Criminal

After a crime occurs, or when someone dies, the police aren’t responsible for cleaning up. That’s not their job. The coroner takes the body, the police conduct their investigation, and then everyone leaves. But the blood, and the rubber gloves, and the uneaten food in the refrigerator are all left behind. Sandra Pankhurst didn’t like imagining that. So she decided to clean it up.

When 18-year-old Ruth Cruger disappeared in 1917, newspapers reported that she probably ran off with a boyfriend. New York police said that there were no clues to go on. But an investigator named Grace Humiston decided that she would do whatever it took to find her. She became known as "Mrs. Sherlock Holmes."

John Buettner-Janusch was one of the first Americans to study lemurs. He held prestigious faculty positions at Yale, Duke and NYU, before surprising everyone with a series of increasingly bizarre crimes.

“I never did anything wrong. I never had a speeding ticket. I think I just saved all my stuff up for just one thing.” This week, we speak with Toby Dorr - better known as the Dog Lady of Lansing Prison.

In the late 1800s, North Carolina was trying to build a railway system through the Western part of the state. In December of 1882, something went wrong. The Raleigh News and Observer called it “too horrible to chronicle without a shudder.”

Dan Stevenson has lived in Oakland’s Eastlake neighborhood for 40 years. He says crime has been an issue for as long as he can remember, but he isn’t one to call the police on drug dealers or sex workers. He’s a pretty “live and let live” kind of guy. Or he was. Before he finally got fed up and took matters into his own hands.We update a favorite episode with news and additional interviews.

One day in 1969, Paulette Cooper decided to see what she could get away with.

Amanda Hamm and her boyfriend Maurice LaGrone drove to Clinton Lake one night in 2003. The next day, DeWitt County Sheriff Roger Massey told a local newspaper, “We don’t want to blow this up into something that it’s not. But on the other side, we’ve got three children who are dead. None of us know exactly what happened.”

In our last episode we spoke Cecilia Gentili, a trans Latina who worked for many years as an undocumented sex worker. Today, we get two more views of sex work in America. We speak with a high-end escort in New York City, and take a trip to one of the only legal brothels in the country - the Bunny Ranch.

When Cecilia Gentili was growing up in Argentina, she felt so different from everyone around her that she thought she might be from another planet. “Some of us find our community with our own family and some of us don't.”