September 24, 2024 • 44 mins
While serial killers may seem like a relatively new phenomenon, the human species hasn't changed as much as we all might like to think. Join the guys as they dive into the mysterious, grisly stories of proven and suspected serial killers from ancient civilizations across the planet.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to tonight's classic episode, Fellow conspiracy Realist. We talk
a lot about true crime. We examine a lot of
what makes people called serial killers, and while the nomenclature right,
While the term may be astonishingly recent, it turns out,
you guys, that the human species may have already been
(00:24):
well familiar with this behavior.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Is this the one where we get into assassins? Or
it inspired our assassins episodes?
Speaker 1 (00:31):
It may well be our history of Oh what are
we supposed to call it?
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Now?
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Targeted operations, that's the euphem is. It's like when you
say regime if you don't like a government, and you
say government if you like them, it's an assassin. I
sure don't like them, but.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
I get it. It's like a targeted drone strike or
a targeted nuclear attack. I know what you're saying.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Are we going to start calling serial killers cereal unalivers?
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Is that next we should? If we want people to
see this on YouTube?
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Oh jeez, yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Conspiracies within conspiracies, just like a bunch of murderous Matroshka dolls.
This is our classic episode from twenty nineteen called The
Eternal Shadow. Serial Killers throughout Ancient History.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Our compatriot nol Is on Adventures they call me Ben.
We are joined as always with our super producer Paul.
Mission control decands, most importantly, you are you. You are here,
and that makes this stuff they don't want you to
know a pretty gory, grim episode for us today.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Man, Yeah, let's go ahead and put this warning up
here right now. We're going to be discussing some things
that you may not want to hear, especially if you
dislike murder, sometimes, dismemberment, sometimes, torture, all kinds of things
that make me squeamish. So if you feel that way,
(02:22):
go ahead and turn back now.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
If you're in the middle of eating something and you
have a somewhat delicate stomach, perhaps it is time to
put this on pause and finish your case idea or
your thuh whatever.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Even if you find yourself, I don't know, in the
backyard with a glass of wine, building a fountain, just
you know, just know that this one's a little messed up.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Serial killers, Matt, Yeah, serial killers. We've explored their lives,
their methods, and their attempts to evade justice, and you know,
most disturbingly, the tragedies they leave behind in their wake.
This on multiple episodes, sometimes focusing on general tendencies, sometimes
focusing on specific individuals. In an earlier episode, we trace
(03:11):
the evolution of the term serial killer from its initial
roots and it's not a very old term, spoiler alert
to the modern day, along with the changing and at
times controversial definitions involved. Usually when we talk about serial
murderers on this show, we are talking about let's see,
(03:35):
we've done a three part series on serial killers who
are never apprehended. Correct, we've done We've done some looks
at cults that incorporated serial killing, some human sacrifice and
so on.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Yeah, a couple of individual ones like the original Nightstalker
or what is it, the Golden State Killer?
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Ah, yes, yeah, that's a bit of good news, right,
Golden State Killer was finally apprehended. Was that twenty eighteen?
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Yes? Last? Or well yes, and of last year.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
And when we look into these cases, we're typically exploring
things in the modern day or in the recent past,
because for most of us, especially here in the West,
when we think of serial killers, we generally tend to
think of things that happened in the twentieth century, maybe
(04:35):
a little bit in the nineteenth century, but primarily the
nineteen hundreds. It goes back to about that. And now
we're going to explore something different. Today. We are looking
into the past to search for the first recorded serial killers,
if we could find those, the ancient murderers, the murderers
(04:58):
of old, the ones who exis before the term serial
killer was ever invented. And to do that we first
have to we first have to explain what we mean
when we say serial killer.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Right, that's right. Here are the facts. Oh hey, sounds
so hokey when I say it. I'm sorry everybody, but
here are the facts. So a serial killer, at the
most basic level is it can be described or is
categorized by the manner in which they kill someone and
along with the amount they kill someone, like the frequency
(05:34):
in which they do this act. And according to the FBI,
we've used them as our source before to discuss what
a serial killer is. According to the FBI, serial killer
is someone who commits at least three murders over the
span of a month, and then there's always some some
form of cooling down period, generally in emotional cooling down
period in between those murders and those deaths. So this
(05:58):
really sets them apart from say a spree killer, someone
who kills a large amount of people over a short
time span, or a soldier in battle who takes lives
because it's part of their mission and job to do so,
and in particular it's that type of killer. So, okay,
(06:23):
let's put it this way. A spree killer has the
potential of killing more people generally in the span of
you know, a day or a week or something like that.
Then perhaps a serial killer who kills even over the
course of a year or at least, there's a potential there.
So it's not just sheer numbers, it's how they.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Kill, right, And serial killers will often be differentiated from
other individuals who murder multiple people.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
In that they.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Tend to have they tend to have patterns of some sort,
whether it is the perceived commonality of their victims, by
which we mean something that the killer themselves sees in
these victims. That makes them all qualify as prey or
whether it's the method of homicide that they employ. So
(07:21):
you can see how there are some important distinctions here.
How many of these individuals are alive or uncaught today.
Every time we look at this we run into an
unsurprising but unpleasant lack of evidence. The current estimates on
serial killer numbers you see are woefully vague, and the
(07:45):
people who have attempted to attempted to guestimate the number
of unapprehended serial killers or murderers at large I always
walk away with a wide range of numbers. We are
going to give you a couple just to set up
some bookends here. Thomas Hargrove Sky, who founded the Murder
(08:06):
Accountability Project, And according to Hargrove and his research, there
are as many as two thousand serial killers at large
as of twenty eighteen in the US or at least
in the anglosphere.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Wow. That's a high number. Wow. And how did he
get to that number? That's one of the big questions here.
And really he started by asking contacts that he had
with the Federal Bureau of Investigation asked them to calculate
how many unsolved murders are linked to at least one
other murder through DNA on the FBI's database. So there
(08:45):
you go. Already, because they determined that about fourteen hundred murders,
or roughly two percent of those, like, of all the
murders within that database met the classification of being connected
to at least one other. That's already pretty disturbing. But
you know, if you look, if you look at the
(09:05):
fact that not all murder cases actually involve any kind
of evidence of the DNA sort at least, and not
all cases are even reported to the FBI, so that
two percent is a pretty low estimate. So then Hargrove
went through and he said, okay, well, let's add up.
Let's round it up to two thousand, just as a
(09:27):
measure of what he believes could be closer. And that's
because he continued looking.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Right, he said, there are more than two hundred and
twenty thousand unsolved murders just since nineteen eighty. So when
we put that in perspective, he asked, how shocking is
it that there are at least two thousand unrecognized series
of homicides. There's an important note here, So earlier, Matt,
(09:53):
you had broken down the FBI definition of serial killer
for US, and that's three or more murder with a
cooling off period. The thing about Hargrove's study is that
he only required a person to have killed two other people.
So what happens when we stick to the definition of
three murders per killer. That's when we run into Kenna Quinnette,
(10:16):
a criminologist at Indiana University, Perdue University, Indianapolis, and she
has a much more conservative estimate. So her estimate is
based on links between cases that were made by journalists
or law enforcement, and there's a different metric in her study,
the killer had to have murdered at least three victims
(10:37):
conforming to that FBI serial killer definition. By her definition,
there are about one hundred and fifteen serial killers dating
back to the nineteen seventies in the US whose crimes
have never been solved. In the same time period as
her estimate for unsolved serial murders, there were roughly six
hundred and twenty five solved serial murder cases. And we
(11:02):
don't again, we don't mean that every single one of
these people fits that sort of film and fiction definition.
