Crime House 24/7

Two of the world's most famous daredevils — Netflix's "Skywalkers" Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus — snuck into the Empire State Building last Tuesday, hid overnight, and climbed the antenna 1,454 feet above Manhattan. At the top, Beerkus got down on one knee. Now the couple is facing eight criminal counts in Manhattan — including two felonies. Vanessa walks you through how they pulled it off, the...

Zoe Reidy Watts was 25 — a poet, ceramic artist, and Bay Area presence who had once made work about gender-based violence. In February 2024, after a date night, she was killed inside her boyfriend's Oakland apartment. Surveillance footage caught her escaping to the sidewalk — and her boyfriend, Victor Frieson, dragging her back inside. This past week, more than two years later, a jury found Frieso...

This afternoon, Vanessa is bringing you a preview from another Crime House show: Murder: True Crime Stories, hosted by Carter Roy. In this episode, Carter unpacks the Wonderland Gang — a crew of drug dealers and thieves who robbed feared LA nightclub owner Eddie Nash in 1981. The retaliation that followed left four people bludgeoned to death inside a Laurel Canyon townhouse in one of the most noto...

In December 2020, a 200-pound guard dog attacked housekeeper Maria Avila at singer Chris Brown's Los Angeles home, leaving her permanently disfigured and unable to return to work. This week, more than five years later, a Los Angeles jury ordered Brown to pay her and her family more than $13 million in a civil verdict — after hearing that when Maria lay bleeding on the ground, Brown left the scene...

This afternoon, Vanessa is bringing you a preview from another one of her shows: Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, co-hosted with forensic psychologist Dr. Tristin Engels. In this episode, they dive into the case of the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run — a 1930s serial killer whose crimes gave rise to one of the first modern criminal profiles, decades ahead of its time. This is Part 1. For Part 2,...

In India, a 26-year-old businessman fell 400 feet to his death while trekking with his fiancée at Lohagad Fort — just weeks before their palace wedding. What was first ruled an accident is now something else entirely. His fiancée and a man police say was her secret lover have been arrested and charged with murder and conspiracy in a plan investigators allege was months in the making. Vanessa walks...

On June 24th, 19-year-old Marly Kinney went out on a rented pontoon boat on Kentucky's Grayson Lake with a group of friends. By the end of the afternoon, she was gone. For five days, hundreds of searchers — divers, helicopters, drones, cadaver dogs, and volunteers — combed the lake. On Sunday, the search ended in tragedy. The man driving the boat has been charged with boating under the influence a...

In 1979, six-year-old Etan Patz vanished walking to his school bus stop alone for the first time, a case that put his face on the side of milk cartons and sparked the modern missing-children movement. Forty-seven years later, the U.S. Supreme Court has reinstated the murder conviction of Pedro Hernandez in a 6-to-3 ruling. Vanessa walks you through the case from that spring morning in SoHo to the...

In Utah, David Vander Meer was charged with the 2006 murder of his wife Bernadette, who fell 1,200 feet from Angel's Landing at Zion National Park in what was ruled an accident at the time; a reinvestigation revealed he had allegedly told a teenage girl from his church youth group that his wife would need to die for them to be together, and had quadrupled her life insurance policy before the trip....

In Los Angeles, a federal jury deadlocked ten to two in favor of acquittal in the arson trial of Jonathan Rinderknecht, the former Uber driver accused of setting the brush fire that prosecutors say became the catastrophic Palisades Fire, which killed twelve people and destroyed more than 6,800 structures; a mistrial was declared Friday after jurors said they were unwilling to change their position...

In Maine, Stephen Bouchard, 63, has been charged with the 1987 murder of his then-girlfriend Alice Hawkes, who was found with her throat slit in their Westbrook apartment; a judge denied bail this week after prosecutors presented evidence including an alleged statement by Bouchard that he had committed the perfect crime. The case was cracked open by a 2025 reinvestigation by the Maine State Police...

In Delaware County, Pennsylvania, Michelle Zajko has been indicted for the 2022 murders of her parents, shot to death in their Chester Heights home on New Year's Eve; charges came after shell casings from her Vermont property matched the murder weapon and investigators found a note on her phone titled "There are so many things we f---ed up." The case is the last unsolved chapter in a string of six...

