Wicked Words - A True Crime Talk Show with Kate Winkler Dawson

This is a story about a landmark case in Canada from just a few years ago. A teenager attacked two women in a massage parlor in Toronto in 2020. He killed one and seriously injured the other. When he told investigators why he did it, they settled on trying him for murder…and terrorism. Journalist Lana Hall tells me abo

Dean Corll was a serial killer in Houston in the early 1970s. He kidnapped and murdered more than two dozen missing teenage boys before he was murdered by one of his accomplices. Decades later, a forensic anthropologist discovered a box of remains from the case. She spent years using scientific tools to identify some o

It’s been 30 years since the infamous OJ Simpson trial, and the lead prosecutor Marcia Clark has had quite a career since then. She writes fiction and nonfiction books, including the one we’ll talk about today. It’s called Trial by Ambush and it’s a story about a young woman in Burbank, California. In 1953, Barbara Gra

Did you know that some of the most effective American spies during World War II were librarians and archivists and history professors? Some were locked in the basement of the Library of Congress, analyzing documents. Those documents were being gathered by academics sneaking around Europe, under the noses of the Nazis. 

We don’t talk a lot on this show about female killers, but author Craig Monson has brought me a fascinating story right out of a Hollywood film. His book, The Black Widows of the Eternal City, centers on a web of women poisoners in 17th century Rome and their male victims.  Support this podcast by shopping our latest s

This week on Wicked Words, we’re traveling to 1856 Ireland for a locked-door mystery. A cashier for a Dublin railway station is found dead, savagely beaten. Nothing appears to have been stolen. Can an experienced detective crack this case? Author Thomas Morris tells us the story in his new book The Dublin Railway Murde