The last episode went out on June 5. There hasn’t been one since, and I owe you a straight answer about why, rather than letting the silence keep doing the talking.

I’ve paused making new episodes. I’m resting. That’s the honest version.

The timing isn’t lost on me. This year the show was named Highly Commended for Podcast: Rising Star at the CrimeCon UK True Crime Awards — and then I stopped making it. Believe me, I’ve noticed.

I’m not closing the door. Every episode is still up, and if I come back to it you’ll be the first to know. But right now I’m putting my energy somewhere else, and I want to tell you where — because I don’t think it’s as much of a departure as it looks.

What pulled me into these cases was never the crime. It was the people who got overlooked. Cases nobody covered. Victims whose names never made it past the local paper. The whole point was to put attention where attention wasn’t going.

That instinct hasn’t changed. What’s changed is where I think the need is sharpest right now.

The economy is getting harder for a lot of people. I’ve spent thirty years watching what happens when money goes wrong — and watching who shows up to take advantage when it does. Debt collectors who break the law. Companies that charge desperate people for help they never deliver. The people getting hurt right now mostly aren’t in a court file. They’re at a kitchen table at eleven at night, deciding which bill not to pay.

So that’s where I’ve gone. It’s the same job — pay attention to the people nobody else is paying attention to — just in a different room.

If you want to come along, Your Money Actually is where I’m writing about it: yourmoneysteve.substack.com. Same voice, same approach, no jargon. And my Get Out of Debt Guy podcast still goes out every week, so if it was the audio you came for, that hasn’t stopped.

One other thing, because it’s true and it made me happy: I started a 3D printing business. It’s called GetRedStuff. I make things out of red plastic. After years of spending my days in court documents, there’s something genuinely restorative about making an object you can hold.

Thank you for listening. Making this show mattered to me, and the people who found it made it matter more.

Every episode stays up. I’ll be around.

— Steve

Back in March I told you I was a little embarrassed to be nominated for the True Crime Awards. My feeling then was that I just pulled the court records — the cases did the rest.

Well, the results are in. True Crime Cases You Haven’t Heard was named Highly Commended in the Podcast: Rising Star category at the CrimeCon UK True Crime Awards 2026.

We didn’t take the top spot — someone else earned that, and good for them. But I keep thinking about what “highly commended” means for a show like this one. No network. No production company. No staff. Just me, a stack of PACER documents, and a promise to tell these stories without exploiting the people who lived them.

That promise is the part I hope got commended. No gore. No speculation. No recycled clips. Court records, named sources, and victims treated like human beings instead of content.

And honestly — you did this. Every listen, every share, every reply telling me a case stayed with you is what grew this show to the point where award judges noticed it existed. Thank you.

The badge is up on truecrimeunheard.com. The next case drops next week.

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

In October 2019, a crew in DEA ballistic vests pulled a man over in a Naperville parking lot in front of security cameras, put him in handcuffs, and walked him to a waiting car. Every bystander who looked up saw a federal arrest. Every bystander looked away.

What followed inside a vacant apartment on Chicago’s South Side is the hardest part of this story. He prayed to die. They laughed. He refused to give them another name to go after. He survived. And because he survived, he could one day point at the men who did it.

This episode is built from 15 federal court documents — the indictment, trial testimony, the government’s 33-page sentencing memo, and the signed judgment. The man who organized it, Sedgwick Williams, is serving 50 years in federal prison. The case was closed in 2024. Three sets of DNA from inside the kidnapping car have never been matched to a name.

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts

🎧 Listen on Spotify

What paid subscribers get this week:

📜 Behind the Case — There’s a document in the court file labeled “Letters of Support” — except it isn’t. It’s an FBI interview I almost skipped, and it holds a moment that never made the episode: a robber who calls himself “Sarge” stops mid-robbery to tell a victim he can keep his wedding ring. There’s the jail call where Williams, before he understood what he was facing, told his brother he was relieved he hadn’t “gotten life” — and then got fifty years anyway. There’s the piece of the law that means the entire DEA disguise was only a three-year crime, while the kidnapping it powered carried life. And there’s the number I pulled straight from the signed judgment: the restitution Williams was ordered to pay the man he tortured all night came to three hundred dollars. The full Behind the Case recording — plus the case files and court documents — is below for paid subscribers.

