In 1934 to consolidate his iron grip on Germany, Hitler did away with dozens of political foes, and even allies he considered might be foes. This was Operation: Hummingbird. Also known as The Night of the Long Knives... This is the story of how Hitler turned on one of his closest allies, the story of the first openly gay politican in history and the story of Germany's further descent into tyranny. Along the way we speculate wildly about Hitler's sex life and try to get the bottom of the ultimate...
Jan 20, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 5Ep. 13
The Nazis are in power and barely one month after the enabling act effectively makes Hitler dictator of Germany steps are made to eradicate literature and research deemed to go against the Nazi ideology. One particular place of scientific learning which falls foul is an institute set up by a Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, a progressive man who dedicated his life to helping the LGBTQIA+ community. No mean feat for a century ago. Hirschfeld's institute helped many but one in particular was Dora Richter - t...
Jan 13, 2022•1 hr 23 min•Season 5Ep. 12
We hit the 1930s in our Geopolitics, War & Espionage season and hotfoot it straight over to Germany in 1933 where something big was brewing. Hitler and his Nazi party are able to seize absolute power and rule Germany as a dictatorship. An arson attack on the home of Germany's parliament - the Reichstag - helps to precipitate all of this. But who literally started the fire? And could Erik Jan Hanussen, the man who coached Hitler in public speaking, somehow predicting it ahead of time hold som...
Jan 06, 2022•55 min•Season 5Ep. 11
1928 New York. Prohibition has been in place for some time but some of the criminal underworld (who have been some of the few to profit from its tight grip) are sensing it is nearing its end. Casper Holstein, a black racketeer from Harlem who has considerable control over illegal gambling and has been very generous to black activism with his profits, is kidnapped at gunpoint. A ransom of $50,000 demanded. He is released three days later and he insists no ransom has been paid. Nor will he name hi...
Dec 30, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Season 5Ep. 10
This week we're taking a week off from our ongoing themed season for a chilled-out Christmas special - join us for some Christmas drinks where we go through our middle names, our Christmas plans and opinions on Christmas dinner. Thanks for listening everyone, have a great Christmas!! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Dec 23, 2021•35 min
In September 1928 Latvian dentist Morduch Halsman is hiking in Austria with his son, Phillippe. He loses his footing and plummets off a cliff to the horror of Phillippe. When Phillippe manages to find a way down to the bottom, he discovers his father has been robbed and, if the fall hadn't killed him, murdered.Yet this is smack bang in between the World Wars, in a country with an ever more pronounced lean towards fascism. And the Halsmans are Jews. Phillippe is promptly arrested, tried and convi...
Dec 16, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Season 5Ep. 9
When a Native American people gains immense wealth from oil found on their land at the beginning of the 20th Century, it sets in motion a chain of events which leads to fraud and death in a concentrated campaign of malevolence throughout the 1920s. Who is responsible for a string of murders, all carried out with the express aim of wresting control of the land and money from those to whom it rightfully belongs...? And just what has Masud been getting up to with plums? Hosted on Acast. See acast.c...
Dec 09, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Season 5Ep. 8
This week, we decide to educate ourselves on something which didn't really get taught to us at school or, we feel, get adequately explained to us as children... Irish history. Specifically, the story of one man - Michael Collins. A firebrand revolutionary, his story cannot be understated when it comes to the formation of the republic of Ireland. After ruffling so many belligerent, colonial feathers it should have come as no surprise that people would want him out of the way. But no official reco...
Dec 02, 2021•1 hr 26 min•Season 5Ep. 7
On September 16th 1920, an attack on Wall Street killed 30 people instantly, 10 more in the aftermath and injured hundreds more. Yet it remains unsolved, despite arrests being made, trials being held and executions being conducted in a story which went on to grip the world. Might the attack have its roots in an armed robbery on a shoe factory months earlier? We try to piece it all together as we learn about Italian anarchism in early 20th Century America and get sidetracked by late 1980s kids' c...
Nov 25, 2021•57 min•Season 5Ep. 6
Following the Great War, in the early 1920s celebrated military strategist Earl Hancock Ellis worked tirelessly on a secret project - a project which would eventually lead him on a secret mission to Japanese islands in the Central Pacific. A project which could well have predicted the attack on Pearl Harbor almost 20 years before it actually happened... Join us as we discuss Ellis's predictions and high-stakes mission as well as, among other things, nits. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy f...
