Triggered - The True Crime Podcast

Jaksot

• 
  Dangerous Delusions | The Matthew Hertgen Case 15.09.2026 44min

  On February 22, 2025, a 911 call came in from a luxury apartment complex in Princeton, New Jersey. The caller told dispatch there was a fire, and a body. The body was his younger brother.Matthew Hertgen was 31, a Wesleyan grad and former college soccer player. Joseph was 27, a finance analyst, the little brother everyone liked. Hours before the killing, a third Hertgen brother had driven Matthew home, watched him fall apart in the passenger seat, and texted him to hang in there. That text was sent about an hour before the 911 call.This week we get into the four years of untreated psychosis that led to that night, the single witness whose testimony ended the trial in one day, and a verdict that even the prosecution said it could not argue against. We also talk about what happens to a family when the person who killed your son is also your son.Content warning: this episode includes descriptions of graphic violence, animal cruelty, psychosis and suicide. Please take care of yourself while listening.🎧 Listen to Triggered wherever you get your podcasts: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcast💬 Join the Chaos Crew (free Discord): https://discord.gg/YuEWjMzkJN ⭐ Become an Inner Circle member on Supercast: triggeredthepod.supercast.com🌐 triggeredthepodcast.comMake sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
• 
  Garbage Cults 11.09.2026 1t 5min

  Two cults. Two self-proclaimed religious leaders. And one unsolved murder mystery that would take more than forty years to unravel.First, we dive into the Brethren, better known as the “Garbage Eaters,” a secretive religious group whose members abandoned their families, possessions and careers to travel across America, live off discarded food and follow the teachings of Jim Roberts.Then we meet the Christ Family, led by a former house painter who renamed himself Jesus Christ Lightning Amen. What begins as another bizarre story of white robes, barefoot followers and dumpster diving takes a much darker turn when investigators connect the group to the unsolved murders of young parents Dean and Tina Clouse.Their bodies remained unidentified for decades. Their baby daughter, Holly, was nowhere to be found. Until forty-two years later, detectives walked into a restaurant in Oklahoma and told a waitress something that would completely change her life.🎧 Listen to Triggered wherever you get your podcasts: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcast💬 Join the Chaos Crew (free Discord): https://discord.gg/YuEWjMzkJN ⭐ Become an Inner Circle member on Supercast: triggeredthepod.supercast.com🌐 triggeredthepodcast.comMake sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
• 
  Honourless: The Shafia's 08.09.2026 1t 5min

  In the early morning hours of June 30, 2009, a black Nissan Sentra was discovered submerged in the water at the Kingston Mills locks in Kingston, Ontario. Inside were four members of the same family: 19-year-old Zainab Shafia, 17-year-old Sahar Shafia, 13-year-old Geeti Shafia, and 52-year-old Rona Mohammad Omar.At first, their deaths appeared to be a horrific accident. But details surrounding the family's trip, damage to a second vehicle, and the increasingly troubling story being told to investigators soon suggested something much darker.This week on Triggered, we’re covering the Shafia family murders, a case that shocked Canada and eventually led to the conviction of Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya, and their son Hamed for four counts of first-degree murder. We look at the lives of the four women, what was happening inside the Shafia home before their deaths, how investigators unravelled the case, and the trial that exposed the horrifying motive behind it.🎧 Listen to Triggered wherever you get your podcasts: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcast💬 Join the Chaos Crew (free Discord): https://discord.gg/YuEWjMzkJN ⭐ Become an Inner Circle member on Supercast: triggeredthepod.supercast.com🌐 triggeredthepodcast.comMake sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
• 
  Did you hear that? | Cryptids 04.09.2026 1t 1min

  Four cryptids and what the evidence actually shows. A sacred lake spirit, an iguana in the trunk of a police cruiser, a Wampanoag story that isn't about a monster, and a movie...or is there more?🎧 Listen to Triggered wherever you get your podcasts: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcast💬 Join the Chaos Crew (free Discord): https://discord.gg/YuEWjMzkJN ⭐ Become an Inner Circle member on Supercast: triggeredthepod.supercast.com🌐 triggeredthepodcast.comMake sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
• 
  Systemic Failure | Harmony Montgomery 01.09.2026 1t 13min

  In February 2019, a Massachusetts family court judge handed five year old Harmony Montgomery over to a father with a long and violent criminal record. Ten months later she was dead. Nobody noticed for two years.Harmony was blind in one eye and had spent most of her short life moving in and out of foster care. Her mother, Crystal Sorey, had lost custody while struggling with addiction, and when Sorey started pushing for answers in late 2021, she discovered her daughter had never been enrolled in school in New Hampshire. The missing person report was finally filed in December 2021. By then, investigators say, Harmony had been dead since December 7, 2019, killed in the back of a car in Manchester where the family had been living after an eviction.This week we get into how one little girl fell through every crack in two state child welfare systems, what her stepmother Kayla Montgomery told a jury and why Adam Montgomery is back in a New Hampshire courtroom in 2026 after the state Supreme Court overturned his second degree murder conviction and ordered a new trial.Harmony has still never been found.Content warning: this episode discusses the abuse and death of a child.Make sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
• 
  Three Screws: Shannon Graves 28.08.2026 52min

  In July 2017, a woman in Campbell, Ohio went down to her basement for a pound of ground beef. There was a chest freezer down there that belonged to a friend of her husband's, and it had a padlock on it, and whoever installed that padlock had mounted it backwards.Three screws. That's what it took to break open a case that had been running unnoticed for five months.Shannon Graves was 28 years old. She lost her mother young, dropped out of high school, and went back years later to get her GED and put herself through cosmetology school. She was two years into a career she'd built herself, one client at a time. She had a dog she adored and a family she never missed a birthday for.She also had a boyfriend she was preparing to leave, and an apartment, a car, a phone and a benefits card that he was living on.What was discovered in a basement in Ohio will haunt Ash and Chantal forever. Content warning: intimate partner violence, homicide, dismemberment, and the destruction of a body using chemicals. Please take care of yourself.🎧 Listen to Triggered wherever you get your podcasts: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcast💬 Join the Chaos Crew (free Discord): https://discord.gg/YuEWjMzkJN ⭐ Become an Inner Circle member on Supercast: triggeredthepod.supercast.com🌐 triggeredthepodcast.comMake sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
• 
  He Joined the Search: Nicola, Karen and Rachel 25.08.2026 56min

  On October 9, 1986, nine year old best friends Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway told a neighbour they were heading to Wild Park in Moulsecoomb, Brighton. It was the last time anyone saw them alive. The next afternoon, two civilian searchers found the girls hidden in a makeshift den in the park, and a case that would consume Sussex Police for the next three decades was born.A 20 year old local roofer named Russell Bishop inserted himself into the search from the very beginning, bringing along his terrier and claiming the dog was a highly trained tracker. He was arrested within weeks. And in December 1987, after a four week trial and just two hours of jury deliberation, he walked free.Then, in 1990, he abducted and tried to kill a seven year old girl.This week we walk through the forensic failures that let a child killer go home: the body temperatures nobody recorded, the hand marks never measured, the blood evidence never analysed, and a blue Pinto sweatshirt that the prosecution built its case around and the police failed to preserve. We get into the 2005 double jeopardy reform that cracked the door open, the billion to one DNA match found on evidence taped in 1986 and stored for decades, the 2018 retrial at the Old Bailey, and the girlfriend who lied on the stand in 1987 and finally answered for it in 2021.Bishop died in prison in January 2022. In April 2024, Sussex Police formally apologised for their failings, including the wrongful arrest of Nicola's father.Two families waited 32 years. Here is how they finally got there.Sources include BBC News, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, The Argus, and the published sentencing remarks in R v Bishop and R v Johnson.Content note: this episode discusses the murder and sexual assault of children.Join the Chaos Crew on Discord, and become a Witness or an Accomplice at triggeredthepodcast.comMake sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
• 
  The Only Witness: Laura Letts-Beckett 21.08.2026 1t 11min

