BEHIND THE HORROR-Dr. Lee Mellor

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case of demonic possession inspired The Exorcist? What horrifying front page story generated the idea for a Nightmare on Elm Street? Which film was based on the infamous skin wearing murderer.

of abduction, Disappearance, Murder, and Exorcism. The book that we're featuring this evening is Behind the Horror, True stories that inspired horror movies, with my special guests, journalist, author, and podcaster doctor Lee Meller. Welcome back to the program, and thank you so much for this interview, Doctor Lee Meller.

are influenced by other filmmakers. So you talk about Fritz Lang nineteen thirty one and M and just talk about just a little bit of the true history that inspired filmmaker.

the citizenry in Germany at the time. Now, they didn't have a name for it. It wasn't until around this time, about nineteen thirty one, the same year that m came out that Ernestkinnatt, who was like the director of the Berlin Police, came up with the term Syrian mart for serial murder. So it was the first time it was really named. And so we can talk about some of those some of those murderers that were in Weymeyer, Germany. Some of them there's a lot more information than others,

but some of them are really truly grotesque cases. Like even by today's standards, they still hold up as being really foul.

lot to talk about with him. Just the case itself seemed to be mainly shooting people, and he would do weird things like he killed two men and then he would decapitate them and he would swap their heads, for instance. And so this was going on more around the very end of the First World War. He's not a particularly interesting one, but I gave him like a couple of pages just to show where it all began. Then you have a guy Frederick Schumann, the Terror of Falconhagen Lake,

and he was I think probably highly psychopathic. He was one of these criminals that he was very diverse, and he would prey on people in lover's lanes, kill the males and then rape and murder their female partners in a much more sadistic way. And he would do things too, like just shoot people driving along the Autobahn just for a thrill. So those are probably the two of the

lesser known ones. When we get to Carl Grossman, and this is now into the nineteen twenties, he's known as the Butcher of Berlin, and Grossman ran a sausage stand

at a train station. I can't recall it off the top of my head, but it was a very busy train station in Germany, and essentially people would just come by and they loved his plump, juicy sausages and the special flavor that they had, and these significantly improved at one point in time, and because I guess at the time, because there were fruit shortages in Germany, they would pad out the sausages with things like turnips and all kinds

of other fillers. But they noted at some point that his sausages became particularly needy and they would buy them and they'd be in a rush, so nobody really paid much attention to just get the famous sausages, get on

the train and go where they needed to be going. Well, the reason the sausages got so much more juicy was because Carl Grossmann, having spent so much time around the station, he knew that there were people coming in from the provinces, so from the countryside, and they were looking for work in Berlin. As I said, this was a time of great economic downturn, it was the depression, and that these people they didn't know the city and they were desperate

and looking for work. And he would select young women and try and make it seem like a coincidence, like hmmm, why are you here? Can I can I help you? Well, I'm looking for work, you know, maybe as a serving girl or something. Oh my, I can't believe this. What luck could you imagine? I am actually on my way to the employment office right now looking for a serving girl, and here I have found one. Do you want to take the job? Well, of course they do, and they

must have felt very fortunate themselves. They just step off the train into Berlin and they've already found employment doing what they want. Except that's the ruse and he brings them back to his apartment and he rapes them and seems to have sadistically tortured them, and then he kills and butchers them, and he makes them into sausage meat.

So it's like you've got the victims arriving at the station, being processed at his apartment, and then being returned to the station and sold to passengers who are either getting off the train or getting onto the train. So that in itself was just a complete grizzly case. Yeah, it reminds me, you know, we see kind of modern iterations of that, like in the Robert Kickton case in Canada, right where he didn't exactly feed the remains to his neighbors, but he fed them to the pigs and then so yeah,

it's close enough. It's like cannibalism by proxy, right, And so this obviously just powrified a lot of people. And I don't think that you could just forget that. I mean, even if you lived to the ripe old age of eighty and through the horrors of the war that were to come, you would always remember the time that you ate the sausage that was probably made from a young woman who had stepped off the green, right.

good pick up on that. Dan. A lot of young men coming into Hanover on trains, you know, looking for opportunities, and there he is, and he has an accomplice who is his lover and I think his hands grands, I remember that directly, and they would lure these young men back to his apartment and he would bite through their wind pipe. I think sometimes they might have been drunk or asleep, but he would actually kill them by biting through their wind pipe. And then he would dismember them

and he would dump the bodies into the river. And there was some pretty strong evidence that he was also selling the meat too. The interesting thing about Harmon is that he was also a police informant, which is something that I've seen in modern serial killers or criminals like you get like Whitey Bulger, right or Scott Lee Kimball. You hear these cases and you go, how can this person be a police informant and be a serial killer at the same time. Well, it's nothing new. This goes

back to Fritz Harmon at least in Weimar, Germany. And so I mean they think he killed about twenty five people Grossman. It may have been as little as maybe four or six, but it could have been high. But yeah, Harmon almost certainly like at least twenty five. And so this is when they start to really notice this. I mean, Grossman is in Berlin, Harmon is in Hanover. I mean, these are major cities, and so it's making it into

the press. And I think at this time Ernskinnatt who coins Surrey and Marred and probably Fritz Lang are starting to pick up on it more. The final one, of course, is Peter Curtin, the Vampire of Dusseldorf. And Peter Curtin is he Matt's alist. That's someone who is sexually aroused by the side of blood and also a sexual vampire and he gets off in drinking blood and a sexual

sadist and that he gets off and causing harm. So he has a whole array of paraphilia, but mainly centering around blood and over a very long career, starting in the twenties but going into the thirties and targeting mainly females, but I think there was a few male victims in there too, but the age ranges went from being little girls all the way up to being middle aged women.

Peter Curtin is basically there was a few home invasions, but he's stalking them through the streets and he might club them over the head with a hammer or stab them to death, and then he will masturbate at the you know, looking at their blood or in some cases drinking their blood. And on at least one occasion that I can recall he had sex with the dead body.

