Deepwater Horizon, for nearly a decade, this offshore oil rig was the pride of the industry. Not only did it drill the deepest well in history at one time, but it set a seven year safety record impressive in such a hazardous business. On April 20th, 2010, all of that, a claim disappeared in the span of a single night.

The first sign that something was wrong came at nine forty p.m. when a hissing noise echoed through the rig below deck, crew members discovered rising pressure in the central drilling pipe they launched into action as heavy drilling fluid, also called mud, flowed up from the well and poured onto the station's deck. Despite the mounting danger, the rest of the rig's crew wasn't alerted because the automatic alarms failed to go off. Nine minutes later, two explosions suddenly tore through the horizon.

Panicked workers rushed to the lifeboats.

Secondary eruption sent debris flying everywhere, and flames soared two hundred and forty feet above the deck. Within moments, even the water underneath the huge drilling station was on fire. It was covered in spilled oil. Realizing that their efforts were doomed, the remaining crew members piled into an inflatable raft. Others, having no choice, jumped from the platform in a long fall to the ocean's surface.

Eleven people died in the horrific Deepwater Horizon explosion, and 17 others were severely injured. But with millions of gallons of oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico from an unsealed well, the worst was yet to come.

Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify original from past every Monday and Wednesday, we dig into the complicated stories behind the world's most controversial events and search for the truth. Carter Roy.

And I'm Molly Brandenberg.

And neither of us are conspiracy theorists, but we are open minded, skeptical and curious.

Don't get us wrong. Sometimes the official version is the truth, but sometimes it's not.

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This is the first of two episodes on Deepwater Horizon, an offshore rig in the Gulf of Mexico that exploded in 2010, killing 11 people and dumping millions of gallons of oil into the ocean. This industrial disaster left the public with questions about exactly what went wrong on the horizon that night and who was to blame.

This episode will explore the history and purpose of drilling for fossil fuel, will also run through the April 20th explosion and rescue, as well as the devastating impact on the environment and American economy.

Next time, we'll examine those who could have benefited from this catastrophe. Among them, North Korea, big oil and ecoterrorists.

We have all that and more coming up. Stay with us. The fate of Deepwater Horizon was sealed long before the disaster that destroyed it. Oil drilling is complicated. Past laid a foundation for the company's practices and culture that ultimately decimated the infamous rig. Crude oil is a fossil fuel, meaning the yellowish black liquid is made up of the remains from plants, animals and dinosaurs. This resource was first used to light fires around 2000 years ago in China.

In the late eighteen forties, geologists and chemists discovered new ways to distill the thick black liquid into various petroleum products like gasoline, diesel, asphalt and more. These products were far more efficient energy sources than coal, and this scientific revelation changed the economy of the world forever.

The first step along the road to an oil based future came in 1857. A group of businessmen in Titusville, Pennsylvania, commissioned an entrepreneur named Edwin Drake to find and deliver the promising new resource. Up to this point, no one had figured out a way to cheaply and efficiently acquire the raw liquid that was about to change. It took two years. Then Drake and his team managed to create the first commercial well in America, the strategy that changed everything was a deceptively simple one.

Drake pioneered the technique of lining the boreholes with pipe to allow for deeper digging. This proved to be decisive because not only did it make drilling easier, but it allowed the ability to collect massive amounts of crude oil. At the time, the innovation caught the attention of a young John D. Rockefeller.

The bookkeeper saw potential in this new resource, so he went in a business and formed the Standard Oil Company over the span of a few decades. He built wells and refineries across the Northeast and Midwest and bought out or acquired other small oil firms. By the beginning of the 20th century, Standard grew to control 91 percent of petroleum production and 85 percent of final sales in the United States.

By this time, however, the corporation was so powerful that the public and the U.S. government greatly feared the conglomerates it controlled. Railroads influence legislation and maintained horrible working conditions. In 1911. The Supreme Court ordered the oil giant to dissolve its trust into 34 smaller entities. Among these companies were what we know today as Exxon Mobil and Chevron over the rest of the 20th century.

Oil became one of the dominant energy sources across the entire world. The US in particular used massive amounts of it, utilizing the resource to fuel cars, heat buildings and produce electricity in 2017, while Russia, Japan and India each accounted for roughly four percent of world petroleum consumption. The United States used around 20 percent, second only to taxes.

