Crime Clueless

This is Part 2 of a two-part episode. If you haven't listened to Part 1, we strongly recommend going back — this story builds on itself, and the full weight of what you're about to hear depends on understanding everything that came before.

In Part 1, we introduced you to Mitrice Richardson — a 24-year-old honors graduate from Cal State Fullerton with a degree in psychology, a dream of going to grad school, and a life full of promise. We walked through the warning signs her family noticed in the days before her disappearance, the alarming evening at Geoffrey's restaurant in Malibu where every person who interacted with her recognized something was wrong, and the devastating series of failures at the Lost Hills Sheriff's Station — where deputies arrested her on minor charges, promised her mother they would hold her, and then released her at 12:28 in the morning with no phone, no money, no car, and no way home. Into the dark canyon roads of Malibu. Into an area she had never been. The department's official position: "She was fine."

Part 2 picks up at 6:30 the next morning, when a retired KTLA news anchor spots a young woman in his backyard in Monte Nido — six miles from the station. She tells his wife she's "just resting." She's gone before deputies arrive. It's the last confirmed sighting of Mitrice Richardson alive.

What unfolds over the next eleven months is a search effort plagued by decisions that defy explanation. K9 dogs pick up Mitrice's scent and are pulled off the trail. A two-day search is cancelled after one day. A volunteer drone is redirected away from the area where her remains will eventually be found. Over 300 volunteers comb 18 square miles and come up empty. Privately organized searches discover disturbing, racially offensive graffiti in a canyon drainage culvert — which authorities paint over.

And then, in August 2010, California State Park Rangers — who are not looking for Mitrice at all — find skeletal remains in a remote creek bed in Dark Canyon. Naked. Clothing scattered hundreds of feet down a ravine. Adjacent to a secluded ranch known for producing pornography. Residents had reported hearing screams from the canyon in the nights after Mitrice disappeared.

The coroner rules the cause of death undetermined. The sheriff's department says no foul play. Deputies move the remains against the coroner's explicit orders, then can't lead investigators back to the correct location. Critical evidence — including Mitrice's clothing — goes missing from the chain of custody. The family is taken to what they later believe was the wrong discovery site, where they find a bone left in the dirt.

No one has ever been charged. No one has ever been held accountable. Mitrice's mother, Latice Sutton, who spent sixteen years fighting for answers, died in September 2025 without ever learning what happened to her daughter.

This one stays with you.

If you have any information about the disappearance and death of Mitrice Richardson, please contact the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department at (323) 890-5500 or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 1-800-222-8477. A $25,000 reward is available for information leading to an arrest and conviction.

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On the evening of September 16, 2009, a 24-year-old Cal State Fullerton graduate named Mitrice Richardson walked into an upscale Malibu restaurant and immediately alarmed everyone she encountered. She told the valet she was there to avenge Michael Jackson's death. She told strangers she was from Mars. She couldn't pay her bill.

The staff didn't just call the police — they called because they were worried about her safety. One employee refused to cover her tab, saying: "She's not safe to go out on her own."

Deputies arrested Mitrice on minor charges and drove her to the Lost Hills Sheriff's Station in Calabasas. Her mother called, begging them not to release her. They promised they wouldn't.

At 12:28 AM, they let her walk out the door — no phone, no money, no car, no way home — into the pitch-black canyons of Malibu. She vanished.

What followed was eleven months of botched searches, hidden surveillance footage, contradicted testimony, and a department that insisted, at every turn, that everything was fine.

This one stays with you.

If you have any information, contact the LASD at (323) 890-5500 or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 1-800-222-8477. There is a $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction.

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

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It was supposed to be a quick trip into town. Twelve-year-old Sherry Lynn Marler — Little Farmer, tractor operator, country music lover — climbed into her stepfather's red pickup truck on the morning of June 6th, 1984, and rode twelve miles from their farm into Greenville, Alabama. He had to run into the bank. He gave her a dollar for a soda from the vending machine across the street. Meet me back at the truck.

She crossed the street.

She was never seen by her family again.

In a town of 7,600 people — where everybody knew everybody, where a strange face turned heads, where the police chief would later say a child had never once gone missing in his entire life — not a single person saw Sherry Marler that morning. Not crossing the street. Not at the machine. Not walking back.

This week, we dig into one of Alabama's most haunting unsolved disappearances: a twelve-year-old who vanished between a bank and a Chevron, three separate sightings with a mystery man witnesses say she called B.J., a stepfather who declined a polygraph but was cleared anyway, a pig farm in Butler County where cadaver dogs hit on something, evidence that reportedly never made it from a local sheriff's office to the FBI, and an amateur investigator who spent over a decade chasing the truth — only to write, in a Facebook post in 2020: I know exactly where she is, what happened to her, who did it, and why. But I can't prove it.

