So, this might seem like a weird question, but hear me out. Does authenticity matter? Let me be more specific. Does art need to be authentic? What if you found out, for example, that your favorite writer—somebody whose traumatic life story you related to, somebody whose identity was a living, breathing part of the power of the stories they told—was a fake? Not the person they presented themselves to be at all? Would you be fine with it, or would you feel kind of…betrayed? And how would you feel ...
Apr 08, 2022•49 min
The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed—only transferred from one form to another. For example, dynamite explodes when chemical energy is converted to kinetic energy. It’s an interesting metaphor for a kind of killer we see a lot on True Crime Campfire: the smart, dynamic charmer with everything going for them, who throws it all away by putting their energy into all the wrong stuff: Revenge, or greed, or a lust for power. And like a stick of dynami...
Apr 01, 2022•43 min
Becky Sears and Kay Parsons were not only next door neighbors, but best friends, too. Their sons were in Little League together, and their husbands liked to join them both for dinner, drinks, and games of mixed doubles tennis. But secrets and lies would soon rip their friendship apart, and the consequences would reverberate throughout their small Georgia community for years to come. Join us for one of the twisty-turniest murder cases we've ever covered, a story of sex, lies, and stunning persona...
Mar 25, 2022•53 min
Lying is an essential human activity—everybody does it sometimes. And there are a few different reasons people do it. Sometimes it’s an innocent attempt to spare somebody’s feelings: Y’know, “It’s not you, it’s me,” or “Oh no, Gramma, I loved that sweater you made me! It’s just um…it was stolen. Yeah, stolen!” Sometimes it’s to avoid accountability. “I didn’t kill that guy,” or “That vase was shattered when I got here.” Sometimes it’s to cause somebody else pain. “I never loved you.” And sometim...
Mar 18, 2022•45 min
T.S. Eliot ends his poem “The Hollow Men” with the line “This is the way the world ends…not with a bang, but a whimper.” Spree criminals are always after the bang. Many see themselves going out in a blaze of glory, taking as many people with them as they can. Going down in history as some kind of dark antihero, shaking up the way we think, making us question our most basic values—leaving a big, smoking crater in the earth on their way out of it. These guys are legends in their own minds. Funnily...
Mar 11, 2022•54 min
In the series premiere, radio DJ Fred Heckman (Jon Hamm) receives an unexpected call from a listener that turns his life upside down. Follow American Hostage on Amazon Music, to hear all 8 episodes right now: wondery.fm/TCC_AmericanHostage Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support ....
Mar 08, 2022•5 min
In the old Hans Christian Anderson tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes, the emperor was the kind of clothes horse who’d make Anna Wintour look like a frump in a burlap sack. This guy was all about the fashion, and the more extravagant the better. So one day, a couple of con men came blazin’ into town, pretending to be the best tailors in the biz. They swept into the emperor’s castle, bragging about the spectacular wardrobe they could make for him…for the right price. And it got even better than th...
Mar 04, 2022•50 min
When we left you at the end of part 1, we had just learned one of Bart Corbin’s best-kept secrets: that, 14 years before the murder of Jennifer Corbin, his ex-girlfriend Dolly Hearn had died from a gunshot wound to the head. A gunshot wound eerily similar to Jenn’s—and a death that had been ruled a suicide, to the disbelief of the people closest to the victim. Now, Dolly’s parents were determined to make contact with the investigators in Jenn Corbin’s case, and finally bring to light a truth the...
Feb 25, 2022•47 min
A little mystery can be fun in a relationship. It keeps things interesting. You don’t have to share every thought that passes through your head, or tell all your best stories on the first or second date. Keeping your partner guessing about a few things can add a little spice. You shouldn’t feel like you have to make your life an open book. But if you end up with someone who won’t even let you take a peek at the very first page, that’s a red flag. This is the twisting, turning story of a marriage...
Feb 18, 2022•51 min
I always loved the old “Twilight Zone” series. In most of the stories, ordinary people would wake up one morning and find themselves in a world that had changed in some crucial, baffling way. Everybody else would be in on the change, going around like nothing had happened, and the hero would have to figure out how to navigate this scary new reality. It’s fun to watch, when it’s fiction. But what if you woke up one morning and realized you were living your own version of that story? That all the ...
