Red Tree Crime

A fourteen-year-old girl with shoulder-length blonde hair vanishes from a bus stop after an afternoon at the fair. Her mother spends the rest of her life searching for answers. Thirty-three years later, the question still haunts Washington state. On September 17, 1992, Misty Copsey and her best friend spent the day at the Washington State Fair in Puyallup. Around 9:20 PM, a bus driver saw her at a...

A couple that seemed perfect. Neighbors described them as quiet, friendly, the kind of people you would trust with your spare key. Behind the locked basement door, detectives found a secret so twisted that even seasoned investigators struggled to process the evidence. In this episode, I uncover cases where two people, bound by love or family, conspired to commit crimes that neither would have dare...

A child dies of a rare seizure disorder. The autopsy shows something else. The detective sits across from the mother in an interrogation room. He slides a photograph across the table. A receipt for a poison she never mentioned. In Minnesota, Jennifer Latham told doctors her two-year-old son Chase died from a seizure. But when forensic toxicologists tested his liver tissue, they found a lethal conc...

A teenage shop assistant goes out dancing on a Friday night. She never comes home. A coal miner on his buck's night meets her at the disco. Hours later, he returns to the party alone. Kim Barry is in his spare room with her skull shattered by a spanner. The next morning, while his brother slept in the next room, Graham Gene Potter carried Kim's body to the bathroom. He used a hacksaw to remove her...

A fisherman pulls a body from the sea. No wallet. No ID. Just a Rolex on the wrist and a tattoo on the hand. Six weeks later, that watch would expose one of the most cunning fugitives in Interpol history. On July 28, 1996, a Brixham trawler netted the body of a man six miles off the Devon coast [citation:2]. The corpse had a gash to the back of the skull, pockets turned inside out, and a 25-year-o...

A 13-year-old girl is suspended from school. Her mother decides to let her walk one block home. She never arrives. Seventeen months later, a contractor finds her body buried under a neighbor's porch. For three decades, the killer walks free. Then he calls a TV station. On March 16, 1982, Carrie Ann Jopek was sent home from Kosciuszko Middle School in Milwaukee after being suspended for roaming the...

A man walks into a police station in 2025. He asks to speak to a detective. He says he has something to get off his chest. Then he confesses to a murder that happened fifteen years ago. No deal. No lawyer. Just guilt that finally crushed him. In May 2025, 47-year-old Michael Thomas walked into the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office in Florida and confessed to the 2010 murder of 22-year-old Jessica L...

A boyfriend drops his girlfriend off at home after a date. He kisses her goodnight and drives away. The next morning, her family finds her dead in the bathtub. The boyfriend was the last person to see her alive. He was also the killer. Police statistics show that when a woman is murdered, the most likely suspect is her current or former partner. The boyfriend who calls 911 with a trembling voice....

A man tells police his wife drowned. He collects the insurance and remarries. His second wife disappears. He remarries again. His third wife disappears. For fifty years, Felix Vail claimed each woman chose to vanish. The mothers of the missing women never believed him. They were right. In 1962, Vail told police his wife Mary drowned in the Calcasieu River in Louisiana. In 1973, his girlfriend Shar...

A boy in a red shirt waiting for a bus on a Sunday afternoon. A bus that drove past without stopping. And a three-minute window of time that changed Australia forever. On December 7, 2003, 13-year-old Daniel Morcombe left his home on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland to catch the 1:35 pm bus to the Sunshine Plaza shopping centre [citation:2]. A replacement bus had been sent after a breakdown, but i...

A man who murdered young women and mutilated their bodies, earning nicknames like "The Boy Next Door Killer" because he lived near his victims. One victim was supposed to go on a date with actor Ashton Kutcher, who testified that he saw what he thought was red wine spilled on her floor—it was her blood. Michael Gargiulo, born in 1976 in Glenview, Illinois, began his killing spree in 1993 with 18-y...

A wife sobs at her husband's funeral. Friends hold her as she collapses. She tells reporters he was the love of her life. Hours earlier, she was researching how long arsenic stays in the body. In this episode, I uncover the true stories of wives who murdered their husbands and then played the role of grieving widow to perfection. From poisoners who watched their spouses die in agony to women who s...

A former Marine security guard. A red spray-painted message on the wall: I told you this was going to happen. A wife and two young sons strangled in their beds. The husband claimed a stalker did it. The jury said he was the stalker. On May 5, 2009, Christopher Coleman called police from a bridge, frantic that his family was not answering their phones inside their Columbia, Illinois home. Officers...