So when you put this all together, like we even in this time right now, we can't think of five serial killers that really are that standout in this day and age. As you said, the golden age in quotation marks has kind of passed. But if you just go to the swamp period in Weimar, Germany, you have this deluge of sexual, violent depravity and people that are just going what is going on and suddenly earn skinnat coins the term Surian mord for it. By the way, he

was the one that investigated several of these cases. And so Fritz Lang, this filmmaker, is watching this and it inspires him to make m City Searches for a Murderer in nineteen thirty one, starring the great Peter Lourie who plays basically a child murderer. And they don't get into really the details too much about what he did, and I mean back then they have to be careful with that, right.

But from a cinematic point of view, it's beautifully shot as a narrative, it's in German, it's got subtitles, it's

dated a bit. You have to be a very patient film watcher, but just seeing the photography and the performance by Peter Laurie, and then if you're able to go back to that period and put yourself in what it would have been like to see a film like that back in nineteen thirty one, you realize this is like one of the masterpieces of cinema, like a Citizen Kane, basically one of the first Yeah, sorry, that is my fault. I paused and then went to add because also arguably one of the first thrillers.

of criminals, and we'll find this miscreant. And so for all the organized crime bosses in the city at this time, this is really bad for business. And so then they join in and they're like, if we can get rid of this child murderer too, then the police are going to back off and we can make as much money as we were before. Once again, this is during the depression and there were black markets and things to profit from. And so now he's not only got the police coming

after him, he's got the criminals. And it's the criminals, the organized gangsters that find him and they at the end of the movie, they bring him before this kangaroo court, and the expression on Peter Lourie's face, he's so a motive and you can see he's genuinely panicked and he knows that though they're going to give him a trial, it's not a real trial and they're gonna end up

killing him anyway. And he says, and I'm paraphrasing here, who are you to accuse me like you do this because you profit for you, it's a choice for me. I just can't help myself. And that's when he breaks down that famous scene where he's weeping into his hands. I just can't help my self. And it's an interesting as you said, it breaks the black and white there, because there is something of a point in that he's driven by this intersexual compulsion which leads him to do

immoral things. And yes, he chooses to do that, but the strain on him psychologically to commit these acts of murder versus the choices that these other criminals make, which almost certainly involved murder at some point if you're an organized crime, right, he's saying that, you know, you make me out to be a monster, But I'm driven by what BTK or someone would call factor X, right, like I was born this way and you guys choose it

and you point the finger at me. And so don't take that as a defense of the serial child killer. But it's that sometimes I think we we tend to glorify organize criminals, right, We tend to think of them and oh, they're not as bad, even though they can be responsible for many more deaths, and they're doing it for much shallower reasons psychologically, you know. So absolutely a student observation there Dan, and that's the masterpiece of the film,

and that took a lot of balls. I think to have that kind of gray approach at that time.

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the century. So Leopold and Lobe. Are these two people of genius IQ or around it, and they come from privileged upbringings and they're attending the best schools. And Lobe is more of a criminal, Yeah, he gets off on transgression. He's more charismatic, he makes friends more easily. And Leopold, his counterpart, not so much. He's more of a removed intellectual. He's awkward, and he's also homosexual, and he really craves Lobe.

So you have a folly, a good situation that happens here where you have Lobe going, you know, we should commit crime because it's thrilling and it's fun, and you have Leopold who knows that if he helps Lobe with the crimes that Lobe will engage in sexual relations with him. So Lobe uses his sexual the fact that Leopold is sexually attracted to him as like a character he dangles. And of course, with Lobe being Lobe, it's enough to

just say committing crime is fun. But with Leopold, because he is and he did have a really high IQ, very learned young man, he had to justify it in some ways, so he used I would say a total misreading of Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of the ubermanche, and that was the way that he was able to justify doing this, is that saying, hey, we are so intelligent and we are so rich, and we are so much more transcendent than other people that we can commit murder and like

have almost a right to do it because we're part of this elite are we are beyond man ubermanch. I won't get into the into what Nietzsche actually meant by that. It was something a lot more in my mind, benevolent, but he uses it to justify it. And you know, they go from thefts to break and enterings and such. But with these types of criminals, at some point the thrill is gone, to quote BB King, and they decide, you know, what would be the ultimate thrill would be

to commit a murder. And so they meticulously plan this murder. You know, how they're going to rent the car, where they're going to dump the body, how they're going to

do it. They overplan it in many ways, which was I was just having a conversation about this with Catherine Ramslin the other day about how you can actually overplan a murder because then you don't really adjust for all of the variables that can go wrong, right, and they they scour a neighborhoohood looking for a victim to abduct, and they find Bobby Franks, who was about fourteen years old at the time. He was a young man and

he was I think a cousin of Lobe. He was related to him and Bobby he's walking home from school and they're like, hey, we'll give you a ride. He's like, I don't need a ride. I'm almost hume, no hop in, Bobby will give you a ride. He gets in the car and they use a chisel to kill him. I think they may have also strangled him with a length of rope. They drive his body out to the pre selected place in the countryside and they put him in like a covert, and then they drive back and they

go through all the stages of their plan. They call his family and they put in a fake ransom demand, all to stage it and make it look like something else has happened. Except Leopold drops his prescription glasses at the crime scene. So this is this criminal genius right, despite all his planet he loses his glass with the crime scene. And this is before mass manufacturing. Right of

these and him. Being so rich, they're very easily able to trace where these glasses, you know, where the lenses were, who they were made for, Who in Chicago imports these types of frames, and eventually it's traced back to Leopold and Lobe. And so these criminal geniuses are are caught and they stand trial in court and are convicted. Leopold eventually gets out and seems to live a fairly He lives a fairly normal life in his old age and dies.

