Dark Downeast

In 1985, 16-year-old Cathy Malcolmson left home with somewhere to be and every reason to come back. A bike ride that should have taken only minutes became an enduring decades-long mystery that spread across state lines and outlasted the careers of some of the officers trying to solve it. 

Kylie was invited to sit down with investigators who worked Cathy's case and examine the original records they accumulated over four decades; the leads they scrutinized, details that challenged the earliest prevailing theories, and footage of a prison interview that pushed her into a deep, dark rabbit hole.

Thirteen-year-old Kathy Lynn Gloddy left her home in Franklin, New Hampshire, on a November evening in 1971 with the family dog beside her. The dog came home. Kathy did not.

By the following afternoon, her disappearance had become something far darker, and a community was left trying to understand how such violence could be inflicted on a child.

In the years that followed, investigators would return to Kathy’s case again and again, each time believing they might finally be close to an answer. Suspects surfaced while old evidence was reconsidered and new theories took shape, bu...

In the fall of 2010, Roberta “Bobbie” Miller was starting over. She had a new home in Gilford, New Hampshire, she was back in school, and she was making plans for the life ahead of her. Then, on Halloween weekend, Bobbie and her dog, Sport, were shot and killed inside that home. 

There were circumstances that seemed to point suspicion in one direction. But as the years passed, some members of Bobbie’s own family began looking somewhere else entirely.

No one has ever been charged with Bobbie’s murder. When Dark Downeast first covered this story in...

Judy Belfrey. Kathy Williams. Holly Davidson. Melodie Stankiewicz. Four young women whose lives crossed the same few blocks of Boston in the 1970s, and whose deaths left investigators with a pattern they could see but never fully explain.

The cases unfolded in different places and under different circumstances, but there was enough overlap to consider a connection. Again and again, investigators were drawn back to Boston’s Combat Zone. The question then – and now – is what that shared geography means. Was one killer returning to the same hunting ground, or were multiple dangerous men taking advantage of a neig...

If there is any case where you wish you could turn back the clock and change just one small decision, it might be the disappearance of Bianca Lebron. There were several moments that morning in November 2001 when a question, a phone call, or one person stopping her before she walked away might have changed everything that came next.

Now, as the 25 year mark approaches, Bianca’s case needs attention more than ever. I want everyone to see her face, to study the composite sketch of the man believed to drive her away from school that day, and do...

Why talk about a case that was solved years ago? Because the answer to who did it isn’t the only thing that matters.

One night in October 2006, a college student needed to borrow a phone. She happened to ask a stranger with violent intentions. What makes that even harder to sit with is what investigators learned about this man afterward. There were red flags everywhere, allegations that reached back years, but none of it stopped him from being there that night.

This young woman’s story did not end with what happened to her. The...

On a Saturday morning in 1990, the body of a teenager was found on a dead-end street in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The scene raised immediate concerns, but the autopsy did not answer the question everyone needed answered most: how did Kasha Blount die?

Police waited on the medical examiner. The medical examiner waited on police. Kasha’s mother pushed for answers and a reporter started asking questions. Finally, the investigation turned toward Kasha’s final plans, the boyfriend she expected to meet, and the belongings missing when she was found. The case would reach a jury...

A young mother disappears just days before Christmas. More than a year later, another woman is murdered across state lines. The cases seem separate – different cities, different circumstances – but eventually they converge around the same teenage suspect.

What follows is more complicated than a confession and a conviction. It’s a case shaped by questions of mental competency, juvenile justice, changing constitutional protections, and what happens when one act of violence forces investigators to reconsider others that never made sense.

View source material and photos for this episode at: https://darkdowneast.com/nancyannfrenier

Dark D...

Host Sean Kipe investigates the 2020 disappearance of 27-year-old Georgia mother Natalie Jones, who vanished after a July 4th lake party. Her car and remains were found 93 days later in a rural field, sparking questions of accident, suicide, or murder—especially since Natalie had begun publicly sharing allegations of past abuse.

Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.

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In August of 1972, 44-year-old Gloria Gough left her home in Gardiner, Maine after a late-night phone call and vanished. Two days later, more than a thousand miles away in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, 52-year-old Evelyn “Penny” Deans was shot to death inside her home.

Then police looked in Penny’s driveway. Sitting there was Gloria’s car. Inside were blood-soaked towels, clothing, and a map pointing toward yet another state.

What followed was a multistate investigation, a murder case built largely on circumstantial evidence, and a second murder case that never reached trial – not because investigat...

