Episode #48
2016-08-12 00:50:37
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2008 was an exciting time to be a Harry Potter fan. The final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, had been released. Movies were on the way. And author Melissa Anelli was at the center of it all, running a popular fan site called The Leaky Cauldron and working on...
Episode #47
2016-07-15 00:52:29
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Shortly after Meridy Volz moved from Milwaukee to San Francisco, she received a phone call from a friend asking her to take over a small bakery business. Meridy agreed to run the bakery, but she only wanted to sell one thing: pot brownies. Her brownies were a massive success, and...
Episode #46
2016-06-30 20:52:46
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There are more tigers in captivity in America than wild tigers in the entire world. The exact number of captive tigers in this country isn't known, because many of them live in people's backyards or unaccredited zoos, and the legality of their ownership varies widely by state and even by...
Episode #45
2016-06-17 01:53:06
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As a law student, Bryan Stevenson was sent to a maximum security prison to meet a man on death row. The man told Stevenson he'd never met an African-American lawyer, and the two of them talked for hours. It was a day that changed Stevenson's life. He's spent the last...
Episode #44
2016-06-03 03:05:31
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Not only was John Frankford a famous horse thief, he was also a notoriously good escape artist. People thought no jail was strong enough to keep him, but then in 1895 he was sentenced to Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary. At Eastern State, Frankford became the victim of a strange practice:...
Episode #43
2016-05-20 02:51:00
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In 1979, a group of labor organizers protested outside a Ku Klux Klan screening of the 1915 white supremacist film, The Birth of a Nation. Nelson Johnson and Signe Waller-Foxworth remember shouting at armed Klansmen and burning a confederate flag, until eventually police forced the KKK inside and the standoff ended without violence. The...
Episode #42
2016-05-06 00:50:33
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People have been giving each other "the finger" since Ancient Greece. The first documented use is said to be a photograph from 1886 in which the pitcher for the Boston Beaneaters extends his middle finger to the camera (ostensibly to the rival New York Giants). Even though it's been around...
Episode #41
2016-04-15 00:54:52
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Since 1965, there's been an unsolved murder in Houston, Texas. The main suspect, Charles Rogers, managed to disappear and police were never able to find him. The case is still considered open. In 1997, a couple of forensic accountants named Hugh and Martha Gardenier decided to look into the murders,...
Episode #40
2016-04-01 00:14:51
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When it comes to Kentucky bourbon, Pappy Van Winkle is among the most exclusive offered, according to food writer Brett Anderson. The bourbon is prized for its wheat-base and special barrels for aging handpicked by Julian Van Winkle III, the president of Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery. It doesn’t matter...
Episode #39
2016-03-18 04:25:07
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In 1983, three men were prepared to plead guilty to the violent sexual assault of Elizabeth Daniel in Anderson, South Carolina. Defense attorneys did not want their clients to go before a jury, so they arranged a plea deal. This left the sentencing in the hands of Judge C. Victor...
Episode #38
2016-03-04 05:23:04
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Jane Toppan was born in Massachusetts in 1857. She attended the Cambridge Nursing School, and established a successful private nursing career in Boston. Said to be cheerful, funny and excellent with her patients, nothing about "Jolly Jane" suggested she could be "the most notorious woman poisoner of modern times” responsible...
Episode #37
2016-02-18 21:13:30
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In 2010, an eighth-grader brought a loaded gun to a middle school in Hastings, Minnesota. We speak with Jake Bullington and Emma Oelkers, two students at the school, and Mark Zuzek, the principal, about the hours in lockdown. Read Jake Bullington's essay, "Yeah, I'm Afraid of Guns."
Episode #36
2016-02-05 02:43:17
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The 500-year-old Treaty Oak in Austin, Texas was once called "the most perfect specimen of a North American tree." But in 1989, Austin's city forester John Giedraitis realized that the Treaty Oak didn't look so good, and began to wonder whether someone had intentionally tried to kill it. The Austin...
Episode #35
2016-01-22 01:29:44
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As a young woman in the '60s, Andy Austin talked her way into a job as a courtroom sketch artist in Chicago. She spent 43 years sketching everyone from disgraced governors to John Wayne Gacy, and says she only made someone look bad on purpose once. [caption id="attachment_949" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]...
Episode #34
2016-01-08 07:43:35
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Michael Ross was the first person in Connecticut to be sentenced to death since 1960. He claimed that he wanted to die in order to atone for what he had done. One journalist spent twenty years trying to figure out whether his remorse was real. Learn more about Martha Elliott's relationship with...
Episode #33
2015-12-17 23:39:43
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Sgt. David Mascarenas is the Dive Supervisor for the Los Angeles Police Department. He's been diving his whole life, and prides himself on never refusing a dive, no matter how treacherous. At least until the summer of 2013, when a murder investigation led him into the unusually murky waters of...