Forgotten Serial Killers True Crime

Charles Rodman Campbell was the second person executed by Washington State after the 1976 reinstatement of capital punishment and the last inmate ever hanged there. Convicted of murdering three women in a Clearview home in 1982, Campbell was returned to the scene of his earlier crimes through a flawed work-release program that allowed him to exact revenge on the witnesses who had sent him to prison eight years earlier.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans' overwhelmed police force missed the pattern of four women murdered by Joseph Brant over eleven months. This episode examines how systemic collapse after the storm created the perfect conditions for a careful killer to operate undetected, from the burned-out car containing the first unidentified victim in October 2007 through the high-profile September 2008 murder of activist Kirsten Brydum that finally drew national attention.

In 1996, three nurses at a Massachusetts VA hospital finally broke their silence and accused colleague Kristen Gilbert of murdering patients by injecting them with epinephrine, then rushing to the rescue to impress her police-officer boyfriend.

In the early hours of January 9, 1992, a routine traffic stop in Riverside, California, led authorities to William Lester Suff, an outwardly mild-mannered county stock clerk. Over the next three years, investigators would link him to at least twelve brutal murders of local women, uncovering a chilling double life hidden behind a friendly smile and community volunteer work.

In late February 1991, 21-year-old Mary Ann Newton escaped a brutal assault by long-haul trucker Clark Perry Baldwin at a Texas truck stop, only to have investigators identify him nearly three decades later as the killer of three women across multiple states. This gripping episode traces Baldwin’s predatory career and the groundbreaking DNA work that finally brought him to justice.

In July 1916, wartime fuel shortages led Austro-Hungarian officers to a tinsmith’s cottage in Cinkota where they discovered twenty-four methanol-preserved bodies sealed inside metal drums—marking the revelation of one of Hungary’s most prolific serial killers.

In this chilling episode, we recount the final hours and explosive legacy of Catherine Monvoisin—better known as La Voisin—whose 1680 execution exposed a vast network of poison, black magic, and aristocratic murder plots at the glittering court of Louis XIV. Her refusal to confess, even as flames engulfed her, protected the most dangerous secret of all: the King’s own mistress had been her most powerful client. The Affair of the Poisons would shake the French monarchy to its core and reveal the hidden occult underbelly beneath Versailles’ rational façade.

In January 2018, Texas carried out its first execution of the year when Anthony Allen Shore was put to death for the 1992 murder of Maria del Carmen Estrada. The case remained unsolved for more than a decade until a preserved fingernail scraping finally yielded a DNA match that linked Shore to four brutal killings spanning nine years.

On November 7, 1983, a watchful neighbor in Hollywood’s Beachwood Canyon foiled a burglary attempt and unwittingly cracked open the case of one of Los Angeles’s most prolific serial killers. The suspect, Brandon Tholmer, was quickly connected to a chilling trove of jewelry and personal belongings that linked him to the murders of at least twelve elderly Westside women between 1981 and 1983. What began as a routine attempted-burglary arrest soon revealed that Tholmer, a convicted sex offender released from Patton State Hospital under California’s Mentally Disordered Sex Offender protocol, had been preying on vulnerable seniors for years.

In the sleepy corridors of Nocona General Hospital, a routine pharmacy inventory check uncovered a chilling mystery—twenty vials of the potent paralytic mivacurium chloride had vanished without a trace. The discovery set in motion a Texas Ranger investigation that would link the missing medication to an alarming spike in patient deaths, revealing a pattern too precise to be coincidental.

In the mid-1970s, a polite young man who introduced himself as a cartoonist lured at least five gay men from San Francisco bars, then stabbed them to death on the city’s beaches and in their homes. The case, known as The Doodler, remains the city’s longest-running unsolved serial-killing investigation, with a detailed police sketch but no arrests fifty-one years later.

On April 29, 2004, Baton Rouge police quietly arrested 41-year-old computer-store clerk Sean Vincent Gillis. Within hours he calmly confessed to eight brutal murders spanning a decade—crimes overshadowed by the parallel hunt for serial killer Derrick Todd Lee.

On November 15, 1971, an 18-year-old Howard University student named Brenda Denise Woodard was found dead along Route 202 in Maryland, her coat pocket containing a chilling note signed “Free-way Phantom.” The message linked her death to four earlier abductions of young Black girls and foreshadowed a sixth, creating one of the longest-running unsolved serial cases in the nation’s capital.

