Tag Archives: serial killers

234 – Serial Killers Are Not Hot: The Ghost of Ted Bundy

After being dead for almost three decades, serial killer Ted Bundy is back in the news. Of course, true crime TV shows are in big time since Making A Murderer set the world on fire three years ago, so Netflix is continuing the trend with their come series, Confessions of a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. It’s the first thing you see when you open Netflix and people are reacting to it.

Now Ted Bundy was a charismatic guy in real life and he’s been played by Hollywood heartthrob Mark Harmon and is there’s currently a movie where he’s going to be played by former teen idol, Zac Efron. So many people have been commenting about how good-looking this brutal serial killer/rapist/necrophiliac was, that Netflix this week had to issue a statement letting people know that talking about how Ted Bundy is attractive is not really that cool.

So, Ted is back in the news, but that’s not the only reason. Jumping in on the trend, Ghost Adventures  star Zak Bagans just bought Ted Bundy’s glasses for $50,000 so that he can display them in his haunted museum in Las Vegas. That’s almost twice what he paid for the Demon House in Gary, Indiana.

Now there’s no guarantee that Ted Bundy actually wore the glasses, but they did find them in a car that he had stolen, so chances are that they’re his. Is it a cursed object? Well, the jury is still out, but people have been seeing Ted Bundy’s ghost since shortly after he was executed. In fact, the story goes that so many guards were seeing his ghost in the electric chair that they refused to enter the execution room alone. Other guards say that he was taunting them from beyond the grave, saying things like “Well, I beat you guys, didn’t I?” Messed up. Reminds me of Horace Pinker from Wes Craven’s criminally underrated Shocker, where the killer is about to be electrocuted and they ask him, “Does the prisoner have any final words?” and he replies, “Yeah, no more Mr. Nice Guy.”

The Megadeth version of “No More Mr. Nice Guy” on the Shocker soundtrack is Epic as well!

My sister Allison closed out the episode by also brings out an interesting story she heard this week about how former New Age guru Doreen Virtue turned around and renounced her former Pagan ways and became a Born Again Christian. She says that all the stuff she used to believe in was actually a pathway to The Devil and Doreen’s recent blogpost, “An A-Z List of New Age Practices to Avoid, And Why” proceeds to tell us why everything from Harry Potter to Yoga are evil and anti-Christian.

Well, that blogpost wasn’t about to go unanswered and Warlock Christian Day decided to rebut her alphabetical proclamations with his own blogpost, “A Former New-Ager Turned Fundie Christian Wackjob To Avoid, And Why”. It’s always a pleasure to read good writers debate each other, especially when we’re talking about magic and religion. Sometimes it’s just fun to argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. And when you get through both articles, it seems like the only thing that these two can agree on is that faeries are dangerous. And I think that’s something even Ozzy can agree with!

Also, in this episode we wanted to follow up a little bit on last episode’s conversation about the guy that ran through the gates at the Nevada National Security Site (the former Nevada Nuclear Test Site). To me it seemed that it was unthinkable to roll through the security gates at a military facility because you’re just going to be killed onsite, but it sounds like it happens a lot more than we think (this one was just reported by the news.) One of our Patreon members (and frequent idea contributors!), author C.E. Martin let us know in an email exactly how and why these security breaches happen more often than we think, here’s what he wrote:

1. Someone who wants to do mischief.

I once hear a story of a base in where the Swords to Plowshares group cut through the fence and stormed onto an alert area, some maniac running toward a B-5 with a sledge hammer. He actually reached the plane and managed to get several swings in on it. The guard in a tower watching over these alert-ready, engines-running, nuclear laden bombers had fallen asleep. Thankfully, the guards on foot saw it and stopped the hippy terrorist before too much damage was done (to the plane–the intruder did not fare very well, surviving the beating they took, but just barely).

