True Crime Reporter

What is it about Waco, Texas? A whirlwind of bizarre events and violence seems to dump all sorts of strange creatures into Central Texas. Whether it is serial killers on the hunt for victims or the Branch Davidian Cult ending in a fiery inferno, it spins out true crime stories that are stranger than fiction. Investigative reporter Robert Riggs and former federal prosecutor Bill Johnston have been deeply involved in all of them...

In this “Best Of True Crime Reporter™”, we take you back to the first episode in our series about serial killer Kenneth Allen McDuff. It was a Webby Award Honoree for Best True Crime Podcast in 2021. McDuff is the only criminal in Texas history to have received three death sentences. Yet he got out of prison under a cloud of corruption after murdering three teenagers. An FBI profiler, the late Roy Hazelwood, described McDuff to me as the Great White Shark of serial killers...

After listening to our episodes about serial killer Kenneth McDuff, you have no doubt that McDuff is what FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood described as a textbook psychopath. But it’s not only criminals that are psychopaths. CEOs of major corporations, politicians, and entertainers score high on the checklist of psychopathic behavior. Think about your work colleagues or social circle...

When you hear about violent crime, do you think to yourself, “it would never happen to me?” When 29-year old Colleen Reed went to a self-service car wash in Austin, Texas none of her family or friends thought it would be the last time they would see her.  Reed never imagined that serial killer Kenneth McDuff was stalking her...

When a woman’s head bobbed to the surface on Lake Waco in Central Texas no one had the slightest clue about who she was or how she died. An autopsy revealed that she had been decapitated and there was no sign of the rest of her body in the lake. As veteran Texas Ranger John Aycock began to learn more about the woman’s life (profilers call it victimology), he declared the likely identity of the murder suspect. Now he just had to prove it...

Former NYPD Detective Randy Jurgensen walked a beat in Harlem all the way into Hollywood’s greatest crime dramas of all time. His walk of fame started when William Friedkin, the director of The French Connection asked Jurgensen to demonstrate how to put a suspect against a wall for the “pat down”. Friedkin hired Jurgensen as the film’s technical consultant to advise him on how to realistically show the gritty side of heroin trafficking in the 1960s...

The Los Zetas drug cartel ambushed two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on a dangerous stretch of highway on February 15, 2011. Special Agent Victor Avila was severely wounded. His partner, Jaime Zapata, was killed. Zapata was the first U.S. enforcement officer killed in the line of duty in Mexico since the murder of DEA agent Enrique “KiKi” Camarena. The ICE agents had been dispatched from Mexico City to Monterrey to pick up supplies without proper training or protection...

The men and women of the Texas Highway Patrol work alone, often at night, on remote stretches of highway. They drive distinctive black and white cruisers and SUV’s with bright gold emblems in the shape of Texas on the side doors. If a traffic stop turns bad, help might be a hundred miles away. For example in 2021 Texas Department of Public Safety Trooper Chad Walker was killed in an ambush. Walker stopped to help a driver in a disabled vehicle...

This is a story about two botched murder attempts by hired hitmen. And what happened when 65-year old Joyce Sturdivant took matters into her own hands. One of the most common forms of homicide is when one half of a couple kills the other. Women are usually the victims of this form of homicide. Only one percent of male victims are killed by a partner...

Fort Worth Cold Case detectives solved the murder of 17-year old Carla Walker after it had gone cold for nearly five decades. They analyzed old evidence using genetic genealogy and new DNA extraction technology pioneered by Othram, a forensic genealogy lab in the Woodlands a suburb of Houston.  Othram matched the DNA to a test submitted to a genealogy site by a member of the killer’s family tree. Othram did not disclose the relative’s name...