Scams, Money, & Murder

On a summer night in July 2015, 21-year-old Lauren Agee was camping with friends on a towering rocky bluff above Center Hill Lake at Tennessee's Wakefest boating festival. By morning, she was dead at the base of the cliff ninety feet below. Authorities ruled it an accidental fall. Her family never accepted that answer. Inconsistencies in the autopsy, shifting witness accounts, and a scene that was...

In Peru's scorching Nazca Valley, ancient inhabitants carved enormous animal figures into the desert floor over a thousand years ago — figures so large they can only be understood from the air. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes, Vanessa traces the decades-long quest to decode these mysterious formations, from the mathematician who dedicated her life to the desert to the bes...

In early 2001, a recreational caver named Ted documented his obsessive attempt to break through a sealed passage deep inside a cave... and what he found on the other side became one of the internet's earliest and most disturbing horror stories. Presented as a real personal account with photographs and journal entries, Ted the Caver predated modern creepypastas and convinced countless readers it wa...

Let’s go back to the beginning of one of the most polarizing true crime cases in recent American history, and the country still can't agree on the truth. This episode contains descriptions of death, and references to domestic conflict. Please listen with care. Follow America's Most Infamous Crimes to hear the rest of the story: https://pod.link/1882861002 Join Crime House+ to binge a special limit...

In the mid-1930s, Cleveland, Ohio was gripped by a series of brutal killings that would become one of the most disturbing mysteries in American criminal history. Victims were discovered dismembered, their heads and limbs removed, leaving investigators struggling to identify the dead or track the killer responsible. As the bodies began appearing along the city’s rail yards and riverbanks, fear spre...

A fashion icon was gunned down outside his home. The murder stunned the creative world. Behind the glamour was a calculated predator. Follow Murder: True Crime Stories for Part 2 of this episode: https://pod.link/1745145932 Join Crime House+ to binge a special limited series on Murder: True Crime Stories for America’s 250th: The Crimes That Built America. These are the cases that created the FBI,...

Led by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho), the movement built a utopian commune in Oregon that devolved into bioterrorism, immigration fraud, and assassination plots. In 1984, members carried out the largest bioterror attack in U.S. history by poisoning salad bars to sway a local election. The case shows how charismatic leadership and insular power structures can turn spiritual movements into criminal...

On the night before Thanksgiving 2016, eighteen-year-old Tom Brown left his home in Canadian, Texas to go cruising with friends. But he never came home. When his red Dodge Durango turned up the next morning at a sewage treatment plant on the edge of town, there was a bullet casing on the floor and a drop of his blood on the door handle, but no sign of Tom. What followed was two years of strange di...

For over two thousand years, the Yeren — China's legendary wildman — has haunted the mountains and folklore of rural China, inspiring fear, government bans, and even a state-funded scientific expedition. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes, Vanessa traces the creature's origins from ancient poetry to modern eyewitness accounts, and follows the researcher who spent fifty years...

In September 2010, a college student bought a used copy of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask at a garage sale, and discovered a save file named BEN belonging to a boy who had drowned years before. What started as glitchy gameplay quickly became something far more sinister: a presence that manipulated the game, invaded his computer, and refused to be deleted. Ben Drowned is the creepypasta that re...

On the day before Thanksgiving, 1971, a man named D.B. Cooper walked up to an airport counter, paid cash for a one-way ticket, and boarded a commercial flight. By the time the plane landed, he had collected $200,000 in ransom, strapped it to his body, and jumped out the back of a jet. No one has seen him since. In the first of three episodes on D.B. Cooper, Katie Ring takes you back to November 24...

In early 1970s Houston, Texas, businessman Dean Corll used free candy, a party-ready apartment, and a carefully cultivated reputation as a community pillar to lure teenage boys to their deaths. But behind his friendly facade, Corll was systematically grooming victims... and recruiting young accomplices to help him carry out increasingly brutal crimes. This episode traces his childhood, his escalat...

