Crime at Bedtime

Jack Laurence

Crime at Bedtime is a true crime podcast for listeners who love fascinating murder cases, unsolved mysteries, disappearances, strange crimes and extraordinary stories — told in a calm, relaxed style designed for listening as you drift off to sleep.

Each episode explores a different true crime story, from notorious murders and mysterious disappearances to unsolved cases, historical crimes and some of the strangest cases from around the world.

There are no loud sound effects or over-the-top dramatics. Just compelling true crime storytelling delivered in a slower, relaxed style for those who like to unwind with a fascinating story at the end of the day.

So get comfortable, take a minute, unwind and let me tell you a story.

Crime at Bedtime is written and hosted by Australian podcaster Jack Laurence.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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30 episodes
Avg 29 min
English

Episodes 30

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S1 · E192
July 22 · 28 min
Missing: Madeleine McCann
On the evening of Thursday the 3rd of May 2007, a British couple on holiday in the resort of Praia da Luz on Portugal's Algarve coast finished dinner with friends at a tapas restaurant, roughly 50 metres from the ground-floor apartment where their three children were sleeping. Kate and Gerry McCann had, over the course of the evening, taken turns checking on the children at approximately half-hour intervals. Their eldest daughter, three-year-old Madeleine, was in the front bedroom with her two-year-old twin siblings. At approximately 10:00 pm, Kate McCann returned to Apartment 5A of the Ocean Club resort for her turn to check. She walked through the unlocked patio door. She looked into the children's bedroom. The twins were still asleep. Madeleine's bed was empty. The window in the room was open. Nineteen years later, Madeleine McCann has never been found. Portuguese police initially treated the case as an abduction, then as a homicide, then closed it, then reopened it. Kate and Gerry McCann were themselves named as formal suspects, then cleared. Multiple men have been investigated over the years, including a German convicted paedophile named Christian Brueckner, who remains the primary suspect of German prosecutors. The case has generated more media coverage than any missing child case in modern European history. The story of the little girl who vanished from Apartment 5A, of the parents whose lives were destroyed by the search for her, and of a mystery that, at the time of this recording, has still never been solved. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
S2 · E67
July 21 · 28 min
The Thing on the Hill: The Flatwoods Monster
At approximately 7:15 in the evening on Friday the 12th of September 1952, three young boys were playing in the schoolyard of Flatwoods Elementary School, in the small Appalachian town of Flatwoods, West Virginia. It was almost fully dark. One of them looked up. A bright, pulsating object was streaking across the sky. It appeared to descend and crash on a nearby hillside, on the property of a local farmer. The boys ran home to tell their mother, 27-year-old Kathleen May. Kathleen called on her 17-year-old cousin, a National Guardsman named Eugene Lemon. Two other local boys joined the group. The family dog, Rickie, came along. Seven of them altogether. Six boys, one mother, one dog. What they said they found in a clearing at the top of the hill has become one of the most persistently unsettling paranormal encounters in American history. They said they saw a creature. They said it was ten feet tall. They said its head was shaped like an ace of spades, glowing red and orange in the dark. They said it emitted a foul, sulphurous mist that burned their throats and eyes. They said it did not walk. It glided toward them. By the time they got back to the May family home, six of the seven witnesses were vomiting. Their eyes were red. Their throats were swollen. The dog was cowering. The local sheriff came. The local newspaper editor came, with a shotgun. Multiple neighbours reported strange lights that night. Nothing physical was ever found at the site. But for the rest of their lives, all seven witnesses would stand by exactly what they had seen. And nearly 74 years later, no one has ever definitively explained what it was. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
S1 · E191
July 19 · 36 min
The Biggest Lie: Bernie Madoff
On the morning of Thursday the 11th of December 2008, two FBI agents knocked on the door of a penthouse apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The man who answered the door was 70 years old, silver-haired, and one of the most respected figures on Wall Street. His name was Bernard Lawrence Madoff. He had served as chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. He had advised the Securities and Exchange Commission on trading regulation. He ran an investment firm that managed money for celebrities, royalty, universities, and Holocaust survivors' foundations. When the FBI agents asked whether there was an innocent explanation for what he was about to be asked, Madoff replied: there is no innocent explanation. Over the previous 17 years, and possibly longer, he had operated the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world. It had defrauded his clients of approximately $65 billion. It had wiped out charities. It had bankrupted pension funds. It had led to at least two of his victims taking their own lives, and it would eventually lead to the death of his own son. The story of how one man, sitting behind a desk on the 17th floor of a Manhattan office block, fabricated 17 years of financial statements from nothing, and how the entire American financial regulatory system failed to catch him despite being told, in writing, exactly what he was doing. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
S1 · E190
July 15 · 28 min
The Taxi Driver: Sian O'Callaghan and Becky Godden
At just before three in the morning on Saturday the 19th of March 2011, a 22-year-old woman named Sian O'Callaghan left a nightclub in the centre of Swindon, Wiltshire, and began the 800-metre walk home to the flat she shared with her boyfriend. She never arrived. Within days, Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher of Wiltshire Police had identified a suspect. Within a week, he had made a decision that would save one family from years of wondering, deliver another family a second set of remains that had been missing for eight years, and destroy his own career in the process. Fulcher took the suspect, a local taxi driver named Christopher Halliwell, to an Iron Age hill fort north of Swindon. He deliberately broke the Police and Criminal Evidence Act to interrogate him. And there, without a solicitor present, Halliwell led him first to Sian O'Callaghan's shallow grave in an Oxfordshire field, and then, on the drive back to the police station, offered him a second body. This is the story of two young women who died eight years apart, the detective who broke the rules to find them, and the spade in a Swindon shed that eventually put their killer behind bars for the rest of his life. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