They're not all hannibal lecters. In fact, most serial killers
do not have a very high IQ. But that's a
lot of death, and one hundred and fifteen is still
(11:22):
it might still be missing some pieces, because this doesn't
include cases where no one ever made a link between murders. If,
for instance, a serial killer murdered a person in Arkansas
and then drifted to an adjacent state to kill two
more people, the crimes might never have been flagged by
anyone as related, so they wouldn't appear in this count.
(11:42):
And that's one of the biggest reasons experts believe that
there could be any serial killers uncought and are missed.
People don't link you know, it's not like Charlie Day
with a conspiracy wall. People are not linking up these
various seemingly unrelated events. It's tough to do, so, you know,
it's a lot of research and it's a lot of time.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
I mean, yeah, where is Pepe? For real?
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Though there is no Pepe lost? Who had to inject some.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Left just a tiny bit good god, Well, because it's
a terrifying thought, just the unknown serial killer that just
could be lurking everywhere. And even if it's only one
hundred and fifteen.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
That's still over one hundred. Yeah, over one hundred people.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
They're only fifty states. That's true.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
That's true. And I remember, I remember we had talked
about this, maybe off air one day met. But we
start talking about the distribution of serial killers at least
in the states. Are there more in Alaska, or they're
more in Florida, and so on, And it's an interesting
conversation because it quickly goes to speculation. We we don't
(12:56):
really know. We know that the inner State in Texas
is very, very dangerous, and the FBI has been keeping
an eye on it. But if we count on these estimates,
we can reasonably assume that there's somewhere between one hundred
and fifty to two thousand killers who never saw justice
for their crimes. Many of them may have been incarcerated
(13:16):
for other unrelated crimes, grand theft, auto drug possessions, something
like that, and many may have died right but as
grizzly as it is to point out, some remain at
large and alive today. And it's tricky and not a
little disheartening to realize how little we actually know about
these numbers and these murders a long time ago. Actually,
(13:39):
this is one of those conversations that you and I
have been having for years, right with slight pauses in there.
We've talked about it before. How much easier it seems
to get away with murder and other crimes in the
days before mass surveillance and forensic science. Yes, no one
knew what fingerprints were, No one knew how to attract DNA,
(14:00):
or even.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Even if you got it, it was a lot harder
to match somebody up with the database.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
Right, yeah, there's no database. That's a good point. So
this leads us to ask a disturbing question. Our serial
killers a relatively recent phenomenon in the human story. How
long have they been with us? Have serial murderers always
been in our midst? The answer, sadly, is an emphatic yes.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Yeah, and it's about to get crazy after this quick
word from our sponsor.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Upon closer inspection, it appears that the act of serial
murder has been with our species for as long as
written history, and by all indications, predates written history. These
killers ran the socio economic gamut. Among their number, we
find people at the very top and the very bottom
of social hierarchies. We find outcast royalty, criminals and members
(15:09):
of what functioned as the middle class. There are no
common denominators for these murderers other than their actions. And
here are some of the strangest examples of ancient serial
killers we came across. By no means are these all
of them.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Let's get started with someone named zoo Shinatier and this
is from originates from fifth century Yemen, so quite a
time ago. This man was in the Himarite Kingdom that's
a modern day Yemen. And this guy was known as
or at least he's come to be known as one
(15:45):
of the first serial killers, the first recorded at least.
He was reportedly a very wealthy man. He lived in
a place called Aiden. And this guy, it's really disturbed.
Remember that thing, that whole warning we gave you at
the top, just remember it still stands. He would reportedly
(16:07):
lure young men, young boys into his home with the
promise of things that they needed at the time in
fifth century Yemen or fifth century what is now Yemen, food, money,
things again, things that they required, and he would strip
them naked. He would assault them, generally it included rape
(16:30):
at least from the things that we found. He would
then kill them generally by throwing them naked out of
an upper story window of his home, and he did
this repeatedly, and then, thankfully, one of the young men
that he lured into his home was able to put
a stop to him and stabbed him to death. There's
(16:50):
a man at least that was named in one book
that recorded it as zarash as the young man who
killed him, thankfully, But he's only the start, and he's
really messed up, and it only gets.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
Worse, right, right, He is not the first. He is
just one of the earliest that.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
We know of. Yeah, well again because it's fifth century,
so it was written down a little more easily than
some of the even earlier ones.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
That we'll find very important point with shu Shinatir. He
was definitely doing this. We're going to run into some
strange concerns we always need to have about historical documents.
But this guy definitely was a child murderer and a
somewhat prolific one until, of course, as you said, Matt,
(17:41):
one of his victims managed to take his life. Let's
move on to someone who is commonly called the world's
first recorded serial killer or the world's first female serial killer.
This is Lucusta the Poisoner. So she gets this title
all the time. You'll hear it pretty often. I did
(18:03):
an episode about her for another show, Ridiculous History, where
I also called her the one of the first recorded
serial killers. But there's a question here because she wasn't
so much a serial killer as a paid assassin. So
members of the Roman elite were hiring her to poison
(18:24):
the coworkers they didn't like, or to get rid of
their relatives if they wanted an inheritance, you know, and
great Uncle Flavius has just taken too long to kick
the bucket. She grew up in what we call France today,
and she had an encyclopedia knowledge of herbal medicine and
plant lore. The local elite saw her knowledge as a
(18:49):
way to get rid of their enemies without a fuss,
and she saw a market opportunity. So she wasn't necessarily
motivated by some sort of again perceived commonality of the victims, right,
She wasn't looking for young people or brunettes or so on.
(19:10):
She was doing this as a job, and she became
pretty famous. She was arrested a few times, but the
people in power who used her services always kept her
out of jail. She got rescued by her wealthy patrons
numerous times, and eventually she was called to the city
of Rome to assist the Empress Agrippina in getting rid
(19:33):
of her husband, and she served a Grappina. She went
on to serve the infamous Emperor Nero, who just loved her,
and a lot of stuff about Nero is exaggerated, but
he was not a nice character. When he died, she
found herself robbed of all the protection she had enjoyed
(19:54):
for decades. She had even set up a poison school.
At this point, she was immediately sentenced to death for
her role in the murders of dozens and dozens of
upper crust members of Roman society. And again, like the
case with Zushinatier, we know that she was real and
(20:14):
we know she actually did this.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Yeah, exactly as soon as I think Galba was the
person who took over after Nero fell. But yeah, he
definitely said, hey, guess what you get to die now.
It really messed up, but at least somebody put an
end to the assassinations. Now, let's move on to one
of the first forms of serial killers that we ever
(20:38):
covered on this show. Back in a video we made
about where wolves in the history of lycanthropy fascinating stuff.
So if we go to the Middle Ages in Europe,
there were a lot of killers, deranged people who would
go around doing just terrible things, everything from murder to cannibalism,
(20:59):
just just the worst of the worst. There were human
men that would go out and do this that were
considered to be werewolves, or at least thought to be werewolves.