In October 2008, a routine LAPD dragnet targeting 92 pre-2004 registered Los Angeles County sex offenders unexpectedly solved two long-running serial-murder investigations, identifying John Floyd Thomas Jr. as the man behind the Westside Rapist and Claremont/Southland Strangler killings spanning 1972–1986.

Carl Panzram’s own words open this chilling episode as we examine the life and crimes of a man who claimed to have murdered 21 people and assaulted over a thousand others without a shred of remorse. From his brutal Minnesota childhood to the execution chamber at Leavenworth, Panzram’s story is preserved in one of the most unfiltered criminal autobiographies ever published.

On Halloween morning 1969, Glasgow mother Helen Puttock was murdered after a night at the Barrowland Ballroom, leaving behind her sister Jeannie as the key witness and a mysterious dance partner known only as “the second John.” This episode reconstructs the fateful taxi ride and the minute details that turned an ordinary Thursday night into Scotland’s most enduring cold case.

In July 1988, the discovery of Debra Medeiros's body in a Freetown drainage ditch launched one of the most enigmatic serial-killing investigations in modern American history. Over the next ten months, nine women were found murdered along the highways surrounding New Bedford, Massachusetts, with two more presumed victims still missing. The case, which targeted vulnerable women from the city's struggling waterfront district, remains unsolved nearly four decades later.

On April 10, 2015, forensic teams discovered four additional sets of remains behind a New Britain strip mall, confirming inmate William Devin Howell’s chilling claim that police had only found “half of what is out there.” The recovery brought the total body count to seven victims murdered by Howell during a single year while he worked as a lawn-mowing contractor in central Connecticut.

On February 2, 2007, nineteen-year-old Joshua Anderson entered the north Tulsa home of Herbert and Rosemary Hobbs intending only to rob them. Within ninety minutes he had forced the mother and son into sexual acts, murdered them both, and set their house ablaze, escalating a simple robbery into one of Tulsa’s most disturbing post-millennium homicide cases.

In November 1984, a single preserved tissue sample from a 1976 death finally revealed that Steven David Catlin had been murdering his wives and mother with undetectable paraquat for nearly a decade.

On the morning of April 12, 1919, Paris police finally arrested the mild-mannered, bearded man who had been living under multiple aliases. What they uncovered was a chilling web of deception, wartime disappearances, and a secluded villa in Gambais that may have hidden the remains of as many as eleven victims.

On January 4, 2006, recently released juvenile offender Leo Boatman carried a stolen AK-47 into Ocala National Forest and gunned down two Santa Fe Community College students in a quiet woodland clearing near Juniper Springs. The brutal attack left John Parker and Amber Peck dead within minutes, their bodies hidden in a marshy pond before Boatman calmly returned home to watch television.

On the evening of March 30, 2010, Franklin DeWayne Alix was executed by lethal injection in Texas for the capital murder of Eric Bridgeford during a violent 1998 home invasion. The episode examines how the crime began with the rape of Eric’s sister Karyl, escalated to Eric’s shooting death on the front lawn, and concluded with Alix’s final statement before his death at Huntsville Unit.

On the second day of the new millennium, a seemingly model Navy veteran named John Eric Armstrong reported discovering a body in the Rouge River—yet within months, investigators would learn he was the man responsible for multiple murders of Detroit-area sex workers. This episode unpacks how a man with a clean record and honorable discharge from the USS Nimitz became one of the most surprising serial killers in Detroit history.

## Episode 29 — Jake Bird: The Tacoma Ax and the Hex

In the warm spring nights of May 2005, Dale Hausner and Samuel Dieteman began a terrifying 15-month drive-by shooting spree across suburban Phoenix, wounding and killing random strangers for no reason other than the thrill. High on methamphetamine and sleep-deprived, the pair carried out nearly 40 shootings, murdering eight people and wounding nineteen others while also targeting animals in the same manner.

On Christmas Day 2007, ten-year-old Lee Hye-jin and eight-year-old Wu Ye-seul vanished from a small park in Anyang, South Korea after attending a church concert, launching one of the nation’s most intense missing-children investigations. For seventy-two days, police pursued dead-end leads and national AMBER alerts until a chance discovery on a nearby mountain finally broke the case open.

