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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 DTK. 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 Zupanski.
Based off Hannah McGuire and Sirruthie VALA's popular podcast of the same name, Red Handed, explores real life true crime cases to help answer, once and for all, if a killer is born or made. After meeting at a house party in London, where they discuss a mutual obsession for all things true crime, so Ruthie Bala and Hannah McGuire drunkenly promised to one day start their own murder podcast. Six weeks later, they order their first microphones, and the
rest is history. From the hosts of the hit podcasts Red Handed, dubbed by Anna Paquin as their all time favorite true crime podcast, Bala and McGuire have amassed a cult following of spooky bitches. What is it about killers, cults and cannibals that capture our imagination even as they terrify and disturb us? Do we find these stories endlessly and equally compelling and frightening? Because they hold up a mirror to society's failings and to the horrors that we
humans are capable of. Red Handed rejects the outdated narrative killers of killers as monsters and that a victim was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Instead, it dissects the stories of killers in a way that challenges perceptions and ask the hard questions about society, gender, poverty, culture, and even our politics. With their trademark humor, research on real life cases and unflinching analysis of what makes a criminal, Bala and McGuire take you through what drives the most
extreme of human behavior. Find out once and for all what makes a killer tick. The book that we're featuring this evening is Red Handed, an exploration of criminals, cannibals, cults and what makes a killer tick with my special guest podcasters and authors, Sir Ruthie Bala and Hannah McGuire. Thank you very much for this interview and welcome to the program. Tarruthi Bala and Hannah McGuire, Thank you.
For having us done.
Thank you.
We're super excited to be here.
Thank you so much.
Before we start, for my audience, i'd tell us a little bit about your award winning and and hit podcast Red Handed, and how you.
Started your podcast.
We actually so it's difficult to keep track of this number because we just sort of have lived, eaten, and breathed the podcast for the past half many years. But we are pretty sure that about four years ago, four and a half years ago, we didn't know each other at all, and we just happened to meet at a party. And I think in the States, podcasting is about five years ahead of where we are in the UK.
So back then, finding anyone who.
Listened to podcasts full stop was a revelation, like let alone bumping into Surru at this party, and we listened to all of the same murder podcasts and had all of the same interests in all the same theories.
About the same thing.
So it felt like this incredible moment of like, oh wow, this is something really special.
And then we sort of half jokingly.
Decided to start a true crime podcast because we thought that women's voices were yet to be heard, not in their entirety, that's the wrong way of saying it, but we felt like we had something to.
Offer, We felt like we had something to add, so.
We decided that we would start the show and then against the odds, we did and here we are four years later with.
An award and a book. So do what you say when you're drunk is the answer to the.
Question right now.
Can you tell us about the book itself in terms of the contents.
Yes, absolutely so.
The book really was as as Hannah said, we've been doing this for four years now, and we realized when we went into COVID Lockdown that we weren't going to be able to do any of the live shows or anything that we had been hoping.
To be able to do. So it felt like the right time to.
Think about putting down all of the stuff that we had learnt over the course of four years into this book, and it really has become this culmination of everything that Hannah and I have learned over the past few years, because I think one of the great things about true crime books, obviously, is when you read them by an investigative journalist or a former detective, they have one case that they're so passionate about that they know inside out
better than anybody. And that's not really what we do on Red Handed. Every single week we talk about a different case because that's what fascinates us, and Hannah and I are very much armchair detectives. We're not experts in this. We're not investigative journalists, we're not detectives. We are just two lay people who happen to have an interest in true crime, and we like to think, are eternally curious
and ask lots of questions. And so the book, really, what we wanted it to be about wasn't one specific case. We knew that that wasn't the right fit for us. What we wanted it to be was an exploration of the key question that always comes up any dinner party. I go to anyone who finds out what job I do, question they ask is why do they do what they do? That's at the heart of every case that we do. So we thought, let us explore this in an entire book.
