True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers

True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers

Every week host Dan Zupansky will interview the true crime authors that have written about the most shocking killers of all time.

Episodes

June 23, 2025 57 mins
A twisting, deeply engrossing investigation into the many lingering questions surrounding the sudden disappearance of the McStays, a family of four who vanished from their suburban San Diego home without a trace—until their skeletal remains were found in the Mojave Desert nearly four years later—from New York Times bestselling author Caitlin Rother.
On February 15, 2010, Joseph McStay, his wife Summer, and their two young sons were ...
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FOLLOW-UP TO THE #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER 22 MURDERS
The truth about the deadliest criminal incident in Canadian history has remained untold—until now.
Investigative journalist Paul Palango’s 22 Murders examined the April 2020 shooting spree committed by Gabriel Wortman that began in Portapique, Nova Scotia, and ended thirteen and a half hours later when Wortman was shot dead by RCMP officers. The episode left numerous serious question...
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June 9, 2025 77 mins
The inside story of the CIA’s secret mind control project, MKULTRA, using never-before-seen testimony from the perpetrators themselves.
Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s most cunning chemist. As head of the infamous MKULTRA project, he oversaw an assortment of dangerous―even deadly―experiments. Among them: dosing unwitting strangers with mind-bending drugs, torturing mental patients through sensory deprivation, and steering the movement...
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June 2, 2025 77 mins
On September 6, 1982, convicted murderer Leroy James Chasson made a daring break for freedom from the Massachusetts Correctional Institute-Walpole—one of the most infamous, escape-proof prisons in the country. But this wasn't just any prison break. It was a meticulously planned, five-year effort, made possible by an unlikely accomplice—Kathleen MacDonald, Chasson's former pen-pal turned wife.
True crime author Daniel Zimmerman (SHOT...
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May 26, 2025 80 mins
In 1971, Montgomery County Deputy Sheriff James Tappen Hall was gunned down outside a Maryland country club. The case went cold—no suspect, no answers, no closure. But his daughter never gave up trying to find her father's killer.Fifty years later, cold case detectives finally reopened the investigation and identified a suspect whose shocking confession revealed a detail never released to the public: Hall was shot twice. A Second S...
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"It was the most horrific crime ever to come before this Court,” said the Judge. A renowned forensic pathologist shouted from the witness stand, “Torture!” when describing the beating three-year-old Kyson Rice took at the hands of a 6-foot 3-inch, 240-pound monster. Read the account of an ambulance team desperately trying to keep a badly beaten boy alive and a high-risk arrest by a well-equipped professionally trained police force ...
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May 12, 2025 85 mins
Anne JaegerFrom her small-town Michigan roots to becoming a New York Times bestselling author, Ann Rule’s life journey is as fascinating as the cases she covered. Discover how she revolutionized crime writing, influenced FBI profiling, and Rule's fateful encounter with a murderer at just nine years old.Go behind the scenes of Rule’s most infamous cases—including Ted Bundy (The Stranger Beside Me), Randy Woodfield (The I-5 Killer), ...
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May 5, 2025 72 mins
London, 1953. Police discover the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy terrace house in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they find another body beneath the floorboards, then an array of human bones in the garden. But they have already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place, three years ago, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wrong man?
A nationwide manhunt is laun...
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April 28, 2025 77 mins
 What drove the inconspicuous sociopath to become a ruthless killer? During his nearly fifteen-year reign of terror, Ronald Lloyd Bailey’s depraved obsession with sexual sadism held communities across southeast Michigan in a shroud of fear. From the early 1970’s to the mid-1980’s, the former patient at one of Michigan’s foremost psychiatric hospitals, abducted as many as fifteen teens and over time became a sadistic serial killer.I...
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April 21, 2025 75 mins
L.A. Coroner is a gripping true crime biography of Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the controversial “Coroner to the Stars,” who performed the autopsies of Marilyn Monroe, Robert F. Kennedy, Sharon Tate, Natalie Wood, and hundreds of other notable personalities. Choi, an award-winning historian and professor, deftly blends Los Angeles history, death investigation and forensic science, and Asian American history in a feat of exquisite storytell...
