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Speaker 3: You are now listening to True Murder The most shocking
Speaker 3: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 3: written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK Every
Speaker 3: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 3: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 3: host journalist and author Dan Zufanski, Good Evening uncover the
Speaker 3: twisted tales that inspired the big screen's greatest screams. Which
Speaker 3: case of demonic possession inspired The Exorcist? What horrifying front
Speaker 3: page story generated the idea for a Nightmare on Elm Street?
Speaker 3: Which film was based on the infamous skin wearing murderer.
Speaker 4: Ed Gain unearthed the terrifying and true tales behind some
Speaker 4: of the scariest horror movies to ever haunt our screens,
Speaker 4: including the Enfield poltergeist case that was retold in The
Speaker 4: Conjuring two, and the serial killers who inspired Hannibal Lecter
Speaker 4: in Silence of the Lambs. Behind the Horror dissects these
Speaker 4: and other bizarre tales to reveal haunting, real life stories
Speaker 4: of abduction, Disappearance, Murder, and Exorcism. The book that we're
Speaker 4: featuring this evening is Behind the Horror, True stories that
Speaker 4: inspired horror movies, with my special guests, journalist, author, and
Speaker 4: podcaster doctor Lee Meller. Welcome back to the program, and
Speaker 4: thank you so much for this interview, Doctor Lee Meller.
Speaker 5: Hey, Dan, it's been so long. Well, I can't remember
Speaker 5: the last time. I'm so thrilled to be back on
Speaker 5: the show.
Speaker 4: It's a big thrill for me to have you since
Speaker 4: you're a very very busy man writing and now with
Speaker 4: the fantastic podcast Murder was the case, Let's talk about
Speaker 4: just what is covered in this book Behind the Horror.
Speaker 4: If you like this, we could go through each of
Speaker 4: the chapters that you have, and then you could just
Speaker 4: make a comment about it. We could discuss it briefly
Speaker 4: because there are so many stories in this collection.
Speaker 5: So yeah, that'd be great. And I mean, I think
Speaker 5: the book came out a few months ago and I
Speaker 5: had all of the chapters, all the details memorized. But
Speaker 5: you know, after a few months it starts to fade
Speaker 5: a little bit, so I think a broader approach would
Speaker 5: probably work better. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, you also just talk at the beginning, a little
Speaker 4: bit about just movie makers deciding to well not deciding
Speaker 4: to be inspired, but certainly they were inspired by real
Speaker 4: life and bizarre crimes and strange crimes that are covered
Speaker 4: in Behind the Whore. Just tell us a little bit
Speaker 4: about just the very beginning of filmmaking, because obviously filmmakers
Speaker 4: are influenced by other filmmakers. So you talk about Fritz
Speaker 4: Lang nineteen thirty one and M and just talk about
Speaker 4: just a little bit of the true history that inspired filmmaker.
Speaker 5: Okay, Yeah, So M was a film that was made
Speaker 5: by Fritz Lang and released in Weimar, Germany. That is
Speaker 5: the period of the German Republic between the two World Wars.
Speaker 5: It was about two years before Hitler's rise to power,
Speaker 5: and during this period there was a lot of problems.
Speaker 5: We just kind of paved the way for the Nazis.
Speaker 5: There is like hyperinflation, there is a lot of poverty,
Speaker 5: and there was also a strange boom in serial murder
Speaker 5: and this did not go unnoticed to the police and
Speaker 5: the citizenry in Germany at the time. Now, they didn't
Speaker 5: have a name for it. It wasn't until around this time,
Speaker 5: about nineteen thirty one, the same year that m came
Speaker 5: out that Ernestkinnatt, who was like the director of the
Speaker 5: Berlin Police, came up with the term Syrian mart for
Speaker 5: serial murder. So it was the first time it was
Speaker 5: really named. And so we can talk about some of
Speaker 5: those some of those murderers that were in Weymeyer, Germany.
Speaker 5: Some of them there's a lot more information than others,
Speaker 5: but some of them are really truly grotesque cases. Like
Speaker 5: even by today's standards, they still hold up as being
Speaker 5: really foul.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, Yeah, and some of them are now again involved
Speaker 4: with the golden age of serial killing. At least these
Speaker 4: are regarded as some of the biggest and biggest names
Speaker 4: in serial killing and certainly in true crime these days.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you'll see references going back to particularly the
Speaker 5: one that I was able to find the most information
Speaker 5: about and wrote the most about was the Vampire of Dusseldorf,
Speaker 5: Peter Turton. But he's also kind of the last in
Speaker 5: the chronology. So just to begin, you have a guy
Speaker 5: who was known mostly as stump arm and his name
Speaker 5: was Johann Meyer, and there's not a hell of a
Speaker 5: lot to talk about with him. Just the case itself
Speaker 5: seemed to be mainly shooting people, and he would do
Speaker 5: weird things like he killed two men and then he
Speaker 5: would decapitate them and he would swap their heads, for instance.
Speaker 5: And so this was going on more around the very
Speaker 5: end of the First World War. He's not a particularly
Speaker 5: interesting one, but I gave him like a couple of
Speaker 5: pages just to show where it all began. Then you
Speaker 5: have a guy Frederick Schumann, the Terror of Falconhagen Lake,
Speaker 5: and he was I think probably highly psychopathic. He was
Speaker 5: one of these criminals that he was very diverse, and
Speaker 5: he would prey on people in lover's lanes, kill the
Speaker 5: males and then rape and murder their female partners in
Speaker 5: a much more sadistic way. And he would do things too,
Speaker 5: like just shoot people driving along the Autobahn just for
Speaker 5: a thrill. So those are probably the two of the
Speaker 5: lesser known ones. When we get to Carl Grossman, and
Speaker 5: this is now into the nineteen twenties, he's known as
Speaker 5: the Butcher of Berlin, and Grossman ran a sausage stand
Speaker 5: at a train station. I can't recall it off the
Speaker 5: top of my head, but it was a very busy
Speaker 5: train station in Germany, and essentially people would just come
Speaker 5: by and they loved his plump, juicy sausages and the
Speaker 5: special flavor that they had, and these significantly improved at
Speaker 5: one point in time, and because I guess at the time,
Speaker 5: because there were fruit shortages in Germany, they would pad
Speaker 5: out the sausages with things like turnips and all kinds
Speaker 5: of other fillers. But they noted at some point that
Speaker 5: his sausages became particularly needy and they would buy them
Speaker 5: and they'd be in a rush, so nobody really paid
Speaker 5: much attention to just get the famous sausages, get on
Speaker 5: the train and go where they needed to be going. Well,
Speaker 5: the reason the sausages got so much more juicy was
Speaker 5: because Carl Grossmann, having spent so much time around the station,
Speaker 5: he knew that there were people coming in from the provinces,
Speaker 5: so from the countryside, and they were looking for work
Speaker 5: in Berlin. As I said, this was a time of
Speaker 5: great economic downturn, it was the depression, and that these
Speaker 5: people they didn't know the city and they were desperate
Speaker 5: and looking for work. And he would select young women
Speaker 5: and try and make it seem like a coincidence, like hmmm,
Speaker 5: why are you here? Can I can I help you? Well,
Speaker 5: I'm looking for work, you know, maybe as a serving
Speaker 5: girl or something. Oh my, I can't believe this. What
Speaker 5: luck could you imagine? I am actually on my way
Speaker 5: to the employment office right now looking for a serving girl,
Speaker 5: and here I have found one. Do you want to
Speaker 5: take the job? Well, of course they do, and they
Speaker 5: must have felt very fortunate themselves. They just step off
Speaker 5: the train into Berlin and they've already found employment doing
Speaker 5: what they want. Except that's the ruse and he brings
Speaker 5: them back to his apartment and he rapes them and
Speaker 5: seems to have sadistically tortured them, and then he kills
Speaker 5: and butchers them, and he makes them into sausage meat.
Speaker 5: So it's like you've got the victims arriving at the station,
Speaker 5: being processed at his apartment, and then being returned to
Speaker 5: the station and sold to passengers who are either getting
Speaker 5: off the train or getting onto the train. So that
Speaker 5: in itself was just a complete grizzly case. Yeah, it
Speaker 5: reminds me, you know, we see kind of modern iterations
Speaker 5: of that, like in the Robert Kickton case in Canada,
Speaker 5: right where he didn't exactly feed the remains to his neighbors,
Speaker 5: but he fed them to the pigs and then so yeah,
Speaker 5: it's close enough. It's like cannibalism by proxy, right, And
Speaker 5: so this obviously just powrified a lot of people. And
Speaker 5: I don't think that you could just forget that. I mean,
Speaker 5: even if you lived to the ripe old age of
Speaker 5: eighty and through the horrors of the war that were
Speaker 5: to come, you would always remember the time that you
Speaker 5: ate the sausage that was probably made from a young
Speaker 5: woman who had stepped off the green, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely, and as well as it doesn't end with
Speaker 4: that too, because it's almost like he's inspired, is it
Speaker 4: Fritz Harmon. Fritz Harmon.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Fritz Harmon was in Hanover, so that's further to
Speaker 5: the west and a little later than Carl Grossman, but
Speaker 5: also known as a butcher and the werewolf of Hanover
Speaker 5: and Fritz Harmon once again, yeah, very similar. M good,
Speaker 5: good pick up on that. Dan. A lot of young
Speaker 5: men coming into Hanover on trains, you know, looking for opportunities,
Speaker 5: and there he is, and he has an accomplice who
Speaker 5: is his lover and I think his hands grands, I
Speaker 5: remember that directly, and they would lure these young men
Speaker 5: back to his apartment and he would bite through their
Speaker 5: wind pipe. I think sometimes they might have been drunk
Speaker 5: or asleep, but he would actually kill them by biting
Speaker 5: through their wind pipe. And then he would dismember them
Speaker 5: and he would dump the bodies into the river. And
Speaker 5: there was some pretty strong evidence that he was also
Speaker 5: selling the meat too. The interesting thing about Harmon is
Speaker 5: that he was also a police informant, which is something
Speaker 5: that I've seen in modern serial killers or criminals like
Speaker 5: you get like Whitey Bulger, right or Scott Lee Kimball.
Speaker 5: You hear these cases and you go, how can this
Speaker 5: person be a police informant and be a serial killer
Speaker 5: at the same time. Well, it's nothing new. This goes
Speaker 5: back to Fritz Harmon at least in Weimar, Germany. And
Speaker 5: so I mean they think he killed about twenty five
Speaker 5: people Grossman. It may have been as little as maybe
Speaker 5: four or six, but it could have been high. But yeah,
Speaker 5: Harmon almost certainly like at least twenty five. And so
Speaker 5: this is when they start to really notice this. I mean,
Speaker 5: Grossman is in Berlin, Harmon is in Hanover. I mean,
Speaker 5: these are major cities, and so it's making it into
Speaker 5: the press. And I think at this time Ernskinnatt who
Speaker 5: coins Surrey and Marred and probably Fritz Lang are starting
Speaker 5: to pick up on it more. The final one, of course,
Speaker 5: is Peter Curtin, the Vampire of Dusseldorf. And Peter Curtin
Speaker 5: is he Matt's alist. That's someone who is sexually aroused
Speaker 5: by the side of blood and also a sexual vampire
Speaker 5: and he gets off in drinking blood and a sexual
Speaker 5: sadist and that he gets off and causing harm. So
Speaker 5: he has a whole array of paraphilia, but mainly centering
Speaker 5: around blood and over a very long career, starting in
Speaker 5: the twenties but going into the thirties and targeting mainly females,
Speaker 5: but I think there was a few male victims in
Speaker 5: there too, but the age ranges went from being little
Speaker 5: girls all the way up to being middle aged women.
Speaker 5: Peter Curtin is basically there was a few home invasions,
Speaker 5: but he's stalking them through the streets and he might
Speaker 5: club them over the head with a hammer or stab
Speaker 5: them to death, and then he will masturbate at the
Speaker 5: you know, looking at their blood or in some cases
Speaker 5: drinking their blood. And on at least one occasion that
Speaker 5: I can recall he had sex with the dead body.
Speaker 5: So when you put this all together, like we even
Speaker 5: in this time right now, we can't think of five
Speaker 5: serial killers that really are that standout in this day
Speaker 5: and age. As you said, the golden age in quotation
Speaker 5: marks has kind of passed. But if you just go
Speaker 5: to the swamp period in Weimar, Germany, you have this
Speaker 5: deluge of sexual, violent depravity and people that are just
Speaker 5: going what is going on and suddenly earn skinnat coins
Speaker 5: the term Surian mord for it. By the way, he
Speaker 5: was the one that investigated several of these cases. And
Speaker 5: so Fritz Lang, this filmmaker, is watching this and it
Speaker 5: inspires him to make m City Searches for a Murderer
Speaker 5: in nineteen thirty one, starring the great Peter Lourie who
Speaker 5: plays basically a child murderer. And they don't get into
Speaker 5: really the details too much about what he did, and
Speaker 5: I mean back then they have to be careful with that, right.
Speaker 5: But from a cinematic point of view, it's beautifully shot
Speaker 5: as a narrative, it's in German, it's got subtitles, it's
Speaker 5: dated a bit. You have to be a very patient
Speaker 5: film watcher, but just seeing the photography and the performance
Speaker 5: by Peter Laurie, and then if you're able to go
Speaker 5: back to that period and put yourself in what it
Speaker 5: would have been like to see a film like that
Speaker 5: back in nineteen thirty one, you realize this is like
Speaker 5: one of the masterpieces of cinema, like a Citizen Kane,
Speaker 5: basically one of the first Yeah, sorry, that is my fault.
Speaker 5: I paused and then went to add because also arguably
Speaker 5: one of the first thrillers.
Speaker 4: Yes, also too that it had gone not suddenly, but
Speaker 4: it had gone by nineteen thirty one from a depiction
Speaker 4: of mindless evil to a psychological drama. So it really
Speaker 4: was a leap in sort of a protagonist depiction in
Speaker 4: movies certainly.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well that's it. So the villain in m who's
Speaker 5: portrayed by Peter Laurie by no means do you like him.
Speaker 5: I mean, this is a child serial child killer. But
Speaker 5: there's this classic scene where the police start to increase
Speaker 5: their presence and they start to come down on criminal
Speaker 5: elements in the city because these murders are so high
Speaker 5: profile and they're like, we've got to crack down. It's
Speaker 5: got to be one of these criminals, you know, increase
Speaker 5: basically the police interference into the day to day lives
Speaker 5: of criminals, and we'll find this miscreant. And so for
Speaker 5: all the organized crime bosses in the city at this time,
Speaker 5: this is really bad for business. And so then they
Speaker 5: join in and they're like, if we can get rid
Speaker 5: of this child murderer too, then the police are going
Speaker 5: to back off and we can make as much money
Speaker 5: as we were before. Once again, this is during the
Speaker 5: depression and there were black markets and things to profit from.
Speaker 5: And so now he's not only got the police coming
Speaker 5: after him, he's got the criminals. And it's the criminals,
Speaker 5: the organized gangsters that find him and they at the
Speaker 5: end of the movie, they bring him before this kangaroo court,
Speaker 5: and the expression on Peter Lourie's face, he's so a
Speaker 5: motive and you can see he's genuinely panicked and he
Speaker 5: knows that though they're going to give him a trial,
Speaker 5: it's not a real trial and they're gonna end up
Speaker 5: killing him anyway. And he says, and I'm paraphrasing here,
Speaker 5: who are you to accuse me like you do this
Speaker 5: because you profit for you, it's a choice for me.
Speaker 5: I just can't help myself. And that's when he breaks
Speaker 5: down that famous scene where he's weeping into his hands.
Speaker 5: I just can't help my self. And it's an interesting
Speaker 5: as you said, it breaks the black and white there,
Speaker 5: because there is something of a point in that he's
Speaker 5: driven by this intersexual compulsion which leads him to do
Speaker 5: immoral things. And yes, he chooses to do that, but
Speaker 5: the strain on him psychologically to commit these acts of
Speaker 5: murder versus the choices that these other criminals make, which
Speaker 5: almost certainly involved murder at some point if you're an
Speaker 5: organized crime, right, he's saying that, you know, you make
Speaker 5: me out to be a monster, But I'm driven by
Speaker 5: what BTK or someone would call factor X, right, like
Speaker 5: I was born this way and you guys choose it
Speaker 5: and you point the finger at me. And so don't
Speaker 5: take that as a defense of the serial child killer.
Speaker 5: But it's that sometimes I think we we tend to
Speaker 5: glorify organize criminals, right, We tend to think of them
Speaker 5: and oh, they're not as bad, even though they can
Speaker 5: be responsible for many more deaths, and they're doing it
Speaker 5: for much shallower reasons psychologically, you know. So absolutely a
Speaker 5: student observation there Dan, and that's the masterpiece of the film,
Speaker 5: and that took a lot of balls. I think to
Speaker 5: have that kind of gray approach at that time.
Speaker 4: Certainly, certainly let's use it as an opportunity to stuff
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Speaker 4: Now, the you talk about the next book that you are,
Speaker 4: pardon me, the next movie you touch on is the
Speaker 4: Murder of Bobby Franks. And so this is a real
Speaker 4: life murder of Bobby Franks and the movie is Rope
Speaker 4: by Alfred Hitchcock. So tell us just briefly about the inspiration,
Speaker 4: the real life inspiration for this movie.
Speaker 5: The inspiration for the movie was based on the crimes
Speaker 5: of Nathan Leopold and Richard Lob in Chicago. And this
Speaker 5: goes back to I think it was the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 5: It was, yeah, it was around us. Yeah, yeah, it
Speaker 5: was the mid twenties. And at the time it was
Speaker 5: called the crime of the Century, and like when you
Speaker 5: hear it, it's a bad crime, but it's had a
Speaker 5: lot of hyperbole. Back then, everything was the crime of
Speaker 5: the century. So Leopold and Lobe. Are these two people
Speaker 5: of genius IQ or around it, and they come from
Speaker 5: privileged upbringings and they're attending the best schools. And Lobe
Speaker 5: is more of a criminal, Yeah, he gets off on transgression.
Speaker 5: He's more charismatic, he makes friends more easily. And Leopold,
Speaker 5: his counterpart, not so much. He's more of a removed intellectual.
Speaker 5: He's awkward, and he's also homosexual, and he really craves Lobe.
Speaker 5: So you have a folly, a good situation that happens
Speaker 5: here where you have Lobe going, you know, we should
Speaker 5: commit crime because it's thrilling and it's fun, and you
Speaker 5: have Leopold who knows that if he helps Lobe with
Speaker 5: the crimes that Lobe will engage in sexual relations with him.
Speaker 5: So Lobe uses his sexual the fact that Leopold is
Speaker 5: sexually attracted to him as like a character he dangles.
Speaker 5: And of course, with Lobe being Lobe, it's enough to
Speaker 5: just say committing crime is fun. But with Leopold, because
Speaker 5: he is and he did have a really high IQ,
Speaker 5: very learned young man, he had to justify it in
Speaker 5: some ways, so he used I would say a total
Speaker 5: misreading of Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of the ubermanche, and that
Speaker 5: was the way that he was able to justify doing this,
Speaker 5: is that saying, hey, we are so intelligent and we
Speaker 5: are so rich, and we are so much more transcendent
Speaker 5: than other people that we can commit murder and like
Speaker 5: have almost a right to do it because we're part
Speaker 5: of this elite are we are beyond man ubermanch. I
Speaker 5: won't get into the into what Nietzsche actually meant by that.
Speaker 5: It was something a lot more in my mind, benevolent,
Speaker 5: but he uses it to justify it. And you know,
Speaker 5: they go from thefts to break and enterings and such.
Speaker 5: But with these types of criminals, at some point the
Speaker 5: thrill is gone, to quote BB King, and they decide,
Speaker 5: you know, what would be the ultimate thrill would be
Speaker 5: to commit a murder. And so they meticulously plan this murder.
