Crime Adjacent

On the afternoon of Friday, Sept. 4, 1987, 9-year-old Jessica Murphy disappeared from her cul-de-sac in the quiet, peaceful Willow Creek neighborhood of Omaha, Nebraska. One minute, she was whizzing around the court on her Space Invaders edition BMX bicycle with red streamers flowing off the handle bars and a sparkly red banana seat.  And the next, she was simply gone. Jessica remained missin...

On Wednesday, June 17, 2015, Officer Danielle Peterson breaks down the front door of a house on quiet Lundy Street in the fancy North Arts District of Columbus, Ohio. The co-workers of David Thomas Brown, 56, said the man had not reported to work since the previous week, and they were worried something had happened to him. So as Officer Peterson performed a welfare check that morning, she did, ind...

On Saturday May 8, 2021, hikers Libby Mitchell and Stacey Rose Anderson met on the Deer Mountain Trail in the Rocky Mountain national park in Colorado. They were before strangers before this morning, but they soon realized they had something in common.  Both of their partners had just abandoned them on the trail. So as they're hiking back to the trailhead together, they see yet another solo w...

It was late at night on July 5, 2019, when the phone suddenly rang in the empty Ridge Hollow Recorder newspaper in Ridge Hollow, Colorado. Reporter Penny C. Johnson casually answered the phone, thinking it was a caller perhaps angered over a typo -- that happened with surprising frequency. This late night phone call was anything but ordinary. It was a watershed moment.  It was the moment John...

On March 20, 2021, the body of Alexia Russo was discovered inside her Anaheim, California, townhouse just blocks from Disneyland. The 33-year-old horticulturalist actually worked at the theme park. In fact, it was her dream job, a joyful convergence of her two favorite things in the world: trees and Disney.  But this dream job also had a dark side, because it was this very place where Alexia...

On the morning of Sunday, Feb. 14, 2010, the body of 21-year-old Monica Bixby was discovered behind bushes and berms along a desolate stretch of Highway 79 in Temecula, California. The aspiring film student had been bound, stabbed, and then strangled the previous night, following a date with an on again, off again lover that did not end well.  To police, this initially seemed like an ope...

On the morning of Saturday, Jan. 3, 1998, the body of 17-year-old Samantha Carpenter was discovered in the kitchen of a popular sandwich shop in Fairfield, California.  She had been hit on the back of the head, and then stabbed. Her jeans were discovered around her ankles, and her green sandwich shop apron was pulled over her head, concealing her face. This was, quite obviously, a murder.&nbs...

On November 23, 1987, Bernard "Barnie" Jones arrives home from a business trip and tells his wife he feels "heavy" after a long flight and stress. The next morning, she finds him dead of an apparent heart attack. By all accounts, this looks like a small, ordinary tragedy, the kind that plays out in homes across America every day.  But a year later, another man arrives home from a tr...

At the tail end of September 2024, a man in a clown mask broke into the cabins of vacationing women on Walloon Lake in Northern Michigan to rub their feet in the dead of night.  And then, the murders began. A Realtor, and then another one. A billionaire human resources officer turned obnoxious podcaster. And then a real estate developer. One after another, someone was murdering the most power...

Two things happened on that final night, Sunday September 29, 2024. Sheriff Press, Bill Laboa, and one of the Crime Adjacent computer pros formed a makeshift team to track all of the clowns roaming Walloon: Tim Meeks, Roger Michaels, and a mysterious third one. As they worked together to identify this new killer, Deputy Swanson raced to the Bear River Country Club, hellbent on rescuing the woman w...

Early in the morning on May 24, 2010, a fire broke out at a cabin on Walloon Lake. At first, investigators thought it was an ember flying from a backyard fire pit. But then, fire investigators immediately noticed the smell of gasoline throughout the cabin. And they soon discovered the unlikeliest of suspects outside, watching, wide-eyed and mesmerized, as an entire family burned within the fully e...

Deputy Swanson immediately recognized a victim of sextortion when she saw high school senior Emily Willis trudging fearfully through town. The FBI reports that more than 7,000 cases of sextortion happen every year, when blackmailers start up fake relationships with minors to get incriminating materials they can then use to blackmail those minors. Swanson, who had worked with the FBI, recognized th...

