RedHanded

Remember the time London was overcome by a stench so foul that it shut down Parliament, and convinced terrified city-dwellers that the end was surely near? No? Well let us remind you of the grim summer of 1858: otherwise known as The Great Stink. The crisis brought about a long overdue transformation of the city’s sanitation system that formed the basis for the sewers we still use today – so thank...

Today, catch the first episode of The Poet, a new six-part true crime series from The Binge.  Hosted by journalist Rachel Browne, The Poet is an investigation that drops you into Wichita, Kansas in 1977, where a woman named Ruth Finley is receiving threatening, obsessive poems from an unknown stalker – at the exact same time police are trying to track down the notorious serial killer known as BTK....

Watching slaves being ritually hacked to pieces may not seem like many people’s idea of a great day out. But 2,000 years ago, Romans turned up in their thousands to watch exactly that. So, with Gladiator back on our screens, we set out to find the truth behind the spectacle – and it’s even bloodier than the movies could ever allow. So what exactly happened in the gladiatorial games? Were there rea...

Joseph James DeAngelo is a burglar, a killer, and a rapist. A vile man with a proclivity for terrorising and sexually violating women. But that wasn’t everyone’s perception of the elderly man who was arrested in the yard of his suburban Sacramento home. To his daughters he was a loving father, to his employers he’d been a reliable worker, and to the wider community he was just another sleepy old m...

What could drive a person to eat another human being? Well, as it turns out, humankind has actually been surprisingly open to a little cannibalistic carpaccio. From funeral traditions where families gather to gobble up their loved one as a mark of respect; to a European craze for drinking liquefied, mummified human brains (plus a surprising number of societies who just really liked the taste) – he...

For almost as long as we’ve made films, we’ve made horror films – but what happens when the terror isn’t just on screen? Movie-making lore is riddled with stories of bizarre accidents on set, creepy coincidences and even murders, all of which can give rise to cult followings and, in some cases, rumours of a curse over the whole production.  From Indian ghosts to demonic hauntings, we run through a...

To find the most prolific and violent serial rapist and killer the state of California had ever seen, took over fifty years, and some ethically questionable methods. Public DNA databases were trawled without their users consent, samples were entered under false pretences, and hundreds if not thousands of people had their rights violated.  But, they did eventually catch their man, and walk him up t...

For decades, the Soviet Union’s top-secret testing site Kapustin Yar didn’t appear on any maps. It was so top-secret, the government relocated an entire town just to make sure none of its residents ever discovered it. But in the aftermath of the Cold War, stories began to emerge about what the Soviets had really been up to in that remote, arid stretch of land in southern Russia… From rumours of cr...

Bryan Kohberger is now claiming his innocence in the Idaho Student Murders.  And he wants a trial to prove it.  A year after admitting to the horrific murders of University of Idaho students Kaylee Gonçalves, Maddie Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin back in November 2019, Bryan Kohberger has done yet another U-turn by seeking to withdraw his guilty plea.  In a petition claiming his lawyers fai...

When 90 men, 17 women, and 11 children disappeared without a trace – leaving behind nothing but a single cryptic word carved into a tree – it began a mystery that’s lasted centuries. From bloody battles with Native American tribes to Elizabeth I’s private pirates – we get to the bottom of the disappearing colonists of Roanoke Island. -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-length...

Michelle Eileen McNamara dedicated her life to closing the net on the man she called “The Golden State Killer’. A man whose prolific spree of violent home invasions, rapes, and murders was so large and covered such a vast geographical area several law enforcement agencies failed to realise it was all one man. Join us in part 2 of our 3 part series on The Golden State Killer, as we discuss how Mich...

What happens when a group of fame-obsessed teens with a passion for fashion go for a shopping spree in their favourite stars’ wardrobes? You get the Bling Ring: the unlikely architects behind a string of burglaries in the Hollywood Hills in the mid-2000s, targeting celebs from Paris Hilton to Orlando Bloom… Until those Ugg-booted cat burglars finally ran out of lives.  Behind the TMZ headlines lay...

America the beautiful: from sea to shining sea! (...Plus a bunch of random islands 2,000 miles away in the Pacific Ocean.) The story of why these seven Polynesian islands became part of the US of A is a wild one, taking in a slew of sweet-toothed sugar barons, a pinch of rampant colonialism, and one heroine who refused to let her culture die. When a white militia surrounded the palace of Queen Lil...

The Golden State Killer, The Easter Area Rapist, The Visalia Ransacker, and The Original Night Stalker. All pseudonyms for a man who committed one of the largest and most prolific sprees of home invasions, rapes, and murders, in American history. For over ten years one man held a vice like terror across the entire state of California, committing over 120 burglaries, at least 51 rape and 10 murders...

When the night guards passed Frank Morris’s cell, in San Francisco’s “inescapable” island super-prison, Alcatraz, he seemed to be sleeping soundly. But what they saw was a dummy head made of plaster, soap and real human hair. And Morris was already making his way to the shore – and his homemade raft, stitched together using 50 prison raincoats. This week we look at the history of the US’s big bad...

As part of our virtual road trip around North America inspired by the 2026 World Cup, we're revisiting some of our most classic cases. This week we stop off in  Sacramento, to revisit on of the single most disturbing individuals we have ever covered Richard Chase - The Vampire of Sacramento. Clinical vampirism, terrifying delusions and paranoid schizophrenia. This week the girls enter the bloody w...

The idea of human beings floating in space used to feel as likely as time travel. But after WWII, the world’s two strongest superpowers had to find a way of outdoing each other that didn’t involve the total eradication of the human race. So they decided to race to the stars instead. Here’s how that ideological moonshot became a reality. -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-leng...

When elderly women started being murdered around Mexico City in the early 2000s, it sparked the nation’s first ever serial killer manhunt… But the fearsome monster targeting the city’s beloved grandmas? She was actually (gasp!) a woman .  The search for the so-called “Mataviejitas” – The Little Old Lady Killer – was hampered by media hysteria, clueless (and maybe corrupt) coppers, and one gigantic...

Louisiana has more than its fair share of real monsters hiding in its deep, dark bayous. So, settlers’ nightmares about what else was hiding there – spiced up with African folk beliefs, plus Cajun and Creole folklore and a dash of Haitian voudou – quickly became a rogues’ gallery of gruesome monsters that couldn’t exist anywhere else. From a grim scaly monster, born in a voodoo ritual from the dev...

As part of our virtual road trip around North America inspired by the 2026 World Cup, we're revisiting some of our most classic cases. This week we stop off in North Carolina, to revisit the infamous staircase of Michael & Kathleen Peterson... From the outside the Petersons had it all; the perfect family, a beautiful mansion and more money than they could spend. But on 9th December 2001 all th...

If someone told you they could read your mind, levitate, walk through walls, or make your heart explode in your chest, you’d probably say they were crazy. But for over 30 years, the US government spent tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money attempting to create psychic super soldiers of the future, with all those skills and more. This is the ShortHand on Jim Channon, and the First Earth Bat...

After the search of Vancouver’s missing women finally brought them to the gates of Robert ‘Willie’ Pickton’s grisly pig farm, Canadian police faced the gigantic task of bringing the country’s most prolific serial killer to justice.  But with much of the evidence literally eaten by the pigs, how much would be left to piece together this puzzle?  And even long after the cell doors clanged shut on ol...

Long before the ‘90s cartoon version painted with all the colours of the wind, a real Native American woman named Pocahontas inspired a romantic tale that would endure for centuries… But how much of her story is fact – and how much is a convenient colonial fiction? Featuring gold-hunting colonists, grisly cannibalism and more than a splash of imperialist violence, let’s just say the true story isn...

As part of our virtual road trip around North America inspired by the 2026 World Cup, we're revisiting some of our most classic cases – with a stop in Massachusetts sparking spooky memories of our visit to the Lizzie Borden house... The brutal hatchet murders of Andrew and Abby Borden are still among the most infamous and hotly debated cases in true-crime history. Truly springing from the pages of...

Any moment now, we might experience an explosion that emits the power of 1,000 atomic bombs every second. An explosion so fierce that it would reduce the world’s most powerful country to an ash-covered wasteland – and, if it was feeling particularly gnarly, could lead to the extinction of the entire human race. This week we take a look at just how royally f***ed we’d be if the world’s largest abov...