  In 1995, a Canadian schoolteacher took the trip of a lifetime to New Zealand. Her tour guide was a six foot seven, four hundred pound former city councillor who had spent his entire life on the water.Fifteen years later, one of them drowned in a mountain lake in British Columbia. The other one was the only person on earth who saw it happen.What followed was one of the strangest homicide cases in Canadian history. A rock. A fishing rod. An accidental death policy pulled out of a stack of bank flyers. A jailhouse informant with a list of five names. A four month trial where the accused defended himself and performed a haka in the courtroom. A hung jury. A first degree murder conviction. And then an appeal court that took the whole thing apart and wrote five words that ended it: the Crown's case was not strong.Sixteen years on, there is still no answer.This episode is about the case. But it is also about a woman who taught grade three in a hamlet called Dapp, Alberta, and the town that still remembers her.Make sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
• 
  Released into the Dark: Mitrice Richardson 14.08.2026 59min

  On the night of September 16, 2009, a 24 year old woman sat down alone at Geoffrey's, an upscale restaurant on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. She ordered dinner. She could not pay the $89 bill. Staff described her behaviour as strange, and deputies were called.Mitrice Richardson was a Cal State Fullerton graduate. She was warm, brilliant, and by her family's account she had been quietly struggling with her mental health in the weeks before that night. Her father would later say she had bipolar disorder. She was arrested for defrauding an innkeeper, a small amount of marijuana was found in her car, and her car was impounded.At roughly 12:28 in the morning on September 17, she was released from the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff's Station in Calabasas. No car. No purse. No phone. No money. She was from West Covina and had no reason to know a single road in that canyon. She walked out into the dark and was never seen alive again.🎧 Listen to Triggered wherever you get your podcasts: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcast💬 Join the Chaos Crew (free Discord): https://discord.gg/YuEWjMzkJN ⭐ Become an Inner Circle member on Supercast: triggeredthepod.supercast.com🌐 triggeredthepodcast.comMake sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
• 
  Lilith Framed: The Michelle Hadley Case 11.08.2026 1t 23min

  Michelle Hadley was in her twenties, in grad school, and by her own description sickeningly wholesome. Then she was arrested, held on a million dollars bail, and told she was facing life in prison.The emails threatening her ex fiancé's pregnant wife were real. Sent several times a day, from an account called Lilithistruth, describing what the woman wore to work and where she went. The Craigslist ads inviting strangers to her door were real. The men who showed up were real. The 911 call was real.And every piece of it pointed at Michelle. Including two emails she really had written, months earlier, in her own name, using the same name the stalker was using.She sat in that cell for 88 days saying she'd been set up. Not one person believed her.This week Chantal walks Ashley through the case behind Netflix's A Toxic Love Story, and she starts a long way before the documentary does. With Michelle before any of it. With cameras in a kitchen and a life narrowed to three points on a map. With a woman in a Huntington Beach bar telling a police officer what she does for a living. And with a family in the Arizona desert who found a stranger walking alone, miles from her own car.Content warning: sexual assault allegations, coercive control, staged assaults, and a psychiatric crisis. No graphic detail.Sources include the Orange County District Attorney's Office, the US Department of Justice, filings from the Central District of California, and Netflix's A Toxic Love Story.Follow us: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastMake sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
• 
  The Story Pembroke Never Forgot | The Witt Family Murders 07.08.2026 54min

  We grew up outside Pembroke, Ontario, hearing a story adults would only tell in whispers. A daughter. Her boyfriend. A little boy. A farmhouse. And a line that followed the case for fifty-five years: "She should have gone to prison too."We never knew the names. This week, Ash went looking for them.In March 1971, in what was then Alice Township, six-year-old David Witt and his uncle Leslie Molson were murdered. David's mother, Eleanor, survived and testified that she had been held and abused for more than two weeks before the killings. Her seventeen-year-old daughter, Catherine Delarge, and Catherine's twenty-three-year-old boyfriend, Lorne Edward Lafrance, were both charged. Lafrance got life. What happened to Catherine is where the public record goes quiet and where a small town's memory took over.This is an episode about what actually happened, and about what happens to the truth when a story gets passed down for half a century.Follow us: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastMake sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
• 
  July 2026 | After Hours with Triggered 04.08.2026 55min

