The Biggest Lie: Bernie Madoff

The Thing on the Hill: The Flatwoods Monster

At approximately 7:15 in the evening on Friday the 12th of September 1952, three young boys were playing in the schoolyard of Flatwoods Elementary School, in the small Appalachian town of Flatwoods, West Virginia. It was almost fully dark. One of them looked up. A bright, pulsating object was streaking across the sky. It appeared to descend and crash on a nearby hillside, on the property of a local farmer. The boys ran home to tell their mother, 27-year-old Kathleen May. Kathleen called on her 17-year-old cousin, a National Guardsman named Eugene Lemon. Two other local boys joined the group. The family dog, Rickie, came along. Seven of them altogether. Six boys, one mother, one dog. What they said they found in a clearing at the top of the hill has become one of the most persistently unsettling paranormal encounters in American history. They said they saw a creature. They said it was ten feet tall. They said its head was shaped like an ace of spades, glowing red and orange in the dark. They said it emitted a foul, sulphurous mist that burned their throats and eyes. They said it did not walk. It glided toward them. By the time they got back to the May family home, six of the seven witnesses were vomiting. Their eyes were red. Their throats were swollen. The dog was cowering. The local sheriff came. The local newspaper editor came, with a shotgun. Multiple neighbours reported strange lights that night. Nothing physical was ever found at the site. But for the rest of their lives, all seven witnesses would stand by exactly what they had seen. And nearly 74 years later, no one has ever definitively explained what it was. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here [linktr.ee/one_minute_remaining] Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE [https://www.youtube.com/@CrimeAtBedtimeOfficial] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

The Biggest Lie: Bernie Madoff

On the morning of Thursday the 11th of December 2008, two FBI agents knocked on the door of a penthouse apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The man who answered the door was 70 years old, silver-haired, and one of the most respected figures on Wall Street. His name was Bernard Lawrence Madoff. He had served as chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. He had advised the Securities and Exchange Commission on trading regulation. He ran an investment firm that managed money for celebrities, royalty, universities, and Holocaust survivors' foundations. When the FBI agents asked whether there was an innocent explanation for what he was about to be asked, Madoff replied: there is no innocent explanation. Over the previous 17 years, and possibly longer, he had operated the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world. It had defrauded his clients of approximately $65 billion. It had wiped out charities. It had bankrupted pension funds. It had led to at least two of his victims taking their own lives, and it would eventually lead to the death of his own son. The story of how one man, sitting behind a desk on the 17th floor of a Manhattan office block, fabricated 17 years of financial statements from nothing, and how the entire American financial regulatory system failed to catch him despite being told, in writing, exactly what he was doing. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here [linktr.ee/one_minute_remaining] Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE [https://www.youtube.com/@CrimeAtBedtimeOfficial] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

The Taxi Driver: Sian O'Callaghan and Becky Godden

At just before three in the morning on Saturday the 19th of March 2011, a 22-year-old woman named Sian O'Callaghan left a nightclub in the centre of Swindon, Wiltshire, and began the 800-metre walk home to the flat she shared with her boyfriend. She never arrived. Within days, Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher of Wiltshire Police had identified a suspect. Within a week, he had made a decision that would save one family from years of wondering, deliver another family a second set of remains that had been missing for eight years, and destroy his own career in the process. Fulcher took the suspect, a local taxi driver named Christopher Halliwell, to an Iron Age hill fort north of Swindon. He deliberately broke the Police and Criminal Evidence Act to interrogate him. And there, without a solicitor present, Halliwell led him first to Sian O'Callaghan's shallow grave in an Oxfordshire field, and then, on the drive back to the police station, offered him a second body. This is the story of two young women who died eight years apart, the detective who broke the rules to find them, and the spade in a Swindon shed that eventually put their killer behind bars for the rest of his life. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here [linktr.ee/one_minute_remaining] Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE [https://www.youtube.com/@CrimeAtBedtimeOfficial] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

An Adventure: The Versailles Time Slip

On the afternoon of Saturday the 10th of August 1901, two English women stepped off a train at Versailles, near Paris, on holiday together. One was 55-year-old Charlotte Anne Moberly, the first Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford. The other was 38-year-old Eleanor Jourdain, her incoming Vice Principal. They toured the palace. They found it uninspiring. They opened their guidebook and decided to walk to the smaller chateau at the end of the grounds, the Petit Trianon, which had once been the private retreat of Marie Antoinette. They took a wrong turn at an unmarked lane. And over the following 30 minutes, in the gardens of Versailles, they would claim to have seen palace bodyguards in green-grey coats and three-cornered hats, an old plough beside a farmhouse that had long since been demolished, and a woman sitting on a terrace sketching, in an old-fashioned summer dress and a shady white hat. Moberly would come to believe that the woman was Marie Antoinette herself. Neither of them knew, at the time, that the date they had chosen was the 109th anniversary of the fall of the French monarchy. Sixty years of research followed. A book was published in 1911. It became one of the most famous ghost stories in the English language. And to this day, no one has ever been able to prove or disprove what the two women said they had seen. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here [linktr.ee/one_minute_remaining] Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE [https://www.youtube.com/@CrimeAtBedtimeOfficial] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

The Disappearance of Ray Gricar

On a warm Friday morning in April 2005, Ray Gricar, the sitting District Attorney of Centre County, Pennsylvania, walked out of his office in Bellefonte, got into his red Mini Cooper, and drove east on Route 192 towards the town of Lewisburg. He was 59 years old. He was eight months from retirement. He had spent 20 years as one of the most respected prosecutors in central Pennsylvania. At 11:30 that morning, he called his partner from a rural stretch of road, told her he would not be home in time to walk the dog, and hung up. He was never seen again. The next day, his car was found in a Lewisburg parking lot with cigarette ashes inside from a man who did not smoke. His work laptop was later pulled from the Susquehanna River with its hard drive removed. His home computer had recent searches for "how to wreck a hard drive." Three national investigations have never resolved what happened. Twenty-one years later, no one knows whether Ray Gricar took his own life, staged his own disappearance, or was murdered by someone connected to the criminals he had prosecuted. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here [linktr.ee/one_minute_remaining] Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE [https://www.youtube.com/@CrimeAtBedtimeOfficial] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.