DARK ROSES-Michael Benson

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An excerpt from the book's final story. It is the most famous American murder case not involving a celebrity, a crime so horrible that it changed the tone of an entire city. Before throughout Los Angeles, women routinely walked home alone after they required escorts and all because of the mind boggingly bizarre ordeal of Elizabeth Short. The Black Dahlia, a celebrity only in death to twenty two year old raven haired beauty as Shobiz Wannabee was found on the

morning of January fifteenth, nineteen forty seven. She was naked, severed into two pieces below the rib cage and arranged on the ground like a piece of surreal art. Arms above her head, legs spread, a upper body parallel but to the side of her lower body. Our sardonicus smile carved into her face with a knife and portions of a breast and a thigh cut out. The missing piece of a thigh flesh was found inserted in her rectum. The skin attached to that piece contained a rose tattoo.

She'd been tortured for days, tortured till dead, drained of blood and dumped no presented at the edge of a vacant lot, left foot only inches from the sidewalk, hair freshly washed in the Limit Park section of La. The cause of death was drowning. She drowned on her own blood. The book that we're featuring this evening is Dark Roses thirteen, horrific True Stories with my special guest, journalist and author Michael Benson. Welcome back to the program, and thank you

very much for this interview. Michael Benson. Hey, thanks for having me Dan, thank you, it's always a treat to have you on. And congratulations on this latest It certainly lives up to the name thirteen Horrific True Stories. Let's just start because I gave a basic synopsis. In the synopsis, I gave a sort of the contents of this incredible book. Let's just get you talking about some of the first characters, some of the first killers and subjects of this book,

Monster of the Low Country. Tell us about Steven Stanko and a little bit about this story.

As a rule, they have no real understanding of compassion. Yet Stanko was observant, and he had emotional mimicry skills the rival and Oscar winner. He could make friends, pick up women, command the spotlight, even when he he was completely desperate and on the run for his life. As a kid, he seemed to have everything going for him. His dad was demanding and impossible to please, but Steven,

by all accounts, had a lot going on. He entered high school tall and good looking, good at sports, baseball, football, Plus he was smart. His teachers got dreamy i thinking about him. They knew that the boy was going to go far, and they were going to be able to say that they knew him. When Ostenko had it all mapped out, he was going to join the Air Force Academy. He was going to become a fighter pilot, an astronaut, and then president in the United States, and he had

to drive to do it. His father had seen to that, But then something went bad. When he was fifteen, his older brother died in a suspicious fire, and Stephen thought, like in a battlefield promotion, he would move up a notch in his father's estimation, but it didn't work out that way. Dad seemed to hold Stephen responsible for his brother's death, and Steven fell apart. Instead of schoolwork, he worked on schemes, convoluted plots, get rich schemes, things like that.

He took the SAT exam, didn't do that great. I was rejected by the Air Force Academy. So when high school was over, instead of becoming a fighter pilot and astronaut and president of the United States, he took a couple of courses at a community college, skipped class, and started stealing cars. He became a full fledged con man. He could tell lies for weeks without betraying himself, but when his lives were exposed, he was cornered by reality.

He lashed out with violence real doctor Jekyl mister Hyde type. First time came in nineteen ninety six when he tried to kill his longtime girlfriend Liz. The attack sent him to prison for eight years, and like many psychopaths, Stanko functioned better in jail. Lack of freedom helped him focus, and he wrote a book about life in prison while he was in prison. He got it published while incarcerated, and he was released a better man than he went in.

He became out a published author, and he immediately planned to write a second book, a sort of encyclopedia of serial killers, which, as it turned out, was more of a book about how to become a serial killer. Yeah. To help with his research, he found a beautiful librarian named Laura Ling in the low country of South care Carolina, but divorce, living in a tiny house with her teenage daughter now free outside of prison, Stanko couldn't write a book.

