Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast

Actress Winona Ryder was caught stealing more than $5,000 worth of designer clothing and accessories from Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. Security detained her after observing her cutting sensor tags and walking out with the merchandise, leading to her high-profile arrest and a media frenzy that dominated early-2000s pop culture.

In July 2001, German couple Daniel and Manuela Ruda- deeply involved in Satanic and vampire-themed beliefs- lured their friend, 33-year-old Frank Hackert, to their apartment in Witten and brutally murdered him in what they described as a ritual killing. Manuela had filed her teeth into fangs and slept in a coffin, and Daniel claimed he’d received a vision of the number 6667, which he believed mean...

Yareni Rios-Gonzalez was involved in a reported road-rage incident in Weld County, Colorado, on September 16, 2022, after a man called 911 claiming she tailgated him and pointed a firearm. Police pulled her over near Platteville, where officers from two departments handcuffed her and placed her in the back of a patrol SUV that one officer had parked directly on railroad tracks. While officers sear...

Devan Schreiner, a former USPS worker from Longmont, Colorado, was locked in a turbulent custody battle with her ex-boyfriend, postal carrier Jason Schaefer, the father of their young son. Their relationship had soured after years of conflict, and shortly before the murder she was fired from the post office following an undisclosed “incident.” Prosecutors said Schreiner became enraged when Jason s...

Leonardo Notarbartolo was the mastermind behind the 2003 Antwerp Diamond Heist, one of the most ingenious burglaries ever pulled off. Working with a crew of elite Italian thieves, he spent over a year posing as a diamond trader to gain access to the Antwerp Diamond Center, a building considered nearly impenetrable thanks to its multilayered security

John Orr was a respected Glendale, California fire captain and arson investigator who spent nearly a decade secretly setting the very fires he was supposed to prevent. Between 1984 and 1991, Orr ignited hundreds possibly thousands of fires.

Rafael Pérez was an LAPD officer whose crimes detonated the largest police-corruption scandal in Los Angeles history. A member of the elite Rampart Division CRASH unit, Pérez spent years planting guns, framing suspects, falsifying reports, beating civilians, and even shooting unarmed people- including paralyzing 19-year-old Javier Ovando, then lying to send him to prison.

Ronnie O’Neal III committed one of Florida’s most shocking family murders on March 18, 2018. His son miraculously survived, crawled out of the burning house, and later testified against his father in court.

Velma Barfield was a North Carolina caretaker who became one of the most notorious female poisoners in U.S. history. Between 1971 and 1978, she quietly murdered multiple people in her orbit- beginning with her husband, Jennings Barfield, who died in a suspicious house fire while he slept, and later her own mother, along with an elderly couple she stole money from. Her final victim was her boyfrien...

The Nigerian cook Harrison Okene was using the bathroom on a tugboat when a massive wave capsized the vessel and sent it to the ocean floor about 100 feet down. Trapped in total darkness, surrounded by drowning crew members, Okene found a tiny pocket of trapped air inside a bathroom and laundry area. He survived nearly three days in that pitch-black bubble.

Jodi Arias brutally murdered her ex-boyfriend, Travis Alexander, a charismatic Mormon salesman from Mesa, Arizona. The pair had met two years earlier at a business conference and quickly began a passionate but toxic relationship marked by jealousy, obsession, and sexual tension that clashed with Travis’s religious values. After he tried to end things and invited another woman on a Cancun trip, Ari...

Samuel Israel III was a New York hedge fund manager who founded the Bayou Hedge Fund Group in 1996 and orchestrated one of the largest financial frauds of the early 2000s. After years of falsifying trading records and using a fake accounting firm to hide losses, Israel’s $300 million Ponzi scheme collapsed in 2005 when investors tried to withdraw their money. Facing charges of fraud and conspiracy...

Gilberte Van Erpe aka Madame Gil is a Belgian con artist who launched a fake health and cosmetics company called Crema in the early 2000s. Posing as the mystical “Madame Gil,” she convinced thousands of people- especially in Chile- to invest in a bogus line of “magic cheese” and other products that supposedly contained miraculous healing or cosmetic properties. Investors were promised huge profits...

