Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast

Mississippi Elvis impersonator Paul Kevin Curtis was wrongly accused of sending ricin-laced letters to President Obama, Senator Roger Wicker, and a local judge. Curtis had a history of posting online about an alleged hospital cover-up after he claimed to have discovered human body parts in 2001 while working as a janitor.

In December 2023, 44-year-old Daniel Krug of Broomfield, Colorado murdered his wife, Kristil Krug, in the garage of their home after months of secretly tormenting her with fake messages from a made-up stalker he created using burner phones and multiple online identities. Posing as her ex-boyfriend Jack, Daniel sent harassing emails and photos to both himself and Kristil to convince her she was bei...

In 1994, Bobbi Parker, the wife of an Oklahoma prison deputy warden, vanished from the Oklahoma State Reformatory along with inmate Randolph Dial, a convicted murderer and artist who had been given unusual privileges due to his painting skills. For 11 years, the two lived under assumed identities on a remote chicken farm in Texas until their discovery in 2005.

Gerald Barnbaum was a conman who spent decades posing as a medical doctor despite never being one. Born in 1933 in Chicago, he was originally a licensed pharmacist, but his license was revoked. Rather than reform, Barnbaum found a new and more dangerous way to exploit the medical system: he began impersonating real physicians, using their stolen identities to practice medicine illegally.

In November 1971, Theo Albrecht, the reclusive German billionaire co-founder of Aldi supermarkets, was kidnapped at gunpoint outside his company’s headquarters in Essen, Germany, by Heinz-Joachim Ollenburg and Paul Krüzen, a pair of small-time criminals seeking a massive ransom. The kidnappers held him for 17 days.

Matthew Muller was a former Marine and Harvard-educated lawyer whose life spiraled into a series of bizarre crimes. In 2015, he broke into the Vallejo, California home of Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn, abducting Denise and demanding ransom in what police initially dismissed as a hoax inspired by  Gone Girl.  Muller, who suffered from mental illness and believed he was a kind of vigilante, held Hu...

Kwang Chol Joy was a California man who became infatuated with 37-year-old Maribel Ramos, an Army veteran and college student who had taken him in as a roommate in her Orange County apartment. Over time, his obsession with her deepened, but she rejected his romantic advances and eventually asked him to move out. In May 2013, shortly after a heated argument about rent, Maribel disappeared. Weeks la...

Barry Minkow was a teenage entrepreneur who founded the carpet-cleaning company ZZZZ Best in the 1980s and became a Wall Street sensation- until it was revealed to be one of the biggest Ponzi schemes of its time. Minkow fabricated fake restoration projects and used forged documents to trick investors, inflating his company’s value to over $200 million before it collapsed in 1987.

Israel Keyes was an American serial killer, burglar, and arsonist who operated from 2001 until his arrest in 2012. A meticulous and methodical predator, he murdered at least eleven people across the United States, hiding “kill kits” containing weapons and supplies years in advance to use during his crimes.

John DeLorean was a trailblazing automobile executive who rose to prominence at General Motors by engineering iconic muscle cars like the Pontiac GTO and Firebird. In 1975 he struck out on his own and founded the DeLorean Motor Company (DMC), aiming to build a futuristic sports car—the DMC-12 with gull-wing doors and stainless steel panels. Unfortunately, despite early hype, DMC’s production launc...

Bernie Madoff was an American financier who ran what is widely regarded as the largest Ponzi scheme in history, defrauding thousands of investors of billions of dollars by paying returns to earlier investors with funds from newer ones rather than from legitimate profits.

Jermell Jones is a 41-year-old Florida man who was arrested in July 2025 while working as the mascot for Chuck E. Cheese in Tallahassee. He was taken into custody in full costume during a children’s birthday party after surveillance linked him to using a woman’s child-support debit card to make fraudulent charges.

Elizabeth Wettlaufer is a Canadian former registered nurse who confessed to murdering eight elderly patients and attempting to kill six others between 2007 and 2016 in long-term care homes in southwestern Ontario.

Todd Davis, the co-founder and CEO of LifeLock, became famous in 2007 for publicly displaying his real Social Security number in ads to prove confidence in his company’s identity-theft protection service. But the stunt backfired when his identity was stolen at least a dozen times, exposing flaws in LifeLock’s system.

Pedro Rodrigues Filho was a Brazilian serial killer who claimed to have murdered more than 100 people- most of them other criminals.

Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, was a Harvard-educated mathematician who abandoned academia to live in a remote Montana cabin, and between 1978 and 1995 carried out a nationwide bombing spree targeting universities, airlines and individuals he believed were advancing technology.

Joran van der Sloot whose criminal history includes the 2010 murder of 21-year-old Stephany Flores Ramírez in Lima, Peru- he was convicted and sentenced to 28 years in prison for the crime. He first came to international attention as the prime suspect in the disappearance of 18-year-old Natalee Holloway in Aruba in 2005.

Jeremiah “The Bull” Evans was a Utah-based entrepreneur who, between July 2019 and July 2022, ran a fraudulent investment scheme through his company Alpha Influence, LLC, claiming to sell clients stakes in automated stores.

Heather Mack is an American woman convicted of conspiring to murder her mother, Sheila von Wiese-Mack, during a 2014 vacation in Bali. Heather had secretly used her mother’s credit card to fly her boyfriend, Tommy Schaefer, to Bali, and the two exchanged messages plotting her mother’s death.

James Hogue is an American impostor and career con man best known for infiltrating elite institutions by assuming false identities. 

Gina Champion-Cain is a former San Diego business executive who orchestrated what is considered one of the largest woman-led Ponzi schemes in U.S. history. Beginning around 2012, she raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors by promising to use their funds to make high-interest loans to individuals seeking California liquor licenses—funds she claimed would be held in escrow. In reality...

Mark Acklom is an English conman and fraudster who for decades used false identities and elaborate scams to swindle large sums from victims, often posing as a wealthy Swiss banker or even an MI6 agent.

James and Suzanne Agnew, a couple from Lakewood, Colorado, were arrested in July 2025 after authorities discovered the decomposed body of 64-year-old James O'Neill in their home. The Agnews allegedly kept O'Neill's body under a deflated air mattress for nearly 18 months following his death.

Mark Hofmann is a former document dealer and convicted murderer from Salt Lake City, Utah, known for perpetrating one of the most elaborate forgery schemes in American history. In the early 1980s, Hofmann created and sold numerous forged documents related to the history of the Latter-day Saint (LDS) movement

Michael Swango is a former American physician and convicted serial killer believed to have caused the deaths of up to 60 individuals across the United States and Zimbabwe.