History's Hidden Killers

Cindy Anthony told a 911 dispatcher the car smelled like a dead body. She meant it. You can hear it in the recording — the panic, the certainty, the horror. Three years later, she sat on the witness stand and told the jury those words were just an expression she used to get police to come faster. A mother on a 911 call knew the truth. A mother on the stand could not afford it. George and Cindy pro...

Buster Murdaugh gave his firstborn child his father’s name. His father is Alex Murdaugh, convicted of murdering Buster’s mother Maggie and brother Paul at the family’s hunting estate. Alex also confessed to stealing millions from clients, running drugs through his law firm, and staging a suicide attempt. Buster sat through every day of the murder trial. He testified that Alex was “destroyed, heart...

Kitty Menendez’s sister Joan VanderMolen stood at a courthouse podium in 2024 and said the men who killed her sister should go free. She said Erik and Lyle were “failed by the very people who should have protected them.” More than twenty family members stood with her. For thirty years, the extended Menendez family said almost nothing. Then new evidence surfaced — including a 1988 letter Erik wrote...

Michelle Duggar’s letter to the judge called her convicted son “tender-hearted” and “compassionate toward others.” It asked the court to reunite the family. It did not dwell on the children depicted in the material Josh was convicted of possessing. Jim Bob Duggar’s performance on the witness stand told the rest of the story. He refused to answer questions about Josh’s earlier acknowledged conduct...

Janey Peterson tells anyone who will listen: “The wrong person’s in prison.” She has been saying it for more than twenty years. Her brother-in-law Scott was convicted of murdering his pregnant wife Laci on circumstantial evidence alone — no weapon, no crime scene, no eyewitnesses. And Janey has spent two decades building a factual counter-narrative so organized that the Los Angeles Innocence Proje...

Cindy Watts went on camera after her son’s confession and said: “He’s not a sociopath.” Her son had just admitted to strangling his pregnant wife, smothering their two daughters, and disposing of the children’s bodies in crude oil tanks. And Cindy’s instinct was not to reckon with what he did. It was to defend who he was. This episode follows the Watts parents from the sentencing courtroom — where...

Twenty-two years after Lonnie Franklin Jr. shot her, Enietra Washington was shown a Polaroid photograph. It was her — twenty-seven years old, unconscious, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the chest, slumped in the passenger seat of an orange Ford Pinto. Franklin had taken it as a trophy and stored it in his garage alongside over a thousand other photos of women. The Grim Sleeper killed at least te...

She didn't know about the wilderness or the rifle or the map with the X's. What Cindy Paulson knew was that wherever Robert Hansen's Cessna was going, she was not coming back. She ran barefoot in handcuffs across Merrill Field, flagged a driver on the highway, and led police to the exact spot where Hansen's plane was still parked. Hansen's method was specific and horrifying — he flew women to remo...

Five words. "Everything is going to be okay." Chris Maier said them on his knees, hands bound, staring at a man with a fifty-two-pound rock. He said them to Holly Dunn. He was twenty-one. He was dead within minutes. Holly wasn't. The Railroad Killer — Angel Maturino Reséndiz — was eventually linked to at least fifteen murders across six states. Holly was the only known survivor. She crawled two hu...

She crossed the courtroom. She walked directly at Richard Speck. She stopped close enough to touch him. And she said: "This is the man." Then Corazon Amurao disappeared from public life for sixty years. On the night of July 13, 1966, Speck killed eight of her roommates in a Chicago townhouse. Corazon survived by hiding under a bed for six hours while he worked room by room. Her description of his...

She told him she'd be his secret girlfriend. She told him her father was dying and she was his only caretaker. She asked him questions to build rapport. She was seventeen years old, blindfolded, in a serial killer's apartment — and she was running a psychological operation designed to keep herself alive. Every word Lisa McVey said to Bobby Joe Long during those twenty-six hours was calculated. And...

On February 16, 2005, a purple Memorex floppy disk arrived at KSAS-TV in Wichita. The disk had been mailed by Dennis Rader. It contained a Microsoft Word file titled Test A.RTF. The file's content was unremarkable. The file's metadata was not. The metadata showed two things. The file had been last saved on a computer at Christ Lutheran Church in Park City, Kansas. The user account that had saved i...

In his fourteen years as the compliance officer for the city of Park City, Kansas, Dennis Rader designed a rain slicker for himself with the word POLICE printed across the back. He wore it on the job. He was not a police officer. He did not have arrest authority. His authority extended to grass height, junked vehicles, and other municipal code matters. The Park City police chief made him stop wear...

In April of 1985, Marine Hedge was killed in her own bedroom in Park City, Kansas. She was sixty-three years old. She lived alone. Her body was found a week later in a ditch outside town. Marine Hedge lived on Independence Street. Dennis Rader lived on Independence Street. They were neighbors. On the night Rader killed her, he walked from her front door to his own back door. He went home. He went...

Factor X was a phrase Dennis Rader typed in a letter to a Wichita television station in February of 1978. He used it to describe what he claimed was driving him to kill. He compared the feeling to a demon. He compared himself to Jack the Ripper. He compared himself to Son of Sam. He asked the press, in writing, to call him the BTK Strangler. The press said yes. For forty-seven years, every documen...

Cynthia Dawn Kinney walked out of her aunt and uncle's laundromat in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, on June 23, 1976. She was sixteen years old. A cheerleader. Reportedly, she was last seen getting into a beige 1965 Plymouth with two women she did not appear to know. She has never been seen alive since. Her body has never been found. Almost fifty years later, her family is still waiting. In August of 2023, t...

Twenty-six names ran through these five conversations. Karen Sparks. Lynda Healy. Donna Manson. Susan Rancourt. Kathy Parks. Brenda Ball. Georgann Hawkins. Janice Ott. Denise Naslund. Nancy Wilcox. Melissa Smith. Laura Aime. Debby Kent. Carol DaRonch. Caryn Campbell. Julie Cunningham. Denise Oliverson. Lynette Culver. Susan Curtis. Margaret Bowman. Lisa Levy. Kathy Kleiner. Karen Chandler. Cheryl...

Nita Neary did not scream. She ran upstairs. She woke another sister. They turned on the lights. They opened doors. They found their friends. That is who acted first on the night of January 15, 1978, inside the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University. Not the police. Not a detective. A twenty-year-old woman who saw a masked man on the stairs and chose to go up instead of out. Margaret...

The first time, he went out a window. The second time, he went up through a ceiling. Both times, the building he left behind had believed it was holding somebody smaller than who was actually there. Utah had Ted Bundy for one kidnapping. Colorado had him for one murder. The man in custody had killed at minimum sixteen women across five states by the end of 1975. Nobody in either building had proce...

Carol DaRonch was eighteen when she fought her way out of Ted Bundy's car on a November night in 1974. She ran into the road. A couple stopped. She told her story to the Murray Police Department at ten o'clock that night. She would tell it again in a Salt Lake courtroom sixteen months later, and that telling would put him in prison. The system did not catch Ted Bundy. A survivor did. An accident d...

Before Ted Bundy was the most recognized name in American criminal history, he was a man nobody had connected to anything. In 1974, across the state of Washington, young women began to disappear. Not from dark alleys. From campuses. From parking lots behind sororities. From a state park on a Sunday afternoon in front of forty thousand people. Karen Sparks survived an attack in her basement bedroom...