Crime Clueless

Ed Edwards has spent his whole life deciding how his story goes. Now he’s sitting in a Wisconsin jail, and there’s one ending he refuses to accept. So he picks up a pen and writes a letter to Ohio, with a line in it that should make anyone reading stop cold: I have other places I can go.

What follows is a confession game unlike anything we’ve covered. A couple he invited to his own backyard barbecues. A plan that blows up in his face. A foster son’s half-sister standing up in court to ask for something no one sees coming. And after it’s all over, two letters found in his cell that were never mailed.

Then we go where the internet has gone wild: a lovers’ lane in Portland, a prison in Montana, a newspaper tip from 1971, and the question nobody can quite answer. Was Ed Edwards the Zodiac, or just a man who wanted to be part of that story? His daughter has a map, and she calls it her timeline.

You’ll want to hear how this one ends.

To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here.

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Dannie was the kind of kid who’d disappear for weeks to follow a traveling carnival and come home like nothing happened. So when he moved in with a big, charming man named Wayne, and asked a judge to let him take the family’s name, it felt like he’d finally found somewhere to stay. I call them Mom and Dad, he wrote.

Then one spring, Dannie was gone again. This time, nobody called the police. Not his friends. Not his foster families. Not the man he called Dad.

Years later, Ed’s oldest daughter is still trying to make sense of her childhood: the midnight moves, the houses left burning behind them, the father who yelled at the TV during murder documentaries. Night after night, she sits at her computer typing in the names of every town they ever lived in. And one night, a story from 1980 stops her cold. She knows that place. She remembers that summer.

She picks up the phone.

And when the man who once bragged about everything finally gets caught, there’s only one thing he wants. Wisconsin won’t give it to him.

To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here.

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In August 1977, Billy Lavaco and Judy Straub are found shot in Silver Creek Metro Park in Norton, Ohio, and a local man is charged on the word of a teenager in a barn. 

In August 1980, high school sweethearts Tim Hack and Kelly Drew walk out of a Concord, Wisconsin wedding reception and never make it to their car. 

In Part Two we follow both cases through the search, the small towns that wouldn’t give up, the grand jury that walked the crime scene, and the investigators who said the killer “knew the lay of the land.” 

Along the way: a farmhand with an unsettling story, a Pennsylvania prison deal built on Cheryl Ann Lee’s murder, and a 1988 tip that came within one birth date of solving everything.

To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here.

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In 1962, FBI agents knock on the door of a two-room rental in Atlanta, and one of America’s ten most wanted men answers in his underwear, laughing. Ed Edwards never wore a mask, and he wanted the world to know his name.

We follow Ed from an Ohio orphanage through stolen cars, marriages, jailbreaks, a fake psychiatrist named Dr. Jerry Love, and a jail escape that came up eight bed sheets short.

Then comes his reinvention: a prison guard who “lit a fire in him,” a redemption memoir, a lecture circuit, and a guest spot on To Tell the Truth.

By Christmas 1975, he’s a family man in a small Ohio village, and the whole town has accepted him. Everyone liked Ed.

To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here.

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This is part two of two - we suggest listening to part one first, to get all the details on Halloween 1974, in Pasadena, Texas.

In this episode, we talk about the cyanide, the stapler a witness saw in his hand on Halloween day, and the trial that follows. 

The trial includes a Pixy Stix executive, a wife's testimony that he never shed a tear, and the man responsible, takes a turn on the stand, where he admitted, "I exaggerate — like any normal human being."

A quick verdict, a national candy panic, and a crowd outside the Huntsville prison in 1984, this is the story of the man who became known as the Candy Man.

It's also the story of why the stranger with poisoned candy has always been a myth.

To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here.

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On a rainy Halloween night in 1974, two dads from church take their kids trick-or-treating in the Bowling Green neighborhood of Pasadena, Texas. It's three blocks and about thirty minutes. Somewhere along the way, five giant Pixy Stix turn up from a house where no one answered the door.

By 10:40 that night, 8-year-old Tim O'Bryan is dead. The candy is laced with cyanide, and police race through the night to find the other four Pixy Stix before any child eats them. One of them is in a sleeping 10-year-old's hand, stopped only by a staple he couldn't pry open.

This episode goes from the porch lights on Citation Street to the panic that swept Houston's suburbs. Along the way: a mopped floor that saved a life, a witness who can't remember whether the person at the door was a man or a woman, a vision from God, and the man at the dark house who has an airtight alibi.

To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here.

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In September 2017, deputies stopped a Cadillac SUV five minutes from a lake house in southwest Virginia and arrested a 54-year-old woman her neighbors knew as Debbie.

Twenty-seven years earlier, she was Sheila Keen, the prime suspect in the murder of Marlene Warren.

Who was Sheila before 1990? How did she end up married, living in Virginia and running a burger/everything you can think of/plus ice cream drive-thru in Tennessee? Named the Purple Cow. Anyone else remember "Purple Cow" milkshakes, circa 1990s?

Now, what actually brought this case back to life after decades? Remember we said all they needed was "a little bit"? Well, that's honestly all they found. A little bit. Tiny. Was it even enough?

The fight that follows is long, drawn out, and full of prosecutorial missteps. The defense called the evidence contaminated (we agree!) and the witnesses, well their accounts don't really match what was recorded. There is a prosecution running out of time, I mean, it happens after 27 years. 

After you listen, tell us, was justice done?

To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here.

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On a rainy Saturday morning in May 1990, Marlene Warren opened her front door to a clown holding red and white carnations and a silver balloon that read “You’re the Greatest.” Without a word, the clown shot her in the face, walked back to a white convertible, and drove away.

In Part One, we follow the trail the killer left behind: a costume bought at closing time, balloons sold at only one store in the county, and a getaway car taken through a knockoff Yellow Pages ad.

We meet Marlene’s husband, Mike, a used-car dealer with a racehorse named after his wife, and the repo woman everyone at his car lot said to look at. Detectives knew who they suspected within days.

So why did it take decades to charge anyone?

To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here.

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In January 1897, Zona Heaster Shue was found dead in her home in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, just months after marrying a charming newcomer named Edward Shue. Her death was quickly ruled natural, and she was buried with little fuss.

But her mother, Mary Jane Heaster, never believed it. She claimed that over four nights, Zona’s spirit came to her and described exactly how she died, and exactly who killed her.

What happened next is one of the strangest chapters in American legal history. A mother’s ghost story led to an exhumation, an autopsy, and a murder trial. The case is often called the only one in the U.S. where a ghost’s testimony helped convict a killer.

We covered the Greenbrier Ghost last October, and it’s stayed with us ever since. It’s one of the most interesting and genuinely haunting cases we’ve covered. So we’ve given it a full remaster and are re-releasing it for spooky season.

This one is also a throwback to the original Crime Clueless lineup: Laura and I recorded it with our sisters Chrysta and Kayla, so if you’re newer to the show, you’ll get to meet the rest of the family.

Laura and I have both been down with colds, (leaving us not sounding our best) and couldn’t record for this week. We felt like this was the perfect time to dust off a favorite. New episodes are coming soon. Until then, grab a blanket, turn off the lights, and listen to the ghost who wouldn’t stay quiet.

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They drained a reservoir and dragged the Ohio River. They dug up a sandbar and chased a stage conjurer’s “clue.” Pearl Bryan’s head was never found.

In part two, we piece together Pearl’s last four days in Cincinnati: a hotel register signed with her sister’s name, an argument outside a music company, and a sarsaparilla in a saloon’s back room. Then comes the circus.

There are lemonade stands at the murder scene, a shooting gallery offering a five-cent cigar to anyone who shoots Scott Jackson’s effigy, a witness bribery scheme that falls apart on the stand, and two defenses built on epilepsy and hypnosis.

It all leads to March 20, 1897, when a governor’s offer, a five-minute decision and one man’s silence settle everything. And at the end, a ritual that still happens at a small Indiana grave: pennies, left heads up.

To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here.

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