True Crime Campfire

In last week’s episode, we met John Smith, a lying, manipulative weirdo who almost certainly had killed his missing second wife, Fran. Towards the end of that episode, we learned that John had been married before, to a young woman named Janice Hartman—and that Janice, just like Fran, had gone missing, never to be seen again. We started that episode with a grim discovery six years after Janice’s di...

If there’s one old folktale that finds a frequent echo in true crime stories, it has to be ‘Bluebeard,’ about a man who marries and then murders a series of wives. It’s a pattern we’ve seen time and again, with both killer husbands and lethal wives, most often driven by greed. That, at least, is something comprehensible—there are some killers driven by urges so cold and petty that it’s hard to eve...

All of us have some tensions and frustrations with our families, and that’s fine. It’s just normal human nature. But for some people, these rough edges to everyday family interactions become absolutely unbearable, an insult to their overinflated sense of importance. And those resentments can seep like poison through every particle of their being until it's all they can think of. Visit crimewaveats...

Do you think people will still be talking about Scott Peterson or Chris Watts in a hundred years? How about five-hundred? Probably not, right? But there are some acts of cruelty and depravity that echo down the centuries, becoming entwined with myth and legend. This week, we’re going to take a look at two of these famous perpetrators. Sources: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/transactions-o...

Death is not always the end. We’re not stepping into any kind of spiritual territory here, though, we’re talking about the very earthly fact that just because someone appears to be dead, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that is the case. Maybe someone needs to escape an upcoming personal disaster, maybe they need the insurance money, maybe they’ve tied their life into such a knot that it’s easier...

Reddit is an endless archive of humanity’s most disturbing, bizarre, and deeply human stories. If you love going down internet rabbit holes, you are going to love CRIMES OF REDDIT with Alexis Linkletter and Sabrina Deana-Roga.  Every Tuesday, one host brings a set of true-crime stories while the other reacts in real time with no prep, no spoilers asking the questions on everyone’s mind. They...

Last week, we introduced you to Krystyna Skarbek, a daring resistance agent who smuggled valuable intelligence and thousands of refugees out of Nazi-occupied Poland. When we left off last week, she and her lover Andrzej had just fled Hungary, one step ahead of the Gestapo, and enjoyed a brief moment of peace in Belgrade. That wasn’t going to last for long. Join us for the finale of this incredible...

James Belushi once wrote, “Heroes aren’t born, they’re cornered.” It’s often extraordinary, and sometimes horrifying, circumstance that compels a person into actions they’d never have imagined previously. This week’s story is about a woman who was faced with horrors and discovered she had the courage to fight them. Join us live at Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp in Equinunk, PA, September 10-13th! V...

You can’t judge a book by its cover. There’s no shortage of gold-hearted biker dudes and wicked ministers—you can’t really know what someone’s like inside right away. Like that guy in the library over there, with the glasses and neat hair and preppy style and self-effacing affect. He seems harmless, right? He isn’t, though. He’s as full of anger and danger as someone on death row. Sometimes it’s t...

In Irish and other European folklore, a changeling is a fae child that is swapped with a human baby to be raised by humans. Sometimes it’s because the fae needed human milk to survive, in others, it’s because the fae needed a human to be a servant or sometimes, as revenge on the parents. The parents would raise the fae child unknowingly, but the infant would be… wrong. Maybe it would eat more than...

In August of 2012, the family of an Irish woman named Elaine O’Hara reported her missing. Investigators located her car near the seashore, but found no sign of Elaine herself. She had been struggling with her mental health for most of her life; in fact, the day she disappeared was the day she got home from a five-week stay in a psychiatric hospital. So after a brief investigation, everyone conclud...

In Part One of this story last week, we followed the rise to riches of hotel owner Ben Novack Sr. and his glamorous model wife Bernice, and the spoiled yet lonely life of their son Benji. When we left off, Ben and Bernice were divorced, and Benji’s own first marriage had just ended. He had just gotten together with an exotic dancer named Narcy, a choice that would eventually have disastrous conseq...

