Heinous – An Asian True Crime Podcast

When Japan surrendered on the 15th of August, 1945, the world called an end to its most brutal chapter in history. Flags were lowered. Peace treaties were signed. Everyone just wanted to move on.

But nobody told the comfort women.

For years during the war, while men braved the frontlines, hundreds of thousands of women were abducted from their homes and their villages; enslaved into camps and forced to satisfy the needs of passing soldiers. Many died of disease and malnutrition, while others were killed for trying to escape. And what made it even more chilling was how bureaucratic it all was, from the kidnapping and the enslavement, to even accounting for the fees collected for each sexual encounter. And yet when the war ended, the soldiers simply left, and the women, those who actually managed to survive the atrocities, were left to deal with their trauma on their own.

In this episode, we trace the architecture of the comfort women system: who constructed it, who enforced it, and who was paid to look the other way. And we hear from the women who waited sixty years to say out loud what everyone already knew.

The world tried to forget about them and move on.

So they had no choice but to make the world remember.

Join your fellow Heinous fans and interact with the team at our website or through our socials (IG, TikTok) @heinous_1upmedia.
-
Love Heinous? But feel its getting too dark for you? Check out:
📝💕 "Post, Love", Essays on Love, Life and Everything in Between.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It was 4:25pm on a Wednesday afternoon in Taipei. Commuters, students, strangers were on board a train on the Bannan line heading west to Jiangzicui from Longshan Temple; the longest gap between any two stations on the entire Taipei Metro network.
To anyone else, this detail wouldn't mean much, but Cheng Chieh had pondered over this for years. Later, he even revealed to investigators that he chose that specific stretch precisely because he knew it would give him more time.
And twenty seconds after leaving the Longshan Temple station, he pulled out a knife.
Passengers flooded out of the carriage when the train finally pulled into Jiangzicui, screaming for people on the platform to run. Four people were dead. Twenty-four were injured. It was the first fatal attack on the Taipei Metro since the day it opened.
Cheng Chieh was only twenty-one years old. And he had been planning this attach since childhood.

Part 1: We examine Cheng Chieh's troubled background and the conditions that led him to the attack in May of 2014.

Part 2: We dig into the fallout following Cheng Chieh's horrific metro attack, as well as the shocking revelations uncovered during his murder trial.

Join your fellow Heinous fans and interact with the team at our website or through our socials (IG, TikTok) @heinous_1upmedia.
-
Love Heinous? But feel its getting too dark for you? Check out:
📝💕 "Post, Love", Essays on Love, Life and Everything in Between.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It was 4:25pm on a Wednesday afternoon in Taipei. Commuters, students, strangers were on board a train on the Bannan line heading west to Jiangzicui from Longshan Temple; the longest gap between any two stations on the entire Taipei Metro network.
To anyone else, this detail wouldn't mean much, but Cheng Chieh had pondered over this for years. Later, he even revealed to investigators that he chose that specific stretch precisely because he knew it would give him more time.
And twenty seconds after leaving the Longshan Temple station, he pulled out a knife.
Passengers flooded out of the carriage when the train finally pulled into Jiangzicui, screaming for people on the platform to run. Four people were dead. Twenty-four were injured. It was the first fatal attack on the Taipei Metro since the day it opened.
Cheng Chieh was only twenty-one years old. And he had been planning this attach since childhood.

Part 1: We examine Cheng Chieh's troubled background and the conditions that led him to the attack in May of 2014.

Part 2: We dig into the fallout following Cheng Chieh's horrific metro attack, as well as the shocking revelations uncovered during his murder trial.

Join your fellow Heinous fans and interact with the team at our website or through our socials (IG, TikTok) @heinous_1upmedia.
-
Love Heinous? But feel its getting too dark for you? Check out:
📝💕 "Post, Love", Essays on Love, Life and Everything in Between.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the morning of November 23, 2009, a convoy of vehicles wound through the highways of Maguindanao province in the southern Philippines. Inside were lawyers, political supporters, journalists, and the wife and family members of a man who simply wanted to run for governor.
They had no reason to believe they wouldn't make it home by nightfall. But they never did.
Armed men blocked the convoy on the highway, and herded the group to a nearby hilltop where several open graves had been dug up. Then, without warning, they opened fire.
When it was over, 58 people were dead. Among them: 32 journalists and media workers, two lawyers, and six motorists who had simply been travelling the same road. It would become the single deadliest attack against journalists ever recorded, and one of the most brazen acts of political violence in modern history. Behind it all stood the Ampatuans a powerful clan whose private army had long operated in the shadows of state power, linked to killings, torture, abductions, and a culture of fear that had gone unchallenged for decades.
This is a story about what happens when impunity becomes a way of life. About power so entrenched it believed itself untouchable. And about the long, gruelling decade-long fight to make it answer for what it did on a hillside in Maguindanao.

Join your fellow Heinous fans and interact with the team at our website or through our socials (IG, TikTok) @heinous_1upmedia.
-
Love Heinous? But feel its getting too dark for you? Check out:
📝💕 "Post, Love", Essays on Love, Life and Everything in Between.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the surface, Nancy Kissel had the life people dreamed about. A luxury apartment in a posh Hong Kong neighbourhood. A high-flying husband who works in banking. Three beautiful kids. A postcard existence, by any measure.
So why, on the night of November 2nd, did she hand her husband a strawberry milkshake laced with enough sedatives to drop a man twice his size? And why, hours later, was Robert Kissel found dead and wrapped in a carpet and locked in a storage room?
The answer isn't simple. It never is. Because behind every perfect life, there are things that don't make it into the postcard. Affairs. Secrets. Years of something quietly rotting underneath, until it surfaces in the most heinous way imaginable.

Part 1 - We trace the roots of Robert and Nancy's marriage. Detailing how they first met, and where the tensions started to build up before culminating in Robert's brutal murder.

Part 2 - We follow the sensationalized trial of Nancy Kissel and the media furor that surrounded it. Will justice be served? Or will Nancy get away with it all?

Join your fellow Heinous fans and interact with the team at our website or through our socials (IG, TikTok) @heinous_1upmedia.
-
Love Heinous? But feel its getting too dark for you? Check out:
📝💕 "Post, Love", Essays on Love, Life and Everything in Between.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.