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Speaker 4: Plus, you are now listening to True Murder The most
Speaker 4: shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that
Speaker 4: have written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker, DTK.
Speaker 4: Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking
Speaker 4: and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with
Speaker 4: your host journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Speaker 5: Thirteen new insomnia aducing murder stories from the true crime
Speaker 5: Master Michael Benson, including Monster of the Low Country, Born
Speaker 5: to Raise Hell, The Hollywood Ripper, The Murder of Craig Rideout,
Speaker 5: Call Me Daddy, Savage, Waitress King Creep, Dark Stretch of Road,
Speaker 5: Family of Terror, The Telltale Knot, Vengeance's Mine Breckinridge, and
Speaker 5: a Few Thoughts on the Black Dahlia, Dozens of Photos.
Speaker 5: An excerpt from the book's final story. It is the
Speaker 5: most famous American murder case not involving a celebrity, a
Speaker 5: crime so horrible that it changed the tone of an
Speaker 5: entire city. Before throughout Los Angeles, women routinely walked home
Speaker 5: alone after they required escorts and all because of the
Speaker 5: mind boggingly bizarre ordeal of Elizabeth Short. The Black Dahlia,
Speaker 5: a celebrity only in death to twenty two year old
Speaker 5: raven haired beauty as Shobiz Wannabee was found on the
Speaker 5: morning of January fifteenth, nineteen forty seven. She was naked,
Speaker 5: severed into two pieces below the rib cage and arranged
Speaker 5: on the ground like a piece of surreal art. Arms
Speaker 5: above her head, legs spread, a upper body parallel but
Speaker 5: to the side of her lower body. Our sardonicus smile
Speaker 5: carved into her face with a knife and portions of
Speaker 5: a breast and a thigh cut out. The missing piece
Speaker 5: of a thigh flesh was found inserted in her rectum.
Speaker 5: The skin attached to that piece contained a rose tattoo.
Speaker 5: She'd been tortured for days, tortured till dead, drained of
Speaker 5: blood and dumped no presented at the edge of a
Speaker 5: vacant lot, left foot only inches from the sidewalk, hair
Speaker 5: freshly washed in the Limit Park section of La. The
Speaker 5: cause of death was drowning. She drowned on her own blood.
Speaker 5: The book that we're featuring this evening is Dark Roses thirteen,
Speaker 5: horrific True Stories with my special guest, journalist and author
Speaker 5: Michael Benson. Welcome back to the program, and thank you
Speaker 5: very much for this interview. Michael Benson. Hey, thanks for
Speaker 5: having me Dan, thank you, it's always a treat to
Speaker 5: have you on. And congratulations on this latest It certainly
Speaker 5: lives up to the name thirteen Horrific True Stories. Let's
Speaker 5: just start because I gave a basic synopsis. In the synopsis,
Speaker 5: I gave a sort of the contents of this incredible book.
Speaker 5: Let's just get you talking about some of the first characters,
Speaker 5: some of the first killers and subjects of this book,
Speaker 5: Monster of the Low Country. Tell us about Steven Stanko
Speaker 5: and a little bit about this story.
Speaker 6: Okay, I have written about psycho killers of all shapes
Speaker 6: and sizes, both major genders, but none were more sinister
Speaker 6: than Steven Stenko, the Monster of the Low Country. He
Speaker 6: was different from other psychos. He had charisma, he was
Speaker 6: a social being or he could perfectly imitate one, and
Speaker 6: he metamorphosed into a pied piper party animal while under
Speaker 6: torturous stress. He reminded people of Ted Bundy. He had
Speaker 6: superior social skills, very rare for a cold budded killer.
Speaker 6: As a rule, they have no real understanding of compassion.
Speaker 6: Yet Stanko was observant, and he had emotional mimicry skills
Speaker 6: the rival and Oscar winner. He could make friends, pick
Speaker 6: up women, command the spotlight, even when he he was
Speaker 6: completely desperate and on the run for his life. As
Speaker 6: a kid, he seemed to have everything going for him.
Speaker 6: His dad was demanding and impossible to please, but Steven,
Speaker 6: by all accounts, had a lot going on. He entered
Speaker 6: high school tall and good looking, good at sports, baseball, football,
Speaker 6: Plus he was smart. His teachers got dreamy i thinking
Speaker 6: about him. They knew that the boy was going to
Speaker 6: go far, and they were going to be able to
Speaker 6: say that they knew him. When Ostenko had it all
Speaker 6: mapped out, he was going to join the Air Force Academy.
Speaker 6: He was going to become a fighter pilot, an astronaut,
Speaker 6: and then president in the United States, and he had
Speaker 6: to drive to do it. His father had seen to that,
Speaker 6: But then something went bad. When he was fifteen, his
Speaker 6: older brother died in a suspicious fire, and Stephen thought,
Speaker 6: like in a battlefield promotion, he would move up a
Speaker 6: notch in his father's estimation, but it didn't work out
Speaker 6: that way. Dad seemed to hold Stephen responsible for his
Speaker 6: brother's death, and Steven fell apart. Instead of schoolwork, he
Speaker 6: worked on schemes, convoluted plots, get rich schemes, things like that.
Speaker 6: He took the SAT exam, didn't do that great. I
Speaker 6: was rejected by the Air Force Academy. So when high
Speaker 6: school was over, instead of becoming a fighter pilot and
Speaker 6: astronaut and president of the United States, he took a
Speaker 6: couple of courses at a community college, skipped class, and
Speaker 6: started stealing cars. He became a full fledged con man.
Speaker 6: He could tell lies for weeks without betraying himself, but
Speaker 6: when his lives were exposed, he was cornered by reality.
Speaker 6: He lashed out with violence real doctor Jekyl mister Hyde type.
Speaker 6: First time came in nineteen ninety six when he tried
Speaker 6: to kill his longtime girlfriend Liz. The attack sent him
Speaker 6: to prison for eight years, and like many psychopaths, Stanko
Speaker 6: functioned better in jail. Lack of freedom helped him focus,
Speaker 6: and he wrote a book about life in prison while
Speaker 6: he was in prison. He got it published while incarcerated,
Speaker 6: and he was released a better man than he went in.
Speaker 6: He became out a published author, and he immediately planned
Speaker 6: to write a second book, a sort of encyclopedia of
Speaker 6: serial killers, which, as it turned out, was more of
Speaker 6: a book about how to become a serial killer. Yeah.
Speaker 6: To help with his research, he found a beautiful librarian
Speaker 6: named Laura Ling in the low country of South care Carolina,
Speaker 6: but divorce, living in a tiny house with her teenage
Speaker 6: daughter now free outside of prison, Stanko couldn't write a book.
Speaker 6: He could only count people out of money, and again
Speaker 6: he lied until he painted himself into a corner, and
Speaker 6: this time when mister Hyde came out, he came out
Speaker 6: big time. He raped his girlfriend's teenage daughter and then
Speaker 6: forced the girl to watch as he beat her mother
Speaker 6: to death. He then slipped the girl's throat, calmly took
Speaker 6: a shower, and then left, stealing the librarian's car. But
Speaker 6: what he didn't know was that the teenager had survived
Speaker 6: and it managed to call nine to one one reporting
Speaker 6: that her attacker was Stephen Stanko. Police were on his
Speaker 6: trail in minutes, so Steiko drives to another friend's trailer home.
