Introducing true crime podcast: Untested

USA Today

08-05-2025

Introducing true crime podcast: Untested | The Excerpt
On a bonus episode (first released on May 6, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: Buried in an evidence room, a DNA swab held the key to catching a serial sex offender. But no one tested it for years. Detective Annie Harrison finally put the pieces together in two states 800 miles apart. This is the story of Untested, an exclusive true crime podcast from USA TODAY and Witness. The show's host, USA TODAY Investigative Reporter Gina Barton, joins The Excerpt to discuss the reporting that went into the series and why she thinks listeners should tune in.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Tuesday, May 6th, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. A quick warning, this episode includes descriptions of sexual assault and suicide, so it may not be suitable for all listeners. Annie Harrison had just gotten back from a family vacation to Mexico with her husband, her aunt, and uncle, and her two daughters. She was cleaning out her inbox when she saw an email that would change the lives of two women who'd reported being raped. Annie is a detective in Michigan, and the email was from the state crime lab detailing a DNA match that would lead her on a quest to hunt down and bring a serial sex offender to justice. This is the story of Untested, an exclusive true crime subscriber podcast series from Witness in USA TODAY. The podcast is available to subscribers of Witness and also on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Untested's host, investigative reporter Gina Barton joins me now to talk about her reporting and why she thinks listeners should tune in. Thanks for joining me, Gina.
Gina Barton:
Thanks for having me.
Dana Taylor:
This is obviously a huge project, one that you've dedicated many, many months to now. What made you want to create Untested, Gina?
Gina Barton:
The idea started with our project into the problem of untested rape kits, and we looked into a federal grant program that was supposed to help solve that problem. During our reporting, I came across a court file talking about a man named Marshawn Curtis, and he was just going to be coming up for trial. I went to the trial and that is where I met Detective Annie Harrison and started to hear and learn about everything that she went through for almost a year to try and bring this man to justice after he had gotten away with numerous sex crimes for 10 years. I just thought it would be a really compelling story for listeners, and we have some great audio that really gives you the inside view of how a police investigation works.
Introducing true crime podcast: Untested
Untested tells the story of one detective's dogged pursuit of a serial sex offender to deliver justice.
Dana Taylor:
The main character of the show is Detective Annie Harrison. How exactly did you meet her and what drew you to her as a character?
Gina Barton:
I met Annie in the courtroom. And I have to say, when I first met her, I was a little bit intimidated by her. She is obviously very authoritative as a police detective, she's a little hard to read, but once I started talking with her, I realized she is really unusual as a police detective compared to lots of other ones that I've met during the course of my career. Annie was willing to talk about some of the mistakes that had been made in the investigation. She was willing to talk about how she as a detective had learned and evolved over the course of her career. She was very open about how much she cared about victims and how important she feels like this project is to get these rape kits tested, and how police across the country just have to do better. As the reporting process went on, I ended up talking to Annie for probably 40 or 50 hours. I recorded all of those conversations, so I'd like to share this clip from one of them.
Annie:
I've always been a curious person, and I also feel that I've had a strong interest in justice. I was raised by a single mother who was a hard worker and always wanted to do things for other people, and I think that way that I was raised helped to contribute to my career choice to be in law enforcement. And also I've always believed and known that bad things happen to good people and I want to be there to help.
Dana Taylor:
Gina, what are some of the things Annie did differently from the other detectives who worked on this case?
Gina Barton:
The thing that struck me about Annie is that she is very victim-centered in her investigations. She really concentrates on how to make the victims feel comfortable, how not to re-traumatize them through the investigation. She also goes the extra mile and makes the extra effort to find out everything that she possibly can about the suspect so that if the victim chooses not to come to trial, they can still have a case against him. So Annie never asks the victims if they want to prosecute. Instead, she builds a case assuming that that victim will not testify. And if the victim does testify, then that's great and it's a better case, but that isn't required to make a case. That stands in contrast to some of the other detectives who investigated this same suspect. The first detective who investigated that case did not send the rape kit to be tested, and she basically said, this is a he-said-she-said case, he's just as believable as she is. It's probably not going to go anywhere.
