Just The Tip-Sters: True Crime Podcast

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Karyn Kupcinet was a beautiful young actress working her way up the Hollywood ladder, using her grit, tenacity (and her dad's solid connections throughout the entertainment industry) to eventually get steady work and even praise for her acting ability.  In November 1963 - just 8 days after the Kennedy assassination, Karyn was found murdered in her apartment, strangled to death by an unknown assail...

In 1978, while hitchhiking to visit a relative, 15 year-old Mary Vincent  was abducted, then repeatedly raped and sodomized, then tortured by 51 year-old Lawrence Singleton, who then attempted to finish the teenager off by cutting both of her arms off with an ax, then kicking her into a drainage ditch.  Almost impossibly, young Mary found the will to stuff dirt into the stubs that were once her fo...

In April 1989, Ramon Salcido, a husband and father of three girls, went on a drunken, ghastly, deadly rampage, killing seven people, including his wife, two of his daughters, his mother-in-law, two sisters-in-law and a coworker.  What he did with his three daughters was particularly evil - he  took them to a dump, slit their throats from ear-to-ear and left them to die in piles of garbage.  The so...

Here's a quick between-regular-episodes MURDERTIZER to abate your appetite for All Melissa, All the Time - and it's got some BIG NEWS - Peter Chadwick, the millionaire (alleged) wife killer who told cops one of the stupidest "my spouse was murdered" stories ever (allegedly) concocted and then, once arrested, got out on bail and (allegedly) skipped the country for four years - has finally been foun...

SURVIVOR MONTH on Just The Tip-Sters begins with our first edition of MURDER NERD UNIVERSITY - where Melissa focuses on the sciences and practices and interesting people - both in the past and in modern-day criminology - that contribute to the art of criminal justice.  In late 2017 Brigida Uto (who later changed her surname back to maiden name McInvale for reasons that will become obvious) got ver...

It was October 7, 1992 in Morphett Vale, South Australia, and 12 year-old Rhianna Barreau was on a school holiday.  Rhianna, who lived with her mother and brother, wanted to buy a Christmas card for her pen pal in America (remember, this was 1992 and it took awhile for a card to get from Australia to the U.S.).  The family lived only about a mile or so away from a local shopping center, so when Rh...

Back around the turn of the century...no not 2001....no, no, not 1901...the turn of the century before THAT, in the late 1700s and early 1800s...a young man raised in a good family in France was very busy being a very very bad boy, all over France as well as a good chunk of Europe.  His name was Eugene Francois Vidocq, and his penchant for getting into trouble with the law was matched only by his...

Back at Season 2, Episode 28 Melissa covered the missing person case of Savannah Spurlock, a young single mother who lived near Lexington, Kentucky and who disappeared after leaving a bar with two men in January of 2019.  Her family's quick response to her disappearance and steadfastness in making sure law enforcement stayed relentless in finding out what happened has been nothing short of phenome...

The tragic 1987 public suicide of Pennsylvania State Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer is one of the most well known, horrifying and sad media events ever to occur in the United States.  A media event because Dwyer shot himself in the mouth with a .357 magnum revolver during a live, highly-publicized press conference.  Horrifying because it was a snow day and kids were home from school watching TV when it h...

In the dark early evening of November 20, 2011, 23 year-old David Michael Grubbs left his job at a local supermarket in Ashland Oregon, carrying some groceries, to walk home.  Just a couple of hours later, David's body was found just off a bike path that was on his route home.  The body was nearly decapitated by what police determined was a medium to large blade such as a sword or machete.  Now go...

On January 4, 2019 Savannah Spurlock, a 22 year-old mother of 4 who had given birth to twins just a month earlier, was told by her mother that she should take a break and go have some fun.  So with grandma watching the kids, Savannah did just that - she and two friends went to downtown Lexington Kentucky for a night on the town and ended up at a place called The Other Bar.  After one friend left t...

Recently a Tip-Ster from Boston - "Tip-Ster Jennifer" - brought a case to Melissa's attention that she had not been aware of - the 1993 murders in Houston Texas of 14 year-old Jennifer Ertman and 16 year-old Elizabeth Pena.  The facts of the case are among the most gruesome and disturbing Melissa has ever encountered - but more than the horror of the crimes themselves were two compelling side-stor...

