Things I Want To Know
Ever wonder what really happened — not the rumors, not the Netflix version, but the truth buried in forgotten police files? We did too. We don’t chase conspiracy theories or ghost stories. We chase facts. Through FOIA requests, interviews, and case files scattered across America, we dig through what’s left behind to find what still doesn’t make sense. Along the way, you’ll hear the real conversations between us — the questions, the theories, and the quiet frustration that comes when justice fades. Each episode takes you inside a case that time tried to erase — the voices left behind, the investigators who never quit, and the clues that still echo decades later. We don’t claim to solve them. We just refuse to let them be forgotten. Join us as we search for the truth, one mystery at a time.
Episodes
Eight women were found dead in Jennings, Louisiana. Nobody’s been held responsible.
That’s the case.
This all happens in Jefferson Davis Parish. Small town. Water everywhere. Canals, drainage ditches, roadside drops. If you’ve ever been down there, you already know—there are a lot of places where something can be left and not found right away. And when water gets involved, whatever was there doesn’t stay long.
We walk ...
In April 1978, three-year-old Stephanie Alana Hall was killed in the Ozark woods of Newton County, Arkansas by members of a small religious cult. When investigators asked why anyone would murder a child, the answer they heard was almost impossible to process: the group believed the girl had been declared “anathema.”
In their belief system, that meant she no longer belonged among the living.
In this episode we walk thr...
On August 23, 1987, two Arkansas teenagers were found dead on a railroad track outside Bryant.
Authorities quickly ruled it an accident. The official story claimed Kevin Ives and Don Henry had smoked marijuana, laid down on the tracks, and fallen asleep before a freight train came through.
Case closed.
But when a second autopsy was performed, investigators discovered one of the boys had a crushed skull before the train...
When the Coroner Says It’s Not Murder
Two teenage boys are found dead on railroad tracks near Mena, Arkansas.
The ruling? Accident.
A man is found with four gunshot wounds to the chest.
The ruling? Suicide.
Now… I don’t know about you, but that should at least make you pause.
Because once that word is written down — accident, suicide — everything shifts. Detectives slow down. Prosecutors adjust. The public moves on. And f...
Was H. H. Holmes really Jack the Ripper?
It’s one of true crime’s most persistent myths. This week on Things I Want To Know, we break it apart using motive, method, timeline, and behavioral profiling.
Andrea takes Whitechapel and builds the Ripper’s profile. Paul steps into Chicago and dissects Holmes. Same era. Completely different predators.
Holmes built traps. Private rooms. Insurance scams. Control and profit at th...
What if your entire town was built on something that wasn’t real?
Claremore, Oklahoma once rebranded itself as “Radium Town.” Hotels. Parades. Bathhouses. Souvenir jugs. Steam rooms packed with believers.
One problem.
The water didn’t contain radium.
It smelled like sulfur. It burned your nose. And it sold like a miracle.
This episode dives into the radium craze that swept America after the Curies made the element famous...
Secrets don’t always hide in the dark. Sometimes they sit in a box on a shelf for decades, waiting on the day science finally catches up. After a quick start, we take a hard turn into Benton County, Arkansas, where skeletal remains were found in 1990 and the victim lived for 32 years in the system as a Jane Doe.
We walk through why this case stalled for so long. A skull too damaged for reconstruction, early forensic ...
A nine-pound socket slipped during routine maintenance inside a Titan II missile silo near Damascus, Arkansas. That’s not a metaphor. That’s the start of a real chain of events that turned a live Cold War ICBM into a disaster under rural farmland.
In this episode, I walk Andrea through it the way I learned it. No assuming you’re a history nerd. No pretending everybody remembers the Cold War. We break down the basics ...
A quiet driveway is supposed to be the end of the day. Park. Breathe. Go inside. Safe.
That is why this case won’t let go.
Misty Dawn Faulkner makes it home to rural Oklahoma after a shift. There’s a Walmart run in the mix. There’s a phone call, maybe finished from the car. And then the part that turns your stomach: she’s gone. No obvious struggle. No screaming heard. Her purse and phone are left behind. The vehicle i...
A funeral home is supposed to be the one place that runs on dignity, routine, and trust. Transfer. Refrigeration. Service. Closure.
In Jacksonville, Arkansas, that trust snapped.
In this episode of Things I Want To Know, we start where the damage actually lived: with the families who paid for care, waited for answers, and later learned what state inspectors said they found inside Arkansas Funeral Care. Not rumor. Not ...
This episode examines Ronald Gene Simmons, tracing his rigid rise through the military, the incest allegation that triggered a sudden move, and the slow construction of an isolated household on Mockingbird Hill. As control began to slip, children leaving, jobs unraveling, pension delays stacking up, Simmons’ fixation hardened into a plan that unfolded over several days during Christmas 1987.
Fourteen members of his f...
Most true crime podcasts lie politely. We don’t.
So we decided to explain why.
After getting pushback for “disrespecting” a victim, Andrea and I laid out exactly how Things I Want to Know works. This episode is our playbook. How we research. Why we focus on underreported Arkansas cases. And why respecting victims does not mean turning them into saints or pretending uncomfortable facts don’t exist.
We start with p...
Things I Want To Know
Don’t Boil the Water | Charleston, West Virginia
A sweet smell coming out of the tap should never turn into a guessing game.
In this episode, we dig into the 2014 Charleston, West Virginia chemical spill that sent crude MCHM from a neglected storage tank straight toward a municipal water intake, forcing 300,000 people to stop using their water overnight. Not limit it. Not boil it. Stop.
We talk abo...
Two women vanish in Arkansas, sixteen years apart, and the details still don’t sit right.
In this episode, we examine the disappearance of 18-year-old Cleashindra Hall in Pine Bluff in 1994 and art teacher Mary “Jimmie” Bobo Shinn in Magnolia in 1978. Two very different lives. Two very different towns. The same outcome: unanswered questions and investigations that lost traction early.
We walk through what went wrong a...
Paul G and Andrea trace the violent trail of James “Red” Hall across wartime Arkansas, where a hellfire upbringing and a childhood head injury twisted a drifter into a man who turned small moments into real-life dead ends. A .38 revolver ties the bodies together. The chaos of World War II gives him cover. And Arkansas rushes him from confession to Old Sparky before most people even know who he is.
They follow the dis...
In 1992, seventeen year old Kelly Wilson vanished in Gilmer, Texas. A short walk from a video store to her car became one of the most debated missing person cases in Texas history. What should have been a focused, evidence driven investigation was quickly consumed by the national Satanic Panic that overtook the early nineties. Gilmer followed the same pattern seen in McMartin, Kern County, and the West Memphis Three...
In this Episode we dive into the case of Michael Ronning, a convicted murderer who spent years bragging about killings no court ever proved. His life stretched from Michigan to Arkansas to Florida, and everywhere he went the same pattern followed: a missing girl, an unexplained death, and a story he couldn’t resist inserting himself into.
Was Ronning a forgotten serial killer, or a drifter who loved the attention tha...
A police lieutenant turns the key, presses the brake, and his truck erupts. He lives. The case almost disappears. We set out to learn why a 1972 Springdale, Arkansas bombing barely made the paper and what the town didn’t (or wouldn’t) say out loud. Along the way we sketch the real backdrop: a rural region on the cusp of change, where Walmart and Tyson were still rising, Sundays went quiet, and a hard-edged meth trad...
A nameless girl lay in a Florida forest for decades, filed under Judy Doe and lost to a noisy era of serial predators and thin evidence. Forty years later, genetic genealogy restores her identity—Rebecca Sue Hill, a teenager from Arkansas—and forces us to confront how a single misidentification can bury a case and mute a family’s questions for a generation.
We walk through the case from both ends: an Arkans...
The story starts on a quiet May evening in 1991 and never really stops echoing. A nine-year-old sets out to sell costume jewelry in a tiny Arkansas town where people wave from porches and the fields hold the day’s last light. By week’s end, she’s found in a ditch four miles away, and everything residents believe about safety, trust, and “being home before dark” begins to crack.
We walk you through what happ...
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