Just The Tip-Sters: True Crime Podcast

Latest Episodes:

146. Smells Like Adventure In Grand Theft Auto - With Special Guest Vic Ferrari Jul 21, 2020

Show notes

Sometimes the life of a cop can be filled with danger and even terror. Sometimes with grief none but those wearing Blue can even begin to comprehend. But a police officer's day is also filled with a never-ending parade of examples of the weirdness and wonder of the human species - and oftentimes those examples can be amazing in their complexity and/or rife with outrageous (and sometimes gruesome) hilarity. So goes the second career of retired 20-year NYPD veteran Vic Ferrari, who has spent his post-police life writing books about his life in law enforcement - such tomes as "Through the Looking Glass: Stories from Inside America's Largest Police Department" or (Melissa's favorite title) "Dickheads & Debauchery and Other Ingenious Ways to Die" have made Ferrari one of the most entertaining American crime writers. In his latest book, "Grand Theft Auto: The NYPD's Auto Crime Division," Ferrari ventures into some of the most colorful, strange and downright wild stories from his years chasing after car thieves - those who work by themselves and those who work in groups using some incredibly complex schemes. In a midsummer break from murder (serial, mass, solved and unsolved), Melissa sits down for a conversational joy ride with Vic, who talks about the new book and just generally reminisces about his days on the Force. Enjoy!

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145. Smells Like Mass Murder Times Two - The Limb Collector (Baton Rouge Serial Killers - Part Four) Jul 14, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, the last of a four-part series on what came to be known as the "Baton Rouge Serial Killers," we meet Sean Vincent Gillis - the "other" of the two evil men who rained terror upon women in South Louisiana in the late 90s and early 2000s. The "original" killer, whom Melissa dubbed "The Key Collector" (because of his penchant for keeping victims' keychains as souvenirs) was Derrick Todd Lee, whose murders, arrest, conviction and death while awaiting execution were chronicled in the first three parts of the series. Gillis was arrested for the rape, murder and mutilation of three women in the Baton Rouge area in 2004, a full year after Lee was finally brought down. But Gillis, unlike Lee, once he knew his goose was cooked, became a complete chatterbox, and with little or no coercion by law enforcement, immediately admitted to five - five! - additional murders of five additional female victims over the previous decade. Gillis' crimes were in many ways even more gruesome than Lee's, as Gillis tended to keep body parts of his victims - whom he dismembered in his house- in the freezer (hence Melissa's dubbing Gillis "The Limb Collector") - all while his girlfriend - unbelievably - remained clueless until the night he was arrested. Give a listen as Melissa retells Gillis' awful story - how he was nearly set free when the police inadvertently violated his Fifth Amendment rights - and how Gillis actually kept a file on Derrick Lee, his horrific namesake, so he could compare notes. Shivers...

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144. Smells Like Somebody Should Have Listened - The Key Collector Part Three - With Special Guest Chief David McDavid Jul 07, 2020

Show notes

When you're a veteran cop in a small town, with a deep knowledge of your community and the bad guys in it - and you're smart and everyone knows it...well...you'd think that when a serial killer is loose in your backyard and your years of experience with, and detailed documentation about, one bad guy in particular points as clearly to that bad guy as being said serial killer - you'd think the eggheads and profilers and federal law enforcement hoo-hahs in charge of the case would pay attention to your evidence and perhaps look into that bad guy to maybe, you know, prevent new murders from happening. Think again. David McDavid is one of those folks in law enforcement you want to be around when trouble starts. A veteran plainclothesman, detective and now Chief of Police in the small Baton Rouge suburb of Zachary Louisiana, Chief McDavid noticed a pattern of behavior in the murders committed by the notorious Baton Rouge Serial Killer, who terrorized South Louisiana from as early as 1992 to 2003, and a miscreant peeping Tom he'd come across for many years - one Derrick Todd Lee. McDavid long considered Lee a prime suspect in the killings, but because Lee was African-American and profilers (on the slimmest of evidence) had decided that the killer was white, no one listened. Until a solid sketch provided by a survivor of one of the attacks finally set the investigation in motion to arrest Lee. In this episode, Melissa interviews Chief McDavid about his experience with Derrick Todd Lee and the Baton Rouge Serial Killer investigation - and it's a fascinating and even educational look into the precise and steady workings of a humble, dedicated police professional who never cared who got the credit - but who simply wanted a very dangerous, very evil man off the street.

