Prey Tell

This week I’m doing something different and leaning into spooky season, hauntings and horror in some of America’s most haunted cities. It's a five-stop tour, featuring: St. Augustine, Florida; Charleston, South Carolina; Salem, Massachusetts; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Don’t be fooled by these picturesque locations. When you visit a haunted place there’s often a qui...

February 12, 2010 was a chilly day in Huntsville, Alabama. It was unusually cold and hovering in the mid 30s. Huntsville is known as the rocket city. It’s where NASA and the space program were born and where many aerospace companies call home. Instead of heading to the space center, this story takes place at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in an ordinary conference room with professors. It...

The town of Cloverdale, California sits at the northern end of Sonoma County’s wine country. Way back on May 23, 1982 it was warm, although the heat from  peak daytime had worn off by the evening.  Sarah Geer left her friend’s house and set off walking downtown. She was a child and only thirteen-years-old at the time. She had no way of knowing she wouldn’t come home that night, and she would never...

Somewhere around mile marker 83, near a little town called North Utica, a white Pontiac has pulled onto the shoulder. It's a 1985 Pontiac T1000 with New Jersey plates. And behind the wheel is a Twenty-one-year-old named Tammy. If everything had gone according to plan, Tammy should have been about five hours from finishing a fifteen-hundred-mile drive, from her family's home in New Jersey...

This is a tangential part two of Wednesday’s episode on the mysterious death of Bernadette Vander Meer. While there was no trial and conviction in that case, but it raised questions about the horrors of Alpine Divorce. Alpine divorce goes something like this: a couple go for a hike, often to a high peak, and one spouse falls over the edge. In my reported cases, it's the woman that falls, but...

On Tuesday, August 22, 2006, the beautiful singing voice of Bernadette Vander Meer went silent on a ridge in Zion National Park, in Utah. She was twenty-eight years old. And she was there with her husband to celebrate ten years of marriage. Her husband’s story was simple. She was standing near the edge of a roughly twelve hundred foot cliff edge. He was setting up a photo. He turned away only for...

On October 19th, 2023, a group of ten people rented kayaks and paddleboards from a small outfitter on the shore. They're not experienced paddlers. They're a yoga group and most of them were strangers to each other just a week earlier. And they’re out for one more excursion before they fly home. Two of the women drift away from the rest of the group, out past where the guides can clearly...

Every morning, something like four million vehicles move through São Paulo, Brazil on a highway system called the Rodoanel. Most of the drivers on it have never once heard the name of the man who helped engineer it. Manfred, the engineer, didn't live to see it finished. He was forty-nine years old. Married for two decades. Father of two. And on the night of October 31st, 2002, in his own home...

In 2024 a little girl named Joshlin Smith disappeared in South Africa. She was just six years old. As of the recording of this episode, she still hasn't been found. By the time her case reached trial, it had become one of the most closely watched criminal proceedings in recent South African history. Many people would go on to draw comparisons to Madeleine McCann's disappearance in Portug...

On the morning of September 7th, 1988, a seventeen-year-old boy called 911 from a house on the Long Island Sound and said his parents had been attacked. Within hours, before Martin began to process what had happened to his parents, he was sitting in a police interrogation room, being told, over and over, that he was the one who did it. This is the story of Seymour and Arlene Tankleff. And it'...

This episode covers one of the more haunting missing persons cases in recent California history. It’s a case that took years to be classified as a homicide, and it raises hard questions about what happens when investigators commit to the wrong theory early, and don't let go of it.  The McStay Family disappeared on February 4th, 2010. Their bodies were eventually found in the Mojave Desert in...

On October 5th, 2004, at just after 11 o’clock at night, a cleaning crew finished up and headed out into the parking lot of the medical office building they were cleaning in Tucson, Arizona. They noticed a car that had been sitting in the parking lot for hours with the engine off and the lights off.  Inside was David Brian Stidham. Everyone who loved him called him Brian. He was 37-years-old, and...

Two girls. Two different states. Two families who reported them missing quickly, called every hotline, stood in front of every camera that would point their way, and yet as of the day I'm recording this, neither one has come home. I usually give you one case per episode. Today, I'm doing something different. I'm giving you two. Not because they're connected. They’re not connect...

It's just after 4 a.m. on February 13th, 2022, in New York City's Chinatown. Most of the neighborhood is fast asleep. Somewhere on Chrystie Street, a young woman gets out of a cab. She's only three minutes from her apartment door. She has no idea that a man has been watching her. And she certainly has no idea that he's about to follow her through the front door of her building,...

Sixty-nine-year-old Warren Barnes was from Grand Junction, Colorado. On the night of February 27th, 2021, while he slept in a small encampment he kept under a bridge close to downtown, a nineteen-year-old drove around looking for someone to murder. In the Murder of Warren Barnes, I’ll tell you who Warren was before anyone knew his name as a headline about a beheading, and what it says about societ...

This episode is the extraordinary survival story of Mary Vincent. Picture a two-lane highway outside of Modesto, California. It's late September, 1978, and a girl is walking down the center of that highway. Mary is only 15-years-old. She’s naked, and she’s covered in blood with her arms pointed straight up to the sky.  She might only be a teenager, but she instinctively knows that if she does...

Sarm Heslop was a native of Southampton, England. The port city saw many people come and go so perhaps it was natural that Sarm pivoted from her initial career in aviation as a flight attendant to living and working on a luxury boat in St. John’s US Virgin Islands.  That pivot would result in her disappearance. On the night of March 7, 2021, Sarm Heslop was 41 years old, living on a boat with a ma...

Imagine doing what your family and friends say are “all the right things” in life. You graduate college, get married and start a family and you have a job and a clear career path. Now, imagine that someone violently cuts your life short just because they felt like it. And for little more than $200 in cash. I wish I could tell you this story is rooted in imagination, but sadly it isn’t. The reality...

When Jordie Hudson’s mother officially reported her missing on April 14, 2016, she had no way of knowing the horror of what her daughter, an accomplished artist, endured days earlier. On April 9th, a chance encounter after a night out at a local pub resulted in Jordie’s murder. The aftermath of her death is even more horrific, involving the US Marshals, the recovery of her body from a shallow grav...

For most people Sunday, September 16th, 2012 was a typical day. If anything, they may have been grateful for the warmer-than-average weather blanketing the area of Chesterfield, Virginia that year. But for 44-year-old Pareshkumar (Paresh) Patel, this Sunday marked the first of a series of truly terrifying events that would result in his kidnapping and heinous murder. For a full list of source mate...

On April 5th, 1986, Jeanne Ann Clery was brutally attacked and murdered in her dorm room at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. A swift investigation determined the murderer was a fellow student. The aftermath of Jeanne’s murder lead her parents to create the Clery Center and become staunch advocates for campus safety. Their efforts set precedent and regulations for colleges and universi...

Welcome to the PREY TELL Podcast! I'm your host, Ashley Schef. PREY TELL is a true crime podcast built on the conviction that the victim is the story. Not the predator. Every victim covered on this podcast was labeled prey by a world that failed them — reduced to a target, a file number, or a case that was easier to close than to pursue.  This show returns victims to what they always were: hu...