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Speaker 4: You are now listening to true murder, the most shocking
Speaker 4: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 4: written about them. Gaesy Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker, BTK every week,
Speaker 4: another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous
Speaker 4: killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 4: journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Speaker 5: Good evening, This is your host Dan Zupanski for the
Speaker 5: program True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime
Speaker 5: history and the authors that have written about them. In
Speaker 5: the horrifying annals of American crime, infamous names of brutal
Speaker 5: killers such as Bundy, Dahmer, Gaycy, and Berkowitz are writ
Speaker 5: large in the imaginations of a public both horrified and
Speaker 5: hypnotized by their monstrous murderous acts. But for every celebrity
Speaker 5: psychopath who's gotten ink for spilling blood, there's a bevy
Speaker 5: of all but forgotten homicidal fiends studying the bloody margins
Speaker 5: of US history. Spurred by prophet passion, paranoia, or perverse pleasure,
Speaker 5: these killers, the Witch of Staten Island, the Smutty Nose Butcher,
Speaker 5: the Bluebeard of Quiet Dell, and many others, span three
Speaker 5: centuries in a host of heroing murder methods. These demonic
Speaker 5: denizens may be long gone to the gallows, but this
Speaker 5: insidiously irresistible slice of Gothic Americana will ensure that they'll
Speaker 5: no longer be forgotten. The book that we're featuring this
Speaker 5: evening is Psycho USA, American Psycho Killers You've Never Heard Of,
Speaker 5: with my special guest journalist and author and professor Harrow Checkter.
Speaker 5: Welcome to the program, and thank you for agreeing to
Speaker 5: this interview. Harold Checkter.
Speaker 2: Great, what pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 5: Thank you very much. I just want to make another
Speaker 5: little introduction for those that tune into this program, and
Speaker 5: it's been on almost three years now, that you are
Speaker 5: the perfect person to be coming on this program. So
Speaker 5: I'm very glad to welcome you on here because if
Speaker 5: there is anybody who understands and has written about and
Speaker 5: researched and knows about the most shocking killers in true
Speaker 5: crime history, it's definitely you. So thank you very much
Speaker 5: for coming on. This is a great book to discuss too.
Speaker 5: This is a great.
Speaker 2: Book, by the way. Thank you.
Speaker 5: Now let's go back for those that don't know what
Speaker 5: a serial killer the definition of that somebody just woke
Speaker 5: up after a coma after twenty years, but please tell
Speaker 5: us about the term serial killer, because you do take
Speaker 5: us back to a time where there wasn't a term
Speaker 5: for serial killer. And as we talked well in the introduction,
Speaker 5: the killers that you're talking about span three centuries. So
Speaker 5: tell us what when the term coin the phrase or
Speaker 5: the term was coined serial killer, and what were they
Speaker 5: called before that, and what were they called centuries ago?
Speaker 2: Well, apparently the first use of the phrase serial murderer
Speaker 2: dates to around nineteen sixty two, according to the Oxford
Speaker 2: English Dictionary, which tracks the etymology of language. And apparently
Speaker 2: it first appeared in a book by a German film
Speaker 2: critic strangely enough named Sigfried Krackoer, who was writing about
Speaker 2: the famous movie m starring Peter Laurie about pedophiliac serial
Speaker 2: murder and Krackower coined that term, and then it was
Speaker 2: picked up a little later by another British writer. It
Speaker 2: it didn't really, you know, become widely used until the
Speaker 2: nineteen eighties when the FBI Profiling Unit began to employ
Speaker 2: that term. You know, there's some controversy over exactly who
Speaker 2: coined it, but in any case, it's you know, it's
Speaker 2: a relatively recent term, but it's a recent term for
Speaker 2: an age old phenomenon. I mean, it goes back way
Speaker 2: beyond the three centuries that my that my book covers,
Speaker 2: you know, it's probably really as old as our species itself.
Speaker 2: There's actually a very illuminating book I read years ago
Speaker 2: by a Harvard anthropologist named Richard Wrangham. The book is
Speaker 2: called Demonic Males, and it traces the origins of male
Speaker 2: violence in the human species, you know, back to our
Speaker 2: primate ancestors, and you know, chimpanzees with whom we share
Speaker 2: something like ninety nine point nine percent of our DNA.
Speaker 2: You know, we share more d A with chimpanzees, and
Speaker 2: chimpanzees do with gorillas are as. It turns out, I
Speaker 2: hadn't realized this until I read the book. You know,
Speaker 2: frighteningly violent creatures who commit the kinds of atrocities. Really,
Speaker 2: you know that we associate with things like serial killers.
Speaker 2: So you know, I'm sure you have, you know, found
Speaker 2: that kind of crime going on all throughout human history
Speaker 2: and possibly even prehistory. In the past, serial murderers were
Speaker 2: known by a variety of names. You know, there was
Speaker 2: a point at which they're called lust murderers, which I
Speaker 2: think actually is a very very in a way, a
Speaker 2: more expressive and even accurate term than serial murder. You know,
Speaker 2: back in the Middle Ages, they were referred to as
Speaker 2: lichen thropes because the kind of butchery they committed was
Speaker 2: so extreme that, you know, people thought that these were
Speaker 2: human beings too, literally turned into wolves when they were
Speaker 2: committing these kinds of crimes. You know, somebody like Chickatillo
Speaker 2: for example, you know, it would be a modern example
Speaker 2: of that kind of killer. Back in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 2: there was no distinction made between serial murder and mass murder.
Speaker 2: I wrote a book about Albert Fish for example, you know,
Speaker 2: arguably the most heinous serial killer in the annals of
Speaker 2: US crime, cannibal pedophile who is preying on children, back
Speaker 2: in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and it was interesting
Speaker 2: to me that in the newspaper stories of the time
Speaker 2: when he was arrested, they were just using the term
Speaker 2: mass murder. Of course, now a distinction is made between
Speaker 2: serial murder, which again is basically a sadistic sex crime,
Speaker 2: and mass murder, which is, you know, a kind of apocalyptic,
Speaker 2: suicidal explosion of violence in which a person just takes
Speaker 2: out a bunch of people at one time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's interesting, Yeah, that that term now is is
Speaker 5: still used, but in a different context.
Speaker 2: Right. Well, again, they're two very very different phenomena. You know. Again,
Speaker 2: the mass murderer, you know, I mean, I guess the
Speaker 2: most recent notorious case is you know, the guy who
Speaker 2: shot up the movie theater in Denver, right uh? And
Speaker 2: they you know that is again this this explosion of
Speaker 2: apocalyptic violence that takes place. You know, it's it's a
Speaker 2: it's a one off deal. You know, usually those people
Speaker 2: tend to be suicidal. You know, they've reached somehow the
Speaker 2: end of their life, even this guy who didn't actually
Speaker 2: end up committing suicide or being killed by the cops,
Speaker 2: as obviously his life was all over. And you know,
Speaker 2: they're basically going out with a bang. I mean, that's
Speaker 2: it's this one time deal. Whereas serial murderers, again it's
Speaker 2: basically a sadistic sex crime. You know, these are people
Speaker 2: who derive this extremely perverse pleasure from inflicting pain and
Speaker 2: torture on their victims. And you know the pattern of
Speaker 2: serial murder tends to follow the pattern of sexual behavior.
Speaker 2: You know, a period of fantasizing about committing this act.
Speaker 2: You know, finally this overwhelming impulse to do it you know,
Speaker 2: trolling for a victim or picking up a victim, you know,
Speaker 2: perpetrating this act. Then this cooling off period which basically
Speaker 2: just parallels, you know, the kind of period that follows
Speaker 2: a normal person sexual release, and then the build up
Speaker 2: again of the impulse.
Speaker 5: So now in your research for this book we talk
Speaker 5: about we just talked about Albert Fish. So that's back
Speaker 5: in the forties. But throughout centuries did you find with
Speaker 5: this research, because it was not only killers we've never
Speaker 5: heard of. It's also some killers even for you, that
Speaker 5: you've never heard of. Is that correct?
