Forgotten Serial Killers True Crime

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans' overwhelmed police force missed the pattern of four women murdered by Joseph Brant over eleven months. This episode examines how systemic collapse after the storm created the perfect conditions for a careful killer to operate undetected, from the burned-out car containing the first unidentified victim in October 2007 through the high-profile Sept...

In 1996, three nurses at a Massachusetts VA hospital finally broke their silence and accused colleague Kristen Gilbert of murdering patients by injecting them with epinephrine, then rushing to the rescue to impress her police-officer boyfriend.

In the early hours of January 9, 1992, a routine traffic stop in Riverside, California, led authorities to William Lester Suff, an outwardly mild-mannered county stock clerk. Over the next three years, investigators would link him to at least twelve brutal murders of local women, uncovering a chilling double life hidden behind a friendly smile and community volunteer work.

In late February 1991, 21-year-old Mary Ann Newton escaped a brutal assault by long-haul trucker Clark Perry Baldwin at a Texas truck stop, only to have investigators identify him nearly three decades later as the killer of three women across multiple states. This gripping episode traces Baldwin’s predatory career and the groundbreaking DNA work that finally brought him to justice.

In July 1916, wartime fuel shortages led Austro-Hungarian officers to a tinsmith’s cottage in Cinkota where they discovered twenty-four methanol-preserved bodies sealed inside metal drums—marking the revelation of one of Hungary’s most prolific serial killers.

In this chilling episode, we recount the final hours and explosive legacy of Catherine Monvoisin—better known as La Voisin—whose 1680 execution exposed a vast network of poison, black magic, and aristocratic murder plots at the glittering court of Louis XIV. Her refusal to confess, even as flames engulfed her, protected the most dangerous secret of all: the King’s own mistress had been her most po...

In January 2018, Texas carried out its first execution of the year when Anthony Allen Shore was put to death for the 1992 murder of Maria del Carmen Estrada. The case remained unsolved for more than a decade until a preserved fingernail scraping finally yielded a DNA match that linked Shore to four brutal killings spanning nine years.

On November 7, 1983, a watchful neighbor in Hollywood’s Beachwood Canyon foiled a burglary attempt and unwittingly cracked open the case of one of Los Angeles’s most prolific serial killers. The suspect, Brandon Tholmer, was quickly connected to a chilling trove of jewelry and personal belongings that linked him to the murders of at least twelve elderly Westside women between 1981 and 1983. What b...

In the sleepy corridors of Nocona General Hospital, a routine pharmacy inventory check uncovered a chilling mystery—twenty vials of the potent paralytic mivacurium chloride had vanished without a trace. The discovery set in motion a Texas Ranger investigation that would link the missing medication to an alarming spike in patient deaths, revealing a pattern too precise to be coincidental.

In the mid-1970s, a polite young man who introduced himself as a cartoonist lured at least five gay men from San Francisco bars, then stabbed them to death on the city’s beaches and in their homes. The case, known as The Doodler, remains the city’s longest-running unsolved serial-killing investigation, with a detailed police sketch but no arrests fifty-one years later.

On April 29, 2004, Baton Rouge police quietly arrested 41-year-old computer-store clerk Sean Vincent Gillis. Within hours he calmly confessed to eight brutal murders spanning a decade—crimes overshadowed by the parallel hunt for serial killer Derrick Todd Lee.

On November 15, 1971, an 18-year-old Howard University student named Brenda Denise Woodard was found dead along Route 202 in Maryland, her coat pocket containing a chilling note signed “Free-way Phantom.” The message linked her death to four earlier abductions of young Black girls and foreshadowed a sixth, creating one of the longest-running unsolved serial cases in the nation’s capital.

In October 2008, a routine LAPD dragnet targeting 92 pre-2004 registered Los Angeles County sex offenders unexpectedly solved two long-running serial-murder investigations, identifying John Floyd Thomas Jr. as the man behind the Westside Rapist and Claremont/Southland Strangler killings spanning 1972–1986.

Carl Panzram’s own words open this chilling episode as we examine the life and crimes of a man who claimed to have murdered 21 people and assaulted over a thousand others without a shred of remorse. From his brutal Minnesota childhood to the execution chamber at Leavenworth, Panzram’s story is preserved in one of the most unfiltered criminal autobiographies ever published.

On Halloween morning 1969, Glasgow mother Helen Puttock was murdered after a night at the Barrowland Ballroom, leaving behind her sister Jeannie as the key witness and a mysterious dance partner known only as “the second John.” This episode reconstructs the fateful taxi ride and the minute details that turned an ordinary Thursday night into Scotland’s most enduring cold case.

In July 1988, the discovery of Debra Medeiros's body in a Freetown drainage ditch launched one of the most enigmatic serial-killing investigations in modern American history. Over the next ten months, nine women were found murdered along the highways surrounding New Bedford, Massachusetts, with two more presumed victims still missing. The case, which targeted vulnerable women from the city's strug...

On April 10, 2015, forensic teams discovered four additional sets of remains behind a New Britain strip mall, confirming inmate William Devin Howell’s chilling claim that police had only found “half of what is out there.” The recovery brought the total body count to seven victims murdered by Howell during a single year while he worked as a lawn-mowing contractor in central Connecticut.

On February 2, 2007, nineteen-year-old Joshua Anderson entered the north Tulsa home of Herbert and Rosemary Hobbs intending only to rob them. Within ninety minutes he had forced the mother and son into sexual acts, murdered them both, and set their house ablaze, escalating a simple robbery into one of Tulsa’s most disturbing post-millennium homicide cases.

In November 1984, a single preserved tissue sample from a 1976 death finally revealed that Steven David Catlin had been murdering his wives and mother with undetectable paraquat for nearly a decade.

On the morning of April 12, 1919, Paris police finally arrested the mild-mannered, bearded man who had been living under multiple aliases. What they uncovered was a chilling web of deception, wartime disappearances, and a secluded villa in Gambais that may have hidden the remains of as many as eleven victims.

On January 4, 2006, recently released juvenile offender Leo Boatman carried a stolen AK-47 into Ocala National Forest and gunned down two Santa Fe Community College students in a quiet woodland clearing near Juniper Springs. The brutal attack left John Parker and Amber Peck dead within minutes, their bodies hidden in a marshy pond before Boatman calmly returned home to watch television.

On the evening of March 30, 2010, Franklin DeWayne Alix was executed by lethal injection in Texas for the capital murder of Eric Bridgeford during a violent 1998 home invasion. The episode examines how the crime began with the rape of Eric’s sister Karyl, escalated to Eric’s shooting death on the front lawn, and concluded with Alix’s final statement before his death at Huntsville Unit.

On the second day of the new millennium, a seemingly model Navy veteran named John Eric Armstrong reported discovering a body in the Rouge River—yet within months, investigators would learn he was the man responsible for multiple murders of Detroit-area sex workers. This episode unpacks how a man with a clean record and honorable discharge from the USS Nimitz became one of the most surprising seri...

## Episode 29 — Jake Bird: The Tacoma Ax and the Hex

In the warm spring nights of May 2005, Dale Hausner and Samuel Dieteman began a terrifying 15-month drive-by shooting spree across suburban Phoenix, wounding and killing random strangers for no reason other than the thrill. High on methamphetamine and sleep-deprived, the pair carried out nearly 40 shootings, murdering eight people and wounding nineteen others while also targeting animals in the sa...