Speaker 1: Picture this for a second. You are standing right in
the center of a municipal police evidence room, and the
air in there is just stagnant. It's heavy with that
smell of old paper, decaying cardboard dust, and just the
sheer weight of time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that highly specific archival smell.
Speaker 1: Exactly all around you, stretching from the floor to the ceiling,
are rows upon rows of identical archival boxes. To the
naked eye, they look entirely unremarkable, a barcode, a sharpie scrawl,
maybe a faded date from the nineteen seventies or eighties.
But inside one of these specific boxes, gathering dust for
over thirty years is a secret. Now, I want you
to imagine the person who actually put that secret there.
They are out in the world, living their life, going
about their day, yeah, drinking their morning coffee, going to
their kids' soccer game, celebrating the holidays, and they are utterly,
deeply convinced that they have outsmarted the entire world.
Speaker 2: They believe the book is permanently closed.
Speaker 1: But then decades later, something shifts, an invisible speck of data,
a microscopic drop of DNA, maybe a sudden slip of
the tongue or a completely unexpected confession brings the entire
facade crashing down.
Speaker 2: It's a really fascinating thought experiment, and I think it
really gets to the core of what we're doing here today.
I agree, because to live with a secret of that magnitude,
particularly a violent secret, it requires a highly specific kind
of psychological compartmentalization.
Speaker 1: It really does.
Speaker 2: It requires a level of hubris that is genuinely difficult
for the average person to even comprehend. We tend to
think of secrets as heavy burdens that naturally force their
way out.
Speaker 1: Guilt will just consume you, exactly.
Speaker 2: But the reality is that the truth possesses this terrifying
silent patience. It doesn't need to shout. It can wait
in those cardboard boxes for ten, twenty, or even fifty years.
Speaker 1: Well, welcome to Thrilling Threads. I'm so glad you're joining
us today because we are embarking on a massive, meticulous
exploration into those exact shadows. We really are unraveling ten infamous,
heavily researched true crime mysteries that went completely unsolved for years,
sometimes decades, until shocking, often deeply scientific breakthroughs finally brought closure.
Speaker 2: And to you listening right now, consider yourself the third
person at this table with us. Absolutely, we want you
to really lean in to examine the pieces of these
puzzles alongside us. If you've ever looked at a cold
case and wondered, how does someone just vanish? Or how
does a killer just walk away? This is for you.
Speaker 1: We aren't here for the grim, gratuitous details either, No,
not at all. We are here to understand the mechanics
of how the truth eventually forces its way to.
Speaker 2: The surface, which I think is a really important distinction
to make right up front. The analytical framework we're establishing
today isn't about sensationalizing tragedy. It is a complex study
in three distinct areas. First, human psychology, both of the
perpetrator and the public. Second, the rapid, almost science fiction
level evolution forensic science over the last few decades.
Speaker 1: It's wild how fast it moved.
Speaker 2: It really is. And third, the relentless, heartbreaking determination of
families and advocates who simply refused to be silenced by
an apathetic system.
Speaker 1: We are relying strictly on established facts, court records, and
meticulous investigative reports to understand precisely how these seemingly impenetrable
walls of secrecy finally crumpled.
Speaker 2: So let's get into it.
Speaker 1: Let's start by looking at cases where the victims weren't
hidden in some remote wilderness, but right under the perpetrator's noses.
The proximity factor, Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about
the psychological toll of maintaining that kind of physical proximity
to your own crime. To explore this, I want to
take you to a quiet, upscale, suburban neighborhood in Jericho,
New York.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: The date is September second, nineteen ninety nine. A homeowner
who had recently purchased the property makes a horrifying discovery
in the crawl space of his house. It's a massive
fifty five gallon steel drum.
Speaker 2: I'd point out right away that just the physical presence
of a fifty five gallon steel drum in a residential
crawl space is a massive anomaly.
Speaker 1: It's totally bizarre, right.
Speaker 2: Because these are industrial containers. They weigh upwards of forty
pounds empty and hundreds of pounds when full. They're used
for transporting bulk chemicals or industrial waste, not.
Speaker 1: Something you keep next to the holiday decorations exactly.
Speaker 2: To find one tucked away beneath the floorboards of a
suburban home immediately suggests premeditated concealment. It requires significant physical
effort to maneuver it into that tight space.
Speaker 1: It's not something you just accidentally leave behind when you move.
And when investigators finally managed to open this sealed drum,
they found the mummified remains of a pregnant woman, surrounded
by plastic pellets in a very distinct green dye.
Speaker 2: The dye is a crucial detail.
Speaker 1: It is now the police immediately trace the drum itself.
It bore the markings of a company called Melrose Plastics,
and when they looked into Melrose Plastics, they found that
the co owner of the company was a man named
Howard Elkins.
Speaker 2: Who just happened to be the former owner of the house.
Speaker 1: He was the former owner of the very house where
the drum was found.
Speaker 2: The connection is immediate there, but the timeline is what
makes this case so staggering. The forensic turning point didn't
actually come from the drum itself, but from a seemingly
impossible piece of evidence found inside it.
Speaker 1: This part always gets me.
Speaker 2: Right alongside the remains investigators discovered a rotting, severely water
damaged address.
Speaker 1: Book, which feels like something straight out of a movie.
I mean, for those who might not know what exactly
are the forensic odds of a paper book surviving inside
a sealed steel drum alongside decomposing remains for literally decades.
Speaker 2: The odds are vanishingly small. The internal environment of a
sealed drum containing biological material is highly corrosive. You have moisture,
shifting temperatures and the chemical byproducts of decomposition. It should
be soup papers should disintegrate into illegible mush within a year. However,
the unique combination of the plastic pellets and that specif
sif a chemical green dye seemed to have inadvertently created
a slightly preservative environment. Forensic experts in nineteen ninety nine
had to use incredibly delicate processes basically freeze drying the
pages and using specialized lighting to reveal indentations and feeded ink.
Speaker 1: And they managed to lift a single legible name, Raina Merriquin.
She was a twenty eight year old immigrant from El Salvador.
