Acclaimed crime historian, podcaster, and author of American Sherlock Kate Winkler Dawson tells the thrilling story of Edward Rulloff—a serial murderer who was called “too intelligent to be killed”—and the array of 19th century investigators who were convinced his brain held the key to finally understanding the criminal mind. Edward Rulloff was a brilliant yet utterly amoral murderer—some have called him a “Victorian-era Hannibal Lecter”—whose crimes spanned decades and whose victims were chosen...
Oct 04, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 688
The Generation Why Podcast released its first episode in 2012 and pioneered the true crime genre in the podcasting world. Two friends, Aaron & Justin, break down theories and give their opinions on unsolved murders, controversies, mysteries and conspiracies. One of the longest running true crime podcasts out there, Generation Why has a little something for every true crime listener. Follow The Generation Why Podcast on Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or you can listen ad-fr...
Oct 03, 2022•9 min•Ep. 687
Nearly a hundred years ago, two wealthy and privileged teenagers―Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb―were charged and convicted in a gruesome crime that would lead to the original “Trial of the Century”. Even in Jazz Age Chicago, the murder was uniquely shocking for the motive of the killers: well-to-do Jewish scions, full of promise, had killed fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks for the thrill of it. The trial was made even more sensational by the revelation of a love affair between the defendants and ...
Sep 26, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 686
Boston had its Strangler. California had the Zodiac Killer. And in the depths of the Great Depression, Cleveland had the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. On September 5th, 1934, a young beachcomber made a gruesome discovery on the shores of Cleveland’s Lake Erie: the lower half of a female torso, neatly severed at the waist. The victim, dubbed “The Lady of the Lake,” was only the first of a butcher’s dozen. Over the next four years, twelve more bodies would be scattered across the city. The bodies ...
Sep 19, 2022•56 min•Ep. 685
On September 16, 1922, the bodies of Reverend Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills were found beneath a crabapple tree on an abandoned farm outside of New Brunswick, New Jersey. The killer had arranged the bodies in a pose conveying intimacy. The murder of Hall, a prominent clergyman whose wife, Frances Hall, was a proud heiress with illustrious ancestors and ties to the Johnson & Johnson dynasty, would have made headlines on its own. But when authorities identified Eleanor Mills as a choir singer ...
Sep 13, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 684
During an eight-month period in 1977 and 1978, the city of Columbus, Georgia, was terrorized by a mysterious serial killer who raped and ritualistically strangled seven elderly women in one of the community's finer neighborhoods. Despite intensive efforts on the part of police the Stocking Strangler, as he came to be known, managed to elude capture. After the last murder in April 1978, the case went cold. In the spring of 1984, a series of fortuitous events connected to an unrelated murder and a...
Sep 08, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 683
On August 31, 1972, Hellen Hanks, a pretty thirty-four-year-old mother of three disappeared from her place of employment at Wilcox Advertising in Valdosta, Georgia. After a brief investigation by local and state authorities, the case went cold. In the fall of 1980, a farmer clearing a field south of town discovered a buried object, a box containing the dismembered remains of the missing woman. After several months of investigation, police arrested "Foxy" Wilcox, his son Keller Wilcox, and two lo...
Aug 31, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 682
Our family members are not always who we think. When Eleonore Richland exposed her father’s dark legacy, she vowed to clean up the family business – and hired her half-brother, Santino Reyes, to help her do it. But old habits die hard. In the shocking new third season, Eleonore reckons with what her father always taught her growing up: medicine is a bloody business. From Wondery, the makers of “The Shrink Next Door” and “Dr. Death,” Blood Ties stars Gillian Jacobs (Community, Love), Christian Na...
Aug 29, 2022•6 min•Ep. 681
Every serial killer is a “nice guy”—until he’s found out. The shocking, true account of a Southern charmer who left a trail of victims in his wake. Jerry Marcus fooled them all. He was “a nice guy,” always helped at home, did well in school, an athlete, and always employed. When things went wrong, he was the first to help clean up the mess. He was the last person anyone suspected of being a serial killer. After Marcus was caught and sentenced to life in prison in the late ’70s, author Linda Lou ...
Aug 25, 2022•56 min•Ep. 680
Paris, 1889: Margeurite Steinheil is a woman with ambition. But having been born into a middle-class family and trapped in a marriage to a failed artist twenty years her senior, she knows her options are limited. Determined to fashion herself into a new woman, Meg orchestrates a scandalous plan with her most powerful resource: her body. Amid the dazzling glamor, art, and romance of bourgeois Paris, she takes elite men as her lovers, charming her way into the good graces of the rich and powerful....