And then when the same suspect was investigated again in 2020, the detective there in Georgia, if you listen to her interview with the victim and her interview with the suspect, which we will be sharing with you on the show Untested, it's almost as if the victim is being treated as a suspect. And when that detective interviews the actual suspect, Marshawn Curtis, she seems very friendly and tells him that basically she believes him before she's even started talking to him. So I have a clip from that conversation that I'd like to share.
Detective:
Like I said, it's not illegal. You guys are both grown. If y'all had sex, you had sex, you know what I mean? It might not be the smartest thing to meet people off the internet, but I mean, it's not illegal. So what I want to do is to prove what actually happened. You get what I'm saying? Like I said before, there were a few inconsistencies, which, I'm pretty good at my job, I can usually tell when people are not being straightforward so that's why I wanted to call you and be straightforward with you, and hopefully with what you're giving me, I'm able to just say, instead of spending it, saying that there's a possibility it happened, but I can't prove it. I want to say that it didn't happen. You know what I'm saying?
Marshawn Curtis:
I would rather that anyways.
Dana Taylor:
Tell us about some of the more compelling twists and turns in the case.
Gina Barton:
Every time Detective Harrison turned around, she found something else. And the most heartbreaking thing, of course, is that he had been accused of rape in 2012 and wasn't taken to trial then, wasn't held accountable, and then eight years later, 800 miles away from Michigan, in Georgia, another woman had accused him of rape. There were other things too that she found in his background. About a month after the first rape complaint in 2012, he was 19 at the time, and he had sex with a fifteen-year-old, got her pregnant, which would be illegal on its face because she was not old enough to consent, but no charges there. He followed a woman home from a bar one night at Michigan State, and as he's walking with her, he starts masturbating on the street. He had a lot of issues with exposing himself to women, planting cameras in public restrooms, just a lot of behavior that was very disturbing even though it wasn't a physical assault.
Dana Taylor:
Gina, as a reporter, did you take any special steps when you were dealing with the victims because of the sensitivity of this topic?
Gina Barton:
I think it's really important that as journalists, we are also cognizant of trauma that victims have been through, and the last thing that I want to do is make things harder for them or traumatize them any further by speaking with them, interviewing them by what I'm reporting or how it's reported. So we did take lots of steps in the show to make sure that the victims were all comfortable with not only whether their names were used, but with how their words were going to be used, what the context is, what quotes we were using. And in fact, one of the victims who plays a key role in the story, Jocelyn Phillips from Michigan, said it was okay if we use her name, but she did not want us to use her voice. So instead, we used transcripts and we had an actor read her part. And so that allows her to be empowered to have her story shared, but to not have to go through having her voice out there, which she wasn't comfortable with. So that's just one example.
Dana Taylor:
What did your team learn about the problem of untested rape kits?
Gina Barton:
I think the biggest problem that we discovered when we investigated this is that a lot of agencies didn't really think about what to do after they tested the rape kit, right? They get a grant, they send the kits to the lab, they come up with the DNA profile, and then they don't do anything with it. So in Michigan, where I focused my reporting for the show, they had a team that consisted of the detective, a prosecutor, and a victim advocate, and they made sure that for every rape kit that got tested, they went back and re-investigated the case because just testing those kits really does no good if you don't do anything with the new evidence that you get.
Dana Taylor:
What do you hope that listeners will walk away with after listening to your podcast series?
Gina Barton:
I think that law enforcement definitely needs more training. Annie Harrison in Michigan has had a lot of training on how to deal with victims, how to build a case. The prosecutors there have had training on how to bring a case to trial if the victim doesn't testify. There are all kinds of small things that make a huge difference in whether these suspects are brought to justice. In some jurisdictions, if the victim isn't going to testify, there's no charges, there's no investigation. And if that would've happened in this case, this man might still be out there assaulting other women.
Dana Taylor:
Gina, thank you so much for being on The Excerpt.
Gina Barton:
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
Dana Taylor:
Subscribe on Apple or Spotify to get the full season of Untested, a witness exclusive podcast, ad free. For much more true crime content, subscribe at witness.usatoday.com. Thanks for our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [e-mail]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.