Criminal

In 1983, three men were prepared to plead guilty to the violent sexual assault of Elizabeth Daniel in Anderson, South Carolina. Defense attorneys did not want their clients to go before a jury, so they arranged a plea deal. This left the sentencing in the hands of Judge C. Victor Pyle who gave the assailants a very controversial choice: undergo castration or serve 30 years in jail. Say hello on Tw...

Jane Toppan was born in Massachusetts in 1857. She attended the Cambridge Nursing School, and established a successful private nursing career in Boston. Said to be cheerful, funny and excellent with her patients, nothing about "Jolly Jane" suggested she could be "the most notorious woman poisoner of modern times” responsible for the death of at least 35 people. She would later be committed to the...

In 2010, an eighth-grader brought a loaded gun to a middle school in Hastings, Minnesota. We speak with Jake Bullington and Emma Bolters, two students at the school, and Mark Zuzek, the principal, about the hours in lockdown. Read Jake Bullington's essay, "Yeah, I'm Afraid of Guns."  Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the sho...

The 500-year-old Treaty Oak in Austin, Texas was once called "the most perfect specimen of a North American tree." But in 1989, Austin's city forester John Giedraitis realized that the Treaty Oak didn't look so good, and began to wonder whether someone had intentionally tried to kill it. The Austin police were on the case, so when Paul Stedman Cullen was arrested for the criminal “mischief,” it wa...

As a young woman in the 60s, Andy Austin talked her way into a job as a courtroom sketch artist in Chicago. She spent 43 years sketching everyone from disgraced governors to John Wayne Gacy, and says she only made someone look bad on purpose once. See Andy Austin's sketches, including the one she made of Phoebe, on our website http://thisiscriminal.com/episode-35-pen-paper-1-22-2016/. Her book, Ru...

Michael Ross was the first person in Connecticut to be sentenced to death since 1960. He claimed that he wanted to die in order to atone for what he had done. One journalist spent twenty years trying to figure out whether or not his remorse was real. Learn more about Martha Elliot's relationship with Michael Ross in her book, The Man in the Monster. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Si...

Sgt. David Mascarenas is the Dive Supervisor for the Los Angeles Police Department. He's been diving his whole life, and prides himself on never refusing a dive, no matter how treacherous. At least until the summer of 2013, when a murder investigation led him into the unusually murky waters of the La Brea tar pits. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter...

Ed Crawford had never been to a protest until he heard about the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Robert Cohen, a staff photographer with the St. Louis Post Dispatch, ended up taking a photograph of Ed that would be seen around the world, and change both of their lives. To see the photos, visit http://thisiscriminal.com/episode-32-it-looked-like-fire-12-11-2015/. We released an upd...

When we're kids, we have ideas of what we want to be when we grow up -- movie star, doctor, astronaut. But what if we dream of being like Butch Cassidy, Jesse James, or John Dillinger? And what happens when you're not a kid anymore but you're still obsessed with becoming an outlaw? For Clay Tumey, this dream led him to commit a series of robberies in 2006. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instag...

In 2005, Danny Egipciaco had the opportunity to participate in a robbery of a drug supplier's stash house. He was told he'd take home between $100K-200K. In the end, the robbery never happened, so why has Danny spent the last ten years at Fort Dix Correctional Institution? Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and revie...

Corporal Scott Foster of the Hillsborough, NC Police Department worked closely with his K-9 partner, Talon, for many years. They located weapons and narcotics, tracked suspects through dark woods, and went home together after work. But when Talon was injured on the job and had to retire early, Corporal Foster was paired with a new dog and life got a lot more complicated. Watch Phoebe get attacked...

Patti Hammond Shaw is a transgender woman. She's legally female on her birth certificate and driver's license, and has been since 1993. But when she was arrested in 2009, male officers strip-searched her in front of male detainees, and held her overnight in a men's cellblock. Patti Hammond Shaw hired a lawyer and fought back. Her case was instrumental in changing how the police process and detain...

