Some cases stay with you long after the verdict, and the Grabbe murder — covered in True Crime Case Histories – Volume 1 — is one of them. Charlotte Grabbe vanished from her family’s farm near Marshall, Illinois, in July 1981. It took years, a private investigator, a witness’s confession, and a now-famous “murder tree” before her husband, Fred, was finally convicted of strangling her, burning her body in a steel drum, and dumping the remains in the Wabash River.

When Volume 1 went to print, the story ended roughly where readers expected it to: Fred Grabbe, paroled in 2022 after nearly four decades behind bars, an old man quietly released back into the world. What I didn’t expect was for him to start talking.

In April 2025, the popular true crime podcast Crime Junkie devoted a full episode — “MURDERED: Charlotte Grabbe” — to the case. Its most striking moment wasn’t a retelling of the old facts. It was that the show’s team tracked Fred down and interviewed him in person at the retirement facility where he now lives as a free man. Asked directly about Charlotte’s death, he denied it. Asked about the abuse that defined their marriage, he denied that too. Two separate juries found him guilty; Fred, all these years later, still insists he killed no one.

The renewed attention also pulled a darker thread back into the light. Fred’s surviving daughter, Jennie, has long believed her father may be connected to as many as six other deaths — a suspicion repeated over the years but never tested in a courtroom, and one no prosecutor has ever charged. The killing of her brother, Jeff Grabbe — shot and dumped in the water off the California coast in 1988, before he could testify at the retrial — remains officially unsolved. The episode was released, in part, as an appeal for information: Fred is now 86 and reportedly in poor health, and the people who have spent their lives chasing the truth know they may be running out of time.

There’s something deeply unsettling about a man convicted twice of murdering his wife spending his final years comfortable, free, and unrepentant — calmly telling an interviewer that none of it happened. Charlotte’s body was never recovered. Her daughter is still asking questions more than four decades later. And the man at the center of it all has, so far, kept whatever he knows to himself.