A podcast can do a good deal for a case that has gone quiet. It can reach a witness who never spoke to police, put an old name back in circulation, or hand a detective a microphone and a tip line. What it has rarely done is put anyone in handcuffs. In the six cases below, no arrest followed from a broadcast. What came instead varied widely: names restored to victims, a retelling that drew a tip or two from listeners, a police review that has run for years without a published result, and one confession to a number that no court has ever tested.
Terry Peder Rasmussen was convicted of one murder. In June 2003, under the name Curtis Kimball, he was sentenced in Contra Costa County, California, to 15 years to life for the killing of Eunsoon Jun, a woman in her mid-forties whom he had lived with and called his wife. At a hearing that year he told the court he wanted to plead guilty, against his lawyer’s advice, a move the prosecutor, Joe Motta, later described on the Bear Brook podcast as highly unusual. Detective Roxane Gruenheid of the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office, who built the case, described him afterward as "very smart, very intelligent, very calculated." He died in a California prison in December 2010. The authorities who held him did not know his real name.
That he had been several men was the point of the case. Over three decades he had used the names Robert Evans, Gerry Mockerman, Gordon Jenson, Larry Vanner and Curtis Kimball. In August 2017 the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office named him as the man it attributed four deaths to in Allenstown, a woman and three girls whose deaths had come to light in 1985 and 2000. One of the girls was his own daughter. He was never charged in New Hampshire, and he could not be; he was dead.
New Hampshire Public Radio began its Bear Brook podcast in 2018, and the series gave the case what investigators had struggled to supply, which was an audience with a long memory. A cousin of Eunsoon Jun described on air the party in Monterey on New Year’s Eve 1999 where she first met the man who called himself Larry Vanner, a self-described retired army colonel who said he had worked for the CIA. Afterward, family members received emails in her name telling them to leave her alone. Investigators later concluded that he had written them.
The first identifications came through a listener. Rebekah Heath, a Connecticut librarian with an interest in missing persons, heard the series and remembered an old message on a genealogy website from someone looking for a missing girl named Sarah McWaters. She contacted the person who had posted it. Investigators confirmed a family link through mitochondrial DNA, and genealogy work, including that of Barbara Rae-Venter, supplied the final confirmation. On June 6, 2019, officials at the Department of Safety in Concord named the woman as Marlyse Elizabeth Honeychurch and the two related girls as her daughters, Marie Elizabeth Vaughn and Sarah Lynn McWaters. "We know what he was," Strelzin said at the announcement. "We know what he did and now we know who his victims were."
The fourth victim waited six more years. In January 2024 the State Police Cold Case Unit brought the case to the DNA Doe Project, after another genealogy firm had worked on it for years. Volunteers built a family tree of about 25,000 people. In June 2025 a key match led them to a 2005 obituary listing a daughter named Pepper Reed, and within about half an hour of finding her name they located a 1976 Orange County birth record for a girl named Rea Rasmussen. Two volunteer researchers working with the podcast reached the same record independently. DNA testing confirmed the identification on September 5, 2025, and on September 7 Attorney General John Formella announced it. "With Rea Rasmussen’s identification, all four victims now have their names back," he said.
The identification opened a different question. Pepper Reed, born in 1952, was Rea’s mother, and her records stop in the 1970s. In a 2025 episode a woman who had known her in Houston described her as a friend who went missing in that decade, who had been dating Rasmussen and was pregnant when the two left town. Investigators have said they believe Reed is likely another of his victims; she has never been located. Denise Beaudin, 23, has been missing from New Hampshire since November 1981, and the Attorney General’s office has named her as a likely victim as well. New Hampshire investigators said in September 2025 that their work was continuing and was now focused on the two women. Nobody has been charged with anything in either case.
Between February 1968 and October 1969 three women, Patricia Docker, Jemima McDonald and Helen Puttock, died in Glasgow after nights out at the same dance hall in the city’s east end. The press gave the unidentified man police wanted to trace the name Bible John, and for half a century the name has outlasted every attempt to attach it to a person. No one has been charged. Police Scotland told STV in 2018 that cases of this kind are never closed.
