Hannah Smith on the Art of True Crime Podcasting
Apr 25, 2021 | 7 min read
Storytelling best practices that the audio writer uses to make any narrative compelling.
Written by Laura Beeston | Illustration by Mayara Lista
After launching the first series of The Opportunist — a true crime podcast about regular people who turn sinister through opportunistic behaviour — the lead producer, writer and host reflects on telling the story of Sherry Shriner, who led a double life as a mother and internet cult leader.
Hannah Smith says she had a wandering career path before diving deep into conspiracy theories about reptilian overlords and doomsday prophecies in October of 2020.
The Los Angeles-based audio writer recalls discovering Sherry Talk Radio, clicking the link and being greeted by the gravelly, smoker voice of a midwest mom.
“To me, she was perfectly complicated,” Smith says of the cult leader. “There is nothing simple or straightforward about Sherry Shriner.”
Cultivating a prolific internet presence, Shriner self-published three books and dozens of articles. She had a regular radio show that produced a decade’s worth of tape. And she maintains an active Facebook page that is animated to this day by loyal followers — even after her death in 2018.
“The fact that so much happened on the internet was something that made this story incredible to tell,” says Smith. “There [were] all these different rabbit holes that I could go down.”
An overwhelming amount of information proved to be helpful in figuring out who this woman really was, to build her out as a character and to get to the bottom of a burning question:
Is it possible that this person with an online following could have somehow been responsible for a suicide and murder?
Weaving the storylines of Shriner and the fates of her two followers, Kelly Pingilley and Stephen Mineo, The Opportunist is a narrative masterclass.
Demonstrating universal best practices of storytelling that are helpful beyond the true crime genre, Smith was generous enough to share her process.
Build out a timeline.
When working with a massive amount of information (or, in this case, disinformation), getting a sense of chronology and time becomes essential to the storytelling.
Smith began by reading Shriner’s books, taking note of biographical details, like the colleges she supposedly graduated from, and reaching out to check the facts.
Then there was the radio show, which Smith would be delighted to discover was transcribed and searchable by date of publication.
“When I found that I was like, it’s a gift from Sherry Shriner to me,” she laughs. “I could cross reference dates… identifying key shows based on a timeline and listening to [them] as well as [searching] their transcripts.”
A timeline also allowed Smith to focus in on certain years — notably 2012, when Pingilley died by suicide, or when Mineo was kicked out of the cult and started his blog.
Building the narrative “was just like following the trails, getting obsessed and spending a lot of time taking notes based on the “main” characters and what years they interacted with Sherry,” says Smith. “There was just so much online that was so helpful in being able to find all this information and tell the story…
“I just really wanted to try to understand.”
Define central questions.
From there, Smith had to make the difficult decisions about what to include in eight episodes and what to cut. She did so by defining central questions that needed to be answered in the first season and using them as a reference.
She says she loved raising a seemingly-outlandish idea off the top — did Sherry Shriner have a hand in the murder of Stephen Mineo? — and then circle back to it later.
“You know, one of the biggest and most intriguing things on the face of this story is that you have this death,” explains Smith. “You have a couple [where a woman named Barbara Rogers] shot her boyfriend in the head and there is not a clear motive…
“My goal was to give listeners enough information about the situation and all the people involved so that, when we raise the question again at the very end, they can make an informed opinion.”
Smith thought about what the audience would need to know about Sherry to explore that question: “How she interacted with her followers, what her tools of engagement and manipulation [were], what her motives were… those were the questions that guided me.”
She also advises storytellers to step back and ask themselves existential questions throughout the process: Why am I doing this? And: What's interesting about this?
“It's the classic thing but following your curiosity is really powerful,” she says, “not only at the beginning of the story but throughout it, too.”
Her other advice is to not get precious about cutting things. “I think that is really important in good storytelling,” Smith says, “you have to be able to let things go in order to make the story shine and be the best it can be.”
Humanize the characters.
Sometimes, research will lead you away from the central idea. For Smith, who says she “[tends] to like stories that are just about character development,” she took a little detour from the main narrative arc to include the suicide of Pingilley.
“My goal was to try to create some understanding so [the audience could] put themselves in the shoes of someone like Kelly,” she says. “I know a lot of people have not had experiences with extreme groups like that.”
Raised in a religious environment herself, Smith says she could understand what it’s like for a spiritual belief to inform every decision and to be incredibly real:
“When I was researching Kelly, talking to her friends and family, and reading her blog, it was so heartbreaking for me because I felt like, had I been exposed to different things, this could have been me as a young person.”
“I tried to tell Kelly’s story in a way that people would listen to it and not just write her off as some crazy girl but see the humanity in her and see how this can happen. It’s common. It can happen to people.”
And, of course, Smith says she was conscious about humanizing Shriner.
“There were these little clues about who she was as a person but it was always shrouded in her retelling of herself as this god-like figure,” she explains. “So everything she said was told through that lens but, within that, there were things that would tell me more about her.”
Like, she knew that Shriner lived in Ohio. And once, Shriner talked about seeing chemtrails in the sky and pointing them out to other football moms. “It’s humanizing [that this cult leader] is raising four kids and taking them to after-school sports games.”
Let tape be your guide.
As with any podcast or narrative audio project, at the end of the day, The Opportunist shines due to the quality and selection of its tape. Tape is incredibly important and really critical, says Smith. “The tape leads me.”
Whether it’s a lively clip of Shriner on The Truth Train with Liberty Lisa radio segment debating the Christian Truthers, or recordings of an increasingly-agitated Stephen Mineo, these tapes do much more than narration ever could.
Admittedly, there is a piece of tape that made this reporter’s blood run cold.
Without revealing any spoilers, this tape is of Rogers and it is so good that it brings the central question of the entire season back into sharp relief. “It was like wow, what a moment,” Smith agrees. “You can describe it but the tape is so powerful.”
Whenever Smith doesn’t know where to start, she says she looks at the tape that she has and it will guide her.
“Finding interesting tape or going out and creating interesting tape and working with the medium is something I kept in mind if I was feeling a little lost or needed to reorient,” she says. “What’s the tape? Just go back to the tape.”
Season two of The Opportunist
While she can’t reveal too much about the next series of The Opportunist Smith says that she and her team — Associate Producer Kate Mays, Kast Media CEO and Executive Producer Colin Thomson and Audio Editor Matt Soule — have something compelling on the go.
“Season two is out in June,” she confirms. “I can’t say a lot [but] the next season is probably not going to be as long.”
A shorter season means more seasons per year, she adds. “So there will be more content for listeners. It is going to be a totally different opportunist but I think it’s really exciting stuff.”
Listen to the first series of The Opportunist wherever you get your podcasts.