Cold Case Murder Mysteries

Join host Ryan Kraus for the final episode of a two-part series exploring the disappearance of 12-year-old paperboy Johnny Gosch on September 5, 1982. In part I, we examined the crime itself, but this time we'll take a deep dive into the events that transpired in the aftermath of the kidnapping. From local pedophiles to mass conspiracies, this perplexing, unsolved abduction offers no shortage of p...

Join host Ryan Kraus for Part I of a two-part series delving into one of the strangest, most complex disappearances in US history, the kidnapping of 12-year-old West Des Moines, Iowa paperboy Johnny Gosch on the morning of September 5, 1982. In this episode, we'll explore the crime itself, while part II will examine the various theories and conspiracies that arose in the aftermath.

August 29, 2014. A Bladenboro, NC woman rises shortly after 7am to find a deceased black male hanging by a makeshift noose from an old swing set in the yard of the predominantly white trailer park where she lives. Her subsequent call to 911 draws police to the scene of the crime to investigate. They quickly determine the person in question is a 17-year-old high school student and football player n...

On November 2, 2016, husband and father of two young children, Keith Papini, arrived home to discover his wife, Sherri, was missing. After using an app to locate her phone, he found it lying on the side of the road about a mile from their house. Keith dialed 911 and reported the incident, hoping the disappearance was just some type of a misunderstanding. But Sherri never came home that day, or eve...

On the night of September 26, 2014, a 30-year-old woman named Kayelyn Louder dialed 911 to report an altercation involving guns in the clubhouse at her condo development. What followed over the next 24 hours was a series of inexplicable events shrouded in mystery, at the culmination of which Kayelyn was missing. Surveillance footage later discovered by police depicted her fleeing home on foot, but...

When a mother fails to show up for her 10-year-old son's birthday party, his father drives home to check on her, only to learn she's been murdered in the shower with a shotgun blast to the head. In the aftermath, Tom Foley, Dar's husband, becomes the focus of the police investigation. Before long, he finds himself convicted of the crime and sent to prison. But a retrial based on new evidence revea...

On the night of May 28, 1980 a 32-year-old single mother named Dorothy Jane Scott, who had recently been stalked by an unknown man, left her 4-year-old son in the care of her parents as she went to a staff meeting being held at work. During the meeting, she noticed a coworker seemed ill, and had some type of swollen, red mark on his arm that was getting worse. After taking him to the hospital with...

On July 13, 2014 the body of 18-year-old Conrad Roy was found inside the cab of a pickup truck in the parking lot of the Fairhaven, MA K-Mart store, a scene which suggested the young man had succumbed to suicide by way of inhaling carbon monoxide from a gas generator found at the scene. Before long, however, police not only discovered his cell phone, but also an extensive thread of revealing text...

Enter the strange mind of Cold Case Murder Mysteries host Ryan Kraus for the fascinating final episode of a two-part series in which he answers questions posed by listeners. SPONSOR: CDL.com With plenty of new jobs and schools around the country, get your trucking career started at CDL.com . Explore a truckload of jobs for the trucker in you.

December 6, 1991. Austin, TX. The local fire department is called to the scene of a blaze at the I Can't Believe It's Yogurt store after 11pm when a police officer notices smoke coming from the rear of the building. But when the flames subside, it soon becomes clear something much more sinister is at play. Inside, the money is missing from the cash register, and four teen girls lay dead on the flo...

Enter the strange mind of Cold Case Murder Mysteries host Ryan Kraus for the fascinating first episode of a two-part series in which he answers questions posed by listeners. SPONSOR: CDL.com With plenty of new jobs and schools around the country, get your trucking career started at CDL.com . Explore a truckload of jobs for the trucker in you.

On the afternoon of July 24, 2006 a 33-year-old man named Sean Dickus arrived home from work to discover his 26-year-old wife Chynna and 10-year-old son Blake had been brutally murdered inside their house in Franklin, IN. As the investigation proceeded, two possibilities quickly became apparent as the most likely scenario that rendered this horrifying result: one is that Sean Dickus himself could...

At 10:40pm on the night of May 19, 1983 a young mother named Diane Downs pulled her Nissan Pulsar up to the ER entrance of a hospital near Springfield, OR and informed the staff her children had been shot by a strange man who tried to carjack her out on a dark, desolate road nearby. Inside the vehicle, doctors and nurses discovered three kids who had suffered severe wounds delivered by a .22 handg...

