Triggered - The True Crime Podcast · Chantal + Ashley

You're safe with me: Montie Rissell

March 3, 2026·42 min·2 clips

Gladys Ross Bradley was raped twice, dragged by her feet, and drowned after Rissell waited outside her apartment with a steak knife.

1. Triggered - The True Crime Podcast covers Monty Rissell and the murders tied to an Alexandria, Virginia apartment complex. 2. Ashley and Chantal lead the episode, with Ashley telling the story and Chantal reacting to the case details and system failures. 3. The episode asks how a 17-year-old “untouchable” teenager reached five murders after earlier sexual violence and court leniency. 4. Ora Marina Gaber is introduced first, walking to her car in Alexandria, Virginia, in August 1976 during rain. 5. Rissell lived in the same apartment complex as Gaber and forced her into her car before making her drive to a secluded place. 6. The hosts say he raped Gaber and strangled her with her own bra before dumping her body in a nearby ravine. 7. Rissell told FBI investigators he killed Gaber because she “tried to stay calm,” which the hosts frame as a survival response. 8. The episode then goes back to Rissell’s childhood, naming Wellington, Kansas, Sacramento, and his parents’ split when he was seven. 9. The hosts say he committed his first rape at 14 and received probation and counseling instead of a prison term. 10. At 16, he was arrested for attempted robbery with a knife in an elevator and got a five-year suspended sentence. 11. The hosts argue that the system’s responses taught Rissell that he could keep going without meaningful consequences. 12. After his mother moved the family to Virginia, the story shifts to Ursula Mittenberger, a 22-year-old McDonald’s manager trainee. 13. Mittenberger accepted a ride from Rissell, and the hosts say he raped her, stabbed her, and left her body in Fairfax County woods on March 6, 1977. 14. Gladys Ross Bradley is described as a 27-year-old postal worker and divorced mother who lived in the same apartment complex. 15. Rissell waited outside Bradley’s apartment with a steak knife from his mother’s kitchen drawer, raped her twice, dragged her by the feet, and drowned her in a creek. 16. John Douglas is named as the FBI profiler who treated Bradley’s murder as a turning point because the offender was becoming less careful and more excited by the violence. 17. The episode says Aletha Byrd, a 34-year-old personal counselor, went missing on April 10 and was found on May 17 in a wooded area near the complex. 18. Jeanette McKellen is identified as a 24-year-old graphic design proofreader who was stabbed 100 times, which the hosts describe as frenzied destruction. 19. The tone is conversational, reactive, and detail-heavy, with Ashley repeatedly stopping to comment on the system, the victims, and the profiling angle. 20. Listeners who want true crime, FBI profiling, and case analysis will get the most from this episode.

As heard by us

A sharp, angry look at how repeated leniency framed Rissell's escalation into murder.

Montie Rissell's story is handled as a grim pattern of escalation, with rape, a knife-point robbery, and repeated leniency setting the frame for the violence that followed.

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Why you'd press play

You press play for a case where a fresh start goes spectacularly wrong.

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