This new true-crime podcast blurs the line between fiction and reality
Crime Adjacent is the never-ending true-crime story told weekly. As a genre-busting, scripted podcast, it overlays speculative storylines onto real, actual crime cases, blurring the lines between reality and nightmare. It’s an atmospheric, immersive podcast where true crime and psychological thrillers collide.Each episode unfolds exactly like your favorite true-crime documentary, featuring meticulous research, investigative reporting, and deep, intimate storytelling from the perspectives of victims and survivors, along with engaging explorations of deeper social issues. Just like actual crime cases themselves, Crime Adjacent doesn’t fit neatly into any box or solid narrative. It complicates the line between audio drama, narrative nonfiction, thriller, and true-crime documentary, asking listeners to consider: Just how real are our nightmares? Our entertainment?
In this season of Crime Adjacent, host Chase Patrick returns home to uncover what really happened in Ridgewood, California, and to find out how the nation’s most prolific serial killer could slip under the radar for so long. The Rest Stop Killer targeted young men in a string of brutal murders from the 1990s, abducting them from city streets and murdering them in a secluded lovers' lane. Then - he vanished.
Until the winter of 2023, when he struck again…

Crime Adjacent is hosted by serial killer survivor Chase Patrick and produced by his sister, Nikki Freeman. Although each season focuses on a new case, one thing remains constant: the hunt to bring their mother’s killer to justice.
Crime Adjacent is written and performed by Mike Adamick, a former NPR and New York Times contributor and best-selling author. He began his writing career as a small-town crime reporter in the Bay Area, covering the Zodiac killer and once nearly colliding with the Co-Ed Killer in prison. His reporting and personal essays have been published regularly in Parade Magazine, NPR, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and KQED Radio. He has published several books, most notably the Dad’s Book of Awesome Series (Simon & Schuster, 2014) and Raising Empowered Daughters (Seal Press, 2019).
Adamick returned to college later in life and uses degrees in sociology and gender studies from UC Berkeley, as well as crime reporting interests in forensic psychology and profiling, to provide each season with an in-depth exploration of why the crimes were committed, why the men who committed them can also live next door, and what our social fascination with true crime says about … us.
Check out Crime Adjacent. It's a show where the truth lives on the brink of insight.
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