Speaker 1: Imagine just for a second that you are settling in
Speaker 1: for the night. You walk over to your front door,
Speaker 1: you turn the dead bolt, and you hear that heavy, reassuring,
Speaker 1: metallic click, right.
Speaker 2: That sound that just tells your brain you're safe.
Speaker 1: Exactly, and you know. You punch the code into your
Speaker 1: security system, you listen for the little chirp, and you
Speaker 1: basically do every single thing you're supposed to do to
Speaker 1: keep the monsters out, and you go to sleep feeling perfectly.
Speaker 2: Safe as you should. I mean, you followed all the rules.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But what you don't know, and honestly, what you
Speaker 1: couldn't possibly know, is that the internal mechanism of the
Speaker 1: lock is fundamentally broken. The security system's wiring was severed
Speaker 1: months ago.
Speaker 2: Oh that is a terrifying thought.
Speaker 1: Right, And the monster you were trying so incredibly hard
Speaker 1: to keep out, well, he didn't even have to break
Speaker 1: a window. He is already holding a freshly cut copy
Speaker 1: of your house key.
Speaker 2: You know, it is a profoundly unsettling psychological space to occupy.
Speaker 2: That false sense of security is in a lot of
Speaker 2: ways demonstrably more dangerous than having no security at all.
Speaker 1: I completely agree.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you know your door is broken, you
Speaker 2: stay awake, right, you stand guard. But when you trust
Speaker 2: the system blindly, it just lulls you into a state
Speaker 2: of total, absolute vulnerability.
Speaker 1: And that terrifying, stomach dropping realization you know that the
Speaker 1: law is actually broken, is exactly what we are unraveling today.
Speaker 1: So welcome to Thrilling Threads.
Speaker 2: It's good to be here.
Speaker 1: We have a lot to cover, we really do. Today
Speaker 1: we are embarking on an exploration into well the darkest
Speaker 1: and most maddeningly frustrating corners of the justice system. I
Speaker 1: have this massive stack of historical records, court transcripts, and
Speaker 1: investigative files sitting right here on the desk today. It's
Speaker 1: quite the pile, it is. And our mission for today's
Speaker 1: journey on Thrilling Threads is to dissect ten harrowing historical
Speaker 1: cases where the system inexplicably catastrophically failed.
Speaker 2: You know, true crime is a genre, and just as
Speaker 2: a societal interest, it usually focuses super heavily on the
Speaker 2: meticulous detective work. Oh, for sure, the brilliant investigator right
Speaker 2: like we love the forensic breakthroughs, the late night interrogations
Speaker 2: and those dramatic court room reveals that finally put the
Speaker 2: killer away. I mean, it makes us feel like the
Speaker 2: world is ordered and safe.
Speaker 1: It gives us closure exactly.
Speaker 2: But today we are turning the magnifying glass completely around.
Speaker 2: We are looking at the systemic failures, the blind spots,
Speaker 2: the bureaucratic loopholes, and just the absolute institutional blunders that
Speaker 2: let killers slip through the cracks and walk free.
Speaker 1: Right Because I think a lot of us, and myself
Speaker 1: absolutely included, have this default assumption that once a criminal
Speaker 1: is caught, once the handcuffs click and the gavel drops,
Speaker 1: the story is over. The credits roll, yeah, the credits roll. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But today we're going to shatter that assumption entirely. For you,
Speaker 1: catching a killer is well, is only half the battle.
Speaker 1: Keeping them caught, as it turns out, is a completely different,
Speaker 1: terrifying game.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: So let's just jump right in because the very first
Speaker 1: way the system breaks down isn't through some brilliant cinematic
Speaker 1: like Ocean's eleven style escape, and it's not a lack
Speaker 1: of DNA evidence either.
Speaker 2: No, it is the most mundane, infuriating thing in the world.
Speaker 1: Bureaucracy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the banal, everyday mistakes that govern our modern lives.
Speaker 2: Only in this context they carry literal life or death consequences.
Speaker 1: Hold, I want to ground this in a reality we
Speaker 1: all understand. Think about when you make a typo in
Speaker 1: a casual email at work.
Speaker 2: Oh, the worst feeling, right.
Speaker 1: Like, maybe you accidentally hit reply all on a complaint,
Speaker 1: or you transpose two numbers on a spreadsheet.
Speaker 2: Sure it causes an afternoon of chaos.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe a few awkward conversations by the water cooler,
Speaker 1: then you know it's fixed. But I am looking at
Speaker 1: the case file for Kathan Guzman from twenty twenty four
Speaker 1: and my brain is just struggling to process the math here.
Speaker 2: It's a hard one to wrap your head around.
Speaker 1: A literal typo unleashed a man who had just been
Speaker 1: handled a life sentence for murder back into society.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate digital nightmare. To give you the
Speaker 2: foundational context here, in twenty twenty, Cathan Guzman strangled his
Speaker 2: girlfriend Delilah Grayson inside their apartment in Georgia.
Speaker 1: It's awful.
Speaker 2: It is. The investigative files show she had been trying
Speaker 2: to pack her things and leave him. So it's a
Speaker 2: tragedy rooted in domestic violence that we just see far
Speaker 2: too often. Her body was found in.
Speaker 1: A bathroom, so are breaking?
Speaker 2: Yeah. Fast forward to October twenty twenty four, and the
Speaker 2: justice system appears to work perfectly. Gusman is convicted of
Speaker 2: felony murder. He is sentenced to life in prison.
Speaker 1: The gabble falls, the family thinks they can finally start
Speaker 1: to grieve. The monster is lock away exactly.
Speaker 2: But then we reach March twenty twenty five. Guzman is
Speaker 2: sitting in the Clayton County jail. He is simply waiting
Speaker 2: for standard processing to be transferred to a state maximum
Speaker 2: security prison to begin serving that life sentence.
Speaker 1: Just standard holding, right, But.
Speaker 2: Instead of putting him on a heavily guarded bus, the
Speaker 2: jail staff processes paperwork, they open the front doors, and
Speaker 2: they let him walk right out into the Georgia sunlight.
Speaker 1: How I mean, legitimately, How does the physical mechanism of
Speaker 1: a jail allow a convicted murderer to just walk out?
Speaker 2: Well, it wasn't a physical failure, right, It was a
Speaker 2: digital one, A simple coding error.
Speaker 1: The coding air unbelievable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a data entry mistake deep within the jail's internal
Speaker 2: computer network misclassified his holding status. So when the staff
Speaker 2: at the jail pulled up his profile. The screen essentially
Speaker 2: told them he was cleared for release.
Speaker 1: But don't they double check? I mean, doesn't a human
Speaker 1: being look at the guy and say, wait, aren't you
Speaker 1: the guy who is just on the news for a
Speaker 1: life sentence.
Speaker 2: You'd think so. But this gets to the heart of
Speaker 2: the fragility of our digitized justice system. We trust databases implicitly.
Speaker 1: Too implicitly, clearly right.
Speaker 2: When a computer screen tells a bureaucratic worker, you know,
Speaker 2: release this inmate, the human instinct to question that command
Speaker 2: is heavily suppressed by our modern reliance on technology.
Speaker 1: Because the computer's always right.
Speaker 2: Exactly, we assume the machine is infallible. It's the whole
Speaker 2: computer says, yes, phenomenon, But the machine is really only
Speaker 2: as good as the exhausted, underpaid data entry clerk who
Speaker 2: typed the code in the first place.
Speaker 1: Okay, but here is what actually sends me over the
Speaker 1: edge on this one. Are you telling me that my
Speaker 1: phone has facial recognition that can tag me in a
Speaker 1: blurry photo from a concert ten years ago? But the
Speaker 1: state prison system doesn't get an automatic push notification when
Speaker 1: a convicted murderer goes missing. For fourteen days.
Speaker 2: That is precisely what happened for two entire weeks. Guzman
Speaker 2: was just roaming.
Speaker 1: Free fourteen days. Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the county authorities had zero clue they had released
Speaker 2: a murderer, and the state authorities had zero clue their
Speaker 2: incoming prisoner was.
Speaker 1: Missing, so they were just both waiting in the dark.
Speaker 2: Yep. The mistake was only discovered when the District Attorney's office,
Speaker 2: who was just doing a routine administrative follow up, tried
Speaker 2: to locate him in the state prison database and came
Speaker 2: up completely empty.
Speaker 1: It is a total silo effect. They aren't talking to
Speaker 1: each other, thankfully, And I cannot stress this enough. Us
Speaker 1: marsh was eventually tracked Guzman down to his mother's home
Speaker 1: in Florida.
Speaker 2: Right. They did get him back.
Speaker 1: They returned him to custody, and Delilah Grayson's family expressed
Speaker 1: just sheer relief. But my goodness, the emotional whiplash you
Speaker 1: would feel.
Speaker 2: Oh. It fundamentally erodes public trust. I mean, if the
Speaker 2: state apparatus cannot even manage the digital paperwork required to
Speaker 2: keep a convicted murderer behind bars, the public is left
Speaker 2: wondering what other foundational errors are just quietly sitting in
Speaker 2: these databases.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and if Kensan Guzman's case was a digital typo,
Speaker 1: this next historical file is a legislative typo, like a
Speaker 1: blind spot in the actual written.
Speaker 2: Law, a very dangerous blind spot.
Speaker 1: We are looking at Pedro Alnzo Lopez, infamously known as
Speaker 1: the Monster of the Andes.
Speaker 2: A title that he earned through a scale of violence
Speaker 2: that is almost impossible to fully comprehend, it really is.
Speaker 1: Starting in nineteen seventy eight, Lopez began a reign of
Speaker 1: terror across Columbia, Peru, and Ecuador. He'd abducted and murdered
Speaker 1: dozens and eventually one hundred of young girls, just.
Speaker 2: A horrific, horrific scale.
Speaker 1: And his psychological justification, according to his own statements of
Speaker 1: these records, was that he strangled them so they would
Speaker 1: quote go to heaven and not suffer in this world.
Speaker 1: It's just this absolute chilling detachment from reality.
Speaker 2: It is. And to understand how he operated for so long,
Speaker 2: you have to look at the geography and sociology of
Speaker 2: the region at that time.
Speaker 1: The terrain played a big part.
Speaker 2: Yes, he targeted deeply rural, impoverished areas. He weaponized the
Speaker 2: fact that disappearances in these marginalized communities were tragically easy
Speaker 2: for the broader authorities to overlook or dismiss.
Speaker 1: He knew they wouldn't get the same police attention.
Speaker 2: Exactly. He lived in the transient spaces between borders.
Speaker 1: But in nineteen eighty the locals caught him. He was
Speaker 1: captured by villagers in Ecuador, and he didn't even try
Speaker 1: to deny it.
Speaker 2: No, he was quite open about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he confessed to hundreds of killings. He physically led
Speaker 1: the police out into the terrain and pointed out mass graves.
Speaker 1: So the authorities have the killer, they have the confession,
Speaker 1: they have the bodies. It is the ultimate slam.
Speaker 2: Dunk in theory.
Speaker 1: Yes, but the system breaks down not because of a
Speaker 1: lack of evidence, but because the law simply didn't know
Speaker 1: what to do with him.
Speaker 2: This is where we run into statutory limits. We assume
Speaker 2: the law is an all encompassing that right, but laws
Speaker 2: are generally written for the criminals a society realistically expects
Speaker 2: to face.
Speaker 1: They couldn't conceive of a Lopez exactly.
Speaker 2: The authorities in Ecuador had him dead to rights, but
Speaker 2: the statutory reality of Ecuador's legal code at the time
Speaker 2: was entirely unprepared for a serial killer. Their absolute maximum
Speaker 2: sentence for murder under any circumstances was just sixteen years.
Speaker 1: Sixteen years for hundreds of lives.
Speaker 2: The legislative framework was built to handle single homicides, crimes
Speaker 2: of passion, or just standard violent.
Speaker 1: Crime, so it maxed out right.
Speaker 2: The law literally treated a man who industrialized the murder
Speaker 2: of children exactly the same as a man who killed
Speaker 2: a single person in a tavern brawl. The machine of
Speaker 2: the law could not scale to meet the magnitude of
Speaker 2: his evil.
Speaker 1: But the outrage doesn't even stop there. I am looking
Speaker 1: at these records and he didn't even serve the sixteen years. No,
Speaker 1: he did not. He was released from the Garcia Moreno
Speaker 1: prison in nineteen ninety four after serving only fourteen years.
Speaker 1: Why because the system granted him two years of early
Speaker 1: release for good behavior.
Speaker 2: Good behavior.
Speaker 1: I need you to explain this to me, because how
Speaker 1: does a concept like good behavior even theoretically apply to
Speaker 1: a man who literally filled mass graves.
Speaker 2: Well, it is the blind, unfeeling application of standard penal policy.
Speaker 2: A prison operates on compliance.
Speaker 1: Just keeping the peace inside exactly.
Speaker 2: The bureaucracy says, you know, if an inmate makes their bed,
Speaker 2: sweeps the floors, and doesn't assault the guards deduct time,
Speaker 2: the bureaucracy does not have a mechanism to say, wait,
Speaker 2: this particular inmate's baseline crimes are so uniquely horrific that
Speaker 2: standard behavioral metrics should be suspended.
Speaker 1: They just look at a checklist on a clipboard.
Speaker 2: Yes, the system is blind to the nature of the
Speaker 2: evil outside the walls. It only sees the compliance within
Speaker 2: the walls.
Speaker 1: So because he swept the floors nicely, they unlocked the door.
