RedHanded

“Juiced to his gills” on a combination of testosterone, steroids, and god knows what else, three times Olympic medalist James Magnussen put on over 30 lbs of lean muscle in just a few months, risking his health, his reputation and his legacy, all in an attempt to break the 50m freestyle world record, and launch the ‘Enhanced Games’ into history books.  Yet, two years later, the classic thought exp...

Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, changed the course of English history – despite being queen for just 1,000 days before her beheading at the Tower of London. And despite being one of the most infamous and influential figures ever to sit the throne, people still get Anne wrong. This is the Tudor ShortHand. -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-length Video Episodes Tik...

In 2024, a year on from RedHanded’s episode on the Murdaugh Family Murders, we had the great pleasure of talking to Mandy Matney, the foremost independent expert on the Murdaugh family and their rampant trail of destruction through South Carolina. Mandy filled us in on everything that happened since we last checked in – including Stephen Smith’s death being re-classified as a murder and the potent...

BREAKING NEWS: Alex Murdaugh WILL face a new trial. A South Carolina court has overturned the 2023 murder convictions of ex-lawyer Alex Murdaugh. Five out of five Supreme Court judges ruled that he deserved a new trial because the jury had been unfairly biased against him. Listen to our full episode from 2023, to get the full story on one of the most sprawling true crime cases out there… -- The Mu...

As wrongful convictions go, the trial of Leo Schofield – who stood accused of killing his young wife Michelle Schofield – had it all: bias, speculation, and pure fabrication. And through the years, through a combination of bad luck and bad representation, Schofield stayed behind bars. In this second part, we look at how this cold case finally warmed up, thanks in no small part to the journalists b...

Critically lauded dance troupe, or sinister, human-trafficking, brainwashing, child-abusing cult? However you slice it, there is a lot more going on to Shen Yun than the glitzy public posters let on. This week we open the curtain on Shen Yun, and the cult behind it, Falun Gong – whose founder Li Hongzhi believes he can levitate, predict the future and read his followers’ minds. So: what does Falun...

A deadly virus that causes hydrophobia, frothing at the mouth and delirious aggression might sound more like science fiction than real life. But that’s what awaited 15-year-old Jeanna Giese when she was bitten by a rabid bat in 2004. This is the history of one of the oldest and most deadly viruses known to man – and how a 15-year-old girl and her doctor managed to overcome it, against all odds. Th...

When the body of 18-year-old Michelle Schofield was found in a canal in Bone Valley, Florida, the police quickly closed in on her guitar-playing, heavy-metal husband, Leo Schofield. Leo claimed to be innocent, but investigators couldn’t shake the fact that Leo’s own father had been the one to discover Michelle’s body - after receiving “a message from God”… -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes...

Party favours full of drugs, a hose-down rubber sex balcony, and Bianca Jagger on a real horse. It’s often said that the brightest flames burn for the shortest time – and by god did Studio 54 burn bright.  Under the helm of Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, 254 West 54th was the single coolest place on the planet – and set the blueprint for exclusive nightclubs to this day. Bowie, Warhol, the Jaggers...

Zombies, incantations and dolls full of pins… the version of voodoo that most of us get has been suffused with decades of Hollywood magic, and a dusting of light xenophobia. But the reality of Haitian vodou is much more complex – and way more fascinating. So, how did slaves reconcile their own folklore and religions, with the Catholicism that colonisers were forcing down their throats? Who are the...

Trapped in a soundproof underground bunker, sleeping in a coffin-shaped box, abused and forced to watch news footage of her December 1992 disappearance on a loop, 10-year-old Katie Beers wondered if she’d ever see the world outside her makeshift prison ever again… But one thing her captor didn’t know? Katie was a survivor.  This is the story of a little girl who fought against the odds – and manag...

Rage-inducing viruses that spread through bites; a flesh-eating fungus that controls its host like a puppet; deadly pathogens trapped for millennia in Arctic ice… sometimes nature is more gruesome than fiction. From the Walking Dead to the Last of Us, stories of contagion are never far from our screens. So what are the closest real-life scenarios that could turn our world into a full-on zombie was...

Somehow, perhaps the worst deep-sea diving disaster in history – one that led to two men being crushed, three men boiling to death, and one man being liquified and shot out of a five-inch hole – happened above sea level. How? Well, join us off the coast of Norway for a little explosive decompression – and find out what can happen when the pressure of diving just gets too much… -- Patreon - Ad-free...

