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Dark Downeast

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294 episodes

Dark Downeast: Maine and New England's True Crime Podcast digs into the decades-old and modern day cases that prickle the history of Vacationland and beyond – the unsolved homicides, undetermined deaths, unexplained disappearances and other dark stories of New England.

More about the show

Investigative journalist and storyteller Kylie Low gets straight to the story with a mix of narrated episodes and documentary style production featuring interviews with surviving family and friends and insight on the investigations from detectives and sources who know these cases best.

This is heart-centered, ethical true crime, bringing light to stories you’re not hearing on other podcasts. It is Dark Downeast's mission to honor the legacy of the humans at the heart of each story and bring new attention to the cases still awaiting justice.

Episodes page 1 of 6

  1. The Murders of Boston’s Combat Zone (Massachusetts)

    · 45 min

    Judy Belfrey. Kathy Williams. Holly Davidson. Melodie Stankiewicz. Four young women whose lives crossed the same few blocks of Boston in the 1970s, and whose deaths left investigators with a pattern they could see but…

  2. The Disappearance of Bianca Lebron (Connecticut)

    · 44 min

    If there is any case where you wish you could turn back the clock and change just one small decision, it might be the disappearance of Bianca Lebron. There were several moments that morning in November 2001 when a…

  3. The Murder of Michelle Gardner-Quinn (Vermont)

    · 37 min

    Why talk about a case that was solved years ago? Because the answer to who did it isn’t the only thing that matters. One night in October 2006, a college student needed to borrow a phone. She happened to ask a…

  4. The Suspicious Death of Kasha Blount (Massachusetts)

    · 50 min

    On a Saturday morning in 1990, the body of a teenager was found on a dead-end street in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The scene raised immediate concerns, but the autopsy did not answer the…

  5. The Murder of Nancy Ann Frenier (Rhode Island)

    · 40 min

    A young mother disappears just days before Christmas. More than a year later, another woman is murdered across state lines. The cases seem separate – different cities, different circumstances – but eventually they…

  6. INTRODUCING: The Truth About Natalie

    · 39 min

    Host Sean Kipe investigates the 2020 disappearance of 27-year-old Georgia mother Natalie Jones, who vanished after a July 4th lake party. Her car and remains were found 93 days later in a rural field, sparking…

  7. The Murders of Gloria Gough & Evelyn "Penny" Deans (Maine and South Carolina)

    · 37 min

    In August of 1972, 44-year-old Gloria Gough left her home in Gardiner, Maine after a late-night phone call and vanished. Two days later, more than a thousand miles away in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, 52-year-old…

  8. The Suspicious Death of Nicole Parsons-Bucki (Rhode Island)

    · 40 min

    On a morning when the country’s attention was fixed on unimaginable tragedy, a Rhode Island family was learning that someone they loved was gone. In the hours before Nicole Parsons-Bucki died, there had been violence,…

  9. The Murder of Michael Cochran (Maine)

    · 50 min

    On an ordinary winter night in 1981, danger was moving through the Bangor, Maine area in three different directions at once. A barroom dispute was followed by a deadly blaze. A drug sting was underway at a nearby…

  10. The Disappearance of Melanie Melanson (Massachusetts)

    · 53 min

    In a small New England city, a teenager disappeared after a night in the woods, and almost immediately, the story of what happened fractured.The last people known to be with her gave conflicting accounts. Her family…

  11. The Murder of Judith Whitney (New Hampshire)

    · 41 min

    There are cases that frustrate you because the evidence is thin. And then there are cases where the warning signs seem to be everywhere, but the system still can’t quite turn suspicion into action. A woman leaves home…

  12. The Disappearance of Edward Sprenkle Dubbs Jr. (Connecticut)

    · 45 min

    Some people disappear from a place you can picture right away: a house, a road, a parking lot, a stretch of woods. But in the case of Edward Sprenkle Dubbs Jr., he seems to vanish somewhere between the parts of his…

  13. The Disappearance of Dr. Margaret Kilcoyne (Massachusetts)

    · 58 min

    Sometimes, on an island, the only witness is the water. In January of 1980, a brilliant Columbia doctor went to her home on Nantucket’s remote east end carrying the weight of a life’s work, a possible medical…

  14. UNSOLVED: The Disappearance of Ryan Blagojevic (Maine)

    · 45 min

    When someone has been missing for more than thirteen years, it can start to feel from the outside like the story has stopped moving. Like whatever answers existed back then are either gone now or buried too deep to…

  15. The Murder of Victoria Cushman (Rhode Island)

    · 42 min

    Victoria Cushman was just 29 years old when she was found murdered inside her Warwick, Rhode Island apartment, just steps from the sporting goods store where she worked. For years, her family waited for answers and…

