A PODCAST ABOUT DEADLY SECRETS AND SECOND CHANCES
When a birthday party in suburban San Jose turns deadly, 18-year-old identical twins are arrested for suspected murder. One brother spends nearly two years in jail before the truth comes out: authorities locked up the wrong twin. How could one brother let his twin take the fall? And why would the other sacrifice his freedom for a crime he didn’t commit? Blood Will Tell is a modern-day Shakespearean saga about Vietnamese-American brothers whose unbreakable bond is tested by silence, sacrifice, and an unthinkable choice.
Jennifer Miller unravels the story in this deeply reported, six-episode narrative podcast.
Listen on Spotify, Apple, Castbox, or anywhere you get podcasts.
Reporting Blood Will Tell
In 2020, Washington Post contributor Jen Miller was at San Quentin State Prison, reporting a story about a prison-based Shakespeare program. There, she met a 26-year-old actor and inmate named Trung Tong. During a rehearsal for Othello, Trung told Jen the most astonishing story she'd ever heard in her 20-year journalism career: At age 18, Trung killed a man and an eyewitness mistakenly identified his identical twin brother Anh in a lineup. But as Jen soon learned, this was only the beginning.
She would spend the next six years talking to Trung and Anh on a weekly basis, earning their trust and painstakingly following every thread of their story. Her reporting led her from the traumatic aftermath of the Vietnam war, into San Jose’s Southeast Asian underworld, and ultimately to a reckoning that helped the brothers rebuild their severed bond and embark on a path of atonement and renewal. Jen’s long engagement with the twins–and the space she created for them to confide in her–led them to finally talk honestly to each other. Had she and this show not been a part of their journey, their true feelings about the past might have remained buried for years, perhaps forever.
