Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - She Killed Her Ex - The Ezra McCandless Story

Episode Date: January 10, 2026

Ezra McCandless, also known as Ezra McCandless Mitchell, was convicted for the 2018 murder of her former boyfriend, Alex Woodworth, in rural Wisconsin, a case that initially appeared to be a tragic act of self-defense but unraveled into a carefully staged homicide.

This is your fix. I am your host, Stasi Schroeder. Welcome to Tell Me Lies, the official podcast. What's the most unhinged thing of season three? Stephen, because he's so evil. I do think he is misunderstood. You see everyone base consequences. It's intoxicating.

The writers just know how to trick you. There's always a twist in this show. Tell Me Lies, the official podcast, January 6th, and stream the new season of Tell Me Lies, January 13, on Hulu, and Hulu on Disney Plus. So in the middle of nowhere, a woman shows up to a house, and she starts beating on the front door and yelling for help. And she's been beaten up and stabbed, and she's got no shoes on. So this farmer guy answers the door,

and the woman tells him that she was just attacked, but she also claims that she can't remember what happened, and that she can't remember her own name. Now, the woman, her name's Ezra, and Ezra is 19 living in Wisconsin, and Ezra has a prime. problem. She's pregnant. And I guess she and her boyfriend don't really know if they're ready to be parents. So one day in 2017, she decides that she's going to go to the local clinic and, you know, get rid of it. Now, I'm not 100% sure if it's both she and her boyfriend's decision or what, but that's what Ezra does.

She goes and has the procedure. Now, Ezra's boyfriend is this guy, Jason. And Jason, he's a bit older than her. She is 19 and he's 33. But whatever, they're gonna try and make it work, I guess. The problem is, it's not really working. Things aren't going so great between them. And one day, that same year, Ezra is chilling at a local coffee shop, and there she meets this barista, Alex. And Ezra and Alex, they become friends and they hang out,

and then Jason becomes friends with Alex too. And so the three of them all start hanging out. together. And soon enough, Ezra and Alex, they start hooking up, low key, and smashing a bunch behind Jason's back. But then Jason catches on. About eight months into his relationship with Ezra, he's going through her phone one day, and he finds all these text messages between her and Alex, and basically the whole affair blows up in Ezra's face. So now what's she going to do? Well, after all that, she kind of just says, fuck it. And she's she. And she's, she breaks up with both Jason and Alex. However, after a while, she starts to regret that decision.

Because even though she broke up with both of them, she's still not over Jason specifically. And she wants to get back together with him. Here's the thing, though. At some point, she gets drunk and smashes with one of Jason's friends. Then she reports that friend to the police for SA. But after all that, it actually turns out that the friend did not essay her, so police end up dropping the case. Now, during all this legal drama, Ezra is still desperate to get back with Jason. But of course, by this point, Jason, he's not really interested in her at all. I mean, why would he be? She slept with Alex and she also slept with his other friend.

Regardless, Ezra, she's not trying to hear all this rejection. She's doing anything she can to reach Jason, but she just can't. get through to him. Like she's blown up his phone with hundreds of text messages, she's begging him to take her back, she's sending him, I guess, journal entries that indicate how much she wants to get back together with him. She's even messaging Alex a ton and begging him to help her get back together with Jason. But I guess Alex is like, no, you're crazy. So nothing is working. And now Ezra's got to come up with a new plan to get Jason to take her back. She wants to make sure that he knows that her fling with Alex meant absolutely nothing. So she decides to make it look like

Alex is a really bad guy who tried to essay her. And not only that, but she also plans to murder him. So one day in 2018, Jason is at that local coffee shop that they like to hang out at. And out of nowhere, Ezra shows up. And she tells him that she's about to swing by Alex's place and she says that she's going to return some items that she has of his, but the thing is, Jason notices that she's acting really strange, and he gets a really bad feeling. So when Ezra leaves the coffee shop to drive to Alex's house, Jason low-key follows her on his bike.

So then Ezra gets to Alex's house, and she goes inside. And then Jason gets there, and he's not sure what to do or what's going on, so he just lets himself inside Alex's house as well. And there, he sees Alex and Ezra talking. And there's like nothing contentious going on. They aren't like fighting or anything. So eventually, I guess Jason doesn't see anything wrong.

And he leaves. Then Ezra drives Alex all the way over to some rural, remote area on some dirt road where they can be really alone. Then they get out of the car and the moment Alex turns his back on her, she suddenly pulls out a knife. And boom, she stabs him. And then she stabs him again and again and again. And she ends up stabbing him 16 times. And he, unfortunately, doesn't survive. Then she takes his phone and she breaks it so that no one can trace him.

Then she turns the knife on herself and she starts giving herself cuts and slashing at her clothes and whatnot to make it look like that she was attacked by him. And then she takes the knife and she carves the word boy into her fore. Why does she carve the word boy into her forearm? Well, apparently back in high school, Ezra used to identify as a boy and use male pronouns. But then she later changed that and went back to identifying as a woman. And I guess she's trying to make it look like Alex was mocking her gender identity and carving the word boy in her arm or something. Anyway, then she kind of just leaves Alex there in the middle of nowhere.

And she starts hiking barefoot. And three hours later, she's still hiking and she reaches some random farmer's house and she starts beating on his door crying for help. So this farmer guy answers the door and Ezra tells him that she was just attacked and that she can't remember exactly what happened and that she also can't even remember her own name. And this poor farmer guy, he doesn't know what's going on. So he calls the police. And so police come all the way out there and they pick her up. Then they take her to a local hospital to get her wounds treated. And while she's there, they question her because, you know, they're trying to figure out what happened.

But again, she claims that she doesn't remember much, except she remembers that the last person that she was with was Alex. Now, she doesn't tell them that Alex is lying dead out in the middle of nowhere. No, no, she claims she doesn't know where he is. So police try contacting him. And they obviously get no answer. So then they contact his parents, and his parents haven't seen him around. So now Alex is officially missing. And about a day later, police are driving around, and I don't know if this is part of their

normal patrol or what, but they end up finding Ezra's car and Alex's body is still at the scene. And so they go back to the hospital where Ezra is, and they start questioning her about all this, about why her friend's dead body is around her car. And at this point, Ezra can suddenly remember stuff. It's a miracle. So she stops claiming that she can't remember what happened, and she starts claiming that Alex attacked her and tried to essay her, and that she had no choice but to kill him in self-defense with a knife. And she even tells police that Alex somehow carved the word boy into her forearm.

But here's the thing. Police know that something is way off about her story. mostly because the word boy is carved into her left forearm, and if she was actually sitting in the driver's seat when he supposedly attacked her like she claimed, and Alex was sitting in the passenger seat, he would have had to have reached over her to get to her left arm, which is not impossible, but it just seems very unlikely. And so Ezra has no choice. She has to finally admit that Alex never attacked her and that she did it all to her stuff. And so police keep investigating. And two weeks later, bam, they arrest Ezra. Here's her mugshot. And so she ends up going to trial and she's found guilty and she gets sentenced to life in prison.