Signs of Danger: A True Crime Astrology Podcast

In 1928, the Budd family opened their door to a gentle, polite older man who called himself Frank Howard. He brought gifts for the children. He sat with the family over lunch. He had already been there once before. He asked if he could take ten-year-old Grace to a birthday party. They trusted him. He looked like someone they already knew. Six years later, Grace's mother received an anonymous l...

On August 13, 2018, Christopher Watts loaded his pregnant wife's body into his work truck. He had strangled her in their bed an hour earlier. Their two daughters — Bella, four, and Celeste, three — were also in the truck. One of them may still have been alive. He drove forty-five minutes to an oil worksite, buried his wife in a shallow grave, and pushed his daughters' bodies through eight-...

In 1928, a frail old man who looked like someone's grandfather knocked on the Budd family's door with gifts for the children, sat with them over lunch, and charmed them completely. Then he asked if he could take ten-year-old Grace to a birthday party. They said yes. They trusted him. He looked like someone they already knew. Sixty-five years later, in Frederick, Colorado, a man stood on hi...

He built a settlement in the Guyanese jungle, named it after himself, and controlled the food supply, the communications, and the exits. He rehearsed the mass suicide multiple times — he called them White Nights — testing who would comply. When the real moment came, he had the children drink first, so the parents would watch their children die and lose the will to resist. Nine hundred and eighteen...

Aries was combustion. The self so consuming it left no room for anyone else. Taurus is something different. Taurus is the soil. What gets planted here grows slowly. What takes root here does not come out. And when what has been planted is a wound — when the seed is neglect, and the soil is silence, and the roots grow down into a child who learned that the only safety in the world is what you can h...

On February 26, 1993, a bomb hidden in a Ryder van detonated in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center's North Tower. Six people were killed. More than a thousand were wounded. When the FBI picked up one of the men who had helped build it, he was cooperative. He gave them names and addresses. They released him. He flew to Iraq. He has not been seen since 2002. In Verona, Ital...

She rode the elevator with him. She had been there before — left and come back, left and come back. She had given him her play years ago and he had misplaced it. The most famous artist in America had taken the thing that contained her voice, her ideas, her claim to relevance, and set it down somewhere and forgotten about it. On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol, turned herself in to a...

On December 16, 1989, a federal judge named Robert Vance opened a package at his home in Mountain Brook, Alabama. It contained a pipe bomb sheathed in nails. He died instantly. Two days later, a civil rights attorney in Savannah opened a similar package. He was killed too. The FBI spent a year looking for hate groups and political extremists. They found a man who was angry about a seventeen-year-o...

She earned twenty-five dollars a week when most women earned five. She was Jolly Jane — bright, cheerful, well-liked, the nurse patients requested by name and doctors recommended to their wealthiest clients. While her patients slept, she experimented on them. She altered their prescribed dosages of morphine and atropine to watch what it did to their nervous systems. She climbed into bed with them...

He described himself as the best. Not one of the best. The best. He told patients he was the only clean, minimally invasive surgeon in the whole state of Texas. He mixed vodka orange juice before morning rounds. By the time the law caught up with him, more than thirty patients had been operated on. Most were paralyzed. At least two were dead. The hospitals that processed him let him quietly resign...

He was the student body president. Pious, poised, systematic. He bought a crowbar a week before he used it, told his lover he had bought it, and beat his sleeping best friend's face with a dozen blows so severe that investigators initially thought the victim had been shot at close range with a shotgun. Then he showed up to the crime scene composed and smartly dressed to help. She married him,...

A neighbor asks what is blocking the pipes in their shared apartment building. "Guts," says the quiet man in the bachelor flat. The neighbor laughs, assumes it's a joke, then looks inthe toilet and sees tiny human organs. The man has been killing for twenty-one years. Six other men have been arrested for his crimes. One of them hanged himself in custody. In Denver, a former basketbal...

Bonnie Parker was already married when she met Clyde Barrow. She was nineteen. She left her husband. She smuggled a gun into the prison where Clyde was serving time so he could escape. When he got out, she got in the car. She did not get out of that car for the rest of her life. In Clear Lake City, Texas, seventy years later, a seventeen-year-old named Christine Paolilla walked into the home of th...

She helped him build the door. Elisabeth Fritzl was eighteen years old when she followed her father into the cellar beneath the family home in Amstetten, Austria. She believed she was helping him fix a door. He held a cloth soaked in ether over her face. She did not see daylight again for twenty-four years. Josef Fritzl did not snap. He did not explode. He planned, he engineered, he built — and th...

Judy Buenoano waited five days after her husband died before she cashed his three life insurance policies. Five days. The discreet minimum. Then she found a new man. The new man died too. She cashed three life insurance policies on him. Then her nineteen-year-old son — poisoned with arsenic, partially paralyzed, fitted with heavy metal leg braces — drowned when the canoe she was paddling capsized....

Mel Ignatow knew she was going to leave him. So he found an accomplice, scream-tested a house, dug a grave in the woods behind it, and spent several weeks making extensive preparations. He taped what he did to the woman who tried to leave. He photographed it. He hid the photographs under a floor vent in a house he later sold to fund his defense. A jury acquitted him. The photographs survived anywa...

In Frankston, Australia, in 1993, a woman came home to find her cats slaughtered, their blood used to write a message on the wall: “Donna You’re Dead.” Her neighbor — a heavyset twenty-one-year-old named Paul Denyer — told her she would be safe now. He was the one who had done it. He had brought a knife that afternoon with the sole purpose of cutting her throat. In Santa Cruz, California, in Octob...

He killed at least eight women and could not stand the fact that nobody knew it was him. So he drew a smiley face on a truck stop bathroom wall, wrote an anonymous confession with details only the killer would know, and waited. When nobody responded, the letters started — to prosecutors, to journalists, to news outlets — each one signed the same way. In a hotel room on the thirty-second floor of t...

He told them he was five hundred years old. He dressed in black. He claimed he could smell blood through walls. He formed a clan, gave lost teenagers a mythology to belong to, and then drove through the night from Kentucky to Florida to murder a fifteen-year-old girl's parents with a crowbar — because she said her life at home was hell, and he decided he was the one who would save her. He was...

What happens when the Aries wound doesn't belong to one person — but to a unit? Season 1, Episode 6 of Signs of Danger examines the sibling bond as closed system: what happens when two siblings share the same damage, the same fire, and that shared fire doesn't cancel out but compounds. Jillian Clemmons profiles two cases that could not look more different on the surface — and share everyth...

He read Mein Kampf as a teenager and felt, in his own words, "something weird about that book." He changed his name, joined the Klan, and spent a decade sniping strangers from a distance. He wanted to start a race war. He did not start a race war. He sat alone in his bedroom, typed "black on white crime" into a search engine, and attached his entire worldview to the first thing...

For Christmas 1978, Wallace Spencer gave his sixteen-year-old daughter a Ruger semi-automatic rifle, a telescopic sight, and five hundred rounds of ammunition. She had asked for a radio. Six weeks later, she opened her bedroom window, aimed across the street at Cleveland Elementary School, and started shooting. "I don't like Mondays," she told a reporter. "This livens up the day...

On July 29, 1994, seven-year-old Megan Kanka crossed the street to see a puppy. The man across the street had told her he had one. She did not come back. What the Kanka family did not know — what the law at the time did not require anyone to tell them — was that their neighbor was a convicted sex offender who had been through a treatment program he slept through before being released directly acro...

A nine-year-old boy stands at a window during visiting hours, waiting for his mother. She doesn't come. She hasn't come in weeks. He makes excuses for her: she is ill. Her back is bothering her. He was not mentally ill. The doctors had said so. He was just unwanted — and the system that caught him did nothing about it. He grew up to kill the boys he wished he could have been. Episode 2 of...

Before there was a killer, there was a child. Season One of Signs of Danger: A True Crime Astrology Podcast opens where every true crime story really begins — not with the crime, but with the childhood that made it possible. Jillian Clemmons introduces the Aries shadow: Mars-ruled, cardinal fire, the zodiac's first sign — and the one most structurally dangerous when the warrior instinct has no...