Murders & Minivans

In November 1974, Ronald “Butch” DeFeo Jr. walked through his family’s home at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York, with a hunting rifle and shot his parents and four siblings as they slept. Thirteen months later, George and Kathy Lutz moved into the same house with three kids and a dog. They lasted 28 days. What they said happened next became The Amityville Horror: a bestselling “true story,...

newly released bodycam footage shows the moments after a six-year-old shot his teacher at richneck elementary. three men are found guilty in the murders of two australian brothers and their american friend on a surf trip in baja. and the fort hood shooter has an execution date. this is bad news good news from murders and minivans. tali covers the week’s crime news. stephanie brings the good news....

In March 2015, Denise Huskins was taken from her boyfriend's home in Vallejo, California, held for two days, and assaulted. When she came home, police held a press conference calling it a hoax, and the media named her the real Gone Girl. The only reason anyone believed her was that her kidnapper attacked another family and left his phone behind. A year and a half later, a Redding mom named Sherri...

this week on bad news good news, tali brings the bad news and stephanie balances it out. caleb flynn has been sentenced. a jury convicted the former american idol contestant on all nine counts in the murder of his wife, ashley flynn. the judge ordered him to serve 16 years for firearm specifications and evidence tampering before his life sentence begins. statements from his two young daughters wer...

On the evening of May 8th, 2008, Sharon Randolph and her husband went out for dinner and a movie. Mother's Day was that Sunday. She was forty-seven years old and she loved going to the theatre. Just after 9:30 that night, her husband called 911 and told the dispatcher that a masked intruder had shot his wife in the hallway of their home, and that he had shot the intruder five times. When Las Vegas...

this week on good news bad news, tali brings the bad news and stephanie balances it out. first up is caleb flynn. the former american idol contestant and church worship leader is on trial in ohio for the murder of his wife, ashley flynn. he told 911 an intruder broke in. prosecutors say the evidence tells a different story. we cover the secret affair, the deleted messages, the missing gun, the ste...

On Super Bowl Sunday 2007, four-year-old Ella Bennett was killed in her bed in Abilene, Texas. The person responsible was her thirteen-year-old brother, Paris. He has said Ella wasn't his target. Their mother was. Two years later in St. Martins, Missouri, nine-year-old Elizabeth Olten walked to a friend's house and never came home. Fifteen-year-old Alyssa Bustamante had dug a grave days earlier. S...

17 Years. 16 Bombs, 3 dead, $50 million dollars and 150 full time investigators, and at the end of it a 53 year old man in a 10x12 foot cabin with no electricity and a lot of books. everybody knows the outline. what most people know beyond it is a story about Harvard, a Psychologist, and the CIA. that story is about to get a Netflix film. so this week we went and did a deep dive... what we found i...

On June 30, 2009, a black Nissan Sentra was found submerged at the Kingston Mills locks on the Rideau Canal with four bodies inside: Zainab Shafia, 19, Sahar Shafia, 17, Geeti Shafia, 13, and Rona Amir Mohammad, 52. The family called Rona the girls' aunt. She was their father's first wife, in a polygamous marriage Canadian immigration knew nothing about. Within three weeks, Mohammad Shafia, his wi...

mica miller: the trial that isn't about her death mica miller was found dead on april 27, 2024, at lumber river state park in robeson county, north carolina, about seventy miles from her home in myrtle beach. she was 30. the robeson county sheriff's office determined she died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. the north carolina medical examiner ruled her death a suicide. investigators said there...

between april 1971 and september 1972, six young Black girls disappeared from southeast washington, d.c. they were ten to eighteen years old. they were walking home from the store. going to work. going to night class. coming home from a boyfriend's house. their bodies were found along highways in and around d.c. and maryland. Carol Spinks. Darlenia Johnson. Brenda Crockett. Nenomoshia Yates. Brend...

On August 4, 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were killed in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. Ten months later, Andrew's daughter Lizzie was tried for both murders and acquitted in about ninety minutes. Nobody else was ever charged. Everyone knows the rhyme. Almost none of it is true. The weapon was a hatchet. Abby was Lizzie's stepmother. And the autopsy records eighteen wounds to Abby and te...

