True Crime Campfire

In the story of Pinocchio, a wooden puppet dreams of becoming a real boy—a real son to his maker, Geppetto. He’s a bit of a mess—always getting into mischief, lying and hanging around with the wrong crowd. But when he learns how to really care about people, the good fairy finally grants his wish, making him fully human. It’s a pretty powerful lesson: That what makes us whole, a lot of the time, is...

Elle Newmark wrote, “Unrequited love does not die; it’s only beaten down to a secret place where it hides, curled and wounded.” Most of us have felt that special kind of pain that comes from pining after somebody who’s not pining after you. Most of us manage to take the hit and move on. But a few take…another path. This is the story of Jonna Henningsson, a bright, outgoing young woman who loved an...

John Adams once wrote that genius is sorrow’s child. A couple years ago, The Economist published an article called “The Curse of Genius” about the tumultuous lives of child prodigies. And how many times has Mensa come up on this show by now? About half a dozen, at least? Genius, it seems, is a double-edged sword. Some people are able to harness it to make spectacular leaps forward in art or scienc...

In the Bible, First Corinthians 13:4 says, “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” It’s actually a pretty good defini...

There’s an old saying that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get ya. For one brilliant yet troubled mind, living in fear was pretty much the norm for most of his adult life. His friends had come to take his worries with a grain of salt. Some of them seemed like the kind of bizarre fantasies you’d find in an episode of the X-Files. Nobody really took them seriously. That...

So, this might seem like a weird question, but hear me out. Does authenticity matter? Let me be more specific. Does art need to be authentic? What if you found out, for example, that your favorite writer—somebody whose traumatic life story you related to, somebody whose identity was a living, breathing part of the power of the stories they told—was a fake? Not the person they presented themselves...

The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed—only transferred from one form to another. For example, dynamite explodes when chemical energy is converted to kinetic energy. It’s an interesting metaphor for a kind of killer we see a lot on True Crime Campfire: the smart, dynamic charmer with everything going for them, who throws it all away by putting their...

Becky Sears and Kay Parsons were not only next door neighbors, but best friends, too. Their sons were in Little League together, and their husbands liked to join them both for dinner, drinks, and games of mixed doubles tennis. But secrets and lies would soon rip their friendship apart, and the consequences would reverberate throughout their small Georgia community for years to come. Join us for on...

Lying is an essential human activity—everybody does it sometimes. And there are a few different reasons people do it. Sometimes it’s an innocent attempt to spare somebody’s feelings: Y’know, “It’s not you, it’s me,” or “Oh no, Gramma, I loved that sweater you made me! It’s just um…it was stolen. Yeah, stolen!” Sometimes it’s to avoid accountability. “I didn’t kill that guy,” or “That vase was shat...

T.S. Eliot ends his poem “The Hollow Men” with the line “This is the way the world ends…not with a bang, but a whimper.” Spree criminals are always after the bang. Many see themselves going out in a blaze of glory, taking as many people with them as they can. Going down in history as some kind of dark antihero, shaking up the way we think, making us question our most basic values—leaving a big, sm...

In the series premiere, radio DJ Fred Heckman (Jon Hamm) receives an unexpected call from a listener that turns his life upside down. Follow American Hostage on Amazon Music, to hear all 8 episodes right now: wondery.fm/TCC_AmericanHostageBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/a...

In the old Hans Christian Anderson tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes, the emperor was the kind of clothes horse who’d make Anna Wintour look like a frump in a burlap sack. This guy was all about the fashion, and the more extravagant the better. So one day, a couple of con men came blazin’ into town, pretending to be the best tailors in the biz. They swept into the emperor’s castle, bragging about...

When we left you at the end of part 1, we had just learned one of Bart Corbin’s best-kept secrets: that, 14 years before the murder of Jennifer Corbin, his ex-girlfriend Dolly Hearn had died from a gunshot wound to the head. A gunshot wound eerily similar to Jenn’s—and a death that had been ruled a suicide, to the disbelief of the people closest to the victim. Now, Dolly’s parents were determined...

