May 7, 2025 • 32 mins
Roger hits his writing stride, only to be interuppted by the worst riot in Canadian history.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Campsite Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
A warning.
Speaker 3 (00:07):
This episode contains graphic content that may be difficult for
some listeners.
Speaker 4 (00:11):
Please listen with care.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
After Roger had spelt the word pigs out of jelly beans,
the prison guards had deemed him too menacing to be
trusted with candy, so they confiscated the beans, which we
can all agree is very pig like behavior, leaving Roger
with a spirit full of four letter words, but with
no tools with which to express them. He was left
(00:40):
in a cell with a new epiphany pulsing in his head,
a discovery about himself that he had something to say.
Before this, it had never really crossed his mind to
put anything to paper. But when he would arrange these
words made out of jelly beans, look at the colorful, simple,
(01:02):
slanderous words, and think I made this word, and he
could see a new world of possibility.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
I felt I never finished Grade.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Sixth Writing a word or a sentence is something most
of us take for granted, but for Roger it was
a revelation. So down in solitary confinement, he thought, if
I learned to write the characters of the words that
I think or speak, I'm free to make whatever words
I want. Being free in any way was very attractive
(01:35):
to Roger. He couldn't go anywhere, or do anything, or
eat what he wanted or see anyone he wanted. But
if he could write, he could write anything he wished.
But how and with what. It was then that he
remembered the Kingston Penitentiary had a school teacher based in
(01:57):
the library, so he sent out a verbal quest for
pencils and paper. His request made it all the way
to the teacher, and that same day this teacher made
the trip all the way down to the hole to
deliver the supplies to Roger himself.
Speaker 5 (02:12):
He get you three striggers, three pencil a dictionary, and ASSAURIUSM.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Roger was hardly allowed anything in the hole, so when
he was handed these novel objects and allowed these objects,
he almost couldn't believe it. So he figured might as
well get started before they changed their mind. Roger had
read books in the past, but when it came to
his own writing, it was almost as if he was
(02:39):
inventing it for himself, because what he was saying was
more urgent than the logistics of spelling and punctuation. He
had feelings that he needed to let out, and then
I grant.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Out a pencil and had so much house failed. The
intention to meet a pencil rob not easy. I opened
a sprigger, I went to write the paper, tore the
nip girl. I sharpened the dip of the confeefore, and
then turned on the patient. I went to write, and
it was like frustration.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
I was choked up. All these massive words don't come out.
They didn't know I was filled.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
He'd spell phonetically or in a made up way for
himself to decipher. Later, as he tried to keep up
with a stream of consciousness, which was flowing like a river,
he'd write about the past, about the scenes and people
he'd encountered, the moments in his life that he'd revisit
the most in his imagination. He was driven by the
(03:34):
need to get these stories out of his head and
into the physical realm in whatever way he could, at
whatever pace it took.
Speaker 5 (03:43):
So I stole in the dictionary and Sidorus, and I
found words, and I started writing.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
And it take me six hours to fill one felt paid.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
He'd spend hours with the dictionary to see if he
could find the words he meant and learn how to
spell them correctly. Then he'd flip to the thesaurus and
find better words, tune tunnels, catacombs. The limbo room was
in the catacombs underneath the reformatory. There's such pleasure in
(04:13):
finding the right words. Each addition to the vocabulary brought
with it a new permission to feel.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
But for the first time my life had felt good.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
All these words are born of my own aurus to
the word anger and fell definition.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Anger an intense emotional state of displeasure. See also indignation, rage, bitterness,
higher contempt. Whole months would pass where it seemed like
his pencil never stopped.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Moving, I wrote, wrote.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
As the words plotted their way onto the page. He
felt like he could unburden himself, one word at a time,
of this mountain of strife and trauma.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
And I really think that was the beginning of where
he learned, Wow, write a few things down here and whatnot.
And I think that's really what set him off onto
his writing journey.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Around this time, Roger's sister Sue started to receive letters
more regularly from her dear brother, where he'd explain this
new writing kick he'd been on in the most Roger
way possible.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
He said, my fingers are cramping and just writing and
writing and writing and writing. You know, I'm doing a
lot of writing whatnot. And I said, super, you know
this is good. This is good.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Sue had always been very encouraging of her brother through everything,
and this was no different.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
I thought, it's not going to do him any harm,
and hopefully you'll learn from some of what he's putting down.
Sometimes when we have to face our thoughts, it's better
for us and we see it more. It's nothing like
putting it on paper and having a good look at it.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
When she received handwritten letters from Roger, she'd slide it
from the envelope and would study the page fascinated.
Speaker 4 (05:59):
It was just so interesting. He was writing as it sounded,
you know, the spelling some of it. You had to
almost figure it out.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
With each letter. It became more obvious that writing was
no passing fad in Roger's life. He was a writer.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
He was just like a train down the track. He
was just on a roll. So I guess he had
a lot to say.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
From iHeart podcasts and campsite media. I'm Sam Mullens and
this is Go Boy episode five under new management. So
(06:57):
the jellybeans were given to Roger on Christmas nineteen sixty three,
and we need to fast forward to nineteen seventy one,
eight years later. Usually when you're writing a podcast about someone,
this is a good example of the type of time
jump where you just skip those eight years, nice and clean.
(07:19):
But this is the story of Go Boy, where too
much happens all the time, so we'll skim jellybeans were
in sixty three, he starts writing. After twenty three months
in the hole. He sent to Manitoba, then to Quebec,
where he was finally paroled. He got a job laying brick,
(07:39):
but then he was arrested for conspiring to rob a brinkstruck,
which is how in late nineteen seventy he found himself
for the first time in many years, entering through the
gates of the Kingston penn back where he started. Okay,
so that gets us from sixty three to seventy one.
