A True crime Podcast

On Saddleworth Moor the weather changes without warning. In the 1960s, five children left home in Greater Manchester and did not come back. One of them is still up there. Alexander Lawson tells the story of Ian Brady, Myra Hindley, and the two years Britain walked past the ground where the answers were buried.

In 1893, Chicago built the White City. Three miles south, H.H. Holmes built a hotel with corridors that led nowhere, rooms that locked from the outside, and a basement that was never meant for guests. Alexander Lawson tells the story of Herman Webster Mudgett—the charming swindler who turned the World’s Fair into a hunting ground—and the castle America wanted to believe was only a hotel.

February 1983, Muswell Hill. A plumber opens a manhole to clear a blocked drain and finds human remains. The tenant upstairs is Dennis Andrew Nilsen — a quiet civil servant neighbours called Des. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander Lawson tells the UK story of the Muswell Hill Murderer: two north London addresses, Cricklewood and Cranley Gardens; at least twelve young men and boys k...

On October 25, 1994, Susan Smith told America a Black man had carjacked her Mazda in Union, South Carolina, and driven off with her sons still in the back seat. Michael was three. Alexander was fourteen months old. For nine days the country searched. Then she confessed: there was no carjacker. She had let the car roll into John D. Long Lake. Alexander Lawson traces the night at the boat ramp, the...

In February 1994, police dug up a Gloucester back garden looking for a missing 16-year-old. They found her under the patio. Then they found another body. Then they opened the cellar. This episode is the story of Rosemary West, 25 Cromwell Street, and the ten murders that put her on a whole-life sentence. Host Alexander’s Lawson names the victims — including eight-year-old Charmaine and Rose’s own...

February 1994. Gloucester police go into an ordinary house on Cromwell Street looking for a missing 16-year-old. In the garden they find something that should not be there: a third femur. That is how Britain learned what Fred West had been hiding. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander Lawson tells the confirmed story of 25 Cromwell Street: the builder, the wife who stood trial, the tw...

On a November morning in 1957, a hardware-store owner in a Wisconsin town of eight hundred people failed to come home. The last receipt in the register was made out to a neighbor everyone thought they knew. Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of Edward Theodore Gein—two confirmed murders, graves opened in the night, and a farmhouse that changed American horror. This episode stays with the record...

In 1978, America watched a charming photographer win a date on national television. By then, Rodney Alcala had already murdered women and girls across the United States — and he would kill again after the cameras stopped. Host Alexander Lawson traces Alcala’s path from the 1968 assault of eight-year-old Tali Shapiro, through New York, California, and Wyoming, to the 1979 kidnapping and murder of t...

If you asked most people to name America’s deadliest serial killer, they would say Bundy. They would be wrong. In 2012, Samuel Little was an old man in a Louisville homeless shelter. DNA then tied him to three Los Angeles murders from the 1980s. A jury gave him three life sentences. That was only the start of the count. From prison he confessed to ninety-three killings across nineteen states, from...

In the early 1990s, a lift on Australia’s Hume Highway could cost you your life. Seven young backpackers vanished between Sydney and the south. Their bodies were found in Belanglo State Forest — shot, stabbed, hidden under leaves. The man who offered the ride was road worker Ivan Milat. Host Alexander’s Lawson tells the story of the vanishings, the forest, the hitchhiker who escaped, and the trial...

A Bolingbrook police sergeant. A bathtub with no water in it. A death ruled an accident — until the next wife vanished. Alexander Lawson tells the story of Drew Peterson: the 2004 death of Kathleen Savio, the 2007 disappearance of Stacy Peterson, the law Illinois rewrote to put a cop on trial, and the prison plot that added decades to his sentence. One conviction. One case still open. Who got beli...

On a Florida roadside, a man pulls over. A woman gets in. By morning his car is empty and his body is in the woods. That happened seven times in twelve months. Host Alexander Lawson traces Aileen Wuornos from a leap-year childhood in Rochester, Michigan, to the interstates of central and north Florida in 1989 and 1990. Seven men were shot and dumped near the highway. Six death sentences followed....

New York, 1976–77. Couples in parked cars. A .44 Bulldog. Letters from the gutter signed Son of Sam. Alexander Lawson traces David Berkowitz’s year-long siege of the city: Donna Lauria and the first shot in the Bronx, the .44 Caliber Killer, the Breslin letter, the anniversary warning, and the parking ticket in Yonkers that ended the largest manhunt in New York history. Six murdered. Seven wounded...

