FBI Files

Cindy Paulson’s Escape Exposes Robert Hansen in Anchorage 

She was seventeen years old, handcuffed, barefoot, and running for her life. She had been kidnapped, tortured, and raped inside a quiet Anchorage home by a man she believed was just another client. Now, he was trying to load her onto a small bush plane, and she knew exactly what that meant: she would never be seen again. But Cindy Paulson had no intention of becoming another name on a list of missing women that no one was even investigating. She ran. And in doing so, she exposed one of...

He was one of Delaware's most powerful lawyers, with ties to the governor's own office. When his secret relationship with the governor's young secretary turned deadly, he was confident he could make the evidence disappear — permanently, sixty miles out in the Atlantic Ocean.

The cooler had other plans.

This episode traces the disappearance of Anne Marie Fahey, the year-long investigation that stalled without a body or a weapon, and the single piece of physical evidence — an ordinary plastic cooler that simply wouldn't sink — that finally convicted Thomas Capano of murder.

Part of The FBI Files...

Liberty Park Sniper: The Hunt for Joseph Paul Franklin | The FBI Files

It was a warm summer evening in Salt Lake City. Ted Fields, 20, and David Martin, 18, were jogging through Liberty Park with two white girlfriends. They were young. They were happy. They had no idea that a man with a high-powered rifle was watching them from a vacant lot across the street, hidden behind a hill, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

The shots rang out at 10:30 PM on August 20, 1980. Seven rounds from a .30-06 rifle tore through the night. Fields and Martin were...

Jack Unterweger: Austria's Serial Killer Caught by the FBI | The FBI Files

He was celebrated as a literary genius, a reformed man who had turned his life around behind bars. He walked red carpets, gave interviews, and rubbed shoulders with Vienna's elite. But while the world applauded his redemption story, Jack Unterweger was doing what he had always done: hunting women. And this time, he was reporting on his own crimes.

In this episode of The FBI Files, we reopen one of the most twisted cases in Bureau history—the chilling story of Johann "Jack" Unterweger, an...

It was a crisp winter morning in Langley, Virginia. Cars were lined up at a stoplight, waiting to turn into the main entrance of CIA headquarters. Inside those vehicles were ordinary people—analysts, engineers, covert operatives—going about their daily commute. None of them knew that a man with an AK-47 was watching them from a brown Datsun station wagon, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

At approximately 8:00 AM on January 25, 1993, Mir Aimal Kansi stepped out of his vehicle and walked calmly between the lanes of traffic. He raised his Norinco Type 56 assault rifle and opened fire. Ten...

A burned pickup truck in a Van Nuys hospital parking lot. A woman’s body inside, strangled before the flames ever touched her. A single earring. A lottery win. And a name that kept surfacing: Glenn Rogers.

It began on the night of September 29, 1995, when Sandra Gallagher—a 33-year-old mother of three—won $1,200 on a scratch-off at McRed’s Cocktail Lounge in Van Nuys. She was celebrating. She was happy. And when a charming stranger with long blond hair needed a ride home, she volunteered. Hours later, her truck was found on fire in a hospital parking lot. Her body...

He was a ghost. A drifter. A man with no fixed address and no fingerprints on file. He moved across the country like a shadow, robbing banks to fund his travels and using a high-powered rifle to kill from a distance. He was not motivated by money. He was not motivated by passion. He was motivated by hate—a consuming, irrational, all-encompassing hatred that he believed was a divine mission. His name was Joseph Paul Franklin. And on August 20, 1980, his cross-country killing spree brought him to Salt Lake City, where two young men would die in a hail of sniper fi...

He was the most powerful mob boss in America. The head of the Gambino crime family. A man who walked the streets of New York like a king, wearing $2,000 suits and flashing a smile that dared the government to take him down. The press called him "The Dapper Don." The FBI called him something else: "The Teflon Don." Because no matter how many times they arrested him, no matter how many charges they brought, nothing ever stuck. Three trials. Three acquittals. Witnesses disappeared. Jurors were bribed. And John Gotti walked free, again and again, laughing at the system that couldn't...