But the most important thing for our story is that
(08:01):
throughout these seven plus years, while Nixon was being elected
and the Beatles were making Sergeant Pepper's and Neil Armstrong
was walking on the moon, Roger was writing and revising
and rewriting, and his pages would always come with him
from place to place, and by nineteen seventy one he
do a lot of writing, not in his cell but
(08:23):
in the KP library, where he was finally bold enough
to share his work with someone other than his sister.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
I went to work in the library there, Kitty, with
all of my scrippers and the library and encourage to
be the writing book.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Roger had been sharing some of the sections of his
manuscript with the librarian and he told Roger that he
thought he really had something here.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
And then that's when he started talking, I probably got
enough material here for a book, And I say why not?
Why not? And he was really excited about telling me
about that.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
In the letters, Roger's manuscript had ballooned to eighteen hundred pages,
and those pages had become the center of his whole life.
He'd spent so many years looking over his shoulder, being
hyper vigilant about his surroundings just to survive. But when
he started thinking about a book, all the preoccupations of
(09:15):
the institution kind of faded into the background. The project
of his book was all encompassing, and there's almost no
room anymore for the day to day dramas of the prison.
But whether he was paying attention or not, there was
something in the air at the Kingston Penitentiary in nineteen
(09:36):
seventy one. A pressure was building in the institution and
things were about to explode. The prisoners had learned of
a new super maximum security prison that was being built
eighteen miles away, called Millhaven, or ironically the Haven for short,
(09:57):
and it was almost ready to open. The Kingston pen
was nearly a century and a half old by this point,
so the powers that be began pouring millions of dollars
into the prison that would one day replace it, and
everything the prisoners heard about Milhaven's design filled them with dread.
It was going to have more gun towers than the pen,
(10:20):
more razor wire, and a fleet of attack dogs. There
were rumors that every cell would have a solid steel
door instead of bars, every cell would have security cameras,
and every room would be bugged by state of the
art voice recorders, listening in on and recording their every move,
their every conversation. And this was all on top of
(10:44):
the changes they'd been observing at KP. Everything was more
locked down than ever, The food was worse, the punishment
more severe, and the mutual respect that was once possible
between guard and inmate was a dinosaur of an earlier era.
Roger was less invested in all this angst than an
(11:05):
earlier version of him might have been, because he had hope,
hope that his lawyer would help him overturn this wrongful
conviction in appeal, and he had hope in the form
of his eighteen hundred pages, that one day he'd be
able to do something with him. He had convinced himself
(11:26):
that these pages had value. But on April fourteenth, nineteen
seventy one, the Kingston Penitentiary was about to become an
all time bad place to have anything of value. On
April fourteenth, the first dozen inmates were moved from KP
(11:49):
to Millhaven, so the abstract boogeyman of this new prison
had finally arrived at their door. Tension was at an
all time high. Prisoners had been speaking in hushed tones
for months about what they could do to stop this
transfer to Millhaven from happening, and they've been brainstorming about
what sort of power play they could make to fight
(12:11):
against it. But when you pulled the threads apart to
trace what triggered the most horrifying thing to ever happen
in the Canadian prison. It started with a dress code
violation when we went on our tour of the Kingston Penitentiary.
In this one part, we walked into what looks like
(12:34):
a big gymnasium like you'd see in high school, and
to get in, there's a couple checkpoints with steel gates
in this little bottleneck just before you walk in and
through this bottleneck is where the inmates would pass into
the gym where they would have their recreation time. They
could exercise, play a game, or often they would just
(12:57):
watch TV. I think they were a hockey game.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
And then it was basically somewhere on this segment when
the riot started.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
To keep the groups manageable, the guards would bring inmates
through the checkpoints to the recreation area only twenty men
at a time. So it was in one of these
checkpoints with steel bars all around them that guard named Decker,
when glancing at an inmate named Knight, spotted a dress
(13:26):
code violation. KP had a strict dress code that was
enforced at all times that included, among other things, having
your shirt tucked in. We stood in the exact corridor
where this happened. I would imagine it was a long
partner wow a guard stand Tucker shirt at tuck that
(13:47):
shirt in. The guard barked at the exact wrong inmate
on the exact wrong days. Everyone in the checkpoint waited
to see what Billy Knight would do, to see how
this most respect of inmates would react to the upity
tone of this cocky twenty seven year old guard. They
(14:07):
didn't need to wait for very long, because Knight swung
a sudden punch to the stomach of Decker and yelled,
that's the last order you're going to give. Within seconds,
the inmates had the keys to get through the next barrier,
where they overpowered the next guard and moved into the area.
(14:28):
After that, they were making a break for the center Dawn,
the effect of control center of the whole institution, where
they knew that if they got control of that, the
prison would be theirs. While all this was going on,
Roger was sitting quietly in his cell when he heard
the sound of yelling in the distance. Where were you
(14:50):
on April fourteenth, nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 6 (14:53):
I was where I wish I wouldn't have been. I
was in Kingston Penitentiary just before it exploded.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
D Roger will take a break and then we'll come
back and find out what did happen when somebody yelled bingo.
In short order, the rogue inmates had captured six of
the guards, taken them prisoner, and locked them up in
their cell block. Word deliriously spread that the inmates had
(15:20):
taken control of the place, as they said about the
urgent task of freeing every inmate in the pen. Some
cell blocks were a cinch to unlock and required just
a spinning of the wheel to open, while with others
they needed to smash their way in by ripping the
bars clean out of the wall. One by one, the
(15:41):
men ran to the dome, whooping and hollering, disbelieving this
sudden twist in their Wednesday evening. What were they going
to do with this unlikeliest of opportunities. Well, I'll tell
you the first thing they did. They smashed the shit
of the Kingston Penitentiary bell. Today you can go and
(16:02):
see what remains of it at the Canadian Penitentiary Museum.
During the riot, this was such a focal point of
all their aggression and all their like let's take it
out on the bell. One can't help but think of
the scene with the printer from Office Space one of
their things was not just take it, not just to
assemble it, but to smash it as many pieces as
(16:24):
they can. So it's amazing they actually have it here
with the actual pieces. Wow. There's a newspaper headline framed
above the bell remains that reads, Jangling Bell tolls no longer.
And the destruction of the bell was just the beginning.
The prisoners have done some damage. They've smashed the three
chapels and destroyed most of the locking systems throughout the
(16:45):
cell block they occupy. They broke windows, kicked in doors,
and broke every breakable thing there was. It was complete mayhem,
complete disorder. And after the initial wave of joy and
anger and revel on the physical, it was time to
think about what their next move was. With the six
(17:06):
guards in their custody, they knew they had a very
strong bargaining tip. If the inmates really were planning on
getting some sort of message out to the public about
how poorly they were being treated at the hands of
the Canadian penal system and how afraid they were about
what waited for them in Millhaven, they had a horrified
(17:26):
nation's undivided attention. In Kingston, Ontario, prisoners hold six guards
and insist their demands be met or else the inmates
needed to figure out what to do with their hostages. There,
of course, were some who wanted to just kill the
guards and not let this opportunity slide by, while others
wanted to protect the guards because without them there was
(17:49):
nothing stopping the police from just shooting their way in
to regain control. But aside from the guards, there was
another group of hostages. There was even more disagreement over
the undesirables. The undesirables are the men at the very
bottom of the inmates social order, the rapists, child abusers,
(18:10):
pedophiles and informants who were kept in Cell Block one D.
The undesirables are kept completely separate from the general population
for their own safety. If the main population ever got
their hands on them, they try to kill them. So
now that the prison had fallen, the fate of Cell
Block one D was very much in jeopardy, but for
(18:33):
the time being, the riot leaders wanted to keep them safe.
The inmates appointed a committee to speak on their behalf,
and the two sides would meet regularly, giving updates and
passing along their demands to the media. Number one medication
for those who need it. Number two food they needed
(18:53):
to feed their hostages and insisted on control of the kitchen,
and three security. They wanted assurance that there would be
no surprise offensives that would jeopardize the lives of inmate
and guard alike. At the bargaining table, the discussions appeared
civil and well organized and intentioned, but everything was that
(19:14):
a stalemate, with neither side budging. Many members of the
public had no idea of the state of things on
the inside, and found it easy to empathize with the
inmates who'd been suffering out of sight of Canadian society
outside the wall. The police had the place surrounded and
the Canadian Armed Forces were called in as the riot
(19:35):
became the top story in the nation. But inside the prison,
the main persistent thing was the cold. They'd recklessly smashed
so many windows that the place felt like a Nordic castle,
with the icy wind coming off Lake Ontario chilling them
to the bone. As they ran low on things to
keep the fires burning, Roger took the time to explore
(19:59):
the place to see if he could find some snacks.
At first, and a little later he was involved in
the making and hanging of one of the lasting images
of the riot. The banner hung out the top dome window,
which read under new management. Roger claims to have been
part of the group who advocated for keeping the hostages
(20:20):
safe and alive. There was a small group who worked
in shifts to safeguard the prisoners from the wolf packs
who roamed the cell blocks thirsty for blood. But after
a few days it became apparent that whatever civility had
remained among the inmates in the first day or two
was merely a mirage, and with the combination of the cold,
(20:44):
the running low on supplies, and the growing desperation, there
was no way this was going to have a happy ending.
But no one would believe how horrifying a turn everything
was about to take.
Speaker 6 (20:58):
Everybody was going a little bit crazy, and they decided
that they were going to drag the undesirables from d
block here into the central part of the dome.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
A small group of the most violent men in the
place said enough was enough. If they were just gonna
end up rotting away in Millhaven anyway, they might as
well get to do something they'd always wanted to do.
Speaker 6 (21:18):
They dragged them out, screaming, and they tied them to
fourteen chairs with wire rope and chained. He held a
kangaroo court.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
In the central dome of the prison. There's a truly
theatrical layout. All around the center circle are catwalks four
stories high.
Speaker 7 (21:34):
All these galities of the nags and demo stairways, and
all these heart like figures all leaning over the rail
in a spot like the high dome, shining on the
floor just like a stage light.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
The leader took the stage and asked the sea of
faces above him, what shall we do, gentlemen, Cast right them,
cut their throats, kill them. The faces shouted. As the
bloodthirsty audience began rhythmically pounding the railings in anticipation. The
man in the center shouted, the show is about to begin.
Speaker 5 (22:10):
The twelve thirteen chairs were all eye together, and then
they're rich, realistically tortured.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
At first, the undesirables were beaten with clubs, kicked, slashed.
Before long, blood began to pool on the dome floor
as the hundreds looked on, horrified at the violence and
depravity of their peers. At one point in the proceedings,
a figure emerged on the makeshift stage to try and
(22:37):
put a stop to the senseless violence.
Speaker 6 (22:39):
One guy lost his mind for a moment and ran
into this inner circle where the fourteen undesirables were being tortured,
and everybody gave a gasp of shocked and said, the
guy's crazy. He went in there and he says, you
got to stop this torture. You got to stop this cruelty,
and biff bang arm bars to the head, boots knives
at him. He crawled out of the circle just barely alive.
And that was one example to everybody else. Don't interfere
(23:02):
or you'll end up tied up to that chair.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Some of the onlookers would try to slink away from
the violence and go wander to a different part of
the prison, but looking away was not an option.
Speaker 6 (23:14):
Sort of wolf packs would roam around and they drag
the guys out of their cell and you say, come
back to the dome.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
You need to show a force.
Speaker 6 (23:20):
The army and the prison warden is looking through the
windows of binnockers and they got to see that there's
a shower.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
After the initial beating of all the undesirables, they were
covered in sheets and if you were one of the
unfortunate souls in the circle, all you could hear were
the sounds of steel bars snapping bones, the crunch of
fists breaking noses, the moans of the beaten, and the
gasps of the horrified crowd. The sounds alone made it
(23:46):
obvious that not everyone would be making it out of
the dome alive. One of the main undesirables taking the
worst of it was a convicted child molester. After having
his ribs broken, his chair was tipped backward, his head
bouncing off the cement.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
And the rail walked over and took his knife slacks.
This guy tied to the chair, crash and sank. Wo
took a steel mop.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Actually it wasn't a steel mug. It was a chalice
stolen from the chapel.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Fill the steel mop full of blood.
Speaker 5 (24:18):
Look the guy tied up in the chair, hook him
the eye said, here's to you, sucker, drank the guy's blood,
took an iron bar and killed the.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Guy's It was the most savage ending imaginable. In the end,
two of the undesirables were killed and the rest were
left barely clinging to life. As the inmates shuffled out
of the dome, most of them just wanted whatever gate
they'd opened to hell. To be permanently shut. With the
(24:58):
end of the riot in sight, Roger took some cellophane
he'd found in his wanderings and securely wrapped his eighteen
hundred page manuscript, hoping that he could find a way
to bring it with him wherever he was about to go.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
I'm sure the pile had to be maybe fourteen sixteen
inches high or more. That's a lot of sheets. That's
a lot of sheet, not on how many piles he had.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Apart from his own life. It was the only thing
he wanted to bring with him from this cursed place.
A surrender was brokeered. The military and police moved in,
and with machine guns trained on them, the inmates came
out with their hands up, one at a time. When
it was his turn, Roger emerged from the rubble with
a cellophane wrapped manuscript held high above his head. He
(25:46):
pleaded to keep it, but a guard tore the package
from Roger's hands and tossed it into a heap of garbage.
As Roger protested in Vain, the horrible misstep that the
inmates had made by riding when they did was that
all it really accomplished was that they made their inevitable
transfer to the Supermax and Millhaven happened ahead of schedule.
(26:10):
Roger's name was called to board the bus, and when
the inmates emerged onto the street outside the pen, there
was a considerable media presence. Many members of the public
were holding up signs of support and were impressed with
what the inmates had managed to pull off in their
effort to get their message out. As the bus drove
(26:30):
off to Millhaven, the inmates might have thought that maybe
in the end they had done something that would affect
positive change, that they had played their hand well, but
they didn't know what was waiting for them when they
arrived at the haven. In a lifetime filled with beatings,
(26:51):
the one that Roger received getting off the bus in
Millhaven was perhaps the most consequential. When the bus arrived,
there was a gag of Millhaven guards with their weapons drawn,
ready to send a very strong message to the newbies.
Fresh off of taking some of their brothers hostage, Roger
(27:11):
and his fellow inmates were subject to walking a gauntlet.
Imagine a beating so bad and cruel that, even given
what the inmates had just done in KPD, and even
given the power imbalance that exists between inmates and guard
that many of the guards forming the Gauntlet would later
be arrested and tried for what they did to Roger
(27:34):
and the other prisoners that day. Many of the inmates
were clubbed and blackjacked and then were dragged inside to
their new home. And thus the Great Riot of seventy
one had concluded if their actions did affect any positive change,
they wouldn't feel it until many years in the future. Okay,
(27:59):
are you still with me? Good, because here comes the
fucking crazy part. So, in the aftermath of the riot,
KP was obviously just a huge mess. Everything was mangled,
everything was dirty, and so they began the long process
of cleaning it all up.
Speaker 4 (28:18):
They cleaned out the cells, you know, and everything was
just tossed, just tossed in the middle of the yard
in one great, big, great, big pile.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
All the broken glass, bent and damaged cell doors and
everyone's personal effects, including something very special to Roger, were
all thrown in one big pile and hauled off to
the city dump.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
It was all gone, all his work, and that had
been a few years. Uh, he just figured I've lost
it all.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
But there was a teacher, one of the school teachers
who worked inside KP and in the aftermath of the riot,
this teacher is like, what do you mean there's nothing left?
I had a perfectly functional classroom with nice chairs and desks,
and I had things in that classroom that were special
to me. You knuckleheads just threw it all in the garbage.
(29:10):
So then this teacher was like, I'm just gonna go
the dump then to see if anything from my classroom
is salvageable. And you know what, I don't know if
that teacher in the end was able to find what
he was looking for at the dump. I don't know
if he ended up finding any of his classroom materials
that he was looking for. All I know is that
(29:33):
he found something he wasn't looking for, because after a
time coming through the rubble at the city dump, he
was thinking about just getting out of there by points
to his.
Speaker 5 (29:45):
Hand, fell on corner of his package, and out of curiosity,
he shook it loose and there was my manscript.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Taged wit is still in pact of.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
My name on picture it. This teacher picks up this
package in the rubble like it's Jumanji, and he tugs
at the edge and discovers that Underneath several layers of
plastic are the words Roger Koran inmate number nine zero
(30:15):
three three, I Shit You Not. Go Boy is a
(30:51):
production from Campside Media in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. Listen
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get
your podcasts. Go Boy was written and hosted by me
Sam Wellens. Our producer is Rob Lindsay of Paradox Pictures.
Laine Rose is our senior producer. Sound design, mix and
(31:13):
engineering by Garrett Tiedemant, original music by Garrett Tiedemant, fact
checking by Michael Kenyon Meyer. Selected archival clips are from
CBC Licensing. The book Go Boy was written by Roger Kuran.
iHeart Podcasts executive producers are Lindsay Hoffman and Jennifer Bassett.
(31:36):
Special thanks to Kingston Pentitentry Tours and Greg Guthrow from
Saint Lawrence Parks Commission. Thanks also to Canada's Penitentiary Museum,
Mike Schreider, Dave Saint Ounge and Correctional Service Canada. Campside
Media's executive producers are Josh Dean Vanessa, Gregoriatis, Adam hoff
(31:56):
and Matt cher A special thanks to our Operations to
Doug Slaywyn Ashley Warren, Sabina Marra, and Destiny Dingle. If
you enjoyed Go Boy, please rate and review the show
wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.
Campsite Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
A warning.
