There have been numerous explorations of the NXIVM sex cult, including The Vow and Seduced on TV, but I first came across it in this podcast, told from the perspective of Sarah Edmondson, a victim and one of the bravest whistleblowers. Truly horrifying.
Susan Powell disappeared from her Utah home in 2009 and her body has never been found. An examination of a marriage turned toxic and a family with a terrifying secret.
One for the CSI devotees out there – how pioneering DNA detective work solved a decades-long mystery that began with the discovery of a barrel in New Hampshire woods in 1985. Inside, there were two bodies…
May 2015: A wealthy couple, their ten-year-old son, and the family’s housekeeper are found murdered in their ashes of their burning home in Washington DC, after being held captive and tortured for 22 hours. Who could possibly have committed such an unthinkable crime?
One of the first and still one of the best – a meticulous analysis of the 1996 murder of French film-maker Sophie Toscan du Plantier at her remote Irish holiday home.
This podcast was made by Ceri Jackson, whose BBC training shines through in the professionalism and objectivity of her account of an infamous miscarriage of justice from her home town. Five black and mixed-race men from Cardiff were charged with the 1988 murder of 20-year-old Lynette White, and three were eventually convicted, despite a complete lack of evidence. Ceri follows this compelling and appalling story from the original investigation through to the present day.
This podcast examines a terrible inexplicable death. Phoebe Handsjuk was only 24 when her body was found at the bottom of a rubbish chute in a residential block in Melbourne, 12 storeys below the apartment she shared with her boyfriend. By some miracle she survived the initial impact, but no-one knew she was there, and she bled to death in the hours that followed. The coroner said she’d climbed in herself; the family say that wasn’t even physically possible. So what really happened?
I came across Robert Maxwell when I was working in the City back in the day (thankfully only at one remove), and the toxic dynamics of the Maxwell family are integral to the story of his daughter Ghislaine. As its narrator John Sweeney puts it, this is ‘a fairy story the wrong way round, where a princess ends up accused of being the monster’.
A different type of crime this time – not just white-collar but white coat. The staggering story of Elizabeth Holmes, a Stanford University drop-out who became the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire by founding a medical technology company, and turning it into a business valued at more than $9bn, Only trouble was, the blood-testing device they claimed to have invented never actually existed….
If you’re an addict of The Staircase (like me) then do check out this brilliant podcast from BBC 5Live. Particularly fascinating on what the documentary series didn’t show…