In the summer of 1930, Peter Kürten sat across from the psychiatrist Karl Berg and talked for months. To the court, he gave one reason for his crimes: revenge on a society that had wronged him. To Berg, he gave another. Same acts, same year, two motives, each fitted to its listener.

This episode turns to the confession that made Berg’s name and has shaped nearly every account of Kürten since. We look at the childhood he described, which no one can check. We follow a medical search for a defect that turned up nothing. And we sit in the courtroom as Berg admits, under oath, that parts of the story were embellished. Then comes a harder question. Kürten knew a book was being written. Who was he really talking to?

Content note: this episode discusses murder, sexual violence, and child abuse. These are handled briefly and without graphic detail.

A free discussion guide for this episode is available at reexaminedpodcast.com.

Music: “Southern Gothic” by Kevin Macleod

In the spring of 1929, months before anyone knew the name Peter Kürten, the Düsseldorf police already had a confession. A man had told them he'd done it, and they believed him. This episode is about that confession, the year it cost, and the harder question underneath it: what is a confession actually worth? Before this season reaches the one it's built on, we start here.

"Southern Gothic" by Kevin Macleod.

Düsseldorf, 1929. A city comes apart. Over months, a killer moves through its streets, and the police can't hold him. The newspapers give the fear a shape and a name: the Vampire. This is the crime told straight, from the first body to the arrest, and the story of how a manhunt became a mirror for the city that lived through it. We know who he was. This season asks what the city made of him, and what it made of itself.

Music: "Southern Gothic" by Kevin Macleod.

In the autumn of 1929, people in Düsseldorf were afraid to walk their own streets. Someone was killing children, women, and men across the city, with no pattern the police could work out and no face anyone could name. The newspapers called him a vampire.

Season 2 of Re:Examined takes that story apart. Over four episodes, we follow a frightened city, a survivor whose letter led police to the door of a killer, and a confession from the murderer himself.

Season 2 begins September 15th. Free discussion guides for every episode are available at reexaminedpodcast.com.

"Southern Gothic" by Kevin MacLeod

Bobby Franks was fourteen when he got in the car. This season spent four episodes inside the minds of the men who killed him. This one is for him.

Content note: this episode is about the murder of a child and what it took from his family.

Discussion guide at reexaminedpodcast.com.

Richard Loeb learned early that a constructed self was safer than the real one, and he never stopped building. This episode follows the boy behind the "master criminal" fantasy, the questions about who actually drove the murder, and the death that left even his last moments in someone else's hands. It asks what's left when the performance is all there is.

He fell in love with birds at age six. What happened between then and Bobby Franks's murder is the question this episode won't resolve.

Two boys make an agreement. What they trade, and what they get in return, has been read by a century of writers as everything from friendship to something darker. The court records tell one story. Each boy told another. Neither could explain the other.

This episode traces the arrangement between Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb from what's documented, not what's assumed. We look at what was said, what was written down, and how much of it can be trusted.

The questions close the episode. The answers are yours.

May 21, 1924. Two of Chicago's brightest young men commit what they believe will be a flawless murder. They've planned every detail. They've left nothing to chance. This is the story as it was first told: brilliant minds, a perfect crime, a city gripped by horror.

Every true crime show promises you'll know who did it, and why. Re:Examined takes that apart instead. One case, one episode at a time, dismantled layer by layer until the version you thought you knew falls away. Season One: Leopold and Loeb, Chicago 1924 — two brilliant young men, a murdered boy, and the crime they called the crime of the century. No verdicts. No tidy endings. No monster waiting at the bottom. Just the nerve to leave you with more than you can neatly put away.

Season One starts August 4th.