Speaker 3 (00:07):
This episode contains graphic content that may be difficult for
some listeners.
Speaker 4 (00:11):
Please listen with care.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
After Roger had spelt the word pigs out of jelly beans,
the prison guards had deemed him too menacing to be
trusted with candy, so they confiscated the beans, which we
can all agree is very pig like behavior, leaving Roger
with a spirit full of four letter words, but with
no tools with which to express them. He was left
(00:40):
in a cell with a new epiphany pulsing in his head,
a discovery about himself that he had something to say.
Before this, it had never really crossed his mind to
put anything to paper. But when he would arrange these
words made out of jelly beans, look at the colorful, simple,
(01:02):
slanderous words, and think I made this word, and he
could see a new world of possibility.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
I felt I never finished Grade.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Sixth Writing a word or a sentence is something most
of us take for granted, but for Roger it was
a revelation. So down in solitary confinement, he thought, if
I learned to write the characters of the words that
I think or speak, I'm free to make whatever words
I want. Being free in any way was very attractive
(01:35):
to Roger. He couldn't go anywhere, or do anything, or
eat what he wanted or see anyone he wanted. But
if he could write, he could write anything he wished.
But how and with what. It was then that he
remembered the Kingston Penitentiary had a school teacher based in
(01:57):
the library, so he sent out a verbal quest for
pencils and paper. His request made it all the way
to the teacher, and that same day this teacher made
the trip all the way down to the hole to
deliver the supplies to Roger himself.
Speaker 5 (02:12):
He get you three striggers, three pencil a dictionary, and ASSAURIUSM.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Roger was hardly allowed anything in the hole, so when
he was handed these novel objects and allowed these objects,
he almost couldn't believe it. So he figured might as
well get started before they changed their mind. Roger had
read books in the past, but when it came to
his own writing, it was almost as if he was
(02:39):
inventing it for himself, because what he was saying was
more urgent than the logistics of spelling and punctuation. He
had feelings that he needed to let out, and then
I grant.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Out a pencil and had so much house failed. The
intention to meet a pencil rob not easy. I opened
a sprigger, I went to write the paper, tore the
nip girl. I sharpened the dip of the confeefore, and
then turned on the patient. I went to write, and
it was like frustration.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
I was choked up. All these massive words don't come out.
They didn't know I was filled.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
He'd spell phonetically or in a made up way for
himself to decipher. Later, as he tried to keep up
with a stream of consciousness, which was flowing like a river,
he'd write about the past, about the scenes and people
he'd encountered, the moments in his life that he'd revisit
the most in his imagination. He was driven by the
(03:34):
need to get these stories out of his head and
into the physical realm in whatever way he could, at
whatever pace it took.
Speaker 5 (03:43):
So I stole in the dictionary and Sidorus, and I
found words, and I started writing.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
And it take me six hours to fill one felt paid.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
He'd spend hours with the dictionary to see if he
could find the words he meant and learn how to
spell them correctly. Then he'd flip to the thesaurus and
find better words, tune tunnels, catacombs. The limbo room was
in the catacombs underneath the reformatory. There's such pleasure in
(04:13):
finding the right words. Each addition to the vocabulary brought
with it a new permission to feel.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
But for the first time my life had felt good.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
All these words are born of my own aurus to
the word anger and fell definition.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Anger an intense emotional state of displeasure. See also indignation, rage, bitterness,
higher contempt. Whole months would pass where it seemed like
his pencil never stopped.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Moving, I wrote, wrote.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
As the words plotted their way onto the page. He
felt like he could unburden himself, one word at a time,
of this mountain of strife and trauma.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
And I really think that was the beginning of where
he learned, Wow, write a few things down here and whatnot.
And I think that's really what set him off onto
his writing journey.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Around this time, Roger's sister Sue started to receive letters
more regularly from her dear brother, where he'd explain this
new writing kick he'd been on in the most Roger
way possible.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
He said, my fingers are cramping and just writing and
writing and writing and writing. You know, I'm doing a
lot of writing whatnot. And I said, super, you know
this is good. This is good.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Sue had always been very encouraging of her brother through everything,
and this was no different.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
I thought, it's not going to do him any harm,
and hopefully you'll learn from some of what he's putting down.
Sometimes when we have to face our thoughts, it's better
for us and we see it more. It's nothing like
putting it on paper and having a good look at it.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
When she received handwritten letters from Roger, she'd slide it
from the envelope and would study the page fascinated.
Speaker 4 (05:59):
It was just so interesting. He was writing as it sounded,
you know, the spelling some of it. You had to
almost figure it out.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
With each letter. It became more obvious that writing was
no passing fad in Roger's life. He was a writer.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
He was just like a train down the track. He
was just on a roll. So I guess he had
a lot to say.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
From iHeart podcasts and campsite media. I'm Sam Mullens and
this is Go Boy episode five under new management. So
(06:57):
the jellybeans were given to Roger on Christmas nineteen sixty three,
and we need to fast forward to nineteen seventy one,
eight years later. Usually when you're writing a podcast about someone,
this is a good example of the type of time
jump where you just skip those eight years, nice and clean.
(07:19):
But this is the story of Go Boy, where too
much happens all the time, so we'll skim jellybeans were
in sixty three, he starts writing. After twenty three months
in the hole. He sent to Manitoba, then to Quebec,
where he was finally paroled. He got a job laying brick,
(07:39):
but then he was arrested for conspiring to rob a brinkstruck,
which is how in late nineteen seventy he found himself
for the first time in many years, entering through the
gates of the Kingston penn back where he started. Okay,
so that gets us from sixty three to seventy one.
