KILLED - Episode 6: The Inmate

Episode Date: May 11, 2023

Rolling Stone scraps an essay about rock legend Phil Spector's death. Featuring Nicole Audrey Spector and Corene Kendrick.To submit your KILLED story, visit www.KILLEDStories.com.

Well, I realized this was a story pretty much the day after my father died. As soon as I saw the press release from the prison the next day, stating that my father died from natural causes, I thought, well, that's quite funny. He did not die from natural causes. I was very angry and raw when I pitched this story. I think I pitched it just a couple weeks after he died. I had a lot of grief adrenaline pumping. There was a lot of vitriol on the internet when he died. I mean, I was being really harassed and there was a lot of like fuck you energy going through me

where it was like you wanted my dad to suffer you know well he did and this is what happened but having sympathy for Phil Spector is not something a lot of magazines wanted to take a gamble on. Take a gamble on. From Justine Harmon and audio Chuck, this is Killed. The podcast that brings dead stories back to life. Season 2, Episode 6, The Inmate. My name is Nicole Audrey Spector. I am a journalist and an author. I am very much a part of the hustle culture. I didn't go to journalism school, which I go back and forth feeling bad about. I'm really all over the map. I contribute frequently. Nicole

Audrey Spector has a lot going on. She has a new baby and a mother who needs care taking. She's also a freelance writer for places like NBC News and Yahoo Finance. I also have done a lot of ghost writing and some book editing. Some of my most fun years were probably spent free-lancing at the New Yorker where I covered nightlife and didn't get a byline. I think there's a little more freedom and flexibility when your name isn't attached. I tend to make bolder decisions, especially when I'm ghost writing. When it's under someone else's name, I tend to write a little more. I don't want to say I write more empowered, but I just feel like a little bit more like,

well, you know, it's not my name. And that usually ends up being brave or war call, ultimately. But this story is about a piece that bore her name. Well, more importantly, her father's name. One of the most divisive names in American history, Phil Spector. As in the famous pioneering pop producer behind the sublime layering technique known as the wall of sound, the man who became a tabloid sensation after he was charged with and later convicted of murdering actress and house of blues hostess Lana Clarkson who meet only met that night.

We the jury in the Breven titled action find the defendant Philip Spector guilty of the crime of second-degree murder of Lana Clarkson Depending on who you ask Phil Spector was a genius Spector's catalog includes classics from the Beatles or a madman had a log includes classics from the Beatles. Or a Madman. Damaged by drug abuse and his own eccentric reputation. And maybe that's what the word genius is, the genius in us. Or a punchline.

He is a music legend and he is a murderer. Here on Special Release, Phil Spector. These cats are trying to set me up! Some might say, he was all three. America's favorite kind of celebrity. His legacy will forever be that of a convicted murderer who happened to write songs. But by January 15, 2021, Phil Specter was an 81-year-old inmate at the San Joaquin General Hospital in French Camp, 2021. Phil Specter was an 81 year old inmate at the San Joaquin General Hospital in French Camp, California.

And he was in a medical coma after contracting COVID-19 in prison. His daughter Nicole was there. She'd managed to secure medical clearance for an end of life visit. And she was hoping to bring her dad home. When he first got COVID, because this is actually the second time he got COVID, within like a month's time, he got really, really sick. So he was so hopeful that

it would help get him home like a compassionate release type of situation. And it didn't, but this time, it looked like it could because it had debilitated him to so much. And we knew that if he survived it, he would be in really bad shape for the rest of his life. So there was a much stronger chance of him getting to go home. And that would have meant that I

could be his caregiver, which was always the plan. But the plan never came to pass. The day after Nicole's end of life visit, she agreed to take her father off life support. He was never coming home. Music producer and convicted killer Phil Spector died over the weekend at the age of 81, a California state prison official announced that he died of natural causes in the hospital. As soon as I saw the press release from the prison the next day, stating that my father died from natural causes, I thought, well, that's not the hospital. As soon as I saw the press release from the prison the next day stating that my father died from natural causes, I thought well that's quite funny. He did not die from natural causes. I was there when he was pronounced

dead due to COVID and of course it's on his death certificate. How is that a natural cause of death? So that's when I decided to juice and exploring and make this a reported piece. Nicole found herself at a crossroad. She didn't want to write about her dad, but she couldn't write about what she'd observed. How COVID was ravaging prisons and then disappearing from the headlines

about the incarcerated, without him. COVID-19 is sweeping through the country's jails and sweeps across California. It has been tearing through the prisons like wildfire. The half of everyone incarcerated around the state became infected. It was just an instrument that I felt that I had to use to hook the reader and frankly

to sell the piece. I know that sounds sort of cold and calculating, but I wanted this piece to get attention and I wanted people to know what was happening and I sort of thought, if I have to sell out a little bit, well, that's what I have to do. Nicole decided that the trade-off was worth it. Plus, she was pissed. Her dad had just died and she was getting absolutely harassed online.

You know, there was this barrage of trolling and there was so much hatred coming at me. I had a bit of a... Gosh, which is the Greek heroine who has to like honor her father and like bury her dead brother's body. And she's on that like mission. I think she's talking about Antigone. Anyway, Nicole didn't want to write a story about whether she thinks her dad is guilty or not. I couldn't write that story because I'm not ready to write that story, but I could write about how gruesomely he died and why he died and why others are dying the same way. I just wanted people

to know like a famous person, a person who was at one time rich, they don't get special treatment, they don't get a warmer meal, they don't get a softer bed. If anything, you do, I think, and I might get called out for this. Get treated worse, at least by the guards, because the guards think, oh, you come in here thinking you're hot shit. And my dad had his hands broken by guards who stomped on them. Someone once fed him his food out of a dog bowl.

There was no shortage of ways to humiliate. In response to a list of queries from Killed, a spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the CDCR, denied these injuries occurred while Phil Spector was an inmate at CHCF Stockton. Quote, there's zero evidence to support these abhorrent and patently false allegations. CDCR confirmed no records exist that would indicate any such injuries were sustained by Mr. Specter or any such incident occurred at any time.

End quote. The thing is that a lot of other families are going through this or we're going through it and honestly they go through it in times that aren't just pandemic times. The lack of information, the opacity, not knowing where your family member is, you know, you're supposed to be informed when your family member is incapacitated and in critical condition. And you're just not. You find out word of mouth through other inmates. Nicole considered the few potential outlets that might go for this kind of thing. Nicole considered the few potential outlets that might go for this kind of thing.

I originally pitched it to the Atlantic who I'd written for before and had a great experience with, but they passed on it. I went to Rolling Stone because I liked some of their investigative work, and I also figured they would be interested in him because they've done so many profiles on him in the past, for his musical legacy. So, you know, I figured, hey, you know, this is a celebrity that you have done ample coverage on in the past. Maybe you'd be interested in, you know,

a story that talks about him as a person and a human and how he passed away, but also can tie in some major investigative elements into a prison system since they're considered themselves somewhat cutting edge in the social justice front. Rolling Stone had covered Spectre historically. He was, after all, one of the most celebrated record producers in music history. Be My Baby by the Ron Nets. Unchain melody by the righteous brothers

You've lost that loving feeling In 1969, Jan Wiener himself interviewed Spectre for the magazine And the man's Christmas album has forever been minted on Rolling Stones' 500 Greatest Albums list They'd even covered his death And reported that the revolutionary producer had died from natural causes. I pitched it two weeks after my dad died. The initial pitch was essentially to tell the story of how the prison system in California is mishandling and basically covering up COVID cases and to build emotional resonance around these facts

by building a personal narrative around my father's death. Rolling Stone was in. It got assigned, I would say, within the next week or so. Just weeks after her father died, Nicole Audrey Spector was writing about his death, but really the prison system at large, for rolling stone. I did a lot of legwork and a lot of reporting, and I really like to hit the ground and run

in with it. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. Rolling Stone had Greenlit Nicole Audrey Specter's piece, and she was committed to using her famous father's death as a keyhole into what she determined was California's prison systems failing response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Note, our interview took place on November 28, 2022. I realize the scope of the problem when I looked at the numbers. CDCR has a COVID tracking site. As of today, there are over 100,000 people locked up in California.

