Speaker 1: I want you to stop whatever you are doing right now,
just for a second and really picture a very specific
scenario with me.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm picturing it.
Speaker 1: Imagine walking through the front door of a perfectly normal,
quiet suburban home. Right, It's exactly the kind of house
you pass by every single day on your way to
work or running to the grocery store.
Speaker 2: Just a totally average house exactly.
Speaker 1: You step inside and the environment is completely mundane. The
curtains are drawn to keep out the afternoon sun. The
living room furniture is arranged around to television. There's a
pair of shoes tuck neatly by the door. Everything is
completely undeniably in.
Speaker 2: Its place, which is usually comforting. Right.
Speaker 1: But as you walk through this totally familiar setting, your
eyes land on one seemingly ordinary object. Maybe it's a
stack of floral teacups resting precariously on a wooden side table.
Or maybe it's a brightly colored plastic child's toy left
in the middle of a hallway rug, or just a
plain piece of hotel stationary sitting on a kitchen counter
next to a pen.
Speaker 2: Just everyday items.
Speaker 1: Yes, and in your own home, you wouldn't blink twice
at any of these things, but in this specific context,
in this specific house, that entirely normal object instantly and
violently shifts the atmosphere in the room from a sanctuary
to a place of utter paralyzing terror.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, Yeah, it's.
Speaker 1: Not blood that makes your stomach drop. It's not gore
or a shattered window that haunts you. It is the quiet, lingering,
suffocating implication of human intent.
Speaker 2: A intent is everything.
Speaker 1: It is the realization that someone looked at a mundane
object and decided to completely weaponize it.
Speaker 2: That is the precise moment. The everyday environment is just
entirely inverted because the psychology of our surroundings dictates that
we assign safety to the familiar. When an offender takes
the familiar and corrupts it, the psychological shockwave is often
far more devastating than the physical violence itself because.
Speaker 1: It just Droi's the foundational concept of.
Speaker 2: Sanctuary exactly, It completely shatters it.
Speaker 1: Well, welcome to Thrilling Threads. Today. Our mission is to
embark on a deep, incredibly unsettling exploration through criminal history, archives,
forensic reports, and behavioral analyses.
Speaker 2: It's a heavy one today, it really is.
Speaker 1: We are going to examine the creepiest, most unnerving items
ever recovered from violent crime scenes.
Speaker 2: And we should clarify we aren't talking about obvious things, right, No.
Speaker 1: We are going out of our way today to avoid
the obvious. We aren't talking about firearms or bladed weapons.
Speaker 2: No knives, no guns exactly.
Speaker 1: We are talking about the psychology of objects. We are
looking at the exact moments where the totally mundane is
deliberately and meticulously transformed into the monstrous.
Speaker 2: It is critical to understand that we are doing this
to decode the behavioral residue left behind by these offenders.
Speaker 1: The behavioral residue I like that phrase.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because every object left at a crime scene is
a piece of communication. Sometimes it's a taunt, sometimes it's
a physical necessity for their delusion, and sometimes it's an
unconscious projection of their own fractured mind. By analyzing these
specific items, we bridge the gap between understanding what happened
and the far more terrifying question of why it happened.
Speaker 1: You might think you know what makes a crime scene terrifying.
You know, you picture the yellow tape, the flashing police.
Speaker 2: Lights, the chaos of a struggle.
Speaker 1: Right, But I guarantee you, by the end of this conversation,
you will never look at a pair of sneakers, a
kitchen pot, or a simple handwritten note the exact same way.
Speaker 2: Again, you really won't.
Speaker 1: I want to dive straight into this concept of weaponizing
the mundane, specifically focusing on items that were never designed
to hurt anyone, but were intentionally utilized to exert psychological control.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's get into it.
Speaker 1: Let's look at the Golden State killer, Joseph DiAngelo. This
is a man who terrorized California for years, but his
most chilling signature weapon wasn't his physical strength.
Speaker 2: No, it wasn't. It was dinnerware, the tea cups, and
the plates.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: In the Annals of Criminal Profiling, this is a detail
that stands out because of its specific, highly calculated brand
of sadism.
Speaker 1: It's just so twisted.
Speaker 2: D'Angelo would break into these homes in the dead of night,
awaken the couples, and bind them. But securing them physically
just wasn't enough to satisfy his need for.
Speaker 1: Control, right, he had to take it further.
Speaker 2: He would go into their kitchen, take ceramic plates or
teacups from their cupboards, and stack them precariously on the
backs of the bound.
Speaker 1: Men, and he would deliver this ultimatum that is just
pure psychological torture. He would lean in and whisper, well,
I'm paraphrasing here, but basically, if I hear these dishes rattle,
I am going to kill your wife, and then I'm
going to come back in here and kill you.
Speaker 2: It's horrifying.
Speaker 1: When you read the police reports. The detail it always
stops me dead in my tracks is that when authorities
finally arrived, sometimes hours after DiAngelo had loved the house,
those precarious stacks of china were often still standing perfectly
balanced on the backs of.
Speaker 2: These men hours later. It's unbelievable.
Speaker 1: Let's really think about the biology and the psychology of that.
Your sympathetic nervous system is screaming at you to fight
or flee.
Speaker 2: Your body wants to move.
Speaker 1: You have adrenaline flooding your veins, causing your muscles to
naturally tremor, and yet the terror is so absolute that
these men force their bodies into a state of statuesque
paralysis for hours. Yeah, it reminds me of the andient
parable of the Sword of Damicles. You know, the agonizing
fear of impending doom, right.
Speaker 2: Where the sword is hanging by a single horse hair.
Speaker 1: Exactly. The sheer agony isn't the blade cutting your skin.
The pure, unadulterated agony is the anticipation of the blade falling.
DiAngelo used teacups to build a sort of damicalles in
a suburban bedroom.
Speaker 2: That analogy perfectly captures the mechanism of his terror. He
was effectively turning the victim's own body into an alarm system.
Oh yeah, yeah, And in doing so, he forced the
victim to become a passive, unwilling accomplice in their own subjugation. Wow,
this is a crucial concept in victimology. He didn't just
want to physically overpower them. He wanted to dominate their
mind so completely that they would police themselves.
Speaker 1: They became their own jailers.
Speaker 2: Exactly. The sensory deprivation of lying in the dark, unable
to see, straining your ears to hear if a piece
of ceramic shifts even a millimeter against another piece.
Speaker 1: Of ceramic, it's just sickening to think about.
Speaker 2: It induces a state of hyper arousal that causes deep,
deep psychological trauma. And utilizing their own dishes, items intimately
associated with family meals, holidays, and domestic comfort is a
profound violation.
Speaker 1: He corrupted the very symbols of their safe home.
Speaker 2: He absolutely did.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to wrap my head around the efficiency of
that cruelty because it requires zero physical exertion on his part.
Once the cups are stacked right, he's free to do
whatever he can, freely roam the house knowing the husband
is locked in the self made prison of muscle tension.
Speaker 2: It's a very organized, a stematic approach to terror.
Speaker 1: But if we were talking about outsourcing terror and the
bizarre efficiency of psychological destruction, we have to transition into
a different medium entirely.
Speaker 2: Okay, where we're going.
Speaker 1: I want to discuss audio, specifically the audio cassette tape
recovered from David Parker Ray, the man the media dubbed
the Toy box Killer.
Speaker 2: Ah Yes, the discovery of his orientation cassette.
Speaker 1: That tape.
Speaker 2: Within forensic psychology and law enforcement circles, this is widely
considered one of the most fundamentally disturbing pieces of evidence
ever cataloged.
Speaker 1: The very phrase orientation cassette makes my skin crawl because
it sounds like something you get on your first day
of a.
Speaker 2: Corporate job, and some's so mundane.
Speaker 1: Right. Investigators found this standard, cheap plastic cassette tape that
Ray would play for the women he had abducted right
as they were regaining consciousness inside his customized soundproof trailer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, his toy box.
Speaker 1: The tape itself is just a piece of plastic housing
magnetic ribbon. But what is recorded on it is the
systematic dismantling of human hope.
Speaker 2: What strikes behavioral analysts the most isn't just the existence
of the tape or even the horrific explicit acts at details.
It is a vocal delivery.
Speaker 1: The tone of his voice.
Speaker 2: On this tape. Ray's voice is remarkably calm. It is detached, steady,
and terrifyingly bureaucratic.
Speaker 1: Bureaucratic is the perfect word for it.
Speaker 2: He explains in exhaustive professional detail, exactly where they are,
what the rules of their captivity are, and the precise
mechanized devices they are going to be subjected to.
Speaker 1: Wait, let me stop you right there, because this is
where my brain hits a wall. Sure, I understand sadism,
I understand the drive to inflict pain. But I struggle
with the medium here. Why a tape?