  16. The Murder of Trish Haynes (New Hampshire)

    · 42 min

    In the summer of 2018, Trish Haynes disappeared from New Hampshire. Or at least, that’s what the public knew. Investigators searched a rural property, then quietly recovered something from a nearby pond, but for…

  17. The Murder of Valerie Tieman (Maine)

    · 43 min

    In 2016, the disappearance of Valerie Tieman became one of the most talked-about cases in Maine in the last decade. At first, there was room for hope, and maybe even a version of the story where Valerie had simply…

  18. The Murder of Martha Brailsford (Massachusetts)

    · 36 min

    On a Friday afternoon in July of 1991, Martha Brailsford told friends she was going sailing. In coastal Massachusetts at what is often the peak of summer heat and humidity, that wasn’t unusual. Martha knew the water,…

  19. The Murder of Estella Brantley (Connecticut)

    · 38 min

    Estella Brantley’s murder should have been urgent from the beginning. She was found in one of Bridgeport’s most visible public places, around witnesses who may have heard her final moments, with evidence that would…

  20. The Murder of Rose Marie Moniz (Massachusetts)

    · 36 min

    Sometimes, a case can have evidence, a suspect, and a theory investigators believe explains what happened yet a family is still left without the ending they waited decades to hear. Grief and justice don’t always move…

  21. The Murder of Pamela Brown (Vermont)

    · 37 min

    On a summer weekend in 1982, Barre, Vermont was crowded with music, traffic, and thousands of people moving through town for an annual festival. Somewhere in that noise, an 18-year-old woman disappeared. In the days…

  22. The Murder of Kathleen Flynn (Connecticut)

    · 47 min

    For nearly 40 years, Kathleen Flynn’s murder has haunted Norwalk, Connecticut. She was 11 years old, newly in middle school, walking home on a familiar path when she was attacked and killed. Her case became one of the…

  23. The Disappearance of Patrick Merrill (New Hampshire)

    · 40 min

    One spring evening in 1987, a college student got into a green car in Plymouth, New Hampshire and vanished. His friends believed he was coming back. His family knew he would have called if he’d left on his own. But he…

  24. The Suspicious Death of Phil Williams Jr. (Maine)

    · 51 min

    For more than 30 years, Pam Williams believed she knew how her brother died. She was told it was a medical event. The kind of tragedy no one could have stopped. She carried that explanation with her as she tried to…

  25. The Murder of Carol Ann Barlow (Rhode Island)

    · 35 min

    Some cases appear straightforward at first glance. A late-night crash on a quiet road, a damaged car, and a victim who doesn’t survive. It is the kind of situation people think they understand, and the kind that often…

  26. The Murder of Christine Hurlburt (Massachusetts)

    · 37 min

    It started like so many Saturday nights at Mountain Park – music, crowded dance floors, and teenagers trying to stretch the night a little longer before heading home. But sometime before midnight on October 5th, 1968,…

  27. STILL UNSOLVED: The Disappearance of Regina Brown (Connecticut)

    · 48 min

    Regina Brown disappeared under troubling circumstances in April of 1987. She was a former flight attendant, a devoted mother of three young children, and a woman whose life had become increasingly defined by fear,…

  28. The Murder of Claire Gravel (Massachusetts)

    · 38 min

    On a Saturday night in late June of 1986, a 20-year-old college student went out with friends in a familiar place, celebrating her softball team’s big win. But in a narrow window of opportunity just after she was…

  29. The Murder of Laurie Gonyo (Vermont)

    · 39 min

    In the fall of 1976, a woman vanished from her home in rural Vermont sometime between a cup of morning coffee and the end of an ordinary workday. What followed was years of suspicion, rumor, and silence until a witness…

  30. The Murder of James Cassidy, Part 2 (Maine)

    · 36 min

    Fifty years after James Cassidy’s death, there is still no simple explanation for his brutal murder. The evidence left behind in the Maine woods raised questions investigators have never fully answered. And the deeper…

  31. The Murder of James Cassidy, Part 1 (Maine)

    · 35 min

    In April of 1976, an anonymous call to a sheriff’s department in Maine alerted investigators to something almost impossible to imagine: a burning station wagon hidden off a remote road, and what looked like a body…

  32. The Murder of Brenda Warner & Charlene Ranstrom (New Hampshire)

    · 42 min

    On a fall morning in 1988, police in Nashua, New Hampshire walked into an apartment and found two women murdered in their bed. What followed seemed, at first, like a case that would never truly reach an ending. There…

  33. The Murder of Joan Wertkin (Connecticut)

    · 45 min

    On a rainy night in late May 1989, a fire was spotted in a Westport, Connecticut parking lot. Within minutes, first responders realized the impossible: a body was burning in the open. Not long after and just a few…

