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Speaker 5: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 5: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 5: written about them. Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK Every week,
Speaker 5: another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous
Speaker 5: killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host
Speaker 5: journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 6: Good Evening. Michael Benson is one of today's most popular
Speaker 6: true crime writers. His books including Betrayal in Blood Murder
Speaker 6: and Connecticut Killer Twins, The Burned Mummy, Deadliest, A Killer's Touch,
Speaker 6: Evil Season, Watch Mummy Die, A Knife in the Heart,
Speaker 6: Escape from Danimora, Nightmare in Rochester, Haunting Homicides, and The
Speaker 6: Devil at Genesee Junction tell vividly of today's most heinous
Speaker 6: criminals and the clever and stalwart lawman who bring them
Speaker 6: to justice. He is currently a regular commentator for two
Speaker 6: true crime series, Evil Twins and Evil Kin on the
Speaker 6: Investigation Discovery ID channel, and also had made guest appearances
Speaker 6: on that channel's Evil Stepmoms, Deadly Sins, Southern Fried Homicide,
Speaker 6: and on the case with Paula's On a Devil at
Speaker 6: Genese Junction tells the story of his return to the
Speaker 6: scene of a childhood trauma. Two of his friends were
Speaker 6: murdered and mutilated near his rural home south of Rochester,
Speaker 6: New York, when he was nine. Those murders were never solved.
Speaker 6: As an adult and veteran true crime writer, Benson teamed
Speaker 6: up with the mother of one of the victims and
Speaker 6: a local private investigator to heat up that cold case
Speaker 6: and propel it in a startling new direction. During his
Speaker 6: three decades as professional writer, Benson has worked closely with
Speaker 6: a retired Army intelligence agent during the ten Stays After
Speaker 6: nine to eleven for a book about the CIA, and
Speaker 6: with a retired FBI agent for a book about national security.
Speaker 6: Co written two books with a former New York Police
Speaker 6: Department Cop of the Year, explored the Grassey Noel in
Speaker 6: Dallas with a former KGB agent while researching his much
Speaker 6: acclaimed Who's Who in the jfk Assassination, collaborated efficiently with
Speaker 6: an astronaut, and covered the Stephen Hayes triple murder trial
Speaker 6: in New Haven, Connecticut for The New York Post. The
Speaker 6: episode Tonight is Michael Benson True Crime Retrospective with my
Speaker 6: special guest, artist, writer, filmmaker, and true crime author extraordinaire
Speaker 6: Michael Benson. Welcome to the Welcome back to the program,
Speaker 6: and thank you very much for this, Thanks for having
Speaker 6: me retrospective. Thank you so much. As I was saying
Speaker 6: when I looked, just to do more research for this
Speaker 6: after I've had you on now. This is the ninth
Speaker 6: appearance I believe, covering nine of your now true crime.
Speaker 6: It almost looks like there's another Michael Benson, the filmmaker
Speaker 6: and artist. And because when I mentioned to you for
Speaker 6: the audience, when you mentioned prolific, When you say prolific author,
Speaker 6: then you have Michael Benson.
Speaker 4: Well, there is another Michael Benson. I am not the filmmaker.
Speaker 4: I'd like to consider myself an artist. But there's another
Speaker 4: Michael Benson who writes books about planets and satellite photography.
Speaker 4: And sometimes I'm confused with him. I wrote a book
Speaker 4: called The Complete Idiot's Guide to NASA, So people tend
Speaker 4: to confuse us because he also writes about outer space
Speaker 4: and stuff. But as far as I know, I am
Speaker 4: the only Michael Benson who writes true.
Speaker 6: Crime, absolutely, and with what we're talking about tonight, you're
Speaker 6: this true crime retrospective. Let's talk about how you got involved,
Speaker 6: where you grew up, and before we talk about something
Speaker 6: that happened in nineteen sixty six that helped shape your career,
Speaker 6: not that you knew it at the time you were
Speaker 6: nine years old. Let's talk about your early life, where
Speaker 6: you grew up, and before we talk about how you
Speaker 6: got started in writing period.
Speaker 4: Okay, Well, I was born in Rochester, New York, considered
Speaker 4: to a large extent in my hometown, even though I've
Speaker 4: lived in Brooklyn for a long time. Lived my first
Speaker 4: five years in the city of Rochester. When I was six,
Speaker 4: we moved to the town of Chili. It's spelt like Chile,
Speaker 4: but it's pronounced Chili, and that's just south of Rochester.
Speaker 4: Had you never seen the show Green Acres, I think
Speaker 4: that was my dad. He wanted to live in the
Speaker 4: country and he had his job in the city, so
Speaker 4: we moved to the end of a dirt road, as
Speaker 4: my kids called it when they were visiting Grandma and
Speaker 4: Grandpa in the middle of nowhere, and it was just
Speaker 4: a great place for a little kid to grow up.
Speaker 4: I mean there were third paths everywhere. You take a
Speaker 4: bee line to each other's houses through the woods. We
Speaker 4: had treehouses, roots, cellar forts. There was a field of
Speaker 4: wild strawberries spelled great. Come June, go out and pick strawberries,
Speaker 4: come back with a bucket full. We played war cowboys
Speaker 4: and Indians. We had a barn, no horses, but the
Speaker 4: barn was still there. The Black Creek was the northern
Speaker 4: border of my dad's property, so we'd go fishing. Lots
Speaker 4: of adventures in the woods, but it stopped being idyllic
Speaker 4: on June twenty fifth, nineteen sixty six, when something really
Speaker 4: bad happened.
Speaker 6: What happened and how did it affect this community?
Speaker 4: Well, my babysitter, Georgie and Formacola and her good friend
Speaker 4: Kathy Bernhard from down the road had just purchased new
Speaker 4: bathing suits and wanted to try them out. So they
Speaker 4: went through a swimming hole behind my house in Black Creek.
Speaker 4: And the swimming hole was right next to an ancient
Speaker 4: stone trestle that originally was built to for the mules
Speaker 4: to tug barges on the Genesee Valley Canal. Canal was
Speaker 4: long gone, and now it took railroad tracks across Black Creek,
Speaker 4: but there was a nice swimming hole there and it
Speaker 4: was a place where police never went, so it was
Speaker 4: sort of the domain of teenagers. And in the daytime
Speaker 4: kids go swimming there. At nighttime kids go back there
Speaker 4: drink beer. And on June twenty fifth, nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 4: they went back to go swimming around dust and never returned. Now,
Speaker 4: at first, you know, there was a lot of optimistic
Speaker 4: thinking perhaps they'd just run off, and the mother said
Speaker 4: that I couldn't be the case because all they had
Speaker 4: was their bathing suits and a towel. You know, they
Speaker 4: didn't take their perse, they didn't take their makeup, nothing,
Speaker 4: So well, maybe they got picked up by men, and
Speaker 4: who knows, But the optimist optimism died a couple of
Speaker 4: days after they disappeared, when Kathy's transistor radio her prize possession,
Speaker 4: was found broken in the weeds, so it was pretty
Speaker 4: obvious the girls had been taken by force. So for
Speaker 4: a month they were missing, and then one day in July,
Speaker 4: a farmer two miles to the west of our property
Speaker 4: found the remains of the girls in the weeds, next
Speaker 4: to the same railroad tracks, but down the line of
Speaker 4: the way and just thought of a lover's lane and
Speaker 4: they'd been horribly mutilated with a knife, sexually mutilated, details
Speaker 4: of which I overheard adults talking about. So yeah, here,
Speaker 4: I'm a nine year I don't even know if the facts.
Speaker 4: I like that, and I'm learning about sex crimes before
Speaker 4: I'm learning about sex And it was traumatic, and the
Speaker 4: whole neighborhood did change. It was a dark cloud came
Speaker 4: over our area sort of stayed. No more paths through
Speaker 4: the woods. Everybody had to stay in their own yard,
Speaker 4: and it became bleak, and I became obsessed with finding
Speaker 4: out what happened to those girls because the case wasn't solved.
Speaker 4: You know, there was a booking man out there and
Speaker 4: perhaps living nearby, and we didn't know who he was.
Speaker 4: So I grew up to become a true crime writer.
Speaker 4: And that's not a coincidence. That's I wanted, you know,
Speaker 4: right from the time I was twelve, I started to
Speaker 4: write about the murders. And I finished the book about
Speaker 4: the murders forty seven years later. Wow, A lot a
Speaker 4: lot happened in between. I went to college, I got
Speaker 4: a degree, graduated with honors from hofstin university degree in journalism,
Speaker 4: communication Arts, and after bouncing around a little bit, I
Speaker 4: got a job as a magazine editor for the Starlock
Speaker 4: Group and during that time I launched my first adult
Speaker 4: investigation into those murders. Didn't have a book in mind,
Speaker 4: I just wanted to know. What I found was that
Speaker 4: there was a fellow named Arthur Shawcross sure right, all
Speaker 4: of your listeners have heard of and he was He
Speaker 4: was arrested for killing a series of sex workers in Rochester.