I think Lobe dies in prison. But this inspired a play called Rope, in which two young men basically conspire to kill a former classmate and then hide him in a trunk and then invite over his fiancee and his parents and this university professor who always talked about moral relativesm and that it would be like this great piece of art, you know, it would be a kind of like a joke that was also artistic, homicidal performance art in a way to have them all over and to

put out like a buffet spread over this trunk, and they would be in on it. You know, we've just strangled this guy and put them in this trunk and everyone's eating off it, and they have no idea, and all the time they're asking when's he going to show up?

Because he's supposed to be at the dinner party too. Well, Hitchcock liked this play and he made it into his nineteen forty eight film Rope, which is probably most notable because it was not only Hitchcock's first technicolor film, but it was also a film which seems to have almost zero cuts, which if you think of even a film today, there's copious editing like this is one my complaints about

modern cinema. It has gotten a little bit better, but especially around from two thousands to like twenty ten, it's this cut, cut, cut, cut, cut all the time. The cuts are unnecessary. Why are you doing this just because you didn't film the scene right? And here's Hitchcock, he doesn't even have the technology. He does the entirety of the film in what appears to be a single cut, so there's there's never an editing take. But there's a

trick to it. Dan, do you know the trick? No, So what he does, because it was actually impossible to do it with the technology, is that he will say, pan the camera away for a moment so that the screen is blocked out by a cabinet momentarily, and then because the screen is blacked out, he could then switch the camera up, put new film in, start filming from the exact same spot, and then pan back out so it appears that it hasn't cut when it actually has.

crimes in Wisconsin. What I wanted to talk about was a little bit was about Frenzy from nineteen seventy two and the crimes all Christy and Navil Neville Health Heath, Pardon Me, and the Hammersmith Nude murders. Talk about a little bit about Frenzy from nineteen seventy two and the crimes that inspired and the killers that inspired this movie.

Britain over that period of time. And the case that it most obviously resembles, let's say about slightly less than a decade old at the time that Frenzy comes out, and that's the Hammersmith Nude murders, where you have somewhere but in the realm, of between six and eight prostitutes in London who are murdered. They're usually found strangled or dround.

Many of them are floating in the Thames and the unknown killer was dubbed Jack the Stripper by the press, obviously as an homage to the earlier Jack the Ripper, but because he always stripped the victims, and so this was this has never been solved. There's a lot of people that they strongly believe did it. The police have one of those things where they say, look, we know the guy who did it. We didn't get enough evidence, but he killed himself. For all intents and purposes, it's closed.

But officially this case has never been solved. And so that was going on in the swing in sixties in London, and Frenzy starts off where there are a group of people gathered by the Thames River and somebody's talking about some sort of environmental project, you know, beautifying the river again or the surrounding community. And then a nude body with a necktie wrapped around its neck, the young woman comes floating into the scene and everyone screams and they

say it's the necktie killer. He's done another one, so, you know, thus implying there's a serial killer at large. So that's the case that people have noticed the most, and Hitchcock himself confirmed in Inspired Frenzy. But there are parts of other serial killers in there. So the guy who plays the man who turns out to be the eventual necktie killer, the actor Alfred Hitchcock, approached him and he said, in order to understand the type of man you're playing, I want you to read this book on

Neville Heath. Neville Heath is a really fascinating serial killer. Now he only killed two victims to our knowledge, but he was almost like a Ted Bundy light figure in that he was extraordinarily charming. I would say he'd make Bundy look completely like a wallflower. He was such a dashing, charming guy. And he was also a total comment. So imagine this blonde, square jawed, very athletic fellow and he's going around London and he has actually been a pilot.

But what he doesn't tell is, you know, he was a pilot the RAF, but he leaves out all parts of him getting into so much trouble in the military and all the people he's conned. He's once again he's a consummate psychopath, and he's always in the pub. This guy can drink like it's ridiculous. When I had heard how much this guy was drinking when he was committing his mothers. We're talking, you know, something like twenty four pints or you know, and it's seemingly not affecting him.

Just as an aside, I've heard that about quite a few serial killers, and so I don't even know if he was using his real name at the time, but he had the reputation around the pubs, you know, the dashing, handsome raf pilots. And this would have been just after the Second World War. And he's always buying drinks for people, and he's telling tall tales and stories and everyone likes him.

And he's also into s and m And because he's such an attractive man and he's able to pick up the ladies fairly easily, he has no problem finding partners to engage in sin m with. And on this one particular night, whether this was planned or not, I guess, we don't know. But he meets up with somebody who's he's had a sado masochistic relationship before in the within the past, and he brings her back to this hotel and they go through all the consensual stuff, you know.

She allows herself to be tied up, and he pulls out a writing crop and he begins to whip her. I believe he has her gag too, so that they can't hear the screams, and she may might have consented to that as well. You know, it's all The thing about the whole BDSM thing is that there's a lot of role play involved. There's an idea that there are limits. You know, you've obviously probably just got stafeword and stuff

on the show then. But Heath is whether it's the drink or you know, disinhibiting him, or he planned to do this all along, he just goes overboard. He gets into a frenzy. He basically whips this woman to death with a writing crop and it puts a pillow over her face, and then also thrust a yeah he did, he thrust a poker from the fireplace into her vagina.

And then he escapes and the next day the cleaning lady tries to enter and management gets involved, and that's when they discovered the body and they're like, oh wow, And so the police put out this description. They're looking for this guy. By this time, Heath has made his way to another part of England. He's staying with another lover and his name is in the paper. It is about to be in the paper, but he gets ahead of it and he tells her, hey, you know this,

I can't remember how he spins it. He gets her to believe that he was framed or as an accident or something like that, and then he gets out of town before things really blow up, and he kind of disappears, and he makes his way to a port side city. I think it was Bourne Mouth, that's what's coming to mind. Yeah, and he under a different name and a different identity.

that she knew there was something up about him. There's something about him that she didn't like, and he insists on walking her home, and at that point she goes missing. And it isn't until some time later that they find her body. She's been eviscerated, and she's been hidden like some bushes and briar patch or something like that in the countryside, and they realize that he would have been walking this way, one of the potential routes to take

her home. And at this point he comes under police scrutiny and he tries to bullshit his way out of it. But at the end of the day they find out it's Neville Heath, and he hangs for it. And he was known by I think it was Albert Pierpoint that hung him, Albert Pierpoint probably being the most famous hangman in British history. He said he was the most handsome

man I ever hanged. Yea, And so that maybe not the crimes, but the presentation and the affect and the ability to have like a personality that the world sees and then your secret, hidden personality. Hitchcock told the actor, I think his name was very I don't remember Bury. Something he told the actor read this book on Neville heat and that's I think what was brought to the table, not so much Heath's crimes, but Heath as a person committing crimes that were more like the Hammersmith nude murders.

