Joseph Kallinger - The Shoemaker

or destroy it. This is the story of Joseph Collinger, aka the Shoemaker.

in mid century America. He lived in a modest home in Philadelphia, ran a small shoe repair business, and raised his children alongside his wife. Betty yabors knew him as a quiet man, bit eccentric. He had a fondness for tinkering with shoes and odd inventions, and kept largely to himself. To the outside world, he was unremarkable, but behind closed doors,

something monstrous was stirring. By the time his story would come to light, Joseph Collinger would be responsible for a string of crimes so bizarre, brutal, and senseless they would leave one sorry, not one, several seasoned detectives absolutely stunned. His victims would include the innocent, the unsuspecting, and, most chillingly, his own flesh and blood. He would be described by psychiatrists as deeply disturbed, plagued by visions, and controlled by

what he claimed were divine commands to destroy humanity. But none of that was visible from the beginning. There were no early newspaper headlines warning of danger, no police reports hinting at the darkness behind mind, the walls that were brewing inside. Just a man who fixed shoes for a living, a man who would eventually tell the world that God himself had chosen him for a terrible mission, one that would begin with one death and spiral into a surreal

nightmare of violence and absolute madness. Now, what drove Joseph Collinger to kill wasn't greed, vengeance, or even hatred in the ordinary sense. Anyways, his crimes were fueled by something far more unsettling, but long before the world knew his name as a murderer, Joseph Collinger was a boy scarred by rejection, abuse, and a mine unraveling from within. He was born Joseph Lee Brenner II on December eleventh, nineteen thirty five, in Philadelphia, to a young woman named Judith Renner.

life that she couldn't. That family turned out to be Stephen and Anna Cullinger, Australian immigrants who owned a modest shoe repair shop in Philadelphia. Outwards, they seem like a hard working couple, but inside the walls of their home a far darker reality. Played out. The Callingers were very

deeply strict, emotionally distant, and prone to violence. They brought Joseph home at a young age, just three, not out of love, though, but as insurance against loneliness in old age, which, in my opinion, is not a reason to.

his skin was bleeding. He asked to attend some school outings even at one point, and his mother responded with beating him with a hammer. One particularly disturbing incident defined his early years. When Joseph was around the age of five, he was caught touching himself, an innocent act of childhood curiosity,

you know what, learning about their body, that sort of thing. Yeah, and Joseph he was also diagnosed with a hernia earlier that year, and his parents told him in this incident that the doctor who repaired his hernia also fixed his penis to stop it from ever becoming aroused because his genitals quote housed the devil.

He would slice holes in the walls, masturbating while fixating on knives and mutilating images. But even then he felt both exhilarated and disgusted by his own actions. At eight years old, Joseph endured yet another trauma that further shaped his fractured psyche. While running errands near the set of abandoned train tracks, a place where he often visited to escape his impressive home life, he stumbled upon a group

of slightly older boys from his neighborhood. Now these boys were let's just say, engaging in quote mutual sexual acts with one another, okay, But rather than letting Joseph leave when he encountered them or ignoring his presence, the boys reacted cruel cruelly. At knife point, they forced Joseph to participate in the acts against his will, and in that moment, Joseph became a victim of sexual assault and was forced to perform oral sex on one of the boys. He

was terrified, confused, and utterly powerless in the situation. It was a horrific experience for someone so young, let alone anyone of any age. But it combined overwhelming fear with feelings of helplessness, and it etched into him in a dangerous way for associating between sex, violence, and domination. By adolescence, Joseph's life had splintered into two worlds, the outer appearance of a quiet, isolated boy and an inner life dominated

by dark fantasies. His obsessions with knives deepened, his fantasies turned violent. He would tear out magazine photos of women, stabbing the pictures before ejaculating and climaxing, only to be consumed by overwhelming guilt afterwards. And then came the voices. At age fifteen, Joseph heard what he believed would be the voice of God. It wasn't just a fleeting thought, though, it was a full on auditory hallucination. The voice told

him he had a divine mission through orthopedic manipulation. By controlling the feet of people, he would control the mind. He was to heal mankind by altering how people walked.

