True Crime Campfire

Anger can be useful. If you need to defend yourself or those you love, or if you need to stand up against some outrage in your community, anger can give you the necessary fire to get things done. It can also be poisonous, eating away at a soul until there’s not much left but dense fury that constantly leaks out like oil from a ruptured tanker. This week’s story is about a man who let his anger con...

Love can be a pretty hard thing to define. It’s easier to say what it is not. Love is not secretly following someone and trying your best to keep her within sight every second of the day. Love is not trying to keep someone scared and uncertain so that they’ll rely on you more. And love is not thinking you own a person, and becoming furious when you find out that you do that. This is a story about...

Many of the stories we cover revolve around the disintegration of a marriage. It’s often a deeply traumatic event, upending entire lives and making an imagined future just vanish into nothing. It can drive some people kind of crazy. But other people are just built differently, and can move effortlessly from one marriage to the next as easily as changing a pair of socks. The woman in this week’s ca...

Life, obviously, is easier with money. Without having to scrabble and hustle just to survive, you can be free to pursue whatever interests and fascinations you like. But wealth doesn’t make you immune to the realities of human life. Families still have drama, hearts still get broken, dreams still get crushed into dust. This week’s story is about someone who started life with every possible advanta...

If you’re unlucky, you might have at least one person in your life who just drives you crazy, someone with whom every interaction has an edge of mutual antipathy, that makes you feel like you’re always on the brink of a screaming argument. Sometimes two particular human beings just do not fit together. And because human beings are strange, sometimes a couple like that hook up and stay together for...

Every night in the city, there are people out looking for something. Usually it’s just fun and excitement, but there are also those who go out looking to fulfill darker desires, who view the night city as a hunting ground where they will get what they want, no matter what. And sometimes, what they want is a nightmare of pain and suffering that shocks the conscience. Note: This episode is about a s...

It’s hard to convict someone of murder without a body. Even if it’s plain to everyone with a lick of common sense that the victim is dead and this is the guy who killed her, a prosecutor is wary of going to trial without being able to say with absolute certainty, this person is dead, and we know because we have her body. This week’s story is about a killer whose crime was apparent almost immediate...

Thanks to books and movies, and very occasionally real life, the idea of the genius killer has become pervasive. But most murderers are not dazzlingly creative schemers. If they have a plan at all, it’s usually simple and dumb—but unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean the plan will fail. This week’s story is about a man who got away with one murder, and then tried to repeat the trick almost...

Love is supposed to make you better. Your partner should push lift you up and make you want to improve yourself, improve life for you both. Sometimes, though, there are couples that do nothing but make each other worse. They become jealous, resentful, and cruel. Their relationship is a disgusting mire that sucks in the couple and everyone in their orbit. Everyone knows a couple like that. But toda...

In the cases we cover, there are types of relationship that frequently crop up between killer and victim, romantic partners or romantic rivals most of all. Sometimes, though, the relationship that is broken by murder is more shocking: a parent killing a child, or a child killing a parent. And sometimes that killer is still literally a child, someone you would never suspect to be capable of such br...

Legendary Conservationist Steve Irwin said, “We don’t own the planet Earth, we belong to it. And we must share it with our wildlife.” It’s such a lovely sentiment. We have a responsibility to protect and care for creatures that can’t protect themselves. It’s something that almost every person on earth would agree with. But what happens when someone loves something so much they throttle the life ou...

Come join us for CrimeWave 2.0, February 8-12, 2027 on Royal Caribbean's beautiful Oasis of the Seas. We're going to the Bahamas! See Katie and Whitney, plus Casefile, Last Podcast on the Left, True Crime Garage, Crime Time Teatime, Scared to Death, A Paranormal Chicks, No Sleep, Unexplained, Sinisterhood and Crime with Kourt. Live shows, meet and greets, pool parties, game shows, and new friends...

In a lot of ways, the world is smaller now than it ever has been. With a few clicks of the mouse, I can watch a live camera feed of Sydney harbor, or read a newspaper from any country I can think of. Just five hours in an airplane can get you from the US to Europe, and pretty much anyone on the planet can listen to a couple of nerds like us on a podcast. But, obviously, the world is not in fact sh...

