Just The Tip-Sters: True Crime Podcast

October 1969.  Nighttime in a quiet, leafy upscale suburban neighborhood in one of Cincinnati's toniest conclaves.  A young couple with two young children, and the wife's mother, all presumably asleep inside.  Except when the kids wake up the next morning and go to the neighbors to say they can't rouse mom and dad, what the neighbors find is simply horrific: The stabbed and shot bodies of Martin D...

Here's a twisted little murder story of justice delayed and (at least as of right now) justice denied for the victim - the location of whose body still hasn't been revealed by the killer.  And about that killer - dude named Will Greer (no not Grandpa Walton - this bastard has an "r" in his last name).  Greer actually drunkenly admitted - while TWO police video cameras were rolling - that he killed...

There are mysteries.  There are baffling mysteries.  And then there are mysteries that throw an entire nation into fits of frustration and anger.  This is one of those cases.  3 year-old William Tyrrell was playing with his older sister - when his foster mother (who was watching both kids with her own mom) went into the house briefly.  When she returned, young William was gone - the grandmother ha...

In 1956 Chicago, it wasn't unusual for a couple of young women to venture out on foot at night to see a movie at a local theater.  So when 15 year-old Barbara Grimes and her 12 year-old sister Patricia - both huge fans of Elvis Presley - asked their mom if they could walk to the local cinema to watch "Love Me Tender" for the umpteenth time on December 28, 1956, Loretta Grimes had no problem saying...

Back a few episodes ago (JTT Episode 98 to be precise) Melissa covered the puzzling 1963 murder of young Hollywood actress Karyn Kupcinet.  Karyn's killer has never been identified, but her demise was surrounded in a shroud of weirdness, including a tie to the JFK assassination and a possible link to a tough guy matinee idol named Lawrence Tierney, who, Melissa was once told by a colleague of Tier...

Matthew Weaver Jr. was troubled - but really not that much more troubled than any other 21 year-old young man is troubled.  So when he went for a late night ride in the hills above Malibu California in August 2018, it seemed a perfectly natural thing for him to do, to catch his breath and settle his mind.  Except that he never returned.  His car was found perilously perched at a place called Rosas...

In August 1994 a sports fisherman cruising the Hawkesbury River in Sydney Australia got a tug on his line unlike any he'd gotten before.  Hauling what he thought was going to be a prize flathead into his boat, he instead encountered pure horror: The macabre remains of a man's body tied to a cross-like rack.  Forensic science determined that the man had been killed roughly one year prior - but that...

It's the 100th episode of "Just The Tip-Sters" - and Melissa marks the occasion with a tragic story from her home state of Kentucky - in honor of those who perished and in celebration of the positive strides, both culturally and in the law, that sprang forth after that terrible day.  On May 14, 1988, a converted school bus carrying 63 (mostly) young teenagers and four adults (including the bus dri...

This episode Melissa details two unrelated cases involving two sets of two best friends, one case a little weird but solved , the other completely mysterious and just as completely unsolved.   In July 2019, school teachers Kenneth Anderson Jr. and Mark Anderson (no relation, believe it or not) were found dead in the swimming pool of a house they were sitting in Davenport Iowa.  Local police recent...

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Karyn Kupcinet was a beautiful young actress working her way up the Hollywood ladder, using her grit, tenacity (and her dad's solid connections throughout the entertainment industry) to eventually get steady work and even praise for her acting ability.  In November 1963 - just 8 days after the Kennedy assassination, Karyn was found murdered in her apartment, strangled to death by an unknown assail...

In 1978, while hitchhiking to visit a relative, 15 year-old Mary Vincent  was abducted, then repeatedly raped and sodomized, then tortured by 51 year-old Lawrence Singleton, who then attempted to finish the teenager off by cutting both of her arms off with an ax, then kicking her into a drainage ditch.  Almost impossibly, young Mary found the will to stuff dirt into the stubs that were once her fo...

In April 1989, Ramon Salcido, a husband and father of three girls, went on a drunken, ghastly, deadly rampage, killing seven people, including his wife, two of his daughters, his mother-in-law, two sisters-in-law and a coworker.  What he did with his three daughters was particularly evil - he  took them to a dump, slit their throats from ear-to-ear and left them to die in piles of garbage.  The so...

