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Bone Valley · Lava for Good Podcasts

Chapter 1 | Something Stinks

September 17, 2025·41 min·3 clips
A Kentucky housewife with no training becomes obsessed with solving the brutal murder of 18-year-old Jessica Curran.
The case itself only just starts. Before Bone Valley gets much room, the excerpt spends most of its time in iHeart promo traffic. Investigator Slater opens by setting up Psychopedia's October turn into Spookopedia, with spooky, creepy, gory, and haunted true-crime packaging. It sounds like marketing, not reporting. Then the next promo swings into recovery and second chances, naming the CINO Show and a conversation with Danny Trejo about addiction and transformation. The guest list widens fast. Tiffany Addish and Johnny Knoxville get pulled in for a bingeable second season, with the ad leaning hard on raw, confessional language. Bob Pittman follows. As chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, he introduces a new season of Math & Magic, built around marketing and business, before the excerpt cuts away. Another show slides in after that. It's Dangerous to Go Alone gets a quick plug, built around a running theme and the usual nudge to listen. Iris Palmer then takes over. Against All Odds is pitched as a show about beating expectations, breaking generational patterns, and hearing entertainers or entrepreneurs explain how they kept going. Eva Longoria gives the most concrete moment. She remembers having about two hundred dollars saved, looking at a four-hundred-dollar apartment, and having to work out the math. The business thread keeps rolling from there. A founder-and-freelancer pitch collects stories about creators who turned a scary leap into a business, a paycheck, and a life they could claim. Only then does the actual chapter peek through, with Mayfield, Kentucky, in Graves County. The closing ads go right back to practical and promotional ground. Math & Magic names Strauss Zelnick and Lisa Coffey, then Eating While Broke moves through Financial Literacy Month, Zoe Spencer, Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre, and community entrepreneurship.

As heard by us

A polished sampler that keeps moving, even if it never settles into one clear story.

The piece moves like a promo reel, not a single settled story. The voice is polished and certain, and it keeps shifting across recovery, resilience, marketing, entrepreneurship, and financial literacy. That breadth gives it energy, but it also keeps the piece at arm's length.

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Why you'd press play

Start here if you want a true-crime story that moves like a file cabinet opening, with an October-dark mood that lingers.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
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