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Tyler Perry, two missing men and a true crime podcast

Nicole Fallert   | Paste BN

Felipe Santos and Terrance Williams vanished three months apart on the same road in the early 2000s. Their disappearances haunt their families, police and journalists. In both cases, now-fired deputy Steven Calkins said he gave Santos and Williams rides to Circle K gas stations, stories that could never be corroborated.

👋 Hi, I'm Nicole Fallert. Welcome to Your Week, our newsletter exclusively for Paste BN subscribers (that's you!). This week, we talk with Janine Zeitlin, an investigative journalist with the Paste BN Network in Florida and host of new true crime podcast "The Last Ride," which centers on the stories of these missing men.

The eight-episode series reveals new details about the cases and exclusive interviews with lead investigators, the deputy, media mogul Tyler Perry and more key players.

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Over a decade tracking an unsolved mystery

Zeitlin first reported on the disappearances of Santos and Williams in January 2006 when she was a project reporter at the Naples (Florida) Daily News. In the following years, whenever there was a development in the cases, she would be the journalist to cover it.

By 2019, with the case still unsolved, she started wondering how to move the story forward. That's when her team discovered they still hadn't heard the audio recordings from polygraph tests with the deputy.

"This needs to be a podcast," Zeitlin remembers thinking. "When you can hear the inconsistences [in the story] it's a lot more powerful. Hearing someone lie is different than printing their lie."

This sparked the work leading to "The Last Ride" podcast.

Zeitlin tapped into other Paste BN Network newsrooms to retrace the work their reporters had done on the case. At one point she leaned on the network's Iowa team, which actually went and knocked on the deputy's door after he moved. 

"We were able to extend the reach of our reporting," Zeitlin said, adding the Paste BN Network not only helped bolster the reporting but also the story's national profile, garnering the attention of National Public Radio, which would become a valuable platform for the podcast. 

And the Tyler Perry of it all? Zeitlin said national attention was slow to grow around the cases until Perry shared one of her stories on Facebook in 2012. Perry visited Naples to hold press conferences about the case in 2013 and again in 2018, attracting national coverage and also involving famed civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who helped file a civil lawsuit on behalf of the Williams family. 

"It's a case he's used his star power to bring out," she said.

No one’s been arrested or charged for whatever happened to Santos and Williams. Some of Zeitlin's sources say they are convinced "somebody knows something." She hopes the podcast will encourage anyone with information to submit to their tip line.

After more than a decade of searching, Zeitlin said this is the one story that's kept coming back to her: "I think it's the injustice of it all."

"As a journalist, I want to use my skills to do whatever I can to bring a resolution for these families," she said, adding she's connected to Williams' mother on social media, and her resolute resurfaces whenever she sees posts about the missing man. "It's heartbreaking. It's one of those handful of stories in my career that still bothers me."

The Last Ride was reported by Zeitlin and other investigative reporters with the Naples Daily News and The Fort Myers News-Press, part of the Paste BN Network, distributed by the NPR Network and produced in partnership with WGCU Public Media. Listen to "The Last Ride" wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and NPROne. 

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