On a morning when the country’s attention was fixed on unimaginable tragedy, a Rhode Island family was learning that someone they loved was gone.

In the hours before Nicole Parsons-Bucki died, there had been violence, a police response, and a relationship already under strain, but 25 years later, no one has been charged. That could be because the deeper you look at Nicole’s case, the less simple it becomes: We’re dealing with an uncertain timeline, evidence that disappeared, unanswered questions about who was actually with her, and the possibility that what has seemed obvious for years...

On an ordinary winter night in 1981, danger was moving through the Bangor, Maine area in three different directions at once. A barroom dispute was followed by a deadly blaze. A drug sting was underway at a nearby apartment complex. And a few miles away, a lakeside cabin would be reduced to smoldering rubble before sunrise.

None of those events appeared connected as they unfolded. But the first fire would pull investigators away from the second, some of the names in the sting later surfaced in the cabin arson, and before anyone knew what – or rather, who – was lyin...

In a small New England city, a teenager disappeared after a night in the woods, and almost immediately, the story of what happened fractured.The last people known to be with her gave conflicting accounts. Her family believed the investigation lost precious time. As the years passed, searches kept returning to the same narrow stretch of land, the same handful of names, and the same possibility that someone had been carrying the truth all along.

After decades of searches, whispers and shifting loyalties, someone still knows where to find her. And it’s time to spe...

There are cases that frustrate you because the evidence is thin. And then there are cases where the warning signs seem to be everywhere, but the system still can’t quite turn suspicion into action.

A woman leaves home for a few quiet days away. Weeks later, police find her car in the woods and the man last seen with her is carrying her gun and giving away her personal belongings. Investigators see the pattern. Her family sees the danger. But seeing it and proving it are not the same thing.

As the years pass, th...

Some people disappear from a place you can picture right away: a house, a road, a parking lot, a stretch of woods. But in the case of Edward Sprenkle Dubbs Jr., he seems to vanish somewhere between the parts of his life that made sense on paper. 

He had an office in New York, a home in Connecticut, a train he took like clockwork, and people waiting for him on both ends of the day. When he did not arrive where he was expected, the questions began almost immediately. Did he ever leave the city? Did he m...

Sometimes, on an island, the only witness is the water.

In January of 1980, a brilliant Columbia doctor went to her home on Nantucket’s remote east end carrying the weight of a life’s work, a possible medical breakthrough, and a kind of urgency the people around her struggled to understand. By the next morning, she was gone. No ferry record. No plane tickets. No clear path away from the house. Just a trail of clues that seemed to point in every direction except the answer.

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When someone has been missing for more than thirteen years, it can start to feel from the outside like the story has stopped moving. Like whatever answers existed back then are either gone now or buried too deep to reach. But for Ryan Blagojevic’s family, time has not softened the urgency. His sister Eve is still living inside the search for her brother, still turning over every possibility, still hoping that one piece of information could finally bring Ryan home.

Ryan was last seen in Portland, Maine on March 31, 2013, after he was asked to leave a sh...

Victoria Cushman was just 29 years old when she was found murdered inside her Warwick, Rhode Island apartment, just steps from the sporting goods store where she worked. For years, her family waited for answers and eventually, the case seemed to have them: a suspect known to the case from day one, who investigators said had motive to end Vickie’s life.

The evidence was circumstantial, but it was compelling. A secret relationship. Conflicting statements. A timeline that seemed to close in around one man. To a jury, the pieces fit. But fitting isn’t the same as true...

In the summer of 2018, Trish Haynes disappeared from New Hampshire. Or at least, that’s what the public knew. Investigators searched a rural property, then quietly recovered something from a nearby pond, but for months, they said almost nothing about what they had found or how it related to the missing persons case.

Behind the scenes, Trish’s family was living with a very different reality. They had spent months trying to reach her, hearing shifting explanations about where she was and why she couldn’t come to the phone. Then they learned a truth they were told n...

In 2016, the disappearance of Valerie Tieman became one of the most talked-about cases in Maine in the last decade. At first, there was room for hope, and maybe even a version of the story where Valerie had simply walked away from a life that had become too painful. 

Her husband, Luc Tieman, was a wounded military veteran, a man whose service and struggles shaped how people first understood him. But as investigators followed the trail from a parking lot to a wooded property in central Maine, the story Luc told evolved. Each new version raised a darker q...

On a Friday afternoon in July of 1991, Martha Brailsford told friends she was going sailing.

