Switchblade Sisters Social Club

This is one of those cases that makes you side-eye your banking app. Because this episode isn’t about a serial killer. It’s about a spreadsheet. It’s about a computer system called Horizon .And it’s about what happens when an institution decides the software must be right… even when real human beings are losing everything. Between 1999 and 2015, nearly 1,000 sub-postmasters were wrongfully convict...

What do you get when a serial liar, suspected fraudster, manipulative nurse, and convicted murderer all happen to be the same person? This week, Dee and Isla dive into the chilling case of Malcolm Webster – the so-called "Black Widower" whose trail of deception, suspicious fires, insurance scams, fake illnesses, and attempted murders stretched from Scotland to New Zealand. From the mysterious deat...

On 18 November 1987, a small fire broke out beneath a wooden escalator at London’s King’s Cross St Pancras Underground station. It should have been a routine incident. Instead, within minutes, it became one of the deadliest fires in modern British history. Thirty-one people lost their lives, more than 100 were injured, and an entire culture of complacency was exposed. In this episode, Dee takes us...

Trigger Warning: This episode contains discussion of murder, extreme violence, mental illness, child abuse, and graphic injuries. In February 1933, police were called to a quiet house in Le Mans, France, after René Lancelin returned home to find the doors locked, the lights out, and his wife and daughter missing. Upstairs, officers discovered a scene so brutal it would shock France for decades to...

In June 2022, British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian Indigenous rights defender Bruno Pereira set out on a reporting trip deep into one of the most remote regions on Earth: the Javari Valley in the Brazilian Amazon. They never came home. What began as a journey to document illegal fishing and environmental crime quickly became an international missing persons case that shone a spotlight on...

Trigger Warning: This episode contains discussion of murder, violence against women, arson, substance misuse, and graphic descriptions of injuries. Three women. Four days. One of Birmingham’s most shocking killing sprees. This week, Dee takes Isla back to Birmingham in the year 2000 to examine the disturbing case of Philip John Smith, a man described by those who knew him as a "gentle giant&q...

The Black Dahlia case remains one of the most infamous unsolved murders in true crime history. In this special second part of our conversation with retired LAPD homicide detective and bestselling author Steve Hodel, we go deeper into the evidence, controversy, and personal cost behind his decades-long investigation into the murder of Elizabeth Short. Steve originally set out to prove that his fath...

In one of the most infamous unsolved murders in true crime history, Dee takes on a case she never thought she’d cover: The Black Dahlia . On 15 January 1947, the mutilated body of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short was discovered in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. The shocking brutality of the crime, the glamour of post-war Hollywood, and the mystery surrounding her killer created a media sensation that con...

In July 2024, six foreign nationals of Vietnamese ethnicity were found dead inside a luxury suite at Bangkok’s Grand Hyatt Erawan Hotel in a case that quickly became known in international headlines as the “Bangkok Cyanide Tea Party.” What initially looked like a mysterious locked-room death soon became one of the most disturbing true crime stories of the year. Thai police publicly stated that cya...

Trigger Warning: This episode contains discussion of murder, sexual violence, and extreme brutality. It’s the summer of 1975 in Colorado Springs. Sunshine, freedom, and young people on the brink of their futures. And then, over less than two weeks, three lives are taken in acts of violence so senseless, so brutal, they still haunt the community nearly 50 years later. This week, Isla brings Dee a c...

In this solo Dee-Brief, Dee dives into the haunting and unresolved disappearance of Amy Fitzpatrick, a 15-year-old Irish girl who vanished without a trace from Spain’s Costa del Sol. On New Year’s Day 2008, Amy left a friend’s house for what should have been a short, 10-minute walk home. She never made it. What follows is a case filled with unanswered questions, early investigative missteps, and a...

This week’s Dee-Brief is a solo episode while we take a short mid-season break (life has been life-ing ). But don’t worry, we’ll be back very soon with full episodes and both of us back behind the mic. In the meantime, Dee dives into one of the most shocking and brutal cases in British criminal history: The Dore Wedding-Day Murders . A joyful family celebration. A quiet, affluent suburb. And a cri...

We’re on a very brief mid-season pause (because life), but Dee couldn’t leave you hanging. So welcome back to a bite-sized Dee-Brief - short, sharp, and just a little bit scandalous. This week, we’re diving into one of history’s most iconic and controversial women: Mata Hari . Exotic dancer. Alleged spy. Wartime scapegoat? Shot by firing squad in Paris in 1917, Mata Hari’s story has been retold fo...

Trigger Warning: This episode discusses the murder of a child and racially motivated violence. On 21 August 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Louis Till boarded a train from Chicago to Mississippi. He carried a small suitcase, his father’s ring engraved “L.T.” — and the excitement of a summer adventure. Four days later, he was dead. What happened to Emmett in the Mississippi Delta became one of the m...

A hedgerow on a hill. A winter field. And a 74-year-old man who doesn’t come home. On 14 February 1945, in the quiet Warwickshire village of Lower Quinton, Charles Walton set out to cut hedges on The Firs farm. By dusk, he was dead — brutally beaten, slashed, and pinned to the ground with his own pitchfork. Within hours, rumours spread that this was no ordinary murder. Some called it ritual. Other...

The only solicitor ever hanged for murder in Britain. Hay-on-Wye. 1920s respectability. A provincial solicitor. A dying wife. A poisoned rival. And Britain’s most famous forensic pathologist taking the stand with absolute certainty. Herbert Rowse Armstrong — known locally as “Major Armstrong” after his WWI service — was a pillar of society in Hay-on-Wye. Churchwarden. Freemason. Clerk to the justi...

This week we are going way back - to 1766 - for a story that sounds ridiculous… until it very much isn’t. At Nottingham’s historic Goose Fair, amid rising food prices and fears of scarcity, tensions boiled over when outside traders began buying up vast quantities of cheese. What followed was one of the strangest  and deadliest  public disorders in British history: wheels of cheese rolling through...

This week, Isla takes the reins while Dee tries (and fails) to sit quietly. We head to Aberdeen, New South Wales - not Scotland - and to a case so shocking it changed Australian sentencing history forever. In March 2000, John “Pricey” Price failed to turn up for work. He had warned colleagues the day before: “If I don’t come in tomorrow, she’s killed me.” He was right. What police discovered insid...

Can you ever imagine confessing to murder… to catch the real killer? This week we revisit one of the Netherlands’ most haunting cold cases: the 1995 murder of 15-year-old Nicole van den Hurk. What began as a teenage girl cycling to her early-morning supermarket shift in Eindhoven became a decades-long investigation filled with false leads, forensic controversy, courtroom drama - and one of the bol...

On the morning of 5 July 1995, gunshots shattered the calm at 1 Snoopy Place in Santa Rosa, California, the office complex of Charles M. Schulz , creator of Peanuts . Instead of gentle beagle wisdom and existential children, the lawn outside the studio became a crime scene when Ronald “Ron” Nelson, Schulz’s long-time business manager and licensing powerhouse, was shot by his wife of nearly three d...

On a spring night in 1987, private investigator Daniel Morgan was murdered in the car park of a South London pub. What followed wasn’t just a homicide investigation, it became a decades-long saga involving five police inquiries, collapsed trials, allegations of corruption, and one of the most damning independent reports ever published about the Metropolitan Police .  As detectives chased suspects,...

We head to Melbourne for one of Australia’s strangest and most disturbing true crime cases - the murder of millionaire Peter Shellard . Shellard was wealthy, eccentric, litigious, and openly antagonistic toward almost everyone around him. He lived in a sprawling heritage mansion, feuded endlessly with neighbours, and seemed to enjoy pushing boundaries just to watch things burn - sometimes literall...

Dee takes Isla on a truly bonkers journey into wartime espionage, where the British government decided the best way to win a major strategic battle was to weaponise a dead body - with the enthusiastic help of history’s most famous forensic pathologist. Yes, this episode is about Operation Mincemeat - the WWII intelligence plot so unhinged it involved: A corpse with a fake life Love letters, overdr...

In the early hours of 6 June 2020, sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman were brutally murdered in Fryent Country Park, north-west London. What followed was not only one of the most shocking crimes in recent British history, but a cascade of failures that compounded the violence: a delayed police response, a family forced to search for their loved ones themselves, grotesque misconduct by officer...

Before CSI, before DNA, before forensic teams filled our screens - there was Sir Bernard Spilsbury . The man who made science the star witness and turned the pathologist into a courtroom celebrity. In this Dee-Brief , Dee revisits the life and legacy of the 'People’s Pathologist' - a brilliant, controversial figure whose work helped convict murderers like Dr Crippen and George Joseph Smith...