"If Serial walked so that the genre of true crime could run, Bear Brook is a show that picked up the baton to help make the space better. In the wake of so many true crime stories focussed exclusively on gore and trauma exploitation, Bear Brook pushed the boundaries of figuring out why we're so obsessed with these stories as a society and created something thoughtful, education, and compassionate."

- Jess Schmidt, Rooked: The Cheaters' Gambit/Cities 1.5/Witness to Yesterday

Bear Brook is a true crime series that doesn’t just investigate a mystery—it excavates the uneasy terrain where science, memory, and justice collide. Hosted by Jason Moon with quiet intensity, the podcast begins with the discovery of four bodies in barrels in a New Hampshire forest and spirals outward into something much stranger: a tangled story of lost identities, cold-case breakthroughs through genetic genealogy, and the haunting persistence of unanswered questions.

What makes Bear Brook extraordinary isn’t its twists, though they are plenty—it’s the way Moon resists the genre’s familiar hunger for resolution. He tells the story with restraint and empathy, grounding each revelation in the human consequences of violence and the failures of the justice system. Season Two deepens this approach, investigating the case of Jason Carroll, a man whose confession may not be what it seems, and whose story speaks to the system’s hunger for closure at the expense of truth.

This isn’t true crime for the thrill of it. It’s a slow burn that dares to live in ambiguity, to question not only what happened but how we come to believe we know. Bear Brook lingers like a memory you can’t shake—half horror, half elegy. It’s a reminder that the scariest things are not the crimes themselves, but the ways they get misremembered, misjudged, and misunderstood.