And the interesting thing is where the last crimes come in was based on John Christie. Now the John Christy, Yeah, the John Christy case. Have you covered that one, Dan.

naturally do that to him. So this was a guy who was very anxious, very hypochondriac, and This also manifests in his relationships with women from a young age. When he was a teenager, he had a chance to get laid and for whatever reason, he couldn't get it up, and the girl told everyone. The whole town laughed at them and shamed him, and they called him can't make it Christie and Reggie no dick. So this obviously, yeah, I mean, this is before he'd done anything really bad.

And I do actually have some compassion for that because you can imagine at the time there's no viagra, right, there's no way to fix the situation, and so it becomes you know, whether it would have been just a one time thing if he had just been left alone, or you know, whether it was going to be chronic. Anyways,

he suffers from chronic impotence his whole life. He has a marriage of convenience with a woman called Ethel, who he later kills, and they don't really have a sex life, they don't have any kids, and they moved to ten Rillington Place in Nodding Hill and Christy. In total, he kills at least eight people, and he uses various ruses. Generally he'll knock them out using gas and then he'll strangle them with a rope or with a tie, so there's your neck tie connection again, and then he will

rape them while they're either unconscious. But also some of them seem to have been kept in the home. This was after he killed his wife, kept in the home and raped after death, so he was in that crofile. Now in the middle of all this, upstairs, there's a couple called Timothy and Beryl Evans. Timothy Evans as well. He's working class. He's from a mining town and he's known as a guy once again. He tells tall tales, he likes to drink a lot, and he's got a

short temper. He's barely literate, and he's kind of married above his station to Beryl Evans, who is this beautiful young lady. And they have to rent this grubby flat. It was infamously, you know, ridden by bedbugs. It wasn't a bad part of town, not so much for crime, but just poverty. And he's always conscious that he's not giving her the life that really is deserved of a

woman of her station. And they have a lot of domestic altercations, and it doesn't seem like he was a wife beater at least not chronically, but there is a lot of turbulence in that household. And to escape at Timothy always goes down to the pub and drinks, where he tells his stories. You know that nobody believes to

his pub friends. And it's just a tumultuous relationship. And so what happens is they're already struggling with they're already struggling with their wan child, Geraldine, who is I think something like just over a year old at the time, and they find out that Beryl's pregnant again. Well, this is an issue because Beryl doesn't want to have the baby. For first of all, she's not a very good mother, not necessarily doesn't love her kids, but she's just not maternal.

She's not cut out for it really, so she didn't have that really natural instinct. But she knows also that they can't really afford it, and Timothy knows that too. But tim is I can't remember if he was a Catholic or not, but you know, he's not for abortion. He thinks that it's wrong to do and she's like, I want an abortion. He's saying, you can't. You know it's wrong. We'll deal with it, and this just leads to more and more of a storm upstairs. Well, of course,

creepy mister Christy and his wife are downstairs. The walls of paper thin, they can hear every single thing that's going on. They know all about what's going on in their life. Of course, he pretends not to, because he's a manipulative, psychopathic serial killer. And one day Beryl's coming down the stairs and mister Christie comes out and is gassed unthreatening voice. East says, you know I've heard about

you know, you're having problems. You know what's going on, And she confides in him things that he probably already knows, right, And he says, I'm pregnant again, and I want to have an abortion, And he says, well, I don't know if you know about this, but you know I have medical training and I know how to do such a procedure. And so for her it's like, wow, my neighbor downstairs can do this. And of course abortion is illegal at the time, so either way she's got to go to

a back alley abortionist. So trusting the nice old man downstairs, doesn't you know, it seems like the most rational choice. There is no option to go to a medical professional who's certified at this procedure. And so she basically tells Tim, look, mister Christy's going to do the abortion. And Tim's like, no,

he's not, and she's like, well he is. And eventually she wins and he just kind of throws up his hands and he goes off to work, and this is when the procedure is supposed to happen, and Christy warns him, you know, sometimes these things go wrong, but it should be okay, and when you come back, this is what you should expect. Well, when he comes back, Christy meets him as he's coming up the stairs and he says, you know, Tim, come up to the apartment, to your apartment.

There's something we must discuss. And there's Beryl and she's dead on the bed and baby Geraldine, if I remember correctly, is still alive at this point. Yeah, And he says the procedure went wrong. Yeah. I think he might have said it went septic or something like that, and she's died. You know, we always said that this was a possibility, and what had really happened was that Christy had drugged and raped her and strangled her, just like he did

with his other victims. He'd probably been coveting her like this attractive woman for so long. But because tim is first of all, he knows he's complicit and illegal act in an illegal act, he's low iq, he's pretty gullible, and he's getting played by a master manipulator. And Christy says, you know, we'll take care of this. We'll find someone to foster baby Geraldine out. You can go back to Wales. I'll hide the body and no one will be any

the wiser. And Timothy Evans, it seems, because he contradicts himself a lot later, seems to go along with this plot. I guess if he's rationalizing it, he's probably thinking it's the lesser of two evils, right, And so he does. He leaves, and he goes to Wales, and eventually they start he's staying with family in Wales, and he's telling them stories about how Beryl has gone to visit family

on another side of England. And then Beryl's family are getting concerned and they're attempting to look into it, and Christie's being weird with them and he's saying, oh, Beryl just went to another part of England. But they're thinking, well, why would you do that without telling does and where

did Timothy go? So Evans eventually, Timothy Evans eventually makes his way back to London, and the way it ultimately plays out is that the police discover Beryl's body and that of baby Geraldine, who keeping let's keep in mind, Timothy Evans didn't know was dead. He thought she'd been fostered out, and they've both been strangled, and they're in like a wash house on the property. At least Beryl was Geraldine my have been somewhere else, but they're in

pretty close proximity. And so they the police are going, okay, well, who's the likely suspect here? Who did it? And it's always the husband, right, and there is a slight grain of truth to that, and that he knew he knew about it a bit. And Evans is then taken into custody and you have your classic low IQ confesses to a you know, under police pressure enough of it, confesses to a crime that he didn't do, and is, you know,

then standing trial. Well, by the time he's at trial, he's yelling, it wasn't me, you know, Christie done it. Christie done it. And Christie is actually a witness at his trial, and he's just completely lying about the situation. And oh, I always heard them fighting and I worried something like this would happen. And Timothy Evans hangs and John Christie, who did actually come under some scrutiny in court, just walks out of there and goes back to living

with Ethel at ten Rillington Place. And so he's just completely destroyed this family. And sometime after he kills his wife, Ethel, and I think he mainly does this because she's an impediment to what he wants to do and he needs his own space to do that and she's in his space, so she needs to go, so he kills her, puts

her under the floorboards. Then he starts inviting I think they were mainly prostitutes back to the flat and you know, doing his strangling them unconscious, maybe using the gas, and then keeping them in an alcove and using their bodies over and over for the necrophilic intercourse. He eventually decides to move and he puts wallpaper over the alcove so it doesn't even appear that there is one, and he

just sort of flee without paying his rent. So by this time there's been a lot of social changes in England. Then you've got like a West Indian population coming in, so people from Jamaica, you know, particularly, and Christy and his wife are racist there. They were always unhappy with the fact that all these Jamaican blacks are moving into the neighborhood and they didn't hide that. And so this guy, Beresford Brown, he buys ten Rillington Place, the apartment building,

and he starts to move in these Jamaican families. Actually maybe one of the families that came in was Bearrisfard Brown. But at the point is there's a Jamaican landlord, there's Jamaican tenants, and they're up in I think it's the Evans's apartment, this one Jamaican tenant. And he asked the landlord. He says, you know, I don't have access to it was something like a kitchen to you know, to cook my cuisine with upstairs. This doesn't work or something I

can't remember exactly what it was. He says, do you mind if I used the abandoned place downstairs? And the guy goes, I go ahead, you know, I haven't rented it out yet, And so he goes down there, and he starts sort of looking around and he realizes that wait, this one section of wall isn't wall, it's just wall paper. And then when he pokes through it, you know, he brings us to the landlord's attention. That's when they find

the initial bodies. And then the police are on the scene and they're like, well, sorry, who was the tenant here? And oh, his name was John Reginald Holliday Christy. Oh oh remember him, John Christy, the guy upstairs with the neighbor and on trial. Oh my god. And then Christy becomes a fugitive. His name is splashed all over the newspapers and he's hanging around London. He's living death to

and ultimately he's caught and he also hangs. But where this is important playing into Frenzy by Hitchcock, is that the serial killer, the necktie killer Bob Rusk in Frenzy sets up his friend, the protagonist, Dick Blaney, because Rusk kills Blaney's wife and kills his girlfriend, and he sets him up for it. At which is I mean, beyond that, you might not say it's similar. They also reference Christie in you know, the line is we haven't had a

good sex murder around these parts since Christy. But here's the thing too, the character of Richard Blaney is very much like Timothy Evans. His IQ is higher, but he's a drunk, he's short tempered. People see him yelling at his wife. So all of these things that were used as aggravate, aggravating factors or evidence, whatever you want to call them against Timothy evans you find them in the

character of Dick Blaney's. So you have this amazing fusion of these three disparate serial killer stories, all that all of which transpired in London, coming together in Hitchcock's Frenzy, and you can read in far greater detail about all those and behind the horror.

weja boards and the like. And then Aunt Hattie dies and it's pretty sad for him because he doesn't have many other friends and he misses his aunt. After this, many of the things that you see in the Exorcist begin to happen to Roland's. So he'll be on his bed and his bed will start to shake in this strange way, and he'll talk in tongues and there will

be words that seem to appear in his skin. And they, the parents, they don't know what to make of this, so they go to their I think they are Lutheran, and they go to their local Lutheran reverend, mister Reverend Schultz, and he says, okay, well, let him come stay at my house and we'll see how this works out. Well, he's at Reverend Schultz's house for a very short period of time and before the exact same thing starts happening there.

So now it's not only the family that's seeing all of this paranoi normal phenomena happening, but it's also their reverend and there's they're seeing things like vibrating beds and crockery flying all over the place and furniture moving. So it's pretty intense and you can imagine how they're scared. And at some point the reverend goes, you know, I'm not really equipped to handle this. Maybe this is more in the domain of the Catholic Church, which from a

Lutheran is a pretty bold statement. So they yeah, you know the history, right so behind yeah, So they turn basically Roland over to this Catholic church and they take him into a hospital which is run by Jesuits, and the same thing happens. You know, the behavior continues to escalate, most of which you see in the film The Exorcist, and at some point they realize that they can't handle this.

