02 / Uneasy Company

About Us

Two friends, one microphone each, and very different ideas about how much detail is too much.

Uneasy Company: two silhouettes against a yellow moon, one looking ahead calmly, the other flinching.

Investigative reporter

Alex Pullos

Alex Pullos went to work as a stringer the day he got his driver’s license. From 16 to 18, he photographed San Jose, California, for whichever publication would buy his pictures. More often than he’d like, that meant pointing his camera at the aftermath of violent crime. Then he needed a real job.

He went on to a career in software development, now retired, but he never strayed far from true crime. What drew him was never the crime itself. It was the work of solving it: the forensics, the deductive reasoning, the moment the pieces finally fit. To Alex, a case is a puzzle, much like the code he wrote for a living, and he has never been able to leave a puzzle alone.

On DEAD & DREAD, he’s the one who follows the evidence. He has seen enough of it up close to know when to take a breath.

Reluctant analyst

Nery Ordoñez

Nery “Neo” Ordóñez has one request when Alex gets to the gruesome part of a case: spare him the details. Give him a minute, and he’ll ask Alex to go back and explain exactly what happened.

He spent his career making stories work on screen. In Spanish-language television at Univision and Telemundo, he produced, directed and edited everything from commercials to live broadcasts, earning multiple Joey Awards and a regional Emmy nomination. He went on to spend a decade at ServiceNow, leading video production and managing editing teams. Years in the edit bay taught him how much the order of a story shapes what people believe happened.

That’s the ear he brings to DEAD & DREAD. Alex follows the evidence. Nery listens for the part that doesn’t add up: who told the story first, what got left out, and why everyone is so sure about a detail nobody can explain. Sometimes the answer changes how he sees the whole case. Sometimes he just regrets asking.

He’s usually the first to admit he’s squeamish, and the first to say, “Wait. Back up. How do we know that?” And when Alex asks whether he really wants to know, he says yes before he can think better of it.

How we work

Careful reporting, uneasy questions

We report each case from the record: inquest files, police statements, court documents and contemporary reporting. When something is a theory and not a fact, we say so. We laugh at the absurd and at ourselves, never at the people who died.

If you spot a mistake, tell us. We'll correct it on the case file.