A Simpler Time True Crime

Send us a text In January of 2002, a group of four land surveyors were working in a lightly wooded area in Harris County Georgia. According to the crew, they were all walking in the same direction about 50 feet apart and carrying on conversation. A 20 year old named Christopher was last in the vertical line and the third person in line asked Christopher a question and got no answer. When he turned...

Send us a text On an early Wednesday morning in 1992, a husband and father called home to check in on his family. His wife was typically on her own in the morning, managing the routine of caring for their preschooler while getting their elementary-aged son up and moving and out the door while he was at work. Appreciating that she had her hands full, he liked to call to make sure the older boy was...

Send us a text It was an ordinary October day in 1978, and a utility worker named Steve was laying cable on a remote highway in Lyon County, Iowa. Just a short distance off the road he spotted what he thought was a mannequin. But as he got closer, he soon realized that he had come across something far worse. It was the partially clothed body of a dead woman, and it appeared she had been there for...

Two young girls, opposite sides of the country, thirteen years apart, with one thing in common: they chased after the ice cream truck and vanished without a trace. Join me as I discuss the cases of Equilla Hodrick, an 8-year-old from the Bronx in 1985 and Mikelle Biggs, an 11-year-old from Mesa, Az. I'll share their stories, the possibilities of what happened to them, and where the cases stand tod...

Send us a text On a spring weekend in 1970, a group of boy scouts went camping on a church property in Pennsylvania and spent the weekend having fun and doing typical outdoor activities. But on the morning they were to leave, the scouts would wake up to find on of their own dead in his sleeping bag. Despite two dozen people being at the campsite and everyone sleeping within feet of each other, nob...

Send us a text  The release of this episode, on February 10th, 2025 will mark a devastating milestone. The 35th Anniversary of possibly the most horrific crime the state of New Mexico has ever seen. Early on a Saturday morning, the community of Las Cruces New Mexico would have its sense of safety and serenity shattered forever, when two gunman entered a family-owned small business and gunned down...

Send us a text A computer programmer is running month end inventory at an empty office park on her day off. At least, she thought it was empty. The next morning her colleagues reported to work and found the building flooded and signs that a fire had been started around the woman's desk. Further examination would reveal blood at her workspace and the next few days would uncover one ominous clue aft...

Send us a text Ann Arbor Michigan, 1994. College junior Renee Welka and a friend are returning home to her apartment complex after a night out. Shortly after parking her car, a man emerges from the shadows and pulls a gun, shooting Renee once in the back through the window. Renee tries to drive away but doesn't make it out of the parking lot, dying from her injuries. Her passenger quickly identifi...

Send us a text A family of four is camping with their friends at a remote campground in Maine near the Canadian border. On a Sunday morning after a hearty camping breakfast next to the fire, the moms went to the boathouse to wash dirty shoes, the Dads went to get more firewood and the kids played. Amongst them was four-year-old Kurt, who was riding his Big Wheel Tricycle. In about a ten-minute win...

Send us a text Austin Texas, 1983. A close-knit family is experiencing a wave of terror and domestic violence connected to a recent break-up. By the time everything played out, there would be burglary, threats, stalking, arson, false allegations to a workplace, attempted shootings, assault, and eventually there would be murder. So much of this heartbreaking situation has been left unresolved, with...

Send us a text A young family living off the grid in a rugged part of Northern California in late 1977. The mother and her two toddlers set out to do a host of errands never to return. Nobody in the city of Eureka saw the family complete their errands, but when the vehicle is later found, there's evidence that they did.  The mystery of this finding causes rumors to swirl in the tiny community. Did...

Send us a text Just three days after Christmas of 1964, in the quiet town of Garfield Heights, Ohio a sixteen-year-old girl was getting ready to meet up with friends. When her friend shows up at their agreed upon time, she does not answer the door. Later that afternoon, the teen's father would come home to a horrific discovery – his oldest daughter dead on her bedroom floor, the victim of a viciou...

