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This is part two of two - we suggest listening to part one first, to get all the details on Halloween 1974, in Pasadena, Texas. In this episode, we talk about the cyanide, the stapler a witness saw in his hand on Halloween day, and the trial that follows.  The trial includes a Pixy Stix executive, a wife's testimony that he never shed a tear, and the man responsible, takes a turn on the stand, where he admitted, "I exaggerate — like any normal human being." A quick verdict, a national candy panic, and a crowd outside the Huntsville prison in 1984, this is the story of the man who became known as the Candy Man. It's also the story of why the stranger with poisoned candy has always been a myth. To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here. Find Crime Clueless socials, website, and more here  Thank you for listening - we are grateful for you! Support Crime Clueless - Buy Me A Coffee Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On a rainy Halloween night in 1974, two dads from church take their kids trick-or-treating in the Bowling Green neighborhood of Pasadena, Texas. It's three blocks and about thirty minutes. Somewhere along the way, five giant Pixy Stix turn up from a house where no one answered the door. By 10:40 that night, 8-year-old Tim O'Bryan is dead. The candy is laced with cyanide, and police race through the night to find the other four Pixy Stix before any child eats them. One of them is in a sleeping 10-year-old's hand, stopped only by a staple he couldn't pry open. This episode goes from the porch lights on Citation Street to the panic that swept Houston's suburbs. Along the way: a mopped floor that saved a life, a witness who can't remember whether the person at the door was a man or a woman, a vision from God, and the man at the dark house who has an airtight alibi. To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here. Find Crime Clueless socials, website, and more here  Thank you for listening - we are grateful for you! Support Crime Clueless - Buy Me A Coffee Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In September 2017, deputies stopped a Cadillac SUV five minutes from a lake house in southwest Virginia and arrested a 54-year-old woman her neighbors knew as Debbie. Twenty-seven years earlier, she was Sheila Keen, the prime suspect in the murder of Marlene Warren. Who was Sheila before 1990? How did she end up married, living in Virginia and running a burger/everything you can think of/plus ice cream drive-thru in Tennessee? Named the Purple Cow. Anyone else remember "Purple Cow" milkshakes, circa 1990s? Now, what actually brought this case back to life after decades? Remember we said all they needed was "a little bit"? Well, that's honestly all they found. A little bit. Tiny. Was it even enough? The fight that follows is long, drawn out, and full of prosecutorial missteps. The defense called the evidence contaminated (we agree!) and the witnesses, well their accounts don't really match what was recorded. There is a prosecution running out of time, I mean, it happens after 27 years.  After you listen, tell us, was justice done? To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here. Find Crime Clueless socials, website, and more here  Thank you for listening - we are grateful for you! Support Crime Clueless - Buy Me A Coffee Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On a rainy Saturday morning in May 1990, Marlene Warren opened her front door to a clown holding red and white carnations and a silver balloon that read “You’re the Greatest.” Without a word, the clown shot her in the face, walked back to a white convertible, and drove away. In Part One, we follow the trail the killer left behind: a costume bought at closing time, balloons sold at only one store in the county, and a getaway car taken through a knockoff Yellow Pages ad. We meet Marlene’s husband, Mike, a used-car dealer with a racehorse named after his wife, and the repo woman everyone at his car lot said to look at. Detectives knew who they suspected within days. So why did it take decades to charge anyone? To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here. Find Crime Clueless socials, website, and more here  Thank you for listening - we are grateful for you! Support Crime Clueless - Buy Me A Coffee Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In January 1897, Zona Heaster Shue was found dead in her home in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, just months after marrying a charming newcomer named Edward Shue. Her death was quickly ruled natural, and she was buried with little fuss. But her mother, Mary Jane Heaster, never believed it. She claimed that over four nights, Zona’s spirit came to her and described exactly how she died, and exactly who killed her. What happened next is one of the strangest chapters in American legal history. A mother’s ghost story led to an exhumation, an autopsy, and a murder trial. The case is often called the only one in the U.S. where a ghost’s testimony helped convict a killer. We covered the Greenbrier Ghost last October, and it’s stayed with us ever since. It’s one of the most interesting and genuinely haunting cases we’ve covered. So we’ve given it a full remaster and are re-releasing it for spooky season. This one is also a throwback to the original Crime Clueless lineup: Laura and I recorded it with our sisters Chrysta and Kayla, so if you’re newer to the show, you’ll get to meet the rest of the family. Laura and I have both been down with colds, (leaving us not sounding our best) and couldn’t record for this week. We felt like this was the perfect time to dust off a favorite. New episodes are coming soon. Until then, grab a blanket, turn off the lights, and listen to the ghost who wouldn’t stay quiet. To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here. Find Crime Clueless socials, website, and more here  Thank you for listening - we are grateful for you! Support Crime Clueless - Buy Me A Coffee Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

They drained a reservoir and dragged the Ohio River. They dug up a sandbar and chased a stage conjurer’s “clue.” Pearl Bryan’s head was never found. In part two, we piece together Pearl’s last four days in Cincinnati: a hotel register signed with her sister’s name, an argument outside a music company, and a sarsaparilla in a saloon’s back room. Then comes the circus. There are lemonade stands at the murder scene, a shooting gallery offering a five-cent cigar to anyone who shoots Scott Jackson’s effigy, a witness bribery scheme that falls apart on the stand, and two defenses built on epilepsy and hypnosis. It all leads to March 20, 1897, when a governor’s offer, a five-minute decision and one man’s silence settle everything. And at the end, a ritual that still happens at a small Indiana grave: pennies, left heads up. To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here. Find Crime Clueless socials, website, and more here Thank you for listening - we are grateful for you! Support Crime Clueless - Buy Me A Coffee Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On a foggy February morning in 1896, a farmhand outside Fort Thomas, Kentucky, finds a woman lying in the privet bushes. At first he thinks she’s just another girl, sleeping off a hangover maybe.   Then the sheriff pulls her down the bank, and her dress falls away. Her head is gone. Detectives start with no name and not even what city she is from. There is a pile of wild theories, including one man who confidently identifies her as his wife until his wife walks in alive. Then detectives notice her tiny size-three boots. A number stamped inside leads to a factory, then a ledger in Greencastle, Indiana, and finally to a farmhouse where a family is waiting for a daughter who said she was going to Indianapolis. In this episode, we follow the shoes, the letters, a blood-soaked valise passed around three Cincinnati saloons, and two roommates who can’t stop pointing at each other. It all builds to a moment beside her coffin that will stay with you. Part two will be out friday, and you will not want to miss how this one ends. To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here. Find Crime Clueless socials, website, and more here  Thank you for listening - we are grateful for you! Support Crime Clueless - Buy Me A Coffee Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

"You're looking for bodies? Go ahead. Dig up the yard." In Part Two, investigators take Hugo Selenski up on his offer. Less than 20 feet from his back door, they find Michael Kerkowski and Tammy Fassett. In the fire pit behind the house, they find the remains of three more people. One of them has never been identified. We cover the drug-house sleepover that turned deadly, a jeweler's home invasion undone by sneaker prints in the snow, and the night Hugo climbed down a 60-foot rope of prison bedsheets, only to go home. Then there's the 2006 trial that ended in a headline nobody saw coming, prison fan mail from people who really should have known better, and the jailhouse phone call where Hugo offered the least convincing denial in history. Finally, after nearly 13 years, Michael and Tammy's families get their day in court. There's an informant who admits he lied, a mother who tells the defendant to wipe the smile off his face, and a verdict, followed by an elevator ride nobody at that courthouse will forget. If you missed Part One, start there. Our Vanished Voices episode on Cindy Song, the Penn State student an informant tried to tie to this case, is out now. To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here. Find Crime Clueless socials, website, and more here  Thank you for listening - we are grateful for you! Support Crime Clueless - Buy Me A Coffee Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On the afternoon of May 3, 2002, Michael Kerkowski and Tammy Fassett were doing yard work when two visitors pulled into the driveway. When Michael's mother called, Tammy kept it short: "We have company." Michael was a pharmacist from northeastern Pennsylvania who'd been caught selling hundreds of thousands of painkillers out of his own store, and he was days away from sentencing. The man he trusted to help him through it was his best friend, Hugo Selenski, a bank robber fresh out of federal prison who once tried to wash exploded dye out of stolen cash in his parents' washing machine. When Michael and Tammy disappeared, police assumed Michael had fled. But Hugo knew exactly where they were. For months he sat with Michael's grieving parents, promising their son was alive and taking about $100,000 of their money, until the night a gun went off in their basement. In part one of two, we cover a dream house on six wooded acres, a sweaty pair of men with brand-new shovels, a lie about a gas tank, a $500,000 story about Belize, and the moment an old prison buddy finally decided to talk. Part two drops Friday. And over on Vanished Voices this week, we cover the disappearance of Penn State student Cindy Song, a case that became tangled up in this one. Look for that episode Thursday. To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here. Find Crime Clueless socials, website, and more here  Thank you for listening - we are grateful for you! Support Crime Clueless - Buy Me A Coffee Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Private investigator Ken Brennan has a theory about what happened in Room 348, and it starts with a question nobody thought to ask. As he and Detective Scott Apple follow a rumor, a hunch, and one very small