Today we look into a series of murders, mostly occurring in the mid-1980s, in the southeastern US. The bodies of unidentified women kept being found along I-40. Collectively, these killings came to be known as the Redhead Murders. And a possible unknown serial killer thought to be responsible for killing many of these women was named the Bible Belt Strangler. Have any of these murders been solved? Who are the main suspects? And what new forensic advancements have recently made the identification...
Apr 17, 2023•2 hr 9 min
Today we dig into the origins and the history of America's Irish Mob. We begin centuries ago in Ireland, when a series of oppressive, discriminatory laws designed to break the backs of the Irish and leave them too powerless to rebel against British rule, followed by the Great Famine that was greatly intensified by these same laws, led to hundreds of thousands of Irish fleeing the Emerald Isle for America to avoid certain death. Impoverished and often malnourished, these new immigrants were met w...
Apr 10, 2023•2 hr 56 min
The conclusion of the the craziest cult story I had never heard of. This week, things, incredibly, get even weirder and darker than last week. More sexual debauchery. More twisted visions. And mass murder. And then it all comes crashing down after Jeffrey leads his followers into the wilderness where are there are dreams of magical vaginas, additional wives, and a lot more scat play. Want to apply for the Cummins Family Scholarship fund? Click this link! : https://learnmore.scholarsapply.org/cum...
Apr 03, 2023•2 hr 27 min
The craziest cult story I had never heard of. Jeffrey Lundgren was a cult leader and a mass leader before being caught, imprisoned, and executed. What a wild ride he had before it all came to an end. Twisted sexual desires, doomsday predictions, and more. Today I tell the first of two parts of this tale. Who was Jeffrey Lundgren? How did he twist RLDS/Community of Christ teachings to convince his followers that he was the prophet Joseph Smith preached of who would redeem Zion for the faithful? A...
Mar 27, 2023•2 hr 55 min
Skull and Bones has been shrouded in mystery ever since it was founded nearly two centuries ago now, back in 1832. All members take an oath promising NEVER to reveal the group’s activities and secrets. And that oath is taken seriously. According to the traditional narrative, Skull and Bones was founded by a group of Yale juniors who were either angry over that year’s honor society elections or inspired by occult European secret societies, or perhaps both. Is this group a nefarious organization c...
Mar 20, 2023•2 hr 56 min
The Zebra Murders were a series of racially motivated attacks and murders committed in San Francisco, California, by some so-called "Death Angels." From October of 1973 to April of 1974, a group of cold-blooded killers truly terrorized the city. Why? Nation of Islam teachings had convinced them that white people, in general, were truly evil "white devils" who needed to be destroyed. They were also taught that it was time for black men and women to violently start ridding the world of these white...
Mar 13, 2023•2 hr 33 min
Early in the morning of March 28th, 1979, equipment failures and a stuck open relief valve prevented the removal of heat from Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island Unit 2 nuclear reactor’s core - an essential function that prevents reactor damage. And within hours, it seemed like things were on the brink of a catastrophic nuclear crisis. In the end, a true crisis would be averted... kind of. While the reactor's partial meltdown did NOT kill anyone... the media coverage of it DID nearly kill America's...
Mar 06, 2023•3 hr 3 min
On March 18th, 1990 two men disguised as Boston police officers entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and overpowered the two security guards on duty. In just 81 minutes, the thieves stole over $600 MILLION worth of historic art. Valued at over $200 million at the time. The Gardner Museum heist remains the biggest art theft in the world - and the biggest private property theft in US history if not in the history of world. Thirty-three years later, the case still remains unsolved. So who st...
Feb 27, 2023•2 hr 23 min
On October 8th, 1941, with Stalingrad surrounded, Leningrad besieged, and the Nazis making new gains on Russian territory every day, Joseph Stalin ordered the creation of three new Air Force regiments... the first female aviation military regiments in world history. Led by famed civilian aviator Marina Raskova, these young women, most of whom were between the ages of 17 and 26, would have to transform from flight hobbyists to killer soldiers. The 588th Night Bombers Regiment would earn the nickn...
Feb 20, 2023•2 hr 53 min
What is the the Perfect Murder? It's what two affluent and academically brilliant young Chicagoans, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, wanted to pull off in 1924 when the murdered fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. WHY did they want to kill anyone? In part, to prove to themselves that were Übermensches after misunderstanding the philosophical nihilism of Nietzsche. They had come to think that they were truly advanced humans. People above the law. And that normal morality didn't apply to him. They cou...
