Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries - Presenting True Crime News: The Podcast

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

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. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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, 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. 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 Carol 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 Weberry, streaming on HBO Max. Our guest today is Patricia E. Gillespie, the director of The Secrets Wee Berry. Trish, welcome to the program. Hi, thank you so much for having me.

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. Indeed, yes. I think it came as quite a surprise to have. everyone in the film. 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. It just, I just find that. And that no one reported him missing to the police? 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, you know, whatever you hear from your mom is what you believe. And it wasn't until the Carol

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 Carol children. And one of the big moments for him was he'd been a paper boy growing up. And he delivered in the block 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 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, and he 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. Okay. Well, that is just bizarre. How would you not know that your grandparents? How do you not know that these are your grandparents?

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 right. rest of his life there. And he started to put the pieces together over the ensuing decades. So these grandparents, I'm just curious, are they George's parents? George were missing? George's, George's mom and stepfather, yeah. 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? Yeah, I mean, there had been stories and rumors of, George's mom actually hiring a private investigator who broke it in the house and took pictures of the basement and had serious questions about it. But none of that ever came to bear fruit because she passed away long, long before this crime was ever solved. How bizarre. Okay, so 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's 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?

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. Well, that's fairly suspicious. If you want more cases that go beyond the headlines, be sure to follow True Crime News, the podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.