It’s been a year of audacity, diabolical behavior, and pure mayhem — and now it’s time to run it back.
In this 2025 Year-End Review, your favorite country girl counts down the Top 10 Melanin Mayhem Podcast episodes of the year, based on listener engagement and the sheer what-the-hell-did-I-just-listen-to factor.
From serial offenders and scandalous lovers to insurance schemes, courtroom chaos, and crimes that left communities reeling, this episode revisits the cases that shook Noir Nation in 2025. And did I mention I made a video for this episode??
Whether you’ve been rocking with the mayhem all year or you’re new to these streets, this countdown is both a greatest-hits replay and a reminder of why Black true crime stories deserve to be told with depth, nuance, and respect.
Lock in, revisit the madness, and see if your favorite episode made the list.
Welcome to the mayhem.
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America’s Forgotten Black Female Serial Killer
The FBI says serial killers are usually white men — but Roberta Elder shatters that profile. In this retelling of the inaugural episode of Melanin Mayhem, your favorite country girl brings you the chilling story of a Black woman in Jim Crow–era Georgia who is believed to have poisoned at least 13 people, including husbands, children, relatives, and boarders, all from inside her own home.
Operating quietly from the 1930s to the 1950s, Roberta Elder exploited racism, respectability, and systemic neglect to hide a decades-long killing spree fueled by insurance payouts and unchecked access to her victims. Though authorities suspected multiple murders, she was ultimately convicted of only one, raising disturbing questions about who the system chooses to investigate — and who it ignores.
This episode has been refreshed with improved audio quality
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For the final episode of Love Kills, your favorite country girl is closing the series with a story that begins in love and ends in devastation. What starts as a young family building a life together slowly unravels after a husband returns home from war… changed.
As isolation tightens, paranoia grows, and control replaces care, a once-happy home becomes something far more dangerous. When the road finally runs out, the consequences are irreversible — and the truth is impossible to ignore.
This finale isn’t just the end of a series, it’s a reflection on how love, loyalty, and unchecked trauma can turn deadly — and why these stories still need to be told.
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This isn’t about glorifying a killer—this is about the women he tried to erase and the system that helped him do it. In Quiet Carnage, I'm closing out The Samuel Little Files by confronting the part America avoids: the deadliest violence is often the violence nobody treats like an emergency. We’re talking unchecked movement across state lines, cold cases that lost urgency the moment Sam died, and the reality that “Jane Doe” is somebody’s daughter whether the world respected her or not.
This week I wrap this series with reflections on how a killer traveled the U.S. like a rolling stone, how “women on the margins” became a loophole in the system, and how the machinery of justice failed so consistently it might as well have been policy. Sam is gone—but the conditions that made him possible? Still here.Tap in, Noir Nation—then meet me in the discussion group, because we need to talk.@melaninmayhempodcast
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melaninmayhempodcast@gmail.comGet your Melanin Mayhem Merch: Shop Melanin Mayhem PodcastLink to the FBI website for Samuel Little:Samuel Little: Confessions of a Killer — FBI
This chapter isn’t about Samuel Little. It’s about the women whose voices were stolen long before their lives were taken.
In Part 3 of The Samuel Little Files, we shift the focus where it always should’ve been—on the victims the system ignored, dismissed, and failed to protect.
Many of these women lived on the margins, and because of that, their disappearances didn’t raise alarms. Their names weren’t shouted from headlines. In many cases their names were never even known. Their cases weren’t pursued with urgency because in many cases nobody knew they were missing. And Samuel Little not only counted on that silence, he capitalized on it.
This episode honors the lives lost. In this episode we say her name, as much as we can. This episode brings to light how apathy and bias allowed a predator to move freely, and asks the uncomfortable question: how many voices were lost because no one was listening?
It’s New Year’s Eve… and there’s a man laid out dead on the floor.
This wasn’t random — it was a setup. And once the body dropped, the heat came down fast looking for somebody to pay.
One stupid ass decision cost one brother everything.
