True crime with street-level criminal justice context.
The True Crime Podcaster follows cases ranging from ticket scams and AI fraud to serial killers, spouse murder, and drug-smuggling lore. Ryan Horne frames each story through criminal justice concepts, courtroom evidence, offender behavior, and everyday warning signs.
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The True Crime Podcaster covers crime with a practical, plainspoken style that sits somewhere between a case file, a lecture, and a warning from someone who has seen the system up close. Ryan Horne presents episodes on fraud, murder, serial killers, spouse murder, drug smuggling, and the behavior patterns that can push ordinary-looking lives toward criminal outcomes. The show is not polished into distance. It often keeps the conversational asides, local references, sponsor mentions, and personal framing that make the episodes feel closer to a live talk than a scripted documentary. That looseness is part of its identity. The cases themselves can be dark. Albert Fish receives a two-part treatment that emphasizes depravity, childhood trauma, institutional failure, and why Horne believes the case is underrecognized in criminal justice classrooms. Other episodes follow Piper Roundtree through relationship breakdown, custody loss, financial pressure, and revenge. Melanie McGuire’s case becomes a discussion of circumstantial evidence and how suspicion can build around timing, behavior, and physical clues. Harrison Graham’s story turns toward neighborhood warning signs, drug activity, social environment, and differential association. The Andrew Thornton II episode moves into risk-taking, smuggling, and the strange cultural afterlife of the Cocaine Bear story. The scam episodes widen the lens. Steve Commissar, also called Brett Champion and the Don of Con, appears in The Con Man and the Cop installments, where old-school persuasion meets modern fraud tools. Ticket scams, cashless venues, AI voice impersonation, and email threats are treated as everyday hazards rather than distant curiosities. The show’s strongest throughline is prevention. It repeatedly asks how people get targeted, how evidence gets interpreted, and how families can stay alert to predators, financial or violent.
Made for: Best for true crime listeners who prefer direct case narration with practical explanations of fraud, evidence, offender behavior, and criminal justice concepts. It especially fits audiences interested in both violent crime and white-collar schemes.
What sets it apart: The show blends case storytelling with recurring classroom-style explanations from Ryan Horne’s criminal justice perspective. Its scam episodes also add Steve Commissar’s old-school con-man framing to modern fraud risks like ticket scams and AI impersonation.
Become a Paid Subscriber: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ryan-christopher-horn/subscribeA discussion of crime from white-collar crime to serial killers and everything in between! Check out our website at http://truecrimepodcaster.com
A con man and a cop talk ticket scams; your skeptical inbox gets some company.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A speeding-ticket email leads into a loose, practical talk about fraud, cashless venues, and why one yes is enough.
Ticket scams start with a speeding notice sent to a college email, then the conversation opens out into the way fraud can follow people into busy public spaces.
Steve Commissar and Ryan Horne return with a candid look at how AI is changing the scam playbook.
The Con Man and the Cop Return brings Steve Commissar, also identified as Brett Champion, back into conversation with Ryan Horne after a sabbatical, and the reunion quickly moves past small talk.
A grim, carefully staged look at Albert Fish's early life before the crimes are fully covered.
Albert Fish's childhood is treated as a grim foundation for a criminal case that has not yet reached its most disturbing material. Ryan Horn traces a line from family reports of hallucinations and religious delusions to Fish's father's death, his mother's inability to support…
A strange drug-smuggling case ties a Kentucky-born attorney to the bear behind a familiar movie title.
Andrew Thornton II anchors a true-crime story with an odd, almost unbelievable trail: a Kentucky-born drug-smuggling attorney, a California plea, a flight to North Carolina, and the cocaine-addicted bear that later made the case more widely familiar.
A plainspoken murder case study shaped by custody loss, support debt, and a difficult return to Texas.
Custody, housing, child support, and a return to Texas press in on Piper Roundtree in a murder case built around unusually tangled personal fallout.
