It’s hard to convict someone of murder without a body. Even if it’s plain to everyone with a lick of common sense that the victim is dead and this is the guy who killed her, a prosecutor is wary of going to trial without being able to say with absolute certainty, this person is dead, and we know because we have her body. This week’s story is about a killer whose crime was apparent almost immediately, but who dragged on the crumbling pretense of a normal life for long weeks afterwards, until the horrific results of his actions were uncovered.

Want to join us for grown-up summer camp? Katie and Whitney will be performing live along with the podcasts Scared to Death and Astonishing Legends at Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp 2026, Sept. 10-13. For tickets and more info, go to https://badmagicproductions.com AND...Tickets are on sale now for CrimeWave 2.0! Visit crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE to get your discount code for $100 off your cabin and a private meet-and-greet with us! The cruise is Feb. 8-12, 2027, from Ft. Lauderdale to the Bahamas.

Sources:

Diane Fanning, Gone Forever

https://inmate.tdcj.texas.gov/InmateSearch/reviewDetail.action?sid=07021839&tdcj=01218516&fullName=MCFARLAND%2CRICHARD+MARVIN

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Thanks to books and movies, and very occasionally real life, the idea of the genius killer has become pervasive. But most murderers are not dazzlingly creative schemers. If they have a plan at all, it’s usually simple and dumb—but unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean the plan will fail. This week’s story is about a man who got away with one murder, and then tried to repeat the trick almost exactly.

Registration is now open for CrimeWave 2.0! Visit crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE to get your discount code for $100 off your cabin and a private meet-and-greet with us! The cruise is Feb. 8-12, 2027.

If you want to see TCC live but would rather stay on dry land, come to Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp 2026, 9/10-13th in Equinunk, Pennsylvania. Visit badmagicproductions.com for full info and to buy tickets.

Sources:

Please Don’t Kill Mommy, Weinstein & Schumann

https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/triad/news/2018/12/13/prison-time-after-parole-for-man-who-strangled-wives-in-tubs

https://katv.com/news/nation-world/man-who-killed-two-of-his-wives-in-two-states-considered-for-parole

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Love is supposed to make you better. Your partner should push lift you up and make you want to improve yourself, improve life for you both. Sometimes, though, there are couples that do nothing but make each other worse. They become jealous, resentful, and cruel. Their relationship is a disgusting mire that sucks in the couple and everyone in their orbit. Everyone knows a couple like that. But today, we’re going to talk about a couple who committed one of the most heinous crimes we ever heard of to satisfy their own jealousy.

Registration is now open for CrimeWave 2.0! Visit crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE to get your discount code for $100 off your cabin and a private meet-and-greet with us! The cruise is Feb. 8-12, 2027.

Join us for Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp '26, September 10-13. Go to badmagicproductions.com for more details and to buy tickets. 

Sources:
How I Caught My Killer, Frenemies, S2E3, “Text, Lies, and Murder”
A Stranger In My Home, “Mean Girls”
HuffPost: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/brandy-stevens-rosine-murder_n_4065921
https://www.brandyrosine.com/blog

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In the cases we cover, there are types of relationship that frequently crop up between killer and victim, romantic partners or romantic rivals most of all. Sometimes, though, the relationship that is broken by murder is more shocking: a parent killing a child, or a child killing a parent. And sometimes that killer is still literally a child, someone you would never suspect to be capable of such brutal action. Case 1: The Murder of Jackie Bartlam. Case 2: The Murder of Gina Padilla. 

Tickets are on sale now for CrimeWave 2.0! Visit crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE to book your cabin, plus get $100 off and a private meet-and-greet with us! The cruise is from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida to Nassau, Bahamas, Feb. 8-12, 2027.

