PODCAST · society
Dark Downeast
by Audiochuck
Dark Downeast: Maine and New England's True Crime Podcast digs into the decades-old and modern day cases that prickle the history of Vacationland and beyond – the unsolved homicides, undetermined deaths, unexplained disappearances and other dark stories of New England.Investigative journalist and storyteller Kylie Low gets straight to the story with a mix of narrated episodes and documentary style production featuring interviews with surviving family and friends and insight on the investigations from detectives and sources who know these cases best.This is heart-centered, ethical true crime, bringing light to stories you’re not hearing on other podcasts. It is Dark Downeast's mission to honor the legacy of the humans at the heart of each story and bring new attention to the cases still awaiting justice.
Episodes
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The Disappearance of Bianca Lebron (Connecticut)
If there is any case where you wish you could turn back the clock and change just one small decision, it might be the disappearance of Bianca Lebron. There were several moments that morning in November 2001 when a question, a phone call, or one person stopping her before she walked away might…
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The Murder of Michelle Gardner-Quinn (Vermont)
Why talk about a case that was solved years ago? Because the answer to who did it isn’t the only thing that matters. One night in October 2006, a college student needed to borrow a phone. She happened to ask a stranger with violent intentions. What makes that even harder to sit with is what...
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The Suspicious Death of Kasha Blount (Massachusetts)
On a Saturday morning in 1990, the body of a teenager was found on a dead-end street in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The scene raised immediate concerns, but the autopsy did not answer the question everyone needed answered most: how did Kasha Blount die? Police waited on...
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The Murder of Nancy Ann Frenier (Rhode Island)
A young mother disappears just days before Christmas. More than a year later, another woman is murdered across state lines. The cases seem separate – different cities, different circumstances – but eventually they converge around the same teenage suspect. What follows is more complicated than a...
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INTRODUCING: The Truth About Natalie
Host Sean Kipe investigates the 2020 disappearance of 27-year-old Georgia mother Natalie Jones, who vanished after a July 4th lake party. Her car and remains were found 93 days later in a rural field, sparking questions of accident, suicide, or murder—especially since Natalie had begun publicly...
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The Murders of Gloria Gough & Evelyn "Penny" Deans (Maine and South Carolina)
In August of 1972, 44-year-old Gloria Gough left her home in Gardiner, Maine after a late-night phone call and vanished. Two days later, more than a thousand miles away in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, 52-year-old Evelyn “Penny” Deans was shot to death inside her home. Then police looked in...
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The Suspicious Death of Nicole Parsons-Bucki (Rhode Island)
On a morning when the country’s attention was fixed on unimaginable tragedy, a Rhode Island family was learning that someone they loved was gone. In the hours before Nicole Parsons-Bucki died, there had been violence, a police response, and a relationship already under strain, but 25 years later,...
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The Murder of Michael Cochran (Maine)
On an ordinary winter night in 1981, danger was moving through the Bangor, Maine area in three different directions at once. A barroom dispute was followed by a deadly blaze. A drug sting was underway at a nearby apartment complex. And a few miles away, a lakeside cabin would be reduced to...
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The Disappearance of Melanie Melanson (Massachusetts)
In a small New England city, a teenager disappeared after a night in the woods, and almost immediately, the story of what happened fractured.The last people known to be with her gave conflicting accounts. Her family believed the investigation lost precious time. As the years passed, searches kept...
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The Murder of Judith Whitney (New Hampshire)
There are cases that frustrate you because the evidence is thin. And then there are cases where the warning signs seem to be everywhere, but the system still can’t quite turn suspicion into action. A woman leaves home for a few quiet days away. Weeks later, police find her car in the woods and…
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The Disappearance of Edward Sprenkle Dubbs Jr. (Connecticut)
Some people disappear from a place you can picture right away: a house, a road, a parking lot, a stretch of woods. But in the case of Edward Sprenkle Dubbs Jr., he seems to vanish somewhere between the parts of his life that made sense on paper. He had an office in New York, a home in…
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The Disappearance of Dr. Margaret Kilcoyne (Massachusetts)
Sometimes, on an island, the only witness is the water. In January of 1980, a brilliant Columbia doctor went to her home on Nantucket’s remote east end carrying the weight of a life’s work, a possible medical breakthrough, and a kind of urgency the people around her struggled to understand. By…
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UNSOLVED: The Disappearance of Ryan Blagojevic (Maine)
When someone has been missing for more than thirteen years, it can start to feel from the outside like the story has stopped moving. Like whatever answers existed back then are either gone now or buried too deep to reach. But for Ryan Blagojevic’s family, time has not softened the urgency. His...
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The Murder of Victoria Cushman (Rhode Island)
Victoria Cushman was just 29 years old when she was found murdered inside her Warwick, Rhode Island apartment, just steps from the sporting goods store where she worked. For years, her family waited for answers and eventually, the case seemed to have them: a suspect known to the case from day…
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The Murder of Trish Haynes (New Hampshire)
In the summer of 2018, Trish Haynes disappeared from New Hampshire. Or at least, that’s what the public knew. Investigators searched a rural property, then quietly recovered something from a nearby pond, but for months, they said almost nothing about what they had found or how it related to the...
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The Murder of Valerie Tieman (Maine)
In 2016, the disappearance of Valerie Tieman became one of the most talked-about cases in Maine in the last decade. At first, there was room for hope, and maybe even a version of the story where Valerie had simply walked away from a life that had become too painful. Her husband, Luc Tieman, was a...
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The Murder of Martha Brailsford (Massachusetts)
On a Friday afternoon in July of 1991, Martha Brailsford told friends she was going sailing. In coastal Massachusetts at what is often the peak of summer heat and humidity, that wasn’t unusual. Martha knew the water, and in Salem Willows, boats were part of the everyday landscape. There was no...
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The Murder of Estella Brantley (Connecticut)
Estella Brantley’s murder should have been urgent from the beginning. She was found in one of Bridgeport’s most visible public places, around witnesses who may have heard her final moments, with evidence that would one day matter more than anyone could have known when it was first collected. But...
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The Murder of Rose Marie Moniz (Massachusetts)
Sometimes, a case can have evidence, a suspect, and a theory investigators believe explains what happened yet a family is still left without the ending they waited decades to hear. Grief and justice don’t always move at the same pace. Grief looks for truth, meaning, and someone to answer for what...
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The Murder of Pamela Brown (Vermont)
On a summer weekend in 1982, Barre, Vermont was crowded with music, traffic, and thousands of people moving through town for an annual festival. Somewhere in that noise, an 18-year-old woman disappeared. In the days that followed, investigators tried to make sense of what little they had…
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The Murder of Kathleen Flynn (Connecticut)
For nearly 40 years, Kathleen Flynn’s murder has haunted Norwalk, Connecticut. She was 11 years old, newly in middle school, walking home on a familiar path when she was attacked and killed. Her case became one of the state’s most well-known cold cases, the kind people never stopped talking…
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INTRODUCING: CounterClock Season 8
In February 2008, six women were held hostage in a women’s clothing store in Tinley Park, Illinois.. Rhoda McFarland, Carrie Hudek Chiuso, Connie Woolfolk, Sarah Szafranski, and Jennifer Bishop were executed and the killer escaped leaving only one survivor. In Season 8 of CounterClock, host and...
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The Disappearance of Patrick Merrill (New Hampshire)
One spring evening in 1987, a college student got into a green car in Plymouth, New Hampshire and vanished. His friends believed he was coming back. His family knew he would have called if he’d left on his own. But he was gone, and the man believed to be with him on the night he disappeared had a...
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The Suspicious Death of Phil Williams Jr. (Maine)
For more than 30 years, Pam Williams believed she knew how her brother died. She was told it was a medical event. The kind of tragedy no one could have stopped. She carried that explanation with her as she tried to rebuild her life around it. But sometimes the truth doesn’t disappear. It just...
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The Murder of Carol Ann Barlow (Rhode Island)
Some cases appear straightforward at first glance. A late-night crash on a quiet road, a damaged car, and a victim who doesn’t survive. It is the kind of situation people think they understand, and the kind that often gets explained quickly and filed away just as fast. But sometimes, there are...
