As always, thank you for hanging out and remembering Charles Taylor with me today.

In April 2015, 24‑year‑old Amanda Taylor drove with her friend Sean Ball to the Montgomery County, Virginia home of her late husband’s father, 59‑year‑old Charles Taylor, carrying a bayonet‑style knife she had bought for what she called “revenge.” Once Charles sat down on his couch, Amanda suddenly attacked, stabbing him 31 times while Ball helped, later telling investigators she chose a knife so Charles would know it was her killing him and describing the murder as feeling like her first roller‑coaster ride.

After Charles lay dead, Amanda posed over his body holding the bloody knife and smirking for a photo, which was then shared online and earned her the nickname “Selfie Killer,” a label she later had tattooed on her arm. She and Ball stole Charles’s car and fled across states before being caught in North Carolina, and prosecutors argued that Amanda had long blamed Charles for her husband Rex’s drug addiction and suicide and had planned the killing in advance. Amanda ultimately pleaded guilty to first‑degree murder and grand larceny and was sentenced to life in prison without parole, while Ball, who cooperated with investigators, received 41 years, leaving the case notorious for its mix of grief, revenge, and chilling social‑media performance.

As always, thank you for hanging out and remembering Sherrice Marsha Renee Iversonwith me today. The murder of Sherrice Iverson is one of the most disturbing and controversial child murder cases in American true crime history. In May 1997, 7-year-old Sherrice Iverson was inside a casino outside Las Vegas with her father when she wandered into a restroom alone and was brutally assaulted and murdered by 18-year-old Jeremy Strohmeyer. The case shocked the nation not only because of the horrific crime itself, but because another teenager, David Cash Jr., later admitted he witnessed part of the attack and walked away without helping or calling police, earning the nickname “The Bad Samaritan.” This infamous Las Vegas casino murder case sparked nationwide outrage, debates over Good Samaritan laws, and remains one of the most heartbreaking child murder cases ever covered in true crime.

As always, thank you for hanging out and remembering Katie Poirier with me today.

In May 1999, 19‑year‑old college student Katie Poirier disappeared from the D.J.’s Expressway Conoco convenience store in Moose Lake, Minnesota, where she was working alone on the night shift. A grainy black‑and‑white surveillance tape showed a man gripping the back of her neck and forcing her out of the store at closing time, and when customers arrived later they found the shop empty, the lights still on, and Katie gone.

The abduction triggered a massive search and investigation that eventually focused on 55‑year‑old local man Donald Blom, a repeat offender with a long history of kidnapping and sexual assaults. Forensic experts matched a partial, distorted imprint of a missing dental bridge from Blom to a bite mark left in a piece of duct tape used in the kidnapping, a key piece of scientific evidence that helped secure his conviction even though Katie’s remains were never definitively identified. Blom was convicted of kidnapping and murdering Katie and sentenced to life in prison, and her case became nationally known both for the terrifying surveillance footage of her being taken and for the innovative forensic work that finally tied her killer to the crime.

As always, thank you for hanging out and remembering Christine Mackinday with me today.

In August 2014, adult film actor Christine Mackinday, known professionally as Christy Mack, was brutally attacked in her Las Vegas home by her ex‑boyfriend, former MMA fighter Jonathan Paul “War Machine” Koppenhaver. He arrived unexpectedly and found her there with a male friend, Corey Thomas, then launched into a sustained assault: first beating Thomas, and after Thomas left, turning on Mack in a two‑hour attack that left her with a fractured eye socket and nose, broken ribs, missing teeth, a lacerated liver, and extensive bruising.

The case drew national attention when photos of Mack’s injuries and her account of the assault circulated online, and police issued a nationwide search for Koppenhaver before U.S. Marshals arrested him days later in California. In 2017, a Nevada jury convicted him on 29 felony and misdemeanor counts, including kidnapping, sexual assault, and battery, and a judge sentenced him to 36 years to life in prison, meaning he will be in his seventies before he is even eligible for parole.

As always, thank you for hanging out and remembering Nicole Lenway Ford with me today.

In April 2022, Minneapolis crime scene investigator Nicole “Nicki” Lenway was ambushed and shot at close range in the parking lot of a parenting center as she arrived to pick up her young son, left bleeding beside her car but miraculously survived. Investigators later concluded the attack was the climax of a years‑long custody and harassment war with her ex, taekwondo instructor Tim Amacher, and that his new girlfriend, Colleen Larson, had lain in wait and pulled the trigger after being drawn into Amacher’s campaign to destroy Nicki. Ultimately, both Amacher and Larson were convicted in the attempted‑murder plot, and Nicki has spoken publicly about rebuilding her life while living with permanent injuries and trauma from the shooting.

