A True crime Podcast

In Houston, Texas, in the early 1970s, the man handing free candy to kids outside an elementary school was making them disappear. Dean Corll, known as the Candy Man, paid two teenage accomplices to lure boys to his homes, where at least 28 young victims were abducted, tortured, and murdered. The killings went largely undetected until one accomplice shot Corll dead in 1973 and led police to the bod...

For nearly two years, children and young men disappeared from Atlanta’s streets. Most were Black boys between the ages of 7 and 17. Their bodies were found strangled and dumped in woods, vacant lots, and the Chattahoochee River. Parents stopped letting kids walk alone. The city lived in fear. Then, at 2:52 a.m. on May 22, 1981, a police stakeout on a bridge heard a loud splash. Minutes later, offi...

On Easter Sunday 1955, Ruth Ellis shot her lover David Blakely dead outside a London pub. Ninety-four days later she became the last woman executed in the UK. Her trial lasted barely a day. The jury never heard the full story of the violence she had endured. Decades later, in 2026, she received a posthumous conditional pardon. This is the true story of the platinum-blonde nightclub hostess, the gu...

In Victorian England, a nurse and mother named Mary Ann Cotton watched husbands, stepchildren, and even her own babies die of “gastric fever”—then collected the insurance. Alexander Lawson traces the quiet, calculated killings of Britain’s most prolific female serial killer, from the coal towns of County Durham to the botched hanging that ended her life. How did she poison as many as twenty-one pe...

“Go down to the shore and wait.” Those were the final words Elaine O’Hara ever received. On 22 August 2012, the 36-year-old childcare worker left a psychiatric hospital, followed instructions from a man she called “Sir,” and walked toward the water at Shanganagh Park in south Dublin. She was never seen alive again. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast , host Alexander Lawson examines the case o...

In the fall of 1972, a 25-year-old man in Santa Cruz, California began hearing voices. They told him that if he didn’t kill, a catastrophic earthquake would destroy the state. Over the next four months, Herbert Mullin murdered 13 people—believing each death was a necessary human sacrifice to save millions. Once voted “Most Likely to Succeed,” Mullin was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic whose del...

In June 1993, New York State Troopers pulled over a landscaper on Long Island for a missing license plate. What they found under a tarp in his pickup truck ended a four-year killing spree no one had connected. Joel Rifkin, an adopted kid from East Meadow living with his mother, confessed to murdering 17 women—mostly sex workers struggling with addiction—between 1989 and 1993. Convicted of nine mur...

In January 1978, a six-year-old girl knocked on a neighbor’s door for a playdate and looked through the window. What she saw was the aftermath of a blood-soaked massacre. Four people dead. A toddler missing. Blood drunk. Organs removed. The killer had simply walked in through an unlocked door—because he believed an unlocked door was an invitation. This is the story of Richard Trenton Chase, the ma...

On a warm May afternoon in 1924, two of the richest, smartest teenagers in America lured 14-year-old Bobby Franks into a rented car. Minutes later he was dead. They called it the perfect crime. It wasn’t. Host Alexander Lawson unravels the chilling story of Richard Loeb—the privileged University of Chicago student who, alongside Nathan Leopold, kidnapped and murdered a neighbor for the thrill of i...

In 1924, two wealthy Chicago teenagers decided they were above the law. Nathan Leopold — a nineteen-year-old prodigy, birdwatcher, and Nietzsche devotee — and his closest friend Richard Loeb spent months planning what they called the perfect crime: the kidnapping and murder of a random rich boy, purely for the intellectual thrill of getting away with it. On May 21 they lured fourteen-year-old Bobb...

On his 31st birthday in June 1994, Julian Webb sat down to his favourite meal — an extra-hot curry cooked by his wife. By the next morning he was dead, and she was already asking about his £36,000 death benefit. She said he took his own life. For years, the inquest agreed. But Dena Thompson, the woman the British press called the Black Widow, had a pattern. Through lonely-hearts columns she target...

In the early hours of 7 August 1985, police were called to a locked farmhouse in rural Essex. Inside they found five members of the Bamber family dead — including two young boys shot in their beds. The only survivor was 24-year-old Jeremy Bamber, who claimed his sister had “gone berserk” with a gun before killing herself. For weeks, that story held. Then his girlfriend walked into a police station...

