Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes

Early on February 5th, 2007, Air Force captain Colleen Shipman was walking to her car at Orlando International Airport when a woman in a wig and a trench coat followed her, banged on her window, and sprayed a chemical through the gap. The woman was Lisa Nowak, a NASA astronaut who had flown aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery seven months earlier. Nowak had driven roughly 900 miles from Houston to confront the woman now dating her former lover, a fellow astronaut, in a case the tabloids named the astronaut love triangle. Police found a knife, a mallet, a BB gun and latex gloves in her car. She was charged with attempted murder, and became the first astronaut NASA ever fired. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson traces the two decades of work that put Lisa Nowak in orbit, the obsession that unravelled her in a matter of weeks, and what the case forced NASA to admit about the mental health of the people it sends into space.
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In the hills outside Melbourne, Australia, a yoga teacher named Anne Hamilton-Byrne convinced several hundred followers that she was Jesus Christ. Her members were not dropouts: they were doctors, lawyers, nurses, psychiatrists and social workers, and at one point they effectively controlled a private psychiatric hospital that fed her new recruits. Between 1969 and 1975, she collected 14 children who were not hers, registered every one as her own birth, and raised them behind a barbed-wire fence at a property on Lake Eildon. Their hair was bleached identical shades of blonde. They were starved, beaten, and dosed with sedatives, and at 14 they were given LSD in an initiation ritual. Police did not go through the gate until August 1987. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson traces how one woman assembled a family out of other people's babies, the professional network that made the paperwork possible, and the survivors who brought the whole thing down after every institution around them failed. Please note, this episode contains descriptions of child abuse and discussion of suicide and may not be suitable for all audiences.
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In 2009, at a science fiction convention in Atlanta, a paranormal researcher named Fiona Broome discovered that strangers shared her vivid memory of Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. Mandela walked free in 1990 and died in 2013. Broome named it the Mandela Effect, and the catalogue grew: a children's book spelled wrong, a logo with a horn that never existed, a Sinbad genie movie nobody made. Believers concluded that reality had been edited and their memories were souvenirs of a lost timeline. Then in 2022, University of Chicago researchers put the phenomenon in a lab, confirmed that huge numbers of strangers share the same specific false memories, and reported no clear explanation for why. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa examines the false memories millions of people share, the parallel-universe and CERN theories built to explain them, and the uncomfortable question underneath all of it: is it scarier to live in an edited universe or to have a mind that cannot be trusted?
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Long before the name Jack the Ripper struck fear into Victorian England, a respectable-looking widow named Mary Ann Cotton was quietly killing her way through the north of the country. By the time investigators caught up with her in 1872, she had outlived four husbands, a lover, and eleven of her own children, nearly all of them poisoned with arsenic and many insured for cash. Hiding in plain sight behind the mask of a grieving mother and wife, she is now considered Britain's first known serial killer, and one of its most overlooked. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson uncovers the chilling story of Mary Ann Cotton, the string of deaths that followed her from town to town, and how a woman managed to murder on such a staggering scale for so long before anyone noticed.
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In 1954, a housewife in Oak Park, Illinois named Dorothy Martin began taking down messages from beings she called the Guardians, and told the small circle around her that a flood would destroy the middle of North America before dawn on December 21st. Flying saucers would collect the believers first. The group, who called themselves the Seekers, gave away possessions and quit jobs, and on the night of the 20th pulled every scrap of metal off their clothes and sat down to wait. Three social psychologists led by Leon Festinger were sitting in the room under false names. Their 1956 book about that night, When Prophecy Fails, gave the world the phrase cognitive dissonance and is still assigned in classrooms. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson examines the prophecy Dorothy Martin took down from the Guardians, the researchers who joined under false names, and the private archive that undid a study taught in classrooms for 70 years.
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If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free and released a day early, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.
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