Energy revenue disbursements from resources such as oil and natural gas generate the most funding for the US Treasury of any one source. On top of this, these industries support five point six percent of national employment.

This is the economic paradigm that gave birth to a rig like Deepwater Horizon for decades, offshore drilling had been a successful technique for oil collection across the world. But in an effort to minimize dependence on foreign petroleum, the U.S. invested in domestic sources such as the Gulf of Mexico. By the end of the 20th century, the Gulf's prosperous oil wells inspired waves of new drilling technologies and strategies.

Hyundai Heavy Industries was building the horizon. By the year 2004, Transocean, an offshore drilling company valued at over 560 million dollars. The rig was a technological marvel and industrial Goliath.

Many floating rigs are essentially giant ships that can move from one oil well to the next. The horizon took this model and refined it, using a technique called dynamic positioning, which stabilized the rig directly over the well.

The Horizons technology also managed the bulk of pipe handling, which was typically the most dangerous part of drilling jobs.

After it was built, Transocean leased the state of the art rig to BP p.l.c., the third largest oil and gas producer in the world, under their control. The advanced rig managed to drill the deepest well in history in 2009 and completed many other challenging projects in the Gulf of Mexico.

However, the rig's biggest test came when BP called on it to drill a well known as the Macondo prospect. This was a recently discovered oil source located 41 miles off the Louisiana coast and approximately 5000 feet below sea level as January turned to February in 2010.

The rig reached the well and the crew began their typical procedures. First, they lowered something called a blowout preventer down to the ocean floor. Then they attached it to the well. This device's purpose was to prevent any sort of uncontrolled release of oil or gas. If that were to happen while the rig was drilling, it would be extremely dangerous.

During the first three months that the horizon spent working on the Macondo workers experienced well control issues four separate times. This triggered emergency protocols on each occasion, but every time a larger crisis was averted, however, this amount of trouble was still unusual for a drilling expedition, and many of the crew members started calling Macondo the well from hell.

In April 2010, Deepwater Horizon completed the well. The next step was to seal the hole and then move on to the next project. And the clock was ticking. The plan was behind schedule and over budget, and BP was anxious to wrap up.

Halliburton, one of the world's largest oil field technology companies, was contracted to close the well, which is a vitally important safety step. After pumping cement around the pipe, the corporation ran several tests to make sure the well was secure.

According to their reports, it was at this news BP executives, or as they were called on the rig company men reportedly urged the crew into double time. They wanted this project done as soon as possible because of the cost overruns.

The rush meant skipping several operational steps. For example, the rig workers were allegedly told to replace heavy drilling mud with lighter saltwater before they were meant to. This exchange would disrupt pressure in the well and should not have been done before the final cement seals were in place in a safety meeting afterwards.

Witness accounts suggest that Transocean Representative Jimmy Harrell demanded a more cautious approach on behalf of the rig's crew. The workers who were there at the time watch the tension grow between Herel and the BP company man. Supposedly, Bob Kaluza Harrell told him that the Oil Corporation's orders undermine safety protocol. But Kaluza put his foot down and said it was his way or the highway.

This was far from the first time BP representatives interfered with operations on Deepwater Horizon because the technology on the rig was new and advanced. It allowed Transocean and BP to eliminate some of the typical positions on an oil rig crew. But as the horizon. Got older and Wells became more challenging, it was hard for workers, it did have to keep up, adding fuel to the proverbial fire.

BP at this time is said to have had a policy that made their disdain for safety clear. If any employee on one of their drilling platforms made a suggestion that saved the oil company money, that worker would get a bonus. This incentivized looking for cheaper and faster ways to operate.

So when the company men insisted on cutting corners, it wasn't personal, it was just business. However, this institutionalized greed had serious consequences.

Up next, BP's shortcuts put Deepwater Horizon at risk. Listeners, this month marks 60 years since John F. Kennedy became the 35th president of the United States, ushering his already prominent family into the highest enclaves of political power. But behind their storied successes lies, secrets and scandals so severe, if it were any other lineage, they would have been left in ruin this January. To commemorate this iconic milestone, dig into the dramas of a Real-Life American dynasty in the Spotify original from podcast The Kennedys.

This exclusive series from Spotify features your favorite part cast hosts, including me, covering every angle of the Kennedys from shows like Today in True Crime, Conspiracy Theories, Crime Countdown and Others, assassinations and conspiracies, corruption and cover ups, international affairs and extramarital ones to examine all of the Kennedy family's most controversial moments. All in one place you can binge all 12 episodes of this limited series starting on Tuesday, January 19th. Follow the Kennedys free and exclusively on Spotify.

Now back to the story, in April 2010, the technologically advanced oil rig Deepwater Horizon completed drilling the Macondo prospect for British Petroleum. The well from hell had already proven a challenge for the crew with a project behind schedule, BP executives ordered shortcuts in sealing the well to make up for lost time on April 20th.

Everyone on the horizon was working full tilt, anxious to move on to a less challenging drill site. That morning, a team of oilfield service providers from Schlumberger Ltd. got on a helicopter and left the horizon, according to Doug Brown, the rig's chief mechanic. They were supposed to run a test and confirm the integrity of Halliburton's cement seal job. But BP sent the team home before they could inspect the safety of the well, hoping to save time and money.

According to the oil company, Halliburton's reports in the horizon's internal inspections made this extra safety step seem unnecessary in preparation to leave the Macondo entirely.

The Horizons crew conducted many internal tests to confirm the integrity of the well and the cement job. However, these procedures went off the rails when the tests returned to contradictory technical readings. Most of the crew had never seen results like this and disagreed over what they meant.

After discussion of these results, Don Vedrine, the well site leader and senior BP company man, ordered a second test. Some Transocean representatives thought Védrine was being unnecessarily cautious. However, at least one worker was convinced that the site leader wasn't cautious enough. According to several accounts. This individual argued with another BP company man, Bob Kaluza, before storming off the drill floor.

When the second test came back, the results were again abnormal, but nobody made records of the procedure and findings for this follow up. Testimonies from the crew about this second report are contradictory. But we know one thing for sure. With the support of site leader Vedrine, the crew went forward with protocols to close up shop and move the rig off the well. At around eight forty five pm, just hours after the test results, natural gas made it around the cement seal and traveled up the well undetected.

This buildup caused the pressure to rise for almost an hour. By 940 p.m., the force of the gas became too great. Mud and seawater burst out of the pipe and onto the horizon's deck alarmed the crew called Védrine immediately, who grabbed his hard hat and ran towards the gushing well.

They signaled the blowout preventer to shut, which should have stopped the flow of mud. But for some reason, the blowout preventer malfunctioned.

The slurry of mud, water and now gas projected from the people into the air with such force that it ricocheted off of walls. Glass and debris exploded. Two crew members who had been working nearby ran to help, but quickly retreated. They tried to radio their bosses who were in the drill shack right next to the eruption of mud. But they didn't receive an answer.

Then another worker smelled gas. This caused panic among the crew to rise. They were right to be alarmed.

Sensors started wailing on the bridge. Crew members should have activated emergency systems that might have prevented gas from spreading or igniting. But those workers in the rig's nerve center didn't bring those systems online. Maybe it was because of technical issues or a lack of training. But regardless, they also failed to sound a general alarm to prompt an evacuation.

As the chaos mounted, all power on the rig suddenly cut out. There was a brief moment of silence and then the flow of natural gas found a source of ignition and one of the drilling station's engines. Seconds later, the first explosion occurred.

The second explosion came immediately after the first, and it was massive. People were hurled across rooms impaled by shrapnel or consumed by fire. In seconds, the rig became a war zone. Crew members doused in mud, blood and combustible gas crawled through dark hallways and over bodies looking for a way out. Cries for help filled the air as flames covered the rig.

Though accounts vary, some say that multiple people called for an emergency disconnect system to cut the drill pipe and seal the well, but the rig's workers were hesitant to do so without first receiving permission by waiting for orders from their superior to engage the emergency disconnect system.

They were apparently following protocol regardless at the time. These actions only spread confusion and distress.

That's why a crew member on the bridge decided to take matters into his own hands. He stepped around his captain, prepared to defy orders and start the disconnect system himself at that moment.

Jimmy Harrell, the Transocean representative, came running into the bridge, partially blinded by debris. He was screaming a three letter acronym, A.D.s Emergency Disconnect System.

The crew member pushed the button, and the rig's computers signified that the process had been successfully executed with the blowout preventer. But it hadn't. It's possible that the first explosion damaged the system and the device couldn't cut the pipe. On top of that, there were two backup methods to ensure the preventer's shears worked no matter what, but they both malfunctioned.

