Foul Play: Crime Series

Season 37, Episode 1 of 4This is the first episode in Foul Play's four-part investigation into Victorian England's most notorious family murder and the case that birthed modern detective fiction.Elizabeth Gough checked Francis Saville Kent's cot at five in the morning on June 30, 1860. The blankets were gone. The three-year-old was gone. And somewhere in Road Hill House, someone who knew exactly...

This episode is part of Season 36: Serial Killers in History—a single-episode deep dive into one of the most disturbing and least-known serial killers of the Weimar era.December 1924. A homeless stonemason narrowly escapes death in a small Silesian town. What police discover in the aftermath reveals twenty-one years of murder hidden behind the most respectable facade imaginable—a church organ...

Episode 14 of 15 | Season 36: Serial Killers in HistoryIn a locked storage chamber in rural Hungary, seven sealed metal drums waited to reveal their terrible secrets—each containing the perfectly preserved body of a woman who had answered a marriage advertisement.The investigation into Hungary's most prolific lonely hearts killer reaches its chilling conclusion as we trace Béla Kiss's...

Season 36, Episode 13 of our Serial Killers in History series. This episode examines one of North Africa's most notorious crimes and the execution that shocked the world.In the spring of 1906, authorities in Marrakesh make a discovery that will reverberate across continents. Beneath the packed-earth floor of a modest shoemaker's workshop, they uncover the remains of twenty-six women. Ten more...

In the fog-shrouded streets of 1880s Leiden, a woman everyone called "Good Mary" brought food to the sick, consoled the grieving, and prepared the dead for burial. For three years, she was the angel of her neighborhood—the trusted caregiver who helped when no one else would. No one suspected that the porridge she served was laced with arsenic. No one questioned why so many of her patients died....

The shepherd saw everything—watched as El Chalequero dragged an elderly woman toward the Consulado River, pulled a knife from hisEpisode 11 of 15 | Season 36: Serial Killers in HistoryMexico City's first documented serial killer hunted working-class women for nearly three decades. This episode examines the systemic failures that allowed Francisco Guerrero Pérez to operate freely while authorities...

Episode 10 of 15 | Series 36: Serial Killers in HistoryFinland's first documented serial killer terrorized two continents across three decades. This episode traces Matti Haapoja's brutal journey from famine-ravaged Finland to Siberian exile and back—a life defined by escape, violence, and ultimately, one final act of defiance.Victim HumanizationHeikki Impponen was forty-two years old when he...

On a warm June afternoon in 1868, a 24-year-old woman accepted a glass of lemonade from her nurse at a Geneva boarding house. Within moments, her pupils dilated grotesquely, her heart pounded violently, and reality dissolved into nightmare. That glass of lemonade broke open one of Switzerland's most disturbing criminal cases.SEASON & EPISODE CONTEXTThis is Episode 9 of Foul Play Season 36:...

In 1826, fellow priests caring for an ailing Father Juan Severino Mallari made a horrifying discovery in his residence: bloodstained clothing belonging to dozens of missing parishioners. Over the next ten years, investigators would uncover fifty-seven murders committed by the parish priest of Magalang, Pampanga—a man who believed killing his congregants would break a curse afflicting his mother....

In February 1842, a dingo unearthed a shallow grave near Ironstone Bridge, revealing the decomposing body of an Irish immiKearns Landregan was twenty-seven years old when he died on a dusty colonial road seven miles from Berrima. An Irish immigrant who'd traveled halfway around the world seeking opportunity in Australia, Landregan worked as a carrier—hard labor that required strength,...