Crime House 24/7

In February, 23-year-old Sofía Devries traveled to Patagonia with her boyfriend to earn her scuba diving certification. On a dive to a sunken ship in near-zero visibility, she panicked, pulled out her regulator, and drowned. Five months later, an Argentine court formally charged her instructor with negligent homicide — arguing that the conditions never should have matched two divers who had earned their entry-level certificat...

This afternoon, Vanessa is bringing you a preview from another one of her shows: Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, co-hosted with forensic psychologist Dr. Tristin Engels. In this episode, they turn to Austin, Texas in 1884 — where an unknown killer began targeting Black female domestic servants in a case that remains unsolved to this day. This is Part 1. For Part 2, follow Serial Killers & Murderous Minds on Apple Po...

Last October, Chicago couple Zafar Mawani and Guillermo Ortiz moved to Mexico City to care for Zafar's mother as she struggled with Alzheimer's. On a Wednesday in May, they set out to buy a chairlift for her home. Their phones went dark that evening — at the exact same moment. Weeks later, they were found in a mass grave outside Mexico City. Seven people are now in custody, including a former police officer investigators say ...

This afternoon, Vanessa is bringing you an episode from another one of her shows: Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes, where she unpacks stories of murderous cults, criminal cover-ups, mass manipulation, and twisted conspiracies. In this episode: the 1770 Boston Massacre, when British soldiers opened fire on a crowd of colonists — and how figures like Paul Revere turned a chaotic street confrontation into a rallying cry th...

Federal prosecutors say former college basketball star Kerr Kriisa spent four years running a $2.2 million wire fraud scheme — inventing personas, faking emergencies, and even impersonating his own mother in emails claiming she had cancer. The FBI arrested Kriisa in Lexington last Friday, and his indictment was unsealed Monday, charging him with five counts of wire fraud against two victims who prosecutors say believed they w...

This afternoon, Vanessa is bringing you an episode from another Crime House show: The Final Hours, hosted by Sarah Turney and Kourtney Nichole. Each week, they cover a different missing persons case, tracing the final moments before the disappearance. In this episode: the 1983 case of Tammy Lynn Leppert — an aspiring actress who called goodbye to her mother, got into a car with a friend, and was never seen again. To hear more...

Two of the world's most famous daredevils — Netflix's "Skywalkers" Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus — snuck into the Empire State Building last Tuesday, hid overnight, and climbed the antenna 1,454 feet above Manhattan. At the top, Beerkus got down on one knee. Now the couple is facing eight criminal counts in Manhattan — including two felonies. Vanessa walks you through how they pulled it off, the charges they're ...

Zoe Reidy Watts was 25 — a poet, ceramic artist, and Bay Area presence who had once made work about gender-based violence. In February 2024, after a date night, she was killed inside her boyfriend's Oakland apartment. Surveillance footage caught her escaping to the sidewalk — and her boyfriend, Victor Frieson, dragging her back inside. This past week, more than two years later, a jury found Frieson guilty of second-degr...

This afternoon, Vanessa is bringing you a preview from another Crime House show: Murder: True Crime Stories, hosted by Carter Roy. In this episode, Carter unpacks the Wonderland Gang — a crew of drug dealers and thieves who robbed feared LA nightclub owner Eddie Nash in 1981. The retaliation that followed left four people bludgeoned to death inside a Laurel Canyon townhouse in one of the most notorious unsolved murder cases i...

In December 2020, a 200-pound guard dog attacked housekeeper Maria Avila at singer Chris Brown's Los Angeles home, leaving her permanently disfigured and unable to return to work. This week, more than five years later, a Los Angeles jury ordered Brown to pay her and her family more than $13 million in a civil verdict — after hearing that when Maria lay bleeding on the ground, Brown left the scene without calling 911. Vanessa ...

This afternoon, Vanessa is bringing you a preview from another one of her shows: Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, co-hosted with forensic psychologist Dr. Tristin Engels. In this episode, they dive into the case of the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run — a 1930s serial killer whose crimes gave rise to one of the first modern criminal profiles, decades ahead of its time. This is Part 1. For Part 2, follow Serial Killers & ...

In India, a 26-year-old businessman fell 400 feet to his death while trekking with his fiancée at Lohagad Fort — just weeks before their palace wedding. What was first ruled an accident is now something else entirely. His fiancée and a man police say was her secret lover have been arrested and charged with murder and conspiracy in a plan investigators allege was months in the making. Vanessa walks you through the case: the al...

On June 24th, 19-year-old Marly Kinney went out on a rented pontoon boat on Kentucky's Grayson Lake with a group of friends. By the end of the afternoon, she was gone. For five days, hundreds of searchers — divers, helicopters, drones, cadaver dogs, and volunteers — combed the lake. On Sunday, the search ended in tragedy. The man driving the boat has been charged with boating under the influence after registering nearly...

In 1979, six-year-old Etan Patz vanished walking to his school bus stop alone for the first time, a case that put his face on the side of milk cartons and sparked the modern missing-children movement. Forty-seven years later, the U.S. Supreme Court has reinstated the murder conviction of Pedro Hernandez in a 6-to-3 ruling. Vanessa walks you through the case from that spring morning in SoHo to the Court's decision, and what it reall...

In Utah, David Vander Meer was charged with the 2006 murder of his wife Bernadette, who fell 1,200 feet from Angel's Landing at Zion National Park in what was ruled an accident at the time; a reinvestigation revealed he had allegedly told a teenage girl from his church youth group that his wife would need to die for them to be together, and had quadrupled her life insurance policy before the trip. He was arrested in Las Vegas last ...

In Los Angeles, a federal jury deadlocked ten to two in favor of acquittal in the arson trial of Jonathan Rinderknecht, the former Uber driver accused of setting the brush fire that prosecutors say became the catastrophic Palisades Fire, which killed twelve people and destroyed more than 6,800 structures; a mistrial was declared Friday after jurors said they were unwilling to change their positions. The government announced it will...

In Maine, Stephen Bouchard, 63, has been charged with the 1987 murder of his then-girlfriend Alice Hawkes, who was found with her throat slit in their Westbrook apartment; a judge denied bail this week after prosecutors presented evidence including an alleged statement by Bouchard that he had committed the perfect crime. The case was cracked open by a 2025 reinvestigation by the Maine State Police Major Crimes Unit-Unsolved, nearly...

In Delaware County, Pennsylvania, Michelle Zajko has been indicted for the 2022 murders of her parents, shot to death in their Chester Heights home on New Year's Eve; charges came after shell casings from her Vermont property matched the murder weapon and investigators found a note on her phone titled "There are so many things we f---ed up." The case is the last unsolved chapter in a string of six deaths linked to the Zizians, a cu...

In Ventura County, Stephen Chavez was sentenced to one year in county jail and three years of probation for the felony incest of his 18-year-old daughter Makayla Settles, who died by suicide five months after the assault; prosecutors had requested the maximum three-year state prison sentence, but the judge cited Chavez's lack of a prior criminal record. Makayla's family and a nationwide public campaign had pushed for stronger charg...