Ep:121 | The Pillow Pyro, Part 2 | How A Fire Captain Became A Serial Arsonist | Murder Unscripted

Jackie Hawks was forced to sign over her boat and her bank accounts right before she was tied to a boat anchor alongside her husband Tom, and thrown overboard. But in a heroic show of bravery, she purposely left the “S” off of her own last name as a clue for investigators - pointing investigators to the five monsters responsible. In Part 2 of our coverage of the Tom and Jackie Hawks case, Melissa takes us from a jail cell, where a man is accused of plotting four more murders, to a courtroom, where a prosecutor squares off against the attorney he used to work for. A wife turns down an offer of complete immunity. And one question from the prosecutor is so brutal the whole room goes silent. Listen on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/murder-unscripted/id1750146409 | Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/2AUGh12ei1wk8x7CvcX9qH?si=bd750581f2294738 Support us on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/c/MurderUnscriptedPod/membership. 20% of every membership goes to the Courthouse Dogs Foundation. Email: [email protected] Follow: @murderunscripted #TrueCrime #TrueCrimePodcast #MurderUnscripted Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tom and Jackie Hawks sold their beloved yacht in Newport Beach, California, to a former Mighty Morphin Power Rangers star and his sweet young family. Then they vanished. Two days before Thanksgiving 2004, family found the boat looking sloppy and the couple's car gone, and the story of the sale only got stranger from there. Melissa opens The Art of Conviction, our prosecutor spotlight block, with Part 1 of one of Orange County prosecutor Matt Murphy's biggest cases. Part 1 of 2. Ad-free and bonus episodes on Patreon, where 20% of every membership goes to the Courthouse Dogs Foundation: https://www.patreon.com/c/MurderUnscriptedPod/membership Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

He found a missing child 200 searchers couldn’t. Then they gave him a badge. To close out the Psychic Connections block, we sit down with the man whose name has run through the whole month: psychic Phil Jordan. In 1975 he led searchers straight to a six-year-old boy lost in the woods when two hundred people couldn’t find him, and was soon sworn in as a deputy sheriff. For fifty years he has worked missing persons, homicides, and arson alongside law enforcement. We dig into how he actually works a case, the Rose Swartwood murder we covered two weeks ago, and the skeptic questions Ed and Melissa couldn’t let go of. Then, at the very end, Phil turned the tables and gave the two of us a reading. Believer or skeptic, this is one you won't want to miss!  Ep. 127 | Psychic Connections Finale | Murder Unscripted | October 2026 Hosted by Ed Hydock & Melissa Spivey | Money Beet Media, LLC   Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/murder-unscripted/id1750146409 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2AUGh12ei1wk8x7CvcX9qH Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/MurderUnscriptedPod/membership [email protected] | @murderunscripted Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A stranger told police exactly where to find the body of a missing nurse. So they arrested her on suspicion of murder. December 1980, the San Fernando Valley. Melanie Uribe, a 31-year-old nurse and single mom, stopped at a red light on her way to an overnight shift and never made it to work. Days later, a woman across town who had never met her, an ordinary Lockheed clerk named Etta Smith, began seeing a place in her mind: a canyon, a curve, a dirt path, something white in the brush. She took it to police. When they wouldn't listen, she drove out and found Melanie's body herself, exactly where she'd pictured it, and detectives made her the prime suspect in Melanie's murder. Ed continues “Psychic Connections” (our October block of cases where a psychic worked alongside police), with a story the detectives could never explain, and a victim who deserves to be remembered for far more than the mystery around her death. E126 | Murder Unscripted | October 2026 Hosted by Ed Hydock & Melissa Spivey | Money Beet Media, LLC Researched by Pam Beiler Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/murder-unscripted/id1750146409 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2AUGh12ei1wk8x7CvcX9qH Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/MurderUnscriptedPod/membership [email protected] | @murderunscripted Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Police handed him a stack of 50 mugshots. He pulled out their two suspects. August 1988, Elmira, New York. Rose Swartwood was 74, a kind, impeccably dressed retiree who would talk your ear off at the mailbox and spent every evening with her little sister. One morning her family found her beaten and stabbed in her own bed, and whoever did it had stayed long enough to scrub the apartment clean. For almost two years, police were sure they knew who was responsible but could not prove it. So two detectives tried something that is not in any manual: they brought in a psychic, told him nothing, and set a stack of unlabeled mugshots in front of him. He described a cleanup no one outside the department knew about, a long knife, a ring on Rose’s hand, and then he reached into the pile and pulled out two faces. Ed continues October's "Psychic Connections" block with a case that we skeptics can't fully explain! LISTEN ON AUDIO Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/murder-unscripted/id1750146409 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2AUGh12ei1wk8x7CvcX9qH SUPPORT THE SHOW Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/MurderUnscriptedPod/membership 20% of every membership goes to the Courthouse Dogs Foundation 🐾 CONNECT Email: [email protected] | Socials: @murderunscripted #MurderUnscripted #TrueCrime #PsychicConnections Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

