Michael May, Contributing Editor, got hooked on producing radio in 1998 when he went to Moscow in search of Oleg Lundstrem, the lone jazz musician that continued to perform during the Stalin years. Inspired by the experience, Michael quit his day job and declared himself a journalist. For more than a decade, he reported from Austin, where he investigated an idiosyncratic FBI informant named Brandon Darby, heard Willie Nelson sing “Amazing Grace” a capella and discovered that a police “bait car” can snare good Samaritans. His stories ended up on NPR, This American Life, Studio 360 and others. He’s currently the radio instructor at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland Maine, and has also worked as the managing editor of the Texas Observer magazine, an editor at the national radio show Weekend America (APM), and as a news reporter at the Austin NPR station KUT-FM. For his radio work, May has won a Third Coast Audio Festival Gold Award and a National Headliners Grand Award. Michael now works at National Public Radio.
A triple murder, a habitual liar on a stolen motorcycle and a confession that doesn’t add up.
Why would anyone confess to a crime they didn’t commit? On Life of the Law, the story of a man
dying of cancer on Texas’s Death Row who confessed to a crime he says he didn’t do.
Over the past 20 years, there’s been a revolution in the science of arson investigations. Many of the clues that had been used for decades to determine that a fire was not accidental, especially the analysis of burn patterns on walls and floors, have been proven to be false. Texas is one state that is re-examining arson convictions that may have been based on junk science.