Speaker 1: Pretty much, He's deported to Columbia. Yeah, they declare him insane,
Speaker 1: put him in a psychiatric facility. But then in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety eight a psychiatric board pronounces him sane and he
Speaker 1: is freed on bail. The bail amount ah less than
Speaker 1: one hundred.
Speaker 2: Dollars, a staggering failure.
Speaker 1: One hundred dollars for the monster of the Andes, And well.
Speaker 2: The inevitable happened. He vanished. He walked straight back into
Speaker 2: the exact same rural, borderless terrain he had originally used
Speaker 2: as his hunting ground, and.
Speaker 1: He hasn't been seen since. He's just gone because the
Speaker 1: system was so rigid, so bound by arbitrary maximums and
Speaker 1: standard procedures that it willingly opened the door.
Speaker 2: Yea's exactly right.
Speaker 1: But that makes me wonder if Lopez walked free because
Speaker 1: the rules were too rigid. What happens when a killer
Speaker 1: faces a system that is designed to be flexible.
Speaker 2: That's a great question.
Speaker 1: Like what happens when a monster realizes the human beings
Speaker 1: running the system can be manipulated.
Speaker 2: That is where we move move from systemic errors to
Speaker 2: psychological exploitation. When a killer realizes that psychiatrists, parole boards,
Speaker 2: and guards are just humans who want to believe certain narratives,
Speaker 2: they weaponize that empathy.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about Arthur Shawcross, because this case is a
Speaker 1: terrifying study in the arrogance of the parole system.
Speaker 2: Arrogance is the perfect word for it.
Speaker 1: Right. In nineteen seventy two, Shawcross murdered two miners in
Speaker 1: New York. He pleaded guilty demandslaughter. Now here's the crucial
Speaker 1: detail that makes this so frustrating to read. The system
Speaker 1: actually got it right at first.
Speaker 2: They did. The initial safeguards worked.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the psychiatric evaluations conducted at the time were incredibly accurate.
Speaker 1: They explicitly formally documented him as quote deeply disturbed and dangerous.
Speaker 1: They waved the red flag as high as it could go.
Speaker 2: The clinical experts looked at his neurological and psychological profile
Speaker 2: and stated unequivocally that he possessed a severe deficit of
Speaker 2: empathy and a high propensity for future violence.
Speaker 1: They basically said, do not let this guy.
Speaker 2: Out, exactly, and yet despite that clear warning, he was
Speaker 2: handed a twenty five year sentence which left the door
Speaker 2: open for parole.
Speaker 1: And he didn't even serve the twenty five years. He
Speaker 1: is paroled in nineteen eighty seven after serving just fourteen.
Speaker 2: Years, which is astounding.
Speaker 1: How does a documented, deeply disturbed killer convince a parole
Speaker 1: board to let.
Speaker 2: Him out by understanding what the parole board desperately wanted
Speaker 2: to see? You know, the parole system fundamentally exists on
Speaker 2: the premise of rehabilitation. They want a success story exactly.
Speaker 2: It is an optimistic institution. It wants to believe that
Speaker 2: incarceration and reflection can genuinely change a human being. But
Speaker 2: severe psychopathy and sociopathy are incredibly adept at mimicking human emotion.
Speaker 1: So he just learned the script precisely.
Speaker 2: He learned the vocabulary of remorse. Our historical records show
Speaker 2: he portrayed himself as very sad for.
Speaker 1: His actions, very sad. Wow.
Speaker 2: He told the board he realized what he did was
Speaker 2: a real bad thing. He gave them a masterclass in
Speaker 2: performative sorrow. And because the Board's mandate is to find
Speaker 2: rehabilitated individuals to relieve prison crowding, they accepted his performance
Speaker 2: over the empirical psychiatric data.
Speaker 1: It's like the system assumed its ability to offer therapy
Speaker 1: was somehow more powerful than his biological compulsion to kill.
Speaker 2: It is a fatal institutional arrogance. You cannot therapy away
Speaker 2: a fundamental psychological void, especially when the subject is actively
Speaker 2: gaming the therapy, and the.
Speaker 1: Cost of that arrogance was just catastrophic. Shortly after his
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty seven release, vulnerable sex workers began disappearing around Rochester.
Speaker 2: New York, oh totally preventable tragedy.
Speaker 1: Absolutely Their bodies were dumped near the Genesee River. It
Speaker 1: took nearly two years of renewed terror before police finally
Speaker 1: arrested him in January of nineteen ninety and that was
Speaker 1: only because an eyewitness and a surveillance team physically spotted
Speaker 1: him near a body.
Speaker 2: He had already done so much damage by then.
Speaker 1: He was convicted of ten more murders, given two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty years, and died in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: But those ten lives were the direct cost of a
Speaker 1: parole board prioritizing a deceptive performance over clinical tries.
Speaker 2: Shawcross manipulated a parole board in a controlled room. But
Speaker 2: if we expand that concept of manipulation, we find individuals
Speaker 2: who didn't just talk their way out of a sentence.
Speaker 2: They manipulated the physical and societal reality of the justice
Speaker 2: system itself.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at the notes for Ted Bundy and my
Speaker 1: brain is just short circuiting.
Speaker 2: It's a baffling sequence of events.
Speaker 1: Because he didn't just trick a psychologist. He literally walked
Speaker 1: out of secure facilities twice. Yes he did, We all
Speaker 1: know the name, but the timeline of how he interacted
Speaker 1: with the law is baffling. August nineteen seventy five, Bundy
Speaker 1: is pulled over in Utah. Inside his Volkswagon, officers find handcuffs,
Speaker 1: a ski mask, rope, and pantiose with eye holes cut out.
Speaker 2: The very clear set of tools.
Speaker 1: It is a literal horror movie prop kit in his.
Speaker 2: Trunk, and compounding that physical evidence, he is placed in
Speaker 2: a lineup and positively identified by teenager Carol Deranch as
Speaker 2: the man who attempted to kidnap her.
Speaker 1: So you would think with a murder kit in the
Speaker 1: trunk and a positive ID from a surviving victim, this
Speaker 1: guy would be locked in a subterranean vault.
Speaker 2: You'd certainly so.
Speaker 1: He is convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to fifteen years.
Speaker 1: He is then transferred to Colorado to face murder charges.
Speaker 1: And this is where the system completely loses its mind.
Speaker 1: How does a man with that profile escape from custody.
Speaker 2: It comes down to a psychological blind spot known as
Speaker 2: the halo effect.
Speaker 1: The halo effect, yes.
Speaker 2: In the nineteen seventies, the prevailing law enforcement profile of
Speaker 2: a deranged killer with someone who looked the part, someone
Speaker 2: visibly unhinged, perhaps unkempt, a lurking monster like a movie villain. Right.
