Crime Clueless

In September 2017, deputies stopped a Cadillac SUV five minutes from a lake house in southwest Virginia and arrested a 54-year-old woman her neighbors knew as Debbie.

Twenty-seven years earlier, she was Sheila Keen, the prime suspect in the murder of Marlene Warren.

Who was Sheila before 1990? How did she end up married, living in Virginia and running a burger/everything you can think of/plus ice cream drive-thru in Tennessee? Named the Purple Cow. Anyone else remember "Purple Cow" milkshakes, circa 1990s?

Now, what actually brought this case back to life after decades...

On a rainy Saturday morning in May 1990, Marlene Warren opened her front door to a clown holding red and white carnations and a silver balloon that read “You’re the Greatest.” Without a word, the clown shot her in the face, walked back to a white convertible, and drove away.

In Part One, we follow the trail the killer left behind: a costume bought at closing time, balloons sold at only one store in the county, and a getaway car taken through a knockoff Yellow Pages ad.

We meet Marlene’s husband, Mike, a used-car dealer w...

In January 1897, Zona Heaster Shue was found dead in her home in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, just months after marrying a charming newcomer named Edward Shue. Her death was quickly ruled natural, and she was buried with little fuss.

But her mother, Mary Jane Heaster, never believed it. She claimed that over four nights, Zona’s spirit came to her and described exactly how she died, and exactly who killed her.

What happened next is one of the strangest chapters in American legal history. A mother’s ghost story led to an exhumation, an autopsy, and...

They drained a reservoir and dragged the Ohio River. They dug up a sandbar and chased a stage conjurer’s “clue.” Pearl Bryan’s head was never found.

In part two, we piece together Pearl’s last four days in Cincinnati: a hotel register signed with her sister’s name, an argument outside a music company, and a sarsaparilla in a saloon’s back room. Then comes the circus.

There are lemonade stands at the murder scene, a shooting gallery offering a five-cent cigar to anyone who shoots Scott Jackson’s effigy, a witness bribery scheme that fall...

On a foggy February morning in 1896, a farmhand outside Fort Thomas, Kentucky, finds a woman lying in the privet bushes. At first he thinks she’s just another girl, sleeping off a hangover maybe.  

Then the sheriff pulls her down the bank, and her dress falls away. Her head is gone.

Detectives start with no name and not even what city she is from. There is a pile of wild theories, including one man who confidently identifies her as his wife until his wife walks in alive.

Then detectives notice her tiny size-three boo...

"You're looking for bodies? Go ahead. Dig up the yard."

In Part Two, investigators take Hugo Selenski up on his offer. Less than 20 feet from his back door, they find Michael Kerkowski and Tammy Fassett. In the fire pit behind the house, they find the remains of three more people. One of them has never been identified.

We cover the drug-house sleepover that turned deadly, a jeweler's home invasion undone by sneaker prints in the snow, and the night Hugo climbed down a 60-foot rope of prison bedsheets, only to go home.

Then...

On the afternoon of May 3, 2002, Michael Kerkowski and Tammy Fassett were doing yard work when two visitors pulled into the driveway. When Michael's mother called, Tammy kept it short: "We have company."

Michael was a pharmacist from northeastern Pennsylvania who'd been caught selling hundreds of thousands of painkillers out of his own store, and he was days away from sentencing. The man he trusted to help him through it was his best friend, Hugo Selenski, a bank robber fresh out of federal prison who once tried to wash exploded dye out of stolen cash in his parents...

Private investigator Ken Brennan has a theory about what happened in Room 348, and it starts with a question nobody thought to ask.

As he and Detective Scott Apple follow a rumor, a hunch, and one very small detail most people would never notice, the answer to Greg Fleniken's death turns out to have been hiding in plain sight the whole time.

But solving it is only half the fight. Susie Fleniken still has to push the case all the way to a courtroom, and she gets her chance to say exactly what she's been waiting...

Greg Fleniken was a man of routine. Every Monday he drove from Lafayette, Louisiana, to Beaumont, Texas, checked into the same hotel, and spent his nights the same way: propped up on two pillows with a candy bar, a cigarette, and a movie.

On September 16, 2010, his co-workers found him dead on the floor of Room 348.It looked like his heart had simply given out.

Then the medical examiner opened him up and found injuries usually seen in car crash victims, and he ruled it a homicide.

But there was no sign of a...

For sixteen years, the disappearance of Mike Williams sits unsolved — a mother's letters to the governor, a reopened investigation, and still, no answers. Then, in the summer of 2016, something happens that has nothing to do with Lake Seminole at all. And everything changes.

In Part Two, we follow the confession that finally broke a seventeen-year silence, the search that found what a 44-day effort never could, and a trial that turns on the smallest, most human of details. This is the second half of the Mike Williams story — the half nobody saw coming, including the people who thou...

