True Crime Reporter

Road rage violence shatters records on US Highways. Experts say a perfect storm of post-pandemic anger and violent criminals out of jail due to liberal bail practices has set off a wave of deadly road rage shootings. Capt Greg Fremin (Ret’d) Houston Police Department Retired Houston Police Captain Greg Fremin tracks the growing carnage at Sam Houston State’s College of Criminal Justice locat...

Former NCIS Special Agent Joe Kennedy established the first federal cold case homicide unit.  Starting in 1986 with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), Kennedy investigated crimes involving sailors and marines worldwide.  In this episode of the True Crime Reporter® Podcast , I take you inside the crime scene tape to hear about cold cases from a legendary agency member popula...

If you are a fan of the NCIS television drama , you are in for a treat. My guest is homicide investigator Joe Kennedy , a former Special Agent for the real-life NCIS. NCIS Special Agent Joe Kennedy Teaching Police In The Philippines Homicide Investigation In this episode of the True Crime Reporter® Podcast , I lift the crime scene tape for Joe Kennedy to take you inside the anatomy of murder cases...

The high school baseball player hung a homemade motivational sign on the wall of his bedroom.  It read Brandon Puffer will be a Major League Baseball player. Indeed, Puffer made it to what ballplayers call “The Show.”  Only to fall from the Bullpen to the State Penitentiary in Texas. Brandon Puffer was a pitcher on the Boston Red Sox baseball team when they broke a century-old curse and...

Steve January, the Chief Deputy of the McLennan County Sheriff in Waco, Texas, was a lawman cut from denim of the old west. Hundreds of officers recently paid their last respects to January, whose life was not cut short by a bullet from his many face-offs with killers but by cancer.  I’m Robert Riggs with a story about an officer who fought many a round seeking justice inside the crime scene...

God forbid if I ever was murdered, I would want Johnny Bonds on the case.    His name sounds like a film noir detective. Johnny Bonds is the stuff true crime legends are made of.  In 1972, he became the youngest officer ever assigned to the elite homicide division in Houston, Texas.  He had a sixth sense of how to approach people or investigations. He relentlessly hunted d...

Before, there was Osama bin Laden. Before, there was Timothy McVeigh. There was Ted Kaczynski.  The UNABOMBER . FBI codename for “UNiversity and Airline BOMBER.” For sixteen years, Jamie Gehring grew up next door to Ted Kaczynski. She never had a clue that the man who appeared to be a harmless hermit was one of the most notorious serial killers of the 20th Century.  Hello. I’m investigat...

50 Sexual Assault Victims Will Never Forget The Stare of Serial Rapist David Hawkins When He Held A Gun To Their Heads This is the third episode in my series about how new DNA technology solves previously unsolvable cold cases.  It’s called FGG — Forensic Genetic Genealogy . I’m investigative reporter Robert Riggs taking you inside the crime scene case into how the first use of forensic...

The Golden State Killer got away with 12 murders, 50 rapes, and more than 100 burglaries for over forty years before being caught.  DNA evidence from his crime scenes never matched DNA samples in the FBI’s CODIS databases because he had never been arrested for murder or rape. Eventually, investigators uploaded the profile to genealogy sites and identified a relative on the killer’s family tre...

The Double Helix That Catches Killers And Sexual Predators Sitting across the desk from a DNA profiler, she told me that I was leaving a trail of cells in her office that would lead back to me, especially if I committed a crime there.  The rapid advancement of science and technology makes DNA evidence  a powerful investigative tool for catching killers and rapists, solving cold cases, id...

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were two of the most notorious outlaws in American history, forever linked to the public consciousness.  They were young, daring, and dangerous, and they captured the imagination of a country struggling through the Great Depression. But behind the legend lay the harsh reality of their lives, a story of poverty, violence, and desperation. They met in Dallas, Texa...

Kenneth McDuff – “The Brookstick Killer” & Jerry McFadden “The Animal” Texas Death Row Inmates Called Them The “Macs.” Kenneth McDuff and Jerry McFadden .   Two violent psychopaths hated and feared by fellow death row inmates.  Two killers with a lust for randomly abducting, raping, and murdering young people. Suzanne Harrison Gena Turner Bryan Boon...

Jerry “Animal” McFadden Pastor Wayne Whiteside says, “there are people that seem to be hell-bent on being held bound.” Whiteside knows of what he preaches after ministering to prison inmates for thirty-nine years. He spent the last 24 years talking with death row inmates in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Mississippi. Whiteside says he has looked evil in the eye and seen noth...

Jerry and Dava Truett lived well beyond their means in the small central Texas town of Kosse. They owned a lake house and a speed boat. They drove a pair of expensive pickup trucks and numerous recreational vehicles. Townfolk thought they were receiving oil and gas money from their farmland or had an inheritance. How Did They Live Such An Extravagant Lifestyle On Small-Town Wages? The small commun...

Chris Hansen , the journalist who created the televised series To Catch A Predator , warns that the problem of adults preying on children for sex is growing at an alarming rate.  The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has reported that during the peak of the pandemic, inappropriate contacts between adults and children, predatory contacts, as well as the transmission of inappro...

The previous episode showed how homicide detectives solved 50-year-old cold cases. They analyzed old evidence using new DNA extraction technology pioneered by Othram , a forensic genealogy lab in Texas. Othram provided new leads by finding relatives of suspects on genealogy databases. As revolutionary as that seems, it was just a few years ago that the FBI pioneered the use of mitochondrial DNA in...

14-year-old Stephanie Anne Isaacson Prom Photo 1989 14-year-old Stephanie Anne Isaacson left her father’s apartment in North Las Vegas on June 1, 1989. She walked through an empty sandlot, her usual shortcut, to the Eldorado High School. The ninth grader never attended her 7:30 AM class at Eldorado High School. Later that evening, officers found her body under a piece of discarded carpet in a sand...

As I stood in the LA office of the FBI’s bank robbery coordinator,  veteran FBI Agent Bill Rehder pointed to a wall plastered with bank surveillance photos. 33-year veteran FBI Agent Bill Rehder Ran The FBI Bank Robbery Squad In Los Angeles Rehder ticked off the nicknames of a rogue’s gallery of serial bank robbers. The baby bandits, the big nose bandit, the big ears bandit, the skunk bandit,...

Don Bentley Pictured With His Helicopter Gunship In Afghanistan Don Bentley’s career zigzagged from flying an Army helicopter gunship on combat missions in Afghanistan to working counterintelligence for the FBI, to now writing suspense-filled novels based on the knowledge of his previous careers. In my last episode, former FBI agent Don Bentley took us inside the training of Special Agents at the...

There’s a bank in Quantico, Virginia, that gets robbed every day. And I am going to take you there. Hello. I’m Robert Riggs.  In this episode of True Crime Reporter® , former FBI Agent Don Bentley takes us inside the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. New Special Agents start their career there in an intensive 20-week long training program. Realistic training scenarios unfold in a mock town c...

In the previous episode, Inside Story Of The Deadliest Attack On Police Officers Since 9/11, the negotiator for the Dallas SWAT team revealed the inside story about the mass killer who ambushed Dallas officers during a Black Lives Matter protest five years ago. Members of our True Crime Community have asked to learn more about the purpose of SWAT teams. SWAT stands for Special Weapons and Tactics....

On the evening of July 7, 2016, Black Lives Matter protesters marched in downtown Dallas and other cities nationwide. They peacefully gathered in response to the police shootings of two black men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. A few blocks from the site of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy , an African American man who had left the U.S. Army following disgraceful conduct got ou...

The True Crime Reporter® Podcast features stories and interviews from the respective careers of investigative reporter Robert Riggs and former U.S. prosecutor Bill Johnston. Listeners have asked how both of them got involved in investigating criminal cases. In response, the podcast featured an episode with Riggs on July 4, 2022, explaining how he first got involved in digging for information durin...

Many U.S. prisons are trade schools for crime . High recidivism rates underscore the failure of the current criminal justice system. Released and rearrested inmates pass through an expensive revolving door.  The Texas prison used to be called the Texas Department of Corrections (TDC), but there was little evidence that it corrected bad behavior.  In Texas, nearly one-fourth of the prisoners r...

A growing threat of grievance killings is taking center stage across the world.   Recent examples include the assassination of Japan’s popular prime minister to a patient in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who gunned down two doctors and two medical personnel because he was angry about ongoing pain following his surgery. Sasha Larkin , the Deputy Chief of the Homeland Security Division at the Las Vegas...