In a last ditch effort, three men ran across the rig to the standby generator. They hope that by turning it on, they could get power back on the deck. But when they got there and filed the sequence three or four times, they realized the generator for some reason was dead.

With a lack of power and a failed ETS, it was time to abandon ship, parts of the horizon were simply gone at that point, blown away by the explosions. There was also flying debris, further injuring people trying to escape. Lastly, fire was burning everywhere to lifeboats were lowered into the water.

They began moving away from the blazing oil rig. The remaining crewmates piled into an inflatable raft and descended 75 feet. The thick black smoke and flames made it impossible for them to see where they were going.

But then the raft finally made it to the water. The crew was relieved until they realized they couldn't cut the rope that connected them to the horizon. They were completely stuck while they struggled underneath the huge ship. Three people panicked 75 feet above on the structures deck.

It's unclear if there was no room left in the raft or if these workers had been separated from everyone else. But regardless, they stood on the rigs deck among the wreckage, unsure of what to do. There were no lifeboats left. Even worse, from what they could see, the Gulf of Mexico was covered in flaming oil. But there are other choice was to burn alive on the rig itself.

One of those crew members moved up to the helicopter deck. The horizon's highest point, one by one, they took running starts. They gained as much speed as possible before launching themselves into the air, then plummeting through the flames and smoke.

The crew members on the stuck life raft watched their colleagues hit the water and surface nearby, miraculously alive. It was one sliver of badly needed good news. However, the inferno continued to rage on the platform above them, and they still couldn't cut their ties from the rig.

Nearby, a motor vessel called Dayman. Bankston sprang into action as soon as its crew saw the flames. They dispatched a fast rescue craft which sped towards the rig. This boat spotted those who jumped because of the reflective patches on their work overalls and started fishing them out of the water.

Eventually, the rescue boat noticed the raft underneath the burning rig. The craft steered as close as possible following the screams for help. Then, with a knife borrowed from the Bankston, one of the swimmers finally managed to cut the raft free.

Soon, crew members covered in mud, seawater and gas poured onto the Bankston deck. Finally, it seemed like they were safe.

For hours, the rescue boat remained 500 metres away from the burning rig. The senior crew members surveyed the damage and tallied the missing crew. Overall, 11 people never made it off the rig, and for some reason, the Bankston wasn't allowed to bring the survivors to shore just yet. So the oil workers watched Deepwater Horizon burn, along with 11 of their colleagues.

Finally, BP and Transocean gave the BENGSTON approval to bring the remaining crew in. However, under orders from the oil company, the ship made several stops. First, some of those detours led high level BP and Transocean personnel off first. This added delays struck many of the rank and file crew members as odd and distressing, considering what they'd all just been through.

When the Bankston finally reached the nearest Louisiana port, it was one 30 a.m. on April twenty second over a day after the explosion. But instead of seeing their families, the crew was immediately sequestered in a hotel. They were questioned by Transocean and BP investigators given urinalysis tests and asked to sign a form.

The form had two statements. One said I was not a witness to the incident requiring the evacuation and have no firsthand or personal knowledge regarding the incident. The second said I was not injured as a result of the incident or evacuation.

Tired, hurt and having just seen a horrific explosion, many crew members signed without considering how it would affect them later. Some think that Transocean and BP counted on their disorientation. A lawyer later suggested that the companies left the crew on the Bankston for a long time so that they could assemble teams of corporate attorneys back on land.

But BP and Transocean had a much bigger issue than lawsuits on their hands. The unsealed oil well was still pumping natural gas all over the rig. The Coast Guard and other emergency responders tried to fight the 300 foot flames by surrounding the station with boats and dousing the structure with water. But it was a lost cause. There was no simple way to fight a fire with endless fuel.

After a day and a half of burning, the rig started to creak and groan. Firefighters later described it as the sound of a ship dying. Multiple explosions went off and debris flew into the air. The firefighters continued their efforts to save the ship, but prepared for an emergency evacuation. Around 10 a.m. on April 22nd, Deepwater Horizon started to slip into the Gulf of Mexico. Within minutes, the vessel was completely submerged. The fight was over. The oil rig had sunk when the horizon crumbled under the waves.

The pipe between the rig in the well beneath it broke with no pressure keeping it underground. Oil flowed freely from the earth, gushing into the Gulf at horrifying rates. At the time, BP claimed the volume of escaping liquid was about 1000 barrels a day. We now know the real amount was far higher.