Speaker 4: And I investigated him and found out that during the
Speaker 4: summer nineteen sixty six, he was twenty one years old
Speaker 4: and was driving around upstate New York of looking for
Speaker 4: places to fish, and the show put him potentially near
Speaker 4: Black Creek. Now you know, he was having problems with
Speaker 4: his then wife, He had sexual problems. He kind of
Speaker 4: misunderstood what the affection and consent was all about. He
Speaker 4: was he He went on to kill two children in Watertown,
Speaker 4: New York a few years later, but this was in
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty six. As far as we know, had never
Speaker 4: hurt anybody. He was an expert with a knife. He
Speaker 4: hunted deer and could dress game. He once talked about
Speaker 4: wanting to kill a doe so that he could use
Speaker 4: his hunting knife to remove the animal's vagina, which me
Speaker 4: is you know that that sent up a red flag
Speaker 4: considering my victims were sexually mutilated. Now, as a young adult,
Speaker 4: he worked as an apprentice butcher, and he was I
Speaker 4: thought a very good candidate to become the we could
Speaker 4: to be the killer of the Childie girls. But I
Speaker 4: got in touch with the Monroe County Sheriff, sent a
Speaker 4: nice letter explaining all my stuff, and they sent a
Speaker 4: team to the prison to talk to Arthur Shawcross. Confronted
Speaker 4: him with pictures of the Childie girls, and he closed
Speaker 4: his eyes, quenched his fists, and put his chin on
Speaker 4: his chest, which I understand was the same reaction he
Speaker 4: had when people asked him questions about his mother. So
Speaker 4: he was given a chance to deny doing it and didn't,
Speaker 4: and I was told that's about as far as he
Speaker 4: can go with that. And I realized that in order
Speaker 4: for me to really do justice to the case in investigation,
Speaker 4: I needed to know about the original investigation in nineteen
Speaker 4: sixty six, and to do that I needed to have
Speaker 4: the rights of next to kin, which I didn't have.
Speaker 4: And life went on. I had a very mediocre career
Speaker 4: as a sportswriter, but every time I had a lunch
Speaker 4: with a acquisition editor from a publisher, I always told
Speaker 4: the story of what happened when I was nine and
Speaker 4: what a great book I thought it would make. And
Speaker 4: what happened was Gary Goldstein from Kensaday Books gave me
Speaker 4: a call one day. He says, you're for Rochester, right,
Speaker 4: I said yeah. He said, well, there's a murder in
Speaker 4: Rochester that I really think you should write about. Beautiful
Speaker 4: young woman was murdered and her husband and her half
Speaker 4: brother have been arrested for the crime. And that's when
Speaker 4: my official true crime career began. I'd also ghost written
Speaker 4: a book, a true crime book the year before, which
Speaker 4: went to number four on the New York Times bestseller list,
Speaker 4: but my name wasn't on it, but people in the
Speaker 4: industry knew who had actually written it, and that was
Speaker 4: another reason why Gary gave me a call.
Speaker 6: Amazing. Now you're referring to your book in two thousand
Speaker 6: and three, Betrayal in Blood.
Speaker 4: That's correct. Yes, that's the story of Tabitha Bryant. It's
Speaker 4: a pretty twenty six year old mother of two and
Speaker 4: she was shot and stabbed to death in her own
Speaker 4: living room while her husband and two children slept upstairs.
Speaker 4: Happened July fourteenth, two thousand and three. Year was a
Speaker 4: hot night, and the book taught me a lesson in
Speaker 4: human depravity. I mean, it turned out that the woman's
Speaker 4: half brother killed her in exchange for cocaine money Jesus.
Speaker 4: I mean, the husband wanted the wife killed. And although
Speaker 4: that's horrible, it kind of happens all the time. The
Speaker 4: husband's always the number one suspect, but hiring you know,
Speaker 4: her brother to do it for him sort of gave
Speaker 4: it that special edge of depravity that you know, I
Speaker 4: think you look for in a successful true murder story.
Speaker 4: It still astounds me that that, you know, Cyril Winebrenner,
Speaker 4: the brother would be so addicted to cocaine that his
Speaker 4: sister would seem dispensable to him in exchange for you know,
Speaker 4: a couple of weeks of really doing some good blow.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The most important interview I had of doing that book
Speaker 4: was with the mother. And she's the mother of both
Speaker 4: the victim and the killer, and she didn't know how
Speaker 4: to feel. She was bouncing back and forth. She loved
Speaker 4: them both, and I asked her if she was going
Speaker 4: to go to the trial, and she said, now, I can't.
Speaker 4: I wouldn't know which side of the courtroom to sit on.
Speaker 6: Wow.
Speaker 4: But and anyway, the book did really well and I
Speaker 4: immediately got another job, and this time teaming up with
Speaker 4: a friend of mine named Robert Maladinich, who was a
Speaker 4: NYPD detective and one time Cop of the Year for
Speaker 4: unbelievably brave thing he did. Once and we met well.
Speaker 4: I was writing for a magazine, you know, in my
Speaker 4: mediocre sports career. I was writing for Bert Sugars Fight
Speaker 4: Game magazine and we were covering heavyweight championship fights. Bob
Speaker 4: was freelancing for Ring Magazine at the time, and we
Speaker 4: sat next to each other in the corral where the
Speaker 4: press sits next to the ring, and he told me
Speaker 4: his story. How about he went to Brockport State which
Speaker 4: is near Rochester, and his he had a friend named
Speaker 4: Joel Riskin in college and they covered fights together. He
Speaker 4: would write about it and Joel took photographs. And then
Speaker 4: Joel dropped out of school and they lost touch. Didn't
Speaker 4: speak to another for twenty years until Joel was arrested
Speaker 4: for being a serial killer on long Island, and here's
Speaker 4: the old college buddy is getting together again. One's a
Speaker 4: serial killer and one's a homicide detective, so a lot.
Speaker 4: It's a pretty good story. But I have one too,
Speaker 4: and I told him my story when I was nine,
Speaker 4: and we both agreed that our books deserve to be published,
Speaker 4: and eventually they both were. So that's our first book
Speaker 4: I'd do with Bob was Lethal Embrace. Right, So they
Speaker 4: told us, try to make your title combined sex and violence.
Speaker 4: So Lethal Embrace right in the Murder cobout in January seventeenth. Yeah,
Speaker 4: go ahead.
Speaker 6: You talk about Lethal Embrace and then teaming up with
Speaker 6: Robert malanititch. But in Murder in Connecticut in two thousand
Speaker 6: and eight, this is an extraordinary case. We mentioned it
Speaker 6: in the did you cover this for the New York Post?
Speaker 6: Tell us about this, I mean, if you were hardened
Speaker 6: by betrayal and blood in that case, and then Lethal Embrace,
Speaker 6: tell us about a little bit about murdering Connecticut and
Speaker 6: being involved with that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, if I had one regret in my
Speaker 4: crime writing career, Murder in Connecticut came out too soon.
Speaker 4: It was the publisher's goal to become the first book out.
Speaker 4: And this is the case where two creeps in Cheshire, Connecticut,
Speaker 4: broke into a house, hit the dad, who was a
Speaker 4: successful physician, over the head with a baseball bat, and
Speaker 4: then tied him up downstairs, and then proceeded to rob
Speaker 4: and rape the mom and two daughters upstairs, and then
Speaker 4: on their way out, they spread gasoline around and lit
Speaker 4: it and all three women died horribly. His dad managed
Speaker 4: to get free himself when he heard screams and made
Speaker 4: it into the backyard and started to yell. At that
Speaker 4: point somebody called the cops. Somebody saw smoke and called
Speaker 4: the fire department, and the authorities arrived and captured the
Speaker 4: guys right away coming out of the house. The two kids,
Speaker 4: Mikayla and Haley, were eleven and seventeen at the time.
Speaker 4: I had two children, they were eleven and seventeen at
Speaker 4: the time, so I took it very personally. And the
Speaker 4: community was just very distraught. It's an upscale community. Things
Speaker 4: like that just don't happen there. They were angry, they
Speaker 4: were a little embarrassed by it. They're just grieving their
Speaker 4: brains out. That is so sad. And six months after
Speaker 4: the crime, my book Murder in Connecticut comes out, and
Speaker 4: I'm getting death threats because there are only so many
Speaker 4: emotions they can feel on the subject, and anger is
Speaker 4: being focused in me. I had to do radio interviews
Speaker 4: to defend myself, and the book itself is nothing worthy
Speaker 4: of a death threat. The crime is described, but the
Speaker 4: second half of the book is all about how wonderful
Speaker 4: the community is and how they rallied around the doctor
Speaker 4: and just try to be as positive as possible. And
Speaker 4: then when Stephen Hayes was tried in new Haven, Connecticut
Speaker 4: for the triple homicide, signed by the New York Post
Speaker 4: to be their freelancer, and it was just devastating to me.
Speaker 4: I didn't sleep for days and days and days. I
Speaker 4: wrote up the first day in the elevator with doctor Pettitt.
