The holiday season kicks off this Thursday, when uncles and cousins and college-student children will travel cross country and gather around tables, where they’ll offer thanks for the thing they appreciate most: their love for one another.

That’s one version, anyway.

For some, though, the holidays can be considerably more grim- like for the people who are mentioned in this podcast. Although it’s widely believed that rates of domestic violence spike during the holidays, the available research shows that assumption to be limited and inconclusive. However, it may be that when gruesome crimes do occur during the holidays, they get more widespread media coverage since they’re so out of the norm of what we’d expect during such celebratory times.

On this episode, I'll take you through 5 true crimes that all happened throughout the states on Thanksgiving Day