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Episode one: When John brought his girlfriend Deven to his family property in Calera, Alabama, Deven became the latest in a decades-long line of women to be beaten and broken down on that same land. In December 2017, after a violent evening and years of abuse, Deven shot and killed John. Then, she called 911 to turn herself in.

Resources:

• If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic abuse, use a safe computer and contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at www.thehotline.org or call 1-800-799-7233. You can also search for a local domestic violence shelter at www.domesticshelters.org/.
• If you have experienced sexual assault and need support, visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) at www.rainn.org or call 1-800-656-HOPE
• Have questions about consent? Take a look at this guide from RAINN at www.rainn.org/articles/what-is-consent
• Learn more about criminalized survival https://survivedandpunished.org/

This series is created with Evoke Media, a woman-founded company devoted to harnessing the power of storytelling to drive social change. To learn more, visit weareevokemedia.com.

This series is presented by Marguerite Casey Foundation. MCF supports leaders who work to shift the balance of power in their communities toward working people and families, and who have the vision and capacity for building a truly representative economy. Learn more at caseygrants.org or visit on social media @caseygrants.

Follow host Liz Flock on Twitter @lizflock. For more stories of women and self-defense, check out her book “The Furies” from Harper Books, available for pre-order now. https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-furies-elizabeth-flock

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Liz Flock, Sheila, Deven, Desi

Liz Flock  00:03

This show contains violent content and scenes of domestic abuse. In a small town outside Birmingham, Alabama sits a plot of overgrown land. It’s almost invisible from the road, tucked deep into the forest, vine snake across the ground wrapping around trees beside an old broken down trailer. A dark history lies beneath those vines. 40 years ago, a woman shot and killed her abusive husband on this land. And now, that woman’s grandson will die in exactly the same way. So let’s go back back to the first time tragedy hit this land. It was 1977 and a woman named Kathleen Mitchell, also known as mama cat, drove down the driveway of that property. Her husband was waiting for her drunk and angry. Her daughter Sheila tells me the story.

Sheila  01:08

Before she could even get out of the car. He had already broken out her windshield. And he was throwing things at her and all kinds of stuff like that. So she ran into the house. And that was when he grabbed her bassinet, like choking.

Liz Flock  01:24

He was choking her. And it was just the two of them there. Mama cat knew she had to do something.

Sheila  01:31

My mom always carried a gun. And she was able to get it out of her purse and shoot him and kill him.

Liz Flock  01:40

Mama cat worked with all men at a local plant and she worked the night shift. Her brothers had taught her how to shoot. And that day it saved her life.

Sheila  01:49

It almost killed her because she had to do that she went through a really hard time over doing that. But she didn’t have any choice.

Liz Flock  01:57

As Sheila tells me the story about her mom over the phone. All I can think about is another woman, Deven Gray. Because decades later, Deven’s boyfriend, John Vance, Mama Cat’s grandson brought her to that same property. And Deven had no idea what she was getting herself into. Well, what John was getting them into.

Sheila  02:23

I remember just being covered in blood after everything happened. I had blood splatter all over me.

Liz Flock  02:31

On the early morning of December 12 2017, 40 years after mama cat killed her husband. All hell broke loose on that same property. Deven says that John beat her for hours. He was drunk. And the similarities to his grandma’s story are uncanny. Deven tells me about what she experienced that night.

Deven  03:01

I had bruises all over me.

Liz Flock  03:06

This wasn’t the first time John hit Deven. But she says John looked different that night that he had an aura of pure evil. A look in his eyes she had never seen before.

