You might say she’s a little bit country, he’s a little bit rock n’ roll.
Rebecca Everett is a former “cowgirl” raised on a dairy farm. Kevin Shea is a surfer dude, who’s passionate about punk rock music.
They both started their journalism careers at newspapers, eventually adapting to the sea change in our industry to become digital-first reporters. The two award-winning journalists also have the distinction of being narrative-crime podcasters for NJ.com and The Star-Ledger.
Everett and Shea are co-hosts of the new podcast “In the Shadow of Princeton,” an eight-part serial about the 1989 cold case murder of the matriarch of a prominent Princeton family who was found brutally stabbed in her locked basement.
The first three episodes of the whodunnit are out now, with the remaining episodes dropping weekly on Wednesdays exclusively on Wondery+. Find the podcast on Wondery.com, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. (For more intrigue, visit theprincetonmurder.com)
This is Shea’s first outing as reporter and co-host of an NJ.com podcast production. Everett broke into the relatively new form of storytelling with the widely acclaimed 2022 “Father Wants Us Dead” series, which told the gut-wrenching story of Westfield’s notorious mass murderer, John List.
“Rebecca and Kevin spent months reporting and reporting, running into dead ends and then finding ways around them, travelling to Maine and California to chase down strands of the drama — in short, applying the moral purpose and investigative scrupulousness that makes our work stand so far apart from the vast sea of podcasts about crime,” said Chris Kelly, VP of Content at NJ Advance Media, which provides content for NJ.com and The Star-Ledger. “Rebecca is a wonder in this form — dogged, empathetic, deeply engaging.”
As for Shea, Kelly wrote in the staff email announcing the project: “One of my great professional pleasures of recent years has been watching a lifelong words-based crime and justice reporter take to podcasting like a fish to water.”
Shea brought this compelling case to Kelly, who is executive producer, and Everett, our newsroom’s senior podcasts producer. He also brought his encyclopedic knowledge of the investigation because he had covered elements of the story for two decades as a Times of Trenton crime reporter.
When Shea, 53, started his professional career at the Asbury Park Press in 1993 as a photojournalist moving shortly afterward to the Times of Trenton, he said there were scarcely a handful of personal computers for the entire staff. By the time he joined NJ Advance Media in 2015 after a few years break, he was ready for the seismic shift in the industry.
“I knew our business would change and would become digital and kind of evolve,” he told me in an interview with Everett. “I understood that, and I embraced all that. I used to tell people, ‘My job is the same — report the story, write the stories the best you can fairly…In the end, you’re doing the same thing. It’s just appearing in a different format.”
It’s this format that earned Everett her first Webby Award for “Father Wants Us Dead,” sometimes called the Oscars of the internet.
“A lot of my learning process was just being a lifelong fan of NPR stuff,” she said, mentioning Ira Glass’ seminal “This American Life.” “Things like that taught me how to put people in the scene. But the scripting was just the hardest thing. Trying to be yourself,and to figure out how to bring listeners along.”
With podcast storytelling, she said, the aim is for listeners to feel in the moment. “You want them to hear the conversation. When you’re writing an article, you never put yourself in the conversation.”
Everett and Shea revealed a few surprises they had in the making of the podcast, which involved nearly 18 months of reporting, writing and editing a script, table reading, countless hours recording and sound engineering. And then, more revising and tweaking the episodes until they believed it was impeccable.
“There’s a couple times captured when our reactions to what we’ve just learned is so in the moment,” said Everett, who joined NJ Advance Media in 2016 from our sister news site, MassLive in her native Massachusetts. “You could never fake it, including me being frustrated or Kevin being just aghast at what we’ve just found.”
“It never really feels 100% comfortable, because we’re so used to print,” Shea chimed in. “We are not TV or radio reporters.”
Unlike written investigative articles, which can sometimes take months or years, it’s near impossible to take the audience through that time of reporting.
“Audio is a great medium for bringing that alive,” she said.
Everett’s first brush with journalism came when she was 12, stemming from being the daughter of dairy farmers in western Massachusetts —on farmland her father’s family owned since the early 1800s. A reporter from the local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, wrote a feature on her and her two sisters about the art of showing the family’s cows at the fair.
“It came out in the newspaper soon after my first week going to the regional school,” said Everett, 37, who lives in Camden County with her husband, whom she’s been with for 14 years. “Suddenly everyone knew me as one of the cowgirls.”
Years later, that newspaper hired her for her first reporter job.
“I went and worked at the newspaper with the reporter who wrote that article,” said Everett, who studied journalism at Westfield State University in her home state. “That was kind of mind blowing.”
And while the country girl enjoys spending her time off in Philly because she still marvels at big cities, Shea is drawn to the ocean and his headphones to listen to punk music.
“I’m going surfing after this interview,” he told us.
Shea lives in Point Pleasant Borough with his wife of 27 years. Together, they raised three now-adult daughters.
For him, journalism is a family trade. His father was a lifelong newspaper man in Washington DC, working for a slew of papers. He recalls his father interviewing Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers) for the National Observer in the early 1970s before he became famous.
“I kind of knew I’d end up in journalism, at a paper,” he said. “I loved it. I thought was cool.”
After earning a degree in photojournalism at the Rochester Institute of Technology, he wanted to find somewhere where he could work and then go surfing. He put down his camera early into his career when his curiosity to get to the bottom of things – especially crime – convinced him to become a writer.
And now he’s a podcaster, as well.
“This podcast is a very organic, and this is truly an NJ.com project,” he said. “I think it’s important that people know this is really homegrown, and a very professional operation.”
If you listen to the podcast, go ahead and leave a review. But also, let the reporters know what you think. Reach Rebecca Everett at reverett@njadvancemedia.com, and Kevin Shea at kshea@njadvancemedia.com
Enrique Lavín is the editor of online newspapers. Call 732-902-4454 or email him at elavin@njadvancemedia.com
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