Serial Napper | True Crime for the Chronically Tired

Alexandra Pesic knew something was wrong. The former beauty queen and young mother had begun noticing a white car appearing around her. Then a disturbing package arrived in the mail: a true-crime book about a woman who had reported years of stalking and terror before her mysterious death. Certain passages had been deliberately marked. Days later, something described in those pages seemed to happen...

In May of 1977, 20-year-old Colleen Stan was hitchhiking through California when a young couple stopped to offer her a ride. With a woman and a baby inside the vehicle, Colleen believed she had found a safe way to finish her journey. She was wrong. For the next seven years, Colleen would live under the control of Cameron Hooker, hidden from the world even as life carried on around her. But perhaps...

This October, Serial Napper is opening the storybook for another season of Serial Nightmare. This year, we're taking familiar fairy tales and looking at the very real cases that echo their darkest themes. We begin with Goldilocks. In 1986, the Bowen family began noticing strange things inside their Massachusetts home. Food disappeared. Objects moved. Tina and Karen heard unexplained noises and bec...

On March 12, 2004, two women arrived at a converted commercial building in Fresno, California, with one goal: they wanted their children back. Inside was their extended family, led by 57-year-old Marcus Wesson. What began as a tense family dispute soon turned into something much darker. Because Ruby Ortiz and Sofina Solorio knew things about Marcus that the police standing outside did not. They kn...

Fourteen-year-old Michael Politte woke to smoke filling his bedroom. His friend Josh was asleep on the floor nearby, and an orange glow was coming from underneath his mother's bedroom door. When Michael opened that door, he found his mother, 40-year-old Rita Politte, lying on the floor with her upper body on fire. Rita hadn't died in an accidental house fire. She had been brutally attacked. Within...

Eighteen-year-old Henry Nowak had only recently started his first semester at the University of Southampton. He was studying accounting and finance, playing football, making new friends and building a life away from home for the first time. On the night of December 3rd, 2025, Henry went out with friends before beginning the walk back to his student accommodation. Along the way, he crossed paths wi...

On October 17th, 1992, 16-year-old Yoshihiro “Yoshi” Hattori was getting ready for his first real American Halloween party. Yoshi had recently arrived in Louisiana from Japan as an exchange student. He was outgoing, adventurous and determined to experience everything his year abroad had to offer. That night, dressed in a white tuxedo inspired by John Travolta, Yoshi headed to a party with his 17-y...

On Christmas night in 2006, Ryan Waller’s parents became worried when their 18-year-old son didn’t show up for dinner and stopped answering his phone. They drove to the Phoenix home he shared with his girlfriend, 21-year-old Heather Quan, but no one came to the door. When police entered the house, they found Heather dead from a gunshot wound and Ryan alive, badly injured and deeply confused. Ryan...

In October of 1996, 35-year-old Sharon Lopatka told her husband she was leaving their Maryland home for a short trip to visit friends in Georgia. But Sharon wasn't going to Georgia. She left her car near a Baltimore train station, boarded a train heading south, and left behind a disturbing goodbye letter for her husband. In it, Sharon seemed to acknowledge the possibility that she might never come...

On June 7th, 2011, a maintenance worker was repairing a broken window inside a 25th-floor apartment in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when he heard a couple arguing in the next room. Then came another crash. Within moments, 23-year-old Josh Hilberling was lying on the roof of a parking garage seventeen stories below. His heavily pregnant wife, 19-year-old Amber Hilberling, admitted almost immediately that she h...

On the evening of October 20th, 2015, 42-year-old father and lorry driver Darren Kelly travelled to Pitsea, Essex, believing he was meeting a woman he'd been talking to online. But when Darren arrived, he wasn't met by one person. A group was already waiting nearby, some of them hiding out of sight. They believed Darren was guilty of something terrible, and they had decided to confront him themsel...

When Stacey Castor called the police to her New York home in August 2005, she told them she was worried about her husband, David. He had locked himself inside their bedroom after an argument and hadn't shown up for work. When officers forced their way inside, they found David dead beside a glass containing a bright green liquid and an open container of antifreeze. At first, everything pointed towa...

In January 2003, two teenage sisters returned home from an evening out with friends and made a frantic call to 911. Their 43-year-old mother, Linda Andersen, was lying face-down in the bathtub. Linda struggled with alcoholism. She had been drinking heavily that night, and toxicology would reveal alcohol and medication in her system. To investigators, everything seemed to point toward a tragic acci...