In the summer of 2017, 26-year-old Anna Sorokin was arrested in Manhattan with a stack of unpaid hotel bills and fraudulent loan requests in her wake. She’d been calling herself Anna Delvey: an uber-wealthy German heiress. In reality? She didn’t have a penny to her (fake) name. Armed only with an untraceable accent and a passion for fashion, Anna tried to pull the designer wool over the eyes of so...

Tens of millions of dollars flowed onto the canvas from the tip of Wolfgang Beltracchi’s brush. His talent? Unquestionable. His methods? Perfect. His ability to recreate the works of other artists? The greatest there has ever been. Alongside his wife Helene, Wolfgang Beltrachhi sold an unknown number of paintings, passed off as the work of 20th-century artists, to some of the most respected galler...

Intimate and explicit images of A-list celebrities – that’s what the world woke up to on the 31st of August 2014. “The Fappening” saw thousands of leaked celebrity nudes dumped onto 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter. It gave unprecedented access to the most overtly private images anyone could imagine – but how on earth did it happen?  This week on ShortHand we’re taking a deep dive into the grubby world...

Mystery, mayhem, and death followed Michael X all the way back to Trinidad. Hacked to death and left in shallow graves, the bodies of Gale Benson and Joseph Skerritt were found at Michael X’s house.  Whispers of black magic and rumours of espionage rippled through the island. How could a young, wealthy British socialite like Gale Benson end up buried alive in the Caribbean? And why would Michael X...

Malcolm X was a true revolutionary, Michael X was an imposter. This con man realised that politics was a lot easier than poetry and rose to the top of the British Civil Rights Movement. All the while violently exploiting the Windrush generation he claimed to be fighting for. John Lennon and Leonard Cohen were his biggest fans. They donated thousands to Michael X's projects that never actually happ...

On the night of 14th April 1912, the ‘unsinkable’ RMS Titanic struck an iceberg and sank into the icy depths of the Atlantic Ocean – killing almost all of its passengers.  But the real question is: would you make it through that fateful night?  In this special 114th-anniversary ShortHand, we walk through your realistic chances of survival after boarding the doomed ship… And with your sex, class an...

When two fighter jets came to check on the unresponsive Helios Flight 522, they were stunned at what they saw: all 115 passengers, lying motionless in their seats. Even worse – the pilot’s seat was empty, and the co-pilot lay slumped over the control panel. The commercial plane was drifting along at 34,000 feet, on autopilot – and fuel was running out.  This is the ShortHand. -- Patreon - Ad-free...

The lead suspect in the Gilgo Beach Killings - 62 year old former architect Rex Heuermann - has now pleaded guilty . So, with a trial off the table in the Long Island Serial Killer saga, join us for an update on what investigators found that finally nailed Heuermann - forcing him to confess.  Then stick around and revisit our two-part episode on this harrowing case that haunted Long Island for dec...

When Rhode Island native Nicholas Rossi found himself wanted by the FBI and Interpol for a string of assaults and large-scale frauds, he didn’t just run away. He faked his death, fled to Scotland, disguised himself as a wheezing British academic called Arthur Knight, and went on the attack – loudly claiming his innocence in wilder and wilder TV appearances across the international press. And that...

With Netflix's new documentary on the modern fundamentalist Mormon church coming out today – we thought it was the perfect time to revisit our episode on Warren Jeffs's FLDS, to give some much-needed context...  Last week, we looked at the formation of the ultra-obedient, bigamist Mormon cult, the FLDS – in which plural marriage to pregnant preteen girls is just the tip of the fundamentalist icebe...

With Netflix's new documentary on the modern fundamentalist Mormon church coming out today – we thought it was the perfect time to revisit our episode on Warren Jeffs's FLDS, to give some much-needed context...  According to Warren Jeffs’ thousands of followers, he was the leader of a secretive but devoted religion – their prophet, and the representative of God on Earth. But according to US law, h...

A relentless barrage of oil that killed anything in its path, the disaster that befell the Deepwater Horizon oil rig took the lives of eleven crew members, destroyed an entire oceanic ecosystem, and is still severely affecting the livelihoods of coastal communities to this day.   Described as “the largest ecocide in history”, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the response of BP, the company res...