Deven  03:18

Kind of reminded me of the whole like, the way he was like a […]

Liz Flock  03:32

Just like mama cat. Deven says it was either her or him that night that she had to make a choice. This is Blind Plea, a show about Deven Gray, the trauma we inherit and who has the right to defend themselves in America. I’m your host, Liz Flock. In some ways, it seems Devon’s fate was already sealed when she arrived in Calera, Alabama, because when she set foot on the V9ance family property in that small town outside Birmingham, she became the latest in a line of women who had come before her who had been beaten, broken down and manipulated on that same land, and who survived by any means necessary. That land served as a pressure cooker with its culture of silence, a history of alcoholism and abuse, and decades of deep isolation. It all came to a head in 2017 and led Deven to where she is now. Deven, Happy birthday. Oh my god, you’re 30. Prison is not the ideal place to celebrate a birthday. But this year Deven says it was pretty special. The other women in the facility showered her with a birthday banner cards, gifts for her big 30.

Deven  05:28

They sent a really beautiful thing about me. And if any feels good to know, you know that. Even places like this, like you can still find good people and people can see that you’re not a bad person.

Liz Flock  05:45

This is Deven’s fifth birthday behind bars. She talks to me from her bunk bed on a prison issued tablet. That’s why it’s sometimes hard to hear her. We chat a lot this way, regularly enough that Devon even named the automated voice on the prison phone calls.

Deven  06:03

Martha is about to come on. So I will tell you the good stuff. So I’ll call you back. And I’ll tell you the good stuff.

Liz Flock  06:19

I’m a journalist who covers women who are wrapped up in the criminal legal system, often women who are claiming self-defense, I have been in an abusive relationship myself. So I understand how someone can end up there in a place they never expected to be. I met Deven by phone two and a half years ago, when a lawyer in Alabama connected us. One of the first things I noticed about Deven is, she’s resilient. She’s going to trade school inside prison for auto servicing because she wants to be a diesel mechanic when she gets out. That way, she’ll be able to support herself and her daughter. She’s determined like that, but also sensitive, a hopeless romantic. She likes listening to songs from Kacey Musgraves and Mary J. Blige, the ones that make you cry. It’s a way for her to process her feelings. And she’s always writing in her journal about being in love.

Deven  07:23

I hate that I’m like this, but I am so in love with love. Like, I am a lover and I hate it. But I guess it’s just like, against the pride of it. But it’s like the thing I want the most, if that makes sense.

Liz Flock  07:51

Deven says she never got the affection she needed from her parents. So when it comes to romantic love, she falls hard and fast. That’s how it was with her. And John at first. She told me when she first ran away with him back when she was 19. She had hit rock bottom. She had been kicked out of college because she was drinking too much. Her mom struggled with alcohol and set a bad example that Deven just couldn’t shake. John was her neighbor. He was confident. And she liked that.

Deven  08:22

He was really charismatic, like, you know, and you know, everyone always wanted him around, you know, uniformly that they always wanted him at the party.

Liz Flock  08:31

John was 25, six years older than Devin. They bonded over their difficult childhoods, and they talked about everything. Devin was sweet. And John was tough. When Devin felt mixed up about what to do with her life. John always had a plan. So how’d you guys get down to Alabama? I know he’s originally from there. It was a hot and sticky afternoon in July 2013 in upstate New York, John was on the run and Devon was with him. John had pissed some people off again, which Deven knew. But she didn’t know the whole story.

Deven  09:08

Like I didn’t really understand that he burned so many bridges with actions and his anger issues and your violent.

Liz Flock  09:18

John and Devon had already been together for a couple of years. During that time. She says she learned that John could go from 0 to 60 that he could get scary and violent in an instant. Not only with her, but with other people, even strangers. They’ve been living with John’s sister, but she kicked them out after John got into a drunken argument with some people down the street and fired a semi-automatic rifle into the air. The cops came to his sister’s house and she told John and Deven they had to go. John had an idea for where they could head next.

Deven  09:54

It was pretty much like we have nowhere else to go, I have family in Alabama. Do you want to come with me? And at first I thought he was kidding. And I thought it was a joke and I was just over it. I was like, okay, this is not funny. And he’s like, I’m not kidding, you know. And so I was, yeah.