Feb 11, 2022•53 min
We’ve said it before on True Crime Campfire: We’re nerds. And so are most of our friends. Nerds can be the very best people. All most of us want to do is to read our comics or cosplay our favorite characters from Final Fantasy VII, or learn to speak Klingon. We’re harmless. Most of us. But every category of person has its dark element. And for some people, fantasy is anything but harmless. For them, it can fuel a sense of superiority and separateness from ordinary life—provide a sort of storylin...
Feb 04, 2022•55 min
Love, hate and obsession have always been pretty close relatives. Anybody who’s ever picked up a Harlequin romance novel or watched a ridiculous rom-com knows that we don’t really get the best guidance from society on how to manage our love lives. Some of us just kinda wing it until we figure it out. Some of us go from train wreck to train wreck, and some decide we’d rather skip the whole thing and focus on hobbies and pets and learning how to keep indoor plants alive. But then there are the one...
Jan 28, 2022•53 min
“Stranger than fiction” is one of our guiding forces here at True Crime Campfire. We always try to find the kind of stories that will live rent-free in your head for the rest of your life. But of all the weird stories we’ve encountered in our decades of true crime obsession, there are a few that stand out far above the crowd. In our first case, a quirky professor known for his unorthodox views on fast food comes home from a conference and walks into a nightmare. A day later, detectives walk in o...
Jan 21, 2022•39 min
When we left you at the end of part 1, Omaha homicide detectives had just put a new suspect on their radar for the brutal murders of Tom Hunter, Shirlee Sherman, and Roger and Mary Brumback: Dr. Anthony Garcia, a former resident in the pathology department at Creighton University Hospital. Garcia had been terminated from his residency after a series of bad evaluations. Now, years later, the doctors who fired him were in the crosshairs, and investigators were desperate to find him before he struc...
Jan 14, 2022•46 min
In 2008, a tranquil neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska was stunned by the vicious double murder of an eleven year old boy—the son of two prominent local doctors—and their much-beloved housekeeper. No one could imagine who was behind the killings, and the case went colder and colder…until the same thing happened again, five years later, and the motive became clear. Join us for a classic whodunnit, the story of a desperate race to uncover the secrets behind these brutal and seemingly senseless murder...
Jan 07, 2022•40 min
In the era of some of the most heinous serial killers of all time, one murderous family went curiously unnoticed: The McCrarys. Led by a psychopathic patriarch and his cunning son-in-law, this Texas clan roamed the country robbing, kidnapping, and killing up to 20 people, most of them taken from donut shops. “Families Who Kill: The Donut Shop Murders” recounts the wild and deeply disturbing story of an unhinged American family and the terrible brutality they unleashed. The podcast features the t...
Jan 04, 2022•5 min
In every great love story, there’s some degree of risk. We risk our hearts, at the very least. We risk getting hurt. But one thing we DON’T usually risk is prison time. This is the story of one of America’s tricksiest con men. An ingenious thief, a master impersonator, and the most prolific prison escapee in U.S. history. One of the fascinating things about him is the motivation behind his many crimes and escapes. Not so much money…but love. Or so he claims. Join us for a made-for-Hollywood tale...
Dec 31, 2021•56 min
Since it's the holidays and we both have family to see and things to bake, we decided to give everybody another peek at one of our past Patreon-exclusive episodes. Sometimes these patron-exclusives are just regular TCC episodes—extra cases. But sometimes we like to mix things up and do something a little different. In this episode, we decided to walk our patrons through some of the most common, most classic cons and scams—we’ll give you a little history on each, tell you how they work, and how t...
Dec 24, 2021•52 min
American Scandal is a podcast from Wondery that explores the darker stories that have shaped the United States. From the Unabomber to Bernie Madoff, these are stories that reveal the underbelly of America: ruthless, secretive, and power-hungry. The new season of American Scandal looks at the controversial decision made by a young government official named Daniel Ellsburg to leak the Pentagon Papers, the documents that led Americans to demand an end to the catastrophic Vietnam War. Once Ellsburg ...
Dec 20, 2021•8 min
There’s a Danish proverb that says, “If envy were a fever, then the whole world would be ill.” It’s probably true. I mean, everybody feels that poisonous little pang now and then. We all occasionally want something that somebody else has, maybe even resent them a little for having it. We learn to get past it, focus on the good in our own lives instead of obsessing about everyone else. But sometimes, envy can take over—spread through the soul like a kudzu vine, smothering and strangling and cover...
