DINNER PARTNERS with Christopher & Eric

The only thing a true crime aficionado loves more than justice is when beloved Dateline host Keith Morrison calls BS on a lying criminal. To their face! You’ll get plenty of the later and some of the former in this Spring Broke installment of Christopher and Eric’s True Crime TV Club. Keith even asks the FBI some hard questions. In 2009, the disappearance of teenager Brittanee Drexel from a crowded Myrtle Beach sidewalk made headlines around the world. In episode 12 of season 31 of DATELINE, entitled “The Last Walk”, we travel the years of false leads, dramatic twists and outrageous lies that led from that rowdy Spring break evening to a jail cell in rural South Carolina and a confession that feels half-baked at best. Plenty of people failed to prevent this awful tragedy, and Christopher and Eric have plenty to say about all of them — but maybe not as much as Keith!

A fateful walk to the beach. A make-up case left behind. A serial killer who died before he could answer for his crimes. Following this trail of sandy clues, Spring Broke heads to the heart of Spring Break country — Daytona Beach, Florida — and travels back in time to 1984. Here Christopher and Eric unearth a decades old story of a vanished young woman, a mysteriously troubled mother and a tragically incompetent medical examiner as True Crime TV Club serves up DISAPPEARED, Season 4, Episode 9, entitled “Spring Break Nightmare”. What became of struggling high school student Colleen Orsborn on that long ago afternoon when she left her house in search of sun, sand and freedom? And why did it take so long to find out?

Welcome to Spring Broke, where adolescents make reckless decisions and your hosts are reminded why they don’t have kids. Because they’d be too afraid to let them out of the house! It’s not the first time Christopher and Eric have visited a small Texas town in search of a missing young man. Echoes of the Tom Brown story can be heard in this breathless installment of True Crime TV Club. Here your hosts serve up a two part episode of the Paramount + series NEVER SEEN AGAIN, Parts 1 and 2 covering the dramatic disappearance of 18-year-old Caleb Diehl. When the borrowed truck Caleb was driving suddenly reappears but the young man who was driving it doesn’t, the resulting investigation unearths a dark legacy of abuse and lies, shaking the tiny, dusty hamlet of Nocona, Texas down to its cattle ranching roots. Police might have the right man, but for what crime? More importantly, where is Caleb? The question remains unanswered, but Christopher and Eric have theories. And they’re not as pretty as the young man at the center of this disturbing case.

Christopher and Eric have done their fair share of snickering at famous paranormal hucksters. This time the joke’s on them. After visiting their respective hometowns, this final installment of Mortality Month pokes at the veil between the living and the dead in not-so-sunny Southern California, the place your hosts have called home for decades. In the process, they rustle up some genuinely terrifying entities. In episode 11 of season 2 of PARANORMAL WITNESS entitled “The Good Skeleton/Hollywood Haunting”, we’re transported to the night-dark hills beneath the Hollywood sign and the dusty and dangerous backgrounds of rural California. Your hosts are set back on their heels by these compelling and disturbingly believable accounts from real people who’ve brushed up against terrifying events they can’t fully explain. (Actually, Eric only believed about 40% of the second story, but you can’t win ‘em all.)

Mortality Month continues. After visiting the haunted happenings in Christopher’s birthplace, it’s time to rustle up some spirits in the Medieval German town in which Eric Shaw Quinn took his first breath — and barked out his first highly detailed tea order. Welcome to Heidelberg, Germany. Here your hosts are introduced to a band of high-strung ghost chasers for whom every breeze, shadow, snapping twig or leafless tree is the stuff of a complex and frightening supernatural narrative for which they present not a single shred of compelling evidence. In this episode of GHOST CHASERS, entitled “Heidelberg”, Eric decides the secret gay romance he’s dreamed up between two of the handsome ghost hunters is a far more interesting avenue of exploration than the team psychic’s ceaseless and absurd proclamations.  It’s his birthday, so we’ll let him roll with it. Word to the wise — if you watch the episode on Tubi, it’s actually episode 6, not episode 7. Be advised we don’t recommend watching either.

Christopher likes to say he’s a man with two hometowns, and the City by The Bay is the first of the two. That’s why Eric suggested they serve up this special about Bay Area hauntings. Or was it Christopher who suggested it? One thing’s clear, after watching episodes 1 and 2 of THE HAUNTED BAY, neither host wants to take blame for bringing it to the table.  Despite the profoundly amateurish filmmaking and incomprehensible interviews, these two episodes of — we’re not sure what to call it, exactly — left your hosts tackling some hard hitting questions. Can ghosts fry camera batteries? Was a nightclub employee who was crushed to death by a prop piano during an act of lovemaking the victim of a grisly accident or murder? You know, the important stuff that keeps everyone up at night.

It’s Christopher and Eric’s birthday month. And what have these dark lords of the podcastverse unleashed at this time of celebration and reflection? Mortality Month, of course. In part thanks to you. Our beloved Party People asked us to take a break from grisly murders and return to the world of the paranormal (and it’s “occasional” fraudsters and cranks.) To give it a birthday theme, your hosts cut a path through the states they’ve called home, starting with the boot-shaped one at the mouth of the muddy Mississip. Follow along as they serve up episode 1 of season 1 of HAUNTED USA, entitled “New Orleans”.  In the City That Care Forgot, Christopher and Eric face off with rampaging spirits (and tourists), night vision cameras and haunted houses where everyone seems a little too eager to make a quick buck.

Clark Williams, our fellow citizen detective at TDPS, returns to round out Citizen Detective Month with another stunning interview, this one focused on a murder that struck close to home for your hosts. In August of 1987 the mutilated remains of eighteen-year-old runaway Tracy Nute were found scattered along Interstate 5 between Los Angeles and Fresno. Meanwhile, an appliance rental company in West Hollywood discovered someone had returned a chainsaw that was flecked with bits of blood and human bone. Were these two horrifying incidents the work of a serial killer preying on young queer men long before Jeffrey Dahmer made headlines for his hideous crimes? With Clark on the case, we’re hopeful we’ll have answers soon as he applies the Clark Williams Method to another baffling case.

It wouldn’t be Citizen Detective Month at TDPS if Christopher and Eric didn’t include their very own fellow citizen detective, Clark Williams, the brilliant and determined amateur sleuth who solved the murder of Billy Newton after thirty years. Clark joins the podcast in our Sunset Strip studios to discuss the cold case murders he’s been working on since finding justice for Billy. Who abandoned Alice Ellicot’s corpse in a Midwestern field? Who ended Talfrieda Covington’s life steps from the front door of her own home? We’re hopeful Clark’s work with local authorities brings justice for these nearly forgotten victims as well.

Citizen Detective Month continues with a decades old mystery that will set your teeth on edge and bring your blood to a boil. In this True Crime TV Club installment, Christopher and Eric serve up episode 7 of season 3 of DEADLINE: CRIME WITH TAMRON HALL entitled “Never Stop Looking”, the tale of Ruth Vosseler’s search for her missing children. When her marriage hit the rocks, Ruth assumed she and her husband would reach an amicable, if difficult, parting. Then one day he and their two children never returned from a weekend away visiting relatives, relatives who soon confessed her husband and the children had never showed up there either. The resulting saga includes false starts, an FBI manhunt and an unflinching look into the many ways the system failed this crusading and determined mother as she became her own investigator in the search for her missing children.