189. Maury Troy Travis: The Basement Tapes

In May of 2002, a St. Louis reporter received a letter with a map marked with an X and a chilling message: "To prove I'm real, here's directions to number seventeen." The map leads police to a body. And one digital mistake exposed a killer's darkest secrets. Between 2000 and 2002, at least twelve women vanished from the streets of St. Louis, their deaths barely noticed by a society that had already dismissed them. What investigators found in a suburban basement would out one of the most disturbing serial killers in American history.

Sources:

• https://www.stltoday.com/ (Main site - archival articles from 2002)
• https://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/11/us/internet-used-to-find-man-who-is-charged-in-2-of-10-killings.html
• https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-17-na-serial17-story.html
• https://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132005&page=1 (Serial Killer's Home Movies)
• https://abcnews.go.com/US/woman-found-serial-killer-lived-home-watching-tv/story?id=24467447
• https://www.bnd.com/news/local/crime/article311186715.html
• https://fox2now.com/news/true-crime/serial-killer-maury-travis-the-street-walker-strangler/
• https://www.semissourian.com/story/77256.html
• Forensic Files: "X Marks the Spot" (Season 7, Episode 35) - Available on streaming platforms
• Cold Case Files: "A Map to Murder" (Season 2, Episode 19) - Originally aired on A&E
• Evil, I: "Hell's Basement" episode
• Unknown Serial Killers of America (2025)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maury_Travis
• https://web.archive.org/web/20120509185024/http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/criminal_mind/forensics/vernon_geberth/12.html
• https://www.fbi.gov/
• https://isp.illinois.gov/
• https://www.slmpd.org/
• https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/forensics/digital-evidence
• https://dnadoeproject.org/

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Intro & Outro by Jahred Gomes: https://www.instagram.com/jahredgomes_official