When a birthday party in suburban San Jose turns deadly, 18-year-old identical twins are arrested for suspected murder. One brother spends nearly two years in jail before the truth comes out: authorities locked up the wrong twin. How could one brother let his twin take the fall? And why would the other sacrifice his freedom for a crime he didn’t commit? Blood Will Tell is a modern-day Shakespearean saga about Vietnamese-American brothers whose unbreakable bond is tested by silence, sacrifice, and an unthinkable choice.

Reporting Blood Will Tell

In 2020, Washington Post contributor Jen Miller was at San Quentin State Prison, reporting a story about a prison-based Shakespeare program. There, she met a 26-year-old actor and inmate named Trung Tong. During a rehearsal for Othello, Trung told Jen the most astonishing story she'd ever heard in her 20-year journalism career: At age 18, Trung killed a man and an eyewitness mistakenly identified his identical twin brother Anh in a lineup. But as Jen soon learned, this was only the beginning.

She would spend the next six years talking to Trung and Anh on a weekly basis, earning their trust and painstakingly following every thread of their story. Her reporting led her from the traumatic aftermath of the Vietnam war, into San Jose’s Southeast Asian underworld, and ultimately to a reckoning that helped the brothers rebuild their severed bond and embark on a path of atonement and renewal. Jen’s long engagement with the twins–and the space she created for them to confide in her–led them to finally talk honestly to each other. Had she and this show not been a part of their journey, their true feelings about the past might have remained buried for years, perhaps forever. 

About the Host

Jen Miller is the writer, reporter and a co-producer of Blood Will Tell, a limited series podcast from Audible/Campside Media. She is also the author of six books: Taylor and Sage: A True Story of Trauma and Resilience in Teenage America (FSG, 2027), Rising Class (FSG, 2023), Mr. Nice Guy (St. Martins, 2018); The Heart You Carry Home (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015); The Year of the Gadfly (HMH, 2012); and Inheriting the Holy Land (Ballantine, 2005). Her journalism appears in the New York Times, the Washington Post and many other publications. For the last decade, Jen has also run the Senior Media Fellows Program at the American Immigration Council, where she and her team have helped over 1,000 people publish powerful immigration-themed essays and op-eds. She is currently creating a storytelling podcast for the Council called Make Yourself At Home. Find her at byjennifermiller.com.