For months afterwards, experts tried to seal the well. They place domes over the blowout preventer and drilled mud into it. But still, underwater cameras showed brown plumes of oil escaping the broken pipe like smoke from a chimney giant. Remote controlled submarines with mechanical arms prodded the leaking equipment, trying to see what could be done. Eventually, it was a combination of efforts that sealed the spill. One of the caps fitted to the well slowed the leak and the drilling mud helped enough to stabilize the flow.

Then the faulty blowout preventer was exchanged with a working one. The new machine ran through all the functions that failed the night of the explosion. This time they worked on September 17th, 2010.

The well was completely sealed after cement was placed and tested. The spill lasted 87 days and dumped over 200 million gallons into the Gulf of Mexico. Up next, the aftermath of the largest oil disaster in history. Now back to the story.

After a horrific explosion and devastating oil spill, Transocean and BP responded not with compassion and aid, but with teams of lawyers.

However, the spill's impact on the world was about to expand from the Horizons 126 crew members to entire ecosystems.

By the time the well was sealed, the colorful orange oil slick spanned more than 57000 square miles across an otherwise teal colored ocean, greater than 1000 miles of shoreline in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, where polluted with oil and tar balls, the spill wreaked environmental havoc.

Dying turtles and birds arrived on land covered in thick layers of sticky goo. And elsewhere on the food chain, the oil proved toxic for a wide range of organisms, including plankton, invertebrates, fish, birds and sea mammals. The effects ranged from death to disease to impaired reproduction.

The spill also brought the fishing industry in the Gulf of Mexico to a complete halt. More than a third of U.S. federal waters closed due to fear of contamination. This devastated many of the American port cities along the Gulf that relied on fishing for their economies.

BP vowed to clean up the spill as soon as possible, among many methods, floating booms were used to contain surface oil. Then the company employed machines to remove the crude by skimming it off the surface. Only two to four percent of the spill was collected this way.

Another tactic involved the use of controlled burns. Setting the oil on fire at the ocean's surface accounted for five to six percent of the removal after Deepwater Horizon.

These cleanup efforts were organized by the National Response Team, a coalition of government agencies with the U.S. Coast Guard and the Environmental Protection Agency at the lead. Funding and support came from BP and Transocean as well.

BP's cleanup attempts had flaws, despite the fact that the company made earnest public declarations about their efforts. For example, they started a program called Vessels of Opportunity that hired fishermen who had lost their jobs to use their boats and equipment to recover oil.

In a video interview for a documentary, one fisherman pointed out that his net was designed to catch fish. Water ran through the tool freely, making it useless to collect spilled crude.

The interview was cut short when the fisherman was reminded by a co-worker that he had signed a form with BP, saying he wouldn't talk to the media.

As the months passed, the disaster continued to impact thousands of Americans. The Obama administration enacted a moratorium on new offshore drilling after the spill, which caused the temporary unemployment of an estimated 8000 to 12000 people.

This was just the initial response. Regulations hurt the oil industry as a whole beyond just BP. The more the petroleum corporations in general were reprimanded for this disaster, the more jobs they eliminated to account for litigation and relief funds. And these funds were substantial.

BP, under pressure from Obama and facing an overwhelming amount of public anger, created a 20 billion dollar compensation package for those affected by the spill. This fund faced criticism from every side, both for approving too many and too few claims.

More than anything, people wanted to know whose fault the disaster was. An investigatory report ultimately placed most of the blame on BP. This inquiry, completed in part by the U.S. Coast Guard, revealed that BP and Transocean representatives on Deepwater Horizon had ignored many early signs that something was wrong. Therefore, they missed numerous opportunities to prevent the blowout.

After this report, the U.S. Department of Justice levied a huge lawsuit at BP and Transocean for violating the Clean Water Act and Oil Pollution Act.

BP later agreed to settle claims with spill victims for at least seven point eight billion dollars, in addition to covering economic losses. The settlement mandated the payment of medical claims related to the spill for the next 21 years.

The consequences didn't end there. In November 2012, BP pled guilty to 14 criminal charges, including 11 counts of manslaughter for the deaths aboard the horizon. That same month, the EPA temporarily banned the British oil company from entering new federal contracts to drill.