She had been an employee at Melrose Plastics and she
had been missing since nineteen sixty.
Speaker 2: Nine, nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: That means she was in that barrel, in that crawl
space for thirty years. Think about that for a sec
reg thirty years of Howard Elkins living in that house.
He raised a family there. He walked across the floorboards,
knowing exactly what was directly beneath his feet.
Speaker 2: Well, it's easy to assume that would slowly drive a
person mad with guild. The psychology of someone like Elkins
suggests the exact opposite. It points to a profound, chilling dissociation.
Speaker 1: How does someone even do that?
Speaker 2: The sheer arrogance required to leave the barrel behind when
he eventually sold the house and moved to Florida in
the nineteen nineties is staggering. Was he simply too old
and frail to move it? Did he believe that because
he had gotten away with it for three decades he
was somehow invincible.
Speaker 1: It's a classic manifestation of perpetrator privilege, isn't it.
Speaker 2: Completely He was shielded by his socioeconomic status, his position
as a business owner, and his facade as a respectable
family man. No one was looking at.
Speaker 1: Him, and when police finally tracked Elkins down, in Florida
and interviewed him. He was defensive, uncooperative, and claimed he
didn't remember anything about a fifty five gallon drum, of course,
but he knew the walls were closing in. Shortly after
that police interview, before they could even arrest him, Elkins
purchased a shotgun and took his own life.
Speaker 2: He took the coward's way out.
Speaker 1: He did and subsequent DNA test and confirmed what the
police already suspected. The fetus inside rain Amerquin was the
biological child of Howard Elkins.
Speaker 2: It paints a very clear, very dark picture of the motive.
You have a married executive engaging affair with a vulnerable employee.
She becomes pregnant, and he calculates that eliminating her is
preferable to facing the social and financial consequences of his infidelity.
Speaker 1: There's a detail that has stayed with me ever since
I read the case files. Among the few legible items
recovered from that address book, there was a message believed
to be written by Raina, possibly referencing the fact that
she had recently called Elkin's house and revealed the affair
to his wife. Yeah that message, The translated message simply said,
don't be mad, I told the truth.
Speaker 2: It is a devastating sentence, don't be mad, I told
the truth. It encapsulates the entire tragedy of the power dynamic.
Speaker 1: It really does.
Speaker 2: It is a plea for understanding and mercy from a
person in a highly vulnerable position, directed as someone who
held absolute financial and social power over her. The Rain
American case forces us to recognize that monsters don't always
hide in the woods.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they hide behind manicured lawns and corporate titles. Percise So,
we've looked at a secret buried beneath the house. But
what happens when the secret isn't contained in a barrel
but scattered out in the vast open.
Speaker 2: Desert a completely different kind of isolation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to pivot to a case that absolutely
paralyzed the public from twenty ten to twenty thirteen, the
disappearance of the mix Stay family.
Speaker 2: The Mixed Day case is fundamentally terrifying because of the
complete absence of a precipitating event.
Speaker 1: There was just nothing.
Speaker 2: In February twenty ten, the family Joseph, his wife Summer,
and their two young boys, Gianny and Joseph Junior, simply
vanished from their home in Fallbrook, California. There was no
ransom note, no signs of a break in, just silence.
Speaker 1: I want you to picture the scene that Joseph's brother
found when he finally went to check on the house.
The doors were locked tight, so he had to literally
climb through an open window to get inside, right, and
what he found was eerie, precisely because it was so normal.
There were eggs left on the kitchen counter, there were
two bowls of popcorns sitting on the futon in the
living room, it'd smack exactly, and the family, these beloved dogs,
Bear and Digger, were left outside in the backyard with
no food or water. As someone who has pets, that
detail alone screams that this wasn't a planned vacation.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely not.
Speaker 1: People who love their dogs do not just abandon them
to starve.
Speaker 2: You're touching on a critical behavioral indicator there. Leaving the
dogs uncared for alongside the perishable food left out immediately
points away from a voluntary orchestrated disappearance.
Speaker 1: It screams foul play.
Speaker 2: It does, however, because there was absolutely no physical crime scene,
no blood, no signs of a struggle, no missing valuables.
The investigation was effectively paralyzed from day one.
Speaker 1: They had nothing to go on.
Speaker 2: Law enforcement had no forensic starting point. Yeah, and when
you have a vacuum of evidence, human nature rushes in
to fill it with speculation.
Speaker 1: And the speculation was wild for three years. The prevailing theory,
even pushed by some in law enforcement, was that the
family had fled to.
Speaker 2: Mexico, based on very flimsy evidence.
Speaker 1: Based on incredibly grainy, low quality border surveillance footage that
showed a family of four walking across the border.
Speaker 2: Which is a perfect example of peridolia.
Speaker 1: What's that again, It's.
Speaker 2: The psychological phenomenon where the mind perceives a familiar pattern
where none actually.
Speaker 1: Exists, like seeing faces in clouds exactly.
Speaker 2: People wanted the mix stays to be alive, so they
looked at a blurry cluster of pixels and convinced themselves
it was Joseph in summer. The lack of a physical
crime scene allowed this false narrative to take root, which
tragically diverted resources and attention for years.
Speaker 1: The sheer vastness of the desert acted as a silent
accomplice to the crime.
Speaker 2: It swallowed them up.
Speaker 1: But that silence finally broke On November eleventh, twenty thirteen,
a motorcyclist riding off road in a desolate stretch of
the Mohave Desert near Victorville noticed something unusual in.
Speaker 2: The dirt, a chance discovery.
Speaker 1: It turned out to be the shallow buried remains of
the entire Mixday family, along with a rusted sledgehammer. Suddenly,
the narrative of a family fleeing to mexic Co evaporated.
This was a brutal quadruple homicide.
Speaker 2: The reality was much darker.
Speaker 1: But the breakthrough didn't point to a random desert cartel
or a stranger in the night. It pointed right back
to Joseph Mixstay's inner circle.
