Episodes

Thanksgiving Day 2012: How Byron Smith Executed Two Teen Burglars Byron David Smith, a 64-year-old retired security engineer, shot and killed teenagers Nicholas Brady and Haile Kifer during a home invasion in Little Falls, Minnesota on Thanksgiving...

The Barron Wisconsin Murders and Jayme Closs’s Escape You know what terrifies me most about this case? Jake Patterson had never met Jayme Closs. Never spoken to her. He saw her getting on a school bus one morning and decided right then that he was...

Keith and Elaine Dardeen: A Family Trying to Escape Death The Dardeen family was supposed to be starting over. Keith and Elaine were packing up their lives in rural Illinois, seven months pregnant with their second child, ready to leave behind a...

Self-Defense or Murder? The Stillwater Bail Bonds Office Shooting A bail bondsman in Stillwater, Oklahoma shoots her own client in the back as he tries to escape through a window. She claims self-defense. He's unarmed. A jury decides her fate in less...

Richard Ramirez: Inside the Mind of the Night Stalker In 1985, serial killer Richard Ramirez terrorized Southern California during a brutal murder spree that left at least 13 people dead across Los Angeles and San Francisco. The Night Stalker, as he...

Is Lucy Letby A Baby Killer: The Medical Evidence Is Under A Microscope What happens when doctors raise alarms about babies dying on their watch, and hospital executives tell them to apologize to the person they suspect? The Lucy Letby case seemed...

The 50-Year Grudge: Carl Ericsson's Fatal Revenge on His High School Rival When 73-year-old Carl Ericsson walked up to Norman Johnson's door in Madison, South Dakota on a freezing January night in 2012, he was about to settle something that had been...

Betrayed By Blood: The Daughter Who Orchestrated Her Family's Slaughter Terry Caffey woke up to gunfire in his bedroom. His wife was shot beside him. His sons were screaming down the hall. Shot five times himself, Terry crawled through flames and...

The Shoe Fetish Slayer: Inside Jerry Brudos' House of Horrors When a 19-year-old encyclopedia saleswoman knocked on the wrong door in Portland, Oregon in January 1968, she walked into the nightmare that would define one of America's most disturbing serial killers. Jerry Brudos looked like everyone's quiet neighbor, a hardworking electrician with a wife and kids. But behind the locked door of his garage workshop, he was living out fantasies so twisted they'd shock even seasoned FBI profilers. Th...

Mark Branch: The Grocery Clerk Who Thought He Was Jason Voorhees When 18-year-old Sharon Gregory was found dead in her Greenfield, Massachusetts home in October 1988, her twin sister knew exactly who did it. Mark Branch had been obsessed with horror...

The Halifax Slasher and the Deadly Power of Collective Fear In November 1938, the town of Halifax, England, became paralyzed by fear. People stopped going to work. Businesses closed. Vigilante mobs formed in the streets. And a man took his own life...

Inside the Murder Castle: The True Story of H.H. Holmes and His Killing Factory Herman Mudgett didn't become America's most notorious serial killer by accident. He built a three-story hotel in Chicago specifically designed to kill people, and he did...

From Unsolved Mysteries to Hollywood: The Jeepers Creepers Murder Case When a couple's quiet Sunday drive turned into a terrifying chase on a Michigan backroad in 1990, they had no idea they'd just witnessed the aftermath of murder. This is the story...

The First Female Serial Killer: Why Aileen Wuornos's Case Still Matters When Aileen Wuornos was executed in 2002, the state of Florida called her a cold-blooded serial killer. But her story is way more complicated than that. We're talking about a...

The Jeannette DePalma Case: When Satanic Panic Destroyed a Murder Investigation What really happened to 16-year-old Jeannette DePalma in 1972? For over 50 years, wild stories about devil worship and ritual sacrifice have overshadowed the truth about...

The Disappearance of Branson Perry: Three Witnesses, Zero Answers When 20-year-old Branson Perry walked 30 feet from his house to a shed on an April afternoon in 2001, three people were watching. He never made it back. This case has every element...

The Ellen Greenberg Case: When Forensic Science Says Murder but the City Says Suicide When a young teacher was found dead with 20 stab wounds, ten of them in the back of her neck, Philadelphia officials called it suicide. Her family has spent 14...

The Staircase Murders Part 2: When the Star Witness Turns Out to Be a Fraud Michael Peterson sat in prison for eight years after being convicted of murdering his wife. The case seemed closed. But then someone started looking into the blood spatter...

The Staircase Murders Part 1: Two Dead Women, Two Staircases, One Suspect Michael Peterson called 911 at 2:40 a.m. saying his wife fell down the stairs. But the words he chose in that call would haunt him for years. Seven deep cuts to her scalp. No...

BTK Dennis Rader: When Your Neighbor Is Literally a Serial Killer What happens when the guy measuring your lawn for code violations is also one of the most prolific serial killers in American history? Dennis Rader spent 31 years hiding in plain sight...

The Truth About Ilse Koch and the Human Skin Lampshade Legend She was called the Bitch of Buchenwald, the Witch, the Beast. Her name became synonymous with Nazi evil, her face plastered across newspapers worldwide. But here's what makes Ilse Koch's...

Gulf War Ghosts: The Jeffrey Hutchinson Death Row Case What happens when a decorated Gulf War veteran's mind becomes a casualty of war that no one wants to acknowledge? Jeffrey Hutchinson's story isn't your typical family annihilation case. This is...

Adeline Watkins and Ed Gein: Separating Fact From Fiction When Ed Gein was arrested in 1957, the press needed someone to explain how a monster could hide in plain sight. Enter Adeline Watkins, a quiet woman from Plainfield who claimed a decades-long...

The Austin Yogurt Shop Murders: How DNA Finally Solved a 34-Year-Old Cold Case In December 1991, four teenage girls were murdered inside an Austin yogurt shop. The crime scene was burned. The evidence was destroyed. Two innocent men went to prison...