New England cold cases, carefully told.
Dark Downeast follows New England cases where the record is messy, the grief is lasting, and the answers rarely come cleanly. Its episodes move through witness accounts, court strategy, forensic questions, family memory, and the small details that keep old cases alive.
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Dark Downeast is a regional true-crime series focused on New England cases that still carry unanswered questions. It favors chronology over spectacle. Episodes travel through Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, reconstructing murders, disappearances, trials, and investigations from the ground up. The show often starts with a precise scene: a burning station wagon off a remote road, two women found murdered in a Nashua apartment, a body discovered in a Westport parking lot, children finding remains in Franklin Park, or a car pulled from a river with unsettling evidence inside. Those openings lead into deeper questions about evidence, motive, police focus, court strategy, and the limits of what can be proven. In the James Cassidy case, the show tracks embezzlement allegations, valuable stamps, banking, prison connections, and possible organized-crime links while carefully distinguishing suspicion from fact. That caution matters. Dark Downeast is comfortable saying when a thread is strange but not conclusive. Other episodes examine contested confessions, Fifth Amendment testimony, anonymous letters, missing weapons, incomplete physical evidence, and families who spent years pushing against silence. The series also keeps returning to how ordinary settings become permanent landmarks of loss: a family farm, a restaurant parking lot, a city park, a college trail, an apartment building. Its pacing is deliberate, with a strong sense of place and a clear respect for what families have carried. The cases are often old, but the show does not treat them as relics. Forensic advances, new witnesses, renewed detective work, and unresolved legal questions all bring the past back into the present. The tone is compassionate without becoming sentimental. It is detailed without turning victims into footnotes. Dark Downeast stands apart by treating regional true crime as both investigation and memory, giving equal weight to timelines, records, and the people left waiting for answers.
Made for: Dark Downeast is for true-crime listeners who prefer grounded regional reporting, careful timelines, and unresolved cases over sensational twists. It especially suits those interested in New England history, court records, forensic questions, and family-centered storytelling.
What sets it apart: The show stands out for its restraint: it follows complicated evidence without overstating what it proves. Its focus on Maine and the wider New England region gives each case a strong local texture often missing from broader true-crime coverage.
Dark Downeast: Maine and New England's True Crime Podcast digs into the decades-old and modern day cases that prickle the history of Vacationland and beyond – the unsolved homicides, undetermined deaths, unexplained disappearances and other dark stories of New England.Investigative journalist and storyteller Kylie Low gets straight to the story with a mix of narrated episodes and documentary style production featuring interviews with surviving family and friends and insight on the investigations from detectives and sources who know these cases best.This is heart-centered, ethical true crime, bringing light to stories you’re not hearing on other podcasts. It is Dark Downeast's mission to hono…
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Kylie Lowe makes complex New England case histories legible while keeping evidence, uncertainty, and the people harmed in proper proportion.
Dark Downeast follows cases from Maine, New Hampshire, and Connecticut with close attention to how an investigation changes over time. Kylie Lowe guides the narration through witness accounts, police theories, courtroom arguments, forensic developments, and family recollections.
A stamp heist enters the picture, and your red string has to learn restraint.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A death case opens into stamps, prison ties, and organized crime shadows.
Dark Downeast moves through Jim Cassidy's death with a steady hand, tracing his stamp and coin business, the prison-era stamp links, and investigators' attention to men later tied to a Boston organized crime figure.
Kylie Lowe revisits a Maine death case shaped by an anonymous call, an embezzlement warrant, and a family left waiting.
Kylie Lowe follows the 1976 death of James Cassidy, a Massachusetts Bank vice president and father of three, after an anonymous call led Maine investigators to a burning station wagon off a remote road.
A 1988 Nashua double murder case shifts as new detectives, witnesses, and forensic technology reopen old questions.
Dark Down East returns to the 1988 Nashua, New Hampshire murders of Brenda Warner and Charlene Randstrom, following a case shaped by suspects, confessions, trials, and years of legal fighting.
A Maine murder case where letters, bullets, and doubt keep shifting the ground.
Dark Down East traces the murder of Abraham Levine and the trial of Eleanor Johnson in Waterville, Maine, where a killing on the Levine family cattle farm grows into a case shaped by race, reputation, and reasonable doubt.
A missing-person case built from witness accounts, a stolen car, and physical clues that never brought closure.
Dark Down East follows April Grisanti's disappearance through a winter night in 1985, opening with the call to Mary Lou Grisanti in Norwalk and staying close to the reported struggle, the voice asking for help, and the unanswered questions that lingered after.
A New Hampshire murder case told with care, skepticism, and a close look at haste.
Joseph Woodside's 1979 killing on a New Hampshire campus trail is framed as a case about how fast certainty can harden. Dark Down East keeps close to the known facts: the suspect police had within a day, the defense challenge to the glass-mug theory, the witness who described a…
Cold cases kept in public view.
Folklore, cryptids, and cautious wonder.
One reads the case notes, one hears them fresh.
This episode covers the mysterious disappearance of Attiin Rachmawati Shaw, a teen from Indonesia who went missing in Washburn, Maine, and the efforts to bring attention to her case.
This episode covers the unsolved murders of Rosalie Miller and Mindy West in New Hampshire during the late 1990s.
This episode of Dark Down East investigates the unsolved 1996 murder of 17-year-old Brandi 'Amy' Sullivan in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, highlighting a flawed investigation and a crucial lie that shifted the timeline.
The episode covers the mysterious disappearance of Brittany Tee from Brookfield, Massachusetts, in January 2023, exploring the circumstances and ongoing search for answers.
A podcast episode exploring the unsolved disappearance of Wilfred 'Butch' King III in Vermont in 1980.
This episode explores the unresolved murder of James Cassidy in 1976, delving into evidence of financial crimes, organized crime, and rare stamps found in the Maine woods.
This episode investigates the 1976 murder of James Cassidy, a Massachusetts bank vice president found dead in a burning station wagon in Maine, amid embezzlement charges and missing money.
Dark Down East host Kylie Lowe covers the October 1988 murders of Charlene Randstrom, 48, and Brenda Warner, 32, stabbed more than a dozen times each in their Nashua, New Hampshire apartment while Charlene's son Joel slept unaware on the couch nearby.
Joan Wertkin’s white BMW was found at Westport’s Merritt Superette after her body was discovered burning there on May 24, 1989.
This episode details the 1982 unsolved murder of 16-year-old Lucia Kai Roberts in Boston's Franklin Park, exploring rumors of a cover-up and a detective's relentless pursuit of justice.
Bertha and a theater cashier placed Eleanor Johnson at the Haynes Theater during the prosecution’s timeline.
April Grisanti called police from Anthony's and said, "I need a restraining order" after reporting choking and attempted rape.
["Dark Downeast traces the November 1979 killing of Joseph Woodside on a University of New Hampshire trail in Durham, where two students found him beneath a burdock bush and police identified the victim as a 35-year-old man from North Vassalboro, Maine.", "The case turns on a Wildcat Pizza encounter, four University of New Hampshire student witnesses, burrs on Barney Zeal's jacket, a heavy glass mug, and an empty wallet with only about four dollars and change on Woodside.", "After a first-degree murder arrest, a dismissed indictment, a retrial, a mistrial, and another trial, Barney Zeal was convicted of second-degree murder and attempted robbery on January 20, 1983.", "The episode also follows Barney's disappearance while free on bail and the family's argument that the investigation narrowed too quickly around one suspect."]
Teenagers towing a sleeping bag weighted with a cinder block from Rhode Island's Narrow River in 1984 found the strangled body of 24-year-old Deborah Stone.