Triggered - The True Crime Podcast

In the summer of 2020, three people living together in a house in northeast Spokane pulled out a Ouija board at 3:30 in the morning. Before sunrise, 25-year-old Anthony Brines was dead, stabbed about twenty times in his own bedroom. This episode we’re doing both sides, like always. We start with the Ouija board, from a Baltimore toy-store novelty to the thing your youth pastor warned you about. Th...

On June 5, 2005, Jennifer Jackson was found dead in her East Memphis home, stabbed more than 50 times. Her 18-year-old daughter Noura told police she came home and found her. Investigators didn't buy it. Noura was charged with her mother's murder and, in 2009, convicted of second-degree murder after a trial that leaned hard on her partying, her texts and her lifestyle. Years later, the Ten...

In 1986, nurse Sherri Rasmussen was found beaten and shot in her Van Nuys condo, three months after her wedding. The LAPD called it a burglary gone wrong. Her father, Nels, knew better. He gave detectives a name: Stephanie Lazarus, her husband's ex, who had threatened Sherri and turned up in her living room. Detectives told him he watched too much TV. The thing is, Stephanie was a cop. For 23...

In 1987, five elderly women died at Alpine Manor, a nursing home in Walker, Michigan. Their deaths were ruled natural. No autopsies. No questions. Then, more than a year later, a man walked into a police station and repeated something his ex-wife had told him. Cathy Wood and Gwendolyn Graham were nurse's aides at Alpine Manor who became lovers in 1986. According to Wood, the killings were a pa...

In November 2010, three armed men walked through the unlocked front door of a quiet home in Markham, Ontario. Within minutes, Bich Ha Pan was dead and her husband Hann was left for dead in the basement. Their 24-year-old daughter Jennifer was found tied to the upstairs banister, the only witness to what looked like a random home invasion. But Jennifer had been wearing a mask for years. Behind it w...

In August 2010, Jennifer Leigh Stewart was found dead in a Vanier parking lot in Ottawa. She was 36, a Cree woman, a mother, and a sex worker, and she was killed with an axe in a detail police kept out of the public eye for years. For two and a half years, nothing. Then a young man in segregation at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre told a guard he wanted to confess to a murder. Adrian Daou tol...

When Netflix released Death of the Pastor’s Wife , millions of people were introduced to the story of Mica Miller, the 30-year-old worship leader whose death in April 2024 sparked questions far beyond the official ruling of suicide. But Mica’s story started long before that day. In this episode, we go back to the beginning: Mica’s teenage years at Solid Rock Church, her first marriage, her affair...

On February 22, 2025, a 911 call came in from a luxury apartment complex in Princeton, New Jersey. The caller told dispatch there was a fire, and a body. The body was his younger brother. Matthew Hertgen was 31, a Wesleyan grad and former college soccer player. Joseph was 27, a finance analyst, the little brother everyone liked. Hours before the killing, a third Hertgen brother had driven Matthew...

Two cults. Two self-proclaimed religious leaders. And one unsolved murder mystery that would take more than forty years to unravel. First, we dive into the Brethren, better known as the “Garbage Eaters,” a secretive religious group whose members abandoned their families, possessions and careers to travel across America, live off discarded food and follow the teachings of Jim Roberts. Then we meet...

In the early morning hours of June 30, 2009, a black Nissan Sentra was discovered submerged in the water at the Kingston Mills locks in Kingston, Ontario. Inside were four members of the same family: 19-year-old Zainab Shafia, 17-year-old Sahar Shafia, 13-year-old Geeti Shafia, and 52-year-old Rona Mohammad Omar. At first, their deaths appeared to be a horrific accident. But details surrounding th...

Four cryptids and what the evidence actually shows. A sacred lake spirit, an iguana in the trunk of a police cruiser, a Wampanoag story that isn't about a monster, and a movie...or is there more? 🎧 Listen to Triggered wherever you get your podcasts: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcast 💬 Join the Chaos Crew (free Discord): https://discord.gg/YuEWjMzkJN   ⭐ Become an Inner Circle member on Superca...

In February 2019, a Massachusetts family court judge handed five year old Harmony Montgomery over to a father with a long and violent criminal record. Ten months later she was dead. Nobody noticed for two years. Harmony was blind in one eye and had spent most of her short life moving in and out of foster care. Her mother, Crystal Sorey, had lost custody while struggling with addiction, and when So...

