A Simpler Time True Crime

It was the end of the semester at UCLA. Students were finishing exams, celebrating, and preparing to head home for the holidays. A freshman named Michael joined friends at a dorm party before winding down with a late-night computer game with another friend in the building. In the early morning hours, he stepped out to congratulate his friend on the win, then headed back toward his room. From that...

In the spring of 1991, a three-year-old girl was playing outside with her siblings and cousins while her mother and aunt were inside. She knew the rules her mom had set—especially not to cross the parking lot alone. That simple rule left her briefly apart from the older children, and in those few unguarded moments on the apartment playground, she disappeared. At first, her mother believed she had...

If you look up this case online, you’ll see one version of events repeated over and over: A young girl leaves a hangout spot to walk home, takes a cut-through trail, and never makes it back. Her body is later found in a nearby ditch, and a witness claims they saw a man follow her into the woods. That’s the story I first read, and it’s the one most people believe. But in recent years, Donna’s cousi...

Sharon was a talented high school dancer with a bright future in ballet. One afternoon, a phone call pulled her from the safety of home. She told her mom she’d be right back, then stepped outside and into a waiting vehicle. She was never seen alive again. Days later her body was found, leaving her family and the small New Jersey community reeling. More than forty years have passed, but those who k...

A 41-year-old Texas woman is trapped in a violent marriage. After barely surviving a previous attack, she gains distance and the hope of a fresh start. But slowly he lures her back into his web. And then one day, she vanishes. Her family receives a letter from her stating she’s leaving her husband, but they grow suspicious when they don’t hear from her. Her husband was uncooperative and maintained...

In scary movies, there’s always that moment—the chase, the panic, the victim just steps away from help when they’re suddenly pulled back into danger. It’s a trope meant to shock us and keep us on the edge of our seats. But in 1970, in a quiet Oregon town, that moment wasn’t fiction. It was real. A young woman, terrified and desperate, made it all the way to the doorstep of help, only for the kille...

People in the midst of a mental health crisis are at a much higher risk of going missing. In the late summer of 1989, a 64-year-old man from North Carolina became part of that troubling reality. That evening, police had been called to his home multiple times in response to what seemed like episodes of paranoia. But later that night, he stepped outside into the dark and was never seen again. It was...

  An 8-year-old boy in Clearwater, Florida spends the evening with his mother and asks if he can sleep in her bed. After putting him to sleep, his mother struggles to fall asleep due to typically working the overnight shift. As the hours tick on, she finally decides to leave Zach alone to get some fresh air. When she returns, he is nowhere to be found. This is a complex case with very few confirma...

It was late January of 1973. Across the country, people were mourning the passing of former President Lyndon B. Johnson. His funeral was set to be broadcast on national television, and schools across the U.S. closed for the day so families could watch. In a quiet neighborhood near Dayton, Ohio, that unexpected day off meant a teenage girl was home alone—just for a short while. But during that smal...

A beautiful and vivacious 32-year-old woman had hit a sweet-spot of success in her life. She was a high-ranking sales consultant for the beauty company Mary Kay and on pace to be one of the top ranks in the company. But one evening in 2002, all of her momentum would be halted when her life was snuffed out by a violent sexual predator.  When she realized she was in danger, she heroically placed a c...

It was the last day of school, and 9-year-old Scott from St. Charles, Missouri, was ready to dive into summer. He started the season like so many other kids—riding his bike and exploring a nearby wooded area popular with local children. But in a single moment, Scott vanished. That same afternoon, a powerful thunderstorm swept through the area, triggering flash floods. At first, many believed he ma...

Send us a text On an unseasonably beautiful fall day in Duluth, Minnesota, a 33-year-old mother decides to take time for herself to bike the beautiful scenic Highway 61 along the shoreline of Lake Superior. After pulling off to take a breather and enjoy the sunshine along the shore, she is brutally attacked in broad daylight. Even though there were bicyclists, drivers, joggers, and boaters everywh...

