Wicked and Grim: A True Crime Podcast

On April 26, 2013, 25 year old Jessica Heeringa vanished from her late night shift at a Norton Shores, Michigan gas station, leaving behind her car, purse, cash, and a small trail of blood, while cameras nearby caught a silver minivan fleeing the area. A massive investigation stalled for three years, that is until a terrified teenager escaped an attempted abduction in 2016 and pointed police toward a man named Jeffrey Thomas Willis. What followed exposed a calculated predator tied to Jessica’s disappearance, the execution style murder of jogger Rebekah Bletsch, and a hidden digital world that revealed how long he had been hunting.

Nobody in Cincinnati imagined a serial killer was moving quietly through its neighbourhoods, especially not a polite young German immigrant mother who cared for lonely, elderly men. But behind Anna Marie Hahn’s warm smile was a trail of sudden illnesses, forged wills, missing valuables, and quiet funerals that never raised suspicion. It wasn’t until one victim collapsed hundreds of miles from home that investigators finally uncovered the poisoner hiding in plain sight.

She left home on a quiet Saturday, promising to be back in a couple of hours. When her truck was found abandoned near the river, with her keys and water bottle on the ground, it was clear something was terribly wrong. What followed was a 28 year nightmare with a cold case buried in silence, until a strand of hair and a sister’s relentless pursuit cracked it wide open.

He confessed years before he was caught, telling his mother he had killed a woman, yet no one believed him until even after the bodies began to surface. This was Frank Gust, the so called Rhine-Ruhr Ripper, a necrophilic predator whose violence escalated from torturing animals to murdering women and posing their remains. Even after receiving a life sentence, Frank remains eligible for release in 2026, raising the unnerving question of whether a self-proclaimed killer can ever be allowed to walk free.

With 93 confessed murders across 19 states, Samuel Little holds the grim title of America’s most prolific serial killer ever, a distinction confirmed by the FBI in 2019. For more than four decades, he strangled vulnerable women, many of them never to be identified, leaving behind a coast to coast trail of bodies and cold cases. His killing spree, which spanned from 1970 to 2005, went undetected for years, until a DNA hit and a series of chilling confessions exposed the staggering scope of his crimes.