In Ventura County, Stephen Chavez was sentenced to one year in county jail and three years of probation for the felony incest of his 18-year-old daughter Makayla Settles, who died by suicide five months after the assault; prosecutors had requested the maximum three-year state prison sentence, but the judge cited Chavez's lack of a prior criminal record. Makayla's family and a nationwide public cam...

In Nashville, the murder trial of Blaise Taylor, charged with fatally poisoning his five-months-pregnant girlfriend Jade Benning with cocaine dissolved in her drink, got underway this week; prosecutors say the concentration found in her system was the highest the medical examiner had ever encountered, while the defense points to the medical examiner's ruling of undetermined manner of death. Jade d...

The Kowalski family, whose story was told in Netflix's "Take Care of Maya," won a $261 million verdict against a Florida hospital, then watched an appeals court erase it entirely. Now they're suing the attorneys who represented them for eight years, alleging millions in settlement funds were diverted to vacation homes, a boat, a private jet, and American Express bills. If you’re new here, don’t fo...

Nearly five months after 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie vanished from her Tucson home, a bombshell ransom note kept secret since February has finally surfaced...and its contents are devastating. If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Crime House 24/7 to never miss a case! For ad-free listening and exclusive bonus episodes, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening...

In Florida, Susan Avalon is accused of shooting two ex-partners in two different counties on the same December afternoon, then driving home and wiping down her minivan with bleach when detectives arrived. When they told her they were there about her ex-husband, she looked at them and asked, "Which one?" She now faces a first-degree murder charge in Hillsborough County, where prosecutors have filed...

Sean "Diddy" Combs is now scheduled to walk out of federal prison on February 23, 2028, more than four months earlier than his original release date, and the Bureau of Prisons isn't saying why. At the same time, a federal judge dismissed Dawn Richard's civil lawsuit against him on statute of limitations grounds, though her legal team says they are refiling in state court. If you’re new here, don’t...

In Butte County, California, Sansue Bee Vang, the founder of a Hmong religious organization he built around himself as a self-declared prophet, has been sentenced to 225 years to life in prison after being convicted on eleven counts of abuse against six victims, including children. He moved his congregation from Wisconsin to California, hand-selecting families to follow him, and used his spiritual...

With Luigi Mangione's state murder trial locked in for September 8th and a federal trial to follow in October, the case against the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is moving fast. A sealed court hearing, a major evidence ruling that kept the gun and notebook in play, and $1.5 million in public donations to his defense fund have made this one of the most closely watched t...

In Broomfield, Colorado, Kristil Krug spent months documenting her terrifying stalker, going to police, hiring a private investigator, and drilling her kids on intruder scenarios. The stalker turned out to be her own husband, who had spent months building a fake identity to terrorize her. If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Crime House 24/7 to never miss a case! For ad-free listening and ex...

Joseph Ashley Garcia poured tiki-torch fluid on his 68-year-old father, lit him on fire, and then took the stand at his own murder trial to explain himself. His father died ten days later. The argument that started it all? A dog. Now, Garcia's insanity defense was thrown out, and the Santa Barbara County DA has called this one of the most disturbing cases his office has ever prosecuted. If you’re...

In Los Angeles, Myung Jin Kim, 31, landed at LAX this week after being transferred from Laos, which had never before handed over a fugitive to the United States; he is accused of orchestrating a 2016 murder-for-hire in San Jose that killed the wrong man, and of shooting a friend six times in a CVS parking lot in 2018 while out on bail. He will face prosecution in two separate California counties....

In Miami, a federal judge has reversed course and ordered Timothy Hudson detained pending trial after prosecutors filed sealed evidence described as newly disclosed test results; Hudson, charged as an adult with the first-degree murder and sexual assault of his 18-year-old stepsister Anna Kepner aboard a Carnival cruise ship, had been free on electronic monitoring for two weeks before the judge ru...

In Duxbury, Massachusetts, the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, charged with strangling her three young children in January 2023, begins July 20th; prosecutors say she calculated her husband's absence to carry out the killings, while the defense argues she was in the grip of a severe postpartum psychiatric crisis and was failed by the medical system. This week, prosecutors filed motions to admit Pa...