And I think one of the key things that we realized as soon as we started brainstorming that was that often people call killers monsters or this, that and the other. And we don't really like that term, not out of some sort of misplaced sympathy or empathy for these killers necessarily, but the idea that otherizing them, calling them monsters makes it the easiest way possible for us to distance ourselves
from that behavior. Behavior that is very human, and usually what leads a person to become a killer is something
very human. So we sat down and we wrote down sort of as many topics as we could think were many factors that we could think that influence a person from maybe being a quote unquote normal person to being on the path to murder, and the eight that we came up with were very much genetics, childhood, insanity, misogyny, cults, relationship, bigotry, and sex and those things, as you can see, are things that are very human. They make us all who
we are. And so it was the perversion of those things and the way they become twisted in the life and influence of a killer is what we want to explore chapter by chapter, and that's basically what the book is is every single chapter is an exploration of a different, very human factor, using various different killers as case studies and all of the most relevant and research and recent research that we could dig up to try and address each of those factors separately and answer that question of
what makes a killer tick.
You explore nature virtus nurture, that ongoing debate in your first chapter with called genetics, but you also talk you cite examples to discuss and one of those is The Brunners Boys and Bundy's pcl R tell us a little bit about some of the things that you discuss in.
And the Browners Boys.
Well, actually, in the writing of that chapter we had to do quite a lot of confronting of what we thought we knew but had wrong. Right, So, as you're working in the true crime space, the warrior gene comes up a lot when you're talking about psychopathy, when you're talking about their congenital violence. Right, that a person can inherit a likelihood to violence, and the warrior gene has gone to and from in lots.
Of different arguments by lots of different people, but.
It's generally accepted now to not be an effect at all, not at all. But it's not this miracle like violence gene that people think it is, or it has been like perceived to be. It just doesn't have that as much sway as it seems like in the press. It's a good headline and doctor Phil had a great time on his episode. But and we have previously done a lot of stuff on the warrior gene and we had to take that part and look at it in another way.
So psychopathy is now accepted to be more genetic than other personality disorders.
But you.
Can't attribute it to a singular gene. It's just reductive.
Right.
You feature a case a killer Bradley Wardrobe knew you titled it Born to Kill. What did you see with this case that ended up being decided as a voluntary manslaughter? Can you describe a little bit about this case and why people might think that that was a irresponsible sentence?
I would think absolutely, and not to give the game away immediately, but I absolutely agree that I think it was an irresponsible sentence that was given.
I think Bradley Waldrop's case.
When we wrote this chapter, we were on the hunt for case that would really highlight the point that we were trying to make so clearly, and I think that you would be hard pressed to find one more so than this so very quick summation of it. In October two thousand and six, a man named Bradley Waldrop. He was separated from his wife. They had children together. I believe they had four children. His wife's name is Penny, and they you know, he was a very violent man.
By all accounts according to Penny, Penny didn't want to go see him, but she had to to hand the children over for a weekend, so she takes her friend with her. While they're there, Bradley actually kills her friend, Leslie, and severely. I was going to say injures that sounds far too softer term for what he did.
He stabs her multiple times.
It's a horrendous attack, and he is fully intending to kill her through the behavior. For example, he tells the children to come in one by one to say goodbye to their mother. I mean, if that is not an admission of what he's planning to do, and the fact that he was very much in control of what he was doing. I think that's a key thing, is that it's not a frenzied attack where he snaps and he
killed Penny. He's a prolonged attack that goes on for a while, and he's sadistic enough to be able to bring the children into state to say goodbye to their mother, so he's obviously calm enough at points. What happens then is thankfully the police turn up and Penny is saved from this situation, goes to trial, and you know, as
is their prerogative the defense. His defense attorney has a brain wave and says, okay, let's get Bradley Waldrob tested for you know this this Brunner's syndrome to check if he's got the quote unquote warrior gene, sorry not bruner syndrome. To check if he's got the warrior gene, which would be that he carries a specific variant of the m
ao al maoa gene. So they do this test and they find out, surprise surprise, that he's got the warrior gene quote unquote, which is just one particular variant of this m aoa gene, and they use that in court and Bradley wardrobe is given instead of what it should have been, which is first degree murder and first degree attempted attempted murder.
