The Guilty Files

Earlier this week, you heard the facts about Susan Smith. You heard about the burgundy Mazda rolling into John D. Long Lake. You heard about Michael and Alex. But this episode goes deeper into the details that didn't make the nightly news.We start with Susan's father Harry, who shot himself in the driveway when Susan was six years old, just hours after telling her he loved her. We examine the arrival of stepfather Beverly Russell, a pillar of the community, a Christian Coalition leader, and a predator who began sexually abusing Susan when she was fifteen and continued until...

On the night of October 25, 1994, Susan Smith stood on a boat ramp at John D. Long Lake in Union, South Carolina, and made a choice that would horrify the nation. She released the emergency brake on her burgundy Mazda Protégé and watched it roll into the dark water with her two sons still strapped in their car seats.

Three-year-old Michael and fourteen-month-old Alex drowned in that lake while their mother ran to a nearby house and told a lie that would captivate America for nine days. Susan claimed a Black man had carjacked her at gunpoint and dr...

On July 27, 1981, six-year-old Adam Walsh vanished from a Sears department store at the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida. Two weeks later, fishermen discovered his severed head in a drainage canal near Vero Beach. His body was never found. This case would transform America's approach to missing children forever, but the question of who actually killed Adam Walsh remains deeply contested to this day. In this episode of The Redacted Report, we go beyond the official narrative to explore the details that rarely make it into documentaries and news specials. 

We examine the seventeen-year-old security guard whose fateful decision t...

On July 27, 1981, six-year-old Adam Walsh vanished from a Sears department store in Hollywood, Florida, and America was never the same. This episode of The Guilty Files Podcast examines one of the most infamous child abduction cases in American history, tracing every devastating detail from that summer afternoon at the Hollywood Mall to the sixteen-year investigation that would ultimately point to drifter and serial killer Ottis Toole.

We explore the catastrophic failures in evidence handling that allowed a prime suspect to escape justice for decades, the heartbreaking discovery along the Florida Turnpike that confirmed every parent's worst nightmare, and...

In this episode, we go beyond the sanitized headlines and Netflix documentaries to examine the Ted Bundy case you were never supposed to know about, including the suppressed files, the buried reports, and the institutional failures that allowed one of America's most prolific serial killers to operate for years longer than he ever should have.

We begin with Bundy's troubled origins at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers, his violent grandfather Samuel Cowell, his grandmother's severe mental illness and electroconvulsive treatments, the family secret that made him believe his mother was his sister, and the chilling incident...

In this episode, we take an unflinching look at one of the most notorious serial killers in American history. Theodore Robert Bundy murdered at least thirty women across seven states during the 1970s, and his case forever changed how we understand the nature of predatory violence.

This is the complete story of Ted Bundy, from his troubled beginnings to his final moments in Florida's electric chair. We open on a summer afternoon at Lake Sammamish State Park in Washington State, where a handsome young man with his arm in a sling approached woman after woman, asking for help...

On September 20, 1988, nineteen-year-old Terra Leigh Calico set out on her morning bike ride along Highway 47 in Valencia County, New Mexico. She never came home. In the nearly 37 years since her disappearance, this case has become one of America's most haunting unsolved mysteries, defined by a chilling Polaroid photograph discovered in a Florida parking lot and decades of whispered accusations that have never led to justice. But the story most people know is only part of the truth. 

In this episode of The Redacted Report, we pull back the curtain on the facts that never made it into the o...

On 09/20/1988, 19-year-old Tara Leigh Calico left her home in Belen, New Mexico, for her daily bike ride along Highway 47. She never returned. Nearly four decades later, her disappearance remains one of the most haunting and controversial missing persons cases in American history.

This episode of The Guilty Files traces Tara’s life from her childhood and active years at Belen High School to her studies in psychology at the University of New Mexico–Valencia Campus. We examine the morning she vanished, including her final conversation with her mother and witness reports of a light-colored 1953 Ford pickup truck following clos...

