True Believer: The Unsolved Murder of Elizabeth Mackintosh

Elizabeth Mackintosh was killed in the chapel basement at Covenant Theological Seminary. The right tour guide will point out the spot, but Covenant hosts no memorial for her. And it’s not like Elizabeth was a stranger passing through… she was a well-respected student at the time she was killed. 

It’s been 33 years since her death, so why are some people still finding out about it for the first time?  Because for all practi...

About a dozen people were around Elizabeth on the morning of her death, but no one saw anything incriminating. Ruth and TJ walk through the morning of March 26, 1990, minute by minute, examining who was where and when. We hear from former Covenant students and staff who were on the campus that morning, and also from two retired Creve Coeur Police detectives, George Hodak and Dennis Spoerry, as they describe the first day of the mur...

Police quickly understand that they have responded to a homicide at Covenant Theological Seminary, not a suicide (as the original 911 call said). As the investigation begins, police become interested in one man, a fellow student of Elizabeth Mackintosh. A choice made that day continues to haunt investigators.

Click here to review the transcript of this episode.

Visit www.truebelieverpodcast.com to see additional m...

To appease everyone dissatisfied with our every-other-week release schedule, we're going to start putting out some bonus content on the weeks in between.

Today we start with the leftovers from our interview with theologian and former Covenant Seminary professor, Jerram Barrs. He talks about his backstory, his time a L'Abri in Switzerland, some additional thoughts about Elizabeth and the environment of Covenant S...

So far we've spent this series examining the details of Elizabeth Mackintosh's murder and the subsequent investigations. We'll come back to more of that later, but in this episode we focus on the way that the murder was handled by Covenant Seminary. Some people at Covenant felt free to talk about Elizabeth. Others felt that Covenant administrators wanted her murder hushed up. But everyone seems to agree that more sho...

In this episode we zoom out to examine the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), the denomination of Covenant Theological Seminary. What does the reaction to Elizabeth's murder tell us about how Christian institutions handle tragedy? And how should they talk about Elizabeth going forward?

Visit www.truebelieverpodcast.com to see additional materials related to each episode or to get in touch with us.

More inf...

In this week's bonus content you'll hear the rest of our interview with Liam Adams, religion reporter for The Tennesseean. 

Liam talks about some specific cases of abuse and misconduct the PCA has dealt with, his reporting on the Nashville Presbytery, the PCA’s 2022 Domestic Abuse and Sexual Assault report, also known as the DASA report, the PCA’s Standing Judicial Commission (which is the PCA’s internal court), his approa...

A couple months after the murder of Elizabeth Mackintosh, Michael left Covenant Seminary (under "duress" as he described it) and moved his family to California. But his contentious relationship with Covenant has continued to this day. Using letters sent back and forth between Michael and Covenant, we examine what went wrong and how there's not much anyone could do about it.

Visit www.truebelieverpodcast.com ...

For this week’s bonus content we have the rest of our two interviews with lawyer Ryan Davidson, whom you’ve heard in the last couple episodes. Ryan reached out to us in February because he had some critiques of how he thought we were characterizing Covenant Seminary, in terms of how they have or haven’t responded over the years, and the legal advice they might be following around that issue. We asked Ryan if he’d be interested in d...

Michael and his family left Covenant's campus in May of 1990, but the stigma of Elizabeth Mackintosh's murder followed them the rest of their lives. In this episode we hear from Michael's two oldest children, Karl and Kirsten, as they talk about the effect the murder had on them.

Here are some resources if you or someone you know needs help with a domestic violence or child abuse situation.

National...

Sandra was one of the few unmarried, female students at Covenant in 1990. And she had a class *with* Elizabeth, which turned out to be incredibly influential on the rest of her life.

She also went to Grace and Peace Church with Egon Middleman, whom we’ve briefly mentioned before in this series. Sandra’s story provides a fascinating look into what it was like to be a female student at Covenant Seminary in 1990, and the eff...

We’ve spent this series mostly focusing on Michael, Elizabeth Mackintosh’s supervisor on the Covenant Seminary house cleaning staff. In the eyes of the police, Michael was the prime suspect in Elizabeth’s death, literally from Day One. But he wasn’t the only person they looked at.

In any large group of people, even at a seminary, there are going to be some people with checkered backgrounds. But as the police started lookin...

We’ve talked about some of the interesting characters around Covenant Seminary in 1990. But as we enter the final phase of this series, we’ll explore the most interesting, and potentially most important, characters yet.

In this episode, Detective Worth will start to lay out his own theory of the case, which differs pretty dramatically from everything the Creve Coeur police had believed before him and, as far as we know, wh...

In this episode we begin to talk about David Winecoff, the pastor of Providence Reformed Presbyterian Church, which Elizabeth Mackintosh attended.

David was something of a lightning rod in St. Louis Presbyterian circles, and his death in 1993 enshrined him as a sort of a mythic figure, especially for those who attended his church.

But despite his elevated status and the high regard that so many have continued to h...