Claim OwnershipRay William Johnson: True Story Podcast
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The Official Podcast of Ray William Johnson, storyteller and comedian. Tune in for the best stories of True Crime and Pop Culture.
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Carl Rinsch’s case centers on the collapse of his Netflix project White Horse aka Conquest, in which he was entrusted with a large production budget but allegedly misused significant portions of the funds. Instead of directing the money toward the series, Rinsch reportedly diverted millions into personal luxury purchases and high-risk options trading, losing vast sums before briefly recovering money through a lucky market swing. As production stalled and the show failed to materialize, Netflix and former crew members accused him of financial misconduct, mismanagement, and erratic behavior.
Between 2005 and 2007, Tim Donaghy bet on games he officiated and supplied inside information to gamblers, exploiting injury reports, referee assignments, and his influence over foul calls. His actions triggered a federal investigation that exposed a network of illicit betting tied to organized crime.
Elliot Rodger’s case is a documented progression from early social withdrawal and untreated psychological distress to a lethal act of targeted violence in Isla Vista in 2014. Born in 1991, Rodger struggled for years with isolation, rigid self-focused thinking, and growing resentment toward peers, particularly women, whom he believed rejected him. After enrolling at Santa Barbara City College in 2011, these grievances intensified as he retreated further from meaningful relationships and built an elaborate narrative framing himself as a victim of injustice. He expressed these views in a lengthy written manifesto and a series of videos that revealed both deep-seated misogyny and deteriorating mental stability.
Heather Tallchief’s life took a drastic turn in 1993, when she became involved with Roberto Solis, a recently paroled murderer whose influence drew her into one of the most successful armored-truck thefts in U.S. history. At age 21, while working as a Loomis driver in Las Vegas, she quietly drove away from her route with millions of dollars and disappeared into Europe with Solis.
In 2022, Deveius Weathers allegedly shot and killed another man at a neighborhood barbecue, after an argument involving chicken wings.
Youtuber Pierogi aka Scammer Payback along with fellow Youtube channel Trilogy media work together to expose and dismantle a $65 million dollar mutinational fraud ring.
Michael Gargiulo, the so-called Hollywood Ripper, was a predator who operated in plain sight, drifting through Los Angeles with the easy confidence of a man no one suspected. His violence began in 1993, when he murdered 18-year-old Tricia Pacaccio in Illinois at just sixteen, then followed him west years later. In Hollywood, he befriended and fixated on 22-year-old fashion student Ashley Ellerin, stabbing her to death in 2001 the night she had a date planned with Ashton Kutcher. Four years after that, he murdered Santa Monica resident Maria Bruno with the same frenzied knife attack style.
Pazuzu Algarad, born John Lawson, was a deeply disturbed man in Clemmons, North Carolina who reinvented himself as a self-styled demon and gathered vulnerable people into a chaotic, drug-soaked, filthy house where violence and decay festered unchecked. In 2009, he murdered Joshua Wetzler, leaving the body in his basement for weeks before burying it in a shallow grave in the backyard, and later that same year his girlfriend Amber Burch killed Tommy Welch, whose body was buried beside the first.
Jean-Claude Lacote and Hilde Van Acker were a Belgian couple who became internationally notorious after the 1996 murder of British businessman Simon Dale, a crime they committed in Knokke-Heist before fleeing the country and vanishing for more than two decades. Skilled con artists, they slipped through Europe, the United States, South Africa, Brazil, Mauritius, and Ivory Coast while living under fake identities, running fraud schemes, and even raising a daughter on the run.
Jenny Cataldo spun a long, emotional hoax by pretending she had terminal cancer, complete with shaved-head photos, fake medical stories, and tearful updates that pulled friends, coworkers, and strangers into her invented struggle. Over several years she accepted money, gifts, and donations from people who genuinely believed they were helping her survive, until inconsistencies in her claims triggered suspicion and investigators discovered there was no cancer diagnosis at all.
