Episodes

  • The FBI’s 57-Year Breakthrough: Tracking the Crew Cut Killer

    The FBI’s 57-Year Breakthrough: Tracking the Crew Cut Killer
    Oct 12 2026
    : In 1969, a teenage girl was murdered in an Oakland hotel room, and a fugitive previously placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list became a suspect. Despite years of investigation, authorities could neither apprehend Taylor Morris Teaford nor identify the victim. When the FBI joined the renewed investigation in 2020, modern forensic techniques and investigative genetic genealogy helped uncover a crucial family connection. This episode explores how federal and local investigators worked together to restore Joanne Burdick’s identity and why the search for answers continues
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    3 mins
  • The Federal Investigation That Finally Brought Down Al Capone

    The Federal Investigation That Finally Brought Down Al Capone
    Oct 11 2026
    During Prohibition, Al Capone became one of America’s most notorious organized crime figures, yet federal authorities struggled to secure a major conviction. Investigators from the Treasury Department pursued his financial records while other federal efforts targeted organized crime in Chicago. Their work culminated in a landmark income tax evasion prosecution in 1931. This episode explores the federal investigative strategy that ended Capone’s criminal career.
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    4 mins
  • Cold Case, Hot Hit: How a DNA Database Search Reopened the Teresa Ann Houck Murder

    Cold Case, Hot Hit: How a DNA Database Search Reopened the Teresa Ann Houck Murder
    Oct 5 2026
    In October 1986, 23-year-old Teresa Ann Houck left the Baltimore club where she worked and was never seen alive again, found shot to death in Druid Hill Park just hours later. Investigators had physical evidence but no identified killer, and the case went cold for nearly four decades. Then a routine DNA database search produced the match prosecutors say finally gave the case a name. This episode looks at how forensic databases and investigative persistence can bring an unsolved homicide back to life.
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    3 mins
  • The Profile That Found the Mad Bomber: How Investigators Narrowed the Hunt for George Metesky

    The Profile That Found the Mad Bomber: How Investigators Narrowed the Hunt for George Metesky
    Sep 27 2026
    For years, bombs appeared across New York City while police struggled to identify the man responsible. Then psychiatrist James A. Brussel examined the bomber’s letters and behavior and produced a remarkably specific portrait of the person investigators should be looking for. The hunt for George Metesky became one of America’s most famous early examples of behavioral profiling—but the real breakthrough also depended on records, painstaking detective work, and a crucial investigative lead.
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    5 mins
  • The Real Path to the BAU: What TV Never Shows About Becoming a Profiler

    The Real Path to the BAU: What TV Never Shows About Becoming a Profiler
    Sep 15 2026
    "FBI Profiler" isn't an entry-level job — it's the end of a long, competitive road that starts with becoming a special agent, surviving Quantico, and working real cases for years before anyone even gets a shot at the Behavioral Analysis Unit. This episode lays out the real path to NCAVC, from selection through the small number of desks available at the top. The steps to get there are public knowledge; the odds of actually making it are not. We fill in the decade of work that television always skips.
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    4 mins
  • Jana Monroe: The First Woman in the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit

    Jana Monroe: The First Woman in the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit
    Sep 7 2026
    Jana Monroe broke ground as the first female FBI agent in the Behavioral Science Unit, consulting on roughly 850 homicide cases over her career, including work connected to Jeffrey Dahmer and the Rogers family murders. Drawing on her book Hearts of Darkness and recent interviews, this episode explores what profiling actually looked like inside the Bureau — crime-scene analysis and victimology used to narrow a suspect pool, not psychic insight into a killer's mind. It's a firsthand account of the real work behind a role Hollywood has spent decades getting wrong.
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    3 mins
  • The Adams County Prison Riot: When Federal Charges Followed the Chaos

    The Adams County Prison Riot: When Federal Charges Followed the Chaos
    Aug 31 2026
    On May 20, 2012, a gang fight inside a privately run Mississippi prison holding federal immigration inmates spiraled into a multi-hour riot. Twenty-four-year-old Senior Correctional Officer Catlin Carithers, called in on his day off, was beaten to death on a roof after inmates rigged food carts into a makeshift ladder to reach him. This episode traces how federal investigators worked the aftermath, ultimately building cases against inmates who assaulted staff, held the carts steady, and destroyed surveillance cameras to cover their tracks.
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    2 mins
  • "Don't Shoot, G-Men!" — How a Bureau PR Line Became FBI Legend

    "Don't Shoot, G-Men!" — How a Bureau PR Line Became FBI Legend
    Aug 30 2026
    The legend goes that gangster "Machine Gun" Kelly coined the term "G-Men" when he begged federal agents not to shoot during his 1933 arrest — but the real story is a lesson in institutional myth-making. This episode traces how J. Edgar Hoover's Bureau and a cooperative press turned a routine capture into a branding coup months after the fact. It's a case study in how authority, narrative control, and media complicity combine to shape public memory long before anyone had a Twitter account.
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    5 mins