Speaker 2: Well, I hadn't heard of them, you know. I was
Speaker 2: doing another book a few years ago. I was putting
Speaker 2: together an anthology of true crime writing going back to
Speaker 2: the sixteen hundreds in America. And when I was researching that,
Speaker 2: I was just very, very very intrigued by coming across
Speaker 2: all of these cases that at the time were extremely sensational,
Speaker 2: extremely notorious, often generated nationwide publicity, but that you know,
Speaker 2: completely had faded into obscurity, had been lost to public memory.
Speaker 2: I mean, one of the things that interests me is
Speaker 2: given the very depressing number, you know, horrific crimes that
Speaker 2: take place all the time. Why is it that's such
Speaker 2: a tiny number of crimes enter into the cultural mythology.
Speaker 2: I mean it's not necessarily you know, the you know,
Speaker 2: the the the awfulness of the crime itself. I mean
Speaker 2: Leopold and Lobe, for example, you know, committed this one
Speaker 2: kidnapping murder, which you know, as terrible as it was
Speaker 2: just purely as a crime, was no more horrendous than
Speaker 2: many other kidnapping murders of children. So there are these
Speaker 2: other elements, you know, these other elements that you know,
Speaker 2: that turn these crimes into these huge phenomena. And anyway,
Speaker 2: I was very interested to discover in my researches, you
Speaker 2: know that again in America, because I was living myself
Speaker 2: to American criminals, you know, going all the way back
Speaker 2: to the seventeenth century. Periodically there would be these crimes,
Speaker 2: and again they would generate lots and lots of attention,
Speaker 2: and you know, and frequently, you know, the newspapers would
Speaker 2: describe them as you know, the worst, you know, most
Speaker 2: monstrous crimes in the annals of history, and you know,
Speaker 2: the time of the century and so on and so forth,
Speaker 2: you know, and yet you know, they're forgotten very very quickly.
Speaker 2: So that's what I started researching for this book.
Speaker 5: Right, well, I think, you know, just not to get
Speaker 5: that too much of a discussion on that, but I
Speaker 5: think one of the things that I found is if
Speaker 5: the perpetrator is never found in a case like the Zodiac,
Speaker 5: and again, that lends credence to what you were saying
Speaker 5: in terms of murders not that horrible, and certainly you've
Speaker 5: written about much horrible, more horrible murders because the perpetrator
Speaker 5: wasn't caught and Jack the Ripper, of course it enters
Speaker 5: into the common mythology, but just because he was never apprehended, so.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, But I mean, you know, if you think
Speaker 2: of you know, the great you know, the Great Crime,
Speaker 2: Lizzie Bored and again Leopold and Loebe, you know, the
Speaker 2: Ruth Snyder, jud Gray Dublin Demnity case, I mean, certainly
Speaker 2: if there is you know, there are there are cases,
Speaker 2: as you say, I'm sure with Jack the Ripper and
Speaker 2: the fact that he was never caught is a very
Speaker 2: very big contributing factor. But I mean there are other,
Speaker 2: you know, very infamous cases like the Cleveland Torso killer
Speaker 2: or the x Man of New Orleans in which the
Speaker 2: perpetrator hasn't been caught, and they haven't quite achieved you know,
Speaker 2: the kind of cultural statuses other crimes have. So I
Speaker 2: mean there is you know, I mean, it's it's difficult
Speaker 2: entirely to pinpoint all the reasons. You know, there's something about,
Speaker 2: you know, the particular story and the way it strikes
Speaker 2: a kind of chord at the time, partly because I
Speaker 2: think it tends to embody certain kinds of anxieties and
Speaker 2: issues that are very, very prominent. For example, Leopold and Lobe,
Speaker 2: you know, as a kind of quintessential jazz age crime.
Speaker 2: There was so much obsession at the time about what
Speaker 2: they used to call the flaming youth who are completely
Speaker 2: out of control, and somehow Leopold and Lobe, you know,
Speaker 2: seem to be the living incarnations of this cultural fear,
Speaker 2: you know, in the same way Charles Manson, you know,
Speaker 2: it's like every you know, parents' worst nightmare of the
Speaker 2: drug crazed hippie, you know. So anyway, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: Now, the in terms of and before we introduce this
Speaker 5: bevy of infamous killers, now to the infamous killers. Have
Speaker 5: killers changed over the last three hundred years? Is there
Speaker 5: any difference in their motivation.
Speaker 2: We'll say, uh, well, in terms of the killers that
Speaker 2: I tend to write about, I would say no, uh,
Speaker 2: you know, certainly again in regard to what we now
Speaker 2: call serial murderers. And let me just say that not
Speaker 2: every not every criminal that I cover in this particular
Speaker 2: book is a serial killer. But in terms of serial killers,
Speaker 2: you know, again the name has changed, but the you know,
Speaker 2: the the modus operande and the and the psychological motives
Speaker 2: pretty much remain the same. You know, these are sexual
Speaker 2: psychopaths who, for whatever reason again you know, derive you know,
Speaker 2: they achieve kind of you'd have to say, almost ecstasy
Speaker 2: in torturing and exerting this power over their victims. And
Speaker 2: again I think that's just a perennial phenomenon, you know.
Speaker 2: I mean, one could say, I suppose in certain cases,
Speaker 2: you know, there are technological changes in terms of the
Speaker 2: kinds of weapons they might use. But otherwise, you know,
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, for example, there are some killers
Speaker 2: I cover who would find their victims through classified ads
Speaker 2: in these lonely hearts, you know, newspapers and stuff, you know,
Speaker 2: nowt they'd use the internet, you know, but basically it's
Speaker 2: the same thing.
Speaker 5: Well, let's do that as an introduction then to somebody
Speaker 5: that did use not the Internet obviously, but use the
Speaker 5: Lonely Hearts club in a Midwest and he was the
Speaker 5: Bluebird of quite Quietville. And this is Harry F.
Speaker 2: Powers.
Speaker 5: So tell us about tell us about Harry F.
Speaker 2: Powers please. Well, he was this rather dumpy, unattractive man
Speaker 2: married who would contact lonely widows. He was he lived
Speaker 2: in West Virginia, again, contacting them through these Lonely Hearts clubs,
Speaker 2: which were you know, I guess you know, the nineteen
Speaker 2: thirties equivalent of match dot com and so on. And
Speaker 2: he would, you know, he was presentable enough, he obviously,
Speaker 2: would create these false identities and present himself as a
Speaker 2: well to do widower and ingratiate himself with these women
Speaker 2: and then lure him lure them to this, you know,
Speaker 2: basically torture chamber that he had constructed on a piece
Speaker 2: of property in a little village called Quiet Dell, and
Speaker 2: trap them in the basement and subject them to various
Speaker 2: tortures and kill them. I mean, in one case he
Speaker 2: killed a woman and both her children, and in another
Speaker 2: case he killed one other woman that he had lured
Speaker 2: there and his crimes. You know, eventually friends of the
Speaker 2: victims became very suspicious about the disappearance of these people,
Speaker 2: and he was tracked down and tried. It was a very,
Speaker 2: very again notorious case that was covered nationally, and you know,
Speaker 2: he was ultimately executed. One of the things that's always
Speaker 2: interesting to me and that I deal with in the
Speaker 2: book is back in the old days, almost invariably popular
Speaker 2: or ballads would be written about these crimes. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: you know, sometimes as in the case of Harry Powers,
Speaker 2: who's also named his real name apparently was Hermann Drenth.
Speaker 2: He was actually an emigrat from Belgium. Harry Powers was
Speaker 2: his adopted American name, although he thought he snared his
Speaker 2: victims under a variety of other pseudonyms. But you know,
Speaker 2: his actual sheet music that exists for some of these
Speaker 2: ballads that are written about them.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: But you know, actually there's a documentary movie that.
