June 20, 2022 • 40 mins
The hosts of the hit true crime podcast “RedHanded” recall murderous stories from their book and uncover some unanswered questions about the killers’ motivations.
Written, researched, and hosted by Kate Winkler Dawson/producer Alexis Amorosi/mixer Ryo Baum/sound designer Andrew Eapen/composer Curtis Heath/web designer Ilsa Brink
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
What we find in true crime often is when people
call killers monsters. Is this idea that if we can
distance killers from ourselves, from our own human urges, then
we don't have to deal with the reasons that these
people actually manifest, things like no access to healthcare, poor housing,
poor education, These kind of things the society is directly
(00:31):
responsible for.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast tenfold war Wicked on Exactly Right. I've
traveled around the world interviewing people for the show. I've
interviewed some people in person and some from my home
studio over zoom and they are all excellent writers. They've
had so many great true crime stories. Do you want
(01:00):
to tell you those stories with details that have never
been published? Tenfold More Wicked presents Wicked Words is about
the choices that writers make, good and bad. It's a
deep dive into the stories behind the stories. Hannah Maguire
and Saruti Bala are the hosts of the true crime
podcast Red Handed. On the show, they break down cases
(01:23):
that fascinate all of us, and then they wrote a
book based on their extensive research into the motives behind
some of the most famous murderers in history. First, tell
me a little bit about Red Handed the podcast, and
then we'll go into the book, and then let's talk
about these stories. So Handed, how do we summarize your
podcast for the folks who haven't heard it, So.
Speaker 4 (01:43):
If you haven't had Red Handed, it is a weekly
true crime show that now has many offshoots, and what
we try and do is cover cases from a geopolitical, economic,
social angle. So we've always thought, since when we started
the show about five years ago, no one goes around
murdering someone for no reason. There's always reasons behind this,
so we've always tried to sort of get behind that
lens to look at crime in a slightly different way.
(02:06):
And when we started five years ago, there just weren't
that many female voices in podcasting full start, let alone
British true crime female voices, so we were like, hey,
we could do that, and then we did in Serrudi.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
One of the offshoots of the podcast is this book.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Yes, and we decided that the book was going to
be sort of a culmination of all of the things
that we'd learned on Red Handed over the past four
years that we had been doing it up until that point.
So what the book was was looking chapter by chapter
at different factors that lead someone down a murdery path,
whether it's genetics, whether it's their childhood and upbringing, whether
(02:42):
it's sex relationships. Ultimately, it was meant to be kind
of a look at the things that make us human,
make us all human, but how those things get perverted
in the mind or experiences of a killer that end
up with them killing somebody.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Okay, we're going.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
To talk about two cases from your book, Sirrudi wants
to take the first one, the Ken and Barbiekullers.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
So, yeah, gosh, this one, it is so so so
well known. Absolutely, I think it is one of those
ones that just the picture alone it conjured up so
many things that people just became obsessed with this case.
Speaker 5 (03:15):
Understandably given what happens.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
We really tried to look at this book chapter by
chapter and look at different factors that influenced a person
on their road to becoming a killer. And this chapter
that links closest to the Ken and Barbie Killers Karla
Hamalka and Paul Bernardo is of course it had to
fit into our Relationships chapter. So I think one of
the things with Relationships is we really did a lot
(03:39):
of head scratching with this. What were we trying to say?
What was the point we were trying to make in
this chapter? And it really dawned on us that probably
one of the most profound things that can happen to
a person, one of the most profound sort of factors
that influence all of our lives is probably the romantic
relationship that we're in. That person is the one who
(03:59):
you spend them most time with. They can probably shape
your life in more ways than anybody else.
Speaker 5 (04:04):
So we thought, why should this be.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
Any different when it comes to killers, And we actually
found some interesting things out like, for example, Gary Ridgeway,
the Green River Killer, he actually during the time that
he was in his most happy marriage actually almost completely
stopped killing, and when he was in his two previous
very unhappy marriages, he was killing more than ever. I mean,
he does put it down to the fact that he
(04:27):
had the love of a good woman and that's why
he had stopped.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Doing it life circumstances precisely.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
And we also know that a similar thing happened with BTK.
So we were like, Okay, there are the killers who
slow down or stop when they feel that kind of
romantic love. Again, a misunderstanding that people think people who
are killers can't possibly feel love, when obviously they can
to whatever extent they do. Then we decided, but maybe
let's look at the ones where would both of the
(04:54):
people involved in a couple who go to kill have
done that had they not met each other. And it
was the kind of meeting of these quote unquote murderous
soulmates and the route they took together that we wanted
to explore here, and so we picked Carla Hamulka and
Paul Bernardo as our kind of key case study here.
(05:15):
So anyone who knows the case knows that Carla Harmulka
and Paul Barnardo met when Carla was very young. She
was working at the time as a veterinary assistant. There
was an unfortunate incident in her childhood where she threw
a hamster out of a window without a parachute. So, yeah,
troubling behavior from the offset even in childhood with Carla
because obviously kids have accidents with animals, but she didn't
(05:37):
show any remorse for it, which was probably a bit
of a worrying sign. So she meets Paul Bernardo in
a hotel when she's there and I believe her pet conference,
and he just happens to be in the same hotel.
Speaker 5 (05:49):
And for Carla, it was absolutely love at first sight.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
She was very much a woman who was very into appearances,
and I think Paul Bernardo was a particularly as much
as I hate to say, a particularly attractive man in
a very eighties kind of way. So the two of
them get together almost immediately, I believe the night they meet,
they actually go up to the hotel that they're staying
in some allegations, even in front of some of their friends.
(06:15):
So the two of them sort of get on this
whirlwind romance. Paul even moves in with Carla's family, and
everybody can kind of see that there is something a
bit off. He's quite controlling. He likes to tell Carla
how to dress, how to wear her hair, what she's
allowed to eat. Very obsessive, very possessive. But Carla seems
to like it, as far as people around her could tell.
(06:37):
She didn't seem to feel like it was a huge problem.
Then things started to get a bit out of hand.
Paul started to lose interest in Carla sexually after a while,
and so she felt like what she had to do
was keep upping the ante every time they were romantically
involved sexually involved, and pretty swiftly, you're going to run
out of options to keep up with a man who
(06:57):
had a voracious sexual appetite like Paul did, because he
wasn't just your average man, because, unbeknownst to Carla, at
least at the start, Paul was living a secret double
life as the Scarborough rapist, who was a notorious rapist
who had attacked multiple women during the view years that
he had been active, and as a Scarborough rapist, Paul
(07:18):
never actually killed any of his victims. He would blitz
attack women on the street, he would rape them, and
then he would say and make them say incredibly derogatory things.
He enjoyed absolutely the idea of, I believe, leaving a
victim alive afterwards, so that he would know that there
was still somebody out there suffering because of something he
(07:39):
had done. I think to kill them wouldn't have served
Paul's purpose because to him, he was a sadist. To him,
the idea that they were still out there suffering was
more of a turn on than if they were just dead.
So that was absolutely his emo when he was acting
separately from Carla.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
What happens the night that changed all of it when
they kill Carla's sister.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
So it's Christmas Eve and decides for Paul's Christmas present
that year, she is going to gift him her little
fifteen year old sister, Tammy, Hermulka's virginity. So Paul's at
the Hermulka Christmas party. Everybody goes to bed, and Paul, Carla,
and Tammy stay up much later than everybody else. They
(08:18):
slip her quite a few drinks and they lace it
with an animal tranquilizer that Carla has brought home from
the vets. Once Tammy passes out, Carla uses a rag
that's soaked in some sort of ether to keep Tammy
unconscious during the assault, and Carla films the entire thing
and films Paul Bernardo her abelieved by this point fiance
(08:39):
raping her fifteen year old sister, and even more horrifically,
Carla also gets involved with the rape and the sexual
abuse of her sister, and Tammy dies because she chokes
on her own vomit, and then, realizing there's not much
they can do, they just clean her up the best
they could. They dress her backup, take her down to
the basement, and then call the police, and unbelievably, the
(09:00):
police authorities, everybody just says, it's an accidental death.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
What did they think it was? What that she drank
something and choked in the middle of the night.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Yeah, Carla and Paul admit to the much lesser offense
of basically saying that, yes, they had been they shouldn't
have been, but they were slipping her fifteen year old
sister cocktails and that she had just got too drunk,
she'd passed out, and she choked on her own vomit.
