Speaker 1: Imagine for just a second walking into a windowless room.
The heavy iron door clicks shut behind you, and the
first thing that hits you isn't the dark, it's the silence.
Speaker 2: Oh right, that absolute, suffocating sea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, It's absolute and just well unnatural. So you
run your hands along the walls, the ceiling, the floor,
and you realize they are completely lined with thick firebrius asbestos.
Speaker 2: Which is terrifying on its own.
Speaker 1: Honestly, right, but it's designed specifically to swallow any possible
sound before it can escape. Or picture a totally different
kind of terror.
Speaker 2: I'm with you.
Speaker 1: You're exhausted from a long day of travel. You check
into this grandiose, historic hotel in the heart of a
bustling downtown metropolis. Sounds nice, actually, sure, until you ride
the vintage elevator up, drop your bags on the bed,
and look out the window, completely unaware that the very
foundation of the building you're sleeping in supposedly sits atop
a literal.
Speaker 2: Hellmel Oh wow, a hellmet Yeah.
Speaker 1: A swirling demonic vortex spewing dark energies straight up through
the floorboard. That took a turn, it really did. But
I mean we tend to think of the most terrifying
monsters in human history, right, the serial killers, whose names
we sort of whisper in the dark. We think of
them as lone wolves acting out their own twisted fantasies.
Speaker 2: Right, isolated monster exactly.
Speaker 1: But what if they weren't working alone? Like, what if
they were just ponds in a much larger, much darker game.
Speaker 2: It is a profoundly unsettling thought. I mean, it really is,
and yet it's a thought that has captivated the public
imagination for decades.
Speaker 1: It really has.
Speaker 2: We are just endlessly drawn to the idea that there's
a man behind the curtain, you know, someone orchestrating the horror.
Speaker 1: Well, welcome to Thrilling Threads. Today. We are embarking on
a massive, intricate exploration of ten of the most chilling, outlandish,
and quite frankly wildly popular conspiracy theories surrounding famous serial killers.
Speaker 2: It's going to be a wild drive, it is.
Speaker 1: Our mission today is to unravel the truth, untangle the fiction,
and really get into the human psychology behind why these
theories exist in the first place.
Speaker 2: Which is the most fascinating part to me.
Speaker 1: For sure. We're going to be looking at historical documents,
crime scene anomalies, and the bizarre cultural mythologies that just
spring up around these figures. There's so much material to cover,
so much, but just a quick note before we dive
into the deep end here. Some of the theories we
are looking at today touch on real political figures, government agencies,
and historical movements.
Speaker 2: We get into some sensitive territory.
Speaker 1: We do, so we want to assure you the listener,
that we are impartially exploring these theories exactly as they
are presented in the historical record.
Speaker 2: We aren't endorsing any viewpoints.
Speaker 1: Exactly, and we certainly aren't taking any political sides. We
are just here to follow the threads of information and
see exactly where they leave.
Speaker 2: Setting that baseline is super crucial, because, well, the psychology
of why we create and consume these conspiracy theories is
arguably just as fascinating as the theories themselves. When you
look at the overarching theme of what we are unpacking today,
a really central question emerges. Why on earth do we
construct these massive, elaborate, sometimes completely illogical conspiracies about serial killers?
Speaker 1: Right? Why do we need the story to be bigger?
Speaker 2: Well, the answer lies in how the human brain processes
trauma and senseless horror. Evolutionarily speaking, our brains absolutely despise senselessness.
Speaker 1: We hate it well on a reason for everything exactly.
Speaker 2: We are pattern recognition machines. We survived as a species
by understanding that, you know, dark clouds.
Speaker 1: Mean rain, and a rustling in the bushes means a
tiger or something.
Speaker 2: Right, we crave a why so, when confronted with the
horrific reality that a completely ordinary looking person like by
next door, Yeah, the guy who might live next door
or bag your groceries or attend year university, when we
realize that person is capable of unspeaking, random violence entirely
on their own, it completely shatters our fundamental sense of safety.
Speaker 1: Because if it's random, you can't predict it, and if
you can't predict it, I mean it, can't protect yourself
from it. It's this terrifying vulnerability. It is, and this
is where the conspiracy theory actually acts as a bizarre
psychological shield. Like as wild as it sounds, it is
genuinely more comforting for the human mind to believe in
a grand shadowy syndicate.
Speaker 2: Or a clandestine government mind control program.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or even a supernatural demonic force than it is
to just accept random chaos.
Speaker 2: Precisely because if there is a shadowy syndicate or a
demon or a government plot, then there is a mechanism
behind the madness. There's a structure to the evil, right,
it has rules exactly, And if there's a structure, perhaps
it can be understood or tracked, or avoided or even dismantled.
A conspiracy theory provides rules to a game that otherwise
has none. That makes so much sense because if the
violence is just random, chaotic and born from the fractured
mind of an individual acting completely alone, well that means
no one is truly safe anywhere at any time.
Speaker 1: That is deeply terrifying. And that desire to put a
framework around chaos brings us right to the concept of
the architecture of evil.
Speaker 2: Yes, the physical spaces right.
Speaker 1: We often try to explain away horror by blaming the
physical environment itself, like creating buildings or geography as the
actual culprits.
Speaker 2: It's a fascinating shift of blame.
Speaker 1: To see how this works in practice, we really have
to look at the mid nineteen eighties in California, during
the absolutely paralyzing reign of terror of the nightstalker Richard Ramirez.
Speaker 2: Ramirez is the ultimate embodiment of the kind of random,
chaotic violence we were just discussing they really was. During
his crime spree, which is the spring and summer of
nineteen eighty five, he murdered at least fifteen people and
left many more injured and deeply traumatized.
Speaker 1: Just a horrific, horrific spree.
Speaker 2: And what made Ramirez so uniquely terrifying to the public
was his complete lack of a recognizable modus operandi, no none,
He didn't target a specific demographic. His victims ranged in
age from children to the elderly. There were men and
women of various ethnicities and socioeconomic background.
Speaker 1: So nobody felt safe exactly, and.
Speaker 2: The weapons very too, from guns to knives to blunt objects.
There was no pattern, which meant the entire population of
Los Angeles felt like they were in the crosshairs.
Speaker 1: And La was sweltering in this massive heat wave at
the time, right, but people were literally nailing their windows
shut in.
Speaker 2: The dead of summer.
Speaker 1: The fear was palpable, it was suffocating. And during this
horrific spree, Ramirez frequently stayed at the Cecil hotel in downtown.
Speaker 2: Los Angeles, a notorious Cecil Hotel.
Speaker 1: Yes, Now, the Cecil has a remarkably dark history all
on its own. Long before Rameirez checked in, it was infamous.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely.
Speaker 1: It was built in the nineteen twenties as a destination
for business travelers, right, but then the Great Depression hit,
the surrounding neighborhood decayed into what we now know as
skid row, and the hotel became this long term residence
for transience.
Speaker 2: It fell on very hard times.
Speaker 1: Very quickly, it really did. And over the decades it
just became this hot spot for suicides, overdoses, and unsolved murders.
It developed a reputation as a place where criminals could
just vanish into the labyrinth of hallways.
