Wisecrack is released weekly and brought to you absolutely free, but if you want to hear the whole season right now, it's available ad free on Tenderfoot Plus.

For more information, check out the show notes enjoy the episode.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do not represent those of iHeartRadio, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees.

This podcast also contains subject matter which may not be suitable for everyone.

Listener discretion is advised.

Previously on Wiscrack, I at Hedges somehow became the center of a true crime podcast, which frankly was not on my five year plan.

Jody came to my village.

I tried to act call she made my family.

Oh no, she didn't make my family.

That was my grandparents.

She met my family.

I panicked and made everyone tea that no one asked for.

Then I stood in the corner like a lamp.

My parents confirmed everything I'd said on stage, so that was validating and also deeply, deeply awkward.

I didn't need therapy before.

I think we're heading there now anyway.

JODI's still digging.

Next up meeting Brett's dad.

I tried to warn her about him, using only my eyes and a secret blinking language that I didn't teach her about before we went.

She didn't pick up on it.

It's her podcast, I guess onwards and upwards?

Hi, how are you?

How are you?

I'm in the UK.

Did you have a chance to read the report?

One of the first documents I got my hands on was the Domestic Homicide Report.

There isn't an official equivalent in the US, and it's only created in the UK when there is a long history of violence or abuse when society demands to know how did this happen?

In Brett Rogers' report, it examines his entire life and was conducted by investigating all the government agencies that were supposed to support and assess him, everything from the education system to the parole board.

What did you think?

Yes, I read it.

I sent this report over to my friend Aaron, a twenty year veteran of social work in Georgia.

She focuses on at risk young adults with mental health issues diagnosed or not.

Though our systems are different from the UK.

I was hoping she could see something I couldn't, especially when it came to Brett's biggest advocate, his father, Pete Rogers.

So it's just that's again a little bit of why I'm nervous for you of being around his dad.

I'm not sure, like clearly none of that.

I'm not sure that was in the report about how dad or past behaviors.

I've just worked in the field for so long that, yes, some of it is biological and the brain does different things, and if he hasn't been diagnosed, that's one thing.

But there is also a learned behavior that comes along with this where most people get it from where they live and what they see the most.

What do you think this is?

So you're saying this isn't safe, I.

Personally would not go there, or please bring someone with you.

Oh gosh, now I'm nervous.

Can you please be careful?

The thing was, I was already on my way.

I'm Jody Tovey and this is wisecrack to episode five Brett you never knew me.

On the drive to Pete's house, I'm silent ed keeps looking over.

He senses I'm nervous and responds with wise cracks and one liners.

But I want to stay focused on the task at hand.

The truth is the thought of meeting the father of a convicted murderer has me on edge.

Out of respect for the subject matter, I ask ed if he can wait in the car while I interview Pete.

Though it confuses him, he agrees, and I take a deep breath and walk up the front steps and knock on the door.

Pete, Hi, I'm Jody.

Nice to meet you.

How's it going.

I'm good, good, good good.

Room in Marklas that is fine, keeps one bedroom is the bottom floor of a converted townhouse in the next village over.

It looks a lot like the Hedges Home, only split in half for those who don't need room for a full family.

All right, lovely, okay, thank you so much.

The apartment is simple and unassuming, pared down to the needs of a retired electrician.

He greets me in shorts and a loud printed shirt like an old surfer.

I can tell he's nervous too, but he calmly smiles as he shows me his place, which includes his music collection and his new hobby, an acoustic guitar.

Uh, we have a musician in the house.

What were we listening to?

There's so much I want to ask Pete about that night, about what he thinks about his son, about how he's continued to move on.

But once we sit down, I just want to work my way into a conversation by starting simple.

So I asked about his other son, Aaron.

He's a bit like me, actually, He's like, he's very very soft, he's very clever actually, And I said, well, I say it self, he's sort of like he's a nice kid.

Everyone says that, you know, everyone says that.

