In early December 1984, not long after the disappearances of 23-year-olds Catherine Davis and Cindy Heller, 21-year-old Angela Ewert spent an evening getting sized for an engagement ring. After leaving her fiance’s house to head to her home in west Arlington, Angela stopped for gas at a southwest Fort Worth 7-Eleven convenience store. She was never…

A few days before Christmas in 1984, 26-year-old David Dale Larson and 21-year-old Regina Suzanne Grover went out for a dinner date at The Keg Restaurant and Bar off Camp Bowie in Fort Worth, Texas. Service industry workers themselves, they knew folks at The Keg, and those folks saw Regina and David leave around 11 PM. It was the last time they wer…

In August of 1983, twenty-seven-year-old Mary Till left her Arlington apartment to head to work in Dallas. She never made it. For month, Mary’s parents agonized over their daughter’s disappearance. In early January of 1984 came an unfortunate end to their uncertainty when Mary’s skeletonized remains were found in a field of tall grass just outside …

On June 10th, 1983, the decomposing body of a well-dressed man was found in a desolate canyon near Los Angeles. John Doe #94 would soon be identified as missing variety show producer Roy Radin. He'd last been seen after meeting with a mysterious woman in a gold dress. Her name was Lanie Jacobs. Jacobs and Radin were obsessed with becoming Hollywood…

Less than a month after the disappearance of Catherine Davis, another 23-year-old woman vanished without a trace. In late October 1984, Cindy Heller stopped to help a stranded motorist. As genuinely friendly and caring as a person can get, she lived up to the term “Good Samaritan” and offered to deliver a note to the motorist’s friends after spendi…

Catherine Davis came to Texas in 1979 from Oxford, Mississippi. Chasing a career in modeling and fashion, she first landed in Dallas but followed a boy to Fort Worth in 1982. In late September 1984, the twenty-three-year-old left her apartment with someone and forty-five minutes later, it was engulfed in flames. Catherine wasn’t inside. But she’d n…

In December of 1984, fifteen-year-old Sarah Kashka travelled to Fort Worth from Denton to visit her best friend and hit a party. The party didn’t happen, and Sarah and her friend parted ways, each with their boyfriends. When Sarah’s boyfriend decided he needed to go home early, he says, he left her outside of an apartment complex where friends live…

A young woman opened the door to her place of work, a sporting apparel store in Washington DC, and immediately realized something was wrong. Too afraid to investigate what she saw and heard, she ran from the store and called 911. When police arrived and entered the store, they heard a sound coming from a hallway in the back, and they began to move …

On October 25th, 2004, four of the most brutal murders in the history of Lubbock, Texas took place; the murders of Ka'Diece, Ka'Sheim, and Mahogany Jasmine Allen and their mother, Tammy Cooper, shook even the most seasoned homicide detectives in the Lubbock Police Department to their cores. Even though the grisly scene and witnesses provided invest…

On February 2nd, 1980, 19-year-old Kristy Lynn Booth and a friend were dropped off at a Midland, Texas nightclub. Kristy took off her coat and shoes and danced all night, the last time with a man no one seems to have known. When a friend who’d borrowed Kristy’s car returned to the club to pick her up, she was nowhere to be found. Five days later, h…

August 23, 1987. Saline County Arkansas. 16-year old Don Henry and 17-year old Kevin Ives head into the woods to do some late-night hunting, but never return. Hours later, the two boys are seen lying on some railroad tracks before they are run over by a cargo train and the medical examiner concludes they had fallen asleep after smoking marijuana an…

After the brutal rape and murder of 18-year-old Teresa Branch, her family was left with the fallout – something that became increasingly difficult to live with. Outside the family, too, there were individuals whose life Teresa’s killer affected. It didn’t help that the investigation was at a crawl, with no actual evidence to work with, at least dur…

This is a preview of Criminology podcast’s season 2; The Golden State Killer. Listeners of season 2 will hear about the crimes of this elusive predator who was ultimately unmasked as Joseph DeAngelo. In season 2, Hosts Mike Morford and Mike Ferguson break down DeAngelo’s crimes one by one using actual police reports, and they include interviews wit…

When high school senior Teresa Branch’s car broke down about a half a mile from her home in Arlington, Texas, she began jogging to the house to get her father’s help. But Teresa never made it home. A while later, the friend she left to watch over the car phoned Teresa’s parents. They all began trying to find the 18-year-old but were having no luck.…

In late 1993, after Roney Dean Harper’s confession to the murder of Lou Goettsch, discoveries of human bones seemed to be commonplace in the Big County, an area of Texas of which Abilene is the heart. With every set of remains unearthed, detectives with the Abilene Police Department, an agency that had no jurisdiction over any of the discoveries, s…

On March 31st, 1981, twenty-one-year-old Lou Allen Goettsch had it made. A couple days earlier, he received a decent sized settlement check for a work injury he’d sustained earlier in the year, opened up a checking account, and put a deposit and first month’s rent on a new apartment. Then, he vanished into thin air. Since the disappearance wasn’t r…

Part 2 of 2. In late September 1983, 17-year-old Bambi Dick and friends attended a heavy metal concert at Davenport, Iowa’s Col Ballroom. Stories about what happened after, perhaps, are conflicting, but whatever the case, Bambi vanished. For more than a quarter century, her family looked for her. At some point, her parents expected her to come walt…