New Orleans Unsolved

Episode 26, Yet Again

April 17, 2024 03:22 - 40 minutes - 55.8 MB

The path of Anna's investigation takes her back to Pass Christian, Mississippi for a second look at the location where Mark Richardson's body was discovered. We also hear about a more sinister undercurrent of what ties these cases together and the shocking news that brings us to the present day.

Episode 25, Take The Long Way Home

April 10, 2024 04:49 - 27 minutes - 37.5 MB

The Rope Murders took place at a time which preceded what we've all come to know as forensic science. The murders of Dennis Turcotte, Mark Richardson and Daniel Dewey were also comitted before the internet age . Anna's investigation of the murders has never revolved around web-sleuthing. Much of it has revolved around making contact and connections. It has led her on a path to retrace the trail of a suspected serial killer. In this episode, Anna explains why taking the long way home revealed...

Episode 24, The Dead End Road

April 03, 2024 04:00 - 44 minutes - 60.7 MB

Dead end roads don't always lead to dead ends, sometimes they lead to answers. Anna takes a trip to meet a listener that helps connect the dots to a location she has been searching for for years.

Episode 23, The Map

March 27, 2024 05:00 - 33 minutes - 46.3 MB

From digging into old records and newspaper archives to tracing faded genealogy lines, Anna has used different investigative techniques and tools. But the one tool that perhaps produced the most revelatory information has been a map that became available through a cab company. In this episode, Anna details what she placed on this map, and in turn, what she learned from it. She also makes a shocking discovery when she examines a document related to one of the Rope Murders.

Episode 22, The Photos

March 20, 2024 05:00 - 36 minutes - 50 MB

Over the course of six years and two seasons of the podcast, Anna has been trying to decipher the identities of the murdered teenage boys who ended up in the photos that were eventually shown to other children. The individual who showed them those photos was a child predator. Anna's investigation has steadily cleared a path through a forest of questions. In this episode, she explains why what was in the background of those photos is perhaps as important as what was front and center in them. ...

Episode 21, Devil in the Detail

March 13, 2024 04:00 - 34 minutes - 39.3 MB

Anna unexpectedly connects with a woman who had information that sent her reeling. The years Anna has spent investigating the Rope Murders have been filled with attempts to connect deaths, details and decades. It’s been a constant pursuit of this theory that the murders of Dennis Turcotte, Mark Richardson and Daniel Dewey were part of a wider web spun by predators masking as trustworthy people. In this episode, the interview Anna wasn’t quite prepared for reveals the story of a missing boy ...

Episode 20, The Leak

March 06, 2024 05:00 - 30 minutes - 42.9 MB

During Anna’s investigation of the Rope Murders, she found correlations to the mysterious case of Eddie Wells, the pedophile operation ran by Boy Scout Troop 137, and one person who seemed to have tentacles touching all those elements. But it took Anna years to find those connections. In the initial stages of her investigation, she had a working theory about the Rope Murders. That theory was tested when she was called to a meeting of law enforcement officers. Also tested was her trust in th...

Episode 19, The Footlocker

February 28, 2024 05:00 - 41 minutes - 56.8 MB

Anna’s investigative focus stays on the Orange Grove Plantation as she sits down with a woman who, as a young girl, lived near the plantation in Plaquemines Parish and visited its grounds. Through Anna’s yearslong investigation of the Rope Murders, she’s come to believe the Orange Grove Plantation was a significant site. It was also a place a survivor from season 1 of New Orleans Unsolved was taken as a child. In this episode, he recalls the murky circumstances surrounding the times he ende...

Episode 18, The Shell Road

February 21, 2024 04:46 - 29 minutes - 41.1 MB

Fragmented memories, fading landmarks and decades old newspaper articles have been among the puzzle pieces Anna has had to work with as her investigation of the Rope Murders took her deeper into Plaquemines Parish…and some of its troubled history. One place, located off what was described as the shell road, stood for more than a century. But for one person, it represents a dark point in his past. In this episode, Anna explores its possible connection to the Rope Murders.

Episode 17, The Dark Star

February 07, 2024 04:55 - 28 minutes - 39.7 MB

The bodies of Dennis Turcotte, Mark Richardson and Daniel Dewey may have been found north of New Orleans, but as Anna as got deeper into her investigation of their murders and the crimes of Boy Scout Troop 137, her findings kept taking her south…to Plaquemines Parish. She discovered connections to some of its history of hate. At a remote site off the parish’s coast, there was physical evidence of that hate. In this episode, Anna explains the mystery around that site and how it fits into her ...

Episode 16, King of the Bayou

January 31, 2024 14:11 - 25 minutes - 35.8 MB

So far, Anna’s investigation of the Rope Murders has uncovered links to the pedophile cell that was Boy Scout Troop 137. While that troop may have been based in New Orleans East, Anna found that its tentacles reached outside of the city. In this episode, Anna’s investigation shifts to a place that was once dominated and defined by a segregationist who some called King of the Bayou.

Episode 15, Be Prepared

January 24, 2024 05:00 - 30 minutes - 42.1 MB

The Boy Scout motto of “Be Prepared” predates the founding of the organization in 1910, but preparedness became a cornerstone of Scouting for the century that followed. In the case of Boy Scout Troop 137 in New Orleans, the crooked leaders of that troop were unprepared for the investigations and arrests that stemmed from the abuse inflicted on the children of that troop in the 1970’s. In this episode, Anna continues to connect the dots between victims of the Rope Murders, Troop 137 and the ...

Episode 14, Scout's Dishonor

January 17, 2024 05:00 - 36 minutes - 49.4 MB

Over the two seasons of the podcast, Anna’s investigations have involved the mysterious deaths of teenage boys and the abuse of young children. As she continued her work on the Rope Murders, she kept finding a connection to an organization that was historically known to be a place for boys and young children.

Episode 13, The Trapper

January 10, 2024 05:00 - 34 minutes - 47.8 MB

Anna begins to lay out her four-year investigation of the Rope Murders. It includes a familiar person from season one who said he was shown photographs of dead boys tied up and left in rural settings. Anna analyzes the locations where the victims of the Rope Murders were left. What did they have in common? And to gain a better understanding of how something or someone can be hogtied, we turn to a man named Trapper John.

Episode 12, The City

January 03, 2024 05:00 - 44 minutes - 61.5 MB

It took almost 30 years for investigators to identify Daniel Dewey’s body. For almost as long, a narrative kept repeating in newspapers and online articles that Dewey and the two other victims of the rope murders may have been male prostitutes or well-known street kids in the city of New Orleans. But was that really the case? We pose that question to Dennis Stewart and relatives of two of the victims.

Episode 11, Texas

December 20, 2023 05:00 - 38 minutes - 53.8 MB

In the summer of 2000, the remains of John Doe were exhumed from his grave at Pine Hill Cemetery in St. Helena Parish. He had been buried for more than 20 years. Back in 1979, his body had been tied up and left at a local garbage dump in the parish. There were hopes that technology and forensic science could finally reveal the boy’s identity. Those hopes quickly faded until the discovery of an encounter in Texas.

Episode 10, The FACES Lab

December 13, 2023 05:00 - 28 minutes - 39.2 MB

For roughly 20 years, John Doe’s body had been buried at Pine Hill Cemetery in St. Helena Parish. At the time of his burial and in the two decades that followed, there wasn't much progress in finding a suspect in his murder. The victim’s true identity also remained elusive. In the summer of 2000, officials and investigators physically dug up the past. They exhumed John Doe’s remains. In an attempt to finally put a name to the boy who had been ritualistically tied up and left in rural Louisia...

Episode 9, Baton Rouge

December 06, 2023 05:00 - 34 minutes - 47.8 MB

In 1997, after almost 20 years of cold case status, the murders of Dennis Turcotte, Mark Richardson and John Doe would get renewed interest. Dennis Stewart was a relatively new detective with Louisiana State Police, but his knowledge of one of the Rope Murders went back to 1979. Stewart grew up in Greensburg, Louisiana, not far from where John Doe’s body was discovered. He remembered hearing about the boy being tied up and left at the garbage dump in St. Helena Parish. Detective Stewart was ...

Episode 8, The Quarter

November 29, 2023 05:00 - 40 minutes - 55.1 MB

When each victim of the rope murders was found, investigators didn’t make any public mention of a serial pattern or perpetrator. But, within a month after the discovery of John Doe’s body in St. Helena Parish, at least one newspaper ran a story about the boys being “male hustlers” who may have been stalked by a “sex killer”. The hustling scene in the French Quarter of New Orleans has been a real thing for decades. Whether these victims were part of that scene is far less certain, but the sti...

Episode 7, Pine Hill

November 22, 2023 05:00 - 32 minutes - 44.4 MB

In 1979, Jack Foster was assigned the case of a teenaged boy who had been ritualistically tied up, murdered and left at a local garbage site in St. Helena Parish. Foster was a self-taught detective working part time with the sheriff’s office. He was described as determined and thorough. But, those qualities wouldn’t be enough to find out the boy's true identity, let alone the person responsible for killing him. The case was a local mystery. When Foster fell into a bizarre coma during the in...

