A Simpler Time True Crime

A Simpler Time True Crime

I’m Megan, your host, and each week I revisit unsolved cases from decades past—stories that have too often been forgotten or overlooked. Together, we examine the facts, question the myths of “the good old days,” and ask whether a simpler time was ever really a safer one. This podcast honors the people at the heart of each case—focusing not on sensationalism, but on the lives affected and the justice still waiting to be served. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/a-simpler-time-true-crime--6665681/support.

Episodes

Prime and Only Suspect Part 2: The Unsolved Disappearance of Kip Hess, Keith Fleming, and Charles Collingwood

November 18, 2025 • 28 mins
In Part 2, we pick back up on what happens after John Rodney McRae is released from prison. In this episode, we leave off after discussing Kip Hess's disappearance and the early conviction of McRae in Joey Housey's murder. After his sentence is commuted, McRae relocates to Florida and other boys begin disappearing. 
While these cases may appear solved on the surface, the boys have never been located and its believed that there are m...
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Prime and Only Suspect Part 1 : The Unsolved Disappearances of Kip Hess, Keith Fleming, and Charles Collingwood

November 17, 2025 • 26 mins
When a young teen vanishes on his way to school, a single note left behind pushes police toward the idea that he was a runaway. But the people who knew him best never believed that. As the days stretched on, that theory began to crumble and a prime suspect emerged. On this podcast, I never center the perpetrator, and that remains true here. But to show just how unsafe the so-called simpler times could be, today I am walking you thr...
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The Motorcycle Gang: The Unsolved Murder of the Deal Family

November 9, 2025 • 32 mins
A family of three is brutally murdered in their rural New Jersey home in 1978. Police dismissed early rumors of connections to a violent motorcycle gang, but as the years went on they began to lean into that theory more, especially after a chillingly similar crime 3.5 years later. While many accept this theory, some say the killings feel more personal and fall outside of the way outlaw motorcycle gangs operate. Despite extensive th...
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Her Last Customer: The Unsolved Murder of Gale Green

November 3, 2025 • 31 mins
In 1987, the owner of a small lingerie shop was closing up for the night, looking forward to a busy evening of plans ahead. Plans she would never make it to.
When her brother came by later, he found her body inside the store. Investigators believe she was ambushed by someone pretending to be a customer, trapped in her own business. She fought hard for her life and injured her attacker in the process.
Now, thirty-eight years later, he...
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Someone She Trusted: The Unsolved Murder of Jessie Marie Twilight Song Crooks

October 27, 2025 • 30 mins
It’s late August of 2001, and a bubbly teenager from a tiny town just outside Bowling Green, Kentucky, answers a phone call on her family’s landline. Everything that happens after that call becomes a mystery. No one knows who was on the other end, but it’s believed she slipped out of her house that night to meet the caller and never came back.

Weeks later, her body was found the day before a national tragedy, and her case faded from...
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The Sales Call: The Unsolved Disappearance of Katie Eggleston

October 20, 2025 • 43 mins
On a hot summer day in 1993, recent college graduate Katie was making sales calls in downtown Portland, Oregon. It was her first day working solo after weeks of training and shadowing. She finished her morning calls and was on her way to her afternoon appointments—appointments she never made it to. When her car was found abandoned in an industrial lot, investigators explored several theories, including that she may have left on her...
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All Just A Game: The Unsolved Murder of Harriet Riley

October 13, 2025 • 28 mins
In 1975 Sacramento, a young girl named Harriet went out to play at the park and never returned home. Her concerned mother called police and tragically, the next day, her body was found in a dumpster just a mile away. Police quickly focused on two local boys who claimed it was all part of a child’s game that went terribly wrong. But as you’ll hear, there’s so much more to this story. Her father — a decorated veteran — was also murde...
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Valid Concerns For Her Safety: The Unsolved Murder of Judy Lord

October 6, 2025 • 24 mins
A young woman is living in a small Concord, New Hampshire apartment with her husband and their little boy. Their marriage is rocky, and he comes and goes often, leaving Judy alone with their toddler. During those stretches, she was said to have been uneasy and fearful, convinced someone might break in. Neighbors didn’t quite understand her worry until one summer day in 1975, when Judy was found dead inside her apartment. In the dec...
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A Killer At The Door: The Unsolved Murder of Virginia State Trooper Johnny Bowman

September 29, 2025 • 34 mins
In the early morning hours of August 19, 1984, a Virginia State Trooper answered his front door and was ambushed. In an attack lasting no more than three minutes, he was fatally stabbed more than 40 times in front of his wife, brother, and sister-in-law, as well as his toddler daughter – who had been asleep in bed with him prior to the attack. From the over-the-top disguises left behind at the crime scene to suspects no one would e...
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Lover's Lane: The Murder of Cathy Britt