Bear.

You know what about Brett?

Was he an easy kid as well or a difficult kid?

Well, it was always naughty Brett.

He was always naughty.

Yeah, that was you know, that was his character, wasn't it.

You know he was full of life, full of life.

And he's like, yeah, he was always out there playing.

He would even play.

The older kids would even follow him.

He was good at football, He was good at sports.

He was very popular, I would say, one of the most popular in school.

When did that friend group start to shrink?

I believe when he stopped football, which is at mumby of thirteen something like that.

Yeah, he is about that then, I think, you know.

Pete continued to walk me through Brett's childhood which includes his divorce from Jillian and when Brett was a teenager.

He tells me about Brett's early run ins with the law, eventually leading to one of the worst days of Pete's life and perhaps the incident that sealed Brett's fate in the years that followed, and he.

Did get a job.

He got a job as a milkman, which was great.

He was only good money.

He was only his own money.

That lasted about a month until we had a problem with me where he went out to he was on his bike.

He was always leaving his wallet in his back pocket.

Likely youngsters, do you know, lost his wallet?

Come home and I was sitting there actually, and he went out there and make himself signing to eat, and he started calling me names again, you know, one of them they just flip.

You see.

I know this sach funny going on, but I didn't know about it then enough about it, and so I said, look, go and take a walk, take a walk in the blog, come back and calm down.

So he decided to attack me.

So I slipped and he might eye on that on the corner.

Pete points to an area where furniture used to be.

It's worth noting that when Pete quote slipped, he hit the furniture so hard he broke open his eye socket.

Anyway, go long story short.

The police come around.

They said to me, don't worry, it's a family thing.

We won't get much time in that, you know, but he's going to get prosecuted, so we want your statement.

So okay, I gave him my statement.

Then they tried to give him seven years a family thing, So they tricked me.

You know, tricked is a heartbreaking choice of words.

I can tell Pete is struggling with memories of Brett.

He's still grieving, still asking what if things could have been different.

As much as his reasoning is strained, I also understand it.

But they give him five years in the end, then he came out into about two and a half something like that.

I thought he needed to be prosecuted.

I thought he needed to but to give him five years was like ridiculous.

Really, But they're saying the law works, you know, Yeah, they tricked me.

I think don't want to have a little tick on their box, the police.

You know, I'm not saying it all like that.

I'm just saying that that's the why it worked.

At that point.

M h, and so is that what it was like when he was staying here with you?

It was just a switch that would flip seemingly.

That's the first time it happened.

Yeah, because I would try to understand him.

You see, I can imagine being a dad and watching your son change behaviors so dramatically.

It's not nice, not well, I didn't understand what was happening.

I dedn'ty I'm just schizophra any you.

Know, this is the first time I've heard this word allowed to describe Brett, and I'm a little stunned, but cautious.

Pete's casual use of the term makes me wonder if he's using the clinical definition of the disease.

Schizophrenia is one of the most complex mental illnesses, affecting how a person thinks, feels, and behaves.

It can cause someone to hear or see things that aren't there, believe things that aren't true, or feel confused about what's real and what's not.

It's also one of the hardest to diagnose, because no test exists.

In men, symptoms tend not to appear until their early twenties, and then, once recognized, a constellation of traits must be diagnosed, but that requires a consistent schedule with medical professionals to uncover.

Simply put, it takes time to see the pattern.

To be clear, Brett was never diagnosed with schizophrenia, but in hindsight Pete believes he suffered from it.

And remember, in prison, Brett was prescribed antipsychotics intended to treat schizophrenia.

And then he became eighteen or seven, not sixteen.

When you stop, you stop having any power over him, you know, then you're lost because you can't do anything.

The doctor won't talk to you.

That's sort of thing.

Due to British age of consent laws, Pete wasn't allowed to talk to the doctors about his son's mental health after he turned sixteen.

It's a frustrating law, paradoxical because those late teenage years are exactly when symptoms start to show.

After Brett was released from prison, it said the family felt like things were better and that the fact that these murders had occurred it seemed out of the blue.

And I'm just curious when he that out of prison, can you describe his behavior, like did it feel out of the blue?

Is that acting you come out of prison, you know, her to stay he had to go and see his probation officer.

That the probation office was on holiday, bless her, so he couldn't see her.

So there's a big thing going on there, like, oh what do I see?

Then where do I go?

There's no way they could give him anywhere to stay, so he's out on the street.

He's not allowed to stay with me, even though I wrote him a really good letter saying, how I understand better what's going on, and I think things would be fine and all the rest of it, you know.

So we put him up in one of these.

Like like a hotel or a hotel or something.

Yeah, that's for about a week or so.

And I thought we can't keep doing this.

So her sister tool like, you know, she said, well, he can't stay here, you know, blah blah blah.

Once the parole board had forbidden Brett to live under his father's roof and Gillian had agreed to take in her son, Pete had some unsolicited advice for his ex wife, and it was absolutely horrifying to hear him say it.

I decide to her, get your knives or what does sharp knives and put them away put him somewhere else.

You had warned Jillian to take away those knives.

Was that because you knew that he was dangerous or because he had threatened before to like use weapons because.

I know there was a risk.

It's as simple as that.

I know there was something not right.

There was not something not right.

You know, sat in his room when we put him in a hotel and he said, I want you to go now.

So he's getting ally, you know, wrong, didn't they?

You know?

You just get to know that.

The moment is both bone chilling and bittersweet.

Brett, self aware, is telling his father to leave the room and get to safety before another psychotic episode takes hold of him.

So you weren't surprised, No.

No, I wasn't surprised the whole thing happening, you know, But merely and truly it didn't surprise me.

This confession is staggering.

Pete Rogers is telling me, pure and simple that he knew Brett was capable of something like this.

With that weight hanging between us, now's the time to ask how did he react when he heard his son murdered his former wife?

Well, Averon found me and a found He said, people are saying sorry about this and sorry about that, and I didn't know what he was talking about.

And then I started getting messages and I went around there basically to see what was going on.

I sort of knew something, something really bad had happened, you know so, And I don't know.

They never told me.

No, they keep storm, don't they.

They just said, like, you know, the incident.

It's an incident.

Basically, it's a weird feeling because like you're in shock, and life goes on and even a little bit of shock, and you don't really know what to do.

Pete.

Having now met you, I think you're you seem like such a well adjusted kind person.

How were you able to get through this?

How have you been able to?

Well?

If you're in stand and hold a house and a job and play guitar.

Well you do.

This comes in as years go by, don't it.

I took a you onion analyst who's a local, and I sat with her for probably once a week, you know, more or less, for about five or six years, and eventually got to where I want to be.

I guess sometimes you're all jumbled up in your head, aren't you, And you just go ahead and do things anyway, you know.

But it gives you that space to sort of like sort of segregate things a little bit and make the right decisions basically.

And me, for me, I am in the winter.

I generally take antidepressants for any a small amount, a small amount, but recently I've taken a bit more.

I've taken them in the summer.

And basically I realized that I've needed them for years.

I've needed them for because I've noticed that if depression comes upon you, you don't really know it unless you've been there, and you think this is life.

And when you get something that lifts you that little bit, you think, well, this is how it's supposed to be, you know, And so you can manage your life like that if you have them problems, you know.

Yeah, And that's the way I'll get through it.

And I'd also like to like to laugh and have a joke, you know.

My head went back to my friend Aaron's analysis.

Of course, she's never met Pete Rogers.

She'd only reviewed the domestic homicide report.

But Aaron had nothing to worry about.

In front of me sat a docile, polite man who openly discussed the worst night of his life.

With a complete stranger.

As we start to wrap up questions about Brett, Pete fairly asks for some clarity on the direction of the podcast.

You've told me that you're here to do a podcast on Edward because he's an up and coming comedian, and he's also done a gig on that something involves that it may involve my one of my sons, and you seem very interested in my son, and so it does seem a bit over the top for you to come all away over here to do a podcast on a comedian.

It does to me.

So ed talks about in his story is how he was home the night that on July twenty second when everything happened, and he said that he came home he was doing a stand up set here in town or at Ugly Village Hall, and it was John and Carroll, his parents, both in the house, and they woke up to banging, and they think that Brett was trying to get into the house.

That's what they believe.

Did you ever hear that before.

I've never heard that before, apart from yourself saying that I don't know.

The first I knew about anything was in the morning.

Do you believe that happened that Brett went and tried to break into their house that night, and this is presumably after he had killed Jill and Dave.

Well, I wouldn't like to say it didn't happen, because I mean, it could have happened, couldn't it?

Because the boy didn't know what he was doing?

Really did he?

If it happened, why do you think he would go to the Hedges house?

It wouldn't I don't think.

No, it won't be the hobbyist thing that I would think he would do.

But who knows?

Because someone with their mind scrambled like that.

You can't blame someone who's got mental health issues like that anyway, and they're not to blame.

Really, it's just circumstances.

Really, you know, that's all it is.

You get nowhere from blame like that anyway?

Do you.

Recognizing this as a chance for Ed to shar his perspective?

On that night, I shoot him a text asking if he wants to come in, how you been?

Was it all right?

You're everything?

Fine?

Cool?

Lovely?

How much is I don't obviously I don't know what I've come what I'm coming into.

How much has been explained to you?

Because six week podcast six podcasts approximately sounds rough?

It okay?

Cool?

So all right, do you know what happened that night with the house?

We might have been for guns?

Do you want me to tell you what happened from our side?

Just to kill you in So, I became a comedian, did gigs all over the place.

But then when I left stance did I didn't come back like ever because mates, I didn't really want So when I came back, I do you know ugly village?

All yeah, they had me.

Do I pack up my stuff and watch this reunion, a decade in the making, unfold out of the corner of my eye.

It takes me back to the years when your friend's parents were just shapes and faces.

You never thought about their lives, their worries, their fears.

You were just a kid, But they watched you play together in the yard, ride bikes on the sidewalk, sheer meals at each other's tables.

In this instance, neither family imagined how it would end.

One of those kids would become a celebrated comedian.

The other would become the subject of every whispered conversation in town.

When you hear I'm a comedian and when you hear I was talking about this, you first thought it was like, why the fuck are you making jokes about that?

Whether there's a line there, haven't there, but I don't know.

I've never heard it show or no.

So the way the way I did it was, if you think of the show, the story that I told in like one hundred percent, eighty percent of it was the village, me growing up, going to school, stupid people in the village.

The last bit was about Brett because obviously me and Brett had some runnings and yeah, I didn't know it.

And the whole show was about me saying, there's this bullshit thing that I think all men do when we hit thirty, where your father or husband and you've got to be like flawless.

You've got to get your money, you got to protect your a lot.

You can't show any weakness at all, and that pressure fucks people.

It just rocks people away because if you can't if you can't show any weakness at all, if a guy can't turn around to his mates and be like, really not happy with my job, really not happy with what's going on, I'm not in a good place.

I'm struggling at the moment, and I feel like if we didn't have that, and if Brett was in the situation he was in, he could have turned around and been like, I'm not good right now.

If there was no shame around it, he could have got help.

Because my stance on it is it ain't Brett's fault.

Good time, so that the ones that keeping.

Their memories definitely I taken everything.

He just told Pete Rogers something that felt like a long winded confession.

Or maybe it was just his nerves kicking in saying what he knew Pete would want to hear a way to justify his comedy.

Either way, it was the first time I'd heard any of it.

Pete, thank you so much, thanks your tom speech to say us.

