August 7, 2024 • 41 mins
We explore the phenomena of women obsessed with men behind bars and look at how pop culture and horror films shape our society.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
The relationship between the girl growing up and her father.
That is what makes a woman attracted to a bad
boy of any type.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Did these girls brush him off and reject him and
he felt rejected in want revenge? Or were they actually nice?
Did they say hi to him and he suddenly said, oh,
they love me.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
This is the Idaho Massacre, a production of KATI Studios
and iHeartRadio, Season two, Episode nine, Obsession. I'm Courtney Armstrong,
a producer at KATI Studios with Stephanie Leideger and Gabe Castillo.
Last episode, we left off on a short conversation between Stephanie,
(00:54):
journalist Connor Powell and data analyst Body Movin. They were
talking about women who are deeply, sometimes obsessively, attracted to
dangerous men behind bars. I continued the conversation with Body,
asking her to describe what is going on online with
women gathering professing their love for a Ques murderer, Brian Coberger.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
If you look at the photos the Bribe Brys are
posting to the subreddit to Brian's Girls subreddit, they're very childlike.
They make these edits of Brian with you know, hearts
in the background, and one of them has an altar
with candles and pictures. I think these people are doing
it for shock value reasons, like they're lacking something at home,
(01:43):
or some believe they can change a man as cruel
and powerful as a serial killer, because they don't really
have any real connection to men. You know, some people
hope to share in the media, spotlight, maybe get a
book and movie deal. A couple of these people have
had their names in the paper now. So when I
look at the and I read their subreddit, because I
do read it, it's not private, I feel like a
(02:04):
lot of them are just angsty young people who are
lashing back at society in any way they can. I
know that some people will disagree with me, and that's
totally fine. It's just my opinion and my very uneducated opinion.
But I'm very educated when it comes to that behavior,
when it comes to troll behaviors, and it's it feels
very trollish, but I think a lot of it comes
(02:27):
down to a shock value. It's like when you're a
teenager and you get a mohawk just to piss off
your mom. It's kind of like that. And when you
look at the memes and stuff that they're creating, a Brian.
One of them put him in a barb meme and
made him look like Ken. It's very immature. And when
I say immature, I don't mean that their attitude is immature.
(02:48):
I mean the edits they're making to these photos. And
I just get a troll feeling from them.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
First of all, thank you for you know, giving a
great picture of what's online. And yeah, it's so curious
to me. Is there a context I'm not grocking with
the barbies or I just.
Speaker 4 (03:07):
Think it's an immature kid, not necessarily a kid, but
a young woman who lives in a fantasy world. Maybe
she maladaptive, daydreams all day. And because there is this
notion that she's going to have this perfect relationship with
Brian Coberger. You know, he's not going to leave his
socks on the floor. You know, he's behind bars. She's protected,
(03:27):
she's not going to have to endure any day to
day issues that most relationships have to, you know, go through,
not going to have to There's not going to be
any cooking or laundry. He's not gonna cheat on her,
you know what I mean. Like it's the perfect boyfriend
if you think about it, and he's famous on top
of it, right. I do think that some of them
do actually suffer from this paraphilia though I really do,
(03:51):
and the others their families need to get them some help,
some mental health help, and I'm not qualified to speak
about that.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
To better understand the phenomena, we reached out to board
certified psychiatrist known as America's psychiatrist, doctor Krol Lieberman. Here
the conversation Stephanie and I had with her.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Hybristophilia is basically the love and sexual attraction to men
who have committed crimes.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Is hybristophilia? Is that a recognized psychiatric disorder?
Speaker 1 (04:32):
I mean it is a term that is recognized. There
isn't a DSM diagnostic and statistical manual category for it,
but more like a descriptive term than an actual separate diagnosis.
I mean. In my book bad Boys, Why We Love Them,
how to live with them, and when to leave them?
(04:53):
I have twelve different types of bad boys that I describe,
and the lethal lover is what I described as the ultimate,
the worst type of bad boy. These are men who
are in prison or who have committed crimes and the
women who love them. In a general sense, you know,
it comes from the relationship between the girl the growing
(05:15):
up and her father. That is what makes a woman
attracted to a bad boy of any type. And with
the lethal lover type of bad boys, the fathers are
particularly cruel and she grew up in a very dark, gloomy,
dangerous household, very cold. And the way that the dysfunctional
(05:38):
relationship with the father works is that it makes the
girl growing up believe that she is not lovable. And
there are many reasons why women are attracted to lethal lovers.
Another reason why, in general, is because they see the
sad little boy inside and so they feel that they
can not only tame him, but they can make him happy.
(06:02):
They can fix him. And of course who needs fixing
more than guys who have permitted crimes. And another reason
why they're attracted to them is because they represent danger,
and that's very powerful. It's an aphrodisiac when a man
is dangerous. There are so many of these criminals behind
(06:23):
bars who have so many women writing to them professing
their love to them back. There was something just the
other day about how one of the Boston bomber terrorists
he has fifty thousand dollars or twenty thousand dollars some
huge amount of money in his canteen in the prison
that comes from women giving him money. I mean, he's
(06:46):
a terrorist. He killed people.
Speaker 5 (06:48):
Convicted, I might add, it's not even up for conversation,
like these are violent criminals, you know, because that's a distinction.
But is there a big distinction between a bad boy
who rides a motorcycle and seeks out at night and
maybe is a little rough and tumble versus a straight
violent criminal and maybe moreover, someone who's going to be
(07:12):
behind bars till the end of days potentially? What is
it about that being attractive? Is it the fact that
they're so dependent on you and there's no competition, you
know where they are at night? Are they just maybe
more faithful because you know that they're locked in a
cell for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
All of that. I mean, look Brian Coburger, for example,
he hasn't been convicted, so yes, he might be in
jail forever. And yet still there are all these women
who are attracted to him.
Speaker 5 (07:42):
There are women that love him, that write him daily,
that basically say that they see the little boy in him,
just like you described. And look, he's a nice looking,
well raised young man. What he's being accused of is
wildly violent. So even if that's a TBD, and yes
he has not been convicted and claims his innocence, but
(08:04):
what if these are.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Women who typically have not had much success themselves in
their love life, and so part of them also identifies
with him.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
We asked doctor Carol as she had experience with any
other notorious men behind bars.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
When I was on Sally Jesse Raphael, the show was
Women who Love Men in Jail, Men in Prison, And
there were three or four different men, and then there
were the women who loved them. And Richard Ramirez was
one of the men, and he obviously he wasn't in
the studio. They had him on camera from the jail.
(08:44):
So for the other two men, each one had a
woman who loved them. For Richard Ramirez, there were two women,
and the thing was that neither one of them knew
about the other. They thought they were going to marry
Richard Ramirez, the nightstalker. The nightstalker, Yes, he had killed women,
strangled them, raped them, all kinds of horrible things, but
(09:07):
they wanted to marry him. So when they saw each other,
they couldn't believe it. You write to Richard Ramirez, you
talked to her what and they started fighting with each other.
They started a brawl right there on the stage. And
the gist of it was, why would you think that
a man who had murdered, rape, strangled thirteen women at
(09:30):
least would be faithful to you like he did all
these other horrible things, and you think he's gonna.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Be a good boy.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
You could trust him, he's gonna be a loving husband.
I mean, it was so crazy that they just kind
of assumed that they were it. There were tons of
women writing to him, so they probably each thought they
were the only one.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
I asked doctor Carroll about an open letter she wrote
for Newsweek. It was addressed to a woman named Brittany
Heislope who made it publicly known that she's in love
with Brian Coburger and calls him, quote the perfect man.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
As you saw in my article in Newsweek, I wrote
a letter to this woman, Brittany J. Heislope. She was
the first one or the first one that was known
widely in terms of the lovers of Coburger, Brian Coburger,
and so I wrote to her about that. I'll read
you some of the things that I wrote. Okay, So
(10:28):
she describes herself as feeling love sick about Coburger when
she wrote letters to him on Facebook. You know he's
your one true love, and your love is very real.
