October 2nd, 2012. Deputy Steve Williams is driving through the Mojave Desert, miles from the nearest town. In the distance, he notices a woman by the side of the road. As he gets closer, he sees her hands are bound behind her back, and there’s a blindfold pushed up on her forehead. When he pulls over to help, she tells him she was kidnapped alongside her friend Michael, who is still back there, further into the desert. She guides Steve to Michael, who is in an even worse state – bloodied, burned, and most dramatically of all, missing his penis. So begins Devil in the Desert, a podcast from ABC News hosted by its Chief National Correspondent, Matt Gutman.
Gutman has been an ABC reporter for seventeen years. Like many TV news reporters, he’s honed a precise and recognizable cadence: clear, jargon free, but with an inbuilt drama in every line. It’s a way of speaking designed to report the facts without overt editorializing, yet we can tell from the lilt of his voice, the weighted positioning of certain pauses, where the import lies. It’s a tried and tested delivery method for four-to-five-minute segments. Devil in the Desert, however, runs altogether around four hours. For this duration, the narration feels far less suited.
That’s not really a problem in this first, cinematically riveting episode. Michael does not appear on the podcast, but Mary does, and she walks Gutman through the ordeal of their kidnapping in gripping, gruelling detail. This recounting is augmented by police recordings of the day in question, which makes it all the more vivid.
But after that opener, the tension ebbs, as Gutman shifts focus into investigating who kidnapped Mary and Michael, and why. Here, we move from an action thriller to a police procedural, following the cops as they trace down clues. These episodes are diligently researched, the complex timeline unfurled with commendable clarity, yet they’re undeniably less gripping than episode one. That the tone of Gutman’s narration remains the same, not accounting for the change of pace, has a flattening effect. If everything is pitched at the same level, then the genuinely dramatic things seem less exciting in comparison. (It’s a grimly amusing sign of the times that a significant number of the show’s reviews on Apple Podcasts are angrily convinced that he is AI).
It doesn’t help that the further into the show we get, the fewer other voices we hear. Many of those belong to interchangeable law enforcement personnel, giddy with the salaciousness of the case at hand, audibly eager to be playing their parts. The most compelling voice belongs to Courtney, the wife of the main antagonist, Hossein Nayeri. The two had an abusive relationship, and in the process of it, Courtney wound up covering for many of his misdeeds. After their separation, she is used by the police to lure her estranged fugitive husband into custody. We’re told repeatedly that the cops don’t trust her, but no one questions the way they’ve manipulated her, putting her in great danger in the process. That law enforcement’s word is always taken at face value gives the show a queasy, uncritical tone.
The action picks up again in the closing stretch, with an arrest, a jailbreak, and a big trial. Gutman secures an interview with Nayeri; it’s taken him three years, and the trading of many letters, to do so. They talked for over an hour, but that conversation takes up just a few minutes of the episode, and even those are dominated by Gutman’s narration.
“Meeting Nayeri in person, he still felt frustratingly out of reach,” he recounts when their encounter is done. Sure, Gutman can’t help it if his subject was less forthcoming then he’d hoped. Nevertheless, when we’ve spent episodes wondering and theorizing about this man, to have our host talk over so much of his interview with him seems wasteful.
Ironically, the podcast might have worked better if Gutman had leaned into his own journey with the case more. It’s an old trope that the reporter should never become part of the story. You don’t want to pull focus from the news at hand. Still, the sheer number of years Gutman has spent reporting the case is fascinating in itself. What must it have been like to be on the same story for so long? To have built a rapport with the man so many call a monster?
Unlike TV news, podcasts are an inherently personal, intimate medium. To hear so much of Gutman’s voice, but so little of his experience, leaves the show in an odd middle ground: both overwhelmed by its host and kept at a distance from him.
The amount of sheer spectacle in Devil in the Desert makes it an easy listen. In “truth is stranger than fiction” fashion, it really is hard to believe all of this took place. But with such an unbelievable story as material and the longer runtime a podcast allows, it’s frustrating that the series never digs much beneath its splashy surface.
¤
Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd page.