  Welcome to our FIRST "After Hours with Triggered"! This is a monthly instalment where Ashley and Chantal tell YOUR stories. If you would like to submit your tales for future episodes, please hurry over to triggeredthepodcast.com🎧 Listen to Triggered wherever you get your podcasts: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcast💬 Join the Chaos Crew (free Discord): https://discord.gg/YuEWjMzkJN ⭐ Become an Inner Circle member on Supercast: triggeredthepod.supercast.com🌐 triggeredthepodcast.comMake sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
• 
  Scott Peterson: Reasonable Doubt? 31.07.2026 56min

  Laci Peterson was almost eight months pregnant when she vanished from her Modesto home on Christmas Eve, 2002. Four months later, she and her unborn son Conner washed ashore in San Francisco Bay, just miles from where her husband Scott said he'd been fishing alone. Scott Peterson was convicted of their murders in 2004. But in 2026, the Los Angeles Innocence Project is fighting to tear that conviction down with what they call new evidence. So did the jury get it right?In this episode we walk through the entire case in the exact order investigators lived it: the dog found alone with its leash, the ninety-mile fishing alibi, the two dead-end theories that nearly sent the investigation sideways, the secret girlfriend whose recorded phone calls changed everything, the bodies that surfaced at Scott's own alibi spot, and the dramatic arrest near the Mexican border. Then we get into what almost nobody covers honestly: the brand new "innocence" evidence, and the April 2026 court ruling that rejected all fourteen of its claims.Follow us: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastMake sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
• 
  Cleveland's Coldest Case: The Torso Murders 28.07.2026 45min

  💬 Join the Chaos Crew (free Discord): https://discord.gg/YuEWjMzkJN ⭐ Become an Inner Circle member on Supercast: triggeredthepod.supercast.com🌐 triggeredthepodcast.comCleveland, the 1930s. Bodies start appearing in Kingsbury Run, decapitated and dismembered, most of them never identified. The papers dub him the Mad Butcher. The man hunting him is Eliot Ness, the same legend who brought down Al Capone. And this time, the legend loses.We break down the known victims, the suspects who got away and why the Cleveland Torso Murders still haunt investigators today. Pour something strong and join us for one of the darkest cold cases in American history.Make sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
• 
  And then there were two: Mickey Shunick 24.07.2026 56min

  Twenty-two years old, alone on a bike at two in the morning, a man twice her size waiting in a white truck with a knife and a gun. Mickey Shunick did not do what he expected. She fought. And the wounds she left on her attacker's body are part of what brought him down.In this episode, the gals walk through the 2012 disappearance and murder of Michaela "Mickey" Shunick in Lafayette, Louisiana: the surveillance footage of the white truck, the bike found submerged under a bridge 25 miles away, the killer who torched his own truck in Texas and then bought a nearly identical one, and the grand jury indictment that revealed a shocking twist from thirteen years earlier. This is the story of a girl who refused to be a victim, a mother named Lisa Pate who waited over a decade for justice, and the Louisiana community that refused to stop searching.Say their names. Mickey Shunick. Lisa Pate.🎧 Listen to Triggered wherever you get your podcasts: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcast💬 Join the Chaos Crew (free Discord): https://discord.gg/YuEWjMzkJN ⭐ Become an Inner Circle member on Supercast: triggeredthepod.supercast.com🌐 triggeredthepodcast.comSources include reporting from ABC News, CBS News, KATC, KLFY, KPEL, WAFB, The Advocate, and NBC Dateline, plus filings from Louisiana's 15th Judicial District Court. CONTENT WARNING: This episode discusses kidnapping, murder, and sexual violence. Please listen with care.If you or someone you love is affected by the topics in this episode, support is available. In the US, you can reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.Make sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
• 
  She Just Wanted to Help: Colleen Ritzer 21.07.2026 46min

