In July 2002, at a party in Aurora, Illinois, 18 year-old Jeff Signorelli was killed when a hail of bullets was fired through a wall into a garage where he stood with his friends. Almost a quarter of a century later, the identity of his killer remains unknown. But City of Lights, written and hosted by Aurora native Willy Nast, is not a whodunnit. It’s something more special.
The podcast tells the story of Jeff’s parents, Al and Mary Ann, and how they carried on with life after the killing of their son. Across the six episode run, City of Lights also becomes the story of local political and community systems buckling in the face of ego and neglect, as well as the brave people who put their whole hearts into fixing them.
When a true crime podcast takes a discursive approach to a murder, it can be a little frustrating (we saw this recently with The Brothers Ortiz). Yet City of Lights is so richly told, so thoughtful and moving, it doesn’t take long to shake off the desire for the showier elements of true crime. We don’t need the twists and the cliffhangers.
Although he references it frequently, Nast’s show actually sits quite uneasily within the true crime genre, mainly because there’s almost no discussion of the crime itself. It’s really more a dual character study; of a city, but most of all, of a couple.
Willy Nast had his first conversation with Al and Mary Ann when he was twenty-five. It was six years after Jeff’s murder, and though the weight of grief was still unimaginably heavy, the two had gotten to the point where they were able to laugh again. They’d graciously agreed to talk to Nast for a book he was planning to write. Yes, the podcast started life as a book, and so as the host himself admits, the interview recordings are not of great quality. Though that’s a little jarring at first in this era when we’re so used to pristine audio, it doesn’t take long to acclimate.
“City of Lights also becomes the story of local political and community systems buckling in the face of ego and neglect, as well as the brave people who put their whole hearts into fixing them.”
Nast recalls casually commenting to Mary Ann at one point during their many years of conversations that it would be funny if he was still working on this story when he was thirty. When he recorded that, he was thirty-eight, and a few more years passed over the time it took him to record his narration for the show. The more you listen, the more it strikes as a good thing that it’s taken him so long. There are a lot of threads at play here, and one of the most endearing early ones is Nast listening to the audio of his younger self and audibly wincing at his clumsiness as an interviewer (sweetly, his voice is also notably higher in those first interviews). Across the series, we hear Nast interviewing people both then and now, and it has the cumulative effect of underlining how he has lived with this story most of his adult life, and just how much it means to him.
Nevertheless, the awe-inspiringly resilient Signorellis are the stars here. Despite the poor quality of the audio, from the moment we first hear them talk with the nervous young Willy — gentle despite all they’d been through, patient despite his sporadic clumsiness, honest despite them not owing him anything at all — you can’t help but be on their side. Many couples are pulled apart by the loss of a child; Al and Mary Ann seem to have gone in the other direction. It’s quite something to be able to hear an unspoken bond so very loudly.
To his credit, Nast is straightforward about his lack of objectivity when it comes to the couple. He states early on: “I like Al and Mary Ann,” and offers a convincingly sceptical take on the whole concept of podcast objectivity in the first place.
When so much of his show revolves around the Signorellis, that could have been a problem, particularly in the later episodes, which cover the pair butting heads with local police and officials about their faltering investigation of Jeff’s killing. Vitally, however, Nast defaults to affording everyone he’s talking to the benefit of the doubt, understanding that two people can take two different things away from the same conversation without either of them lying.
The most compelling instalments of City of Lights are those that focus on the Signorellis: the first episode, where Nast recounts their first meeting; and Episode 5, where he tells the story of their agonising experience right after Jeff was killed and they were sent to the wrong hospital; and the sixth, where we hear them listen to the podcast, and find out what they make of it.
But City of Lights also uses the Signorellis as a narrative throughline through some wider municipal structures. In Episode 3, Al’s campaign for Alderman becomes an engrossing look into the characters of a local election, and in Episode 4, the Signorellis desire to bring an anti-gang violence organization to Aurora sparks an examination of some of those groups. Although these episodes can be dense with logistics and new characters and the structural politics, Nast’s warm, often forth-wall breaking narration helps to guide us through each in an engaging, humane way.
While, between Jeff’s murder and the glaring systemic flaws the show illustrates, Nast’s podcast could have been a deeply depressing listen, that isn’t the presiding note here. More than anything else, City of Lights is a paean to the people who go through hell, and not just keep going, but dedicate themselves to making sure that others don’t have to make that same awful journey.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd.