The Eternal Shadow: Serial Killers Throughout Ancient History

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

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Welcome back

(00:24):
to the show. My name is Matt Our compatriot knoll
Is on Adventures they called me Ben. We are joined
as always with our super producer Paul Mission controlled decands.
Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that
makes this stuff they don't want you to know a
pretty the gory, grim episode for us today. Man, Yeah,

(00:45):
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, go ahead and turn

(01:05):
back now. If you're if you're in the middle of
eating something and you have a somewhat delicate stomach, perhaps
it's time to put this on pause and finish your case,
idea or your thuh whatever. Even if you find yourself,
I don't know, in the backyard with a glass of
wine building a fountain. Uh, just you know, just know

(01:27):
that this one's a little messed up. 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 way. We've done this
on multiple episodes, sometimes focusing on general tendencies, sometimes focusing

(01:49):
on specific individuals. In an earlier episode, we trace the
evolution of the term serial killer from its initial roots
and it's not it's not a old term spoiler alert
to the modern day, along with the changing and at
times controversial definitions involved. Usually when we talk about serial

(02:13):
murderers on this show, we are talking about what. Let's see,
we've done a three part series on serial killers who
are never apprehended. We've done we've done some looks at
cults that incorporated serial killing, some human sacrifice and so
one a couple of individual ones like the original night

(02:34):
Stalker or what is it, the Golden State Killer. Yes, yeah,
that's a bit of good news, right, Golden State Killer
was finally apprehended, was that, yes, lash or well yes,
end of last year. And when we look into these cases,

(02:56):
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 a little bit in the nineteenth century,

(03:19):
but primarily 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, uh, the ancient murderers, the

(03:40):
murderers of old, the ones who existed 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. Right, that's right. Here
are the facts. Oh hey, it sounds so hokey when
I say it. I'm sorry, everybody, but here are the facts.

(04:02):
So a serial killer, at the most basic level, uh
is it can be described or is categorized by the
manner in which they kill someone. Uh and along with
the the amount they kill someone, like the frequency in
which they do this act. And according to the FBI,
we've used them as our source before to discuss what

(04:22):
a serial killer is. Um. 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 an emotional cooling
down period in between those murders and those deaths. So
this really sets them apart from say a UH spree killer,

(04:46):
someone who kills a large amount of people over a
short time span, or a soldier in battle who um
takes lives because it's part of their mission and job
to do so. UM and impetu killer, it's that that
type of killer. So okay, let's put it this way.

(05:06):
A spree killer has the potential of killing more people
generally UH 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 um or at least there's a potential there. So
it's not just sheer numbers, it's how they kill, right,

(05:26):
And serial killers will often be differentiated from other uh
other individuals who murder multiple people in that they tend
to have they tend to have patterns of some sort,
whether it is the um perceived commonality of their victims,

(05:49):
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 a side that they employ.
So you can see how there are some important distinctions here.
How many of these individuals are alive or uncaught today.

(06:15):
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
people who have attempted to, you know, attempted to gut
estimate the number of unapprehended serial killers or murderers at

(06:36):
large always walk away with a wide range of numbers.
We're going to give you a couple just to set
up some bookends here. Thomas Hargrove Sky, who founded the
Murder Accountability Project, And according to Hargrove and his research,
there are as many as two thousand serial killers at

(06:57):
large as of twenty eighteen in the US or at
least in the Anglo sphere. Wow. That's a high number.
Uh wow uh. 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

(07:19):
murders are linked to at least one other murder through
DNA on the FBI's database. So there you go already,
because they determined that about four murders, or roughly two
percent of those, like, of all the murders within that
database met the classification of being connected to at least

(07:40):
one other um that's already pretty disturbing. But you know,
if you look, if you look at the fact that
not all murder cases actually involve any kind of evidence
of the d NA sort at least and not all
cases are even reported to the FBI, so that two
percent is a pretty low stamate. So then Hargrove went

(08:01):
through and he said, okay, well, let's uh, let's add up.
Let's round it up to two thousand, just as a
a measure of what he believes could be closer. And
that's because he continued looking. Right, he said, there are
more than two hundred and twenty thousand unsolved murders just
since nine. So when we put that in perspective, he asked,

(08:25):
how shocking is it that there are at least two
thousand unrecognized series of homicides. There's an important note here.
So earlier, Matt, you had you had broken down the
FBI definition of serial killer for US, and that's three
or more murders right with a cooling off period. The
thing about heart Grove study is that he only required

(08:48):
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 Quinnett, a
criminologist Indiana University, Purdue University, Indianapolis, and she has a
much more conservative estimate. So her estimate is based on

(09:08):
links between cases that were made by journalists or law enforcement,
and there's a different metric in in her study, the
killer had to have murdered at least three victims conforming
to that FBI serial killer definition. By her definition, they
are about one hundred and fifteen serial killers dating back

(09:29):
to the nineteen seventies in the US whose crimes have
never been solved. In the same time period as her
estimate frontsolved serial murders, there were roughly six hundred and
twenty solved serial murder cases. And we don't again, we
don't mean that every single one of these people fits
that sort of um film and fiction definition. They're not

(09:53):
all hannibal lecters. In fact, most serial killers do not
have a very high i Q. But a lot of
death and a hundred and fifteen. It's still 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

(10:16):
and then drifted to an adjacent state to kill two
more people, the crimes might never been flagged by anyone
as related, so they wouldn't appear in this count. And
that's one of the biggest reasons experts believe that there
could be any serial killers on Cotton are missed. People
don't don't link you know, it's not like Charlie Day

(10:36):
with a conspiracy wall. People are not linking up these
very seemingly unrelated events and it's tough to do so,
you know, it's a lot of research and it's a
lot of time. I mean, yeah, where is Pepe for real?
Though there is no Peppe who had to inject some
left could god well, because it's a terrifying thought, just

(11:00):
the the unknown serial killer that just could be lurking everywhere,
and even if it's only a hundred and fifteen. That's
still over a hundred over one people. They're only fifty states.
That's true, that's true. And I remember, I remember we
had talked about this, maybe off air one day met.

(11:21):
But we start talking about the distribution of 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 really know. We know that the inner State
in Texas is very, very dangerous, and the FBI has

(11:44):
been keeping an eye on it. But if we count
on these estimates, we can reasonably assume that there's somewhere
between a hundred and fifty two thousand killers who never
saw justice for their crimes. Many of them may have
been incarcerated for other unreal ALTD crimes, grand theft, auto
drug possession, something like that, and many may have died

(12:06):
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, 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

(12:29):
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 d n A, or even even if you
got it, it was a lot harder to match somebody
up with a database. Right, yeah, there's no database. That's

(12:51):
a good point. So this leads us to ask a
disturbing question. Are serial killers a relatively recent phenomen and
on 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, yeah, And it's

(13:14):
about to get crazy after this quick word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy. 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,

(13:37):
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 of what functioned as the middle class. There
are no common denominators for these murderers other than their actions.

(13:59):
And here are some of the strangest examples of ancient
serial killers we came across. By no means are these
all of them. Let's get started with someone named Zoo
Senna Teer and this is from originates from fifth fifth
century Yemen, so quite a time ago. Uh. This man

(14:19):
was in the humor rights kingdom that's a modern day Yemen,
and it was this guy was known as or at
least he's come to be known as one 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, uh, it's really disturbing. Remember

(14:42):
that that thing, that that whole warning we gave you
at the top, just remember it still stands. He would
reportedly 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,

(15:03):
things again, things that they required, and he would strip
them naked, he would assault them. Um generally included rape,
at least from the 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

(15:27):
young men that he lured into his home was able
to put a stop to him and stabbed him to death.
There's a man, uh man. At least it was named
in one book that recorded it as zaras as the
young man who killed him, thankfully. But he's only the start,
and he's really messed up, and it only gets worse, right, right,

(15:49):
He is not the first. He is just one of
the earliest that we know of. Yeah, but again because
it it's fifth century, so it was written down a
little more easily than some of the even earlier ones.
That will find very important point with shou Shenatier. He
was definitely doing this. We're we're gonna run into some

(16:11):
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,
one of his victims managed to take his life. Let's
let's move on to someone who is commonly called the
world's first recorded serial killer or the world's first female

(16:36):
serial killer. This is Loucusta, the Poisoner. So she gets
this title all the time. You'll hear it pretty often.
I did. I did 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

(16:56):
because she wasn't so much a serial killer as a
paid assassin. So members of the Roman elite were hiring
her to poison the co workers they didn't like, or
to get rid of their relatives if they wanted an inheritance,
you know. And uh, great Uncle Flavius has just taken

(17:17):
too long to kick the bucket. She grew up in
what we call France today, and she had encyclopedia knowledge
of herbal medicine and plant lore. The local elite saw
her knowledge as a way to get rid of their
enemies without a fuss, and she saw a market opportunity.
So she wasn't necessarily um motivated by some sort of

(17:44):
again perceived commonality of the victims, right, She wasn't looking
for uh young people or brunettes or so on. 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

(18:06):
jail that 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 of her husband,
and she served Agrippina. She went on to serve the
infamous Emperor Nero, who just loved her. And uh, a
lot of stuff about Nero is exaggerated, but he was

(18:29):
not a nice character. When he died, she found herself
robbed of all the protection she had enjoyed for decades. Uh.
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 trust members

(18:49):
of Roman society. And again, like the case with Zu
shan a tear, we know that she was real and
we know she actually did this. Yeah, exactly as soon
as I think Galba was the person who who took
over after Nero fell. But yeah, he definitely said, hey,
guess what you get to die now. It's really messed up,

(19:12):
but at least somebody put an end to the assassinations. Um. Now,
let's move on to one of the first forms of
serial killers that we ever covered on this show. Back
in a video we made about werewolves in the history
of of like nthropy, fascinating stuff. So if we go
to the Middle Ages in Europe, there were a lot
of killers, deranged people who would go go around doing

(19:36):
just terrible things, everything from murder to cannibalism, 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

(20:00):
believed that they would transform in some way to a
wolf or at least the spirit of a wolf. In
the sixteenth century, it was a French peasant named Pierre
Bourgeaux who was apparently under the control the thrall of

(20:20):
several figures clad in black, and this is per his testimony,
including one man named Michael ver Dunne. So, according to
Bogot's story, if they're done gave him an ointment that
would transform him from a man into a wolf. And
we talked about this a little bit in the past
in various episodes. The way that werewolves are generally thought

(20:44):
to transform nowadays is you get bit by a werewolf,
but you survive. That's that's the way in right, 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 moon, wearing a

(21:07):
belt made out of wolf pelt, or just rubbing yourself
down with some ointment, yeah, or 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

(21:27):
become a werewolf. And there's some pretty um, pretty fascinating
arguments that are by no means waterproof, 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

(21:50):
with with weird, really weird. First named Philibert doesn't sound
like a killer. Philibert, Montaud, so Ergo, Montauk, and Verdun
became own as the werewolves of Polygamy, and they were
collectively responsible for the murders of several children. They confessed
to these murders they did. But how why did they confess?

(22:14):
Bend Oh? Because they were getting tortured left and right,
day and day out like nobody's business, 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 stuff,
such to the point that they could have easily died

(22:35):
during the torture. So they catch for done, and allegedly
they catch them covered in blood, uh, and they begin
torturing them. Confess to your crimes. What infernal powers have
allowed you to transform into an otherworldly agent of Satan?
And who was with you? Tell us essentially what you're

(22:59):
covenants and identify the members there in So under torture,
he confesses to whatever they say he did. And then
he says, also, these two guys, Bergo and montau are
in on this with me and then they get apprehended.

(23:21):
Burgo gets tortured 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, uh, well,
did you kill hundreds of children? He's saying something like yes,
please God stop, don't kill me. And just quickly, as

(23:42):
a 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 the pictures,
these wood cuts that still remain today, copies of them, Um,

(24:04):
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 and where your joints are
and your arm, your major arm and leg bones are broken.

(24:26):
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, uh on a stake of some sort
and basically turned upside down. Um, while you're still alive.

(24:49):
It's hard 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 tear are involved, then it really
does make you realize that the confessions made when undergoing
that are to be taken with a grain of salt, absolutely,

(25:11):
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. Was also a cannibal named Peter Stump
sometimes spelled Stump or Stube, and he was called the

(25:34):
werewolf of Bedburg. He was a one armed farmer lived
in fifteenth century Germany. Over the course of twenty five years,
he's thought to have murdered fourteen children, two pregnant women,
and he might not have ever been caught. But like

(25:54):
many serial killers, he seemed to have a 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.

(26:15):
This guy Stump or Stump or Stube. When he was caught,
he said, look, yeah, I drank that cow's blood. You
know what else. I also have eaten fetuses and I
had a son. I ate his brain. I don't care.

(26:37):
I'm a monster. And the thing was in his non
killer life. He was a wealthy farmer, and he was
a widower. He had two children, the son of an
unknown age and daughter called Beale or Sybil, who was
as far as you know, at least older than fifteen yea.

(27:01):
He was subjected to tortures 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
had allowed him to change into a wolf, and for
twenty five years, he said he had been an insatiable

(27:22):
blood sucker animals, men, women, children. He confessed when he
was when he was presented with the possibility of more torture,
and he was also accused of having an incestuous relationship
with his daughter. She was sentenced to die with him,

(27:43):
and he said that he had had intercourse with the succubus,
again confessing under torture. This did not save him. These
confessions instead led to his execution. On October thirty one,
fifteen eighty nine. He, his mistress, and his daughter were murdered,
and he was murdered in a particularly gruesome way. He

(28:04):
was put on the wheel that you mentioned earlier, Matt,
and they tore flesh from his body in ten places
with red hot pincers, then his arms and legs. Then
his limbs were broken with an axe head to prevent
him from returning from the grave, and he was beheaded,
and they burned his body. His daughter and his mistress

(28:25):
were flayed 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 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

(28:49):
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. See.
And this is a distinct possibility. They could have been
completely innocent and falsely confessing to avoid further torture. But

(29:11):
there's an entire genre in Europe around this time of
people being accused of lecanthropy. And this is just the
beginning of the story. Will come back with more tales
of ancient serial killers after award from our sponsor. We've

(29:33):
been in Europe for some time. Let's travel to South
America to the story of Rio s E This Bouger. 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
she lived in Chile. She was an aristocrat and landowner.

(29:55):
She uh allegedly carried out about forty murders, around forty
murders while she um while she was basically a tyrant
of sorts over a lot of just a lot of
people who were working on her a state. Uh rough
you know, they're indigenous workers who then she was in
charge of, and she was just brutal to them. Apparently

(30:17):
now she was a member of uh. You know what
what would be considered a privileged set of people under
um Santiago in colonial Santiago, and she was said to
just have delighted it was her. She very much enjoyed
doing depraved things, things that were um, sacrilegious in nature,

(30:39):
I guess to the church, uh, 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 it is.
And there's another person, Elizabeth Bathory from history that we've
kind of heard about a couple of times that that

(31:01):
this person, Laquintrala, has similarities with Um. 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,
her subordinates. She seemed to to delight in it, like
we said. Now, besides you know, the her indentured servants

(31:24):
and her slaves, she also murdered lovers, which is something
we may see here in the future. Here. Um, she
even murdered a priest and even committed patricide and killed
her father. Now you know, in in this case, a
lot of the people we've spoken about haven't been wealthy wealthy,
but this is one of the first cases we see

(31:45):
that the wealth is actually being used to avoid justice.
It's kind of like, um, the person from Rome we
were speaking about friends in high places Locusta, Yeah, where
she was able to use her influence to avoid justice
for quite a while, several years in fact. And she
even would donate to the church, to the Catholic Church
in order to kind of um grease the hand in

(32:08):
a way to be a little a little bit safer,
even though it's kind of a known thing. Maybe, yeah,
she epsteined it since you know, because she was paying
off judges, lawyers, she had many relatives in political positions.
She did go on trial, but um, despite being pegged

(32:28):
for forty separate murders, the trial was stalled as a
result of her influence. She was released and then uh
this 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

(32:51):
sixty five of old age, not in jail, and thirty
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,

(33:18):
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 seem to prefer poison as their primary

(33:42):
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.
And again, like similar to our earlier example, and here's

(34:04):
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

(34:24):
mass producing poison. It was a kind it was believed
to be related to arsenic So is she a businesswoman?
She a killer? Is she both? And she even had
a poison named after her. Right, that's that's true. Yeah, yeah,
what was it? Uh? Well, I mean it's the specific
I guess version of arsenic right, the aqua to fauna,

(34:49):
aqua tofauna. So don't if it, 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. Yeah,
it's not a fancy bottled water aquat. That's what it
sounds like to me. And we have we have time
for one more. Let's see, let's go with Liu Pingli.

(35:10):
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 have on record. So
there are a couple of different competing ones. Here is

(35:31):
the third son of Liu qu 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 a book called Records of
the Grand Historian, this guy was a monster. He was
arrogant and cruel, and his idea of a fun time

(35:53):
would be too round up. Some of his friends or
his followers and go on marauding expedition 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 in the countryside, and they were murder
people for fun and steal their stuff just because he

(36:16):
thought it was a lark. It's like the definition of marauder.
Is that a correct term? Yeah? This is not like
the werewolves of Poligny, right, we we know exactly what
he did. He killed in his crew, killed over a
hundred people, and they became infamous. These murders were known

(36:40):
across the kingdom and people were afraid to go out
at night. Eventually, things get to a boiling point and someone,
a son of someone he had killed, accuses him and
tells the emperor, you know, like your son is a monster.
He's running around killing people for sport. And as soon

(37:01):
as that person said it, other people spoke out, and
officials in the court said, you have to kill your nephew.
More than 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 Liu Pingli of all of his royal titles,

(37:25):
made him just regular schmo and banished him to County
shoon Yong. What happened after that, we don't know, because
again it's it's very difficult for us to trace the
lives of commonplace people in this day and time. You know,
when he got stripped of that title, it kind of

(37:46):
banished even what he did to the unknown. 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 accusation thereof. That's where we have to
talk about the problems with historical accounts. Right, the same
sources that would appear to be our primary means of

(38:08):
learning a story may often be the very same sources
that prevent us from learning the truth. Because you think
propaganda is bad now, right, when you're the one who
survives the end of a sword and the other person
does not, you can write whatever you want, right exactly. Yeah,
history is written by the winners, and often just seeing

(38:30):
something in print was enough to damn someone in the
public eye. There's a fantastic book called devil in the
shape of a woman. That looks at this practice in
the Salem witch trials, and what we find is that, um,
more so in Europe, but also a little bit in Salem,
there are questions of Uh, there are questions of motive.

(38:55):
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
found to be a witch. It's definitely possible, right, And uh, yeah, man,
you gotta think about literacy rates as well in in

(39:18):
general for certain regions where things are happening historically, and
also the people who can read the stuff that is
being written. Um, there are a lot of times the
people who can make the laws or enact justice right
or something to that effect. And when there's a written
document that says it's an accusatory document, it's going to

(39:40):
stand out with the people who are looking to to
root out heresy, to root out things that would go
against the church and or the the well, the state,
sometimes the nation, but usually the church. And in several
of the cases above, despite these salient historical questions. We

(40:00):
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 psychosis are are present,

(40:23):
if not prevalent, and we will never know how many
serial murderers existed. We don't have a particularly sharp understanding
of how many exists today. However, we can surmise that
this practice and these people have been with humanity since
before the dawn of modern history, a dark shadow following
behind our species from the day the first Homo sapiens emerged. Yeah,

(40:48):
and uh, oh my god, and let's uh, let's bring
something else up here really fast. We we 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 very fascinating idea here. He

(41:11):
believes that when there's economic downturn, especially on a wide
scale in any region or globally even or just in
a town, the the probability of creating a future serial
killer who is going through this, uh, the economic downturn,
all the realities that you face when that's happening. He

(41:33):
believes that you increase the probability of creating serial killers.
And in his opinion, he wrote a book called Sons
of Kine, and in it he describes how because of
the financial crisis from two thousand seven two eight, we're
actually creating a new generation of serial killers, or we
have generated essentially a new season of serial killers that

(41:58):
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, faster, fascinating. I'd
love to I'd love to check out this book. I'd
love to learn more about his work. Let us know
if you've read this book, and let let us know
what your take is. Do you think that's correlation, do

(42:20):
you think it's causation. Which killers do you think should
be remembered or learned from in the modern day. What
are other ancient serial killers that you think your fellow
listeners should hear about. Who, if anyone, do you believe
was falsely accused due to the politics or the power

(42:41):
games of the time. Let us know. You can drop
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(43:03):
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(43:24):
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(43:46):
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(44:25):
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