Content warning

This episode discusses disappearance, murder, violent injuries, alleged torture and coercive detention, and repression connected to a labor dispute. It avoids graphic detail.

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In 1993, Marsinah worked at the Catur Putra Surya watch factory in East Java. After workers struck over wages and working conditions, a settlement reportedly promised that there would be no retaliation. The following day, workers were summoned to a military office and pressured to resign. Marsinah tried to find out what had happened to them. She then disappeared.

Her body was found days later in the Nganjuk area. Sources differ on whether that happened on May 8 or May 9. The violent nature of her death is established, but the accessible record does not support one uncontested account of the exact sequence, timing, or mechanism of the killing.

Company personnel were later detained and prosecuted. They alleged torture, threats, and coercion, and later official court citations describe statements obtained under physical and psychological pressure. Civilian defendants were convicted in the first proceedings, but Indonesia's Supreme Court overturned the remaining convictions in 1995. Those reversals discredited the prosecution's solution; they did not establish who killed Marsinah or validate a different theory.

International labor bodies continued to ask for an independent inquiry. The Indonesian government later reported that a further inquiry had begun, but the reviewed accessible record does not reveal a final result. In 2025, Marsinah was named a National Hero. In May 2026, Indonesia's president inaugurated a museum and shelter in her name. This episode asks what that recognition means when the central question of criminal responsibility remains unresolved.

UNTRANSLATED is a source-led true-crime podcast about documented cases that remained untranslated, underreported, or largely local. Where sources conflict, the conflict stays visible.

Chapters

- 00:00 Recognition without resolution

- 01:10 The Murder of Marsinah

- 01:36 Marsinah before the memorials

- 02:12 The settlement that did not settle it

- 03:47 Where the record narrows

- 05:18 What did the investigation prove?

- 08:48 The answer the trials could not give

- 10:07 An inquiry that recedes from view

- 12:50 The state returns to Marsinah

- 14:42 What the record allows

- 17:16 Follow UNTRANSLATED

On 31 March 2026, the final proceeding in the Evandro Case came to an end. Four people whose convictions had once rested on extrajudicial confessions were finally acquitted. The legal process had reached an endpoint. Evandro's murder had not been solved.

Evandro Ramos Caetano was six years old when he disappeared from Guaratuba, Paraná, on 6 April 1992. A child's body was found five days later. Although a 1998 jury rejected the prosecution's proof of identification, a later Paraná appellate court held that dental evidence and DNA testing established that the remains were Evandro's.

Seven people were accused under a prosecution theory that described the death as a ritual killing and tied the allegation to Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian religion. That theory was an accusation, not an established explanation of Evandro's death. Four of the accused gave statements outside court admitting involvement, then denied the crime in court and said those statements had been forced from them.

This episode follows the court record through the interrogation recordings, the separate legal paths of the seven accused, the 2023 criminal review in Paraná, the 2025 ruling of Brazil's Superior Court of Justice, and the final Supreme Federal Court proceeding in 2026. It examines why removing the torture-tainted confessions also changed the status of evidence derived from them—and why acquittal is not the same as solving the murder.

UNTRANSLATED did not independently authenticate every recording circulating publicly. The episode relies on how the Paraná court and the Superior Court of Justice treated the material in the reviewed proceedings.

Content warning

This episode discusses the disappearance and death of a child, coercive interrogation and torture, and religious prejudice. It avoids unnecessary graphic description.

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A Bogotá waiter says he was still talking to the gunman at 9:30 that night. A magazine from the same era says police killed him a quarter to nine. Nearly forty years later, Colombia still cannot agree on when the shooting even started.

Content warning: this episode covers mass violence, gun violence, stabbing, arson, the death of a minor, and a retrospective sexual-assault allegation raised by a later researcher. If any of that is not for you, this is a good one to skip.

On 4 December 1986, a gunman opened fire on diners at Restaurant Pozzetto in the Chapinero district of Bogotá. Contemporary Colombian authorities and reporting identified Campo Elías Delgado Morales as the gunman. He died inside the restaurant during the police response that night, so no arrest, charge, trial, conviction, or acquittal ever followed, and a separate police disciplinary proceeding, not a criminal case, cleared the responding officers two months later. What sounds like a closed case is not, in the Colombian record itself: the exact hour the shooting began, the total number of dead (a range that runs from twenty-eight victims plus the gunman to twenty-nine victims plus the gunman, depending on which publication and which counting rule you use), whether police fire or a self-inflicted shot ended the gunman's life, and why he did any of it, are all points where Colombia's own sources contradict each other or simply do not know. This episode does not average the casualty count, does not assign a motive the record does not support, and does not treat a decades-old media portrait as a clinical finding. It tells the case the way the record actually holds it: contested, sourced, and, on several points, genuinely unresolved.

n 1954, a Japanese court convicted a man of murdering a six-year-old girl on the strength of his own confession, and almost nothing else. Thirty-four years and eight months later, a different court took it back.

Content warning: this episode covers the murder of a six-year-old child in Shimada, Japan, in 1954. She is referred to only by her given name, Hisako, in line with the show's policy of not naming child victims. The original indictment also included a charged sexual-assault offense tied to that six-year-old victim, under a Japanese statute since repealed; it is named once, without further detail. The episode also covers strangulation, a wrongful death sentence, thirty-four years and eight months in custody, and a subject's documented history of mild intellectual disability and past suicide attempts, discussed only as far as the 1989 court's own reasoning requires. If any of that isn't for you today, this one can wait.

This is the Shimada Incident: the disappearance and killing of six-year-old Hisako from a kindergarten graduation event in Shimada, Shizuoka, in March 1954, and the thirty-four-year case against Masao Akabori, the man arrested weeks later on an unrelated theft charge who confessed to her killing without a lawyer present. Akabori was sentenced to death in 1958, and the Supreme Court finalized that sentence in 1960; four retrial petitions failed before a court finally reopened the case in 1986. In January 1989, the Shizuoka District Court acquitted him, ruling that his confession did not match the evidence and that the murder weapon he was said to have led police to had, in fact, already been logged into police custody before he was ever arrested. That same court also expressly rejected his claim that he had been coerced, ruling the confession voluntary but unreliable, and it traced the false confession to Akabori's own intellectual disability rather than to how he was questioned. As of the most recent reporting we found, in 2024, no one has ever been convicted of killing Hisako.

Found an error, a better source, or a date we should revisit? Send it to the show. Corrections are tracked and, where they change the record, will be noted in a future episode or in this page's notes.

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In 1972, a French judge jailed a man for murder and told reporters his only real evidence was a feeling. Weeks later, a national newspaper printed the verdict itself — guilty — before any court ever did.

Content warning: this episode covers the murder of a fifteen-year-old girl (Brigitte Dewèvre, Bruay-en-Artois, France, 1972). It quotes graphic, explicit threats of violence that a French Maoist newspaper printed in 1972 against a man who was never convicted of any crime — including threats to cut him apart with a razor and drag him behind a car. It also references an unrelated attempted-rape arrest of another man, and the false murder confession of a seventeen-year-old orphan who was later cleared by two separate courts. If any of that isn't for you today, this one can wait.

This is the affair of Bruay-en-Artois: a fifteen-year-old girl found dead on a strip of waste ground between a mining town's two halves, a wealthy local notary jailed for months on an investigating judge's "personal conviction" and no tangible evidence, and a Maoist newspaper that ran his guilt as a front-page fact while calling for a "people's tribunal" that, as far as the record shows, was demanded but never actually staged. A second suspect — a seventeen-year-old orphan — falsely confessed on national radio and television nine months later, and was fully cleared by two courts. No one was ever tried. No one was ever convicted. The case was formally dismissed in 1974, closed without resolution in 1981, and became legally time-barred in 2005 — meaning it can never be reopened, no matter what turns up. This episode is about what filled that silence: a judge who ran his investigation in front of cameras, a newspaper that decided guilt was obvious from a man's address, and a government minister who had to step in and remind a prosecutor's office that a charged man is still presumed innocent.

Support my work on Patreon : https://www.patreon.com/cw/Untranslated_Podcast

In November 1951, the man who owned the mill in a small Swedish village was killed and his house set on fire. The local police officer who arrived to investigate was patient, helpful, and full of theories. He answered questions from the national press. When the case stalled, he brought in a psychic to help find the killer.

He was the killer.

Nine months later, Tore Hedin killed nine more people in a single night — his own parents among them — and then drove to a lake and drowned himself, leaving behind a full written confession. In it he wrote that the greatest regret of his life was that he had never become a detective.

This case is still widely known in Sweden. In English, it has almost never been told.

Crime scenes:

Tjörnarp and Hurva, Skåne, Sweden — 55.800° N, 13.433° E

CHAPTERS

0:00 The photograph I can't show you

1:42 Skåne, and a village called Tjörnarp

3:00 What he learned at sixteen

4:49 The mill owner and the five thousand kronor

7:14 The officer who investigated his own case

8:48 A policeman hires a psychic 10:28 The journalists nobody believed

11:14 Ulla

14:41 One night in August

16:09 The lake

17:43 What stays with me

SOURCES

Wikipedia — Tore Hedin / Hurvamorden

Aftonbladet — "Polisen som blev massmördare" (Brotten som skakade Sverige)

Nyheter24 — "Polisen och massmördaren Tore Hedin" (2021) Sveriges

Hembygdsförbund — Lännerberg, "Hurvapolisen som blev mördare" (2001)

Lund University — Linell, "Hurvamorden och Lasermannen"

ABOUT THIS EPISODE UNTRANSLATED covers true crime cases the English-speaking world never heard — cases that were front-page news in their own country and never crossed the language barrier. This case is historical and established by Tore Hedin's own written confession, recovered after his death in 1952. No living person is accused of any crime in this episode. Where the sources disagree or hedge, the narration says so. If you speak Swedish and know something I got wrong, or something I missed, please write. This show only works if it's accurate.

CONTACT [email protected]