Murder Coaster

Murder, gangsters and political intrigue in the roaring twenties!! Critically acclaimed author Michael Wolraich talks to us about his new book THE BISHOP AND THE BUTTERFLY: Murder, Politics and the End of the Jazz Age. When femme fatale Vivian Gordon was found dead in a desolate Bronx park, a dirty clothesline wrapped around her neck, it created a firestorm that brought down the mayor of New York...

Welcome back to part two of Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker. Today we follow the savage and bloody trail of Richard Ramirez as he goes from a West Texas drifter, to the feared and terrible Valley Intruder and the Walk in Murderer, and is penultimately dubbed the Night Stalker before finally becoming the Death Row Romeo. Buckle up, it’s a crazy ride, from his horrible crimes in San Francisco, to...

In the summer of 1985, Los Angeles was in the midst of a heat wave when a serial killer, the likes of which the world had never seen before, struck. A murderer who used guns, knives, hammers, tire irons, machetes, hand cuffs, electrical cords, and his own bare hands and feet to kill with, who attacked his victims at night, while they slept in their beds. A killer that chose his victims completely...

In 1986 Tina Bowen and her best friend held a séance to contact Tina’s dead mother. Instead, they made contact with something much more terrifying than any ghost or demon, for within their very walls lurked a monster: a deeply disturbed rapist and murderer by the name of Daniel LaPlante who was haunting the family and literally living in their walls .   Daniel LaPlante is known today as “the boy i...

Renee Hartevelt was a beautiful 22-year-old college student studying French poetry when fellow student Issei Sagawa shot her in the back of the head, assaulted and mutilated her corpse, and ate large parts of her. Though quickly apprehended, Issei would never go to trial, in fact he would become a celebrated author, painter and porn star, exploiting his crimes and turning them into a profitable co...

Many lost souls find each other on the internet, bonding over common interests and shared fantasies. But never in the history of the internet have two lonely hearts ever made the type of connection that Armin Meiwes and Bernd Brandes made. Their brief love affair would be one of unbridled passion, wild and untamed fantasy fulfillment and dark savage urges, as well as murder and cannibalism. Ladies...

Greetings dear listeners. As many of you may know, Gypsy Rose Blanchard will be released from prison tomorrow, December 28, 2023, after serving eight and a half years for the murder of her mother. So, we've gone back to a previous episode and added our thoughts on the case with a special introduction. Enjoy and thank you so much for listening. The Story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard Everyone in the smal...

New England in the 1800s was gripped with a vampire panic. Belief in the undead rising from their graves at night to feed off the living, spreading pestilence and disease, was rampant, and as families watched their children grow sickly and pale, struggling to breathe and withering away, they saw no choice but to seek out the offending creatures of the night, by digging up their corpses, hacking ou...

Lizzie Borden. The name has been etched into the American consciousness through countless books, movies, even a heavy metal band and a haunting and disturbing children’s rhyme which you can hear on playgrounds to this day. She was the first, modern American Psycho, a woman of class and privilege who caved her parent’s heads in with an axe. Theories over her innocence or guilt, as well as the vicio...

Learn the disturbing truth behind the Conjuring Haunting. There’s a legend of a murderous and devil-worshipping witch that once dwelled in Rhode Island in the early eighteen hundreds by the name of Bathsheba who sacrificed babies to Satan and whose ghost is said to haunt the land. The legend has become so pervasive that the Burrillville cemetery, where her grave is located, has become a tourist de...

Happy release day to THE DAUGHTERS OF BLOCK ISLAND and congratulations to cohost Christa Carmen!! Christa tells us all about her love of Gothic horror and her new book THE DAUGHTERS OF BLOCK ISLAND. It is a book filled with mystery, murder, intrigue, ghosts, red herrings, twists and turns, an underground labyrinth of dungeons and tunnels, and a haunted mansion, everything a Murder Coaster listener...

Welcome back to our second and final episode on Sid and Nancy, the Romeo and Juliette of punk rock. Today we will explore the tumultuous relationship of these two star-crossed lovers, the implosion of the Sex Pistols, and then get into the mysteries surrounding this infamous case. Who killed Nancy Spungen? And was the death of Sid Vicious an overdose or suicide? Ladies and Gentlemen, we present to...

