“Anything you can think of is going to be in the water.”

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Bettersten Wade searched for her missing 37-year-old son for nearly six months. Then she found out that the police knew where he was the whole time.

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On September 18, 1998, an unusual ad ran in USA Today — a company called John’s Estate Sales was looking to buy a moon rock. The phone number on the ad belonged to Special Agent Joe Gutheinz at NASA.

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The bodies of a woman and her child were found inside a burned house on Christmas Day, 1843. An autopsy showed that they’d died before the fire even started.

Alex Hortis's book is The Witch of New York.

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Stories of animals really going for it.

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In 1985, 160 people were sent letters saying they’d won free tickets to an NFL football game. They were told to pick up their tickets at the Washington Convention Center. When they arrived, they were greeted by cheerleaders, men in tuxedos, and team mascots. But then, they found out there were never any tickets at all.

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In 1791, three men filed lawsuits in the General Court of Maryland. They were all suing the same person: the Jesuit priest who enslaved them.

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“Children nowadays, they make maps. And say, this is the street where the store is that we're going to rob, and this is where we're going to hide, and this is how we get away.” In the 1950s, U.S. senators were worrying about “the fifth horseman of doom.” And they started an unusual investigation.

The recordings of the Senate hearings in this episode are courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives.

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In 1993, Gary Settle was sentenced to 177 years in prison. Twenty-six years into his sentence, he started helping other inmates get out of prison through something called compassionate release - a policy that allows people in prison to petition to be let out for “extraordinary and compelling” reasons.

You can learn more about Gary Settle in Anna Altman’s piece, "The Quality of Mercy," in The Atavist Magazine.

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In 1977, a man named Robert Burns went to a funeral and shot someone, in the head, in front of 300 people. He didn’t deny it, and his lawyer didn’t deny it. Burns told a police officer: “I had to do it. And if I had to do it over, I’d do it again.”

Casey Cep’s book is The Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee.

This episode was originally released in 2019.

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