RedHanded

Last week, we looked at the formation of the ultra-obedient, bigamist Mormon cult, the FLDS – in which plural marriage to pregnant preteen girls is just the tip of the fundamentalist iceberg. In this second part, we look at how its new prophet, Warren Jeffs, took his so-called religion to ever stricter and more terrifying depths. 

With followers so beaten down that they were banned from even laughing; the prophet on the lam, living it up at Disneyland; and a team of ex-faithfuls and dogged investigators closing in – something had to give. But not before the full extent of his evil was laid bare in front of a stunned courtroom.

According to Warren Jeffs’ thousands of followers, he was the leader of a secretive but devoted religion – their prophet, and the representative of God on Earth. But according to US law, he was a dangerous, totalitarian, child-molesting horror with over 80 wives – some married off as young as 12. Still, according to the church, Earthly laws are no match for the voice of God.

In this episode, we explore the story behind the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints: how the visions of a charismatic, seventeen-year-old farmhand grew to become a major world religion; how plural marriage caused a major rift in the church; and how its teachings were warped into a systematic cult of child abuse, underage sex, and absolute power.

In 2009, the horror movie Orphan told the story of a couple who take in a creepy child from a Russian orphanage who – spoiler alert – turns out to be a psychopathic adult woman. 

And just a year after the film’s release, real life seemed to echo fiction when the Barnetts, a wealthy American family, adopted a 6-year-old girl named Natalia Grace from Ukraine…Only to abandon her and flee to Canada within just 3 years. 

Why? Because according to the Barnetts, Natalia – who had a rare form of dwarfism – wasn’t a little girl at all. She was actually a 22-year-old woman dead-set on killing their whole family.

In this hotly-disputed case, we explore the allegations, the evidence, and how one girl found herself at the centre of one of the weirdest true-crime mysteries in recent memory. 

Let’s just say that in this story, nothing is quite as it seems…

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Violently stabbed to death in their own home, the bodies of Debra and Marc Richardson showed signs of a desperate struggle. Upstairs lay the body of their 8-year-old son, Tyler. Their 12-year-old daughter, Jasmine, was nowhere to be found.

Believing they were investigating a brutal home invasion, police launched a race against time to find the missing girl…

What they uncovered instead was a deeply disturbing case involving manipulation, fantasy, and a relationship that should never have existed – between a vulnerable tween goth and her allegedly centuries-old werewolf ‘boyfriend’. 

Tried alongside 23-year-old predator Jeremy Steinke, Jasmine Richardson became the youngest person ever convicted of multiple murder in Canada, in a case the country would never forget. 

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How did a Colombian-born orphan become one of the most audacious con artists the United States has ever seen? 

Starting his shapeshifting career in Michigan at the age of just 12, Anthony Gignac transformed himself into a Saudi prince and spent three decades conning society’s elite out of millions…

Until one day in 2017, when he ordered the wrong entrée at a restaurant – and a schoolboy error brought down one of history’s most notorious swindlers. 

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On 14th June 2017, a catastrophic fire engulfed Grenfell Tower, a high-rise residential building in West London.

72 people died, including 18 children. The tragedy became one of the darkest days in recent British history.

But worst of all? A damning public inquiry found that the disaster – and the loss of life – was completely avoidable.

This is the story of how decades of government corruption and corporate greed led to the deaths of 72 innocent people: with an outraged community demanding justice.

To support those still affected by the Grenfell tragedy, we’ve donated a portion of our ad revenue from this episode to the Grenfell Foundation.

To find out more, please follow this link: https://www.grenfellfoundation.org.uk/fundraising

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In our second instalment exploring one of music’s biggest true-crime mysteries, we turn the spotlight on Christopher Latore Wallace – better known as Biggie Smalls, or the Notorious B.I.G. 

Lyrically gifted, privately educated and no stranger to a little crack dealing, Biggie became the face of the prestigious East Coast rap scene at the height of its deadliest era.

So what really happened to Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls? As H&S find out, sometimes the simplest explanation is the most likely…

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With the news that Kathleen Folbigg has finally been pardoned, we wanted to help you revisit this case, and Kathleen's incredibly tragic story by re-uploading our episode from August 2022.

The theory “1 sudden infant death is a tragedy, 2 is suspicious and 3 is murder” has pervaded criminal investigations for decades – so when Kathleen Folbigg’s daughter, Laura, became her fourth to die mysteriously, Kathleen found herself labeled “Australia’s Worst Female Serial Killer”. Today the girls delve into two unbelievable miscarrriages of justice – mothers wrongfully convicted of killing their children – which highlight the immense challenges of the intersection between science and justice in the courtroom. 

And discover how a series of bizarre circumstances and medical anomalies could have led to the deaths of 5 babies and the imprisonment of two women.

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In the 1990s, hip-hop’s most legendary beef turned deadly.

As the East Coast-West Coast rap feud spiralled out of control, Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. became targets in a war driven by clashing egos, heated rivalry and gang violence. 

Within six months of each other, both were killed in drive-by shootings. No one has ever been convicted for their murders.

In the first of our two-part series, we’re lifting the lid on Tupac Shakur: poet, provocateur, and poster boy of the West Coast hip-hop scene, who met his end in a blaze of bullets in Las Vegas.

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When five members of the cheery, churchgoing Dupont de Ligonnès family were found dead at their home in Nantes – buried in the garden with small Catholic relics – a million questions erupted from neighbours, family and friends.

But for the police, only one question mattered: where was the sixth? Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès was nowhere to be found. And as they dug into his past, they uncovered a story that’s obsessed the nation of France for years: one of an ancient aristocratic dynasty, of international espionage, and a crime scene that, decades later, still refuses to add up…