True Crime in the 50

On October 31st, 1994, police officers in the Apple Valley area near San Bernardino, California, received a call from two individuals who were out searching for rocks. They had found what appered to be a human skull which was part of a skeleton buried in a clandestine grave site with it's body wrapped in a plastic bag. It was that of a mixed-race female, 5'1" to 5'5" and anywhere from 25-55 years...

December 1st, 1994, started out like a normal day unlike any other for 19-year-old Melissa "Missy" Witt in Fort Smith, Arkansas. She spent the first part of the morning with her mother, Mary Ann, had lunch with a friend at the Central Mall Food Court and then went to a class at Westark Community College. She then headed to her jog as a dental assistant. When Missy got home, she found a note from h...

24-year-old Arpana Jinaga was once a teenage technology prodigy who excelled in living life to the fullest. She moved to the U.S. to accomplish life goals and live the Dream, but instead, an unknown monster turned her life into a Nightmare. She was found murdered in her apartment after a Halloween party in 2008. Katy Accardo from the podcast True Crime in the 50 joins us as we talk about Arpana's...

In 1981 in Scottsdale, Arizona, a man named Steven Steinberg was accused of killing his wife, Elana Steinberg. While at first, Steven attempted to blame her murder (she was stabbed 26 times with a kitchen knife,) on two bushy-bearded robbers, he soon gave up that ghost and admitted to killing her. But there was one caveat to his guilty plea: he claimed he was sleepwalking when he killed her. Her n...

On a normal day in October of 2006 in an upscale suburb of Olympia, Washington, police officers walked up to the front door of an exclusive-looking home in a high-end neighborhood. They were looking for a 33-year-old married mother of one named Mechele Linehan. Mechele was your typical suburban housewife; she held sleepovers for her daughter, was active in the church, and hosted a weekly pizza nig...

On the night of July 31st, 1999, at 10pm, two teenage girls and best friends, JB Beasley and Tracie Hawlett, set out from Dothan, Alabama, to attend a party held in JB's honor for her birthday. By 10:30pm, though, the girls were hopelessly lost. After making two sets of phone calls to Tracie's mother from two separate gas stations, the last one being at 11:30 pm, the girls decided to give up on th...

David Davis was a husband, a father, a homeowner in Michigan and a farmer. He was also a cheater, a swindler and a murderer. After killing his wife, Shannon Davis, in July of 1980, and making it look like a horse riding accident, he went about his life until the feds caught on to him. But that was 7 years later. By 1987, David Davis had fled to California, Alaska and finally to the islands of Amer...

Amy Wroe Bechtel was a really good runner. She had beat the 3000 meter dash record at her college, the University of Wyoming, and had participated in the Boston Marathon. At 24 years old, she had just settled down and bought a house in Lander, Wyoming, with her husband of one year, Steve Bechtel. But on July 24th, 1997, after Amy ran some errands and set out for her daily run in the Shoshone Natio...

When 9-year-old Morgan Geyser saw Peyton "Bella" Leutner drawing pictures of kitties in her notebook at Horning Middle School in Wakesha, Wisconsin, she knew they would be fast friends. The girls were inseparable and stayed best friends, even through Morgan's struggles with her undiagnosed childhood-onset schizophrenia. That is, until another girl, Anissa Weier, came along. Anissa lived in the sam...

December 15th, 2007 started out like any other day for Leah Hickman, a junior at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. She went shopping for Christmas presents with her sister, Jessica, talked on the phone with a friend and made a stop at the nearby McDonald's. She then set about doing her laundry and packing to go home for break, and was never heard from again after about 6 pm. Her bo...

At 2:01 a.m. on July 13th, 1994, a call came in to 911 from the upscale Somerset neighborhood area in Bellevue, Washington. The caller was 19-year-old Sebastian Burns, a Canadian native, who had been staying with his friend, Atif Rafay, as well as his parents, Dr. Tariq and Sultana, and his special needs sister, Basma Rafay for 5 days. Sebastian was calling to say that he and Atif had come home fr...

In April of this year, in Yorktown, Virginia, a 12-year-old boy named Sean Daugherty got off the bus and walked home after school. Excited to find out he would be responsible for watching his 2-year-old brother for a few hours until his older sister got home from school, he finished his homework, made his favorite snack and went about doing his chores before he set his brother up on the iPad and s...

Sarah Ransome had just moved to New York City to pursue her dream of a career in fashion. One night, while out at a club, she met a woman named Natalya Malashev who then introduced her to a very wealthy man named Jeffrey Epstein. After one date at the movies in Times Square, Jeffrey Epstein invited Sarah to fly on his plane to his private island that he owned in the Caribbean for a girls trip. Lit...

St. Johnsbury was a quiet, small Vermont town with little to no crime. Until the night of March 25, 2012 when a 31-year-old single mother of a young son disappeared with her car running on the side of the road. Police found Melissa Jenkins' dead body the next day, floating in a river. She had been strangled. Who would have wanted the beloved teacher and coach dead? Allen and Patricia Prue. The cou...

In the early morning hours of Monday, June 17th 2019, a flight coming from Los Angeles' LAX airport touched down in Salt Lake City, Utah. On that flight was a 23-year-old girl named Mackenzie Lueck, who was returning from attending her grandmother's funeral. Mackenzie, retrieved her luggage from baggage claim and then got into a Lyft ride share car. After texting on her phone for awhile,...

On September 2nd, 2015, two young men who were hanging out at the upscale apartment complex, Gables Park 17 in the Uptown area of Dallas, Texas, heard a scream and a gunshot. Following the sounds, they made their way to the first floor of the parking garage, where they found a gruesome sight. A woman was lying in a pool of blood, with her car door wide open, a magazine clip lying beside her, and h...

In October of 1992, a hunter in a remote area of Knoxville, Tennessee, came across a disturbing sight. He saw the body of a bruised and beaten woman under a dirty mattress and called police. The woman, whose name was Patricia Anderson, had been a local sex worker. Pretty soon, three more female corpses were found in the same wooded area, two of whom were also in the sex trade. The police immediate...

Michael Swango, born in Quincy, Illinois in 1968, was brilliant. So much so, that he chose to become a doctor of medicine. While most doctors choose the profession because they want to help people, and use their skills for good, Michael Swango chose it for evil. From a young age, he was a narcissist and a sociopath, who was obsessed with car crashes. He made himself a scrapbook filled with newspap...

On November 3rd, 2016, a woman by the name of Kala Brown was found chained inside of a shipping container that sat on the sprawling 95-acre property of a man named Todd Kohlhepp in rural Moore, South Carolina. She had been held against her will for 65 days. Todd Kohlhepp was a 45-year-old single man and a successful realtor who owned his own realty company. He was also an ex-con, a rapist and a se...

In 1988 in Rhode Island, two little girls went missing. They were 10-year-old Christine Cole from Pawtucket and 7-year-old Michelle Norris from Central Falls. Both were found days later, both had been murdered. Michelle Norris had been sexually assaulted. Both cases went cold far too soon. But the family members and friends have never given up hope. Christine Cole's case was reopened in 2018...

She was a gorgeous Puerto Rican beauty queen. He was a wealthy Canadian businessman. From the outside, their marriage looked perfect. But Aurea Vazque-Rijos and Adam Anhang were far from it. Aurea had married Adam for his money and everyone knew it. She also faked a pregnancy and Adam was filing for divorce. But Aurea was not letting him off that easily. In late September of 2005, in Old San Juan,...

On the morning of November 12th, 2013, in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, a woman by the name of Brittany Settler was reaching into her refrigerator to get some cream for her coffee. Outside the window of her kitchen, she saw a man lying prostrate on the ground. Upon further inspection, she realized the man was dead and called police. The man was 42-year-old Troy LaFerrera, the victim of a deadly homicide....

On December 21st, 2001, a man by the name of Aubrey Von Mader was smoking a cigarette in his mother's backyard in West Central Oregon. As he went to toss the butt into Alsea Bay, he saw the body of a child floating along. The boy was Zachery Longo, age 4, and in the next few days, the bodies of two of his siblings and his mother would be found also floating in the bay water. But where was the...

In the early morning hours of December 30, 1999, on a remote stretch of plains in Welch, Oklahoma, a couple got up early for work. As they headed out, they saw one of their neighbors' trailers on fire. With the help of other neighbors, the police and fire department were called. After the fire was extinguished, volunteer firemen found remains of a body so badly burned, they could barely tell...

Granville, Ohio is a tiny town in Central Ohio, about 25 miles East of Columbus. Although it may seem quaint and sleepy, removed from the dangers of the big cities such as Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Dayton, it has a dark past. In the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Granville, Ohio was home to a series of murders, including those perpetrated by the infamous .22 Caliber Killers; Gary and Thaddeus Lewin...