Speaker 4: It's a strong, sturdy man, and I can remember very
Speaker 4: well sitting in the courtroom when they brought Hayes in
Speaker 4: and I felt blasted backward by his evil and it's
Speaker 4: like a wind of evil hit me and made me recoil.
Speaker 4: After a while that wore off, and I saw him
Speaker 4: just as a little worm. In the contrast between the
Speaker 4: worm of a defendant and the huge dad of the
Speaker 4: representing the victims was just so stark. But probably the
Speaker 4: worst part was they chose twelve members of the media
Speaker 4: and I know it was twelve because they put us
Speaker 4: in the jury box. Chose twelve members of the media
Speaker 4: to show the crime scenes photos too. I got to
Speaker 4: see the poor burned ladies, and it was pretty much
Speaker 4: ready to throw up. I walked out of the courthouse
Speaker 4: and was grabbed by CBS News and they put me
Speaker 4: on the air in that condition. And I've never seen it,
Speaker 4: but people from all over texted me at the time
Speaker 4: tell me how great it was. And I don't know.
Speaker 4: I can remember blurting out that. You know, I'm not
Speaker 4: a big proponent of the death penalty, but I think
Speaker 4: there's three cases where it's called for, and that's you know,
Speaker 4: guys who commit murders in prison, who are already serving life,
Speaker 4: cop killers, and these two bastards. Yeah, so it was
Speaker 4: the whole thing was just scruciating and and if I
Speaker 4: could do it over again, I would have written the
Speaker 4: same book, but I would have had it published a
Speaker 4: year later. They're given that town a little chance to heal.
Speaker 4: Before all the sudden, the reporters were back and there
Speaker 4: were new questions to answer all regarding me.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating how you could get in the
Speaker 6: crosshairs in there just doing.
Speaker 4: Some r and I knew it was coming too. I said, well,
Speaker 4: what what what are we going to do when people
Speaker 4: start yelling at me? And then the publishers no such
Speaker 4: thing as bad publicity, not for him, Yeah, the other
Speaker 4: they're just going kaching. I've never done this for money.
Speaker 4: I've never taken on a case because I thought it
Speaker 4: would make the most money. It's always the ones that
Speaker 4: set a fire inside me somehow, and this one sure did.
Speaker 4: But it was it was a mean thing to do
Speaker 4: that town, to have the book come out while the
Speaker 4: you know, the wounds were still so raw.
Speaker 6: Now you were getting all kinds of experience, especially with
Speaker 6: this murder and can etiquette with just the most psychopathic
Speaker 6: and heinous killers. And then you're do the Burn Farm
Speaker 6: and Sheila Lebar tell us a little bit about working
Speaker 6: on the burn Farm long after that.
Speaker 4: It's the only book I ever wrote that got me arrested.
Speaker 4: We'll get to that. The Burn Farm was by a
Speaker 4: lady named Sila Lebar, who, as a young woman, had
Speaker 4: a near death experience. She was in a car accident
Speaker 4: and was in a calma for a while and woke
Speaker 4: up convinced that she had gone to heaven and God
Speaker 4: had told her that he wasn't ready for her yet
Speaker 4: she had a mission right and she was to return
Speaker 4: to earth and kill all of the pedophiles. And she
Speaker 4: said that she had been abused as a child at
Speaker 4: her sister, and which I believe to be true. And
Speaker 4: Shila developed a psychosis, and she was sort of a
Speaker 4: nymphomaniacal dominatrix. And she recruited men with mental disabilities to
Speaker 4: work on her farm. She was recently widowed. Her husband
Speaker 4: had died under suspicious circumstances for which there was never
Speaker 4: any charges. But she was recently widowed, and she brought
Speaker 4: these men in and she would start a sexual relation
Speaker 4: with relationship with them, then it would become more and
Speaker 4: more abusive, and unlike I guess your ritualize s and M,
Speaker 4: there were no safe words. She tortured these guys until
Speaker 4: they admitted that they were pedophiles, even though they probably
Speaker 4: didn't know what pedophile meant, and then she would kill them,
Speaker 4: chop them up, and throw them into the bonfire in
Speaker 4: front of her house, thus making it the burn farm. Now,
Speaker 4: when I went up to it took place in Epping,
Speaker 4: New Hampshire, and she lived in a dirt road off
Speaker 4: of a dirt road, and there was a lady who
Speaker 4: lived down the road who wanted to write a book
Speaker 4: about the case herself. And when I contacted her for
Speaker 4: an interview, she was nasty to me and didn't want
Speaker 4: to cooperate. When I watch your people from New York
Speaker 4: taking our stories and embarrassing us with the book. So
Speaker 4: I went up there and went to the house where
Speaker 4: it happened, looked at the pit where they found the bones,
Speaker 4: and the cop car pulled up, and I walked over
Speaker 4: and the cop I read his night and plate. I said, hell,
Speaker 4: you're in my book. You're one of the heroes of
Speaker 4: my book. Explained to Michael Benson, a writer, and he said, well,
Speaker 4: your opinion of me is about to change because you're
Speaker 4: under arrest. And I was arrested for criminal trespassing, which
Speaker 4: was their way of saying, you know, get out of town.
Speaker 4: But I wrote the book anyway, and I think it's absolutely,
Speaker 4: you know, one of the most well it's it's I
Speaker 4: think we're we're a little bit more conditioned to think
Speaker 4: of men as psycho killers, female psycho killers, especially especially
Speaker 4: when there's sex mixed in, is something new and different
Speaker 4: and the book certainly was. The One person who reviewed
Speaker 4: it on Amazon dot com sept Uh, you know, this
Speaker 4: is the dirtiest book I ever read, which didn't hurt
Speaker 4: sales at all. But I really wanted to say, but
Speaker 4: it's not sexy. Now, there's nothing sexy in this book.
Speaker 4: The sex is not sexy. It's horrible anyway.
Speaker 6: So it's it's integral.
Speaker 4: I came out of that little bit. I'm sorry I
Speaker 4: said it again.
Speaker 6: I say it was integral to understand her mindset to
Speaker 6: include all of those, yes, her sexual fantasies in this
Speaker 6: it has to be on actually.
Speaker 4: And jury's, as I found out on a number of cases,
Speaker 4: do not like insanity defenses. I think it's a cop out.
Speaker 4: And if you did it doesn't make it difference how
Speaker 4: crazy you were when you did it. They're gonna stay
Speaker 4: guilty and put you in jail.
Speaker 6: Absolutely. Now, I'm not sure of the dates of these releases,
Speaker 6: but you wrote a book called Killer Twins about yes,
Speaker 6: just being that Killer Twins in twenty ten, and then
Speaker 6: also Mumley Mummy deadliest in twenty ten apparently. But let's
Speaker 6: talk about killer twins. Okay, this is a fascinating case.
Speaker 4: Kill Well, I had gotten another Rochester, New York case,
Speaker 4: which I loved because I didn't have to stay in
Speaker 4: a hotel while I was doing my research. I could
Speaker 4: stay with my mom. And a fellow named Robert Spahoalski
Speaker 4: was arrested in Rochester and charged with four murders, and
Speaker 4: it looked like, you know, there's there's a serial killer
Speaker 4: book to be written. But it went off the hook
Speaker 4: when I found out that he had a twin named Stephen,
Speaker 4: who had also done time for murder. And then when
Speaker 4: I looked at the two cases, I realized that even
Speaker 4: though they had spent most of their lives separate because
Speaker 4: one or the other was in jail all the time,
Speaker 4: the two male victims involved here, one by Robert, one
Speaker 4: by Steven, the killings themselves were near identical. So it
Speaker 4: becomes this really fascinating story of nature versus nurture. Just
Speaker 4: a one psycho killer only photocopied into two. You know,
Speaker 4: it's it's still a little bit a little bit amazing
Speaker 4: to me and I for the first time, and I
Speaker 4: used this technique sense. I became pen pals with Robert Spahalski,
Speaker 4: and he told me all about how he became a
Speaker 4: serial killer only denied being a serial killer. He thought
Speaker 4: all four incidents were individual. Okay, he was a serial killer,
Speaker 4: you just don't admit it. And but he, I said, well,
Speaker 4: when did you When did you learn how to kill?
Speaker 4: And when did you swell. First thing that pops into
Speaker 4: my head is I killed my dad's favorite pig, put
Speaker 4: a gun to its head, bang my dad's favorite pig,
Speaker 4: debt And I said, wow, you manage your father's No. No,
Speaker 4: I just wanted pork chops that night. So it's a little,
Speaker 4: a little, a little view into the mind of a
Speaker 4: guy who has no sense of guilt, a real psychopath.
Speaker 4: You know. Psychopaths think that they have something extra that
Speaker 4: you don't have, the ability to fight through feeling bad
Speaker 4: about things, and in reality, they're just missing something. They're
Speaker 4: missing the whole uh sense of right and wrong. It's
Speaker 4: not there. Yeah, And that that really really set into
Speaker 4: my personal knowledge of how psychopaths think, because they don't
Speaker 4: need much of a reason to kill somebody, because there's
Speaker 4: no reason not to. If you think you're gonna get
Speaker 4: away with it. There's no reason not to. If a
Speaker 4: person's in your way, destroy them. Person looks like you're funny,
Speaker 4: destroy them. It doesn't have to be anything motive to
Speaker 4: a psychopath. Is it could be I killed last week
Speaker 4: and it was fun as I'm want to do it again.
Speaker 4: And I think they're eventually going to find a genetic
Speaker 4: component to being a psychopath. But until then, it's as
Speaker 4: close as we're ever going to come to finding what
Speaker 4: evil really is.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, and it's always admitted.
Speaker 4: Because that you know that the that's the devil. The
Speaker 4: devil got to Roberts mahs.
Speaker 6: Let's talk about Mummy Deadliest, continuing that theme for psychopathy.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, if you watched twenty twenty last Friday, I
Speaker 4: was on talking about this case and it was recently
Speaker 4: a movie on Lifetime and about It's about the woman
Speaker 4: named Stacy Castor who poison both of her husbands using
Speaker 4: antifreeze and then when the police started to catch on
Speaker 4: to what these weren't accidental deaths or suicide or a
Speaker 4: heart attack, whatever they thought it was, her reaction was
Speaker 4: to poison her daughter and then leave a suicide note
Speaker 4: on her daughter's bed, confessing to killing Daddy and David. So,
Speaker 4: you know, you hear about mothers killing their children, and
Speaker 4: that usually that the kids are very small, usually infants,
Speaker 4: and I think it's a form of suicide, it's postpartum depression.
Speaker 4: But here's a woman who has raised this child to
Speaker 4: the age of eighteen. The daughter is in her first
Speaker 4: week of college, and you're going to sacrifice her to
Speaker 4: save your own boy. And that just flies in the
Speaker 4: face of everything we think we know about maternal instinct.
Speaker 4: How could she do that? And she never, ever, ever
Speaker 4: admitted to doing it. She died of a heart attack
Speaker 4: in prison at age forty eight, denying she'd had anything
Speaker 4: to do it, saying, nope, it with my daughter. Who
Speaker 4: was the killer? You know, just said Ashley, the daughter.
Speaker 4: She wakes up in the emergency room and there are
Speaker 4: all these people looking at her. Why did you try
Speaker 4: to kill yourself? Why did you leave that note? And
Speaker 4: she's going, I didn't try to kill myself. I didn't
Speaker 4: leave a note. Last thing I remember, my mom was
Speaker 4: giving me his foul tasting drink. So, I mean, any
Speaker 4: question about whether who was the actual killer went away
Speaker 4: when a cyber sleuth went into the family computer and
Speaker 4: found earlier drafts of the suicide note being written at
Speaker 4: times when Ashley was at school, So it had to
Speaker 4: be Stacy was the mom who did it. And I
Speaker 4: don't think we're going to see her the likes of
Speaker 4: her again. I just can't imagine a set of circumstances
Speaker 4: where a desperate woman would sacrifice a child to get
Speaker 4: out of a jam. And it should be the other
Speaker 4: way around. She should be sacrificing herself and get her
Speaker 4: daughter out of a jam, and that's the way we
Speaker 4: think it should be, and yet she was completely opposite.
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Speaker 6: Say yeah, that's it is amazing. Another amazing case is
Speaker 6: you have a woman named Denise Amber Lee, a twenty
Speaker 6: one year old happily married mother of two little boys.
Speaker 6: Tell us about this bizarre case where she's calling nine
Speaker 6: one one during her abduction.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. There was a creepy named Michael King who
Speaker 4: was driving around Florida looking for victims. I think he
Speaker 4: might have had some pedophilia in him. He was he
Speaker 4: knew sex workers who were adult women, but who as
Speaker 4: part of their act, put in pigtails and tried to
Speaker 4: you know, acted like they were young. And he was
Speaker 4: cruising around and he saw Denise out and find her house,
Speaker 4: wearing shorts and shared two little boys at home. Dad
Speaker 4: was at work, and he went in, grabbed her and
Speaker 4: threw in the car, took her back to his house
Speaker 4: where he had a room set up as sort of
Speaker 4: a sex dungeon, and he raped her repeatedly and then
Speaker 4: put her back in the car and was taking her
Speaker 4: to a place where he was going to kill her. Now,
Speaker 4: Denise was the daughter of a police officer and smart,
Speaker 4: and she managed to get Michael King's cell phone dialed
Speaker 4: nine to one one, and when the operator came on,
Speaker 4: by talking to the killer using her own name, mentioning
Speaker 4: her own address, she communicated to the dispatcher the jam
Speaker 4: she was in. Now, Unfortunately, the the dispatcher was at
Speaker 4: the end of her shift and didn't quite absorb the
Speaker 4: desperation of the of the you know, the significance of
Speaker 4: what she was hearing. Kept asking questions, please repeat that.
Speaker 4: And eventually Michael King realizes that he doesn't have his
Speaker 4: cell phone she's talking into it, grabs it away from
Speaker 4: her and the call has ended. Now moments later, there's
Speaker 4: a woman driving down the highway and she looks in
Speaker 4: the car next to her. She thinks there's a child.
Speaker 4: Denis's a tiny woman, there's a child in the backseat,
Speaker 4: obviously in distress, pounding on the window, saying help me,
Speaker 4: help me, help me, And she calls nine to one
Speaker 4: one gets this same lady, who's not even closer to
Speaker 4: the end of her shift, and says, I think there's
Speaker 4: a child in trouble, and gives in real time, in
Speaker 4: real space, where she is, where the car is. Car's
Speaker 4: taking a lot not to go straight to them in
Speaker 4: the wrong way, and car's taking a left. Go that
Speaker 4: way and you'll find it well. The dispatcher writes that
Speaker 4: down and leaves, and by the time the next dispatcher
Speaker 4: sits down ready to take calls, reads the note, it's
Speaker 4: too late and Denise's Denise has found dead in the
Speaker 4: in the weeds outside of town. So that's it's uh, yeah,
Speaker 4: it's a sad, sad story. The husband, Denise's husband tried
Speaker 4: to make a big deal out of it, tried to
Speaker 4: turn it into a national cause. But I think, with
Speaker 4: good intentions, let's just revamp nine to one one systems
Speaker 4: because this can never happen again. And I mean the
Speaker 4: problem with that was that most of you know, most
Speaker 4: of North America has very very good one one systems.
Speaker 4: I know that if I call nine to one one here,
Speaker 4: I'm going to get an ambulance, a cop car, and
Speaker 4: a fire trucks just in case, and it's going to
Speaker 4: be quick. But you know, in that particular town in Florida,
Speaker 4: on that particular day nine one one did Denise samber
Speaker 4: Lee no good whatsoever.
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Speaker 6: we were talking about Mummy Dye, another one of your books.
Speaker 6: What was one of the most extraordinary things about working
Speaker 6: on that book. Watch Mummy Dye.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's well. First of all, let me disclaimer is
Speaker 4: not my idea for the title. I was going to
Speaker 4: call it The Monster of the Low Country. Uh down
Speaker 4: in the Carolina coast. Fellow named Stephen Stanko who did
Speaker 4: ten year stretch for attempted murder of his girlfriend at
Speaker 4: the time and my good friend Liz. Hey, Liz A,
Speaker 4: you're listening. But she survived and he went away. And
Speaker 4: while he was in prison, he wrote a book about
Speaker 4: prison reform, you know, boohoo who It's horrible for prisoners
Speaker 4: in here, and he got it published. So he came
Speaker 4: out of prison actually having improved himself a little bit.
Speaker 4: He was a published author, and he was going to
Speaker 4: all psyched to write his second book, which was going
Speaker 4: to be about serial killers. And it's all he needed
Speaker 4: was a branch library with a pretty library. He'd be
Speaker 4: all set now. The pretty librarian turned out to be
Speaker 4: Laura Ling, who became his girlfriend as he did his research.
Speaker 4: And one she had a teenage daughter who was also
Speaker 4: very beautiful, and one night he went nuts. He was
Speaker 4: is the pressure cooker and he raped the daughter, slit
Speaker 4: her throat and then made her watch as he killed
Speaker 4: her mother. He then stole her car, drove to a
Speaker 4: man's house who had befriended him, fella named Henry Lee
Speaker 4: Turner killed him as well, and then went on the
Speaker 4: lamb in Turner's truck, so he he At this point
Speaker 4: it becomes truly extraordinary. I think Sin's Ted Bundy has
Speaker 4: has been a guy like this. He is running for
Speaker 4: his life, and yet he's got time to party, to
Speaker 4: make friends. He picks up a woman in a bar,
Speaker 4: and he's getting a new girlfriend already. And he's in Augusta, Georgia,
Speaker 4: at the time of the master's golf tournament. And you know,
Speaker 4: he said, he's a white guy wearing a golf shirt
Speaker 4: and some khaki shorts. His photo is in the newspapers wanted,
Speaker 4: it's on the TV, is wanted, and he is walking
Speaker 4: around and nobody is noticing that this is the guy
Speaker 4: because he looks just like every other guy who's at
Speaker 4: the golf tournament. So but think they eventually catch him,
Speaker 4: and when they find out his research, the research in
Speaker 4: this book and serial killers. Now the sheriff says, I
Speaker 4: don't think he was researching for a book at all.