And as we say goodbye to Pete, I wondered how much Ed believed what he actually said, and it got me thinking there was one person in the story that I hadn't interviewed yet asked the hard questions one on one, Ed Hedges himself.

How much of the truth did he not know?

Had he not faced had he taken any liberties with the story that he still had not shared with me?

In the car, I check into my flight back to Atlanta.

I decided to follow up on a few final loose ends before I left Stanstead, and Ed was cool to drive me around the village, but the quaint friendliness of this place was quickly wearing off.

I went to Ed's cricket club to interview his old coach, Keith Ayres, the one so proud he'd given Ed an award.

I didn't say anything you no, I don't think you're gonna get anything from me.

But we were met with nothing but icy glares and folded arms.

At a local bar where all the kids who never left the village gather after work, we might as well have been invisible.

I wanted to hear some good memories of Brett from his old friends, but.

Instant, what do you say?

Oh, and Argie membership?

You went, You're not members.

A family friend of the who had agreed to an interview suddenly ghosted.

The former classmate of Brett's ran the local flower shop, but inexplicably, her store was now closed for the foreseeable future.

And see what I mean by you?

Yeah, totally sorry about that, guys.

It felt like whispers were swirling around this town about our podcast and the questions we were asking about Brett.

In an instant, an entire village stopped speaking to us.

The cold shoulders put a chill on Ed's mood too.

By sunset, he wouldn't even look at me.

My mind rushed back to Sophie's accusations, through Ed's parents and the police reports.

I confirmed most everything that happened, But was there something Ed wasn't telling me.

I needed to confront ed here and now.

So I sat him down and I asked him point blank, I'll just be very direct.

I spoke to Sophie Hagen, who directed your original show.

Yeah, I mean she says that you made a lot of this stuff up.

What is what's true and what's not.

She's correct, She's definitely correct.

She's definitely correct.

And that's something I think I'm pretty upfront with in the past, even in reviews.

You can look up and up front with it.

She's you know, I'm not going to say she's incorrect with that.

So in terms of in terms of what's correct and what's not, what's true and what's not, the story is true.

Ed was caught off guard.

His calm replaced with attension that crept into his voice.

I could see him tense up, but I let him breathe let him process, and then I let him tell me his side uninterrupted.

Anything to do with Brett is true, and anything to do with Brett coming to the house is true.

Sophie was really keen on this being a one hundred percent true show, and it was really tough.

It was really really tough for me to do a one hundred percent true show with no embellishments or lives.

And I'm a comedian.

That's my currency.

I need people to laugh.

If I'm telling you this really bad story, you gotta laugh.

And I did a preview and a friend came up to me and he was like, well, it's a crazy story.

And I was like, what do you really think about it?

And he said, edits the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, not the Edinburgh Story Festival, and like a couple of my mates laughed, and I was like, shit, I'm a comedian, this needs to be funny.

So I made the decision to start changing the punchlines.

When I went back into my childhood, I would embellish stories.

I was really nervous to tell Sophie that, because she was so adamant that everything had to be true, but I couldn't keep dying.

And when you're dying on your ass on stage, it's just you and no one knows that you're being well, it was all true, that it's bollocks.

I sucked for four or five months telling this story, and I decided that when I went back into my childhood, I had to earn the laughs.

So I would give them some true, real story.

And then I would tell a story that I'd embellished, or that I'd made up an ending, or I'd made up a conversation in my childhood.

But the stuff that happened in the house with you being there with Brett, those.

I never messed with that.

I never messed with that because I knew that if someone found out I was lying about a murder in my village, I would get crucified.

Everything that I said, you kind of had to be able to google it, You kind of had to be able to search for it.

And that's what upset me.

When Sophy searched for the things and she said, look, I don't think this happened in your childhood.

I was like, damn right, it didn't happen.

But that's not the reason they're coming to see the show.

I'm glad I made the decision that I made.

If you're going to bring the audience down, you have to bring them back up.