Speaker 2: Right Once the remains were discovered, investigators finally had a
forensic anchor. They could analyze cellular tower data from the
area around the gravesite, and they could look closer at
the financial records surrounding the exact time of the.
Speaker 1: Disappearance, and that led them somewhere very specific.
Speaker 2: It led them directly to Charles Merritt, a business associate
who manufactured custom water features for Joseph's company.
Speaker 1: The motive was incredibly basic. Wasn't it just financial greed?
Speaker 2: Entirely? Forensic accounts discovered that Merritt had been writing checks
to himself from Joseph's business.
Speaker 1: Account, so he was stealing from him.
Speaker 2: Yes. When Joseph realized money was missing and planned to
confront him, Merritt murdered the entire family to cover his
tracks and continue looting the business.
Speaker 1: The terror of betrayal by a known associate is chilling.
Think about the logistics of that. This wasn't a boogeyman.
This was a guy Joseph worked with, a guy who
had been to their house, a guy who knew his children's.
Speaker 2: Names, someone they trusted.
Speaker 1: When investigators were secretly observing Merit right before his arrest,
one of them noted to me, it looked like a
broken man. He knew he was done.
Speaker 2: It's an important pivot in how we perceive danger. We
are biologically wired to fear the unknown, the stranger lurking in.
Speaker 1: The dark alley right stranger danger.
Speaker 2: But statistically, victims of violent crime are far more likely
to be harmed by someone in their immediate circle, someone
they trust. The mix staycase is a grim reminder of
that reality.
Speaker 1: That's a scary thought.
Speaker 2: It also highlights how a staged or absent crime scene
can completely mislead both the public and the police. Mary
nearly got away with annihilating an entire family simply because
he understood that without a runeful of evidence, the police
have a very hard time proving a negative.
Speaker 1: It just shows you how terrifyingly fragile are our safety
can be. We lock our doors against the outside world,
but sometimes the threat is the person we invite inside.
And speaking of being misled by the scene of a crime,
that leads us into our next major theme, the tragedy
of false narratives. We're going to explore how initial assumptions,
whether they are made by seasoned police detectives or thousands
of amateur sleuths online, can wildly derail the truth and
cause profound secondary trauma to the victim's families.
Speaker 2: This is such a critical issue in modern true crime.
Speaker 1: Let's look at the heartbreaking case of the acclaimed filmmaker
and actress Adrian Shelley.
Speaker 2: Adrian Shelley was a brilliant creative force. Many listeners might
know her best for writing, directing, and co starring in
the beloved two thousand and seven film Waitress, such a
great movie it is. Her death on November first, two
thousand and six was an absolute shock to the independent
film community in New York and to everyone who knew her.
Speaker 1: She was found dead in her Manhattan office apartment in
Abingdon Square, and the initial response from law enforcement is
what makes this case so deeply frustrat To.
Speaker 2: Analyze frustrating is an understatement.
Speaker 1: The scene was assessed and the police officially ruled it
a suicide. She was found hanging from a shower rod.
The police looked at that environment and immediately drafted a
narrative that fit the most obvious, superficial visual evidence.
Speaker 2: They took the path of least resistance.
Speaker 1: But her husband, Andy Ostroy, categorically refused to accept this.
He knew his wife, He knew she was incredibly happy,
her career was peaking, she loved her young daughter, and
she was not in a psychological state to take her
own life.
Speaker 2: I'd argue that Andy Ostroy's defiance is the single reason
we know the truth today.
Speaker 1: I completely agree.
Speaker 2: This case is a textbook example of confirmation bias in
an initial police investigation, when investigators arrive at a scene
that superficially resembles a suicide. There is a very strong
cognitive heuristic, a mental shortcut to interpret all subsequent evidence
through that specific lens.
Speaker 1: They just stopped looking for anything else.
Speaker 2: It's not necessarily malicious. It's how the human brain processes
complex information. They see a hanging, their brain solves the puzzle,
and they subconsciously stopped looking for anomalies. But Ostroy's intimate,
qualitative knowledge of his wife's psychological state fundamentally contradicted their
physical findings.
Speaker 1: I want to share a detail that really underscores why
Andy Ostroi fought so relentlessly. Our sources note that Adrianne
used to write these beautiful, spontaneous poems for him.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 1: He recalled one where she wrote, don your face is
a brilliant moon in my empty room. Your love is
like a beating drum.
Speaker 2: That's beautiful.
Speaker 1: It is so profound, so full of vibrant life and connection.
When you contrast that deep, expressive love with the absolute
tragedy of a botched initial police ruling that tried to
label her death as a despairing suicide, it's just infuriating.
Speaker 2: The juxtaposition is heartbreaking, but it fueled his advocacy. Because
Ostroy pushed back so hard, literally demanding that the police
re examined the apartment, He forced them to look at
the scene with out the blinder of their initial assumption.
Speaker 1: He made them do their jobs.
Speaker 2: He did, and when forensic teams finally looked closely at
the details they had previously dismissed as irrelevant, they found
a singular, vital piece of evidence, a dusty footprint in
the bathroom right.
Speaker 1: And not just any footprint. It was a clear impression
of a rebox sneaker left in gypsum dust, which did
not match any footwear owned by Adrian or her husband.
Speaker 2: The presence of gypsum dust was the key.
Speaker 1: There because of the construction.
Speaker 2: Exactly it indicated. Construction. Police tracked that specific sneaker tread
to a construction site right downstairs in the same building,
and that print led them directly to a nineteen year
old worker named Diego Pilco.
Speaker 1: Pilco ultimately confessed the reality was that he had been
stealing from the building. Adrian caught him or confronted him
about the noise, and he attacked her.
Speaker 2: Just a horrific escalation.
Speaker 1: He killed her and then in a panic he staged
the scene to look like a suicide to cover his tracks.
He was sentenced to twenty five years in prison.
Speaker 2: If we look at the broader implications, Adrian Shelley's case
is a stark warning about the danger of heuristic thinking
in forensic science.
Speaker 1: It really is.
