Evidence Locker True Crime

Ralph and Joan Vollmer lived on a farm outside of a small Australian country town. When Joan’s mental health deteriaorated, her feverishly religious husband was convinced she was possessed by the Devil. During a botched exorcism, Joan died. But who was to blame? Books: Read collections of The Evidence Locker Files , available in print and digital editions. Follow us on: YouTube , Facebook , Instag...

If Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story left you curious about Erzsébet Báthory, revisit the accusations and disputed accounts behind “Countess Dracula” with Evidence Locker. 16th century Transylvanian Blood Countess, Erzebet Báthory, was labelled as the most prolific female serial killer in history in The Guinness World Records. It is believed that she tortured, mutilated and murdered as many as 650...

In June 2007, the dismembered remains of 36-year-old Sanna Garoës appeared beside three roads leading out of Windhoek. Her death brought two unsolved murders from 2005 back into the headlines and gave Namibia a frightening name for a possible killer: the B1 Butcher. Then a fourth woman’s remains were found more than 400 kilometres away. Police announced her identity, only to discover that the woma...

In October 1849, one of America's greatest writers was found delirious on the streets of Baltimore, wearing someone else's clothes and unable to explain how he had ended up there. Four days later, Edgar Allan Poe was dead. He was just 40 years old. No death certificate survives, no autopsy was performed, and the medical records have long since disappeared. Over the past 175 years, countless theori...

In the small Italian village of Alleghe, high in the Dolomite Mountains, a series of deaths haunted the community for decades. What began in 1933 with the suspicious death of a young hotel waitress was followed by another unexplained death, then the brutal 1946 double murder of village baker Luigi Del Monego and his wife, Luigia. At the centre of the mystery stood the Hotel Centrale, a powerful lo...

In 1984, a mysterious criminal group calling itself "The Monster with 21 Faces" launched an unprecedented campaign of extortion against Japan's largest food manufacturers. Beginning with the kidnapping of a confectionery company president, the group taunted police and the media with mocking letters, threatened to poison popular sweets with cyanide, and spread fear throughout the country. Despite o...

As investigators searched beneath John Wayne Gacy's home, they uncovered a crime scene unlike anything they had encountered before. Hidden within the crawlspace were the remains of dozens of young men and boys, exposing years of murder concealed behind the façade of an ordinary suburban life. With the evidence mounting, Gacy confessed to a staggering number of killings before standing trial in one...

In December 1978, 15-year-old Robert Piest vanished after leaving work to meet a potential employer. His disappearance led investigators to John Wayne Gacy, a respected Chicago businessman, political volunteer and community entertainer known as "Pogo the Clown." At first, Gacy appeared cooperative, but detectives soon uncovered a disturbing pattern of missing young men connected to him. As surveil...

In August 1966, two electronics technicians climbed a hill overlooking Rio de Janeiro and were never seen alive again. Days later, their bodies were discovered lying side by side, dressed in suits, waterproof coats and strange homemade lead eye masks. There were no signs of violence, no clear cause of death and almost no clues—only cryptic notes, an empty water bottle and a mystery that has baffle...

In January 1977, two young women, Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett, were brutally murdered inside their Melbourne home, while Suzanne's 16-month-old son was found alive nearby. The shocking crime became one of Australia's most enduring unsolved murder cases. For nearly five decades, investigators pursued countless leads with little success. Then, an extraordinary breakthrough revived the inves...

Eva Bourseau, 23, was murdered in her Toulouse apartment on 26 July 2015 by two students, Taha Mrani Alaoui and Zakariya Banouni, over a drug debt. Her body was submerged in hydrochloric acid in a plastic trunk — a method inspired by the TV series Breaking Bad . Discovered by firefighters after her mother raised the alarm, the case shocked France and made international headlines. After a 15-day tr...

On August 2, 2006, Washington D.C. attorney Robert Eric Wone was stabbed to death inside the Dupont Circle townhouse of his college friend Joseph Price. Three housemates – Price, Victor Zaborsky, and Dylan Ward – were home at the time. Evidence suggested the crime scene had been staged, and that Wone had been drugged and sexually assaulted before his death. All three men were acquitted of obstruct...

On New Year's Eve 1998, fifteen-year-old Kirsty Bentley vanished while walking her Labrador, Abby, near the Ashburton River in Canterbury, New Zealand. Seventeen days later, her body was found hidden in dense scrub at Camp Gully, Rakaia Gorge, 40 kilometres away. She had been killed by a single blow of blunt force trauma to the head. Despite decades of investigation under Operation Kirsty, hundred...