An actor known for his vulnerability was attacked near his home. The crime shocked Hollywood. His death marked the end of a complex life. Follow Murder: True Crime Stories for Part 2 of this episode: https://pod.link/1745145932 Join Crime House+ to binge a special limited series on Murder: True Crime Stories for America’s 250th: The Crimes That Built America. These are the cases that created the F...

Crime House’s Murder: True Crime Stories presents a special series for America’s 250th Birthday: The Crimes That Built America. Listen every Monday until July 6th on Murder: True Crime Stories. Join Crime House+ to get all 4 episodes right now ad-free. To subscribe, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you are listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. 250 years ago, a b...

In April 2014, Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon, two Dutch women in their early twenties, went for a daytime hike on a trail near Boquete, Panama. They never came back. Weeks later, their backpack was found on a jungle riverbank with their phones, camera, and cash still inside. What was on that camera changed everything: photographs taken in total darkness over several days, including what appears t...

In the mid-1800s, a British naturalist named Philip Sclater proposed the existence of a vast sunken continent — Lemuria — to explain a gap in the fossil record. What began as a genuine scientific hypothesis was seized upon by occultists, racists, and spiritual movements, mutating over 150 years into a living religion practiced at the foot of a California volcano. In this episode of Conspiracy Theo...

What began as a series of tweets about sleep paralysis turned into one of the internet’s most famous live-haunting stories. A man named Adam begins posting about a dead child with a misshapen head who appears first in dreams, then in photographs, then seemingly inside his apartment. Heidi walks through the Dear David thread as it unfolded in real time, and explores why serialized horror told throu...

From the outside, the Watts family had everything: a beautiful home in Colorado, two young daughters, and a social media presence full of smiling family photos. Behind those posts, their marriage was quietly falling apart. In the first of three episodes on the Watts family murders, Katie Ring traces who Shanann Watts really was, how she and Chris built their life together, and the huge secret Chri...

In 1930s Elmendorf, Texas, tavern owner Joe Ball built a reputation for wild alligator feedings and a revolving door of female employees who kept disappearing without explanation. Reportedly a descendant of notorious slaveholders, Ball graduated from bootlegger to killer, and when the women in his life became inconvenient, they simply vanished. Follow Serial Killers & Murderous Minds for Part...

A student studying abroad was found murdered in her apartment. The case became international news overnight. Her life was frequently eclipsed by spectacle. Follow Murder: True Crime Stories for Part 2 of this episode: https://pod.link/1745145932 If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money, & Murder to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at c...

In the summer of 1969, Los Angeles was living in the long glow of the counterculture — until two nights of murders shattered it beyond repair. Charles Manson never held the knife himself, but he held something more powerful: the total psychological devotion of young men and women who would kill on his word. We examine how Manson built his family, what he promised them, the ideology of race war he...

In August 2010, 30-year-old Ben McDaniel suited up for a dive into Vortex Spring, a celebrated cave diving site in Florida, and descended into a narrow underwater passage. He never returned. One of the employees claimed to have watched Ben enter a restricted section of the cave, a passage that required advanced certification that Ben didn't have. Despite exhaustive underwater searches, his body wa...

In southeastern Massachusetts, a stretch of land known as the Bridgewater Triangle has been a magnet for paranormal activity for centuries: cryptid sightings, UFO encounters, ghostly apparitions, and evidence of occult rituals. Many trace the darkness back to King Philip's War of 1675-76, one of the deadliest conflicts per capita in American history, which left the land scarred by massacre, displa...

In the summer of 2012, a teenager's camping trip on remote Alabama woodland turns into something no one can explain. What begins with strange smells and figures standing motionless in the dark escalates when the group realizes there's an extra person in their group... without anyone noticing. The horror isn't a monster in the woods. It's a creature already inside the room. For more follow Twisted...

On the night of November 14th, 1959, four members of the Clutter family were bound and shot dead in their farmhouse in Holcomb, Kansas. Nothing of value had been stolen. The doors, as always, had been unlocked. In the first of three episodes on the Clutter family murders, Katie Ring traces who the Clutters really were, and the morning when friends and neighbors arrived for church and found them go...