Murder: True Crime Stories

Beware...for Halloween, Carter Roy is haunting this feed with an episode of another show he hosts, The First 48.

Adapted from the hit A&E true crime series The First 48, Crime House Studios brings you the podcast that drops you inside that critical window: the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs that crack a case wide open. Each week, we revisit a landmark investigation from the franchise, pairing its signature investigative depth with immersive, long-form storytelling built for your ears.

Real detectives. Real cases. Real stakes. Presented by Crime House Studios, A&E Global...

For Staten Island kids in the 1970s and '80s, the boogeyman had a name: Cropsey, a madman said to live in the tunnels beneath Willowbrook State School and take any child who stayed out too late. Then children began disappearing for real: five-year-old Alice Pereira in 1972, seven-year-old Holly Ann Hughes in 1981, eleven-year-old Tiahease Jackson in 1983. On July 9, 1987, 12-year-old Jennifer Schweiger, a girl with Down syndrome known to every neighbor on her block, went out for a walk and never came home. Thirty-five days later, a volunteer found her in a shallow grave near a Willowbrook campsite used by...

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the excavation of Dorothea Puente's garden and the murder trial that came out of it. Detectives recovered seven bodies from the yard on F Street. Puente walked away during the dig, took a bus to Los Angeles, and was arrested days later after a man she met in a bar recognized her from the news. Prosecutors charged her with nine murders and built the case almost entirely from circumstance: the sedatives in her victims' bodies, the prescriptions she explained away as sleep aids, and the checks that kept...

Through the 1980s, a landlady named Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house at 1426 F Street in Sacramento, California. Her tenants were the people nobody else would take: the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, and the newly homeless. Social workers who visited described her as warm and unusually attentive, the rare operator who cooked real meals. Puente also collected their mail and cashed their Social Security checks, and she was on parole, under orders to stay away from elderly people and stop handling government money. In November 1988, a social worker reported a tenant missing: Alvaro Montoya, a gentle man...

In the mid-1970s, young Western travelers on the overland hippie trail through Southeast Asia began turning up drugged, robbed and murdered, several left on beaches in Thailand. The man investigators would eventually connect to the killings was Charles Sobhraj, a French citizen born in Saigon who moved between Bangkok, Kathmandu and Delhi posing as a gem dealer, befriending backpackers and collecting their passports. Thai press called him the Bikini Killer. He spent two decades in Indian prisons, escaped once, and was finally convicted in Nepal of murdering two travelers in 1975, Connie Jo Bronzich and Laurent Carrière. In D...

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the two Las Vegas murder trials that reached opposite verdicts on how Ted Binion died. In March 1999, the Clark County coroner changed the ruling on Binion's death from undetermined to homicide, and prosecutors charged his girlfriend Sandy Murphy and her lover Rick Tabish with murder. The state's theory was that Binion had been forced to swallow a lethal dose of heroin, or suffocated, or both, and the state's own two pathologists never agreed on which. A jury convicted the pair in 2000. Three years later the Nevada Supreme Court...

Ted Binion was 21 when he took over the casino floor at Binion's Horseshoe, the no-limits gambling hall his father Benny built in Las Vegas, and he ran it for 30 years. By March 1998, regulators had revoked his gaming license for good. That July, he had 24 tons of silver buried 12 feet underground on a lot in Pahrump. That September, he was found dead on a mattress in his den, an empty bottle of Xanax beside him, and police called it an overdose and left without sealing the room. Two days later, deputies found three men digging up his silver, and within...

Barry Sherman had built Apotex into one of the largest generic drug companies in the world, and his wife Honey was among the most prominent philanthropists in Canada. On December 15th, 2017, a real estate agent showing their Toronto mansion opened the door to the basement pool and found them both dead at the water's edge, seated upright and side by side. Within hours, unnamed police sources were telling reporters the working theory was murder-suicide. The Shermans' four children refused it, hired their own lawyer and pathologist, and paid for second autopsies that found marks on both wrists and no...

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the four-decade fight to prove that Lynette Dawson had been murdered. The day after Lynette vanished, Chris Dawson moved the student he had been grooming back into the family home, where she wore Lynette's clothes and raised her daughters. Police took his word that his wife had walked out, waited six weeks for a missing persons report, and let the file go quiet. Two inquests found Lynette had most likely been murdered, and both times prosecutors declined to charge anyone. What finally moved the case was not a...

In January 1982, 33-year-old Lynette Dawson vanished from Bayview, on Sydney's northern beaches, and it would take 40 years to prove she had been murdered. A nurse and the mother of two young daughters, she had spent years trying to hold together a marriage to Chris Dawson, a former rugby league player and PE teacher the community adored. Months earlier, Chris had moved a teenage student into the family's spare room, and Lynette's friends had started noticing bruises on her arms. On the morning of Saturday, January 9th, she left to run errands and did not come home. Her clothes stayed...

