Let’s Talk About It

Prohibition turned Southern Illinois’ quiet backroads into a battleground: the Sheltons built a criminal empire of roadhouses, bribed officials, and even rolled a homemade armored vehicle against rivals. When Charlie Birger broke with them, the feud exploded into unprecedented violence — plane-dropped bombs, public shootouts, and terror that split communities.The conflict didn’t end cleanly: legal technicalities, a famous hanging, and Chicago’s mob pressure eventually toppled the local bosses. Two brothers were murdered, one faded away, and the region was left with a legacy of brazen crime that reads like wartime history.

On a July afternoon in 1874, four-year-old Charley Ross was lured into a wagon with candy and promises of fireworks and vanished, leaving his brother behind and a family desperate for answers. Ransom letters, suspects, trials, and alleged confessions followed, but Charley was never found.This episode traces the chilling details and cultural fallout of the case—how Charley’s disappearance became a national sensation, reshaped policing and missing-child awareness, and gave rise to the warning we still hear today: don’t take candy from strangers.

Lonnie examines the 1933 case of Christine and Léa Papin, two live‑in maids in Le Mans whose violent attack on their employers shocked France: a confrontation over a broken iron escalated into a brutal, intimate murder marked by mutilation and the sisters’ eerie composure.The episode follows the arrest, the rapid trial and divergent theories—from shared psychosis to class revolt—then the aftermath: Christine’s decline and death in prison and Léa’s quiet disappearance. It leaves listeners with the central, unsettling question the case still poses: how do pressure, isolation, and power explode into inexplicable violence?

On a routine traffic stop in 1983, officers found Randy Kraft with a dead Marine at his side — and a cryptic list that would link him to crimes across states. This episode traces how that “scorecard” unlocked a pattern of murdered young men, many hitchhikers and servicemen, and the decades-long hunt to connect scattered cases.We follow the chilling routine investigators uncovered, the protracted 1988–89 trial that led to Kraft’s conviction for sixteen murders, and the lingering mystery of dozens more entries that may represent unidentified victims. The episode focuses on the victims, the investigative blind spots of the era, and what the case teaches about cross-jurisdictional policing and memory, evidence, and closure.

In the summer of 1906, factory worker Grace Brown, pregnant and desperate, left with Chester Gillette for the Adirondacks—only Grace drowned and Chester returned alone, claiming accident. Her pleading letters, bruises, and his evasive behavior turned a private scandal into a national murder trial.The jury convicted Gillette amid questions of class, motive, and evidence; his 1908 execution and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy kept the story alive, but doubts about whether it was accident or murder remain.

Travel back to 19th-century France for the sensational Marie Lafarge trial: a mismatched marriage, a sudden death, and the explosion of public outrage as arsenic and circumstantial evidence pointed to a young wife. The case hinged on cutting‑edge toxicology—Mathieu Orfila’s Marsh test—and fierce disputes over contamination, expert authority, and the limits of emerging science.Convicted in 1840 and later partially pardoned, Lafarge’s fate remains debated, but her trial reshaped how forensics, gendered bias, and social narrative influence justice. This episode untangles the chemistry, courtroom drama, and unresolved questions behind a historic legal turning point.

April 1483: two young princes enter the Tower of London and vanish as power shifts to their uncle, Richard III. This episode traces the suspicious silence, Tudor-era storytelling, the 1674 discovery of child-sized bones at the Tower, and the unanswered questions that still haunt English history.From contemporary reports and later myths to modern archaeology and the promise (and limits) of DNA, we explore why the disappearance of Edward V and Richard, Duke of York remains an unsolved drama of politics, propaganda, and human tragedy.

In February 1957 a young child was found dead in a cardboard bassinet box in Fox Chase, Philadelphia, and despite massive publicity and decades of investigation he was never identified. The case details—surgical scars suggesting prior medical care, signs of a deliberate attempt to hide his identity, and the brutal cause of death—turned the story into a haunting, citywide mystery.Investigators tracked physical clues, exhumed the remains for DNA testing, and created updated forensic images, but the boy’s name remains unknown. The case endures as both a criminal cold file and a public symbol of an unnamed life lost, with investigators and the community still hoping that new evidence or a family connection will one day restore his identity.

Samuel Little confessed to 93 murders and has been called the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history; he targeted women on the margins — sex workers, those struggling with addiction and poverty — and drifted across states for decades while many deaths were dismissed as overdoses or accidents.A 2012 arrest and subsequent DNA matches, confessions, and haunting portraits drawn from memory helped investigators link cold cases and identify victims, but many families still wait for answers.The case exposes systemic bias and investigative gaps that allowed Little to operate for decades and underscores the need to revisit unsolved cases and honor the victims whose lives were too often ignored.

On April 22, 2016, eight members of the Rhoden family were killed across four Pike County homes; three children survived.Years of investigation produced arrests, plea deals, and convictions of four Wagners amid disputed motives—custody, drugs, or long-standing feuds—leaving deep trauma in the community.