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Speaker 2: About Harry Powers. So interesting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I wanted to say too, before we go any further,
Speaker 5: I wanted to say that it was amazed and very
Speaker 5: happy to see all the great photos that you were
Speaker 5: able to put into this book and the posters and
Speaker 5: the original media literature that was all at that time.
Speaker 5: Just it's incredible. It takes you back. You know, a
Speaker 5: lot obviously, lots of this historical crime, that's what this is,
Speaker 5: but amazing stuff that you've been able to gather.
Speaker 2: So well, that's another thing that's interesting to me. I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, you you you hear a lot of people complaining,
Speaker 2: you know, somehow about our you know, contemporary fascination with
Speaker 2: as you know, crime stuff, as though it's some you know,
Speaker 2: particular symptom of you know, like our you know, societal rot.
Speaker 2: You know that the society's going to help. But when
Speaker 2: you look back, I mean, you know, you see everything
Speaker 2: that is characteristic now of our culture was true back then.
Speaker 2: You know, instant true crime books, you know, people dealing
Speaker 2: in what is now called murder abelia, you know, collecting
Speaker 2: souvenirs of crime scenes and souvenirs of notorious criminals. So again,
Speaker 2: you know, it's a plus a change nothing really, you know,
Speaker 2: it's a Bible says there's no new thing under the sun,
Speaker 2: and that relates to you know, the public purient interest
Speaker 2: you know in these kinds of sensational crimes.
Speaker 5: Absolutely and we'll talk about a little bit more about too,
Speaker 5: about the gruesome souvenir and people's attraction to that, and
Speaker 5: also things like how many people were at the potential
Speaker 5: lynching and how many people were at the hanging, so
Speaker 5: it was pretty big entertainment event. Actual, let's talk about
Speaker 5: Lydia Sherman and she was a Crown America's Queen poisoner
Speaker 5: by the media told us about Lydia Sherman.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, Lydia Sherman was one of several very
Speaker 2: notorious nineteenth century serial poisoners. And one thing that actually
Speaker 2: interests me quite a bit about that particular breed of
Speaker 2: serial murderer has to do with the fact that there
Speaker 2: are female serial murders. You know, for a long long time,
Speaker 2: you know, people would think that Aileen Warnos, you know,
Speaker 2: was called the first female serial killer, which is completely
Speaker 2: wrong because you know, again throughout history, there have been
Speaker 2: hundreds and hundreds of female serial killers. In fact, I've
Speaker 2: been in contact recently with a gentleman who's been compiling
Speaker 2: history of it, and he's come up with astonishing number
Speaker 2: of cases internationally. But what's interesting is that it's true
Speaker 2: that there is no such thing as the culture critic
Speaker 2: Camille Pogley has said, there's no female Jack the Ripper,
Speaker 2: But that doesn't mean there are no female serial killers.
Speaker 2: It just means that female serial killers tend to commit
Speaker 2: their crimes in a very different way than male serial killers.
Speaker 2: Or to put it another way, you know that kind
Speaker 2: of you know, mutilation murder that we associate with Jack
Speaker 2: the Ripper or you know, other males serial killers of
Speaker 2: that type, that's a very very male form of serial murder.
Speaker 2: Lydia Sherman, you know, personifies a particularly female form of
Speaker 2: serial murder, which is to say that she and others
Speaker 2: like her, you know, tend to mittle murder strangers the
Speaker 2: way many many serial killers, male serial killers do. In fact,
Speaker 2: most serial killers do, you know, They tend to murder
Speaker 2: family members, friends, people they have some kind of emotional
Speaker 2: intimate relationship with. And they also do not indulge in
Speaker 2: that kind of penetrative phallic penetrative, you know, using a
Speaker 2: knife or you know whatever, mutilation murder. What they tend
Speaker 2: to do is poison their victims. And Lydia Sherman, you know,
Speaker 2: was a very very prolific poisoner, you know, who bumped
Speaker 2: off a bunch of her husbands. I can't remember offhand
Speaker 2: exactly how many of her children and step children she killed,
Speaker 2: but you know, it's a very pressive number and began.
Speaker 2: She was only one of several what they called American
Speaker 2: borges at the time. There was another one, Sarah Jane Robinson,
Speaker 2: and both Lydia Sherman and Sarah Jane Robinson were followed
Speaker 2: by a nurse named Jane Toppin, who, until John Wayne
Speaker 2: Gacy's crime spree, was considered to be the most prolific
Speaker 2: serial murderer in American history. She killed about thirty one people,
Speaker 2: again by poison. The other thing to keep in mind is,
Speaker 2: in many respects, dying by dying at the hands of
Speaker 2: one of these female poisoners was much more horrific, you know,
Speaker 2: than dying at the hands of Jack the Ripper. You know,
Speaker 2: you associate Jack the Ripper with these horrendous mutilations, but
Speaker 2: the mutilations were all performed post mortem. He actually killed
Speaker 2: his victims very very swiftly, whereas people like Lydia Sherman
Speaker 2: and Jane Toppin and Sarah Jane Robinson, you know, arrived
Speaker 2: extreme perverse sexual pleasure from doling out very slow, agonizing
Speaker 2: death to their victims, you know, watching them die over
Speaker 2: an extended span of time, sometimes bringing them very very
Speaker 2: close to death by administering certain combinations of poisons and
Speaker 2: then pulling them back so they could toy with them more.
Speaker 2: And Jane Toppin, for example, confess to when she finally
Speaker 2: decided it was time for one of her victims to die,
Speaker 2: she would administer the fatal dose and then get into
Speaker 2: bed and embrace the person while they were dying and
Speaker 2: have an orgasm while the person was undergoing their death. Ros.
Speaker 2: So you know, it was a classic case again of
Speaker 2: sexual sadistic serial murder, but done in this female form,
Speaker 2: so quite evil. Yeah, yeah, evil.
Speaker 5: Yes.
Speaker 2: Now let's move on to.
Speaker 5: As the evil scale increases here, let's talk about a
Speaker 5: Joseph Lapage or Lapage. Talk about Joseph Lapage please.
Speaker 2: Well. Lapage was uh a Canadian who drifted down into
Speaker 2: New England. And I mean he was. He's in the
Speaker 2: book because he he committed the sexual mutilation murder of
Speaker 2: the young uh New Hampshire schoolgirl named Josie her name
Speaker 2: actually laid langmaid, yes, and made him and uh you
Speaker 2: know he had been he had actually fled Canada, you know,
Speaker 2: after raping a young relative of his. But you know,
Speaker 2: the thing about Lapage, you know that was very interesting
Speaker 2: to me is you know, another case of a nineteen
Speaker 2: totally obscure, nineteenth century killer who was a classic serial
Speaker 2: sex murderer. You know, he stalked this young girl, he
Speaker 2: abducted her, dragged her into the woods, killed her, mutilated,
Speaker 2: mutilated her body, beheaded her, excised her volva. You know,
Speaker 2: it's you know, again a killer, not on the scale
Speaker 2: of somebody like Andre Chicicatillo, but a similar kind of crime.
Speaker 2: You know, you have these psychopathic sex murderers who were
Speaker 2: driven to perform these horrendous mutilation rapes on young women.
Speaker 2: And again you know, you know, associated necessarily with nineteenth
Speaker 2: century New Hampshire. But you know that's part of the
Speaker 2: point of my book is that these crimes have taken
Speaker 2: place at all times and in all places. And let
Speaker 2: me just say that it's not, of course, you know,
Speaker 2: limited to America. You know, I I tend to limit
Speaker 2: my books to American killers. But it's an international phenomenon.
Speaker 5: Sure, I mean there's.
Speaker 2: Probably you know, every culture in the world, including the Inuit.
Speaker 2: Because I did some research to it, you know, you
Speaker 2: find examples of these kinds of criminals.
Speaker 5: So sure, oh, absolutely, yeah. The murder rate's pretty high
Speaker 5: actually as you go further north.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and you know, and again it's it's you know,
Speaker 2: it's a it's an archaic form of crime. You know.
Speaker 2: If you read fairy tales, something like Little Red Riding Hood,
Speaker 2: you know, you know, they're social documents, you know, one
Speaker 2: of the men. You know. The main message of something
Speaker 2: like Little Red Riding Hood, you know is after your
Speaker 2: young girl and you venture out into the forest in
Speaker 2: medieval Germany, you know you're likely to get raped and dismembered,
Speaker 2: you know, and that is converted into this dreamlike tale
Speaker 2: of a little girl and a wolf, you know, but
Speaker 2: it represents a historical and a social social reality of
Speaker 2: the time.
Speaker 5: So sure, yeah, absolutely. Now let's talk about another subject,
Speaker 5: Franklin Evans, the Norwood Monster, and tell us a little
Speaker 5: bit about this.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, similar to lapage really you know Evans, uh, well,
Speaker 2: he there was a very very notorious double murder of
Speaker 2: two children outside of Boston. Uh. These two little kids
Speaker 2: got permission from their grandmother to go off and play
Speaker 2: in the nearby forest and you know, the girl ended
Speaker 2: up being raped and murdered and mutilated, her little brother
Speaker 2: horribly killed, you know, to eliminate him as a witness.
Speaker 2: That crime went unsolved for a very long time, and
Speaker 2: it turned out to have been perpetrated by this guy
Speaker 2: named Franklin Evans, who was arrested years later again for
Speaker 2: committing a crime similar to the kind of atrocity that
Speaker 2: Lapage perpetrated on Josie Langmaide, except in this case it
Speaker 2: was his own niece that he lured into a forest
Speaker 2: and again raped, mutilated, cut out her sexual organs, supposedly
Speaker 2: because you know, he wanted to do some anatomical study
Speaker 2: on them. You know, it's a case that was provoked,
Speaker 2: you know, this incredible nationwide outrage. At the time that
Speaker 2: it was discovered, Evans was considered to be again one
Speaker 2: of the most monstrous criminals in the annals of American crime.
Speaker 2: And yet you know, nobody's ever heard of him. And again,
Speaker 2: you know, the crime itself, I would argue, for example,
Speaker 2: is much more horrific than something like the Leopold had
Speaker 2: Low murder. And yet no one's heard of Evans anymore
Speaker 2: so until you till now.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it is quite shocking that I haven't. I hadn't
Speaker 5: heard of any not that I'm an expert, but I
Speaker 5: mean I hadn't heard of these people either, and actually
Speaker 5: one because.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, sorry, go ahead, no, no, it's going to say,
Speaker 2: I mean talking about Leopold. No, but enough you're going
Speaker 2: to raise it. But to me, one of the most
Speaker 2: horrific figures in the book, and a figure that I
Speaker 2: was sort of only vaguely aware of when I started
Speaker 2: writing it was William Hickman, who has not as the
Speaker 2: Fox who you know. Hickman was a young man who
Speaker 2: had worked as a messenger in a bank. This is
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty seven, and abducted the daughter of one of
Speaker 2: the executives in the bank and held her for ransom,
Speaker 2: and the father agreed to pay the ransom, and Hickman
Speaker 2: arranged to rendezvous with him. He was going to turn
Speaker 2: over this little girl. He had the little girl captive
Speaker 2: for a few days and treated her very nicely, took
Speaker 2: her to movies and bought her ice cream, and kept
Speaker 2: her entertained and kept assuring her that she would be
Speaker 2: returned safely to the father. You know. The father agreed
Speaker 2: to pay the ransom. And they arranged for a rendezvous spot,
Speaker 2: and the father arrived there with this bag full of money.
Speaker 2: Hickman pulled up in a car. The father said, you know,
Speaker 2: I want to make sure my daughter's okay before I
Speaker 2: pay you. So Hickman showing a flashlight on the passenger seat,
Speaker 2: and there was the little girl who was sitting there,
Speaker 2: wrapped up in a blanket, with her eyes wide open
Speaker 2: and apparently smiling. So the father passed them money to
Speaker 2: Hickman through the window. Hickman drove off little ways, opened
Speaker 2: the passenger door, tossed the little girl out, and drove off.
Speaker 2: The father ran up to retrieve his daughter, and what
Speaker 2: he discovered was that Hickman had killed her, disemboweled her,
Speaker 2: cut off her arms and legs so in her eye
Speaker 2: lids open to make it look as if her eyes
Speaker 2: were open, put rouge on her cheeks, and lipstick on
Speaker 2: her mouth to make it look as if those she
Speaker 2: were healthy and smiling. You know, it's it's a crime
Speaker 2: that it's so unimaginably horrible. And when Hickman was you know,
Speaker 2: and when Hickman was arrested, he himself expected that he
Speaker 2: would become his infamous Leopold and Lope. And yet again,
Speaker 2: you know, it's completely stated from public memory.
Speaker 5: I guess Hollywood's got to make a movie.
Speaker 2: And yeah, well see that's that's the interesting thing. I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, the question becomes, what is the story? I mean,
Speaker 2: the story of Leopold and Lobe and the characters of
Speaker 2: Leopold and Lobe we're so fascinating, you know that it's
Speaker 2: constantly being retold as you know, you know, I'm not
Speaker 2: so sure you can really do that with a Hickman case.
Speaker 2: I mean, the crime itself is you know, incredibly night marish.
Speaker 2: You know, but I think to again enter into the
Speaker 2: cultural folklore, you know, there has to be something about them.
Speaker 2: You know, it's like any other story. It's like any
Speaker 2: movie or any play or whatever. There has to be
Speaker 2: something of the story. There has to be something of
Speaker 2: the characters. It can't just be the the awfulness of
Speaker 2: the crime.
Speaker 5: No, no, no, obviously, there has to be a lot
Speaker 5: more to that. And Hollywood really needs a love story.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true idea Leopold and love. Yeah, well,
Speaker 2: Leopold and Lobe with certainly kind of love story.
Speaker 5: So yeah, now let's get back to this Fokes Gallery
Speaker 5: of Evil here and the Smutty Nose Horror of eighteen
Speaker 5: seventy three, and Louis Wagner tell.
Speaker 2: Us a little bit about Louis Wagner. Well, you know,
Speaker 2: that's a really interesting case. Smutty Nose is a tiny,
Speaker 2: tiny little island that's part of this archipelago off the
Speaker 2: coast of it sort of spans Maine and New Hampshire.
Speaker 2: They're called the Isle of Shoals. And on this one
Speaker 2: tiny islet there was a family of Norwegian immigrants who
Speaker 2: made their living well as fisher people. You know, the husband,
Speaker 2: the men were fishermen, and you know, the wives kept
Speaker 2: the house and they Louis Wagner was this German emigre
Speaker 2: who occasionally helped out with a fishing enterprise and uh
Speaker 2: and sometimes boarded with him. You know, he was a
Speaker 2: friend of the family really and uh in on the
Speaker 2: on the on the night of this horrible crime that
Speaker 2: he committed, because the men of the family, I guess
Speaker 2: there were three men. There were three women and three men.