What began as an isolated delusion soon consumed him, and he would eventually even go on to conduct over forty thousand orthopedic experiments over the next two decades, creating strange heal inserts, meticulously documenting shoe altercations and alterations, becoming convinced that he was destined to either save the world or even at times destroy it. But while his mind focused on this imagined calling, the emotional damage and loneliness only deepened.

The boy who had never been wanted, never been loved, and never knew safety was growing into a man teetering on the brink of madness. Now in his late teens, Joseph calling Or seemed on the surface to be pulling his life together. He dropped out of high school, but he found steady work in the only trade he knew, shoemaking, where he of course was building on this obsession. But more surprisingly, he fell in love. At age sixteen, he married a young woman named Hilda, and the two started

a family together in Philadelphia. But Joseph's past wasn't something he could leave behind. The deep psychological scars and the growing mental illness that had taken root in his childhood followed him into adulthood. Early signs of paranoia, obsessive thinking, and explosive temper surfaced almost immediately. His relationship with Hilda

was volatile. When she gave birth to their first child, she in fact showed little interest in motherhood, a reality that pushed Joseph further into despair, and by the time their second child arrived, Hilda was desperate to leave. In fact, she even sought an abortion, a decision Joseph, despite his own dark nature, completely opposed. The marriage collapsed soon after, and Hilda abandoned the children, leaving Joseph with them.

and for a brief time, life seemed stable. They eventually had five children together, in fact, Michael, Joey, Mary, Joe, Jimmy, and little Bonnie. Joseph also reconnected with the two children from his first marriage, bringing the total number of children that he fathered to seven, but stability was more or less an illusion. Joseph's control over Betty quickly became oppressive.

He grew jealous, paranoid that she would leave him as Hilda had, and he installed bars in the windows forbade her from leaving the house without him, and controlled every aspect of her life. His mental health, untreated and deteriorating, began to manifest in more alarming ways. He heard voices both divine and demonic. He spoke of visions. He developed bizarre compulsions, installing a homemade bowling lane in their bedroom, which honestly sounds fucking awesome to me.

these rituals, the psychological damage was profound. Let's say the lessons often involved nudity, knives, and acts that blurred the line between discipline and complete trauma. Yet despite everything, Joseph still maintained that double life. By day, he was the neighborhood shoemaker, a quiet man running his own business. By night, his mind was unraveling. The once innocent orthopedic experiments turned obsessive.

He kept carving new inserts, convinced that by manipulating how people walked, he could cure diseases, control thoughts or bring about salvation. But Joseph's visions were beginning to shift. The command to heal the world through shoes was giving a way to something a little more darker.

In one chilling example, Joseph had burned Joey's inner thigh with a heated metal spatula, supposedly to stop him from quote sinning damn. And then he had beaten his other son with a metal head of a hammer. The case went to court, and though he was convicted, Joseph avoided jail time, receiving psychiatric probation instead. But for some in law enforcement, the image of Joseph Kalinger as a dangerous and disturbed man had already taken root.

him in an unthinkable proposal. Together, they would carry out robberies and eventually murder. Joseph framed this as a divine mission, a father and sons bond sealed not by love but by blood and violence. Now, whether through fear, manipulation, or damage already inflicted upon him, Michael agreed to his dad's proposal without hesitation.

They've demanded a sacrifice. On July seventh, nineteen seventy four, Joseph told Michael he wanted to kill someone that day. There was no discussion, no debate. Michael simply said, okay, Oh.

to help. Joseph led the boy to an abandoned building near G Street and Indiana Avenue, an old, crumbling factory with no power, no lights, and no one around inside. They bound the boy's hands and ankles with an old electrical cord. As jose began to panic, Michael, on his father's command, sodomized the young nine.