Speaker 2: That's a great question.
Speaker 1: Was this purely about laziness and efficiency? Did he just
get tired of repeating his twisted manifesto to every new
victim so he opted for a standardized, pre recorded introduction.
You'd think that right, Or was it something deeper. Was
he sitting there in that trailer, hitting the play button
and actively savoring the fact that a two dollars piece
of plastic was breaking their minds before even head lifts
a finger.
Speaker 2: It is absolutely the latter. It raises a fascinating and
horrifying point about the ritualization of violence. The ritualization for
organized defenders like David Parker Ray, the psychological dismantling of
the victim is the primary objective. The physical violence is
almost a secondary byproduct of the absolute power he derived
from their terror.
Speaker 1: So the tape was the main event. In a way.
Speaker 2: By recording it, he achieved two things. First, he standardized
the terror, ensuring that every victim received the exact, same, flawless,
uninterrupted dose of psychological poison without him ever stumbling over
his words, were losing his train of thought.
Speaker 1: He wanted a perfect performance every time exactly second.
Speaker 2: And more importantly, that tape allowed him to remove himself
from the role of the active speaker and step into
the role of the spectator.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, I never thought of it like that.
Speaker 2: He could sit back, watch the collar drain from their faces,
watch the panic set in, and consume their terror as
an audience member. It elevated his own perceived godlike control.
Speaker 1: So the tape did the heavy lifting of inducing panic,
allowing him to simply observe the collapse precisely. The bureaucracy
of it is what I can't shake the idea of
someone treating unimaginable sadism with the same tonal delivery as
an airline safety demonstration. It's the complete and total absence
of empathy.
Speaker 2: It is entirely devoid of human feeling.
Speaker 1: But a cassette tape only captures the voice. What happens
when the perpetrators need to document their crimes requires a
visual element that takes us.
Speaker 2: To a whole new level of documentation.
Speaker 1: This leads us to the remote California compound belonging to
Leonard Lake and Charles Ang in the mid nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2: This is a textbook example of a case where the
discovery of physical media fundamentally altered the entire scope, trajectory,
and emotional toll of a police investigation.
Speaker 1: Lake and Ang murdered a staggering number of people, somewhere
between eleven and twenty five victims.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the exact number is still uncertain.
Speaker 1: When authorities finally rated Lake's remote cabin, they uncovered a
hidden bunker structure. It was, for all intents and purposes,
a purpose build dungeons.
Speaker 2: It's horrifying.
Speaker 1: But the detail that elevated this from a horrific discovery
to a generational trauma for the investigators involved was a
collection of VHS cassettes chillingly labeled m Ladies.
Speaker 2: Those tapes they contained vivid, grainy, irrefutable documentation of Linkening
psychologically and physically tormenting their.
Speaker 1: Victims, just sitting there on a shelf.
Speaker 2: Right up until the moment a detective slid one of
those VHS tapes into a player. They were working a
very complex, massive missing persons and suspected homicide case. They
were dealing with the aftermath of violence, but.
Speaker 1: The moment they hit play, they weren't dealing with the
aftermath anymore.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the tapes shifted the paradigm. The investigators were suddenly
thrust into the room while the crimes were actively occurring.
Speaker 1: That has to cause PTSD for the cops.
Speaker 2: Oh, without a doubt, they were forced into a position
of helplessness watching the victims in their final, most terrifying moments.
Speaker 1: It turns the detective into an involuntary witness and for lakening.
What was the psychological purpose? Were these purely trophies? Do
they sit around watching these like home movies?
Speaker 2: Yes. In the context of criminal behavior, these tapes are
categorized as high value trophy. High value trophies, we distinguish
between a souvenir and a trophy. A souvenir helps the
offender remember the experience, like taking a victim's piece of jewelry. Okay,
that makes sense, But a trophy represents a victory. It
is proof of conquest. The tapes were irrefutable proof of
their total domination over these individuals.
Speaker 1: They created a permanent, excruciating witness to the suffering they inflicted.
Speaker 2: Exactly allowing them to repeatedly consume the power dynamic long
after the victim was deceased.
Speaker 1: That concept of needing an audience even if the audience
is just yourself. Rewatching the tape brings up a deeply
un settling parallel to our modern era. How so because
Lake and Ang tape their victims. But in nineteen ninety six,
a man named Ricardo Lopez weaponized the camera in a
completely different way. He didn't tape his victims. He taped himself.
Speaker 2: Ah Ricardo Lopez often referred to in the media as
the Byork Stalker.
Speaker 1: Yes exactly.
Speaker 2: He was a pest exterminator living in Florida who developed
a severe, dangerous, and ultimately legal obsession with the Icelandic
musician b York.
Speaker 1: It's a wild case.
Speaker 2: When he learned through the media that she was in
a romantic relationship, his obsession metastasized into violent rage. He
constructed a complex explosive device disguised as a book, which
he mailed to her residence in London, intending to kill
or severely disfigure her.
Speaker 1: But the bombing plot is only half of the horror here.
Alongside constructing this device, Lopez set up a video camera
in his apartment and began recording a video diary.
Speaker 2: A very extensive diary, and.
Speaker 1: We are not talking about a few five minute clips.
He recorded over twenty hours of footage spread across eleven
different tapes.
Speaker 2: Exhaustive.
Speaker 1: He filmed his daily life, his twisted motivations, his intense
self loathing, the actual construction of the acid bomb, and
in the final agonizing tape, he shaves his head, paints
his face, and takes his own life on camera. It
was the discovery of his body and these tapes that
alerted the police to the bomb, which Scotland Yard miraculously
intercepted just in.
Speaker 2: Time, carlyon Time.
Speaker 1: What I find so jarring about the Lopez takes is
how they predate our current culture of constant self surveillance. Today,
vlogging is the norm. People document what they eat, what
they buy, their morning routines.
Speaker 2: It's everyday behavior now.
Speaker 1: But watching Lopez feels like peering into a psychological black hole.
It is deeply, profoundly unsettling to watch a human being
willingly eagerly document their own real time descent into a
homicidal delusion. Why did he need to film them?
Speaker 2: Lopez's tapes are one of the most profound psychological artifacts
we have of a mind and collapsing inward. The camera
served multiple.
Speaker 1: Functions for him, Okay, like what.
Speaker 2: First, it was a surgate companion. He was profoundly isolated,
and the lens gave him someone or something to talk to.
Speaker 1: That's incredibly sad, in a very dark.
Speaker 2: Way, it is. But more importantly, the camera validated his
existence and his grandiosity. In his mind, his pain and
his rage were of monumental importance, and monumental events must
be recorded for history.
Speaker 1: He thought he was doing something historically significant.
Speaker 2: Exactly, he was giving a masterclass on his own psychological deterioration.
He weaponized the camera to ensure that his delusion, his manifesto,
would outlive his physical body. He wanted the world to
understand the depth of his perceived agony.
Speaker 1: He curated his own destruction, which honestly provides a really
dark but perfect bridge to our next area focus.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's pivot.
Speaker 1: If audiotapes in video diaries are attempts to capture a
fleeting moment of terror or a timeline of madness, what
happens when a killer's delusion demands something more.
Speaker 2: Tangible You mean physical objects, right?
Speaker 1: What happens when they feel a compulsion to preserve the
physical reality of the victims themselves.
Speaker 2: They transition from creating media to curating literal galleries of horror.
This is the psychology behind trophies, mementos, and the physical preservation.
Speaker 1: Of death, which is just it's a whole different level.
Speaker 2: It really is. It is one thing to commit a
heinous act and immediately flee the scene to evade capture.
It is an entirely different level of psychological complexity to
intentionally collect catalog and preserve pieces of the crime.
Speaker 1: I look at a killer who flees the scene as
someone driven by panic or a temporary urge. But a collector,
a collector is patient, a collector is building an archives. Yes,
and Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, is the quintessential horrifying.
Speaker 2: Example of this raider evaded capture for decades, terrorizing Wichitac
hans Is from the nineteen seventies until his eventual arrest
in two thousand and five.
Speaker 1: He was a ghost for so long.
Speaker 2: When investigators finally executed search warrants on his property, they
uncovered his hidden archives. He had taken hundreds of polaroids
of his victims, often posing them in various stages of distress,
bondage and post mortem decomposition, and the.
Speaker 1: Places he chose to hide these photos are just as
disturbing as the photos themselves. He didn't just have a
secret safe.
Speaker 2: In his basement, No, he had them everywhere.
Speaker 1: He hid them in the false bottoms of filing cabinets
at his municipal compliance office. He hid them inside the
walls of his local church, where he was a respected
congregation leader. It's wild he was literally surrounded by his
trophies while going about his mundane daily life.
