True Crime Campfire

In last week’s episode, we met John Smith, a lying, manipulative weirdo who almost certainly had killed his missing second wife, Fran. Towards the end of that episode, we learned that John had been married before, to a young woman named Janice Hartman—and that Janice, just like Fran, had gone missing, never to be seen again. We started that episode with a grim discovery six years after Janice’s disappearance—the skeleton of a young woman in a plywood box beside a country road in western Indiana, her legs cut off below the knees. This week, it all come...

If there’s one old folktale that finds a frequent echo in true crime stories, it has to be ‘Bluebeard,’ about a man who marries and then murders a series of wives. It’s a pattern we’ve seen time and again, with both killer husbands and lethal wives, most often driven by greed. That, at least, is something comprehensible—there are some killers driven by urges so cold and petty that it’s hard to even recognize them as human.

Join us for the chilling true story of a serial husband whose entire life was a lie...

All of us have some tensions and frustrations with our families, and that’s fine. It’s just normal human nature. But for some people, these rough edges to everyday family interactions become absolutely unbearable, an insult to their overinflated sense of importance. And those resentments can seep like poison through every particle of their being until it's all they can think of.

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Sources: https://supreme.courts.ca.gov/sites/default/files/supremecourt/default/documents/2-s076337-res...

Do you think people will still be talking about Scott Peterson or Chris Watts in a hundred years? How about five-hundred? Probably not, right? But there are some acts of cruelty and depravity that echo down the centuries, becoming entwined with myth and legend. This week, we’re going to take a look at two of these famous perpetrators.

Sources:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/transactions-of-the-royal-historical-society/article/counting-the-stakes-a-reassessment-of-vlad-iii-draculas-practice-of-collective-impalements-in-fifteenthcentury-southeastern-europe/F1B68C737C004D494BBE3B8B9B5E0FF7

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vlad-the-Impaler

MJ Trow, Vl...

Death is not always the end. We’re not stepping into any kind of spiritual territory here, though, we’re talking about the very earthly fact that just because someone appears to be dead, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that is the case. Maybe someone needs to escape an upcoming personal disaster, maybe they need the insurance money, maybe they’ve tied their life into such a knot that it’s easier to just quit and start again. Faking your own death has an age-old history, and it almost always causes pain and damage all around.

Reddit is an endless archive of humanity’s most disturbing, bizarre, and deeply human stories. If you love going down internet rabbit holes, 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 REA...

Last week, we introduced you to Krystyna Skarbek, a daring resistance agent who smuggled valuable intelligence and thousands of refugees out of Nazi-occupied Poland. When we left off last week, she and her lover Andrzej had just fled Hungary, one step ahead of the Gestapo, and enjoyed a brief moment of peace in Belgrade. That wasn’t going to last for long. Join us for the finale of this incredible true story.

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James Belushi once wrote, “Heroes aren’t born, they’re cornered.” It’s often extraordinary, and sometimes horrifying, circumstance that compels a person into actions they’d never have imagined previously. This week’s story is about a woman who was faced with horrors and discovered she had the courage to fight them.

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You can’t judge a book by its cover. There’s no shortage of gold-hearted biker dudes and wicked ministers—you can’t really know what someone’s like inside right away. Like that guy in the library over there, with the glasses and neat hair and preppy style and self-effacing affect. He seems harmless, right? He isn’t, though. He’s as full of anger and danger as someone on death row. Sometimes it’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for.

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In Irish and other European folklore, a changeling is a fae child that is swapped with a human baby to be raised by humans. Sometimes it’s because the fae needed human milk to survive, in others, it’s because the fae needed a human to be a servant or sometimes, as revenge on the parents. The parents would raise the fae child unknowingly, but the infant would be… wrong. Maybe it would eat more than a human child could, or would be particularly mischievous, or would have extra fingers or toes, but in the stories, the parents eventually knew...

In August of 2012, the family of an Irish woman named Elaine O’Hara reported her missing. Investigators located her car near the seashore, but found no sign of Elaine herself. She had been struggling with her mental health for most of her life; in fact, the day she disappeared was the day she got home from a five-week stay in a psychiatric hospital. So after a brief investigation, everyone concluded that Elaine must have taken her own life. But Elaine had been living a secret life for the past year and half before she went missing—playing a dangerous game...

