Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes

On June 28th, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was shot and killed alongside his wife on the streets of Sarajevo by a young nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. The assassination was the work of a shadowy network of secret societies bent on breaking apart the empire, and within weeks, it plunged the world into the catastrophe of World War I. A single act of violence had toppled the fragile balance of power holding Europe together. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson examines the assassination that changed the course of history, the secret nationalist...

In the aftermath of World War I, a secretive occult group emerged in Germany called the Thule Society, blending Norse mythology, racial mysticism, and extreme nationalism into a dangerous new ideology. Its members believed in a master race descended from a mythical northern homeland, and their obsession with ancestry and bloodline would seep directly into the beliefs of the fledgling Nazi Party. Though the society itself faded, its ideas and several of its members helped shape one of history's darkest movements. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson explores the Thule Society, the toxic fusion of...

Since it opened in 1995, Denver International Airport has been the subject of some of the most enduring conspiracy theories in America. Built years behind schedule and wildly over budget, the airport is famous for its unsettling apocalyptic murals, a towering demonic horse statue with glowing red eyes, cryptic dedication plaques, and a sprawling network of underground tunnels. To believers, these details point to secret bunkers for the elite, headquarters for shadowy organizations, or something even stranger hidden beneath the runways. Officials insist the tunnels are mundane and the art is simply misunderstood, but the speculation has only grown over...

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 Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes, 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 December 1996, 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey was found murdered in the basement of her family's home in the quiet mountain town of Boulder, Colorado, in a case that would become one of the most controversial in American history. A bizarre ransom note, a badly mishandled crime scene, and a swirl of suspicion around her own family turned a private tragedy into a national spectacle, with the media declaring the Ramseys guilty long before any evidence could. Nearly three decades later, despite endless theories and renewed DNA testing, no one has ever been charged, and the truth remains b...

Deep in the redwood forests of Northern California lies Bohemian Grove, a private retreat where some of the most powerful men in the world, presidents, business titans, and political power brokers, have gathered in secret for more than a century. Each summer, members of the exclusive Bohemian Club convene for two weeks of camping, revelry, and a strange opening ritual called the "Cremation of Care," performed before a towering stone owl. That secrecy has fueled decades of speculation, from rumors of occult worship to theories that world-shaping decisions are quietly made around its campfires. In this episode of Conspiracy...

During the Cold War, the CIA quietly turned modern art into a weapon. Convinced that America needed to prove its cultural superiority over the Soviet Union, the agency secretly promoted abstract expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning as symbols of American freedom. Through a front group called the Congress for Cultural Freedom and a network of fake foundations, the CIA funneled millions of dollars into touring exhibitions across Europe, partnering with the Museum of Modern Art, all without the artists ever knowing who was funding their success. The irony was staggering: many of the...

In the 1950s and 60s, at the height of the Cold War, the CIA launched a secret program called Operation Midnight Climax as part of its notorious MKUltra mind-control research. Operating out of safehouses in San Francisco and New York, agents used sex workers to lure unwitting men, then dosed them with LSD without their knowledge and observed the results through one-way mirrors. The goal was to study whether psychedelics could be weaponized for interrogation, coercion, and control. What unfolded was a chilling abuse of government power, hidden from the public for decades until investigations finally exposed it. In...

In the late 1960s, a group of California idealists calling themselves the Brotherhood of Eternal Love set out to change the world through psychedelics, believing that LSD could bring about spiritual awakening and universal peace. Inspired by figures like Timothy Leary, the Brotherhood started as a hippie collective but soon became one of the largest drug-smuggling operations in the country, trafficking massive quantities of LSD and hashish across the globe. What began as a utopian dream drifted steadily into a criminal empire, drawing the attention of federal authorities and culminating in a sweeping prosecution. In this episode of Conspiracy...

In January 1996, the small Brazilian city of Varginha became the center of one of the most famous UFO stories in South American history. Multiple witnesses, including three young women, reported seeing a strange creature with a large head and red eyes lurking in the streets, while others claimed the military had captured one or more living beings and recovered a crashed craft. As soldiers reportedly swarmed the area and a young military police officer who allegedly handled a creature later died under murky circumstances, the official denials only deepened public suspicion that something was being covered up. To this...

Reddit is an endless archive of humanity’s most disturbing, bizarre, and deeply human stories. If you love Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, 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...

