We Saw the Devil: Unfiltered Political Analysis

Six in ten American women have experienced intimate partner violence. Nearly one in five have survived the kind that can kill. The US ranks 31st in the world on women's wellbeing. A third of Gen Z men surveyed globally say a wife should always obey her husband. And two of the loudest voices selling masculinity to boys are facing rape charges. This episode is about why so many women are saying out...

Four updates this week, and the strangest is out of New Mexico. In 2002, Linda Henning stood trial for her life in the 1999 disappearance and presumed murder of Girly Chew Hossencofft, a bank teller whose body has never been found. Last week a judge ruled Henning had been so delusional she believed she was on trial over "golden discs." The judge threw out the conviction, ordered a new trial, and o...

"If anyone should be scared it's not you." Sandra Birchmore wrote that to Matthew Farwell in December 2020, weeks before she was found dead in her Canton apartment. This week the jury in Farwell's federal trial stopped hearing about Sandra and started hearing from her. Over three days on the stand, an FBI agent read their messages aloud: the October 2020 ultimatum after she learned his wife was pr...

"We wanted to make sure we got a statement out of him, whether truthful or otherwise." That's the Massachusetts state trooper who investigated Sandra Birchmore's death, explaining to a federal jury why he and his supervisor interviewed the married Stoughton detective at the center of her life in a school parking lot. No recording. No notes. Week one of United States v. Matthew Farwell is in the bo...

Luminol on Monday. Human DNA on Tuesday, per police sources. An excavator in the backyard, a shed torn down, and dirt sifted three feet deep like a mass grave. Then on Thursday, the medical examiner pulled up to 417 West Chew Avenue because somebody found bones. Nobody knows yet whether they’re human. Philly PD isn’t confirming a damn thing. And Eugene Horsch’s lawyer went on CBS Philadelphia to c...

February 6, 2024. A pastor calls Horry County police and reads them his wife’s location in real time. He isn’t following her, he explains. He’s “watching her on the map.” Over the next ten weeks, Mica Miller contacted police at least fourteen times for help involving her husband, John-Paul Miller, pastor of Solid Rock Church in Myrtle Beach. Five of those contacts involved tracking devices. South...

"Basically, I'm a sociopath, always have been." R.C. Horsch said that into a public radio microphone in 2014. This week, law enforcement sources told CBS Philadelphia they consider him a suspected serial killer, and the FBI and Philadelphia police began taking his Olney house apart. This week in breaking news:  - What "suspected serial killer" means for a man who can never be charged - Peter Crimm...

February 1, 2021. A blizzard is closing in on Boston. According to federal prosecutors, a Stoughton police detective texts 23-year-old Sandra Birchmore and asks if he can come by for a second. At 9:40 p.m., her phone logs eight steps. It never moves again. Three days later she's found dead in her Canton apartment, eight to ten weeks pregnant. By May, Massachusetts had ruled it a suicide. Today, ju...

NOTE: For whatever reason, even after correctly stating her age multiple times, around 22 minutes in, Robin incorrectly refers to Jane Doe as 21 years old.  At 1:42 a.m. on October 20, 2024, according to a civil lawsuit, a Chi Phi brother at Cornell University told a Snapchat group of more than fifty fraternity members there was "free p*ssy upstairs." Upstairs was a twenty year old sophomore. Not...

At 1:42 a.m. on October 20, 2024, according to a civil lawsuit, a Chi Phi brother at Cornell University told a Snapchat group of more than fifty fraternity members there was "free p*ssy upstairs." Upstairs was a twenty year old sophomore. Not one person in that chat went to the police. Two years later, nobody has been charged. Then Jane Doe sued, the Tompkins County DA reopened the case, Governor...

On Wednesday, September 30, the State of Tennessee tried to execute Christa Pike. It couldn't. Pike was convicted of the 1995 torture and murder of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps. After a morning stay from the Sixth Circuit and an evening reversal by the U.S. Supreme Court, she was given two rounds of pentobarbital at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution...

Lindsay Clancy was back in court for the first time since her murder trial ended in a mistrial, and it was chaos. Plus, Christa Pike, the only woman on Tennessee's death row, is scheduled to be executed at 10 a.m. CT on September 30, 2026, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to step in. Yesterday, Lindsay Clancy appeared in Plymouth Superior Court. The former Duxbury, Massachusetts labor and del...

***Show note: Robin is still insanely sick with COVID and this episode is not closely edited.   On January 12, 1995, 18-year-old Christa Pike lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer to an abandoned steam plant on the University of Tennessee's agricultural campus and tortured her to death. She took a piece of Colleen's skull back to her dorm and showed it off at breakfast. She confessed. She has never de...

Robin has COVID, a 103 degree fever, and a voice held together with tape. The episode goes out anyway, because Olney won't stop breaking. It is 100% unedited, so what you're hearing is what you're getting. Sorry, folks.  THE OLNEY HOUSE, PART THREE: ACCESS New reporting from the Philadelphia Inquirer says the late pornographer Raymond "R.C." Horsch had access to a Kensington crematorium connected...

In June, a federal park ranger wrote down a license plate on Independence Mall. Three months later, Philadelphia is running the strangest death investigation in the city since Gary Heidnik, and it has no bodies in it. This is the second episode on the Olney house. Since I last covered it, the numbers have changed completely. Four missing women became seven. Two believed dead became five. Five perc...

Eleven jurors voted to acquit Lindsay Clancy. One didn't. Six days later his dismissed charge, his divorce, and his eviction were on national television. He has never spoken to a reporter. He has never been named. He showed up for jury duty and then did the one thing we tell every juror to do, which is refuse to move when you don't believe it. This week the entire country argued about whether he s...

This episode covers rape, drug-facilitated sexual assault, and the death of a woman. Nothing in it is graphic for the sake of being graphic. Resources are below. Late on June 25, 2026, in the small Upper Austrian town of Marchtrenk, a teenage girl finds her mother unresponsive and bleeding. Paramedics pronounce her dead at 12:44 a.m. Her husband tells police it was rough, consensual sex that went...

The jury foreperson has a name now. Roni Carlson. She and two other women from that panel sat down with NBC10 this week and told everybody what actually went on in there for seven days, and one detail has been rattling around my skull since. The holdout admitted he had reasonable doubt. Out loud. To the room. She was so relieved she started filling out the verdict forms, all three of them, signed...

A judge in Plymouth, Massachusetts spent Thursday afternoon reading twelve adults the definition of a word. Not the evidence. Not the eighty-odd witnesses. A definition. Reasonable doubt. Because a note came out of that jury room saying one person in there will not take it. Disagreeing with eleven people is allowed. That's the job. Refusing the standard itself is something else, and it's about to...

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has a formal diagnosis for caffeine withdrawal. It does not have one for postpartum psychosis. That's where this episode starts, and it turns out to explain almost everything about the six weeks that followed. As I record this, the jury in Plymouth has told the judge for the second time in two days that it cannot agree on whether Lindsay Cl...

Three days. Seventeen hours. Twelve jurors, five possible verdicts, and a door nobody can see behind. Day three of deliberations in the Lindsay Clancy trial ended Monday afternoon with no verdict and instructions to come back Tuesday. Robin breaks down where the case actually stands...the criminal responsibility standard, what "not guilty" would really mean here, and why the jury's request for the...

On Friday morning, twelve people in Plymouth, Massachusetts asked to see two things: a bag of prescription pill bottles and the knife Lindsay Clancy used on herself. That request is the entire factual content of the biggest news day in this trial since closing arguments, and within hours it had been publicly interpreted as a conviction, an acquittal, a hung jury, and a verdict coming Monday before...

Day 21. The last day of evidence in Commonwealth v. Lindsay Clancy. Judge William Sullivan opened with a line from Henry V. Four hours later, defense attorney Kevin Reddington was reading the prosecution's own opening statement out loud to the prosecution's own final witness and asking him if he agreed with it. Dr. Gregory Saathoff, forensic psychiatrist at the University of Virginia and senior ps...

***Due to time constants, this episode is unedited. Day 20 was the last full day of evidence in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial, and it was the strangest day of the whole five weeks. The morning belonged to Dr. Kirk Heilbrun, the forensic psychologist the Commonwealth hired to explain postpartum psychosis to a jury. On cross examination, Kevin Reddington established that Heilbrun last treated a pa...

Day 19 of the Lindsay Clancy murder trial in Plymouth Superior Court, and the prosecution's rebuttal case fell apart in slow motion. Forensic psychologist Dr. Kirk Heilbrun called the postpartum psychosis defense "convenient," offered the clearest alternate theory yet, and then said the words "isn't suicide a mortal sin" in front of the jury. Kevin Reddington moved for a mistrial. Judge William Su...