Podcasts You Should Know: Small Town Dicks with Yeardley Smith

Now Dave and Dan, you’re brothers, and you’re both detectives. Is this something you’ve always wanted to do? How did you get into interested in detective work? 

Dan: Growing up I had cousins that were firefighters, and I remember when I was four or five years old, Dave and I were down in Phoenix, Arizona, visiting my cousins, and we went down to the fire station and they got a call out and to see these guys with all their gear on, I just thought it was the coolest thing and I just idolized these guys who went out and faced danger.

And I think for me after trying to find my feet and find which way I wanted to go in my career, I went on a ride along with a friend of mine who I went to college with – he was a K-9 officer – and within 10 minutes we were doing a code three run with lights and sirens through the city and I said, I have to do this.

Dave: Growing up, I wanted to be a police officer. I think I had the same experience as Dan down in Phoenix where I looked at these firefighters and I was like, that looks really cool and they have amazing equipment and cool lights. I’m afraid of heights, so firefighting was never going to work for me. Dan got hired in 2005 by our former agency, I got hired in 2007.

I was working as a management consultant in Washington, DC and I did a few ride alongs with Dan. I knew, kind of like him within the first 10 or 15 minutes of the first ride along, I was like, this is what I have to do and that kind of started the process to get me out of the consulting gig and over to law enforcement. And, once I was hired as a police officer, I think there’s some kind of…I wouldn’t call them boring calls that you get on patrol that don’t require a ton of brain activity to solve, but they’re really like order maintenance and keeping the city running efficiently. That stuff was exciting for a little bit but then you start figuring out that I really want to get into the interview room with these guys that are accused of horrible things and figure out who did it and ask why’d you do it? You know, it’s the ultimate puzzle to try to solve and there are great stakes involved for the victims getting justice and for the suspects avoiding going to prison for decades. It’s a high stakes game of can you figure this out? And that kind of challenge really appealed to me.

Now for both of you, what has been the most rewarding thing about your line of work? 

Dan: I think for me, when you’re on patrol, a lot of the calls you go on, it’s very transactional. Dispatch sends you to a call and you try to resolve the problem. A lot of times it’s a domestic dispute or a loud noise complaint, and it’s very transactional.

Once you leave the call, it’s over. When you’re a detective, you get the initial report from a patrol officer and you take that case from its infancy all the way through to conviction. Or, maybe you don’t get a conviction, or maybe the DA doesn’t file charges on it, but to see a case go all the way from A to Z is really rewarding.

Dave: Yeah. And I think for me, just the caseload that I worked, child abuse and sexual assault, was the payoff for me. I was at the end, the resolution, when you see a victim that gets to stand up to the person that wronged them, either in court or some other manner, which requires this bad guy to go off and go to prison because a victim stood up and said, “I’m not doing this anymore. You don’t get to hurt me like that.”

I think the payoff that you get outside the courtroom after a conviction. Especially on a child abuse case, there’s no feeling like it. I wouldn’t say it’s an adrenaline dump. It’s more for the detective and the prosecutor. It’s more relief, like I didn’t fail – because when you fail in those circumstances, it’s not just me going home and having a bad night. It’s a victim who basically is being told by the courts, we didn’t believe you. And that to see that is really horrible. So, the conviction really was the payoff for me. It’s not the only thing, but really it’s victims feeling like they were represented and that bad guy doesn’t get to hurt people anymore.

How do you choose what cases you’re going to cover?

Yeardley:  A lot of it depends on, obviously, the guests, but when Dan and Dave vet the guests and they’re like, I don’t know what to talk about, because oftentimes you’ll hear cases that aren’t the national news, which is one of the appeals I think of our podcast is that we’re not rehashing BTK again. I think there’s always a place for that, especially if you have a specialty in one of those, you know, like offender behavior kind of things. But there’s also a place for the big-time crime that’s happening in small towns everywhere, right?

And so, we always say to the detective give us the case that is most meaningful to you, or most memorable. It doesn’t have to be the one that was the most sensational for your agency that made the press. That was, it’s what’s the one that you’ll never forget? What’s the one that sticks with you and why?

Is there a case that sticks to either one of you the most out of all the cases you’ve covered?

Yeardley: It’s like asking me “what’s your favorite Simpsons episode?”

Dan: I kind of categorize the cases that we profile on our podcast. There are cases that mean a lot to me and that I can put myself back in a situation and remember the smells and the sounds that I was experiencing during that case. Then you have other categories, anything that Paul Holes talks about. I’m riveted.  The man is an encyclopedia. He tells a great story and he’s just a brilliant man and I love those cases.

And then, you know, this other category is we get to meet so many people from different parts of the world. We’ve had detectives from Ireland, Scotland, England, Australia and Canada and to hear the similarities – because you think about the differences of all those countries, but there’s so many similarities in how law enforcement operates no matter where you are in the world.

You recently took the show on the road. What was that experience like – going from a studio to going out in front of audiences? 

Dave: I will say for people like Yeardley whose home is on the stage and under the bright lights, she certainly mentored me through my stage fright and the nervousness and the sweaty hands.

It was really unnerving. But I think when you’re up there with people you trust, like Dan and Yeardley and Paul and the rest of our staff. We have just a great staff of people that I know are always going to take care of us. So, I think that part kind of settled me but it’s just different being on a stage, telling stories when you don’t come from an entertainer’s background. I think for me, it was really eye-opening, it was fun but a little bit nerve wracking at times, but overall it was a great experience. 

