Outdoor crime, traced through evidence and unanswered questions.
Park Predators, hosted by Delia, follows criminal investigations through campgrounds, forests, desert camping spots, and a Florida boat ramp. Its case narratives connect forensic clues and conflicting accounts with questions about police decisions and the families left waiting for answers.
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An earlier report of gunfire, a preserved biological sample, or a missing firearm can change how an investigation is understood. Park Predators gives those details room to matter. Hosted by Delia, the show follows murders and disappearances connected to outdoor recreation, moving between the circumstances of a crime and the effort to establish what happened. The settings reach beyond national parks. Cases take place in a Wisconsin campground, the woods of Stanley Park, Arizona desert camping areas, and around a boat ramp on Anna Maria Island. Geography has practical consequences for the search. Dense vegetation complicates the recovery of remains, while the layout of roads and access points becomes part of the effort to reconstruct a suspect's movements. Physical evidence can also overturn an assumption. In the Stanley Park case involving Ramsey and Kenneth Lutz, DNA testing corrects an earlier assessment that one recovered skull belonged to a teenage girl. Identification does not resolve the whole case. The narrative also considers searches, reported sightings, and an account from Kenneth's girlfriend that raises questions about the boys' movements before they disappeared. Other investigations reach a courtroom. The Wisconsin campground double homicide follows the development of forensic testing and familial DNA leads, then examines the evidence and testimony presented at trial. Police decisions receive close attention, too. The Malibu Creek State Park shooting case includes earlier incidents reported by visitors, questions about public warnings, and litigation alleging that authorities failed to protect campers. Allegations remain distinct from established findings. In the disappearance of sheriff's deputy Jonathan Adjaye, competing explanations are considered alongside disputes about a firearm's whereabouts and the absence of evidence establishing how he died. The uncertainty carries a human cost. Families' searches for answers, the financial aftermath of a disappearance, and disputes over restitution keep the consequences visible after the initial investigative work has passed. Measured and grave, Park Predators suits a listener interested in how cases are built, challenged, and sometimes left unresolved.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants true crime grounded in timelines, forensic clues, conflicting accounts, and the consequences for victims' families.
What sets it apart: Suits a listener who wants the outdoor setting to matter to the investigation: difficult searches, park access, and decisions about visitor warnings become part of understanding the case.
Explore the dark side of the world’s most beautiful places with investigative journalist and park enthusiast Delia D’Ambra. Each week, Delia guides you deep into national parks and forests across the globe, uncovering stories where nature’s breathtaking beauty has masked sinister secrets. From infamous cases that made headlines to little-known crimes that still need answers, Delia’s relentless pursuit of the truth takes her through archives and remote landscapes to reveal the hidden darkness haunting these natural wonders. Because sometimes, the most beautiful places hide the darkest secrets. This is Park Predators.
Based on 8 episodes we listened to · November 2026
Park Predators connects outdoor crime investigations with the handling of evidence, decisions about public warnings, and families' continuing pursuit of accountability.
Park Predators makes the response to an outdoor crime part of the story: who reported earlier trouble, what investigators collected, and which warnings never reached visitors. Hosted by Delia, it follows murders and disappearances through measured case narratives.
Missing park warnings give your inner investigator somewhere more useful to look than the nearest suspicious shrub.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A mistaken skull identification gives this Stanley Park cold case its sharpest turn.
Stanley Park's beauty sits uneasily beside the discovery of human remains, and Park Predators uses the 1990 skull case to show how a single early assumption can pull a cold case off course.
A measured Joshua Tree case study that turns an affair and disappearance into a careful account.
Delia D'Ambra keeps the 2014 Joshua Tree National Park case steady from the start. The story moves from attraction and a hidden affair into a marriage coming apart, then into the fallout around a disappearance.
A long cold case gains shape through one unsettling witness account and a stubborn timeline.
Park Predators returns to the Babes in the Woods case in Stanley Park, and the episode works best when it stays close to the 1947 witness account.
A death in Devil's Punchbowl becomes a careful look at marriage strain, investigator judgment, and doubt.
Park Predators follows the case at Devil's Punchbowl Natural Area and Nature Center in South Central California, where the setting itself carries the episode's tension: the rough beauty of the trails, the overlooks, and the wide reach of the San Gabriel Mountains, Mojave Desert,…
A Gatlinburg case where luminol and a blood trail unsettle the first story police heard.
Park Predators keeps the focus on the physical evidence in this Gatlinburg case, tracing a killing along the eastern edge of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
A blunt outlaw case that strips away the myth and stays with the facts.
Claude Dallas Jr. comes off as less folk hero than armed fugitive, and the episode keeps the focus on the murders in Owyhee County, Idaho, the survivalist life he built, and the details that made him difficult to pin down.
A measured episode that is strongest when it lets the record stay incomplete.