Sherry Lynn Marler has been missing since 1984. This is her story

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On July 8th, 2014, airport security cameras in Varna, Bulgaria captured a young German man sprinting through a terminal in what looked like absolute terror. He climbed a barbed wire fence. He ran into a sunflower field. He left everything behind — passport, wallet, phone — and vanished completely.

His name was Lars Mittank. He was 28 years old. It was the first time he had ever left Germany.

Sixteen million people have watched that footage. Thousands have debated it. Nobody has solved it.

This week on Crime Clueless we go through the full story — the bar fight that started everything, the midnight phone calls Lars made to his mother whispering that men were going to kill him, the missing hour the night before that nobody has ever explained, and the single detail that puts a crack in the most widely accepted theory in the entire case.

We also sit with the question at the heart of all of it. Was Lars running from something his injured brain invented — or was he running because running was the only rational thing left to do?

Eleven years on, nobody knows.

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 the morning of June 27th, 1995, 27-year-old KIMT-TV news anchor Jodi Huisentruit answered a call from her producer, saying she'd overslept and was on her way in. She never arrived.

What police found in the parking lot of her Mason City, Iowa apartment — a bent car key, a pair of red heels, a hairdryer, drag marks leading away from her car — told them immediately that this was no ordinary missing person case. It was an abduction.

Violent, fast, and planned by someone who knew exactly when Jodi would be walking to that car in the dark. In Part One, we walk through who Jodi was, the last night anyone can account for, the chilling scene that greeted investigators that morning, and the thing nobody talks about enough — the harassing phone calls, the white truck, the phone number she was one day away from changing.

Someone had been watching Jodi Huisentruit for a long time before June 27th.

This is where it begins.

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

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Thirty years. No arrest. No body. No answers. In Part Two of Dead Air, we get into the people investigators have looked at — a serial rapist who lived two blocks from Jodi's studio, a suspected serial killer whose ex-girlfriend lived next door to the last person to see Jodi alive, and the man who showed up at the crime scene before police finished processing it, named his boat after her, and said "she's gone" before he had any reason to know she was.

We also dig into the development that cracked this case back open in 2025 — a white van, a childhood best friend, an unreleased police sketch, and a phone call made on the tenth anniversary of Jodi's disappearance that no innocent person would ever think to make.

Plus: the former police chief who took evidence home, the 84-page journal mailed anonymously to a newspaper, and a $100,000 reward that is active right now. Someone out there knows what happened in that parking lot.

This is everything we know

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A husband is found dead in a locked bedroom.

Open and shut… right?

But when investigators take a closer look, the details don’t quite add up.

This isn’t the first time.

As the investigation unfolds, a second death resurfaces.

And just when it seems like the case couldn’t get any more disturbing… it does.

Because this story takes a turn no one saw coming—

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 October of 1965, 25-year-old Mary Shotwell Little left work in downtown Atlanta, ran a few errands at the Lenox mall, had dinner with a friend… and vanished. Her car was found the next morning parked exactly where she left it—except now it was covered in blood smears, red dirt dusting, 40 extra miles on the odometer, and groceries from the stop before dinner. After dinner, Mary was never seen again.

This week on Crime Clueless, we’re unpacking the mystery of Mary Shotwell Little—a young newlywed who vanished from a busy parking lot in the middle of her routine evening like a ghost. We’ll talk sightings, cryptic roses, a weirdly calm husband, and that times she and her credit card turned up again… in different cities.

Was Mary kidnapped? Did she stage her own disappearance? Was she silenced for something she knew? Or was this a case of a woman being snatched in plain sight, while the system kept shrugging?

This one’s part mystery, part spy novel, and all disturbing. You’ll be yelling “WHAT?!” every few minutes—and so were we.

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

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Judy Smith left her hotel in downtown Philadelphia for a day of sightseeing.

She had a simple plan. Walk the historic district. Visit places like Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. Meet her husband later that afternoon.

A normal day.

But by that evening… she was gone.

Five months later, her remains were discovered in a remote section of Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina — more than 600 miles away from where she was last seen.

No one can explain how she got there.

No confirmed travel records.

Some witnesses say they saw Judy alive in Asheville in the days after she disappeared — calm, coherent, even shopping. Others believe something happened in Philadelphia that set everything in motion.

But every explanation leaves something out.

In this episode, we walk through Judy’s final known hours, the investigation that followed, and the evidence that continues to raise more questions than answers.

Because in this case, the biggest mystery isn’t just what happened to Judy Smith…

…it’s how she got there at all.

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

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It starts with a normal morning in Houston, Texas.

Until it isn’t.

When one woman disappears, her family does what anyone would do — they start searching. Driving her usual route. Calling anyone who might have seen her. Trying to find even the smallest clue.

But as the hours pass, the silence becomes harder to explain.

And when answers finally begin to surface… they don’t bring clarity — they bring more questions.

Because this isn’t just a disappearance.

It’s the beginning of a case that gets stranger, more confusing, and more unsettling with every new detail.

And trust us… you won’t see where this is going.

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

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