Mystery on the Rocks

We hit the 1930s in our Geopolitics, War & Espionage season and hotfoot it straight over to Germany in 1933 where something big was brewing. Hitler and his Nazi party are able to seize absolute power and rule Germany as a dictatorship. An arson attack on the home of Germany's parliament - the Reichstag - helps to precipitate all of this. But who literally started the fire? And could Erik Jan H...

1928 New York. Prohibition has been in place for some time but some of the criminal underworld (who have been some of the few to profit from its tight grip) are sensing it is nearing its end. Casper Holstein, a black racketeer from Harlem who has considerable control over illegal gambling and has been very generous to black activism with his profits, is kidnapped at gunpoint. A ransom of $50,000 d...

This week we're taking a week off from our ongoing themed season for a chilled-out Christmas special - join us for some Christmas drinks where we go through our middle names, our Christmas plans and opinions on Christmas dinner. Thanks for listening everyone, have a great Christmas!! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In September 1928 Latvian dentist Morduch Halsman is hiking in Austria with his son, Phillippe. He loses his footing and plummets off a cliff to the horror of Phillippe. When Phillippe manages to find a way down to the bottom, he discovers his father has been robbed and, if the fall hadn't killed him, murdered. Yet this is smack bang in between the World Wars, in a country with an ever more pronou...

When a Native American people gains immense wealth from oil found on their land at the beginning of the 20th Century, it sets in motion a chain of events which leads to fraud and death in a concentrated campaign of malevolence throughout the 1920s. Who is responsible for a string of murders, all carried out with the express aim of wresting control of the land and money from those to whom it rightf...

This week, we decide to educate ourselves on something which didn't really get taught to us at school or, we feel, get adequately explained to us as children... Irish history. Specifically, the story of one man - Michael Collins. A firebrand revolutionary, his story cannot be understated when it comes to the formation of the republic of Ireland. After ruffling so many belligerent, colonial feather...

On September 16th 1920, an attack on Wall Street killed 30 people instantly, 10 more in the aftermath and injured hundreds more. Yet it remains unsolved, despite arrests being made, trials being held and executions being conducted in a story which went on to grip the world. Might the attack have its roots in an armed robbery on a shoe factory months earlier? We try to piece it all together as we l...

Following the Great War, in the early 1920s celebrated military strategist Earl Hancock Ellis worked tirelessly on a secret project - a project which would eventually lead him on a secret mission to Japanese islands in the Central Pacific. A project which could well have predicted the attack on Pearl Harbor almost 20 years before it actually happened... Join us as we discuss Ellis's predictions an...

Following last week's encounter with the nefarious Sir Basil Zaharoff, we rewind to the 1880s when machine gun inventor William Cantelo vanishes completely upon completing the prototype machine gun he had been working on for some time. Not long afterwards, Hiram Maxim unveils his outstanding Maxim gun, only for William Cantelo's surviving sons to be shocked by two things... 1) The gun is the exact...

Sir Basil Zaharoff. One of the most evil men who ever lived. Bigamist, fraudster, international arms dealer. Codename: ZedZed. A real nasty piece of work. Most likely the real-life template for the James Bond supervillain, Zaharoff's influence on the geopolitics of the 20th Century cannot be overestimated, yet he lived in the shadows and his name doesn't loom over history as much as the man himsel...

Season Five continues with one of the great 20th Century mysteries; did Princess Anastasia Romanov survive the Bolshevik revolution and execution of her family and go on to live a long life in secret? Several people have indeed claimed to be the princess throughout the years and a potentially sticky diplomatic situation on the eve of peace with Germany during World War 1 helped to stoke speculatio...

Kicking off Season Five of Mystery on the Rocks (a kinda themed trawl through Geopolitics, War & Espionage of the 20th Century) is our 100th case... The Mad Monk Rasputin! A mystic who inveigled his way into Russia's royal family's inner circle to become one of Tsar Nicholas' closest advisers, Rasputin is still held aloft as a totem of pure evil today - a reputation only enhanced by the terrif...

It's our Season Four finale and we wanted to pick a doozy for it! So come with us to Florida in 2005 as we look at how a woman got out of a hotel she couldn't possibly have left without being seen and ended up 8 miles away and left for dead. What happened to her, who did it and just who on Earth is the Mercury Man and might he be the key to the whole affair? This case is covered extensively in (so...

This week's episode focuses on one of the earliest stories of alien abduction, that of Barney and Betty Hill who claimed to have been abducted by an alien spacecraft while they were driving back home to New Hampshire from vacation in Montreal. And even though our theory for what really happened is one of our most juvenile, we are standing by it! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more info...

This week's episode, as voted for by our awesome supporters on Patreon in our monthly mystery vote, is the tale of John Lang who in 2016 was found dead in his burning home, stabbed three times after predicting his own murder in a series of posts on social media. He had uncovered corruption in the Fresno police department and documented all sorts of suspicious goings on as he became increasingly co...

Something a little different this week as we got together in the same ( really echoey - sorry!) room and lay out a story suggested just one hour prior to recording by former guest of the show John Robertson. So listen as we all learn about the colourful life and mysterious death of boxing legend Sonny Liston, which takes in organised crime, Muhammad Ali and pecan nuts... Hosted on Acast. See acast...

A case which has nothing whatsoever to do with 90s movies but which we still managed to make aaaaaallllllll about 90s movies. In 2003, assistant attorney Jonathan Luna is found dead almost 100 miles from where he was last seen leaving his office, face down in a creek with his blood-spattered car idling nearby and 36 stab wounds all over his body, one of which severed his carotid artery. Cause of d...

Pier Paolo Pasolini was an Italian film director, poet, writer, intellectual, actor, journalist, novelist, playwright and political figure who created such uproar during his life that he was eventually assassinated in a pretty brutal way in November 1975. To this day nobody knows really who did it but it could be one or more from one or all of the following groups; the mafia, the government, the f...

Gloria Ramirez was 31 years old when she was admitted to Riverside General Hospital Emergency Room in February 1994, delirious and speaking gibberish with heart palpitations. She died that night, officially from complications relating to cervical cancer but the story is far more complicated and strange... Many of the health professionals who worked on her that night were all seemingly poisoned by...

A big one today. Not including the initial trailer, this week's episode is our big 100! So allow us a little self indulgence as we discuss, among other things, our favourite cases, episodes and cocktails from our ever-growing back catalogue. Thank you to everyone who has supported the podcast (which includes you wonderful people, obviously) along the way, in whatever capacity. Four seasons, a few...

Wonderful comedian, actor and decent bloke Sunil Patel popped by the bar this week to reduce us to hysterics while talking about a Welsh sheep farmer and to assist us with the spooky 19th Century ghost story of Sarah Duckett... You can hear Sunil's podcast Why Is Harriet Crying? wherever you get your podcasts and go see him LIVE this month (June 2021) at the Soho Theatre! Hosted on Acast. See acas...

After an 11th hour guest cancellation we decided to discuss the case between ourselves anyway and had a fun conversation about the oft-repeated story of Freddie Mercury and Kenny Everett disguising Princess Diana as a gay man in the 1980s and taking her out to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern... So is it true or just an urban myth? No real evidence exists to back it up beyond the initial account in Cleo...

A couple of weeks ago, we got together to do Mystery on the Rocks in the same room for the first time in over a year and did a live show from Angel Comedy's brilliant venue The Bill Murray. Restrictions still prevented us having audience in the room with us and so we livestreamed a slightly chaotic show where we got super giddy at being together for the first time in a long time. During the shenan...

The brilliant comedian, director and man behind all those TV intros you have seen re-imagined as stock footage Matt Highton poked his head round the door of the bar for a lot of film chat and to possibly help us reach a solution to the enduring mystery of just who was it that wrote The Circleville Letters? Love, death and bus drivers feature in this curious tale of some of Circleville, Ohio's resi...

Juliette Burton is an absolutely top-drawer comedian, writer and actor as well as being one of the country's foremost speakers and advocates on the topic of mental health, an ambassador for the mental health charity Rethink Mental Illness no less! She also happens to be one of the most fun human beings, as evidenced by the laugh we had when she turned up with ample cocktails of her own and managed...