2. Someone who wants to protest.

Shortly after Desert Storm, my base in Germany, Rhein Main (Frankfurt) was the central air hub for anything going from the eastern US to the Gulf. We had heightened security and a regular assortment of protestors at our gates. One night, when I was actually off duty (after months of no days off, we finally got to work a 6-and-1 as everything came back from the Gulf). Again, it was some group like Swords and Plowshares (or maybe it was them again) cut through the fence and brought an entrourage onto the base–including a camel! They were stopped relatively quickly just inside the fence. They were also fortunate enough not to have gotten roughed up too bad, I was told. (I was sure mad I missed this crazy occurrence).

3. Mistaken travel.

In California, (McClellan AFB, in Sacramento) we were at the end of a major roadway. People often got turned around and ended up at that gate asking for directions. This was the back side of the base–the opposite side being near the highway. People were trying to get to that highway, but the base was in the way. One night, a drunk driver drove through the fence, dodging the gateshack he almost ran over. He ended up on the runway (which he later confessed he thought was the highway) and almost struck the Sacramento Sheriff’s helicopter that had been coming in to refuel for patrol (they rented hangar space from the USAF). I was the closest patrol and got to drive hellbent for leather (something we NEVER were supposed to do) past airplanes and hangars and out onto the runway to get to this guy. With the day-time-like helicopter light’s assistance, i found the truck crashed into a huge drainage ditch at the far end of the runway, and snagged the perp, who had a partially-consumed case of beer in his truck with him. There’s more to that story about toxic waste, me ruining a pair of boots, and almost breaking the guy’s wrists, but I’ll save it for another time…

4. Refusal to follow orders.

Anyone coming onto a military base is subject to search and seizure. Your constitutional rights are suspended when it comes to that. This is to prevent bombs and what not from coming on and damaging resources. Occasionally, someone doesn’t want to comply with a vehicle search (they were picked at random when I was in). In my case, again, back in Germany, an Army sergeant decided he wasn’t going to comply and started to race forward. I jumped in front of his car and put my hand on my gun (he later claimed i drew my pistol, but I don’t think I did). He turned the car around and sped away. This was a back gate on the base, leading directly into the housing area. I called it in and patrols went searching for him… and found him very quick. In his haste to escape, he had lost control of his fancy short-dick sports car and crashed it into a guard rail, doing a considerable amount of damage. He was brought back onto the base, I confirmed his identity and, long story short, he was dishonorably discharged for the whole incident (I think he was also driving drunk or something–can’t recall that part).

Now, while these are just four stories, I assure you, running the gate, while not a “regular” occurrence, is common enough not to be unheard of. During Desert Storm, back in Germany again, we anticipated this problem to the point that at both the main gate and Crash Shortdick’s base housing gate, we had two special patrols parked and ready: Ram-1 and Ram-2. Ram-1 was an armored car, Ram:2 was a regular Humvee. The role of the person sitting in these vehicles, engines running for 12 hour shifts (minus a brief swap out for refueling), was to RAM any vehicle running the gate, to prevent them from reaching anywhere on base. Side note, when the air war kicked off in January 1991, I was actually manning Ram-1 at the main gate. Several of the wives of guys in our unit, who regularly helped bring everyone sandwiches and snacks and stuff while we were on duty, went out and delivered the news that the air war had started.

C.E. Martin, author, USAF vet, and former criminal investigator

Quick hits for other things we mention in the podcast:

For the song this episode, we were thinking about how being a ghost wouldn’t be that great. You’re always stuck hanging around the places that you used to live and work, or worse were killed. After all, Ted Bundy isn’t haunting the sites of his infamous murders, he’s haunting the place where he himself was executed for his crimes. Or maybe now he’s going to haunt Zak Bagans’ museum, roaming around a bunch of musty artifacts and interacting with tourists looking to “touch” some piece of morbid history. Movies and TV shows always treat immortality as a curse more than a blessing, so would it be any fun to be a ghost if you were just an observer? That’s the idea behind this week’s track, “I Don’t Wanna Be A Ghost”.

