ST. LOUIS, MO – October 2, 2026 (STL.News) A decades-old St. Louis homicide interrogation has found an unexpected second life online, drawing renewed attention to a man identified as Raphael — or Rafael — Jackson after the release of his recorded confession and a remarkable telephone conversation from prison with the detectives who once questioned him.
The story resurfaced through The Brighter Side of Blue Podcast, which has published several episodes centered on Jackson and veteran St. Louis homicide detectives Tommy Carroll and Jeff Stone.
The podcast released a 40-minute episode titled “Raphael Jackson Calls from Prison” on March 19. According to the program, Jackson telephoned from prison while Carroll and Stone — described as the detectives who originally took his confession — were present.
The resulting conversation was unusual: a prisoner speaking years later with the homicide detectives who had once sat across from him in an interrogation room.
Topics included Jackson’s original confession, the attention it has received online, his life behind bars, time spent in segregation, remorse, personal accountability, and whether he believes he has changed. The podcast also said Jackson agreed to return to answer questions from listeners.
The telephone call, however, is only the latest chapter in a story that The Brighter Side of Blue began bringing to a new audience in 2025.
Detectives revisit an extraordinary interrogation
On Nov. 3, 2025, the podcast released “Inside the Wildest Confession of Their Career,” featuring Carroll and Stone discussing the Jackson investigation.
According to the program’s description, what began with a Sunday telephone call expanded into raids, a confession, and work spanning multiple jurisdictions.
The podcast also says Jackson’s recorded interrogation was subsequently used as a law-enforcement training tool.
Carroll and Stone described the case as one of the most memorable homicide investigations of their careers. The program said Jackson continued talking during the interrogation, eventually producing an extensive recorded account of violent crimes.
Two days later, on Nov. 5, 2025, the podcast released approximately 89 minutes of what it described as Jackson’s unedited confession.
The episode carried a graphic-content warning. Its accompanying description said Jackson discussed killings, his selection of victims, and his behavior surrounding the crimes.
Those descriptions are claims made by the podcast and should be distinguished from independently verified court findings concerning each individual homicide.
That distinction has become increasingly important as the recording has circulated online.
Podcast now describes confession as five murders
The Jackson story returned to the podcast’s feed again on Sept. 17, 2026, when The Brighter Side of Blue published the interrogation under the explicit title “The Rafael Jackson Confession: 5 murders.”
The episode description says Jackson speaks directly with investigators and recounts involvement in multiple violent crimes while answering questions concerning what happened, the weapons involved, and circumstances surrounding the cases.
The recording runs approximately 89 minutes.
The title represents the podcast’s characterization of the case. Available records reviewed by STL.News does not yet provide enough information to independently establish that Jackson was convicted of five separate murders.
That is more than a technical distinction.
A confession to a crime, an accusation, a criminal charge, and a conviction are separate things. Reporting on an old homicide investigation must distinguish among them, particularly when a decades-old interrogation reaches an entirely new audience through podcasts and social media.
A separate long-form interview published April 25 by the verified YouTube channel The Family also presented Jackson’s story as involving five killings — but framed him as having been accused of five murders in two months rather than documenting five murder convictions.
That interview allows Jackson to discuss the allegations, his interrogation, his upbringing, and his version of events. Its description acknowledges that Jackson disputes at least portions of the broader public narrative surrounding him.
Together, the recordings have transformed an old St. Louis homicide investigation into a contemporary true-crime story.
A very different conversation from prison
What makes the March prison telephone call notable is the passage of time.
Jackson is no longer the man sitting in an interrogation room opposite homicide detectives. In the podcast episode, he is speaking from prison years after the investigation that put him there.
Carroll and Stone are no longer trying to obtain his confession.
Instead, the conversation turns toward what happened afterward.
The program describes Jackson discussing incarceration, including time spent in “the hole,” or segregation. He talks about remorse and accountability and addresses whether he believes he has changed.
He also reacts to the extraordinary fact that his old interrogation has attracted a new audience.
That produces an unusual reversal.
When Carroll and Stone originally questioned Jackson, the audience for the interrogation consisted primarily of investigators, prosecutors, and others within the criminal-justice system. According to the podcast, the recording later became a law-enforcement training tool.
Now members of the general public can hear it themselves.
And Jackson knows they are listening.
Renewed attention raises old questions
The renewed interest also shows how difficult it is to reconstruct violent-crime cases from an earlier era.
Online descriptions of Jackson use varying spellings of his first name — Raphael and Rafael among them. Historical court databases contain records involving multiple Missouri and Illinois prisoners with similar names.
