Just The Tip-Sters: True Crime Podcast

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...

If you’ve never experienced small town life, it’ll be almost impossible to comprehend the now-infamous tale of tiny Skidmore Missouri and the day nearly forty years ago that forever changed it.  That day – July 10, 1981 – was the day 47 year-old Ken Rex McElroy was gunned down in cold blood, in a hail of gunfire, in broad daylight while sitting in his truck alongside his wife, on Skidmore’s Main S...

What makes a prolific serial killer like Randy Kraft – who authorities say brutalized, sexually assaulted and mutilated at least 61 (and almost certainly more unknown) young men in Southern California, Oregon and Michigan in the 1970s and early 1908s – prolific?  How is it possible for such a large number of victims to fall prey to someone who is inarguably a monster?  The answer appears to be tha...

For more than a dozen years, from the early 1970s through the early 1980s, Randy Kraft , a callous and truly sinister serial killer, terrorized young men and boys throughout Soutern California.  His crimes, which included several in other states as well, were some of the most horrific and brutal ever seen by law enforcement.  Kraft was convicted of 16 murders – which involved everything from tortu...

It’s the big Tuesday after the Big Thursday of last week, when our gal got her first taste of TV fame in her home town of Cincinnati – and it’s time to get back to the business at hand with a brand new episode...In June of 1978 the body of a young man – aged 15 to 19 years old – was discovered face down on a back street/alley/parking lot in Long Beach, California.  He was well dressed.  His body a...

Even though Nicole Croom (originally from Stockton California) and Jordan Taylor (originally from Waterbury Connecticut) grew up 3,000 miles apart from each other, both of the two young women found themselves fascinated with pathology – specifically forensic pathology – you know: the science of cutting into dead bodies to see what’s what.  As it happens both Nicole and Jordan found themselves firs...

40 years ago this past weekend, on August 16, 1980, 17 year-old Randy Sellers went to the Kenton County, Kentucky Fair to meet with friends and hang out.  Sometime during the evening, he had too much to drink, got into a fight, took a swing at one of the policemen who responded to the scene and was eventually taken away in a squad car.  He has not been seen or heard from since.  In early 2019, on...

57 years ago psychiatrist J.M. Macdonald   wrote a paper published in The American Journal of Psychiatry entitled "The Threat to Kill," in which he proposed that there is a link between three childhood behaviors - persistent bed-wetting past the age of 5, an obsession with fire and fire-starting, and cruelty to animals - and violent behavior, most notably homicidal and sexually predatory behavior....

One of the very reasons this podcast got started nearly three years ago was that Melissa became involved with her local community in searching for a man who seemingly disappeared into thin air back in 2017.  As far as Linda Cierzan knew, her husband, Will Cierzan was at home making dinner on the evening of January 26, 2017.  But when she entered the house upon returning from work, a chicken was si...

On this episode Melissa gets real about a couple of true crime-related issues - one about those delightful folks who use (far too) easy racism as a way to excuse or further their awful or simply stupid deeds - and the other involving the very nature of the True Crime genre itself.  We start off with a silly story from a detective contact Melissa converses with from time to time - involving a car,...

Just across the Ohio River and a few miles south of downtown Cincinnati lies the quiet suburban community of Florence, Kentucky.  It was there, in an average condominium on a quiet residential street in the community of Oakbrook , on Memorial Day weekend, when Bill and Peggy Stephenson were brutally murdered in the early morning hours of May 29, 2011.  And they were murdered for reasons - and by p...

Sometimes the life of a cop can be filled with danger and even terror.  Sometimes with grief none but those wearing Blue can even begin to comprehend.  But a police officer's day is also filled with a never-ending parade of examples of the weirdness and wonder of the human species - and oftentimes those examples can be amazing in their complexity and/or rife with outrageous (and sometimes gruesome...

In this episode, the last of a four-part series on what came to be known as the "Baton Rouge Serial Killers," we meet Sean Vincent Gillis - the "other" of the two evil men who rained terror upon women in South Louisiana in the late 90s and early 2000s.  The "original" killer, whom Melissa dubbed "The Key Collector" (because of his penchant for keeping victims' keychains as souvenirs) was Derrick T...

