Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes

On June 30th, 1999, sheriff's deputies found a man's body in a field in St. Charles County, Missouri, and nobody had reported him missing. In his pockets were two handwritten pages, more than thirty lines of capital letters, numbers, dashes and parentheses. Fingerprints identified him as Ricky McCormick, 41, a high school dropout whose family later said he had been writing in code since he was a boy. The FBI's codebreakers, the unit that once read Nazi spy traffic, could not crack it, and neither could the American Cryptogram Association. In 2011 the Bureau published the encrypted notes and asked the public for help, something it almost never does. The pages remain one of the FBI's top unsolved codes. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson investigates the man nobody reported missing, the two pages that outlasted the best codebreakers in the country, and why the FBI believes that cracking them could still name his killer. Please note, this episode contains discussion of homicide and may not be suitable for all audiences.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free and released a day early, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at  crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

In 2003, nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos, promising to run hundreds of medical tests from a single finger-prick of blood. By 2014, investors valued the company at $9 billion. But the technology never worked, and patients received dangerously inaccurate results. A 2022 jury convicted Holmes of defrauding investors, and she is now serving an 11-year federal prison sentence... and the face of the breakout documentary, "You Can See Everything."Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free and released a day early, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at  crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

By 2017, Jeff and Shaleia Divine were running Twin Flames Universe out of rural northern Michigan, selling a promise: everyone has one predestined soulmate, and for a fee, they would tell you who yours was. Members paid tens of thousands of dollars for classes, practiced a technique called the mirror exercise that turned every complaint into self-blame, and were assigned soulmates who had agreed to nothing and sometimes had never met them. Former members say that because the group was mostly women, Jeff told some of them they were divine masculine and should live as men. In July 2025, Michigan's attorney general raided two properties in Leelanau County and said a judge had found probable cause that crimes were committed. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson examines how a YouTube channel about finding love became a matchmaking machine, what it cost the people who believed in it, and whether the investigation Michigan opened in 2025 will ever produce a single criminal charge. Please note, this episode contains discussion of suicide and coercive control and may not be suitable for all audiences.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free and released a day early, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at  crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Most nights, Niecy Nash and her daughter, Dia, end up in bed talking true crime, and now they’re inviting you in.If you love Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, you are going to love Crime House’s new podcast out now called Mother Knows Murder. It’s the same team that helps us make this podcast!Mother Knows Murder is hosted by actress Niecy Nash and her daughter, Dia Nash. Each week, one of them brings a case and the other hears it for the first time. They catch different details and lock in their own verdicts, with humor that keeps things fun even when the cases get dark, and they never lose sight of the real people at the heart of these stories.Follow Mother Knows Murder for a new episode every Tuesday: https://pod.link/6827634300Mother Knows Murder is a Crime House Original powered by PAVE Studios.

On the night of September 19th, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were driving home through the White Mountains of New Hampshire when a light in the sky started following their car. Barney pulled over, looked through binoculars, and said figures were looking back. They got home two hours later than they should have, with no memory of where the time went. Betty started having nightmares. Two years later a Boston psychiatrist hypnotized them separately, and both described being taken aboard a craft and examined. The psychiatrist never bought it, and thought Betty had dreamed the whole thing and Barney had heard it from her enough times to believe it. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson examines the most famous abduction case in history, Barney's description of large heads and wrap-around eyes that became the grey alien everyone pictures today, and the question the case has never shaken: what happened on that road?Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free and released a day early, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

On October 8th, 2009, Bobby and Sherilynn Jamison and their six-year-old daughter Madyson drove into the Sans Bois Mountains of Oklahoma to look at land, and vanished. Eight days later hunters found their pickup locked on a dirt road, the dog starving inside. Their phones, wallets and IDs were still in it, along with $32,000 in cash under the seat. Security footage showed the couple making dozens of silent trips to the truck, in what witnesses called a trance. Their remains turned up four years later, three miles away, with no determinable cause of death. Theories have ranged from murder to a drug deal to a shared delusion, but none of them explain the money, the dog, or the footage. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson investigates the disappearance of the Jamison family, the unsettling footage of their last morning at home, and the question of what could make three people walk into the mountains and leave everything behind. Please note, this episode contains discussion of suicide and the death of a child and may not be suitable for all audiences.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free and released a day early, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at  crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

In 1920 Aleister Crowley rented a farmhouse above Cefalù in Sicily and called it the Abbey of Thelema, a school for unlearning everything society had taught you. Residents greeted the sun four times a day, took whatever drugs he handed them, and cut their forearms whenever they said the word I. He made every one of them keep a diary of what they did and what they wanted, and he read all of it. When a 22-year-old Oxford graduate died there in 1923, his widow went to the London papers, and within a month Crowley was the wickedest man in the world. Almost nothing they printed was true, and what the diaries record is smaller and much worse. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson traces the school Crowley said he was building, the year that broke the people inside it, and why the legend outgrew everything the diaries record. Please note, this episode contains descriptions of drug addiction, self-harm, the death of a child, and a miscarriage, and may not be suitable for all audiences.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free and released a day early, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at  crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

In November 1957, police in Plainfield, Wisconsin went looking for a missing hardware store owner, Bernice Worden, and found her body in a shed behind Ed Gein's farmhouse. Inside the house, they found furniture, clothing and keepsakes made from human remains. Gein admitted killing Worden and a tavern owner named Mary Hogan, and to robbing more than 40 graves. He was found unfit to stand trial; when he was tried in 1968, a judge convicted him of a single murder and found him legally insane. He died in a state hospital in 1984. In the meantime, his farmhouse had reshaped American horror three times over, in the films Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson examines the two women Ed Gein admitted killing, the farmhouse that made him a legend, and how a case with one conviction became the template for half a century of American horror. Please note, this episode contains descriptions of extreme violence and may not be suitable for all audiences.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free and released a day early, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at  crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

On Thanksgiving Eve in 1928, three men broke into a farmhouse in Rehmeyer's Hollow, an area of York County, Pennsylvania known locally as Hex Hollow, looking for a book. Nelson Rehmeyer was a farmer and a practitioner of powwow, a Pennsylvania Dutch folk-healing tradition, and he had once cured one of the intruders as a child. John Blymire was convinced that Rehmeyer was the witch who had hexed him, and that burning Rehmeyer's copy of a folk-magic book called The Long Lost Friend would lift the curse. The three men beat Rehmeyer to death and set his body alight. The trial that followed, covered nationally as the York witch trial, put a 200-year-old belief system in front of a jury. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson traces the powwow tradition Nelson Rehmeyer practiced, the curse three men believed had ruined their lives, and the trial that asked a courtroom to take witchcraft seriously as a motive for murder.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free and released a day early, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at  crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Founded in London in the mid-1960s by two former Scientologists, Robert de Grimston and Mary Ann MacLean, the Process Church of the Final Judgment taught that Christ and Satan were not opposites but complementary forces to be reconciled. Members wore black robes with a goat emblem, traveled with German Shepherds, and sold apocalyptic magazines with titles like Fear and Humanity is the Devil on the streets of London, New York, Chicago and New Orleans. They built a commune on the Yucatan, recruited from the counterculture, and attracted contributions from Marianne Faithfull and Funkadelic. Then their magazine ran an interview with the imprisoned Charles Manson, and the group spent the next fifty years attached to a rumor it fought in court. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson unravels the theology of a church that worshipped both Christ and Satan, the communes and celebrity admirers it collected on two continents, and how a single chapter in a 1971 book tied it to the Manson murders long after a publisher retracted the claim.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free and released a day early, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at  crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios