Police Line Do (Not) Cross: True Crime TV & Podcasts

There was a Wired story from 2010 that I vaguely remembered reading back then, but I'd just go direct to the series.

ok i’m done

wow

Marjorie is a PIECE of fucking WORK, my god. What a hideous woman.

We just watched this last week. I'd never heard of it before! And yeah that woman is genuinely disturbed. Mind you by the end I felt like dungarees guy was just as complicit... but we'll never really know.

Oh yeah Rothstein def seemed like he was just as awful.

Anyone have any thoughts about the push for an appeal for Scott Peterson? I don't know if this is the right thread for it. Some true crime fans I know are convinced he's innocent, for some reason.

fucked if I know why

i havent read anything in the affirmative so far that has convinced me it’s not him.

everyone is innocent iirc

Not a podcast, but in the theme of this thread I have a personal interest in the Michael Gargiulo trial that may start in a few weeks, given that his first alleged victim was a high school classmate of mine. Her murder happened 25 years ago this month, in the summer after our class's graduation. She was supposed to attend the college I headed to as well.

http://sprocket-trials.blogspot.com/2011/12/michael-gargiulo-quick-links.html

This lady here has been covering it, and I appreciate that since otherwise I would have no idea what was going on or why it's been a decade since his arrest.

(As it happens, the case of my high school classmate won't appear in this trial, but still...)

highly recommend Teacher’s Pet podcast. Australian joint about a 30+ years old cold case of a missing woman presumed murdered by her ex Rugby player husband, a PE teacher who was boning the 16 year old student he also hired as a babysitter. 2 eps in and I am hooked

Fucking hell

Teacher’s Pet got me hooked like nothing else.
I sat on my couch all day catching up on the series - never donw that before.
So many layers!! Highly recommend.

the endless recapping & dragging it out gets a bit exhausting but the investigative journalism is pretty good. lot less tailchasing than a lot of stories, but he has a lot of cooperation from a lot of different groups which def helps push the story along, and the publicity has been insane

just started listening. holy shit.

right?

i kinda want to listen to it again

have been talking with a friend back home aboutthe way friends & even the family remained so inanely *passive* after her disappearance, and how recognizably Australian that behavior is, and that it is actually much more passive-agressive than it seems on the surface of it.

the slang is glorious too - crime scene investigator says he was “spewin” about an outcome & i nearly died laughing

In the end, I liked Teacher's Pet but the last few episodes dragged on quite a bit with repetition. I'm still trying to reconcile that I'm actually sharing the planet with some of these horrible people.

New fave: Forensic Transmissions. 911 calls, confessions to the police, interrogations, trials - all presented straight up without interruption.

Binged Dr Death this week... holy crap, that was a ride and a half. Feels like an impostor story at first but it's WAY weirder.

I will say I'm not a huge fan of Wondery's tendency to overproduce their shows, with occasional dramatic re-enactments and such, it can veer into radio play territory which I don't always love.

But I can overlook it when the reporting and the story is that good. Warning, if you are grossed out by medical procedures this will give you the fuckin PHEAR jesus christ.

It deeply disturbed me! As if I don’t already completely mistrust the medical system in this country. Jesus.

I agree with you about the over production. Couldn’t get into the wonderland season or the Manson one at all.

The one thing that I loved about Dr Death was that the focus was this hideously grotesque awful doctor, but he was brought to justice by two AWESOME doctors who actually gave a shit. It was a great contrast.

But yeah, I've noped out of two Wondery shows within the first 5 minutes based on re-enactments alone.

i agree 100%. dr death is a great story but i'd like it better if it was not wondery. just listened to their aaron hernandez podcast, same.

:/

Just started listening to the Bear Brook podcast by NHPR - bodies found in 2 barrels in a New Hampshire forest 15 years apart, all within 300 feet of each other. Really good, solid reporting & not too many gimmicks. I’m only 2 eps in & i’m hooked.

have also subscribed to 2 more that sounded interesting
-Death in Ice Valley by BBC World Service about a Norwegian coldcase
-Breakdown by the Atlanta Constitution Journal about the murder trial of an Atlanta businessman

Bear Brook is a remarkable story.