Speaker 2: It highlights the absolutely vital role of family advocacy. If
Andy Astroid had been intimidated by the authority of the police,
if he had accepted their expert conclusion, Diego Pilko would
have walked away without a doubt. Furthermore, Adrian's legacy would
have been forever shadowed by a completely false narrative of suicide.
Her family fought not just for justice, but for the
truth of who she was.
Speaker 1: It really makes you wonder how many cases out there
are permanently closed because there isn't an Andy Astroid fighting
to reopen them.
Speaker 2: That's the chilling part.
Speaker 1: But police aren't the only ones who create false narratives.
Sometimes we do the public the Internet.
Speaker 2: We could be our own worst enemies.
Speaker 1: And that brings us to the deeply unsettling, highly publicized
mystery of Alisa Lamb in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 2: I would categorize the Alisa Lamb case as perhaps the
quintessential example of how the modern Internet eCos system can
completely lose the thread of reality in favor of a sensationalized,
crowdsourced horror story.
Speaker 1: For context, Alisa Lamb was a twenty one year old
Canadian college student. She was traveling alone down the West
Coast and ended up in Los Angeles, staying at the
notorious Cecil Hotel.
Speaker 2: A place with a lot of dark history.
Speaker 1: She went missing for three weeks, and her body was
eventually found inside one of the massive water tanks on
the roof of the hotel. But before she was found,
the LAPD released a piece of surveillance footage from a
hotel elevator, hoping the public could help identify her last movements.
And if you were online in twenty thirteen, you remember
this video was everywhere.
Speaker 2: The footage is undeniably unsettling to watch without context, he
really is? It showed Lamb exhibiting highly erratic behavior. She
steps into the elevator, presses a vertical column of buttons,
steps back into the corner, peers out into the hallway
as if hiding from someone, and makes very unusual swed
gestures with her hands.
Speaker 1: For walking away, and the Internet immediately lost all sense
of perspective. People were downloading the videos, slowing it down,
analyzing it frame by frame.
Speaker 2: Looking for clues that weren't there.
Speaker 1: Because the Cecil Hotel has a very dark history. It
had housed serial killers like Richard Ramirez, and there had
been numerous tragedies there over the decades, the Internet echo
chamber instantly defaulted to the most extreme cinematic.
Speaker 2: Theories that wanted it to be a movie.
Speaker 1: People claimed she was experiencing a supernatural encounter. There were
massive Reddit threads arguing she was possessed or playing some
paranormal elevator game, or that the hotel staff was involved
in a massive conspiracy to murder her.
Speaker 2: It's fascinating from a sociological standpoint, how quickly the Internet
frenzy discarded the most statistically probable explanations.
Speaker 1: Why do you think that happens?
Speaker 2: It's a phenomenon driven by algorithmic reinforcement. Social media platforms
prioritize engagement, and ghost caught on tape generates vastly more
engagement than young woman experiencing a medical emergency.
Speaker 1: That is so true. It's all about clicks.
Speaker 2: Exactly the reality of the Elisa Lamb case was not
a horror movie. It was a profound, deeply relatable human tragedy.
Speaker 1: When the autopsy and toxicology reports finally came out, the
truth was devastatingly grounded. Alisa Lamb suffered from bipolar.
Speaker 2: One disorder, a very serious condition.
Speaker 1: The toxicology reports showed that she was not taking her
prescribed medication properly. She had traces of her antidepressants, but
the mood stabilizers and antipsychotics she needed were absent from
her system.
Speaker 2: And we need to understand the physiological reality of that.
Speaker 1: Please break that down for us.
Speaker 2: The combination of a highly stressful new environment, the disrupted
sleep patterns that are typical of budget travel, and the
sudden cessation of critical psychiatric medication is a well documented
trigger for severe manic or psychotic.
Speaker 1: Episodes, the perfect storm.
Speaker 2: It is. Individuals in the grip of such an episode
can experience profound paranoia and hallucinations. The investigation concluded that,
driven by this internal crisis, she accessed the roof, which
was remarkably easy to do via a fire escape, climbed
onto the water tank, opened the heavy lid, got inside,
and tragically drowned, likely succumbing to hypothermia.
Speaker 1: It really forces us to look in the mirror as
consumers of these stories. I think about how true crime communities,
in their insatiable pursuit of a spooky mystery, completely stripped
Alisa Lamb of her humanity.
Speaker 2: They turned her into content.
Speaker 1: She wasn't a character in a ghost story. She was
a daughter, a sister, a student experiencing a terrifying medical
emergency in an unfamiliar place. We turned her mental health
crisis into a viral campfire tale.
Speaker 2: I'd agree, and I think it raises an important question
about societal responsibility. The Internet's reaction to Alisa Lamb represents
a massive failure in our collective empathy regarding severe mental illness.
Speaker 1: Because it's easier to look away, yes.
Speaker 2: Instead of recognizing the clear signs of a psychiatric emergency,
the paranoia, the erratic movements, millions of people chose to
see d Deans. It's a defense mechanism. It's easier to
blame a ghost than to face the uncomfortable reality of
how fragile human brain chemistry actually is. But choosing the
sensational narrative does a profound disservice to the victim.
Speaker 1: It distracts from the truth, and we see that exact
same distraction, that same swirling cloud of false rumors in
the abduction of Britney Drexel. This is a case that
spans from two thousand and nine all the way to
twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2: Britney Drexel's disappearance is another prime example of how sensationalized
rumors can derail public perception and arguably draw investigative energy
away from the most likely scenarios.
Speaker 1: Brittany was a seventeen year old high school student from
New York who vanished while on spring break in Myrtle Beach,
South Carolina. The last verified sighting of her was on
surveillance footage leaving the Blue Water Resort Hotel. She was
texting her boyfriend back home, and then at exactly nine
one five pm, the text stopped, just abruptly ended mid conversation,
and for thirteen years the case went completely cold, and
into that thirteen years vacuum of information poured the most
terrifying rumors imaginable.
Speaker 2: The narratives that emerged were incredibly elaborate and dark.
Speaker 1: What were people saying?