Speaker 2: The concentration of tragedy in that single building is statistically staggering.
It just naturally breeds folklore.
Speaker 1: And that folklore exploded into a massive paranormal conspiracy. Because
of this dark history, the theory emerged that the Cecil
Hotel doesn't just attract bad people, It actually sits atop
a literal hellmouth.
Speaker 2: A hellmouth. It's such an evocative.
Speaker 1: Term, right. In occult terms, a hellmouth is a demonic vortex,
like a tear in the fabric of reality that spews
out dark, corrupting energy.
Speaker 2: It sounds like a movie plot.
Speaker 1: It really does. The conspiracy suggests that Ramirez wasn't just
a psychopath making his own horrific choices. Instead, the theory
frames him as an avatar, like a vessel, exactly a
vessel possessed and energized by the building supernatural forces.
Speaker 2: It's a profound shift of accountability. I mean it takes
the agency entirely away from the killer and projects it
under the architecture.
Speaker 1: It really does. When I was digging into this, I
immediately thought of Stephen King's The Shining.
Speaker 2: Oh that's a perfect comparison.
Speaker 1: It is the exact same narrative structure, right the theory
it turns Ramirez into an in real life Jack Torrance
in The Shining Jack Torrance is a flawed guy, sure,
but the Overlook Hotel is the actual villain.
Speaker 2: The building makes him do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the building manipulates him, It feeds on his weaknesses,
and it drives him to murder. This conspiracy theory does
the exact same thing to the Cecil Hotel.
Speaker 2: It makes the brick and mortar the antagonist.
Speaker 1: Right, and here's where it gets really interesting. Think about
the sheer horror of this for an everyday tourist. Oh man,
Imagine you're visiting Los Angeles. You see a cheap rate
for a historic hotel downtown and you book it. You
wander into the lobby completely unaware that you are standing
at ground zero of one of the most mythologized places
in the United States.
Speaker 2: Surrounded by people who truly believe the walls themselves are
infected with the demonic virus.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like, you're just looking for the ice machine and
the building is supposedly vibrating with angel evil.
Speaker 2: The psychological mechanism at play here is fascinating, though. Yeah,
and it's deeply tied to how we process societal guilt.
Speaker 1: Okay, guilt, how so?
Speaker 2: Well, the helmet theory is an incredibly extreme, supernatural manifestation
of confirmation bias.
Speaker 1: Let's break that down because confirmation bias is usually talked
about in terms of like reading news articles online or
political bubbles, not demonic vortexes. So how does it apply
to a haunted hotel.
Speaker 2: Well, confirmation bias is our cognitive tendency to search for
interpret favor and recall information in a way that confirms
our prior beliefs.
Speaker 1: Right, we see what we want to see exactly.
Speaker 2: When you look at the Cecil Hotel, you are looking
at a building located in an area that experienced severe,
prolonged urban decay skid row. Yes, it became a magnet
for people suffering from untreated mental illness, severe addiction, and
extreme poverty. These are systemic, deeply entrenched societal failures, are
huge problems, huge problems, and they are incredibly complex to solve,
and quite frankly, they make us feel profoundly helpless and
guilty as.
Speaker 1: A society because we don't know how to fix it.
Speaker 2: Right, So, when people look at the sheer volume of tragedy, despair,
and violence concentrated at the Cecil, the brain struggles to
process that this is just the mathematical result of poverty
and neglect. It's too depressing, it is so to cope,
they retroactively apply a supernatural spin to it, because it.
Speaker 1: Is infinitely easier to point at a menacing looking building
and say that place is cursed by a demon than
it is to look in the mirror and say our
civic infrastructure completely failed to support the vulnerable people living
in this neighborhood. And this is the horrific consequence exactly.
Speaker 2: Blaming a demonic vortex is a psychological escape patch, obss
all society of its collective failures. Wow, if the building
is possessed by ancient dark energy, then the urban decay,
the mental illness, the violence, it's not our fault.
Speaker 1: It's out of our hands.
Speaker 2: Out of our hands. We couldn't have prevented it through
better mental health funding or social safety nets. It's a supernatural.
Speaker 1: Anomaly that is wild. It's like a dark modern way
that humans use folklore to cope with harsh, unforgiving civic realities.
Speaker 2: It's folklore as a defense mechanism.
Speaker 1: Yes, that is deeply unsettling, but it completely tracks with
how human nature operates. Now, sticking with this theme of
how we process these narratives, we don't just use conspiracies
to explain why people kill.
Speaker 2: No, we don't.
Speaker 1: Sometimes we use them to cope with how their stories end.
The escapes, Yes, the escapes. This takes us back over
a century ago to a remote farm in Laporte, Indiana.
We are talking about the early twentieth century and a
notorious killer named Bell gunness.
Speaker 2: Bill Gunnis represents a completely different pypology of terror than
Richard Ramirez.
Speaker 1: Totally different.
Speaker 2: Where Ramirez was chaotic, impulsive, and disorganized, Gunnis was cold, calculating,
and highly methodical.
Speaker 1: A businesswoman of murder.
Speaker 2: Basically, she is the archetype of the black widow. She
placed lonely hearts advertisements in Norwegian language newspapers across the Midwest,
essentially advertising herself as a wealthy widow looking for a
reliable partner to help.
Speaker 1: Run her farm, and these guys just flocked to her,
they did.
Speaker 2: She allured these men, who often arrived carrying their entire
life savings in cash.
Speaker 1: Just walking into a trap with pockets full.
Speaker 2: Of money, exactly, And once they were on her property,
she murdered them, buried them in the hog pen, and
kept the cash.
Speaker 1: She turned murder into a highly efficient, industrialized financial scheme.
Speaker 2: Industrialized is the perfect word for it.
Speaker 1: But the conspiracy surrounding Belgunnis isn't about her methods. It's
about her ultimate fate right the fire, Yes, So, in
April of nineteen oh eight, her massive farmhouse burned to
the ground, and when the authorities sifted through this smoldering ashes,
they made a horrific discovery.
Speaker 2: They found bodies.
Speaker 1: They found the bodies of her children and alongside them
the body of an adult woman. But there was a glaring,
gruesome problem head the head. The adult woman's body was
missing its head. Now, the immediate logical conclusion for the
local authorities was that this headless body was Bell Gunnis
and that she had perished in the fire alongside her kids.
Speaker 2: The authorities desperately wanted that to be the case because
it provided immediate closure. The killer is dead, case.
Speaker 1: Closed right, tied up with a bow. But the physical forensics,
even for nineteen oh eight standards, told a wildly different story.
Speaker 2: It really complicated the narrative.
Speaker 1: Entirely because Bell Gunnis was a famously large, physically imposing woman.
Like she was tall and heavily built, But the headless
body pulled from the fire was measured and it was
significantly shorter and entirely too light to match Belle's known physique.
Speaker 2: The math just didn't that.
Speaker 1: Up, not at all. And then the plot thickens even further.
Her hired hand, a man named Ray Lambfeir, was arrested
and eventually convicted of arscene for setting the fire right,
and while in prison, Lambfear confessed to a story that
is nothing short of a Gothic horror novel. It is
so macab He claimed that Gunnis had meticulously planned her
own disappearance. She ordered him to burn the house down,
but before that, she murdered a completely innocent woman, dressed
the corpse in her own clothing, decapitated it so it
couldn't be identified by dental records or facial features, and
left it in the basement as a decoy.
Speaker 2: And, according to Lampfeir, while the house burned and the
authorities assumed she was dead, Bell Gunnis simply walked away
into the night with a massive fortune and stolen cash.
Speaker 1: Just walked away.
Speaker 2: This discrepancy between the physical evidence and the official narrative
is the anchor for the entire conspiracy.
Speaker 1: It's crazy to this day.
Speaker 2: Despite numerous exhumations and modern attempts at DNA testing on
the remains over the years, it has never been definitively
proven whether Bell Gunnis died in that wa fire or
she orchestrated the ultimate escape.
Speaker 1: I mean, think about the era we are dealing with here.
This is nineteen oh eight. We are in an era
long before DNA testing was a concept, before digital footprints,
before facial recognition, social media, or national CCTV networks.
Speaker 2: You could just vanish.
Speaker 1: Exactly if you wanted to vanish. In nineteen oh eight,
you bought a train ticket, changed your name, and you
were gone.
Speaker 2: It was startlingly easy to reinvent yourself.
Speaker 1: But the sheer audacity of planning your own death using
a body double is staggering. It is to decapitate the decoy,
burn your own property to the ground, and just disappear
into the dawn of the twentieth century. I mean, it
sounds like the climax of a Hollywood thriller, but this
was rural Indiana.
Speaker 2: It is incredibly cinematic, which is exactly why this specific
theory is endured for over one hundred years.
Speaker 1: People love a good story, they do.
Speaker 2: When we look at this through the lens of criminology
and public perception. This ties directly into a phenomenon known
as the myth of the mastermind.
Speaker 1: The myth of the mastermind. Ok, this is a crucial concept.
How does that function here?
Speaker 2: Well, we have a deep seated collective anxiety about justice
being evaded. Sure, society operates on the fundamental agreement that
actions have consequences. When a killer like Gunnis supposedly dies
in a fire before she can be arrested, put on trial,
and forced to face the families of her victims, there
is a profound lack of closure for society.
Speaker 1: Right, it feels unfair like she cheated the system exactly.
Speaker 2: The scales of justice remain permanently unbalanced. So psychologically we
elevate her. We turn her into an evil genius, a
criminal mastermind who is playing chess while the local police
were playing checkers.
Speaker 1: Wow, we make her smarter to explain why she wasn't caught.
Speaker 2: Yes, the ambiguity of her death moralizes her, whether she
actually choked on the smoke and burned in that basement,
or whether she escaped to live out her days in
luxury in California or Europe. The fact that we don't
know for absolute certainty allows the mastermind myth.
Speaker 1: To thrive, because we are terrified by the idea that
someone could commit such Hannas acts and simply get away
with it by being smarter than the system. Precisely, it's
almost as if by leaning into the theory that she escaped,
we are punishing ourselves in a way. Yes, like we're
feeding our own latent anxiety that the bad guys can
actually win if they are clever enough. And open question
is so much more powerful than a closed book. Always
a closed case just fades into the dry archives of history.
But an unresolved, brilliant, gruesome escape that becomes a permanent
legend that's thought on.
Speaker 2: And that concept of elevating the killer to something larger
than life leads us directly into another major psychological defense mechanism,
which is, well, if we aren't blaming demonic architecture or
marveling at the evil genius of a mastermind who escaped
into the night, we tend to shift our focus to
something else entirely, we shift our blame to organized human networks.
Speaker 1: Oh right, the syndicates.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is the most persistent vacic theme across all
the historical cases were analyzing today. The terrifying idea that
the killer didn't act alone.
Speaker 3: The Falgar hypothesis exactly, the idea that the person caught
holding the smoking gun, the person whose face is plastered
on the front page of the newspaper, is just the
tip of a massive, shadowy iceberg.
Speaker 1: That is such a creepy thought. And to explore this
we have to travel to New York City in the
mid nineteen seventies, the summer of nineteen seventy seven, specifically.
Speaker 2: A very chaotic time for New.
Speaker 1: York, incredibly chaotic. The city was already dealing with a
massive heat wave, rolling blackouts, and economic stagnation. It was
a tinder box. And into this tinder box walked David Berkowitz,
Son of Sam, Yeah, plunging the city into absolute terror
with the Son of Sam shootings.
Speaker 2: The Son of Sam case is a really fascinating study
in the intersection of true crime, sensationalist media, and public hysteria.
Speaker 1: It had all the ingredients it did.
Speaker 2: Berkowitz targeted young people, often couples, sitting in parked cars
late at night. The randomness of the attacks just parallel.
Speaker 1: The city because again, no one knew who was next right.
Speaker 2: And when he was finally arrested after a massive man hunt,
he famously provided an explanation for his crimes that seemed
rip straight from a horror film, The Dog the Dog.
He claimed that his neighbour's dog, a black Labrador Retriever
named Harvey, was possessed by an ancient demon named Sam,
and this demon dog commanded him to kill.
Speaker 1: Okay, looking back from a modern perspective, the idea of
a talking demon possessed black lab barking orders to commit
murder sounds utterly ridiculous.
Speaker 2: It does sound absurd now.
Speaker 1: And the historical record shows that Berkovitz eventually admitted this
story was completely fake.
Speaker 2: Right, Yes, he confessed to making it up.
Speaker 1: He invented the demon dog narrative purely for the attention,
hoping it would make him sound legally insane or at
least more interesting to the press.
Speaker 2: And it worked.
Speaker 1: It totally worked, because in the cultural climate of nineteen
seventy seven, that narrative was terrifying. It wasn't left off,
it was front page news.
Speaker 2: It perfectly mirrored the emerging anxieties of the era.
Speaker 1: Yes, this is the absolute bedrock of what would soon
explode into the satanic panic of the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2: It absolutely was the catalyst. Yes, the public was primed
to believe in occult forces.
Speaker 1: They were ready for it.
Speaker 2: And what is truly fascinating is that, even after Berkowitz
admitted the dog story was a fabrication, the conspiracy theory
surrounding him didn't vanish.
Speaker 1: It just mutated, exactly.
Speaker 2: They slimply evolved in something far more complex and organized.
This is where investigative journalist Maury Terry enters the picture.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Terry spent decades meticulously building and championing a highly detailed
theory that David Berkowitz was not a lone, disturbed gunman,
but a fall guy. Right. He argued, Burkowitz was merely
the fall guy for an intricate nationwide organization known as
the Processed Church of the Final Judgment.
Speaker 1: The Processed Church of the Final Judgment. Even the name
sounds deliberately designed to invoke dread. It's very dramatic, it
is so. The theory posits that the Processed Church was
a highly organized, heavily armed Satanic cult with underground network
stretching all the way from New York to California.
Speaker 2: Coast to coast operation exactly.
Speaker 1: And the proponents of this theory argue that Berkovitz was
just a low level member upon when the police closed in,
he was ordered to take the fall, spouting the nonsense
about the demon Dog to cover for the cult's actual
professional hit men.
Speaker 2: It's an elaborate cover up theory, right.
Speaker 1: And these hitmen were allegedly out there carrying out a
master plan of societal terror, trying to bring about the
apocalypse through random violence.
Speaker 2: When you analyze this, you have to ask a fundamental question,
which is why would the public of the nineteen seventies
so readily, almost eagerly accept the idea of a nationwide
underground Satanic network operating right under their noses?
Speaker 1: Because accepting a cult is somehow easier than believing a
frustrated postal worker was just driving around the boroughs shooting
people for the throw of it.
Speaker 2: That is a massive part of it. But we also
have to look at the psychological profile of the killers
themselves to understand why they feed these theory.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's look at Berkowitz's mindset.
Speaker 2: There is a constant, profound tension in the mind of
a serial killer post capture. They are caught between two conflicting.
Speaker 1: Desires, narcissism versus self preservation.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the narcissistic desire to feel important, grandiose, and feared,
versus the cowardly desire to avoid ultimate blame and moral
responsibility for their butchery.
Speaker 1: So they want the credit but not the punishment.
Speaker 2: Yes, Berkovitz crave the infamy. He loved the son of
Sam Moniker. He loves seeing his letters printed in the newspapers.
Speaker 1: He was a media hound.
Speaker 2: But by blaming a demon dog initially or later subtly
encouraging theories of a grand cult, he disperses the moral
weight of his actions. Oh, I see the narrative shifts
from I'm a cruel murderer to I did it, but
I was compelled by a supernatural force. Or I was
just a small cog and a massive, terrifying machine that
I couldn't control.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate having your cake and eating it too
for a psychopath, it really is. He gets to be
the star of the show, the center of national attention,
without being the sole villain of.
Speaker 2: The story exactly. He retains the spotlight but sheds the accountability.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: And from the public's perspective, look at the context of
the nineteen seventies, it was a mess. It was a
time of immense social upheaval, the fallout of the Vietnam War,
the Watergate scandal, destroying trust in institutions, rapidly rising violent
crime rates.
Speaker 1: Everyone is already paranoid.
Speaker 2: Yes, so the mechanics of a cult a structured organization
with a clear hierarchy and a master plan that felt
like a plausible, logical explanation for the seemingly senseless decay
of societal norms.
Speaker 1: It gave the chaos a face, a name, and an agenda.
Speaker 2: Exactly Believing in a master plan of societal terror implies
that the terror has a definable goal.
Speaker 1: Right, And perversely, fighting an enemy with a goal is
far less frightening than facing terror for the sake of terror.
Speaker 2: Because you can strategize against a goal.
Speaker 1: You can fight a cult, You can arrest the leaders
of a syndicate. You can't arrest the abstract cons accept
of random violence.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it.
Speaker 1: This idea of the killer as a cog in the
machine is a perfect bridge to our next historical case.
We are taking this idea of an underground network and
applying it to one of the most infamous, recognizable figures
in American history, John Wayne Gacy.
Speaker 2: Gasey is a figure who's confirmed historical reality is already
so horrific, so beyond the pale of normal human comprehension,
that it naturally breeds disbelief.
Speaker 1: This shear scale of it is just hard to process
the scale of.
Speaker 2: His crimes truly challenges our understanding of how someone could
operate undetected for so.
Speaker 1: Long, right Because, on the surface, Gaysey was a pillar
of his suburban Chicago community.
Speaker 2: He was very involved.
Speaker 1: He was He was a thirty six year old successful
building contractor. He was heavily involved in local politics, a
prominent member of the JCS, and most famously, he dressed
as a clown to entertain children at local hospitals and
block parties. Pogo the clown, Pogo the clown. The contrast
between his public persona as a community servant and his
private reality as a predator who murdered thirty three young
men and boys and buried them in the crawl space
beneath his house, it's just staggering.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate Jekyl and Hyde scenario.
Speaker 1: It is. But the conspiracy theory we are looking at
here has nothing to do with his clown persona. This
theory strips away the personal pathology and replaces it with cold,
hard logistics. The theory alleges that Gaycy was merely a
disposal man for a massive nationwide human trafficking ring known
as the Delta Project.
Speaker 2: The terminology used in these theories is always so striking disposal.
Speaker 1: Man, it's gross.
Speaker 2: It completely dehumanizes the victims and sterilizes the crimes.
Speaker 1: It really does. It's like the corporate outsourcing of murder,
the chilling idea of subcontracting horrific crimes raadchilling. We naturally
think of serial killers as being driven by uncontrollable, deeply
personal compulsions, a psychological itch they have to scratch.
Speaker 2: Right, an internal drive.
Speaker 1: This theory frames it as a logistical supply chain. Like
Gaycy wasn't hunting for his own gratification. He was just
managing the grim logistics for a syndicate. He was the
end of the line.
Speaker 2: It turns him into a middle manager of murder exactly.
Speaker 1: But when you step back, you have to ask, how
does a part time clown and local contractor in Chicago
get linked to a massive nationwide trafficking ring.
Speaker 2: Well, this is where the conspiracy theory finds its footing
in verifiable historical facts, which is exactly what makes it
so unnervingly sticky and difficult to completely debunk.
Speaker 1: Okay, layout the facts for me.
Speaker 2: When you dig into the history, the Delta Project was
in fact a real entity.
Speaker 1: It actually existed.
Speaker 2: It existed, It was a known trafficking operation, and it
was co run by a man named Philip Pasco. Okay,
and here is the crucial chilling link that conspiracy theorists
latch onto. Historical records confirmed that Philip Pasco was briefly
employed by John Wayne Gacy's contracting business in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: See that's a staggering connection. It's not six degrees of separation,
that's one degree.
Speaker 2: It's direct contact.
Speaker 1: And Gaysey himself lean heavily into this ambiguity, didn't.
Speaker 2: He He absolutely did. Much like Berkowitz, Gaysey manipulated the
narrative post capture.
Speaker 1: He loved talking to the press.
Speaker 2: In numerous jailhouse interviews, Gasey claimed that he did not
act alone. He stated that his contracting business meant multiple
people had keys to his house, and he claimed that
others used his home to commit these murders while he
was away.
Speaker 1: Which supposedly mirrored the brutal dorm style operations used by
the Delta Project exactly.
Speaker 2: He was famously arrogant, he told his wife as he
left his house in handcuffs. One day, you're going to
read about me on the front pages of the newspapers.
Speaker 1: So he wanted the fame, he wanted.
Speaker 2: The infamy, Yes, but he tried to disperse the guilt.
Speaker 1: But practically speaking, how much weight can we really put
on the words of John Wayne Gacy sitting in a
jail cell trying to save his own life.
Speaker 2: Well, this is a critical point for anyone analyzing these cases.
You must always be incredibly cautious about taking it. Serial
killers jailhouse claims at face value.
Speaker 1: Because wouldn't they want to eventually come clean at the end,
to clear their conscience before they die.