A teacher looks into a school toilet and sees a black shoe floating in the bowl. She calls for help. Firefighters cut open the septic pipe and find a young man curled inside, facing upward toward the seat, his shirt folded neatly on his chest. No one can explain how he got there. Thirty-six years later, the mystery remains unsolved. On February 28, 1989, 23-year-old teacher Yumi Tanaka returned to...

Thirty-eight witnesses watched a woman being stabbed to death. No one called the police. That was the story that shocked America and created the 911 system. Almost none of it was true. In the early hours of March 13, 1964, 28-year-old Catherine Kitty Genovese was attacked outside her Queens apartment building. She was stabbed, raped, and left to die in a hallway. Two weeks later, The New York Time...

A dog returns home with a human forearm in its mouth. Six weeks after a sixteen-year-old girl vanished, her skeletal remains are found on a cliff locals call the Devil's Teeth. Around her body: sticks arranged in a coffin shape, small wooden crosses, and whispers of a satanic cult. Fifty years later, the truth is stranger than the rumors. On August 7, 1972, Jeannette DePalma left her Springfield,...

A 14-year-old boy woke to the smell of smoke and found his mother burning on the bedroom floor. Within 48 hours, police had labeled him a cold-blooded killer. The only evidence linking him to the crime was gasoline on his shoes. Twenty years later, the state admitted the gasoline was never there. On December 5, 1998, Michael Politte and his friend Josh Sansouci woke to a smoke-filled house in Hope...

A 61-year-old Spanish teacher stood at the front of her classroom, marking a student's work. A 15-year-old boy walked up behind her and plunged a kitchen knife into her neck. She screamed for her students to run. Then she collapsed into the arms of a colleague and died. On April 28, 2014, Ann Maguire was working on her day off to help students prepare for exams at Corpus Christi Catholic College i...

A 36-year-old woman fused to a sofa. Maggots embedded in exposed bone. Feces from head to toe. The floor buckling beneath the couch from pooling urine. And the parents who went to church every weekend while their daughter rotted away in their living room. On January 3, 2022, Clay and Sheila Fletcher called 911 to report their daughter Lacey was dead on their couch in Slaughter, Louisiana. What inv...

A small-town doctor drugs a patient and rapes her on Halloween night. The DNA comes back negative. He walks free. He does it again. And again. Then investigators discover he surgically implanted a tube of someone else's blood in his arm to cheat the tests. In 1992, Dr. John Schneeberger sedated 23-year-old Candice Foley in his Kipling, Saskatchewan clinic and sexually assaulted her [citation:6]. T...

A taxi pulls into a South African township. Two armed men force the driver out, then the husband. Hours later, the bride is found dead in the back seat. The husband says it was a random hijacking. The driver says it was murder for hire. On November 13, 2010, 28-year-old Anni Dewani was shot dead in the back of a VW Sharan in Gugulethu township, Cape Town [citation:1]. She was on honeymoon with her...

A mother of five vanishes on the Fourth of July weekend. Her car is found abandoned on the highway with a flat tire, keys still in the ignition. The last person to see her was her boyfriend. Ten years later, three men are convicted of her murder. Her body has never been found. On July 3, 2015, 35-year-old Crystal Rogers went on what her boyfriend Brooks Houck called a surprise date to his family f...

A young woman calls her fiancé from a payphone at 11:45 PM. She mentions a filthy bearded man circling the parking lot in a green pickup truck. Then her fiancé hears her scream. The line goes dead. He races outside, jumps in his car, and passes the truck speeding away. He hears her call his name. Then his transmission blows out. He watches helplessly as the green Ford truck with a fish mural on th...

A woman takes her own life on Christmas Eve 2010. Her husband and daughter mourn. Then they open a locked box in her closet and discover she never existed. Lori Erica Ruff stole the identity of a two-year-old girl who died in a house fire in 1971. She legally changed her name, earned a college degree, married into a wealthy Texas family, and had a child. No one knew her real name. For six years, i...

A terminally ill woman is stabbed fifty-five times. Her husband is convicted and sent to prison for life. The real killer sits in the courtroom, pretending to help the prosecution. Her name is Pam Hupp, and she is the beneficiary of the victim's life insurance policy. Betsy Faria was murdered in her Troy, Missouri home on December 27, 2011[citation:1]. Her husband Russ was arrested the next day[ci...