A True crime Podcast

On 8 November 2000, 27-year-old Einar Örn Birgisson vanished from Reykjavík. He had just opened a GAP store. Volunteers flooded the search — including his business partner, former Iceland international footballer and lawyer Atli Helgason, who stood with the family and told the press Einar would never simply disappear. A week later, Atli confessed. He had beaten Einar to death with a hammer on Öskj...

In January 2017, 20-year-old Birna Brjánsdóttir left a Reykjavík nightclub and stepped into a red rental Kia. Eight days later her body washed ashore. Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of Greenlandic fisherman Thomas Møller Olsen, the trawler Polar Nanoq, the blood in the car, the hash in the cabin, and the 19-year sentence that became one of Iceland’s heaviest in a generation. A case that bro...

Iceland almost never produces a murderer. In four centuries it has produced only one serial killer. Björn Pétursson — Axlar-Björn, the farmer at Öxl — lived on the Snæfellsnes peninsula in the late 1500s. Travellers and farmhands came looking for work. They did not leave. He confessed to nine killings. The ground gave up more. Some accounts say eighteen. Alexander Lawson tells the case as the reco...

In the spring of 1986, London’s elderly started dying in their beds. A pensioner under the covers. A tidy room. A death that looked natural — until the television was missing, and the post-mortem said otherwise. Then it happened again. Men and women in their seventies, eighties and nineties, killed alone in the one place they were supposed to be safe. The press called him the Stockwell Strangler....

Three honeymoons. Three bathtubs. Three widows who never lived long enough to be widows. In Edwardian England, George Joseph Smith married under false names, emptied bank accounts, and left a trail of wives behind him. Most survived. Bessie Mundy, Alice Burnham, and Margaret Lofty did not. Each was found drowned in the bath, soap still in hand, while their husband was out for eggs or tomatoes. Hos...

By day he sold cinema tickets. By night he hunted men across North Wales and Merseyside. In the autumn of 1995, cinema owner Peter Moore — the so-called Man in Black — murdered four men in just three months. He later said he did it “for fun.” Alexander Lawson tells the story of Henry Roberts, Edward Carthy, Keith Randles and Anthony Davies, the investigation that began on Pensarn Beach, the Christ...

In May 2010, a caretaker in Bradford checked the CCTV. A woman ran from a flat. A man followed with a crossbow. He fired — then turned to the camera and raised a finger. I’m Alexander Lawson. This episode of A True Crime Podcast is about Stephen Griffiths, the criminology student who called himself the Crossbow Cannibal, and about the three women he murdered: Susan Rushworth, Shelley Armitage and...

Four young men were found dead within a few hundred metres of the same street in Barking. Police treated the deaths as separate overdoses. Their families knew something was wrong. Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of Anthony Walgate, Gabriel Kovari, Daniel Whitworth and Jack Taylor — and of Stephen Port, the man who lived nearby, met victims through dating apps, and walked free long enough to...

In the early hours of 30 December 2002, a man searching bins in Camden pulled out black sacks. Inside were human remains. The heads and hands were never found. Anthony Hardy — later called the Camden Ripper — was convicted of murdering Sally White, Elizabeth Valad, and Bridgette MacClennan. One of those deaths had already been written off as a heart attack. Weeks after Hardy was discharged from a...

New Year’s Day, 1993. Most people resolve to quit smoking. Colin Ireland resolved to become a serial killer. I’m Alexander Lawson. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, we follow the three-month hunt that began in a leather bar in Earl’s Court and ended at the Old Bailey. Ireland targeted gay men at The Coleherne, posing as a dominant stranger so they would let him tie them up. Between March an...

February 1949. A widow leaves a Kensington hotel after lunch and never comes back. The man who took her there tells police she no longer exists — destroyed in acid — and asks how you can prove murder if there is no body. He was wrong. Alexander Lawson traces the crimes of John George Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer: six confirmed killings in England between 1944 and 1949, committed for money and hid...

In March 2013 a man texted a friend that life was beautiful. Ten days later three men were dead, two more had been left for dead, and their killer would tell a psychiatrist that murder was “moreish.” Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of Joanna Dennehy — the Cambridgeshire woman who stabbed Łukasz Słaboszewski, John Chapman and Kevin Lee to death with a pocket knife, dumped their bodies in ditc...

In six weeks in 2006, five women vanished from the same streets in Ipswich. Their bodies were found naked in brooks, ponds and woodland. Two were laid out like a cross. Forklift driver Steve Wright said it was coincidence — until DNA, fibres and blood in his Ford Mondeo said otherwise. Host Alexander Lawson traces Wright’s 2006 killing spree, the whole-life sentence that followed, and the 1999 mur...

