Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast

Daylon Pierce became known for running a widespread online dating scam in which he used social media and dating apps to target women, often presenting himself as charming, emotionally invested, and sometimes falsely claiming stable careers or military ties to build trust quickly. After forming intense romantic relationships, Pierce would manufacture financial emergencies and persuade victims to send him money, gifts, or access to funds, only to disappear or cycle them into ongoing manipulation. The scheme unraveled as multiple victims compared stories and reported similar patterns of deception, leading to a criminal investigation that revealed a consistent playbook of emotional exploitation and fraud.

Christina Paolilla is from Clear Lake, Texas, and was involved in a brutal double murder in 2003. Along with her boyfriend, Steven Spence, Paolilla carried out a home invasion that resulted in the execution-style killings of her childhood friends, Clara Harris’s relatives Josh and Alicia Moffatt, whom Paolilla had grown up with and once considered family.

Lorenzen Wright, a former NBA center who played 13 seasons in the league, was found murdered in July 2010 after disappearing from Memphis, Tennessee, his body discovered in a wooded area riddled with multiple gunshot wounds. The case drew national attention due to Wright’s prominence and the disturbing revelation of a 911 call in which he appeared to be fleeing for his life. After years of stalled investigation and public pressure, prosecutors alleged that Wright’s wife, Sherra Wright-Robinson, conspired with her lover, Billy Turner, to have him killed over financial disputes tied to Wright’s multimillion-dollar assets.

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.

Gerald Payne was the pastor and director of Greater Ministries International, a Tampa-based religious organization that operated in the 1990s as a massive Ponzi-style fraud cloaked in faith-healing rhetoric, promising believers that if they “gifted” money to the ministry they would receive double their money back in about 17 months through supposed divinely blessed investments in foreign currency, mines, and other ventures. The scheme pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars from tens of thousands of devout investors across the United States.