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You are now listening to True Murder The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zupansky, Good Evening.
During World War Two, Lithuanian collaborator Sylvestris greek Shell had been plucked from a Nazi death camp and sent on colvert missions by his Allied handlers. Now, during the Cold War, he'd been redeployed as Steve Griggs, a nondescript American husband and father of four, serving stateside as a cook in the U. S. Army, though still doing back black bag jobs on the side. This dangerous, volatile man was consumed by an insatiable appetite for sadistic violence and psychological torture,
and now his obsessions involved his own children. Our story begins just as Griggs and his lovely wife Diane placed Diane and Stephen in a secret multi generational program from experimentation, study and training with psychedelic enhancement. With each episode the brave boy and his clever sister survive, we come to appreciate how they've managed to prevail, and, like Hansel and Gretel,
emerge from this matrix of horror, triumphant and transformed. Sondra London has published Confessions of serial Killers and research some of the most depraved criminal minds of our time. After twenty four years of studying the real life monsters in cages where Murder Road comes to a dead end, Sondra declares that nothing in the true crime genre compares to this vivid and intimate account of surviving mortal terror at
the hands of the undetectable serial killer Silvetrist. The book they were featuring this evening is Good Little Soldiers, a Memoir of true Horror, with my special guest, journalist and author, Sondra London. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Sondra London, Well, hello.
Dan, how are you? I always admired your podcast and I'm proud to participate.
Thank you very much. It's been a couple of years since we spoke and it's my pleasure to have you on the program with this incredible book, Good Little Soldiers. We don't want to get off base because we only have an hour to explain this very, very complicated and incredible case. Suffice to say, let's just say how you came to be in a position to write Good Little Soldiers. Tell us about that.
Okay, I'll try to cut to the chase, and we'll already start with me having been exposed to a serial killer myself at a young age and written a couple of books on that, and we'll pick up where I was under contract with the filmmaker to research mind control and went to a symposium and that's where I met Stephen Griggs, and Steven sent me a box of research that he had done on his case. And this is
how I learned about the whole case Stephen. I dealt with Stephen for three years before he felt that he'd me enough to allow me to be introduced to his sister Diane. And then it was Diane's voice and Diane's experience in Diane's character that really drew me. I didn't work on the book right away, but that story just haunted me and I kept coming back to it, and all in all, it took thirteen years from the time I met Steven until I was able to really complete this project.
What's interesting about this book and so unique is that, as you say, you're the author of books that are incredible for rays into the minds of serial killers, and that has been established, that research and all that work that you have done. What is it about this case in particular that's much different than, as you explain, say, a true crime story. What is the difference between this memoir and a traditional true crime story.
Okay, First of all, a big, big difference is the point of view, because I had concentrated on bringing out the point of view of the killer before, and in this case it's the voice of the victim, an intimate witness, the killer's daughter, and so it's that particular experience is quite different. The other important aspect of the difference is the very idea of true crime. And since we're here on a true murder show, I better go into that.
My understanding of true crime has come to be that this is a marketing term, and that a true crime book relies upon headlines to do the publicity for it, and it relies upon going through the court process to vet and validate information the book is going to include. So, in other words, ripped from the headline is the key
to true crime. And since our perpetrator here was never indicted, never convicted, and went his entire life as what I call the undetectable serial killer, then we didn't have the advantage of those court records. We didn't have the publicity that's generated by you know, a nationwide man hunting the nicknames, you know, like the nightstalk or all of this is
a marketing category that true crime sits under. But I did not want this voice to be lost, even though it could not meet that firewall, and so I declared it its own genre of true horror, because that goes to the horror of knowing an experience, feeling an experience, having an experience, and then when you go to try
to tell about it, you're met with this belief. And that is a big part of the narrative of the book, is these kids telling and telling and telling, and in detail exactly how the consequence is unreal from telling these unwonted tales.
Now you start again, We're gonna do the voice of Diane, and she knows herself as Annie, so we can call her Diana, we can call her Annie. But did you talk about just right from the beginning taking us right inside to the going to the fort. So tell us how old Diane or Annie is at that time, and then describe this experience as you do in the very beginning of her going to this for an examination at the fort, and tell us what the fort is, and tell us a little bit more both this.
Diane and her brother Steve and her children of a soldier and they live on base, and so they live in housing on the grounds of Fort Devons And Diane was six and her brother was nine at the time when our book starts, and her dad and her mom take them down to the office at the fort to actually go through a gate and go on to the fort itself, and then they go to a clinic and they actually sign Diane and her brother into a experimental secret program for what they called the best in the bride,
and they were chosen to be in this program. During that scene, the father tries to promote the fact that he has these other kids and maybe they'd like them too, and then no, they said they were not qualified, just Stephen and Diane were. And so that goings on where they were taken down to the clinic for a period.
There it was every day, and the clinic was a clinic above ground, but then they had a spiral hall that gradually would go down to below and at that point they called it the lab, and that's where a lot of this special training was going on. Now we've heard I didn't I didn't want this book to come out until people knew what mind Control and mk Ultra was because I have so much to tell and I can't just go on and on. I have to fit it into one book. So I wanted people to know.
But now it's become diluted because people say mk ultra about everything, including Beyonce and jay Z, you know, and that's gone far afield from the real thing. But you know, the program was only funded in nineteen sixty one, and Diane and Stephen were already in the lab at that point. But that mk Ultra was not the first program number one, and not the first government funded hypnosis and LSD treatment
of children. This is already going on for three years on the record at the date that Diane and Stephen entered into that program.
Now you talk about what would be the potential advantage. I mean, it seems altruistic that the parents would want to have do whatever patriotic thing they could do.
He is busy.
Oh yeah, there was money, but the money it actually actually everyone clearly stated that that money was going into a fund for the children when they got older. But the father is such a psychopathy, willfully misconstrued that, and he had all he thought was money, and by that he meant money for him now and eventually that his terrible character was the big reason why the kids were bumped out of the program. Is he went down there and tried to shake them down wanting the money, and
he stole equipment from the lab. When he was allowed to bring them deliver them to the lab in the morning and walk in with them. He stole equipment and got caught at it. So you know, I mean, don't get the idea that some kind of big genius mind control murderer, some kind of intelligent person, you know, someone with ethics. This is just a real jerk in every way.
Now you talk about right away at a very very very young age. And maybe he could tell us how old Steve is in comparison to Diane ars Old. There are two pardon me.
Sorry, three years older.
And there's two other daughters as well, right, and so you talk about that right away. Diane and Steven are witnessed to dad's incredible psychopathic behavior, but soon that turns into more of again he uses the children as a ruse to do the things that he wants to do. What are the children, right from the very beginning of this book, what do they witness in terms of behavior.
From their say, sadistic murders? And they were not like you know the book, and they did run into the so called serial killer experts at the FBI would try to browbeat them with their theories. You know, the book is that serial killers have a compulsion and then they reenact their fantasy over and over and they leave a city natural. All that is a bunch of TV fiction makes a good you know, fiction plot. But this guy right here, regardless of other serial killers, this guy right
here was all over the map. He did every kind of murder and I really didn't. I only included some in this book that kind of maintained a kind of a continuity of a story that get there were a lot more so. You had the sadistic murders of a long drawn out courtship and torture of young girls. You had the rape and murder of a little black boy, uh in a very sadistic scenario in which he involved Diane and Steve. And then you had these almost reckless,
careless type murders. You know, there were five dead bodies of soldiers. We don't know how they died, but you'd get the children out of bed and make them go with him while he took those bodies out of where he had them and transported them somewhere else and committed a necrophilic rape upon one of those dead soldiers' bodies.
So you really, I mean, hmm. You'd like to think that there was a pattern or something, but the scope of these guys activities was much further than I could include in any one.
Book you talk about it. At the same time, the fort where they were where the testing was done on Stephen and because they didn't want.
To it was a lot of training. Now there was testing, but they were undergoing military grade training.
And to what end? What was the purpose of this training? Why were they selected and what was the purpose of their training?
Well, we can only reverse engineer that, and we know that overall the goal of the mk Ultra funding was to create super soldiers, to militarize the mind so that somehow or another, people could more effectively be compelled to kill on command. And really that was part of the dramatic development in the book where that became the crucial question revolving around Diane's participation. But I can tell you I have interviewed, oh my goodness, over a dozen other
people that were involved in these programs documented. I have the transcripts, and this scene was re enacted well every time, really, because it always comes down to them. In other words, the idea is will you kill? And the hypnotic procedure is to break the personality to set up a scenario where the hypnotized altar believes that their conditions are being met.
In other words, if you get them to agree that they would kill to protect their mother, they could be hypnotically persuaded that this person they're being pointed at is trying to kill their mother. So that's a simple explanation of what everything always came down to. But along the way you got to realize along the way a lot of these this was not just pure clean medical or anything. It was crazy people down in there. And they did a lot of really sick and crazy things at really
no point. And I'll point to Louis Jolian West, who was of the premier mind controlled experimental doctors and prestent of the United States American Psychiatric Association. He handled Jack Luby, he handled Patty Hurst and so forth. And what did he do. He dosed an elephant with enough LSD to kill him. Within five minutes, the elephant was in seizures, and within an hour the elephant was dead. Now what
was the point of that. I suppose you could say, well, we need to know how much LSD it takes to kill an elephant, right, But that's how you had the ideal under which the terms were granted to do this research in this training. But then you had just anybody in there that had real perverted in stadistic leanings. Now that said, I need to get right in here and say that this is not the nature of dying in and Steven experienced. They were not treated sadistically, they were
given acid, they were put under stress. But the horror stories that I've heard, like the Sleeping Room and many of the other stories, and I do list of books at the end of my book that people.
Can refer to.
You know, it was quite a lot of horrors, but in the case of these two dying in to this day very grateful for what she became from going through that.
Now, just for those that again this there are skeptics of this, but it was very interesting the collaboration or the the the consistency between Steven's account and Diane's account. When you first started this, was there any have those stories mesh so.
That you okay, he was that they aren't really that consistent. And Stephen was three years older than Diane, so he was over in Germany and he saw a lot of stuff in Germany that he's able to describe. But what Diane saw unexperienced in Germany remains kind of dream like
when she describes it. And also the two of them were not were rarely together in the in the lab that most of the work that was done was kind of on a one on one thing with the kids being worked in with worked on with equipment, and she only saw Stephen in passing at the lab and when they were large experiences like a group hypnosis. And also Stephen, Stephen had has a different way of seeing things. He's very he never dissociated in his life. Uh, he's very
like an engineer, like a boy. He's an all boy. He's like an engineer and very practical, reorganized. He had a mission even as a little boy to get to stop his father, and he compiled evidence, and he compiled dossier's and Diane was reluctantly dragged into all this. And Diane is very imaginative, is dissociative. So even though they could both be in the same scene, they would experience it differently. When their father tried to kill Diane, she
manifested a spiritual being that comforted to her. Of course Stephen did not.
Let's talk about some of the events that Diane and Steven witnessed and then later were reported to various authorities and we're disbelieved. Let's talk about one particular case. Well, let's talk about some of the first cases where they notice a stench in the home and then they're as curious and inquisitive children that didn't trust their father already at that point, What did they see and experience and then what is the mother's reaction.
Yeah, the mother is a real curious character. And there's always got to be one in the mix that performs those functions that the mother is very important in the whole overall dynamic. So Dad's away for the time being, He's just not there, and so the rest of them are there and they, you know, they just think, oh, it's under the house, must be a cat. And so Mom and Diane and the others stand outside. The said get under there, Steve, and you go go get it.
And so Stephen crawls under the air. He's the only boy, you know, and so they gags. He comes out. Oh no, He said, did you get it? And he said no, he said it's not a cat. And he said, hello, what do you mean? He said, it's a woman. He said, how do you know? He said, I touched her leg and it was shaved.
So the mother is incredulous, but.
Well, they said they had to get that thing out of there.
So eventually Dad.
Came home and then he had to get it out. And everybody was put into this. In other words, Mom always had an alternative version. You just had a dream, you read it in a book to encourage anything, to deflect the idea that this is something that actually happened to you. Then the other part of that dynamic was that he had her blackmails. And for example, he had insurance policies on all those children, and anytime she would talk about, oh they're how broke they were, she would
leave her. Any it caused any trouble at all, he would literally pull them out and brandish them in her face and say, well, I guess it's time to cash in one of these policies.
Yeah.
The oh she she And she was so broadly and assuming that subservient role to the dominant male, that she had no confidence in her ability to survive as an independent person. She was convinced that that how would I live? And all she knew how to do was be his woman, and the children would bag her to weave and everything.
And the great deal of the books had interactions between the children and what they would say, what she would say, will work out the details of that exactly portray that personality for you, And you would see the woman can and again covering up for the father and brushing all the children and getting desperate saying just shut up, just shut up until it goes up, until she died and he remained living there with her.
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You talk about some of the psychologic terror that he inflicted on his family, the Russian roulette game where with one bullet in a chamber and you shoot Diane and she dies, everyone else lives. So he did that sort of insane pick picked the lesser of two, I guess evils for you. Yeah, to kill this part, kill your fall.
The book of this book is psychological because it's not just the crimes that were committed or that had come before the bar, it's the whole picture. And I mentioned before how he had killed these that he had taken the children to disinenter these five soldiers, and when he packed them into the transport, he was kept commenting there, look at him grammed and they're just like sardines. Then when he got home, Uh, he pulled out, you know, a can of sardines and he would eat it and
looking at Diane and he'd say sardines. He'd just like sardines. And uh, to use that keep the children continually intimidated. He had goals. He had a goal to use those children to deflect suspicion. And it seemed to get a victim to come along. And that is something that Lucas and Toole did. They used the children, Becky and Frank that way to get people to trust them so give them access, and he did that. He also wanted to terrorize them. And for thirdly, he kept trying to turn
them into his apprentices, specifically Steven. But Steven is a pugnacious character. I don't care. He must have been that way when he was exactly worn because it just didn't ever work. And he'd tried with his father and he would just resist him and insult him and so forth. But his father continued to try to teach them how to get away with murder, how to dispose of a corpse, and the children were horrified at the very IDEA.
Yeah, you also talk about not only was the mother incredulous to what the children said about their father when the father used them as tools to be able to rape, sodomize, and murder, but also that the mother was employed. You talk about this incident, maybe you can discuss it where they put up a ruse where they had their car stopped. They put up the hood and a wealthy man stopped and the mother was a participant. Tell us about that she was used.
