One killer per episode, and the ordinary face they wore.
What Makes a Killer gives each episode to one case, in settings that include Los Angeles in 1977, Tampa in 1984 and South London in 2012. Investigators explain the evidence in their own words, and one thread keeps returning: killers who were neighbours, family friends or someone loved.
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What Makes a Killer is a true crime series organised into seasons, and its episode titles read like the index of a case file: Bobby Joe Long, Christopher Hightower, Vincent Tabak, Daniel Lee Siebert, Stuart Hazell, The Hillside Stranglers. Each episode belongs to one case. That lets the show range across time and place. Its cases are set in Los Angeles in 1977, Tampa in 1984, Guilford, Connecticut in 1991, Bristol on Christmas Day 2010 and South London in 2012. Most episodes set the scene exactly that way, with a date and a location straight after a warning about graphic content. Then the investigation takes over. In the Hillside Stranglers case, detectives took the lack of drag marks on a body as a sign that two men were at work, and a fibre on a victim's eyelid showed she had been blindfolded. In the Daniel Lee Siebert case, investigators describe finding a campsite up an embankment from a car, then matching fingerprints that confirmed they had their man. The Vincent Tabak episode rebuilds Joanna Yates's last evening from pub CCTV and from a couple at a nearby party who heard two screams. Investigators speak in their own voices here, not only through narration. The Bobby Joe Long episode also brings in author Anna Flower and criminologist Dr. Elizabeth Yardley. The question in the show's name comes through in how the killers are drawn. Long is described through his divorce and a ferocious hatred of women, and Hightower as a pathological liar. One killer is described keeping up a 'gentle giant' facade that convinced his own family he was innocent. Trust keeps coming up. Tabak was a neighbour whom Joanna Yates probably let in. Hightower, a family friend, phoned a school and then a YMCA pretending to be a girl's father so he could collect an eight-year-old. In the Stuart Hazell episode, the last person to see 12-year-old Tia Sharp was the man she called Granddad. The narration leans dramatic, with lines like 'a fresh hunting ground', while the interview voices are plainer and rawer. The Long episode also includes a survivor, a 17-year-old named Lisa. Several episodes end by turning toward the next case in the season, so a run of them carries some momentum. Jennifer Notoso introduces the series as its host in the Stuart Hazell episode. For a first listen, 'S5 Ep9: The Hillside Stranglers' is a good showcase for the detective work, and 'S5 Ep11: Vincent Tabak' shows how the show rebuilds a victim's last hours from small pieces of evidence. The material is heavy throughout, with sexual violence, murder and harm to children at the core of these cases.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants true crime taken one case at a time, with investigators' own accounts of the evidence, and who can handle frank, graphic descriptions of sexual violence and murder.
What sets it apart: It moves to a different killer in every episode, across American and British cases, and keeps coming back to how these killers passed as ordinary: a neighbour let in at the door, a family friend trusted with a child.
A family friend invents a mafia kidnapping after the murders; you'll want every lie accounted for.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Lisa's survival anchors a bleak, survivor-centered account of Bobby Joe Long's escalating violence in Tampa.
Lisa's 26-hour imprisonment gives the episode its sharpest point of tension: she survived, while ten women in the Tampa area were killed across eight months.
A trusted family friend turns school routines into part of a fatal deception.
What Makes a Killer follows Christopher Hightower's claim that Ernest Brendel and his family had been kidnapped by the mafia, and that $75,000 was needed to free them.
A neighbour's calculated cover-up reveals how ordinary proximity can hide extraordinary violence.
A neighbour becomes the central threat in this account of Joanna Yates's murder, opening with her body found partly covered in snow on Christmas Day, 2010.
A stolen car near Elizabethtown leads investigators up an embankment to the campsite that sharpens the hunt for Daniel Siebert.
Linda Jarman's stolen car is found off the interstate in Elizabethtown, and the search quickly moves up an embankment to a campsite. Fingerprints from the car point investigators toward Daniel Siebert, while what they recover nearby begins tying the scene to Jarman, Shea…
Podcast discovery from the Sherpa Chalet.
Witchy banter with glorious detours.
Female crime, told with grave attention.
What Makes a Killer centers this hour on Bobby Joe Long, the Tampa serial killer tied to 10 women's deaths and Lisa's 1984 abduction.
On September 22, 1991, Christopher Hightower walked into Christine Brendel's house in Guilford, Connecticut, showed her Ernest Brendel's bloodstained Toyota, and claimed the mafia had kidnapped Ernest, Alice, and 8-year-old Emily for ransom.
What Makes a Killer: S5 Ep11 traces the 2010 murder of Joanna Yates in Clifton, Bristol, and Vincent Tabak's path from Dutch engineering student to convicted killer.
Daniel Lee Siebert left a road atlas marked with X's and circles, and Eugene Jacks says each circled X matched a recovered body.
["What Makes a Killer follows the Hillside Stranglers case in Los Angeles, where Angelo Bono and Kenneth Bianchi used fake police badges, a dark blue sedan, and an upholstery shop to abduct women and girls.", "Jennifer Notoso frames the series around killers' origins, behavior, and path to bloodshed, then traces Bono from Rochester to Glendale and Bianchi from Rochester to LAPD reserve work.", "The killings escalate from Yolanda Washington and Judy Miller to Sonia Johnson, Dolores Cepeda, Christina Weckler, Lauren Wagner, Kimberly Martin, Karen Mandic, and Diane Wilder, while detectives track fibers, ligatures, and body-dumping patterns.", "Bianchi's Steve Walker defense, his implication of Bono, and the long November 1981 trial show how the case moved from street abductions to a forensic prosecution."]
Ángel Reséndiz rode freight trains across North America while investigators linked him to murders through fingerprints and DNA.
Arizona State Trooper Michael Miller found a chained woman in Robert Ben Rhodes’s truck on Interstate 10 in April 1990.
What Makes a Killer: “Derrick Bird” traces how taxi driver Derek Bird’s grudges accumulated before the June 2010 Cumbria shootings.
Sante Kimes was born Sandra Singers in Oklahoma City on July 24, 1934, and, per her son Kent Walker, turned shoplifting, arson insurance claims and forged identities into a lifestyle.
Kayla Brown was found alive in a metal storage container on Todd Kohlhepp's Woodruff, South Carolina property in November 2016, after 65 days of captivity.
What Makes a Killer host Jennifer Natoso traces Keith Jesperson, born April 6, 1955 in Chilliwack, British Columbia, from a domineering father to a trucking career that gave him access to victims across five states.
A true crime series chronicling the lives of notorious killers, starting with the disappearance and murder of 12-year-old Tia Sharp.
The episode recounts the 1970 abduction of 12-year-old Robin Samso by a man posing as a photographer.
This episode recounts the 1983 murder of Yolanta by a serial killer known as the Polish Hammer Killer.
A detailed account of the 2002 murder of Heather Barnett, focusing on the police investigation and the brutal nature of the crime.