Chico Mendes was a Brazilian rubber tapper who became one of the world's most important environmental activists, organizing peaceful resistance against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. By the 1980s, he had drawn international attention to the violent clash between cattle ranchers clearing the forest and the communities who depended on it to survive. His activism made him a global symbol of the fight to save the Amazon, and it also made him a target. In December 1988, Mendes was shot and killed outside his home by a rancher's family, a murder that exposed the deadly stakes of standing between...

Founded in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1930s, Santo Daime is a religion that blends Catholicism, indigenous tradition, and African spirituality around a single sacred sacrament: ayahuasca, a powerful psychedelic brew. During hours-long ceremonies, devotees drink the bitter tea, sing hymns, and describe profound visions, healing, and spiritual enlightenment. The faith has spread far beyond Brazil, drawing followers around the world and sparking legal battles over the religious use of a substance banned in many countries. But alongside the devotion come questions about its rigid structure, the intensity of its rituals, and the line between spiritual practice and something...

According to the Bible, the Ark of the Covenant was a gold-covered chest built to hold the Ten Commandments, an object of such immense divine power that it could level cities and strike down anyone who touched it. Then, sometime after the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem, it vanished from history. For thousands of years, the question of what happened to it has fueled legends and obsessive searches, with some claiming it lies hidden in a church in Ethiopia, others pointing to secret chambers beneath Jerusalem, and still others insisting it sits locked away in the vaults...

In December 2017, billionaire pharmaceutical founder Barry Sherman and his wife Honey were found dead in their Toronto mansion, their bodies posed beside the indoor pool, each hanging from a railing by a belt. Police initially suggested a murder-suicide, a theory the couple's family furiously rejected. As private investigators and a second autopsy revealed the truth, the case was reclassified as a targeted double homicide, the work of someone who had carefully staged the scene. Barry had built the generic drug giant Apotex into a fortune worth billions, leaving behind a tangle of lawsuits, business rivalries, and family disputes. Years...

Founded in Spain in 1928, Opus Dei is a Catholic organization built on discipline, secrecy, and the belief that ordinary life can be a path to holiness. Officially recognized and championed by the Vatican, it has counted powerful politicians, judges, and business leaders among its members. But critics, including many former members, describe something far more troubling behind the devotion: rigid control over members' daily lives, pressure and isolation in recruitment, and the practice of corporal mortification, where the most committed members inflict physical pain on themselves as a form of spiritual discipline. Supporters call it a faithful expression of...

For nearly a decade, the Sicilian Mafia ran the largest heroin pipeline in the world, hiding it inside something as ordinary as the neighborhood pizza parlor. Morphine was bought in Turkey, refined into heroin in Sicily, smuggled into the United States, and sold through family-owned pizzerias across the American Northeast, while the profits were laundered through banks in New York, the Bahamas, and Switzerland. The operation moved an estimated $1.65 billion in drugs before the FBI, aided by an undercover agent who had spent years embedded inside the Bonanno crime family, coordinated arrests across four countries in a single day...

In November 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper boarded a commercial flight in Portland, Oregon, told a flight attendant he had a bomb, and demanded $200,000 and four parachutes. After releasing the passengers in Seattle, he ordered the crew back into the air, then lowered the plane's rear stairs and leapt into the freezing night somewhere over the Pacific Northwest. He was never seen again. The hijacking exposed just how little security existed in the early days of commercial aviation, when passengers boarded without screening and a man in a suit could carry a bomb onto a plane unquestioned. Despite...

In the 18th century, England's most powerful men, politicians, aristocrats, and intellectuals, gathered behind closed doors for a secret society known as the Hellfire Club. Founded by the wealthy rake Sir Francis Dashwood, the club met in candlelit caves and a converted abbey, where members reportedly indulged in drunken feasts, mock religious ceremonies, and rituals that scandalized polite society. Rumors swirled of devil worship, orgies, and occult rites performed by men who ran the country by day and mocked God by night. But how much of the legend was real, and how much was the inevitable myth that grows...

In 1483, two boys, the 12-year-old King of England and his 9-year-old brother, were placed in the Tower of London by their uncle, who had sworn to protect them. In 1483, two boys, the 12-year-old King of England and his 9-year-old brother, were placed in the Tower of London by their uncle, who had sworn to protect them. Instead, he declared them illegitimate and crowned himself King Richard III. The princes were seen playing in the Tower gardens that summer, and then they vanished. Their uncle had the clearest motive, but so did his closest ally and the man who later...

For homicide detectives, their chance of solving a murder is cut in half if they don’t get a lead within the first 48 hours.

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. New episodes every Th...