She was one of the fastest runners in the country. And then, she was gone. January 1993, West Philadelphia. 17-year-old Shilie Turner was one of the fastest high school runners in the country, filling out college applications and dreaming of the Olympics. One freezing night she got off a bus six blocks from home and was never seen alive again. Police had no leads and no body, so, on the FBI's advice, they brought in a psychic. What she described, the park, the shallow grave, the missing shoes, was so exact that detectives couldn't explain it, and it pointed them somewhere no one wanted to look. Melissa opens Psychic Connections, our October block of cases where a psychic helped, with the story of who Shilie was and the heartbreaking truth about who took her future. This one has no happy ending.  Ep. 124 | Murder Unscripted | October 2026 Hosted by Ed Hydock & Melissa Spivey | Copyright: Money Beet Media, LLC Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/murder-unscripted/id1750146409 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2AUGh12ei1wk8x7CvcX9qH Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/MurderUnscriptedPod/membership [email protected] | @murderunscripted Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

52 fires in 75 hours. One man terrorized Los Angeles, and this is the investigator who hunted him down. To close out Burning Desires, we sit down with one of the most decorated arson investigators alive: Ed Nordskog. Decades on the LA County Sheriff's Arson-Explosives team, five books that other investigators keep on their desks, and a wall of honors that is frankly ridiculous. Nordskog was the lead investigator on the worst arson spree in American history, the 2011 rampage that brought Los Angeles to its knees. He walks us through how it began in a federal courtroom, how a one-dollar-a-year reserve deputy on his third shift made the arrest, and what it is like to sit for hours across the table from the most dangerous person you have ever met. He also does the thing we have wanted all month: he weighs in on John Orr and Paul Keller, and explains why almost everything the public believes about arsonists is wrong. 🖤 LISTEN ON AUDIO Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/murder-unscripted/id1750146409 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2AUGh12ei1wk8x7CvcX9qH SUPPORT THE SHOW Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/MurderUnscriptedPod/membership 20% of every membership goes to the Courthouse Dogs Foundation 🐾 CONNECT Email: [email protected] | Socials: @murderunscripted #MurderUnscripted #Arson #TrueCrime Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For six months, a phantom arsonist burned Seattle to the ground. The man who finally stopped him was his own father. In 1992, more than a hundred fires tore through the Seattle area. Churches, warehouses, strip malls, and, on one horrifying night, a retirement home where three women lost their lives. Whole neighborhoods slept in shifts. Investigators called the man behind it "the Specter," because chasing him was like chasing a ghost. But he was not the drifter everyone pictured. He was a clean-cut advertising salesman in a nice car. And the person who finally recognized him was the one who knew him best: his own father, reading a police profile at the kitchen table. Ed closes out September's "Burning Desires" block with the story most people reduce to a number, and the three women, Bertha, Mary, and Adeline, whose lives deserve more than a statistic. LISTEN ON AUDIO Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/murder-unscripted/id1750146409 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2AUGh12ei1wk8x7CvcX9qH SUPPORT THE SHOW Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/MurderUnscriptedPod/membership 20% of every membership goes to the Courthouse Dogs Foundation 🐾 CONNECT Email: [email protected] | Socials: @murderunscripted Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For years, a serial arsonist burned his way across California and vanished before the smoke cleared. In Part 2, we finally put a name and a face to him, and it is the last person anyone suspected: John Orr, a celebrated Glendale fire captain and arson investigator. Orr did not just work near the case, he helped run it. He photographed the scenes, argued the theories, and chased the very fires he had set, including the deadly South Pasadena blaze that killed four people. Then he did something almost unbelievable: he wrote a novel about a fire investigator turned serial arsonist, and the story cut far too close to the truth. Melissa brings the Pillow Pyro story to its conclusion: how a fingerprint, a first-of-its-kind tracking device, and Orr's own manuscript finally brought him down, and how a fire once ruled accidental became four counts of murder. Miss part 1? Start here 👉 https://youtu.be/FD6BHgMF5GA LISTEN ON AUDIO Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/murder-unscripted/id1750146409 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2AUGh12ei1wk8x7CvcX9qH SUPPORT THE SHOW Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/MurderUnscriptedPod/membership (20% of every membership goes to the Courthouse Dogs Foundation 🐾) CONNECT Email: [email protected] | Socials: @murderunscripted #MurderUnscripted #JohnOrr #Arson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A cigarette, three matches, and a rubber band. For most of the 1980s, that was all it took for a serial arsonist to burn his way across California and vanish before the smoke was even spotted. Most of the fires destroyed property. One destroyed a family. A fire at a crowded hardware store in South Pasadena killed four people, including a child, and was quietly ruled an accident, letting the man responsible keep going for years. Melissa opens a two-part story on the hunt for one of the most prolific arsonists in American history. And the truth about who he was is something almost nobody saw coming. Ep. 120 | Burning Desires | Murder Unscripted | September 2026 | Part 1 of 2 Hosted by Ed Hydock & Melissa Spivey | A Darkcast Network Production Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/murder-unscripted/id1750146409 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2AUGh12ei1wk8x7CvcX9qH Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/MurderUnscriptedPod/membership [email protected] | @murderunscripted Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices