SOLVED: The Model Student Murderer Pt. 1

More from Murder: True Crime Stories All episodes →

1. 

   E204 · 21 Aug 2026 · 40 min

   MYSTERY: Dating Game Killer

   In the late 1970s, a charming amateur photographer named Rodney Alcala appeared on the popular TV show The Dating Game, flashing a quick smile and winning a date with the bachelorette. What the audience didn't know was that the contestant lighting up their screens was already a serial killer. For years, Alcala had used his camera to lure women and children, charming them with compliments and the promise of a modeling shoot before turning violent. He slipped through the system again and again, serving short sentences and talking his way past parole boards while leaving a trail of victims…

2. 

   E203 · 20 Aug 2026 · 44 min

   SOLVED: The Colonial Parkway Murders 2

   In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the decades-long hunt for the killer behind the Colonial Parkway Murders. For years, the four cases went nowhere, plagued by jurisdictional turf wars, false leads, and a string of suspects who turned out to be dead ends, including two men who inserted themselves into the families' grief only to exploit it. Refusing to let the case die, the victims' families applied relentless public pressure on the FBI and Virginia State Police. Then the same genetic genealogy breakthrough that caught the Golden State Killer gave investigators…

3. 

   E202 · 18 Aug 2026 · 41 min

   SOLVED: The Colonial Parkway Murders 1

   Between 1986 and 1989, four young couples were murdered or vanished along the same 23-mile stretch of road in Virginia known as the Colonial Parkway. A scenic route through the state's Historic Triangle by day, the parkway became a place of terror by night, drawing couples seeking privacy and a killer who seemed to know exactly where to find them. The victims ranged in age from 14 to 27, and the cases shared eerie similarities: abandoned cars, isolated locations, and signs that the attacker may have posed as law enforcement to get close. But the differences left investigators wondering…

4. 

   E201 · 14 Aug 2026 · 53 min

   MYSTERY: TalHotBlond

   In 2005, 46-year-old Thomas Montgomery logged onto an online gaming site, pretended to be an 18-year-old Marine, and fell into an intense romance with a young woman who called herself Jessi. What started as a fantasy quickly curdled into obsession. When Jessi began talking to one of Thomas's younger coworkers, jealousy consumed him, and in September 2006, that obsession turned deadly. But the murder was only the beginning of the story, because almost nothing about this online love triangle was real, and the truth about who Jessi actually was would stun everyone involved. In this episode of…

5. 

   E200 · 13 Aug 2026 · 48 min

   SOLVED: The Model Student Murderer Pt. 2

   By 2010, Jennifer Pan's carefully constructed lies were collapsing around her. Her parents had discovered the truth about her fabricated life, pulled her out of her relationship, and tightened their control over her every move. Desperate to regain command of a situation spinning out of her hands, Jennifer didn't beg for forgiveness. She arranged for three men to enter her family home one night and carry out a staged home invasion that left her mother dead and her father gravely wounded. In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the investigation that slowly unraveled…

6. 

   E198 · 7 Aug 2026 · 40 min

   MYSTERY: Serial Killer Grandparents

   In rural Missouri, Ray and Faye Copeland looked like any other elderly farming couple, churchgoing, weathered, and unremarkable to the neighbors who waved at them from the road. But behind that ordinary facade was one of the most disturbing operations in American criminal history. The Copelands hired drifters and transient men to help on their farm, used them to write bad checks for cattle, and then murdered them to cover their tracks. By the time investigators uncovered the truth, they had found the bodies of five men buried on and around the property, and Ray and Faye, both in their…

7. 

   E197 · 6 Aug 2026 · 54 min

   UNSOLVED: The Galapagos Affair 2

   By the spring of 1934, the small colony of European settlers on the Galapagos island of Floreana was tearing itself apart. A relentless drought had withered the crops, the self-proclaimed Baroness was abusing her companions, and the tiny island had become a pressure cooker of resentment, jealousy, and fear. Then people started to vanish. The Baroness and one of her lovers disappeared overnight, and the story given by the remaining settlers didn't match what the others claimed to have heard that day. Months later, two more bodies turned up mummified on a barren island they had no business…

8. 

   E196 · 4 Aug 2026 · 43 min

   UNSOLVED: The Galapagos Affair 1

   In 1929, a German doctor named Friedrich Ritter and his partner, Dore Strauch, sailed to the uninhabited island of Floreana in the Galapagos to escape what they believed was the worst of human nature. For two years, they had the place to themselves. Then, drawn by Friedrich's articles in the European press, other settlers began to follow. A practical German family arrived in 1932, then a self-styled Austrian Baroness with two younger lovers, who declared the island her personal kingdom and announced plans for a luxury hotel. Within months, the tiny colony was buckling under jealousy,…

9. 

   E195 · 31 Jul 2026 · 52 min

   MYSTERY: JonBenét Ramsey

   On the morning of December 26th, 1996, 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey was found beaten and strangled in the basement of her family's home in Boulder, Colorado. A long, strange ransom note had been left on the back stairs, written on paper from inside the house. What followed was one of the most chaotic investigations in modern American history. The crime scene was contaminated within hours, the press declared the family guilty before anyone was charged, and detectives clashed bitterly with prosecutors over who to focus on. Nearly three decades later, no one has ever been convicted…

10. 

    E194 · 30 Jul 2026 · 48 min

    UNSOLVED: The Murder of Marilyn Sheppard 2

    In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the investigation, trial, and decades-long legal battle that came to define the murder of Marilyn Sheppard. Within days of her death, the Cleveland press had turned her husband into a public villain, with newspapers openly calling for his arrest and conviction before any charges were filed. The trial that followed was a spectacle, and when the verdict came down, almost no one was surprised. But that was only the beginning. What followed was years of appeals, a Supreme Court decision that would reshape how American courts handle…