Fun fact: Did you know Jaws almost never existed because the shark kept sinking while filming? That is Connor Tomlinson just getting started. If that sounds fascinating, you are going to love Rewind Studios’ new podcast out now called WHAT THE FACT hosted by Connor Tomlinson and Carter Roy. It’s produced by the same team that brings you Murder: True Crime Stories.

Connor and co-host Carter Roy pull three unbelievable true facts every week and tell you the full story behind each one. Nothing is off limits. Myths and monsters. Forgotten scandals. Accidental discoveries. Untold stories behi...

In 1996, 16-year-old Rod Ferrell led a group of teenagers in Kentucky who called themselves a vampire clan, immersing themselves in role-playing games, rituals, and a shared fantasy world that blurred the line between imagination and reality. Ferrell claimed to be a 500-year-old vampire, and his growing influence over the other members pulled them deeper into isolation and violence. That November, the fantasy turned deadly when Ferrell and his followers traveled to Florida and brutally murdered the parents of one of the group's members. The case stunned the country and became one of the most infamous examples of youth subculture...

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the long and winding legal battle over the murder of Carrie Daugherty. Micah Johnson claimed he was insane at the time of the killing, setting up a courtroom fight that would stretch across thirteen years, two separate trials, and an overturned conviction. Again and again, juries were asked to weigh the same haunting question: was Johnson genuinely detached from reality, or did he know exactly what he was doing when he took Carrie's life? Carter Roy traces the trials, the appeals, and the competing portraits of a killer...

In 2008, 24-year-old Knoxville server Carrie Daugherty was ambushed and killed outside her Tennessee home, a sudden act of violence that shattered the people who loved her. Suspicion soon turned to Micah Johnson, the ex-boyfriend of Carrie's best friend, and the search for him escalated into a dramatic standoff on Knoxville's Henley Street Bridge. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy introduces Carrie, the young woman whose life was cut short in her own driveway, the tangled web of relationships that investigators believe led to her death, and the tense manhunt that ended with a suspect in...

In January 2006, 24-year-old Jennifer Kesse vanished from her condominium in Orlando, Florida, just days after returning from a vacation with her boyfriend. When she failed to show up for work, her family knew immediately that something was wrong, and her car was found abandoned at an apartment complex more than a mile away. Surveillance footage captured a person of interest parking her car and walking away, but the images were too blurry to ever identify who it was. Despite an exhaustive search, a devoted family who never stopped fighting, and years of investigation, Jennifer has never been found and...

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the trial and turbulent legal aftermath of the murder of Julia Wallace. Convicted largely on circumstantial evidence, William Herbert Wallace was sentenced to death, only for his case to make British legal history when an appeals court overturned the verdict, ruling it could not be supported by the evidence. But clearing his name in court did nothing to settle the question in the public mind. For decades, writers, detectives, and armchair sleuths have argued over whether Wallace was a wronged man or a brilliant killer who got away...

In January 1931, a mysterious phone call was left for insurance agent William Herbert Wallace at his chess club in Liverpool, England, summoning him to a meeting the following night at an address that, it turned out, did not exist. While Wallace wandered the city searching for the phantom street, his wife Julia was beaten to death in the front parlor of their modest home. Almost immediately, suspicion fell on Wallace himself, but the timing was maddeningly tight and the evidence stubbornly ambiguous. Had a killer lured him away to clear the house, or had Wallace engineered the whole thing...

In Prohibition-era Texas, Joe Ball ran a saloon in the small town of Elmendorf, where he kept a pit of live alligators out back as a grisly attraction for his customers. Charming and well-liked, Ball had a steady rotation of young women working as barmaids and passing through his life, until they began to disappear. When authorities finally started asking questions in 1938, what they uncovered turned Ball into one of Texas's most enduring crime legends, a bootlegger and suspected serial killer said to have fed his victims to his alligators. In this episode of Murder: True Crime Stories, host...

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the tangled, decades-long investigation into the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier. Suspicion quickly fell on Ian Bailey, an English journalist living nearby who inserted himself into the coverage of the very crime he would come to be accused of. Bailey was arrested twice but never charged in Ireland, where prosecutors said the evidence fell short, and he maintained his innocence until his death. Yet the case refused to rest, moving across borders when a French court convicted Bailey in absentia and Ireland refused to hand him over...

In December 1996, French television producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier traveled alone to her remote holiday home on the windswept Mizen Head peninsula in County Cork, Ireland, a place she loved for its isolation and beauty. Two days before Christmas, her battered body was found on the lane outside her cottage, beaten so severely that the quiet farming community around Schull could scarcely comprehend it. She had come to Ireland for a few days of peace before the holidays, and instead became the victim of a crime that would haunt the country for decades. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime...