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143. Smells Like This Goes Way Back - The Key Collector (Baton Rouge Serial Killer) Part Two Jun 30, 2020

Show notes

The string of murders that eventually led to the realization that a serial killer was on the loose in Baton Rouge Louisiana began on when the body of 41 year-old Gina Wilson Green was found murdered in her home near the LSU campus on September 24, 2001. But by the time Derrick Todd Lee was finally unveiled as the terror known as the "Baton Rouge Serial Killer," it became clear that his trail of rape, torture and murder almost certainly began much earlier - perhaps a decade beforehand. In Part Two of her exploration of this most fascinating serial killer, Melissa details the discovery of each of Lee's victims, going backward and forward in time to reveal a maddening series of misunderstandings and misreadings of the killer's basic identity until DNA technology - Lee's sole survivor and her son - and an outside-the-box-thinking Chief of Police in a nearby town finally spun a web around him and brought him down. Equally fascinating is how the varied methods of murder used by Lee confounded behavioral scientists for years - for the simple reason that he was simply just too stupid to try to fool the behavioral scientists! Truly instructive and truly chilling.

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142. Smells Like A Predator In Baton Rouge - The Key Collector Part One Jun 23, 2020

Show notes

Beginning in 1993 and continuing for a full decade thereafter, dark haired women were being murdered in and around the river town of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The means and methods of the murders were not consistent, leaving law enforcement baffled as to who their unknown suspect might be. It turns out that the man the cops were looking for was one Derek Todd Lee, who the press came to call the Baton Rouge Serial Killer. A lifelong jailbird with a rap sheet as long as the Mississippi River and - it turned out - a history of behavior in committing his crimes that should have tipped off law enforcement long before it finally did, Lee had the habit of stealing his victims' car keys - which is why some (including us) prefer to refer to him as "The Key Collector." As if his crimes weren't bad enough, a lax judicial system and statutes of limitation that just don't make sense made it possible for Lee to continue his killing spree when he should have been in prison. But the weirdest part of this story is the presence of a SECOND serial killer working Lee's territory at the same exact time. But more on that later. For now, listen in as Melissa covers the main points of Derek Lee's evil killing spree - and sets up Part Two, where the story gets more detailed, more complex - and a lot more strange.

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141. MURDERTIZER - Smells Like A Mid-June Roundup Jun 21, 2020

Show notes

Sometimes there's just too much to talk about at the top of a podcast without getting in the way of the episode's main subject matter. And so far this June, there are three separate cases that Melissa would have mentioned at the top of JUST THE TIP-STERS if they had happened at different times - but they all converged at once! All three are cases that Melissa isn't planning on doing an episode on - not just yet anyway - two of them are new and one of them is a well-known existing case with stirring new developments. So instead of trying to jam them all in at the top of next week's podcast, Melissa decided to covert them all in a special first-weekend-of-the-summer MURDERTIZER (an appetizer of murder)! So enjoy your Sunday stroll, Tip-Ster - and get caught up on some very interesting cases in the news!

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140. Smells Like A Forty Year Waiting Game - How Never Giving Up Solved Carolyn Rose's Murder Jun 16, 2020

Show notes

Carolyn Rose was a driven, successful real estate agent working in suburban Pensacola Florida when one day, after she didn't return from a mid-day home showing, her colleagues drove over to the empty house to find her car still parked in the driveway. Inside the empty, brand new home they found Carolyn's crumpled nude body, hands bound - and dead. She had been raped before being strangled. The 47 year-old Rose had left no notes behind indicating who she was to meet at the showing, which had obviously been a setup by the murderer. After chasing down and eliminating their one and only solid lead, police had nowhere to go. But here's where solid police work and determination prove once again to be the key in solving hard cases, especially ones like this. It turns out that even in 1978, the Escambia County Florida Sheriff's Homicide Squad collected every single piece of evidence at the crime scene and preserved it with intensive care. And then, every single year - every year - on the anniversary of Carolyn's killing, the detectives re-tested whatever they could from that preserved crime-scene until...at the beginning of June 2020 - 42 years after the murder - DNA testing of that preserved evidence finally got a hit - and the murder was solved. Take a peek with Melissa at a very old crime solved with very new technology by some very dedicated law enforcement heroes - and share the tragic unfairness of a legal system that released Carolyn's murderer 18 years early from a previous conviction, just in time to give him the opportunity to commit his heinous offense.

