This week Shane handed the pick to Josh, with one rule: choose a documentary worth talking through start to finish. Josh chose Trust Me: The False Prophet on Netflix, and it turned into one of the heaviest, most gripping conversations the bunker has had.

A heads up before you press play. This episode deals with a polygamous sect and the abuse of children. We handle it with care, we keep the focus on the survivors, and we do not sensationalize what happened to them. Everyone named as a perpetrator here has been convicted.

The story centers on Samuel Bateman, a man who grew up a minor figure inside the FLDS community of Short Creek on the Arizona and Utah border. When the imprisoned prophet Warren Jeffs banned his followers from marrying or having children, Bateman saw an opening. He told the community Jeffs had died, declared himself the chosen successor, and started granting the one thing his followers had been denied. Within a few years he had built a small faction and accumulated more than twenty wives, many of them children.

What makes this documentary different is how it was made. A cult expert named Christine Marie and her husband, a videographer, moved into the community, earned Bateman's trust, and recorded him from the inside while feeding everything to the FBI. The camera was the weapon. Shane, Kim, and Josh walk through the whole timeline: the undercover footage, the moment a stranger spotted small fingers poking through the slats of a trailer on a Flagstaff street, the federal arrest staged inside a warehouse, and the kidnapping Bateman ordered from jail that sent eight girls across state lines before police recovered them.

We also cover what the series could not, because it happened after filming wrapped. Bateman is now serving fifty years. Eleven of his adult followers have been convicted, one of them sentenced to life for handing over his own daughters. And we sit with the hardest questions the story raises. Why did the children who were removed break free while many of the adults stayed loyal? What do we make of a couple who deceived a man for a year to stop him? And what does it mean that he still calls his followers every day from prison?

This one is sobering, but it is also a story about ordinary people who refused to look away. Come sit with us in the bunker for a serious one.

What you'll hear in this episode:

How Warren Jeffs's prison decree created the opening Bateman exploited

The couple who infiltrated the cult and handed the FBI its case

The trailer stop, the warehouse arrest, and the kidnapping from jail

The convictions and fifty year sentence that came after the cameras stopped

Shane handed the reins to Kim for this one. The challenge was simple: pick a documentary off a streaming service, and the gang talks the whole thing through. Kim picked The Jewel Thief on Hulu, and honestly, it is one of the most jaw-dropping true crime stories you will ever hear.

The gang investigates the life of Gerald Blanchard, a Canadian thief who treated high security like a personal insult. Adopted, raised in poverty in Omaha, dyslexic and bullied, he started by forging receipts and returning stolen electronics for cash, and he never really stopped climbing. By the time he peaked, money was not even the point anymore. As one detective put it, he had a genuine compulsion to beat the system.

The centerpiece is the crime that made him famous: in 1998 he walked into Schoenbrunn Palace in Vienna and swapped a priceless imperial diamond star, the Sisi Star, for a replica he bought in the gift shop. Or did he parachute onto the roof from a small plane in the dark, like he claims? A parachute was found near the palace. The director spent years trying to verify the story and could not. That uncertainty is part of the fun, and Shane, Kim, and Josh dig right into it.

From there the gang follows Blanchard through a bank heist so elaborate he built a full replica of the target room to rehearse, mounted handles on the drywall so he could pass through the walls, and beat the bank's high-security locks by loosening the screws that held them in place. We get into the international fraud ring run by a shadowy figure known only as The Boss, the Cairo ATM scheme his crew pulled off in disguise, and the small, almost silly mistake that finally brought the whole thing down. We talk through the eight year sentence that should have been a hundred and sixty, the deal that kept all seven of his accomplices out of prison, the priceless jewel he hid in his grandmother's basement for nine years, and where Blanchard has landed since.

Along the way Shane, Kim, and Josh wrestle with the part that makes this story stick. Nobody got hurt, which is exactly why it plays like a comedy, and the detectives who caught him ended up touring the country praising how brilliant he was. Is that admiration earned, or is celebrating a thief part of the problem? And if a man can rewrite his own legend at will, does it even matter what actually happened on that palace roof?

Pull up a chair in the bunker. No ghosts this week, just one of the strangest, most charming criminals of the modern era, and a conversation about why we cannot stop being fascinated by him.

What you'll hear in this episode:

How a bullied, dyslexic kid from Omaha became a master thief

The Sisi Star heist, and the parachute story nobody can prove

The bank job he rehearsed in a full-scale replica room

The eight year sentence, the bargaining chip, and where he is today

The Michigan Dogman has claw marks, a police report, grainy film footage, and decades of eyewitness accounts. It also has a birth certificate: April 1, 1987. This week Shane brings the gang a mystery about how legends get made, and a radio prank that refused to stay a joke.

Steve Cook, a DJ and production man at WTCM in Traverse City, needed an April Fools bit. So he wrote "The Legend, " a spoken-word song over a cheap keyboard, credited to a singer who did not exist named Bob Farley. Morning host Jack O'Malley slipped it into rotation with no setup and no warning. Within an hour, the phone lines lit up. Listeners were not calling to laugh. They were calling to report their own encounters, including one man who swore he had seen the creature back in 1937 while fishing the Muskegon River and had never told a soul. Cook later admitted to the Detroit Free Press that he made the whole thing up from his own imagination. It did not matter. "The Legend" became the station's most requested song within a month, and Cook eventually cataloged more than one hundred reports, selling the song on cassette and donating the money to animal shelters.

The detail Shane could not shake: the song invented its own history. It placed the first sighting in 1887, exactly one hundred years before it aired, with eleven lumberjacks at a Wexford County logging camp, and it set a pattern of sightings in years ending in seven. Yet no newspaper, diary, or logging camp record from before 1987 describing a Michigan dog man has ever surfaced. Not from believers, not from skeptics, not from anyone.

The gang investigates what grew around the prank: Robert Fortney's black dog with blue eyes near Paris, Michigan, a story whose date drifts between 1937 and 1938 depending on the telling; the July 1987 cabin near Luther, Michigan, clawed up badly enough that DNR officers and the county sheriff investigated and Paul Harvey carried the story nationally; and the infamous Gable Film, the shaky footage that anchored MonsterQuest's series finale until a man named Mike confessed on camera, ghillie suit, coat-hanger ears, and all.

So, case closed? Not quite. Josh wants to know what separates a dogman from a werewolf, and Shane plays devil's advocate: maybe a Dogman really is out there, and the timing is one strange coincidence. Black dog legends reach back through Scottish and Irish lore, and truckers still trade their own versions. Why does this one keep finding believers?

Also in the bunker: a snack box from Thailand turns chaotic the moment the gang meets durian, a fruit so foul that some hotels in Thailand ban it outright. Zoinks. Kim tastes it anyway, and the bunker may never smell the same.

What you'll hear in this episode:

How a 1987 WTCM radio prank invented the Michigan Dogman

The Luther cabin attack that made the papers and a police report

The Gable Film hoax and the on-camera confession that ended it

A durian wafer taste test that nearly cleared the bunker