Speaker 2: The men went off on their fishing boat and ended
Speaker 2: up having to spend the night on on the mainland,
Speaker 2: and they ran into Lewis Wagner uh And Wagner realized
Speaker 2: that the women were going to be all by themselves
Speaker 2: on this remote island, and he believed that there was
Speaker 2: a cache of money somewhere in the house. So he
Speaker 2: stole a row boat and rowed to this little island
Speaker 2: and ended up ended up butchering two of the women
Speaker 2: with an axe. One of the women managed to crawl
Speaker 2: through a window with her little dog and run down
Speaker 2: to the to the shoreline and huddle in under a
Speaker 2: rock all night while Wagner, you know, I think I
Speaker 2: write in the book a sort of a classic scene
Speaker 2: out of you know, like a Hollywood you know, a
Speaker 2: movie with Jamie Lee Curtison or something. You know. You know,
Speaker 2: she was like huddling under this rock, trying to keep
Speaker 2: her dog quiet, you know, while this homicidal madman was
Speaker 2: scouring the island for her with his axe, you know,
Speaker 2: just walking very very close to where she was. But
Speaker 2: in the end he couldn't find her. So he went
Speaker 2: back to the cottage where the corpses of these two
Speaker 2: other young women he had just butchered leg you know,
Speaker 2: and made himself a meal and then hopped in the
Speaker 2: rowboat and you know, and made off, and you know,
Speaker 2: he was eventually caught and executed. One of the very
Speaker 2: interesting things about it was that inhabiting the next island
Speaker 2: over was a family that ran a little hotel which
Speaker 2: was frequented actually by you know, some very very famous
Speaker 2: people during the summer, people like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry
Speaker 2: David Farreaux had visited there. And the daughter of the
Speaker 2: family was this woman named Celia Thaxter, who was a
Speaker 2: very very well known poet at the time, and she
Speaker 2: was one of the first on the seat on the
Speaker 2: murder scene the next day, and she ended up writing
Speaker 2: a long, long article about the smutty Nose horror. That
Speaker 2: is a very very very pioneering piece of American true
Speaker 2: crime writing. It really, in many ways, I would argue,
Speaker 2: is the first modern piece of American true crime writing.
Speaker 2: It predates in Cold Blood, you know, by almost one
Speaker 2: hundred years, but it does something of what in Cold
Speaker 2: Blood does, you know, which is bring a literary kind
Speaker 2: of sensibility and literary style and literary language, you know,
Speaker 2: to the telling of this horrible, horrible murder. So it's
Speaker 2: quite an interesting case. The author Anita Shreeve wrote a
Speaker 2: book called The Weight of Water, which was made into
Speaker 2: a not very good movie with Sean Penn, I believe
Speaker 2: based on the case.
Speaker 5: Interesting, well, let's talk about this was surprising that this
Speaker 5: is the year of this in nineteen twenty seven. But
Speaker 5: tell us about Andrew Keyhole.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well that was a very very fascinating case. You know,
Speaker 2: that was something you know that's gone down in criminal
Speaker 2: history as the Bath School disaster. This was a little
Speaker 2: town in Michigan, Bath, Michigan, and Keyhoe was a local resident,
Speaker 2: local citizen of the town, very well respected. He had
Speaker 2: a farm. He became obsessed with the up until a
Speaker 2: certain point, all the children in that particular vicinity, you know,
Speaker 2: we're going to these little separate, one room schoolhouses. And
Speaker 2: the town built this big, consolidated school which was the
Speaker 2: pride of the community, this big modern school which educated
Speaker 2: the children from kindergarten up through high school. And to support,
Speaker 2: of course, you know, all the citizens of the town
Speaker 2: were taxed. And Keiho developed this obsession about being taxed.
Speaker 2: He and his wife didn't have any children, you know,
Speaker 2: and he thought that this was you know, incredibly unfair,
Speaker 2: and so on and so forth, and and anyway he
Speaker 2: had been he was he had some engineering background and
Speaker 2: was very very very skillful in mechanics, and you know,
Speaker 2: had some electrical knowledge. So he was kind of hired
Speaker 2: to do some upkeep on the building. And over the
Speaker 2: course of many, many months, he was given a key
Speaker 2: to the to the schoolhouse, and unbeknownst to anybody else
Speaker 2: in the community, he was smuggling in explosives into the
Speaker 2: building at night and rigging up this huge time bomb
Speaker 2: in the basement which was triggered to go off of
Speaker 2: some homemade detonating device he made out of alarm clocks.
Speaker 2: Got he got some surplus World War One explosives which
Speaker 2: were very widely available at that time to farmers who
Speaker 2: used them to get rid of stumps on their property
Speaker 2: and so on. And he had managed to accumulate a
Speaker 2: huge man of this stuff, and he just brought you know,
Speaker 2: I can't even remember how much, but you know, hundreds
Speaker 2: and hundreds of pounds of this he loaded into the
Speaker 2: basement of this school. And then on the last day
Speaker 2: of the school year, when he knew that there would
Speaker 2: be many, many, many students attending class to take their finals,
Speaker 2: he set this timer to go off and blew this
Speaker 2: school up. Fortunately for some reason, not all the explosives detonated,
Speaker 2: but it did destroy a huge portion of the school
Speaker 2: and killed I can't remember, about forty children and teachers.
Speaker 2: At the same time. While the school was going up,
Speaker 2: he loaded up his Ford pickup with all this shrapnel
Speaker 2: and dynamite. He murdered his wife. Again typical of mass
Speaker 2: murderers who basically are going to like end their whole
Speaker 2: lives and destroy their whole worlds. Killed his wife up
Speaker 2: this forward pick up with shrapped alt explosives, drove it
Speaker 2: down to the schoolhouse where all these survived, all these
Speaker 2: men and community members are frantically trying to save kids
Speaker 2: and dig the survivors out of the rubble. And drove
Speaker 2: this car bomb down to the down to the schoolhouse
Speaker 2: and called over some men he had this grudge against,
Speaker 2: and then detonated this car bomb, killing himself and these
Speaker 2: other men. So he you know, this was the greatest act.
Speaker 2: This was the most heinous act of domestic terrorism up
Speaker 2: until the time of Timothy McVeigh. And it was a
Speaker 2: kind of combination of both you know, the you know,
Speaker 2: the Oklahoma City bombing, and you know, what you now
Speaker 2: think of is like a contemporary car bombing, so it
Speaker 2: was a suicide bombing, domestic terrorism, just this horrendous, horrendous act,
Speaker 2: and yet after making the front pages of the newspapers
Speaker 2: for a few days, it completely disappeared. And again nobody's
Speaker 2: ever heard of it. And here's a guy who blew
Speaker 2: up a schoolhouse, killing forty children in you know, the
Speaker 2: Midwest in nineteen twenty seven. And if you you know,
Speaker 2: say you know, mentioned the Bath School disaster and it
Speaker 2: was such a horrendous crime for the time that people
Speaker 2: were suggesting that the name Keiho was going to enter
Speaker 2: into the language as a slang term for a domestic terrorist.
Speaker 2: And yet far from that happening, you know, he became,
Speaker 2: you know, completely obscure. So, I mean, I think part
Speaker 2: of the I think there are several reasons for that.
Speaker 2: One is, the Bath School disaster occurred literally just days
Speaker 2: before Charles Lindberg made his transatlantic crossing, and that was
Speaker 2: such a huge epical event that completely overshadow the disaster.
Speaker 2: But the other factor is, you know, I think that again,
Speaker 2: there are certain kinds of crimes that become called obsessions.
Speaker 2: For example, back in the late nineteenth century, poisoners Americans
Speaker 2: obsessed about poisoners in the way Americans did about serial killers.
Speaker 2: In like the nineteen seventies and eighties. There was something
Speaker 2: about something about the crime of poisoning that played on
Speaker 2: very very widespread fears at the time, which I think
Speaker 2: had to do with the fact that, you know, there
Speaker 2: was no regulation of food and drugs and so on and
Speaker 2: so forth, so people were just always afraid that whatever
Speaker 2: they ingested was going to kill them. And somehow the
Speaker 2: poisoner came to incarnate, you know, that particular kind of
Speaker 2: cultural anxiety, you know, just as a serial murderer came
Speaker 2: to incarnate certain kinds of anxieties having to do with
Speaker 2: sexual danger and the spread of aids and so on and
Speaker 2: so forth. In the eighties and so on, and now,
Speaker 2: you know, the fear of the serial killer, I think
Speaker 2: was we're not quite as obsessed with serial killers as
Speaker 2: we were twenty years ago. Now we're much more focused
Speaker 2: on mass murderers again, like you know the Columbine or this,
Speaker 2: you know, the guy in Denver recently, and I think
Speaker 2: that's because you know, the fear of serial murder has
Speaker 2: been replaced by you know, this terror of the mass murder.
