On Saturday, November 2, 2024 15-year-old Tripp Brazeale headed out of his house in Forrest City, Arkansas on a four-wheeler. After dark and into the early morning hours of Sunday November 3, Tripp, two family members, and a friend were hanging out in a part of the woods called Crow Creek, riding ATVs. Now it’s mostly illegal to ride four-wheelers on paved roads in Arkansas and in many other places, but out there in the country, it’s a common mode of transportation for teens. There were police o...
Apr 03, 2025•34 min•Season 6Ep. 27
After Kevin Abel died, and his death was ruled a suicide, Stacie Reeves was scared. Kevin’s friend Jordan said that Stacie told her that Kevin was in serious trouble - that he owed a lot of drug money to people - and that she was planning on talking to police officers about what she knew. One of the officers she spoke with was Jerome LaStraps, an officer Jordan didn't trust. There’s no evidence that Jerome LaStraps did anything wrong, but police did later call him in for questioning about KK’s C...
Mar 27, 2025•36 min•Season 6Ep. 26
On July 6, 1997 in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, Marty LeBouef, Stacie Reeves and Nicole Guidry were all shot execution style in the head. Their bodies were left in the cooler at KK’s Corner. Thedr murders were shocking. And soon, people were talking about another death. One that some people in the community thought could be linked to KK’s Corner’s massacre. On Saturday, May 17, 1997, not even three weeks before the triple homicide at KK’s Corner, Kevin Abel was fatally shot in the head at home. ...
Mar 20, 2025•34 min•Season 6Ep. 25
Just after midnight on July 6, 1997, 21-year-old Marty LeBouef, 26-year-old Stacie Reeves and 14-year-old Nicole Guidry were fatally shot in a triple homicide at KK’s Corner convenience store near Lake Charles, Louisiana. The killings shocked the community. For months police struggled to find answers. No one seemed to have seen anything, and there was no real physical evidence. Eventually, a suspect was arrested: Thomas Cisco. Police questioned Cisco. He confessed that he had been at KK’s Corner...
Mar 13, 2025•36 min•Season 6Ep. 24
It was a few minutes before midnight on Saturday July 5, 1997. 21-year-old Marty LeBouef was working behind the counter as a cashier at KK’s Corner convenience store on Highway 14 in Calcasieu Parish, a few miles from Lake Charles, Louisiana. Marty and his co-worker, 26-year-old Stacie Reeves, were working together that night. There was someone else there too. Stacie had a friend, 14-year-old Nicole Guidry, there with her. Nicole sometimes babysat for Stacie’s twin daughters, who were 23 months ...
Mar 06, 2025•36 min•Season 6Ep. 23
On July 12, 2017, somewhere in the tiny town of Oil Trough, Arkansas, a 37-year-old mother of three named Brooke Allensworth vanished. Two weeks later, the police found Brooke’s car. The car was near a boat ramp and looked like it had been abandoned there for days or possibly weeks. The tire was flat, the doors were locked, and the keys were missing. And so was Brooke. Her family, including her three children and a father and half sister, never saw her alive again and are still searching for ans...
Feb 27, 2025•39 min•Season 6Ep. 22
On November 5, 2005, a jogger found the body of 32-year-old mother of three Brandy Dyson floating in a lake behind the Lake Charles Civic Center. Brandy had been struggling with mental health issues and with addition. For a while she was doing well, and settled into an apartment. But then she lost her apartment after taking refugees in from Hurricane Katrina. She then moved to the Civic Center in Lake Charles with a lot of other evacuees from the storm. After that, Brandy was caught drinking, wh...
Feb 20, 2025•33 min•Season 6Ep. 21
On November 5, 2005 a jogger was out running beside a lake in Lake Charles, Louisiana, behind the Civic Center, when he saw something floating in the water. When he took a closer look, he realized it was the body of a woman. Police identified the body as 32-year-old Brandy Renee Dyson, a mother of three who had recently been made homeless after Hurricane Katrina and then Hurricane Rita, which devastated the state. It’s been almost 20 years, there’s been one arrest and a lot of controversy, but h...
Feb 13, 2025•36 min•Season 6Ep. 20
It was July 29, 2022, just another quiet summer night in Atlanta, Texas. The sun had just gone down when 28-year-old Shommaonique Oliver got a panicked phone call. That’s when her nightmare began. Three of her children- her middle daughters, nine-year-old Zi’Ariel Robinson-Oliver, eight-year-old A’Miyah Hughes, and little five-year-old Te’Mari Robinson-Oliver were missing. Law enforcement found them a few hours later. Divers dragged their lifeless little bodies out of a neighboring pond. Initial...
Feb 06, 2025•41 min•Season 6Ep. 19
On July 30, 2020, in Starke County, Indiana, a 911 call came from North County Road 1025 East just before 3:30 a.m. The caller, a man named Zachary, had worked late that night and had gotten home and climbed into bed when he said that he and fiancé were woken up by someone pounding on their door. The man was 27-year-old Nicholas Rudd. Nick said that he had been shot, but neither Zachary nor his fiancé had heard gunshots. What he didn’t know was that Nick had not been shot, he had been attacked w...
Jan 30, 2025•33 min•Season 6Ep. 18
Six bodies were found in Wonder Valley between December of 2019 and January of 2021. Some of the bodies in the desert, including the disappearance of 37 year old single mother Erika Lloyd, started making local, then national, news. But there were no national news reports about James Escalante. We’re going to dive into the missing persons report and compare accounts from the last people who saw James to see if we can shed more light into what really happened out there in the desert on June 25, 20...
Jan 23, 2025•32 min•Season 6Ep. 17
On June 25, 2020, 56-year-old James Escalante, who also went by Blackhawk, left home on a red mountain bike to help Dee, a friend of his and his girlfriend Sherry’s, whose truck had gotten stuck in the desert. But he never made it back home, and no one reported him missing until September 7th. Heather Escalante and her husband Jon, James’ son, began their own search. After Heather started posting on social media and looking for information, she heard that remains were found in the desert on Augu...
Jan 16, 2025•34 min•Season 6Ep. 16
On June 25, 2020, a 56-year-old named James Escalante, who had Native American heritage and was also known by his nickname, Blackhawk, left his home in Wonder Valley, California on his mountain bike James lived with a girlfriend, Sherry, and she told law enforcement that he left the home that day to head down the road about 10 minutes from their place to help a friend of theirs named Dee whose car had gotten stuck in sugar sand, which is almost like dry desert quicksand. It’s hot out there; the ...
Jan 09, 2025•23 min•Season 6Ep. 15
On September 29, 2023, just over nine months after William Vick was found dead on his bedroom floor in Clarksville Arkansas, his house caught on fire and burned down under very suspicious circumstances. If you have a case you’d like Catherine Townsend to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Jan 02, 2025•23 min•Season 6Ep. 14
Christine Harron, a book-loving teenager from Hanover, Ontario, leaves for school in the spring of 1993 and is never seen again. A suspect emerges, confessing to her murder, but the case falls apart and Christine's family are left without answers. In Season 9 of the award winning podcast Someone Knows Something, David Ridgen, along with Christine's mother, reopen the investigation and come face to face with the man who said he killed Chrissy. Someone Knows Something is the investigative true cri...
Dec 26, 2024•35 min•Season 6Ep. 13
On January 23, 2023, just six days after William Vick was found dead on his bedroom floor at 1954 County Road 3259 in Clarksville Arkansas, police did a welfare check on his wife Larenda’s mother, 72-year-old Martha McLean, who lived in a detached house on the property with William and Larenda. They found Martha struggling to breathe with drugs including lorazepam and morphine around her. Martha had overdosed and was close to death, but paramedics administered Narcan, a drug that blocks opioids....
Dec 19, 2024•29 min•Season 6Ep. 12
On January 17 2023 at 11: 22 PM the Johnson County deputy coroner arrived at 1954 County Road in Clarksville Arkansas and found the body of 53-year-old William Vick. The case of death on William’s autopsy was listed as a combined mixed prescription and illicit drug toxicity. Manner of death: homicide. William’s family was suspicious of his wife, LaRenda, but someone else confessed: LaRenda's mother, Martha McLean. She was in her late seventies, terminally ill with throat cancer, and lived in a s...
Dec 12, 2024•24 min•Season 6Ep. 11
On January 17, 2023, 53-year-old William Vick was recovering at home in Clarksville, Arkansas. William was in good health. He loved making videos for his YouTube channel. But William had gone in for tonsillectomy operation the week before, and had been experiencing some complications. He had texted his daughter, Ashley to say that he believed that something inside him was broken and that he was throwing up a large amount of blood in the sink. Ashley was worried, and told her dad that this didn't...
Dec 05, 2024•25 min•Season 6Ep. 10
Last week, we talked about the mystery regarding whether or not Deputy Blake Hassell ever went out to the area in Kingston where on August 5th at 12:34 AM, a 911 caller reported that she heard a woman screaming - that it sounded like she was being raped or tortured. The dispatch report reads, "A caller advised she believes that she heard a woman in the woods behind her house yelling. Stated she believes at one point the woman screamed for help. Caller advised there is not a physical address but ...
Nov 28, 2024•24 min•Season 6Ep. 9
We’ve been trying to figure out what happened to Taylor Barksdale in the last few weeks of her life that led her to Kingston, Arkansas At 12:34 on August 5, a 911 caller reported that it a woman was screaming on a rural property in Kingston and that she sounded like she was being raped or tortured. Just over a month later, on September 9, Taylor’s remains were found in a field near where the 911 call was made. We have made some headway in finding out what was going on in Taylor Barksdale’s life ...
Nov 21, 2024•29 min•Season 6Ep. 8
The Madison County Sheriff’s Office got a 911 call in the early morning hours of August 5, 2024 from caller who heard sounds that she believed could be from a woman being raped or tortured. But the police never came. Then a few weeks later, people were expressing concern about Taylor Barksdale, a 30-year-old woman who had been living in Huntsville and who had gone missing. When police finally went to the area of the 911 call to investigate on September 9, they went out to a residence in Kingston...
Nov 07, 2024•26 min•Season 6Ep. 7
On September 9, 2024, searchers on a property in Madison County in the area of Kingston, Arkansas, broke open a hay bale and found a body. Police have shared almost no information about this investigation. And while Sheriff Ronnie Boyd at the Madison County Sheriff’s office has publicly denied this, some people in Madison County think this body was discovered while the police were searching for Jason Lierl. We did several episodes about that case: 41-year-old Jason Lierl was going through a toug...
Oct 31, 2024•27 min•Season 6Ep. 6
In this summer we covered the case of Shannon Lee Collins, the 48-year-old veteran who vanished without a trace from his family home in Pottsville Arkansas. I am thrilled to report that we have a major update in this case: federal fraud charges have been filed against Shannon’s wife Treasa and her daughter, Brittany. And now that the fraud has been uncovered could murder charges come next? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Oct 24, 2024•17 min•Season 6Ep. 5
After Doug Janis was murdered in 2020, police were focused on one suspect: his wife, 31-year-old April Mae Janis. Was April a loving wife who adored Doug or a master manipulator who orchestrated his murder? In Hemphill, Texas, it depends on who you ask. Half the town thinks that April was this vixen who has murdered multiple people, while the other half see her as a victim of sexual abuse. This week, we finally got in touch with April Janis. And we learned about an alternative suspect...someone ...
Oct 17, 2024•32 min•Season 6Ep. 4
We’re in Sabine County, Texas, investigating the area where Doug Janis was murdered. We’ve talked a lot about April and Doug’s relationship - one that went on for years - but what I wonder is, if April did kill Doug, why did she choose that moment? What was her motive? I think that solving Doug Janis murder starts with figuring out what really happened to April’s mother, Anna, on the night she was fatally shot, September 3, 2004. That's the same night when Anna told her friend Yvonne that she fo...
Oct 10, 2024•42 min•Season 6Ep. 3
Catherine and Amy head to Sabine County, Texas, where on December 13, 2020, there was a massive explosion on Toledo Bend lake. The houseboat belonging to 64-year-old Doug Janis, a well known commercial catfisherman, went up in flames. Doug Janis was found dead inside the boat. At first, police assumed that it had been a propane leak, but then the medical examiner found the two bullets in the back of Doug’s head. Doug Janis had been murdered. And his much younger wife, 30-year-old April Mae Janis...
Oct 03, 2024•41 min•Season 6Ep. 2
On December 13, 2020, in Hemphill, Texas, police in Sabine County got a call about a houseboat on fire. The houseboat was docked behind 322 Echo Ridge, off of Cedar Grove Road on Highway 21 in the Pendleton area of Toledo Bend. And the scene very quickly descended into total chaos. The firefighters had trouble getting out to the remote location, and by the time they got there the boat was engulfed in flames. Firefighters and paramedics rushed to the boat but it was too late. By the time they got...
Sep 26, 2024•27 min•Season 6Ep. 1
Hello Hell and Gone listeners! We'll be back on September 26th with brand new episodes of Hell and Gone Murder Line. If you have a case you’d like Catherine Townsend to look into, you can reach out to the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Sep 19, 2024•41 min•Season 5Ep. 52
Hello Hell and Gone listeners! We'll be back on September 26th with brand new episodes of Hell and Gone Murder Line. If you have a case you’d like Catherine Townsend to look into, you can reach out to the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Sep 12, 2024•41 min•Season 5Ep. 51
Hello Hell and Gone listeners! We'll be back on September 26th with brand new episodes of Hell and Gone Murder Line. If you have a case you’d like Catherine Townsend to look into, you can reach out to the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Sep 05, 2024•42 min•Season 5Ep. 50