He could only count people out of money, and again he lied until he painted himself into a corner, and this time when mister Hyde came out, he came out big time. He raped his girlfriend's teenage daughter and then forced the girl to watch as he beat her mother to death. He then slipped the girl's throat, calmly took a shower, and then left, stealing the librarian's car. But what he didn't know was that the teenager had survived and it managed to call nine to one one reporting

that her attacker was Stephen Stanko. Police were on his trail in minutes, so Steiko drives to another friend's trailer home. An older man named Henry Lee Turner tells Henry that his dad has just died. He needs someone to talk to. Turner's the shirt come out in so, while Turner's shaving, Stanko shoots him to death with his own gun. He leaves laure Ling's car parked at Turner's trailer, takes Turner's pickup truck and heads off, and he decides to hide

out in the open. He drove to Augusta, Georgia, where the Master's tournament was underway. Golf tournament Tiger Wood's in the lead, but it was a tournament plagued by rain, causing the bars of Augusta to be filled with people. So Stanko put on a golf shirt a pair of cargo shorts, and it didn't matter how often they showed his photo on TV. He blended at least for a while. Yeah, he bar hopped, conspicuously, spent money, met a woman he was invited home to sleep on her couch because he'd

been drinking. I went to church with her and her parents the next morning, and then he went alone to a mall to get breakfast in a diner. And as he did this, the girl he had met the previous night got a call from her mother saying that Steve the guy in church was wanted for murder at his picture in the newspaper, so they called the police and

Stanko was arrested coming out of the diner. So is Stephen Christopher Stanko was one of the rare psychopaths who had the looks in charisma to start new relationships with both men and women and be socially active even as he was running for his life. But the question remains, did Stephen's brother's suspicious death really oil a golden boy future or had Stephen been a con artist all along with the cracks in his schemes only becoming visible following his brother's death.

Hollywood movie The Birdman of Alcatraz. But when Speck was told that he had to get rid of the bird, instead of releasing it, he threw it into an electric fan, resulting in a storm of feathers and blood, and he told the guard that he couldn't have the bird, No one could have the bird. Speck died in nineteen ninety one, his bad heart finally giving out on him. He was forty nine, but before that he made himself known to

us in a hideous manner. There was a videotape released that showed Speck in prison with female breasts the result of illegal hormone injections he'd gotten in prisoning oral sex to another inmate. Sort of a sex tape. I guess he'd called celebrity sex tape in the worst possible way. And on the tape someone asks Beck why he killed those nurses, and he said it wasn't their night.

They couldn't find out. The case grew cold, and life in glen View, Illinois went on a little sadder and scarier than before. They jump ahead eight years. There's a vicious murder of twenty two year old student model Ashley Lauren ellerin in the Hollywood Hills in a yellow wooden

rented bungalowp which I visited. She was less than a year out of school, prettiest girl in her class, and like thousands of others, every year she went to Hollywood to find fame and fortune, and not for the first time in Hollywood, a beautiful young woman won her greatest fame and death. The murder scene was on Pinehurst Road and it was discovered on Thursday morning, February twenty second, two thousand and one. She'd been stabbed the phenomenal forty

seven times. Her throat had been cut so deeply that she was practically decapitated, and the case gained much publicity by the fact that the night before, actually had been scheduled to go on a date with actor Ashton Kushcher, who was an initial suspect. He was a star at the time of the seventies show and he made a couple of movies too, And he told police he'd gone to pick her up the night before, but she didn't

answer the door. He peeked in a window and thought he saw wine stains, but he knew he'd been at a party in that house a few weeks earlier and either been drinking on so he didn't think it was blood. He was quickly exonerated, and again the case grew cold, jumping head another four years. December one, two thousand and five, a woman named Maria Bruno's asleep in her house in Elmonte, California, and she's the mother of four, recently separated from her husband.