On April 20th, 1999, two seniors walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado and committed what was then the deadliest school shooting in American history. Thirteen innocent people lost their lives that day, and the images of terrified students fleeing with their hands raised became seared into America's collective memory. The mainstream narrative has been told countless times, dissected in documentaries, and dramatized in films.

But that narrative, the one carefully curated and presented to the public for over twenty five years, is incomplete. In some cases, it's outright false.In this episode of The Redacted Report, we...

April 20, 1999 changed everything we thought we understood about safety, about schools, and about the capacity for violence within our own communities. In this episode of The Guilty Files, we take a comprehensive and unflinching look at the Columbine High School massacre, cutting through decades of misinformation to separate fact from myth in one of the most misunderstood crimes in American history. Nearly everything the public believes about Columbine has been shaped by early media errors, cultural panic, and narratives that simply do not hold up under scrutiny. The so-called Trenchcoat Mafia was never a factor. 

The idea that E...

On September fifth, nineteen eighty two, twelve year old Johnny Gosch walked out of his West Des Moines home before dawn to deliver newspapers and vanished without a trace. His case changed America forever, leading to the first missing child on a milk carton and landmark legislation that transformed how we handle abducted children.

But the story most people know barely scratches the surface of what really happened.In this episode of The Redacted Report, we dig into the buried facts, the covered-up connections, and the questions that powerful people have spent four decades trying to silence.We...

On September 5, 1982, 12-year-old paperboy Johnny Gosch left his West Des Moines home before dawn to deliver the Des Moines Register—and never returned. His red wagon was found two blocks away, still loaded with undelivered papers. Witnesses reported Johnny speaking with a stocky man near a blue two-toned car, and another man seen trailing him moments later. Within minutes, Johnny vanished.

In this episode, we dig into one of America’s most chilling missing-child cases—and the fallout that changed the country. We reconstruct Johnny’s last morning, then unravel an investigation marked by early missteps and delays that fue...

This episode of The Redacted Report takes a hard, clear-eyed look at the Golden State Killer case, not by retelling the headlines everyone already knows, but by sitting in the uncomfortable spaces where the story actually lives.

We follow the arc from Joseph James DeAngelo’s earliest known crimes in 1974 through his arrest in 2018 and sentencing in 2020, with one chilling fact threaded through every phase: while California was being terrorized, DeAngelo was also an active-duty police officer. He wasn’t just hiding from law enforcement—he was learning how it worked from the inside, and that advantage shaped the wa...

In this week’s deep-dive, we’re taking you into a case that haunted California for decades and still sends a chill through anyone who reads the details. For more than ten years, a masked predator moved through neighborhoods like a ghost — breaking into homes, stalking families, and leaving devastation behind. The numbers alone are staggering: over a hundred burglaries, at least fifty sexual assaults, and thirteen confirmed murders. He slipped between counties and police departments, stayed a step ahead of massive task forces, and then — somehow — disappeared. Not into the shadows, but into ordinary suburban life, where he lived free for m...

In this deeply personal and explosive episode of The Redacted Report, Brian — a former Atlanta police officer with sixteen years on the job — breaks his silence about one of the most devastating and shameful incidents in modern APD history. On November 21, 2006, ninety-two-year-old Kathryn Johnston was shot and killed in her own home during a botched narcotics raid that ultimately exposed systemic corruption inside the Atlanta Police Department.

Brian goes beyond the early headlines and the department’s initial story — the one that falsely portrayed Johnston as a drug dealer who fired first — and lays out what really happened: a chain of...

This case is personal. It happened just months before I began my career with the Atlanta Police Department, and it shaped the way I understood the job, the institution, and the stakes of unchecked power. On November 21, 2006, three Atlanta Police Department narcotics officers executed a no-knock warrant at 933 Neal Street in northwest Atlanta—the home of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston. 

The warrant was built entirely on fabrication. Officers Jason Smith, Gregg Junnier, and Arthur Tesler claimed a confidential informant had bought crack cocaine from the residence earlier that day. No buy occurred. There was no dealer, no “Sam,” no surveil...