Aug 22, 2022•59 min•Ep. 679
By the late 1970s, the fishermen of the Texas Gulf Coast were struggling. The bays that had sustained generations of shrimpers and crabbers before them were being poisoned by nearby petrochemical plants, oil spills, pesticides, and concrete. But as their nets came up light, the white shrimpers could only see one culprit: the small but growing number of newly resettled Vietnamese refugees who had recently started fishing. Turf was claimed. Guns were flashed. Threats were made. After a white crabb...
Aug 12, 2022•59 min•Ep. 678
As Adolph Hitler rose to power in 1930s Germany, a growing wave of fascism began to take root on American soil. Nazi activists started to gather in major American cities, and by 1933, there were more than one-hundred anti-Semitic groups operating openly in the United States. Few Americans dared to speak out or fight back—until an organized resistance of notorious mobsters waged their own personal war against the Nazis in their midst. Gangland-style. . . . In this thrilling blow-by-blow account, ...
Aug 11, 2022•58 min•Ep. 677
An incredible four-decade account of murder, power, and corruption in one of the country’s largest police departments In 1979, the gruesome slaying of a thirteen-year-old boy riveted the suburbs of Suffolk County, New York. As the county hustled to bring the case to a dubious resolution, a wayward local teenager emerged with a convenient story to tell. For his cooperation, Jimmy Burke was rewarded with a job as a cop. Thus began Burke’s unlikely ascent to the top of one of the country’s largest ...
Aug 05, 2022•57 min•Ep. 676
A compelling look at violence and trauma from the psychiatrist who treated mass shooter James Holmes, perpetrator of the infamous movie theater massacre. As an expert and speaker on mass shootings and gun violence, Dr. Lynn Fenton knew it was impossible to “spot a killer.” But when she met her new patient, troubled grad student James Holmes, the hair on her arms stood up. She feared he was going to kill. Yet she could find no way to thwart him. A few months later, Holmes struck: he entered a pac...
Jul 27, 2022•56 min•Ep. 675
A former United Church minister massacres his family. What led to this act of femicide, and why were his victims forgotten? On May 2, 1963, Robert Killins, a former United Church minister, slaughtered every woman in his family but one. She (and her brother) lived to tell the story of what motivated a talented man who had been widely admired, a scholar and graduate from Queen’s University, to stalk and terrorize the women in his family for almost twenty years and then murder them. Through extensi...
Jul 19, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 674
It was a brisk April morning in 1990 when a woman walking her dog stopped cold in her tracks. She reeled back from something strange and disturbing blocking the drainage tile: a human skull. Forensic examination showed that it was the remains of Joan Webster, the 25-year-old Harvard graduate student whose disappearance had rattled the community and stumped investigators for the past eight and a half years. The prosecutors had a suspect, Leonard Paradiso, who was tried and convicted for the murde...
Jul 14, 2022•55 min•Ep. 673
Before Charles Manson, there was Tony Costa—the serial killer of Cape Cod 1969: The hippie scene is vibrant in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Long-haired teenagers roam the streets, strumming guitars and preaching about peace and love... and Tony Costa is at the center of it all. To a certain group of smitten young women, he is known as Sire—the leader of their counter-culture movement, the charming man who speaks eloquently and hands out hallucinogenic drugs like candy. But beneath his benign per...
Jul 07, 2022•51 min•Ep. 672
In 1944 Brooklyn, newborn Michael J. Hardy is rejected by his mother so she can run with gangster Bugsy Siegel, Hardy's godfather. Shirley Rook quickly rose to the top of the criminal ranks. As the Queen of New York City crime, she laundered Mob money, ran the city's largest bookmaking operation, and handed payouts to dirty cops, politicians, and judges. To win his mother's love and respect, Hardy became a fearless gangster. Throughout his career as a criminal, he robbed banks and drug dealers a...
Jul 05, 2022•49 min•Ep. 671
For Tony Reid, this case began as a claim of innocence in the murder of Donna Jo Richmond in 1975. While the errors in the original investigation and a flawed trial resulted in a guilty verdict, the reassessment confirmed that the defendant was framed but the question became: by whom? Working with a new team of investigators, which included two of the original detectives, the probe uncovered a startling new possibility: Was the real culprit a serial offender? Turning to the public for informatio...
Jun 30, 2022•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 670
Under a Cold Moon is the extraordinary true story of a man that devastated two worlds. A killer that used the chump card as his cover for two brutal murders. His first victim lay under the rocks for fifteen nights. His second lay under the dirt for sixty-one. Two women. Two murders. One spurned slayer. In this cold tale, the author exposes the dark secrets of a man that stalked older women. Latham weaves this story from an insider’s window. A writer that was in the thick of things and interviewe...
Jun 24, 2022•52 min•Ep. 669
WHEN THE MOON TURNS TO BLOOD examines the culture of end times paranoia and a trail of mysterious deaths surrounding former beauty queen Lori Vallow and her husband, grave digger turned doomsday novelist, Chad Daybell. When police in Rexburg, Idaho perform a wellness check on seven J.J. Vallow and his sister, sixteen-year-old Tylee Ryan, both children are nowhere to be found. Their mother, Lori Vallow, gives a phony explanation, and when officers return the following day with a search warrant, s...
Jun 21, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 668
On May 4, 2001, Bonny Lee Bakley was found fatally shot in a car on a dark North Hollywood street. The prime suspect was her husband, famed actor Robert Blake. But Bonny, a longtime con artist, had plenty of enemies. She left behind a trail of men she’d scammed, and she had a volatile relationship with Christian Brando, the troubled son of movie star Marlon Brando. Not since the O.J. Simpson case had the eyes of the nation been so fixated on a homicide. The search for Bonny’s killer took detecti...
Jun 20, 2022•6 min•Ep. 667
Due to Sullivan’s extensive writing about Ted Bundy (which has produced six books), he’s become a sort of magnet over the years, drawing out many people who were part of the Bundy story, but have otherwise kept a low profile over the decades; and these first-person contacts continue to this day. As such, this is the first book in a new series of books, whose aim is to bring new revelations to the public about Bundy, the victims, the murders, and the almost murders that failed Bundy for one reaso...
Jun 17, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 666
Summertime in Florida. Tourists flock to the subtropical paradise for its beautiful beaches, abundant sunshine, and the magical allure of Disney World. For one Midwestern mother and her two teenaged daughters, a trip to the Sunshine State seemed like a dream vacation. But the promise of a sunset cruise by a friendly stranger turned that dream into a deadly nightmare. This is the true story of that tragic encounter and the hunt for the Sunset Killer, a modern American Monster. AMERICAN MONSTER: T...
Jun 10, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 665
South Dakota's Mathis Family Murders brought death and deception to the heartland. It was perhaps the most infamous murder case in state history. Ladonna Mathis was shot twice in the head at point-blank range inside the family's metal shed serving as their makeshift home. Two of her three children, ages 2 and 4, were also shot in the head. The brutality of the killings shocked the state and set off a frenzy of law enforcement activity. Despite its intensity, the investigation never found the mur...
Jun 06, 2022•52 min•Ep. 664
Two grisly murders—a brutal double parricide—a suicide, and a fourth death under suspicious circumstances. Drifting Into Darkness is a tangled tale of family dysfunction, fatal attraction, and greed, a saga that wends its way from the elegant Southern mansions of Montgomery, Alabama, to the New Age salons of Boulder, Colorado, to rural, windswept Wyoming. On Thanksgiving weekend in 2004, philanthropists Charlotte and Brent Springford Sr.―a wealthy, socially prominent Montgomery couple―were bruta...
May 30, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 663
What do mobster Meyer Lansky, banker John D. MacArthur and Jack "Murf the Surf" Murphy, have in common? The biggest secret of the century about the biggest crime of the century, that's what! Now, for the first time ever, the true story of the 1964 museum robberies and the 1966 Hendersonville, North Carolina triple murders. Based on an in-person interview with Jack Murphy, aka Murf, in 2015, the author tells a revised version of the story that Murf swore was true. This dramatic narrative of event...
May 27, 2022•50 min•Ep. 662
As the soft-spoken, highly intelligent son of missionaries in Morganton, North Carolina, Luke Chang gave no indication of the killer he would become. But after hacking into a teacher's computer at his school, a stint in the Marines was his only option. As a young recruit, Luke was taunted for being a virgin who didn't cuss, drink, or smoke pot. That all changed when Luke met Casey Byrams, a fun-loving musician and fellow Marine from Cullman, Alabama. Their friendship set off a series of events t...
May 23, 2022•56 min•Ep. 661
By 1966, Hot Springs, Arkansas wasn’t your typical sleepy little Southern town. Once a favorite destination for mobsters like Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, illegal activities continued to lure out-of-state gamblers, flim-flam men, and high rollers to its racetracks, clubs, and bordellos. Still, the town was shaken to its core after a girl was found dead on a nearby ranch. The ranch owner claimed it was an accident. Then the rancher was found to be the killer of another woman – his fourth wife. Th...
May 20, 2022•47 min•Ep. 660
Nicknamed “the most beautiful woman in Alaska,” 31-year-old Diane Wells was bruised and bloodied when she screamed for help in the early hours of October 17, 1953. Her husband Cecil, a wealthy Fairbanks businessman, had been shot dead, and she claimed they were the victims of a brutal home invasion. Blonde, glamorous and 20 years younger than Cecil, police were immediately suspicious of Diane's account, and the investigation soon turned toward her alleged lover, black musician Johnny Warren, who...
May 18, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 659