Sabrina Taylor spent years weaving a sympathy-soaked lie, pretending she had multiple sclerosis and a stack of other crises so she could drain more than half a million dollars from friends and online acquaintances who believed they were helping her stay alive, stay in school, or rescue family members who didn’t actually exist. Beginning around 2013, she told people she needed money for MS treatments, tuition, and emergency bailouts, even forging documents to keep the illusion afloat, all while spending the cash on travel, shopping, and luxury items.
1In 2025, Michael Scaletta-Teates of Washington state goes to great lengths to pretend to be a police officer- outfitting his car with red and blue emergency lights, wearing a ballistic-style vest and badge, and appearing at crime scenes.
Albert Johnson Walker was a Canadian financial adviser who stole over $3 million CAD from clients in the late 1980s, then fled Canada in 1990 with his teenage daughter Sheena to avoid prosecution. While living in England under false names, he manipulated and ultimately stole the identity of a British man named Ronald Platt, even convincing Platt to move to Canada, which left the identity available. When the real Platt returned to England in 1996 and threatened to expose him, Walker murdered him in Devon, weighted the body with an anchor, and dumped it at sea.
Pam Hupp is a Missouri woman at the center of one of the most notorious wrongful-conviction cases in the U.S. in 2011, after her close friend Betsy Faria was brutally stabbed to death, Hupp- who had secretly made herself the beneficiary of Betsy’s $150k life-insurance policy just days earlier- helped steer police toward Betsy’s husband Russ Faria, who was wrongly convicted and imprisoned for nearly three years before being fully exonerated; when investigators began refocusing on Hupp in 2016, she staged a fake kidnapping plot to frame Russ again and instead murdered Louis Gumpenberger, a cognitively impaired man she lured with a fake Dateline acting job.
Andrew and Alecia Schmuhl’s case is one of the most shocking and bizarre crimes in recent Virginia history: after Alecia was fired from her law firm, she and her husband spiraled into desperation and rage, culminating on November 9, 2014, when Alecia drove Andrew- dressed in an adult diaper, latex gloves, and a fake badge- to the home of her former boss, Leo Fisher, in McLean. Posing as law enforcement, Andrew forced his way inside, tased and zip-tied Leo and his wife, Susan, then tortured, stabbed, and slashed their throats using a kitchen knife while demanding passwords and information, all while Alecia waited outside in the getaway car. Miraculously, both victims survived and gave police detailed descriptions that led to a short car chase and the Schmuhls' arrest minutes later, with Andrew still wearing only the diaper.
Timothy McVeigh was a Gulf War veteran whose growing hatred of the federal government- fueled by the Ruby Ridge standoff, the Waco siege, militia-movement ideology, and The Turner Diaries- led him to plan and execute the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Apparently we need to get into the pigeon racing business 😳-Arlan Galbraith known as The Pigeon King, ran one of Canada’s strangest and most devastating Ponzi schemes, convincing hundreds of farmers across Canada and the U.S. to buy expensive breeding pigeons with promises that he would buy back the offspring at a guaranteed profit. Galbraith claimed he was building a massive pigeon-meat and racing-bird industry, but no such market existed, and the only money coming in was from new farmers joining the scheme.
The Joe Rosebrook case centers on a long-simmering grudge, a murder-for-hire plot, and a catastrophic case of mistaken identity that went unsolved for nearly a decade. Rosebrook, a small-time Ohio fraudster and chop-shop operator with a habit of retaliating against people he believed had crossed him, sought revenge against a man named Daniel E. Ott- someone he blamed for exposing one of his earlier scams. The murder contract passed through several intermediaries until it reached Chad Testerman, who located the wrong Daniel Ott.
Samantha Azzopardi is an Australian serial con artist whose crimes span more than a decade and multiple countries, built almost entirely on elaborate false identities.
In 2009, Michael Jackson died of an overdose at his Los Angeles home. A powerful anesthetic propofol had been administered by his personal physician, Dr. Conrad Murray. In a highly publicized 2011 trial, Murray was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.
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RIP Christina Grimmie.
This girl is very disturbed.
This was first originally uploaded on TikTok. #RayWilliamJohnson