Crime Clueless

In September 2017, deputies stopped a Cadillac SUV five minutes from a lake house in southwest Virginia and arrested a 54-year-old woman her neighbors knew as Debbie. Twenty-seven years earlier, she was Sheila Keen, the prime suspect in the murder of Marlene Warren. Who was Sheila before 1990? How did she end up married, living in Virginia and running a burger/everything you can think of/plus ice...

On a rainy Saturday morning in May 1990, Marlene Warren opened her front door to a clown holding red and white carnations and a silver balloon that read “You’re the Greatest.” Without a word, the clown shot her in the face, walked back to a white convertible, and drove away. In Part One, we follow the trail the killer left behind: a costume bought at closing time, balloons sold at only one store i...

In January 1897, Zona Heaster Shue was found dead in her home in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, just months after marrying a charming newcomer named Edward Shue. Her death was quickly ruled natural, and she was buried with little fuss. But her mother, Mary Jane Heaster, never believed it. She claimed that over four nights, Zona’s spirit came to her and described exactly how she died, and exactl...

They drained a reservoir and dragged the Ohio River. They dug up a sandbar and chased a stage conjurer’s “clue.” Pearl Bryan’s head was never found. In part two, we piece together Pearl’s last four days in Cincinnati: a hotel register signed with her sister’s name, an argument outside a music company, and a sarsaparilla in a saloon’s back room. Then comes the circus. There are lemonade stands at t...

On a foggy February morning in 1896, a farmhand outside Fort Thomas, Kentucky, finds a woman lying in the privet bushes. At first he thinks she’s just another girl, sleeping off a hangover maybe.   Then the sheriff pulls her down the bank, and her dress falls away. Her head is gone. Detectives start with no name and not even what city she is from. There is a pile of wild theories, including one ma...

"You're looking for bodies? Go ahead. Dig up the yard." In Part Two, investigators take Hugo Selenski up on his offer. Less than 20 feet from his back door, they find Michael Kerkowski and Tammy Fassett. In the fire pit behind the house, they find the remains of three more people. One of them has never been identified. We cover the drug-house sleepover that turned deadly, a jeweler's hom...

On the afternoon of May 3, 2002, Michael Kerkowski and Tammy Fassett were doing yard work when two visitors pulled into the driveway. When Michael's mother called, Tammy kept it short: "We have company." Michael was a pharmacist from northeastern Pennsylvania who'd been caught selling hundreds of thousands of painkillers out of his own store, and he was days away from sentencing. The man...

Private investigator Ken Brennan has a theory about what happened in Room 348, and it starts with a question nobody thought to ask. As he and Detective Scott Apple follow a rumor, a hunch, and one very small detail most people would never notice, the answer to Greg Fleniken's death turns out to have been hiding in plain sight the whole time. But solving it is only half the fight. Susie Fleniken st...

Greg Fleniken was a man of routine. Every Monday he drove from Lafayette, Louisiana, to Beaumont, Texas, checked into the same hotel, and spent his nights the same way: propped up on two pillows with a candy bar, a cigarette, and a movie. On September 16, 2010, his co-workers found him dead on the floor of Room 348.It looked like his heart had simply given out. Then the medical examiner opened him...

For sixteen years, the disappearance of Mike Williams sits unsolved — a mother's letters to the governor, a reopened investigation, and still, no answers. Then, in the summer of 2016, something happens that has nothing to do with Lake Seminole at all. And everything changes. In Part Two, we follow the confession that finally broke a seventeen-year silence, the search that found what a 44-day effor...

December 16, 2000. Before sunrise, Mike Williams loads his boat and heads out onto Lake Seminole — a lake he's hunted a hundred times before, on a morning that's supposed to end with an anniversary dinner. He never makes it home. What follows is a 44-day search across a reservoir riddled with submerged stumps and alligators, a discovery that seems to close the case for good, and a legal ruling tha...

Steven Koecher's phone has gone silent, his family is left with more questions than answers. What investigators find years later — buried, hidden, and nearly destroyed by time — changes everything about how this case should have been handled from the start. This episode picks up right where the story left off, following the trail into a landlord facing serious felony exposure at the exact moment S...

In December 2009, a 30-year-old man named Steven Koecher parks his car at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in a Henderson, Nevada retirement community — and walks out of frame forever. No struggle. No body. No answers. But in the days before he vanished, Steven put well over a thousand miles on his car for reasons he never explained to a single person, and on the day he disappeared, witnesses heard h...

On the morning of February 4, 2015, 18-year-old Sara Nicole Graham left her home in Fairmont, North Carolina, to go to work. She never arrived. Hours later, her father’s white Chevrolet Astro van was found locked and abandoned in a wheat field off East McDonald Road. There were no signs of a crash, no evidence of a struggle, and no explanation for why the van was there — or where Sara had gone. Wh...

He built the scene before he ever needed it. Then he found out how well the story worked. Edmonton, Alberta. A married father with a failing production company, a growing obsession, and a garage full of secrets. A detective who doesn't buy the story. A document buried on a laptop that reads like a confession dressed up as fiction. This is the man behind the mask — and the trial that finally caught...

It starts with a message. A little hope, after a hard year. A date that feels, finally, like something good. It doesn't stay that way. Edmonton, Alberta. October 2008. A residential garage on the city's south side. Instructions that seem careful, reasonable, easy to follow — a partly open door, a walk across a dark backyard, a knock. Behind that door is nothing anyone could have prepared for. This...

On April 15, 2005, Centre County, Pennsylvania District Attorney Ray Gricar took the day off, told his girlfriend he was going for a drive, and was never seen again. His car was found locked the next day outside an antiques mall, his cell phone still inside — but his keys, wallet, and laptop were gone. In Part One, we dig into Ray Gricar's twenty-year career as DA, the frantic first weeks of the s...

Years after Ray Gricar vanished without a trace, a disturbing discovery about his own computer reopens the case in a whole new light. A scandal connects his name to one of the biggest in American sports history. In Part Two, we trace the twists that followed the Centre County DA's 2005 disappearance: a missing hard drive, a fractured law enforcement community, an infamous case Gricar once declined...

Last episode, we told you who Patsy Wright was. Today, we go looking for who killed her. In part two, the suspects are named and the cards go on the table — one by one, with everything pointing toward them and everything that gives you pause. A brother-in-law with a financial deadline two weeks away, and debt stacking up. An ex-husband who told his own wife he knew people who could get someone snu...

Patsy Wright had everything going for her. A thriving business, a dream ranch on the horizon, a cutting horse she'd competed on and won with, and a life that was finally — after two marriages, an inheritance battle, and years of careful building — moving exactly in the direction she wanted. On the evening of October 22nd, 1987, she came home from a Halloween party at her family's wax museum in Gra...

For decades, the domestic violence movement has operated on a familiar script: abuser is bad, survivor should leave, and the system's job is to punish after the fact. Liz Ortenburger, CEO of SafeNest — Nevada's largest domestic and sexual violence nonprofit, serving Clark County since 1977 — has spent the last ten years challenging that script from the inside. In this conversation, Liz walks us th...

Barbara Mae Tucker was 19 years old — a business student at Mount Hood Community College, a former high school athlete, the baby of a big, blended family — when she was murdered walking to a night class on January 15th, 1980. In her final minutes, multiple drivers saw her flagging down cars on a road at the edge of campus. Not one of them called police. What followed was one of the largest investi...

This is part two of two, if you haven't, listen to part one, then come back to hear the shocking conclusion. For years after Barbara Mae Tucker's murder in Gresham, Oregon, her case sat alongside a growing list of other unsolved local homicides — a running wound for a family, and a community, that never stopped waiting for answers. Her mother died without knowing. Her father died without knowing....

In April 2010, Eric Preimesberger — a 29-year-old father of two known for his big smile and his beloved scooter — vanished from his Reno, Nevada home. His wife told police he'd stormed out after an argument and would never be back. For months, that was the only story anyone had. But Eric's mother never bought it. She kept pushing, kept calling, kept refusing to let her son's disappearance quietly...

If you've been following the Josh Hunsucker case, you know he was arrested for his wife Stacy's death in 2019. What happened in the years after — while he waited, out on bond, for a trial that still hasn't happened — is a story we weren't prepared for either. This week, we're covering everything that unfolded between his arrest and today: an ongoing wrongful death lawsuit from Stacy's parents, a c...