To lure someone to stopping. And then again there was just completely no point in that murder. And I included that because it was well described and complete, it wasn't fragmentary, but it just did start to illustrate that and the other purpose. It's also always to intimidate the mother and children, to say, if I can do this to them, I can do it to you. And that's what he did with Diane's precious toy. If I may, I'd quickly like
to interject. They often asked me to generalize from all of my research and things I've learned, and any contribution I've noticed that was new, And I wanted to say that in many cases, those who turn out to be serial killers have had someone to deliberately victimize their beloved pet or toy at them and specifically do it as a way to terrorize them and to impress upon them
what can be done to them. I can't tell you how many cases I've been on where we're totally interviewing someone and they just go on and on about their crimes, the terrible things they've done, but when it comes to what was done with them, they break down. They can't even talk about it. And these are very profound experiences. And that's what Dad did. He had her teddy bear, and because they told on him down at the school, and the school brought in the priest and they told
the priest. The priest went to the army and told the army, and the army came to him and he said, I'm going to kill you for what you've done. I'm going to burn out your eyes for what you've seen. I'm going to burn out your tongue for what you've said, and he started with the teddy bear. You see, that's important if I'm doing a case study, that all this
be put on the record. This kind of victimization of a toy or a pet is something that has jumped right out at me in case after case after case, and sure enough, when she saw her pet beeting victimized, he was putting it in the fire. He's burning her pat and she and Steven went into action. He grabbed Diane's head and ripped her hair back and went after her with a red hot poker from the fire to
jab her in the eye. Steven kicked him and threw him off balance, and it only burned her in the neck, and she carries this hideous scar to this day of the burn to her neck. When they took her, mother finally took her into the doctor's so oh, she spilled some hot coffee on herself and then doctor didn't believe. They said, well an iron fell on her, okay, and anything to protect the father. As soon as she came
that Diane was left unconscious. He was hit on the head with a shovel and knocked unconscious and covered over with leaves. When she became aware over twelve hours later, she said that the woods taken care of me, and she was still alive. And she came home half dad and bloody, And what did mother scream? Your Dad's going to be so mad at you for staying out all night. Like that and scaring him.
Yeah, here you odd. You also talk about some of the people that look like it's promising that the children can go to them, tell them the truth and they might be helped. And that's why they went to these people and tried to speak to them. And there's a couple characters who maybe could talk about Aunt Magda and also then Grandma. And then when finally they get to tell somebody at school about.
This, well at school is the what I just told you when they told the when I say the nuns that was at school, the nuns that they told told the priest, he told the army, and the army told Dad, and Dad tried to kill Diane and she got away with just that burned to her neck. Now, let's go back in Magda. That was a fascinating and charming interlude. Really, and Magna evidently is an older sister of Sylvester. She knew him in the old country, she knew his ways,
she didn't trust him at all. Evidently, from time to time he had come slinking around the good part of the family, trying to get some advantage. But it came a time there where we dressed Diane up and of course, Steven flicked his hair back and took the children to go visit Aunt Magda. They wanted money. He you know,
he had squandered what he had. So Magda turned out to be just a wonderful character, and she did take Diana aside, and she inspired her so much and gave her so much hope of that there was a life in that she was somebody. She noticed that Diane had the two different colored eyes, and she said, that's in our family, and it runs with the second sight and the ability to sensitivities that you have, and you must protect that. She must not let anyone know what you love.
And she gave her all kind of really good instructions and some good clothes. For once in her life she was able to put on some good clothes thanks to Aunt Magday. They went away and went back to their usual pattern, and the money that had been given to the mother for safeholding, he the father, couraged the mother into giving it up to him, not being able to spend it on his children.
You also talk about another hopeful character. It seems a very likable person, this uncle Frank, which is really there actual half brother, not their uncle, but regardless, tell us about the Uncle Frank confrontation and what comes of that.
I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about, but what it reminds me of is when she drew the picture. Is that what you're talking about, Well.
Just what she had said Uncle Frank and then what he had done in response.
Well, I think that that developed out of her drawing the picture. And she was supposed to draw a picture, and she drew this man with an erect penis and brandishing a hatchet, and that was supposed to be there like Christmas greeting and everything, and the Steven tried to tell her, no, no, no, that's not right, you know, and you can't do that, and they sent it to them and it came out through those sources somewhat of what they were going through, but of course it was
not well received. Right, So, at any rate, any of these other peripheral people that appeared to offer hope were never able to materialize anything that actually solved the problem.
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date funding. Lightstream dot com slash murder. Now Sondra we talked about you have an your book incredible instance of murder rape that are that are perpetrated by silvestros and undetected by people, it seems throughout this entire murderous event, but there are people that are suspicious. But as I mentioned just before we went for break, there was a particularly incredible story that's important about a black boy that's befriended by Diane and then the father takes it upon
himself to kill this young boy. Tell us about this incredible story.
Oh, it's so hardrending this story of Jimmy. Let me say first of all that there was a documentary made by John Edgington that include Diane and Steven and and in the making of this documentary, John Edgington put Diane through the most incredible h torture uh that I thought it was quite unethical, and they forced her to have an averg action of this whole incident while the cameras are rolling, and then unbeknownst to your viewers, the film ran out and Edgington said, hold it right there, can
you do that again? And that was the conditions under which that was brought to the screen. I posted that video on YouTube, but John Edgington fell short of giving any credibility to what went on here and actually contributed to my designing this book a true horror, because he felt that he used that term that you're going to have to find a publisher that will handle true horror. And so with that said, I will tell you what happened.