A little mystery can be fun in a relationship. It keeps things interesting. You don’t have to share every thought that passes through your head, or tell all your best stories on the first or second date. Keeping your partner guessing about a few things can add a little spice. You shouldn’t feel like you have to make your life an open book. But if you end up with someone who won’t even let you take...

I always loved the old “Twilight Zone” series. In most of the stories, ordinary people would wake up one morning and find themselves in a world that had changed in some crucial, baffling way. Everybody else would be in on the change, going around like nothing had happened, and the hero would have to figure out how to navigate this scary new reality. It’s fun to watch, when it’s fiction. But what i...

We’ve said it before on True Crime Campfire: We’re nerds. And so are most of our friends. Nerds can be the very best people. All most of us want to do is to read our comics or cosplay our favorite characters from Final Fantasy VII, or learn to speak Klingon. We’re harmless. Most of us. But every category of person has its dark element. And for some people, fantasy is anything but harmless. For the...

Love, hate and obsession have always been pretty close relatives. Anybody who’s ever picked up a Harlequin romance novel or watched a ridiculous rom-com knows that we don’t really get the best guidance from society on how to manage our love lives. Some of us just kinda wing it until we figure it out. Some of us go from train wreck to train wreck, and some decide we’d rather skip the whole thing an...

“Stranger than fiction” is one of our guiding forces here at True Crime Campfire. We always try to find the kind of stories that will live rent-free in your head for the rest of your life. But of all the weird stories we’ve encountered in our decades of true crime obsession, there are a few that stand out far above the crowd. In our first case, a quirky professor known for his unorthodox views on...

When we left you at the end of part 1, Omaha homicide detectives had just put a new suspect on their radar for the brutal murders of Tom Hunter, Shirlee Sherman, and Roger and Mary Brumback: Dr. Anthony Garcia, a former resident in the pathology department at Creighton University Hospital. Garcia had been terminated from his residency after a series of bad evaluations. Now, years later, the doctor...

In 2008, a tranquil neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska was stunned by the vicious double murder of an eleven year old boy—the son of two prominent local doctors—and their much-beloved housekeeper. No one could imagine who was behind the killings, and the case went colder and colder…until the same thing happened again, five years later, and the motive became clear. Join us for a classic whodunnit, the...

In the era of some of the most heinous serial killers of all time, one murderous family went curiously unnoticed: The McCrarys. Led by a psychopathic patriarch and his cunning son-in-law, this Texas clan roamed the country robbing, kidnapping, and killing up to 20 people, most of them taken from donut shops. “Families Who Kill: The Donut Shop Murders” recounts the wild and deeply disturbing story...

In every great love story, there’s some degree of risk. We risk our hearts, at the very least. We risk getting hurt. But one thing we DON’T usually risk is prison time. This is the story of one of America’s tricksiest con men. An ingenious thief, a master impersonator, and the most prolific prison escapee in U.S. history. One of the fascinating things about him is the motivation behind his many cr...

Since it's the holidays and we both have family to see and things to bake, we decided to give everybody another peek at one of our past Patreon-exclusive episodes. Sometimes these patron-exclusives are just regular TCC episodes—extra cases. But sometimes we like to mix things up and do something a little different. In this episode, we decided to walk our patrons through some of the most common, mo...

American Scandal is a podcast from Wondery that explores the darker stories that have shaped the United States. From the Unabomber to Bernie Madoff, these are stories that reveal the underbelly of America: ruthless, secretive, and power-hungry. The new season of American Scandal looks at the controversial decision made by a young government official named Daniel Ellsburg to leak the Pentagon Paper...

There’s a Danish proverb that says, “If envy were a fever, then the whole world would be ill.” It’s probably true. I mean, everybody feels that poisonous little pang now and then. We all occasionally want something that somebody else has, maybe even resent them a little for having it. We learn to get past it, focus on the good in our own lives instead of obsessing about everyone else. But sometime...