📄 15 federal court documents — the indictment, the government’s 33-page sentencing memo and all eight exhibits, the signed judgment, the trial court’s pretrial and post-trial orders, and the protective order. The full documentary record of what this crew did.

Not a paid subscriber yet? Upgrade below to get the documents and Behind the Case for this episode — and every episode going forward.

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Unlike the cases I cover, I don’t want this one to be a mystery.

Here’s my excuse. Ready?

Life.

The podcast lives on a long list of things I’m responsible for every day, and sometimes it gets bumped down a few spots — because it’s a labor of love, not a necessity. I hate missing a deadline. That’s my own stress to deal with, but I didn’t want to just go quiet on you and let you wonder.

The episode is recorded. It’s done. What’s left is the edit, and that’s the part that takes real time. I’m not going to dump something crappy on you just to hit 7 AM.

Here’s what I’ve come to terms with. The “experts” all say you have to publish at the same time, every time, be consistent, or else. But it’s an artificial deadline. I made it up. I’d love to hit it. I missed it. Sorry.

So, unless more software blows up today, or I make another sale over at my 3D printing shop — GetRedStuff.com, which is a thing I do now as well, and it has its own shipping deadlines — today is edit day.

Episode’s coming. Today or tomorrow.

I just didn’t want 7 AM coming and going to be the mystery this week.

— Steve

Not the court documents. Not the psychiatric evaluations or the sentencing memos. The price list. The Telegram post from January 2023 where a sixteen-year-old in the Mojave Desert laid out what it costs to send armed police to someone’s home.

Forty dollars for a gas leak. Fifty for a major police response. Seventy-five for a bomb threat that shuts down a school for the day. Discounts for returning customers.

I’ve spent thirty years investigating financial criminals. People who steal millions through Ponzi schemes, people who defraud pension funds, people who build entire corporations on lies. And in all that time, I’ve never seen anything that unsettled me quite like a price menu for terror written by a kid who was also pulling a 3.73 GPA at community college.

It’s the casualness of it. The formatting. It reads like a food truck menu. Prices, discounts, delivery terms. “All swats will be done ASAP or present time.” He even offered a money-back guarantee.

Three hundred and seventy-five people looked at that menu and placed an order.

That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about. Not Filion — I’ve spent the last three weeks inside his court documents and I have complicated feelings about him that I laid out in the episode. But the customers. Three hundred and seventy-five people decided that paying forty to seventy-five dollars to terrorize a stranger was a reasonable transaction. We don’t know how many were minors. We know at least one was — a sixteen-year-old who hired Filion to swat a high school in Iowa.

The next Torswats doesn’t have to be a genius with a 99th-percentile test score. The next Torswats just has to know where to post an ad. And the next 375 customers are already out there.

If you haven’t heard the episode yet — it’s built from 20 federal court documents. The plea agreement alone is 40 pages. I think it’s the most important episode I’ve done so far, and I’d really like to know what you think.

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify

Steve

In January 2023, a teenager in the Mojave Desert posted a menu on Telegram. Forty dollars for a gas leak. Fifty for a major police response. Seventy-five for a bomb threat that would shut down a school for the day. Discounts for returning customers.

His name was Alan Filion. He was sixteen. And over the next eighteen months, 375 people placed orders.

This episode is built from 20 federal court documents — the 40-page plea agreement, both sentencing memoranda, the criminal information, and the amended judgment — plus investigative reporting from WIRED, Vice, and Inside Edition. The documents reveal something no news article has fully explored: what it looks like when a 99th-percentile intellect, an autism spectrum diagnosis, and a market for targeted terror collide in a teenager’s bedroom.

