Inside Crime with Angeline Hartmann

Inside Crime with Angeline Hartmann is true crime from a host who, by her own account, is part of the search. At the top of episodes, Hartmann introduces herself as a veteran crime reporter. She was a correspondent and producer on America's Most Wanted, helping police track down fugitives, and she now helps families and law enforcement seek answers at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. She sums it up in two lines: storytelling is her craft, crime fighting her passion. Episodes are built on the words of people close to a case. Hartmann is present as the interviewer and, in one case, as someone who talks with the family regularly. That case is Timmothy Pitzen's, the subject of a five-part season that coincided with ten years since he disappeared. The season is detailed. An investigator walks through hotel video that places Timmothy and Amy at the front desks of Key Lime Cove and then the Kalahari Resort in the Wisconsin Dells, both of them appearing fine. Amy's sister, Kara, is asked whether Amy could have planned something like this, and she answers 'definitely yes.' A law enforcement voice explains why every theory stays open while the boy remains unlocated. One episode carries a perspective Hartmann says had never been shared publicly: a school staff member recalling a growing sense that something was wrong when Timmothy did not come to school. TV news audio about a teenager who told police he was Timmothy is woven in, and several season episodes close on a preview of what comes next. Listeners get a job as well as a story. Hartmann thanks them for sharing Timmothy's age-progression image and passes their social media messages on to his family. She also points to a case in which a young child was identified because a forensic image circulated on social media. Special editions step outside the season format. One is an interview with Secret Service director James Murray at the agency's Washington, D.C. headquarters. He describes an after-action review that turned the agency's threat assessment practices upside down and led it to study people behind assassination attempts that had nothing to do with the Secret Service. Another is a breaking-news episode that returns to a 23-year-old DeKalb County, Georgia case of an unidentified child, which the show had covered in episodes 13 through 18. At its emotional center is a woman who kept checking websites for more than 20 years, describing the sadness and the peace of being told she could stop looking. Inside Crime is independently produced and supported through Patreon, where members are offered ways to get involved behind the scenes on cases. It puts investigative detail and a family's side of a case in the same place, told plainly.