In 1895, a Swedish man named Adolf Beck was stopped on a London street by a woman who accused him of swindling her out of her jewellery. Police quickly connected him to a string of similar frauds — and to a man named John Smith, convicted of identical crimes in 1877. Over a dozen victims picked Beck out of line-ups. He was convicted at the Old Bailey and sentenced to seven years' hard labour. The...

In November 2008, 23-year-old Christine Lindsey Walters left her hotel room in Eureka, California, in her pyjamas, to collect identity documents from a nearby copy centre. She was trying to get home to Wisconsin. She never made it. A junior studying botany and ethnobotany at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, Christine had come to Humboldt County for a planned three-week holiday. She staye...

Frank Sinatra's "My Way" became one of the deadliest songs in history — not on a battlefield, but in the karaoke bars of the Philippines. Between 1998 and 2018, at least a dozen people were killed in disputes linked to the song, in incidents dubbed the "My Way Killings." Victims were shot for singing off-key, stabbed over microphone disputes, and killed for daring to claim the song as theirs. The...

In the sweltering summer of 1908, 20-year-old domestic servant Hazel Drew was found floating face-down in Teal's Pond, New York. Her skull had been crushed by repeated blows. A corset string wrapped around her throat. The investigation revealed a web of secrets, political corruption, and powerful men with much to hide. More than a century later, this unsolved murder would inspire Twin Peaks – and...

On a quiet September night in 2013, a routine traffic stop on the outskirts of Aksai unraveled a mystery that had haunted southern Russia for years. A violent shootout led police to a forest campsite, and what they uncovered was more than just weapons. The suspects were not professional hitmen or members of a paramilitary group. They were a family. A mother, her daughters, and her husband. Their c...

In 2017, 21-year-old French au pair Sophie Lionnet was found burned in a garden in Southfields, London. What began as a dream opportunity became a nightmare of abuse, torture, and ultimately murder at the hands of her employers. Books: Read collections of The Evidence Locker Files , available in print and digital editions. Follow us on: YouTube , Facebook , Instagram , X , TikTok For more informat...

Between September 2003 and April 2006, Wisconsin prosecutors built one of the most challenging murder cases in the state's history: proving a family annihilation without bodies, a crime scene, or eyewitnesses.  In July 1998, Allen Krnak, his wife Donna, their son Thomas, and the family dog vanished without a trace after leaving for a Fourth of July weekend at their cabin. When their truck was foun...

On a windy January day in 1965, two fifteen-year-old best friends walked into the sand dunes at Wanda Beach near Sydney. They never came home. What followed was one of the largest investigations in Australian history, yet the killer vanished without a trace. Sixty years later, three suspects have emerged, but no one has ever been charged. Was it a teenage surfer, a serial killer, or someone far mo...

Between 1959 and 1987, a series of brutal attacks in the forests and lakesides of Finland and Sweden left multiple victims dead – and investigators haunted by their similarities. From Tulilahti and Lake Bodom to Appojaure and the deck of the Viking Sally, the victims were ordinary people, asleep and vulnerable, when violence struck without warning. Some cases were solved. Most weren’t.  What links...

In July 1984, beneath Sweden’s midnight sun, a remote campsite near Lake Appojaure became the scene of a brutal double murder. Dutch tourists Marinus and Janny Stegehuis were stabbed to death as they slept in their tent, an attack that shocked the nation and remains unresolved. This episode marks a milestone for The Evidence Locker : released in celebration of our 250th episode, it is also a remas...

In the summer of 1960, four teenagers went camping at Lake Bodom. In the pre-dawn hours, an unknown assailant attacked them inside their tent, slashing them with a knife and hitting them with a blunt object. Of the four, only 18-year-old Nils Gustafsson survived, narrowly escaping death. 45 years later, he was charged with killing his friends, but acquitted. To this day, the mystery of what happen...

July 1959. Two young women on a cycling holiday vanished from a Finnish campsite. Eine Nyyssönen, 21, and Riitta Pakkanen, 23, were found buried in a bog three weeks later, marked by a sharpened stick. Over 60 years later, this brutal double murder remains unsolved. Books: Read collections of The Evidence Locker Files , available in print and digital editions. Follow us on: YouTube , Facebook , In...