Pineapple Street Studios and Audacy
14 episodes listed below
A stranger’s box, a family’s reckoning.
A box of artifacts pulls reporter Eric Mennel into the life of Matthew MaGill, whose trail runs through strange glamour, crime, and lonely endings. The series keeps turning back toward Mennel’s own family, where old silences prove just as revealing.
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Stay Away from Matthew MaGill starts with the kind of discovery that sounds like a dare. A dead man has left behind a box, and the box seems to contain several lives at once. There are old papers. There are stories of Broadway, boats, stolen cars, and a hijacking. Reporter Eric Mennel follows the trail because the details are irresistible, but the series quickly becomes more complicated than a hunt for the truth about one stranger. Matthew MaGill is a subject, a mystery, and eventually a mirror. People remember him through romance, frustration, fear, admiration, and confusion. Their stories do not line up neatly. That is part of the point. The show is patient with contradiction, especially when a memory arrives with a joke, a pause, or a detail that seems too odd to ignore. A monkey in an apartment can matter. So can money from a mother. As the reporting moves through Matthew’s past, Mennel begins pulling at his own family’s unresolved history. His conversations with Shannon, his father John Mennell, and other relatives turn the series inward without abandoning the investigation. The shift is uncomfortable. It is also where the show becomes most distinctive. A story about a vanished man becomes a story about distance, guilt, inheritance, and the strange labor of asking relatives direct questions. There are crimes here, and deaths, and documents. But the lasting charge comes from the human debris around them: what was saved, what was lost, what was never said, and what finally becomes speakable when someone turns on a recorder.
Made for: For listeners who like investigative storytelling with emotional patience, reported texture, and room for uncomfortable family conversations. It suits true-crime fans who want character, memory, and motive more than tidy answers.
What sets it apart: The series lets the external mystery and the reporter’s family history change each other in real time. Its best moments come from the friction between documents, interview tape, and the uneasy work of asking loved ones what really happened.
When Matthew MaGill died alone in the woods on the Florida-Georgia border, he left behind a box filled with the artifacts of an incredible life: from Broadway in the 1970s, to a 747 hijacking, to the culture of drugs and luxury cars in 1980s Florida. A series of coincidences leads reporter Eric Mennel to the box, sending him on a five-year search to understand the truth about its owner. But as Mennel learns who Matthew MaGill really was, he is confronted with questions about his own life, his own mistakes, and his own family secrets.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · June 2026
A patient serialized investigation that uses documents, witnesses, and family conversations to make Matthew MaGill's contradictions legible.
Stay Away from Matthew MaGill is serialized True Crime built from identity, documents, and the stories people leave behind. The series follows Matthew through a box of artifacts and through people who knew pieces of him, including Ed Libby's encounters at a Florida nursery and…
You want the 747-hijacking artifact box to lead straight back to family dinner.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Matthew McGill's aftermath becomes a blunt, uneasy study of family habits and late honesty.
Matthew McGill's death in 2015 hangs over the episode, but the piece works best when it stops treating that fact as a monument and starts watching the family sit with it. The conversation about whether people deserve another chance is the sharpest stretch here.
A family breakup hits hardest when the dog becomes the thing everyone remembers.
The episode keeps the breakup small and concrete: a late call, the old German shepherd Taz, and the image of him ending up in a cage after the pound takes him. The dog carries the weight here, not the split, and that is what gives the piece its pull.
A grief story about how anger, guilt, and isolation linger after a crash.
This episode stays close to Shannon as grief makes ordinary life feel off balance. It returns to the crash that killed Rob that day and Hillary two weeks later, the hospital letter she was asked to write but never sent, and the guilt that comes from realizing how a few angry…
A family archive of jealousy, memory, and the silence between two very different endings.
The money, the horses, the homes, and the material itself give this chapter a jagged honesty, and that little college letter with a $20 bill tucked inside carries more weight than it should have to.
A South Florida raid and the papers around it leave Cindy and Dorr trying to sort out what was known.
This chapter makes the case feel immediate: a Tuesday afternoon in South Florida, a house ringed by cars, and Cindy trying to make sense of what her family has been pulled into.
A box of keepsakes opens into Sidney, a sailboat, and a warm, unruly portrait of Jenny and Dorr.
The episode starts with Matthew McGill's box on the floor of a New York apartment and lets the objects do the work: old newspapers, maps, and anatomical drawings of rodents, all of it cluttered in a way that feels used rather than arranged.
A patient portrait of a nursery owner whose stories keep getting bigger.
The episode opens on a Christmas Eve 2017 family recording in Florida, then shifts to Matthew McGill, a nursery owner whose life story comes in a steady run of big claims.
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.
A murder rumor in rural Alabama unravels into a clockmaker's suicide and estate feud.
This trailer introduces Season 2 of Pulitzer on the Road, the official podcast of the Pulitzer Prizes, hosted by Nicole Carroll.
This episode is a promotional preview for Hysterical, a podcast from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios hosted by Dan Taberski.
A family conversation finally opens.
Before the ending, the host goes back to beginnings.
A letter never gets written.
A folded note gives the whole scene its ache.
Cindy comes home to cop cars.
Matthew McGill's box lands on a living room floor, and Eric is back in New York in the spring of 2016 trying to explain why he cares.
Christmas Eve starts awkwardly.