The Compendium: An Assembly of Fascinating Things

Los Angeles thought one killer was stalking its hillsides. The truth was even stranger: two men, a trail of murdered women, and a case that exposed how fear can hide in plain sight. The Hillside Strangler case terrified California in the late 1970s, as victims were found across Los Angeles and the surrounding hillsides. This episode explains the Hillside Strangler murders, how Kenneth Bianchi and...

A four-year-old vanished near Swayze Lake in 1912, and the child who came home may not have been the child who disappeared. The Bobby Dunbar case is one of those real life mysteries where the strangest part is not the disappearance, but how confidently everyone claimed to know the truth. A Louisiana family rejoiced, another mother insisted the boy was hers, and a court battle turned a missing chil...

A neonatal nurse was convicted. A hospital was questioned. And the medical evidence behind one of Britain’s most disturbing modern trials is still being fiercely debated. Lucy Letby became the centre of a British true crime case involving baby deaths at the Countess of Chester Hospital, allegations of murder and attempted murder, and wider claims of medical failure, institutional blindness and sys...

One fossil feud helped build the age of dinosaurs — and nearly wrecked the reputations of the men chasing it. The Bone Wars were a furious 19th-century rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, two fossil hunters who turned American palaeontology into a race for discovery, prestige and revenge. The Bone Wars produced landmark dinosaur discoveries, from famous museum dinosaurs...

A man is found dead in a locked hotel room, apparently alone, with no clear weapon, no obvious struggle and injuries that do not seem to belong to the scene around him. Body in Room 348 turns the death of Greg Fleniken at the MCM Elegante Hotel in Beaumont, Texas, into one of those real life mysteries where the solution sounds almost impossible until the evidence is put back together. This episode...

A million-pound question, a nervous contestant, and a series of suspicious coughs turned a Saturday-night quiz show into one of Britain’s most famous scandals. The Millionaire Cough revisits the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire coughing scandal, the night Charles Ingram reached the top prize, and the controversy that turned him, Diana Ingram and Tecwen Whittock into household names. This episode expl...

A failed explosion beneath Parliament became a national ritual of fire, fireworks and remembered treason. Guy Fawkes is the face of Bonfire Night, but the real story is bigger than one man with a match. This episode traces the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 from Robert Catesby’s Catholic rebellion against Protestant England to the failed Parliament explosion attempt that pulled Guy Fawkes into the Tower o...

A young woman survives a catastrophic accident, spends years in pain, and turns her own body into one of the most recognisable subjects in modern art. Frida Kahlo did not simply paint herself; she built a visual language of injury, identity, politics and defiance, creating self-portraits so intimate they made her impossible to ignore. This episode follows Frida Kahlo from the life-changing bus acc...

A private-island fantasy sold by supermodels and social media hype became a stranded, rain-soaked disaster almost overnight. Fyre Festival promised a luxury music escape in the Bahamas, but the glossy dream collapsed into tents, chaos, unpaid workers and the world’s most infamous cheese sandwich. This episode follows Fyre Festival from Billy McFarland’s VIP vision and Ja Rule’s involvement to the...

A family lunch in rural Victoria ended with three people dead, one survivor, and a Beef Wellington at the centre of Australia’s most infamous mushroom murder trial. Erin Patterson became the name attached to one of the most sensational true crime cases in recent Australian history: the Leongatha lunch where death cap mushrooms turned an ordinary meal into a fatal poisoning case. This episode unpac...

A group of contestants believed they had blasted into orbit, but their “space mission” had never left the ground. Space Cadets was Channel 4’s wildly ambitious 2005 reality TV hoax, a British television stunt built on fake cosmonaut training, a shuttle simulator and an entire Russian-style base secretly created in Ipswich. As famous hoaxes go, it was absurd, elaborate and strangely revealing. This...

A troubled drifter becomes one of America’s most notorious female serial killers, leaving behind a trail of violence and a life shaped by cruelty. This episode explores the tragic and brutal story of Aileen Wuornos, from her abusive childhood to the murders that later inspired the film Monster . We look at the forces that shaped her, the rage and trauma that defined her choices, and the unsettling...

A locked bathroom door, four gunshots, and a courtroom battle over fear, intent and truth. Reeva Steenkamp was a model, law graduate and public figure whose life was too often reduced to the night Oscar Pistorius pulled the trigger. This episode revisits the killing of Reeva Steenkamp in Pretoria on Valentine’s Day, tracing Pistorius’s rise as the “Blade Runner”, the shooting itself, and the trial...

A killer stalked couples in the Tuscan hills for nearly twenty years, and the fear never really left. The Monster of Florence case became one of Italy’s most notorious unsolved mysteries : a sequence of lover’s lane murders, shifting suspects, forensic uncertainty, rumours of ritual killings and an investigation that grew stranger every time someone tried to solve it. This episode traces the Monst...

A princess spent her final year caught between private love, public myth and the cameras that never seemed to stop. Princess Diana had left royal life behind, but not the world’s obsession with her. From her relationship with Hasnat Khan to the intense summer with Dodi Fayed, her final months became a collision of romance, celebrity, paparazzi pressure and royal history. This episode follows Princ...

A viral video promised to stop a warlord. Then the movement became a global sensation, a punchline, and a warning about internet activism. Kony 2012 was one of the most famous online campaigns of the early social media age. Built around Joseph Kony, the LRA and Invisible Children’s emotionally polished documentary, Kony 2012 turned international advocacy into a viral campaign powered by celebrity...

A quiet farmhouse in Wisconsin became the source of some of cinema’s darkest nightmares. Ed Gein was not just another name in American crime; his murders, grave robbing and grotesque trophies helped inspire Psycho , The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs , turning a real case into a shadow behind modern horror. This episode examines Ed Gein, from the murder of Bernice Worden and...

A royal marriage collapsed in public, and every headline seemed to turn private pain into national theatre. Princess Diana was no longer just the Princess of Wales; she had become a symbol of heartbreak, rebellion and survival inside an institution that struggled to contain her. This episode follows Princess Diana through the turbulent years leading to her divorce from Charles, from emotional isol...

A honeymoon in Cape Town ended in a staged hijacking, a fatal shooting, and a murder case that still refuses to settle into one simple story. Anni Dewani was killed in Gugulethu in 2010, only days after marrying Shrien Dewani. What followed became one of South Africa’s most controversial true crime cases: a taxi murder investigation, claims of murder for hire, plea bargains, CCTV footage, forensic...

A woman is kidnapped, sexually assaulted, dismissed as a liar, and branded by the media as The Real-Life Gone Girl before the truth finally catches up. Denise Huskins’s Vallejo kidnapping became one of the most shocking modern true crime cases not because the crime was unbelievable, but because so many people in authority decided not to believe her. This episode follows The Real-Life Gone Girl sto...

A fairy-tale engagement became a royal warning sign almost before the wedding bells rang. Princess Diana entered the world stage as a shy young aristocrat marrying the future king, but behind the romance was emotional distance, impossible palace pressure and a love story already crowded by Camilla Parker Bowles. This episode follows Princess Diana from her childhood as Diana Spencer to the early c...

A black turtleneck, a billion-dollar promise, and a blood-testing machine that never lived up to the story being sold. Elizabeth Holmes became the face of Silicon Valley ambition when Theranos promised to revolutionise medicine with a few drops of blood. This episode revisits Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos scandal, Sunny Balwani, Tyler Shultz and the culture of secrecy that turned a medical startu...

A luxury empire built on glamour, ambition and family pride became a murder story with better tailoring than most soap operas. House of Gucci traces the rise of Guccio Gucci’s fashion dynasty and the family tensions that turned one of the world’s most famous brands into a maze of betrayal, power struggles and public spectacle. This episode revisits House of Gucci from Aldo and Rodolfo Gucci to Mau...

Eight Belgian nuns sold their convent, slipped out of religious life and chased a very un-convent-like future in the South of France. Nuns on the Run tells the strange true story of a group of elderly sisters who used a legal loophole to leave behind convent life, spiritual obedience and the expectations of the Order of Saint Clare. This episode revisits Nuns on the Run as weird history, religious...

Before it became a disaster, it was a dream of steel, status and impossible confidence. The Titanic was more than a doomed ocean liner: it was an engineering marvel, a Gilded Age status symbol and a floating world divided by class, ambition and hope. This episode revisits The Titanic before the iceberg, exploring the people, passions and decisions that turned the RMS Titanic into one of the most e...