Radio Recap: Police Reporter

Police Reporter was a 15-minute syndicated program that appears to date back to 1933. It featured dramatizations of what were all apparently true-life crime cases.

There are plenty of other programs about true-life cases, but what sets Police Reporter apart is that the cases were frequently gruesome. There are some infamous true crime stories like that of the "Vampire of Dusseldorf and Burke and Hare and they retain a lot of details that later programs such as the Black Museum would never speak of. Easily the biggest departure from what you're used to in radio violence is the episode "A Gruesome Murder," which is exactly what it says on the tin.

The 15-minute running time keeps every episode of Police Reporter very brisk and easy to listen to, even when the crimes themselves are quite awful. There's little time devoted to thinking and pondering the clues to solving a crime, instead every scene is driven by incident and the dialogue is snapped out by the actors with urgency. If you're a fan of Rick Geary's Treasury of XXth Century Murder graphic novel series, you'll probably really like this radio program.

You can hear the Old-Time Radio Researchers' Group collection of Police Reporter on the Internet Archive.