The Shadow of the Adirondacks: Robert Garrow and the Lawyers Who Kept His Deadly Secrets
10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories
Joe
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the summer of 1973, serial killer Robert Garrow launched an 18-day murder spree through New York's Adirondack wilderness, triggering the largest manhunt in state history and leaving investigators with a map marked with 26 red dots and far too few answers. The homicide investigation surrounding victims Alicia Hauck, Daniel Porter, Susan Petz, and Philip Domblewski eventually led to a courtroom revelation that cracked American legal ethics wide open. Two defense attorneys knew where the bodies were buried and said nothing for five months, while grieving families begged publicly for any information at all. This is a story about a man forged in poverty and institutional failure, a wilderness that became his hunting ground, and the impossible weight of a professional oath when honoring it means doing something that feels profoundly wrong as a human being.
#RobertGarrow #AdirondackKiller #TrueCrime #BuriedBodiesCase #SerialKiller #TrueCrimePodcast #ColdCase
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Today's story takes place in the summer of 1973, deep in the Anirondack Mountains of New York. |
| 0:07.0 | Four young campers went into the woods, only three came back. |
| 0:11.0 | The man responsible would spend years convincing doctors he couldn't walk, |
| 0:15.0 | escape prison inside a bucket of fried chicken, and die in the brush with a hit list in his cell. |
| 0:21.6 | And two lawyers sat on secrets that rewrote American law. |
| 0:25.6 | This is the story of the Anorondack Mountains have genuinely never gotten over, |
| 0:55.5 | and most of the country never even knew that it was happening. |
| 0:58.7 | It's 1973. Watergate is consuming everything. |
| 1:02.4 | Nixon is sweating through press conferences while his entire administration unravels in real time, |
| 1:08.0 | and most of America is watching it from their living rooms. |
| 1:10.3 | But while that noise |
| 1:11.9 | was feeling every airwave, something much quieter and far more terrifying was building in the forests |
| 1:18.7 | of upstate New York. Robert Garrow was born March 4, 1936, in Danamora, New York, a tiny North |
| 1:26.3 | country town that sits directly alongside the Clinton |
| 1:28.8 | Correctional Facility, one of the most formidable prisons in the state. It's not lost on anyone |
| 1:34.3 | that this is where the story begins, in the literal shadow of prison walls. His father was a chronic |
| 1:40.5 | alcoholic who beat his children with whatever was nearby, Belts, bricks, it didn't matter. |
| 1:47.2 | Police were regular visitors to the Garrow Farm in Mindville. By the time Robert was 15, |
| 1:52.3 | authorities removed him from the home and sent him to a prison farm to work. A prison farm, |
| 1:57.4 | as an intervention. For a 15-year-old boy, what it produced was a deeply isolated teenager |
| 2:03.6 | with no therapeutic support, let alone with his own unraveling psychology in an institutional |
| 2:09.7 | setting. He eventually joined the Air Force. That ended in a court-martial for stealing from a superior |
... |
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