In the 18th century, England's most powerful men, politicians, aristocrats, and intellectuals, gathered behind closed doors for a secret society known as the Hellfire Club. Founded by the wealthy rake Sir Francis Dashwood, the club met in candlelit caves and a converted abbey, where members reportedly indulged in drunken feasts, mock religious ceremonies, and rituals that scandalized polite society. Rumors swirled of devil worship, orgies, and occult rites performed by men who ran the country by day and mocked God by night. But how much of the legend was real, and how much was the inevitable myth that grows around extreme privacy and unchecked power? In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson explores the most notorious secret society of Georgian England, the elite circle that operated beyond the reach of law or church, and the truth hidden beneath centuries of scandalous rumor.

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In 1483, two boys, the 12-year-old King of England and his 9-year-old brother, were placed in the Tower of London by their uncle, who had sworn to protect them. In 1483, two boys, the 12-year-old King of England and his 9-year-old brother, were placed in the Tower of London by their uncle, who had sworn to protect them. Instead, he declared them illegitimate and crowned himself King Richard III. The princes were seen playing in the Tower gardens that summer, and then they vanished. Their uncle had the clearest motive, but so did his closest ally and the man who later overthrew him, leaving three suspects and no confession. In 1674, workers found the skeletons of two children beneath a Tower staircase, bones now sealed in a Westminster Abbey tomb that has repeatedly been denied DNA testing. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson examines one of the oldest cold cases in history, the three suspects who all had reason to want the boys dead, and the mystery modern science could finally solve if anyone would open the tomb.

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For homicide detectives, their chance of solving a murder is cut in half if they don’t get a lead within the first 48 hours.

Adapted from the hit A&E true crime series The First 48, Crime House Studios brings you the podcast that drops you inside that critical window: the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs that crack a case wide open. Each week, we revisit a landmark investigation from the franchise, pairing its signature investigative depth with immersive, long-form storytelling built for your ears.

Real detectives. Real cases. Real stakes. New episodes every Thursday. Follow wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Crime House Studios, A&E Global Media, and ITV America.

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In the autumn of 1888, a killer stalked the impoverished streets of London's Whitechapel district, murdering and mutilating at least five women in a matter of weeks. The press dubbed him Jack the Ripper, a name drawn from a taunting letter supposedly sent by the killer himself, and the city descended into panic. The murders exposed the squalor and desperation of Victorian London's East End, where poverty, overcrowding, and inequality left women with few options and little protection. Despite one of the largest manhunts of the era, police never caught him. More than 130 years later, the list of suspects has grown to include everyone from local butchers to royalty, and the case remains the most famous unsolved murder mystery in history. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson revisits the Whitechapel murders, the fear that gripped a divided city, and the endless theories about the identity of the man who was never caught.

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For more than a century, the Yakuza have operated as Japan's most powerful organized crime syndicates, hiding in plain sight with corporate offices, business cards, and fan magazines. But beneath the legitimate front is a world bound by ritual, absolute loyalty, and a rigid hierarchy that mirrors the devotion of a cult. New members are initiated through sacred sake ceremonies that bind them to a boss as a kind of father, severing ties to their own families. Those who break the code perform yubitsume, slicing off a fingertip to atone. Full-body tattoos mark a lifetime of belonging that few ever escape. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson examines how Japan's criminal brotherhoods turned obedience into a religion, the rituals that keep members in line, and how a syndicate of tens of thousands operated for decades as something between a corporation and a cult.

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On April 2, 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis fled Richmond with the entire Confederate treasury, a fortune in gold ingots, silver bricks, and coins guarded by teenage Navy midshipmen on a train heading south into a collapsing nation. Five weeks later, when Union soldiers finally captured Davis, almost all of it was gone. The War Department told the public the missing treasure was worth $13 million, a number historians say was invented to turn every former Confederate into a hunted man. The truth was far more complicated, with records showing most of the money was paid to soldiers and spent along the way. But the legend never died. Wagons were raided in Georgia, deathbed confessions pointed to buried caches no one ever found, and treasure hunters are still searching 160 years later. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson follows the trail of the lost Confederate gold, the myth the government built around it, and the question that still drives people into the woods with shovels: where did it all go?

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A young British teacher in Tokyo is stalked and murdered by a man who evaded police for two and a half years. An experienced hunter on a dream African safari is shot dead in her cabin — and her husband collects nearly five million dollars in life insurance. And four elite American climbers are seized at gunpoint in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, becoming hostages in a war they never knew existed. This is episode 4 of Deadly Destinations, a special four-part series on Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes hosted by Vanessa Richardson. Four exotic locations that should have been a dream vacation, but ended in a nightmare. New episodes drop every Sunday, and all four are available now, ad-free, on Crime House Plus. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page.

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On the evening of April 14, 1865, just five days after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, President Abraham Lincoln attended a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington. He was shot in the back of the head by an actor named John Wilkes Booth and died the following morning. But the murder at Ford's Theatre was not a lone gunman's act of revenge. That same night, across the city, other men were carrying out coordinated attacks on the Vice President and the Secretary of State, all part of a wider Confederate conspiracy aimed at decapitating the federal government in a single stroke. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson tells the story of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the men who plotted it, and the night that altered the course of Reconstruction before it began.

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In 1854, an adventurer named George Bickley founded a secret society with a singular goal: build a slave empire stretching from the American South through Mexico, Cuba, and the Caribbean. He called it the Knights of the Golden Circle. Within a few years, it had grown into a powerful underground network that pushed secession, seized federal arsenals, and intimidated unionists across the South. Some historians have linked it to early plots against Abraham Lincoln, four years before John Wilkes Booth finished the job. When the war ended, the Knights didn't disband. They went underground, reportedly burying millions in gold across the South to finance a second Civil War that never came. Treasure hunters are still digging. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson examines the secret society that helped start the Confederacy, may have helped kill a president, and left behind a trail of buried gold that no one has fully accounted for.

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In 1802, a journalist reported that President Thomas Jefferson was keeping an enslaved woman named Sally Hemings as a concubine and had fathered her children. Jefferson said nothing. His family denied it. America's most prominent historians dismissed the story for nearly two hundred years.

But Hemings' own descendants told a different story, one passed down through generations of oral history that the white historical establishment refused to take seriously. Did the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence have a secret family with a woman he enslaved? And if he did, why did it take the country so long to admit it? In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson revisits one of the most contested questions in American history, and the family that refused to let it go.

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