In this deep-dive episode of The Redacted Report, host Brian cuts through fifty years of myth, speculation, and misinformation surrounding America’s most infamous unidentified killer. This is the Zodiac story told without sensationalism—an investigation grounded in confirmed facts, disputed evidence, and the uncomfortable gray areas that have fueled decades of obsession.

Brian begins by laying out the difference between what investigators know, what they suspect, and what the Zodiac himself claimed. He revisits the confirmed attacks—from the 1968 Lake Herman Road murders to the killing of San Francisco cab driver Paul Stine—along with the crucial survivor...

In the summer of 1969, the San Francisco Chronicle received a letter that would ignite one of the most infamous investigations in American history. Inside was a chilling confession, a cryptic cipher, and the signature that would terrify the nation: a circle with a cross through it. T

 We trace every confirmed attack, beginning with the Lake Herman Road murders of teenage sweethearts David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen—an ambush that seemed random until the killer later claimed it as his own. From there, we follow the trail to Blue Rock Springs, where Darlene Ferrin was killed and Mic...

Tonight on The Redacted Report, we reopen the case file on one of America’s most infamous crimes—the 1966 massacre of eight student nurses in Chicago. The world knows the headline: one survivor, one killer, Richard Speck. But the real story didn’t make the newspapers, and it never made the documentaries.

That story begins here.We trace Speck’s path long before the murders, uncovering early psychiatric evaluations, head trauma, and behavioral red flags buried in government archives—warnings ignored until it was far too late. Records from Texas expose a trail of violence against women that mirror the...

On a sweltering July night in 1966, eight young student nurses gathered in their modest Chicago townhouse, studying, laughing, and planning for bright futures devoted to healing others. By dawn, all but one would be dead — victims of a crime so brutal and senseless that it forever changed how Americans understood violence, safety, and evil itself. In this powerful episode of The Guilty Files, we revisit one of the darkest nights in American history — the Richard Speck murders. 

We begin with Speck’s troubled childhood in rural Illinois, tracing his transformation from an abused and neglected boy into a violent...

In this episode of The Redacted Report, we reopen the case of Edmund Kemper, the so-called “Co-Ed Killer,” to expose the details that were buried in thousands of pages of police files, psychiatric evaluations, and trial transcripts.

This isn’t the version told in documentaries or dramatizations. This is the story of how a system failed, how warning signs were missed, and how one of California’s most intelligent predators learned to play both sides of the law .Ed Kemper wasn’t just hiding in plain sight — he was sitting at the bar with the very officers searching for him. 

In this gripping and deeply unsettling episode, we explore one of the most disturbing and well-documented cases in American criminal history — the story of Edmund Emil Kemper III, better known as The Co-Ed Killer. Between 1964 and 1973, Kemper brutally murdered ten people, including his grandparents and his own mother, leaving behind a trail of horror that still haunts true crime history. But this isn’t just another serial killer story. 

This is an examination of transformation — how a damaged child became a monster, how the system failed at every possible turn, and how a killer managed to hide in plain s...

For over thirty years, Wichita, Kansas lived in fear of a man who called himself BTK — Bind, Torture, Kill. He murdered ten people, including children, and then vanished for years at a time, taunting police and the press with letters that were as cruel as the crimes themselves.

 But the most disturbing part of this story isn’t just the brutality of his murders — it’s how Dennis Rader, the man behind BTK, managed to live a perfectly ordinary life right in plain sight. He was a husband. A father. A church council president.

A city complianc...

In this gripping episode of The Guilty Files Podcast, we go beyond the headlines and dive deep into one of America’s most haunting true crime stories — the life and legacy of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer. “Bind. Torture. Kill.” Three words that held an entire city hostage for more than three decades while a monster disguised himself as an ordinary man.

Dennis Rader wasn’t the drifter or loner that popular culture paints as a serial killer. He was a husband, a father, a Boy Scout leader, and the council president of his church. By day, he enforced c...