Absolutely of his wife.
It was reduced to manslaughter, which is completely unbelievable because, like we said, their argument was that he had the warrior gene. People with the warrior gene in all of the studies that support it say that it increases a person's sort of response to snapping and they lose all control and they can't stop themselves, and it's a fear response. Bradley Waldrop clearly didn't have that kind of response because it was a prolonged attack that went on and it had sadistic elements that he was.
Clearly in control of.
And then when the jurors were interviewed afterwards by MPR, they told him, They told them, well, a bad genes, a bad gene, and the absolute dystopian nightmare that that is the idea that we could just excuse this kind of behavior and say work. You know, Bradley Waldrop couldn't help it. He had this defective gene that made him unable to not kill his wife's best friend and try and kill his wife. I think that is completely irresponsible
and it's absolutely terrifying. And I think the more we give things like a singular gene the power to have this level of control over person's behavior is a very dangerous thing, and I think it's going to lead to more and more irresponsible sentences like this.
Unfortunately, let's talk about childhood and adolescents and mummy issues, and you talk morbid nights and murder prodigies. Just tell us what you have found in this chapter to your research.
Well, I suppose the one of a theme that comes back through and through the book, but particularly in chapter two, which is Childhood and Adolescents, is abuse in childhood can lead to.
That.
I mean, first and foremost, there are many, many people who have abusive childhoods who never go on to do anything wrong and don't kill anyone. However, in cases of serial killers, it's important to look in the childhood and quite often you will find quite severe abuse. So it's another step on the journey where for some people it can turn them to murder and for some people it can't, and we need to examine it from every angle.
You use an example of Jurgen Barsh What did you Why did you feature this case?
What did it demonstrate?
Yeah, I mean there were so many cases is that we could have chosen to explore this. It's hardly a rarity and it won't be a surprised to anybody of course that if you look into the past lives of many serial killers, you are of course going to find a childhood that is riddled with abuse in many cases,
not in all cases, which is the interesting thing. So we really did have a lot of cases to pick from, but we chose Jergenbarts firstly because I don't think he's as well known as serial killer as some of the others. And also because he had certain elements to him that allowed us to explore various different factors. For example, this idea of that very very early stage bonding between a
baby and a primary caregiver. So how once the baby is born, there is only so much time, only so many weeks, so many days, so many months for certain things to happen, and bonding is one of those things. Developing attachment is one of those things. And the really tragic thing is that if those milestones are not met during the windows of opportunity in that baby's life, sadly those windows close and they may not be able to ever be rectified later in life. An attachment is one
of those things. And Jergenbart's being born into an orphanage, being born and then his mother passing away immediately and growing up in an orphanage for the first year. Although he's adopted very quickly as a baby, the fact that he was only fed and sheltered in that year but not given the love and the attachment that he needed.
What impact did that have? And it really allowed us to go and explore some of the things that we've seen the horrific documentaries out there on things like the Romanian orphanages, the slaughter houses of the soulars they're called, And what we wanted to do here was explore the idea of firstly the impact that childhood has on the development of somebody who might go on to become violent or become a killer. But also another point we wanted
to explore was which comes first. Is it that a child is born with problematic behavior which makes it harder for a parent to bond with them, or is it the parents lack of bonding with the child that creates the problematic behavior, And that was another thing that we wanted to explore. But really the crux of this entire chapter was what type of abuse can lead to what type of killer?
And why?
What is the link between abuse and future offending, and why not everybody who was abused go goes on to do that.
Your next chapter you discuss insanity and its rule as a factor in this murder. But you have a a description here that I'll let you.
Pronounce because I don't think I'll be able to do it. Just so.
We had fun with this in the audio book as well.
They worry.
Yes, So describe this as you do, pronounce this as you do in its relation and some of the just a couple of the people, well known people that you discuss in this chapter insanity.
Okay, I think the word is it's the demon one, isn't it true?
Yeah?
Yeah?
Co well no.
Co cockademia. I feel like, you know, once you just start to say a word in your head.