On the morning of June 20, 1994 police in Dunedin, NZ responded to an emergency call placed by 22-year-old David Bain that eerily proclaimed, "They're all dead." Upon arriving at his home, authorities soon discovered a massacre that left the other five family members deceased, seemingly a result of a murder-suicide carried out by patriarch Robin Bain. Yet, as the investigation began, it quickly be...

Around 8pm on the night of December 16, 2011, young father Justin DiPietro put his 20-month-old daughter to sleep in her crib at their Waterville, ME home, leaving his sister to check on the child a while later. All seems fine. But sometime during the night, Ayla Reynolds disappears, prompting Justin to phone 911 when he wakes in the morning and realizes what's happened. Yet, despite the largest s...

On the morning of June 5, 1960, a grim discovery was made along the shoreline of Lake Bodom in Espoo, Finland. Four local teens on a camping trip were found brutally bludgeoned and stabbed inside their tent, with three of them having succumbed to their injuries. The survivor, Nils Gustafsson, suffered a broken jaw and multiple facial fractures, leaving him with almost no memory of the incident. Ye...

On the evening of January 3, 2017, 24-year-old Alex Stevens and 20-year-old Megan Shaffer ventured to High Rock overlook in Western Maryland accompanied by multiple animals, where they abandoned their cars, hiked a mile up a dark trail in the freezing cold, and held a strange ritual in the nude near the edge of a cliff. As the hours passed, and nobody heard from them, a friend became concerned eno...

September, 2015. 32-year-old Liberian immigrant Henry McCabe, an auditor for the Minnesota Department of Revenue, leaves his Mounds View home to go drinking at a nearby night club with two acquaintances. But within hours, Henry will make a desperate, eerie, and alarming phone call to his wife, at which point the line goes dead, and nobody ever hears from him again. Nearly two months later, the man...

In the early morning hours of June 3, 2003, a 20-year-old Indiana University student named Lauren Spierer vanished off the streets of Bloomington while walking home after a long night of partying. Nearly 8 years later, there's still no sign of what happened to her. Some believe she was snatched off the roadside by a serial predator, and others think there's rampant dishonesty among the people who...

June 18, 2014. Justin Ross Harris straps his 22-month-old son Cooper into a rear-facing car seat located in the back of his SUV after exiting an Atlanta Chik-Fil-A restaurant where the two just ate breakfast. He kisses the boy on the head and says "I love you", before getting in the vehicle and driving off. But instead of making a left turn at the next intersection to drop Cooper off at daycare, H...

April 20, 1999. Seniors Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold enter Columbine High School armed with bombs and guns, murdering twelve students and a teacher, while injuring dozens more in what becomes the most iconic school shooting in US history. In the aftermath, a shocked community, and even the nation, searched for understanding that wouldn’t come easily. Twenty years later, we still want to know the...

August, 2008. Kanika Powell, a 28-year-old Army veteran working in national security, is paid a visit at home by a man claiming to be an FBI agent, setting off a series of strange events culminating in her shooting death only days later. More than a decade after the crime, the case remains unsolved, and without leads, begging the question of who wanted this young woman dead. Without enemies, or ev...

On the morning of April 12, 1981, 14-year-old Sheila Sharp returned from a neighbor's home after a sleepover to find her mother, 36-year-old Sue Sharp, 15-year-old brother John, and John's 17-year-old best friend Dana dead on the floor, victims of an apparent massacre by way of knife and hammer. They were bound, and had been tortured, leaving many in shock, wondering who could do such a thing. But...

It's 4:18am on April 18, 2016. 45-year-old fitness instructor and mother of three, Missy Bevers, arrives at the Creekside Church in Midlothian, TX to host a boot-camp style workout that's being held indoors due to heavy rain. Upon entering the building alone, however, Missy is attacked by a vicious assailant, and soon after found unresponsive when her students begin to arrive. In the aftermath, in...

August 15, 2016 - A Tequesta, FL couple sat watching TV in their garage on a hot summer night like any other. It was a normal routine for them, one they tended to repeat every evening, taking advantage of a cool nighttime breeze and conversation with neighbors. But little did they know this night would be their last. Within moments, the couple was attacked by a strange young man who suddenly enter...