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Dark Downeast

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#34 in True Crime this week

Dark Downeast: Maine and New England's True Crime Podcast digs into the decades-old and modern day cases that prickle the history of Vacationland and beyond – the unsolved homicides, undetermined deaths, unexplained disappearances and other dark stories of New England.

Investigative journalist and storyteller Kylie Low gets straight to the story with a mix of narrated episodes and documentary style production featuring interviews with surviving family and friends and insight on the investigations from detectives and sources who know these cases best.

This is heart-centered, ethical true crime, bringing light to stories you’re not hearing on other podcasts. It is Dark Downeast's mission to honor the legacy of the humans at the heart of each story and bring new attention to the cases still awaiting justice.

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  • 35 episodes
  • weekly
  • Avg 41 min
  • English
Counted on this page — what you have heard stays on this device, so it is not something the list can be paged by.
  • Thursday · 46 min

    The Murder of Kathy Lynn Gloddy (New Hampshire)

    Thirteen-year-old Kathy Lynn Gloddy left her home in Franklin, New Hampshire, on a November evening in 1971 with the family dog beside her. The dog came home. Kathy did not. By the following afternoon, her disappearance had become something far darker, and a community was left trying to understand how such violence could be inflicted on a child. In the years that followed, investigators would return to Kathy’s case again and again, each time believing they might finally be close to an answer.

  • October 29 · 44 min

    UNSOLVED: The Murder of Roberta "Bobbie" Miller (New Hampshire)

    In the fall of 2010, Roberta “Bobbie” Miller was starting over. She had a new home in Gilford, New Hampshire, she was back in school, and she was making plans for the life ahead of her. Then, on Halloween weekend, Bobbie and her dog, Sport, were shot and killed inside that home. There were circumstances that seemed to point suspicion in one direction. But as the years passed, some members of Bobbie’s own family began looking somewhere else entirely.

  • October 22 · 44 min

    The Murders of Boston’s Combat Zone (Massachusetts)

    Judy Belfrey. Kathy Williams. Holly Davidson. Melodie Stankiewicz. Four young women whose lives crossed the same few blocks of Boston in the 1970s, and whose deaths left investigators with a pattern they could see but never fully explain. The cases unfolded in different places and under different circumstances, but there was enough overlap to consider a connection. Again and again, investigators were drawn back to Boston’s Combat Zone. The question then – and now – is what that shared geography

  • October 15 · 44 min

    The Disappearance of Bianca Lebron (Connecticut)

    If there is any case where you wish you could turn back the clock and change just one small decision, it might be the disappearance of Bianca Lebron. There were several moments that morning in November 2001 when a question, a phone call, or one person stopping her before she walked away might have changed everything that came next.

  • October 8 · 36 min

    The Murder of Michelle Gardner-Quinn (Vermont)

    Why talk about a case that was solved years ago? Because the answer to who did it isn’t the only thing that matters. One night in October 2006, a college student needed to borrow a phone. She happened to ask a stranger with violent intentions. What makes that even harder to sit with is what investigators learned about this man afterward. There were red flags everywhere, allegations that reached back years, but none of it stopped him from being there that night. This young woman’s story did not

  • October 1 · 50 min

    The Suspicious Death of Kasha Blount (Massachusetts)

    On a Saturday morning in 1990, the body of a teenager was found on a dead-end street in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The scene raised immediate concerns, but the autopsy did not answer the question everyone needed answered most: how did Kasha Blount die? Police waited on the medical examiner. The medical examiner waited on police. Kasha’s mother pushed for answers and a reporter started asking questions. Finally, the investigation turned toward Kasha’s final plans, the

  • September 24 · 40 min

    The Murder of Nancy Ann Frenier (Rhode Island)

    A young mother disappears just days before Christmas. More than a year later, another woman is murdered across state lines. The cases seem separate – different cities, different circumstances – but eventually they converge around the same teenage suspect. What follows is more complicated than a confession and a conviction. It’s a case shaped by questions of mental competency, juvenile justice, changing constitutional protections, and what happens when one act of violence forces investigators to

  • September 18 · 39 min

    INTRODUCING: The Truth About Natalie

    Host Sean Kipe investigates the 2020 disappearance of 27-year-old Georgia mother Natalie Jones, who vanished after a July 4th lake party. Her car and remains were found 93 days later in a rural field, sparking questions of accident, suicide, or murder—especially since Natalie had begun publicly sharing allegations of past abuse. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.

  • September 17 · 37 min

    The Murders of Gloria Gough & Evelyn "Penny" Deans (Maine and South Carolina)

    In August of 1972, 44-year-old Gloria Gough left her home in Gardiner, Maine after a late-night phone call and vanished. Two days later, more than a thousand miles away in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, 52-year-old Evelyn “Penny” Deans was shot to death inside her home. Then police looked in Penny’s driveway. Sitting there was Gloria’s car. Inside were blood-soaked towels, clothing, and a map pointing toward yet another state. What followed was a multistate investigation, a murder case built

  • September 10 · 39 min

    The Suspicious Death of Nicole Parsons-Bucki (Rhode Island)

    On a morning when the country’s attention was fixed on unimaginable tragedy, a Rhode Island family was learning that someone they loved was gone. In the hours before Nicole Parsons-Bucki died, there had been violence, a police response, and a relationship already under strain, but 25 years later, no one has been charged. That could be because the deeper you look at Nicole’s case, the less simple it becomes: We’re dealing with an uncertain timeline, evidence that disappeared, unanswered question

  • September 3 · 50 min

    The Murder of Michael Cochran (Maine)

    On an ordinary winter night in 1981, danger was moving through the Bangor, Maine area in three different directions at once. A barroom dispute was followed by a deadly blaze. A drug sting was underway at a nearby apartment complex. And a few miles away, a lakeside cabin would be reduced to smoldering rubble before sunrise. None of those events appeared connected as they unfolded. But the first fire would pull investigators away from the second, some of the names in the sting later surfaced in t

  • August 27 · 53 min

    The Disappearance of Melanie Melanson (Massachusetts)

    In a small New England city, a teenager disappeared after a night in the woods, and almost immediately, the story of what happened fractured. The last people known to be with her gave conflicting accounts. Her family believed the investigation lost precious time. As the years passed, searches kept returning to the same narrow stretch of land, the same handful of names, and the same possibility that someone had been carrying the truth all along. After decades of searches, whispers and shifting

  • August 20 · 40 min

    The Murder of Judith Whitney (New Hampshire)

    There are cases that frustrate you because the evidence is thin. And then there are cases where the warning signs seem to be everywhere, but the system still can’t quite turn suspicion into action. A woman leaves home for a few quiet days away. Weeks later, police find her car in the woods and the man last seen with her is carrying her gun and giving away her personal belongings. Investigators see the pattern. Her family sees the danger. But seeing it and proving it are not the same thing. As

  • August 13 · 45 min

    The Disappearance of Edward Sprenkle Dubbs Jr. (Connecticut)

    Some people disappear from a place you can picture right away: a house, a road, a parking lot, a stretch of woods. But in the case of Edward Sprenkle Dubbs Jr., he seems to vanish somewhere between the parts of his life that made sense on paper. He had an office in New York, a home in Connecticut, a train he took like clockwork, and people waiting for him on both ends of the day. When he did not arrive where he was expected, the questions began almost immediately. Did he ever leave the city? D

  • August 6 · 57 min

    The Disappearance of Dr. Margaret Kilcoyne (Massachusetts)

    Sometimes, on an island, the only witness is the water. In January of 1980, a brilliant Columbia doctor went to her home on Nantucket’s remote east end carrying the weight of a life’s work, a possible medical breakthrough, and a kind of urgency the people around her struggled to understand. By the next morning, she was gone. No ferry record. No plane tickets. No clear path away from the house. Just a trail of clues that seemed to point in every direction except the answer.

  • July 30 · 45 min

    UNSOLVED: The Disappearance of Ryan Blagojevic (Maine)

    When someone has been missing for more than thirteen years, it can start to feel from the outside like the story has stopped moving. Like whatever answers existed back then are either gone now or buried too deep to reach. But for Ryan Blagojevic’s family, time has not softened the urgency. His sister Eve is still living inside the search for her brother, still turning over every possibility, still hoping that one piece of information could finally bring Ryan home. Ryan was last seen in Portland

  • July 23 · 41 min

    The Murder of Victoria Cushman (Rhode Island)

    Victoria Cushman was just 29 years old when she was found murdered inside her Warwick, Rhode Island apartment, just steps from the sporting goods store where she worked. For years, her family waited for answers and eventually, the case seemed to have them: a suspect known to the case from day one, who investigators said had motive to end Vickie’s life. The evidence was circumstantial, but it was compelling. A secret relationship. Conflicting statements. A timeline that seemed to close in around

  • July 16 · 41 min

    The Murder of Trish Haynes (New Hampshire)

    In the summer of 2018, Trish Haynes disappeared from New Hampshire. Or at least, that’s what the public knew. Investigators searched a rural property, then quietly recovered something from a nearby pond, but for months, they said almost nothing about what they had found or how it related to the missing persons case. Behind the scenes, Trish’s family was living with a very different reality. They had spent months trying to reach her, hearing shifting explanations about where she was and why she

  • July 9 · 43 min

    The Murder of Valerie Tieman (Maine)

    In 2016, the disappearance of Valerie Tieman became one of the most talked-about cases in Maine in the last decade. At first, there was room for hope, and maybe even a version of the story where Valerie had simply walked away from a life that had become too painful. Her husband, Luc Tieman, was a wounded military veteran, a man whose service and struggles shaped how people first understood him. But as investigators followed the trail from a parking lot to a wooded property in central Maine, th

  • July 2 · 36 min

    The Murder of Martha Brailsford (Massachusetts)

    On a Friday afternoon in July of 1991, Martha Brailsford told friends she was going sailing. In coastal Massachusetts at what is often the peak of summer heat and humidity, that wasn’t unusual. Martha knew the water, and in Salem Willows, boats were part of the everyday landscape. There was no reason to think a simple afternoon sail would become anything else. But when Martha didn’t come home that night, the search for her would expose a man whose stories kept changing, a familiar coastline t

Showing 1–20 of 35 episodes