My podcast series would be called “Amber Alert”. It would be fictional, but follow the flow of an S.Town or Serial as a journalist reports on a missing child case.
Set in Chatham, Massachusetts, the story investigates the case of missing 4 year-old Charles Howes. It would be set after-the-fact, and would start with the journalist/narrator describing the history of Amber Alert and then introducing the small town of Chatham.
It would then move on to detailing the day Charles went missing by interviewing Charles’s father, David. David will talk about where he was when he heard the Amber Alert tone for his son that fateful day, and how, because he didn’t think it was his Charles, he didn’t bother looking into it. Only until going to the school to pick Charles up at the end of the day and realising he’s not there does it click for him.
The narrator would pull in some other voices to supplement Episode 1. Charles’s mother (now David’s ex-wife), the police officer in charge of the case, someone from the school, etc. Ideally, 90% of Episode 1 would be setting up the premise of the investigation as a mystery.
But the last minute or so of the episode would twist that and reveal David didn’t lose just one son that day, because it was Charles’s then-9-year-old brother Daniel who abducted and killed him.
The story would then evolve into looking at the after-effects on the family, the signs they felt they missed and a father torn between both wanting to find his son to reconnect on a familial level, and also to confront his son’s killer.