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/true-crime-cases-you-havent-heard/id1829722221

🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0I6mWnR0CLWtiPPhPGGoUr

What paid subscribers get this week:

🎙️ Behind the Case — The FBI found internet searches on Alan Filion’s seized devices that didn’t make the episode: “Execute them. Kill them. Behead them” and “criminal mastermind swatting.” There’s also a number discrepancy buried in the plea agreement that no one has reported: Filion told the internet he swatted himself three times. The court document says nine. And one of the customers who hired him to swat a high school was also sixteen years old. The full Behind the Case recording is below for paid subscribers.

📄 20 federal court documents — the plea agreement, both sentencing memos, the criminal information, the amended judgment, and 15 supporting filings. Read the documents the judge read.

Not a paid subscriber yet? Upgrade below to get the documents and Behind the Case audio for this episode — and every episode going forward.

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This week’s episode is about a teenager who ran a swatting-for-hire business. He published a price list. Forty dollars for a gas leak. Fifty for a major police response. Seventy-five for a bomb threat that shuts down a school for the day. Returning customers got a discount.

He was fifteen when he started. He made over 375 calls in eighteen months. A man in Alabama died of a heart attack during one of the responses. A 28-year-old in another state was shot dead by officers who showed up expecting an active shooter.

His name is Alan Filion. He called himself Torswats. And he told the internet he was invincible.

The episode drops Wednesday.

Stay curious. Stay safe. Stay subscribed.

I’ve been inside this case for weeks. A hundred and sixty-seven research files. Seventy-eight court documents. Seven video transcripts from press conferences and news coverage. And the thing I keep coming back to isn’t the bombs or the meth or the geofence warrant. It’s a text message.

“Bike ride / getting rid of unsafe box.”

That’s what Peter Karasev wrote to his partner before riding his bicycle to a PG&E transformer at 2:50 in the morning and detonating a homemade explosive. An unsafe box. Like he was taking out the trash.

He had a PhD from Georgia Tech. He was a senior machine learning engineer at Zoox — Amazon’s autonomous vehicle company — earning $250,000 a year. He lived in a $1.5 million home across the street from a high school, with his partner and their three children, ages five, three, and one.

He also had three hundred pounds of explosive materials in that home. A grenade in the refrigerator. Unsecured firearms throughout the house. And flash powder scattered on the laundry room floor.

No podcast has ever covered this case. This is the first.

This episode is built from federal court filings — the government’s sentencing memorandum, the defense sentencing memorandum, DOJ press releases, and SJPD press conference footage. Every claim sourced. Every detail verified.

🎧 Listen on Spotify

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts

🎧 Listen on YouTube

What paid subscribers get this week:

📜 Behind the Case audio — Peter Karasev wrote his own words to the judge from federal detention. A PhD from Georgia Tech. A senior ML engineer at Amazon. And his backup plan after prison? Plumbing. There’s also something buried in a character letter that no news outlet has reported — a detail about a television show that may have influenced the bombings. And the defense claims the meth lab that every outlet described? They say it didn’t exist. The full Behind the Case recording — plus hundreds of pages of case files — is below for paid subscribers.

📄 Federal case files — The government’s sentencing memorandum, the defense sentencing memorandum with all five exhibits, the indictment, character letters, and the judgment. Hundreds of pages of primary source documents.

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Peter Karasev had a PhD from Georgia Tech. He was a senior machine learning engineer at an Amazon-owned company building autonomous cars. He had a wife, three kids under five, and a home in San Jose worth a million and a half dollars.

He also had a garage full of

In December 2022 and January 2023, he rode his bicycle — his bicycle — to two PG&E power transformers in the middle of the night and blew them up. Knocked out power to fifteen hundred households. Fifteen of those families depended on electricity for medical equipment — oxygen concentrators, dialysis machines, the kind of thing you don’t get to go without.

When the FBI searched his house, they found over 300 pounds of explosive materials, five firearms, a meth lab, and remote detonation equipment. His three children — ages one, three, and five — were in the house.

