Hell and Gone Murder Line: Maria Rodriguez

On Easter Sunday, April 9, 2023, 21-year-old Ellie Baxter went to check on her parents at their home on Mersea Island, off the Essex coast, 64-year-old Carole Baxter and 61-year-old Stephen Baxter.  She knocked on the door, but no one answered. Ellie looked through the living room window and saw her parents sitting in their usual reclining chairs. But they weren’t moving – they were both sitting upright in their chairs dead.    **This episode is in collaboration with Red Collar, a podcast by Catherine Townsend focused on financial crimes and con artists who kill. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the summer of 1980, sixteen-year-old Maria Rodriguez was living with her boyfriend Milton Colbert Jr. in Long Branch, New Jersey.  When came home from his work shift - he looked around for Maria for a few minutes, and when he opened the closet door, he saw Maria’s body. She had been strangled to death with a belt.  If you have a case you’d like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.  IG: @hellandgonepodSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

At around eight o’clock on the morning of June 19, 2026, Federal Park Ranger Paul Scholtz was parking his patrol vehicle near the corner of Sixth and Market Streets in Philadelphia when he noticed a black BMW parked behind him. Little did the Ranger know this routine encounter was about to open the door to an investigation involving multiple missing women, a deteriorating house in North Philadelphia that has been described by the media as a house of horrors, tens of thousands of videos that depicted at least two dead women , hundreds of thousands of images, vats of chemicals, fake federal credentials and questions police are still nowhere close to answering. If you have a case you’d like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. // IG: @hellandgonepodSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

At around 4:30 in the morning on Thursday, June 14, 2007, police found the body of 22 year old Jennifer Kathleen Nielsen behind an AmeriKing Food Mart in Raleigh, North Carolina. Jenna was covered in blood, and had been stabbed multiple times. She was also eight and a half months pregnant with her third child.  Her father later remembered answering the phone that night, thinking that he would get the news that his daughter had gone into labor. Instead, he got the news that Jenna - and her unborn child - were dead behind a gas station.  If you have a case you’d like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. IG: @hellandgonepodSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On August 24, 2012, a Vietnam veteran who had been staying at the Lake Lanier Club Apartments off Dawsonville Highway in Gainesville, Georgia with his daughter and grandchildren, was taking a walk through the woods behind the complex. The man liked taking nature walks, and he was also following up on a report that he had made to the apartment management about a missing manhole cover. He later told police that he wanted to see if it had been replaced yet.  It was around 7:30 pm in the evening, and still almost  full daylight, and when the man paused near a stream bed, he saw something disturbing...something that he at first thought was a mannequin. Upon closer inspection, he realized that he was looking at a dead body. He called 911 and told them that a young lady, about 18 or 19 years old, was dead and looked like she had been dead for two or three days.  The young woman was 16-year-old Hannah Truelove, a student at Gainesville High School. She had been missing since the night before. And even though her exact cause of death has not been revealed, police said she died a “violent death." She had been stabbed multiple times and left in the stream bed a quarter mile away from home; her flip flop was found a few yards away, tangled in some branches.  Who killed Hannah Truelove?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It was December 28, 2022, a few days after Christmas, and Erbena Costa was beginning to get seriously worried about her daughter, 22-year-old Anna Laura Costa Porsborg.  Before Christmas she had gone on leave and headed out on a vacation in Los Angeles with her boyfriend, 36-year-old Luis Gomes Akay.  What started out in sunny Hollywood would end with a body in a suitcase.  If you have a case you’d like me and my team to look into, you can reach us through the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. IG: @hellandgonepodSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On Sunday May 12, 2002, Mother’s Day evening, 28-year-old Jennifer Harris had spent the day with her family and at 6:30 pm that night, she arrived at her friend Kristy Farr’s house in their hometown of Bonham Texas. Suddenly, Jennifer told Kristy that she had to go.  But Jennifer never came home. Six days later, a fisherman found Jennifer’s naked body floating in the Red River.  If you have a case you’d like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.  IG: @hellandgonepodSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In December 2020, the police received a call from a neighbor of 69 year old Charles Wilding, a reclusive man who lived by himself on Kingswood Road in Sherman Oaks, California. It seemed Charles disappeared from the neighborhood. But neighbors soon noticed someone new. A woman had moved into Charles’s house. Investigators would eventually uncover a conspiracy involving forged wills, false identities, paid impostors, stolen real estate, millions of dollars and a body dismembered and dissolved in acid.  If you have a case you would like me and my team to look into, you can reach us at the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.  IG: @hellandgonepodSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On Sunday October 17, 2021 39-year-old Heidi Planck left her home in West Los Angeles near Culver City, to head out to her 11 year old son’s football game and was never seen again.  And it didn’t take long for the rumors to start flying - about her past struggles with drugs, her, boss, his links to big money and powerful people in Los Angeles – and there are a LOT of new updates - about illegal gambling rings, organized crime and what happened to Heidi’s boss and the millions prosecutors alleged he stole from a Native American tribe.  If you have a case you’d like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. @hellandgonepodSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On June 7, 1980, deputies with the Pulaski County Sheriff's Office arrived at a green one story ranch-style home in southwest Little Rock, Arkansas. Inside, they would discover one of the most brutal double homicides in Arkansas history. If you have a case you’d like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.  IG:@hellandgonepodSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.