Signs of Danger: A True Crime Astrology Podcast

In Spokane, Washington, Robert Lee Yates buried a woman's body in his own backyard. Not in the woods. Not in a ditch off a highway. In the yard where his five children slept. He later told investigators he had wanted to see her "every day." Inside the house, his wife Linda was finding burned credit card bills in the fireplace and charges to hourly hotels. She assumed an affair. The m...

Neville Heath had an address book containing three hundred women. He had proposed marriage to women he intended to sleep with and discard. He had talked his way out of three court martials, multiple fraud convictions, and at least two RAF dismissals. After murdering Margery Gardner in a London hotel room — seventeen lash marks from a riding crop, flesh torn from her body — he wrote to the Scotland...

Catherine Birnie had been in love with David Birnie since she was twelve years old. She followed him through his criminal convictions, through his marriage to another woman, through years of separation. When he finally came back to her — when he told her what he wanted to do — she agreed to help. The code phrase she used to signal him from the car when she spotted a potential victim was "I&#3...

Danny Rolling's father beat him for the first time when he was one year old. The reason: he wasn't crawling properly. His father was a twenty-year veteran of the Shreveport Police Department. He beat his wife. He beat his sons. He showed them no affection because he believed affection wasn't masculine. When Danny's mother slit her wrists and locked herself in the bathroom, Danny tr...

In 1968, a ten-year-old girl in Newcastle strangled a four-year-old boy in an abandoned house. She went to his funeral. She asked his mother if she could see him in his coffin. She told classmates she had killed him. She left written notes claiming responsibility. She was dismissed as a show-off and a liar. No one believed a ten-year-old could mean it. She meant it. Thirty years later in Jonesboro...

From 1920 to 2006, a Murdaugh held the office of solicitor for South Carolina's 14th Judicial Circuit. Nearly a century. Three generations. The family didn't just practice law in the Lowcountry — they were the law. Alex Murdaugh didn't need to build credibility. He inherited it. And he used it to steal approximately $12 million from clients — including nearly $4.3 million from the fami...

Pearl Berkowitz told her adopted son that his birth mother had died giving him life. He believed it. He carried the guilt of a woman who had, as far as he knew, sacrificed everything for his existence. He was thirteen when he said "I hate you, I hope you die" to his adoptive mother — the last words he ever spoke to her before she died of breast cancer. He was twenty-one when he found his...

She poisoned her husband. She collected the life insurance. She poisoned her daughter. She filed so many false police reports that investigators stopped listening to her. She was arrested, made bail, and vanished. Then she built a new woman. She called herself Lindsay Robbi Hannon. Then Robbi Homan. She married a man in New Hampshire. She told him she had a twin sister. Then she faked her own deat...

Three men walked into the Pan family home in Markham, Ontario on the night of November 8, 2010. The door was unlocked. Both parents were shot. The mother, Bich Ha Pan, was killed. The father, Hann Pan, was shot in the face and survived. Their daughter Jennifer was found with her hands tied. She called 911. She told police intruders had broken in — she was just lucky to be alive. Police had questio...

There are different kinds of danger in the zodiac. The danger that strikes — Aries. The danger that charms — Libra. And then there is the danger that splits. The person who is two people at once. The life you see, and the life running underneath it. That is Gemini. The research describes it this way: the dark twin that dwells in darkness is not a stranger, not a monster from the outside — a twin....

He was fourteen years old when he met the man who would teach him how to sell his friends. Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. grew up in the Houston Heights — his father beat him, once fired a pistol at him, and left. His mother did what she could. When a schoolmate introduced him to Dean Corll, Henley later said:"I admired Dean because he had a steady job. He wasn't a wild drunk, got along with kids...

On December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman had already gotten the autograph. John Lennon had signed his copy of Double Fantasy on the sidewalk outside the Dakota. Chapman was overwhelmed by Lennon's sincerity — the kindness was genuine, and for a moment it was enough. Then it wasn't. He stayed on the sidewalk. He waited five hours. He fired five shots when Lennon walked back in. He stood ther...

As the plane cruised at twenty-two thousand feet, David Burke walked to the lavatory. On the way, he dropped a note in his supervisor's lap: "Hi Ray. I think it's rather ironical that we ended up like this. I asked for some leniency for my family, remember? Well I got none, and you will get none." He drew the .44 Magnum he had borrowed from a coworker, shot his supervisor, shot b...

His mother tried to abort him. When the boy was born, she would have nothing to do with him. The message installed before language, before memory: you are not wanted. You are nothing. He spent the next twenty-four years building more than twenty palaces while his people starved, plastering his face on every surface of his country, purging his party on live television, ordering survivors to shoot t...

In Copenhagen in 1920, police searched a woman's apartment and found a baby's clothes. Then they found something else. Bones. A skull. In the masonry heater. Dagmar Overbye confessed to murdering sixteen children. She had been operating as a professional child caretaker — an unofficial adoption service for mothers who couldn't keep babies born outside marriage. For seven years she stra...

"If a normal man fancied a girl, he'd naturally feel a desire to see her, to be close to her, to smell her and kiss her. To me, eating is just an extension of that." That is Issei Sagawa — a man who shot his classmate in the back of the neck while she was reading poetry to him, consumed her body over two days, and said his only regret was that he hadn't eaten her while she was st...

In 1998, a handwritten plea for help was found among the belongings of a dead man in Galena Park, Texas. Louis "Buddy" Musso was fifty-nine years old with the cognitive capacity of an eight-year-old. He had left New Jersey because a woman told him she loved him and promised to marry him. His injuries, when his body was found in a ditch, were so severe the body was unrecognizable. The med...

He made paper rings. In a Florida prison, a man named Paul Rowles wore paper rings on each finger, changed them weekly, with his ex-wife's name and their anniversary written on every one. She had divorced him, destroyed her photographs of him, and moved out of state to disappear. He had already strangled his neighbor, stabbed her, and held her face underwater until she was dead. He still wore...

In Kitakyushu, Japan, a man faked his own death. He recruited three acquaintances to tell his partner that he had committed suicide. He arranged a funeral. She had been trying to escape him — had fled back to her parents, had tried to put distance between herself and the man who had burned his name into her breast with a cigarette, who had threatened to release nude photographs if she left, who ha...

In 2009, two LAPD detectives approached a colleague in a common area. Casual. Friendly. They said they were working a case and needed to talk. During the conversation, they offered her a drink. She accepted. When she finished, they collected the cup. It was not a courtesy. It was a collection. The DNA from Stephanie Lazarus's discarded coffee cup matched saliva taken from a bite mark on the bo...

"If I can't have John, nobody else will." Stephanie Lazarus said that to Sherri Rasmussen's face, at her workplace, after following her, after surveilling her dressed as a man, after sleeping with the fiancé one last time trying to break the engagement. When none of it worked, she entered Rasmussen's home and shot her to death. She bit her. She beat her face. Then she staged...

She called to say she was coming to borrow some sugar. Dorothy Booth was seventy-one years old, a retired professor, living alone in Lancaster, Texas. She knew the woman on the phone. Kimberly McCarthy was a neighbor — a familiar presence, connected to Booth through her own mother. When McCarthy called, Booth had no reason to hesitate. She opened her door. McCarthy stabbed her five times, beat her...

On August 19, 1987, Michael Ryan loaded three firearms into his car, doused his house in petrol, set it on fire, and walked down the main street of Hungerford shooting at anything that moved. Sixteen people died. Fifteen were wounded. When negotiators told him he had killed his own mother, he called it a mistake. Then he said: "Hungerford must be a bit of a mess. I wish I had stayed in bed.&q...

Under an overpass in San Cristobal, Venezuela, police found a shack. Inside: several vessels containing human flesh and viscera prepared for consumption. Three human heads. Several feet and hands. The man who lived there was homeless. He'd been living under that bridge for years. When drunken men fell asleep nearby, he killed them with a bamboo spear. He didn't eat women or children — he f...

When David Copeland's parents sang along to the Flintstones theme — "we'll have a gay old time" — he reportedly believed they were sending him a message. He was a teenager, terrified of something he couldn't accept about himself. His schizophrenic mind converted that terror into its opposite: a hatred so total, so fixed, it required bombs. Over thirteen days in the spring of...