Totalcrime

My guest today is Kacey Baker (pictured), the host of the CultVault podcast. We talk about the history of cults, including The People's Temple, which was responsible for the Jonestown massacre in 1978 (in which more than 1,000 people died), David Koresh and the Branch Davidians (which was destroyed by a 1993 siege in Waco, Texas) and Heaven's Gate (39 members committed suicide in 1997 af...

In July 2003 I travelled to California and visited Stanley "Tookie" Williams (pictured) on Death Row in San Quentin prison. Two years later he was executed on the orders of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Tookie was the co-founder of The Crips in Los Angeles. The Crips - and their rivals the Bloods - have been engaged in gang warfare for generations now. This week Duane "Keffe D&quo...

Rapper Tashera "T" Savage and her mother Shontel Greene tell me about their lives on the streets of Baltimore and how they have been turned into a movie, "Thru The Eyes of the Hustlers' Daughter", which is coming out this autumn (fall) in both the US and UK. It stars Hassan Johnson (who played "Wee-Bey" in The Wire). Tashera was the daughter of teenage parents wh...

Alex Smith - a psychic entertainer and stage hypnotist who uses the stage name Jonathan Royle - thought he could outwit the News of the World's investigative journalist Mazher Mahmood, aka "The Fake Sheikh" and reveal his covert and allegedly unethical methods. But Smith (pictured) ended up in jail. Years later - and long after the News of the World closed in disgrace, and Mahmood h...

This is the second of a two-parter series about the Pottery Cottage Murders in Derbyshire. Podcasters John and Sally Midgley - who are both former police officers from Derbyshire - talk me through what happened after Billy Hughes (pictured) escapes while being escorted to court in Derbyshire one winter's day in 1977. It is a thrilling and terrifying story as he escapes across the snow-covered...

This is the first of a two-parter about the Pottery Cottage Murders in Derbyshire. Podcasters John and Sally Midgley - who are both former police officers from Derbyshire - talk to me about the crimes of Billy Hughes, who was nicknamed "Mad Billy". John and Sally are Britain's foremost experts on this case and in this episode they explain who Billy Hughes was, how he was caught by a...

In this episode I speak to Sanne de Boer, the author of The New Mafia: The Inside Story of the Rise of the 'Ndrangheta. Sanne, who is Dutch, moved to a beautiful village in Calabria in the far south of Italy 20 years ago. She learnt the local Italian dialect and has become an expert in the goings-on of the Calabrian mafia, which has spread its tentacles across the world and is now one of the...

In this episode I talk to N. Leigh Hunt, the author of a new book - The Boy Next Door - about the world's youngest serial killer, Craig C. Price (pictured), who killed a woman in Rhode Island when he was 13 and then a family of three when he was 15. He tells me how the state of Rhode Island pulled out all the stops to stop him being released at the age of 21, and goes into detail about the co...

In this episode I look at one of the most infamous unsolved murders in Britain in the last 40 years - the killing of private investigator Daniel Morgan (pictured). In 1987 Morgan, 37, was murdered by a mystery axeman in the car park of a south London pub. It was subsequently alleged that he had stumbled across police corruption and was about to spill the beans. In this episode I explain the histor...

I recently attended a Metallica concert in London where the chief support band were Pantera. In 2004 one of the founders of Pantera, guitarist Dimebag Darrell Abbott, was shot dead - along with three other people - by a crazed fan while playing with his new band Damageplan. It is one of three incidents I discuss in this episode - the others being the horrific terrorist attack on an Eagles of Death...

Life has come full circle as I interview Shaun Attwood, a YouTuber with 1.1 million followers, who I first wrote about in 2004 (see first link), when he was blogging from an Arizona prison about the horrendous conditions he was facing after being incarcerated for selling party drugs like ecstasy. In today's episode he tells me about being plagued by cockroaches, intense heat and gang violence...

One night in 1984 a civil servant, Anthony Littler, who had just got off a Tube train after a night out with some fellow real ale enthusiasts, was attacked as he walked home along a darkened alley in north London. It would take 42 years to solve the crime. In today's episode I am joined by crime reporter Danny Shaw, who covered the trial of two brothers who were convicted of the murder, which...

