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-year-old Jennifer Schweiger, a girl with Down syndrome known to every neighbor on her block, went out for a walk and never came home. Thirty-five days later, a volunteer found her in a shallow grave near a Willowbrook campsite used by Andre Rand, a former custodian there. In this episode of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy examines the legend that haunted a borough for two decades, the children who vanished without answers, and the grave behind Willowbrook that turned a bedtime story into a police investigation. Please note, this episode contains discussion of the abduction of children and may not be suitable for all audiences.
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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 her with nine murders and built the case almost entirely from circumstance: the sedatives in her victims' bodies, the prescriptions she explained away as sleep aids, and the checks that kept being cashed after her tenants stopped being seen. She insisted they had died of natural causes and that she had only kept collecting their money. The trial also exposed how a woman on parole for stealing from the elderly had been handed one vulnerable adult after another. No court ever reached a verdict on six of the nine deaths she was charged with, and the number of people who died in Dorothea Puente's care has never been settled.
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If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.
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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 mail and cashed their Social Security checks, and she was on parole, under orders to stay away from elderly people and stop handling government money. In November 1988, a social worker reported a tenant missing: Alvaro Montoya, a gentle man with intellectual disabilities who everyone called Bert. Days later, detectives started digging in the garden. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy introduces Dorothea Puente and the record of fraud and violence behind her, the boarding house she ran on other people's benefit checks, and the missing tenant whose social worker refused to accept the story she was given.
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If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.
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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 backpackers and collecting their passports. Thai press called him the Bikini Killer. He spent two decades in Indian prisons, escaped once, and was finally convicted in Nepal of murdering two travelers in 1975, Connie Jo Bronzich and Laurent Carrière. In December 2022, Nepal's Supreme Court ordered him released on health grounds and deported to France, where he lives today. In this episode of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy examines the charm that made Sobhraj so effective on the road, the travelers who trusted him and never made it home, and the open question of how many people a man convicted of two murders and suspected of more than twenty really killed.
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If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.
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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 Binion had been forced to swallow a lethal dose of heroin, or suffocated, or both, and the state's own two pathologists never agreed on which. A jury convicted the pair in 2000. Three years later the Nevada Supreme Court threw the convictions out over how the trial had been run, and in 2004 a second jury heard much of the same evidence and acquitted them of murder, while convicting them of taking the silver. More than twenty years after that acquittal, no one has been convicted in Ted Binion's death, and the question of whether he was killed at all has never been settled. Please note, this episode contains discussion of substance abuse and suicide and may not be suitable for all audiences.
Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios
If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.
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