We Saw the Devil: A True Crime Podcast

February 1, 2021. A blizzard is closing in on Boston. According to federal prosecutors, a Stoughton police detective texts 23-year-old Sandra Birchmore and asks if he can come by for a second. At 9:40 p.m., her phone logs eight steps. It never moves again.

Three days later she's found dead in her Canton apartment, eight to ten weeks pregnant. By May, Massachusetts had ruled it a suicide.

Today, jury selection began in federal court in Boston in the trial of former Stoughton detective Matthew Farwell. Prosecutors say he killed Sandra to keep her from exposing federal crimes, including sexually abusing her beginning when she was 15, and that he caused the death of her unborn son. Farwell has pleaded not guilty. His defense says Sandra died by suicide.


In this episode:
- How Sandra met Farwell through the Stoughton Police Explorers youth program
- The twelve days between a friend's call to the police department and Sandra's death
- The investigation that ruled suicide, and the medical examiner who says she was never told the death was suspicious
- The laptop data state police lost four days before Farwell's arrest
- Why this is a federal case, and why prosecutors have to prove more than who killed her
- DNA, the hyoid fracture, the paternity twist, and the phone search fight that broke days before trial
- The witness lists, the Karen Read crossover, and what to watch when openings begin Friday
- Reality Check: abuse in police Explorer programs, strangulation as a predictor of homicide, and what families can do when a death ruling doesn't fit

Plus the Commonwealth Docket Forecast, because Massachusetts now schedules murder trials the way other states schedule farmers markets.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/we-saw-the-devil-a-true-crime-podcast--4433638/support.

Website: http://www.wesawthedevil.com

Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/wesawthedevil

Robin's Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/robin_wstd

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/WeSawtheDevil

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/wesawthedevilpodcast

TikTok: tiktok.com/@wesawthedeviltruecrime

NOTE: For whatever reason, even after correctly stating her age multiple times, around 22 minutes in, Robin incorrectly refers to Jane Doe as 21 years old. 

At 1:42 a.m. on October 20, 2024, according to a civil lawsuit, a Chi Phi brother at Cornell University told a Snapchat group of more than fifty fraternity members there was "free p*ssy upstairs." Upstairs was a twenty year old sophomore. Not one person in that chat went to the police.


Two years later, nobody has been charged. Then Jane Doe sued, the Tompkins County DA reopened the case, Governor Kathy Hochul pulled it from him, and New York Attorney General Letitia James opened an active criminal investigation.


This update covers everything that has broken since the lawsuit was filed.


The seven men named in the suit: Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar. None has been charged. All seven deny wrongdoing. We go through what each man is accused of, and exactly how Cornell disciplined each one, from expulsion to reflection papers.


The night, three ways: the lawsuit, the six page statement the DA built his decision on, and the police interview transcript he says he never saw. Where they agree, where they don't, and a correction on air about what her signed statement actually says.


The group chat: the photo, "Shop still open?", "Boys come whip it out," and the brother who went upstairs to "check on her" and reported back.


The texts: why Jane Doe told one of the men "non of the sexual stuff was illegal," why she reassured the people she later accused, and why survivors do exactly this.


Breaking: according to Cornell's Title IX record, one of the accused men called a sorority member the next day asking her to keep a friend quiet. Asked how the brothers handled the rumors, he told investigators: "We were just in the idea of just deny." Plus the witness statement nobody can find.
Why nobody was charged: New York's voluntary intoxication rule, which says a woman who chose to drink may not count as incapacitated, and a prosecutor who may not have had the whole record.
The circus: #IAmJaneDoe, the doxxing attempts, the mob going after the wrong people, and the men online who audited her texts before they ever audited the chat.


Reality Check: what fifty silent men actually tells you, and why trying to unmask Jane Doe is the most disgusting part of this entire story.


If you or someone you know needs support, the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline is 1 800 656 HOPE (4673), or online at rainn.org.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/we-saw-the-devil-a-true-crime-podcast--4433638/support.

