Mugshot Mysteries

Ireland, more than two thousand years ago, the last night of October. The harvest is in, the cattle are penned, and every hearth fire in the village has been deliberately put out. The only light for miles is a single bonfire on a distant hill. Inside a pitch-black house, a family eats in total silence, with one place set at the end of the table, a full plate, a cup, and an empty chair for whoever...

Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MugshotMysteries Tennessee, December 1820. On a log farmhouse by the Red River, a seventy-year-old farmer named John Bell doesn’t wake up. His son goes to the medicine cabinet and finds the usual bottle gone, and a strange dark vial in its place. From the ceiling, a voice, no body, no face, the voice the fa...

Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MugshotMysteries A whitewashed kitchen in rural Hungary, sometime in the 1920s. A woman boils strips of flypaper in a pot, skims the arsenic residue off the top, and bottles it. In the next room her husband coughs. Outside, the church bell rings and someone hangs laundry. In the tiny village of Nagyrév, abo...

Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MugshotMysteries Please note: this episode discusses the deaths of three young children, suicide, and postpartum mental illness. If you are a new mom and you are not in a good place right now, it is okay to skip this one. Support resources are listed at the end of this description. In October 2022, a labor...

Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MugshotMysteries You know the rhyme. Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks. Almost every word of it is wrong. It wasn't an axe, it was a hatchet. Not her mother, her stepmother. Not forty whacks, nineteen for Abby Borden and ten for Andrew. But the rhyme got one thing right, the name,...

Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MugshotMysteries The last week of November, 1928. York County, Pennsylvania. In an isolated hollow that has carried one family's name for generations, a neighbor finds sixty-year-old potato farmer Nelson Rehmeyer dead on his kitchen floor, beaten, bound, and burned. Someone had poured lamp oil over him...

Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MugshotMysteries In 2008, six months before the Large Hadron Collider switched on, two men filed a federal lawsuit in Honolulu to stop it, arguing the machine might create a black hole and swallow the Earth. A year earlier, two credentialed theoretical physicists had published a real, peer-reviewed paper su...

Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MugshotMysteries June 2026. One hundred meters beneath the border between Switzerland and France, two beams of protons that have circled a 27-kilometer ring for eighteen years are steered out and dumped into a block of graphite one final time. The Large Hadron Collider, the largest machine humanity has ever...

Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes and original case files on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MugshotMysteries January 12, 1928. Inside Sing Sing, hardened crime reporters stand shoulder to shoulder in the witness room, and at the center sits a woman: hair shorn for the electrodes, wrists and ankles strapped, swallowing hard but not crying. In seconds Ruth Snyder will become...

Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes and original case files on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MugshotMysteries Paris, 1925. The Eiffel Tower is rusting, expensive to maintain, and quietly rumored in the papers to be a candidate for demolition. To most Parisians, that's background noise. To a sharply dressed man in a suite at the Hotel de Crillon, forged government statio...

Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes on Patreon Yonkers, 1976. Above the Hudson sits the ruin of what was once the grandest garden estate in America, its terraces gone feral, its old stone gatehouse renamed the Devil's Cave by local teenagers. And through 1976 and into 1977, people walking the trails keep finding dead German shepherds. Nobody calls it a case, because it isn...

Brooklyn, July 31, 1977, a few minutes past two in the morning. A patrol officer writes up a yellow Ford Galaxie parked too close to a fire hydrant, tucks the ticket under the wiper, and drives on. He never looks inside the car. He has no reason to. That parking ticket will do more to end the biggest manhunt in NYPD history than hundreds of detectives managed in a year, and no one will understand...

Summer 1975. Tourists landing at JFK are handed a pamphlet by off-duty police officers. On the cover is a hooded skull. The title is "Welcome to Fear City," and inside is a survival guide advising visitors to stay off the streets after six, never ride the subway, and if at all possible, not to come at all. It is a real document, printed by the unions representing the men whose job was pr...

