Jeanne D’Arc – the teenage girl guided by saintly voices to command actual French armies into actual military victories – is one of history’s best-known names. Not bad for a 13-year-old.

But that's not all. This week, we take a speedy look through the bloody, Game-of-Thrones-topping madness that is the Hundred Years’ War, meet a mad king that’s convinced he’s made of glass, and find out how one girl changed the entire course of world history.

Societal recluses exist in every culture. But in Japan, the number of permanent shut-ins has risen to incredible levels. There are estimated to be around one million Hikikomori, or ‘modern-day hermits’, in Japan today, and the term has even been proposed to be included in the DSM-5.

So what is it about Japanese culture that causes so many young men to never leave the house? Press play to join us in investigating why so many Japanese citizens choose to live their lives in almost complete social isolation.

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According to her husband Patrick, Lindsay Clancy was found laying on the ground, semi-conscious, having cut her neck and wrists, and thrown herself from a second story window in an apparent attempt to take her own life. Just minutes later, Patrick found all three of their young children barely clinging to life in the basement. They had been strangled at the hands of their own mother. None of the children would survive.

In part one of this two-part dive into the horrific deaths of Cora, Dawson and Callan, we discuss Lindsay Clancy’s multiple attempts to get he...

Ever thought about exploring the places on this mysterious planet where your passport won’t take you?

Join for a whistlestop tour of the world’s most off-limits destinations – from radioactive wastelands to snake-infested islands, and the odd plague pit in between.

Just don’t blame us if anything goes wrong…

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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 REAL PEOPLE.<...

More people know about the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten today than knew about him just 100 years after his death. But Akhentaten was no average ruler. 

He fundamentally changed religious worship forever, and may even have started Judaism itself. So why did he disappear from history? Was he simply forgotten to the sands of time – or did he fly too close to the ‘Aten’?

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This week, RedHanded is joined by Cassie and Danielle from National Park After Dark for an exploration of the myths, outlaws and bloody history of Louisiana.

First up: legendary “land pirate” John Murrell, the mysterious Leather Britches Smith, and the stories lurking along Louisiana’s Myths and Legends Byway.

Then: between 1910 and 1912, several entire families were slaughtered with axes across Louisiana and Texas. Police blamed Clementine Barnabet, a Black teenager who they claimed was the high priestess of a murderous voodoo cult. If guilty, she would easily rank as the worst female serial killer in histor...

At first, OnlyFans seemed like a shiny new frontier for safer sex work – a platform that promised unprecedented financial autonomy for its creators. But wherever there’s sex work, there will inevitably be men who try to profit off it…

And through the manosphere’s lingo of online hustle culture and misogyny, a new breed of so-called “OnlyFans managers” emerged to claim their piece of the digital-sex-work pie, using the oldest tricks in the exploitation handbook: coercive control, financial bondage and physical violence. Welcome to the dark world of E-Pimping. 

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In 2007, child protection officers in Pinella County, Florida, spoke with a 14-year-old girl who’d been sexually assaulted by a musician she’d met on MySpace. But thanks to their failed investigation, more than 20 preteen fans would suffer the same fate.

Dahvie Vanity, frontman of scene kid band Blood On The Dance Floor, spent over a decade using social media to prey on his band’s enormous preteen fan base – seemingly, with absolute impunity.

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In 2018, married couple Jen and Sarah Hart accelerated their SUV over the edge of a 100ft cliff in Mendocino County, California… with their six Black adopted children in the back. 

The world was left in total shock. Jen and Sarah had seemed like model parents: social justice-loving lesbians who’d bravely taken in six Black children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and – according to Jen’s gushing Facebook posts – giving those kids the dream life they’d never had. 

But behind the glossy image the Harts presented, a far more sinister reality lurked… 

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Remember the time London was overcome by a stench so foul that it shut down Parliament, and convinced terrified city-dwellers that the end was surely near?

No? Well let us remind you of the grim summer of 1858: otherwise known as The Great Stink.

The crisis brought about a long overdue transformation of the city’s sanitation system that formed the basis for the sewers we still use today – so thanks, Victorian engineers!

This is the stinky ShortHand.