Send us a text On a hot summer night, a toddler is spending time with her grandmother and other neighbors on the breezeway of her high-rise apartment complex in Chicago. She is left alone in the busy hallway for just minutes, but in that time she disappears. Nearly fifty people were present at the time she was abducted, but nobody claims to have seen anything. Her mother has gone on to be a champi...

Send us a text A woman training for a marathon leaves her house early on a Saturday morning to jog a country road on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. An hour into her run, she is brutally attacked and left for dead. She managed to get to the roadside and eventually a car stopped to help. Her last words were describing her attacker: white guy, blue car. Her case went to the backburner for decades af...

Send us a text Darwin Vest was a bit of a local celebrity in Idaho Falls. He was known locally as Spider Man because of his passion for studying spiders (and snakes, and other creatures that many of us run away from). His biggest claim to fame was identifying and naming the Hobo Spider that had made its way into homes all over the Pacific Northwest. He was an expert at studying venom in snakes, sp...

Send us a text A teen is babysitting a young boy on a stormy March night in 1950. All is going according to plan until a frantic call comes in to police with a woman screaming, only able to yell "come quick!" Unable to trace the call, police have to hope she just calls back. But she wouldn't. The next call would be from the parents of the little boy who return to find their son unharmed but the ba...

Send us a text A Tennessee teen is picked up by her twin brother from work, but they run out of gas just a half mile up the road. A kind family pulls over and offers to take them to get gas. Her brother goes with them, but she decides to stay in the locked car and wait for him to return. In the nine minutes he was gone, she would vanish. A sexual predator who often posed as law enforcement confess...

Send us a text A teen borrows his brother's sports car to take his date to the school dance in 1977. After dropping her off, both he and his brother's sports car disappear forever. Did Jerry suffer a tragic accident and drive his car into a body of water, or was he the victim of a racially motivated hate crime on those back roads of rural Mississippi? Even all of these years later, people are stil...

Send us a text A real estate agent is lured to a home with a potential buyer, only to be brutally murdered. This episode discusses the dangers often not discussed around working as a real estate professional and how this has changed over time. Huge thank you to my friend Julia who gave first-hand insight into her perspective as a real estate agent herself. https://www.mcall.com/2007/09/09/10-years...

Send us a text A woman is about to make her final vows as a nun and is taking part in a spiritual retreat on Convent grounds to pray about her decision. One morning, she grabbed an apple and her Bible and walked up a hill less than 100 yards away from the Retreat House to sit on a bench and pray. Just hours later, her lifeless body would be discovered 40 feet away from that overturned bench. The b...

Send us a text A mother arrives home where her 19-year-old daughter and 18 month old grandson are staying with her. She expects the house to be empty because her daughter is supposed to be at work and her grandson to the babysitters. But when she arrives home, she see's her daughter's car still in the driveway. Even more puzzling, the house is locked from the inside. Confusion turns to concern whe...

Send us a text A nurse works the overnight shift and then drives home to her house on a dead-end dirt road. She calls her mother and husband to let them know she made it home safe, and then crawls into bed to sleep. That would be the last time anyone would hear from her again. When her husband and children arrived home they would find signs of a violent struggle in the house, but Melinda was nowhe...

Send us a text A mother of five takes advantage of some beautiful sunny weather to swim and have a few beers with friends on the shores of the Missouri River.  When she doesn't make it home, suspicion falls on the people who she was hanging out with that day.  After her body is found, the FBI gets involved and a large reward is put out for information on her case, but to this day it has not been s...

Send us a text The 1980s were a terrifying time for some of the population's most vulnerable in Salt Lake City, Utah: A predator was targeting elderly women who lived alone. When numbers climbed into the double digits, police were confronted with a terrifying reality: It wasn't just one suspect. There was a serial killer with twisted sexual fantasies, there were one-off robberies, and some still u...

Send us a text A high school senior rides the bus to school, puts his books into his locker, talks to his friends, and never makes it to his first period class. He was on the verge of qualifying for the USA Ski Team, had put down his deposit for college, and was looking forward to the upcoming ski competition that weekend.  But those close to him say he seemed troubled by something in the days lea...