Hear the incredible real stories behind the making of the biggest documentary series & films on Netflix. Host Rebecca Lavoie leads in-depth interviews with creators and subjects, exploring how these stories are produced & their impact, while uncovering new information. New episodes every Wednesday.
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I'm at the casino until roughly 4 AM. After all have gone to be I leave the casino. I get home within 20 minutes. I had an appointment that close by. Yes. I go to myself. Think of things that you have seen you know, regular night. I go to bed. Yeah. I get woken up to a loud pounding on the door. Either you're getting robbed. Someone trying to knock down the door or the cops. So I grabbed my gun right away to defend the house. I always have a lot of cash in my safe. Then I eat here. FBI. Open up. I just my gun down, I go open the door. But when you looked at me and smiled Hands up, That's when it all began. That's Ray. He surrendered to the FBI right then and there. If you ask me when we were kids where Ray would end up, honestly, I would say right here. Hankuffed in his Gucci shorts and Gucci slides, flashing his newly minted veneers as the neighbors stood there gawking. He was probably more worried about how pale and skinny he looked and less worried about the handcuffs on his wrists. For as long as I could remember, Ray was always good at making a couple pennies. The problem was. Didn't matter how. Rachel Penny was being arrested for fraud, conspiracy to commit security fraud more specifically, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. For what you might ask? Well, Ray's company was called Centra Tech, and he was one of the founders.
Lot of people are really divided and some are like, oh, well, the parents cared for her. They took care of you and then this is how you repay them. Like it was a shock. And other people kind of sympathize with Jennifer for her case and can relate to feeling those parental pressures and affecting the mental health and that could be a serious problem as well. So, you know, they were both sides are very divided. But, Jenny, I mean, if the thought is that the home invasion was about money, it seems like the pans were financially comfortable, but they weren't the wealthiest people on the block. Am I getting that right? Yeah. As Jennifer says on the sound, they're comfortable. They've paid their house off. They're living to their means. They're working very, very hard. They're here to provide a better life for their family, and they're very focused on, you know, being providers and making sure that their next generation is able to have all the opportunities that they didn't have. And they've worked these jobs, this you know, they've worked in a in a company called Magna, a car parts company. They've worked really hard and saved. I don't think that they other than that car, I don't think that they were spending a lot of money on other luxuries. I think that they were focused and driven. And I think it didn't look to the outset to the detectives that it was financially motivated because money was left in the house. The safe was untouched. They didn't pay their wallets. The the it's more like they when they looked back at the photos, they turned the house up. You know, mattresses were over. You could see that it had been turned upside down, but valuables had been left behind. So it didn't seem that they were targeted for their money. Paul, you said that you were from Toronto as well. What what is the community where they live? What is that community like? Markham has a, you know, a larger Asian population, Vietnamese, Chinese background. I would say it's considered a more affluent part of the DGA, which is like the Greater Toronto Area surrounding areas. And yeah, so it's like a, you know, single detached home, double garage, they have 2 luxury cars. I mean, yeah, they're a little bit more than comfortable, I would say, you know, depending on your perspective. But in that community, Markham is not known for crime. They they were just really quiet people. They they didn't bug anyone.
One of the things I was wondering is about your work, Greg, because as a documentarian, you know, to make a good story, you know, there has to be a story arc. There has to be conflict. And I know that the sheriff was hoping for ultimately some sort of harmony in in the unit. So I'm wondering if you felt in some way, like, you know, you want him to be successful, but at the same time, you need material for your documentary. So, you know, did did you find yourself, like, low key, like, slightly across purposes here? You know, like, I'm looking for the moments that the sheriff doesn't want to have happen. He certainly knew that going into it. But I think I think at the end of the day, we both know the world pretty extensively. He far more extensively than I do. You know those moments are gonna happen. This is the world of, jail, and things do happen in a in a in a detention setting. And so going in, I think more for me, the concern was, well, what are we gonna learn? Are there is there actually gonna be growth? Is it worth having done in the first place? Because while we all are obsessed with the sort of confined world and the ingenuity of how things get made or the breaking of rules and all this, At the end of the whole experiment, if if you haven't actually learned something, then it was just a series of escalating incidents. And escalating incidents happen all the time in jail, but that's not the point and purpose for this. So in a weird way, I sorta had a strange confidence that I knew we would get the, quote, unquote, jail of it all. But for me, the bigger question was, and then what? And that was actually the truly remarkable thing about watching this whole thing unfold in real time was that there were and then what's and then and next. Can you talk about the technical challenges of shooting inside a jail pod? Because it's not like other documentaries, right, where you can sit somebody in front of a, you know, and rent an Airbnb say to do like a really quiet nice interview or like put them in front of a really great green
You know, there's still other there's but, I mean, I wanna say that there was maybe, like, 50 murders or something that have happened on the Myrtles' plantation. And so it's a question of, you know, does that challenge the credibility of it being haunted? And I don't think it does. I think that, you know, there's so much going on. There's so much history behind you know, in that plantation overall that it's something worth looking at. And this story sort of stuck around, that there was a ghost who haunted the house. She seemed to be the resident spirit here, a woman in a green turban. Well, when the story of Chloe was created out of thin air, it was using the story of the ghost with the green turban, even though the descriptions didn't match. But we don't wanna let facts get in the way of a good story, at least that's what happened. You know, even though Khloe may not have existed, there probably were, you know, just given the time period and also giving the area of of town where that occurred, there probably was slavery going on there. There were probably some horrors happening there. And so that doesn't negate that at all even though this one particular person by this particular name may not have existed. So that's something that we tried to tried to get across. I will say as another side, Sky, I've watched a lot of ghost stories that feature a lot of ghost hunters. It's one of my kids' favorite genres even though they're adults now. And I've never heard any of these people say he let one of the ghosts play with his toes. That part. In this room, the John Leek room, I had my foot sticking out of the bed and somebody grabbed my ankle and started playing with my toes. Were you, yeah, were you surprised by this very enthusiastic ghost hunting, guy who was just, you know, all in on this experience? I mean, I'll tell you, there's there's very little that surprises me now. That may have been one of the things, but but look, I I think it's one of the things that also makes our series really special is that
That a director is the kind of general of, feature film, calling all the shots, making creative decisions, and organizational decisions. The showrunner is doing the same thing but for television. And, the people who can really run that in an efficient way are it's incredible because it's very complex Yes. And chaotic, but the output is joyous. Yes. We hope. And in this case, yes. Yes. Dan, David, Alex, congratulations on the show. Welcome to the pod. Thank you. Thank you, Drew. You very much. Thanks for having us. Alex, we'll start with you. How did this project come together? I think Netflix played matchmaker on this. Peter Friedlander, one of the executives at Netflix, called me up and said, you know, we we have this project. We can't tell you what it is, but you're gonna love it, and, Terzetti was right. Dan, how did this story first come to your awareness? Peter Friedlander mentioned it sort of in passing at dinner one night that we should check these books out. And they sounded familiar and I realized they sounded familiar because the first one was on my Kindle. And I remember when we wrapped Thrones and we went for a decompression like a weekend, seeing it in my library and almost opening it and then choosing something that just looked a little bit less complicated. Spent my headspace after finishing, Game of Thrones. I had heard of the book only because, president Obama had blurbed it, right, which was unusual because you don't really think of Obama blurbing science fiction books. So I remember that and thinking, that's that's interesting. I'm kinda curious.
