Things I Want To Know
Ever wonder what really happened — not the rumors, not the Netflix version, but the truth buried in forgotten police files? We did too.
We don’t chase conspiracy theories or ghost stories. We chase facts. Through FOIA requests, interviews, and case files scattered across America, we dig through what’s left behind to find what still doesn’t make sense. Along the way, you’ll hear the real conversations between us — the questions, the theories, and the quiet frustration that comes when justice fades.
Each episode takes you inside a case that time tried to erase — the voices left behind, the investigators who never quit, and the clues that still echo decades later. We don’t claim to solve them. We just refuse to let them be forgotten.
Join us as we search for the truth, one mystery at a time.
Episodes
70 episodes
Murder in the Bayou, The Jeff Davis Eight
Eight women were found dead in Jennings, Louisiana. Nobody’s been held responsible.That’s the case.This all happens in Jefferson Davis Parish. Small town. Water everywhere. Canals, drainage ditches, roadside drops. If you’v...
A Three-Year-Old Labeled Evil In The Arkansas Woods
In April 1978, three-year-old Stephanie Alana Hall was killed in the Ozark woods of Newton County, Arkansas by members of a small religious cult. When investigators asked why anyone would murder a child, the answer they heard was almost ...
Boys On The Tracks: Mena Arkansas 1987
On August 23, 1987, two Arkansas teenagers were found dead on a railroad track outside Bryant.Authorities quickly ruled it an accident. The official story claimed Kevin Ives and Don Henry had smoked marijuana, laid down on the tracks, an...
When the Coroner Says It’s Not Murder
When the Coroner Says It’s Not MurderTwo teenage boys are found dead on railroad tracks near Mena, Arkansas.The ruling? Accident.A man is found with four gunshot wounds to the chest.The ruling? Suicide.Now… I ...
Jack The Ripper vs HH Holms. Why the two killers are not the same
Was H. H. Holmes really Jack the Ripper?It’s one of true crime’s most persistent myths. This week on Things I Want To Know, we break it apart using motive, method, timeline, and behavioral profiling.Andrea takes Whitechap...
Radium Town, USA. Come For The Glow, Stay For The Smell
What if your entire town was built on something that wasn’t real?Claremore, Oklahoma once rebranded itself as “Radium Town.” Hotels. Parades. Bathhouses. Souvenir jugs. Steam rooms packed with believers.One problem.The wate...
Donna Sue Nelton: The Jane Doe Who Waited 32 Years For A Name
Secrets don’t always hide in the dark. Sometimes they sit in a box on a shelf for decades, waiting on the day science finally catches up. After a quick start, we take a hard turn into Benton County, Arkansas, where skeletal remains were found i...
Damascus, Arkansas: The Titan II Explosion
A nine-pound socket slipped during routine maintenance inside a Titan II missile silo near Damascus, Arkansas. That’s not a metaphor. That’s the start of a real chain of events that turned a live Cold War ICBM into a disaster under rural farmla...
Vanished In The Driveway: Misty Dawn Faulkner
A quiet driveway is supposed to be the end of the day. Park. Breathe. Go inside. Safe.That is why this case won’t let go.Misty Dawn Faulkner makes it home to rural Oklahoma after a shift. There’s a Walmart run in the mix. There’s ...
Bodies in the Back Room: The Jacksonville Funeral Home Scandal
A funeral home is supposed to be the one place that runs on dignity, routine, and trust. Transfer. Refrigeration. Service. Closure.In Jacksonville, Arkansas, that trust snapped.In this episode of Things I Want To Know, we s...
Ronald Gene Simmons: The Christmas Massacre Arkansas Can’t Forget
This episode examines Ronald Gene Simmons, tracing his rigid rise through the military, the incest allegation that triggered a sudden move, and the slow construction of an isolated household on Mockingbird Hill. As control began to slip,...
