Murders & Minivans

This week we're covering Kouri Richins, the Utah mother, real estate investor, and children's book author who was convicted in March 2026 of poisoning her husband Eric with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl. We get into the debt, the fraud, the affair, the life insurance policies, the failed Valentine's Day attempt, the Moscow Mule, and the book that made this one of the most talked-about cas...

On June 12, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were stabbed to death outside her condo on Bundy Drive in Brentwood. Nicole was nearly decapitated. Ron had defensive wounds on his hands. He was 25 and had just stopped by to return a pair of glasses. OJ Simpson was arrested five days later, but only after a slow-speed chase down the 405 in a white Ford Bronco that 95 million people watched l...

this week we're covering the 1992 murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common, London.... one of the most mishandled cases in metropolitan police history. Rachel was 23 years old when she was attacked and killed during a morning walk with her two-year-old son, Alex, and their dog molly. the case that followed lasted sixteen years and destroyed the life of an innocent man before dna evidence final...

In October 2020, 21-year-old Reagan Simmons-Hancock was found murdered in her home in New Boston, Texas. She was 35 weeks pregnant. Her daughter Braxlynn Sage was removed from her body and died hours later. Reagan's three-year-old daughter Kynlee was found hiding in another room of the house, physically unharmed. The person responsible was Taylor Parker — a woman Reagan knew well enough to let pho...

The Murdaugh Murders, Part 2: The Trial, the Verdict, and the Reversal On June 7, 2021, Maggie and Paul Murdaugh were found shot to death at the family's Moselle property in Colleton County, South Carolina. Alex Murdaugh called 911 seventeen seconds after his GPS placed him at the scene. He had told investigators he was never there. This is Part 2 of our Murdaugh family coverage. We walk through t...

Before Alex Murdaugh shot his wife and son at the family's South Carolina hunting estate, he spent decades building a lie so elaborate that almost no one saw it coming. In Part 1 of this two-part series, we go back to the beginning — not just to June 7, 2021, but to 1920, when the Murdaugh family first seized control of the criminal justice system in the South Carolina Lowcountry and didn't let go...

Beverly Hills. August 20, 1989. José and Kitty Menendez are watching a James Bond movie in the den of their $13.5 million mansion. By the end of the night, they'll be shot a combined sixteen times by their own sons. This week on Murders & Minivans, we're going deep on one of the most complicated — and most misunderstood — cases in American true crime history. Lyle and Erik Menendez. The killin...

Thallium is element 81. A heavy metal banned in the United States since 1972. Colorless, odorless, and tasteless in its soluble form. It mimics potassium so convincingly that your cells invite it in. It starts with nausea, fatigue, stomach pain — things that look like a hundred other conditions. Weeks later, the hair falls out in fistfuls. By then, the nervous system has already taken serious dama...

This is the first episode in our new pod studio! Tali's mic was not co-operating until about 8:20 which is right about when the case starts ◡̈ A Harvard law professor. A bitter divorce. A dentist with a Ferrari and a god complex. Two Miami gang members. And a mother-in-law who, the day after her son was convicted of murder, booked a one-way flight to a country with no extradition treaty. This is t...

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints operated in plain sight for decades — a polygamist cult running across the American Southwest, into rural Texas, and up into the mountains of southeastern British Columbia. What they built wasn't a church. It was a supply chain for the sexual exploitation of children, protected by theology, enforced by economics, and ignored by governm...

kaitlin armstrong googled "can pineapples burn your fingerprints" after killing someone. she sold her jeep for cash two days later. flew to new york. used her sister's passport to get to costa rica. got a nose job, changed her name, dyed her hair, and started teaching yoga on the beach. she responded to a fake job listing posted by u.s. marshals and got arrested in a hostel lobby 43 days after the...

On February 28, 1993, seventy-six ATF agents pulled up to a property outside Waco, Texas, in cattle trailers. Fifty-one days later, the building was gone and seventy-six people were dead inside it. Twenty of them were children. This is the story of Vernon Wayne Howell, the ninth-grade dropout from Houston who memorized the Bible, renamed himself David Koresh, and convinced over a hundred people to...

Moscow, Idaho hadn't seen a murder in seven years. It was the kind of town where parents felt okay dropping their kid off at college and driving away. Small. Quiet. Safe. Then, sometime between 4:00 and 4:25 in the morning on November 13th, 2022, someone entered a house on King Road and stabbed four people to death in 25 minutes. Kaylee Goncalves. Madison Mogen. Xana Kernodle. Ethan Chapin. Two of...

In March 1995, Maurizio Gucci was shot four times outside his Milan office. He had the money, the girlfriend, the peace. What he didn't have was any idea that a chain of people — a socialite, a psychic, a hotel porter, and a broke pizzeria owner — had been quietly building toward that morning. This is the story of a dynasty that ate itself alive, a woman who described $860,000 a year as a bowl of...

Fabio Sementilli spent thirty years building something remarkable. An Italian-Canadian kid who left school early to follow his sister into hairstyling, he climbed all the way to VP of Education at Wella Professionals, managing 500 employees, running studios across North America, mentoring thousands of stylists who called him Big Daddy. The day before he died, he posted about how blessed he felt. T...

On the night of November 16th, 2012, a thirteen-year-old girl in a quiet Ohio suburb called 911 while her mother was being stabbed to death. The person holding the knife was an eighteen-year-old foster daughter named Sabrina Zunich. And for ten months, that's where the story seemed to end; a troubled teenager, a horrific act, a grieving family. Then Sabrina started talking. What came out was a cas...

In January 2011, 27-year-old first-grade teacher Ellen Greenberg was found dead in her Philadelphia apartment during a blizzard. She had 23 stab wounds, including ten to the back of her own neck, 31 bruises in varying stages of healing, and a serrated kitchen knife buried four inches into her chest. The city of Philadelphia ruled it a suicide, and they have spent the last fourteen years defending...

Jeffrey Epstein didn't just know powerful people. He built a machine designed to make himself untouchable — one donation, one dinner, one named research program at a time. In this episode, we break down how that machine worked: the political donations, the Harvard money, the eugenics project he talked about openly while hiding everything else, and the 38,000+ mentions of the sitting president buri...

They were 12, 13, 14 years old. They told their stories to the FBI, to police, to prosecutors. And for years, nobody did anything. In Part 2, we go deep into the lives of the victims — Virginia Giuffre, Maria Farmer, Annie Farmer, Courtney Wild, and dozens of Jane Does — and trace exactly how the system failed them at every turn. We break down the grooming process, the weaponization of poverty, an...

He was born to a groundskeeper and a school aide in a middle-class neighborhood in Coney Island. He never finished college. He had no credentials, no pedigree, no obvious path to power. So how did Jeffrey Epstein end up with a Manhattan mansion, a private island, a Boeing 727, and the phone numbers of presidents and princes? In part one of this three-part series, we trace the early life of one of...

On a snowy January morning in 2022, Boston police officer John O'Keefe was found dying in the front yard of a fellow officer's home in Canton, Massachusetts. His girlfriend, Karen Read, was quickly arrested and charged with murder. But what seemed like a straightforward case spiraled into one of the most controversial and divisive criminal trials in recent Massachusetts history. Was Karen Read a d...

This comprehensive true crime deep-dive examines one of Canada's most disturbing criminal cases; the story of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, dubbed "The Ken and Barbie Killers." In this episode, we explore the horrifying crimes committed by this seemingly perfect couple in Southern Ontario during the late 1980s and early 1990s. From Paul's reign of terror as the Scarborough Rapist to the murders...

Colonel Russell Williams seemed to embody military excellence; a decorated commander of Canada's largest air force base, trusted to fly prime ministers and royalty, with an impeccable service record spanning decades. But behind the uniform and accolades lurked a predator whose crimes would shock a nation. Between 2007 and 2010, Williams led a sinister double life. While commanding Canadian Forces...

A wealthy pharmaceutical CEO's girlfriend is found dead: naked, bound hand and foot, hanging from a balcony. Days earlier, his six-year-old son suffered a mysterious fall in the same mansion. The sheriff says suicide. Her family says murder. A jury awarded them $5.2 million. Then everything changed. This is the Rebecca Zahau case, and it's one of the strangest death investigations you'll ever hear...

This episode examines two cases separated by decades but connected by a troubling pattern: teachers who exploited their positions of authority to abuse students in their care. We begin with the 1996 case of Mary Kay Letourneau, a sixth-grade teacher arrested while pregnant with her twelve-year-old student's child. What followed was years of media spectacle, debates about "forbidden love," and lang...