The Trail Went Cold - Episode 349 - Ronald Sisman and Elizabeth Platzman

The Trail Went Cold

Robin Warder

True Crime, Tv & Film

4.5 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 October 2023

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

October 31, 1981. New York City. The bodies of 39-year old Ronald Sisman and 20-year old Elizabeth Platzman are discovered inside Ron’s apartment in the Chelsea neighbourhood of Manhattan. Both victims have been shot to death, execution-style, and since the apartment was ransacked, there is speculation that the crime might be drug-delated. However, notorious serial killer David Berkowitz, who is serving time in prison for the “Son of Sam” murders, eventually shares information that Ron and Liz were killed by associates of his that were members of a Satanic cult and looking to retrieve a snuff film. Was there any truth to Berkowitz’s claims or were the two victims murdered for entirely different reasons? On this week’s episode of “The Trail Went Cold”, we profile an unsolved double murder which took place on Halloween and has often been surrounded by wild conspiracy theories. Additional Reading: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/02/nyregion/police-seek-motive-in-deaths-of-student-and-a-photographer.html https://www.newspapers.com/image/713488638/ https://www.newspapers.com/image/486177887/ https://www.newspapers.com/image/437021867/ https://www.newspapers.com/image/833884606/ https://www.newspapers.com/image/713490892/ https://www.newspapers.com/image/720692506/ https://thecinemaholic.com/how-and-why-was-ron-sisman-killed/ “The Ultimate Evil: The Search for the Sons of Sam” by Maury Terry “The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes” by Michael Newton “The Trail Went Cold” is on Patreon. Visit www.patreon.com/thetrailwentcold to become a patron and gain access to our exclusive bonus content. “The Trail Went Cold” is doing a weekly livestream show on Vokl every Thursday from 7:00-8:00 PM ET as part of their “True Crime Thursday” line-up. For more information, please visit their website. The Trail Went Cold is produced and edited by Magill Foote. All music is composed by Vince Nitro.

Transcript

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0:00.0	October 31st, 1981
0:03.0	New York City
0:06.0	The bodies of 39 year old Ronald Sisman and 20 year old Elizabeth Plattsman
0:10.0	are discovered inside Ron's apartment. Both victims have been shot to death
0:14.9	execution style and since the apartment has been ransacked there is speculation
0:19.3	that the crime might be drug-related. However, convicted son-of-sam serial killer David Berkowitz
0:25.8	eventually shares information that Ron and Liz were killed by associates of his who were
0:30.4	members of a satanic cult, but this is never substantiated, and the murders continue
0:35.2	to remain unsolved. After that, the trail went cold. I'm going. Oh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, Hello everyone and welcome to our latest episode of the Trail Went cold. I'm your host Robin Warder and since we are currently in the month of October
1:25.0	we're going to be covering an unsolved double homicide which took place around
1:29.1	Halloween. The 1981 murders of Ronald Sisman and Elizabeth Plattsman.
1:34.0	As you probably know, it's always been my yearly tradition to spend the last few weeks of October covering mysteries which have some sort of Halloween slant to them and before I entered the world of
1:44.4	podcasting I wrote a bunch of true crime articles for Lissverse.com.
1:49.8	On October 31st, 2014 I published an article there titled,
1:54.0	Ten Creepy Unsaw Mysteries that Happened on Halloween.
1:58.0	And every year around this time, it seems like this list gets reworked by various websites and YouTube videos which all usually
2:04.7	feature the same cases but make no mistake about it my article is the original.
2:10.0	I've since done Trail went Cold episodes about quite a few of the cases on that list,
2:14.4	but what I haven't talked about until now are the murders of Ronald Sisman and Elizabeth Plattsman.
2:19.6	The main reason I held off on it is because researching this story will take you down a number of different rabbit holes and it can become hard to differentiate fact from fiction.
2:30.0	Ron's Ron and while the police initially suspected that the crime was drug related,
2:38.0	it would eventually be linked to one of the most infamous serial killers of all time,
	...

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