Inquirer’s true crime podcast wins Anvil Award

Super Evil, Inquirer’s hit true crime podcast powered by PumaPodcast, received recognition at the 56th Anvil Awards for its first season “Hatched in Hell.”

The prestigious award is given by the Public Relations Society of the Philippines. This year, over 500 nominees went through two rounds of rigorous evaluation by a board of 63 judges and a panel of 12 jurors led by former Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonio Carpio.

Because of the pandemic, for the first time, Anvil Award winners were honored in a ceremony held online.

“Super Evil: Hatched in Hell,” which bagged a Silver Anvil Award, revisits the 1993 murders of University of the Philippines Los Baños students Eileen Sarmenta and Allan Gomez, one of the most heinous crimes of the decade that led to the conviction two years later of then Mayor Antonio Sanchez of Calauan, Laguna.

“The possibility of winning awards never entered our minds as we worked on the first season of Super Evil. All we wanted to do was tell a compelling story, a heartbreaking one, because it is a story that cannot and should not be forgotten,” said Inquirer Lifestyle assistant editor Pam Pastor, who is Super Evil’s writer and host.

Six-episode series

The Super Evil team—Pastor and producer Tricia Aquino and audio editor Marc Casillan who are both from the pioneering podcasting network PumaPodcast—spent a year working on “Hatched in Hell.”

They spent months digging through the Inquirer archives, poring over court documents, visiting the crime scenes and doing more than 10 interviews that took them from the Inquirer offices and PumaPodcast studios to the Senate, Los Baños and Calauan, Laguna. They worked through the pandemic to piece together the story in a six-episode series that came out in October 2020.

For a new audience

“This recognition proves that people are listening to stories that need to be told, to truths that are difficult to hear, to lessons of the past that we should never forget,” said Casillan, who is also PumaPodcast’s head of audio.

“We always say that Super Evil is not easy listening. It’s dark, nakakagigil, nakakagalit and madalas masakit sa puso. So for them to willingly go on this ride with us means so much,” Pastor said.

Inquirer Podcasts are just another way of taking Inquirer’s brand of journalism and delivering it to a new audience—a listening audience—and keeping them captivated with quality storytelling.

Aquino, PumaPodcast’s chief content officer, said “We at PumaPodcast are thrilled to be recognized for the work that we did—and are doing—with Inquirer Podcasts. Pam and I like to say this partnership was a match made in podcasting heaven. This new medium allows the coverage the Inquirer has done over the decades to reach a new generation.”

Super Evil is not yet done. The second season, “Super Evil: A Beautiful Place To Die” was launched on Dec. 30, with new episodes coming out every two weeks. It covers the 2009 Maguindanao massacre—the deadliest attack on Filipino journalists and the worst case of electoral violence in the country, with 58 people, including 32 men and women of the media killed.

Super Evil is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you like getting your podcasts.