February 1983, Muswell Hill. A plumber opens a manhole to clear a blocked drain and finds human remains. The tenant upstairs is Dennis Andrew Nilsen — a quiet civil servant neighbours called Des.

In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander Lawson tells the UK story of the Muswell Hill Murderer: two north London addresses, Cricklewood and Cranley Gardens; at least twelve young men and boys killed between 1978 and 1983; victims the city often failed to count; an Old Bailey trial; a whole-life sentence; and a case that ended not with a detective’s hunch, but with an ordinary complaint about the drains.

We name the victims we can name. We do not linger on the ritual. If this episode is hard to sit with, that is the point.

On October 25, 1994, Susan Smith told America a Black man had carjacked her Mazda in Union, South Carolina, and driven off with her sons still in the back seat. Michael was three. Alexander was fourteen months old. For nine days the country searched. Then she confessed: there was no carjacker. She had let the car roll into John D. Long Lake.

Alexander Lawson traces the night at the boat ramp, the national manhunt built on a racial hoax, the confession, the trial, and the life sentences that followed — including Smith’s 2024 parole denial and her next hearing in 2026.

Content warning: child homicide, drowning, racial hoax.

A True Crime Podcast. Hosted by Alexander Lawson.

In February 1994, police dug up a Gloucester back garden looking for a missing 16-year-old. They found her under the patio. Then they found another body. Then they opened the cellar.

This episode is the story of Rosemary West, 25 Cromwell Street, and the ten murders that put her on a whole-life sentence. Host Alexander’s Lawson names the victims — including eight-year-old Charmaine and Rose’s own daughter, Heather — and follows the case from the “she ran away” excuses to the 1995 Winchester trial.

A missing girl. A family joke. A house that looked ordinary from the street.

Listener note: this episode covers the murders of children and young women. Victim Support: victimsupport.org.uk

February 1994. Gloucester police go into an ordinary house on Cromwell Street looking for a missing 16-year-old. In the garden they find something that should not be there: a third femur.

That is how Britain learned what Fred West had been hiding.

In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander Lawson tells the confirmed story of 25 Cromwell Street: the builder, the wife who stood trial, the twelve known victims, the 1973 warning that did not stop them, and the dig that tore the house open after seven years of lies about Heather West.

No rumour. No cellar tour. The record, the names, and the front door nobody treated as a crime scene until it was too late.

Listener note: this episode covers murder, sexual violence, and the killing of young women and girls.

On a November morning in 1957, a hardware-store owner in a Wisconsin town of eight hundred people failed to come home. The last receipt in the register was made out to a neighbor everyone thought they knew.

Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of Edward Theodore Gein—two confirmed murders, graves opened in the night, and a farmhouse that changed American horror. This episode stays with the record: the town, the mother, the sheriff’s reports, and the names that belong to the dead.

Content warning: murder, grave robbery, and human remains.

A True Crime Podcast.

In 1978, America watched a charming photographer win a date on national television. By then, Rodney Alcala had already murdered women and girls across the United States — and he would kill again after the cameras stopped. Host Alexander Lawson traces Alcala’s path from the 1968 assault of eight-year-old Tali Shapiro, through New York, California, and Wyoming, to the 1979 kidnapping and murder of twelve-year-old Robin Samsoe, the storage-locker photographs, the overturned death sentences, and the DNA that finally tied him to multiple victims. This episode of A True Crime Podcast covers sexual violence and the murder of a child. Listener discretion is advised.

If you asked most people to name America’s deadliest serial killer, they would say Bundy. They would be wrong.

In 2012, Samuel Little was an old man in a Louisville homeless shelter. DNA then tied him to three Los Angeles murders from the 1980s. A jury gave him three life sentences. That was only the start of the count.

From prison he confessed to ninety-three killings across nineteen states, from 1970 to 2005 — almost all women, many of them poor, Black, and already written off as overdoses or Jane Does. The FBI called his confessions credible and named him the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history by confirmed victims. He drew their faces from memory. He died in custody in 2020. Some of those faces still have no name.

Host Alexander Lawson traces how Little moved, how the system missed him, and why the women he killed were invisible until someone finally sat down and asked him to talk.

Listener discretion advised.

In the early 1990s, a lift on Australia’s Hume Highway could cost you your life. Seven young backpackers vanished between Sydney and the south. Their bodies were found in Belanglo State Forest — shot, stabbed, hidden under leaves. The man who offered the ride was road worker Ivan Milat. Host Alexander’s Lawson tells the story of the vanishings, the forest, the hitchhiker who escaped, and the trial that put Australia’s most infamous serial killer away for life.

A Bolingbrook police sergeant. A bathtub with no water in it. A death ruled an accident — until the next wife vanished.

Alexander Lawson tells the story of Drew Peterson: the 2004 death of Kathleen Savio, the 2007 disappearance of Stacy Peterson, the law Illinois rewrote to put a cop on trial, and the prison plot that added decades to his sentence. One conviction. One case still open. Who got believed first?

On a Florida roadside, a man pulls over. A woman gets in. By morning his car is empty and his body is in the woods. That happened seven times in twelve months.

Host Alexander Lawson traces Aileen Wuornos from a leap-year childhood in Rochester, Michigan, to the interstates of central and north Florida in 1989 and 1990. Seven men were shot and dumped near the highway. Six death sentences followed. In 2002, Florida executed her.

This episode covers the victims — Richard Mallory, David Spears, Charles Carskaddon, Peter Siems, Troy Burress, Dick Humphreys, and Walter Antonio — the partnership with Tyria Moore, the arrest at The Last Resort, the videotaped confession, the Mallory trial, and Wuornos’s last words over a cup of coffee.

Was she a predator, a product of abandonment and violence, or both? The law gave one answer. The case still argues.

A True Crime Podcast. Hosted by Alexander Lawson.