And as it turned out, she was in an apartment house that was supposed to have good security. Dinner no good at all, and intruder climbed in through her kitchen window and stabbed her to death in her bed. She probably never woke up. Left alone with his victim, the killer had fun and mutilated the body, cut open her breast, pulled out her implants. The breasts were removed completely then and one of her nipple was cut off and placed over her mouth, which leads us to Santa Monica, California,

and another crime scene. I've walked through it, and I walked through this one at night, just get an idea of what the alleys for Santa Monica looked like. But there's a twenty six year old Michelle Murphy, and she was a fighter. She says she went to sleep at about ten thirty, woke up about a half hour later with a man straddling her, and the next thing she knew she was being stabbed in the chest, the shoulder, in the arm. She grabbed the knife. Her most severe

cuts were on her hand as she defended herself. Eventually she got a really good boot in kicked him off the bed and he retreated into the other room, and she started screaming, why are you doing this to me? And he said I'm sorry and left. He had cut himself during the attack and he just lived on the other side of the alley. So when the police arrived, all they had to do was follow the blood drops to his house and boom, they had him. And when

they tested his DNA they found bingo. Other cases popped up Maria Bruno, al Manti, Ashley Elleren in the Hollywood Hills. And then they traced his history and found out that he had been a friend of the brother of Tricia Paccaccio and Illinois. So they caught themselves a serial killer. And again his name was Michael Garjulo and his la trial was spotlated because Heeshton Kutcher came to testify for the prosecution, and that was the day that the most reporters were there.

their disturbing nature. Book was originally going to be called I Will Show You Monsters, but I didn't like it because the eye and the title is me and my son is living in la and he was taking some experimental nighttime photography and he took a picture of a rose garden at night, which ended up being the cover of the book, and I said, well, that's it, because you could feel the gloominess coming off the photo in

a way that I thought was unusual. So we call it Dark Roses and the stories themselves, those are the dark roses which grow out of blood soaked soil. King Creep. This is about the murder of Denise Amberley in Northport, Florida. There was a home invasion. She was the young mother of two boys. She was taken to the killer's sex den raped repeatedly and then driven to a secluded spot

and shot to death. Now, the case had a particularly sad angle in that Denise, who was the daughter of a cop and really smart, managed to get a hold of her abductor's cell phone. She called nine one one and gave a real time account of her predicament. Incredible, and at the same time, fellow motorists who saw Denise in the car in obvious distress called nine one one and told the location of the car in real time

to the nine one one operator. But as fate would have it, the nine one one operators shift was almost over. She failed to absorb the import of what she was hearing, apparently, and Denise went unsaved. Between the time that Denise was abducted and when she was killed, police received six nine one one calls, but by the time Michael King's car was stopped, he was alone and there was blood splatter

on the car. Michael King, King Creep as I call him, grew up in Michigan was not a terribly bright fellow. He had for years managed to make a living as a handyman and a plumber, and for the past couple of years things had been on the downturn for him. In two thousand and eight, when this happened, his life was a mess. He was thirty seven years old, divorced

with custody of a son. You could no longer afford dating a series of unusually small blonde women, some of them riddled with dysfunction, but all of them looked younger than they were, and it was getting harder and harder for him to find real work. Who was facing foreclosure on his north Port home. He had already had his apartment emptied a furniture by one of his exes, So he's angry with the women he dated, all of whom were diminutive blondes. He was a pervert, and he didn't

go out of his way to hide it. He liked pretending his girlfriends were really young and he did not have a criminal history. But when the monster with him came out, it came out big time. His financial worries and his girlfriend troubles combined into an intense anger with a strong sexual component. In an frustration, he decided he was going to steal a woman and take what he wanted. But as it turned out, he stole the wrong woman

by Denise calling nine one one on the killer's phone. Uh, there's no better evidence, is there?

weapons from a local National Guard armory. He had planned on smuggling the guns into Mexico to sell, but he was convicted and given a twenty five year sentence. Dorothy remained completely under his spell and continued to see Gary as a wonderful husband and dedicated father who was a victim of an unjustice and he'd been framed and he was actually a nice man. She told friends and family what a great dad Gary was. He called home every day to check on their progress and the guide their

lives with his wisdom. And the three boys, who were inseparable growing up not only close in age, but they felt like they were outsiders in their community due to the fact that Dad was away. On July nineteen sixty six, it happens to be the same month that Richard Spec did his thing. Gary was released early, serving only five of the twenty five years he'd been sentenced to, but

he didn't stay out for long. He went back in for passing a bad check, and while he was being taken from the court to the prison, he shot and killed correctional officer Jim Steiner, a crime for which he was sentenced to life in prison. Now Dorothy constantly reminded

that her children their father was actually a victim. He only shot that security guard for self defense, and the boys grew up thinking that their dad was wonderful, and when he asked them to help him escape from prison, they agreed to do it, and that happened in nineteen seventy eight. Now also escaping with Gary into the US

