A sober Black Dahlia listen that stays grounded even as the theories pile up.
This Black Dahlia episode uses the murder as a way into a wider set of Hollywood unsolved cases, and it keeps the single-killer theory in play without overclaiming.

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Every unsolved crime leaves us with a nagging sense that just one witness, one piece of evidence, could change everything. Join us Mondays to revisit cases that ran cold for decades. Some had breakthroughs that closed the file. Others remain open still today. From the network that brings you Serial Killers, Disappearances, Solved Murders, and more, this is Cold Cases — a Spotify Original from Parcast. New episodes Mondays.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Cold Cases makes decades of evidence, speculation, investigative failure, and partial breakthroughs understandable without pretending every reopened file reaches closure.
Cold Cases rebuilds dormant investigations through narrated timelines, dramatized scenes, and close attention to the evidence that changed a case or failed to move it forward.
A file labeled 'Evidence destroyed' turns your detective instincts toward what's missing.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A sober Black Dahlia listen that stays grounded even as the theories pile up.
This Black Dahlia episode uses the murder as a way into a wider set of Hollywood unsolved cases, and it keeps the single-killer theory in play without overclaiming.
A careful look at the Black Dahlia case, and the stories orbiting it.
The episode treats the Black Dahlia case as a person first and a legend second. Vanessa and Carter move through Hollywood, Elizabeth Short's childhood, and the other unsolved cases tied to the murder, so the story keeps opening outward without losing its center.
A death at sea becomes a race between burial law, suspicion, and one small mark.
Robert Maxwell's death at sea is handled less like a headline than a chain of decisions under pressure: a body recovered after a six-hour search, an autopsy compressed into a single day, and a tiny puncture mark that keeps the case unsettled.
A DNA lead reshapes Jane Mixer's case when one match points to a man who was four years old in 1969.
Jane Mixer sits at the center of a case that starts with a cemetery discovery and quickly becomes a test of what DNA evidence can, and cannot, settle. She was found on a grave on March 21, shot twice in the head, with a stocking around her neck and Catch-22 beside her.
Captivity psychology gives the Sodder family's alleged kidnapping theory a darker, more complicated edge.
A Christmas Eve house fire turns into a disappearance mystery in this Sodder family episode, centered on the failure to find remains after several of the family's children were lost in 1945.
A patient cold-case account that lets the evidence build suspicion without forcing certainty.
The Lewis Clark Valley case unfolds as a slow, widening investigation, beginning with the helicopter search in April 1979 and moving through a cluster of disappearances that keeps suspicion moving across the valley.
A hospital kidnapping opens into a daughter's search for the identity hidden inside her family story.
A hospital kidnapping becomes a later identity mystery as Nettie starts to question the family story she was raised with. The episode moves cleanly from the disappearance of a newborn to Cassandra's memory of Ann returning from a train with a baby, then into Nettie's search…
A restrained cold-case episode about two missing girls, a contested runaway theory, and the family details that keep doubt alive.
Cold Cases follows the disappearance of 17-year-olds Pamela Jackson and Cheryl Miller as a case shaped as much by doubt as by evidence. The girls leave in a ramshackle Studebaker in 1971 with no belongings, Pamela without her medication and glasses, and both paychecks still…

NHPR's Jason Moon investigates the Bear Brook barrel murders and a New Hampshire wrongful-conviction case.

Payne Lindsey's season-long investigation into two disappearances from Nome, Alaska.

CBC's true crime feed tracing Cleo's case into cold cases across its investigative podcast network.

Journalists chase a decades-long trail through a coronial inquest and Rick Bloom's dozens of aliases.

A New York Times reporter reinvestigates Laramie's unsolved 1985 murder of Shelley Wiley.

The Skylight Heist at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts began on September 4, 1972, when three masked men entered through a skylight under repair and took 39 artifacts and 38 paintings, including Rembrandt, Bruegel, Delacroix, and a Picasso.
On Christmas Eve 1945, George and Jenny Sodder of Fayetteville, West Virginia, woke to a house fire while nine of their ten children were at home and five were still inside.
Carter Roy’s Cold Cases episode on the Texas Killing Fields follows the 1984 disappearance of 16-year-old Laura Miller from League City, Texas, after she stopped at a payphone near a convenience store on the corner of one of the town’s busier roads.
Cold Cases follows the Honolulu Strangler murders in Honolulu, where Vicky Purdy, Regina Sakamoto, Denise Hughes, and Linda Pesci were found strangled, partially nude, and bound with parachute cord near Ka'ehi Lagoon.
Cold Cases follows the 1980s Sydney attacks tied to Australia’s family court system, beginning with Justice David O’Paz being shot outside his Woolara home on June 23, 1980.
Cold Cases traces the hunt for the Golden State Killer, a California offender linked to nearly 50 rapes and 13 murders in the 1970s and 1980s.
Cold Cases' "The Sodder Family Tragedy Pt.
Greg Poulsen and Vanessa Richardson trace the Zodiac case from the Lake Herman Road killings in Benicia to the Blue Rock Springs shooting in Vallejo, naming David Faraday, Betty Lou Jensen, Michael Mageau, and Darlene Farrin.
Serial Killers continues its Zodiac Killer coverage with the September 27, 1969 attack on Brian Hartnell and Cecilia Shepard at California's Lake Berryessa, where the assailant wore a black hood marked with a crosshair symbol.
Brad Bishop, a 39-year-old State Department foreign service officer with two master's degrees and five languages, is tied to the March 1976 killings of his wife Annette, his mother-in-law Lobelia, and his three sons.
The episode opens with a warning and a stark setting: Vatican City.
In Bay Village, Ohio, Marilyn Shepard's murder becomes a subject of suspicion and gossip.
On July 4, 1954, an odd early-morning phone call pulls Spencer Houck and his wife, Esther, toward the Sheppard home in Bay Village, Ohio.
Cold Cases: The Yogurt Shop Murders follows the December 6, 1991 killings of Jennifer Harbison, Eliza Thomas, Sarah Harbison, and Amy Ayers in a frozen yogurt shop in Austin, Texas.
Robert Maxwell was born Jan Ludwig Hyman Benjamin Hawk in 1923, then rebuilt himself into Ian Robert Maxwell after leaving Czechoslovakia as a teenager.
Cold Cases follows the Philadelphia case of Joseph Augustus Zarelli, the child found in a cardboard box in Fox Chase in February 1957 and identified through DNA in December 2022.
Carter Roy’s Cold Cases episode on the Freeway Phantom follows six murders in Washington, D.C.
Cold Cases tracks the Colonial Parkway murders, a Virginia case tied to a 23-mile road connecting Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown, where six people were killed and two others disappeared between 1986 and 1989.
Cold Cases covers Harvey Miguel Robinson, called the “East Side Stalker,” and says he was one of the youngest serial killers in American history.
The psych ward was never quiet.
The episode opens in Los Angeles with H C Shelby driving toward a construction job, then pulls back into the Black Dahlia case.
November 5th, 1991, put Robert Maxwell in the headlines.
March 21st begins at a cemetery, where police find Jane Mixer laid out on a grave under a raincoat, a wool jacket, and clothing.
George kept multiple 55-gallon drums of gasoline in the basement—the fire would have smoldered for hours, turning the debris into an oven.
Christina White disappears from the Esotan County Fair in April 1979, and Gary White uses a helicopter to search the fairgrounds after she fails to come home.
Carter Roy presents the Cold Cases episode about Nedra Nance (Nettie), who solved her own kidnapping as a young adult.
Pamela Jackson and Cheryl Miller vanished from Vermillion, South Dakota, after leaving for a May 29, 1971 party near a gravel pit, and their families searched for decades.
Nelson Mandela stood beside a grieving mother to demand justice for her murdered teenage son.
Joan Root's story begins at Lake Naivasha in Kenya.