Isn’t it just!? The way it intersects so many people’s lives, and time periods.

It makes me so sad that the orginal bodies haven’t been identified - that memorial service really got to me.

Also, of all the things, one I can’t stop thinking about is the whole idea of him killing one tiny daughter & keeping another alive. Like, he’s already clearly a fkn monster obv but that detail just fucks me up.

Not sure if it’s been mentioned yet or if it’s technically considered true crime, but I’ve been enjoying The Dream, about MLMs/pyramid schemes.

i have been meaning to check that out

Oooh we just started the dream last night - only got through one episode but I’m hooked already.

I'm liking The Dream a lot. Related: The Grift podcast http://thegriftpodcast.com

i am in love with the dream, just my favorite kind of stories

i have subscribed so i can live the dream w all yall

Loving the Dream so far. on ep 2 - man this whole town & her family sounds exactly like my hometown, every stay at home mum selling tupperware or throwing jewellery parties or cookware or clothing parties. my mum never did because she worked & thought it was “tacky”, but my sister quite a few girls i went to high school with were all up in that life.

When they were talking about the language used to convince ppl they can be sellers/recruiters too, it reminded of this Facebook msg I got back in 2015 from an old friend I hadn’t spoken with in years:

“Hi Jussie! How are you? You look like your enjoying life and your dog is just gorgeous!! I'm contacting you because I've recently started a new business which is pretty exciting. I thought of you because you're always so positive and motivated! It may or may not be for you personally but you may know others that are looking for a new opportunity or just want a bit of extra cash. If you would like to know more, let me know and I'll send you through a 6 minute video that explains a bit more about the business. IN the meantime, enjoy the warm weather - we're freezing our butts off here!!! Speak soon! Emily x“

Now, we used to waitress together for a couple of years and were quite close, so the idea that she would truly believe for even a minute that I’m “positive and motivated” (two adjectives I’ve never heard used to describe me) is hilarious but also ridiculous and immediately clued me in that this was an MLM (she was involved with that aloe product company).

Up and Vanished S2 is amazing

hippies are so awful it's like trying to solve a crime witnessed only by toddlers

Who the Hell is Hamish? podcast looks promising

New wondery podcast Over My Dead Body is pretty good.

Obv this way more than true crime but Lorena docuseries in Amazon Prime is a must-watch.

and in case you are wondering yes ~he~ is still a walking piece of human garbage & he will make you want to throw your tv out the window

but Lorena herself is v inspiring

and I cried through the whole 3rd episode

I am addicted to Yeardley Smith’s “Small Town Dicks”.

Quite possibly my platonic ideal of a true crime show.
Most of the details are relayed by the IRL small-town law enforcement who worked the crime, perhaps one of the two detectives Dan & Dave or their colleagues, interspersed with querying or clarifying questions from Yeardley or Zibby.

At times, it’s fuuuuucking brutal; like if Forensic Files was a podcast. These guys will spare no detail, & lay it all out in that very matter of fact way.

One thing I love is they occasionally talk to other involved people, like a victim’s mother, or the dispatcher . It’s usually really good & adds a lot of context to a case.

I dunno if it’s for everyone: but it’s DEF for me.

It’s SO rare that hosts are willing to take a backseat & let the stories be told to them. It’s impressive.

I unsubscribed from Sword & Scale years ago - had no idea the host was such a horrible person but am not surprised.
https://www.tampabay.com/arts-entertainment/want-to-quit-your-job-and-start-a-true-crime-podcast-obscuras-host-did-it-20190703/

yeah Sword & Scale turned me off years ago. Host is a grade-A douchebag.

Oh my bf has said a loootttt about Boudet, he is Not a Popular Man among the indie TC pod community.