And the story unfolds as our villain, Sylvia Stress, works as a cook on base and his boss is a big, jolly black man, and so Sylvestris comes and he brings the two kids with him to work. Then he goes off on some detail and they're there with the man and they have the most wonderful time, and he shows them how to cut up carrots and talks to them and encourages them, and they just have the most wonderful,
heart warming scene. Then Dad comes back from his errand she's dying cutting and starts getting mad and saying, oh, she can't do that, and interfering, and they get into a bit of a discussion there between the boss and Sylvestris, in which the boss somewhat chides him for the way he's treeting his children and kind of tries to in a very gentle and in civil way, tries to encourage him in the ways of how you can bring a
child along without browbeating them. And so forth. Well, then he has his little son there, little Jimmy, and Jimmy's Diane's agent. He's a bubbly, little, happy little guy. And so Jimmy and Diane become close friends. And then they have an older brother that's Steven's agent. They start hanging out those two and they're getting along great, just great, and Diane's just delighted to have met this charming little
boy that she enjoys so much. Jimmy. Well, by the time you've come to this part in the book, you know what that means to Sylvest's It strikes at his sick soul, and he developed such a hatred for his boss, the man that had showed him up, and determines how to cause the most pain for everyone. So he tells them, let's have a picnic. Invite your little friend. He will pack him out on a picnic and tell him it's
a si, a secret and a surprise. Uh ho they do, and uh they picked the little boy out, and then Dad gets the kids drunk, and and then he starts driving around crazy and then he tells little uh, little uh Jimmy, yuh, don't you you wanna drive? He sits him up in his lap, and the little boy drives. He's so exciting everything. Then Dad says, now you've got to pay for it, and the little boy says, what do you mean, bayam I have anything? Just a kid?
He says, oh, you know what I mean, and then he proceeds to viciously rape the child dying and Stephen in the backseat. Dad and little Jimmy in the front where he's raping it rapes him viciously. Then the kid pukes and Dad throws him out of the car and tells Diana Stephen to clean him up. And it's think it's uh the little boy, he's just crying, you know why he's doing this to me? And then it gets worse and he takes them out to a remote location where there's a pump house. Now I go up in Florida,
we didn't have pump houses, but evidently it's a thing. Right. So it's like a little concrete building and I guess there's a pump in it, but it's called a pump house. So he takes a little Jimmy out there and incarcerates him in the pump house and leaves him and the children go try and sneak in there, comforting whatever. Dad
comes back. He takes him out to the actual well and he puts again like with the the uh with the guns, with the Russian roulette, and he makes Steven have to push, uh, push the little boy down and fight with him and take a knife to him and fight. And Steven, no, I don't want to. They said, well,
are you going to do it to Diane? He's gonna put Diane down in the well then, uh, you know, And so always using the fatal encounter for the most maximum torment and torture is what takes him beyond the beyond the pail from your run of the milk killer, uh, torturing and going on with this, putting the little boy down the uh, the well, closing it over, taking Diane and and Steven lim bringing them back, pulling the little boy's body out of the air and putting it in
the trunk, putting Diane in the trunk with the little boy corpse, taking them out and undergoing a more degradation of the corpse, showing demonstrating teaching Diane is Stephen how to bury him, Oh he won't fit, and kicking his skull in viciously and making Diane Diane's in dissociation. No, that's not Jimmy, that's not to me, So yes, it is. He grabs her hand and forces her to rub his little burr hair so she can feel it, and makes
her participate in the degradation of the corps. Well, this is a the point is made there of how he uses the children. The whole horrible story goes on afterwards, him taking Diana Stephen and going back and visiting the boy's father and putting him through torture and torment, psychological torment about his missing son. Then the father lost his job from the you know, unable to continue, and Dad got a promotion, so he had another bar added. So then he would tell Diane that that she deserved that
bar because she helped him earn it. And that's what we're using the you know, the uh the sardine can to trigger. Afterwards, he had would keep those little trigger mechanisms and then bring them out to further terrorize the children.
After this and after all world had.
To be put through this for that movie. You know, the whole Jimmy thing is just horrible, But that's why I chose it for the cover of the book. I I experimented with about five or six different artworks, and then when the Diane saw that one with Jimmy, she said, Bingo, that's it. That's the heart of the book right there.
Yea.
And with this too, you say, is the heart of the book. Is also this triggers this Uncle Frank comes over and says what's wrong? And then so Diane can't help herself, and Stephen is also wanting to talk, so it comes out to Frank. What does Frank do? And then it also slips out at Grandma's house, So more and more they're these somebody now all the way through.
To where they're grown up, and they have an encounter with the FBI, which it describes is very telling, very telling, and that was one of my favorite parts of the book, where they're trying to tell them, oh, serial killers don't have families. And Diane eventually she jumps right over the desk and grabs a fi ah by his tie. If you tell me what a serial glory this will walk you up in a trunk with a victim, you know, And Stephen pulls her off, and now now Diane, you know,
by then, Diane's a big woman. She's over sixty toll. Whenever anything gets kind of harry with her, she says, look, don't even try it with me. I'm too big, I'm too smart, and I am absolutely fearless. And she's a terrific person having come through these incredible ordeals.
Let's talk about another very important event in here with a military officer named McCaffrey. And this is the guy that doesn't like dad. And again we see what happens when there is even a sense that he has been humiliated. So tell us a little bit about this instown.
Roles again at the consequence of these kids trying to talk and tell and so then this time Dad takes them out to this firing range on bass and then he says, oh, we're gonna play baseball. You know, they don't have baseball if they don't have bats. What he has is a gun and he's firing, and the children are dodging the gun flyer. This is out on the army's range, you know, and there's you know, a guard tower and everything, so shall we say, did not go unnoticed.
So after the little interlude where.
Different things happen and the kids, he gets the kids back, they run away, He gets them back, gets them in the car, and then here comes a motorcycle which is an officer military officer officer McCaffrey. Stephen notices on his name label, and he said, what are you doing? You know what you're doing here, and everything is that they're my kids and so forth, and at any rate, at one point he's summon higher brath. A car comes with brass in it. There's a conversation that goes on. The
brass goes away. He's not able to to arrest him or anything. He'say, okay, but you know, I'm aware of what you're doing and we're watching you now. And so that then he goes on home. Then he tells all of us to Mom, and he's like, Mom, you have to conspire, and you have to go back and you have to get that book that he wrote up and that he wrote this incident up, and you have to go get that book from that soldier and destroy that incident report. Is his idea of how to deal with
this now. So Mom takes Stephen and Diane. They go down the air. She tries to seduce McCaffrey. McCaffrey's having none of that. And as far as taking the book out. It's hopeless, it's ridiculous, it's a fool's errand. And this chapter ends with her crying on the phone. I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it, you know. But it's not over because it picks up somewhat later with Stephen and I Diane watching out the window during a thunderstorm and the dad dragging a corpse out up the hill
out to the shed. Well, it's a long story, but that soldier shoe fell off, and Stephen sees that sh shoe. Then he used it later to negotiate with his father and threaten him that he has the shoe. He made an evidence box with the shoe, with the ID and with a card from a CID officer who told him he was looking into his father. He made an evidence box and put the box and put all that together
and buried it. It's a long, long, long, drawn out series of consequences that unraveled as the fact of Steven knowing about this and resisting it, and so that said long sequence in the book referred to as the shoe. But it unravels because Sergeant McCaffrey caught him in the act of trying to kill both kids.
As a result, when you talk about the that Stephen knows and says to the mother, how can and it's increasingly he's confronting the mother, Ye how could you? How could you let this person do what he does to us? But also he's done to you and what he's and he's killing people, and so the the the idea that he's saying is that how could you possibly let this man do this?
And it's just a portrait, an accurate portrait of one of the component parts of a very dire social construct. There's always got to be someone like that involved for something to go this far, someone who is complicit and
who derives some some material benefit from the cooperation. Well, not to change the subject, but Danny Rowling case, it was well documented that the mother was abused even when Danny Rowling was in utero, and the father knocked that stomach and knocked her down the stairs and continued and throughout that boy's life, it was constantly asking her, please, let's leave, let's leave, but she would not, or she would leave, you know, or make a gesture and come
right back. And so I'm saying that to say that this is a component part of that dynamic it could have been. You know, if that person would have been able to handle it differently, it couldn't develop that far.
You talk about that the military, when you talk about McCaffrey, there seemed to be you're write that there was some investigation they were watching Stephen Griggs.
Now here's where we go off into can't prove area. And this is why so many people stay away from this kind of story, because you can't prove anything, but also to simply offer some observations that might go towards explaining why this cannot be closed. When you have a small community that has nothing, and they have a big military base there, they have every reason in the world to bow to their precedent. And when they have soldiers that are involved in cases, they bow to the CID.
They refer it to the military. Now if in fact the military is having a secret program that's going on there, and you know, of course that brings them a lot of money, and they do have operatives who are being sent out, a man with dual citizenship who came over from Lithuania, who's been caught time and again acting stupid and crazy. And take people like this that you are using, you are you know, we can't put in our book
what the government was doing with him. These were recreational murders that were witnessed by the children, but they were using him. And if that's the case, then whenever anything came up with his name, it would be referred to the appropriate authorities who would handle it their own way.
And in fact, that program was evidently dismantled very shortly after the children were dismissed from it, and that both Diane and Steven witnessed the scene they described as a stand down where armed personnel came in and told the people at the lab to get out and they took over in the According to Diane and Stephen, the program
was shortly after our dismantled there on the base. And then when their father got out, he wanted to get some benefits, you know, negotiat negotiate his benefits on leaving the military, and he tried to contact the commander and they said, no, he's no longer hear what command or what program. There was no program. You were not in
a program, and that was how that was settled. So this leaves all the room in the world for not only honest skeptics, but for paid operatives who are on orders to exploit these lines of reasoning and discredit anyone who comes forward.
Certainly, you talk about later in the book that mum is finally institutionalized with a mental breakdown, and then there is an incredible event where Diane finally fully confronts her father about murders and rapes.
Yeah, a little bit of conflation now on the family history. One of the sisters was institutionalized. The mother did go insane, she was non compost mentis, but did die at home in her bed. It was a sister who was put in an institution. So anyway, yeah, a mother died and dad was there, and I forget what was your question.
