A True crime Podcast

In the early hours of February 17, 1970, Army Captain Jeffrey MacDonald called for help from his home at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Inside, his pregnant wife Colette and their two young daughters, Kimberley and Kristen, had been brutally beaten and stabbed to death. Written in blood on the headboard was the word “PIG.” MacDonald, a Green Beret surgeon, claimed four drug-crazed hippies had broken...

Between 1977 and 1980, white supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin drifted across the United States with a rifle and a stated mission to start a race war. He targeted Black men, Jewish people, and interracial couples in sniper attacks, bombed synagogues, and robbed banks to fund his next stop. Host Alexander Lawson traces Franklin’s path from his early radicalization to the Madison parking-lot double m...

In 1990, police stopped a delivery van outside the Scottish village of Stow and found a six-year-old girl bound and gagged in the back. The driver was Robert Black. His arrest ended one of the longest and most extensive manhunts in modern British history. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, host Alexander Lawson examines how Black, a long-distance delivery driver, used his job to abduct, sexu...

In the fall of 1986, a self-proclaimed bishop in North Philadelphia began kidnapping women off the street and chaining them in a pit he dug in his basement floor. Over the next four months, Gary Heidnik held six Black women captive at 3520 North Marshall Street. He raped them, beat them, starved them, and tortured them with electricity and screwdrivers. Two of the women died. One was dismembered i...

On 15 July 1997, fashion designer Gianni Versace was shot dead outside his Miami Beach mansion. The killer was Andrew Cunanan, who had already murdered four other men in a three-month spree that stretched from Minnesota to Florida. Eight days later he was dead by his own hand. No clear motive was ever established. This is the story of the charming, status-obsessed killer who became one of America’...

In July 1976, French students collapsed in a Delhi hotel after accepting “anti-dysentery” pills from a charming stranger. That man was Charles Sobhraj—the Serpent, the Bikini Killer—whose trail of drugged and murdered tourists stretched across Asia. Host Alexander Lawson unpacks Sobhraj’s early life between Vietnam and France, his marriage and move to Asia, the 1976 arrest in Delhi, his years insi...

In the late 1980s, a series of child abductions in Tokyo and Saitama Prefecture shocked Japan. Four young girls disappeared and were later found murdered. The man responsible was Tsutomu Miyazaki, a reclusive 26-year-old who became known as the “Otaku Killer” after police discovered thousands of anime and horror videotapes in his home. This episode examines Miyazaki’s isolated childhood, the crime...

On New Year’s Day 1958, a man walked into a quiet home in Uddingston, Scotland, and shot a husband, wife, and their young son as they slept. Then he stayed. He ate their food, fed their cat, drove their car, and even gave a lift to a policeman searching for another missing girl. Peter Manuel, the Beast of Birkenshaw, terrorised Lanarkshire between 1956 and 1958. Convicted of seven murders and susp...

In the mid-1990s, as South Africa emerged from apartheid, a charming predator preyed on desperate women looking for work. Moses Sithole, known as the ABC Killer, lured at least 38 victims — mostly Black women and one toddler — to remote fields across Atteridgeville, Boksburg and Cleveland. He raped and strangled them, often with their own underwear, leaving a trail of bodies that shocked the natio...

In 1990, a 22-year-old high school media coordinator in New Hampshire was accused of conspiring with a teenage student to murder her husband. The resulting trial—one of the first in the country to be broadcast live from start to finish—captivated the nation and raised lasting questions about influence, responsibility, and justice. Host Alexander’s Lawson examines the facts of the case, the trial t...

In August 1966, Kenneth McDuff and an accomplice abducted three teenagers on a Texas baseball field. He shot the two boys in the trunk of their car, then raped and strangled 16-year-old Edna Louise Sullivan with a broomstick so violently it broke her neck. A jury sentenced him to death three times. After the Supreme Court emptied death rows, Texas paroled him in 1989. Within days he was suspected...

In Houston, Texas, in the early 1970s, the man handing free candy to kids outside an elementary school was making them disappear. Dean Corll, known as the Candy Man, paid two teenage accomplices to lure boys to his homes, where at least 28 young victims were abducted, tortured, and murdered. The killings went largely undetected until one accomplice shot Corll dead in 1973 and led police to the bod...