Speaker 6: An older man named Henry Lee Turner tells Henry that
Speaker 6: his dad has just died. He needs someone to talk to.
Speaker 6: Turner's the shirt come out in so, while Turner's shaving,
Speaker 6: Stanko shoots him to death with his own gun. He
Speaker 6: leaves laure Ling's car parked at Turner's trailer, takes Turner's
Speaker 6: pickup truck and heads off, and he decides to hide
Speaker 6: out in the open. He drove to Augusta, Georgia, where
Speaker 6: the Master's tournament was underway. Golf tournament Tiger Wood's in
Speaker 6: the lead, but it was a tournament plagued by rain,
Speaker 6: causing the bars of Augusta to be filled with people.
Speaker 6: So Stanko put on a golf shirt a pair of
Speaker 6: cargo shorts, and it didn't matter how often they showed
Speaker 6: his photo on TV. He blended at least for a while. Yeah,
Speaker 6: he bar hopped, conspicuously, spent money, met a woman he
Speaker 6: was invited home to sleep on her couch because he'd
Speaker 6: been drinking. I went to church with her and her
Speaker 6: parents the next morning, and then he went alone to
Speaker 6: a mall to get breakfast in a diner. And as
Speaker 6: he did this, the girl he had met the previous
Speaker 6: night got a call from her mother saying that Steve
Speaker 6: the guy in church was wanted for murder at his
Speaker 6: picture in the newspaper, so they called the police and
Speaker 6: Stanko was arrested coming out of the diner. So is
Speaker 6: Stephen Christopher Stanko was one of the rare psychopaths who
Speaker 6: had the looks in charisma to start new relationships with
Speaker 6: both men and women and be socially active even as
Speaker 6: he was running for his life. But the question remains,
Speaker 6: did Stephen's brother's suspicious death really oil a golden boy
Speaker 6: future or had Stephen been a con artist all along
Speaker 6: with the cracks in his schemes only becoming visible following
Speaker 6: his brother's death.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, you have the next story born to raise hell
Speaker 5: about Richard Speck, and many people are familiar with this
Speaker 5: story with this one student, nurse Corson Amurreo escaping this
Speaker 5: killer Richard Spec by him losing count and her hiding
Speaker 5: under a bed. You do include some very very interesting,
Speaker 5: horrifying information that we talked about just before the program
Speaker 5: in this story about Richard Spec.
Speaker 6: Could you just tell us a little.
Speaker 5: Bit about the end of this story that again many
Speaker 5: people might not know of, and before we talk about
Speaker 5: a very very horrifying story The Hollywood Ripper sure A.
Speaker 6: Spec was a cover boy for TVs and t R
Speaker 6: newspapers and magazines in the summer in nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 6: His crime was worse than anybody could previously have imagined,
Speaker 6: and he became part of American nightmare. Richard Speck was
Speaker 6: America's boogeyman for a while, but he managed to have
Speaker 6: a second act. He worked his way into our nightmares
Speaker 6: a second time. So in prison, he temporarily endeared himself
Speaker 6: to the prison population by rescuing an injured bird and
Speaker 6: then nursing it back to health, just like in the
Speaker 6: Hollywood movie The Birdman of Alcatraz. But when Speck was
Speaker 6: told that he had to get rid of the bird,
Speaker 6: instead of releasing it, he threw it into an electric fan,
Speaker 6: resulting in a storm of feathers and blood, and he
Speaker 6: told the guard that he couldn't have the bird, No
Speaker 6: one could have the bird. Speck died in nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 6: his bad heart finally giving out on him. He was
Speaker 6: forty nine, but before that he made himself known to
Speaker 6: us in a hideous manner. There was a videotape released
Speaker 6: that showed Speck in prison with female breasts the result
Speaker 6: of illegal hormone injections he'd gotten in prisoning oral sex
Speaker 6: to another inmate. Sort of a sex tape. I guess
Speaker 6: he'd called celebrity sex tape in the worst possible way.
Speaker 6: And on the tape someone asks Beck why he killed
Speaker 6: those nurses, and he said it wasn't their night.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Tell us about the Hollywood Ripper, a little less known
Speaker 5: serial killer.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, I think the interesting thing about the Hollywood
Speaker 6: Ripper is that it sort of ties into Ashton Kutcher's
Speaker 6: story rising to start him in Hollywood. Story starts nine
Speaker 6: am on a Saturday morning in nineteen ninety three when
Speaker 6: Rick Paccaccio puts his dog on Alesia and comes out
Speaker 6: to walk and they this is in glen View, Illinois,
Speaker 6: and he finds his daughter Tricia dead on the front porch.
Speaker 6: She'd been murdered and left on the front porch of
Speaker 6: the house. They tried to figure out who did it.
Speaker 6: They couldn't find out. The case grew cold, and life
Speaker 6: in glen View, Illinois went on a little sadder and
Speaker 6: scarier than before. They jump ahead eight years. There's a
Speaker 6: vicious murder of twenty two year old student model Ashley
Speaker 6: Lauren ellerin in the Hollywood Hills in a yellow wooden
Speaker 6: rented bungalowp which I visited. She was less than a
Speaker 6: year out of school, prettiest girl in her class, and
Speaker 6: like thousands of others, every year she went to Hollywood
Speaker 6: to find fame and fortune, and not for the first
Speaker 6: time in Hollywood, a beautiful young woman won her greatest
Speaker 6: fame and death. The murder scene was on Pinehurst Road
Speaker 6: and it was discovered on Thursday morning, February twenty second,
Speaker 6: two thousand and one. She'd been stabbed the phenomenal forty
Speaker 6: seven times. Her throat had been cut so deeply that
Speaker 6: she was practically decapitated, and the case gained much publicity
Speaker 6: by the fact that the night before, actually had been
Speaker 6: scheduled to go on a date with actor Ashton Kushcher,
Speaker 6: who was an initial suspect. He was a star at
Speaker 6: the time of the seventies show and he made a
Speaker 6: couple of movies too, And he told police he'd gone
Speaker 6: to pick her up the night before, but she didn't
Speaker 6: answer the door. He peeked in a window and thought
Speaker 6: he saw wine stains, but he knew he'd been at
Speaker 6: a party in that house a few weeks earlier and
Speaker 6: either been drinking on so he didn't think it was blood.
Speaker 6: He was quickly exonerated, and again the case grew cold,
Speaker 6: jumping head another four years. December one, two thousand and five,
Speaker 6: a woman named Maria Bruno's asleep in her house in Elmonte, California,
Speaker 6: and she's the mother of four, recently separated from her husband.
Speaker 6: And as it turned out, she was in an apartment
Speaker 6: house that was supposed to have good security. Dinner no
Speaker 6: good at all, and intruder climbed in through her kitchen
Speaker 6: window and stabbed her to death in her bed. She
Speaker 6: probably never woke up. Left alone with his victim, the
Speaker 6: killer had fun and mutilated the body, cut open her breast,
Speaker 6: pulled out her implants. The breasts were removed completely then
Speaker 6: and one of her nipple was cut off and placed
Speaker 6: over her mouth, which leads us to Santa Monica, California,
Speaker 6: and another crime scene. I've walked through it, and I
Speaker 6: walked through this one at night, just get an idea
Speaker 6: of what the alleys for Santa Monica looked like. But
Speaker 6: there's a twenty six year old Michelle Murphy, and she
Speaker 6: was a fighter. She says she went to sleep at
Speaker 6: about ten thirty, woke up about a half hour later
Speaker 6: with a man straddling her, and the next thing she
Speaker 6: knew she was being stabbed in the chest, the shoulder,
Speaker 6: in the arm. She grabbed the knife. Her most severe
Speaker 6: cuts were on her hand as she defended herself. Eventually
Speaker 6: she got a really good boot in kicked him off
Speaker 6: the bed and he retreated into the other room, and
Speaker 6: she started screaming, why are you doing this to me?
