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South Bend - 2017 to present
The telephone co-host: Crime Junkie's first episodes were recorded in an extra bedroom of Ashley Flowers' home in Indianapolis, with her co-host joining by telephone. ELLE's profile of Flowers, published 11 August 2022, fixes the other end of that line in a single clause: Prawat, who lives in South Bend, Indiana, on the telephone. The arrangement was not a remote work convenience; it was the show's founding geography. The two women had been friends since birth, Flowers has said, their mothers friends before them, both raised on the same diet of crime stories, and Prawat was the established podcast listener of the pair. When the show launched in December 2017, its format was set by that distance: Flowers narrates a case she has researched, and Prawat, from South Bend, asks the questions and supplies the interjections the audience came to expect.
The reach, at show size: Prawat has co-hosted Crime Junkie since 2017, which makes her, on the dated figures in the Flowers entry, a co-host of a podcast with 10 million weekly listeners, the most listened to show on Apple Podcasts in the United States in 2022 and 2023. This section prints her at that size and no larger: no source found fixes a separate personal audience figure for her beyond the show's, and her own following is not the record. What the record holds is that one half of the most successful two voice format in American podcasting was performed, from the first episode, from South Bend.
The hiatus: In May 2022 Flowers told listeners that Prawat had undergone a series of brain surgeries; Prawat addressed her health on the show that September and resumed her place. The episode is recorded here at the size the coverage supports, as the moment the audience learned how much of the format was one woman's voice on a phone line from Indiana. [Her birth date and birthplace are given conflicting values by low grade biography sites and are not printed; no encyclopedia entry of her own was found, and the gap is carried as an open item.]
Sources:
- ELLE, Katherine Rosman, "The Queen of True Crime", 11 Aug 2022 (as cited by Wikipedia, "Ashley Flowers" and "Crime Junkie"): the first episodes recorded at Flowers' home with Prawat, who lives in South Bend, Indiana, joining by telephone; Prawat's husband composing the theme music; the friends since birth account via the Inside Radio question and answer cited there.
- Wikipedia, "Ashley Flowers" and "Crime Junkie": co-hosts since 2017; the show's audience rankings and download figures as dated in the Flowers entry; the May 2022 surgeries announcement and the September 2022 return, with its references to Entertainment Tonight's coverage.