True Crime in the 50

Ryan and Sarah Widmer were twenty-something newlyweds living in the Cincinnati, Ohio area. Ryan worked as a sports marketer for the Warren County Convention and Visitor's Bureau and cheered for the Red Sox and the Bengals; Sarah loved her work as a dental hygienist. Until one Monday night in August of 2008, Sarah wasn't feeling well. She had been plagued by sleep issues and migraines for...

Wife and mother of two, Kathy Bonderson's body was found in a burning car, well past midnight, on October 25th, 1987, in New Rockford, North Dakota. 18-year-old Minot University college student, Anita Knutson, was found stabbed to death in her off-campus apartment in June of 2007. Both murders were investigated, and both ended up as cold cases in North Dakota. Until the state's two-perso...

From the outside looking in, Frank Martin "Marty" Theer and his wife, Michelle Theer, were the perfect couple, married for 10 years. Marty was an air force pilot stationed at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and Michelle was a smart and successful psychologist. The couple had no children, but plenty of friends, co-workers and...lovers. Michelle, at least. She had a penchant for posting...

Thomas Gilbert Jr. was born into extravagant wealth, and grew up in the Hamptons and on Manhattan's posh Upper East Side. He attended elite schools such as The Buckley School, Deerfield Academy and Princeton University. Once he graduated college, he took off for years to surf in exotic locations like Brazil, Hawaii and South America, and his parents footed the bill. When he returned to New Yo...

Perhaps not surprisingly, The Great State of New Mexico has been home to a good number of cults over the years. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a cult as "a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object," and, as "a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister." Well, two such New...

16-year-old Jeannette DePalma disappeared from her Springfield Township, New Jersey home on August 7th, 1972, while on her way to visit a friend in a nearby city. Police would find her body three weeks later, on top of the Devil's Teeth cliff, surrounded by what looked like wooden crosses, pentagram shapes and other satanic cult-like ritual materials. Jeannette's murder remains unsolved,...

You may have heard of the New Jersey Devil? Also called the Leeds Devil, it is a flying, screaming, biped creature with cloven hooves, a horse or goat head, leathery wings and a forked tail, that is said to inhabit the remote woods of Pine Barrens, New Jersey. While some remain skeptical of it, others from New Jersey believe the Devil himself exists and inhabits certain residents of the state, mak...

We'll hear from Pia, host of Crimes From the East True Crime Podcast, and her account of how the murder of Lizzi Marriott rocked her sleepy little New Hampshire town. We'll also hear her report of how she found herself in too-close proximity with killer Seth Mazzaglia, not once...but twice. Show Notes: Thanks so much to Pia from Crimes From the East for her input and for suggesting this...

When 17-year-old Kat McDonough met 28-year-old Seth Mazzaglia, they were both performing in a play at the local community theater in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Not long after, the two would begin a secret and illicit romance that only they understood. Pretty soon, Kat moved in with Seth and their sexual escapades escalated to kinky role play endeavors and risky BDSM practices, as Kat fell more and...

Steve Wynn is unarguably one of Las Vegas, Nevada's most famous people. A hotel magnate and real estate developer, Wynn was responsible for some of the strip's most exciting properties, such as the The Mirage, Treasure Island, Encore, and, of course, The Wynn Hotel and Casino. But Wynn's life wasn't always so glamorous...in July of 1993, Steve Wynn's 26-year-old daughter,...

You've heard of organized crime families, those descendants through the years who keep it in the lineage and commit similar acts of terror...whether that be kidnapping, theft, violence or murder. But you have probably never heard of the Leverings, Nebraska's own un-organized crime family. The patriarch, Levi Levering, was an upstanding Native American Tribal chief whose subsequent offspr...

The numbers are staggering: Since 2016, over 6,800 Indigenous Women have gone missing in the United States. These same women are 10 times more likely to be victims of abuse, rape or murder compared to any other race or ethnicity. And Native American Women are a tremendous 40% of the country's sex-trafficked victims. In Montana alone, Indigenous women make up 6.7% of the population, but 26% of...