Speaker 6: And he said I'm sorry and left. He had cut
Speaker 6: himself during the attack and he just lived on the
Speaker 6: other side of the alley. So when the police arrived,
Speaker 6: all they had to do was follow the blood drops
Speaker 6: to his house and boom, they had him. And when
Speaker 6: they tested his DNA they found bingo. Other cases popped
Speaker 6: up Maria Bruno, al Manti, Ashley Elleren in the Hollywood Hills.
Speaker 6: And then they traced his history and found out that
Speaker 6: he had been a friend of the brother of Tricia
Speaker 6: Paccaccio and Illinois. So they caught themselves a serial killer.
Speaker 6: And again his name was Michael Garjulo and his la
Speaker 6: trial was spotlated because Heeshton Kutcher came to testify for
Speaker 6: the prosecution, and that was the day that the most
Speaker 6: reporters were there.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, you talk about another story, King Creep, featuring a
Speaker 5: Michael King tell us about King Creep.
Speaker 6: Wow, this is one of the most disturbing stories in
Speaker 6: the book. And I picked the thirteen stories because of
Speaker 6: their disturbing nature. Book was originally going to be called
Speaker 6: I Will Show You Monsters, but I didn't like it
Speaker 6: because the eye and the title is me and my
Speaker 6: son is living in la and he was taking some
Speaker 6: experimental nighttime photography and he took a picture of a
Speaker 6: rose garden at night, which ended up being the cover
Speaker 6: of the book, and I said, well, that's it, because
Speaker 6: you could feel the gloominess coming off the photo in
Speaker 6: a way that I thought was unusual. So we call
Speaker 6: it Dark Roses and the stories themselves, those are the
Speaker 6: dark roses which grow out of blood soaked soil. King Creep.
Speaker 6: This is about the murder of Denise Amberley in Northport, Florida.
Speaker 6: There was a home invasion. She was the young mother
Speaker 6: of two boys. She was taken to the killer's sex
Speaker 6: den raped repeatedly and then driven to a secluded spot
Speaker 6: and shot to death. Now, the case had a particularly
Speaker 6: sad angle in that Denise, who was the daughter of
Speaker 6: a cop and really smart, managed to get a hold
Speaker 6: of her abductor's cell phone. She called nine one one
Speaker 6: and gave a real time account of her predicament. Incredible,
Speaker 6: and at the same time, fellow motorists who saw Denise
Speaker 6: in the car in obvious distress called nine one one
Speaker 6: and told the location of the car in real time
Speaker 6: to the nine one one operator. But as fate would
Speaker 6: have it, the nine one one operators shift was almost over.
Speaker 6: She failed to absorb the import of what she was hearing, apparently,
Speaker 6: and Denise went unsaved. Between the time that Denise was
Speaker 6: abducted and when she was killed, police received six nine
Speaker 6: one one calls, but by the time Michael King's car
Speaker 6: was stopped, he was alone and there was blood splatter
Speaker 6: on the car. Michael King, King Creep as I call him,
Speaker 6: grew up in Michigan was not a terribly bright fellow.
Speaker 6: He had for years managed to make a living as
Speaker 6: a handyman and a plumber, and for the past couple
Speaker 6: of years things had been on the downturn for him.
Speaker 6: In two thousand and eight, when this happened, his life
Speaker 6: was a mess. He was thirty seven years old, divorced
Speaker 6: with custody of a son. You could no longer afford
Speaker 6: dating a series of unusually small blonde women, some of
Speaker 6: them riddled with dysfunction, but all of them looked younger
Speaker 6: than they were, and it was getting harder and harder
Speaker 6: for him to find real work. Who was facing foreclosure
Speaker 6: on his north Port home. He had already had his
Speaker 6: apartment emptied a furniture by one of his exes, So
Speaker 6: he's angry with the women he dated, all of whom
Speaker 6: were diminutive blondes. He was a pervert, and he didn't
Speaker 6: go out of his way to hide it. He liked
Speaker 6: pretending his girlfriends were really young and he did not
Speaker 6: have a criminal history. But when the monster with him
Speaker 6: came out, it came out big time. His financial worries
Speaker 6: and his girlfriend troubles combined into an intense anger with
Speaker 6: a strong sexual component. In an frustration, he decided he
Speaker 6: was going to steal a woman and take what he wanted.
Speaker 6: But as it turned out, he stole the wrong woman
Speaker 6: by Denise calling nine one one on the killer's phone. Uh,
Speaker 6: there's no better evidence, is there?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 5: You have a story called a dark stretch of road
Speaker 5: with someone called Mike. Is it Mike Tyson or tissand
Speaker 5: Gary Gary Tyson, Gary, Oh, pardon me sorry anyway.
Speaker 6: Dark Mike Tyson has enough troubles me.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I was gonna say, sure, yes, a dark stretch
Speaker 5: of road in it. This is certainly even more horrifying
Speaker 5: in some of the better known stories.
Speaker 6: Yeah, this is terrible. Gary Tyson, his violent escape from
Speaker 6: prison and his subsequent run from the law not only
Speaker 6: turned out to be his ruin, but the ruin of
Speaker 6: his entire family. He and his Dorothy had three sons, Donald,
Speaker 6: Ricky and Raymond. Gary was better at stealing than at working.
Speaker 6: In March nineteen sixty one, he went on a two
Speaker 6: week crime spreek Hell, bent on making some quick cash,
Speaker 6: and in the end he was arrested trying to steal
Speaker 6: weapons from a local National Guard armory. He had planned
Speaker 6: on smuggling the guns into Mexico to sell, but he
Speaker 6: was convicted and given a twenty five year sentence. Dorothy
Speaker 6: remained completely under his spell and continued to see Gary
Speaker 6: as a wonderful husband and dedicated father who was a
Speaker 6: victim of an unjustice and he'd been framed and he
Speaker 6: was actually a nice man. She told friends and family
Speaker 6: what a great dad Gary was. He called home every
Speaker 6: day to check on their progress and the guide their
Speaker 6: lives with his wisdom. And the three boys, who were
Speaker 6: inseparable growing up not only close in age, but they
Speaker 6: felt like they were outsiders in their community due to
Speaker 6: the fact that Dad was away. On July nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 6: it happens to be the same month that Richard Spec
Speaker 6: did his thing. Gary was released early, serving only five
Speaker 6: of the twenty five years he'd been sentenced to, but
Speaker 6: he didn't stay out for long. He went back in
Speaker 6: for passing a bad check, and while he was being
Speaker 6: taken from the court to the prison, he shot and
Speaker 6: killed correctional officer Jim Steiner, a crime for which he
Speaker 6: was sentenced to life in prison. Now Dorothy constantly reminded
Speaker 6: that her children their father was actually a victim. He
Speaker 6: only shot that security guard for self defense, and the
Speaker 6: boys grew up thinking that their dad was wonderful, and
Speaker 6: when he asked them to help him escape from prison,
Speaker 6: they agreed to do it, and that happened in nineteen
Speaker 6: seventy eight. Now also escaping with Gary into the US
Speaker 6: Southwest and was another hardcore criminal named Brandy Greenwald. Greenoald,
Speaker 6: Gary Tyson, and the three brothers went on the lamb
Speaker 6: together and the idea was to frequently switch vehicles, stay
Speaker 6: ahead of stay ahead of the man. But twice when
Speaker 6: they switched vehicles, Gary and Greenowald, to the horror of
Speaker 6: Tyson's sons, killed the owners of the car and their families,
Speaker 6: which included a baby and his mother, both shot through
Speaker 6: the head by Gary tysonredible. So at this point the
Speaker 6: boys know that this lifelong delusion they've been living under
Speaker 6: the dad's a good guy, has been shattered, but they're
Speaker 6: stuck with him, and he arranges its so that he
Speaker 6: or Greenowald is with one of the boys at all.
