Murder Unscripted

He found a missing child 200 searchers couldn’t. Then they gave him a badge. To close out the Psychic Connections block, we sit down with the man whose name has run through the whole month: psychic Phil Jordan. In 1975 he led searchers straight to a six-year-old boy lost in the woods when two hundred people couldn’t find him, and was soon sworn in as a deputy sheriff. For fifty years he has worked...

A stranger told police exactly where to find the body of a missing nurse. So they arrested her on suspicion of murder. December 1980, the San Fernando Valley. Melanie Uribe, a 31-year-old nurse and single mom, stopped at a red light on her way to an overnight shift and never made it to work. Days later, a woman across town who had never met her, an ordinary Lockheed clerk named Etta Smith, began s...

Police handed him a stack of 50 mugshots. He pulled out their two suspects. August 1988, Elmira, New York. Rose Swartwood was 74, a kind, impeccably dressed retiree who would talk your ear off at the mailbox and spent every evening with her little sister. One morning her family found her beaten and stabbed in her own bed, and whoever did it had stayed long enough to scrub the apartment clean. For...

She was one of the fastest runners in the country. And then, she was gone. January 1993, West Philadelphia. 17-year-old Shilie Turner was one of the fastest high school runners in the country, filling out college applications and dreaming of the Olympics. One freezing night she got off a bus six blocks from home and was never seen alive again. Police had no leads and no body, so, on the FBI's advi...

52 fires in 75 hours. One man terrorized Los Angeles, and this is the investigator who hunted him down. To close out Burning Desires, we sit down with one of the most decorated arson investigators alive: Ed Nordskog. Decades on the LA County Sheriff's Arson-Explosives team, five books that other investigators keep on their desks, and a wall of honors that is frankly ridiculous. Nordskog was the le...

For six months, a phantom arsonist burned Seattle to the ground. The man who finally stopped him was his own father. In 1992, more than a hundred fires tore through the Seattle area. Churches, warehouses, strip malls, and, on one horrifying night, a retirement home where three women lost their lives. Whole neighborhoods slept in shifts. Investigators called the man behind it "the Specter," because...

For years, a serial arsonist burned his way across California and vanished before the smoke cleared. In Part 2, we finally put a name and a face to him, and it is the last person anyone suspected: John Orr, a celebrated Glendale fire captain and arson investigator. Orr did not just work near the case, he helped run it. He photographed the scenes, argued the theories, and chased the very fires he h...

A cigarette, three matches, and a rubber band. For most of the 1980s, that was all it took for a serial arsonist to burn his way across California and vanish before the smoke was even spotted. Most of the fires destroyed property. One destroyed a family. A fire at a crowded hardware store in South Pasadena killed four people, including a child, and was quietly ruled an accident, letting the man re...

Shoreline, Washington, 1995. Firefighters knock down a small apartment fire and find a woman's body inside. One month later, 50 feet away, it happens again. Two ordinary, kind women were murdered in nearly identical attacks by a man who brought nothing with him. He used the victims' own belongings, disabled their smoke detectors, and set the fires to erase himself completely. For two years, it wor...

Her degree says nuclear physics but her work changed the way cold cases are solved. ⬇️ To close out our Killer Connections block, Ed and Melissa sit down with the woman whose name has come up all month long: Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick. Before forensic genetic genealogy was a headline, before it was even a field, Colleen saw a different way to use DNA. She founded Identifinders International, helped t...

Billings, Montana, November 1973. Cliff and Linda Bernhardt set their dinner table for three and welcomed a guest they trusted. By the next morning, the young couple were dead, and the killer had staged the scene in a way so strange it would puzzle investigators for the next 45 years. Cliff had survived the jungles of Vietnam. He didn't survive dinner at his own table. Melissa covers Week 3 of Kil...

On the morning of May 2, 2001, Leslie Preer -- a warm, generous 48-year-old woman who her family said saw the world through rose-colored glasses -- didn't show up to work in Washington DC. Her boss drove to the family home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Her husband Sandy met him there. When police arrived, they found Leslie on the bathroom floor, under the running shower, having suffered a brutal attac...

