She brought dogs into the courtroom! Listen to find out how.

Most true crime content is about catching the bad guy. This episode covers what happens afterwards - specifically, the moment a child has to walk into a room full of strangers and say out loud what happened to them.

Courthouse facility dogs sit with victims and witnesses (many of them children) during forensic interviews, depositions, and testimony. They reduce cortisol. They increase accuracy. They make the impossible feel possible. And in most courtrooms, the jury never even knows they're there.

To close out the Dog Days of Summer block, Ed and Melissa sit down with Dr. Celeste Walsen - co-founder and Executive Director of the Courthouse Dogs Foundation, the organization that coined the term, built the field, and has been MU's charity partner from the beginning.

Watch til the end to see Celeste take part in a round of "Paw & Order." It gets good!

Learn more and donate: https://www.courthousedogs.org

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#MurderUnscripted #CourthouseDogs #TrueCrime

Frances Fritts was murdered in a house fire in Brenham, Texas in 1994. Her husband Charles walked out without a scratch. He had $800,000 in insurance lined up, a girlfriend abroad, and a Mercedes ad running in the local paper.

Investigators had plenty of motive. What they needed was proof the fire was set deliberately. That proof came from two dogs named Samantha and Jager - hydrocarbon-sniffing K-9s who alerted to accelerant in the ruins of the Fritts home and helped put Charles away for life. And when the defense challenged their evidence in court, the Texas Court of Appeals made history. Fitts versus State, decided in 1998, became the case that put arson dogs in Texas courtrooms permanently.

Melissa covers Frances's case and the remarkable legal legacy it left behind - including a note from the heart about a victim she couldn't find enough about, and the reason she still needed to say her name.

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If you knew Frances Fritts, please reach out to murderunscriptedpod@gmail.com. We would love to tell her story properly.

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#MurderUnscripted #FrancesFritts #TrueCrime

He named his murder plan "Operation Slop Shop" and his neighbor was first on the list.

Carlos Maldonado was a 55-year-old dad rebuilding his life - starting a window tinting business and rekindling a relationship with his daughter Talisa. On April 14th, 2024, he vanished without a trace. His body wasn't found until October 30th - wrapped in tarp and garbage bags, tied with rope, hidden on a wooded hill less than 200 feet from his own front door.

A trail camera in a tenant's garden captured Maldonado's 63-year-old neighbor, Kevin Lychwick, making trips to the hillside at 12:41am. His explanation: he feeds the rabbits at night. But his apartment told a different story. In the living room, police find a stack of handwritten documents. One was labeled 'Operation Slop Shop.' It named his neighbor Carlos Maldonado as a threat. It was stamped November 2023...six months before Maldonado's murder.

Lychwick represented himself during a shocking and entertaining trial, and was eventually found guilty of first-degree intentional homicide.

Sentencing is scheduled for August 20, 2026. Subscribe so you don't miss the update.

LISTEN ON AUDIO:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/murder-unscripted/id1750146409

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#MurderUnscripted #OperationSlopShop #TrueCrime

Two fires. One night. Four bodies. His own brother was behind everything.

In the early hours of November 20th, 2018, a 911 call came in reporting a house fire in Ocean Township, New Jersey. Within hours, a second 911 call came in from a neighborhood fifteen miles away in Colts Neck. A man had gone outside to check on his generator after a mysterious power failure. He never came back in. His wife and two children were still inside when the house was set on fire.

The victims were Keith Caniero, 50. His wife Jennifer, 45. Their son Jesse, 11. And their daughter Sophia, 8.

The man who set the first fire at his own home, as a decoy) was Paul Caniero...Keith's older brother. The man who had been secretly embezzling from Keith's life insurance trust for years, spending the money on a lavish lifestyle and a mistress, and who faced financial ruin the moment Keith discovered the truth.

If not for a New Jersey State Police K-9 named Creed, he might've gotten away with it.

LISTEN ON AUDIO:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/murder-unscripted/id1750146409

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#MurderUnscripted #CanieroFamily #TrueCrime

Kaylee's parents sit down to address the recently released autopsy details, the relentless online conspiracies, and share never-before-heard stories about their daughter Kaylee.

The media dubbed them "The Idaho Four." But behind that moniker were four individuals with four families and four futures. One of them was Kaylee Goncalves...a bright, bubbly 21-year-old who had the world by a string. And while everyone knows the story of what happened to her few know the REAL Kaylee. Like how fiercely independent she was from the time she was small...the kind of kid who didn't ask for help and didn't need to be told twice. Like the prankster who liked throwing cell phones in the toilet and once told her dad she saw a cougar, only to show him a photo of an African leopard. That was Kaylee.