In this special episode I dissect the recent trial of London rappers Rack5 and TY with two voices from the streets, Tankz and TMC. Rack5 (Ellis Heather) was jailed for life on 17 July 2026 for the murder of the brother of rapper Morrisson after a trial which featured his former CGM buddy TY (Yonas Girma, pictured) - who has reinvented himself as a wildlife influencer - giving evidence against him...

So the World Cup is over and the painful memories of England's semi-final defeat against Argentina will stay with us for years. Where did you watch the game? I was lucky enough to watch it in a bar in the Caribbean. In today's episode I explain how detectives in two cold case murders are hoping that two England games in the Euro 96 tournament 30 years ago will jog the public's memor...

In this episode I speak to Simon Michael, a former barrister turned novelist, who is sometimes known as "Britain's John Grisham". We had a fascinating discussion about the differences between true crime and crime fiction and Simon - who has written the Charles Holborne series of novels - explained how many of his books were based on real criminal trials. We also talk about plotting...

This is the second part of my interview with Thomas Herdman, the Canadian businessman who has been waiting for more than five years to go on trial in France accused of setting up Sky ECC to help organised criminals do their deals in secret. He tells me the real reason why the FBI wanted to close down Sky ECC and tells me why France's legal establishment has cast him as the digital bogeyman an...

In this episode I have an exclusive interview with Thomas Herdman, who is awaiting trial in France four years after he was arrested and accused of being behind an international criminal enterprise at the encrypted app Sky ECC. Herdman tells me he is innocent and is the victim of France's war against privacy. During the French Revolution, Cardinal Richelieu said: "If you give me six lines...

Last week Jamie Varley was given a whole life sentence for the murder of Preston Davey, a 13-month-old boy he was in the process of adopting with his boyfriend John McGowan-Fazakerley. I covered the trial, which heard shocking evidence that the little boy was sexually abused for weeks or months prior to his death. In this episode I tell you the full story, including the moving words of Preston&apo...

This is an exclusive interview with Zac Law, from Yorkshire, who tells me how he discovered one day that one of his American friends on the app Discord, Travis Dyer (pictured), had killed himself and then later found out that three other people he knew on the app - including "Jimmy" - had played an active part in encouraging Travis to shoot himself and had even watched it on a videocall....

I have been following the machinations of the Turkish and Kurdish underworld in London for almost a quarter of a century and this seems like the perfect time to tell the story. The reason I am doing this episode now is because of the conviction (on Friday 5 June) of Beytullah Gunduz, one of the leaders of the Hackney Turks - one of two violent feuding gangs in London. The other being the Tottenham...

Nicola Tallant, top Irish crime journalist and author of Groomed: Coercion, Control and a Cold-blooded Murder, joins me to discuss the horrific murder of Katie Simpson, a 21-year-old showjumper in Northern Ireland who fell into the clutches of Jonathan Cresswell, a horse trainer (pictured) who was also her brother-in-law. This is the government review she mentions in the episode: https://www.justi...

Polly Rippon, a former court reporter with the Sheffield Star who now teaches journalism at Sheffield University, joins me to discuss the art of court reporting and why it is so important. We talk about why trials are covered differently than they were in the past, why it can be dangerous for untrained people to cover cases, and some of the social issues which have only been unearthed by court rep...

In this episode I am joined by Loukas Ntanos, a criminologist from Birmingham City University and an expert on murderabilia - which is the collection of items related to homicide cases. Yes, believe it or not, there are people out there who collect and trade in ghastly souvenirs of serial killers such as Frederick Deeming (pictured) and infamous crimes. It's a fascinating subject which Loukas...

In Episode 13 of the Totalcrime podcast my special guest is Adam Lloyd, the host of the UK True Crime podcast, which has been going for almost 10 years. We talk mainly about the murder of Robert "Fox" Powell in June 2020 and the amazing criminal career of Nana Oppong (pictured), a drug dealer who beat three separate murder raps before finally being convicted of killing Fox. I was in cour...

Daniel Kinahan - the alleged head of the Kinahan drugs cartel - was arrested in Dubai on 17 April. But why has it taken nearly a decade to arrest a man who had been hiding in plain sight in Dubai for a decade and had put his head above the parapet in 2020 to facilitate a world title fight between Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua? In this episode I go into detail about Kinahan's activities - star...