Speaker 2: There were widespread heavily circulated rumors, some even repeated by
local informants, that Brittany had been abducted by massive human
trafficking rings. There were stories that she had been taken
to a stash house in mccloneville, assaulted by gang members,
and that her remains have been fed to.
Speaker 1: Alligators, fed to alligators. I mean, these stories gained immense traction.
Why do you think people latch onto those specific rumors?
Is it because it sounds like the plot of a
Hollywood thriller.
Speaker 2: Partly, yes, the idea of a vast organized criminal syndicate
is terrifying, but it also provides a structured narrative for
an otherwise senseless crime. It implies a level of evil
that is extraordinary.
Speaker 1: It makes it feel like an action movie exactly.
Speaker 2: However, the actual reality of violent crime, especially the abduction
and murder of young women, is almost always far more
localized and banal.
Speaker 1: Alkham's razor right, the SIMP explanation is usually the correct one.
Speaker 2: Precisely in twenty twenty two, a stunning breakthrough finally occurred
that shattered the trafficking myth. Raymond Moody, a local man
and a convicted sex offender, who had been living in
the area at the time, confessed to the crime.
Speaker 1: Just a local guy.
Speaker 2: He admitted to seeing Brittany offering her a ride and
then abducting, assaulting, and murdering her. He led the police
directly to her remains, buried in a wooded area in
Georgetown County.
Speaker 1: It was just a crime of opportunity by a local predator.
Speaker 2: Yes. While human trafficking is a very real and serious
global issue, the statistical likelihood in cases of stranger abduction
is usually a local, opportunistic offender operating within their own
geographic comfort zone.
Speaker 1: They stay where they know the roads.
Speaker 2: It's exactly the sensationalized rumors of alligator pits and massive
gang networks distracted from the grim reality that a known
predator was living right in the community. It shows how
false narratives, even when born out of a desperate desired
to find answers, only serve to muddy the waters.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's shift gears entirely. We've spent time analyzing how
victims are perceived and the narratives surrounding their disappearances, But
what about the psychology of the killers themselves?
Speaker 2: This is where it gets really dark.
Speaker 1: This brings us to a completely different pathology. We are
focusing now on perpetrators who didn't want to hide in
the shadows. We're looking at killers who sought notoriety, who
literally couldn't resist taunting the public, and who ultimately engineered
their own destruction through sheer, blinding technological arrogance.
Speaker 2: And there was absolutely no better example of this than
the BTK killer Dennis Raider. Dennis Raider Dennis Rader is
a psychological study in extreme narcissism in the need for control.
Under the moniker BTK, an acronym he assigned to himself
standing for bind Torture, Kill HERA, he terrorized the greater Wichita,
Kansas area between nineteen seventy four and nineteen ninety one,
murdering at least ten individuals.
Speaker 1: He was a fan him, and for thirty one years
he successfully evaded police capture.
Speaker 2: Thirty one years.
Speaker 1: That is an entire lifetime of getting away with it.
He went dormant in the nineties. He could have just
lived out his days as an unassuming code enforcement officer,
retiring quietly and taking his secrets to the grave.
Speaker 2: But his ego wouldn't let him no.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and four, as Hubris kicked into overdrive.
He was triggered by a news article in the Wichita
Eagle about the thirtieth anniversary of his first crimes. The
article suggested that BTK was either dead, in prison for
another crime, or simply.
Speaker 2: Forgotten, and that was the ultimate insult to him.
Speaker 1: His egos simply couldn't handle the idea that people were
forgetting him or minimizing his legacy, so he resumed communicating
with the police and the media.
Speaker 2: It's fascinating to observe the intersection of a killer's desperate
need for relevance and his complete staggering misunderstanding of the
modern world.
Speaker 1: He was stuck in the past.
Speaker 2: Raider's initial crimes PREE occurred in a purely analog era.
He was used to writing physical letters, drapping them in
public mailboxes, and playing this grand theatrical cat and mouse
game with police using nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: Tactics, right before the Internet.
Speaker 2: But when he resurfaced in two thousand and four, the
technological landscape had fundamentally shifted beneath his feet.
Speaker 1: And he had absolutely no idea. He actually sent a
purple floppy disc to a local Wichita TV station KSAs Now.
He wasn't completely reckless. He actually asked the police in
a previous communication via a newspaper ad if a floppy
disc could be traced back to him.
Speaker 2: He literally asked them.
Speaker 1: The police, playing on his ego, lied and published a
message saying no, it's totally safe. We can't trace a disc.
Raider believe them he sent the disc.
Speaker 2: Which highlights a profound arrogance. He believed he was smarter
than the combined forces of law enforcement. When the police
received that disc, they didn't even need to look at
the physical object. They immediately pulled the hidden metadata from
the Microsoft word document saved on it.
Speaker 1: For those who might not be familiar with early two
thousand's digital forensics, what exactly is metadata in this context?
How did it catch him?
Speaker 2: Metadata is essentially data about data. It's the invisible footprint
embedded within a digital file. When you create a Microsoft's
word document, the software automatically records information in the background,
the time it was created, the time it was last modified,
and crucially, the registered name of the software license and
the computer system it was saved on.
Speaker 1: It tracks everything.
Speaker 2: The police looked at the metadata on Raider's floppy disk,
and they found that the document had been saved by
a user named Dennis at a location registered as Christ
Lutheran Church.
Speaker 1: It's almost comical. A quick Internet search of Christ Lutheran
Church in Wichita pulled up their congregation president, Dennis Raider.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate digital downfall. He was caught not
by a brilliant forensic deduction of his crime scenes, not
by a behavioral profile, but by the basic automated metadata
embedded in a word processor.
Speaker 3: Unbelievable.
Speaker 2: If we look at the broader evolution of criminal investigations,
the BTK case marks a definitive transition point. It signaled
to the world that digital forensics, analyzing the invisible footprints
we leave in our technology, was becoming just as critical
as physical forensics, like fingerprints are ballistics.
Speaker 1: And what's wild is that his arrogance about physical forensics
was just as absurd as his ignorance of digital forensics.