Speaker 5: You know, how they're going to rent the car, where
Speaker 5: they're going to dump the body, how they're going to
Speaker 5: do it. They overplan it in many ways, which was
Speaker 5: I was just having a conversation about this with Catherine
Speaker 5: Ramslin the other day about how you can actually overplan
Speaker 5: a murder because then you don't really adjust for all
Speaker 5: of the variables that can go wrong, right, and they
Speaker 5: they scour a neighborhoohood looking for a victim to abduct,
Speaker 5: and they find Bobby Franks, who was about fourteen years
Speaker 5: old at the time. He was a young man and
Speaker 5: he was I think a cousin of Lobe. He was
Speaker 5: related to him and Bobby he's walking home from school
Speaker 5: and they're like, hey, we'll give you a ride. He's like,
Speaker 5: I don't need a ride. I'm almost hume, no hop in,
Speaker 5: Bobby will give you a ride. He gets in the
Speaker 5: car and they use a chisel to kill him. I
Speaker 5: think they may have also strangled him with a length
Speaker 5: of rope. They drive his body out to the pre
Speaker 5: selected place in the countryside and they put him in
Speaker 5: like a covert, and then they drive back and they
Speaker 5: go through all the stages of their plan. They call
Speaker 5: his family and they put in a fake ransom demand,
Speaker 5: all to stage it and make it look like something
Speaker 5: else has happened. Except Leopold drops his prescription glasses at
Speaker 5: the crime scene. So this is this criminal genius right,
Speaker 5: despite all his planet he loses his glass with the
Speaker 5: crime scene. And this is before mass manufacturing. Right of
Speaker 5: these and him. Being so rich, they're very easily able
Speaker 5: to trace where these glasses, you know, where the lenses were,
Speaker 5: who they were made for, Who in Chicago imports these
Speaker 5: types of frames, and eventually it's traced back to Leopold
Speaker 5: and Lobe. And so these criminal geniuses are are caught
Speaker 5: and they stand trial in court and are convicted. Leopold
Speaker 5: eventually gets out and seems to live a fairly He
Speaker 5: lives a fairly normal life in his old age and dies.
Speaker 5: I think Lobe dies in prison. But this inspired a
Speaker 5: play called Rope, in which two young men basically conspire
Speaker 5: to kill a former classmate and then hide him in
Speaker 5: a trunk and then invite over his fiancee and his
Speaker 5: parents and this university professor who always talked about moral
Speaker 5: relativesm and that it would be like this great piece
Speaker 5: of art, you know, it would be a kind of
Speaker 5: like a joke that was also artistic, homicidal performance art
Speaker 5: in a way to have them all over and to
Speaker 5: put out like a buffet spread over this trunk, and
Speaker 5: they would be in on it. You know, we've just
Speaker 5: strangled this guy and put them in this trunk and
Speaker 5: everyone's eating off it, and they have no idea, and
Speaker 5: all the time they're asking when's he going to show up?
Speaker 5: Because he's supposed to be at the dinner party too. Well,
Speaker 5: Hitchcock liked this play and he made it into his
Speaker 5: nineteen forty eight film Rope, which is probably most notable
Speaker 5: because it was not only Hitchcock's first technicolor film, but
Speaker 5: it was also a film which seems to have almost
Speaker 5: zero cuts, which if you think of even a film today,
Speaker 5: there's copious editing like this is one my complaints about
Speaker 5: modern cinema. It has gotten a little bit better, but
Speaker 5: especially around from two thousands to like twenty ten, it's
Speaker 5: this cut, cut, cut, cut, cut all the time. The
Speaker 5: cuts are unnecessary. Why are you doing this just because
Speaker 5: you didn't film the scene right? And here's Hitchcock, he
Speaker 5: doesn't even have the technology. He does the entirety of
Speaker 5: the film in what appears to be a single cut,
Speaker 5: so there's there's never an editing take. But there's a
Speaker 5: trick to it. Dan, do you know the trick? No,
Speaker 5: So what he does, because it was actually impossible to
Speaker 5: do it with the technology, is that he will say,
Speaker 5: pan the camera away for a moment so that the
Speaker 5: screen is blocked out by a cabinet momentarily, and then
Speaker 5: because the screen is blacked out, he could then switch
Speaker 5: the camera up, put new film in, start filming from
Speaker 5: the exact same spot, and then pan back out so
Speaker 5: it appears that it hasn't cut when it actually has.
Speaker 4: Brilliant.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's like watching a really good play and Jimmy
Speaker 5: Stewart's in it, and yeah, once again more of a thriller,
Speaker 5: but the story behind it's fantastic and all of well,
Speaker 5: I would say most of these films I would recommend
Speaker 5: people watch if they haven't seen him.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, We're going to try to talk about some of
Speaker 4: these and a little bit more specifics a little bit,
Speaker 4: but people are pretty familiar with Psycho from nineteen sixty
Speaker 4: obviously Norman Bates, and also they're very, very familiar with
Speaker 4: the Texas Chainsaw massacre. And also people have talked about
Speaker 4: the connections or the inspiration being ed Gain and his
Speaker 4: crimes in Wisconsin. What I wanted to talk about was
Speaker 4: a little bit was about Frenzy from nineteen seventy two
Speaker 4: and the crimes all Christy and Navil Neville Health Heath,
Speaker 4: Pardon Me, and the Hammersmith Nude murders. Talk about a
Speaker 4: little bit about Frenzy from nineteen seventy two and the
Speaker 4: crimes that inspired and the killers that inspired this movie.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so sure. Frenzy was I believe Hitchcock's second last film,
Speaker 5: and it was the last film he ever did in England,
Speaker 5: and it was a return after he had made some
Speaker 5: forays into espionage films that received mixed reviews. It was
Speaker 5: his return back to this sort of serial killer thriller genre,
Speaker 5: which I tackle a lot of those films in the book.
Speaker 5: And by that time, so it's yeah, it's nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 5: He's had a whole lot of murder. Keep in mind,
Speaker 5: Hitchcock is English, so there's a lot of murder in
Speaker 5: Britain over that period of time. And the case that
Speaker 5: it most obviously resembles, let's say about slightly less than
Speaker 5: a decade old at the time that Frenzy comes out,
Speaker 5: and that's the Hammersmith Nude murders, where you have somewhere
Speaker 5: but in the realm, of between six and eight prostitutes
Speaker 5: in London who are murdered. They're usually found strangled or dround.
Speaker 5: Many of them are floating in the Thames and the
Speaker 5: unknown killer was dubbed Jack the Stripper by the press,
Speaker 5: obviously as an homage to the earlier Jack the Ripper,
Speaker 5: but because he always stripped the victims, and so this
Speaker 5: was this has never been solved. There's a lot of
Speaker 5: people that they strongly believe did it. The police have
Speaker 5: one of those things where they say, look, we know
Speaker 5: the guy who did it. We didn't get enough evidence,
Speaker 5: but he killed himself. For all intents and purposes, it's closed.
Speaker 5: But officially this case has never been solved. And so
Speaker 5: that was going on in the swing in sixties in London,
Speaker 5: and Frenzy starts off where there are a group of
Speaker 5: people gathered by the Thames River and somebody's talking about
Speaker 5: some sort of environmental project, you know, beautifying the river
Speaker 5: again or the surrounding community. And then a nude body
Speaker 5: with a necktie wrapped around its neck, the young woman
Speaker 5: comes floating into the scene and everyone screams and they
Speaker 5: say it's the necktie killer. He's done another one, so,
Speaker 5: you know, thus implying there's a serial killer at large.
Speaker 5: So that's the case that people have noticed the most,
Speaker 5: and Hitchcock himself confirmed in Inspired Frenzy. But there are
Speaker 5: parts of other serial killers in there. So the guy
Speaker 5: who plays the man who turns out to be the
Speaker 5: eventual necktie killer, the actor Alfred Hitchcock, approached him and
Speaker 5: he said, in order to understand the type of man
Speaker 5: you're playing, I want you to read this book on
Speaker 5: Neville Heath. Neville Heath is a really fascinating serial killer.
Speaker 5: Now he only killed two victims to our knowledge, but
Speaker 5: he was almost like a Ted Bundy light figure in
Speaker 5: that he was extraordinarily charming. I would say he'd make
Speaker 5: Bundy look completely like a wallflower. He was such a dashing,
Speaker 5: charming guy. And he was also a total comment. So
Speaker 5: imagine this blonde, square jawed, very athletic fellow and he's
Speaker 5: going around London and he has actually been a pilot.
Speaker 5: But what he doesn't tell is, you know, he was
Speaker 5: a pilot the RAF, but he leaves out all parts
Speaker 5: of him getting into so much trouble in the military
Speaker 5: and all the people he's conned. He's once again he's
Speaker 5: a consummate psychopath, and he's always in the pub. This
Speaker 5: guy can drink like it's ridiculous. When I had heard
Speaker 5: how much this guy was drinking when he was committing
Speaker 5: his mothers. We're talking, you know, something like twenty four
Speaker 5: pints or you know, and it's seemingly not affecting him.
Speaker 5: Just as an aside, I've heard that about quite a
Speaker 5: few serial killers, and so I don't even know if
Speaker 5: he was using his real name at the time, but
Speaker 5: he had the reputation around the pubs, you know, the dashing,
Speaker 5: handsome raf pilots. And this would have been just after
Speaker 5: the Second World War. And he's always buying drinks for people,
Speaker 5: and he's telling tall tales and stories and everyone likes him.
Speaker 5: And he's also into s and m And because he's
Speaker 5: such an attractive man and he's able to pick up
Speaker 5: the ladies fairly easily, he has no problem finding partners
Speaker 5: to engage in sin m with. And on this one
Speaker 5: particular night, whether this was planned or not, I guess,
Speaker 5: we don't know. But he meets up with somebody who's
Speaker 5: he's had a sado masochistic relationship before in the within
Speaker 5: the past, and he brings her back to this hotel
Speaker 5: and they go through all the consensual stuff, you know.
Speaker 5: She allows herself to be tied up, and he pulls
Speaker 5: out a writing crop and he begins to whip her.
Speaker 5: I believe he has her gag too, so that they
Speaker 5: can't hear the screams, and she may might have consented
Speaker 5: to that as well. You know, it's all The thing
Speaker 5: about the whole BDSM thing is that there's a lot
Speaker 5: of role play involved. There's an idea that there are limits.
Speaker 5: You know, you've obviously probably just got stafeword and stuff
Speaker 5: on the show then. But Heath is whether it's the
Speaker 5: drink or you know, disinhibiting him, or he planned to
Speaker 5: do this all along, he just goes overboard. He gets
Speaker 5: into a frenzy. He basically whips this woman to death
Speaker 5: with a writing crop and it puts a pillow over
Speaker 5: her face, and then also thrust a yeah he did,
Speaker 5: he thrust a poker from the fireplace into her vagina.
Speaker 5: And then he escapes and the next day the cleaning
Speaker 5: lady tries to enter and management gets involved, and that's
Speaker 5: when they discovered the body and they're like, oh wow,
Speaker 5: And so the police put out this description. They're looking
Speaker 5: for this guy. By this time, Heath has made his
Speaker 5: way to another part of England. He's staying with another
Speaker 5: lover and his name is in the paper. It is
Speaker 5: about to be in the paper, but he gets ahead
Speaker 5: of it and he tells her, hey, you know this,
Speaker 5: I can't remember how he spins it. He gets her
Speaker 5: to believe that he was framed or as an accident
Speaker 5: or something like that, and then he gets out of
Speaker 5: town before things really blow up, and he kind of disappears,
Speaker 5: and he makes his way to a port side city.
Speaker 5: I think it was Bourne Mouth, that's what's coming to mind. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and he under a different name and a different identity.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: Keep in mind, there wasn't television at the time broadcasting
Speaker 5: the face everywhere, so you might have heard the name
Speaker 5: in the paper or whatever, but it's not going to
Speaker 5: be as easily identifiable as it is today. And so
Speaker 5: he's at this hotel. He's playing the whole captain whatever
Speaker 5: war hero thing again, and he's taking tea and he's
Speaker 5: charming everyone, and eventually he hooks up with his second
Speaker 5: female victim, and he invites her back to the hotel
Speaker 5: to have dinner with him, and Wan gets the impression
Speaker 5: that she knew there was something up about him. There's
Speaker 5: something about him that she didn't like, and he insists
Speaker 5: on walking her home, and at that point she goes missing.
Speaker 5: And it isn't until some time later that they find
Speaker 5: her body. She's been eviscerated, and she's been hidden like
Speaker 5: some bushes and briar patch or something like that in
Speaker 5: the countryside, and they realize that he would have been
Speaker 5: walking this way, one of the potential routes to take
Speaker 5: her home. And at this point he comes under police
Speaker 5: scrutiny and he tries to bullshit his way out of it.
Speaker 5: But at the end of the day they find out
Speaker 5: it's Neville Heath, and he hangs for it. And he
Speaker 5: was known by I think it was Albert Pierpoint that
Speaker 5: hung him, Albert Pierpoint probably being the most famous hangman
Speaker 5: in British history. He said he was the most handsome
Speaker 5: man I ever hanged. Yea, And so that maybe not
Speaker 5: the crimes, but the presentation and the affect and the
Speaker 5: ability to have like a personality that the world sees
Speaker 5: and then your secret, hidden personality. Hitchcock told the actor,
Speaker 5: I think his name was very I don't remember Bury.
Speaker 5: Something he told the actor read this book on Neville
Speaker 5: heat and that's I think what was brought to the table,
Speaker 5: not so much Heath's crimes, but Heath as a person
Speaker 5: committing crimes that were more like the Hammersmith nude murders.
Speaker 5: And the interesting thing is where the last crimes come
Speaker 5: in was based on John Christie. Now the John Christy, Yeah,
Speaker 5: the John Christy case. Have you covered that one, Dan.
Speaker 4: A little bit? Yeah, But I just I think it
Speaker 4: warrants bringing it up again because of the diabolical nature
Speaker 4: of you know that he possessed I mean compared to
Speaker 4: I mean anyone. Basically, just tell us a little bit
Speaker 4: about the the abortion offer that he made to the
Speaker 4: couple and that's an incredible story that's worth repeating, I think, yeah, definitely.
Speaker 5: So just to cover John Christy, I'll try and get
Speaker 5: in like three sentences. We're talking about a guy who
Speaker 5: is a high anxiety psychopathic. He is like a hypochondriac.
Speaker 5: He speaks, he speaks in this sort of hushed voice
Speaker 5: because he believes that he was actually suffered mustard gas
Speaker 5: in the First World War, but he believes that it
Speaker 5: made him talk this way when all the doctors are
Speaker 5: telling are really saying it's psychosomatic. You know, it didn't
Speaker 5: naturally do that to him. So this was a guy
Speaker 5: who was very anxious, very hypochondriac, and This also manifests
Speaker 5: in his relationships with women from a young age. When
Speaker 5: he was a teenager, he had a chance to get
Speaker 5: laid and for whatever reason, he couldn't get it up,
Speaker 5: and the girl told everyone. The whole town laughed at
Speaker 5: them and shamed him, and they called him can't make
Speaker 5: it Christie and Reggie no dick. So this obviously, yeah,
Speaker 5: I mean, this is before he'd done anything really bad.
Speaker 5: And I do actually have some compassion for that because
Speaker 5: you can imagine at the time there's no viagra, right,
Speaker 5: there's no way to fix the situation, and so it
Speaker 5: becomes you know, whether it would have been just a
Speaker 5: one time thing if he had just been left alone,
Speaker 5: or you know, whether it was going to be chronic. Anyways,
Speaker 5: he suffers from chronic impotence his whole life. He has
Speaker 5: a marriage of convenience with a woman called Ethel, who
Speaker 5: he later kills, and they don't really have a sex life,
Speaker 5: they don't have any kids, and they moved to ten
Speaker 5: Rillington Place in Nodding Hill and Christy. In total, he
Speaker 5: kills at least eight people, and he uses various ruses.
Speaker 5: Generally he'll knock them out using gas and then he'll
Speaker 5: strangle them with a rope or with a tie, so
Speaker 5: there's your neck tie connection again, and then he will
Speaker 5: rape them while they're either unconscious. But also some of
Speaker 5: them seem to have been kept in the home. This
Speaker 5: was after he killed his wife, kept in the home
Speaker 5: and raped after death, so he was in that crofile.
Speaker 5: Now in the middle of all this, upstairs, there's a
Speaker 5: couple called Timothy and Beryl Evans. Timothy Evans as well.
Speaker 5: He's working class. He's from a mining town and he's
Speaker 5: known as a guy once again. He tells tall tales,
Speaker 5: he likes to drink a lot, and he's got a
Speaker 5: short temper. He's barely literate, and he's kind of married
Speaker 5: above his station to Beryl Evans, who is this beautiful
Speaker 5: young lady. And they have to rent this grubby flat.
Speaker 5: It was infamously, you know, ridden by bedbugs. It wasn't
Speaker 5: a bad part of town, not so much for crime,
Speaker 5: but just poverty. And he's always conscious that he's not
Speaker 5: giving her the life that really is deserved of a
Speaker 5: woman of her station. And they have a lot of
Speaker 5: domestic altercations, and it doesn't seem like he was a
Speaker 5: wife beater at least not chronically, but there is a
Speaker 5: lot of turbulence in that household. And to escape at
Speaker 5: Timothy always goes down to the pub and drinks, where
Speaker 5: he tells his stories. You know that nobody believes to
Speaker 5: his pub friends. And it's just a tumultuous relationship. And
Speaker 5: so what happens is they're already struggling with they're already
Speaker 5: struggling with their wan child, Geraldine, who is I think
Speaker 5: something like just over a year old at the time,
Speaker 5: and they find out that Beryl's pregnant again. Well, this
Speaker 5: is an issue because Beryl doesn't want to have the baby.
Speaker 5: For first of all, she's not a very good mother,
Speaker 5: not necessarily doesn't love her kids, but she's just not maternal.
Speaker 5: She's not cut out for it really, so she didn't
Speaker 5: have that really natural instinct. But she knows also that
Speaker 5: they can't really afford it, and Timothy knows that too.
Speaker 5: But tim is I can't remember if he was a
Speaker 5: Catholic or not, but you know, he's not for abortion.
Speaker 5: He thinks that it's wrong to do and she's like,
Speaker 5: I want an abortion. He's saying, you can't. You know
Speaker 5: it's wrong. We'll deal with it, and this just leads
Speaker 5: to more and more of a storm upstairs. Well, of course,
Speaker 5: creepy mister Christy and his wife are downstairs. The walls
Speaker 5: of paper thin, they can hear every single thing that's
Speaker 5: going on. They know all about what's going on in
Speaker 5: their life. Of course, he pretends not to, because he's
Speaker 5: a manipulative, psychopathic serial killer. And one day Beryl's coming
Speaker 5: down the stairs and mister Christie comes out and is
Speaker 5: gassed unthreatening voice. East says, you know I've heard about
Speaker 5: you know, you're having problems. You know what's going on,
Speaker 5: And she confides in him things that he probably already knows, right,
Speaker 5: And he says, I'm pregnant again, and I want to
Speaker 5: have an abortion, And he says, well, I don't know
Speaker 5: if you know about this, but you know I have
Speaker 5: medical training and I know how to do such a procedure.
Speaker 5: And so for her it's like, wow, my neighbor downstairs
Speaker 5: can do this. And of course abortion is illegal at
Speaker 5: the time, so either way she's got to go to
Speaker 5: a back alley abortionist. So trusting the nice old man downstairs,
Speaker 5: doesn't you know, it seems like the most rational choice.
Speaker 5: There is no option to go to a medical professional
Speaker 5: who's certified at this procedure. And so she basically tells Tim, look,
Speaker 5: mister Christy's going to do the abortion. And Tim's like, no,
Speaker 5: he's not, and she's like, well he is. And eventually
Speaker 5: she wins and he just kind of throws up his
Speaker 5: hands and he goes off to work, and this is
Speaker 5: when the procedure is supposed to happen, and Christy warns him,
Speaker 5: you know, sometimes these things go wrong, but it should
Speaker 5: be okay, and when you come back, this is what
Speaker 5: you should expect. Well, when he comes back, Christy meets
Speaker 5: him as he's coming up the stairs and he says,
Speaker 5: you know, Tim, come up to the apartment, to your apartment.
Speaker 5: There's something we must discuss. And there's Beryl and she's
Speaker 5: dead on the bed and baby Geraldine, if I remember correctly,
Speaker 5: is still alive at this point. Yeah, And he says
Speaker 5: the procedure went wrong. Yeah. I think he might have
Speaker 5: said it went septic or something like that, and she's died.
Speaker 5: You know, we always said that this was a possibility,
Speaker 5: and what had really happened was that Christy had drugged
Speaker 5: and raped her and strangled her, just like he did
Speaker 5: with his other victims. He'd probably been coveting her like
Speaker 5: this attractive woman for so long. But because tim is
Speaker 5: first of all, he knows he's complicit and illegal act
Speaker 5: in an illegal act, he's low iq, he's pretty gullible,
Speaker 5: and he's getting played by a master manipulator. And Christy says,
Speaker 5: you know, we'll take care of this. We'll find someone
Speaker 5: to foster baby Geraldine out. You can go back to Wales.
Speaker 5: I'll hide the body and no one will be any
Speaker 5: the wiser. And Timothy Evans, it seems, because he contradicts
Speaker 5: himself a lot later, seems to go along with this plot.
Speaker 5: I guess if he's rationalizing it, he's probably thinking it's
Speaker 5: the lesser of two evils, right, And so he does.
Speaker 5: He leaves, and he goes to Wales, and eventually they
Speaker 5: start he's staying with family in Wales, and he's telling
Speaker 5: them stories about how Beryl has gone to visit family
Speaker 5: on another side of England. And then Beryl's family are
Speaker 5: getting concerned and they're attempting to look into it, and
Speaker 5: Christie's being weird with them and he's saying, oh, Beryl
Speaker 5: just went to another part of England. But they're thinking, well,
Speaker 5: why would you do that without telling does and where
Speaker 5: did Timothy go? So Evans eventually, Timothy Evans eventually makes
Speaker 5: his way back to London, and the way it ultimately
Speaker 5: plays out is that the police discover Beryl's body and
Speaker 5: that of baby Geraldine, who keeping let's keep in mind,
Speaker 5: Timothy Evans didn't know was dead. He thought she'd been
Speaker 5: fostered out, and they've both been strangled, and they're in
Speaker 5: like a wash house on the property. At least Beryl
Speaker 5: was Geraldine my have been somewhere else, but they're in
Speaker 5: pretty close proximity. And so they the police are going, okay, well,
Speaker 5: who's the likely suspect here? Who did it? And it's
Speaker 5: always the husband, right, and there is a slight grain
Speaker 5: of truth to that, and that he knew he knew
Speaker 5: about it a bit. And Evans is then taken into
Speaker 5: custody and you have your classic low IQ confesses to
Speaker 5: a you know, under police pressure enough of it, confesses
Speaker 5: to a crime that he didn't do, and is, you know,
Speaker 5: then standing trial. Well, by the time he's at trial,
Speaker 5: he's yelling, it wasn't me, you know, Christie done it.
Speaker 5: Christie done it. And Christie is actually a witness at
Speaker 5: his trial, and he's just completely lying about the situation.
Speaker 5: And oh, I always heard them fighting and I worried
Speaker 5: something like this would happen. And Timothy Evans hangs and
Speaker 5: John Christie, who did actually come under some scrutiny in court,
Speaker 5: just walks out of there and goes back to living
Speaker 5: with Ethel at ten Rillington Place. And so he's just
Speaker 5: completely destroyed this family. And sometime after he kills his wife, Ethel,
Speaker 5: and I think he mainly does this because she's an
Speaker 5: impediment to what he wants to do and he needs
Speaker 5: his own space to do that and she's in his space,
Speaker 5: so she needs to go, so he kills her, puts
Speaker 5: her under the floorboards. Then he starts inviting I think
Speaker 5: they were mainly prostitutes back to the flat and you know,
Speaker 5: doing his strangling them unconscious, maybe using the gas, and
Speaker 5: then keeping them in an alcove and using their bodies
Speaker 5: over and over for the necrophilic intercourse. He eventually decides
Speaker 5: to move and he puts wallpaper over the alcove so
Speaker 5: it doesn't even appear that there is one, and he
Speaker 5: just sort of flee without paying his rent. So by
Speaker 5: this time there's been a lot of social changes in England.
Speaker 5: Then you've got like a West Indian population coming in,
Speaker 5: so people from Jamaica, you know, particularly, and Christy and
Speaker 5: his wife are racist there. They were always unhappy with
Speaker 5: the fact that all these Jamaican blacks are moving into
Speaker 5: the neighborhood and they didn't hide that. And so this guy,
Speaker 5: Beresford Brown, he buys ten Rillington Place, the apartment building,
Speaker 5: and he starts to move in these Jamaican families. Actually
Speaker 5: maybe one of the families that came in was Bearrisfard Brown.
Speaker 5: But at the point is there's a Jamaican landlord, there's
Speaker 5: Jamaican tenants, and they're up in I think it's the
Speaker 5: Evans's apartment, this one Jamaican tenant. And he asked the landlord.
Speaker 5: He says, you know, I don't have access to it
Speaker 5: was something like a kitchen to you know, to cook
Speaker 5: my cuisine with upstairs. This doesn't work or something I
Speaker 5: can't remember exactly what it was. He says, do you
Speaker 5: mind if I used the abandoned place downstairs? And the
Speaker 5: guy goes, I go ahead, you know, I haven't rented
Speaker 5: it out yet, And so he goes down there, and
Speaker 5: he starts sort of looking around and he realizes that wait,
Speaker 5: this one section of wall isn't wall, it's just wall paper.
Speaker 5: And then when he pokes through it, you know, he
Speaker 5: brings us to the landlord's attention. That's when they find
Speaker 5: the initial bodies. And then the police are on the
Speaker 5: scene and they're like, well, sorry, who was the tenant here?
Speaker 5: And oh, his name was John Reginald Holliday Christy. Oh
Speaker 5: oh remember him, John Christy, the guy upstairs with the
Speaker 5: neighbor and on trial. Oh my god. And then Christy
Speaker 5: becomes a fugitive. His name is splashed all over the
Speaker 5: newspapers and he's hanging around London. He's living death to
Speaker 5: and ultimately he's caught and he also hangs. But where
Speaker 5: this is important playing into Frenzy by Hitchcock, is that
Speaker 5: the serial killer, the necktie killer Bob Rusk in Frenzy
Speaker 5: sets up his friend, the protagonist, Dick Blaney, because Rusk
Speaker 5: kills Blaney's wife and kills his girlfriend, and he sets
Speaker 5: him up for it. At which is I mean, beyond that,
Speaker 5: you might not say it's similar. They also reference Christie
Speaker 5: in you know, the line is we haven't had a
Speaker 5: good sex murder around these parts since Christy. But here's
Speaker 5: the thing too, the character of Richard Blaney is very
Speaker 5: much like Timothy Evans. His IQ is higher, but he's
Speaker 5: a drunk, he's short tempered. People see him yelling at
Speaker 5: his wife. So all of these things that were used
Speaker 5: as aggravate, aggravating factors or evidence, whatever you want to
Speaker 5: call them against Timothy evans you find them in the
Speaker 5: character of Dick Blaney's. So you have this amazing fusion
Speaker 5: of these three disparate serial killer stories, all that all
Speaker 5: of which transpired in London, coming together in Hitchcock's Frenzy,
Speaker 5: and you can read in far greater detail about all
Speaker 5: those and behind the horror.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's stop for a second for these messages. Now
Speaker 4: what's interesting is then, and I haven't heard I've just
Speaker 4: read a little bit about this, but you cover this
Speaker 4: extensively in your book, and you discuss the Exorcist forced
Speaker 4: the incredible movie in nineteen seventy three with the possession
Speaker 4: of Roland Doe. We don't have time to go too
Speaker 4: much into it, but for those people that might have
Speaker 4: thought that the Exorcist was just dreamed up completely, this
Speaker 4: does have a foundation in truth, doesn't it.
Speaker 5: It does. Yeah, So the main difference is like, as
Speaker 5: you said, Roland Doe. His last name isn't actually Doe.
Speaker 5: This was all kept top secret by the Catholic Church,
Speaker 5: and so it's like a Jane Doe. We don't even
Speaker 5: know that his first name was Roland. But essentially in
Speaker 5: the late forties in Maryland, Roland Doe is thirteen years
Speaker 5: old and he's living there with his parents and in
Speaker 5: this house, and he has an aunt, Hattie, and Aunt
Speaker 5: Hattie is into the occult, introduces him to things like
Speaker 5: weja boards and the like. And then Aunt Hattie dies
Speaker 5: and it's pretty sad for him because he doesn't have
Speaker 5: many other friends and he misses his aunt. After this,
Speaker 5: many of the things that you see in the Exorcist
Speaker 5: begin to happen to Roland's. So he'll be on his
Speaker 5: bed and his bed will start to shake in this
Speaker 5: strange way, and he'll talk in tongues and there will
Speaker 5: be words that seem to appear in his skin. And they,
Speaker 5: the parents, they don't know what to make of this,
Speaker 5: so they go to their I think they are Lutheran,
Speaker 5: and they go to their local Lutheran reverend, mister Reverend Schultz,
Speaker 5: and he says, okay, well, let him come stay at
Speaker 5: my house and we'll see how this works out. Well,
Speaker 5: he's at Reverend Schultz's house for a very short period
Speaker 5: of time and before the exact same thing starts happening there.
Speaker 5: So now it's not only the family that's seeing all
Speaker 5: of this paranoi normal phenomena happening, but it's also their
Speaker 5: reverend and there's they're seeing things like vibrating beds and
Speaker 5: crockery flying all over the place and furniture moving. So
Speaker 5: it's pretty intense and you can imagine how they're scared.
Speaker 5: And at some point the reverend goes, you know, I'm
Speaker 5: not really equipped to handle this. Maybe this is more
Speaker 5: in the domain of the Catholic Church, which from a
Speaker 5: Lutheran is a pretty bold statement. So they yeah, you
Speaker 5: know the history, right so behind yeah, So they turn
Speaker 5: basically Roland over to this Catholic church and they take
Speaker 5: him into a hospital which is run by Jesuits, and
Speaker 5: the same thing happens. You know, the behavior continues to escalate,
Speaker 5: most of which you see in the film The Exorcist,
Speaker 5: and at some point they realize that they can't handle this.
Speaker 5: They're going to have to move him to this He's
Speaker 5: got family in Missouri where there is also another Jesuit hospital,
Speaker 5: and that they're going to have to, you know, move
Speaker 5: him down there. So they move him into this house
Speaker 5: with his family in Missouri so that some of the
Speaker 5: Jesuit priests down there can come in. And at this
Speaker 5: point they're like, he's possessed. We're going to do an exorcism,
Speaker 5: So they start going through all these esoteric rituals. You know,
Speaker 5: it's very rare that an exorcism is actually sanctioned, so
Speaker 5: this is one of the cases where it was. So
Speaker 5: obviously he's displaying the pretty convincing signs and these priests
Speaker 5: are trying there, he's exhausting them. They're coming there in
Speaker 5: the morning and they're staying there late into the night,
Speaker 5: and and sometimes he'll be asleep. But then when he's away,
Speaker 5: key's you know, the bet is vibrating, he's talking in tongues,
Speaker 5: the messages are appearing on his skin, all kinds of
Speaker 5: weird phenomena, and they end up at some point bringing
Speaker 5: him to this hospital which is run by Jesuits. Now,
Speaker 5: during this process, if you were to believe the story
Speaker 5: because the thing is that the Catholic Church kept a
Speaker 5: lid on this. They kept all this really secret and
Speaker 5: tightly sealed for a while, until finally somebody wrote a
Speaker 5: book on it and they got some people to talk.
Speaker 5: So what we know about it and what actually happened
Speaker 5: they may not be exact, but this is how it
Speaker 5: seems to have ended, where at some point the entity,
Speaker 5: the demon or whatever that possessed Roland gave a hint
Speaker 5: something like if you are able to say, if you
Speaker 5: know my name, then I will leave the boy's body.
Speaker 5: And for a while, it's like they missed the clue,
Speaker 5: you know, it gets lost in the sauce because it's
Speaker 5: the entity is saying so much, or perhaps they don't
Speaker 5: know what the name is and they have to figure
Speaker 5: it out. But if you were to believe the tale,
Speaker 5: they're in the Jesuit hospital this one day things are
Speaker 5: getting particularly intense and the priest figures it out and
Speaker 5: he says, then your name is this, and then some
Speaker 5: other rituals follow, and after that the demon has been
Speaker 5: exercised from Roland, and then he disappears from history, and
Speaker 5: everything is closely guarded secret until the secret starts to
Speaker 5: leak out in the form of the original book about
Speaker 5: this case. But if you look into how professional skeptics
Speaker 5: have interpreted this, there's a lot of information that is
Speaker 5: left out of those sources, and believe it or not,
Speaker 5: it's fairly convincing that Roland Doe may have been just
Speaker 5: a very disturbed kid who was pulling one over on
Speaker 5: not only his family and his minister, but on all
Speaker 5: of these priests too. And there were times where they
Speaker 5: saw him doing things like cutting things into his own skin,
Speaker 5: and they never thought, maybe we're being fooled here. It
Speaker 5: was like that piece of information didn't actually enter. I
Speaker 5: think there was a lot of confirmation biased going on.
Speaker 5: So you think of a bed shaking, right, you think, well,
Speaker 5: that must be a demonic bores But then try it right,
Speaker 5: like get onto an old bed that's not very sturdy
Speaker 5: and oscillate your body a little bit, and it's possible
Speaker 5: to do those things. Speaking in tongues is easy. I'll
Speaker 5: do it right now, he goff min nihar Less, Crystal
Speaker 5: Dominos Sky or you know what I mean. That's so,
Speaker 5: it's whether you believe or are skeptical. There is a
Speaker 5: very good argument to be made too that this kid
Speaker 5: pulled one over on all these people. And I'll just
Speaker 5: add that the story that inspired Poltergeist also involved a
Speaker 5: teenage male Jimmy, as a central character in that, and
Speaker 5: he seems to have done the same thing with the
Speaker 5: house being haunted, not him being possessed. But and he
Speaker 5: fooled parapsychologists. I don't think that's a big achievement. But
Speaker 5: he fooled the police, he fooled his family.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 5: The interesting thing about that case is there was a
Speaker 5: famous magician, as in like a conjuror a stage magician,
Speaker 5: who heard about this case. It was going on in
Speaker 5: Long Island, New York, and it was nineteen fifty eight,
Speaker 5: Milburn Christopher I think was his name, and he said,
Speaker 5: can I come into the house and observe? And this
Speaker 5: family had led in police, They had let in all
Speaker 5: these scientists, they'd led in everyone, but they wouldn't let
Speaker 5: in Milburn Christopher. And that's the interesting part. And then
Speaker 5: when the police asked the family, well, will you all
Speaker 5: take polygraphs? The family also turned that down too. So
Speaker 5: I'd say those are two fairly tell clues. When you
Speaker 5: don't allow the master of sleight of hand to observe
Speaker 5: the situation, and Milbourne Christopher was able to replicate a
Speaker 5: lot of this poltergeist activity. And he even showed the
Speaker 5: parapsychologists like you would just be in the office talking
Speaker 5: to them and tops would start popping off bottles and such.
Speaker 5: So he's showing them like it's not that hard. I
Speaker 5: can do it as well. So you can read more
Speaker 5: about that and behind the horror. The point is whether
Speaker 5: you choose to believe the paranormal explanations or you want
Speaker 5: to run with the skeptical explanations. But I've got both
Speaker 5: in there and how they relate to the movies and
Speaker 5: inspired them.
Speaker 4: Absolutely. And you talk in this this is a story
Speaker 4: I'm not so familiar with, at least in its connection
Speaker 4: to a movie, and you write about the Town That
Speaker 4: Dreaded Sundown, and very interesting about its connection to not
Speaker 4: only about a movie or at least it takes part
Speaker 4: a drive in theater, but tell us a little bit
Speaker 4: about the inspiration for the Town That Dreaded Sundown nineteen
Speaker 4: seventy six.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so The Town that Dreaded Sundown, I honestly think
Speaker 5: is a fairly awful movie. But it was one of
Speaker 5: the first slasher films, and at the time people did
Speaker 5: find it genuinely scary. And it is probably the film
Speaker 5: that mirrors the inspiring story the closest. Although it is
Speaker 5: certainly far enough away that you can say that it
Speaker 5: inspired it, it's nowhere near a true account of events.
Speaker 5: So it's not like Fincher's Zodiac, for instance, Right, I
Speaker 5: would not do something like that. Then you're basically just
Speaker 5: telling the story. But what it was now that I
Speaker 5: mentioned Zodiac because we're in the realm of lovers lanes
Speaker 5: here and men wearing masks. It's Texarkana, which is actually
Speaker 5: exists in two states. I believe there's a Texas part
Speaker 5: of it and there's an Arkansas part of it, and
Speaker 5: it gets the name Texarkana because it's white on the
Speaker 5: border of Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana. And so this is
Speaker 5: in about nineteen forty five nineteen forty six around there,
Speaker 5: and there are couples, some of them are in their twenties,
Speaker 5: some of them are teenagers, and they're going out on
Speaker 5: dates no to lover's lanes and such. And the first
Speaker 5: so the first time this happens, this couple they go
Speaker 5: out to a movie with the brother, and I think
Speaker 5: it's the friend and his girlfriend and it's sort of
Speaker 5: like a double date to go to a movie. And
Speaker 5: then after that they drop off his brother and the
Speaker 5: brother's girlfriend at home, and then they go out to
Speaker 5: a lover's lane, this couple, and while they're in the
Speaker 5: car and you know, presumably in the middle of making
Speaker 5: out or about to or something like that, there is
Speaker 5: this masked gunman that shows up and orders them out
Speaker 5: of a car, and he basically wants there out of
Speaker 5: the car. He pistol whips the male unconscious, and the
Speaker 5: female sees this happening and gets terrified, and she starts
Speaker 5: running down the road and she passes a car on
Speaker 5: the way. That's an important clue, and he manages to
Speaker 5: catch up to her, and then he strikes her a
Speaker 5: number of times, and then he sexually violates her with
Speaker 5: the barrel, and then he goes back to beating up
Speaker 5: on the guy, and in the meantime, she manages to
Speaker 5: continue on down the road and she gets to a
Speaker 5: farmhouse and she knocks on the door and gets help.
Speaker 5: As she's waiting for someone to answer the door, she
Speaker 5: sees another vehicle drive by, which very well may have
Speaker 5: been the vehicle that the attacker used, although it doesn't
Speaker 5: match the description of the vehicle that she passed. Anyways,
Speaker 5: police come to the scene. Both survive in this first instance,
Speaker 5: although they're severely traumatized physically and psychologically. The young lady
Speaker 5: moves out of the town. I think she goes to
Speaker 5: Oklahoma and just goes to stay with relatives there. The
Speaker 5: young man remains in the town, but it takes him
Speaker 5: years to get over the injuries he has sustained. And
Speaker 5: so this continues. There are two more couples that go
Speaker 5: through this over the next few months, weeks even, and
Speaker 5: these ones are not allowed to go they're killed. And
Speaker 5: what I found in researching this is something that has
Speaker 5: been kept from the public for a while, and that
Speaker 5: is that the females were raped, and when this story
Speaker 5: has been told elsewhere, that's not included, but that's a fact.
Speaker 5: And then they seem to have been they seem to
Speaker 5: have redressed themselves and then been shot to death. So
Speaker 5: you've got this basically masked attacker of couples at lovers
Speaker 5: Lanes who probably shoots the man outright and then rapes
Speaker 5: the woman at gunpoint, gets herself to redress herself and
Speaker 5: then shoots her, and people will just find the cars. Well,
Speaker 5: in the first instance, they find the car with the
Speaker 5: bodies in it the next day, and then the next
Speaker 5: instance the bodies are in two separate places, and by
Speaker 5: this time they bring in the Texas Rangers. And there's
Speaker 5: this one particular Texas Ranger. He's got a reputation of,
Speaker 5: you know, he's an expert tracker with all these skills,
Speaker 5: and he always gets his man, and there's the big
Speaker 5: media attention when he comes to town, and he's always
Speaker 5: making these announcements in the newspapers about, you know, leads
Speaker 5: on the killer and how he's going to find and
Speaker 5: in truth, he's not doing much of anything. He's not
Speaker 5: getting anywhere close. And the last attack, and this is
Speaker 5: disputed because it might not be the same guy, but
Speaker 5: it is usually included in the canon, is there's a
Speaker 5: man just sitting in his home and he's watching the television.
Speaker 5: His wife is lying in bed, and this is like
Speaker 5: a farmhouse, and she hears the noise, I believe, and
Speaker 5: gets up to see what it is, and she goes
Speaker 5: out into the living room and sees that her husband
Speaker 5: has been shot dead through the window and he's still
Speaker 5: sitting in the chair watching TV. And at that point
Speaker 5: she sees this mast man outside the window and realizes
Speaker 5: that she's next, and so he starts to chase her,
Speaker 5: and she manages to get away, and she gets to
Speaker 5: the nearest farmhouse and they take her to the hospital
Speaker 5: and then the reign of terror seems to end. Now
Speaker 5: in the film, it's not portrayed like that. The cops
Speaker 5: get a lot closer. They are like shootouts and the
Speaker 5: car chases and such. The reality is they really got
Speaker 5: close to this guy, and they have a suspect who
Speaker 5: they believe may have done it, but they never proved it,
Speaker 5: and the killings did stop, you know. And I think
Speaker 5: one of the big questions beyond who actually did this
Speaker 5: was was that last killing actually part of the series.
Speaker 5: And what I note and behind the horror is that
Speaker 5: the guy who was shot in his farmhouse while watching
Speaker 5: TV was having an affair with a married woman whose
Speaker 5: husband had just come back from overseas, So that may
Speaker 5: have been lumped in there as being, you know, the
Speaker 5: final victim of the Texar Can of Moonlight murderer, when
Speaker 5: in reality it was a jealous husband who shot the
Speaker 5: guy who was screwing his wife through the window. So yeah,
Speaker 5: there's you know, a hell of a lot more detail
Speaker 5: obviously in the book, but that's the meat of it.
Speaker 5: And what I would say is just most intriguing to
Speaker 5: me about that. It's not just the time, and you know,
Speaker 5: the setting it's got has a vibe to it, an atmosphere.
Speaker 5: When you're reading about it, it transports you back to
Speaker 5: a much morenescent time. But he was like the prototypical
Speaker 5: mass killer, and there's so much attention on like the Zodiac, right,
Speaker 5: you know, he wears this weird head and he attacks
Speaker 5: people at Lover's Lanes. But this guy was doing it
Speaker 5: twenty two years before that, And so there's two ways
Speaker 5: to look at that. The Zodiac presumably knew about that
Speaker 5: guy or and I don't think this is true, but
Speaker 5: it's fun to speculate is the same guy? Yeah, yeah, right,
Speaker 5: I don't think so at all. But yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 5: that inspires the Town that Dread Sundown, which, by the way,
Speaker 5: you can watch on YouTube right now and no offense
Speaker 5: you like it. I thought it was the worst movie
Speaker 5: I wrote about in the book.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, well let's get the ones we have to
Speaker 4: just briefly summarize the other the other stories that you
Speaker 4: cover in this, the movies and their inspiration, the Anitiville
Speaker 4: Horror from nineteen seventy nine, the Haunting of one to
Speaker 4: twelve Ocean Avenue. You mentioned Poltergeist from nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 4: based on the Seafort Poltergeist. You say that likely some
Speaker 4: Shenanigan's going on there Nightmare on Elm Street nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 4: and I thought this was odd. The sudden and explained
Speaker 4: nocturnal death syndrome as an inspiration. I thought that was fascinating.
Speaker 4: And you cover the Serpent in the Rainbow of a
Speaker 4: movie I saw many years ago was and the Strange
Speaker 4: Tale of Claire vus Narses, and that incredible tale behind
Speaker 4: that which I thought that I had not read anything
Speaker 4: about that in terms of the real story behind that.
Speaker 4: So you also.
Speaker 5: Better than the film, absolutely too, Yeah, absolutely, yes. Silence
Speaker 5: Plans was sorry, go ahead, Dan.
Speaker 4: No, go ahead, talk about the Silence of the Lambs,
Speaker 4: because that particularly was inspired by many very much like
Speaker 4: the Weimar Germany cases, there was much inspiration for the
Speaker 4: Silence of the Lambs in terms of story.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you talk the words out of my mouth. I
Speaker 5: was just about to make that comparison. It was Thomas Harris,
Speaker 5: and you know, I guess it was Jonathan Demi and
Speaker 5: the screenwriters. They really studied up on their Golden Age
Speaker 5: serial killers to use that term.
Speaker 4: And so.
Speaker 5: Even the even the premise of the Silence of the
Speaker 5: Lambs has some route in reality. And that's that law
Speaker 5: and form goes to a notorious serial killer to get
Speaker 5: his insight into finding another serial killer who's at large.
Speaker 5: And this is the story of Bob Keppel and Dave Reikert,
Speaker 5: who was investigating they're both investigating the Green River killings,
Speaker 5: going to Ted Bundy's cell in Florida's Death Row and saying, Ted,
Speaker 5: you know this is your neck of the woods. And
Speaker 5: it really is, because I've been there physically. It's amazing
Speaker 5: how close Bundy and Ridgway's crimes were and saying, so, Ted,
Speaker 5: can you help us find this guy? And Bob Keppel
Speaker 5: wrote a book about this called The Riverman, and he said,
Speaker 5: to be honest with you, I didn't think Ted would
Speaker 5: have any insight. I was using this as a trick
Speaker 5: to try and get him to talk about some of
Speaker 5: his own crimes. What I find compelling about that is,
Speaker 5: if you actually look into the riverman, Bundy did give
Speaker 5: them some good eyes ideas that they could have acted upon,
Speaker 5: so he wasn't totally useless. And so that frames the
Speaker 5: Hannibal Lecter advising Clarice Starring on how to catch Buffalo Bill,
Speaker 5: who famously skins his humps as they say, they call
Speaker 5: him buffalo you know, Buffalo Bill for like skinning buffaloes,
Speaker 5: And that's because he's making the bodies that they're finding
Speaker 5: in rivers. They all have big patches of skin missing
Speaker 5: from them. They're all obese young women. And this of
Speaker 5: course goes back to ed Gean, who makes the woman
Speaker 5: suit right. And so not only does ed Gean inspire
Speaker 5: Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, but he inspires
Speaker 5: the leather Faced with his dead skin mask and Texas
Speaker 5: Chainsaw Massacre and in some ways Norman Bates and Psycho.
Speaker 5: That's another chapter of the book. But to get back
Speaker 5: to the Silence of the Lambs, the character of Buffalo Ill.
Speaker 5: A lot of people know about the ed Geen thing.
Speaker 5: They're like, oh, yeah, it's inspired by Edyen. What they
Speaker 5: don't know is that there are aspects of many other
Speaker 5: serial killers in the Buffalo Bill characters. So if we
Speaker 5: look at how he apprehends the victims. If you recall
Speaker 5: that classic scene from Silence of the Lambs where the
Speaker 5: I think it's the congresswoman or the senator's daughter is
Speaker 5: coming back from she's driving home to her apartment at night,
Speaker 5: and there's a guy who's struggling to get a piece
Speaker 5: of furniture inside his van, and he keeps driving it
Speaker 5: and he's making a bit of a show, and she
Speaker 5: feels guilty and mister, can I help you? Would you know,
Speaker 5: you know, although it's so kind of you, And then
Speaker 5: he gets her into the van and knocks her unconscious.
Speaker 5: That's how he gets control over her. That's classic Ted Bundy. Sure,
Speaker 5: that is how Ted Bundy got at least most of
Speaker 5: his Washington victims when he was sort of at the
Speaker 5: height of his success in Washington. So that first approach
Speaker 5: stage of them is based on Bundy. But then as
Speaker 5: far as how he keeps them, that was inspired by
Speaker 5: Gary Heidnick, who ran the infamous House of Horrors in Philadelphia,
Speaker 5: where he kept I think it was five or six
Speaker 5: young black women naked in a pit in his basement
Speaker 5: and he would torture them, and it's all in the book,
Speaker 5: but it's a pretty horrific case, you know, torture murder.
Speaker 5: And the whole point is with Buffalo Bill, he keeps
Speaker 5: his victims in the pit. That's basically the connection to Hydnick.
Speaker 5: When they read about the promoterists read about the Hydnick case,
Speaker 5: he said, okay, well we'll put that in there. And
Speaker 5: then how Buffalo Bill disposes of his victims is he
Speaker 5: dumps them in rivers, and that, of course hearkens back
Speaker 5: to Gary. Well at the time they didn't melt with
Speaker 5: Gary Ridgeway's still then uncaught Green River Killer. But also
Speaker 5: you can put in Jerry Brudos in there. Jerry Brudos.
Speaker 5: Everyone's seeing mind Hunter now, so I don't think I
Speaker 5: need to expand on him too much. He's the foot
Speaker 5: fetish guy, like the guy who covets the shoes. And
Speaker 5: the thing about Jerry Brudos that isn't in Mind Hunter,
Speaker 5: I don't think, which is pretty tremendous, is Brudos would
Speaker 5: put his victims in the river, but he would carry
Speaker 5: them out there from his car. And he would also
Speaker 5: carry like car engines and transmissions with like things that
Speaker 5: you would think that you know, no single man would
Speaker 5: be able to carry. He was that strong that he
Speaker 5: would do that, And some of Buffalo Bill's earliest victims
Speaker 5: are attached to similarly heavy objects. Brutos was also transvestic fetish,
Speaker 5: so a bit of Jerry Brutos bled into that character too.
Speaker 5: And then finally, once again, Mindhunter, you have ed Kemper, right,
Speaker 5: and this is more in the background story. It's not
Speaker 5: so much in the film, but it is in the novel.
Speaker 5: And of course the person portraying Buffalo Bill in the
Speaker 5: film would have known this, as the backstory of his
Speaker 5: character is that he killed his grandparents and was committed
Speaker 5: to a psychiatric institution. Well who did that, Ed Kemper.
Speaker 5: So just in that one character, Buffalo Bill, you have
Speaker 5: that many serial killers. And I mean, we can do
Speaker 5: Hannibal Lecter too if you want, or we can leave
Speaker 5: that a bit of a mystery for people who might
Speaker 5: want to read the book. But there's stillers that inspired
Speaker 5: yeah Hannibal, that you've never even heard of, and the
Speaker 5: foremost one you definitely haven't.
Speaker 4: Heard of, doctor Trevino, don't give it away.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. But also the go Ahead.
Speaker 4: You also also the monster of Florence is and also
Speaker 4: an influence. And also you talk about Andre Chickatillo as
Speaker 4: an influence as well. So it's got everybody and covering
Speaker 4: every single thing that we would seem as a unique
Speaker 4: characteristic among serial killers and infamous killers. You continue with
Speaker 4: a scream in nineteen ninety six, and that inspired by
Speaker 4: the murder of Janet Christman and the crimes of the
Speaker 4: Gainesville Ripper. And we've talked on this program about the
Speaker 4: Gainesville Ripper a little bit. You also have the Mothman
Speaker 4: prophecies two thousand and two.
Speaker 5: The Mosman that was the point was right, Yeah, that's surreal.
Speaker 5: That's just I was writing that, and I was just
Speaker 5: in a weird had like a weird good headspace writing that.
Speaker 5: If you don't know the story of the Mothman and
Speaker 5: injured cold and all the things that happen in Point Pleasant,
Speaker 5: West Virginia between nineteen sixty six and sixty seven, which
Speaker 5: actually results in like a major disaster in which a
Speaker 5: bridge collapses amidst all this, and then stories of men
Speaker 5: in black showing up and everything, things that didn't even
Speaker 5: make it into the movie. This is a case of
Speaker 5: where this story is actually far better than the film
Speaker 5: and writing it. Writing it felt like being on acid.
