Crimes of the Centuries

Faith Hedgepeth was 19 when she was beaten to death in her off-campus apartment in September 2012. It took nine years to make an arrest, and five more to get Miguel Salguero-Olivares in front of a jury. At trial, Faith’s former roommate, long the internet’s favorite suspect, took the stand while the defense suggested she had killed her best friend. Testimony also exposed mistakes investigators made, and some of them are hard to forgive. (No regular COTC this week, so Amber is bringing you this update on a case we first covered as a Future COTC?.)

In November 1990, something terrible happened inside a stall at one of the most storied farms in Kentucky. The victim was worth millions. The people around him were drowning in debt. And when an injury that initially looked survivable turned fatal, the questions started almost immediately: Was this really an accident? Or had someone at Calumet Farm decided a death was worth more than a life?

Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark and helped change history. You can get early and ad-free episodes...

Happy Halloween, everybody. I thought I'd mark the occasion by revisiting one of the most chilling stories we've ever covered, that of Ronald O'Bryan, the man who came dangerously close to ruining Halloween for everybody. Because while we spend this time of year dressing up as monsters and pretending to be scared of things that go bump in the night, this story is a reminder that sometimes the scariest monsters are the people closest to us. So grab some candy, check for tampering, and settle in for this encore episode of Crimes of the Centuries. 

On Christmas Eve 1870, a chaotic brawl inside a Hamilton, Ohio gambling saloon left notorious ruffian Thomas Myers dead from a mysterious gunshot. The state quickly pinned the murder on political operator Thomas McGehean, triggering a sensational series of Gilded Age trials wrapped up in a multi-million-dollar federal whiskey ring. Defense attorney Clement L. Vallandigham was so sure of his own theory about the shooting that he staged a demonstration to prove it — and shot himself in the process.

Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a...

When 16-year-old John Paul Getty III was kidnapped from a Roman street in 1973, his captors thought they’d chosen the perfect target: the grandson of the richest man in the world. They hadn’t counted on J. Paul Getty refusing to pay. As weeks turned into months and the kidnappers grew increasingly desperate, a teenager already struggling under the weight of his famous name would pay a horrifying price for his family’s fortune.

Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark and helped change...

Through the 1970s and ’80s, women were being raped and murdered in northwest Fort Lauderdale, and police kept hearing the same name: Eddie Lee Mosley. He was arrested, questioned, identified and released again and again. And somehow, while Mosley remained free, two other men paid for his crimes instead. 

Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark and helped change history. You can get early and ad-free episodes and more over at www.grabbagcollab.com

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In 1907, Ireland’s Crown Jewels vanished from Dublin Castle just days before a royal visit. The hunt for them led into the private lives of aristocrats, con men and royal insiders — and whispers of secret relationships, blackmail and a scandal nobody in power particularly wanted dragged into the light.

Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark and helped change history. You can get early and ad-free episodes and more over at www.grabbagcollab.com

Order the Crimes of the Centuries book at y...

For years, famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright had made headlines for his personal life. After all, he'd left his wife and six children for a married woman during the Victorian era, and made no apologies for the two "living in sin" in a home he built on family land in Wisconsin. Then, on a hot August day in 1914, Wright's whole world came crashing down: A murderer had attacked his so-called Love Cottage dubbed Taliesin. The case not only riveted the nation, but it also changed the course of architecture in America. 

"Crimes of the Centuries" is a p...

Fourteen-year-old Shelly Boggio was found stabbed and drowned off a Florida beach in 1985. Two men were convicted of her murder — but the case against one of them depended heavily on the word of Paul Skalnik, a serial con man and prolific jailhouse informant who claimed his fellow prisoners had a remarkable habit of confessing to him. Skalnik would help send dozens of people to prison and four men to death row. Journalist Pamela Colloff, author of the new book Catch the Devil, joins us to examine Shelly’s murder, the case that followed, and what happens when the justice system deci...

On September 5, 1982, 12-year-old Johnny Gosch left his West Des Moines home to deliver newspapers. He never made it back. What followed was a police chief with his own violent history, an FBI that wanted nothing to do with it, and a mother who refused to let the case go quiet — even when the few answers she found led somewhere far stranger than anyone expected.

Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark and helped change history. You can get early and ad-free episodes and mo...

