US police departments harness podcasts to solve cold cases and murder investigations

Peter Chadwick had been living under an assumed identity in Mexico for nearly four years when California police decided to tell his story to the world. He was wanted for murdering his wife in October 2012, but he had never stood trial. In June 2018, the Newport Beach Police Department launched a podcast about the case. Ten months and twenty days later, Chadwick was in custody.

That success was not an outlier. In Illinois, when the Elgin Police Department released their first podcast episode about Karen Schepers—a woman who had vanished more than forty years earlier—her remains surfaced within weeks at the bottom of a river, still in her car. This summer, the Aurora Police Department in Colorado joined the trend, launching their own podcast to pursue justice for Chelsea Yasser, a twenty-one-year-old stabbed to death in a shopping center parking lot in 2016, a case that has eluded investigators for a decade.

Across the United States and beyond, police departments are discovering that podcasts—a medium most people associate with entertainment and true crime storytelling—can be a legitimate investigative tool. The appeal is straightforward: true crime content has become enormously popular, and police departments want to harness that appetite for attention and channel it toward solving cases. "We were deliberate in trying to tap into that broader audience," says Joe Moylan, the Aurora Police Department's public information officer. Unlike a news broadcast that airs once and vanishes, or a newspaper article that reaches only those who happen to read it, a podcast can be downloaded and listened to repeatedly, shared among friends, and discovered by people who had no idea the case existed.

The Chelsea Yasser investigation illustrates both the promise and the mechanics of this approach. She was stabbed after climbing into a minivan in a parking lot; she collapsed moments after exiting the vehicle. Security footage captured the van rocking during the assault, but the image quality was too poor to identify anyone. DNA recovered from under her fingernails matched no one in any database. The case had stalled. When the Aurora Police Department released their podcast in June, they were simultaneously testing that DNA using new forensic genealogy technology—a development they shared with listeners. The podcast had been downloaded 7,184 times by the end of July and had generated several tips, including one that investigators continue to pursue.

But the approach carries complications. When the Newport Beach Police Department produced their podcast about Peter Chadwick, they introduced him as "a man who killed his wife"—without using the word "alleged." Chadwick had been charged and had pleaded not guilty, but he had never been convicted. Critics argued that the podcast violated the presumption of innocence and that police should investigate, not adjudicate. Jennifer Manzella, the officer who produced and hosted the podcast, defended the choice as a balance between telling an engaging story and protecting the investigation. After Chadwick's capture in August 2019, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to fifteen years to life. Manzella later acknowledged that the podcast itself may not have directly led to his capture, but it created pressure that made him more likely to make mistakes. The podcast reached number twenty-four on the iTunes chart, and the awareness it generated allowed investigators to obtain warrants and extraditions in record time.

When Detective Andrew Houghton at the Elgin Police Department learned that his new cold case unit would also be producing a podcast, he was skeptical. "Why are we adding something else new on top of that?" he recalls thinking. But as he and his partner, Detective Matthew Vartarian, began structuring episodes for their 2025 podcast, "Somebody Knows Something," they discovered that the process was actually helping them organize their investigation. Different theories about what happened to Karen Schepers naturally formed separate episodes. The podcast generated tips, but it also gave the detectives a new way to find leads—they began reading social media comments from listeners who remembered details about the neighborhood or had personal connections to people involved. The detectives ultimately solved the case through traditional police work: they found a decades-old newspaper article mentioning that police had searched salvage yards by helicopter and dragged the Fox River, but they discovered no evidence that the river search had actually occurred. They brought in a search company with sonar technology and divers, and in March 2025, they found Karen Schepers and her car at the bottom of the river.

Most police departments lack the staff, budget, equipment, or expertise to produce podcasts. Others hesitate because of concerns about lawsuits and civil liability. Yet experts believe the trend will accelerate. Michael Alcazar, a retired NYPD detective and adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says that podcasting is a tool "that everyone will eventually embrace." Younger officers, he suggests, will be more comfortable with the medium because it is native to their world. And if departments can sustain the effort, podcasting may help with recruitment and retention by showing the public what police work actually entails, told by working officers themselves.