True Crime in the 50

In 2012, Dave Kroupa was just a normal guy living in Omaha, Nebraska. Dave was recently single, after breaking up with the mother of his two children, and was casually dating on the online dating forum, Plenty of Fish. It was on there that he met Liz Golyar. Liz and Dave dated for awhile, until Dave found someone he was more interested in; a woman named Cari Farver. Cari was twice divorced, had a...

On Monday, July 8th, 2013, a man named Cameron Frederickson was concerned. His usually reliable and on-time employee, 25-year-old Cody Johnson had not shown up to work that day. Frederickson went to Johnson's house in Kalispbell, Montana, and let himself into his garage. There, he found his friend's cell phone lying on a table, which was also out of the ordinary. Cody Johnson had just gotten marri...

Robert Courtney grew up as the son of a revivalist preacher, moving around to Alabama, Kansas and Louisiana before settling in Missouri. He was a strange child and never had many friends. But he graduated from the University of Missouri, met and married three times, had five children and became a successful pharmacist. So successful, in fact, that he lived in a mansion and bought an office in down...

Hey there all you Christmas fans: Check out my podcast The Evergreen Murders: A Mackenzie Monroe Christmas Mystery. Mackenzie Monroe is a hardworking, high-powered Hollywood talent agent who HATES Christmas. Much to her dismay, her newest actor client, Cameron Stack, has just gone against her wishes and accepted a role as the architect love interest in a holiday movie on the Candy Cane channel. Af...

On Tuesday evening, February 4th, 1986, 17-year-old Shondra May drove to her part-time McDonald's fast food restaurant job in Forest, Mississippi. Since it was a slow night, her manager let her go home around 7 pm. At 7:24 Shondra used a pay phone outside of the McDonald's to call her mother to tell her she was going to the local TG&Y store to pick up a Valentine's Day gift for her boyfriend,...

On November 1st, 2002, Steve and Jan Jenkins were at their home in Burlington, Wisconsin, waiting for their daughter, Sara, to visit, when they got a call from Ben Kroon, their son, Chris' roommate at the University of Minnesota. Ben was calling to tell Chris' parents that Chris had attended a Halloween party at a bar the night before, and no one had seen or heard from him since. Chris Jenkins, 21...

In the dead of winter, February 2014, married couple Jason and Kelly Cochran moved to Iron River, a tiny town with a population just shy of 3,000 in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Jason, due to his mental and physical disabilities, stayed home, while Kelly was the breadwinner; she had a job at the Oldenberg Group as an electrical assembler. Jason and Kelly were said to have an open marriage...but thi...

Annie Dhookan was a rising star and the MVP at her job as a drug lab chemist at the Hinton State Laboratory Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. Annie's role was test drugs or other substances that were brought in by arresting officers, see if they were of the illegal variety, and sometimes, to testify in a court of law. But Annie was so good at her job, she was getting complaints from the other ch...

Steve and Kim Hricko's marriage was on the rocks. So that is why, on Valentine's Day in 1998, Steve had the idea to take his bride to the Harbourtowne Golf Resort and conference center on the Eastern Shore of Maryland for the night. It was to be a romantic getaway, with food and drinks and even a Dinner Theatre Murder Mystery experience. But by the end of the night, it was not only the Dinner Thea...

Little Ayla Bell Reynolds was only 20 months old when she mysteriously disappeared from Watertown, Maine on December 16th, 2011. Her parents, who never married, were locked in a legal custody battle for the child and Ayla had been staying with her father on the night of December 15th. Also at her father's house were 6 or 7 other people, children and adults, and a party was being thrown. Ayla's fat...

Barbara Blount was a widow with two children who lived in the small town of Holden, Louisiana. She was devout and church-going and did not have an enemy in the world. May 2nd, 2008 started out just like any other. Barbara spoke to her daughter Christy, and a friend on the phone and set about cleaning out her kitchen cupboards. But by 2 pm, when none of her friends or family could reach her, Barbar...

On the first day of summer, Friday, June 21st, 2013, Brookelyn Farthing went with her sister to obtain her driver's license. She then went to a birthday party for a family member, and, that night, went to a party in a rural field in Berea, Kentucky to celebrate her graduation with classmates. Her sister and her friend abandoned her, so, pretty soon, Brookelyn was looking for a ride home. She found...

When Tracy, a 40-something-year-old Kansas mother of two found Mickey on an online dating site, she thought she had hit the jackpot. He was accomplished, handsome, had his private pilot's license and owned his own real estate company. Within days they were saying I love you and within a month, moving in together. Then, they were talking marriage. It all seemed too good to be true...because it was....

In August of 1969, Dorothy Miller, the only female real estate agent in the city of Burlington, Iowa, received a call from a man named Robert Clark, asking to see the for sale property at 118 Grand Street. Dorothy agreed to show it to the man that evening, but made sure her husband, Fred Miller, came along for safety purposes. The next day, the man called Dorothy and asked to see the property agai...

Herbert "Herb" Baumeister was born on April 7th, 1947 to a prominent doctor and a homemaker on the upscale north side of Indianapolis, Indiana. Ever since he was a child, Herb was odd. And not just odd, downright weird. He once asked a friend what he thought drinking urine would taste like, and placed a dead crow on top of his grade school teacher's desk. But Herb got married and found semi-succes...

It was the fall of 2003 when Southern Illinois University student Sarah Delashmit told her suitemates that she had cancer. All of them were devastated and even shaved their heads in solidarity. The next year, Sarah told her roommate she had gotten into a horrific car accident, was in a wheelchair and would never walk again. By the time Sarah moved out of the dorm, the roommate and she were not on...

Katy Benoit was a bubbly, young, happy and personable graduate student of psychology at The University of Idaho. While she had briefly entered into a romantic relationship with a 31-year-old teacher's assistant at the college, Ernesto Bustamante, she had broken up with him and was trying to move on with her life. But Bustamante was making that difficult. He was stalking Katy and had threatened her...

Phrogging is defined as: "The act of sneaking into a person's home and hiding among it's occupants without their knowledge." While this phenomenon is rare, it is not unheard of. P. Diddy had a phrogger in his home, as did Pamela Anderson in 2001. But the creepiest and most disturbing case is the one of the Campbell family in Honolulu, Hawaii. In 2019, the Campbells had just moved to Honolulu, when...

College freshman Justin Gaines had returned to his parent's home in Duluth, Georgia, for the weekend. The smart and outgoing 18-year-old student did not have any classes on Fridays, so he used the weekends to catch up with his parents, do a little work at their family roofing company and party with friends. And on Thursday, November 1st, 2007, he set out for Wild Bill's Nightclub with a friend and...

Friends and family members were concerned, in March of 2020, when the world was shutting down because of COVID, because of the strange texts they had been getting from Gretchen Anthony. Gretchen, who lived in Jupiter, Florida, was a fitness buff, and had a little girl and a second husband, was healthy by all accounts. But no one had seen her in person for a few days, and had only received messages...

When 24-year-old Ashley Byers met 54-year-old Doug Benefield on August 25th, 2016, at party in former President hopeful Ben Carson's mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, it was love at first sight. Literally. The two started texting and said "I love you" within days. In under 14 days, they were married, much to Doug's 15-year-old daughter Eva's chagrin. But the two were very much alike; both were gun-t...

After Joe Connell was released from prison, he was a changed man who wanted to settle down and start a family. Pretty soon, he found his true love, a mail order Russian bride named Olga. Joe was successful; he ran a successful auto body repair shop in Wilminginton, Delaware with his partner, Christopher Rivers. He also had a side hustle selling sterioids out of said body shop. Joe and Olga had onl...

Suzanne Jovin was a 21-year-old senior at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, when her life was cut mercilessly short. December 4th, 1998 started out just like any other day for Suzanne. She woke up early, went to classes, turned in an assignment to her professor, and then attended a Best Buddies volunteer organization pizza party. After that, she returned to her apartment, shot off a quick...

Candace Hiltz was a 17-year-old daughter, sister and young mother to a baby girl with a debilitaring illness who lived in Canon City, Colorado. She was also a bona fide genius. By the age of 11, she was perfecting calculus equations. By age 17, Candace was already in her third year of college online at Brigham Young University, studying to be a lawyer and Supreme Court Justice, and had already bee...

Show Notes: https://www.newsweek.com/lady-fridge-murder-victim-identified-amanda-deza-1784070 If you have any information about the murder of Amanda Lynn Shumann-Deza, the former San Joaquin County "Lady in the Fridge" Jane Doe from 1995, please call: 1-209-468-5087 or email: coldcase@sjgov.org