Curator 135

Send us Fan Mail An elderly couple sits for a photograph. Behind them, a mysterious young woman appears. Her face is faint, her clothing ghostly, and according to the photographer, she isn't among the living. But is this photographic evidence of life after death, or something far more sinister? In this edition of Down the Wiki Rabbit Hole, one peculiar image from Wikimedia Commons leads us in...

Send us Fan Mail Los Angeles, 1936. After a night out, retired organist Samuel Whittaker and his wife, Ethel, returned home to find an armed stranger waiting inside their apartment. Shots rang out. Ethel lay dead. The mysterious gunman escaped with bullets in his body. At first, Samuel Whittaker looked like a grieving husband who had bravely fought back against his wife’s killer. Then police found...

Send us Fan Mail When we left sixteen-year-old John Paul Getty III, he had been struck in the head, bound, blindfolded, and driven away from the streets of Rome. Now the kidnapping begins. Paul awakens in the hands of masked men who have taken him south to Calabria, where they believe the grandson of the richest man in the world must be worth a fortune. There's just one problem. His family is...

Send us Fan Mail In 1973, sixteen-year-old John Paul Getty III had one of the most recognizable surnames on Earth. His grandfather, J. Paul Getty, was known as the richest man in the world—an oil billionaire famous not only for his staggering fortune, but for his eccentricity, complicated family relationships, and legendary reluctance to part with his money. But being a Getty didn't necessari...

Send us Fan Mail Lake Lanier is one of the most popular lakes in America. It is also one of the most feared. Beneath its waters lie old roads, foundations, forgotten pieces of communities, and a history far darker than the ghost stories suggest. In Episode 109, we travel back long before the lake existed. We explore the Native American history of the land, the forced removal of the Cherokee, and t...

Send us Fan Mail What if a single footprint could reveal where someone had been, what they were carrying, and where they were headed? In this episode of Curator 135, we explore the remarkable story of the Shadow Wolves—an elite Native American tracking unit composed primarily of members of the Tohono O'odham Nation. For more than five decades, these extraordinary trackers have used skills pas...

Send us Fan Mail Most horror movies begin as fiction. But sometimes the truth is even more terrifying. In April 1990, Marilynn DePue, a respected Michigan high school guidance counselor and mother of three, vanished after an encounter with her ex-husband, Dennis DePue. What followed was a shocking murder investigation, a terrifying eyewitness account involving a body dumped behind an abandoned sch...

Send us Fan Mail For eleven weeks, I had the opportunity to step inside the world of the Livonia Police Department through the 2026 Livonia Citizen Police Academy — and this episode documents the entire experience. From SWAT demonstrations and accident reconstruction to crisis negotiations, K9 training, ride-alongs, use-of-force policy, crime scene investigations, active shooter response, and virt...

Send us Fan Mail What if the end of the world wouldn’t begin with a decision… but with a misunderstanding? In Drawn to the Stars, a single moment of uncertainty triggers a chain reaction that leads to nuclear war. It’s fiction—but it may be closer to reality than we’d like to admit. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union came dangerously close to nuclear conflict more than onc...

Send us Fan Mail What happens when you leave Earth—and take the human mind somewhere it was never meant to go? After diving back into space while writing Drawn to the Stars: Book One – The Exchange (now available on Amazon), I found myself drawn not just to the missions we all know… but to the moments we don’t talk about as often. The strange ones. The quiet ones. The ones astronauts themselves st...

Send us Fan Mail What makes science fiction so powerful? And why do these stories stay with us long after we’ve finished them? In Episode 103, we explore the minds that helped shape the genre. From early works like New Atlantis and Somnium to the groundbreaking stories of H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip K. Dick, this episode dives into the ideas, predictions, and strange re...

Send us Fan Mail In May of 1922, a young Michigan farmer named Romie “Doc” Hodell was found hanging in a barn outside White Cloud. At first glance, it looked like suicide. But his feet were touching the ground. Within days, doctors ruled it murder. And what followed would become one of the strangest and most divisive criminal cases in Michigan history. Three months earlier, Romie’s father had died...

Send us Fan Mail Las Vegas wasn’t built by saints. It was built by gamblers. In this episode, we dive deep into the life of Benny Binion — the Texas-born gambling boss who fled murder rumors and federal heat, arrived in the Nevada desert, and helped shape modern Las Vegas. Born in rural Pilot Grove, Texas, Binion left school early and learned odds at livestock auctions instead of in classrooms. By...

