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Photo by Cathlene Cowart.
Lindsay Moryoussef, left, and Jennifer Blakeney host Corpus Delicti: The Body of a Crime, a podcast about true crime.
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Photo courtesy of Corpus Delicti.
Blakeney talks with another attendee at the True Crime Podcast Festival in July in Chicago.
Corpus Delicti is a law that there must be proof of a crime before someone can be convicted of that crime. It’s pronunciation may be debated as “Corpus Delic-tea” or “Corpus Delic-tie,” but another definition of this legal term would be a podcast of two Birmingham women.
Lindsay Moryoussef of Chelsea and Jennifer Blakeney of Hoover produce Corpus Delicti: The Body of a Crime. After discovering a mutual interest in true crime and bonding over podcasts, they decided to start one of their own.
“We started working together, and we just clicked because we started talking about Brendon Dassey,” Blakeney said. “We just kept going and going, and we thought, ‘We need to do a podcast.’”
Moryoussef describes the podcast as “true crime between friends,” where they lay out the facts of each case in a way that’s understandable and passionate.
“It’s mainly about telling what happened, who did it, if they got caught and our opinions on it,” Blakeney explained.
Their interests in true crime started at young ages, so it’s not a shock to their families that they chose this topic for their podcast. Moryoussef has a self-proclaimed dark sense of humor and enjoyed horror movies as a child. Blakeney grew up watching crime dramas with her mom, also enjoying books of the same nature.
Both are full-time working moms with busy schedules, but podcasting is their outlet. Almost three years in, the women have learned a lot about how to balance it all, putting in weeks of research to make it happen. They record over Skype, getting separate audio tracks and then piecing them together for the final product.
“It’s something we’re passionate about and that we have bonded over,” Moryoussef said. “We just said, ‘Hey let’s do this,’ and the rest is history. That’s literally how it started and that’s literally the extent of how prepared we were.”
Corpus Delicti’s first live show was in September with another southern podcast, Moms and Murder, at Wild Roast Cafe in Bluff Park. Not anticipating a large crowd beyond their families, Moryoussef and Blakeney were shocked when they were nine tickets short of selling out the venue. Many in attendance were “Delictibles,” the name for fans of the podcast.
"This is fun, it’s a hobby, and we’ve just been really good at it,” Blakeney said. “We’re not going to push it so hard, so fast that we forget who we are and we get stuck in a rut.”
As for the future, the duo show no sign of stopping. They’re grateful for whatever happens, and it’s clear they’re focused on having as much fun as possible when talking about true crime.
“At the end of the day, we have said a million times, we do this until it’s not fun,” Moryoussef said. “We said going into this, ‘If we have two listeners, and it’s us, we’re happy.’”
For more information, visit their Facebook page at @corpusdelictipod. The podcast can be found on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and other outlets.
