FilmRise True Crime

A body is found discarded in a dumpster, beaten beyond recognition, with no wallet, no phone, and no way to identify the victim. The killer believed the garbage would erase the evidence. But a single tooth, a fractured piece of enamel, held the DNA that would put him in prison. In this episode of The New Detectives, the groundbreaking Discovery Channel series that aired from 1996 to 2004 and inspi...

A thirteen-year-old honor roll student stands over his sleeping mother's bed. The baby cam captures him in eerie black-and-white frames. He holds a kitchen knife. He stabs her forty-six times. Then he takes a smiling selfie with bloody hands and texts it to a friend. The case of Derek Rosa shocked Florida. In October 2023, the Hialeah teen called 911 to report he had killed his mother, Irina Garcí...

A pregnant woman lies dead in a bathtub. Her husband, a respected doctor, claims she slipped and broke her neck. The bruises on her body tell a different story. The DNA under her fingernails tells another. The prosecution wants an arrest warrant. The doctor says he is being denied time to grieve. The case, dubbed the Korean O.J. Simpson case by local media, began when police found the 29-year-old...

A friend who stayed too long. A secret that justified murder. When two men vanished from a Queens apartment, the trail led to a charismatic bodybuilder who hid bodies in the trunk of a stolen car. George Calomeris, a 34-year-old aspiring actor and bodybuilder from Queens, New York, was convicted of murdering two of his friends, Richard Bilello and Richard Smith, in the early 1990s. The case center...

A crime scene so clean it looked like a ghost had done it. No fingerprints. No witnesses. No motive. Any other agency might have called it unsolvable. The Texas Rangers called it a challenge. In this episode, we examine three cases where killers tried to execute the perfect crime, only to be hunted down by the relentless Texas Rangers. One case involves a wealthy ranch owner shot in his locked stu...

A string of suspicious fires in vacant Baltimore rowhouses. Burned-out shells hiding a secret industry. Investigators realized they weren't chasing an arsonist; they were dismantling a criminal network that used fire to cover up homicides. In this episode of The New Detectives, the groundbreaking Discovery Channel series that aired from 1996 to 2004, forensic investigators and ATF agents break a B...

A mother of four young children, a pillar of her Mormon community, a woman who seemed to have it all. She poisoned her youngest son with arsenic, watched him die in agony, and then claimed he had a rare disease. She was almost never caught. Melissa Gilbert was a mother from West Valley City, Utah, who was convicted of killing her 15-year-old son James by lacing his tea with arsenic . She had been...

He wore a badge in Miami. He used it to pick up vulnerable young women, handcuff them, and drive them to remote locations where he raped them. When the department finally fired him, he moved to Nevada and found a new job that gave him access to a new set of victims. He was the Cable Guy. And he is the only convicted serial killer in American history who is also an ex-police officer. David Middleto...

A package explodes on a quiet afternoon, killing an innocent woman. More bombs follow, each one more sophisticated than the last. The FBI faces two bomb experts who believe their intelligence makes them untouchable. They are wrong. In this episode of The New Detectives, the groundbreaking Discovery Channel series that aired from 1996 to 2004 and inspired CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, forensic in...

A camera click. A flash. A moment frozen in time. In that single frame, the victim smiles at the lens, unaware that the person standing beside her will end her life before the day is over. Photographs taken seconds before murder are among the most haunting evidence in forensic science. In this episode of The New Detectives, the groundbreaking Discovery Channel series that aired from 1996 to 2004 a...

A body on the floor. A shotgun by the hand. What looks like an open-and-shut suicide is often the killer's final deception. Forensic pathologists have a complete process to expose the truth hiding behind the staged scene. The differentiation between suicide and homicide by shotgun requires integrating autopsy findings with scene reconstruction [citation:5]. Investigators first analyze wound ballis...

Three women. Three husbands dead. Three life insurance policies cashed. Each thought she had committed the perfect crime. Each was undone by the same science: toxicology. In this episode of The New Detectives, the groundbreaking Discovery Channel series that aired from 1996 to 2004 and inspired CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, forensic toxicologists examine cases of black widow murderers who poison...

A string of house fires. A grieving mother who lost her children in the flames. The community raised money for her funeral expenses. The FBI raised questions about how the fires started. In this episode of The New Detectives, the groundbreaking Discovery Channel series that aired from 1996 to 2004 and inspired CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, forensic investigators examine cases of maternal filicid...

He wore a badge. He carried a gun. He was trusted to protect the vulnerable. But behind the uniform hid a predator driven by jealousy and forbidden desire. When the object of his obsession refused him, he turned his service weapon on an innocent woman. In this episode of The New Detectives, the groundbreaking Discovery Channel series that aired from 1996 to 2004 and inspired CSI: Crime Scene Inves...

A young mother is found strangled in her own apartment. The killer leaves no witnesses, no confession, and almost no trace. For two decades, the case sits on a shelf, growing colder with each passing year. Then a forensic scientist opens an evidence locker and finds the one clue that was waiting to be read. This episode of The New Detectives examines the painstaking process of solving cold case ho...

A woman found hanging in her closet. A man discovered in a locked room with a gun in his hand. A body at the bottom of the stairs. Three scenes that looked like suicide. Three killers who thought they had committed the perfect crime. Three forensic experts who proved them wrong. In this episode of The New Detectives, the groundbreaking Discovery Channel series that aired from 1996 to 2004 and insp...

Twenty-nine Black children and young adults vanished from Atlanta’s streets between 1979 and 1981. Police were under immense pressure. The break in the case did not come from a witness or a confession. It came from a carpet fiber and a dog hair examined in a quiet Georgia laboratory. The evidence was microscopic but damning. Investigators discovered fibers on the victims that matched the carpet an...

A body hidden for eighteen months. Flesh reduced to bone and dust. No witnesses. No confession. But the insects left behind told a story that would put a killer in prison. For the forensic entomologist, insects that nest in corpses are like witnesses to the crime. By studying their behavior, scientists learn everything from when a murder was committed to what sort of weapon was used [citation:4]....

A woman walks to the office water cooler, fills her cup, and takes a sip. The taste is bitter, metallic. She sets the cup down. Within hours, she is dead. Her name is Julie Williams. She was never the target. In March 1986, Lewis Allen Harry Jr., a 32-year-old equipment manager at a Phoenix community college, decided to kill his wife Sandra [citation:1]. He tried poisoning her Scotch bottle first....

She managed his motorcycle shop. She shared his home for years. Then she vanished. The boyfriend told police she ran away. Her sister never believed him. Fourteen years later, a private investigator found Ava DeHart's skeleton at the bottom of a dry well. In July 1982, 26-year-old Ava DeHart disappeared from Stafford County, Virginia. Her live-in boyfriend, George Christ Sparta, owned the Jokers W...

A tree stump holding three dismembered bodies. A thirteen-year-old girl tied up in a basement. A Walmart bag that cracked the case wide open. The most wanted man in Ohio was hiding in plain sight. Matthew Hoffman did not wake up planning to become a multiple murderer. He was burglarizing a home in Knox County when the residents returned unexpectedly. Tina Herrmann, her eleven-year-old son Kody, an...

A woman vanishes after a date. Two weeks later, a motorist spots something on the side of Interstate 65. A body wrapped in a sleeping bag, dumped like trash. The killer believed the highway would hide his secret. He forgot about traffic cameras, tire treads, and a receipt found in the victim's pocket. The New Detectives covered the case of Kimberly Yvette Smith, a young mother whose body was found...

The Marine Corps sergeant reported his wife missing. He appeared on television, pleading for her return. The NCIS discovered he was the one who killed her. The badge does not protect you from forensic science. The New Detectives devoted an entire episode to crimes committed within military communities. Season 7 Episode 8, titled Military Justice, examined how the law enforcement agency of the Unit...

A house fire kills a family of four. The firefighters call it a tragic accident. A space heater near the Christmas tree. The insurance company pays the claim. Then a forensic pathologist notices something wrong with the children's airways. They did not die from smoke. They died from suffocation hours before the fire started. In this episode of The New Detectives, the groundbreaking Discovery Chann...

A city of angels became a city of death. Over twenty serial killers stalked the same streets at the same time, miles apart, murdering without mercy. The detectives had no DNA, no computers, and no time to rest. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Los Angeles experienced an unprecedented wave of serial murder. The Hillside Strangler, the Freeway Killer, the Sunset Strip Killer, the Tool Box Killers, an...