For five years, thirteen women in Yorkshire and Greater Manchester never came home. Police interviewed the killer nine times. They chased a hoax tape from Sunderland while Peter Sutcliffe — a Bradford lorry driver with a wife and an ordinary life — kept walking free. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander Lawson tells the story of the Yorkshire Ripper case without turning the victims i...

On 24 June 1998, 81-year-old Kathleen Grundy opened her door in Hyde to her family GP. He said he was there for a blood test. Within hours she was dead — and he had typed a will leaving her estate to himself. That clumsy forgery is the only reason Britain discovered what Harold Shipman had been doing for more than twenty years. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander Lawson tells the st...

On 21 July 1997, a young woman walked into a police station in provincial Russia and said there was a factory under an ordinary garage: captives sewing for sixteen hours a day, an electrified ladder, the word “slave” tattooed on a forehead, and four people who never came back up. Alexander Lawson tells the case of Aleksandr Nikolayevich Komin — the “Slaveholder” of Vyatskiye Polyany — who, with ac...

November 1998. A teenager lifts a sheet of iron on a dump outside Novosibirsk and finds a human head. Nearby, a headless body is stuffed into an old refrigerator. The victim is never identified. Over seven years, nineteen women—most of them sex workers—are killed, dismembered, and scattered across the city. Hearts are cut out. Pentagrams are carved into skin. The man doing it is not a stranger in...

July 2015. Saint Petersburg CCTV catches a 68-year-old woman dragging heavy bags from her apartment. Inside one of them, police say, is a cooking pot—and a human head. Hours earlier, Tamara Samsonova had laced her friend’s Olivier salad with fifty sleeping pills. Then she took a saw. They called her the Granny Ripper. Baba Yaga. In her kitchen sat a diary, written in Russian, English and German, c...

In a quiet Russian town, men began vanishing — alcoholics, the homeless, the forgotten. Then a soft-spoken 23-year-old was arrested for a petty theft… and police found his diary. Inside it, Alexander Bychkov called himself a lone wolf and a predator. He detailed nine confirmed murders (and possibly more), the knives, the hammers, the dismemberment — and claimed he had eaten the hearts of his victi...

A polite knock at the door. A doctor with a medical bag. A routine check-up that ends in murder. Between 1997 and 2000 in St. Petersburg, emergency physician Maxim Petrov exploited the trust of elderly patients, injecting them with lethal drugs before robbing their homes. Nicknamed “Doctor Death,” he carried out dozens of calculated attacks that left at least eleven dead. In this episode of A True...

Christmas Eve 1995. A quiet Ukrainian village. An entire family is slaughtered and their house set ablaze. It was only the beginning. Over the next three months, Anatoly Onoprienko — known as the Beast of Ukraine, the Terminator, and Citizen O — would kill more than forty people, wiping out whole families with a sawed-off shotgun, axes, and knives. Fifty-two victims in total. No remorse. Just cold...

In a quiet Nizhny Novgorod supermarket, a security guard spots two ordinary-looking shoppers… and realises he’s staring at Russia’s most wanted killers. Inside the woman’s bag: a revolver, two axes, a stun gun and rope. Over nine months, Elvira Egorycheva and her partner Vladimir Guryanov murdered at least thirteen people. They called themselves Princess Elena and Prince Mikhail. They claimed God...

In the frozen streets of Nizhny Novgorod, a man and a woman answered newspaper ads for fortune-tellers, waited in dark courtyards, and carried two revolvers, three knives, and a stun gun. They believed God had chosen them to cleanse the world of sinners. Between December 2007 and September 2008, Vladimir Guryanov and Elvira Egorycheva murdered at least thirteen people. Eleven of the victims were w...

In the forests outside Rostov-on-Don, the bodies kept appearing—children, teenagers, and young women, mutilated beyond recognition. For more than a decade the Soviet Union insisted a monster like this could not exist in their society. They were wrong. This episode tells the story of Andrei Chikatilo, the man who became known as the Butcher of Rostov and the Red Ripper. Between 1978 and 1990 he mur...

Between 1988 and 1993, a giant stalked the forests and parks outside Moscow. Standing nearly 6’6” and weighing almost 300 pounds, Sergei Ryakhovsky — known as the Balashikha Ripper and the Hippopotamus — left at least 19 bodies in his wake. Elderly women walking home, men lured into the woods, teenagers who never returned. He strangled, stabbed, mutilated, and desecrated his victims. In this episo...