A True crime Podcast

July 15, 1982. Two boys find a body in the Green River south of Seattle. She is sixteen. Within a month, four more women are pulled from the same water and mud. For nearly twenty years after that, a truck painter named Gary Leon Ridgway lives an ordinary life by day and hunts vulnerable women along Pacific Highway South by night. He later said he chose them because he thought no one would miss the...

Two girls walked onto an Indiana railroad bridge. One filmed a stranger. The next day they were dead — and the man who later confessed lived down the road the whole time. On February 13, 2017, Abby Williams, 13, and Libby German, 14, vanished on the Monon High Bridge Trail in Delphi. Libby’s phone captured “Bridge Guy.” For five years the case went cold. Richard Allen — a local CVS tech with no re...

For sixteen years, Charles Cullen walked hospital corridors in New Jersey and Pennsylvania as a critical-care nurse. Patients who were recovering suddenly died. Families were told it was natural. It wasn’t. Cullen admitted to murdering 29 people with lethal overdoses of ordinary hospital drugs. Investigators have long said the real number could be far higher. He was fired, forced out, and hired ag...

At 1:48 a.m. on August 13, 2018, a doorbell camera caught pregnant Shanann Watts walking into her Frederick, Colorado home. By dawn her husband, Chris Watts, was loading a truck. By Thursday she was in a shallow grave at his worksite. Bella, 4, and Celeste, 3, were in crude-oil tanks. Then he went on TV and asked America to bring his family home. Alexander Lawson tells the Watts case from the last...

A stable twin dies 90 minutes after Lucy Letby takes over. His sister collapses the next night. Then the insulin. Then the air in the lines. Then the triplets. This episode of A True Crime Podcast with Alexander Lawson tells the Lucy Letby case as the court recorded it — and as the fight over it still stands. Between June 2015 and June 2016, babies on the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester H...

Israel Keyes looked like a contractor and a dad. The FBI called him one of the most methodical serial killers in modern U.S. history. He flew thousands of miles, picked strangers at random, and dug up weapons he had buried years earlier. Only three victims have been named. He said there were more — then he died in jail and took the map with him. Host Alexander Lawson on the case that still isn’t f...

He cut the phone line, murdered a family—including two children—and went home to dinner. For decades, Wichita hunted “BTK.” The man they were looking for wrote parking tickets, led Boy Scouts, and sat in the front pew. This episode of A True Crime Podcast follows Dennis Rader from the Otero house in 1974 to a floppy disk in 2005—the letters, the near-misses, the neighbor he killed, and the metadat...

He broke into homes while you slept. He bound couples. He killed 13 people. Then he vanished for 32 years — and mowed his lawn in a Sacramento suburb. Joseph James DeAngelo was a police officer. He was also the Visalia Ransacker, the East Area Rapist, the Original Night Stalker, and the Golden State Killer. For more than a decade he moved across California. Then DNA from a discarded tissue and a f...

3 a.m. Two brothers. One bed. One shotgun. In 1943, Pere Areny Aleix killed his sleeping brother in a stone house in the Pyrenees — then became the last man a European principality ever executed. No lawyer. A public rosary. Six rifles, and only one loaded. The court said he did it for the inheritance. The file says his mind was already breaking. Alexander Lawson on the fratricide Andorra tried to...

October 1505. Two Grimaldi brothers. One dagger. By morning, Jean II is dead and Lucien is Lord of Monaco. Eighteen years later his nephew walks into the palace, cuts his throat, and the body is dragged down the steps with forty-three wounds. Alexander Lawson tells the story of how a fortress on a cliff was kept — and lost — inside one family.

On 6 May 2014, billionaire heiress Hélène Pastor and her chauffeur, Mohamed Darwich, were gunned down outside a hospital in Nice. The shooting looked like a street robbery. It wasn’t. Alexander Lawson traces the case from Monaco’s gilded drawing rooms to a Marseille contract killing — and to Wojciech Janowski, Poland’s honorary consul, charity figure, and the longtime partner of Pastor’s daughter....

Before dawn in one of the most guarded penthouses on Earth, billionaire Edmond Safra locked himself in a bathroom with his nurse. They thought assassins were in the house. The only other man inside was Ted Maher — the nurse hired to keep Safra alive. Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of the 1999 Monte Carlo fire that killed Safra and nurse Vivian Torrente: the staged home invasion, the wasteba...

August 1907. A trunk leaks on a Marseille platform. Inside is a woman’s torso. Head and legs in another bag. Jewels beside them. The couple who checked the luggage called themselves Sir and Lady Goold. She was Marie — French dressmaker, self-styled lady, and the woman Monaco’s court sentenced to death. Alexander Lawson tells the story of the Monte Carlo trunk murder: a faded Wimbledon finalist, a...

