Prey Tell

Imagine it’s 2007, and the Saturday before Halloween. Swarms of people all jam into a bar dressed in their best Halloween costumes. Among those costumes are reportedly a lion, a clown, a cowboy, a hunter, a Joker, and a woman dressed as Paris Hilton.

And then there’s a man named Joel Lovelien who decided to dress up as a hockey player wearing a green jersey for the North Dakota Fighting Sioux.

Joel is at this bar with his fiancée, and offers to help someone outside the bar. But later that night Joel dies under...

This week I’m doing something different and leaning into spooky season, hauntings and horror in some of America’s most haunted cities. It's a five-stop tour, featuring: St. Augustine, Florida; Charleston, South Carolina; Salem, Massachusetts; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Don’t be fooled by these picturesque locations.

When you visit a haunted place there’s often a quietness that seems to settle in the air. You can’t escape it. It’s not silence exactly. It’s something even eerier. Something you can’t quite put you’re your finger on, but instinctively you know you might not...

February 12, 2010 was a chilly day in Huntsville, Alabama. It was unusually cold and hovering in the mid 30s. Huntsville is known as the rocket city. It’s where NASA and the space program were born and where many aerospace companies call home.

Instead of heading to the space center, this story takes place at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in an ordinary conference room with professors. It’s a run-of-the-mill meeting that quickly turned fatal.

By the end of that meeting, three professors were shot dead and three more were wounded. When we hear scho...

The town of Cloverdale, California sits at the northern end of Sonoma County’s wine country. Way back on May 23, 1982 it was warm, although the heat from  peak daytime had worn off by the evening. 

Sarah Geer left her friend’s house and set off walking downtown. She was a child and only thirteen-years-old at the time. She had no way of knowing she wouldn’t come home that night, and she would never make it to the eighth grade. Sarah was brutally raped and murdered by an unknown man in an alleyway. Her case went cold for over...

Somewhere around mile marker 83, near a little town called North Utica, a white Pontiac is pulled over onto the shoulder.

It's a 1985 Pontiac T1000 with New Jersey plates. And behind the wheel is a Twenty-one-year-old college senior named Tammy. Tammy was on the last leg of a 1,500 mile drive from her family's home in New Jersey headed to her college in Iowa. 

Somewhere between three and four o'clock that afternoon, several drivers passing by on I-80 remember seeing a young woman standing near her disabled car. And parked close by was a tractor-trailer with a f...

This is a tangential part two of Wednesday’s episode on the mysterious death of Bernadette Vander Meer. While there was no trial and conviction in that case, but it raised questions about the horrors of Alpine Divorce.

Alpine divorce goes something like this: a couple go for a hike, often to a high peak, and one spouse falls over the edge. In my reported cases, it's the woman that falls, but not always. Usually, there's no witnesses. And what follows is a sentence that investigators often hear in one form or another: She just slipped. Or, sh...

On Tuesday, August 22, 2006, the beautiful singing voice of Bernadette Vander Meer went silent on a ridge in Zion National Park, in Utah. She was twenty-eight years old. And she was there with her husband to celebrate ten years of marriage.

Her husband’s story was simple. She was standing near the edge of a roughly twelve hundred foot cliff edge. He was setting up a photo. He turned away only for a moment, and when he turned back, Bernadette was gone.

Investigators initially ruled the fall an accident. Then, in June 2026, a court document was ma...

On October 19th, 2023, a group of ten people rented kayaks and paddleboards from a small outfitter on the shore. They're not experienced paddlers. They're a yoga group and most of them were strangers to each other just a week earlier. And they’re out for one more excursion before they fly home. Two of the women drift away from the rest of the group, out past where the guides can clearly see them. When the group paddles back to shore that afternoon, one of the two women who went out further doesn't come back to shore.

Her na...

Every morning, something like four million vehicles move through São Paulo, Brazil on a highway system called the Rodoanel. Most of the drivers on it have never once heard the name of the man who helped engineer it.

Manfred, the engineer, didn't live to see it finished. He was forty-nine years old. Married for two decades. Father of two. And on the night of October 31st, 2002, in his own home, in a quiet and gated neighborhood on the south side of São Paulo, he was beaten to death while he slept.

His wife, Ma...

In 2024 a little girl named Joshlin Smith disappeared in South Africa. She was just six years old. As of the recording of this episode, she still hasn't been found.

By the time her case reached trial, it had become one of the most closely watched criminal proceedings in recent South African history. Many people would go on to draw comparisons to Madeleine McCann's disappearance in Portugal (another case where a young child's vanishing gripped an entire country's attention for years). 

Police would soon find out Joshlin’s wasn’t a tragic disappearance, it was human traff...

On the morning of September 7th, 1988, a seventeen-year-old boy called 911 from a house on the Long Island Sound and said his parents had been attacked. Within hours, before Martin began to process what had happened to his parents, he was sitting in a police interrogation room, being told, over and over, that he was the one who did it.

This is the story of Seymour and Arlene Tankleff. And it's the story of their son, Martin Tankleff, who lost both of them to a single act of violence in his own home. Then, in a set of...

This episode covers one of the more haunting missing persons cases in recent California history. It’s a case that took years to be classified as a homicide, and it raises hard questions about what happens when investigators commit to the wrong theory early, and don't let go of it. 

The McStay Family disappeared on February 4th, 2010. Their bodies were eventually found in the Mojave Desert in 2013. The public ran rampant with speculation and wild theories. But the reason for the family’s murder was much closer to home.

