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  • Thirty Years Without a Name: The Tent Girl Case

    Thirty Years Without a Name: The Tent Girl Case
    2026/10/29
    Thirty Years Without a Name: The Tent Girl Case

    In May 1968, a man collecting glass insulators beside U.S. Route 25 in Scott County, Kentucky, kicked open a bundle of canvas and found the body of a young woman. Investigators estimated her age at 16 to 19, the press called her Tent Girl, and a town buried her in 1971 under a donated headstone reading "Unidentified." Why did no missing person report exist anywhere in the country? How did one wrong number on an autopsy sheet aim thirty years of searching at the wrong people? And why did the man who finally named her turn out to be a Tennessee factory worker with a home computer?

    In this episode, we follow two searches. The first is the search for her name: Todd Matthews hears the story at a Halloween party in 1987, marries the daughter of the man who found the body, chases the case for 11 years, builds TentGirl.com, and in January 1998 finds an online classified ad from an Arkansas woman looking for her sister. DNA from an exhumed grave confirms it: Tent Girl was Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor, 24, a wife and mother of an eight month old from Lexington, just a short drive away. The second search is the one nobody talks about: the hunt for her killer, which never really began, because the prime suspect, her carnival worker husband, died in 1987, uncharged, eleven years before she even had a name.

    Person: Barbara Ann "Bobbie" Hackmann Taylor, 24
    Date: Found May 17, 1968; identified April 1998
    Location: Georgetown, Scott County, Kentucky
    Case: Unidentified homicide victim named after 30 years
    Legal status: No one ever arrested or charged; the murder remains unsolved

    - The husband's lie that stopped any missing person report
    - The age estimate that froze the case for a generation
    - Todd Matthews, the cold call to Arkansas, and the DNA match
    - The family verdict carved into her new headstone
    - How one case seeded the Doe Network and NamUs

    The Tent Girl case gave Barbara Hackmann Taylor her name back and launched internet sleuthing, but the Tent Girl murder has never been solved.

    To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com.

    © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
    This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: business@obomedia.com.
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    20 分
  • The Showing Was a Trap: The Lindsay Buziak Case

    The Showing Was a Trap: The Lindsay Buziak Case
    2026/10/28
    The Showing Was a Trap: The Lindsay Buziak Case

    On February 2, 2008, Lindsay Buziak, a 24 year old real estate agent, arrived at a million dollar home in Saanich, British Columbia, to show it to a couple she had never met. The appointment was a trap built specifically for her. Who was the woman with the strange foreign accent who called her personal cell number? Why was a burner phone bought months earlier, used only to lure Lindsay, then deactivated forever? And why did two killers leave behind no DNA, no fingerprints, and no motive anyone can prove?

    In this episode, we take the trap apart piece by piece: the fake buyers with the million dollar budget, the burner phone activated under the false name Paulo Rodriguez, the second phone used only to check its voicemail, the half built cul de sac with an escape route onto a main road, and the unidentified couple seen walking up to the house, including the blond woman in the distinctively patterned dress that remains the best public clue in the case. We follow the timeline minute by minute, the forensic void that stunned investigators, the police clearing of Jason Zailo and his family, the drug bust retaliation theory and who owns it, the FBI and RCMP task force, and the father who has walked for justice every February 2 for eighteen years.

    Person: Lindsay Elizabeth Buziak, 24, RE/MAX real estate agent
    Date: February 2, 2008
    Location: 1702 De Sousa Place, Saanich, Greater Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
    Case: Murder by stabbing during a staged home showing; unsolved
    Legal status: No arrests, no charges, no named suspects; investigation open and active with Saanich Police, RCMP and FBI; a related defamation lawsuit is unproven civil litigation, not a criminal finding

    - The late January call that made Lindsay uneasy and the instincts she voiced
    - The burner phone tradecraft revealed by a 2020 records disclosure
    - The clean crime scene and the reconstructed escape onto Torquay Drive
    - Cleared by police: the boyfriend, the alibi footage and the polygraph
    - Theories with owners: the drug bust link, the online confession, the internet accusations

    The Lindsay Buziak case remains one of Canada's most disturbing unsolved murders, and the question was never how the trap worked. It was why it was built for her.

    To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com.

    © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
    This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: business@obomedia.com.
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    20 分
  • Her Car Drove Away Without Her: The Dorothy Jane Scott Case

    Her Car Drove Away Without Her: The Dorothy Jane Scott Case
    2026/10/26
    Her Car Drove Away Without Her: The Dorothy Jane Scott Case

    On May 28, 1980, Dorothy Jane Scott, a 32-year-old single mother, drove a coworker with a black widow spider bite to the UCI Medical Center in Orange, California. Shortly after midnight she walked out to get her car, and minutes later her white Toyota came speeding past her waiting coworkers, high beams blinding them, driver unseen. She was never seen alive again. Who had been calling her at work for months, reciting her own days back to her? Why did the man who confessed to a newspaper editor know about the spider bite and her scarf when neither had been made public? And who kept calling her mother for four years after she vanished?

    In this episode, we follow the Dorothy Jane Scott case from the anonymous calls that alternated between love and death threats, through the dead rose on her windshield and the karate lessons she started a week before she was taken, to the burning car in a Santa Ana alley, the June 1980 newsroom call ("I killed her. I killed Dorothy Scott."), and the construction site in Anaheim Hills where her remains surfaced in 1984 beside a turquoise ring and a watch stopped at 12:30.

    Person: Dorothy Jane Scott, 32, secretary and single mother
    Date: Disappeared shortly after midnight, May 29, 1980
    Location: Orange, Santa Ana and Anaheim, California
    Case: Stalking, abduction and murder; remains found August 6, 1984
    Legal status: Unsolved; no arrests in 46 years, open cold case with the Orange County Sheriff's Department

    - Months of stalking calls a decade before stalking was a crime
    - The hospital trip nobody planned and the fork it creates: followed, or known
    - The confessor who knew unpublished details, and the contradiction Pam Head exposed
    - Four years of untraceable calls to a grieving mother
    - The theories, each with an owner, and the suspect never named

    The Dorothy Jane Scott case remains one of America's most chilling unsolved stalking murders, and the voice she almost recognized has never been identified.

    To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com.

    © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
    This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: business@obomedia.com.
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    20 分
  • Her Children Vanished. Police Studied Her Makeup: The Alice Crimmins Case

    Her Children Vanished. Police Studied Her Makeup: The Alice Crimmins Case
    2026/10/25
    Her Children Vanished. Police Studied Her Makeup: The Alice Crimmins Case

    On July 14, 1965, Alice Crimmins opened her children's bedroom door in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, and found two empty beds. Her daughter Missy, 4, was found strangled in a vacant lot that same afternoon; her son Eddie Jr., 5, was found five days later, so decomposed that no cause of death was ever determined. Why did the lead detective judge the mother's clothes and makeup before any evidence existed? Why did police drop the father as a suspect over a refused polygraph? And how did three years of wiretaps, tails, and bugged motel rooms produce two convictions without a single piece of physical evidence?

    In this episode, we follow the Alice Crimmins case from a first-floor apartment on 72nd Drive through one of the longest surveillance operations ever aimed at a private citizen in New York, the recruited informant boyfriend, the anonymous 2 a.m. window witness, two trials, and the appeals ladder that dismantled almost everything the juries decided. This is the story of a prosecution built on a woman's private life instead of proof, and of two children the case forgot.

    Person: Alice Marie "Missy" Crimmins, 4, and Edmund "Eddie" Crimmins Jr., 5; their mother Alice Crimmins, 26
    Date: July 14, 1965
    Location: Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, New York
    Case: Double child death; strangulation confirmed only for Missy
    Legal status: Only one conviction survived, first-degree manslaughter for Missy, reinstated in 1975; the murder conviction for Eddie Jr. was dismissed in 1973 for insufficient evidence; Alice was paroled in 1977 and later vanished into private life

    - The custody fight, the Family Court inspection scheduled for the day the children vanished
    - Detective Piering's instant judgment and the polygraph that narrowed the case
    - Sophie Earomirski, Joseph Rorech, and two witnesses with documented credibility problems
    - The prosecutor's comment on her silence that overturned a conviction
    - The hitchhiker affidavit that was never disproven or credited

    Sixty years later, the killings of Missy and Eddie Crimmins remain essentially unsolved.

    To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com.

    © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
    This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: business@obomedia.com.
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    19 分
  • She Never Owned a Typewriter: The Lonely Hearts Killers

    She Never Owned a Typewriter: The Lonely Hearts Killers
    2026/10/23
    She Never Owned a Typewriter: The Lonely Hearts Killers

    In postwar America, lonely hearts clubs sold lists of widows to anyone with a stamp, and Raymond Fernandez read those lists as a catalog of victims. With Martha Beck posing as his devoted sister, he courted women by mail, drained their savings, and vanished. Then, in January 1949, the con stopped being a con. Why did a typed letter signed "Janet L. Fay" instantly tell her family she was dead? And how did a woman who joined the scheme as a jealous facade end up holding the hammer?

    In this episode, we take apart the romance fraud machine of the Lonely Hearts Killers letter by letter: the ads, the "Charles Martin" persona laced with religion, the fake sister down the hall, and the cement floors poured over Janet Fay in Queens and over Delphine and Rainelle Downing in a Michigan basement. We follow the family detectives who spotted the typewriter lie, the neighbors whose welfare check ended the spree, Governor Dewey's phone calls that moved two confessed killers from a state with no death penalty into the reach of the electric chair, and a 44-day Bronx trial that doubled as a tabloid circus, including the documented press cruelty toward Martha Beck's body.

    People: Raymond Fernandez, 36, and Martha Beck, 30, the "Lonely Hearts Killers"
    Victims: Janet Fay, 66, Albany, NY; Delphine Downing and daughter Rainelle, Byron Center, MI; Jane Thompson (Spain, 1947, unresolved)
    Dates: Spree 1947 to 1949; trial summer 1949
    Location: Albany and Valley Stream, NY; Grand Rapids, MI
    Legal status: Convicted of Janet Fay's murder only; both executed at Sing Sing on March 8, 1951; the 17 to 20 victim figure remains unproven suspicion

    - How the lonely hearts con worked, step by step
    - The night in Valley Stream when the "sister" became a killer
    - The extradition deal built around an electric chair
    - One lawyer for two defendants who each blamed the other
    - The Honeymoon Killers and the case's long life on film

    The Lonely Hearts Killers turned love letters into a weapon, and the mailbox was the real crime scene.

    To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com.

    © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
    This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: business@obomedia.com.
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    20 分
  • Catch Me Before I Kill More: The Lipstick Killer Case

    Catch Me Before I Kill More: The Lipstick Killer Case
    2026/10/22
    Catch Me Before I Kill More: The Lipstick Killer Case

    A message scrawled in red lipstick on a dead woman's wall. A six-year-old girl taken from her bed. And a seventeen-year-old college student who confessed, then spent sixty-five years insisting he never killed anyone. Did William Heirens really murder three people in postwar Chicago? Why did another man confess to the Degnan murder and simply walk away? And what happens to the truth when a confession is extracted with a drug, a spinal tap, and six days without a lawyer?

    In this episode, we follow the Lipstick Killer case twice: first as Chicago lived it in 1946, then under a modern forensic audit. We move from the murders of Josephine Ross and Frances Brown to the abduction of little Suzanne Degnan, through the largest manhunt in the city's history, to the arrest of a brilliant student burglar and the six days of interrogation that produced the most disputed confession in Chicago history.

    Person: William George Heirens, "The Lipstick Killer"
    Date: June 1945 to January 1946; arrested June 26, 1946
    Location: Chicago, Illinois, North Side (Edgewater and Uptown)
    Case: Murders of Josephine Ross (43), Frances Brown (early 30s), and Suzanne Degnan (6)
    Legal status: Convicted by guilty plea in 1946; three consecutive life terms; never exonerated; died in custody March 5, 2012, after 65 years, the longest-serving prisoner in Illinois

    - The lipstick message on the wall: "For heaven's sake catch me before I kill more," and the allegation a reporter may have written it
    - Sodium pentothal, a spinal tap without anesthesia, and a vanished transcript: the interrogation methods no court would allow today
    - The Chicago Tribune's invented front-page confession, published before Heirens ever confessed
    - A fingerprint announced to the press, a handwriting match later experts rejected, and a prosecutor who admitted how thin the case was
    - Richard Russell Thomas: the drifter who confessed to killing Suzanne Degnan and was released

    The Lipstick Killer case never got a trial, and that is exactly why it never ended. Press play and judge the Lipstick Killer confession for yourself.

    To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com.

    © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
    This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: business@obomedia.com.
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    18 分
  • The Banging Inside the Container: The Todd Kohlhepp Case

    The Banging Inside the Container: The Todd Kohlhepp Case
    2026/10/21
    The Banging Inside the Container: The Todd Kohlhepp Case

    On November 3, 2016, deputies searching a fenced 96 acre property near Woodruff, South Carolina, heard banging from inside a locked metal shipping container. They cut five padlocks and found Kala Brown, chained by the neck, alive after 65 days. The land belonged to a successful real estate broker named Todd Kohlhepp. How did a registered sex offender build a brokerage, buy nearly a hundred acres, and kill seven people across 13 years without anyone noticing? And how did the woman he chained in that box end up solving Spartanburg County's most infamous cold case?

    In this episode, we tell the Todd Kohlhepp story in reverse: from the rescue of Kala Brown back through the murder of Charlie Carver, the killings of Johnny and Meagan Coxie, the chilling Amazon reviews he posted while their bodies lay buried on his land, the unsolved 2003 Superbike Motorsports massacre in Chesnee that he confessed to with details only the killer would know, and all the way back to Arizona in 1986, when a 15 year old Kohlhepp kidnapped and raped a 14 year old neighbor and served 14 years in prison.

    Person: Todd Christopher Kohlhepp; seven confirmed victims across 2003 and 2015 to 2016
    Date: November 6, 2003 and December 2015 to November 3, 2016
    Location: Chesnee and Woodruff, Spartanburg County, South Carolina
    Case: Serial murder, kidnapping, and criminal sexual conduct; survivor rescued from a shipping container
    Legal status: Pleaded guilty May 26, 2017 to seven murders and related charges; seven consecutive life terms plus 60 years, no parole, appeal rights waived; a 2025 investigation exposed his attempts to sell merchandise and autographs from prison

    - The rescue: cellphone pings, five padlocks, and a survivor who started solving murders
    - The Superbike massacre: four victims and 13 years without answers
    - The Amazon reviews: a confession hiding in plain sight
    - Why prosecutors took the death penalty off the table
    - Kala Brown's agency: the survivor a victim's widow called "the real hero"

    The Todd Kohlhepp case shows how a serial killer hid behind success, and how one survivor ended it.

    To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com.

    © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
    This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: business@obomedia.com.
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    19 分
  • He Told Tourists He Was a New York Times Reporter: The Christian Longo Case

    He Told Tourists He Was a New York Times Reporter: The Christian Longo Case
    2026/10/19
    He Told Tourists He Was a New York Times Reporter: The Christian Longo Case

    In nine days of December 2001, divers on the Oregon coast recovered four bodies from the water: MaryJane Longo, 34, and her children Zachery, 4, Sadie, 3, and Madison, 2. While they searched, husband and father Christian Longo was in a cabana in Tulum, Mexico, on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, introducing himself to strangers as Michael Finkel of The New York Times, a real journalist who had just been fired for fabricating a story. How does a Starbucks employee drowning in fraud end up impersonating a disgraced reporter on a Mexican beach?

    In this episode, we follow the counterfeit life of Christian Longo from a Kingdom Hall parking lot in Michigan to an upscale condo on Yaquina Bay he could never afford: the forged checks and stolen trailers, the congregation that shunned him, the pawned wedding ring, the twelve-hundred-dollar rent that equaled his entire monthly pay, and the mid-December night when the performance ran out of money. Then the strangest chapter in modern true crime: the real Michael Finkel writing to the man who stole his name, a correspondence that became the book and film True Story, and a trial where Longo tried to hand his own crime to his murdered wife.

    Person: MaryJane Longo, 34; Zachery, 4; Sadie, 3; Madison, 2
    Date: Mid-December 2001, bodies recovered December 19 to 27, 2001
    Location: Newport and Waldport, Lincoln County, Oregon
    Case: Family murder; suitcases in Yaquina Bay, children in Lint Slough
    Legal status: Longo pleaded guilty to two murders and was convicted of the other two in April 2003 and sentenced to death; in December 2022 Oregon commuted all 17 death row sentences, and he now serves life without the possibility of parole

    - The fraud spiral that funded a picture-perfect image
    - Nine days of divers during Christmas week in a small coastal town
    - The Tulum arrest, 80 miles south of Cancun, in January 2002
    - The Finkel letters: two fabricators studying each other
    - The 2022 commutation and a family's second wound

    The Christian Longo case is the story of an impostor whose last stolen identity made him famous, and of the four real people he erased.

    To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com.

    © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
    This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: business@obomedia.com.
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    19 分