True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers - podcast cover

True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers

Dan Zupanskywww.spreaker.com
Every week host Dan Zupansky will interview the true crime authors that have written about the most shocking killers of all time.
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Episodes

THE DOCTOR, THE HITMAN, AND THE MOTORCYCLE GANG-Annie McCormick

THE DOCTOR, THE HITMAN, AND THE MOTORCYCLE GANG: The True Story of One of New Jersey’s Most Notorious Murder for Hire Plots is the true story of the murder of April Kauffman, a beloved and vivacious local radio personality and veterans’ advocate who was found shot to death in the bedroom of her home in Linwood, the affluent town just outside Atlantic City, New Jersey, in May of 2012. In the months leading up to her death, she had uncovered a tangled web of deceit surrounding her husband. She fea...

May 14, 20201 hr 33 minEp. 508

JOHN WAYNE GACY: HUNTING A PREDATOR-John Borowski

On December 21, 1978, John Wayne Gacy was arrested. Upon an initial search of the crawlspace beneath his ranch house in Norwood Park Township, Illinois, the authorities discovered the remains of several bodies. Eventually, the skeletal remains of 29 young men were unearthed on Gacy’s property. Another 4 bodies were pulled from the river where Gacy dumped them off the Smith Bridge in Channahon, Illinois, bringing the body count to 33 total. In 1978 Gacy held the title of America’s most prolific s...

May 05, 20201 hr 3 minEp. 507

MAYBE YOU DIE-Nancy Lee

Nina, a new graduate from fashion design in college, gladly accepts the offer to have her palm read as a graduation gift. Smiling, the palm reader tells Nina that she has a long lifeline, as she traces it on her hand. As soon as the words are uttered, the palm reader’s facial expression turns to one of fear. In broken English, she whispers, “Break – very bad break in middle of life. Maybe you die.” Nina does come close to death at age thirty-four when she and her family are involved in a serious...

May 02, 20201 hr 33 minEp. 506

LOSING JON-David Parrish

David Parrish was in disbelief when he learned that nineteen-year-old Jon Bowie’s body had been found hanged from a backstop at the local high school’s baseball field and the death declared a suicide. David had known Jon and his twin brother since they were boys. He had coached them on the baseball field and welcomed them into his home for sleepovers with his own sons. However, when David learned how Jon’s body was found, he felt compelled to find the facts behind this incomprehensible tragedy. ...

Apr 29, 20201 hr 29 minEp. 505

A TANGLED WEB-Leslie Rule

It was a bleak November in 2012 when Cari Lea Farver vanished from Omaha, Nebraska. Cari, thirty-seven, was a devoted mother, reliable employee, and loyal friend—not the type to shirk responsibilities, abandon her son, and run off on an adventure while her dying father took his last breaths. Yet, the many texts from her phone indicated she had done just that. It appeared that Cari had dumped her new boyfriend, quit her job, and relinquished custody of her son to her mother—all by text. While Car...

Apr 24, 202059 minEp. 504

FIRST DEGREE RAGE-Paula May

Terrifying things are happening to Kay Weden, a forty-something single mom and high school teacher in Salisbury, North Carolina. Despite having no known enemies, Kay’s home, car, and peace of mind are under attack throughout 1993. Most chilling of all are the senseless attacks on her only son and the shot fired in the night through a wall of her house, which narrowly misses his head as he sleeps. Kay’s new love interest is the charming Viktor Gunnarsson. He’s a handsome Swede who left his home c...

Apr 14, 20201 hr 29 minEp. 503

KILLER FICTION-Sondra London

At a high school dance in 1964, 17 year-old Sondra London met a bright, handsome, well mannered Catholic boy, 18 year-old Gerard John Schaefer. They hung out all the time and soon fell in love. But after a year, as young lovers will, they went their separate ways. She thought she'd never see him again. Then in 1972 came the screaming headlines: “6 Dead, 28 May Be,” and the ghoulish stories about the smiling cop turned sadistic killer and corpse-loving fiend, hoarding mementos of his mutilated vi...

Apr 11, 20201 hr 36 minEp. 502

THE TRUE STORY OF THE 1966 HENDERSONVILLE TRIPLE MURDERS-Terrance Ryerson Neal

The story raced across the news wires in 1966. Residents jumped in their cars and drove to Lake Summit to see the gruesome crime scene. On a late, hot July summer night in 1966, in a small North Carolina mountain town, the days-old bodies of two local men were found on a hillside overlooking a lake south of town. Nearby was a woman's body, a tire jack shoved into her genitals. Author Terrance Ryerson Neal discovered the crime in 2014, forty-eight years after it happened, and still unsolved. Now,...

Apr 03, 20201 hr 31 minEp. 501

STEPHEN AND JOYCE SINGULAR TRUE CRIME RETROSPECTIVE

Stephen Singular is the author of 25 non-fiction books, many of them about high-profile criminal cases. His first book in 1987 was Talked to Death: The Life & Murder of Alan Berg, which became the basis for the 1989 Oliver Stone film, “Talk Radio", and set the tone for his journalistic career. Since 1991, Denver native Joyce Jacques Singular has partnered with Stephen on eight of the true-crime books. The 1995 study of the O.J. Simpson case, Legacy of Deception, went beneath the media hyster...

Mar 26, 20201 hr 28 minEp. 500

THE "SUPREME GENTLEMAN" KILLER-Brian Whitney

Elliot Rodger considered himself to be intelligent, refined, handsome, fashionable and charming. He spent years trying to be cool so women would like him. He thought if he just wore expensive and fashionable clothing, had a better car, or if he were rich, then women would throw themselves at him. In fact, he thought himself to be “The Supreme Gentleman.” Yet, women paid no attention to him. His only conclusion was that they were genetically flawed, and because of this they ignored him and threw ...

Mar 23, 20201 hr 13 minEp. 499

THE BODY SNATCHER'S WIFE-Barbra Reifel

As seen on ID Discovery’s The Devil You Know, Who the (Bleep) Did I Marry?, and Tabloid The shocking true story of how Barbra’s picket fence turned to prison bars, trapped in her twisted husband’s dangerous web of addiction, abuse, and world-infamous crime. Barbra Reifel, former wife of notorious Body Snatcher Michael Mastromarino, has appeared on Oprah, Nancy Grace, ID Discovery, and Lifetime. Never before has her raw account been laid so bare. Fairytale shattered, deceit and danger beyond her ...

Mar 18, 20201 hr 32 minEp. 498

BEAST OF NEW CASTLE-Larry Sells and Margie Porter

"'No witnesses, no problems.' Thompson’s mantra was supposed to be reassuring to the smaller man, but Percy felt the shadow of his own death coming. There was one witness. Him. And he cowered, wondering when his neck would be broken, when his body would be ripped apart with bullets." Maybe the youngest son of a violent criminal named Hoggy Thompson was born a beast. Maybe rage was beaten into him. One thing was certain, by the time he reached manhood, Jerry Thompson was a savage killer. He had n...

Mar 16, 20201 hr 14 minEp. 497

THE TRIALS OF ALBERT STROEBEL-Chad Reimer

In April, 1893, John Marshall, an immigrant and successful farmer on Sumas Prairie in British Columbia, was found dead lying sprawled across the veranda of his farmhouse. The farmer's face was a mess, his nose smashed in and cracked blood covering his forehead around a jagged black hole. The shocked neighbour who discovered the body rushed to summon the authorities. An autopsy, coroner's inquest and murder investigation followed. Two days later, a handyman named Albert Stroebel was arrested for ...

Mar 12, 20201 hr 31 minEp. 496

DOOMSDAY CULTS-Alan R. Warren

Jim Jones convinced his 1000 followers they would all have to commit suicide since he was going to die. Shoko Asahara convinced his followers to release a weapon of mass destruction, the deadly sarin gas, on a Tokyo subway. The Order of the Solar Temple lured the rich and famous, including Princess Grace of Monaco, and convinced them to die a fiery death now on Earth to be reborn on a better planet called Sirius. Charles Manson convinced his followers to kill, in an attempt to incite an apocalyp...