Speaker 2: Rarely, rarely, if ever, the minds of these individuals do
not operate on standard human empathy or guilt. Post capture
killers engage in intense, calculated impression management. Their physical freedom
is gone, so the only thing they have left to
control is their narrative.
Speaker 1: So they just spin webs.
Speaker 2: Exactly, They will inflate their importance, spin elaborate yarns that
make them look like criminal masterminds who outsmarted everyone. Or conversely,
they will deflect guilt by pointing fingers at shadowy organizations.
Speaker 1: Like saying someone else had keys to the house.
Speaker 2: Right claiming others used his house as a classic deflection tactic.
It plants the seed of reasonable doubt, it muddies the waters.
Speaker 1: But the Pasco connection is real.
Speaker 2: It is the confirmed historical existence of the Delta Project,
combined with Gaycy's documented employment of Passco, provides just enough
factual connective tissue to make the theory impossible to dismiss
out of hand.
Speaker 1: It bridges the gap between a lone suburban predator and
a systemic organized operation.
Speaker 2: It definitely provides that bridge.
Speaker 1: Yes, and once you cross that bridge from lone wolf
to systemic operation, the theories only get more extreme.
Speaker 2: They certainly do.
Speaker 1: We are moving from human trafficking to a theory that
takes the idea of the elite syndicate to its absolute,
most macarre extreme conclusion. We are looking at Jeffrey Dahmer
and the theory of the elite cannibal cover up.
Speaker 2: Dahmer's case is entirely unique in this context because the
primary conspiracy theory doesn't focus on his horrific life or
his actual crimes. It focuses entirely on the circumstances of
his death in prison.
Speaker 1: Right, let's look at the facts first. Jeffrey Dahmer was
beaten to death in nineteen ninety four by Christopher Scarver,
a fellow inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Wisconsin.
Speaker 2: That is the established historical fact.
Speaker 1: Scarver cornered him in the prison gym while they were
on cleaning duty and bludgeoned him with a metal bar,
a brutal end it was, but a persistent dark corner
of the Internet insists this was not a random act
of prison violence or a clash of unstable inmates.
Speaker 2: No, they have a much grander theory.
Speaker 1: The fringe theory claims this was a highly orchestrated assassination
directed by a shadow government.
Speaker 2: Which sounds completely wild.
Speaker 1: It is because, according to this conspiracy, Dahmer wasn't just
a deeply troubled, isolated man from Milwaukee. He was a
procurement agent for a global syndicate of wealthy elite cannibals.
The leafs and logic are astounding, and the theory alleges
that Dahmer was preparing to blow the whistle that he
was going to name high ranking politicians and billionaires who
partook in these acts, prompting this shadow government to activate
Scarver as a sleeper assassin to silence him forever.
Speaker 2: If we logically deconstruct this, we have to start with
the foundational evidence, or rather the complete and total lack thereof.
Speaker 1: Right, where's the proof?
Speaker 2: There is absolutely zero evidence, no paper trail, no witness testimony,
no financial links tying Jeffrey Dahmer to any external organization,
let alone a global syndicate of elite cannibals.
Speaker 1: Zero. If anything, the tragedy of Dahmer was defined by
his extreme isolation.
Speaker 2: He's a profound loaner.
Speaker 1: He was deeply lonely, operating entirely in the shadows of
his own apartment. The idea that he was rhything elbows
with billionaires is absurd.
Speaker 2: Entirely isolated. And as for the assassination theory, Scarver's motives
for the murder had been thoroughly documented and they were
entirely his own. What they were driven by his own
severe untreated schizophrenia and a deeply held personal religious disgust
for Dahmer's gruesome crimes.
Speaker 1: So he just hated what Dahmer did.
Speaker 2: Yes, Historical accounts and psychological evaluations of Scarver highlight his
sentiment of divine retribution. He believed he was acting as
an instrument of God's wrath, bringing justice to a man
who had escaped the death.
Speaker 1: Penalty because Wisconsin didn't have the death penalty.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it was a volatile, tragic mix of severe mental
illness and close proximity in an undersupervised prison environment, not
a calculated hit by a shadow government.
Speaker 1: You know, this maps perfectly onto the concept of blood libel.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely, for.
Speaker 1: Anyone unfamiliar, blood libel is that centuries old, completely false
and deeply anti Semitic myth where marginalized groups, historically Jewish
people were accused of murdering children to use their blood
in religious rituals.
Speaker 2: It's one of history's oldest conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1: It was a horrific tool used to dehumanize and justify
the persecution of an outgroup. And we're essentially seeing that
ancient template repurposed for the modern era.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it's the architecture of an ancient myth updated for
the Internet age. The outgroup is no longer a religious minority.
It is the ultra wealthy, the political elite, the amorphous
shadow government.
Speaker 1: The one percent.
Speaker 2: Yes, we currently live in an era of profound, pervasive
distrust of the ultra wealthy and the political establishment. Health
inequality is staggering, and people feel disconnected from the levers
of power. People are angry, very angry. So by projecting
the absolute most heinous, unforgivable taboo in human society, cannibalism,
onto the elite, the conspiracy theory aggressively validates that profound
societal distrust.
Speaker 1: Oh that's fascinating.
Speaker 2: Dahmer, in this narrative, ceases to be a real human being.
He becomes a terrifying prop used to express a broader
societal fear that those in power are not just financially corrupt,
but fundamentally monstrously evil on a biological level.
Speaker 1: That completely reframes the narrative. If you look at it
from that angle, the conspiracy isn't about the killer at all.
It's an indictment of the system.
Speaker 2: It is political commentary dressed up as true crime.
Speaker 1: It takes the visceral horror of Dahmer and weaponizes it
to articulate class warfare and political paranoia.
Speaker 2: That's exactly right.
Speaker 1: And you know, this profound distrust of the elites naturally
and almost inevitably bleeds into a profound distrust of the
government itself.
Speaker 2: It's a very short jump from billionaires to government agencies.
Speaker 1: It is we start to wonder if the institutions meant
to protect us are actually the ones pulling the strings.
In the nineteen sixties and seventies, the Cold War was raging,
public trust in the government was actively fracturing due to
the Vietnam War and political assassinations.
Speaker 4: The culture was saturated with paranoia saturated, and this atmosphere
of intense, suffocating paranoia birth theories that the government didn't
just fail to catch our worst killers, they actively manufactured
them in laboratories.
Speaker 2: The Manchurian candidate theory.
Speaker 1: Yes, and the poster child for this terrifying theory is
Ted Bundy.
Speaker 2: Bundy is perhaps the most heavily mythologized serial killer in
modern history.
Speaker 1: He really is.
Speaker 2: He's recognized for his high BodyCount, his perceived good looks,
his charisma, and his ability to blend seamlessly into high society.
He really defy the stereotype of the creeping monster in
the shadows.
Speaker 1: He was the guy who looked like he could be
the president of a fraternity or a rising star in
local politics. He was very polished, and when you look
at his timeline, it's fascinating. In nineteen sixty six, he
was an exceptionally bright, ambitious student studying Chinese at the
University of Washington. Out of nowhere, he drops out in nineteen.
Speaker 2: Sixty eight, just a suddeny shift.
Speaker 1: Yeah. He travels to the East coast supposedly to understand
his roots and figure out his identity, and then he
returns to the West, eventually being accepted into law school
at the University of Utah.
Speaker 2: It sounds like typical young adult wanderlust.
Speaker 1: Right on the surface, this just looks like a young
man trying to find his way in the world. But
the fringe theory attempts to tie this specific transient timeline
directly to the CIA.
Speaker 2: Specifically, the theory suggests that during this transient period, Bundy
was recruited or kidnapped and became a rogue test subject
for the M Culture program.
Speaker 1: Right the M Culture program. The theory posits that the
government scrambled his brain. They used massive doses of LSD,
sleep deprivation, and hypnosis.
Speaker 2: The usual M culture toolkit exactly.
Speaker 1: But their intention wasn't to create a serial killer. Their
intention was to create a covert programmable sleeper assassin for
the Cold war a weapon, yes, a weapon, but the
experiment supposedly went wrong. It broke his psyche, fracturing his
mind and resulting in him becoming a cross country serial
killer instead of a controlled asset.
Speaker 2: It's a very sci fi concept.
Speaker 1: When I hear this, I immediately imagine a real life,
incredibly dark, twisted version of Jason Bourne, or, like you said,
the Manchurian candidate. The idea of a sleeper agent triggered
to kill by a code word. It's pure Hollywood, but
bringing it back to reality is so jarring. Picture it
a handsome, ordinary looking law student sitting in a lecture
hall in Utah, taking notes on tort law, but harboring
this shattered engineered government program psycheist waiting to snap.
Speaker 2: It is profoundly terrified.
Speaker 1: It's a nightmare, it is.
Speaker 2: But to understand why this theory has such a men's traction,
we must ground it in historical reality.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's look at the facts.
Speaker 2: The listener needs to remember that cultural was not a myth.
It was not a movie plot. It was a real,
highly controversial, heavily documented, and deeply illegal CIA mind control
program spearheaded by a man named Sidney Gottlieb.
Speaker 1: The fact that it was real is the craziest part.
Speaker 2: It really is. The United States government actually was experimenting
on its own citizens, often unwittingly, with LSD, sensory deprivation,
electroshock therapy, and psychological torture during that exact era.
Speaker 1: And what were they trying to do.
Speaker 2: They were desperately trying to crack the code of human
consciousness to use it as a weapon against the Soviets.
Speaker 1: Which is the terrifying kernel of truth that makes the
conspiracy bloom. If the government admits to dosing people with
LSD in secret facilities, the public mind naturally extrapolates the
worst case scenario.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the verified facts provide a rock solid foundation of
justifiable paranoia. If the government was secretly running psychological torture
camps in the nineteen sixties, what else were they capable of? However,
making the leap from unethical, illegal experiments to the deliberate
or accidental creation of a highly organized cross country serial
killer like.
Speaker 1: Bundy, that's a big lead.
Speaker 2: It's a massive leap. That's where the verified facts end
and sci fi horror begins. There's absolutely no documentary evidence
placing Bundy in any and culture program none at all.
His pathology, his narcissism, and his violent compulsions are deeply
rooted in his own psychological development and early life trauma.
Not a CIA laboratory.
Speaker 1: But the shadow of the CIA and their covert operations
looms incredibly large over the nineteen sixties, which brings us
to another figure from that.
Speaker 2: Era, a very different kind of figure.
Speaker 1: Very different. Not a lone wolf acting out in the dark,
but a highly charismatic cult leader operating in the bright
California sun. Charles Manson, the Manson family. Yes, and the
theory here isn't just about a mind control experiment gone wrong.
It's about a deliberate, calculated, successful psychological operation.
Speaker 2: A psyop theory builds heavily on that same underlying theme
of government paranoia, but it introduces a very specific, very
plausible political.
Speaker 1: Motive, the anti hippie angle exactly so. The theory alleges
that Charles Manson was not just a rambling x KHN
who gathered a following. He was an active intelligence asset
working directly for the.
Speaker 2: CIA, which is a bold claim, very bold.
Speaker 1: The premise sets the stage perfectly, though it's the late
nineteen sixties, the US government and the conservative establishment were
absolutely terrified of the growing hippie counterculture.
Speaker 2: It was a massive cultural shift.
Speaker 1: You had millions of young people protesting the Vietnam War,
rejecting traditional capitalism and forming a massive political block.
Speaker 2: They were a threat to the status quo.
Speaker 1: A huge thought. So the conspiracy asks a strategic question,
how do you stop a peaceful anti war movement that
is gaining massive momentum.
Speaker 2: And the alleged answer is.
Speaker 1: You rot hit from the inside out. You brainwash a
charismatic cult leader Manson and have his follower his girls
commit horrific high profile murders are.
Speaker 2: The Tate LaBianca murders of August nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: Yes, the goal of this supposed syop was to completely
discredit the political left in the eyes of the general public.
Speaker 2: It's a smear campaign via murder.
Speaker 3: Exactly.
Speaker 1: If the government could paint the peace and love hippies
as nothing more than drug craze murderous vagabonds who might
break into your house at night, the middle class sympathy
for the anti war movement would evaporate instantly.
Speaker 2: And the details line up in a very eerie way,
which fuels the theory.
Speaker 1: They really do. Manson famously used massive amounts of LSD
and sleep deprivation to strip away his followers' egos and
create permanent personality changes, making them willing to kill on command.
Speaker 2: Chillingly, those were the exact research objectives of the m
culture scientists.
Speaker 1: The parallels are undeniable.
Speaker 2: They are, which is why the theory endures. It raises
an incredibly complex historical question, one that forces us to
look at the intersection of intent and outcome.
Speaker 1: So let me ask you directly, separating the conspiracy from
the truth for a second, Let's assume the CIA had
absolutely nothing to do with it. Even if it wasn't
a conspiracy, did it work?
Speaker 2: That is the truly chilling reality we have to confront
when studying this era. If we look purely at the
historical outcome, the answer is an unequivocal yes.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Even the CIA link is entirely false, which all credible
historical consensus says it is. The Manson family did effectively
kill the hippie movement's innocence in the eyes of the
American public.
Speaker 1: The optics were utterly devastating. You went from Woodstock to
the Manson family.
Speaker 2: In a matter of months, they were the counterculture, which
had branded itself entirely on peace, love and anti violence,
was suddenly globally associated with a charismatic madman and butchery.
Speaker 1: To change everything.
Speaker 2: Middle America looked at the Hippies and no longer saw
misguided kids holding flowers. They saw potential murderers. The fact
that Manson emerged at the exact time the government was
struggling to contain the anti war movement, and the fact
that he used LSD, a drug popularized by the counterculture
but also actively weaponized by mculture, makes the theory incredibly
compelling to anyone looking for historical patterns.
Speaker 1: It feels too perfectly timed, too strategically flawless to be
a mere coincidence, and that feeling.
Speaker 2: The feeling that things line up too perfectly, is the
lifeblood of any strong conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1: It's that human desire for pattern recognition asserting itself again.
We see the historical result the sudden death of the
Hippie movement, and we reverse engineer a grand Mastermind plot
to explain.