Skepticism with receipts and a pulse.
ABC Audio's Theranos fraud series that also introduces its other true-crime podcasts.
LA Times reporter Christopher Goffard traces con man John Meehan's fraud, abuse, and its Bravo TV adaptation.
Steve Commissar says a speeding-ticket demand landed in his college email, and Ryan Horn says no police department collects ticket payments by email.
Steve Commissar and Ryan Horne open The Con Man and the Cop on phishing texts, fake utility emails, and AI voice cloning.
Ryan Horn opens The True Crime Podcaster's Albert Fish Part One by calling Fish the most depraved criminal he has studied and saying fewer than 10% of his college students know the name.
Ryan Horn uses the Cocaine Bear reference to introduce Andrew Thornton II, the Kentucky-born lawyer and former Lexington police officer at the center of the story.
Host Ryan Horn covers the 2004 murder of University of Richmond professor Fred Jablin by his ex-wife, Texas attorney Piper Roundtree.
Host Ryan Horn narrates the 2004 'suitcase murder' case of New Jersey nurse Melanie McGuire, convicted of killing her husband, Bill McGuire, a Navy veteran turned computer programmer.
Host Ryan Horn covers Harrison Graham, a Philadelphia man convicted of murdering seven women, most of them sex workers, whom he strangled after drug use and sex, and whose 1987 arrest police compared to the Jeffrey Dahmer case due to the smell of decomposing bodies reported by neighbors.
Host Ryan Horn examines the unfounded internet rumor that beloved PBS painter Bob Ross was secretly a serial killer, stressing that no victims, evidence, or law-enforcement involvement have ever surfaced to support it.
The True Crime Podcaster's second episode covers Alyssa Bustamante, who at 15 strangled, slit the throat of, and stabbed nine-year-old Elizabeth Olten near St.
The inaugural episode of The True Crime Podcaster (rebranded from White Collar Crimes) covers the disappearance of Brandon Swanson, a 19-year-old Minnesota West Community and Technical College student who vanished after a phone call to his parents on May 14, 2008.
Ryan Horn covers the Blue Bell Creameries listeria outbreak, which began in the company's Oklahoma plant, triggered a 2015 nationwide recall and production shutdown, and was linked to several deaths.
Ryan Horn of the White Collar Crimes Podcast walks through how scammers are now using AI-cloned voices of family members, friends, and even CEOs to extract money and confidential information.
Host Ryan Horn returns from a week off with COVID to run through 2024 data on white-collar offenders, citing the University of Cincinnati's finding that only 7% of white-collar crime cases involve women and about three-fourths of male offenders are white.
The White Collar Crimes Podcast revisits the case of Solomon Dweck, a New Jersey real estate investor arrested by the FBI in 2006 on an alleged $50 million bank fraud and released on a $10 million bond.
Ryan Horn covers a developing case involving Arkansas psychiatric doctor Brian Hyatt, a former state medical board chairman now facing two Medicaid fraud counts and roughly 60 civil lawsuits.
Defense attorney and former U.S.
Host Ryan Horn recounts the mid-1990s McDonald's Monopoly game fraud orchestrated by Jerome Jacobson, the former police officer who ran security for contractor Simon Marketing.
Ryan Horn opens a new season of the White Collar Crimes Podcast with the case of Kobi Alexander, the Israeli-American CEO who built telecom firm Converse into a NASDAQ-listed company before fleeing fraud charges.
Host Ryan Horn interviews Steve Commissar, the man behind the solar-powered clothesline scam, discussing how he conceived and executed the scheme.
The host discusses how white-collar crimes are prosecuted differently from conventional crimes, referencing a 1980s Bureau of Justice study.
Host Ryan Horne introduces a case about a massive Ponzi scheme in the entertainment industry, focusing on Zachary Joseph Horowitz.
Host Ryan Horn introduces an educational episode about Edwin Sutherland, the sociologist who coined the term 'white-collar crime'.