For nearly two years, children and young men disappeared from Atlanta’s streets. Most were Black boys between the ages of 7 and 17. Their bodies were found strangled and dumped in woods, vacant lots, and the Chattahoochee River. Parents stopped letting kids walk alone. The city lived in fear. Then, at 2:52 a.m. on May 22, 1981, a police stakeout on a bridge heard a loud splash. Minutes later, offi...

On Easter Sunday 1955, Ruth Ellis shot her lover David Blakely dead outside a London pub. Ninety-four days later she became the last woman executed in the UK. Her trial lasted barely a day. The jury never heard the full story of the violence she had endured. Decades later, in 2026, she received a posthumous conditional pardon. This is the true story of the platinum-blonde nightclub hostess, the gu...

In Victorian England, a nurse and mother named Mary Ann Cotton watched husbands, stepchildren, and even her own babies die of “gastric fever”—then collected the insurance. Alexander Lawson traces the quiet, calculated killings of Britain’s most prolific female serial killer, from the coal towns of County Durham to the botched hanging that ended her life. How did she poison as many as twenty-one pe...

“Go down to the shore and wait.” Those were the final words Elaine O’Hara ever received. On 22 August 2012, the 36-year-old childcare worker left a psychiatric hospital, followed instructions from a man she called “Sir,” and walked toward the water at Shanganagh Park in south Dublin. She was never seen alive again. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast , host Alexander Lawson examines the case o...

In the fall of 1972, a 25-year-old man in Santa Cruz, California began hearing voices. They told him that if he didn’t kill, a catastrophic earthquake would destroy the state. Over the next four months, Herbert Mullin murdered 13 people—believing each death was a necessary human sacrifice to save millions. Once voted “Most Likely to Succeed,” Mullin was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic whose del...

In June 1993, New York State Troopers pulled over a landscaper on Long Island for a missing license plate. What they found under a tarp in his pickup truck ended a four-year killing spree no one had connected. Joel Rifkin, an adopted kid from East Meadow living with his mother, confessed to murdering 17 women—mostly sex workers struggling with addiction—between 1989 and 1993. Convicted of nine mur...

In January 1978, a six-year-old girl knocked on a neighbor’s door for a playdate and looked through the window. What she saw was the aftermath of a blood-soaked massacre. Four people dead. A toddler missing. Blood drunk. Organs removed. The killer had simply walked in through an unlocked door—because he believed an unlocked door was an invitation. This is the story of Richard Trenton Chase, the ma...

On a warm May afternoon in 1924, two of the richest, smartest teenagers in America lured 14-year-old Bobby Franks into a rented car. Minutes later he was dead. They called it the perfect crime. It wasn’t. Host Alexander Lawson unravels the chilling story of Richard Loeb—the privileged University of Chicago student who, alongside Nathan Leopold, kidnapped and murdered a neighbor for the thrill of i...

In 1924, two wealthy Chicago teenagers decided they were above the law. Nathan Leopold — a nineteen-year-old prodigy, birdwatcher, and Nietzsche devotee — and his closest friend Richard Loeb spent months planning what they called the perfect crime: the kidnapping and murder of a random rich boy, purely for the intellectual thrill of getting away with it. On May 21 they lured fourteen-year-old Bobb...

On his 31st birthday in June 1994, Julian Webb sat down to his favourite meal — an extra-hot curry cooked by his wife. By the next morning he was dead, and she was already asking about his £36,000 death benefit. She said he took his own life. For years, the inquest agreed. But Dena Thompson, the woman the British press called the Black Widow, had a pattern. Through lonely-hearts columns she target...

In the early hours of 7 August 1985, police were called to a locked farmhouse in rural Essex. Inside they found five members of the Bamber family dead — including two young boys shot in their beds. The only survivor was 24-year-old Jeremy Bamber, who claimed his sister had “gone berserk” with a gun before killing herself. For weeks, that story held. Then his girlfriend walked into a police station...

In January 1982, 33-year-old mother of two Lynette Dawson vanished from her home on Sydney’s northern beaches after telling her mother her husband had just made her “a lovely drink.” For four decades, former rugby league player and high school teacher Chris Dawson insisted she had simply walked out on him and their young daughters. Within days of her disappearance, the teenage student he’d been ha...

In the fall of 1977, Los Angeles was gripped by terror. Bodies of young women and girls—some as young as 12—kept turning up naked and strangled on the city’s hillsides. The press named the killer the Hillside Strangler. What no one knew yet was that the murders were the work of two men: cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono Jr., a foul-mouthed auto upholsterer in Glendale who called himself the...