Dark Downeast
Dark Downeast
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Dark Downeast: Maine and New England's True Crime Podcast digs into the decades-old and modern day cases that prickle the history of Vacationland and beyond – the unsolved homicides, undetermined deaths, unexplained disappearances and other dark stories of New England. Investigative journalist and storyteller Kylie Low gets straight to the story with a mix of narrated episodes and documentary style production featuring interviews with surviving family and friends and insight on the investigations from detectives and sources who know these cases best. This is heart-centered, ethical true crime, bringing light to stories you’re not hearing on other podcasts. It is Dark Downeast's mission to honor the legacy of the humans at the heart of each story and bring new attention to the cases still awaiting justice.
The Murder of Claire Gravel (Massachusetts)
On a Saturday night in late June of 1986, a 20-year-old college student went out with friends in a familiar place, celebrating her softball team’s big win. But in a narrow window of opportunity just after she was dropped off in the shadows outside her apartment building, the young woman faced an evil that managed to stay hidden in those same shadows for decades. Investigators searched for connections…People who knew her, places she had been, anything that might explain her senseless death. But nothing fit. Leads faded. The case stalled. And over time, it slipped into that uncertain space between open and unsolved. For decades, the answer remained just out of reach until advances in science, and a single piece of preserved evidence, began to tell a different story.
Apr 23
37 min
The Murder of Laurie Gonyo (Vermont)
In the fall of 1976, a woman vanished from her home in rural Vermont sometime between a cup of morning coffee and the end of an ordinary workday. What followed was years of suspicion, rumor, and silence until a witness with questionable credibility stepped forward. Laurie Gonyo’s case has an ending but not the kind of clean resolution people imagine when they hear the word solved. This is a story about what happens when justice feels incomplete, when a sentence seems too small for the violence at the center of it, and when the killer in one case leaves a trail of suspicion wherever he goes.
Apr 16
38 min
The Murder of James Cassidy, Part 2 (Maine)
Fifty years after James Cassidy’s death, there is still no simple explanation for his brutal murder. The evidence left behind in the Maine woods raised questions investigators have never fully answered. And the deeper the investigation went, the more complicated the picture became. A respected bank executive had vanished, federal authorities were preparing to arrest him, and a burned car was found far from home on a deserted logging road. But the paper trail and the witness accounts pointed in several directions at once – toward financial crimes, toward organized crime figures operating in New England, and toward the surprisingly valuable world of rare stamps. Somewhere among those threads may lie the explanation for what really happened all those years ago in April of 1976.
Apr 9
36 min
The Murder of James Cassidy, Part 1 (Maine)
In April of 1976, an anonymous call to a sheriff’s department in Maine alerted investigators to something almost impossible to imagine: a burning station wagon hidden off a remote road, and what looked like a body inside. What they found would open a case filled with contradictions. The victim was James Cassidy, a Massachusetts bank vice president, father of three, churchgoing family man, and by all accounts someone living a quiet, ordinary life. But in the days before his death, Jim had vanished across state lines, federal authorities were preparing to arrest him on embezzlement charges, and whispers of missing money, valuable stamps, and possible organized crime connections began to surface. Nearly fifty years later, his death remains unsolved.
Apr 2
34 min
The Murder of Brenda Warner & Charlene Ranstrom (New Hampshire)
On a fall morning in 1988, police in Nashua, New Hampshire walked into an apartment and found two women murdered in their bed. What followed seemed, at first, like a case that would never truly reach an ending. There were suspects, confessions, trials, and years of legal battles but no final resolution. For decades, the killings of Charlene Ranstrom and Brenda Warner lingered in the background, a file sitting quietly among other unsolved cases. But some investigations refuse to stay buried. Years later, new detectives took another look. With fresh eyes, new witnesses, and forensic technology that hadn’t existed when the crime was first investigated, the story began to change.
Mar 26
42 min
The Murder of Joan Wertkin (Connecticut)
On a rainy night in late May 1989, a fire was spotted in a Westport, Connecticut parking lot. Within minutes, first responders realized the impossible: a body was burning in the open. Not long after and just a few miles away, a husband called police to report his wife missing. Her name was Joan Wertkin. From the outside, she was living an enviable life in one of Connecticut’s most idyllic towns. But as investigators traced her final hours, the case turned into something far more complicated – a tight timeline, a fraying relationship, a car left where it shouldn’t have been, and questions that still echo for her family.
Mar 19
44 min
The Murder of Lucia Kai Roberts (Massachusetts)
On an August evening in 1982, children playing in Boston’s Franklin Park stumbled onto a scene that would quietly become one of the city’s most troubling unsolved cases. The victim was a 16-year-old girl who had already endured instability, displacement, and independence far beyond her years. Her murder received little attention at the time, but within months, rumors began to swirl: allegations of sexual assault inside a private police club, whispers of a cover-up, and a detective who refused to back down.
Mar 12
38 min
The Murder of Abraham Levine and Trial of Eleanor Johnson (Maine)
On a quiet Saturday night in 1931, a 19-year-old cattle dealer sat at his desk to write a check that he never got the chance to finish signing. Investigators were left with more questions than answers – a missing revolver, a name on a check no one could trace, and a household already tangled in rumor and tension. What followed was a shifting investigation, a contested admission, and a trial that forced a small New England city to confront issues of race, reputation, and reasonable doubt.
Mar 5
40 min
The Disappearance of April Grisanti (Connecticut)
Before she vanished, April Grisanti was a young woman trying to find her footing. Then, over the course of one winter night in 1985, she disappeared in plain sight. Witnesses saw her struggle. Police heard her voice asking for help. And yet, April was never seen again. What followed has never felt like justice. No murder charge. No body. No answers. This is a story about incomplete justice, and about a family left carrying questions the investigation has never fully resolved. Over four decades later, the question still hangs in the air. Where is she?
Feb 26
35 min
The Murder of Joseph Woodside (New Hampshire)
In November of 1979, a man was found beaten to death along a quiet trail in a New Hampshire college town. Within a day, police had a suspect, but the case was hardly open and shut. The college student convicted of the murder – and the family who stood by him – were prepared to spend a lifetime fighting to prove his innocence. They believed the investigation narrowed too quickly, that key questions went unanswered, and that the truth had yet to fully surface. But before the courts could decide what came next, the Atlantic Ocean wrote the final chapter of this story.
Feb 19
43 min
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