Forgotten Serial Killers True Crime

On April 10, 2015, forensic teams discovered four additional sets of remains behind a New Britain strip mall, confirming inmate William Devin Howell’s chilling claim that police had only found “half of what is out there.” The recovery brought the total body count to seven victims murdered by Howell during a single year while he worked as a lawn-mowing contractor in central Connecticut.

On February 2, 2007, nineteen-year-old Joshua Anderson entered the north Tulsa home of Herbert and Rosemary Hobbs intending only to rob them. Within ninety minutes he had forced the mother and son into sexual acts, murdered them both, and set their house ablaze, escalating a simple robbery into one of Tulsa’s most disturbing post-millennium homicide cases.

In November 1984, a single preserved tissue sample from a 1976 death finally revealed that Steven David Catlin had been murdering his wives and mother with undetectable paraquat for nearly a decade.

On the morning of April 12, 1919, Paris police finally arrested the mild-mannered, bearded man who had been living under multiple aliases. What they uncovered was a chilling web of deception, wartime disappearances, and a secluded villa in Gambais that may have hidden the remains of as many as eleven victims.

On January 4, 2006, recently released juvenile offender Leo Boatman carried a stolen AK-47 into Ocala National Forest and gunned down two Santa Fe Community College students in a quiet woodland clearing near Juniper Springs. The brutal attack left John Parker and Amber Peck dead within minutes, their bodies hidden in a marshy pond before Boatman calmly returned home to watch television.

On the evening of March 30, 2010, Franklin DeWayne Alix was executed by lethal injection in Texas for the capital murder of Eric Bridgeford during a violent 1998 home invasion. The episode examines how the crime began with the rape of Eric’s sister Karyl, escalated to Eric’s shooting death on the front lawn, and concluded with Alix’s final statement before his death at Huntsville Unit.

On the second day of the new millennium, a seemingly model Navy veteran named John Eric Armstrong reported discovering a body in the Rouge River—yet within months, investigators would learn he was the man responsible for multiple murders of Detroit-area sex workers. This episode unpacks how a man with a clean record and honorable discharge from the USS Nimitz became one of the most surprising seri...

## Episode 29 — Jake Bird: The Tacoma Ax and the Hex

In the warm spring nights of May 2005, Dale Hausner and Samuel Dieteman began a terrifying 15-month drive-by shooting spree across suburban Phoenix, wounding and killing random strangers for no reason other than the thrill. High on methamphetamine and sleep-deprived, the pair carried out nearly 40 shootings, murdering eight people and wounding nineteen others while also targeting animals in the sa...

On Christmas Day 2007, ten-year-old Lee Hye-jin and eight-year-old Wu Ye-seul vanished from a small park in Anyang, South Korea after attending a church concert, launching one of the nation’s most intense missing-children investigations. For seventy-two days, police pursued dead-end leads and national AMBER alerts until a chance discovery on a nearby mountain finally broke the case open.

In June 1972, fifteen-year-old Deborah Januszko became the fourth young woman murdered in her Queens bedroom by an intruder who slipped through an unlocked window and vanished without a trace. Detectives soon connected her death to three earlier unsolved stabbings, revealing a chilling pattern that had terrorized Richmond Hill, Woodhaven, and Jamaica for nearly two years. The arrest of Joseph Bald...

During the evening shifts in the Bexar County Hospital's pediatric ICU in 1981–1982, licensed vocational nurse Genene Jones turned<|eos|>

In this chilling episode we uncover the horrifying crimes of Darya Saltykova, the eighteenth-century Russian noblewoman known as the Saltychikha, who systematically tortured and murdered dozens of her own serfs over a seven-year reign of terror on her estate south of Moscow.

On August 9, 1987, Philadelphia police forced open an apartment at 1631 North Nineteenth Street and discovered seven strangled African American women hidden inside what would become known as the “House of Death.” The tenant, Harrison Graham—locally famous for his Cookie Monster impressions—had vanished that morning, leaving behind a trail of bodies that spanned a year of undetected killings.

In the late 18th century, Scottish planter Lewis Hutchinson turned his fortified estate, Edinburgh Castle, into a killing ground, dropping dozens of victims into a deep Jamaican sinkhole now known as Hutchinson's Hole. This episode explores how a man educated in medicine became one of the Caribbean's most prolific and least-known serial killers.

In April 1989, investigators discovered a horrifying scene at Rancho Santa Elena near Matamoros, Mexico: a ritual cauldron filled with human remains and the mutilated bodies of fifteen victims. At the center of this nightmare was Adolfo Constanzo, a Cuban-American cult leader whose supernatural “insurance” racket had protected major drug shipments across the U.S.-Mexico border—until the abduction...

In the summer of 1924, hundreds of human bones surfaced from Hanover’s Leine River, exposing one of Weimar Germany’s most shocking serial murder cases. Fritz Haarmann, a petty criminal and police informant, was ultimately revealed as the killer of at least 22 young men whose dismembered remains had been dumped in the water. This episode traces the discovery of the bones, the city’s growing panic,...

In the early hours of May 1, 2010, Shannan Gilbert vanished after a frantic 911 call from Oak Beach, Long Island. Months later, police discovered a cluster of bodies along Ocean Parkway that would become known as the Gilgo Four, all escorts who had advertised on Craigslist. Over the next decade the search would expand, uncovering at least ten victims and leading investigators to a suspect whose ow...

In this chilling episode of Forgotten Serial Killers, we examine the double life of Dennis Nilsen, a quiet Scottish-born civil servant who murdered at least twelve young men in North London between 1978 and 1983 while maintaining an unremarkable routine as a job-centre clerk and trade-union steward.

In this haunting episode of Forgotten Serial Killers, we examine the life of Cary Anthony Stayner—the overlooked older brother of Steven Stayner, whose abduction made national headlines in 1972. While America celebrated Steven’s miraculous return, Cary grew up in the long shadow of that tragedy, eventually becoming the Yosemite serial killer who murdered four women in 1999.

In this chilling episode of Forgotten Serial Killers, we unravel the horrifying true story of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka—dubbed the "Ken and Barbie Killers"—whose seemingly perfect lives masked a campaign of rape, torture, and murder that stunned Canada. From their lavish 1991 wedding to the gruesome discovery of Leslie Mahaffy's remains, we trace how a charming couple evaded justice for year...

In the spring of 1984, Australian-born photographer Christopher Bernard Wilder used his charm and camera to lure aspiring models from Florida malls, leaving a trail of missing women and unsolved murders across the American South.

Carroll Edward Cole was executed in Nevada in 1985 after waiving all appeals and demanding death for murdering at least thirteen women. This episode examines the Iowa-born killer whose horrific childhood, high IQ, and chilling self-awareness led him to request execution rather than fight for his life.

In this chilling episode of Forgotten Serial Killers, we trace the calculated campaign of Joseph Paul Franklin, a lone-wolf sniper who murdered across state lines in an attempt to ignite a race war. Franklin's story reveals how personal grievance, white-supremacist ideology, and meticulous planning converged into years of targeted terror from Alabama to Utah.

In May 1982, Carl Eugene Watts was caught in Houston while preparing to drown a young woman in her bathtub. What followed was one of the most controversial immunity agreements in American true-crime history, allowing the self-described “Sunday Morning Slasher” to confess to a dozen murders in exchange for avoiding prosecution on those charges.