10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories

50 Dollars and a New Name: The Jeremy Bryan Jones Story

In September 2004, 43-year-old Lisa Nichols was raped and murdered inside her Turnerville, Alabama home just days after Hurricane Ivan tore through the region, and the man responsible had been living under a stolen identity for four years thanks to a fingerprint system that failed him. Jeremy Bryan Jones walked free through three separate arrests before investigators connected him to the crime, and once he was caught, he didn't stop talking. He confessed to killing over 20 people across five states. Some of it was true. A lot of it...

The Grandparents Who Killed for Cattle Money

Picture the most harmless looking couple you can imagine. Now picture that couple with a farm, a livestock scam, and a body count. Ray and Faye Copeland spent fifty years married before they became, at 66 and 69, the oldest couple ever sentenced to death row in American history. This one has a quilt in it. It has a list. It has a man who talked his way out of a barn and lived to make the call that ended it all. It's one of the strangest true crime cases you'll hear this...

The Fixer, the Photos, and the Death of Tom Merriman

In December 2020, a Solana Beach, California woman named Jade Janks drugged and killed the man she'd called her father for over two decades, then spent New Year's Day disguising his body as a pile of trash in their shared driveway. Thomas Merriman was a beloved butterfly conservationist. Jade Janks was the stepdaughter who'd cooked him dinner every night of the pandemic. Somewhere between those two facts sits a discovery on his computer that she said broke something in her permanently, and a string of increasingly desperate text messages...

The Serial Killer Shrine: The Shaye Groves and Frankie Fitzgerald Case

Her bedroom walls were covered in framed photos of serial killers. Her bookshelf was stacked with true crime and gangster biographies. And when the moment came, prosecutors say she used everything she'd absorbed from years of true crime obsession to try to talk her way out of what she'd done. This is the story of a relationship that turned lethal, a woman who thought she'd studied the perfect getaway, and the digital trail that proved otherwise.

Frankie Fitzgerald, 25, was found dead from a fatal knife...

The Captain Who Hired a Hitman: The Harding Story

On September 26, 2022, the body of 53-year-old Sacramento HVAC contractor Michael Harding was discovered inside a vacant home for sale on Glasgow Road in Burkesville, Kentucky, shot four times. The investigation that followed led Kentucky State Police, FBI agents, and detectives across three states to California Highway Patrol Captain Julie Harding and her secret partner Thomas O'Donnell, a 60-year-old amateur hitman from Napa Valley, in one of the most disturbing murder-for-hire cases of the decade.

This is a story about a 22-year law enforcement career that ended in...

The House of Horrors: Billy Mansfield's Family of Predators

In 1980, along the Florida coast from Spring Hill to Daytona Beach, a chilling pattern emerged that Detroit investigators would later connect to serial killer Billy Mansfield Jr. Six women and teenage girls vanished or were found buried beneath a mobile home in Weeki Wachee Acres, with DNA technology in 2022 finally identifying one victim as 16-year-old Theresa Fillingim after 42 years. The FBI continues searching for additional bodies as recently as June 2026.

But this story doesn't start with bodies in the ground. It starts with a father who couldn't...

Blood in the Rocket City: The 1998 Franklin Family Massacre

On March 10, 1998, seventeen-year-old Jeffrey Brendan Franklin attacked his own family inside their home at 1305 Camelot Drive in Huntsville, Alabama, killing his parents Gerald and Cynthia Franklin and critically wounding three of his four younger siblings with a sledgehammer, hatchet, butcher knife, and a mechanic’s rat-tail file. The Huntsville Police investigation led by detective Mac McCutcheon, the journals and Satanic writings recovered from Jeffrey’s bedroom, the prescription psychiatric medications he had been taking, and Alabama’s pursuit of the juvenile death penalty turned one afternoon into one of the mo...

Fifty Dollars and a Bus Ticket: The Robert Alton Harris Story

On July 5, 1978, sixteen-year-old best friends John Mayeski and Michael Baker were abducted, murdered, and left in the brush near Miramar Lake in San Diego, California, by Robert Alton Harris and his younger brother Daniel during the planning of a bank robbery. The investigation, the trial, the criminal profile of the suspect, and the fourteen-year appeals process that followed turned this homicide into one of the most consequential capital cases in American legal history.

Robert Alton Harris came into the world already broken. He was born...

