RedHanded

In just seven years, the bubonic plague killed half of all Europeans – more than 50 million people. We look at its surprising origins on the Mongolian battlefield (where diseased bodies were literally catapulted at the enemy); its unstoppable spread through a terrified Europe; and how it turned cultural, religious and social life in the 14th century completely upside down. -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-length Video Episodes TikTok / Instagram

When Julian Assange created WikiLeaks in 2006, it was the aim of rooting out corruption and improving transparency. And its successes were unprecedented, exposing hard-kept, dirty secrets from the very highest levels of power. But somewhere along the way, something happened. And whether it was Assange’s ego that brought him down – or the institutions he had so royally pissed off – isn’t totally clear. H&S try to find the truth about the world’s most famous truth-teller. -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-length Video Episodes TikTok / Instagram

Did Lindsay Clancy kill her children? Despite what was portrayed online, this was not the question at the heart of a trial which has gripped a nation. Both the defence and the prosecution agreed, that tragically, the 36-year-old was indeed the the person who took the lives of the Clancy Children. The question was why? Was Lindsay Clancy insane and did that lead to a momentary lapse of control in which her actions felt justified? Or were the murders the result of a cold and calculated decision? This was what the jury was tasked with deciding, and is the focus of part two in our deep drive into the tragic killings of Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy. -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-length Video Episodes TikTok / Instagram

Jeanne D’Arc – the teenage girl guided by saintly voices to command actual French armies into actual military victories – is one of history’s best-known names. Not bad for a 13-year-old. But that's not all. This week, we take a speedy look through the bloody, Game-of-Thrones-topping madness that is the Hundred Years’ War, meet a mad king that’s convinced he’s made of glass, and find out how one girl changed the entire course of world history.

Societal recluses exist in every culture. But in Japan, the number of permanent shut-ins has risen to incredible levels. There are estimated to be around one million Hikikomori, or ‘modern-day hermits’, in Japan today, and the term has even been proposed to be included in the DSM-5. So what is it about Japanese culture that causes so many young men to never leave the house? Press play to join us in investigating why so many Japanese citizens choose to live their lives in almost complete social isolation. -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-length Video Episodes TikTok / Instagram

According to her husband Patrick, Lindsay Clancy was found laying on the ground, semi-conscious, having cut her neck and wrists, and thrown herself from a second story window in an apparent attempt to take her own life. Just minutes later, Patrick found all three of their young children barely clinging to life in the basement. They had been strangled at the hands of their own mother. None of the children would survive. In part one of this two-part dive into the horrific deaths of Cora, Dawson and Callan, we discuss Lindsay Clancy’s multiple attempts to get help, the response of those she reached out to, and the public’s reaction to struggles with postpartum psychosis. -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-length Video Episodes TikTok / Instagram

Ever thought about exploring the places on this mysterious planet where your passport won’t take you? Join for a whistlestop tour of the world’s most off-limits destinations – from radioactive wastelands to snake-infested islands, and the odd plague pit in between. Just don’t blame us if anything goes wrong… -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-length Video Episodes TikTok / Instagram

Reddit is an endless archive of humanity’s most disturbing, bizarre, and deeply human stories. If you love going down internet rabbit holes, you are going to love CRIMES OF REDDIT with Alexis Linkletter and Sabrina Deana-Roga. Every Tuesday, one host brings a set of true-crime stories while the other reacts in real time with no prep, no spoilers asking the questions on everyone’s mind. They pull at every thread until the whole twisted picture comes into view. It’s dark, it’s messy, and the scariest part is simple: THESE ARE STORIES POSTED BY REAL PEOPLE. Follow CRIMES OF REDDIT for a new episode every Tuesday. https://pod.link/1838511303 CRIMES OF REDDIT is a Crime House original powered by PAVE Studios.

More people know about the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten today than knew about him just 100 years after his death. But Akhentaten was no average ruler. He fundamentally changed religious worship forever, and may even have started Judaism itself. So why did he disappear from history? Was he simply forgotten to the sands of time – or did he fly too close to the ‘Aten’? -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-length Video Episodes TikTok / Instagram

This week, RedHanded is joined by Cassie and Danielle from National Park After Dark for an exploration of the myths, outlaws and bloody history of Louisiana. First up: legendary “land pirate” John Murrell, the mysterious Leather Britches Smith, and the stories lurking along Louisiana’s Myths and Legends Byway. Then: between 1910 and 1912, several entire families were slaughtered with axes across Louisiana and Texas. Police blamed Clementine Barnabet, a Black teenager who they claimed was the high priestess of a murderous voodoo cult. If guilty, she would easily rank as the worst female serial killer in history. But looking back on the changing confessions, questionable police work, and some impossible crimes – and almost nothing is as it seems... -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-length Video Episodes TikTok / Instagram

