A Heavy Weight

Two young men disappeared from South St. Paul on May 2, 1993. Eleven days later, Chad Birkeland’s body was recovered from the Mississippi River near Hastings. Todd Hanson was never found, and the case remains unresolved.

A woman works an overnight shift she wasn’t supposed to take.

Sometime between 3:10 and 4:30 in the morning, Toni Monette is stabbed to death inside a 7-Eleven in Mounds View, Minnesota. She’s found in the store’s back room. Nothing is taken. No clear motive is ever established.

More than 40 years later, the case remains unsolved.

A woman gets into a van at 3 a.m. and disappears.

Days later, Eden Young is found beaten to death in a quiet yard miles away from where she was last seen. Her clothing is discovered along a highway. Investigators later say her killing wasn’t random.

But no one is ever charged.

Eden Young wasn’t the only one.

In the early 1990s, multiple women connected to sex work in the Twin Cities were found dead — beaten, strangled, left in fields and along roads.

Advocates said there was a pattern.

Law enforcement wasn’t sure.

An 18-year-old leaves work to run an errand and never returns.

In August 1973, Teresa Osborne disappeared after picking up pastries from a bakery in Seymour, Indiana. Ten days later, her body was found in the trunk of her burned car in a remote wildlife refuge.

Investigators interviewed hundreds of people and followed countless leads, but no one was ever charged.

A detail uncovered months later suggests Teresa may have been afraid of “some man or men” before she vanished.

More than fifty years later, her case remains unsolved.

Seventeen-year-old Hailey Buzbee left her home in 2026 after months of online communication with a man she thought she knew. What followed exposed the realities of grooming and the gaps in a system still trying to catch up.

https://www.change.org/p/pass-hailey-s-law-pink-alert-and-mandated-grooming-awareness-education-in-schools?utm_medium=custom_url&utm_source=share_petition&recruited_by_id=5757cf30-e8a5-012f-1742-4040b91ba155

In 1993, Lola Fry went to a party in Indianapolis and never came home.

The people who were with her told police a story — but it’s one that has never fully made sense.

Lola disappeared along with her car. Neither have ever been found.

In October 1995, Wilma Cheek was found shot to death in her car at Willow Grove Cemetery in Fountain City, Indiana. It was late morning. Daylight. A place that should have felt quiet, familiar, safe. Thirty years later, her case remains unsolved.

https://www.in.gov/isp/crime-reporting/cold-case-investigations/cold-cases-by-county/pendleton-district-investigations/wilma-cheek-10301995/

A new case in Bloomington, Indiana. An arrest tied to alleged child sexual abuse material. In part 1, we slow down the headline and walk through what’s been publicly reported so far, how these cases often start, what digital evidence can and can’t prove at this stage, and what research says about who gets caught with csam and how often this behavior happens in secrecy. This episode avoids graphic details and centers accuracy, prevention, and the reality that harm can be amplified long after abuse occurs.

We're sharing our coverage of the waverly two case again as Terence and Ferrone work towards their deserved full exoneration after their release.

In 1998, Terence Richardson and Ferrone Claiborne of Waverly, Virginia, were sentenced to life for a murder they were acquitted of, exposing systemic flaws like withheld evidence and a judge’s power to override a jury’s verdict. In this episode, we examine the controversial mechanism of acquitted conduct sentencing and the tireless advocacy work aimed at righting this profound injustice.

In Bloomington, two rape charges against a former Indiana University student ended without a trial. The charges were dismissed, a plea to battery remained, and the sentence was one year of probation. This episode follows the gap between what the public thinks the system does and what the rules of proof allow it to do.