In coastal Massachusetts at what is often the peak of summer heat and humidity, that wasn’t unusual. Martha knew the water, and in Salem Willows, boats were part of the everyday landscape. There was no reason to think a simple afternoon sail would become anything else.

But when Martha didn’t come home that night, the search for her would expose a man whose stories kept changing, a familiar coastline that suddenly felt unknowable, and a truth hidden somewhere beyo...

Estella Brantley’s murder should have been urgent from the beginning.

She was found in one of Bridgeport’s most visible public places, around witnesses who may have heard her final moments, with evidence that would one day matter more than anyone could have known when it was first collected. But for years, Estella’s case stayed unresolved, folded into a larger city-wide pattern of deadly attacks on women and families left wondering whether anyone was really fighting for them.

Then, decades later, science brought the case back to life. But Estella’s family was still le...

Sometimes, a case can have evidence, a suspect, and a theory investigators believe explains what happened yet a family is still left without the ending they waited decades to hear. 

Grief and justice don’t always move at the same pace. Grief looks for truth, meaning, and someone to answer for what was taken. The justice system looks for proof, and proof has to survive questions, strategy, doubt, and twelve separate minds in a jury room. 

This is a case about a woman killed inside the place where she should have been safest, a family frac...

On a summer weekend in 1982, Barre, Vermont was crowded with music, traffic, and thousands of people moving through town for an annual festival. Somewhere in that noise, an 18-year-old woman disappeared.

In the days that followed, investigators tried to make sense of what little they had: fragments of sightings, possible suspects, conflicting leads, and tests that seemed to narrow the field. But the case did not move cleanly from suspicion to arrest.

Decades later, the same investigation that was first shaped by uncertainty was reopened by science. And this time, the evidence pointed back to...

For nearly 40 years, Kathleen Flynn’s murder has haunted Norwalk, Connecticut. She was 11 years old, newly in middle school, walking home on a familiar path when she was attacked and killed. Her case became one of the state’s most well-known cold cases, the kind people never stopped talking about, and the kind investigators kept returning to as forensic science moved forward. 

In 2019, after decades of waiting, police finally made an arrest. And in 2026, it looked like Kathy’s family might finally see the case reach a verdict. But then, just days into trial, a single email threate...

One spring evening in 1987, a college student got into a green car in Plymouth, New Hampshire and vanished.

His friends believed he was coming back. His family knew he would have called if he’d left on his own. But he was gone, and the man believed to be with him on the night he disappeared had a long history of run-ins with the law.

What started as a missing persons investigation soon stretched across state lines, into jail breaks, forged identities, strange searches in the Vermont woods, and disturbing yet inconclusive physical evidence. 

P...

In February 2008, six women were held hostage in a women’s clothing store in Tinley Park, Illinois.. Rhoda McFarland, Carrie Hudek Chiuso, Connie Woolfolk, Sarah Szafranski, and Jennifer Bishop were executed and the killer escaped leaving only one survivor. In Season 8 of CounterClock, host and investigative journalist Delia D’Ambra covers the Lane Bryant Murders and goes further into the case than any journalist has before. Through firsthand accounts and thousands of documents, Delia reconstructs what happened inside the store, why it may have happened, and who may have been responsible. For nearly twenty years, their families have lived with...

For more than 30 years, Pam Williams believed she knew how her brother died. She was told it was a medical event. The kind of tragedy no one could have stopped. She carried that explanation with her as she tried to rebuild her life around it.

But sometimes the truth doesn’t disappear. It just waits. In 2016, a stranger showed up with questions about what really happened inside a school in rural Maine. A place that promised help, structure, and change for struggling teenagers.

What followed would force Pam to confront a different version of her br...

Some cases appear straightforward at first glance. A late-night crash on a quiet road, a damaged car, and a victim who doesn’t survive. It is the kind of situation people think they understand, and the kind that often gets explained quickly and filed away just as fast. 

But sometimes, there are details that do not quite fit. They can be easy to overlook in the moment. A position that does not make sense. Damage that does not match the outcome. A version of events that works on paper but feels incomplete when examined more closely.

I...

It started like so many Saturday nights at Mountain Park – music, crowded dance floors, and teenagers trying to stretch the night a little longer before heading home. But sometime before midnight on October 5th, 1968, a teenager stepped out of that crowd and into the dark, beginning a walk she would never finish.

In the days after she disappeared, there were delays, missed opportunities, and details that didn’t always line up. Some witnesses came forward, while others stayed quiet, and critical information surfaced only long after it might have made a difference. This case has been stagnant for...

Regina Brown disappeared under troubling circumstances in April of 1987. She was a former flight attendant, a devoted mother of three young children, and a woman whose life had become increasingly defined by fear, control, and violence inside her marriage. Almost four decades later, Regina has never been found.

Her story begins in a close-knit Texas community and follows a whirlwind romance that led her far from home. But behind the scenes, that relationship began to unravel – marked by accusations, intimidation, and escalating threats. In the days before she vanished, Regina confided to someone close to her that sh...

On a Saturday night in late June of 1986, a 20-year-old college student went out with friends in a familiar place, celebrating her softball team’s big win. But in a narrow window of opportunity just after she was dropped off in the shadows outside her apartment building, the young woman faced an evil that managed to stay hidden in those same shadows for decades.

Investigators searched for connections… People who knew her, places she had been, anything that might explain her senseless death. But nothing fit. Leads faded. The case stalled. And over time, it slipped into that...

In the fall of 1976, a woman vanished from her home in rural Vermont sometime between a cup of morning coffee and the end of an ordinary workday. What followed was years of suspicion, rumor, and silence until a witness with questionable credibility stepped forward.

Laurie Gonyo’s case has an ending but not the kind of clean resolution people imagine when they hear the word solved. This is a story about what happens when justice feels incomplete, when a sentence seems too small for the violence at the center of it, and when the killer in one ca...

Fifty years after James Cassidy’s death, there is still no simple explanation for his brutal murder. The evidence left behind in the Maine woods raised questions investigators have never fully answered. And the deeper the investigation went, the more complicated the picture became.

A respected bank executive had vanished, federal authorities were preparing to arrest him, and a burned car was found far from home on a deserted logging road. But the paper trail and the witness accounts pointed in several directions at once – toward financial crimes, toward organized crime figures operating in New England, and towa...

In April of 1976, an anonymous call to a sheriff’s department in Maine alerted investigators to something almost impossible to imagine: a burning station wagon hidden off a remote road, and what looked like a body inside. What they found would open a case filled with contradictions.

The victim was James Cassidy, a Massachusetts bank vice president, father of three, churchgoing family man, and by all accounts someone living a quiet, ordinary life. But in the days before his death, Jim had vanished across state lines, federal authorities were preparing to arrest him on embezzlement charges, and wh...

On a fall morning in 1988, police in Nashua, New Hampshire walked into an apartment and found two women murdered in their bed. What followed seemed, at first, like a case that would never truly reach an ending. 

There were suspects, confessions, trials, and years of legal battles but no final resolution. For decades, the killings of Charlene Ranstrom and Brenda Warner lingered in the background, a file sitting quietly among other unsolved cases. But some investigations refuse to stay buried.

Years later, new detectives took another look. With fresh eyes, new witnesses, and forensic technology t...

On a rainy night in late May 1989, a fire was spotted in a Westport, Connecticut parking lot. Within minutes, first responders realized the impossible: a body was burning in the open. Not long after and just a few miles away, a husband called police to report his wife missing.

Her name was Joan Wertkin. From the outside, she was living an enviable life in one of Connecticut’s most idyllic towns. But as investigators traced her final hours, the case turned into something far more complicated – a tight timeline, a fraying relationship, a car left where it shou...

On an August evening in 1982, children playing in Boston’s Franklin Park stumbled onto a scene that would quietly become one of the city’s most troubling unsolved cases. 

The victim was a 16-year-old girl who had already endured instability, displacement, and independence far beyond her years. Her murder received little attention at the time, but within months, rumors began to swirl: allegations of sexual assault inside a private police club, whispers of a cover-up, and a detective who refused to back down.

On a quiet Saturday night in 1931, a 19-year-old cattle dealer sat at his desk to write a check that he never got the chance to finish signing. 

Investigators were left with more questions than answers – a missing revolver, a name on a check no one could trace, and a household already tangled in rumor and tension. What followed was a shifting investigation, a contested admission, and a trial that forced a small New England city to confront issues of race, reputation, and reasonable doubt.

View source material and photos for this episode at: darkdowneast.com/abr...

Before she vanished, April Grisanti was a young woman trying to find her footing. Then, over the course of one winter night in 1985, she disappeared in plain sight. Witnesses saw her struggle. Police heard her voice asking for help. And yet, April was never seen again.

What followed has never felt like justice. No murder charge. No body. No answers. This is a story about incomplete justice, and about a family left carrying questions the investigation has never fully resolved. Over four decades later, the question still hangs in the air. Where is she?