They're going to have to move him to this He's got family in Missouri where there is also another Jesuit hospital, and that they're going to have to, you know, move him down there. So they move him into this house with his family in Missouri so that some of the Jesuit priests down there can come in. And at this point they're like, he's possessed. We're going to do an exorcism,

So they start going through all these esoteric rituals. You know, it's very rare that an exorcism is actually sanctioned, so this is one of the cases where it was. So obviously he's displaying the pretty convincing signs and these priests are trying there, he's exhausting them. They're coming there in the morning and they're staying there late into the night,

and and sometimes he'll be asleep. But then when he's away, key's you know, the bet is vibrating, he's talking in tongues, the messages are appearing on his skin, all kinds of weird phenomena, and they end up at some point bringing him to this hospital which is run by Jesuits. Now, during this process, if you were to believe the story because the thing is that the Catholic Church kept a

lid on this. They kept all this really secret and tightly sealed for a while, until finally somebody wrote a book on it and they got some people to talk. So what we know about it and what actually happened they may not be exact, but this is how it seems to have ended, where at some point the entity, the demon or whatever that possessed Roland gave a hint something like if you are able to say, if you know my name, then I will leave the boy's body.

And for a while, it's like they missed the clue, you know, it gets lost in the sauce because it's the entity is saying so much, or perhaps they don't know what the name is and they have to figure

it out. But if you were to believe the tale, they're in the Jesuit hospital this one day things are getting particularly intense and the priest figures it out and he says, then your name is this, and then some other rituals follow, and after that the demon has been exercised from Roland, and then he disappears from history, and everything is closely guarded secret until the secret starts to leak out in the form of the original book about

this case. But if you look into how professional skeptics have interpreted this, there's a lot of information that is left out of those sources, and believe it or not, it's fairly convincing that Roland Doe may have been just a very disturbed kid who was pulling one over on not only his family and his minister, but on all of these priests too. And there were times where they saw him doing things like cutting things into his own skin, and they never thought, maybe we're being fooled here. It

was like that piece of information didn't actually enter. I think there was a lot of confirmation biased going on. So you think of a bed shaking, right, you think, well, that must be a demonic bores But then try it right, like get onto an old bed that's not very sturdy and oscillate your body a little bit, and it's possible to do those things. Speaking in tongues is easy. I'll do it right now, he goff min nihar Less, Crystal Dominos Sky or you know what I mean. That's so,

it's whether you believe or are skeptical. There is a very good argument to be made too that this kid pulled one over on all these people. And I'll just add that the story that inspired Poltergeist also involved a teenage male Jimmy, as a central character in that, and he seems to have done the same thing with the house being haunted, not him being possessed. But and he fooled parapsychologists. I don't think that's a big achievement. But he fooled the police, he fooled his family.

in Milburn Christopher. And that's the interesting part. And then when the police asked the family, well, will you all take polygraphs? The family also turned that down too. So I'd say those are two fairly tell clues. When you don't allow the master of sleight of hand to observe the situation, and Milbourne Christopher was able to replicate a

lot of this poltergeist activity. And he even showed the parapsychologists like you would just be in the office talking to them and tops would start popping off bottles and such. So he's showing them like it's not that hard. I can do it as well. So you can read more about that and behind the horror. The point is whether you choose to believe the paranormal explanations or you want

to run with the skeptical explanations. But I've got both in there and how they relate to the movies and inspired them.

telling the story. But what it was now that I mentioned Zodiac because we're in the realm of lovers lanes here and men wearing masks. It's Texarkana, which is actually exists in two states. I believe there's a Texas part of it and there's an Arkansas part of it, and it gets the name Texarkana because it's white on the

border of Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana. And so this is in about nineteen forty five nineteen forty six around there, and there are couples, some of them are in their twenties, some of them are teenagers, and they're going out on dates no to lover's lanes and such. And the first so the first time this happens, this couple they go out to a movie with the brother, and I think it's the friend and his girlfriend and it's sort of

like a double date to go to a movie. And then after that they drop off his brother and the brother's girlfriend at home, and then they go out to a lover's lane, this couple, and while they're in the car and you know, presumably in the middle of making out or about to or something like that, there is this masked gunman that shows up and orders them out of a car, and he basically wants there out of

the car. He pistol whips the male unconscious, and the female sees this happening and gets terrified, and she starts running down the road and she passes a car on

the way. That's an important clue, and he manages to catch up to her, and then he strikes her a number of times, and then he sexually violates her with the barrel, and then he goes back to beating up on the guy, and in the meantime, she manages to continue on down the road and she gets to a farmhouse and she knocks on the door and gets help.

As she's waiting for someone to answer the door, she sees another vehicle drive by, which very well may have been the vehicle that the attacker used, although it doesn't match the description of the vehicle that she passed. Anyways, police come to the scene. Both survive in this first instance, although they're severely traumatized physically and psychologically. The young lady moves out of the town. I think she goes to

Oklahoma and just goes to stay with relatives there. The young man remains in the town, but it takes him years to get over the injuries he has sustained. And so this continues. There are two more couples that go through this over the next few months, weeks even, and

these ones are not allowed to go they're killed. And what I found in researching this is something that has been kept from the public for a while, and that is that the females were raped, and when this story has been told elsewhere, that's not included, but that's a fact. And then they seem to have been they seem to

have redressed themselves and then been shot to death. So you've got this basically masked attacker of couples at lovers Lanes who probably shoots the man outright and then rapes the woman at gunpoint, gets herself to redress herself and then shoots her, and people will just find the cars. Well, in the first instance, they find the car with the bodies in it the next day, and then the next instance the bodies are in two separate places, and by

this time they bring in the Texas Rangers. And there's this one particular Texas Ranger. He's got a reputation of, you know, he's an expert tracker with all these skills, and he always gets his man, and there's the big media attention when he comes to town, and he's always making these announcements in the newspapers about, you know, leads on the killer and how he's going to find and in truth, he's not doing much of anything. He's not

getting anywhere close. And the last attack, and this is disputed because it might not be the same guy, but it is usually included in the canon, is there's a man just sitting in his home and he's watching the television. His wife is lying in bed, and this is like a farmhouse, and she hears the noise, I believe, and gets up to see what it is, and she goes out into the living room and sees that her husband has been shot dead through the window and he's still

sitting in the chair watching TV. And at that point she sees this mast man outside the window and realizes that she's next, and so he starts to chase her, and she manages to get away, and she gets to the nearest farmhouse and they take her to the hospital and then the reign of terror seems to end. Now in the film, it's not portrayed like that. The cops get a lot closer. They are like shootouts and the

car chases and such. The reality is they really got close to this guy, and they have a suspect who they believe may have done it, but they never proved it, and the killings did stop, you know. And I think one of the big questions beyond who actually did this was was that last killing actually part of the series.

