Dark Downeast

If there is any case where you wish you could turn back the clock and change just one small decision, it might be the disappearance of Bianca Lebron. There were several moments that morning in November 2001 when a question, a phone call, or one person stopping her before she walked away might have changed everything that came next. Now, as the 25 year mark approaches, Bianca’s case needs attention...

Why talk about a case that was solved years ago? Because the answer to who did it isn’t the only thing that matters. One night in October 2006, a college student needed to borrow a phone. She happened to ask a stranger with violent intentions. What makes that even harder to sit with is what investigators learned about this man afterward. There were red flags everywhere, allegations that reached ba...

On a Saturday morning in 1990, the body of a teenager was found on a dead-end street in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The scene raised immediate concerns, but the autopsy did not answer the question everyone needed answered most: how did Kasha Blount die? Police waited on the medical examiner. The medical examiner waited on police. Kasha’s mother pushed for answers and a re...

A young mother disappears just days before Christmas. More than a year later, another woman is murdered across state lines. The cases seem separate – different cities, different circumstances – but eventually they converge around the same teenage suspect. What follows is more complicated than a confession and a conviction. It’s a case shaped by questions of mental competency, juvenile justice, cha...

Host Sean Kipe investigates the 2020 disappearance of 27-year-old Georgia mother Natalie Jones, who vanished after a July 4th lake party. Her car and remains were found 93 days later in a rural field, sparking questions of accident, suicide, or murder—especially since Natalie had begun publicly sharing allegations of past abuse. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an...

In August of 1972, 44-year-old Gloria Gough left her home in Gardiner, Maine after a late-night phone call and vanished. Two days later, more than a thousand miles away in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, 52-year-old Evelyn “Penny” Deans was shot to death inside her home. Then police looked in Penny’s driveway. Sitting there was Gloria’s car. Inside were blood-soaked towels, clothing, and a map poi...

On a morning when the country’s attention was fixed on unimaginable tragedy, a Rhode Island family was learning that someone they loved was gone. In the hours before Nicole Parsons-Bucki died, there had been violence, a police response, and a relationship already under strain, but 25 years later, no one has been charged. That could be because the deeper you look at Nicole’s case, the less simple i...

On an ordinary winter night in 1981, danger was moving through the Bangor, Maine area in three different directions at once. A barroom dispute was followed by a deadly blaze. A drug sting was underway at a nearby apartment complex. And a few miles away, a lakeside cabin would be reduced to smoldering rubble before sunrise. None of those events appeared connected as they unfolded. But the first fir...

In a small New England city, a teenager disappeared after a night in the woods, and almost immediately, the story of what happened fractured. The last people known to be with her gave conflicting accounts. Her family believed the investigation lost precious time. As the years passed, searches kept returning to the same narrow stretch of land, the same handful of names, and the same possibility tha...

There are cases that frustrate you because the evidence is thin. And then there are cases where the warning signs seem to be everywhere, but the system still can’t quite turn suspicion into action. A woman leaves home for a few quiet days away. Weeks later, police find her car in the woods and the man last seen with her is carrying her gun and giving away her personal belongings. Investigators see...

Some people disappear from a place you can picture right away: a house, a road, a parking lot, a stretch of woods. But in the case of Edward Sprenkle Dubbs Jr., he seems to vanish somewhere between the parts of his life that made sense on paper.  He had an office in New York, a home in Connecticut, a train he took like clockwork, and people waiting for him on both ends of the day. When he did not...

Sometimes, on an island, the only witness is the water. In January of 1980, a brilliant Columbia doctor went to her home on Nantucket’s remote east end carrying the weight of a life’s work, a possible medical breakthrough, and a kind of urgency the people around her struggled to understand. By the next morning, she was gone. No ferry record. No plane tickets. No clear path away from the house. Jus...

When someone has been missing for more than thirteen years, it can start to feel from the outside like the story has stopped moving. Like whatever answers existed back then are either gone now or buried too deep to reach. But for Ryan Blagojevic’s family, time has not softened the urgency. His sister Eve is still living inside the search for her brother, still turning over every possibility, still...