And there are some pretty intense claims made about these men,
even claims by the men themselves who believed, perhaps truly
believed that they would transform in some way to a
(21:22):
wolf or at least the spirit of a wolf.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
In the sixteenth century, it was a French peasant named
Pierre Bourgeau who was apparently under the control the thrall
of several figures clad in black, and this is per
his testimony, including one man named Michael ver Dunn. So,
(21:46):
according to Brugeau's story, Verdunn gave him an ointment that
would transform him from a man into a wolf. And
we talk about this a little bit in the past
in various episodes. The way that were wolves are generally
thought to transform nowadays is you get bit by a
were wolf, but you survive. Yes, that's the way in right,
(22:09):
and then you follow the path of the wolf. However,
back then, you could become a wolf through any number
of weird satanic rituals, drinking water from a water from
a wolf's print in the light of the full boon,
wearing a belt made out of a wolf pelt, or
just rubbing yourself down with some ointment, yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Or you know, taking a potion. As you said before,
there are a lot of ways that people could be
you know, from a rational, very rational standpoint, a lot
of ways that people could be convinced that they can
become a werewolf or have become a werewolf.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
And there's some pretty fascinating arguments that are by no
means water proof, but there are some pretty fascinating arguments
that some of these ointments were in fact hallucinogens, and
so these people really did, at least from their perspective, transform,
even if not physically. There was a third guy who
was named in this fiasco with weird, really weird, first
(23:09):
named Philibert. Yeah, doesn't sound like a killer, Philibert Montaute.
So Brigot, Montaut and Verdun became known as the werewolves
of Polygony and they were collectively responsible for the murders
of several children. They confessed to these murders.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
They did, But how why did they confess? Ben Oh?
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Because they were getting tortured left and right, day and
day out like nobody's business.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
And full on tortured, bad torture beyond the things that
you see in any mob movie you've ever seen. It's
really truly medieval.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Stuff, such the point that they could have easily died
during the torture. So they catch Dune and allegedly they
catch them covered in blood, and they begin torturing him.
Confess to your crimes. What infernal powers have allowed you
to transform into an otherworldly agent of Satan? And who
(24:14):
was with you? Tell us essentially what your covenant is? Yeah,
and identify the members therein So, under torture, he confesses
to whatever they say he did, and then he says, also,
these two guys, Brigo and Monteaux are in on this
with me. And then they get apprehended. Burgo gets tortured
(24:40):
and he says, these two guys forced me to renounce
God and turn into a werewolf. I had to do
it to survive. And you know, they're breaking more of
his limbs, and they're saying, well, did you kill hundreds
of children? He's saying something like yes, please, God stop,
don't kill me.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
And just quickly, as sidebar, let's talk about the torture
that was used against these guys, because it's something that
I've seen pictures of before and I looked at it again,
and you may have heard of it, called something that's
a torture wheel of sorts. And in a lot of
these pictures, these woodcuts that still remain today, copies of them,
(25:21):
you can see what's being employed. And it is so brutal.
I'm just I'm gonna describe it trigger warning. Here Where
you were laid down where and there are I guess,
wedges put beneath the places in where your joints are
and your arm your major arm and leg bones are broken.
(25:44):
And then you're where those bones are broken. You are
wrapped around this wheel like a wooden looks like a
large wooden wagon wheel, and then you are hung from
on this wheel on a stake of some sort and
basically turned upside down while you're still alive. It's hard
(26:07):
to imagine you can find pictures of it. The thing is,
if you if you can imagine, which is very difficult
to do going through something like that and the pain
and terror involved. Then it really does make you realize
that the confessions made when undergoing that are to be
taken with a grain of salt.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Absolutely, and we probably will never know for sure to
what degree these three men were guilty. However, they were
not the only quote unquote werewolves of the time. There
was a serial killer. It was also a cannibal named
Peter Stump sometimes spelled Stump or Stube, and he was
(26:52):
called the werewolf of Bedburg, who was a one armed
farmer lived in fifteenth century Germany. Over the course of
twenty twenty five years, he's thought to have murdered fourteen children,
two pregnant women, and he might not have ever been caught,
but like many serial killers, he seemed to have a
(27:15):
degrading mental state. Yeah, which is how you know things
like Dennis Radar, right, the BTK killer would have gotten
away had his mental state not continued to decay such
that he felt like he had to be recognized for
his terrible, terrible crimes. This guy Stump or Stump or Stube.
(27:37):
When he was caught he said, look, yeah, I drank
that cow's blood.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
You know what else?
Speaker 1 (27:47):
I also have eaten fetuses. And I had a son.
I ate his brain. I don't care. I'm a monster.
And the thing was in his non kill her life.
He was a wealthy farmer and he was a widower.
He had two children, the son of an unknown age
(28:10):
and a daughter called Beale or Sybil, who was, as
far as you know, at least older than fifteen. He
was subjected to torture who stretched on her rack, and
that's when he claimed he had been practicing black magic
since he was twelve years old. He said the devil
(28:31):
had allowed him to change into a wolf, and for
twenty five years, he said he had been an insatiable
bloodsucker animals, men, women, children. He confessed when he was
when he was presented with the possibility of more torture,
(28:52):
and he was also accused of having an incestuous relationship
with his daughter. She was sentenced to die with him,
and he said that he had had intercourse with a succubus,
again confessing under torture. This did not save him. These
confessions instead led to his execution on October thirty one,
(29:13):
fifteen eighty nine. He his mistress and his daughter were murdered.
He was murdered in a particularly gruesome way. He was
put on the wheel that you mentioned earlier, Matt, and
they tore flesh from his body in ten places with
red hot pinchers, then his arms and legs, then his
limbs were broken with an axe head to prevent him
(29:34):
from returning from the grave, and he was beheaded. They
burned his body. His daughter and his mistress were aflayed
and strangled and then also burned along with him, and
the authorities placed his severed head on top of a
pole with the torture wheel and a figure of a
(29:55):
wolf audit, so they were convinced that he did something.
While none of these men were, of course proven to
be capable of physically changing shape, contemporary accounts paint a
picture of one or two possibilities. One they could have
been mentally ill and homicidal. Two, they could have been
mentally ill and confessing to non existent or exaggerated crimes
(30:20):
see and this is a distinct possibility. They could have
been completely innocent and falsely confessing to avoid further torture.
But there's an entire genre in Europe around this time
of people being accused of lycanthropy. And this is just
the beginning of the story. We'll come back with more
(30:40):
tales of ancient serial killers after a word from our sponsor.
We've been in Europe for some time. Let's travel to
South America to the story of Rios e Lis Buguer.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Yes, this is a woman who was also known as
law Quintralla. And this had to do with her the
color of her hair. She had very striking red hair
and she lived in Chile. She was an aristocrat and landowner.