But the most important thing for our story is that
(08:01):
throughout these seven plus years, while Nixon was being elected
and the Beatles were making Sergeant Pepper's and Neil Armstrong
was walking on the moon, Roger was writing and revising
and rewriting, and his pages would always come with him
from place to place, and by nineteen seventy one he
do a lot of writing, not in his cell but
(08:23):
in the KP library, where he was finally bold enough
to share his work with someone other than his sister.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
I went to work in the library there, Kitty, with
all of my scrippers and the library and encourage to
be the writing book.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Roger had been sharing some of the sections of his
manuscript with the librarian and he told Roger that he
thought he really had something here.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
And then that's when he started talking, I probably got
enough material here for a book, And I say why not?
Why not? And he was really excited about telling me
about that.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
In the letters, Roger's manuscript had ballooned to eighteen hundred pages,
and those pages had become the center of his whole life.
He'd spent so many years looking over his shoulder, being
hyper vigilant about his surroundings just to survive. But when
he started thinking about a book, all the preoccupations of
(09:15):
the institution kind of faded into the background. The project
of his book was all encompassing, and there's almost no
room anymore for the day to day dramas of the prison.
But whether he was paying attention or not, there was
something in the air at the Kingston Penitentiary in nineteen
(09:36):
seventy one. A pressure was building in the institution and
things were about to explode. The prisoners had learned of
a new super maximum security prison that was being built
eighteen miles away, called Millhaven, or ironically the Haven for short,
(09:57):
and it was almost ready to open. The Kingston pen
was nearly a century and a half old by this point,
so the powers that be began pouring millions of dollars
into the prison that would one day replace it, and
everything the prisoners heard about Milhaven's design filled them with dread.
It was going to have more gun towers than the pen,
(10:20):
more razor wire, and a fleet of attack dogs. There
were rumors that every cell would have a solid steel
door instead of bars, every cell would have security cameras,
and every room would be bugged by state of the
art voice recorders, listening in on and recording their every move,
their every conversation. And this was all on top of
(10:44):
the changes they'd been observing at KP. Everything was more
locked down than ever, The food was worse, the punishment
more severe, and the mutual respect that was once possible
between guard and inmate was a dinosaur of an earlier era.
Roger was less invested in all this angst than an
(11:05):
earlier version of him might have been, because he had hope,
hope that his lawyer would help him overturn this wrongful
conviction in appeal, and he had hope in the form
of his eighteen hundred pages, that one day he'd be
able to do something with him. He had convinced himself
(11:26):
that these pages had value. But on April fourteenth, nineteen
seventy one, the Kingston Penitentiary was about to become an
all time bad place to have anything of value. On
April fourteenth, the first dozen inmates were moved from KP
(11:49):
to Millhaven, so the abstract boogeyman of this new prison
had finally arrived at their door. Tension was at an
all time high. Prisoners had been speaking in hushed tones
for months about what they could do to stop this
transfer to Millhaven from happening, and they've been brainstorming about
what sort of power play they could make to fight
(12:11):
against it. But when you pulled the threads apart to
trace what triggered the most horrifying thing to ever happen
in the Canadian prison. It started with a dress code
violation when we went on our tour of the Kingston Penitentiary.
In this one part, we walked into what looks like
(12:34):
a big gymnasium like you'd see in high school, and
to get in, there's a couple checkpoints with steel gates
in this little bottleneck just before you walk in and
through this bottleneck is where the inmates would pass into
the gym where they would have their recreation time. They
could exercise, play a game, or often they would just
(12:57):
watch TV. I think they were a hockey game.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
And then it was basically somewhere on this segment when
the riot started.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
To keep the groups manageable, the guards would bring inmates
through the checkpoints to the recreation area only twenty men
at a time. So it was in one of these
checkpoints with steel bars all around them that guard named Decker,
when glancing at an inmate named Knight, spotted a dress
(13:26):
code violation. KP had a strict dress code that was
enforced at all times that included, among other things, having
your shirt tucked in. We stood in the exact corridor
where this happened. I would imagine it was a long
partner wow a guard stand Tucker shirt at tuck that
(13:47):
shirt in. The guard barked at the exact wrong inmate
on the exact wrong days. Everyone in the checkpoint waited
to see what Billy Knight would do, to see how
this most respect of inmates would react to the upity
tone of this cocky twenty seven year old guard. They
(14:07):
didn't need to wait for very long, because Knight swung
a sudden punch to the stomach of Decker and yelled,
that's the last order you're going to give. Within seconds,
the inmates had the keys to get through the next barrier,
where they overpowered the next guard and moved into the area.
(14:28):
After that, they were making a break for the center Dawn,
the effect of control center of the whole institution, where
they knew that if they got control of that, the
prison would be theirs. While all this was going on,
Roger was sitting quietly in his cell when he heard
the sound of yelling in the distance. Where were you
(14:50):
on April fourteenth, nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 6 (14:53):
I was where I wish I wouldn't have been. I
was in Kingston Penitentiary just before it exploded.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
D Roger will take a break and then we'll come
back and find out what did happen when somebody yelled bingo.
In short order, the rogue inmates had captured six of
the guards, taken them prisoner, and locked them up in
their cell block. Word deliriously spread that the inmates had
(15:20):
taken control of the place, as they said about the
urgent task of freeing every inmate in the pen. Some
cell blocks were a cinch to unlock and required just
a spinning of the wheel to open, while with others
they needed to smash their way in by ripping the
bars clean out of the wall. One by one, the
(15:41):
men ran to the dome, whooping and hollering, disbelieving this
sudden twist in their Wednesday evening. What were they going
to do with this unlikeliest of opportunities. Well, I'll tell
you the first thing they did. They smashed the shit
of the Kingston Penitentiary bell. Today you can go and
(16:02):
see what remains of it at the Canadian Penitentiary Museum.
During the riot, this was such a focal point of
all their aggression and all their like let's take it
out on the bell. One can't help but think of
the scene with the printer from Office Space one of
their things was not just take it, not just to
assemble it, but to smash it as many pieces as
(16:24):
they can. So it's amazing they actually have it here
with the actual pieces. Wow. There's a newspaper headline framed
above the bell remains that reads, Jangling Bell tolls no longer.
And the destruction of the bell was just the beginning.