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Today, catch the first episode of The Poet, a new six-part true crime series from The Binge. 

Hosted by journalist Rachel Browne, The Poet is an investigation that drops you into Wichita, Kansas in 1977, where a woman named Ruth Finley is receiving threatening, obsessive poems from an unknown stalker – at the exact same time police are trying to track down the notorious serial killer known as BTK. 

Is Ruth’s stalker the same person? You’ll have to listen to find out. 

To keep listening, here’s Episode 2: Where’s Ruth?

For The Binge...

Watching slaves being ritually hacked to pieces may not seem like many people’s idea of a great day out. But 2,000 years ago, Romans turned up in their thousands to watch exactly that. So, with Gladiator back on our screens, we set out to find the truth behind the spectacle – and it’s even bloodier than the movies could ever allow.

So what exactly happened in the gladiatorial games? Were there really lions, elephants, bears – and even full-scale naval battles in water-filled arenas? And did Maximus Decimus Meridius really have his vengeance? Find out in this week’s ShortHan...

Joseph James DeAngelo is a burglar, a killer, and a rapist. A vile man with a proclivity for terrorising and sexually violating women. But that wasn’t everyone’s perception of the elderly man who was arrested in the yard of his suburban Sacramento home. To his daughters he was a loving father, to his employers he’d been a reliable worker, and to the wider community he was just another sleepy old man living out his retirement. 

So who is Joseph James DeAngelo and how did he co-exist as a “regular Jo” and the Golden Stake Killer?

What could drive a person to eat another human being? Well, as it turns out, humankind has actually been surprisingly open to a little cannibalistic carpaccio.

From funeral traditions where families gather to gobble up their loved one as a mark of respect; to a European craze for drinking liquefied, mummified human brains (plus a surprising number of societies who just really liked the taste) – here is ShortHand’s history of inter-personal dining.

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For almost as long as we’ve made films, we’ve made horror films – but what happens when the terror isn’t just on screen? Movie-making lore is riddled with stories of bizarre accidents on set, creepy coincidences and even murders, all of which can give rise to cult followings and, in some cases, rumours of a curse over the whole production. 

From Indian ghosts to demonic hauntings, we run through a ShortHanded historical horror archive and investigate whether these sinister events were the result of supernatural curses, coincidence or just bloody good PR.

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To find the most prolific and violent serial rapist and killer the state of California had ever seen, took over fifty years, and some ethically questionable methods. Public DNA databases were trawled without their users consent, samples were entered under false pretences, and hundreds if not thousands of people had their rights violated. 

But, they did eventually catch their man, and walk him up the garden path, leaving a roast to overcook in the oven. 

Join us in part 3 of our now 4 part series on the Golden State Killer as we discuss how Joseph James De...

For decades, the Soviet Union’s top-secret testing site Kapustin Yar didn’t appear on any maps. It was so top-secret, the government relocated an entire town just to make sure none of its residents ever discovered it.

But in the aftermath of the Cold War, stories began to emerge about what the Soviets had really been up to in that remote, arid stretch of land in southern Russia…

From rumours of crashed UFOs to underground labs conducting bonkers alien autopsies, this is the highly-classified ShortHand. 

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Bryan Kohberger is now claiming his innocence in the Idaho Student Murders. 
And he wants a trial to prove it. 

A year after admitting to the horrific murders of University of Idaho students Kaylee Gonçalves, Maddie Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin back in November 2019, Bryan Kohberger has done yet another U-turn by seeking to withdraw his guilty plea. 

In a petition claiming his lawyers failed to disclose “exculpatory evidence” and pushed him to make a false confession, Kohberger stated that “actual innocence is my truth”...

But does Kohberger have a valid argume...

When 90 men, 17 women, and 11 children disappeared without a trace – leaving behind nothing but a single cryptic word carved into a tree – it began a mystery that’s lasted centuries.

From bloody battles with Native American tribes to Elizabeth I’s private pirates – we get to the bottom of the disappearing colonists of Roanoke Island.

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Michelle Eileen McNamara dedicated her life to closing the net on the man she called “The Golden State Killer’. A man whose prolific spree of violent home invasions, rapes, and murders was so large and covered such a vast geographical area several law enforcement agencies failed to realise it was all one man.

