Examined: The Backfire Effect

Temujin Kensu spent much of his youth wandering, mainly in his home state of Michigan. In 1986 he and his then-fiancée moved to a cabin outside Port Huron, where he briefly dated someone else. A few weeks later, he and his fiancée moved again, more than 400 miles away, to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He says he was there on November 5, 1986. But that didn’t stop police from accusing him of a murder he said he could never have committed.
You can hear the entire season of Examined: The Backfire Effect, ad-free, right now by subscribing to Pushkin+. Sign up on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin.fm/plus. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, and exclusive binges of other true crime podcasts throughout the year.
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On the morning of November 5th, 1986, students at a community college in Port Huron, Michigan, heard the sound of what many thought was a car backfiring. It was a gunshot, and it killed a student named Scott Macklem. The murder would leave the community shocked, and police baffled. Until they found a suspect: a young man who lived across the state.
You can hear the entire season of Examined: The Backfire Effect, ad-free, right now by subscribing to Pushkin+. Sign up on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin.fm/plus. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, and exclusive binges of other true crime podcasts throughout the year.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 1986, a man named Scott Macklem was killed in broad daylight. Eight days later, a suspect was arrested. But now, almost 40 years later, reporter Josie Duffy Rice is re-examining this case. Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time?
New episodes drop September 14. Subscribe to Pushkin+ to binge the entire season, ad-free. Find Pushkin+ on the Examined show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin.fm.

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Lost Hills has been quiet for a bit, so we've decided to do something different: turn this feed into a home for a new kind of story, told fresh each season. Starting this fall, this feed becomes Examined — a show about overlooked cases that never got the real investigation they deserved and need to be unpacked. These are stories about crime, punishment, and the people caught inside the criminal legal system. Every season, a new host will dig into one of these stories with the kind of in-depth reporting you’ve always heard in this feed. First up: Examined: The Backfire Effect, coming September 14, a story of police misconduct and prosecutorial zeal, and about a very complicated man.
Don't worry — previous episodes of Lost Hills will still stay on this feed so you can return to them at any time. One last thing: we want to hear from you. What overlooked cases have stuck with you — the ones you think about, the ones nobody's really told right? Email us at [email protected]. Thanks for staying with us.
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In February 2024, celebrated children’s book author and illustrator Petra Mathers and her husband, photographer Michael Mathers, mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Petra and Michael were by all accounts healthy, happy, and deeply in love. As much a love story as one about death, it begs the question: what did that decision do to the people left to mourn them?
In season 3 of Death of an Artist, journalists Leon Neyfakh and Alice Gregory set out to interview everyone who got one of Petra and Michael’s letters—as one married couple trying to understand another. Told through intimate conversations with Petra and Michael’s friends and family about their own relationships to aging, grief, death, and the friends they thought they knew, Death of an Artist weaves together a portrait of a community grappling with the Mathers’ deaths and the final words they left behind.
Search for Death of an Artist wherever you get podcasts. And get early, ad-free access to the entire season now by subscribing to Pushkin+ on the Apple Podcasts show page or at pushkin.fm/plus.
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