The Guilty Files

On May 20, 1999, South Australian police forced open the vault of a disused State Bank building in the small farming town of Snowtown, roughly 90 miles north of Adelaide. Inside they found six black plastic barrels containing the dismembered, acid-soaked remains of eight people. Two more bodies were later excavated from a backyard in Salisbury North, and two earlier deaths were subsequently linked...

In the summer of 2008, a two-year-old girl named Caylee Marie Anthony vanished from her home in Orlando, Florida, and her mother Casey didn't tell a soul for thirty-one days. Instead of calling police, Casey went clubbing, got a tattoo that read "Bella Vita," stayed with her boyfriend, posted party photos on social media, and spun an elaborate web of lies about a fictional nanny named Zenaida Fern...

Alaska is the largest state in the union. It is also one of the deadliest places in America to be an Indigenous woman. Alaska Native people make up roughly one-fifth of the state's population but account for more than sixty percent of its recorded homicide victims. Four of the ten American cities with the highest per-capita rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women are located in Alaska. And...

If you listened to our full episode on the Gary Farris murder earlier this week, you got the whole story. The life, the marriage, the murder, the trial, the verdict. But this episode isn't a recap. This is The Redacted Report, and we're going deep into the lesser-known, verified details that most people never heard about. We break down how a three-hundred-pound man was reduced to just thirty-three...

He was a small-town kid from Tuscumbia, Alabama, who dreamed of becoming a lawyer and made it all the way to the top. Gary Wayne Farris built a thirty-year legal career, raised four children, and settled his family on a stunning ten-acre farm in Cherokee County, Georgia. His grandchildren called him "Big Daddy," and he was the kind of man who'd hand you his credit card before you even finished ask...

This episode of The Redacted Report is a companion piece to our full deep dive on the Lewis Lent case released earlier this week. If you haven't listened to that episode first, we strongly recommend starting there, as this isn't a recap. This is where we dig into the overlooked, lesser known, and rarely discussed facts surrounding Lewis Lent and the investigation that brought him down. We examine...

For seven years, Lewis Lent worked as a janitor at a movie theater in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He volunteered his time helping the blind. He studied the Bible and became an ordained minister. He mentored neighborhood kids who called him "the Big Brother." And behind that mask of kindness, he was hunting, abducting, and murdering children across the northeastern United States. In this episode, we...

Six teenage boys left a house party in Pickering, Ontario, in the early hours of March 17, 1995, and vanished without a trace. Durham Regional Police settled on a theory almost immediately — the boys stole a boat, went joyriding on the frigid waters of Lake Ontario, and drowned. Case closed. Except it wasn't. Not even close. In this episode, we go beyond the official narrative and dig into the fac...

On the night of March 16, 1995, six teenage boys left a house party in Pickering, Ontario and headed toward the East Shore Marina at Frenchman's Bay. They told friends they'd be back before sunrise. None of them were ever seen again. Jay Boyle, 17. Chad Smith, 18. Robbie Rumboldt, 17. Jamie Lefebvre, 17. Michael Cummins, 17. Danny Higgins, 16. Known collectively as the Lost Boys of Pickering or th...

On January 2nd, 2018, nineteen-year-old Blaze Bernstein walked out of his parents' home in Orange County, California, to meet a former high school classmate. He left behind his wallet, his keys, and his glasses. He never came home. In Tuesday's episode, we laid out the facts of the case. Tonight, we go deeper — into the encrypted chat logs, the self-authored diary of hate, the dating app predation...

On January 2nd, 2018, a nineteen-year-old University of Pennsylvania sophomore slipped out of his parents' house in Lake Forest, California, to meet up with a former high school classmate. He left without his wallet, his glasses, or his keys. He never came home. Blaze Bernstein was everything you'd want a kid to be. A pre-med student at an Ivy League school, the managing editor of a culinary magaz...

On December 27th 2010, Georgia State Trooper First Class Chadwick LeCroy pulled over a car with a broken taillight on Bolton Road in northwest Atlanta. It should have been routine. Instead, it became the first fatal shooting of a Georgia trooper in thirty-five years. The man behind the wheel was Gregory Favors, a thirty-year-old career criminal with eighteen prior arrests stretching back to 1998....

This one is personal because I knew and worked alongside Trooper Chadwick LeCroy when I was an Atlanta Police Officer. Chad and I served together in Zone 2, and later I had the privilege of working with him when he joined the elite Georgia State Patrol Nighthawks DUI Task Force. He was one of the good ones – the kind of officer you wanted backing you up, the kind of man who made the badge mean som...

If you listened to Tuesday's episode covering the cold hard facts of the Ottis Toole case, you know the basics. His horrific childhood in Jacksonville's Springfield neighborhood. His partnership with Henry Lee Lucas. His six confirmed murder convictions. His confessions to the Adam Walsh killing. But the basics only scratch the surface of one of the most mishandled investigations in American crimi...

Ottis Elwood Toole claimed to have murdered over one hundred people. While that number remains disputed, what we know for certain is horrifying enough. Six confirmed kills. A partnership with fellow serial killer Henry Lee Lucas that terrorized the American South. And quite possibly the most infamous child murder in American history. Born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1947, Toole emerged from a chil...

Earlier this week, you heard the facts about Susan Smith. You heard about the burgundy Mazda rolling into John D. Long Lake. You heard about Michael and Alex. But this episode goes deeper into the details that didn't make the nightly news. We start with Susan's father Harry, who shot himself in the driveway when Susan was six years old, just hours after telling her he loved her. We examine the arr...

On the night of October 25, 1994, Susan Smith stood on a boat ramp at John D. Long Lake in Union, South Carolina, and made a choice that would horrify the nation. She released the emergency brake on her burgundy Mazda Protégé and watched it roll into the dark water with her two sons still strapped in their car seats. Three-year-old Michael and fourteen-month-old Alex drowned in that lake while the...

On July 27, 1981, six-year-old Adam Walsh vanished from a Sears department store at the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida. Two weeks later, fishermen discovered his severed head in a drainage canal near Vero Beach. His body was never found. This case would transform America's approach to missing children forever, but the question of who actually killed Adam Walsh remains deeply contested to thi...

On July 27, 1981, six-year-old Adam Walsh vanished from a Sears department store in Hollywood, Florida, and America was never the same. This episode of The Guilty Files Podcast examines one of the most infamous child abduction cases in American history, tracing every devastating detail from that summer afternoon at the Hollywood Mall to the sixteen-year investigation that would ultimately point to...

In this episode, we go beyond the sanitized headlines and Netflix documentaries to examine the Ted Bundy case you were never supposed to know about, including the suppressed files, the buried reports, and the institutional failures that allowed one of America's most prolific serial killers to operate for years longer than he ever should have. We begin with Bundy's troubled origins at the Elizabeth...

In this episode, we take an unflinching look at one of the most notorious serial killers in American history. Theodore Robert Bundy murdered at least thirty women across seven states during the 1970s, and his case forever changed how we understand the nature of predatory violence. This is the complete story of Ted Bundy, from his troubled beginnings to his final moments in Florida's electric chair...

On September 20, 1988, nineteen-year-old Terra Leigh Calico set out on her morning bike ride along Highway 47 in Valencia County, New Mexico. She never came home. In the nearly 37 years since her disappearance, this case has become one of America's most haunting unsolved mysteries, defined by a chilling Polaroid photograph discovered in a Florida parking lot and decades of whispered accusations th...

On 09/20/1988, 19-year-old Tara Leigh Calico left her home in Belen, New Mexico, for her daily bike ride along Highway 47. She never returned. Nearly four decades later, her disappearance remains one of the most haunting and controversial missing persons cases in American history. This episode of The Guilty Files traces Tara’s life from her childhood and active years at Belen High School to her st...

On April 20th, 1999, two seniors walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado and committed what was then the deadliest school shooting in American history. Thirteen innocent people lost their lives that day, and the images of terrified students fleeing with their hands raised became seared into America's collective memory. The mainstream narrative has been told countless times, dissec...

April 20, 1999 changed everything we thought we understood about safety, about schools, and about the capacity for violence within our own communities. In this episode of The Guilty Files, we take a comprehensive and unflinching look at the Columbine High School massacre, cutting through decades of misinformation to separate fact from myth in one of the most misunderstood crimes in American histor...