In this powerful conversation, Steve and Kristi Goncalves also address the relentless media scrutiny, the release of case details not meant for the public, and the hateful online conspiracies that keep them up at night. They also speak to the work of the Murder Has a Name Foundation, which they founded in Kaylee's memory to advocate for victims' families navigating the criminal justice system.

This is an interview that personifies Murder Unscripted, and it's one of the most important conversations we've ever had.

To learn more about the Kaylee Goncalves Foundation: "Murder Has a Name" visit: www.murderhasaname.com

LISTEN ON AUDIO:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/murder-unscripted/id1750146409 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2AUGh12ei1wk8x7CvcX9qH

SUPPORT THE SHOW:

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/MurderUnscriptedPod/membership

20% of every membership goes to Courthouse Dogs Foundation

CONNECT WITH US:

Email: murderunscriptedpod@gmail.com

Socials: @murderunscripted

If this one moved you, please consider leaving us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

#MurderUnscripted #KayleeGoncalves #SteveGoncalves

They were the 3 musketeers. One of them was a killer.

In February 1980, 18-year-old University of South Alabama freshman Katherine Foster was supposed to meet her two best friends for a trip to the mall. She never showed up. Days later, a search party found her body in the woods just a few hundred yards from campus -- laying flat on her back, fully clothed, makeup intact, looking for all the world like she had simply laid down to take a nap. She had been shot twice in the head. Investigators were baffled. There was no struggle, no drag marks, no sign of sexual assault. Whoever did this, Katherine had trusted enough to walk into the woods with.

Police chased every lead they had, but Katherine's case went cold for more than 22 years. Until a single phone call from an AA sponsor changed everything.

Ed and Melissa cover the full case: the friend group at the center of it, the disturbing items found in a dead security guard's garage, the forensic science breakthrough at the University of Tennessee's Body Farm that rewrote the entire timeline, and the obsession that drove Jamie Kellam Letson to kill the friend who stood between her and a boyfriend who barely knew she existed.

Content warning: murder, stalking, obsessive behavior.

LISTEN ON AUDIO: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/murder-unscripted/id1750146409

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2AUGh12ei1wk8x7CvcX9qH

SUPPORT THE SHOW:

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Socials: @murderunscripted

If this one got you, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

#MurderUnscripted #KatherineFoster #TrueCrime

On April 5th, 1986, Howard and Connie Clery returned home from a vacation in Bermuda to find a police car waiting in their driveway. Their 19-year-old daughter Jeanne had been found murdered in her dorm room at Lehigh University.

What the Clerys discovered in the aftermath was as infuriating as it was devastating. In the three years before Jeanne's murder, there had been 38 violent crimes at Lehigh including rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults. Campus security had received over 2,000 reports of propped-open dorm doors in the year she was killed. 188 of those came from her building. None of this information had been available to them when they chose the school. Nobody was required to share it.

The man who killed Jeanne - fellow student, Josoph Henry - had walked through a propped door and found her room unlocked because her roommate didn't have her key. He was convicted of first-degree murder. But Howard and Connie Clery were not finished.

In 1990, the Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act was signed into law -- later renamed the Jeanne Clery Act. It requires every college and university receiving federal funding to publicly disclose campus crimes, issue timely warnings, and give students and families the safety information they need before choosing a school. Four decades later, it is still one of the most important pieces of campus safety legislation in the country.

Alaskan Sophie Sergie came from a remote Yupik village of 70 people. She was going to be the first in her family to graduate college. The last thing she told her family was a promise to bring her little brother a brand new kite. She never came home.

On April 25th, 1993, Sophie Sergie was found violently murdered in a University of Alaska Fairbanks dorm bathroom. Her case went cold, and it stayed that way for more than a quarter century, until a woman uploaded her DNA to an ancestry site and unknowingly pointed investigators straight at her nephew, Steven Downs, who had been quietly living as a nurse in Maine the entire time.

Ed covers Sophie's emotional story, the 28-year cold case, and the genetic genealogy breakthrough that finally brought justice.

Ep. 107 | Collegiate Crimes Block | Murder Unscripted | June 2026

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/murder-unscripted/id1750146409

https://open.spotify.com/show/2AUGh12ei1wk8x7CvcX9qH