Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast

In 2011, Elliot Turner murdered his girlfriend, aspiring New Zealand model Emily Longley, by smothering and strangling her at his parents' home in Bournemouth, England. Driven by an obsessive, controlling need to monitor her social activities, Turner flipped out after falsely suspecting she was seeing other men. Following the murder, his affluent parents, Leigh and Anita Turner, attempted to cover up the crime by destroying their son's written confession letter and removing vital evidence from the scene.

Carlos Rafael, known as "The Codfather," built a massive, vertically integrated commercial fishing empire in New Bedford, Massachusetts, eventually controlling over 25 percent of the region’s groundfish revenue. For decades, Rafael circumvented strict federal overfishing regulations through a prolific fraud scheme known as "painting fish," where his business intentionally misreported hundreds of thousands of pounds of restricted, high-value species like cod and sole as abundant, low-value haddock.

In 2022, Julie Harding, a veteran California Highway Patrol captain, orchestrated a multi-state murder-for-hire plot against her estranged husband, Michael Harding, amidst a bitter divorce. Prosecutors revealed that after uncharacteristically draining money from their shared bank accounts, she hired her romantic partner, Thomas O'Donnell, to assassinate Michael.

David Vander Meer was a former Las Vegas youth pastor who was arrested in June 2026 and charged with murder and insurance fraud following the reopening of a 20-year-old cold case. Investigators alleged that Vander Meer intentionally shoved his 29-year-old wife, Bernadette, off the 1,200-foot Angels Landing trail at Zion National Park in August 2006.

Sanal Edamaruku is a prominent Indian author and president of the Indian Rationalist Association who spent decades debunking superstitious claims, famously making headlines in 2012 by exposing a "weeping" crucifix miracle at a Mumbai church as nothing more than capillary action from a leaky sewage pipe. Following this revelation, Catholic organizations filed multiple police complaints against him under India's strict blasphemy laws, forcing him to flee into self-imposed exile in Finland to escape potential imprisonment.