Spade Cooley Cuts the Landline

What’s it like to be obsessed by true crime? Matt interviews a young woman who says tales of murder have changed her life…for the better. A deeper look at why we’re fascinated by the darkest stories.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Spade Cooley was the King of Western Swing, but when his career dried up, he turned his fury on his petrified wife. Matt heads to the basement with his band Mr. Pescado, plugs in his amp, and says goodbye with a song.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It’s October 19th, 1970, and a young intruder named John Linley Frazier is sitting on a sofa inside a spectacular stone and glass mansion on a hill in Soquel, California, patiently waiting for a wealthy family of five to return home, so he can kill them one by one, and then burn their dream home to the ground.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Would you buy a home where a double murder had occurred? How about a home where another murder occurs, in the same bedroom, seven years later? The unbelievable story of the horrors that continue to haunt the quaint brick colonial in Silver Spring, Maryland. It may look like any other home on that quiet street, but a river of blood runs through it.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Take a step into a Murder Home that only exists in the future. It’s 2048 on Magnolia Drive, and a man named Millar is about to find out what happens when you leave your custom-designed comfort zone and become the person you fear most.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Roy Den Hollander, a fanatical men’s right’s activist, was dying of cancer and only had a few months to live. He decided he would make the most of it by hunting down his two arch enemies in California and New Jersey. Dressed as a fake Fedex deliveryman, he embarked on a murder spree that would become even more bloody than he had planned.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The murder of Reverend Canon Wancura was only the second homicide to occur in the history of Shelter Island in over 300 years. But was his home invasion a random and brutal attack by a day laborer working near his mansion, or an act of revenge on a priest who was leading a double life?  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Levittown, Pennsylvania, is just an ordinary suburban town, and January 30th, 2024, seemed like a perfectly ordinary winter day, which made it all the more shocking when a 32-year-old man named Justin Mohn uploaded a video to YouTube that began with him lifting his father’s head out of a stockpot, and ended with him calling for armed revolution from his tidy bedroom.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jim Gordon was one of rock & roll’s most legendary drummers, but when he began hearing voices the high-paying gigs started drying up fast. It was his mother’s voice in particular that nagged him incessantly, all day long. Slowly driven crazy, he packed a clawhammer and knife in a canvas bag and on June 8th, 1983, committed one of the most shocking crimes in music history.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a modest ranch home on Pine Valley Road, a young woman named Melinda Snyder has packed up almost all of her belongings in boxes and is getting ready to move out, looking forward to a bright future. The only thing standing in the way is a man who has become slowly obsessed with her: a real estate agent named Ed Cronell. He has the key to the home’s lockbox and on the night of January 23rd, 1990, he'll use it to commit a crime that the residents of Rock Hill still remember to this day.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.