WILDCIDE

Long before TSA lines and shoe removal, American skies lived through the *Golden Age of Hijacking*. Between 1968 and 1972, more than 130 airliners were commandeered — and one bored ex–Navy airplane electrician from Detroit decided he could turn that chaos into his big score. Part 1 traces how Martin J. McNally became obsessed with D.B. Cooper, studied parachutes in the library, and convinced himse...

A key witness disappears. A body is found. A grand jury convenes. And suddenly the man who ruled Bridger Valley through fear is no longer hunting—he’s being hunted. This episode takes you inside Hickey’s bombshell confession, the federal takedown of Hopkinson’s criminal network, the high-security trial that shook Wyoming, and the appeals battle that dragged on for years. This is the downfall of a...

In Part 1 of our two-part deep dive into the Hopkinson case, we trace the origins of one of Wyoming’s most shocking criminal sagas. Beginning in the quiet, rural Bridger Valley—where authority flows through family networks and reputation—we follow the early life of Mark Hopkinson, a charismatic local favorite whose charm masked a growing pattern of manipulation, violence, and unchecked entitlement...

This Thanksgiving, we’re serving up something sweeter than Aunt Carol’s mystery casserole. When a beloved Texas fruitcake company started bleeding money, nobody expected the sticky fingers behind the mess to belong to the accountant who made the dough.   Join us as we unwrap the embezzlement scandal that turned corporate holiday cheer into a true crime feast- complete with shady spreadsheets, fanc...

Last week in Part 1, we sat down with musician, author, and racial bridge-builder Dr. Daryl Davis—a man who has spent decades sitting across from members of the Ku Klux Klan and asking the world’s most disarming question: “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?” Daryl shared how simple human curiosity opened doors that fear had sealed shut, and how that first conversation led to dozens o...

In Part 2, we pick up inside Durham’s 1971 school charrette — the collision point where a civil rights legend and a Klan leader are forced to sit face-to-face for ten days and decide the fate of the city’s schools. What begins as shouting, sabotage, and years of rage finally cracks open into something neither of them saw coming: recognition. Across long days and brutal night sessions, Ann Atwater...

Dr. Daryl Davis is an international recording artist who has performed and toured all 50 States and around the world. He has performed extensively with Chuck Berry, The Legendary Blues Band (formerly The Muddy Waters Blues Band), Elvis Presley’s Jordanaires, and many others. He is also a man who has sat across from members of the Ku Klux Klan—by choice. In this powerful first half of our conversat...

In 1971 Durham, North Carolina, a civil rights activist and a Ku Klux Klan leader are forced to share a table—and a title. Before that moment, though, their collision was decades in the making. In this first half of our two-part series, we trace Ann Atwater’s rise from public housing organizer to unshakable community force, and C.P. Ellis’s descent from working-class humiliation to Klan leadership...

This Shortcide is all glitter, salt rims, and felony-level delusion. First up — Rita Crundwell: the beloved small-town comptroller who quietly drained an entire Illinois city for 22 years to fund her rhinestone horse empire. She stole $53.7 million from Dixon — the biggest municipal fraud in U.S. history — all while winning world championships and convincing everyone she was basically the financia...

In this episode of Wildcide, we sit down with one of the most influential figures in modern criminal profiling — Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess, the real-life inspiration behind Dr. Wendy Carr from Netflix’s Mindhunter. Long before Mindhunter brought behavioral analysis into pop culture, Burgess was already inside the real FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, decoding the minds of serial offenders and changing...

Between 1978 and 1981, a quiet terror crept through the southern United States. Women and couples were attacked in their own homes—bound, blindfolded, and violated by a man wearing a ski mask who seemed to appear and vanish like a ghost. His name was Jon Barry Simonis, and by the time he was caught, he’d confessed to more than 80 rapes across 12 states. Investigators now believe the real number wa...

Some people will do anything to be noticed — post, pose, or even escape from jail. This week, Bailey and Chelsea dive into the wild world of “Pick Me” criminals — THE MOST obnoxious types of criminals where their egos outweighed any rational thought.  First up, Bailey unpacks the bizarre case of Antoine Massey, the New Orleans fugitive who escaped jail, then went full influencer-on-the-run — lives...

Trigger Warning: This interview discusses sexual compulsive behaviors, juvenile sexual offending, trauma, and family dysfunction. Listener discretion is advised. In this episode, Bailey and Chelsea sit down with Samantha, a Licensed Therapist and Certified Sex Addiction Therapist (CSAT), who specializes in treating individuals struggling with sexual compulsive behaviors, pornography addiction, and...

Trigger Warning: This episode contains detailed discussion of sexual assault involving minors and may be distressing to some listeners. In 2021, two assaults inside Loudoun County schools ignited one of the most divisive moral panics in modern America. The perpetrator—a sixteen-year-old named Hunter Heckel—became the face of a national storm that fused crime, politics, and gender identity into a s...

⚠ Trigger Warning: This episode discusses violence against children, trauma, and death. Listener discretion is advised. On October 2, 2006, the quiet farmlands of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, were shattered when a local milk truck driver, Charles Carl Roberts IV, stormed a one-room Amish schoolhouse and took ten young girls hostage. By the time police broke through the doors, five were dead, fi...

The most devastating crimes don’t always start with violence — sometimes, they begin with a promise. A voice that sounds enlightened. Someone who claims to see something special in you… and then, piece by piece, rewrites what love means. What truth means. What safety means. This is the story of Iasia Sweeting, a gifted teenage artist who vanished in 2010 — and was found years later weighing just f...

Some crimes don’t begin in the shadows — they start in silence. In this groundbreaking conversation, we sit down with Dr. Christoffer Rahm, psychiatrist and lead researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and Allison McMahan, psychologist and doctoral candidate specializing in early intervention for individuals with pedophilic disorder. Together, they’re part of a pioneering movement ask...

Some secrets are buried forever. Others come spilling out in the final moments of life — whispered to a nurse, a prison guard, or an investigator when there’s no more time left to lie. In this Shortcide, Bailey and Chelsea dive into the unsettling world of deathbed confessions. Sometimes they come from guilt too heavy to carry. Sometimes from fear of judgment in the afterlife. And sometimes, from...

“I acted without any qualms and with a single objective — to commit sexual assaults as often as I could.” Those weren’t the words of a man caught in a single moment of weakness. They were the written confession of Joël Le Scouarnec, a French surgeon who spent more than 25 years preying on children under the cover of his white coat. Behind the image of a trusted doctor lay meticulous diaries, thous...

When 18-year-old Danielle Marzejka and 19-year-old Seren Bryan vanished from their Clinton Township home in August 2018, friends expected them to pop back up with a laugh and a message. Instead, their belongings remained untouched—their phones, insulin, and treasured keepsakes left behind. Days later, a horrific discovery in a backyard shed shattered the illusion of safety in suburban Michigan. As...

**CORRECTED/UPDATED 9/3: Audio Issues with this episode** Kenneth McDuff was supposed to die in prison. Instead, a broken justice system set him free—and unleashed one of the most sadistic serial killers Texas has ever known. Nicknamed The Broomstick Killer for the brutality of his first murders in 1966, McDuff’s first death sentence was commuted, and he walked out of prison decades later into a s...

In April 2008, neighbors in Vidalia, Georgia, were jolted awake by the sound of a shotgun blast. The man who died that morning was no stranger — Sonny Graham was a beloved golf director, a husband, a father. But Sonny also carried a secret: the transplanted heart of another man who had died by suicide more than a decade earlier. That man’s widow, Cheryl, had since become Sonny’s wife. What unfolde...

In this episode, Bailey and Chelsea peel back the layers of a New York story most people never knew was happening right under their noses. At the height of the city’s cultural revolution—where art, politics, and therapy collided—a radical psychotherapy collective promised liberation from tradition, family, and fear. But what began as an experiment in freedom grew into something far more controllin...

Some criminals steal for money. These two stole for sport. Chelsea takes on Victor Lustig, the smooth-talking con artist who “sold” the Eiffel Tower — twice — and even conned Al Capone. From fake government papers to counterfeit money presses, Lustig’s schemes left a trail of humiliated victims from Paris to New York. Bailey dives into Ferdinand Waldo Demara, the master impostor who bluffed his wa...

A car bomb. A forest war. And an activist caught in the middle. When Earth First! organizer Judi Bari was nearly killed by a bomb planted beneath the driver’s seat of her Subaru, the FBI didn’t hunt for the bomber—they arrested her. What followed was a decades-long battle between environmentalists, the logging industry, and law enforcement, marked by conspiracy, smear campaigns, and civil rights v...