Southwest and was another hardcore criminal named Brandy Greenwald. Greenoald, Gary Tyson, and the three brothers went on the lamb together and the idea was to frequently switch vehicles, stay ahead of stay ahead of the man. But twice when they switched vehicles, Gary and Greenowald, to the horror of Tyson's sons, killed the owners of the car and their families, which included a baby and his mother, both shot through

the head by Gary tysonredible. So at this point the boys know that this lifelong delusion they've been living under the dad's a good guy, has been shattered, but they're stuck with him, and he arranges its so that he or Greenowald is with one of the boys at all. They're never allowed three of them to be together, and eventually a roadblock does them in. The oldest son is shot to death. Gary runs off into the desert and dies of exposure. Every man for himself are his last words?

Must have felt great to it. The boys who adored him and his two sons went to prison for life for crimes that they never would have committed in a million years if they hadn't loved their dad.

both men and killed in a deserted place. After each murder, the family would up and move to another area and the process would begin again, and police never connection between the murders of the doughnut girls and the bad checks being passed. It took a while before they realized that those two things went together and this was a family doing these crimes. But once they got in the habit, McCrary and Taylor were killing two or three women per month.

The murder that undid them was the murder of twenty year old Leora Rose Looney on August twentieth, nineteen seventy one, the men sat in a diner, drank coffee and waited for the other customers to leave, and as soon as they were alone with the girl behind the counter, Leora,

they did their thing. They took the money from the cash register, They stole Leora, they took out in the Wilners to be raped and then killed, and one witness the next day returns to the scene and tells the police the coffee cup on the counter, that one right there, that was the one that was being used by those creepy guys. So they dust the cup for fingerprints, and

perfect fingerprints show. So the killers eventually decide that they're going to go straight, But it turns out that Sherman and Carl can only get along when they're doing crimes. The second that they try to do anything in the legitimate world, they hate each other's guts. So Carl goes out to rob a supermarket by himself, and it's a disaster.

He doesn't get nearly all the money. He ends up shooting and wounding a cop in the parking lot making his getaway, and witnesses get his license plate, and by the end of the evening, a full swat team is at the Mercrari family home. Carl and his wife Ginger are arrested in Texas soon thereafter, on June twenty fourth, nineteen seventy two, and the fingerprint from the coffee cup

matches Carl's prince. So Carl and Sherman ended up confessing to seven murders, although the belief is that there were many more, and Sherman ended up committing suicide in prison.

apparently vanished. He was an information technology specialist making good money and also missing was his car and he's reported missing by his sister on Wednesday morning, And at five point thirty Wednesday morning, a mena night farmer named Lowell Weaver, is on his bicycle in the town of Jerusalem, New York, near Penyan and he's on his way to do his farm shores and up ahead, as he peddled along the shoulder of the road, we received two vehicles parked alongside

Adams Road. Because he nears the vehicles, he saw two figures having a discussion, each standing between the cars. He sped up and heard their voices, but he couldn't understand any words. Later that morning, he's coming back on his breakfast to break Farmers have breakfast breaks and the cars aren't there anymore. But he sees a shovel lining by the side of the road and some crumpled down weeds. So he follows the smash down weeds into the woods

and he sees a tarpaulint. He lifts the tarpaulint and what he sees sends a chill running up and down his spine. It's a bare human foot. So we dropped the tarp ran, got on his bike and called the police. Please find a small hole had been dug nearby, and it looked as if someone had intended to bury a body but found it too hard and gave up and

covered the body with the tarp instead. The deputies removed the tarp to completely expose the body, and they winced at the face because the killers had used a corrosive drain cleaner to eat away the victim's face hope, hopefully posthumously and most likely to delay identification. Garrett had been used to choke the life out of the man, and the medical examiner later confirmed that the cause of death

was asphyxiation. Now, the deputies at the scene are stunned because this effort has been made to slow the identification of the victim. And while they're looking at it, a phone goes off and the phone is in the shorts pocket of the victim. Wow, how stupid could the killer there? They're not dealing with murdering here, obviously. They answer the phone and it's Craig's sisters saying we're looking for Craig.

We're worried we can't find him. And the cops say, we think we think we may know where he is. So and while they're wondering, who would be stupid enough to remove the guy's face but leave the phone in his pocket. Authorities had no trouble tracing this back to Craig's family, another lovely family. His estranged wife, Laura, is

trying to get a divorce. There's a nasty custody battle going on for the youngest children, and she wants to run away with her new boyfriend and they pull out of a pond in mending ponds in the Rochester area, a black bag that contains work gloves, disinfectant, and six empty bottles of drain cleaner, all of which can be

traced to Laura's sons. And there's a trial, and the trial mixsed the front pages every day in Rochester, and the two sons, the wife, and the wife's boyfriend are all tried together, and as it turns out, all of the evidence incriminating the boyfriend are acquisition of the materials used in the crime. He was there when Laura bought the draino and the bungee cords and the tarp, but there was no evidence whatsoever that he knew what that's was.

Four right, So the wife and the two sons are convicted, and the boyfriend was absolutely acquitted. And we don't even use his name in the book because he's free. He's an innocent man, free to go about his life without an intent.

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promo code true Murder at sign up. That's one hundred dollars off at talkspace dot com promo code true Murder. Now, Michael, we were talking about another story that you have included in this incredible thirteen horrific true Stories. Tell us a little bit about this savage waitress Rachel Wade.

well young man who likes to have a lot of girlfriends. Yeah, and Sarah and Rachel were trading insults online. And the story is old enough. So this is my space. It's pre Facebook. But in a previous generation hours, for example, two girls who were having a war of words with each other would have cooling off periods because they would physically separate. You would have to call on the phone in order to talk to the other, and who knows

if they'd answer. But with social media, there's no way for the pressure to release, and things amp up quickly. And the other factor is that because the messages were put on social networks, they were in essence insulting one another in public right. So anger is increased tenfold by humiliation embarrassment, and the case continues to build until there

was a fight in the middle of the street. It was supposed to be a fistfight, but Rachel pulls out a kitchen knife and stabs Sarah to death with it. There are four eyewitnesses to the stabbing to on either side, and their stories, of course, are very different. Rachel's friends spoke of a small woman, Rachel's tiny defending herself against three larger women who had all jumped out of a

van together and came at her all at once. Sarah's friends spoke of Rachel charging at Sarah and immediately plunging the kitchen knife into Sarah's chest and until it all fell apart. Josh Camacho had his ducks in a row. In terms of scheduling, his girlfriends were perfectly complimentary to each other. Sarah was a high school girl with a curfew she had to be home early. Rachel was a restaurant waitress who wasn't available until late. Camacho was a

constant player. Considered both Rachel and Sarah as friends with benefits, and most people understand that phrase to mean a non romantic sexual relationship with no pretensions of monogamy, but nobody told that to Rachel and Sarah now. In terms of their personalities, sexual and otherwise, the women were also complimentary. Rachel was a cute you know apple She worked at Applebee's. She had a wild lifestyle. She was a sexual experimenter, and she was unfortunately as intense out of the sack

as she was in. Whereas the much larger Sarah, you know, she'd been a heavy girl when she was young, and she was kind of a late bloomer, and she was new to the world of sex and needed to be taught. So she switched schools to be closer to Josh Camachu, and she adored him completely for reasons that befuddle adults everywhere. Now, a large contributor to this entire tragedy was opiate addiction.

Right a frightening number of the city's young people were addicted to an opiate painkiller they called roxies, and the brand name was roxy Codo, apparently the same as oxy Codo. There are blue pills, and the kids called them blues.

There had been a major theft at a pharmaceutical warehouse and hundreds of thousands of pills were swiped, one crime that caused a tragic wave of serious drug addiction throughout Florida, and kids taking the pills were completely unaware that they're becoming addicted to the same active substance there was in Harrowing. They just they made them feel good that pretty soon they needed more pills. So girls got hooked, and soon enough they owed a debt to their male suppliers. Now

there's a tendency for young people to feel immortal. They don't feel anxiety about danger the same way adults do. They're careless, They're reckless, and that natural tendency was exasperated by the roxies, which further removed inhibitions and created a pain free illusion of euphoria.

other than to say she hated him. Now, according to New Jersey psychological counselor Kathy Morelli, there's a change in brain chemistry that happens to people, and they have sex of biological attachment forms and brain changes they shared experience produced. They cause potent emotions, causing normally mild people to resort to violence, And there was nothing normally mild about Rachel.

repeatedly because of an unwanted curfew. As for the cyber bully, and the mental health specialist I spoke to agreed that parents should have a monitor on their child's smartphones and computers, and they should check in silently to see what was being said in their child's world. They need to know that even though it's a virtual world, it's a real place with real feelings being created, not imaginary cyber threats.

These things can turn into real violence. You know, Sarah's friends served as the virtual bully, egging her and Rachel on and in teenage navete. The Sarah camp thought it wasn't real and no violence would occur, but boy did it. Ever.

There was a moment during the trial that was just amazing because Rachel was put on the stand in her own defense, and once she was doing her direct testimony, everything went swell because her lawyer led her through her testimony almost word by word, you know, she was in fear, she was attacked by three girls at once. She follow

weapon was necessary. Well, cross examination was a different story, and the prosecutor just lit into her and pretty soon had her in tears and babbling, saying things like I didn't mean to murder her, and yes, I threatened to kill her, and then I carried out my threat. So anyway, she's she's in prison for a long time, and from her latest Department of Corrections mugshot, you know, the twinkle of youthful cuteness she used to have is now gone. She's just a con.

of women. Whether this is another case where the victim is a very tiny blonde woman, now, whether it be bondage or in which a master ties up a slave, and renders are helpless or pedophilia in which men desire small girls or small women who look like small girls. The resulting sensation of power and complete control is a perk. But the bottom line is that these things make the

man aroused yet unafraid. Now, the thing with the knots being a signature was true in the BTK case Dennis Raider in Wichita, Kansas call himself buying torture and kill, and it was true in the case of Richard Cottingham, whose story was told in a recent ne flick show Times Square. You've seen it, Yeah, really good. Yes, and it's true in this case as well. Our story takes

place in Edgewater, Colorado. It's a sleepy suburbs on Sloan Lake just west of Denver, population about five thousand, and the place resembled a picture postcard three hundred days of sunshiny year. Everyone knew everyone, and nobody locked their doors. But on the afternoon of September fourth, two thousand and three, that sense of security was shaded. A highway worker was picking up debris in a front loader alongside Highway six in Clear Creek Canyon when he made a puzzling discovery.

It was a plastic bag with something sticking out of it, and when he hopped down to take a closer look, he saw it was a decomposing woman's leg. The man immediately called nine one one. Police arrived and determined that the woman had died in a bizarre and sadistic way, something out of a horror movie. She was tied up tightly with rope and her face was masked with duct tape. Now the body was identified as that of Heather de Wilde, a young wife and mother who had been reported missing

six weeks earlier. The story had been big news, her face had been on TV and the front page of the papers. Now, her husband was a piece of work. He was one half of twins, identical twins. He was Daniel, his brother was David. They were both porn addicts. Daniel in particular enjoyed looking at S ANDM porn, which featured women being hurt and bound. He'd gone as far as to try to make money by making his own SNM

video with his wife as the victim. Anyway, and that turned out to be his undoing because it looked like the twins were going to get away with the murder until investigators took a close look at the porn movie that Daniel de Wilde had made, and the knots in the movie we're exactly the same as the knots on the woman's body busted.