She allegedly carried out about forty murders, around forty murders
while she while she was basically a tyrant of sorts
(31:23):
over a lot of just a lot of people who
were working on her estate rough you know, they're indigenous
workers who then she was in charge of, and she
was just brutal to them. Apparently now she was a
member of you know, what would be considered a privileged
set of people under Santiago in colonial Santiago, and she
(31:46):
was said to just have delighted it was her she
very much enjoyed doing depraved things, things that were sacrilegious
in nature, I guess to the church, things that were
sexual and you know, having to do with consumption, like
over indulging, copious consumption exactly. It's hedonism, that's exactly what
(32:10):
it is. And there's another person, Elizabeth Bathory from history
that we've kind of heard about a couple of times
that this person, Laquintralla, has similarities with. She had a
violent temper. Again, she's a noble woman. She's got a
fondness for torture, and specifically torturing people who are underneath her,
(32:33):
her subordinates. She seemed to delight in it, like we said. Now, besides,
you know, her indentured servants and her slaves, she also
murdered lovers, which is something we may see here in
the future. Here she even murdered a priest and even
committed patricide and killed her father. Now, you know, in
(32:55):
this case, a lot of the people we've spoken about
haven't been wealth be wealthy, but this is one of
the first cases we see that the wealth is actually
being used to avoid justice. It's kind of like the
person from Rome we were speaking about, Friends in high Places, yeah, Lacusta, Yeah,
where she was able to use her influence to avoid
justice for quite a while, several years in fact, and
(33:19):
she even would donate to the church, to the Catholic
Church in order to kind of grease the hand in
a way to be a little a little bit safer,
even though it's kind of a known thing.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Maybe, yeah, she epsteined it essent. Yeah, you know, because
she was paying off judges, lawyers, she had many relatives
in political positions. She did go on trial, but despite
being pegged for forty separate murders, the trial was stalled
as a result of her influence. She was released and
(33:52):
then this is around the sixteen hundreds, from sixteen thirty
seven on, she was released and she lived out the
remainder of her life. She eventually passed away in sixteen
sixty five of old age, not in jail, and thirty
(34:14):
years later the judiciary system caught up and they said,
let's investigate these things. But she was dead, so whatever
she did, whatever kind of justice she would face, it
would not be earthly justice. And years after her death
(34:36):
her home was abandoned because people thought that her ghosts
still walked the premises. And let's stick with let's stick
with female serial killers here. There's another one, Gulia Tofana.
As we know, there's a stereotype that tells us female
serial killers generally seemed to prefer poison as their primary
(35:00):
a murder instrument. This is a stereotype. Stereotypes are everywhere.
There may be a tendency, but that's certainly not everybody. However,
Gulia Tofana is a poster child for the compulsive poisoning crew.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
And again, like similar to our earlier example.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
And here's our question. Is she We have confirmed kills
on her side, but is she a serial killer or
is she someone in a gruesome profession? She was helping
wives who wanted to kill their husbands, along with her
daughter who worked with her, and a couple of assistants,
and they were mass producing poison. It was a kind
(35:44):
of it was believed to be related to arsenic So
is she a businesswoman?
Speaker 2 (35:49):
She a killer? Is she both? She even had a
poison named after her.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Right, that's that's true?
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Yeah, what was it?
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Well, I mean it's the specific I guess version of
of arsenic right, the Aqua Tofana.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
So don't.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Don't take it if you read that in an ingredient
list or anything. Don't don't bother with that. Put those
cheese nips away.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Yeah, it's not a fancy bottled water aqua ta fauna.
That's what it sounds like to me.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
And we have time for one more. Let's see, let's
go with Liu pingree. Liu pingli was a Han prince.
Like some of our other early serial killers, he was
from wealth. He was born in the second century BC.
He is one of the earliest serial killers that we
(36:45):
have on record. So there are a couple of different
competing ones. Here is the third son of Liu Hu,
who is Prince Yao of Liang and the grandson of
the Emperor One and the nephew of the Emperor Jing,
so he is very very well connected. According to book
called Records of the Grand Historian, this guy was a monster.
(37:06):
He was arrogant and cruel, and his idea of a
fun time would be to round up some of his
friends or his followers and go on marauding expeditions with
slaves from the court or with young men who are
on the wrong side of the law, and they would
literally ride out around town and the countryside and they
(37:29):
would murder people for fun and steal their stuff just
because he thought it was a lark.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
Wow, It's like the definition of marauder is that a
correct term.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Yeah, gosh, this is not like the werewolves of Polygony, right.
We know exactly what he did. He killed and his
crew killed over one hundred people, and they became infamous.
These murders were known across the kingdom, and people were
afraid to go out at night. Eventually, things get to
(38:03):
a boiling point and someone, a son of someone he
had killed, accuses him and tells the Emperor, you know, look,
your son is a monster. He's running around killing people
for sport. And as soon as that person said it,
other people spoke out, and officials in the court said,
you have to kill your nephew. More than one hundred
(38:26):
people have died, how many more have to die? And
the Emperor said, I can't. I can't bring myself to
kill my nephew, no matter what kind of person he is.
But I will do the next best thing. He stripped
Leu Pingli of all of his royal titles, made him
just regular shmo, and banished him to County Shangyong. What
(38:50):
happened after that, we don't know, because again it's it's
very difficult for us to trace the lives of commonplace
people at this day.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
High you know. Yeah, when you got stripped of that title,
it kind of banished even what he did to the unknown.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
But this is pretty surprising stuff when you see just
from a few examples, you see how prevalent serial murdering is,
or at least the accusations thereof. That's where we have
to talk about the problems with historical accounts, right yep.
The same sources that would appear to be our primary
means of learning a story may often be the very
(39:28):
same sources that prevent us from learning the truth. Because
you think propaganda is bad now, oh body, right.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
When you're the one who survives the end of a
sword and the other person does not, you can write
whatever you want.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Right exactly.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
History is written by the winners, and often just seeing
something in print was enough to damn someone in the
public eye. There's a fantastic book called A Devil in
the Shape of a Woman that looks at this practice
in the Salem witch tribes. And what we find is
that more so in Europe, but also a little bit
(40:05):
in Salem, there are questions of there are questions of motive.
Did the accusers always believe someone was in league with
the devil? Or were they pushing the case because according
to law in some communities, the inquisitors or the accusers
got a piece of the person's estate when they were
(40:28):
found to be a witch.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
It's definitely possible, right right, And yeah, man, you gotta
think about literacy rates as well in general for certain
regions where things are happening historically, and also the people
who can read the stuff that is being written. There
a lot of times, the people who can make the
laws or enact justice right or something to that effect.
(40:52):
And when there's a written document that says it's an
accusatory document, it's going to stand out with the people
who who are looking to root out heresy, to root
out things that would go against the church and or
well the state, sometimes the nation, but usually the church.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
And in several of the cases above, Despite these salient
historical questions, we have found cooperating sources that appear to
confirm some basic and disturbing truths. And just with this
small collection of examples, we have illustrated that the concept
of serial murderers predates the term serial killer. The same
(41:37):
psychoses are present, if not prevalent, and we will never
know how many serial murderers existed we don't have a
particularly sharp understanding of how many exist today. However, we
can surmise that this practice and these people have been
with humanity since before the dawn of modern history, a
(41:58):
dark shadow falling behind our species from the day the
first Homo sapiens emerged.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
Yeah, and oh my god, and let's bring something else
up here really fast. We've been talking about serial murders
and serial killers and how many may exist right now. Well,
there's a person that we talked to through the Zodiac
Killer show named Peter Vronsky, and he brings up a
(42:26):
very fascinating idea here. He believes that when there's economic downturn,
especially on a wide scale in any region or globally
even or just in a town, the probability of creating
a future serial killer who is going through this, uh,
(42:46):
the economic downturn, all the realities that you face when
that's happening, He believes that you increase the probability of
creating serial killers. And in his opinion, he wrote a
book called Sons of Kin, and in it he describes
how because of the financial crisis from two thousand and
seven two thousand and eight, we are actually creating a
(43:08):
new generation of serial killers, or we have generated essentially
a new season of serial killers that will emerge ten
twenty years from now. And he believes that that economic
downturn at least in some way helped to create those
serial killers. Fascinating stuff, fast.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Scaring, fascinating. I'd love to I'd love to check out
this book. I'd love to learn more about his work.
