Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast

Suzane von Richthofen is the mastermind behind the murder of her wealthy parents on October 31, 2002. Then an 18-year-old law student, Suzane conspired with her boyfriend, Daniel Cravinhos, and his brother, Christian, to bludgeon Manfred and Marísia von Richthofen to death in their São Paulo home while they slept.

Joe Conforte operated several illicit brothels before successfully lobbying for the state's first legal brothel license at his famous Mustang Ranch in 1971. His career was defined by high-stakes battles with the government, including a stint in prison for extortion and a scandalous association with the shooting death of boxer Oscar Bonavena on his property. Facing mounting federal indictments for tax evasion and racketeering, Conforte fled to Brazil in 1991, where he lived as a fugitive until his death in 2019, successfully avoiding extradition for nearly three decades.

The eBay stalking scandal was a bizarre and criminal harassment campaign orchestrated in 2019 by company employees against Ina and David Steiner, authors of the newsletter EcommerceBytes, in retaliation for their critical reporting. Led by eBay’s security team, the harassment included sending terrifying packages—such as a bloody pig mask, live insects, and a funeral wreath—to the couple’s home, alongside physical surveillance and public Craigslist posts inviting strangers to their property.

Juliana Peres Magalhães, a Brazilian former au pair, was a central figure in a sensational 2023 double-murder case in Northern Virginia, where she participated in a plot with her employer and lover, Brendan Banfield, to kill his wife, Christine Banfield. The pair orchestrated an elaborate scheme using a fetish website to lure a stranger, Joseph Ryan, to the family's home, where they fatally shot and stabbed him and Christine while attempting to stage the scene as a home invasion.

Founded in 2004 by Nicole Daedone, OneTaste marketed itself as a revolutionary wellness company focused on OM to foster female empowerment and healing. While it initially gained mainstream acclaim through high-profile endorsements and a popular TED Talk, investigative reports in 2018 exposed a dark side, with former members alleging cult-like manipulation, financial exploitation, and psychological abuse.

Michael Mastromarino, a former oral surgeon whose license was revoked due to drug addiction, orchestrated a massive illegal body-snatching enterprise between 2001 and 2005 through his company, Biomedical Tissue Services. He conspired with several funeral directors to plunder tissue, bone, and organs from over 1,000 cadavers.

Wayne Couzens is a former Metropolitan Police officer who is serving a whole-life prison sentence for the kidnap and murder of 33-year-old Sarah Everard in March 2021.

Jessy Kurczewski was a Wisconsin woman convicted in 2023 for the first-degree intentional homicide of her friend, Lynn Hernan, for whom she had been acting as a caregiver. In October 2018, Kurczewski reported finding Hernan unresponsive in her home, initially suggesting the death was a result of a self-inflicted overdose. However, investigations and toxicology reports later determined that the death was a homicide caused by poisoning.

Nanette Johnston (now Nanette Packard) orchestrated the 1994 murder of her millionaire fiancé, Bill McLaughlin, to secure a $1 million life insurance payout and hide her extensive embezzlement of his funds. While living with McLaughlin in Newport Beach, she maintained a secret affair with former NFL player Eric Naposki and provided him with a house key and his schedule to facilitate the shooting.

Malcolm Webster, a British nurse dubbed the "Black Widower," was convicted in 2011 for the 1994 murder of his first wife, Claire Morris, and the 1999 attempted murder of his second wife, Felicity Drumm, both staged as car accidents to claim life insurance money. Operating as a calculated, financially-driven sociopath, Webster drugged his victims and attempted to kill them on different continents to fund an affluent lifestyle, eventually defrauding his second wife of her savings.

Dr. John Schneeberger, a trusted physician in Kipling, Saskatchewan, was revealed in the late 1990s to be a predator who assaulted patients and his own stepdaughter, launching a sensational true-crime case centered on an audacious forensic deception.

The Nick Perry lottery scandal, famously known as the "Triple Six Fix," was a 1980 scheme to rig the Pennsylvania Lottery’s "Daily Number". Orchestrated by beloved local TV host Nick Perry, the plan involved injecting white latex paint into all but the number 4 and 6 ping-pong balls used in the drawing, making the weighted balls too heavy to be sucked into the machine’s chute.

In January 2009, Rosa Hill and her mother, Mei Li, entered the Dublin, California, home of Hill’s estranged husband, Eric Hill, during a contested custody battle over their daughter. During the incident, the women killed Eric's 91-year-old grandmother, Selma Hill.

Stewart Parnell, the former owner and CEO of the Peanut Corporation of America (PCA), was at the center of one of the deadliest food safety scandals in U.S. history after his company knowingly shipped salmonella-tainted peanut products between 2008 and 2009.

In May 2015, Glenna Duram fatally shot her husband, Martin "Marty" Duram, five times in their Sand Lake, Michigan. Glenna claimed to have no memory of the event, but investigators uncovered evidence of a motive rooted in severe financial troubles and a gambling addiction that had led to their home's foreclosure. The case gained international attention due to the couple's pet African Grey parrot, Bud, who began eerily mimicking an argument in Marty's voice following the murder.

Trey Eric Sesler, known online as "Mr. Anime," was a 22-year-old YouTuber from Texas popular in the late 2000s for his anime review channel, LensCap Productions. Sesler committed a horrific familicide in 2012.

In November 2004, 21-year-old University of Rochester student Christopher Porco used an axe to murder his father, Peter, and severely injure his mother, Joan, in their Delmar, New York home.

Kouri Richins, a Utah mother of three and real estate agent, was convicted in March 2026 of murdering her husband, Eric Richins, by spiking his cocktail.

Father Gerald Robinson, a Catholic priest in Toledo, Ohio, who was convicted in 2006 for the brutal 1980 murder of a 71-year-old nun, Sister Margaret Ann Pahl.

Bryan Cranston was once wanted for murder. And this could have ended his acting career before it had a chance to start.

Matthew Cox is a former Tampa, Florida-based mortgage broker who became one of the most prolific mortgage fraud con artists of the early 2000s, stealing an estimated $55 million by crafting elaborate synthetic identities and forging extensive loan documents. After his initial mortgage company collapsed in 2002, Cox escalated his crimes, leading to a three-year multi-state fugitive spree while on the U.S. Secret Service's Most Wanted list.

Davion Irvin is the man who was arrested in 2023 for a series of high-profile incidents at the Dallas Zoo, including the theft of two monkeys.

Bruno Fernandes de Souza, a prominent Brazilian soccer goalkeeper and captain for Flamengo, had his career abruptly ended in 2010 when he was arrested for orchestrating the abduction and brutal murder of his former girlfriend, Eliza Samudio.

In the 1960s, naturalist Margaret Howe Lovatt took part in a NASA-funded experiment on the island of St. Thomas aimed at teaching a bottlenose dolphin named Peter to understand and speak English. To facilitate constant interaction, Lovatt lived in a partially flooded house called the Dolphin House, where she spent nearly every waking moment with Peter. The study gained notoriety not just for its ambitious goals, but for the controversial turn it took when Lovatt began a physical relationship with the dolphin.

The Randy Stair case refers to a tragic incident that occurred on June 8, 2017, at a supermarket in Eaton Township, Pennsylvania. Stair, an employee at the store, opened fire during an overnight shift, killing three of his coworkers.

Valerie Cincinelli, a former 12-year veteran of the NYPD, was sentenced to four years in prison in 2021 after being caught in a murder-for-hire plot targeting her estranged husband, Isaiah Carvalho, and her boyfriend’s daughter. Cincinelli reportedly paid her then-boyfriend, John DiRubba, to hire a hitman to kill Carvalho as well as DiRubba’s daughter whom she viewed with sheer jealousy.

Suzan Carson, along with her husband James "Bear" Carson, became known as the "San Francisco Witch Killers" during a notorious murder spree in the early 1980s. Driven by a shared paranoid schizophrenia and a radicalized religious delusion, the couple believed they were "holy warriors" tasked with eliminating "witches" who threatened their spiritual survival. Their trail of violence claimed the lives of three people: their roommate Keryn Barnes in San Francisco, farmworker Clark Stephens in Humboldt County, and hitchhiker Jon Hellyer in Sonoma County.

An unidentified person or persons pretended to be Eon Musk and successfully pulled a romance scam on a Texas woman.

Luka Magnotta is a Canadian convicted murderer who gained international notoriety in 2012 for the murder of international student Jun Lin in Montreal

Quincy Promes, once a star forward for the Netherlands national team and Ajax, has seen his career derailed by a series of high-profile criminal convictions. After a 2020 family party ended with Promes attacking his cousin in the knee, he was sentenced in absentia to 18 months in prison for aggravated assault. This was followed by a much more severe six-year sentence in February 2024 for his involvement in smuggling drugs through the port of Antwerp. For several years, Promes avoided his prison terms by living and playing for Spartak Moscow in Russia, which has no extradition treaty with the Netherlands. However, while on a winter training camp in Dubai in early 2024, he was detained by local authorities following a traffic accident and subsequently arrested on a Dutch extradition request.

Lillo Brancato Jr. is an American actor whose rapid rise to fame was followed by a public descent into addiction and a high-profile criminal case. After being discovered at age 15 for his striking resemblance to Robert De Niro, he gained stardom as Calogero in the 1993 film A Bronx Tale and later appeared in several episodes of The Sopranos. However, Brancato’s promising career was derailed by a severe addiction to drugs, leading to a tragic incident on December 10, 2005, when he and an accomplice, Steven Armento, were involved in a botched burglary in the Bronx.

Bruce McArthur is a Canadian serial killer who murdered eight men in Toronto between 2010 and 2017. A self-employed landscaper who occasionally worked as a shopping mall Santa Claus, McArthur targeted vulnerable men, many of whom had ties to Toronto's Gay Village.

Eliyahu "Eli" Weinstein is a New Jersey-based repeat fraudster who masterminded multiple high-stakes Ponzi schemes totaling over $250 million in losses, specifically targeting investors within the Orthodox Jewish community. Originally sentenced to 24 years in federal prison for a $200 million real estate scheme, his sentence was commuted to time served by the president in January 2021 after serving only eight years. Almost immediately following his release, Weinstein began a new $41 million scheme.

Kelly Cochran and her husband, Jason, lived by a "marriage pact" that required them to kill anyone with whom they had an affair. In 2014, they fulfilled this vow by luring Kelly’s lover, Christopher Regan, to their Michigan home where Jason shot him; the couple then dismembered his body and allegedly served his remains to unsuspecting neighbors at a barbecue. Two years later, Kelly murdered Jason in Indiana by injecting him with a lethal dose of heroin and smothering him, claiming it was revenge for Regan's death.

Yasutomo Ihara is a former Japanese stuntman and "suit actor" who gained notoriety for using his professional training to commit a series of high-profile burglaries in Japan. He is frequently associated with the Green Power Ranger in viral reports, though his actual work was as a suit actor in the original Japanese Super Sentai and Kamen Rider series, which were later adapted for the American Power Rangers franchise.

In 1982, Malcolm Macarthur, a refined but impoverished socialite, committed two brutal murders in Ireland as part of an ill-conceived plan to rob a bank. After squandering his inheritance, Macarthur bludgeoned nurse Bridie Gargan with a hammer to steal her car and later shot farmer Dónal Dunne with a shotgun he was pretending to buy. The subsequent manhunt ended in a major political scandal when Macarthur was discovered hiding in the home of the Irish Attorney General, Patrick Connolly, who was an unwitting acquaintance.

Katherine Kealoha, a former high-ranking deputy prosecutor in Honolulu, was the central figure in Hawaii's largest public corruption scandal. Together with her husband, then-Police Chief Louis Kealoha, she orchestrated an elaborate scheme to maintain a lavish lifestyle by defrauding her own family and financial institutions. Her downfall began when she conned her elderly grandmother into a reverse mortgage and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund luxury car payments, high-end concert tickets, and an expensive brunch for her husband’s induction. When her uncle, Gerard Puana, sued her for this financial abuse, the Kealohas abused their power by using a specialized police unit to frame him for stealing their mailbox in an attempt to discredit him. 

Jesse Kempson is a New Zealand man who became the center of a major international criminal case following the 2018 murder of 21-year-old British backpacker Grace Millane in Auckland. After meeting Millane on the dating app Tinder, Kempson strangled her in his hotel room and subsequently attempted to hide her body in a suitcase, which he buried in a shallow grave in the Waitākere Ranges.

The 1994 Tonya Harding scandal involved a conspiracy to break the leg of rival figure skater Nancy Kerrigan, orchestrated by Harding’s ex-husband Jeff Gillooly to ensure Harding’s path to Olympic gold. While the January attack failed to break the leg, it caused a massive media sensation. Though Harding pleaded guilty only to hindering the prosecution after the fact, the scandal resulted in a lifetime ban from U.S. Figure Skating and an eighth-place finish at the 1994 Olympics, forever defining her career as one of the most bizarre in sports history.

Tiger Woods 2009 cheating scandal began with a tabloid report of an affair with nightclub manager Rachel Uchitel, which escalated into a global media frenzy after Woods crashed his SUV into a tree outside his home. Following the crash, dozens of women came forward claiming to have had affairs with the golfer, shattering his carefully maintained clean image.

21-year-old Jordan Marie Shaver shot and killed 49-year-old Brian Barton Geddes in his Garden City, Idaho, home after he had allowed her to stay with him. After the shooting, Shaver wrapped Geddes’ body in a comforter and hidden it in the crawlspace beneath his house. For nearly three weeks, she lived in the home, drove his cars, spent his money, and used his cell phone to send text messages to his family to cover up his disappearance.

Paul Bateson was a radiological technician in New York City who gained notoriety for his brief appearance in the 1973 film The Exorcist and his subsequent conviction for the 1977 murder of film critic Addison Verrill. During his trial, Bateson allegedly bragged about killing several other men.

Robert Pickton was a Canadian pig farmer and serial killer who, in 2007, was convicted of murdering six women, though he confessed to an undercover officer that he killed 49.

Ephren Taylor II rose to fame as a self-proclaimed "teenage tycoon," building a massive public profile as a financial guru and "social capitalist" who supposedly earned his first million by age 16. Leveraging this manufactured persona and his status as a minister’s son, he launched a "Building Wealth" tour that targeted African American megachurches, including Bishop Eddie Long’s New Birth Missionary Baptist Church. Under the guise of Biblical, "risk-free" investments in small businesses and sweepstakes machines, Taylor orchestrated a $16 million Ponzi scheme that defrauded over 400 people of their life savings.

Marjorie Ann Orbin was a former Las Vegas showgirl convicted of the 2004 murder of her husband, Jay Orbin, a successful jewelry dealer.

Leon Jacob was a failed medical resident in Houston who, along with his girlfriend, veterinarian Valerie McDaniel, orchestrated a plot to hire a hitman to murder both of their ex-partners. Motivated by a desire to prevent his ex-girlfriend from testifying in a stalking case against him and to resolve McDaniel's custody battle, Jacob offered cash and luxury watches to an individual he believed was a contract killer but was actually an undercover officer.

Jonathan Crupi was a Brooklyn high school English teacher who, on July 5, 2012, murdered his wife and fellow teacher, Simeonette Mapes-Crupi, in their Staten Island home.

In 2005, Amy Bosley made a frantic 911 call reporting that an intruder had broken into her Kentucky home and shot her husband, Bob Bosley, while their two young children were asleep nearby. However, investigators quickly grew suspicious of her story after finding bullet casings in the washing machine and evidence that she had staged the break-in by breaking glass after the shots were fired. The true motive was revealed to be financial: Amy had embezzled approximately $1.7 million from their family roofing business and was desperate to hide the theft from both her husband and the IRS, who had scheduled a meeting with Bob for that very morning.

In September 2025, a California jury unanimously cleared Cardi B of all liability in a $24 million civil lawsuit brought by former security guard Emani Ellis. The legal battle stemmed from a 2018 encounter at a Beverly Hills medical office where Ellis claimed the rapper- who was four months pregnant at the time- physically assaulted her, spat on her, and used slurs after a disagreement regarding privacy and recording.

Robyn Lindholm, a former Melbourne adult dancer often dubbed the "Black Widow," is a convicted double murderer whose crimes involved orchestrating the deaths of her own partners by manipulating other men into doing her bidding. In 2013, she arranged for her then-boyfriend Torsten Trabert and another associate to kill her former partner Wayne Amey following a bitter property dispute; Amey was bashed with a baseball bat and his body was later found hidden between boulders at Mount Korong. While serving a 25-year sentence for Amey's murder, Lindholm was further convicted in 2019 for the 2005 murder of her fiancé George Templeton, a crime she had ironically recruited Wayne Amey to help her commit years before.