Speaker 6: They're never allowed three of them to be together, and
Speaker 6: eventually a roadblock does them in. The oldest son is
Speaker 6: shot to death. Gary runs off into the desert and
Speaker 6: dies of exposure. Every man for himself are his last words?
Speaker 6: Must have felt great to it. The boys who adored
Speaker 6: him and his two sons went to prison for life
Speaker 6: for crimes that they never would have committed in a
Speaker 6: million years if they hadn't loved their dad.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you follow this up with another heartwarming family you
Speaker 5: call family of Terror and the Sherman McCrary and the
Speaker 5: unholy alliance that forms. Please tell us about Family of Terror.
Speaker 6: Okay, Well, Sherman McCrary and his partner in crime, his
Speaker 6: son in law, Carl Taylor. They had a specialty during
Speaker 6: the nineteen seventies. While their families passed bad checks and
Speaker 6: made money, they would go out late at night and
Speaker 6: hold up donut shops roadside donut shops, preferably those with
Speaker 6: a cute waitress working alone. They would take the money
Speaker 6: and the waitress, after which she would be raped by
Speaker 6: both men and killed in a deserted place. After each murder,
Speaker 6: the family would up and move to another area and
Speaker 6: the process would begin again, and police never connection between
Speaker 6: the murders of the doughnut girls and the bad checks
Speaker 6: being passed. It took a while before they realized that
Speaker 6: those two things went together and this was a family
Speaker 6: doing these crimes. But once they got in the habit,
Speaker 6: McCrary and Taylor were killing two or three women per month.
Speaker 6: The murder that undid them was the murder of twenty
Speaker 6: year old Leora Rose Looney on August twentieth, nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 6: the men sat in a diner, drank coffee and waited
Speaker 6: for the other customers to leave, and as soon as
Speaker 6: they were alone with the girl behind the counter, Leora,
Speaker 6: they did their thing. They took the money from the
Speaker 6: cash register, They stole Leora, they took out in the
Speaker 6: Wilners to be raped and then killed, and one witness
Speaker 6: the next day returns to the scene and tells the
Speaker 6: police the coffee cup on the counter, that one right there,
Speaker 6: that was the one that was being used by those
Speaker 6: creepy guys. So they dust the cup for fingerprints, and
Speaker 6: perfect fingerprints show. So the killers eventually decide that they're
Speaker 6: going to go straight, But it turns out that Sherman
Speaker 6: and Carl can only get along when they're doing crimes.
Speaker 6: The second that they try to do anything in the
Speaker 6: legitimate world, they hate each other's guts. So Carl goes
Speaker 6: out to rob a supermarket by himself, and it's a disaster.
Speaker 6: He doesn't get nearly all the money. He ends up
Speaker 6: shooting and wounding a cop in the parking lot making
Speaker 6: his getaway, and witnesses get his license plate, and by
Speaker 6: the end of the evening, a full swat team is
Speaker 6: at the Mercrari family home. Carl and his wife Ginger
Speaker 6: are arrested in Texas soon thereafter, on June twenty fourth,
Speaker 6: nineteen seventy two, and the fingerprint from the coffee cup
Speaker 6: matches Carl's prince. So Carl and Sherman ended up confessing
Speaker 6: to seven murders, although the belief is that there were
Speaker 6: many more, and Sherman ended up committing suicide in prison.
Speaker 5: Interesting. Another story that involves a family, but in different
Speaker 5: circumstances is the murder of Craig ride Out. Tell us
Speaker 5: a little bit about this murder of Craig ride Out.
Speaker 6: Well, you know, I love to write about crimes in
Speaker 6: the New York, in the Rochester, New York area, so
Speaker 6: it was my hometown when I grew up, and this
Speaker 6: one was a big It dominated the headlines for months.
Speaker 6: Starts about eleven pm Tuesday evening, July nineteenth, twenty sixteen.
Speaker 6: Fifty year old Craig ride Out of Penfield, New York,
Speaker 6: one of the nicer suburbs of Rochester. He was last
Speaker 6: scene in his townhouse on New Wickham Drive, and he
Speaker 6: apparently vanished. He was an information technology specialist making good
Speaker 6: money and also missing was his car and he's reported
Speaker 6: missing by his sister on Wednesday morning, And at five
Speaker 6: point thirty Wednesday morning, a mena night farmer named Lowell Weaver,
Speaker 6: is on his bicycle in the town of Jerusalem, New York,
Speaker 6: near Penyan and he's on his way to do his
Speaker 6: farm shores and up ahead, as he peddled along the
Speaker 6: shoulder of the road, we received two vehicles parked alongside
Speaker 6: Adams Road. Because he nears the vehicles, he saw two
Speaker 6: figures having a discussion, each standing between the cars. He
Speaker 6: sped up and heard their voices, but he couldn't understand
Speaker 6: any words. Later that morning, he's coming back on his
Speaker 6: breakfast to break Farmers have breakfast breaks and the cars
Speaker 6: aren't there anymore. But he sees a shovel lining by
Speaker 6: the side of the road and some crumpled down weeds.
Speaker 6: So he follows the smash down weeds into the woods
Speaker 6: and he sees a tarpaulint. He lifts the tarpaulint and
Speaker 6: what he sees sends a chill running up and down
Speaker 6: his spine. It's a bare human foot. So we dropped
Speaker 6: the tarp ran, got on his bike and called the police.
Speaker 6: Please find a small hole had been dug nearby, and
Speaker 6: it looked as if someone had intended to bury a
Speaker 6: body but found it too hard and gave up and
Speaker 6: covered the body with the tarp instead. The deputies removed
Speaker 6: the tarp to completely expose the body, and they winced
Speaker 6: at the face because the killers had used a corrosive
Speaker 6: drain cleaner to eat away the victim's face hope, hopefully
Speaker 6: posthumously and most likely to delay identification. Garrett had been
Speaker 6: used to choke the life out of the man, and
Speaker 6: the medical examiner later confirmed that the cause of death
Speaker 6: was asphyxiation. Now, the deputies at the scene are stunned
Speaker 6: because this effort has been made to slow the identification
Speaker 6: of the victim. And while they're looking at it, a
Speaker 6: phone goes off and the phone is in the shorts
Speaker 6: pocket of the victim. Wow, how stupid could the killer there?
Speaker 6: They're not dealing with murdering here, obviously. They answer the
Speaker 6: phone and it's Craig's sisters saying we're looking for Craig.
Speaker 6: We're worried we can't find him. And the cops say,
Speaker 6: we think we think we may know where he is.
Speaker 6: So and while they're wondering, who would be stupid enough
Speaker 6: to remove the guy's face but leave the phone in
Speaker 6: his pocket. Authorities had no trouble tracing this back to
Speaker 6: Craig's family, another lovely family. His estranged wife, Laura, is
Speaker 6: trying to get a divorce. There's a nasty custody battle
Speaker 6: going on for the youngest children, and she wants to
Speaker 6: run away with her new boyfriend and they pull out
Speaker 6: of a pond in mending ponds in the Rochester area,
Speaker 6: a black bag that contains work gloves, disinfectant, and six
Speaker 6: empty bottles of drain cleaner, all of which can be
Speaker 6: traced to Laura's sons. And there's a trial, and the
Speaker 6: trial mixsed the front pages every day in Rochester, and
Speaker 6: the two sons, the wife, and the wife's boyfriend are
Speaker 6: all tried together, and as it turns out, all of
Speaker 6: the evidence incriminating the boyfriend are acquisition of the materials
Speaker 6: used in the crime. He was there when Laura bought
Speaker 6: the draino and the bungee cords and the tarp, but
Speaker 6: there was no evidence whatsoever that he knew what that's was.
Speaker 6: Four right, So the wife and the two sons are convicted,
Speaker 6: and the boyfriend was absolutely acquitted. And we don't even
Speaker 6: use his name in the book because he's free. He's
Speaker 6: an innocent man, free to go about his life without
Speaker 6: an intent.
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Speaker 5: we were talking about another story that you have included
Speaker 5: in this incredible thirteen horrific true Stories. Tell us a
Speaker 5: little bit about this savage waitress Rachel Wade.
Speaker 6: Oh boy, you know, I covered this story a few
Speaker 6: years back, and it still kind of gets to me
Speaker 6: because it involves it the young people of Penelas Park, Florida,
Speaker 6: just had a lot of problems thirteen, fourteen years ago,
Speaker 6: and it demonstrates that adolescent behavior can be turned into
Speaker 6: a pressure cooker by social media. It's the story of
Speaker 6: Rachel Wade, who's the savage waitress who kills Sarah Ludeman,
Speaker 6: a high school senior, over Josh Camacho, who's anair do
Speaker 6: well young man who likes to have a lot of girlfriends. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and Sarah and Rachel were trading insults online. And the
Speaker 6: story is old enough. So this is my space. It's
Speaker 6: pre Facebook. But in a previous generation hours, for example,
Speaker 6: two girls who were having a war of words with
Speaker 6: each other would have cooling off periods because they would
Speaker 6: physically separate. You would have to call on the phone
Speaker 6: in order to talk to the other, and who knows
Speaker 6: if they'd answer. But with social media, there's no way
Speaker 6: for the pressure to release, and things amp up quickly.
Speaker 6: And the other factor is that because the messages were
Speaker 6: put on social networks, they were in essence insulting one
Speaker 6: another in public right. So anger is increased tenfold by
Speaker 6: humiliation embarrassment, and the case continues to build until there
Speaker 6: was a fight in the middle of the street. It
Speaker 6: was supposed to be a fistfight, but Rachel pulls out
Speaker 6: a kitchen knife and stabs Sarah to death with it.
Speaker 6: There are four eyewitnesses to the stabbing to on either side,
Speaker 6: and their stories, of course, are very different. Rachel's friends
Speaker 6: spoke of a small woman, Rachel's tiny defending herself against
Speaker 6: three larger women who had all jumped out of a
Speaker 6: van together and came at her all at once. Sarah's
Speaker 6: friends spoke of Rachel charging at Sarah and immediately plunging
Speaker 6: the kitchen knife into Sarah's chest and until it all
Speaker 6: fell apart. Josh Camacho had his ducks in a row.
Speaker 6: In terms of scheduling, his girlfriends were perfectly complimentary to
Speaker 6: each other. Sarah was a high school girl with a
Speaker 6: curfew she had to be home early. Rachel was a
Speaker 6: restaurant waitress who wasn't available until late. Camacho was a
Speaker 6: constant player. Considered both Rachel and Sarah as friends with benefits,
Speaker 6: and most people understand that phrase to mean a non
Speaker 6: romantic sexual relationship with no pretensions of monogamy, but nobody
Speaker 6: told that to Rachel and Sarah now. In terms of
Speaker 6: their personalities, sexual and otherwise, the women were also complimentary.
Speaker 6: Rachel was a cute you know apple She worked at Applebee's.
Speaker 6: She had a wild lifestyle. She was a sexual experimenter,
Speaker 6: and she was unfortunately as intense out of the sack
Speaker 6: as she was in. Whereas the much larger Sarah, you know,
Speaker 6: she'd been a heavy girl when she was young, and
Speaker 6: she was kind of a late bloomer, and she was
Speaker 6: new to the world of sex and needed to be taught.
Speaker 6: So she switched schools to be closer to Josh Camachu,
Speaker 6: and she adored him completely for reasons that befuddle adults everywhere. Now,
Speaker 6: a large contributor to this entire tragedy was opiate addiction.
Speaker 6: Right a frightening number of the city's young people were
Speaker 6: addicted to an opiate painkiller they called roxies, and the
Speaker 6: brand name was roxy Codo, apparently the same as oxy Codo.
Speaker 6: There are blue pills, and the kids called them blues.
Speaker 6: There had been a major theft at a pharmaceutical warehouse
Speaker 6: and hundreds of thousands of pills were swiped, one crime
Speaker 6: that caused a tragic wave of serious drug addiction throughout Florida,
Speaker 6: and kids taking the pills were completely unaware that they're
Speaker 6: becoming addicted to the same active substance there was in Harrowing.
Speaker 6: They just they made them feel good that pretty soon
Speaker 6: they needed more pills. So girls got hooked, and soon
Speaker 6: enough they owed a debt to their male suppliers. Now
Speaker 6: there's a tendency for young people to feel immortal. They
Speaker 6: don't feel anxiety about danger the same way adults do.
Speaker 6: They're careless, They're reckless, and that natural tendency was exasperated
Speaker 6: by the roxies, which further removed inhibitions and created a
Speaker 6: pain free illusion of euphoria.
Speaker 2: Too.
Speaker 6: Many of Penel's parks, teenage girls were skipping school, hanging
Speaker 6: out with their older boyfriends, taking drugs, having sex, and
Speaker 6: making babies. Well, why was Rachel the way she was? Well,
Speaker 6: her home appeared normal, devastated, devastated by what had occurred,
Speaker 6: but completely confused as to the reason. One thing, though
Speaker 6: the Wades had a reluctance to discuss Rachel's older brother,
Speaker 6: who is estranged from the family, Rachel seldom mentioned her brother,
Speaker 6: other than to say she hated him. Now, according to
Speaker 6: New Jersey psychological counselor Kathy Morelli, there's a change in
Speaker 6: brain chemistry that happens to people, and they have sex
Speaker 6: of biological attachment forms and brain changes they shared experience produced.
