Presenting True Crime News: The Podcast

True Crime News: The Podcast is your weekly dose of real-time updates on the most gripping true crime stories, current cases, investigations, scams, and schemes. Host Ana Garcia is joined by crime experts, police officers, defense attorneys, and other leading authorities in their fields as they cover murders, scams, investigations, and unsolved crimes from across the country. Join us each week as we take you inside the biggest, most shocking, and most bizarre true crime cases.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kaelyn Moore?

  Hi, everyone. As part of the true crime community, we know the cases that really stay with us aren't always the loudest or the most sensational, but the ones that happen inside families who, from the outside, look completely ordinary. The ones that make you wonder how something so dark could stay hidden for so long. Today, I'm going to share with you an episode from True Crime News, the podcast. It's a show that digs into some of the most shocking cases and the investigations that slowly unravel them. This episode focuses on a haunting mystery that lingered for decades. It's one that I remember following as it unraveled. When George Carroll suddenly disappeared, he left behind his wife and four children and a lot of unanswered questions. For years, the family lived with the uncertainty of not knowing what happened to their father. Then,

• 0:44Kaelyn Moore?

  after a chance visit with a psychic, they began digging into the past and uncovered a deadly secret that had been hidden in their own basement all along. It's a case that's both heartbreaking and deeply unsettling, and I think you guys are going to get a lot out of it.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to a special edition of True Crime News, the podcast. I'm your host, Anna Garcia. Everyone in the world of true crime has a story to tell about a case they worked on or they lived through. Some are high profile, some you have never heard of, but they are all fascinating. Today's case is about a deadly family secret hidden in the basement. Generations of the Carroll family lived in the home, wondering whatever happened to the patriarch. The story was he just walked away from the family. Well, following a hunch, and guided by a psychic vision, we now know what happened. His murder and the secrets surrounding it are the subject of a new investigation discovery documentary called The Secrets We

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Bury, streaming on HBO Max. Our guest today is Patricia E. Gillespie, the director of The Secrets We Bury. Trish, welcome to the program.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Hi, thank you so much for having me.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  So, this is a fascinating case. I must be honest, I haven't seen it yet. I've only seen clips of it, but was reading some of the research on this. And it's shocking to believe that, you know, George Carroll, the patriarch of this family, the entire time had been in the basement of the home.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Indeed, yes. I think it came as quite a surprise to everyone in the film.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Oh my goodness. So this, you know, it goes back to 1963. Just a little bit of background here and then you'll lead us through this. George Carroll of Long Island, New York vanished, right? He just left behind his wife and four children. The kids have always had questions, obviously, when people just disappear. And people just don't disappear. A few do want to, but that is in the minority. And so, you know, his wife Dorothy, having to take care of the four kids, her story was to the children that he simply went to get a packet of cigarettes, which of course didn't make sense since he left, what, his car, his wallet?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  It just, I just find that, and that no one reported him missing to the police?

• 3:20Speaker 02

  No one picked up his last paycheck. You know, there were a bunch of things that didn't totally make sense. But when you're young, you know, whatever you hear from your mom is what you believe. And it wasn't until the Carroll children were older that they really started to ask questions. And I think one of the watershed moments for Mike, Mike had been, Mike's the youngest of the Carroll children. And one of the big moments for him was he'd been a paper boy growing up. And he delivered in the blocks surrounding his home. And there was this one yellow house that always sort of stood out to him and he couldn't figure out why. And then when he was

• 4:02Speaker 02

  about 17 or 18, he ended up hearing a knock at the door and seeing his mother go out. And it was the man from that yellow house delivering to his mother a box of possessions. And Mike said, "What's that?" And she says, "That's your father's stuff." He says, "Well, why does he have it?" And she says, "That's your grandfather." And no one had ever told Mike that he'd been delivering papers to his grandfather for, you know, seven or eight years. They had been kept totally separate. So I think at that point, he knew something was going on.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Okay, well, that is just bizarre. How would you not know that your grandparents? How do you not know that, that these are your grandparents?

• 4:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think there was an energy of secrets around that whole thing. And he couldn't really get a straight answer. And so that sort of lingered in his brain for the rest of his life there. And he started to put the pieces together over the ensuing decades.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  So, these grandparents, I'm just curious. Are they George's parents?

• 5:05Speaker 02

  They were George's mom and stepfather, yeah.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Now, one would think, Trish, that they would have called the police. I mean, if their son is missing. Like, how did they not get involved in an investigation?

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there had been stories and rumors of George's mom actually hiring a private investigator who broke into the house and took pictures of the basement and had serious questions about it. So, but none of that ever came to bear fruit because she passed away long, long before this crime was ever solved.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  How bizarre. Okay, so let's, can you, let's walk us through here and really the main people involved here. So, the story is that George Carroll walks away in 1963, last time that he is seen alive. Okay, after he disappears, there is a man who becomes prominent in this family. Who is this man? What role does he play?

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so George had come home from the Korean War. He was a Korean War veteran. And, you know, in making the adjustment, coming back home with, you know, four kids, he decided he wanted to add an extension onto the house, do some work onto the house for Dorothy and the kids. And he hired a local man to help sort of do this extension and do some work. And this guy ended up becoming a good friend of George's and staying at the house when he had nowhere else to stay. And when George disappeared, he ended up marrying Dorothy, George's wife.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Well, that's fairly suspicious.

• 6:57Kaelyn Moore?

  If you want more cases that go beyond the headlines, be sure to follow True Crime News, the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Do you want more darkly curious stories in your life? Sign up for our Patreon for free and get access to a rotating shelf of bonus content, our weekly Rogue Detecting Society newsletter, and the HSP Book Club. Paid members also get monthly bonus episodes and archive access, which I think is more than 40 episodes at this point. You also get a cool jinx sticker after your first three months. And you can check it all out with a free seven day trial. Link in the bio or go to patreon.com backslash heart starts pounding. But whatever you do, stay curious.