Murder Most Foul

When last we saw our heroine, Karen Read, she was free after her trial last year in Dedham, MA for the murder of her then boyfriend, Police Officer John O’Keefe. The trial ended in a hung jury. But like all soap operas, we ain’t done yet! Her retrial has just begun and it promises to be as bizarre as her first…or even more so. Once again, we turn to Kevin Lenihan of YELLOW COTTAGE TAILS and a freq...

The 1987 murder of Lita McClinton Sullivan sent shockwaves through the affluent Atlanta suburb of Buckhead, Georgia like few other crimes before it. The neighborhood, with its stately mansions and top-tier schools, was simply not the kind of place where women were gunned down in cold blood in broad daylight. How many socialites had enemies so dangerous they would be murdered by a hitman pretending...

The incredible story of a 1958 murder that ended with the last woman to ever be executed in California—a murder so twisted it seems ripped from a Greek tragedy. Deborah Larkin was only ten years old when the quiet calm of her California suburb was shattered. Thirty miles north, on a quiet November night in Santa Barbara, a pregnant nurse named Olga Duncan disappeared from her apartment. The myster...

In 1910 in the tranquil seaside town of Asbury Park, New Jersey, ten-year-old schoolgirl Marie Smith is brutally murdered. Small town officials, unable to find the culprit, call upon the young manager of a New York detective agency for help. It is the detective’s first murder case, and now, the specifics of the investigation and the daring sting operation that caught the killer is captured in all...

On a cold winter day in 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead in a quiet farmyard in a small New England town. When her troubled past and a secret correspondence with charismatic Methodist minister Reverend Ephraim Avery was uncovered, more questions emerged. Was Sarah’s death a suicide...or something much darker? Determined to uncover the real story, Victorian writer Catharine Read Arnold Will...

Would you kill for love? After Alice, a desperate young mother in a gritty Wyoming boomtown, kills her husband in 1974 and dumps his body where it will never be found, she slips away and starts a new life with a new love. But when her new love's ex-wife and twokids start demanding more of him, Alice delivers an ultimatum: Fix the problem or lose her forever. With Alice's help, he "fix...

At just 41 years of age, Florida State law professor Dan Markel was among the most well-known and accomplished criminal law scholars in the country.  He was also a newly divorced dad, his toddlers Ben and Lincoln the center of his universe. ​On the morning of July 18, 2014, Dan dropped his boys off at preschool, hit the gym for a workout, and headed home to his quiet, tree-canopied neighborhood. ...

In the fall of 1966, Eduardo Tirella, close confidant of billionaire Doris Duke, informed the possessive and vindictive heiress that he was leaving her employ as chief designer and art curator to return to Hollywood where his career as a set designer was just catching fire. Minutes later, she crushed him to death under the wheels of a two-ton station wagon as they were leaving Rough Point, her Bel...

In Part One of our two part series on 5 time Emmy winning investigative reporter Peter Lance’s Book, HOMICIDE AT ROUGH POINT, we left off as Mr. Lance was detailing how, back in the fall of 1966, the Newport, Rhode Island police covered up the murder of art curator and designer Eduardo Tirella, whom Doris Duke, crushed to death under the wheels of a two-ton station wagon just minutes after he told...

Seven years before Lyle and Erik Menendez gunned down their parents in Beverly Hills, after years of abuse, suffered by he and his sister, Richard Jahnke ambushed their father in the garage of their home on Cowpoke Lane in Cheyenne, Wyoming and shot him dead. THE POISON TREE is a riveting account of the sadistic physical, mental and sexual abuse suffered by Richard and Deborah. The book also cover...

Lyle and Erik Menendez, two brothers who murdered their parents in 1989 in Beverly Hills and would be all but forgotten as they languished in prison under a sentence of life without the possibility of parole save for recent developments in their case. Today there is the good chance the brothers will be released from prison sometime in 2025. Interest in the murders, trials and convictions has peake...

Based on true events. In 1975 Florida, a series of violent disappearances go unnoticed, and young Annie (Madison Wolfe) is targeted by an ominous white van that stalks her every move. As the menace escalates, her parents dismiss her fears, and Annie is soon plunged into a terrifying nightmare that shatters her world. Also starring Brec Bassinger, Skai Jackson, Ali Larter, and Sean Astin. Directed...

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the NCIS television dynasty. Some of you may have the impression that the entire agency is made up entirely of Leroy Jethro Gibbs and a handful of agents and wacky support staff. Au contraire. NCIS has many divisions staffed by hundreds of agents. One of those divisions is the NCIS Cold Case Homicide Unit (CCHU). My guest today, Joe Kennedy, established the C...

Provocative title? In the early morning hours of January 29, 2022, Boston Police Department Officer John O'Keefe was found dead outside the home of fellow Boston Police Officer, Brian Albert, in Canton, Massachusetts. O'Keefe had been dropped off the night before by his girlfriend, Karen Read, to join a party hosted by Brian Albert and Jennifer McCabe. Upon being discovered, he was transported to...

Was “What's My Line?” TV Star, media icon, and crack investigative reporter and journalist Dorothy Kilgallen murdered for writing a tell-all book about the JFK assassination? If so, is the main suspect in her death still at large? These questions and more are answered in former CNN, ESPN, and USA Today legal analyst Mark Shaw in his book, “The Reporter Who Knew Too Much.”  Shaw unfolds a &quot...

Melissa Ramirez, Claudine Anne Luera, Guiselda Hernandez, and Janelle Ortiz were four marginalized women striving to make ends meet as sex workers. They looked out for one another. But they would soon share a connection that none of them could have imagined. When Melissa was found dead, the other three women were on edge but assumed they were safe. Twelve days later, they too were dead and police...

Who Killed Seth Rich? If you guessed Hilary Clinton, you’d be wrong, but not alone. It’s been said that we all love a good conspiracy story. In the midst, of the political convulsions that surrounded the 2016 Presidential Election, a young man by the name of Seth Rich was gunned down and killed on “W” street in Washington, D.C. He was presumably the victim of a botched robbery attempt. Seth had no...

Can two brilliant minds outsmart the law?  In 1924 Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two wealthy University of Chicago students, sought to commit the perfect crime simply for the thrill of it.  They meticulously planned the kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks, a distant relative of Loeb.  Despite their careful plotting, a pair of eyeglasses left at the crime scene linked them to the m...

Teach me to kill . That’s exactly what Media Instructor, Pamela Smart, did for 3 of her teenage students in 1990, in Derry, New Hampshire. Smart seduced and slept with Billy Flynn, the trigger man, and encouraged his friends to participate in the plot that she created, to kill her husband, Greg. After 34 years, Pam, serving life without the possibility of parole, wants out of prison. Although she...

Steve DeMocker was a narcissist, a philander and all-around cad, but was he a cold-blooded killer? In 2008, in Prescott, Carol Kennedy, his newly minted ex-wife, was found bludgeoned to death in her home. It wasn’t long until the police focused on Steve as the main suspect. One might suppose this became a run-of-the mill murder case. Au contraire, mon frere! Returning Murder Most Foul guest author...

On September 13, 2016, Shawn Grate was arrested in the small city of Ashland, Ohio for the abduction and rape of a young woman. Miraculously the victim actually guided her rescuers to her location using the perp’s cell phone as he slept. But her rescue was only the beginning! Police Detective, Kim Mager – a cross between Clarice Starling from “Silence of the Lambs” and Olivia Benson from Law &...

MISSISSIPPI BURNING is the name of a motion picture, released in 1988, starring Gene Hackman and Willem DaFoe, loosely based on the murders of 3 Civil Rights workers in Mississippi, during the “Freedom Summer” of 1964.  James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were lured to Philadelphia, Mississippi, and executed by the Ku Klux Klan. No one was ever convicted of their murders, until over...

On New Year’s Eve 1989, 11-year-old Collier Landry wakes up to a loud thud coming from his parents' bedroom, and it becomes the night his mother Noreen Boyle disappears forever. All his family has no doubts that she ran away after a fight with her husband. But Collier knows that his mom would never leave him behind. As Dr John Boyle refuses to discuss his wife’s disappearance, Detective David...

In the spring of 2016, as immigration debates rocked the United States, three men in a militia group known as the Crusaders grew aggravated over one Kansas town’s growing Somali community. They decided that complaining about their new neighbors and threatening them directly wasn’t enough. The men plotted to bomb a mosque, aiming to kill hundreds and inspire other attacks against Muslims in America...

In 1990, Jens Soering, a German honors student at the University of Virginia, was sentenced to life after a spectacular televised trial for the 1985 murders of his lover’s Elizabeth’s parents, Derek and Nancy Haysom. In a classic example of “he said/she said,” at their trials the star-crossed lovers each pointed the finger at the other as the actual murderer. Were Jens and Elizabeth Romeo and Juli...