The prisoners have done some damage. They've smashed the three
chapels and destroyed most of the locking systems throughout the
(16:45):
cell block they occupy. They broke windows, kicked in doors,
and broke every breakable thing there was. It was complete mayhem,
complete disorder. And after the initial wave of joy and
anger and revel on the physical, it was time to
think about what their next move was. With the six
(17:06):
guards in their custody, they knew they had a very
strong bargaining tip. If the inmates really were planning on
getting some sort of message out to the public about
how poorly they were being treated at the hands of
the Canadian penal system and how afraid they were about
what waited for them in Millhaven, they had a horrified
(17:26):
nation's undivided attention. In Kingston, Ontario, prisoners hold six guards
and insist their demands be met or else the inmates
needed to figure out what to do with their hostages. There,
of course, were some who wanted to just kill the
guards and not let this opportunity slide by, while others
wanted to protect the guards because without them there was
(17:49):
nothing stopping the police from just shooting their way in
to regain control. But aside from the guards, there was
another group of hostages. There was even more disagreement over
the undesirables. The undesirables are the men at the very
bottom of the inmates social order, the rapists, child abusers,
(18:10):
pedophiles and informants who were kept in Cell Block one D.
The undesirables are kept completely separate from the general population
for their own safety. If the main population ever got
their hands on them, they try to kill them. So
now that the prison had fallen, the fate of Cell
Block one D was very much in jeopardy, but for
(18:33):
the time being, the riot leaders wanted to keep them safe.
The inmates appointed a committee to speak on their behalf,
and the two sides would meet regularly, giving updates and
passing along their demands to the media. Number one medication
for those who need it. Number two food they needed
(18:53):
to feed their hostages and insisted on control of the kitchen,
and three security. They wanted assurance that there would be
no surprise offensives that would jeopardize the lives of inmate
and guard alike. At the bargaining table, the discussions appeared
civil and well organized and intentioned, but everything was that
(19:14):
a stalemate, with neither side budging. Many members of the
public had no idea of the state of things on
the inside, and found it easy to empathize with the
inmates who'd been suffering out of sight of Canadian society
outside the wall. The police had the place surrounded and
the Canadian Armed Forces were called in as the riot
(19:35):
became the top story in the nation. But inside the prison,
the main persistent thing was the cold. They'd recklessly smashed
so many windows that the place felt like a Nordic castle,
with the icy wind coming off Lake Ontario chilling them
to the bone. As they ran low on things to
keep the fires burning, Roger took the time to explore
(19:59):
the place to see if he could find some snacks.
At first, and a little later he was involved in
the making and hanging of one of the lasting images
of the riot. The banner hung out the top dome window,
which read under new management. Roger claims to have been
part of the group who advocated for keeping the hostages
(20:20):
safe and alive. There was a small group who worked
in shifts to safeguard the prisoners from the wolf packs
who roamed the cell blocks thirsty for blood. But after
a few days it became apparent that whatever civility had
remained among the inmates in the first day or two
was merely a mirage, and with the combination of the cold,
(20:44):
the running low on supplies, and the growing desperation, there
was no way this was going to have a happy ending.
But no one would believe how horrifying a turn everything
was about to take.
Speaker 6 (20:58):
Everybody was going a little bit crazy, and they decided
that they were going to drag the undesirables from d
block here into the central part of the dome.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
A small group of the most violent men in the
place said enough was enough. If they were just gonna
end up rotting away in Millhaven anyway, they might as
well get to do something they'd always wanted to do.
Speaker 6 (21:18):
They dragged them out, screaming, and they tied them to
fourteen chairs with wire rope and chained. He held a
kangaroo court.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
In the central dome of the prison. There's a truly
theatrical layout. All around the center circle are catwalks four
stories high.
Speaker 7 (21:34):
All these galities of the nags and demo stairways, and
all these heart like figures all leaning over the rail
in a spot like the high dome, shining on the
floor just like a stage light.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
The leader took the stage and asked the sea of
faces above him, what shall we do, gentlemen, Cast right them,
cut their throats, kill them. The faces shouted. As the
bloodthirsty audience began rhythmically pounding the railings in anticipation. The
man in the center shouted, the show is about to begin.
Speaker 5 (22:10):
The twelve thirteen chairs were all eye together, and then
they're rich, realistically tortured.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
At first, the undesirables were beaten with clubs, kicked, slashed.
Before long, blood began to pool on the dome floor
as the hundreds looked on, horrified at the violence and
depravity of their peers. At one point in the proceedings,
a figure emerged on the makeshift stage to try and
(22:37):
put a stop to the senseless violence.
Speaker 6 (22:39):
One guy lost his mind for a moment and ran
into this inner circle where the fourteen undesirables were being tortured,
and everybody gave a gasp of shocked and said, the
guy's crazy. He went in there and he says, you
got to stop this torture. You got to stop this cruelty,
and biff bang arm bars to the head, boots knives
at him. He crawled out of the circle just barely alive.
And that was one example to everybody else. Don't interfere
(23:02):
or you'll end up tied up to that chair.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Some of the onlookers would try to slink away from
the violence and go wander to a different part of
the prison, but looking away was not an option.
Speaker 6 (23:14):
Sort of wolf packs would roam around and they drag
the guys out of their cell and you say, come
back to the dome.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
You need to show a force.
Speaker 6 (23:20):
The army and the prison warden is looking through the
windows of binnockers and they got to see that there's
a shower.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
After the initial beating of all the undesirables, they were
covered in sheets and if you were one of the
unfortunate souls in the circle, all you could hear were
the sounds of steel bars snapping bones, the crunch of
fists breaking noses, the moans of the beaten, and the
gasps of the horrified crowd. The sounds alone made it
(23:46):
obvious that not everyone would be making it out of
the dome alive. One of the main undesirables taking the
worst of it was a convicted child molester. After having
his ribs broken, his chair was tipped backward, his head
bouncing off the cement.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
And the rail walked over and took his knife slacks.
