The Devil Within

The Devil's Ledger | October 12, 2026 A Human-Skin Teddy Bear, a Hollywood Disappearance, a Surgeon on Trial, and a Reality TV Fraudster Welcome back to The Devil's Ledger, your weekly journey through the darker corners of the Evio Universe. As wild weather continues to make headlines, we're hoping everyone is staying safe, staying dry, and finding a little time to escape into a good book, a great movie, or one of our latest podcasts. This week, we're serving up a particularly unsettling collection of stories involving a grotesque discovery in the California desert, an aspiring actress who vanished in San Francisco, a plastic surgeon facing murder charges, a reality television star's multimillion-dollar fraud scheme, and a Nevada motel where the hospitality is positively murderous. THE CREEPIEST THING: The Human-Skin Teddy Bear In Victorville, California, a horrifying discovery outside a convenience store sent investigators scrambling: a teddy bear that appeared to be stitched together from human skin. The county coroner was called, police launched an investigation, and the truth turned out to be almost as bizarre as the original discovery. Was it evidence of something monstrous, or simply the world's most ill-advised practical joke? THE DEVIL WITHIN: The Devil's Audition San Francisco, 1980. Aspiring actress Valerie McDonald disappears after being lured by the promise of an audition for a nonexistent Dustin Hoffman film. What follows is an investigation involving dangerous criminals, alleged international drug trafficking, and disturbing reports of Satanic activity. In this three-part investigation, The Devil Within explores the circumstances surrounding Valerie's disappearance and the troubling intersection of ambition, deception, and the occult. CRIMINAL MISCHIEF: Tomasz Kosowski, Part Two After last week's special conversation with COLD creator Dave Cawley, Carolyn Ossorio returns to the disappearance and alleged murder of Florida attorney Steven Cozzi. This week, the investigation moves into the courtroom, where accused murderer and plastic surgeon Tomasz Kosowski makes the extraordinary decision to represent himself. Carolyn examines the evidence, the legal proceedings, and the unanswered questions surrounding a case in which the victim's body has never been recovered. THE SLIPPERY: Jen Shah She was a reality television celebrity, a self-proclaimed business mogul, and the face of a lavish lifestyle. Behind the designer clothes and extravagant parties, however, Jen Shah was helping operate a nationwide telemarketing fraud scheme that devastated financially vulnerable Americans. Scott and Nancy investigate the mechanics of the operation, the victims who lost their savings, and the federal investigation that ultimately brought Shah down. She's already out of prison, but has justice really been served? THIS WEEK IN HORROR: Last Chance Motel A newlywed couple's dream wedding becomes a nightmare when they encounter a remote Nevada motel operated by a bloodthirsty family. Starring Heather Langenkamp and Sierra McCormick, Last Chance Motel offers a gruesome reminder that sometimes the best travel advice is simply to keep driving. JOIN US ACROSS THE EVIO UNIVERSE There's always another mystery to investigate, another criminal to expose, and another nightmare waiting just around the corner. Listen & Follow: Subscribe to The Devil Within, Criminal Mischief, The Slippery, and The Devil's Ledger wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a new episode. Rate & Review: If you enjoy our shows, please leave a five-star rating and a written review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Your support helps introduce the Evio Universe to new listeners. Watch & Subscribe: Visit the Evio Creative YouTube channel, subscribe, and turn on notifications for new videos, original content, and updates from across our network. Stay Connected: Follow @thedevilwithinpod on Instagram, and send your stories, tips, and suggestions to mailto:[email protected]. Until next time, stay safe, have a calm and productive week, and we'll catch up again across the Evio Universe. An Evio Creative Production. Suggested episode keywords: The Devil's Ledger, Evio Creative, The Devil Within, Valerie McDonald, The Devil's Audition, Satanism, occult mysteries, Criminal Mischief, Tomasz Kosowski, Steven Cozzi, Carolyn Ossorio, Dave Cawley, COLD podcast, The Slippery, Jen Shah, Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, true crime, fraud, human skin teddy bear, Victorville, Last Chance Motel, Heather Langenkamp, horror movies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