Speaker 2: The locations speak to his intense need for compartmentalization, But
the psychological utility of the photos themselves is the core.
Speaker 1: Issue here right Why he needed them.
Speaker 2: During his extensive interrogations and subsequent psychological profiling, Raider was
remarkably candid. He explained that he used these polaroids to,
in his own exact words, facilitate his imagination.
Speaker 1: Facilitate his imagination. That is such a sterile, clinical way
to describe something so demonic. I want to dig into that.
How exactly does a polaroid act as a facilitation tool
for a mind like his?
Speaker 2: To understand this, we have to look at the neurological feedback.
Speaker 1: Loop of addiction, Okay, addiction.
Speaker 2: For psychopathic serial offenders. The act of murder is the
ultimate high, a surge of absolute power and dominance. But
by its very nature, the act is transient. It ends,
the victim dies, the adrenaline fades, and the killer is
left with a baseline reality that feels empty. By comparison,
the photograph acts as a synthetic substitute. It is a
psychological battery. Whenever Raider felt his sense of power waning,
he would retrieve these photos, plug into that battery, and
ritually relive the crime.
Speaker 1: Wow. Plug into the battery.
Speaker 2: The visual stimulus allowed his brain to endlessly replay and
manipulate the scenario, essentially allowing him to repeatedly violate the
victim in his mind for years after their physical death.
That is, I mean, that's just evil organized killers. The
memory of the act, the ability to control the narrative
of the memory, is often just as important as the
murder itself.
Speaker 1: So the photo isn't a memory, it's a tool to
reinflict the crime internally. That makes a horrifying kind of sense,
it does. But if Rader used photos as a battery
to recharge his ego, what do we make of an
offender whose collection grows so massive it practically overtakes their
physical environment.
Speaker 2: Ah.
Speaker 1: Yes, because Rader hit his photos carefully. Lonnie Franklin Junior,
the Grim Sleeper, basically wallpapered his life with them.
Speaker 2: Franklin operated in the shadows of south central Los Angeles
for over two decades. He targeted highly vulnerable women, and
his crimes went tragically unconnected for years.
Speaker 1: That's such a tragic case.
Speaker 2: When a DNA familial match finally led Task Force investigators
to his doorstep, they executed a search warrant on his
property and opened his garage. The cash of evidence they
uncovered was staggering in its volume.
Speaker 1: They found over one thousand photos and hundreds of hours
of video footage hidden in that garage, images of women
in various states of unconsciousness, severe distress, or worse, over
a thousand. The police actually had to take the unprecedented
step of releasing nearly one hundred and eighty of these
photos to the public, just desperately pleading for help to
identify all these unknown women, to figure out who was
still alive and who was a victim.
Speaker 2: It was a massive undertaking for law enforcement.
Speaker 1: But I want to challenge something here. We just talked
about the survival instinct of a killer hiding his crimes.
How does the urge to collect override the basic primal
instinct to hide the evidence.
Speaker 2: That's the real puzzle.
Speaker 1: Think about a normal garage. You have some tools, maybe
some old paint cans, a box of holiday decorations. We
build photo walls in our living rooms to celebrate life, birthdays,
family vacations, graduations.
Speaker 2: Simile milestones.
Speaker 1: To see that entirely normal human impulse to document one's
life inverted into this sprawling, monstrous gallery of death. It's paralyzing.
He lived mere feet away from his own personal museum
of a trial. How did the sheer volume not terrify
him into destroying it all?
Speaker 2: It is a phenomenal question, and it speaks to the
concept of normalization within a fractured psyche, normalization. Over decades
of successfully evading capture, Franklin's fear of apprehension likely diminished,
replaced by a profound arrogance. The sheer volume of the
collection indicates that the documentation was no longer just a trophy.
It had become the primary fabric of his reality.
Speaker 1: So it was just part of his everyday life.
Speaker 2: For Franklin, destroying the photos would have been akin to
erasing his own identity and his life's work. The collection
was his legacy.
Speaker 1: That word legacy, it's chilling.
Speaker 2: He normalized the presence of this horrific evidence because in
his mind those photos represented his ultimate success and dominance.
He had completely detached from the societal reality, where those
photos represent a lethal liability.
Speaker 1: That detachment from reality is a perfect segue, because if
we are exploring the preservation of death, we have to
look at cases where the preservation goes far beyond photography
and enters the realm with a physical form itself.
Speaker 2: This is where things get truly bizarre, It really does.
Speaker 1: This leads us to a deeply confusing case out of
Russia involving a man named Anatoley Mosfin.
Speaker 2: This case continually challenges behavioral analysts because the underlying motivations
are so unique.
Speaker 1: It's hard to even categorize him.
Speaker 2: In twenty eleven, Russian authorities rated the cramped, cluttered apartment
of Mossfin, who was a well regarded academic, a linguist
and a historian who specialized in Celtic history and local
burial rights. A very smart guy on paper, very intelligent.
When officers entered his living space, they found what appeared
to be a massive, eccentric collection of large antique.
Speaker 1: Dolls to sit around his apartment.
Speaker 2: They were dressed in knee high boots, elaborate dresses, and
their faces and hands were carefully wrapped in thick fabric.
Speaker 1: But they weren't dolls. As the investigators got closer, the
smell and the texture gave it away. They realized they
were looking at the mummified remains of twenty six young girls.
Speaker 2: Twenty six.
Speaker 1: Mosvin had spent years actively digging up the fresh graves
of children from local cemeteries, bringing their bodies back to
his apartment, and painstakingly mummifying them using salt and baking soda.
Speaker 2: And he didn't just store them in a closet.
Speaker 1: No, he lived his daily life with them. He installed
music boxes inside their chest cavity so they would sing.
He threw them birthday parties. He sat them on his
sofa to watch television.
Speaker 2: It's an uncanny tableau.
Speaker 1: I have to push back on the standard true crime
narrative here. Usually when we talk about a man with
an apartment full of corpses, we are talking about a
sadistic serial killer. But Moscovin didn't kill these girls. He
dug them up right.
Speaker 2: He was a grave robber, not a murderer, based.
Speaker 1: On everything we know about how lovingly he thought he
was preserving them. Where is the line here? Is he
irredeemably evil or is he just completely terrifyingly detached from reality?
How does the legal and psychological system classify a crime
where the intent was in his twisted mind an act
of care.
Speaker 2: You've hit on the exact debate that forensic psychologists and
the Russian legal system grappled with for months.
Speaker 1: It's a tough one.
Speaker 2: Standard criminal profiling categorizes grave robbing or corpse mutilation under
the umbrella of sexual sadism or necrophilia. But Moskvin did
not fit those profile.
Speaker 1: No, he didn't seem to have those motives.
Speaker 2: During his psychiatric evaluations, his logic, while completely detached from reality,
was internally consistent. He claimed that he felt immense sorrow
for these children who had been abandoned in the cold,
dark earth.
Speaker 1: He felt sorry for them.
Speaker 2: He stated he was waiting for science to eventually find
a way to reanimate the dead, and in the meantime,
he was bringing them into his home to keep them warm,
to keep them company and to care for them.
Speaker 1: So, in his completely fractured logic, he was actually performing
an act of salvation.
Speaker 2: Precisely, it is a singular, extreme example of severe delusion,
manifesting as horrific desecration. He lacked the malicious in to
harm the living, but his profound schizophrenia led to an
incomprehensible violation of the dead.
Speaker 1: It's just so sad.
Speaker 2: He was ultimately ruled unfit to stand trial and committed
to a psychiatric facility. It challenges our standard definitions of
a crime scene because his motive wasn't violence or destruction.
It was a grotesque, desperately misguided form of preservation born
out of profound loneliness and mental illness.
Speaker 1: It is the ultimate tragedy of the Uncanny Valley. The
attempt to make death look like life only highlights the
horror exactly. But if we're talking about homes filled with
the physical remnants of the dead, there is one historical
case that casts a long, dark shadow over everything else.
You cannot talk about the physical preservation of human remains
without analyzing the butcher of Plainfield ed guine.
Speaker 2: Ed Gains, Wisconsin farmhouse in the late nineteen fifties remains
the ultimate literal house of horror.
Speaker 1: It's infamous.
Speaker 2: When local police entered his pitch black, dilapidated home searching
for a missing hardware store owner named Bernice Warden, they
didn't just find a victim, they found an entire environment
constructed from death.
Speaker 1: It's the stuff of literal nightmares. It is the real
life inspiration for Norman Bates in Psycho, leather Face in
the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Buffalo Bill in Silence of
the Lambs.
Speaker 2: His influence on horror cinema is massive.
Speaker 1: Investigators found furniture, clothing, and everyday household items crafted entirely
from human remains. He had bowls fashioned from human skulls,
chairs upholstered with human skin, a waste basket made of skin,
and articles of clothing made from the flesh of women
he had exhumed from local graveyards.
