Mugshot

Mugshot is a crime show narrated by its host, Lindsay, and the cases in its recent run are frauds, thefts and cons. Most episodes open the same way, with a name and then the charges, read out like a booking card. Then the scene-setting starts. The Rose Marks episode asks the listener to imagine losing a child and waking every morning hunting for anything that might ease the pain, and only then introduces the psychic shops in Fort Lauderdale's malls. The case widens from one victim to a family network, and eventually to the IRS tracing money through the accounts of relatives who declared almost no income. The Barefoot Bandit episode follows Colton Harris Moore from years of studying aviation manuals and flight simulators to a real Cessna, a clumsy takeoff and a crash onto the Yakima Reservation. Sanford Wallace, introduced as the Spam King, gets the same treatment, starting with the hiss of dial-up and an inbox filling with ads. Not every subject was arrested. The episode on Diederik Stapel says so up front and asks whether he should have been. It then traces how fabricated data sets passed through graduate students who had no idea they were fake, and how the fraud went on for years. It closes on a system whose own design was the weak point, rather than on one villain. Lindsay makes room for background when a case needs it. The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist stops for a lesson on Quebec's syrup production before any theft happens, with a wry aside insisting that the detour is relevant. The Wallace episode says where the record is thin, noting that even his birth year comes from his stated age in court documents, and it names an Ars Technica article by Nate Anderson as a source. Larger stories can run across more than one episode, and Rajneeshpuram is told in two parts. Part two picks up with a Wasco County election looming, Ma Anand Sheila scheming, and her poisonings reaching the commune's own members, which Lindsay reads as classic authoritarian psychology. The humour is dry rather than loud, and the syrup theft becomes the stickiest of situations. Some endings look past the case, as when the Barefoot Bandit episode notes that there have been no new criminal charges since his release. The sign-off is a standing warning to stay out of trouble, or end up pictured in a mugshot of your own. What a listener gets is a run of stories about how people got away with something, and what eventually caught up with them.