In Part One of this story last week, we followed the rise to riches of hotel owner Ben Novack Sr. and his glamorous model wife Bernice, and the spoiled yet lonely life of their son Benji. When we left off, Ben and Bernice were divorced, and Benji’s own first marriage had just ended. He had just gotten together with an exotic dancer named Narcy, a choice that would eventually have disastrous consequences for everyone in Benji’s life. This week, things get nuts.

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It has sometimes been said that great wealth is a curse—usually by people who have never had to go hungry, but there is something to it. The idea of the miserable millionaire goes back much further than Ebeneezer Scrooge. If you dedicate everything you have to the pursuit of wealth, then what’s left over for the rest of your life? In particular, the children of the very wealthy can have a tough time, sometimes both cosseted and ignored, sailing out into life without the lessons hammered into the rest of us by hard experience. It can leave them...

There are some crimes and schemes that must be just about as old as humanity itself. I’m sure handsome scammers have been wooing the daughters of wealthy families for about as long as the concepts of marriage and inheritance have existed. And I’m equally sure that every now and again, one of those handsome scammers got tired of waiting for nature to take its course, and decided to hurry along his in-laws’ journey to the grave. This week’s story is about a man who was entirely of his time, but chose to seek his fortune through these ti...

In his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde tells the story of a handsome young man who makes a deal with the Devil—his soul, in exchange for eternal youth and beauty. But there is a portrait of Dorian in the attic of his house, and as he moves through the years with his handsome face not aging, the portrait ages—and it also begins to show the poison seeping through him as he lives his life in soulless, selfish pursuit of hedonistic pleasures. He drives a young woman to suicide and doesn’t feel bad about it. He...

It’s almost impossible to know someone perfectly. Everyone has their private thoughts and hidden moments from their past, and this is usually no problem at all, it’s all just inconsequential things. Usually, but not always. Because some people don’t just have little harmless secrets, they have whole separate lives that the people close to them know nothing about. And the tension between those two lives can have deadly consequences.

Join us live at Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp in Equinunk, PA, September 10-13th! Visit ⁠badmagicproductions.com⁠ for more info and to buy...

When we left you at the end of part 1, Wayne Nance had begun his career as a serial killer with the murder of Donna Pounds. As much as he tried to blend into normal society—joining the Navy, working as a bouncer at a busy Western-themed bar—he could never completely hide the strangeness…and darkness brewing inside. Not everyone who saw it up close lived to tell about it, but as we’ll see in this episode, there were two who did. Join us for part 2 of this terrifying story.

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In the 1970s in Missoula, Montana, there was a brief epidemic of unsolved violent murders that shocked the small city down to its roots. A dark rumor spread quickly—the deaths must be the work of some sinister Satanic cult, secret rituals performed in the service of demonic powers. This was not the case. The murders were unconnected, the motives behind them having nothing to do with the big bad devil… except for one, in which the killer proudly declared his occult allegiance to anyone who asked. But that was just a cover for overpowering violent fantasies that this weak...

Our homes are supposed to be where we’re the safest. It’s where we’re our most vulnerable. Last week, we told you about someone who would use that vulnerability to his advantage. This week, as the story continues, his monstrous intentions will focus on two women and destroy their families' senses of safety forever. Join us for part 2 (the final part) of the story of Russell Williams. Sources:

Appleby, Timothy. A New Kind of Monster: The Secret Life and Shocking True Crimes of an Officer . . . and a Murderer

The Fifth Estate, episode Above Suspic...

In the military, a “gray man” refers to a service member who neither outperforms or underperforms his or her comrades. Someone who seamlessly fits into the group and gets the job done and doesn’t get unwanted attention while doing it. In that line of work, that can be a talent. In today’s story, we’re talking about a man who made a career out of being unnoticed, whose entire personality could be described as “gray,” and yet, had a violent and hateful nature resting just under the surface. When all was said and done, two women would be dead and co...

