Things I Want To Know

Send us Fan Mail Eight women were found dead in Jennings, Louisiana. Nobody’s been held responsible. That’s the case. This all happens in Jefferson Davis Parish. Small town. Water everywhere. Canals, drainage ditches, roadside drops. If you’ve ever been down there, you already know—there are a lot of places where something can be left and not found right away. And when water gets involved, whateve...

Send us Fan Mail In April 1978, three-year-old Stephanie Alana Hall was killed in the Ozark woods of Newton County, Arkansas by members of a small religious cult. When investigators asked why anyone would murder a child, the answer they heard was almost impossible to process: the group believed the girl had been declared “anathema.” In their belief system, that meant she no longer belonged among t...

Send us Fan Mail On August 23, 1987, two Arkansas teenagers were found dead on a railroad track outside Bryant. Authorities quickly ruled it an accident. The official story claimed Kevin Ives and Don Henry had smoked marijuana, laid down on the tracks, and fallen asleep before a freight train came through. Case closed. But when a second autopsy was performed, investigators discovered one of the bo...

Send us Fan Mail When the Coroner Says It’s Not Murder Two teenage boys are found dead on railroad tracks near Mena, Arkansas. The ruling? Accident. A man is found with four gunshot wounds to the chest. The ruling? Suicide. Now… I don’t know about you, but that should at least make you pause. Because once that word is written down — accident, suicide — everything shifts. Detectives slow down. Pros...

Send us Fan Mail Was H. H. Holmes really Jack the Ripper? It’s one of true crime’s most persistent myths. This week on Things I Want To Know , we break it apart using motive, method, timeline, and behavioral profiling. Andrea takes Whitechapel and builds the Ripper’s profile. Paul steps into Chicago and dissects Holmes. Same era. Completely different predators. Holmes built traps. Private rooms. I...

Send us Fan Mail What if your entire town was built on something that wasn’t real? Claremore, Oklahoma once rebranded itself as “Radium Town.” Hotels. Parades. Bathhouses. Souvenir jugs. Steam rooms packed with believers. One problem. The water didn’t contain radium. It smelled like sulfur. It burned your nose. And it sold like a miracle. This episode dives into the radium craze that swept America...

Send us Fan Mail Secrets don’t always hide in the dark. Sometimes they sit in a box on a shelf for decades, waiting on the day science finally catches up. After a quick start, we take a hard turn into Benton County, Arkansas, where skeletal remains were found in 1990 and the victim lived for 32 years in the system as a Jane Doe. We walk through why this case stalled for so long. A skull too damage...

Send us Fan Mail A nine-pound socket slipped during routine maintenance inside a Titan II missile silo near Damascus, Arkansas. That’s not a metaphor. That’s the start of a real chain of events that turned a live Cold War ICBM into a disaster under rural farmland. In this episode, I walk Andrea through it the way I learned it. No assuming you’re a history nerd. No pretending everybody remembers th...

Send us Fan Mail A quiet driveway is supposed to be the end of the day. Park. Breathe. Go inside. Safe. That is why this case won’t let go. Misty Dawn Faulkner makes it home to rural Oklahoma after a shift. There’s a Walmart run in the mix. There’s a phone call, maybe finished from the car. And then the part that turns your stomach: she’s gone. No obvious struggle. No screaming heard. Her purse an...

Send us Fan Mail A funeral home is supposed to be the one place that runs on dignity, routine, and trust. Transfer. Refrigeration. Service. Closure. In Jacksonville, Arkansas, that trust snapped. In this episode of Things I Want To Know , we start where the damage actually lived: with the families who paid for care, waited for answers, and later learned what state inspectors said they found inside...

Send us Fan Mail This episode examines Ronald Gene Simmons , tracing his rigid rise through the military, the incest allegation that triggered a sudden move, and the slow construction of an isolated household on Mockingbird Hill. As control began to slip, children leaving, jobs unraveling, pension delays stacking up, Simmons’ fixation hardened into a plan that unfolded over several days during Chr...

Send us Fan Mail Most true crime podcasts lie politely. We don’t.  So we decided to explain why. After getting pushback for “disrespecting” a victim, Andrea and I laid out exactly how Things I Want to Know works. This episode is our playbook. How we research. Why we focus on underreported Arkansas cases. And why respecting victims does not mean turning them into saints or pretending uncomfortable...

Send us Fan Mail Things I Want To Know Don’t Boil the Water | Charleston, West Virginia A sweet smell coming out of the tap should never turn into a guessing game. In this episode, we dig into the 2014 Charleston, West Virginia chemical spill that sent crude MCHM from a neglected storage tank straight toward a municipal water intake, forcing 300,000 people to stop using their water overnight. Not...

Send us Fan Mail Two women vanish in Arkansas, sixteen years apart, and the details still don’t sit right. In this episode, we examine the disappearance of 18-year-old Cleashindra Hall in Pine Bluff in 1994 and art teacher Mary “Jimmie” Bobo Shinn in Magnolia in 1978. Two very different lives. Two very different towns. The same outcome: unanswered questions and investigations that lost traction ea...

Send us Fan Mail Paul G and Andrea trace the violent trail of James “Red” Hall across wartime Arkansas, where a hellfire upbringing and a childhood head injury twisted a drifter into a man who turned small moments into real-life dead ends. A .38 revolver ties the bodies together. The chaos of World War II gives him cover. And Arkansas rushes him from confession to Old Sparky before most people eve...

Send us Fan Mail In 1992, seventeen year old Kelly Wilson vanished in Gilmer, Texas. A short walk from a video store to her car became one of the most debated missing person cases in Texas history. What should have been a focused, evidence driven investigation was quickly consumed by the national Satanic Panic that overtook the early nineties. Gilmer followed the same pattern seen in McMartin, Ker...

Send us Fan Mail In this Episode we dive into the case of Michael Ronning, a convicted murderer who spent years bragging about killings no court ever proved. His life stretched from Michigan to Arkansas to Florida, and everywhere he went the same pattern followed: a missing girl, an unexplained death, and a story he couldn’t resist inserting himself into. Was Ronning a forgotten serial killer, or...

Send us Fan Mail A police lieutenant turns the key, presses the brake, and his truck erupts. He lives. The case almost disappears. We set out to learn why a 1972 Springdale, Arkansas bombing barely made the paper and what the town didn’t (or wouldn’t) say out loud. Along the way we sketch the real backdrop: a rural region on the cusp of change, where Walmart and Tyson were still rising, Sundays we...

Send us Fan Mail A nameless girl lay in a Florida forest for decades, filed under Judy Doe and lost to a noisy era of serial predators and thin evidence. Forty years later, genetic genealogy restores her identity—Rebecca Sue Hill, a teenager from Arkansas—and forces us to confront how a single misidentification can bury a case and mute a family’s questions for a generation. We walk through the cas...

Send us Fan Mail The story starts on a quiet May evening in 1991 and never really stops echoing. A nine-year-old sets out to sell costume jewelry in a tiny Arkansas town where people wave from porches and the fields hold the day’s last light. By week’s end, she’s found in a ditch four miles away, and everything residents believe about safety, trust, and “being home before dark” begins to crack. We...

Send us Fan Mail A simple errand, a stamped receipt at 3:17 p.m., and a car left on US 71 with the keys still in the ignition. We walk through the last verified hours of 18-year-old Dana Stidham and sort what’s true from what’s been repeated for decades. No theatrics—just timestamps, locations, and choices that still demand answers: the unfixed flat, the Omni facing the wrong way, and a seven-week...

Send us Fan Mail Ever wondered what dark secrets lurk beneath the surface of America's quiet small towns? In this episode, Paul and Andrea pull back the curtain on two shocking criminal cases from Northwest Arkansas that time has nearly forgotten. The conversation begins with a puzzling 1972 case where Lieutenant Carl Martins, a young Springdale police officer, survived when a bomb detonated...

Send us Fan Mail Buried in declassified government archives lies a chilling reminder of how fragile democracy can be from within. Operation Northwoods represents one of the most disturbing chapters in American military planning – a moment when the nation's top generals unanimously approved a scheme to attack their own citizens as a pretext for war. The story begins in 1962, with the United St...

Send us Fan Mail Nuclear weapons vanish without a trace. Soviet submarines prepare to launch. False alarms flash across screens in Moscow bunkers. The Cold War was more dangerous than most of us ever realized. We reveal the shocking truth that at least six American nuclear weapons have been lost since the 1950s and never recovered. These aren't training devices or empty shells—they are fully...

Send us Fan Mail  In 1927, a “modern cure” for ringworm left a boy’s skull collapsed. He wore a hat for 80 years to hide the truth.  In a rural Black farming town in Indiana, 1927, a group of schoolchildren were told they’d receive a modern medical treatment for ringworm. It was free, it was fast, and it was promised safe. What followed was one of the most chilling medical betrayals of the 20th ce...