Feb 13, 2023•2 hr 25 min
The Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China in 1989 is one of the most important, noteworthy tragedies in modern Chinese history. It was the biggest protest against communism rule in over sixty years. But thanks to the consistent suppression and propaganda of the modern Chinese government… many if not most Chinese citizens today...don’t even know it ever happened. Why is the communist regime in charge of China so insistent on erasing the history of this event? What IS the history of this eve...
Feb 06, 2023•2 hr 38 min
In the 1960s, a strange new cult emerged in Manhattan's Upper West Side out of the Sullivan Institute. A cult created by shady "therapist" Saul Newton, who twisted the psychoanalytical teachings of Henry Stack Sullivan into something insidious - a way from him to sleep with paying therapy patients, have them move onto his compound, and play god over their lives. He and a few of his wives would run their scam for decades. They convinced members to live on their compound, pay to be in continual th...
Jan 30, 2023•3 hr 3 min
This week we investigate the life and crimes of one of the Freeway Killers. Patrick Kearney, the Trash Bag Killer, was convicted for 21 murders, confessed to 32, but is suspected of up to 43 killings of both boys and young men between 1962 and 1977 in Southern California. Lesser known then the other Freeway Killers, previous Suck subjects Randy "Scorecard Killer" Kraft and William "The Freeway Strangler" Bonin, Patrick Kearney at first appears less brutal than his murderous counterparts. And in ...
Jan 23, 2023•2 hr 12 min
Today we dig into the life of Julius Caesar and the final days of the Roman Republic. How was Caesar and what was Rome when he lived there? How did he transform himself from a random minor noble in a Republic full of fandom nobles, into one of the most powerful man in Rome and one of the most known historical figures of all time? Today's tale if full of alliances, betrayals, a very confusing Roman political system, and more as I try my best not to ruin the tale of the man who set Rome on the pat...
Jan 16, 2023•2 hr 22 min
What do you think you know about Amanda Knox? Do you think she was a sex-crazed party girl who got away with the murder of Meredith Kercher in Italy in 2007? That's what I thought before I dug into the research for this episode. I do not think that anymore. The case against her is the sloppiest murder trial I've ever looked into. Outlandish investigative bias, ridiculous crime lab mistakes, and a court system where jurors are allowed to be influenced by the media during the trial. And in this ca...
Jan 09, 2023•2 hr 42 min
Today we dig into the history of Dungeons and Dragons and look at what influences Gary Gygax and others drew from to create such an immersive and addictive RPG experience. We'll examine the long history of wargaming and fantasy literature to understand where games like D&D come from. And I'll lay out exactly how D&D came to be associated with Satanic influences. Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! That'll make sense when you listen. Happy 2023 and Hail Nimrod! Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Cam...
Jan 02, 2023•2 hr 59 min
We take a look this week at the incredibly inspirational life of Helen Keller. She accomplished SO much despite completely losing her sight and ability to hear at the age of just 19 months. Had the miracle worker Anne Sullivan not entered her life when she did, I don't think we'd know Helen's name today. Anne's life - also so incredible. Their intertwined story got me all fired up. We also take a look back at what went on at Bad Magic in 2022 and what we hope to accomplish going forward. Thank y...
Dec 26, 2022•2 hr 18 min
Josef Mengele was a great guy! Just very misunderstood. Wait, no. I'm thinking of someone else. Josef Mengele was a MONSTER. His complete and total lack of empathy for anyone not a member of Hitler's nonsensical racial purity dream boggles the mind. He saw his experimental patients at the Auschwitz concentration camp as nothing more than lab rats who happened to kind of look human. His experiments were cruel and misguided. And mostly dealt with identical twins. Child twins. And saddest of all - ...
Dec 19, 2022•2 hr 49 min
Herb Baumeister was VERY likely the I-70 Strangler, killing a suspected nine boys and men between 1980 and 1990. And then, over the next six years, he seems to have killed at least another twenty-five men and boys and buried them on his Indianapolis area property. And now this property - Fox Hollow Farms - is reportedly VERY haunted. Today we explore what we know about Herb's life, go over the many suspected crimes, and how he was about to be arrested before he took his own life. And then, after...
Dec 12, 2022•2 hr 24 min
Evangelical End Times pastor Mike Bickle founded the International House of Prayer in 1999, later renamed IHOPKC, in Kansas City after saying God had told him to do so in a series of prophecies. Former members have referred to it as a cult. Is it? Or is it an organization, with its focus on modern day prophecy, where cult leaders can easily recruit followers? In 2012, IHOPKC member Bethany Deaton was found dead, and investigators looking into her suicide (originally thought to be a murder case),...