As always, thank you for hanging out and remembering Muhlaysia Booker with me today.

In 2019, 22‑year‑old Muhlaysia Booker, a Black transgender woman in Dallas, briefly survived one act of shocking public violence only to be killed weeks later in another. In April, after a minor traffic accident at an apartment complex, a crowd gathered as men dragged her across a parking lot and brutally beat her while bystanders filmed; the video went viral, and Booker later described how they hurled anti‑LGBTQ slurs as they punched and kicked her, turning her into a symbol of the dangers faced by Black trans women in the US.

Just a month later, in May 2019, police found her lying face down in a Dallas street near Tenison Park, dead from gunshot wounds, and investigators eventually linked her killing to 37‑year‑old Kendrell Lyles, who was also suspected in other murders around the same time. Prosecutors said phone records and witness accounts placed Booker in Lyles’s car shortly before her death, and although authorities did not publicly label the murder as a hate crime, her family and advocates saw it as part of a wider pattern of lethal anti‑trans hostility. In 2023, on the eve of trial, Lyles pleaded guilty to murdering Booker and was sentenced to 48 years in prison, as her relatives faced him in court and described how she had been trying to rebuild her life after the filmed beating when she was killed.

As always, thank you for hanging out and remembering Serena McKay, Janette Tovar, Sandee Rozzo, Holly Guess, Rylee Elizabeth Allen, Michael James Mayo, Tiffany Dore Guess, Ivy Webster, and Brittany Brewer with me today.

As always, thank you for hanging out and remembering Yun-Mi Hoy with me today. In August 2013, 18‑year‑old Isabella Yun‑Mi Guzman killed her mother, 47‑year‑old Yun‑Mi Hoy, in the bathroom of their home in Aurora, Colorado, after a long period of escalating conflict between them. Investigators later described how Guzman ambushed her mother in the upstairs bathroom and stabbed her dozens of times in the face, neck, and torso, leaving a scene so brutal that responding officers immediately treated the case as premeditated murder. Neighbors and court records pointed to a deteriorating relationship in the weeks before the attack, with troubling incidents and explicit threats that suggested Hoy had grown increasingly afraid of her daughter and had tried to seek help.

The case quickly drew national attention, not only because of the victim’s vulnerability and the ferocity of the attack, but also because of Guzman’s demeanor in court, where her blank, almost detached expression in early appearances spread widely online and became part of the public’s image of the case. As the legal process unfolded, doctors diagnosed her with serious mental illness, and the court ultimately found that she was legally insane at the time of the killing. Rather than receiving a traditional prison sentence, she was committed to a secure state psychiatric hospital, where her confinement and any possible future release depend on ongoing evaluations of her mental state and the risk she might pose to others.

As always, thank you for hanging out and remembering Gail Peck with me today.

In October 2017, 76‑year‑old Gail Peck vanished from the Chicago‑area home she shared with her son, 55‑year‑old Brian Peck, after yet another argument over how loudly he was blasting his Jimi Hendrix records. Brian later admitted that when Gail confronted him about the deafening music, the fight escalated until he knocked her to the floor and stomped on her head and neck, killing her in their Elgin, Illinois house.

Instead of calling for help, Brian dismembered Gail’s body in the bathtub, packed her remains into bags, a suitcase, and a duffel, and dumped them in Lake Michigan and Chicago’s Lincoln Park lagoon while pretending she had simply gone out for a walk and never returned. Days later, a fisherman found a duffel bag full of body parts, and forensic work led back to Gail and to Brian’s story about a “Jimi Hendrix” argument turned deadly. A jury convicted Brian of first‑degree murder, dismembering a human body, and concealing a homicidal death, and he was sentenced to 62 years in prison, effectively ensuring he will die behind bars.

As always, thank you for hanging out and remembering Awatef Aboudihaj with me today.

On December 30, 2006, singer and actress Brandy Norwood was driving her SUV northbound on the 405 Freeway in Los Angeles when she failed to notice that traffic ahead had slowed. Her Land Rover rear‑ended a 2005 Toyota driven by 38‑year‑old Awatef Aboudihaj, pushing that car into another vehicle, the center divider, and then into the path of a fourth car in a chain‑reaction crash. Awatef, a married mother, was critically injured and died in hospital the following day, while Brandy and others involved escaped serious physical harm.

Investigators found no evidence that Brandy was impaired, and after a lengthy review prosecutors ultimately declined to file criminal charges, concluding the fatal pile‑up was a traffic accident rather than a crime. Awatef’s family pursued civil lawsuits that were later settled out of court, but Brandy has said she carried “unimaginable grief” and deep survivor’s guilt for years afterward, even as official investigations cleared her of criminal responsibility.