forty seven changed the tone of La. La went from being a overgrown little town where people felt safe to just a horrible a place where this horrible thing happened. And again, the victim was a woman who came to La to find fame and fortune and instead found brutal death. And she'd been found and tortured for days before her death. Now I've read I think every one of the books written about the Black dalli right, and I was never ever happy. Two unrelated authors both claimed that their dad

was the killer. Yes, one of them had a better case than the other, but neither one of them had that gradud case. And then I read Black Dahlia Red Rose by Pwee twelve and I don't know if you've had her on your show, No missus Eatwell who She lives in Paris. I had a chat with her. She was watching Saint Peter's burn out her window. Yes, you know, we saw it on TV. I thought it was horrible. She was looking out a window at it, so I said, well, it was me on nine to eleven. I got to

see that out my window. But anyway, lovely lady. But she wrote a book that that didn't seem to rely on any of her relatives, didn't rely on any LA celebrities to sell books. She went to the LA police files and she dug out the truth. And I don't understand why her book isn't more famous. I was tempted to write a book about the Black Dahlia until her book came out. Now I don't have to. She did

the work. She found two promising suspects who were, for no apparent reason allowed to escape, and upon closer examination, the pair a narcissistic pimp and a well connected restaurant tour. They looked guilt, but the police dropped the ball seemingly on purpose. She even found the crime scene, which was, as expected, a bloody mess, and she found a hotel,

a motel that days after Elizabeth Short disappeared. Witnesses were saying one room was completely drenched with blood and fecal matter, but they didn't call police because they were a sleazy motel, and they discouraged the police from coming. So, I mean, it's unbelievable that you can find how much blood in a hotel room and not call police. But the police in La were different. They were corrupt through and through. You couldn't trust that they would go after the bad

guys because the bad guys were often connected. Yeah, I mean, all of the all of the books on the Black Dallian mentioned this that LAPD was so interwoven with corruption that the killer, even if he was known to the police, could avoid investigation if you were a person with the right connections. And that's the case here, which is scary, And I mean that the LAPD is not like that anymore.

And when it did get better, it did some real damage control, mostly through the efforts of Jack Webb and he showed Dragnet and Adam twelve and the LAPD is now a sophisticated and fair minded force, but in nineteen forty seven not so much. And I've written about it from the other side too. I've written books in which La gangsters, you know, include top cops in their numbers.

she was going to show him. So she swallowed a bottle of pills, got behind the wheel of her car and drove until she passed out and crashed. And she almost killed herself in this way. She really did in a long time in a coma, And when she woke up, she said that she had gone to heaven, and God and a bunch of other men with beards told her that they weren't ready for her yet, but she still had a mission back on earth, and they sent her

back to complete her life. And her mission was to rid the world of pedophiles jazz like the ones who had abused her when she was a little girl. Yes, so, after her husband dies unexpectedly, she recruited mentally handicapped men to work on her horse farm in New Hampshire. She

then had sex with them. She dominated them, and she made them under duress to say the least confessed to pedophilia yea, and to incest, at which point she said, Aha, now God has given me permission to kill you, and she killed them, chopped them up, and burned their bodies in a big fire pit in her front lawn. So, I mean, this is the rarest of all serial killers.

That women serial killers are rare to begin with, and often they kill in passive ways, they poison their boyfriends or but here's a woman killer who's beating the crap out of her victims until they're dead and then chopping them up. And then she was like a like the Witch and Hansol and Gretel, only she didn't care about the little girls. She just wanted the little boys in

her oven. And Dark Roses concentrates on Sheila's bizarre behavior because if you can figure out what was going on in that tortured brain of hers, let me know, as I've looked at all directions and it defies absolute interpretation. Now, in normal conditions, it's hard to determine when a person with mental problems is malingering, since the malingering itself can

be a simctim of the illness. So I provided as much as I could about what Sheila did and what she said about what she did, But what was actually going on in her I mean, did she really believe she went to heaven. Did she really believe that she was justified to do these things? Or was she just angry at men because they'd abused her when she was little? You can't tell now. When I went to Epping, New Hampshire to cover the story, I was busted by the

local police. The two Epping New Hampshire cops took me into their station and handcuffed me to a bench. Now they let shield would go for months, even though they knew something was seriously bad was going on at the range. But they had no trouble busting the writer who came up to.

