Just The Tip-Sters: True Crime Podcast

Melissa was lucky enough to be in beautiful Laguna Beach, California a couple of weeks ago,when a longtime friend of the show - "Detective Joe," a law enforcement officer who spent some serious time on loan to the U.S. Marshals, was able to drop by for a chat.  And what a chat it is!  You see,Detective Joe was attached to the U.S. Marshals unit that tracked down and finally caught suspected serial...

On Valentine's Day 1982, eleven miles west of the traveler-stopover town of Williams Arizona, the body of a beautiful young woman was discovered in a ditch on the side of Interstate 40.  She was impeccably dressed, had not been sexually assaulted, but had - according to the coroner - been suffocated somehow.  What baffled police - and baffles them to this day - is why no one ever claimed her.  Ove...

In 2019 Melissa covered the 1980 missing person case of 17 year-old Randy Sellers, who disappeared after attending the Kenton County (Kentucky) Fair, becoming drunk and disorderly and after taking a swing at one of the Sheriff's Deputies sent to deal with him.  He was last seen in the company of four officers, who claimed to have dropped him off a mile from his home so he could avoid getting in tr...

This is the case that inspired Melissa to start this very podcast.  As she has since the first January of "Just The Tip-Sters," Melissa recaps and updates the "shouldn't-be-a" cold case of Will Cierzan, a regular guy living a simple life with the love of his life in the Southern California suburb of Santa Clarita - whose wife came home from work one early evening in January 2017 to find dinner sit...

In 1988 Diane Sherman Young was a 22 year-old working mother living in rural Indiana.  Diane was married to Scott Young,  whose brother -Mike - was actually married to Susan, one of Diane's sisters.  Diane worked in a local convenience store and seemed by all appearances to be leading a normal, everyday life.  Then, suddenly, everyday became a horror story.  On May 21, 1988 a local man driving his...

Terry Brisk was your average Minnesota family man and sportsman - not a big game hunter, but someone who did enjoy deer hunting during Deer Season - and who doesn't like a hot bowl of venison stew on a chilly autumn evening?  So when Terry took off early from work in November of 2016 to spend a couple of hours on his family's 100-acre property hunting for dinner, it wasn't anything out of the ordi...

Season 3 open with the story of Joe Bryan, a high school principal who lived with the love of his life - his wife Mickey, an elementary school teacher - in (seemingly) idyllic Clifton Texas.  The Bryans were known not only as pillars of their community, but truly good people who cared about their young charges and even spent their own money to buy clothing and lunches for those most in need.  Ever...

Say what you will about Dan Rather - the famed newsman and former anchor of the CBS Evening News has had an ... interesting ... time of it over the years.  There was that time that viewers of the broadcast in the Eastern and Central time zones saw a black screen instead of Rather because he'd walked out in a huff over a tennis match digging into his time.  Then there was the time a cab driver in C...

In 1975 a series of murders of young women in Dade and Broward Counties in South Florida baffled police.  They were dubbed the "Flat Tire Murders" because evidence strongly suggested that tires on the victims' cars were deflated as they shopped or were otherwise away from their vehicles - and then "assisted" by the killer when they returned.  But wait just a second.  Officially, the still-unsolved...

In 1974 and 1975 five white gay men were savagely stabbed to death by a young African American man who attracted his victims by sketching their likenesses in the bars and cafes of San Francisco's Castro District, eventually luring them away to their doom.  He has never been identified, let alone arrested.  So how do we know so much about this killer and his modus operandi?  We know because three a...

In 1970 and 1971, the bodies of six girls and young women were tossed onto the side of various freeways in the Washington DC metropolitan area.  Most had been sexually assaulted and then strangled - none were over the age of 18.  Like so many serial killers, the so-called "Freeway Phantom" not only tortured his victims before slaying them - he also taunted police, and worst of all, the families of...

Scott Cox is a monster - the question is, how big of a monster - and can the immensity of his monstrosity be proven?  Convicted of the rape and murder of two women in 1990 and 1991, Cox - a trucker who frequented the two major interstates in and around his home town of Seattle - is the ONLY suspect in an additional 20 homicides up, down and across the I-5 and I-90 corridors, some as far north as C...

