Killer Story

Baylor journalism students who are interested in true crime reporting are getting a rare treat this semester. Texas journalist and Baylor graduate Claire St. Amant, who has spent the past 15 years reporting on major crime stories through prominent national media platforms, is teaching a class showing students how to tell great stories by creating their own podcasts.

St. Amant, who was named the 2024 Radford Visiting Professor in Baylor's Department of Journalism, Public Relations & New Media, and whose first book about her reporting experiences will be released this winter, is no doubt sharing with her students about how telling true crime stories can come with lots of surprises along the way.

Persistence pays off

As a successful journalist, St. Amant knows a good story when she hears one. But that same sense of what makes for a compelling news story almost got her fired five years ago from her job at the CBS newsmagazine 48 Hours. 

St. Amant began working for CBS News in 2014 as a field producer based in Dallas, helping the network cover breaking news stories in Texas. She worked her way up to the role of development producer, where she produced long-form stories for presentation across CBS platforms, including the CBS Evening News and CBS This Morning. Most of her work was for 48 Hours, which debuted in 1988. 

In 2019, when St. Amant was covering a murder trial for the show, a Texas Ranger was called to testify. The Ranger, James Holland, had taken a confession from a killer while working on another case and, on the stand, “he was giving his bonafides for why he was qualified to be a witness to talk about interviewing and interrogation,” St. Amant said. “He casually mentioned that he was working on a serial killer case where there were 93 victims.”

Ninety-three victims? That certainly caught her attention. 

“I must have heard him wrong,” St. Amant recalls thinking. “And he had mentioned the killer’s name –– it was the Samuel Little case in California.”

During the next break in the court session, St. Amant got busy on her phone, searching for more information about Samuel Little.

“How can I have not heard of a serial killer with 93 victims?,” she said.

The only media outlet she could find that had covered the case at all was the Los Angeles Times, and she wondered, “Why is no one else covering this?”

After Holland finished testifying, St. Amant introduced herself and told him that she was interested in learning more about Samuel Little and any other cases that he wanted to talk about –– but Holland told her he had a firm “no media” policy. He said he hadn’t given a single interview in the 20 years that he had worked in law enforcement. 

“Like any good journalist, that was just catnip to me,” St. Amant said. “So, I stayed close and interested in any type of information he was willing to give me. And over the course of that summer, he started talking more about the Samuel Little case, saying that there might be the right circumstances for him to give an interview on that case.”

Those circumstances involved the fact that law enforcement had hit a wall in identifying many of the victims Little had admitted to killing. 

“He had preyed on women on the fringes of society, always people down on their luck, but oftentimes prostitutes and drug users,” St. Amant said. 

Sitting on an exclusive interview, St. Amant pitched the story to 48 Hours, but it was rejected. The reasoning, she was told, was that the show’s true crime stories usually focused on “people you would never expect to be killed,” she said. “It’s always the girl next door.”

“So, the idea of all of these victims who in many ways were breaking the law and were doing things that are considered risky behaviors that might make them more likely to face violence –– that was a big hurdle for 48 Hours,” she said.

St. Amant also suggested the story to the morning and evening news broadcasts at CBS, but still had no luck. As her one remaining outlet within the network, she figured that then pitching the story to the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes –– “the most exclusive hour on television,” she said –– was surely a long shot at best. 

As she didn’t know anyone who worked at 60 Minutes, St. Amant was asking fellow CBS producers to introduce her to someone on the show but had no luck. It got to the point that Susan Zirinsky, the president of CBS News, told her point blank to stop shopping the story around the network. 

As a last –– very last –– resort, she used the company directory to find the email address of Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes. She composed an email, hesitated for a moment, and hit Send. St. Amant then figured that her logical next step would probably be to start looking for a new job. 

Instead, she received a reply 10 minutes later: “This is my direct line. Call me.” 

She did, and she and Owens had a conversation where he asked plenty of questions. In the end, he gave St. Amant the OK to proceed with the story. 

A few days later, St. Amant told her boss Judy Tygard, the executive producer at 48 Hours, “By the way, I ended up pitching that story to 60 Minutes and Bill Owens greenlit it.”

“She was very happy for me at that time,” St. Amant said. “She said, ‘That’s fabulous. I’m so glad you found a home for it.’”

The story, eventually titled “The Ranger and the Serial Killer,” aired on 60 Minutes on Oct. 6, 2019. 

