Great Lakes True Crime

Great Lakes True Crime is a narrated case series about people who disappeared or were killed in towns around the Great Lakes, and it introduces itself as coming from the south shore of Lake Erie. Steve, who signs off as host and producer, carries the narration. The register is sober and procedural. Episodes are built from dates, places, police findings and what friends and family remembered, and the telling stays close to that record. Several open on the last moment someone was seen. Cheryl Hughes, a mother of three in Chillicothe, Ohio, went out to pick up a pizza for her husband in July 1977. Cindy Anderson vanished in 1981 from a Toledo law office that was found locked from the inside, with the radio playing and a romance novel open on her desk. Chelsea Bruck went to a Halloween party near her southeast Michigan home in 2014 and never made it back. Place matters to how these stories get told. The Cheryl Hughes episode pauses to explain that Chillicothe served as Ohio's first and third capital, and the Chelsea Bruck episode places her home village of Maybee between Toledo and Detroit. The investigations get patient attention, including the parts that went nowhere. In the Bruck case there is a composite sketch of a man in dark sunglasses and a black hoodie, along with tips that police later found to be false. In the Hughes case the investigative file itself disappeared, leaving only a brief Kentucky police report from when her body was found. In Traverse City, Michigan, the detail that an 18-year-old front desk worker's killer wore work boots pointed police first toward workers at the condominium complex and then toward her boyfriend, and both were ruled out. Not every case stays near Lake Erie. One follows the death of Katrina Smith in Rockford, Illinois, where investigators looking into her husband's past found a changed name and an arson conviction from his teens. The show also revisits its own earlier cases. An update episode returns to the 1989 kidnapping and murder of Amy Mihaljevic in Bay Village and the 1964 killing of Beverly Jarosz in Garfield Heights, both in Cleveland's suburbs. In that update, the show declines to name a person being discussed online because the police have not named anyone. Several episodes end with the victim rather than the case: the family left behind, a burial place, a memorial scholarship. The Cindy Anderson episode closes with a Toledo Police Department number for anyone with information, and the show asks for thoughts and case suggestions by email and on its Facebook page.