Well, we talk about the confrontation with his father.
So Diane had a daughter, a little girl, and she's amazed to admit that she actually took her child and came back into the home as an adult, even though she'd been through all this. And she explains to this as part of the effect of suppressing all those memories that they were in order to get on with life and to just keep putting one step ahead of another. It's not possible to dwell upon these dire experiences, and so the mind is helpful in feeling that over as
much as possible. But the memories did come back because Mom died or I guess you was dying. Everybody knew that the family was getting together. Well, what are we going to do now? Because we've got a little brother here, and then Stephen and Diane and a sister. All three remember Dad molesting that little boy, the new brother. They
all remembered it. And so that was a moment where the secrets had to go and where everybody had to become galvanized, because now Mom was not going to be in the home and the father would be left there with the little boy. And at that point the memory
started coming back. So I mentioned this in detail in my analysis at the end of the book because so many skeptics point to the allegations of cases where false memories have been suborned by dishonest therapists, and I wanted to ensure the reader that nothing of that nature took place here.
Right, You talk about that Diane stopped speaking to Stephen when she was eleven and didn't speak.
They had to speak now and throughout their whole life, these two will avoid one another because when they look into each other's eyes. It brings it all back. And I'll just tell you that for both of them, and they they lived not too far from each other, they don't see each other, they don't talk, they don't want to think about this. Diane went through this ordeal in order to resolve it, to put aim into it, to bring it out. You know, so long as you hide things,
you don't know exactly what they are. You can't tell the edges of them, the scope, the dimensions, the properties, the abilities if you're hiding it. And the only way that we say you come to terms, well terms, coming to terms is like writing words and capturing it, putting it all down, putting it all outwithstanding questions about it, going through it. And then Diane's done. She is done. She said, I'm done, no interviews, no appearances. I don't
want to talk about it anymore. And that's a wonderful thing. You know, I respect so much. You know, you don't really like she calls it going down and to the hole, and she says, I don't have to go down into the hole anymore. I know what it is. It's the whole.
Yeah, you have a dramatic scene in there with the FBI how to tell us a little bit about this dramatic interview with the FBI and their conclusions and how they dismissed all of this.
Well, again, it was Stephens, the generator of the action, trying to get this man reported and stopped. And he had his whole val least full of material. And so when they finally admitted Diane and him in there, they were very smirky and very dismissive and say, you know, every time someone comes in with one of these big boxes, I just roll my eyes because I know that they've been to everyone else and no one else has listened
to them either. And then they you know, they tried to tell the simplest thing they tried to tell him is that serial killers aren't family men, you know. At any rate, they tried to dismiss their veracity. And this film that John Edgington did have the same net effect, although if you carefully watch it, he doesn't disproved anything, and he hooks Diane and Steven up to electrodes and no one can say that they're lying, no one can
say that they're crazy. But then they bring on an expert from somewhere else who doesn't even know them who starts talking about in cases like this, And so they managed to cast dispersions on the sanity of the person because this is the easiest way to get funding for a documentary. And John Edgington had told me himself, as far as all that MK Ultra stuff goes, I wouldn't touch that with a ten foot poll. It just won't
go there because it makes life too difficult. But you see, those kinds of editorial decisions to not go there is what keeps this stuff going. People who make the decision, well, I can't talk about that even though they know it.
That is a dynamic that is counted upon in the planning of these adventures that people don't want to talk about things that are disgusting, and people don't want to hear about things that are incredible, and people don't want to go down a rabbit hole of something that's very complicated. And so these are what I call shields that protect a high level crime from investigation because people automatically turn away on their own choice.
Yeah, what was in conclusion and what was it like speaking with Stephen and speaking with Diane considering once you knew their ordeal, what was it like? What was their car heart.
Just heartrending. That's all I can say is, you know, it would just tear my heart out, really, and that's why I felt I had to do the story. It has so much heart, and tried not to do the story for many years and just so heartrending. I have to say this about Steven. Stephen has a tendency to confabrulate, and by that I mean a process by which a person knows about point A and about point C, and they were a little vague on how they got from A to C, and then they come up with an explanation.
And so their example would be you were at home, then you work what route did you take? And your answer would be, well, I went down main Street. And you'd say that because you always go down main street. While you were going down main street, you were listening to the radio, you were thinking about your girlfriend, you were everywhere else, but you will just say I went down main street. Now Stephen does that, and Diane has
faulted him for doing that. There was a merry go round horse she wanted, and he found a merry go round horse and he said that was it. That was the one, and it wasn't the one, Okay, that's an example. It's a it was a different one. It was a merry go round horse from another year and another place, and and sure enough it was familiar, sure enough, it was part of the life. But it is not the one that he said it was. And that's a very
simple example of confabulation. But he doesn't dissociate, right, Steven will confabulate, but he won't dissociate. And Diane doesn't confabulate. She'll just say I don't know, but she does dissociate.
You talk about how silvestrous Stephen Griggs was found by David tell Us just when he died in the circumstances.
