RedHanded

The police knew their suspect was a sexual sadist – one who had trapped a young boy for days and took great pleasure in slowly, methodically, snapping every bone in his legs. What they didn’t expect was that this ghastly resident of Baraboo, Wisconsin was still just 17 years old. And it wasn’t his first time. H&S spin the sinister tale of a twisted young psychopath, hiding in plain sight in an...

*Update* Ian Watkins has been stabbed to death in Wakefield Prison by two fellow inmates, on Saturday 11th October 2025. He was previously stabbed in 2023, when he was taken hostage for six hours by a group of inmates. Here is our full episode from 2019. -- Ian Watkins was the lead singer of Welsh rock band Lostprophets. He toured all over the world, playing to sold out stadiums of adoring fans -...

One of WWII’s lesser-known horrors, Japan’s secret biological warfare testing program is so brutal and inhumane that it’s hard to believe it could ever happen. And at its helm was a twisted microbiologist Shiro Ishi.  Victims, known inside as “logs”, were injected and exposed to countless pathogens including typhoid, cholera, and the plague, then watched like lab rats as they were gripped by the d...

In 1981, nineteen-year-old Arne Cheyenne Johnson stabbed his landlord to death – but claimed he wasn’t guilty. Why? Because he was possessed by the literal Devil. With a wild alibi starring a possessed tween, budget exorcisms and even a cameo from America’s most notorious spooky grifters Ed and Lorraine Warren, Satan was going on trial... But would a judge believe that the horned guy himself was r...

Almost immediately after 13-year-old Madeline Soto was reported missing in February 2024, something didn’t seem quite right. Her mother Jennifer Soto – and Jennifer’s boyfriend Stephan Sterns – gave a series of strange interviews in the press. And over the next five days, as investigators picked apart the lives (and sleeping arrangements) of those who lived in the Soto home, bombshells kept on roc...

We’re finally diving into the case of infamous bodysnatcher, human-skin-furniture-maker, and OG mummy’s boy...Ed Gein.  A shy bachelor who terrorised a tiny Wisconsin town with his nightmarish farmhouse of horrors in the 1950s, Ed Gein inspired some of the creepiest characters in scary-movie history: from Psycho ’s Norman Bates to Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs.  And with the third sea...

Due to a huge number of requests following a new Netflix doc on Thabo Bester, we're re-releasing our 2023 episode on the shocking, shameless, madder-than-fiction South African saga. -- At 2am, on the 3rd of May 2022 – inmates at Mangaung prison in Bloemfontein, South Africa, were woken up by an explosion. Word spread that Thabo Bester, the infamous “Facebook Rapist”, had set himself and his cell o...

With cyberbullying and catfishing stories back in the news it felt like the perfect time to revisit this early episode from back in 2019. -- Someone was cyberbullying Jenelle Potter: hurling online abuse and threatening her life with claims that she was "too pretty to live". As things escalated, inexplicably, the CIA seemed to become involved and Jenelle's parents felt the only way to save their v...

Being in the World Trade Centre when the second plane hit the South Tower; watching her assistant be decapitated; crawling over the bodies of her dead and injured co-workers; and becoming one of only nineteen people to survive being at or above the point of impact: these are all things Tania Head did not experience.  Yet for six years, Tania (real name Alicia) was the 9/11 survivor. She inspired o...

What do you do with a prisoner so unhinged that he’s been kicked out of 120 prisons to date? How have Britain’s most secure facilities dealt with a man who could explode in a frenzy of brutal violence and destruction at any moment? What happens to a man who spends more than 25 years in solitary confinement? And most importantly: now that Britain’s most infamous inmate has rebranded as an artist, p...

In 2006, the body of Polish student Angelika Kluk was found hidden in the most unthinkable place: stuffed beneath the floorboards of a Glasgow church. The man who put her there – greyhaired handyman Peter Tobin – was about to have his own sins laid bare. And what police found would reveal a predator whose impact stretched far beyond the church walls: with vanished girls, broken families, and a raf...

Recorded LIVE in New York’s Town Hall in front of a sold-out crowd, RedHanded’s Confessions Tour show takes in everything from Mormon sex scandals to intergalactic baby-making missions to save the planet. Plus: more than we ever wanted to know about our lovely audience… For the full experience, watch the slideshow on our YouTube channel: Exclusive bonus content: Wondery  - Ad-free & ShortHand...

