On September 16, 1922, the bodies of Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall and Eleanor Reinhardt Mills, a member of his church choir, were discovered beneath a crabapple tree near an abandoned farm outside New Brunswick, New Jersey. Both were married to other people—and investigators soon learned the minister and choir singer had been carrying on a secret affair.

The crime scene was as strange as it was brutal.

Hall had been shot once in the head. Eleanor had been shot three times, and her throat had been cut. Their bodies appeared to have been deliberately arranged together, and love letters connected to their affair were found nearby.

Suspicion quickly fell on Hall’s wealthy wife, Frances Stevens Hall, and members of her powerful family. Prosecutors eventually accused Frances and her brothers of confronting the lovers and killing them in a fit of jealousy and revenge.

But the investigation was plagued by mistakes, competing jurisdictions, contaminated evidence, sensational newspaper coverage, and witnesses whose stories were difficult to prove.

Then came Jane Gibson, a local hog farmer whom the newspapers dubbed “The Pig Woman.” Gibson claimed she had witnessed the confrontation on the night of the murders and eventually became the prosecution’s star witness, even being brought into the courtroom on a stretcher during the sensational 1926 trial.

Frances Hall and her brothers were ultimately acquitted.

No one else was ever convicted.

More than a century later, the murders of Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills remain officially unsolved—and the case endures as one of the great true crime mysteries of the Jazz Age, filled with forbidden love, wealth, jealousy, scandal, and a media frenzy that helped shape America’s fascination with sensational murder trials.

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In early 1984, women began disappearing across America, many of them young, attractive, and hoping for careers in modeling. The man approaching them often seemed harmless: Christopher Wilder, a successful photographer and race-car enthusiast who used promises of modeling jobs, photo shoots, and magazine opportunities to lure women into his control.

What followed was a terrifying 47-day cross-country crime spree that stretched from Florida to the West Coast and back across the country. Wilder abducted young women and girls, sexually assaulted and tortured them, and murdered at least eight. Several others survived encounters with him and helped investigators understand just how calculated his methods had become.

Among the survivors was 16-year-old Tina Risico, whom Wilder kidnapped in California and held captive for days while continuing his journey across the country. She endured repeated abuse and was forced to accompany him as he targeted other young women before he eventually released her.

By then, Wilder had become the subject of a massive FBI manhunt.

On April 13, 1984, police finally caught up with him in Colebrook, New Hampshire. During a struggle with officers, Wilder’s own gun discharged, killing him and bringing the killing spree to an abrupt end.

But his death left investigators with unanswered questions. Wilder has been suspected in additional murders and disappearances in both the United States and his native Australia, meaning the full number of women he victimized may never be known.

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On the morning of December 6, 1984, 14-year-old Gloria Pointer left her Cleveland, Ohio, home and headed to school. She never made it.

Gloria’s body was found in the stairwell of an apartment building on Cleveland’s east side. She had been sexually assaulted and murdered, leaving her mother, Yvonne Pointer, devastated—and determined that her daughter would not become just another forgotten cold case.

Years passed. Then decades.

Yvonne became an outspoken advocate for victims and refused to stop pushing investigators to find Gloria’s killer. Nearly 30 years after the murder, advances in DNA technology finally produced the break she had been waiting for.

In 2013, DNA recovered from the crime was entered into Ohio’s database and matched Hernandez Warren, a convicted sex offender with a violent criminal history. Warren was arrested and charged with Gloria’s kidnapping, rape, and murder.

In May 2014, Hernandez Warren pleaded guilty to aggravated murder and rape, finally bringing a measure of justice to a case that had haunted Gloria’s family and the Cleveland community since 1984.

But this story is about more than the man who killed Gloria Pointer.

It is about a mother who made a promise to her daughter and spent almost three decades refusing to let the world forget her name.

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In September 2004, Charlie Brandt and his wife, Teri, evacuated their Florida Keys home ahead of Hurricane Ivan and went to stay with Teri’s niece, Michelle Jones, near Orlando.

Days later, Michelle and Teri were found brutally murdered inside the house.

Michelle had been decapitated and mutilated. Teri had been stabbed to death. Charlie was found hanging in the garage.

At first, the horrific murder-suicide seemed almost impossible to reconcile with the quiet, ordinary man friends and neighbors thought they knew. Then Charlie’s family revealed a secret they had kept buried for more than thirty years.

When Charlie Brandt was just 13 years old, he walked into his parents’ bedroom with a gun and shot both of them, killing his pregnant mother and seriously wounding his father. He was committed to a psychiatric facility but was never criminally charged.

That revelation changed everything.

Investigators began comparing Michelle’s murder to unsolved killings across Florida and eventually linked Brandt to the 1989 murder of Sherry Perisho. Detectives also suspected him in several additional cold cases whose victims had suffered mutilation similar to Michelle’s, although those killings were never conclusively proven to be his work.