A History Channel original podcast brought to you by Rewind Studios, History's Greatest Mysteries examines the top theories surrounding the world's most enigmatic unsolved mysteries. If you love Murder: True Crime Stories, then you’re gonna love History’s Greatest Mysteries. Each episode unpacks these puzzles with contributions from top historians, authors, scientists, and researchers. From unsolved crimes to lost and buried treasures, and the deaths and disappearances of famous figures, History's Greatest Mysteries explores possible explanations to some of the world's most confounding events. Follow the show for a new episode every Wednesday: https://pod.link/6801242598

In 2005, a dismembered body began turning up in pieces along a canal in Dublin, Ireland, in a case so gruesome it gripped the entire country. The victim was Farah Swaleh Noor, and the killers turned out to be two sisters, Charlotte and Linda Mulhall, dubbed by the press the "Scissor Sisters." The man had been in a relationship with their mother, and one violent night, fueled by drugs and alcohol and years of buried rage, the sisters killed him and set about disposing of his body in horrifying fashion. The case shocked Ireland not only for its brutality but...

In the days after two of his acquaintances went missing in Costa Mesa, California, Dan Wozniak played the part of the grieving friend to perfection, comforting others while concealing a monstrous secret. In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the investigation that slowly stripped away the aspiring actor's performance, from suspicious ATM withdrawals and staged text messages to the gruesome truth about what he had done and how far he had gone to cover it up. As detectives closed in, Wozniak's carefully rehearsed innocence gave way to a chilling confession, and a courtroom drama that...

Dan Wozniak was a charming, talented actor in Southern California with big dreams and a wedding on the horizon, but his finances were falling apart and his taste for the spotlight far outpaced what his life could actually afford. Rather than face the truth, he began to lie, manipulate, and scheme, building a fantasy of the life he wanted on a foundation of deception. In the spring of 2010, that spiral of debt and delusion set the stage for an unthinkable crime. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy traces Wozniak's troubled path from aspiring theater star...

Michael Swango was a charming, ambitious young doctor who seemed destined for a successful medical career when he began his residency in Ohio in the early 1980s. But wherever he worked, patients who should have recovered began dying without explanation, and colleagues who fell ill after eating food he brought them narrowly survived. For years, hospitals and medical boards across the United States and eventually as far as Zimbabwe passed him along rather than confront the mounting suspicions, allowing him to keep practicing and leaving a trail of poisoned patients in his wake. By the time authorities finally caught...

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the century-long investigation into the Hinterkaifeck murders, one of the most baffling cold cases in European history. From the moment the six bodies were discovered, the case defied explanation. The killer had apparently stayed on the farm for days after the murders, feeding the animals and lighting the stove while the victims lay dead. Investigators chased down hundreds of suspects over the decades, from estranged family members to neighbors to passing strangers, but no theory ever held. More than a hundred years later, the case remains officially unsolved...

In 1922, six members of the same family were found murdered on their isolated farmstead in the Bavarian countryside, killed one by one with a pickaxe. In the days before their deaths, the family had noticed strange and frightening signs: footprints in the snow, footsteps in the attic, and the unshakable feeling that someone was watching them. But they never made it out alive, and their killer was never caught. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy introduces the family at the center of one of Europe's most haunting unsolved mysteries, the eerie warnings that preceded the...

In August 2017, Swedish journalist Kim Wall boarded a homemade submarine in Copenhagen to interview its inventor, Danish entrepreneur Peter Madsen, for a story. It was supposed to be a routine assignment, the kind of work she had done all over the world. She never came back. When the submarine sank the next day and Madsen was rescued alone, he claimed he had dropped Wall off safely on shore the night before. But his story kept changing, her body was found dismembered in the waters off Copenhagen, and the investigation that followed exposed a calculated and deeply disturbing crime. In...

In September 2022, veteran Las Vegas journalist Jeff German was found stabbed to death outside his home, killed in a brutal attack just days before he was set to receive records he had requested about a disgraced local official. In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the investigation into German's murder, the surveillance footage of a disguised killer that horrified his colleagues, and the distinctive maroon SUV that pointed straight back to Robert Telles. As DNA evidence sealed the case, Telles clung to an elaborate conspiracy theory, insisting he had been framed. What followed was a...

For nearly 45 years, Jeff German was one of the most respected investigative journalists in Las Vegas, exposing organized crime, political corruption, and the people who thought they were untouchable. In the spring of 2022, he turned his attention to a low-level elected official named Robert Telles, whose office was plagued by allegations of bullying, favoritism, and an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate. German's reporting ended Telles's political career, but it also made him a target for a man who refused to take responsibility for his own downfall. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy traces Telles's rise...