So lock in, because this is a story about how sibling love can turn lethal. And nah — this ain’t Cain and Abel. This diabolical duo is giving Menendez-style brothers, real twisted, real tragic.
And the wild part? The murder wasn’t even the biggest atrocity.
The real fuckery shows up in the courtroom. Because the legal shenanigans in this case damn near steal the whole show.
BTCC presents Season's Greetings: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1947314021659?aff=oddtdtcreator
America’s deadliest secret was exposed in 2012. It all started with a traffic stop in Kentucky which led to a cheek swab in California. This DNA sample would link what looked like an unassuming senior citizen to being a serial killer. They knew they were prosecuting a killer; they had no clue they would be uncovering the most prolific serial killer the US had ever seen.
In Part 2 of The Samuel Little Files, I am going to walk you into the interrogation room where the man that had lived in the shadows, keeping the lowest of the low profiles, finally started talking and drawing revealing decades of murders hidden in plain sight.
You've asked and now it is my pleasure to give yall what you want. Your favorite country girl is bringing you the story of the killing-est killer to ever kill- Samuel Little.
In order to do it justice I am bringing you a four-part series on America's most prolific killer past or present. In this episode we go back to the beginning and learn how it this killer came to be. From the red clay of Georgia to the sunny skies of the city of angels. I am spilling all the tea on the most audacious one of them all.
Tickets for the live BTCC show: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1947314021659?aff=oddtdtcreator
Happy Black Friday Noir Nation. Enjoy a replay of one of the top Love Kills episodes. I'll be back in 2 weeks with a brand-new episode for your listening pleasure.
When religion turns to manipulation and devotion becomes deadly, what’s left is a twisted legacy soaked in blood. In this episode of Love Kills X Melanin Mayhem, I'm diving into the disturbing case of Marcus Wesson—a man who called himself a prophet, ruled his household like a cult leader, and shattered the lives of everyone under his control.
Wesson’s version of “family” was built on lies, incest, isolation, and a warped form of love that ended in one of the most horrifying mass murders California has ever seen. This is the story of blind obedience, stolen innocence, and a God complex gone completely unchecked.
Tune in as we unravel the layers of manipulation, spiritual distortion, and generational trauma behind the man who blurred the lines between husband, father, uncle and grandfather...
This week we’re headed to St. Petersburg, Florida for a story that proves once again—that some people should never be given second chances. A teenager with a violent past grows into a full-blown menace the moment he hits the free world, leaving a trail of mayhem that went unnoticed for far too long. From vanished women to cold cases that refused to stay buried, this episode digs into how one man slipped through every crack in the system…and how many lives were destroyed because of it. Tap in, Noir Nation and let me know what you think of this week's Melanin Mayhem maker Mr. Tony Ables. Tickets for the virtual BTCC show: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1947314021659?aff=oddtdtcreator
In 1911, a family was slaughtered in their sleep in Lafayette, Louisiana. By 1912, a young woman named Clementine Barnabet had been branded the Voodoo Murderess — accused of killing at least fifteen people and a part of a blood stained cult called the Church of Sacrifice.
But separating fact from fiction is tricky. Was Clementine the OG serial killer or was she caught up in the South’s obsession with fear, faith, and a Black woman they needed to see as a monster?
For tickets to Season's Slayings:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1947314021659?aff=oddtdtcreator
Love, money & murder — things that never mix well in Texas.
In 1987, Frances Newton’s quiet Houston home became the scene of unthinkable tragedy: her husband and two children murdered. The police called it diabolical. The press called it cold-blooded. And the state of Texas called for justice. A life for a life.
But was Frances really a calculating killer… or a woman caught telling the wrong story at the wrong time?
In this week’s Love Kills, I am spilling the tea on the case that made Frances Newton the first Black woman executed in Texas since the 1800s and how she went to the death chamber saying it wasn't her.
In 1978, the city of Columbus, Georgia was shooketh.
Headlines screamed about a serial killer targeting the elderbuns and all the while another monster was hiding in plain sight a melanated baddie with delusions of grandeur.