  FROM THE VAULT!***Hi friends, Ash and Chantal pulled one of their first episodes from the vault this week. Brand new episode coming Friday!***Colleen Ritzer was a 24-year-old math teacher who believed no student was beyond reaching. On October 22, 2013, that belief left her alone with a 14-year-old freshman named Philip Chism at Danvers High School. This week we cover the murder, the trial, the failed insanity defense, and the teacher who deserved so much better.Follow us: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastMake sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
• 
  35 Acre Nightmare: The Cordell's 17.07.2026 44min

  Eight children. A 35 acre property. "Underground caves" made of mud, and a home prosecutors compared to a city landfill. This week we head to Deming, New Mexico for the case of Valerie and Melvin Cordell, arrested in February 2025 and now facing dozens of combined charges of child abuse and sexual assault. Both have pleaded not guilty. The whole thing came to light because one 16 year old daughter, finally somewhere safe, decided to speak. This is her case as much as theirs.Content warning: child abuse and sexual assault.Join The Inner Circle: VIP chat with Ash and Chantal, Ad-free episodes and a BONUS monthly episode: triggeredthepod.supercast.comMake sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
• 
  The confusing last night of Karlie Guse 14.07.2026 1t 1min

  Sixteen year old Karlie Guse smoked a joint at a party, spent the night terrified that her own family was going to kill her, and by morning she had walked out the front door and vanished. She left her phone, her glasses, and her money behind. This week: the case, the recording nobody has heard, and the science that suggests it was never really about the weed at all.Follow us: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastKARLIE IS STILL MISSING.Karlie Lain Guse was 16 years old. 5'7", 110 pounds, dark blonde hair, blue eyes, left nostril pierced. Last seen walking south along Highway 6 in Chalfant Valley, Mono County, California on the morning of October 13th, 2018, wearing a white t-shirt, grey sweatpants or jeans, and Vans.She would be 24 today.The FBI is offering a reward for information leading to her location.Mono County Sheriff's Office: 760-932-5678 Email: [email protected] FBI Sacramento: 916-746-7000All tips can remain anonymous.Make sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
• 
  Dissolved: Andras and Agnes Pandy 10.07.2026 54min

  Andras Pandy was a Hungarian born Protestant pastor who fled to Belgium after the 1956 revolution, built a life as a respected clergyman and religious teacher, and spent decades quietly destroying the people closest to him. Two wives. Four children, biological and step. All of them vanished across the 1980s, and every single time, Pandy had a tidy explanation and often a forged document to go with it. They moved to Germany. They went to South America. They send postcards. Do not worry about it.There were no bodies. He made sure of that. And when investigators finally dug into the houses he owned in Molenbeek, they found something even bigger and darker than the family annihilation they were expecting.Fair warning: this episode discusses murder, dismemberment, incest, and the long term sexual abuse of children. Please take care of yourself.WANT MORE? Join the Inner Circle for bonus episodes and access to our VIP Discord community: triggeredthepod.supercast.com Follow us so you never miss a Tuesday or Friday drop. Rate and review, it genuinely helps other people find the show: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastMake sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
• 
  BTK: Dennis Rader 07.07.2026 52min

  For thirty years, the people of Wichita, Kansas thought BTK was a phantom. Bind. Torture. Kill. Three words signed at the bottom of taunting letters mailed to police and newsrooms by a man who wanted to be feared more than he wanted to stop. The truly sickening part is who he turned out to be. A married father of two. The president of his church council. A Cub Scout leader. The local compliance officer who might show up to measure your grass for the city.This week we walk through the crimes of Dennis Rader, the ten lives he stole between 1974 and 1991, the decade of silence, and the ordinary vanity that finally undid him. We are keeping this one exactly where it belongs, with Joseph, Julia, Josie, Joey, Kathryn, Shirley, Nancy, Marine, Vicki, and Dolores.Follow us: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastJoin the Inner Circle and become a member! Monthly bonus episode, VIP Discord chat and ad-free listening: triggeredthepod.supercast.comMake sure to follow us on social media and check out everywhere you can listen at linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcastContact us at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.