This is what you think you feel. He's lonely and
sad in jail, and that no one understands him like
you do. You want to rescue Brian. He's been misunderstood
all his life. You know what that feels like, because
(10:49):
you've been misunderstood too. You want to believe he's not guilty.
Have you thought about the fact that he may have
other women writing to him too, other women who have
fallen in love with him like you. You might never
know about this until you've wasted years pining for him.
So then I conclude by saying, get some psychotherapy and
work on your feelings of not being lovable enough. But
(11:10):
with therapy you'll discover that a man who is already
out in the real world will make you happier than
you deserve it.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
It turns out Coburger was not this woman's first time
experiencing obsessive feelings for an incarcerated man. In fact, doctor
Carroll has spoken with the mother of a man Brittany
High Slope used to visit while he was in prison.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
This was a man who was accused of killing somebody.
As she gave him money, she put money in his canteen.
In the end, after a few months, this young man
told his mother to tell her to stop, you know,
writing to him and coming to visit him and all that.
She didn't stop after the mother told her to stop,
and so one time when she was visiting him, the
(11:53):
next time he told her that she had to stop.
I mean, in other words, the mother said she was
even too crazy for my son, even with all the perks,
you know, the nice letters, love you, blah blah blah,
and the money, and he couldn't deal with her, you know.
He It's so ironic with Brian Coburger because throughout his
life he has been rejected time and time again, starting
(12:16):
in middle school. This got worse in high school. It's
so ironic because now that he's in jail, now he
has all these women throwing themselves at him. His reward,
so to speak, is getting all these women who he
never got before to write him love letters and want
to marry him. And all of that.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Is there any part on the women's part of being
wrapped up in sort of the notoriety.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
That's a part of it too. Yes, sometimes women want
to marry the man because if they did, you know,
had a jail house wedding, there would be tons of
media and they would get to be as famous as
the man.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
Are you familiar with the online group of the Bribe
Ryese or Brian's Girls. It seems to me it's like
a group mentality, all of these women professing their love
and putting together pictures of the accused in alter scenarios
or with hearts all around him. And I was curious
(13:19):
from sort of a psychological perspective of are these women
do you imagine they're egging each other on? Do you
imagine that it's competition between them?
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Well, it's interesting, you know, because that's that's a little
different than what I was describing with Richard Ramirez. Now
in the group Brian's Girls, it's kind of interesting that they,
I mean, I guess they're finding companionship or support in
the fact that that other women are so entranced by
him too. And I'll bet you though that each one
(13:50):
of them, I'm sure they've been writing to him, not
just you know, not just in this group. Each one
of them must think that Brian really loves them, that
they she's his girl. These girls, may you be writing
all these things online and we can talk about him. Yes,
isn't he adorable and blah blah blah, but each one
(14:12):
is probably thinking or at least hoping, that they're the
one he really loves.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
There was one and this was reported on the news.
A woman in the group. I believe she's the leader,
the founder of the group. She physically carved Brian Kohlberger's
entire name and his initials into her skin.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
That is definitely sick. I mean, that is definitely goes
beyond just loving you know, a bad boy. I mean
some of these women are actually mentally ill. Some of
them take it beyond the edge and they do have
some kind of mental illness. They could be borderline, or
(14:55):
they could be manic, depressive, bipolar, but have some kind
of diagnosible mental disorder. Because that, I mean, that's supposed
to show that she loves him the most. Right, Look,
I love him more than you girls. Look what I did.
You know, I'm the real one, that his real love
and all that kind of stuff. He needs mental health help.
(15:17):
She needs to be in therapy, just like I recommended
to Brittany Heislope that that girl definitely needs to be
in therapy.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Is there anything else you'd like to share?
Speaker 1 (15:25):
I'll just say that if you are a woman who
is thinking about writing letters too, or becoming in love
with or wanting to marry one of these criminals, think twice.
Realize that this is a reflection about yourself and your
insecurity and your relationship with your father, and get therapy
instead of writing letters.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Let's stop here for a break. We'll be back in
a moment. The women we've been speaking about are looking
in on the accused, hoping to be part of his world,
while simultaneously posting outwardly on social media so everyone will
(16:06):
know they are the ones in love with an alleged murderer.
From looking at this psychological perspective, we switch the lens
to a pop culture perspective and look at how those
influences might possibly imprint on a murderer. How does the
presentation of violence and horror movies mirror back what's going
on in our own worlds. As for accused murderer Brian Coburger,
(16:31):
there's a much reported on example that starts very close
to home.
Speaker 5 (16:39):
Brian Coberger's sister was an actress and she was in
this movie called Two Days Back, and the loose timeline
story plot on that is that co eds go out
into the woods and not all of them return. In fact,
several of them meet their own untimely death in very
(17:01):
scary ways, including with a knife and a hatchet, and
it's a slash reflick and just looking at the timeline.
That particular movie that his older sister was in was
released on November eighteenth, twenty eleven, and the murders happened,
as we know, on November thirteenth, twenty twenty two. But
what we're really trying to pinpoint here is something that
(17:24):
we've been learning about, which is kind of about these
social imprints that maybe set into somebody's mind that similarly
how police investigators and detectives create a wall that has
the facts and how this piece of evidence was found
here and then this piece of evidence was found there.
Those are the facts, and then sometimes there's a psychological
(17:46):
profile that looks at certain imprints of a person's life
and to see if that tells a story. And obviously,
in no way are we saying that Brian Koberger is
guilty of the crimes that he claims his since four
to this day and has not been found guilty yet.
But in the spirit of this unpacking what imprints maybe
(18:08):
would have shaped a potential killer's mind. Is there any
crossover there? So we brought in pop culture expert Dorano Fear.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
I'm a horror fan. I like to compare the historical
relevance of horror and how it affects society's deepest fears.
And it's always been a reflection because what happens in
our real world then inspires horror, and it's been going on,
you know, since the twenties, the event of film. How So,
(18:38):
during the time of post World War One, it was
the rise of German expressionism. So that's when we got
movies in the Silent era that were like Nosferatu or
The Cabinet of Doctor Kilgary, which explored themes of madness,
extential dread, the unknown. Horror has always gone into the
darker themes, and if you look at classic horror movies
like Frankenstein, it was the people that turned on the monster,
(19:01):
but the monster wasn't the epitome of evil. And when
you really look a decade by decade. You know, the
fifties brought about like a Cold War paranoia, and pop
culture reflected that instantly. It caught up to it, like
in real time. And then the biggest movies of that
decade were things like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or
(19:21):
The Day the Earth Shirt. Still and by the way,
this is a global thing. This is not an American thing,
because you know, Japan released Godzilla and that was you know,
until this day. These are icons of pop culture heroism
and fear. Now you get into a whole other era
when you get into the sixties and we start dealing
with like the Civil Rights movement is social and heaval.
(19:43):
And look, that's where I started getting involved because when
I first saw Knight of a Living Dead, I was
really stunned by that movie because, first of all, it
was George Romero invented the concept of the zombie in film,
it was a terrifying portrayal of this other and this
idea that people come back to life and they are
here to kill you and eat you. But it was
(20:05):
really an allegory because that's a movie about racism. So
it's a reflection in horror and that was the first
movie to really show very graphic violence, you know, and
it reflected social instability and the questioning of authority and norms.
And it was in nineteen sixty that we got the
first real Hollywood serial killer with Anthony Perkins in his
(20:28):
portrayal of Psycho, which was kind of the first time
that American audiences had to face the idea of mental
illness and the idea of psychopathy, which really has stayed
with us since we got into religious temitar like The
Exorcist and The Omen, which, by the way, The Omen
is my favorite horror movie of all time. But that
(20:49):
was also the birth of the real slasher movies. Although
Psycho is considered a slasher movie, but you never really
saw you never saw the violence it was perceived, and
that's what made it so terrifying. Roman Polanski used Rosemary's
Baby as a sort of a view a capitalist theory,
because the truth is is that Rosemary's Baby, although dealing
(21:09):
with satanism and the fear of women and birth and
the non control of their own body, it also exhibited
the betrayal of the people that she loved most for
economic gain, because her husband sells her out in that again,
this is going to be all spoiler.
Speaker 5 (21:25):
Alerts for fame by the way he sells her out
so he can be famous. That's such an interesting theme
that we're kind of seeing there a little bit for
the first time.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Well, it deals with the idea of capitalism, you know,
and simultaneously because socially, women are now becoming standing on
their own and their world of feminism and abortion is
the topic, and the freedom of sexuality after the sixties
and the free love movement. The religious kind of connotation
is that morals were gone. So you then experience the
(21:59):
birth of the slasher movie, the real slasher movies, and
it starts with Texas jamesaw Massacre and Toby Hooper terrified
the world with that. Now that was also loosely based
on a real story. So that was loosely based on
the serial killer Ed Geen, you know, who's murdered people
and he wore their skins, which that theme gets repeated
(22:20):
over and over again, including Silence of the Lambs. So
you're seeing a pattern here of how audiences want to
escape their internal fears or see their internal fears projected
on a big screen where they can process it, which
is very similar of why true crime and the realism
of fear now works because people can't process it in
their brain or imagine the horror of it until they
(22:42):
see it. And then once they see it, it becomes
less afraid because they can process how to deal with
it if it ever comes knocking. At this point in time,
movies still had the Motion Picture Ratings Association had a
lot of control, so they were rated movies to stop
kids from watching it. But that really lost power with
(23:05):
nineteen seventy eight and the birth of Michael Myers and Halloween,
and when you deal with that, now you're dealing with
the concept of true evil in a child form that
becomes an adult and his whole reason for killing goes
back to this moral compass. Why was he killing co eds?
Why was he killing high school kids? Why was he
killing women in particular? And going after the main character?
(23:28):
And the immediate follow to that was Friday the Thirteenth. Now,
the original Friday the Thirteenth isn't Jason Vorhees, but it
is the concept of kids at a summer camp losing
their morals, not paying attention to the children, going off
into the woods and having sex and running around in
crop tops. And the girls are very probiscuous and they
(23:51):
are killed for it. And it's a reflection of the
fears of that time because this was the first time
women really controlled their own sexuality, and it was a
weird signal that maybe you shouldn't maybe you should be
afraid of this because it's immorl And now the creepy
boogeyman in the woods that used to scare you under
your bed as a child is judging you. And that
(24:14):
was a really big leap. And when you started to
see these movies, they also glamorized it because Jason became
a hero to a lot of people. The Halloween costume
of Jason became the number one Halloween costume, followed by
Michael Myers, and societally, we now enter the eighties and
the eighties become something completely different because we get inundated
(24:37):
in the rise of consumer culture. The AIDS epidemic is everywhere,
so fear of disease and pandemic. So it was really
the next level of the explosion of the slasher films
because Friday the Thirteenth came out literally in nineteen eighty
and then you followed things like Nightmare and elm Street,
which dealt with the psychological fears of damage, and that
(24:58):
was in nineteen eighty four, and in a way weird way,
it was also the birth way they started to blend
horror and comedy to try and alleviate some of this
fear and tension, which is why Freddy Krueger in Nightmare
and Elm Street tended to be campy or funny, but
the truth was he was terrifying as a movie monster.
Speaker 5 (25:18):
So any movie that Jamie Lee Curtis, for example, was
in really did sort of speak to the idea of
the popular kids, the ones that were enjoying life the
most and living their best life, like those were the
ones to go first. Is that accurate?
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Well, they always said yes, that it was about the
popular or the outsider's view in so that really I
think the first movie that pops in my head when
it comes to that is Carrie. Carrie was this innocent
girl of a religious family that happened to have this
telekinesist power, and it was the cheerleaders and the popular ones.
And one of the most insane scenes in that movie
(25:56):
was the bullying of Carrie in the locker room by
the other girl, where she gets her period for the
first time, and they pummel her away the tampons and
the humiliation of that, and so for her, Carrie is
a movie of revenge. It's taking pain, the hurt and
the rage and taking out on those that bullied her.
(26:18):
Or you could also flip the script and say who
she might have envied to be more like. So you're
right about that. It was always the pretty, the beautiful,
And yes, you're also talking about the other a campy
comedy horror movie which which if you talk to modern
day director as the reference was sleep Away Camp. And
what's insane about sleep Away Camp in the eighties was
(26:39):
that sleep Away Camp was the murders of those kinds
of people, the popular, the sexy, the coach, the cheerleader,
all of that. But the killer in that was a
transgender and that is also sort of was referenced by
ed Geen, the serial killer from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. What
(27:00):
became the pop culture teen sensation globally was the birth
of the Scream franchise. Scream was a sort of horror
comedy that was based on the tropes of all these
other movies of who dies first, Which answers your question,
you know, it was always like the virgin survives at
the end, and they kind of twisted that on its ear.
And what's pretty interesting about the Idaho massacre is that
(27:24):
it has certain similarities to the serial killer Danny Rollins
of the nineteen ninety University of Florida killings in Gainesville.
You know, he killed five co eds and he did
it in a kind of a pornographic view of violence
and torture, and the world stopped and were terrified by
(27:44):
the concept that somebody could go and do this. There
are similarities to that because we haven't had really a
college co ed murder spree that was coming from a
place of psychopathy. And that is probably what I think
makes the Idaho massacre most like film Scream two takes
(28:05):
place on a college campus. It's not directly about sorority murders,
but it features a sorority setting, and you know, the
subplot involves murder of sorority sisters.
Speaker 5 (28:14):
So if we were looking at Brian Coberger, because some
of it a little bit, again not accusing anybody of murder,
but there is seemingly a couple of touch points. One
if what we have been told regarding Brian Coberger in
his backstory air quotes is that he was bullied and
he was sort of the outsider, and that likely his
connection to the victims was one from a distance where
(28:37):
maybe he was observing them and watching them as someone
who was looking in and maybe looking in often, which
has some creepy undertones to some of the movies that
you've since brought up. And then just the idea of
a slasher flick in general, it's pretty uncommon from what
(28:58):
we've been told that in a sale would use a knife,
for example, to murder, frankly, anyone, because a it's not exact,
it's extremely messy as you could imagine, and requires a
level of energy and for a very ordinary guy that
seems hard to picture. You only see that in the
horror movies. Where does he fit in this timeline horror?
Speaker 2 (29:23):
It mirrors society's deepest fears. Right, So, now, when you
get into this story, if all of the things are true,
first of all, personally, as an opinion, I don't really
buy that any of it is excusable. And we now
live in a society where people try and justify the
actions of brutality and violence as warranted. In some way,
(29:48):
I think that that is where we get into a
situation of societal collapse. To be honest, because there are
fine lines. There is right, there is wrong. Up until recently,
I would say in the last fifteen years, ten to
fifteen years, we knew who the villains were, We knew
who the monsters were. There is a throwback to what
(30:10):
I brought up with Frankenstein. Where was Frankenstein truly a monster?