Dec 17, 2021•46 min
We all think of charm and good looks as a good thing, right? Something we all wish we had goin’ on. But for some people, a silver tongue and a knockout bod are nothing more than tools to help them hurt and manipulate. Tools that make it easier for them to wreak six kinds of havoc on the lives of everyone they meet. Some people are just forces of destruction, determined to take everything they can get their hands on and not worried about who they destroy in the process. We’ve covered some bad bit...
Dec 10, 2021•53 min
Few things are more devastating than a loved one going missing. On The Vanished podcast from Wondery, host Marissa Jones tells stories of missing persons that have gone overlooked by mainstream media. In a recent episode, Marissa looks into the disappearance of James Foster Chance. The 48-year-old man from Texas went missing in March of 2021. Devastated and without any leads, James’ family began searching for him. But in their search they began uncovering clues that James was not the man they th...
Dec 06, 2021•7 min
Marriage. It might not be for everybody, but for a lot of us, it’s great stuff. You get to join up with your best friend, the love of your life, somebody you can just be you around, somebody who feels like home. And of course most of us begin that journey with a wedding: a beautiful ceremony where you pledge to hang together for better or worse, then throw down and join your best buds for some cake. Most of the time, the worst case scenario with all this stuff is divorce. But in the stories we’r...
Dec 03, 2021•52 min
Since it's Thanksgiving, we're giving you a sneak peek at one of our Patreon subscriber exclusive episodes this week! This one is the story of one of New York City's most notorious murders: A beautiful, privileged young woman brutally strangled in Central Park after a night out with friends. The crime initially looked to be sexually motivated, but the experienced detectives felt something was amiss--the scene was almost a caricature of a sex crime, as though the killer had staged it to look that...
Nov 26, 2021•45 min
Veteran journalist Joe Nocera’s neighbor in the Hamptons was a therapist named Ike. Ike counted celebrities and Manhattan elites as his patients. He’d host star-studded parties at his eccentric vacation house. But one summer, Joe discovered that Ike was gone and everything he’d thought he’d known about his neighbor -- and the house next door -- was wrong. From Wondery, the company behind Dirty John and Dr. Death, and Bloomberg, “The Shrink Next Door” is a story about power, control and turning t...
Nov 22, 2021•8 min
Parenthood, or so we hear, is full of a kind of transcendent joy, the kind you can only experience by watching your offspring learn and grow. That is, when they’re not making you want to hop in the car and keep driving until you run out of road. There are some ups and downs, for sure. But you’ll hardly ever find a parent who wouldn’t do almost anything for their kids. Notice we said “almost” anything. Because there have to be limits, right? Well…for the parents in today’s story, not so much. Fir...
Nov 19, 2021•40 min
In 1997, a 26 year old woman named Sarah Smith went in for a routine breast augmentation procedure. It should have been an easy, outpatient surgery for this healthy young woman, but it didn't turn out that way. Sarah went into cardiac and respiratory arrest on the operating table, slipped into a coma, and died a few days later. Investigators soon discovered that Sarah wasn't the first of cosmetic surgeon Dr. Anthony Pignataro's patients to die after routine surgery. And the more they investigate...
Nov 12, 2021•46 min
Killer Psyche is a new weekly true crime podcast from Wondery that explores the minds behind infamous killers and criminals. They cover high-profile cases that have shocked the world, and host Candice Delong uses her five decades of experience as a clinical psychiatric nurse and FBI Criminal Profiler to dissect the motivations and behaviors of the most terrifying felons in history. In a recent episode, Candace examines the mind of Ed Gein, the notorious murderer who inspired the movies "The Texa...
Nov 08, 2021•8 min
In 1998, South Yorkshire residents Howard Walmsley and his wife Kathy were on top of the world. After years of financial struggle as they tried to get Howard's painting and decorating business off the ground, they finally hit a stroke of luck: Howard won the lottery. Kathy was thrilled at the thought of being able to get out from under their bills, take a lavish holiday, and spoil their friends and family. But there was one thing that plucked at the back of her mind: Howard would never be specif...
Nov 05, 2021•46 min
In 1997, 20-somethings Anu Singh and Joe Cinque were an up and coming young couple--Joe a successful civil engineer, Anu a law student at Australian National University, both smart and gorgeous. From the outside looking in, they seemed to be on top of the world. But there was a storm brewing behind the scenes. Anu was becoming more and more obsessed with a myriad of health problems that no doctors seemed to be able to find any evidence of. She was becoming more and more controlling and needy, de...
Oct 29, 2021•46 min
