Have you ever seen the 2005 supernatural horror movie, “The Exorcism of Emily Rose”? Tonight I’m talking about the true story that inspired the hit flick.  Anneliese Michel was a deeply religious young lady from Klingenberg, Bavaria, who had suffered from epilepsy and mental health issues for several years. Despite undergoing multiple medical treatments, her condition worsened, leading her family and two local priests to believe she was possessed. To rid her body and soul of the demonic...

As if being a parent isn’t hard enough, many of us have had to leave our precious children in the care of a stranger at one point or another. It takes a great deal of trust and pure hope that everything will be okay - because how much can you really know about a person, and what they’re like when watchful adults are not around? The crimes committed by Christine Falling, known as the babysitter from hell, are a reminder that parents need to be diligent when selecting a caregiver for their...

In March 2022, married couple Eric and Kouri Richins were celebrating at their Utah home. Kouri, a real estate agent, had closed on a house that she had planned to flip for her business. They put their three young boys to bed and had a few drinks, including a Moscow mule that Kouri made for Eric to enjoy in bed. The couple then fell asleep, with Eric sleeping in the master bedroom and Kouri sleeping in one of the boy’s rooms because he often had night terrors. Around 3 am, the child woke up...

On September 8th, 2014, Troy Turner walked into a police station in Maryland to report that his girlfriend, Catherine Hoggle, and their two youngest children were missing. He claimed that he had awoken in their apartment that morning to find them gone - only their eldest son remained at their home. It was alarming, but Troy was relieved when a few hours later Catherine returned to explain that she had dropped three-year-old Sara and two-year-old Jacob off at a new daycare centre. Panic once...

We often think of DNA as one of the most solid, fool-proof pieces of evidence in a crime investigation, but our story tonight shows how that isn’t at all true. A female German serial killer, dubbed “the Phantom of Heilbronn” - or the woman without a face, was believed to be responsible for a slew of crimes across the country, including six murders. The hunt to find this evil monster made international headlines as police tried to identify the killer before they struck again. The Phantom of...

Serial Napper will be taking a hiatus over the summer. Thank you for your support. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Before dawn break, on New Year's Day, 1998, 21-year-old Ben Smart and 17-year-old Olivia Hope were looking for a place to crash after spending the evening celebrating with other partygoers in the Marlborough Sounds, in New Zealand. They were last seen getting out of a water taxi and boarding a yacht after a strange man offered them a place to sleep off the champagne on board his boat. Not the greatest of decisions, but they needed a place to sleep because other partygoers had taken the place...

It was the early evening hours of Sunday, April 19, 2015. Vincent Viafore and his fiancee Angelika Graswald were trying to enjoy a kayaking adventure in the Hudson River, but the water was cold and choppy, and they were not adequately prepared for the conditions. For one - Vincent wasn’t wearing a life vest and his kayak was missing a drain plug. Disaster struck as they tried to cross the river, leaving from Bannermans Island and heading towards Plum Point Park. Vincent’s kayak started to...

The date was March 6th, 1984, the night before Mardi Gras. Hailing from New Orleans, The Brown family, which included parents Johnnie Mae and Aubrey Brown and their 10 children, spent the evening getting ready to celebrate. Excitement was in the air in anticipation of the music, food and floats that they were going to be able to enjoy. The kids were put down to bed early that night so that they would be well-rested for the festivities the next day. And then, around 3 am when the house was...

One of the first things I noticed when I moved to Tokyo was the smiling faces of J-Pop idols posted everywhere - large billboards, moving trucks, subway cars. Japan has the second largest music market in the world, mostly due to the rising popularity of J-Pop, with millions of fans in Japan and all around the world.  One man, known as Johnny Kitagawa, considered the grandfather of J-pop, is responsible for creating idols out of hundreds of young boys who dreamed of being famous. But few know...

It was the very early morning of March 9, 2019 - around 3:30 am, before the sun came up. 25-year-old Aubrey Dameron walked into the living room and told her mother and brother that she was off to meet a friend. She doesn’t specify who this friend is - but she leaves home without her purse or her anti-seizure medication, which she is supposed to carry with her at all times as she suffers from epilepsy. She wouldn’t return home and after a few days of no contact with her family - they reported...

On September 4th, 2023, at around 5:53 am, 19-year-old Noah Presgrove was found dead on the side of an Oklahoma highway. It was a bizarre scene - Noah was found wearing mismatched shoes, with only one of the shoes belonging to him. His shorts were found a few feet away from his body, along with three pieces of white metal chain and part of his tooth. There were two chunks of hair found - one on the roadway and one on his right butt cheek. Noah had attended a party earlier that evening, where...