September 22, 2025 • 30 mins
In May 1983, a young couple parked near the Loch Raven Reservoir in Baltimore County, Maryland, was suddenly ambushed when gunfire shattered the quiet night. Just four weeks earlier, another couple had been shot in a similar lovers’ lane attack, but they managed to survive. This second tragedy claimed the life of a 22-year-old woman and left the community shaken with fears that a serial predator was on the loose. Then, as suddenly ...
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A Mountain Town's Code of Silence: The Murders of Earl and Clarissa Gonzales

September 15, 2025 • 31 mins
High in the mountains of northern New Mexico, overlooking the village of Questa, a father and his young daughter lived in the dream home he built with his own hands. Friends and neighbors knew him as the kind of man who always offered help and kept his door open to anyone in need. But that open door would one day invite in evil. In early September 1999, both he and his 9-year-old daughter were found murdered inside their home. Now,...
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Disappeared from the Dorms: The Unsolved Case of Michael Negrete

September 8, 2025 • 40 mins
It was the end of the semester at UCLA. Students were finishing exams, celebrating, and preparing to head home for the holidays. A freshman named Michael joined friends at a dorm party before winding down with a late-night computer game with another friend in the building. In the early morning hours, he stepped out to congratulate his friend on the win, then headed back toward his room. From that moment on, Michael was never seen a...
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Abducted From The Playground: The Kidnapping of Megan Garner

September 1, 2025 • 32 mins
In the spring of 1991, a three-year-old girl was playing outside with her siblings and cousins while her mother and aunt were inside. She knew the rules her mom had set—especially not to cross the parking lot alone. That simple rule left her briefly apart from the older children, and in those few unguarded moments on the apartment playground, she disappeared. At first, her mother believed she had only wandered off, but panic set in...
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Nothing Is What It Seems: The Unsolved Murder of Donna Emmel

August 24, 2025 • 64 mins
If you look up this case online, you’ll see one version of events repeated over and over: A young girl leaves a hangout spot to walk home, takes a cut-through trail, and never makes it back. Her body is later found in a nearby ditch, and a witness claims they saw a man follow her into the woods. That’s the story I first read, and it’s the one most people believe. But in recent years, Donna’s cousins have worked to unravel the truth...
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I'll Be Right Back: The Unsolved Murder of Sharon Thor

August 18, 2025 • 22 mins
Sharon was a talented high school dancer with a bright future in ballet. One afternoon, a phone call pulled her from the safety of home. She told her mom she’d be right back, then stepped outside and into a waiting vehicle. She was never seen alive again. Days later her body was found, leaving her family and the small New Jersey community reeling. More than forty years have passed, but those who know the truth have yet to come forw...
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House of Horrors: The Disappearance of Martha Martinez Maxwell

August 11, 2025 • 33 mins
A 41-year-old Texas woman is trapped in a violent marriage. After barely surviving a previous attack, she gains distance and the hope of a fresh start. But slowly he lures her back into his web. And then one day, she vanishes. Her family receives a letter from her stating she’s leaving her husband, but they grow suspicious when they don’t hear from her. Her husband was uncooperative and maintained that she just up and left the fami...
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A Frightening Chain of Events: The Unsolved Murders of Julie and Terry Dade

August 4, 2025 • 32 mins
In scary movies, there’s always that moment—the chase, the panic, the victim just steps away from help when they’re suddenly pulled back into danger. It’s a trope meant to shock us and keep us on the edge of our seats. But in 1970, in a quiet Oregon town, that moment wasn’t fiction. It was real. A young woman, terrified and desperate, made it all the way to the doorstep of help, only for the killer to catch up and drag her away.
In...
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He Walked Into The Night and Vanished: The Disappearance of Ellis Faison Sr.

July 28, 2025 • 28 mins
People in the midst of a mental health crisis are at a much higher risk of going missing. In the late summer of 1989, a 64-year-old man from North Carolina became part of that troubling reality. That evening, police had been called to his home multiple times in response to what seemed like episodes of paranoia. But later that night, he stepped outside into the dark and was never seen again. It was easy for some to assume that he’d ...
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An Empty Bed and Unending Mystery: The Unsolved Disappearance of Zachary Bernhardt

July 21, 2025 • 36 mins
  An 8-year-old boy in Clearwater, Florida spends the evening with his mother and asks if he can sleep in her bed. After putting him to sleep, his mother struggles to fall asleep due to typically working the overnight shift. As the hours tick on, she finally decides to leave Zach alone to get some fresh air. When she returns, he is nowhere to be found. This is a complex case with very few confirmable facts, rather rumors and theori...
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The Classified Ad: The Murder of Linda Sue Dearth

July 14, 2025 • 39 mins
It was late January of 1973. Across the country, people were mourning the passing of former President Lyndon B. Johnson. His funeral was set to be broadcast on national television, and schools across the U.S. closed for the day so families could watch. In a quiet neighborhood near Dayton, Ohio, that unexpected day off meant a teenage girl was home alone—just for a short while. But during that small window of time, someone entered t...
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