Ricky

what the f*ck. He told the cameras she was left on a beach. Then that she collapsed and he got rid of her. Then that he sold her to a stranger for money. Five years later, to the day, another young woman was dead in his hotel room. That's him in the video, on Fox News in 2008, explaining calmly that a man at a casino "was interested in me bringing him a blonde girl." Then his own confession, 18 years after the night it happened. Natalee Holloway was 18 when she disappeared on a graduation trip to Aruba on May 30, 2005. The last person seen with her was Joran van der Sloot, a 17-year-old Dutch student whose father was training to be a judge. He was arrested twice. He was never charged. And he kept talking. In 2006 he said he left her alone on the beach. In 2008 a Dutch reporter caught him on a hidden camera saying she collapsed and he got rid of her body. Seven million people in the Netherlands watched it. Nine months later he sat down with Fox News, which had paid to license recordings from him, and told a third story: he'd been offered $10,000 by a man at a casino for a blonde girl, and he delivered Natalee. When the host pushed for details, he shrugged: "Okay, well, you only gave me $10,000." In 2010 his father died, and his mother later said he had severe mental problems. That spring he offered Natalee's mother the location of the body for a $25,000 advance. The FBI ran a sting. He took $10,000 in cash and $15,000 by wire and pointed them to the foundation of a house that hadn't been built yet in 2005. Then he flew to Lima for a poker tournament. On May 30, 2010, five years to the day after Natalee vanished, 21-year-old Stephany Flores died in room 309 of his hotel. Hotel cameras showed them walking in together. He fled to Chile, was arrested, confessed, and got 28 years in Peru. In 2023 he was sent to Alabama, pleaded guilty to extortion, and finally admitted what happened on that beach. Natalee has never been found. Five stories. One beach. Two dead women, five years apart. Was he a liar so practiced he couldn't stop, or did he just keep telling the truth to whoever paid?

god. Ten months after his pregnant wife and two little girls were stabbed to death, he went on national TV and called his own case "fascinating." His father-in-law watched the show and stopped believing him. That's him in the video, December 1970 on The Dick Cavett Show: "There was no evidence, which is the really fascinating thing about the whole case." Then him in 2003, from prison, still telling the exact same story. Jeffrey MacDonald had it all: Princeton, Northwestern medical school, a Green Beret doctor at Fort Bragg. At 3:42 a.m. on February 17, 1970, he called for help. Military police found his wife Colette, 26 and pregnant, beaten so hard both her forearms were broken, then stabbed 37 times with a knife and an ice pick. Kimberley, 5, had a fractured skull. Kristen, 2, had been stabbed 48 times, with her baby bottle next to her mouth. On the headboard, someone had written "PIG" in Colette's blood. MacDonald was found lying next to his wife, alive. He said four intruders did it, three men and a blonde woman in a floppy hat chanting "acid is groovy, kill the pigs." His own injuries: cuts, bruises, a mild concussion and one small stab wound that partly collapsed a lung. None of them needed stitches. He was out of the hospital in nine days. In the living room, investigators found that March's Esquire, with a story about the Manson murders. The Army charged him, then dropped the charges that October. Weeks later he was on Cavett, complaining about incompetent investigators and saying he'd suffered 23 wounds, "some of which were potentially fatal." His father-in-law, Alfred Kassab, had stood up for him in public. By then MacDonald had also told Kassab that he and some Army buddies had tracked down one of the intruders and killed him. After the show, Kassab turned on him for good. It took nine years. In August 1979 a federal jury convicted him of murdering all three. Three life sentences, back to back. Four jurors cried. MacDonald barely moved. The author he'd invited to write his story, Joe McGinniss, published Fatal Vision instead, suggesting the diet amphetamines he was taking could have set off a psychotic rage. He's 83 now, still in federal prison in Maryland, still saying it was the hippies. In 2017 he explained why he'll never get parole: "If it takes me saying 'I killed my family' to the parole commission to get out of here and go home, I'm never going home." Three dead. One survivor with no stitches. Fifty-six years of the same story. Has he been telling the truth for 56 years, or telling one lie so long he can't stop?

are you f*cking kidding me. His brother was holding him at knifepoint, so his dad called 911 for help. Police showed up, he ran out the back door to them, and they shot him five times. His brother was still standing in the doorway with the knife. That's the Ring camera in the video, January 6, 2026. You hear the officers yell "drop the knife," then the shots. From the ground, he says it himself: you shot the wrong guy. Maverick Lyon was 21, a lacrosse player and business major at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, home in Albany, Oregon, for winter break. His older brother Dakota had recently gotten out of prison and relapsed. The day before, their parents told a county probation officer Dakota was acting dangerously and asked for him to be taken into custody. According to the lawsuit, the county said no. Prosecutors later said Dakota believed Maverick and their father were plotting against him. That morning Dakota pulled a knife on Maverick inside the house. Their father wasn't home. He watched it on the security camera and called 911, and he told the dispatcher which son was which: Dakota was shirtless, in pajama pants. Maverick grabbed another knife to defend himself and got out the back door. The lawsuit says officers saw both brothers through a window, with Maverick mouthing "help me." Outside, an officer tased him. The lawsuit says he dropped the knife. Two officers fired at least five times, hitting him in the chest, the back and the face, including after he was already down. Then they told him to roll over onto his stomach for the cuffs. "I can't move," he said. "You shot me." Surgeons took half of his right lung, his spleen and his appendix. He spent four weeks in the hospital. The district attorney ruled the shooting justified: the officers had "only fractions of a second" and an "objectively reasonable belief." Dakota pleaded guilty to attempted kidnapping, unlawful use of a weapon and coercion, and got 77 months. His lawyer said Dakota wished he could have taken the bullets himself. This month Maverick sued the city of Albany, the two officers, Benton County and the probation officer. One shirtless brother with a knife. One call for help. Five bullets in the wrong one. His dad told them who was who before they got there. So was it fractions of a second, or did nobody listen?

what the actual f*ck. In 1978 a serial killer went on The Dating Game, smiled into the camera, and won. He had already killed at least five women, and he'd kill again within a year. The only person who saw it was the woman who picked him. She refused to go on the date. She said he was creepy. That's him in the video, introduced as a "successful photographer" who likes skydiving. Asked about his best time of day, he says nighttime, "because that's the only time there is." The audience laughs. Rodney Alcala was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder by an Army psychiatrist when he was 21, with an estimated IQ of 135. In 1968 he lured an 8-year-old girl into his Hollywood apartment and beat her with a steel bar. She spent 32 days in a coma. He ran, enrolled at NYU under a fake name, and took a job as a counselor at a children's arts camp in New Hampshire, where two campers recognized him from an FBI poster at the post office. He served 34 months. By the time he sat down on that stage, he had strangled a flight attendant in Manhattan and killed four more women in New York and Los Angeles. The host, the crew and the audience had no idea. A fellow bachelor later called him "a standout creepy guy in my life." Cheryl Bradshaw picked him anyway, then said no to the date. Nine months later, 12-year-old Robin Samsoe disappeared riding a borrowed bike to ballet class in Huntington Beach. Her friends said a stranger on the beach had asked to take their pictures. A police sketch went out, and Alcala's own parole officer recognized him. He was sentenced to death in 1980. The verdict was overturned. He was sentenced to death again in 1986. Overturned again. In 2010, at his third trial, he fired his lawyers and defended himself. He took the stand and for five hours asked himself questions, calling himself "Mr. Alcala" in a deeper voice, then answered them. He showed the jury his own Dating Game clip. In his closing he played "Alice's Restaurant." The jury took less than two days: five counts of first-degree murder. Death, for the third time. He died on death row in 2021, at 77, of a heart attack. One game show. Three death sentences. Zero executions. Was he too disturbed to know what he was doing, or so in control that he could charm a TV studio between kills?