Liz Flock  10:22

Deven says John promised her that now Alabama, he built her dream home, that it would be a fresh start from his anger issues and run ins with the law. John was proposing they go to his childhood home and Calera to the property where his grandmother mama cat killed her husband, though Deven didn’t know that yet. All she knew was that John had lived on the property when he was a kid until the age of six, when his parents divorced. His mom said his dad became severely abusive, and she fled the property in the middle of the night with John and his older sister in tow. So at this point, John hadn’t seen his dad Henry in over 20 years. He hadn’t been back to that property since they left. And Deven didn’t know if Henry would welcome her. She’s black and John and his family are White. And it’s the South.

Deven  11:15

I didn’t know how he was going to treat me and I didn’t know if I was going to be accepted. So I was really wary. Like, hey, like, don’t bring it to us […]

Liz Flock  11:29

But Henry said, sure, come on down. And just like that, they were off to Alabama on a Greyhound bus. They had only a few bags with them, and they left behind everything and everyone Deven knew. The bus ride started off Okay, John got Devon her favorite sour cream and cheddar chips and a Dr. Pepper for the ride. They watched a Melissa McCarthy movie the heat together on their laptop. John was comforting along the way, checking in on Deven asking her if she was doing all right. But the ride was 32 hours long. And the closer they got to Alabama, the more distant John became. He got moody and quiet.

Deven  12:13

The longest ever, it was horrible. And I remember draw this day further away from the more scared I was because it was just like what am I doing? I don’t have good idea. This is not smart, you know?

Liz Flock  12:41

But she kept those fears to herself. Calera was only a half hour drive from Birmingham, but the long stretches of road bordered by longleaf pines made it feel much farther away. Within hours of arriving at the Vance property, the promise for fresh start disappeared.

Deven  13:16

We actually were there. […] so it was kind of crazy actually how that worked out.

Liz Flock  13:26

Deven says John and his dad split a bottle of whiskey and then got into a fight. John was mad that Henry had never been there for him. The land seemed to be a trigger for John. Deven says he took it out on her that he busted her lip and hit her in the face leaving her with a knot on the side of her head.

Deven  13:45

[…], none of this is you know […]. So here we are again. […]

Liz Flock  13:59

John had hit Devon before, but he had been so kind to her the last few weeks that she thought things would be different. It was the cycle of their relationship, and it was confusing. The property itself was not what she expected. Creeping kudzu vines covered everything. John’s dad Henry lived on the property in a tiny rundown shack. And since Henry had been in a bad car accident years ago, he wasn’t doing any upkeep. The land had taken on a life of its own.

Deven  14:31

It was just so unbelievable. There were trailers and little snacks and little like sheds. And we walked around and we’ve seen that like everything was pretty much run down.

Liz Flock  14:48

Deven says it looked abandoned, almost like a jungle with grass as tall as she was like six feet tall. There are guard dogs chained up in the yard. Years back, Mama Cat’s house had burned down in a gas stove fire, and there was no room for them in Henry’s shack.

Deven  15:06

So like, we ended up going to Walmart and getting a tent. And we lived in a tent for like, two months.

Liz Flock  15:20

Eventually, they did move out of that tent and into a dilapidated camper on the property, which they tried to make livable.

Deven  15:26

We didn’t actually have like whelming like inside, so everything was like we had a hose. We had a hook of a hose to the trailer, straight, like pioneer style. It was just crazy. Yeah, it was really like we roughed it like really rested. And I remember like, I cooked outside on a hot day, […].

Liz Flock  15:53

Most her life, Deven had lived in nice houses. So this was way out of her comfort zone. Still, Devin was accustomed to going with the flow. Because as a kid in upstate New York, she’d moved around a lot. She spent the longest at her grandparents’ house on Saratoga Lake. That was the place that felt like home. She remembers swimming with minnows, they’re long after everyone else went inside. This was nothing like that. But John kept telling her it was gonna work out.

Deven  16:22

And he was like, don’t worry, we’re gonna, you know, we’re gonna make the squids work if you got a promise, but he was gonna build the house and all that BS, so forth, as usual.

