Crime at Bedtime

When a pickup truck was found abandoned on a remote Oklahoma mountain road, its doors were unlocked, wallets untouched, and a family dog barely alive inside. Bobby and Sherilynn Jamison, and their six-year-old daughter Madyson, were gone. Inside the truck — $32,000 in cash, phones, IDs, and a note that hinted at despair. For years, searchers combed the wilderness with no trace… until four years la...

Drew Peterson spent twenty nine years as a police officer in Bolingbrook, Illinois. He wore a badge. He knew the law. He knew exactly how investigations worked. In October 2007, his fourth wife Stacy Peterson vanished without trace. She was twenty three years old. Drew Peterson told police she had left him for another man. Nobody who knew Stacy believed him. As investigators began looking more clo...

On the afternoon of Saturday 3 May 2014, neighbours in the exclusive gated community of Reynolds Great Waters at Lake Oconee, Georgia, gathered for a Kentucky Derby watch party. Two of the invited guests never arrived. Three days later, a neighbour found 88 year old Russell Dermond's decapitated body in the garage of his million dollar lakefront home. His head was missing. His 87 year old wife Shi...

In 2013, three threatening letters laced with the deadly poison ricin were mailed to President Barack Obama, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and a gun control advocate. The FBI raced to identify the sender as panic spread across the country. But when Texas mother and bit-part actress Shannon Richardson contacted the FBI to point the finger at her husband Nathaniel, investigators quickly realised...

On June 6, 2015, two convicted murderers escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York—a maximum-security prison that hadn't seen a successful escape in over 150 years. Richard Matt and David Sweat spent months meticulously cutting through steel walls, crawling through tunnels, and navigating the bowels of the prison before emerging through a manhole cover on a street outside t...

Michele Diane "Shelly" Miscavige was once one of the most powerful women in the Church of Scientology—the wife of its leader, David Miscavige, and a commanding figure within the organisation's elite Sea Org division. But in August 2005, Shelly vanished from public view following a reported confrontation with her husband. For years, no one outside Scientology's inner circle saw or heard from her. H...

Richard Kuklinski was a contract killer who claimed to have murdered over 100 people during his 30-year career as a hitman for the mob. Known as "The Iceman" for his method of freezing victims' bodies to disguise their time of death, Kuklinski lived a double life as a seemingly devoted family man in suburban New Jersey while working as one of America's most prolific contract killers. He used an ar...

July 12, 1979. Brooklyn, New York. Carmine Galante sat on the back patio of Joe and Mary's restaurant, finishing lunch with his cigar clenched between his teeth. At 69 years old, he controlled the heroin trade in New York City. He had built a drug empire worth millions through the French Connection. He had murdered at least 80 people over his career. And he had made a critical error: he declared h...

January 12, 1981. A dog wandered into the woods north of Houston and returned home carrying a decomposed human arm. Search parties found two bodies. A young man, bound and beaten to death. A young woman, strangled and posed in prayer. For 40 years, they remained unidentified. Buried in anonymous graves. Forgotten. Until genetic genealogy finally gave them their names: Harold Dean Clouse Junior, 21...

On November 3, 2005, Charles Victor Thompson did something no death row inmate had accomplished in the 21st century: he walked out the front door of Harris County Jail using a fake badge and civilian clothes. For 78 hours, one of Texas's most dangerous killers rode freight trains, posed as a Hurricane Katrina evacuee, and evaded a massive manhunt. But Thompson's story didn't start with his audacio...

In 1912, four-year-old Bobby Dunbar vanished beside Louisiana’s Swayze Lake . After eight desperate months, a child was found hundreds of miles away with a travelling handyman — and the Dunbars swore he was their son. The story became a national sensation: a miracle return, a family reunited, faith rewarded. But ninety years later, a simple DNA test exposed one of America’s most haunting cases of...

In the summer of 1951, 67-year-old Mary Reeser was found almost entirely incinerated in her armchair in St. Petersburg, Florida — in a fire so strange, the FBI was called in. The walls were untouched. The clock had frozen at 4:20 a.m. And all that remained of Mary was a slippered foot, part of her spine, and a shrunken skull. Her death would become one of the most famous unsolved mysteries in mode...

Richard Lancelyn Green was the world’s leading expert on Sherlock Holmes. A lifelong collector, historian, and passionate Holmesian, he spent years uncovering long-lost treasures tied to Arthur Conan Doyle. But in March 2004, Green was found dead in his London flat under circumstances eerily reminiscent of the detective stories he adored. Did he take his own life, an accident, or something far mor...