When your cousin and his best friend are attacked - and your cousin is killed - and his best friend suffers permanent brain damage - by three random thugs - for no reason whatsoever - and then all three disappear into thin air - for THREE DECADES - what would you do?  Well here's what Audry McDonald did:  Audry McDonald never stopped looking, that's what.  And when as the case got colder, she beca...

In the aftermath of the horrific shooting deaths of two innocent high school students on November 14, 2019 - and the suicide of the shooter - in our home town of Santa Clarita, Melissa examines the facts known to date about this tragic incident and celebrates the hero first responders who ran toward the sound of gunshots.  And in a moving dialogue on the causes and lifelong effects of such an even...

When you kill someone and you're sentenced to prison "for the rest of your natural life," without the possibility of parole, you're done.  Finished.  Kaput.  No more freedom for you, ever.  Right?  Right.  Except.  What does the "your natural life" mean, exactly?  Especially when we live in an age where technology can actually revive someone who has literally died for a few seconds?  And how does...

Setting fires is bad.  Setting fires that destroy property and businesses is worse.  But setting fires so recklessly as to take innocent lives in service of some hidden, inexplicable lust for flame and heat is evil.  And the most evil among those fire-starters are those who are sworn to protect us from that very danger - those in the uniform of firefighters.  And the very worst of all is one John...

October 1969.  Nighttime in a quiet, leafy upscale suburban neighborhood in one of Cincinnati's toniest conclaves.  A young couple with two young children, and the wife's mother, all presumably asleep inside.  Except when the kids wake up the next morning and go to the neighbors to say they can't rouse mom and dad, what the neighbors find is simply horrific: The stabbed and shot bodies of Martin D...

Here's a twisted little murder story of justice delayed and (at least as of right now) justice denied for the victim - the location of whose body still hasn't been revealed by the killer.  And about that killer - dude named Will Greer (no not Grandpa Walton - this bastard has an "r" in his last name).  Greer actually drunkenly admitted - while TWO police video cameras were rolling - that he killed...

There are mysteries.  There are baffling mysteries.  And then there are mysteries that throw an entire nation into fits of frustration and anger.  This is one of those cases.  3 year-old William Tyrrell was playing with his older sister - when his foster mother (who was watching both kids with her own mom) went into the house briefly.  When she returned, young William was gone - the grandmother ha...

In 1956 Chicago, it wasn't unusual for a couple of young women to venture out on foot at night to see a movie at a local theater.  So when 15 year-old Barbara Grimes and her 12 year-old sister Patricia - both huge fans of Elvis Presley - asked their mom if they could walk to the local cinema to watch "Love Me Tender" for the umpteenth time on December 28, 1956, Loretta Grimes had no problem saying...

Back a few episodes ago (JTT Episode 98 to be precise) Melissa covered the puzzling 1963 murder of young Hollywood actress Karyn Kupcinet.  Karyn's killer has never been identified, but her demise was surrounded in a shroud of weirdness, including a tie to the JFK assassination and a possible link to a tough guy matinee idol named Lawrence Tierney, who, Melissa was once told by a colleague of Tier...

Matthew Weaver Jr. was troubled - but really not that much more troubled than any other 21 year-old young man is troubled.  So when he went for a late night ride in the hills above Malibu California in August 2018, it seemed a perfectly natural thing for him to do, to catch his breath and settle his mind.  Except that he never returned.  His car was found perilously perched at a place called Rosas...

In August 1994 a sports fisherman cruising the Hawkesbury River in Sydney Australia got a tug on his line unlike any he'd gotten before.  Hauling what he thought was going to be a prize flathead into his boat, he instead encountered pure horror: The macabre remains of a man's body tied to a cross-like rack.  Forensic science determined that the man had been killed roughly one year prior - but that...

It's the 100th episode of "Just The Tip-Sters" - and Melissa marks the occasion with a tragic story from her home state of Kentucky - in honor of those who perished and in celebration of the positive strides, both culturally and in the law, that sprang forth after that terrible day.  On May 14, 1988, a converted school bus carrying 63 (mostly) young teenagers and four adults (including the bus dri...

This episode Melissa details two unrelated cases involving two sets of two best friends, one case a little weird but solved , the other completely mysterious and just as completely unsolved.   In July 2019, school teachers Kenneth Anderson Jr. and Mark Anderson (no relation, believe it or not) were found dead in the swimming pool of a house they were sitting in Davenport Iowa.  Local police recent...