Nov 18, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 5Ep. 5
Following last week's encounter with the nefarious Sir Basil Zaharoff, we rewind to the 1880s when machine gun inventor William Cantelo vanishes completely upon completing the prototype machine gun he had been working on for some time. Not long afterwards, Hiram Maxim unveils his outstanding Maxim gun, only for William Cantelo's surviving sons to be shocked by two things... 1) The gun is the exact same design as their father's and 2) Hiram Maxim bears a startling physical resemblance to their mi...
Nov 11, 2021•40 min•Season 5Ep. 4
Sir Basil Zaharoff. One of the most evil men who ever lived. Bigamist, fraudster, international arms dealer. Codename: ZedZed. A real nasty piece of work. Most likely the real-life template for the James Bond supervillain, Zaharoff's influence on the geopolitics of the 20th Century cannot be overestimated, yet he lived in the shadows and his name doesn't loom over history as much as the man himself did. So why does nobody really know when and where he was born, why did he burn all records of him...
Nov 04, 2021•1 hr 15 min•Season 5Ep. 3
Season Five continues with one of the great 20th Century mysteries; did Princess Anastasia Romanov survive the Bolshevik revolution and execution of her family and go on to live a long life in secret? Several people have indeed claimed to be the princess throughout the years and a potentially sticky diplomatic situation on the eve of peace with Germany during World War 1 helped to stoke speculation but did she really get away? And is the Dreamworks film worth watching? We attempt to answer these...
Oct 28, 2021•50 min•Season 5Ep. 2
Kicking off Season Five of Mystery on the Rocks (a kinda themed trawl through Geopolitics, War & Espionage of the 20th Century) is our 100th case... The Mad Monk Rasputin! A mystic who inveigled his way into Russia's royal family's inner circle to become one of Tsar Nicholas' closest advisers, Rasputin is still held aloft as a totem of pure evil today - a reputation only enhanced by the terrifying stories told of his assassination in 1916. So, did Rasputin really possess powers magical enoug...
Oct 21, 2021•1 hr 35 min•Season 5Ep. 1
It's our Season Four finale and we wanted to pick a doozy for it! So come with us to Florida in 2005 as we look at how a woman got out of a hotel she couldn't possibly have left without being seen and ended up 8 miles away and left for dead. What happened to her, who did it and just who on Earth is the Mercury Man and might he be the key to the whole affair? This case is covered extensively in (so this episode owes a huge debt to) Mark Bowden's excellent Vanity Fair article The Case of the Vanis...
Jul 29, 2021•1 hr 17 min•Season 4Ep. 20
This week's episode focuses on one of the earliest stories of alien abduction, that of Barney and Betty Hill who claimed to have been abducted by an alien spacecraft while they were driving back home to New Hampshire from vacation in Montreal. And even though our theory for what really happened is one of our most juvenile, we are standing by it! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jul 22, 2021•49 min•Season 4Ep. 19
This week's episode, as voted for by our awesome supporters on Patreon in our monthly mystery vote, is the tale of John Lang who in 2016 was found dead in his burning home, stabbed three times after predicting his own murder in a series of posts on social media. He had uncovered corruption in the Fresno police department and documented all sorts of suspicious goings on as he became increasingly convinced they would make him pay. So did they? And is Masud secretly a bestselling novelist? Hosted o...
Jul 15, 2021•42 min•Season 4Ep. 18
Something a little different this week as we got together in the same ( really echoey - sorry!) room and lay out a story suggested just one hour prior to recording by former guest of the show John Robertson. So listen as we all learn about the colourful life and mysterious death of boxing legend Sonny Liston, which takes in organised crime, Muhammad Ali and pecan nuts... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jul 08, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Season 4Ep. 17
A case which has nothing whatsoever to do with 90s movies but which we still managed to make aaaaaallllllll about 90s movies. In 2003, assistant attorney Jonathan Luna is found dead almost 100 miles from where he was last seen leaving his office, face down in a creek with his blood-spattered car idling nearby and 36 stab wounds all over his body, one of which severed his carotid artery. Cause of death? Drowning. What's more, the wounds seem to have come from his own knife. The cases for suicide ...
Jul 01, 2021•1 hr•Season 4Ep. 16
Pier Paolo Pasolini was an Italian film director, poet, writer, intellectual, actor, journalist, novelist, playwright and political figure who created such uproar during his life that he was eventually assassinated in a pretty brutal way in November 1975. To this day nobody knows really who did it but it could be one or more from one or all of the following groups; the mafia, the government, the far-right or even the freemasons. We try to get to the bottom of it at the same time as getting distr...
