True Crime Central

The Man Who Shot the Wrong Person and Changed the Law: The Murder of Edward Drummond A stranger stood outside 10 Downing Street for weeks, watching. Soldiers noticed him. Police questioned him. He told them he was waiting for a gentleman. On January 20, 1843, he finally stopped waiting — and fired a pistol into the back of a man he had never met, a man he was absolutely certain was someone else. T...

She Called In Late. She Never Made It Out.: The Disappearance of Jodi Huisentruit At 4:10 in the morning, a young news anchor answered her phone, groggy, and promised her producer she'd be at the station in twenty minutes. She never arrived. Outside her apartment, investigators found her shoes, her hair dryer, and a bent car key on the ground — but no Jodi. In nearly thirty years, no one has b...

The Text She Sent Before She Disappeared: The Death of Morgan Patton At 10:25 PM on November 8, 2019, a 24-year-old woman texted her fiancé something strange — a tip about cocaine being smuggled onto a Marine Corps base through pizza deliveries. Eleven minutes later, she sent her last message. Six minutes after that, she was dead, found on the ground beneath a speeding truck she had no known reaso...

She Won Six Hundred Dollars. Then Someone Shot Her.: The Murder of Furbia Faye Tinsley A 51-year-old Army veteran won big at bingo on a Friday night, deposited her winnings at the bank, and was found shot twice in the head inside her own car before sunrise. The engine was still running. Her seatbelt was still on. Her purse was gone, but nothing inside the car had been touched. Homicide investigato...

She Said His Name. The Phone Disappeared.: The Murder of Deanna Cook She called 911 while he was in the room. For nearly seventeen minutes, the operator listened to a woman beg for her life — and heard a man say "I'll kill you" three times. When police finally knocked on her door, they left without going inside. Three days later, her mother found her face down in a bathtub full of wate...

The Confession That Wasn't His to Give: The Murder of Father Patrick Ryan and the Wrongful Conviction of James Harry Rios A housekeeper opened Room 126 of a Texas motel on December 22, 1981, and found a man beaten beyond recognition, hands bound, lying face-down in a pool of blood. The investigation that followed produced a conviction built entirely on a phone call — no fingerprints, no DNA, n...

The Officer Who Investigated His Own Crime: The Disappearance of Rachel Good A 20-year-old mother of three vanished on the night of October 18, 2003, and by the next morning, the officer assigned to find her was the same man investigators now name as their only suspect. He stood at the missing persons desk, pen shaking in his hand, and took the report himself. How does a police department hand a c...

She Texted Goodbye. He Described the Wrong Death.: The Death of Molly Marie Young A 21-year-old woman was found on the floor of her boyfriend's bedroom with a gunshot wound above her left eye. When her boyfriend called 911, he described an overdose — never once mentioning the visible wound to her head. The gun that killed her left no residue on her hands. So how did she pull the trigger? In th...

She Was Wrapped, Bound, and Nobody Looked: The Murder of Patricia "Tricia" Melody Newsome A canvas tarp. Copper wire. Two trash bags and a cloth stuffed in her mouth. Someone spent a significant amount of time preparing this body for disposal — and then nearly fifty years passed without a single arrest. The forensic science existed. The tips came in. So why does no one answer for what happ...

The Dog Bones Buried Six Feet Deep: The Disappearance of Reed Jepson A fifteen-year-old boy stepped into his backyard to feed his dogs on a Sunday afternoon in 1964 and was never seen again. Forty-five years later, a backhoe in the neighboring yard hit something five feet down — two dogs, surgically dismembered, sealed in plastic bags. The man who owned that property in 1964 was a bone surgeon. Wh...

He Cleaned the Room. The City Became the Grave.: The Disappearance of Bruce Blackwood Bruce Blackwood called his job minutes before his shift on March 6, 2006, to say he had slipped in the bathtub — but his phone pinged a cell tower nowhere near his home. Three days later, someone spotted his prized Cadillac being driven across the city with music blasting, and Bruce was nowhere to be found. The i...

The Trunk Nobody Thought to Open: The Double Murder of J.B. Hilton Beasley and Tracy Hollett Two seventeen-year-old girls called home from a payphone just after eleven-thirty at night — perfectly fine, asking for directions. By the next morning, their car sat abandoned on a back road with purses, wallets, and cash still inside. Officers stood at that car for hours before anyone thought to pull the...