Website: http://www.wesawthedevil.com

Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/wesawthedevil

Robin's Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/robin_wstd

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/WeSawtheDevil

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/wesawthedevilpodcast

TikTok: tiktok.com/@wesawthedeviltruecrime

At 1:42 a.m. on October 20, 2024, according to a civil lawsuit, a Chi Phi brother at Cornell University told a Snapchat group of more than fifty fraternity members there was "free p*ssy upstairs." Upstairs was a twenty year old sophomore. Not one person in that chat went to the police.


Two years later, nobody has been charged. Then Jane Doe sued, the Tompkins County DA reopened the case, Governor Kathy Hochul pulled it from him, and New York Attorney General Letitia James opened an active criminal investigation.


This update covers everything that has broken since the lawsuit was filed.


The seven men named in the suit: Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar. None has been charged. All seven deny wrongdoing. We go through what each man is accused of, and exactly how Cornell disciplined each one, from expulsion to reflection papers.


The night, three ways: the lawsuit, the six page statement the DA built his decision on, and the police interview transcript he says he never saw. Where they agree, where they don't, and a correction on air about what her signed statement actually says.


The group chat: the photo, "Shop still open?", "Boys come whip it out," and the brother who went upstairs to "check on her" and reported back.


The texts: why Jane Doe likely told one of the men "non of the sexual stuff was illegal," why she reassured the people she later accused, and why survivors do exactly this.


Breaking: according to Cornell's Title IX record, one of the accused men called a sorority member the next day asking her to keep a friend quiet. Asked how the brothers handled the rumors, he told investigators: "We were just in the idea of just deny." Plus the witness statement nobody can find.
Why nobody was charged: New York's voluntary intoxication rule, which says a woman who chose to drink may not count as incapacitated, and a prosecutor who may not have had the whole record.
The circus: #IAmJaneDoe, the doxxing attempts, the mob going after the wrong people, and the men online who audited her texts before they ever audited the chat.


Reality Check: what fifty silent men actually tells you, and why trying to unmask Jane Doe is the most disgusting part of this entire story.


If you or someone you know needs support, the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline is 1 800 656 HOPE (4673), or online at rainn.org.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/we-saw-the-devil-a-true-crime-podcast--4433638/support.

Website: http://www.wesawthedevil.com

Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/wesawthedevil

Robin's Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/robin_wstd

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/WeSawtheDevil

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/wesawthedevilpodcast

TikTok: tiktok.com/@wesawthedeviltruecrime

On Wednesday, September 30, the State of Tennessee tried to execute Christa Pike. It couldn't.


Pike was convicted of the 1995 torture and murder of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps. After a morning stay from the Sixth Circuit and an evening reversal by the U.S. Supreme Court, she was given two rounds of pentobarbital at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.

According to media witnesses and her lawyers' court filings, she stayed conscious, said her arm felt like it was about to burst open, and was still audibly snoring behind a closed curtain when reporters were walked out. Then the state put her in an ambulance. The Death Penalty Information Center says no one in the U.S. had ever survived after receiving the drugs before.


In this emergency episode:

• The night, minute by minute, from the people who were in the room
• The vein-access warnings Pike's lawyers raised in August, and the Attorney General calling them "speculation"
• Tony Carruthers in May, Byron Black in 2025, and Tennessee's track record
• Governor Bill Lee's demand that executions be "effective," and his second outside review since 2022
• The state admitting, six weeks before her date, that Pike was abused as a child
• Colleen Slemmer, her mother May Martinez, and thirty-one years of waiting
• "What if it were your child?" Answered by parents who lost theirs and still opposed executing the killers
• Why the state should never hold the power to kill its own citizens

Reality Check: the study estimating at least 4.1% of people sentenced to death are innocent, 203 death row exonerations since 1973, and what Tennesseans can demand from the Governor's review.


Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/we-saw-the-devil-a-true-crime-podcast--4433638/support.