After his arrest in two thousand and five, when investigators
confronted him with DNA evidence linking him to the crime scenes,
Reader was genuinely confused.
Speaker 2: You didn't get it.
Speaker 1: Our sources show he actually believed you couldn't extract a
person's DNA unless they had undergone a total blood transfer.
Speaker 2: It's a textbook example of the Dunn Kruger effect.
Speaker 1: Explain that for our listeners.
Speaker 2: The Dunning Krueger effect is a cognitive bias where people
with limited knowledge or competence in a given domain greatly
overestimate their own knowledge or competence. Rader believed he was
an evil genius, a master criminal who has studied forensics
at the library.
Speaker 1: He thought he knew at all.
Speaker 2: He genuinely thought reading a few books made him an expert.
But his knowledge, which was entirely superficial and wildly outdated,
his ego convinced him he was the smartest man in
the room, and that delusion led him right into a
jail cell.
Speaker 1: He literally outsmarted himself. Now, moving from the dawn of
digital forensics to the absolute explosive power of the modern
hyper connected Internet, we have to talk about Luca Magnata
and the international manhunt of twenty twelve.
Speaker 2: The Lucamagnota case represents a terrifying modern evolution and true crime.
It's the era where the killer actively crowdsources their own
infamy in real time.
Speaker 1: On May twenty fifth, twenty twelve, a video was uploaded
to a shock site on the Internet titled one Lunatic,
One Ice Pick. It is widely considered one of the
most horrific pieces of media ever made public.
Speaker 2: It's notoriously brutal.
Speaker 1: It showed the murder and dismemberment of a thirty three
year old international student named Lynn June. Magnata didn't just
kill him. He filmed it, He edited it, He scored
it to the song True Faith by New Order, and
he posted it for the entire world to see. He
then began mailing Lyndin's body parts to elementary schools and
federal political offices across Canada to ensure maximum media coverage.
Speaker 2: It was an act of supreme performative cruelty, designed specifically
to manipulate the Internet algorithm and go viral.
Speaker 1: He wanted to be famous.
Speaker 2: Magnata was completely obsessed with Internet fame. He had spent
years prior to the murder creating dozens of fake profiles,
leaving comments on his own photos, and trying to start
rumors that he was dating notorious killers, all to cultivate
a dark persona.
Speaker 1: He understood how it worked.
Speaker 2: He understood the architecture of the twenty twelve Internet, a
time when viral videos could spread like wildfire across forums
before any sort of content moderation could take them down.
Speaker 1: The contrast here is what really breaks my heart. Our
sources highlight that while this viral nightmare was unfolding, lyn Jinn,
the victim, was living a quiet, dutiful life.
Speaker 2: He was just a student.
Speaker 1: He was a computer engineering student. He had been calling
his worried mother back in China every single day via Skype.
He would walk the streets of Montreal, points his hammer
around and tell her, don't worry, I'm safe. While Lynjin
was trying to assure his family of his safety, Magnata
was orchestrating a global spectacle out of his death.
Speaker 2: It is a devastating juxtaposition of pure innocence and manufactured evil. However,
Magnata's reliance on the Internet for his infamy proved to
be a massive double edged sword. How so Well, yes,
the crime made international headlines instantly, but that same global
connectivity meant that law enforcement agencies worldwide were instantly mobilized.
Interpol issued a red notice almost immediately.
Speaker 1: Right Magnata fled Canada, flying to Paris and then taking
a bus to Berlin, thinking he could pull off some
sort of cinematic escape across Europe.
Speaker 2: He thought he was in a movie.
Speaker 1: But he was recognized by a civilian in an internet
cafe in Berlin on June fourth, that is just about
a week and a half after he uploaded the video.
A week and a half. The guy who ran the
cafe had literally just read a news article about the
man hunt, looked over and saw Magnata reading news articles
about himself.
Speaker 2: This raises an essential point about modern man hunts. The
very tool Magnata used to achieve his dark fame, the Internet,
was the exact tool that ensured he couldn't hide.
Speaker 1: He broadcast his own face to the.
Speaker 2: World in a hyper connected world, a face that is
plastered across global news feeds cannot simply disappear into a crowd,
not even across an ocean. The unprecedented speed of his
capture is a testament to the power of international cooperation
fueled by instant digital communication. He wanted the world's attention,
and the world gave it to him, resulting in a
life sentence.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate be careful what you wish for scenario. Now,
let's look at a different kind of killers, Hubris one
that took a lot longer to crack than a week
and a half, the Zodiac Killer, the Ultimate Cipher. This
phantom terrorized northern California in the late nineteen sixties, and
a major part of his terror campaign involved sending complex
ciphers to local newspapers, demanding they be published on the
front page or he would kill again.
Speaker 2: The Zodiac ciphers are legendary in the annals of cryptography.
He produced four of these cryptograms, and they were hard.
The first one, known as the Z four eight, was
cracked relatively quickly by a local school teacher and his
wife in nineteen sixty nine, but the remaining three, particularly
the infamous three hundred and forty character cipher known as
a Z three forty, sat completely unsolved for over fifty years.
Speaker 1: Over half a century. That piece of paper stumped the FBI,
the CIA, naval intelligence, and the most brilliant professional code
breakers in the world. It just mocked investigators from.
Speaker 2: The archives until recently.
Speaker 1: But in December twenty twenty, there was a massive breakthrough.
The Z three to forty cipher was finally decoded, and
what fascinates me is that it wasn't cracked by a
supercomputer at the Pentagon. It was solved by a small
international team of private citizen's amateur codebreakers who just refused
to let it go.
Speaker 2: I'd argue this is a fascinating counterpoint to the Elisa
Lamb case we discussed earlier.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's a good point.
Speaker 2: With Elisa Lamb, we saw the destructive, koot and harmful
nature of Internet sleuthing. But with the Zodiac cipher, we
see the absolute best of crowd sourced citizen science.
Speaker 1: They actually helped.