For months, our mayhem maker terrorized the city, murdering women near Fort Benning and sending letters to police pretending to be something he was not. His twisted deception played the city and the cops like a poker chip. Come take a ride with me as I break down the story of William Henry Hance and the Forces of Evil that never was.
Orlando in the 80s was all sunshine, theme parks, and vacation dreams… until it wasn’t. Tourists were flying in for fun in the sun, but someone waiting in the shadows turned paradise into panic. A teenage terrorist with a taste for mayhem was using a popular tourist strip as his personal hunting ground, and his crimes would leave Orlando shooketh.
This week, we head to the Sunshine State to unravel the story of Isaac Green that the travel brochures never mentioned.
Behind the doors of a quiet Houston home, David Conley turned a family’s love into a chamber of terror. What started as control and manipulation ended with eight lives stolen in cold blood — eight futures wiped out in one night of pure evil. They say home is where the heart is, but inside this little house, horror reigned supreme.
In this week’s Love Kills, your Favorite Country Girl breaks down the twisted tale of one of Texas’s darkest family massacres, as I introduce you to the monster who sent a family of eight to the Pearly Gates.
This week I am headed to Springfield, Massachusetts to bring you the story of a disgusting doped up demon that was disconnecting black women like he worked for the power company. Alfred Gaynor was not only chasing a fix — he was chasing victims. Women overlooked and under investigated by police, all raped and killed by a dope smoking killer who thought his crimes would disappear like the crack smoke.
You know how I bring it, and this story is a whole ass mess, so get comfortable and let's spill all this tea on Alfred's shenanigans.
This week, Noir Nation, we’re headed to Tampa, Florida, where the Seminole Heights neighborhood was under siege in late 2017. For 51 days, residents were shooketh because of a serial killer whose random, unprovoked attacks left four people dead and an entire community terrified. The man behind the violence? Someone no one ever would have thought could or would be behind it all- a young man named Howell Emanuel Donaldson III.
From the fear on the streets to the jailhouse drama, this case is a chilling reminder that sometimes the predator is the boy next door.
This week on Love Kills x Melanin Mayhem, we ain’t talking about some far-off case in another city—nah, this one hit me right in my backyard. I knew the people. I worked with them. And when the news broke, it shook me to my core.
What happens when a dusty, trifling DJ decides he’d rather destroy his wife rather than let go? What happens when the trigger man shows up not only at the crime scene, but later as a pallbearer for the very woman he helped put in the casket?
This isn’t just another story I researched. This is one I lived through. A wife, a mother, a colleague gone too soon because of the niggacity and evilness of two men who thought they were untouchable.
Today, I’m pulling back the curtain on the murder of Tiffany Jackson-Pugh—told through my point of view as someone who knew the players, felt the fallout, and still carries the rage. Buckle up, because this ain’t just true crime. This is personal.
Noir Nation have you ever seen somebody get caught with their hand in the cookie jar… then burn down the whole damn kitchen? This week’s Melanin Mayhem maker turned a petty hustle into pure carnage and went from “caught slipping” to “counting bodies” in minutes. This week we're going to Connecticut, and I've got a crazy story of how one man made the leap from misdemeanor theft to felony murder to busting hell wide open. I’ll walk you through how it all went down to become one of the worst workplace massacres you’ve probably never heard of committed by a melanated baddie named Omar Thornton.
In the winter of 1857, a Mississippi plantation dinner ended with more than just indigestion — we got a dead body, a master and mistress poisoned, and all fingers pointing to the cook.
Was she serving dinner with a side of revenge, or was she the perfect scapegoat in a house already boiling with jealousy, colorism, pettiness and lust?
This story has everything: a master who couldn’t keep out of his slaves’ beds, a mistress burning with rage, house slaves pitted against field slaves, and one pot of tea that changed everything. From whispered gossip around the cabins to a courtroom packed with lies, betrayals, and technical loopholes, this case shows how one woman may have turned the tables in the deadliest way possible.
So, grab your cup, Noir Nation — because this week we’re sipping on a vintage tea as I lay out the story of Josephine the enslaved woman whose cup was overflowing with get back.