The Real-Life Boogeyman: Albert Fish in 1920s New York

In 1928 New York City, ten-year-old Grace Budd walks out of her family’s Manhattan apartment with a soft-spoken “farmer” named Frank Howard and disappears, pulling her parents, detectives, and eventually a courtroom into one of the most disturbing homicide investigations in American history. The search for Grace exposes a pattern of missing children, a mild-mannered house painter named Hamilton “Albert” Fish, and a criminal profile that collides with questions of insanity, responsibility, and what justice looks like when the suspect looks like somebody’s grandfather instead of a monster.

I...

The Beauty School Killer: What Really Happened in Wenatchee

In February 2010, 17-year-old Mackenzie Cowell disappeared from the Academy of Hair Design in Wenatchee, Washington, and four days later her body was found on the banks of the Columbia River. The homicide investigation that followed became the largest multi-agency case the region had seen in years, eventually drawing in the FBI and zeroing in on a 29-year-old beauty school classmate named Christopher Scott Wilson, a man with a Hannibal Lecter tattoo on his forearm and a history that made investigators stop and take a very long pause. What started...

Two Dead Fathers and a Demon: The 2008 Texas Exorcism Murder


The 2008 murder of 13-month-old Amora Bain Carson in Tatum, Texas remains one of the most disturbing capital cases in modern American history. Her mother, Jesseca Bain Carson, and the mother's boyfriend, Blaine Keith Milam, were both convicted of capital murder after a sheriff's investigation, forensic evidence including 24 human bite marks, and a partial jailhouse confession placed them at the center of what they later called an exorcism. Milam was sentenced to death; Carson received life without parole under the Texas law of parties. He was executed by...

Killed by a Fake Cop: The Kaylee Sawyer Story

The 2016 murder of Kaylee Sawyer in Bend, Oregon shocked a town that thought it was untouchable. Edwin Enoc Lara, a Central Oregon Community College campus safety officer who had failed his police psychological evaluation, abducted and killed the 23-year-old student in his marked patrol vehicle, sparking a multi-state manhunt, a federal kidnapping case, and the legislation now known as Kaylee's Law.

This is the story of how one community college dressed its security guards up to look exactly like cops, then handed a man with documented warning...

The Digital Leash: Serial Murder Under Government Supervision

In Orange County, California, between October 2013 and March 2014, registered sex offenders Steven Dean Gordon and Franc Cano abducted, raped, and murdered at least five women while actively wearing state and federally mandated GPS ankle monitors. The investigation, led by Anaheim homicide detective Julissa Trapp, eventually cracked the case when a victim's body surfaced on a recycling conveyor belt, triggering a digital dragnet that matched both men's trackers to the crime scenes.

The system that was supposed to make these men impossible to ignore was watching everything and doing...

The Bleach Killer: The Kimberly Saenz Murders

In April 2008, licensed vocational nurse Kimberly Clark Saenz committed one of the most disturbing healthcare serial killings in American history at a DaVita dialysis clinic in Lufkin, Texas. The homicide investigation connected Saenz to five patient deaths and four aggravated assaults after eyewitnesses watched her draw concentrated household bleach into syringes and inject it into active venous lines. The FBI, CDC, and FDA toxicologists used a groundbreaking forensic biomarker called 3-chlorotyrosine to confirm the poisonings, leading to a capital murder conviction in 2012.

This case has every element that makes...

Nobody Would Miss Them: The Craigslist Murders of Richard Beasley

In 2011, Richard Beasley of Akron, Ohio was convicted in the homicide investigation surrounding the murders of Ralph Geiger, 56, David Pauley, 51, and Timothy Kern, 47 — three men lured to a remote Noble County location through a fraudulent Craigslist job posting, then shot and buried in shallow graves. A fourth victim, Scott Davis, 49, survived a gunshot wound and escaped through the Ohio woods after dark, triggering a digital forensics investigation that ultimately put Beasley on death row.

Here's what makes this one different: Richard Beasley was not a ghost. He...

FBI Most Wanted to Motivational Speaker to Murderer: Edward Wayne Edwards

Edward Wayne Edwards, born Charles Wayne Murray, was an armed robber who landed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in 1961 before reinventing himself as a celebrated motivational speaker on prison reform, appearing on national television game shows and lecturing at police academies across the country. Investigators eventually linked him through DNA evidence to at least five confirmed homicides spanning from 1977 to 1996 in Ohio and Wisconsin, including the cold case murders of teenage sweethearts Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew.