Speaker 5 (09:21):
And this was.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Despite the fact that Tummy had a massive burn on
her face from the rag that had been soaked with ether,
and nobody seemed to wonder what that was. They just
said that it must have been because she was lying
in her own sick on the carpet.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
What about the parents. The parents didn't think something. They're
noticing all of this odd behavior with Paul. I guess
they don't think that these two young people are.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Capable of that.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
I mean, if they did, they don't sort of push
for this. Now there's nothing really said about what the
parents think. I think everybody accepts Carla and Paul's version
of events, possibly because it's just the least painful version.
I mean, your daughter's just died. Do you really want
to think that your other daughter and you'll soon to
be son in law, were involve killing her. I'm not sure.
(10:02):
But this passes by and nothing happens. And so after this,
Paul continues his activities solo as a Scarborough rapist, and
together he and Carla continue to kill more girls, and
always the way that they do it. When it's a
girl that they kill, it's always a victim that's known
to Carla. And this is interesting because when men tend
(10:24):
to kill or commit sexual offenses, they usually go after
victims that they don't know, and when women tend to kill,
they usually.
Speaker 5 (10:30):
Tend to kill people that they know.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
And I think that this is what kind of lends
credence to me that Carla was the one instigating the kills,
because she always is involved in the victim's selection and
looking at the victims she chose. It's always a girl
that she peripherally knows, like a friend of a friend
or something like that. And she always lures them to
a place like their house or something like that, because
(10:52):
the two of them move in together after the Tammi incident, possibly,
as you said, maybe there was some suspicion at home.
Speaker 5 (10:58):
They lure them home again. It's very similar.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
They always dose the victims with some sort of animal
tranquilizer that Carla provides, they rape them, and then they
kill them. There is one victim who's only known as
Jane Doe, probably because she survived, who was let go,
but the other girls are all killed.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
I was going to ask that, what do you think
made the change from leaving the victims in humiliation to killing?
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Was it the addition of Carla.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
It really felt to me like when Paul acts alone,
he doesn't kill, He rapes, and he releases because that's
his sadistic side.
Speaker 5 (11:29):
Is what he enjoys.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
But when Carl is involved, apart from the Jane Doe case,
every single victim dies. And we can only theorize about this.
But the only theory that I could come up with
that we wrote in the book was the idea that
was there something linked to Carla's jealousy. I mean, Paul
was raping these women, but was it linked to some
sort of perverse jealousy on her part that these women
(11:50):
had been with her man and she wanted them gone,
she wanted them killed.
Speaker 5 (11:53):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
She brought them to the relationship so she could idea
all of them, but that does make sense. Remind me, please,
of the age difference between these two when this starts.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Is she a teenager or is she in her early twenties.
Speaker 4 (12:05):
She's I think she's seventeen when they meet. She's very
very young, and he's not much older.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
I believe he's in like his early to mid twenties,
so she's still like pre college. But he has a
job at PwC, so they're not hugely a part. But
what you do see is that Paul is very immature
for his age as well, and he also was very controlling,
so it's not surprising that he was drawn to a
girl who was I believe at least five years younger
than him.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
And what was his background? Did you know much about
his family?
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Yeah, his background is a little bit more of a mystery.
