Murders & Minivans

Beverly Hills. August 20, 1989. José and Kitty Menendez are watching a James Bond movie in the den of their $13.5 million mansion. By the end of the night, they'll be shot a combined sixteen times by their own sons. This week on Murders & Minivans, we're going deep on one of the most complicated — and most misunderstood — cases in American true crime history. Lyle and Erik Menendez. The killin...

Thallium is element 81. A heavy metal banned in the United States since 1972. Colorless, odorless, and tasteless in its soluble form. It mimics potassium so convincingly that your cells invite it in. It starts with nausea, fatigue, stomach pain — things that look like a hundred other conditions. Weeks later, the hair falls out in fistfuls. By then, the nervous system has already taken serious dama...

This is the first episode in our new pod studio! Tali's mic was not co-operating until about 8:20 which is right about when the case starts ◡̈ A Harvard law professor. A bitter divorce. A dentist with a Ferrari and a god complex. Two Miami gang members. And a mother-in-law who, the day after her son was convicted of murder, booked a one-way flight to a country with no extradition treaty. This is t...

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints operated in plain sight for decades — a polygamist cult running across the American Southwest, into rural Texas, and up into the mountains of southeastern British Columbia. What they built wasn't a church. It was a supply chain for the sexual exploitation of children, protected by theology, enforced by economics, and ignored by governm...

kaitlin armstrong googled "can pineapples burn your fingerprints" after killing someone. she sold her jeep for cash two days later. flew to new york. used her sister's passport to get to costa rica. got a nose job, changed her name, dyed her hair, and started teaching yoga on the beach. she responded to a fake job listing posted by u.s. marshals and got arrested in a hostel lobby 43 days after the...

On February 28, 1993, seventy-six ATF agents pulled up to a property outside Waco, Texas, in cattle trailers. Fifty-one days later, the building was gone and seventy-six people were dead inside it. Twenty of them were children. This is the story of Vernon Wayne Howell, the ninth-grade dropout from Houston who memorized the Bible, renamed himself David Koresh, and convinced over a hundred people to...

Moscow, Idaho hadn't seen a murder in seven years. It was the kind of town where parents felt okay dropping their kid off at college and driving away. Small. Quiet. Safe. Then, sometime between 4:00 and 4:25 in the morning on November 13th, 2022, someone entered a house on King Road and stabbed four people to death in 25 minutes. Kaylee Goncalves. Madison Mogen. Xana Kernodle. Ethan Chapin. Two of...

In March 1995, Maurizio Gucci was shot four times outside his Milan office. He had the money, the girlfriend, the peace. What he didn't have was any idea that a chain of people — a socialite, a psychic, a hotel porter, and a broke pizzeria owner — had been quietly building toward that morning. This is the story of a dynasty that ate itself alive, a woman who described $860,000 a year as a bowl of...

Fabio Sementilli spent thirty years building something remarkable. An Italian-Canadian kid who left school early to follow his sister into hairstyling, he climbed all the way to VP of Education at Wella Professionals, managing 500 employees, running studios across North America, mentoring thousands of stylists who called him Big Daddy. The day before he died, he posted about how blessed he felt. T...

On the night of November 16th, 2012, a thirteen-year-old girl in a quiet Ohio suburb called 911 while her mother was being stabbed to death. The person holding the knife was an eighteen-year-old foster daughter named Sabrina Zunich. And for ten months, that's where the story seemed to end; a troubled teenager, a horrific act, a grieving family. Then Sabrina started talking. What came out was a cas...

In January 2011, 27-year-old first-grade teacher Ellen Greenberg was found dead in her Philadelphia apartment during a blizzard. She had 23 stab wounds, including ten to the back of her own neck, 31 bruises in varying stages of healing, and a serrated kitchen knife buried four inches into her chest. The city of Philadelphia ruled it a suicide, and they have spent the last fourteen years defending...

Jeffrey Epstein didn't just know powerful people. He built a machine designed to make himself untouchable — one donation, one dinner, one named research program at a time. In this episode, we break down how that machine worked: the political donations, the Harvard money, the eugenics project he talked about openly while hiding everything else, and the 38,000+ mentions of the sitting president buri...

They were 12, 13, 14 years old. They told their stories to the FBI, to police, to prosecutors. And for years, nobody did anything. In Part 2, we go deep into the lives of the victims — Virginia Giuffre, Maria Farmer, Annie Farmer, Courtney Wild, and dozens of Jane Does — and trace exactly how the system failed them at every turn. We break down the grooming process, the weaponization of poverty, an...

He was born to a groundskeeper and a school aide in a middle-class neighborhood in Coney Island. He never finished college. He had no credentials, no pedigree, no obvious path to power. So how did Jeffrey Epstein end up with a Manhattan mansion, a private island, a Boeing 727, and the phone numbers of presidents and princes? In part one of this three-part series, we trace the early life of one of...

On a snowy January morning in 2022, Boston police officer John O'Keefe was found dying in the front yard of a fellow officer's home in Canton, Massachusetts. His girlfriend, Karen Read, was quickly arrested and charged with murder. But what seemed like a straightforward case spiraled into one of the most controversial and divisive criminal trials in recent Massachusetts history. Was Karen Read a d...

This comprehensive true crime deep-dive examines one of Canada's most disturbing criminal cases; the story of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, dubbed "The Ken and Barbie Killers." In this episode, we explore the horrifying crimes committed by this seemingly perfect couple in Southern Ontario during the late 1980s and early 1990s. From Paul's reign of terror as the Scarborough Rapist to the murders...

Colonel Russell Williams seemed to embody military excellence; a decorated commander of Canada's largest air force base, trusted to fly prime ministers and royalty, with an impeccable service record spanning decades. But behind the uniform and accolades lurked a predator whose crimes would shock a nation. Between 2007 and 2010, Williams led a sinister double life. While commanding Canadian Forces...

A wealthy pharmaceutical CEO's girlfriend is found dead: naked, bound hand and foot, hanging from a balcony. Days earlier, his six-year-old son suffered a mysterious fall in the same mansion. The sheriff says suicide. Her family says murder. A jury awarded them $5.2 million. Then everything changed. This is the Rebecca Zahau case, and it's one of the strangest death investigations you'll ever hear...

This episode examines two cases separated by decades but connected by a troubling pattern: teachers who exploited their positions of authority to abuse students in their care. We begin with the 1996 case of Mary Kay Letourneau, a sixth-grade teacher arrested while pregnant with her twelve-year-old student's child. What followed was years of media spectacle, debates about "forbidden love," and lang...

Some cases go cold because evidence disappears. Others because the truth is buried beneath mistakes, assumptions, and public pressure. The murder of JonBenét Ramsey may be both. In this episode, we revisit the facts of the case, the forensic evidence that still sparks debate, and the investigative errors that changed everything. We also explore why this case continues to captivate the public and w...

Susan Powell went missing in December 2009. Her husband claimed he took their children camping in a snowstorm but investigators suspected something far more sinister. This episode explores the evidence, the investigation, and the heartbreaking failures that allowed this case to end the way it did. For source information, and any other comments/inquiries: murdersminivans@gmail,com

RentAHitman dot com is not a hitman service. It never was. And yet, it has helped put multiple people in prison for trying to have someone murdered. This episode breaks down how a fake website became one of the most effective accidental crime traps on the internet. It starts in 2005 with Bob Innes, a former police academy graduate working in IT. He buys a domain name for a potential tech business....

or years, the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case has been reduced to headlines. A sick child. An abusive mother. A shocking murder. But that version skips over the part that matters most. In this episode, we walk through Gypsy’s life in full context what her childhood actually looked like behind closed doors, how control and isolation shaped her understanding of the world, how the murder unfolded step by s...

When news broke in 2018 that a seemingly normal Colorado dad had reported his pregnant wife and two little girls missing, the world braced for another tragic family disappearance. What unfolded over the next 72 hours was darker and more calculated than anyone expected. In this episode, we go deeper than the headlines and look at the parts of the case people rarely talk about. The manipulation. The...

When two children vanish, their mother insists they’re safe; but months later, they’re found buried in the backyard of her new husband, a man who writes doomsday prophecies. In this episode, we unpack the chilling story of Lori Vallow Daybell the so-called “Cult Mom” who believed she was chosen by God to lead 144,000 survivors into the end times. From a picture-perfect suburban life to murder char...