"I Love You, Now Die" is extremely compelling

Darknet Diaries has hit a streak of terrific episodes this year, but this one on the financial trader who dug the bunkers underneath his house in Bethesda is outstanding. I had no idea this was the same guy who set fire to hard drives at hacker cons.
ttps://darknetdiaries.com/episode/39/

Crimetown season two is outstanding

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Noida_double_murder_case

watched pt one of the hbo show, its not great just read the wiki if youre interested

god help me I started listening to Wondery’s Mysterious Mr Epstein podcast - it is v good, I really like Lindsey Graham (not that one) as a host, his American Scandal podcast is great.

anyhoo it’s creepy and gross and I cant stop listening...and Real Crime Profile has a crossover series of eps about it. You havent lived til you hear Jim Clemente lose his ~shit~ over the deal Acosta gave Epstein in 2008. I have never heard him so angry (& he is an angry man at the best of times)

Also Kim Goldman (sister of Ron Goldman) has a podcast about the OJ trial & she talks to everyone & it is v good. First ep is v sad, she talks to a lot of Ron’s friends etc. Highly recommend.
c

This is interesting:

https://newrepublic.com/article/155801/favorite-murder-problem

I think it would be hard to listen to MFM and get the sense that your trust in the police (as opposed to a handful of hero cops) should be greater but there’s something increasingly troubling about the way they, and the broader network, looks at justice. The strain of ‘why aren’t people locked up forever / why aren’t people executed’? has been there for a while but it was legit shocking to hear Kilgariff recently talk about a prisoner being murdered by other prisoners as a great piece of moral community justice.

The trend mentioned briefly in the article towards positioning the listener as detective and crowdsourcing investigations is even worse imo. Paul Jensen’s podcast on their network strikes me as deeply irresponsible and dangerous.

In terms of fearmongering / copagands, TV procedurals are much worse than podcasts, though.

I just binged the Teacher's Pet series. They actually had to take the podcast down in Australia! That's nuts.

legit shocking to hear Kilgariff recently talk about a prisoner being murdered by other prisoners as a great piece of moral community justice.

oh no, poor necrophiliac serial killer got what was coming.

This has always bothered me about MFM. So much of true crime fandom is like this. It seems like the emphasis on identifying with and emphasizing with victims, in theory a good thing, is often shallow, self-indulgent, sanctimonious, and a way to avoid critical thinking or challenge. So are the usual lazy supposed explanations of why women love true crime.
Also, true crime podcasts classifying themselves as “comedy” and endlessly repeating that they’re not experts and don’t do much research seems like something of a cop out at this point.
Of course it’s nothing new or exclusive to podcasts.

Xp, yes, if you think the death penalty should be outsourced to other criminals’ sense of justice, it’s great.

Following up but yeah, The Yogurt Shop Murders was very good, I thought; I won't go far as to say it was truly groundbreaking, since there's been high profile work about calling police interrogations and the like into question already, but I appreciated how it was a frayed, fraught narrative that went against the idea of 'closure' without using the word once, to my memory. Just this sense of layers upon layers of damage across time. The whole series can be streamed now, I'd recommend it.

Meantime I just watched Unknown Number: The High School Catfish on Netflix and Christ on a bike. Credit to the creative team, though: I guessed a few minutes in that it had be one of the parents, so when they featured all four of them initially soon after I thought "Oh, huh...a teacher maybe?" And then of course, things get revealed.

ive watched more than a dozen netflix tru-crime docs over the 3-4 months and my father the btk killer is i think the first one the police come out of well

(i guess they did catch him, thx to his super-weird credulity abt the floppy disc being untraceable)

anyway kerri rawson comes across as earnest, very damaged and very angry, damned if she speaks and broken if she hides away, holding it somewhat together except when she exidently isn't. very hard not to feel desparately sorry for her, even when she's said things -- as she has in the past -- that make you flinch a bit. commenting on her book on th true crime books thread ilxor eliza d. said it was heavily religious: the doc isn't at all (the fact of the local church communty is mentioned but faith doesn't feature as a topic).

