Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast

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.