Murder: True Crime Stories

For Staten Island kids in the 1970s and '80s, the boogeyman had a name: Cropsey, a madman said to live in the tunnels beneath Willowbrook State School and take any child who stayed out too late. Then children began disappearing for real: five-year-old Alice Pereira in 1972, seven-year-old Holly Ann Hughes in 1981, eleven-year-old Tiahease Jackson in 1983. On July 9, 1987, 12-yea...

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the excavation of Dorothea Puente's garden and the murder trial that came out of it. Detectives recovered seven bodies from the yard on F Street. Puente walked away during the dig, took a bus to Los Angeles, and was arrested days later after a man she met in a bar recognized her from the news. Prosecutors charged h...

Through the 1980s, a landlady named Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house at 1426 F Street in Sacramento, California. Her tenants were the people nobody else would take: the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, and the newly homeless. Social workers who visited described her as warm and unusually attentive, the rare operator who cooked real meals. Puente also collected their ...

In the mid-1970s, young Western travelers on the overland hippie trail through Southeast Asia began turning up drugged, robbed and murdered, several left on beaches in Thailand. The man investigators would eventually connect to the killings was Charles Sobhraj, a French citizen born in Saigon who moved between Bangkok, Kathmandu and Delhi posing as a gem dealer, befriending back...

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the two Las Vegas murder trials that reached opposite verdicts on how Ted Binion died. In March 1999, the Clark County coroner changed the ruling on Binion's death from undetermined to homicide, and prosecutors charged his girlfriend Sandy Murphy and her lover Rick Tabish with murder. The state's theory was that Bi...