December 16, 2000. Before sunrise, Mike Williams loads his boat and heads out onto Lake Seminole — a lake he's hunted a hundred times before, on a morning that's supposed to end with an anniversary dinner. He never makes it home.

What follows is a 44-day search across a reservoir riddled with submerged stumps and alligators, a discovery that seems to close the case for good, and a legal ruling that moves faster than anyone can quite explain. For years, the official story holds. For one woman — Mike's mother — it never does.

This is Part One of our two-pa...

Steven Koecher's phone has gone silent, his family is left with more questions than answers. What investigators find years later — buried, hidden, and nearly destroyed by time — changes everything about how this case should have been handled from the start.

This episode picks up right where the story left off, following the trail into a landlord facing serious felony exposure at the exact moment Steven needed money more than ever, a call log that turns increasingly desperate over the span of just a few days, and a piece of physical evidence that stayed hidden for years before fina...

In December 2009, a 30-year-old man named Steven Koecher parks his car at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in a Henderson, Nevada retirement community — and walks out of frame forever.

No struggle. No body. No answers. But in the days before he vanished, Steven put well over a thousand miles on his car for reasons he never explained to a single person, and on the day he disappeared, witnesses heard him say something that still doesn't add up sixteen years later.

We look at the timeline, the money struggles, the phone calls, the P.I. in...

On the morning of February 4, 2015, 18-year-old Sara Nicole Graham left her home in Fairmont, North Carolina, to go to work. She never arrived.

Hours later, her father’s white Chevrolet Astro van was found locked and abandoned in a wheat field off East McDonald Road. There were no signs of a crash, no evidence of a struggle, and no explanation for why the van was there — or where Sara had gone.

Who was Sara beyond the headlines? What do we know about her final morning? And why, for over a decade did her case stay stag...

He built the scene before he ever needed it. Then he found out how well the story worked.

Edmonton, Alberta. A married father with a failing production company, a growing obsession, and a garage full of secrets. A detective who doesn't buy the story.

A document buried on a laptop that reads like a confession dressed up as fiction.

This is the man behind the mask — and the trial that finally caught up to him. Press play to find out where it leads.

It starts with a message. A little hope, after a hard year. A date that feels, finally, like something good.

It doesn't stay that way.

Edmonton, Alberta. October 2008. A residential garage on the city's south side. Instructions that seem careful, reasonable, easy to follow — a partly open door, a walk across a dark backyard, a knock.

Behind that door is nothing anyone could have prepared for.

This is the beginning of one of Canada's strangest and most disturbing true crime cases — a story of online dating, obsession, and a plan more twis...

On April 15, 2005, Centre County, Pennsylvania District Attorney Ray Gricar took the day off, told his girlfriend he was going for a drive, and was never seen again.

His car was found locked the next day outside an antiques mall, his cell phone still inside — but his keys, wallet, and laptop were gone.

In Part One, we dig into Ray Gricar's twenty-year career as DA, the frantic first weeks of the search, an eerily similar case in his own family's past, and the strange river discovery that closes out the summer of 2005 with more questions than an...

Years after Ray Gricar vanished without a trace, a disturbing discovery about his own computer reopens the case in a whole new light.

A scandal connects his name to one of the biggest in American sports history.

In Part Two, we trace the twists that followed the Centre County DA's 2005 disappearance: a missing hard drive, a fractured law enforcement community, an infamous case Gricar once declined to prosecute, and a theory tying his fate to another prosecutor's unsolved death.

Twenty years later, the case remains open, the reward of $5,000 remains unclaimed, and Ray...

Last episode, we told you who Patsy Wright was. Today, we go looking for who killed her.

In part two, the suspects are named and the cards go on the table — one by one, with everything pointing toward them and everything that gives you pause.

A brother-in-law with a financial deadline two weeks away, and debt stacking up.

An ex-husband who told his own wife he knew people who could get someone snuffed out, had a looming trial Patsy was going to testify at, refused to say a single word to investigators, and wa...

Patsy Wright had everything going for her. A thriving business, a dream ranch on the horizon, a cutting horse she'd competed on and won with, and a life that was finally — after two marriages, an inheritance battle, and years of careful building — moving exactly in the direction she wanted.

On the evening of October 22nd, 1987, she came home from a Halloween party at her family's wax museum in Grand Prairie, Texas. She made herself something to eat. She made some phone calls. She set her alarm clock for the next morning.

And sometime after midnight, she...

For decades, the domestic violence movement has operated on a familiar script: abuser is bad, survivor should leave, and the system's job is to punish after the fact. Liz Ortenburger, CEO of SafeNest — Nevada's largest domestic and sexual violence nonprofit, serving Clark County since 1977 — has spent the last ten years challenging that script from the inside.

In this conversation, Liz walks us through the real, layered reasons abuse gets passed down through generations, and why SafeNest made the controversial decision to work directly with abusers alongside survivors. We talk about the DALE lethality assessment and the 4,300 people Safe...

Barbara Mae Tucker was 19 years old — a business student at Mount Hood Community College, a former high school athlete, the baby of a big, blended family — when she was murdered walking to a night class on January 15th, 1980.

In her final minutes, multiple drivers saw her flagging down cars on a road at the edge of campus. Not one of them called police.

What followed was one of the largest investigations Gresham, Oregon had ever seen: composite sketches, hypnotized witnesses, an FBI consultation, hundreds of interviews, and a community that transformed itself in real time — securi...

This is part two of two, if you haven't, listen to part one, then come back to hear the shocking conclusion.

For years after Barbara Mae Tucker's murder in Gresham, Oregon, her case sat alongside a growing list of other unsolved local homicides — a running wound for a family, and a community, that never stopped waiting for answers.

Her mother died without knowing. Her father died without knowing. Her sister spent decades calling police for updates on a case that never moved.

Then, technology finally caught up to a piece of evidence that ha...

In April 2010, Eric Preimesberger — a 29-year-old father of two known for his big smile and his beloved scooter — vanished from his Reno, Nevada home. His wife told police he'd stormed out after an argument and would never be back. For months, that was the only story anyone had.

But Eric's mother never bought it. She kept pushing, kept calling, kept refusing to let her son's disappearance quietly fade into a closed file — and four months later, her instincts would prove devastatingly right.

A story of family, betrayal, and a cover-up that unraveled almost by accident. Along...

If you've been following the Josh Hunsucker case, you know he was arrested for his wife Stacy's death in 2019. What happened in the years after — while he waited, out on bond, for a trial that still hasn't happened — is a story we weren't prepared for either.

This week, we're covering everything that unfolded between his arrest and today: an ongoing wrongful death lawsuit from Stacy's parents, a change-of-venue fight built on years of national media coverage, and new charges that have kept this case escalating well into 2026.

We pulled directly from court filings for this one...

Two weeks after a South Carolina eye drop poisoning case made national headlines, a flight paramedic's wife collapsed at their North Carolina home and died of an apparent heart attack — plausible, given her years of unexplained cardiac issues.

Josh Hunsucker refused an autopsy, had his wife cremated within two days, and filed for her life insurance before the week was out.

It would take a mother's suspicion, a preserved blood sample nobody expected to still exist, and over a year of investigation to reveal what actually happened to Stacy Hunsucker — and how closely it echoed a ca...

In May 2016, Lana Clayton walked into the York County Sheriff's Office and told deputies she'd accidentally shot her husband in the head with a crossbow while he slept. Steven Clayton backed up her story. Accident. No charges were filed. They moved on.

Two years later, Steve was dead — found at the bottom of the staircase in the South Carolina mansion he'd built as an exact replica of George Washington's Mount Vernon. The first theory was a fall, maybe a heart attack. It took his family's insistence on an autopsy, and a coroner who'd never even heard of th...

For over a decade, Sheriff Howard Sills has carried the unsolved murders of Russell and Shirley Dermond with him — a case that's outlasted every other investigation of his forty-year career. In this episode, we go deep into the man behind the badge, the staggering range of theories the public threw at this case — mafia, cult, extremism, even an alligator — and the family who's spent twelve years asking not for revenge, but simply for an answer.

We also trace the forensic breakthroughs that have quietly reshaped this case in recent years: cellphone geolocation data, a touch-DNA discovery on Russel...

Russell and Shirley Dermond had been married for over 60 years. Retired, well-liked, and settled into a quiet gated community on Lake Oconee, Georgia, they were the kind of couple who never missed a neighborhood gathering — until the weekend of the 2014 Kentucky Derby, when they simply didn't show up.

Days later, concerned friends walk into their unlocked home and find a horrifying scene. 

No forced entry. Nothing stolen. No known enemies.

In this episode, we walk through the disappearance, the discovery, and the earliest theories in a case that would go on to baffle inv...

This is part two of two. If you haven't listened to part one, do that first, then join us for part two.

The Gary Triano case had been cold for nearly nine years when a tip to America's Most Wanted led investigators to a storage unit in Yorba Linda, California.

Inside: microcassette recordings, thousands of emails, financial documents, a map of Tucson, a Ramada Inn receipt dated four months before the bombing — and Gary Triano's divorce papers.

What investigators found in that storage unit, was a story told in spreadsheets, amortization tables, Federal Ex...

On the evening of November 1st, 1996, more than 100 people were waiting at Gary Triano's Sabino Canyon home to surprise him for his upcoming 53rd birthday. He never arrived.

