Criminal

Episode 48: Eight Years

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 a...

Aug 12, 2016

Episode 47: Brownie Lady

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...

Jul 15, 2016

Episode 46: Tiger

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 u...

Jul 01, 2016

Episode 45: Just Mercy

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 hou...

Jun 17, 2016

Episode 44: One Eyed Joe

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'...

Jun 03, 2016

Episode 43: 39 Shots

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...

May 20, 2016

Episode 42: The Finger

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 fi...

May 06, 2016

Episode 41: Open Case

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...

Apr 15, 2016

Episode 40: Pappy

When it comes to Kentucky bourbon, Pappy Van Winkle is among the most exclusive, according to food writer Brett Anderson. The bourbon is prized for its wheat base and special barrels for aging, handpi...

Apr 01, 2016

Episode 39: Either/Or

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 the...

Mar 18, 2016

Episode 38: Jolly Jane

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 h...

Mar 04, 2016

Episode 37: Hastings

In 2010, an eighth-grader brought a loaded gun to a middle school in Hastings, Minnesota. We speak with Jake Bullington and Emma Bolters, two students at the school, and Mark Zuzek, the principal, abo...

Feb 19, 2016

Episode 36: Perfect Specimen

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...

Feb 05, 2016

Episode 35: Pen & Paper

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...

Jan 22, 2016

Episode 34: The Stay

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...

Jan 08, 2016