“I’m just sitting in my house in LA, kind of going mad over the computer, thinking ‘I’ve stumbled across something’,” Sheen told Dan and Lucy.
“Well, not thinking I’ve stumbled across something. Thinking, I’m finding out about something that surely people must know about, because this is extraordinary.”
Sheen tracked Douglas down in 2017 just a year before he died.
The actor then spent a weekend with Douglas, during which he recorded his full story.
“He seemed very into wanting to tell his story, and also I think it became clear he felt like he might not have long to tell it.
“I suppose, if anything, I was expecting a kind of anti-establishment, rebel, maverick, ‘stick it to the man’ kind of bloke, and that is not at all what I found,” said Sheen.
Douglas, who returned to the south Wales farm to take multiple samples over the years, believed being exposed to PCBs had taken a toll on his health.
“I’ve got all sorts of problems. Of which… I think virtually all can be attributed to my exposure to PCBs,” Douglas told Sheen in the recording.
Douglas was angry, because he said PCBs had cost him and feared they would cost many others in the future.
But he was angrier still that nobody did anything.
The podcast’s producer Dan Ashby said: “Most true-crime series have a victim, who we all feel empathy for.
“But in this one, we know the poison, we know the culprits, but the scary question is this: are we all the victims? I’ve never recorded an investigation that is at once so universal, and so deeply personal.”