Join us in part 2 of our 3 part series on The Golden State Killer, as we discuss how Michelle McNamara gave her life to catching a man she wouldn’t live to see behind bars.

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What happens when a group of fame-obsessed teens with a passion for fashion go for a shopping spree in their favourite stars’ wardrobes?

You get the Bling Ring: the unlikely architects behind a string of burglaries in the Hollywood Hills in the mid-2000s, targeting celebs from Paris Hilton to Orlando Bloom…

Until those Ugg-booted cat burglars finally ran out of lives. 

Behind the TMZ headlines lay a tangled web of teenage angst and codependent friendships – and we’re unravelling it all in this week's designer-label ShortHand. 

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America the beautiful: from sea to shining sea! (...Plus a bunch of random islands 2,000 miles away in the Pacific Ocean.)

The story of why these seven Polynesian islands became part of the US of A is a wild one, taking in a slew of sweet-toothed sugar barons, a pinch of rampant colonialism, and one heroine who refused to let her culture die. When a white militia surrounded the palace of Queen Lili’uokalani, she was ready to spill her “last drop of blood” for the Hawai’ian people. This is the ShortHand.

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The Golden State Killer, The Easter Area Rapist, The Visalia Ransacker, and The Original Night Stalker. All pseudonyms for a man who committed one of the largest and most prolific sprees of home invasions, rapes, and murders, in American history.

For over ten years one man held a vice like terror across the entire state of California, committing over 120 burglaries, at least 51 rape and 10 murders.

Join us in part 1 of a 3 episode series on The Golden State Killer, as we discuss how it all began.

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When the night guards passed Frank Morris’s cell, in San Francisco’s “inescapable” island super-prison, Alcatraz, he seemed to be sleeping soundly. But what they saw was a dummy head made of plaster, soap and real human hair. And Morris was already making his way to the shore – and his homemade raft, stitched together using 50 prison raincoats.

This week we look at the history of the US’s big bad citadel in the war on crime; its most infamous inmates; and find out if anyone ever really escaped The Rock.

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As part of our virtual road trip around North America inspired by the 2026 World Cup, we're revisiting some of our most classic cases. This week we stop off in 

Sacramento, to revisit on of the single most disturbing individuals we have ever covered Richard Chase - The Vampire of Sacramento.

The idea of human beings floating in space used to feel as likely as time travel. But after WWII, the world’s two strongest superpowers had to find a way of outdoing each other that didn’t involve the total eradication of the human race. So they decided to race to the stars instead.

Here’s how that ideological moonshot became a reality.

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When elderly women started being murdered around Mexico City in the early 2000s, it sparked the nation’s first ever serial killer manhunt…

But the fearsome monster targeting the city’s beloved grandmas? She was actually (gasp!) a woman. 

The search for the so-called “Mataviejitas” – The Little Old Lady Killer – was hampered by media hysteria, clueless (and maybe corrupt) coppers, and one gigantic misunderstanding.

Because Juana Barraza – a middle-aged woman with a sinister lucha libre alter-ego called “The Lady of Silence” – was the very last culprit the authorities were expecting to unmask…

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Louisiana has more than its fair share of real monsters hiding in its deep, dark bayous. So, settlers’ nightmares about what else was hiding there – spiced up with African folk beliefs, plus Cajun and Creole folklore and a dash of Haitian voudou – quickly became a rogues’ gallery of gruesome monsters that couldn’t exist anywhere else.

From a grim scaly monster, born in a voodoo ritual from the devil’s testicles, to a big hairy hominid known as ‘Swamp Thang’, these are the very worst of Louisiana’s cryptids.

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As part of our virtual road trip around North America inspired by the 2026 World Cup, we're revisiting some of our most classic cases. This week we stop off in North Carolina, to revisit the infamous staircase of Michael & Kathleen Peterson...

From the outside the Petersons had it all; the perfect family, a beautiful mansion and more money than they could spend. But on 9th December 2001 all that changed, when Michael Peterson claimed to have found his wife, Kathleen, dead at the bottom of their stairs.

What followed would become a bizarre tale of strange family...