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Send us a text On this podcast, I often share cases filled with mystery — where there are multiple suspects, possible outcomes, and unanswered questions about what happened or who was responsible. But for every one of those cases, there are just as many where both the loved ones of the missing or murdered person and law enforcement feel certain they know what happened — they just don’t have the ev...

Send us a text Friday July 21st, 1961 was ranked the fourth hottest day in Washington DC that year, coming in at 93 degrees. And so, the children on their summer school break were trying to keep cool. Amongst those was a young girl named Hattie, who went to play at Rock Creek Park with some friends and her older brother. But the water at Rock Creek Park wasn’t safe to swim in and a series of event...

Send us a text It was a Monday afternoon in July. Leota, a mother of three, was home with her kids, doing the most ordinary of tasks — hanging laundry on the clothesline.   But while she was outside, someone is believed to have slipped into her home and waited.  What happened next shattered her family’s world — and left behind a mystery that’s remained unsolved for decades.  Still, there’s hope. B...

Send us a text In 1979, a woman drops her husband off to his shift at K-Mart in a shopping plaza in Shreveport, Louisiana. She doesn’t make it too far back towards home when she realizes her tire is flat. She pulls over to the side of the road and vanishes. While her husband was immediately fearful of foul play, some recent odd behavior led others to think maybe she had just run away. That was unt...

Send us a text There is something so eerie about a case like the one I’m about to tell you about today. I think its because, sleeping in your bed in the comfort of your home is where you’re supposed to feel most safe. Ironically, its often the place small children feel most afraid and vulnerable.   In the early morning hours of the fourth of July in 2002, four year old Dannarriah was put to bed. I...

Send us a text If you’ve found this episode, you may have been pulled in by the title. And if you’ve listened to my show for a while, you know I try to avoid dramatic headlines and writing. But the fact of the matter is, no matter how many titles I tossed around for this episode, I kept coming back to the urgency of telling this story and how dangerous it’s going to be in Spring of 2027 for anybod...

Send us a text The Montana Teacher of the Year was known for his words of wisdom, volunteering his time, coaching, mentoring, helping students in need, and leaving lasting impact on everyone he taught. So when he was gunned down in the early morning hours of September 30th, 1996 the community was shook. Within days, focus shifted on two former students of his. But between an acquittal and lack of...

Send us a text Its summer of 1990, a thirteen-year-old Texas girl named Deanna is doing her best, living in a difficult situation but also trying to just be a regular teenage girl. One night, she sneaks out of the house to visit her twin sister, who is staying with a relative. They chat for a bit before the relative wakes up and tells her to head back home. But Deanna would never make it back home...

Send us a text July 1986 - Silver Spring, Maryland. – A nineteen-year-old black man named Keith Warren heads out for an evening and never returns home. Two days later, he is found hanging from a tree in a wooded area behind a townhome complex. From the moment law enforcement arrived at the scene, everything was egregiously mishandled, and Keith’s case was abruptly ruled as a suicide and closed. As...

Send us a text In January of 1981, an Oklahoma woman is celebrating her 21st birthday. She kisses her husband goodbye that morning as he heads to school, and she tells him that she plans to run errands, have lunch with a friend, and have a quiet dinner in with him that evening. She talks to friends and family that morning who call to wish her a Happy Birthday, but she stops responding in the early...

Send us a text On an ordinary winter day in January of 2001, a sixty-eight year old woman set off on a hike with three others. Shortly into the trail, she decided she wasn’t up for the hike and turned around to go back to the park’s lodge area while the other’s carried on to the destination. When the others returned, there was no sign of her, and there hasn’t been ever since. Besides her hiking pa...

Send us a text TW: Mention of sexual abuse towards a minor If you walked around the Jordan Heights Neighborhood of Allentown, PA in early 1984, you might bump into a cute little seven-year-old boy. If you did, the 44 lb elementary school student with light brown hair and sweet blue eyes would likely say to you something like this: “Hi, I’m Louis. Let’s be friends!” A stranger to nobody, Louis was...