Signs of Danger: A True Crime Astrology Podcast

The baby was still in her mother's arms. Fifteen-month-old Chelsea McClellan had come in for a routine vaccination. The nurse approached with a syringe. She injected the baby in her left thigh. Immediately, Chelsea had trouble breathing. She was trying to say her mother's name. But she couldn't. The drug was suxamethonium chloride -- a muscle relaxant that paralyzes the respiratory sys...

Cancer rules the breasts. That is not metaphor. That is medical astrology -- each sign governs a region of the body. Cancer's region is the chest. The place where a mother holds a child. The place where nourishment comes from. Peter Norris Dupas removed the breasts of his female victims. Cut them off. Placed one inside a victim's mouth. His violent criminal history spanned more than three...

In the summer of 1971, in Finland, a girl got into a car. The driver was talkative. He spoke about himself, about his life. He took her to places around the city. When they arrived, he would not let her out. She jumped out and fled. She survived. Three other women did not. Their cause of death: carbon monoxide poisoning. A hose from the exhaust pipe to the back seat. They fell asleep and never wok...

He was five foot three. He stuffed his cowboy boots with newspapers and flattened tin cans. He smeared pancake makeup across his face. He drew a fake mole on his cheek. He looked absurd -- everyone said so, later, when it was safe. It did not matter. Because what Charles Howard Schmid Jr. was selling was never appearance. It was the feeling of being near someone who did whatever they wanted. Girls...

He was twenty-six years old. She was fifteen. That is not a love story. That is a blueprint. A twenty-six-year-old man with a criminal record finds a fifteen-year-old runaway from the juvenile system. He does not date her. He elopes with her. Within two years, that fifteen-year-old is committing armed robberies across the American South. Within three, both are committing murder. When they were cau...

She crawled through his dog door. She converted to his religion two months after meeting him. He called her a stalker and a sociopath. He kept sleeping with her anyway. On June 4, 2008, Jodi Arias stabbed Travis Alexander twenty-seven times, slit his throat, and shot him in the head. Seven thousand miles away, in France, a man killed across three relationships spanning decades. Each time: love-bom...

She slashed his tires. Twice. She hacked into his social media accounts. She crawled through his dog door and hid behind his Christmas tree. She converted to his religion two months after meeting him. She recorded their phone sex without his knowledge. When he told his friends she was a stalker and a sociopath, she drove to his house in Mesa, Arizona, with a gun, a knife, and gas cans in the car....

His daughter called him a shark. Not a monster. Not a devil. A shark — "emotionless, cold and constantly hunting." She was sixteen when she pushed furniture against her bedroom door at night. She had been raised by her grandmother, who told her one thing from the time she was old enough to understand: never be alone with your father. And the thing about that warning is that the girl look...

In June of 2020, the FBI descended on a property in Rexburg, Idaho. They were looking for two children — a seven-year-old boy and a sixteen-year-old girl who had not been seen in months. They found the children in the backyard. Buried in shallow graves. Their mother had told people they were "zombies." That their souls had been replaced by dark spirits. That God had told her she was requ...

On April 29, 2004, at 1:30 in the morning, police arrived at a small ranch-style house on Burgin Avenue in Baton Rouge. His girlfriend yelled "What's going on?" He shrugged his shoulders and said "Sorry honey-bunny." That is how Sean Vincent Gillis announced the end of a decade-long murder spree. Eight women. Stalked, kidnapped, raped, murdered, mutilated. All of it within...

There is a cell in Wakefield Prison in West Yorkshire, England. It was built for one man. The walls are bulletproof glass. He has been inside it, alone, for more than four decades. He has a genius-level IQ. He loves classical music and poetry. He has asked for a pet budgerigar. Denied. He has asked to be allowed to commit suicide via a cyanide capsule. Denied. He killed four people. Three of them...

"In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and, last but not least, I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all of these things I am not the least bit sorry." That is how Carl Panzram began his autobiography. Not with justification. Not with the performance of remorse. He opened with th...

On September 18, 1983, a thirteen-year-old boy named Danny Joe Eberle left his house before dawn to deliver newspapers in Bellevue, Nebraska. He made it to his fourth delivery. His bicycle was found at the end of a cul-de-sac. His body was found days later — stripped, bound, mouth taped with surgical tape. The man who killed him was an assistant scoutmaster from the Air Force base. A former altar...

On July 31, 1966, a young man sat at a desk in Austin, Texas, and began typing a letter. It started with love — how much his wife meant to him, how her love was the only thing keeping him from exploding. Then the letter shifted. He described violent compulsions he could not quiet. That night, he killed his mother with a bayonet. Then he went home and killed his wife in her sleep. The next morning,...

Dark Cancer: Many Faces and Phases | Season 4, Episode 1 The Moon shows you a different face every night and never lets you see the whole thing at once. Neither does Cancer. In the Season 4 premiere of Signs of Danger , host Jillian Clemmons opens the case file on the zodiac's most misunderstood predator — the caretaker who kills. Cancer is the sign of the mother, the home, the nurturer. But w...

Nineteen episodes ago, this season opened with a thesis: the dark Gemini is made, not born. The dangerous twin is not something a person arrives with. It is installed — by a childhood that punished one version and rewarded the other. By a world that taught them, early, that the safest way to survive is to split. Now, after nineteen episodes, three arenas, and thirty-six subjects, it's time to...

In Toulouse, a serial killer worked in the police station cafeteria. He served coffee to the officers who would eventually investigate his crimes. He raped and strangled women between 1989 and 1997, and when the homicide squad arrived, they classified the deaths as suicides — not because the evidence supported it, but because the people above them needed it that way. Because the killer was connect...

On the morning of March 16, 1968, a twenty-four-year-old Army lieutenant led his platoon into a hamlet in South Vietnam expecting to meet a Viet Cong battalion. They found women. Children. Old men. No weapons. No resistance. No enemy fire. Over the next several hours, American soldiers killed between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians. The lieutenant did not stop it. He participated. He dire...

In Adelaide, South Australia, a bookkeeper who lived with his mother threw the parties everyone wanted an invitation to. He was charming, softly spoken, generous with drugs and alcohol. Known around the gay bars and river beats of the city as "Bevbang." By night, he drugged teenage hitchhikers and held them captive. When the fifteen-year-old son of a local television newsreader turned up...

A nurse in Woodstock, Ontario walks the night shift at a long-term care facility. She is cheerful. She shows up drunk sometimes, high other times. Her coworkers file over a hundred complaints, but the facility keeps her on because night shifts are hard to staff. Over seven years, eight elderly patients in her care stop breathing. She tells a friend what she's done. The friend says, don't d...

In February 2013, a former LAPD officer posted an 11,000-word manifesto on Facebook. He named forty people he intended to kill. He declared unconventional and asymmetric warfare against the LAPD, their families, and their associates. He had been fired five years earlier for filing what the department called a false report. He said the report was true. He said the department was corrupt. He said th...

He wrote letters to her for seven months. Love poems, romantic confessions slipped under a dormitory door at Yale. When the letters didn't work, he called. When the calls didn't work, he followed her. When none of it worked — when the actress he had built his entire interior life around still would not look at him — he decided to do something so loud she would have no choice. On March 30,...

On the back of a twenty-three-year-old woman found dead near the Tamiami Trail in Miami, someone had written a message. "THIRD!" — with a happy face dotting the I. Below it: "See if you can catch me." The killer used two drawn eyes instead of the word "see." He signed it with his initials. He was numbering his kills. He was addressing the police. He was writing on the...

Between 1970 and 2005, Samuel Little strangled women across more than a dozen states. He chose his victims with precision — sex workers, women addicted to drugs, women of color living on the margins, women whose disappearances would not trigger investigations, whose bodies, if found, would be misclassified as overdoses or natural deaths. He was arrested twenty-six times in eleven states before any...

In 1979, a man who had applied to be a police officer multiple times, who had ridden along in squad cars with the very detectives hunting the Hillside Strangler, who had bought a fake psychology degree and opened a counseling practice — was arrested in Bellingham, Washington, for strangling two women. Without his cousin beside him, he had left evidence everywhere. As if the part of him that planne...