Winston Churchill once said, “Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.” That’s a nice sentiment—I mean, by and large it’s good to let failure be a learning experience, to not let it discourage you from following your dreams. But…hear me out here: What if you’re just a hot mess? What if every time you go from one failure to the next, you leave a pile of bodies in your...

On the surface, Blanche Taylor Moore looked like a model of small-town virtue: a devoted caregiver, a churchgoing woman, a trusted neighbor. But behind that carefully maintained image lay a wild heart with few limits on what it was capable of. Murder certainly wasn’t beyond her, and those closest to her were in the most danger, consuming their own deaths with every bite of Blanche’s carefully prep...

A lot of the murder cases we cover feature slow-boiling resentments, or criminal schemes hatched with an explicit target in mind. Killings by strangers are rare—and terrifying. You can just be going about your life with no idea that a predator is hunting you, a twisted mind that has no more connection to your life than a shark does. And then, out of the night, they strike. Join us for the chilling...

In the early 1990s, a beloved first-grade teacher in Pennsylvania began receiving harassing, threatening letters from an anonymous sender. Her school principal, fellow teachers, and the parents of some of her students soon began receiving them too. As the ordeal wore on, the stalker slowly escalated from taunts to vile accusations and death threats—and then, finally, violence. From early on in the...

In Part Two of this story last week, we learned how serial husband and waste of DNA Randy Roth seduced, married, and almost certainly murdered his second wife Jan for a life-insurance payout, and tried and failed to use the same scheme on wife number three, Donna Clift. And if you already hate Randy, that’s only going to get worse after the tragic conclusion to his story this week. Sources: Fatal...

Last week, we introduced you to Randy Roth, and described his early life and his escalation from ridiculous loser and petty criminal, to the chief suspect in the death of his second wife, Jan. Jan plummeted to her death from Beacon Rock, on the Washington-Oregon border, leaving behind a young daughter and a hefty life-insurance policy with Randy Roth as the beneficiary. This week, we find out more...

The story of Bluebeard has a mostly happy ending, with the killer’s newest bride being rescued in the nick of time by her brothers. Good for her, less good for his previous wives, who she’d discovered hanging on hooks from the walls of a bloody closet. There are countless real-life stories of spouses being killed for money, with no muscular siblings breaking down the door with swords in hand. It’s...

When we last left you, former Amishman Eli Stutzman was having a little trouble with the law. He’d abandoned the Amish lifestyle after the suspicious death of his wife and was currently going on a tour of the US, sleeping with any man with a pulse. His son, Danny, was starting to show signs of severe abuse, but no one in his life stepped forward to report it. Finally, Eli’s roommate/employee was f...

The thing about serial killers is that it seems so obvious to us after the fact, right? Their behavior is so outrageous and so antisocial that we’re always left wondering why no one noticed. Eli Stutzman’s strange behavior was written off by everyone that knew him. He was quiet and odd, but being raised Amish, who could blame him? To the Amish, his time spent with the Englisch gave him some strang...

Comedian Simon Amstell said, “If you are somebody who is going to at some point be revealed as not like everyone else, then to be in an insular community is a problem.” Here Amstell was discussing how it felt growing up gay and going to a religious school. Insular religious communities shut themselves off from the world in order to keep their views unchanged by the outside. It’s extremely effectiv...

Last week, we did our first-ever live show on the Crimewave true crime cruise! We covered three cases, a sort of "sampler platter" to give new listeners an idea of what kind of stories we usually tell on TCC. Case 1 is the bizarre story of a parody website that ended up bringing dozens of would-be killers to justice. Case 2 is the murder of chef Dan Brophy by his mystery-novelist wife. Case 3 is t...

We tell a lot of wild stories about crimes that happened right here in the States—but it’s worth noting that our cousins across the pond are misbehaving just as badly. Y’know, same crimes, different accent. Today we’ve chosen two cases that each mirror so many of the ones we’ve covered from here: A woman consumed by her toxic obsession for the man she wanted to marry, and a man more interested in...