On May 25, 1996, nineteen-year-old Cal Poly San Luis Obispo freshman Kristin Smart vanished after walking back from an off-campus party with fellow student Paul Flores: the last person ever confirmed to have seen her alive. Despite cadaver dogs alerting to Flores's emptied dorm room within weeks of her disappearance, campus police had already fumbled the early investigation badly, failing to preserve evidence, seal the room, or take the case seriously until it was too late. For the next two decades, Flores remained the prime suspect but walked free, as a series of searches of his parents' properties in Arroyo Grande turned up suspicious but ultimately inconclusive physical evidence, and a string of other women came forward to allege he had drugged and sexually assaulted them using the same methods. It took a true crime podcast (Chris Lambert's "Your Own Backyard," launched in 2019) to reignite public interest, generate new leads, and set in motion the renewed investigation that finally led to Flores's arrest in April 2021, nearly 25 years after Kristin disappeared. To this day, Kristin’s body has never been found. This is the story of the 25 year investigation into the disappearance of Kristin Smart.

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DISCLAIMER: This podcast is intended for entertainment purposes only. While we research thoroughly and use credible, publicly available information, it should not be considered a legal or definitive authority. We cannot guarantee veracity or completeness. Neither host is a lawyer, journalist, or investigator — views expressed are personal and should not be taken as fact. Listeners are encouraged to do their own research. This podcast is not intended to harm, slander, or defame any individual, group, or organization. All individuals discussed are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Questions or concerns? Reach us at [email protected].

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On February 2nd, 2008, twenty-four-year-old real estate agent Lindsay Buziak was murdered inside a vacant home she was showing to a couple posing as prospective buyers. Days earlier, a woman with an unplaceable accent had called her out of the blue, claiming she and her husband urgently needed a million-dollar home and could close within days. Lindsay was uneasy enough to ask her boyfriend, Jason Zailo, to wait nearby during the showing.

Witnesses saw Lindsay take the couple inside the home, but she would not leave it alive. That evening, while Jason waited in his car down the street and while Lindsay’s blackberry butt dialed an old acquaintance, Lindsay was brutally murdered inside the home. Nothing was stolen, there was no sexual assault, and there was almost no forensic evidence left behind. Police believe whoever did this had done it before.

To this day, no arrests have ever been made. This is the unsolved murder of Lindsay Buziak.

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DISCLAIMER: This podcast is intended for entertainment purposes only. While we research thoroughly and use credible, publicly available information, it should not be considered a legal or definitive authority. We cannot guarantee veracity or completeness. Neither host is a lawyer, journalist, or investigator — views expressed are personal and should not be taken as fact. Listeners are encouraged to do their own research. This podcast is not intended to harm, slander, or defame any individual, group, or organization. All individuals discussed are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Questions or concerns? Reach us at [email protected].

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On February 2nd, 2008, twenty-four-year-old real estate agent Lindsay Buziak  was murdered inside a vacant home she was showing to a couple posing as prospective buyers. Days earlier, a woman with an unplaceable accent had called her out of the blue, claiming she and her husband urgently needed a million-dollar home and could close within days. Lindsay was uneasy enough to ask her boyfriend, Jason Zailo, to wait nearby during the showing.

Witnesses saw Lindsay take the couple inside the home, but she would not leave it alive. That evening, while Jason waited in his car down the street and while Lindsay’s blackberry butt dialed an old acquaintance, Lindsay was brutally murdered inside the home. Nothing was stolen, there was no sexual assault, and there was almost no forensic evidence left behind. Police believe whoever did this had done it before.

To this day, no arrests have ever been made. This is the unsolved murder of Lindsay Buziak.

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Sources for this episode will be posted at atrialbypodcast.com within 30 days of the publish date.

DISCLAIMER: This podcast is intended for entertainment purposes only. While we research thoroughly and use credible, publicly available information, it should not be considered a legal or definitive authority. We cannot guarantee veracity or completeness. Neither host is a lawyer, journalist, or investigator — views expressed are personal and should not be taken as fact. Listeners are encouraged to do their own research. This podcast is not intended to harm, slander, or defame any individual, group, or organization. All individuals discussed are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Questions or concerns? Reach us at [email protected].

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On the morning of February 23, 1861, a train pulled quietly into Washington, D.C., hours ahead of schedule and without the fanfare that should have accompanied the arrival of a president-elect. Abraham Lincoln, dressed not in his customary black suit but in a soft felt hat and an overcoat draped like a shawl across his shoulders, stepped off the car and into the capital unannounced. There was no brass band, no cheering crowd, no ceremony befitting the man about to take the oath of office. There was, instead, a tired detective named Allan Pinkerton, a bodyguard named Ward Hill Lamon, and a woman who had spent the entire night awake in a train berth, watching over a man the world did not yet know was sitting beside her.

That woman was Kate Warne. She was thirty-one years old, a widow, an actress by temperament if not by trade, and, improbably for a country that would not grant women the right to vote for another sixty years, the first female detective in the history of the United States. Warne did not carry a badge that history remembers, and she left behind no diary, no memoir, no photograph with her own handwriting on the back to tell us who she really was. What she left behind, instead, was a single, extraordinary night in which her composure, her intelligence, and her willingness to do a job no one thought a woman could do may have altered the entire course of American history. Had Abraham Lincoln been assassinated in Baltimore in February of 1861, before he ever took the oath of office, there would have been no Emancipation Proclamation, no Gettysburg Address, no Thirteenth Amendment signed under his hand. The Union that fought and won the Civil War as we know it might never have existed in that form at all.

This is the story of how Kate Warne helped history play out the way that it did, and of the largely undocumented life that led her to a moment when the safety of a nation rested, in no small part, on the nerve of one woman traveling under a false name.

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Sources for this episode will be posted at atrialbypodcast.com within 30 days of the publish date.

DISCLAIMER: This podcast is intended for entertainment purposes only. While we research thoroughly and use credible, publicly available information, it should not be considered a legal or definitive authority. We cannot guarantee veracity or completeness. Neither host is a lawyer, journalist, or investigator — views expressed are personal and should not be taken as fact. Listeners are encouraged to do their own research. This podcast is not intended to harm, slander, or defame any individual, group, or organization. All individuals discussed are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Questions or concerns? Reach us at [email protected].

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

 In 2007, in the quiet town of Thetford, Vermont, a nurse and a mother of two named Carmen Tarlton was doing what she'd always done, showing up for her daughters, her patients, and her community. She was the kind of person people described as resilience before they ever knew how much resilience she would need. That same year, a man she had once loved, broke into her home and attacked her with industrial lye, leaving her blind, disfigured, and fighting for her life. This is the story of how Carmen and her attacker's relationship curdled into violence, how he took it there, the night that changed everything, and the years that followed, including the pioneering face transplant that gave Carmen not just a new face, but a second chance at a life that she refused to let anyone take away from her This is one of the most brutal stories of domestic violence I've dived into But it's also one of the most incredible stories of resilience I've ever heard.

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DISCLAIMER: This podcast is intended for entertainment purposes only. While we research thoroughly and use credible, publicly available information, it should not be considered a legal or definitive authority. We cannot guarantee veracity or completeness. Neither host is a lawyer, journalist, or investigator — views expressed are personal and should not be taken as fact. Listeners are encouraged to do their own research. This podcast is not intended to harm, slander, or defame any individual, group, or organization. All individuals discussed are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Questions or concerns? Reach us at [email protected].

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In March of 1977, Tucson escrow agent Charles Morgan dropped his daughters at school and vanished. Three days later he stumbled through his front door, hands zip-tied, unable to speak. He wrote to his wife that his throat had been doused with a hallucinogenic drug that would kill him if he talked, and begging her not to call police. Morgan ran Statewide Escrow Service, a business rumored to have ties to organized crime figures in Phoenix and the Bonanno crime family.

Three months later, on June 18th, his body was found in the desert forty miles from home, shot once in the back of the head with his own revolver. He was wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a hidden knife and holster, with no fingerprints on the gun beside him. Gunshot residue was found on his left hand, but Morgan was right-handed.

Despite the contradictions, authorities ruled it suicide. His family has never accepted that finding, and nearly fifty years later, Chuck Morgan's death remains a mystery.

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DISCLAIMER: This podcast is intended for entertainment purposes only. While we research thoroughly and use credible, publicly available information, it should not be considered a legal or definitive authority. We cannot guarantee veracity or completeness. Neither host is a lawyer, journalist, or investigator — views expressed are personal and should not be taken as fact. Listeners are encouraged to do their own research. This podcast is not intended to harm, slander, or defame any individual, group, or organization. All individuals discussed are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Questions or concerns? Reach us at [email protected].

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On the night of May 27th, 1991, a fourteen-year-old boy named Konerak Sinthasomphone stumbled out of the Oxford Apartments in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was naked, drugged, and bleeding. Three women found him on the sidewalk and called 911. When police arrived, they had everything they needed: a visibly injured victim, three eyewitnesses insisting he was a child, and the man who'd drugged him standing right there, calmly trying to explain it all away. Ten minutes later, officers carried Konerak back upstairs to the man’s apartment - the apartment of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer - where he was strangled to death within the hour.

