ST. LOUIS, MO – October 2, 2026 (STL.News) An extraordinary St. Louis police interrogation recording gives viewers a rare, disturbing look inside an interview in which Raphael Jackson discusses his involvement in multiple violent crimes and what the program presenting the recording describes as a confession involving five murders.
The approximately 89-minute recording, published by The Brighter Side of Blue Podcast, largely consists of Jackson speaking directly with investigators about violent crimes, weapons, and the circumstances surrounding the cases.
The program originally released the recording on Nov. 5, 2025, under the title “Full Confession of Raphael Jackson — The St. Louis Killer Speaks.” It was republished on podcast platforms on Sept. 17, 2026, under the more descriptive title “The Rafael Jackson Confession: 5 murders.”
The latter description says Jackson “recounts his involvement in multiple violent crimes” while answering investigators’ questions about what happened and the weapons involved.
That distinction is important.
The recording provides unusually direct evidence of what Jackson told investigators, but Jackson’s statements should not automatically be treated as independent verification of every crime, victim, circumstance, or motive he describes.
A review of publicly accessible records and historical reporting did not produce sufficient documentation to independently reconstruct all five homicides discussed or attributed to Jackson in the program. For that reason, you should understand specific claims made during the interrogation as Jackson’s account unless police, court, or other reliable records corroborate them.
A Police Interrogation Made Public Years Later
The recording was made public decades after the original investigation and has since attracted significant attention online.
The YouTube version published by The Brighter Side of Blue has surpassed 1 million views, turning an old St. Louis homicide interrogation into a widely watched true-crime document.
The program identifies the investigators questioning Jackson as veteran St. Louis homicide detectives Tom Carroll and Jeff Stone.
Their work together as St. Louis homicide detectives can be independently corroborated.
For example, historical reporting by the Riverfront Times identified Carroll and Stone as St. Louis detectives working together in 2004 when they traveled to Texas to question convicted killer Tommy Lynn Sells in connection with another St. Louis homicide investigation.
In the Jackson case, however, Carroll and Stone were dealing with a suspect who, according to their later account, was willing to talk extensively.
Two days before releasing Jackson’s complete interrogation in November 2025, The Brighter Side of Blue published a lengthy interview with Carroll and Stone about the investigation.
The program describes the Jackson case as beginning with a Sunday telephone call and expanding into raids, work across multiple jurisdictions, and ultimately Jackson’s confession.
According to the episode description, the detectives also discussed the challenge of interviewing a suspect who seemingly did not want to stop talking.
The full recording lets viewers see that interrogation for themselves, rather than relying solely on a detective’s recollection or a narrator’s summary.
Jackson Speaks in His Own Words
What makes the recording unusual is its length and format.
It is not a short excerpt assembled from selected statements. The Brighter Side of Blue presents it as the full, unedited interrogation.
Jackson discusses violent incidents directly with investigators and responds to questions about what occurred, weapons and other circumstances surrounding the crimes.
The program’s description of the original November 2025 release says Jackson discusses why he killed, how he selected victims, and why he laughed afterward.
Those are the publisher’s descriptions of what occurs in the interrogation. They should not be confused with an independent psychological assessment of Jackson.
The program has used stronger characterizations of Jackson, including calling him “remorseless” and using the term “serial killer” in promotional material and hashtags.
STL.News is not independently adopting those characterizations.
Whether Jackson meets a particular criminological definition of a serial killer would require a reliable reconstruction of the individual killings, their dates and circumstances. Publicly available documentation reviewed for this article was insufficient to make that determination independently.
What can be said is considerably simpler: Jackson is recorded discussing his involvement in multiple killings and other violent crimes with St. Louis homicide investigators.
Robberies, Drug Houses and Violence
Additional descriptions released by The Brighter Side of Blue provide context for the crimes discussed in the recording.
When the program later included the Jackson confession as bonus material in a December 2025 episode examining St. Louis crime history, it described the Jackson material as involving home invasions, drug robberies and attacks on drug houses.
That context suggests the violence Jackson discusses was intertwined, at least in part, with robberies and the illegal drug trade rather than being a collection of randomly selected homicides.
The same program description refers to an unusual detail involving a teddy bear containing cocaine.
Again, those details come from the program presenting the interrogation. Without corresponding police reports or court records, they should be attributed accordingly rather than reported as independently established facts.
The distinction matters because confessions can contain several different kinds of information at once.
A suspect may describe conduct investigators already know occurred. He may provide information police subsequently corroborate. He may minimize or exaggerate his own role. He may implicate other people. And he may describe crimes for which he was never separately charged or convicted.
An interrogation recording establishes with considerable clarity what the suspect said. Establishing precisely what happened in each underlying crime requires additional evidence.
From One Call to Multiple Jurisdictions
Carroll and Stone’s retrospective account provides some additional context about the scope of the investigation.
According to The Brighter Side of Blue’s November 2025 episode featuring the detectives, the case grew from a Sunday phone call into raids and investigative work involving multiple jurisdictions before producing the recorded confession.
That detail may help explain why reconstructing the complete case decades later from publicly searchable records is difficult.
