The Cold Case Ledger

In December 1978, a missing teenager in Des Plaines, Illinois led police to a quiet contractor's house — and one of the most disturbing discoveries in American criminal history. EP13 traces the full arc of John Wayne Gacy: a childhood shaped by abuse and shame, an elaborate double life as Pogo the Clown, the methodical killing of 33 young men and boys, a trial in which he claimed insanity and called himself the thirty-fourth victim, and a case that still carries five unidentified names.

On May 5, 1993, three eight-year-old boys vanished after school in West Memphis, Arkansas — and were found murdered the following afternoon in a drainage ditch. Within weeks, police had arrested three local teenagers. The evidence against them was almost nothing. What followed was one of the most documented wrongful conviction cases in American history: a coerced confession from a teenager with a 72 IQ, a prosecution built on Satanic panic, and eighteen years of a man sitting on death row for a crime the DNA evidence says he didn't commit. As of late 2025, the case evidence sits at a laboratory waiting to be tested. The real killer has never been charged.

Northern California, 1968–1969: a masked killer struck four times in fourteen months, then spent years taunting police with encrypted letters and a running body count. This episode reconstructs every confirmed attack, decodes the letter campaign, examines the 2020 breakthrough that finally cracked the Z-340 cipher, and traces the only named suspect through DNA evidence that couldn't close the case. No one has ever been arrested. The Zodiac case remains open.