I had a lot of fun on this one taking a nostalgic look at US culture in 1989 and 1993. Also found the story of Lyle and Erik Menendez incredibly interesting. Why did two brothers viciously murder their parents with shotguns in the summer of 1989? Erik was about to enroll in UCLA. Lyle was attending Princeton. Their parents spoiled them with money for lavish shopping trips, vacations, fancy cars, condos, and more. They grew up in affluence. Their parents lived in a Beverly Hills mansion that Mich...
Nov 22, 2021•3 hr 48 min
Levi Boone Helm. The Kentucky Cannibal. Born in 1828 in Kentucky, and hanged in Montana Territory in 1864, this guy was mayhem on legs. He spent nearly his entire adult life fighting, robbing, killing, and running from the law. He killed at least 18 men in various shootouts and other violent encounters. He ended up stuck way out in the woods on numerous occasions with no option for food other than to eat another grown man, which he did if he got hungry enough. He spent his final days riding with...
Nov 15, 2021•2 hr 13 min
Aum Shinrikyo was a Japanese doomsday cult led by psychotic madman Shoko Asahara, a man who claimed to be Jesus who was nicknamed the Japanese Charles Manson. He was actually a much more dangerous cult leader than Manson was. He pulled tens of thousands into his dark insanity, instead of just a handful. He had thousands of followers willing to help him violently bring about the end times. Aum started in the 1980s as a small spiritual group based on tenets of Buddhism. And then he soon incorporat...
Nov 08, 2021•2 hr 22 min
Who put the rock-a-bye-baby up in the tree branch, and why? Seems irresponsible. When it was raining and pouring, why didn't the old man get out of bed after bumping his head? Did he die? What is Ring Around the Rosie really about? The bubonic plague? Why are we singing to small children about cutting the tails off of three blind mice? Who wrote all the strange, often dark, mostly weird old nursery rhymes kids have been memorizing for centuries? We look into all of this and more today. Such a fu...
Nov 01, 2021•2 hr 11 min
Happy Halloween! This episode feels appropriately dark enough for Halloween week. French serial killer Marcel Petiot was an evil genius. A master manipulator. And the greatest scam artist we've covered here so far. He likely lied his way into a medical degree. He ended up working at a psychiatric hospital when he was supposed to be a patient. He collected 100% disability payments while working full time as a doctor while also double charging his patients. He built his practice up by slandering o...
Oct 25, 2021•2 hr 18 min
The Oregon Trail was 2,100 plus mile journey from Independence, Missouri all the way to Oregon City, Oregon. And along this trail and its offshoots, between 1841 and 1869, somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 travelers headed West, motivated by the philosophy of Manifest Destiny and the hope for economic prosperity. The Homestead Act and the Monroe Doctrine also fueled US westward expansion. The journey to get oneself a 160 acre homestead was not for the faint of heart. Somewhere between 1 in 1...
Oct 18, 2021•3 hr 34 min
Oh boy. This is an especially weird one. Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction. In the summer of 1965, John C. Lilly, a medic and neuroscientist, and his assistant Margaret Howe, a young lady who just happened to live nearby, would set up a partially-flooded house on St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, where Margaret would spend nearly twenty-four hours a day with a young bottlenose dolphin named Peter. Where she would have sex with this dolphin. Why? To help it learn English. Why? So...
Oct 11, 2021•2 hr 13 min
Today we head to The Rock, America's Devil Island - Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. So much prison-related info and history to go over today! I'll share the history of Alcatraz Island - how it was discovered by a Spanish explorer, then went from a lighthouse and US military fort, to a US military prison, to the end of the line for the most unruly prisoners in the United States federal penitentiary system, to a national park. I'll share brief bios on some of its most infamous inmates, like Al Capo...
Oct 04, 2021•3 hr 37 min
William Bonin is a little known serial killer who died via lethal injection in 1996 in San Quentin, after sitting on California's death row for over a decade. Surprising that he isn't more well known considering how shocking his crimes were. He was only active as a serial killer for a year, from May of 1979 to June of 1980, but he would be convicted of fourteen murders. And law enforcement was certain he killed at least another seven victims. All boys and young men. All bound, beaten, sodomized,...
Sep 27, 2021•2 hr 26 min
I'm guessing you know of the Jehovah's Witnesses. You've heard of them. Maybe you've noticed their "Kingdom Halls." Maybe they've knocked on your door. But - do you really know anything about them? Before this week, I didn't. Now that I do, I will NEVER look at them the same way again. The Jehovah's may not live on a compound, but, in my opinion they are a dangerous doomsday cult. Their continual focus on impending Armageddon has hurt so, so many lives. And so has their "Two Witness Rule." The G...