Speaker 5: I'll just put it out, well, it was surreal experience
Speaker 5: to write it.
Speaker 4: You also cover something that we've spoken about on this
Speaker 4: program before, and I think some people are familiar with
Speaker 4: this incredible movie Wolf Creek from two thousand five and
Speaker 4: the incredible crimes of Ivan Malatt and the murder of
Speaker 4: Peter Falconil. You also we just reference it a little bit.
Speaker 4: We'll mention it in the introduction The Conjuring twenty thirteen
Speaker 4: films that I'm not familiar with, Annabelle twenty fourteen and
Speaker 4: The Conjuring two twenty sixteen. Again, you talked about the
Speaker 4: Mofmann prophecies like you were on acid. How about the
Speaker 4: Conjuring two? Tell us about a little bit about that.
Speaker 5: Not the same, although interesting. Why the Mofman feels hallucinatory
Speaker 5: is because it's not paranormal in the conventional sense. So
Speaker 5: it's not demons or ghosts. It's something that we can't explain,
Speaker 5: something interdimensional, you know, energies and manifestations, but not in
Speaker 5: a Judeo Christian framework. The Conjuring films and Annabelle are
Speaker 5: all based on the case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren,
Speaker 5: who where of course Ed was a demonologist, and I
Speaker 5: think Lorraine said she was some sort of psychic, like
Speaker 5: a claire voyant or whatever. And they were also involved
Speaker 5: apparently in the Amityville though that never actually made it
Speaker 5: into the movie. Actually the Conjuring two starts with the
Speaker 5: house in the Amityville Horror, so that appears in actually
Speaker 5: both films. So yeah, those are I mean, those films
Speaker 5: are decent. I mean they're good little horror films. Some
Speaker 5: people like them more than me. I thought number two
Speaker 5: is the better of the two, but essentially, yeah, the
Speaker 5: first one, the Conjuring one, is about the Piran family
Speaker 5: who move into a house, a big old country home
Speaker 5: in New England, and they find out that it's haunted
Speaker 5: by a woman called Bathsheba Sherman, who was believed to
Speaker 5: be a witch, and that the house is full of
Speaker 5: all kinds of spirits. And so there's the story of
Speaker 5: that is told in the film, but I actually tell
Speaker 5: you the story that came from the family themselves and
Speaker 5: the involvement of Ed and Lorraine Warren. I should say
Speaker 5: that I also looked into anything paranormal with a skeptical
Speaker 5: eye and I always found I always found things that
Speaker 5: were suspicious, and that one's suspicious. The conjuring too, that
Speaker 5: my mind, was a better movie that's set in Enfield,
Speaker 5: North London, and that was a big case at the time.
Speaker 5: That was all in the British newspapers. This was something
Speaker 5: that someone wrote a book about later. This was like
Speaker 5: an ongoing thing where police were showing up at the
Speaker 5: house and there's items flying all over the place and
Speaker 5: the police can't explain it and they've got, you know,
Speaker 5: once again, parapsychologists and involved in there, and everyone trying
Speaker 5: to figure out what's going on and the possession of
Speaker 5: this little girl and potentially her sister and so yeah,
Speaker 5: Edam Lorraine Warren. In reality, in the film it depicts
Speaker 5: them as central to it. In reality, they just kind
Speaker 5: of popped in and you know, I don't think they
Speaker 5: were there longer than a couple of days, and it's
Speaker 5: much less dramatic. I think the final prognosis on the
Speaker 5: Enfield Poltergeist is that once again we have a mischievous
Speaker 5: little child who has some issues and was able to
Speaker 5: fool a lot of adults. And I think people struggle
Speaker 5: with that explanation because we think of children as I mean,
Speaker 5: it's bad enough to be fooled by another adult into
Speaker 5: believing that something supernatural is going on, but how can
Speaker 5: a kid pull it off? But they did catch this
Speaker 5: little girl, some of the paranormal investigators, the parapsychologists, they
Speaker 5: did catch this little girl setting things up. So she
Speaker 5: maintains this day that she didn't and she's you know,
Speaker 5: still makes little public appearances every once in a while.
Speaker 5: But now it's I guess it comes down to your
Speaker 5: degree of belief. I lend you know, I tend towards skepticism,
Speaker 5: and so yeah, I detail both of those stories and
Speaker 5: the investigations into them and all the players involved in
Speaker 5: Behind the Horror.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the finally you have you discussed the Witch from
Speaker 4: twenty fifteen and the Lighthouse from twenty nineteen, and the
Speaker 4: inspiration for the Witch is the Salem Witch Trials of
Speaker 4: sixteen ninety two, and also for the Lighthouse, the Smalls
Speaker 4: Lighthouse Tragedy. I want to thank you very much for
Speaker 4: coming on and talking about this book Behind the Horror,
Speaker 4: true stories and inspired horror movies. Also, you've been on
Speaker 4: this program a couple times with your books Cold North
Speaker 4: Killers and Rampage, tell a little bit about how they
Speaker 4: might take a look at your work, and do you
Speaker 4: have a website, and also about your podcast Murder was
Speaker 4: the case? Right?
Speaker 5: Yeah, well there's so much now Dan since we last
Speaker 5: talked that, and you know, I apologize for not being
Speaker 5: more in touch. I've just been so busy. I got
Speaker 5: my PhD. I don't know if I ever talked to
Speaker 5: you about that relations Yeah, thank you. Yeah. So there
Speaker 5: is my twenty twelve book Cold North Killers Canadian Serial Murder,
Speaker 5: which covers sixty cases of serial murder in Canada, and
Speaker 5: you can get that on Amazon as you can also
Speaker 5: get my twenty thirteen book Rampage Canadian Mass Murder and
Speaker 5: Spree Killing on Amazon, and that's about the same subject,
Speaker 5: a fewer cases, but I think well written. I was
Speaker 5: a little wiser at that point. And then I have
Speaker 5: some academic books, but you know, if you are really
Speaker 5: into criminal psychology, yes they're expensive, but they might be
Speaker 5: worth picking up. I wrote a homicide, a forensic psychology casebook,
Speaker 5: and you can learn everything that you can't learn anywhere
Speaker 5: else about NECROPHILICX and sexually statistic offenders in there, about
Speaker 5: what psychopathic violence is like, and then I actually have
Speaker 5: a book which focuses on the topic of necrophilia itself,
Speaker 5: Understanding necrophilia. If you really want to go down into
Speaker 5: the abyss, we go there, and I say we because
Speaker 5: I collaborated with other people on that. And then after
Speaker 5: that there's the Crime Book, which was a coffee table
Speaker 5: book that I helped author. I wrote a good forty
Speaker 5: percent of that. That's from the same publisher as Behind
Speaker 5: the Horror, DK Books, which is a Penguin imprint, so
Speaker 5: you know it's high quality stuff. You don't get a
Speaker 5: contract with Penguin unless you're a good writer. And that
Speaker 5: The Crime Book has got everything from famous heist to
Speaker 5: white collar crime, to serial killings to strange cult like behavior.
Speaker 5: It would make a terrific Christmas present. And so there's
Speaker 5: that one, and there's Behind the Horror, which we just
Speaker 5: discussed and you can get that on Amazon. And I've
Speaker 5: got to tell you then, I've got one coming out
Speaker 5: in February, once again with DK Books. It's all written
Speaker 5: and this was the one I actually had the most
Speaker 5: fun writing. And if you want to talk about the
Speaker 5: feeling like you're on psychotropic drugs while you're writing it,
Speaker 5: this is conspiracies Uncovered, and I didn't do a hack
Speaker 5: job on it. I really delved into it and I
Speaker 5: got about I don't know how many made the final cup,
Speaker 5: but I got about fifteen really compelling conspiracies into that book.
Speaker 5: Conspiracy theories, starting with Operation Gray Wolf, you know, did
Speaker 5: Hitler actually make it out of Germany and live in Argentina?
Speaker 5: And ending with the COVID nineteen Like what all the
Speaker 5: conspiracy theories surrounding that. That was an interesting conversation with
Speaker 5: the publisher because I think when we thought of doing
Speaker 5: that chapter, we were like, well, that's going to be
Speaker 5: resolved and I'll be able to have some established truth
Speaker 5: so we can say what the conspiracy theories really are.
Speaker 5: And at some point we had the conversation, Yeah, it
Speaker 5: seems like the truth is getting farther and farther away
Speaker 5: with this one. So which part is the Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 5: So I also got some stuff on Jeffrey Epstein and
Speaker 5: there and his involvement with intelligence, so there's yeah, there's
Speaker 5: some stuff in that one. Yeah, excited for that to
Speaker 5: come out. That's my Those are my writings, Dan, And
Speaker 5: as you mentioned, I have a podcast Murder was the Case,
Speaker 5: and it appeals to a very I would say niche audience,
Speaker 5: but if you like uncensored, but not for the sake
Speaker 5: of being tasteless, but for the sake of getting to
Speaker 5: the truth and really understanding crime and particularly aberrant sex
Speaker 5: homicides and the like at you know, the highest level
Speaker 5: you can go to that I talked to all. I
Speaker 5: think I've talked to all of the experts now, but
Speaker 5: I also teach little seminars myself. And so if that
Speaker 5: sounds like your cup of tea Murder was the Case podcast,
Speaker 5: please check that out. It's an ongoing thing. I'm really
Speaker 5: really proud of what I do with that. And I've
Speaker 5: got to say then, you know, since we last talked,
Speaker 5: there's been this big boom and all these true crime podcasts,
Speaker 5: which I know you've noticed. There's no way you didn't right, right,
Speaker 5: But you're the original as far as I'm concerned. Now,
Speaker 5: you might dispute that you might know something that I don't.
Speaker 5: You might not think of yourself as a podcast. You know,
Speaker 5: it might be a radio show. But I just want
Speaker 5: to remind everyone, before Cereal and before all these podcasts
Speaker 5: that you're addicted to, it was always Dan Zupanski You're
Speaker 5: the guy I knew that was doing this going all
Speaker 5: the way back to twenty twelve with my first bug,
Speaker 5: So I consider you the grand master.
Speaker 4: Dan. Well, thank you so much. That's a great honor
Speaker 4: hearing from you and those kind words. I want to
Speaker 4: thank you so much for coming on and talking about
Speaker 4: behind the horror, true stories that inspired horror movies. It's
Speaker 4: been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. Have a
Speaker 4: great evening, Doctor Lee Miller.
Speaker 5: Yeah, see you, Dan. Good night, good night.