Crimes of the Centuries

Through the 1970s and ’80s, women were being raped and murdered in northwest Fort Lauderdale, and police kept hearing the same name: Eddie Lee Mosley. He was arrested, questioned, identified and released again and again. And somehow, while Mosley remained free, two other men paid for his crimes instead.  Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from time...

In 1907, Ireland’s Crown Jewels vanished from Dublin Castle just days before a royal visit. The hunt for them led into the private lives of aristocrats, con men and royal insiders — and whispers of secret relationships, blackmail and a scandal nobody in power particularly wanted dragged into the light. Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times...

For years, famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright had made headlines for his personal life. After all, he'd left his wife and six children for a married woman during the Victorian era, and made no apologies for the two "living in sin" in a home he built on family land in Wisconsin. Then, on a hot August day in 1914, Wright's whole world came crashing down: A murderer had attacked his so-called Love Co...

Fourteen-year-old Shelly Boggio was found stabbed and drowned off a Florida beach in 1985. Two men were convicted of her murder — but the case against one of them depended heavily on the word of Paul Skalnik, a serial con man and prolific jailhouse informant who claimed his fellow prisoners had a remarkable habit of confessing to him. Skalnik would help send dozens of people to prison and four men...

On September 5, 1982, 12-year-old Johnny Gosch left his West Des Moines home to deliver newspapers. He never made it back. What followed was a police chief with his own violent history, an FBI that wanted nothing to do with it, and a mother who refused to let the case go quiet — even when the few answers she found led somewhere far stranger than anyone expected. Crimes of the Centuries is a podcas...

A con man with a gift for talking fast and a knack for never getting caught made himself invaluable to the FBI in the late 1970s — and the FBI made him the centerpiece of the biggest political corruption sting in a generation. It never should have worked, yet it went further than anyone expected. Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past t...

In 1979, a federal judge in San Antonio was known for one thing above all else: He did not show mercy. John H. Wood Jr. had earned his nickname the hard way, one maximum sentence at a time. Just before he was set to face off with a powerful drug empire, he was killed outside his home in broad daylight. What followed would become the most expensive FBI investigation since the Kennedy assassination,...

The roaring '20s of last century were fueled in part by a new industry: filmmaking in Hollywood. Directors were rolling in dough, as were the silver screen's first stars. But in 1921, the future of cinema would forever be altered after internationally beloved comedian Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle was charged in the death of a young starlet after attending a boozy Prohibition-era party in Arbuckle's hot...

A young woman named Elsie Cameron vanished after delivering an ultimatum to her fiancé, chicken farmer Norman Thorne. Weeks later, investigators dug up his property and found her dismembered remains buried in an unmistakable place — the same spot where he'd posed for a photograph days earlier, smiling, surrounded by his birds. Thorne had an explanation. It was a strange one. And the only person wh...

Weeks after a woman's mysterious disappearance, a ship's captain noticed something off about two of his passengers — a quiet, bespectacled man and his teenage "son." He couldn't shake the feeling he'd seen that face somewhere recently. So he did something no ship's captain had ever been able to do before: He alerted police, instantly, from the middle of the ocean that two murder suspects might be...

For three years in the late 1970s and into 1980 — before shared databases and DNA evidence — one man moved freely across 11 states trying to start a race war. He changed his name to honor a Nazi propagandist and a founding father. He bombed synagogues, gunned down interracial couples, shot a magazine publisher in broad daylight, and left whole communities living in fear of a killer they couldn't i...

Three people vanished from a Memphis home in February 1994. A week later, they turned up in a local cemetery, buried in a grave dug for someone else's funeral — held the day after they disappeared, with mourners who had no idea what was beneath the casket. Tony Carruthers was convicted of the murders in 1996, representing himself after burning through six court-appointed attorneys. Thirty years, o...

Investigators were certain they knew who killed Leslie Preer. Their main suspect had motive, a suspicious alibi, and a failed polygraph. Investigators had everything they needed — except the right guy. Twenty-three years later with a pair of fresh detectives, a water bottle at Dulles Airport told a very different story. Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten...

Twenty-two-year-old Fred Korematsu was parked on a San Francisco hillside with his girlfriend, listening to music on the car radio, when the broadcast stopped on Dec. 7, 1941. In the weeks that followed, the U.S. government imprisoned 120,000 people based solely on their ancestry. Fred, a California-born welder who had tried to register for the draft on the very first day he could, decided he wasn...

On the night of Oct. 23, 1989, Chuck Stuart called 911 from a car phone in Boston's Mission Hill neighborhood, his voice strained with panic. He said he and his wife Carol had been shot by a Black man. Within hours, Boston police had launched the most intensive manhunt in the city's history — tearing through a predominantly Black neighborhood, stopping and searching anyone who dared answer their d...

Dozens of Girl Scouts arrived at Camp Scott in the Oklahoma woods in June of 1977 expecting songs, crafts and campfires. By morning, three of the girls were dead, their bodies discovered along a dirt path called Cookie Trail Road. The investigation that followed became the largest manhunt in Oklahoma history, fueled accusations of corruption and racism, and left behind a mystery that still divides...

In Victorian England, a serial killer preyed on sex workers and other vulnerable women, targeting the people society was least likely to mourn or protect. But unlike the infamous Jack the Ripper, whose identity remains one of history's great unsolved mysteries, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream had a name, a medical degree, and a chilling willingness to use both. Cream weaponized his professional knowledge,...

In 1884 Cincinnati, a string of brutal murders and a verdict that outraged the public set off a chain of events that would end in one of the darkest moments in American history — the largest massacre of unarmed civilians by National Guard troops on U.S. soil. In Truth Deferred, historians Mike and Amy Morgan investigate what actually happened — and present the truth that was deliberately buried fo...

When a 22-year-old woman living with relatives in a boarding house disappeared on Dec. 22, 1799, her loved ones didn't immediately worry. But when she still hadn't returned days later, all eyes turned to her lover, whom she'd supposedly been set to marry the last time she was seen alive. Levi Weeks came from a family with money, so his rich brother did something that was unheard of at this point i...

Amber's on vacation, so she's yanking an episode of The Catalyst from behind the paywall over at Grab Bag Collab. Dive deep into the upbringing and backstories of individuals who committed history's most notorious crimes, shedding light on the psychological factors that shaped their paths. With a suspenseful twist, the identities of these individuals won’t be unveiled until the end of each episode...

In September 2012, a 19-year-old UNC-Chapel Hill student was found beaten to death in her off-campus apartment. She was a biology major, a member of the Haliwa-Saponi tribe, and weeks away from her twentieth birthday. Despite DNA evidence collected from the scene on day one, her case went cold for nine agonizing years — generating hundreds of DNA tests, thousands of interviews, and an internet's w...

In 1859, a wealthy Alabama landowner made a bet that he could do the unthinkable. The next spring, he did just that — trafficking human beings from West Africa to the United States a half-century after it had been made a federal crime punishable by death. The Clotilda brought back 110 men, women and children. For more than 150 years, the ship sat buried in the mud of a Mobile Bay bayou, as if the...

One April morning in 1948, a tenant farmer named Wilson Turner walked out of a rural Georgia jail and into an ambush. The man waiting for him owned 2,000 acres known as The Kingdom, a moonshine empire, and the county sheriff. What followed was a murder investigation that drew 500 lawmen from across the state — and a verdict few in Meriwether County saw coming. This is the real story behind Murder...

After three people died on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie, it took four years to get five defendants into a courtroom and another 10 months before anyone knew how it would end. What unfolded in between was part legal battle, part Hollywood spectacle and entirely unlike anything the film industry had faced before. Part two of two. Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab explo...

In the early morning hours of July 23, 1982, cameras were rolling at a California filming location when a helicopter crashed into a river, killing actor Vic Morrow and two young children, Renee Chen and Myca Le. It was called a tragic accident. But the more investigators looked, the harder that word was to defend. Part one of two. Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring...