True Crime 48 Hours

The nanny who wanted to steal her identity: The murder of Rachel Barber An anonymous call offered easy money. Rachel Barber, a 16-year-old dancer, accepted without telling her mother. Hours later, she disappeared. What the family discovered in her killer's notebook revealed a documented obsession: Caroline Reed not only wanted to kill her, she wanted to become her. In this episode, we explore how...

Killer Changes Weapons Every Crime While Police Search Five Separate Cases: The Serial Murders of Sergey Reakovsky In June 1988, a screwdriver murder in Balashikha opens a file. Two weeks later, another stabbing victim dies in the hospital. The two cases sit in separate desks, handled by different units, connected by nothing but geography. This episode traces five years of institutional fragmentat...

Marilyn's last post: 30 stabs and a secret: The femicide of Marilyn Martínez in San Borja, Lima. On January 16, 2023, a scream pierced an apartment in San Borja. Marilyn, an influencer with 600K followers who smiled on TikTok, was packing to escape when her husband arrived. An impossible detail: her last post from the day before carried a message of female autonomy. In this episode, we explore the...

Man Jumps from Eight-Meter Window as Courtroom Realizes Who He Really Is: The Serial Murders of Ted Bundy A law student in a three-piece suit sits calmly in a Florida courtroom, taking notes on legal motions. Hours earlier, forensic evidence linked him to the bodies of at least thirty women across five states. The question that haunted investigators for years was not whether he killed-it was how s...

A like on Facebook triggered the femicide of Adriana: The murder of Adriana Jacobo Rocha Adriana liked a photo of Yael on social media. Her friend Alexa saw it, secretly contacted Giovanni, and for weeks planned the perfect crime. The trigger for a premeditated femicide was not an explicit love triangle, but a digital gesture that escalated to murderous planning among teenagers. In this episode, w...

Two Officers Stop the Zodiac in the Dark and Let Him Walk: The Murder of Paul Lee Stein October eleventh, nineteen sixty-nine. A taxi driver named Paul Stein is shot in the head on a quiet residential street in San Francisco, and three teenagers watch a man calmly wipe down the vehicle before walking into the darkness. The killer's identity would become unmistakable-but not before two patrol offic...

The glove that pointed to the void of the Colca: The homicide of Ciro Castillo Rojo A body found 900 meters deep without shoes or jacket, with a foreign glove next to it on a route that Ciro knew well. His girlfriend survived nine days alone in the canyon. But the evidence and her own words contradicted her. In this episode, we explore how an unregistered phone call, impossible knowledge about a f...

Twelve Days After Release, He Started to Kill: The Murders of Jorge Cajiga Ruiz, Juan Uribe Peña, Curtis Bradford, and Andrea Krueger On August eleventh, two thousand thirteen, Omaha police found two men dead in an alley, shot with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Eight days later, a third victim appeared-connected by a single photograph on Facebook to a man released from prison just twelve days before. Th...

The night Montse did not return for dinner: The homicide of Monserrat Vendimes Roldán A 20-year-old young woman left a family gathering on April 17, 2021, promising to return for dinner. Her mother found her hours later in a coma, with fractures in her skull, neck, and arms. Her boyfriend was already fleeing, protected by a wealthy family willing to do anything. In this episode, we explore how the...

Killer Confesses to Thirteen Murders from Prison Before He's Stabbed to Death: The Boston Strangler case of Albert De Salvo In the early hours of November 25, 1973, Albert De Salvo was stabbed six times in his maximum-security cell while he slept. Hours earlier, he had requested an urgent meeting because he claimed he had something to reveal about the Boston Strangler-the man he had confessed to b...

The Jachachiran Sisters: 35 Stabs to a Tyrant: The murder of Mikail Jachachiran in Moscow. Three sisters stabbed their father 35 times while he slept, then called the police and confessed everything. The same act that should close the case opens it: why did these confessed murderers never escape? Why did the system ignore their cries for years? In this episode, we explore the tension between preme...

Girl Vanishes from Her Bed as Lipstick Message Warns Stop Me Before I Kill: The Lipstick Killer murders of Chicago, 1945-1946 Chicago, June 1945. A woman is found stabbed and washed clean in her apartment with no witnesses and no leads. Six months later, another woman dies with a knife in her neck-and this time, a desperate message scrawled in her own lipstick appears on the wall: "For the love of...

Marichuy: the fall that the State wanted to hide: The femicide of María de Jesús Jaime Samudio A university student falls from the fifth floor of an apartment in the early morning of January 16, 2016. Within hours, the police close the case as a suicide. The impossible: four years later, DNA under her nails proves she was thrown by two men while struggling and calling for help. In this episode, we...

Two Young Men Find a Severed Hand and Discover What Lies Beneath the Bridge: The cannibal case of José Dorcel Vargas Gómez On a February morning in 1999, two young men walking along the Torbes River in Tariba, Táchira state, discovered a severed hand and foot on the riverbank. What they found inside the shack beneath Libertador Bridge defied explanation: human heads, seasoned organs in containers,...

Lupita: Nine months without a name in Nezahualcoyotl: The murder of Guadalupe Medina Pichardo A small girl's corpse lies in a vacant lot in Nezahualcoyotl, wearing red shoelaces. Nine months later, no institution knows who she was. The central question: how does a minor disappear without the State knowing her identity? In this episode, we explore the investigation that connected a citizen video, a...

Medical Student Opens Door with Hammer, Knife, Machete Inside His Bag: The Eight Murders of Alex Maquera December 20, 2004. Police arrive at a house in Tacna after a disappearance report and find a twenty-five-year-old medical student standing at the door with a canvas bag. Inside: a hammer, a knife, a machete, a sharpener. Inside the house: the body of Fidel Mina Mamani, beaten forty times. The c...

Ten Against One: The Ambush That Changed Everything: The Murder of Fernando Báez Sosa One January morning, an eighteen-year-old buys an ice cream on the street after leaving a nightclub. Minutes later, he is dead. The impossible: ten middle-class attackers coordinate the murder of a stranger without any of them raising a hand to stop it. In this episode, we explore how a fifteen-second video recor...

The demons in the freezer of Detroit: The case of Michelle Blair A domestic freezer. Two bodies stacked. Almost three years living under the same roof while the mother continued to collect welfare for children who were already dead. The discovery was not the result of a police investigation: it was accidental, during an eviction for unpaid rent in March 2015. In this episode, we explore how a moth...

Police Stop a Pickup Truck at Three AM and Discover Seventeen Bodies: The Serial Murders of Joel Rifkin A routine traffic stop on the Southern State Parkway at three in the morning turns into one of New York's darkest discoveries. Officers pull over a pickup truck without rear license plates, but what they find in the back shatters the quiet facade of a suburban gardener living a double life for f...

Killer Calls Police Crying While Choosing His Next Victim: The Serial Murders of Paul Stefan January 1981, early morning. A man dials 911 sobbing, confessing to an attack he just committed. Minutes later, police find a young woman barely alive near railroad tracks. But the caller vanishes into the city, and the emergency recordings become the only evidence he exists. In this investigation, we expl...

Sharon La Hechicera: Accident or calculated femicide?: The femicide of Rosario Bermeo Cisneros A call in the early morning asking for help. Minutes later, Sharon lies dead on the road. Her partner blames a phantom car. But her two-year-old son whispers the truth no one expected to hear: "my dad pushed my mom." In this episode, we explore the collision between two irreconcilable versions: the defen...

Woman Shoots Her Date and Stops a Photographer's Three-Year Killing Spree: The Murder of Judy Doll, Shirley Britford, and Ruth Mercado August 1957, Los Angeles. A nineteen-year-old named Judy Doll climbs into a stranger's car for what she believes is a professional photo shoot. She never returns. What remained hidden for months was that her killer kept a toolbox filled with photographs documenting...

The killer who asked for his victim to return: The homicide of Brenda Requena Montaña A man appears on national television pleading for the return of his missing wife. Five days later, burned and dismembered remains are found just meters from his home. How did the perpetrator become the public face of the search? In this episode, we explore the obsessive control that Diego exerted over Brenda, the...

The priest who confessed to a crime for 57 years: The murder of Irene Garza A young teacher went to confess on Holy Saturday in McAllen, Texas, and never came out alive from the Sacred Heart church. Her body floated in an irrigation canal days later, but the priest who heard her confession took more than half a century to be convicted - although his guilt was an open secret from the first month. I...

Teenager Walks Into Cafeteria and Opens Fire in Forty-Seven Seconds: The Chardon High School Shooting of Daniel Parmertor, Russell King Jr., and Demetrius Hulin Seven thirty-five in the morning. A seventeen-year-old pulls a stolen .22-caliber pistol from his backpack in a crowded high school cafeteria. Ten shots. Three students dead by dawn the next day. But the shooter himself could never explain...