And no one's correcting you, it's very hard to know if I'm actually saying it right.
But let's go essentiallyma, Yeah, it is the very real belief in a person that they are possessed by demons. And in the case of Andrea Yates, which is one of the two cases we discussed in the insanity chapter, she truly truly believed that she was not only possessed by a demon, but the devil. And in the true crime space, I think a lot of people will look at the insanity defense as kind of an easy way out.
That's actually the opposite, and we explore that in chapter three, the insanity chapter by comparing the cases of Andrea Yates and Susan Smith. Both of them killed their children, and both of them went to trial. Both of them used the insanity defense, and one of them is in a psychiatric hospital where she will probably never get out, and one of them went to prison where she has a
release date. And so the story is Andrea Yates was when you look at insanity, when to prove someone is insane, it's a very difficult thing to do, and depending on which state you are in, and these are both American cases, so we have to go through the American justice system, which, as I'm sure you are perfectly aware done, is extremely different from state to state, and particularly with the insanity defense,
there are one of two that states will use. But the main thing you need to be able to prove is that the person genuinely believed that what they were doing was right, like their moral compass was completely switched.
And in the case of Andrew Yates, it's pretty commonly accepted that she truly believed because of all of the trauma she had gone through, because she had postpartum psychosis, not depression psychosis, it's completely different, and she had been she'd gone through this psychosis time after time because her and her husband were told multiple times not to have children, but that they continued to at sort of her husband's behest, and she really believed, because of this long build up
of trauma and abuse, that she was the worst thing that could possibly have happened to her children, and the only way to stop them from going to hell forever was to kill them. And she truly believed that. And we counteract that. So Andrea Yates is now in a
psychiatric hospital. She may never get out because it's very difficult once you go in to prove that you are better, and there's multiple experiments about that, and then when you compare it to Susan Smith, who also killed her children, but it's an entirely different situation, and it was very difficult to make a case that she was in the legal sense insane because legal is.
A cultural term. It doesn't mean like insane.
As the cultural term, it doesn't mean anything medically, so it's a very difficult crossover. So what we wanted to do with this chapter was show just how difficult a proving not guilty by reason of insanity is and also that it really is not an easy way out.
In some ways, it's a lot worse than a prison sentence.
We talk about the chapter Misogyny, Basement Virgins, Black Pills, and Blue balls and what misogyny has to do with all of this.
Yes, this was a very interesting chapter. So Hannah and I for a long time actually have been very interested in the subculture known as in cells in particular, and there's no, there's absolutely not at all any case that misogyny is only affiliated with this particular violent group of offenders. It is one of the most common motivators that we
find in the world of true crime. But in this chapter we particularly we explore the in cell movement, the manosphere, everything that's going on in that particularly seedy part of the Internet, and how it has in real terms in the last few years spilled over into real world violence. And I think the point that we were trying to
make in this chapter was that in cell culture. While people want to laugh at in cells for being sort of as we've put basement virgins, and for anyone who does maybe isn't aware of in cell culture, it stands for involuntary celibate. So they are a group of predominantly men who feel very angry with women due to the fact that they are not and in sexual relationships. And
they say that it's despite having tried. But as we have found out time and time again, they generally lack the social skills to be able to engage with women, and they feel a lot of rage because of that and the isolation. And if you go into the forums that they use, there is a lot of radicalization going
on in there. There's no two ways about that. And while absolutely yes, loneliness and social anxiety and these kind of things are incredibly sad, and you know, they absolutely need help and support, the problem is is that the way that they express that rage is through violent misogyny and a hatred of women. And as we said, in
these forums, there is absolutely radicalization going on. They have conversations about mass rate, about murder, about killing women, and they don't even refer to them as women, refer to women as.
Femoids, to be female humanoid.
