Category: True Crime

In 2004 Deborah Jones was living in Skowhegan, Maine and working in the mental health field, which she really liked. She had been married and divorced before, but she was now single so she decided to try out online dating, which is how she connected with Gerard Pepin. They had a lot in common and he checked a lot of boxes for Deborah, so she was excited to talk to him and meet him. He worked with at-risk teens, which was close to Deborah’s profession. They soon got married, but she soon found out that her new husband was not who she thought he was.

In 2010 15-year-old Loren Leslie felt out of place in her local community and spent more and more hours in front of the computer. She thought she had found the connections he craved on a website called Nexopia, but it was a deadly illusion.

At 5:49 AM on January 14, 2018 17-year-old Jordan Turpin took a chance that saved the lives of herself and her 12 siblings. She had never really seen the outside world, but she knew she had to try in order to save everyone from the horrific misery they were enduring at the hands of their parents. Jordan grabbed her brother’s old cellphone and snuck out a window of their house. Once she felt she’d made a safe enough distance, she struggled to call 911 with shaking hands.

73-year-old Philip Snider’s wife Roberta had been missing for several months when he met Missy at a Burger King in March 2018. Philip was part of a group of mostly men that would meet up at small-town Hartville, OH’s fast-food restaurants in the mornings to drink coffee and gossip. Missy, who was attractive and 20 years younger than Philip, raised eyebrows in the community when she set her sights on the retired carpenter.

Jeanne Trantel thought she had the perfect life, but looking back she wished she had questioned it more. She thinks there was also a part of her “that just didn’t want to know what was happening.” Her husband Stephen Trantel was a hard worker but he had a criminal secret.

On October 13, 1997, 10-year-old Joel Kirkpatrick was murdered and his mother Julie Rea was sentenced to 65 years in prison for his death. Julie had woken up the night of Joel’s murder to his screams and found an intruder in his room.

Growing up, Sarah Ripoli didn’t know all the details of what happened with her parents when she was only six years old. At age 26, however, she decided to start writing about it in a blog. Her mother’s best friend Debbie Wende read the blog and sent her an email the very next day.

Frederick and Deborah Banks provided a peaceful and loving life for their three daughters Latonya, Avis, and Fredreana in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Their idyllic close sisterhood would be destroyed, however, when one of them chose the wrong life partner.