Hello, campers, grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire.

We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story

that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire.

There's an old saying that if you hear hoofbeats, you should think horses, not zebras.

It means that in most situations, the simplest, most likely explanation is probably the right one.

But, you know, we deal in stranger than fiction here, folks, and sometimes you turn around expecting horses and you get

a stampeding herd of zebras instead. Things are not always what they seem at first glance.

And today we'll tell you two stories where digging down below the surface pulled investigators

through the looking glass and into the strangest cases they'd ever seen. This is a mystery grab bag.

See if you can guess the theme.

Case 1.

So, campers, for this one, were in Leander, Texas, just a short drive from Austin, June 18th, 2004.

The sky was showing the first signs of dawn when the Burnett County Dispatch got a call about a car on fire.

Though by the time the firefighters got to it, you could hardly call it a car anymore.

It had gone off the road, down a little hill, and crashed into a tree, and the fire had torched it so badly it was basically just a smoldering, blackened shell.

The paint was burned off, the tires were melted to the ground.

The firefighters had seen car fires before, obviously, but this one was different,

way worse than any they'd seen before. This thing was toast. They'd never seen anything like it.

And once they had the fire out and were able to approach, they were horrified. The car was occupied.

A charred body still sat in the remains of the driver's seat, and that was about all

you could tell about it right then, that it was a human body. There was obviously no hope of

saving the driver, so as the medical examiner got to work on an autopsy, the investigators

...