Crossing the Line with M. William Phelps

A group of four head out for a camping trip and one of them winds up being tied to a tree and murdered by a serial killer. As that is happening, an attorney is sitting on information where two additional bodies are buried … but he tells no one. How these cases are connected and the psychopath in the middle of it all is the focus this week.

A teenage girl from Bronx, New York, leaves school one cold winter afternoon, on her way to meet her younger sister. But she never arrives and a search in a city of 10 million people begins. It takes decades, but law enforcement catch a break … this, mind you, after figuring out how the planet Jupiter and their main suspect, are connected.

On September 5th, 1982, 12-year-old paperboy Johnny Gosch vanished into the early morning darkness of West Des Moines, Iowa. His abandoned red Radio Flyer wagon, filled with undelivered newspapers, was the only trace left behind. The mystery deepened over the decades as bizarre theories, allegations of systemic conspiracies, and a shocking, unannounced midnight visit to his mother, Noreen Gosch, transformed a tragic mi...

A three-year-old is found wandering through a parking lot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, one day. She is holding onto her favorite pillow–and her feet are covered in dried blood. Her mother … is missing. As the search gets underway, a suspect emerges. 

It's the 80s. The bogeyman, a scumbag named Frank Walls, is roaming about the day and night, killing random people along the beachside in Okaloosa County, Florida—a serial killer displaying some of the vilest behaviors imaginable.

A police commander's husband goes missing and law enforcement seems to think he might have taken off on his own. Then he is found murdered—and the case soon turns into a strange whodunit, with his wife at the center of the investigation. This, as another death ocurrs, leaving one man holding all the cards.

A serial rapist, Mitchell Gaff, is caught and jailed. Thinking he's getting out of prison many years later, the court sentences him to McNeil Island, where the worst sexual predators are kept from society. After decades, he is finally released. 50 years after his first crimes, police are knocking on his door once again—but this time, it's murder they're looking to charge him with.

Five members of the Martin family--Kenneth, Barbara, and their three young children, Barbie, Susan and Virginia--head out one afternoon in 1958 for a Sunday drive in Oregon and never return. The only family member left behind, the oldest son, has some explaining to do. But in the end, a case spanning nearly 70 years, the answers are not what anyone has been expecting, sending shockwaves throughout the community. 

A young mother, Judith Lord, estranged from her husband, is home alone with her 20-month-old baby one night in Concord, New Hampshire. The next morning, the landlord is looking to collect the rent—and soon discovers a brutal homicide that will take 50-plus years to resolve.

A mother, Heather Dewild Springer, heads out to meet her soon-to-be ex at the home they once shared… and nobody sees her again. True crime tells us to go right to the old adage: the husband did it. But if you think that's the end of the story, tune in, because it is far more complicated.

For 25 years you go about your life as if you're a normal dude living the dream … you have a good woman supporting you; a solid job; and loyal friends. Yet, you do it all while holding onto a dark secret … buried underneath the floorboards in one of the bedrooms inside your home.

You and your girlfriend are parked on Lovers' Lane, the moonlight shining its wondrous glow on you both. A scumbag comes up to the car—with a gun. Such an innocent image shattered by a psychopath one night in Houston, lurking in the shadows, like the Zodiac Killer… and ready to strike. A double murder that goes unsolved for over 30 years.

It's been a life-long dream of mine to write Westerns (as you can clearly see from the photo below of Little M. William Phelps, the cowboy, LOL). The old-school, plot-driven, big character stories pitting good verses evil, good guys against bad guys, which is not so much different from what I normally do for my day job of true crime reporting and investigation for the podcasts I am most known...

For some, killing is an addiction, like food, alcohol, sex or drugs. Each victim makes the next one easier … Is the man behind the murders I have for you this week the most prolific serial killer on record—whose name you have likely never heard of? And what do the experts say regarding the psychology behind the dozens of murders he committed? 

A young couple is living together and finishing their graduate studies in March 1980. One of them arrives home to a horrific scene. For nearly 50 years the case flies under the radar of the media and investigators … until, that is, a compassionate journalist decides the victim deserves to be remembered.