He claimed to see Joey falling from a mountaintop, and the message was clear. To fulfill the MISSI, he needed to kill his own child. Joseph planned several failed attempts. He took Joey, Michael, and his youngest son Jimmy, to bus terminals, train stations, and even towards abandoned mine shafts.

Each time Joseph's courage faltered, though it's obvious what he was planning, he would panic, make an excuse and abandon the plans, and at one point he even tried to set up an accidental fall from a construction site, positioning Joey for a photo near the scaffolding edge. But again you couldn't follow through. The pressure from the visions were relentless, though, and Michael, by now fully immersed in his father's warped world, urged him on.

accelerate at a much deeper level. The death of his son had broken something permanent, and the whispers he heard, the twisted commands, they were louder than ever before. The act of killing, which he believed was divinely mandated mission, didn't bring the relief of transformation he had imagined. Instead, the voices in his head, the ones that had come to identify as God's command, or so he said, only

grew louder and more erratic. The next target in his twisted vision became his youngest child, fifteen month old Bonnie. Born with mysterious sores on her skin, Bonnie became a focal point of a new delusion. Joseph became convinced that the only way to heal her was through a grotesque ritual combining a woman's vaginal fluids with his own semen and perfume, which he believed would create a salve to cure her.

or not. They gained entry to her home and once inside, they bound her, stripped her, and Joseph sexually assaulted her, not for gratification, but to obtain the bodily fluids he believed were key to saving his daughter. Then, returning home with what he collected. He followed the ritual meticulously. He mixed the stolen fluids with perfume and his own seamen and applied it to bonnie sores, but unsurprisingly, nothing happened.

The child's condition remained unchanged, and another delusion was another failure.

out again, this time to Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. They broke into the home of sixty five year old Helen Bogan while she was out shopping. When Helen returned around eleven thirty am arms full of groceries, Joseph ambushed her. He pressed a butcher knife to her cheek and forced her upstairs, bound her to an overturned bed frame. He then doused cotton balls with lighter fluids and placed them on her eyes, his plan to burn her alive, igniting her face as

the hallucinations were demanding. However, at the very last second, these hallucinations, these voices, the visions, they stopped. They vanished, just as he had with Joey. Joseph now was hesitating. The voices were gone, and with them, the will to kill did leave as well, And before he could decide what to do, the doorbell rang. Helen's Bridge. Friends were arriving for their weekly.

was growing increasingly restless. He viewed the hesitation as weakness. He wanted the killings to happen, not the elaborate games that Joseph seemed to trap him in, but once again the murders didn't material materialize. Instead, they robbed the house, stealing around twenty thousand dollars or so worth of cash, jewelry, and then left the victims physically unharmed.

woman in Dumont, New Jersey. The pattern was identical, home invasion, binding, sexual assault, robbery. Again, the hallucinations, though, were dictating the behavior, and when the visions dispatched, so did the resolve to kill. Michael was now barely a teenager. He was increasingly becoming eager for violence and to commit these crimes, and became openly frustrated with his father's restraint. Each time Joseph failed

to follow through, the tension built. His belief was that he was destined to destroy humanity, pressed harder, and this already fragile mind was there and its cracking. Michael, for his part, was no longer just a willing participant. He was becoming a co conspirator with it all at this point, with his own dark desires and his own mind that was beginning to crack. The pace of their crimes were quickening.

The escalation was coming, and this time, when the visions were turned, Joseph wouldn't stop, because he was officially hurtling towards complete psychological collapse. His hallucinations once sporadic, were then building and have now become constant companions always with him, and with thirteen year old Michael desensitized and eager for violence, it was all too much. He was willing to follow his father's lead, and on January eighth, nineteen seventy five,

the pair arrived in Leonia, New Jersey. Their target the home of the Kneller family. The home belonged to Rita and Randy Kneller, who lived there with their young son and bedridden elderly grandmother. When Joseph and Michael entered the home, they immediately took control, brandishing a gun and a knife. The women, terrified, complied as Joseph gathered them together on the main floor of the house. Now the grandmother, helplessly upstairs,

was left untouched. The invaders began methodically tying up the hostages with whatever they could find electrical cords, coat hangers, belts. But as they worked, the front doorbell rang Visitors the Kneller's friends were arriving one by one. Joseph calmly answered the door and ushered each new arrival into the unfolding nightmare inside. A total of eight hostages were eventually brought under control, including a young boy and a woman by the name of Maria Fashing, a twenty one year old

nurse and family friend who had come to visit. She was the last one to enter the home. For Joseph, Maria would become the symbol of everything the voice in his head demanded he destroyed. The atmosphere inside the house was tense but eerily controlled. Joseph seemed oddly polite at moments, even apologetic. He told his captives he wasn't going to hurt them, just rob them, he reassured. The women even follow following what he had done before, allowing small comforts.

But underneath the surface, the hallucinations were still there. The supreme power, the dark figure Joseph saw on his visions, whispered that this wasn't enough. Blood needed to be spilt. This time, Joseph ordered the largest man amongst the captives to a pipe in the basement, where he was bound to it. The original plan, if it could be called that, was to mutilate the man's genitals, a twisted act Joseph believed was central to his new divine mission of destroying

mankind by attacking sexuality itself. But Joseph's hallucinations in that moment, In that last moment shifted Now in his mind, it wasn't this man who he needed to start with. It was Maria instead, who became the target. See, she was vocal and defiant. Joseph had brought her into the basement and demanded that she assisted in the mutilation of this man, but she flat out refused, telling him she would rather

die than do what he demanded. She didn't beg she didn't break nothing, and this was exactly the trigger that the visions demanded. In that moment, she was now the target. Joseph grabbed a knife and stabbed Maria in the neck. She tried to scream, but she could only gurgle as blood spilled into her airway. Joseph stabbed her again and again until her body crumpled to the basement floor, spilling blood onto the concrete. In that moment, the calling Air

killing spree had finally claimed its first adult victim. The barrier Joseph had so often stopped short of crossing was obliterated, and that murder triggered chaos. Meanwhile, upstairs, one of the women managed to break free and she ran screaming into the streets. Neighbors heard the commotion, and sirens quickly followed.

on Joseph. A neighbor had seen two men washing their hands and faces in a puddle near baseball field not far from the Neller home, discarding clothing. Witnesses had partial descriptions. The investigators were already of where Joseph, callingear's history, his prior arrest for child abuse, his missing son, his erratic behavior, and when Maria's murder first hit the news, detectives quietly

zeroed in on him. On January seventeenth, nineteen seventy five, just nine days after that murder, Joseph and Michael would be arrested. Police arrived at the calling her home. Joseph was already known to law enforcement thanks to his prior arrest and those sort of things. What they didn't know, what no one could have predicted, was that just how dark his crimes had become. Joseph and Michael were sitting inside the modest home in Philadelphia when officers knocked in

the front door. They were casually sorting through stolen coins from their recent robberies. Joseph's wife, Betty, answered the door. When officers demanded entry, She asked for a warrant, but in that moment, Joseph and Michael attempted to flee, reportedly trying to sneak out the back, but it was useless. The house was surrounded and they were quickly handcuffed on the spot. What followed was an unspooling of chaos as detectives across three states began piecing together with father and this.

Father and son had done the bloodsoak chirk that Joseph clearly discarded carelessly and quickly recovered by police. The name tag had Callinger right on it and it removed any doubt. Multiple witnesses, including neighbors and surviving victims from various attacks, identified the pair and police lineups. The list of the offenses stretched across Pennsylvania, New Jersey and beyond home invasions, assaults, sexual assaults, robbery, and of course, murders. Investigators also uncovered

something even more disturbing. Joseph had taken out a significant life insurance policy on his murdered son, Joey. The policies totlled nearly seventy thousand dollars, which in nineteen seventy four was a fortune. Yeah, and they were barely a few months old when Joey's body was found in the abandoned building Yang. The case was no longer just a string

of robberies. It was a murder, her profit, sadism, and something far more complex because it was a man teetering on the edge of sanity dragging his own son into the abyss with him. Seeing these things, detectives quickly separated Joseph and Michael. Michael, who was only still thirteen, was placed in juvenile detention. Thirteen thirteen. Psychologists were brought in to evaluate him, and what they found was a boy who was hostile, rebellious, and disturbingly detached, but also someone

who perhaps could still be saved. Michael, who had been a child under the control of a father who believed he was chosen by God to destroy mankind. Right, it was clear thebilitation process was possible, but how far it's only up to anyone to cass.

Psychiatrists were brought in. Some suspected schizophrenia. Others thought it might be something more physical, perhaps Huntington's disease, which can cause involuntary movements, paranoia, and even dementia. Joseph himself requested testing for this Huntington's disease, but the results came back negative, and Joseph continued In years later to keep requesting more tests, but it was never proven to be positive. There was

no physical explanation for the way his mind worked. It was psychological and profoundly so when I say profound, I don't mean in a good profound way. Meanwhile, back in the Linonia, investigators worked around the clock to build their case. The surviving hostages from the Kneller home gave detailed statements. The physical evidence there was blood, fingerprints, discarded clothing. It was also overwhelming, and in Pennsylvania, authorities dug into Joey's

suspicious death. However, without any direct witness, it was harder to prove. But suspicion fell heavily on Joseph, and while the surviving victims of the early robberies provided statements, many of the women Joseph had sexually assaulted were too traumatized to testify, complicating those charges across all jurisdictions, One fact became clear. Joseph Callinger wasn't just a killer. He was a man who had slipped so far into delusion that

reality no longer governed his actions. The question remained, would the court see him as a criminal or as a madman beyond control? The first of Joseph Callinger's many trials began in June nineteenth. On nineteen seventy five, the charges were connected to the non lethal crime, things like robbery, burglary, false imprisonment, those sort of things, the home invasions and such.

But the questions hanging over the courtroom wasn't just whether he committed these crimes, it was whether he was legally sane when he did them. From the onset, the defense focused squarely on Joseph's mind. His lawyers argued that he was deeply mentally ill, suffering from hallucinations so powerful and persistent that he couldn't distinguish reality from the bizarre visions

commanding him to kill. They even suggested that years of exposure to toxic chemicals from working in a poorly ventilated shoe repair shop may have damaged his brain, contributing to that delusion as well. Prosecutors painted a very different picture. They pointed to the methodical way Joseph and Michael had planned their crimes, casing home, selecting victims, timing their break ins. They highlighted Joseph's deliberate disposal of evidence, burning bloody clothes,

hiding weapons, even changing his story repeatedly during questioning. This wasn't madness, they argued, this was calculation. Joseph himself would take the stand in his own defense, which was against the advice of nearly anyone everyone on his legal team. What followed stunned the courtroom. He calmly informed the jury that he was one thousand years old. He said he had once been a butterfly. He spoke of voices from God commanding him to save humanity by killing millions of people.

He described the Supreme Power an unseeing entity guiding his hand. Every word he spoke underscored the central argument of his defense. Joseph was not sane.

you know what I mean. The judge, visibly shaken by the details of the case, described him as quote utterly vile and depraved, and then sentenced him to thirty to eighty years in prison for those charges alone.

impossible organic brain damage. He was, they argued, unable to control his actions. But the prosecution wasn't swayed. They brought forward surviving victims from that day, ordinary people who looked Joseph in the face as he held them hostage at knife point. They described him as calm, deliberate as he tied up each and every person. They testified about the terrifying moment that he dragged Maria into the basement, about the screams, about the blood they saw, about the way

he and his son had simply walked away. Afterwards, the jury found him guilty once again. Another thirty to eighty years was added to his sentence behind bars, Joseph's mental health continued to decline in prison. He was erratic and violent. He attacked another inmate, stabbing him toward twenty times with a pair of sewing scissors in nineteen seventy eight, another act he later said was commanded by unseen forces.

argued over his condition. Some claimed he was faking illness to avoid punishment, others saw genuine and terrifying signs of profound mental breakdown. Joseph himself continued to request testing for Huntington's disease, convinced it might explain his behavior, but still no diagnosis came. Further trials unfolded for additional crimes, but by this time Joseph's court room appearance were basically meaningless.

His fate was sealed. He would die in prison, far from the streets where his reign of terror played out, and it was more about closure for the victims than anything. Right died of heart failure at the age of fifty nine inside a Pennsylvania state prison. As for Micah Callinger, his son, the courts took a different approach. He was just thirteen when the crimes were committed. Multiple psychologists assessed him as a child under extreme coercion, possibly salvageable with treatment.

After serving his time in a juvenile facility, Micah was placed with foster parents relatives of his stepmother, who worked to rehabilitate him. By nineteen seventy nine, he pled guilty to robbery charges in exchange for the dismissal of the murder charge related to Maria Fassinger's death. He was released on probation under careful supervision until his twenty first birthday in nineteen eighty two, and then after that, Michael vanished

from public view. His records were sealed, his name disappeared from headlines, and to this day, no public records are to account for where he is today. Whether he rebuilt his life or descended further into darkness remains unknown.

commanding him to kill. They weren't fleeting thoughts. They are immersive, all consuming, and very persistent. He genuinely believed that he was on a divine mission tasks from or for saving the world and later destroying it, and he failed to live up to that imagined responsibility. These are real things that he firmly believed. This is not made up for his defense. This is fact. He believed these. But was this madness the product of trauma, mental illness, physical brain damage,

or some tangled combination of these. Forensic psychologists who evaluated Joseph over the years often pointed to early childhood trauma as the seed bed for his psychosis. His adoptive parents were brutally abusive. They did things like burnt his fingertips, beat him with hammers, punished him for normal childhood behaviors

like exploring his body. Sure maybe it disturbed them a little bit, but it's not their responsibility to be disturbed by someone learning about themselves or their sexuality, and exploring that the deep psychological scars of those years clearly shaped the man that he would become. At that same time, signs of schizophrenia were impossible to ignore. His hallucinations, paranoia, and elaborate religious delusions fit classic psychiatric definitions of the disorder.

Schizophrenia often manifests in late adolescents or early adulthood, right around the time Joseph's visions began, and it's hard to not correlate those totally. But then there were the physical symptoms. He also had muscle spasms, He was very jerky with his movements, very much so. In many times he had inappropriate laughter, and some doctors suspected neurological conditions might also be in play. It's worth noting that Joseph's early crimes

before murders, showed some faint traces of humanity. There were multiple occasions where he stopped short of killing. He retreated from violence at the last second. He wavered, He showed doubt, But as the hallucinations deepened, so did the detachment from the reality around him. The command these hallucinations had over him, as he described, he left him feeling trapped, as though his mind was no longer his own. His actions became increasingly erratic, brutal, and devoid of emotions. So was he

legally saying. Some courts say no, others weren't so sure. And the truth is it may be impossible to ever fully know. Mental illness doesn't exactly excuse his crimes, but it does explain much about why his life spiraled so horrifyingly out of control. And then there came the other puzzle, his son, Michael. Unlike his father, Michael didn't appear to

suffer from hallucinations or psychosis. Instead, he was raised inside the madness, exposed from childhood to Joseph's violence, control, and twisted worldview, in some ways very similar to how his father was even raised. Some psychologists view Michael as a classic case of traumatic bonding, a child so desperate for approval that he was willing to follow his father into unspeakable acts. Others warned that Michael showed signs of emerging

psychopathy himself, cold, calculating, and eager for violence. Ultimately, Michael was considered rehabilitated or rehabilitate a bull, though his current whereabouts dew still remain unknown. In the end, the arrest of Joseph and Michael in January of nineteen seventy five brought an abrupt end to their violent spree, but the echoes of their crime stretched far beyond that moment in time. For the families of their victims, the scars ran deep, permanent,

and in many cases impossible to fully heal. The murder of twenty one year old Maria Fascing the only convicted homicide during their rampage, apart from Joseph's own son, I get well, I guess that's not convicted. That is confirmed because Joseph fully, flat out has admitted it in interviews, but Maria is the only convicted one. It left a profound wound on Pennsylvania. In the community. Maria was not just a victim of opportunity.

She was a woman known for her kindness, her activism, and her refusal to back down the face of, you know, adversity. It was that very courage, her refusal to comply with Joseph's demands, that cost her her life. She died on that cold basement floor of a stranger's house, well, not

a stranger, a friend's house. Far from the life that she could have lived, but still with her own morals in person intact, her murder shook that small town leaven behind grief stricken family members and friends who would carry the weight of her loss forever. The survivors, the women who had been tied up, threatened, and assaulted in their own homes, carry visible scars. Though they escaped with their lives,

the terror they endured could not be undone. Imagine the horror of sitting in your living room, expecting a quiet afternoon with friends, only to be held captive at knife point by a stranger who seems completely unhinged. The emotional trauma from such an experience doesn't just vanish. Many of these people were left deeply affected for years, if not for life. Some reportedly suffered from PTSD post traumatic stress disorder, chronic fear, and shattered feelings of their own safety and

their own homes. And then there were the children, the Callinger's kids, his own flesh and blood, his sons, his daughters who had been pawns, and his delusions. Sometimes victims sometimes witnesses the psychological damage on those kids, especially Michael's young Michael's younger siblings. It's hard to quantify. To grow up in a home like this, it meant living in constant fear, caught between love, loyalty, and honestly absolute horror. You feel like you're probably living in a horror movie.

Even decades later, the name of Joseph and Michael Collinger evoke unease in the city, in towns where they once prowled. Their story once national news faded into relative obscurity over the years, but for those directly touched by the violence, it never truly went away. While Joseph died in prison nineteen ninety six, taking many of his secrets with him, the ripples of what he did, what he and his son did continue to spread through the lives that they

touched and the histories that they've altered. The story of the Calling Yers is one of the darkest and most disturbing in American true crime history. It's a case that leaves us grappling not only with the depths of human depravity, but also with uncomfortable questions about mental illness, responsibility, and the limits of rehabilitation. So much though, that in this episode today, I've only begun to scratch the surface of

this conversation. Though Joseph calling Her died of heart failure in nineteen ninety six, having spent over two decades behind bars. He remained a deeply disturbed man until the very end, reportedly continuing to experience these hallucinations, paranoiase, and suicidal urges till the very end. To this day, the question remains was Joseph calling Her evil, insane or a tragic collision of both. The case continues to be study in criminal psychology, psychiatry,

and criminology circles. It's a haunting example of how untreated mental illness, childhood trauma, and distorted religious delusions can create a perfect storm of violence in the end. What makes this case linger is not just the brutality of the acts, but the profound sadness running through every single chapter of the story. It's about damaged people damaging other people. It's about the terror that unfolded in quiet neighborhoods, and it's about the lives lost, not just those who died, but

those who live with the aftermath. The majority of the world may forget the name Callinger eventually, but for those who study the darkest corners of human behavior, this case remains absolutely unforgettable. And that's a story of Joseph Kellinger aka the.

will hurt people, and that's the matter of fact. And don't let me go because it will happen. Don't be wrong. He should be locked up. He's a fucking monster. But there's many times where it's like you feel bad for the monster, you.

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