Moms and Mysteries: A True Crime Podcast

In March 2010, Holly Bartlett, a 31 year old blind public servant and graduate student, left a party in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and took a cab toward her condo. Seven hours later, ironworkers found her critically injured inside a fenced area beneath the MacKay Bridge, less than 1,000 feet from her home.

Police concluded Holly became disoriented after leaving the cab, entered the restricted area, climbed a steep concrete abutment, and fell. But the people who knew Holly best struggled to accept that explanation. Holly had spent years mastering the orientation and mobility skills that allowed her to live independently. Her cane was later found leaning against a fence after police and a search dog had already searched the area. Her phone and wallet were discovered scattered in her condo parking lot. The cab driver, Paul Fraser, gave changing accounts of what happened after he dropped her off.

A 2014 independent review upheld the accidental death finding, but criticized important parts of the original investigation, including delayed neighborhood canvassing and the brief initial interview with the last person known to see Holly alive. We cover Holly's life, the final night that cannot be fully reconstructed, and the questions her family still carries.

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In September 1987, Vincent Sherry and his wife Margaret were found shot to death inside their Biloxi, Mississippi home. Vincent was a former Air Force colonel, a law professor, and a sitting circuit court judge. Margaret was a prominent local attorney and politician. Neither had any known enemies. The investigation would take years and lead directly into the heart of the Dixie Mafia, a loose network of contract killers, drug smugglers, and corrupt officials who had turned Biloxi's Gulf Coast into one of the most lawless stretches in the American South.

What investigators eventually uncovered was that Vincent's own law partner, Peter Hallett, had pointed Dixie Mafia hitman Kirksey Nix toward the Sherrys to protect himself from a money dispute he had no clean way out of. Peter stood at the Sherry family's side at the funeral. He handed out copies of the eulogy to the press. He described Vincent and Margaret as family.Convictions were eventually secured for racketeering, fraud, conspiracy, and murder-for-hire. But no one was ever charged with pulling the trigger inside the Sherry home. The murders technically remain unsolved.

We cover the full story, including the Dixie Mafia, the corruption that made Biloxi a criminal safe haven, the Sherry family, and the betrayal that set everything in motion.

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On November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper boarded a flight in Portland, handed a flight attendant a note saying he had a bomb, and walked away with $200,000 in ransom after jumping out of the plane somewhere over the Pacific Northwest. He was never identified. His body was never found. And to this day, most of the money has never turned up.To the public, it looked like he got away with it. That was enough.

In the months and years that followed, a string of men tried to copy what Dan (or who the public would know him by) D.B. Cooper had done boarding planes with fake bombs, demanding money and parachutes, and attempting to disappear into the sky. Some lost their nerve. Some were surrounded before they ever got off the ground. One actually knew how to use a parachute, landed successfully in a Colorado wheat field, and then discovered that the U.S. Air Force had been watching him the entire way down.

We cover the original D.B. Cooper hijacking and the copycats who followed, and why nearly all of them demonstrated just how unlikely his disappearance really was.

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On the night of his 21st birthday, U.S. Army soldier Zarius Hildabrand came home drunk from the bars in Anchorage, Alaska. His wife Saria, also a soldier and also 21, spent the next hour going through his phone and finding proof he had been cheating. A neighbor heard a single gunshot at 2:46 AM.By the next morning, Zarius was texting her coworkers from her phone, telling her friends she had walked out, and joining the search party that formed to find her. He knew exactly where she was the entire time.

Saria Hildabrand was a National Guard combat medic who had moved to Alaska to build a life and a career. She called her mom every single day. On June 25, 2026, a jury found Zarius guilty of second-degree murder and tampering with physical evidence. He faces up to 99 years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for October 2026.

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New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday!

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In the summer of 2023, police in the Bahamas were investigating a routine bar burglary when they stumbled onto something shocking . And that was WhatsApp messages on a suspect's phone containing a photo of Robert Shiver, a former Auburn football player and Georgia businessman, alongside a text that read: "Kill him." The messages were allegedly sent by his wife, Lindsay Shiver, a former beauty queen from south Alabama.

Three years later, Lindsay has still not gone to trial. The case has been delayed over and over again — and now her U.S. attorney is arguing it should be thrown out entirely, claiming there is a "legally fatal" defect in the prosecution's case. He says the Bahamas may not even have jurisdiction to charge her because she was in the United States, not the Bahamas, on the day the alleged conspiracy took place.We originally covered this case in March 2026. We are re-releasing it today with a new update because this story is still very much unfolding, and the question we keep asking is: will Lindsay Shiver ever actually face a jury?

We cover the full story: the marriage, the affair, the hitman, the accidental discovery, and where everything stands right now.

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