Shadows In The Pines

In April 1979, twelve-year-old Christina White left a friend’s house in Asotin, Washington, and never made it home. Two years later, University of Idaho student Kristin David disappeared while riding her bicycle between Moscow and Lewiston. Her murder would send shockwaves through the Lewis-Clark Valley and leave investigators asking whether these two cases were connected—or simply heartbreaking c...

The Selkirk Mountains are among the oldest and most remote wilderness areas in the Pacific Northwest—and for generations, they’ve been home to stories of something that walks upright through the trees. In this episode of Mini Pines, we explore documented Bigfoot encounters, Indigenous traditions, eyewitness accounts, mysterious tracks, and why the Selkirks have quietly become one of North America’...

The Witches of Rathdrum | Mini Pines For decades, people across North Idaho whispered about a lonely stretch of Highway 41 where hooded figures formed human chains across the road, bonfires flickered deep in the trees, and anyone brave enough to drive through after dark risked encountering something they couldn’t explain. But where did those stories come from? In this episode of Mini Pines, we sep...

The investigation into the murders of Jennifer Bastian and Michella Welch had already spanned decades. Detectives had followed leads, families had endured years of unanswered questions, and an entire community had learned to live with the possibility that the truth might never be known. Then everything changed. In Part Two of Bound by Assumption, Dan and Bekah follow the investigation through the...

The Maury Island Incident It’s the summer solstice, 1947. A man named Harold Dahl is out on a salvage boat in Puget Sound when six enormous, doughnut-shaped objects appear in the sky above him. One of them falters. Debris rains down — burning the hull, injuring his teenage son, killing the family dog. And the morning after Dahl tells his story, a stranger in a dark suit shows up at his door, knows...

For decades, the murders of Jennifer Bastian and Michella Welch haunted Tacoma, Washington. Two young girls. Two bicycle rides. Two families left searching for answers. And for more than thirty years, investigators believed they were looking at a single mystery.   In Part One of Bound by Assumption, Dan and Bekah examine the disappearances that terrified an entire community, the massive search eff...

CrimeCon 2026 was an experience we’ll never forget.   This week, Dan and Rebekah take a break from the case files and pull back the curtain on their trip to Las Vegas for CrimeCon 2026. From Nancy Grace’s opening remarks and discussions about the Gabby Petito investigation, to meeting victims’ families still searching for answers, this episode explores the people, stories, and moments that left a...

The Loneliest Road to the Stars — Nevada’s Extraterrestrial Highway   What if the most famous alien highway in America has been hiding its biggest secret in plain sight?   This week on Mini Pines, we travel Nevada’s mysterious Extraterrestrial Highway—a lonely stretch of desert road forever linked to Area 51, Bob Lazar, UFO sightings, and the legendary Black Mailbox that became a pilgrimage site f...

🔎 Part 2 of our Diane Downs series is available now.   As detectives continue pulling apart the story from Old Mohawk Road, the investigation begins shifting in a dramatic direction. What started as the search for a mysterious roadside gunman slowly becomes something much darker as timeline problems, forensic evidence, and survivor statements begin pointing investigators toward an unthinkable pos...

🚨 This week on Shadows in the Pines, we head to Springfield, Oregon for one of the most disturbing and psychologically unsettling cases in true crime history: the case of Diane Downs.   On a dark stretch of Old Mohawk Road in May of 1983, three children were shot inside a family car. Seven-year-old Cheryl Lynn Downs was killed. Eight-year-old Christie and three-year-old Danny barely survived. The...

Just a soft recap of what we’ve learned and final thoughts along with show announcements 

🏔️🪣 This week on Mini Pines, we head deep into the high desert of eastern Oregon for one of the strangest lost-treasure legends in American history — The Blue Bucket Mine. 🌵✨   In 1845, a wagon train following the infamous Meek Cutoff became hopelessly lost in the Oregon wilderness. Families starved. People died. And somewhere during the nightmare journey, children playing in a dry creek bed ma...

September 24th, 1997. A Spokane patrol officer pulls over a white Corvette near East Sprague. The driver is Robert Lee Yates Jr. He’s ticketed and allowed to go. The officer fills out the field interview report and writes one word in the vehicle make field. Camaro. In Part Three of the Robert Lee Yates Jr. arc, Dan and Becka follow the investigation from the inside — the task force, the databases,...

Shadows in the Pines — The Killing Years (Robert Lee Yates Jr., Part Two) East Sprague Avenue, Spokane. The late 1990s. A social worker named Lynn Everson parks a Winnebago on the strip once a week and keeps a bad-trick list of over a hundred and forty entries. The man in the white Corvette is never on it. In Part Two of the Robert Lee Yates Jr. arc, Dan and Becka spend time with the thirteen wome...

The Thing in the Lake: Idaho’s Sharlie In the mountains of central Idaho, there’s a lake that drops nearly 400 feet into darkness. Cold. Still. Old. And for over a century, people standing along its shoreline have reported the same thing—something moving beneath the surface. Long. Deliberate. Not a wave. Not a fish. They call it Sharlie. Tonight, we head to Payette Lake in McCall—a place where fol...

The Predator Next Door — Robert Lee Yates (Part 1) Shadows in the Pines   Spokane, Washington. A quiet city tucked beneath pine-covered hills and long stretches of highway. The kind of place where routines feel safe… and danger doesn’t look the way you expect it to.   In the late 1990s, women began disappearing—many from the edges of society, their lives overlooked, their absences barely making he...

Hey Listeners, both Bekah and I are a bit under the weather this week. Please enjoy a Patreon exclusive episode this week while we take time to recover and heal. We will return next week when we begin a four part series on Hometown killer Robert Lee Yates

What walks through the forests of the Pacific Northwest after dark? What waits in the water, watches from the mountain, or drifts just beyond the fog? In this episode of Many Pines, Becca takes you deep into the eerie folklore of the Pacific Northwest for a fireside journey through five of the region’s most haunting legends. From the ancient presence of Sasquatch to the impossible mystery of Mel’s...

Inside the Mind: The Birth of FBI Criminal Profiling If you’ve been listening to this show, you’ve heard the language everywhere. Behavioral profiles. Organized offenders. Victim typology. Signature behavior. The science that runs in the background of every major serial crime investigation in the country. Today we tell the story of where it came from. In 1972, the FBI opened a new academy in Quant...

Episode 4 — Confession of a Predator Joseph Edward Duncan the Third was calm when they arrested him. He didn’t resist. He didn’t run. He sat in that Denny’s booth while officers escorted him outside, and then he waited. From the moment he was taken into custody, Duncan confessed. All of it. Freely, consistently, and in meticulous detail across twenty-four hours of recorded FBI interviews. He didn’...

Mini Pines — The Oregon Bandage Man Along a quiet stretch of highway outside Cannon Beach, drivers have reported something they can’t quite explain. A figure. Wrapped head to toe in what looks like bloody bandages. Standing just off the road… or worse—stepping into it. They call him the Bandage Man. In this Mini Pines episode, we’re heading into the fog-soaked coastline of the Pacific Northwest to...

Episode 3 — The Hunt for Shasta On July 4th, 2005, FBI agents worked their way up a primitive forest service road in the Bitterroot Mountains of western Montana. They had been directed there by an eight-year-old girl who had walked out of a Denny’s restaurant in Coeur d’Alene two days earlier. What they found at the end of that road confirmed what Shasta Groene had already told them. Dylan was gon...

The Wolf Lodge Murders Shadows in the Pines — Episode 2 In May of 2005, along a quiet stretch of land just east of Coeur d’Alene, a home sat within sight of Interstate 90 — visible to thousands of passing drivers every single day. One of them stopped. In this episode, we step inside the Groene family home at Wolf Lodge — not as a crime scene, but as a place that was once full of life. A mother. A...

PART 1 — THE PREDATOR THE SYSTEM RELEASED Before the headlines… before the manhunt… before the name became synonymous with one of the most horrifying crimes in Idaho history… there was a system that saw him coming—and still let him go. In this opening chapter of our multi-part series, we step away from the crime itself and focus on the man at the center of it all: Joseph Edward Duncan III. This is...