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139. Smells Like A Lousy Day For A Break-In - The Unfortunate Fate Of Shane Snellman Jun 09, 2020

Show notes

When Tracy Trudgett got the news in late 2018, she passed out. Tracy hadn't seen her brother Shane Snellman, since she visited him in prison nearly a decade before. Tracy and Shane had been separated from their father when they were just children - raised in a convent and then foster parents when the New South Wales authorities refused to let dad have the kids back due to his single parent status. Shane had not had an easy life - falling in with the wrong crowd and resorting to breaking and entering and other petty crimes, he had been released from prison in mid-2012 and then, after just a few months, seemingly fell off the face of the earth. But then Bruce Roberts died. Roberts was, according to his neighbors in the Sydney suburb of Greenwich - an oddball - a bit of a hermit and, it turned out, a rabid hoarder - as bad or worse as the kind of hoarder you see on those reality shows about hoarders. When Roberts stopped being seen in his neighborhood in 2017, police entered the home to find him dead on the floor from what the coroner determined was a heart attack. The home was filled with so much clutter and dust and filth, it was shuttered and eventually turned over to Roberts' relatives, who took well into 2018 to settle his estate. It was only then, more than a year after his death - once the family sent crews in to clean the house and prepare it for sale - did the full extent of Bruce Roberts'...er...eccentricities…come fully into the light - and the police to come knocking on Tracy Trudgett's door with the sad - and downright weird - news of her brother Shane Snellman's demise. Join Melissa as she relates the details of one hoarder's six-year secret, and the unlucky fellow who decided to break in and rob the wrong house.

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138. Smells Like Dirty Rotten Solvable - The Assassination Of Edward Berber Jun 02, 2020

Show notes

So hold on just a minute. Let's get this straight: Guy was murdered in his home. All the doors were locked. No broken or open windows. All the locks had been recently changed except the French doors in the bedroom. The only person known to have a second key for those French doors is guy's soon-to-be ex-wife, whose new live-in boyfriend hates guy's guts and - in more than one written email and more than one recorded voice mail message - has threatened to kill him. And 15 years later, there have been no arrests. Waitwut? So goes the story of Edward Berber, a solid working dude living in Hacienda Heights, an L.A. bedroom community, just trying to better his life, take care of his kids and maybe even get back together with his wife. - and whose 27 year-old life was cut short in a way that SEEMS pretty cut and dried. But as we've learned, Tip-Sters, the fact is that sometimes "cut and dried" is more like "gnawed and moldy" when it comes to solving a murder. And when the initial investigators drop the ball on a case like this, it can take years to correct the screw-up. The good news is that the homicide detectives with the L.A. County Sheriff's Department now working Edward Berber's cold and disturbing assassination from 2005 are hot on the tail of closing this case - but they need your help. Listen in as Melissa is joined on the phone by Detectives Rob Martindale, Bill Cotter and Gina Eguia, who go over the details, explain the problems with, and propose solutions to bringing the perpetrator of this awful crime to justice, whomever that may be.

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137. Smells Like We're Coming For Ya, A**holes - The Murder Accountability Project And How YOU Can Help May 26, 2020

Show notes

Since 1980, more than a quarter of a million unsolved homicides have occurred in the United States - which is more than all U.S. military deaths since the end of WWII. And here's the maddening truth about those unsolved cases - there is no centralized agency in the United States dedicated to keeping track of cold or inadequately investigated murders. Unbelievably, the statistics we read about murders in America are only estimates. Projections. This is because local police and sheriff's departments only provide data that they want to provide - there is no federal standard for such reporting, and no single place to hold the data even if such a standard existed. Enter Thomas Hargrove, the retired reporter-turned-justice warrior,who in 2015 founded the Murder Accountability Project ("MAP"), a nonprofit organization dedicated to tracking and accounting for unsolved U.S. homicides. Gathering data provided by multiple federal, state and local governments, MAP publishes it all, enabling anyone - even YOU - to investigate patterns in unsolved murders, figure out how often your local law enforcement agencies clear homicides - and look at individual cases reported to the FBI or obtained by MAP through Freedom of Information Acts. Listen in as Melissa tells Hargrove's story, describes the frustration he has experienced when law enforcement pays no attention to his research - including one serial killer he identified after seven women were killed in Indiana - and police didn't pay attention until the murderer was caught after taking seven additional victims. But mostly, take note of how YOU can use the data MAP collects to do your own research and perhaps find patterns in your own community that could lead law enforcement to seek out the bad guys.

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