Chronicle Mysteries: Helped to Death

After her first idea doesn't pan out, Alex decides to do her next podcast on Billy Garrett and the restart of his self-help empire centered on retreats, he currently trying to find investors to set up a more permanent facility. The reason Alex decides on this subject is partly the fact of the paper's new overly enthusiastic employee, communications graduate student Zack Warren, attending the latest retreat, he sounding even more hyper than usual on the telephone in asking to delay his employment start in wanting to stay at the retreat an extra week giving her an uneasy feeling, and partly because of Billy's troubled history. With his self-help methods not only psychological, but combined with physical endurance and nutritional supplements, the sales of which which seems to have paid the bills in the past, Billy was charged and convicted five years ago for negligent homicide in the death of a retreat guest during an endurance hike, Billy refusing to get him treatment in his exhaustion in telling the victim to toughen it out. After being released from prison earlier on in the year with his wealth gone, Billy has restarted his business along with his primary partners: his wife, Ivy Garrett, and their CFO, Kurt Hardy. In the restart, Billy has stated that he learned much from that incident in wanting to do the business right in given this second opportunity. Alex approaches this podcast in an up front manner, she welcomed with open arms by Billy as a retreat guest, and given access to the other guests who are free to state on the record whatever they want. Partly on gut instinct and partly on advice by Kendall, Drew, without telling Alex beforehand, also decides to attend the retreat as backup, his attendance a little more guarded in he not disclosing his connection to the newspaper or to Alex. What they discover is that returning guests have nothing but praise for Billy and the retreats in him/they having "saved their lives", they including married business owners Jack and Marianne Carpenter, and Zack's retreat roommate Daniel Brandt, who invested in the Carpenters' business after having met them at a previous retreat. Things take a turn when a guest is found dead during a hike, the body discovered at the bottom of a cliff, the incident, at least to Alex, Drew and Zack, looking like murder and not an accident. As they try to do their own investigation in secret alongside the official investigation by the local sheriff's office, they face some obstacles in retreat guests not having access to electronic devices, meaning no easy access to either conducting online research or asking for help from the outside world if the murderer gets too close to their activities.—Huggo