10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories

A Marriage of Secrets: The Susan Cox Powell Case

Susan Cox Powell disappeared from her West Valley City, Utah home on December 6, 2009, launching a homicide investigation that centered on her husband, Josh Powell, before he killed himself and their two young sons in a 2012 murder-suicide. Despite a decade of searches, forensic evidence, and a $98.5 million negligence verdict against the state of Washington, Susan's body has never been found.

A husband tells police he took his toddlers camping at midnight, in a blizzard, on a work night, and came home to find his wife gone. That's the story Josh Powell gave investigators, and it barely survives contact with the evidence. Behind it sits a father-in-law running an obsessive surveillance operation out of his own house, a marriage built on quiet financial control, a will Susan wrote a year before she vanished warning that her death might not look like an accident, and 807 unexplained miles on a rental car. This is the story of what investigators found, what they missed, and the stretch of Idaho highway that's never been searched.

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Divorce Papers on an Empty Bed: The Dan Markel Case

Dan Markel, a 41-year-old Florida State University law professor, was shot twice in the head in the garage of his Tallahassee home on July 18, 2014, in a murder-for-hire plot built by his former in-laws. The FBI and Tallahassee police investigation that followed used wiretaps, SunPass toll records, and a cooperating hitman to win five convictions, including first-degree murder verdicts against former brother-in-law Charlie Adelson and family matriarch Donna Adelson.

This one begins with a mop, a stepladder, and a hyperactive kid in Montreal who grew up to teach punishment theory to law students, and it ends with a 76-year-old grandmother serving life in a Florida prison. In between there's a divorce, a 50-50 custody schedule, a $1 million offer, a rented silver Prius trailing a man around town for two days, and a family so rattled by one undercover FBI agent that they started calling a murder "TV" on their own phone lines. Twelve years of trials, appeals, and one Florida law now named after the victim. Here's how a fight over 500 miles became a contract killing.

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Gerald and Charlene: The Sex Slave Murders

Between 1978 and 1980, Gerald and Charlene Gallego abducted and murdered at least 10 victims across California, Nevada, and Oregon, including Sacramento teenagers Rhonda Scheffler and Kippi Vaught, in a homicide investigation detectives came to call the Sex Slave Murders. The FBI arrested the couple in November 1980, and what followed was a controversial plea bargain, a conviction built on a co-defendant's testimony, and 2 death sentences that people still argue about today.

A friendly young woman walks up to 2 girls at a Sacramento shopping plaza and offers to get them high. She is 21 years old and she looks like somebody's babysitter. That is the entire mechanism, and it worked for more than 2 years across 3 states while investigators were still working with phone books and blood typing. This one is about the people. A boy who inherited something from a father he never laid eyes on, and a girl who had every advantage and set it on fire. It ends with an ordinary young man in a parking lot doing the one thing that stopped it.

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Au Pair Affair Murders: The Brendan Banfield Double Murder

On February 24, 2023, pediatric ICU nurse Christine Banfield, 37, and a stranger named Joseph Ryan, 39, were killed inside a home in Herndon, Fairfax County, Virginia, in a double homicide staged to look like a home invasion. The investigation eventually turned on Christine's husband, former IRS criminal investigator Brendan Banfield, and the family's 22-year-old Brazilian au pair, whose cooperating testimony and forensic evidence of a staged crime scene produced two aggravated murder convictions and a life sentence.

Christine spent her early career as a sexual assault nurse examiner, sitting with strangers on the worst nights of their lives, and she died inside a story her own husband wrote to make her look like the author of it. This one has a fake profile on a fetish website, a young woman from São Paulo who came over to watch a toddler, a detective who got moved out of his unit right after his findings pointed the wrong direction, and a federal investigator who was certain he understood how these cases get solved.

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Dead Weight: The Windi Thomas and Keeno Butler Case

On March 18, 2018, 44-year-old Keeno Butler was killed inside his Erie, Pennsylvania apartment in a domestic violence homicide that ended with his girlfriend, 44-year-old Windi C. Thomas, pleading guilty to third-degree murder. Detectives, the Erie County Coroner, and forensic evidence documented more than 90 traumatic injuries on the victim's body, and the case closed with a plea deal and an 18-to-36-year sentence.

The whole world turned this into a headline about body weight and forgot the rest. Keeno was a grandfather at 44 who loved music and dancing and working, and who was, by his sister's account, an occasional pest she would give anything to have back. His family got a vigil, a plea deal, and a mother who kept calling his name into an empty house. Buried in the file is a coincidence so small and so Erie that it ties this apartment on East Avenue to the most notorious crime in the city's history, 15 years earlier. The prosecutor stood in front of reporters and asked them to stop reducing it to one detail. Nobody listened.

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💬 Have a Case Suggestion? Know a fascinating case that deserves coverage? I love listener suggestions and feature the best ones in upcoming episodes. Email: joe@10minutemurder.com Website: 10minutemurder.com ⭐ Help Grow the True Crime Community
Rate & Review: Leave a 5-star review to help other true crime fans discover the show
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🎧 Want Even More True Crime? 
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