Speaker 2: It, because accepting that a random x con just happened
to derail an entire cultural movement by accident is deeply unsatisfying.
Speaker 1: It's anti climactic, and this idea of reverse engineering a
myth to fit a narrative leads us perfectly into the
final thematic area of our exploration today, the power of
the pen. Yes, we are moving from vast government cover
ups to the myths we manufacture entirely ourselves. Through the
power of the pen.
Speaker 2: This is where we examine how history, literature, journalism, and
eventually the Internet create killers out of thin air, or
exaggerate real, mundane criminals into literal comic book supervillains.
Speaker 1: And we're going to start this examination way back in
eighteen ninety three at the Chicago World's Fair with a
man named h. H. Holmes.
Speaker 2: H HH Holmes a classic case of myth making.
Speaker 1: He is a fascinating character. He is often cited as
America's first documented serial killer, and the mythology surrounding him
is absolutely monolithic. It's huge, It's woven into the fabric
of American folklore. The most famous element of his story
is what historians call the murder Castle myth.
Speaker 2: Right, the hotel.
Speaker 1: We've all heard the legend. Right, Holmes built this massive,
labyrinthine hotel in Chicago, specifically time to capitalize on the
influx of tourists for the eighteen ninety.
Speaker 2: Three World's Fair, a literal trap for tourists.
Speaker 1: Supposedly, he supposedly attended the fair, picked up unsuspecting naive
women who are traveling alone, took them back to his castle,
and murdered them in a building explicitly designed from the
ground up for slaughter.
Speaker 2: The details that get passed around are incredibly gruesome.
Speaker 1: Oh they are insane, soundproof gas chambers where he could
watch them die, giant acid vats in the basement, the
plumbing system right, a system of pipes leading directly to
his private apartment so he could asphyxiate victims in their
sleep at the push of a button. And the most
eerie cinematic detail the shoot, the greased shoot, a three
feet by three feet shaft leading straight from the upper
floors to the basement, where he allegedly installed a cremation
kiln and lime pits to dispose of the evidence.
Speaker 2: The narrative paints a picture of a Victorian industrial slaughterhouse.
It presents Holmes as an evil genius of architecture.
Speaker 1: And engineering exactly. It's incredibly captivating. It sounds like a movie.
But here is the massive reality check. When you dig
into the historical documents.
Speaker 2: The truth is much less glamorous, way less.
Speaker 1: Most modern historians and architectural experts have thoroughly debunked almost
all of this. They argue the castle was just a
poorly constructed, very ugly, over sized buildings.
Speaker 2: It was a shoddy hotel.
Speaker 1: Did it have multiple hidden rooms and weird hallways, Sure,
but those rooms were used to stash stolen furniture and
hide from his constant barrage of creditors, not to stash corpses.
Speaker 2: Holmes was a con man first, second, and third, he
was a grifter.
Speaker 1: Yes, he absolutely killed people, but almost always people he
knew personally, like his business partners or his mistresses, and
he killed them as part of larger insurance fraud and
financial schemes.
Speaker 2: He was chasing money, not a body.
Speaker 1: Count, right. He wasn't hunting random fairgoers in a labyrinth
of doom. When I was reading the realities of this,
I was laughing because I realized this is basically eighteen
nineties clickbait.
Speaker 2: That is a very apt analogy. It was the birth
of true crime sensationalism, right.
Speaker 1: It's the peak of yellow journalism, you had newspaper barons
like Hurst and Pulletzer fighting for circulation in a crowded market, and.
Speaker 2: A mundane fraudster doesn't sell.
Speaker 1: A grimy, cowardly con man who poisons his business partner
for a life insurance payout isn't exciting enough to out
the morning edition. But an architectural evil genius with a
custom built murder castle filled with acid rats.
Speaker 2: That sells papers by the millions.
Speaker 1: They literally invented a supervillain to drive revenue.
Speaker 2: It was a highly profitable fiction. But this raises an
important psychological question. Why do we still prefer the evil
genius trope today, long after the sensationalized journalism of the
eighteen nineties has faded into history.
Speaker 1: That's a great point. Why does the murder castle myth
endure so strongly?
Speaker 2: Why do we want him to be a supervillain? Yeah?
Why because believing a killer is an architectural genius, a
mastermind who designed a flawless technological system of death, makes
us feel better about the fact that the authorities didn't
catch him sooner.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, Okay, if.
Speaker 2: You look at the reality that Holmes was just a
regular sleazy con man who slipped through the cracks of
a deeply flawed, disorganized, in nascent police system in eighteen
ninety Chicago. That implies the police were incompetent.
Speaker 1: And realizing the police incompetent makes society feel incredibly unsafe exactly.
Speaker 2: But if he was an uncatchable, once in a generation
genius operating an impossible labyrinth, well, no police force could
be expected to stop a supervillain. The myth of his
genius protects our faith and the institutions meant to protect us.
Speaker 1: It excuses the failure of the system.
Speaker 2: It does wow.
Speaker 1: We actively elevate the killer's intelligence to protect the reputation
of the cops. That is a wild psychological twist. We
need the villain to be brilliant so the heroes don't
look foolish exactly, And speaking of elevating killers through literature
and myth, our next theory takes a beloved literary figure
and violently drops him right into the foggy, bloodsilk streets
of Whitechapel.
Speaker 2: We are talking about the granddaddy of all true crime mysteries.
Speaker 1: Jack the River, the famous London serial killer who terrorized
the East End in eighteen eighty eight and was never caught.
Speaker 2: The ultimate cold case.
Speaker 1: The list of suspects proposed over the last century is endless,
ranging from impoverished butchers to members of the royal family.
But one of the most absurd head scratching theories comes
from a nineteen ninety six book by an author named
Richard Wallace.
Speaker 2: Oh, this one is out there.
Speaker 1: He claimed that the shadowy Jack the Ripper was none
other than Lewis.
Speaker 2: Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland.
Speaker 1: Yes, curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say. And what
was his rock solid, irrefutable evidence for besmirching the name
of a globally beloved children's author.
Speaker 2: Prepare yourself anagrams. Anagrams.
Speaker 1: According to the methodol or. Wallace took completely random paragraphs
from Carrol's children's books and simply rearranged the letters to
form new sentences where Carroll supposedly confessed to the gruesome murders.
Speaker 2: It's just it's beyond beelief.
Speaker 1: I mean, come on, I burst out laughing when I
read this. If you give me a long enough grocery list,
I could probably make an anagram out of it to
confess to a bank robbery if I tried hard enough.
Speaker 2: It is a stark, almost comical reminder of how cheap
parlor tricks can masquerade as legitimate.
Speaker 1: Criminology, parlor tricks designed to sell books exactly.
Speaker 2: The theory relies entirely on a forced, bad faith manipulation
of text. As you pointed out, you can make an
anagram out of almost any lengthy text if you've bend
the rules of syntax enough.
Speaker 1: It's just a word puzzle.
Speaker 2: But while the theory itself is laughable, it highlights a
much darker, more cynical side of the true crime industry.
