You Never Can Forget: Ashley Flowers and the Fiasco

Ashley Flowers, the host of CRIME JUNKIE, is on a PR tour to promote a novel that she worked on with another writer. As part of that, ELLE magazine just published a long article referring to her as “the Queen of True Crime.” To our surprise, the Murder Sheet was also mentioned in that article. 

The article gets into the history of crime junkie and it’s parent company Audiochuck, Flowers’s upbringing, and Flowers’ close relationship with Sarah Turney — a true crime podcaster who we’ll note has often weighed in publicly on ethical issues but has seemingly not spoken about the controversy around Flowers. Interesting given that she also sits on the board of Flowers’ nonprofit. 

It discusses a bit of the criticism we leveled at her for RED BALL. That podcast, you will recall, focused on the Burger Chef murders. As part of it, Bill Dalton of the Indiana State Police gave Flowers the exclusive right to monetize criminal investigative files that even the families of the victims are not permitted to see. We are quoted in the piece as calling the resulting programs badly written copaganda– we stand by that criticism but also note there were far worse ethical transgressions involved in the production of that program. 

In the same article, Flowers dismisses the plagiarism complaints against her. She says she did not use the work of other podcasters or paraphrase their words. She claims that “I didn’t take anyone’s work and make it my own.” 

We do not believe that to be true. But we thought it made sense to let you decide for yourself. So, as a bonus episode, we are re presenting an episode we originally released late last year which goes into considerable detail on the plagiarism charges Flowers tries to brush aside and the long lasting real world harm caused by the Bill Dalton/ RED BALL affair. It permanently affected the willingness of the Indiana State Police to use media to publicize cold cases– and cost at least one grieving family the opportunity to have the story of their loved one reach a natrional audience.

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