In July 2017, a woman in Campbell, Ohio went down to her basement for a pound of ground beef. There was a chest freezer down there that belonged to a friend of her husband's, and it had a padlock on it, and whoever installed that padlock had mounted it backwards. Three screws. That's what it took to break open a case that had been running unnoticed for five months. Shannon Graves was 28 years old....

On October 9, 1986, nine year old best friends Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway told a neighbour they were heading to Wild Park in Moulsecoomb, Brighton. It was the last time anyone saw them alive. The next afternoon, two civilian searchers found the girls hidden in a makeshift den in the park, and a case that would consume Sussex Police for the next three decades was born. A 20 year old local roo...

In 1995, a Canadian schoolteacher took the trip of a lifetime to New Zealand. Her tour guide was a six foot seven, four hundred pound former city councillor who had spent his entire life on the water. Fifteen years later, one of them drowned in a mountain lake in British Columbia. The other one was the only person on earth who saw it happen. What followed was one of the strangest homicide cases in...

On the night of September 16, 2009, a 24 year old woman sat down alone at Geoffrey's, an upscale restaurant on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. She ordered dinner. She could not pay the $89 bill. Staff described her behaviour as strange, and deputies were called. Mitrice Richardson was a Cal State Fullerton graduate. She was warm, brilliant, and by her family's account she had been quietly str...

Michelle Hadley was in her twenties, in grad school, and by her own description sickeningly wholesome. Then she was arrested, held on a million dollars bail, and told she was facing life in prison. The emails threatening her ex fiancé's pregnant wife were real. Sent several times a day, from an account called Lilithistruth, describing what the woman wore to work and where she went. The Craigslist...

We grew up outside Pembroke, Ontario, hearing a story adults would only tell in whispers. A daughter. Her boyfriend. A little boy. A farmhouse. And a line that followed the case for fifty-five years: "She should have gone to prison too." We never knew the names. This week, Ash went looking for them. In March 1971, in what was then Alice Township, six-year-old David Witt and his uncle Leslie Molson...

Welcome to our FIRST "After Hours with Triggered"! This is a monthly instalment where Ashley and Chantal tell YOUR stories. If you would like to submit your tales for future episodes, please hurry over to triggeredthepodcast.com 🎧 Listen to Triggered wherever you get your podcasts: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcast 💬 Join the Chaos Crew (free Discord): https://discord.gg/YuEWjMzkJN   ⭐ Become...

Laci Peterson was almost eight months pregnant when she vanished from her Modesto home on Christmas Eve, 2002. Four months later, she and her unborn son Conner washed ashore in San Francisco Bay, just miles from where her husband Scott said he'd been fishing alone. Scott Peterson was convicted of their murders in 2004. But in 2026, the Los Angeles Innocence Project is fighting to tear that convict...

💬 Join the Chaos Crew (free Discord): https://discord.gg/YuEWjMzkJN   ⭐ Become an Inner Circle member on Supercast: triggeredthepod.supercast.com 🌐 triggeredthepodcast.com Cleveland, the 1930s. Bodies start appearing in Kingsbury Run, decapitated and dismembered, most of them never identified. The papers dub him the Mad Butcher. The man hunting him is Eliot Ness, the same legend who brough...

Twenty-two years old, alone on a bike at two in the morning, a man twice her size waiting in a white truck with a knife and a gun. Mickey Shunick did not do what he expected. She fought. And the wounds she left on her attacker's body are part of what brought him down. In this episode, the gals walk through the 2012 disappearance and murder of Michaela "Mickey" Shunick in Lafayette, Louisiana: the...

FROM THE VAULT! ***Hi friends, Ash and Chantal pulled one of their first episodes from the vault this week. Brand new episode coming Friday!*** Colleen Ritzer was a 24-year-old math teacher who believed no student was beyond reaching. On October 22, 2013, that belief left her alone with a 14-year-old freshman named Philip Chism at Danvers High School. This week we cover the murder, the trial, the...

Eight children. A 35 acre property. "Underground caves" made of mud, and a home prosecutors compared to a city landfill. This week we head to Deming, New Mexico for the case of Valerie and Melvin Cordell, arrested in February 2025 and now facing dozens of combined charges of child abuse and sexual assault. Both have pleaded not guilty. The whole thing came to light because one 16 year old daughter...

Sixteen year old Karlie Guse smoked a joint at a party, spent the night terrified that her own family was going to kill her, and by morning she had walked out the front door and vanished. She left her phone, her glasses, and her money behind. This week: the case, the recording nobody has heard, and the science that suggests it was never really about the weed at all. Follow us: linktr.ee/triggeredt...