This Feels Criminal: A True Crime Podcast (Formerly Killer Queens)

"I did not kill the president. The doctors did. I merely shot him." That was Charles Guiteau's defense.
In 1881, a failed lawyer and preacher convinced himself he'd single-handedly won James Garfield the presidency — and that the president now owed him a job. When the reward never came, he decided Garfield had to die. In Part 2 of Founding Felons Week, Tyrella and Nikita get into who Guiteau really was and how he got there: the Oneida free-love commune that rejected him, his pattern of latching onto powerful men and then turning on them, the ten-week media circus of a trial, and the 1882 execution where he asked for an orchestra.
It ends on the grim irony of a man who spent his whole life desperate to be remembered — and got his wish, as a brain on display at the Mütter Museum.
New here? Start with Part 1 (the shooting and the nearly 80 days) before this one.
Content warning: this episode discusses an assassination, capital punishment, child abuse, and preserved human remains.

Founding Felons is back! A bullet put President James Garfield on the floor of a train station in 1881 — but it wasn't the bullet that killed him.
In Part 1 of Founding Felons Week, Tyrella and Nikita trace the unlikely life of James A. Garfield: the dirt-poor Ohio farm boy who couldn't swim but dreamed of being a sailor, and the self-taught general who went on to win the closest popular-vote election in U.S. history. Four months into his presidency, he was shot at a Washington train station — and then handed over to his doctors.
We get into the shooting, Dr. Charles Burleigh Purvis (the first Black physician to treat a sitting president, and the one man in the room who was right), and the nearly 80-day medical disaster that followed — the finger-probed wound, the misfired Alexander Graham Bell metal detector, and the sepsis that did what the gun couldn't.
Part 2 drops Thursday: the assassin, Charles Guiteau, and a trial that went completely off the rails. Patrons can listen now.
Content warning: graphic 19th-century medical detail and descriptions of an infected gunshot wound.

After the guilty verdict, most people wait quietly. Taylor Parker wrote a confession to the murder — and signed it as someone else.
Part 2 is the half the Netflix documentary Maternal Instinct never showed. After she was convicted of capital murder, Taylor Parker ran a months-long jailhouse operation to frame other people for the killing of Reagan Simmons-Hancock — forged confessions, fabricated co-conspirators, the works. Then came the penalty phase and one question: was Taylor Parker calculating, or was she sick? Tyrella and Nikita break down the dueling experts, the 2022 death sentence that landed her on Texas death row, the appeals that have since run out, and where Taylor Parker is now.
You'll hear the forged confessions, the jail calls, just how rare fetal abduction really is — and why the hosts chose to end on Reagan and her baby, Braxlynn, not the woman who killed them.
Missed Part 1? Start there for Reagan's story and the years of deception that led to October 9th.
Content warning: graphic violence, the death of an infant, and discussion of suicide. If you're struggling, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline).

Before she was a Netflix documentary, Reagan Simmons-Hancock had a name, a daughter, and a baby due in weeks. This is the part the cameras skipped.
The Netflix documentary Maternal Instinct tells the story of Taylor Parker, who faked a pregnancy for nearly a year — fake ultrasounds, a silicone belly, even a gender reveal — before committing one of the rarest and most disturbing crimes there is: fetal abduction. In 2020, in the tiny town of New Boston, Texas, that lie ended in the murder of her friend Reagan Simmons-Hancock. Tyrella and Nikita walk through how a con artist with a fabricated oil-and-gas fortune slowly escalated toward the unthinkable.
Part 1 traces Reagan's life and the years of deception by Taylor Parker that led to October 9th: the cons, the fake inheritance, the invented villains, and the warnings no one could legally act on.
Part 2 covers everything Netflix left out — what Taylor did from behind bars. Patrons have it now; everyone else, it drops Thursday.
Content warning: this episode discusses graphic violence and the death of an infant.

Caysen Allison stabbed a classmate more than once and got 10 years. Karmelo Anthony stabbed Austin Metcalf once and got 35. Both said it was self-defense.
Part 2 opens at Anthony's sentencing in Frisco, Texas — including the victim impact statement from Austin's mother that reframes the whole debate — then sets the case beside a strikingly similar one out of Belton: same self-defense claim, very different ending.
Tyrella and Nikita break down the 35-year sentence, the data on sentencing disparities, the jury and the Batson challenge, the online firestorm, and the appeal — built on the record, not the noise.
Start with Part 1 for the trial and the verdict.
Content warning: fatal violence involving minors, and a racist remark (quoted and condemned) in the context of public reaction to the case.