For a full list of source mater...

On October 5th, 2004, at just after 11 o’clock at night, a cleaning crew finished up and headed out into the parking lot of the medical office building they were cleaning in Tucson, Arizona. They noticed a car that had been sitting in the parking lot for hours with the engine off and the lights off. 

Inside was David Brian Stidham. Everyone who loved him called him Brian. He was 37-years-old, and less than an hour earlier he was standing in front of a room full of medical students at the University of Arizona teaching them about pediatric eye...

Two girls. Two different states. Two families who reported them missing quickly, called every hotline, stood in front of every camera that would point their way, and yet as of the day I'm recording this, neither one has come home.

I usually give you one case per episode. Today, I'm doing something different. I'm giving you two. Not because they're connected. They’re not connected as far as anyone knows. We’re talking different states, different years, and different circumstances. I'm putting them in the same episode because neither one has gotten the coverage they deserve.

Th...

It's just after 4 a.m. on February 13th, 2022, in New York City's Chinatown. Most of the neighborhood is fast asleep. Somewhere on Chrystie Street, a young woman gets out of a cab. She's only three minutes from her apartment door.

She has no idea that a man has been watching her. And she certainly has no idea that he's about to follow her through the front door of her building, up six flights of stairs, and into her apartment. 

Less than two hours later, Christina Yuna Lee was pronounced dead.

For a full l...

Sixty-nine-year-old Warren Barnes was from Grand Junction, Colorado. On the night of February 27th, 2021, while he slept in a small encampment he kept under a bridge close to downtown, a nineteen-year-old drove around looking for someone to murder.

In the Murder of Warren Barnes, I’ll tell you who Warren was before anyone knew his name as a headline about a beheading, and what it says about society that a teenager could look at a sleeping, unhoused man and assume no one would miss him.

For a full list of source materials, please visit: https://pr...

This episode is the extraordinary survival story of Mary Vincent. Picture a two-lane highway outside of Modesto, California. It's late September, 1978, and a girl is walking down the center of that highway. Mary is only 15-years-old. She’s naked, and she’s covered in blood with her arms pointed straight up to the sky. 

She might only be a teenager, but she instinctively knows that if she doesn't keep her arms elevated, she is going to bleed to death on the highway. Only a few hours earlier, a man used a hatchet to cut off both of her f...

Sarm Heslop was a native of Southampton, England. That's the same port city the Titanic left from. Being that it's a port city it seems fitting that Sarm went from a flight attendant to living and working on a luxury boat in St. John’s US Virgin Islands. 

That career change would result in her disappearance. On the night of March 7, 2021, Sarm Heslop was 41 years old, living on a boat with a man she had known for seven months. She was only two hundred feet from the St. John shoreline. By all accounts she was healthy and an...

Imagine doing what your family and friends say are “all the right things” in life. You graduate college, get married and start a family and you have a job and a clear career path. Now, imagine that someone violently cuts your life short just because they felt like it. And for little more than $200 in cash...

I wish I could tell you this story is rooted in imagination, but sadly it isn’t. That was the terrifying reality for Jerry Colyer on a seemingly normal Thursday night back in 2016 as he worked the nightshift front desk at the Ec...

When Jordie Hudson’s mother officially reported her missing on April 14, 2016, she had no way of knowing the horror of what her daughter, an accomplished artist, endured days earlier. On April 9th, a chance encounter after a night out at a local pub resulted in Jordie’s murder. The aftermath of her death is even more horrific, involving the US Marshals, the recovery of her body from a shallow grave and two reported lovers who would ultimately turn on each other in connection to the murder.

For a full list of source materials, please visit: www.preytellpodcast.com...

For most people Sunday, September 16th, 2012 was a typical day. If anything, they may have been grateful for the warmer-than-average weather blanketing the area of Chesterfield, Virginia that year. But for 44-year-old Pareshkumar (Paresh) Patel, this Sunday marked the first of a series of truly terrifying events that would result in his kidnapping and heinous murder.

For a full list of source materials, please visit: www.preytellpodcast.com/episodes/the-murder-of-pareshkumar-patel

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For...

On April 5th, 1986, Jeanne Ann Clery was brutally attacked and murdered in her dorm room at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. A swift investigation determined the murderer was a fellow student. The aftermath of Jeanne’s murder lead her parents to create the Clery Center and become staunch advocates for campus safety. Their efforts set precedent and regulations for colleges and universities receiving federal funding that continues to present day.

For a full list of source materials, please visit: https://www.preytellpodcast.com/episodes/murder-of-jeanne-clery

Connect with Prey Tell Podcast on social media and stay up...

Welcome to the PREY TELL Podcast! I'm your host, Ashley Schef. 

In every case I cover on PREY TELL I begin with the victim and their story. I created this show to help advocate on behalf of victims who can no longer speak for themselves. As someone invested in true crime, I kept seeing the same troubling patterns across cases. And when it comes to victims and their families, they’re left hoping someone cares enough to uncover the truth. Every victim has a story to tell, and that story deserves to be told. 

The nami...

Welcome to the PREY TELL Podcast! I'm your host, Ashley Schef. 

In every case I cover on PREY TELL I begin with the victim and their story. I created this show to help advocate on behalf of victims who can no longer speak for themselves. As someone invested in true crime, I kept seeing the same troubling patterns across cases. And when it comes to victims and their families, they’re left hoping someone cares enough to uncover the truth. Every victim has a story to tell, and that story deserves to be told. 

The nami...