The man who wrote a...

The Alexandria Assassin: The Strange Descent of Charles Severance

In December 2003, Nancy Dunning, wife of Alexandria, Virginia Sheriff James Dunning, was shot and killed after answering a knock at her front door, launching a cold case homicide investigation that would remain unsolved for over a decade. Ballistics, eyewitness testimony, and forensic evidence eventually linked the murder to Charles Stanard Severance, a Virginia mechanical engineer and failed political candidate who was also convicted of murdering transportation planner Ronald Kirby in November 2013 and music teacher Ruthanne Lodato in February 2014, earning multiple capital murder convictions and consecutive life sentences.

...

Fuzzy Slipper on the Gas Pedal: The Mackenzie Shirilla Murder Case

On July 31, 2022, in Strongsville, Ohio, 17-year-old Mackenzie Shirilla drove a 2018 Toyota Camry into a brick wall at nearly 100 miles per hour, killing her 20-year-old boyfriend Dominic Russo and their 19-year-old friend Davion Flanagan. Black box telemetry, GPS data pulled from a teen location-sharing app, and thousands of recovered text messages combined to transform what looked like a catastrophic accident into one of the most closely watched vehicular homicide trials in Ohio history, ending in a conviction on all 12 felony counts.

Dominic had been trying to...

The Grief Book: How Kouri Richins Hid a Murder Behind a Children's Story

In March 2022, Eric Richins of Kamas, Utah died of acute fentanyl intoxication, with five times the lethal dose detected in his system. His wife, Kouri Richins, was convicted of first-degree aggravated murder in March 2026 following a trial built on forensic accounting, toxicology reports, witness testimony, and a handwritten letter discovered hidden in a jail cell. She was sentenced to life without parole on May 13, 2026.

What makes this case so hard to shake is the year between Eric's death and Kouri's arrest. She appeared...

Burlap and Blueprints: Rex Heuermann and the Gilgo Beach Murders

In April 2026, Rex Andrew Heuermann pleaded guilty to the murders of at least eight women in one of the most devastating serial homicide cases in Long Island history, after a decades-long investigation by the Suffolk County Police Department and the Gilgo Beach Homicide Task Force broke the case through forensic DNA evidence, surveillance, and genetic genealogy. Victims including Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, and Amber Lynn Costello disappeared between 1993 and 2010 along New York's South Shore, with some remains found wrapped in burlap near Ocean Parkway.

...

Always Laughing: How Demorris Hunter Hid a Serial Killer Behind a Friendly Face

In 2002, California parolee Demorris Andy Hunter shot and killed forty-one-year-old Ivora Denise Huntley in Oakland after she intervened in a domestic assault, then fled to Orlando, Florida, where he strangled and concealed the body of thirty-eight-year-old Theresa Ann Green before stealing the identity of a Washington D.C. executive to fund his life as a federal fugitive while his face aired on America's Most Wanted. Convicted of Huntley's murder in California in 2005, Hunter wasn't extradited to Florida to face charges in the Green case until 2015...

The Peacemaker: Jesse Alvarez and the Murder of Mario Fierro

On February 1, 2021, Mario Fierro, a 37-year-old social studies teacher and football coach at Cathedral Catholic High School in San Diego, California, was shot and killed outside his home by Jesse Milton Alvarez, the ex-boyfriend of Fierro's fiancée, fellow teacher Amy Gembara. Alvarez had been systematically stalking Gembara for over a year before the homicide, and despite Gembara filing a domestic violence restraining order application in January 2020, a San Diego Superior Court judge denied her petition, citing insufficient evidence of abuse under the legal definitions in place at t...

Black Swan Murder: The Trial of Ashley Benefield

In Lakewood Ranch, Florida, on September 27, 2020, retired U.S. Navy intelligence officer Douglas Benefield was fatally shot by his wife, Ashley Benefield, a former professional ballerina and Trump campaign staffer. The Manatee County homicide investigation led to a July 2024 murder trial in which Ashley mounted a battered spouse syndrome defense, resulting in a manslaughter conviction and a 20-year prison sentence handed down December 3, 2024.

Doug and Ashley Benefield met at a Palm Beach political dinner in August 2016, and thirteen days later they were married. Thirteen. They launched a ballet...

Carroll Edward Cole: The Man Who Asked to Be Stopped

Carroll Edward Cole was convicted of murdering at least thirteen women across California, Nevada, Wyoming, and Texas between 1971 and 1980, making him one of the most prolific and underdocumented serial killers of the twentieth century. Despite repeated contact with law enforcement, psychiatric evaluation at multiple state hospitals, and documented confessions of violent homicidal urges, Cole was discharged and released each time, enabling a decade-long killing spree that left investigators scrambling to connect cases spanning half the country.

This is not a story about a killer who hid...

Six Months of Warnings: What Rochester Missed Before the Brom Massacre

In February 1988, sixteen-year-old David Brom murdered his parents, Bernard and Paulette, and two of his younger siblings, Diane and Richard, with an axe at their home in Rochester, Minnesota, in what became the most notorious mass killing in Minnesota state history. The investigation by the Olmsted County Sheriff's Office, the subsequent trial involving competing psychiatric testimony, and a landmark insanity defense ruling would shape Minnesota criminal law for decades.

The Brom family was everything a quiet Catholic suburb was supposed to produce. Polite. Organized. Deeply...

Britain's Most Disturbing Love Story: The Moors Murders

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley abducted and murdered five children between July 1963 and October 1965 in and around Manchester, England, burying their victims on Saddleworth Moor in what became the most devastating criminal investigation in British history. The case, known as the Moors Murders, led to their conviction in 1966, fundamentally altered British penal law, and left one wound that has never closed: the body of victim Keith Bennett has never been recovered.

There are true crime cases that disturb you, and then there are cases that change the way...

This is a sample from an episode of a new podcast called True Crime Blueprint. It's still hosted and created by me, Joe. But it's longer and more of a deep dive into selected and curated cases. 

To follow and subscribe, go here:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43zuDpH01HtdIrH0ShCAid?si=86b2281063334139



Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/true-crime-blueprint/id1877878404


iHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/323307878


Amazon Music/Audible: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b7d5eaae-9d27-40f9-8efb-6864c2af8055


De...

The Rise and Fall of Pretty Boy Floyd: Corn Liquor and Submachine Guns

In October 1934, FBI agents shot and killed Charles Arthur Floyd, known nationwide as "Pretty Boy" Floyd, in an Ohio cornfield, closing the book on one of the most controversial manhunts in American criminal history. Floyd, a Sequoyah County, Oklahoma bank robber elevated to Public Enemy Number One by J. Edgar Hoover's newly formed FBI, was linked to multiple homicides and suspected involvement in the 1933 Kansas City Massacre, a shooting that left four law enforcement officers dead and reshaped the entire architecture of federal law enforcement...

The Phantom of Heilbronn: The Most Dangerous Woman Nobody Could Find

For over a decade, European law enforcement hunted a woman they called the Phantom of Heilbronn, a suspected serial killer whose DNA appeared at more than forty crime scenes across Germany, Austria, and France. Her profile connected murders, burglaries, drug offenses, and eventually the killing of a police officer in broad daylight. Investigators swabbed over three thousand women, logged sixteen thousand overtime hours, and posted rewards of up to three hundred thousand euros.

She was not real.In this episode, we follow one of the...

This is a sample from an episode of a new podcast called True Crime Blueprint. It's still hosted and created by me, Joe. But it's longer and more of a deep dive into selected and curated cases. 

To follow and subscribe, go here:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43zuDpH01HtdIrH0ShCAid?si=86b2281063334139



Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/true-crime-blueprint/id1877878404


iHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/323307878


Amazon Music/Audible: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b7d5eaae-9d27-40f9-8efb-6864c2af8055


De...

The Teflon Don: How John Gotti Ran New York and Lost Everything

In 1985, John Gotti orchestrated the assassination of Gambino crime family boss Paul Castellano outside Sparks Steak House in Midtown Manhattan, setting off one of the most aggressive FBI investigations in organized crime history. The RICO prosecution that followed resulted in Gotti's 1992 conviction on five counts of murder, racketeering, and extortion, marking the effective end of the old-school New York mob era.

What keeps the Gotti story compelling decades later runs deeper than the Brioni suits and tabloid headlines. The real architecture is a kid...

The Smiling Confession: How Alyssa Bradburn Planned Her Father's Death

In June 2024, 68-year-old Timothy Bradburn flew home from Hawaii to fix a leaking roof at his Spokane, Washington house. He walked through the front door holding his suitcase and his keys, and he never set them down.

His daughter Alyssa had been planning this for three weeks. She practiced at a gun range. She wrote a journal detailing exactly what she intended to do and left it on the table for police to find. She told her father she was sick so he would walk in...