Speaker 2: What is most fascinating about Gain from spatial and psychological
standpoint is how he completely reversed the normal human process
of habitation and boundary setting.
Speaker 1: Boundary setting, what do you mean?
Speaker 2: Usually a functional human being maintains a strict boundary between
their safe living space and the refuse or decay of
the outside world. You clean your house, you take your
trash out to the dump, you bury the dead.
Speaker 1: All right, we keep the inside clean and the outside out.
Speaker 2: He's suffering from severe isolation and undiagnosed psychotic disorders. Following
the death of his domineering mother, did the exact opposite.
He went out into the world to the local graveyards,
dug up the decaying dead, and brought the dump into
his living room.
Speaker 1: He erased the boundary between the graveyard and the home exactly.
Speaker 2: His home became an externalized, physical reflection of his completely
fractured internal mind. He lived entirely alone, boarding up the
rooms his mother used to occupy, keeping them in pristine
condition like a museum, while he lived an absolute squalor
in the remaining rooms, surrounded by his macabre creations.
Speaker 1: So his house was literally his brain.
Speaker 2: In his isolation, the boundary between the living world, the dead,
and his own morbid obsessions dissolved completely. His environment wasn't
just a place he lived, It was a physical manifestation
of his psychosis.
Speaker 1: It is deeply unsettling to consider how our physical environments
reflect our internal mental states, which brings us to a
transition that I find possibly the most heartbreaking aspect of
this entire discussion.
Speaker 2: Where are we heading now?
Speaker 1: Because trophies and mementos, Green's skin furniture, Franklin's photo walls,
raiders polaroids, They are usually hidden the way Gen's farmhouse
was isolated. Franklin's garage was padlog raidar used false bottoms
and cabinets.
Speaker 2: They kept their secret secret.
Speaker 1: But sometimes the horror is placed right out in the open.
Sometimes it is woven into the very fabric of society,
directly corrupting symbols of childhood, innocence, community trust, and spiritual peace.
Speaker 2: The corruption of safe sanctuaries. This is a recurring theme
in criminal behavior that creates an intense, lingering psychological dissonance
for the general public.
Speaker 1: It really messes with people's heads.
Speaker 2: We as a society rely heavily on certain archetypes, symbols,
and institutions to signify safety and predictability. When an offender
violates those symbols, the shockwave goes far beyond the immediate victims.
It traumatizes the collective psyche.
Speaker 1: And I can think of no case that symbolizes this
specific cultural dissonance more intensely than John Wayne Gacy in
The Clownsuits.
Speaker 2: Gaysey is a terrifying case study in the duality of
a psychopath in the nineteen seventies. To all outward appearances,
he was a pillar of his suburban Chicago community.
Speaker 1: He was a respected guy.
Speaker 2: It was a highly successful local contractor. He was actively
involved in local politics and the Democratic Party, and most famously,
he volunteered his weekends to dress up as Pogo the
Clown to entertain children at neighborhood block parties and local
pediatric hospitals.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was the friendly neighborhood guy. And all the
while he was operating a literal graveyard beneath the floorboards of.
Speaker 2: His home, a literal mass grave.
Speaker 1: He was hiding twenty nine corpses in the crawl space
of his house and tossing several others into the nearby
de Plain River. Yeah. When investigators finally pieced the clues
together and executed a search worn on his home, the
smell of decay was overpowering. But alongside the unimaginable physical
horror of excavating the human remains, they found his custom
made Pogo the Clown costumes hanging neatly in his bedroom closet. Now.
Speaker 2: Obviously, owning a brightly colored clown suit is not illegal.
Speaker 1: Of course not.
Speaker 2: But finding those roughle outfits, the oversized shoes, and the
makeup kits sitting near feet away from a trapdoor leading
to a mass grave adds a layer of nightmarish irony
that is difficult to process.
Speaker 1: It is the.
Speaker 2: Ultimate collision of a manufactured persona of joy, with the
reality of absolute predation.
Speaker 1: I want to look at the cultural impact of that
discovery because it fundamentally altered the American psyche think about
the timeline. Before Gacy was arrested, clowns were almost universally
seen as figures of unadulterated joy, of childhood, innocence, of
harmless circus fund.
Speaker 2: They are just goofy entertainers.
Speaker 1: The widespread media coverage of the clown suits hanging above
the crawl space permanently assassinated that archetype. It solidified the
evil clown trope and pop culture forever. Steen King's It
was published just a few years later.
Speaker 2: The timing is undeniable.
Speaker 1: Whenever we see a creepy clown movie now, that virtual
fear traces its roots directly back to the very real
juxtaposition of Pogo the Clown and John Wayne Gacy. It
wasn't just physical evidence of a crime, It was a
public execution of a cultural symbol of innocence.
Speaker 2: It boils down to the ultimate betrayal of trust. In
Youngin's psychology, the clown or the fool is a boundary crosser.
They are allowed to break societal rules for the sake
of entertainment. The clown mask is designed to elicit immediate,
unearned trust from the most vulnerable members of society. Children
Gaysey utilized that mask as the ultimate camouflage for a predator.
It's sickening when the public realized that the mask of
ultimate safety was hiding the face of ultimate evil. The
resulting cultural fear was profound and lasting.
Speaker 1: Betrayal of trust is the exact right phrase, and we
see another massive betrayal of trust, but operating on a
completely different frequency, a spiritual level, with the Heaven's Gate cult.
Speaker 2: In March of nineteen ninety seven, police entered a sprawling
rented man in the affluent neighborhood of Rancho Santa Fe, California.
Speaker 1: I remember seeing this on the news.
Speaker 2: What they discovered was the aftermath of the largest mass
suicide in United States history on domestic soil, Thirty nine
members of the Heaven's Gate cult had systematically taken their
own lives, driven by the belief that their souls would
evacuate their physical vessels and board an extraterrestrial spacecraft they
believed was trailing the Hailbop Comet.
Speaker 1: I was just a kid when this happened, but the
video footage shot by the investigators walking through that house
is burned into my brain because it absolutely devides everything
your brain expects a mass casualty scene to look like.
Speaker 2: It was so bizarrely calm.
Speaker 1: When you hear the phrase thirty nine bodies, your mind
immediately conjures images of chaos, violence, blood, and panic. But
what the police found was the exact opposite. They found
immaculate uniformity.
Speaker 2: Yes, the pristine, quiet, orderly nature of the scene is
what makes it so profoundly eerie and unsettling to behavioral analysts.
Took the poison in waves over the course of three days.
The surviving members cleaned up after the deceased, posed their
bodies and covered them Before taking the poison themselves.
Speaker 1: They cleaned up after each other.
Speaker 2: Each member was dressed in identical stark black shirts and sweatpants.
They were laid out on bunk beds or mattresses on
the floor. Their faces and torsos were neatly covered with
identical square purple shrouds.
Speaker 1: It's so ritualistic.
Speaker 2: They all had packed luggage bags placed neatly at the
foot of their beds, and perhaps most famously, every single
one of them was wearing brand new, identical black and
white Nike decade.
Speaker 1: Sneakers, Those matching snakers sticking out from under the purple cloths.
It's an iconic, devastating image. The juxtaposition of a global
corporate athletic brand whose slogan is just do it utilized
as the uniform for a mass cosmic suicide.
Speaker 2: It's surreal.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you, why does the lack of
a struggle make it so much worse? Why does the
peacefulness of the scene induce more dread than a vinyl one?
Speaker 2: Because it forces us to confront the terrifying invisible power
of coercive control and extreme isolated.
Speaker 1: Belief systems cours of control.
Speaker 2: A violent crime scene is something we can rationalize on
a primal level. There was an attacker, There was a victim,
and the victim's survival instincts kicked in and they fought back.
It aligns with our understanding of human nature.
Speaker 1: It makes logical sense to us.
Speaker 2: But the Heaven's Gate scene was a highly organized, surreal,
meticulously planned tableau. The uniformity, the matching nikes, the identical shrouds,
the packed lovage indicates a complete and total surrender of
individual ego and the survival instinct to a shared lethal delusion.
Speaker 1: They just gave up.
Speaker 2: It is deeply unsettling because the silence of that house
is a testament to the fact that psychological manipulation and
the corruption of faith can be just as lethal and
far more efficient than any physical weapon. They trusted their leader,
Marshall Applewhite, so completely that they put on their matching shoes,
lay down in their bunk beds, and willingly went to
sleep forever.
Speaker 1: It's the weaponization of belief and from the corruption of faith,
we unfortunately have to look at the absolute corruption of
a symbol of pure global childhood innocence. I am talking
about the Hello Kitty doll case from Hong Kong in
nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 2: This is a case of extreme, prolonged cruelty that shocked
the entire world.
Speaker 1: It's really hard to even hear about.
Speaker 2: A twenty three year old nightclub hostess named Fan man
U was abducted by three Triad members over a relatively
minor financial dispute. She was held captive in a busy
apartment complex and subjected to weeks of unimaginable escalating torture,
which eventually resulted in her death.
Speaker 1: It is brutal. It's a story of horrific dehumanization. But
what places this specific case into our discussion today is
the psychology of how they chose to dispose of her remains.
Speaker 2: Right the disposal method.
Speaker 1: After she died, her captors dismembered her body. They then
took a large Hello Kitty Mermaid doll, a massive plush
toy that is globally recognized as an icon of extreme cuteness, softness,
and childhood sweetness, and they severed the stuffed head, remove
the stuffing, and placed her skull inside it.
Speaker 2: It's so morbid.
Speaker 1: They literally sowed the plush doll back up with her
remains hidden inside, and left it in the apartment.
Speaker 2: The drawing juxtaposition here is what investigators focus on. The
perpetrators didn't just want to hide the evidence. They could
have disposed of the remains in any number of covert ways.
Speaker 1: They had other options.
Speaker 2: They deliberately chose a vessel that represented the absolute antithesis
of their brutal actions.
Speaker 1: Why do that?
Speaker 2: Though Hello Kitty is soft, harmless, and innocent, by utilizing
it as a grotesque disposal method, they demonstrated a complete
and utter contempt for the victim's humanity, even in death.
It was a mocking gesture, so it was an insult.
It takes an object explicitly designed to bring comfort and
joy to a child and permanently taints it, turning it
into a literal container for torture and death. It highlights
a depth of depravity where the killers are actively mocking
the concept of innocence itself.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate profanity. They took something soft and filled
it with hold horror, and keeping with this terrible theme
of childhood toys being corrupted by violence, we have to
talk about the nineteen ninety one murder of Lucille Johnson
in Utah and the chilling presence of the legos.
Speaker 2: Lucille Johnson was a seventy eight year old woman, a
grandmother who was brutally beaten and strangled to death in
the living room of her own home.
Speaker 1: Just awful.
Speaker 2: But what stood out immediately to the crime scene investigators
was a detail that felt completely incongruous with the violent
struggle that had taken place. Scattered all over the floor
around her body, mere inches from the violence, were brightly
colored plastic lego bricks.
Speaker 1: For twenty three years, this case was completely cold. Detectives
had no idea who killed her, and they had absolutely
no idea why a pile of children's toys was left
at the scene of an elderly woman's murder.
Speaker 2: It was a bizarre mystery.
Speaker 1: It wasn't until DNA and advanced fingerprint technology caught up
in twenty fourteen that they finally cracked it. They identified
the killer as a man named John Sansing, but the
bombshell was that the tiny fingerprints found on the legos
didn't belong to him.
Speaker 2: The forensic analysis concluded that the fingerprints on the toys
belonged to Sansung's son, his son. Further investigation revealed the
horrifying truth. Sansing had brought his young toddler aged son
with him to Lucille Johnson's house on the day of
the murder.
Speaker 1: Let's really sit with the gravity of that. While this
man is committing a heinous, brutal, physically exhausting murder of
an elderly woman, he had given his own toddler a
pile of legos to play on the floor of the
exact same room.
Speaker 2: It's almost impossible to picture.
Speaker 1: The cognitive dissonance required to process that visual is pure torment.
Imagine a young child innocently snapping together red and blue
plastic blocks, entirely unaware of or tragically ignoring, the extreme
violence happening mere feet away. Yeah, it is the literal
visual representation of innocence colliding with pure evil in the
exact same physical space. The legos themselves are completely neutral,
innocent objects, but they serve as a permanent physical marker
of the most severe parental failure and moral bankruptcy imaginable.
Speaker 2: It forces us to consider the silent collateral damage of
violent crime. That child unknowingly present at a murder, leaving
his tiny fingerprints on toys at a bloody crime scene.
Speaker 1: It's devastating to that kid.
Speaker 2: It corrupts the sanctity of childhood play in the most
unimaginable way. It shows how the perpetrator compartmentalized his reality.
He was acting as an active murderer and a passive
babysitter simultaneously.
Speaker 1: It really highlights how evil doesn't just happen in dark
cinematic alleys. It happens in living rooms. It happens right
next to play mats.
Speaker 2: It brings the horror right into the domestic sphere, which
brings us.
Speaker 1: To our next segment. And I think this explores one
of the most primal fears we have grotesque infrastructure. What
happens when the domestic environments we rely on to survive
our kitchens, our plumbing, our basements are utilized for unspeakable acts,
When the architecture of the home itself becomes the horror.
Speaker 2: The home, structurally speaking, is supposed to be our ultimate
refuge from the dangers of.
Speaker 1: The outside world, our safe place.
Speaker 2: When an offender utilizes the very infrastructure of domestic life
to facilitate, commit or conceal their crimes, it violates one
of the most fundamental societal contracts we have. It turns
the shelter into a trap.
Speaker 1: And Catherine Knight is a terrifying, almost mythic example of this.
She was the first Australian woman to be sentenced to
life without parole, and when you examine the crime scene,
it is immediately viscerally obvious why the courts threw away
the key.
Speaker 2: In February of two thousand, police arrived at the home
of her partner, John Price, after his coworkers grew concerned
when he failed to show up for work. The scene
the officers encountered upon entering the house was beyond anything
their training could have prepared them for.
Speaker 1: They walked into a slaughterhouse.
Speaker 2: Knight had stabbed Price to death during a domestic dispute,
but the murder was merely the prologue to her actions.
She then meticulously flayed his body, skin him and hung
the pelt from a door frame in the hallway.
Speaker 1: The hallway is horrific, but the true horror, the discovery
that elevates this from a brutal domestic homicide to a
level of almost ancient mythic evil, was waiting for them
in the kitchen.
Speaker 2: The kitchen scene is infamous.
Speaker 1: Police noticed a large pot boiling on the stove, and
when seasoned veteran officers approached and peered inside, the boiling water.
They saw John Price's decapitated head cooking alongside a medley
of vegetables.
Speaker 2: It's just beyond belief.
Speaker 1: And nearby, set up neatly on the dining room table
were plates of prepared food with handwritten place cards bearing
the names of Price's adult children. She had cooked his
flesh and was actively intending to serve him to his
own children when they came home for dinner.
Speaker 2: Let's unpack the psychology of the home here, please do.
The kitchen is universally recognized as the heart of a home.
It is a place of nourishment, of warmth, of family gathering,
and of care. Catherine Knight didn't just murder her partner.
She orchestrated a culinary nightmare. She weaponized the tools of domesticity,
the stove, the cooking pots, the dinner plates, the place
cards to commit and act a profound taboo breaking vengeance.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate perversion of a home cooked meal.
Speaker 2: It is the media complex fully realized in Greek mythology.
Medea killed her own children to punish her betraying husband.
Knight intended to feed a father to his children.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, that's a perfect comparison.
Speaker 2: Transforming a family dinner table into a cannibalistic trap shatters
any concept of a safe domestic life. It is the
ultimate perversion of the nurturing female archetype. She took the
role of the homemaker and inverted it into the role
of the destroyer, using the infrastructure of the kitchen to
execute her vengeance.
Speaker 1: And while Knight's crime was an overt theatrical display right
in the heart of the home, other offenders utilized the invisible,
hidden infrastructure of a building to conceal their crimes. This
brings us to the grim claustrophobic case of Dennis Nilssen
in London in nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 2: The blocked drains at twenty three Cranley Gardens. This case
exposes our vulnerability to the shared infrastructure of urban living.
The residents of this multi unit apartment building began complaining
to their landlord about a foul smell and their plumbing
backing up.
Speaker 1: The landlord does what any landlord does. He calls a plumber.
The plumber arrives, goes to the exterior drain cover, pops
it open, and he's expecting to pull out a mass
of tangled hair mobe. Some congealed soap or tree roots,
standard plumbing issues.
Speaker 2: Instead, he finds the drain clogged with small bones and
a fleshy substance.
Speaker 1: A nightmare.
Speaker 2: When the authorities were called and a pathologist conclusively identified
the material as human remains, it was a shockingly simple
matter of tracing the plumbing pipes directly up to the
top floor flat, which was occupied by Dennis Nilsen.
Speaker 1: Milson, a former police officer and civil servant, had been
luring young men back to his apartment, murdering them and
dissecting them. But he didn't have a car to dispose
of the bodies, so he u's the plumbing right, So
he literally began flushing their remains down the toilet piece
by piece for months, until the sheer volume of human
material caused the municipal pipes of the Victorian house to
clog under the pressure.
