A True crime Podcast

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...

In June 1925, Emil Marek took an axe to his own leg so his wife could collect the insurance. The money came in. The killing did not stop there. Host Alexander’s Lawson traces the crimes of Martha Marek — the Viennese poisoner who insured the people closest to her, then watched them die of “mysterious” illness while the city sent her sympathy and cash. Husband. Daughter. Aunt. Lodger. The same slow...

In postwar Austria, lonely women answered marriage ads. A charming salesman promised a honeymoon by the water — then poured the drink that ended the trip. Max Gufler was convicted of four murders and suspected of as many as eighteen. Police later opened an attic in St. Pölten and found handbags, jewelry, dentures, and bottles of sleeping pills. Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of the man news...

In Vienna’s Lainz geriatric hospital, death was supposed to be ordinary. Between 1983 and 1989, nurse’s aide Waltraud Wagner and three colleagues turned Pavilion V into a killing ground — overdoses, insulin, and a ritual they called “mouth care.” They confessed to dozens of murders. The real number may never be known. Host Alexander Lawson follows the case from the night-shift jokes that nobody re...

Vienna, January 1996. Detectives are at the door before dawn. The woman who opens it has already buried the men who rewrote their wills for her. Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of Elfriede Blauensteiner — the Austrian serial poisoner known as the Black Widow. She hunted lonely, wealthy pensioners through newspaper ads, moved in as carer and companion, then used a diabetes drug, an antidepres...

A charming crime reporter walks into Vienna police headquarters and asks how the hunt is going for the man strangling women in the woods. Then he leaves — and another body appears. Johann “Jack” Unterweger was Austria’s celebrated prison poet: convicted of murder in 1976, released in 1990 as proof that art could redeem a killer. Within months, sex workers were dying in Graz, the Vienna Woods, Prag...

If you were in a German ICU in the early 2000s, the most dangerous person on the ward may not have been your illness. It may have been the nurse on shift. Niels Högel injected patients with unprescribed heart drugs so he could crash their hearts — then rush in to “save” them. A court convicted him of 85 murders. Police and families believe the true number may be far higher. Host Alexander’s Lawson...

In a quiet Bavarian hospital, patients went to sleep expecting morning. Between 2003 and 2004, nurse Stephan Letter walked the night ward with a syringe — sedative first, then a muscle relaxant that stopped the lungs. At least twenty-eight people never woke. Some were dying. Some were getting better. One was a young soldier with a fall injury. Germany called it the worst killing spree since the wa...

In 1948, a man already in a German prison applied to be an official executioner. He signed the letter Rudolf Pleil, Totmacher a. D. — Deathmaker, retired. Then he told them where to look. They pumped out a well by the railway. They found the bodies. Host Alexander’s Lawson traces Pleil’s crimes in the ruined Harz borderlands of 1946–47: women fleeing the Soviet zone, a guide who offered them a pat...

July 3, 1976. A little girl is missing in Duisburg. A neighbor reports a blocked toilet. The quiet man upstairs says the pipe is full of guts. That man was Joachim Kroll — lavatory attendant, neighbor, and one of postwar Germany’s most notorious serial killers. For more than two decades he murdered across the Ruhr. Innocent men were arrested for his crimes. Some never recovered. He was convicted o...

Düsseldorf, 1929. An eight-year-old is found under a hedge. Then a mechanic in the road. Then two sisters after a fair. The papers name him before they have a face: the Vampire of Düsseldorf. Alexander Lawson tells the story of Peter Kürten — the moulder, the husband, the man who spent half his life in German prisons and the other half turning violence into pleasure. From the 1913 murder of Christ...

May 1924. Children playing by the River Leine in Hanover pull a human skull from the mud. Then another. Then hundreds of bones. At least twenty-two young men. Alexander Lawson tells the story of Fritz Haarmann — police informant, former butcher, and the man Germany called the Vampire, the Wolf Man, and the Butcher of Hanover. Between 1918 and 1924 he lured boys and young men from the station with...

A pastor stands in a Brussels pulpit and talks about God. Then he goes home and erases his own family. Hungarian-born András Pándy fled after 1956, preached to fellow émigrés in Belgium, and told the world his wives and children had simply moved away — to Germany, to France, to South America. They never came back. When police asked where they were, he said it was up to justice to prove they were d...

