Amory Sivertson was ready to ingratiate herself with the Clark County records office in Vancouver, Washington. She says she brought donuts into the office and made sure to express her gratitude when her contact, Belinda, sent updates on the massive amounts of information that she’d requested in the fall of 2021.
For years, Sivertson spent time understanding the story found in those voluminous case files — the story of a murder whose perpetrator is legally unknown. As a journalist at WBUR — one of Boston’s two NPR stations — Sivertson created a 10-“chapter” podcast series about the case. Released in March of 2024, “Beyond All Repair” evoked intense emotions for the family at the center of the story.
Sivertson remembers “watching ‘Frasier’ reruns with [her] family” sometime around her “tween years.” The television show’s namesake was “like a radio therapist,” she explains. Now 36, Sivertson planned to combine her hobbies and interests when she grew up, with inspiration from the show thrown in. “I think I wanna be . . . a singer, radio [psychiatrist] . . . gymnast, softball-playing, actor,” she recalls telling her mom.
Sivertson would go on to earn an acting degree, graduating from Emerson College in 2011. Looking back on her education, she says that “studying acting . . . has taught me more about what it means to be a human being and what it means to try to understand another human being. And that, I think, is crucial to just about any work that you do, but it certainly has proven crucial in journalism.”
During her elementary school years, Sivertson says she spent time “singing and writing music and playing piano.” Today, with dozens of her songs streaming on Spotify, she continues her music-making endeavors. Her home boasts a parlor grand piano, fulfilling her “long-held hope . . . to have [her] own piano someday.” As she notes in the show, she even wrote the theme and credits music for “Beyond All Repair” herself.
Rounding out her early dreams, Sivertson says she joined the team at WBUR as an “unpaid intern” because she “had some free time” while in college and she thought it was “a responsible thing to do.”
Sivertson’s husband of seven years, Mike Moschetto, also works at WBUR. He says that Sivertson “has internalized the ethics of [journalism] just like that” by learning “on the job,” even though she didn’t take the “proven path” of “J-school.”
Fifteen years later, Sivertson describes pivotal moments in her career in intuitive terms. She says she “fell in love with the people that [she] was working with,” had a “natural rapport” right off the bat with Ben Brock Johnson — now her co-host on the weekly podcast “Endless Thread” — and was “feeling pulled [toward what she calls ‘audio journalism’] for some reason.”
Sivertson says she has worked on “Endless Thread” since 2017, and it began airing in 2018. Together, Sivertson’s and Johnson’s effusive personalities explore what Johnson called “unsolved mysteries, untold histories, and other weird stories from the internet” in a March 2026 guest appearance on podcast “You’re Wrong About.” Often these stories are discovered on their favorite subreddits.
But one of these stories eventually led to a macabre mystery. In 2018, Sivertson and Johnson released an episode of “Endless Thread” called “Getting Home.” The episode centered on Shane Correia, a gay man who says he faced homelessness in New York City when his father changed the locks on his eighteenth birthday. In that episode, listeners learn not only Shane’s own journey of survival, but also some family history — including that his sister, Sophia Johnson, was convicted of murdering her mother-in-law, Marlyne Johnson, in 2002.
A few years after Shane was featured in the “Endless Thread” episode, Sophia “wanted to talk — and she wanted to talk, to me,” Sivertson tells listeners in Chapter 1 of “Beyond All Repair.” Today, Sivertson reflects that “this story really felt like it fell into my lap.”
In “Beyond All Repair,” we learn that Sophia was given a new lease on life after a 2005 retrial found her “not guilty.” But that’s the abbreviated version, without the many confusing and heartbreaking details listeners learn in the podcast itself. Sivertson says she aimed “to tell Sophia’s story — what happened to this one person past, present, and future.” Along the way, listeners meet a whole slew of other characters: Sophia’s father, her brothers Sean and Shane, and her partner Morgen among the most significant.
Sivertson’s husband, Moschetto, admits his “pro-Amory bias” candidly, but praises her work nonetheless. “She doesn’t half-ass anything,” he reflects. “She is a maximalist in all ways . . . I’m like, ‘Just turn it off. It’s okay. We’re all kinda like doing our best here,’ but no, she does the best.”
“Beyond All Repair’s” producer, Sofie Kodner, says “[Sivertson] expected perfection when it came to production in a way I think really paid off.” She also praises Sivertson’s “empathetic” nature — “I mean, she’s a vegan!” she explains. “You know that saying, ‘Do no harm, take no shit?’ I feel like that’s Amory to me.”
“Beyond All Repair” received an Ambie Award in 2025 for “Best True Crime Podcast.”
But Sivertson’s excellence and empathy haven’t stopped some people from still wrestling with the podcast’s effects two years later. Shane Correia, the younger brother of Sophia, says he confronted much of the evidence surrounding his sister’s case for the first time as the podcast was being researched. Shane explains that when the murder happened, “I was a kid. I didn’t go looking for anything except what was available publicly.”
