Mystery On The Rocks

The Nazis are in power and barely one month after the enabling act effectively makes Hitler dictator of Germany steps are made to eradicate literature and research deemed to go against the Nazi ideology.One particular place of scientific learning which falls foul is an institute set up by a Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, a progressive man who dedicated his life to helping the LGBTQIA+ community. No mean feat for a century ago. Hirschfeld's institute helped many but one in particular was Dora Richter - the first known transwoman to ever undergo complete gender confirmation surgery.But she vanished, her fate unknown... So what happened to Dora?And along the way we touch on Hirschfeld being almost unfathomably ahead of his time and a gay sex scandal which rocked Germany... See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We hit the 1930s in our Geopolitics, War & Espionage season and hotfoot it straight over to Germany in 1933 where something big was brewing. Hitler and his Nazi party are able to seize absolute power and rule Germany as a dictatorship. An arson attack on the home of Germany's parliament - the Reichstag - helps to precipitate all of this.But who literally started the fire? And could Erik Jan Hanussen, the man who coached Hitler in public speaking, somehow predicting it ahead of time hold some clue? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

1928 New York. Prohibition has been in place for some time but some of the criminal underworld (who have been some of the few to profit from its tight grip) are sensing it is nearing its end. Casper Holstein, a black racketeer from Harlem who has considerable control over illegal gambling and has been very generous to black activism with his profits, is kidnapped at gunpoint. A ransom of $50,000 demanded. He is released three days later and he insists no ransom has been paid. Nor will he name his kidnappers.He also could have paid that ransom himself several times over...To this day, nobody knows who kidnapped him or why. Could it be dodgy attorney Dixie Davis? Maybe out-of-control hoodlum Dutch Schultz? Or Casper's rival in illegal gambling, the formidable Stephanie St Clair? Each have motive and each have an incredible story of their own.Join us for this season's stop-off in prohibition New York, where Chris chaperones Sooz and Masud to a threesome with a sexy gangster... See acast.com/privacy for privacy a

This week we're taking a week off from our ongoing themed season for a chilled-out Christmas special - join us for some Christmas drinks where we go through our middle names, our Christmas plans and opinions on Christmas dinner.Thanks for listening everyone, have a great Christmas!! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In September 1928 Latvian dentist Morduch Halsman is hiking in Austria with his son, Phillippe. He loses his footing and plummets off a cliff to the horror of Phillippe. When Phillippe manages to find a way down to the bottom, he discovers his father has been robbed and, if the fall hadn't killed him, murdered.Yet this is smack bang in between the World Wars, in a country with an ever more pronounced lean towards fascism. And the Halsmans are Jews. Phillippe is promptly arrested, tried and convicted.But was Phillippe ever destined for a fair trial? And is the pressure cooker of anti-semitism responsible for not only a skewed trial, but also possibly the murder itself...? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

When a Native American people gains immense wealth from oil found on their land at the beginning of the 20th Century, it sets in motion a chain of events which leads to fraud and death in a concentrated campaign of malevolence throughout the 1920s. Who is responsible for a string of murders, all carried out with the express aim of wresting control of the land and money from those to whom it rightfully belongs...?And just what has Masud been getting up to with plums? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week, we decide to educate ourselves on something which didn't really get taught to us at school or, we feel, get adequately explained to us as children... Irish history.Specifically, the story of one man - Michael Collins.A firebrand revolutionary, his story cannot be understated when it comes to the formation of the republic of Ireland. After ruffling so many belligerent, colonial feathers it should have come as no surprise that people would want him out of the way. But no official record exists of how he met his end in a violent shootout.So just who did assassinate him in 1922?  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On September 16th 1920, an attack on Wall Street killed 30 people instantly, 10 more in the aftermath and injured hundreds more. Yet it remains unsolved, despite arrests being made, trials being held and executions being conducted in a story which went on to grip the world.Might the attack have its roots in an armed robbery on a shoe factory months earlier? We try to piece it all together as we learn about Italian anarchism in early 20th Century America and get sidetracked by late 1980s kids' cartoon The Shoe People...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Following the Great War, in the early 1920s celebrated military strategist Earl Hancock Ellis worked tirelessly on a secret project - a project which would eventually lead him on a secret mission to Japanese islands in the Central Pacific.A project which could well have predicted the attack on Pearl Harbor almost 20 years before it actually happened...Join us as we discuss Ellis's predictions and high-stakes mission as well as, among other things, nits.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Following last week's encounter with the nefarious Sir Basil Zaharoff, we rewind to the 1880s when machine gun inventor William Cantelo vanishes completely upon completing the prototype machine gun he had been working on for some time. Not long afterwards, Hiram Maxim unveils his outstanding Maxim gun, only for William Cantelo's surviving sons to be shocked by two things...1) The gun is the exact same design as their father's and 2) Hiram Maxim bears a startling physical resemblance to their missing dad...Could the villainous ZedZed have been involved somehow?  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sir Basil Zaharoff. One of the most evil men who ever lived. Bigamist, fraudster, international arms dealer. Codename: ZedZed. A real nasty piece of work.Most likely the real-life template for the James Bond supervillain, Zaharoff's influence on the geopolitics of the 20th Century cannot be overestimated, yet he lived in the shadows and his name doesn't loom over history as much as the man himself did. So why does nobody really know when and where he was born, why did he burn all records of himself and could he really be responsible for World War I?And is a previous mystery on the show solved in the process?Let's find out together!  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Season Five continues with one of the great 20th Century mysteries; did Princess Anastasia Romanov survive the Bolshevik revolution and execution of her family and go on to live a long life in secret?Several people have indeed claimed to be the princess throughout the years and a potentially sticky diplomatic situation on the eve of peace with Germany during World War 1 helped to stoke speculation but did she really get away?And is the Dreamworks film worth watching? We attempt to answer these in a very echoey room...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Kicking off Season Five of Mystery on the Rocks (a kinda themed trawl through Geopolitics, War & Espionage of the 20th Century) is our 100th case... The Mad Monk Rasputin!A mystic who inveigled his way into Russia's royal family's inner circle to become one of Tsar Nicholas' closest advisers, Rasputin is still held aloft as a totem of pure evil today - a reputation only enhanced by the terrifying stories told of his assassination in 1916. So, did Rasputin really possess powers magical enough to cure the Tsar's son of haemophilia as well as survive being poisoned, shot and drowned?And do our three MOTR idiots end up becoming TYPICAL SNOWFLAKE RASPUTIN APOLOGISTS?  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It's our Season Four finale and we wanted to pick a doozy for it! So come with us to Florida in 2005 as we look at how a woman got out of a hotel she couldn't possibly have left without being seen and ended up 8 miles away and left for dead. What happened to her, who did it and just who on Earth is the Mercury Man and might he be the key to the whole affair?This case is covered extensively in (so this episode owes a huge debt to) Mark Bowden's excellent Vanity Fair article The Case of the Vanishing Blonde so be sure to take a look after you've finished listening!And we'll be back soon with Season Five!  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week's episode focuses on one of the earliest stories of alien abduction, that of Barney and Betty Hill who claimed to have been abducted by an alien spacecraft while they were driving back home to New Hampshire from vacation in Montreal. And even though our theory for what really happened is one of our most juvenile, we are standing by it!  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week's episode, as voted for by our awesome supporters on Patreon in our monthly mystery vote, is the tale of John Lang who in 2016 was found dead in his burning home, stabbed three times after predicting his own murder in a series of posts on social media. He had uncovered corruption in the Fresno police department and documented all sorts of suspicious goings on as he became increasingly convinced they would make him pay.So did they?And is Masud secretly a bestselling novelist?  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Something a little different this week as we got together in the same (really echoey - sorry!) room and lay out a story suggested just one hour prior to recording by former guest of the show John Robertson. So listen as we all learn about the colourful life and mysterious death of boxing legend Sonny Liston, which takes in organised crime, Muhammad Ali and pecan nuts...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A case which has nothing whatsoever to do with 90s movies but which we still managed to make aaaaaallllllll about 90s movies.In 2003, assistant attorney Jonathan Luna is found dead almost 100 miles from where he was last seen leaving his office, face down in a creek with his blood-spattered car idling nearby and 36 stab wounds all over his body, one of which severed his carotid artery.Cause of death? Drowning. What's more, the wounds seem to have come from his own knife. The cases for suicide vs homicide continue to be argued, especially as details of the trial Luna had been working on could point to either...Also, find out how much Masud used to eat in a day as a schoolboy because it's quite something.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Pier Paolo Pasolini was an Italian film director, poet, writer, intellectual, actor, journalist, novelist, playwright and political figure who created such uproar during his life that he was eventually assassinated in a pretty brutal way in November 1975.To this day nobody knows really who did it but it could be one or more from one or all of the following groups; the mafia, the government, the far-right or even the freemasons. We try to get to the bottom of it at the same time as getting distracted by former heartthrob and current POS Ryan Phillippe...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Gloria Ramirez was 31 years old when she was admitted to Riverside General Hospital Emergency Room in February 1994, delirious and speaking gibberish with heart palpitations. She died that night, officially from complications relating to cervical cancer but the story is far more complicated and strange... Many of the health professionals who worked on her that night were all seemingly poisoned by her skin, by her blood and generally just by being in her proximity.This is the story of the Toxic Lady...It's also the story of Chris' idea for a new Batman comic book and the episode where we find out Sooz's fetish...   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.