The question was no longer whether Charlie Brandt had suddenly snapped in 2004.

It was how long had he been killing?

Because Charlie died before investigators could question him, the full extent of his crimes may never be known. What appeared to be one horrifying family murder ultimately exposed a man investigators came to believe had been hiding a violent secret for decades.

This is the true crime story of Charlie Brandt—a teenage killer who grew into an apparently ordinary husband, a horrifying double murder that exposed his past, and the cold cases that left investigators wondering how many other victims he may have left behind.

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In March 2005, Dublin was rocked by a murder so gruesome that the women responsible would become infamous across Ireland as the Scissor Sisters.

Sisters Linda and Charlotte Mulhall were living in a world marked by drugs, alcohol, violence, and chaos when a confrontation erupted with their mother’s boyfriend, Farah Swaleh Noor. By the end of the night, Noor was dead.

But the killing was only the beginning.

The sisters dismembered Noor’s body and disposed of his remains in Dublin’s Royal Canal. The horrifying case began to unravel after human remains were discovered in the water, launching an investigation that would expose what had happened inside the family home.

Charlotte was convicted of murder and received a life sentence. Linda was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years in prison; she was released in 2018 after serving her sentence.

The brutality of the crime, the dismemberment of the victim, and the fact that two sisters committed it together turned the case into one of the most notorious murders in modern Irish criminal history.

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For years, women disappeared from the streets, hotels, and neighborhoods of New York and New Jersey while Richard Cottingham lived an outwardly ordinary life as a husband, father, and computer operator for an insurance company.

Behind that façade was a serial killer.

Cottingham became known as the Torso Killer, the Times Square Killer, and the Times Square Ripper because of the extreme mutilation found in some of his crimes. His confirmed murders stretched from the 1960s into 1980, and investigators have continued linking him to cold cases decades after his arrest.

He was finally arrested in May 1980 after hotel employees heard the screams of a young woman he was attacking and called police. That arrest ended his active killing career—but it did not end the investigation into how many women he had murdered.

Over the decades, Cottingham has confessed to additional killings, some dating back more than sixty years. In January 2026, authorities announced that he had confessed to the 1965 murder of 18-year-old nursing student Alys Eberhardt, a New Jersey cold case that had remained unsolved for six decades. He has claimed responsibility for as many as 80 to 100 murders, although that staggering number has never been independently proven.

Now in his late seventies and still incarcerated, Cottingham continues to reveal information about murders long thought unsolvable—leaving detectives to determine where confession ends and truth begins.

This is the true crime story of Richard Cottingham, the Torso Killer—a serial murderer who hid behind an ordinary suburban life while leaving behind a trail of victims, cold cases, and confessions that investigators are still unraveling more than forty years after his capture.

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In the early 1920s, the Osage Nation of Oklahoma had become extraordinarily wealthy after oil was discovered beneath their land. But that wealth made them targets.

One by one, members of the Osage began dying under suspicious circumstances. Some were shot. Some were poisoned. Others simply disappeared. The period became known as the Osage Reign of Terror, and behind many of the deaths was a calculated scheme to steal the victims’ oil-rich headrights.

At the center of one of the most notorious conspiracies was powerful cattleman William King Hale, known as the “King of the Osage Hills.” Hale encouraged his nephew, Ernest Burkhart, to marry Osage woman Mollie Kyle Burkhart. Then members of Mollie’s family began dying—including her sister Anna Brown, her mother Lizzie, and other relatives—allowing valuable headrights to move through the family inheritance line.

The killings were not limited to one family or one mastermind. Historians and researchers have found evidence that the violence was broader and more systematic, involving corruption, greed, guardianship abuses, and people in positions of authority who profited from the exploitation of the Osage. Many suspicious deaths were never fully investigated or solved.

Eventually, the Bureau of Investigation—the agency that would become the FBI—entered the case. Undercover investigators helped expose Hale’s murder conspiracy, and Hale, Ernest Burkhart, and other conspirators were eventually convicted for their roles in the killings.

The Osage murders later became the subject of David Grann’s bestselling book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI and Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed film adaptation. But behind the books, movies, and headlines were real families whose relatives were murdered for something other people wanted to steal from them.

This is the true crime story of the Osage Indian Murders and the Reign of Terror—a chilling chapter of American history built on oil, greed, betrayal, racism, and a conspiracy to murder people for their inheritance.

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For decades, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter lived a life built almost entirely on lies.

The German-born con man reinvented himself again and again, adopting identities that allowed him to move through wealthy American circles as a film producer, aristocrat, financier, and eventually “Clark Rockefeller”—a man who convinced friends, employers, and even his own wife that he belonged to one of America’s most famous families.