detail most people would never notice, the answer to Greg Fleniken's death turns out to have been hiding in plain sight the whole time. But solving it is only half the fight. Susie Fleniken still has to push the case all the way to a courtroom, and she gets her chance to say exactly what she's been waiting two years to say. To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here. Find Crime Clueless socials, website, and more here  Thank you for listening - we are grateful for you! Support Crime Clueless - Buy Me A Coffee Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greg Fleniken was a man of routine. Every Monday he drove from Lafayette, Louisiana, to Beaumont, Texas, checked into the same hotel, and spent his nights the same way: propped up on two pillows with a candy bar, a cigarette, and a movie. On September 16, 2010, his co-workers found him dead on the floor of Room 348.It looked like his heart had simply given out. Then the medical examiner opened him up and found injuries usually seen in car crash victims, and he ruled it a homicide. But there was no sign of a fight, no enemies, nothing taken, no motive, and not a single neighbor who heard a thing. Months later, with the case headed for the cold files, Greg's wife Susie made one phone call that changed everything. This week we take you through one of the strangest locked-room mysteries in true crime. To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here. Find Crime Clueless socials, website, and more here  Thank you for listening - we are grateful for you! Support Crime Clueless - Buy Me A Coffee Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

For sixteen years, the disappearance of Mike Williams sits unsolved — a mother's letters to the governor, a reopened investigation, and still, no answers. Then, in the summer of 2016, something happens that has nothing to do with Lake Seminole at all. And everything changes. In Part Two, we follow the confession that finally broke a seventeen-year silence, the search that found what a 44-day effort never could, and a trial that turns on the smallest, most human of details. This is the second half of the Mike Williams story — the half nobody saw coming, including the people who thought they already knew how it ended. To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here. Find Crime Clueless socials, website, and more here  Thank you for listening - we are grateful for you! Support Crime Clueless - Buy Me A Coffee Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

December 16, 2000. Before sunrise, Mike Williams loads his boat and heads out onto Lake Seminole — a lake he's hunted a hundred times before, on a morning that's supposed to end with an anniversary dinner. He never makes it home. What follows is a 44-day search across a reservoir riddled with submerged stumps and alligators, a discovery that seems to close the case for good, and a legal ruling that moves faster than anyone can quite explain. For years, the official story holds. For one woman — Mike's mother — it never does. This is Part One of our two-part deep dive into the disappearance of Mike Williams: what everyone believed happened at Lake Seminole, and the small, stubborn refusal to let it stay that way. To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here. Find Crime Clueless socials, website, and more here  Thank you for listening - we are grateful for you! Support Crime Clueless - Buy Me A Coffee Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Steven Koecher's phone has gone silent, his family is left with more questions than answers. What investigators find years later — buried, hidden, and nearly destroyed by time — changes everything about how this case should have been handled from the start. This episode picks up right where the story left off, following the trail into a landlord facing serious felony exposure at the exact moment Steven needed money more than ever, a call log that turns increasingly desperate over the span of just a few days, and a piece of physical evidence that stayed hidden for years before finally surfacing — only to fall agonizingly short of giving anyone a real answer. We also dig into a second person tied to the case, whose documented history raises just as many questions, and a piece of property damage that nobody has ever been able to explain the timing of. Sixteen years later, this case is still wide open, and by the end of this episode, you may find yourself just as unsettled by how little was ever actually investigated as by what may have happened to Steven himself. If you have any information regarding Steven Koecher, please contact the Henderson Police Department or the St. George Police Department. To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here. Find Crime Clueless socials, website, and more here Thank you for listening - we are grateful for you! Support Crime Clueless - Buy Me A Coffee Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In December 2009, a 30-year-old man named Steven Koecher parks his car at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in a Henderson, Nevada retirement community — and walks out of frame forever. No struggle. No body. No answers. But in the days before he vanished, Steven put well over a thousand miles on his car for reasons he never explained to a single person, and on the day he disappeared, witnesses heard him say something that still doesn't add up sixteen years later. We look at the timeline, the money struggles, the phone calls, the P.I. investigation, and even the frozen lasagna. To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here. Find Crime Clueless socials, website, and more here  Thank you for listening - we are grateful for you! Support Crime Clueless - Buy Me A Coffee Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.