On a brutally hot Thursday morning in August 1892, Abby Borden was killed upstairs in her own guest room. Ninety minutes later, her husband Andrew was killed on the sofa downstairs. The doors were locked, nothing was stolen, and nobody saw a stranger come or go. The only person in the house both times was the couple's youngest daughter, Lizzie, a Sunday school teacher.

This unsolved case has been the topic of gossip for decades, so we're walking through the whole case: from the family's background, to the autopsies, to the corrupted trial. We're also talking about myth versus life and ending by traveling back to the 1600s.

Content Warning: this episode discusses a double homicide and includes non-graphic descriptions of injuries and autopsy findings.

Quick note: the audio quality isn't my best this week. I had trouble finding a quiet place to record and my microphone was giving me trouble. Thanks for bearing with me!

In January 1947, a woman walking with her toddler in Leimert Park found the body of a 22-year-old woman. Within 24 hours the police knew her name. Within a week, the newspapers had given her a different one.

This week we're discussing the Black Dahlia, but mostly I'm covering Elizabeth Short, which turns out to be a different story than the one everybody knows. A father who faked his own suicide and came back from the dead twelve years later. A mother who raised five daughters alone through the Depression. A fiancé who died in a plane crash before he could come home. And a letter, written seven days before her body was found, saying she was leaving California for good.

Content Warning: this episode discusses murder, mutilation, and the sexual violence the press invented around it.

In December of 1972, seven-year-old Steven Stayner was walking home from school in Merced, California when a man stopped him with a handful of church pamphlets and offered him a ride.

Steven spent the next seven years living under another name, with the man who took him. He went to school. He had friends. He was never locked up, and that turns out to be the most important thing about this case.

This week, the Steven Stayner kidnapping: how a child is taken without force, what happened when he came home at fourteen to a family frozen in 1972, the trial that gave his kidnapper seven years, and the tragedies that kept finding the Stayners for decades afterward.

Content Warning: this episode involves a child abduction and child sexual abuse (no graphic detail), and murder.

On July 4, 1956, Betty Weinberger left her one-month-old son asleep in his carriage on the patio and went inside for ten minutes. When she came back, Peter was gone and a ransom note was in his place.

Federal law in 1956 said the FBI had to wait seven days before getting involved in a kidnapping case, and by the time agents were allowed in the door, they had almost nothing left to work with but handwriting.

Peter Weinberger is the reason the response to a missing child now starts in the first hour instead of the second week.

Content Warning: this episode involves the kidnapping and death of a baby.

On May 30, 2005, an eighteen-year-old from Alabama vanished on the last night of her senior trip to Aruba. Five years later, to the day, a twenty-one-year-old business student left a poker table in Lima with the same man. She was found in his hotel room three days later.

This week, we follow the disappearance of Natalee Holloway and the murder of Stephany Flores, from a night outside a bar, through ten arrests without a single charge, a hidden-camera confession the courts wouldn't touch, an FBI sting that put twenty-five thousand dollars in a killer's hands, and the plea deal that finally produced the truth eighteen years later.

How can a monster confess to killing two women walk the streets disguised as a civilian?

Content Warning: this episode discusses sexual assault, homicide, and a description of killing.

Between 1884 and 1908, men across the Midwest answered a newspaper ad placed by a prosperous Norwegian widow with a farm in La Porte, Indiana. She wrote them letters for months. She told them to sell everything, keep it quiet, and come to her with cash in hand. Dozens of them did. Almost none of them were ever seen again.

This week, we're unraveling the case of Belle Gunness, known as the Lonely Hearts Killer, from a poor farm in Selbu, Norway to the bodies pulled out of her hog lot in the spring of 1908. Two convenient fires, two dead husbands, insurance payouts at every turn, foster children buried in the yard, and a headless woman in the basement who was almost certainly not Belle.

What does it take to maintain an intimate lie for months at a time? Why does a killer this prolific vanish from public memory? And did Belle Gunness truly die in that fire?

Content Warning: this episode discusses the murder of children, poisoning, and arson.

In January 1993, 23-year-old Bonnie Haim vanished from her Jacksonville, Florida home, just days before she planned to leave her abusive husband and start over with her three-year-old son. Her husband said she'd walked out. Her family knew better. And her little boy told anyone who would listen exactly what he saw that night.

No one could act on it. For more than twenty years, the case went cold, until that same boy, now grown, made a discovery in the backyard of his childhood home that would finally reveal the truth.

This is the story of Bonnie Haim, the son who never stopped remembering, and how the most dangerous moment in an abusive relationship is so often the moment someone tries to leave.

Content Warning: this episode discusses domestic violence, homicide, and child trauma.

In 1970, a girl was discovered after spending her entire childhood locked in a single room. Her rescue made her one of the most studied children in the history of psychology. But the people who set out to save her would, in their own way, fail her all over again.

This is the story of Susan "Genie" Wiley, what was taken from her, what science tried to learn from her, and why her case still haunts the fields of psychology and linguistics decades later.

Content Warning: this episode discusses child abuse and neglect.

For twelve years, a masked man climbed through California's windows in the dark. He tore apart homes but stole almost nothing. He raped more than fifty women and murdered thirteen people, and for decades, no one realized they were hunting a single man.

Then, in 1986, he simply stopped. And vanished.

When they finally caught him thirty-two years later, he wasn't a drifter or a phantom. He was a grandfather in the suburbs, a retired mechanic, a former police officer, arrested at the age of seventy-two. The thing that undid him wasn't a witness or a confession. It was a distant cousin who had never met him, and a genealogy website neither of them ever meant to share.

This week, we go over three aliases, forty-four years, and the DNA breakthrough that changed how cold cases are solved forever.

Content warning: this episode discusses sexual violence and murder.

The day after Christmas, 1996, a six-year-old girl is found murdered in the basement of her own home, hours after a bizarre three-page ransom note appears on the stairs, demanding money for a child who was never actually taken.

Was the killer inside that house all along? Or did a stranger slip in on the worst possible night and vanish before sunrise?

Thirty years later, JonBenét Ramsey's murder remains unsolved, and the single piece of evidence that should end the argument is the one thing everyone still argues about. A crime scene contaminated before noon. A ransom note with no kidnapping. A secret grand jury. Suspects who confessed, then didn't fit.

This week, we walk through all of it, and the theory of what really happened that night.

Content warning: this episode discusses the assault and murder of a child.