This guy tied to the chair, crash and sank. Wo
took a steel mop.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Actually it wasn't a steel mug. It was a chalice
stolen from the chapel.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Fill the steel mop full of blood.
Speaker 5 (24:18):
Look the guy tied up in the chair, hook him
the eye said, here's to you, sucker, drank the guy's blood,
took an iron bar and killed the.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Guy's It was the most savage ending imaginable. In the end,
two of the undesirables were killed and the rest were
left barely clinging to life. As the inmates shuffled out
of the dome, most of them just wanted whatever gate
they'd opened to hell. To be permanently shut. With the
(24:58):
end of the riot in sight, Roger took some cellophane
he'd found in his wanderings and securely wrapped his eighteen
hundred page manuscript, hoping that he could find a way
to bring it with him wherever he was about to go.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
I'm sure the pile had to be maybe fourteen sixteen
inches high or more. That's a lot of sheets. That's
a lot of sheet, not on how many piles he had.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Apart from his own life. It was the only thing
he wanted to bring with him from this cursed place.
A surrender was brokeered. The military and police moved in,
and with machine guns trained on them, the inmates came
out with their hands up, one at a time. When
it was his turn, Roger emerged from the rubble with
a cellophane wrapped manuscript held high above his head. He
(25:46):
pleaded to keep it, but a guard tore the package
from Roger's hands and tossed it into a heap of garbage.
As Roger protested in Vain, the horrible misstep that the
inmates had made by riding when they did was that
all it really accomplished was that they made their inevitable
transfer to the Supermax and Millhaven happened ahead of schedule.
(26:10):
Roger's name was called to board the bus, and when
the inmates emerged onto the street outside the pen, there
was a considerable media presence. Many members of the public
were holding up signs of support and were impressed with
what the inmates had managed to pull off in their
effort to get their message out. As the bus drove
(26:30):
off to Millhaven, the inmates might have thought that maybe
in the end they had done something that would affect
positive change, that they had played their hand well, but
they didn't know what was waiting for them when they
arrived at the haven. In a lifetime filled with beatings,
(26:51):
the one that Roger received getting off the bus in
Millhaven was perhaps the most consequential. When the bus arrived,
there was a gag of Millhaven guards with their weapons drawn,
ready to send a very strong message to the newbies.
Fresh off of taking some of their brothers hostage, Roger
(27:11):
and his fellow inmates were subject to walking a gauntlet.
Imagine a beating so bad and cruel that, even given
what the inmates had just done in KPD, and even
given the power imbalance that exists between inmates and guard
that many of the guards forming the Gauntlet would later
be arrested and tried for what they did to Roger
(27:34):
and the other prisoners that day. Many of the inmates
were clubbed and blackjacked and then were dragged inside to
their new home. And thus the Great Riot of seventy
one had concluded if their actions did affect any positive change,
they wouldn't feel it until many years in the future. Okay,
(27:59):
are you still with me? Good, because here comes the
fucking crazy part. So, in the aftermath of the riot,
KP was obviously just a huge mess. Everything was mangled,
everything was dirty, and so they began the long process
of cleaning it all up.
Speaker 4 (28:18):
They cleaned out the cells, you know, and everything was
just tossed, just tossed in the middle of the yard
in one great, big, great, big pile.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
All the broken glass, bent and damaged cell doors and
everyone's personal effects, including something very special to Roger, were
all thrown in one big pile and hauled off to
the city dump.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
It was all gone, all his work, and that had
been a few years. Uh, he just figured I've lost
it all.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
But there was a teacher, one of the school teachers
who worked inside KP and in the aftermath of the riot,
this teacher is like, what do you mean there's nothing left?
I had a perfectly functional classroom with nice chairs and desks,
and I had things in that classroom that were special
to me. You knuckleheads just threw it all in the garbage.
(29:10):
So then this teacher was like, I'm just gonna go
the dump then to see if anything from my classroom
is salvageable. And you know what, I don't know if
that teacher in the end was able to find what
he was looking for at the dump. I don't know
if he ended up finding any of his classroom materials
that he was looking for. All I know is that
(29:33):
he found something he wasn't looking for, because after a
time coming through the rubble at the city dump, he
was thinking about just getting out of there by points
to his.
Speaker 5 (29:45):
Hand, fell on corner of his package, and out of curiosity,
he shook it loose and there was my manscript.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Taged wit is still in pact of.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
My name on picture it. This teacher picks up this
package in the rubble like it's Jumanji, and he tugs
at the edge and discovers that Underneath several layers of
plastic are the words Roger Koran inmate number nine zero
(30:15):
three three, I Shit You Not. Go Boy is a
(30:51):
production from Campside Media in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. Listen
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get
your podcasts. Go Boy was written and hosted by me
Sam Wellens. Our producer is Rob Lindsay of Paradox Pictures.
Laine Rose is our senior producer. Sound design, mix and
(31:13):
engineering by Garrett Tiedemant, original music by Garrett Tiedemant, fact
checking by Michael Kenyon Meyer. Selected archival clips are from
CBC Licensing. The book Go Boy was written by Roger Kuran.
iHeart Podcasts executive producers are Lindsay Hoffman and Jennifer Bassett.
(31:36):
Special thanks to Kingston Pentitentry Tours and Greg Guthrow from
Saint Lawrence Parks Commission. Thanks also to Canada's Penitentiary Museum,
Mike Schreider, Dave Saint Ounge and Correctional Service Canada. Campside
Media's executive producers are Josh Dean Vanessa, Gregoriatis, Adam hoff
(31:56):
and Matt cher A special thanks to our Operations to
Doug Slaywyn Ashley Warren, Sabina Marra, and Destiny Dingle. If
you enjoyed Go Boy, please rate and review the show
wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.
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Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Ridiculous History
History is beautiful, brutal and, often, ridiculous. Join Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown as they dive into some of the weirdest stories from across the span of human civilization in Ridiculous History, a podcast by iHeartRadio.