In the late 1970s, a charming amateur photographer named Rodney Alcala appeared on the popular TV show The Dating Game, flashing a quick smile and winning a date with the bachelorette. What the audience didn't know was that the contestant lighting up their screens was already a serial killer. For years, Alcala had used his camera to lure women and children, charming them with compliments and the promise of a modeling shoot before turning violent. He slipped through the system again and again, serving short sentences and talking his way past parole boards while leaving a trail of victims...

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the decades-long hunt for the killer behind the Colonial Parkway Murders. For years, the four cases went nowhere, plagued by jurisdictional turf wars, false leads, and a string of suspects who turned out to be dead ends, including two men who inserted themselves into the families' grief only to exploit it. Refusing to let the case die, the victims' families applied relentless public pressure on the FBI and Virginia State Police. Then the same genetic genealogy breakthrough that caught the Golden State Killer gave investigators a new path...

Between 1986 and 1989, four young couples were murdered or vanished along the same 23-mile stretch of road in Virginia known as the Colonial Parkway. A scenic route through the state's Historic Triangle by day, the parkway became a place of terror by night, drawing couples seeking privacy and a killer who seemed to know exactly where to find them. The victims ranged in age from 14 to 27, and the cases shared eerie similarities: abandoned cars, isolated locations, and signs that the attacker may have posed as law enforcement to get close. But the differences left investigators wondering whether they were chasing...

Reddit is an endless archive of humanity’s most disturbing, bizarre, and deeply human stories. If you love Murder True Crime Stories, you are going to love CRIMES OF REDDIT with Alexis Linkletter and Sabrina Deana-Roga.

Every Tuesday, one host brings a set of true-crime stories while the other reacts in real time with no prep, no spoilers asking the questions on everyone’s mind. They pull at every thread until the whole twisted picture comes into view. It’s dark, it’s messy, and the scariest part is simple: THESE ARE STORIES POSTED BY REAL PEOPLE.

Fol...

In 2005, 46-year-old Thomas Montgomery logged onto an online gaming site, pretended to be an 18-year-old Marine, and fell into an intense romance with a young woman who called herself Jessi. What started as a fantasy quickly curdled into obsession. When Jessi began talking to one of Thomas's younger coworkers, jealousy consumed him, and in September 2006, that obsession turned deadly. But the murder was only the beginning of the story, because almost nothing about this online love triangle was real, and the truth about who Jessi actually was would stun everyone involved. In this episode of Murder: True Crime Stories...

By 2010, Jennifer Pan's carefully constructed lies were collapsing around her. Her parents had discovered the truth about her fabricated life, pulled her out of her relationship, and tightened their control over her every move. Desperate to regain command of a situation spinning out of her hands, Jennifer didn't beg for forgiveness. She arranged for three men to enter her family home one night and carry out a staged home invasion that left her mother dead and her father gravely wounded. In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the investigation that slowly unraveled Jennifer's story, the...

From the outside, Jennifer Pan was the perfect daughter. She brought home straight A's, won swimming trophies and piano awards, and seemed destined for a career in medicine, exactly the future her strict immigrant parents had demanded. But almost none of it was real. Over years, Jennifer built an elaborate web of lies to hide failing grades, a secret boyfriend, and a life that looked nothing like the one her parents believed she was living. As the deceptions piled up and the walls began to close in, she came to believe there was only one way out. In Part 1...

In rural Missouri, Ray and Faye Copeland looked like any other elderly farming couple, churchgoing, weathered, and unremarkable to the neighbors who waved at them from the road. But behind that ordinary facade was one of the most disturbing operations in American criminal history. The Copelands hired drifters and transient men to help on their farm, used them to write bad checks for cattle, and then murdered them to cover their tracks. By the time investigators uncovered the truth, they had found the bodies of five men buried on and around the property, and Ray and Faye, both in...

By the spring of 1934, the small colony of European settlers on the Galapagos island of Floreana was tearing itself apart. A relentless drought had withered the crops, the self-proclaimed Baroness was abusing her companions, and the tiny island had become a pressure cooker of resentment, jealousy, and fear. Then people started to vanish. The Baroness and one of her lovers disappeared overnight, and the story given by the remaining settlers didn't match what the others claimed to have heard that day. Months later, two more bodies turned up mummified on a barren island they had no business being on...

In 1929, a German doctor named Friedrich Ritter and his partner, Dore Strauch, sailed to the uninhabited island of Floreana in the Galapagos to escape what they believed was the worst of human nature. For two years, they had the place to themselves. Then, drawn by Friedrich's articles in the European press, other settlers began to follow. A practical German family arrived in 1932, then a self-styled Austrian Baroness with two younger lovers, who declared the island her personal kingdom and announced plans for a luxury hotel. Within months, the tiny colony was buckling under jealousy, accusations, and the kind of...