If crimes occurred in different jurisdictions, records would not necessarily exist in a single court file or under one defendant’s name. Nor does an admission to a homicide necessarily mean the person was subsequently charged with that homicide as a separate criminal case.
For that reason, STL.News is not assigning victim names, dates, conviction counts or specific sentences to the five murders based solely on search-engine matches or records belonging to people with similar names.
The name itself presents another problem.
Sources associated with the program alternate between “Raphael Jackson” and “Rafael Jackson.”
The November 2025 full-confession episode uses Raphael in its title. The September 2026 rerelease uses Rafael. The March 2026 prison-call episode again uses Raphael in the title while its description also uses Rafael.
That inconsistency can significantly complicate searches of older court, prison and newspaper archives.
Rather than assume that every historical record for a Raphael or Rafael Jackson refers to the man shown in the interrogation, STL.News has excluded records that cannot be reliably connected to him.
Carroll and Stone Revisit the Case
The recording also provides a window into an older style of homicide investigation.
Carroll and Stone were longtime partners. The Brighter Side of Blue has described them as having worked together for approximately 18 years, including at least 16 years in homicide.
Their status as St. Louis homicide investigators is independently supported by historical reporting unrelated to Jackson.
In the interrogation, the central evidence is not forensic imagery or a modern digital reconstruction. It is conversation.
Investigators ask questions, listen to Jackson’s answers, and continue drawing out details.
That is one reason the recording has value beyond its true-crime appeal. It allows the public to observe an extended homicide interview rather than the short interrogation clips normally seen after a criminal case becomes public.
The Brighter Side of Blue says the Jackson interrogation was used as a training tool for years, although STL.News has not independently located police training documentation establishing how widely or officially it was used.
The program’s description of its November 2025 interview with Carroll and Stone calls it the most chilling case of their careers.
That is their retrospective characterization of the investigation.
Jackson Calls From Prison
Another piece of evidence connects Jackson to the historical recording.
On March 19, 2026, The Brighter Side of Blue released an episode titled “Raphael Jackson Calls from Prison.”
According to the program, Jackson called from prison while Carroll and Stone — identified as the same detectives who took his original confession — were present.
The roughly 40-minute conversation revisited the confession and addressed Jackson’s prison life, time spent in segregation, remorse, accountability, and whether he believed he had changed.
Jackson also reacted to the attention the old confession had received after becoming publicly available.
The prison call provides important context because it links the person identified by the program as Jackson back to the original interrogation and to the two detectives who conducted it.
It also illustrates how dramatically the context surrounding the recording has changed.
What began as a police interrogation during a homicide investigation has become, decades later, publicly accessible material viewed by a large online audience.
Jackson himself has now participated in that renewed discussion from prison.
What the Recording Does — and Does Not — Establish
The interrogation is powerful evidence of Jackson’s statements.
It is not, standing alone, a complete judicial history of five homicide cases.
Based on the materials reviewed for this article, STL.News can verify that The Brighter Side of Blue published an approximately 89-minute interrogation in which Jackson discusses involvement in multiple violent crimes; that the program identifies Carroll and Stone as the homicide detectives who took the confession; that its September 2026 release identifies the material as involving five murders; and that Jackson subsequently participated in a prison telephone conversation with the same detectives.
Publicly available historical reporting independently confirms that Carroll and Stone worked as St. Louis homicide detectives.
What remains less clear from readily accessible records is the complete judicial disposition of every killing Jackson discusses.
STL.News has not independently established a verified list of all five victims, the date and location of each killing, which admissions resulted in homicide charges, the precise convictions arising from each event, or Jackson’s complete sentencing history.
Those gaps are significant enough to acknowledge rather than fill with assumptions.
They do not diminish the recording’s significance.
They define what the recording actually is.
A Rare Look Inside a St. Louis Homicide Interview
The most compelling aspect of the Jackson video may ultimately be its simplicity.
No one needs to embellish it.
A man sits with homicide investigators and talks.
Over nearly an hour and a half, investigators question him about violent crimes, and Jackson provides answers about killings, weapons, and events surrounding them.
Years later, the detectives publicly revisited the investigation. The interrogation was released in full. The recording reached a mass audience. Then Jackson himself called from prison and spoke again with the men who had questioned him.
That sequence has transformed an old police recording into a remarkable piece of St. Louis crime history.
But responsible reporting requires separating three things that can easily become blurred in true-crime coverage: what Jackson says, what investigators say they established, and what independent records can verify.
The video provides the first in extraordinary detail.
Carroll and Stone have subsequently provided their recollection of the second.
The publicly accessible historical record still leaves unanswered questions about the third.
Until those records can be definitively matched to the crimes Jackson describes, the interrogation is best presented for what can unquestionably be seen and heard: a lengthy recorded account in which Raphael Jackson discusses multiple violent crimes with St. Louis homicide investigators — an account now described by its publisher as his five-murder confession.
For viewers, it is a disturbing glimpse inside a homicide interrogation.
For researchers and journalists, it also reminds them that even a remarkably detailed confession is only one part of the evidentiary record.
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