He told police that Russia-Ukraine was “like parents getting divorced.” He said he used meth instead of Adderall. He never gave a manifesto. He never joined a group. And nobody — not the press, not podcasters, nobody — has done a deep dive into the court records to figure out what actually happened here.

That’s what I’ve been doing this week. I’ve pulled the federal filings, the plea agreement, the sentencing memos, the surveillance footage transcripts. There are things in these documents that didn’t make the news. Next week’s episode is being built from them right now.

I don’t have a tidy answer for why a man with everything to lose would build bombs in his garage while his toddlers slept upstairs. I’m not sure one exists. But the court records tell a story that’s more complicated and more unsettling than any headline I’ve read about this case.

I’m recording this one today. Every time I go back through the documents I find another layer that doesn’t make sense — and that’s exactly what makes it worth telling.

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify

A woman knocked on a door in Spring Lake Park, Minnesota. She used the homeowner’s stepdaughter’s first name. She left a butterfly-covered Hallmark gift bag containing $120,000 in cash — hundreds, fifties, and twenties held together with rubber bands — and a message: vote not guilty, and there would be more tomorrow.

The stepdaughter was Juror 52. She was 23 years old, serving on the biggest pandemic fraud trial in American history. The defendants had tracked her online, followed her from the courthouse, and purchased a GPS device for her car. They chose her because she was the youngest juror and they believed she was the only person of color on the panel. They spent weeks researching her Facebook account, mapping her home, and surveilling her movements — nineteen times in three days, according to the FBI.

This episode is built from the federal indictment, five plea agreements, the FBI search warrant affidavit, government and defense sentencing memoranda, and DOJ press releases filed in *United States v. Farah* (D. Minn.). Twenty-one court documents total.

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts:

🎧 Listen on Spotify:

What paid subscribers get this week:

🎙️ Behind the Case — my unfiltered recording about what didn’t make the episode. The detail about the woman who delivered the bribe — she wasn’t some random recruit. And what really happened at her DWI arrest. No script, no production — just me, the documents, and what I couldn’t say on the main show.

📄 The court documents — 21 federal court filings. The indictment, all five plea agreements, the FBI affidavit, sentencing memoranda. Read what the investigators read.

Ladan Ali — the woman from Seattle who delivered the Hallmark bag — had her own company called Afro Produce LLC that received $1.6 million from entities connected to the same fraud pipeline. She wasn’t a civilian doing a favor. She was already in the ecosystem. That context changes how you understand the entire conspiracy. The full story is in the Behind the Case recording below.

*Not a paid subscriber yet? Upgrade below to get the documents and Behind the Case for this episode — and every episode going forward.*

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The men who killed them weren’t there for the firearms the Lorenzos had come to sell. They were there for $3,000 in cash. Money they needed to fly to Venezuela and join an armed uprising against the Maduro government. Craig Austin Lang — dishonorably discharged Army veteran, foreign fighter in Ukraine, charged under a statute written in 1794 — spent five years fighting extradition from Kyiv before a federal jury in Fort Myers finally convicted him on all counts in September 2025. He’s serving two consecutive life sentences.

This episode is built from 566 pages of federal court documents, international extradition filings, and trial records.

If you’re reading this on a free preview: the download link below is for paid subscribers only. Please don’t share it. The honor system is the only thing keeping this case file from disappearing behind a hard paywall, and I’d rather trust you than build more walls.

🎧 Listen Now

What paid subscribers get this week:

🎙️ Behind the Case — my unfiltered audio about what didn’t make the episode. There’s a detail in the extradition filings about what Lang’s Ukrainian defense attorney actually told the European Court of Human Rights — one sentence that reframed how I understood this entire case. I couldn’t fit it into the main show.

📄 The federal court documents — 566 pages of primary source material across 83 files. The superseding indictment, trial filings, sentencing records, the ECHR application, and the extradition correspondence. Read what the investigators and the judge read.

The court documents are sent exclusively to paid subscribers when each episode drops. Future episodes won’t include this case file — this is your one chance.