San Francisco, 2013. A letter arrives at a police station with no return address. The writer says his name is John Anglin. He says he escaped Alcatraz in June 1962 with his brother Clarence and Frank Morris. He says he is eighty-three now, and sick, and the last one left. And he makes an offer: promise me a year in prison and medical care, say it on television, and I will tell you exactly where I...

June 12, 1962. 7:15 in the morning, Alcatraz. A guard reaches through the bars of cell 138 to wake a sleeping inmate, and the man's head rolls off the pillow and shatters on the concrete. It is made of soap, toilet paper, and real human hair. Frank Morris has been gone for nine hours. And he is not the only one. On the most secure island in America, a prison the government spent twenty-eight...

November 10, 2009. Inside a Virginia execution chamber, the man at the center of one of the most infamous killing sprees in American history is asked if he has any final words. He says nothing. No confession, no apology, no reason, the same thing he offered every stranger he killed. Minutes later, John Allen Muhammad is pronounced dead. If this were a simpler story, that would be the ending. But t...

While five million people were afraid of a stranger, one woman was afraid of a name. She lived in the Maryland suburbs of Washington with her three children, watched the same coverage as everyone else, the faceless sniper, the white van, the lone white male the experts kept describing, and did not believe a word of it. Because she was the one person in America who understood that this was not real...

October 2002. For twenty-three days, an invisible killer turns the suburbs around the nation's capital into a shooting gallery. People are cut down doing the most ordinary things imaginable, pumping gas, mowing a lawn, reading on a bench, loading groceries, stepping off a bus. Ten will die. A region of five million will learn to weave across parking lots and crouch behind car doors. And for a...

He spent his whole career guarding the game. Then he robbed it blind. For more than a decade, McDonald's Monopoly turned a paper sticker peeled off a fries box into the most reliable lottery in America. Cash, cars, grand prizes worth a fortune. There was just one problem. The winners were never random. They were chosen, recruited, and coached by a single man. This week on Mugshot Mysteries, w...

A twenty-three-year-old woman has never walked in public. Has never eaten without a feeding tube. Has leukemia, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, brain damage from a premature birth. Has been to more than a hundred doctors. Has had her teeth removed and her head shaved weekly to mimic chemotherapy. Has spent her entire life in a wheelchair in a little pink house in Springfield, Missouri, where the who...

A sheriff leaves two suspects alone in an interrogation room and steps out. The recorder is still running, and they have no idea. He is certain that the moment the door clicks shut, the act will drop. Instead the younger man is sobbing, and the older one, trying to hold them both together, says quietly to an empty room: when they come back, I want to be ready for them. Not if. When. This week on M...

A 26-year-old mother of five walks into a respected Montreal hospital because she cannot sleep. She has postpartum depression. The most decorated psychiatrist alive puts her into a drug-induced coma for eighty-six days, delivers more than a hundred rounds of electroshock, and loops a recording of her own voice under her pillow for weeks. When she wakes, she does not know her name, her husband, or...

A 42-year-old man checks himself into a New York psychiatric hospital for depression after his marriage ends. Five weeks later a doctor injects him with 450 milligrams of an Army chemical-warfare compound, a mescaline derivative no human had ever been given at that dose. Two hours and twenty-two minutes later he is dead. The death certificate blames his heart. It will keep blaming his heart for tw...

A biological warfare scientist goes out a tenth-floor hotel window at 2:30 in the morning. The man sharing his room, a CIA chemist, does not call an ambulance or the police. He calls his boss at the agency. The official verdict is suicide, and it holds for twenty-two years. What the family does not learn until a footnote in a government report is that nine days earlier, the CIA had secretly dosed...

You are lying in a hospital bed on a hilltop above Louisville in 1932. Every window in the building is open, because your doctors believe freezing air is medicine, and there is actual snow on your blanket. You have tuberculosis. You have been here for months, maybe years, and you cannot leave. Every few days, someone on your floor stops coughing, and you have learned that the silence means they ar...