The third season of New Hampshire Public Radio’s hit true crime podcast “Bear Brook” debuted on Wednesday, inviting listeners to plumb the depths of what it calls “an epic tragedy of humble proportions.”
Unlike the first two seasons, which hooked an audience of millions on mysteries stemming from people found slain decades ago, the latest storyline is more recent and might not involve a murder at all.
This season, titled “A Private Matter,” digs into the disappearance of John “Jay” Hickey, a Christmas tree farmer with dementia who was last seen three years ago — and whose wife, Patricia, didn’t report him missing.
The first two episodes are available now, with three more set for release in the coming weeks.
The podcast’s host, Jason Moon, spoke with the Globe about this story and his thoughts on the true crime genre. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: How did you come to recognize this story would work for the podcast?
When the story first came to me, it was, “Hey, there’s this guy in his mid-70s who had dementia who vanished from Epsom, N.H.,” and I thought that sounded very upsetting and sad, but not terribly surprising. But the tipster wrote in their email that “a lot of strangeness” was starting to emerge. Something about that caught my eye.
There were two things that really got me thinking about this more as a story for us. The first was the huge delay in when Jay was reported missing. It may have been as long as 10 months, and his own wife did not report him missing. The other eyebrow went up when I was able to get the police interrogation audio. … The wife, Patty, gives a story that is hard for anyone to make heads or tails of. It leaves the door open to all kinds of explanations, ranging from she was a negligent caretaker, all the way up to some people having the opinion that she intentionally killed her husband — and I would add the possibility that she was overwhelmed, fell into a state of denial, and wasn’t able to process what had happened.
Once I learned these two facets, I couldn’t stop thinking about the story. Suddenly the things that initially had (me seeing this as) a not-all-that-uncommon situation now started to feel like, oh, this is exactly why it’s a story. … This is a very unusual and maybe extreme scenario, but at its heart, it’s a story about dementia care and family estrangement and how we as a society take care of folks in this state.
Q: What did you learn about dementia and vulnerable adults?
I came into this relatively naive about dementia. I had this impression that we knew more than we do. When I started to read about it in a serious way, I realized dementia is really still a huge mystery to medical science. We don’t have a good understanding of what’s happening inside the brain.
From a policy lens, when it comes to protecting people, you run into some thorny issues around folks’ autonomy and their right to live how they want. In the weeks before Jay likely disappeared, someone made a report to adult protective services. A caseworker went out there and met with them. I don’t know exactly what transpired, but I know they closed the case shortly before Jay disappeared. On its face that could seem like a missed opportunity for the state to intervene, but I think it points to the ways in which dementia and cognitive decline challenge all of our modes of thinking about how to treat adults.
Families are faced with a version of that all the time. When do you take the car keys away? When do you tell Dad or Mom it’s time to stop making financial decisions? Those are impossibly blurry lines. That’s what I find myself thinking about in this story.
Q: Those issues underscore the possibility that no crime was committed in this case. If there maybe wasn’t a crime involved, is this season truly a “true crime” podcast?
That’s a really good question. I don’t know. I always kind of cringe at the “true crime” label anyways, even though inarguably that’s the work that I have done and am most known by. This story has the elements of a true crime story. There’s the mystery of it. I think that’s what will capture people initially.
I’m trying to use a really fascinating mystery story to get people engaged on topics they might not otherwise be that interested in. A podcast about dementia care could be pretty boring, to be frank. But if you couch it in the context of this high-stakes mystery, you can get to these bigger-picture issues and deeper questions. That is the power that true crime and true crime adjacent storytelling can wield. I’m trying to use the whodunnit magnetism of these stories for something that’s of public good.
Q: How do you balance that ethical and social responsibility with the demands of good storytelling?
Often a big part of it is knowing up front why you’re doing the story and having a really clear and defensible reason. For me, it’s not enough that there’s an interesting story. It has to point to these bigger issues, whether it’s a systemic issue with how our criminal justice system works or just a larger philosophical debate.
We spend a lot of time pre-vetting stories. We’ll spend sometimes two or three months looking into a situation before we then decide there’s not this larger issue that we thought this story pointed to, and we’ll drop it. That’s probably the most important choice we make.
Q: Your podcasts have gotten a lot of recognition. Do you worry about this season living up to the notoriety of the first two?
For sure. There’s always that pressure. But I think this is what we asked for. It’s what we wanted. Even before we had the recognition, we felt strongly that we didn’t have to cede the landscape of prestige podcasting to media outlets that only were in New York or D.C. From the beginning, one of our beliefs with NHPR’s Document team was there are stories here in New Hampshire — and we can tell them just as well as anyone else could — that will resonate with people anywhere. Yeah, it is pressure. But it’s the sort of pressure we were trying to put on ourselves from the beginning.
Steven Porter can be reached at steven.porter@globe.com. Follow him @reporterporter.