Episode 6, St. Helena Parish

November 15, 2023 05:00 - 30 minutes - 42.7 MB

On November 12, 1979, the tiny sheriff’s department in St. Helena Parish was just beginning its investigation of a body that had been ritualistically tied-up and left at a garbage dumpsite. The body was decomposing. Identifying the victim was difficult. What authorities could say definitively was that it appeared to be the body of a teenage boy. In an attempt to identify that boy, the sheriff’s grandson says he was taken to the scene. What he and the deputies saw that day would stick with th...

Episode 5, Greensburg

November 08, 2023 05:00 - 31 minutes - 43.6 MB

Following a coroner’s inquest jury in Harrison County, it was determined that Mark Richardson’s death was the result of a homicide. The coroner presumed Richardson died from a possible overdose of injected drugs, but the actual cause of death was undetermined. No explanation or theory was offered about the fact that Richardson was found with his hands and feet tied behind him. How was Richardson killed? What did the ropes have to do with his death? More than a year later, similar questions w...

Episode 4, Biloxi

November 01, 2023 03:53 - 34 minutes - 47.4 MB

Two days after a tied-up body was found in a wooded area near coastal Mississippi, a family from Biloxi believed it was that of their teenage son. Only weeks separated the discoveries of his body and Dennis Turcotte’s. The fact that both victims had been ritualistically bound would seem to show a strong connection between the cases, but early in the Mississippi investigation, authorities were grappling with a basic but crucial question: who is the victim?

Episode 3, Pass Christian

October 25, 2023 04:00 - 34 minutes - 47.6 MB

Soon after Dennis Turcotte’s body was discovered, the working theories about his death and disappearance revolved around New Orleans’ French Quarter. A New Orleans bellhop was said to be the last person who saw Turcotte alive. In this episode, Turcotte’s brother details what Dennis was doing before he went missing. In neighboring Mississippi, a second investigation begins after the body of another teenager is found.

Episode 2, Slidell

October 18, 2023 04:00 - 38 minutes - 53.2 MB

After Dennis Turcotte’s body was discovered bound and dumped in 1978, New Orleans Police Detective Frank Weicks traveled out of his jurisdiction to the rural area of Talisheek to assist in the case. The working theory was Turcotte had spent time in New Orleans’ French Quarter and was possibly kidnapped from there. But once at the crime scene, Weicks found some pressing and practical problems. In this episode, Weicks explains his concerns about the integrity of the investigation. And a suspec...

Episode 1, Talisheek

October 11, 2023 04:00 - 32 minutes - 45.3 MB

The creators of New Orleans Unsolved are finally back with their second season. This time, they’re investigating a set of truly mysterious murders. In 1978, hunters found the body of a teenager in a rural area of Louisiana. His hands and feet were ritualistically tied, the rope was connected to his neck. Some described the way the victim was bound as “hogtied”. A veteran New Orleans Police detective was quickly called in to assist in the investigation. When he arrived at the location, he cou...

The Rope Murders Trailer

September 29, 2023 11:21 - 4 minutes - 7.94 MB

Investigative producer Anna Christie and veteran journalist Thanh Truong are back with the second season of their independent true crime podcast. Season 2 of New Orleans Unsolved, The Rope Murders, begins October 11th, 2023.

Episode 18: Raleigh

December 21, 2021 05:00 - 35 minutes - 48.7 MB

The finale to season 1 has been more than a year in the making. Will Stanley Burkhardt remain in prison or go free? The judge's ruling finally comes down.

Episode 17: Urquhart Street

June 25, 2020 04:00 - 1 hour - 82.4 MB

In the season finale, Stanley Burkhardt gets arrested again, but will he stay in prison? His testimony in a court hearing weighs heavily in that decision. The testimony includes details in Eddie Wells’ case.

Update on episode 17

June 18, 2020 04:00 - 59 seconds - 9.34 MB

Episode 17 is still in production. Release date: June 25th, 2020

Episode 16: The Lower 9th Ward

June 11, 2020 04:00 - 38 minutes - 52.5 MB

On the very same day of the jailhouse interview, a second interview followed. It was unexpected and took place in the Lower 9th Ward. What did one of Eddie's closest friends say to him before he disappeared?

Episode 15: St. Bernard Parish

June 04, 2020 04:00 - 36 minutes - 49.6 MB

A man who says he was one of Eddie Wells’ best friends cautiously shares what he knows of a fateful day in 1982. He claims he was with Eddie the day he disappeared. To get his story, we go inside a parish jail.

Episode 14: Haney Drive

May 28, 2020 04:00 - 45 minutes - 60.3 MB

New Orleans is in the 1980’s was a very dark place and time for one man. As a boy, he lived in New Orleans East, not far from Stanley Burkhardt’s home. His memories of certain events are some of the most detailed we’ve heard so far, including details of a disturbing photo of Eddie Wells.