Speaker 2: Bundy completely contradicted that archetype. He was handsome, articulate, educated
Speaker 2: and white. He was a law student. He spoke their language,
Speaker 2: so he just subconsciously relaxed around him entirely because he
Speaker 2: looked and sounded like a young professional. The guards and
Speaker 2: officials afforded him courtesies they would never have given to
Speaker 2: someone who looked well rougher, that is wild. During his
Speaker 2: time in Aspen, Colorado, he elected to serve as his
Speaker 2: own defense attorney. This allowed him access to the courthouse,
Speaker 2: lawless library, wait, unsupervised pretty much. He wasn't shackled. He
Speaker 2: was simply left alone to research. And because they didn't
Speaker 2: view him as a feral threat, they didn't realize he
Speaker 2: was just waiting for them to look away. He opened
Speaker 2: a second story window and jumped out.
Speaker 1: He literally jumped out a window because they thought he
Speaker 1: was too polite to flee.
Speaker 2: That's exactly what happened.
Speaker 1: But they catch him. He's recaptured a week later, so
Speaker 1: you'd think, Okay, fool me once, shame on you. Now
Speaker 1: he's in maximum security, right, but he escapes again from
Speaker 1: a jail in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.
Speaker 2: The second escape was even more methodical.
Speaker 1: How do you do it?
Speaker 2: He mapped the guard rotations, He purposefully dropped a significant
Speaker 2: amount of weight. He acquired a hacksaw blade, which again
Speaker 2: is a massive failure of basic physical security, and he
Speaker 2: sawed through a metal plate in the ceiling of his.
Speaker 1: Cell, just sitting in his cell sawing away.
Speaker 2: Yep, he crawled through the duct work and dropped down
Speaker 2: into the chief jailer's apartment, which was actually in the
Speaker 2: same building, and simply walked at the front door in clothes.
Speaker 1: He weaponized their own biases against them. He knew they
Speaker 1: didn't see him as a physical threat, so he just
Speaker 1: quietly dismantled their prison from the inside.
Speaker 2: And the cost was immense.
Speaker 1: It was he flees to Florida, goes on a horrific
Speaker 1: rampage at a sorority house and kills several more young women.
Speaker 2: It's devastating to think about.
Speaker 1: He was finally caught during a routine traffic stop in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight and executed in nineteen eighty nine. But
Speaker 1: the fact that he was able to walk out of
Speaker 1: secure facilities because people just couldn't reconcile his clean cut
Speaker 1: face with his horrific crimes.
Speaker 2: It's chilling, which brings us to an individual who took
Speaker 2: that concept of systemic manipulation and escalated it to an
Speaker 2: international scale.
Speaker 1: Oh, this one is a wild ride.
Speaker 2: It is if Bundy used his charm to get unsupervised
Speaker 2: time in a library. Charles Sabraje used his intellect to
Speaker 2: play sovereign nations against each other, The.
Speaker 1: Bikini Killer the Serpent. During the nineteen seventies, Subroge traveled
Speaker 1: across Asia, specifically targeting young Western tourists traveling the hippie trail.
Speaker 1: He was charming, multi lingual, and highly manipulative. He would
Speaker 1: befriend them, drug them, rob them, and murder them, and
Speaker 1: he slipped across international borders seamlessly.
Speaker 2: The culture of the hippie trail in the seventies was
Speaker 2: inherently transient and trusting, which made his victims especially vulnerable,
Speaker 2: but his evasion of the police was based entirely on
Speaker 2: identity theft.
Speaker 1: He was stealing their lives.
Speaker 2: Basically, he utilized the passports he stole from his victims.
Speaker 2: The historical files mention a specific instance where he is
Speaker 2: pulled over in a car matching the suspects description. The
Speaker 2: officer approaches and Sabraj completely unflappably produces a stolen passport,
Speaker 2: calmly identifying himself as.
Speaker 1: Carlkeel just ice water in his veins.
Speaker 2: He exhibited no autonomic fear response whatsoever.
Speaker 1: But his luck does eventually run out. In nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: Indian authorities arrest him in New Delhi after he tries
Speaker 1: to drug an entire group of French students.
Speaker 2: In a hotel lobby, a very brazen move.
Speaker 1: Very so he is finally behind bars. It seems like
Speaker 1: the end of the road. But this is where Sobraj
Speaker 1: executes one of the most diabolical mastermind legal maneuvers in
Speaker 1: the history of the justice system.
Speaker 2: It is truly a masterclass in malignant genius. He views
Speaker 2: the law not as a moral authority, but as an
Speaker 2: obstacle course governed by very specific mathematical rules.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's break this down step by step for you listening,
Speaker 1: because it plays out like a movie script. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: is in the massive Tahar jail in India. He manages
Speaker 1: to escape how He literally throws a party for the
Speaker 1: guards y he smuggles and sedatives, leases their food in
Speaker 1: candy with the sleeping pills, and when they pass out,
Speaker 1: he just walks out the front gates.
Speaker 2: But he doesn't stay on the run. No, he is
Speaker 2: quickly recaptured and as punishment for this brazen escape, the
Speaker 2: Indian courts add an additional ten years to his original
Speaker 2: sentence Right now, to any rational person, adding a decade
Speaker 2: to your time in a harsh prison is a total disaster.
Speaker 2: But our records reveal a massive structural twists. This is
Speaker 2: exactly what he wanted.
Speaker 1: Wait, he escaped knowing he would be caught, specifically to
Speaker 1: get more prison time.
Speaker 2: Why to understand this, we have to look at the
Speaker 2: broader map of international law. Sobroje knew he had a
Speaker 2: massive lethal problem waiting for him in Thailand. Okay, he
Speaker 2: had committed multiple highly publicized murders there and the Thai
Speaker 2: government was actively seeking his extradition to face the death penalty.
Speaker 1: So he's in India, but Thailand is waiting with a
Speaker 1: firing squad.
Speaker 2: Exactly. He knew that if he finished his original shorter
Speaker 2: sentence in India, the moment he stepped out of the prison,
Speaker 2: Indian authorities would put him on a plane to Bangkok
Speaker 2: and he would be executed.
Speaker 1: Right, that makes sense.
Speaker 2: However, Sobraj had meticulously studied the Thai legal code. He
Speaker 2: discovered that Thailand had a strict twenty year statute of
Speaker 2: limitations on murder charges.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I see where this is going.
Speaker 2: He did the math. He realized his current sentence in
Speaker 2: India wasn't long enough to run out the clock in Thailand.
Speaker 2: If he served his normal time, he'd be extradited with
Speaker 2: years left on the statute of limitations.
Speaker 1: So he orchestrates a fake escape drugs. The guards gets recaptured,
Speaker 1: just to force the Indian justice system to lock him
Speaker 1: up for an extra ten years.
Speaker 2: Precisely, by legally forcing India to keep him imprisoned for
Speaker 2: that additional decade, he ensured that by the time he
Speaker 2: was finally officially released, the twenty year statute of limitations
Speaker 2: in Thailand had completely expired.