He wore cowboy boots and carried a hunting knife on his belt, calling himself by names lifted straight from western paperback novels. Behind the costume, FBI profilers concluded, was a man acting out a violent outlaw fantasy — one that cost 22-year-old Robin Smith her life.

After Smith's remains were discovered weeks later in a rural stretch of Washington state, the case grew into a multi-state manhunt spanning the Pacific Northwest, landing Darren Dee O'Neall on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list for over a year.

This episode traces the investigation, the eerie western fantasy behind O'Neall's al...

Eight FBI agents went out that morning expecting a routine arrest. Five minutes later, two were dead, five more were wounded, and one agent — already shot himself — fired the final rounds that ended it.
After an eight-month investigation into a wave of brutal bank robberies in south Miami, agents finally located their suspects on April 11th, 1986. What followed became known simply as the Firefight — one of the bloodiest and most studied shootouts in FBI history, a five-minute battle that permanently changed how every American law enforcement agency arms and trains its officers.
This episode reconstructs the shootout second by sec...

Eight FBI agents. Two armed men. Less than five minutes. On a quiet residential street in Miami in April 1986, a routine vehicle stop turned into one of the deadliest days in FBI history.
Michael Platt and William Matix, two former US Army servicemen suspected of a violent robbery spree across South Florida, were carrying firepower the Bureau never anticipated. By the time the gunfire ended, two agents were dead and five more were wounded — a tragedy that would permanently change how every FBI agent trains, arms, and prepares for the unexpected.
This episode breaks down the shootout, the fo...

A vanished bride-to-be. A red Torino. A drifter with a teardrop tattoo. This is the manhunt that gripped the Pacific Northwest—and the FBI agent who refused to let it go cold.

On the night of March 28, 1987, 22-year-old Robin Smith left a bar in Puyallup, Washington, with a man she had just met. Her fiancé had left the party early. Robin stayed behind. She was supposed to be home hours ago. She never came back.

The man she left with called himself Herb Johnson. His real name was Darren Dee O'Neall—a violent drifter, a serial rapis...

Two Boston police officers walked into an alley to check on a domestic dispute that had nothing to do with the man they encountered there. Ted Otsuki, a parolee with a violent past, assumed they were coming for him — and in a single, catastrophic misjudgment, opened fire.

What followed was an eleven-month international manhunt that placed Otsuki on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list and eventually led investigators from Boston to San Francisco, through Texas, and into a high-rise apartment in Guadalajara, Mexico.

This episode traces the tragic misunderstanding that cost Officer Roy Sergei his life, th...

By day, he ran a used bookstore and impressed customers with his knowledge of the classics. By night, he put on a fake beard, picked up an assault rifle, and robbed banks across suburban Chicago while his wife waited in the getaway car.

Between 1990 and 1991, Jeffrey and Jill Erickson, the "Bearded Bandit" and his partner, pulled off eight violent bank robberies, shot at a police officer, and stockpiled 38 guns in their suburban townhouse. When the FBI and Chicago police finally closed in, they discovered the couple had made a pact never to surrender.

This episode traces...

A fake beard. A baseball cap. A police scanner in his hand. Between 1990 and 1991, one man walked into bank after bank across suburban Chicago, announced a hold-up with military precision, and vanished before anyone could stop him. Outside, his wife waited with a stolen getaway car.

The FBI and Chicago police knew only his disguise, and bank employees gave him a name: the Bearded Bandit. But as the heists grew more violent, and a routine traffic stop ended in gunfire against a police officer, the hunt became a race against a man who had nothing left to lose.<...

An elderly woman battling cancer, vanished without a trace. An 86-year-old man and his wife, killed in their own home. A security guard, shot without warning while simply doing her job. In just one week, two killers — a 23-year-old ex-convict and his 16-year-old accomplice — crossed seven states, stealing a new car with every victim they left behind.

This episode traces the 1994 killing spree of Lewis Eugene Gilbert II and Eric Elliott, the nationwide manhunt it triggered, and the single overlooked tip that finally brought it to an end in a drainage ditch outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.