I don’t want to be a ghost
I just want to be a man
I don’t want to hear my friends
When I cannot talk to them
I’ll be right behind the wall
and I’ll wait for you to call my name

I used to want to come back as a spirit,
and be in some romantic tragedy
I’d be Patrick Swazye and you would be my sweet Demi.

If we can’t be together
who wants to live forever
when you’re just looking right through me,
If I will always be lonely
there’s no point in eternity and
I can see you looking right through me

I don’t want to be a ghost
I just want to be a man
I don’t want to hear my friends
When I cannot talk to them
I’ll be right behind the wall
and I’ll wait for you to call my name

I could walk the earth as a phantom
and be an orb in your phone photos
Scaring all the people who never came to my gravestone

What’s the point of a soul
if there’s no one to make you whole
A spectral spectator that’s bored with immortality.

If we can’t be together
who wants to live forever
when you’re just looking right through me,
If I will always be lonely
there’s no point in eternity and
I can see you looking right through me

I don’t want to be a ghost
I just want to be a man
I don’t want to hear my friends
When I cannot talk to them
I’ll be right behind the wall
and I’ll wait for you to call my name

232 – Shiny Space Pancakes: Big Bands, Assassination Conspiracies, Smiley Face Killers, and Oumuamua

When The New Yorker runs an article called “Have Aliens Found Us? A Harvard Astronomer on the Mysterious Interstellar Object ‘Oumuamua'”, people are going to listen. It’s one of America’s most prestigious magazines, which is probably why they were a little combative in their discussion with Avi Loeb (who’s been popping up all the time lately) about the possibility that the interstellar Oumuamua object is artificial, perhaps created by an alien race to probe the universe, much like our Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft. My sister Allison was so excited about the article, she couldn’t wait to talk about it in this episode.

Of course, Avi Loeb is no slouch, he’s the chair of the Harvard Astronomy Department stranger to aliens, he is also involved with the Breakthrough Initiative, the $100 million search for alien intelligence founded by a Russian billionaire which we discussed in episode 50. In the past year, he’s become the poster child for real scientists talking about the possibility of alien life in the universe. He’s tenured, so they can’t fire him for having these ideas. And he’s well-respected, so he’s not coming out of left field.

Painting of Oumuamua as a pancake-shaped object. Copyright 2018 William K. Hartmann

Since we discovered it after it was already out of range to get an actual picture of it, all the details have to come through what we can observe and mathematically derive from the data coming through the radio telescopes. So, why do they think that it might be artificial and what’s interesting about it?

  • As it spends every eight hours, it’s brightness changes by a factor of ten, that means it’s probably ten times longer than it is wide
  • That means it might be cigar shaped OR pancake shaped!
  • It deviates from an orbit that physics would dictate for a normal object around the sun
  • There are no gases coming off it like a comet, so it’s not being propelled by anything

Here’s one of the best quotes from the article:

I do not view the possibility of a technological civilization as speculative, for two reasons. The first is that we exist. And the second is that at least a quarter of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy have a planet like Earth, with surface conditions that are very similar to Earth, and the chemistry of life as we know it could develop. If you roll the dice so many times, and there are tens of billions of stars in the Milky Way, it is quite likely we are not alone.

Professor Abraham “Avi” Loeb

Avi, you’re my man! He’s the guy who’s saying that it’s unscientific to completely rule out the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence. He even brings up the old Sherlock Holmes chestnut “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” I like him and if he ends up being a disinformation agent, I’ll be super sad,

The real Dr. Hynek and his TV counterpart J. Allen Littlefinger

Something I found really interesting this week was all the talk about the new Project Blue Book TV show on the History Channel starring Littlefinger from Game of Thrones (and Tommy Carcetti, I haven’t forgotten about you, The Wire fans!) Everyone on my Facebook feed is talking about it because it uses the real-life character of Dr. J. Allen Hynek (who we talk about extensively with author Mark O’Connell who wrote a book about him called The Close Encounters Man) who investigated UFO reports for the real Project Blue Book and turns it into X-Files style fiction.

