House of Mystery Radio on NBC

A revelatory account by the best- selling author of Ratf**ked that will give you hope that America’s fragile democracy can still be saved.

Following Ratf**ked, his “extraordinary timely and undeniably important” (New York Times Book Review) exposé of how a small cadre of Republican operatives rigged American elections, David Daley emerged as one of the nation’s leading authorities on gerrymandering. In Unrigged, he charts a vibrant political movement that is rising in the wake of his and other reporters’ revelations. With his trademark journalistic rigor and narrative flair, Daley reports on Pennsylvania’s dramatic defeat of a gerrymander using the research of ingenious mathematicians and the Michigan millennial who launched a statewide redistricting revolution with a Facebook post. He tells the stories of activist groups that paved the way for 2018’s historic blue wave and won crucial battles for voting rights in Florida, Maine, Utah, and nationwide. In an age of polarization, Unrigged offers a vivid portrait of a nation transformed by a new civic awakening, and provides a blueprint for what must be done to keep American democracy afloat.

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On a dreary morning in April, 1893, John Marshall, a Portuguese immigrant and successful farmer on Sumas Prairie in British Columbia, was found lying sprawled across the veranda of his farmhouse, his body cold and lifeless. The farmer's face was a mess, his nose smashed in and cracked blood covering his forehead around a jagged black hole. The shocked and unfortunate neighbour who discovered the body rushed to Huntingdon railway station to summon the authorities. An autopsy, coroner's inquest and murder investigation followed. Only two days later, a local handyman named Albert Stroebel was arrested for Marshall's murder. Stroebel was an unlikely killer: short and physically disabled, locals considered him a harmless "boy" who seemed much younger than his 20 years. The young man the community knew was not capable of murder, and locals were shocked to imagine that Stroebel could have killed the man who had treated him like family.

But something had gone tragically wrong on the night Marshall died. Unravelling the mystery would take nine months and two lengthy trials that seized the attention of local communities on both sides of the Canadian-American border, splitting them into pro- and anti-Stroebel factions. Newspapers devoted page after page of coverage and throngs of spectators squeezed into the courtroom galleries. The first trial in New Westminster ended with the jury hopelessly deadlocked, the second in Victoria found him guilty and set an impending date for his execution. The heaviest hitters of BC?s political and legal establishment took part including former and current premiers, an Attorney General, and a future Supreme Court justice.

When the second trial ended with a guilty verdict and death sentence many in the public howled in protest, convinced that a young man had been condemned to die for a crime he did not commit. And the dramatic events would not stop there. With the condemned man sitting on death row, the case would take more twists and turns that would lead Albert Stroebel to the shadow of the gallows.

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When Truth Mattered is a gripping, authoritative account of a young editor and his staff painstakingly pursuing the truth of the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970 - a tragedy that has haunted the nation for 50 years and significantly changed the debate about the Vietnam War.

The heart-pounding story captures the flash of National Guard rifles, the bloody aftermath of four students killed and nine wounded, and the stress of reporters hurrying to sort fact from fiction for a horrified world wanting to know "what" and "why."

The Beacon Journal's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage created a truthful narrative that has stood unchallenged and unchanged for five decades. It also provides an urgent lesson for today: What is the role of truth in media? Can you trust the news that you're hearing and seeing? If not, how do you equip yourself? When Truth Mattered shows how journalism was done right ... and how those standards must still be applied today.

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The little-known story of how a young Wyatt Earp, aided by his brothers, defeated the Cowboys, the Old West’s biggest outlaw gang.

Wyatt Earp is regarded as the most famous lawman of the Old West, best known for his role in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. But the story of his two-year war with a band of outlaws known as the Cowboys has never been told in full.

The Cowboys were the largest outlaw gang in the history of the American West. After battles with the law in Texas and New Mexico, they shifted their operations to Arizona. There, led by Curly Bill Brocius, they ruled the border, robbing, rustling, smuggling and killing with impunity until they made the fatal mistake of tangling with the Earp brothers.

Drawing on groundbreaking research into territorial and federal government records, John Boessenecker’s Ride the Devil’s Herd reveals a time and place in which homicide rates were fifty times higher than those today. The story still bears surprising relevance for contemporary America, involving hot-button issues such as gang violence, border security, unlawful immigration, the dangers of political propagandists parading as journalists, and the prosecution of police officers for carrying out their official duties. Wyatt Earp saw it all in Tombstone.

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Mothers & Murderers: A True Story of Love, Lies, Obsession … and Second Chances takes readers on a wild tragicomic ride from the criminal courtrooms of California’s Silicon Valley to the Himalayan mountains of Pakistan to the deserts of Ethiopia.

In delightful, insightful prose, Ellison reflects on her mistakes and her triumphs as she weaves together the stories of how her Pulitzer Prize-winning career almost ended before it began, how she nearly missed marrying the love of her life, and how she unwittingly got drawn into a stranger-than-fiction murder case.

Rich in drama and self-reflection, replete with unique characters --including two bumbling hitmen, a rodeo-riding prosecutor, a flamboyant Beverly Hills defense attorney, and a charismatic stay-at-home mother-of-three who is keeping outrageous secrets-- Mothers & Murderers is a mashup of “Fargo," "Body Heat," and “Eat, Pray, Love.”* It's guaranteed to make you laugh, cry – and think.

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On a fall evening in Corvallis, Oregon, in 1967, 17-year-old Dick Kitchel, a senior at the high school, disappeared after attending a party. Ten days later, his body was spotted by two children as it floated down the Willamette River. He had been beaten and strangled.    

The investigation into his murder played out during one of the most dramatic years in America. Life in Corvallis, a college town, had offered a protective, idyllic life to many. But in 1967 to '68, Vietnam, a presidential campaign, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, and the murder of Dick Kitchel changed that.  

His friends thought his death was ignored because Dick was from the wrong side of the tracks. Police and the district attorney thought they knew who had murdered the boy but never made an arrest. Decades later, a cold-case detective believed he, too, had solved the case. However, once again, justice was elusive.   

Now, nearly 50 years later, a classmate, New York Times best-selling author Rebecca Morris, returns to her hometown to write about how the murder changed the town and the lives of Dick Kitchel's friends.

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The assumption that Jesus existed as a historical person has occasionally been questioned in the course of the last hundred years or so, but any doubts that have been raised have usually been put to rest in favor of imagining a blend of the historical, the mythical, and the theological in the surviving records of Jesus. Historian and philosopher Richard Carrier reexamines the whole question and finds compelling reasons to suspect the more daring assumption is correct. He lays out extensive research on the evidence for Jesus and the origins of Christianity and poses the key questions that must now be answered if the historicity of Jesus is to survive as a dominant paradigm. Carrier contrasts the most credible reconstruction of a historical Jesus with the most credible theory of Christian origins if a historical Jesus did not exist. Such a theory posits that the Jesus figure was originally conceived of as a celestial being known only through private revelations and hidden messages in scripture; then stories placing this being in earthly history were crafted to communicate allegorically the claims of the gospel. Such stories eventually came to be believed or promoted in the struggle for control of the Christian churches that survived the tribulations of the first century. Carrier finds this theory more credible than has been previously imagined. He explains why it offers a better explanation for all the disparate evidence surviving from the first two centuries of the Christian era. He argues that we need a more careful and robust theory of cultural syncretism between Jewish theology and politics of the second-temple period and the most popular features of pagan religion and philosophy of the time. For everyone intent on defending a historical Jesus,

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1926 was the year that Americans all over the country said screw it. And screw it they did... mixing too much bootleg booze, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, with fast cars, sex, and jazz music can only lead to trouble. The number of allegedly normal people senselessly committing ghastly murders in 1926 is astounding. It is like a switch got turned on and some people went mad unlike any other time in American history.

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In “The Garden State Parkway Murders,” true crime writer and attorney Christian Barth dives into the harrowing story of the unsolved murders of Elizabeth Perry and Susan Davis. College friends, the two women were brutally knifed to death and their bodies left off the parkway in the early hours of May 30, 1969.

Among the numerous suspects Barth identifies are infamous serial killers Ted Bundy and Gerald Eugene Stano, who were living within an hour’s drive from where the murder scene at the time they occurred. The killers also resided next to one another on Florida’s Death Row, and indirectly confessed to the double homicide.

A culmination of more than nine years of research, Barth’s book is compiled from multiple sources, including interviews with retired New Jersey State Police detectives, law enforcement officials from other jurisdictions, federal agents, possible witnesses, victim family members, as well as information gathered from FBI case files, letters, journals, libraries, newspaper articles, and university archives.

In scintillating detail, Barth presents the case, including previously undisclosed information surrounding these brutal murders, as well as an examination of recent technological advancements in crime scene analysis and FBI serial killer profiling that could help identify the killer. When all is said and done, the reader is asked to consider: Why hasn’t this cold case been solved?

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On September 12, 2001, Michele Harris went missing from a small town in upstate New York. She has never been found, and the mystery surrounding her disappearance remains. Four years after she went missing, her wealthy husband, Cal Harris, was arrested and charged with her murder.

With neither a body nor a murder weapon, Cal was shockingly tried and convicted of her murder. Then new evidence surfaced. His conviction was overturned, and a new trial granted. But once again, he was convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. That conviction, too, was overturned on appeal. The saga continued as Cal went on trial for the third time. This one ended in a mistrial.

By the time Cal went on trial the fourth time, Michele had been missing for nearly 15 years.

Defense investigator, David M. Beers, worked on the Cal Harris case from start-to-finish. His account, “Reign of Injustice,” walks you through the details and events of the case never before revealed. It provides a inside view of the scandalous case facts you will not find elsewhere, including why he considers Cal’s story a reign of injustice.

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