Mugshot Mysteries

April 3, 1996. Forty FBI agents close in on a ten-by-twelve plywood shack in the Montana woods. Inside lives a man most of the town couldn’t name, who for seventeen years mailed hand-carved wooden bombs to strangers, killing three and maiming more than twenty. This is the story of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and the two things that may explain him: a locked room at Harvard, and a single backwards sentence that gave him away. Kathryn and Gabriel trace the whole arc, from a 167-IQ childhood through a three-year Harvard psychological study, the bombings, the manifesto, and the brother who re...

Please note: this episode discusses a brutal murder, child abuse, and a failed execution in graphic detail. Please take care while listening.

On the night of September 30, 2026, the state of Tennessee tried to execute Christa Gail Pike, the only woman on its death row, and the first woman it had attempted to put to death in over two centuries. It did not work. After an execution team spent roughly fifty minutes and some ten needles trying to establish an IV line, after two full doses of pentobarbital, after witnesses heard her say “I feel like my arm is...

Ireland, more than two thousand years ago, the last night of October. The harvest is in, the cattle are penned, and every hearth fire in the village has been deliberately put out. The only light for miles is a single bonfire on a distant hill. Inside a pitch-black house, a family eats in total silence, with one place set at the end of the table, a full plate, a cup, and an empty chair for whoever is coming. Before they sat down, they smeared ash on their faces and pulled animal skins over their heads, because the door between...

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Tennessee, December 1820. On a log farmhouse by the Red River, a seventy-year-old farmer named John Bell doesn’t wake up. His son goes to the medicine cabinet and finds the usual bottle gone, and a strange dark vial in its place. From the ceiling, a voice, no body, no face, the voice the family had been living with for three years, brags that it gave “Old Jack a big dose last night.” They test the vial on the family cat. The cat is dead w...

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A whitewashed kitchen in rural Hungary, sometime in the 1920s. A woman boils strips of flypaper in a pot, skims the arsenic residue off the top, and bottles it. In the next room her husband coughs. Outside, the church bell rings and someone hangs laundry. In the tiny village of Nagyrév, about sixty miles from Budapest, this was a routine that lasted some twenty years, and the whole village, it seems, was in on it. When investigators finally started digging up the g...

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Please note: this episode discusses the deaths of three young children, suicide, and postpartum mental illness. If you are a new mom and you are not in a good place right now, it is okay to skip this one. Support resources are listed at the end of this description.

In October 2022, a labor and delivery nurse in Duxbury, Massachusetts texted her mother: "I'm really sick. Something is wrong." Three months later, her three children were dead. This...

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You know the rhyme. Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks. Almost every word of it is wrong. It wasn't an axe, it was a hatchet. Not her mother, her stepmother. Not forty whacks, nineteen for Abby Borden and ten for Andrew. But the rhyme got one thing right, the name, and Fall River has been singing it for over a hundred and thirty years. On a sweltering August morning in 1892, two people were hacked to death inside a locked...

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The last week of November, 1928. York County, Pennsylvania. In an isolated hollow that has carried one family's name for generations, a neighbor finds sixty-year-old potato farmer Nelson Rehmeyer dead on his kitchen floor, beaten, bound, and burned. Someone had poured lamp oil over him and set the house alight, expecting it to burn to the ground. It didn't. The fire scorched a hole through the floorboards, charred the body, and went out. The house refused to burn. And when word spread through the...

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In 2008, six months before the Large Hadron Collider switched on, two men filed a federal lawsuit in Honolulu to stop it, arguing the machine might create a black hole and swallow the Earth. A year earlier, two credentialed theoretical physicists had published a real, peer-reviewed paper suggesting something even stranger: that the collider kept suffering bad luck because the future itself was reaching back to sabotage it. And in August 2016, a video filmed inside the lab at night appeared to show hooded figures...

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June 2026. One hundred meters beneath the border between Switzerland and France, two beams of protons that have circled a 27-kilometer ring for eighteen years are steered out and dumped into a block of graphite one final time. The Large Hadron Collider, the largest machine humanity has ever built, is powering down for four years of upgrades. Its public status page, after nearly two decades of beam reports, displays a single word: "Goodbye." Within seventy-two hours, the posts begin. Time feels slower. Dreams are...

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January 12, 1928. Inside Sing Sing, hardened crime reporters stand shoulder to shoulder in the witness room, and at the center sits a woman: hair shorn for the electrodes, wrists and ankles strapped, swallowing hard but not crying. In seconds Ruth Snyder will become the first woman executed in New York in over thirty years. And as the current surges, a reporter named Tom Howard raises his trouser leg, where a camera is strapped to his ankle, and squeezes the shutter...