Sold into slavery at just four years old, Iqbal Masih’s future was not bright. He was set to be one of the millions of children and adults across Asia trapped in bonded labour.  But Iqbal was no ordinary child: he would escape slavery, campaign tirelessly to free fellow children, be recognised on the global stage – and then tragically be assassinated by the “Carpet Mafia” – all before his thirteen...

In 2016, ex-footballer Andy Woodward revealed on live TV that he and countless other boys were sexually abused by their former youth coach, Barry Bennell, whilst training in Manchester City and Crewe Alexandra’s acclaimed “football factories” as youngsters in the 1980s and 90s.  In doing so, he blew the whistle on one of the UK’s most prolific child abusers – and triggered a scandal that went deep...

In our second and final part on Erin Patterson’s deadly beef Wellington dinner, we focus on the jaw-dropping trial. So: did she purposefully forage for death cap mushrooms, then cook and serve them to her extended family with the express purpose of giving them a slow and painful death? Did she really lie about having cancer? Or was it all just an innocent mistake? The video version of this episode...

Jeffrey Epstein – the billionaire financier-turned-serial-sex-trafficker – is back in the news, in another new guise that no one saw coming: political football. So let's take a look at what we know (and, more pertinently, what we will never know) about the so-called “Epstein files”. Exclusive bonus content: Wondery  - Ad-free & ShortHand Patreon  - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes Follow us on soc...

NOTE: Our update on the Epstein files will be released TOMORROW (Tuesday July 29th) to everyone. In the meantime, for all the context, here’s our two-parter in full! -- The story of Jeffrey Epstein – the billionaire financier with an industrial-scale web of child abuse implicating some of the most powerful people in the world – sounds like some half-baked conspiracy theory. But it’s all true. We t...

At lunchtime, a family in southeast Australia sat down for beef wellington with a mushroom duxelles, creamy mash and buttery green beans. The next morning, most of the guests would be violently ill. A week later, three of them would be dead. Only one diner was totally unaffected: the host, Erin Patterson… who later would stand trial for murder by poison mushroom. In part one of our post-trial eval...

On Wednesday 2 July 2025, a jury found Sean Combs NOT GUILTY of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy – his two most serious charges, which carried a potential sentence of life in prison. He was found guilty on lesser charges of transportation to engage in prostitution. So, despite all the clear evidence of guilt, how did the jury come to this decision in just two days of deliberation? We ta...

This week, Constance Marten and Mark Gordon were found GUILTY of gross negligence manslaughter. So, on top of our rereleased episode from last year, here is everything you need to know from the bizarre retrial: unbelievable revelations about Mark Gordon's past crimes, an answer on Constance's mysterious 'fall' from a balcony, and more delays and fired barristers than we ever thought possible. -- W...

The report into Kennedy's assassination brought in a new era of mistrust in the government... and that was just the beginning. Because if you look for even a second – the official version just doesn't add up. In this second part, we take a closer look at Lee Harvey Oswald's shaky history, meet JFK's other worst enemy (the Mafia), and, finally decide: what do we think really happened that day? Excl...

This week in a shocking twist Bryan Kohberger accepted a plea deal for the brutal murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin. In this update – taken from this week's Under the Duvet on our Patreon – we discuss what evidence the prosecution had, why he accepted this deal that will see him die behind bars, and if justice was really served. This episode also includes a...

Who shot JFK is irrelevant, how many people shot him is the real question. Once you have decided there was more than one shooter, the fate of the world is sealed forever. This is the original conspiracy theory, the dawn of the tin foil hat era. The assassination of the President in broad daylight, in front of hundreds, it had everyone asking questions. Questions that went totally unanswered by the...

“I am a paedophile… and I’m very happy about it.” The thousands of handwritten entries in the so-called ‘black notebooks’ of France’s worst ever child sex offender revealed more than 30 years of horrendous abuse. In devastating detail, they described acts carried out on young patients in his work as a surgeon, in hospitals across western France. He is likely to have abused more than 400 children....

Party girl Tiffany Cole had always relied on the kindness of strangers – including her former neighbours, Reggie and Carol Sumner. This frail older couple helped Tiffany out as if she were their own daughter… And she repaid their kindness by digging their grave. Literally. Tiffany claimed it was all her boyfriend’s idea, and she never meant for the Sumners to get hurt. But how did a boneheaded rob...