Check out the brand new podcast, American Dread, from Adam White.

Two winters. Two murders. Eighteen years apart.

In Decatur, Illinois, the winters of 1942 and 1960 were marked not by snow and holiday cheer, but by the sound of shotguns shattering the night.

In this episode of American Dread, we revisit two chilling cases: the Short Street double shooting of 1942, and the shotgun murder of Virginia Eades in 1960. Different killers, different motives—but each crime left the same lasting scar on the community.

Step into the cold, walk the streets where it happened, and hear the true stories of tragedy and terror from the dark side of the American Heartland.

On October 26, 1965, a 16-year-old girl named Sylvia Likens died in Indianapolis from shock, malnutrition, and a brain hemorrhage. She had been tortured for three months and by the time she died, she could barely move or speak. She had been tortured, neglected, sexually humiliated, starved, beaten, and cut by her tormentors. Her autopsy later revealed 150 wounds on her body, including cigarette burns, skin brandings, and knife wounds.

What had Sylvia done to deserve such torture? Nothing.

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This episode was written by Troy Taylor

Produced and edited by Cody Beck

Check out the brand new podcast, American Dread, from Adam White.

On a quiet May night in 1976, the city of Decatur, Illinois, was shattered by a brutal double murder that still echoes nearly fifty years later. Two young cousins, June and Marcella Freeman, were savagely stabbed to death and left discarded like trash on the side of West Center Street. Their killer, Michael Timothy Gibson, would soon be caught — but justice didn’t end the nightmare.

In this debut episode of American Dread, host Adam White takes you deep into the horror of that night, the trial that followed, and the decades of pain that haunted the victims’ families and the Decatur community. With real crime statistics, eyewitness details, and chilling atmosphere, this story explores not just the crime itself, but the scars it left behind.