Not a paid subscriber yet? Upgrade below to get the documents and Behind the Case for this episode — and every episode going forward.

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I'm in the middle of launching a completely unrelated new business — 3D printing — and I've spent the last several days learning an entirely new set of skills and software. I didn't want to rush an episode and shortchange the case, so this week I'm giving myself permission to step away.

The show will be back next Wednesday with a new case.

But here's what I want to tell you while I have your attention.

I've been running two subscriber lists — one here on Substack, one through my website — and it's been more work than it's worth. So I'm consolidating everything here. Substack is where the audience is growing, and it's where I want to invest my energy.

If you were on my email list at the website, you should have gotten a goodbye note from me this week. I'm migrating that list here. You'll get a welcome email from Substack shortly if you haven't already — that's intentional, and I'm glad you made it over.

I also just launched a paid tier.

$5/month. Here's what it includes:

Every episode, I dig through court documents — FBI affidavits, indictments, sentencing memos, transcripts. Most of what I find doesn't make it into the episode. There's always a detail that changed how I understood the case. A quote I couldn't figure out how to say out loud. A document that reframes everything.

Paid subscribers get that — a behind-the-scenes breakdown of what I found in the documents, delivered the same day as the episode. Not a teaser. The actual thing.

You also get the full court document package as a downloadable vault file.

If that sounds useful: truecrimecases.substack.com/subscribe

Back next Wednesday with a new case.

— Steve

Behind the Case: Christina Chapman

151 research files. 402 pages of federal court documents. 46 PDFs. And yesterday’s episode on Christina Chapman’s laptop farm used maybe a third of it.

Here’s what didn’t make the cut. You can listen here.

The indictment contains a quote I couldn’t fit into the episode’s narrative, but it changed how I understood Chapman’s role. When a co-conspirator asked about the other workers using her address, Chapman wrote: “Because I don’t know who is on who’s team, or who know about each other… I can’t reveal other names. I got some people in trouble for that before.”

That’s not someone passively hosting laptops. That’s compartmentalized operational security — the kind of language you hear in intelligence briefings, not suburban Arizona living rooms. She was managing cells. She knew which workers knew about which other workers, and she kept them separated. The indictment also shows she ran 1,700 identity queries through an online background check service. This wasn’t improvised. It was administered.

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And then there’s this moment from March 2023. Chapman receives a payroll check made out to “Irving.” According to the indictment, she asks her handler: “Irving is not a real person at all?” The handler confirms. Chapman tries to deposit the check anyway. By that point, she’d been forging I-9 forms and installing AnyDesk on corporate laptops daily for over two years — and she was still discovering new layers of the fraud she was facilitating. The operation was bigger than any single person inside it understood.

One more thing that stuck with me. The 23-year-old who infiltrated a separate North Korean laptop farm operation — Aidan Raney, whose story I referenced in the episode — lost both his parents by age 18. He’d been in juvenile detention. He slept against tree stumps covered in leaves for warmth. He rebuilt his life with help from a small Wisconsin community and turned his hacking skills into a cybersecurity firm. Chapman was homeless and desperate when she got recruited. Raney was homeless and desperate when he decided to fight back. Same starting point. Different doors.

Yesterday I asked you: “Who do I say I am?”

Now I can tell you who said it — and why.

Christina Marie Chapman was homeless in a Minnesota travel trailer. No running water, no heat. Then someone messaged her on LinkedIn and asked her to “be the U.S. face” of their company. Within three years, she had ninety laptops in her Arizona home, each labeled with a Post-it note bearing a stolen American name. North Korean operatives logged in remotely and worked at Fortune 500 companies — including Nike, a top-five television network, and an aerospace defense contractor.

One North Korean worker attended a General Services Administration video meeting. He introduced himself. He could not speak again. He was on a U.S. government call, connected through a laptop on a shelf in suburban Arizona.

The scheme generated $17.1 million. Chapman’s cut was $176,850 — one percent.

This episode is built from 402 pages of federal court documents, including the 57-page indictment, Chapman’s personal letter to the judge, and the full sentencing transcript where she spoke exactly six sentences.

Did you miss the case files?

Site subscribers received exclusive access to the superseding indictment, government sentencing memorandum, and Chapman’s letter to the judge when this episode dropped.

I only send case file links once, right when episodes release. If you want the documents for future episodes, subscribe here.

— Steve

A woman is sitting in her living room in suburban Arizona. She’s about to join a Microsoft Teams call with an IT tech at one of the five largest TV networks in America. And she types this to her handler: “Who do I say I am?”

There were ninety laptops in her house. Each one had a Post-it note on it with a stolen American name. And every paycheck that flowed through those machines was funding a nuclear weapons program.

Tomorrow.

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133 research files. 544 pages of court documents. 30 media reports from 10 news outlets. Five years of coverage from shooting to sentencing. And Tuesday’s episode on the Hassan Elliott case used maybe 20% of it.

Here’s what didn’t make it in.

The government’s trial brief against Elliott’s codefendants contained a footnote — just a footnote — about a rap lyric they chose not to introduce at trial. The lyric described a real event: an opposition gang member’s mother had gotten on her knees and begged SG1700 not to kill her son. The words from the song: “momma come prayin’ for ya life / she talkin bout please don’t kill my baby.”

They turned that moment into a verse. And the government didn’t even need it. They had four murders, nine shootings, prison letters, a kill list on a cell wall, and a music video filmed at a murder scene. This lyric — describing a mother pleading for her child’s life — was left on the cutting room floor because the evidence pile was already overwhelming.

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That’s the detail I keep coming back to. Not because it’s the most dramatic thing in the case. Because of what it says about the volume of cruelty the court documents contained. There was so much that prosecutors could afford to leave this out.

The other thing I couldn’t stop thinking about: 69 days before Sergeant O’Connor climbed those stairs, SG1700 filmed a music video called “No Cap” inside the same building — 1688 Bridge Street. During the shoot, according to court documents, they burned a memorial teddy bear for a rival on camera. Jimenez had stored the teddy bear at his own home beforehand. He brought it specifically for the video. That building was already a stage for them before it became a crime scene.

I also want to be honest about something. There’s a document I know exists but couldn’t get my hands on — Document #359 on the federal docket. It’s the defense’s sentencing memorandum and mitigation report. Whatever Elliott’s attorneys presented about his childhood, his background, the circumstances that shaped him. That document is part of the full story, and I don’t have it. If I ever do, you’ll hear about it.

What detail from this case stuck with you the most? I’d love to hear it.

If you haven’t heard the full story: Hassan Elliott Killed a Cop He Never Saw

Hassan Elliott told his SG1700 gang members exactly what he’d do if police ever came for him. On March 13, 2020, they came — and he did exactly what he said.

A SWAT team climbed a narrow staircase in a Frankford rowhouse to serve a murder warrant that had been outstanding for 353 days. Elliott fired 16 rounds through a closed bedroom door. Sgt. James O’Connor IV — a 23-year veteran, 15 years on SWAT, a brand-new grandfather — was killed by someone who never even saw him.

This case spans four murders, nine shootings, rap videos filmed at murder scenes, and one of the most significant federal RICO prosecutions in Philadelphia history. It’s built from 544 pages of federal court documents.

🎧 Listen Here

Did you miss the case files?

Site subscribers received exclusive access to the federal sentencing memorandum, change of plea memorandum, judgment, and forfeiture documents when this episode dropped.

I only send case file links once, right when episodes release. If you want the documents for future episodes, subscribe here.

Steve

His real name was Joseph LaForte. He’d already been to federal prison twice — once for a $14 million real estate Ponzi, once for illegal gambling. He came out, borrowed his wife’s maiden name, called himself “Joe Mack,” and built the same scheme five times bigger.