And instead of one cop going to get the search warrant and the other one's staying with Sheila, they leave her alone in the middle of nowhere and they go get the search warrant together by having to come back, the bone's gone, the victim sneakers are gone, and she'll's covered with ashes. Anyway, Luckily, Sheila tape recorded the torture

sessions of her victims. She had on tape their confessions that there were pedophiles and they committed incest and claimed, even after she was arrested, that this was the reason they had to go. She'd been sleeping with pedophiles. They needed to be burned, and she quoted, you know biblical passages they talk about purification by fire. Anyway, I managed to to photograph the crime scene and eventually the charges

against me were dropped. Yeah, I was working, and but you know, I don't don't want to go back to that Big New Hampshire anytime soon. So if they're worried about becoming, they don't have to. Sheilla's in prison for.

summer souls just crimes get ickier. Around the first few days of summer two thousand and eight, ran off Vermond area and a man named Michael S. Jakes was what you might call a kiddy porn enthusiast, and he belonged to a club he'd found on the so called dark web called Breckinridge. Now Breckenridge may have been his own invention, and the guys who the other members were his friends and acquaintance, says, or it was just the tip of a Breckinridge iceberg that the rest of which we haven't

seen because it knows how to stay submerged. But club members shared photos and videos and sometimes victims. Now Jake's was an active member of the group. He'd already recruited and videotaped a number of young victims, giving his comrades the kind of entertainment they wanted, and at some point he decided to up the ante. He had these girls convinced that they would be killed if they failed to

serve their masters as ordered to do. Now, Bereckerrine was an organization that recruited nine ten eleven year old girls and told them that they had to learn how to be adequate sexual partners for these men, or else bad things would happen to them. And they're basically terrorized into

being these guys little Nymph at Playmates. Now we talk about a girl in the story named Janet had her real name, but she was one of Jake's success stories, and she'd learned all the sex acts and she was very close to getting the seventy five percent approval rate she needed to graduate Wow, and Jakes tells her that he really would rather talk about sex and pleasure. But there comes a time sometimes when girls won't do what

they're told and they are scheduled. This is quote scheduled for termination, and sure enough, Janet finds out that her friend Brooke Bennett, twelve years old, is not behaving as she should and has been scheduled for termination, and Janet is forced to Jan's told that if she finally does the right thing at the last moment, she might be able to save herself. But it's up to Janet to

help get Brooke Bennett into Michael Jake's house. So they come over together under the lie that there's going to be a pool party, and Brooke shows up with her bathing suit and Janet leaves and Brooke Bennett was missing. Her body's found and cops know who's responsible right away because Jake's Janet and Brooke, Bennett were all all appeared on a surveillance tape at a convenience store earlier on the day of Brooks murder. So they go after Janet

and they start questioning Janet. Finally she starts to say, well, you know, I belong to this club. It's called Breckinridge. We're supposed to have sex with men. And she says that Michael Jakes is one of the guys. So and it turns out that the Janet's stepfather is another member of Breckenridge, and he's in Texas throwing hard drives out the window when he finds out that Jake's has been arrested. And it did a horrible thing to that area of Vermont.

The crime happened in the early summer, and at the end of the summer, all the way to Halloween, they were so traumatized they were talking about canceling Halloween because of child molesters. Right, hopefully, hopefully they've recovered to some extent now. The case did bring about some legislative changes in the way pedophiles were treated in the court system, because Jake's had been arrested multiple times for the same stuff, and how every time he'd been let out one time.

He was let out early on purpose because they wanted him to get into a program for pedophiles, and you couldn't do that when he was a prisoner, so they let him out. They led him out to do it again rather than keeping him in jail and away from little girls. So it's a guilt that that section of Vermont had a lot of trouble shaking.

cover design by my daughter. It's truly a Benson book.