Criminal
Episodes
Vanish
17 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
People have faked death to escape criminal convictions, debts, and their spouses. In 2007, a man named Amir Vehabovic faked his death just to see who ...
Finding Sarah and Philip
03 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In 2005, Teri Knight drove 650 miles on midwestern roads through Ohio, Indiana, Iowa and Illinois, pleading with the public to help her do what law en...
In Plain Sight
20 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In 1849, abolitionist and attorney Wendell Phillips wrote: "We should look in vain through the most trying times of our revolutionary history for an i...
Walnut Grove
06 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In 2010, Michael McIntosh's son was incarcerated at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility in the small town of Walnut Grove, Mississippi. One S...
Everyday Genius
16 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
To close out 2016, we're bringing you two lighter stories of people exhibiting everyday genius under. . . unusual circumstances. Comedian Dave Holmes'...
Don't Let Me See You In The Whirl
02 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Since 1938, a weekly African-American owned newspaper called The Evening Whirl has covered crime in St. Louis with a style all its own, using allite...
The Shell Game
18 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The Magic Castle in Hollywood has been a private club for magicians since 1963, and its walls are lined with portraits of magicians past and present. ...
Melinda and Clarence
04 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
SPOILER WARNING: Please listen to Episode 53: Melinda and Judy before you listen to this one. Melinda Dawson found out on the same day in 1998 that he...
Melinda and Judy
21 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
When Melinda Dawson was seven years old, she learned that she was adopted under suspicious circumstances. As she got older and had children of her own...
The Checklist
07 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
SPOILER WARNING: Please listen to Episode 51: Money Tree before you listen to this one. While working on our last episode, we became curious about the...
Money Tree
23 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
When Axton Betz-Hamilton was 11 years old, her parents' identities were stolen. At that time, in the early 90s, consumer protection services for ident...
This is Criminal
09 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
To celebrate Criminal's 50th episode, we check in with some of our most memorable guests including Fran Schindler from Episode 17: "Final Exit," Dan...
The Editor
26 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In November of 1988, Robin Woods was sentenced to sixteen years in the notoriously harsh Maryland Correctional Institution. In prison, Robin Woods fou...
Eight Years
12 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
2008 was an exciting time to be a Harry Potter fan. The final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, had been released. Movies were on the way. A...
Brownie Lady
15 Jul 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Shortly after Meridy Volz moved from Milwaukee to San Francisco, she received a phone call from a friend asking her to take over a small bakery busine...
Tiger
01 Jul 2016
Contributed by Lukas
There are more tigers in captivity in America than wild tigers in the entire world. The exact number of captive tigers in this country isn't known, be...
Just Mercy
17 Jun 2016
Contributed by Lukas
As a law student, Bryan Stevenson was sent to a maximum security prison to meet a man on death row. The man told Stevenson he'd never met an African-A...
One Eyed Joe
03 Jun 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Not only was John Frankford a famous horse thief, he was also a notoriously good escape artist. People thought no jail was strong enough to keep him, ...
39 Shots
20 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In 1979, a group of labor organizers protested outside a Ku Klux Klan screening of the 1915 white supremacist film, The Birth of a Nation. Nelson J...
The Finger
06 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
People have been giving each other "the finger" since Ancient Greece. The first documented use is said to be a photograph from 1886 in which the pitch...
Open Case
15 Apr 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Since 1965, there's been an unsolved murder in Houston, Texas. The main suspect, Charles Rogers, managed to disappear and police were never able to fi...
Pappy
01 Apr 2016
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to Kentucky bourbon, Pappy Van Winkle is among the most exclusive, according to food writer Brett Anderson. The bourbon is prized for it...
Either/Or
18 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In 1983, three men were prepared to plead guilty to the violent sexual assault of Elizabeth Daniel in Anderson, South Carolina. Defense attorneys did ...
Jolly Jane
04 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Jane Toppan was born in Massachusetts in 1857. She attended the Cambridge Nursing School, and established a successful private nursing career in Bosto...
Hastings
19 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In 2010, an eighth-grader brought a loaded gun to a middle school in Hastings, Minnesota. We speak with Jake Bullington and Emma Bolters, two students...
Perfect Specimen
05 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The 500-year-old Treaty Oak in Austin, Texas was once called "the most perfect specimen of a North American tree." But in 1989, Austin's city forester...
Pen & Paper
22 Jan 2016
Contributed by Lukas
As a young woman in the 60s, Andy Austin talked her way into a job as a courtroom sketch artist in Chicago. She spent 43 years sketching everyone fro...
Willing to Accept
08 Jan 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Michael Ross was the first person in Connecticut to be sentenced to death since 1960. He claimed that he wanted to die in order to atone for what he...
Deep Dive
18 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Sgt. David Mascarenas is the Dive Supervisor for the Los Angeles Police Department. He's been diving his whole life, and prides himself on never refus...
It Looked Like Fire
11 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Ed Crawford had never been to a protest until he heard about the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Robert Cohen, a staff photographer w...
American Dream
27 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
When we're kids, we have ideas of what we want to be when we grow up -- movie star, doctor, astronaut. But what if we dream of being like Butch Cassid...
The Agreement
13 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In 2005, Danny Egipciaco had the opportunity to participate in a robbery of a drug supplier's stash house. He was told he'd take home between $100K-20...
Officer Talon
30 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Corporal Scott Foster of the Hillsborough, NC Police Department worked closely with his K-9 partner, Talon, for many years. They located weapons and ...
P.D.I.D.
09 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Patti Hammond Shaw is a transgender woman. She's legally female on her birth certificate and driver's license, and has been since 1993. But when she w...
No Place Like Home
25 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In the early 90s, a wealthy magazine publisher was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 18 months in a minimum security prison in Louisiana. But white ...
Angie
11 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In July of 2002, Philadelphia Homicide Detective Pat Mangold was called to the scene of a gruesome murder on the Schuylkill River. When he wasn't able...
The Portrait
28 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
More than eighty years ago, a North Carolina family of nine posed for a Christmas portrait. Two weeks later, all but one of them had been shot dead. (...
Pearl Bryan
07 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In February of 1896, a little boy discovered a woman's headless body in a farmer's field in Fort Thomas, Kentucky. No one knew who she was, or what ha...
Triassic Park
17 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona has the largest collection of petrified wood in the world. The beautiful wood is more than 200 million y...
Ex Libris
26 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of rare books have been disappearing across America since the late 90s, and haven't resurfaced in the marketpl...
Bloodlines
05 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Julius Robinson had killed for revenge before, and so when his sister was brutally murdered in her sleep last year, he says he planned to "get" the ki...
Gil From London
15 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Karen Miller met a man named Gil Harper on Facebook. They started flirting. The flirtation grew more serious. Eventually, they planned to meet in real...
Mother's Little Helper
24 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Sandie Alger is a 71-year-old woman with a very long rap sheet. She was in and out of prison throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and upped her game ea...
695BGK
03 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
This episode won a “Best Documentary” award at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. Police officer John Edwards was patrolling a quiet ne...
Final Exit
13 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
No one disputes that it's against the law to take another person's life, but is it against the law to sit with someone and watch while they die by sui...
Poster Boy
20 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
On July 17th, 1889, the residents of Clayton County, Iowa woke up to news of the worst crime in their history. A Civil War veteran John Elkins and his...
He's Neutral
30 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Dan Stevenson has lived in Oakland's Eastlake neighborhood for 40 years. He says crime has been an issue for as long as he can remember, but he isn'...
The Fifth Suspect
09 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In June 2014, authorities released information about a massive child pornography ring being conducted in North Carolina. Four suspects had already bee...
The Big Sleep
19 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Raymond Chandler is often called the greatest American crime novelist, famous for murder mysteries like The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely. He's th...
Break The Internet
26 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In 1999, most of America's tech hysteria centered around Y2K. But at that same time, a teenager in Canada named Mike Calce was messing around in chat ...
I'm About To Save Your Life
30 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In 1977, a mild-mannered aeronautical engineer sideswiped a parked car in Compton, CA. When he stopped his car to survey the damage, a man named Leon ...
Dear Sheila
26 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Working as a reporter for a TV station in New Hampshire, Kevin Flynn was covering the capture and arrest of a female serial killer named Sheila LaBarr...
That Crime Of The Month
29 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean when a woman commits a crime and attributes her actions to PMS? We revisit the first use of the "PMS defense" in this country, back ...
Can't Rock This Boat
29 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In March 1964, a 35-year-old African-American woman named Johnnie Mae Chappell was walking along the side of the road in Jacksonville, Florida. Four w...
J.R.R. Ziemba
30 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Crime victims are often put under the same scrutiny as the accused. Not only for their version of events, but sometimes for how they look and talk, to...
We Lost Them
23 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
On April 13, 2014, former KKK member Frazier Glenn Cross pulled into a Jewish Community Center and ambushed William Corporon and his grandson Reat Gri...
Dropping Like Flies
24 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Every year for the past few years, tens of thousand of flytraps have gone missing – from the wild, from gardens, from nurseries. And, really, nobody...
Call Your Mom
28 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
There are plenty of things we don't share with our mothers. Dark, sad things. Unless of course, you both speak the same dark language. Kathleen Vernon...
The Buck Stops Here
28 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
With the advent of the Inkjet printer, counterfeiting money became as simple as a trip to Staples. By the year 2000, there were 72 million of these ho...
Pants On Fire
14 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
For nearly a century we've been trying to read someone's truthfulness by the way they act. Be it through machines, or our own intuition. The police ha...
Animal Instincts
29 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In 2001, Kathleen Peterson was found dead in her home. Her husband Michael Peterson was convicted of her murder. A curious neighbor, a lawyer named La...