THE DEVIL’S AUDITION Episode One: Temptation On November 9, 1980, twenty-six-year-old Valerie McDonald was doing something remarkably sensible: she was getting out. The aspiring filmmaker, actress, model and cocktail waitress had become frightened by the men managing her apartment building in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. She reportedly told friends and family about drugs, threatening behavior and activity she considered Satanic. With friends helping her move, Valerie appeared ready to put the Tower Apartments—and the people surrounding it—behind her. TDW_Devil Audition_1 Then Michael Hennessey arrived with an offer almost perfectly designed for an ambitious young actress. There was a movie shooting in town, he said, starring Dustin Hoffman, who was then at the absolute height of his career after winning the Academy Award for Kramer vs. Kramer. The production supposedly needed an attractive blonde woman for a small role playing the victim of a serial killer. The job paid $200 and, more importantly, offered Valerie the possibility of appearing opposite one of the biggest movie stars in America. TDW_Devil Audition_1 Valerie agreed to go. Her family would never see her alive again. The movie did not exist. A private investigator hired by Valerie’s parents later contacted the production company and Hoffman’s representatives and found no evidence of the film or the role Valerie had been promised. Someone appears to have constructed an elaborate fiction around Valerie’s ambitions and used it to lure her away. TDW_Devil Audition_1 Then the story became considerably stranger. Within days, Hennessey and convicted criminal John Gordon Abbott were fleeing north. On November 26, Canadian authorities caught up with them in British Columbia. A confrontation with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police erupted into gunfire. Abbott was captured. Hennessey was killed. TDW_Devil Audition_1 Among the fugitives’ belongings, authorities reportedly discovered Valerie’s voter-registration and unemployment-benefit cards. The missing woman in San Francisco was now physically connected to the men who had fled hundreds of miles toward Canada. TDW_Devil Audition_1 But Valerie herself was nowhere to be found. In Episode One of The Devil’s Audition, we return to San Francisco at the dawn of the 1980s—a city emerging from Jonestown, the assassinations of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, and the fading glow of the counterculture—to reconstruct Valerie’s final days. We enter the Tower Apartments, meet the dangerous men who surrounded her and follow the irresistible promise of a Hollywood audition that appears to have been created specifically for her. TDW_Devil Audition_1 Because Valerie recognized that she was in danger. She was already leaving. Then somebody offered her exactly what she wanted. Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode. Rate & Review: Leave us a five-star rating and review—it remains one of the best ways to help new listeners discover the show. Watch & Subscribe: Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, subscribe, and turn on notifications for every new episode. TDW_Devil Audition_1 Join the Conversation: Follow @thedevilwithinpod for episode clips, imagery, updates and more from the Evio Universe. Stories & Tips: Have a story you think belongs on The Devil Within? Send it to [email protected]. The Devil’s Audition — Episode One: Temptation, on The Devil Within. LISTEN • WATCH • FOLLOW Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

THE DEVIL ON DEATH ROW Episode Three: Twice Condemned For nearly thirty years, Christa Pike waited to die. She entered Tennessee’s death row at nineteen under a sentence of electrocution, but remained there long enough to watch the machinery of capital punishment change around her. The electric chair gave way to lethal injection, the teenager associated with pentagrams became a fifty-year-old practicing Buddhist, and Tennessee eventually set September 30, 2026, as the day her sentence would finally be carried out. TDW_Pike_3 In the final episode of The Devil on Death Row, we follow Pike through decades of appeals, challenges to her original sentencing, arguments over childhood trauma and adolescent brain development, and her attorneys’ final attempts to obtain clemency. Then September 30 arrives. A federal appeals court temporarily stops the execution, Tennessee appeals, and the United States Supreme Court clears the way for the state to proceed. TDW_Pike_3 At 7:27 p.m., the curtains open at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution and Pike is strapped to a gurney. Pentobarbital is administered—but Pike remains alive and complains that her arm is burning. Tennessee tries again. After a second administration of the execution drug, witnesses can still hear her breathing. Eventually the witnesses are removed, Pike is transported to a hospital, and the state acknowledges an extraordinary fact: Christa Pike survived her execution. TDW_Pike_3 Governor Bill Lee subsequently halts Tennessee’s remaining 2026 execution and orders an independent review. Thirty-one years after Colleen Slemmer was murdered, the story that began with pentagrams, Satanic imagery and the fading embers of the Satanic Panic is suddenly unfinished again. TDW_Pike_3 The Devil may have been everywhere in this story, but perhaps he was never required. Human beings did all of it themselves. Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a 5-star rating and review. Watch and subscribe on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, turn on notifications, and join the conversation at @thedevilwithinpod. Stories and tips: mailto:[email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

THE DEVIL ON DEATH ROW Episode Two: The Devil in the Woods Hours after nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer was tortured and murdered in the woods outside Knoxville, Christa Pike went to breakfast. According to trial testimony, she was carrying something almost impossible to comprehend: a fragment of Colleen’s skull, taken from the murder scene as a souvenir. Pike reportedly showed the bone to other students, pointed to blood on her shoes and openly described what had happened the night before. TDW_Pike_2 In Episode Two of The Devil on Death Row, we return to the woods to reconstruct Colleen’s final hour and examine the Satanic imagery that became inseparable from the crime. The attack lasted somewhere between thirty minutes and an hour, and when Colleen’s body was examined, investigators found a pentagram carved into her chest. But the occult connection went deeper: at Tadaryl Shipp’s later trial, another student testified that days before the murder Shipp had spoken about the need for a human sacrifice because the celestial bodies were in alignment. TDW_Pike_2 As Christa goes on trial, psychiatrists attempt to answer the question that had haunted the case from the beginning. Was this a Satanic murder, or were troubled teenagers borrowing the imagery of Satanism to give jealousy, rage and violence a darker mythology? The jury ultimately finds Pike guilty of premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy, and Tennessee chooses the ultimate punishment: death by electrocution. TDW_Pike_2 The Satanic Panic taught America to believe extraordinary evil required an extraordinary explanation. Christa Pike offered something considerably more disturbing: perhaps people don't need the Devil to commit monstrous acts. Sometimes they simply borrow his language. Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a 5-star rating and review. Watch and subscribe on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, turn on notifications, and join the conversation at @thedevilwithinpod. Stories and tips: mailto:[email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

THE DEVIL ON DEATH ROW Episode One: The Pentagram In January 1995, nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer walked away from the Knoxville Job Corps Center with three other students. The following morning, her body was discovered on the University of Tennessee agricultural campus. She had been subjected to a prolonged attack, and carved into her chest was a symbol America had spent more than a decade learning to fear: a pentagram. TDW_Pike_1 In Episode One of The Devil on Death Row, we return to the fading years of the Satanic Panic, when allegations of secret cults, ritual abuse and devil worship had moved from horror movies into police departments, courtrooms and American living rooms. By 1995, much of that panic was beginning to collapse beneath the weight of its own extraordinary claims. Then Colleen Slemmer was murdered, and the crime contained genuinely documented Satanic imagery: Christa Pike and her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp were observed wearing pentagram necklaces, Pike had experimented with occult imagery before the murder, and a forensic psychiatrist would later testify that the crime contained “satanic elements,” while characterizing what he saw as adolescent dabbling rather than evidence of an organized cult. TDW_Pike_1 But behind the pentagrams was something considerably more human. Eighteen-year-old Christa Gail Pike had endured an unstable adolescence before arriving at Job Corps, where she became intensely attached to Shipp and convinced herself that Colleen wanted to take him away from her. The day before the murder, Pike reportedly told another student that she intended to kill Colleen. On January 12, four young people walked into the woods together, with Colleen believing they were going to smoke marijuana and settle their differences. TDW_Pike_1 The Satanic Panic taught America to search for elaborate explanations for evil. The Christa Pike story asks a more unsettling question: what happens when the symbols a culture creates to represent evil become part of the language young people use to commit it? Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a 5-star rating and review. Watch and subscribe on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, turn on notifications, and join the conversation at @thedevilwithinpod. Have a story or tip for the show? Email mailto:[email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices