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The Ballad of Billy Balls · iHeartPodcasts

Introducing Beyond All Repair

April 17, 2024·24 min·1 clip
Sophia Johnson's own brother testified against her for murdering her mother-in-law with fireplace tongs — and she was six months pregnant.
The episode opens with a brief introduction from Zach Stewart-Pontier of ZSP Media, explaining that Beyond All Repair is a collaboration with WBUR Boston hosted by Anne-Marie Sievertson of the podcast Endless Thread. The show's first chapter begins with raw voicemail recordings of a father threatening his daughter and warning a younger son to stay out of family business, establishing an atmosphere of family dysfunction and intimidation. Sievertson reveals she triggered these messages by contacting the father and brother days earlier while reporting on a murder case more than 20 years old. The reporter introduces herself and frames the story as a reopened box that some family members wanted shut forever. The central figure is Sophia Johnson, accused of murdering her mother-in-law Marlene Johnson with fireplace tongs in a small Washington State town. The case is introduced through the eyes of Shane Coraya, Sophia's younger brother, whom Sievertson first interviewed in 2017 for an Endless Thread episode about his experience with homelessness as a teenager. Shane was born in the Bronx, the youngest of four siblings, and grew up amid parental violence and an ugly divorce before moving with his mother and sister to Washington State, where the family were devout Jehovah's Witnesses. Around his pre-teen years, Shane came out to his mother as gay, and she largely stopped speaking to him, leaving food outside his bedroom door. Shortly after, his sister Sophia was arrested and charged with murder, and the story spread through Shane's school. Unable to cope at home or at school, Shane flew back to New York alone and spent months sleeping on the subway while attending school and working part-time jobs. He eventually put himself through college and law school and was working in the Bronx District Attorney's office when Sievertson first interviewed him. In spring 2021, Shane emailed Sievertson out of the blue to say Sophia wanted to speak openly about the murder for the first time. Sievertson describes her first video call with Sophia, who appeared polished and composed despite the weight of her circumstances, speaking from an undisclosed location. Sophia describes her life as a house full of boxes in different rooms that need to be unpacked. A physical box of 13 VHS tapes — the video footage of Sophia's murder trial — arrived at Sievertson's office the same day their conversations began. Sophia says she has never watched the tapes and does not want to, fearing it will impose someone else's version of events on her memory. The episode recounts the basic facts of the crime: on January 10th, 2002, Sophia's mother-in-law Marlene failed to show up for a planned lunch, and when Sophia and her husband went to check on her, they found her bludgeoned to death in her basement. Sophia was four months into her marriage and six months pregnant at the time of her arrest. She gave birth to her only child while incarcerated and has never met her son, who turned 19 the day before one of their recorded conversations. Sophia states that her primary motivation for speaking is so her son can hear the truth rather than only knowing her as someone accused of killing his grandmother. Sievertson explains that the show's title comes from the military acronym FUBAR — Fucked Up Beyond All Repair — and frames the series as a question: can Sophia's life be repaired, and if she is innocent, can telling her story change minds, starting with Shane's? The episode ends with a tease that Shane has decided to stop surrendering to the justice system and will dig into his sister's cold case himself, while Sievertson will examine the trial and the key witness who testified against Sophia — identified as Sophia's other brother.

As heard by us

A tense handoff into Sophia Johnson's fight to answer a murder accusation and reach the son she has never met.

The Ballad of Billy Balls hands its feed over to Beyond All Repair, a WBUR and ZSP Media true crime series hosted by Anne-Marie Sievertson. The case is blunt and strange from the jump: Sophia Johnson was accused of killing her mother-in-law with fireplace tongs, says she did not…

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Why you'd press play

You want the family witness, the accusation, and the long road to an answer.

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