How an American investigative reporter used podcasting to expose failures in criminal justice and overturn convictions
Madeleine Baran is an American investigative journalist who has transformed cold cases and institutional failures into award-winning podcasts that have influenced criminal justice outcomes. Her work exposing clergy abuse and reinvestigating murder convictions has earned her multiple Peabody Awards and national recognition.
Quick Facts
Madeleine Baran is an American investigative journalist whose probing work has transformed cold cases, exposed institutional failures, and helped overturn wrongful convictions—primarily through the podcast she created and hosts, *In the Dark*.
Baran spent approximately six-and-a-half years at Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), where she established herself as a tenacious investigator willing to take on powerful institutions. In 2013–2014, she led MPR's coverage of clergy sexual abuse and institutional cover-ups within the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, culminating in the radio documentary *Betrayed by Silence*. Her reporting documented systematic failures to protect children and contributed directly to real-world consequences: the archbishop resigned, and both criminal charges and lawsuits followed against the archdiocese. For this work, Baran received a Peabody Award and a 2014 Gracie Award for Outstanding Investigative Program or Feature.
In 2016, Baran launched *In the Dark* with American Public Media (APM), moving her investigative approach into the podcast medium. The strategy proved transformative. Season 1, which premiered that year, focused on the 1989 abduction of eleven-year-old Jacob Wetterling from Stearns County, Minnesota—a case that had remained unsolved for nearly three decades. Beginning her reporting in fall 2015, Baran examined how the Stearns County Sheriff's Office had failed the investigation and allowed the case to stall for years. Her final interviews, conducted in late July and early August 2016, included questioning the sheriff himself about these failures. The podcast's impact was immediate: in October 2016, just months after *In the Dark* debuted, Danny Heinrich—who had been arrested in late 2015 on an unrelated child pornography charge—publicly confessed in court to Jacob Wetterling's abduction and murder. Though prosecutors used a plea deal rather than pursuing a homicide conviction at trial, Baran's reporting had exposed the institutional shortcomings that allowed the case to languish and helped secure answers for the Wetterling family.