July 28, 1985. The Miami River. A marine salvager pulls three bodies from the murky water—men dressed in designer clothes, guns still tucked into their waistbands, large bills stuffed in their pockets. They were Colombian drug smugglers. And they hadn't drowned by accident.Witnesses said men in police uniforms had rushed them at the Jones Boat Yard. The smugglers panicked, jumped into the river, and disappeared beneath the surface. But these weren't real cops making a bust. They were cops making a heist—stealing 400 kilograms of cocaine worth $9 million on the street. And when the smugglers realized it wasn't a raid, they...

Thomas Capano had everything. Wealth. Power. A prestigious law career. A beautiful family. He was a former prosecutor, a political insider, a man who moved through Delaware's elite circles with effortless charm. But behind the polished facade lurked a controlling, obsessive man who could not accept rejection. And when Anne Marie Fahey—the governor's scheduling secretary, his secret lover—tried to end their affair, he made sure she would never leave him again.On the night of June 27, 1996, Thomas Capano took Anne Marie Fahey to dinner at a Philadelphia restaurant. They were seen leaving together.

Anne Marie was neve...

It was 3:40 p.m. on May 9, 1980, when five heavily armed men stormed into a Security Pacific Bank branch in Norco, California. But this was not a typical bank robbery. The men were not drug addicts desperate for a fix, nor professional thieves looking for a quick score. They were survivalists, led by a born-again Christian who believed the apocalypse was coming—and that they needed money to prepare for it.Within minutes, the robbery spiraled into something the Riverside County Sheriff's Department had never seen before.

When Deputy Glyn Bolasky arrived at the scene, the robbers opened fire wi...

A sledgehammer smashing through a front door in the dead of night. A Camden, New Jersey home invaded by two violent men. A shootout in a park that left a police officer nearly dead. And two suspects who vanished without a trace.
For one year, they were ghosts. Witnesses refused to talk—they knew the consequences of cooperation could be deadly. The community lived in fear. And the men who had shot at a cop were still out there, somewhere, planning their next move. But criminals make mistakes. And when new clues finally emerged, the FBI was called in to...

Harlem has always been a battleground. But in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the war was not fought with politics or poetry—it was fought with heroin, crack, and blood. A succession of drug empires rose from the streets of Upper Manhattan, each more ruthless than the last. They made millions, they corrupted entire neighborhoods, and they left behind a trail of bodies that would take decades to count.This is the story of the rise and fall of Harlem's deadliest drug gangs.We begin with Nicky Barnes and The Council. In 1972, Barnes—a man who learned the heroin trade while...

Two Boston police officers were simply responding to a routine domestic disturbance call. They weren't looking for Ted Otsuki. But Otsuki, a parolee with a violent past, believed they were coming for him — and in a dark alley, that fatal misunderstanding cost one officer his life and left another fighting for his.

What followed was a manhunt that stretched from the streets of Boston to San Francisco, and finally across the border into Mexico, as the FBI worked to track down a fugitive determined never to be taken alive.

This is the story of how a ca...

He was a successful businessman. A race car driver. A photographer who charmed young women with promises of modeling contracts. Nothing about Christopher Wilder looked like a killer — until the bodies started appearing across the country.

In the spring of 1984, Wilder began a 47-day cross-country rampage, kidnapping and murdering young women he lured with the promise of a photoshoot. As the death toll rose, the FBI placed him on the Ten Most Wanted list, but Wilder stayed one step ahead — swapping license plates, changing cars, and slipping through the fingers of law enforcement again and again.

This...

It was 3 a.m. in St. Paul, Minnesota, when witnesses found the body of twenty-six-year-old Duon Walker burning in a dark alley. He had been shot three times in the head with a .22 caliber handgun, wrapped in plastic, doused with gasoline, and set ablaze within two miles of the condo where he had been staying. Walker was a cocaine dealer from Los Angeles, a man who had come to Minnesota to do business with a man named Kenneth Wendell Jones—a man who paid him $90,000 in cash just days before he was murdered.

The case went cold for ov...

A body burning in a dark alley. A suspected drug courier from California, hundreds of miles from home. And a killer so ruthless that his own partners in crime feared they would be next.