Keith Hunter Jesperson wanted the world to know his name.
He wanted the spotlight, the ink, the infamy—so badly that when his first murder was pinned on someone else, he couldn’t stand it. That’s when the crude smiley faces started showing up on letters to police and the media, signed by the man who would become known as the Happy Face Killer.

But in this ReWired episode, we dig beneath the sensational headlines and handwritten taunts to ask the bigger questions: What makes someone so desperate for recognition that they risk everything just to be see...

In this week’s Uncovered episode, Brian dives into the chilling case of Keith Hunter Jesperson—better known as the Happy Face Killer.Jesperson was a long-haul trucker with a deadly double life, using the open road to mask a cross-country killing spree in the early 1990s.

While police and the public remained unaware, Jesperson began anonymously confessing to his crimes—signing his letters with a chilling smiley face.

But this is more than just a story of a murderer on the move. It's a cautionary tale of missteps in criminal justice, a media frenzy that target...

In this haunting episode of The Guilty Files: Rewired, Dani pulls back the layers of the infamous Clutter family murders—not just to revisit the crime, but to reimagine the emotional and psychological shockwave it left behind.This isn’t a retelling of the facts—that’s already been done.

Instead, Dani dives deep into the psyche of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, the two drifters whose fractured paths led them to one brutal night in Holcomb, Kansas. What made them tick? How did childhood trauma, cycles of poverty, and a hunger for significance culminate in the cold-blooded executio...

In this episode of The Guilty Files: True Crime Uncovered, Brian takes us back to the heartland of America—Holcomb, Kansas—where one of the most chilling and senseless mass murders in U.S. history occurred. On the night of November 15, 1959, four members of the Clutter family were brutally murdered in their own home, sending shockwaves through a tight-knit farming community and eventually capturing the nation’s attention.

Brian lays out the cold, hard facts of the case—from the meticulous planning by ex-convicts Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, to the terrifying final hours of Herbert, Bonnie, Nancy, and Keny...

In this gripping ReWired episode, Dani peels back the layers of Randy Steven Kraft’s chilling legacy as the Scorecard Killer. With a twisted ledger of cryptic notations and a pattern of meticulously targeted victims, Kraft wasn’t just killing—he was keeping score.

This isn’t about gore for gore’s sake. It’s about decoding power, control, and the dark psychology that drives a killer to turn murder into a methodical game.Dani challenges listeners to look beyond the headlines and into the structured chaos of Kraft’s mind. What does his scorecard truly reveal about the way he vie...

In this chilling installment of The Guilty Files Uncovered, Brian dives deep into the twisted psyche of one of America’s most meticulous and methodical serial killers—Randy Kraft, the man known as the Scorecard Killer.

With a body count that may exceed 60, Kraft’s trail of terror left Southern California and beyond scarred by brutal, calculated murders—each victim a tragic entry on a cryptic and haunting “scorecard” list found in Kraft’s car upon arrest.

Brian peels back the layers of Kraft’s double life—a seemingly clean-cut computer consultant by day, and sadistic predator by night...

Brian approaches the case like a detective on a cold trail: revisiting the timeline, scrutinizing law enforcement’s shifting strategy, and examining what’s been revealed—and what’s been redacted. Dani peels back the emotional and psychological layers, exploring trauma, fear, and how this case embedded itself in the soul of an entire community.

From the chilling Snapchat video to the strange behavior of the suspect now in custody, we go beyond the known facts and push into the uncomfortable space between justice and uncertainty. This isn’t just about who did it. It’s about how it happened...

Two young girls. A quiet Indiana trail. A haunting video.
And the three chilling words:
“Guys… down the hill.”In this week’s ReWired episode, Dani takes the reigns and rips the veil off one of the most disturbing and heavily speculated true crime cases of our time — the Delphi Murders.

We know the names: Abby Williams and Libby German.
We’ve seen the sketch. We’ve heard the voice.
But have we really understood the story?🔥 In this immersive and brutally honest deep-dive, Dani dissects more than just the facts — we tear into the why, the how, a...