A podcast broadcast in 2022 reopened the case’s oldest argument, which is whether one man was involved at all. Two retired detectives who had reviewed the files in the 1990s told the series that they believed the three deaths were the work of different men. They went further. According to a column by the former MSP Joan McAlpine in the Sunday Post, they said that a man who came to attention in 1969 had been visited by senior officers days after Helen Puttock’s death and was never shown to her sister, that the taxi driver and a doorman were never asked to attend line-ups, and that the 1990s team noticed inconsistencies in logbooks and missing evidence. The retired officers attributed this to the man’s family tie to an officer close to the head of the inquiry.
These are allegations made by retired officers. No inquiry or court has held them proved, and the man they refer to has never been charged. McAlpine wrote that she was not suggesting he had killed anyone, only that the original inquiry had been deeply flawed.
Police Scotland responded in October 2023. A spokesperson said the force was assessing the contents of a recent podcast in consultation with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, that the murders of the three women "remain unresolved," and that any new information would be investigated, as Greatest Hits Radio reported. No outcome of that assessment has been published. Helen Puttock’s sister, the key witness of 1969, died in 2010, as the Scotsman reported. The people who might test the podcast’s claims are fewer each year.
Between April 1971 and September 1972 six Black girls and young women, aged 10 to 18, were killed in the Washington area: Carol Spinks, Darlenia Johnson, Brenda Crockett, Nenomoshia Yates, Brenda Woodard and Diane Williams. A note signed with the nickname the press had given the killer accompanied the fifth. No one has been arrested or charged. The Metropolitan Police Department still lists the case, naming its Major Case/Cold Case Unit and the Prince George’s County Police Homicide Unit, and a poster offers a reward of up to $150,000.
In May 2023 a ten-part podcast on the case launched, hosted by the journalist Celeste Headlee and produced by iHeartPodcasts, Tenderfoot TV and Black Bar Mitzvah, the company of the actor Jay Ellis. Headlee spent two years on it. She told Washingtonian and Black Enterprise that many residents of Southeast Washington felt police brought little urgency to the cases, that parents were asked whether their daughters had run off with boyfriends when in nearly every instance the girl had been sent to a store or was returning from class, and that mistrust between police and Black communities may have cost the investigation information. She called it possibly the first serial killing case in the District.
What did the podcast produce? Headlee said it generated a tip or two from listeners. She also said that a scientific profile the production commissioned did not match the man law enforcement had focused on in the 1970s, and that her own suspicion was that the killer was a Black man who was probably dead. None of this has been tested. She held back some details.
The older record is less comfortable. In 1974 a man held on a separate indictment cooperated with investigators for about five weeks, from May 1 to June 4, then repudiated the arrangement. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals, in a decision of May 5, 1977, held that he had on various occasions deliberately given misleading or inaccurate information about the killings. The case before the court concerned that other indictment, not the six deaths. WETA’s Boundary Stones reports that his account was full of inconsistencies and that intercepted letters showed he had lied in the hope of winning his release.
Much of what the 1970s investigators gathered has since been lost. A WUSA9 report on a book about the case recorded a gap between the two police agencies: Prince George’s County police said they were still actively investigating, while a District of Columbia police spokeswoman said the city’s cases had been purged years earlier and were no longer active. The podcast did not close that gap. It did make the case audible to people who had never heard of it, and Albright of Tenderfoot TV called the lack of coverage, then and since, shameful.
Dellmus Colvin drove trucks out of Toledo, Ohio. In 2006 he pleaded guilty in Toledo to the deaths of five women in northwest Ohio, and he later admitted a sixth, Dorothea Wetzel. In his own words, reported by WFTV from a 2020 interview, he made the plea to avoid a capital trial: "I was on my way to death row, so I made a deal with them at the last minute." Prosecutors did not seek the death penalty. He was serving life sentences. In 2009 New Jersey detectives, who had learned of his confessions in Ohio, reopened the 1987 death of Donna Lee White, 27, of Somers Point, which had first been ruled an accidental cocaine overdose. On April 8, 2011, Colvin pleaded guilty in Atlantic County and was sentenced to 30 more years.