A new platform

For the next couple of years, St. Amant split her time between producing stories for 48 Hours and 60 Minutes. In 2021, she decided to begin her own true crime podcast –– based on a case she had covered while working at CultureMap Dallas in 2014. The podcast told the story of Dammion Heard, a college wrestler who, during his freshman year at Western Colorado University, went missing after an off-campus party. His body was found four days later in a remote location. 

“That story really resonated with me –– just the idea of sending your child off to college, and they don’t come home. And not only that, but you have so many questions about how they died and why they died and where they died,” she said.

Heard had wrestled for and graduated from Fossil Ridge High School in Fort Worth. 

St. Amant, acting as co-creator, executive producer and host, recorded 17 episodes about Heard’s case and released it as Season One of the podcast Final Days on Earth: A True Crime Podcast. The podcast description on its website declares that “each season examines mysterious deaths that have elements of an accident, murder, or suicide –– and sometimes all three.”

After “getting a taste of owning my own content and being the executive producer of my own show,” St. Amant left CBS News in 2022 to devote time to the second season of Final Days, titled “The Life and Death of Jennifer Harris.” In 12 episodes it tells the story of the 28-year-old Harris, who disappeared on Mother’s Day 2002 in Bonham, Texas. Her body was found floating in the Red River a week later, and the case has remained unsolved. 

“It’s a really tragic story of a young life cut short, a woman who had recently told her friends that she was pregnant, that she was excited to have the baby, but that the father didn’t want her to keep the baby,” St. Amant said. “It’s a fascinating, complicated, complex murder investigation, with no shortage of theories and evidence.”

Earlier this year, St. Amant created Rebel Studios, and under that umbrella she’s recently released the third season of the Final Days on Earth podcast, titled “The Life and Death of Greg Williams.” She calls it her “true crime origin story,” dating back to when she worked for People Newspapers in Dallas, which was her first journalism job after graduating from Baylor. 

“That story really introduced me to how complicated and interesting and deceptive true crime reporting can be,” she said. “I wanted to go back to the case that started it all and look at that case with all my experience now, as a true crime reporter.”

Baylor days

St. Amant, originally from Katy, Texas, attended Baylor as a major in professional writing with a minor in journalism. While at the University she was a staff writer and city editor for the campus newspaper, the Baylor Lariat. 

“When I was at Baylor, I took working at the Lariat very seriously,” she said. “And I realized when I got my first job in journalism that the Lariat had been a professional newsroom. The lessons that I learned working with the Lariat –– finding sources, reporting stories, fact checking, all of that –– came into play when I was a journalist.”

After graduating from Baylor in 2008, St. Amant spent a year with the Peace Corps teaching English in Ukraine, then worked two years as a reporter for People Newspapers. Her coverage of a case involving the sexual assault of a child by a teacher at a private school in Dallas landed her a job at CultureMap Dallas. 

Killer story

After her successes with newspapers, television and podcasting, the versatile St. Amant is adding a new medium to her résumé. In February 2025, BenBella Books will release her memoir, “Killer Story: The Truth Behind True Crime Television.” The idea for the book came as she was doing self-reflection after leaving CBS and realizing the effects of constantly covering true crime stories. 

“It was very interesting work, very difficult work, challenging work,” St. Amant said. “It kept me very busy for many years, before I ever stopped to think about what it was doing to other parts of my life. And I really think as the emotional toll added up of covering so many types of crimes like this, that I started to realize that it probably wasn’t the most healthy, long-term choice for me.”

St. Amant said she knew that her life experiences would make a good book because while she was at 48 Hours, her job there was “a source of endless conversations.”

“It was something that everyone wanted to talk about,” she said. “What stories are you working on? What’s a day at the office look like at a true crime show? I found myself repeating the same pieces of information to different people and realizing that no one really has a point of reference for what it’s like to work on a true crime television show.”

Using books such as “Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV” as inspiration, St. Amant began to look back on the cases that she had covered in her career. And she realized that sometimes what happened behind the scenes “was even more twisted and bizarre than the murder cases themselves,” she said.

“I think that people will be surprised to learn what it’s like to work in true crime television.”

Back on campus

St. Amant has been a frequent guest speaker in Baylor’s Department of Journalism, Public Relations & New Media, and made her debut as an adjunct faculty member this semester teaching Professional Podcasting on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Enrollment is limited to 15 students, and there was a waitlist at the beginning of the semester.

“I’m really excited about teaching my Baylor course –– getting to create podcasts with students and walk them through the whole process, including the creation of the show, the editing, and putting it out to market by doing the advertising and marketing that every good podcast needs,” she said. “I can’t wait to see what shows the students come up with.”

*This story originally appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of Baylor Arts & Sciences magazine.

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