Jun 24, 2021•54 min•Season 4Ep. 15
Gloria Ramirez was 31 years old when she was admitted to Riverside General Hospital Emergency Room in February 1994, delirious and speaking gibberish with heart palpitations. She died that night, officially from complications relating to cervical cancer but the story is far more complicated and strange... Many of the health professionals who worked on her that night were all seemingly poisoned by her skin, by her blood and generally just by being in her proximity. This is the story of the Toxic ...
Jun 17, 2021•56 min•Season 4Ep. 14
A big one today. Not including the initial trailer, this week's episode is our big 100! So allow us a little self indulgence as we discuss, among other things, our favourite cases, episodes and cocktails from our ever-growing back catalogue. Thank you to everyone who has supported the podcast (which includes you wonderful people, obviously) along the way, in whatever capacity. Four seasons, a few different formats, loads of cases, hundreds of cocktails, a litany of amazing guests, plenty of anci...
Jun 10, 2021•51 min•Season 4Ep. 13
Wonderful comedian, actor and decent bloke Sunil Patel popped by the bar this week to reduce us to hysterics while talking about a Welsh sheep farmer and to assist us with the spooky 19th Century ghost story of Sarah Duckett... You can hear Sunil's podcast Why Is Harriet Crying? wherever you get your podcasts and go see him LIVE this month (June 2021) at the Soho Theatre! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Jun 03, 2021•55 min•Season 4Ep. 12
After an 11th hour guest cancellation we decided to discuss the case between ourselves anyway and had a fun conversation about the oft-repeated story of Freddie Mercury and Kenny Everett disguising Princess Diana as a gay man in the 1980s and taking her out to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern... So is it true or just an urban myth? No real evidence exists to back it up beyond the initial account in Cleo Rocos' late-90s autobiography and the three main players are no longer with us to confirm or deny th...
May 27, 2021•39 min•Season 4Ep. 11
A couple of weeks ago, we got together to do Mystery on the Rocks in the same room for the first time in over a year and did a live show from Angel Comedy's brilliant venue The Bill Murray. Restrictions still prevented us having audience in the room with us and so we livestreamed a slightly chaotic show where we got super giddy at being together for the first time in a long time. During the shenanigans, we did touch upon the story of the terrifying ghost ship SS Ourang Medan, and thought why not...
May 20, 2021•41 min•Season 4Ep. 10
The brilliant comedian, director and man behind all those TV intros you have seen re-imagined as stock footage Matt Highton poked his head round the door of the bar for a lot of film chat and to possibly help us reach a solution to the enduring mystery of just who was it that wrote The Circleville Letters? Love, death and bus drivers feature in this curious tale of some of Circleville, Ohio's residents in the 1970s and 1980s being plagued by a persistent and sinister letter writing campaign... H...
May 13, 2021•55 min•Season 4Ep. 9
Juliette Burton is an absolutely top-drawer comedian, writer and actor as well as being one of the country's foremost speakers and advocates on the topic of mental health, an ambassador for the mental health charity Rethink Mental Illness no less! She also happens to be one of the most fun human beings, as evidenced by the laugh we had when she turned up with ample cocktails of her own and managed to flirt outrageously with each one of us in the course of helping us out with the mystery of the S...
May 06, 2021•54 min•Season 4Ep. 8
Stuart Laws isn't just a fantastic comedian in his own right, he is also behind some of the best online comedy content of the past few years. His company Turtle Canyon are responsible for some absolutely stellar productions, including James Acaster's four 'Repertoire' Netflix specials and many more besides. We were very lucky that he visited the Mystery on the Rocks bar to help with another mystery, pitch a brilliant sequel to 1996 Arnie action flick 'Eraser' and maybe, just maybe, steal the pod...
Apr 29, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Season 4Ep. 7
This week the fabulous Vix Leyton, stand-up comedian and host of the awesome Comedy Arcade podcast, swung by and was even generous enough to get the round in herself! We drank lovely pre-mixed cocktails from Nio , because when the three of us did the exclusive livestreamed Comedy Arcade show Vix had kindly bought us all cocktails. Alas, we were prohibited from drinking them on stage so we had them in this episode instead! And we had a very winding saunter through the intriguing case of Richard L...
Apr 22, 2021•56 min•Season 4Ep. 6
Joining us for this week's episode is absolutely fantastic comedian, actor and writer Helen Duff. You may have seen Helen on The Mash Report, heard her beautifully narrate one of many, many audiobooks, seen her at a litany of brilliant live shows or even heard her hosting her own amazing podcast Come As You Are... Helen swung by the bar for a top-drawer chinwag as well to help us piece together the mystery of the Watseka Wonder. It is the curious tale of Lurrancy Vennum, which has gone down as o...
Apr 15, 2021•54 min•Season 4Ep. 5