Liz Flock  16:37

Here’s something you need to know about Devin. She’s incredibly hard on herself, especially for ignoring the red flags for believing it could be different. But as someone who has experienced abuse myself, I know how hard it is to walk away, especially when you’re isolated. Amid all the uncertainty and Alabama for Deven, there was one friendly face, Henry’s sister, and John’s aunt Sheila, who you met at the top of that episode. And Sheila is the caretaker of the family.

Sheila  17:09

And the property does […] to me. My mom left it to me.

Liz Flock  17:12

She’s organized and keeps herself busy. Every time I call her she’s running off to take care of somebody or something or to chat with a neighbor.

Sheila  17:21

And I have to go get groceries for my brother. And then I’ve got for my car. So I’ve got a busy day tomorrow.

Liz Flock  17:30

And Sheila took to Deven immediately.

Sheila  17:33

What do you think of Devin when you first met her? Oh, I thought she was this lady. Yes. I’ve always thought that. She was kind of really sad to start with when they first came because of course she didn’t know any of the.

Liz Flock  17:47

Deven didn’t leave the property much because she didn’t have a car. So aunt Sheila sometimes picked her up to run errands. And eventually Devon found her footing. She spent her days cooking watching TV or tidying up the camper. She sometimes brought Henry warm meals since he wasn’t doing well health wise. Every now and then Devin and John would go over to Aunt Sheila’s for a holiday or family get together. And when they did, Aunt Sheila noticed something was off.

Sheila  18:19

She finally got to where she was a lot easier with everybody. But it to me it was always kind of strange. He never let her get three feet away from him while they were here. I never could understand why he did that. But he was always in it. And they ever really did get to know John very well. I never get to really know him. I really got to know her better than I did him.

Liz Flock  18:45

Since John had grown up in New York with his mom and Sheila was absent for most of his life. And now that John was back in Alabama, he was elusive. He drank a lot. And when he wasn’t drinking, he was working, always doing odd jobs to make ends meet for him in Deven. When he was home, he sometimes shot guns on the property or rode a tractor around. But he never got too friendly with his dad Henry, or his aunt Sheila.

Sheila  19:10

I mean, I would have loved to get to know him better. I mean, bless his heart. He had been in trouble so much he’s had a laugh.

Liz Flock  19:20

In New York, John had a lot of pending charges for assaulting an inmate while at Saratoga County Jail for allegedly stealing $4,000 from two bank accounts. And for that time, he shot a rifle into the air at his sister’s place. It’s honestly hard to keep track of them all. So John was a fugitive. He was even on the Saratoga Springs police department’s most wanted list, and he was paranoid and Alabama about getting caught by the law. Anytime he cut his hair, Devon says he would burn the clippings. So there would be no trace and the cops couldn’t find him. John’s paranoia has seeped into their relationship too. In Alabama Devin was no longer Deven. Just D. John had renamed them when they arrived. The few people who got to know them and Alabama knew them as their initials J and D.

Desi  20:18

I remember being a little sketched out because we didn’t know anything about him. They had like no social media presence. We didn’t know their last names at all.

Liz Flock  20:28

That Desi at the time, she was married to Ethan, John’s best friend in Alabama. Ethan eventually sold them a trailer so they can move out of the dilapidated camper, Desi went over to the property once.

Desi  20:43

It was strange, I’ve never really been on any kind of property like that before. And I just thought they had to really gotten into something bad to be in this situation. But I never really asked me questions about it.

Liz Flock  20:55

So in the beginning, Desi would see Deven every now and again.

Desi  20:58

Because she was really shy at first. She just seemed kind of uncomfortable all the time. Like I felt like she was just nervous to be and I think that being in the south, here in an interracial relationship is not any way to be comfortable.

