Explore every episode of the podcast Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast

David Edward Taylor, a self-proclaimed televangelist and "Apostle," led the Kingdom of God Global Church (KOGGC). In a sweeping 2025 federal indictment, prosecutors revealed that Taylor and executive director Michelle Brannon operated a coercive multi-state forced labor and fraud scheme.

Karl Karlsen is an American murderer convicted of killing his first wife, Christina Karlsen, in a staged 1991 California house fire and his 23-year-old son, Levi Karlsen, by crushing him under a truck in New York in 2008. Motivated entirely by financial gain.

Edwin Valero was a Venezuelan professional boxer who finished his career with an undefeated record of 27–0, winning every single match by knockout. He is remembered both as one of the most explosive and destructive punchers in the history of combat sports and for the horrific real-life tragedy that ended his life.

In 2011, a woman named Debbie Stevens reportedly donated a kidney through a transplant chain to help her boss. After the surgery, Stevens later claimed she faced workplace problems during recovery and was eventually fired.

Artur Samarin was a 23-year-old Ukrainian national who famously posed as a teenage honors student at Harrisburg High School in Pennsylvania to remain in the United States after his visa expired in 2012. Under the fabricated identity of "Asher Potts," he maintained a 4.1 GPA, joined the National Honor Society, and participated actively in the school’s ROTC program. He reportedly orchestrated the scam with his American host parents to gain legal status and pursue an education.

Ricardo Lopez was an obsessed, delusional fan of singer Björk who documented his downward spiral in a video diary culminating in his 1996 incident.

Jean-Claude Romand was a French impostor who spent 18 years pretending to be a successful medical doctor and researcher for the World Health Organization. In reality, he never finished medical school, spending his days hiding in cars or highway rest areas. When his colossal web of deceit and financial fraud began to unravel in January 1993, Romand committed murder to avoid the shame of exposure.

Jennifer Faith pleaded guilty in February 2022 to orchestrating the October 2020 murder of her husband, American Airlines technology director Jamie Faith, outside their Dallas home. She was sentenced to life in prison in June 2022. She manipulated her high school boyfriend, Darl Niemann, into shooting her husband by using fake email accounts to pose as her husband and a colleague, fabricating vivid stories that she was being abused.

In 2019, 18-year-old Berfin Ozek from Turkey was brutally attacked with sulfuric acid by her ex-boyfriend, Casim Ozan Celtik, who told her "if I can't have you, no one can". The assault left her permanently disfigured and partially blind.

Charlize Theron’s father, Charles Theron, was legally shot and killed by her mother, Gerda, in self-defense on June 21, 1991, after he violently attacked his family. Charles, a chronic alcoholic, returned to the family’s South Africa home in a drunken rage.

Andrés Escobar was a Colombian national team defender tragically murdered in Medellín on July 2, 1994, just days after accidentally scoring an own goal against the United States at the FIFA World Cup. The own goal contributed to Colombia's shocking early elimination from the tournament and sparked widespread outrage, deeply compounding the tension already driven by the nation's political chaos and cartel violence.

The story of James Farthing centers on a dramatic turn of fortune where a historic lottery win was immediately followed by a cascade of serious legal troubles. In April 2025, Farthing, a Kentucky resident with a prior criminal record, made history by winning a massive $167.3 million Powerball jackpot, the largest ever in the state. However, just days after claiming the prize and publicly promising to turn his life around, he was arrested at a hotel bar in Florida for battery on a law enforcement officer. Over the following year, Farthing's legal spiral worsened with multiple additional arrests in Kentucky, including charges for a 100-mph hit-and-run crash, witness intimidation, and a burglary charge involving his ex-girlfriend.

The Kenneth Noid story is a bizarre and tragic piece of fast-food history involving a 1989 hostage situation fueled by extreme paranoia. Domino's Pizza was running a highly successful advertising campaign featuring "The Noid," a claymation character who tried to ruin pizzas, alongside the slogan "Avoid the Noid." Kenneth Lamar Noid, a 22-year-old man from Georgia who suffered from severe mental illness, became convinced that the commercial campaign was a personal attack directly mocking him. Believing the company was out to get him, he entered a local Domino's restaurant, held two employees hostage for over five hours, and demanded $100,000 and a getaway car.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, along with his older brother Tamerlan, perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, 2013, detonating two pressure-cooker bombs near the race's finish line.

That’s disrespectful to Jurassic Park--Actress Jenifer Lewis was scammed out of $50,000 by her then-boyfriend Antonio Mariot Wilson, a serial con artist who orchestrated a multi-year romance scam targeting several women.

Chris Latham, a former wealthy bank executive from Charleston, South Carolina, was convicted in 2014 for his involvement in a failed 2013 murder-for-hire plot against his estranged wife, Nancy Cannon. Motivated by a bitter divorce and a desire to avoid substantial alimony payments, Latham collaborated with his mistress and assistant, Wendy Moore, who orchestrated the scheme by hiring her ex-husband, Samuel Yenawine, and another accomplice, Aaron Wilkinson, to execute the hit.

