U.S HIDDEN CRIMES

The tragic deaths of Joby and Jason Graf in a backyard shed fire in Texas became the center of a decades long investigation marked by disputed forensic evidence, a controversial conviction, and a dramatic courtroom confession. As evolving fire science challenged the original prosecution, the case exposed the dangers of unreliable expert testimony, the consequences of investigative mistakes, and th...

This collection traces the killing of five year old Ashley Zhao in Jackson Township, Ohio, from the long search that missed her hiding place inside her parents' restaurant to the plea bargains that closed the case without a trial. It examines each person bound up in the tragedy, the child raised apart from her parents, a father who knew of the abuse and stayed silent, a mother under immigration an...

This true crime case follows the death of four-year-old Lauren Key, who fell from a 120-foot cliff in Palos Verdes, California, while on a court-ordered visit with her estranged father, Cameron Brown, a man who had resisted fatherhood and sought visitation chiefly to reduce his child support payments. Investigators doubted his claim of an accidental slip because of the cliff's remote and dangerous...

When Chris Regan accepted a married coworker’s invitation to dinner in the quiet town of Iron River, Michigan, he walked into a house he would never leave alive, and for nineteen months the people who loved him were left without answers. This story follows the stubborn instincts of a small town police chief, the patient work of ordinary people, and a trail of lies that slowly gave way to the truth...

The murder of Army soldier Karlyn Ramirez in her Maryland townhouse unfolds as a story of obsession, a staged alibi, and a husband who believed a marriage could only end on his terms. Investigators broke through his borrowed car, borrowed phone, and streaming account illusion by following the quiet persistence of deleted texts, gas can receipts, and a gun recovered from a Florida river. Beyond the...

Behind the quiet appearance of a New Hampshire farm lay a disturbing story of manipulation, disturbing beliefs, and two men whose lives ended in tragedy. As investigators uncovered burned remains, unsettling recordings, and a trail of evidence, Sheila LaBarre’s claims of divine justice became central to a chilling murder investigation. This true crime story explores the deaths of Kenneth Countie a...

Tennessee faces a reckoning after the failed lethal injection of Christa Pike, who survived two doses of pentobarbital, raising hard questions about whether and how the state may try again. In North Carolina, a man stands trial fourteen years after the killing of UNC student Faith Hedgepeth, with prosecutors leaning on DNA that surfaced after a routine DUI arrest while the defense is barred from p...

Sandra Birchmore, twenty three and newly pregnant, was found dead in her Massachusetts apartment in 2021, and the first official verdict of suicide was later amended to undetermined after her family and friends refused to let the questions fade. Federal prosecutors now allege that former Stoughton police officer Matthew Farwell, whom they say exploited her from the age of fifteen through a police...

Twenty one year old Ohio State student Reagan Tokes was abducted after her waitressing shift in 2017 and murdered by Brian Golsby, a registered sex offender released from prison only three months earlier. Investigators traced him through a cigarette butt left in her car and a GPS ankle monitor whose pings nobody was watching, evidence that secured a conviction and a sentence of life without parole...

This week on True Crime News, host Anna Garcia and criminal justice professor Dr. Nikki Ali Jackson examine the Florida death penalty trial of a former plastic surgeon accused of murdering attorney Steven Cozzi, who vanished from his Largo law office in March 2023. They go through the surveillance footage, license plate flipping devices, and phone and vehicle tracking data that prosecutors say tie...

Between 1974 and 1983, the FALN carried out more than a hundred bombings across New York, Chicago and Washington, killing five people and leaving a wound that has never fully closed. This narration follows the investigators who chased the group through luggage handles, a single fingerprint, a Chicago bomb factory and a chance arrest in Evanston, until the leadership was finally dismantled. It trac...

Ash Rowl was a successful businessman, a devoted father, and a man remembered for his kindness, until a gunshot at his front door shattered his family’s world. As investigators revisit old threats, bitter family conflicts, and conflicting suspicions, the question of who wanted Ash dead remains unanswered. Five years later, his murder is still an open case, leaving his loved ones searching for the...

In 2013, 21-year-old Demitri Hampton was shot dead fighting armed home invaders on Long Island, but his killers' 2017 murder trial collapsed when prosecutor Glenn Kurtzrock was found to have hidden over 125 pages of exculpatory police notes. The charges were reduced to burglary pleas with short sentences, Kurtzrock was later suspended and his other cases investigated, and no one has ever been held...