According to the CDCR tracking site, close to 88,000 people have caught COVID in CDCR's custody. Yet only 257 people have died from it, according to this site, which just simply doesn't make sense. This would be far less than the National Fatality Rate, which is around 1.1% of all cases, according to Johns Hopkins University of Medicine. And there's also a separate tab on the site that shows they're letting people out into the population while they have COVID. And then they seem to be artificially depressing numbers of people who have died. And this goes back to this idea of like, well, what's a natural cause of death versus

a COVID death? There's just a glaring discrepancy. The CDCR denies any manipulation of its COVID-related death statistics. The spokesperson told Killed, CDCR never identified a cause of death. In our press release, you can see that we state the official cause of death will be determined

by the medical examiner in the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Office. Per our regulations, CDCR can only describe a manner of death in general terms as natural homicide, suicide, accidental or executed. This distinction was explained to misbector when she initially raised her concern. End quote. But Nicole was on a mission. She was reaching out to families of inmates, correction officers, prison doctors, anyone who could help illuminate the grim reality of the COVID pandemic behind bars. It's very hard to get people on the inside to talk. Inmates, it's easy to talk to you.

And I say it's hard to get people to talk. I'm talking staff. It's hard to find a whistleblower. There's tremendous fear of retaliation, so it's almost impossible to find someone to go on the record. One of the most surprising finds during my reporting process was talking to one of the doctors who worked at CHCF's Doctin, which was a CDCR facility that my dad was held in, and he was just terrified. He was terrified of catching COVID, he was terrified of how it was being mismanaged, and he was terrified of the higher-ups, finding out that he was terrified and talking to a reporter.

And he was terrified of the higher ups, finding out that he was terrified and talking to a reporter. There's a general hopelessness that is just resounding throughout every interview of just like you're up against this like falling tower that you're never going to be able to mount. It's the green, well, in California, they call it the green wall because that's the color of the uniforms that the officers wear. That's Karine Kendrick, Deputy Director of the ACLU's National Prison Project. Karine knows all about the difficulties of reporting on prisons in real time. I had only just started at the ACLU when Nicole contacted me in January of 2020 and early January was when the number of people who were incarcerated,

who were testing positive for COVID just went through the roof. There was a spike across the country, but it's just striking how much worse it was in the prison system, you know, whether it was for COVID or failure to treat somebody's heart condition that, you know, then led to a heart attack. The death rate was just going through the roof, period. There can be a real tendency sometimes to have the focus switch from, you know, the humanity of people who are inside prisons and jails to, well, what did they do? And, you know, the view that I have and that the National Prison Project has is that being separated from society is the punishment.

We should not be sending people to prison for additional punishment and torture, whether that's through the use of solitary confinement or failing to provide people with basic medical care or not protecting them from assaults by other incarcerated people or by staff or you know whatever. The practical reality is that the vast majority of people who are in our nation's presence upwards of more than 90 percent are at some point going to come back to society.

And why do we want them coming back more broken than they were when they went in? Karine was interested in helping Nicole, not necessarily because of who her dad was, but because of the exposure it might get for a segment of society, rarely covered in mainstream publications. As a result of all the tough on crime, sentencing laws that were passed, especially in the 80s and the early 90s, our nation's prisons, look like nursing homes. You will see all of these men who are in wheelchairs or, you know, women who are hunched over pushing a four-wheeled walker along a rutted jogging path at a present. And it's just, it's really jarring.

Nicole's dad, he kind of fit the profile of the incarcerated population that was extremely vulnerable to complications or death from COVID. COVID. California, you know, to its credit, has pretty good transparency in terms of its information about COVID and its prisons. It has a dashboard on its website where they do provide all this data where you can see the rates. The problem we were seeing is there's other parts of the country where at the end of 2020, the prison system just decided we're not going to report infections and death rates anymore. And that's problematic because it's going to spread to the outside community. And then there was a problem with the federal Bureau of Prisons, which started reducing the numbers

of infections and deaths. Researchers actually at UCLA Law School discovered in 2021 that suddenly the number of infections cumulative was going down. And after a lot of digging, they found out that the federal Bureau of Prisons had decided that they were going to start removing from the count any person who ultimately left B.O.P. custody either due to discharge or dying. You know every time I talked to Nicole about her plans for the story she was definitely like saying I want my family's experience to highlight what other families are going through.

