An Assembly of Fascinating Things

Two women worked inside Facebook years apart, and both tried to warn the world about the exact same harms. One of these women became a household name, the other got a gag order. This episode tells both stories side by side, and asks whether Meta's $1...

In 1980, a young straight-porn director called Chris Covino walked into a New York City fetish club and met a man who introduced himself as J.R. Lewis. Over the course of that conversation, Lewis agreed to fund something Covino had always fantasised ...

Before Ted Kaczynski was a name on the news, the Unabomber was an anonymous figure who could vanish for years and return with a more lethal device. Part One follows the hunt from the first 1978 package bomb to the manifesto that finally made his anon...

Ted Kaczynski stayed hidden for 17 years, but the manifesto he believed would justify his crimes ultimately revealed him. Part Two follows the man behind the Unabomber from Harvard and the Montana wilderness to his arrest, legal battle and guilty ple...

Aileen Wuornos admitted killing seven men, but spent years changing the explanation for why she did it. Behind the woman portrayed in Monster lies a complicated story of trauma, murder, contradictory confessions and a first killing that remains centr...

In 1892, two people were hacked to death in a respectable Massachusetts home, and the only real suspect walked free after a trial that still divides opinion. Kyle and Adam dig into the evidence, the myths, the rhyme that got the numbers wrong, and th...

An aspiring comedian enters a sweepstakes challenge and unknowingly becomes one of Japan’s biggest television stars. Nasubi’s 15-month ordeal reveals how an unlocked door, an unseen audience and a desperate hope for fame can turn entertainment into e...

In 2016, five members of the Tromp family fled their farm in a single car, leaving behind their passports, credit cards and mobile phones. Why they fled remains one of Australia's greatest modern mysteries—a mystery that not even the Tromp family can...

Ruth Ellis became the last woman hanged in Britain after shooting her lover, racing driver David Blakely, outside a Hampstead pub on Easter Sunday 1955. The facts that secured her conviction appeared brutally simple: she waited for him, fired six tim...

MKUltra was the CIA’s secret Cold War programme built around drugs, hypnosis, interrogation, and the dream of controlling the human mind. This episode follows Frank Olson, LSD testing, Operation Midnight Climax, Donald Ewen Cameron, destroyed files, ...