Speaker 6: They cause potent emotions, causing normally mild people to resort
Speaker 6: to violence, And there was nothing normally mild about Rachel.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 6: Teenagers aren't adults, obviously, so it's a strong yet immature
Speaker 6: attachment that they have with their sex partners. Passion stirs
Speaker 6: up primal possessiveness, and psychologists agree that there's a strong
Speaker 6: chance that Rachel had problems at home. Most teen girls
Speaker 6: don't drop out of school and run away from home
Speaker 6: repeatedly because of an unwanted curfew. As for the cyber bully,
Speaker 6: and the mental health specialist I spoke to agreed that
Speaker 6: parents should have a monitor on their child's smartphones and computers,
Speaker 6: and they should check in silently to see what was
Speaker 6: being said in their child's world. They need to know
Speaker 6: that even though it's a virtual world, it's a real
Speaker 6: place with real feelings being created, not imaginary cyber threats.
Speaker 6: These things can turn into real violence. You know, Sarah's
Speaker 6: friends served as the virtual bully, egging her and Rachel
Speaker 6: on and in teenage navete. The Sarah camp thought it
Speaker 6: wasn't real and no violence would occur, but boy did it. Ever.
Speaker 6: There was a moment during the trial that was just
Speaker 6: amazing because Rachel was put on the stand in her
Speaker 6: own defense, and once she was doing her direct testimony,
Speaker 6: everything went swell because her lawyer led her through her
Speaker 6: testimony almost word by word, you know, she was in fear,
Speaker 6: she was attacked by three girls at once. She follow
Speaker 6: weapon was necessary. Well, cross examination was a different story,
Speaker 6: and the prosecutor just lit into her and pretty soon
Speaker 6: had her in tears and babbling, saying things like I
Speaker 6: didn't mean to murder her, and yes, I threatened to
Speaker 6: kill her, and then I carried out my threat. So anyway,
Speaker 6: she's she's in prison for a long time, and from
Speaker 6: her latest Department of Corrections mugshot, you know, the twinkle
Speaker 6: of youthful cuteness she used to have is now gone.
Speaker 6: She's just a con.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you talk about another interesting family dynamic with the
Speaker 5: tail tale. Not tell us about all identical twins and
Speaker 5: the mayhem that ensues.
Speaker 6: All right, Well, I've known for a while the killers
Speaker 6: who are into bondage often have a specific preference when
Speaker 6: it comes to the knots. They use men with a
Speaker 6: bondage fetish. They're particular. Their ropework becomes like a signature, right,
Speaker 6: And many fetishes for men are symptoms of being afraid
Speaker 6: of women. Whether this is another case where the victim
Speaker 6: is a very tiny blonde woman, now, whether it be
Speaker 6: bondage or in which a master ties up a slave,
Speaker 6: and renders are helpless or pedophilia in which men desire
Speaker 6: small girls or small women who look like small girls.
Speaker 6: The resulting sensation of power and complete control is a perk.
Speaker 6: But the bottom line is that these things make the
Speaker 6: man aroused yet unafraid. Now, the thing with the knots
Speaker 6: being a signature was true in the BTK case Dennis
Speaker 6: Raider in Wichita, Kansas call himself buying torture and kill,
Speaker 6: and it was true in the case of Richard Cottingham,
Speaker 6: whose story was told in a recent ne flick show
Speaker 6: Times Square. You've seen it, Yeah, really good. Yes, and
Speaker 6: it's true in this case as well. Our story takes
Speaker 6: place in Edgewater, Colorado. It's a sleepy suburbs on Sloan
Speaker 6: Lake just west of Denver, population about five thousand, and
Speaker 6: the place resembled a picture postcard three hundred days of
Speaker 6: sunshiny year. Everyone knew everyone, and nobody locked their doors.
Speaker 6: But on the afternoon of September fourth, two thousand and three,
Speaker 6: that sense of security was shaded. A highway worker was
Speaker 6: picking up debris in a front loader alongside Highway six
Speaker 6: in Clear Creek Canyon when he made a puzzling discovery.
Speaker 6: It was a plastic bag with something sticking out of it,
Speaker 6: and when he hopped down to take a closer look,
Speaker 6: he saw it was a decomposing woman's leg. The man
Speaker 6: immediately called nine one one. Police arrived and determined that
Speaker 6: the woman had died in a bizarre and sadistic way,
Speaker 6: something out of a horror movie. She was tied up
Speaker 6: tightly with rope and her face was masked with duct tape.
Speaker 6: Now the body was identified as that of Heather de Wilde,
Speaker 6: a young wife and mother who had been reported missing
Speaker 6: six weeks earlier. The story had been big news, her
Speaker 6: face had been on TV and the front page of
Speaker 6: the papers. Now, her husband was a piece of work.
Speaker 6: He was one half of twins, identical twins. He was Daniel,
Speaker 6: his brother was David. They were both porn addicts. Daniel
Speaker 6: in particular enjoyed looking at S ANDM porn, which featured
Speaker 6: women being hurt and bound. He'd gone as far as
Speaker 6: to try to make money by making his own SNM
Speaker 6: video with his wife as the victim. Anyway, and that
Speaker 6: turned out to be his undoing because it looked like
Speaker 6: the twins were going to get away with the murder
Speaker 6: until investigators took a close look at the porn movie
Speaker 6: that Daniel de Wilde had made, and the knots in
Speaker 6: the movie we're exactly the same as the knots on
Speaker 6: the woman's body busted.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's another example of people. I've seen quite a
Speaker 5: few examples more and more often of people getting justice
Speaker 5: via from the grave basically through their efforts, or from
Speaker 5: the grave anyway, getting their justice from being a victim.
Speaker 6: Can't do anything else. Scratch the guy's face.
Speaker 5: Yeah, absolutely incredible. Let's use this as an opportunity to
Speaker 5: stop for a second for these messages.
Speaker 6: Sure, step into the.
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Speaker 1: Welcome to the Family vdW group.
Speaker 6: No perches necessary.
Speaker 1: If we were privateed by loss he terms and conditions
Speaker 1: eighteen plus.
Speaker 5: Now let's talk about let's talk about a few thoughts
Speaker 5: on the Black Dahalia, because you felt it important to
Speaker 5: talk about that, and of course we'd like to hear
Speaker 5: about that.
Speaker 6: Well, I'm sure that you know ninety percent of your
Speaker 6: listeners know about the Black Dallia. Yes, and you gave
Speaker 6: a little synopsis at the beginning of the show. But
Speaker 6: I tribated it not as a crime but as a
Speaker 6: true crime phenomena, because well, with the exception of political
Speaker 6: assassinations and the deaths of celebrities, I can think of
Speaker 6: no single crime that has been written about more than
Speaker 6: the Black Daly heard. The murder of Elizabeth Short nineteen
Speaker 6: forty seven changed the tone of La. La went from
Speaker 6: being a overgrown little town where people felt safe to
Speaker 6: just a horrible a place where this horrible thing happened.
Speaker 6: And again, the victim was a woman who came to
Speaker 6: La to find fame and fortune and instead found brutal death.
Speaker 6: And she'd been found and tortured for days before her death.
Speaker 6: Now I've read I think every one of the books
Speaker 6: written about the Black dalli right, and I was never
Speaker 6: ever happy. Two unrelated authors both claimed that their dad
Speaker 6: was the killer. Yes, one of them had a better
Speaker 6: case than the other, but neither one of them had
Speaker 6: that gradud case. And then I read Black Dahlia Red
Speaker 6: Rose by Pwee twelve and I don't know if you've
Speaker 6: had her on your show, No missus Eatwell who She
Speaker 6: lives in Paris. I had a chat with her. She
Speaker 6: was watching Saint Peter's burn out her window. Yes, you know,
Speaker 6: we saw it on TV. I thought it was horrible.
