The first season of Truth Media and Sony Music Entertainment’s Crooked City podcast took place in Youngstown, Ohio, which is so well known for crookedness that its nickname is “Crimetown, U.S.A.”

Crooked City’s new season is set in Dixon, Illinois, which would like to be known as the hometown of Ronald Reagan. Reagan graduated from Dixon High School in 1929, and his boyhood home has been preserved as a museum.

But Dixon has another famous resident: Rita Crundwell, the comptroller who embezzled $53 million from the city treasury, and spent most of it to raise and show quarter horses. (Crundwell’s crimes were detailed in this 2012 Chicago magazine feature.) It was the largest municipal embezzlement in American history, and it took place in a small town of 15,000 people on the Rock River, 100 miles west of Chicago. Dixon is a town that, as the first episode points out, was seen to exemplify the values that propelled its favorite son to the presidency — faith, honesty, neighborliness — until Rita Crundwell tarnished its name.

“Someone said they were on a cruise to Alaska, and they said they were from Dixon, and someone said, ‘That’s where that woman stole the money,’” says Alexa Burke, who produced and narrates the podcast. “Dixon isn’t necessarily crooked. It’s not like this is a pervasive thing. It’s just her and they couldn’t connect it to anyone else.”

Burke, who lives in New York City, made three trips to Dixon to research Crundwell’s crimes. She was attracted to the story, she says, because it featured a “strong central character” in Crundwell, and two worlds that might be unfamiliar to listeners: Dixon, and the competitive quarter horse showing circuit. With the money she stole from Dixon, Crundwell built a ranch for breeding and showing horses, with a 20,000-square-foot barn, an arena, and stalls. She traveled the country in a $2 million Liberty Coach, hauling her horses in a trailer labeled “RC,” winning 54 ribbons at the annual American Quarter Horse Association World Championship Show in Oklahoma City, and establishing herself as “the undisputed grande dame of the competitive quarter horse circuit,” in this magazine’s words. Meanwhile, Dixon couldn’t afford to pave its streets or buy police cars.

(In 2013, Crundwell was sentenced to 19-and-a-half years in prison. She served eight and a half, and has been living with her brother in Dixon since her 2021 release.)  

“I wanted to find out how someone so normal and so nice could do something so extreme,” Burke says. “A lot of people thought she started off small, thinking she might pay it back. A lot of people I talked to said she felt like it was her money. I also wonder how much cognitive dissonance was involved. I don’t think she hated Dixon.”

To answer those questions, Burke interviewed high school classmates, Dixon city officials, Crundwell’s relatives (off the record) and members of the competitive quarter horse circuit, who may have known Crundwell even better than her neighbors, and whose voices have not been heard in most tellings of Crundwell’s story.

“There’s these people in the horse world, the Berryhills, that really care for her,” Burke says. “We feel this emotional connection with Rita and the people she loved.”

The podcast’s first episode begins with a clip from the 1949 Ronald Reagan movie The Hasty Heart. Reagan plays a World War II veteran telling a Scotsman that he longs to go home to “a little place on the Rock River: Dixon, Illinois.”

Fast forward 35 years. Reagan, by then campaigning for his second term as president, is at the Dixon High School gymnasium. The script originally called for him to say Boston, Reagan tells his old neighbors, but he asked the director if he could change it to Dixon.

“It’s great to be back home,” Reagan said. “What I remember most clearly is how Dixon held together. Our faith was our strength. Neighbors helped neighbors. People held on to their hopes and dreams.”

The episode makes much of the contrast between Reagan’s ideals and Crundwell’s malfeasance. She was able to bilk her fellow townsfolk for so long because they saw her as embodying the small-town values Reagan celebrated. Crundwell began working at City Hall in high school, and was such a diligent employee she was appointed comptroller at age 30: “A Lee County girl, country girl, started at the bottom, worked her way up,” former mayor Jim Dixon (a descendant of the city’s founder) told Crooked City. “Everybody admires that kind of thing in a town like Dixon.”

“Rita took advantage of that trust,” Burke puts it. “We all have this common thing we’re holding onto, this idea of, what does Reagan represent?”

Reagan, though, represented only one side of Dixon. Crundwell, as we will learn in this episode and the seven to follow, represented another.

Check back to our site each Friday morning for an exclusive early listen and recap of each new episode.