When Valentino Rodriguez started his job at a high-security prison in Sacramento, California, informally known as New Folsom, he thought he was entering a brotherhood of correctional officers who hold each other to a high standard of conduct.

Five years later, Rodriguez would be found dead in his home. His unexpected passing would raise questions from his family and the FBI.

Before he died, Rodriguez was promoted to an elite unit investigating crimes in the prison. His parents and his widow say he had been hoping for the position for a long time.

But once inside the unit, the job consumed him. From day one, his fellow officers began to undermine and harass him. Stressed and fed up with how he was being treated, Rodriguez reached a breaking point.

He left the prison, but his experiences there still haunted him—so he went in for a meeting with the warden. He didn’t know it would be his last.

This week on Reveal, we partner with KQED reporters Sukey Lewis and Julie Small and the On Our Watch podcast to explore what this correctional officer’s story shows about how the second-largest prison system in the country is failing to protect the people who live and work inside it.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in March 2024. Listen to the whole On Our Watch series here.

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Every summer, 50 of the nation’s best and brightest teenage girls gather in Mobile, Alabama, to embark on two of the most intense weeks of their lives. Everybody wants the same thing: to walk away with a $40,000 college scholarship and the title of Distinguished Young Woman of America.

Reporter Shima Oliaee competed for Nevada when she was a teenager, and was invited back as a judge more than 20 years later. Oliaee accepted, all while recording it for a six-part audio series called The Competition.

In the final days of the competition, there was news from Washington that had big implications for women across the nation: Roe v. Wade had fallen.

The girls are faced with a tough decision: Do they speak up for their political beliefs or stay focused on winning the money? And what might this mean for their futures—and their friendships?

“This series changed how I view America,” Oliaee said. “I came away from it thinking, damn. American teen girls are the canaries in the coal mine.”

This week, Reveal is partnering with The Competition podcast, from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios and hosted by Oliaee, to explore the dreams of young women, America’s promise, and what it takes to survive being a teen girl today.

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Note: This episode contains descriptions of violence and suicide and may not be appropriate for all listeners.

In 1989, Chuck Stuart called 911 on his car phone to report a shooting.

He said he and his wife were leaving a birthing class at a Boston hospital when a man forced him to drive into the mixed-race Mission Hill neighborhood and shot them both. Stuart’s wife, Carol, was seven months pregnant. She would die that night, hours after her son was delivered by cesarean section, and days later, her son would die, too.

Stuart said he saw the man who did it: a Black man in a tracksuit.

Within hours, the killing had the city in a panic, and Boston police were tearing through Mission Hill looking for a suspect.

For a whole generation of Black men in Mission Hill who were subjected to frisks and strip searches, this investigation shaped their relationship with police. And it changed the way Boston viewed itself when the story took a dramatic turn and the true killer was revealed.

This week on Reveal, in partnership with columnist Adrian Walker of the Boston Globe and the Murder in Boston podcast, we bring you the untold story of the Stuart murder: one that exposed truths about race and crime that few White people in power wanted to confront.

To hear more of the Boston Globe’s investigation, listen to the 10-part podcast Murder in Boston. The HBO documentary series Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, and Reckoning is available to stream on Max.

This is an update of a show that originally aired in May 2024.

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