Murder: True Crime Stories

Think about the last time an AMBER Alert lit up your phone, or the last time you heard a Code Adam announcement at Walmart. All of it traces back to one crime and one father who refused to let his son's death be the end of the story. In 1981, 6-year-old Adam Walsh vanished from a Sears in Hollywood, Florida. The investigation was a disaster, but his father, John Walsh, took that failure and built an entire national system for findi...

In 2006, a 27-year-old Ohio State medical student named Brian Shaffer walked into a crowded Columbus bar to celebrate the end of finals with friends and vanished without a trace. Surveillance cameras captured him entering the Ugly Tuna Saloona but never showed him leaving. His mother had died of cancer just weeks earlier, he had a vacation flight booked for Monday, and in the days before he disappeared, he had swung between asking ...

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the investigation into the 1981 Wonderland murders in Los Angeles. Four people were bludgeoned to death in a Laurel Canyon townhouse, and a fifth barely survived with severe brain damage. Detectives had bloody palmprints, a long list of suspects, and a trail that led straight to nightclub owner Eddie Nash and former pornstar John Holmes. But fractured loyalties, shift...

In the summer of 1981, a group of drug dealers known as the Wonderland Gang were living in a townhouse in LA's Laurel Canyon, broke, desperate, and with a contract already out on their heads. Their solution was to rob Eddie Nash, one of the most powerful and dangerous nightclub owners in Los Angeles, with the help of a washed-up pornstar who was in debt to both sides. The heist netted $100,000 in cash, drugs, and jewelry. Two days ...

In 1973, a 7-year-old girl was taken from her tent at a Montana campsite while her family slept. The FBI had no evidence, no witnesses, and no leads, but two agents in a basement at Quantico thought they could describe the killer based on the crime scene alone. What they built would be tested on some of the most notorious cases in American history, including the Ted Bundy manhunt, the Atlanta child murders, and the hunt for BTK. It...

She married them fast, drugged their food, and emptied their bank accounts. Then they died. Melissa Ann Shepard did it for decades, moving between Canada and Florida, leaving a trail of dead and disabled husbands behind her. The drug was always the same. The pattern was always the same. And no one could stop her until one man survived long enough to tell someone what was in his coffee. In this episode of Murder: True Crime Stories,...

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows Andrew Cunanan's cross-country killing spree from Minneapolis to Miami Beach. After murdering two men he knew personally, Andrew killed a wealthy Chicago real estate developer and a New Jersey cemetery worker before driving south to Florida, where he spent two months hiding in plain sight just miles from Gianni Versace's Ocean Drive mansion. On the morning of July 15t...

Gianni Versace was the Italian fashion designer who turned bold prints, bare skin, and celebrity culture into a global empire. From his mother's seamstress studio in southern Italy, he rose to dress everyone from Princess Diana to Tupac Shakur, building a brand that generated over $800 million in annual sales by the mid-1990s. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy traces Gianni's creative journey from small-town ...

In the 1920s, members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma were among the wealthiest people on the planet, thanks to massive oil reserves beneath their land. Then they started dying: poisoned, shot, and blown up in their own homes. Local law enforcement wouldn't help, and some of them were in on it. There was no FBI to call. Not the way we know it. This is the story of the conspiracy that targeted the Osage for their oil money, and the ...

On August 31st, 1997, Princess Diana died in a car crash in a Paris tunnel. She was 36 years old. The official investigation concluded it was a tragic accident caused by a drunk driver and high-speed paparazzi pursuit. But for millions of people around the world, the explanation never quite fit. Questions about the events leading up to that night, the role of the British establishment, and what Diana herself had feared in the month...

By the mid-1970s, Sal Mineo's Oscar-nominated Hollywood career had collapsed. He was broke, deeply in debt, and sleeping in a rented apartment with rented furniture. But a sold-out stage run in San Francisco had the critics raving again, and a deal to direct his first feature film was finally coming together. On the night of February 12th, 1976, Sal left rehearsal for the LA run of his comeback show, stopped for cupcakes and cigare...

Before he was a Hollywood star, Sal Mineo was a scrappy kid from the Bronx who couldn't stop getting into fights. His mother enrolled him in dance lessons to keep him out of trouble, and by 11 he was on Broadway. By 15 he was in his first film. By 16, he was reading lines poolside at the Chateau Marmont with James Dean, cast as one of three leads in Rebel Without a Cause. It was the kind of rise that seemed destined to last forever...

You know the words by heart: "You have the right to remain silent." But do you know the crime behind them? In 1963, a man named Ernesto Miranda confessed to a violent crime in a Phoenix police station, was convicted, and sentenced to decades in prison. Three years later, the Supreme Court threw out his conviction, not because he was innocent, but because of how he'd been questioned. The ruling changed the rules for every police int...

He was called the Visalia Ransacker, the East Area Rapist, and the Original Night Stalker before anyone realized they were chasing the same man. Over more than a decade, he committed over 100 burglaries, approximately 50 sexual assaults, and 13 murders across California. Then he vanished for 40 years, raising a family in the suburbs while his victims spent decades checking their locks and flinching at unknown calls. He had studied ...

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, Carter Roy explains what happened after a 21-year-old British student named Meredith Kercher was found murdered in Perugia, Italy in November 2007. Investigators quickly fixated on her American roommate Amanda Knox. Not because of hard evidence, but because of the way she acted. What followed was a years-long legal battle shaped more by tabloid speculation than forensic fact, while the man c...

In November 2007, 21-year-old British student Meredith Kercher was found murdered in her home in Perugia, Italy, just five weeks into a semester abroad she had spent months dreaming about. What should have been a straightforward search for justice became a global media spectacle, one that centered not on the victim, but on her American roommate, Amanda Knox. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, Carter Roy traces Meredith's life...

In November 2006, Abraham Shakespeare won 30 million dollars in the Florida Lottery. He couldn't read or write and had spent most of his life scraping by on odd jobs in Lakeland, Florida, but overnight he became one of the wealthiest men in town. He gave most of it away within two years, paying off mortgages, covering funeral costs, and helping nearly anyone who asked. Then a woman named Dee Dee Moore showed up, promising to protec...

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, Carter Roy and Katie Ring, host of America's Most Infamous Crimes, follow the case against Kaitlin Armstrong in the 2022 murder of rising gravel racing star Mo Wilson. Digital forensics revealed months of obsessive surveillance, but a clerical error let Armstrong walk out of the police station before the murder warrant was ready. Within days, she had sold her Jeep, stolen her sister's passpo...

In May 2022, 25-year-old Moriah "Mo" Wilson traveled to Austin, Texas, for a gravel race that was supposed to kick off her biggest season yet. A former elite ski racer turned dominant cyclist, Mo had overcome two ACL tears to become one of the top gravel racers in the country, with journalists calling her the future of the sport. But on the evening of May 11th, after a swim and dinner with a fellow racer, she returned to a friend's...