Moms and Mysteries: A True Crime Podcast

In March 2010, a middle-aged ex-convict named Lawrence Ray was released from prison after serving six months for child custody interference. With nowhere else to go, he moved into his daughter Talia's co-ed dormitory at Sarah Lawrence College, a small and prestigious liberal arts school just outside New York City. Talia had spent months telling her roommates that her father was a brilliant man who had been unfairly targeted by a corrupt government. So when he arrived, the students opened the door.

What began as a temporary stay quickly evolved into a decade of psychological terror, financial exploitation, and absolute domination. Larry positioned himself as a trusted mentor and therapist, conducting lengthy late-night sessions where he encouraged the students to reveal their deepest insecurities, family conflicts, and mental health struggles. Piece by piece, he assembled a detailed map of each student's vulnerabilities, which he eventually weaponized against them.

Through a combination of sleep deprivation, physical violence, and relentless interrogation, Larry convinced his followers that they had committed terrible acts, poisoned him, and destroyed his property. He forced them to write detailed false confessions in journals and on video, and then insisted they owed him hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. To pay these fabricated debts, the students drained savings, borrowed from parents, performed grueling unpaid manual labor in North Carolina, and in one case, were coerced into commercial sex work.This is the story of how a master manipulator took over the minds of some of the brightest young people in the country, the New York Magazine investigation that exposed the truth, and the federal trial that finally brought him to justice.

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*We realized after recording that we mispronounced the name of Traer, Iowa throughout this episode. We are sorry to anyone from Traer who had to listen to that!*

On the morning of June 18, 2021, a frantic 911 call led deputies to a quiet farmhouse in Traer, Iowa. Inside, they found 42-year-old Ryan Cooper, a beloved local farmer, slumped in his recliner. He had been shot twice in the face. His wife, Karina Cooper, was found clinging to his body, sobbing and claiming that a mysterious intruder had broken into their home while she and their three children slept upstairs. But as investigators began to peel back the layers of their seemingly ordinary family life, they realized the scene was not what it appeared to be.

Behind the scenes, detectives uncovered a secret affair between Karina and a local 22-year-old man named Huston Danker. Though both insisted their relationship was nothing more than a harmless online fantasy, their digital footprint told a far more sinister story. Investigators recovered messages where Karina referred to her husband as merely a sperm donor, fantasized about a rogue semi-truck accident taking him out, and openly discussed building a new life with Huston. When a half-million-dollar life insurance payout entered the picture, the pieces of a cold-blooded murder conspiracy fell into place.

In 2024, nearly three years after the murder, both Karina and Huston were arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Karina chose to take the stand in her own defense, a high-risk move that ultimately sealed her fate. Following a dramatic trial, a jury convicted her in just three hours, resulting in a mandatory life sentence. Just weeks later, as his own trial was set to begin, Huston unexpectedly changed his plea to guilty, bringing a final, shocking conclusion to a devastating case.

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In October 1987, 20-year-old Corinna Mullen was found brutally murdered in the trunk of her own car behind a city garage in Central City, Kentucky. Her injuries were catastrophic. She had been beaten, sexually assaulted, and left to die. Her boyfriend, Jimmy Springer, was arrested, tried, and ultimately acquitted when the jury found the evidence too thin to convict. The investigation was riddled with problems. Evidence was never tested. Key interviews were never recorded. And a pocket knife with blood and hair on it was found by Corinna's own father after her car was returned to the family.

For nearly two decades, Corinna's parents, Claude and Patricia Mullen, refused to let the case die. They placed ads in newspapers, handed out flyers, met with agencies, and followed every lead they could find. Then in 2005, a woman named Sandy came forward with a story that changed everything. She claimed she had been a 16-year-old witness to Corinna's murder and that the man who orchestrated it was none other than Lieutenant Billy Fields, the very officer who had responded to the crime scene and led the original investigation.

In 2006, Billy Fields, Jeffrey Boyd, Jimmy Cramer, and Angela Smith were all arrested in connection with Corinna's death. The trial finally began in 2009, more than 20 years after the murder. Billy and Jeffrey each received life sentences. Jimmy Cramer received 60 years. Corinna's mother did not live to see the arrests. Her father, Claude, died just before Christmas in 2011, two years after the verdicts. Corinna's daughter, Stephanie, who was just two years old when her mother was killed, said she never believed this day would come.

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Jordan James Parke spent years chasing the next procedure, spending over £130,000 on surgeries, fillers, and dramatic transformations that made him one of the most recognizable faces in the British cosmetic industry. He called himself the Lip King, building a massive social media following and launching his own aesthetics training academy. But behind the glamorous before-and-after photos lay a deeply unregulated industry and a series of increasingly dangerous choices.

In September 2024, 33-year-old Alice Webb, a mother of five daughters, traveled to Gloucestershire to attend one of Jordan's training sessions. After undergoing a liquid BBL procedure, Alice became critically ill and died later that day from complications, sparking a national manslaughter investigation and renewed calls for tighter regulation of the cosmetic industry.

Then, before investigators could reach a conclusion or file charges, another death shocked the industry. On February 18, 2026, Jordan was found dead at a London hotel at just 34 years old under circumstances that appeared connected to the very same world that made him famous. This week, we look at the rise of the Lip King, the tragic loss of Alice, and the shocking twist that left both cases with more questions than answers.

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On March 26, 1997, deputies responding to an anonymous tip entered a luxury mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California, and found 39 people dead. They were all dressed in matching black clothing and brand-new Nike sneakers, with purple shrouds placed carefully over their faces. The house was immaculate. The trash had been taken out.

And every single person inside had died willingly, convinced they were boarding a spacecraft hidden behind the Hale-Bopp comet.

This week, we are covering the full story of Heaven's Gate, from the very beginning. We trace the origins of the group through its two founders: Marshall Applewhite, a charismatic former music professor from Texas, and Bonnie Nettles, a Houston nurse with a deep interest in astrology and the occult. Together, they spent years building a belief system that blended UFO mythology, biblical prophecy, and New Age spirituality into something entirely their own. We talk about how they recruited hundreds of followers across the country, the strict rules that governed every aspect of daily life inside the group, and how Bonnie's death from cancer in 1985 forced Marshall to completely reinterpret everything the movement had been built on.

We also get into the final days of Heaven's Gate, the farewell videos members recorded, and the chilling, methodical way the group carried out their plan over the course of three days. This one is a deep one, and it is a story that still feels impossible to fully understand almost thirty years later.

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