This week’s episode of Reveal is unlike any we’ve produced in nearly seven years on the air. It begins with the haunting parallel stories of two civil rights icons: Medgar Evers and Nina Simone. It’s the perfect capstone to our seven-part series, Mississippi Goddam: The Ballad of Billey Joe. 

If you’ve been following along, you know that our host Al Letson and reporter Jonathan Jones have spent the last three years investigating the 2008 death of a Black teenager named Billey Joe Johnson Jr. during a traffic stop with a White sheriff’s deputy in Lucedale, Mississippi. 

Al started the series with a promise to the Johnson family that he would review the case and share everything with them. “If I didn’t tell this story, no one would,” he said.

We may never know exactly what happened to Billey Joe the morning he died. But ultimately, we laid bare tremendous flaws in the investigation. The most striking: After our interview with the medical examiner, she reversed her opinion on how Billey Joe died, which undermines the grand jury’s decision. That would mean that the official account of Billey Joe’s death – that he died of an accidental gunshot – is wrong.

In this week’s episode, we take all we learned back to the Johnson family. That includes information from two emotional interviews. 

For the first time ever, Hannah Hollinghead, Billey Joe’s ex-girlfriend, agreed to a recorded interview. We hear how the case has followed her for 13 years. And we ask her about what appear to be inconsistencies in her statements to the police. 

Then there’s the case’s lead investigator, Joel Wallace. When Al and J.J. first met him in 2019, Wallace showed them a newspaper clipping he carried around. It was an editorial expressing the community’s trust in Wallace’s ability to investigate Billey Joe’s death. Now, after all he’s learned in the two years since, he confesses he no longer carries that clipping with him. So we ask him: Does he still think he did a proper investigation? 

“The case was about a kid laying on the ground dead that I saw that day. I got to live with it now.” His voice cracks as he concludes, “I only did what I was led to and what I was told to."

Wallace has called for a new investigation. The grand jury’s decision was based on inaccurate information. But so far, there’s been no response from local officials on whether that will happen. 

“This is going on 14 years,” said Billey Joe’s sister Tiffanie Johnson. “And I'm tired. I'm tired. Justice is what we need.”

The Johnsons still don’t have all the answers they wanted. But we were able to show them how deeply flawed the investigation into Billey Joe's death was. And we brought our listeners the story of how the history of this country – and Mississippi – continues to hang over the case, this family and Black Americans everywhere.

Al wraps the show with this thought: “The promise I gave was fulfilled.” 

If you haven’t listened yet, be sure to download the series now, which Spotify just listed in its Best of 2021 list.

Best,

Kevin Sullivan

Executive Producer

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