Murder Unscripted

Alaskan Sophie Sergie came from a remote Yupik village of 70 people. She was going to be the first in her family to graduate college. The last thing she told her family was a promise to bring her little brother a brand new kite. She never came home.

On April 25th, 1993, Sophie Sergie was found violently murdered in a University of Alaska Fairbanks dorm bathroom. Her case went cold, and it stayed that way for more than a quarter cent...

Yeardley Love was 22 years old and ten weeks from graduating from the University of Virginia. She was a D1 lacrosse player, a political science major with plans for law school in New York, and by every account, the kind of person who made every room warmer just by being in it.

She was also in an abusive relationship with a men's lacrosse player, George Huguely V, that had been escalating for years. Obsessive contact. Jealousy. Physi...

If you haven't listened to our DC Sniper episode yet (E104), start there first. This is the conversation that follows it.

Dr. Mildred Muhammad was married to John Allen Muhammad for 12 years. She knew him as a soldier, a father, a man she loved. What she didn't know was that after their separation, he had begun stalking her, that he had kidnapped their three children and taken them to Antigua for 18 months using forged documents, th...

In October 2002, the Washington DC area woke up to something it had never felt before. People were being shot at gas stations, in parking lots, at bus stops, at a school...apparently at random, by someone nobody could see, in a car nobody could find. Police were sprinting between active scenes. Schools canceled outdoor activities. People crouched at gas pumps trying to make themselves smaller targets. Senators got police escorts to...

In post-Soviet Siberia, women were disappearing from the streets of Angarsk. Their bodies turned up in forests and industrial wastelands, mutilated beyond recognition. The weapons changed every time, but the tire tracks at the scenes were always from the same vehicle: a Lada Niva, the standard-issue Soviet police truck.

The man driving it was Mikhail Popkov: junior police lieutenant, champion biathlete, beloved neighbor, husband an...

His 13-year-old son found a skull in the backyard. Herb Baumeister said it was from his father's medical collection. His wife believed him.

Over ten thousand human bone fragments were eventually recovered from Fox Hollow Farm — the 18-acre Indiana estate where Herb hosted family pool parties, ran a thrift store empire, and murdered at least eleven men, possibly twenty-five, while his wife and kids had no idea.

Melissa walks thr...

⚠️ Content warning: domestic violence, child abandonment, shooting.

She was abandoned by both parents before she was 17. She spent her life searching for a man who would finally take care of her. She found a 73-year-old millionaire who led her on for seven years — and then tried to walk away with a restraining order.

He didn't make it out of the parking lot.

Episode 101 is the finale of MU's "Rules of Murder" block — and o...

At age 14, her mother introduced her to Ted Bundy, and by 17, she was photographing killers in courtrooms.

For our special 100th episode, Murder Unscripted welcomes the incredible Leslie Rule - author, paranormal investigator, and daughter of true crime legend, Ann Rule! In a wide-ranging conversation, Leslie takes us inside her extraordinary childhood living in a haunted house, her decades of ghost hunting, and what she thought of...

In this Murder Unscripted bonus episode, Ed and Melissa take you through a brief but essential overview of the murder of Cari Farver—a case that spirals far beyond a simple missing persons story.

What begins as a sudden disappearance quickly unravels into a disturbing web of obsession, manipulation, and deception that went on for years before the truth came to light.

This case is the subject of Leslie Rule’s book, A Tangl...

⚠️ Content warning: domestic violence, murder, child endangerment.

If you haven't listened to Part 1 (Ep. 98) yet — start there. This is the conclusion of one of the most devastating cases MU has ever covered.

Sheila Bellush had done everything right. She got out of the marriage, fled across the country in the middle of the night, and built a new life in Sarasota, Florida with her husband Jamie and six children - including the ...

⚠️ Content warning: domestic violence, sexual assault, animal abuse

On November 7th, 1997, Sheila Bellush was murdered inside her own home in Sarasota, Florida. It was a murder-for-hire... planned at a distance, carried out by strangers. And it would never have happened if the man she'd married had faced even one consequence for any of the things he had done before.

This is Part 1 of MU's two-part deep dive into one of Ann Rule's mos...

Crime scene cleaner Anthony Vogel has walked into homicides, suicides, and unattended deaths. He's found things nobody expected and carried the weight of other people's worst days home with him.

In the finale of our 2026 Spring Cleaning block, Ed and Melissa sit down with Anthony for one of the most fascinating conversations we've ever had — covering the training, the tools, the humor, the haunting scenes, and what crime TV ge...

The night before Irene Izak left Cleveland, she woke up screaming. She had dreamed of a faceless figure beating her over the head with rocks. Her family calmed her down. It was just a dream.

Two nights later, on June 10th, 1968, Irene's body was found at the bottom of a wooded ravine on Wellesley Island, New York — just one mile from the Canadian border. She had been bludgeoned with rocks. Killed exactly as she had dreamed.

Ire...

⚠️ CONTENT WARNING: This episode covers the deaths of infants. Ed and Melissa handle it with care, but please listen accordingly.

In 2015 and 2016, the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital in the UK recorded a disturbing spike in unexplained infant deaths. The investigation — codenamed Operation Hummingbird — eventually zeroed in on one suspect: a quiet, introverted nurse named Lucy Letby.

After a 10-month tr...

On Thanksgiving Day 2018, 29-year-old flight instructor and mother Kelsey Berreth vanished from her Woodland Park, Colorado condo. She'd been at the grocery store that morning. She'd texted her mom about Thanksgiving dinner recipes. She'd left cinnamon rolls on the stove for her baby daughter. Then she was gone.

What followed was one of the most gripping murder investigations in Colorado history... a missing person case that turned ...

On New Year's Eve 2013, 23-year-old Ashley Kline left her Robesonia, PA home to meet a friend — and never came home. While her best friend waited at a party and her father held onto hope, Ashley had vanished without a trace. What followed was a chilling investigation: scattered belongings in a snow-covered field, a Tinkerbell keychain pulled from a drained water tank, and a body found burned in a wildlife preserve 16 miles aw...

30 Years Fighting for Murder Victims: An Interview with Andy Kahan

Andy Kahan has dedicated over three decades to victims' advocacy at Crime Stoppers Houston. He's the expert families call when they need someone to fight for them, whether it's navigating the parole system, keeping cold cases in the public eye, or understanding why the justice system doesn't always deliver what they expect. He leads meetings for Parents of Murdered ...

In June 1996, twenty-two-year-old Aimee Willard — a two-sport All-American athlete at George Mason University and a beloved daughter of the Philadelphia suburbs — vanished on her drive home from a night out with friends. Her car was found running on an Interstate 476 off-ramp in the early morning hours, door open, radio still playing. She was nowhere.

What followed was a sprawling, shocking investigation: a police impers...

On March 5, 1984, a Houston father discovered both of his daughters murdered in their Heights-area home. Yleen Kennedy, 33, had been sexually assaulted, stabbed four times in the throat, and shot. Her younger sister Lillie, 23, was executed with a single bullet to the back of the head. A neighbor spoke directly to the killer that morning, and police released a composite sketch within 48 hours. Tips flooded in by the hundreds. But o...