In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till traveled from Chicago to Mississippi and never came home.

In this Black History Month episode of When Killers Get Caught, Brittany Ransom examines the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till, the trial that followed, and the decision that forced America to confront the brutal reality of racial violence under Jim Crow.

This case was legally “solved.” Arrests were made. A trial was held. But justice was never truly served.

Emmett Till’s death became a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement, influencing activists, reshaping public awareness, and exposing the deadly consequences of racism in the American South.

In this episode, we explore:

• The historical context of Mississippi in 1955

• The accusation that led to Till’s abduction

• The controversial trial and acquittal

• How Mamie Till’s courage changed history

• Why the case remains morally unresolved decades later

This is more than a true crime story. It’s a case that forced a nation to look at itself.

🎧 Subscribe to When Killers Get Caught for deep dives into solved, unsolved, and morally unresolved cases that shaped history.

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In January 1923, the Black town of Rosewood, Florida was surrounded, burned, and erased after a white woman accused a Black man of assault—an accusation never proven and never investigated. Over the course of several days, white mobs hunted residents, destroyed homes and churches, and forced families to flee into swamps and forests to survive. When it was over, Rosewood no longer existed—and no one was held accountable.

In this episode of When Killers Get Caught, Brittany Ransom examines the Rosewood Massacre, one of the most devastating and least discussed acts of racial violence in American history. We break down how false accusations, racial hysteria, and government inaction led to the destruction of an entire Black community, why official death tolls never matched survivor testimony, and how the state of Florida failed to protect its own citizens.

This episode is part of a Black History Month series exploring violence against Black Americans, alongside the Tulsa Race Massacre, the murder of Emmett Till, and the assassination of Fred Hampton. Though Rosewood was buried for decades, survivors eventually forced the truth into the light—leading to a rare moment of accountability when Florida acknowledged its role and paid reparations.

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In this episode, Brittany Ransom investigates the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, one of the deadliest and most deliberately obscured acts of racial violence in American history. What happened in Greenwood, often called Black Wall Street, was not a riot, it was a coordinated assault that left as many as 300 Black residents dead, more than 35 city blocks destroyed, and over 10,000 people homeless.

Early reports falsely minimized the devastation. Decades later, survivor testimony and official investigations revealed a very different truth: white mobs looted and burned Greenwood block by block, while airplanes flew overhead, dropping incendiary devices and firing into the neighborhood. Homes, churches, schools, hospitals, and businesses were reduced to ashes in less than two days.

More than 1,200 homes were burned, with property losses exceeding $1.5 million in 1921—the equivalent of tens of millions today. Insurance companies refused to pay claims. Families were forced into Red Cross tents through the winter. City officials worked to bury the evidence and erase the crime from public memory.

This episode confronts the uncomfortable reality that the perpetrators were never held accountable, and asks what it means when a mass killing goes unpunished.

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Every time a Black person is killed, the lie arrives faster than the facts.

He had a gun. He was high. She was threatening.

In this alternative episode of When Killers Get Caught, Brittany Ransom steps away from a traditional case to examine a pattern that stretches from Emmett Till to the present day and why the phrase “they’re killing Americans now” is landing as confirmation, not concern, for Black Americans and other marginalized communities.

This episode explores how state violence has historically been justified through dehumanization, fear, and selective citizenship. From Indigenous displacement and slavery to policing, internment, mass detention, and modern use-of-force narratives.

Drawing on history, law, and the warnings of James Baldwin, this episode asks a difficult but necessary question: Who is recognized as fully human, and when does injustice finally “count”?

This is not about partisanship. It’s about citizenship, power, and the cost of a system that teaches itself how to look away.

Content warning: This episode discusses state violence, racism, and historical trauma.Sources for this episode include U.S. Supreme Court decisions, federal legislation, Department of the Interior reports, and the work of James Baldwin, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Michelle Alexander, Erika Lee, and other historians and legal scholars.

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In 1981, during the height of the War on Drugs, police raided a San Francisco apartment expecting a major drug dealer. Instead, they found a grandmother in an apron baking brownies.

Her name was Mary Jane Rathbun, later known as Brownie Mary, a woman whose arrest would help change how America viewed medical marijuana, the AIDS crisis, and compassion under the law.

As young men died alone in hospital wards during the 1980s AIDS epidemic, Mary broke the law to feed, comfort, and care for patients no one else would touch. Her quiet rebellion challenged the criminalization of cannabis, exposed the cruelty of drug policy, and helped pave the way for medical marijuana legalization in the United States.

This episode explores the life, motivations, and legacy of Brownie Mary, and asks a deeper true-crime question: What happens when the system treats compassion like a crime?

Because sometimes the most extreme crimes aren’t committed by monsters but by people the law refuses to understand.

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This episode contains in depth discussion of infanticide, postpartum psychosis, suicide, and severe mental illness. Listener discretion is advised.

In 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five children in a case that shocked the nation and was quickly labeled as one of the most horrific crimes in American history. But what if the story most people remember is incomplete?

In this episode of When Killers Get Caught, host Brittany Ransom revisits the Andrea Yates case with updated medical, legal, and psychological context focusing not on shock value, but on what the system missed before the tragedy ever occurred.

Andrea Yates suffered from severe postpartum psychosis, a rare but life-threatening psychiatric condition that causes hallucinations, delusions, and a complete break from reality. She had a long, documented history of mental illness, multiple hospitalizations, suicide attempts, and explicit medical warnings not to be left alone, not to stop medication, and not to have more children. Those warnings were ignored.

This episode breaks down:

• The warning signs of postpartum psychosis and why it is a psychiatric emergency

• How religious extremism and untreated mental illness collided

• Why Andrea Yates’s first trial resulted in a wrongful conviction

• How misinformation in court influenced a jury

• What changed after her acquittal by reason of insanity and what still hasn’t

• Why women with postpartum psychosis are still more likely to be incarcerated than treated
  

More than two decades later, Andrea Yates remains confined to a state psychiatric hospital. Her case is now taught in medical schools and cited in maternal mental health advocacy yet many of the same systemic failures remain.

This is not a story about a monster. It’s a story about untreated illness, institutional failure, and a tragedy that unfolded in plain sight.

Because when systems fail, the truth always leaves a trail.

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⁠⁠https://spoti.fi/1Uda2ci

The True Crime Story of William Chester Minor and the Oxford English Dictionary

In 1872, a former U.S. Army surgeon named William Chester Minor shot a stranger to death on a London street. Declared criminally insane, he was confined to Broadmoor Asylum where he would unexpectedly become one of the most significant contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary. This true crime story explores murder, mental illness, and how one fractured mind helped define the English language.

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He stood at the altar as a man of God and lived in secret as a killer.