Send us Fan Mail In the summer of 1967, Detroit was already burning when a far quieter tragedy unfolded behind the doors of the Algiers Motel. As the city reeled from six days of unrest, three young Black men—Carl Cooper, Auburey Pollard, and Fred Temple—were detained, terrorized, and killed during a police raid that would later become one of the most disturbing chapters of the Detroit Uprising. I...

Send us Fan Mail What started as a quiet investigation into a vandalized mausoleum at Mount Moriah Cemetery quickly spiraled into something much darker. In this episode, we explore the recent arrest of Jonathan Christian Gerlach — accused of stealing human remains from Philadelphia’s historic cemeteries — and the eerie digital trail he left behind. From curated Instagram posts to disturbing discov...

Send us Fan Mail In the mid-1850s, America was expanding westward — fast, hungry, and ruthless. The ink was barely dry on the Gadsden Purchase when settlers began pouring into the unforgiving deserts of what would one day become southern Arizona. The land was harsh, lawless, and already inhabited by Native nations like the Apache, who fiercely resisted encroachment. This episode begins in that vol...

Send us Fan Mail Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, the United States has executed over 1,500 people — but only 17 of them have been women. In this episode, we walk cell-by-cell through their stories. The crimes. The trials. The years spent on death row. And, ultimately, the moments the state said it was time to die. From Velma Barfield to Lisa Montgomery, we examine not just wh...

Send us Fan Mail She wasn’t a monster in the shadows — she was a nurse at your bedside. In this chilling episode, we uncover the twisted life of Jane Toppan, the 19th-century caregiver who confessed to murdering at least 31 people — not out of hatred, but for pleasure. A seemingly cheerful and devoted nurse, “Jolly Jane” used her position to experiment with fatal doses of morphine and atropine, ho...

Send us Fan Mail This Halloween, we dig deep — literally — into one of the most disturbing true crime tales in medical history. Step into 1820s Edinburgh, where cobblestone streets echoed with the footsteps of scholars by day… and the shovels of grave robbers by night. This episode uncovers the chilling story of William Burke and William Hare, two men who didn’t just rob graves — they skipped the...

Send us Fan Mail Between June of 1911 and June of 1912, America’s heartland lived in fear. From Oregon to Iowa, entire families were slaughtered in their beds — curtains drawn, lamps dimmed, the blunt edge of an axe left behind. The trail of terror ran through Ardenwald, Rainier, Colorado Springs, Monmouth, Ellsworth, and Paola, before ending with the infamous Villisca murders. Was it the work of...

Send us Fan Mail He was the sheriff with a big stick and an even bigger legend. Buford Pusser fought crime on the Tennessee-Mississippi border with his fists, a badge, and a whole lot of vengeance. His story inspired Walking Tall , a string of sequels, ballads, and generations of folk-hero worship.  But behind the headlines, beneath the scars, there’s a different story.  In this episode of the Cur...

Send us Fan Mail In the late 1800s, Nellie Titus had a dream about a missing girl. A dream so precise, so disturbingly accurate, that it drew the attention of scholars, spiritualists, and skeptics alike — including America’s most famous psychologist, William James. In this episode, we step back in time to a snow-covered mill town, where a woman who’d had visions all her life claimed to see what no...

Send us Fan Mail In 1878, a quiet town in Nova Scotia became the stage for one of Canada’s strangest hauntings. Esther Cox, an ordinary young woman, was suddenly surrounded by raps in the walls, flying objects, and ghostly messages carved into plaster. Neighbors, doctors, ministers — even a touring actor — all claimed to witness the terror firsthand. Was it the work of restless spirits, the echoes...

Send us Fan Mail An up-and-coming NBA star who had it all. The talent, the money, the fame, the women... but then he just walked away. And soon, he would vanish altogether. Learn about Brian Williams, who, after changing his name to Bison Dele, found that the NBA lifestyle was no longer for him. He bought a boat, reconnected with an old flame, and then reconnected with his brother. The last move m...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 89 of the podcast highlights the criminal careers of Dennis Lincoln and John Wolfenbarger and goes into correspondence between the defendants and myself back in 2014. This is chapters 24, 25, and 26 of the book, A Wolf in Suburbia - The Pesce Family Murders. Some of the language used in this podcast is not intended for younger listeners. Parental discretion is advised; bad...