In January 1982, 33-year-old mother of two Lynette Dawson vanished from her home on Sydney’s northern beaches after telling her mother her husband had just made her “a lovely drink.” For four decades, former rugby league player and high school teacher Chris Dawson insisted she had simply walked out on him and their young daughters. Within days of her disappearance, the teenage student he’d been ha...

In the fall of 1977, Los Angeles was gripped by terror. Bodies of young women and girls—some as young as 12—kept turning up naked and strangled on the city’s hillsides. The press named the killer the Hillside Strangler. What no one knew yet was that the murders were the work of two men: cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono Jr., a foul-mouthed auto upholsterer in Glendale who called himself the...

Two girls walking home from school. A man steps out with a badge. “Police. You’re under arrest.” They believed him. Their bodies were found posed on a Los Angeles hillside. In this episode, host Alexander Lawson takes you inside the chilling crimes of Kenneth Bianchi—one half of the Hillside Stranglers. From the brutal Los Angeles murders of 1977–78 to the two women he killed alone in Washington,...

There is a cell under Wakefield Prison that was built for one man. Bulletproof glass. A cardboard chair. Food passed through a hatch. The prisoner inside has killed four people — three of them after the state had already locked him up. In 1974, twenty-year-old Robert John Maudsley walked into a London police station after killing a man who had shown him photographs of abused children. Sent to Broa...

Thanksgiving Day, 2018. Kelsey Berreth, a 29-year-old flight instructor, is seen for the last time pushing a grocery cart in Woodland Park, Colorado, her one-year-old daughter in the seat. Ten days later she is reported missing. Her phone is still texting. Her body is never found. Host Alexander Lawson traces how her fiancé, rancher Patrick Frazee, first asked his mistress three times to kill Kels...

On the morning of January 25, 2006, a woman leaves a house in the Moctezuma neighborhood of Mexico City in a hurry. Inside, Ana María de los Reyes Alfaro is dead, strangled with the cord of a stethoscope. The visitor the police stop is not the man the city has been hunting. She is Juana Dayanara Barraza Samperio, a wrestling fan who called herself La Dama del Silencio, the Lady of Silence. The pre...

On 4 August 2002, ten-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman left a family barbecue in Soham to buy sweets. A security camera caught them in matching red Manchester United shirts. They never came home. For thirteen days the town searched, and the school caretaker who said he was the last person to speak to them stood in front of the cameras and helped look. Alexander Lawson tells the story of I...

She called herself a lonely widow with a farm outside La Porte, Indiana. The ads asked for a reliable man, preferably Norwegian, willing to come alone and bring cash. In the spring of 1908, neighbors dug up Belle Gunness’s hog pen and stopped counting the bodies. Alexander’s Lawson tells the story of the Norwegian-born killer known as Hell’s Belle: the husbands, the insurance money, the men who an...

In March 1953, a tenant at 10 Rillington Place tapped a kitchen wall and found three bodies hidden behind fresh wallpaper. The man who had lived there for fifteen years was already gone. His name was John Reginald Halliday Christie, a former special constable who had stood in the witness box three years earlier and helped send Timothy Evans to the gallows. Alexander Lawson tells the story of the N...

In 1982, parents in Texas handed their children to a nurse named Genene Jones. Some of those children stopped breathing in her care. One was Chelsea McClellan, fifteen months old, dead after a shot she never needed. Jones was convicted, given 99 years, and then scheduled for release. This episode is how a pediatric nurse became the suspect in a string of infant deaths, how one murder was proved, a...

At 2:32 on a Tuesday in Bushey, Carol Hunt let her daughter’s ex-boyfriend in. He said he was returning Louise’s things. Within minutes Carol was dead. He waited. Louise came in from the garden. Hannah came home from work and texted: “he’s tying us up.” Kyle Clifford, 26, had spent eleven days planning it: a crossbow bought online for £350, a butcher’s knife, rope, duct tape. He murdered Carol, 61...

A package outside a Salt Lake City office killed Steven Christensen before he could stand back up. Two hours later, a second bomb killed Kathy Sheets in her own home. She was not the target. The man who built both devices was Mark Hofmann, a document dealer who had spent years forging Mormon history, including the infamous Salamander Letter, and selling it to collectors and church leaders. When a...

In 1987, a baker in Leicestershire paid a colleague to give blood in his name. Two hundred pounds. A clean result. The police never got his sample. They already had it. It was on the bodies of two fifteen-year-old girls, Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth, raped and strangled on footpaths three miles apart. For nearly four years, nobody could put a name to it. Then a woman in a pub overheard the wrong c...