And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't
wait to hear your thoughts. We try to be easy
to find online. Find this in the handle conspiracy Stuff,
where we exist on Facebook x and YouTube, on Instagram
and TikTok where Conspiracy Stuff show.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
Call our number. It's one eight three three std WYTK,
leave a voicemail.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
And if you have more to say, we can't wait
to hear from you at our good old fashioned email
address where we are conspiracy at iheartbrate dot com.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tonight's classic episode, Fellow conspiracy Realist. We talk
a lot about true crime. We examine a lot of
what makes people called serial killers, and while the nomenclature right,
While the term may be astonishingly recent, it turns out,
you guys, that the human species may have already been
(00:24):
well familiar with this behavior.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Is this the one where we get into assassins? Or
it inspired our assassins episodes?
Speaker 1 (00:31):
It may well be our history of Oh what are
we supposed to call it?
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Now?
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Targeted operations, that's the euphem is. It's like when you
say regime if you don't like a government, and you
say government if you like them, it's an assassin. I
sure don't like them, but.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
I get it. It's like a targeted drone strike or
a targeted nuclear attack. I know what you're saying.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Are we going to start calling serial killers cereal unalivers?
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Is that next we should? If we want people to
see this on YouTube?
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Oh jeez, yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Conspiracies within conspiracies, just like a bunch of murderous Matroshka dolls.
This is our classic episode from twenty nineteen called The
Eternal Shadow. Serial Killers throughout Ancient History.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Our compatriot nol Is on Adventures they call me Ben.
We are joined as always with our super producer Paul.
Mission control decands, most importantly, you are you. You are here,
and that makes this stuff they don't want you to
know a pretty gory, grim episode for us today.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Man, Yeah, let's go ahead and put this warning up
here right now. We're going to be discussing some things
that you may not want to hear, especially if you
dislike murder, sometimes, dismemberment, sometimes, torture, all kinds of things
that make me squeamish. So if you feel that way,
(02:22):
go ahead and turn back now.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
If you're in the middle of eating something and you
have a somewhat delicate stomach, perhaps it is time to
put this on pause and finish your case idea or
your thuh whatever.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Even if you find yourself, I don't know, in the
backyard with a glass of wine, building a fountain, just
you know, just know that this one's a little messed up.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Serial killers, Matt, Yeah, serial killers. We've explored their lives,
their methods, and their attempts to evade justice, and you know,
most disturbingly, the tragedies they leave behind in their wake.
This on multiple episodes, sometimes focusing on general tendencies, sometimes
focusing on specific individuals. In an earlier episode, we trace
(03:11):
the evolution of the term serial killer from its initial
roots and it's not a very old term, spoiler alert
to the modern day, along with the changing and at
times controversial definitions involved. Usually when we talk about serial
murderers on this show, we are talking about let's see,
(03:35):
we've done a three part series on serial killers who
are never apprehended. Correct, we've done We've done some looks
at cults that incorporated serial killing, some human sacrifice and
so on.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Yeah, a couple of individual ones like the original Nightstalker
or what is it, the Golden State Killer?
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Ah, yes, yeah, that's a bit of good news, right,
Golden State Killer was finally apprehended. Was that twenty eighteen?
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Yes? Last? Or well yes, and of last year.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
And when we look into these cases, we're typically exploring
things in the modern day or in the recent past,
because for most of us, especially here in the West,
when we think of serial killers, we generally tend to
think of things that happened in the twentieth century, maybe
(04:35):
a little bit in the nineteenth century, but primarily the
nineteen hundreds. It goes back to about that. And now
we're going to explore something different. Today. We are looking
into the past to search for the first recorded serial killers,
if we could find those, the ancient murderers, the murderers
(04:58):
of old, the ones who exis before the term serial
killer was ever invented. And to do that we first
have to we first have to explain what we mean
when we say serial killer.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Right, that's right. Here are the facts. Oh hey, sounds
so hokey when I say it. I'm sorry everybody, but
here are the facts. So a serial killer, at the
most basic level is it can be described or is
categorized by the manner in which they kill someone and
along with the amount they kill someone, like the frequency
(05:34):
in which they do this act. And according to the FBI,
we've used them as our source before to discuss what
a serial killer is. According to the FBI, serial killer
is someone who commits at least three murders over the
span of a month, and then there's always some some
form of cooling down period, generally in emotional cooling down
period in between those murders and those deaths. So this
(05:58):
really sets them apart from say a spree killer, someone
who kills a large amount of people over a short
time span, or a soldier in battle who takes lives
because it's part of their mission and job to do so,
and in particular it's that type of killer. So, okay,
(06:23):
let's put it this way. A spree killer has the
potential of killing more people generally in the span of
you know, a day or a week or something like that.
Then perhaps a serial killer who kills even over the
course of a year or at least, there's a potential there.
So it's not just sheer numbers, it's how they.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Kill, right, And serial killers will often be differentiated from
other individuals who murder multiple people.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
In that they.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Tend to have they tend to have patterns of some sort,
whether it is the perceived commonality of their victims, by
which we mean something that the killer themselves sees in
these victims. That makes them all qualify as prey or
whether it's the method of homicide that they employ. So
(07:21):
you can see how there are some important distinctions here.
How many of these individuals are alive or uncaught today.
Every time we look at this we run into an
unsurprising but unpleasant lack of evidence. The current estimates on
serial killer numbers you see are woefully vague, and the
(07:45):
people who have attempted to attempted to guestimate the number
of unapprehended serial killers or murderers at large I always
walk away with a wide range of numbers. We are
going to give you a couple just to set up
some bookends here. Thomas Hargrove Sky, who founded the Murder
(08:06):
Accountability Project, And according to Hargrove and his research, there
are as many as two thousand serial killers at large
as of twenty eighteen in the US or at least
in the anglosphere.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Wow. That's a high number. Wow. And how did he
get to that number? That's one of the big questions here.
And really he started by asking contacts that he had
with the Federal Bureau of Investigation asked them to calculate
how many unsolved murders are linked to at least one
other murder through DNA on the FBI's database. So there
(08:45):
you go. Already, because they determined that about fourteen hundred murders,
or roughly two percent of those, like, of all the
murders within that database met the classification of being connected
to at least one other. That's already pretty disturbing. But
you know, if you look, if you look at the
(09:05):
fact that not all murder cases actually involve any kind
of evidence of the DNA sort at least, and not
all cases are even reported to the FBI, so that
two percent is a pretty low estimate. So then Hargrove
went through and he said, okay, well, let's add up.
Let's round it up to two thousand, just as a
(09:27):
measure of what he believes could be closer. And that's
because he continued looking.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Right, he said, there are more than two hundred and
twenty thousand unsolved murders just since nineteen eighty. So when
we put that in perspective, he asked, how shocking is
it that there are at least two thousand unrecognized series
of homicides. There's an important note here, So earlier, Matt,
(09:53):
you had broken down the FBI definition of serial killer
for US, and that's three or more murder with a
cooling off period. The thing about Hargrove's study is that
he only required a person to have killed two other people.
So what happens when we stick to the definition of
three murders per killer. That's when we run into Kenna Quinnette,
(10:16):
a criminologist at Indiana University, Perdue University, Indianapolis, and she
has a much more conservative estimate. So her estimate is
based on links between cases that were made by journalists
or law enforcement, and there's a different metric in her study,
the killer had to have murdered at least three victims
(10:37):
conforming to that FBI serial killer definition. By her definition,
there are about one hundred and fifteen serial killers dating
back to the nineteen seventies in the US whose crimes
have never been solved. In the same time period as
her estimate for unsolved serial murders, there were roughly six
hundred and twenty five solved serial murder cases. And we
(11:02):
don't again, we don't mean that every single one of
these people fits that sort of film and fiction definition.