Speaker 1: That is just wow.
Speaker 2: Thailand could no longer legally prosecute him. The arrest warrants
Speaker 2: were void. He literally weaponized the Indian penal system to
Speaker 2: build a temporal shield against a Thai death sentence.
Speaker 1: He played international jurisdictions against each other like a grand master.
Speaker 1: He used a prison cell as a bunker to survive
Speaker 1: a death penalty.
Speaker 2: It's terrifying because it shows that a purely mechanical, rules
Speaker 2: based system can be completely hijacked by a sociopath who
Speaker 2: just bothers to read the rule book.
Speaker 1: He was eventually released in nineteen ninety seven and returned
Speaker 1: to France a freeman. Now his narsess eventually got the
Speaker 1: better of him. He traveled to Nepal in two thousand
Speaker 1: and three, where they had a separate outstanding warrant. He
Speaker 1: was arrested, served nineteen years and was released in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two due to old age.
Speaker 2: But that middle section of his life, manipulating international timelines
Speaker 2: to beat the executioner is the ultimate exploitation of a
Speaker 2: legal loophole.
Speaker 1: It's staggering, but as dark as that is, we have
Speaker 1: to keep pulling on these threads because manipulating the system
Speaker 1: to save yourself is horrific. But what happens when a
Speaker 1: killer manipulates the system to execute an innocent person in
Speaker 1: their place?
Speaker 2: Now we are moving into cases of fatal confirmation bias.
Speaker 2: We are transitioning from cases where the system was outsmarted
Speaker 2: to cases where the system willingly put on a blindfold
Speaker 2: because it found a narrative that was just well convenient.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about London, nineteen forty nine, the murder of
Speaker 1: Baryl Evans at ten Rillington Place. The police arrive at
Speaker 1: this cramped dingy flat. They have a body they are
Speaker 1: investigating and.
Speaker 2: They need witnesses enter the downstairs neighbor.
Speaker 1: John Reginald Christy.
Speaker 2: Christy presented himself to the investigators as an upstanding, respectable citizen.
Speaker 2: He was polite, articulate, and immensely eager to assist.
Speaker 1: Law enforcement, almost two eager yes.
Speaker 2: And he pointed the fingers squarely at Beryl's husband, Timothy Evans.
Speaker 1: And the police just bought it, hook line and sinker.
Speaker 1: They needed a suspect, and Christy handed them one on
Speaker 1: a silver platter.
Speaker 2: Well, Timothy Evans was somewhat dim witted, prone to panic,
Speaker 2: and he gave conflicting statements out of fear. He fit
Speaker 2: the profile of a domestic dispute gone wrong.
Speaker 1: So, based largely on the testimony of the helpful neighbor,
Speaker 1: Timothy Evans was convicted of murder, and in nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: the state hanged him.
Speaker 2: The justice system executed a completely innocent man.
Speaker 1: But the reality of the absolute nightmarish reality is that
Speaker 1: the helpful neighbor, John Reginald Christy was the actual killer.
Speaker 1: He was, and he hadn't just killed Beryl Evans. According
Speaker 1: to the historical files, Christy had been operating as a
Speaker 1: prolific serial killer since nineteen forty three.
Speaker 2: The scale of his deception is hard to fathom.
Speaker 1: While he was standing in a court of law, wearing
Speaker 1: a suit, solemnly testifying against an innocent man, he literally
Speaker 1: had the decaying bodies of his previous victims hidden inside
Speaker 1: his own home.
Speaker 2: They were concealed in the walls.
Speaker 1: Stuffed under the floorboards, buried in the small back garden.
Speaker 1: He'd even murdered his own wife.
Speaker 2: This raises a fundamental question about the psychology of criminal investigation,
Speaker 2: like how does law enforcement develop such a profound, impenetrable
Speaker 2: tunnel vision. The police were conducting interviews while standing in
Speaker 2: a literal graveyard.
Speaker 1: Exactly, they were interacting with an active serial killer on
Speaker 1: a daily basis. Why couldn't they smell it? Why didn't
Speaker 1: they look closer at him?
Speaker 2: Because they had decided early on that the husband was
Speaker 2: the most logical suspect. Statistically, in cases of domestic homicide,
Speaker 2: the partner is almost always.
Speaker 1: The culprit, so they just played the odds.
Speaker 2: The police latched onto that statistic and suffered from terminal
Speaker 2: confirmation bias. They ignored any inconsistencies or red flags surrounding
Speaker 2: Christy because Christy was serving them The exact narrative they
Speaker 2: needed to close the file on Evans.
Speaker 1: The system didn't want the complex, horrifying truth. The system
Speaker 1: wanted a swift conviction.
Speaker 2: Precisely, they took the path of least resistance, and Christy
Speaker 2: just paved it for them.
Speaker 1: It wasn't until nineteen fifty three, when Christy finally moved
Speaker 1: out and new tenants found the bodies hidden behind the wallpaper,
Speaker 1: that the truth came out. Christi fled, was quickly captured,
Speaker 1: and was hanged at Pentonville Prison that same year, a.
Speaker 2: Small measure of justice finally.
Speaker 1: But the damage was permanent. An innocent man was dead
Speaker 1: because the police trusted a monster who offered them an
Speaker 1: easy answer.
Speaker 2: And we must recognize that this isn't just an archaic
Speaker 2: mid century British problem. This dynamic the bureaucratic machine prioritizing
Speaker 2: a closed case over the messy pursuit of actual truth.
Speaker 1: It happens continually, which brings us to the devastating case
Speaker 1: of David Ray Harris and Randall Dale Adams. Fast forward
Speaker 1: to November nineteen seventy six in Dallas.
Speaker 2: Time a very different setting but a similar systemic flaw.
Speaker 1: A police officer named Robert Wood is shot and killed
Speaker 1: during a routine traffic stop.
Speaker 2: We really need to understand the institutional environment here. When
Speaker 2: a police officer is murdered, it puts immense overwhelming pressure
Speaker 2: on a police department and the district attorney's office. The
Speaker 2: whole city is watching, right, The political and emotional mandate
Speaker 2: to find the killer is absolute, and the speed at
Speaker 2: which they are expected to deliver a suspect to the
Speaker 2: public is incredibly high.
Speaker 1: So they scramble and they find a suspect. David Ray Harris.
Speaker 1: He was the teenager driving the stolen car that Officer
Speaker 1: Wood had pulled over.
Speaker 2: He is in custody, and he spins a story.
Speaker 1: He points the figure at a man he'd only met
Speaker 1: a few hours earlier, a twenty eight year old drifter
Speaker 1: named Randall Dale Adams.
Speaker 2: Harris claims he was just a frightened passenger and that Adams,
Speaker 2: the older man, suddenly pulled the trigger.
Speaker 1: Now here's where the machinery of justice completely derails into corruption.
