Things We Do in the Dark

Drew Malcolm, a Toronto-based career investigative reporter who now hosts a wildly popular true-crime podcast, Things We Do in the Dark, cannot believe that Ruby Reyes is to be paroled. He remembers the 1992 trial and the brutal circumstances of the murder: multiple stabbings and then a near decapitation using, of all things, an ice skate. Drew was later a friend of Ruby’s then 12-year-old daughter, Joey, and cannot see why Ruby is being paroled “[b]ecause not only is the woman a murderer, she was an absolute horror of a mother” (67). Ruby had been the mistress of a bank president named Charles Baxter. When Ruby was arrested, Joey was placed with relatives amid rumors of being mistreated by her mother, including a series of disturbing emergency-room visits. After her mother was convicted, Joey was sent to live with her aunt and uncle in Maple Sound, a small town two hours north of the city. There, Joey was miserable, mistreated by her adoptive family and by the kids in school not only because of her mother’s notoriety but because of her Asian ethnicity. After high school, Joey returned to Toronto, where she met and shared an apartment with Drew and his fiancée, and two years later she died in the fire.