They're not all hannibal lecters. In fact, most serial killers
do not have a very high IQ. But that's a
lot of death, and one hundred and fifteen is still
(11:22):
it might still be missing some pieces, because this doesn't
include cases where no one ever made a link between murders. If,
for instance, a serial killer murdered a person in Arkansas
and then drifted to an adjacent state to kill two
more people, the crimes might never have been flagged by
anyone as related, so they wouldn't appear in this count.
(11:42):
And that's one of the biggest reasons experts believe that
there could be any serial killers uncought and are missed.
People don't link you know, it's not like Charlie Day
with a conspiracy wall. People are not linking up these
various seemingly unrelated events. It's tough to do, so, you know,
it's a lot of research and it's a lot of time.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
I mean, yeah, where is Pepe? For real?
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Though there is no Pepe lost? Who had to inject some.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Left just a tiny bit good god, Well, because it's
a terrifying thought, just the unknown serial killer that just
could be lurking everywhere. And even if it's only one
hundred and fifteen.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
That's still over one hundred. Yeah, over one hundred people.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
They're only fifty states. That's true.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
That's true. And I remember, I remember we had talked
about this, maybe off air one day met. But we
start talking about the distribution of serial killers at least
in the states. Are there more in Alaska, or they're
more in Florida, and so on, And it's an interesting
conversation because it quickly goes to speculation. We we don't
(12:56):
really know. We know that the inner State in Texas
is very, very dangerous, and the FBI has been keeping
an eye on it. But if we count on these estimates,
we can reasonably assume that there's somewhere between one hundred
and fifty to two thousand killers who never saw justice
for their crimes. Many of them may have been incarcerated
(13:16):
for other unrelated crimes, grand theft, auto drug possessions, something
like that, and many may have died right but as
grizzly as it is to point out, some remain at
large and alive today. And it's tricky and not a
little disheartening to realize how little we actually know about
these numbers and these murders a long time ago. Actually,
(13:39):
this is one of those conversations that you and I
have been having for years, right with slight pauses in there.
We've talked about it before. How much easier it seems
to get away with murder and other crimes in the
days before mass surveillance and forensic science. Yes, no one
knew what fingerprints were, No one knew how to attract DNA,
(14:00):
or even.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Even if you got it, it was a lot harder
to match somebody up with the database.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
Right, yeah, there's no database. That's a good point. So
this leads us to ask a disturbing question. Our serial
killers a relatively recent phenomenon in the human story. How
long have they been with us? Have serial murderers always
been in our midst? The answer, sadly, is an emphatic yes.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Yeah, and it's about to get crazy after this quick
word from our sponsor.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Upon closer inspection, it appears that the act of serial
murder has been with our species for as long as
written history, and by all indications, predates written history. These
killers ran the socio economic gamut. Among their number, we
find people at the very top and the very bottom
of social hierarchies. We find outcast royalty, criminals and members
(15:09):
of what functioned as the middle class. There are no
common denominators for these murderers other than their actions. And
here are some of the strangest examples of ancient serial
killers we came across. By no means are these all
of them.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Let's get started with someone named zoo Shinatier and this
is from originates from fifth century Yemen, so quite a
time ago. This man was in the Himarite Kingdom that's
a modern day Yemen. And this guy was known as
or at least he's come to be known as one
(15:45):
of the first serial killers, the first recorded at least.
He was reportedly a very wealthy man. He lived in
a place called Aiden. And this guy, it's really disturbed.
Remember that thing, that whole warning we gave you at
the top, just remember it still stands. He would reportedly
(16:07):
lure young men, young boys into his home with the
promise of things that they needed at the time in
fifth century Yemen or fifth century what is now Yemen, food, money,
things again, things that they required, and he would strip
them naked. He would assault them, generally it included rape
(16:30):
at least from the things that we found. He would
then kill them generally by throwing them naked out of
an upper story window of his home, and he did
this repeatedly, and then, thankfully, one of the young men
that he lured into his home was able to put
a stop to him and stabbed him to death. There's
(16:50):
a man at least that was named in one book
that recorded it as zarash as the young man who
killed him, thankfully, But he's only the start, and he's
really messed up, and it only gets.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
Worse, right, right, He is not the first. He is
just one of the earliest that.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
We know of. Yeah, well again because it's fifth century,
so it was written down a little more easily than
some of the even earlier ones.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
That we'll find very important point with shu Shinatir. He
was definitely doing this. We're going to run into some
strange concerns we always need to have about historical documents.
But this guy definitely was a child murderer and a
somewhat prolific one until, of course, as you said, Matt,
(17:41):
one of his victims managed to take his life. Let's
move on to someone who is commonly called the world's
first recorded serial killer or the world's first female serial killer.
This is Lucusta the Poisoner. So she gets this title
all the time. You'll hear it pretty often. I did
(18:03):
an episode about her for another show, Ridiculous History, where
I also called her the one of the first recorded
serial killers. But there's a question here because she wasn't
so much a serial killer as a paid assassin. So
members of the Roman elite were hiring her to poison
(18:24):
the coworkers they didn't like, or to get rid of
their relatives if they wanted an inheritance, you know, and
great Uncle Flavius has just taken too long to kick
the bucket. She grew up in what we call France today,
and she had an encyclopedia knowledge of herbal medicine and
plant lore. The local elite saw her knowledge as a
(18:49):
way to get rid of their enemies without a fuss,
and she saw a market opportunity. So she wasn't necessarily
motivated by some sort of again perceived commonality of the victims, right,
She wasn't looking for young people or brunettes or so on.
(19:10):
She was doing this as a job, and she became
pretty famous. She was arrested a few times, but the
people in power who used her services always kept her
out of jail. She got rescued by her wealthy patrons
numerous times, and eventually she was called to the city
of Rome to assist the Empress Agrippina in getting rid
(19:33):
of her husband, and she served a Grappina. She went
on to serve the infamous Emperor Nero, who just loved her,
and a lot of stuff about Nero is exaggerated, but
he was not a nice character. When he died, she
found herself robbed of all the protection she had enjoyed
(19:54):
for decades. She had even set up a poison school.
At this point, she was immediately sentenced to death for
her role in the murders of dozens and dozens of
upper crust members of Roman society. And again, like the
case with Zushinatier, we know that she was real and
(20:14):
we know she actually did this.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Yeah, exactly as soon as I think Galba was the
person who took over after Nero fell. But yeah, he
definitely said, hey, guess what you get to die now.
It really messed up, but at least somebody put an
end to the assassinations. Now, let's move on to one
of the first forms of serial killers that we ever
(20:38):
covered on this show. Back in a video we made
about where wolves in the history of lycanthropy fascinating stuff.
So if we go to the Middle Ages in Europe,
there were a lot of killers, deranged people who would
go around doing just terrible things, everything from murder to cannibalism,
(20:59):
just just the worst of the worst. There were human
men that would go out and do this that were
considered to be werewolves, or at least thought to be werewolves.
