Crimes of the Centuries
Crime is so commonplace that it takes something particularly shocking to be labelled the “crime of the century.” Even so, there are a lot of cases that have earned the distinction. In each episode of Crimes of the Centuries, award-winning journalist Amber Hunt will examine a case that’s lesser known today but was huge when it happened. The cases explored span the centuries and each left a mark. Some made history by changing laws. Others were so shocking they changed society.
Episodes
June 23, 2025 • 30 mins
While Crimes of the Centuries takes a brief summer break, enjoy a guest episode from Josh at The Wild West Extravaganza. This one’s a doozy: It’s the story of "Black Jack" Ketchum — a train robber whose criminal exploits made headlines across the American frontier. But it was his botched execution that really cemented his place in Wild West lore. This is one of those cases where the truth is not only stranger than fiction — it...
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June 16, 2025 • 54 mins
In late 1910 and early 1911, a band of impulsive Latvian radicals fleeing persecution in Russia unleashed a wave of violence in London that left three policemen dead and part of a quiet city block in ruins. The siege that followed would not only transform British law enforcement but also mark a turning point in media history, as cameras captured the chaos in real time.
"Crimes of the Centuries" is a podcast from Grab...
"Crimes of the Centuries" is a podcast from Grab...
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June 9, 2025 • 43 mins
When Berry Stoll returned from work on Oct. 10, 1934, the scene greeting him was pure chaos: His maid was tied up, his wife was missing and a terrifying pool of blood covered one of the beds. Alice Speed Stoll had been kidnapped by a smooth-talking, well-dressed man who claimed to be a phone repairman. What followed was a tense and twisted saga of ransom demands, narrow escapes, and a desperate manhunt that captured the countr...
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June 2, 2025 • 43 mins
One Sunday morning in 1997, a security guard noticed the front fence at Loomis Fargo in Charlotte, North Carolina, was ajar. So was the warehouse door. And the vault inside was fitted with a suspicious time lock. When authorities finally opened the vault the next day, they found it completely empty, the target of one of the largest cash thefts in US history. The manhunt that followed would grip the nation as authorities raced ...
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May 26, 2025 • 46 mins
In 1952, Ruby McCollum left two of her children in her car as she casually walked into a doctor's office in Live Oak, Florida, and shot Dr. C. Leroy Adams — a respected white physician and newly elected state senator. But what seemed like a clear-cut case of murder over a disputed medical bill soon unraveled into a story of power, race, sexual violence, and silence in the Jim Crow South.
"Crimes of the Centuries" is ...
"Crimes of the Centuries" is ...
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May 19, 2025 • 47 mins
When Henrietta Lacks discovered a tumor inside of her in 1951, she turned to Johns Hopkins Medical Center for help. They examined her cells and discovered two things: First, she had cervical cancer. And second, her cells, for reasons we still can't explain, multiplied at astonishing rates, allowing doctors and pharmaceutical companies to use them to conduct all sorts of valuable research. Without Lacks knowledge or consent, he...
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May 15, 2025 • 6 mins
Murder: True Crime Stories explores the depths of history's most notorious murders, like you've never heard before. Go beyond the crime scene as we search for the real story, and focus on the people impacted the most. Whether or not the case is solved, you'll come away with an understanding of why these stories need to be told.
Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios. New...
Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios. New...
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May 12, 2025 • 44 mins
A band of nerdy geology enthusiasts were sure the email they received in 2002 was a hoax: The unsolicited message said that its writer was in possession of moon rocks that he was willing to sell. But moon rocks were among the most valuable objects on earth and anyone who knew anything about NASA knew that not only was owning them illegal, but it was impossible. One email recipient reached out to the FBI and was instructed to p...
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May 5, 2025 • 39 mins
When 25-year-old Tim Evans was hanged for killing his wife and 14-month-old daughter in 1949, few outside of his family questioned whether justice had been done. After all, Evans had at one point confessed to the crimes. But during his trial he recanted, saying that a neighbor had killed his 20-year-old wife Beryl during a botched abortion attempt. It seemed a ludicrous attempt at diversion -- until that same neighbor was hims...
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April 28, 2025 • 41 mins
In 1953, a horrific discovery was made behind some hastily hung wallpaper in a flat at 10 Rillington Place in London's Notting Hill neighborhood: The decomposing bodies of three women. Another body was found beneath floor boards, and two more skeletons were recovered from the backyard garden. Soon, a nationwide manhunt was under way for John Reginald Christie, a man author Kate Summerscale describes as "terrifyingly ordinary."...
