The True Crime Witch Podcast

The True Crime Witch Podcast gives each episode to one case. The host, Emma, follows it from the first detail to the outcome, or to the point where the record runs out. The format stays the same. She opens with 'Good evening friends', several episodes start with a warning about graphic content, and the closing line is 'stay safe and stay spooky'. Within that format her voice is conversational, with small asides and her own readings of the evidence. The cases come from several countries. At Yale, Annie Le is caught on camera heading to a research lab. Her phone and pocketbook are later found inside, none of the campus's 70 cameras shows her leaving, and her body is found on the day she was due to marry. In Rockledge, Florida, 18-year-old Tammy Lynn Leppert, winner of more than 280 pageant crowns, becomes convinced that a van outside has mirrored windows. In Australia, the Sharon Siermans episode starts with a four-year-old telling his grandmother, 'Mummy's up there'. 'Babes in the Woods' traces how police came to charge Russell Bishop with the murders of Karen Hadaway and Nicola Fellows, including details an officer said Bishop could not have seen. Emma does not treat an official finding as the last word. In the Annie Borjesson episode she explains why the quick suicide ruling looked thin to her: no note, job applications in Edinburgh, no forensic team, no door-to-door enquiries, and bruises and scratches found at autopsy. She sets out the theories around the case, from a cover-up to ties with the CIA and MI6, without choosing one. With Sharon Siermans she focuses on parole and argues that closer monitoring might have saved a life. 'The Angel of the Meadow' shows another habit: close attention to objects. An unidentified woman's pinafore dress, with a 1970s print of a couple in 1920s or 1930s clothes, becomes a clue in itself, and Emma says plainly that to her it looks art deco. A black stiletto court shoe and a Guinness measuring chart from the 1960s sit beside it. Anyone drawn to unidentified-person cases could start there. When a case is unresolved, the episode can close with the police contact, as it does for the Cocoa Beach Police Department, and for Greater Manchester Police and Crime Stoppers UK. Emma asks for case suggestions by email or direct message, and in one episode she announces she is writing a book, 'It's Grim Up North', about cases from the north of England. The families stay in view throughout: Annie Le's loved ones trying to rebuild, Annie Borjesson's family pressing for answers, a boy growing up without his mother.