Okay, so that is a lot of fun, but The New York Times this week also wrote an article about the real life Project Blue Book and how it was nothing like it’s described in the TV show. Those are the same authors who wrote the 2017 article that blew the lid open on modern military research into unexplained aerial phenomena. Okay, we know Hollywood is gonna Hollywood, but why are we so predisposed to believe that the government is okay lying to us?

David Crosby is one of The Truth and Reconciliation Committee members looking for new answers to the political assassinations of the 60s.

Well, I think we can thank the government of America’s Golden Age, the Happy Days of yore, because they were super good at lying to the American people. From the Tuskegee experiments to the Gulf of Tonkin, the Mid-20th Century US government wasn’t afraid to deceive its own citizens to accomplish a goal. And it’s one of the reason that on Martin Luther King Day this year, a group of 60 activists who are calling themselves the Truth and Reconciliation Council are demanding a new investigation into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr, and Malcolm X.

Celebrities include Alec Baldwin, Oliver Stone, Martin Sheen, Rob Reiner, famous walrus-man and musician David Crosby, as well as relatives of both Robert Kennedy and Dr. King. King’s family has long believed that James Earl Ray did not act alone and RFK Jr. himself has said that Sirhan Sirhan’s trial was a “mockery”.

There was just an invincibility and an impunity about that era of government that’s almost terrifying. From J. Edgar Hoover’s personal fiefdom of the FBI to the CIA’s mind control experiments, how many unelected officials wreaked havoc on American citizens “for our own good”? Might these assassinations be another example and we can’t learn the truth until the Boomers finally pass on?

Glenn Miller says “I gotta trombone for ya, baby.”

Wendy this week thought that it was fascinating that they think they might have found the wreckage of Glenn Miller’s airplane. One of the most popular musicians in America during Word War II, Miller’s plane disappeared over the English Channel on December 15th, 1944. There have been several theories to the disappearance:

  • Because of the freezing conditions, his plane’s engine iced over and they crashed on the way to Paris
  • British bombers returning from an air raid were told they needed to jettison their unexploded bombs over the Channel and Miller’s plane was accidentally in the way and killed by friendly fire
  • Miller made it to Paris, but had a heart attack while in a brothel, and they “disappeared” him to save the famous musician’s family embarrassment

Well, a fisherman now claims that he pulled up the remains of Miller’s plane in 1987. He says that he was advised to let it back into the deep, but he recorded the coordinates of the exact spot. What I wanna know is WHO TOLD HIM TO PUT IT BACK?!? That seems to be the missing piece in this journalism for me.

The good news is that he’s given a team of researchers the coordinates, so that if they can get the money, they can send divers down there to investigate. Because Miller’s plane is the last of its manufacture in the world that’s unaccounted for, if they find it, they’ll know it’s his and maybe the mystery can be solved.

Why so serious?

The first time we had Scott Markus on the show, we were featuring his documentary, The Hidden Truth?, which was about a series of mysterious drownings that happened in La Crosse along the Mississippi River from the 90s to the Aughts. Police claim it’s probably just drunken misadventure, but La Crosse’s Deputy Chief Medical Examiner had some other ideas and he wanted to see if their might be a paranormal explanation.

Which leads us to Scott’s topic for the week, the premiere of Smiley Face Killers: The Hunt for Justice on the Oxygen Network. In 2008, retired New York City police detectives Kevin Gannon and Anthony Duarte proposed that these drownings were the work of a “Murder Club” that they nicknamed “The Smiley Face Killers” because they seemed to find smiley face graffiti near where each of these poor victims went into the river. They postulated that these murders were planned and organized by a dark web of thrill killers throughout the country.