35 years cold. 6 cells worth of DNA. One pink-haired genealogist. ⬇️ Roxanne Wood was murdered in her home in Niles, Michigan in February 1987. Her husband Terry was never charged, but he was never cleared either. For 35 years, a small town called him "Slash" to his face. The real killer was a stranger who lived a few miles away and had never been in the case file. The case was cracked by genetic...

She brought dogs into the courtroom! Listen to find out how. Most true crime content is about catching the bad guy. This episode covers what happens afterwards - specifically, the moment a child has to walk into a room full of strangers and say out loud what happened to them. Courthouse facility dogs sit with victims and witnesses (many of them children) during forensic interviews, depositions, an...

Frances Fritts was murdered in a house fire in Brenham, Texas in 1994. Her husband Charles walked out without a scratch. He had $800,000 in insurance lined up, a girlfriend abroad, and a Mercedes ad running in the local paper. Investigators had plenty of motive. What they needed was proof the fire was set deliberately. That proof came from two dogs named Samantha and Jager - hydrocarbon-sniffing K...

He named his murder plan "Operation Slop Shop" and his neighbor was first on the list. Carlos Maldonado was a 55-year-old dad rebuilding his life - starting a window tinting business and rekindling a relationship with his daughter Talisa. On April 14th, 2024, he vanished without a trace. His body wasn't found until October 30th - wrapped in tarp and garbage bags, tied with rope, hidden on a wooded...

Two fires. One night. Four bodies. His own brother was behind everything. In the early hours of November 20th, 2018, a 911 call came in reporting a house fire in Ocean Township, New Jersey. Within hours, a second 911 call came in from a neighborhood fifteen miles away in Colts Neck. A man had gone outside to check on his generator after a mysterious power failure. He never came back in. His wife a...

Kaylee's parents sit down to address the recently released autopsy details, the relentless online conspiracies, and share never-before-heard stories about their daughter Kaylee. The media dubbed them "The Idaho Four." But behind that moniker were four individuals with four families and four futures. One of them was Kaylee Goncalves...a bright, bubbly 21-year-old who had the world by a string. And...

They were the 3 musketeers. One of them was a killer. In February 1980, 18-year-old University of South Alabama freshman Katherine Foster was supposed to meet her two best friends for a trip to the mall. She never showed up. Days later, a search party found her body in the woods just a few hundred yards from campus -- laying flat on her back, fully clothed, makeup intact, looking for all the world...

On April 5th, 1986, Howard and Connie Clery returned home from a vacation in Bermuda to find a police car waiting in their driveway. Their 19-year-old daughter Jeanne had been found murdered in her dorm room at Lehigh University. What the Clerys discovered in the aftermath was as infuriating as it was devastating. In the three years before Jeanne's murder, there had been 38 violent crimes at Lehig...

Alaskan Sophie Sergie came from a remote Yupik village of 70 people. She was going to be the first in her family to graduate college. The last thing she told her family was a promise to bring her little brother a brand new kite. She never came home. On April 25th, 1993, Sophie Sergie was found violently murdered in a University of Alaska Fairbanks dorm bathroom. Her case went cold, and it stayed t...

Yeardley Love was 22 years old and ten weeks from graduating from the University of Virginia. She was a D1 lacrosse player, a political science major with plans for law school in New York, and by every account, the kind of person who made every room warmer just by being in it. She was also in an abusive relationship with a men's lacrosse player, George Huguely V, that had been escalating for years...

If you haven't listened to our DC Sniper episode yet (E104), start there first. This is the conversation that follows it. Dr. Mildred Muhammad was married to John Allen Muhammad for 12 years. She knew him as a soldier, a father, a man she loved. What she didn't know was that after their separation, he had begun stalking her, that he had kidnapped their three children and taken them to Antigua for...

In October 2002, the Washington DC area woke up to something it had never felt before. People were being shot at gas stations, in parking lots, at bus stops, at a school...apparently at random, by someone nobody could see, in a car nobody could find. Police were sprinting between active scenes. Schools canceled outdoor activities. People crouched at gas pumps trying to make themselves smaller targ...

In post-Soviet Siberia, women were disappearing from the streets of Angarsk. Their bodies turned up in forests and industrial wastelands, mutilated beyond recognition. The weapons changed every time, but the tire tracks at the scenes were always from the same vehicle: a Lada Niva, the standard-issue Soviet police truck. The man driving it was Mikhail Popkov: junior police lieutenant, champion biat...