A Simpler Time True Crime

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...

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...