Cozy Crime

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores the final afternoon of Empress Elisabeth of Austria: a woman who spent most of her life seeking quiet and ordinary freedom, and who was killed on a sunlit lakeside promenade by a man who had originally come to Geneva to kill someone else entirely.

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores one of the earliest and most haunting unsolved sequences of killings in American history: the Servant Girl Annihilator of Austin, Texas.

A relaxing cozy crime true story told slowly for sleep, quiet listening.

When the steamship Waratah sailed from Durban on the morning of the twenty-sixth of July 1901, one passenger was not aboard. Then when the Waratah passed from sight of the last ship to see her, somewhere off the Wild Coast of South Africa in a winter storm, she carried two hundred and eleven people into a silence that has never, in all the years since, offered a single answer back.

A relaxing cozy crime true story told slowly for sleep, quiet listening.

When Rose Harsent, a young servant woman in the Suffolk village of Peasenhall, was found at the foot of the kitchen stairs of Providence House on the morning of Whit Sunday 1902, the questions that gathered around her death - a letter of uncertain authorship, a stormy night, and a chapel deacon whose respectability had everything to lose - would occupy two juries and remain unresolved for more than a century.

A cardinal of France, long excluded from the queen's favour and aching for her forgiveness, received letters he believed were written in her own hand. The stage was set for one of the most elaborate and consequential frauds of the eighteenth century.

A relaxing cozy crime true story told slowly for sleep, quiet listening.

A mass poisoning in the European quarter of colonial Hong Kong begins when hundreds of breakfast tables across Victoria fall suddenly and violently ill on the same January morning, all of them sharing one thing in common: bread from the Esing Bakery on Wyndham Street.

A relaxing cozy crime true story told slowly for sleep, quiet listening.

On a cold December morning in 1910, Dorothy Arnold walks out of her family's home on East 79th Street, turns west toward Fifth Avenue, and does not come back, becoming a prominent missing persons case.

A relaxing cozy crime true story told slowly for sleep, quiet listening.

Tonight we are in Camden Town in the year 1907. A young woman named Emily Dimmock is dead in a locked room and no one will ever be convicted of killing her.

This is a classic true crime mystery, an unsolved murders case from the 20th century that remains a cold case despite initial investigation. Good evening and welcome. There will be no sudden sounds here, no raised voices, nothing to startle you from rest.

If you find comfort in these stories and wish to follow us, we shall always have a tale waiting for you. This episode is told in the Cozy Crime manner: calm, unhurried, and companionable. It is intended for quiet evenings, for the hours before sleep, for those who find comfort in careful storytelling and in the gentle company of history. There are no sudden sounds, no raised voices, nothing to startle you from rest.

Tonight we travel to the North Atlantic Ocean in the winter of 1872, where a merchant ship, the Mary Celeste, drifts alone beneath grey December skies. This is a real-life unsolved mystery, a chilling ghost ship tale that has puzzled historians for over a century.

A relaxing cozy crime true story told slowly for sleep, quiet listening.

In the summer of 1889, a routine investigation at the General Post Office uncovered a secret that reached from the cramped offices of London's telegraph service to the drawing rooms of the aristocracy.

Telegraph boys like fifteen year old Charles Swinscow found themselves questioned about visits to Cleveland Street, about the money they had earned and the men they had met.