Seven people in Chicago died in three days in 1982 after taking Extra Strength Tylenol laced with cyanide. Nobody has ever been charged. Every seal on your medicine bottle comes from this case. On September 29, 1982, a twelve-year-old girl in Elk Grove Village named Mary Kellerman took a capsule for a sore throat before school. She was dead within hours. By the end of that week, six more people we...

Laci Peterson was eight months pregnant when she was reported missing from her modesto home on christmas eve 2002. four months later, her body and the body of her unborn son conner washed up in the san francisco bay, just miles from where her husband scott said he had been fishing alone that day. this episode walks through the full case. we cover the timeline of Laci's disappearance, scott's shift...

Nolan Xavier Wells was an 18 year old wide receiver from ocean springs, mississippi, preparing for his freshman season at southwest mississippi community college. on july 4, 2026, he traveled to horn island with a large group of friends on multiple boats. the boat he rode out on took on water from a failed bilge pump and turned back early. nolan was not on it. his body was found in the water on ju...

in october 1989, ten-year-old amy mihaljevic left her school in bay village, ohio to meet a man she had spoken to on the phone. he told her that her mom had gotten a promotion. he said he wanted her help picking out a gift. she was never seen alive again. her body was found four months later in a field in ashland county, more than fifty miles from home. what most people don't know is that amy wasn...

everyone remembers the verdict. almost nobody knows about the google search the jury never saw. on the last day Caylee Anthony was seen alive, someone in the anthony home searched "fool-proof suffocation" — and the state never found it, because investigators checked the wrong browser. this week: the full casey anthony case from the primary record. the 31 days, zanny the nanny, the deputy who would...

She spent 88 days in jail for a crime that never happened. The person who framed her was her own ex-fiancé: a deputy U.S. Marshal. This is the true story behind Netflix's A Toxic Love Story (2026). In 2016, Michelle Hadley was a 29-year-old grad student with a marketing job at Disney when Anaheim police arrested her for stalking, criminal threats, and six counts of attempted rape. Her bail was set...

on a friday morning in december 2017, two real estate agents walked a couple through a mansion in north toronto. downstairs by the lap pool, they found the owners. barry and honey sherman. fully dressed, sitting upright, necks looped to a low railing with leather belts. one agent thought it was some kind of weird yoga. they had been dead for almost two days. barry built apotex into the largest can...

This week we're covering Kouri Richins, the Utah mother, real estate investor, and children's book author who was convicted in March 2026 of poisoning her husband Eric with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl. We get into the debt, the fraud, the affair, the life insurance policies, the failed Valentine's Day attempt, the Moscow Mule, and the book that made this one of the most talked-about cas...

On June 12, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were stabbed to death outside her condo on Bundy Drive in Brentwood. Nicole was nearly decapitated. Ron had defensive wounds on his hands. He was 25 and had just stopped by to return a pair of glasses. OJ Simpson was arrested five days later, but only after a slow-speed chase down the 405 in a white Ford Bronco that 95 million people watched l...

this week we're covering the 1992 murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common, London.... one of the most mishandled cases in metropolitan police history. Rachel was 23 years old when she was attacked and killed during a morning walk with her two-year-old son, Alex, and their dog molly. the case that followed lasted sixteen years and destroyed the life of an innocent man before dna evidence final...

In October 2020, 21-year-old Reagan Simmons-Hancock was found murdered in her home in New Boston, Texas. She was 35 weeks pregnant. Her daughter Braxlynn Sage was removed from her body and died hours later. Reagan's three-year-old daughter Kynlee was found hiding in another room of the house, physically unharmed. The person responsible was Taylor Parker — a woman Reagan knew well enough to let pho...

The Murdaugh Murders, Part 2: The Trial, the Verdict, and the Reversal On June 7, 2021, Maggie and Paul Murdaugh were found shot to death at the family's Moselle property in Colleton County, South Carolina. Alex Murdaugh called 911 seventeen seconds after his GPS placed him at the scene. He had told investigators he was never there. This is Part 2 of our Murdaugh family coverage. We walk through t...

Before Alex Murdaugh shot his wife and son at the family's South Carolina hunting estate, he spent decades building a lie so elaborate that almost no one saw it coming. In Part 1 of this two-part series, we go back to the beginning — not just to June 7, 2021, but to 1920, when the Murdaugh family first seized control of the criminal justice system in the South Carolina Lowcountry and didn't let go...