Sources:
https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/local-news/coronation-street-obsessed-killer-who-9828273 https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/daniel-bartlam-14-year-old-255698 https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/uk-world-news/chilling-story-coronation-street-obsessed-9289922 https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/02/teenager-daniel-bartlam-jailed-murder
A&E's "Killer Kids" S1E14, “A Scream & Banana Split” 
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-jul-23-me-58845-story.html https://www.cbsnews.com/news/2-guilty-of-iscream-i-murder/ https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-jul-02-me-52343-story.html

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Legendary Conservationist Steve Irwin said, “We don’t own the planet Earth, we belong to it. And we must share it with our wildlife.” It’s such a lovely sentiment. We have a responsibility to protect and care for creatures that can’t protect themselves. It’s something that almost every person on earth would agree with. But what happens when someone loves something so much they throttle the life out of it? What if one man’s selfish wants pushed him to sacrifice over 50 animals that he claimed to love? Heads-up: If you're really sensitive about harm to animals, you might want to skip this one. 

Tickets are on sale now for the CrimeWave 2.0 TRUE CRIME CRUISE, Feb. 8-12, 2027! Visit crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE to get your discount code for $100 off your cabin and a private meet-and-greet with us! 

Sources:
https://ohiodnr.gov/discover-and-learn/animals/mammals/coyote
http://esquire.com/news-politics/a12653/zanesville-0312/
https://www.gq.com/story/terry-thompson-ohio-zoo-massacre-chris-heath-gq-february-2012?fbclid=IwY2xjawP13ERleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEe-ekW_BZLa5McRg9DVSSyZ50zqxDkImS9jTLlx2kUqFNq_T7WJKZCyW69A6I_aem_jr-yYesRIf0kgn0-znd8Xg
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/local/2021/10/18/zanesville-ohio-animal-tragedy-captivates-inspires-change-10-years-later/5823607001/
https://agri.ohio.gov/divisions/animal-health/resources/dangerous-wild-animals https://my.onecause.com/fundraiser/organizations/sf-001C0000016d5QlIAI/fundraisers/fundraiser:29043b3c-9361-435d-8d91-198913babca0/closed https://www.thewilds.org/about-wilds https://vetmedbiosci.colostate.edu/directory/member/?id=barb-wolfe-40668

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Come join us for CrimeWave 2.0, February 8-12, 2027 on Royal Caribbean's beautiful Oasis of the Seas. We're going to the Bahamas! See Katie and Whitney, plus Casefile, Last Podcast on the Left, True Crime Garage, Crime Time Teatime, Scared to Death, A Paranormal Chicks, No Sleep, Unexplained, Sinisterhood and Crime with Kourt. Live shows, meet and greets, pool parties, game shows, and new friends for life!

Tickets go on sale Friday, February 13th--to get $100 off your cabin and a private meet and greet with us, go to crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE

Come on vacation with us! You'll be glad you did. 

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In a lot of ways, the world is smaller now than it ever has been. With a few clicks of the mouse, I can watch a live camera feed of Sydney harbor, or read a newspaper from any country I can think of. Just five hours in an airplane can get you from the US to Europe, and pretty much anyone on the planet can listen to a couple of nerds like us on a podcast. But, obviously, the world is not in fact shrinking. It is still just as vast and potentially perilous as it was in the days when no one knew what lay on the other side of the ocean, and all it takes to bring that home is to lose connection to our world of technology and information. Our story is about a man’s unimaginable journey through the ocean wilderness, driven by nothing but his wits and his will to survive.

*Registration is now open for CrimeWave 2.0! Visit crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE to get your discount code for $100 off your cabin and a private meet-and-greet with us! The cruise is Feb. 8-12, 2027.

Sources:
Jonathan Franklin, “438 Days”
Time Magazine: https://time.com/4154458/castaway-sued-cannibalism-allegations/
The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/04/castaway-story-backing-from-mexican

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Winston Churchill once said, “Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.” That’s a nice sentiment—I mean, by and large it’s good to let failure be a learning experience, to not let it discourage you from following your dreams. But…hear me out here: What if you’re just a hot mess? What if every time you go from one failure to the next, you leave a pile of bodies in your wake? Can you be a little TOO good at failure? Should you sometimes maybe acknowledge “Hey, maybe this thing I’m trying to do isn’t one of my strengths”? I think some of the people in this week’s episode would have left the world a better place if they’d thrown in the towel.

