Decoding Mysteries

On Halloween morning 1969, Glasgow mother Helen Puttock was murdered after a night at the Barrowland Ballroom, leaving behind her sister Jeannie as the key witness and a mysterious dance partner known only as “the second John.” This episode reconstructs the fateful taxi ride and the minute details that turned an ordinary Thursday night into Scotland’s most enduring cold case.

In July 1988, the discovery of Debra Medeiros's body in a Freetown drainage ditch launched one of the most enigmatic serial-killing investigations in modern American history. Over the next ten months, nine women were found murdered along the highways surrounding New Bedford, Massachusetts, with two more presumed victims still missing. The case, which targeted vulnerable women from the city's struggling waterfront district, remains unsolved nearly four decades later.

On April 10, 2015, forensic teams discovered four additional sets of remains behind a New Britain strip mall, confirming inmate William Devin Howell’s chilling claim that police had only found “half of what is out there.” The recovery brought the total body count to seven victims murdered by Howell during a single year while he worked as a lawn-mowing contractor in central Connecticut.

On February 2, 2007, nineteen-year-old Joshua Anderson entered the north Tulsa home of Herbert and Rosemary Hobbs intending only to rob them. Within ninety minutes he had forced the mother and son into sexual acts, murdered them both, and set their house ablaze, escalating a simple robbery into one of Tulsa’s most disturbing post-millennium homicide cases.

In November 1984, a single preserved tissue sample from a 1976 death finally revealed that Steven David Catlin had been murdering his wives and mother with undetectable paraquat for nearly a decade.

On the morning of April 12, 1919, Paris police finally arrested the mild-mannered, bearded man who had been living under multiple aliases. What they uncovered was a chilling web of deception, wartime disappearances, and a secluded villa in Gambais that may have hidden the remains of as many as eleven victims.

On January 4, 2006, recently released juvenile offender Leo Boatman carried a stolen AK-47 into Ocala National Forest and gunned down two Santa Fe Community College students in a quiet woodland clearing near Juniper Springs. The brutal attack left John Parker and Amber Peck dead within minutes, their bodies hidden in a marshy pond before Boatman calmly returned home to watch television.

On the evening of March 30, 2010, Franklin DeWayne Alix was executed by lethal injection in Texas for the capital murder of Eric Bridgeford during a violent 1998 home invasion. The episode examines how the crime began with the rape of Eric’s sister Karyl, escalated to Eric’s shooting death on the front lawn, and concluded with Alix’s final statement before his death at Huntsville Unit.

On the second day of the new millennium, a seemingly model Navy veteran named John Eric Armstrong reported discovering a body in the Rouge River—yet within months, investigators would learn he was the man responsible for multiple murders of Detroit-area sex workers. This episode unpacks how a man with a clean record and honorable discharge from the USS Nimitz became one of the most surprising serial killers in Detroit history.

## Episode 29 — Jake Bird: The Tacoma Ax and the Hex