Peabody Award-winning investigative reporter Robert Riggs created the True Crime Reporter™ podcast, an original true crime genre podcast based on three decades of real-life stories ripped from his reporter’s notebooks. The True Crime Reporter™ podcast tells the backstory of criminal cases using interviews with the law enforcement law officers that played key roles in the investigation.
“I set out to create serialized immersive content that is character-driven. I want to bring the true crime audience into the story with characters that they care about so much that they want to binge-listen,” said Riggs.
True Crime Reporter™ taps into Riggs’ network of criminal investigators from his career as an award-winning television news reporter and congressional committee investigator. It features episodes covering serial killers, mass killers, FBI profilers, child predators, notorious fugitives, cold case squads, prison gangs, drug cartels, human smugglers, bank robbers, gun traffickers, cults, terrorists, and militia groups.
In each episode, Riggs pulls out his reporter’s notebook. His law enforcement sources open up their confidential case files. And they take listeners on a journey into darkness.
Riggs, the host, and editor of the True Crime Reporter™ podcast and website oversees a team of journalists who help produce content for both platforms about current and historical crime news.
Free To Kill
The first season of True Crime Reporter™ features a 17-episode series called Free To Kill. It’s Riggs’ corruption investigation of the parole of serial killer Kenneth Allen McDuff. McDuff, known as the “Broom Stick Killer”, is the worst sadistic sexual serial killer in Texas history and the state’s only inmate to ever receive three death sentences.
Riggs takes listeners inside the nationwide manhunt for McDuff with interviews from the investigators who brought him to justice. Riggs reveals how he uncovered a massive bribery scandal inside the state’s parole system that set McDuff and hundreds of violent criminals like him free.
McDuff abducted, r***d, and killed a young woman the day after he walked out of prison on early parole.
The episodes also cover McDuff’s capital murder trials, efforts to get him to reveal the location of his victim’s bodies, details from his ex*****on inside the Texas death chamber, and the impact of his case on changing the Texas criminal justice system.
In the final episode, Riggs compares notes about serial killers with Stephen Michaud who is regarded as one of the world’s top true crime authors. Michaud’s tape-recorded interviews with serial killer Ted Bundy are featured in a four-part mini-series on Netflix.
Inside The Yellow Crime Scene Tape
During his journalism career, Riggs never settled for standing outside the yellow crime scene tape. He went inside by knocking on doors, digging through records, and cultivating sources to get to the bottom of the story.
He is a recipient of television’s prestigious Peabody Award for investigative reporting and three coveted Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Awards for Investigative Reporting.
The American Bar Association honored Riggs with its Silver Gavel Award for his investigation of corruption in Texas’ parole and prison systems. The Dallas Crime Commission in conjunction with the FBI awarded Riggs its first-ever “Excellence In Reporting Award” for his investigation of teenage he**in deaths in Plano, Texas and a landmark series on identity theft.
Riggs was appointed Chief Investigator for the Joint Committee on Defense Production by the late Congressman Wright Patman during the Watergate scandal. Patman as Chairman of the House Banking Committee launched the first Watergate investigation. Riggs held a Top Secret Security clearance from the Department of Defense.
True Crime Reporter™ is a trademarked and copyrighted production. Justice Facts, a podcast about current and historical criminal cases is cohosted by Robert Riggs and Bill Johnston the former federal prosecutor who led the manhunt for McDuff and indicted the parole board chairman for corruption.
The true crime stories from their respective careers are stranger than fiction.
