Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes

On April 2, 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis fled Richmond with the entire Confederate treasury, a fortune in gold ingots, silver bricks, and coins guarded by teenage Navy midshipmen on a train heading south into a collapsing nation. Five weeks later, when Union soldiers finally captured Davis, almost all of it was gone. The War Department told the public the missing treasure was worth $13 million, a number historians say was invented to turn every former Confederate into a hunted man. The truth was far more complicated, with records showing most of the money was paid to soldiers and spent along the way. But the legend never died. Wagons were raided in Georgia, deathbed confessions pointed to buried caches no one ever found, and treasure hunters are still searching 160 years later. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson follows the trail of the lost Confederate gold, the myth the government built around it, and the question that still drives people into the woods with shovels: where did it all go?
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A young British teacher in Tokyo is stalked and murdered by a man who evaded police for two and a half years. An experienced hunter on a dream African safari is shot dead in her cabin — and her husband collects nearly five million dollars in life insurance. And four elite American climbers are seized at gunpoint in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, becoming hostages in a war they never knew existed. This is episode 4 of Deadly Destinations, a special four-part series on Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes hosted by Vanessa Richardson. Four exotic locations that should have been a dream vacation, but ended in a nightmare. New episodes drop every Sunday, and all four are available now, ad-free, on Crime House Plus. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page.
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On the evening of April 14, 1865, just five days after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, President Abraham Lincoln attended a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington. He was shot in the back of the head by an actor named John Wilkes Booth and died the following morning. But the murder at Ford's Theatre was not a lone gunman's act of revenge. That same night, across the city, other men were carrying out coordinated attacks on the Vice President and the Secretary of State, all part of a wider Confederate conspiracy aimed at decapitating the federal government in a single stroke. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson tells the story of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the men who plotted it, and the night that altered the course of Reconstruction before it began.
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In 1854, an adventurer named George Bickley founded a secret society with a singular goal: build a slave empire stretching from the American South through Mexico, Cuba, and the Caribbean. He called it the Knights of the Golden Circle. Within a few years, it had grown into a powerful underground network that pushed secession, seized federal arsenals, and intimidated unionists across the South. Some historians have linked it to early plots against Abraham Lincoln, four years before John Wilkes Booth finished the job. When the war ended, the Knights didn't disband. They went underground, reportedly burying millions in gold across the South to finance a second Civil War that never came. Treasure hunters are still digging. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson examines the secret society that helped start the Confederacy, may have helped kill a president, and left behind a trail of buried gold that no one has fully accounted for.
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In 1802, a journalist reported that President Thomas Jefferson was keeping an enslaved woman named Sally Hemings as a concubine and had fathered her children. Jefferson said nothing. His family denied it. America's most prominent historians dismissed the story for nearly two hundred years.

But Hemings' own descendants told a different story, one passed down through generations of oral history that the white historical establishment refused to take seriously. Did the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence have a secret family with a woman he enslaved? And if he did, why did it take the country so long to admit it? In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson revisits one of the most contested questions in American history, and the family that refused to let it go.
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If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free and released a day early, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.
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