Just The Tip-Sters: True Crime Podcast

Hey Tip-Sters!  Surprise!!!  We have a special between-regular-episodes MURDERTIZER (an appetizer of murder)!  Last week Melissa appeared as a guest on a terrific podcast – the Don’t Assume Podcast hosted by Dave Kimball – a truly interesting and interesting guy who hosts people from all over the country from a wide array of professions and backgrounds and challenges his listeners to not assume th...

This week’s episode involves a twisted web of convictions (perhaps wrongful), acquittals (also possibly wrongful), the murder of a young woman and the disappearance and probable murder of a second young woman – all wrapped around two potentially really bad guys and one no-doubt-about-it nasty scumbag.  The story unfolds in tony Putnam County, an affluent New York City suburb north of Manhattan in...

On the night before Valentine’s Day 2000 (which, like this year, was also part of a three-day Presidents Day weekend), a beautiful 9 year-old girl named Asha Degree and her ten year-old brother O’Bryant went to bed in their Shelby North Carolina home.  Sometime around 2:30 am, O’Bryant heard his sister go to the bathroom and return to bed – but when he was awakened in the morning by his frantic mo...

Sometimes when researching a case, Melissa discovers threads that lead her in multiple directions.  Every once in a while one of those threads leads to a clue in the case she’s investigating.  But other times, they lead to cases clearly unrelated – but eerily similar – to the matter at hand.  This week’s episode brings together two such cases.  The cold case Melissa started researching involves th...

One day in March 1980, a member of the U.S. Army (her rank still not clear) named Tamara Tigard , who was living (or was she stationed?) in Las Vegas , went for a walk.  And then vanished.  One month later, 1,200 miles away near the small town of Jones, Oklahoma – on Tamara’s 21st birthday, as it happens – the unclothed body of a young woman was found in a shallow grave on the banks of the North C...

This week’s sad and (like most unsolved cases) totally frustrating case was discovered when Producer Mark read a bio of Academy Award and Emmy-winning actress Cloris Leachman upon her recent passing.   In the article, a fascinating side note about the show “ Phyllis ,” a spinoff of the “ Mary Tyler Moore Show ” (which starred Leachman as the title character) mentioned that the spinoff lasted only...

On October 10 1996, a 65 year-old retired eyeglass maker named Otha Young, Jr. , who had been admitted to a hospital in his hometown of Louisville Kentucky for a medical episode related to his Alzheimer’s - against the advice of the attending physicians and staff – checked himself out of the hospital, got in his car and headed north on Interstate 75 .  Along the way he was stopped by law enforceme...

This week Melissa jumps into the Tip-Ster Wayback machine and journeys to the rough-and tumble era of 1950s Los Angeles , where corruption ran rampant, the mob still held sway, mean jamokes with ill intent lurked in the shadows –and where Hollywood influenced everything from clothing to language to the very news being home-delivered every day.  And right near the outset of that turbulent era – on...

Melissa opens Season 4 with a vexing case out of Soutwest Ohio – the town of Kettering , where on February 7, 1999, nine year-old Erica Baker took her aunt’s dog for a walk and never returned.  The dog, with leash still attached, was found just an hour after Erica left the house.  And this disappearance is not just frustrating and sad (as all cold or missing person cases are).  It is also weird.  ...

As a between-season special, we thought we’d pass along this delightful interview with Melissa from last week when she visited the YouTube Live channel for The Incognito Society and its host, Elizabeth.  In the interview, Melissa shares a lot about herself, her podcast, the relationship between podcasts and law enforcement, as well as a number of cases, including the vexing Delphi Murders out of I...

Melissa wraps up Season 3 of the podcast with the tale of an horrific “family annihilator” mass murder from 2002 and the mysterious 18 year delay it took to bring a suspect to justice...mysterious because, right from the very beginning, all signs pointed – with big bright shiny, glowing arrows – to Jason Michael Walker , who was finally arrested on December 2, 2020 after nearly two decades followi...

On this special episode, Melissa explores the phenomenon of outlier religious or alternative followings – otherwise known as cults.  At the center of this fascinating discussion, Melissa focuses on the still-operating community known as  Buddhafield – currently situated in Hawaii.  The cult is the subject of the 2016 documentary “ Holy Hell ,” which was made by former cult member Will Allen, with...

On October 19, 1971, ten year-old Cheryll Spegall was last seen running to catch the bus to school near her home in Highland Heights, Kentucky.  No one saw her after that.  No one, that is, except her murderer.  Whoever that person is (or was), he has never been caught.  Not yet, that is.  Cheryll’s lifeless body was found nearly two weeks later, buried under a pile of rocks in a remote area in ne...

Ever since the mid-1980s, when Sir Alec Jeffreys first developed “genetic fingerprinting” which soon came to be known of DNA profiling , forensic science has not only become more important in crime-solving than in the previous several hundred years combined, its potential for making it almost impossible to commit a crime in the first place seems to grow exponentially with each passing day.  To be...

Murderers are evil – and yes they’re evil because they take the lives of innocents – but also because of the lives and futures they affect for those left behind.  Sometimes the murder itself is so disturbing or maddening that it’s easy to forget that the friends and colleagues – and particularly family –  who are left to pick up the pieces of a murdered or disappeared loved on are often victimized...

This Thanksgiving week Melissa updates a couple of unsolved missing person cases – one we’ve not yet covered but which has been covered extensively and one we’ve covered extensively and almost no one else has…and as with all unsolved cases, it’s a mixed bag.  The first update has to do with the 2015 disappearance of Crystal Rogers , the then 35 year-old mother of five from Bardstown Kentucky who w...

You wanna hear a really creepy ghost story?  Well…actually…a really creepy satanic possession story…or something? Try this on for size: Guy gets really good at his job.  So good that he’s given a cameo doing his job in one of the biggest horror movies of the century.  A movie whose set became legendary for weird accidents, injuries, fires – even deaths! – during its making…and a few years later, s...

Diane Louise Augat did not have an easy life.  Diagnosed with bipolar disorder in her early 30s, she lost her marriage and custody of her children as she was forcibly institutionalized 32 times between 1990 and 1998.  Living the best life she could, protected and watched over by family who cared for her, Diane was living with her sister in Odessa , a tiny town located in Pasco County, just north o...

There is absolutely no doubt that a new era in crime-solving was introduced with the bombshell announcement in the spring of 2018 that the four decades-long search for the infamous and evil Golden State Killer had been solved utilizing publicly available DNA data and applying the science of genetic genealogy .  In the two-and-a-half years since Joseph James DeAngelo was brought to justice, more th...

This episode takes us back to the Tri-State area (the Cincinnati Metro Area), where Episode 147 took us in an overview of the Bill and Peggy Stephenson murder investigation out of Kenton County Kentucky.  The Stephensons were murdered in their townhome on a quiet suburban street over Memorial Day weekend in 2011 under strange circumstances.  Across the other side of the Ohio River, to the northwes...

This week’s episode updates two podcasts from the first season of JTT – Episode 16, which focused on the weird death of Vicki Morgan, who had been a sort of paid mistress to Alfred Bloomingdale and (sometimes) his high powered friends – and Episode 19, which told the tale of Grade A Asshole Scott Peterson – who may or may not have murdered his wife Laci and the couple’s unborn son back in 2002.  T...

This week’s episode is the third in a row wherein Melissa looks at a case revolving around a state of emergency – the first two are still technically unsolved – this one is solved but every bit as fascinating.  Dana Marie Surette Pastori, who was known as "Polly" to her friends and to her customers at the Bourbon Street restaurant in New Orleans where she last worked in 2002, had lived a turbulent...

Last week’s episode concerning the disappearance of Sneha Philip right on the cusp of the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11/2001 got Melissa to thinking about other cases revolving around major national emergency events.  And so this week’s episode is about someone else whose disappearance – this one occurring just the day after 9/11 – is still a mystery and whose killer has never been convicted...

The recent anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001 was once again a moment to pause and reflect on the awful events of that day, and the heroism of so many people from all walks of life who helped remind us all of the humanity we all share.  So many souls were lost that day – the official count is nearly 3,000 – and even after all this time there...

Earlier this year, in Episode 130 , Melissa retold the story of a terrible and terribly unsolved murder out of Fort Worth Texas – the tragic 1974 abduction and killing oif 17 year-old Carla Jan Walker.  Carla and her boyfriend had just attended the Valentine’s dance at Carla’s high school and were doing what young lovers do in the front seat of the boyfriend’s car, in the parking lot of a local bo...