Yeardley:  You guys were great. They were really great. And the audiences, it was very interesting. We did four cities and each city was very different in terms of the tone of the audience. We went from really kind of very convivial, almost raucous in Portland to very reserved in Salt Lake City.  I would say they neither of those polarities were any less attentive, you know, every audience has its own personality and they feed off their own energy as well as ours.

I would say the real challenge, I think always for a performer and for these guys. Paul is a little more well-versed in terms of speaking in front of large crowds because he’s done a lot of lectures and stuff like that. But Dan and Dave actually have also done lots of community lectures too.

But the hardest thing, I think – speaking for myself, is if the audience is quiet. You are telling a story and you’re expecting some sort of verbal response, something that you can key off of and you don’t get it. You don’t want to sink into some sort of backdoor narrative like, oh shit, they don’t like me. This isn’t going well. Oh my God, I’m screwing up. That is a hundred percent probably not true. My motto is whether you’re performing in front of five people or 5,000, your job is the same. Tell the story in the best way you know how to and trust that you have this because you do.

And these guys were great. They were money. The audience absolutely loved it. We would have a meet and greet afterward. They were all sold out. People stayed and stayed and I was really happy to see that they got to be showered with the love of the fans in a way that I’m more familiar with and is not as regular for them.

Are you planning on doing more tours in the future with the show? 

Yeardley: I don’t know. TBD. I would say it’s hard enough to get four people to agree on where to have dinner on any given night. To get all four of us on a stage for even a week is not easy.

We are going to Crime Con again in September. I think it’s September 5th this year and that will be our third – which is great. The fans there are great, of course. It’s, again, it’s kind of a captive audience. But we haven’t said yes or no to another tour yet.

What are you hoping that people take away from listening to Small Town Dicks?

Dave: I can say for me personally, I think just offering listeners an alternative picture of what’s happening with police officers and detectives and just showing what it actually means to law enforcement when they get a case and they are advocating for a victim and trying to get a case prosecuted and tried. I think just to show what that requires from an investigative standpoint. 

Yeardley does a really good job of pulling the humanity out of our guest detectives. We make jokes like Yeardley is going to make you cry if you come on our show and tell a story because she’s going to get a couple layers deeper than you’re used to with cops being like, how you doing, man?

So, I think that’s the benefit. We reach people on a level they probably don’t expect from law enforcement. That’s been rewarding for us, showing a different side than is portrayed in the media and in the movies. 

Dan: And just to add on to that, when Dave and I started this podcast…we’re not entertainers and podcasts are entertainment. I think Dave and I approached this project that we were taking on as we have an opportunity to educate people. When I present a case, I want to educate people on what was going on and all the steps I took to try to solve the problem and if I was thinking about being an entertainer, I don’t think it would come off well.

Yeardley: But I also think it’s really an interesting distinction because you’re right, podcasts are considered entertainment and we even walk a very fine line of not exploiting the horrible experiences that these people, that Dan and Dave and our other guests are talking about, right?

When you’re talking about the victims, which is why we always leave it up to the detective, but we won’t tell you where the crime happened. We’ll change all the names. We’ll sort of blur relationships. We’ll add siblings. We’ll say it’s an aunt, not a mother, kind of stuff like that. So that we try not to re-traumatize the victim.

The victim is obviously essential, but what we’re doing on this podcast is giving you a very behind the scenes look at what it took for all of the dominoes to line up perfectly in order for justice to be served. It’s such it’s such a tenuous process.

As Dan and Dave said earlier, maybe you gather the most extraordinary evidence and still your DA doesn’t file. At the end of the day, you’re still dealing with human beings and no matter how dedicated they are to the job, everybody will have a feeling and a reaction to the thing that they’re doing, and you hope that you are dealing with a system by and large that is sort of” just the facts, ma’am”, and “I care about you because the thing that happened to you is wrong”, but if God forbid somebody had been assaulted by their own uncle and there’s not enough evidence to convict this person who’s on the docket, and you’re like, well, fuck it. My uncle assaulted me and he was never caught. So now I’m going to bring the hammer down on this person.

You want to make sure that there’s a separation between the personal and the professional.  It’s such a fine line though, and these guys do it so beautifully, and that’s when I think the system works best, you know?

What can you tell me about the new season?

Yeardley: Our new season drops on the 18th of April. Season 16. It’s really fantastic. We actually start out with a two-parter by from Paul Holes, which is great. You know, it’s hard to get the A team, the OGs to bring us a case anymore. We really have rung them out, really. Like, come on, one more. But we actually have a great season. We also have Matt Murphy, who, if you watch any true crime on tv, Matt is the former Orange County DA, Homicide DA. He does a lot of common consultation or, or sort of analysis on ABC News. He’s terrific. He brings us a couple of cases. We have old and new guests. I’m very, very happy about this season. I’m the last set of ears that listens to each episode. I’m the last edit pass, so I’m quite familiar and I think we’ve set the bar very high. We aim to continue to touch the bar, so I think we’ll be alright this season.

Season 16 of Small Town Dicks premieres on Friday, April 18. The show is available to stream on Spotify,Apple Podcasts, SmallTownDicks.com, and wherever else you like to listen. Follow the show on Instagram (and follow Yeardley, Dan, Dave and Paul too.)

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