We quit our jobs and turned our obsession with true crime into a hit podcast — then we broke news on a major murder case

We’re a married couple who channeled our mutual obsession with true crime into a full-time podcasting business that eventually replaced our careers.

We gave four years of our lives to one particularly haunting murder case — the Delphi murders — producing hundreds of podcast episodes, breaking news, and ultimately writing and publishing a crime nonfiction book about the mystery.

Things got pretty wild. We endured extreme conditions at a month-long murder trial, sitting out in the cold, going without food or water, and skipping sleep in order to get a seat every single day. In a contracting media market, our podcast came to dominate coverage of the case.

We managed to do it all as an independent husband-and-wife team, and despite struggles along the way, the experience ultimately made our marriage and working relationship stronger.

We bonded over a cold case, got married, and quit our jobs to pursue true crime full-time

The way the two of us met sounds like something out of a slightly twisted Hallmark movie.

We both got interested in the same cold case, and Kevin — an intellectual property attorney in Indiana — noticed Áine, a reporter in New York on Business Insider’s retail desk, was saving articles about a mystery he was investigating for a victim’s relative on a media archive website and reached out.

We became friends first, bonding over our love of true crime. Texting turned into hours-long phone calls where we would joke around, share stories, and discuss favorite films and authors and books. We became extremely close, long-distance.

Later on, we discovered — much to our surprise — that we had fallen in love.

Kevin moved from Indiana to NYC, and from a tiny 350-square-foot studio apartment in Fort Greene, we launched a true crime podcast, The Murder Sheet, and hoped it might attract a small, niche audience.

In our first year, we made $300 from the podcast

It’s easy to start a podcast. Making a living with one is far more difficult.

There are literally millions of podcasts available; the listener has a wealth of choices, and the audience is spread thin.

In the beginning, we didn’t worry about the financial angles; our focus was on using journalistic and legal principles to discuss true crime ethically and responsibly.

In our first year, we made about $300 from a scattering of programmatic ads, and more in year two as a sizable audience discovered — and stuck by — us.

By the beginning of year three, we felt confident enough to make the show our full-time jobs.

There have been occasional periods of financial stress. Podcasting is cyclical, and like any media dependent on ad revenue, there are ups and downs. We try to keep our operating costs low and write, edit, produce, and promote the show ourselves, so the creative control is in our hands.

Our earnings have become more stable with time. We’ve carved out an audience of like-minded people who are interested in a more factual, less sensationalized true crime show. Going forward, we don’t plan to make any big changes, except for perhaps expanding to other platforms like YouTube and TikTok.

We spend more time together than most spouses

Neither of us knew any other couples who worked together this closely. We feel lucky, but wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. We happen to have personalities that are largely similar and complementary — the same insatiable curiosity and a quirky, occasionally morbid sense of humor, which buoys us during and after working hours. We derive a lot of joy from chatting about a new case, watching trials, or digging up obscure facts about a historical crime together.

We’ve had to learn to ease off at times, like when something goes wrong at work. We really try to guard our free time and prevent work from intruding, although that’s sometimes difficult. The best piece of advice we could offer to any married couple trying to work together: Hold those boundaries.

A year in, we became obsessed with a haunting mystery: The Delphi murders

The story centers around 13-year-old Abby Williams and 14-year-old Libby German, two best friends who lived in Delphi, Indiana. In February 2017, the girls went hiking on a forested trail and walked onto a deserted bridge. As they were approached by a strange man, Libby took out her phone and managed to capture his image and voice on video. Brandishing a gun, he forced the girls down a hill and across Deer Creek, ultimately murdering them.

The fact that Libby recorded her killer helped take the story national.

We broke into the case in 2021, after we moved to Indiana from New York for a lower cost of living. We spent time in the community of Delphi, allowing us to gather sources and break news on the case. Pretty quickly, we realized we had something to add.

We knew that a podcast was not the only way to cover it; we wanted to write a book. Luckily, one of the first agents we approached shared our love of crime nonfiction and was interested in working with us.

Once there was an arrest in October of 2022 — a man named Richard Allen, a quiet local CVS manager — we knew that the time was right. Whether he was acquitted or convicted, the trial would provide some answers about the case.

To cover the trial, we skipped meals, went without water, and huddled in the cold for hours in lawn chairs

The trial took place across a wintry October and November in Indiana. Access was extremely limited; there were no cameras in the courtroom and only a couple of dozen seats available to the public.

In order to secure a place, we’d get in line in the frigid cold at 3 a.m., then midnight, and then even earlier as the trial went on. In the early morning hours, the ramp outside the courthouse would be packed with dozens of people huddled in sleeping bags or portable chairs. At night, temperatures would drop to the 30s. Friends brought us lawn chairs, electric blankets, and disposable hand warmers, and we bundled in layers and blankets.

The case attracted a lot of unstable people, so sometimes we feared confrontations or fights breaking out in the line. But for the most part, those waiting to get into court got along well.

At least one of us managed to get into the trial every day. We gave up eating and drinking in the mornings, as heading to the restroom during the day would result in a forfeited seat. Every night, we’d go home and immediately record a multi-hour podcast episode based on pages and pages of trial notes. We struggled with fatigue, dehydration, hunger, and the cold for most of the time.

Enduring the process together strengthened us. We learned to let a lot of minor annoyances go and made a pact to be as patient, calm, and compassionate with each other as we could be at all times.

Kind listeners ended up volunteering to hold our spots in line as the weeks went on. We wouldn’t have been able to report the story without them. As a result of our trial coverage, our podcast broke into the Top 100 list on Apple Podcasts for all podcasts for the first time ever.

We had a limited time to complete the book

Our book, “Shadow of the Bridge: The Delphi Murders and the Dark Side of the American Heartland,” includes exclusive, unprecedented access to the main players in the story — family members, prosecutors, detectives, and members of the Delphi community — and pieces together all the turns of the investigation.

When the guilty verdict finally came in, it felt like we had spent a month on a dreary, depressing campout. Going inside and thawing out felt nice, and we had no doubt the jury got it right, but we couldn’t relax. We had to scrap parts of our book draft and add complicated new details we’d learned in the trial while cutting extraneous minutiae so our readers wouldn’t get lost.

For a month, we pulled 15-hour workdays, working late into the night and on weekends. For a while we felt more like drudges in the same miserable workplace than spouses, but we knew it would come to an end.

It was hard, but we’re proud of what we did

The book has been successful so far, and our publisher is happy. We are too. That said, no sensible person should get into book-writing to make big money — especially not crime nonfiction about a depressing double homicide.

The book was never a financial move for us. It helps build our profile and credibility, but more importantly, it shares the truth about a case with the public. It was an honor to get to tell the story, and witness firsthand the men and women — detectives, prosecutors, volunteers, and victims’ relatives alike — who strived to get justice in the case.

Our hearts still are broken for those girls and their families. We gave a chunk of our advance to a charity that memorializes Libby and Abby with scholarship funds and a beautiful park.

The hardest part about covering Delphi has been questioning our faith in humanity. Not only did we cover a case where a man senselessly murdered two children, but we saw a lot of sordid, dishonorable, and downright bizarre, both in the courtroom and online from conspiracy theorists and content creators out to rake in views. Getting to observe and interview the men and women who truly cared about the girls gave us back some hope.

We want to keep covering cases meticulously and with empathy on the podcast, and to write more crime nonfiction books. Our ultimate goal is to fill up a whole shelf of our bookcase with works we wrote. This experience taught us what we are capable of and ultimately reminded us why we got into true crime — to work closely together on a shared passion project, and to tell the stories of the human beings behind the headlines.

Áine Cain is a journalist who previously worked as a senior reporter for Business Insider. Kevin Greenlee is an attorney. Together, they are founders of The Murder Sheet and authors of new book.