When you're a veteran cop in a small town, with a deep knowledge of your community and the bad guys in it - and you're smart and everyone knows it...well...you'd think that when a serial killer is loose in your backyard and your years of experience with, and detailed documentation about, one bad guy in particular points as clearly to that bad guy as being said serial killer - you'd think the egghe...

The string of murders that eventually led to the realization that a serial killer was on the loose in Baton Rouge Louisiana began  on when the body of 41 year-old Gina Wilson Green was found murdered in her home near the LSU campus on September 24, 2001.  But by the time Derrick Todd Lee was finally unveiled as the terror known as the "Baton Rouge Serial Killer," it became clear that his trail of...

Beginning in 1993 and continuing for a full decade thereafter, dark haired women were being murdered in and around the river town of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  The means and methods of the murders were not consistent, leaving law enforcement baffled as to who their unknown suspect might be.  It turns out that the man the cops were looking for was one Derek Todd Lee, who the press came to call the Ba...

Sometimes there's just too much to talk about at the top of a podcast without getting in the way of the episode's main subject matter.  And so far this June, there are three separate cases that Melissa would have mentioned at the top of JUST THE TIP-STERS if they had happened at different times - but they all converged at once!  All three are cases that Melissa isn't planning on doing an episode o...

Carolyn Rose was a driven, successful real estate agent working in suburban Pensacola Florida when one day, after she didn't return from a mid-day home showing, her colleagues drove over to the empty house to find her car still parked in the driveway.  Inside the empty, brand new home they found Carolyn's crumpled nude body, hands bound - and dead.  She had been raped before being strangled.  The...

When Tracy Trudgett got the news in late 2018, she passed out. Tracy hadn't seen her brother Shane Snellman, since she visited him in prison nearly a decade before. Tracy and Shane had been separated from their father when they were just children - raised in a convent and then foster parents  when the New South Wales authorities refused to let dad have the kids back due to his single parent status...

So hold on just a minute.  Let's get this straight:  Guy was murdered in his home.  All the doors were locked. No broken or open windows.  All the locks had been recently changed except the French doors in the bedroom.  The only person known to have a second key for those French doors is guy's soon-to-be ex-wife, whose new live-in boyfriend hates guy's guts and - in more than one written email and...

Since 1980, more than a quarter of a million unsolved homicides have occurred in the United States - which is more than all U.S. military deaths since the end of WWII.  And here's the maddening truth about those unsolved cases - there is no centralized agency in the United States dedicated to keeping track of cold or inadequately investigated murders.  Unbelievably, the statistics we read about mu...

In one of the most rage-inducing cases she's covered so far, Melissa investigates the outrageous circumstances surrounding the official suicide of U.S. Army PFC LaVena Johnson while stationed at the Balad Air Base in Iraq in July 2005, just eight days shy of here 20th birthday.  And we put the emphasis on "official" because the "official" position of the Army is...well..."suspect" is the kindest w...

18 year- old Abdi Sharif lived with his family in Des Moines, Iowa.  He and his sister both worked at a local Target store to help support the struggling household.  By all accounts a happy, friendly kid, Abdi intended to spend some time with his friends on a snowy night at the mall where the Target Store is located on a snowy January 17, 2020.  He was last seen walking on a road near the mall, an...

Bryce Laspisa was having problems.  What sort of problems, he wouldn't say.  But at the end of August 2013 it was pretty clear to his friends - and his girlfriend - up in the far-Northern California town of Chico, where Bryce was attending a local community college, that something was not right.  The young redhead had started giving some of his prized possessions away.  He told his mother - who li...

In October 1998 15 year-old Crystal Marler disappeared from her home in McCreary County Kentucky after being out with friends and - evidence suggests - briefly returning to the house. Where she went, and with whom, remains a mystery.  As too often happens when a teenager vanishes, the authorities did not take Crystal's disappearance as anything much more than a case of a runaway.  That perception...