In the autumn of 1888, a killer stalked the impoverished streets of London's Whitechapel district, murdering and mutilating at least five women in a matter of weeks. The press dubbed him Jack the Ripper, a name drawn from a taunting letter supposedly sent by the killer himself, and the city descended into panic. The murders exposed the squalor and desperation of Victorian London's East End, where poverty, overcrowding, and inequality left women with few options and little protection. Despite one of the largest manhunts of the era, police never caught him. More than 130 years later, the list of suspects has...

For more than a century, the Yakuza have operated as Japan's most powerful organized crime syndicates, hiding in plain sight with corporate offices, business cards, and fan magazines. But beneath the legitimate front is a world bound by ritual, absolute loyalty, and a rigid hierarchy that mirrors the devotion of a cult. New members are initiated through sacred sake ceremonies that bind them to a boss as a kind of father, severing ties to their own families. Those who break the code perform yubitsume, slicing off a fingertip to atone. Full-body tattoos mark a lifetime of belonging that few...

On April 2, 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis fled Richmond with the entire Confederate treasury, a fortune in gold ingots, silver bricks, and coins guarded by teenage Navy midshipmen on a train heading south into a collapsing nation. Five weeks later, when Union soldiers finally captured Davis, almost all of it was gone. The War Department told the public the missing treasure was worth $13 million, a number historians say was invented to turn every former Confederate into a hunted man. The truth was far more complicated, with records showing most of the money was paid to soldiers and spent along the...

A young British teacher in Tokyo is stalked and murdered by a man who evaded police for two and a half years. An experienced hunter on a dream African safari is shot dead in her cabin — and her husband collects nearly five million dollars in life insurance. And four elite American climbers are seized at gunpoint in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, becoming hostages in a war they never knew existed. This is episode 4 of Deadly Destinations, a special four-part series on Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes hosted by Vanessa Richardson. Four exotic locations that should have been a dream va...

On the evening of April 14, 1865, just five days after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, President Abraham Lincoln attended a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington. He was shot in the back of the head by an actor named John Wilkes Booth and died the following morning. But the murder at Ford's Theatre was not a lone gunman's act of revenge. That same night, across the city, other men were carrying out coordinated attacks on the Vice President and the Secretary of State, all part of a wider Confederate conspiracy aimed at decapitating the federal government...

In 1854, an adventurer named George Bickley founded a secret society with a singular goal: build a slave empire stretching from the American South through Mexico, Cuba, and the Caribbean. He called it the Knights of the Golden Circle. Within a few years, it had grown into a powerful underground network that pushed secession, seized federal arsenals, and intimidated unionists across the South. Some historians have linked it to early plots against Abraham Lincoln, four years before John Wilkes Booth finished the job. When the war ended, the Knights didn't disband. They went underground, reportedly burying millions in gold across...

In 1802, a journalist reported that President Thomas Jefferson was keeping an enslaved woman named Sally Hemings as a concubine and had fathered her children. Jefferson said nothing. His family denied it. America's most prominent historians dismissed the story for nearly two hundred years.

But Hemings' own descendants told a different story, one passed down through generations of oral history that the white historical establishment refused to take seriously. Did the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence have a secret family with a woman he enslaved? And if he did, why did it take the country...

Three people sought refuge in remote wilderness — and never made it home safely. A young American woman vanished without a trace in Nepal's Himalayas, a serial killer preyed on hitchhikers along an Australian highway, and two men were murdered deep in the Amazon for exposing illegal activity. This is episode 3 of Deadly Destinations, a special four-part series on Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes hosted by Vanessa Richardson. Four exotic locations that should have been a dream vacation, but ended in a nightmare. New episodes drop every Sunday, and all four are available now, ad-free, on Crime House Plus. Join at...

In the spring of 1846, a group of nearly ninety American pioneers set out from Springfield, Illinois, bound for California. They were farmers, merchants, and families with young children, led by a 60-year-old man named George Donner. They expected to reach the West Coast by autumn.They never made it. After taking an unproven shortcut called the Hastings Cutoff, the party fell weeks behind schedule and was trapped by an early snowstorm high in the Sierra Nevada. By the time the first rescuers reached them in February 1847, nearly half were dead, and stories of what the survivors had done to...

The government gets a bad rap. But the roads under your feet, the forecast on your phone, and the letter in your mailbox are all government too. Hosted by Professors Greg Jackson and Lindsey Cormack, Government That Doesn't Suck brings together the sharpest thinkers to reveal the real-world impact of American government, one episode at a time. Follow ⁠Government That Doesn’t Suck⁠ for a new episode every other Monday. Government That Doesn’t Suck is a Rewind Studios original powered by PAVE Studios.

