He Thought The Truth Would Set Him Free - He Was Wrong

In the hours after he allegedly stabbed his wife to death, a Turkish-born contractor named Mr. Kotenchi sat in a police cruiser and then an interrogation room, telling anyone who would listen that he had tried to kill himself by jumping into Puget Sound. He had been up for more than 30 hours, he explained, after flying from Cancún to Seattle. He wanted to see his children. He had a protection order against him. He was exhausted, he was irritable, and he was bleeding from a cut on his hand. The detective who sat across from him did not ask many questions. Kotenchi did not stop talking.

The episode unfolds almost entirely through the raw audio of Kotenchi's arrest and subsequent interview, giving the listener direct access to a man who believes he has been destroyed by a system that refuses to see his side. The narrative hook is the gap between what Kotenchi thinks he is—a devoted husband and father who built a house with his own hands—and what the charges say he is: a man facing murder one, kidnapping, and burglary. The explanation that makes the phenomenon understandable is Kotenchi's own obsessive monologue, which he offers as a kind of defense: a long, looping account of marital betrayal, financial ruin, and the psychological toll of isolation from his children.

The spiral: money, sex, and the British ex-boyfriend