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Irma Grese “The Hyena of Auschwitz” entered Adolph Hitler’s concentration camps at the age of 18 as one of the most feared females in Nazi Germany. Before she was 20 years old, Grese became legendary for her insatiable cruelty and salacious liaisons, an alleged predator and sadist. Even Nazi supervisors were forced to curtail her brutal behavior. Irma Grese hailed from a small farming village. Her life’s goal was to become a nurse....
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April 7, 2025 63 mins
For all Tom Marquardt knew, Capital Gazette just had an unhappy reader. What he didn’t know was that the unhappy reader was about to become a mass murderer.
Marquardt, the former editor of Capital Gazette newspapers in Annapolis, MD, was a target of a 38-year-old loner who sought to avenge a 2011 article that reported the reader’s conviction of sexually harassing a former high school classmate. For years the man sued the editor, the...
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The true story of how one dedicated forensic scientist restored the long-lost identities of the teenaged victims of the “Candy Man,” one of America’s most prolific serial killers.
Houston, Texas, in the early 1970s was an exciting place—the home of NASA, the city of the future. But a string of more than two dozen missing teenage boys hinted at a dark undercurrent that would go ignored for too long. While their siblings and friends w...
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March 24, 2025 51 mins
Acclaimed journalist, author, and creator of the True Crime This Week podcast, and former Boy Scout James Renner, explores the dark side of an American institution, its pervasive culture of sexual abuse, and the traumatic—even deadly—repercussions of its long-buried secrets.
In the summer of 1995, at the largest Boy Scout camp in Ohio, a night of sexual violence ended with one counselor dead and another hospitalized. The death was r...
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March 17, 2025 61 mins
THE CRACK CITY STRANGLER: The Homicides of Serial Killer Benjamin Atkins offers a chilling, in-depth account of the horrifying crimes committed by one of America’s most notorious serial killers.
Award-winning journalist B.R. Bates delves into the twisted life of Benjamin “Tony” Atkins, whose reign of terror in Detroit spanned less than a year in the early 1990s. Known for targeting vulnerable women in Detroit’s most dangerous neighb...
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March 10, 2025 69 mins
Smitty: My Marriage to Serial Killer Charles Schmid, the Pied Piper of Tucson unveils an unforgettable tale of love, betrayal, and survival. Diane Schmid thought she had found her Prince Charming when she met Charles Schmid, a charismatic and mysterious man who swept her off her feet as a teenager in the mid-1960s. But her fairytale quickly unraveled when her husband was arrested for multiple shocking murders that captured national...
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Detective Rick Jackson, a decorated LAPD detective and a key inspiration in the development of Harry Bosch, delivers a shocking and immersive look into the one case he could never let go. In June 1990, Ronald Baker, a straight-A UCLA student, was found repeatedly stabbed to death in a tunnel near Spahn Ranch, where Charles Manson and his followers once lived. Shortly thereafter, Detective Rick Jackson and his partner, Frank Garcia,...
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February 24, 2025 60 mins
When Wayne Adam Ford walked into the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office in November 1998 with a woman's body part in his jacket pocket, the 36-year-old truck driver wasn’t a suspect in any crime. After a lengthy investigation spanning four California counties and a sensational trial, he was convicted of the torture and murder of four women. His first victim, whom he dismembered, would remain unidentified for 25 years. While serving h...
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February 17, 2025 67 mins
At just 21 years of age, friends Todd Wilson and Scott McCarthy were virtually inseparable. The pair reported for duty at United Bank of Denver at 6:00 a.m. on Father's Day 1991-McCarthy's first day on the job. They joined two more experienced guards and began making their rounds. By 9:30 a.m., all four were dead. The killer then descended upon the cash vault where he held six petrified tellers at gunpoint before absconding with ne...
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February 10, 2025 64 mins
On a Sunday morning in the spring of 1921, a small boy made a grim discovery as he played on a riverbank in the cotton country of rural Georgia: the bodies of two drowned men, bound together with wire and chain and weighted with a hundred-pound sack of rocks. Within days a third body turned up in another nearby river, and in the weeks that followed, eight others. And with them a deeper horror: all eleven had been kept in virtual sl...
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