Speaker 4: I think he was trying to learn how to be
Speaker 4: a serial killer, which, wow, it struck me as pretty
Speaker 4: interesting because I'm sure that he and I read some
Speaker 4: of the same books. The only difference was he thought
Speaker 4: this seemed like a good idea, and I of course
Speaker 4: think that evil should be vanquished. Yea. Other than that,
Speaker 4: we might have some things in common.
Speaker 6: Yeah, funny. Now, was there anything of Knife in the
Speaker 6: Heart your book from twenty twelve, It almost seems not
Speaker 6: quite as serious as the books proceeding and later. Was
Speaker 6: there anything about Knife in the Heart that was remarkable?
Speaker 4: Well, the thing I I did. Yeah, Knife in the
Speaker 4: Heart is a social commentary. It's not an examination of evil.
Speaker 4: These are just kids. It's about a love triangle. Sarah
Speaker 4: and Rachel both love Josh, and although nobody can really
Speaker 4: figure out why, Josh seems not all that desirable, but
Speaker 4: they both loved him and that's all that's important. And
Speaker 4: they had a feud over him, which she seemed to enjoy.
Speaker 4: It was the early days of social media, and I
Speaker 4: think it was a little bit of a warning signal
Speaker 4: because if this had happened ten years earlier, these girls
Speaker 4: would have had an argument or a fight and then
Speaker 4: they would have been separated and there would have been
Speaker 4: a chance for the hostilities to simmer down. But because
Speaker 4: they had their cell phones with them, they could continue
Speaker 4: the insults twenty four hours a day. And because it's
Speaker 4: a social media they were in essence doing it in public,
Speaker 4: So not only were they insulting each other, they were
Speaker 4: doing it in front of all their friends. So the
Speaker 4: person who's being insulted is also being humiliated at the
Speaker 4: same time. And it builds up to a major fight.
Speaker 4: And Rachel, who's a cute, little blonde, and Sarah, who's
Speaker 4: a larger woman in a brunette, meet to fight in
Speaker 4: the middle of the street, and Rachel brought a kitchen
Speaker 4: knife with her, and I envisioned Sarah putting up her
Speaker 4: dukes ready to fight, and Rachel stabs in the chest
Speaker 4: with the knife, and Sarah's dead and just so sad.
Speaker 4: The other thing that struck me as important in the case,
Speaker 4: and it's since become big news, but at the time
Speaker 4: it hadn't even occurred to me. But all these kids
Speaker 4: were hooked on opioid painkillers. There'd been a major theft
Speaker 4: of a pharmaceutical company down there, and you know, millions
Speaker 4: of oxy cotones went into the high school and they're
Speaker 4: all hooked. So their behavior is erratic, even more than
Speaker 4: considering that they're teenaged early twenties. You're not expected to
Speaker 4: act like a full fledged adult yet, but under the
Speaker 4: numb conditions that they're in, it's even more erratic. And
Speaker 4: I ended up befriending, you know, some of the other
Speaker 4: girls in this group, and I still keep tads on them,
Speaker 4: rooting for them, and they said they'd be doing okay.
Speaker 4: They've kicked the habit and they're having adult lives now,
Speaker 4: so that's good. And that's but you know, Rachel Wade
Speaker 4: is the only killer I exchanged letters with who dotted
Speaker 4: her eyes with little hearts.
Speaker 6: Incredible. Now there's a book you call titled Evil Season,
Speaker 6: and yes, a brutal killer named Elton Brutus Murphy tell
Speaker 6: us a little antidote about Evil Season, if you will.
Speaker 4: Sure, Well, I was speaking with a district attorney down there.
Speaker 4: I was writing one of the other Florida books. It
Speaker 4: might have been nice in the heart, I'm not sure,
Speaker 4: but I told my nineteen sixty six stories I'm apt
Speaker 4: to do, and I knew these girls they're sexually mutil agents. Oh, well,
Speaker 4: you want to write about a sexual mutilization, you should
Speaker 4: look up Elton Brutus Murphy and talk to him, because
Speaker 4: he loves talking to bouts. Now, he was a guy
Speaker 4: who had all kinds of mental difficulties. He wandered around
Speaker 4: all day and night picking up garbage thinking he thought
Speaker 4: he was an artist and he would make paintings, but
Speaker 4: they just look like mud everybody else. And one day
Speaker 4: he decides he's got the voices in his brainer telling
Speaker 4: him to go out and rape a woman. So he's chicken.
Speaker 4: So he goes into a bar to drink himself into
Speaker 4: the courage to do it, and goes into an art
Speaker 4: gallery where a woman named Joyce Wishart is working. She
Speaker 4: owns the place, and there are pieces of art all
Speaker 4: over the walls, and they're on the ground, leaning against
Speaker 4: the wall, this somewhere on the floor. And he tries
Speaker 4: to rape her, and there's only one exit out the front,
Speaker 4: so he pretty much traps her in there. There's no
Speaker 4: back exit for her to run too. But he can't
Speaker 4: accomplish the rape. Cannot accomplish the rape because he spent
Speaker 4: too much time in the bar, and that's when his
Speaker 4: knife came out. And he removes stabs her to death,
Speaker 4: and then removes her vagina and takes it with him. Now,
Speaker 4: according to the people who lived with him in his
Speaker 4: rooming house, that night, for the only time ever, Elton says,
Speaker 4: I'm cooking dinner, and he serves his neighbor's pork stew,
Speaker 4: which got mixed reviews, And it seems pretty clear to me.
Speaker 4: He admits to taking human flesh home with him, admits
Speaker 4: to chopping it up in little pieces, admits to serving
Speaker 4: dinner to his neighbors, but denies that those two things
Speaker 4: are connected. So it's a lot of times you'll find
Speaker 4: these guys will admit to everything except for one thing,
Speaker 4: because if the word gets out about it, they their
Speaker 4: life in prison could get to be uncomfortable. I know
Speaker 4: there are lots of guys who will admit to raping
Speaker 4: adult women who will not admit to raping children because
Speaker 4: child rapists get murdered in prison. Maybe that that's that's
Speaker 4: the story there, And it was after it was near
Speaker 4: the end of Evil season. I would say, Okay, now
Speaker 4: I'm ready to go back and write about my own
Speaker 4: experiences when I was a kid, and as fate would
Speaker 4: have it, at the same time, my mom and Kathy
Speaker 4: Bernhard's mom that the second victim in the Child I murders,
Speaker 4: are at a party together, sitting in lawn chairs in
Speaker 4: a backyard, and my mom has a copy of my
Speaker 4: latest books. She said, my son Michael writes about nasty murders,
Speaker 4: and everybody say, oh, that's great, and I'm so proud
Speaker 4: of him. And Alice Bernhardt says, it's too bad your
Speaker 4: Michael can't write a book about my Kathy. My mom said,
Speaker 4: ask him, I think he'd love to. Well, Alice was
Speaker 4: too shy to do that. We needed a eating an intermediary,
Speaker 4: a matchmaker named Evelyn Douglas, who called me up and said,
Speaker 4: Alice really wants to talk to you. And I know
Speaker 4: you want to talk to Alice, So why didn't you
Speaker 4: guys get that together? And we did, and Alice says,
Speaker 4: bring me any paperwork you got, I'll sign it. And
Speaker 4: I would love to have a book just like the
Speaker 4: one your mom showed me about Kathy and George Anne.
Speaker 4: And so I can't promise a book because that's not
Speaker 4: up to me, but I can promise I will give
Speaker 4: you a full investigation. Now that I have next to
Speaker 4: kin writes, we should be able to get the sheriff
Speaker 4: to cooperate a little. We'll see what happened. And we
Speaker 4: recruited Donald Tubman, who was a private investigator who also
Speaker 4: went to school with the girls. He was graduating from
Speaker 4: high school on the night of the murders, so he
Speaker 4: has an alibis and we and we went to work.
Speaker 4: And four years passed and we had developed a suspect
Speaker 4: that we liked a lot better than Arthur Shawcross. This
Speaker 4: was a guy who, you know, look at the in
Speaker 4: laws before we look at the outlaws. This is a
Speaker 4: guy His brother was George Anne's brother in law. He
Speaker 4: himself was married to George Anna's first cousin. And I
Speaker 4: took Alice Bernhard was in her late eighties at the time,
Speaker 4: and I put her on the six o'clock news in
Speaker 4: Rochester saying something should be done about this. My daughter
Speaker 4: was forgotten way too soon. If you know anything, tell
Speaker 4: Michael Well. I got a series of reports from women
Speaker 4: in their fifties who were children at the time, all
Speaker 4: saying the same story. This guy Clint and is sometimes alone,
Speaker 4: sometimes with his brothers. We're taking little girls out the
Speaker 4: Black Creek, putting a knife to their throat and saying,
Speaker 4: if you make any sounds, you're dead meat. On the
Speaker 4: night that George, Aana and Cathy were tilled in nineteen
Speaker 4: sixty six, there were multiple reports of one loud scream,
Speaker 4: and Georgian's throat had been cut so deeply that she
Speaker 4: was almost beheaded.
