When Johnathan Walton hosted a wine and cheese night in his Los Angeles apartment in 2013, he couldn’t have known that the event would invite a shark into his inner circle. His story unfolds thousands of miles away from New England, but the woman he knew as Mair Smith began her long career of conning and scamming in her home state of Maine.

He committed his first murder at 15-years old, ending the life of an innocent shopkeeper as he and his buddies made their way around Lawrence, Massachusetts holding up convenience stories “for the thrill of it”. His lawyer would later plead for mercy on the accused teenage killer, but that mercy would have unintended consequences not so far in the future.

Jessica Zernicke Holmes left work on the night of September 24, 2015 to find her phone flooded with missed calls and messages. When she was finally able to call her family member back, they delivered shocking news about her father. 58-year old Kenneth Zernicke was found dead inside his burning home in Caribou, Maine. Two days later, his death was ruled a homicide.

Strung up in the corner of a roadside amusement park fun house was the figure of a man. In the several years the figure was on display, no one dared question if the display was anything more than a mannequin.

In October of 2016, about a month after he was plucked from a life raft after a week at sea, Nathan Carman walked into the private memorial service he’d organized to honor his mother, Linda Carman. Notably missing from the private service were Linda Carman’s three sisters. Soon it would be abundantly clear how and what the aunts thought about their nephew. They believed he was a murderer driven by greed for the family fortune.

Every detail of the sinking boat, the extensive week-long search, and the incredible rescue of Nathan after that search was called off made for a massive story in local and national media. But it only got more compelling when it was learned that Nathan was the grandson and Linda the daughter of wealthy real estate developer John Chakalos, whose 2013 shooting death remained unsolved when the tragedy occurred at sea.

When the daughter of wealthy real estate developer John Chakalos walked into her father’s Connecticut home one morning in December 2013, it set into motion a long-term investigation of not one, but two suspicious deaths in the same family within a three year span.

The murder of 70-year old Augusta resident Blanche Kimball remained a cold case for decades until a new tip, advancements in DNA technology, and a clever idea brought all the loose ends together.

Missing Kim, a Dark Downeast mini-documentary is out now.

The fire horn rang out in Ossipee, New Hampshire around 10 p.m. on September 28, 1916. The blaze at Frederick and Florence Small's cottage on the lake burned fast, even, and hot. The fire department could do nothing to save the structure or anyone who might remain inside. Frederick was out of town, seen leaving on a train towards Boston that afternoon, but Florence was unaccounted for.

When Albert Flick was released from his first prison sentence for killing his wife, he restarted his pattern of threatening and victimizing women. But he’d age out of it, wouldn’t he? Statistics said so. His drooping, wrinkled face and frail body did not look like that of a brazen killer.

Ellen Choate’s name remains on the Maine State Police Unsolved Homicide list all these decades later, one of two long-standing cases without resolution in Newport, Maine. From the start of the investigation, detectives considered possible ties to numerous other homicides in the area. What was happening in Sebasticook Valley in the mid-1970s?