  34. The Murder of Lucia Kai Roberts (Massachusetts)

    · 39 min

    On an August evening in 1982, children playing in Boston’s Franklin Park stumbled onto a scene that would quietly become one of the city’s most troubling unsolved cases. The victim was a 16-year-old girl who had…

  35. The Murder of Abraham Levine and Trial of Eleanor Johnson (Maine)

    · 41 min

    On a quiet Saturday night in 1931, a 19-year-old cattle dealer sat at his desk to write a check that he never got the chance to finish signing. Investigators were left with more questions than answers – a missing…

  36. The Disappearance of April Grisanti (Connecticut)

    · 36 min

    Before she vanished, April Grisanti was a young woman trying to find her footing. Then, over the course of one winter night in 1985, she disappeared in plain sight. Witnesses saw her struggle. Police heard her voice…

  37. The Murder of Joseph Woodside (New Hampshire)

    · 44 min

    In November of 1979, a man was found beaten to death along a quiet trail in a New Hampshire college town. Within a day, police had a suspect, but the case was hardly open and shut. The college student convicted of the…

  38. The Murder of Debra Stone (Rhode Island)

    · 40 min

    For more than forty years, Debra Stone’s murder lingered in the uneasy space between knowing and proving. An informant came forward early on with a story that, in hindsight, mapped almost every detail of what happened…

  39. STILL UNSOLVED: The Murder of John Evers Robinson (Connecticut)

    · 45 min

    In December of 2024, I shared an episode about a 24-year-old musician whose life was cut short in New Haven, Connecticut in 1990. More than three decades later, the murder of John Evers Robinson remains unsolved and…

  40. The Murder of Mark Knapp (Vermont)

    · 38 min

    When Mark Knapp’s routine commute home from work one February night in 1984 ended with his car abandoned and his body at the bottom of an old marble quarry, the shock rippled far beyond one family. What followed was…

  41. The Suspicious Death of Cam Lyman (Rhode Island)

    · 46 min

    Cam Lyman vanished in the summer of 1987, leaving behind a forty-acre estate, dozens of prizewinning dogs, and a silence that would stretch on for more than a decade. Friends and family disagreed on whether Cam had…

  42. The Murder of Brandi "Amy" Sullivan (Massachusetts)

    · 43 min

    17-year-old Brandi “Amy” Sullivan was used to coming and going. She was restless, independent, and always in motion. So when she didn’t come home in the summer of 1996, her family tried not to panic. But this time was…

  43. The Murder of Elizabeth Sterling Seeley (Connecticut)

    · 42 min

    Every now and then I uncover a case buried deep in the archives with circumstances that prove truth is stranger than fiction. This story is one of them. When a prominent Bridgeport, Connecticut woman failed to show up…

  44. The Murder of Shirley McAvoy (Maine)

    · 34 min

    In late summer of 1990, a mother in central Maine seemed to slip quietly out of her own life. Shirley McAvoy had been navigating a painful separation, leaning on friends and trying to rebuild a sense of normalcy. Then,…

  45. The Murder of Mary Monsell (Connecticut)

    · 39 min

    More than a century ago during the winter of 1923, a quiet Christmas in East Hartford, Connecticut took a devastating turn that would echo far beyond that holiday. Mrs. Mary Monsell never arrived for the dinner she’d…

  46. The Murder of Judith Lord (New Hampshire)

    · 40 min

    Some cases linger for years not because the truth is hidden, but because the tools needed to prove it aren’t yet strong enough. Evidence waits on shelves, memories shift, and flawed forensic science can steer an…

  47. The Murder of John E. Volungis Jr. (Massachusetts)

    · 36 min

    On a winter night in early February of 1992, John E. Volungis Jr. was standing on the edge of a brand-new life. After years of working toward a career in law enforcement, John was about to take off for his next step in…

  48. The Murder of Peggy Flynn (Rhode Island)

    · 38 min

    It was early January in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, when a discovery in a quiet stretch of woods changed a family forever. A young woman had crossed paths with a violent killer close to home. The investigation led…

  49. STILL MISSING: The Disappearance of Reina Carolina Morales Rojas (Massachusetts)

    · 30 min

    November 26 marks three years since Reina Carolina Morales Rojas disappeared after getting into a car in East Boston, Massachusetts. She was later dropped off in nearby Somerville and that was the last time anyone saw…

  50. The Murder of Bernard Egounis (New Hampshire)

    · 41 min

    One ordinary day during August of 1983, in a quiet patch of parkland just off the road in Penacook, New Hampshire, a teenager found something that didn’t belong. What followed rippled through the small community for…

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