10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories

The Captain Who Hired a Hitman: The Harding Story

On September 26, 2022, the body of 53-year-old Sacramento HVAC contractor Michael Harding was discovered inside a vacant home for sale on Glasgow Road in Burkesville, Kentucky, shot four times. The investigation that followed led Kentucky State Police, FBI agents, and detectives across three states to California Highway Patrol Captain Julie Harding and her secret partner Thomas O'Donnell, a 60-year-old amateur hitman from Napa Valley, in one of the most disturbing murder-for-hire cases of the decade.

This is a story about a 22-year law enforcement career that ended in a conspiracy, a $220,000 cash withdrawal nobody could trace, and 194 phone calls between two people who thought they had everything figured out. We follow Michael Harding from a quiet Sacramento neighborhood to an empty room in rural Kentucky where someone he had never met was waiting for him. We look at how a wiped phone, a Ring camera, a Netflix login, and one rambling call to a brand-new supervisor told investigators everything they needed to know. There is a verdict in this case. There is also a question no verdict could ever answer.

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The House of Horrors: Billy Mansfield's Family of Predators

In 1980, along the Florida coast from Spring Hill to Daytona Beach, a chilling pattern emerged that Detroit investigators would later connect to serial killer Billy Mansfield Jr. Six women and teenage girls vanished or were found buried beneath a mobile home in Weeki Wachee Acres, with DNA technology in 2022 finally identifying one victim as 16-year-old Theresa Fillingim after 42 years. The FBI continues searching for additional bodies as recently as June 2026.

But this story doesn't start with bodies in the ground. It starts with a father who couldn't stop touching children, a son who learned violence was normal, and a rural Florida community in the 1970s where nobody asked questions and everybody stayed quiet. You're going to meet women who went out for a drink and never came home, a teenage girl at a campground shower who became a Jane Doe for decades, and a family compound so messed up that neighbors just drove past it faster. This is about what happens when institutions fail at every level, when a kid grows up watching his dad evade prison for rape and learns that's just how the world works. We're going through the psychology, the family dynamics, the cultural moment that let predators like Mansfield operate across state lines with no database to connect the dots. You'll hear about the prison escape, the bag brothers, the woman who got away, and the brother who's still living on that property forty years later.

This case is still open.

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🎧 Want Even More True Crime? 
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Blood in the Rocket City: The 1998 Franklin Family Massacre

On March 10, 1998, seventeen-year-old Jeffrey Brendan Franklin attacked his own family inside their home at 1305 Camelot Drive in Huntsville, Alabama, killing his parents Gerald and Cynthia Franklin and critically wounding three of his four younger siblings with a sledgehammer, hatchet, butcher knife, and a mechanic’s rat-tail file. The Huntsville Police investigation led by detective Mac McCutcheon, the journals and Satanic writings recovered from Jeffrey’s bedroom, the prescription psychiatric medications he had been taking, and Alabama’s pursuit of the juvenile death penalty turned one afternoon into one of the most studied family-violence cases of the late twentieth century.

You always hear about cases like this happening in the bad part of town, and this one happened in the part of town where every dad worked for NASA. Camelot was a subdivision in the safest stretch of Rocket City, Alabama, and it sat at the center of the wildest convergence of late-nineties American chaos you can think of: pediatric Prozac, the Satanic Panic, a cop who was also a Baptist preacher, and a global human rights fight that helped reshape American law four years later. This is the story of an honors-track American family, the seventeen-year-old who came home from school first, and the quiet that settled over a brick house on Camelot Drive that nobody on the cul-de-sac has ever fully shaken.

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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
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🎧 Want Even More True Crime? 
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Fifty Dollars and a Bus Ticket: The Robert Alton Harris Story

On July 5, 1978, sixteen-year-old best friends John Mayeski and Michael Baker were abducted, murdered, and left in the brush near Miramar Lake in San Diego, California, by Robert Alton Harris and his younger brother Daniel during the planning of a bank robbery. The investigation, the trial, the criminal profile of the suspect, and the fourteen-year appeals process that followed turned this homicide into one of the most consequential capital cases in American legal history.

Robert Alton Harris came into the world already broken. He was born premature because his father kicked his pregnant mother in the stomach. He was abandoned at fourteen, diagnosed with schizophrenia at sixteen, and released from federal custody with fifty dollars and a Greyhound ticket at nineteen. The murders he committed were callous in a way that still leaves people speechless when they read the case files. But the story underneath them is older, stranger, and far more painful than any of the headlines from 1992 ever let on.

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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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The Real-Life Boogeyman: Albert Fish in 1920s New York

In 1928 New York City, ten-year-old Grace Budd walks out of her family’s Manhattan apartment with a soft-spoken “farmer” named Frank Howard and disappears, pulling her parents, detectives, and eventually a courtroom into one of the most disturbing homicide investigations in American history. The search for Grace exposes a pattern of missing children, a mild-mannered house painter named Hamilton “Albert” Fish, and a criminal profile that collides with questions of insanity, responsibility, and what justice looks like when the suspect looks like somebody’s grandfather instead of a monster.

In this episode, we walk slowly and carefully through Albert Fish’s life, from a brutal orphanage childhood to the day he knocks on the Budd family’s door, and we sit with the human moments around him: the parents who just want their kid to get a job, the kids playing in city hallways, and the detective who will not let this case go. It is a heavy story, but told like a late-night conversation with a friend, with room for context, a little observational humor where it fits, and a focus on the people rather than just the headlines.

🔔 Subscribe for True Crime Cases multiple times a week

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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
Share: Send this episode to fellow true crime enthusiasts
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🎧 Want Even More True Crime? 
Check out True Crime Blueprint, also created and hosted by Joe.

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43zuDpH01HtdIrH0ShCAid?si=86b2281063334139


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