On January 31, 2002, Robert Roberson carried his two-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, into the emergency room in Palestine, Texas. She was limp and blue, and she had been sick all week. He said she had fallen out of bed in the night. The nurses thought he seemed too calm, and the detective said his story didn’t match the evidence. Nikki died the next day.

Doctors called it shaken baby syndrome. Within a year a jury had convicted Roberson of capital murder, and he was sentenced to death.

Twenty years later the case looks different. New experts point to pneumonia, the medicine she was given, and a fall. The State’s experts still stand by abuse. Roberson was later diagnosed with autism, and the detective who arrested him now says he didn’t see Robert for who he was. In October 2024, days before his execution date, a Texas House committee stepped in. A year later the state’s highest criminal court stopped the execution and sent the case back to East Texas.

This episode walks through what the jury heard, what has changed since, and why some of the people who were most sure in 2002 aren’t anymore. As of October 2026, Robert Roberson is still waiting.

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Monday night, the fourth of June, 1945. Park Avenue at Forty-Seventh Street, the Hotel Marguery, where the people who live there don't visit; they live there, in suites, with maids. Two men in soft dark hats step into an elevator, and one of them says one word: "Seven."

Up on the seventh floor, in apartment 705, a red-haired heiress is lying in bed. Her husband, Albert Langford, sixty-three, a textile man, is sitting at the foot of it, reading the paper. Then their little black Pekingese starts to growl at a door they never use. Two strangers are out there, and they want to see her about Raphael Diaz, a Metropolitan Opera tenor who has been dead for a year and a half. She tells Albert to send them away. He goes back out to the foyer, and she hears a thud, and a groan.

Within days, New York had everything it wanted except an answer: a widow who said one age and was another, a silent film star, the most famous face of 1906, a singer under a borrowed name, a self-styled chief and a self-styled baroness, and a little gift book with more than two hundred names in it and a sum of money beside every one. The papers chased all of it, and somewhere along the way they lost sight of the man on the foyer floor. This is his story, built from the newspapers of the time and the records that survive, and it's about what a city looked at instead of him, and the name a district attorney finally said out loud, five years later.

Content note: this episode describes a shooting and a death, and the investigation that followed. Nothing in it is graphic, but if that's not for you today, sit this one out. There'll be another one.

ON THE BLOG: Everything I found for this episode is at Section29.com: the newspaper pages from 1945 to 1950, the photographs, and a floor plan of the apartment that a newspaper artist drew in 1950.

Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio.

MUSIC: Music by TrackTribe, copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com

FIND THE SHOW: Blog: Section29.com · YouTube: Forgotten True Crime · Facebook: Forgotten True Crime

Subscribe wherever you're listening so you know when the next one drops. And if this episode got you, leave a review and share it with somebody who loves true crime. For an independent show, that's worth more than you'd think.

Two women and a girl, killed in one Chicago neighborhood in the space of seven months.

On June 5, 1945, Josephine Ross was murdered in her flat at 4108 North Kenmore Avenue. Within a week, everyone held for questioning had been let go. Six months later, on December 10, Frances Brown, a former WAVE just home from the Navy, was killed at the Pine Crest hotel on Pine Grove Avenue. On her bedroom wall, someone had written thirteen words in her own lipstick, begging to be caught. By morning, the papers had a name for a man nobody had seen: the Lipstick Killer.

By the first week of January, no one had been charged with either murder. Then, in the small hours of Monday, January 7, 1946, two miles up the same street, a six-year-old girl was taken from her bed.

This is Suzanne Degnan.

Photographs, front pages and the full source list for all three episodes are at Section29.com.

#TrueCrime #ForgottenTrueCrime #LipstickKiller #Chicago #ColdCase

On the morning of December 10, 1945, a maid at the Pine Crest hotel on Chicago's North Side saw a door standing open and heard a radio playing. Inside, someone had written a message in lipstick on the wall, begging the police to catch him before he killed again.

The woman in that apartment was Frances Brown, 33. She grew up in Richmond, Indiana, played the bass fiddle in her high school orchestra, served three years in the WAVES, and had been home from the war for less than three months.

Her killer got a name from the newspapers almost overnight. The investigation got the same police captain who had worked the Josephine Ross case six months earlier, a crime lab, banner headlines and a long list of men questioned and let go. Then, week by week, her story moved further back in the paper.

Built from the December 1945 newspaper record, this episode follows Frances Brown from Richmond to the Pine Crest, and the city's hunt for her killer from page one to page twelve. By January, she was a single paragraph in a small box on someone else's front page.

Episode two of three.

Content warning: this episode describes a violent murder.

Chicago, June 1945. A woman is murdered in her apartment on the North Side of the city — and when they find her, one of her hands is closed around several short black hairs. She fought him. Somebody taped the wounds on her throat closed afterwards and left the tape to dry, rinsed her clothes in the bathtub, and went out the back way, down the fire escape, between noon and one o'clock. Nothing was taken.

Her name was Josephine Ross. She was forty-three years old. She had been married three times and divorced twice, and she had two daughters. The police worked her murder for eight days — one captain, one coroner, and not one other officer we can name. Then it went quiet. Six months later, when the next woman was killed, the city built a task force. It did not go back for Josephine Ross. This is episode one of three, and it is about the woman everybody forgot first.

Everything here is built from the record — the death certificates, the census pages, the coroner's file, and the newspapers of 1945. Every source, photograph and document in the case file is at Section29.com. New to the show? Hit subscribe so the next two episodes find you. And if it was worth your time, a review helps more than you know — Forgotten True Crime is one person doing the research, the writing, the recording and the editing. AI is only used to enhance audio quality of what is recorded.

