Mugshot Mysteries

A man checks himself into a psychiatric hospital for depression and dies after being injected with an experimental Army chemical warfare compound.

A young painter in Paris accepts a drink from a stranger and spends the next forty years trapped inside his own mind.

The CIA rents apartments in San Francisco, hires sex workers, doses unsuspecting men with LSD, and watches them through two-way mirrors while agents take notes from behind ...

On the night of November 28th, 1953, a man named Frank Olson went out a tenth-floor window at the Statler Hotel in New York City. He was 43. He was a biological warfare scientist for the United States Army. He had a wife and three kids in Maryland.

The official story, for the next 22 years, was suicide.

The actual story is that nine days earlier, the CIA had spiked his drink with LSD without telling him. And when his behavior became ...

Six thousand people died in this building. The architecture was specifically designed so the living would never see the bodies leave. A five-hundred-foot underground tunnel. A motorized rail cart. A nickname nobody on staff gave it.

They called it the body chute.

Kathryn and Gabriel walk the full history of Waverly Hills Sanatorium, the tuberculosis epidemic that built it, the experimental treatments that defined it, and the sixty ye...

Two thousand five hundred people formally investigated. Fifty new names proposed every year. Fifty-seven years. Not one charge. Not one conviction. Not one answer.

That is where Part 4 begins.

Kathryn and Gabriel finally get to the names. Arthur Leigh Allen, the gravitational center of the investigation, the man eight filing cabinets were built around, whose DNA and fingerprints still came back negative. Lawrence Kane, identified by ...

December 11th, 2020. A software developer in Virginia, a mathematician in Melbourne, and a Belgian programmer get on a video call. Between them: a 340-character cipher unsolved since 1969. The FBI tried. The NSA tried. Fifty-one years of nothing. Then the characters begin to resolve. It says: "I hope you are having lots of fun trying to catch me."

That is where Part 3 begins.

Kathryn and Gabriel lay out the complete authent...

August 8th, 1969. A schoolteacher named Donald Harden and his wife Bettye sit at their kitchen table in Salinas, California with a newspaper spread in front of them. On the front page is one-third of a 408-character coded message sent by a serial killer. The FBI has been staring at it for over a week. Bettye has a hunch: this man is an egomaniac, so the message probably starts with "I." And he is a killer, so the word &qu...

September 27th, 1969. A man in a homemade black executioner hood walks out of the tree line at Lake Berryessa and approaches two college students picnicking on a small island. He ties them up. Then he stabs them. Then he drives 45 minutes to a payphone and calmly reports the crime to police. He was never identified. He was never caught. This was only attack number three.

In Part 1 of their four-part series, Kathryn and Gabriel build...

September 29, 1982. A twelve-year-old girl takes one Tylenol for a sore throat and never wakes up. Six more strangers die across Chicago suburbs in three days. Same brand. Different stores. No connection except a bottle on a shelf.

Someone replaced acetaminophen with potassium cyanide at three times the lethal dose and returned the capsules to store shelves. No manifesto. No motive ever proven. No arrest. No conviction. One of Ameri...

July 15th, 1997. Gianni Versace, the man who dressed Princess Diana, Madonna, and Tupac, who built the supermodel era, who chose the face of Medusa as his logo, is shot twice on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion by a 27-year-old serial killer from San Diego named Andrew Cunanan. 

Cunanan was already four murders deep into the most sensational FBI manhunt of the 1990s. And the bureau had completely failed to stop him. 

In Part One,...

July 15th, 1997. Gianni Versace, the man who dressed Princess Diana, Madonna, and Tupac, who built the supermodel era, who chose the face of Medusa as his logo, is shot twice on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion by a 27-year-old serial killer from San Diego named Andrew Cunanan.

Cunanan was already four murders deep into the most sensational FBI manhunt of the 1990s. And the bureau had completely failed to stop him.

In Part One, K...

March 1, 1932. The most famous man in America puts his twenty-month-old son to bed. By 10 PM, the nursery is empty. A ransom note on the windowsill. A homemade ladder against the house. The Lindbergh baby kidnapping had begun.

Charles Lindbergh was not just a celebrity. In a country devastated by the Great Depression, he was proof the American Dream still worked. Then someone took his baby.

What followed was one of history's mos...

1977. Circleville, Ohio. An anonymous letter writer terrorizes a town for nearly two decades. Over 1,000 letters exposing affairs, corruption, and secrets. Then attempted murder.

Mary Gillispie, a school bus driver, was accused of having an affair with school superintendent Gordon Massie. Her husband Ron received threatening letters. In August 1977, Ron told his children he knew who the writer was, grabbed his gun, and left. He neve...

January 9, 1947. Elizabeth Short walks into the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. She paces for four hours. Makes calls. Waits. At 10 PM, someone waves through the glass doors. She walks out. Turns south on Olive Street. Forty-eight hours later, her body is found cut in half on a vacant lot.

This episode reconstructs Elizabeth Short's final 48 hours in real time. One hour of her life equals one minute of runtime. We walk backward ...

September 12, 1952. Seven people climb a hill in Flatwoods, West Virginia after watching a red light streak across the sky. At the top, they encounter something ten feet tall with a spade-shaped head, glowing eyes, and a metallic body. They run in terror. Several begin vomiting.

To understand what happened, you need to understand 1952 America. The Soviets had the bomb. Boys were dying in Korea. UFOs appeared on radar over Washington...

November 15, 1966. Two young couples encounter a seven-foot creature with glowing red eyes and ten-foot wings at an abandoned TNT plant in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Over the next thirteen months, more than one hundred witnesses report seeing the same impossible entity. Then, on December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge collapses during rush hour, killing forty-six people. The sightings stop.

Was the Mothman a harbinger of disaster? ...

Flannan Isles lighthouse keepers mystery Scotland December 1900. Three experienced keepers James Ducat, Thomas Marshall, and Donald MacArthur vanished without trace from Eilean Mor island in the Outer Hebrides. No bodies found. No distress signals. Just a stopped clock, an unlit lamp, and one missing oilskin coat. Official explanation: rogue wave swept them into the Atlantic. Locals say the island took them back. One of history&apo...

Belle Gunness La Porte Indiana 1908. America's first prolific female serial killer. A lonely hearts scammer who lured at least 40 men to her farm with promises of marriage, poisoned them, bashed their skulls with a meat cleaver, and buried them in her hog pen. Then her farmhouse burned down with a headless woman inside five inches too short and fifty pounds too light to be Belle. Did she die in that fire or escape with a suitc...

Germany, 1922. Footprints in the snow leading to a farmhouse. None leading back. Someone walked out of the forest toward the Gruber family home and never left. Days later, all six people inside were murdered with their own farm tool. The killer stayed for days afterward, sleeping in their beds, eating their food, feeding their animals. This is the Hinterkaifeck murders, Germany's most disturbing unsolved case.

THE CAS...

Britain's most documented haunted house. The true story of the Enfield Poltergeist.

August 1977, 284 Green Street, Enfield, London: 11-year-old Janet Hodgson's bed shakes. Knocking from inside walls. A police officer witnesses paranormal activity—chair slides 4 feet by itself, official report. 18 months of supernatural events: ghostly possession, levitating children, flying furniture, horrifying voice claiming to be a dead...