The last anyone saw 27 year-old Natalie Jones alive, she was driving into the night in her hot pink Chevy after a 2020 4th July party in Alabama. Three months later in rural Georgia, her partially mummified body was found in that same car. What happened during those three months? Did Natalie die by overdose, as the police initially suspected, or was someone else involved? The Truth About Natalie, written and hosted by Sean Kipe, dives into the mystery.
There are six episodes in the series (one is yet to be released at time of writing), which has topped podcast charts since its release. The first episode is a table setter, which describes Natalie’s difficult upbringing, her love for her two young sons, and the increasing public interest in her case during those three months when she seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth.
After that, The Truth About Natalie spends the next two instalments digging into the clues. We hear a lot about how the strange way Natalie’s cell phone signal bounced around on the night of her disappearance, the peculiar position in which her car was found, the toxicology report, and the amount of teeth left in her corpse all add up to suggest that there was something more to her case than the "accidental overdose" verdict that investigators were leaning towards.
While all this does raise questions, the way in which the potential evidence is presented here leaves a lot to be desired. Most of it is very visual, and hearing Kipe trying to describe the exact position and state of Natalie’s car when it was found (the implication being that it hadn’t been there the whole three months she was missing) is both confusing, and frankly not very interesting. It doesn’t help that these clues are presented to us before any suspects, so while we can agree that they might well add up to something, we aren’t given enough information to know who they might be pointing towards. These episodes have the effect of just listening to a lightly editorialised police report.
The Truth About Natalie becomes a little more engaging after that point, when we start to hear about Natalie's illicit online life, and her overly trusting relationships with shady men, at least one of whom scammed her out of an awful lot of money. Here, however, the problem becomes the opposite of those earlier episodes: there are so many people who could have taken advantage of her (almost every man she encountered sounds like a feasible suspect), it just seems impossible that the culprit would ever be found. That’s if there even is a culprit to be found, as Kipe doesn’t resoundingly disprove that overdose theory; yes, there was nothing in the toxicology report, but considering her body was partially mummified, it seems feasible any drugs in her system would have had more than enough time to leave it.
Natalie’s life was too short, and far too full of traumas, several of which we hear told by Natalie herself in clips from her YouTube channel. She was abused as a child. Her brother died young. Her mom did time in prison. The father of her first son left her when she was seven months pregnant. She was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and didn’t take the prescribed medication. She was so intensely vulnerable, it seems almost inevitable that her end would be a tragic one. As such, the podcast makes for a horribly depressing listen.
And a frustrating one, too. Besides Kipe and Natalie's mother, most of the voices here come from people described as "advocates" for Natalie, who seem acquainted with every detail of her case. The more we hear though, the more it becomes so apparent how desperately she needed people in her corner before she met her horrible end. Obviously, that's not the fault of these advocates, who perhaps only heard of her existence after she'd already died. Still, the irony of so many more caring about her once it was too late to change anything is hard to miss.
Perhaps that's the silver lining of The Truth About Natalie. While muddled storytelling means that it's not particularly engaging as a true crime podcast, if it encourages someone to check on the Natalie in their own life, then something good will have come out of it, at least.