Website: http://www.wesawthedevil.com

Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/wesawthedevil

Robin's Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/robin_wstd

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/WeSawtheDevil

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/wesawthedevilpodcast

TikTok: tiktok.com/@wesawthedeviltruecrime

Lindsay Clancy was back in court for the first time since her murder trial ended in a mistrial, and it was chaos. Plus, Christa Pike, the only woman on Tennessee's death row, is scheduled to be executed at 10 a.m. CT on September 30, 2026, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to step in.

Yesterday, Lindsay Clancy appeared in Plymouth Superior Court. The former Duxbury, Massachusetts labor and delivery nurse is charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of her three children. She pleaded not guilty, and her jury deadlocked 11 to 1 in favor of not guilty by reason of insanity.


Defense attorney Kevin Reddington argued the Commonwealth never proved she caused the deaths. Prosecutor Shanan Buckingham called that argument "laughable."

In this episode I break down:
- The Rule 25 motion for a required finding of not guilty
- Martin Weinberg's double jeopardy motion to dismiss
- The fight over sealed jury notes and sidebar records
- The "Juror Doe" motion aimed at the holdout juror
- The DA's push for a gag order on Reddington
- Why nobody will commit to a retrial date


Plymouth County DA Timothy Cruz still won't say whether he'll retry the case. The next hearing is November 2.



CHRISTA PIKE: 
In 1995, Christa Pike was 18 when she tortured and killed Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps Center. Sentenced to death at 20, she has spent 30 years on death row, most of it as the only woman there. We cover the crime, Colleen's life and her mother's 30-year wait, the defense arguments about age, childhood abuse and mental illness, Governor Bill Lee's clemency denial, the Supreme Court's denial, and Tennessee's lethal injection protocol after the abandoned Tony Carruthers execution attempt. If carried out, it would be the first execution of a woman in Tennessee in more than 200 years.

One woman gets supporters in pink outside the courthouse. The other gets AI-generated videos of herself crying. What the public reaction to both cases says about who gets mercy in America, how jurors became targets, and why death penalty support is at its lowest point in 50 years.


Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/we-saw-the-devil-a-true-crime-podcast--4433638/support.

Website: http://www.wesawthedevil.com

Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/wesawthedevil

Robin's Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/robin_wstd

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/WeSawtheDevil

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/wesawthedevilpodcast

TikTok: tiktok.com/@wesawthedeviltruecrime

***Show note: Robin is still insanely sick with COVID and this episode is not closely edited.  

On January 12, 1995, 18-year-old Christa Pike lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer to an abandoned steam plant on the University of Tennessee's agricultural campus and tortured her to death. She took a piece of Colleen's skull back to her dorm and showed it off at breakfast. She confessed. She has never denied any of it.

She was also sexually abused from the age of two. At five, she drew her abuser for a kindergarten teacher, and the school called her parents. At eleven, a neighbor raped her, pleaded down, and served no prison time. At seventeen, a stranger raped her, and nobody was ever arrested. She was born with brain damage and had bipolar disorder and PTSD, none of it diagnosed until years after a jury sentenced her to die. That jury never heard any of it.

Before trial, prosecutors offered her life without parole. Her lawyers spent about ninety minutes on it and didn't advise her to take it. Her co-defendant, who testified years later that he carved the pentagram, was seventeen. He got life with parole and is eligible now. The third participant got probation.

On Wednesday, September 30, Tennessee plans to execute her. It would be the first woman the state has executed since 1819. The physician overseeing it is the same one who spent over an hour failing to find a vein during Tony Carruthers' execution attempt in May. Her clemency petition sits on Governor Bill Lee's desk.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/we-saw-the-devil-a-true-crime-podcast--4433638/support.

Website: http://www.wesawthedevil.com

Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/wesawthedevil

Robin's Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/robin_wstd

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/WeSawtheDevil

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/wesawthedevilpodcast

TikTok: tiktok.com/@wesawthedeviltruecrime

Robin has COVID, a 103 degree fever, and a voice held together with tape. The episode goes out anyway, because Olney won't stop breaking. It is 100% unedited, so what you're hearing is what you're getting. Sorry, folks. 