S2 · E66
July 14 · 27 min
An Adventure: The Versailles Time Slip
On the afternoon of Saturday the 10th of August 1901, two English women stepped off a train at Versailles, near Paris, on holiday together. One was 55-year-old Charlotte Anne Moberly, the first Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford. The other was 38-year-old Eleanor Jourdain, her incoming Vice Principal. They toured the palace. They found it uninspiring. They opened their guidebook and decided to walk to the smaller chateau at the end of the grounds, the Petit Trianon, which had once been the private retreat of Marie Antoinette. They took a wrong turn at an unmarked lane. And over the following 30 minutes, in the gardens of Versailles, they would claim to have seen palace bodyguards in green-grey coats and three-cornered hats, an old plough beside a farmhouse that had long since been demolished, and a woman sitting on a terrace sketching, in an old-fashioned summer dress and a shady white hat. Moberly would come to believe that the woman was Marie Antoinette herself. Neither of them knew, at the time, that the date they had chosen was the 109th anniversary of the fall of the French monarchy. Sixty years of research followed. A book was published in 1911. It became one of the most famous ghost stories in the English language. And to this day, no one has ever been able to prove or disprove what the two women said they had seen. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
S1 · E189
July 12 · 31 min
The Disappearance of Ray Gricar
On a warm Friday morning in April 2005, Ray Gricar, the sitting District Attorney of Centre County, Pennsylvania, walked out of his office in Bellefonte, got into his red Mini Cooper, and drove east on Route 192 towards the town of Lewisburg. He was 59 years old. He was eight months from retirement. He had spent 20 years as one of the most respected prosecutors in central Pennsylvania. At 11:30 that morning, he called his partner from a rural stretch of road, told her he would not be home in time to walk the dog, and hung up. He was never seen again. The next day, his car was found in a Lewisburg parking lot with cigarette ashes inside from a man who did not smoke. His work laptop was later pulled from the Susquehanna River with its hard drive removed. His home computer had recent searches for "how to wreck a hard drive." Three national investigations have never resolved what happened. Twenty-one years later, no one knows whether Ray Gricar took his own life, staged his own disappearance, or was murdered by someone connected to the criminals he had prosecuted. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
S1 · E188
July 8 · 29 min
The Springfield Three
On the morning of the 7th of June 1992, a 19-year-old woman named Janelle Kirby drove across Springfield, Missouri, to a small house on East Delmar Street, looking for her two best friends. They had graduated from high school the day before. They were supposed to be driving down to a resort in Branson. When Janelle pushed open the unlocked front door, she found the family's terrier agitated, the girls' clothes folded neatly on chairs, beds slept in, purses untouched, cars in the driveway, and the smashed pieces of the porch light scattered across the boards outside. What she did not find was Suzie Streeter, her mother Sherrill Levitt, or her friend Stacy McCall. Three women had vanished from inside that house overnight. The dog. The beds. The car. The purses. The cash. All of it left behind. Thirty-four years later, no one has ever solved one of the strangest unsolved disappearances in the history of the American Midwest. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
S2 · E65
July 7 · 31 min
The Lost Cosmonauts
On a winter night in 1961, in a stone bunker on a hilltop outside Turin, two young Italian brothers sat in front of a wall of homemade radio equipment and heard something they would spend the rest of their lives trying to explain. The slow, wet sound of a man breathing his last breaths from somewhere above the Earth. Over the following years, Achille and Giovanni Battista Judica-Cordiglia would record eight more transmissions just like it. Morse code SOS signals from spacecraft in trouble. A capsule drifting into deep space. A female voice, calm at first and then terrified, counting down numbers in Russian as her capsule appeared to burn up around her. They were the dying breaths of Soviet cosmonauts on missions that, officially, never happened. Or they were one of the most extraordinary fabrications of the Cold War. Sixty years on, no one has been able to decide which. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
S1 · E187
July 5 · 29 min
The Woodchipper Murder: Helle Crafts
At just past three in the morning on the 19th of November 1986, a snowplough driver named Joseph Hine was driving along the edge of Lake Zoar in rural Connecticut when he saw something that did not belong. A rented truck. A woodchipper attached to the back. And a man standing beside it, operating the machine, in the middle of a snowstorm, in the middle of the night. Hine kept driving. He had a job to do. Five weeks later, when Connecticut State Police searched a house just a few miles from where Hine had been working that night, he would remember exactly what he had seen. And what investigators would find on the shore of Lake Zoar, sifting through the snow with a forensic laboratory in a tent, would become the foundation of one of the most extraordinary murder convictions in American legal history. The first time the state of Connecticut would ever secure a conviction for murder without a body. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
S1 · E186
July 1 · 26 min
Maternal Instinct: Taylor Parker
For eleven months, Taylor Parker told everyone she was pregnant. She posted gender reveals on social media. She showed off sonograms. She accepted gifts. Her boyfriend believed her. Her friends believed her. So did a young mother in New Boston, Texas named Reagan Simmons-Hancock, who had let Taylor photograph her wedding the year before and had defended her against the doubters. But Taylor Parker had two children already. She had no uterus. She had not been pregnant for a single day. On the 9th of October 2020, with the lie unravelling, Taylor drove to Reagan's home in New Boston with a scalpel in her bag. By the time a state trooper pulled her over on a highway outside De Kalb, Texas, with an umbilical cord visible from her trousers, two lives were over. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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