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At about 3:30 on a winter afternoon in February 1983, a school bus driver named Mary Gillispie pulled over at a crossroads outside Circleville, Ohio. Someone had posted a hand-lettered sign on her route, aimed at her daughter, and she climbed down to tear it off. Behind it was a box holding a loaded pistol, rigged to fire. By then Mary had spent six years as the first target of an anonymous letter writer. The letters went on to reach hundreds of people across town. Her husband Ron had died on a country road in 1977, the night he said he was going to confront the writer. The trap gun was traced to her brother-in-law, Paul Freshour, and he went to prison for attempted murder. Then the letters kept coming, for the whole decade he was locked up, and they stopped around the year he was paroled. Freshour was never charged with writing a single one, and he denied it until he died. In 2021 a forensic document examiner and a former FBI profiler went through the same letters and came to opposite conclusions. This week Eli follows the handwriting: a capital G shaped like a six, a zip-code habit, and a gun that was his. Simone follows the person: a profile that doesn't fit him, a trial built on a copied handwriting sample, and ten years of letters from a man who shouldn't have been able to send them.

Want to see for yourself? The case file has the full story in writing, and the source list shows which claims are confirmed, which are disputed, and which rest on a single account.

Case file: https://precisionandinstinct.com/cases/circleville-letters/

Source list: https://notes.precisionandinstinct.com/episodes/17-the-circleville-letters.html

Leave us your questions and comments: https://rss.com/podcasts/precision-instinct/voicemail/

CONTENT NOTE: This episode covers a real anonymous-letter campaign, a death officially ruled accidental, and an attempted-murder conviction. Mary Gillispie and Gordon Massie are private individuals. The affair the letters accused them of has never been shown to be true, and this episode treats it only as the letters' accusation. Paul Freshour, Karen Sue Freshour and their son Mark have all died. Karen Sue's testimony and the couple's divorce are presented as context only, with no suggestion of bad faith. Mark's death is mentioned briefly and without detail. Mary's daughter, who was a minor in 1983, is not named, and the wording of the sign is not repeated. Claims that later anonymous letters made about local officials are attributed to the letters only. No one beyond Paul Freshour is named or suggested as a suspect. As with every case on this show, Precision and Instinct does not resolve who wrote the letters. The episode closes with authorship still officially unresolved and both hosts' reads intact.

The hosts are fictional characters created by Verb Editorial, with AI-generated voices designed specifically for each one. Each episode is researched and written with AI assistance, then fact-checked, edited, and produced by a human team.

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At 2:41 in the afternoon on July 30th, 1975, a man in a windbreaker who'd already used the payphone twice shook a stranger's hand through a car window in a suburban Detroit parking lot, got into the back seat, and was never seen again by anyone who wasn't in that car. James Riddle Hoffa — the most powerful union boss in America, a man who tracked his own schedule in his own handwriting down to the restaurant and the hour — vanished so completely that fifty-one years of sworn testimony, an FBI memo, a matched hair, and five separate failed digs for his body have never added up to a single indictment. The version most people actually know is Frank Sheeran's deathbed confession, dramatized in Scorsese's "The Irishman" — and independent reporters and legal scholars have been picking it apart since the movie made it the default story. The case the FBI actually built is a different one, and in some ways a stronger one, and it's never cleared a courtroom either. This week, Eli argues the sworn record holds up better than this case's reputation for chaos suggests. Simone argues that confidence has outrun proof in this case for fifty years — and that the record Eli's citing rests on exactly the kind of overconfident insider certainty that's been wrong here before.

Want to see for yourself? The case file has the full story in writing, and the source list shows which claims are confirmed, which are disputed, and which rest on a single account.

Case file: https://precisionandinstinct.com/cases/jimmy-hoffa-disappearance/

Source list: https://notes.precisionandinstinct.com/episodes/16-the-disappearance-of-jimmy-hoffa.html

Leave us your questions and comments: https://rss.com/podcasts/precision-instinct/voicemail/

CONTENT NOTE: This episode covers a real, unsolved 1975 disappearance that the FBI still describes as an open investigation. Every person ever named in connection with Hoffa's death — Anthony Provenzano, Anthony Giacalone, Salvatore Briguglio, Chuckie O'Brien, and Frank Sheeran — is deceased; Gabriel Briguglio, the last of the three men named in the 1975 sworn testimony, died in November 2025 still denying involvement, and no living person is named as a suspect anywhere in this episode. James P. Hoffa and Barbara Ann Crancer, Hoffa's son and daughter, are living private citizens currently and publicly petitioning the FBI; their July 2026 letter to the Bureau is presented factually, without dramatizing their private grief or putting words in their mouths. That petition was addressed to the sitting FBI Director; this episode states the 2025–2026 records-release activity as a reported fact only and does not editorialize on the administration's motives in either direction. As with every case on this show, Precision and Instinct does not resolve who was responsible — the episode closes with the investigation still open and both hosts' reads intact.

The hosts are fictional characters created by Verb Editorial, with AI-generated voices designed specifically for each one. Each episode is researched and written with AI assistance, then fact-checked, edited, and produced by a human team.

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In the span of four days in September 1982, seven people across the Chicago suburbs — a twelve-year-old with a sore throat, a postal worker, and the two family members who gathered at his house to grieve him, among others — took an ordinary Extra-Strength Tylenol capsule from a bottle that looked exactly like the one in anyone's medicine cabinet, and never woke up again. It took a public health nurse counting missing capsules out loud in a grieving family's kitchen, and a medical examiner's investigator willing to lean over a pill bottle and smell it, to even figure out what had happened: someone had opened bottles on store shelves across the city, laced the capsules with cyanide at nearly triple the lethal dose, and put them back — with no connection to a single victim. The case named one man, James Lewis, who mailed Johnson & Johnson a million-dollar extortion letter days later containing operational detail about the tampering that had never been made public — and was convicted only of that extortion, never of the murders. He died in 2023, mid-documentary, still saying he didn't do it. This week, Eli and Simone dig into a case that reshaped how an entire country buys medicine and still has no answer to the one question it was actually about.

Want to see for yourself? The case file has the full story in writing, and the source list shows which claims are confirmed, which are disputed, and which rest on a single account.

Case file: https://precisionandinstinct.com/cases/chicago-tylenol-murders/

Source list: https://notes.precisionandinstinct.com/episodes/15-the-chicago-tylenol-murders.html

CONTENT NOTE: This episode covers a real, unsolved 1982 mass-poisoning case with seven named victims; several of their relatives appeared on-camera in the 2025 Netflix documentary covering this case and are treated with the same care this show gives other cases with living family participants. LeAnn Lewis, James Lewis's wife, is named only as a factual anchor (a traced bank account, assumed names, her own documented aliases) and is never characterized or implicated beyond what's sourced — she was investigated and cleared. Roger Arnold, a second person investigators looked at hard and never charged in this case, is named consistent with this show's established pattern on uncharged-suspect naming; he died in 2008 and two rounds of DNA testing never connected him to the poisonings. James Lewis, the case's central suspect, was convicted only of extortion, never murder, and died in 2023 still maintaining his innocence — this episode does not resolve whether he was responsible, and the murders remain an officially open investigation to this day.

The hosts are fictional characters created by Verb Editorial, with AI-generated voices designed specifically for each one. Each episode is researched and written with AI assistance, then fact-checked, edited, and produced by a human team.