Love and Murder: Heartbreak to Homicide

A coroner called Albany police with a simple question: were investigators planning to attend the autopsy of a stillborn baby?

Police asked a question back ... what autopsy??

The baby’s 19-year-old mother had recently arrived at a hospital badly injured, and the story investigators were given involved an attack by two strangers on Central Avenue.

But when police started checking that story, they discovered the crime scene wasn’t on Central Avenue at all, and the person they needed to look at was much closer to the victim than anyone had initially been told.

Thomas Strong’s teachers knew something was wrong.

He had lost a startling amount of weight, was eating unusually large amounts of food at school, and then, suddenly, his mother pulled him out altogether. Over the next several weeks, reports about possible starvation, neglect, and isolation kept reaching Oregon child-welfare officials.

But, by the time authorities finally arrived with a court order allowing them to take him into protective custody, the question was no longer whether Thomas needed help ... it was why so many warnings had failed to bring that help sooner.

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Nichole Drummond called 911 from inside her Las Vegas home and told the dispatcher her boyfriend was chasing her with a blowtorch.

Her 14-year-old daughter, Aven, was trapped in another bedroom, smoke was filling the house, and police were already racing toward a scene that was getting more dangerous by the second.

By the time officers arrived, they had a choice to make: wait outside for SWAT or go into a burning house knowing an armed man was somewhere inside.

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Phil Hartman was one of those performers who seemed to be everywhere. Saturday Night Live. The Simpsons. NewsRadio. Behind the scenes, his friends described him as dependable, talented, and the person who held everyone else together.

However, inside his marriage to Brynn Hartman, things had become increasingly complicated.

During the early morning hours of May 28, 1998, one of Brynn’s friends received a confession he initially didn’t believe. By the time police arrived at the Hartman home, two children were still inside, Phil was upstairs, and a family that had looked incredibly successful from the outside was...

Nancy Howery was supposed to pick up her children from school, but she never showed.

Her van was eventually found parked miles away with her groceries, bank cards, and personal belongings still inside.

Then investigators started looking closely at the man Nancy had planned to meet the day she disappeared.

What followed involved changing stories, overnight surveillance, a helicopter with thermal cameras, and a remote stretch of Florida land that would become the center of the entire case.

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When first responders arrived at an Ohio motel for an unresponsive 11-month-old baby, they managed to get her heart beating and help her breathe again.

As they worked, they began noticing injuries that made it clear something was very wrong.

The two adults responsible for caring for her, Jason Santos and Jamilee Hunt, offered an explanation ... then another, but Investigators didn't buy either one.

What doctors eventually discovered would turn that emergency call into a criminal case against the baby’s own father and his girlfriend.

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Hey LaMs, today’s episode is finished, recorded, edited, and ready to go... except my editing platform has apparently decided I don’t need the actual audio file.

Right now, I’m dealing with a technical issue that won’t allow me to download the completed episode, which means I can’t upload it to the podcast feed today.

The episode itself is DONE. I just need technology to release it from captivity.  As soon as I can get the audio downloaded, I’ll get the episode posted for you.

Thank you for being patient with...

Elga Davis II walked into a Florida sheriff’s office with a story that was going to sound almost impossible. His girlfriend was dead and he knew who had done it, and for hours afterward, he said he had been forced to help the people responsible cover up what happened.

As investigators followed Elga’s story from a Riverview home to a remote nature preserve, they began uncovering just how far the people inside that house were willing to go to hide Hiojaira Velez-Bonilla’s death.

The case is still ongoing so everything said in this episod...

Beau and Jackie Shroyer left Minnesota with their five children to become missionaries in Angola.

Then, in October 2024, Beau was killed in a remote area outside Lubango.

At first, his death appeared to be the result of a violent robbery, and the church community back home rallied around Jackie and the children as they tried to process what had happened.

But investigators in Angola soon began finding things that didn’t fit the story they had been given.

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When deputies arrived at an Orlando home for what had been dispatched as a “man-down” call, 80-year-old William Simmons was already waiting outside.

His 83-year-old wife, Nancy, was inside.

And before the deputy had even made it through the garage, William began saying things that immediately changed the nature of the call.

William had spent 25 years as an Orlando police officer himself. Now investigators had to determine what happened inside his own home and whether the decisions he allegedly made during an argument with his wife amounted to first-degree murder.

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Stephen Mooney never denied killing his wife, Anna.

From the night she died, he told emergency responders exactly who had stabbed her, but admitting the killing and admitting murder were two very different things.

Stephen planned to argue that discovering Anna’s affair had caused him to lose control, reducing the crime to manslaughter.