Speaker 2: It's incredibly grim.
Speaker 1: I look at this case and it makes me look
at my own apartment building differently. We are surrounded by pipes, vents,
and wires that connect us to our neighbors. We never
think about the invisible infrastructure in our walls or the
drains under our streets. Until they'd stop working.
Speaker 2: That is the core terror of the Nilsen case. He
utilized the functional anonymity of the city's sewer system to
erase his victims. He relied on the mundane mechanics of
urban infrastructure to swallow his crimes.
Speaker 1: It's disgusting to think about.
Speaker 2: It is a disgustingly stark reminder that the terrifying secrets
of a serial killer can be flowing right through the
pipes in the walls of your own home.
Speaker 1: And when we talk about utilizing infrastructure for disposal and processing,
you absolutely have to examine Jeffrey Dahmer.
Speaker 2: When Milwaukee police finally broke into Dahmer's apartment in July
of nineteen ninety one, they found a litany of horrors,
heads in the refrigerator, skulls in the closet.
Speaker 1: House of horrors, But one of.
Speaker 2: The most imposing terrifying items from a logistical standpoint was
a massive fifty seven gallon blue plastic drum sitting openly
in the corner of his bedroom.
Speaker 1: A fifty seven gallon vat filled with a highly corrosive,
powerful acid solution, which he was actively using to dissolve
the torsos and remains of three victims.
Speaker 2: Just sitting there in his bedroom.
Speaker 1: I want to focus on a quote from the medical
examiner on the case. They famously said that processing Dahmer's
apartment felt less like working a standard crime scene and
more like quote, dismantling someone's museum. And I would take
that a step further. It was like dismantling a processing plant.
Speaker 2: That is an incredibly accurate assessment. The blue acid vat
represents a premeditated, logistical, almost corporate approach to murder. Dahmer
wasn't just acting on impulse. He had set up an
industrial scale disposal facility within the confines of a standard
unit apartment complex.
Speaker 1: Consider the logistics required. He had to source a specialized
fifty seven gallon chemical drum.
Speaker 2: Which isn't easy.
Speaker 1: He had to purchase gallons of investrial strength acid from
chemical supply companies transported in his car, carry it up
the stairs, and figure out the ventilation to avoid suffocating
himself from the fumes, all while living side by side
with unsuspecting neighbors who are complaining about the smell. It
is a dark mirror of corporate supply chain logistics applied
to human destruction.
Speaker 2: It's the banality of evil mixed with hardware store procurement,
which leads me directly to Dean Corel, the candy man,
And I really want to push back on a narrative
we often hear in True Prime, this idea of crimes
of passion or killers who just snap.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the excuse gets thrown around a lot.
Speaker 2: Corel, along with two teenage accomplices, murdered at least twenty
eight young men in Texas in the early nineteen seventies.
When police searched his properties, they found this clywood board,
a custom built torture board with metal handcuffs and ropes
permanently attack hatched, designed specifically to restrain his victims by
all four limbs.
Speaker 1: Here is my question, and I want you to break
this down for me. When we see an offender literally
building a structure, going to the lumberyard, measuring the plywood,
buying the heavy duty hardware, pre drilling the holes, screwing
in the handcuffs, what does that tell us about their
psychological methodology? Because that's not snapping. They are literally constructing
architecture for their crimes.
Speaker 2: It tells us everything we need to know about the
difference between a disorganized, reactive offender and a highly organized,
sadistic predator. You are exactly right. A crime of passion
is an explosion of emotion in a specific moment. It
is chaotic, right. Constructing a torture board is proactive, patient,
and methodical. It requires a trip to the hardware store.
It requires measuring tapes and levels.
Speaker 1: Ye had to sit there and build it.
Speaker 2: It requires a person to sit quietly in their garage
with their own thoughts, visualizing exactly how they are going
to inflict maximum pain, and then meticulously building the physical
apparatus to make that dark fantasy a reality.
Speaker 1: It is a terrifyingly premeditated project.
Speaker 2: In profiling, we look at this as the ultimate expression
of the killer's signature. When an offender engages in carpentry
to facilitate murder, they are demonstrating a complete and total
commitment to their sadism.
Speaker 1: So the board is proof.
Speaker 2: The board is irrefutable proof that the torture wasn't an
accidental byproduct of a robbery gone wrong. The prolonged culture
was the entire purpose of the crime. They are acting
as the engineers of their own dark fantasies.
Speaker 1: Is chilling to think of someone whistling while they sand
down the edges of a torture device.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: But you know, for some perpetrators keeping their crimes a secret,
locking it away in their own infrastructure, dissolving it in
a vat, or bearing it in a crawl space, it
just isn't enough. The ego demands more. They desperately want
to communicate, They want to taunt, They want to leave
a permanent, visible mark on the world, which leads us.
Speaker 2: To our final segment, Cipher's taunts and Manifesto's the killer's voice.
When the physical evidence of a crime scene is accompanied
by the written word, it provides a direct, albeit highly manipulated,
and unreliable window into the offender's mind.
Speaker 1: Let's start with what is arguably the most famous and
most endlessly debated note in modern criminal history, the John
Beney Ramsey ransom note.
Speaker 2: The murder of six year old John Benet in Boulder, Colorado,
in nineteen ninety six remains a source of massive public
interest and intense forensic debate, and a large part of
that debate centers on the bizarre nature of the primary
piece of evidence, the two and a half paid handwritten
a ransom note found by her mother Patsy Ramsey on
the staircase.
Speaker 1: The note is a masterclass in behavioral anomalies. First, the
demands are oddly specific, exactly one hundred eighteen thousand dollars,
which happened to mirror the father's exact holiday bonus. It
is signed by a fictitious small foreign faction.
Speaker 2: It's very theatrical.
Speaker 1: But the detail that has always made my stomach turn
is the physical reality of the note it's creation. The
note was written on a pad of paper taken from
a desk inside the home, using a sharpie pen from
that same desk. Okay, I want to place the listener
in this scenario. Imagine being an intruder. You break into
a large house, You commit a horrific, loud, messy crime
in the basement, and then you just hang around. You stay,
You sit down at a desk in the quiet house,
knowing the parents are sleeping right up stairs, and you
take the time to write out a rambling, dramatic, moviesque manifesto.
You even write a practice draft.
Speaker 2: First, the psychology of the lingering intruder is deeply problematic
for investigators. It contradicts standard criminal behavior. Most burglars or
intruders are driven by a desperate need to minimize their
time on the scene to avoid detection. Every second spent
in the house exponentially increases the risk of.
Speaker 1: Capture, so writing a draft makes no sense.
Speaker 2: To sit and write a draft and then carefully write
out a final two and a half page letter suggests
as an incredibly bizarre level of comfort or compulsion that
overrides the basics revival.
Speaker 1: Instinct or suggests something else entirely.
Speaker 2: Of course, as many FBI analysts and law enforcement officials
have heavily theorized over the decades, this massive anomaly strongly
points to the possibility that the note was entirely staged,
staged by someone already living in the home, completely comfortable
in the environment, utilizing the note to cover up an
accidental death or an internal crime.
Speaker 1: Regardless of who held the pen, the stationary itself is
the focal point of the mystery. It is a physical
object intended to dictate a false narrative to the police.
Speaker 2: A physical object intended to dictate a false narrative.
Speaker 1: And speaking of dictating narratives, we have David Berkowitz, the
son of Sam who paralyzed New York City in the
summer of nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 2: Berkovitz targeted young couples in parked cars, shooting them with
a forty four callible revolver. The random nature of the
attacks caused widespread systemic panic across the Burroughs, but the
dynamic of the manhunt shifted drastically when authorities found a
handwritten letter left at a crime scene addressed directly to
NYPS Captain Joseph Birelli.
Speaker 1: It is a terrifying piece of correspondence. He identifies himself
as the son of Sam, He mocks the police for
their inability to catch him, and he writes at length
about his father Sam, wanting blood, demanding blessed.
Speaker 2: It's a very famous letter.
Speaker 1: But when you actually read the letter, what strikes me
isn't the sense of criminal mastermind brilliance. It's how unpolished
and chaotic it is. It's full of block lettering, strange misspellings,
grammatical errors, and incoherent rambling thoughts that jump from topic
to topic. It's not the work of a supervillain. It
is a raw glimpse into a deeply troubled, fragmented mind.
Speaker 2: The Brelli letter demystified him in a way, while simultaneously
making him scarier to the public. It showed he was
not a calculated assassin, but a chaotic, unpredictable individual driven
by profound, unyielding delusions.
Speaker 1: And he wanted everyone to know it.
