Gilberte Van Erpe aka Madame Gil is a Belgian con artist who launched a fake health and cosmetics company called Crema in the early 2000s. Posing as the mystical “Madame Gil,” she convinced thousands of people- especially in Chile- to invest in a bogus line of “magic cheese” and other products that supposedly contained miraculous healing or cosmetic properties. Investors were promised huge profits from selling this special cheese, but the entire operation was a pyramid scheme.

In 2003, Thomas “Bart” Whitaker orchestrated a murder-for-hire plot against his own family in Sugar Land, Texas, in order to claim his inheritance. After luring his parents and brother home from a celebratory dinner, his friend Christopher Brashear ambushed them inside the house, killing Bart’s mother and brother and seriously wounding his father, Kent.

Mississippi Elvis impersonator Paul Kevin Curtis was wrongly accused of sending ricin-laced letters to President Obama, Senator Roger Wicker, and a local judge. Curtis had a history of posting online about an alleged hospital cover-up after he claimed to have discovered human body parts in 2001 while working as a janitor.

In December 2023, 44-year-old Daniel Krug of Broomfield, Colorado murdered his wife, Kristil Krug, in the garage of their home after months of secretly tormenting her with fake messages from a made-up stalker he created using burner phones and multiple online identities. Posing as her ex-boyfriend Jack, Daniel sent harassing emails and photos to both himself and Kristil to convince her she was being watched, all while portraying himself as her protector.

In 1994, Bobbi Parker, the wife of an Oklahoma prison deputy warden, vanished from the Oklahoma State Reformatory along with inmate Randolph Dial, a convicted murderer and artist who had been given unusual privileges due to his painting skills. For 11 years, the two lived under assumed identities on a remote chicken farm in Texas until their discovery in 2005.

Gerald Barnbaum was a conman who spent decades posing as a medical doctor despite never being one. Born in 1933 in Chicago, he was originally a licensed pharmacist, but his license was revoked. Rather than reform, Barnbaum found a new and more dangerous way to exploit the medical system: he began impersonating real physicians, using their stolen identities to practice medicine illegally.

In November 1971, Theo Albrecht, the reclusive German billionaire co-founder of Aldi supermarkets, was kidnapped at gunpoint outside his company’s headquarters in Essen, Germany, by Heinz-Joachim Ollenburg and Paul Krüzen, a pair of small-time criminals seeking a massive ransom. The kidnappers held him for 17 days.

Matthew Muller was a former Marine and Harvard-educated lawyer whose life spiraled into a series of bizarre crimes. In 2015, he broke into the Vallejo, California home of Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn, abducting Denise and demanding ransom in what police initially dismissed as a hoax inspired by Gone Girl. Muller, who suffered from mental illness and believed he was a kind of vigilante, held Huskins captive for two days before releasing her. 

Kwang Chol Joy was a California man who became infatuated with 37-year-old Maribel Ramos, an Army veteran and college student who had taken him in as a roommate in her Orange County apartment. Over time, his obsession with her deepened, but she rejected his romantic advances and eventually asked him to move out. In May 2013, shortly after a heated argument about rent, Maribel disappeared. Weeks later, her remains were discovered in a remote canyon

Barry Minkow was a teenage entrepreneur who founded the carpet-cleaning company ZZZZ Best in the 1980s and became a Wall Street sensation- until it was revealed to be one of the biggest Ponzi schemes of its time. Minkow fabricated fake restoration projects and used forged documents to trick investors, inflating his company’s value to over $200 million before it collapsed in 1987.