If you want a view into the world that lies behind the Ted Bundy murders, this last work in a series of six books on Bundy, is definitely for you. For within these pages you’ll read of the many questions still surrounding this fascinating and intricate case, as well as the answers that are only now being provided here. There’s so much more to learn, and new information is still surfacing about Bundy, his victims and his potential victims. As such, there is new testimony included from those who h...
Apr 01, 2021•1 hr 38 min•Ep. 568
The Gospel of Blood is the autobiography of Nico Claux, a French morgue attendant whose morbid obsessions led him to grave robbery, cannibalism and murder in the early 1990s. It is a bone-chilling chronicle of a real-life vampire who prowled the Gothic cemeteries of Paris, unearthing coffins and mutilating the bodies inside. A practicing Satanist, Claux escalated to murder after working for a year in several morgues, receiving orders to kill from the corpses he had autopsied.The Gospel of Blood ...
Mar 28, 2021•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 567
Faulkner County native Red Hall was a serial killer who confessed to murdering at least twenty-four people. Most of his victims were motorists who picked him up as he hitchhiked around the United States. In the closing months of World War II, he beat his wife to death and went on a killing spree across the state. His signature smile lured his victims to their doom, and even after his capture, he maintained a friendly manner, being described by one lawman as "a pleasant conversationalist." Author...
Mar 27, 2021•1 hr 39 min•Ep. 566
In 1976, a killer who called himself ‘The Son of Sam’ shot and killed a half dozen people and wounded as many more in New York City. During his crime spree, the madman left bizarre letters mocking the police and promising more deaths. After months of terrorizing the city while garnering front-page headlines and international attention, a man named David Berkowitz was arrested. He confessed to the shootings, claiming to be obeying a demon that resided in a dog that belonged to his neighbor “Sam.”...
Mar 13, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 565
Harold Schechter, Amazon Charts bestselling author of Hell’s Princess, unearths a nearly forgotten true crime of obsession and revenge, and one of the first—and worst—mass murders in American history. In 1927, while the majority of the township of Bath, Michigan, was celebrating a new primary school—one of the most modern in the Midwest—Andrew P. Kehoe had other plans. The local farmer and school board treasurer was educated, respected, and an accommodating neighbor and friend. But behind his or...
Mar 12, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 564
Growing up on Cape Cod in the 1960s, Liza Rodman was a lonely little girl. During the summers, while her mother worked days in a local motel and danced most nights in the Provincetown bars, her babysitter—the kind, handsome handyman at the motel where her mother worked—took her and her sister on adventures in his truck. He bought them popsicles and together, they visited his “secret garden” in the Truro woods. To Liza, he was one of the few kind and understanding adults in her life. Everyone tho...
Mar 09, 2021•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 563
Cold Case Story is based on the brutal murder of a housewife in the Denver suburbs in 1973. A college student back then, Stephanie Kane was more than a witness to this terrible crime. For nearly thirty years, she remained silent. Then, in 2001, she tried to exorcise the crime by fictionalizing it in a mystery novel called Quiet Time. But instead of laying the murder to rest, Quiet Time brought it roaring back to life. Cold Case Story is about a family that fractured along the fault lines of a mu...
Mar 05, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 562
There was a time when New York City was dying a fast death. The slums were warzones, the government bankrupt and sputtering. Mobsters disassembled one another nightly and dropped hefty bags of mixed parts off the Canarsie pier. Gangs rumbled in the city’s playgrounds and ghost towns, each battle busted up by the sound of gunfire or a police siren. Co-eds were raped and sent home shattered. Wide swaths of real estate, former ghettos, were abandoned and left to the squatters. Times Square, once se...
Feb 19, 2021•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 561
On a warm night in September 1985, teenagers Kimberly Dowell and Ethan Dixon were brutally murdered in Westside Park in Muncie, Indiana. Their killer has never been charged. Early on, police focused on a family member of one of the teens as a primary suspect. The investigation even ruled out fantastic scenarios, including a theory that the perpetrator was a Dungeons & Dragons devotee. The case grew cold. Only decades later did a dogged police investigator narrow the scope to a suspect whose ...
Feb 17, 2021•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 560
Fans of Mindhunter and true crime podcasts will devour these chilling stories of serial killers from the American "Golden Age" (1950-2000). With books like Serial Killers, Female Serial Killers and Sons of Cain, Peter Vronsky has established himself as the foremost expert on the history of serial killers. In this first definitive history of the "Golden Age" of American serial murder, when the number and body count of serial killers exploded, Vronsky tells the stories of the most unusual and prom...
Feb 10, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 559
It was the midcentury murder that fascinated a nation and kept it glued for two years to radio, television and newspapers through three trials. Did the handsome, wealthy doctor and his beautiful young paramour plan to kill his glamorous socialite wife? Or did the gun accidentally discharge as he claimed? Early in the evening on July 18, 1959, Dr. Bernard Finch and his girlfriend, Carole Ann Tregoff, drove from their Las Vegas love-nest to the Finch home in the Los Angeles suburb of West Covina t...
Feb 04, 2021•1 hr 34 min•Ep. 558
ANGILA WAS STABBED 44 TIMES. THIS WAS PERSONAL. On a November morning in 2015, Christopher Jackson waited for his fiancée, Angila Wilder, to pick him up from work as she always did. But this time, she didn’t show—and Christopher’s calls went unanswered. The police found what looked like a scene from a horror movie at their home. The backdoor kicked in. A bedroom splattered with blood. And a pregnant young woman violently stabbed to death. Could Christopher have murdered the woman he claimed to l...
Jan 29, 2021•58 min•Ep. 557
They were all subjects of true crime newspaper reporting in the 1800s. And now these stories and that of many others are brought together in their original form in a two-volume set: TRUE CRIME CHRONICLES: Serial Killers, Outlaws, and Justice ... Real Crime Stories From The 1800s. Compiled and commented on by New York Times bestselling author and former detective Mike Rothmiller, these classic works of journalism resurrect astonishing stories that will take the reader on a fascinating journey ba...
Jan 28, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 556
In 2010, a brave whistleblower alerted the police to Dr. Stan Li’s corrupt pain management clinic in Queens, New York. Li spent years supplying more than seventy patients a day with oxycodone and , trading prescriptions for cash. Emergency room doctors, psychiatrists, and desperate family members warned him that his patients were at risk of death but he would not stop. In Bad Medicine, former prosecutor Charlotte Bismuth meticulously recounts the jaw dropping details of this criminal case that w...
Jan 18, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 555
During the depths of the Great Depression in Ypsilanti, Michigan, a seven-year-old boy is found frozen to death under the Frog Island footbridge in Depot Town after being reported missing the night before by his parents. Upon examination, the Washtenaw County coroner discovers the child is the victim of foul play. After three years of investigation, the Ypsilanti and Michigan state police are no closer to making an arrest than they were when Richard Streicher Jr.'s body was discovered. Local gos...
Jan 15, 2021•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 554
Over 13 months in 1976-1977, four children were abducted in the Detroit suburbs, each of them held for days before their still-warm bodies were dumped in the snow near public roadsides. The Oakland County Child Murders spawned panic across southeast Michigan, triggering the most extensive manhunt in U.S. history. Yet after less than two years, the task force created to find the killer was shut down without naming a suspect. The case "went cold" for more than 30 years, until a chance discovery by...
Jan 15, 2021•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 553
A successful young mother, Kelsey Berreth, vanishes on Thanksgiving Day 2018. The FBI is afraid they’ll have to do a deal with the devil to find her. Kelsey, a pilot so good she taught the military how to fly, goes shopping at a Safeway store, and simply disappears. Her fiance, Patrick Frazee, says he doesn't have a clue. In fact, he says they broke up just a few days before. He's as mystified as everyone else. But Kelsey's mother, Cheryl, is afraid she knows what happened to her daughter. A tas...
Jan 13, 2021•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 552
The extraordinary life and crimes of heiress-turned-revolutionary Rose Dugdale, who in 1974 became the only woman to pull off a major art heist. In the world of crime, there exists an unusual commonality between those who steal art and those who repeatedly kill: they are almost exclusively male. But, as with all things, there is always an outlier—someone who bucks the trend, defying the reliable profiles and leaving investigators and researchers scratching their heads. In the history of major ar...
Jan 06, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 551
What do Wyatt Earp, Belle Gunness, Big Foot the Renegade, Billy the Kid, and Dr. H.H. Holmes, and The Black Hand have in common? They were all subjects of true crime newspaper reporting in the 1800s, and now these stories and that of many others are brought together in their original form in a two-volume set: TRUE CRIME CHRONICLES: Serial Killers, Outlaws, and Justice … Real Crime Stories From The 1800s. Compiled and commented on by New York Times bestselling author Mike Rothmiller, these classi...
Dec 30, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 550
*This interview was recorded in 2019. The late, great Fred Rosen passed away Dec. 2020. Fred Rosen is a former columnist for the Arts and Leisure Section of The New York Times. He is also one of the most important and successful figures in true crime writing, and the author of several true crime classics. He got off to an incredible start with Lobster Boy in 1995, Blood Crimes in 1996, and Gang Mom and The Mad Chopper both published in 1998. Deacon of Death was published in 2000, Needle Work in ...
