Episodes

Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MugshotMysteries June 2026. One hundred meters beneath the border between Switzerland and France, two beams of protons that have circled a 27-kilometer ring for eighteen years are steered out and dumped into a block of graphite one final time. The Large Hadron Collider, the largest machine humanity has ever built, is powering down for four years of upgrades. Its public status page, after nearly two dec...

Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes and original case files on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MugshotMysteries January 12, 1928. Inside Sing Sing, hardened crime reporters stand shoulder to shoulder in the witness room, and at the center sits a woman: hair shorn for the electrodes, wrists and ankles strapped, swallowing hard but not crying. In seconds Ruth Snyder will become the first woman executed in New York in over thirty years. And as the current surges, a reporter ...

Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes and original case files on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MugshotMysteries Paris, 1925. The Eiffel Tower is rusting, expensive to maintain, and quietly rumored in the papers to be a candidate for demolition. To most Parisians, that's background noise. To a sharply dressed man in a suite at the Hotel de Crillon, forged government stationery in his briefcase, it's an opportunity. He is not a politician, not a diplomat, not even French. B...

Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes on Patreon Yonkers, 1976. Above the Hudson sits the ruin of what was once the grandest garden estate in America, its terraces gone feral, its old stone gatehouse renamed the Devil's Cave by local teenagers. And through 1976 and into 1977, people walking the trails keep finding dead German shepherds. Nobody calls it a case, because it isn't one. A year later, a man from this same neighborhood confesses to eight shootings and blames a demo...

Brooklyn, July 31, 1977, a few minutes past two in the morning. A patrol officer writes up a yellow Ford Galaxie parked too close to a fire hydrant, tucks the ticket under the wiper, and drives on. He never looks inside the car. He has no reason to. That parking ticket will do more to end the biggest manhunt in NYPD history than hundreds of detectives managed in a year, and no one will understand its importance for another ten days. This is Part 2 of our three-part Summer of Sam series, and it'...

Summer 1975. Tourists landing at JFK are handed a pamphlet by off-duty police officers. On the cover is a hooded skull. The title is "Welcome to Fear City," and inside is a survival guide advising visitors to stay off the streets after six, never ride the subway, and if at all possible, not to come at all. It is a real document, printed by the unions representing the men whose job was protecting New York. The city is broke, burning, and shedding thousands of cops. And into that city, one year la...

San Francisco, 2013. A letter arrives at a police station with no return address. The writer says his name is John Anglin. He says he escaped Alcatraz in June 1962 with his brother Clarence and Frank Morris. He says he is eighty-three now, and sick, and the last one left. And he makes an offer: promise me a year in prison and medical care, say it on television, and I will tell you exactly where I am. Fifty-one years of official history say the man who wrote that letter drowned in San Francisco B...

June 12, 1962. 7:15 in the morning, Alcatraz. A guard reaches through the bars of cell 138 to wake a sleeping inmate, and the man's head rolls off the pillow and shatters on the concrete. It is made of soap, toilet paper, and real human hair. Frank Morris has been gone for nine hours. And he is not the only one. On the most secure island in America, a prison the government spent twenty-eight years promising could not be beaten, three convicted bank robbers have just walked out through walls they...

November 10, 2009. Inside a Virginia execution chamber, the man at the center of one of the most infamous killing sprees in American history is asked if he has any final words. He says nothing. No confession, no apology, no reason, the same thing he offered every stranger he killed. Minutes later, John Allen Muhammad is pronounced dead. If this were a simpler story, that would be the ending. But the seventeen-year-old pulled from that car beside him is very much alive, and the courts of this cou...

While five million people were afraid of a stranger, one woman was afraid of a name. She lived in the Maryland suburbs of Washington with her three children, watched the same coverage as everyone else, the faceless sniper, the white van, the lone white male the experts kept describing, and did not believe a word of it. Because she was the one person in America who understood that this was not really about strangers at all. Her ex-husband had given himself a new name the year before: John Allen M...

October 2002. For twenty-three days, an invisible killer turns the suburbs around the nation's capital into a shooting gallery. People are cut down doing the most ordinary things imaginable, pumping gas, mowing a lawn, reading on a bench, loading groceries, stepping off a bus. Ten will die. A region of five million will learn to weave across parking lots and crouch behind car doors. And for almost the entire siege, the largest manhunt in the area's history will hunt, with total confidence, a ...

He spent his whole career guarding the game. Then he robbed it blind. For more than a decade, McDonald's Monopoly turned a paper sticker peeled off a fries box into the most reliable lottery in America. Cash, cars, grand prizes worth a fortune. There was just one problem. The winners were never random. They were chosen, recruited, and coached by a single man. This week on Mugshot Mysteries, we dig into the McMillions scam, the audacious con that drained an estimated $24 million from the world...

A twenty-three-year-old woman has never walked in public. Has never eaten without a feeding tube. Has leukemia, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, brain damage from a premature birth. Takes a fistful of medications every day just to survive. Has been to more than a hundred doctors. Has had her teeth removed, her salivary glands surgically excised, her head shaved weekly to simulate chemotherapy. Has spent her entire life in a wheelchair in a pink house in Springfield, Missouri, where the whole town c...

October 11, 1973. Pascagoula, Mississippi. Two shipyard workers drive to an abandoned fishing pier after work looking for a quiet night on the river. Less than an hour later, they walk into a sheriff’s office claiming they were taken aboard a craft by something not human. What happened next turned the Pascagoula Abduction into one of the most studied UFO cases in American history. In this episode of Mugshot Mysteries, Kathryn and Gabriel walk through the full encounter reported by Charles Hic...

You're right, I pulled the BBC source and some framing straight from your Part 2 example. Here it is rebuilt clean, sourced only from what's actually in the Part 3 script. MKUltra Part 3: "The Sleep Room" A 26-year-old mother of five checks into a hospital for postpartum depression and is put into a drug-induced coma that lasts 86 days. A young mother in Winnipeg is sent to the most respected psychiatrist alive and comes home unable to recognize her own husband, not knowing she has a daughter...

A man checks himself into a psychiatric hospital for depression and dies after being injected with an experimental Army chemical warfare compound. A young painter in Paris accepts a drink from a stranger and spends the next forty years trapped inside his own mind. The CIA rents apartments in San Francisco, hires sex workers, doses unsuspecting men with LSD, and watches them through two-way mirrors while agents take notes from behind the wall. And in a small French village in 1951, hundreds of...

On the night of November 28th, 1953, a man named Frank Olson went out a tenth-floor window at the Statler Hotel in New York City. He was 43. He was a biological warfare scientist for the United States Army. He had a wife and three kids in Maryland. The official story, for the next 22 years, was suicide. The actual story is that nine days earlier, the CIA had spiked his drink with LSD without telling him. And when his behavior became inconvenient, they put him in a hotel room with a chemist, an...

Six thousand people died in this building. The architecture was specifically designed so the living would never see the bodies leave. A five-hundred-foot underground tunnel. A motorized rail cart. A nickname nobody on staff gave it. They called it the body chute. Kathryn and Gabriel walk the full history of Waverly Hills Sanatorium, the tuberculosis epidemic that built it, the experimental treatments that defined it, and the sixty years of institutional suffering layered inside its walls. Then...

Two thousand five hundred people formally investigated. Fifty new names proposed every year. Fifty-seven years. Not one charge. Not one conviction. Not one answer. That is where Part 4 begins. Kathryn and Gabriel finally get to the names. Arthur Leigh Allen, the gravitational center of the investigation, the man eight filing cabinets were built around, whose DNA and fingerprints still came back negative. Lawrence Kane, identified by the only officer known to have seen the Zodiac face-to-face. ...

December 11th, 2020. A software developer in Virginia, a mathematician in Melbourne, and a Belgian programmer get on a video call. Between them: a 340-character cipher unsolved since 1969. The FBI tried. The NSA tried. Fifty-one years of nothing. Then the characters begin to resolve. It says: "I hope you are having lots of fun trying to catch me." That is where Part 3 begins. Kathryn and Gabriel lay out the complete authenticated Zodiac communication record chronologically, go deep on what mad...

August 8th, 1969. A schoolteacher named Donald Harden and his wife Bettye sit at their kitchen table in Salinas, California with a newspaper spread in front of them. On the front page is one-third of a 408-character coded message sent by a serial killer. The FBI has been staring at it for over a week. Bettye has a hunch: this man is an egomaniac, so the message probably starts with "I." And he is a killer, so the word "kill" is probably in there. Twenty hours later, a couple at a kitchen table h...

September 27th, 1969. A man in a homemade black executioner hood walks out of the tree line at Lake Berryessa and approaches two college students picnicking on a small island. He ties them up. Then he stabs them. Then he drives 45 minutes to a payphone and calmly reports the crime to police. He was never identified. He was never caught. This was only attack number three. In Part 1 of their four-part series, Kathryn and Gabriel build the world the Zodiac operated in: the assassinations and riots...

September 29, 1982. A twelve-year-old girl takes one Tylenol for a sore throat and never wakes up. Six more strangers die across Chicago suburbs in three days. Same brand. Different stores. No connection except a bottle on a shelf. Someone replaced acetaminophen with potassium cyanide at three times the lethal dose and returned the capsules to store shelves. No manifesto. No motive ever proven. No arrest. No conviction. One of America's most infamous unsolved cold cases. Every tamper-evident s...

July 15th, 1997. Gianni Versace, the man who dressed Princess Diana, Madonna, and Tupac, who built the supermodel era, who chose the face of Medusa as his logo, is shot twice on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion by a 27-year-old serial killer from San Diego named Andrew Cunanan. Cunanan was already four murders deep into the most sensational FBI manhunt of the 1990s. And the bureau had completely failed to stop him. In Part One, Kathryn and Gabriel built the world before the crime: Versace'...