Victoria Cushman was just 29 years old when she was found murdered inside her Warwick, Rhode Island apartment, just steps from the sporting goods store where she worked. For years, her family waited for answers and eventually, the case seemed to have them: a suspect known to the case from day one, who investigators said had motive to end Vickie’s life. The evidence was circumstantial, but it was c...

In the summer of 2018, Trish Haynes disappeared from New Hampshire. Or at least, that’s what the public knew. Investigators searched a rural property, then quietly recovered something from a nearby pond, but for months, they said almost nothing about what they had found or how it related to the missing persons case. Behind the scenes, Trish’s family was living with a very different reality. They h...

In 2016, the disappearance of Valerie Tieman became one of the most talked-about cases in Maine in the last decade. At first, there was room for hope, and maybe even a version of the story where Valerie had simply walked away from a life that had become too painful.  Her husband, Luc Tieman, was a wounded military veteran, a man whose service and struggles shaped how people first understood him. B...

On a Friday afternoon in July of 1991, Martha Brailsford told friends she was going sailing. In coastal Massachusetts at what is often the peak of summer heat and humidity, that wasn’t unusual. Martha knew the water, and in Salem Willows, boats were part of the everyday landscape. There was no reason to think a simple afternoon sail would become anything else. But when Martha didn’t come home that...

Estella Brantley’s murder should have been urgent from the beginning. She was found in one of Bridgeport’s most visible public places, around witnesses who may have heard her final moments, with evidence that would one day matter more than anyone could have known when it was first collected. But for years, Estella’s case stayed unresolved, folded into a larger city-wide pattern of deadly attacks o...

Sometimes, a case can have evidence, a suspect, and a theory investigators believe explains what happened yet a family is still left without the ending they waited decades to hear.  Grief and justice don’t always move at the same pace. Grief looks for truth, meaning, and someone to answer for what was taken. The justice system looks for proof, and proof has to survive questions, strategy, doubt, a...

On a summer weekend in 1982, Barre, Vermont was crowded with music, traffic, and thousands of people moving through town for an annual festival. Somewhere in that noise, an 18-year-old woman disappeared. In the days that followed, investigators tried to make sense of what little they had: fragments of sightings, possible suspects, conflicting leads, and tests that seemed to narrow the field. But t...

For nearly 40 years, Kathleen Flynn’s murder has haunted Norwalk, Connecticut. She was 11 years old, newly in middle school, walking home on a familiar path when she was attacked and killed. Her case became one of the state’s most well-known cold cases, the kind people never stopped talking about, and the kind investigators kept returning to as forensic science moved forward.  In 2019, after decad...

One spring evening in 1987, a college student got into a green car in Plymouth, New Hampshire and vanished. His friends believed he was coming back. His family knew he would have called if he’d left on his own. But he was gone, and the man believed to be with him on the night he disappeared had a long history of run-ins with the law. What started as a missing persons investigation soon stretched a...

In February 2008 , six women were held hostage in a women’s clothing store in Tinley Park, Illinois.. Rhoda McFarland, Carrie Hudek Chiuso, Connie Woolfolk, Sarah Szafranski, and Jennifer Bishop were executed and the killer escaped leaving only one survivor. In Season 8 of CounterClock, host and investigative journalist Delia D’Ambra covers the Lane Bryant Murders and goes further into the case th...

For more than 30 years, Pam Williams believed she knew how her brother died. She was told it was a medical event. The kind of tragedy no one could have stopped. She carried that explanation with her as she tried to rebuild her life around it. But sometimes the truth doesn’t disappear. It just waits. In 2016, a stranger showed up with questions about what really happened inside a school in rural Ma...

Some cases appear straightforward at first glance. A late-night crash on a quiet road, a damaged car, and a victim who doesn’t survive. It is the kind of situation people think they understand, and the kind that often gets explained quickly and filed away just as fast.  But sometimes, there are details that do not quite fit. They can be easy to overlook in the moment. A position that does not make...