Triggered - The True Crime Podcast

In July 2017, a woman in Campbell, Ohio went down to her basement for a pound of ground beef. There was a chest freezer down there that belonged to a friend of her husband's, and it had a padlock on it, and whoever installed that padlock had mounted it backwards.

Three screws. That's what it took to break open a case that had been running unnoticed for five months.

Shannon Graves was 28 years old. She lost her mother young, dropped out of high school, and went back years later to get her GED and put herself through cosmetology school. She was two years into a career she'd built herself, one client at a time. She had a dog she adored and a family she never missed a birthday for.

She also had a boyfriend she was preparing to leave, and an apartment, a car, a phone and a benefits card that he was living on.

What was discovered in a basement in Ohio will haunt Ash and Chantal forever.

Content warning: intimate partner violence, homicide, dismemberment, and the destruction of a body using chemicals. Please take care of yourself.

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On October 9, 1986, nine year old best friends Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway told a neighbour they were heading to Wild Park in Moulsecoomb, Brighton. It was the last time anyone saw them alive. The next afternoon, two civilian searchers found the girls hidden in a makeshift den in the park, and a case that would consume Sussex Police for the next three decades was born.

A 20 year old local roofer named Russell Bishop inserted himself into the search from the very beginning, bringing along his terrier and claiming the dog was a highly trained tracker. He was arrested within weeks. And in December 1987, after a four week trial and just two hours of jury deliberation, he walked free.

Then, in 1990, he abducted and tried to kill a seven year old girl.

This week we walk through the forensic failures that let a child killer go home: the body temperatures nobody recorded, the hand marks never measured, the blood evidence never analysed, and a blue Pinto sweatshirt that the prosecution built its case around and the police failed to preserve. We get into the 2005 double jeopardy reform that cracked the door open, the billion to one DNA match found on evidence taped in 1986 and stored for decades, the 2018 retrial at the Old Bailey, and the girlfriend who lied on the stand in 1987 and finally answered for it in 2021.

Bishop died in prison in January 2022. In April 2024, Sussex Police formally apologised for their failings, including the wrongful arrest of Nicola's father.
Two families waited 32 years. Here is how they finally got there.

Sources include BBC News, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, The Argus, and the published sentencing remarks in R v Bishop and R v Johnson.

Content note: this episode discusses the murder and sexual assault of children.

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In 1995, a Canadian schoolteacher took the trip of a lifetime to New Zealand. Her tour guide was a six foot seven, four hundred pound former city councillor who had spent his entire life on the water.

Fifteen years later, one of them drowned in a mountain lake in British Columbia. The other one was the only person on earth who saw it happen.

What followed was one of the strangest homicide cases in Canadian history. A rock. A fishing rod. An accidental death policy pulled out of a stack of bank flyers. A jailhouse informant with a list of five names. A four month trial where the accused defended himself and performed a haka in the courtroom. A hung jury. A first degree murder conviction. And then an appeal court that took the whole thing apart and wrote five words that ended it: the Crown's case was not strong.

Sixteen years on, there is still no answer.

This episode is about the case. But it is also about a woman who taught grade three in a hamlet called Dapp, Alberta, and the town that still remembers her.
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On the night of September 16, 2009, a 24 year old woman sat down alone at Geoffrey's, an upscale restaurant on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. She ordered dinner. She could not pay the $89 bill. Staff described her behaviour as strange, and deputies were called.

Mitrice Richardson was a Cal State Fullerton graduate. She was warm, brilliant, and by her family's account she had been quietly struggling with her mental health in the weeks before that night. Her father would later say she had bipolar disorder. She was arrested for defrauding an innkeeper, a small amount of marijuana was found in her car, and her car was impounded.

At roughly 12:28 in the morning on September 17, she was released from the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff's Station in Calabasas. No car. No purse. No phone. No money. She was from West Covina and had no reason to know a single road in that canyon. She walked out into the dark and was never seen alive again.

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Michelle Hadley was in her twenties, in grad school, and by her own description sickeningly wholesome. Then she was arrested, held on a million dollars bail, and told she was facing life in prison.

The emails threatening her ex fiancé's pregnant wife were real. Sent several times a day, from an account called Lilithistruth, describing what the woman wore to work and where she went. The Craigslist ads inviting strangers to her door were real. The men who showed up were real. The 911 call was real.

And every piece of it pointed at Michelle. Including two emails she really had written, months earlier, in her own name, using the same name the stalker was using.

She sat in that cell for 88 days saying she'd been set up. Not one person believed her.

This week Chantal walks Ashley through the case behind Netflix's A Toxic Love Story, and she starts a long way before the documentary does. With Michelle before any of it. With cameras in a kitchen and a life narrowed to three points on a map. With a woman in a Huntington Beach bar telling a police officer what she does for a living. And with a family in the Arizona desert who found a stranger walking alone, miles from her own car.

Content warning: sexual assault allegations, coercive control, staged assaults, and a psychiatric crisis. No graphic detail.

Sources include the Orange County District Attorney's Office, the US Department of Justice, filings from the Central District of California, and Netflix's A Toxic Love Story.

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Make sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcast

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