The Murder Police Podcast

Send us Fan Mail A single detail flips the whole ending: “We’re not following you with the disguise, we’re following the tracers.” From there, the Tree House story stops feeling like a stylized true crime hit and starts sounding like what it really is, a chain of choices, pressure, and consequences that never fully leaves the people who lived it. We sit down with Steven Meyers alongside former FBI agent Shawn Johnson to revisit the final stretch of the Seattle bank robbery saga and the...

Send us Fan Mail A bank robber and the FBI investigator who chased him do not usually end up swapping stories and laughing about dinner next to a vault, but that’s where this chapter of the Hollywood case leads. We sit down with Steven Meyers and Shawn Johnson to talk through what the Netflix documentary hints at, what it skips, and what it gets wrong by omission. Steven brings the lived detail behind The Tree House, including the original prison manuscript packed with scenes, subplots...

Send us Fan Mail A trenchcoat in blazing sun should never be the detail that ends you, but in Portland it nearly did. Part Four of The Treehouse story digs into the robbery that went sideways fast, when “Hollywood” walks into a bank expecting storm cover and instead meets clear skies, a watchful drive-thru witness, and the kind of radio traffic that forces a no-money abort. If you’re here for real-world criminal tradecraft and the thin line between planning and luck, this is where it gets pai...

Send us Fan Mail A bank robber walks into a bank with a face that looks almost human, just wrong enough that people glance away instead of staring. That single social reflex can buy the seconds needed to control a room, and it sits at the center of our conversation about Scott “Hollywood” Skurlock and the disguise work that made his run so hard to stop. We talk with Steven Meyers about the craft behind prosthetic disguises: sculpting components, cutting wigs, building looks that shift ...

Send us Fan Mail You think you know what a bank robbery looks like, until you hear how a “face” can do more than a gun. We talk through the unsettling mechanics behind the “Hollywood” robberies, where prosthetic disguises, wigs, and deliberate imperfection created a psychological blind spot. When tellers looked away to avoid embarrassing someone who seemed disfigured, politeness became part of the plan, and that detail changes how you understand threat, attention, and human instinct. We also...