In a quiet Hungarian village, elderly people started sleeping with the lights on. Someone was coming through the roof. Between 1991 and 2004, Zoltán Ember murdered five people in Szentkirályszabadja—including his stepfather and his own brother. For the later killings he used a method he said he learned from the movies: a sliding noose that turned struggle into suffocation. He robbed the dead, left...

September 2001, Szeged. A homeless man knocks on an old woman’s door, claims to be her son, and walks out with her money. Four days later her real son finds the body. That was only the first killing. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander Lawson tells the story of Tibor Kruchió: a drifter who, with Lajos Kocsis, murdered four people in six weeks — including their own accomplice, dumped...

A woman withdraws 300,000 forints for a phone deal and drives toward an isolated farm outside Balástya. She never comes back. Between 1998 and 2001, Zoltán Szabó — later known as the Balástya Monster — lured women across Hungary’s Great Plain with the promise of work, friendship, or easy money. Host Alexander Lawson traces the murders, the shallow graves fifty metres from the farmhouse, the arrest...

In the winter of 1610, men opened a castle in the Kingdom of Hungary and found girls who were still alive — and girls who were not. The owner was Countess Erzsébet Báthory, one of the most powerful women in the realm. History would call her the Blood Countess. The file never quite settled whether she was a killer, a myth, or a problem the crown needed gone. Alexander Lawson follows the raid on Čac...

In May 1916, a landlord outside Budapest opens a metal drum he thinks is full of petrol. Inside is a woman, strangled and preserved in wood alcohol. Then another drum. Then another. By the time police finish counting, twenty-four bodies lie on one tinsmith’s property — and the man who made the barrels has already vanished into the First World War. Alexander Lawson tells the story of Béla Kiss, the...

Just after 3:40 a.m. on 18 September 1965, a white Simca full of stolen goods is pulled over on Amager. Denmark’s police are still largely unarmed. Ten minutes later, four young officers are dead. Fifteen shots. Twelve hits. Palle Sørensen was a career burglar who did not want another prison sentence. What he did that night ended four lives — Gert Søndergaard Harkjær, Henning Skov Hansen, Elmer Ge...

On 2 September 1920, Karoline Aagesen stood in a Copenhagen stairwell and demanded her baby back. The woman she had paid would not open the door. In the stove, police found bone. Alexander Lawson tells the story of Dagmar Johanne Amalie Overbye — Englemagersken, the Angel Maker — Denmark’s most prolific known serial killer. Between 1916 and 1920 she took infants from unmarried mothers who answered...

On 9 March 2019, a young man left a Copenhagen cinema after watching Captain Marvel . He had paid with a dead woman’s bank card. In four weeks, three pensioners died in the same red-brick block on Vangehusvej in Østerbro. Two were strangled. One was cremated before police treated the death as suspicious. The money on their cards went to pizza, taxis, a strip club — and a movie ticket. Alexander La...

On August 10, 2017, journalist Kim Wall boarded Peter Madsen’s homemade submarine in Copenhagen harbor for an interview. By morning, Madsen had been pulled from the water. The Nautilus was sinking. Wall was gone. Host Alexander Lawson traces the rise of Denmark’s self-taught submarine builder, the last hours of a reporter days from moving to Beijing, the shifting stories Madsen told police, and th...

In June 2000, Marianne Pedersen and her two sons, Brian and Dennis, vanished from a house in Rødovre, Denmark. There were no bodies. No graves. Police later searched 8,500 tons of incinerator slag and still found almost nothing. The man who lived there was Peter Lundin — already convicted in the United States of killing his own mother, already deported, already free under Danish law. Host Alexande...

For 23 years, Marcel Lychau Hansen coached football, cleaned planes at Copenhagen Airport, and lived as a family man on Amager. At night he was something else. In 2010, DNA from one attack finally tied him to two murders and a string of rapes dating back to 1987 — including the killing of 73-year-old Edith Andrup and schoolteacher Lene Buchardt Rasmussen. Host Alexander Lawson tells how Amagermand...

On 3 March 2021, Sarah Everard was walking home through Clapham when a police officer pulled over, showed a warrant card, and put her in handcuffs. Five minutes later she was gone. That officer was Metropolitan Police constable Wayne Couzens. He kidnapped, raped and murdered her — then tried to cover it up. He is serving a whole-life sentence. He will never be released. But this episode is not onl...