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On Wednesday 22 July 2015, a 23-year-old man named Brett Rogers stabbed his mother and her friend 97 times, using seven different knives, over the course of an hour. Immediately afterwards, he made the short walk to the childhood home of comedian Edd Hedges, the boy he had bullied throughout school, and set about trying to break his door down.
Hedges, who was staying with his parents after a local charity gig, was woken by his mother. She urged him to stay quiet and not turn on the lights. Eventually, after barricading themselves in their bathroom, the arrival of a police helicopter halted the attempted break-in. Rogers was arrested, charged and sentenced to a minimum of 32 years in prison.
Two years later, this story – with several identifying details carefully obscured – formed the backbone of Hedges’s debut solo Edinburgh fringe show Wonderland. One day, documentary producer Jodi Tovay found herself in the audience, after buying a ticket to escape the rain. She was transfixed by the storytelling, and snuck backstage to ask Hedges if she could investigate the story further. He was hesitant in a way that made her suspicious. Two years later, after Rogers had been killed in his cell by two fellow inmates, he called her and accepted her request. The outcome of this is Wisecrack, a six-part podcast digging into the details around the events of that night. The project has been a runaway word of mouth hit – it is currently topping the UK iTunes charts – which makes it something of an anomaly for a true-crime show, because the crime’s victims and perpetrator are known from the start.
“It’s not a whodunnit,” says Tovay from her home in the US over Zoom, on a joint call with Hedges. “We already know who did it. It’s an open-and-shut case. This is really an exploration of backstory. And it’s quite relatable, because everyone’s had a bully. We partnered with various bullying charities for the podcast, and they explained why the moment that Edd talks about is so powerful – because if you’re bullied, it’s the first expression of power that’s used against you. And if you’re the bully, it’s your first moment of feeling powerful.”
In Wonderland – clips of which form the throughline of Wisecrack – Hedges details his fraught relationship with Rogers. Rogers was confident and good at sport; Hedges was overweight, dyslexic and asthmatic. During their time at school, Rogers would regularly pelt him with doughnuts. This, combined with life with a father cursed with a hot temper, made Hedges’s life particularly unhappy.
“When I did the show in Edinburgh, the message was there are three examples of masculinity. There’s me, there’s Brett, and there’s my dad. They were the three characters. And all the while I was touring this, I was like: ‘This is a show about masculinity. This is about how I dealt with things, how Dad dealt with things, and how Brett was never allowed to deal with things.’ But as I’ve learned more through Jodi about Brett’s story, it has hit home in a way that I was not prepared for. The similarities between me and him were wild.”
Hedges is palpably nervous as we talk. He’s softly spoken, and compulsively avoids eye contact. The release of the podcast, he says, has brought home how much he used Wonderland as a tool to stay on top of a terrifying moment in his life. “On stage, I have a say over what you think of me,” he says. “When I’m on stage, I get to control the narrative. And now the challenge that I’m having is that this is out there in the world, and people’s perception of me is being created without me being able to directly control it.”
This is the neat trick Wisecrack plays. Other, more sensationalist podcasts would have glossed over Hedges completely and dived into the gory details of the murders. But Wisecrack is far more interested in the machinations of storytelling itself. The facts of the murders are incontrovertible. However, in crafting an hour-long show from it, Hedges is prone to a little artistic licence to maximise entertainment. After all, as one friend tells him in one episode, it’s called the Edinburgh comedy festival, not the Edinburgh story festival. As such, Wisecrack is Tovay’s effort to uncover what actually happened to Hedges and his family that night.
“There was a point where Jodi had to ask: ‘Is this bullshit? Is all of this a lie? What are you making up?’” says Hedges. “She had to dig down into facts, and that was super-uncomfortable, because I didn’t really want to know the facts. I was protected by naivety. Talking to Jodi, I realised that I weaponised my naivety when I was doing this show live. Jodi sat me down and was like: ‘You need to answer everything. We need everything from you, every single thread.’”
What follows is, in truth, more extraordinary than the murders themselves. Tovay begins to uncover the circumstances of Rogers’s life, his troubles and lack of support. Incredibly, she even talks to his dad. In 2012, three years before he killed his mother, Brett Rogers attacked his father Pete, stamping on his head and fracturing his eye socket. The interview with Pete is the standout moment of the entire series. You are listening to a man who endured tremendous anguish as his family was torn apart, and whose humanity in the wake of it is remarkable.
“Pete is an incredible person,” says Tovay. “He is breaking the cycle of what might be typical for a man his age, and the typical way to respond to some really horrible things that happened to his family. I personally view him as a true hero in the story.”
“If you knew the version of him that I grew up with, he has had a ‘come to Jesus’ moment,” adds Hedges. “He was a completely different man, and he’s gone through a proper healing journey. He has had to face a lot of demons.”
Whether intentionally or not, Wisecrack is also a document of the relationship between Hedges and Tovay. She, a self-confessed “nosy American girl from a podcast” and he, a comedian torn between telling his story and wanting to protect himself. It has now been eight years since they met, and they have weathered a huge amount of ups and downs. Even during the recording of the podcast, despite Tovay going to Hedges’s village and interviewing the closest members of his family, there are moments when they don’t talk to each other.
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“I’ve been a knob with Jodi,” says Hedges. “We’ve had disagreements, but we’ve had to work things out. I definitely trust Jodi more than anyone else I’ve ever worked with.”
“Obviously, my expectations were very low when I first met him,” Tovay adds. “I didn’t even know if he’d respond to me at first. And to some degree, he didn’t respond many times. Now, I feel like an old friend or a big sister. It’s a very unique relationship. But personally, I think we’re quite close, and I feel very protective of you.”
“If I didn’t trust her, this story would have been very hard to tell,” Hedges continues. “One of the reasons I didn’t respond to Jodi for so long is because I was like: ‘I will be damned if I’m about to put this in the hands of someone who’s going to cheapen it.’ The main thing I needed to see was respect, and respect for the fact that this is a village my family still live in.”
Given that this is a story about violence fed through the lens of standup comedy, Wisecrack has drawn comparisons to Baby Reindeer. However, once it was released, the narrative around Baby Reindeer became more about the mistakes made in the duty of care towards the people depicted.
“It’s not my favourite comparison,” sighs Tovay. “The responsibility towards the victims in this story, because there are two very clear victims, was our utmost concern.” However, by digging deep into the life of Brett Rogers, it also manages to take a figure who threatens to be a two-dimensional baddy and flesh him out. By the end, even if you don’t outright sympathise with him, you have a greater understanding of why he did what he did.
“For a long time, I was like: ‘Oh, Brett’s the villain, 100%. He’s a bad guy,’” says Hedges. “But the one thing I hope people take away from this is that my story and Brett’s are dead parallel. My story could have so easily gone one way, and his could have gone the other. He’s a dude that went down a path and it didn’t go great, but so much of it is down to circumstance. That’s something I want people to realise.”
Wisecrack is out now, widely available, episodes released weekly