I want to talk to other families. And you know, basically, you don't read about prisons very often in Rolling Stone magazine. And this is an audience and frankly, you know, given who he was and when he, you know, was kind of at his peak, it's a generational cohort that would be an opportunity to talk about these broader issues of, why are we locking up so many older men,

holding aside whether Mr. Spector deserved to be in prison, needed to be in prison in his individual case. Really, let's take a step back and look at why are all these people locked up? You know, why are they crammed into these horrible warehouses or cells where they're just sitting ducks for infection? For Nicole, the reporting had been cathartic. It had been this way to put her grief to work.

Plus, she felt pretty good about the words she put on the page. The first draft I turned in, you know, I showed it to my old editor at the New Yorker who's one of my best friends and, you know, he gave his thumbs up. I showed it to my friend David Means, who's one of my favorite authors. He really liked it. I was like, you know, I got all this positive feedback from people I admire. And then I sent it to the editor and he just had like, you know, I got all this positive feedback from people I admire. And then I sent it to the editor and he just had like all those red marks on it. And I get it looking back at that piece,

it was really angry, it was almost all reporting and it was just like, it was just very angry. So he wanted more personal added and less, wrath, which I agree with in Metro's back. So Nicole went back to her computer and she got more personal. On January 15th, I sat beside my dad, Phil Spector in a COVID ICU room at San Joaquin General Hospital in St. John. All of a sudden, the piece clicked. He laid coma toes on a ventilator. His face was so thin, his cheekbones stuck out like little moons.

His head was turned away from me in a way that looked painful, like his neck was being wrung out. His swollen ankles were handcuffed to the bars at the bed. being wrung out. His swollen ankles were handcuffed to the bars at the bed. Papa, Papa, Papa, I bowed my head. I'm here. I made it. A California Department of Corrections guard stared blankly at us from the corner of the room. Sipping from his water bottle, his mask was pulled down. His surgical glove was torn at the fingertips. He texted and swirled on his phone with rapid ease. Does he have to be here?

I asked a nurse not in toward the guard. The nurse hesitated. Policy, the guard interjected before the nurse could answer. Eyes on his phone. For the past 12 years, my father had been in the custody of some. I felt it was important to bring a personal angle to the piece because, though these are very broad systemic problems that I'm exploring, my experience with them is ultimately a personal one, right?

I'm not just a reporter looking at these issues through a detached lens. In a sense, I'm not so level-headed. I'm writing with a wound, and I can't hide that. So it would be dishonest to go into this as though I were not being deeply affected by the issues at hand. I also like to think that making this a personal story or agreeing that element to the surface makes the reported to more urgent and powerful for the reader. But I don't know. I struggle with the worry that perhaps making a personal means I'm less of a reporter, or perhaps making it reported makes me less of an essayist. You know, I talk about our drive up to Stockton and the sort of harrowing going through this pandemic with our bottle of lice all,

holding my mother up, who's disabled, holding her up to pee on the side of the road because all the bathrooms at pit stops were shut down. You know, I talk about being in the room with my dad wearing the PPE draped in PPE, I gripped my dad's hand. It was too mid-speckled black with sepsis. His eyes were stuck open, the lower inner eyelids poking out, raw like meat. I tried to close them, but they wouldn't shut. COVID, one of the doctors said, had destroyed his body. Because of it, nothing in him worked on its own anymore, not even as eyelids. It was a miracle that they let me be with him. I was so lucky. I don't ever take that for granted. So I turned in a more personal draft and I thought it was pretty good. I mean I wanted more words, more space, but I figured for the 3,000 words it was a nice glimpse.

This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. After Nicole Audrey Spector filed her revised Rolling Stone, this time with more personal and intimate details. She waited. But why wasn't it running? Wasn't the peg his death? She'd included the bit about prison guards whispering about taking a picture of her dad's unconscious body, hadn't she? Korean remembers this period. It was just crickets.