Here's a quick between-regular-episodes MURDERTIZER to abate your appetite for All Melissa, All the Time - and it's got some BIG NEWS - Peter Chadwick, the millionaire (alleged) wife killer who told cops one of the stupidest "my spouse was murdered" stories ever (allegedly) concocted and then, once arrested, got out on bail and (allegedly) skipped the country for four years - has finally been foun...

SURVIVOR MONTH on Just The Tip-Sters begins with our first edition of MURDER NERD UNIVERSITY - where Melissa focuses on the sciences and practices and interesting people - both in the past and in modern-day criminology - that contribute to the art of criminal justice.  In late 2017 Brigida Uto (who later changed her surname back to maiden name McInvale for reasons that will become obvious) got ver...

It was October 7, 1992 in Morphett Vale, South Australia, and 12 year-old Rhianna Barreau was on a school holiday.  Rhianna, who lived with her mother and brother, wanted to buy a Christmas card for her pen pal in America (remember, this was 1992 and it took awhile for a card to get from Australia to the U.S.).  The family lived only about a mile or so away from a local shopping center, so when Rh...

Back around the turn of the century...no not 2001....no, no, not 1901...the turn of the century before THAT, in the late 1700s and early 1800s...a young man raised in a good family in France was very busy being a very very bad boy, all over France as well as a good chunk of Europe.  His name was Eugene Francois Vidocq, and his penchant for getting into trouble with the law was matched only by his...

Back at Season 2, Episode 28 Melissa covered the missing person case of Savannah Spurlock, a young single mother who lived near Lexington, Kentucky and who disappeared after leaving a bar with two men in January of 2019.  Her family's quick response to her disappearance and steadfastness in making sure law enforcement stayed relentless in finding out what happened has been nothing short of phenome...

The tragic 1987 public suicide of Pennsylvania State Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer is one of the most well known, horrifying and sad media events ever to occur in the United States.  A media event because Dwyer shot himself in the mouth with a .357 magnum revolver during a live, highly-publicized press conference.  Horrifying because it was a snow day and kids were home from school watching TV when it h...

In the dark early evening of November 20, 2011, 23 year-old David Michael Grubbs left his job at a local supermarket in Ashland Oregon, carrying some groceries, to walk home.  Just a couple of hours later, David's body was found just off a bike path that was on his route home.  The body was nearly decapitated by what police determined was a medium to large blade such as a sword or machete.  Now go...

On January 4, 2019 Savannah Spurlock, a 22 year-old mother of 4 who had given birth to twins just a month earlier, was told by her mother that she should take a break and go have some fun.  So with grandma watching the kids, Savannah did just that - she and two friends went to downtown Lexington Kentucky for a night on the town and ended up at a place called The Other Bar.  After one friend left t...

Recently a Tip-Ster from Boston - "Tip-Ster Jennifer" - brought a case to Melissa's attention that she had not been aware of - the 1993 murders in Houston Texas of 14 year-old Jennifer Ertman and 16 year-old Elizabeth Pena.  The facts of the case are among the most gruesome and disturbing Melissa has ever encountered - but more than the horror of the crimes themselves were two compelling side-stor...

On the last day of June in 2017, Craig Lackey got to watch his 25 year-old son Chase compete in a ballgame in his home town of Houston, Texas.  After the game, Craig hugged his son and told him he'd had a great game - and Chase, a dazzlingly cheerful, happy young man and friend to all who knew him, told his dad he loved him.  That was the last time Craig saw his son.  The next day, Chase was seen...

By all appearances, Peter Chadwick is a pretty rotten human.  A millionaire British ex-pat living in an exclusive Southern California enclave with his wife and three sons, he suddenly disappears, along with his bride, one day in October 2012.  Early the next morning 911 operators some 100 miles away in San Diego get a call from Chadwick, who claims his wife had been killed the previous day, and th...

It's been just over a year since the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo, the alleged Golden State Killer, who was captured through an ingenious ploy by law enforcement, which registered the then-unknown killer's DNA under a dummy name on GEDMatch, a public DNA-based genealogy website.  That sample led to distant relatives of DeAngelo who had registered their DNA on GEDMatch.  From there, detectives p...