Voices for the Victims
True crime meets forensic science in the What Remains podcast from WRAL Studios. With no ID, human skeletal remains often end up at medical examiners’ offices where they sit in storage closets for years, gathering dust as evidence slowly disappears. These are some of the most difficult cold cases to crack. Unsolved murders. Missing people never identified. Families without answers. Every year in the United States there are 600,000 missing person reports and 4,400 sets of unidentified human remai
21 most recent episodes
Visit website →The events that took place in Chester County, Pennsylvania in August 1978 were unthinkable. Family killing family. A father calling for the murder of his own son. For years The Johnston Gang got away with everything—theft, burglary, violence—until th
Indigenous woman are ten times more likely to be murdered than the rest of the population in some parts of the US. More than 4 in 5 indigenous women experience violence in their lifetime. These are simple facts, facts that Brittany Hunt and Chelsea L
Carla Davis isn’t your typical American living the good life in Dubai. While we sleep, she teases the knots out of stubborn cold cases as a self-taught forensic genealogist. But she doesn’t just give her time and talent, she opens her wallet. Carla h
17-year-old Brittanee Drexel went against her mother’s orders and traveled from New York to Myrtle Beach for spring break 2009. She disappeared on a crowded street and was never seen again. Thirteen years later, there is a break in the case when a ti
Two men, with no connection, were both found dead in rural Chatham County, North Carolina more than forty years ago. To complicate matters, one man’s head and hands were removed to prevent his identification. Both cases had been cold for years, until
You know the phrase, you are what you eat? Well, it’s true. Isotopes from the water we drink and the water in the food we eat can tell scientists where we live, and where we have traveled and lived in the past. Isotope analysis is quickly becoming a
What do you do with a cold case that happened a lifetime ago when things like DNA testing and forensic genealogy didn’t exist? If you’re a professor at Adelaide University in Southern Australia, you do everything you can to solve it. In December 1948
When a child’s remains are found in a remote area of Yavapai County, Arizona in 1960, the community comes together to bury the child with a card that reads “Little Miss Nobody. God’s little child. Date of birth unknown. Date of death unknown.” In 20
Two families in Texas, grieving after separate tragedies, decided something needed to change. Alice Almendarez’s father, John, disappeared when she was just 16. She spent her later teen years visiting the local morgue looking for his body. She wouldn
An unidentified man is found dead in Charlotte, North Carolina in 2010 in a rough part of town. Leads dry up quickly. The case goes cold. That is until one cold case investigator teams up with a forensic genealogist to solve the mystery. All they nee
In 1975, Priscilla Blevins vanished from her home in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her parents reported their adult daughter’s disappearance to the police, but investigators didn’t seem very interested. Priscilla’s file was only two pages long. Ten year
What is justice? For some people, it’s finding the missing remains of the person they love. For others, it’s convicting the person responsible for taking a life. Sometimes, it’s both. In this episode, we take you into the belly of the criminal justic
Unlike most of this podcast, this is not a story about skeletal remains. In this case, no human remains have been found. Cole Thomas is officially a missing person, but his father knows in his heart his son is dead.
Imagine if your child disappeared
When you think of an artist, drawing dead people is probably not the first thing that comes to mind, but that’s exactly what a forensic artist does. In this episode, we meet two forensic artists who piece together clues allowing them to take a human
In 2005 young boys playing near an abandoned house in Harnett County, North Carolina found skeletal remains. More than fifteen years later those remains are identified thanks to the work of The Carolina Cold Case Coalition. In this bonus episode, the
Sitting in each state is a collection of skeletal remains, unnamed and gathering dust. These are cold cases that have proven to be uncrackable, unwilling to give up the secrets of who they are or what happened to them. Unsolved murders that refuse to
Each investigator has that one case that haunts them, the one that just won’t budge. For Detective Tim Horne, the Billboard Boy was that case. He was just a young crime scene tech when the skeletal remains of a little boy were found beneath a billboa
As a teenager, Todd Matthews had an unusual obsession. He was fascinated by the human remains found along the side of a highway in a small community in rural Kentucky. The woman had been wrapped in a tent bag, and the tale of Tent Girl became a sort
There’s this beautiful place in the mountains of North Carolina where death lives to tell a story. For people who have chosen to donate their body to science, their remains are laid out on the ground and left to decompose. Forensic anthropologists ca
Dr. Ann Ross is surrounded by bones, literally. Everywhere you look in her osteology lab at North Carolina State University there are skeletal remains on metal tables laid out like jigsaw puzzles – a mosaic of hundreds of pieces that only she knows h
More than twenty years ago, a newborn baby was found dead inside a garbage bag on the side of the road near a military base in North Carolina. The officers working to solve his murder called him Baby Michael, named for the patron saint of police. Wit