Speaker 2: You know, because of terrorism. So yeah, yeah, that key
Speaker 2: how is that? I mean, Key Hoo's crime was always like,
Speaker 2: you know, in that sense, it was ahead of its time.
Speaker 2: You know, it wasn't quite the kind of crime. As
Speaker 2: horrendous as it was, it didn't strike that sort of
Speaker 2: communal cord of anxiety, you know that something like that
Speaker 2: would nowadays.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I think since nine to eleven as well,
Speaker 5: we have this collective terror at mass murder and obviously
Speaker 5: and also it keeps in line with the fear of
Speaker 5: a serial killer. It's it's the fear of the randomness
Speaker 5: of it. So that's why more people can relate to it.
Speaker 2: I think, yeah, well, yeah, well, I think randomness is
Speaker 2: always Yeah, randomness is always a very very terrifying thing.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think it's one of the reasons why
Speaker 2: there are so many conspiracy theories. You know, it's much
Speaker 2: it's you know, it's more comforting to think, well, you know,
Speaker 2: I mean my own opinion, for example, about the Kennedy assassination.
Speaker 2: You know, it's more comforting in a way to think,
Speaker 2: you know that something like that was committed as part
Speaker 2: of a you know, a vast conspiracy. Then there was
Speaker 2: just this one loose Cannon, you know, who randomly killed
Speaker 2: this president and you know, changed all of history.
Speaker 5: So anyway, Yeah, some people look for explanations that are
Speaker 5: bigger than they are. I think there's I think that
Speaker 5: there's an unwitting conspiracy a lot of times as well.
Speaker 5: People just buy human nature do a lot of things
Speaker 5: that seem to look like conspiracies.
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, there's.
Speaker 5: A lot of you know, you've covered how many two
Speaker 5: crime books. There are so many it looks like ineptitude,
Speaker 5: but it's just fortune the other way. And oftentimes the
Speaker 5: police and authorities get breaks in the same sort of way,
Speaker 5: just coming out of the blue. So I don't know
Speaker 5: if it ever evens out, but it's probably not tell
Speaker 5: us about a person I found particularly interesting, Anton Probes
Speaker 5: the monster in the shape of a man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that to me was one of the
Speaker 2: most disturbing crimes you know, that I covered in the
Speaker 2: book you know you had. You know, actually when it's
Speaker 2: one of those sometimes I'll come across a crime and
Speaker 2: you know, when you write about these things enough, you know,
Speaker 2: you do a tree of a certain kind of detached
Speaker 2: attitude towards it. You know, it's I always compare it
Speaker 2: to you know, a medical student, you know, performing at autopsic.
Speaker 2: You know, after a while, you know, it becomes kind
Speaker 2: of a routine. But the Probe's case is one that
Speaker 2: you know, I found when I really really allowed myself,
Speaker 2: you know, to think about it, getting quite upset over it.
Speaker 2: You know. Probes, again, was this German immigrant fought in
Speaker 2: the Civil War. He'd been taken in by this family
Speaker 2: called the Deerings, this farmer and his wife and young children,
Speaker 2: and you know, who'd just been treated really really well
Speaker 2: and you know, almost like a family member himself. And
Speaker 2: then he decided that again a little bit like it
Speaker 2: was a little analogous to this smutty nos case, you know,
Speaker 2: because just as Lewis Wagner had been taken into this
Speaker 2: family and then decided he was going to kill them all,
Speaker 2: or the women, just so he could rob the money.
Speaker 2: You know, Probes decided, you know, that Deering had a
Speaker 2: bunch of money in his house which he didn't uh
Speaker 2: and he was going to get it. And the only
Speaker 2: way he could figure out somehow to achieve this goal
Speaker 2: was to slaughter the entire family. So excuse me. One day,
Speaker 2: he basically lured each of the members of the family
Speaker 2: in succession, you know, the mother, you know, then one child,
Speaker 2: the next child. He lued each one into the barn
Speaker 2: under some pretext, you know, and as soon as he
Speaker 2: got them in the barn, he would butcher them with
Speaker 2: an axe. And then he ended up killing the father,
Speaker 2: and he ended up killing you know, one other young
Speaker 2: man who worked on the farm who was very very
Speaker 2: friendly with He ended up butchering like eight people all together.
Speaker 2: When I was writing about it, you know, it struck
Speaker 2: me again as an atrocity that was on the level
Speaker 2: of the Manson murders, you know, the Sharon Tate killings. Sure,
Speaker 2: And you know, I in proped was a rather dull
Speaker 2: witted fellow who didn't actually bother after he committed this massacre,
Speaker 2: to put much distance between himself and the crime scene.
Speaker 2: And so he was promptly, promptly captured. And that crime,
Speaker 2: you know, very justifiably generated such incredible communal outrage and indignation.
Speaker 2: You know, the Probes was just really seen as one
Speaker 2: of the most hideous murderers of that era, which you know,
Speaker 2: in fact he was so again it's not you wouldn't
Speaker 2: call him a serial murder. His you know, he's unlike
Speaker 2: Bundy or Gay si Er, you know, Jeffrey Dahmer. You know,
Speaker 2: these are people whose crimes are sexually motivated. That wasn't
Speaker 2: the case with Probes. He was just this, you know.
Speaker 2: At the same time, he was obviously you know, psychopathic
Speaker 2: in the sense that he was without any conscience. He
Speaker 2: basically contrived and carried out this massacre, you know, on
Speaker 2: people he knew and who had befriended him, you know,
Speaker 2: for no other reason that you know, they were basically
Speaker 2: in his way, because he wanted to get a little
Speaker 2: money so he can go to the local brothel.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Tell us about Robert Erwin, the mad sculptor.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Erwin actually writing a whole book about Erwin was
Speaker 2: a very fascinating character. This is going back. Erwin's crimes
Speaker 2: were committed in the nineteen thirties. But Irwin was the
Speaker 2: son of a well known, well within the particular world
Speaker 2: Pentecostal evangelists. Both his parents were religious, zealous, and he
Speaker 2: and his brothers were brought up in this world of
Speaker 2: constantin meetings and you know, and and in traveling ministries
Speaker 2: and so on and so forth. And Irwin and his brothers,
Speaker 2: they were very neglect at as children because well, the
Speaker 2: father ran off with some other woman, leaving the mother
Speaker 2: to raise the kids by ourselves. And the mother was
Speaker 2: very very fanatically religious, I mean, all her time was
Speaker 2: spent involved with her religion and all that. There were
Speaker 2: three sons who were allowed to run wild, and Erwin's
Speaker 2: two brothers, you know, very promptly ended up in reformed
Speaker 2: schools and they really became career criminals. Erwin himself displayed
Speaker 2: a very very early talent for art, and particularly for sculpture,
Speaker 2: and as he grew older, he decided to devote his
Speaker 2: life to his art, and he became quite quite an
Speaker 2: accomplished sculpture sculpt her who made his way first when
Speaker 2: he was around in his teens, he ran away from home,
Speaker 2: made his way to Hollywood and found work in the
Speaker 2: studio of a guy named Carlo Romanelli, who did a
Speaker 2: lot of set design at that time for early silent movies. Romanelli,
Speaker 2: for example, did the statuary for the first silent version
Speaker 2: of Ben her and Erwin worked with him for a while,
Speaker 2: and then he made his way to Chicago and became
Speaker 2: a protege of the man who at that time was
Speaker 2: America's most famous sculptor guy named Laredo Taft who had
Speaker 2: done a lot of work for the eighteen ninety three
Speaker 2: Chicago World's Fair and did a lot of public statuary
Speaker 2: around Chicago. Very very well known, and Irwin was a
Speaker 2: favorite student of his. But Irwin was a very very
Speaker 2: stable character. He really was a kind of jackal hide personality.