Mar 06, 20201 hr 34 minEp. 495

GONE AT MIDNIGHT-Jake Anderson

21 year-old Vancouver student Elisa Lam was last heard from on January 31, 2013, after she checked into downtown L.A.’s Cecil Hotel—a 600-room building with a nine-decade history of scandal and tragedy. The next day, Elisa vanished. A search of the hotel yielded nothing. More than a week later, complaints by guests of foul-smelling tap water led to a grim discovery: Elisa’s nude body floating in a rooftop water tank, in an area extremely difficult to access without setting off alarms. The only c...

Mar 04, 20201 hr 2 minEp. 494

A CROSSING OF PATHS-THE HILLSIDE STRANGLER CASE-Ron Crisp

Ron Crisp invites the reader to follow him through his investigation of the Leslie Barry murder; the trial of Art Anzures for the murder; the evidence that led him to his 3 suspects; how his investigation of the Barry murder led him to the defense of Angelo Buono in the Hillside Strangler case; and what happened in his personal life as a result of his attempts to expose the systematic cover-up in California V. Angelo Buono. The single most important clue in the case came from the statement of a ...

Feb 28, 20201 hr 32 minEp. 493

MICHAEL BENSON TRUE CRIME RETROSPECTIVE-Michael Benson

Michael Benson is one of today's most popular true-crime writers. His books--including Betrayal In Blood, Murder In Connecticut, Killer Twins, The Burn Farm, Mommy Deadliest, A Killer's Touch, Evil Season, Watch Mommy Die, A Knife in the Heart, Escape From Dannemora, Nightmare In Rochester, Haunting Homicides and The Devil at Genesee Junction--tell vividly of today's most heinous criminals, and the clever and stalwart lawmen who bring them to justice. He is currently a regular commentator for tw...

Feb 24, 20201 hr 25 minEp. 492

AMERICAN SHERLOCK-Kate Winkler Dawson

Berkeley, California, 1933. In a lab filled with curiosities–beakers, microscopes, Bunsen burners, and hundreds upon hundreds of books–sat an investigator who would go on to crack at least two thousand cases in his forty-year career. Known as the “American Sherlock Holmes,” Edward Oscar Heinrich was one of America’s greatest–and first–forensic scientists, with an uncanny knack for finding clues, establishing evidence, and deducing answers with a skill that seemed almost supernatural. Heinrich wa...

Feb 19, 202055 minEp. 491

EVIL DESIRES-Dean T. Olson

Sexual predators exist in our society and their evil desire leads them to commit heinous, brutal crimes with little concern for their victims or the toll it takes on the community. Violent sociopaths have no interest in the needs or safety of anyone else and see ordinary people as either targets or competitors. They have no hesitation taking what they want from their victims. Whether they are rapists, pedophiles, or murderers, these monsters will do whatever it takes to get their needs met and t...

Feb 18, 20201 hr 12 minEp. 490

DIANE FANNING TRUE CRIME RETROSPECTIVE-Diane Fanning

Diane Fanning is the author of fourteen true crime books published by St. Martin's Press and Berkley Books including the Edgar Award nominated Written in Blood, about Michael Peterson of Netflix's The Staircase and the best-selling Mommy's Little Girl, about the infamous Casey Anthony case. For the work she began with Through The Window about serial killer Tommy Lynn Sells, she received the "Defender of Innocence" award from the Downstate Illinois Innocence Project. Diane's 14 true crime books a...

Feb 13, 20201 hr 2 minEp. 489

DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND-Nova West

A young pregnant mother is killed, and a small town demands justice, a conviction, someone to blame. When an unlikely suspect is convicted, it raises a question: Is this the culprit, a scapegoat, or a martyr? This question prompted a mother and daughter to go beyond the official version to search for the truth. As they delved deeper into the story of this murder and conviction, they found themselves asking, how many victims came out of this tragedy, and how many perpetrators? Why did it feel lik...

Feb 11, 20201 hr 25 minEp. 488

18 TINY DEATHS-Bruce Goldfarb

The story of a woman whose ambition and accomplishments far exceeded the expectations of her time, 18 Tiny Deaths follows the transformation of a young, wealthy socialite into the mother of modern forensics... Frances Glessner Lee, born a socialite to a wealthy and influential Chicago family in the 1870s, was never meant to have a career, let alone one steeped in death and depravity. Yet she developed a fascination with the investigation of violent crimes, and made it her life's work. Best known...

Feb 07, 20201 hr 11 minEp. 487

THE GARDEN STATE PARKWAY MURDERS-Christian Barth

In “The Garden State Parkway Murders,” true crime writer and attorney Christian Barth dives into the harrowing story of the unsolved murders of Elizabeth Perry and Susan Davis. College friends, the two women were brutally knifed to death and their bodies left off the parkway in the early hours of May 30, 1969. Among the numerous suspects Barth identifies are infamous serial killers Ted Bundy and Gerald Eugene Stano, who were living within an hour’s drive from the murder scene at the time they oc...

Jan 29, 20201 hr 32 minEp. 486

ARC ROAD-Tony Tiffin

The Gwinnett County, Georgia, Police Department was formed by tough, honorable men who were brought in to clean up the county after the sheriff made moonshining his personal business. With a low budget—officers had to buy their own uniforms, guns, even bullets—the police had to take anyone with a pulse who could stand upright. Even with the odds against them, the police department grew into a force feared by the criminals and respected by county citizens.Late one night in spring of 1964, the pol...

Jan 21, 20201 hr 31 minEp. 485

DUCT TAPE KILLER-Phil and Sandy Hamman

When Piper Streyle failed to show up for work, a coworker called her home. Piper’s three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Shaina, answered and said, “A mean man carried Mommy away.” Then the line went dead. In the tranquil region of southeast South Dakota, word of the young mother who was brazenly abducted from her home in broad daylight shocked residents. Piper was the second woman to vanish, following the startling incident of a young woman who narrowly escaped abduction by fighting for her life ...

Jan 17, 20201 hr 31 minEp. 484

FRED ROSEN TRUE CRIME RETROPSPECTIVE-Fred Rosen

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 2001. Both Body Dump and Flesh Collectors were published in 2002. The Historical Atlas o...

Jan 14, 20201 hr 28 minEp. 483

BURL BARER RETROSPECTIVE-Burl Barer

Burl Barer definitely is a legendary figure in true crime writing and broadcasting, co-hosting the very first true crime podcast, True Crime Uncensored. He is an Edgar Award winning author and two-time Anthony Award nominee. Burl Barer is the author of 9 truly important true crime books. In 2000, Murder in the Family was published, In 2004, Broken Doll, In 2008, Mom Said Kill. In 2011, Fatal Beauty, In 2012, Body Count and also Head Shot were published, Man Overboard in 2014, and with co-author ...

Jan 09, 20201 hr 33 minEp. 482

REIGN OF INJUSTICE-David M. Beers

On September 12, 2001, Michele Harris went missing from a small town in upstate New York. She has never been found, and the mystery surrounding her disappearance remains. Four years after she went missing, her wealthy husband, Cal Harris, was arrested and charged with her murder. With neither a body nor a murder weapon, Cal was shockingly tried and convicted of her murder. Then new evidence surfaced. His conviction was overturned, and a new trial granted. But once again, he was convicted and sen...

Jan 07, 20201 hr 31 minEp. 481

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE TED BUNDY MURDERS-Kevin Sullivan

"Sullivan's A-to-Z coverage of Ted Bundy provides a solid guide to the people and places that define the man and the monster, including some not present in other Bundy narratives. It nicely rounds out his Bundy oeuvre and gives readers an extensive reference tool on one of the world's most infamous serial killers." - Katherine Ramsland, author of Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer. A writer of history and true crime, Kevin M. Sullivan is the author of...

Jan 03, 20201 hr 27 minEp. 480

my_son_the_killer_the_untold_story_of_luka_magnotta_brian_whitney

INFOCOMMENTS True Crime, #1 lunatic 1 ice pick, #anna yourkin, #brian whitney, #gore site, #luka magnotta BEFORE NETFLIX'S DON'T F**CK WITH CATS: Hunting an Internet Killer-Brian Whitney had an exclusive interview with Luka Magnotta for his book, My Son The Killer. In 2012, the Canadian Press ignited a firestorm of criticism by naming killer Luka Magnotta as its “Newsmaker Of The Year.” But while the recognition was questionable for its sensitivity, there’s no doubt that few people had captured ...

Dec 31, 20191 hr 27 minEp. 479
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