Independence Day 2012. Castle Rock, Colorado. Lonnie James Pebley turns a quiet neighborhood into a war zone, pinning down 27 officers with an AK-47 for 30 straight minutes. No one dies… but justice hits hard. Full story on the podcast. #TrueCrime #TrueCrimeTikTok #CrimeStory #CastleRock #July4th

In Mexico City, elderly women opened their doors to a helpful stranger… and never lived to close them. Police hunted a man. They were wrong. The killer was Juana Barraza—professional wrestler “La Dama del Silencio”—who strangled dozens of grandmothers between the late 1990s and 2006. Convicted of 16 murders and sentenced to 759 years, she became known as La Mataviejitas, the Old Lady Killer. Host Alexander Lawson uncovers her abusive past, deadly deception, and the shocking truth that left a city in fear.

On a Friday afternoon in June 1987, shoppers filled a Barcelona supermarket. In the underground parking garage, a stolen car sat loaded with explosives and an incendiary mixture. At 4:12 p.m., it detonated—killing 21 people, including four children, and injuring 45 more.

This was the deadliest single attack in ETA’s history. Host Alexander Lawson examines the planning by the Barcelona Commando, the phone warnings that failed to clear the store, the investigation, the trials, and the lasting impact on the victims’ families and Spanish society.

A stark account of how ordinary lives were erased in seconds by calculated terror.

Imagine trusting an insurance company with your life savings—only to have nearly half a billion dollars drained away. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, host Alexander Lawson tells the story of Sholam Weiss and the National Heritage Life Insurance Company collapse, one of the largest insurance frauds driven by criminal acts in U.S. history.

Weiss and his partners looted hundreds of millions from the Orlando-based insurer, devastating tens of thousands of mostly elderly policyholders. When the jury began deliberating in 1999, Weiss fled the country. He was later sentenced in absentia to 845 years in prison—the longest white-collar sentence ever imposed—before being captured in Austria, extradited, and eventually having his sentence commuted in 2021.

A tale of complex financial schemes, a mid-trial disappearance, a record-breaking punishment, and an unexpected release.

For fifteen years, a masked predator slipped into homes across Northern California, binding his victims and leaving a trail of fear that stretched from Rohnert Park to Sacramento. He was known only as the NorCal Rapist—until genetic genealogy and DNA evidence finally put a name and a face to the nightmare: Roy Charles Waller, a quiet UC Berkeley employee living a double life.

In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, host Alexander Lawson recounts the chilling series of attacks between 1991 and 2006, the decades-long investigation, the breakthrough that solved the case, and the 897-year sentence that brought justice to nine survivors.

Listener discretion is advised. This episode contains discussions of sexual violence.

A father drops his two young daughters at a babysitter’s apartment and casually says one of them is sick. Within hours, that little girl is dying from massive internal injuries caused by blunt-force trauma. Her name was Dominique. Her father was Raymond Rodriguez.

In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander Lawson examines the chilling case of a man who hid his violence behind the role of parent, the pattern of abuse that left both of his daughters bearing the marks of his cruelty, and the confession that ultimately led to his murder conviction in San Antonio, Texas.

In March 1963, 19-year-old Carl Junior Hackathorn from Akron, Ohio, shot 20-year-old Dallas mother Bobbie Jewell Smith three times above the left ear, killing her instantly. He fled south, crashed near the Mexican border, and confessed within hours, claiming he “didn’t know what he was doing.”

A Texas jury rejected his insanity defense and sentenced him to death. What followed was a years-long legal battle over the voluntariness of his confessions in the pre-Miranda era.

Host Alexander Lawson examines the killing, the flight, the confessions, the trial, and the constitutional fights that kept the case alive long after the shots were fired.

On a June night in 1973, a teenage gunman forced an engaged couple to the side of Interstate 57 and ordered them to “kiss your last kiss” before opening fire. Henry Brisbon’s murderous spree that night left three people dead for almost nothing—and it was only the beginning.

In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander Lawson examines the brutal I-57 killings, Brisbon’s later murder of a fellow inmate with a sharpened soup ladle, his attacks on death-row prisoners (including John Wayne Gacy), and why prosecutors once called him “a walking testimonial for the death penalty.”

A story of random roadside slaughter, unrelenting prison violence, and a man the system could never fully contain.

In Chile, one man carries more than a thousand years of prison sentences for kidnapping, torture, and forced disappearance. His name is Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko—known as “El Ruso.”

As a key operative in Pinochet’s secret police, the DINA, Krassnoff helped run the interrogation centers that swallowed political opponents whole. He led the hunt for MIR militants, operated inside Villa Grimaldi and Londres 38, and left a trail of vanished students, workers, and activists whose bodies were never returned.

Host Alexander Lawson traces the rise of this feared officer, the cold machinery of state terror in 1970s Chile, the survivor testimony that finally reached the courts, and the long legal fight that keeps adding years to a sentence no human lifetime could ever serve.

This is the story of a system designed to erase people—and the justice that refused to let the clock run out.

December 30, 2006. A van packed with hundreds of kilos of explosives detonates in the parking garage of Madrid’s brand-new Terminal 4. Two Ecuadorian workers — Diego Armando Estacio and Carlos Alonso Palate — are killed. Dozens more are injured. Spain’s fragile ceasefire with ETA is shattered in an instant.

In this episode, host Alexander Lawson examines the attack carried out by Igor Portu, Mattin Sarasola, and Mikel San Sebastián — three young men from a small Navarre town who formed part of ETA’s Elurra commando. From the careful planning and reconnaissance, to the execution of one of the group’s last major civilian attacks, to their eventual capture and the 1,040-year sentences handed down by the Spanish courts, this is the full story of the Barajas T4 bombing.

A gripping true-crime account of terrorism, investigation, and the human cost of political violence.