But what we did find was that Paul Bernardo, he
was so Karla Hamulka's childhood was very normal, She had
very loving parents, She had a very normal upbringing. Nothing
sort of untoward really happened. The only thing we can
find was the Hamster incident. But Paul's background is very,
very different. So Paul he grew up in a household
(12:53):
where his mum had actually had an affair, and well,
his father was very abusive and his mother had an affair,
and Paul was the result of this affair. But he
didn't know this until he was a teenager, and one
day it sort of comes spilling out of the family
sort of closet as it were. He discovers who he
really is, and then immediately his parents are sort of
(13:15):
very especially his father, very hostile towards him, calling him
a bastard, obviously looking up Paul as a reminder to
him of his wife's infidelity. But his father was incredibly
abusive before this as well, lots of beatings, allegations of
sexual abuse towards Paul's sister in the household, for which
she did take him to court when she was an adult.
But I don't believe he was convicted, so I know,
(13:37):
we can't say that, We'll have to say it was
allegations of But the allegations that his sister made was
that Paul's father used to rape her in front of
the entire family.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
Nothing good going on in that family, unfortunately, And from
a very young teenager, Paul was very sexually deviant. His
diaries were found by his mother and other people and
were obviously came to light after his crimes did. But
he was writing in there things about wanting to abduct girls,
wanting to abduct virgins.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
So a lot of violent sexual behavior.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Yes, he drew lots of pictures of bondage, lots of
very very aggressive sexual behavior from being a young teenager.
And these things obviously coupled with then the frustration and
the rage that he felt, no doubt, the abuse that
he suffered at home. It culminated in him becoming the
Scarborough rapist at a very young age. He started doing
that when he was in his early twenties, which is
(14:31):
again very unusual. You typically don't see a zerial offender
starting to offend with crimes like that that early. Surely
they usually build up to it with things like vandalism,
and peeping toms and voyeurism and things like that, but
he kind of skipped straight ahead to what he wants
to do.
Speaker 5 (14:48):
So that's kind of Paul's background.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
We don't know, or at least I couldn't find much
more that was sort of solid evidence about Paul's background.
And he had a very dysfunctional relationship with his family,
which is why he saw of just moves into the
Harmulka family quite quickly, and then we don't really hear
about his family too much after that.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
So you have a question at the beginning of your chapter,
which is essentially, would either of these people have done
this had they not met It? Sounds like part one
of that answer is certainly yes for Paul, wouldn't you think?
Speaker 3 (15:20):
It's really complicated And we did actually have lots of
conversations about this, And I think that what we typically
see with cereal rapists is they don't often kill at
the start because that's not what really does it for them.
But eventually, maybe after the first time they're caught for
a rape, they usually learn, as horrendous as it is
to say that the way to get away with rapists
to not leave a victim. So I think that Paul
(15:42):
would have eventually started killing, if only as a forensic countermeasure.
But the Carla point is the interesting one because I
really find it hard to shake the idea that he
only killed. All the victims only died when Carla was involved,
and Paul continued acting as a Scarborough rapist after he
started killing, so it wasn't like, oh I love that kill,
(16:02):
let me now try it again and again and again.
As we see with serial killers, he only does it
when Carla's there. But would Carla have killed if she
hadn't met Paul, I don't think so. I think she
would have been She basically has a very extreme personality,
and I don't think she would have ever been in
a super functional, great relationship. The people who knew her
saw her as being quite a difficult person.
Speaker 5 (16:24):
But would she have killed, I don't think so. I
guess we'll never know.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
And I think also the other thing to say about
Carla is a lot of people some people want to
paint her as purely a victim in this as she
paints herself, But things like when she went in to
report Paul, she only did it after he beat her
so badly that her eyes were both completely black, and
she ended up in an emergency room, and when she
went to go and report him to the police, on
her wrist she was wearing a Mickey Mouse watch, and
(16:51):
that Mickey mouse watch belonged to one of the victims.
Speaker 5 (16:54):
That is trophy.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
Keeping behavior if I ever saw it, surely, and by
this point Paul and her were apart. He wasn't then
making her do it for his pleasure or his excitement.
