S1 Ep9: Charley Ross: America's First Kidnapping for Ransom
After 4-year-old Charley Ross vanished in a carriage with two men who'd offered him candy and fireworks, police at first told his father to wait it out. Surely the men had no bad intentions. Then came the first ransom letter. And another. And another. In 1874, the Charley Ross case marked the first time in American history that a child had been stolen for money. The case terrified parents, made...
40m Dec 21, 2020
40m
S1 Ep8: Kitty Genovese: A Murder with 38 Witnesses
As a 28-year-old woman screamed for help on an otherwise quiet New York City street, neighbors roused from sleep ... and then largely did nothing. The 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese would soon represent apathy in America and spark the creation of a centralized phone number that ultimately changed how the entire nation reported emergencies. While Kitty's case will go down in history as a driving ...
38m Dec 14, 2020
38m
S1 Ep7: The Mysterious Beheading of Pearl Bryan
When a headless woman's remains were discovered near Cincinnati in 1896, police had a problem. Long before DNA and fingerprinting, the lack of a head made it tough to identify the victim. Thanks to a sharp-eyed shoemaker, a new kind of detective work was born: The woman was ID'd thanks to a pair of distinctive shoes on the corpse's feet. Pearl Bryan was a 22-year-old Indiana woman who'd recentl...
39m Dec 07, 2020
39m
S1 Ep6: Bob Berdella: The Serial Killer Known as the Kansas City Butcher
To his neighbors, Bob Berdella was a proactive citizen who helped launch a neighborhood watch group. Sure, he was a bit condescending, but he seemed to have a big heart, using his Kansas City home as a safe haven for young men in trouble. But then, in 1988, a young man jumped from a second-story window of Berdella's house wearing nothing but a dog collar, prompting police to scour the innocuous...
44m Nov 30, 2020
44m
S1 Ep5: Prohibition Murderers: The Karpis/Barker Gang
Thanks to Prohibition, criminal gangs were a dime a dozen in the 1920s and '30s, but the Karpis/Barker Gang became one of the era's longest lived, highest profile, and most consequential. During the Depression, their exploits not only burnished the reputation of the FBI and its director J. Edgar Hoover, but also inadvertently triggered the end to rampant corruption in St. Paul Minnesota. While...
44m Nov 16, 2020
44m
S1 Ep4: Nannie Doss: The Murderous Giggling Granny
When widower Sam Doss was rushed to the hospital with abdominal pains in 1954, his doctor was flummoxed by his life-threatening yet mysterious illness. But Doss got better and came home -- then died the next day. That's what prompted police to look at his matronly, sweet-talking new wife, Nannie. Born Nannie Hazle, it turned out this missus had left a trail of dead husbands behind her -- not t...
40m Nov 09, 2020
40m
S1 Ep3: Elma Sands: The Manhattan Well Murder
When a 22-year-old woman living with relatives in a boarding house disappeared on Dec. 22, 1799, her loved ones didn't immediately worry. But when she still hadn't returned days later, all eyes turned to her lover -- whom she'd supposedly been set to marry the last time she was seen alive. Levi Weeks came from a family with money, so his rich brother did something that was unheard of at this po...
45m Nov 02, 2020
45m
S1 Ep2: Leopold & Loeb: Jazz Age Killers
On May 21, 1924, 19-year-old Nathan Leopold and 18-year-old Richard Loeb convinced a younger boy, 14 year old Bobby Franks, to get in a car with them. We think Leopold was driving with Loeb in the backseat. 14 year old Bobby sat in the passenger seat. From behind, Loeb struck the younger boy several times in the head with a chisel, and then dragged him into the backseat where he eventually died...
46m Oct 26, 2020
46m
S1 Ep1: The Murder of Mary Phagan
At 3:00 am on April 27th, 1913, the body of 13 year old Mary Phagan was found in the basement of the factory where she worked in Atlanta, Georgia. Her dress was up around her waist and a strip from her petticoat had been torn off and wrapped around her neck. Her face was blackened and scratched, and her head was bruised and battered. Almost immediately, the murder, and the mystery surrounding w...
44m Oct 26, 2020
44m
S1: PREVIEW: Crimes of the Centuries
Crime is so commonplace that it takes something particularly shocking to be labelled the “crime of the century.” Even so, there are a lot of cases that have earned the distinction. In each episode of Crimes of the Centuries, award-winning journalist Amber Hunt will examine a case that’s lesser known today but was huge when it happened. The cases explored span the centuries and each left a mark....
2m Oct 13, 2020
2m