A True crime Podcast

In the spring of 1984, Christopher Wilder drove from Florida toward the Canadian border, posing as a photographer and promising young women a picture that would change their lives. In forty-seven days he abducted at least twelve. At least eight were murdered. Host Alexander Lawson follows the Beauty Queen Killer from the Miami Grand Prix to a gas station in Colebrook, New Hampshire, and the strugg...

On a quiet veterans’ ward in Massachusetts, the code alarm became routine. The nurse who answered it was Kristen Gilbert. Prosecutors said she injected patients with epinephrine so a hospital security officer she wanted would come through the door. Four men died. A federal jury had to decide whether she would live. Alexander Lawson tells the Ward C case, the names the verdict proved, and the death...

In June 1989, Peter and Gwenda Dixon left their tent on the Pembrokeshire coast for one last walk. They never came back. Their killer had been on national television only weeks before, throwing darts for a cash prize. His name was John Cooper. For more than twenty years he stayed free, while two double murders, a rape, and a string of armed burglaries sat unsolved in west Wales. Alexander Lawson t...

October 15th, 1977. Two seventeen-year-olds leave a pub on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile called the World’s End. By morning Christine Eadie and Helen Scott are dead in East Lothian. The man who killed them will not be convicted of it for thirty-seven years. Angus Sinclair had already killed as a teenager. Police later believed 1977 was a year of murders. DNA tied him to Mary Gallacher. A 2007 trial for t...

On January 3, 1990, a police helicopter over the Genesee River spots a body in the ice — and a man on the bridge above it, watching. His name is Arthur Shawcross. New York had already locked him up for killing two children, then let him out. In the twenty-one months that followed, eleven more women died. Host Alexander Lawson traces the Watertown murders of Jack Blake and Karen Ann Hill, the parol...

February 1999. A mother, her teenage daughter, and her daughter’s friend check into a lodge at the edge of Yosemite. The man who hands them the key works the front desk. By the time the search starts, three of them are already gone. Carole Sund. Juli Sund. Silvina Pelosso. Months later, Joie Armstrong, a naturalist in the park. Cary Stayner — the older brother in a family America already knew for...

In February 1999, Carole Sund, her daughter Juli, and Silvina Pelosso checked into a motel at the edge of Yosemite and never checked out. For months the FBI hunted a stranger. The man who killed them was already inside the investigation — fixing the lights, changing the locks, walking agents to the room. His name was Cary Stayner. Alexander Lawson tells the story of four murders, a family already...

August 1990. A new semester has just started at the University of Florida. In four days, five students are dead: Sonja Larson, Christina Powell, Christa Hoyt, Tracy Paules, and Manuel Taboada. The man in the woods behind campus is Daniel Harold Rolling, later called the Gainesville Ripper. Florida does not yet know he has already killed three people in Shreveport, Louisiana, including an eight-yea...

In 1987 a medical examiner in Cincinnati opened a body that was supposed to be routine. The patient had died in a hospital. The paperwork said natural causes. The autopsy did not agree, and the trail led to a nurse’s aide named Donald Harvey. Alexander Lawson follows the seventeen years Harvey spent on hospital wards in Kentucky and Ohio, the list of names he kept at home, and the guilty pleas tha...

On 24 March 2011, Swindon taxi driver Christopher Halliwell sat in the back of an unmarked police car and told Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher to take the next left. At the end of the track, officers found Sian O’Callaghan, 22, missing since she left a nightclub five days earlier. Then Halliwell said there was another one. Alexander Lawson follows the drive that led police to Becky Godden,...

Alex Murdaugh called 911 just after 10 p.m. on June 7, 2021, and said he had just found his wife and son shot dead beside the dog kennels at Moselle. He told investigators he was never there. A video on Paul’s phone, recorded minutes before the shooting, put him at the scene. Alexander Lawson traces the Hampton County dynasty, the stolen millions, the boat crash that killed Mallory Beach, the road...

Valentine’s Day, 2013. Pretoria. Four shots through a locked bathroom door. On the other side is Reeva Steenkamp, twenty-nine, a model and a law graduate. The man with the gun is Oscar Pistorius, the Blade Runner, the double amputee South Africa sent to the Olympics. He says he thought she was an intruder. She was his girlfriend. A first court calls it culpable homicide. A higher court calls it mu...

New Jersey knew him as a computer operator. Married. Three kids in Lodi. A man who said the night shifts were work. In Times Square hotel rooms, he was the Torso Killer. For more than a decade Richard Cottingham abducted and murdered women in North Jersey and midtown Manhattan, then drove home. Firefighters found two women without heads or hands. A fingerprint turned up under a motel bed. He is st...

