Announcing: Blood Trails, Season Three

A hunter hears gunshots in the woods. Then his friend emerges and says, "Your dad's dead, my dad's dead, they're all effing dead." That moment is the anchor for one of the cases in the third season of Blood Trails, a podcast that examines violent crimes that occur in and around hunting country. The show returns with eight new episodes, each centered on a death or disappearance that happened beyond the pavement, where the usual rules of evidence and investigation don't always apply.

The Woods as a Crime Scene

The central premise of Blood Trails is that the environment itself becomes part of the story. As the host, Jordan Sillars, explains, the woods are not a blank space where violence happens and then vanishes. They leave signs: tracks, broken branches, blood spatter, the way scavengers disturb a body. A hunter knows how to read those signs, but the same skills that make someone good at tracking game also make them attuned to the unnatural—the thing that doesn't fit. The season opens with a case involving a confrontation between hunters that escalated into one of the deadliest crimes ever committed in the American woods. The show does not name the specific incident in the trailer, but the language is deliberate: "a confrontation between hunters explodes" into something far beyond a dispute over deer or property lines.

Three Kinds of Cases