Liz Flock  21:16

Deven says the real reason she was uncomfortable was because of John and the close tabs he kept on her. She was always worried she might say or do the wrong thing, or break one of his many rules. But Desi didn’t notice that. Instead, she thought Deven felt out of place because they were living in Shelby County, a very white area with a racist history. Just for context. It’s the same Shelby County that gutted the Voting Rights Act through a Supreme Court decision in 2013. Deven got there the same year.

Desi  21:48

I mean, I feel like when we weren’t in public, she was much calmer. She would get out of her shell, she would talk to me she’s funny.

Liz Flock  21:57

Desi would become one of Devon’s only friends there, if you could even call it that, because Desi was really John’s friend. Like aunt Shiela, Desi would take Devon to run errands. But whenever she did, John, or J arranged though,

Desi  22:13

I thought her situation was just like mine. Like when they talked about fighting and stuff. I thought maybe he like yelled at her a lot, or maybe broke things in the house. But that’s what I was used to. I didn’t think it was like physical fighting. So it’s kind of hard for me to really be like, oh, this is a horrible situation, because I was in a bad situation, too. So it just felt normal. Like now looking back. I’m like, That’s not normal at all. But I was 19.

Liz Flock  22:39

Yeah, she was 19. But there was also a culture of abuse in the area. It was common and people lived with it. Summer turn to fall, Deven said she and John had good days, bad days and very bad days. John’s main job was fixing cell phones out of a gas station. When he got home in the evenings he and Devon drink together. It always started off fun. But if John didn’t make money that day, Deven said it was like a switch flipped and he got angry.

Deven  23:15

[…] horrible. Like that’s really what was always the problem. In drinking in his when his drinking that’s just ridiculous, regardless.

Liz Flock  23:33

They both had a drinking problem. And she says John took advantage of that. She says it seemed like he always wanted her to be as drunk or more than he was. One night they got into a fight over something small that had happened back in New York, and she says John got furious.

Deven  23:50

Getting one flat really hard. And he had adopted. It was like a pop like it literally sounded like a balloon popping like inside my mouth. was just like […] like, all on my mouth. And like, you’re not kidding.

Liz Flock  24:19

I’ve seen the photos. Deven’s front tooth was gone. After that happened, she said she felt like a failure because she had ended up in this situation, that there must be something wrong with her. With everything. She didn’t Dorje, she just wanted to go home, that she was too ashamed.

Deven  24:38

After all the times that he had been made just not wanting to go back because you know, I had a black guy or a bruise and I just didn’t want my family to see me that way. They knew so broken and you know, I just couldn’t deal with that.

Liz Flock  24:56

Devin did consider leaving him that first year in Alabama. She says when she told John, she wanted to leave, he was livid. And they had a horrible fight that he slapped her and threw around the trailer. So she stayed afraid of what would happen if she left. And Devin says John started to keep a closer watch on her, telling her she couldn’t leave the trailer without him being present. He eventually installed surveillance cameras that he kept trained on the property, so he could see anyone coming in or out, including Deven. By Christmas 2013, Devin became unexpectedly pregnant. They had always been careful. And Devin felt that John intentionally did not take precautions so that they’d have a baby as a way to keep her away to tether her to him forever. Devon was worried about bringing a baby into this environment. I can’t leave, I don’t have anything. But when she got pregnant, John stopped hitting her, at least at first. She said she quit drinking alcohol. Things were better. Around this time, aunt Sheila took Deven to the dentist to finally fix her front tooth. The one she says John had knocked out around six months before. John told Deven to tell Aunt Sheila that she fell in the dark.

Sheila  26:19

Actually, what I found is that she had a tooth and something had happened to it. I mean, an artificial tooth. And then I never asked her and she never told me. I do wish I had said, well what happened? But I didn’t. I mean, I’m not one to ask a lot of questions. That everybody just amazed that I don’t even do that with my kids. If it’s something and it’s their business, I don’t ask questions. I raised them the best I could. And I hope that whatever they do, they make the right decisions about things.

Liz Flock  26:56

There were so many times someone could have intervened, but they didn’t recognize the signs or didn’t want to get involved. Maybe they only saw what they wanted to see. Because on the outside, John and Devin looked like a couple making it work. Deci says they were building a life together.

Desi  27:15

They were very passionate with one another. Like, all their interactions and things. I mean, he was I remember thinking, this is such a crazy thought. But I remember thinking that I wish that my husband treated me like he did her. And I just can’t imagine ever thinking that now. They only had each other. It’s like all they had in the world.

Liz Flock  27:39

Deven’s daughter was born in the summer of 2014. Becoming a mother gave her a new purpose. A photo from the day of birth shows Deven in a hospital gown staring serenely down at her tiny baby. We’re not using her name out of respect for her privacy as a minor. Well, Deven’s love of her daughter sustained her for a little while. It wasn’t long before the love with John turn scary again. By 2016, when Devon’s daughter was two years old, she says the abuse had become a regular occurrence, and it seemed to be escalating. She says it was physical, sexual and emotional. Deven was sinking into despair. She could hardly sleep anymore. Only three hours a night. About once a week, she’d have a nightmare about the abuse she faced. Devon was barely leaving the house. And when she did go places with John, she says it was miserable.

Deven  28:39

I was always so nervous because he would be so like, what are you looking at? We’re looking at me like, Why run out of wood? We went with that dude, we were talking to him. It’s like, oh my gosh, it made me so uncomfortable. Like it was just he was so I don’t know, like everything I did when I would go out with him that I didn’t even care if he went anywhere without.

Liz Flock  29:10

Instead Deven mostly stayed at home. Her TV and phone were her windows to the outside world. She used the phone to communicate with John and make doctor’s appointments for their daughter. But she says John monitored her calls and texts and she wasn’t allowed to contact anyone from back home. That when she tried to call 911, John got violent.

Deven  29:33

I’ve tried to call the cops several times. Every time he started turning off my phone and hiding it from me while we thought so I did have my phone because he didn’t want me to call the cop. So it’s not like you know I’ve never tried before. It was just something that I never tried to get.

Liz Flock  29:59

A few to times she went against John and called her family. She says John found out and changed her number, so no one could reach her. Deven tried to stand up to John, but there were a lot of things she said she never tried again, because she was terrified of the repercussions of what John would do to her. In 2017. She says she only left the house a total of four times, she became a shell of herself. From all my reporting, it’s clear she did not leave the relationship because like many domestic abuse survivors she could not leave. Deven was under John’s course of control, where a perpetrator grooms a victim, creating trust, and then fear. Psychologists compare it to a state of siege. Deven was a mental hostage, she felt like she had nowhere to go. No one to lean on, and no control over her own life. As I’ve gotten to know, Deven, I’ve spoken to dozens of other women behind bars who defended themselves against their abusers and have researched hundreds of these kinds of cases. It’s common for women to say like Devon did, that something was different that night, that if they didn’t protect themselves, they were going to die. Devin tells me about the night she shot John, and how quickly things escalated.

Deven  31:52

It was like, like a total transformation. […] It felt like a monster. He was choking me and I remember, I was like, I would blacked out. And then he would like, be back awake. And I’m like, I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know how to stop breathing. I was just, I was so scared. I was like, He’s gonna kill me. He’s gonna kill me. He’s gonna kill me.

Liz Flock  32:22

Devin says John told her he was going to finish what he started. She was sure she was going to die. She says he had gotten out his gun and pistol whipped her that he had shot up the trailer. Meanwhile, their daughter was asleep in the next room. She had grown accustomed to the loud fighting. victims of abuse make one calculation all the time. What can I do to stay alive? And so she says after hours of John beating her when he finally went to lie down, she picked up the gun. After Deven called 911 the cops arrived. John’s family started to get word of what had happened around 3am On December 12 2017. Aunt Sheila’s phone rang, it was her brother Henry, John’s dad.

