A Simpler Time True Crime

Send us a text A young family living off the grid in a rugged part of Northern California in late 1977. The mother and her two toddlers set out to do a host of errands never to return. Nobody in the city of Eureka saw the family complete their errands, but when the vehicle is later found, there's evidence that they did.  The mystery of this finding causes rumors to swirl in the tiny community. Did...

Send us a text Just three days after Christmas of 1964, in the quiet town of Garfield Heights, Ohio a sixteen-year-old girl was getting ready to meet up with friends. When her friend shows up at their agreed upon time, she does not answer the door. Later that afternoon, the teen's father would come home to a horrific discovery – his oldest daughter dead on her bedroom floor, the victim of a viciou...

Send us a text On a hot summer night, a toddler is spending time with her grandmother and other neighbors on the breezeway of her high-rise apartment complex in Chicago. She is left alone in the busy hallway for just minutes, but in that time she disappears. Nearly fifty people were present at the time she was abducted, but nobody claims to have seen anything. Her mother has gone on to be a champi...

Send us a text A woman training for a marathon leaves her house early on a Saturday morning to jog a country road on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. An hour into her run, she is brutally attacked and left for dead. She managed to get to the roadside and eventually a car stopped to help. Her last words were describing her attacker: white guy, blue car. Her case went to the backburner for decades af...

Send us a text Darwin Vest was a bit of a local celebrity in Idaho Falls. He was known locally as Spider Man because of his passion for studying spiders (and snakes, and other creatures that many of us run away from). His biggest claim to fame was identifying and naming the Hobo Spider that had made its way into homes all over the Pacific Northwest. He was an expert at studying venom in snakes, sp...

Send us a text A teen is babysitting a young boy on a stormy March night in 1950. All is going according to plan until a frantic call comes in to police with a woman screaming, only able to yell "come quick!" Unable to trace the call, police have to hope she just calls back. But she wouldn't. The next call would be from the parents of the little boy who return to find their son unharmed but the ba...

Send us a text A Tennessee teen is picked up by her twin brother from work, but they run out of gas just a half mile up the road. A kind family pulls over and offers to take them to get gas. Her brother goes with them, but she decides to stay in the locked car and wait for him to return. In the nine minutes he was gone, she would vanish. A sexual predator who often posed as law enforcement confess...

Send us a text A teen borrows his brother's sports car to take his date to the school dance in 1977. After dropping her off, both he and his brother's sports car disappear forever. Did Jerry suffer a tragic accident and drive his car into a body of water, or was he the victim of a racially motivated hate crime on those back roads of rural Mississippi? Even all of these years later, people are stil...

Send us a text A real estate agent is lured to a home with a potential buyer, only to be brutally murdered. This episode discusses the dangers often not discussed around working as a real estate professional and how this has changed over time. Huge thank you to my friend Julia who gave first-hand insight into her perspective as a real estate agent herself. https://www.mcall.com/2007/09/09/10-years...

Send us a text A woman is about to make her final vows as a nun and is taking part in a spiritual retreat on Convent grounds to pray about her decision. One morning, she grabbed an apple and her Bible and walked up a hill less than 100 yards away from the Retreat House to sit on a bench and pray. Just hours later, her lifeless body would be discovered 40 feet away from that overturned bench. The b...

Send us a text A mother arrives home where her 19-year-old daughter and 18 month old grandson are staying with her. She expects the house to be empty because her daughter is supposed to be at work and her grandson to the babysitters. But when she arrives home, she see's her daughter's car still in the driveway. Even more puzzling, the house is locked from the inside. Confusion turns to concern whe...

Send us a text A nurse works the overnight shift and then drives home to her house on a dead-end dirt road. She calls her mother and husband to let them know she made it home safe, and then crawls into bed to sleep. That would be the last time anyone would hear from her again. When her husband and children arrived home they would find signs of a violent struggle in the house, but Melinda was nowhe...

Send us a text A mother of five takes advantage of some beautiful sunny weather to swim and have a few beers with friends on the shores of the Missouri River.  When she doesn't make it home, suspicion falls on the people who she was hanging out with that day.  After her body is found, the FBI gets involved and a large reward is put out for information on her case, but to this day it has not been s...

Send us a text The 1980s were a terrifying time for some of the population's most vulnerable in Salt Lake City, Utah: A predator was targeting elderly women who lived alone. When numbers climbed into the double digits, police were confronted with a terrifying reality: It wasn't just one suspect. There was a serial killer with twisted sexual fantasies, there were one-off robberies, and some still u...

Send us a text A high school senior rides the bus to school, puts his books into his locker, talks to his friends, and never makes it to his first period class. He was on the verge of qualifying for the USA Ski Team, had put down his deposit for college, and was looking forward to the upcoming ski competition that weekend.  But those close to him say he seemed troubled by something in the days lea...

Send us a text A woman travels with her husband from Boston to Philadelphia to attend his work conference. She decides to do a day of sightseeing while he works. When she fails to meet back at the hotel on their agreed upon time, alarm bells go off in her husbands head. Police eager to show that this is a city safe for tourists urgently hit the streets but come up empty, shifting focus back to her...

Send us a text A man from Poland is in the United States trying to earn enough money to help his family back home. His job as a day laborer at a construction site in lower Manhattan is interrupted by the events of 9/11/2001. Desperate to not lose out on any money, he finds a job mopping floors overnight at a grocery store that night. But a wrong subway stop would prove deadly for him, and he would...

Send us a text This week I'm doing something a little different.  In an effort to show that ice cold cases still have hope of being solved, I'm sharing two with that outcome from the past couple of years.  But a big purpose of this episode is to show that nothing is like its shown on TV, and answers do not tie everything up in a neat bow for the surviving families.  I want to share the messy and c...

Send us a text In the fall of 1972, a young girl in a rural community outside of Tampa couldn’t wait to get some fresh air after school. And for this walk, she had a unique companion: her pet raccoon whom she affectionally called Bandit. She walked out of the house and told her father she would be back in time for dinner. But her family would never see her again. Her family vowed to stay in the Th...

Send us a text A devastated father faces tragedy one day when he loses his nine year old daughter to an accidental drowning. He returns home to be with his girlfriend and her two daughters, to try to catch some sleep and regroup on how to put the pieces of his life back together. But just hours after losing his daughter, he walks in the door to a horrifying scene. A scene that still haunts everyon...

Send us a text A little boy begs his family to stay home alone for the first time ever. His tiny midwestern town was nearly free of crime, with the last reported homicide being in 1928. But in the fall of 1990 that would change. After a day of playing with friends and riding his bike around town, Nelson would be murdered in his own home just before his family arrived home. Nearly 34 years later, h...

Send us a text The Queen of True Crime, The late Ann Rule, cited Bob Milton Hansen as one of the meanest men she has ever written about. That is the person that Joan Hansen was trying to leave in the summer of 1962. While on the phone with her best friend, Joan suddenly realizes her estranged husband is in the house with her and coming to kill her. The phone went dead and Joan was never heard from...

Send us a text Three young women go sunbathing at the popular Indiana Dunes on 4th of July Weekend 1966. They are last seen getting on a boat with a man and never seen again. Theories run the gamut, from botched abortions to the dark underbelly of the horse industry to a mob hit. Nearly sixty years later the fate of these women remains as unknown as the day they vanished.  Follow on Instagram: @si...

Send us a text An elementary school teacher who stayed late in her classroom to clean up after her classrooms Halloween party. One minute, a school custodian saw her sweeping up popcorn and packing up her things, and the next she was just  gone. A school and community would be left heartbroken when she was found dead on Halloween night. After more than thirty years, investigators might be closer t...

An arrest has been made in the 1991 Killing of Cindy Wanner. Here you'll hear the original episode plus the updates.  A mother is making a little extra money by cleaning her sister's house in an upscale neighborhood. She is feeding her eleven-month old daughter cereal in her high chair while cleaning each room. Somewhere in a small forty-five minute window, someone would gain access to the house a...