In 2003, Thomas “Bart” Whitaker orchestrated a murder-for-hire plot against his own family in Sugar Land, Texas, in order to claim his inheritance. After luring his parents and brother home from a celebratory dinner, his friend Christopher Brashear ambushed them inside the house, killing Bart’s mother and brother and seriously wounding his father, Kent.

Mississippi Elvis impersonator Paul Kevin Curtis was wrongly accused of sending ricin-laced letters to President Obama, Senator Roger Wicker, and a local judge. Curtis had a history of posting online about an alleged hospital cover-up after he claimed to have discovered human body parts in 2001 while working as a janitor.

In December 2023, 44-year-old Daniel Krug of Broomfield, Colorado murdered his wife, Kristil Krug, in the garage of their home after months of secretly tormenting her with fake messages from a made-up stalker he created using burner phones and multiple online identities. Posing as her ex-boyfriend Jack, Daniel sent harassing emails and photos to both himself and Kristil to convince her she was bei...

In 1994, Bobbi Parker, the wife of an Oklahoma prison deputy warden, vanished from the Oklahoma State Reformatory along with inmate Randolph Dial, a convicted murderer and artist who had been given unusual privileges due to his painting skills. For 11 years, the two lived under assumed identities on a remote chicken farm in Texas until their discovery in 2005.

Gerald Barnbaum was a conman who spent decades posing as a medical doctor despite never being one. Born in 1933 in Chicago, he was originally a licensed pharmacist, but his license was revoked. Rather than reform, Barnbaum found a new and more dangerous way to exploit the medical system: he began impersonating real physicians, using their stolen identities to practice medicine illegally.

In November 1971, Theo Albrecht, the reclusive German billionaire co-founder of Aldi supermarkets, was kidnapped at gunpoint outside his company’s headquarters in Essen, Germany, by Heinz-Joachim Ollenburg and Paul Krüzen, a pair of small-time criminals seeking a massive ransom. The kidnappers held him for 17 days.

Matthew Muller was a former Marine and Harvard-educated lawyer whose life spiraled into a series of bizarre crimes. In 2015, he broke into the Vallejo, California home of Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn, abducting Denise and demanding ransom in what police initially dismissed as a hoax inspired by  Gone Girl.  Muller, who suffered from mental illness and believed he was a kind of vigilante, held Hu...

Kwang Chol Joy was a California man who became infatuated with 37-year-old Maribel Ramos, an Army veteran and college student who had taken him in as a roommate in her Orange County apartment. Over time, his obsession with her deepened, but she rejected his romantic advances and eventually asked him to move out. In May 2013, shortly after a heated argument about rent, Maribel disappeared. Weeks la...

Barry Minkow was a teenage entrepreneur who founded the carpet-cleaning company ZZZZ Best in the 1980s and became a Wall Street sensation- until it was revealed to be one of the biggest Ponzi schemes of its time. Minkow fabricated fake restoration projects and used forged documents to trick investors, inflating his company’s value to over $200 million before it collapsed in 1987.

Israel Keyes was an American serial killer, burglar, and arsonist who operated from 2001 until his arrest in 2012. A meticulous and methodical predator, he murdered at least eleven people across the United States, hiding “kill kits” containing weapons and supplies years in advance to use during his crimes.

John DeLorean was a trailblazing automobile executive who rose to prominence at General Motors by engineering iconic muscle cars like the Pontiac GTO and Firebird. In 1975 he struck out on his own and founded the DeLorean Motor Company (DMC), aiming to build a futuristic sports car—the DMC-12 with gull-wing doors and stainless steel panels. Unfortunately, despite early hype, DMC’s production launc...

Bernie Madoff was an American financier who ran what is widely regarded as the largest Ponzi scheme in history, defrauding thousands of investors of billions of dollars by paying returns to earlier investors with funds from newer ones rather than from legitimate profits.