Crimery

On November 28, 1969—the quiet day after Thanksgiving—a 22-year-old Penn State graduate student walked into Pattee Library to retrieve one final source for a research paper. She never walked out. Betsy Ruth Aardsma was stabbed once—cleanly, precisely—between the shelves of the basement stacks. No scream. No visible blood. Students and staff believed she had collapsed from a medical emergency and unknowingly wiped away crucial evidence while trying to save her life. By the time doctors discove...

A 26-year-old woman vanishes from Long Pond, PA on May 11, 1983. Her husband waits 72 hours to call police. Fifteen years later, two separate accounts surface—one claiming her remains were dumped off Seaside Heights, another pointing to a shaft in Centralia, the ghost town that’s been burning underground since 1962. If investigators are right, Susan Cerritelli rests in a place no one can safely search—an impossible grave. In this episode, we trace the timeline, the red flags, and why “no-body...

Eighteen-year-old Jennifer Barziloski walks out into a warm June night in 2001 and never makes it home. Three years later, her closest friend, 22-year-old Phylicia Thomas—the one who wouldn’t stop asking what happened to Jennifer—vanishes too. One skull is found along an ATV trail years later; the other woman is still missing. The same names, the same party talk, the same rural pocket of Luzerne County keep surfacing. Coincidence—or a pattern everyone’s been too afraid to say out loud? In thi...

An 11-year-old leaves Mercy Hospital in Scranton with a stuffed animal for her mom and starts the short walk home—broad daylight, one block to go. Witnesses see a girl matching Michelle “Jolene” Lakey get into a light yellow car near North Washington Ave. She is never seen again. This episode of CRIMERY traces the chilling threads that still haunt Northeast PA: the three-day ransom call that named Nay Aug Park, the unexplained purse found on Jolene’s dresser, and years of scrutiny around a fa...

A well-liked Pleasant Valley freshman drives to a secluded cul-de-sac for a $120 marijuana sale—and meets three teens who never planned to pay. Within minutes, 15-year-old Aiden Paiz is shot with an AR-15, his friend is wounded, and the killers scatter into the Poconos night. It will take Pennsylvania State Police less than a day to crack the case—built on a brave survivor’s account, confessions, recovered weapons, and a pattern of “drug rips” plaguing rural Monroe County. In this episode of ...

A devoted father and small-town carpenter walks out of his Polk Township home one October afternoon—and never returns. His blue work van is found wiped clean. His bank accounts go quiet. For years, rumors swirl. Then a drunk shoplifter starts talking about a crack house in the woods, a hammer, a rifle, and a basement “injection” meant to end a man’s life. What follows is a decade-long path to justice without a body—built on confessions, forensics that survived a bleach-and-paint scrub, and th...

MICHAEL KERKOWSKI & TAMMY FASSETT: THE BACKYARD GRAVEA trusted small-town pharmacist vanishes with his girlfriend and a year later investigators dig into a Kingston Township backyard and uncover a nightmare: multiple shallow graves, including Michael Kerkowski and Tammy Fassett, strangled with plastic ties and buried one atop the other. The tip that cracks the case? An unexpected confession from burglar Paul Weakley that leads police straight to Hugo Selenski’s property—and to a truth mor...

This is a preview of things to come.