More than 1,200 investors trusted him with more than $500 million. Par Funding wasn’t a company — it was a RICO enterprise. When merchants couldn’t pay, LaForte personally threatened to kidnap their kids and fit them for cement shoes. When the court-appointed lawyer came for their assets, his brother Jimmy ambushed him from behind in broad daylight and put seven staples in his head.

This is one of the most fully documented cases I’ve covered — loads of pages of federal court filings. On March 26, 2025, Joseph LaForte was sentenced to 15½ years in federal prison.

Did you miss the case files?

Site subscribers received exclusive access to 992 pages of federal court documents when this episode dropped — including the RICO indictment, the fraud loss determination, and the government’s sentencing memoranda for both LaForte brothers.

I only send case file links once, right when episodes release. If you want the documents for future episodes, subscribe at https://truecrimeunheard.com/subscribe

Steve

If you’re new here, you might not know what that actually means. So I want to tell you.

For each episode, I pull the original court records. FBI affidavits. Indictments. Sentencing memoranda. Victim impact statements. Sometimes thousands of pages — not summaries, not press releases. The actual documents that tell you what really happened to real people.

For the dentist episode I released last week, that meant reading through testimony from patients who said they felt everything during procedures — including children — because he’d stolen the fentanyl that was supposed to keep them unconscious and replaced it with saline. Ninety-nine-plus victims. He glued the vials shut afterward.

For the hospice fraud episode, I read through records of patients who were enrolled in end-of-life care without their knowledge — some of them with years left to live — so a company could maximize Medicare billing while cutting off their access to curative treatment.

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For the whistleblower episode, I followed a man who discovered his employer was committing fraud, reported it, and then found himself with 48 hours to live.

For the identity theft episode, I documented how a man was jailed for 428 days — including a stint in a psychiatric ward — for telling the truth about who he was.

That material doesn’t stay in the documents.

I started this show because I kept running into cases that nobody was covering. Not because they weren’t serious — but because they didn’t have the celebrity angle or the dramatic optics that drive most true crime coverage. A hospice company quietly enrolling vulnerable patients without consent isn’t as visually dramatic as a murder. But the harm is just as real. The families are just as devastated. The stories deserve to be told with the same care.

So that’s what I try to do. Every case is sourced from public records. Every victim treated like a person, not a plot point. Every episode is complete — beginning, middle, end — because people’s lives aren’t cliffhangers.

The research is what makes that possible, and the research is also the thing that accumulates. After enough hours inside FBI affidavits and victim impact statements, you carry some of it with you. That’s not a complaint. That’s the job. But it means stepping back sometimes is how you keep doing it well.

New episode next week. In the meantime — if you’re just finding this show, welcome.

The stories are worth the work. The people in them deserve better than being forgotten.

— Steve

Before each surgery, Dr. Phillip Jensen would take the fentanyl vial, remove the tamper-evident safety cap, extract half the drug with a syringe, replace it with saline, and glue the cap back on. Then he’d administer the diluted anesthesia to the patient in his chair.

At least 99 patients went under — or tried to. Half-strength fentanyl doesn’t produce full sedation. A child came out of surgery and told their mother, “felt everything.” A woman had her teeth extracted while conscious and was struck in the head with a stainless steel surgical instrument when Jensen realized she was awake.

This went on for eight months. Jensen knew. His staff told him. He kept going.

The case — U.S. v. Phillip Jensen, 3:22-cr-30005, Central District of Illinois — was covered only by local Illinois media. Not one podcast episode before this one.

On December 18, 2024, after 20 federal counts, a guilty plea, and a two-and-a-half-year pretrial period that included 17 bond modifications and a witness-stalking incident, Judge Colleen R. Lawless sentenced Jensen to 15 years in federal prison. She ended the hearing with a question: *”If you cannot trust your doctor, who can you trust?”*

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Did you miss the case files?

Site subscribers received exclusive access to approximately 150 pages of federal court documents when this episode dropped — including the indictment, the change of plea transcript (in which Jensen confirmed every detail under oath), and the judgment.

I only send case file links once, right when episodes release. If you want the documents for future episodes, subscribe here.

Steve