July 22nd, 1991. A man runs into a Milwaukee street with one handcuff still locked to his wrist and begs police to come upstairs. In apartment 213 they find what the city had failed to see for thirteen years. Jeffrey Dahmer murdered seventeen young men and boys. He looked ordinary — blond, polite, employed — while victims vanished from bars, malls, and sidewalks. Many were Black. Some were boys. N...

On a January night in 1978, a man left a Tallahassee sorority house as if he were heading home from a party. Two women were already dead. Two more were fighting to live. He was already a two-time jail escapee — and America still wanted him to look harmless. Alexander Lawson traces Ted Bundy across Washington, Oregon, Utah, Colorado, and Florida: the sling-and-smile approach, the Volkswagen, the es...

February 5th, 2002. Police walk onto a Port Coquitlam pig farm looking for illegal guns. They find the start of the largest crime scene in Canadian history. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander Lawson tells the story of Robert William Pickton — the farmer neighbours called Willie — and the women who vanished from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside while institutions looked away. Between 1...

Five days after Travis Alexander vanished from his Mesa, Arizona home, friends found him in the shower: stabbed more than two dozen times, his throat cut, a bullet in his head — and a camera in the washing machine. The last photos on that camera showed his ex-girlfriend, Jodi Arias. She said she wasn’t there. Then she said masked intruders did it. Then she took the stand and called it self-defense...

A 16-year-old girl is last photographed at Yellowstone. A 7-year-old boy in red pajamas disappears weeks later. Their mother laughs when police ask where they are — then marries an apocalyptic author on a Hawaiian beach. Nine months on, both children are found buried on his land. Host Alexander Lawson traces the Vallow–Daybell case from Charles Vallow’s shooting in Arizona to Tammy Daybell’s death...

Two kids vanished. His wife died in their bed. Seventeen days later, he got married on a beach in Hawaii. Then investigators dug up Tylee Ryan, 16, and JJ Vallow, 7, on Chad Daybell’s Idaho property. This episode follows the doomsday author who rated souls, called children “zombies,” and was sentenced to death for three murders. Host Alexander’s Lawson tells the Chad Daybell case from the affair w...

April 23, 1973. A 6’9” man walks into a Colorado phone booth and asks Santa Cruz police for an officer he used to drink with. He says he killed his mother. Then he starts listing the others. Edmund Kemper was 15 when he murdered his grandparents. Doctors released him. For eleven months he picked up hitchhikers on California campuses, took them home, and left Santa Cruz hunting a killer who was sit...

He threw block parties. He ran a construction company. He dressed as a clown for children’s events. In a Chicago suburb in the 1970s, John Wayne Gacy looked like the last person anyone would fear. Then a 15-year-old left work after talking to him — and never came home. This episode follows the public record: the double life, the investigation that finally opened the door, the 33 murder charges, th...

Summer 1985. Southern California stops sleeping with the windows open. Someone is walking into houses after dark—no single neighborhood, no single type of victim—and leaving pentagrams behind. This episode of A True Crime Podcast with Alexander Lawson follows Richard Ramirez from the first linked murders through the months-long manhunt, the fingerprint that finally named him, and the East L.A. str...

A baby goes into hospital with a chest infection. The nurse smiles. Hours later, he’s dead. Between February and April 1991, 13 children collapsed on one UK children’s ward. Four never came home. The only person on duty for every attack was 22-year-old nurse Beverley Allitt — later dubbed the Angel of Death. Insulin. Air. Suffocation. A 59-day killing spree inside Grantham Hospital. How she got aw...

A pregnant woman sets brunch for Christmas morning. Her husband says he’s going fishing. Four months later, Laci Peterson and her unborn son wash up in San Francisco Bay — miles from the marina Scott said he launched from. By then his hair is dyed blond, he’s carrying cash and extra IDs, and he’s heading toward the border. Alexander’s Lawson takes apart the case that ate American cable news: the a...

He watered other people’s gardens. He posed as Santa at the mall. Neighbours said he was gentle. Under the soil in those planters were eight men. Between 2010 and 2017, men vanished from Toronto’s Gay Village. Police treated the cases as isolated. Missing — not murdered. Then a single word in Andrew Kinsman’s calendar — Bruce — pulled the thread. This episode is the story of Bruce McArthur, the la...