Imagine living with a secret so big, if anyone were to find out, it would change everything. From illicit affairs and fake identities to heists and murder — do you think you could take a secret like that to the grave? Every week, discover the most explosive things people have admitted to moments before the end. Deathbed Confessions is a Spotify Original from Parcast.
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In 1944, two schoolgirls were murdered in their hometown of Alcolu, South Carolina. Witnesses claimed to have seen 14-year-old George Stinney Jr. talking with them on the day of their disappearance. George was swiftly arrested, interrogated, and charged with murder. After allegedly confessing to the crimes, he was sentenced to death, becoming the youngest person in all of America to undergo the death penalty. Three years later, the son of a powerful South Carolina family made a deathbed confessi...
In the small, sleepy village of Effingham, Surrey, Tony Wakeford confessed on his deathbed to a dark secret that would destroy both himself and his wife, Patricia. He admitted to having had an affair with her best friend during their 50-year marriage. But when he didn't die, the Wakeford's were sentenced to a further five years with each other…despite both knowing that the marriage was a lie. News of the affair destroyed Patricia, who’d dedicated her life to caring for her husband. A seed of hat...
The spree continues into Christmas Day and beyond, during which the teen gang murders their third, fourth, fifth and sixth victims. After a tip, police catch the group wearing victims’ clothing, driving a victim’s stolen car, and in possession of the guns they used in their murders. A Parcast holiday special from Serial Killers . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices...
In the early hours of Christmas Eve 1992, a senseless murder in Dayton, Ohio, marks the beginning of a rampage. What started as a desire for Christmas cash turns into a three-day killing spree that leaves six people dead. Even more shocking was that the brazen killers were just teens. A Parcast holiday special from Serial Killers . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices...
In 1996, a dying Edward Dobick allegedly confessed to his sister-in-law, Jean, that he murdered two teenage girls, Nancy Shomet and Michael Ann Ryan, in 1955 after they laughed at his advances. This confession came 41 years after the brutal double homicide had stumped police. The episode details the original crime, the initial, unsuccessful investigation, the re-emergence of the case through an amateur sleuth, and the highly dubious nature of Dobick's deathbed confession, leaving the case still unsolved.
Ted Conrad is an all-American kid. Smart, popular, and well-liked by everyone. He jokes with friends about how easy it would be for him to steal money from the bank at which he works. Nobody takes him seriously though, until he vanishes one weekend in July 1969, taking a bag of cash from the vault with him. His disappearance is the start of a decades-long man-hunt, like something from a movie. One that will only end on Conrad's terms half a century later. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ...
In 1883, 30-year-old Emma Stillwell arrived at her father-in-law's house and believed she was dying. As she lay preparing for death, she confessed a dark, twisted, and horrifying past. When she was just 15, she married her first husband but killed him shortly after with the help of her mother and brother. She then murdered an innocent traveller whom she believed possessed a large fortune. Years later, she remarried but killed her 14-month-old baby who suffered from poor health, and was then invo...
In 2022, Southside Crips gang member, Keefe D, confessed that he knows what really happened in the infamous murder of Tupac Shakur. Shakur was one of hip-hop’s most beloved and celebrated artists, but when he was fatally shot in 1996, police failed to find the killer. They interviewed a few suspects, and a number of conspiracies spread, but no one ever found out the truth. Keefe D is the last person alive who might have the answers of what truly happened that fateful night. Learn more about your...
On New Year's Day 2020, tragedy struck in Norman, Oklahoma. A two-year-old boy, Ryder, is found unresponsive by his mom. Her boyfriend, Christopher Trent, is missing, and it's feared that he is to blame for Ryder's condition. The toddler sadly passes away, and when Trent is found, he has taken his own life — leaving behind a deathbed confession carved into a tree. Far from the end of a sad story for Ryder's mom, Rebecca Hogue, she's about to find out just how bad this tragedy can get. Learn more...