This is a sample from an episode of a new podcast called True Crime Blueprint. It's still hosted and created by me, Joe. But it's longer and more of a deep dive into selected and curated cases. 

To follow and subscribe, go here:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43zuDpH01HtdIrH0ShCAid?si=86b2281063334139



Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/true-crime-blueprint/id1877878404


iHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/323307878


Amazon Music/Audible: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b7d5eaae-9d27-40f9-8efb-6864c2af8055


De...

Ice Cream and a Shallow Grave: The Bobby Greenlease Kidnapping

In September 1953, six-year-old Bobby Greenlease was abducted from his Kansas City Catholic school and murdered within hours, setting off the largest ransom demand in American history. The FBI investigation into the murder of Robert Greenlease Jr. by Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Brown Heady led to a swift federal conviction, a double execution, and a police corruption scandal surrounding $312,000 in ransom money that has never been found.

This one starts with a lie told in a school hallway, and it gets stranger and darker from there...

The Pine Barrens Body: Who Killed Cody MacPherson?

In September 2017, 20-year-old Cody MacPherson disappeared from Pemberton Township, New Jersey, launching a six-month investigation that eventually drew in New Jersey State Police homicide detectives, Ocean County prosecutors, and a forensic team working largely skeletal remains discovered near the Colliers Mills Wildlife Management Area. Alan McGinnis, a 26-year-old Burlington County man with deep roots in the Pemberton community, was arrested, charged, and convicted of first-degree murder, ultimately sentenced to 30 years without parole.

Cody played bass guitar, sang in choir, and had a daughter back in Indiana he was...

Who Killed the Rhoden Family? The Wagner Family's Pike County Massacre Explained

In April 2016, eight members of the Rhoden and Gilley families were found shot execution-style across four separate locations in Pike County, Ohio, in what became one of the most extensive homicide investigations in American history. After two years of surveillance, wiretaps, ballistics analysis, and a homemade silencer recovered from the bottom of a well, the Wagner family of four was arrested in November 2018 and charged with aggravated murder, conspiracy, and related offenses.

What started as a custody dispute over a baby girl became the...

The Chelsea Perkins Case: A Veteran, a Double Life, and an Execution in the Woods

In March 2021, the body of Matthew Dunmire, 31, was found in a remote ravine inside Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Valley View, Ohio. The federal homicide investigation led agents to Chelsea Perkins, a 35-year-old United States Coast Guard veteran who had driven 300 miles from Alexandria, Virginia, to commit the crime. Forensic evidence including GPS tracking, DNA analysis, and a recovered deleted file from her phone resulted in a federal conviction. On May 27, 2025, Perkins pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 270 months in...

Alaska Serial Killer Robert Hansen: The Baker Who Hunted His Victims Like Game

In 1983, Anchorage, Alaska investigators connected respected local businessman Robert Christian Hansen to the murders of at least seventeen women, building their criminal profile case through FBI behavioral analysis, forensic evidence recovered from a hidden attic cache, and the survivor testimony of seventeen-year-old Cindy Paulson, who escaped Hansen in handcuffs before her scheduled flight into the Alaskan wilderness. Hansen pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree homicide and was sentenced to life plus 461 years without the possibility of parole. Robert Hansen sold donuts. He had hunting...

Bodies in Barrels: The True Story of the Snowtown Murders

In May 1999, South Australian police breached the vault of a disused bank building in the remote town of Snowtown and found eight barrels of human remains, uncovering what would become the most prolific serial murder case in Australian history. The Snowtown murders, also known as the Bodies in Barrels case, resulted in the convictions of John Justin Bunting, Robert Wagner, James Vlassakis, and Mark Haydon for the murders of twelve victims between 1992 and 1999, following an investigation that stands as the longest and most complex in South Australian legal...

The High Priest of New Castle: Frank Costal and the Kadunce Ritual Murders

On July 11, 1978, Kathy Kadunce, age 25, and her four-year-old daughter Dawn were found stabbed to death inside their New Castle, Pennsylvania home in what investigators would eventually classify as a ritualistic homicide connected to a Satanic cult operating in Lawrence County. The cold case investigation sat dormant for three years before a convicted serial killer named Michael Atkinson provided testimony pointing to Frank Costal Jr., a self-styled occult high priest who maintained a following of alienated young men, as the architect of the killings.

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