Their ideas made some news for a little while, but it was a popular theory to debunk because of the sheer audacity of it. The FBI even made an official statement about it. However, do you think that’s going to stop the producers of reality TV?! Hell no. Oxygen has developed a series about the detectives’ continuing investigation into more mysterious drownings. What did they find and do you find their evidence convincing? Well, you can be the judge by watching the first episode online right now.

Hush now baby baby don’t you cry…

Finally, this week’s Sunspot song inspired by the conversation is just a straight up punk tune about how easily we’re manipulated. From Vladimir Lenin’s “useful idiots” to the latest stories like the Covington High School video fracas, interest groups and factions vying for power and wealth have worked over the narrative so that the “common people” will come to their way of thinking. We fully expect propaganda in advertising, but we hope that our news sources at least attempt objectivity and our elected officials are at least telling us the truth sometimes… but we know that’s not true. Sometimes, you just get sick of people in authority saying they know what’s good for you and “Father Knows Best” is just a load of bollocks.

It’s a little story that story that they wrote for you and me,
keeping out the best parts for our own good, don’t you see?

The program is designed so that the masses will obey.
We’re all the same, it’s just a game, and we don’t get to play.
Worse than Illuminati or lizard conspiracy
for who controls the narrative, controls all the money.

Father Knows Best and our trust becomes a weapon.
Mommy’s bedtime story is mind control and thought suppression.
You can’t fight the power while you’re busy getting screwed
Hey Rube, sometimes the truth ain’t good enough for you.

I guess we’re just not smart enough to grasp at the big picture,
we just get the Cliffs Notes and they tell us that it’s scripture.

They’ve got the dials all set to outrage no matter what side that you choose
When it comes to facts, no one retracts, they just play fast and loose
It’s pissed-off vegan communists or truck driver redneck hicks
It’s about the bottom line, and everything is fine, as long as they get the clicks.

Father Knows Best and our trust becomes a weapon.
Mommy’s bedtime story is mind control and thought suppression.
You can’t fight the power while you’re busy getting screwed
Hey Rube, sometimes the truth ain’t good enough for you.

225 – Evil: From Serial Killers to Slenderman

This weekend we did our first live podcast from a convention! Allison from Milwaukee Ghosts, Scott from WhatsYourGhostStory.com, Wendy, and I did a panel on EVIL at Wizard World Madison and it was a fantastic experience. Here’s how they described the panel in the literature:

From urban legends to comic books to true crime, evil permeates our pop culture. Hear about real cases of evil and how they influenced movies and TV with Madison haunted historian Mike Huberty, Milwaukee paranormal researcher Allison Jornlin, Waukesha Ghost tour guide Wendy Lynn Staats, and Chicago ghost story author, Scott Markus. From Ed Gein and Psycho to John Wayne Gacy and evil clowns, the Slenderman to famous demonic possessions, the crew behind Wisconsin paranormal and pop culture podcast, See You On The Other Side, discuss the real life evils hiding under the fiction.

Here are your evil panelists! Mike, Allison, Scott, and Wendy

So, we each took a topic that had a Wisconsin connection (since we were in Madison) of evil in real life that had paranormal implications and also had a ton of pop culture connections.

It was a great crowd and a lot of fun and if we met you at the convention, then thanks for coming to visit us at See You On The Other Side for the first time!

Wendy giving us the “skinny” on Slenderman

Evil often hides in the form of good intentions. For the song this week, we go back to this worn-out, but still valuable quote:

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

Nietzche, Beyond Good and Evil

The mantra of revolution is often that once a few “necessary evils” are taken care of, they can stop and that the ends will justify the means. Whether it’s the French Revolution or the Bolsheviks, history hasn’t borne that out.  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Here is Sunspot with “Evil On Evil”.