Alan Nunn May, a British physicist, died aged 91 in 2003. But before he passed away, he gave a dramatic deathbed confession. Nunn had been jailed and sentenced to ten years’ hard labour in 1946 for passing information from the Western allies’ atomic bomb project, to the Soviet Union. May’s confessions were dictated to a family member days before Christmas, and began with the intriguing sentence: "This is a disclosure of how I became a Russian spy." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcast...
In 1957, 24-year-old Willie Edwards Jr. spent the last hours of his life being terrorized by Ku Klux Klan members, including one named Henry Alexander. Though this KKK cohort were suspects in Willie’s murder, the judge threw out their case — twice. Henry’s wife always believed he was innocent. His deathbed confession not only proved her wrong, but revealed that Willie didn’t even commit the offense that upset his killers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices...
Hosted by John Hopkins, Short History Of is a transportive podcast, taking you back in time to witness history’s most remarkable events. Today, get the true story behind the legend that inspired the hit TV series. Between the 1890s and 1910s, the British city of Birmingham was in the grip of a gang: the Peaky Blinders. But were they really champions of the working class, driven by a code of loyalty and morality? Or was theirs simply a reign of terror, marked by dishonour and violence? Short Hist...
Boyd Bushman had dedicated his life to science and the pursuit of invention. He was well educated and renowned in his field — a defence contractor with the highest levels of top-secret clearance. But Bushman claims he saw far more than just government-sponsored weapons. Deep in the bowels of Area 51, inside one of the most classified locations on the planet, Bushman claimed to have sources that shared the most clandestine of secrets: proof of the existence of extraterrestrial life. Many have mad...
This episode recounts how Soviet scientist Valery Legasov, facing death from radiation sickness, defied the state to reveal the true story of the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. His confessions detail the RBMK reactor's fatal design flaws, the Soviet Union's reckless pursuit of nuclear dominance, the chaotic and deceptive official response, and the immense human cost of prioritizing image over safety. Legasov's bravery ultimately forced global changes in nuclear safety protocols.
Gina Dawn Brooks was only 13 years old when she vanished on a summer's night in 1989. Police turned the town upside down but never found so much as a trace of her. Years later, a deathbed confession from a man named Bryant Squires suggested that they'd been looking in the wrong places for years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Jesse Aylward was a good man according to his friends and family. He'd had a few run-ins with the law as a younger man, sure. But he was a hardworking local business owner, trying to carve out a living for himself. He was described as an intelligent, creative man, one who was kind to local homeless people. But Aylward had a secret. One he has kept since 1984. One that dates all the way back to one of the most brutal homicides the town of Pembroke, Massachusetts, has seen. Learn more about your a...
In August 1975, Samuel Bronfman was kidnapped by two strangers. As his father was a multi-millionaire, the FBI suspected that money was the motive behind the abduction. But then, at the trial in 1976, one of the defending lawyers — Peter DeBlasio — spun a convincing and captivating tale that Samuel in fact masterminded his own kidnap. DeBlasio told the jury about Samuel’s homosexual affair with one of his captors, the resentment he felt towards his own father, and evidence that seemed to prove S...
Tragedy struck in 1980 when a Brooklyn townhouse fire claimed the lives of Elizabeth Kinsey and her five children. It's quickly ruled to be arson, and the landlady, Hannah Quick, tells police she saw three men running away just before it started. Those men were sentenced to a minimum of 25 years — despite their pleas of innocence. But nothing is quite as it seems. On her deathbed, Hannah Quick told a different version of events. It seems she hadn't been entirely honest back then. And her confess...
Émile Zola was one of France’s most celebrated writers, yet his name always carried controversy. He was unafraid to write about society’s taboos, and to challenge the laws of the government. Zola put his life at risk when he became publicly involved in the infamous Dreyfus Affair, and defended the persecuted Jewish captain by writing an open letter to the President. The bold action led to a violent witch-hunt against Zola, and his life was put in mortal danger. Then, just four years after his le...
In 1969, local beauty queen Anne Zappelli was brutally murdered while walking back from a visit to the drive-in with her friends. Witnesses saw two men following her, climbing out of a car near the crime scene, and it seems like a slam dunk. But what followed is a tale of frustration and grief for the Zappelli family that would last decades. It's a list of police errors and questionable decisions, that saw an already tragic case fascinate true-crime fans for over 40 years. Learn more about your ...
It shook the people of LaSalle County, Illinois to their core in 1961. Three friends, savagely beaten to death while out hiking. No witnesses, no apparent motive. Police eventually charge 21-year-old local man Chester Weger with the killings. When he confesses in custody, it seems a slam dunk, until Weger recants, claiming police had bullied him into signing it. This is just the start of one of the longest running sagas in Illinois legal history, as Chester Weger begins a decades long fight to c...
Samuel Little continues to kill America's most vulnerable women, but what he doesn't know is that the police are beginning an investigation to catch the killer. When they finally arrest him and sentence him to life in prison, Little's health is failing: the killer is dying. In the two years preceding his death, a series of chilling deathbed confessions reveal he's killed a total of 93 women. His gruesomely detailed stories spark FBI investigations to finally solve the forgotten cases of Little's...
Samuel Little was never a normal boy. Growing up, he experienced sexual fantasies about strangling women's necks and throats. These fantasies came to life when he was just 24 years old, resulting in the horrific strangulation of a young sex worker. For the next 45 years, Little terrorized the poorest neighborhoods of America, picking out vulnerable women and strangling them to death. They all existed on the outskirts of society — so police never investigated their deaths, or even linked the murd...
Dorothy King was born in the slums of Harlem to poor, Irish immigrant parents. But her beauty, charm and ambition quickly propelled her from Harlem’s streets to the exclusive world of the Upper West Side. When she was found dead at the age of 29 in her beautiful apartment, police followed leads on three individuals who had put her life in danger. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The hunt for DB Cooper was one of highs and lows. For years after his daring hijack, there was no sign of him or even any evidence that he made it to the ground alive. But a chance discovery in 1980 breathed new life into an old case, and for the first time, the FBI had real hope that they'd find their man. As it turned out, there were far more twists and turns than they could possibly have imagined, and not just one, but multiple people eventually laid claim to being him. Today, DB Cooper isn’t...
In 1971, a man calling himself DB Cooper boarded a flight bound for Seattle. The plane reached its destination safely, but not before Cooper had threatened to blow it up unless his demands were met. Two hundred thousand dollars and four parachutes, plus a full tank of gas for the plane. What followed was one of the most extraordinary crimes, and largest manhunts in US history, as the FBI threw the full weight of their resources at answering one question: Who was DB Cooper? Learn more about your ...
As the charwoman prepared Dr. James Barry’s body for burial, she made an unbelievable discovery: the reputed army surgeon was in fact a female. During a time when females were forbidden from studying or practicing medicine, the British Army’s top surgeon was a woman. Dr. James Barry’s story begins in poverty in Ireland, where a young, intelligent girl was desperate for the same opportunities as her brother. Refusing to let the sex of her birth extinguish her ambitions, she disguised herself as a...
Judge Joseph Peel was a flamboyant figure, known for his fine suits and even finer cars. But beneath that veneer of respectability lay a web of deceit and dishonesty, linking him to prominent underworld figures. His unethical approach to the law threatened to catch up with him when fellow judge, Curtis Chillingworth, swore he’d have him disbarred if he crossed the line again. Days later, Chillingworth and his wife vanished, kicking off one of Florida’s most notorious cases. Was Peel behind his a...
At the end of World War Two, when the Nazis had thrown much of Europe into disarray and devastation, a myth speculating the existence of a Nazi gold train was born. It claimed that a train carrying hoards of gold, money, and stolen treasures was fleeing from the Red Army in Poland when it vanished forever. In 2015, two men approached the Polish government with new information about the train and reopened the captivating mysteries and conspiracies surrounding the final months of Nazi rule. Learn ...
An unknown killer terrorized the area around the Connecticut River Valley for almost a decade in the 1980s. Back in the days before mobile phones and CCTV cameras on every corner, this man struck in remote areas, targeting women traveling alone. Police were left scratching their heads without a main suspect until 1997, when a man called Gary Westover saw his failing health as a sign that the time was right to get something off his chest. He shared a chilling tale of a night out with friends that...