Speaker 2: The handwritten taunt is an exercise and power. He couldn't
control his own mind, but by writing that letter and
ensuring it made the front page of the newspapers, he
was forcing the entire city of New York to interact
with his psychosis.
Speaker 1: And then we have a case that I want to
debate with you. The Lipstick Killer William Aarons, operating in
Chicago in the nineteen forties. He murdered three people, but
he is most famous for the message he left scrolled
on the living room wall of one of his victim's apartments,
written in her own lipstick.
Speaker 2: Yes the lipstick message.
Speaker 1: It read, for Heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more.
I cannot control myself, So I have to ask, when
you analyze a message like that, how do you interpret it?
On one hand, people say it's theatrical, but I have
a really hard time buying that it's purely theater.
Speaker 2: You think it's genuine if you are.
Speaker 1: A narcissist trying to build a brand. You write I
am a god. You don't write I cannot control myself.
That sounds like genuine terror at your own compulsions. Why
are we so quick to dismiss the possibility that a
monster can be terrified of their own reflection? Is it
a genuine plea for help from a fractured mind or
is it just manipulative mockery?
Speaker 2: That is one of the eternal unresolved debates in behavioral analysis.
You make a very strong point about the vulnerability of
the wording.
Speaker 1: It just feels too pathetic to be bragging.
Speaker 2: On one hand, serial offenders often experience an escalating compulsion
that feels entirely out of their conscious control, a sort
of psychological pressure cooker. The message could indeed be a
rare moment of lucidity, a fleeting instant where the conscious
mind begs society to stop the subconscious monster. However, many
profilers argue the opposite. Psychopaths are incredibly adept at theatricality
and manipulation. Writing a melodramatic plea in a victim's lipstick
is incredibly cinematic. It is tailored for the front page
of the Chicago Tribune.
Speaker 1: They know it'll make a good headline.
Speaker 2: It feeds the killer's ego by creating a compelling, tragically
conflicted persona for the public to obsess over. They want
to be seen as a complex jeckyal and Hide figure
rather than just a brutal thug. Given what we know
about the deep narcissistic trad it's required to take a
human life, many analysts lean heavily towards theatrical manipulation. The
killer wants to direct the audience's emotional response.
Speaker 1: It's morbid brand building. Yeah, and sadly, sometimes a killer's
communication isn't a taunt after the fact, but a clear
warning beforehand that is tragically misinterpreted. Let's look at the
Camp Scott murders in nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 2: This is a profoundly tragic case where context completely masked
a lethal threat. Three young girl scouts were murdered in
their tent at Camp Scott in Oklahoma. But what haunts
everyone involved is what happened less than two months prior
to the killings. A camp counselor returned to her tent,
found her personal belongings ransacked, and discovered a handwritten note
inside a donut box, and.
Speaker 1: The note wasn't vague. It literally read we are on
a mission to kill three girls in tent one.
Speaker 2: The counselor took it to the camp director, but it
was universally dismissed as a cruel, tasteless prank. No sweeping
security actions were taken, and the camp opened as scheduled.
Speaker 1: That is just heart wrenching.
Speaker 2: The tragedy of Heinz site is agonizing here. The note
was a literal blueprint of the crime i' MacB promise,
but because it was delivered in the specific environment of
a summer camp, a place inherently associated with childhood pranks,
dramatic ghost stories, and harmless mischief, it wasn't given the
way it deserved. The innocent context blinded the adults to
the very real threat.
Speaker 1: Killers absolutely know how to use symbols in context. Let's
run through some of the macob calling cards and signatures
offenders leave behind to assert their dominance. Take the Bellway
snipers John al Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, who completely
paralyzed the Washington DC area for three weeks in two
thousand and two. They were shooting people at random from
the modified trunk of a Chevy Caprice.
Speaker 2: The extreme distance and the use of a vehicle provided
them with near total anonymity, but their egos still craved
recognition and interaction with the authorities. At one of the scenes,
tuck near the woods, they left a death tarot card
and on it they wrote a message for the police.
Speaker 1: Call me God, Call me God. It's the ultimate expression
of the megalomania we were just discussing. They held the
power of life and death from the trunk of a car,
completely unseen, and they used a mystical symbol of fate,
the tarot card, to assert their perceived divinity over the
public and law enforcement. It's all about power, and we
see another intensely symbolic signature with Richard Ramirez, the Nightstalker.
He terrorized California in the mid eighties, breaking into homes,
and he had an obsessive fascination with satanic imagery.
Speaker 2: Ramirez openly embraced satanic symbols, utilizing them largely for their
intense shock value and their ability to inflict maximum psychological
fear on his victims and the public. During one of
his early assaults, he stole a victim's lipstick and drew
two large pentagrams on her bedroom walls. Later, after murdering
a couple, he drew another pentagram on the wall and
wrote the phrase.
Speaker 1: Jack the knife, leaving a symbol of pure cultural malevolence
right at the scene. He wanted the victims and the
police who were later to believe they were dealing with
a literal demon, not just a man.
Speaker 2: He was playing a character.
Speaker 1: And sometimes the message isn't symbolic at all, it's brutally
painfully literal, like the case of Prince Hepburn in the Bahamas.
Speaker 2: Hepburn violently murdered his girlfriend. When police arrived at the
bloody scene, they didn't have to search for the murder weapon.
They found the bloody machete left plainly at the scene,
but Hepburn had used the broad blade of the weapon
as a billboard. On one side of the machete, he
had scrawled in marker, this is what cheaters get.
Speaker 1: It's so morbidly vindictive. He used the very instrument that
ended her life to retroactively justify the murder and leave
a crude warning for the man he suspected she was seeing.
It is the weapon serving double duty as a.
Speaker 2: Manifesto that's a very apt description.
Speaker 1: And taking that vindictive need to communicate into the modern
digital age, we have David Kallak, the so called four
Chan murderer. In twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2: Kailak murdered his ex girlfriend in their apartment, and rather
than fleeing or calling the authorities, he immediately took to
the Internet to broadcast his crime. He uploaded gruesome, undeniable
photos of her body to the anonymous four Chan message boards,
treating a real world murder as sensational content for an
anonymous online audience.
Speaker 1: He posted terrible things alongside the photos, like it's way
harder to strangle someone to death than the looks on
the movies. And inside the physical house, he wrote messages
on the window blinds and on her driver's license. He
just took a black marker and wrote the word dead.
Speaker 2: Writing dead on a driver's license is a profound, calculated
act of erasure. Think about what a license is. It
is state sanctioned proof of identity. It proves you exist
and have a place in society. By scrolling that word
across her photo, he wasn't just killing her physically. He
was administratively and symbolically attempting to cancel out her existence
entirely wow erasing her identity.
Speaker 1: Completely simultaneously by posting to four chan, he was desperately
boosting his own infamy. Seeking validation from the darkest corners
of the Internet.
Speaker 2: And seeking infamy and power isn't just an adult compulsion.
We see it manifest in children, specifically Mary Bell, Written's
youngest female serial killer. She was only an eleven year
old girl in the late nineteen sixties when she murdered
two young boys.
Speaker 1: Bill's psychology is incredibly complex, heavily rooted in severe childhood
trauma and maternal abuse, but what is striking for our
discussion is her behavior. Immediately following the murders. She and
a friend broke into a local nursery, vandalized the property,
and left haunting notes for the police. One of them
explicitly read, I murders that I may come back. It
is deeply chilling to hear those words coming from the
mind of an eleven year old. The general consensus among
psychologists is that she was intentionally teasing and provoking the
police because they hadn't caught her yet. She was a
child playing a lethal, real world game of hide and seek.
Using these notes as a way to feel intellectually superior
to the adults investigating the case.
Speaker 2: It is a grotesque mimicry of adult power dynamics played
out by a profoundly damaged child who had never experienced
healthy control in her own life.
Speaker 1: And finally, when we discuss writings left at crime scenes,
we must analytically acknowledge the Manson family murders in the
summer of nineteen sixty nine. Over the course of their
two night crime spree, the followers left multiple messages written
in the victim's own blood on the walls and doors.
Speaker 2: At the Hinman scene, they wrote political piggy. At the
Tait residence, the word pig was written on the front door,
and at the La Bianca home they wrote Rise Death
to Pigs and the famously misspelled helter skelter on the refrigerator.
Speaker 1: Looking at this purely from a behavioral analysis standpoint, these
writings are fascinating because they represent a completely fabricated motive.
The phrase political piggy and the other messages were orchestrated
by Charles Manson as part of a highly convoluted, delusional
strategy to incite a nationwide race war. He wanted the
police to find these culturally charged phrases and blame the
murders on the Black Panthers or other political groups. We
are just looking at this as a historical artifact of
forensic misdirection, without taking any sides on the political ideologies themselves,
but rather analyzing the attempt to use tense cultural language
to create chaos.
