In 1973 a movie opened in theaters that scared the nation - The Exorcist. But you may not be aware that it was based on true events that took place in 1949. Billy Graham urged audiences not to see it due to its depiction of …
A rocky marriage, a controlling husband, an estranged wife, and alcohol addiction; a destructive combination that led down a deadly path and ultimately ended in tragedy for several families.
A group of families headed west to California in the spring of 1846 during the Westward Expansion movement. They were well provisioned for the journey that was expected to take them 4-6 months. But one delay after another al…
Sometimes a simple "welfare check" for someone's safety turns out to be more than investigators bargained for. For the Houston Police Department in 1965, this was the case when a man called in concerned about his elderly aun…
Since the 1840s the Stiles family had passed down a rare condition called Ectrodactyly that makes the hands look like lobster claws. Grady Stiles turned his family's condition into a lucrative business performing in the tra…
In the years between 1984 and 1985, three intertwined families experienced the murders of close family members. The murders spanned from Louisville, Kentucky to Winston Salem and Greensboro, NC.
Susie Newsome Lynch and Fri…
As Westward expansion began in the US after the Civil War, homesteaders staked land claims across the plains. One family set up a crude store and Inn along the trail, taking advantage of the location where many a weary trave…
On Mother's Day 1985, a young mother and her two little girls were found dead in their home near Ft. Bragg, NC. The youngest of her daughters was left alive, alone, crying, and dehydrated in her crib waiting for a rescue. Th…
In early 1970 Capt. Jeffrey MacDonald is awakened by the screams of his wife and daughters being attacked. He claims a group of drugged-up hippies were the intruders, but authorities quickly begin to question that claim. Th…
At the height of the hippie culture and "Satanic Panic" in the early 1970s, a gruesome murder is committed at Fort Bragg, NC. A pregnant mother and her two small daughters are repeatedly stabbed to death. Her husband, Capt…
Accident? Suicide? Or Murder? The question of "Z" Smith Reynolds' death is still not answered to this day more than ninety years later. The wealthy heir of the RJ Reynolds Tobacco fortune was shot on his sleeping porch after…
Georgia Tann was a social worker whose crimes spanned three decades from the 1920s to 1950. What appeared to be benevolence on her part was actually greed and downright evil that affected many families during those years. Sh…
During a snowstorm in early 1972, a Boone, NC family is shockingly murdered in their own home. At first, it appears to be a robbery gone bad, but upon further inspection, that theory does not seem to add up. It was a crime t…
Lowell Lee Andrews was a bright university student, and beloved son of a Kansas farmer. On Thanksgiving day in 1958, he would shock his community by murdering his family in order to get his inheritance. Sources: In Cold Bl…
In 1892, in the town of Fall River, Massachusetts, a wealthy older couple was axed to death in their own home in broad daylight. Almost immediately their thirty-two-year-old daughter, Lizzie Borden, is suspected of the brut…