And there are some pretty intense claims made about these men,
even claims by the men themselves who believed, perhaps truly
believed that they would transform in some way to a
(21:22):
wolf or at least the spirit of a wolf.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
In the sixteenth century, it was a French peasant named
Pierre Bourgeau who was apparently under the control the thrall
of several figures clad in black, and this is per
his testimony, including one man named Michael ver Dunn. So,
(21:46):
according to Brugeau's story, Verdunn gave him an ointment that
would transform him from a man into a wolf. And
we talk about this a little bit in the past
in various episodes. The way that were wolves are generally
thought to transform nowadays is you get bit by a
were wolf, but you survive. Yes, that's the way in right,
(22:09):
and then you follow the path of the wolf. However,
back then, you could become a wolf through any number
of weird satanic rituals, drinking water from a water from
a wolf's print in the light of the full boon,
wearing a belt made out of a wolf pelt, or
just rubbing yourself down with some ointment, yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Or you know, taking a potion. As you said before,
there are a lot of ways that people could be
you know, from a rational, very rational standpoint, a lot
of ways that people could be convinced that they can
become a werewolf or have become a werewolf.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
And there's some pretty fascinating arguments that are by no
means water proof, but there are some pretty fascinating arguments
that some of these ointments were in fact hallucinogens, and
so these people really did, at least from their perspective, transform,
even if not physically. There was a third guy who
was named in this fiasco with weird, really weird, first
(23:09):
named Philibert. Yeah, doesn't sound like a killer, Philibert Montaute.
So Brigot, Montaut and Verdun became known as the werewolves
of Polygony and they were collectively responsible for the murders
of several children. They confessed to these murders.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
They did, But how why did they confess? Ben Oh?
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Because they were getting tortured left and right, day and
day out like nobody's business.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
And full on tortured, bad torture beyond the things that
you see in any mob movie you've ever seen. It's
really truly medieval.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Stuff, such the point that they could have easily died
during the torture. So they catch Dune and allegedly they
catch them covered in blood, and they begin torturing him.
Confess to your crimes. What infernal powers have allowed you
to transform into an otherworldly agent of Satan? And who
(24:14):
was with you? Tell us essentially what your covenant is? Yeah,
and identify the members therein So, under torture, he confesses
to whatever they say he did, and then he says, also,
these two guys, Brigo and Monteaux are in on this
with me. And then they get apprehended. Burgo gets tortured
(24:40):
and he says, these two guys forced me to renounce
God and turn into a werewolf. I had to do
it to survive. And you know, they're breaking more of
his limbs, and they're saying, well, did you kill hundreds
of children? He's saying something like yes, please, God stop,
don't kill me.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
And just quickly, as sidebar, let's talk about the torture
that was used against these guys, because it's something that
I've seen pictures of before and I looked at it again,
and you may have heard of it, called something that's
a torture wheel of sorts. And in a lot of
these pictures, these woodcuts that still remain today, copies of them,
(25:21):
you can see what's being employed. And it is so brutal.
I'm just I'm gonna describe it trigger warning. Here Where
you were laid down where and there are I guess,
wedges put beneath the places in where your joints are
and your arm your major arm and leg bones are broken.
(25:44):
And then you're where those bones are broken. You are
wrapped around this wheel like a wooden looks like a
large wooden wagon wheel, and then you are hung from
on this wheel on a stake of some sort and
basically turned upside down while you're still alive. It's hard
(26:07):
to imagine you can find pictures of it. The thing is,
if you if you can imagine, which is very difficult
to do going through something like that and the pain
and terror involved. Then it really does make you realize
that the confessions made when undergoing that are to be
taken with a grain of salt.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Absolutely, and we probably will never know for sure to
what degree these three men were guilty. However, they were
not the only quote unquote werewolves of the time. There
was a serial killer. It was also a cannibal named
Peter Stump sometimes spelled Stump or Stube, and he was
(26:52):
called the werewolf of Bedburg, who was a one armed
farmer lived in fifteenth century Germany. Over the course of
twenty twenty five years, he's thought to have murdered fourteen children,
two pregnant women, and he might not have ever been caught,
but like many serial killers, he seemed to have a
(27:15):
degrading mental state. Yeah, which is how you know things
like Dennis Radar, right, the BTK killer would have gotten
away had his mental state not continued to decay such
that he felt like he had to be recognized for
his terrible, terrible crimes. This guy Stump or Stump or Stube.
(27:37):
When he was caught he said, look, yeah, I drank
that cow's blood.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
You know what else?
Speaker 1 (27:47):
I also have eaten fetuses. And I had a son.
I ate his brain. I don't care. I'm a monster.
And the thing was in his non kill her life.
He was a wealthy farmer and he was a widower.
He had two children, the son of an unknown age
(28:10):
and a daughter called Beale or Sybil, who was, as
far as you know, at least older than fifteen. He
was subjected to torture who stretched on her rack, and
that's when he claimed he had been practicing black magic
since he was twelve years old. He said the devil
(28:31):
had allowed him to change into a wolf, and for
twenty five years, he said he had been an insatiable
bloodsucker animals, men, women, children. He confessed when he was
when he was presented with the possibility of more torture,
(28:52):
and he was also accused of having an incestuous relationship
with his daughter. She was sentenced to die with him,
and he said that he had had intercourse with a succubus,
again confessing under torture. This did not save him. These
confessions instead led to his execution on October thirty one,
(29:13):
fifteen eighty nine. He his mistress and his daughter were murdered.
He was murdered in a particularly gruesome way. He was
put on the wheel that you mentioned earlier, Matt, and
they tore flesh from his body in ten places with
red hot pinchers, then his arms and legs, then his
limbs were broken with an axe head to prevent him
(29:34):
from returning from the grave, and he was beheaded. They
burned his body. His daughter and his mistress were aflayed
and strangled and then also burned along with him, and
the authorities placed his severed head on top of a
pole with the torture wheel and a figure of a
(29:55):
wolf audit, so they were convinced that he did something.
While none of these men were, of course proven to
be capable of physically changing shape, contemporary accounts paint a
picture of one or two possibilities. One they could have
been mentally ill and homicidal. Two, they could have been
mentally ill and confessing to non existent or exaggerated crimes
(30:20):
see and this is a distinct possibility. They could have
been completely innocent and falsely confessing to avoid further torture.
But there's an entire genre in Europe around this time
of people being accused of lycanthropy. And this is just
the beginning of the story. We'll come back with more
(30:40):
tales of ancient serial killers after a word from our sponsor.
We've been in Europe for some time. Let's travel to
South America to the story of Rios e Lis Buguer.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Yes, this is a woman who was also known as
law Quintralla. And this had to do with her the
color of her hair. She had very striking red hair
and she lived in Chile. She was an aristocrat and landowner.
She allegedly carried out about forty murders, around forty murders
while she while she was basically a tyrant of sorts
(31:23):
over a lot of just a lot of people who
were working on her estate rough you know, they're indigenous
workers who then she was in charge of, and she
was just brutal to them. Apparently now she was a
member of you know, what would be considered a privileged
set of people under Santiago in colonial Santiago, and she
(31:46):
was said to just have delighted it was her she
very much enjoyed doing depraved things, things that were sacrilegious
in nature, I guess to the church, things that were
sexual and you know, having to do with consumption, like
over indulging, copious consumption exactly. It's hedonism, that's exactly what
(32:10):
it is. And there's another person, Elizabeth Bathory from history
that we've kind of heard about a couple of times
that this person, Laquintralla, has similarities with. She had a
violent temper. Again, she's a noble woman. She's got a
fondness for torture, and specifically torturing people who are underneath her,
(32:33):
her subordinates. She seemed to delight in it, like we said. Now, besides,
you know, her indentured servants and her slaves, she also
murdered lovers, which is something we may see here in
the future. Here she even murdered a priest and even
committed patricide and killed her father. Now, you know, in
(32:55):
this case, a lot of the people we've spoken about
haven't been wealth be wealthy, but this is one of
the first cases we see that the wealth is actually
being used to avoid justice. It's kind of like the
person from Rome we were speaking about, Friends in high Places, yeah, Lacusta, Yeah,
where she was able to use her influence to avoid
justice for quite a while, several years in fact, and
(33:19):
she even would donate to the church, to the Catholic
Church in order to kind of grease the hand in
a way to be a little a little bit safer,
even though it's kind of a known thing.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Maybe, yeah, she epsteined it essent. Yeah, you know, because
she was paying off judges, lawyers, she had many relatives
in political positions. She did go on trial, but despite
being pegged for forty separate murders, the trial was stalled
as a result of her influence. She was released and
(33:52):
then this is around the sixteen hundreds, from sixteen thirty
seven on, she was released and she lived out the
remainder of her life. She eventually passed away in sixteen
sixty five of old age, not in jail, and thirty
(34:14):
years later the judiciary system caught up and they said,
let's investigate these things. But she was dead, so whatever
she did, whatever kind of justice she would face, it
would not be earthly justice. And years after her death
(34:36):
her home was abandoned because people thought that her ghosts
still walked the premises. And let's stick with let's stick
with female serial killers here. There's another one, Gulia Tofana.