So they really really fundamentally believe that women are a s class, not almost non human, and so of course then it becomes much easier for them to go out there and commit acts of violent misogyny. And the key case that we focus on here is, of course, the shootings that occurred in Ela Vista, committed by a man named Elliott Roger who was at university there, and he wrote an entire manifesto about his rage. He went out
and he shot a lot of people. He predominantly wanted to go after women, go to sororities, kill the type of women he felt like he was unable to have. And when you read his manifesto, it is filled with, of course misogyny. And I think the thing that we really wanted to make clear in this chapters. While these men are of course outliers in the behavior that they're engaging in the thought process is that they have why are we not talking about this as if they are terrorists?
Because they themselves say in their interviews, on their forums and their manifestos that they are doing it out of a politically motivated aim. They are doing it because they think that their in seldom is an apartheid issue, and that is there are quotes that we have taken from their own literature.
There is a lot of that literature.
And yeah, if you're a committing acts of violence thinking it's because it's a social issue and apartheid issue, an issue of your oppression as a marginalized group, as they like to say, they're calling it a political issue and they go out and kill women because of it. It feels like a terrorist act and we would like for it to be acknowledged as such. And yeah, it's one of those things that we also talk about in here.
Why misogyny is such an easy route to radicalization for many young men who may be angry today, And it feels like it was because you don't need to go and sort of learn a whole new religion maybe, or read a lot of scripture, or change your lifestyle or change your habits. It's just believing something that already exists
at every strata of our society to some extent. And we make the argument that that's possibly why, because it is so commonplace that we're reluctant as a society to look at it as a terrorist act, and why it's so easy for people to get radicalized into this group, and why these men are currently so angry, why it's getting worse, and why sadly we're only going to have to expect more attacks like this.
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Now, we were talking.
About the next section, your next chapter, which is Cults.
Let's talk about this next chapter.
I would love to you this is actually my favorite chapter.
So Cults is something that we do cover our Red Handed but the big in the true crime world, the big ones we haven't for a few reasons because we release every week year round, so in order to do a cult that has been well covered justice, that's a lot of time and work that we don't always have because our schedule is so tight, and we do bonus contents. And that's why we were so excited for this opportunity in the book to cover Jonestown, which is the main
focus of the cult chapter. And what makes the cults chapter so interesting is that we came at it from a different angle. You'll often hear about what drives a cult leader, like what drives a cult leader to kill so many people, etc.
Etc.
Driven by narcissism.
And the hunger for power and to be important and to be this messiah figure. What is less often discussed is what it makes a normal person turn into a cult member that will willingly kill their peer or maybe that even their own child.
And the Jonestown story is such.
A good vehicle to examine that transition because the thing is like, sorry, I just drop up my phone on the floor.
The thing is.
Normal people join cults all the time without realizing. Nobody joins a cult on purpose, No one does it knowingly. People join yoga studios or you know, vegan peacock feather making workshops. No one joins a cult on purpose, and it's actually beneficial for cults to hire to recruit successful people, because that means more people will be like, oh, they seem like really high achieving, go getting people, and they're there,
so maybe I should be there also. And Jonestown is the perfect example of this because Angela Davis and Harvey Milk were all over the radio saying that Jim Jones was a visionary and that he had really had something going on because his initial message was one of racial equality in Indiana, which was seminal at the time.
So the journey of the cult member to us is a lot more interesting and what.
Happens in a cult, and you can read all about this in Cult Formation, which is obviously extremely famous and incredibly insightful.
If you're in a.
Cult, often you're very hungry, You're very tired. Hungry tired people become anxious, and they become depressed. Anxious depressed people are much less likely to try and make an escape plan. They're they're much less likely to fight back, they're much less likely to leave, and they're much less they're much more likely to do something incredibly irrational, like be convinced to murder their peer because Jim Jones told them to.
And that organization of personality is something we explore really thoroughly in this book because being in a cult and the things that generally happened to you o cult, like starvation, sleep deprivation, brainwashing, they can push anyone to a point where their personality organization, as it's called is it resembles someone with a severe personality disorder who is much more likely to do something incredibly impulsive.
Let's talk about bigotry and what you found out.
About its raw.