the 3-parter on the 6 aug 2005 heist from banco central in brazil's fortaleza is both flawed and also terrific: R$160 million taken and they got into the vault via a v patiently built 100-yard tunnel from several streets away, where they'd set up a fake storefront for an artificial grass company

it's in portugeuse (which i find a nice language to listen to) & not always easy to follow, not least bcz the post-heist story gets pretty tangly: those who got away with the money (largest bank raid in brazil's history at the time, and possibly since) were immediately targeted for extortion, with at least one senior figure simply being executed by his kidnappers: and it turned out that while the property-crime team were just as patiently tracking them down, identifying them and rounding them up, the lads extorting them were often-times fellow cops who already knew who they were & decided it was time to hlep themselves

the extortion-by-cop got so bad that several of the heisters, when finally arrested by NON-crooked cops, were like "thank god i thought you'd never find me! slap the cuffs on and take me away, im safe now, ps the rest of the money's in a cellar hidden under the stove"

in fact the extortion-by-cop got so bad that the largest drugs gang launched a notorious series of extreme actions against the police & other security forces in may 12-14 2006 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_São_Paulo_violence_outbreak (wikipedia entry doesnt link it to fortaleza banco central heist: the theory put forward in the doc is that the huge new amount of money now washing around crimworld was at a minimum very destabilising of the normal uneasy balance of power)

(this theory is not v well explained or explored IMO: probably it requires its own documentary)

anyway it's lots of very engaging interviews (plus a couple that are amusingly shy and stiff): several cops are anonymised & at least one wrong un (this too not explained: was this someone they hadn't yet caught? or interviewed in jail?) -- they could have gone into more depth abt the catching of the corrupt cops (e.g. none are named, unlike the entire burglary gang) and the aftermath of their being caught (assuming all opf them were). this aspect is a little bit moving-swiftly-on-hem-hem

the general conclusion is: heist? superb, ingenious, full marks! laundering? they just didnt think it through…

raoul moat: inside the mind of a killer

don't feel we got "inside the mind” of same: except maybe brief pain-empathy spasms for a man -- based on trasncripts of his DMs and scribbled messages -- mostly fully out of his brain on selfi-pitying rage (first destructive then self-destructive) -- his intention surely always basically suicide by cop, hence the very first shooting (he wrongly believed the boyf was a cop)

the big reveal has been his real dad emerged from total obscurity to discuss it all: and (not said out loud but implied) the possibility that gazza turning up (dealt with very brusquely) put the kibosh on any actual friends or lost relatives being allowed near to help talk him down (moat's self-diagnosis of his MH issues very much included never having a real dad as a better model) (of course the model he chose instead was roided & coked beefy gym-boy) (no offence to any ilxors this also describes)

doc delicately treads the line between "why did a nice smiling little red-heaed boy end up like this?" and "he was a worthless dangerous cowardly arsehole loser"

otherwise the main thing i learned was that this played out mainly in pleasant-looking suburbs and verdant bosky leafiness (in my minds eye during the legendary ilxor coverage he was instead lying out on some blasted heath of a moor) -- turns out it's only bleak up north mentally

(not to derail this thread, which has other fish to fry: but i feel that the moat story actually is that rare instance -- per discussion on the britpol thread -- when a letter from his real dad a few months after his 18th birthday might have made a difference?)

2 eps in to the new series on Peacock “Devil In Disguise: John Wayne Gacy” w Michael Chernus, Diego Luna & James Badge Dale

It’s pretty good so far - director aims to ultimately center the victims more than Gacy (that starts to be more evident in ep2), which is relatively unique for these things. has a mostly queer writers room, apparently they got the blessings from families of i think 5 of the victims idk

regardless, it’s a damn sight better than whatever the fuck Murphy’s doing w that Gein nonsense. (which i havent watched and maybe wont at all now)

GABRIEL Luna oops

i put this in the ART THIEVES thread bcz it's tonally very unlike most tru-crime: Art Thieves GO CRAZY!

(like the burglar never laid hands on anyone)

STOLEN: HEIST OF THE CENTURY (netflix, 90mins, 2025) -- abt the massive antwerp diamond robbery in 2003 -- has a very likeable vibe to it (plus a hilarious shock twist hard up against the closing credits)

the charm derives from their key interview: a participant in the heist tho not (he insists, the cops demur) its mastermind. he has done his time (six years), his loot (a lot of it) is presumably squirrelled away somewhere (tho he seems to be hinting that the mastermind, true name & whereabouts unknown, in fact made off with it all). he is from turin, which boasts a entire “school” (as the italian police call it) of dedicated safe-breakers: he knows what he's about and describes it all very matter-of-factly. when his version fails to accord with what the police believe happened, they basically say "he would say that, he never stops fibbing!"

the doc makers are happy to challenge both him and the cops in their versions and their perspective: this makes it a complex and interesting unveiling as they disagree. the cop view is that this heist was suberb in the planning and execution, sloppy to the point of being silly in the aftermath (just as we saw in the brazil heist discussed above), and here the participant does not disagree

at one point he's asked if he feels bad that ppl lost everything they had in their bank vaults and he says "no! everyone claims twice as much as they had on insurance!" -- and we cut to a victim angrily saying "no! it's stupid and vulgar to say this! we did NOT have insurance because we never thought we'd need it!" this isn't put to the participant but it's hard to imagine him being especially sympathetic

the final element that makes him so likeable is that he's just a massive wife guy: they were sweethearts in their teens, the day of the heist is the day after valentines's and he is getting grief from her for being in another country and not with her (she knows he's a bad kid but not about this heist). he grins and says "when she gets mad she's terrifying!" -- and then when it all goes pear-shaped she too is arrested and he finds this very upsetting and starts to cry.

(one of the cops also starts to try at one point, this is a very intense affair!)

anyway as you can perhaps tell i liked it

Two well structured and watchable docs with, at their centre, a mastermind who lives in a self-built tree-house, one in the wild woods outside seattle (HOW TO ROB A BANK, 2024), one out in the flatlands of argentina BANK ROBBERS: THE LAST GREAT HEIST, 2022): both evidently very bohemian, drawn to this life by a species of self-absorbed existentialist creativity.

The outcome of events mean we never meet the seattle mastermind: all get is extracts from his diary, which as selected paint him as a confused self-important emo twerp, despite being FIT AS FUCK PHYSICALLY (tall, slender, strong, super-handsome in a repulsively byronic kind of way), plus descriptions from his fond close friends, which cause him to land (to me) as ABSOLUTELY FUCKING INSUFFERABLE, the worst kind of seattle-formed bohemian type. (One of his companions — unclear exactly how crime-adjacent he was — is one-time drummer for the band LOVE = alban “snoopy” pfisterer)

The argentinians are also p insufferable, which their doc holds at bay by making an arty virtue, via faintly precious presentation. One of them, a professional Urugayan thief, has a very borges-villain feel to him: almost archetypal in his presence. Their mastermind is the centrepiece, an intense, poised, wildly pretentious artist (like literally a painter, with brushes & easels & everything) who conceives of his heist as a GREAT WORK OF ART = it must be something no one ever did before. He has great focus and a somewhat toxic & sinister charisma (perhaps unfairly I feel Momus would love him)!

And tbf in technical terms he kind of pulls this off as an art project? Combining the two types of bank robbery = one you walk in the the front with guns during opening hours, two you tunnel in over the weeked… via method one they ensure the cops out front are besieging them; at which point they scamper via method two through the basement and down the secret hole they dug into the sewers and away!

The law-guy side comes across p badly in most of the true-crime docs I watch: here it does a little better perhaps simply because the interviews stay lightly if firmly sceptical of the cops-eye-view? In the seattle doc the cops interviewed have contradictory versions of how they approached their task and two of them clearly greatly dislike one another (which is good fun). The seattle robbers stuck up many banks before it all went pear-shaped — and become more an more stressed, increasingly base their judgments on dreams getting steadily worse (one of them dreams that sharks bite his legs off while sea-swimming — is that good lads?)

They also psych themselves up before their one last job by watching HEAT (1995), which by its nature freaks them all out.

