When the night guards passed Frank Morris’s cell, in San Francisco’s “inescapable” island super-prison, Alcatraz, he seemed to be sleeping soundly. But what they saw was a dummy head made of plaster, soap and real human hair. And Morris was already making his way to the shore – and his homemade raft, stitched together using 50 prison raincoats.
This week we look at the history of the US’s big bad citadel in the war on crime; its most infamous inmates; and find out if anyone ever really escaped The Rock.
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RedHanded
In 2007, child protection officers in Pinella County, Florida, spoke with a 14-year-old girl who’d been sexually assaulted by a musician she’d met on MySpace. But thanks to their failed investigation...
In 2018, married couple Jen and Sarah Hart accelerated their SUV over the edge of a 100ft cliff in Mendocino County, California… with their six Black adopted children in the back. The world was left...
Remember the time London was overcome by a stench so foul that it shut down Parliament, and convinced terrified city-dwellers that the end was surely near?No? Well let us remind you of the grim summe...
Today, catch the first episode of The Poet, a new six-part true crime series from The Binge. Hosted by journalist Rachel Browne, The Poet is an investigation that drops you into Wichita, Kansas in 19...
Watching slaves being ritually hacked to pieces may not seem like many people’s idea of a great day out. But 2,000 years ago, Romans turned up in their thousands to watch exactly that. So, with Gladi...
Joseph James DeAngelo is a burglar, a killer, and a rapist. A vile man with a proclivity for terrorising and sexually violating women. But that wasn’t everyone’s perception of the elderly man who was...
What could drive a person to eat another human being? Well, as it turns out, humankind has actually been surprisingly open to a little cannibalistic carpaccio.From funeral traditions where families g...
For almost as long as we’ve made films, we’ve made horror films – but what happens when the terror isn’t just on screen? Movie-making lore is riddled with stories of bizarre accidents on set, creepy...
To find the most prolific and violent serial rapist and killer the state of California had ever seen, took over fifty years, and some ethically questionable methods. Public DNA databases were trawled...
For decades, the Soviet Union’s top-secret testing site Kapustin Yar didn’t appear on any maps. It was so top-secret, the government relocated an entire town just to make sure none of its residents e...
Bryan Kohberger is now claiming his innocence in the Idaho Student Murders. And he wants a trial to prove it. A year after admitting to the horrific murders of University of Idaho students Kaylee Gon...
When 90 men, 17 women, and 11 children disappeared without a trace – leaving behind nothing but a single cryptic word carved into a tree – it began a mystery that’s lasted centuries.From bloody battl...
Michelle Eileen McNamara dedicated her life to closing the net on the man she called “The Golden State Killer’. A man whose prolific spree of violent home invasions, rapes, and murders was so large a...
What happens when a group of fame-obsessed teens with a passion for fashion go for a shopping spree in their favourite stars’ wardrobes?You get the Bling Ring: the unlikely architects behind a string...
America the beautiful: from sea to shining sea! (...Plus a bunch of random islands 2,000 miles away in the Pacific Ocean.)The story of why these seven Polynesian islands became part of the US of A is...
The Golden State Killer, The Easter Area Rapist, The Visalia Ransacker, and The Original Night Stalker. All pseudonyms for a man who committed one of the largest and most prolific sprees of home inva...
When the night guards passed Frank Morris’s cell, in San Francisco’s “inescapable” island super-prison, Alcatraz, he seemed to be sleeping soundly. But what they saw was a dummy head made of plaster,...
As part of our virtual road trip around North America inspired by the 2026 World Cup, we're revisiting some of our most classic cases. This week we stop off in
Sacramento, to revisit on of the single...
The idea of human beings floating in space used to feel as likely as time travel. But after WWII, the world’s two strongest superpowers had to find a way of outdoing each other that didn’t involve th...
When elderly women started being murdered around Mexico City in the early 2000s, it sparked the nation’s first ever serial killer manhunt…But the fearsome monster targeting the city’s beloved grandma...
Louisiana has more than its fair share of real monsters hiding in its deep, dark bayous. So, settlers’ nightmares about what else was hiding there – spiced up with African folk beliefs, plus Cajun an...
As part of our virtual road trip around North America inspired by the 2026 World Cup, we're revisiting some of our most classic cases. This week we stop off in North Carolina, to revisit the infamous...
If someone told you they could read your mind, levitate, walk through walls, or make your heart explode in your chest, you’d probably say they were crazy.But for over 30 years, the US government spen...
After the search of Vancouver’s missing women finally brought them to the gates of Robert ‘Willie’ Pickton’s grisly pig farm, Canadian police faced the gigantic task of bringing the country’s most pr...
Long before the ‘90s cartoon version painted with all the colours of the wind, a real Native American woman named Pocahontas inspired a romantic tale that would endure for centuries…But how much of h...
As part of our virtual road trip around North America inspired by the 2026 World Cup, we're revisiting some of our most classic cases – with a stop in Massachusetts sparking spooky memories of our vi...
Any moment now, we might experience an explosion that emits the power of 1,000 atomic bombs every second. An explosion so fierce that it would reduce the world’s most powerful country to an ash-cover...
For years, women were vanishing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside…But the police refused to admit it.In the first of a two-parter on the grisly crimes of Robert ‘Willie’ Pickton, we uncover the inve...
People who seem to have suddenly burst into flames – leaving just a pile of ash, a foot or skull, and a puddle of strange grease – have left biologists and police stumped for hundreds of years. And a...
The gold-lined, intact tomb of Tutankhamun is without a doubt the most important archaeological discovery in Egypt's history. But what if Tutankhamun, the teenage God King, took something in return? ...