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True Crime Tuesdays – A Fearsome Fiction Feature: The Many Victims of Randy Steven Kraft, the Scorecard Killer
He looked like your neighbor. He worked as a computer programmer. He threw dinner parties for friends. But from 1971 to 1983, Randy Steven Kraft prowled the freeways of Southern California — and beyond — leaving a trail of young men’s bodies in his wake. When police finally caught him, they found something almost no one expected: a coded list. Sixty-one cryptic entries, each one believed to represent a life he had taken. Investigators called it the Scorecard.
More than fifty years later, victims are still being identified — and the case is still growing. This week on True Crime Tuesdays, we go deep into one of America’s most prolific and least-known serial killers: the man police called the Scorecard Killer, the Freeway Killer, and the Southern California Strangler. And we ask the question that haunts investigators to this day: how many names are still on that list?
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The Twist Podcast 329: Mad for the Middling Podcast, Great American State Fair Fail, and an Interview with Courtney Cordova
This week on The Twist, Mark and Rick cut their losses and ditch their tickets to the Great American State Fair — and they have thoughts. Then it’s all good news as they share their enthusiasm for Eden Sher and Brock Ciarlelli’s Middling podcast, the irresistible rewatch show for fans of The Middle. Plus Rick sits down with Courtney Cordova of Madison’s Henry Vilas Zoo for a conversation about the animals, the mission, and what makes this beloved institution one of the best free zoos in the country. All that and the usual twists on Episode 329.
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Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Night Flight to Murder Town – A Marshall James Thriller (Chapters 34 – 36)
Fasten your headphones for another three chapters of Night Flight to Murder Town: A Marshall James Thriller by Mark McNease. Narration provided by Wondervox.
When we left Marshall James, he was in the middle of a very bad few days in New York City. His friend Trent is dead, the murder scene has been suspiciously cleaned up, and someone has apparently lifted Marshall’s driver’s license — which has now turned up in a dead senator’s apartment.
In Chapter Thirty-Four, Marshall and Colin pay a visit to Rhonda — Colin’s neighbor two floors down — to use her computer and finally open the disk that Trent died for. What they find on it is a spreadsheet of cities, money, and names that make everything a great deal more dangerous.
Chapter Thirty-Five takes us back to the present in Lambertville, New Jersey, where his husband Boo has been gently lobbying for a change of scenery. He wakes up in a bed and breakfast, comes downstairs to coffee and conversation, and meets Kyle Callahan and his husband Danny Durban — hosts, innkeepers, and, as we’ll come to see, people who know something about starting over in a new town.
Chapter Thirty-Six continues that morning, as Marshall begins to take the measure of this quieter life and wonder whether he might actually belong in it.
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This Week’s Twist Podcast Survey: When the Temperature Climbs, Where Do You Want to Be?
This week’s Twist Podcast survey (results next week!) R
When the temperature climbs, where do you want to be?
On a shady porch with a cool beverage and nowhere to be
Floating in a swimming pool
In the mountains / outdoors where the air is clean and cool
Inside with the air conditioner on
Baking in the sun
Name your own in the comments -
Terri Schlichenmeyer’s Bookworm Sez: Books for a Pre-Pride Celebration by various authors
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Bookworm SezBooks for a Pre-Pride Celebration by various authors
c.2026, various publishers
$19.99 – $39.95 various page countsYou’re all geared up.
You’ve got your best parade-walking shoes, your coolest tee, your most-comfortable shorts, and a rainbow flag to carry. You’re set for Pride, but before you go, try one of these great new books about LGBTQ life and history…
After the parade, where will you end up? A place to talk your experience over, to re-hash things for the next parade? Then you may need “The Lesbian Bar Chronicles: The Living History and Hopeful Future of America’s Dyke Dives and Sapphic Spaces” by Rachel Karp (Beacon Press, $29.95).
Lesbian bars, says Karp, are more than just places to drink. They’re also places to find community, and to organize. For many, she says, they are “sanctuaries,” as they have been for at least a century, and this book introduces you to some of the people who run the establishments, the things they do to support their patrons, and the hundred-year-plus bravery that it took to own, run, and enter a lesbian bar.
If you had to name a gay icon, there are probably quite a few who come to mind. So read “Without Prejudice: My Life as a Gay Judge” by Harvey Brownstone (ECW Press, $21.95) and add another name to your list.
This memoir, written by Canada’s first openly gay judge, takes readers from Brownstone’s childhood to his life as a lawyer, then to his work within the justice system in Ontario, and beyond, to his current career. This is a surprising, informative book that gives you an idea what gay life is like, north of our uppermost borders, then and now.
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True Crime Tuesdays – A Fearsome Fiction Podcast Feature: The Strange Death of Rey Rivera
On the evening of May 16, 2006, aspiring screenwriter Rey Rivera received a brief phone call, said “oh,” and ran out of his Baltimore home. He was 32 years old, newly married, and by every account a happy man on the verge of the life he’d always wanted. Eight days later, his body was found inside a locked, abandoned conference room at the historic Belvedere Hotel — beneath a hole in the ceiling that should have been impossible to make from above.
The physics didn’t add up. The injuries didn’t match. The detective assigned to the case said the scene looked staged and was pulled off it three weeks later. And taped to the back of Rey’s computer at home was a note — typed in tiny font, folded into a strange shape, addressed to “brothers and sisters” — that opened with a Masonic phrase, referenced volcanoes and secret societies and Stanley Kubrick, and was never satisfactorily explained by anyone.
This week on True Crime Tuesdays, we go to Baltimore, to a fourteen-story hotel, and to one of the genuinely strangest unsolved deaths of the past twenty years. No resolution. No clean answers. Just a hole in a roof, a note that reads like a riddle, and a case the medical examiner still considers open.