Anyway things end badly for both heists, tho the Argentinian blunder is much funnier — no one dies plus they failed to make proper allowance for a wife-guy’s wife. And there’s the massive twist at the end. Seattle ends a bit grimly — tho I wouldn’t say surprisingly, given what we know abt the tree-house mastermind.

ps the twist at the end of the argentinian doc is not massive the way the twist at the end of the antwerp doc was: it's more ironic than massive in fact

Discovered the podcast Park Predators last week and I have been bingeing it relentlessly. Brief, but well-researched, tales of murders/accidents/missing persons that take place in the great outdoors (podcast description says national parks, but some of them are state parks, municipal parks, etc.). The host's voice is really soothing, and so is the theme song.

ooh that sounds good

Wild Crime on Hulu is a pretty good true crime show about missing and murdered in national parks too

Have been listening to the new season of ABC Australia’s Expanse series, (covers unusual stories from across the country)

Expanse: The Nannup Four

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/expanse

“In 2007 four people disappeared from a blue farmhouse on the outskirts of the Western Australian town of Nannup, leaving behind the scatterings of a life, a note pinned to the door and a question: was the disappearance a choice… or murder?

As police and family try to piece the puzzle together to find the Nannup Four, what emerges is a bizarre story of secrets, hidden identities and rumours of a dark online cult.”

3 episodes up so far and I’m pretty well hooked.

oh and Casefile is doing a 4 part series on BTK if you’re into that kind of thing
IMO they do really thorough research, i usually like their just-the-facts approach, there’s no real sensationalism. also they usually include more context & detail so even if you know it, the quality of the reporting is usually good enough to reveal stuff you haven’t heard anywhere else.

Case files narrator annoys the fuck out of me, I don’t understand people who love it.

But thanks for the heads up on the ABC podcast - I find Aussie investigative pods to be almost always really good.

i love Casefile because it’s dry as a bone. Sometimes I just prefer an encyclopedia article about a crime, yknow? no bells, whistles, opinions, editorializing, just heavy-on-the-research

the 3-part netflix doc "a friend , a murderer" ("en ven, en morder"): about a 2016 disappearance in the semi-rural west of sjælland aka zealand*, for years unsolved and locally much-discussed. i'm not going to describe it bcz its effectiveness for me was bound up in not knowing anything about the case & also not knowing how the doc was going to unfold -- but i think it gets a lot out of its decisions

it goes without saying that it's sad and grim

*(zealand is the big island part of denmark, with copenhagen & THE BRIDGE in the east near sweden)

disgruntled at the end of the netflix one-piece doc THE CRASH: in ohio teen mackenzie shirilla is (per trial and conviction) shpown as having murdered her bf & his best friend, by driving all three into a building at 100mph

afterwards there were damning-seeming stats from the car's computer (she was pedal to metal for a long way down a straight road) but she herself claims amnesia and “cant be bcz im not like that"

disgruntled bcz i took a tremendous instant dislike to the prosecuting attorney (not a good reason i know) but also bcz whatever was demonstrated -- including that MS is dslikeable & manipulative -- as theory of mind was not demonstrated (she cannot possible have expected to survive such a crash herself; but the evidence she was murderous to the point of being suicidal? not shown)

instead the prosecution painted a picture of her before & after the crash via select extracts from DMs and uploaded halloween tiktoks: these tended to show she was a v normal teen well aware she was pretty & she put effort into spooky popstar cosplay -- again, whatever, it's not news that teenagers can be self-absorbed annoying & thoughtless, nor does it tell us much abt events like this

(i dont really like "the accused showed no remorse, an innocent person would have behaved differently!" type arguments)
.'
(this is not to say she isn't guilty -- the jury watched her every day during the trial and saw what they saw, the car stats seem (on my total non-knowledge of such things) p irrefutable)

anyway this all came back to mind yesterday when i was sat v near a teen on the bus, as she had her chum on blast on her phone as they picked over the chum's maybe-bad-maybe-not relationship: it was loud & i was an unwilling eavesdropper, they did not care that it was audible to all, but how wd it sit if something terrible happened & it became evidence? (tbc this is not going to happen in this instance but absolutely unremarkable material does sometimes become “damning evidence”)

(lol at pre-coffee posting)

no jury it was a bench trial… all the worse cuz the judge shd understand the law better