Then, in January 2013, Transocean reached its own settlement with the government. The company agreed to a one billion dollar civil penalty under the Clean Water Act. They also paid a 400 million dollar criminal penalty and resolved plaintiff's claims at around 211 million dollars.

A couple of months later, the Halliburton Corporation also saw consequences. The corporation pled guilty to criminal charges that its employees destroyed evidence suggesting their cement job was not stable. In response, the company was fined a 200000 dollar penalty.

Later, a civil trial by the federal government found BP 67 percent culpable, Transocean 30 percent and Halliburton three percent. The ruling recognized that BP had claimed approximately two point four or five million barrels of oil had leaked into the ocean, while the U.S. government estimated that four point one nine million barrels had spilled then in the largest financial penalty ever delivered by the U.S. government against one company.

BP's final settlement was set at twenty point eight billion dollars, in addition to financial punishments, the government publicly reprimanded the oil companies at fault, as well as the industry as a whole. The Subcommittee on Energy and Environment in the US House of Representatives summoned the CEOs of BP, ExxonMobil and Shell Oil sitting behind a desk in a line.

Each leader had to answer why the companies had invested so little in safety and cleanup.

Furthermore, BP company men Don Védrine and Bob Kaluza were charged with manslaughter for ignoring safety, protocol and concern among the Deepwater Horizon crew. These charges were later dropped. The father of Gordon Jones, who was one of the 11 people killed on April 20th, attended these hearings. He said he was disappointed that no one will ever spend a moment behind bars for killing 11 men due to reasons based entirely on greed. Between these financial punishments, the temporary moratorium on drilling and the public shaming they delivered, the U.S. government finally seem to be taking action against the oil industry.

For decades, the country bent to the will of petroleum corporations. After the spill, the U.S. publicly stated no more.

But this show of strength didn't last. As mentioned at the beginning of this episode, the entire infrastructure of America relied on oil to keep the economy running despite concern over the spill. This dependency persisted. Afterwards, Congress passed the 2012 Restore Act, which ensured that civil penalties from the spill would be shared amongst the states. Other than that, the Obama administration imposed some safety rules and regulations through the Interior Department.

But many have since been reversed within two years of the spill. The U.S. government sold 39 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron and, of course, BP. The government made one point seven billion dollars in profits on water that wasn't even cleaned up yet. The sale was completed at the same time the federal government sued these energy corporations.

While people and ecosystems still struggle today from the aftermath of the BP oil spill. America has returned to its cycle of oil dependency. U.S. oil production continue to set records through 2019, dipping only during the covid pandemic.

The negligence of companies involved was clear. But this catastrophe, one of the biggest environmental disasters in history, prompts important questions. The rig had countless safety systems in place. Yet how was it that all of them failed the night of April 20th? And did the Halliburton employees destroy more evidence than was acknowledged publicly?

Next week, we'll explore some theories surrounding these questions, Deepwater Horizon and its fiery demise. First, we'll discuss the involvement of foreign powers like North Korea and Russia and whether or not their exclusion from the world's oil profits led them to undertake sinister actions.

Second, we'll dive deeper into the corporations that ran the infamous oil rig to see if the negligence on display was actually a conspiracy. We'll investigate whether executives set out to make money from selling shares of stock right before the explosion.

Finally, we'll explore the potential role of some eco terrorist groups. It's possible that radical environmentalists plan to expose the dangers of oil drilling by targeting the vessel and creating that disaster themselves. After all, the rig sank just before Earth Day. While many chalk this up to coincidence, it could instead be due to sabotage.

Thanks for tuning in to conspiracy theories. We'll be back Wednesday with our second episode on Deepwater Horizon. You can find all episodes of conspiracy theories and all other Spotify originals from Park Cast for free on Spotify.

Until then, remember, the truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth.

Conspiracy Theories is a Spotify original from past. Executive producers include Max and Ron Cutler, Sound Design by Dick Schroder with production assistance by Ron Shapiro, Carly Madden and Freddie Beckley. This episode of Conspiracy Theories was written by Kit Fitzgerald with writing assistants by Nicholas Swart and Obiageli Megu, fact checking by Bennett Logan and research by Bradley Klein. Conspiracy theory stars Molly Brandenberg and Carter Roy.

Fact, fiction, fame, discover the real story behind one of history's most formidable families in the Spotify original from Park Cast the Kennedys. Remember, you can binge all 12 episodes starting on Tuesday, January 19th. Listen free and exclusively on Spotify.