Speaker 2: This team, comprising an American software developer and Australian applied
mathematician and a Belgian programmer, didn't just guess. They applied
rigorous mathematical principles, built custom software to run hundreds of
thousands of combinations, and utilized obsessive patients to achieve a real,
tangible result that had eluded official channels for decades.
Speaker 1: It's a huge victory for logic and persistence. For those
curious about the mechanics, the Zodiac used what's known as
a homophonic substitution.
Speaker 2: Cipher, which is very tricky.
Speaker 1: It means he used multiple different symbols to represent common
letters like E, or A, making traditional frequency analysis incredibly difficult.
Plus he shifted the reading direction diagonally instead of just
left to right.
Speaker 2: He was trying to be clever.
Speaker 1: When the team finally ran the correct algorithm and translated it,
the message was chilling. It read in part, I hope
you are having lots of fun and trying to catch me.
That wasn't me on the TV show. I am not
afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me
to Paradise all the sooner because I now have enough
slaves to work for me.
Speaker 2: Lots of fun and trying to catch means It's the
ultimate taunt from a sidistic personality. But the cracking of
the cipher actually stripped away some of his mystique. Howso,
it revealed him not as some infallible supernatural mastermind, but
as an arrogant individual with a flawed understanding of cryptography.
He misspelled Paradise as paradic and he actually made several
encoding mistakes in the cipher itself that made it much
harder to crack than he likely intended.
Speaker 1: He screwed up his own code exactly.
Speaker 2: There are still two short ciphers remaining, and given the
success of twenty twenty. You have to believe that somewhere
out there a citizen sleuth is running code on them.
Speaker 1: Right now, I have absolutely no doubt. Okay, we have
arrived at our final major theme of this exploration. Science
as the great equalizer.
Speaker 2: This is the game changer.
Speaker 1: We've talked about behavioral filing, digital footprints, and cryptography, but
now we are looking at the absolute most powerful tool
in the modern investigative arsenal. We are going to look
at how the patient silent witness of DNA eventually catches
up to the most prolific phantoms in criminal history. Let's
talk about the Golden State Killer.
Speaker 2: For decades, the Golden State Killer was the ultimate cold case.
He was a fandom who completely terrorized California throughout the
mid nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: His crime spree was massive.
Speaker 2: The scale of his crimes is almost unfathomable. At least
fifty one sexual assaults, over one hundred burglaries, and thirteen
brutal murders.
Speaker 1: He was a ghost. He operated across multiple different jurisdictions,
moving from Sacramento down to southern California, and because law
enforcement agencies in the seventies and eighties weren't sharing data effectively.
They literally used different filing systems. They didn't even realize
they were chasing the same guy for years.
Speaker 2: The lack of communication helped him hide.
Speaker 1: He was known by various regional monikers, the Vicelia Ransacker,
at the East Area Rapist, the Original Nightstalker. It wasn't
until twenty thirteen that the late true crime writer Michelle McNamara,
through her relentless advocacy in writing, coined the unifying name
the Golden State Killer.
Speaker 2: McNamara's writing was pivotal in bringing the case back into
the national spotlight, keeping the pressure on law enforcement, but
it was a revolutionary leap in forensic science that actually
put handcuffs on the perpetrator the DNA. Yes, law enforcement
had always possessed the killer's DNA preserved from the crime scenes,
but it hadn't matched anyone in CODIS, the national criminal database.
The breakthrough came when investigators, led by Paul Hols, utilized
a completely new technique called investigative genetic genealogy or IgG.
Speaker 1: This methodology is what I found most compelling when the
news broke in twenty eighteen. Can you break down for
the listeners exactly how IgG works. How do you catch
a killer using genealogy?
Speaker 2: It's an incredible synthesis of biology and historical research. Investigators
took the killer's nuclear DNA, the unique genetic blueprint inherited
from both parents, and converted it into a format compatible
with consumer DNA.
Speaker 1: Testing like the ones you buy online.
Speaker 2: Exactly. They then uploaded this specialized profile to ged match,
and open source genealogical website where regular people voluntarily upload
their DNA to find distant relatives. By analyzing shared DNA
segments known as Santa Morgan's, the system identified distant relatives
of the killer third or fourth cousins who shared a
great great grandparent.
Speaker 1: So they didn't find him directly, they found a distant
branch of his family tree.
Speaker 2: Exactly. From a sociological and scientific standpoint, this was a
watershed moment. Once they found those cousins, a team of
genetic genealogists painstakingly built massive family trees backward combing through
census records, birth certificates, marriage licenses, and obituaries.
Speaker 1: That sounds like so much work.
Speaker 2: It is meticulous. They built the tree back to the
shared ancestors in the eighteen hundreds and then traced every
single branch forward to the present day. They eliminated branch
is based on age, sex, and location, systematically narrowing down
thousands of people until they found a viable suspect who
lived in the exact areas where the crimes occurred.
Speaker 1: And that meticulous search led them to a seventy two
year old man named Joseph James DiAngelo. He was a
former police officer, which explains how he knew police tactics
so well, living quietly in a suburb of.
Speaker 2: Sacramento right under their noses.
Speaker 1: Once they had his name, investigators secretly followed him, collected
his DNA from a discarded tissue in his trash, ran
it against the crime scene evidence, and boom, one hundred
percent match.
Speaker 2: What is truly remarkable here is the paradigm shift that
represents Deangelos stopped his known crimes in nineteen eighty six.
He likely believed he had won.
Speaker 1: He thought he was safe.
Speaker 3: He believed that he had beaten the technology of his era.
He could not have conceived of a future where his
own distant relatives participating in a recreational hobby of genetic
testing to find out if they were Irish or Italian
would unwittingly form a digital net that would drag him
out of retirement and into a court.
Speaker 1: Think about your own family tree for a second. Anyone
who has taken a consumer DNA test could theoretically be
the key to solving a forty year old cold case.
Speaker 2: It's mind blowing.
Speaker 1: It is the ultimate poetic justice. A monster who completely
terrorized an entire state, who made people change their locks
and sleep with guns under their pillows, was caught by
the innocent curiosity of his extended family wanting to know
their ancestry. He was sentenced to life in prison, dying
behind bars.