Episode 13: Southeast Louisiana

May 21, 2020 04:00 - 40 minutes - 54.4 MB

Robert details a set of serial killings that predates the death of Eddie Wells. He believes all the cases could be linked to Stanley Burkhardt, but is there evidence to support any of it?

Episode 12: Orleans Parish

May 14, 2020 04:00 - 36 minutes - 49.4 MB

Two people with intimate details of Stanley Burkhardt’s career as a New Orleans police detective are coming forward. They both believe Burkhardt is capable of murder. They only agreed to speak under a cloak of anonymity.

Episode 11: The Upper 9th Ward

May 07, 2020 04:00 - 34 minutes - 48 MB

After revealing her story about her time with Stanley Burkhardt, Kristin now is ready to detail what she knows about the death of Eddie Wells. Her accounts seem to build a stronger connection between Burkhardt and Eddie’s mysterious death in 1982.

Episode 10: Florida

April 30, 2020 04:00 - 35 minutes - 48.1 MB

A woman who has never spoken publicly about her alleged ordeals with Stanley Burkhardt finally comes forward. Her revelations about Burkhardt and Eddie Wells are shocking. We travel to Florida to get her story.

Episode 9: Kenner

April 23, 2020 04:00 - 37 minutes - 51 MB

As the current cold case investigation into Eddie Wells’ death continues, we hear from a woman who has intimate knowledge of the man whom multiple people believe had a role in Eddie’s death in 1982. She is also the man's niece, and a victim of his criminal side.

Episode 8: Dallas

April 16, 2020 04:00 - 32 minutes - 45.3 MB

In the aftermath of the prison system releasing Stanley Burkhardt multiple times, Richard decides to go on the offensive. He begins what he calls “the crucible.” It set off a chain of events that ultimately leads to the cold case investigation of Eddie Wells’ death.

Episode 7: Vaughan's Lounge

April 09, 2020 04:00 - 35 minutes - 49 MB

The law catches up with Stanley Burkhardt, but not before a shocking a conversation Richard says he had with him. That conversation supposedly took place at Vaughan’s Lounge in the Bywater, and it revolved around the death of Eddie Wells.

Episode 6: New Orleans East

April 02, 2020 04:00 - 35 minutes - 48.3 MB

The narrative shifts to New Orleans East. Vic’s family moves to that neighborhood and he believes he can avoid Stanley Burkhardt. He’s proven wrong and something proves to be even more chilling when he says Burkhardt shows him a set of photos.

Episode 5: North Carrollton and Banks

March 26, 2020 04:00 - 29 minutes - 42.2 MB

An already twisted situation for Richard worsens and it begins to unfold just blocks away from his home in Mid-City. Meanwhile, Vic recalls the first time he met Eddie Wells. All of this takes place with Stanley Burkhardt looming over their lives.

Episode 4: South Broad and Gravier

March 19, 2020 04:00 - 30 minutes - 43.4 MB

Detailed accounts and accusations of corruption deepen. Serious questions about a New Orleans Police Detective are swirling. It’s the same detective who was adamant that Eddie Wells was murdered back in 1982.

Episode 3: Mid-City

March 12, 2020 04:00 - 53 minutes - 69.7 MB

The current cold case investigation into the death of Eddie Wells began after complaints filed with the New Orleans Police Department by two men. They believe one man killed Eddie. The accounts of what they endured and witnessed begin to uncover a long history of cover-up.

Episode 2: The Bywater

March 05, 2020 05:00 - 45 minutes - 59.7 MB

We get a clearer picture of the life Eddie Wells led in the neighborhood where he grew up: Bywater. Eddie was portrayed in a less than favorable way in the newspaper, but those who grew up with him paint a different portrait. They also describe a person who often put Eddie on edge. Did he have anything to do with Eddie’s death? The web of questions expands.

Episode 1: Piety and Desire

February 27, 2020 01:02 - 32 minutes - 37.5 MB

The death of Eddie Wells in 1982 would seem like a straightforward case. His body was found floating in the Mississippi River in New Orleans’ Upper 9th Ward. The coroner determined he likely drowned, but a police detective believed the 17-year old boy was murdered. The New Orleans Police Department is now re-examining Eddie’s death, and so are we. The mystery begins between Piety and Desire streets.

New Orleans Unsolved Trailer

February 13, 2020 18:59 - 2 minutes - 3.9 MB

The new podcast is a narrative dive into the decades old case of a 17-year old boy who drowned in New Orleans. The investigation into the mysterious death uncovers a web of crime, corruption and cover up. At the center of it all is a criminal who has been hiding in plain sight.

New Orleans Unsolved

Episodes