THE OLNEY HOUSE, PART THREE: ACCESS
New reporting from the Philadelphia Inquirer says the late pornographer Raymond "R.C." Horsch had access to a Kensington crematorium connected to the Garzone Funeral Home. The owners of that funeral home later pleaded guilty to selling more than 240 corpses for body parts. Sources say Horsch paid an employee in drugs and cash so he could photograph and film the dead. Years later, he staged a gallery show that ended with a woman's body going into an incinerator.


We also cover:
- Two women who posed for Horsch inside the Chew Avenue house describe the smell, the mold, and the one rule about the basement
- Blair Tonzelli's former roommate tells 6abc the Horsches used Kensington's streets as a hunting ground
- New details from the June traffic stop that started the case
- Eugene Horsch's federal trial moves to March (a correction to our last episode)
- The self-written Wikipedia page, the pen name, and the 1973 film title that says it all
- Why the same number, 58, keeps coming up
- Police plans for a deeper search that could mean removing walls and floorboards

Seven women are connected to the house, and police believe five are dead. No bodies have been recovered and no one has been charged with homicide. R.C. Horsch died in 2025 and was never charged in connection with the missing women. Eugene Horsch faces federal weapons and false credential charges, is not charged in connection with any of the women, and is presumed innocent.


NEWS DROP: CLAVICULAR
Braden Peters, the 20 year old looksmaxxing streamer known as Clavicular, is charged in Orleans District Court in Massachusetts with rape, drugging a person for sexual intercourse, and procuring liquor for a person under 21. The charges stem from an alleged May 2025 incident in Chatham involving a 17 year old. Peters denies the allegations. He has not been arraigned and has not entered a plea, and he is presumed innocent. His arraignment is set for October 14. We also look at the podcast circuit that kept booking him all summer.


NEWS DROP: NOLAN WELLS
A Jackson County, Mississippi grand jury returned no indictments in the death of 18 year old Nolan Wells. His body was found off Horn Island after a Fourth of July boat trip. The grand jury found his death consistent with drowning, while both the state medical examiner and the family's pathologist ruled the cause undetermined. We cover what the report found, what it didn't, and the district attorney's handling of the announcement. We also cover the online mob that doxxed and threatened his friends.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/we-saw-the-devil-a-true-crime-podcast--4433638/support.

Website: http://www.wesawthedevil.com

Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/wesawthedevil

Robin's Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/robin_wstd

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/WeSawtheDevil

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/wesawthedevilpodcast

TikTok: tiktok.com/@wesawthedeviltruecrime

In June, a federal park ranger wrote down a license plate on Independence Mall. Three months later, Philadelphia is running the strangest death investigation in the city since Gary Heidnik, and it has no bodies in it.


This is the second episode on the Olney house. Since I last covered it, the numbers have changed completely. Four missing women became seven. Two believed dead became five. Five percent of the digital evidence reviewed became thirty percent, out of more than a million images and videos, with fifty eight separate human beings identified inside them.


Robin walks through everything that broke at the September 16th press conference: the new name, Nicole Fusaro, and the video Philadelphia police say shows Raymond "R.C." Horsch tightening a zip tie around her neck with a plumbing tool. The sixth woman her family asked not to name. The seventh woman who has no name at all. The 2017 metadata that gives investigators a window and gives one defendant an alibi. The sixteen survivors who were found alive and refused to help police, and the reasons that is completely rational.


Then the part that makes this case nearly unprosecutable: some women who appear dead in that footage have been found alive. R.C. Horsch spent fifty years manufacturing images of women pretending to die, and he was good enough at it that homicide detectives in 2026 cannot tell his performances from his crimes. He published the disposal method in a 2014 book under his own name, described himself as a natural at playing a perverted serial killer on a 2013 podcast, and died in his own bed at eighty two without ever being charged.


And the spine of the episode: every single time the state of Pennsylvania was already standing in the room. A 1985 psychiatric report that a retired FBI agent says describes a potential serial killer. A 2009 search warrant that turned up other women's IDs and a police chief who never heard what became of them. A 2016 sit-down interview with the last man to see a missing woman alive. A 2025 search of the house itself, written up as a narcotics matter. Families pointing at the address for years.


Five chances. Zero response. One parking ticket.


Plus: a cousin taking the Philadelphia Police Department to the DOJ Civil Rights Division, five urns with three tentative answers, fifty containers of something sitting in a federal lab in Chicago, and a safe sealed in a foundation in Bucks County that nobody has opened.


Housekeeping this week: Robin is back from a week in Philadelphia, which included Circa Survive, the Mütter Museum, the Liberty Bell, Reading Terminal Market, two cheesesteaks, a near-death experience in the pit sixty seconds into the first song, and a serious argument about Kathleen Hanna, Bikini Kill, and who a room's default actually serves.


Their names are Gabrielle Amarando, Amy McHale, Maribel Fresses, Nicole Fusaro, and Blair Tonzelli. There are two more.


Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/we-saw-the-devil-a-true-crime-podcast--4433638/support.

Website: http://www.wesawthedevil.com

Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/wesawthedevil

Robin's Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/robin_wstd

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/WeSawtheDevil

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/wesawthedevilpodcast

TikTok: tiktok.com/@wesawthedeviltruecrime

Eleven jurors voted to acquit Lindsay Clancy.

One didn't.

Six days later his dismissed charge, his divorce, and his eviction were on national television.

He has never spoken to a reporter. He has never been named. He showed up for jury duty and then did the one thing we tell every juror to do, which is refuse to move when you don't believe it.

This week the entire country argued about whether he should have been allowed in the building. Almost nobody arguing bothered to read the statute that answers it.

Motions are heard September 29th.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/we-saw-the-devil-a-true-crime-podcast--4433638/support.

Website: http://www.wesawthedevil.com

Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/wesawthedevil

Robin's Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/robin_wstd

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/WeSawtheDevil

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/wesawthedevilpodcast

TikTok: tiktok.com/@wesawthedeviltruecrime

This episode covers rape, drug-facilitated sexual assault, and the death of a woman. Nothing in it is graphic for the sake of being graphic. Resources are below.

Late on June 25, 2026, in the small Upper Austrian town of Marchtrenk, a teenage girl finds her mother unresponsive and bleeding. Paramedics pronounce her dead at 12:44 a.m. Her husband tells police it was rough, consensual sex that went wrong. That story lasts until the autopsy.

Austrian prosecutors have said on the record that she was extremely intoxicated and unable to defend herself; that her husband is under investigation for sexual abuse of a defenseless person resulting in death; that a neighbor has confessed to abusing her twice, including the night she died; and that a third man was expected to take part and did not show. Reports of a wider paid network, secret drugging, and specific chat messages.

From there the episode goes to Gisèle Pelicot: the 2024 Mazan trial, the fifty-one convictions, France’s 2025 consent-based rape law, her 2026 memoir A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, and her daughter Caroline Darian’s still-open fight to be believed without a hard drive full of proof.

Then Stockport, England, where a husband has pleaded guilty to five rapes of his unconscious wife while twelve co-defendants stand trial beside him. Then the CNN investigation into the so-called rape academy: sleep-content platforms, Telegram groups, a Polish arrest that started with an undercover reporter, Project Medusa, and the viral 62-million figure that was wrong.

The Reality Check covers how common incapacitated rape is, leftover marital-rape loopholes, what actually moves cases, and the men who were invited, declined, and told no one.

US: RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline — 1-800-656-4673 / rainn.org
US: National Domestic Violence Hotline — 1-800-799-7233 / thehotline.org
International resources are linked below.

If you have unexplained blackouts or lost time, you can ask a doctor about testing for chemical submission. You do not have to be sure first.


Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/we-saw-the-devil-a-true-crime-podcast--4433638/support.

Website: http://www.wesawthedevil.com

Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/wesawthedevil

Robin's Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/robin_wstd

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/WeSawtheDevil

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/wesawthedevilpodcast

TikTok: tiktok.com/@wesawthedeviltruecrime