It was the morning of February 26, 2024, and it was supposed to be a day like any other. At around 6am, Katie Proudfoot walked into the bedroom of her 15-year-old son, Sebastian Rogers, to wake him up for school. To her shock, she found his room empty - he was gone. Not in his room and nowhere to be found elsewhere in their Tennessee home. Yes, Sebastian was a teenager and sometimes they can be notorious for sneaking out or leaving without telling their parents where they’re going - but in...

It was the summer of 1995. 13-year-old Thad Phillips had fallen asleep in his living room watching a movie. Suddenly, he awoke to the feeling of someone lifting him up and carrying him away - initially he thought maybe it was his dad, bringing him upstairs to bed. But it wasn’t. The person holding him was an older teen boy named Joe Clark. Joe carried Thad outside of his home and asked him to follow him to help fix his broken-down car. Still half asleep, Thad agreed, following Joe all of the...

One early morning in February 1977, the Chicago fire department responded to a call reporting billowing smoke coming from one of the units at the Pine Grove Avenue apartments. After putting out the flames, they discovered that this was much more than a simple fire - it was a crime scene. Inside the smokey apartment, they found the body of Teresita Basa, a middle-aged healthcare worker originally from the Philippines. She had been stabbed to death, and still had the butcher knife lodged in her...

“If he catches me, he will make me disappear,” was one of the last things wife and mother of three, Amy Mullis, allegedly told the man she was having an affair with just a few months before she was found lying face down with a corn rake sticking out of her back. She would die from her injuries received in what was initially believed to be a freak farm accident. However during her autopsy, it was revealed that Amy had sustained six stabs to her back - when the corn rake only had 4 prongs -...

28-year-old Kanika Powell was a young military veteran who lived in an apartment by herself in Prince George County, Maryland. She has been described as a strong, independent woman, whose life experiences made her very capable of handling stressful situations. However, all of that would change in August 2008, when Kanika would receive a series of strange visitors to her front door. The first was a man, dressed in plain clothing, claiming to be an FBI agent, who refused to produce a badge to...

John Christie was a World War 1 and 2 veteran who lived with his wife Ethel in the bottom floor flat of 10 Rillington Place, a low-income apartment building in London’s Notting Hill district. In the 50s, there was a media storm when one of the tenants living in the same building as John, a man named Timothy Evans, was convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and baby daughter - despite claiming innocence. John and his wife were star witnesses in that trial, testifying that their upstairs...

In 1950 Timothy Evans was accused of murdering his wife Beryl, and their baby girl, Geraldine. Timothy, a simple man who couldn’t read or write, lived with his little family in London’s Notting Hill district in the top floor flat. He refuted the accusations, instead claiming that it was actually his downstairs neighbour, John Christie, who killed his wife and daughter during a botched home abortion. John Christie was a World War 1 and 2 veteran who lived in the ground floor flat with his...

In the early morning hours of September 1st, 2017, around 1 am, a North Carolina 911 dispatcher receives a phone call from 29-year-old Matthew Phelps, an aspiring pastor. He says, “I think I killed my wife. I had a dream, and then I turned on the lights and she’s dead on the floor…I have blood all over me and there’s a bloody knife on the bed and I think I did it. I can’t believe this.”  Matthew claimed that he had “accidentally” stabbed his wife to death while under the influence of cough...

In the early morning hours of May 24, 1987, Kenneth Parks got up from the sofa where he had been watching TV, got into his vehicle and drove 20 km - or 12 and a half miles - from his home in Toronto to his in-laws home in Scarborough. He used the spare key that they had given him to enter the residence and proceeded to the master bedroom, where he found his mother and father-in-law sleeping in their bed. He proceeded to bludgeon his mother-in-law with a tire iron, which he had brought with...

14-year-old British Columbia teenager Reena Virk struggled to fit in. She was relentlessly bullied from elementary school, all the way to high school. Self-conscious about her looks and struggling with her strict religious parent's rules, times were tough. So on Nov. 14, 1997, when she received a phone call inviting her out to a social gathering, she gladly accepted. She had no idea the invite was all a part of a revenge plan - retaliation for spreading rumours about one of the other girls....

Life was not always easy for 20-year-old Amanda Wienckowski. At one point, her friends and family had to watch her struggle with an addiction that had her spending time with undesirable people on the wrong side of town. But she was trying to get her life back on track, even enrolling in a criminal justice course at her local community college. However, on the evening of December 5, 2008, her life was cut short. According to Adam Patterson, Amanda was dropped off that night at Antoine Garner’s...

In 2014, YouTuber and experienced hiker, Kenny Veach, who went by the handle ‘snakebitmgee’ seemingly vanished while looking for a mysterious cave in the Mojave Dessert. The first time he discovered this cave, which was shaped like a perfect letter ‘M’, he said his whole body began to vibrate and the feeling only grew stronger as he got closer to the entrance. After commenting about this strange cave on a YouTube video, he received a slew of responses from people who thought he was lying. On...