On the last day of June in 2017, Craig Lackey got to watch his 25 year-old son Chase compete in a ballgame in his home town of Houston, Texas.  After the game, Craig hugged his son and told him he'd had a great game - and Chase, a dazzlingly cheerful, happy young man and friend to all who knew him, told his dad he loved him.  That was the last time Craig saw his son.  The next day, Chase was seen...

By all appearances, Peter Chadwick is a pretty rotten human.  A millionaire British ex-pat living in an exclusive Southern California enclave with his wife and three sons, he suddenly disappears, along with his bride, one day in October 2012.  Early the next morning 911 operators some 100 miles away in San Diego get a call from Chadwick, who claims his wife had been killed the previous day, and th...

It's been just over a year since the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo, the alleged Golden State Killer, who was captured through an ingenious ploy by law enforcement, which registered the then-unknown killer's DNA under a dummy name on GEDMatch, a public DNA-based genealogy website.  That sample led to distant relatives of DeAngelo who had registered their DNA on GEDMatch.  From there, detectives p...

In this special Memorial Day Weekend MURDERTIZER (an appetizer of murder!), Melissa takes a look at a case not even a month old.  One that is seemingly solved...or is it?  On May 15, 2019 sheriff's deputies in Merced County (in California's San Joaquin Valley) were alerted to a big rig parked on the side of a major Interstate highway.  Unlocked.  With its motor running.  With the driver's wallet a...

This week, in a tip-of-the-cap to her growing band of Tip-Sters in Australia, Melissa focuses on one of the most agonizingly maddening murder mysteries our brethren Down Under still have no answers for - the 1980-1981 killings of six women in the southeastern suburbs of Melbourne.  Known simply as the Tynong North and Frankston Murders (based on the two locations where the bodies of the victims we...

Say True-Crimers, here's a couple of brain teasers for the next time you want to stump a fellow Murder Maven: What was the investigation covered in the very first episode of "Forensic Files"?  Or how about this: What was the first "no body" murder trial to result in a conviction in the State of Connecticut?  Well surprise!  The answer to both questions is the same - it's the gruesome-yet-freakishl...

The brutal strangulation death of Karina Vetrano in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens New York in August 2016 seemed like a slam-dunk, easy-to-solve crime at first blush.  The 30 year-old beauty had been killed while jogging in the late afternoon, her body dumped just a few yards off the running path in Spring Creek Park.  But then things got not so slam-dunk.  And fast.  Police followed emp...

On June 21, 2014 Jeff Joseph - a Southern California cannabis entrepreneur who had opened a marijuana growing operation some 700 miles to the north, was on his way back to his farm when he disappeared seemingly off the face of the planet and hasn't been seen or heard from since.  Sadly, Jeff's story is just one of literally hundreds of missing persons in Humboldt County, where - as detailed in the...

How about an update on the prosecution of one of our most fascinating topics - the Golden State Killer?  One year after the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo, Melissa has the latest on the (possibly politically-motivated) legal strategies happening in this continually mind-bending saga.  Plus: It's been a crazy week at Tip-Ster Central, with updates on three (3) (count 'em!) additional previously-co...

On June 24, 1986 one of the most sensational and brutal attempted jewelry store robberies in US history took place at the storied Van Cleef and Arpels Jewelers on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.  It was there that a 22 year-old would-be thief named Steven Livaditis quickly and without much explanation at all turned himself into a cold-blooded murderer when the robbery he thought he could pull off we...

Imagine living what would be every woman's worst nightmare:  You're driving down the road with your favorite cousin in the passenger seat, not a care in the world, when suddenly a truck pulls up beside you and the guy inside fires a shotgun directly at you.  And shoots.  Blowing your elbow into shattered bone and blood.  When you pull over, that same driver tries to pull your cousin out of your ca...

A rare MURDERTIZER (an appetizer of murder) in our regular weekly time slot - but as this week's podcast reveals, Melissa and Producer Mark have a lot on their plate - but Melissa wanted to make sure you, dear listener, had a zesty treat until the next full episode.  And this one is straight out of the "it's so strange it MUST be true" department... in 2010 a bank robbery took place in Gallatin Te...