I can understand that, and I'm not trying to where I struggle, like, I can confirm those things, but where I struggle is that I can't.

I cannot confirm that you and your parents were in your house that night, right.

I can't prove that there was banging at the door because it's not in a police report and it's not a yeah, that's and that's where i'm that's my struggle.

Yeah, Brett was found next to my house, like and you've seen the house.

He was found ten foot away from my house.

That's where they found him.

Brett spent a lot of time at my house as a child.

My house was the only house in the village that Brett could have gone to because we were the only house that he would come to to hang out as a kid.

He was repeating the same facts, clinging to them, but not because he was sticking to a made up story, because there simply wasn't any new or different truths to offer me.

I could see the wheels in his head turning, his frustration heating.

Up with me.

You've spoken to the three eyewitnesses, me, my mom, and my dad.

I guess to be very direct, Do you have any proof though that you were?

But Jody, what proof do you want?

What proof can I give you?

It is a first hand account of something that happened.

If you can think of a way that I can prove this in a time that happened before video, doorbells and CCTV.

If you can think of something I can bring to you, tell me and I will bring it.

If you can think of something that will definitively prove it did or it didn't happen, tell me and I will bring it.

You've spoken to all of us, and we've told you.

Is there anything else I can offer you?

Because if not, this is one of those things where you take my word or you don't.

I'm trying to stay objective to form an educated opinion, knowing that there may never be hard proof that Brett was at the Hedges door that night.

For me to believe that Ed is making it all up, I'd also have to believe that he's convinced his parents to join in on the lie, and after meeting them, I just don't buy it.

The truth is I believe Ed.

I do.

ED repeats a behavioral pattern I've seen in my work, frantic, anxious energy the Ed you see on stage, followed by long periods of social withdrawal reflection.

Those are the months I couldn't even get a text back from him.

It's taken me this entire investigation to understand that this is Ed's healing.

P I have done this show for so long, I've told this story for so long, and the fact that I lived through the.

Night, I could see the burden of proof weighing on Ed's shoulders, and I wanted to stop the conversation and tell him I trust him.

But with what he said next, I wasn't even sure i'd ever hear from him again.

The fact that I lived through the night.

I don't mean to sound like blase, but if I can be one hundred percent honest with you, and this might not be what you want to hear, I really don't give a fuck if you believe me or not.

Next time on wisecrack, I'm just gonna show you something for context.

This is his rap sheet And that was only twelve years of his life.

So in twenty twelve, Joe calls the police again and explicitly says her son is trying to kill her.

Wisecrack is a production of Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts in association with Starwiit Productions.

I'm Your Host Jody Tovey.

The show is written by Charles Forbes.

Stand up comedy written and performed by Ed Hedges, with additional writing contributions by Charles Forbes.

Executive producers for Tenderfoot TV are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay.

Executive producers for Starwiit Productions are Jody Tovey and Charles Forbes.

Lead producer is Alex Vespestad, with additional production by Stephen Perez, Joe Grizzle, ja Ja Muhammad, Jamie Albright, and Jordan Foxworthy.

Lead editor is Stephen Perez, with additional editing by Dylan Harrington and Liam Luxon.

Coordinating producers are John Street and Tracy Kaplan.

Research by Jim Nlly and Misty Showalter.

Original music by Jay Ragsdale with additional music by Makeup and Vanity Set mix by Cooper Skinner.

Artwork by Byron McCoy.

Special thanks to Orrin Rosenbaum and the team at Uta Nate Ranson, Alexander Kaplan and the Synergy Clubhouse and the Nord Group.

For more podcasts like Wisecrack, search Tenderfoot Tv on your favorite podcast app, or visit us at tenderfoot dot tv.

Thanks for listening.

Episode six will release next week, but you can binge the rest of the season right now, completely add free by subscribing to Tenderfoot Plus on Apple Podcasts or at time underfoot plus dot com.