Sep 20, 2021•3 hr 47 min
Lonnie David Franklin Jr. was but one of the numerous prolific serial killers preying on sex workers in South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s. And then after possibly going to "sleep" during the 1990s, he started killing again in the first decade of the 2000's. The Grim Sleeper preyed almost exclusively on black, female, crack-addicted sex workers in South Central where he lived. South Central was in the midst of a crack epidemic when he got started in 1985 (or possibly 1984), and by the time h...
Sep 13, 2021•3 hr 33 min
Robin Williams knew how to make people feel deeply. He could give you a belly laugh - or a cathartic cry. He knew how to entertain you in a way that only he could. He seemingly had so much energy it's like he vibrated around instead of walking like the rest of us. His mind seemed to move so FAST. And then his brilliant mind betrayed him. Or, rather, his mind just wasn't able to defend him from the cruel and degenerative disease of Lewy Body Dementia. With the diagnosis not coming until two years...
Sep 06, 2021•3 hr 36 min
Let's get royal, Meatsacks! Born a minor aristocrat, Diana Spencer grew up to become one of the most famous people of all time. For years, she was the most photographed person in all of England if not the entire world. The tabloids adored her. Why? She appeared to be the real-life version of possibly the most popular fantasy ever - the fabled princess swept up by Prince Charming! But her life was no fairy tale. She suffered mental health issues, was married to a man who never loved her, bullied ...
Aug 30, 2021•2 hr 12 min
Oh boy. Did you know that some people think that Avril Lavigne, Britney Spears, Beyoncé, Eminem, some guy named Donald Marshall, and many other celebrities have been cloned? There are conspiracies revolving around underground cloning centers created and run by illuminati global elites who sometimes kill celebrities who don't follow orders and then clone them to keep making music money mostly. Donny and his clones have been busy writing hit songs since before he was five years old. Most of the mu...
Aug 23, 2021•2 hr 22 min
Mark Twitchell really wanted to become a serial killer. In 2008, after discovering the Showtime series, Dexter, it had become his latest obsession. The aspiring filmmaker felt like he related to Dexter Morgan, the methodical serial killer so good at continually covering his tracks. Mark thought he was just as clever as Dexter, and would be able to get away with murder just as easily. Boy was he wrong. Mark constantly overrated his abilities. As a filmmaker, as a businessman, as a lover, and as a...
Aug 16, 2021•3 hr 32 min
A very recent Christian militant cult, the Aggressive Christianity Mission Training Corps was founded in the late 1970s by married couple Lila and Jim Green. Lila would later change her name to Deborah, after the biblical prophetess of the God of the Israelites and the only female judge mentioned in the Bible. And she ruled her cult with an iron fist. And then, after decades of keeping her cult members continually worried about the devil and engaging in strange rituals like giving birth to spiri...
Aug 09, 2021•3 hr 56 min
Lot to unpack in this one! Today we are blending history, aliens, and conspiracy. We'll be talking about the Ancient Sumerians - quite possibly the world's first civilization. Who were they and what "firsts" did they contribute to human civilization? Why did their culture flourish so long ago? We'll go over one of the oldest, if not the oldest written story in the world - the epic of Gilgamesh. And then, we'll look into how Ancient Sumerians connects to Ancient Aliens/Astronaut Theory. What is t...
Aug 02, 2021•3 hr 38 min
Remember Jodi Arias? Remember why her trial back in 2013 captivated so many and made so many headlines? I'd forgotten. But I sure remember now. Most people have either dated someone like Jodi, or known someone who has, or... been that person. The girl who just doesn't seem to understand the difference between someone just wanting to hook up with her, and someone actually caring about her. The girl who refuses to go away and gets a little scary after a breakup. And most of us have either dated so...
Jul 26, 2021•2 hr 24 min
This guy. Killing mainly in 1929 when he was 46, the final year of his freedom, Peter Kürten would be charged with nine brutal murders and seven attempted murders in 1930, and then executed 1931. Over the course of his depraved life, he'd be sent to prison over and over, for theft, breaking and entering, fraud, army desertion, arson, rape, and then eventually, murder. Dubbed the "Vampire of Dusseldorf" the year before he was caught, this German monster was a sexual sadist who raped and killed wo...
Jul 19, 2021•2 hr 4 min
So much WTF!?! coming at you today. Wow. Dwight York is a maniac. And a terrible writer. And only a good disco/r&b vocalist if you compare him to other cult leaders who also have dabbled in music. But somehow this two-bit con man strung together around two hundred pamphlets full of his very confusing and constantly changing theology, or "factology" as he'd call it. The only message that remained the same as Dwight shifted his teachings from being based in Islam to Christianity to American Indian...
Jul 12, 2021•3 hr 48 min
Operation Greenup was a covert OSS operation carried out by a special group of men many have called the “real life Inglorious Basterds, ” a reference to the 2009 Quentin Tarantino film in which a group of US Jewish soldiers plot to assassinate high-up Nazi leaders. Two Jewish refugees living in Brooklyn - Frederick Mayer and Hans Wynberg, and Franz Weber, a Wehrmacht lieutenant and Allied POW who has belatedly come to his senses about the tyrannical, antisemitic, sociopathic nature of Adolf Hitl...
Jul 05, 2021•2 hr 16 min
My God. This story is so over-the-top, it's hard to accept as true. But sadly, it did happen. For roughly two decades, Fred and Rose West were the patriarch and matriarch of torture, sadism, incest, and death at their horrific British home at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, England. Both Fred and Rose were raised in preposterously incestuous homes where sexual abuse was normalized. They also both grew up in households of regular physical violence. This, plus some head injuries and a whole bunc...
Jun 28, 2021•2 hr 29 min
Hope you have as fun listening to this one as I had making it! I had no idea prior to digging into this topic, that Lovecraft was so influential on modern horror. Like Stranger Things? Heavily influenced by Lovecraft. Like Stephen King's It? The cosmic monster who presents as Pennywise is a creature who could have come directly from the Cthulhu mythos. Much of the Twilight Zone, the X-Files, the BBC's Black Mirror and more - so influenced by Lovecraft. And, in a way, fictional universes like the...
Jun 21, 2021•2 hr 27 min
Big episode for a big, complex topic today. PT Barnum has been called the The Greatest Showman on Earth. And he certainly was the most famous promoter of the 19th century. He brought entertainment to millions, and millions loved him for it. He also stirred up a fair amount of controversy and many in the modern day have not looked back kindly on him. He often lied to his audience about the nature of his acts - and his acts were often people with physical abnormalities or deformities. Did he explo...
Jun 14, 2021•2 hr 27 min
The Great Pyramid of Giza. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Colossus of Rhodes. The Lighthouse of Alexandria. The Temple of Artemis. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. These are just SOME of the wonders we go over today. Get ready to want to explore the world. We are so surrounded by so many impressive man-made monuments. And also so much natural beauty - we also look at the seven natural wonders of the world today. And we look at the new seven wonders of the world. An...
Jun 07, 2021•2 hr 29 min
When the 1830s began, nearly 125,000 various tribal members lived on millions of acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida - land where their ancestors had lived for centuries. By the end of that decade, only a handful of indigenous Americans would remain in the southeastern United States. The federal government had forced them to leave their homelands and walk hundreds of miles to a specially designated “Indian territory” across the Mississippi River - present day...
May 31, 2021•3 hr 32 min
Heard of this guy before? If you haven't, I'm with you. I hadn't either. And then once I got into this story, I wondered HOW had I never heard of him? This story is insane. Karl Denke killed, it seems, at least 30 people in Ziębice, Poland (formerly Münsterberg, Weimar Republic aka Germany). And he ate them. And he sold some of their meat to others. Probably many, MANY others. And he made suspenders out of their skin and shoelaces out of their hair and on and on and on. And he did that out of hi...
May 24, 2021•2 hr 2 min
Today we take a fun and sometimes concerning tour around the United States looking at laws that are still on the books that either definitely shouldn't be, shouldn't have ever been, are sadly necessary, or are just plain... odd. Did you know that in Indiana it's illegal to have a " a covered clearly erect penis" at a city park? Or that it's illegal to use a ferret to help you hunt in West Virginia? It's also illegal to sell dog hair in New York. And if you've ever been in a "duel with deadly wea...
May 17, 2021•2 hr 15 min
Cult! Cult! Cult! We're back to sucking on a cult - a small and relatively unknown one which is surprising considering how crazy this story is. For well over a decade, conman Daniel Perez convinced a small band of followers into thinking he was possessed by three mostly evil angels, or maybe was an angel, and that he had the keys to heaven, or maybe reincarnation? And that he could make it rain, or maybe bring animals back from the dead? He was way better at talking followers into dying so he co...
May 10, 2021•2 hr 12 min
Whiskey! Today’s suck is SOAKED in whiskey. Mostly, in Jameson - some Irish whiskey. John Jameson - the founder of Jameson - was originally a lawyer from Alloa in Scotland before he founded a distillery in Dublin in 1780. In 1805, he was joined by his son John Jameson II who took over the family business. For the next 41 years, John Jameson Jr. built up the business before handing over to his son John Jameson the 3rd in 1851. By the turn of the 19th century, Jameson’s distilleries were the secon...
May 03, 2021•2 hr 51 min