Speaker 6: She was looking out a window at it, so I said, well,
Speaker 6: it was me on nine to eleven. I got to
Speaker 6: see that out my window. But anyway, lovely lady. But
Speaker 6: she wrote a book that that didn't seem to rely
Speaker 6: on any of her relatives, didn't rely on any LA
Speaker 6: celebrities to sell books. She went to the LA police
Speaker 6: files and she dug out the truth. And I don't
Speaker 6: understand why her book isn't more famous. I was tempted
Speaker 6: to write a book about the Black Dahlia until her
Speaker 6: book came out. Now I don't have to. She did
Speaker 6: the work. She found two promising suspects who were, for
Speaker 6: no apparent reason allowed to escape, and upon closer examination,
Speaker 6: the pair a narcissistic pimp and a well connected restaurant tour.
Speaker 6: They looked guilt, but the police dropped the ball seemingly
Speaker 6: on purpose. She even found the crime scene, which was,
Speaker 6: as expected, a bloody mess, and she found a hotel,
Speaker 6: a motel that days after Elizabeth Short disappeared. Witnesses were
Speaker 6: saying one room was completely drenched with blood and fecal matter,
Speaker 6: but they didn't call police because they were a sleazy motel,
Speaker 6: and they discouraged the police from coming. So, I mean,
Speaker 6: it's unbelievable that you can find how much blood in
Speaker 6: a hotel room and not call police. But the police
Speaker 6: in La were different. They were corrupt through and through.
Speaker 6: You couldn't trust that they would go after the bad
Speaker 6: guys because the bad guys were often connected. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 6: all of the all of the books on the Black
Speaker 6: Dallian mentioned this that LAPD was so interwoven with corruption
Speaker 6: that the killer, even if he was known to the police,
Speaker 6: could avoid investigation if you were a person with the
Speaker 6: right connections. And that's the case here, which is scary,
Speaker 6: And I mean that the LAPD is not like that anymore.
Speaker 6: And when it did get better, it did some real
Speaker 6: damage control, mostly through the efforts of Jack Webb and
Speaker 6: he showed Dragnet and Adam twelve and the LAPD is
Speaker 6: now a sophisticated and fair minded force, but in nineteen
Speaker 6: forty seven not so much. And I've written about it
Speaker 6: from the other side too. I've written books in which
Speaker 6: La gangsters, you know, include top cops in their numbers.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so.
Speaker 6: I suspect that we now know, and I recommend it it.
Speaker 6: Right after you read Dark Roses, read QWE twelve's Black
Speaker 6: Dahlia Red Rose. I think that's the that's the story there.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, you include a story about Sheila Lebar. Vengeance is mine.
Speaker 5: And what I found particularly interesting is that many people
Speaker 5: have heard the stories of of course her murderous ways,
Speaker 5: but I wasn't so familiar with her disturbing family background
Speaker 5: and early life. Tell us a little bit about a
Speaker 5: vengeance's mind and she.
Speaker 6: Sure, Yeah, Sheila, I suspect this is ter Sheila was
Speaker 6: sexually abused as a child by her father and his friends.
Speaker 6: That those stories are corroborative by her sister, who you know,
Speaker 6: didn't grow up to be a psycho killer. But Sheila definitely,
Speaker 6: if she lacked a solid conscience to begin with, she
Speaker 6: was abused into being a woman who was constantly angry
Speaker 6: and hateful. Now, as a young woman, she had had
Speaker 6: a near death experience when a boyfriend hit the nerve
Speaker 6: to break up with her right to her face. So
Speaker 6: she was going to show him. So she swallowed a
Speaker 6: bottle of pills, got behind the wheel of her car
Speaker 6: and drove until she passed out and crashed. And she
Speaker 6: almost killed herself in this way. She really did in
Speaker 6: a long time in a coma, And when she woke up,
Speaker 6: she said that she had gone to heaven, and God
Speaker 6: and a bunch of other men with beards told her
Speaker 6: that they weren't ready for her yet, but she still
Speaker 6: had a mission back on earth, and they sent her
Speaker 6: back to complete her life. And her mission was to
Speaker 6: rid the world of pedophiles jazz like the ones who
Speaker 6: had abused her when she was a little girl. Yes, so,
Speaker 6: after her husband dies unexpectedly, she recruited mentally handicapped men
Speaker 6: to work on her horse farm in New Hampshire. She
Speaker 6: then had sex with them. She dominated them, and she
Speaker 6: made them under duress to say the least confessed to
Speaker 6: pedophilia yea, and to incest, at which point she said, Aha,
Speaker 6: now God has given me permission to kill you, and
Speaker 6: she killed them, chopped them up, and burned their bodies
Speaker 6: in a big fire pit in her front lawn. So,
Speaker 6: I mean, this is the rarest of all serial killers.
Speaker 6: That women serial killers are rare to begin with, and
Speaker 6: often they kill in passive ways, they poison their boyfriends
Speaker 6: or but here's a woman killer who's beating the crap
Speaker 6: out of her victims until they're dead and then chopping
Speaker 6: them up. And then she was like a like the
Speaker 6: Witch and Hansol and Gretel, only she didn't care about
Speaker 6: the little girls. She just wanted the little boys in
Speaker 6: her oven. And Dark Roses concentrates on Sheila's bizarre behavior
Speaker 6: because if you can figure out what was going on
Speaker 6: in that tortured brain of hers, let me know, as
Speaker 6: I've looked at all directions and it defies absolute interpretation. Now,
Speaker 6: in normal conditions, it's hard to determine when a person
Speaker 6: with mental problems is malingering, since the malingering itself can
Speaker 6: be a simctim of the illness. So I provided as
Speaker 6: much as I could about what Sheila did and what
Speaker 6: she said about what she did, But what was actually
Speaker 6: going on in her I mean, did she really believe
Speaker 6: she went to heaven. Did she really believe that she
Speaker 6: was justified to do these things? Or was she just
Speaker 6: angry at men because they'd abused her when she was little?
Speaker 6: You can't tell now. When I went to Epping, New
Speaker 6: Hampshire to cover the story, I was busted by the
Speaker 6: local police. The two Epping New Hampshire cops took me
Speaker 6: into their station and handcuffed me to a bench. Now
Speaker 6: they let shield would go for months, even though they
Speaker 6: knew something was seriously bad was going on at the range.
Speaker 6: But they had no trouble busting the writer who came
Speaker 6: up to.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 6: And the difference is that she was one of the
Speaker 6: richest women in town, and that's another story. She conderedway
Speaker 6: the riches by taking the last name of a man
Speaker 6: she'd never married, a man that she'd only co ha
Speaker 6: cohabitated with for a brief period of time. And when
Speaker 6: they asked her for her marriage license, she said, I
Speaker 6: don't have a license. I have a pistol and I'll
Speaker 6: use it. So they wrote down she was his wife.
Speaker 6: And she'd had her husband's will rewritten, incredible, clearly written
Speaker 6: by her.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 6: The will was a testament to wonderful, wonderful person. That's Sheila,
Speaker 6: and she got the farm and she's one of the
Speaker 6: richest women in town. And if she gets herself alone
Speaker 6: with a cop, she exposes herself at Yell's Ring. So
Speaker 6: she here's the two cops. The two upping cops are
Speaker 6: at Sheila's house. Sheila's latest boyfriend is missing. The boyfriend's
Speaker 6: mothers wants to know what's going on. And instead of
Speaker 6: having and then ellen, they find a human bone, something
Speaker 6: that looks like a human bone in her fire pit.