George Trepal, a chemist and Mensa member, was convicted in 1991 for the murder of his neighbor, Peggy Carr, and the attempted murder of her family in Alturas, Florida.

Colleen Stan, famously known as the "Girl in the Box," was abducted at knifepoint in May 1977 by Cameron and Janice Hooker while hitchhiking. Held captive in a remote Red Bluff, CA home for seven years, she was often confined to a coffin-like wooden box beneath a waterbed.

Jeffrey Stenner, a former Connecticut bank vice president and restaurant owner, infamously orchestrated two high-profile armored car robberies in West Hartford, including a 1988 heist where he wore a Santa Claus. Fearing that his accomplice and getaway driver, Robert Schmidt, was talking too much and would expose their crimes to federal investigators, Stenner hired several men to murder him.

Maximilian Schmidt is a German cybercriminal who, at age 18, single-handedly ran a multi-million-euro international drug empire named "Shiny Flakes" from his childhood bedroom. Over 14 months, he sold roughly one ton of illegal narcotics worldwide using his website and standard postal services.

Suzane von Richthofen is the mastermind behind the murder of her wealthy parents on October 31, 2002. Then an 18-year-old law student, Suzane conspired with her boyfriend, Daniel Cravinhos, and his brother, Christian, to bludgeon Manfred and Marísia von Richthofen to death in their São Paulo home while they slept.

Joe Conforte operated several illicit brothels before successfully lobbying for the state's first legal brothel license at his famous Mustang Ranch in 1971. His career was defined by high-stakes battles with the government, including a stint in prison for extortion and a scandalous association with the shooting death of boxer Oscar Bonavena on his property. Facing mounting federal indictments for tax evasion and racketeering, Conforte fled to Brazil in 1991, where he lived as a fugitive until his death in 2019, successfully avoiding extradition for nearly three decades.

The eBay stalking scandal was a bizarre and criminal harassment campaign orchestrated in 2019 by company employees against Ina and David Steiner, authors of the newsletter EcommerceBytes, in retaliation for their critical reporting. Led by eBay’s security team, the harassment included sending terrifying packages—such as a bloody pig mask, live insects, and a funeral wreath—to the couple’s home, alongside physical surveillance and public Craigslist posts inviting strangers to their property.

Juliana Peres Magalhães, a Brazilian former au pair, was a central figure in a sensational 2023 double-murder case in Northern Virginia, where she participated in a plot with her employer and lover, Brendan Banfield, to kill his wife, Christine Banfield. The pair orchestrated an elaborate scheme using a fetish website to lure a stranger, Joseph Ryan, to the family's home, where they fatally shot and stabbed him and Christine while attempting to stage the scene as a home invasion.

Founded in 2004 by Nicole Daedone, OneTaste marketed itself as a revolutionary wellness company focused on OM to foster female empowerment and healing. While it initially gained mainstream acclaim through high-profile endorsements and a popular TED Talk, investigative reports in 2018 exposed a dark side, with former members alleging cult-like manipulation, financial exploitation, and psychological abuse.

Michael Mastromarino, a former oral surgeon whose license was revoked due to drug addiction, orchestrated a massive illegal body-snatching enterprise between 2001 and 2005 through his company, Biomedical Tissue Services. He conspired with several funeral directors to plunder tissue, bone, and organs from over 1,000 cadavers.

Wayne Couzens is a former Metropolitan Police officer who is serving a whole-life prison sentence for the kidnap and murder of 33-year-old Sarah Everard in March 2021.

Jessy Kurczewski was a Wisconsin woman convicted in 2023 for the first-degree intentional homicide of her friend, Lynn Hernan, for whom she had been acting as a caregiver. In October 2018, Kurczewski reported finding Hernan unresponsive in her home, initially suggesting the death was a result of a self-inflicted overdose. However, investigations and toxicology reports later determined that the death was a homicide caused by poisoning.

Nanette Johnston (now Nanette Packard) orchestrated the 1994 murder of her millionaire fiancé, Bill McLaughlin, to secure a $1 million life insurance payout and hide her extensive embezzlement of his funds. While living with McLaughlin in Newport Beach, she maintained a secret affair with former NFL player Eric Naposki and provided him with a house key and his schedule to facilitate the shooting.

Malcolm Webster, a British nurse dubbed the "Black Widower," was convicted in 2011 for the 1994 murder of his first wife, Claire Morris, and the 1999 attempted murder of his second wife, Felicity Drumm, both staged as car accidents to claim life insurance money. Operating as a calculated, financially-driven sociopath, Webster drugged his victims and attempted to kill them on different continents to fund an affluent lifestyle, eventually defrauding his second wife of her savings.

Dr. John Schneeberger, a trusted physician in Kipling, Saskatchewan, was revealed in the late 1990s to be a predator who assaulted patients and his own stepdaughter, launching a sensational true-crime case centered on an audacious forensic deception.

The Nick Perry lottery scandal, famously known as the "Triple Six Fix," was a 1980 scheme to rig the Pennsylvania Lottery’s "Daily Number". Orchestrated by beloved local TV host Nick Perry, the plan involved injecting white latex paint into all but the number 4 and 6 ping-pong balls used in the drawing, making the weighted balls too heavy to be sucked into the machine’s chute.

In 1995, McArthur Wheeler robbed two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight without a mask, believing that smearing lemon juice on his face would render him invisible to security cameras, a misunderstanding based on the logic of invisible ink. Wheeler, who was not delusional but simply profoundly mistaken, was shocked to be arrested later that evening after his clear image appeared on local news, stating "But I wore the juice".

In January 2009, Rosa Hill and her mother, Mei Li, entered the Dublin, California, home of Hill’s estranged husband, Eric Hill, during a contested custody battle over their daughter. During the incident, the women killed Eric's 91-year-old grandmother, Selma Hill.

Stewart Parnell, the former owner and CEO of the Peanut Corporation of America (PCA), was at the center of one of the deadliest food safety scandals in U.S. history after his company knowingly shipped salmonella-tainted peanut products between 2008 and 2009.

In May 2015, Glenna Duram fatally shot her husband, Martin "Marty" Duram, five times in their Sand Lake, Michigan. Glenna claimed to have no memory of the event, but investigators uncovered evidence of a motive rooted in severe financial troubles and a gambling addiction that had led to their home's foreclosure. The case gained international attention due to the couple's pet African Grey parrot, Bud, who began eerily mimicking an argument in Marty's voice following the murder.

Trey Eric Sesler, known online as "Mr. Anime," was a 22-year-old YouTuber from Texas popular in the late 2000s for his anime review channel, LensCap Productions. Sesler committed a horrific familicide in 2012.

In November 2004, 21-year-old University of Rochester student Christopher Porco used an axe to murder his father, Peter, and severely injure his mother, Joan, in their Delmar, New York home.

Kouri Richins, a Utah mother of three and real estate agent, was convicted in March 2026 of murdering her husband, Eric Richins, by spiking his cocktail.

Father Gerald Robinson, a Catholic priest in Toledo, Ohio, who was convicted in 2006 for the brutal 1980 murder of a 71-year-old nun, Sister Margaret Ann Pahl.

Bryan Cranston was once wanted for murder. And this could have ended his acting career before it had a chance to start.

Matthew Cox is a former Tampa, Florida-based mortgage broker who became one of the most prolific mortgage fraud con artists of the early 2000s, stealing an estimated $55 million by crafting elaborate synthetic identities and forging extensive loan documents. After his initial mortgage company collapsed in 2002, Cox escalated his crimes, leading to a three-year multi-state fugitive spree while on the U.S. Secret Service's Most Wanted list.

Davion Irvin is the man who was arrested in 2023 for a series of high-profile incidents at the Dallas Zoo, including the theft of two monkeys.

Bruno Fernandes de Souza, a prominent Brazilian soccer goalkeeper and captain for Flamengo, had his career abruptly ended in 2010 when he was arrested for orchestrating the abduction and brutal murder of his former girlfriend, Eliza Samudio.

In the 1960s, naturalist Margaret Howe Lovatt took part in a NASA-funded experiment on the island of St. Thomas aimed at teaching a bottlenose dolphin named Peter to understand and speak English. To facilitate constant interaction, Lovatt lived in a partially flooded house called the Dolphin House, where she spent nearly every waking moment with Peter. The study gained notoriety not just for its ambitious goals, but for the controversial turn it took when Lovatt began a physical relationship with the dolphin.

The Randy Stair case refers to a tragic incident that occurred on June 8, 2017, at a supermarket in Eaton Township, Pennsylvania. Stair, an employee at the store, opened fire during an overnight shift, killing three of his coworkers.

Valerie Cincinelli, a former 12-year veteran of the NYPD, was sentenced to four years in prison in 2021 after being caught in a murder-for-hire plot targeting her estranged husband, Isaiah Carvalho, and her boyfriend’s daughter. Cincinelli reportedly paid her then-boyfriend, John DiRubba, to hire a hitman to kill Carvalho as well as DiRubba’s daughter whom she viewed with sheer jealousy.

Suzan Carson, along with her husband James "Bear" Carson, became known as the "San Francisco Witch Killers" during a notorious murder spree in the early 1980s. Driven by a shared paranoid schizophrenia and a radicalized religious delusion, the couple believed they were "holy warriors" tasked with eliminating "witches" who threatened their spiritual survival. Their trail of violence claimed the lives of three people: their roommate Keryn Barnes in San Francisco, farmworker Clark Stephens in Humboldt County, and hitchhiker Jon Hellyer in Sonoma County.

An unidentified person or persons pretended to be Eon Musk and successfully pulled a romance scam on a Texas woman.

Luka Magnotta is a Canadian convicted murderer who gained international notoriety in 2012 for the murder of international student Jun Lin in Montreal