Listener discretion advised: This story contains subject matter some may find upsetting. In the quiet Scottish countryside, just outside Dumbarton, lies an elegant stone bridge that has become infamous around the world. Since the 1950s, Overtoun Bridge has drawn eerie attention for a chilling phenomenon: hundreds of dogs have leapt from its walls—many to their deaths—without warning or explanation...

In 1976, the small town of Circleville, Ohio, began receiving letters, hundreds of them. Each one was anonymous. Each one accused neighbours, teachers, and officials of dark secrets. And each one carried the same eerie signature: none at all. The anonymous writer seemed to know everything, where people worked, who they spoke to, even private affairs no one else could have known. Then came the thre...

In December 1946, 18-year-old Bennington College student Paula Jean Welden set out for a short hike on Vermont’s Long Trail. She was seen by motorists and hikers and then she was gone. Despite one of the largest searches in state history, no trace was ever found. Her case not only unsettled a community, but directly led to the creation of the Vermont State Police, and became part of the legend of...

In 1928, nine-year-old Walter Collins vanished on his way to the cinema in Los Angeles. Months later, police declared they had solved the case and returned a boy to his grieving mother. But when Christine Collins insisted the child was not her son, she found herself locked in a battle with one of America’s most corrupt police departments and at the centre of a mystery that would spiral into one of...

In December 2016, American diplomats in Havana, Cuba, began reporting a strange set of symptoms, nausea, dizziness, headaches, and hearing loss. Many described hearing a high-pitched sound, like marbles rolling inside a funnel, just before the illness struck. By 2018, dozens of U.S. and Canadian officials had been affected, sparking panic, diplomatic fallout, and years of investigation. Was it a n...

In August 2005, 21-year-old Australian backpacker Ryan Chambers walked barefoot out of an ashram in Rishikesh, India, leaving behind his passport, wallet, phone, and shoes. He was never seen again. For nearly two decades, his family searched across India, chasing rumours and plastering posters from Punjab to Rajasthan. In 2023, a South Australian court finally declared Ryan dead — but the mystery...

In January 2013, 21-year-old Canadian student Elisa Lam checked into Los Angeles’ infamous Cecil Hotel. Known for its dark history of crime, tragedy, and mystery, the hotel was the last place Elisa was seen alive. When she failed to check out or contact her family, police launched a search. Two weeks later, security footage of Elisa inside a hotel elevator shocked the world. Her behaviour, pressin...

For 22 years, Robert Hanssen lived two lives. By day, he was a devoted Catholic, a father of six, and a senior FBI counterintelligence officer trusted with America's most guarded secrets. By night, he was Ramon Garcia, a faceless traitor selling those secrets to Moscow for diamonds and cash. He compromised nuclear war strategies, revealed the identities of American spies working inside the KGB, an...

February 27, 2026. Albuquerque, New Mexico. Retired Air Force Major General William McCasland left his home between 11:10am and 12:04pm. He took his wallet, hiking boots, a .38-calibre revolver, and a red backpack. He left behind his phone, glasses, and wearable devices. Seventeen days later, despite helicopters, drones, search dogs, and 700 homes canvassed, there was no trace of him. But McCaslan...

On December 13, 2000, seven convicted felons walked out of a maximum-security Texas prison in broad daylight. They overpowered guards, stole weapons, and drove through the front gate in a maintenance truck. For eleven days, they stayed ahead of the largest manhunt in Texas history. Then, on Christmas Eve, they robbed a sporting goods store in Irving. Officer Aubrey Hawkins responded to the call. H...

Between May 2005 and August 2006, Phoenix, Arizona, was terrorised by two men who drove through the city at night, shooting random strangers for sport. Dale Hausner, a Sky Harbor Airport custodian and boxing journalist, and Samuel Dieteman, an electrician from Minnesota, killed at least eight people and injured 19 more in what they called "RV'ing"—Random Recreational Violence. High on methamphetam...

On a warm June evening in 1768, a 69-year-old paralysed man named Owen Parfitt sat outside his sister's cottage in Shepton Mallet, England, dressed in his nightshirt and propped up on his folded greatcoat. Just a dozen yards away, farm workers laboured in full view of the porch. Around 7 PM, Owen's elderly sister Mary and a young neighbour, Susannah Snook, went inside to fetch him before an approa...