Podcast Episodes

Patricia Cornwell: Scarpetta

Episode 64

I’ve interviewed quite a few authors who are inspired by real people or real crimes. And then they write these fantastic novels. Patricia Cornwell’s iconic character, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, has a legion …

Published on 7 hours ago

Ross Halperin: Bear Witness

Episode 63

A gang in a mountain barrio in Honduras terrorized the people there for years. The police claimed that their hands were tied because witnesses refused to testify. An American sociologist and a Hondur…

Published on 1 week ago

Michael Beach Nichols: Perfect Wife

Episode 62

Most of us have heard about Sherri Papini. She’s the woman who faked her own kidnapping in 2016, which terrified her husband and soon sparked outrage in her Northern California community. Michael Bea…

Published on 2 weeks ago

Bryan Burrough: The Gunfighters

Episode 61

We’ve heard from my buddy Bryan Burrough before for one of his Audible books based on a true crime story. His new book is very different. It’s called The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild. En…

Published on 3 weeks ago

James Polchin: Shadow Men

Episode 60

Our story this week is set in the 1920s in Westchester County, New York…it’s a Jazz Age mystery. A young ex-sailor is found dead on a desolate road. A suspect from a wealthy family admits to the murd…

Published on 4 weeks ago

Dan Slater: The Incorruptibles

Episode 59

New York in the early 1900s was filled with people trying to make their lives better. But for many, the rise of organized crime kept them in constant fear. On the Lower East Side, Jewish criminals fr…

Published on 1 month ago

Tanya Talaga: The Knowing

Episode 58

If you’ve ever dug deep into your family history, you know that there are sometimes surprises. Author Tanya Talaga discovered that the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter was mostly u…

Published on 1 month, 1 week ago

Alex Eliseev: Cold Case Confession

Episode 57

This week on Wicked Words on Exactly Right: in 1999, a woman named Betty Ketani went missing in Johannesburg, South Africa. She just vanished from the restaurant where she was working. Then a letter …

Published on 1 month, 2 weeks ago

Megan Abbott: El Dorado Drive

New York Times’ best-selling author Megan Abbott often uses true crime stories as a jumping off point for her wildly popular novels. Now she has a new book out called El Dorado Drive. It’s about thre…

Published on 1 month, 3 weeks ago

Caroline Fraser: Murderland

Episode 55

This week’s author grew up in the Pacific Northwest with the memories of notorious serial killers like Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer, who also lived there. But the region wasn’t just home to t…

Published on 2 months ago