Scams, Money, & Murder

In the mid-1800s, a British naturalist named Philip Sclater proposed the existence of a vast sunken continent — Lemuria — to explain a gap in the fossil record. What began as a genuine scientific hypothesis was seized upon by occultists, racists, and spiritual movements, mutating over 150 years into a living religion practiced at the foot of a California volcano. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes...

What began as a series of tweets about sleep paralysis turned into one of the internet’s most famous live-haunting stories. A man named Adam begins posting about a dead child with a misshapen head who appears first in dreams, then in photographs, then seemingly inside his apartment. Heidi walks through the Dear David thread as it unfolded in real time, and explores why serialized horror told through social media can make fict...

From the outside, the Watts family had everything: a beautiful home in Colorado, two young daughters, and a social media presence full of smiling family photos. Behind those posts, their marriage was quietly falling apart.

In the first of three episodes on the Watts family murders, Katie Ring traces who Shanann Watts really was, how she and Chris built their life together, and the huge secret Chris was keeping from her. This...

In 1930s Elmendorf, Texas, tavern owner Joe Ball built a reputation for wild alligator feedings and a revolving door of female employees who kept disappearing without explanation. Reportedly a descendant of notorious slaveholders, Ball graduated from bootlegger to killer, and when the women in his life became inconvenient, they simply vanished.

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A student studying abroad was found murdered in her apartment. The case became international news overnight. Her life was frequently eclipsed by spectacle.

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In the summer of 1969, Los Angeles was living in the long glow of the counterculture — until two nights of murders shattered it beyond repair. Charles Manson never held the knife himself, but he held something more powerful: the total psychological devotion of young men and women who would kill on his word. We examine how Manson built his family, what he promised them, the ideology of race war he called Helter Skelter, and th...

In August 2010, 30-year-old Ben McDaniel suited up for a dive into Vortex Spring, a celebrated cave diving site in Florida, and descended into a narrow underwater passage. He never returned. One of the employees claimed to have watched Ben enter a restricted section of the cave, a passage that required advanced certification that Ben didn't have. Despite exhaustive underwater searches, his body was never recovered. Some believe Ben...

In southeastern Massachusetts, a stretch of land known as the Bridgewater Triangle has been a magnet for paranormal activity for centuries: cryptid sightings, UFO encounters, ghostly apparitions, and evidence of occult rituals. Many trace the darkness back to King Philip's War of 1675-76, one of the deadliest conflicts per capita in American history, which left the land scarred by massacre, displacement, and loss. In this episode o...

In the summer of 2012, a teenager's camping trip on remote Alabama woodland turns into something no one can explain. What begins with strange smells and figures standing motionless in the dark escalates when the group realizes there's an extra person in their group... without anyone noticing. The horror isn't a monster in the woods. It's a creature already inside the room.

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On the night of November 14th, 1959, four members of the Clutter family were bound and shot dead in their farmhouse in Holcomb, Kansas. Nothing of value had been stolen. The doors, as always, had been unlocked.

In the first of three episodes on the Clutter family murders, Katie Ring traces who the Clutters really were, and the morning when friends and neighbors arrived for church and found them gone. This is the case that change...

Richard Kuklinski grew up in the violent housing projects of Jersey City, New Jersey, where abuse at home and relentless bullying on the streets hardened him into a killer before he turned 15. By his mid-twenties, he had leveraged his capacity for cold-blooded violence into a career as a trusted hitman for the Gambino crime family under Brooklyn mob boss Roy DeMeo. This episode traces how Kuklinski's early trauma, unchecked rage, a...

A rising athlete was shot in a friend’s home. Her achievements were overshadowed by violence. The case exposed how rivalry can escalate fatally.

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Rod Ferrell led a group of teenagers who believed they were vampires, blending goth subculture with authoritarian devotion. In 1996, Ferrell and an accomplice murdered the parents of one member in a violent attempt to cement control. The case demonstrates how identity fantasy combined with cult hierarchy can culminate in real-world homicide.

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On September 12, 1987, 50-year-old night watchman Dale Kerstetter clocked in at Corning Glass Works in Bradford, Pennsylvania and was never seen again. Surveillance footage captured him calmly walking off-camera beside a masked intruder, pausing only to look directly into the lens. When the masked man reappeared hours later, he dragged a large bag from the building and left with $220,000 worth of platinum. Thirty-five years later, ...

In 1954, the CIA orchestrated a covert coup that removed Guatemala's democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, at the behest of Cold War anxieties and the United Fruit Company's political influence. What looked like a communist threat to Washington was, in reality, a land reform program that dared to challenge American corporate power in Central America. In this episode, Vanessa untangles how Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and ...

In the summer of 2008, two-year-old Caylee Anthony vanished, and her mother Casey didn't report her missing for thirty-one days. In that time, she got a tattoo, went to nightclubs, and stayed at her boyfriend's apartment. When Casey's car turned up at a tow yard, a former police officer recognized the smell coming from the trunk. He was Caylee's grandfather. He said nothing.

In the first of three episodes on the death of Caylee ...

Vanessa and Dr. Engels are joined by Katie Ring, host of the Crime House Original America's Most Infamous Crimes to discuss the crimes of the "Ypsilanti Ripper." In the late 1960s, Eastern Michigan University students Mary Fleszar and Joan Schell were brutally murdered by someone hiding in plain sight: their charming, honor-roll neighbor John Norman Collins. Despite a witness placing Collins with one victim and a description matchi...

In March 1998, 23-year-old Amy Bradley boarded a Royal Caribbean cruise ship in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with her family — and vanished without a trace three days into the voyage. When her father checked the balcony at dawn, her shoes and shirt were still in the cabin, but Amy was gone. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy traces Amy's life in Virginia, the night she disappeared, and the investigation that q...

In 2005, a married factory worker reinvented himself online, and fell hard for a girl he’d never met. When “Tommy,” “Jessi,” and a coworker named Brian became tangled in a toxic digital love triangle, jealousy exploded into real-world violence. Sabrina and Corinne uncover the TalHotBlond case, where fantasy blurred into obsession… and one lie led to another until a man wound up dead.

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