He died of malnutrition, died at home of malnutrition. Well, we can construe that as him being in control of his life to the very end. And by God, if he didn't want to eat, he wouldn't eat, I guess, Or if he wanted to eat junk, he'd eat junk, so there would be no one there to care for him, and he died.
Who found him?
I'm sorry, I don't know, or if I did know, I forgot m.
I thought David had felled him his brother, I.
Mean, I mean the young son, the youngest son. Well, I guess he did because he was living with him.
M hmm.
It wasn't Dian or Stephen. I know that it probably was the brother because he was living there, m hmm. And the one sister, the one that was not hospitalized. She went was interviewed in the John Edgington film and she gave very persuasive testimony consistent with the father being exactly what Dinah. Stephen had reported that he took Diana Stephen off away from the others and to her as
a kid. She always thought that meant they were special USh And then another time and she told one of her friends he was a Russian and he liked to beat her to death. She heard her mother screaming, you're gonna kill her, You're gonna kill her, and she did believe that he was going to kill her, and he
did believe that he could and would kill her. And so you know, I also had testimony from two individuals who knew Stephen in the program, and no one has come forward that remembers Uh encountering Diane, but two people remember Steven and one woman who had not read the book described as scene almost just like the one with Diane. The business about who will you kill? And in the book UH, what happens with Diane is it Stephen jumps in and defends the child against the soldiers UH and
interferes with them. And this woman came forward to say that he did that for her and she called it. She say that he saved her life when she was being traumatized at the hands of the MK ultra UH operatives, that Steven came forward and saved her life. Another girl remembered seeing him up there in Canada at the Bronsman estate up there where ew and mccameron was doing his work up at McGill University. She saw Steven there and Steven told her you had your little puppy with you.
Your hair was blowing, you know. So I mean you can't just completely say well, you can't prove it, so it can't be true. Another thing I'd like to comment on is usually when people disbelieve something that can't be proven, they say they just want attention. And I want you to know that the kind of attention that you get from this kind of a story is horrible. It could include depth, and it is not welcoming by anyone. No
one welcomes this kind of story. No one gives you any kind of sympathy or kindness and much less, you know, money and fame. No, you don't get that from this kind of story. So enough with the attention thing. You don't want that kind of attention.
No, what's evident in this story too, and again again, the sort of upbeat part of this book is that Diane and Stephen, despite their treatment in the program and by the atrocious behavior of their father and all of this, all the people authorities they went to without them being believed these two people are especially brave individuals. Stephen very I.
Tell Stephen all the time, he's my hero. Diane had commented that I was asked said something about what she learned or what they taught in the program, and she said, you know, it wasn't like they taught it. She's like it was in us, and they brought it out in us. And she said that for once in my life, someone believed that I could be somebody, someone believed that I could do things. And Diane had manifested some shall we say, unusual abilities, and upon those occasions Stephen would I don't
think they were in the book. Even Stephen would always tell her, don't let them know you can do that. But Diane was always bursting with pride. She just wanted to do more. She just wanted to achieve and for her potential to come out. Stephen was always cautioning her, you, why do you always want to get everything right? Why do you always want to be the strongest and the best? He says, they just want to get you for that. You've got to stop. You can't let them see what
you can do. And of course Stephen was right, But that's the different kids and their personalities and the way. I think that the program probably saved Diane and transformed her into the powerful woman she is today. She's an ordained minister and she surfs, so she had married a surfer. She goes surfing every day. She's in her fifties and supremely fit to ride to horses, and she has somebody to love.
Yeah, yeah, it's a little bit of a right spot in this very, very very dark story. I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about Good Little Soldiers, a memoir of true horror. Sondra London, Can you tell us about you mentioned the video? Can you tell us where people might find more information about this fascinating story and more about your other work about serial killers.
All right, I'd like you to go to Good Little Soldiers dot com because I have posted the links there to first of all, some excerpts from the book, and you get the text, and you also get Diane reading from the beginning of the book, and then you have my afterward where I talk directly to the audience about
these issues. And you also have the links to the video John Edgington video Our Father the serial Killer, as well as a video I posted of an interview I gave on Coast to Coast about this book, along with some visuals that I put with it. So all that you can access easily one link, which would be Good Little Soldiers dot com.
That sounds great. Now you asked thoughts.
About my other books, if I could squeeze any quickie here.
Sure.
I had one book called Knocking on Joe Voices from Death Brother and that came and went over in England. Then I had three books published by Farrell House and Faraoh House is one man operation and the publisher is Adam Parker. He recently passed away, and so I'm looking forward to seeing if I can bring out new editions of those books with more information about Danny Rowling, about
Gerard John Schaeffer, and my encyclopedic volume True Vampires. So all three were Farrell House books, and I hope to bring out new and improved editions of those.
That's fascinating and incredible news. We'd look forward to getting you back on and talking about those three incredible classic books and what you are going to update those books with and add that will be very very interesting. I want to thank you very much, Sondra London, Good Little Soldiers, a Memoir or True Horror. It has been fascinating. Thank you very much.
You have a great thank you for the opportunity, Dan, I will be very proud to join your roster.
Thank you very much, Sandra. Do you have a great evening alrighte Bye bye