I don’t know about you, campers, but I like to have emergency plans for any eventuality. For example, what if I find myself in the center of a maze with only my wits to get out? What would I do? Of course, the secret to escape a maze is to keep your hand on one wall while you walk and eventually, you’ll find yourself at the exit. This case is a little bit like a maze. Every time the investigators thought they had a break in the case, they found themselves at yet another dead end, but luck...

People can be pretty strange. And not just people—as we’ll see in one story of this week’s episode, you can add all our extended family of primates to that. If you have a big brain and opposable thumbs, there’s a good chance you’ll be getting up to shenanigans. But as we’ll see in our other story, human beings still wear the crown for weird, ridiculously confident nonsense.

Join us live at Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp in Equinunk, PA, September 10-13th! Visit ⁠badmagicproductions.com⁠ for more info and to buy...

Today we’re sharing something a little different from our friends at ABC News and 20/20. It’s the first episode of a brand new original true crime series called "Blood and Water." 
 
In 2001, Leslie Preer was found brutally murdered, her body left in the shower of her home in the wealthy suburbs of Washington, D.C. Investigators initially set their sights on Leslie’s husband as the prime suspect — until bombshell DNA evidence revealed the presence of an "unknown male" at the scene. With extensive access to the original police tapes and interviews with the cold case detectives who w...

I’m sure most of you have heard some variant of the phrase, “nobody wants to see how the sausage gets made,” which refers to the often messy procedures behind getting things done in, say, business or politics. But it’s also a literal truth that most of us don’t want to see how sausage gets made, and that goes double if the person making it cuts corners and develops a wildly aggressive attitude to any kind of government oversight.

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Secrets can ruin everything. Not little ones, we’re talking big, looming secrets that might change your life forever if they were ever brought out into the light of day. Some people just can’t help themselves, stacking lie upon lie, hiding the secret truth behind an ever-growing wall of falsehood. And if that wall comes crashing down…well, some people will go to any lengths to keep their secrets safe.

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Anger can be useful. If you need to defend yourself or those you love, or if you need to stand up against some outrage in your community, anger can give you the necessary fire to get things done. It can also be poisonous, eating away at a soul until there’s not much left but dense fury that constantly leaks out like oil from a ruptured tanker. This week’s story is about a man who let his anger consume not only himself, but the lives of three innocent people.

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Love can be a pretty hard thing to define. It’s easier to say what it is not. Love is not secretly following someone and trying your best to keep her within sight every second of the day. Love is not trying to keep someone scared and uncertain so that they’ll rely on you more. And love is not thinking you own a person, and becoming furious when you find out that you do that. This is a story about someone who made all those mistakes, who mistook obsession for devotion, and whose towering sense of entitlement turned into...

Many of the stories we cover revolve around the disintegration of a marriage. It’s often a deeply traumatic event, upending entire lives and making an imagined future just vanish into nothing. It can drive some people kind of crazy. But other people are just built differently, and can move effortlessly from one marriage to the next as easily as changing a pair of socks. The woman in this week’s case certainly could do that, and she took that same casual attitude into matters of life and death.

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Life, obviously, is easier with money. Without having to scrabble and hustle just to survive, you can be free to pursue whatever interests and fascinations you like. But wealth doesn’t make you immune to the realities of human life. Families still have drama, hearts still get broken, dreams still get crushed into dust. This week’s story is about someone who started life with every possible advantage, but despite all her privilege, still descended into darkness.

Sources:

Deadly American Beauty by John Glatt

https://www.smh.com.au/world/jury...

If you’re unlucky, you might have at least one person in your life who just drives you crazy, someone with whom every interaction has an edge of mutual antipathy, that makes you feel like you’re always on the brink of a screaming argument. Sometimes two particular human beings just do not fit together. And because human beings are strange, sometimes a couple like that hook up and stay together for years before finally spinning apart. But that undercurrent of anger can remain, a little toxic flame that doesn’t need much fuel to erupt into an inferno that d...

Every night in the city, there are people out looking for something. Usually it’s just fun and excitement, but there are also those who go out looking to fulfill darker desires, who view the night city as a hunting ground where they will get what they want, no matter what. And sometimes, what they want is a nightmare of pain and suffering that shocks the conscience.

