Pamela Smart became a household name - not for being the next Barbara Walters as she’d hoped but for orchestrating the cold-blooded murder of her husband - using her teenage lover as the trigger man. The case became a media sensation when it hit the news cycle in 1990.  It was such a high-profile...

In this month’s series, we’ll look at people who were manipulated into committing murder.  First up, we’ll take a look at a case where a mother pressures her child to kill his father.  That fact alone would make this story truly horrible but it was not the last murder Marie Witte orchestrated. ...

In this special bonus episode of Once Upon a Crime, I speak with Michael Wolraich, the author of a new true crime book, The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age.  In 1931, Vivian Gordon’s body was found in a gully in the Bronx’s Van Cortlandt Park. She’d been...