Speaker 2: That is exactly the mechanism at play. The bloody writings
were not spontaneous acts of passion by the killers at
the scene. They were highly calculated theatrical elements dictated prior
to the crimes by Manson. His goal was to sew
maximum societal panic and provide forensic misdirection. There were a
false flag operation written in blood, utilizing the tense political
language of the late nineteen sixties to serve a purely chaotic,
violent agenda.
Speaker 1: It was a false flag that thankfully failed to ignite
his apocalyptic vision, but it succeeded in leaving a permanent
scar on American history. Now, let's pivot to a different
type of communication, messages that weren't meant to misdirect blame,
but were meant to be inherently unsolvable. Cipher's the idea
of a killer communicating in a code. We all know
the Zodiac Killer's cryptograms, but there is a lesser known,
highly bizarre case, Ricky McCormick.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety nine, the body of fourty one year
old Ricky McCormick was found dumped in a Missouri cornfield.
He had been murdered, but when investigator searched his clothing
inside his pockets, they found two pieces of paper filled
with seemingly random, highly structured strings of letters, numbers, and punctuation.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just gibberish. It had the clear cadence of
a cipher And here's what makes this case legendary. The
FBI's Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit has been staring at
these two pieces of paper for decades. These are the
best code breakers in the world, people who crack at
terrorist communications and cartel codes, and they still cannot decode
Ricky McCormick's notes. The FBI actually took the rare step
of releasing the notes to the public, crowdsourcing the problem,
begging armchair salutes for help.
Speaker 2: It's one of their greatest unsolved puzzles.
Speaker 1: This brings up something so fundamental about human nature. We
have this innate, burning desire to solve puzzles. We want order,
we want answers, we hate open loops. And the ultimate
tragedy here is that the key to potentially solving a
man's murder, perhaps the name of his killer or the
reason for his death, is sitting right in front of us,
locked behind an unbreakable code he carried in his own pocket.
Speaker 2: It's maddening, it is incredibly frustrating for law enforcement. A
cipher is a psychological barrier. It holds the tantalizing promise
of truth while actively denying access to it. Whether McCormick
wrote it himself as a personal shorthand or his killer
placed it there as an ultimate taunt, the cipher acts
as a permanent lock on justice. It proves that sometimes
the evidence doesn't speak, it actively refuses to.
Speaker 1: We have two more incredibly bizarre physical signatures to cover
before we wrap up today's exploration. The verse takes us
to the Boston strangler in the early nineteen sixties. He
murdered thirteen women, and his signature was the murder weapon itself.
Speaker 2: He notoriously used his victim's own nylon stockings or articles
of clothing to strangle them. But the chilling detail that
elevated his crimes to a level of distinct psychological horror
is what he did afterward. He didn't just pull the
ligatures tight and leave them. He took the time to
tie the stockings into elaborate flowing bow under the victim's chins.
As one historical writer famously described it, it was tied
like a circus clown's bow tie.
Speaker 1: It's that macar of theatricality we keep coming back to.
To commit a violently intimate murder, expending immen's physical energy
to strangle someone, and then in the immediate aftermath, taking
the time to delicately, meticulously tie a decorative bow. It's
a grotesque mockery of femininity, of gift wrapping, of care.
It's posing the victim for the audience of the police.
Speaker 2: It demonstrates a terrifying post offense behavior. The killer felt
completely unhurried. He wasn't panicked about being caught in the moment.
Tying a delicate bow requires fine motor skills, which means
his adrenaline had settled. He was in total control of
the aftermath, claiming ownership of the scene and.
Speaker 1: Speaking of the aftermath, of a scene. Let's travel back
in time to nineteen twenty two to a remote farm
in Bavaria, Germany. The hinter Kaifk murders a family of
five and their new maid, all brutally killed in their
barn and home with a mattock, a farming tool. The
case remains completely unsolved to this day.
Speaker 2: It is one of the most famous unsolved mysteries in
European history, and it is famous largely because of the
deeply unsettling, almost supernatural clues leading up to the crime.
In the days prior, the patriarch of the family, Andreas Kruber,
noticed a strange newspaper from Munich on the property that
no one in the family had purchased. He heard unexplained
footsteps in the attic. They found scratches on the lock
of the tool shed.
Speaker 1: But the creepiest detail, the one that gives everyone absolute
chills when they hear it, involves the snow. Gruber found
a single set of human footprints in the fresh winter snow.
They let out from the dense, dark edge of the forest,
walking directly to the farmhouse, and there were absolutely zero
footprints leading away.
Speaker 2: It is the physical, real world manifestation of a dose story.
The footprints proved definitively that someone had arrived from the woods,
but the lack of an exit trail meant the threat
was already inside the perimeter. It's the creeping, suffocating realizeation
that the monster is already in the house, hiding in
the attic, waiting for nightfall.
Speaker 1: It's terrifying because it's a clue that confirms your worst paranoia.
And for our final item today, we are going to
look at a piece of physical evidence that wasn't a
cipher and wasn't a taunt, but was a brilliant, profoundly
gross act of forensic misdirection. I'm talking about Ted Katsinski,
the un of Armer.
Speaker 2: Katsinski was a former mathematics professor and a verifiable genius
who waged a nearly two decade solitary bombing campaign against universities, airlines,
and individuals involved with modern technology. Living off the grid
in a Montana cabin, he was incredibly meticulous about forensic countermeasures.
He knew exactly how the FBI analyzed bomb fragments.
Speaker 1: In one of his explosive packages, investigators found a crucial
piece of biological evidence, a single strand of human hair
tucked inside the device. They thought they had a massive break,
but it wasn't his hair. Katsinski had intentionally gone into
a dirty public bus station bathroom, scrounged around, collected random
strands of hair left behind by complete strangers, and place
them inside the bomb, specifically to throw the FBI off
his scent.
Speaker 2: This is a perfect culminating example of a brilliant, angry
mind utilizing deeply unsettling misdirection. It highlights the terrifying intersection
of high intelligence and complete mortal detachment. He understood forensic
science well enough to know the FBI would exhaustively analyze
the hair for DNA and demographic profiling, and he cold
bloodedly used the biological detritus of a random, innocent citizen
to send federal investigators on a massive, expensive, wild goose chase.
Speaker 1: It really makes you think about the vulnerability of our
physical existence. Imagine the FBI knocking on your front door,
treating you as a prime suspect in a domestic terrorism case,
all because your stray hair from a Greyhound bus station
sink ended up inside a bomber's device. The level of calculation,
the sheer paranoia required to think of that countermeasure is
just astounding.
Speaker 2: If we pull all of these disparate threads together from
the nineteen twenties to the modern digital age, we see
a fascinating and deeply disturbing journey of human behavior. We've
traveled from the psychological manipulation of sensory deprivation using balanced teacups,
through the desperate preservation of nightmares and polaroids and dolls,
down into the corrupted, invisible infrastructure of pipes and kitchens,
and finally into the twisted, calculated language of ciphers, bloody manifestos,
and planted evidence.
Speaker 1: It really is a journey through the absolute darkest, most
complex parts of the human mind. And as we wrap
up this exploration into the archives, I want to leave
you the listener with one final lingering thought to Mollover.
We've spent the last hour talking about teacups. We've talked
about a pair of Nike sneakers. We've talked about a
piece of hotel stationery, a child's lego block, a cooking pot,
a Hello Kitty doll. Here is the undeniable truth. None
of these objects are inherently evil. They are completely totally neutral.
They're just plastic ceramic paper and fabric.
Speaker 2: They're just things, right.
Speaker 1: It is solely the human intent that imbues them with horror.
It is the context that transforms them from the mundane
into the monstrous. It makes you wonder, as you sit
in your house right now, or as you walk down
the street, take a look at the objects around you,
how much of our safe, everyday environment is just waiting
to be completely reframed by context.
Speaker 2: It's a haunting thought.
Speaker 1: We've covered a lot of dark, heavy, and psychologically complex
ground today and I genuinely want to know where you
stand on all of this. Which of these objects, scenes,
or psychological concepts do you find the absolute most disturbing?
Is it the calculated psychological terror of David Parker Ray's
audio tapes? Is it the taunting, unhinged notes left by
the lipstick killer? Or is it the corrupted, innocent items
like the legos left beside a terrible crime. Leave a
comment below and let us know your thoughts. We want
to hear your perspective on this.
Speaker 2: It is always fascinating to see which elements resonate most
strongly with different people, as it speaks volumes about our
own individual psychological fears, boundaries, and how we define safety.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Thank you, thank so much for joining us on
this intense exploration today here on Thrilling Threads. We appreciate
you taking the time to unravel these mysteries with us,
and we will catch you next time. Stay curious and
stay safe.