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Paris, 1925. The Eiffel Tower is rusting, expensive to maintain, and quietly rumored in the papers to be a candidate for demolition. To most Parisians, that's background noise. To a sharply dressed man in a suite at the Hotel de Crillon, forged government stationery in his briefcase, it's an opportunity. He is not a politician, not a diplomat, not even French. But he is about to sell the Eiffel Tower for scrap, not because he owns it, but because he...

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Yonkers, 1976. Above the Hudson sits the ruin of what was once the grandest garden estate in America, its terraces gone feral, its old stone gatehouse renamed the Devil's Cave by local teenagers. And through 1976 and into 1977, people walking the trails keep finding dead German shepherds. Nobody calls it a case, because it isn't one. A year later, a man from this same neighborhood confesses to eight shootings and blames a demon that lived in a dog. The city files that under madness and moves on. But the park...

Brooklyn, July 31, 1977, a few minutes past two in the morning. A patrol officer writes up a yellow Ford Galaxie parked too close to a fire hydrant, tucks the ticket under the wiper, and drives on. He never looks inside the car. He has no reason to. That parking ticket will do more to end the biggest manhunt in NYPD history than hundreds of detectives managed in a year, and no one will understand its importance for another ten days.

This is Part 2 of our three-part Summer of Sam series, and it's the letter, the blackout, the anniversary...

Summer 1975. Tourists landing at JFK are handed a pamphlet by off-duty police officers. On the cover is a hooded skull. The title is "Welcome to Fear City," and inside is a survival guide advising visitors to stay off the streets after six, never ride the subway, and if at all possible, not to come at all. It is a real document, printed by the unions representing the men whose job was protecting New York. The city is broke, burning, and shedding thousands of cops. And into that city, one year later, walks a man with a five-shot revolver chambered...

San Francisco, 2013. A letter arrives at a police station with no return address. The writer says his name is John Anglin. He says he escaped Alcatraz in June 1962 with his brother Clarence and Frank Morris. He says he is eighty-three now, and sick, and the last one left. And he makes an offer: promise me a year in prison and medical care, say it on television, and I will tell you exactly where I am. Fifty-one years of official history say the man who wrote that letter drowned in San Francisco Bay on the night of the escape. The...

June 12, 1962. 7:15 in the morning, Alcatraz. A guard reaches through the bars of cell 138 to wake a sleeping inmate, and the man's head rolls off the pillow and shatters on the concrete. It is made of soap, toilet paper, and real human hair. Frank Morris has been gone for nine hours. And he is not the only one. On the most secure island in America, a prison the government spent twenty-eight years promising could not be beaten, three convicted bank robbers have just walked out through walls they dug with sharpened spoons, past guards who spent all night saying goodnight...

November 10, 2009. Inside a Virginia execution chamber, the man at the center of one of the most infamous killing sprees in American history is asked if he has any final words. He says nothing. No confession, no apology, no reason, the same thing he offered every stranger he killed. Minutes later, John Allen Muhammad is pronounced dead. If this were a simpler story, that would be the ending. But the seventeen-year-old pulled from that car beside him is very much alive, and the courts of this country will spend the next fifteen years arguing not about whether he did it...

While five million people were afraid of a stranger, one woman was afraid of a name. She lived in the Maryland suburbs of Washington with her three children, watched the same coverage as everyone else, the faceless sniper, the white van, the lone white male the experts kept describing, and did not believe a word of it. Because she was the one person in America who understood that this was not really about strangers at all. Her ex-husband had given himself a new name the year before: John Allen Muhammad. For two years she had been telling anyone who...

October 2002. For twenty-three days, an invisible killer turns the suburbs around the nation's capital into a shooting gallery. People are cut down doing the most ordinary things imaginable, pumping gas, mowing a lawn, reading on a bench, loading groceries, stepping off a bus. Ten will die. A region of five million will learn to weave across parking lots and crouch behind car doors. And for almost the entire siege, the largest manhunt in the area's history will hunt, with total confidence, a lone white man in a white van, a person who does not exist, in a vehicle that...

He spent his whole career guarding the game. Then he robbed it blind.

For more than a decade, McDonald's Monopoly turned a paper sticker peeled off a fries box into the most reliable lottery in America. Cash, cars, grand prizes worth a fortune. There was just one problem. The winners were never random. They were chosen, recruited, and coached by a single man.

This week on Mugshot Mysteries, we dig into the McMillions scam, the audacious con that drained an estimated $24 million from the world's most famous fast food chain. At the center of it...

A twenty-three-year-old woman has never walked in public. Has never eaten without a feeding tube. Has leukemia, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, brain damage from a premature birth. Has been to more than a hundred doctors. Has had her teeth removed and her head shaved weekly to mimic chemotherapy. Has spent her entire life in a wheelchair in a little pink house in Springfield, Missouri, where the whole town calls her mother a saint.

None of it is true.

This week on Mugshot Mysteries, Kathryn and Gabriel unpack the case of Gypsy Rose Blanchard: twenty-three years of...

A sheriff leaves two suspects alone in an interrogation room and steps out. The recorder is still running, and they have no idea. He is certain that the moment the door clicks shut, the act will drop. Instead the younger man is sobbing, and the older one, trying to hold them both together, says quietly to an empty room: when they come back, I want to be ready for them.

Not if. When.

This week on Mugshot Mysteries, Kathryn and Gabriel head to Pascagoula, Mississippi, on the night of October 11, 1973, for the case many serious...

A 26-year-old mother of five walks into a respected Montreal hospital because she cannot sleep. She has postpartum depression. The most decorated psychiatrist alive puts her into a drug-induced coma for eighty-six days, delivers more than a hundred rounds of electroshock, and loops a recording of her own voice under her pillow for weeks. When she wakes, she does not know her name, her husband, or that she has five children. She never gets a single memory back.

This was not an interrogation. It was supposed to be treatment.

This week on Mugshot Mysteries, Kathryn...

A 42-year-old man checks himself into a New York psychiatric hospital for depression after his marriage ends. Five weeks later a doctor injects him with 450 milligrams of an Army chemical-warfare compound, a mescaline derivative no human had ever been given at that dose. Two hours and twenty-two minutes later he is dead. The death certificate blames his heart. It will keep blaming his heart for twenty-two years.

His name was Harold Blauer. He thought he had checked in for a broken heart.

This week on Mugshot Mysteries, Kathryn and Gabriel continue their three-part MKUltra series...

A biological warfare scientist goes out a tenth-floor hotel window at 2:30 in the morning. The man sharing his room, a CIA chemist, does not call an ambulance or the police. He calls his boss at the agency. The official verdict is suicide, and it holds for twenty-two years. What the family does not learn until a footnote in a government report is that nine days earlier, the CIA had secretly dosed him with LSD.

His name was Frank Olson. This is where MKUltra begins.

This week on Mugshot Mysteries, Kathryn and Gabriel open their three-part...

You are lying in a hospital bed on a hilltop above Louisville in 1932. Every window in the building is open, because your doctors believe freezing air is medicine, and there is actual snow on your blanket. You have tuberculosis. You have been here for months, maybe years, and you cannot leave. Every few days, someone on your floor stops coughing, and you have learned that the silence means they are dead. You never see the bodies go. Five hundred feet below you, a tunnel with a motorized cart carries them down the hill and out of sight. The staff...

The Zodiac is long gone, or quietly elderly, and his case is still open. More than two thousand five hundred suspects have been formally investigated. Not one has ever been charged. And then, in December 2025, a self-taught codebreaker stands up and claims the one cipher nobody ever solved has finally given up a name, and that the name ties the Zodiac to a murder committed more than twenty years before he ever killed anyone.

This week on Mugshot Mysteries, Kathryn and Gabriel close their four-part Zodiac series with the finale: the suspects, the newest twist, and the...

December 11, 2020. The world is nine months into a pandemic. A software developer in Virginia gets on a video call with a mathematician in Melbourne and a programmer in Belgium. Three people, three countries, three time zones, and on the screen between them sits a 340-character cipher that the FBI, the codebreaking community, and fifty-one years of obsessives had all failed to crack. By the end of the call, for the first time since 1969, it begins to speak.

This week on Mugshot Mysteries, Kathryn and Gabriel continue their four-part Zodiac series with Part 3, "The Code Breakers," the episode...

It is a clear Saturday afternoon at Lake Berryessa in September 1969. Two college students are picnicking on a small spit of land when a man steps out of the tree line. He is wearing a homemade black executioner's hood with clip-on sunglasses over the eyeholes and a white crossed-circle symbol drawn on the chest. He says he is an escaped convict who needs their car. He has them tie each other up. Then he pulls a twelve-inch knife. Afterward, he walks to their car, writes the dates of his crimes on the door in felt-tip, drives to a payphone...

September 27th, 1969. A man in a homemade black executioner hood walks out of the tree line at Lake Berryessa and approaches two college students picnicking on a small island. He ties them up. Then he stabs them. Then he drives 45 minutes to a payphone and calmly reports the crime to police. He was never identified. He was never caught. This was only attack number three.

In Part 1 of their four-part series, Kathryn and Gabriel build the world the Zodiac operated in: the assassinations and riots that cracked America open in 1968, the Vietnam body count nobody could justify...

Go look at a bottle of Tylenol. A glued box, a cap you push and twist, a foil seal on the rim, maybe a wad of cotton. Three layers of protection between you and a headache pill, and if any seal is broken, you put it back without thinking. None of that existed before September 1982. Before then, you could twist open a bottle in any store, do whatever you wanted to the capsules, and slide it back on the shelf. The seals you fight with today are not a convenience feature. They are a scar.

This week...

On a bright July morning in 1997, the most famous fashion designer in the world walks back to his Miami Beach mansion with the morning papers. As he puts his key in the gate, a young man steps up behind him and fires twice into the back of his head. The killer had spent his entire life trying to become everything Gianni Versace already was. Failing that, he settled for being the man who killed him.

This week on Mugshot Mysteries, Kathryn and Gabriel conclude their two-part series on Andrew Cunanan and Gianni Versace with Part 2, "The Killing...

It is the morning of July 15, 1997, on Ocean Drive in Miami Beach. A fifty-year-old Italian man in sandals walks back from the café with his morning paper. At the iron gate of his mansion, a younger man steps out of nowhere and fires twice into the back of his head. The dead man is Gianni Versace, who dressed Princess Diana, Madonna, and Tupac, and who chose the face of Medusa as his logo. His killer is a twenty-seven-year-old from San Diego named Andrew Cunanan, already four murders into a spree the FBI could not stop. But the murder is P...

In March 1932, the most famous man on earth puts his twenty-month-old son to bed in a remote New Jersey farmhouse. Hours later the crib is empty, a homemade ladder lies broken under the window, and a ransom note sits on the sill. Charles Lindbergh, the pilot who crossed the Atlantic alone and became a living symbol of American hope in the depths of the Great Depression, has just had his child stolen. The press will call it the crime of the century. Almost a century later, serious people still disagree about who did it and whether the man executed...

You walk to your mailbox in a small Ohio town where everyone knows your name. Inside is an envelope with no return address, postmarked Columbus, written in aggressive block letters. It says they know what you did. It says they have been watching your house. It says they know about your children. For nearly two decades, the people of Circleville lived under a writer who seemed to know everyone's secrets, sent more than a thousand of these letters, and was eventually tied to a death and a booby trap. A man went to prison for it. The letters kept...

January 15, 1947. A young mother pushing a stroller down a quiet Los Angeles street sees something white in a vacant lot, so white she thinks it's a discarded mannequin. It isn't. It's the body of twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short, cut clean in half, drained of blood, washed, and posed. Within hours the papers will call her the Black Dahlia. Within days it will be the most infamous unsolved murder in American history. But this episode isn't about solving it. It's about the forty-eight hours before it.

This week on Mugshot Mysteries, Kathryn and Gabriel reconstruct the final two days...

September 12, 1952. In a West Virginia town of three hundred people, four boys watch a red light streak across the sky and come down behind a hill. They run for help, and a small group climbs into the dark with a flashlight and the family dog. Near the top, the dog bolts. A foul metallic smell stings their eyes. And then the flashlight finds two glowing eyes attached to something ten feet tall, with a spade-shaped head and a face that glowed red. They ran. Several of them were physically sick for days. The story made national headlines, and the...

November 15, 1966. Two young couples are driving the back roads near an abandoned WWII explosives plant outside Point Pleasant, West Virginia, when their headlights catch two red eyes near a gate. The thing is shaped like a man, but bigger, seven feet tall, with folded wings and a hypnotic red stare. It chases their car down the highway at a hundred miles an hour without flapping, just gliding. Over the next thirteen months, more than a hundred people will report the same creature. Then, on December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge collapses at rush hour and forty-six people die. And the sightings...

December 26, 1900. A relief ship reaches a lighthouse on a remote rock twenty miles off the Scottish coast and finds it dark and silent. The keeper who climbs the 160 steps finds a stopped clock, a lamp prepped but never lit, and two of three coats gone from their hooks. Three experienced lighthouse keepers, James Ducat, Thomas Marshall, and Donald MacArthur, have vanished without a trace. No bodies were ever found. One hundred and twenty-four years later, their official cause of death is still a single hedged word: "probably."

This week on Mugshot Mysteries, Kathryn and Gabriel travel to...