Seven deaths, then, rest on court records and press coverage. In August 2020 Phil Chalmers, a Florida-based criminal profiler and author, released a 43-minute podcast episode built on telephone interviews with Colvin, then 61 and held at Lebanon Correctional Institution. Colvin told him he had killed women across the United States between 1987 and 2005 and put his total at as many as 52. "I never counted," he said. He declined to discuss states with the death penalty, saying he kept a list.
Chalmers told Shaw Local that many of Colvin’s statements had been corroborated and that he put the confirmed total at 40 or more. No court or police agency has produced such a figure. The one detailed claim in the interview concerned La Salle County, Illinois, where Colvin described meeting a woman and killing her. At first he gave no year; after a follow-up call he told Chalmers it was 2005. On September 2, 2020, La Salle County sheriff’s deputies began work near La Salle and Peru on the strength of his account. By October 26 Shaw Local reported that police had halted the inquiry, with nothing to show for it. The woman Colvin described has not been identified.
Colvin has not been charged in any killing he claimed beyond the seven. Chalmers said Colvin had never boasted of crimes he did not commit, which is a statement about a man’s character from the person who interviewed him. It is not evidence, and the podcast produced none.
In 2009 the deaths of eleven women and girls, and of the unborn child one of them was carrying, came to light on the West Mesa, on the western edge of Albuquerque. All eleven had been identified within a year: Monica Candelaria, Victoria Chavez, Virginia Cloven, Syllannia Edwards, Cinnamon Elks, Doreen Marquez, Julie Nieto, Veronica Romero, Evelyn Salazar, Michelle Valdez and Jamie Barela. Two of them, Syllannia and Jamie, were 15. They had gone missing in 2003 and 2004. No one has been arrested or charged.
In 2022 the Albuquerque Police Department started its own podcast, Duke City Case Files, and devoted its second episode, "The Missings," to eight women reported missing between 2003 and 2006 whom the department believes may be connected to the case. Among them were Martha Jo Lucher, Anna Vigil, Felipa Gonzales, Nina Herron, Vanessa Reed, Jillian Ortiz and Leah Peebles. This was a different use of the medium. A police podcast does not argue with the department, and it carries no reporter’s second opinion; it is an appeal for tips in a department’s own voice.
The department has measured the results in numbers at each anniversary. By 2022 it had documented more than 1,184 tips and interviewed about 200 women. By 2024 the figure was above 1,400, and by 2025 nearly 1,500. Five detectives were assigned in 2024, working with the FBI. The reward, set by the department, the FBI and the victims' families, stands at up to $100,000.
Detective Ida Lopez, who noticed in 2005 as a missing-persons detective that women kept being reported and not turning up, was the department’s cold case investigator by 2022. "These women were loved, each one has a unique story and their families want answers," she said that year. In February 2026, on the seventeenth anniversary, the president of the Albuquerque City Council repeated that the killings were unsolved. The podcast, so far, has not changed that.
The oldest case here belongs to a different era of crime reporting, and the podcast is local. Arnold Karl Sodeman, a laborer born in Hawthorn, Melbourne, in 1899, was arrested in December 1935 over the death of June Rushmer, 6, at Leongatha in South Gippsland. He confessed to her killing and to three earlier killings of girls that had been unsolved: Mena Griffiths, 12, and Hazel Wilson, 16, in the Melbourne suburb of Ormond in 1930 and 1931, and Ethel Belshaw, 12, at Inverloch on New Year’s Day 1935. Only the Leongatha case went to trial.