And what I note and behind the horror is that the guy who was shot in his farmhouse while watching TV was having an affair with a married woman whose husband had just come back from overseas, So that may have been lumped in there as being, you know, the final victim of the Texar Can of Moonlight murderer, when in reality it was a jealous husband who shot the

guy who was screwing his wife through the window. So yeah, there's you know, a hell of a lot more detail obviously in the book, but that's the meat of it. And what I would say is just most intriguing to me about that. It's not just the time, and you know, the setting it's got has a vibe to it, an atmosphere. When you're reading about it, it transports you back to

a much morenescent time. But he was like the prototypical mass killer, and there's so much attention on like the Zodiac, right, you know, he wears this weird head and he attacks people at Lover's Lanes. But this guy was doing it twenty two years before that, And so there's two ways to look at that. The Zodiac presumably knew about that guy or and I don't think this is true, but it's fun to speculate is the same guy? Yeah, yeah, right,

I don't think so at all. But yeah, yeah, so that inspires the Town that Dread Sundown, which, by the way, you can watch on YouTube right now and no offense you like it. I thought it was the worst movie I wrote about in the book.

nocturnal death syndrome as an inspiration. I thought that was fascinating. And you cover the Serpent in the Rainbow of a movie I saw many years ago was and the Strange Tale of Claire vus Narses, and that incredible tale behind that which I thought that I had not read anything about that in terms of the real story behind that. So you also.

it really is, because I've been there physically. It's amazing how close Bundy and Ridgway's crimes were and saying, so, Ted, can you help us find this guy? And Bob Keppel wrote a book about this called The Riverman, and he said, to be honest with you, I didn't think Ted would have any insight. I was using this as a trick to try and get him to talk about some of

his own crimes. What I find compelling about that is, if you actually look into the riverman, Bundy did give them some good eyes ideas that they could have acted upon, so he wasn't totally useless. And so that frames the Hannibal Lecter advising Clarice Starring on how to catch Buffalo Bill, who famously skins his humps as they say, they call him buffalo you know, Buffalo Bill for like skinning buffaloes, And that's because he's making the bodies that they're finding

in rivers. They all have big patches of skin missing from them. They're all obese young women. And this of course goes back to ed Gean, who makes the woman suit right. And so not only does ed Gean inspire Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, but he inspires the leather Faced with his dead skin mask and Texas Chainsaw Massacre and in some ways Norman Bates and Psycho. That's another chapter of the book. But to get back to the Silence of the Lambs, the character of Buffalo Ill.

A lot of people know about the ed Geen thing. They're like, oh, yeah, it's inspired by Edyen. What they don't know is that there are aspects of many other serial killers in the Buffalo Bill characters. So if we

look at how he apprehends the victims. If you recall that classic scene from Silence of the Lambs where the I think it's the congresswoman or the senator's daughter is coming back from she's driving home to her apartment at night, and there's a guy who's struggling to get a piece of furniture inside his van, and he keeps driving it and he's making a bit of a show, and she

feels guilty and mister, can I help you? Would you know, you know, although it's so kind of you, And then he gets her into the van and knocks her unconscious. That's how he gets control over her. That's classic Ted Bundy. Sure, that is how Ted Bundy got at least most of his Washington victims when he was sort of at the height of his success in Washington. So that first approach

stage of them is based on Bundy. But then as far as how he keeps them, that was inspired by Gary Heidnick, who ran the infamous House of Horrors in Philadelphia, where he kept I think it was five or six young black women naked in a pit in his basement and he would torture them, and it's all in the book, but it's a pretty horrific case, you know, torture murder. And the whole point is with Buffalo Bill, he keeps his victims in the pit. That's basically the connection to Hydnick.

When they read about the promoterists read about the Hydnick case, he said, okay, well we'll put that in there. And then how Buffalo Bill disposes of his victims is he dumps them in rivers, and that, of course hearkens back to Gary. Well at the time they didn't melt with Gary Ridgeway's still then uncaught Green River Killer. But also you can put in Jerry Brudos in there. Jerry Brudos. Everyone's seeing mind Hunter now, so I don't think I need to expand on him too much. He's the foot

fetish guy, like the guy who covets the shoes. And the thing about Jerry Brudos that isn't in Mind Hunter, I don't think, which is pretty tremendous, is Brudos would put his victims in the river, but he would carry them out there from his car. And he would also carry like car engines and transmissions with like things that you would think that you know, no single man would be able to carry. He was that strong that he would do that, And some of Buffalo Bill's earliest victims

are attached to similarly heavy objects. Brutos was also transvestic fetish, so a bit of Jerry Brutos bled into that character too. And then finally, once again, Mindhunter, you have ed Kemper, right, and this is more in the background story. It's not so much in the film, but it is in the novel. And of course the person portraying Buffalo Bill in the film would have known this, as the backstory of his character is that he killed his grandparents and was committed

to a psychiatric institution. Well who did that, Ed Kemper. So just in that one character, Buffalo Bill, you have that many serial killers. And I mean, we can do Hannibal Lecter too if you want, or we can leave that a bit of a mystery for people who might want to read the book. But there's stillers that inspired yeah Hannibal, that you've never even heard of, and the foremost one you definitely haven't.

Gainesville Ripper a little bit. You also have the Mothman prophecies two thousand and two.

If you don't know the story of the Mothman and injured cold and all the things that happen in Point Pleasant, West Virginia between nineteen sixty six and sixty seven, which actually results in like a major disaster in which a bridge collapses amidst all this, and then stories of men in black showing up and everything, things that didn't even make it into the movie. This is a case of where this story is actually far better than the film and writing it. Writing it felt like being on acid.