Park Predators keeps this case grounded in what can be supported, which is where it works best. It follows two crimes separated by nearly 30 years and treats the 1934 Shoshone County, Idaho disappearance of Ellsworth Teed as something still worth weighing carefully.
A Florida island murder case that leans on geography, timing, and a possible escape route to build suspicion.
The review treats Anna Maria Island as more than a vacation backdrop, and that focus gives the case some weight. It follows Delia D'Ambra through the boat ramp, the Foodway grocery store, and the island's limited ways on and off, so the timing and escape questions never feel…
ABC Audio's Theranos fraud series that also introduces its other true-crime podcasts.
Patrick Radden Keefe investigates whether the CIA secretly wrote a Scorpions hit.
Jake Halpern and the Snowball team track a con artist who defrauded a family.
A city-by-city true-crime documentary, from Detroit's Kwame Kilpatrick scandal to mob confessions.
Host Dilia D'Ambra recounts the June 22, 2018 killing of 35-year-old chemist Tristan Baudet, shot in his tent at campsite 51 while his two daughters slept beside him.
An FBI investigation traced 18-year-old Tammy Sears’s January 2006 killing to a green Camaro ride into Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Dilia DeAmbra traces the July 9, 1976 shooting deaths of David Schuldees and Ellen Mathies at McClintock Park in Marinette County, Wisconsin, using the full public investigative file.
Host Delia D'Ambra investigates the unsolved 1989 murders of 13-year-olds Ramsey Rue and Kenneth Lutz, whose skulls were found years apart in Stanley Park, Vancouver—Ramsey's in 1990 and Kenneth's discovered in 1995 by a local man who kept it on his basement shelf for three years before turning it over to police.
This episode of Park Predators investigates the 1998 unsolved murder of a park ranger at Big Witch Overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina.
Delia D'Ambra takes the case to Joshua Tree National Park in California.
Delia D'Ambra returns to Stanley Park and the Babes in the Woods case, a British Columbia cold case that has stayed unsolved for more than 70 years.
A death in Devil's Punchbowl pulls the case into a striking Los Angeles County recreation space.
Delia D'Ambra takes the case to the eastern edge of Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
Delia D'Ambra centers the story on Claude Dallas Jr., the dangerous man at the center of a case that had started to harden into a legend for all the wrong reasons.
Delia D'Ambra frames the episode around two separate crimes that happened almost 30 years apart.
Delia D'Ambra takes listeners to Anna Maria Island, a thin strip of land off Florida's west coast that looks like paradise on the surface.
Delia D'Ambra takes the case to Burke County, North Carolina.
Delia D'Ambra revisits the case.
Delia D'Ambra sets the case in Uncompahgre National Forest in western Colorado, a sprawling nearly one-million-acre landscape of canyons, mountains, wildlife, and trails.
Delia D'Ambra opens on Bumblebee Road in central Arizona.
The case opens in 1896, near White Sands National Park.
Host Delia D'Ambra examines the unsolved 1977 murder of 22-year-old Julianne Cohen, a University of Florida forestry graduate student strangled with her own bra in the Austin Cary Memorial Forest in Gainesville.
Pine Mountain State Resort Park in southeastern Kentucky sets the scene.
This episode investigates the unsolved 2017 murder of Kathy Hardy in Renaissance Park, Chattanooga, featuring an interview with her husband and eyewitness Sean Hardy.
Delia D'Ambra anchors the case in Bienville National Forest in Mississippi.
Delia D'Ambra opens in Prentiss Cooper State Forest in southeast Tennessee.
Host Delia D'Ambra investigates a 1991 murder at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, uncovering a violent betrayal.
Host Delia D'Ambra explores crimes and tragedies that occur in national parks, blending investigative journalism with nature's beauty.
Host Delia D'Ambra investigates a 1995 murder of a forest service worker in Payette National Forest.
This episode includes ads for Saatchi Art and Helix Sleep, then begins a story about a GoFundMe for an adoptive mother of a non-verbal autistic child.
This episode promotes other podcasts and discusses the host's approach to covering cold cases in national parks.
Host Delia D'Ambra introduces a complex case involving two homicide victims and several sexual assault survivors in Angelina National Forest, Texas.
Delia D'Ambra introduces a notorious multi-victim homicide case from 50 years ago in Iowa, highlighting a survivor who helped ensure justice.
Host Delia D'Ambra investigates two unrelated missing persons cases at Indiana Dunes National Park, collaborating with the Crime Junkie podcast.
Host Delia D'Ambra investigates a crime that occurred in Cherokee National Forest, Tennessee, exploring the dark side of beautiful natural places.
Host Delia D'Ambra investigates the unsolved 35-year-old double murder of Harry Billy Scott and John Stanley Smith at Don Pedro Island State Park in Florida.