Speaker 6: And instead of one cop going to get the search
Speaker 6: warrant and the other one's staying with Sheila, they leave
Speaker 6: her alone in the middle of nowhere and they go
Speaker 6: get the search warrant together by having to come back,
Speaker 6: the bone's gone, the victim sneakers are gone, and she'll's
Speaker 6: covered with ashes. Anyway, Luckily, Sheila tape recorded the torture
Speaker 6: sessions of her victims. She had on tape their confessions
Speaker 6: that there were pedophiles and they committed incest and claimed,
Speaker 6: even after she was arrested, that this was the reason
Speaker 6: they had to go. She'd been sleeping with pedophiles. They
Speaker 6: needed to be burned, and she quoted, you know biblical
Speaker 6: passages they talk about purification by fire. Anyway, I managed
Speaker 6: to to photograph the crime scene and eventually the charges
Speaker 6: against me were dropped. Yeah, I was working, and but
Speaker 6: you know, I don't don't want to go back to
Speaker 6: that Big New Hampshire anytime soon. So if they're worried
Speaker 6: about becoming, they don't have to. Sheilla's in prison for.
Speaker 2: There you go.
Speaker 5: I'd like to discuss one more story with you, and
Speaker 5: this is the very disturbing because it involves children, this Breckinridge,
Speaker 5: but because it's unfamiliar to me, I'm pretty sure that
Speaker 5: people haven't heard this incredible story. Tell us briefly about Breckinridge.
Speaker 6: Sure, it was while I was in at Big New Hampshire.
Speaker 6: It was the day before I went to Shield's farm
Speaker 6: and ended up in Hancuffs. I learned that it was
Speaker 6: June twenty fifth, two thousand and eight. It was the
Speaker 6: forty second anniversary of the double murders behind my house
Speaker 6: when I was nine, Right, So there's something about the
Speaker 6: summer souls just crimes get ickier. Around the first few
Speaker 6: days of summer two thousand and eight, ran off Vermond
Speaker 6: area and a man named Michael S. Jakes was what
Speaker 6: you might call a kiddy porn enthusiast, and he belonged
Speaker 6: to a club he'd found on the so called dark
Speaker 6: web called Breckinridge. Now Breckenridge may have been his own invention,
Speaker 6: and the guys who the other members were his friends
Speaker 6: and acquaintance, says, or it was just the tip of
Speaker 6: a Breckinridge iceberg that the rest of which we haven't
Speaker 6: seen because it knows how to stay submerged. But club
Speaker 6: members shared photos and videos and sometimes victims. Now Jake's
Speaker 6: was an active member of the group. He'd already recruited
Speaker 6: and videotaped a number of young victims, giving his comrades
Speaker 6: the kind of entertainment they wanted, and at some point
Speaker 6: he decided to up the ante. He had these girls
Speaker 6: convinced that they would be killed if they failed to
Speaker 6: serve their masters as ordered to do. Now, Bereckerrine was
Speaker 6: an organization that recruited nine ten eleven year old girls
Speaker 6: and told them that they had to learn how to
Speaker 6: be adequate sexual partners for these men, or else bad
Speaker 6: things would happen to them. And they're basically terrorized into
Speaker 6: being these guys little Nymph at Playmates. Now we talk
Speaker 6: about a girl in the story named Janet had her
Speaker 6: real name, but she was one of Jake's success stories,
Speaker 6: and she'd learned all the sex acts and she was
Speaker 6: very close to getting the seventy five percent approval rate
Speaker 6: she needed to graduate Wow, and Jakes tells her that
Speaker 6: he really would rather talk about sex and pleasure. But
Speaker 6: there comes a time sometimes when girls won't do what
Speaker 6: they're told and they are scheduled. This is quote scheduled
Speaker 6: for termination, and sure enough, Janet finds out that her
Speaker 6: friend Brooke Bennett, twelve years old, is not behaving as
Speaker 6: she should and has been scheduled for termination, and Janet
Speaker 6: is forced to Jan's told that if she finally does
Speaker 6: the right thing at the last moment, she might be
Speaker 6: able to save herself. But it's up to Janet to
Speaker 6: help get Brooke Bennett into Michael Jake's house. So they
Speaker 6: come over together under the lie that there's going to
Speaker 6: be a pool party, and Brooke shows up with her
Speaker 6: bathing suit and Janet leaves and Brooke Bennett was missing.
Speaker 6: Her body's found and cops know who's responsible right away
Speaker 6: because Jake's Janet and Brooke, Bennett were all all appeared
Speaker 6: on a surveillance tape at a convenience store earlier on
Speaker 6: the day of Brooks murder. So they go after Janet
Speaker 6: and they start questioning Janet. Finally she starts to say, well,
Speaker 6: you know, I belong to this club. It's called Breckinridge.
Speaker 6: We're supposed to have sex with men. And she says
Speaker 6: that Michael Jakes is one of the guys. So and
Speaker 6: it turns out that the Janet's stepfather is another member
Speaker 6: of Breckenridge, and he's in Texas throwing hard drives out
Speaker 6: the window when he finds out that Jake's has been arrested.
Speaker 6: And it did a horrible thing to that area of Vermont.
Speaker 6: The crime happened in the early summer, and at the
Speaker 6: end of the summer, all the way to Halloween, they
Speaker 6: were so traumatized they were talking about canceling Halloween because
Speaker 6: of child molesters. Right, hopefully, hopefully they've recovered to some
Speaker 6: extent now. The case did bring about some legislative changes
Speaker 6: in the way pedophiles were treated in the court system,
Speaker 6: because Jake's had been arrested multiple times for the same stuff,
Speaker 6: and how every time he'd been let out one time.
Speaker 6: He was let out early on purpose because they wanted
Speaker 6: him to get into a program for pedophiles, and you
Speaker 6: couldn't do that when he was a prisoner, so they
Speaker 6: let him out. They led him out to do it
Speaker 6: again rather than keeping him in jail and away from
Speaker 6: little girls. So it's a guilt that that section of
Speaker 6: Vermont had a lot of trouble shaking.
Speaker 5: Yes, I want to thank you so much Michael Benson
Speaker 5: for coming on talking about your latest Dark Roses thirteen
Speaker 5: horrific true Stories. I know this is a Benson book
Speaker 5: for those that might want to take a look at
Speaker 5: other work. I know there's an Amazon page, but is
Speaker 5: there a website.
Speaker 6: Guys still don't have a website. I'm sorry, Dan, but
Speaker 6: on on Amazon, i am the I am the Michael
Speaker 6: Benson with the white Beard. I think author author Michael
Speaker 6: Benson does the trick. And I'm on Facebook and if
Speaker 6: you want to by all means, I've had many friend
Speaker 6: requests over the years where the friend in communist Dan Zupansky,
Speaker 6: so and that's another way to get in touch with me.
Speaker 6: And I do have many true crime books and Dark
Speaker 6: Roses with the great cover photo by my son and
Speaker 6: cover design by my daughter. It's truly a Benson book.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, thank you so much, Michael Benson.
Speaker 6: Thanks Dan, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 5: Thank you, good night,