It has sometimes been said that great wealth is a curse—usually by people who have never had to go hungry, but there is something to it. The idea of the miserable millionaire goes back much further than Ebeneezer Scrooge. If you dedicate everything you have to the pursuit of wealth, then what’s left over for the rest of your life? In particular, the children of the very wealthy can have a tough ti...

There are some crimes and schemes that must be just about as old as humanity itself. I’m sure handsome scammers have been wooing the daughters of wealthy families for about as long as the concepts of marriage and inheritance have existed. And I’m equally sure that every now and again, one of those handsome scammers got tired of waiting for nature to take its course, and decided to hurry along his...

In his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde tells the story of a handsome young man who makes a deal with the Devil—his soul, in exchange for eternal youth and beauty. But there is a portrait of Dorian in the attic of his house, and as he moves through the years with his handsome face not aging, the portrait ages—and it also begins to show the poison seeping through him as he lives his li...

It’s almost impossible to know someone perfectly. Everyone has their private thoughts and hidden moments from their past, and this is usually no problem at all, it’s all just inconsequential things. Usually, but not always. Because some people don’t just have little harmless secrets, they have whole separate lives that the people close to them know nothing about. And the tension between those two...

When we left you at the end of part 1, Wayne Nance had begun his career as a serial killer with the murder of Donna Pounds. As much as he tried to blend into normal society—joining the Navy, working as a bouncer at a busy Western-themed bar—he could never completely hide the strangeness…and darkness brewing inside. Not everyone who saw it up close lived to tell about it, but as we’ll see in this e...

In the 1970s in Missoula, Montana, there was a brief epidemic of unsolved violent murders that shocked the small city down to its roots. A dark rumor spread quickly—the deaths must be the work of some sinister Satanic cult, secret rituals performed in the service of demonic powers. This was not the case. The murders were unconnected, the motives behind them having nothing to do with the big bad de...

Our homes are supposed to be where we’re the safest. It’s where we’re our most vulnerable. Last week, we told you about someone who would use that vulnerability to his advantage. This week, as the story continues, his monstrous intentions will focus on two women and destroy their families' senses of safety forever. Join us for part 2 (the final part) of the story of Russell Williams. Sources: Appl...

In the military, a “gray man” refers to a service member who neither outperforms or underperforms his or her comrades. Someone who seamlessly fits into the group and gets the job done and doesn’t get unwanted attention while doing it. In that line of work, that can be a talent. In today’s story, we’re talking about a man who made a career out of being unnoticed, whose entire personality could be d...

I don’t know about you, campers, but I like to have emergency plans for any eventuality. For example, what if I find myself in the center of a maze with only my wits to get out? What would I do? Of course, the secret to escape a maze is to keep your hand on one wall while you walk and eventually, you’ll find yourself at the exit. This case is a little bit like a maze. Every time the investigators...

People can be pretty strange. And not just people—as we’ll see in one story of this week’s episode, you can add all our extended family of primates to that. If you have a big brain and opposable thumbs, there’s a good chance you’ll be getting up to shenanigans. But as we’ll see in our other story, human beings still wear the crown for weird, ridiculously confident nonsense. Join us live at Wet Hot...

Today we’re sharing something a little different from our friends at ABC News and 20/20. It’s the first episode of a brand new original true crime series called "Blood and Water."  In 2001, Leslie Preer was found brutally murdered, her body left in the shower of her home in the wealthy suburbs of Washington, D.C. Investigators initially set their sights on Leslie’s husband as the prime suspect — u...

I’m sure most of you have heard some variant of the phrase, “nobody wants to see how the sausage gets made,” which refers to the often messy procedures behind getting things done in, say, business or politics. But it’s also a literal truth that most of us don’t want to see how sausage gets made, and that goes double if the person making it cuts corners and develops a wildly aggressive attitude to...

Secrets can ruin everything. Not little ones, we’re talking big, looming secrets that might change your life forever if they were ever brought out into the light of day. Some people just can’t help themselves, stacking lie upon lie, hiding the secret truth behind an ever-growing wall of falsehood. And if that wall comes crashing down…well, some people will go to any lengths to keep their secrets s...