Then, almost two years later, investigators finally managed to unlock a phone Stephen had refused to give them access to.

What they found on it changed the entire case.

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Twenty-four-year-old Erica Bader was living with several people inside a small apartment in Central Falls, Rhode Island, when her friends started worrying that something wasn’t right.

They reached out for help, but the concerns surrounding Erica didn’t go away.

Months later, the case took a devastating turn, and investigators began looking much more closely at the people Erica had been living with and what may have been happening inside that home.

What started as concern for Erica’s safety would eventually lead to multiple arrests and some very serious questions about whether warnin...

When 55-year-old Mark Trent disappeared from his Indiana home, his family immediately knew something wasn’t right. His dogs had been left behind, his wallet was empty, his truck was gone, and a strange Facebook post claimed Mark was “taking a break from everyone, possibly permanently.”
Then his bank cards started moving across the country.

For years, police had surveillance photographs of someone spending Mark’s money, but no body and no proof of exactly what had happened to him.

More than five years later, investigators finally tracked down two people who had once been living i...

Two parents, eight children dead, and in both courtrooms, the question wasn’t really who did it; it was whether the parent who killed them was mentally capable of understanding or controlling what they had done.

Lindsay Clancy’s attorneys said postpartum psychosis took her away from reality. Timothy Ray Jones Jr.’s attorneys pointed to schizophrenia, brain damage, heavy synthetic-marijuana use, and a psychotic break.

But when jurors were asked essentially the same legal question, they responded very differently.
So, what separated these two cases? Was it the type of mental illness? What happened before...

A 5-year-old girl went to a friend’s birthday party in Palmetto, Florida, and came home with something she needed to tell her parents.

She said a man from across the street had taken her away from the party and brought her into his house. Her parents believed her and immediately called police.

That one report led investigators into Christopher Lee Thompson’s home, onto his electronic devices, and eventually into a much bigger question: how many children had been around someone their families believed they could trust?

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Jeffrey Ferguson had spent decades inside California courtrooms, first as a prosecutor and then as a Superior Court judge.

Then one night, his own home became a crime scene.

His wife, Sheryl, was shot during an argument. Their son said he watched his father aim and fire, but Jeffrey said something very different happened.

And one text message sent moments after the shooting would become central to the question jurors eventually had to answer:

Was this a horrific accident, or did a judge who knew exactly how firearms worked intentionally pull the...

Correction: During the episode, I mistakenly stated that Enrique Lopez Gomez pleaded guilty on February 11, 2006. The correct date is February 11, 2026.

When little Anilson Mauricio Perez Gomez stopped breathing, his family told investigators they believed "the evil eye" had made him sick. They had tried treating him at home before finally calling 911.

But doctors quickly discovered that Anilson hadn’t died from an unexplained illness.

And when detectives separated Anilson’s mother from her boyfriend, Enrique Lopez-Gomez, Enrique finally revealed what had really happened inside their apartment that morning.

List...

When two-year-old Macy Grace Ditty was rushed to a North Carolina hospital, her mother said she had gotten sick, choked, and stopped breathing.

But the doctors looking at Macy immediately knew something about that explanation didn’t fit.

Then, while investigators were still trying to determine what happened during Macy’s final days, a series of emotional memorial photographs went viral online, images created for what the photographer believed was a grieving mother.

Years later, those same photographs would look very different.

This is the case of Macy Grace Ditty, a decade-long figh...

When police entered David Castor’s locked bedroom, everything seemed to point toward suicide.

There was alcohol beside the bed, an open container of antifreeze underneath it, and David was already dead.

But Detective Dominick Spinelli couldn’t shake the feeling that something about the scene was wrong.

Then investigators started looking backward into Stacey Castor’s past and discovered that another man close to her had also died suddenly after weeks of mysterious symptoms.

What detectives uncovered next would turn one suspicious death into a case involving antifreeze, a turkey baster, a forg...

Coral Springs Vice Mayor Nancy Metayer Bowen was supposed to attend several meetings on the morning of April 1, 2026.

She never showed up.

Police went to her home, but no one answered the door. Family members were growing increasingly desperate, even begging officers to force their way inside.

But police said they didn’t yet have the legal authority to enter.

Then Nancy’s husband’s uncle called 911.

And what he told the dispatcher changed everything. 


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Allen Franco’s passenger could describe the blue pickup truck, the three men who approached them, and the gunshot that sent Allen’s truck rolling into a ravine, but she couldn’t identify who had pulled the trigger.

For two years, his murder went cold.

Then an anonymous tip gave detectives three names, and one of the men allegedly involved started talking. What emerged was a story about a phone, nude photographs, and a group that went searching for Allen that night to settle a personal grievance. But it would still take nearly a decade before his fa...

On New Year’s Day 2025, police were called to a parking lot behind a downtown Tacoma bar after a woman was seriously injured during an incident involving a pickup truck.

The man behind the wheel was 22-year-old Cameron Boucher, a probationary corrections deputy with the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department. Witnesses said he had been drinking heavily that night, and what they described seeing in the moments before police arrived would lead to a felony charge.

But Cameron’s arrest soon raised another question: how had someone with problems in his background been hired into the sherif...

Two-and-a-half-month-old Londyn Gonzalez was born healthy, but within weeks, her pediatrician noticed something concerning: she was losing weight instead of gaining it.

Her parents, Luis Gonzalez Jr. and Kitrina Udrea, were given specific instructions about what Londyn needed and were scheduled to return so doctors could keep monitoring her.

Weeks later, emergency responders were called to the family’s Cheektowaga, New York, apartment, and what they found raised serious questions about everything that had happened since Londyn’s last doctor visit.

What did investigators uncover when they started looking at the medical records, text mess...

Stein-Erik Soelberg had been struggling for years before he started relying heavily on a personalized ChatGPT chatbot he called “Bobby.”

But instead of consistently challenging his increasingly paranoid beliefs, some of their conversations went in the opposite direction. Bobby told him he was being watched, interpreted ordinary packages as possible assassination attempts, and eventually suggested that his own mother could be involved in surveillance or poisoning him.

Then Suzanne Adams was found dead inside her Connecticut home.

Now her family is asking a much bigger question: when someone can no longer reliably separate reality from...

Gloria Jean Leathers had gone to a police station to make a complaint against her partner, Wanda Jean Allen.

Wanda followed her there.

Minutes later, officers inside the station heard a gunshot.

But what began as a murder case would eventually become something much bigger ... a fight over the death penalty, Wanda’s brain damage and intellectual limitations, an inexperienced attorney, and whether the jury ever heard enough about the woman they were deciding should live or die.

Then, years later, someone unexpected joined the fight to save Wanda’s life:

A relationship dispute in Leesburg, Florida ended with a broken window, damaged property, conflicting accusations, and felony charges.

When deputies arrived, both sides claimed they were the victim. One said she had been attacked inside a home where she believed she still lived. The other said she broke in, destroyed property, and assaulted him.

This episode breaks down the investigation, the witness statements, the physical evidence, and why deputies ultimately decided to make an arrest.

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Ashley Bocanegra thought she was going to meet a man she had been secretly seeing.

Instead, two women were waiting for her.

What started in the parking lot of a Georgia apartment complex was initially described to police as a mutual fight over a man. But hours later, Ashley was dead, and investigators began finding text messages and a cellphone video that told a very different story.

The question quickly became not only what happened to Ashley, but how much of it had been planned before she ever arrived. 

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A woman in Dothan, Alabama, tells her partner to leave after an argument.

Before handing over his belongings, she makes one decision that would soon become incredibly important.

Minutes later, Brantley Lloyd Tolleson allegedly forces his way back inside while she’s on the phone with 911.

Then he points a gun directly at her and pulls the trigger.

What happened next left investigators praising the woman’s quick thinking, and raised a much bigger legal question about intent when the weapon never actually fires.

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Jaie Benson thought she had opened her home to a missionary named Camille.

Then she found a passport hidden in the guest room. The face belonged to the woman sleeping under her roof.

The name did not.

One Google search later, Jaie was reading about dead husbands, a dead friend, an unsolved murder, and decades of rumors surrounding the woman she had just invited into her life.

And suddenly, the question wasn’t just who is this woman?

It was how many times had Sandra Camille Bridewell reinvented herself before som...

A historical true crime case tied to love and murder.

In this episode, Ky welcomes the hosts of Family Plot Podcast: Dean, Laura, and Arthur to tell you the case of Cordelia Botkin.

Cordelia Botkin thought she had found love with married journalist J.P. Dunning.

Then he left San Francisco.

Months later, more than 2,500 miles away in Delaware, J.P.’s wife received an unexpected package of chocolates with a handwritten note signed only, “Mrs. C.”

What happened after that package was opened would connect a broken affair in Califo...

When three roommates were found murdered inside a Virginia rental home, investigators quickly noticed that the newest tenant had vanished.

What followed was a multistate manhunt, a high-speed chase, and evidence that would connect Alyssa Venable to the murders of Robert McGuire, Gregory Powell, and Carol Reese.

This episode traces how a quiet shared home became the scene of a triple homicide, and the clues Alyssa allegedly left behind before disappearing.

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Do you have thoughts about this case, or is there a...