She Called at 10 A.M. — Seven Hours After She Died: The Disappearance of Vivian Cameron A woman was officially declared dead by suicide on the morning of September 23, 1986 — yet a friend received a phone call from her at 10:00 a.m. that same day, corroborated by a second witness and a handwritten diary entry the friend never saw. The bridge she allegedly jumped from showed no disturbance on its s...

The Fifteen Minutes No One Can Explain: The Murder of Fiona Yu A college student walked through her back door at 5:10 PM with mail in her hand. Her roommate arrived ten minutes later. In that window — no forced entry, no sign of panic, no stranger visible on the street — someone who had been watching for days was already inside. The forensic science recovered one thing that does not belong to Fion...

Guilty and Innocent at the Same Time: The Murder Case of Nathaniel Young and the Plea That Changed American Law A man stood in a North Carolina courtroom in 1963 and told the judge he was innocent — then pleaded guilty to the crime. That single moment created a legal mechanism used hundreds of times every year in American courts. The same mechanism that failed to save Henry Alford later freed thre...

The Night Nobody Called: The Murder of Catherine "Kitty" Genovese A young woman was stabbed twice on a lit sidewalk in New York City, screamed loud enough to wake her neighbors, and then lay dying in a vestibule for nearly an hour while her attacker sat quietly in his car two blocks away and waited. The first phone call to police came after she was already gone. This homicide investigation...

The Locked Door That Has No Answer: The Death of Hugues de la Plaza A neighbor stepped outside at 8:00 AM and found two pools of blood leading to a door that was locked from the inside. Every bloody shoe print inside the apartment belonged to the victim. No weapon was ever found. Four separate investigations reached four different conclusions — and no one has ever been charged. In this episode, we...

The Fishing Pole That Was Sold for Two Dollars: The Murder of Matthew Margolis A thirteen-year-old boy went fishing on a summer Friday and never came home. His body was found five days later in a shallow pit off Pemberwick Road, covered with leaves and a heavy rock — and the fishing pole his grandfather had given him was gone. One of the Valley Boys later turned up with it, claiming Matthew sold i...

She Left Without Her Shoes: The Disappearance of Lucely "Lily" Aramburro A 23-year-old mother walked out of her Miami condo at 2 AM with no wallet, no keys, no phone — and no shoes. The only person home that night filed a missing persons report nearly 24 hours later. When investigators finally ran a polygraph, they told her family he passed. He didn't. In this episode, we explore a fab...

The Wallet Nobody Was Supposed to Find: The Murder of Evelyn Hernandez A nine-months-pregnant woman steps out to collect her mail on a Wednesday evening — and then simply ceases to exist. The new wallet she bought that same afternoon turns up weeks later in a parking lot one block from her ex-boyfriend's workplace, still carrying an uncashed check. How does a woman due to give birth in six day...

The Couples Who Vanished on the Parkway: The Colonial Parkway Murders of Four Young Couples in Virginia A car hung off a riverbank embankment at a 45-degree angle, stopped only by a bush. Inside, two women were dead — throats slit, diesel fuel poured over them, unlit matches scattered nearby. The killer had tried to burn the evidence and failed. That was 1986. Three more attacks followed. The bodi...

The Boy Who Watched and Stayed Silent: The Murder of Christy Mullins A fourteen-year-old girl walked into the woods behind a shopping center on a Saturday afternoon and never walked back out. The man who reported finding her body described the killer in precise detail — tall, thin, scraggly black hair, shirtless, wearing cut-off jeans. That description matched the clothes he was wearing when he wa...

The Bite Mark Nobody Wrote Down: The Death of Lauren Agee at Wakefest 2015 A 21-year-old woman was found floating face-down in a cove at a Tennessee lake festival, and investigators declared it an accident before the autopsy was even complete. The lead investigator had no homicide training, no sexual assault kit was ever requested, and a bite mark found by a private forensic expert never appeared...

The Door That Locked From The Wrong Side: The Double Murder of Arushi Talwar and Hemraj Banjadeh A thirteen-year-old girl was found in her bed with a blanket pulled neatly over her body — throat slit, skull fractured, blood soaking through the mattress. The door to the terrace had been locked from the outside. And for more than twenty-four hours, while police searched the city for a missing suspec...

She Vanished Before Help Arrived: The Disappearance of Maura Murray A school bus driver stopped at a crashed car on a dark New Hampshire road and spoke directly to a young woman standing outside it. She told him she had already called for help. There was no cell service at that location — he knew that. Within fifteen minutes, every officer on scene agreed: she was simply gone. In this episode, we...