Speaker 1: Harris Head actively loudly bragged to his friends that he
Speaker 1: had quote off the pig.
Speaker 2: The authorities had this information.
Speaker 1: Yes, they knew the teenager in the stolen car was
Speaker 1: bragging about the murder, but instead of prosecuting the obvious killer,
Speaker 1: they lock onto the drifter Adams.
Speaker 2: Why because of the rigid mechanics of capital punishment. Explain that, well,
Speaker 2: Harris was sixteen years old. As a juvenile, he was
Speaker 2: ineligible for the death penalty. Adams was an adult. Prosecuting
Speaker 2: Adams meant the district Attorney Henry Wade could seek the
Speaker 2: death penalty.
Speaker 1: So it was about the optics of the punishment entirely.
Speaker 2: It allowed the state to present a much harsher, more
Speaker 2: politically satisfying blood for blood conclusion to aggrieving police force
Speaker 2: and an angry public.
Speaker 1: So they get that lethal injection. They make a literal
Speaker 1: deal with the devil they do. The prosecutors actually give
Speaker 1: David Ray Harris, the teenager bragging about the murder and
Speaker 1: immunity deal so he can serve as the star witness
Speaker 1: against the completely innocent Randall Dale Adams.
Speaker 2: It is the Christie and Evans dynamic, but institutionalized. The
Speaker 2: state active shielded a murderer to secure a death sentence
Speaker 2: against an innocent man.
Speaker 1: Adams is condemned to death row. He spends over twelve
Speaker 1: agonizing years of his life waiting to be executed for
Speaker 1: a crime he had absolutely nothing to.
Speaker 2: Do with, just existing in a nightmare.
Speaker 1: And he would have died there too, strapped to a
Speaker 1: gurney if it hadn't been for a documentary filmmaker. The
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty eight film The Thin Blue Line painstakingly investigated
Speaker 1: the case, exposing the prosecutorial misconduct, uncovering the witness lies,
Speaker 1: and revealing the sheer corruption of the Dallas authorities.
Speaker 2: That documentary was pivotal.
Speaker 1: The public outcry was so massive that Adams was finally
Speaker 1: released in nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 2: There is a chilling quote from the historical record regarding
Speaker 2: this case. It says, if there was ever a hell
Speaker 2: on Earth, it's Dallas County.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: It perfectly encapsulates the terror of a justice system that
Speaker 2: is mutated from a mechanism for discovering the truth into
Speaker 2: an industrialized machine for producing convictions. When the massive weight
Speaker 2: of the state decides you are guilty, overturning that momentum
Speaker 2: takes an absolute miracle.
Speaker 1: And as for Harris, because of that immunity deal, he
Speaker 1: was never charged for Officer Woods murder.
Speaker 2: He walked free, which is just a stunning failure of justice.
Speaker 1: He continued his life of crime, and decades later he
Speaker 1: was eventually executed in Texas in two thousand and four
Speaker 1: for a completely separate, unrelated murder. The system let him
Speaker 1: go entirely by choice, just so they could close a
Speaker 1: file with a death sentence.
Speaker 2: This brings us to a historical transition that requires us
Speaker 2: to look very objectively at the mechanics of the law.
Speaker 2: We have discussed systems failing due to digital errors, psychological manipulation,
Speaker 2: and confirmation bias.
Speaker 1: Yes, all different types of cracks.
Speaker 2: But we must now examine a historical reality where the
Speaker 2: justice system did not technically break down. Instead, it functioned
Speaker 2: exactly as it was designed to by the society of
Speaker 2: that era.
Speaker 1: That is a crucial distinction. When he looked the American
Speaker 1: South in the nineteen fifties and sixties through the lens
Speaker 1: of legal mechanics, we see a system where the law
Speaker 1: itself was used as a shield. Yes, we are impartially
Speaker 1: reporting the historical record here to understand how the composition
Speaker 1: of jury can completely override physical evidence.
Speaker 2: The jury is designed to be the ultimate arbiter of
Speaker 2: truth in the American legal system, but a jury is
Speaker 2: merely a reflection of the society. It is drawn from.
Speaker 1: Let's look at the case file for Byron Dilla beck With.
Speaker 1: The year is nineteen sixty three. Civil rights leader Medgar
Speaker 1: Bembers is tragically assassinated, shot in the back in the
Speaker 1: driveway of his own home in Mississippi.
Speaker 2: A monumental loss.
Speaker 1: According to the historical record, the initial police investigation actually
Speaker 1: worked efficiently. They quickly identify Byron Dela beck With as
Speaker 1: the primary suspect.
Speaker 2: And the physical evidence linking him to the crime was
Speaker 2: remarkably robust for the era, very robust. The investigative file
Speaker 2: state his fingerprints were found directly on the high powered
Speaker 2: rifle left at the scene. Furthermore, investigators found multiple witnesses
Speaker 2: who confirmed Dila beck With have been actively publicly asking
Speaker 2: around town forever home address prior to the shooting.
Speaker 1: You have a clear motive, you have witness testimony placing
Speaker 1: him on the hunt, and you have forensic fingerprint evidence
Speaker 1: on the actual murder weapon.
Speaker 2: In a vacuum. In a purely objective legal system, this
Speaker 2: is an open and shutcase.
Speaker 1: But the trial wasn't held in a vacuum. It was
Speaker 1: held in nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 2: Mississippi, exactly Della beck With faced two separate trials in
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty four. In both instances, the legal system required
Speaker 2: a jury of his peers, and in both instances, reflecting
Speaker 2: the segregated society of the time, those juries were exclusively
Speaker 2: all white.
Speaker 1: The source material notes that despite the overwhelming, undeniable physical evidence,
Speaker 1: both trials ended in deadlock juries miss trials. The jury
Speaker 1: simply refused to convict Byron Dilla beck With walked entirely free,
Speaker 1: and the record show he didn't just walk away quietly.
Speaker 1: He brazenly bragged about the assassination at clan rallies and
Speaker 1: public gatherings for decades.
Speaker 2: The mechanism of failure here isn't a clerical typo or
Speaker 2: a manipulated role board. The failure was a societal one,
Speaker 2: perfectly preserved in the amber of the jury box.
Speaker 1: It's just devastating to read.
Speaker 2: If the jury pool is drawn from a society where
Speaker 2: a systemic prejudice is the unwritten law of the land,
Speaker 2: the verdict will inevitably reflect that prejudice, regardless of what
Speaker 2: the fingerprints say. The system functioned precisely to protect the
Speaker 2: status quo of that era.
Speaker 1: It took over thirty years for the societal and legal
Speaker 1: environment to shift enough for justice to even be a
Speaker 1: mathematical possibility.
Speaker 2: Thirty years is a long time for a family to wait,
Speaker 2: it really is.
