‘Cruel Summer’ Investigators Examined 150,000 Files in Tiffany Valiante Case — and Say More Episodes Are Coming

GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP — The journalists behind a new podcast reinvestigating the death of Tiffany Valiante say they examined more than 150,000 pieces of digital information from the South Jersey teenager's phone and computer — and their investigation is already generating enough new information that they expect it to continue beyond the planned eight episodes.

Marie McGovern and Martin Dunn, the journalists behind Cruel Summer: The Violent Death of Tiffany Valiante, discussed the extraordinary scope of their work during a two-hour WOND special Saturday hosted by Gabe Staino and Don Berenato.

The podcast premiered Thursday, Aug. 20, and is scheduled to release a new chapter each Thursday.

But Dunn said eight episodes will apparently not be the end.

“We've already started to garner far more information that there will be further episodes after the initial eight,” Dunn said.

“So this is going to be an ongoing thing for us.”

The development comes after more than four years of reporting by McGovern and Dunn, veteran journalists who previously worked together at the New York Daily News.

Their investigation takes a different approach to a case that has generated years of documentaries, news coverage, social-media speculation and debate.

Rather than begin and end with the railroad tracks where Tiffany died, McGovern and Dunn reconstructed the 18-year-old's life and relationships in the weeks and months leading to July 12, 2015.

“We collect facts,” McGovern said Saturday. “We don't go on assumptions. We timeline facts.”

“We collect every piece of information that we can, and we talk to everyone that will talk to us.”

She said that approach allowed the team to develop a much fuller picture of Tiffany's life.

“We don't just concentrate on that night, the night of her death,” McGovern said. “We build the story that's leading up to her death, and that's where all of those questions and controversies lie.”

More than 150,000 pieces of information

Dunn said McGovern's work included an enormous review of Tiffany's digital life.

“Marie alone went through more than 150,000 pieces of information that were uncovered on Tiffany's cell phone and laptop,” Dunn said.

He said the material produced information that listeners will hear as the series unfolds.

“She uncovered some amazing information that you will hear over the course of the next few episodes,” Dunn said.

Dunn also said McGovern established contact with people who had not previously told their stories publicly.

“She established links with people that nobody had ever spoken to,” he said, “and they will tell their stories.”

The podcast's producers had previously disclosed that new digital-forensics work recovered tens of thousands of previously unexamined text messages, photographs and voice notes from Tiffany's phone.

Saturday's disclosure put an even larger number on the total universe McGovern says she reviewed when the phone and computer material are considered together.

‘I thought ... her parents would be in denial’

Dunn said he did not enter the case convinced that authorities were wrong.

Quite the opposite.

“As a journalist, I think we always question everything that's put in front of us,” Dunn said.

His initial reaction, he said, was that Tiffany's parents could understandably have been unable to accept their daughter's suicide.

“One of the things that I thought initially when Marie and I first talked about this story was that these are parents — Tiffany's parents — would be in denial,” Dunn said.

But he said McGovern's reporting changed his assessment of the amount of investigation still needed.

“Once Marie started digging into this story, it became clear there were many, many levels that needed to be investigated.”

Dunn said much of the existing public discussion consisted of circumstantial evidence and strongly held opinions.

“No one has had the time, the commitment, the application to really carry out a proper in-depth investigation,” he said.

McGovern, he said, spent approximately four and a half years doing precisely that.

Access didn't come immediately

Attorney Paul D'Amato, who represents Tiffany's parents, said the reporters were eventually given extensive access to his case files — but only after proving themselves over time.

“I don't want them to think that one day Marie McGovern and Martin Dunn walk into our law offices in Egg Harbor Township and I say, ‘Oh, here, you have unfettered access to our files,’” D'Amato said.

“It was baby steps.”

D'Amato said their commitment convinced both him and Tiffany's parents, Stephen and Dianne Valiante, to share more.

“There is a body of knowledge that today has not been revealed,” D'Amato said. “But for the first time through this podcast, you're going to hear things — you're going to hear an analysis that has never, ever been done before.”

Dunn similarly said the trust took years to establish.

He said the team wanted the family to understand they were “not there to jump to conclusions” or obtain a quick headline.

Instead, their intention was to build enough trust that sources could speak candidly about Tiffany and events surrounding her life.

Reconstructing Tiffany before reconstructing her death

One of the most noticeable elements of the first episode is Tiffany's own voice.

McGovern recovered recordings, photographs, text messages and other material that allow listeners to hear and see portions of Tiffany's life shortly before she died.

During Saturday's broadcast, the hosts played a brief recording of Tiffany joking with friends.

McGovern said those recordings are among tens of thousands of pieces of information recovered from the teenager's devices.

Tiffany had recently graduated and expected to leave for college within weeks.

Dunn said restoring Tiffany as a person — rather than merely a name attached to a controversial death — became central to the project.

“This is a real person,” Dunn said.

He described Tiffany as someone who had “dreams, aspirations” and plans for the future.

Dunn said long-running cases can cause the person at their center to become almost a character rather than an individual.

Over the course of Cruel Summer, he said, listeners will instead “get to know her as a real person.”

Relationships become a focus

Dunn also offered a preview of where the reporting is heading.

He said the podcast will examine Tiffany's relationships and communications before her death.

“What no one has done until Marie really went into this,” Dunn said, was construct “a picture of the events in her life before that night, her relationships with her friends, her relationships with people in her world.”

He said upcoming episodes will explore what he described as “a breakdown of those relationships and some very revealing things that appear in those relationships.”

Those details have not all been publicly released, so they should not yet be treated as established findings.

The family's 2025 lawsuit did cite newly recovered text messages and other digital evidence in arguing that authorities should reconsider whether Tiffany could have been the victim of a hate crime because of her sexual orientation. The court dismissed that lawsuit this spring, and Tiffany's death remains officially classified as suicide.

Investigation continuing in real time

The eight-part series officially debuted Aug. 20 with an episode titled Into The Night. The podcast description says McGovern retraces Tiffany's final evening and examines questions surrounding the official conclusion.

But McGovern and Dunn are no longer simply presenting a completed four-year investigation.

They say the publication of the podcast is generating new information.

That means Cruel Summer could become an ongoing reporting project rather than a closed eight-chapter series.

Dunn, who has worked in journalism for decades, told WOND that relatively few stories have affected him as deeply.

“These type of stories don't happen to you very often,” he said.

For McGovern, the method remains the same as new information arrives:

“We collect facts. We don't go on assumptions.”

And after 150,000 pieces of digital information, four and a half years of reporting and eight initial episodes, the journalists say their investigation of Tiffany Valiante is not finished.