Sid and Nancy. They were the Romeo and Juliette of punk rock, star-crossed lovers, each despised and hated by the other's friends and family, bound together by fate and passion into a forlorn and doomed romance that would see them both dead in the prime of their youth. Their relationship is the stuff of legend, of films, books, songs, and poems, a tumultuous and violent affair riddled with drugs a...

The story of professional skateboarder Gator is a distinctly American tale about a rocket to success and a tumble to disgrace. It is also a story about the history skateboarding and Southern California culture, a story of celebrity and fame, of bizarre religious mania, sexual sadism and murder. Mark Rogowski was just a child when his mother brought him from Brooklyn to San Diego, and beach culture...

New York Times bestselling, Edgar Award winning author Harry N MacLean joins us to discuss his new true crime book STARKWEATHER: The Untold Story of the Killing Spree That Changed America. In late 1957 and early 1958 nineteen-year-old Charles Starkweather went on a spree of crime and murder through the American heartland, much of it accompanied by his fourteen-year-old girl friend Caril Ann Fugate...

PUNK ROCK. It was a battle cry for alienated and disaffected youth around the world. Outsider kids who wanted to go wild in a cruel world where they saw no future. The rejected, the misfits, banding together and causing chaos. And in many ways, no band reflected the anarchistic spirit of the hardcore punk movement better than Fang, from Berkley California. Fang would become infamous for their hedo...

The Black Dahlia. Just the name itself evokes mystery and intrigue, conjuring images of a raven-haired and gothic beauty tragically slain at the zenith of her youth, of a gritty 1940s Los Angeles straight from a hard-boiled True Detective magazine, revealing the dark underbelly of old-school Hollywood. Indeed, the Black Dahlia murder is one of the most enduring murder mysteries in the history of t...

The Wendigo. Today we will examine the origins of the mythological beast, and explore three cases of supposed Wendigo possession that ended in madness, murder and cannibalism. Swift Runner was a Cree Native American in Saskatchewan who is said to have succumbed to the Wendigo spirit and butchered and ate his entire family during the harsh winter of 1878. He would become the first person legally ex...

What does Hitler, Russia’s most prolific serial killer, and a Florida frat-boy cannibal have in common? They’re all werewolves!!! Hitler was obsessed with wolves and werewolves. The name Adolf literally means “noble wolf” and Hitler often called himself Father Wolf. He also deployed not one, but two Werewolf Battalions during the nightmare of World War II. Mikhail Viktorovich Popkov is Russia’s mo...

Horror writers on werewolves! From huge, mainstream, bestselling authors, to underground indie writers of extreme horror and splatter punk, we have curated an amazing collection of horror authors to give us their take on what the werewolf means to them. The authors featured on today's episode are: Richard Chizmar, New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Boogeyman and Gwendy’s Button Box,...

Albert Fish is one of the most terrifying and notorious figures in the history of true crime. A cannibal and child killer, he was both a sadist and a masochist whose sexual perversions knew no bounds. Albert Fish was the original Boogeyman. For decades he roamed the country, a shadowy figure, abducting children and eating them. Not unlike the Slenderman of internet lore, he would appear and then m...

World War I caused astounding economic and social ramifications in Germany. Severe reparations led to an extreme economic crisis marked by hyperinflation, unemployment, and widespread poverty. The social fabric of Germany was torn apart, allowing a vast criminal underground to flourish. And one of these criminals was a werewolf, prowling the city of Hanover at night, ripping the throats out of his...

Mark and Jim from the Horror Movies and Shit podcast join us today as we cover the long history of the werewolf in cinema! Unlike vampires, which entered the realm of cinema with an established mythology, the modern werewolf is a creature almost entirely created by Hollywood. Today we’ll explore how film shaped and influenced our notions of lycanthropy. Along the way, we’ll let you know which were...

In humanity's oldest surviving work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the goddess of sex and violence transforms her lover into a wolf. This ancient narrative suggests that the concept of the werewolf has been intertwined with human culture since time immemorial. Join us on a journey into the historical roots of the werewolf, which culminated in the infamous werewolf trials and executions duri...

On April 11, 1981, a chilling and unsolved multiple murder unfolded in Cabin 28 in the little town of Keddie, California, nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Three victims were found: Sue Sharp, her son John Sharp, and John’s best friend Dana Wingate. They were brutally slain, having been bound, beaten with a hammer and stabbed. Sheila Sharp, Sue's 12-year-old daughter, was mi...