Speaker 1: The case was finally reopened in the early nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: Prosecutors uncovered evidence that had been deliberately ignored or suppressed
Speaker 1: during the original nineteen sixty Forard trials, and new witnesses
Speaker 1: finally felt safe enough to come forward.
Speaker 2: A different era, a different outcome.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety four, Byron Della Beckwith was convicted of
Speaker 1: the murder and sentenced to life in prison, where he
Speaker 1: died in two thousand and one. But that thirty year
Speaker 1: gap where a known assassin lived freely and boasted about
Speaker 1: his crime, is a stark historical testament to the power
Speaker 1: of biased legal framework.
Speaker 2: And the historical record presents an even more blatant, structurally
Speaker 2: terrifying example of this framework in action, the murderers of
Speaker 2: Emmett Till.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty five, Emmett Till, a fourteen year old
Speaker 1: boy from Chicago, traveled to Mississippi to visit family. He
Speaker 1: was accused of offending a white woman in a grocery store.
Speaker 2: The catalyst for a horrific crime.
Speaker 1: As a result, he was abducted in the middle of
Speaker 1: the night, brutally tortured, and murdered once again.
Speaker 2: The initial LA enforcement response resulted in swift arrests. Authorities
Speaker 2: apprehended two men, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam.
Speaker 1: The source material is very clear about the sheer weight
Speaker 1: of the evidence presented. It was overwhelming.
Speaker 2: There is no shortage of proof.
Speaker 1: There were direct eye witnesses who physically placed Emmett Till
Speaker 1: in the back of the truck driven by Bryant and Millium,
Speaker 1: and tragically, days later, his mutilated body was pulled from
Speaker 1: the Tallahatchee River.
Speaker 2: They went to trial, and much like the Della Beckwith case,
Speaker 2: they were tried by an all white jury.
Speaker 1: But this wasn't a hung jury. According to the court records,
Speaker 1: the jury deliberated for barely an hour before returning a
Speaker 1: verdict of completely totally not guilty. They quitted both men.
Speaker 2: They walked free and this is where a foundational legal concept,
Speaker 2: double jeopardy comes into play. But it operates in a
Speaker 2: way that creates an impenetrable fortress around admitted murderers.
Speaker 1: Let's unpack the mechanics of double jeopardy because it's vital
Speaker 1: to understand how the law was weaponized here.
Speaker 2: Okay, the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution contains the
Speaker 2: double jeopardy Clause, which essentially states that a person cannot
Speaker 2: be tried twice for the exact same.
Speaker 1: Crime, which sounds like a good thing, right.
Speaker 2: It was originally conceived by the founders as a vital,
Speaker 2: necessary protection for citizens. It prevents a tyrannical government with
Speaker 2: unlimited resources from harassing an innocent person with endless, back
Speaker 2: to back trials until they finally managed to secure a conviction.
Speaker 1: It forces the state to definitively prove its case the
Speaker 1: very first time.
Speaker 2: But in this specific historical context, that vital protection was
Speaker 2: completely inverted.
Speaker 1: Yes, because Bryant and Mielem had been officially legally acquitted
Speaker 1: by that jury, the double jeopardy law created an absolute
Speaker 1: legal shield around them.
Speaker 2: The state of Mississippi and the federal government could never
Speaker 2: ever put them on trial for the murder of Emmitt
Speaker 2: Till again, no matter what new evidence came to light
Speaker 2: or what they.
Speaker 1: Said, which leads to one of the most audacious, horrifying
Speaker 1: moments in American legal history. Knowing they were absolutely legally untouchable.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty six, just a year after the acquittal,
Speaker 1: Bryant and Milem accepted a cash payment from Look magazine.
Speaker 2: It is hard to even fathom they.
Speaker 1: Sat down for a formal interview and publicly confessed to
Speaker 1: the murder in vivid, horrific detail for a national audience.
Speaker 2: They detailed exactly how they abducted him, how they beat him,
Speaker 2: and how they disposed of the body. They literally monetized
Speaker 2: their own crime on a national stage.
Speaker 1: I am just reflecting on the sheer audacity of that,
Speaker 1: to cash a check, to confess to a lynching in
Speaker 1: a national magazine because you know with absolute mathematical certainty
Speaker 1: that the local law isn't entirely on your side.
Speaker 2: They weren't afraid of the law.
Speaker 1: The law was their armor. Neither man was ever punished
Speaker 1: for the murder.
Speaker 2: But what is fascinating here from a historical perspective is
Speaker 2: the massive unintended blowback. Hey, you mean Bryant and Milem
Speaker 2: assumed they had won, But their arrogant public confession coupled
Speaker 2: with the sheer, undeniable brutality of the crime, especially after
Speaker 2: Emmett's mother insisted on an open casket funeral. It's sent
Speaker 2: a shockwave across the country.
Speaker 1: It really broke people up.
Speaker 2: It exposed the absolute institutional rot of that localized legal
Speaker 2: system to the rest of the world. It became a
Speaker 2: primary catalyst for the civil rights movement. People realized that
Speaker 2: if the constitution itself could be used as a shield
Speaker 2: for admitted killers, the societal framework had to be torn
Speaker 2: down and rebuilt.
Speaker 1: It is a heavy, heavy historical truth, and it perfectly
Speaker 1: transitions us to our final set of files. Today. We've
Speaker 1: looked at localized prejudice, We've looked at typos, We've looked
Speaker 1: at psychological manipulation.
Speaker 2: We've covered a lot of ground.
Speaker 1: Now you're going to look at the combination of systemic gaps.
Speaker 1: What happens when the sheer lack of technological and jurisdictional
Speaker 1: coordination creates an entire, massive landscape for a monster to
Speaker 1: thrive invisibly.
Speaker 2: We are talking about the ghosts in the machine, the
Speaker 2: blind spots that exist not within a police department, but
Speaker 2: in the empty spaces between town lines.
Speaker 1: Let's pull the file for Samuel Little. Now, many of
Speaker 1: you listening might not immediately recognize his name in the
Speaker 1: same way you recognized Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. But
Speaker 1: according to the files on our desk today, Samuel Little
Speaker 1: was the most prolific serial killer in United States history.
Speaker 2: He formally confessed to ninety three killings, ninety three lives
Speaker 2: taken over a span of decades.
Speaker 1: How does one human being commit ninety three murders without
Speaker 1: triggering a massive nationwide FBI led manhunt. How does he
Speaker 1: not become the most famous fugitive on planet Earth?
Speaker 2: By instinctively understanding and exploiting the absolute lack of communication
Speaker 2: infrastructure between local police departments over a three decade period.
Speaker 1: Was a transient. He drifted across the United States. He
Speaker 1: wasn't tied to one city like Jack the RiPP.
Speaker 2: He was always moving.
Speaker 1: And here is a statistic from the files that absolutely
Speaker 1: floors me. He was arrested almost one hundred times throughout
Speaker 1: his life across various states. One hundred arrests for all
Speaker 1: sorts of things, for theft, assault, drugs, you name it.
Speaker 1: But he only spent a total of ten combined years
Speaker 1: behind bars before his final capture.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate tragic example of a fragmented system.
Speaker 1: Imagine the country as a giant chessboard, but the police
Speaker 1: are only allowed to look at their own single square.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to visualize it.
Speaker 1: Let's look at a specific incident to see how this worked.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty four, Little is arrested in San Diego,
Speaker 1: the charge beating and strangling two women. Thankfully they survived
Speaker 1: to testify. He is convicted.
Speaker 2: He is now a known violent offender in the system.
Speaker 1: But he serves just two and a half years.
Speaker 2: And when he is released, he just moves. He packs
Speaker 2: up and crosses the county line or a state line,
Speaker 2: and back in the nineteen in eighties and nineties, the
Speaker 2: moment he stepped across that invisible jurisdictional line into a
Speaker 2: new square on the chessboard, he effectively became a ghost.
Speaker 2: The game reset right.
Speaker 1: Because a police department in rural Texas had absolutely no
Speaker 1: idea what a police department in San Diego was doing.
Speaker 1: There was no centralized, instant digital database connecting them.
Speaker 2: If he was arrested in a new town in Florida
Speaker 2: for vagrancy or a minor assault, the local police would
Speaker 2: run his name through their local paper based filing.
Speaker 1: Cabinets, just flipping through folders.
Speaker 2: He would come up clean or maybe with a minor
Speaker 2: local infraction. They had no technological mechanism to know that
Speaker 2: he was the prime suspect in a string of brutal
Speaker 2: strangulations three stakes over.
Speaker 1: The system was entirely siloed.
Speaker 2: To the cops and square b. He was a brand
Speaker 2: new player with no history.
Speaker 1: So he just operated in the shadows. And he compounded
Speaker 1: this by specifically targeting marginalized women, sex workers, people struggling
Speaker 1: with severe anniction, transience victims that society and bikes dension.
Speaker 1: Local police departments of that era tragically didn't prioritize.
Speaker 2: Is a perfect storm of vulnerability.
Speaker 1: He weaponized their socioeconomic vulnerability and the police's technological inability
Speaker 1: to communicate.
Speaker 2: But eventually the infrastructure caught up with the ghosts.
Speaker 1: Twenty twelve, everything finally changes. He is arrested on a
Speaker 1: seemingly unrelated minor drug charge in Kentucky. But by twenty twelve,
Speaker 1: the landscape of law enforcement has fundamentally shifted. We aren't
Speaker 1: relying on paper files anymore.
Speaker 2: No, we have interconnected national DNA databases.
Speaker 1: The evolution of digital and biological forensic technology finally closed
Speaker 1: the physical cracks he had been slipping through for thirty years.
Speaker 2: They take a routine DNA swab in Kentucky, run it
Speaker 2: through the national system, and suddenly the computer pings.
Speaker 1: The ultimate connection.
Speaker 2: It connects his genetic profile to three horrific cold case
Speaker 2: murders all the way out in Los Angeles, California, from
Speaker 2: the nineteen eighties. He is extradited back to LA and
Speaker 2: this is where investigators, specifically Detective Mitsi Raw who is
Speaker 2: highlighted in our sources, really go to work.
Speaker 1: She did incredible work piecing it all together.
Speaker 2: They link his DNA to biological material left at crime
Speaker 2: scenes decades ago. That biological evidence was sitting in frozen
Speaker 2: evidence lockers for decades, just waiting patiently for the jurisdictional
Speaker 2: communication network to finally be built so it could speak.
Speaker 1: In twenty fourteen, he is convicted and sentenced to three
Speaker 1: consecutive life terms. Once he realized that technological gig was
Speaker 1: finally up, he just started confessing to everything, ninety three murders.
Speaker 2: He died in prison in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: But for three entire decades, a monster was allowed to
Speaker 1: roam the country simply because police departments didn't have a
Speaker 1: way to talk to each other.
Speaker 2: It is a profound failure of physical infrastructure finally solved
Speaker 2: by the invention of a new digital infrastructure.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to the end of our exploration today
Speaker 1: on thrilling threads, We've pulled it a lot of dark,
Speaker 1: frayed threads today. I think the biggest takeaway is that
Speaker 1: we have to stop viewing the justice system as an omnipotent,
Speaker 1: flawless machine.
Speaker 2: It isn't. It is an incredibly complex, creaky, fragmented apparatus
Speaker 2: built and run by fundamentally flawed human beings.
Speaker 1: It is a system that relies on a highly precarious
Speaker 1: stack of conditions to function correctly.
Speaker 2: It relies on perfect paperwork and attentive data clerks, or
Speaker 2: Kathy Guzman walks right out the front door.
Speaker 1: It relies on unbiased, courageous juries where the killers of
Speaker 1: Emmett Till monetarily brag about their crimes in the open.
Speaker 2: It relies on foolproof psychological assessments that can actually see
Speaker 2: through a psychopath's charm. Or Arthur Shawcross goes back to
Speaker 2: the river, and.
Speaker 1: It relies on flawless communication across thousands of miles, or
Speaker 1: Samuel Little spends thirty years preying on the vulnerable.
Speaker 2: When just one of those gears slips, the monster's walk free.
Speaker 1: But as we close these historical files on the desk today,
Speaker 1: only it is something to chew on.
Speaker 2: Yes, we talked about how modern technology, like those interconnected
Speaker 2: DNA databases finally caught Samuel Little. We rely heavily on
Speaker 2: digital systems to close the historical cracks of the past.
Speaker 1: But this raises a deeply provocative question. As we build
Speaker 1: these massive automated digital fortresses, using algorithms to predict recidivism
Speaker 1: or AI to manage prison populations, are we inadvertently creating
Speaker 1: entirely new, invisible digital cracks for the criminals of the future.
Speaker 2: If a single data entry typo can release a murderer today,
Speaker 2: what happens when we hand even more of the justice
Speaker 2: system over to predictive algorithms We barely.
Speaker 1: Understand a terrifying thought to keep you up at night.
Speaker 1: The monster might not need to steal a physical key anymore.
Speaker 1: You might just need the right password or the right
Speaker 1: line of code.
Speaker 2: It's definitely something to consider.
Speaker 1: I want to hear from you, which of these systemic
Speaker 1: failures frustrated you the most? Was it the digital typo,
Speaker 1: the easily manipulated parole board, the bias juries. Do you
Speaker 1: think our modern justice system is truly immune to these
Speaker 1: kinds of blind spots today? Or have the cracks just
Speaker 1: changed shape? Drop a comet below and let us know
Speaker 1: where you stand. Thank you for joining us this journey. Today,
Speaker 1: I'm tickling threads. Lock your doors, double check your paperwork,
Speaker 1: and we will see you next time,