Three doctors told the jury that he had been insane at the time of each killing. The jury, at the Supreme Court in Melbourne in February 1936, convicted him of murder and rejected the defence. His appeals failed, up to a petition to the Privy Council, and he was hanged at Pentridge Gaol on June 1, 1936. An examination after the hanging reported a disease of the membranes of the brain, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography. How far such a condition could explain what he did was a medical question the trial did not settle.
His case outlasted him in the law. In July 1942 the Court of Criminal Appeal of Ceylon, hearing a different murder appeal, heard counsel cite the Privy Council’s decision in Sodeman v. The King on the legal test for insanity.
In 2025 Matt Dunn, a journalist at Leongatha, released a podcast series on the case with the author Katherine Kovacic and the former detective Narelle Fraser. The Nightly reported in July 2025 that Dunn called it "the biggest story of its time." The retelling touched a detail the older record leaves vague, which is how Sodeman came to police attention. The Australian Dictionary of Biography credits a suspicious workmate. The columnist Ben Harvey, drawing on the podcast, describes an outburst during a tea break that led to a call to police. The two accounts may describe the same event. A podcast about a man hanged nearly ninety years ago cannot produce an arrest, and it was not meant to; what it offers is the town’s memory of the case.
A podcast has produced evidence in these cases only when someone outside the investigation was able to act on it. Bear Brook worked because a librarian remembered a message and because volunteer genealogists were already working on a name. Colvin’s interview worked as a lead for eight weeks in Illinois and then stopped. The retired detectives in Glasgow supplied an accusation, and the police response, in October 2023, was an assessment with no published outcome. Headlee’s listeners gave her a tip or two. Albuquerque’s detectives asked the public for help in a medium of their own choosing, and the answer so far has been tips, not charges.
None of this makes the form worthless. It makes plain what the form is good at, which is memory, patience and the collection of voices that official reports leave out.
• 1935 to 1936: Arnold Sodeman is arrested in December 1935, convicted in February 1936 and hanged on June 1, 1936.
• July 1942: Ceylon’s Court of Criminal Appeal hears counsel cite Sodeman’s case.
• February 1968 to October 1969: Three women die in Glasgow after nights at the same dance hall.
• April 1971 to September 1972: Six girls and young women are killed in the Washington area.
• May 5, 1977: The District of Columbia Court of Appeals decides the case in which an informant’s misleading statements about the killings are recorded.
• 2003 and 2004: The eleven West Mesa women go missing, according to the department’s account.
• June 2003: Terry Peder Rasmussen, as Curtis Kimball, is sentenced in Contra Costa County, California, to 15 years to life for the murder of Eunsoon Jun.
• 2006: Dellmus Colvin pleads guilty in Toledo.
• 2009: The deaths of eleven women and girls come to light in Albuquerque.
• December 2010: Rasmussen dies in prison.
• April 8, 2011: Colvin pleads guilty in Atlantic County, New Jersey, to the 1987 death of Donna Lee White.
• August 2017: New Hampshire authorities name Rasmussen as the man they attribute four Allenstown deaths to.
• 2018: NHPR’s Bear Brook podcast begins.
• June 6, 2019: Three of the four Allenstown victims are named in Concord, New Hampshire.
• August 2020: Phil Chalmers releases an interview with Colvin in which Colvin claims as many as 52 killings.
• September 2 to October 26, 2020: La Salle County, Illinois, authorities act on that interview and then halt the inquiry.
• 2022: A podcast on the Bible John case carries claims by retired detectives.
• August 2, 2022: Albuquerque police release "The Missings," the second episode of Duke City Case Files.
• May 2023: Celeste Headlee’s "Freeway Phantom" podcast launches.
• October 11, 2023: Police Scotland says it is assessing the Bible John podcast’s contents.
• 2025: Matt Dunn releases a local podcast on the Sodeman case.
• September 5 to 7, 2025: The fourth Allenstown victim, Rea Rasmussen, is identified and announced.
• February 2026: On the seventeenth anniversary of the West Mesa discovery, the case is still unsolved.