Anchorage knew him as Bob the baker. Quiet. Married. A record-holding bowhunter who sold doughnuts to cops. In the bush along the Knik River, he was something else. For twelve years Robert Hansen abducted women, flew them into the Alaska wilderness, and hunted them. He confessed to seventeen murders. Most of the city never looked twice, until a seventeen-year-old ran barefoot and handcuffed from h...

June 3rd, 1928. A gray-haired man tells a Manhattan mother he has come to take her daughter to a children’s party. Grace Budd is ten. She puts on a white dress. She does not come home. For six years the lie holds. Then a letter arrives, and the police find Albert Fish — the man the press will call the Gray Man, the Werewolf of Wysteria, the Brooklyn Vampire. He is convicted of Grace’s murder. Inve...

On a warm night in May 1983, Diane Downs pulled up to a Springfield, Oregon hospital with three shot children in her car and a story about a stranger on a dark country road. One child was already dead. Host Alexander Lawson follows the case that made investigators stop looking for that man and start looking at the woman who drove them in: the slow car, the wound in the wrong arm, the diaries, and...

In September 2006, Polish student Angelika Kluk vanished from a Glasgow church. Days later, police lifted the floorboards and found her body. The handyman was already gone — and the name he’d given the priest was a lie. When his DNA hit the national database, it didn’t just identify a killer. It opened a trail across the UK: aliases, stolen years, and two teenagers missing since 1991 whose remains...

February 7, 2010. Canada’s top air-base commander sits across from a detective. No shouting. Just a photo of a tire track. By morning, the country learns the man who flew prime ministers and the Queen had also been breaking into homes, assaulting women, and murdering two of them. This episode is the Russell Williams case: CFB Trenton, the “Tweed Creeper,” Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, Jessica Lloyd, 8...

May 2012. A video appears on the open internet. People who hunt cruelty online hope it is a hoax. It is not. Jun Lin was a Chinese student in Montreal. Luka Magnotta — born Eric Newman in Scarborough — murdered him, then used the remains and the news cycle as a stage. He fled through Europe and was arrested in a Berlin internet café, reading about himself. In 2014 a Montreal jury rejected a not-cr...

August 1969. A house in the Los Angeles hills. A pregnant actress. The word pig on the door. The man the cameras want is not in the living room — and the murders still belong to him. Charles Manson turned a ranch full of lost young people into a weapon. Over two nights the Family killed Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Parent, Leno LaBianca and Rosemary LaBianca...

A thirteen-year-old girl leaves school in Surrey and never reaches the door. For years her parents live inside a missing-person case while a man who knows the night roads keeps choosing who gets off the bus alive. Levi Bellfield — the man Britain called the Bus Stop Killer — was convicted of murdering Milly Dowler, Marsha McDonnell and Amelie Delagrange, and of the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy....

A ten-by-twelve shack in Montana. No running water. A former Berkeley mathematician who decided other people’s bodies were postage for an argument about machines. From 1978 to 1995, Ted Kaczynski mailed and planted bombs that killed three people — Hugh Scrutton, Thomas Mosser, Gilbert Murray — and injured twenty-three more. The FBI called the hunt UNABOM and still could not put a face to it until...

A bride in white. A twelve-year sentence. A country that still cannot agree what to call her. Karla Homolka told Canada she was a battered young wife trapped by Paul Bernardo. Then the videotapes surfaced. They showed her role in the death of her own sister, Tammy Homolka, fifteen, and in the murders of Leslie Mahaffy, fourteen, and Kristen French, fifteen. She took a plea before the full recordin...

A smiling wedding portrait. A Scarborough street at night. Two schoolgirls who never made it home. For years Canada hunted a rapist in Toronto’s east end while Paul Bernardo lived in plain sight. Then Leslie Mahaffy, fourteen, and Kristen French, fifteen, were taken from the Niagara region. Behind Bernardo and Karla Homolka’s marriage was a house in St. Catharines, videotapes the public would neve...

A blonde beehive. A police mugshot. For sixty years Britain has argued about the woman in the frame — and too often forgotten the children first. Between 1963 and 1965, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady took five young lives on the edge of Manchester and buried them on Saddleworth Moor. Pauline Reade. John Kilbride. Keith Bennett, who has never been found. Lesley Ann Downey. Edward Evans. A tape exists t...