Speaker 2: And we see that exact same inevitability of modern DNA
forensics playing out right now with the Long Island serial Killer.
Speaker 1: Yes, the Long Island serial Killer, often referred to as LASK,
is one of the most absorbing and unsettling mysteries of
the early twenty first century. Beginning in the late nineteen
nineties and culminating in a horrific discovery in twenty ten,
the remains of at least eleven victims were discovered dumped
in the thick bramble along the desolate stretches of Ocean
Parkway near Gilgo Beach in New York.
Speaker 2: For over a decade, the public assumed this would be
another Zodiacit situation, a phantom who operated in the dock
and would never be named right.
Speaker 1: Four of the victims found wrapped in burlap were officially
dubbed the Gilgo four. But then in the summer of
twenty twenty three, the world watched in shock as a
fifty nine year old man named Rex Andrew Huerman was
arrested in midtown Manhattan.
Speaker 2: The contrast between the horrific nature of the crimes and
a Hureman's public life is jarring. He was a successful,
established architect.
Speaker 1: Working right in the city.
Speaker 2: He ran a firm in Manhattan, interacting with city agencies
and high profile clients while living a seemingly normal suburban
life in mastapecka park just across the bay from where
the bodies were found. It is the terrifying juxtaposition of
a man navigating professional circles while allegedly harboring a decade's long,
dark double life.
Speaker 1: And once again it comes down to the silent witness
of science catching up. According to the bail documents and
our sources, the breakthrough involved two distinct technologies, mitochondrial DNA
and cellular FT tracking data.
Speaker 2: Both are incredibly powerful.
Speaker 1: I think it's worth explaining the DNA aspect first, because
it's different from the Golden State killer case. What is
mitochondrial DNA and why was it crucial here?
Speaker 2: It's a vital distinction. In the Golden State killer case,
they had nuclear DNA a complete genetic profile, but environmental exposure,
like body sitting in marshland for years, degrades nuclear DNA.
Speaker 1: It breaks it down.
Speaker 2: Yes. However, investigators recovered as single male hair from the
burlap wrapping of one of the Lisk victims. Because the
hair lacked a root, they couldn't extract nuclear DNA, but
they could extract mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA.
Speaker 1: How is that different?
Speaker 2: Unlike nuclear DNA, which you get from both parents, mtDNA
is inherited solely from your mother. And because there are
thousands of copies of mtDNA in every single cell, it
survives degradation much better. Investigators matched the mtDNA profile from
that single hair to DNA recovered from a pizza cross
Hoyerman discarded in Manhattan.
Speaker 1: It's incredible. A single hair and a pizza crust, and
then they layered that genetic evidence over massive amounts of
cellular data. They mapped the burner phones used to contact
the victims, and they mapped Hoyrman's.
Speaker 2: Personal phone the digital footprint.
Speaker 1: And they found that these phones traveled together. They pinged
the same cell towers in Massapeqwell Park and the same
cell towers in midtown.
Speaker 2: Manhattan, which demonstrates the sheer inevitability of modern forensic science.
The margin for error for a perpetrator today is virtually zero.
You shed DNA, skin cells, hair saliva everywhere you go,
You leave a trail. Your phone, even a burner phone,
constantly handshakes with cell towers, leaving a precise geographic footprint
of your movements. The days of a serial offender operating
in a vacuum of information, relying on shadows and silence,
are rapidly coming to an end.
Speaker 1: They can't hide anymore.
Speaker 2: Science is systematically dismantling the anonymity that these individuals relied
upon to survive. We should note that Hoyerman has pleaded
not guilty and is currently a waiting trial. The methodology
used to make the arrest is a testament to the
fact that the investigative window is closing on the monsters
of the past.
Speaker 1: It is a totally new era. So what does this
all mean for us as we pull these threats together.
At the end of this extensive discussion, we have to
look at the massive timeline we've covered today.
Speaker 2: We've covered a lot of ground.
Speaker 1: Whether it took a week and a half, like in
the case of Luca Magnata's international manhunt, or over fifty
years to crack the Zodiacs twisted cipher, these cases prove
one undeniable truth. Justice has a remarkable, terrifying patience.
Speaker 2: It really does, and I think it's important to reflect
on why we are so drawn to these stories. We
consume true crime narratives not simply for the morbid thrill
of the mystery.
Speaker 1: No, it's deeper than that.
Speaker 2: We analyze them for the profound psychological relief of seeing
order restored to a chaotic world. When a cold case
is solved, when a phantom is finally given a name
and put in handcuffs, it reaffirms our fundamental belief in
a system of consequences.
Speaker 1: But the bad guy gets caught.
Speaker 2: Justice delayed undeniably damages families and inflicts deep wounds on communities.
But as the meticulous unraveling of these ten story shows,
the book has rarely ever truly closed. The truth is
incredibly resilient, it really is.
Speaker 1: It waits patiently in the crawl space, It waits under
the desert sand, and it waits within the microscopic strands
of our DNA. We've talked today about the silent historical
power of genetic genealogy, the dangerous wildfire nature of Internet rumors,
and the sheer blinding arrogance of killers who genuinely think
they can outsmart the future. They can't.
Speaker 2: No, they cannot. The tools we have to eliminate the
darkness are only growing sharper, more precise, and more connected.
Speaker 1: So we want to ask you directly, as the third
person sitting at this table with us. After everything we've
explored today, the scientific breakthroughs, the tragic false starts, the
stunning conclusions, what unresolved mystery or true crime story are
you hoping becomes solved? Next?
Speaker 2: I'll have one.
Speaker 1: What is the one case that burrows into your mind
and keeps you up at night waiting for that final
piece of the puzzle to snap into place? Leave a comment,
and let us know where you stand.
Speaker 2: We read every single one, and your insights often fuel
the direction of our next investigations.
Speaker 1: You've been listening to thrilling threads. Thank you for joining
us on this exploration into the shadows, and remember to
keep pulling at the threads of curiosity.