PANIC BUTTON | SEASON 3
Dead silent
Season 3 of Panic Button is back in production! Episode One will release August 26th, 2025.
Here’s more about the story: In 2016, Emily Morgan and Totinika “Ty” Elix were found murdered in a white Ford Fusion parked under a carport in Bache, Oklahoma. Both women were shot execution-style, leaving behind children, grieving families, and a community desperate for answers.
Emily, a 22-year-old Choctaw woman and former tribal princess, was a devoted mother determined to build a better life for her young son. Ty, a 24-year-old Black woman and also a young mother, was fiercely protective of her family and known for her loyalty to friends. Both were young women with vibrant futures ahead of them, yet their lives were violently cut short — and the investigation into their murders has stalled, plagued by systemic failures, racial bias, and apathy.
The unsolved murders of Emily and Ty expose stark truths about justice in America, particularly for Indigenous women and women of color. Their case underscores broader crises: the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), a justice system that fails marginalized communities, and the violent effects of gang activity and drug trafficking in rural America.
SEASON TWO –
OPERATION : WILDFIRE
Come with us on a journey through rural Oklahoma, on the backroads and through the courthouses as we track a serial domestic abuser who is still out there. A person with a trail of victims as long as Boston Pool Road– winding all the way back to 1997. What will it take for a punitive system to hold a known violent offender accountable? So many folks said that April Wilkens should have held back, should not have shot so many times, should have left. But what happens when an abuser is left unchecked in Oklahoma? Women are getting life sentences for fighting back— but men go on to abuse with impunity. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
SEASON ONE –
THE APRIL WILKENS CASE
A podcast about a true crime story unlike any other– only there's no whodunnit, and there's no whydunnit. We know exactly who killed Terry Carlton on April 28th, 1998. And we know exactly why. Because she told us--April Wilkens told anyone who would listen that she defended her own life that night. And yet--even in the face of overwhelming evidence and testimony--the jury sentenced her to LIFE.
Attorneys Leslie Briggs and Colleen McCarty deep dive into the facts of the case, and the phenomenon of criminalized survivors in Oklahoma prisons.
OKLAHOMA
APPLESEED
Panic Button is presented by
CENTER FOR LAW & JUSTICE
Oklahoma Appleseed is a non-profit organization that fights for justice and opportunity for all Oklahomans. We approach big issues--like Criminal & Juvenile Justice, Education Justice, and Election Justice--by tackling their root causes. We take our work wherever we believe we can do the most good, whether that’s in the courthouse, at the Capitol, or in the community.
THE PANIC
BUTTON TEAM
Trevor Aaronson
Trevor Aaronson is a contributing writer for The Intercept and a 2020 ASU Future Security Fellow at New America. He is also author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism and the creator and host of documentary podcasts including “Alphabet Boys” and “American ISIS.”
His TED Talk, “How this FBI strategy is actually creating U.S.-based terrorists,” has been viewed more than 1 million times and translated into 23 languages. “Informants,” a documentary he reported and produced, screened at the London Investigative Film Festival and was broadcast worldwide in three languages.
A two-time finalist for the Livingston Awards, Aaronson has won dozens of national and regional journalism awards for investigative reporting, feature writing and data journalism, including the Molly National Journalism Prize and the Data Journalism Award. Aaronson has discussed his reporting on national programs including CBS This Morning, NPR’s All Things Considered, This American Life and On the Media.
Aaronson co-founded the nonprofit Florida Center for Investigative Reporting in 2010. Investigations he edited spurred changes to law and policy and won honors from the National Headliner Awards, the National Awards for Education Reporting, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and the Green Eyeshade Awards.
COLLEEN McCARTY,ESQ.
Colleen McCarty is an attorney and life-long Oklahoman. In 2017, McCarty went back to the University of Tulsa College of Law to attend law school (JD ‘20). She served as an Articles Submission Editor on the Tulsa Law Review.
Since becoming licensed to practice law in Oklahoma, she has served as Policy Counsel and Deputy Director of Oklahomans for Criminal Justice Reform. In Spring of 2022, McCarty worked with Appleseed Foundation Executive Director, Benet Magnuson, to open Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, where she now serves as Executive Director. She has worked across both sides of the aisle in the Oklahoma legislature on criminal justice policy, and was instrumental in passing medical parole reform in 2020 (SB 320).
McCarty assisted in formulating a proposal for a felony classification & sentencing system, as introduced in SB 1646 (2022) and later in HB 1792 (2023). McCarty has been one of the key advocates pushing for survivor justice reform, which materialized in the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act, SB 1835 (2024)—a measure that passed the Oklahoma Senate 46-0 and the Oklahoma House 86-4.
She is admitted to practice in Oklahoma District Court, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court of the United States.
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