When I first covered the case of Laken Snelling, it was a Patreon-exclusive, and one of the biggest questions surrounding the case remained unanswered: what really happened to her newborn baby in the hours after she secretly gave birth? Now, we finally have an answer. In August 2025, 21-year-old University of Kentucky student and STUNT athlete Laken Snelling gave birth alone inside her off-campus...

In January 2006, 18-year-old Joe Pichler seemingly vanished from Bremerton, Washington. Joe had grown up in front of the camera, appearing in movies and television shows including The Fan, Varsity Blues, Beethoven’s 3rd and Beethoven’s 4th. After stepping away from Hollywood as a teenager, he returned home, graduated high school and began building an ordinary life while planning his eventual retur...

When we left off in Part One, Florida State University law professor Dan Markel had been murdered in what investigators believed was a carefully planned hit. Nearly two years later, police had traced a rented green Prius from Tallahassee back to South Florida, identified suspected gunmen Sigfredo Garcia and Luis Rivera, uncovered connections to Katherine Magbanua and Charlie Adelson, and staged an...

Florida State University law professor Dan Markel was 41 years old when he was shot in the garage of his Tallahassee home in July 2014. It quickly became clear that this wasn't a random act of violence. Someone had followed Dan through his morning routine, waited until he returned home, and then disappeared. But who would want a Canadian-born law professor and devoted father of two dead? The answe...

In this episode, the True Crimecast team, John and Jamie, sit down with Nikki Young, host of the Serial Napper podcast, to take a deep dive into the disturbing and unsolved disappearance of 22-year-old Liam Tomen. On the weekend of January 31, 2025, Liam and two friends travelled from Whitby, Ontario, to the resort village of Mont Tremblant, Quebec, for a ski trip. After spending the evening at lo...

On a warm September night in 2005, 18-year-old Jennifer Teague finished her shift at a Wendy's restaurant in Barrhaven, Ontario. She stopped to chat with friends at the local Mac's Milk before beginning the short walk home, a route she'd taken countless times before. She never made it. Jennifer's disappearance shattered the sense of safety in one of Ottawa's fastest-growing suburbs. As police, vol...

On April 3, 2022, 27-year-old Christian "Toby" Obumseli was fatally stabbed inside the luxury Miami condominium he shared with his girlfriend, influencer and OnlyFans creator Courtney Clenney. Courtney never denied causing the fatal injury, but she insisted it was self-defence. Prosecutors insisted it was murder. For years, this case divided the internet. Security footage, police bodycam video, di...

In June 2009, four women from the same family were found dead inside a submerged car at the Kingston Mills Locks near Kingston, Ontario. At first, it appeared to be a tragic accident. Their family claimed the women had taken the car for a late-night drive and somehow ended up in the water. But investigators quickly uncovered a much darker truth. As evidence mounted, police began to suspect that th...

In February 2007, two-year-old Mariah Alvarez died after suffering a catastrophic head injury just days after her family moved into a new apartment in Harlingen, Texas. Within hours, investigators became convinced they were looking at one of the worst cases of child abuse they had ever seen. Mariah's mother, Melissa Lucio, endured a five-hour interrogation while pregnant with twins, eventually utt...

On November 24, 2022, 38-year-old Liam Smith stepped outside his home in Shevington, Greater Manchester. He never made it back inside. For nearly ten hours, Michael Hillier had been waiting in a Mitsubishi Shogun parked outside Liam's home. When Liam approached the vehicle, Hillier shot him in the face at close range before pouring sulphuric acid over him as he lay fatally wounded. The shocking at...

Frauke Liebs: The Woman Who Kept Calling Home On June 20, 2006, 21-year-old nursing student Frauke Liebs left an Irish pub in Paderborn, Germany, after watching an England World Cup match with friends. She was expected home in just fifteen minutes. She never arrived. Then something unimaginable happened. Over the next week, Frauke made a series of brief phone calls to her roommate, her family, and...

When Angela Diaz reported that someone was terrorizing her with anonymous emails, Craigslist rape fantasies, and violent threats against her unborn twins, the case seemed straightforward. Her husband, Deputy U.S. Marshal Ian Diaz, told investigators he knew exactly who was responsible: his ex-fiancée, Michelle Hadley. Police believed him. Prosecutors believed him. The media believed him. Michelle...