Dec 25, 2020•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 549
All it took for a hundred people to die during a show by the hair metal band Great White was a sudden burst from four giant sparklers that ignited the acoustical foam lining the Station nightclub. But who was at fault? And who would pay? This being Rhode Island, the two questions wouldn't necessarily have the same answer. Within 24 hours the governor of Rhode Island and the local police chief were calling for criminal charges, although the investigation had barely begun, key evidence still neede...
Dec 16, 2020•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 548
Between the summers of 1967 through 1969, before the term serial killer was coined, a predatory killer stalked the campuses of Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan seeking prey until he made the arrogant mistake of killing his last victim in the basement of his uncle's home. All-American boy John Norman Collins was arrested, tried, and convicted of the strangulation murder of Karen Sue Beineman. The other murders attributed to Collins never went to trial, with one exception...
Dec 10, 2020•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 547
A husband. A father. A killer. Chris Watts was a family man. Everybody, including his family, believed that. Yet, on August 13, 2018, he murdered Shanann, his pregnant wife, and two young daughters, burying Shanann and their unborn son in a shallow grave and dumping their daughters’ bodies in separate oil tanks. As terrible as his story is, it is also a warning because, to this day, living behind bars, Watts is still acting out the character traits that made him kill in the first place.In this, ...
Dec 05, 2020•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 546
Uncover the twisted tales that inspired the big screen's greatest screams. Which case of demonic possession inspired The Exorcist? What horrifying front-page story generated the idea for A Nightmare on Elm Street? Which film was inspired by an 18th-century Japanese folktale? Unearth the terrifying and true tales behind some of the scariest horror movies to ever haunt our screens, including the Enfield poltergeist case that was retold in The Conjuring 2 and the serial killer who inspired Hannibal...
Nov 25, 2020•1 hr 38 min•Ep. 545
The legendary FBI criminal profiler and international bestselling author of Mindhunter and The Killer Across the Table returns with this timely, relevant book that goes to the heart of extremism and domestic terrorism, examining in-depth his chilling pursuit of, and eventual prison confrontation with Joseph Paul Franklin, a White Nationalist serial killer and one of the most disturbing psychopaths he has ever encountered. Worshippers stream out of an Midwestern synagogue after sabbath services, ...
Nov 18, 2020•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 544
This psychological crime thriller takes us inside the mind of a unique female serial killer, a prostitute who murdered seven adult men-a case with which the author was intimately involved. The issues raised by this high-profile criminal case remain unresolved to this day. Women, even prostitutes, have the right to self-defense in theory, but in practice, the story is more complicated. This book will challenge everything you ever thought about prostitutes, serial killers, and justice in America. ...
Nov 12, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 543
Every once in a great while a genuine murder mystery unfolds before the eyes of the American public. The tragic story of Susan Powell and her murdered boys, Charlie and Braden, is the only case that rivals the Jon Benet Ramsey saga in the annals of true crime. When the pretty, blonde Utah mother went missing in December of 2009 the media was swept up in the story – with lenses and microphones trained on Susan's husband, Josh. He said he had no idea what happened to his young wife, and that he an...
Nov 04, 2020•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 542
It was a crime unlike anything seen in British Columbia. The horror of the "Wells Gray Murders" almost forty years ago transcends decades. On August 2, 1982, three generations of a family set out on a camping trip – Bob and Jackie Johnson, their two daughters, Janet, 13 and Karen, 11, and Jackie's parents, George and Edith Bentley. A month later, the Johnson family car was found off a mountainside logging road near Wells Gray Park completely burned out. In the back seat were the incinerated rema...
Oct 30, 2020•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 541
The True Story of the 1990 Gainesville Student Murders in the Killer's Own Words. 2nd Edition. Murder confessions & drawings done on Death Row in Florida during the early 1990's. The man convicted of the vicious murders of five college students in Gainesville, Florida, discusses his motivations and actions in committing the crimes, reflects on what made him into a killer, and his struggle to come to terms with what he did. New prologue, new illustrations and a new preview of the companion vo...
Oct 22, 2020•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 540
You probably know part of the Zodiac story. The guy killed five, wounded two, wrote letters in code, and drew tremendous press. There was a great movie about the case. But true crime veteran Michael Benson is taking a brand new look at that most-interesting of cold cases, coming from the mindset that the Zodiac’s combination of diverse killing styles, codemaking, and letter writing means more than one guy was involved. The Zodiac has team-work written all over it. And so, perhaps, a Zodiac Club....
Oct 17, 2020•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 539