At first, OnlyFans seemed like a shiny new frontier for safer sex work – a platform that promised unprecedented financial autonomy for its creators. But wherever there’s sex work, there will inevitably be men who try to profit off it… And through the manosphere’s lingo of online hustle culture and misogyny, a new breed of so-called “OnlyFans managers” emerged to claim their piece of the digital-sex-work pie, using the oldest tricks in the exploitation handbook: coercive control, financial bondage and physical violence. Welcome to the dark world of E-Pimping. -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-length Video Episodes TikTok / Instagram

In 2007, child protection officers in Pinella County, Florida, spoke with a 14-year-old girl who’d been sexually assaulted by a musician she’d met on MySpace. But thanks to their failed investigation, more than 20 preteen fans would suffer the same fate. Dahvie Vanity, frontman of scene kid band Blood On The Dance Floor, spent over a decade using social media to prey on his band’s enormous preteen fan base – seemingly, with absolute impunity. -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-length Video Episodes TikTok / Instagram

In 2018, married couple Jen and Sarah Hart accelerated their SUV over the edge of a 100ft cliff in Mendocino County, California… with their six Black adopted children in the back. The world was left in total shock. Jen and Sarah had seemed like model parents: social justice-loving lesbians who’d bravely taken in six Black children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and – according to Jen’s gushing Facebook posts – giving those kids the dream life they’d never had. But behind the glossy image the Harts presented, a far more sinister reality lurked… -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-length Video Episodes TikTok / Instagram

Remember the time London was overcome by a stench so foul that it shut down Parliament, and convinced terrified city-dwellers that the end was surely near? No? Well let us remind you of the grim summer of 1858: otherwise known as The Great Stink. The crisis brought about a long overdue transformation of the city’s sanitation system that formed the basis for the sewers we still use today – so thanks, Victorian engineers! This is the stinky ShortHand. -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-length Video Episodes TikTok / Instagram

Today, catch the first episode of The Poet, a new six-part true crime series from The Binge. Hosted by journalist Rachel Browne, The Poet is an investigation that drops you into Wichita, Kansas in 1977, where a woman named Ruth Finley is receiving threatening, obsessive poems from an unknown stalker – at the exact same time police are trying to track down the notorious serial killer known as BTK. Is Ruth’s stalker the same person? You’ll have to listen to find out. To keep listening, here’s Episode 2: Where’s Ruth? For The Binge’s free true crime newsletter on Patreon, head to GetTheBinge.com .

Watching slaves being ritually hacked to pieces may not seem like many people’s idea of a great day out. But 2,000 years ago, Romans turned up in their thousands to watch exactly that. So, with Gladiator back on our screens, we set out to find the truth behind the spectacle – and it’s even bloodier than the movies could ever allow. So what exactly happened in the gladiatorial games? Were there really lions, elephants, bears – and even full-scale naval battles in water-filled arenas? And did Maximus Decimus Meridius really have his vengeance? Find out in this week’s ShortHand. -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-length Video Episodes TikTok / Instagram

Joseph James DeAngelo is a burglar, a killer, and a rapist. A vile man with a proclivity for terrorising and sexually violating women. But that wasn’t everyone’s perception of the elderly man who was arrested in the yard of his suburban Sacramento home. To his daughters he was a loving father, to his employers he’d been a reliable worker, and to the wider community he was just another sleepy old man living out his retirement. So who is Joseph James DeAngelo and how did he co-exist as a “regular Jo” and the Golden Stake Killer? -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-length Video Episodes TikTok / Instagram

What could drive a person to eat another human being? Well, as it turns out, humankind has actually been surprisingly open to a little cannibalistic carpaccio. From funeral traditions where families gather to gobble up their loved one as a mark of respect; to a European craze for drinking liquefied, mummified human brains (plus a surprising number of societies who just really liked the taste) – here is ShortHand’s history of inter-personal dining. -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-length Video Episodes TikTok / Instagram

For almost as long as we’ve made films, we’ve made horror films – but what happens when the terror isn’t just on screen? Movie-making lore is riddled with stories of bizarre accidents on set, creepy coincidences and even murders, all of which can give rise to cult followings and, in some cases, rumours of a curse over the whole production. From Indian ghosts to demonic hauntings, we run through a ShortHanded historical horror archive and investigate whether these sinister events were the result of supernatural curses, coincidence or just bloody good PR. -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-length Video Episodes TikTok / Instagram

To find the most prolific and violent serial rapist and killer the state of California had ever seen, took over fifty years, and some ethically questionable methods. Public DNA databases were trawled without their users consent, samples were entered under false pretences, and hundreds if not thousands of people had their rights violated. But, they did eventually catch their man, and walk him up the garden path, leaving a roast to overcook in the oven. Join us in part 3 of our now 4 part series on the Golden State Killer as we discuss how Joseph James DeAngelo was finally caught. -- Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes YouTube - Full-length Video Episodes TikTok / Instagram