August 1907. A leaking steamer trunk at Marseille station. Inside: a woman’s dismembered body. The man who packed it had once reached the Wimbledon final. Alexander Lawson tells the story of Vere St. Leger Goold — Irish tennis champion, gambler, and the only Wimbledon finalist ever convicted of murder — and the killing of Emma Levin in Monaco’s Villa Menesini. Roulette, borrowed titles, a thousand...

June 26, 2003. A 13-year-old girl in Ciney, Belgium, is forced into a van — and escapes. That night ends the long hunt of Michel Fourniret, the so-called Ogre of the Ardennes. Host Alexander Lawson traces the crimes Fourniret committed in and through Belgium: the abduction of 12-year-old Elisabeth Brichet from Saint-Servais; bodies left in the woods of Vresse-sur-Semois; the years he lived in Sart...

On 23 June 1979, five people were murdered in a house in Sint-Amandsberg, near Ghent. A father, a mother, two daughters, and a young man who had only come home to see the woman he loved. Months earlier, a Polish shopkeeper had been shot in the port of Ghent. The same weapon. The same names in the dock. Freddy Horion — Sunglasses, the Monster — and Roland Feneulle were convicted of six murders and...

In 1930s Liège, a widow poured the tea, borrowed the money, and measured the dose. Marie Alexandrine Becker — the Black Widow, the Belgian Borgia — was convicted of poisoning eleven people and attempting to kill five more. Host Alexander Lawson follows her rise from a farm in Waasmont to a dressmaker’s parlour, the digitaline in the cup, the anonymous letters that finally stopped her, and the 1938...

In 1971, women around Mechelen stopped walking home after dark. Three were found strangled and bitten. The killer was twenty, worked the railway yards, and had danced with his last victim the same night he murdered her. Staf Van Eyken — the Vampire of Muizen — was sentenced to death in 1974. The sentence became life. More than fifty years later he is still Belgium’s longest-serving prisoner, and h...

June 1995: two eight-year-old girls vanish after waving at cars from a motorway bridge. Fourteen months later, police open a hidden cellar in Marcinelle—and Belgium’s justice system is forced into the light. Host Alexander Lawson traces the public record of Marc Dutroux: a convicted offender released early, a trail of missing girls across Wallonia and Flanders, the rescue of Sabine Dardenne and La...

July 1945. Five people are shot in a Luxembourg farmhouse living room. Three years later, Nicolas Bernardy is tied to a wooden post and executed by firing squad — the last common criminal put to death in the Grand Duchy. Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of the Windhof massacre: Johann and Susanne Weyer, their son Mathias, farmhand Josef Lucas, and maid Leonie Colling. A fingerprint. A confess...

A teenager in France finds a torso. Weeks later, more remains turn up in Germany. The woman they belong to — Diana Santos, 40, Portuguese, living in Diekirch — was killed in her Luxembourg home on 18 September 2022. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander’s Lawson follows the case of Saïd Banhakeia: the former partner who told a Diekirch court he did not kill her — he only helped cut up...

On a Sunday in Bereldange, a Luxembourg police officer poured drinks to toast his promotion. Minutes later his sister and brother-in-law were dying on the terrace. The lab said cyanide. He said it was the wrong poison — that he only meant to ruin their holiday. The court called it murder for money. Alexander Lawson traces the 2016 double killing, the darknet orders, the life sentence, and the late...

Luxembourg was supposed to be too small, too rich, and too quiet for this. On 30 October 1985, Carlo Fett walked into the BIL headquarters on Boulevard Royal, smashed the glass with a shotgun, and opened fire. Minutes later, officer Patrice Conrardy was dead — the first police officer in the country’s history killed on duty. Fett fired 22 of the 33 shots. This episode follows Fett from a children’...

Luxembourg is one of the safest countries in Europe — until a man starts hunting women in car parks, on footpaths, and across the German border. Between the mid-1980s and 1989, Luis Matias attacks seven women. Three are murdered. Four survive. One of them, Rosanna Campanella, fights him off in a Luxembourg City parking garage, reaches the police, and watches him walk free. He keeps his job. He wri...

In 1883 Vienna, a charming fraudster promised marriage to housemaids — then robbed them, murdered them, and sank their bodies in the river. Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of Hugo Schenk, Austria’s “Viennese Housemaids Killer”: four confirmed victims, a prison-made accomplice, a stack of letters to women still waiting for a wedding, and a skull that still sits in Vienna’s crime museum. A col...