STL.News therefore has not treated every court record for a Rafael, Raphael or Rafeal Jackson as necessarily belonging to the man featured in the interrogation.
That caution matters.
For example, a federal court record from Southern Illinois documents an inmate identified as “Rafeal A. Jackson” at the St. Clair County Jail in 2004. The record concerns allegations that the inmate threatened another detainee with a sharp weapon and later attacked him despite an order intended to keep the two separated.
Separately, federal appellate records identify a Missouri prisoner named Rafeal Arlandos Jackson who was litigating a civil-rights case by the 1990s.
Without a definitive identifier connecting those records to the man heard in the homicide interrogation — such as a matching Department of Corrections number, birth date, or underlying criminal case — STL.News is not representing those records as Jackson’s criminal history.
The existence of similarly named records illustrates why viral true-crime material requires additional verification before old allegations become present-day statements of fact.
What the recording does establish
Nevertheless, an important piece of primary material is available to the public: the interrogation itself.
Rather than relying solely on someone’s recollection of what Jackson supposedly told investigators, listeners can hear the lengthy interview released by The Brighter Side of Blue.
The podcast identifies Carroll and Stone as the homicide detectives involved in the original investigation and says the case grew from an initial telephone call into raids, multi-jurisdictional investigative work and Jackson’s eventual confession.
The program’s September 2026 release describes Jackson as recounting involvement in multiple violent crimes and discussing weapons and circumstances surrounding those incidents.
The recording does not automatically establish the final legal disposition of every crime discussed during the interrogation.
Some crimes discussed by a suspect can result in charges. Others can result in convictions, dismissals, plea agreements or no prosecution at all. Statements about crimes can also require corroboration.
Determining exactly what happened in each of the cases attributed to Jackson requires matching the interrogation with the original homicide files, charging documents and court dispositions.
Confession becomes part of the internet era
Another dimension to the story could not have existed when the interrogation was originally recorded.
Old police interviews once remained largely inaccessible to the general public. A recording might sit in an evidence archive, appear in court or be shown to investigators during training.
Digital media changed that.
The Jackson interrogation can now circulate indefinitely through podcast services, YouTube and social media. People who were children — or perhaps not yet born — when the underlying crimes occurred can watch detectives question him.
Then they can hear Jackson himself, years later, react to the attention.
The March telephone call therefore functions almost as an epilogue to the interrogation.
The detectives know what Jackson told them.
Jackson knows what he told them.
And now Jackson knows that thousands of strangers know it too.
The podcast description characterizes the resulting exchange as involving prison life, remorse, accountability, and the possibility that Jackson has changed.
Whether listeners accept Jackson’s present-day account is ultimately something they must evaluate themselves.
Victims remain central to the story
The renewed attention surrounding Jackson also carries a risk common to true-crime coverage: the person accused or convicted of violence can become more recognizable than the people who were killed.
The podcast’s increasingly dramatic presentation — culminating in the September title referring to “5 murders” — has generated renewed interest in Jackson, the detectives and the interrogation.
But behind every homicide discussed in such an interrogation is a victim, a family and an investigation that existed long before the recording became online content.
A complete historical accounting of the Jackson case therefore requires more than replaying his confession.
It requires identifying the individual homicide cases, determining what Jackson was charged with in each case, establishing the final court dispositions and restoring the victims to the center of the history.
Until that reconstruction is complete, descriptions such as “five murders” should be understood as the characterization currently being used by the podcast rather than a substitute for five independently verified murder convictions.
An old St. Louis case finds a new audience
Nearly everything about the way people encounter crime stories has changed since Carroll and Stone sat across from Jackson.
The interrogation room has become online video.
A recording reportedly used to train police officers has become true-crime content.
And a prisoner who once spoke primarily to investigators is now speaking directly to a public audience.
That transformation helps explain why Raphael Jackson’s name has resurfaced.
The March prison call was not a new confession and did not announce a new criminal case. Instead, it brought together Jackson and the detectives connected to his old interrogation and allowed them to revisit an investigation that had suddenly become relevant to thousands of people again.
The September rerelease has extended that attention, with The Brighter Side of Blue explicitly presenting the interrogation as a confession involving five murders.
An important piece of reporting remains to be completed.
The next step is not another retelling of the interrogation. It is reconstructing the underlying cases: the victims, dates, locations, charges, jurisdictions, convictions and sentences associated with Jackson’s statements.
That record would establish precisely where confession ends and proven criminal history begins.
For now, what can be established is remarkable enough: a lengthy St. Louis homicide interrogation from years ago has reemerged in the digital age, its subject remains incarcerated, and the detectives who once questioned him have now spoken with him again — this time with an audience listening.
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