New Podcast
ST. LOUIS – October 7, 2025 – iHeartPodcasts and Coolfire Studios announced today the launch of The Peacemaker, a new true-crime podcast hosted by investigative journalists Ben Westhoff (Fentanyl, Inc.) and Ryan Krull (St. Louis Magazine). The eight-part investigative series drops Tuesday, October 14, with new episodes released weekly, available on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere podcasts are heard.
The Peacemaker will take listeners to Truman State University, a small liberal arts college in Missouri often called the “Harvard of the Midwest.” Between 2016 and 2017, the campus was shaken by a rash of suicides. Many of them were from the Alpha Kappa Lambda (AKL) fraternity and all had close ties to a fellow student named Brandon Grossheim.
Grossheim, the house manager at AKL, was close friends with all of the victims and found some of their bodies. After their deaths, he began dating some of the victims’ girlfriends and wearing one of the victim’s clothes. He was kicked out of his fraternity and is now being sued in civil court over the deaths. Yet not everyone believes Grossheim is guilty. Some call him a caring and empathetic underclassman who had a string of bad luck. He even called himself “The Peacemaker” for his supposed ability to counsel his classmates in their darkest moments.
But as the suicides continued mounting and police interviewed him at death scenes over and over again, suspicion grew. Why was he so closely tied to all of these suicides? Was he somehow responsible for them? Through exclusive interviews and on-the-ground reporting, hosts Westhoff and Krull will expose new revelations and never-told details, going deeper than anyone has before on this disturbing case—one that continues to divide a college town, perplex the devastated families of the bereaved, and raise urgent questions about mental health, responsibility and justice.
The Peacemaker will bring to light shocking revelations about what really happened inside the Alpha Kappa Lambda fraternity house and the man at the center of it all.
The Peacemaker is distributed by iHeartPodcasts. Listeners can hear the trailer now, here.