In 1985, three drowned men in the Miami River exposed a ring of corrupt Miami cops who dressed as police to rob cocaine smugglers, leaving a trail of murders. After a mistrial, informants, wiretaps, and confessions brought down 17 officers in the largest police corruption case in Florida history. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/u-s-hidden-crimes--6962513/suppor...

In 1992, Atlanta mother Sara Tokars was shot dead in front of her two young sons in what looked like a random carjacking. Investigators uncovered the truth: her prominent attorney husband, Fred Tokars, had hired a hitman to silence her before she could expose his drug-money laundering. He was convicted of murder and died in prison in 2020. Full details that will shock you are in the podcast.  Beco...

On October 23, 2026, gunmen opened fire on mourners at a Greek Orthodox church in Hamoud, in Jordan’s Karak governorate, leaving nine dead and forty wounded according to Reuters, while the identities of the attackers and the motive remain unestablished. Authorities have called it terrorism and are searching for those responsible, yet no group has claimed the attack, and early claims about recordin...

A carpenter driving home for lunch in Bend, Oregon, spotted an armed teenager outside his daughters' school, crawled through a shattered window and stopped the gunman, yet he says the children he could not save are what haunt him most. The same Friday night newscast follows a Mississippi officer who resigned after killing a one year old in a Walmart parking lot, floods and fierce storms across the...

In Lauderhill, Florida, a routine welfare check in July of 2022 ended with a dead man discovered inside his own home, and years later a police officer stands accused of using that man’s identity to keep the property alive on paper. Investigators allege a quiet pattern of forged permits, database searches and paid utility bills, uncovered not by a dramatic breakthrough but by heirs, records and a n...

In a Durban courtroom, seven men stand trial for the 2023 Florida Road killings of rapper AKA and chef Tibz Motsoane, while surveillance footage of a man in a white T-shirt, seated for nearly an hour with a clear line of sight to the victims’ table, is played frame by frame. This is a story of airport cameras, hired cars, tollgate records and a card swipe, the ordinary traces of life that now carr...

On October 20, 1981, masked gunmen from a Black Liberation Army and Weather Underground alliance robbed a Brink's truck at the Nanuet Mall, killing guard Peter Paige, then ambushed and killed Nyack officers Edward O'Grady and Waverly Brown at a roadblock. Police chief Alan Colsey stopped one getaway car, and a trail of safe houses, informants and ordinary tips led the FBI task force to the rest of...

Three FBI investigations show how patience, forensic science, and behavioral insight can break cases that seem unsolvable. A Marine captain's missing body is answered by a hidden computer file that outlined her husband's murder plan. An Alaskan serial killer is unmasked when a profiler's portrait of a stuttering baker leads to a cache of trophies and a map marked with graves. A teenage runaway lef...

In March 2025, detectives in Dayton, Ohio executed a search warrant on a home tied to a sexual assault investigation and illegal online activity, seizing phones and laptops from a young man who was told he was free to go. Forensic examination uncovered a large collection of child sexual abuse material hidden in locked folders on his phone, leading to arrest warrants and a separate indictment on th...

Detective Susan Logothetti, working a cold case in Everett, Washington, linked a DNA match to Mitchell Gaff, a registered sex offender who had been living quietly under a new name after his release from civil confinement. Posing as a promoter for a fictitious energy gum company, she and her team collected a freshly chewed sample that tied him to the 1984 murder of Judy Weaver and the 1980 killing...

This crime report follows a federal immigration operation in Marble Hill that ended in gunfire and public outrage, while a Bronx community mourns a young mother killed in a balcony fall, with her ex boyfriend now charged with murder and their infant daughter still in critical condition. It also reports on an off duty NYPD detective stabbed during an attempted robbery in Norwood, with two arrests m...

This story follows two scam baiters who trace the impersonators behind a fake Elon Musk operation after a woman in Austria asks for help with her sister in Texas, who is convinced she is in a relationship with the billionaire. Through staged conversations, tracked links, and an eventual trip to Nigeria, they expose how these scammers harvest personal data, recycle victims between accounts, and pus...