Murder Homes

On a chilly night in September, 1958, an intruder breaks into a two-bedroom home and fatally stabs the mother and father living there, leaving three children alive. Days later, the homicides will cause mass hysteria across the country as attention focuses on a suspect that no one could have imagined – their eight-year-old son.

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Matt and his producer JB travel to a location they cannot disclose to meet a crime scene cleanup crew. A shocking triple homicide has occurred and the murderer is in custody, but a gruesome crime scene still has to be dealt with. An up-close, visceral look at what happens behind-the-scenes at a real murder home.

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The "Hinterkaifeck Murders" are one of Germany's most infamous crimes and one of its most puzzling cold cases. In the winter of 1922, the Gruber family's nerves were shattered by signs that someone had been watching them. Footsteps in the snow. Strange noises in the attic. A broken lock on a barn door. On March 31st, 1922, all six are found viciously slaughtered with an ax and a hunt begins for a maddeningly elusive murderer.

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In the summer of 1975, a maniacal preacher named Vernon LeGrande hits upon a brilliant scheme to use fake nuns to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in the New York City subways. His forty disciples operate out of a three-story brownstone in Crown Heights and a summer camp called "LeGrande Acres" in the bucolic Catskills, where the bodies of his followers are still being discovered to this day. 

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It’s just before Thanksgiving in the upper middle class suburb of Rock Hill, South Carolina, and a young man named Jimmy Robertson is standing in the den of his parents’ home, contemplating the unthinkable. After squandering all the opportunities he’s been given in life, and freshly kicked out of an elite college, he has a diabolical plan for those who love him the most. 

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An overzealous detective trying to infiltrate a betting scheme in Fairfax County, Virginia, targets an innocent and well-liked optometrist named Sal Culosi in a three-month undercover investigation, culminating in his shocking death.

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Rachel James is the co-author of the bestselling book, The Man from the Train, which has garnered plenty of attention by claiming to solve the Villisca ax murders, one of Iowa’s most notorious crimes. Rachel, together with author Bill James, her father, say they now have the identity of the person who the murdered eight people in the quaint home on 2nd street. They say his name is Paul Mueller. We talk to Rachel about what she’s learned. The book also links Mueller to a murder home in Germany that we will be covering in Season 2.

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Ever wonder what it would be like to run a murder home bed and breakfast? We talked to Lance Zaal about it in this special bonus content for True Crime Plus subscribers.

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Mark and Barb Nelson are one of the most sought-after ghost-hunting teams on the west coast. In this bonus content for True Crime + subscibers, Mark & Barb talk about their first murder home experience at an infamous mansion in Los Feliz in Los Angeles. 

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In this exclusive bonus content for True Crime + subscribers, we hear from Cindy Hagley, a real estate broker who specializes in staging murder homes, on how the most gruesome crime scenes can be cleansed of negative energy before they are put on the market.

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In this special bonus episode, Matt reaches out to renowned psychic medium Cindy Kaza (Travel Channel; Max). In this episode, she explores Matt’s home, which leads to a haunting discovery in the basement and the apparition of a mother still mourning for her lost child.

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Zach Bowen and Addie Hall were a good looking, hard drinking young couple who survived Hurricane Katrina and charmed all those who knew them. As the ravaged city of New Orleans recovered from the storm, Zach and Addie’s loving relationship spiraled out of control, ending in a two-week bender and an act of shocking violence that is still talked about today.

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In the small railroad town of Villisca, Iowa, there is a quaint B&B at 508 East Second street you can still stay in for $150 a night, if you don’t mind sleeping in a home where eight people were murdered with an ax. The killer washed the blood off his fingers in a bowl filled with water then vanished, and a town turned against itself, every friendly face suddenly suspicious.

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In this episode, host Matt Marinovich’s producer calls with some mixed news – no one died in his home, but then she tells him to brace himself for the bad news: a well-known and brutal murderer lived here. Matt digs into the story of his home’s former occupant, Rashid Baz, who terrorized New York City on a cold spring day in 1994, committing a crime that is still memorialized by signs on the Brooklyn Bridge.

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When a father and son go on a killing spree, the residents of Leonia, N,J., where everyone leaves their door unlocked, are the last people who expect a bloody home invasion. The unlikeliest hero emerges as a nurse named Maria Fasching places herself in harm’s way.

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When a beautiful woman named Rebecca Zahau is found hanging naked from a balcony of one of the most expensive mansions in Coronado, California, bound and gagged, authorities are quick to rule her death a suicide. As new, troubling facts emerge about the case, suspicion begins to fall on her brother-in-law, who cut her down and tried to save her as he talked to 911. Nothing is as it seems as airtight alibis slowly unravel, and even the intricate clove-hitch knots she supposedly tied around her wrists are removed from cardboard tubes and presented to a spellbound jury.

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On a stifling August morning in 1892, a young woman named Lizzie Borden is about to discover the dead body of her father on the parlor sofa. As her screams are heard by neighbors and her stepmother’s butchered body is also discovered, the whispers about her guilt will begin. Join host Matt Marinovich as he spends the night in the infamous place where the murders took place.

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George Hill Hodel was a brilliant physician who rubbed elbows with the cream of Los Angeles society, but after the mutilated body of a 22-year-old woman named Elizabeth Short is found in the weeds of South Norton Avenue, suspicion falls on him. After planting a listening device in his neo-Mayan mansion at 5121 Franklin Avenue, investigators begin to learn sickening secrets about his life, but always seem to be one step behind the possible murderer of the Black Dahlia."

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In her apartment above the famous Carnegie Deli in midtown Manhattan, an upscale weed dealer named Jennifer Stahl is about to get two visitors. Over the course of six minutes, the two men will commit a crime that will traumatize the city for weeks.

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A 30-year-old ex con named Matthew Hoffman is a stalker who has layered his home with thousands of pounds of dead leaves. Hunting for just the right home to invade, he soon finds his perfect opportunity. Only one person at King Beach Drive will survive his ferocious attack, and she’ll have to use all her wits to keep alive in the house of leaves he has built for her.

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On a freezing day in 2017, host Matt Marinovich walked past an ordinary-looking stucco home in Leonia, N.J. that had a shocking history. Since then, he’s been obsessed with crimes that happen where we least expect: in peaceful looking homes on quiet tree-lined streets. Take a walk with Matt to the end of the block, to the home everyone whispers about. Empty homes that real estate agents term “stigmatized” for the shocking murders that occurred there.

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A wealthy financier named Ted Ammon is relieved to be in the last stages of a bitter divorce. As he enters his mansion on a warm October day, and sees the disabled security system, he realizes his wife and her lover are plotting something terrible against him.

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The real estate market has never been hotter, but there is one kind of property that often sits on the market for years, no matter how much of a bargain it seems to be. In real estate jargon, it’s called a “stigmatized property” because a horrible death occurred there. Each week, Murder Homes tells the story of a single stigmatized property. Who lived there? What secrets did they keep, and what did they leave behind? Take a walk down the street with host Matt Marinovich to the house everyone whispers about and step inside to hear the shocking story of a day that is still frozen in time.

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