High school senior Emily Willis said her best friend, Dorian Block, was the happiest, most cheerful person she had ever met. They'd known each other since before kindergarten and were about to graduate this year from high school and go on to college together. But one day, in early September 2024, Dorian began acting very, very strangely. Like she was scared of something, or someone. Within hours,...

Sheriff Press had a grand theory about the ultimate suspect in this case. She put it all together when she noticed a pattern. All of the women who were assaulted were out-of-town visitors. But all of the women who were murdered had something in common. They were Realtors. And there was only one man in town with a grudge against Realtors. Was he behind all this? The only problem was ... this guy ha...

Northern Michigan lake country had seen a murder in years. And then all of a sudden there are four, in just two days? It didn't make sense to Sheriff Press. All of her prime suspects were either in jail already or dead. So clearly, someone was still out there, targeting her citizens. And it felt like there was nothing she could do to stop it. This is part 19 of the 8th season of Crime Adjacent: th...

Tim Meeks said he had an accomplice, someone who gave him information about which cabins were rented by single women and then paid him to go scare all these visitors. Really put the fright into them. And this someone, Meeks said, was a big name on the lake. A huge name on the lake.  Sheriff Morgan Press went to this someone's house and what she discovered didn't make any sense. If she had jus...

How do you get information out of someone who absolutely, positively, doesn’t want to give it?  And what if you raise the stakes even more?  What if, say, you want them to tell you something. But that something will land them in prison, for life.  How do you get them to talk? Can you get them to talk? That was the dilemma facing Sheriff Morgan Press when she confronted Tim Meeks abo...

The plan to use Deputy Swanson as a decoy to lure out the Nightstalker failed miserably. Swanson was stabbed. The Nightstalker got away. And although Sheriff Press finally had confirmation that Tim Meeks was, indeed, the real identity of the Nightstalker, we were no closer to catching him. Until that night, when we did, in fact, catch Tim Meeks. Red handed. In the cabin of a woman named "Cassandra...

The same thing that happened in California, in the 1980s, happened in Northern Michigan. Residents wondered: What do we call this guy? In the beginning, he broke into cabins and rubbed women's feet while wearing a creepy Halloween clown mask. So he became known as the Clown Creeper. But when he started to murder people, a new name emerged: the Nightstalker. Specifically, the Michigan Nightstalker,...

We had to get ahead of this guy. That was my thinking.  The clown creeper was breaking into cabins with impunity, and now he was in downtown Petoskey, where he was responsible for the murder of Allison Barnes and apparently tried to do the same thing to Ebony Aster just minutes later. So my plan was simple. We would plant a decoy to lure him out of hiding. It was the biggest mistake in this c...

Just a few blocks from the Clinton Street house where Allison Barnes was murdered that Saturday, Realtor Ebony Aster was hosting her own open house on Lake Street. But while she was getting ready, she heard something. Upstairs. That strange noise soon turned to pounding footsteps, and she knew, immediately, she had to get out of the house. Fast. It turns out, these type of attacks on Realtors happ...

Can you kill a person in five minutes? And then appear perfectly reasonable when the cops arrive? These questions were floating through Sheriff Press's mind as she questioned Billy Barnes, who had just discovered his wife had been murdered.  Why, Press wondered, did it take him five whole minutes from the alleged discovery of her body until the time he called 911? The more she dug into the st...

As more and more cabins were broken into and more and more visitors were assaulted, or murdered, the town grappled with a sticky moral dilemma. Who belongs? Who gets to call this place home, and who should be kept away? The town boiled with debate and turmoil that Saturday. But as residents gathered inside the town hall to discuss these issues, the clown creeper was elsewhere. No longer content to...

Best-selling author Aitana Ruiz heads to Walloon Lake every September to put the finishing touches on the latest book in her popular series Daggers and Wind. But 2024 was different. Because on Saturday morning, September 28, she awoke close to daybreak with a man in a clown mask at the foot of her bed.  This man snapped a length of rope between his hands, whispering, "And now, the fun begins....

Can you get away with murder if someone is forcing you to do it? This episode looks at crimes of duress and just how far some people force others to go on their behalf.  Because that is exactly what was happening in Petoskey in 2024, in the lead up to the murders that began in September. This is part nine of the 8th season of Crime Adjacent: the untold story of the Michigan Nightstalker. What...