Wicked and Grim: A True Crime Podcast

In 1971, 16 year old Stephen Spahalski killed a man in Elmira, New York and was sent to prison, in a case that seemed shocking but contained. But nearly two decades later, in Rochester, a different story was quietly unfolding. Between 1990 and 2005, four people would be murdered in separate incidents, each one investigated on its own, each one going unsolved, and none of them connected at the time...

Starting in 1926, women renting out rooms began turning up dead in cities across the United States and into Canada. In each case, the circumstances were nearly identical, the victim had let someone into her home, and the encounter ended in violence. At the time, there was no system in place to connect cases across jurisdictions, so each investigation stayed local. Police followed leads within thei...

Starting in 1926, women renting out rooms began turning up dead in cities across the United States and into Canada. In each case, the circumstances were nearly identical, the victim had let someone into her home, and the encounter ended in violence. At the time, there was no system in place to connect cases across jurisdictions, so each investigation stayed local. Police followed leads within thei...

About a year after her husband’s sudden death, a Utah woman published a children’s book about grief, hoping to help her three sons cope with the sudden loss of their father. But behind that story was a very different reality, one investigators had already begun uncovering. Her husband, Eric Richins, had been found dead in their bed in March 2022, and an autopsy later revealed he had five times the...

On May 24, 2019, 50 year old Jennifer Dulos dropped her five children off at school in New Canaan, Connecticut, and returned home, then seemingly vanished within a two hour window. Inside her garage, investigators would later find significant blood evidence, while her abandoned vehicle turned up nearby in Waveny Park. What came next was a complex investigation involving surveillance footage, recov...

Kim Wall set out to interview a man who had built his own submarine. It was an unusual story, but not an unusual assignment for her as a professional journalist. Hours later, she was gone, and the man she had been with was the only one to resurface. His explanation began to change as evidence came in, each version falling apart under scrutiny. What followed was an investigation that exposed a cont...

In April 2009, 8 year old Tori Stafford disappeared just blocks from her home in Woodstock, Ontario after leaving school. Surveillance footage showed her calmly walking away with an unknown woman, suggesting she didn’t feel threatened. What started as a missing persons case quickly escalated into one of the largest investigations in the province, as police worked to figure out who she went with an...

65 year old Brian Egg was a creature of habit, a man whose daily routine rarely changed, that is until it suddenly stopped altogether. In a neighborhood where his presence had become part of the everyday rhythm, his absence didn’t go unnoticed for long, but it wasn’t immediately understood either. As the days stretched into weeks, small details began to surface and quietly stack up, each one sugge...

In December 1992, a 16 year old girl from Moston, Manchester was falsely accused by a group she trusted and lured into a house where she was held captive for nearly a week. During that time, she was beaten, burned with cigarettes, injected with drugs, deprived of food, and subjected to sustained physical and psychological torture. As the days passed, the abuse only escalated, and it became clear s...

In 2020, a report submitted to San Diego County Crime Stoppers prompted police to begin looking into allegations involving inappropriate online communication with a minor. Detectives soon discovered the suspect was not a stranger hiding behind an anonymous profile. Instead, the investigation pointed toward a correctional deputy working for the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department. As investigator...

In the early hours of May 1, 1999, sixteen year old Marianne Vaatstra disappeared while cycling home through the quiet countryside of Friesland in the Netherlands. Later that morning, her body was discovered in a field near the village of Veenklooster, the victim of a brutal rape and murder. The crime shocked the nation and quickly became one of the most controversial investigations in Dutch histo...

Dead Man’s Flats is one of the strangest place names in the Canadian Rockies, and most people passing through have no idea where it came from. But the name isn’t just local legend, it traces back to a real and disturbing crime. In the spring of 1904, a man named François Marret murdered his own brother inside their small cabin along the Bow River, striking him with an axe while he slept before dum...

In the summer of 1999, a quiet financial office in Atlanta became the final stop in a three day killing spree for one man. Before the gunfire erupted at his work place, this man had already murdered his wife and children inside their suburban apartment. By the time police closed in, twelve people in total were dead and more than a dozen were wounded. However, investigators also uncovering disturbi...

In March 1981, a quiet courtroom in Lübeck, West Germany, erupted in gunfire when a mother shot the man accused of killing and assualting her seven year old daughter. The shocking act instantly transformed a tragic child murder case into one of the most controversial true crime stories in modern German history. But to truly understand how that moment happened, you have to go back to the years of g...

The Smurl family never expected their home to become the center of a national paranormal mystery. Over the course of more than a decade, they claimed their quiet duplex in West Pittston, Pennsylvania, became the stage for unexplained noises, violent incidents, and a growing sense that something unseen was watching them. As their story spread, it drew in priests, skeptics, and the famous demonologi...

In the fall of 2009, police in Cleveland entered a house expecting to arrest a man accused of sexual assault. Instead, they stepped into one of the most shocking crime scenes in the city’s history. Hidden inside the home, and buried in the yard, were the remains of eleven women. They were the victims of a killer who had blended into the neighborhood for years. What followed was a devastating inves...

In October 1970, a thirteen year old girl stumbled into a Los Angeles welfare office, weighing just 59 pounds she had spent nearly her entire life strapped to a chair in a darkened bedroom, cut off from language, sunlight, and normal human contact. She could barely walk, could not speak grammatically, and had lived almost entirely without language. Soon the scientific community would descend on he...

In the woods of a small New Hampshire town, four bodies were hidden in two metal barrels and left to decay in silence. For decades, no one knew who they were, where they came from, or who had killed them. The only certainty was that they had been beaten to death and abandoned far from home. What followed was a relentless investigation that would not only expose a serial killer who lived under stol...

For years, residents of Nehe, a quiet city in Heilongjiang Province of China, watched people vanish without explanation. Travelers arrived by train, stepped into the streets, and were never seen again. Police had few leads and even fewer answers, while rumors spread through the community. It wasn’t until a routine arrest in 1991 that investigators finally uncovered the gruesome truth hidden beneat...

In September 2015, three people in the small communities of Crowsnest Pass, Alberta, were caught up in a series of violent events that would leave the entire region shaken. What began with the murder of a senior living alone quickly escalated into the killing of a young father and the sudden disappearance of his two year old daughter under a province wide Amber Alert. As police raced against time...

From the outside, it looked like a perfect life: a brilliant scientist, a successful marriage, and a prestigious career in pharmaceuticals. But behind the scenes, secret affairs, obsessive surveillance, and carefully crafted lies were quietly taking over. A hidden love triangle inside one workplace would spiral into stalking, betrayal, and brutal violence. What started as love, turned into murder,...

From the outside, it looked like a perfect life: a brilliant scientist, a successful marriage, and a prestigious career in pharmaceuticals. But behind the scenes, secret affairs, obsessive surveillance, and carefully crafted lies were quietly taking over. A hidden love triangle inside one workplace would spiral into stalking, betrayal, and brutal violence. What started as love, turned into murder,...

In 1928, nine year old Walter Collins vanished on his way to the movies in Los Angeles, setting off a desperate search that would grip the nation. As police scrambled to close the case and protect their reputation, they forced a false reunion and pressured his grieving mother to accept a child who was not hers. When she refused, she was silenced, institutionalized, and left to fight the system alo...

In April 2010, twenty five year old Erinn Orcutt was abducted at gunpoint from the Ontario Mills Mall parking lot in California as she left her waitressing job. For seventy two minutes, she was held captive inside her own SUV, beaten, sexually assaulted, photographed, and threatened with death. She escaped only after noticing her attacker’s gun had fallen to the floor and sprinting to a nearby liq...

In October 1994, a young mother in Union, South Carolina, told police that a stranger had carjacked her vehicle and driven away with her two small children still strapped in their car seats. For nine days, the case dominated national news as law enforcement searched roads, lakes, and backcountry while the public watched her tearful pleas for the boys’ return. As the investigation unfolded, however...