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The Murder of Christine Hurlburt (Massachusetts)
It started like so many Saturday nights at Mountain Park – music, crowded dance floors, and teenagers trying to stretch the night a little longer before heading home. But sometime before midnight on October 5th, 1968, a teenager stepped out of that crowd and into the dark, beginning a walk she...
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STILL UNSOLVED: The Disappearance of Regina Brown (Connecticut)
Regina Brown disappeared under troubling circumstances in April of 1987. She was a former flight attendant, a devoted mother of three young children, and a woman whose life had become increasingly defined by fear, control, and violence inside her marriage. Almost four decades later, Regina has...
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The Murder of Claire Gravel (Massachusetts)
On a Saturday night in late June of 1986, a 20-year-old college student went out with friends in a familiar place, celebrating her softball team’s big win. But in a narrow window of opportunity just after she was dropped off in the shadows outside her apartment building, the young woman faced an...
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The Murder of Laurie Gonyo (Vermont)
In the fall of 1976, a woman vanished from her home in rural Vermont sometime between a cup of morning coffee and the end of an ordinary workday. What followed was years of suspicion, rumor, and silence until a witness with questionable credibility stepped forward. Laurie Gonyo’s case has an…
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The Murder of James Cassidy, Part 2 (Maine)
Fifty years after James Cassidy’s death, there is still no simple explanation for his brutal murder. The evidence left behind in the Maine woods raised questions investigators have never fully answered. And the deeper the investigation went, the more complicated the picture became. A respected…
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The Murder of James Cassidy, Part 1 (Maine)
In April of 1976, an anonymous call to a sheriff’s department in Maine alerted investigators to something almost impossible to imagine: a burning station wagon hidden off a remote road, and what looked like a body inside. What they found would open a case filled with contradictions. The victim…
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The Murder of Brenda Warner & Charlene Ranstrom (New Hampshire)
On a fall morning in 1988, police in Nashua, New Hampshire walked into an apartment and found two women murdered in their bed. What followed seemed, at first, like a case that would never truly reach an ending. There were suspects, confessions, trials, and years of legal battles but no final...
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The Murder of Joan Wertkin (Connecticut)
On a rainy night in late May 1989, a fire was spotted in a Westport, Connecticut parking lot. Within minutes, first responders realized the impossible: a body was burning in the open. Not long after and just a few miles away, a husband called police to report his wife missing. Her name was Joan...
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The Murder of Lucia Kai Roberts (Massachusetts)
On an August evening in 1982, children playing in Boston’s Franklin Park stumbled onto a scene that would quietly become one of the city’s most troubling unsolved cases. The victim was a 16-year-old girl who had already endured instability, displacement, and independence far beyond her years. Her...
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The Murder of Abraham Levine and Trial of Eleanor Johnson (Maine)
On a quiet Saturday night in 1931, a 19-year-old cattle dealer sat at his desk to write a check that he never got the chance to finish signing. Investigators were left with more questions than answers – a missing revolver, a name on a check no one could trace, and a household already tangled in...
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The Disappearance of April Grisanti (Connecticut)
Before she vanished, April Grisanti was a young woman trying to find her footing. Then, over the course of one winter night in 1985, she disappeared in plain sight. Witnesses saw her struggle. Police heard her voice asking for help. And yet, April was never seen again. What followed has never…
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The Murder of Joseph Woodside (New Hampshire)
In November of 1979, a man was found beaten to death along a quiet trail in a New Hampshire college town. Within a day, police had a suspect, but the case was hardly open and shut. The college student convicted of the murder – and the family who stood by him – were prepared to spend a lifetime...
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The Murder of Debra Stone (Rhode Island)
For more than forty years, Debra Stone’s murder lingered in the uneasy space between knowing and proving. An informant came forward early on with a story that, in hindsight, mapped almost every detail of what happened to her, yet the case drifted through the decades. Weighed down by doubt, fear,...
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STILL UNSOLVED: The Murder of John Evers Robinson (Connecticut)
In December of 2024, I shared an episode about a 24-year-old musician whose life was cut short in New Haven, Connecticut in 1990. More than three decades later, the murder of John Evers Robinson remains unsolved and the questions surrounding what happened to him have only grown more complicated...
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The Murder of Mark Knapp (Vermont)
When Mark Knapp’s routine commute home from work one February night in 1984 ended with his car abandoned and his body at the bottom of an old marble quarry, the shock rippled far beyond one family. What followed was not a straight line from crime to justice. Suspects were quickly identified and...
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The Suspicious Death of Cam Lyman (Rhode Island)
Cam Lyman vanished in the summer of 1987, leaving behind a forty-acre estate, dozens of prizewinning dogs, and a silence that would stretch on for more than a decade. Friends and family disagreed on whether Cam had walked away or been taken or worse. Meanwhile, millions of dollars in trusts and...
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The Murder of Brandi "Amy" Sullivan (Massachusetts)
17-year-old Brandi “Amy” Sullivan was used to coming and going. She was restless, independent, and always in motion. So when she didn’t come home in the summer of 1996, her family tried not to panic. But this time was different. Weeks later, Amy was found dead in the woods behind a warehouse in...
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The Murder of Elizabeth Sterling Seeley (Connecticut)
Every now and then I uncover a case buried deep in the archives with circumstances that prove truth is stranger than fiction. This story is one of them. When a prominent Bridgeport, Connecticut woman failed to show up for lunch with a friend, it led to a devastating discovery in her overflowing...
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The Murder of Shirley McAvoy (Maine)
In late summer of 1990, a mother in central Maine seemed to slip quietly out of her own life. Shirley McAvoy had been navigating a painful separation, leaning on friends and trying to rebuild a sense of normalcy. Then, shortly before a scheduled court date related to her pending divorce, she…
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The Murder of Mary Monsell (Connecticut)
More than a century ago during the winter of 1923, a quiet Christmas in East Hartford, Connecticut took a devastating turn that would echo far beyond that holiday. Mrs. Mary Monsell never arrived for the dinner she’d been warmly invited to, and within hours, her home became the center of a crime...
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The Murder of Judith Lord (New Hampshire)
Some cases linger for years not because the truth is hidden, but because the tools needed to prove it aren’t yet strong enough. Evidence waits on shelves, memories shift, and flawed forensic science can steer an investigation away from the person who seemed suspect from the start. This is one of...
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The Murder of John E. Volungis Jr. (Massachusetts)
On a winter night in early February of 1992, John E. Volungis Jr. was standing on the edge of a brand-new life. After years of working toward a career in law enforcement, John was about to take off for his next step in that pursuit. It was supposed to be a fresh start after navigating a…
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The Murder of Peggy Flynn (Rhode Island)
It was early January in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, when a discovery in a quiet stretch of woods changed a family forever. A young woman had crossed paths with a violent killer close to home. The investigation led to a swift arrest and a conviction that should’ve brought some measure of…
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STILL MISSING: The Disappearance of Reina Carolina Morales Rojas (Massachusetts)
November 26 marks three years since Reina Carolina Morales Rojas disappeared after getting into a car in East Boston, Massachusetts. She was later dropped off in nearby Somerville and that was the last time anyone saw or heard from her. Despite being reported missing soon after, information about...
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The Murder of Bernard Egounis (New Hampshire)
One ordinary day during August of 1983, in a quiet patch of parkland just off the road in Penacook, New Hampshire, a teenager found something that didn’t belong. What followed rippled through the small community for years. Interviews, rumors, and timelines never quite fit together. Voices clashed...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Dark Downeast: Maine and New England's True Crime Podcast digs into the decades-old and modern day cases that prickle the history of Vacationland and beyond – the unsolved homicides, undetermined deaths, unexplained disappearances and other dark stories of New England.Investigative journalist and storyteller Kylie Low gets straight to the story with a mix of narrated episodes and documentary style production featuring interviews with surviving family and friends and insight on the investigations from detectives and sources who know these cases best.This is heart-centered, ethical true crime, bringing light to stories you’re not hearing on other podcasts. It is Dark Downeast's mission to honor the legacy of the humans at the heart of each story and bring new attention to the cases still awaiting justice.
HOSTED BY
Audiochuck
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