In 1848, a preacher named John Humphrey Noyes founded a religious community in upstate New York built around an idea most Americans found unthinkable. At Oneida, traditional marriage was abolished in favor of what Noyes called "complex marriage," a system in which exclusive pairings were forbidden and sexual relationships were governed by the community's leadership. Children were raised collectively. Reproduction was controlled through a program of selective breeding Noyes called stirpiculture. For more than thirty years, the Oneida Community grew, prospered, and held itself out as proof that human beings could live without sin. Then it collapsed. In this episode...

On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 39 years old. The killing triggered unrest in more than a hundred American cities and altered the course of the civil rights movement. Two months later, a small-time criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested in London and charged with the murder. He pleaded guilty, then almost immediately recanted, claiming he had been part of a larger conspiracy. King's own family eventually came to believe him. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson revisits...

Three separate journeys onto the water ended in death, disappearance, and unanswered questions. NBA champion Bison Dele vanished from his own sailboat in the South Pacific in 2002; cruise passenger Merrian Carver disappeared aboard a Celebrity Cruises ship bound for Alaska in 2004 while the cruise line stayed silent; and Australian mother Dianne Brimble died within hours of boarding a Sydney cruise in 2002 in a case that took nearly a decade to reach a courtroom. This is episode 2 of Deadly Destinations, a special four-part series on Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes hosted by Vanessa Richardson. Four exotic locations that should have...

Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI ran a secret program called COINTELPRO, short for Counter Intelligence Program. Its targets included civil rights leaders, Black liberation groups, anti-war activists, and feminist organizers. Its methods included surveillance, infiltration, disinformation, and tactics designed to, in the FBI's own words, "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" them. For years, the program ran entirely in the shadows. Then in March 1971, a group of activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, stole the files, and sent them to the press. What they revealed changed how Americans saw their own government. In this episode of...

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the FLDS, was a polygamist offshoot of mainstream Mormonism that operated for decades along the Utah-Arizona border. By the early 2000s, its prophet was a man named Warren Jeffs. Under Jeffs, the FLDS tightened into something closer to total control. He assigned wives, expelled men, and arranged marriages between adult followers and underage girls. In 2006, the FBI placed him on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. Two years later, Texas authorities raided the Yearning for Zion Ranch. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson...

Walt Disney didn't just build a theme park. He built a system of total control, and convinced the world to call it magic. Employees aren't staff, they're "cast members." Uniforms are "costumes." Guests who step out of line are escorted by plainclothes security to unmarked holding rooms. Beneath the park, a nine-acre tunnel network houses a command center monitoring over 70,000 functions per second. For 56 years, Disney ran its own government in Florida, with its own fire department, building codes, and laws, after promising the state a utopian city of 20,000 residents living under permanent corporate rule with no voting rights...

Three tropical destinations, three true crimes: in Aruba, 35-year-old Robyn Gardner vanishes from a beach with a travel companion who later tries to collect her life insurance... and is never charged. On Thailand's Koh Tao, British backpackers Hannah Witheridge and David Miller are found murdered at dawn, and the convictions that follow are disputed worldwide. In Bali, nine young Australians are arrested for heroin smuggling after their own government tips off Indonesian police, leading to two of them being executed by firing squad. This is episode 1 of Deadly Destinations, a special four-part series on Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes...

On the morning of August 5, 1962, Marilyn Monroe was found dead in the bedroom of her Los Angeles home. She was 36 years old. The Los Angeles County Coroner ruled her death a probable suicide from an overdose of barbiturates, citing her long history of insomnia, depression, and substance use. But almost immediately, the official story began to fray. Inconsistencies in the timeline, conflicting accounts from the people closest to her, and Monroe's well-documented ties to some of the most powerful men in America turned a tragic death into one of the most enduring mysteries of the twentieth century. In this...

Behind a windowless brownstone on the Yale campus known only as "the Tomb," fifteen students are tapped each year to enter one of the most powerful and secretive brotherhoods in American history. Its alumni have included three U.S. presidents, CIA directors, Supreme Court justices, and titans of finance and media. Founded at Yale in 1832, Skull and Bones has operated by a strict code of silence ever since. Members swear lifelong oaths, perform rituals in private, and confide their deepest secrets to one another before carrying those secrets into government, business, and intelligence. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories...