Criminal Conduct

Criminal Conduct is a true-crime series that approaches each season as a stubborn file, not a solved story being retold for effect. Its center of gravity is doubt. The show spends time with deaths that have been explained officially but remain contested by families, witnesses, or the people who kept digging after the first answer was written down. In the Buffalo Jim Barrier episodes, the terrain is Las Vegas: motel rooms, harassment, the Rizzolos, cocaine residue, a Rolls-Royce, and a daughter convinced the story around her father was staged. The material is messy. The show lets it stay messy long enough for the contradictions to matter. In the Pravin Varughese season, the focus shifts to prosecutors, toxicology, a jury verdict, and the language used to describe a young man's death in the woods. Small wording choices become evidence of attitude. A report is not just summarized; it is tested for what it leaves out. That habit gives Criminal Conduct its texture. It is not built on constant revelation, but on accumulation. Witnesses and guests often carry long stretches of the episode, from Karma describing what she believed Buffalo Jim would or would not have done, to Oscar Goodman talking through old Las Vegas defense work, to Major Garrett explaining how Robert Hansen exploited the FBI's self-image. The hosts frame theories, challenge them, and mark speculation when the record cannot carry a firmer claim. The result is grave, skeptical, and conversational. It can be blunt about violence, addiction, sex work, corruption, and institutional failure, but it does not need lurid emphasis to make those subjects land. Criminal Conduct is best for listeners who like procedural detail, unresolved questions, and true crime that notices when the official version sounds too neat.