Speaker 2: He can be extremely likable, extremely ingratiating. He was very
Speaker 2: very bright. He was basically self taught but very well read.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, he really had this kind
Speaker 2: of homicidal temper which could be provoked for very very
Speaker 2: little reason, and again and again and again he would
Speaker 2: end up being fired from his jobs or as or
Speaker 2: kicked out of his place of work, you know, because
Speaker 2: some coworker would somehow insult him in some small way,
Speaker 2: and he would just go crazy and administer this horrendous,
Speaker 2: horrendous beating on this person, you know, and end up
Speaker 2: being fired. Anyway, Irwin made his way to New York City,
Speaker 2: and at that time he also had this weird crackpot
Speaker 2: theory he developed called visualization, in which he believed that
Speaker 2: he could somehow acquire the power to create art strictly
Speaker 2: through mental you know, through his imagination. You know that
Speaker 2: if he trained himself enough, if he could visualize a
Speaker 2: piece of art in his mind, he would somehow be
Speaker 2: able just to transform it into some material form. And
Speaker 2: he became convinced that what was preventing him from doing
Speaker 2: that was his his sexual impulses. You know, he believed
Speaker 2: that he was being too distracted by his sex drive
Speaker 2: and he wanted to channel that energy into his visualization.
Speaker 2: So sometime in nineteen thirty four, he attempted to slice
Speaker 2: off his own penis. Was living in New York at
Speaker 2: the time, and he you know, you know, he tried
Speaker 2: to do it. I mean, he inflicted this very very
Speaker 2: very severe incision on his penis, but he couldn't quite
Speaker 2: manage to bring himself to cut loll off. It was
Speaker 2: too painful. So he went to Bellevue Hospital and tried
Speaker 2: to persuade the doctors there to finish castraining him, and instead,
Speaker 2: of course, they stuck him in the psych award and
Speaker 2: he spent the next three or four years in an
Speaker 2: out of mental institutions, and when he got out, he
Speaker 2: became obsessed with He was boarding at the home of
Speaker 2: a family called the Geddeons, and the family consisted of
Speaker 2: a mother, a father who subsequently moved out of the house,
Speaker 2: a daughter named Ethel who was an editor for a
Speaker 2: valley fair magazine, and a beautiful younger what her named
Speaker 2: Veronica Ronnie Gideon, who was an artist's model, and and
Speaker 2: and Erwin became actually Erin became very obsessed with Ethel,
Speaker 2: the older sister, you know. And and at this point,
Speaker 2: you know, he was really in a way becoming more
Speaker 2: and more demented. He also had syphilis, which might have
Speaker 2: been a contributing factor to his growing instability. And anyway,
Speaker 2: he decided he was going to he decided that again
Speaker 2: in his own mad way, you know, to to achieve
Speaker 2: this apotheosis. He was after who was going to sacrifice Ethel?
Speaker 2: Who was going to kill Ethel? And he went to
Speaker 2: the house. Ethel was not there. She had actually moved
Speaker 2: out of the house and gotten married. And Erwin ended
Speaker 2: up strangling the mother, strangling Veronica, the beautiful artist model,
Speaker 2: and they and killing a border who was just living
Speaker 2: there and was just you know, Irwin decided he had
Speaker 2: a dispose of him as a potential witness. He stabbed
Speaker 2: him eleven times, and they had with an ice pick
Speaker 2: that he happened to have with him, and it became
Speaker 2: this huge, huge tabloid sensation. I mean, it was one
Speaker 2: of the biggest tabloid sensations in the nineteen thirties. Irwin
Speaker 2: was called the mad Sculptor. I mean, it became a
Speaker 2: huge tabloid sensation for a whole variety of reasons, one
Speaker 2: of which was that there were all these naked photographs
Speaker 2: of Ronnie Gideon floating around, which the tabloids immediately started
Speaker 2: splashing over their front pages. You know, they retouched them
Speaker 2: a little with air brushed on, you know, some you know,
Speaker 2: some discrete coverings, but you know, they were running dozens
Speaker 2: and dozens and dozens of pictures of Ronnie Gideon. She
Speaker 2: had also posed for some true detective magazines at the time,
Speaker 2: so that was another, you know, very very sensational, lurid
Speaker 2: element of the case because she had posed for pictures
Speaker 2: in these true detective magazines being attacked and strangled, and
Speaker 2: here she showed up getting getting killed. So anyway, you know,
Speaker 2: the thing that was one thing very fascinating to me
Speaker 2: about the case is that Irwin's psychiatrist at Bellevue, when
Speaker 2: he tried cutting off his penis was this famous New
Speaker 2: York psychiatrist named Frederick Weretham. Wortham had been Albert Fish's psychiatrist,
Speaker 2: and then were them in the nineteen fifties became very,
Speaker 2: very notorious himself for leading a crusade against comic books
Speaker 2: that almost put the comic American com book industry out
Speaker 2: of business. He wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent,
Speaker 2: which was a big best seller, which argued that the
Speaker 2: main cause of juve no delinquency was comic books. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and so I've always been interested in more of them,
Speaker 2: and was his psychiatrist where them got to know him
Speaker 2: very well. It was, it was, it was a huge case.
Speaker 2: The other element, you know, that added by the way
Speaker 2: to its sensational character was that Irwin, who himself was
Speaker 2: something of a religious fanatic, killed this family on Easter
Speaker 2: Sunday in nineteen thirty seven.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 2: So, so you had all these you know, this Easter
Speaker 2: Sunday triple murder, which was committed in a very fashionable
Speaker 2: neighborhood in New York City. You know, one of whose
Speaker 2: victims was a beautiful artist model, you know, who had
Speaker 2: posed for true crime magazines. You know. The killer turns
Speaker 2: out to be you know, this very very talented sculptor
Speaker 2: who had once tried to cut off his eye. It
Speaker 2: had just everything, you know, like a tabloid could possibly
Speaker 2: hope for. You know, it's like the perfect tabloid. It
Speaker 2: was like the perfect tabloid storm. You know. So it
Speaker 2: was like a huge, huge case.
Speaker 5: Interesting that the tabloid business hasn't changed that much in
Speaker 5: eighty years either.
Speaker 2: No, not at all. Well, you know, I mean when
Speaker 2: you look again, when you look at the tabloids in
Speaker 2: nineteen thirties are so much more you know, sensationalistic, really,
Speaker 2: you know, so much more. But yeah, but I mean
Speaker 2: you know that that kind of that kind of sensationalistic
Speaker 2: newspaper goes back to the Victorian era. Really, you know,
Speaker 2: the Illustrated Police News when Jack the Ripper was around. Again,
Speaker 2: nothing new, I mean, you know that tabloid sensibility, you
Speaker 2: know that so many people point to somehow you know,
Speaker 2: it's a sign that we're living in particularly like debased
Speaker 2: you know, particularly debased culture. You know, that's that's completely ridiculous.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, the tabloids going back to the
Speaker 2: Victorian era, where every bit as lurid and prurient, as
Speaker 2: they are now wiistic, you know.
Speaker 5: And the thing is to it, you could look at
Speaker 5: it a different way too. True crime is it is
Speaker 5: the name of the genre, but really it's history.
Speaker 2: Absolutely history, Yeah, absolutely, I mean, you know, I think
Speaker 2: you know what I think I say or meant to
Speaker 2: say anyway in the introduction of my book is you know,
Speaker 2: you can learn as much about American culture from studying
Speaker 2: the crimes you know that people were obsessed by as
Speaker 2: you can from looking at you know, the politics or
Speaker 2: you know the you know, movie stars or other celebrities.
Speaker 2: You know. I regard my books like a USA as
Speaker 2: a kind of social history of American culture.