On February 13, 2017, two best friends went for a walk on the Monon High Bridge Trail in Delphi, Indiana.
By the next day, their bodies were found — and a haunting mystery began.In this Uncovered episode, Brian delivers a methodical, fact-based breakdown of one of the most heartbreaking and puzzling cases in recent true crime history: the murders of Abigail Williams and Liberty German.No speculation. No conspiracy. Just the timeline, the evidence, and the roadblocks that have made this case linger for more than half a decade in the public eye.

🔎 In this episode, Brian covers:
A det...

When charm turns lethal and lies wear a thousand faces, how do you stop a killer hiding in plain sight?In this co-hosted episode of The Guilty Files: Revisited, Brian and Dani peel back the layers of one of the most disturbing cases to hit the American South: the case of Jeremy Bryan Jones. A drifter with a gift for manipulation and a trail of stolen identities, Jones moved through states like a ghost—leaving behind a path of devastation, shattered families, and unanswered questions.

Brian brings the procedural heat, diving into the investigative missteps, multi-jurisdictional chaos, and re...

He was charming. He was convincing. And for more than a decade, Jeremy Bryan Jones was a shapeshifter moving through the Deep South—stealing names, slipping past suspicion, and leaving behind only victims and lies.In this week’s ReWired episode, Dani pulls back the curtain on the illusion, dismantling the mythology of a drifter who turned murder into a method of survival.

This isn’t just a retelling of Jones’s crimes—it’s a confrontation with the systems, the psychology, and the societal blind spots that allowed a predator to keep moving, even as bodies piled up in his wa...

In this gripping episode of The Guilty Files: Uncovered, Brian unpacks the chilling story of Jeremy Bryan Jones—a charismatic drifter who used charm, stolen identities, and the cracks in the system to hide in plain sight across the American South. For over a decade, Jones drifted from state to state under the name John Paul Chapman, manipulating those around him, passing background checks, and leaving behind a trail of violence that went undetected for far too long.

But in September 2004, a natural disaster set in motion a series of events that would finally expose the predator beneath th...

In this week's Revisited episode, Brian and Dani pull no punches as they dive into the chilling case of Gary Michael Hilton—the so-called “National Forest Serial Killer.” With his string of murders stretching across state lines and spanning years, Hilton’s case exposes glaring gaps in communication between law enforcement jurisdictions and raises disturbing questions about how someone so unstable could fly under the radar for so long.

Brian brings a procedural breakdown of the timeline, the forensic fumbles, and the legal aftermath, while Dani takes us deep into the psychological shadows—unpacking Hilton’s erratic behaviors, emotional de...

In this emotionally charged episode of The Guilty Files: Revisited, Brian and Dani take on one of the most haunting and high-profile true crime cases of the last decade: the disappearance and murder of Gabby Petito.From the outside, Gabby’s story looked like a dream life shared through van-life vlogs and Instagram-perfect snapshots. But as Brian and Dani dig deeper into the case file, they expose the far more disturbing truth beneath the curated lens of social media.

What begins as a chronological walk-through of Gabby and Brian Laundrie’s cross-country trip quickly turns into a sobering exam...

This week on The Guilty Files, things look a little different—but don’t worry, we haven’t lost the plot (just maybe our minds). In this raw and unfiltered bonus episode, Brian and Dani pull back the curtain and get real about the chaos, curveballs, and caffeine it takes to keep this podcast alive. With life throwing punches and production delays piling up, they’re hitting pause on the usual case deep dives to share a heartfelt update, a few behind-the-scenes laughs, and some truly wild stories from their past lives in law enforcement.

From Dani’s unforgetta...

What makes a man vanish into the woods—only to return as a predator? In this week's ReWired, Dani ventures into the haunted trailheads of the human psyche to unpack the chilling case of Gary Michael Hilton, a drifter-turned-serial killer whose victims were hikers, wanderers, and lovers of the wild. But this isn’t just a rehash of his crimes—it’s an excavation. We peel back the camouflage of Hilton’s mind to explore:
Why the wilderness became both his refuge and his hunting groundHow psychological detachment and transient identity fueled his violenceWhether a different intervention—or system—might have sto...