But we're talking about psychopathy.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
Let's stop here for another break. We'll be back in
a moment. Stephanie continues her conversation with pop culture expert
Doronto Fear.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
We live at a time of social media where nothing
is real, and every single scroll, every single post, every
single TikTok or snap is fully produced and curated by
the person posting it. We all laugh when we take
a selfie, we go, let me see it, and don't
post it without me looking at it, right, And that's
a very common trait. But when you're curating a fake
(30:59):
world so that other people will see you in a
certain light, it brings about envy For somebody that can't
differentiate between that, it becomes envy watching in you know,
they'll say, oh, well, if you don't have haters you
don't have a life. Well, yes and no, because the
haters can become very dangerous and they don't see themselves.
(31:24):
And the rise of the en cell or you know,
that concept and the unattainability for men and women. Now
that is another question about gender here. Women have always
dealt with the concept of higher standards in media and
pop culture. You know, they've always looked to fashion magazines
(31:46):
and flipped through it and tried to see themselves as
the models, which led to a lot of self degradation.
It's really roughly since the mid nineties where well, I
would say now that that's twenty five years, but where
men have been highly sexualized, you know, with the birth
of Abercrombie and Finch and all of those you know bags,
where it was all sexualized men and you would walk
(32:08):
in the mall and they'd be a shirtless guy standing
outside like inviting you in. That then created the insecurity
that women have felt for decades and decades and decades. Suddenly,
for boys, they suddenly had to look at other males
and realize where they fitted and the hierarchy of what
is deemed his beauty and the crowd that they run
in and who they're with. And an Instagram post where
(32:30):
there is four guys in a pool with six pretty
girls behind them. It elicits of why them not me.
Speaker 5 (32:37):
It's such an interesting touch point because it makes me
think of a couple of things. One, if what Brian
Coberger is being accused of is accurate, Yes, he was
allegedly pinging his phone, had been in and around that
home many many times leading up to the murders and thereafter,
so it implies that you know he is standing outside
(33:02):
looking in from a distance under a street light, allegedly
as again we would see in something very scary. It's
the person of envying something that they may be see
And maybe is it possible that the connection that he
had to one or more of the victims was legitimately
just through this lens of social media, you can see
(33:25):
how that can happen. We develop relationships with people because
we see them often and we do not know them.
It feels real. And if you're someone who doesn't have
an understanding of social cues or other areas to fill
that hole with real friends and family, that layer of
isolation and lonesome behavior or loneliness is really dangerous.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
I think that isolation, loneliness, mental illness all plays a factor.
But these concepts are not new. What I mean by
I don't buy it, I buy it. I believe it.
It's true. I don't think it's an excuse. I don't
think that when you begin to frame the conversation around
(34:11):
and I'll keep it in pop culture terms, sort of
the origin story, that it makes it okay.
Speaker 5 (34:16):
That's so fair.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
I think that if you were to cross reference one
hundred people and talk to one hundred people regarding their history,
trauma is a permanent and pervasive fact in almost every
one of the hundred. Nobody lives an idyllic life. The
concept of how one deals with their childhood trauma or
psychological trauma or abuse, or even if it's just environmental,
(34:40):
the way they handle it moving forward is a mark
of maturity, of evolutionary adulthood. And by minimizing that and
saying well, that's an excuse and that's okay, and it
gives free rein for this. And we see this often
from a pop culture perspective, where again the heroes and
the villains are now being blurred. Where you have, you know,
(35:05):
in the DC comics and the superhero world, one of
the most greatest psychological psychotic killers of all time is
The Joker, and he's specifically a psychopath. He's written as
a psychopath.
Speaker 5 (35:18):
Well, I thought that movie was actually pretty interesting, the
Joker specifically, which is the Joaquin Phoenix portrayal of the Joker,
and it really does kind of give exactly to your point,
an origin story for this villain. I have to be
honest with you. When this massacre first happened and Brian
(35:41):
Coberger was arrested, we were just all like what And
that's the movie that kind of comes to mind is
sort of is it the micro aggressions with mental illness
and isolation? And you know, the Joker had been hit
one too many times or overlooked one too many times,
or left out of the conversation one too many times,
(36:02):
and had had enough and had a wicked relationship with
his mother or some sort of meaningful backstory that maybe
not justified but explained his actions.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
I do think that, you know, everybody wants to know
the reason why why do people do what they do?
Are is somebody born evil? Is somebody not? You know,
I always have to look at everything through a pop
culture lens. It really comes into I've bene of social media.
With social media as being so prolific, it's like these things, look,
they fascinate us. We can't get enough of it, and
(36:36):
so we have this fascination. We have this as a society.
We have this sort of morbid attraction to these things,
which is why horror is sort of the number one
entertainment resource, cheap to make millions of view. They like
the bad ones, they like the good ones, doesn't matter.
That's your key into any kind of entertainment. And then
(36:57):
the proliferation of true crime over the last really ten
to eleven years has been extraordinary, and strangely, women tend
to be the highest consumers of that because they deal
with trauma, they deal with genes. You know, it's funny.
I had a conversation with a man one day who
doesn't like understand this concept, and I said, when you
get in an elevator, anytime you get in an elevator,
(37:19):
are you ever afraid? He said, well, why would I be?
And I said, do you know that women, no matter
who they are, wherever they are, when they get in
an elevator and a man enters, it's not fear. It's
an immediate alert for potential fear, and men don't realize
that that is something that women go through every day
(37:41):
walking through a parking lot, if a light goes out
in a garage, when they get in their car, they
check their back seat. And it's not because they're conditioned
by through crime shows. It's because it is a fact
for them from childhood. And I think that's why women
consume this, because they want to know, They want to
know what to look for, they want to know how
to protect themselves.
Speaker 5 (38:02):
One question, though, so does that mean just looking at
that so well? I might ed so well said? Is
are women scared in the elevator because they've seen Psycho
too many times? Or because they've seen women being murdered
endlessly in horror films or in scary movies throughout the times?
(38:23):
And now true crime is having this surge because we've
all lost our minds? Or is it because we really
think it's important to share stories so that we can
keep ourselves safe and look out for each other. And
I believe you can't protect yourself against the boogeyman if
you don't know the boogeyman exists, and that people don't
(38:44):
heal alone.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Well, it's a reflection. It's a reflection of the times.
I think that women feel like they're prey, and in
a lot of ways they are. I think it's ingrained
in the DNA, and I think that it's correct. And
I think the fascination with true crime is a symptom
of this. I'm a fan of true crime, but I
(39:07):
tend to like the ones that deal with it in
a subject matter that I can at least escape a
little bit into the humor, like Don't f with Cats.
I thought that the way that that was told was
genius in a the most terrifying story of the most
psychotic killer. And by the way, another one who was
(39:27):
influenced by pop culture, because Luca thought he was Sharon
Stone in basic instinct, he basically embodied her character the
way he imagined her to be. You're tapping into the
concept of compassion and empathy. For the vast majority, there
are going to be people who will zero it and
not hear the compassion and empathy and be aroused by
(39:50):
the concept. And that's the terrifying part. And that's where
mental illness comes in. Now, if he was the main
character from You, and he was stalking and he felt
like that outsider. There's five million ways to look at it.
Did these girls brush him off and reject him and
he felt rejected in want revenge? Or were they actually nice?
Did they say hi to him and he suddenly said, oh,
(40:12):
they love me. So now you go into the two
sides of psychology, which then becomes like, well, so you
can't be nice to a person. You can't look at
us in their eyes. You have to avert them. But
if you avert them, then are you attracting violence? So
there is no right answer. The right answer is to
identify the signs early, the responsibility of family, friends, teachers,
(40:36):
peers to raise the alarm.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
More on that next time. For more information on the
case and relevant photos, follow us on Instagram at kat
Underscore Studios. The Idaho Masker is produced by Stephanie Leideger,
Gabriel Castillo and me Courtney Armstrong. Editing and sound design
by Jeff Torois, Music by Jared Aston. The Idaho Mascer
(41:07):
is a production of Katie's Studios and iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts like this, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
The relationship between the girl growing up and her father.
That is what makes a woman attracted to a bad
boy of any type.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Did these girls brush him off and reject him and
he felt rejected in want revenge? Or were they actually nice?
Did they say hi to him and he suddenly said, oh,
they love me.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
This is the Idaho Massacre, a production of KATI Studios
and iHeartRadio, Season two, Episode nine, Obsession. I'm Courtney Armstrong,
a producer at KATI Studios with Stephanie Leideger and Gabe Castillo.
Last episode, we left off on a short conversation between Stephanie,
(00:54):
journalist Connor Powell and data analyst Body Movin. They were
talking about women who are deeply, sometimes obsessively, attracted to
dangerous men behind bars. I continued the conversation with Body,
asking her to describe what is going on online with
women gathering professing their love for a Ques murderer, Brian Coberger.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
If you look at the photos the Bribe Brys are
posting to the subreddit to Brian's Girls subreddit, they're very childlike.
They make these edits of Brian with you know, hearts
in the background, and one of them has an altar
with candles and pictures. I think these people are doing
it for shock value reasons, like they're lacking something at home,
(01:43):
or some believe they can change a man as cruel
and powerful as a serial killer, because they don't really
have any real connection to men. You know, some people
hope to share in the media, spotlight, maybe get a
book and movie deal. A couple of these people have
had their names in the paper now. So when I
look at the and I read their subreddit, because I
do read it, it's not private, I feel like a
(02:04):
lot of them are just angsty young people who are
lashing back at society in any way they can. I
know that some people will disagree with me, and that's
totally fine. It's just my opinion and my very uneducated opinion.
But I'm very educated when it comes to that behavior,
when it comes to troll behaviors, and it's it feels
very trollish, but I think a lot of it comes
(02:27):
down to a shock value. It's like when you're a
teenager and you get a mohawk just to piss off
your mom. It's kind of like that. And when you
look at the memes and stuff that they're creating, a Brian.
One of them put him in a barb meme and
made him look like Ken. It's very immature. And when
I say immature, I don't mean that their attitude is immature.
(02:48):
I mean the edits they're making to these photos. And
I just get a troll feeling from them.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
First of all, thank you for you know, giving a
great picture of what's online. And yeah, it's so curious
to me. Is there a context I'm not grocking with
the barbies or I just.
Speaker 4 (03:07):
Think it's an immature kid, not necessarily a kid, but
a young woman who lives in a fantasy world. Maybe
she maladaptive, daydreams all day. And because there is this
notion that she's going to have this perfect relationship with
Brian Coberger. You know, he's not going to leave his
socks on the floor. You know, he's behind bars. She's protected,
(03:27):
she's not going to have to endure any day to
day issues that most relationships have to, you know, go through,
not going to have to There's not going to be
any cooking or laundry. He's not gonna cheat on her,
you know what I mean. Like it's the perfect boyfriend
if you think about it, and he's famous on top
of it, right. I do think that some of them
do actually suffer from this paraphilia though I really do,
(03:51):
and the others their families need to get them some help,
some mental health help, and I'm not qualified to speak
about that.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
To better understand the phenomena, we reached out to board
certified psychiatrist known as America's psychiatrist, doctor Krol Lieberman. Here
the conversation Stephanie and I had with her.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Hybristophilia is basically the love and sexual attraction to men
who have committed crimes.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Is hybristophilia? Is that a recognized psychiatric disorder?
Speaker 1 (04:32):
I mean it is a term that is recognized. There
isn't a DSM diagnostic and statistical manual category for it,
but more like a descriptive term than an actual separate diagnosis.
I mean. In my book bad Boys, Why We Love Them,
how to live with them, and when to leave them?
(04:53):
I have twelve different types of bad boys that I describe,
and the lethal lover is what I described as the ultimate,
the worst type of bad boy. These are men who
are in prison or who have committed crimes and the
women who love them. In a general sense, you know,
it comes from the relationship between the girl the growing
(05:15):
up and her father. That is what makes a woman
attracted to a bad boy of any type. And with
the lethal lover type of bad boys, the fathers are
particularly cruel and she grew up in a very dark, gloomy,
dangerous household, very cold. And the way that the dysfunctional
(05:38):
relationship with the father works is that it makes the
girl growing up believe that she is not lovable. And
there are many reasons why women are attracted to lethal lovers.
Another reason why, in general, is because they see the
sad little boy inside and so they feel that they
can not only tame him, but they can make him happy.
(06:02):
They can fix him. And of course who needs fixing
more than guys who have permitted crimes. And another reason
why they're attracted to them is because they represent danger,
and that's very powerful. It's an aphrodisiac when a man
is dangerous. There are so many of these criminals behind
(06:23):
bars who have so many women writing to them professing
their love to them back. There was something just the
other day about how one of the Boston bomber terrorists
he has fifty thousand dollars or twenty thousand dollars some
huge amount of money in his canteen in the prison
that comes from women giving him money. I mean, he's
(06:46):
a terrorist. He killed people.
Speaker 5 (06:48):
Convicted, I might add, it's not even up for conversation,
like these are violent criminals, you know, because that's a distinction.
But is there a big distinction between a bad boy
who rides a motorcycle and seeks out at night and
maybe is a little rough and tumble versus a straight
violent criminal and maybe moreover, someone who's going to be
(07:12):
behind bars till the end of days potentially? What is
it about that being attractive? Is it the fact that
they're so dependent on you and there's no competition, you
know where they are at night? Are they just maybe
more faithful because you know that they're locked in a
cell for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
All of that. I mean, look Brian Coburger, for example,
he hasn't been convicted, so yes, he might be in
jail forever. And yet still there are all these women
who are attracted to him.
Speaker 5 (07:42):
There are women that love him, that write him daily,
that basically say that they see the little boy in him,
just like you described. And look, he's a nice looking,
well raised young man. What he's being accused of is
wildly violent. So even if that's a TBD, and yes
he has not been convicted and claims his innocence, but
(08:04):
what if these are.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Women who typically have not had much success themselves in
their love life, and so part of them also identifies
with him.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
We asked doctor Carol as she had experience with any
other notorious men behind bars.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
When I was on Sally Jesse Raphael, the show was
Women who Love Men in Jail, Men in Prison, And
there were three or four different men, and then there
were the women who loved them. And Richard Ramirez was
one of the men, and he obviously he wasn't in
the studio. They had him on camera from the jail.
(08:44):
So for the other two men, each one had a
woman who loved them. For Richard Ramirez, there were two women,
and the thing was that neither one of them knew
about the other. They thought they were going to marry
Richard Ramirez, the nightstalker. The nightstalker, Yes, he had killed women,
strangled them, raped them, all kinds of horrible things, but
(09:07):
they wanted to marry him. So when they saw each other,
they couldn't believe it. You write to Richard Ramirez, you
talked to her what and they started fighting with each other.
They started a brawl right there on the stage. And
the gist of it was, why would you think that
a man who had murdered, rape, strangled thirteen women at
(09:30):
least would be faithful to you like he did all
these other horrible things, and you think he's gonna.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Be a good boy.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
You could trust him, he's gonna be a loving husband.
I mean, it was so crazy that they just kind
of assumed that they were it. There were tons of
women writing to him, so they probably each thought they
were the only one.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
I asked doctor Carroll about an open letter she wrote
for Newsweek. It was addressed to a woman named Brittany
Heislope who made it publicly known that she's in love
with Brian Coburger and calls him, quote the perfect man.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
As you saw in my article in Newsweek, I wrote
a letter to this woman, Brittany J. Heislope. She was
the first one or the first one that was known
widely in terms of the lovers of Coburger, Brian Coburger,
and so I wrote to her about that. I'll read
you some of the things that I wrote. Okay, So
(10:28):
she describes herself as feeling love sick about Coburger when
she wrote letters to him on Facebook. You know he's
your one true love, and your love is very real.
This is what you think you feel. He's lonely and
sad in jail, and that no one understands him like
you do. You want to rescue Brian. He's been misunderstood
all his life. You know what that feels like, because
(10:49):
you've been misunderstood too. You want to believe he's not guilty.
Have you thought about the fact that he may have
other women writing to him too, other women who have
fallen in love with him like you. You might never
know about this until you've wasted years pining for him.
So then I conclude by saying, get some psychotherapy and
work on your feelings of not being lovable enough. But
(11:10):
with therapy you'll discover that a man who is already
out in the real world will make you happier than
you deserve it.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
It turns out Coburger was not this woman's first time
experiencing obsessive feelings for an incarcerated man. In fact, doctor
Carroll has spoken with the mother of a man Brittany
High Slope used to visit while he was in prison.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
This was a man who was accused of killing somebody.
As she gave him money, she put money in his canteen.
In the end, after a few months, this young man
told his mother to tell her to stop, you know,
writing to him and coming to visit him and all that.
She didn't stop after the mother told her to stop,
and so one time when she was visiting him, the
(11:53):
next time he told her that she had to stop.
I mean, in other words, the mother said she was
even too crazy for my son, even with all the perks,
you know, the nice letters, love you, blah blah blah,
and the money, and he couldn't deal with her, you know.
He It's so ironic with Brian Coburger because throughout his
life he has been rejected time and time again, starting
(12:16):
in middle school. This got worse in high school. It's
so ironic because now that he's in jail, now he
has all these women throwing themselves at him. His reward,
so to speak, is getting all these women who he
never got before to write him love letters and want
to marry him. And all of that.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Is there any part on the women's part of being
wrapped up in sort of the notoriety.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
That's a part of it too. Yes, sometimes women want
to marry the man because if they did, you know,
had a jail house wedding, there would be tons of
media and they would get to be as famous as
the man.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
Are you familiar with the online group of the Bribe
Ryese or Brian's Girls. It seems to me it's like
a group mentality, all of these women professing their love
and putting together pictures of the accused in alter scenarios
or with hearts all around him. And I was curious
(13:19):
from sort of a psychological perspective of are these women
do you imagine they're egging each other on? Do you
imagine that it's competition between them?
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Well, it's interesting, you know, because that's that's a little
different than what I was describing with Richard Ramirez. Now
in the group Brian's Girls, it's kind of interesting that they,
I mean, I guess they're finding companionship or support in
the fact that that other women are so entranced by
him too. And I'll bet you though that each one
(13:50):
of them, I'm sure they've been writing to him, not
just you know, not just in this group. Each one
of them must think that Brian really loves them, that
they she's his girl. These girls, may you be writing
all these things online and we can talk about him. Yes,
isn't he adorable and blah blah blah, but each one
(14:12):
is probably thinking or at least hoping, that they're the
one he really loves.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
There was one and this was reported on the news.
A woman in the group. I believe she's the leader,
the founder of the group. She physically carved Brian Kohlberger's
entire name and his initials into her skin.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
That is definitely sick. I mean, that is definitely goes
beyond just loving you know, a bad boy. I mean
some of these women are actually mentally ill. Some of
them take it beyond the edge and they do have
some kind of mental illness. They could be borderline, or
(14:55):
they could be manic, depressive, bipolar, but have some kind
of diagnosible mental disorder. Because that, I mean, that's supposed
to show that she loves him the most. Right, Look,
I love him more than you girls. Look what I did.
You know, I'm the real one, that his real love
and all that kind of stuff. He needs mental health help.
(15:17):
She needs to be in therapy, just like I recommended
to Brittany Heislope that that girl definitely needs to be
in therapy.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Is there anything else you'd like to share?
Speaker 1 (15:25):
I'll just say that if you are a woman who
is thinking about writing letters too, or becoming in love
with or wanting to marry one of these criminals, think twice.
Realize that this is a reflection about yourself and your
insecurity and your relationship with your father, and get therapy
instead of writing letters.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Let's stop here for a break. We'll be back in
a moment. The women we've been speaking about are looking
in on the accused, hoping to be part of his world,
while simultaneously posting outwardly on social media so everyone will
(16:06):
know they are the ones in love with an alleged murderer.
From looking at this psychological perspective, we switch the lens
to a pop culture perspective and look at how those
influences might possibly imprint on a murderer. How does the
presentation of violence and horror movies mirror back what's going
on in our own worlds. As for accused murderer Brian Coburger,
(16:31):
there's a much reported on example that starts very close
to home.
Speaker 5 (16:39):
Brian Coberger's sister was an actress and she was in
this movie called Two Days Back, and the loose timeline
story plot on that is that co eds go out
into the woods and not all of them return. In fact,
several of them meet their own untimely death in very
(17:01):
scary ways, including with a knife and a hatchet, and
it's a slash reflick and just looking at the timeline.
That particular movie that his older sister was in was
released on November eighteenth, twenty eleven, and the murders happened,
as we know, on November thirteenth, twenty twenty two. But
what we're really trying to pinpoint here is something that
(17:24):
we've been learning about, which is kind of about these
social imprints that maybe set into somebody's mind that similarly
how police investigators and detectives create a wall that has
the facts and how this piece of evidence was found
here and then this piece of evidence was found there.
Those are the facts, and then sometimes there's a psychological
(17:46):
profile that looks at certain imprints of a person's life
and to see if that tells a story. And obviously,
in no way are we saying that Brian Koberger is
guilty of the crimes that he claims his since four
to this day and has not been found guilty yet.
But in the spirit of this unpacking what imprints maybe
(18:08):
would have shaped a potential killer's mind. Is there any
crossover there? So we brought in pop culture expert Dorano Fear.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
I'm a horror fan. I like to compare the historical
relevance of horror and how it affects society's deepest fears.
And it's always been a reflection because what happens in
our real world then inspires horror, and it's been going on,
you know, since the twenties, the event of film. How So,
(18:38):
during the time of post World War One, it was
the rise of German expressionism. So that's when we got
movies in the Silent era that were like Nosferatu or
The Cabinet of Doctor Kilgary, which explored themes of madness,
extential dread, the unknown. Horror has always gone into the
darker themes, and if you look at classic horror movies
like Frankenstein, it was the people that turned on the monster,
(19:01):
but the monster wasn't the epitome of evil. And when
you really look a decade by decade. You know, the
fifties brought about like a Cold War paranoia, and pop
culture reflected that instantly. It caught up to it, like
in real time. And then the biggest movies of that
decade were things like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or
(19:21):
The Day the Earth Shirt. Still and by the way,
this is a global thing. This is not an American thing,
because you know, Japan released Godzilla and that was you know,
until this day. These are icons of pop culture heroism
and fear. Now you get into a whole other era
when you get into the sixties and we start dealing
with like the Civil Rights movement is social and heaval.
(19:43):
And look, that's where I started getting involved because when
I first saw Knight of a Living Dead, I was
really stunned by that movie because, first of all, it
was George Romero invented the concept of the zombie in film,
it was a terrifying portrayal of this other and this
idea that people come back to life and they are
here to kill you and eat you. But it was
(20:05):
really an allegory because that's a movie about racism. So
it's a reflection in horror and that was the first
movie to really show very graphic violence, you know, and
it reflected social instability and the questioning of authority and norms.
And it was in nineteen sixty that we got the
first real Hollywood serial killer with Anthony Perkins in his
(20:28):
portrayal of Psycho, which was kind of the first time
that American audiences had to face the idea of mental
illness and the idea of psychopathy, which really has stayed
with us since we got into religious temitar like The
Exorcist and The Omen, which, by the way, The Omen
is my favorite horror movie of all time. But that
(20:49):
was also the birth of the real slasher movies. Although
Psycho is considered a slasher movie, but you never really
saw you never saw the violence it was perceived, and
that's what made it so terrifying. Roman Polanski used Rosemary's
Baby as a sort of a view a capitalist theory,
because the truth is is that Rosemary's Baby, although dealing
(21:09):
with satanism and the fear of women and birth and
the non control of their own body, it also exhibited
the betrayal of the people that she loved most for
economic gain, because her husband sells her out in that again,
this is going to be all spoiler.
Speaker 5 (21:25):
Alerts for fame by the way he sells her out
so he can be famous. That's such an interesting theme
that we're kind of seeing there a little bit for
the first time.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Well, it deals with the idea of capitalism, you know,
and simultaneously because socially, women are now becoming standing on
their own and their world of feminism and abortion is
the topic, and the freedom of sexuality after the sixties
and the free love movement. The religious kind of connotation
is that morals were gone. So you then experience the
(21:59):
birth of the slasher movie, the real slasher movies, and
it starts with Texas jamesaw Massacre and Toby Hooper terrified
the world with that. Now that was also loosely based
on a real story. So that was loosely based on
the serial killer Ed Geen, you know, who's murdered people
and he wore their skins, which that theme gets repeated
(22:20):
over and over again, including Silence of the Lambs. So
you're seeing a pattern here of how audiences want to
escape their internal fears or see their internal fears projected
on a big screen where they can process it, which
is very similar of why true crime and the realism
of fear now works because people can't process it in
their brain or imagine the horror of it until they
(22:42):
see it. And then once they see it, it becomes
less afraid because they can process how to deal with
it if it ever comes knocking. At this point in time,
movies still had the Motion Picture Ratings Association had a
lot of control, so they were rated movies to stop
kids from watching it. But that really lost power with
(23:05):
nineteen seventy eight and the birth of Michael Myers and Halloween,
and when you deal with that, now you're dealing with
the concept of true evil in a child form that
becomes an adult and his whole reason for killing goes
back to this moral compass. Why was he killing co eds?
Why was he killing high school kids? Why was he
killing women in particular? And going after the main character?
(23:28):
And the immediate follow to that was Friday the Thirteenth. Now,
the original Friday the Thirteenth isn't Jason Vorhees, but it
is the concept of kids at a summer camp losing
their morals, not paying attention to the children, going off
into the woods and having sex and running around in
crop tops. And the girls are very probiscuous and they
(23:51):
are killed for it. And it's a reflection of the
fears of that time because this was the first time
women really controlled their own sexuality, and it was a
weird signal that maybe you shouldn't maybe you should be
afraid of this because it's immorl And now the creepy
boogeyman in the woods that used to scare you under
your bed as a child is judging you. And that
(24:14):
was a really big leap. And when you started to
see these movies, they also glamorized it because Jason became
a hero to a lot of people. The Halloween costume
of Jason became the number one Halloween costume, followed by
Michael Myers, and societally, we now enter the eighties and
the eighties become something completely different because we get inundated
(24:37):
in the rise of consumer culture. The AIDS epidemic is everywhere,
so fear of disease and pandemic. So it was really
the next level of the explosion of the slasher films
because Friday the Thirteenth came out literally in nineteen eighty
and then you followed things like Nightmare and elm Street,
which dealt with the psychological fears of damage, and that
(24:58):
was in nineteen eighty four, and in a way weird way,
it was also the birth way they started to blend
horror and comedy to try and alleviate some of this
fear and tension, which is why Freddy Krueger in Nightmare
and Elm Street tended to be campy or funny, but
the truth was he was terrifying as a movie monster.
Speaker 5 (25:18):
So any movie that Jamie Lee Curtis, for example, was
in really did sort of speak to the idea of
the popular kids, the ones that were enjoying life the
most and living their best life, like those were the
ones to go first. Is that accurate?
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Well, they always said yes, that it was about the
popular or the outsider's view in so that really I
think the first movie that pops in my head when
it comes to that is Carrie. Carrie was this innocent
girl of a religious family that happened to have this
telekinesist power, and it was the cheerleaders and the popular ones.
And one of the most insane scenes in that movie
(25:56):
was the bullying of Carrie in the locker room by
the other girl, where she gets her period for the
first time, and they pummel her away the tampons and
the humiliation of that, and so for her, Carrie is
a movie of revenge. It's taking pain, the hurt and
the rage and taking out on those that bullied her.
(26:18):
Or you could also flip the script and say who
she might have envied to be more like. So you're
right about that. It was always the pretty, the beautiful,
And yes, you're also talking about the other a campy
comedy horror movie which which if you talk to modern
day director as the reference was sleep Away Camp. And
what's insane about sleep Away Camp in the eighties was
(26:39):
that sleep Away Camp was the murders of those kinds
of people, the popular, the sexy, the coach, the cheerleader,
all of that. But the killer in that was a
transgender and that is also sort of was referenced by
ed Geen, the serial killer from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. What
(27:00):
became the pop culture teen sensation globally was the birth
of the Scream franchise. Scream was a sort of horror
comedy that was based on the tropes of all these
other movies of who dies first, Which answers your question,
you know, it was always like the virgin survives at
the end, and they kind of twisted that on its ear.
And what's pretty interesting about the Idaho massacre is that
(27:24):
it has certain similarities to the serial killer Danny Rollins
of the nineteen ninety University of Florida killings in Gainesville.
You know, he killed five co eds and he did
it in a kind of a pornographic view of violence
and torture, and the world stopped and were terrified by
(27:44):
the concept that somebody could go and do this. There
are similarities to that because we haven't had really a
college co ed murder spree that was coming from a
place of psychopathy. And that is probably what I think
makes the Idaho massacre most like film Scream two takes
(28:05):
place on a college campus. It's not directly about sorority murders,
but it features a sorority setting, and you know, the
subplot involves murder of sorority sisters.
Speaker 5 (28:14):
So if we were looking at Brian Coberger, because some
of it a little bit, again not accusing anybody of murder,
but there is seemingly a couple of touch points. One
if what we have been told regarding Brian Coberger in
his backstory air quotes is that he was bullied and
he was sort of the outsider, and that likely his
connection to the victims was one from a distance where
(28:37):
maybe he was observing them and watching them as someone
who was looking in and maybe looking in often, which
has some creepy undertones to some of the movies that
you've since brought up. And then just the idea of
a slasher flick in general, it's pretty uncommon from what
(28:58):
we've been told that in a sale would use a knife,
for example, to murder, frankly, anyone, because a it's not exact,
it's extremely messy as you could imagine, and requires a
level of energy and for a very ordinary guy that
seems hard to picture. You only see that in the
horror movies. Where does he fit in this timeline horror?
Speaker 2 (29:23):
It mirrors society's deepest fears. Right, So, now, when you
get into this story, if all of the things are true,
first of all, personally, as an opinion, I don't really
buy that any of it is excusable. And we now
live in a society where people try and justify the
actions of brutality and violence as warranted. In some way,
(29:48):
I think that that is where we get into a
situation of societal collapse. To be honest, because there are
fine lines. There is right, there is wrong. Up until recently,
I would say in the last fifteen years, ten to
fifteen years, we knew who the villains were, We knew
who the monsters were. There is a throwback to what
(30:10):
I brought up with Frankenstein. Where was Frankenstein truly a monster?
But we're talking about psychopathy.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
Let's stop here for another break. We'll be back in
a moment. Stephanie continues her conversation with pop culture expert
Doronto Fear.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
We live at a time of social media where nothing
is real, and every single scroll, every single post, every
single TikTok or snap is fully produced and curated by
the person posting it. We all laugh when we take
a selfie, we go, let me see it, and don't
post it without me looking at it, right, And that's
a very common trait. But when you're curating a fake
(30:59):
world so that other people will see you in a
certain light, it brings about envy For somebody that can't
differentiate between that, it becomes envy watching in you know,
they'll say, oh, well, if you don't have haters you
don't have a life. Well, yes and no, because the
haters can become very dangerous and they don't see themselves.
(31:24):
And the rise of the en cell or you know,
that concept and the unattainability for men and women. Now
that is another question about gender here. Women have always
dealt with the concept of higher standards in media and
pop culture. You know, they've always looked to fashion magazines
(31:46):
and flipped through it and tried to see themselves as
the models, which led to a lot of self degradation.
It's really roughly since the mid nineties where well, I
would say now that that's twenty five years, but where
men have been highly sexualized, you know, with the birth
of Abercrombie and Finch and all of those you know bags,
where it was all sexualized men and you would walk
(32:08):
in the mall and they'd be a shirtless guy standing
outside like inviting you in. That then created the insecurity
that women have felt for decades and decades and decades. Suddenly,
for boys, they suddenly had to look at other males
and realize where they fitted and the hierarchy of what
is deemed his beauty and the crowd that they run
in and who they're with. And an Instagram post where
(32:30):
there is four guys in a pool with six pretty
girls behind them. It elicits of why them not me.
Speaker 5 (32:37):
It's such an interesting touch point because it makes me
think of a couple of things. One, if what Brian
Coberger is being accused of is accurate, Yes, he was
allegedly pinging his phone, had been in and around that
home many many times leading up to the murders and thereafter,
so it implies that you know he is standing outside
(33:02):
looking in from a distance under a street light, allegedly
as again we would see in something very scary. It's
the person of envying something that they may be see
And maybe is it possible that the connection that he
had to one or more of the victims was legitimately
just through this lens of social media, you can see
(33:25):
how that can happen. We develop relationships with people because
we see them often and we do not know them.
It feels real. And if you're someone who doesn't have
an understanding of social cues or other areas to fill
that hole with real friends and family, that layer of
isolation and lonesome behavior or loneliness is really dangerous.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
I think that isolation, loneliness, mental illness all plays a factor.
But these concepts are not new. What I mean by
I don't buy it, I buy it. I believe it.
It's true. I don't think it's an excuse. I don't
think that when you begin to frame the conversation around
(34:11):
and I'll keep it in pop culture terms, sort of
the origin story, that it makes it okay.
Speaker 5 (34:16):
That's so fair.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
I think that if you were to cross reference one
hundred people and talk to one hundred people regarding their history,
trauma is a permanent and pervasive fact in almost every
one of the hundred. Nobody lives an idyllic life. The
concept of how one deals with their childhood trauma or
psychological trauma or abuse, or even if it's just environmental,
(34:40):
the way they handle it moving forward is a mark
of maturity, of evolutionary adulthood. And by minimizing that and
saying well, that's an excuse and that's okay, and it
gives free rein for this. And we see this often
from a pop culture perspective, where again the heroes and
the villains are now being blurred. Where you have, you know,
(35:05):
in the DC comics and the superhero world, one of
the most greatest psychological psychotic killers of all time is
The Joker, and he's specifically a psychopath. He's written as
a psychopath.
Speaker 5 (35:18):
Well, I thought that movie was actually pretty interesting, the
Joker specifically, which is the Joaquin Phoenix portrayal of the Joker,
and it really does kind of give exactly to your point,
an origin story for this villain. I have to be
honest with you. When this massacre first happened and Brian
(35:41):
Coberger was arrested, we were just all like what And
that's the movie that kind of comes to mind is
sort of is it the micro aggressions with mental illness
and isolation? And you know, the Joker had been hit
one too many times or overlooked one too many times,
or left out of the conversation one too many times,
(36:02):
and had had enough and had a wicked relationship with
his mother or some sort of meaningful backstory that maybe
not justified but explained his actions.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
I do think that, you know, everybody wants to know
the reason why why do people do what they do?
Are is somebody born evil? Is somebody not? You know,
I always have to look at everything through a pop
culture lens. It really comes into I've bene of social media.
With social media as being so prolific, it's like these things, look,
they fascinate us. We can't get enough of it, and
(36:36):
so we have this fascination. We have this as a society.
We have this sort of morbid attraction to these things,
which is why horror is sort of the number one
entertainment resource, cheap to make millions of view. They like
the bad ones, they like the good ones, doesn't matter.
That's your key into any kind of entertainment. And then
(36:57):
the proliferation of true crime over the last really ten
to eleven years has been extraordinary, and strangely, women tend
to be the highest consumers of that because they deal
with trauma, they deal with genes. You know, it's funny.
I had a conversation with a man one day who
doesn't like understand this concept, and I said, when you
get in an elevator, anytime you get in an elevator,
(37:19):
are you ever afraid? He said, well, why would I be?
And I said, do you know that women, no matter
who they are, wherever they are, when they get in
an elevator and a man enters, it's not fear. It's
an immediate alert for potential fear, and men don't realize
that that is something that women go through every day
(37:41):
walking through a parking lot, if a light goes out
in a garage, when they get in their car, they
check their back seat. And it's not because they're conditioned
by through crime shows. It's because it is a fact
for them from childhood. And I think that's why women
consume this, because they want to know, They want to
know what to look for, they want to know how
to protect themselves.
Speaker 5 (38:02):
One question, though, so does that mean just looking at
that so well? I might ed so well said? Is
are women scared in the elevator because they've seen Psycho
too many times? Or because they've seen women being murdered
endlessly in horror films or in scary movies throughout the times?
(38:23):
And now true crime is having this surge because we've
all lost our minds? Or is it because we really
think it's important to share stories so that we can
keep ourselves safe and look out for each other. And
I believe you can't protect yourself against the boogeyman if
you don't know the boogeyman exists, and that people don't
(38:44):
heal alone.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Well, it's a reflection. It's a reflection of the times.
I think that women feel like they're prey, and in
a lot of ways they are. I think it's ingrained
in the DNA, and I think that it's correct. And
I think the fascination with true crime is a symptom
of this. I'm a fan of true crime, but I
(39:07):
tend to like the ones that deal with it in
a subject matter that I can at least escape a
little bit into the humor, like Don't f with Cats.
I thought that the way that that was told was
genius in a the most terrifying story of the most
psychotic killer. And by the way, another one who was
(39:27):
influenced by pop culture, because Luca thought he was Sharon
Stone in basic instinct, he basically embodied her character the
way he imagined her to be. You're tapping into the
concept of compassion and empathy. For the vast majority, there
are going to be people who will zero it and
not hear the compassion and empathy and be aroused by
(39:50):
the concept. And that's the terrifying part. And that's where
mental illness comes in. Now, if he was the main
character from You, and he was stalking and he felt
like that outsider. There's five million ways to look at it.
Did these girls brush him off and reject him and
he felt rejected in want revenge? Or were they actually nice?
Did they say hi to him and he suddenly said, oh,
(40:12):
they love me. So now you go into the two
sides of psychology, which then becomes like, well, so you
can't be nice to a person. You can't look at
us in their eyes. You have to avert them. But
if you avert them, then are you attracting violence? So
there is no right answer. The right answer is to
identify the signs early, the responsibility of family, friends, teachers,
(40:36):
peers to raise the alarm.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
More on that next time. For more information on the
case and relevant photos, follow us on Instagram at kat
Underscore Studios. The Idaho Masker is produced by Stephanie Leideger,
Gabriel Castillo and me Courtney Armstrong. Editing and sound design
by Jeff Torois, Music by Jared Aston. The Idaho Mascer
(41:07):
is a production of Katie's Studios and iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts like this, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hosts And Creators
Stephanie Lydecker
Courtney Armstrong
Jeff Shane
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