jesus christ. Her two-year-old daughter had been gone for 31 days before anyone called the police, and it wasn't her who called. When they asked her where the girl was, she named a nanny who didn't exist. A jury still walked her out of the courtroom. That's her in the video, July 5, 2011, hearing "not guilty." Then the call she made from jail, played to the jury while her mother sat on the stand. Her daughter is missing. She wants her boyfriend's phone number. Casey Anthony was 22 and lived with her parents in Orlando, along with her daughter, Caylee. On June 16, 2008, she left the house with Caylee. She told her mother, Cindy, that Caylee was with a nanny named Zanny. Then that the three of them were on a work trip to Tampa. For a month, every time Cindy asked about her granddaughter, the story changed. On July 15, Casey's car turned up in a tow yard. Her father, George, said the trunk smelled like a dead body. That day Cindy called 911 and said she hadn't seen Caylee in 31 days. Casey told police the nanny had kidnapped her. The nanny's apartment had been empty for more than 140 days. Casey said she worked at Universal Studios, walked detectives into the building, and then admitted she hadn't worked there in almost three years. In August a meter reader named Roy Kronk called the sheriff's office three days in a row about something he'd seen in the woods near the Anthony house. An officer looked and said he saw nothing. On December 11, Kronk called again. It was Caylee, in a trash bag, with duct tape still hanging from the hair on her skull. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide, cause undetermined. Florida went for the death penalty. At trial her lawyer, Jose Baez, told the jury Caylee had drowned in the family pool and George had covered it up. He said Casey's strange calm and her lies came from years of abuse by her father. George denied it under oath, and the judge later barred Baez from arguing it in closing because no evidence had been presented. Casey never took the stand. On July 5, 2011, the jury found her not guilty of murder, aggravated child abuse and aggravated manslaughter. Guilty only of lying to police, four misdemeanors. With time served, she walked out of jail days later. Time magazine called it the social media trial of the century. Two of the four lying convictions were later thrown out. 31 days. One nanny who never existed. Not guilty. A mother too damaged to act like one, or a woman who lied so well that twelve people couldn't tell where the lies stopped?

unreal. Four of her babies died in their sleep over ten years. Not one of them had a mark on them, and a jury still made her Australia's worst female serial killer. Twenty years later, the answer turned out to be in their DNA. That's her in the video after her pardon in 2023: "I have forever and will always think of my children." For two decades, the state of New South Wales had told her she killed them. Kathleen Folbigg's first son, Caleb, died in 1989 at 19 days old. Patrick nearly died at four months, was left epileptic and blind, and died of seizures at eight months. Sarah died in 1993 at ten months. Laura died in 1999 at 19 months. After Patrick, Kathleen phoned her husband at work and said: "It's happened again!" There was no physical evidence. None of the autopsies showed any sign of smothering. What police had was her diary. Her husband Craig found it and handed it over in 1999. In it she wrote about her struggles with motherhood, her frustration, her guilt. Prosecutors read those pages as a confession. At trial, when the jury replayed her police interview, she tried to run out of the courtroom. The prosecution also leaned on a rule of thumb from British pediatrician Roy Meadow: "One sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder, until proven otherwise." In May 2003 the jury found her guilty of three murders and one manslaughter. Forty years. On appeal it became thirty, with no parole for 25. She was kept in protective custody, and in 2021 another inmate beat her badly anyway. Then scientists looked at the DNA. Immunologist Carola Vinuesa found a rare mutation in Kathleen's CALM2 gene, which helps control the rhythm of the heart. Both girls carried it too. Mutations in that gene show up in roughly one in 35 million people. The boys carried a different pair of rare mutations, in a gene linked to fatal early epilepsy. A 2019 inquiry still found no reasonable doubt. In 2021 about 90 scientists, two Nobel laureates among them, petitioned for her release. On June 5, 2023, she was pardoned and walked out the same day. In December the appeals court quashed all four convictions. Outside, she said the system "preferred to blame me rather than accept that sometimes children can and do die suddenly." She had spent 20 years in prison. Four babies. One diary. Twenty years. Was that diary ever a confession, or just a grieving mother's worst thoughts, read by people who had already decided what she was?

holy sh*t. The man who produced the Beatles' Let It Be shot an actress in the mouth inside his mansion, then walked out the back door with the gun still in his hand. His defense: she killed herself. He later told a magazine she "kissed the gun." That's him in the video, charged with murder, reading a statement outside court: the "Hitler-like district attorney" was out to get him, and he wanted Governor Schwarzenegger, "a fellow artist," to step in. It took two juries and six years to answer him. Lana Clarkson was 40. In the '80s she had played the lead in Roger Corman's Barbarian Queen. By 2003 the roles had dried up, and for about a month she'd been working as a hostess at the House of Blues in West Hollywood to make ends meet. In the early hours of February 3, Phil Spector walked in. He was 62, the Wall of Sound, the Ronettes, a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer. She left with him in his limousine for his mansion in Alhambra. His driver waited outside. About an hour later, the driver heard a gunshot. Spector came out the back door holding a pistol. The driver, Adriano de Souza, called 911 and said Spector had told him: "I think I killed somebody." Police found Clarkson slumped in a chair, shot in the mouth. By that night Spector was home again, out on $1 million bail. Then came the explanations. In July 2003 he told Esquire her death was an "accidental suicide." In a 2005 deposition he said he'd been treated for bipolar disorder for eight years: no sleep, depression, mood swings. "I've been called a genius," he said, "and I think a genius is not there all the time and has borderline insanity." At trial a defense pathologist pointed him out to the jury: "He has Parkinson's features. He trembles." Prosecutors brought in women from the past 30 years who said that when they tried to leave his house, he pulled a gun on them. His lawyers called that ancient history and said Spector had only "acted erratically after a suicide." In September 2007 the first jury deadlocked, 10 to 2 for conviction. Mistrial. The retrial wasn't televised. On April 13, 2009, a second jury found him guilty of second-degree murder. Nineteen years to life. In prison he lost his voice to a disease of the larynx, and in January 2021 he died of COVID complications at 81, three years before he could have asked for parole. One gunshot. Two juries. Nineteen years to life. He called it a suicide, then a conspiracy, then borderline genius. Was he too sick to know what he'd done, or too famous to believe he'd ever pay for it?

what the f*ck. A man stabbed an actress ten times on her own sidewalk, so hard the blade bent, because he said God sent him. Seven years later, California was ready to let him out for good behavior. The whole time, he was mailing letters from his cell promising to finish the job. That's her in the video, May 1989, 22 days before his release date: "It is insanity to allow someone out who we know is patently dangerous." Two months later, another actress was dead. Arthur Jackson was a 46-year-old drifter from Aberdeen, Scotland. He saw Theresa Saldana in Raging Bull and decided she was his mission. He hired a private investigator, who dug up her mother's unlisted number. Then Jackson called her mother, posing as Martin Scorsese's assistant: there was a film role in Europe, and he just needed Theresa's address. He got it. March 15, 1982. West Hollywood, broad daylight. He came at her outside her home with a 5½-inch hunting knife and stabbed her ten times. One blow punctured a lung. The blade bent. People were watching, kids among them. The only one who moved was a deliveryman, Jeff Fenn, who heard her screaming, ran down from a second floor, and pinned Jackson to the ground. She spent four months in the hospital. Jackson said he was on a mission from God. He got 12 years for attempted murder, and from his cell he kept writing. In one letter he swore "on the grave of his dead mother and on the scars of Theresa Saldana" that he would carry out "this divine act." In another, to a journalist, he wrote that he would use others to kill her. Under the rules, none of that was bad behavior. Skipping a day of prison work would have been. So Saldana went public. She had already played herself in an NBC movie about her own stabbing. Now she pushed for a law that made threatening a crime victim a crime, and in December 1990 Jackson became the first man convicted under it. He stayed locked up. But by then a fan named Robert Bardo had copied his method, hired a private investigator of his own, and shot Rebecca Schaeffer at her front door. In 1996, after almost 14 years, America sent Jackson to Britain to stand trial for a robbery and murder from 1966. A British court accepted diminished responsibility and sent him to a psychiatric hospital, where he died in 2004, at 68. Saldana went back to work, earned a Golden Globe nomination for The Commish, and died in 2016, at 61. Ten stab wounds. Seven years. Not one mark for bad behavior. A man who believed God sent him to kill her, and a system that graded him on whether he showed up for work. Which one was really insane?