True Crime Episodes

We take a trip back to '40s and '50s London this week to cover the grimy and gruesome story of serial killer John Reginald Christie, who gassed and strangled 8 women to death and stowed their bodies in and around his London f...

This week we tackle the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft, one of the most notorious and high-value art heists of all time. One March night in Boston, 1990, two men donned police disguises to enter the Isabella Stewart Ga...

Last week we shared the first half of the dramatic tale of one of America's so-called "Crimes of the Century" - the kidnapping, and tragic murder, of Charles Lindbergh Jr., toddler son to one of the most famous men in the wor...

On the night of March 1st, 1932, little Charles Lindbergh Jr. was tucked into his crib for a good night's sleep. Mere hours later, the family nurse discovered that Charles Jr. was no longer in his bed...nor was he anywhere el...

Born in small-town Italy in 1893, Leonarda Cianciulli had led a hard and tragic life - but her friends and neighbors in Correggio, Reggio Emilia knew her as a kindly woman and a good neighbor. Naturally, they were all shocked...

This week, we finish our two-parter on the rise of the Norwegian black metal scene and the leaders of the pack, Mayhem, as the culture descends into edgelord-on-edgelord crime - first with a series of arsons across Norway, an...

In the early 1990s, a series of crimes rocked the historically peaceful country of Norway. Churches were burned, home-grown terrorist plots were revealed, and arrests were made. Then, the murders came. This rash of crime all ...

On Christmas Eve, 1945, a mysterious fire burned the home of George and Jennie Sodder to the ground. George, Jennie, and four of their children escaped the blaze. The five remaining Sodder children, aged 5 to 14, were not so ...

Perhaps the most notorious carnival sideshow performer of all time, Grady Stiles Jr. is known to history as Lobster Boy. Born with severe ectrodactyly, a genetic condition that left him unable to walk and with forked, two-fin...

Our two-part jaunt into murder, madness and 19th century elections continues (and ends) this week, as Sean finishes the heartbreaking tragic story of the death of James Garfield — followed by the slapstick comedy romp that wa...

James Garfield was shot on July 2, 1881, just a few months into his tenure as 20th President of the United States. The man who shot him, Charles Guiteau, was a lifelong loser who had previously tried his hand at (manic) stree...

Here we are: the end of the line for the Manson Family. This week, we bring our epic series on the Manson Family Murders to an explosive conclusion with the August 9th killings of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, the retaliation m...

And here we are. The infamous murders of August 8th, 1969, where 5 people - some famous - would meet horrific ends at the hands of the Manson Family, directed by Charlie to create "copycat murders" to lessen the heat on the r...

This week, the horror of Helter Skelter begins on part 4 of our Manson Family deep-dive with the lesser-known murder of the Family's first official victim, former friend Gary Hinman. We explore the circumstances leading to th...

In week 3 of our Manson saga we travel with the Family to the worn-down Western movie set of Spahn Ranch, where Charlie and co set up shop and begin their descent further into shared cult madness - separated from their loved ...

"Cease to exist, just come and say you love me Give up your world, come on you can be, I'm your kind, I'm your kind, and I see..." This week, we take a tour through the epicenter of the hippie movement right at the peak of th...

The innocence of the Summer of Love and the hippie counterculture movement came to an abrupt end in August 1969, when a string of brutal murders in the Los Angeles area rocked Hollywood, the country, and the world. The perpet...

In the summer of 1974, a body was discovered among the dunes of Cape Cod by a young girl chasing her dog. Despite the efforts of local and state police, the so-named "Lady of the Dunes" would go unidentified for nearly 50 yea...

In the 1920s and 30s, colonial Kenya was playground to a social clique of wealthy British expats called the "Happy Valley Set," famed for their excessive tastes and drug-fueled sex parties. One of the foremost members of the ...

This week, we explore how a crime story can inform pop culture with the true tale of Grace Brown's murder at the hands of Chester Gillette in 1906. In a collaboration with the You're Missing Out podcast, we took a (virtual) t...

Between 1911 and 1912, at least 11 Black families were murdered with an axe in their beds, in towns along the Southern Pacific railway line in Louisiana and Texas. The only person ever punished for any of these crimes was a t...

In this 4th and final part of the Lizzie Borden story, we round out the rest of the sensational Borden Murders trial, hear the final verdict, and learn what Lizzie Borden did with the rest of her life after her (spoiler alert...

Screw it, we're doing 4 parts! The tea is too scorching and the drama too intense to not give Lizzie's case room to breathe, so we're dedicating all of Axe Murder March to Miss Borden herself. This week: Lizzie is charged, ar...

Axe Murder March plunges on, Part 2 is coming in hot, and we're making it a 3-parter for the story of the Borden Murders and the accusations levied against Lizzie Borden, she of "40 whacks" fame. This week, we explore the pre...