If someone told you they could read your mind, levitate, walk through walls, or make your heart explode in your chest, you’d probably say they were crazy.

But for over 30 years, the US government spent tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money attempting to create psychic super soldiers of the future, with all those skills and more. This is the ShortHand on Jim Channon, and the First Earth Battalion.

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After the search of Vancouver’s missing women finally brought them to the gates of Robert ‘Willie’ Pickton’s grisly pig farm, Canadian police faced the gigantic task of bringing the country’s most prolific serial killer to justice. 

But with much of the evidence literally eaten by the pigs, how much would be left to piece together this puzzle? 

And even long after the cell doors clanged shut on old Willie Pickton, the case raised serious questions about the plight of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Canada – many of which remain unanswered to this day.

Long before the ‘90s cartoon version painted with all the colours of the wind, a real Native American woman named Pocahontas inspired a romantic tale that would endure for centuries…

But how much of her story is fact – and how much is a convenient colonial fiction?

Featuring gold-hunting colonists, grisly cannibalism and more than a splash of imperialist violence, let’s just say the true story isn’t exactly a Disney fairytale. 

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As part of our virtual road trip around North America inspired by the 2026 World Cup, we're revisiting some of our most classic cases – with a stop in Massachusetts sparking spooky memories of our visit to the Lizzie Borden house...

The brutal hatchet murders of Andrew and Abby Borden are still among the most infamous and hotly debated cases in true-crime history.

Truly springing from the pages of your favourite murder mystery – with seemingly innocent housekeepers, “evil stepmothers”, and precocious ladies of luxury aplenty – there’s a lot of fact and a lot of fiction to wade through...

Any moment now, we might experience an explosion that emits the power of 1,000 atomic bombs every second. An explosion so fierce that it would reduce the world’s most powerful country to an ash-covered wasteland – and, if it was feeling particularly gnarly, could lead to the extinction of the entire human race.

This week we take a look at just how royally f***ed we’d be if the world’s largest above-ground supervolcano blew its top. How likely is it? When could it happen? And is there anything we can do?

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For years, women were vanishing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside…

But the police refused to admit it.

In the first of a two-parter on the grisly crimes of Robert ‘Willie’ Pickton, we uncover the investigation into the missing women, the community whose cries for help went unheard, and the systemic failures that kept the authorities from discovering what was really going on at the pig farm from hell…

This is the disturbing story of Canada’s most notorious serial killer: the so-called ‘Butcher of Vancouver’.

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People who seem to have suddenly burst into flames – leaving just a pile of ash, a foot or skull, and a puddle of strange grease – have left biologists and police stumped for hundreds of years. And as recently as 2010, a medical examiner in the UK was forced to write ‘spontaneous combustion’ on a real death certificate.

But there are some very strong scientific theories, and they are… unpleasant. Join us to find out why we think people go WHOOMP – and the very disturbing ‘human wick effect’.

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The gold-lined, intact tomb of Tutankhamun is without a doubt the most important archaeological discovery in Egypt's history. But what if Tutankhamun, the teenage God King, took something in return? 

After the young Pharaoh was found, several people connected to his discovery died in “mysterious circumstances”, including the man who had financed the whole operation. Was this King Tut’s price for gold and riches beyond anyone's wildest dreams? We dig a little deeper…

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Tom Cressman’s brutal murder – beaten with a cricket bat by the ex-royal dresser to Sarah Ferguson, the ex-Dutchess of York – was a truly British tragedy.

Jane Andrews’s act of violence dominated the headlines in the UK, and for good reason. The obsessive social climber had spent a lifetime getting herself into rooms with some of the richest and most influential people in the country. All she had left to do was marry one of them, and she’d be set for life. But just when she was rubbing shoulders with the family of the soon-to-be-disgraced Prince And...

Reliably living to 100 years old – a once unthinkable goal – is slowly creeping closer to becoming a reality. But there’s a catch: we’re still not entirely sure how it works…

On the one hand, a healthy, stress-free, and activity-rich lifestyle (with a bit of actually-rich thrown in for good measure) does seem to have a legitimate effect on your mortality. However, some people seem to be able to rip ciggies, drink wine, and still live to a ripe old age. So what gives?

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