But one of his earliest identities would eventually connect him to murder.

In the 1980s, Gerhartsreiter called himself Christopher Chichester and lived in a guesthouse behind a home in San Marino, California. The property belonged to the family of John and Linda Sohus, a young married couple who mysteriously disappeared in 1985.

Years later, new owners began digging a swimming pool in the backyard.

They uncovered human remains.

The victim was eventually identified as John Sohus, whose skull had been fractured and whose body had been dismembered and buried in bags beneath the property. Linda Sohus has never been found.

By then, the mysterious Christopher Chichester had long since vanished and Christian Gerhartsreiter had moved on to new names and new lives.

His elaborate deception finally began unraveling after another extraordinary crime. In 2008, while living as Clark Rockefeller, Gerhartsreiter kidnapped his own daughter during a custody visit following his divorce. He was captured in Baltimore, and the publicity surrounding his arrest helped investigators connect the sophisticated Boston “Rockefeller” to the man once known as Christopher Chichester.

That connection eventually brought Gerhartsreiter back to California to face trial for John Sohus’s murder.

In April 2013, a jury convicted him of first-degree murder, finding that he had killed Sohus using both blunt and sharp instruments. He was later sentenced to 27 years to life in prison.

Gerhartsreiter denied killing John and maintained that Linda Sohus was responsible, but prosecutors rejected that account. Linda’s disappearance remains one of the haunting unanswered questions surrounding the case.

This is the true crime story of Christian Gerhartsreiter, the man who called himself Clark Rockefeller—a master impostor who spent decades creating new identities until a murder buried in a California backyard finally helped expose the man behind them all.

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For years, Walburga “Dolly” Oesterreich appeared to be living an ordinary married life with her wealthy husband, Fred Oesterreich.

What Fred didn’t know was that another man was living inside their house.

Around 1913, Dolly began an affair with Otto Sanhuber, a teenage sewing-machine repairman who worked for her husband. To keep their relationship secret, Otto eventually moved into the attic of the Oesterreich home, where he lived hidden away while Fred went about his life below completely unaware.

When the couple later moved from Milwaukee to Los Angeles, Otto came too—and once again took up residence in the attic of their new home. He spent his days reading and writing while Dolly secretly brought him food and continued their affair.

Then, on August 22, 1922, everything changed.

During an argument between Dolly and Fred, Otto emerged from his hiding place and shot Fred Oesterreich to death. Dolly and Otto then attempted to make the killing look like a botched burglary. Otto locked Dolly inside a closet, took valuables from the house, and disappeared back into the attic before police arrived.

Investigators suspected Dolly, but there was one major problem: they couldn’t explain how she could have murdered her husband, locked herself inside a closet, and made the supposed killer disappear without a trace.

The truth would remain hidden for years.

Otto continued living secretly in Dolly’s attic even after Fred’s death, while Dolly carried on other relationships—including one with her attorney. Eventually, former lovers, suspicious gifts, hidden guns, and Dolly’s increasingly complicated web of secrets began unraveling the story.

In 1930, authorities finally learned about the mysterious man who had lived above the Oesterreich household.

Otto confessed to shooting Fred and was convicted of manslaughter, but the conviction could not stand because the statute of limitations had expired. Dolly later faced conspiracy charges, but her trial ended with a hung jury, and the case against her was ultimately dropped.

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On the night of May 19, 1983, Diane Downs sped into a hospital emergency entrance in Springfield, Oregon, with her three children bleeding inside her car.

Eight-year-old Christie, seven-year-old Cheryl, and three-year-old Danny had all been shot at close range. Cheryl was dead. Christie and Danny were critically wounded. Diane herself had suffered a gunshot wound to the arm.

Diane told police a terrifying story: a bushy-haired stranger had stepped into the road, tried to hijack her car, and opened fire when she refused to surrender it.

Investigators soon began questioning that story.

The physical evidence didn’t seem to fit Diane’s account, and prosecutors argued that her behavior and changing explanations pointed toward something far darker. They eventually developed a motive involving Lew Knickerbocker, a married man with whom Diane had been involved and who, according to prosecutors, did not want children in his life.

Then came the testimony that would become devastating for Diane.

After surviving her injuries and regaining the ability to speak, Christie Downs testified that the person who shot the children was their own mother.

In 1984, Diane Downs was convicted of murdering Cheryl and attempting to murder Christie and Danny. She received a sentence of life plus fifty years.

But the story became even stranger.

In 1987, Diane escaped from prison, scaling the facility’s fencing and remaining on the run for ten days before authorities recaptured her.

For more than four decades, Diane Downs has continued to insist that she did not shoot her children. She has repeatedly been denied parole, most recently in December 2025, and remains incarcerated.

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