Crime at Bedtime

The murder of Rachel Nickell in July 1992 is one of the most notorious crimes in British history, and one of the most catastrophic miscarriages of justice British policing has ever produced. Rachel Nickell was a 23-year-old former model and devoted young mother when she was attacked and killed on Wimbledon Common in southwest London, in broad daylight, in front of her two-year-old son, who was the only witness. Under enormous public pressure, the police fixed on a local dog walker named Colin Stagg and, with no forensic evidence against him, mounted one of the most controversial undercover operations in British history, a so-called honeytrap that a judge would later condemn as deceptive conduct of the grossest kind. Colin Stagg was innocent. And while the police pursued the wrong man, the real killer, Robert Napper, remained free, and took two more lives before he was stopped. In this episode of Crime at Bedtime, we tell the full story of the murder of Rachel Nickell: the killing on the common, the disastrous profiling and the honeytrap, the collapse of the case at the Old Bailey, the terrible cost of pursuing the wrong man, and the tiny speck of DNA that finally, sixteen years later, identified the true killer and cleared an innocent man's name. We tell it with care, and we keep Rachel, and every life this failure touched, at its heart. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the wrong man.
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The Solway Firth Spaceman is one of the most famous unexplained photographs in British history, and after more than sixty years, people are still arguing about what it shows. On the afternoon of the 23rd of May 1964, a Carlisle firefighter named Jim Templeton took three photographs of his five-year-old daughter Elizabeth on Burgh Marsh, overlooking the Solway Firth in Cumberland, England. It was an ordinary family day out on an ordinary spring afternoon. But when the film came back from Kodak, the middle photograph showed something that should not have been there: a tall figure in what looked like a white spacesuit, standing silently in the empty marsh behind the little girl. Templeton swore no one had been there when he took the picture. The police examined it and found nothing suspicious. Kodak confirmed the negative had not been faked or tampered with. Within days, the photograph was in newspapers around the world. Then two strange men in dark suits arrived at Templeton's fire station, refused to give their names, and demanded he take them to the marsh. And on the far side of the world, at a rocket testing range in Australia, a launch was said to have been aborted after two similar figures were seen on the firing range. In this episode of Mysteries at Bedtime, we tell the full story of the Solway Firth Spaceman: the photograph, the family, the Men in Black, the Blue Streak missile connection, and the surprisingly
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The great con of Cassie Chadwick is one of the most audacious frauds in American history, and it was built on a single, brilliant lie: that she was the secret illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie, the richest man in the world. Born a poor railway worker's daughter in rural Canada, Cassie Chadwick reinvented herself a dozen times before arriving in Cleveland as the wife of a respectable doctor. Then she staged her masterpiece. She had herself driven to Andrew Carnegie's New York mansion, went inside on a pretext, and let a banker "accidentally" glimpse a forged promissory note for millions, signed in Carnegie's name. She swore him to secrecy, confident he would do exactly the opposite, and soon the bankers of Ohio were falling over themselves to lend her a fortune, certain they held a private claim on the wealth of Andrew Carnegie himself. The genius of it was that Carnegie had never met her, never signed a thing, and had no idea she existed. In this episode of Crime at Bedtime, we tell the full story of the great con of Cassie Chadwick: how the scheme worked, why the greed of America's bankers became the very thing that protected her, the small-town bank she brought crashing down, and the single question no one thought to ask until it was far too late. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the Carnegie secret.
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The disappearance of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon in April 2014 is one of the most haunting and hotly debated mysteries of the modern age, and more than a decade later, no one agrees on what really happened. The two young Dutch women, best friends near the end of the trip of a lifetime, set out on a popular jungle trail near Boquete, Panama, on a bright afternoon. They photographed themselves smiling at the foot of the trail at 11 in the morning. They never came back. Six hours later, one of their phones dialled the emergency number. It did not connect, and for the next ten days the phones kept trying, again and again, and never once reached a soul. Then, one week in, in the dead of night, their camera took ninety photographs in near-total darkness: rocks, jungle, running water, and images no one has ever been able to fully explain. Ten weeks later, a backpack was found by a remote river, dry and neatly packed, far from where the two women should ever have been. In this episode of Mysteries at Bedtime, we tell the full story of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon: the ten days of calls into the void, the ninety flashes in the dark, the strange condition of the backpack and the remains, and the two competing explanations that still divide everyone who studies the case. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the ninety flashes in the dark.
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The murder of Brett Bowyer in February 2002 is one of the most harrowing crimes in Alabama's history, and it produced one of the most extraordinary acts of survival ever recorded. On a cold night in Russell County, two men posing as narcotics officers talked their way into the home of a car dealer named Forrest "Butch" Bowyer, presented a fake search warrant, and handcuffed Butch and his 12-year-old son, Brett. It was not an arrest. It was a robbery, and it would end in a shallow grave in the rural darkness. The two men took Butch's money, drove father and son to a remote site, cut Butch's throat, murdered young Brett, and buried them both, laughing as they covered the grave. But Butch Bowyer was not dead. With his throat cut, he played dead until his killers left, then clawed his way up out of the earth and walked a quarter of a mile to a road, not to save himself, but to make sure his son's killers were caught and his boy was brought home. In this episode of Crime at Bedtime, we tell the full story of the murder of Brett Bowyer: the fake officers, the fatal robbery, the almost unbelievable survival of a mortally wounded father, the dashcam footage that captured him at the roadside, the swift arrests, and the two death sentences that followed. We have told it with care, and we have kept a 12-year-old boy, not the men who killed him, at its heart. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the man who would not die.
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