In June 1972, fifteen-year-old Deborah Januszko became the fourth young woman murdered in her Queens bedroom by an intruder who slipped through an unlocked window and vanished without a trace. Detectives soon connected her death to three earlier unsolved stabbings, revealing a chilling pattern that had terrorized Richmond Hill, Woodhaven, and Jamaica for nearly two years. The arrest of Joseph Baldi exposed not only a forgotten serial killer but also the devastating consequences of a broken mental-health system.

During the evening shifts in the Bexar County Hospital's pediatric ICU in 1981–1982, licensed vocational nurse Genene Jones turned

In this chilling episode we uncover the horrifying crimes of Darya Saltykova, the eighteenth-century Russian noblewoman known as the Saltychikha, who systematically tortured and murdered dozens of her own serfs over a seven-year reign of terror on her estate south of Moscow.

On August 9, 1987, Philadelphia police forced open an apartment at 1631 North Nineteenth Street and discovered seven strangled African American women hidden inside what would become known as the “House of Death.” The tenant, Harrison Graham—locally famous for his Cookie Monster impressions—had vanished that morning, leaving behind a trail of bodies that spanned a year of undetected killings.

In the late 18th century, Scottish planter Lewis Hutchinson turned his fortified estate, Edinburgh Castle, into a killing ground, dropping dozens of victims into a deep Jamaican sinkhole now known as Hutchinson's Hole. This episode explores how a man educated in medicine became one of the Caribbean's most prolific and least-known serial killers.

In April 1989, investigators discovered a horrifying scene at Rancho Santa Elena near Matamoros, Mexico: a ritual cauldron filled with human remains and the mutilated bodies of fifteen victims. At the center of this nightmare was Adolfo Constanzo, a Cuban-American cult leader whose supernatural “insurance” racket had protected major drug shipments across the U.S.-Mexico border—until the abduction of American student Mark Kilroy brought everything crashing down.

In the summer of 1924, hundreds of human bones surfaced from Hanover’s Leine River, exposing one of Weimar Germany’s most shocking serial murder cases. Fritz Haarmann, a petty criminal and police informant, was ultimately revealed as the killer of at least 22 young men whose dismembered remains had been dumped in the water. This episode traces the discovery of the bones, the city’s growing panic, and the disturbing double life of the man known as the Butcher of Hanover.

In the early hours of May 1, 2010, Shannan Gilbert vanished after a frantic 911 call from Oak Beach, Long Island. Months later, police discovered a cluster of bodies along Ocean Parkway that would become known as the Gilgo Four, all escorts who had advertised on Craigslist. Over the next decade the search would expand, uncovering at least ten victims and leading investigators to a suspect whose own home sat just miles from the burial sites.

In this chilling episode of Forgotten Serial Killers, we examine the double life of Dennis Nilsen, a quiet Scottish-born civil servant who murdered at least twelve young men in North London between 1978 and 1983 while maintaining an unremarkable routine as a job-centre clerk and trade-union steward.

In this haunting episode of Forgotten Serial Killers, we examine the life of Cary Anthony Stayner—the overlooked older brother of Steven Stayner, whose abduction made national headlines in 1972. While America celebrated Steven’s miraculous return, Cary grew up in the long shadow of that tragedy, eventually becoming the Yosemite serial killer who murdered four women in 1999.

In this chilling episode of Forgotten Serial Killers, we unravel the horrifying true story of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka—dubbed the "Ken and Barbie Killers"—whose seemingly perfect lives masked a campaign of rape, torture, and murder that stunned Canada. From their lavish 1991 wedding to the gruesome discovery of Leslie Mahaffy's remains, we trace how a charming couple evaded justice for years while the system failed their victims.

In the spring of 1984, Australian-born photographer Christopher Bernard Wilder used his charm and camera to lure aspiring models from Florida malls, leaving a trail of missing women and unsolved murders across the American South.

Carroll Edward Cole was executed in Nevada in 1985 after waiving all appeals and demanding death for murdering at least thirteen women. This episode examines the Iowa-born killer whose horrific childhood, high IQ, and chilling self-awareness led him to request execution rather than fight for his life.