On a humid summer night in 1990, witnesses in St. Paul, Minnesota, discovered a horror they would never forget: the burning corpse of twenty-six-year-old Duon Walker, a cocaine dealer who had been staying with a man named Kenneth Wendell Jones. The body was charred beyond recognition. It would take weeks for investigators to even identify the victim. And when they did, they realized they were...

He was celebrated as a literary genius, a reformed man who had turned his life around behind bars. He walked red carpets, gave interviews, and rubbed shoulders with Vienna's elite. But while the world applauded his redemption story, Jack Unterweger was doing what he had always done: hunting women. And this time, he was reporting on his own crimes.

In this episode of The FBI Files, we reopen one of the most twisted cases in Bureau history—the chilling story of Johann "Jack" Unterweger, an Austrian journalist and celebrated author who was secretly a serial killer targeting prostitutes ac...

They were not motivated by money. Not by jealousy. Not by passion. They were motivated by something far more dangerous: an idea. A belief so powerful, so consuming, that it justified murder in their minds. They saw themselves as soldiers in a war—a war against the government, against society, against anyone who did not share their vision. And the FBI had to stop them before they struck again.In this episode of The FBI Files, we open the case files on America's most violent ideological killers—domestic terrorists, political extremists, and lone wolves whose beliefs drove them to commit unsp...

The 1990s. A decade of prosperity, of hope, of cultural revolution. But beneath the surface of the American Dream, a war was raging. Street gangs exploded across the nation's cities—Bloods, Crips, Gangster Disciples, Latin Kings—transforming neighborhoods into battlegrounds and turning crack cocaine into a billion-dollar industry. And the FBI was caught in the crossfire.In this triple episode of The FBI Files, we take you deep inside the FBI's war on gangs in the 1990s—a decade-long battle that pitted the Bureau's best agents against some of the most violent, organized, and ruthless criminal enterprises America had ever seen...

Love. Devotion. Passion. These are the emotions we celebrate, the feelings we chase, the bonds that give life meaning. But when love curdles into obsession, when devotion becomes a cage, and when passion turns to violence—the result is a crime that shocks even the most seasoned investigators. This is Deadly Obsession. And the FBI has seen it all.In this full episode of The FBI Files, we descend into the darkest corner of human emotion: the obsession that consumes, controls, and ultimately kills. These are the cases where love became a weapon, where romance turned into a trap, and wh...

For years, they sat in filing cabinets. Forgotten. Abandoned. Written off as unsolvable. Detectives retired, families grieved, and the files gathered dust while killers walked free. But then the phone rang. A whisper. A confession. A memory that someone could no longer carry alone. And everything changed.In this episode of The FBI Files, we explore the cases that were cold—frozen in time, given up for dead—until a single tip cracked them wide open. These are the stories of justice delayed but not denied, of secrets that could no longer be kept, and of the moment when a stra...

The FBI has a saying: the most dangerous place in the world is inside the mind of a criminal. But for a select few, the most dangerous place is inside the mind of an undercover agent—a person who must lie for a living, betray for survival, and hold their own sanity together while standing inches from death.

In this episode, we open the files on the FBI's most dangerous undercover operations—missions so risky that failure meant execution, and success meant a lifetime of looking over your shoulder. These are not Hollywood stories. These are real men and...

Florida. Where the sun shines, the secrets run deep. And the FBI has files on all of them.

This is a quadruple episode of The FBI Files, diving into four of the most twisted, shocking, and unforgettable cases to ever come out of the Sunshine State. From brazen bank heists to cold-blooded murder, from corrupt officials to fugitives who vanished without a trace—these are the investigations that pushed agents to their limits and left communities forever changed.

Some cases made headlines. Others were buried. All of them will keep you on the edge of your se...

Think you know the difference between the CIA and the FBI? Think again.

Hollywood has spent decades blurring the lines—CIA officers making arrests, FBI agents running covert operations abroad. But what's the truth behind the badge and the shadow?

In this explosive special episode of FBI Files, we go straight to the top. CIA Deputy Director David Cohen returns, and this time he's brought backup: FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate. Together, they pull back the curtain on the distinct—yet deeply connected—roles these two legendary agencies play in protecting the United States.Who rea...