Murder: True Crime Stories

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the tangled, decades-long investigation into the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier. Suspicion quickly fell on Ian Bailey, an English journalist living nearby who inserted himself into the coverage of the very crime he would come to be accused of. Bailey was arrested twice but never charged in Ireland, where prosecutors said the evidence fell short, and he maintained...

In December 1996, French television producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier traveled alone to her remote holiday home on the windswept Mizen Head peninsula in County Cork, Ireland, a place she loved for its isolation and beauty. Two days before Christmas, her battered body was found on the lane outside her cottage, beaten so severely that the quiet farming community around Schull could scarcely comprehend it. She had come to Ireland for...

A History Channel original podcast brought to you by Rewind Studios, History's Greatest Mysteries examines the top theories surrounding the world's most enigmatic unsolved mysteries. If you love Murder: True Crime Stories, then you’re gonna love History’s Greatest Mysteries. Each episode unpacks these puzzles with contributions from top historians, authors, scientists, and researchers. From unsolved crimes to lost and b...

In 2005, a dismembered body began turning up in pieces along a canal in Dublin, Ireland, in a case so gruesome it gripped the entire country. The victim was Farah Swaleh Noor, and the killers turned out to be two sisters, Charlotte and Linda Mulhall, dubbed by the press the "Scissor Sisters." The man had been in a relationship with their mother, and one violent night, fueled by drugs and alcohol and years of buried rage, the sister...

In the days after two of his acquaintances went missing in Costa Mesa, California, Dan Wozniak played the part of the grieving friend to perfection, comforting others while concealing a monstrous secret. In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the investigation that slowly stripped away the aspiring actor's performance, from suspicious ATM withdrawals and staged text messages to the gruesome truth about wha...

Dan Wozniak was a charming, talented actor in Southern California with big dreams and a wedding on the horizon, but his finances were falling apart and his taste for the spotlight far outpaced what his life could actually afford. Rather than face the truth, he began to lie, manipulate, and scheme, building a fantasy of the life he wanted on a foundation of deception. In the spring of 2010, that spiral of debt and delusion set the s...

Michael Swango was a charming, ambitious young doctor who seemed destined for a successful medical career when he began his residency in Ohio in the early 1980s. But wherever he worked, patients who should have recovered began dying without explanation, and colleagues who fell ill after eating food he brought them narrowly survived. For years, hospitals and medical boards across the United States and eventually as far as Zimbabwe p...

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the century-long investigation into the Hinterkaifeck murders, one of the most baffling cold cases in European history. From the moment the six bodies were discovered, the case defied explanation. The killer had apparently stayed on the farm for days after the murders, feeding the animals and lighting the stove while the victims lay dead. Investigators chased down hun...

In 1922, six members of the same family were found murdered on their isolated farmstead in the Bavarian countryside, killed one by one with a pickaxe. In the days before their deaths, the family had noticed strange and frightening signs: footprints in the snow, footsteps in the attic, and the unshakable feeling that someone was watching them. But they never made it out alive, and their killer was never caught. In Part 1 of Murder: ...

In August 2017, Swedish journalist Kim Wall boarded a homemade submarine in Copenhagen to interview its inventor, Danish entrepreneur Peter Madsen, for a story. It was supposed to be a routine assignment, the kind of work she had done all over the world. She never came back. When the submarine sank the next day and Madsen was rescued alone, he claimed he had dropped Wall off safely on shore the night before. But his story kept chan...

In September 2022, veteran Las Vegas journalist Jeff German was found stabbed to death outside his home, killed in a brutal attack just days before he was set to receive records he had requested about a disgraced local official. In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the investigation into German's murder, the surveillance footage of a disguised killer that horrified his colleagues, and the distinctive mar...

For nearly 45 years, Jeff German was one of the most respected investigative journalists in Las Vegas, exposing organized crime, political corruption, and the people who thought they were untouchable. In the spring of 2022, he turned his attention to a low-level elected official named Robert Telles, whose office was plagued by allegations of bullying, favoritism, and an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate. German's report...

In the late 1970s, a charming amateur photographer named Rodney Alcala appeared on the popular TV show The Dating Game, flashing a quick smile and winning a date with the bachelorette. What the audience didn't know was that the contestant lighting up their screens was already a serial killer. For years, Alcala had used his camera to lure women and children, charming them with compliments and the promise of a modeling shoot before t...

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the decades-long hunt for the killer behind the Colonial Parkway Murders. For years, the four cases went nowhere, plagued by jurisdictional turf wars, false leads, and a string of suspects who turned out to be dead ends, including two men who inserted themselves into the families' grief only to exploit it. Refusing to let the case die, the victims' families applied re...

Between 1986 and 1989, four young couples were murdered or vanished along the same 23-mile stretch of road in Virginia known as the Colonial Parkway. A scenic route through the state's Historic Triangle by day, the parkway became a place of terror by night, drawing couples seeking privacy and a killer who seemed to know exactly where to find them. The victims ranged in age from 14 to 27, and the cases shared eerie similarities: aba...

In 2005, 46-year-old Thomas Montgomery logged onto an online gaming site, pretended to be an 18-year-old Marine, and fell into an intense romance with a young woman who called herself Jessi. What started as a fantasy quickly curdled into obsession. When Jessi began talking to one of Thomas's younger coworkers, jealousy consumed him, and in September 2006, that obsession turned deadly. But the murder was only the beginning of the st...

By 2010, Jennifer Pan's carefully constructed lies were collapsing around her. Her parents had discovered the truth about her fabricated life, pulled her out of her relationship, and tightened their control over her every move. Desperate to regain command of a situation spinning out of her hands, Jennifer didn't beg for forgiveness. She arranged for three men to enter her family home one night and carry out a staged home invasion t...

From the outside, Jennifer Pan was the perfect daughter. She brought home straight A's, won swimming trophies and piano awards, and seemed destined for a career in medicine, exactly the future her strict immigrant parents had demanded. But almost none of it was real. Over years, Jennifer built an elaborate web of lies to hide failing grades, a secret boyfriend, and a life that looked nothing like the one her parents believed she wa...

In rural Missouri, Ray and Faye Copeland looked like any other elderly farming couple, churchgoing, weathered, and unremarkable to the neighbors who waved at them from the road. But behind that ordinary facade was one of the most disturbing operations in American criminal history. The Copelands hired drifters and transient men to help on their farm, used them to write bad checks for cattle, and then murdered them to cover their tra...