Inside Our True Crime Playbook: Respecting Victims Without Lying About the Facts
Most true crime podcasts lie politely. We don’t. So we decided to explain why.After getting pushback for “disrespecting” a victim, Andrea and I laid out exactly how Things I Want to Know works. This episode is our playb...
Charleston’s Chemical Spill and the Fragile Promise of “Safe” Water
Things I Want To KnowDon’t Boil the Water | Charleston, West VirginiaA sweet smell coming out of the tap should never turn into a guessing game.In this episode, we dig into the 2014 Charleston, West Virginia c...
Vanished Without A Trace
Two women vanish in Arkansas, sixteen years apart, and the details still don’t sit right.In this episode, we examine the disappearance of 18-year-old Cleashindra Hall in Pine Bluff in 1994 and art teacher Mary “Jimmie” Bobo Shi...
A Broken Brain, A Violent Trail Across Wartime Arkansas. Red Hall, the killer History overlooked
Paul G and Andrea trace the violent trail of James “Red” Hall across wartime Arkansas, where a hellfire upbringing and a childhood head injury twisted a drifter into a man who turned small moments into real-life dead ends. A .38 revolver ties t...
Kelly Wilson and the Evil that Gilmer, Texas Mistook for the Truth
In 1992, seventeen year old Kelly Wilson vanished in Gilmer, Texas. A short walk from a video store to her car became one of the most debated missing person cases in Texas history. What should have been a focused, evidence driven investigation ...
Did Michael Ronning Kill One Woman… Or Ten?
In this Episode we dive into the case of Michael Ronning, a convicted murderer who spent years bragging about killings no court ever proved. His life stretched from Michigan to Arkansas to Florida, and everywhere he went the same pattern fol...
The 1972 Bombing of a Small-Town Cop
A police lieutenant turns the key, presses the brake, and his truck erupts. He lives. The case almost disappears. We set out to learn why a 1972 Springdale, Arkansas bombing barely made the paper and what the town didn’t (or wouldn’t) say out l...
From Jane Doe To Rebecca Sue Hill: DNA, Missteps, And A Trail Across States
A nameless girl lay in a Florida forest for decades, filed under Judy Doe and lost to a noisy era of serial predators and thin evidence. Forty years later, genetic genealogy restores her identity—Rebecca Sue Hill, a teenager from Arkansas—and f...
A Small Town, A Vanished Child, And The Case That Won’t Let Go
The story starts on a quiet May evening in 1991 and never really stops echoing. A nine-year-old sets out to sell costume jewelry in a tiny Arkansas town where people wave from porches and the fields hold the day’s last light. By week’s end, she...
Roadside Vanishings, Real Timelines
A simple errand, a stamped receipt at 3:17 p.m., and a car left on US 71 with the keys still in the ignition. We walk through the last verified hours of 18-year-old Dana Stidham and sort what’s true from what’s been repeated for decades. No the...
Banjos, Bombs, and Bathtub Drownings: A Tour of Arkansas Crime
Ever wondered what dark secrets lurk beneath the surface of America's quiet small towns? In this episode, Paul and Andrea pull back the curtain on two shocking criminal cases from Northwest Arkansas that time has nearly forgotten.The co...
Staged Terror, Signed in Blood
Buried in declassified government archives lies a chilling reminder of how fragile democracy can be from within. Operation Northwoods represents one of the most disturbing chapters in American military planning – a moment when the nation's top ...
Nuclear Nightmares
Nuclear weapons vanish without a trace. Soviet submarines prepare to launch. False alarms flash across screens in Moscow bunkers. The Cold War was more dangerous than most of us ever realized.We reveal the shocking truth that at least s...
Vertus Hardyman's Hat: When Modern Medicine Burns
In 1927, a “modern cure” for ringworm left a boy’s skull collapsed. He wore a hat for 80 years to hide the truth. In a rural Black farming town in Indiana, 1927, a group of schoolchildren were told they’d receive a modern med...