You want the power
but they won’t go without a fight
you said you’re gonna drain the swamp
this time you’ll do it right

you said you want justice
no one said it’d be bloodless
it’s time, the heads will roll
ain’t that how it always goes

Fire with fire, you gotta be lethal
it’s just evil on evil
Drag em through the eye of a needle
now you’re evil on evil

Tie up the noose
payback’s a bitch
fail the purity test
we’ll burn the witch.

you said you want justice
no one said it’d be bloodless
it’s time, the heads will roll
ain’t that how it always goes

Fire with fire, you gotta be lethal
it’s just evil on evil
Drag em through the eye of a needle
now you’re evil on evil

220 – True Crime Halloween: Scarier Than Superstition

When we think about Halloween, we think of witches and ghosts and demons. Superstitions and mythical creatures. Wicked? Sure. Scary? You bet. Real? Well, the jury is out. We talk about the veil between the worlds being at its most thin on the holiday, we talk about Samhain, horror movies, and jack o’ lanterns. We make evil into a joke, something cute for kids. We dress up little girls as witches, little boys as vampires. The terrors of our Dark Ages become fantasy fodder for our Enlightened era. We’ve talked about all kinds of supernatural brutes on this show and every kind of superstition. But sometimes the most horrible monsters aren’t monsters at all. They’re just people, sick and weak and selfish and angry people. 

  • Halloween night 1974, Ronald Clark O’Bryan laced candy Pixy Stix with cyanide in order to kill his children and collect their life insurance policies. He pretended to go to a neighbor’s house who wasn’t home and “trick or treat”-ed the candy, giving it to his own children and their friends. His son Timothy was poisoned to death and O’Bryan was caught and eventually executed. He was nicknamed “The Candy Man” or “The Man That Killed Halloween”.

  • On Halloween 1975, 15 year old Martha Moxley’s body was found bludgeoned to death and stabbed with a golf club. The affluent and troubled Skakel brothers were implicated in the murder and one of the brothers was eventually tried and convicted of her murder 25 years later. The case was international news because their aunt was married to Robert F. Kennedy.

  • October 28th, 2014, 35 year old Derek Ward decapitated his mother, Patricia Ward, and carried her body out into a Long Island street. There were several witnesses that watched him carrying the headless corpse but they had no idea it was real, they thought they were looking at a Halloween decoration. Derek Ward then proceeded to walk three blocks and killed himself by jumping in front of a train.

  • Halloween 1981, Ronald Sisman and Elizabeth Platzman are found murdered in their New York City apartment. The apartment is ransacked and they are killed execution style. Police suspect a drug transaction gone bad until a prison inmate came to them with an unusual claim. That inmate was imprisoned with David Berkowitz, the infamous “Son of Sam” killer, who was arrested in 1977. The inmate claimed that Berkowitz told him earlier that he was part of a cult that was planning on killing a photographer in an apartment in Greenwich Village on Halloween in a Satanic ritual. The police couldn’t get enough evidence and the case remains unsolved.

  • On Halloween night 2002, Christopher Jenkins was kicked out of a Minneapolis bar into the freezing weather while still in his costume. His body was found in the Mississippi River four months later. Four years later, the Minneapolis police changed the status of his death from an accidental drowning to homicide, but no one has ever been charged in the crime. Two New York detectives have their own theory about a “Smiley Face Murder Club” that travels along the Mississippi, killing young men and covering up their crimes by dumping the bodies in the river.

When we use names to describe these real-life terrors we turn people into monsters: “Smiley Face Killers”, “Son of Sam”, “The Candyman”. Nicknames are catchy, they sell newspapers and get clicks, but it also de-humanizes the people behind the names. It turns them into a witch or a vampire or a ghost. Because how could someone, a regular person like us, do something as horrible as this?

The song this week is based on a  true crime that happened in St. Louis in October of 1899. Francis “Frankie” Baker was a young woman who was keeping company with ragtime piano player named Allen Britt. Allen he stepped out on her with a prostitute named Alice Nelson, Frankie heard about it and got so enraged that she shot him. Allen died 4 days later and was able to tell the police who did it.

At Frankie’s trial, she claimed that it was self-defense, that Allen pulled a knife on her and that he beat her in the past. That was good enough for the jury, who acquitted her. But within months, someone had already written a song about it and soon afterwards, the names were changed a little bit to accommodate easier rhymes. The song “Frankie and Johnny” was born and was covered by everyone from Johnny Cash to Merle Haggard to Elvis. Francis Baker died poor in 1952, and was bitter that she never received any money from the song that she inspired. However, she did kill a guy. This episode’s song is our own acoustic guitar and violin version of the true crime murder ballad, “Frankie and Johnny”.

Frankie and Johnny was lovers, oh, how they could love
They sworn to be true to each other, true as the skies above
He was he man, he wouldn’t do her no wrong.

Frankie went down to the corner, to get her a stein of beer
She asked the big old fat bartender, “Have my lovin’ Johnny been here?
He is my man, he wouldn’t do her no wrong. “

Said, “I ain’t gonna tell you no story, I ain’t gonna tell you no lie
He was here ’bout an hour ago with that gal they call Nellie Bly,
He was your man, but he’s been doin’ you wrong.”

Frankie went down to the hotel, she didn’t go down there for fun
Under her long red kimono she carried her .44 gun
Lookin’ for the man that was doin’ her wrong.

Johnny pulled off his Stetson hat, hollered, “Now, baby, don’t shoot!”
Frankie pressed her finger on the trigger and that gun went “rrrroooolietoo”
She killed her man, ’cause he was doin’ her wrong

This is the end of my story, this is the end of my song
Frankie’s down in the county jail, poor thing, down there all alone
She killed her man, ’cause he was doin’ her wrong.
She killed her man, ’cause he was doin’ her wrong.
She killed her man, ’cause he’d been doin’ her wrong.

112 – Serial Killers: Amanda Howard and a Fascination With Evil

[ Credit to Djbarrett Photographer and Graphic Artist for photo of Amanda Howard in this episode’s header image ]

Remember the first time you saw The Silence of The Lambs? I do. I was fourteen years old and I went to go see the movie with my dad at the local budget theater in Milwaukee in June of 1991. I remember the day well because I’d  just picked up the latest issue of my favorite guitar magazine because I wanted to learn how to play “Bohemian Rhapsody”. But I also remember it because that movie blew my frickin’ mind. It was behind only Ghostbusters and Total Recall (and both films we discussed this summer on the podcast, funny enough) in my mind as what I thought were the greatest movies of all time.

Guitar for the Practicing Musician July 1991
Sunspot still plays “Seek and Destroy” live, originally learned from this magazine! All bass lines included? That’s why it was my favorite!
But it wasn’t just me who loved it. Silence of the Lambs nabbed the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1991 in addition to Best Acting trophies for both Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter (Best Actor for merely sixteen minutes of screen time!) and Jodie Foster. It is a tour de force of suspense and the measure to which all other serial killer movies are based.

And there were lots of movies of which to compare it to. Serial killers became the villain of the decade. Even The X-Files has Silence of the Lambs in its DNA. Fox Mulder was originally a serial killer profiler that was allowed to pursue his weird research on the X-Files because he was such an ace profiler. That’s right, in the 90s, being a serial killer profiler was a viable employment goal.

serial killers image
Here let me save you some profiling time. Single. White. Male. Usually have been picked up for a sex crime in the past.
From Scream to Kiss The Girls, Se7en to Copycat (which was Sigourney Weaver taking on the very evil Harry Connick Jr.), it seemed like serial killers were everywhere. One of the most awkward moments in watching a film in Milwaukee as a young man was hearing Wesley Snipes psycho character in Demolition Man say “Jeffrey Dahmer? I love that guy!” Audiences on the coast might have laughed, but definitely not in Brewtown.

There was even a reaction to all these serial killers as villains with the switcheroo of them becoming the protagonist instead. While some works, like Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho are meant to be completely satirical, others like Dexter have the audience rooting for a vigilante murderer like he’s Batman. Indeed, they made a special action figure out of his “Dark Defender” alter ego.

dexter dark defender
Hey kids, Merry Murderin’ Christmas!
But it wasn’t just a 90s thing, we’ve always been fascinated with serial killers, from H.H. Holmes (Chicago’s Devil In The White City) who was heavily covered in the Hearst newspapers of the 1890s to Uncle Charlie in the 1943 Alfred Hitchcock classic, Shadow of a Doubt. But it was back in the 90s, that an Australian writer by the name of Amanda Howard began compiling stories about serial killers on the web into a sort of online encyclopedia.

Amanda Howard
True crime author and this episode’s guest, Amanda Howard
Amanda’s fascination with these murderous personalities eventually led to a career as a successful true crime novelist where she goes in depth on the stories behind these psychos, from their motivations to the impact that it has on their often completely innocent families.

We were lucky that Amanda was willing to join us at 5am Sydney time for the interview to share her expert knowledge on the history of serial killers and provide an insight into the reasons that as a culture, for some reason, we just can’t get enough of serial killers. One of the most interesting cases that she shares with us is Fred and Rose West, a British couple who many in the US are unfamiliar with, and their grotesque story shocked me.

Amanda has been a pen pal of some of your favorite crazies, from Family Man Charles Manson to Night Stalker Richard Ramirez and her exhaustive research has given her a unique perspective into why these people fascinate us, and she even makes some paranormal connections as well!

More information about Amanda Howard and her books can be found at her website, amandahoward.com.au. If true crime isn’t your thing, she’s also written the Ritual series of fiction books about an investigator named Kate Reilly who probes serial killers in a city called Somerset, which if the books are any indication, is the most dangerous place in Australia!

For this week’s Sunspot song, we pulled out our track “Cannibal” from The Slingshot Effect. After all, on a week where we’re talking about serial killers and Silence of the Lambs, we just had to include our song that quotes one of Hannibal Lecter’s most famous lines.

You’re such a tease,
You always leave me wanting more,
And you could turn a guy like Gandhi into a carnivore.
Cuz you look like you’ve got great taste, you’re good enough to eat.
Maybe with a nice Chianti and some fava beans.

I’ve got a hunger that can’t be sated normally,
Here’s your invitation to my Donner Party…

I want you more than just inside of me,
And I’ll take that super-sized.
I want to be studied by Margaret Mead,
and I’ll bake you right into a pie,
This cannibal will eat you alive.

I’m into lust not into vengeance, I’m no Andronicus,
Carnality not hubris, I’m no Tantalus.
When I get turned on, I’m a barbarian,
My tastes decidedly non-vegetarian.

You always satisfy my craving that’s so big,
I get hungry for a hunk of the long pig.

I want you more than just inside of me,
And I’ll take that super-sized.
I want to be studied by Margaret Mead,
and I’ll bake you right into a pie,
This cannibal will eat you alive.

Every time I see you, I just can’t touch you enough.
Every time I’m with you, I just can’t taste you enough.
I can’t confuse, I can’t control you,
I can’t abuse you, I can’t cajole you,
I can’t surprise you and I can’t imbibe you, monopolize you, osmosicize you,
I just can’t make you enough a part of me.

I’ve got a hunger that can’t be sated normally,
Here’s your invitation to my Donner Party…

I want you more than just inside of me,
And I’ll take that super-sized.
I want to be studied by Margaret Mead,
and I’ll bake you right into a pie,
I want you more than just inside of me,
And I’ll take that super-sized.
Your sweet taste is the key to my recipe,
and I’ll bake you right into a pie,
This cannibal will eat you alive.