Dec 05, 2022•3 hr 1 min
Strange and thought provoking episode today! In the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s, animal behavior researcher John B Calhoun ran a number of experiments on rodents regarding how their behavior would be affected by increased urbanization if all their basic needs were made. The results were terrifying. Crowded rats and mice became increasingly violent and lost their reproductive instincts to the point that eventually, the utopia went extinct after enduring a final phase full of random violent attacks,...
Nov 28, 2022•2 hr 33 min
The Pacific War may have been even more brutal than the War in Europe. Imperial Japan had a ferocious fighting force, they despised their enemies unlike even the Nazis, and they arguably tormented locals unlike any conquering army in modern history. The stories of local civilians being raped, tortured and killed en masse are truly disturbing. We also examine disturbing acts committed by the allies - like the brutal firebombing of Tokyo. Today we examine how Imperial Japan rose to power, how thei...
Nov 21, 2022•3 hr 5 min
Another whopper of a topic that could not be more action packed. WW2. Going over the war in Europe today - as much as we can in roughly three hours. The scale of WW2.... so massive. Over sixty million people died. OVER sixty MILLION. More people killed in less than a decade than all the people killed in two centuries of Mongol invasions. On numerous occasions, over 100,000 people would die in a single DAY. And it could have been so much worse had not the Allied powers defeated the primary Axis P...
Nov 14, 2022•3 hr
So much to go over in under three hours! Why are indigenous women on reservations in the US being killed at a rate ten times the national average? Why are indigenous women in Canada being murdered six times as often as other women? The answer is complex. It goes back to the first Europeans who colonized the New World and the precedents they set for the treatment of native women. And in the US, much of the MMIW crisis is related to the very confusing jurisdictional nightmare of tribal law versus ...
Nov 07, 2022•2 hr 40 min
On October 25, 2012, NYPD Office Gilberto Valle was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit kidnapping after his estranged wife Kathleen had turned her computer over to the FBI following using spyware and uncovering Gil's sexual obsession with cannibalism. He'd been sharing photos of her and other women with other cannibalism fetishists and writing in graphic detail about how badly he wanted to have her kidnapped, raped, tortured, killed, and eaten. Was Gil planning on killing his wife an...
Oct 31, 2022•2 hr 41 min
How much do you know about America's first documented serial killers, The Bloody Harpes? Micajah and Wiley Harpe went on a crazy murder spree out on the western American frontier, starting in late 1798. The murdered men, women, children, and even babies. And they'd been bad, murderous men long before their final year of terror. They'd ran with a gang of river pirates, they'd been members of a Tory rape gang during the Revolutionary War. They went on raids with a band of Cherokee warriors. They L...
Oct 24, 2022•2 hr 14 min
Today we cover the formation of the infamous Bloods and Crips gang rivalry. How did it get started? Why did it begin in South Central Los Angeles in the late 1960s and early 1970s? The Crips were founded by two high schoolers named Raymond Washington and Stanley “Tookie” Williams, who formed an alliance to protect their neighborhoods from other young people who were harassing them. And then very quickly, gang violence escalated far beyond beating up other kids with your fists to drive-by shootin...
Oct 17, 2022•2 hr 35 min
For four months in 1974, 28 year old Paul John Knowles went on a reckless murder spree across the United States that claimed the lives of at least 18 people. He killed men, women, seniors, and small children. He strangled some, shot others, and stabbed still others. Some crimes were sexual, and some weren't. The man who had spent more than half his life incarcerated in some form for a variety of petty, generally theft-related crimes suddenly became very, VERY violent. Why? That's what we explore...
Oct 10, 2022•2 hr 19 min
Is Bayer AG really EVIL? Or have they, like a lot of companies done both really good things - like marketing aspirin and other valuable medicine around the world - and really bad things, like market heroin after they knew it was dangerous, and perform deadly drug experiments on concentration camp victims? Yeah - that last one is real, REAL bad. But - how many corporate hands are truly clean? How many companies buy minerals from conflict zones, or materials from sweatshops? How many other compani...
Oct 03, 2022•2 hr 47 min
The name The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God might not sound familiar, but in the world of cults, it should be. Only one cult in modern history has ever had more people die in its final act, the Peoples Temple's Jonestown Massacre. 778 people died in Uganda in early 2000 - murdered by cult leaders who had failed to correctly predict the day the world would end and the apocalypse would begin, on four different occasions. Today we explore what this cult was about - incl...
Sep 26, 2022•2 hr 44 min