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Speaker 4: So something this is this, This is the guy. This
Speaker 4: is the guy tried to get the book published, couldn't
Speaker 4: do it because it had nothing that the publishers wanted.
Speaker 4: They like beautiful victims, like rich victims. They like recent cases.
Speaker 4: They like cases that you could tie up a neat bow.
Speaker 4: And this this had none of that. Eventually, The Devil
Speaker 4: at Geneasy Junction was published because I framed my proposal
Speaker 4: as a personal memoir that the thing that made this
Speaker 4: case special was and it's you know, my humility makes
Speaker 4: me hesitant to say this, but the thing that made
Speaker 4: it special was a guy who grew up to be
Speaker 4: a true crime writer, was a neighbor at the time,
Speaker 4: Right and Roman and Littlefield published it. They'd never published
Speaker 4: a true crime book before or since. It's just it's
Speaker 4: the story of me overcoming childhood trauma by the cathartic
Speaker 4: use of investigation. But Alice and I knew what it
Speaker 4: was about. It's dedicated to Alice Bernhardt, and boy, oh boy,
Speaker 4: did I ever write it for her? And yeah, she
Speaker 4: wanted me to do two things. Find out what happened
Speaker 4: to her Kathy, because the crime scene was so ghastly
Speaker 4: that nobody had ever told her the details. And to
Speaker 4: get people to think about Kathy because she'd been forgotten
Speaker 4: way too soon. So everybody think about Kathy Bernhard today.
Speaker 4: It's part of my mission. Both my mom and Alice
Speaker 4: had since passed away. But you know, it's a lifetime agreement,
Speaker 4: my lifetime not Hards and everybody should read The Devil
Speaker 4: gene Ze Junction. It is as close as I can
Speaker 4: come to writing something in my own blood. As I said,
Speaker 4: I started writing when I was twelve. I finished at
Speaker 4: age fifty nine, and my life changed after that came out.
Speaker 4: I for one thing. You know, I'm a little bit
Speaker 4: of a celebrity in.
Speaker 6: Rochester, New York now, and I agree.
Speaker 4: Which which is? Which is fun? And I think I did.
Speaker 4: I did the case the key justice that we we
Speaker 4: hoped that it would be a DNA case because we
Speaker 4: you know, we had a volunteer who was a close
Speaker 4: relative of our suspect gave us DNA and we had
Speaker 4: a cold case officer from the sheriff's apartment say that
Speaker 4: they still had the bloody bathing suits in the evidence.
Speaker 4: I said, this is great, We're going to solve this.
Speaker 4: But somehow between that and when the book came out,
Speaker 4: all of the evidence in the case was lost. Will
Speaker 4: put quotations around the word lost. Yeah, So I guess.
Speaker 4: I guess we're never going to know for sure. But
Speaker 4: I've had critics say that the book comes to us
Speaker 4: satisfying conclusion, and that's good enough for me.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, It's an unforgettable case and an unforgettable book absolutely
Speaker 6: now tell us so when Escape from Dana Mora and
Speaker 6: again I saw the film production of this, I think
Speaker 6: on HBO was incredible. Escape from Dana Moore one of
Speaker 6: your books. Before we talk about Nightmare in Rochester again
Speaker 6: something that comes, you know, close to home, tell us
Speaker 6: about Escape from Dana Mora.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, I think most people are fairly familiar with
Speaker 4: the case. It's Richard Matt and David Sweat managed to
Speaker 4: escape from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dana Moore in
Speaker 4: New York. Not that it did them that much good,
Speaker 4: but just the fact that they got out was pretty amade.
Speaker 4: You had two guys with complimentary skills. One was a
Speaker 4: schmoozer who could make friends easily, got people to do
Speaker 4: what he wanted. And the other was would have been,
Speaker 4: if he had had a legit life, would have been
Speaker 4: a great structural engineer. You know. He could read blueprints
Speaker 4: upside down from across the room. He could think outside
Speaker 4: the box, and he was in a box, so that
Speaker 4: was good. And he found a way to get out
Speaker 4: of the prison through the catwalks and through the heating
Speaker 4: pipe which was only turned off for a couple of
Speaker 4: months every year, and then eventually out through a man
Speaker 4: hall into a street in the town at Dana Mora. Now,
Speaker 4: the thing about the prison is it's surrounded by wilderness,
Speaker 4: miles and miles and miles of hills and valleys and
Speaker 4: woods and swamps. So it's a little bit like Alcatraz
Speaker 4: that you know, even if you do get out, what
Speaker 4: are you gonna do? Now? You got to get in
Speaker 4: a boat and get to the mainland somehow. So these
Speaker 4: guys had hoped to get a car, and they befriended
Speaker 4: a civilian employee named Joyce Mitchell, and she agreed to
Speaker 4: help them, but chickened out at the last second and
Speaker 4: didn't show up with the away car. So they had
Speaker 4: no choice but to dash into the woods. And for
Speaker 4: three weeks it was the largest manhunt in New York
Speaker 4: state history, which is saying something. And in the long run,
Speaker 4: Richard Matt was shot and killed, and two days later
Speaker 4: David Sweat was shot and wounded and captured again, and
Speaker 4: Joyce Mitchell did three years in prison and just recently
Speaker 4: got out.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's a very very exciting.
Speaker 4: Sexual relations with Richard Matt as well. Yeah, David's another
Speaker 4: book that has sex in it.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Absolutely, Yeah, it's a very very exciting book. Now
Speaker 6: Nightmare in Rochester Again. There are crimes that occurred when
Speaker 6: in nineteen seventy one, and tell us about the writing
Speaker 6: of Nightmare in Rochester Again. Who do you team up
Speaker 6: with for this book? And tell us a little bit
Speaker 6: about it.
Speaker 4: Well, when the Devil of Genesee Junction came out, very
Speaker 4: positive reaction, and I had long lines at book signings,
Speaker 4: and everybody I went to school was so proud. Every
Speaker 4: wanted the picture. It was really great. And somebody said,
Speaker 4: what are you going to do for an encore? Well,
Speaker 4: when I was in high school, this is five years
Speaker 4: after the Genesee Junction murders, there began a series of
Speaker 4: murders of little girls in the city of Rochester. Carmen Cologne,
Speaker 4: Wanda walk Withoz, and Michelle Maenza and they were all abducted.
Speaker 4: They're ten eleven years old, all abducted walking alone on
Speaker 4: the street in the inner city of Rochester and found
Speaker 4: in a rural area outside the city, dumped beside the road.
Speaker 4: And it seemed like it might have all been the
Speaker 4: work of one guy. First one was a little bit
Speaker 4: different from the second, third, second and third were identical.
Speaker 4: They're the same guy. Whether or not the first one's
Speaker 4: but the same guy, we don't know. But there was
Speaker 4: Two years after it began, there was an article in
Speaker 4: the Rochester Democratic Chronicle, an interview with a psychiatrist from
Speaker 4: the University of Rochester who said he had it all
Speaker 4: figured out. The killer was a mastermind, and these killings
Speaker 4: that looked spontaneous and opportunistic were actually well fought out
Speaker 4: in advance, and that all three victims, of course, had
Speaker 4: the same first and last initial, and that all three
Speaker 4: had been dumped in a town that also began with
Speaker 4: that initial. There was a leap of logic there that
Speaker 4: because these girls had the same first and last initial,
Speaker 4: that that's the reason they were chosen as victims. But
Speaker 4: everybody immediately embraced it and believed it. You know that
Speaker 4: there are still people who are absolutely convinced that this
Speaker 4: guy must have known these girls in advance, because he
Speaker 4: had chose only girls with the same first and last
Speaker 4: INNISI to investigate the case. I was thinking about this
Speaker 4: and it kind of didn't make any sense. And what
Speaker 4: are we supposed to believe This guy's cruising around the
Speaker 4: un city of Rochester looking for little girls by themselves.
Speaker 4: Is he asking them their names? And if their names
Speaker 4: don't have the same first and last invisial, is he
Speaker 4: rejecting them and then continue his search. Because there weren't
Speaker 4: any little girls saying that they'd been asked their names
Speaker 4: by strangers. So I went into the theory Okay, it's
Speaker 4: a coincidence, and the geography part that didn't work out
Speaker 4: at all, because Carmen Cologne was not dumped in either
Speaker 4: Chili or Churchville. It was in a different town with
Speaker 4: a different letter. Michelle Maenza was technically in massive In
Speaker 4: but it was right on the town line with Walworth
Speaker 4: and there's absolutely no way for the killer to know
Speaker 4: which town that was. It's just a cornfield. So I
Speaker 4: went on the the assumption that there was all coincidence,
Speaker 4: that what we had here was just a guy driving around.
Speaker 4: He knew what he liked, like ten or eleven year
Speaker 4: old girls, and if they were he did it always
Speaker 4: after school, but before dinner, when you're most have to
Speaker 4: find big girls walking alone, and three times he was successful. Now,
Speaker 4: there were certain number of suspects that came up who
Speaker 4: lived in the town of Gates at that time, which
Speaker 4: was town next to Chili, and the crimes in terms
Speaker 4: of disposal greatly resembled those of the Hillside Stranglers, which
Speaker 4: he became one of. And he had shown that although
Speaker 4: he preferred adult women, he wasn't adverse to raping and
Speaker 4: killing a child. Two of the Hillside strangler victims were children.
Speaker 4: I don't think many people know that, but he of
Speaker 4: course denies that he had anything to do with it.
Speaker 4: The thing I should not is it could be a
Speaker 4: DNA case. There is extant DNA from the Wanda Wakowitz
Speaker 4: crime scene. There was DNA evidence from the other two
Speaker 4: as well, but it was used up at the time
Speaker 4: for a secretion test, which was the state of the
Speaker 4: art at the time. Instead of just using a portion
Speaker 4: of the sample, they used the whole thing, never thinking
Speaker 4: that in fifty years this could be really valuable. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Then there's there's Joseph Nazo, who grew up in Rochester,
Speaker 4: married a Rochester girl. His wife grew up across the
Speaker 4: street from my dad, and he went to California and
Speaker 4: became a serial killer and killed a series of sex workers,
Speaker 4: many of whom had the same first and last initial,
Speaker 4: including another Carmen Cologne, which was the name of the
Speaker 4: first victim in Rochester. How could that be a coincidence?
Speaker 4: But you try to you try to look into that,
Speaker 4: and there's evidence that Joseph ever knew the adult Carmen
Speaker 4: Cologne's name, that she wouldn't have given him her real name.
Speaker 4: And he kept lots of notes, copious notes on all
Speaker 4: of his crimes dating back to when he was a teenager,
Speaker 4: and he mentions how good their legs are. He liked.
Speaker 4: He was a photographer. He took photos of women, both
Speaker 4: alive and dead, and there would be comments about the
Speaker 4: photos he took, the dates, the places. Never once did
Speaker 4: he ever mention that he had anything for the alphabet. So, okay.
Speaker 4: The third suspect I looked at with a guy named
Speaker 4: Dennis Termini, and there are still cops in Rochester were
Speaker 4: convinced Toermini must be the guy. He was a serial rapist.
Speaker 4: As far as we know, he only raped adult women.
Speaker 4: But the thing that tied all three double initials cases
Speaker 4: together was that there were white animal hairs found at
Speaker 4: all the crime scenes, and Dennis Termini's car had cat
Speaker 4: hairs in it, and he killed himself after being caught
Speaker 4: mid rape and so he could not be questioned. And
Speaker 4: his DNA as all you know, no DNA has ever matched.
Speaker 4: They want to walk awards DNA Now. The last one
Speaker 4: the guy I found is named Ted given Ted. If
Speaker 4: we assume that the initials don't mean anything, that what
Speaker 4: we're looking for the guy who cruises around looking to
Speaker 4: pick up the little girls. Ted givens the guy. In
Speaker 4: nineteen seventy four, he abducts two little girls in the
Speaker 4: town of Gates and takes them to an abandoned house,
Speaker 4: ties one up in the basement and attempts to rape
Speaker 4: the other one upstairs, and when he's done, he then
Speaker 4: puts them back in the car, takes them back to
Speaker 4: the park. We found him and lets him go. And
Speaker 4: the police chief at the time of the town was
Speaker 4: asked by a reporter, do you think you have the
Speaker 4: double initial guy? And he goes, no, No, can't be.
Speaker 4: These girls had different first and last initials.
Speaker 6: Oh jes.
Speaker 4: So I started another pen pal situation with Ted, and
Speaker 4: Ted said, you keep calling the guy that. I said,
Speaker 4: you have some things in common with the double initial killer,
Speaker 4: so you should be I would like you to be
Speaker 4: an expert witness for me, give me an idea of
Speaker 4: how this guy ticks, what makes him ticks. And he said, well,
Speaker 4: first of all, the name of the guy is the
Speaker 4: alphabet killer, not the double initial killer, get it right.
Speaker 4: And I probably shouldn't talk to you at all. But
Speaker 4: I've been looking at myself in the mirror a lot lately,
Speaker 4: and then I decided it's time to come to grips
Speaker 4: with some things. So right there, I thought it was
Speaker 4: a little bit, you know, he was leaning on an admission,
Speaker 4: but he didn't quite get there, and never did, by
Speaker 4: the way, But he told me in really grewsome detail
Speaker 4: how he became a pedophile, and we had all kinds
Speaker 4: of insights into how pedophiles think. Again. You know, I
Speaker 4: think that the chances that all four of these guys
Speaker 4: are completely innocent in the nightmare in Rochester cases, it
Speaker 4: seems remote, and there's absolutely no reason to think that
Speaker 4: this is a lone nut. Pedophiles have clubs. We've seen
Speaker 4: it in the past. Those Breckinridge up in Vermont, a
Speaker 4: group of guys who used the computers to share, you know,
Speaker 4: kittie porn pictures. They find each other and facilitate each
Speaker 4: other's weird needs. So I mean, it's entirely possible that
Speaker 4: that what we're seeing is a tip of an iceberg,
Speaker 4: much of which we can we haven't yet found. And
Speaker 4: eventually we're gonna fight in one of these guys and
Speaker 4: he is going to be a match for the one
Speaker 4: who walk we had seen.
Speaker 6: Yeah, incredible. Now tell us about Haunting Homicides and why
Speaker 6: the title this is a twenty nineteen.
Speaker 4: Well, Haunting Homicides was originally going to be called Cold
Speaker 4: Case Rochester and these were going to be cases that
Speaker 4: we encountered while John Tobin and I that we found
Speaker 4: while we were investigating the devil Chency Junction and a
Speaker 4: Nightmare in Rochester, and you know, a lot a lot
Speaker 4: of things seemed to be connected into that were not
Speaker 4: hadn't been published. So I put them together and formed
Speaker 4: a kind of a you know, a magazine, a true
Speaker 4: crime magazine of cases. We changed the name from Cold
Speaker 4: Case Rochester to Haunting Homicides because by the time we
Speaker 4: were done, they weren't all cold cases. Some of them
Speaker 4: had been solved and now place in Rochester, although they
Speaker 4: had Rochester connections, so haunting and they're all haunting, that
Speaker 4: was for sure. So that became in violent. What was the.
Speaker 6: What were some of the cases that were especially haunting.
Speaker 4: Well, I'd like to think they're all equally haunting, but
Speaker 4: there are a couple of cases that there has been
Speaker 4: activity in since the book came out, which is kind
Speaker 4: of exciting. One of the there's a case of joe
Speaker 4: Anne Lynn. She was an eleven year old girl who
Speaker 4: looked older and in September nineteen forty nine, her school
Speaker 4: bus broke down, so she had to walk to school
Speaker 4: and she never made it. And then a few days
Speaker 4: later her body was found seven miles to the north,
Speaker 4: hidden underneath some trees, and she'd been raped and murdered
Speaker 4: and glory d to the Livingston County sheriff. They kept
Speaker 4: that evidence and it is still good. There's a DNA profile,
Speaker 4: I mean from nineteen forty nine, there's a DNA profile. Unbelievable.
Speaker 4: But while I was doing research, I found that they
Speaker 4: used bloodhounds in an attempt to figure out what happened.
Speaker 4: And the bloodhounds went down the road where she was
Speaker 4: walking and got to a particular farmhouse which was known
Speaker 4: as Green Acres for some reason, and the dogs went
Speaker 4: one at a time, but they both did the same thing.
Speaker 4: They alongside the house behind the house, milled around behind
Speaker 4: the house, then came back to the shoulder and stopped
Speaker 4: end of trail. So the sheriff says, this must be
Speaker 4: where the motorists picked up the girl. And I said,
Speaker 4: wait a second. Those dogs went behind the house. They
Speaker 4: both went behind the house. So we took a closer
Speaker 4: look at the house, and we found out that living
Speaker 4: there at the time was a middle aged man who
Speaker 4: had been kicked out of the house by his wife
Speaker 4: for trying some funny business with her stepdaughter who was
Speaker 4: a child, and he was living with his sister and
Speaker 4: with a sixteen year old boy who didn't seem to
Speaker 4: be related to them in any way. And he was
Speaker 4: a key witness in the initial investigation because he said
Speaker 4: he was the only one who said he heard a
Speaker 4: scream and after he heard the scream, he went to
Speaker 4: the windows on both sides of his house and did
Speaker 4: not see a car. League Later, on Don Tubman's find
Speaker 4: he went down into the basement of a retired cop
Speaker 4: and went to dusty boxes and found a letter that
Speaker 4: had been written to the Rochester Police chief in nineteen
Speaker 4: forty nine by a woman who worked with the sixteen
Speaker 4: year old kid's mom, and she was complaining that she
Speaker 4: couldn't get in t with him ever since the murder,
Speaker 4: and that one time she called him and he answered
Speaker 4: the phone, he hung up in the middle of a sentence,
Speaker 4: which made her think that somebody was hanging up the
Speaker 4: phone for him. So we we have we have new
Speaker 4: suspects in the case. And well, yeah, and we have located, uh,
Speaker 4: we've located the adult man's grave in case there's any
Speaker 4: disinterring that needs to be done, because I don't mind
Speaker 4: digging up the debt if it's going to solve the crime.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, mh.
Speaker 6: What this change in your career or this is all
Speaker 6: I wanna say change? I would say an evolution in
Speaker 6: your career in terms of being an investigative journalist and author.
Speaker 6: But the teaming up with Donald Tubman, it seems that
Speaker 6: maybe I'm wrong, but it's a new direction in terms
Speaker 6: of uh, an investigation, in terms of what an author
Speaker 6: normally doesn't do. It relies on police reports. You do
Speaker 6: do an investigation of sorts, But is this a new
Speaker 6: direction and evolution in your writing? It seems to be
Speaker 6: even more satisfying than the writing of your other books
Speaker 6: for me, what do you think?
Speaker 4: Absolutely? I think what it is is I finally made
Speaker 4: it to where I wanted to be in the first place. Yeah,
Speaker 4: the initial idea was to figure out who killed Kathy
Speaker 4: and Georgia, And in order to get there, I had
Speaker 4: to write for a big time publisher who always demanded
Speaker 4: that a jury had convicted a person before we ever
Speaker 4: wrote about them. So there was an investigation to do,
Speaker 4: but there was no I wasn't breaking cases in any way,
Speaker 4: and since we had so much success with the devil
Speaker 4: Chancy Junction, I really do think we figured out what happened.
Speaker 4: I couldn't stop. I'm always I'm always going to be
Speaker 4: looking at who done It's now and that's you know,
Speaker 4: if somebody pays me to write another book like like
Speaker 4: Evil Season or The Burned Farm where the killer is
Speaker 4: already in prison at the time I start, that's fine,
Speaker 4: but it's not as fine as taking away a question
Speaker 4: mark and putting a face in its place.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, I could. I could really really sense that with
Speaker 6: these last few books. How about Carmine the Snake your
Speaker 6: collaborations and in twenty twenty, Lord High Executioner with Frank
Speaker 6: di Matteo, just tell us a little bit about this
Speaker 6: collaboration with Frank.
Speaker 4: Frank is Frank is the son of a gangster. His
Speaker 4: dad was Larry Gallow's bodyguard, one of the President Street Boys. Uh.
Speaker 4: Larry Gallow is Joey Gallow's brother who was famously whacked
Speaker 4: in Umburdo's clamorhouse. And he has made Frank has made
Speaker 4: a living out of, you know, the cards he was dealt.
Speaker 4: He had a magazine called Mob Candy, and he wrote
Speaker 4: a book, is an autobiography called h Lion in the
Speaker 4: Basement because Joey Gallo kept the Mountain Lion in the
Speaker 4: basement of the Social Club and if somebody owed him money,
Speaker 4: they just took him down the stairs and showed him
Speaker 4: the lion and the guy would pay up. The lion
Speaker 4: never actually had to kill anybody. So and and because
Speaker 4: and because Frank, you know, dropped out of school after
Speaker 4: fifth grade or whatever, because it was cutting into his
Speaker 4: hanging out on street corners time. Uh. He's not an
Speaker 4: extremely literate guy, but he's smart and he's a reader.
Speaker 4: But the resulting book was someone endearing but comically flawed.
Speaker 4: You know, there's a lot of ds and dose and
Speaker 4: this and that, and I was given an assignment to
Speaker 4: take his self published book and to transform it into
Speaker 4: something that could be published by Kensington Books. And it
Speaker 4: became Growing Up Mafia the President Street Boys, which I
Speaker 4: was an editor and he was the author. And after
Speaker 4: that we said, well, you know this this team works
Speaker 4: pretty good. You know he's got all the street cred.
Speaker 4: You know I can write sentences with propa grammar. And
Speaker 4: we took on the biography of Carmine Persica, who was
Speaker 4: a longtime head of one of the Five Families in
Speaker 4: New York. And after we did that, which did very well,
Speaker 4: we took on the story of Albert Anastasia, who was
Speaker 4: the head of Murder Inc. And the it became a family,
Speaker 4: a godfather himself and was famously whacked by Carmine Persido
Speaker 4: in a barber chair in the Sheridan Hotel in Manhattan.
Speaker 4: So it's it's been fun. It's it sounds perhaps a
Speaker 4: little cold, but because these are stories about guys who
Speaker 4: are killer be killed, Uh, there's not the sadness and
Speaker 4: there's not the heaviness that weighs on my brain that
Speaker 4: there is when I'm writing about cases where there's a
Speaker 4: stark contrast between good and evil. You know, this is
Speaker 4: more like war stories. And I've been finding it fun
Speaker 4: for the first time in many years to write again,
Speaker 4: because usually then you know, some sort of the demon
Speaker 4: within me that that makes me do this stuff, and
Speaker 4: it's not that much fun. But telling telling Malkius stories
Speaker 4: can be kind of a riot.
Speaker 6: What do you do to counter this darkness that you
Speaker 6: have to always delve into constantly?
Speaker 4: Well, I, I personally do not have a dark side,
Speaker 4: So when I'm not working, I try not to dwell.
Speaker 4: You know. I like to go to go to baseball games,
Speaker 4: and I have a lovely wife, have two grown kids
Speaker 4: who are perfect in every way, and light life is good,
Speaker 4: but it is It's always good for me when I
Speaker 4: am writing a particularly tough book to have something I
Speaker 4: can turn to. Like during the time when I was
Speaker 4: I was writing The Deviligency Junction in Nightmare in Rochester,
Speaker 4: I also wrote why the Grateful Dead matter? Perhaps there's
Speaker 4: no better way to alleviate yourself of much time on
Speaker 4: the dark side. Then, you know, listen to some grateful dad.
Speaker 4: It's it's very relaxed here.
Speaker 6: Absolutely now for the audience that's craving more, Michael Benson,
Speaker 6: is there something that you are working on now, considering
Speaker 6: now looking into delving into what might the audience be
Speaker 6: looking for next.
Speaker 4: Well, I have a couple of things in the works.
Speaker 4: There's a there's a third Mafia book with Frank I'm
Speaker 4: working here. It's called Mafia Hitman about a fellow named
Speaker 4: Carmine Dbiazzi aka Sonny Penthal and he's the actual killer
Speaker 4: of Joey Gallo. And the reason that it's coming up
Speaker 4: now is because the movie The Irishman, in which Frank
Speaker 4: Sharon takes credit for killing Joey, and I can guarantee
Speaker 4: you that there was not a single Irishman in the
Speaker 4: room at the time when it happened. Yeah, that's why.
Speaker 4: And on the other side, there is there's more Rochester
Speaker 4: cases coming and I don't want to get too specific
Speaker 4: just yet, but the you know, Rochester bookstore should be
Speaker 4: aware that I'm coming up for a book signing sometime
Speaker 4: before the year's out and it's going to be great.
Speaker 4: I haven't come up with the title yet, but these
Speaker 4: are these are murder cases that took place very close
Speaker 4: to to Genesee Junction that well geographically, it's been a
Speaker 4: real draw for evil. As you know, the name of
Speaker 4: Deviligent Tennessee Junction would imply it's it's kind of true.
Speaker 4: We've got throughout the throughout history, going back to the
Speaker 4: real olden times. It's a good place to to kill
Speaker 4: people in stash bodies.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you said it's a rich territory for a true
Speaker 6: crime writer, and certainly it's that's evident.
Speaker 4: Yes, I think there's something in the water. Well lucky
Speaker 4: for us, that's why we only drink Gennesee beer because
Speaker 4: that's that's good.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I want to thank you very much
Speaker 6: Michael for coming on. Oh Dann, thank you being part
Speaker 6: of this. For those that might want to take a look,
Speaker 6: Can I go to an Amazon page website, tell us
Speaker 6: how people might just take a look at it.
Speaker 4: You're having an Amazon page to myself, put Michael Benson
Speaker 4: true crime and it comes up. I have a white Beard,
Speaker 4: the guy who takes pictures of planets. He's a different guy.
Speaker 4: He'll be able to You'll be able to figure it out.
Speaker 4: And keep watching the Investigation Discovery Channel and usually on
Speaker 4: about once a day. I was on twenty twenty last
Speaker 4: Friday night. Although I have ten that I missed it.
Speaker 4: I got started getting texts and by the time I
Speaker 4: turned it on, it almost over. But that was the
Speaker 4: Stacey cast the case.
Speaker 6: It'll be on again.
Speaker 4: And it'll be on again. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, Thank you Michael. This has been fantastic of Michael
Speaker 6: Benson True Crime Retrospective. Thank you very much, Michael Podcast
Speaker 6: in the world. Thank you very much, Michael. You have
Speaker 6: a great evening.
Speaker 4: Good Bye bye.