As we know, there's a stereotype that tells us female
serial killers generally seemed to prefer poison as their primary
(35:00):
a murder instrument. This is a stereotype. Stereotypes are everywhere.
There may be a tendency, but that's certainly not everybody. However,
Gulia Tofana is a poster child for the compulsive poisoning crew.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
And again, like similar to our earlier example.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
And here's our question. Is she We have confirmed kills
on her side, but is she a serial killer or
is she someone in a gruesome profession? She was helping
wives who wanted to kill their husbands, along with her
daughter who worked with her, and a couple of assistants,
and they were mass producing poison. It was a kind
(35:44):
of it was believed to be related to arsenic So
is she a businesswoman?
Speaker 2 (35:49):
She a killer? Is she both? She even had a
poison named after her.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Right, that's that's true?
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Yeah, what was it?
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Well, I mean it's the specific I guess version of
of arsenic right, the Aqua Tofana.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
So don't.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Don't take it if you read that in an ingredient
list or anything. Don't don't bother with that. Put those
cheese nips away.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Yeah, it's not a fancy bottled water aqua ta fauna.
That's what it sounds like to me.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
And we have time for one more. Let's see, let's
go with Liu pingree. Liu pingli was a Han prince.
Like some of our other early serial killers, he was
from wealth. He was born in the second century BC.
He is one of the earliest serial killers that we
(36:45):
have on record. So there are a couple of different
competing ones. Here is the third son of Liu Hu,
who is Prince Yao of Liang and the grandson of
the Emperor One and the nephew of the Emperor Jing,
so he is very very well connected. According to book
called Records of the Grand Historian, this guy was a monster.
(37:06):
He was arrogant and cruel, and his idea of a
fun time would be to round up some of his
friends or his followers and go on marauding expeditions with
slaves from the court or with young men who are
on the wrong side of the law, and they would
literally ride out around town and the countryside and they
(37:29):
would murder people for fun and steal their stuff just
because he thought it was a lark.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
Wow, It's like the definition of marauder is that a
correct term.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Yeah, gosh, this is not like the werewolves of Polygony, right.
We know exactly what he did. He killed and his
crew killed over one hundred people, and they became infamous.
These murders were known across the kingdom, and people were
afraid to go out at night. Eventually, things get to
(38:03):
a boiling point and someone, a son of someone he
had killed, accuses him and tells the Emperor, you know, look,
your son is a monster. He's running around killing people
for sport. And as soon as that person said it,
other people spoke out, and officials in the court said,
you have to kill your nephew. More than one hundred
(38:26):
people have died, how many more have to die? And
the Emperor said, I can't. I can't bring myself to
kill my nephew, no matter what kind of person he is.
But I will do the next best thing. He stripped
Leu Pingli of all of his royal titles, made him
just regular shmo, and banished him to County Shangyong. What
(38:50):
happened after that, we don't know, because again it's it's
very difficult for us to trace the lives of commonplace
people at this day.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
High you know. Yeah, when you got stripped of that title,
it kind of banished even what he did to the unknown.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
But this is pretty surprising stuff when you see just
from a few examples, you see how prevalent serial murdering is,
or at least the accusations thereof. That's where we have
to talk about the problems with historical accounts, right yep.
The same sources that would appear to be our primary
means of learning a story may often be the very
(39:28):
same sources that prevent us from learning the truth. Because
you think propaganda is bad now, oh body, right.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
When you're the one who survives the end of a
sword and the other person does not, you can write
whatever you want.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Right exactly.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
History is written by the winners, and often just seeing
something in print was enough to damn someone in the
public eye. There's a fantastic book called A Devil in
the Shape of a Woman that looks at this practice
in the Salem witch tribes. And what we find is
that more so in Europe, but also a little bit
(40:05):
in Salem, there are questions of there are questions of motive.
Did the accusers always believe someone was in league with
the devil? Or were they pushing the case because according
to law in some communities, the inquisitors or the accusers
got a piece of the person's estate when they were
(40:28):
found to be a witch.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
It's definitely possible, right right, And yeah, man, you gotta
think about literacy rates as well in general for certain
regions where things are happening historically, and also the people
who can read the stuff that is being written. There
a lot of times, the people who can make the
laws or enact justice right or something to that effect.
(40:52):
And when there's a written document that says it's an
accusatory document, it's going to stand out with the people
who who are looking to root out heresy, to root
out things that would go against the church and or
well the state, sometimes the nation, but usually the church.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
And in several of the cases above, Despite these salient
historical questions, we have found cooperating sources that appear to
confirm some basic and disturbing truths. And just with this
small collection of examples, we have illustrated that the concept
of serial murderers predates the term serial killer. The same
(41:37):
psychoses are present, if not prevalent, and we will never
know how many serial murderers existed we don't have a
particularly sharp understanding of how many exist today. However, we
can surmise that this practice and these people have been
with humanity since before the dawn of modern history, a
(41:58):
dark shadow falling behind our species from the day the
first Homo sapiens emerged.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
Yeah, and oh my god, and let's bring something else
up here really fast. We've been talking about serial murders
and serial killers and how many may exist right now. Well,
there's a person that we talked to through the Zodiac
Killer show named Peter Vronsky, and he brings up a
(42:26):
very fascinating idea here. He believes that when there's economic downturn,
especially on a wide scale in any region or globally
even or just in a town, the probability of creating
a future serial killer who is going through this, uh,
(42:46):
the economic downturn, all the realities that you face when
that's happening, He believes that you increase the probability of
creating serial killers. And in his opinion, he wrote a
book called Sons of Kin, and in it he describes
how because of the financial crisis from two thousand and
seven two thousand and eight, we are actually creating a
(43:08):
new generation of serial killers, or we have generated essentially
a new season of serial killers that will emerge ten
twenty years from now. And he believes that that economic
downturn at least in some way helped to create those
serial killers. Fascinating stuff, fast.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Scaring, fascinating. I'd love to I'd love to check out
this book. I'd love to learn more about his work.
And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't
wait to hear your thoughts. We try to be easy
to find online. Find this in the handle conspiracy Stuff,
where we exist on Facebook x and YouTube, on Instagram
and TikTok where Conspiracy Stuff show.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
Call our number. It's one eight three three std WYTK,
leave a voicemail.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
And if you have more to say, we can't wait
to hear from you at our good old fashioned email
address where we are conspiracy at iheartbrate dot com.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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