In Ringgold, Georgia, Alvin Ridley was something of a local bogeyman. He rarely left his house and, when he did, he was always by himself. 

So when Alvin called 9-1-1 to report the death of his wife – a woman that no one had ever heard about, let alone seen – the town was shocked.

Quickly a narrative began to emerge: Alvin Ridley had held this woman captive for more than thirty years. And then, he’d strangled her.

It didn’t take much for the citizens of Ringgold to believe it. And, before long, police came to the same conclusion and charged Alvin with first degree murder.

But there was one person who came to Alvin’s defence: a down on his luck attorney named McCracken Poston, who would become Alvin’s biggest defender – and his friend. 

In his memoir Zenith Man: Death, Love, and Redemption in a Georgia Courtroom, Poston recounts his experience representing Alvin Ridley, and tells the story of one of the strangest trials in Georgia history. 

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When someone is attacked, especially in their home, the victim usually knows the person hurting them. And in the 2002 murder of a woman named Marlyne Johnson, the police charged her daughter-in-law, Sophia Johnson, with first degree murder. The whole ordeal tore two families apart because not only was Sophia charged with killing her mother-in-law, but the main witness against her was her own brother.

Amory Sivertson dives back into the case in her new podcast, Beyond All Repair. She joins Crime Story now. 

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When Derrick Johnson was a toddler, he was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. He never developed the ability to speak. Instead, he would communicate with his eyes and his hands, and his family would do their best to interpret his gestures.

That was until they met a Rutgers professor named Anna Stubblefield.

Anna thought that with the right technique and coaching Derrick could learn to say exactly what was on his mind.

But what began as an attempt to expand Derek's horizons quickly turned into a nightmare. One that ended with Derrick’s family accusing Anna of sexual assault.

In his documentary Tell Them You Love Me, director Nick August Perna explores Anna and Derrick’s relationship – and the complicated questions it forces us to confront.

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Like most journalists, veteran reporter Tonya Mosley spent her career telling other people's stories. But then she got a call from a man named Antonio Wiley.  

In her podcast, She Has A Name, Tonya and Antonio investigate the disappearance of his mother, Anita Wiley, who went missing in Detroit in 1987. The more they learn about what happened to Anita, the more Tonya realizes that the investigation will impact her entire life. 

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There is no shortage of scam artists, catfishers, and grifters in true crime.

Usually, they’re looking for money, sex, or fame.

But Kaitlyn Braun was a different kind of con artist all together.

Over the course of two years, Braun tricked more than 50 birthworkers into thinking she was pregnant. She’d take them on wild, unpredictable rides through traumatic pregnancies (and births) that turned out to be completely fabricated.

In The Con: Kaitlyn’s Baby, journalist Sarah Treleaven (Madness of Two, Unrestorable) tries to figure out what could possibly lead someone to do something like this. 

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Amy, a seasoned doula, is bedridden due to illness when she receives a call from fellow doula Katie to assist a client, Kaitlyn, over the phone. Kaitlyn is pregnant as a result of sexual assault and has just learned her baby will be stillborn. Over the next 10 days, Amy and Katie are swept into Kaitlyn's escalating crises — bleeding disorders, a hysterectomy, cancer, and seemingly predatory doctors — while supporting her emotionally, over the phone. Despite exhaustion and their own trauma, they unquestioningly focus on Kaitlyn's needs. However, when Amy’s girlfriend points out strange details in Kaitlyn's story, alarm bells ring. A dog barks during a call where Kaitlyn claims she’s in the hospital, and photos Kaitlyn sent of her stillborn are traced back to Wikipedia. Something isn't right. More episodes of The Con: Kaitlyn's Baby are available at: https://link.mgln.ai/yPZ95Z

Content warning: This episode contains references to medical emergencies, including baby loss. We also deal with sexual assault and there is some strong language. 

Subscribers of CBC True Crime Premium can binge all episodes of The Con: Kaitlyn's Baby right now.

How should we deal with women who kill their abusers? In the Globe and Mail’s first longform podcast In Her Defence, reporter Jana Pruden tells the story of Helen Naslund, who shot and killed her husband after enduring 30 years of abuse. It’s a story about a long fight for freedom and a justice system stuck in the past.

Feedback for us? You can email us directly at [email protected].

This episode's transcript can be found here.

Crime Story will be back in the new year with brand new episodes. To keep you company over the holidays, we're bringing you episode one of Bad Results.

They needed certainty. They got chaos. For over a decade, countless people from at least five different countries put their trust in a company offering prenatal paternity tests. It promised clients “99.9% accuracy” — but then routinely, for over a decade, identified the wrong biological fathers.

Investigative journalists Jorge Barrera and Rachel Houlihan track down the people whose lives were torn apart by these bad results, the shattered families and acrimonious court cases that followed, and the story behind the company that continues to stand by its testing and is still operating today.

More episodes of Bad Results are available here.

Crime Story will be back in the new year with brand new episodes. To keep you company over the holidays, we're bringing you episode one of Lords of Death, a podcast from Tenderfoot TV. 

While digging through an old memory box, host Thrasher Banks discovers forgotten VHS tapes, police reports, and faded letters regarding a 1995 murder in Dayton, Ohio. Drawn to the connection between this murder and the other seemingly innocuous contents of the box, Thrasher begins investigating. 

Could the 1995 murder be connected to other unsolved cases? Join Thrasher as he unpacks this box and searches for answers about the “Lords of Death.” 

Listen now or subscribe to Tenderfoot+ to binge the show ad-free! More episodes are available at: https://lnk.to/lordsofdeath

For more than three decades, Peter Walaschek has been on the run. In the late 1980’s, during the Iran-Iraq war, Walaschek admitted to selling illegal chemicals used to make mustard gas to the Iranian regime. But he wasn’t a professional weapons dealer or a career criminal. He was a pharmacist who happened to really hate his office job. 

Reporter Chloe Hadjimatheou joins Crime Story to explain what it was like sitting across from the international fugitive, and how, Walaschek says, he went from working in a pharmacy in Germany to visiting the battlefields of Iran. 

Feedback for us? You can email us directly at [email protected].

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