Quiet investigations into institutional harm.
Bed of Lies follows carefully reported investigations into scandals where official records, missing files, and public denials shape private grief. Its recent episodes trace Stakeknife, the Troubles, the infected blood inquiry, and related Telegraph investigations with restrained force.
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Bed of Lies is a grave, carefully reported investigative series from The Telegraph. It is built around scandals that were not simply hidden, but managed, filed away, denied, or allowed to drift for years. Recent episodes focus on the Northern Ireland Troubles and the legacy of Stakeknife, the British Army agent at the centre of one of the period’s most contested intelligence stories. The reporting follows families, former investigators, intelligence records, legal cases, and the unresolved question of state responsibility. It does not rush. A taxi tour through Belfast, a childhood home in Newry, a prison cell in Crumlin Road Jail, and a Westminster inquiry hall all become entry points into larger systems of power. The series pays close attention to ordinary details because they are often what make official language feel inadequate. Children waiting for their father’s van. Families hoping for court. Survivors hearing an inquiry finally name what happened. Files turning up years after they were thought gone. Bed of Lies also returns to the infected blood scandal through a special episode marking the final inquiry report. That material broadens the show’s central concern: what happens when institutions know more than they admit, and when the people harmed must spend years proving it. The feed also carries first episodes from related Telegraph investigations, including Murder in the Masai Mara and Call Bethel. Those episodes share the same method: careful scene-setting, direct testimony, and a reluctance to simplify pain. The result is true crime with the heat removed and the moral force left intact. There are murders, allegations, informers, abuse, medical scandal, and state secrecy, but the presentation is controlled rather than lurid. Bed of Lies suits listeners who prefer documents, interviews, and patient reconstruction to quick twists. It asks hard questions about accountability. It also leaves room for the families who have had to keep asking them.
Made for: For listeners who want serious investigative journalism, especially true crime and political scandal told through records, testimony, and patient reporting. Best for those comfortable with grave subject matter and unresolved accountability questions.
What sets it apart: Bed of Lies separates itself from louder true-crime formats by treating evidence, memory, and institutional silence as the drama. Its power comes from restraint: the facts are allowed to accumulate without spectacle.
A taxi driver is shot dead in front of his children. A high-security room goes up in flames. Then terrorists are unmasked as spies. And behind it all, a shadowy unit of the British Army, who ran the notorious agent Stakeknife. Award-winning journalist Cara McGoogan investigates the biggest cover-up of the Northern Ireland Troubles and asks: is the British state getting away with murder?The first and second series of Bed of Lies are also available to listen to on this feed:Series 2: It was meant to be a miracle treatment, but it became a deadly poison. Cara investigates the...
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Bed of Lies connects intimate testimony to documentary evidence, making institutional secrecy and its human consequences unusually clear.
Bed of Lies follows institutions whose secrets have caused lasting harm, giving Cara McGoogan's reporting room to connect individual testimony with records, official inquiries and decisions made out of public view.
Bed of Lies keeps pulling at official stories until the paperwork starts contradicting the people in charge.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A restrained opening that turns family records and a Kenyan road trip into quiet tension.
Murder in the Masai Mara begins in Bob Ward's childhood home in Suffolk, and that choice gives the story a steady emotional anchor. Catherine Rushton keeps the reporting measured and precise, using the house, the filing rooms, and Bob Ward's memories to carry much of the weight…
A restrained Belfast investigation that turns MI5 file revelations into consequences for waiting families.
Bed of Lies treats Belfast as more than backdrop. The black taxi Troubles tour and the city’s divided communities give the reporting a lived-in setting, while the Stakeknife affair unfolds as a slow account of what was hidden and how long families have been left waiting.
A family story that widens into a long fight over state failure and accountability.
Newry in 1990 is framed as a place of ordinary family ritual before an IRA attack breaks into the McCabe home and shatters that sense of safety.
A steady account of how intelligence fed into murder.
Brian Nelson's arrest in Crumlin Road Jail is the hinge, but the episode is really about how he became useful inside the wider targeting network.
A careful, painful account of a long-awaited reckoning in Westminster.
The episode treats the final report of the infected blood inquiry as a public reckoning, and it does so with a steady hand. Set in Westminster on a day shaped by years of waiting, it lets grief, anger, and vindication surface in the room without losing sight of the people…
Measured reporting turns a doorstep confrontation into a chilling account of secrecy and abuse.
The episode opens near Jehovah's Witness headquarters at Bethel, with a reporter trying to deliver a letter tied to a tip about a library of information meant to protect children, including admissions by paedophiles.
ABC Audio's Theranos fraud series that also introduces its other true-crime podcasts.
Patrick Radden Keefe investigates whether the CIA secretly wrote a Scorpions hit.
Jake Halpern and the Snowball team track a con artist who defrauded a family.
A city-by-city true-crime documentary, from Detroit's Kwame Kilpatrick scandal to mob confessions.
A murder rumor in rural Alabama unravels into a clockmaker's suicide and estate feud.
A family story starts quietly.
Fog hangs over Belfast.
Newry is a child-filled home until a late knock on the door shatters it.
Brian Nelson is trembling.
Central Hall in Westminster is already busy, with people waiting outside.
A reporter waits outside Bethel with a letter that has been planned for a long time.