Registration is now open for CrimeWave 2.0! Visit crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE to get your discount code for $100 off your cabin and a private meet-and-greet with us! The cruise is Feb. 8-12, 2027.

Sources:
Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test
CBC news: https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/oak-ridge-st-thomas-psychiatric-treatment/
IFL Science: https://www.iflscience.com/canadas-dark-history-of-giving-lsd-to-prisoners-69821
Washington University: https://library.washu.edu/news/bizarre-but-true-happenings-at-the-1904-olympics-in-st-louis/
Wikipedia, "Truth serum": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_serum
CBC's "The Fifth Estate," episode "Psychiatric Treatment or Torture? The Oak Ridge Experiment"
Hidden Persuaders: http://www7.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/blog/happened-oak-ridge-psychiatric-unit/
Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief
Smithsonian: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-1904-marathon-became-one-of-the-weirdest-olympic-events-of-all-time-14910747/

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On the surface, Blanche Taylor Moore looked like a model of small-town virtue: a devoted caregiver, a churchgoing woman, a trusted neighbor. But behind that carefully maintained image lay a wild heart with few limits on what it was capable of. Murder certainly wasn’t beyond her, and those closest to her were in the most danger, consuming their own deaths with every bite of Blanche’s carefully prepared dinners. She turned domestic intimacy into a lethal weapon.

Sources:
Jim Schutze, Preacher’s Girl 
Court papers: https://law.justia.com/cases/north-carolina/supreme-court/1994/556a90-0.html https://abc11.com/post/black-widow-killer-is-north-carolinas-oldest-woman-on-death-row/5137961/ https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-08-22-vw-1071-story.html https://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/15/us/suspected-of-poisoning-her-mates-woman-is-guilty-in-friend-s-death.html

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A lot of the murder cases we cover feature slow-boiling resentments, or criminal schemes hatched with an explicit target in mind. Killings by strangers are rare—and terrifying. You can just be going about your life with no idea that a predator is hunting you, a twisted mind that has no more connection to your life than a shark does. And then, out of the night, they strike. 

Join us for the chilling story of a would-be serial killer stopped after his first murder.

Stick around after the outro for a funny blooper! 

Sources:
Cold Storage, Don Lasseter
LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/tn-wknd-et-denise-huber-20160702-story.html
Court papers: https://law.justia.com/cases/california/supreme-court/2011/s064306/
LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-05-23-mn-61651-story.html

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In the early 1990s, a beloved first-grade teacher in Pennsylvania began receiving harassing, threatening letters from an anonymous sender. Her school principal, fellow teachers, and the parents of some of her students soon began receiving them too. As the ordeal wore on, the stalker slowly escalated from taunts to vile accusations and death threats—and then, finally, violence. From early on in the case, the police thought they knew the tormentor’s identity, but it took 18 months to finally gather the evidence needed for an arrest. The trial to follow would be one of the most bizarre the state had ever seen. The case took twist after twist before reaching a conclusion nobody saw coming. 

Sources:
Forensic Files, episode "Sealed With a Kiss"
The Morning Call: https://www.mcall.com/1996/01/21/accused-stalker-says-victim-framed-her/
The Morning Call: https://www.mcall.com/1997/01/30/custodian-says-teacher-was-often-upset-testimony-continues-in-pocono-mountain-stalking-case-at-school-fellow-instructors-job-is-at-stake/
Pocono Record: https://www.poconorecord.com/story/news/2000/12/14/pm-pays-600000-to-settle/51084692007/
https://www.poconorecord.com/story/news/2000/11/04/odd-teacher-harassment-case-returns/51083383007/?gnt-cfr=1&gca-cat=p&
Forensic Files Now: https://forensicfilesnow.com/index.php/2020/06/27/joanne-chambers-and-paula-nawrocki-strange-lesson/

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