Sheila  33:59

And he said sis I hate to tell you this time of night, but they have shot and killed John. Of course the police came to tell him he was asleep.

Liz Flock  34:09

Shortly after that they brought Henry down to the police station for questioning. Cops were investigating the crime scene now and Deven’s daughter was in the hands of Child Protective Services. Meanwhile, Aunt Sheila was piecing together what happened?

Liz Flock  34:24

Did that make you upset with her at all?

Sheila  34:26

Oh, I understood. Oh, no, no, no. I was none of my family. I have daughters and a son. And nobody was upset with her. Once we found out what the whole thing one of my and I’m sure she didn’t say anything to me about it because of him being my nephew.

Liz Flock  34:48

And Sheila says she understood that Devin was defending herself because her mom, mama cat had done the same thing when she killed Sheila’s stepdad 40 years prior. Court records show momma cat was charged with second degree murder. But Aunt Sheila says her mom’s charges. They didn’t stick.

Sheila  35:09

And I mean that was that one of the shortest trials I’ve ever seen in my life. It didn’t last long at all. So they wrote that she did it in self-defense. She testified to what happened. And of course, they wanted some people that knew her to testify. And there were several people that did. In fact, I did. I mean, it was it was just short and sweet and didn’t last long at all.

Liz Flock  35:39

Mama cat got off, but it wasn’t that easy for Deven.

Deven  35:44

And I feel like it’s a race thing. Okay, obviously black. And the fact that I had like used a gun and because that was turned like there was like things if you really find to calm down like that they could say, okay, well, you’re guilty. And you mentioned you this.

Liz Flock  36:07

Deven claim self-defense at a standard ground hearing a year after the shooting. She said she had been severely abused, but the judge denied her claim. In the end, she took a blind plea for manslaughter, in part to avoid a majority white jury at trial. She was sentenced to 15 years in prison. She was just 25 years old. Blind pleas are rare nationally, they happen mostly in the Midwest and the South. There when a person takes a guilty plea without even knowing what sentence they’re going to get. Which is pretty shocking. If you think about it. Even some of the legal experts I spoke with throughout my reporting didn’t know much about Blind Pleas. But that’s par for the course in Devon’s life. Because as I got to know the details of her case, it was clear. Her story is about the things we choose not to see. It’s about what happens when we ignore our trauma for too long, when generations of pain lead to a point of no return.

Liz Flock  37:19

Next time on Blind Plea, we’ll get into exactly what happened the night Devon killed John. While Devin claims self-defense. The investigator presented a very different narrative of that night, a narrative that came from someone else entirely. Alexis Bernstein, the other woman John was dating. She wasn’t there the night of the shooting, but she had a lot to say about it.

CREDITS  38:01

That’s in your feed right now. If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic abuse, use a safe computer and contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at the hotline.org or call 1-800-799-7233 There’s more Blind Plea with Lemonada Premium, subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content, like an interview with John’s dad, Henry and Tate from Deven’s detective interview the night of the shooting. Subscribe now in Apple podcasts Blind Plea is production of Lemonada Media. I’m your host Liz Flock. This episode was produced by Kristin Lapore, […] Evans and Tony Williams, Hannah Boomershine and Rachel Pilgrim are also our producers. Story editing by Martina Abrahams Ilunga. Mix music and sound design by Andrea Kristinsdóttir  with additional mixing and engineering from Ivan Kuraev. Naomi Barr is our fact checker. Jayla Everett is our production intern. Jackie Danziger is our Vice President of narrative content. Executive Producers are Stephanie Wittles Wachs, Jessica Cordova Kramer, evoked media, Sabrina Merage Naim and myself, Liz Flock. This series is presented by Marguerite Casey Foundation. Help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review. Follow me at @LizFlock. And for more stories of women and self-defense, check out my book The Furies from Harper books available for preorder now. Find Lemonada at @LemonadaMedia across all social platforms, and follow Blind Plea wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership. Thanks so much for listening.