Blue Lights and Bylines

"Blue Lights and Bylines" is a true-crime based podcast hosted by veteran journalists Kathy Kelly and Claire Metz, who have some 90 years of experience between them covering crime and other breaking news in Central Florida. Kelly started at the Daytona Beach News-Journal as a 16-year-old "copy kid," working her way up to become a seasoned crime writer and news editor. Meanwhile, Metz began her career in the 1980s at WESH-TV - the NBC affiliate for Orlando/Daytona Beach - working her way up to the anchor desk before retiring in 2023. Coverage of "hard news" in those days was generally delegated to male journalists, but these two women were undaunted covering the grittiest, most sobering stories in a busy news market that spread from Florida's east coast to Walt Disney World and beyond in the west, and from the Space Coast in the south to St. Augustine and beyond in the north. Unlike many podcasters, who often go no further than Google and Wikipedia for their information, Kelly and Metz were boots-on-the-ground journalists who lived these stories from their first moments on the crime scenes to the courtrooms. Along the way they talked to law enforcement officers, witnesses, suspects, attorneys, family and friends of victims and community leaders. This included interviews with some of America's most infamous serial killers. For example, Kelly covered the case of Geraldo Stano, who was the verified killer of 23 women and girls across Florida and who was suspected of killing three or four times that many victims. Stano corresponded with Kelly from death row, where she also interviewed him in person, and he agreed to cooperate with her for her book about his life and crimes, “I Would Find a Girl Walking,” published by Penguin in 2013. For her part, Metz was a go-to reporter in the case of Aileen Wuornos, a former prostitute who shot and killed at least 7 men and whose story was the basis for the 2003 film "Monster," starring Charlize Theron in an Oscar-winning portrayal of Wuornos. The murderer granted Metz, whom she had come to know during her trial, an exclusive interview on death row, and Metz was a witness to the execution of Wuornos in 2002. "Blue Lights and Bylines" will include stories and updates of other murders - from the infamous "XBox murders" in Deltona in 2004 and the "Pulse murders" of 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando in 2016 to cases ranging from the slaying of a beloved photographer in 1996 to the case of a teen tourist abducted from her hotel room in 1980 and murdered by a serial killer. The podcast will feature cold cases, solved murders and other crimes with questions about their resolution, and Kelly and Metz will occasionally have guests with them in the studio, including law enforcement officers and other journalists. What's more, "Blue Lights and Bylines" will explore other types of stories Kelly and Metz covered related to breaking news, including mysterious disappearances, the slayings of police officers and even natural disasters such as hurricanes and attacks on humans by sharks and alligators. Kelly and Metz crossed paths as rivals during their years as journalists working for competing news outlets, but they became friends over time. Now with "Blue Lights and Bylines," they are partners in crime.