Hometown Murders Podcast

Marlene Lehnberg (15 October 1955 – 7 October 2015) was a South African murderer more commonly known as The Scissor Murderess. She was 18 years old in 1974 when she and hired killer Marthinus Choegoe stabbed Susanna Magdalena van der Linde, the wife of Lehnberg’s 47-year-old lover Christiaan van der Linde, to death with a pair of scissors. At 19 she was then the youngest woman to be convicted of murder in South Africa. Both Lehnberg and Marthinus Choegoe received the death penalty, but this was later set aside and she served 11 years of her 20-year sentence in Pollsmoor Prison outside Cape Town.

Joseph Vacher was a French serial killer, sometimes known as "The French Ripper" or "L'éventreur du Sud-Est" owing to comparisons to the more famous Jack the Ripper murderer of London, England, in 1888. His scarred face and plain, white, handmade rabbit-fur hat composed his trademark appearance

David John Birnie (16 February 1951 – 7 October 2005) and Catherine Margaret Birnie (née Harrison) (born 23 May 1951) were an Australian couple from Perth, Western Australia. They murdered four women ranging in age from 15 to 31 at their home in 1986, and attempted to murder a fifth. These crimes were referred to in the press as the Moorhouse murders, after the Birnies' address at 3 Moorhouse Street in Willagee, a suburb of Perth.

Sophie Louise Hook (27 May 1988 – 30 July 1995) was a seven-year-old British child who was murdered in Llandudno, Wales in the early hours of 30 July 1995. She was from Great Budworth, near Northwich, Cheshire, but was staying at the Llandudno home of her uncle, Danny Jones, when she was murdered. She had gone missing from a tent where she was camping in her uncle's garden, and her body was found washed up on a nearby beach several hours later. Howard Hughes was arrested for the murder soon afterwards, and sentenced to life imprisonment after being found guilty in July 1996.

Madeleine Hamilton Smith (29 March 1835 – 12 April 1928) was a 19th-century Glasgow socialite who was the accused in a sensational murder trial in Scotland in 1857.

Rachel Margaret McLean (1971–1991) was a British student at St. Hilda's College in Oxford, England, when she was murdered by her boyfriend, John Tanner, a day after they became engaged. In the aftermath, Tanner concocted ruses in an attempt to allay suspicion, and elaborated a series of lies in an attempt to confuse the crime investigation and outwit the police.

New podcast Mind Blown History from creators of Brief History Podcast and Hometown Murders Podcast.
 
History of Jack 'o' Lantern's.

Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi was assassinated at 9:29 a.m. on 31 October 1984 at her residence in Safdarjung Road, New Delhi. She was killed by her Sikh bodyguards Satwant Singh and Beant Singh in the aftermath of Operation Blue Star. Operation Blue Star was an Indian military action carried out between 1 and 8 June 1984, ordered by Indira Gandhi to remove the Sikh Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his armed followers from the holy Golden temple of the Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar, Punjab. The collateral damage included the death of many pilgrims, as well as damage to the Akal Takht. The military action on the sacred temple was criticized by Sikhs both inside and outside India.

Ronald Clark O'Bryan (October 19, 1944 – March 31, 1984), nicknamed The Candy Man and The Man Who Killed Halloween, was an American man convicted of killing his eight-year-old son on Halloween 1974 with a potassium cyanide-laced Pixy Stix that was ostensibly collected during a trick or treat outing. O'Bryan poisoned his son in order to claim life insurance money to ease his own financial troubles, as he was $100,000 in debt. O'Bryan also distributed poisoned candy to his daughter and three other children in an attempt to cover up his crime; however, neither his daughter nor the other children ate the poisoned candy. He was convicted of capital murder in June 1975 and sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal injection in March 1984.

Southampton - England

Southampton is a city in Hampshire, South East England, 70 miles (110 km) south-west of London and 15 miles (24 km) north-west of Portsmouth. A major port, and close to the New Forest, it lies at the northernmost point of Southampton Water, at the confluence of the River Test and Itchen, with the River Hamble joining to the south. The unitary authority had a population of 253,651 at the 2011 census. A resident of Southampton is called a Sotonian.

This Episode contains the Hometown Murder Cases of:

Teresa Elena De Simone (24 June 1957 – 5 December 1979) was murdered in Southampton, England, in 1979. Her murder led to one of the longest proven cases of a miscarriage of justice in English legal history. The murder occurred outside the Tom Tackle pub and was the subject of a three-year police investigation which resulted in the arrest of Sean Hodgson. Over the course of his 15-day trial it was not revealed that Hodgson was a pathological liar and had confessed to numerous crimes, including some that he could not have committed and others that did not appear to have happened. Hodgson was convicted of the murder by a unanimous jury verdict in 1982 and was sentenced to life imprisonment.After serving 27 years in prison he was exonerated and released in March 2009. DNA analysis of semen samples that had been preserved from the original crime scene showed that they could not have come from him.
Hannah Foster was a 17-year-old British student who was abducted after a night out in Southampton in mid-March 2003. Murdered by Indian immigrant Maninder Pal Singh Kohli, who had come to the UK in 1993, her body was found in nearby West End, two days after she disappeared. A few days later, Kohli fled to his family's home in Chandigarh, India, later assuming a new identity in Darjeeling, but was finally extradited in 2007 (becoming the first Indian citizen to be extradited to the UK). He was found guilty of the crime in 2008, and was sentenced to life imprisonment with a 24-year non-parole period.
Eileen Isabella Ronnie Gibson (16 June 1926 – 18 October 1947),known professionally as Gay Gibson, was an actress who went missing during a sailing of a ship between Cape Town in South Africa and Southampton, England in October 1947. The criminal case that followed was known as The Porthole Murder, as the man who would be convicted of killing her admitted that he had pushed her body out of the porthole in her cabin into the Atlantic Ocean. He claimed that they had engaged in consensual sex and that she had died of an apparent sudden illness; he had then panicked and thrown her body out of the cabin porthole.