Crime Clueless

He built the scene before he ever needed it. Then he found out how well the story worked.

Edmonton, Alberta. A married father with a failing production company, a growing obsession, and a garage full of secrets. A detective who doesn't buy the story.

A document buried on a laptop that reads like a confession dressed up as fiction.

This is the man behind the mask — and the trial that finally caught up to him. Press play to fin...

It starts with a message. A little hope, after a hard year. A date that feels, finally, like something good.

It doesn't stay that way.

Edmonton, Alberta. October 2008. A residential garage on the city's south side. Instructions that seem careful, reasonable, easy to follow — a partly open door, a walk across a dark backyard, a knock.

Behind that door is nothing anyone could have prepared for.

This is the beginning of one of C...

On April 15, 2005, Centre County, Pennsylvania District Attorney Ray Gricar took the day off, told his girlfriend he was going for a drive, and was never seen again.

His car was found locked the next day outside an antiques mall, his cell phone still inside — but his keys, wallet, and laptop were gone.

In Part One, we dig into Ray Gricar's twenty-year career as DA, the frantic first weeks of the search, an eerily similar case...

Years after Ray Gricar vanished without a trace, a disturbing discovery about his own computer reopens the case in a whole new light.

A scandal connects his name to one of the biggest in American sports history.

In Part Two, we trace the twists that followed the Centre County DA's 2005 disappearance: a missing hard drive, a fractured law enforcement community, an infamous case Gricar once declined to prosecute, and a theory tying h...

Last episode, we told you who Patsy Wright was. Today, we go looking for who killed her.

In part two, the suspects are named and the cards go on the table — one by one, with everything pointing toward them and everything that gives you pause.

A brother-in-law with a financial deadline two weeks away, and debt stacking up.

An ex-husband who told his own wife he knew people who could get someone snuffed out, had a looming trial...

Patsy Wright had everything going for her. A thriving business, a dream ranch on the horizon, a cutting horse she'd competed on and won with, and a life that was finally — after two marriages, an inheritance battle, and years of careful building — moving exactly in the direction she wanted.

On the evening of October 22nd, 1987, she came home from a Halloween party at her family's wax museum in Grand Prairie, Texas. She ...

For decades, the domestic violence movement has operated on a familiar script: abuser is bad, survivor should leave, and the system's job is to punish after the fact. Liz Ortenburger, CEO of SafeNest — Nevada's largest domestic and sexual violence nonprofit, serving Clark County since 1977 — has spent the last ten years challenging that script from the inside.

In this conversation, Liz walks us throug...

Barbara Mae Tucker was 19 years old — a business student at Mount Hood Community College, a former high school athlete, the baby of a big, blended family — when she was murdered walking to a night class on January 15th, 1980.

In her final minutes, multiple drivers saw her flagging down cars on a road at the edge of campus. Not one of them called police.

What followed was one of the largest investigations Gresham, Oregon...

This is part two of two, if you haven't, listen to part one, then come back to hear the shocking conclusion.

For years after Barbara Mae Tucker's murder in Gresham, Oregon, her case sat alongside a growing list of other unsolved local homicides — a running wound for a family, and a community, that never stopped waiting for answers.

Her mother died without knowing. Her father died without knowing. Her sister spent decades call...

In April 2010, Eric Preimesberger — a 29-year-old father of two known for his big smile and his beloved scooter — vanished from his Reno, Nevada home. His wife told police he'd stormed out after an argument and would never be back. For months, that was the only story anyone had.

But Eric's mother never bought it. She kept pushing, kept calling, kept refusing to let her son's disappearance quietly fade...

If you've been following the Josh Hunsucker case, you know he was arrested for his wife Stacy's death in 2019. What happened in the years after — while he waited, out on bond, for a trial that still hasn't happened — is a story we weren't prepared for either.

This week, we're covering everything that unfolded between his arrest and today: an ongoing wrongful death lawsuit from Stacy's parents, a change-of-venue fight bu...

Two weeks after a South Carolina eye drop poisoning case made national headlines, a flight paramedic's wife collapsed at their North Carolina home and died of an apparent heart attack — plausible, given her years of unexplained cardiac issues.

Josh Hunsucker refused an autopsy, had his wife cremated within two days, and filed for her life insurance before the week was out.

It would take a mother's suspicion, a preserved blood...

In May 2016, Lana Clayton walked into the York County Sheriff's Office and told deputies she'd accidentally shot her husband in the head with a crossbow while he slept. Steven Clayton backed up her story. Accident. No charges were filed. They moved on.

Two years later, Steve was dead — found at the bottom of the staircase in the South Carolina mansion he'd built as an exact replica of George Washington's Mo...

For over a decade, Sheriff Howard Sills has carried the unsolved murders of Russell and Shirley Dermond with him — a case that's outlasted every other investigation of his forty-year career. In this episode, we go deep into the man behind the badge, the staggering range of theories the public threw at this case — mafia, cult, extremism, even an alligator — and the family who's spent twelve years asking not f...

Russell and Shirley Dermond had been married for over 60 years. Retired, well-liked, and settled into a quiet gated community on Lake Oconee, Georgia, they were the kind of couple who never missed a neighborhood gathering — until the weekend of the 2014 Kentucky Derby, when they simply didn't show up.

Days later, concerned friends walk into their unlocked home and find a horrifying scene. 

This is part two of two. If you haven't listened to part one, do that first, then join us for part two.

The Gary Triano case had been cold for nearly nine years when a tip to America's Most Wanted led investigators to a storage unit in Yorba Linda, California.

Inside: microcassette recordings, thousands of emails, financial documents, a map of Tucson, a Ramada Inn receipt dated four months before t...

On the evening of November 1st, 1996, more than 100 people were waiting at Gary Triano's Sabino Canyon home to surprise him for his upcoming 53rd birthday. He never arrived.

Gary Lee Triano was a larger-than-life figure who served on hospital boards, and earned a Medal of Merit from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Task Force. He was also a man whose financial life had left a trail of lawsuits, failed casino deals,...

On the night of September 12th, 1985, 23-year-old CJ DeLuca was working an overnight shift at a Connecticut gas station he wasn't even supposed to be covering. By morning, he was dead — and three hours later, a second gas station attendant had been shot with the same gun.

This wasn't a random act of violence. It was a spree.

Forty years later, investigators believe they know who did it. They ...

On the morning of June 27th, 2000, sixteen-year-old Molly Bish was dropped off for her second day as a lifeguard at Comins Pond in Warren, Massachusetts. She walked toward the water with her things, her mom watched her go, and drove away. Less than fifteen minutes later, the chair was empty. Molly's flip-flops, her first aid kit, her lunch and her towel were sitting at the water's edge — but Molly wasn't there.

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