Yeah, absolutely so. Bigotry was an interesting chapter that actually took. It took quite a few different routes, I guess, before it got to where we finally settled with it. And I think there are so many things that we could have said when it related to bigotry, but what we wanted to keep it focused around what makes a killer tick. And in this chapter one of the things that we
really wanted to do was address a few myths. I think one of the biggest myths that we see constantly perpetrated is this idea that all serial killers are white men, and that's just not the case, serial killers are as diverse as the nations from which they are spawned, So there is no particular racial group that has a monopoly over others in terms of their representation in the world of serial killing, and so we really wanted to understand
why then this myth was constantly perpetuated. That was one part of this chapter, and you know, we explore a few different theories as to why. In particular, because this became a very US centric chapter, why say African American serial killers are ignored? Was it because predominantly their victims would also.
Be African American? But that didn't make sense.
Because when we looked at a killer like Gary Heidnik, the majority of his victims were African American.
Or at least people of color.
And then you also look at somebody like Jeffrey Dharmer, who absolutely the majority of his victims were either Asian or African American. So when that was the case, and especially Dharma is absolutely a household name in terms of as far as serial killers go, then what was the real reason that we didn't talk that much about black
serial killers? That was the question we wanted to address, and so we compared it to the case of Harrison Graham, who is a black killer who was operating at the same exact time as Gary Heidnick, almost down the road
from him, and why that case went ignored. So really, that was the premise of this entire chapter was an exploration of almost why in the media and in sort of pop culture we choose to ignore certain types of killer and why we almost do especially I'm sure Dan, you know you must have come across this in your time in true crime, almost the veneration of certain types of serial killers and the glamorization that we see in disturbing things like there are things like Etsy coloring books
of serial killers.
It's a very bizarre world. So why is that?
And is it because we have been able to give a certain type of person. So maybe white men the ability to be serial killers because in movies like say Hannibal, things like this, every serial killer movie that comes out, the serial killer is this omnipotent, incredibly intelligent, charismatic man.
And is that the reason?
Is it because we can only think about giving those characteristics to a white man in society and who knows, generally speaking, serial killers are not that charming or particularly intelligent. That seems to be another myth that we've created to glamorize them, and that was really the crux of this episode. And the other point was why did somebody like Jeffrey Dahmer and Gary Heidnick go after the victims they did?
And this idea of the less dead. Sure, absolutely, Jeffrey Dahmer says that he was just attracted to those men, and I absolutely believe there was an element to that, But it's hard to ignore the fact that when one of his victims, a fifteen year old boy, managed to escape after Jeffrey Dahmer drilled the hole in his head and he was found by police, that they simply returned him to Jeffrey Dahmer. And I wonder if they would have done that if the racial roles had been reversed.
And you do have to wonder, is it because Jeffrey Dahmer was operating out of a very poor part of Milwaukee and he was killing us that type of.
Person that people that the police were ignoring it.
So that was really at the heart of the episode.
Of the chapter on bigotry, we.
Were talking about the chapter on sex, torture, trailers, tribal tats, and truth or Consequences and you discuss with your research your brain on sex, and you cite the case of David Parker Ray and family and discuss sexual sadism. Can you talk about this chapter and its importance.
Yes, this was actually a story that we tued and throwed whether to include in the book, just because you know, as I'm sure you have a similar experience, Dan, we read a lot of fucked up shit all the time, so we are a bit desensitized.
But the story of David Parker Ray, I've dreamt.
About it ever since I read about it, and Saru has had similar experiences, so we're worried whether it's a bit too much.
But then we thought, no, this is the perfect illustration.
Because I think sex and sadism are extremely important when you're looking at killers, because a lot of people think that almost all serial killers are sexually motivated, which isn't really the case because quite often rape is about power rather than it is about sexual attraction. However, sadism is
a different thing entirely. So the David Parkeray story takes place in Elephant But which is right next to Truth or Consequences in New Mexico, And we just thought that truth or consequences was the most terrifying name for a town.
Ever, So it.
