On the morning of September 7th, 1988, a seventeen-year-old boy called 911 from a house on the Long Island Sound and said his parents had been attacked. Within hours, before Martin began to process what had happened to his parents, he was sitting in a police interrogation room, being told, over and over, that he was the one who did it.

This is the story of Seymour and Arlene Tankleff. And it's the story of their son, Martin Tankleff, who lost both of them to a single act of violence in his own home. Then, in a set of horrifying circumstances, he lost the next eighteen years of his own life to a system that decided, almost immediately, that grief and guilt looked the same on a teenager's face. Instead of being known as Martin, he was known as inmate number 90T3844 for nearly two decades.

For a full list of source materials, please visit: www.preytellpodcast.com/episodes/wrongful-conviction-of-martin-tankleff

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This episode covers one of the more haunting missing persons cases in recent California history. It’s a case that took years to be classified as a homicide, and it raises hard questions about what happens when investigators commit to the wrong theory early, and don't let go of it.

The McStay Family disappeared on February 4th, 2010. Their bodies were eventually found in the Mojave Desert in 2013. The public ran rampant with speculation and wild theories. But the reason for the family’s murder was much closer to home.

For a full list of source materials, please visit: www.preytellpodcast.com/episodes/mcstay-family-murders

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On October 5th, 2004, at just after 11 o’clock at night, a cleaning crew finished up and headed out into the parking lot of the medical office building they were cleaning in Tucson, Arizona. They noticed a car that had been sitting in the parking lot for hours with the engine off and the lights off.

Inside was David Brian Stidham. Everyone who loved him called him Brian. He was 37-years-old, and less than an hour earlier he was standing in front of a room full of medical students at the University of Arizona teaching them about pediatric eye care.

Today's episode is dark, but this isn't really a story about a murder, a hitman, a stabbing, or even really about the man who ordered the murder. This is a story about what happens when the people whose entire job it is to protect the public fail to do exactly that. Think doctors bound by an oath, and prosecutors bound by the law.

For a full list of source materials, please visit: www.preytellpodcast.com/episodes/murder-of-brian-stidham

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Two girls. Two different states. Two families who reported them missing quickly, called every hotline, stood in front of every camera that would point their way, and yet as of the day I'm recording this, neither one has come home.

I usually give you one case per episode. Today, I'm doing something different. I'm giving you two. Not because they're connected. They’re not connected as far as anyone knows. We’re talking different states, different years, and different circumstances. I'm putting them in the same episode because neither one has gotten the coverage they deserve.

The first case is a twenty-one-year-old woman named Heaven Desiree McGee, who disappeared from Stockton, California, in January of 2025. The FBI reportedly believes she's a victim of human trafficking.

The other case is a thirteen-year-old girl named Ja'Niyah McMichael, who disappeared from Gary, Indiana, in August of 2024. Investigators believe she may be the victim of foul play.

For a full list of source materials, please visit: https://preytellpodcast.com/episodes/disappearance-of-heaven-desiree-mcgee

For a full list of source materials, please visit: https://preytellpodcast.com/episodes/disappearance-of-janiyah-mcmichael

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For more information on the podcast or to suggest a case, visit: www.preytellpodcast.com

It's just after 4 a.m. on February 13th, 2022, in New York City's Chinatown. Most of the neighborhood is fast asleep. Somewhere on Chrystie Street, a young woman gets out of a cab. She's only three minutes from her apartment door.

She has no idea that a man has been watching her. And she certainly has no idea that he's about to follow her through the front door of her building, up six flights of stairs, and into her apartment.

Less than two hours later, Christina Yuna Lee was pronounced dead.

For a full list of source materials, please visit: https://preytellpodcast.com/episodes/murder-of-christina-yuna-lee

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Sixty-nine-year-old Warren Barnes was from Grand Junction, Colorado. On the night of February 27th, 2021, while he slept in a small encampment he kept under a bridge close to downtown, a nineteen-year-old drove around looking for someone to murder.

In the Murder of Warren Barnes, I’ll tell you who Warren was before anyone knew his name as a headline about a beheading, and what it says about society that a teenager could look at a sleeping, unhoused man and assume no one would miss him.

For a full list of source materials, please visit: https://preytellpodcast.com/episodes/murder-of-warren-barnes

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This episode is the extraordinary survival story of Mary Vincent. Picture a two-lane highway outside of Modesto, California. It's late September, 1978, and a girl is walking down the center of that highway. Mary is only 15-years-old. She’s naked, and she’s covered in blood with her arms pointed straight up to the sky.

She might only be a teenager, but she instinctively knows that if she doesn't keep her arms elevated, she is going to bleed to death on the highway. Only a few hours earlier, a man used a hatchet to cut off both of her forearms and then threw her into a ravine to die.

Her attacker, Lawrence Singleton, hoped Mary would die in the canyon he threw her down. Her story is about resilience as much as survival.

For a full list of source materials, please visit: https://preytellpodcast.com/episodes/survival-of-mary-vincent

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Sarm Heslop was a native of Southampton, England. The port city saw many people come and go so perhaps it was natural that Sarm pivoted from her initial career in aviation as a flight attendant to living and working on a luxury boat in St. John’s US Virgin Islands.

That pivot would result in her disappearance. On the night of March 7, 2021, Sarm Heslop was 41 years old, living on a boat with a man she had known for seven months. She was two hundred feet from the St. John shoreline. By all accounts she was healthy. She was an experienced swimmer. And she was level-headed, according to family and friends.

She hasn’t been seen since that night.

For a full list of source materials, please visit: https://www.preytellpodcast.com/episodes/disappearance-of-sarm-heslop

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For more information on the podcast or to suggest a case, visit: www.preytellpodcast.com