Speaker 5: So well, you know, the thing is when, as you know,
Speaker 5: when you write your crime, that the stories include all
Speaker 5: the history at that time, all the events, all all
Speaker 5: the the attitudes and perspectives and myths or or our
Speaker 5: events that would in many cases overshadow. I just interviewed somebody,
Speaker 5: Steve Miller, about his book about the Cleveland serial killer,
Speaker 5: and I wondered why it wasn't, you know, these facts
Speaker 5: weren't ringing so easy for me, Like I hadn't really
Speaker 5: known about this crime so much, And of course it
Speaker 5: was overshadowed by Casey Anthony. So you know, even even
Speaker 5: a case like that can be overshadowed by a case
Speaker 5: that has the optics or something that the media can
Speaker 5: that does grab onto and that's that story dominates. And
Speaker 5: you've seen in American media both three or four stories
Speaker 5: seen the dominate in the last couple of years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and and P on their course. So yeah, well again,
Speaker 2: the question, you know becomes, you know, what is it about?
Speaker 2: The interesting question for me is what is it about
Speaker 2: the case? A case that you know, it's not it's
Speaker 2: not that the media is foisting this on people, you know,
Speaker 2: it's just that, you know, there are certain cases that
Speaker 2: resonate for whatever reason, and you know, we can't get
Speaker 2: enough of them. I think there are complex, you know,
Speaker 2: there are very very complex psychological and social reasons for that.
Speaker 2: You know, think if there are aspects to those cases
Speaker 2: that speak to very very dark, unacknowledged and forbidden feelings
Speaker 2: that lots and lots of people have. And you know,
Speaker 2: I mean, just to to state what I regard is
Speaker 2: the obvious, you know, something like suit You know, you
Speaker 2: get these matricidal cases like Susan Smith or Casey Anthony.
Speaker 2: You know, and then you have this huge audience and
Speaker 2: a great you know, a large part of it is
Speaker 2: made up of women, you know, who just can't get
Speaker 2: enough of this, you know, and you can't help to
Speaker 2: get the feeling that you know, these kinds of cases
Speaker 2: allow people to think thoughts that they that are going
Speaker 2: on in the deepest recesses of their mind, you know,
Speaker 2: if they wouldn't allow themselves other ways of thinking about, like, oh,
Speaker 2: what would it be like to get rid of my child?
Speaker 2: You know what I'm saying? Yeah, you know, whatever, what you've.
Speaker 5: You've done over tell us, I tell our how many
Speaker 5: two crime books you have penned, But it's around ten
Speaker 5: or so, and you've covered, if not the most evil
Speaker 5: and infamous killers of all times. Then I don't know.
Speaker 5: But and in the research for this book that took
Speaker 5: you even further back into history, I would think than
Speaker 5: you've even delved already in past books. Is there anything
Speaker 5: different about the killers today? Do you see any new
Speaker 5: Not that we're looking for anything like this, but do
Speaker 5: you see any difference in any trend, any disturbing sort
Speaker 5: of difference in killers over the last three hundred years?
Speaker 2: You know? I mean, I can't say that I do accept,
Speaker 2: you know, the most obvious way, which is as I
Speaker 2: was suggesting earlier, you know, in terms of you know,
Speaker 2: the weapons technology, you know, I mean obviously you can
Speaker 2: you know, if you're going to commit a mass murder,
Speaker 2: you can kill a lot more people with an automatic rifle,
Speaker 2: you know, than you can with a six shooter. So
Speaker 2: I mean, I think that is the most striking difference.
Speaker 2: Not that there weren't mass murderers in the past. There
Speaker 2: definitely were. It's just that they couldn't quite wreak as
Speaker 2: much you know, carnage as they can do. So you know,
Speaker 2: I can't you know, I don't actually see a huge
Speaker 2: amount of difference, and certainly in terms of the kinds
Speaker 2: of killers that I write about, which again are these
Speaker 2: you know, psychopathic basically psychopathic sex killers. To the most part,
Speaker 2: you know, that seems to me just to be as
Speaker 2: I said, you know, a part of human nature that
Speaker 2: has always unfortunately existed, and that seems to be rooted,
Speaker 2: you know, something very very archaic in our in our nature.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I think the thing is too that with
Speaker 5: a lot of people, and I know from reading Stranger
Speaker 5: Beside Me, and there's there are various reasons why that
Speaker 5: sort of down plate. I would think, as you probably
Speaker 5: know with Annrule knowing Ted Bundy, but at the very
Speaker 5: least that I don't think a lot of people realize
Speaker 5: or most of the people realize, the necrophilia aspect of
Speaker 5: Ted Bundy and a lot of these killers. And and
Speaker 5: it is hard when you talk about the sexual motivation
Speaker 5: of murder. Obviously sex and murder intertwined fantasies, but then
Speaker 5: you get there are fair amount of necrophiliacs out of
Speaker 5: this deal as well. And again those we can see
Speaker 5: why I think why some of those crimes don't Certainly
Speaker 5: they resonate, they send fear throughout the throughout the community.
Speaker 5: But at the same time, there are things that we
Speaker 5: really don't want to dwell on, those those horrific tag
Speaker 5: teams where they're torturers and keep these sellers, and so
Speaker 5: I think maybe that's why some of that is that
Speaker 5: there's certainly you don't want to make a movie about
Speaker 5: anything like that.
Speaker 2: So but it is you know, I mean, what difference
Speaker 2: is well, especially now with the Internet, I mean interesting,
Speaker 2: knowledge of these crimes is much more widespread. But you know,
Speaker 2: if you look at craft Ebbing Psychopathia Sexualis, you know,
Speaker 2: which was published in the late nineteenth century, and you know,
Speaker 2: parts of it originally were written in Latin, you know,
Speaker 2: so that presumably only like professional medical people could understand
Speaker 2: what was going on, you know, the case histories that
Speaker 2: he relates there, I mean, you know again, or you know,
Speaker 2: every bit is is horrendous and awful. Or Wilhelm Steckel,
Speaker 2: who is a you know, who is a colleague of
Speaker 2: Sigmund Freud's, has a famous book on sadism and masochism,
Speaker 2: you know, and he has case histories of killers you know,
Speaker 2: who are at least as you know, horrendous and monstrouses
Speaker 2: John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy, you know, or Jeffrey Dahmert.
Speaker 2: Really you know, you see there again that there've always
Speaker 2: been very fortunately, you know, a small you know, but
Speaker 2: fraction of you know, any given population where you have
Speaker 2: these people who indulge in these kinds who are driven
Speaker 2: to indulge in these kinds of things. And I think
Speaker 2: it's probably always been that way, you know. Again, one
Speaker 2: difference is that nowadays, you know, the books about it,
Speaker 2: and certainly on the internet, the information about that kind
Speaker 2: of thing is just so much more readily available, but
Speaker 2: the crimes themselves have always existed and probably always existed
Speaker 2: in the same proportion to the population at large.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's interesting. Th things just remain the same, yep.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, I want to thank you Harold for coming on
Speaker 5: this little program and talking about your new book Psycho
Speaker 5: USA American Famous American Killers You've never heard of, And
Speaker 5: thank you very much for your time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting me.
Speaker 5: And you'll have to get a hold of us, get
Speaker 5: a hold of me next time when you release anything else.
Speaker 5: And I may be just bothering you to come on
Speaker 5: and talk about some of the classics because I think
Speaker 5: it's now with the published on demand and the book.
Speaker 5: I think it is really good for true crime authors
Speaker 5: because a lot of these books, and part of what
Speaker 5: this program is too is telling people about some of
Speaker 5: the the best and greatest true crime authors who have
Speaker 5: covered some of the most incredible cases and written some
Speaker 5: of the best books. So I can get your back,
Speaker 5: I want to talk about some of the cases, so
Speaker 5: it would be great. Well, thank you very much, Harold.
Speaker 5: You have a good evening, and thank you very much.
Speaker 2: Thank you