A con man with a gift for talking fast and a knack for never getting caught made himself invaluable to the FBI in the late 1970s — and the FBI made him the centerpiece of the biggest political corruption sting in a generation. It never should have worked, yet it went further than anyone expected.

Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark and helped change history. You can get early and ad-free episodes and more over at www.grabbagcollab.com

Order the Cr...

In 1979, a federal judge in San Antonio was known for one thing above all else: He did not show mercy. John H. Wood Jr. had earned his nickname the hard way, one maximum sentence at a time. Just before he was set to face off with a powerful drug empire, he was killed outside his home in broad daylight. What followed would become the most expensive FBI investigation since the Kennedy assassination, a courtroom circus involving a Las Vegas kingpin, a hitman with the world's most unusual business card, and a famous son fighting to clear his father's name.<...

The roaring '20s of last century were fueled in part by a new industry: filmmaking in Hollywood. Directors were rolling in dough, as were the silver screen's first stars. But in 1921, the future of cinema would forever be altered after internationally beloved comedian Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle was charged in the death of a young starlet after attending a boozy Prohibition-era party in Arbuckle's hotel suite. 

Please enjoy this encore episode from Season 1, sparked by a listener suggestion who'd missed it in our lineup. 

"Crimes of the Centuries" is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab ex...

A young woman named Elsie Cameron vanished after delivering an ultimatum to her fiancé, chicken farmer Norman Thorne. Weeks later, investigators dug up his property and found her dismembered remains buried in an unmistakable place — the same spot where he'd posed for a photograph days earlier, smiling, surrounded by his birds. Thorne had an explanation. It was a strange one. And the only person whose opinion would really matter in deciding whether to believe it was a man whose word, by 1925, was treated as close to unimpeachable in a British courtroom. A jury took less than 30 minutes to decide who was...

Weeks after a woman's mysterious disappearance, a ship's captain noticed something off about two of his passengers — a quiet, bespectacled man and his teenage "son." He couldn't shake the feeling he'd seen that face somewhere recently. So he did something no ship's captain had ever been able to do before: He alerted police, instantly, from the middle of the ocean that two murder suspects might be aboard his vessel. What followed was one of the strangest manhunts in criminal history, and a case that would later split a forensic field down the middle more than 100 years later.

Cr...

For three years in the late 1970s and into 1980 — before shared databases and DNA evidence — one man moved freely across 11 states trying to start a race war. He changed his name to honor a Nazi propagandist and a founding father. He bombed synagogues, gunned down interracial couples, shot a magazine publisher in broad daylight, and left whole communities living in fear of a killer they couldn't identify.

Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark and helped change history. You can get early and ad-f...

Three people vanished from a Memphis home in February 1994. A week later, they turned up in a local cemetery, buried in a grave dug for someone else's funeral — held the day after they disappeared, with mourners who had no idea what was beneath the casket. Tony Carruthers was convicted of the murders in 1996, representing himself after burning through six court-appointed attorneys. Thirty years, one botched execution, and one recanted medical examiner later, Tennessee still hasn't tested the DNA that might resolve the crime.

Investigators were certain they knew who killed Leslie Preer. Their main suspect had motive, a suspicious alibi, and a failed polygraph. Investigators had everything they needed — except the right guy. Twenty-three years later with a pair of fresh detectives, a water bottle at Dulles Airport told a very different story.

Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark and helped change history. You can get early and ad-free episodes and more over at www.grabbagcollab.com

Order the Crimes of the Centuries bo...

Twenty-two-year-old Fred Korematsu was parked on a San Francisco hillside with his girlfriend, listening to music on the car radio, when the broadcast stopped on Dec. 7, 1941. In the weeks that followed, the U.S. government imprisoned 120,000 people based solely on their ancestry. Fred, a California-born welder who had tried to register for the draft on the very first day he could, decided he wasn’t going anywhere. His decision would lead to one of the most consequential civil liberties cases in American history, and a decades-long effort to prove something that should never have needed proving.

Crimes of...

On the night of Oct. 23, 1989, Chuck Stuart called 911 from a car phone in Boston's Mission Hill neighborhood, his voice strained with panic. He said he and his wife Carol had been shot by a Black man. Within hours, Boston police had launched the most intensive manhunt in the city's history — tearing through a predominantly Black neighborhood, stopping and searching anyone who dared answer their door or walk the streets. They were certain they knew what had happened. They were wrong in ways that would take decades to reckon with.

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Dozens of Girl Scouts arrived at Camp Scott in the Oklahoma woods in June of 1977 expecting songs, crafts and campfires. By morning, three of the girls were dead, their bodies discovered along a dirt path called Cookie Trail Road. The investigation that followed became the largest manhunt in Oklahoma history, fueled accusations of corruption and racism, and left behind a mystery that still divides people nearly 50 years later.

Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark and helped change history. You can get early...

In Victorian England, a serial killer preyed on sex workers and other vulnerable women, targeting the people society was least likely to mourn or protect. But unlike the infamous Jack the Ripper, whose identity remains one of history's great unsolved mysteries, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream had a name, a medical degree, and a chilling willingness to use both. Cream weaponized his professional knowledge, exploiting the trust his victims placed in him as a physician to devise methods that were slower, more calculated, and in many ways more sinister than anything the Ripper was known for. When he was finally caught...

In 1884 Cincinnati, a string of brutal murders and a verdict that outraged the public set off a chain of events that would end in one of the darkest moments in American history — the largest massacre of unarmed civilians by National Guard troops on U.S. soil. In Truth Deferred, historians Mike and Amy Morgan investigate what actually happened — and present the truth that was deliberately buried for over 140 years. While Amber's on vacation, we share Episode 1 of Truth Deferred: The story starts on Monday, March 31, 1884. The streets are covered in blood. Over 50 people are dead, and some are dying in the...

When a 22-year-old woman living with relatives in a boarding house disappeared on Dec. 22, 1799, her loved ones didn't immediately worry. But when she still hadn't returned days later, all eyes turned to her lover, whom she'd supposedly been set to marry the last time she was seen alive. Levi Weeks came from a family with money, so his rich brother did something that was unheard of at this point in American history: He hired fancy lawyers. And that's how Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr ended up on the same side defending a man against murder charges in 1800. The case, referenced i...

Amber's on vacation, so she's yanking an episode of The Catalyst from behind the paywall over at Grab Bag Collab. Dive deep into the upbringing and backstories of individuals who committed history's most notorious crimes, shedding light on the psychological factors that shaped their paths. With a suspenseful twist, the identities of these individuals won’t be unveiled until the end of each episode. ‘The Catalyst’ will unravel the complex narratives behind these disturbing cases and try to understand what triggered them. This episode is called "The Traveler."

To get our back catalog of Catalyst episodes, plus all of...

In September 2012, a 19-year-old UNC-Chapel Hill student was found beaten to death in her off-campus apartment. She was a biology major, a member of the Haliwa-Saponi tribe, and weeks away from her twentieth birthday. Despite DNA evidence collected from the scene on day one, her case went cold for nine agonizing years — generating hundreds of DNA tests, thousands of interviews, and an internet's worth of amateur theories that muddied the waters and targeted people who had never been charged. An arrest has since been made, and trial is set for September. But questions about what was preserved, what was lost, an...

In 1859, a wealthy Alabama landowner made a bet that he could do the unthinkable. The next spring, he did just that — trafficking human beings from West Africa to the United States a half-century after it had been made a federal crime punishable by death. The Clotilda brought back 110 men, women and children. For more than 150 years, the ship sat buried in the mud of a Mobile Bay bayou, as if the whole thing had never happened.

Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark an...

One April morning in 1948, a tenant farmer named Wilson Turner walked out of a rural Georgia jail and into an ambush. The man waiting for him owned 2,000 acres known as The Kingdom, a moonshine empire, and the county sheriff. What followed was a murder investigation that drew 500 lawmen from across the state — and a verdict few in Meriwether County saw coming. This is the real story behind Murder in Coweta County.

Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark and helped change history. You ca...

After three people died on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie, it took four years to get five defendants into a courtroom and another 10 months before anyone knew how it would end. What unfolded in between was part legal battle, part Hollywood spectacle and entirely unlike anything the film industry had faced before. Part two of two.

Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark and helped change history. You can get early and ad-free episodes and more over at www.grabbagcollab.com<...

In the early morning hours of July 23, 1982, cameras were rolling at a California filming location when a helicopter crashed into a river, killing actor Vic Morrow and two young children, Renee Chen and Myca Le. It was called a tragic accident. But the more investigators looked, the harder that word was to defend. Part one of two.

Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark and helped change history. You can get early and ad-free episodes and more over at www.grabbagcollab.com
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On a hot July morning in 1889, two adults were found murdered in their beds on a small Iowa farm, shot and bludgeoned to death while they slept. The only witness was an 11-year-old boy who said a stranger had done it. What followed was a legal and moral reckoning that divided the country and forced a question the American justice system wasn't remotely prepared to answer: What do you do with a child who kills?

Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark and...

You've heard the name. You've read the headlines. But the Alex Murdaugh story is bigger than one man's spectacular fall — bigger, even, than two people's horrific deaths. It's about the century of institutional rot that made it all possible. In this bonus episode of "Future Crimes of the Centuries?", Amber looks beyond the expected retrial to the people whose stories got buried under the spectacle: a housekeeper who died at the Murdaugh estate and whose sons were swindled, a 19-year-old whose suspicious death was treated as a traffic accident for years, and the clerk of court so convinced the system wo...

A young mother from a tiny Kentucky hollow vanished without a trace in 1989, leaving behind her clothes, her makeup and her two children. She'd been working as an informant for FBI Agent Mark Putnam, so her family held onto one hope: Maybe she'd finally gotten the fresh start she'd always dreamed of through the federal witness protection program. It would take a year to find out the truth about what happened to Susan Daniels Smith. And it was worse than anyone had imagined.

Dr. Harini Bhat is a clinical pharmacist and storyteller obsessed with the moments in history that still can't be fully explained. Every week she investigates real events that defy easy explanation. Mass hysterias. Vanished civilizations. Medical oddities. Strange signals. Unexplained phenomena that keep repeating across centuries, as if history is trying to tell us something.
Hidden History doesn't dismiss ancient events as myth or superstition. It treats them as open case files, shaped by the limits of knowledge, technology, and record-keeping. Because the unknown isn't a failure of explanation. It's a constant in human experience, one that evolves, repeats...

In 1978, a nine-year-old girl in a red coat went looking for a kind man she'd met at a train station. She never came home. Over the next 12 years, at least 52 more would follow. But in the Soviet Union's supposed utopia, serial killers didn't exist — and a government more committed to its own mythology than to its citizens would pay a terrible price for that belief. 

Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark and helped change history. You can get early and ad-free episodes and...

In 1991, investigators of a house fire in Corsicana, Texas, concluded the fatal blaze was arson, pointing to burn patterns they said proved someone had deliberately turned the house into a death trap. They zeroed in on Cameron Todd Willingham as the one who ignited the inferno. But in the years that followed, a growing number of fire scientists began questioning whether the evidence used to convict him was ever sound in the first place, raising enduring doubts about one of the most controversial death penalty cases in modern Texas history.

Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast...

On the night of January 31st, 2026, 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie was dropped off at her home in the Catalina Foothills outside Tucson, Arizona. By morning, the mother of one of America's most famous TV news personalities had vanished. Nearly three months later, she's still missing. In this bonus episode, Crimes of the Centuries steps outside its usual format to ask some questions about how this investigation has been handled — questions that deserve answers whether or not we ever get them.

In 1949, a headless, legless torso surfaced in the Essex marshes, setting off one of Britain’s most sensational postwar murder investigations. The victim was Stanley Setty, a black-market car dealer. The suspect was Donald Hume, a small-time crook, chronic liar and pilot who rented a plane the night Setty disappeared but swore he had nothing to do with the gruesome killing.

Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark and helped change history. You can get early and ad-free episodes and more over at ww...

In 1945, a reverend, a realtor, a science teacher, and a white woman in a low-cut dress conspired to help a St. Louis couple buy a house. The couple had steady jobs, a down payment, and six children who needed a safe home. What they didn't have was permission — at least not according to a clause buried in the property's deed. Their attempt to move in triggered outrage from neighbors, a lawsuit, and a legal battle that climbed all the way to the United States Supreme Court, resulting in the landmark 1948 ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer.

Crimes of th...

In May 1988, a church bus returning to Kentucky was struck head-on by a wrong-way driver. Within seconds, it became an inferno. As families searched for answers, an unsettling truth emerged: The children had been trapped inside a bus never designed to protect them. The Carrollton bus tragedy is a story about how grief collided with corporate power, government delay tactics and America’s evolving reckoning with drunken driving.