For nearly a month, a picturesque cabin on northern Lake Michigan hid a ghastly secret. The bodies of wealthy ad executive Dick Robison, his wife Shirley, and their four children lay waiting for someone to find them following a brutal attack on a summer afternoon. From the moment a caretaker stumbled upon the murder scene while investigating reports of a foul odor coming from the property, nothing would every be the same in the small town of Good Hart.
In 1903 Chicago, a peculiar murder unfolded on the city's southside. Despite her insistence that a burglar broke in and shot her husband in bed, authorities immediately suspected Jane Quinn, who was covered from head to toe in blood. And that was BEFORE they found out about the pile of dead bodies Jane left behind when she fled Michigan years earlier.
On a Monday afternoon in May of 1930, the world's first set of identical quadruplets were born in Lansing, Michigan- even though nobody knew they were coming. Instant celebrities, the Morlok quads were treated like a sideshow attraction by the community that insisted on naming them and claiming them as their own. While the girls were paraded around the country in matching dresses performing adorable song-and-dance routines as they racked up Guiness World Records, their sweet smiles hid ghastly secrets. Behind the picture of a wholesome American family was a house of horrors.
It's been 100 years since a Lansing socialite was murdered inside the brand new manor her politician husband built for her. Was she the victim of a traveling carnival run by outlaws? Targeted by an enemy of her husband's? Or was the police department's wide-reaching witch hunt an attempt to cover up something much more diabolical?
On March 8, 1994, residents in 42 of Michigan's 82 counties reported seeing an unidentified flying object in the night sky. One of the best-documented UFO sightings in world history, a lighted chrome aircraft with capabilities beyond any technology known to man was spotted hovering over the Great Lakes by law enforcement agencies, pilots, government officials, scientists, and hundreds of frightened civilians. To this day, no answers have been provided as to what happened that night. The crazy part? It wasn't the first well-documented alien encounter in Michigan. Do you believe? By the end of this episode, you just might.
The news was shocking. Occult obsessed cult leader Benny Evangelist, his wife, and their four young children had been murdered in their lavish Detroit home by an ax-wielding maniac. Beheaded. Dismembered. As police ran down the long list of suspects, an unfathomable possibility emerged. Was Benny himself behind the murders? The 1929 St. Aubin Street Massacre is one of Detroit’s oldest and most notorious cold cases, but it is not alone in its tragedy. In 1990, it happened again. And while the circumstances were very, very different, the end result was the same- six lives lost, and many more destroyed in a massacre on St. Aubin Street.
As the Great Depression sunk its teeth into America, a Lansing man's fortune was on the rise- literally. Auto magnate R.E. Olds built a decadent sky scraper, the tallest building in Michigan's capital city, to house his bank. But less than a year after the Olds Tower opened its doors, blood and bullets tarnished its immaculate reputation. What drove a pillar of the community to a shooting rampage? Deak Mead wasn't motivated by money. He was after revenge.
The summer of 1967 was an especially violent one in the United States. Known as "the long, hot summer," there were 159 race riots in America over the course of just a few months, the deadliest of which occurred in Detroit in late July. What led to the deaths of nearly fifty citizens, mostly at the hands of law enforcement officials called in to quell the violence? And what really happened inside The Algiers Motel?
A charismatic waitress in a Yugo headed north to visit the man she hoped to marry. A young father in a Bronco driving south, back toward home. Though their paths did not cross in life, their fates are forever linked by the tragedy that befell them both on the Mackinac Bridge, one of the world's longest (and most treacherous.)
In 1998, the body of a young boy was found beneath a billboard along a North Carolina highway. With very little to go on, authorities were not able to determine who the boy was, or who killed him. But one investigator was determined to solve the case no matter how long it took, so he kept the case file in a box beneath his desk, right in his way, so that he bumped his leg on it every time he turned in his chair. The box never let him forget, and he watched and waited for the scientific advancement that would crack the case wide open. When it finally happened, a heartbreaking story emerged, leading authorities to a small Michigan town and another unsolved murder.
In the early 1900s, the auto industry reigned supreme in Lansing. But another, more deadly industry was making moves in the shadows. Fruit. When two rival fruit companies owned by Italian immigrants with strong ties to La Cosa Nostra went to war, no one was safe. Using fruit stands as a front throughout the city, a secret battle raged for years- contract killings, bombings, murder, extortion. Lansing's Fruit War was among the Capital City's best kept secrects...until now.
The name Tom Toaz was well-known in Mid-Michigan at the turn of the 20th century. He was a celebrated lawman, infamous for throwing more citizens behind bars than all of the other constables combined. He had a hand in all of the scandalous, headline-making cases in Eaton County in the late 18 and early 1900s, but no case he was involved in was quite as scandalous as his own.
Born just outside Detroit to a single teenage mother and a violent criminal, Aileen Wuornos had the cards stacked against her from birth. She was raised in a house of horrors, amidst rumors of incest and unspeakable abuse. A child sex worker who gave birth at the age of 15, Aileen lived in the woods behind her family home after she was kicked out by her sadistic grandfather. And that was just the beginning of the cruelty and abuse Aileen would face in her 46 years on Earth. Listen in for more on how one woman's horrific childhood in Michigan led to her becoming the world's most notorious female serial killer.
On February 20, 2016, the city of Kalamazoo, Michigan found itself under siege. From a father/son duo out car shopping to a group of friends meeting for dinner, a madman was methodically gunning down unsuspecting citizens with no rhyme or reason. When the family man responsible for the rampage was apprehended, authorities were not prepare for the story he told them. Did Jason Dalton simply snap on that winter afternoon? Or was he possessed by evil, as he claimed?
