For a lot of 18 year olds, moving away from home and starting college is the first real big adventure in their lives. In the fall semester of 2021, freshman Danny Santulli at the University of Missouri was ready and excited to start this exact journey. He, like many other young coeds, was interested in Greek Life on campus and was quickly recruited to pledge one of the biggest and best fraternities on the Mizzou campus. He would soon learn just how steep the price was to join the elite brotherhood, though. And what started as pretty normal college fun as he joined the Fiji Fall pledge class soon devolved into a living nightmare for both Danny and all his friends and family.

At the turn of the new Millennia, a pair of unlikely "friends" in Southern California came together in order to scam unassuming individuals who were already very much down on their luck who were looking for a hand up in just about any way they could get it. Both Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt had spent most of their adult lives making their money by running different scams over the years, most notably using their looks to their advantage on wealthy men when they were younger. But as time moved on, they had to adapt and come up with different ways to go about obtaining their income which would eventually lead them down an even darker road costing multiple people their lives.

This week’s episode begins in a similar fashion to last week’s. A young girl hitchhiking in the 1970s unfortunately accepts a ride from the wrong “family.” What follows are years of abuse in every form from a cruel “master” who slowly groomed her to be so dedicated to him that she was willing to do anything to keep him happy. Even after she was kept locked away in a tiny space with no light, room, food, or access to basic needs for more than 20 hours a day for years, Colleen Stan fought through it all by compartmentalizing and looking forward to even the smallest of rewards believing she was letting herself be put through this torture in order to save herself and her family.

Mary Vincent’s story is truly one of the most incredible, terrifying, and awe-inspiring tales any of us could ever hear in the world of true crime. The 1970s were most certainly a “different time” to say the very least. It was very common for people to get from one place to another via hitchhiking. Unfortunately, Mary would be one of the many victims to fall prey to drivers without the best of intentions.

From the very start of his life, the deck was stacked against Hadden Clark. Growing up in both a physically as well as emotionally abusive home, the young boy was taught from a very early age the art of manipulation by his entire family. His parents, while very intelligent, struggled deeply with their reliance on alcohol and overall deeper unresolved mental health conditions that manifested in Hadden’s “mistreatment” (for lack of a better phrase). Though by the end of today’s episode our listeners will know where Hadden ended up, all the details of how he got there and who was touched by his life an actions is still thought to be largely unknown to this day.

In 2022 a Louisiana couple returned home from a weekend away to find every parent's worst nightmare. Their adult daughter who was home alone over the weekend was unresponsive and not breathing on the couch in their living room. But the scene first responders arrived to was nowhere near typical, and before they even saw the couple's daughter, everyone knew there was something much worse happening inside this home.

This week we wrap up our deep dive into one of the most infamous serial killers in American history, Jeffrey Dahmer.

This week Mel takes on yet another big name in the world of true crime with one of America's most infamous serial killers, Jeffrey Dahmer. While most people are somewhat familiar with Dahmer and his murders, the details are absolutely chilling to hear no matter if you are hearing them for the first time or the 50th time. From a very young age, Jeffrey had some somewhat out of the ordinary interests that his family just believed to be an interest in biology and chemistry, but many years and red flags later the world would learn just how much more intense and scary this man's interests were. And, of course, how deadly they eventually turned.