Shane says when Sivertson offered to share the case files with him and hear his opinion on it, he agreed. Today, Shane says he’s not sure he regrets participating, but that the process was “life-changing . . . in a negative way” and “career-[disrupting].”
Sivertson recalls the “voice memos” Shane sent her throughout the reporting process. “It is such an intimate medium,” Sivertson reflects, “that you feel like . . . you’re having a conversation with that person. He would record them sometimes in the middle of the night . . . and then I would be listening to them sometime the following day while I’m out for a walk or doing dishes or cleaning my rabbit’s litter box. We were together, but apart.”
Shane recalls how he, Sophia and Morgen “thought maybe there was a real relationship” with Sivertson “beyond the journalistic bounds.” “I was sending voice notes still to her even after the podcast,” he explains, “sometimes messy, messy voice messages.”
Reflecting on Shane and Sophia, Sivertson says, “I don’t know if they think that I’ve just forgotten about them and finished the podcast and moved on with my life, but truly not a day goes by that I don’t think about them.”
Kodner remembers working alongside Sivertson, saying, “Amory had to be both objective as a journalist, trying to figure out the truth of the situation, while also having this relationship with Sophia and Morgen and Shane. We had to figure out . . . how she could remain objective while also being human in her relationships with them.”
Sivertson explains that the journalistic process creates a “totally uneven relationship,” where subjects like Shane and Sophia were “sharing all of this with me, but . . . they’re not hearing about the worst days of my life and the best days of my life.”
Throughout the reporting process, Sivertson says she had to work hard to communicate her intentions clearly. “When you have that much contact with a person,” she says, “you do need to be reminding each other all the time of what you’re doing and what your goals are.” In Chapter 1, listeners hear Sivertson explain to Sophia, “I can’t root for people in this story, but I can root for the truth. And if the people are aligned with the truth, then I’m rooting for the people, you know?”
Shane critiques Sivertson’s conclusion in Chapter 10 of the podcast, where — spoiler alert — she says “I don’t believe what Sophia has told me about the day of the murder. Not fully.” He says his sister received “death threats” after the story aired and asks, “are we just stories to be told, damn the consequences?”
With sincerity in her voice, Sivertson says “I know in my heart of hearts that I didn’t set out to hurt anyone and that my guiding light in this really was trying to get as close to the truth as possible — and my thoughts at the end are sharing what I believe, not what I know to be true.”
In the podcast, Sophia’s brother Sean is a particularly complicated character. Before Sophia’s first trial, he works with a detective to try to get Sophia to incriminate herself on a recorded call. But in Chapter 3, listeners learn of information that links Sean to the crime scene. His reputation also mires his character; in the podcast, Sean’s younger brother Shane and Sean’s ex-wife, Cynthia Molina, both accuse Sean of abuse.
In a Facebook comment — dated one year ago and posted in her name — on one of Shane’s posts about the podcast, Molina says “Sophia is innocent.” She expresses her frustrations about the podcast. “[Sivertson] didn’t care about the pain she caused, the people forced to relive their trauma, or the damage of her false accusations.”
Sivertson says that telling this story brought her to the realization that though she “[doesn’t] want to hurt anyone in anything that [she does] . . . that’s not always possible in journalism. Because stories are painful.”
Still, Sivertson explains how journalists work to mitigate some of that pain when talking to victims of trauma. “We’re doing things in spaces that they’re comfortable talking — on their terms, on their turf, around their timeline,” she says, continuing, “it’s always going to be hard and you do have to take great care, but I think I did take great care.”
Molina’s Facebook comment maintains that Sivertson didn’t “[expose] the real failures in the system.” Shane also says he’s “struggling to find” the “public good” in this story.
Sivertson asserts that the podcast was a story about Sophia. And she’s ok with that outcome. “Some stories have these huge, larger systemic issues hanging over them,” Sivertson explains. But, she says, “I didn’t go in with those expectations.”
On a Wednesday in early May, the sky outside the WBUR headquarters on Commonwealth Avenue is a quintessential Boston grey. Inside, staff members mill around a clothing and household items exchange put on by the office’s sustainability committee, which Sivertson says she is a part of.
Sivertson spends her afternoon pulling sound bites for an upcoming WBUR festival, planning future episodes of “Endless Thread” with colleagues, and editing an episode of the show with her co-host over speakerphone.
As the day wraps up, her husband comes to find her at her neat desk as she packs up for the day. They navigate the rain that has begun outside as they make their way a few blocks to Grasshopper, a local vegan restaurant. Sivertson and Moschetto have come to sample a variety of dishes for an upcoming lunch that Sivertson will coordinate for her colleagues at WBUR.
Over tea, lo mein, and spring rolls, Sivertson says she’s still receiving installments of Sophia’s case file, which she originally requested over four years ago. And she emphatically believes that new information could still change her mind about the case.