Podcast Corner: Four new true crime podcasts to get you hooked
A selection of true crime podcast series to dip into
From the same creators as 2023’s involving scams, shamanism, and the Amazonian jungle, and last year’s is a six-part series about a scam that hoodwinked powerful forces globally who really should have known better. Jim McCormick is a wheeler-dealer who convinced governments and security services around the world that a cheap golf ball finder sold as a stocking filler was in fact a world-class, life-saving bomb detector.
“Many of the people persuaded to use his dud devices believed in them because they offered hope against the daily threat of violent death,” says host Alice Levine. He used pseudoscience to fool extremely powerful people, making an obscene fortune off an item that cost $10-$20 and was intended as a stocking filler. The podcast acts as a deep investigation, culminating into courtroom drama at the Old Bailey in London.
“What would you do if your deepest secrets were held to ransom,” asks Jenny Kleeman, the host and investigator of the six-part series from BBC Radio 4. In 2020, every patient who used a certain psychotherapy service in Finland had their therapy notes stolen and held to ransom by a faceless, remorseless hacker.
He called himself Ransom Man — and it’s the biggest crime in Finnish history. Kleeman traces the story around the world and by the end of it ponders, is privacy a thing of the past. The final episode brings her face to face with Ransom Man. She says: “I want to know if he’s a hacker genius or simply a cold opportunist who just stumbled upon a goldmine of badly protected data.”
This five-part series from the revisits a haunting unsolved case: The 1988 disappearance of British tourist Julie Ward in Kenya's Masai Mara. Her father spent decades chasing answers that took him all the way to MI6 headquarters in London, yet justice never came.
Nearly 40 years later, the Telegraph’s deputy investigations editor Katherine Rushton digs into classified files, interviews key figures, and travels to Kenya in a bid for answers: Who really killed Julie Ward? Why did Kenyan authorities stonewall? And what role did British intelligence play?
An eight-part thriller from NJ.com, it focuses on 20-year-old Khalil Wheeler-Weaver, a nerdy, skinny, polite young man with glasses, who, in 2016, targeted young black women in New Jersey he thought no one would miss, luring them via dating apps and evading police.
Hosts Daysi Calavia-Robertson and Rebecca Everett weave survivor interviews, interrogation tapes, and deep reporting into a compelling story that concludes on March 10. They ask: “Imagine your sister or your best friend disappeared… What wouldn’t you do to try to find her? Would you become the investigator? Would you catfish a serial killer?”