I'll just put it out, well, it was surreal experience to write it.

Mofmann prophecies like you were on acid. How about the Conjuring two? Tell us about a little bit about that.

a claire voyant or whatever. And they were also involved apparently in the Amityville though that never actually made it into the movie. Actually the Conjuring two starts with the house in the Amityville Horror, so that appears in actually both films. So yeah, those are I mean, those films are decent. I mean they're good little horror films. Some

people like them more than me. I thought number two is the better of the two, but essentially, yeah, the first one, the Conjuring one, is about the Piran family who move into a house, a big old country home in New England, and they find out that it's haunted by a woman called Bathsheba Sherman, who was believed to be a witch, and that the house is full of

all kinds of spirits. And so there's the story of that is told in the film, but I actually tell you the story that came from the family themselves and the involvement of Ed and Lorraine Warren. I should say that I also looked into anything paranormal with a skeptical eye and I always found I always found things that were suspicious, and that one's suspicious. The conjuring too, that my mind, was a better movie that's set in Enfield, North London, and that was a big case at the time.

That was all in the British newspapers. This was something that someone wrote a book about later. This was like an ongoing thing where police were showing up at the house and there's items flying all over the place and the police can't explain it and they've got, you know, once again, parapsychologists and involved in there, and everyone trying to figure out what's going on and the possession of this little girl and potentially her sister and so yeah,

Edam Lorraine Warren. In reality, in the film it depicts them as central to it. In reality, they just kind of popped in and you know, I don't think they were there longer than a couple of days, and it's much less dramatic. I think the final prognosis on the Enfield Poltergeist is that once again we have a mischievous little child who has some issues and was able to

fool a lot of adults. And I think people struggle with that explanation because we think of children as I mean, it's bad enough to be fooled by another adult into believing that something supernatural is going on, but how can a kid pull it off? But they did catch this little girl, some of the paranormal investigators, the parapsychologists, they

did catch this little girl setting things up. So she maintains this day that she didn't and she's you know, still makes little public appearances every once in a while. But now it's I guess it comes down to your degree of belief. I lend you know, I tend towards skepticism, and so yeah, I detail both of those stories and the investigations into them and all the players involved in Behind the Horror.

true stories and inspired horror movies. Also, you've been on this program a couple times with your books Cold North Killers and Rampage, tell a little bit about how they might take a look at your work, and do you have a website, and also about your podcast Murder was the case? Right?

you about that relations Yeah, thank you. Yeah. So there is my twenty twelve book Cold North Killers Canadian Serial Murder, which covers sixty cases of serial murder in Canada, and you can get that on Amazon as you can also get my twenty thirteen book Rampage Canadian Mass Murder and Spree Killing on Amazon, and that's about the same subject, a fewer cases, but I think well written. I was

a little wiser at that point. And then I have some academic books, but you know, if you are really into criminal psychology, yes they're expensive, but they might be worth picking up. I wrote a homicide, a forensic psychology casebook, and you can learn everything that you can't learn anywhere else about NECROPHILICX and sexually statistic offenders in there, about what psychopathic violence is like, and then I actually have a book which focuses on the topic of necrophilia itself,

Understanding necrophilia. If you really want to go down into the abyss, we go there, and I say we because I collaborated with other people on that. And then after that there's the Crime Book, which was a coffee table book that I helped author. I wrote a good forty percent of that. That's from the same publisher as Behind the Horror, DK Books, which is a Penguin imprint, so you know it's high quality stuff. You don't get a

contract with Penguin unless you're a good writer. And that The Crime Book has got everything from famous heist to white collar crime, to serial killings to strange cult like behavior. It would make a terrific Christmas present. And so there's that one, and there's Behind the Horror, which we just discussed and you can get that on Amazon. And I've got to tell you then, I've got one coming out in February, once again with DK Books. It's all written and this was the one I actually had the most

fun writing. And if you want to talk about the feeling like you're on psychotropic drugs while you're writing it, this is conspiracies Uncovered, and I didn't do a hack job on it. I really delved into it and I got about I don't know how many made the final cup, but I got about fifteen really compelling conspiracies into that book. Conspiracy theories, starting with Operation Gray Wolf, you know, did Hitler actually make it out of Germany and live in Argentina?

And ending with the COVID nineteen Like what all the conspiracy theories surrounding that. That was an interesting conversation with the publisher because I think when we thought of doing that chapter, we were like, well, that's going to be resolved and I'll be able to have some established truth so we can say what the conspiracy theories really are. And at some point we had the conversation, Yeah, it seems like the truth is getting farther and farther away

with this one. So which part is the Yeah, exactly. So I also got some stuff on Jeffrey Epstein and there and his involvement with intelligence, so there's yeah, there's some stuff in that one. Yeah, excited for that to

come out. That's my Those are my writings, Dan, And as you mentioned, I have a podcast Murder was the Case, and it appeals to a very I would say niche audience, but if you like uncensored, but not for the sake of being tasteless, but for the sake of getting to the truth and really understanding crime and particularly aberrant sex homicides and the like at you know, the highest level you can go to that I talked to all. I think I've talked to all of the experts now, but

I also teach little seminars myself. And so if that sounds like your cup of tea Murder was the Case podcast, please check that out. It's an ongoing thing. I'm really really proud of what I do with that. And I've got to say then, you know, since we last talked, there's been this big boom and all these true crime podcasts, which I know you've noticed. There's no way you didn't right, right,

But you're the original as far as I'm concerned. Now, you might dispute that you might know something that I don't. You might not think of yourself as a podcast. You know, it might be a radio show. But I just want to remind everyone, before Cereal and before all these podcasts that you're addicted to, it was always Dan Zupanski You're the guy I knew that was doing this going all the way back to twenty twelve with my first bug, So I consider you the grand master.