Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes

On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 39 years old. The killing triggered unrest in more than a hundred American cities and...

Three separate journeys onto the water ended in death, disappearance, and unanswered questions. NBA champion Bison Dele vanished from his own sailboat in the South Pacific in 2002; cruise passenger Merrian Carver...

Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI ran a secret program called COINTELPRO, short for Counter Intelligence Program. Its targets included civil rights leaders, Black liberation groups, anti-war activists, and feminist...

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the FLDS, was a polygamist offshoot of mainstream Mormonism that operated for decades along the Utah-Arizona border. By the early 2000s...

Walt Disney didn't just build a theme park. He built a system of total control, and convinced the world to call it magic. Employees aren't staff, they're "cast members." Uniforms are "costumes." Guests who step out of...

Three tropical destinations, three true crimes: in Aruba, 35-year-old Robyn Gardner vanishes from a beach with a travel companion who later tries to collect her life insurance... and is never charged. On Thailand's Koh...

On the morning of August 5, 1962, Marilyn Monroe was found dead in the bedroom of her Los Angeles home. She was 36 years old. The Los Angeles County Coroner ruled her death a probable suicide from an overdose of...

Behind a windowless brownstone on the Yale campus known only as "the Tomb," fifteen students are tapped each year to enter one of the most powerful and secretive brotherhoods in American history. Its alumni have...

In the summer of 1776, as the Continental Army braced for a British invasion of New York City, a network of loyalist conspirators bribed five of George Washington's own elite bodyguards to murder him. Governor William...

On the night of March 5, 1770, British soldiers opened fire on a crowd of colonists on King Street in Boston, killing five men and wounding several others. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes...

For centuries, the Freemasons have counted kings, revolutionaries, and founding fathers among their ranks, a secret brotherhood whose rituals, oaths, and hidden hierarchies shaped the modern world. But when...

In Peru's scorching Nazca Valley, ancient inhabitants carved enormous animal figures into the desert floor over a thousand years ago, figures so large they can only be understood from the air. In this episode of...

In April 2009, four Somali pirates boarded the MV Maersk Alabama in the Indian Ocean, taking Captain Richard Phillips hostage in a lifeboat standoff that gripped the world. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults...

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, indigenous communities across Melanesia developed powerful religious movements in response to the sudden arrival of European colonizers and wartime military forces bearing vast...

For over 2,000 years, the Yeren, China's legendary wildman, has haunted the mountains and folklore of rural China, inspiring fear, government bans, and even a state-funded scientific expedition. In this episode of...

By her early 30s, Griselda Blanco had transformed herself from a poverty-stricken Colombian girl into one of the wealthiest and most feared drug lords in history, architecting a cocaine empire that flooded Miami with...

In the Chilean wilderness, German preacher Paul Schaefer ran Colonia Dignidad, a walled commune where 300 followers lived under surveillance, forced labor, and daily abuse for decades. In this episode of Conspiracy...

In the mid-1800s, a British naturalist named Philip Sclater proposed the existence of a vast sunken continent called Lemuria to explain a gap in the fossil record. What began as a genuine scientific hypothesis was...

In 1875, a mild-mannered Civil War veteran named Charles Boles began robbing Wells Fargo stagecoaches across Northern California. He was always polite, never harmed passengers, and occasionally left handwritten poems...

In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes, Vanessa traces how Guy and Edna Ballard built the I AM Movement, a Depression-era spiritual empire claiming contact with immortal "Ascended Masters," and turned...

In southeastern Massachusetts, a stretch of land known as the Bridgewater Triangle has been a magnet for paranormal activity for centuries: cryptid sightings, UFO encounters, ghostly apparitions, and evidence of occult...

In 2011 and 2012, a small crew of men systematically drained nearly $19 million worth of maple syrup from the world's only strategic reserve, barrel by barrel, night by night, and replaced it with water. Vanessa...

In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes, host Vanessa Richardson traces Breatharianism from its fringe origins to a worldwide movement that has been linked to at least six deaths. Beginning with con...

In 1954, the CIA orchestrated a covert coup that removed Guatemala's democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, at the behest of Cold War anxieties and the United Fruit Company's political influence. What looked...

In 1929, Peter Kürten terrorized the German city of Düsseldorf in a months-long killing spree that claimed at least nine lives, including those of young children. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and...