NEW YORK (NYTIMES) - Late in January, Ms Ashley Flowers, 33, producer of more than a dozen true crime podcasts, was racing between her home and her office in Indianapolis, preparing for the arrival of two babies.

The first, her daughter Josie, was born on Jan 28. The second, due this week, is a new podcast she is hosting called The Deck.

Like her hit show Crime Junkie, The Deck delves into true stories about murders and missing people. But for the new show, rather than drawing on crime stories in the news and suggestions from listeners, Ms Flowers and her team have sought out cases represented in cards that law enforcement agencies print with the photographs of victims, then distribute in prisons in the hopes of turning up new leads.

"These cards are kind of an agency's last Hail Mary pass in trying to get very cold cases solved," Ms Flowers said last week in a virtual production meeting she conducted from her office at Audiochuck, the true crime media company she runs.

She knows that it is important to give her listeners the sense that their communities are represented in her shows. That is why she challenged Ms Emily Mieure, the lead reporter for The Deck, to find a deck from every state in the country.

When Ms Flowers and her best friend from childhood, Ms Brit Prawat, started Crime Junkie in 2017, the true crime genre was already a crowded one.

But the hosts cut the chit-chat that is a hallmark of other popular podcasts in its category, such as My Favorite Murder. A spokesman for Apple said Crime Junkie is often the top podcast across all categories.

Ms Flowers and Ms Prawat live in Indiana, outside the major podcasting hubs of New York and Los Angeles.

"One of the things I love about podcasts is that somebody with no name from Indiana could come into this space and make a name," Ms Flowers said.

She grew up reading Nancy Drew novels and watching Matlock, but she did not plan on devoting her life to unsolved mysteries or pursuing a career in media. She worked her way through college and began a job search after graduation by Googling companies that have dog-friendly offices.

While she was working in business development at a software start-up in 2017, Ms Prawat recommended her the first season of Serial, which investigated a 15-year-old murder case.

That series inspired her to make a podcast with Ms Prawat, about the sort of person "who becomes fascinated with a case" to the point of obsession.

She decided the first episode would be about a local Indiana woman who had gone missing and created Audiochuck (named for her beloved mutt, Chuck).

After a year, the show had a loyal, growing audience. So she quit her day job and began to build her company's portfolio, which now includes Anatomy Of Murder, CounterClock, Park Predators and O.C. Swingers, which Apple said was one of its platform's most popular new shows of 2021.

In Indianapolis, where Audiochuck employs a staff of 18, the company has avoided the exorbitant operating costs. "I want to create a space in the Midwest that creative people can come to and have a job at one of the best podcasting companies in the country," Ms Flowers said.

Mr Scott Greenstein, chief content officer of SiriusXM, signed a partnership deal with Audiochuck last year, which gives the satellite radio company the exclusive right to manage the podcast network's advertising sales.

He noted that a lot of media is made by and for people in cities such as New York, but "Ashley has clearly found the mainstream just fine from Indianapolis", he said.

Ms Flowers has "built one of the most successful podcast businesses of all time, completely independently", Mr Ben Cave, head of Apple Podcasts, wrote in an e-mail.

In August, Bantam will publish her first book, a thriller titled All Good People Here.

From the moment Tiger King captivated many viewers under lockdown, true crime's cultural impact has been hard to ignore. A Saturday Night Live skit spoofed women's obsession with the genre. Over the summer, Hulu released Only Murders In The Building.

For some, the emphasis on true crime has become too much. Emma Berquist, an author who was stabbed in broad daylight several years ago, wrote an essay stating that true crime "has rotted our brains" and seized on the anxieties of a majority-female audience.

Ms Flowers stands behind her work, but she believes that people who make these shows need to take on more responsibility. She wants "to change the way people interact with true crime", she said, calling on listeners to share information, support victims and those at risk, and even help prevent crime.

In 2019, she caught flak when BuzzFeed reported Crime Junkie was using journalists' work without acknowledgement. Audiochuck removed the episodes that BuzzFeed flagged, then re-uploaded them with notes that listed sources. The audio, however, was not updated to reflect the sources cited.

Ms Flowers now frequently cites sources on the podcast and shares links to source material online.

Today, Audiochuck has a team of seven journalists and writers who do original reporting when possible.

Some cases have come from listeners. After Ms Sherri Lynn Snider, 28, reached out to share her story and ask if she could help jump-start an investigation into the 2005 disappearance of her mother, Ms Diane Francis, Ms Flowers recorded an episode to get the word out.

Since Missing: Diane Francis was released last month, Ms Snider has heard from reporters interested in covering her mother's story and hundreds of strangers have donated to help fund the search.

Ms Flowers hopes The Deck will help to bring resolution to victims' relatives. The "coldest of cold cases", represented by the cards in her new show, were the ones that got her into true crime in the first place.

"There's no leads, there's just nothing," she said. "There's someone out there who has information. So what if we brought these stories to a bigger audience?"