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April 21, 2025 • 45 mins
As American journalists worked to cover the Vietnam War, one of their colleagues proved a valuable asset: Pham Xuan An had been born in Vietnam, and was therefore able to help his coworkers navigate the ins and outs of an unfamiliar culture. His work was praised as detailed, empathetic and unbiased. It would be years later that the truth finally came out, revealing that the journalist was in fact a South Vietnamese spy whose a...
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April 14, 2025 • 49 mins
In the 1990s, Dr. Jack Kevorkian ignited a firestorm when he began helping to end the lives of people who said they were terminally ill. Over the years, he claimed to have assisted in the deaths of more than 130 people, all while challenging police and prosecutors who vowed to stop him. His first four trials ended in three acquittals and a mistrial, but as his antics grew more daring, so, too, did the legal system's fervor to ...
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April 7, 2025 • 44 mins
For much of their outlaw careers, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid weren't the inseparable duo that Hollywood made us believe with its 1969 depiction of the pair. But the movie isn't the only reason the two are inextricably linked: The two members of the Wild West crew known as The Wild Bunch were wanted men when they opted in 1901 to disappear together. The official story is that the pair died in a shoot-out with the Bolivi...
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Crimes Of The Centuries is dark this week, but we hope you'll enjoy this episode of Strange And Unexplained with Daisy Eagan.
In the 1930s, some shadowy figures approached a decorated and beloved Marine with a plot to overthrow the government and replace FDR with someone much more friendly to the wealthy. If only they hadn't chosen Smedley Butler to do their bidding, we might be living in a very different world today...
In the 1930s, some shadowy figures approached a decorated and beloved Marine with a plot to overthrow the government and replace FDR with someone much more friendly to the wealthy. If only they hadn't chosen Smedley Butler to do their bidding, we might be living in a very different world today...
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March 24, 2025 • 43 mins
As the audience was settling in for an evening of entertainment in one of the swankiest nightclubs in the Midwest, a busboy approached the mic and asked everyone to exit the sprawling building. Soon, the place was engulfed. The May 28, 1977, fire at the Beverly Hills Supper Club was a deadly disaster that subsequent investigations found was not only preventable, but had been predicted, too. The lawsuits that followed changed t...
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March 17, 2025 • 44 mins
To outsiders, John List was a mild-mannered, church-going father of three whose oddest trait was mowing the lawn in a suit and tie. But then the bodies of his wife, mother and three children were uncovered rotting in the family's Westfield, New Jersey, home in late 1971. This was no whodunit: List left notes explaining not only what he'd done, but why he claimed he had to do it. Then he disappeared, becoming one of America's m...
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March 10, 2025 • 43 mins
William Mulholland was summoned to the St. Francis Dam in San Francisquito Canyon early March 12, 1928, to inspect some leaks that workers found worrisome. Mulholland shrugged off the concerns and declared the dam -- the 19th he'd designed alone to feed water to the parched desert of Los Angeles -- perfectly safe. Hours later, the dam gave way, releasing billions of gallons of water downstream, killing more than 400 people.
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March 3, 2025 • 44 mins
Sex workers began disappearing in the Rochester, New York, area at an alarming rate in the late 1980s. When their strangled and mutilated bodies were later discovered, it was clear they were being targeted by a sick killer with a distinct MO. It turned out that the man behind the killings, Arthur Shawcross, had already killed before.
"Crimes of the Centuries" is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crim...
"Crimes of the Centuries" is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crim...
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February 28, 2025 • 43 mins
On this Friday Follow-Up, we update with information brought to us by two descendants of an important latter-day figure in the case. After 4-year-old Charley Ross vanished in a carriage with two men who'd offered him candy and fireworks, police at first told his father to wait it out. Surely the men had no bad intentions. Then came the first ransom letter. And another. And another. In 1874, the Charley Ross case marked the f...
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February 24, 2025 • 46 mins
When a well-dressed man approached a Los Angeles junior high school in 1927 asking for his coworker Perry Parker's daughter, the woman at the front desk should have immediately sensed something was off. Parker didn't have one daughter at the school; he had two. When the man clarified he wanted the "younger" Parker girl, that should have struck the office marm as odder still because the girls were twins. Still, Mary Holt summon...
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