Updated October 1st 2026.

On Wednesday morning, about an hour before the State of Tennessee was set to execute Christa Pike, a federal appeals court stopped it. This is the story of how she got there, and of the nineteen-year-old girl thirty years of headlines mostly forgot.

It's a Thursday night in January of 1995, and May Martinez's phone is ringing in Orange Park, Florida. It's her daughter, Colleen, calling from Knoxville, Tennessee, five hundred miles up the interstate, where she's living at a Job Corps center in an old Holiday Inn on Dale Avenue. The call keeps breaking up. So May hangs up and calls her back.

Colleen's gone out.

At about eight o'clock that night, four students signed out at the front desk of that building and walked off toward the University of Tennessee. A couple of hours later, three of those names came back in.

This is Colleen's story, told from where her mother stood: a bad phone connection, a sign-out book, a trial, a deal the jury never heard about, three kids from one building sent to three very different places, and thirty years of waiting for the rest of that phone call.

Recorded on September 30, 2026, the day of the stay. Things may have moved since.

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Content note: this episode describes the killing of a nineteen-year-old woman, quotes a jailhouse letter in crude language, and refers to claims of childhood sexual abuse made in court filings. I don't dwell on any of it, but some details are hard to hear. If that's not for you today, sit this one out. There'll be another one.

ON THE BLOG — Everything I found for this episode is posted at Section29.com: the court opinions, a map of the walk from Dale Avenue to the university, and a timeline of the whole case, from that phone call to this week. There's a good deal there I didn't have room for.

IF YOU KNOW SOMETHING — If you knew Colleen, or you were at the Knoxville Job Corps center on Dale Avenue in 1994 or 1995, or you know what happened to that front-desk sign-out book or the Knoxville police file, I'd love to hear from you. Reach out at Section29.com. And if you have a forgotten case you'd like me to dig into, send it along. I'm always looking for the next one.

A NOTE ON THE AUDIO — I narrate every episode of this show myself. I use AI tools in the edit to clean that narration up: levels, noise, the rough edges you get recording in a room that isn't a studio. The voice is mine and the read is mine. The software just makes it easier to listen to.

MUSIC — Music by TrackTribe, copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com

FIND THE SHOW — Blog: Section29.com · YouTube: Section29 · Facebook: Forgotten True Crime

Subscribe wherever you're listening so you know when the next one drops. And if this episode got you, leave a review and share it with somebody who loves true crime. For an independent show, that's worth more than you'd think.

Half past two on a Monday afternoon, the third of March, 1952, in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Augustus Shoals comes home and finds his wife sitting on the side of the bed with her head down. She tells him what his cousin did that morning — and the cousin, on the other side of the wall, hears every word of it, and calls through the boards: "If you fool with me, I will take my old scatter gun and shoot you through the wall." Shoals answers him: "No, don't do that, Pannell. Meet me out doors."

The house is three rooms in a line, split down the middle by one-by-twelve boards and paper, with two doors that open onto the same yard. Pannell is sixty and over six feet tall. Shoals is fifty-nine that day, arthritic since 1947, and out of work. The two men are cousins, and they have known each other all their lives.

This is the story of a killing the record has argued about ever since — the gun, the hour, the bullet, and the spelling of the dead man's name — of the wife who was in that house from ten in the morning until the officers came for her, and of where it ended sixteen years later, somewhere nobody in that courtroom would ever have guessed.

Content note: this episode carries a killing, a courtroom and a prison. It also quotes 1952 newspapers in the language they were printed in — including the word they used for these men in every headline. When you hear that word, that is 1952 talking, not me. Nothing in it is graphic, but if that's not for you today, sit this one out. There'll be another one.

The case file — the front pages, the court opinion, the documents — is at Section29.com.

Blog: Section29.com · YouTube: Forgotten True Crime · Facebook: Forgotten True Crime

Subscribe wherever you're listening so you know when the next one drops — and if this episode got you, leave a review and share it with somebody who loves true crime. For an independent show, that's worth more than you'd think.

Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio.

Music by TrackTribe — copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com

On a Monday evening in November 1936, a young woman carried a basket of clean laundry up the steps of a little clapboard house on South Waco Avenue in Wichita, Kansas, and knocked on her grandfather's door. Nobody answered. She knocked again on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday, and by then she had decided the old man was behind his curtains, laughing at her. On Thursday her father snapped the latch. George Washington Wiant was on the floor of the next room, fully clothed, on his left side near the wall, and the newspapers had been piling up on the porch for three days.

Seventeen years later, a New York tabloid retold the case under a headline that did all the work for the reader: Perfect Candidate for Murder. An old man, alone, bad-tempered, separated from his wife, eight housekeepers hired and none of them stayed, a flock of relatives waiting to inherit, and money — everybody in the neighborhood knew — hidden somewhere in that house. A police chief with three conclusions and a bloody footprint on the linoleum. A lie detector. A woman with a briefcase and a fur coat. And a hired hand from a farm south of town who went in front of a Wichita jury twice, once with the State asking for his life.

But the coroner said something about the night George Wiant died that changes what that knock on Monday evening meant. The county clerk said something about the estate that takes the paper's motive apart in a single line. And a jury that had put a boot on a footprint and voted ten to two to acquit talked itself back into a deadlock on three words that became the title of this episode. Then we went and found him ourselves: three censuses, a farm in Sumner County, a house he owned outright, a wife the paper never names, and a life that starts with a fatherless one-year-old in Ohio and runs longer than the newspaper ever knew. A beating death, a description of a body, and a district court trial. Listener discretion advised.