Gary Lee Triano was a larger-than-life figure who served on hospital boards, and earned a Medal of Merit from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Task Force. He was also a man whose financial life had left a trail of lawsuits, failed casino deals, and angry creditors stretching from Tucson to Las Vegas to Hong Kong.

At approximately 5:30 p.m. that Friday evening, as Triano got into a borrowed...

On the night of September 12th, 1985, 23-year-old CJ DeLuca was working an overnight shift at a Connecticut gas station he wasn't even supposed to be covering. By morning, he was dead — and three hours later, a second gas station attendant had been shot with the same gun.

This wasn't a random act of violence. It was a spree.

Forty years later, investigators believe they know who did it. They just need someone to finally come forward and say so.

If you have any information about the murder of Carmen "CJ" DeLuca, please contact th...

On the morning of June 27th, 2000, sixteen-year-old Molly Bish was dropped off for her second day as a lifeguard at Comins Pond in Warren, Massachusetts. She walked toward the water with her things, her mom watched her go, and drove away. Less than fifteen minutes later, the chair was empty. Molly's flip-flops, her first aid kit, her lunch and her towel were sitting at the water's edge — but Molly wasn't there.

What followed was the largest missing person search in Massachusetts history. Three years later, only twenty-six bones were found in the deep woods of Palmer, five mi...

This is episode two of two. Please listen to episode one first, this story has too many details to be one part. 

When a former employee named Steven Durst was caught collecting ransom money for the missing couple, the investigation took a dark turn. Durst failed a polygraph and had been telling people the Markleys owed him exactly $1,000 — the same amount withdrawn at the bank. 

He was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison, but has steadfastly maintained his innocence when it comes to the disappearance.

Twenty-five years later, a shooting in the same...

On a Friday morning ten days before Christmas 1995, John and Shelly Markley helped their five children get ready for school. By the time their kids came home that afternoon, both parents had vanished — leaving behind Shelly's purse and cigarettes, John's wristwatch, an open gun cabinet, a ransacked safe, and a coffee pot that had nearly boiled dry.

The only confirmed sighting that day came from a bank teller, who watched the couple withdraw $1,000 in cash at a drive-thru — with an unidentified man in the passenger seat of their truck. Their vehicle was later found locked, abandoned, and cove...

Hey, Crime Clueless family — we're doing something a little different this week. We're bringing you a two-part crossover from our sister show, Vanished Voices, hosted by Jenna and Shannon.

This is part two of two, if you haven't listened to Part One yet — start there. This story deserves to be heard from the beginning.

On the morning of April 20th, 2011, workers near the Conowingo Dam on the Susquehanna River spotted something in the water.

It was Phylicia.

In Part Two of our Phylicia Barnes episode, we cover the discovery of her body...

Hey, Crime Clueless family — we're doing something a little different this week. We're bringing you a two-part crossover from our sister show, Vanished Voices, hosted by Jenna and Shannon. Vanished Voices focuses on cases that deserve far more attention than they get. 

This week's case is Phylicia Barnes. She was sixteen years old. A straight-A honor student from Monroe, North Carolina, with a scholarship ahead of her and a whole life waiting.

On December 28th, 2010, Phylicia Simone Barnes was last seen in her half-sister's apartment in Baltimore — and never seen again.

In Part One o...

The murders of Rose Burkert and Roger Atkison at the Amana Holiday Inn in September 1980 left investigators with a hotel full of witnesses and not a single person who heard a thing. In Part Two, Jenna and Laura dig into the suspects — and there's no shortage of them.

There's Danny Burton, Rose's ex-boyfriend who stalked her relentlessly, killed her dog, and was the person Rose herself told police to look at if she ended up dead. There's the hotel bartender who argued with Rose the night of the murder, then abandoned his truck, left his paycheck behind, an...

September 1980. A young couple drives four hours from Missouri to a Holiday Inn in rural Iowa for a secret weekend together. When they arrive, the hotel is fully booked — a morticians' convention has taken every room. But a last-minute cancellation opens up Room 260.

By the next afternoon, both are found dead — hacked with an ax, face down on the bed, in one of the most disturbing crime scenes in Iowa history. Chairs pulled up beside the bodies. Toothpaste squeezed around the bathtub. A bar of soap carved into pieces. And a single word left on the bathroom mirr...

Holly Searcy lost her mother to murder at 10. She lost her father to murder at 19. She battled her own addiction before getting sober and becoming a substance abuse counselor. Now, she's the one fighting for the case no one else has been able to solve.

In Part 2, Holly opens up about what it's like to grow up with both parents taken by violence, the moment she decided to pick up the torch from her exhausted aunt and become her mother's advocate, and the emotional cost of re-traumatizing yourself over and over again to keep a cold case...