There is a relentless, insatiable hunger for new angles on
old cases, especially the Ripper case. We call it ripperology,
and sometimes authors will prioritize a sensational, deeply libelous claim
over historical integrity simply to generate controversy, secure publishing deal,
and drive sales.
Speaker 1: It turns real historical tragedy into a game of scrabble
where the prize is notoriety and profit.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate commodification of true crime.
Speaker 1: It is, and what's truly wild is that this desire
to connect ridiculous dots hasn't gone away. The tools have
just changed.
Speaker 2: The instinct remains the same.
Speaker 1: The instinct is the same, but the delivery mechan as faster.
What used to be published in fringe books in nineteen
ninety six is now birthed instantaneously online, and.
Speaker 2: That brings us to the modern era.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to the final thread in our exploration
today and perhaps the most modern bizarre example of how
conspiracies are manufactured and propagated.
Speaker 2: Today, we are looking at the Zodiac Killer meme.
Speaker 1: Yes, we absolutely cannot talk about famous serial killer conspiracies
without talking about the incredibly bizarre internet phenomenon of claiming
that US Senator Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer.
Speaker 2: It's a defining moment in Internet culture now.
Speaker 1: To be clear, this started as a literal joke on
Twitter back in twenty thirteen, a random user made a
sarcastic comment, but by the twenty sixteen presidential election cycle,
it had morphed from a niche joke into a massive,
unstoppable viral phenomena.
Speaker 2: It evolved rapidly, complete with users generating side by side
photo comparisons between Cruse and the original nineteen sixties police
sketches of the Zodiac right.
Speaker 1: The Internet was absolutely flooded with these side by side comparisons.
People were analyzing his facial structure, his mannerisms.
Speaker 2: The glasses, the hair yea.
Speaker 1: It bled out of Twitter and led to mainstream news articles,
late night talk show monologues, and people were literally buying
t shirts and coffee mugs referencing the theory.
Speaker 2: It became an industry of its own.
Speaker 1: I remember seeing this spread online in real time. It
was fascinating as a cultural observer to watch a sheer
admitted Internet absurdity completely bypass all logic and become mainstream
cultural news.
Speaker 2: The Internet moves at lightning speed.
Speaker 1: And the glaring fatal flaw to the entire theory the
absolute physical impossibility of it. The Zodiac murders peaked primarily
in nineteen sixty eight and nineteen sixty nine, and Ted Cruise.
Ted Cruz was born in late nineteen seventy, so logically
physically temporarily impossible.
Speaker 2: It perfectly illustrates the rapid evolution of conspiracy theories in
the modern era. What used to be whispered in dark
rooms like the folklore of the Hellmouth at the Caesel Hotel,
or published in exhaustive friends books like the Lewis Carroll
anagram is now birth does a meme.
Speaker 1: It's weaponized humor. It's using irony to build a narrative exactly.
Speaker 2: The fundamental human desire to connect dots to find patterns
in the chaos hasn't changed, but it is now being
weaponized by social media algorithms in irony.
Speaker 1: People knew it was fake, right, oh.
Speaker 2: The vast majority of the people sharing the Ted Cruz
meme knew it was factually impossible. They knew he wasn't born.
Speaker 1: Yet, so why share it?
Speaker 2: Because the act of participating in the conspiracy, of sharing
the side by side photos, of engaging with the content,
it became a form of digital community building.
Speaker 4: It was a shared inside joke, yes, an inside joke
that scaled globally in a matter of days.
Speaker 2: The actual truth of the claim was entirely secondary to
the viral engagement and the sense of belonging it produced.
Speaker 1: That's incredible.
Speaker 2: It shows that today a conspiracy theory doesn't even need
to be believable to be influential. It just needs to
be shareable if.
Speaker 1: It's funny or provocative enough. The truth simply doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: Not anymore.
Speaker 1: No, that is such a profound point. It doesn't need
to be true, it just needs to be shareable. The
metric of success has changed from accuracy to virality.
Speaker 2: It's a brave new world for conspiracies, and that brings.
Speaker 1: Us to the end of our exploration today. We have
been on a truly thrilling journey unraveling the threads of
these chilling narratives.
Speaker 2: We've covered a lot of ground.
Speaker 1: From haunted hotels and decapitated decoys in rural Indiana to
the paranoia of government sleeper agents and the viral absurdity
of modern Twitter memes.
Speaker 2: And throughout all of these diverse, seemingly disconnected threads spanning
over a century, we see a unified, deeply human theme.
Speaker 1: Which is that these theories, no matter how outlandish, how
historically inaccurate, or how biologically impossible they might be, are
ultimately a reflection of us, you really are. They aren't
really about the killers at all. They reflect our own fears,
our modern anxieties, our profound distrust of authority, and our
desperate evolutionary need to find meaning and structure in the darkest,
most chaotic corners of human behavior.
Speaker 2: If I may leave you with the final thought to
mull over something that reframes everything we've discussed today.
Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely, let's hear it.
Speaker 2: It is this our conspiracy theories at they're very core,
actually a bizarre, twisted form of optimism.
Speaker 1: Optimism that's a strong word for theories involving demons and cults.
Speaker 2: How do you figure out think about it deeply. If
a shadowy elite syndicate is pulling the strings behind the scenes,
or a vast government agency is running a massive, calculated
psychological operation, or even if an ancient demonic vortex is
possessing people, that at least someone or something is in control.
Oh wow, there is a pilot flying the plane. Even
if that pilot is evil, there is a master plan.
The alternative that the world is fundamentally chaotic, that violence
is utterly random, that no one is at the wheel,
and that completely ordinary people can commit horrific acts entirely
on their own volition for no grand purpose is far
more terrifying.
Speaker 1: It really is.
Speaker 2: A conspiracy theory gives the monster a leash, It gives
the horror of boundary. Without the theory, the monster is
just walking freely among us, unbound by any rules.
Speaker 1: Wow. A conspiracy theory gives the monster a loosh. That
is a profoundly heavy thought and one that is going
to stick with me for a long time.
Speaker 2: It changes how you look at the folklore.
Speaker 1: It makes you realize that sometimes we invent monsters to
hide from the chaos. And now we want to turn
it over to you, the listener. Yes, as you listen
to this deep dive today, did any of these theories
fundamentally change how you view these historical events? Do you
subscribe to the idea that there's always more to the story?
Speaker 2: We want to know.
Speaker 1: Does the idea of a nationwide trafficking ring or a
Grand Cia plot secretly comfort you more than the reality
of a lone, disturbed individual acting out in the dark.
Are we just building elaborate cages for our own fears.
Speaker 2: It's a lot to ponder.
Speaker 1: We want you to be part of this conversation. Let
us know your stance. Drop a comment below and tell
us where you draw the line between historical fact, comforting
fiction and absolute fear.
Speaker 2: Is we are constantly drawing and redrawing.
Speaker 1: As a society, It truly is. Thank you so much
for joining us for this incredibly deep exploration on thrilling threads.
We hope you challenged your perspective and kept you on
the edge of your seats.
Speaker 2: We certainly covered a lot.
Speaker 1: We can't wait to unravel the next mystery with you.
Until next time, stay curious.