In October 2002, the Washington DC area woke up to something it had never felt before. People were being shot at gas stations, in parking lots, at bus stops, at a school...apparently at random, by someone nobody could see, in a car nobody could find. Police were sprinting between active scenes. Schools canceled outdoor activities. People crouched at gas pumps trying to make themselves smaller targets. Senators got police escorts to the Capitol.

Ten people would be killed in three weeks. Three more wounded. And almost none of it was random.

In today's spine-chilling episode, Ed walks through the case of the DC Sniper, including: the months of seemingly disconnected shootings across six states before the DC attacks began, the investigation that kept missing the blue Caprice that was hiding in plain sight, the tarot card left at a middle school, and the motive reveal that reframes everything.

Ed also shares something personal: in October 2002, he was a first-day intern at Forensic Files... and the DC Sniper case was his very first assignment. He watched it unfold, frame by frame, on two hours of raw news tape. It's what drew him into the true crime industry.

In post-Soviet Siberia, women were disappearing from the streets of Angarsk. Their bodies turned up in forests and industrial wastelands, mutilated beyond recognition. The weapons changed every time, but the tire tracks at the scenes were always from the same vehicle: a Lada Niva, the standard-issue Soviet police truck.

The man driving it was Mikhail Popkov: junior police lieutenant, champion biathlete, beloved neighbor, husband and father. His wife Elena, a fellow officer in the same department, called him a 'perfect husband and father.' His colleagues said he was the soul of every party. When women were attacked on his city's streets, he was often first on scene.

Because he was the one who had attacked them.

Popkov used his badge, his uniform, and the trust people place in law enforcement to lure women into his patrol vehicle on freezing Siberian nights. He killed them with weapons stolen from his own department's evidence room, varying the method each time to prevent investigators from finding a pattern. He then returned to work, attended briefings on his own murders, and offered his observations to his colleagues.

When a 15-year-old survivor picked him out of a photo lineup, his wife gave him an alibi. When biological evidence linked him to a victim, his wife gave him an alibi again. Investigators shelved the case. Popkov kept killing.

By the time a 3,500-officer DNA sweep finally caught him in 2012, Popkov had confessed to 87 murders, making him the most prolific serial killer in Russian recorded history. Some investigators believe the true number may be closer to 200. When a judge asked how many total murders he had committed, Popkov shrugged and said: 'I can't say exactly. I didn't write them down.'

Ed walks through the full story for the Who the Bleep Did I Marry block: the victims, the system failures, the jaw-dropping confession, and the impossible question Popkov's own daughter asked aloud while pregnant: would her child grow up to be a monster like him? She said she still didn't fully understand what her father was. And that she still loved him.

Researched & written by Sue Grice | Hosted by Ed Hydock | A Darkcast Network Production

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murderunscriptedpod@gmail.com | @murderunscripted

His 13-year-old son found a skull in the backyard. Herb Baumeister said it was from his father's medical collection. His wife believed him.

Over ten thousand human bone fragments were eventually recovered from Fox Hollow Farm — the 18-acre Indiana estate where Herb hosted family pool parties, ran a thrift store empire, and murdered at least eleven men, possibly twenty-five, while his wife and kids had no idea.

Melissa walks through one of the most disturbing cases in our "Who the Bleep Did I Marry?" block cases MU has ever covered — including the I-70 Strangler theory, the missing tapes, and the DNA work that is still identifying victims in 2026.