In the early 90s, a wealthy magazine publisher was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 18 months in a minimum security prison in Louisiana. But white collar criminals weren't the only people living there, and the other people inside had basically been forgotten about by the outside world, some of them for decades. Learn more about Neil White’s time at Carville in his memoir, In the Sanctuary of Ou...

In July of 2002, Philadelphia Homicide Detective Pat Mangold was called to the scene of a gruesome murder on the Schuylkill River. When he wasn't able to determine the victim's identity, he expected the case to remain unsolved. But then, out of the blue, a professional soccer player named Adam Bruckner inserted himself into the investigation, and became obsessed with solving the crime. Say hello o...

More than eighty years ago, a North Carolina family of nine posed for a Christmas portrait. Two weeks later, all but one of them had been shot dead. (See the portrait here.) Today, we bring you the story of the Lawson family of Stokes County. Thanks to Elephant Micah and Sarah Bryan for collaborating with us this month. Download Elephant Micah's version of "Lawson Family" (along with their version...

In February of 1896, a little boy discovered a woman's headless body in a farmer's field in Fort Thomas, Kentucky. No one knew who she was, or what had happened. Newspapers carried headlines like "Hunt for the Head" and "Headless Horror." Quickly, the crime scene became a tourist attraction and visitors traveled from all over to collect bloody souvenirs. The gruesome details were adapted into a po...

The Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona has the largest collection of petrified wood in the world. The beautiful wood is more than 200 million years old, and visitors to the park often take a little piece home with them as a souvenir. But stealing the wood has serious consequences, both legal and, some say, supernatural.  See photographs of the conscience letters and learn more about Ryan Th...

Hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of rare books have been disappearing across America since the late 90s, and haven't resurfaced in the marketplace. They've just vanished, never to be seen again. But unlike most thieves, this thief is motivated by something more abstract and romantic than money, which makes him extremely difficult to catch.  Today, we have the story of John Charles Gilkey. S...

Julius Robinson had killed for revenge before, and so when his sister was brutally murdered in her sleep last year, he says he planned to "get" the killer. He felt like his family expected him to get revenge, because that's what he'd always done, both in and out of prison. But when he learned that the killer was actually his 17-year-old nephew, he struggled against his family's expectations and hi...

Karen Miller met a man named Gil Harper on Facebook. They started flirting. The flirtation grew more serious. Eventually, they planned to meet in real life. Gil would travel from London to meet Karen for her birthday. With his arrival just a few days away, Karen's son scrambled to learn more about Gil's identity. But trying to determine whether someone is who they say they are turned out to be a w...

Sandie Alger is a 71-year-old woman with a very long rap sheet. She was in and out of prison throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and upped her game each time she got out. Prison, she says, is where you move "up the criminal ladder, just like the corporate ladder." Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on A...

This episode won a “Best Documentary” award at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. Police officer John Edwards was patrolling a quiet neighborhood in Bellaire, Texas when he saw an SUV driven by two young Black men, including Robbie Tolan. It was just before 2am on December 31, 2008. Edwards followed the SUV and ran the license plate number. When his computer indicated that the SUV was s...

No one disputes that it's against the law to take another person's life, but is it against the law to sit with someone and watch while they die by suicide? We meet an elderly woman named Fran Schindler who sneaks around the country as an "exit guide."  This is a live interview from Motorco Music Hall in Durham, North Carolina. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasiona...

On July 17th, 1889, the residents of Clayton County, Iowa woke up to news of the worst crime in their history. A Civil War veteran John Elkins and his young wife Hattie had been murdered in their bed in a grisly attack. Their two children escaped to raise the alarm. But something was off. There were no suspects. There were no clues. To quote the local newspaper, the whole thing was “surrounded in...

Dan Stevenson has lived in Oakland's Eastlake neighborhood for 40 years. He says crime has been an issue for as long as he can remember, but he isn't one to call the police on drug dealers or sex workers. He's a pretty "live and let live" kind of guy. Or he was. Before he finally got fed up and took matters into his own hands. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasiona...