Often, in true crime stories, there’s a narrative urge to make something of the terrible experience endured by the people at the story’s heart. As the reader (or listener, in the case of podcasts), we can’t help but hope for catharsis; if the life can’t be saved, the child found, or the murder solved, we’ll settle for the relief of believing that grief doesn’t just grind on, endless and unchanged, for the victim’s loved ones. We want to hear that they turned their pain into productivity, that old American vice, maybe by passing a law or founding a nonprofit. In other words, by the end of the story, we want these people to be relatively OK, because if they are, it’s easier to pretend that, in their shoes, we’d be OK, too.
City of Lights, the first podcast of writer Willy Nast, flips this script on its head. It’s ostensibly a true crime tale about the unsolved murder of Jeff Signorelli, a teenager from Aurora, Illinois, who was shot in July 2002—the summer after he finished high school, on the humid cusp of the rest of his life. But City of Lights doesn’t prioritize the comfort of the listener or force the story into a tidy narrative arc. Instead, Nast does something different: He tells the truth.
In the first of six episodes, Nast lets the listener know that this isn’t a whodunnit: Jeff’s murder remains unsolved. Instead, the question this podcast asks is, “What now?” To provoke interest in that question, Nast uses his creative nonfiction background and shoe-leather journalism to introduce listeners to the physical and emotional topography of this story, and to reconstruct the last day of Jeff’s life. In the middle of “a bad week, in a bad month, in a bad year,” in which Aurora was reeling from frequent gun violence, a young man woke up for the last time and put on his uniform for his crappy but fun summer job at a local water park. Perhaps, Nast says, Jeff pet his cat, Zeke; he grabbed a thermos of earl grey tea from his mom. On his way to work, he listened to the loud, angry music favored by many teenage white boys of the early aughts—maybe Korn, maybe Limp Bizkit—though, Nast tells us, Jeff was neither loud nor angry. “He was alive.”…