Just captures this image of and for British people, New Mexico is exclusively breaking bad. So to explore anything beyond that was a good opportunity. And the David Parkeray story is so special and so completely unique because you can piece it together in a lot of different ways. The most usual telling of the story is that a woman, a totally naked woman, is running down the street in Elephant but with a collar and a chain around her neck. And that just opening of a story is just straight
out of Texas chains or massacre. But it happened, It really truly happened.
And one woman she just went missing for three days. She went missing for three days.
Her husband divorced, says, I can't believe you left me, And it was like days after they got married. She just disappeared and she's like, no, you have to understand, I don't know what happened. I don't know where I was. And he didn't believe her. He just thought she was
off on a bend or whatever. And then years later it turns out she was abducted by David Parkerrey and defiled for days in this sex caravan he's had in his backyard, and the police identified her by a tattoo on her calf that was in CCTV footage that David Parkerrey was taking. So she didn't know what had happened to her, and the police had to show her the footage.
And there's something so dystopian and so night marriage of marriage or something of watching yourself in a situation that you don't know happened to you, and that situation, that story has never come out of. It's never left my brain, like I think it's there forever, and I think that's why it's such an important story to tell.
You also cite the work of Jim Fielder, which was I interviewed about his amazing book Slow Death to get some of the information that it informed you in this chapter.
Certainly, Yes, absolutely, and that's the thing you know.
With us, we're not, as I said before, we're not
investigative journalists or dedicated to one particular case. So whenever we were doing the exploration into a specific case, be it David Parker Ray in this or any of the others that we looked at in any depth, we were pulling on the fantastic work of different authors like that, because our book really is an amalgamation of everything we've learned, and it's true crime cases put together under these different factors, trying to answer the question of what makes the killer
tick alongside social commentary. You know, that's what we do on the podcast, and that's what we do in the book. So we're always eternally grateful for the fantastic journalists and authors who have done all of the deeper dives into the various different cases for us.
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Now, you we have talked about this book, and you leave some conclusions for this after doing all this research and four years of your hit podcast and the research that went into doing each one of those episodes, as you deep dive each week, what were some of and again, it's hard to make huge conclusions, but where are some of the conclusions that you cite in this book at the end of it.
Oh, I think that was one of the things really, I think always on the show and even with the book, while we wanted to absolutely explore the different factors and how it affects a person on the path to becoming a killer, we know that we cannot offer a.
Sort of definitive answer.
I think the definitive answer can only be that it's complicated, and that the things that make a person become a killer, whether it is their genetics, whether it is their childhood and upbringing, whether it's their relationships that they encountered throughout their life in the form of other human beings, whether it is their sexual drives, whatever motivates them, whether it is any latent misogyny or bigotry, whatever it may be,
or perhaps insanity, mental health, whatever it is, it's something that is incredibly human. So the real point of the book was to stop this otherization, was to stop looking for a quick fix, stop looking for a magic answer that would just solve this conundrum of why people kill and it was to offer a holistic, kind of nuanced, all encompassing approach that there are just so many reasons.
And the reason we wanted to do that is again, our podcast in this book is very much based on social commentary, and I think when people want to call them monsters and we want to look for us, say a gene that caused this, and what we're doing is we're saying we don't need to worry about the other things the society is responsible for, like poor access to healthcare, education, housing, whatever it might be, lack of social services, lack of resources,
lack of social support. All of these things aren't important because oh well, they were a monster.
They were going to do it anyway.
And I think it's the easiest way for society to wash its hands of these people and to say we're not responsible, when of course we are. So I think that was the ultimate conclusion. And the other thing we just wanted to pick up on very final bit was the idea of what is it that motivates us as people who consume true crime and what makes us tick? Why are we so obsessed with true crime? And it really you know, again, we don't have a definitive answer, nor would be so arrogant as to say we did.
But the only thing we could talk about it was from our perspective and this idea that we're all biologically hard wired in some way to almost seek out fear, and maybe with true crime it's a cathartic thing because we're in a privileged enough position where we can allow ourselves to glimpse into the very extremes of human behavior to be truly afraid to feel that fear. But then at the end of it, we can turn off the podcast or close the book and walk away and just
go back to our normal lives. And maybe that's what makes us tick, and maybe that's what drives us to being fascinated.
With true crime and with murder and with killers.
So, you know, we can't offer a solution or an answer to any of it, but hopefully what we wanted to do was just maybe think differently about some of the assumptions we've all held, and challenge some of our thinking and look at killers and the justice system and everything else encompassed in that in a more nuanced way, rather than in such black and white terms as it's sometimes presented.
Now.
You did an incredible amount of research, and you do put the bibliography in there is tell us just some of the research that you did do, some of the resources that you did use to be able in order to be able.
To do this.
Honestly, I look at some of the stories that didn't make it into this book as long lost children, and the only place they live on is a bibliography. Every chapter went through several different iterations, so it's kind of impossible to point to each source. I would say so for the cults chapter, for example, the absolute definitest source on Jonestown is The Road to Jonestown, incredible book by Jeff Grynn, and that I mean that you need to
look no further than that book. But then when it came to so for example, our sex and Sadism chapter, originally we were going to include Peter curtin The Vampire of Dusseldorf, and like that, sourcing was much more difficult because it's a much older case and it really is just one book, the sad this which is translated from German, and it's all sort of all over the place and it's not chronological, and it's confusing and difficult to read.
But most of we, you know, We're incredibly.
Lucky to live in the day and age that we do, that we have all of these incredible resources available to us. But yeah, so we we we read books, we watched documentaries, we paid a lot for academic papers. But it was all absolutely worth it because I think, you know, yeah, we're we're commentators. We're not we're not so scientists, we're not investigative journalists.
We are commentator so enable.
So to be able to commentate on anything, you need to be able to back it up.
So we're very proud of the bibliography.
We're very proud of the reading that we did putting the book together, because it backs up our arguments and without backup your arguments of meaningless.
Were there any surprises or whatsoever in this research and in writing this book.
Oh, there were quite a few surprises.
I guess there.
Were lots of things that we you know, we had the bare bones of the idea of what we wanted the book to be about, but it really was evolving, I would say, right up until the day that we submitted it the final draft to our publishers. It just felt like every time you opened one new book, or one new academic paper, or one new anything.
It just opened a whole new can of worms.
I think this maybe wasn't so much as surprise, but it was something that was partly challenging, partly so motivating was that for everything you could find both sides of the story. For example, if you look at genetics, there are people who are absolutely convinced, beyond a doubt, that the warrior gene is fundamentally it is this gene that you know influences human behavior to this extent, and you can find so many papers that back it up, and then you can find papers that say the exact opposite.
And it was which route are we going to take? And you know, the point we were trying to make is we're going to read everything we can and just present to you the case that we think is the most valid. And so I think it was the puzzle of putting everything together. It wasn't surprising, but I guess we have never ever sat down and tried to look at so many different cases and so many different variables within one piece of work like we did for this book.
So it was it was eye opening in that sense.
I want to thank you and applaud you for coming on and talking about this your book Red Handed, An Exploration of Criminals, cannibals, cults and what makes a killer tick? Can you tell us about where this Obviously they could take a look at Amazon, but if there's a Facebook page and also tell us a little bit about your weekly podcast, red Handed.
Sure.
So we do have a Facebook group and you can also follow us on Twitter and on Instagram at red Handed the Pod. You can find the book in all good bookstores Amazon if you have to, and red Handed we come at you every week with a socio political explanation of crime. Very very recently, last week we've done a two parts on Shamima Begum, who is a British nationalale not a British national anymore.
She was fifteen, she ran away from East.
London to join ISIS in Syria and now she's currently stateless in a camp and it's the argument of whether whether she should be allowed back to the UK because here is where she was radicalized, or whether she should be left stateless in account.
Yes, great, thank you so much, Sir Ruthie, Sir Ruthie Bala and Hannah McGuire Red Handed An exploration of criminals, cannibals, cults and what makes a killer tick. Thank you so much. It's been a very interesting episode. Thank you so much for this interview.
Thanks for jeving us, thank you for having us down.
Good Night, good night.