This isn't a story about whether police could have caught a killer sooner in some abstract sense. It's a story about ten specific minutes, on one specific night, when three private citizens did everything right to stop the murder of a 14-year-old boy, but three sworn officers simply handed him back to his killer. Konerak didn't die because no one noticed. He died because the people who noticed weren’t believed, and the people with the power to act chose not to.

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DISCLAIMER: This podcast is intended for entertainment purposes only. While we research thoroughly and use credible, publicly available information, it should not be considered a legal or definitive authority. We cannot guarantee veracity or completeness. Neither host is a lawyer, journalist, or investigator — views expressed are personal and should not be taken as fact. Listeners are encouraged to do their own research. This podcast is not intended to harm, slander, or defame any individual, group, or organization. All individuals discussed are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Questions or concerns? Reach us at [email protected].

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On the afternoon of November 2nd, 2016, a thirty-four-year-old stay-at-home mother named Sherri Papini went for a jog near her home in Mountain Gate, a small community just outside of Redding, in Northern California’s Shasta County. She left her two young children at daycare, laced up her shoes, and headed out into a mild autumn afternoon. She did not come back.

Her husband, Keith Papini, returned from work that evening to find an empty house. The children were still at daycare — uncharacteristically uncollected. He used the Find My iPhone app to trace Sherri’s phone and drove to the location it showed: a roadside near Sunrise Drive, about a mile from their home. What he found there was her cell phone and her earbuds, lying in the dirt on the side of the road. Wound around the earbuds were several strands of blonde hair.

Sherri Papini was gone, and 22 days later she would reappear on the side of a road 150 miles from her home, looking gaunt, with a chain tied around her waist, and the word “exodus” branded into her back. It was a story that seemed to demand justice — and it would, eventually, get it, just not in the way anyone expected.

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On the afternoon of November 2nd, 2016, a thirty-four-year-old stay-at-home mother named Sherri Papini went for a jog near her home in Mountain Gate, a small community just outside of Redding, in Northern California’s Shasta County. She left her two young children at daycare, laced up her shoes, and headed out into a mild autumn afternoon. She did not come back.

Her husband, Keith Papini, returned from work that evening to find an empty house. The children were still at daycare — uncharacteristically uncollected. He used the Find My iPhone app to trace Sherri’s phone and drove to the location it showed: a roadside near Sunrise Drive, about a mile from their home. What he found there was her cell phone and her earbuds, lying in the dirt on the side of the road. Wound around the earbuds were several strands of blonde hair.

Sherri Papini was gone, and 22 days later she would reappear on the side of a road 150 miles from her home, looking gaunt, with a chain tied around her waist, and the word “exodus” branded into her back. It was a story that seemed to demand justice — and it would, eventually, get it, just not in the way anyone expected.

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Sources for this episode will be posted at atrialbypodcast.com within 30 days of the publish date.

DISCLAIMER: This podcast is intended for entertainment purposes only. While we research thoroughly and use credible, publicly available information, it should not be considered a legal or definitive authority. We cannot guarantee veracity or completeness. Neither host is a lawyer, journalist, or investigator — views expressed are personal and should not be taken as fact. Listeners are encouraged to do their own research. This podcast is not intended to harm, slander, or defame any individual, group, or organization. All individuals discussed are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Questions or concerns? Reach us at [email protected].

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In November 1986, Helle Crafts was reported missing. Danish flight attendant and mother of three, Helle had been planning to leave her husband after discovering he'd been having an affair.

What followed was one of the most gruesome and forensically groundbreaking murder investigations in American history. Because there was no body. There was no crime scene. There was, however, a rented woodchipper, a freezer purchased just days before Helle vanished, and a witness who spotted a man feeding something into a chipper on the banks of the Housatonic River in the dead of a blizzard.

Investigators ultimately recovered bone fragments, a fingernail, strands of blonde hair, and a single crown from Helle's tooth — enough to piece together what Richard Crafts had done to his wife, and enough to put him away. He became the first person in Connecticut history to be convicted of murder without a body.

This is the story of Helle Crafts — and the case that changed forensic investigation forever.

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DISCLAIMER: This podcast is intended for entertainment purposes only. While we research thoroughly and use credible, publicly available information, it should not be considered a legal or definitive authority. We cannot guarantee veracity or completeness. Neither host is a lawyer, journalist, or investigator — views expressed are personal and should not be taken as fact. Listeners are encouraged to do their own research. This podcast is not intended to harm, slander, or defame any individual, group, or organization. All individuals discussed are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Questions or concerns? Reach us at [email protected].

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.