It's like, well, whatever happened to that Rolling Stone story. Korean remembers this period. It was just crickets. It's like, well, whatever happened to that Rolling Stone story, and, you know, about six months later, my boss even asked me that. He's like, when is it gonna run? The story was ultimately killed because it didn't fall firmly in either the personal essay camp or the reported camp, which was sort of the point, I thought. More specifically, and this is where it gets disappointing for me, is that it didn't quote wrestle with what my dad did or didn't do as the editor I was working with put it.

I believe Rolling Stone wanted something more sensational in the end, but that's just my interpretation. The editor also said he thought it would make a better book than an essay, which I'm not sure what to make of that. It wasn't the most helpful feedback, but I guess when a story is on, it's deathbed, helpful feedback isn't the M.O. anymore. Killed reached Nicole's editor at Rolling Stone, who declined to comment on a list of queries. And Nicole, she was crushed.

The story had been so much more than a story. It had been a life raft. A way to make sense of her loss. It wasn't until January 14th after exhaustive attempts that I finally obtained medical clearance from the prison for a visit. A quote end of life visit. The doctors had not been so foreboding over the phone when they asked if I would visit to, quote, discuss next steps.

That sounded almost optimistic. Packing my overnight bag, I thought I'd be going up to the hospital to sign up on a tracheostomy and gastrostomy. The next necessary procedure is to provide long-term life support and then bring my dad home. Finally. I talk a lot about some flashbacks to other times in prison together. My father always trying to have an upbeat attitude, but also self-diagnosing, always having a health problem that he was trying to figure out. You know, I talk about his caregiver, his relationship with Matthew, who was an inmate

that was housed a couple doors down from him who was basically the person who gave me all this information about how my dad was doing and when he got transferred to the hospital. I kind of try to structure it like, you know, weaving in the personal and then saying, like, you know, here's why this happened or like, here's the reason why my dad got COVID in the first place. And then when your story gets killed, you start to think about, you know, what was my motive, what was my intention, and you start to, you just go down the spiral of second guessing everything.

Nicole didn't have the heart to tell Karine what had happened. She thought, maybe I'll find another home for the piece, and then I'll have good news to share. So she just put the story to the side, filed it under, not right now. It wasn't until Nicole reached back out to me a few months ago and told me what happened. Well, told me that was killed. And she said to me, you know, I still want to do this story. You know, I still want to bring attention to how the

COVID pandemic was not just mishandled in the case of her father as she viewed it, but more broadly, how the nation's prisons and jails didn't respond. So I think it would have been a great story, and it's just unfortunate that Rolling Stone,

for whatever reason chose to kill the story. No matter what you think, Phil Spector, genius, madman, punchline, of the indelible music he created, or the grotesque senseless crime he was convicted of. The man who died that day will also always be Nicole's dad. He really, really valued my journalism career. He saved every story I ever wrote. He had all these folders in his cell of all my stories. He had a fascination with the weather that transcended small talk before prison, he would call me and he would always be like, hey Nicole, it's

dad. It's about 70 degrees here today. Anyway, but you're in New York, it's about 70 degrees here today. Anyway, but you're in New York. It's about 48 degrees where you are. And every single message started with full weather report. So he had definitely was, he was just a very quirky guy. I mean, I feel like people are going to listen to this and then they're going to like shit on me on Twitter, which I just locked down because of that.

But um, I'm be like, oh, he loved dogs. But he did love dogs. He loved all animals. I wanted other people to know, like, you know, I'm out there. Reporters are trying to keep an eye on the prison. You know, we were not their reporters are trying to keep an eye on the prison. We're not having victories in court, which would be the most meaningful, but we're watching them and we're trying to make a difference, however small that difference is. And I also think we fetishize prisons in this weird way. We watch these gross documentaries about them, you know, those like shock, reality shock shows. But we feel very separate from them. And I think it's important to understand that no matter how much you

loathe or disregard inmates, there's, you know, an army of families for each of those inmates that are suffering and worrying about their family members. Next time on Killed. Where's the drama? That's the problem. You're writing a magazine piece. Where's the drama? Where's the conflict?

I would say things like, well, has anybody died on board? And they were like, no, nobody's ever died on board the ship. Killed is an audio chuck production, created and written by Justin Harmon and edited by Alistair Sherman. You can find links to all the published stories featured on the first and second seasons of Killed at KilledStories.com. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

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