Note: This episode is about a serial killer, and the descriptions of his crimes are more graphic than most. Listener discretion is advised.

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It’s hard to convict someone of murder without a body. Even if it’s plain to everyone with a lick of common sense that the victim is dead and this is the guy who killed her, a prosecutor is wary of going to trial without being able to say with absolute certainty, this person is dead, and we know because we have her body. This week’s story is about a killer whose crime was apparent almost immediately, but who dragged on the crumbling pretense of a normal life for long weeks afterwards, until the horrific results of his ac...

Thanks to books and movies, and very occasionally real life, the idea of the genius killer has become pervasive. But most murderers are not dazzlingly creative schemers. If they have a plan at all, it’s usually simple and dumb—but unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean the plan will fail. This week’s story is about a man who got away with one murder, and then tried to repeat the trick almost exactly.

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Love is supposed to make you better. Your partner should push lift you up and make you want to improve yourself, improve life for you both. Sometimes, though, there are couples that do nothing but make each other worse. They become jealous, resentful, and cruel. Their relationship is a disgusting mire that sucks in the couple and everyone in their orbit. Everyone knows a couple like that. But today, we’re going to talk about a couple who committed one of the most heinous crimes we ever heard of to satisfy their own jealousy.

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In the cases we cover, there are types of relationship that frequently crop up between killer and victim, romantic partners or romantic rivals most of all. Sometimes, though, the relationship that is broken by murder is more shocking: a parent killing a child, or a child killing a parent. And sometimes that killer is still literally a child, someone you would never suspect to be capable of such brutal action. Case 1: The Murder of Jackie Bartlam. Case 2: The Murder of Gina Padilla. 

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Legendary Conservationist Steve Irwin said, “We don’t own the planet Earth, we belong to it. And we must share it with our wildlife.” It’s such a lovely sentiment. We have a responsibility to protect and care for creatures that can’t protect themselves. It’s something that almost every person on earth would agree with. But what happens when someone loves something so much they throttle the life out of it? What if one man’s selfish wants pushed him to sacrifice over 50 animals that he claimed to love? Heads-up: If you're really sensitive about harm to animals, you might want...

Come join us for CrimeWave 2.0, February 8-12, 2027 on Royal Caribbean's beautiful Oasis of the Seas. We're going to the Bahamas! See Katie and Whitney, plus Casefile, Last Podcast on the Left, True Crime Garage, Crime Time Teatime, Scared to Death, A Paranormal Chicks, No Sleep, Unexplained, Sinisterhood and Crime with Kourt. Live shows, meet and greets, pool parties, game shows, and new friends for life!

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In a lot of ways, the world is smaller now than it ever has been. With a few clicks of the mouse, I can watch a live camera feed of Sydney harbor, or read a newspaper from any country I can think of. Just five hours in an airplane can get you from the US to Europe, and pretty much anyone on the planet can listen to a couple of nerds like us on a podcast. But, obviously, the world is not in fact shrinking. It is still just as vast and potentially perilous as it was in the days...

Winston Churchill once said, “Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.” That’s a nice sentiment—I mean, by and large it’s good to let failure be a learning experience, to not let it discourage you from following your dreams. But…hear me out here: What if you’re just a hot mess? What if every time you go from one failure to the next, you leave a pile of bodies in your wake? Can you be a little TOO good at failure? Should you sometimes maybe acknowledge “Hey, maybe this thing I’m trying to do isn’t...

On the surface, Blanche Taylor Moore looked like a model of small-town virtue: a devoted caregiver, a churchgoing woman, a trusted neighbor. But behind that carefully maintained image lay a wild heart with few limits on what it was capable of. Murder certainly wasn’t beyond her, and those closest to her were in the most danger, consuming their own deaths with every bite of Blanche’s carefully prepared dinners. She turned domestic intimacy into a lethal weapon.

Sources:
Jim Schutze, Preacher’s Girl 
Court papers: https://law.justia.com/cases/north-carolina/supreme-court/1994/556a90-0.html https...