Around 9:30 pm, on December 27th, 2011, just off Highway H on a dead-end drive in Troy, Missouri, a man named Russ Faria came home from a game night with friends to find his wife, Betsy Faria, stabbed to death. Initially, Russ thought that Betsy had killed herself, as he could not see the extent of her injuries (she was stabbed 55 times,) and she was suffering from Stage 4 cancer and had attempted...

During the evening of December 6th, 2014, one dozen volunteer firefighters responded to a call about a car fire in the tiny town of Courtland, Mississippi, population 512. When they arrived at the scene, they found not only a car on fire, but a person, as well. 19-year-old Jessica Chambers, a bubbly, sweet, former High School cheerleader and softball player had become engulfed in flames after bein...

On the night of October 22nd, 1989, three boys biked to a nearby convenience store to rent the movie Major League in the town of St. Joseph, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. The boys were Jacob Wetterling, 11, his little brother Trevor, 10 and a friend, Aaron Larson, also 11. Major League was rented out so they grabbed The Naked Gun instead and stocked up on candy. But as they were biking home,...

On January 24, 2012, the body of Jane Bashara, a 56-year-old resident of ritzy Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, was found dead in the backseat of her Mercedes SUV in a seedy area of Detroit. The police first went to interview her husband, Bob Bashara, who came from an extremely prominent Lebanese family in the area. Bob denied anything to do with his wife's murder. Eventually, the finger was poi...

In the Spring of 1995, two young women were finishing their junior year at the prestigious Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The girls were Sinedu Tadesse and Trang Ho, roommates, study buddies and, by all accounts, friends, and had been for the past two years. Even though Sinedu was a transplant from Ethiopia and Trang an immigrant from Vietnam, the women had many similarities. Both...

On the afternoon of May 14th, 2015, a wallpaper installer named Donald Spence had just finished a job in an upscale neighborhood of Washington D.C. and was driving home, when he saw smoke pouring out of the upstairs windows of a high-end mansion. He ran up to knock on the door, fearing the residents were still inside, but all he could hear were dogs barking. When firefighters arrived at the scene,...

I take a closer look at psychics who help solve crime cases...and psychics who don't. I also discuss the famous psychic, Vicki Monroe, and her involvement with the Amy St. Laurent case out of Portland, Maine. 

In October 2001, a 25-year-old woman by the name of Amy St. Laurent, went out on the town late at night in the Old Port area of Portland, Maine. She was accompanied by a new friend, a man by the name of Eric Rubright, someone she had just met three weeks prior in Florida. As the night progressed, Amy met two more men playing pool, lost Eric, and accompanied the two men, whose names were Jeffrey "R...

In the month before Hurricane Katrina, two young people fell in love in New Orleans, Louisiana. They were Zack Bowen and Addie Hall. He was a 28-year-old Iraq war veteran, an already-divorced father of two. She was a hippie, a free spirit and a dreamer. They rode out the storm together, a famous picture of the two of them partying amongst the rubble, even showing up in Playboy and other national p...

In the mid 2010s, there were multiple murders and disappearances in the small, rural town of Bardstown, Kentucky. First, Jason Ellis, a decorated 7-year veteran of the Bardstown Police Department was gunned down on the Bluegrass Parkway in the middle of the night...and that was no accident. Next, a mother and daughter were brutally slain in their home for no apparent reason. Third, Crystal Rogers,...

John Robinson was known around Kansas City as a driven entrepreneur, Boy Scout leader, basketball coach and Sunday School teacher. He was also known to be a member of a popular charitable organization and started a few businesses in which friends and neighbors invested. But, this was all a facade. What John Robinson really was, was a scam artist, fraudster, kidnapper, rapist and serial killer. He...

In December 2010, a few days after Christmas, someone won $16.5 million dollars in Iowa's Hot Lotto drawing. The winning ticket was purchased a few days before at a QuikTrip convenience store off of I-80 in North Des Moines. According to video surveillance footage, the mystery man buying the ticket was a heavyset middle-aged white man who wore casual clothing,  and a hood pulled over a baseba...

Marcus Schrenker, a once well-established and respected financial advisor in Indianapolis, Indiana, was in trouble. Big trouble. In late 2008, he and his businesses were being sued, the FBI was investigating him and his wife was divorcing him after catching him cheating on her. So in January of 2009, Marcus Schrenker chose not to right his wrongs, but instead to fake his own death by jumping out o...