She chose to put that watch on herself. And we
know she was involved in that killed because there's video
evidence of it that was just found too late for
criminal conviction. So she knows what that watch was. It
(17:16):
wasn't like it was just a present from Paul and
she put it on. So I don't know. I find
it hard to buy and I don't really think many
people are saying it these days.
Speaker 5 (17:23):
But Carla enjoyed it, There's no doubt about that.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Tell me the end of this story.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
So they've killed Tammy, she's fifteen, but no one seems
to be suspicious. Then they go on and Carla's luring
women in who she knows, and Paul is sexually assaulting
them and then they kill them. How many victims are
we talking about and then how does this begin to unravel?
Speaker 5 (17:43):
They killed three girls.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
First was obviously Tammy Harmalk in nineteen ninety then they
wait a few months. In the following year, in nineteen
ninety one, they kill a fourteen year old girl called
Leslie Mahaffey, and then they actually wait another year until
nineteen ninety two to kill their final victim, who was
fifteen year old Kristin French.
Speaker 5 (18:01):
And the pressure starts.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
To build, as I think, their relationship starts to deteriorate.
So Paul had always been controlling an abusive towards Carla,
but the physical abuse really started to ramp up. I
think again, because Carla was constantly trying to up the
ante and keep him interested. But I think a man
like Paul Bernardo, he could only be so interested for
so long in one woman, even if it was Carla.
(18:25):
She would do things like and this is a grotesque,
but she would dress up in Tammy's schoolgirl clothes when
they would have sex, and things like this. She was
trying everything she could to keep him interested. But I
think he started to slip. Their relationship became more and
more abusive, and as I said, he eventually put her
in hospital after one physical attack on her, at which
(18:47):
point her parents were like, enough's enough. And also the
police was starting to connect the dots because he had
left so many women alive who he had raped as
the Scarborough rapist that one woman actually came forward and
gave a perfect description of him, and the police artist
that drew the sketch it looked so much like Paul
Bernardo that people that Paul Bernardo knew were making jokes
(19:08):
that he looked like.
Speaker 5 (19:09):
The Scarborough rapist.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
So her parents are like, this is enough's enough. Now
you need to tell the police that Paul Bernardo did
this to you. And by this point, obviously the police
are obviously also suspecting him of being the Scarborough rapist.
Speaker 5 (19:23):
There's a DNA breakthrough and they're on to him.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
And Carla knows that her time's up because she knows
that she's been involved in the murders, so she gives
him up very much in order to save herself. And
the surprising thing is she told the police about the videotapes,
even though she knows she's in the videotapes. The unbelievable
thing is that the police don't find the videotapes. Yeah,
they don't find them, so they have to go ahead.
(19:48):
They get Carla on some very minimal charges.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
So there is no other evidence other than.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
They had DNA because when Paul had been committing the rapes,
they had DNA from that. It was just that when
they took his DNA sart It's something ridiculous, like they
took Paul Bernardo's DNA sample and it sat there for
years not being tested because they took so many DNA
samples from all the men in the area that they
didn't actually work their way through them. So eventually DNA's
starting to connect Paul to the crimes, and the police
(20:16):
need Carla to basically work with them. She was going
to be their star witness in the Paul Bernardo case.
So she gets a very very lenient sentence and she's
actually free today and she's not even on the sex
offenders registry.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
What How's that possible?
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Because she wasn't convicted of a sexually related charge, so
she was never put because they found the tapes of
her sexually assaulting her own sister after she had already
been convicted. And she basically apparently now even works with
children in schools, So that's pretty horrifying. But Paul Bernardo,
he was convicted and he's very much in jail.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Ianna, you can jump in on this too. Did you
guys both discuss this together? You discussed this together and
concluded what that it was likely that Paul was going
to continue on with or without a partner, but that
Carla was a big old question mark. You certainly can
have psychopathy. You could certainly be a sociopath and never
be violent. What we're wondering, right is would she have
(21:13):
been capable of doing this on her own? And we
just aren't sure.
Speaker 4 (21:17):
I think yes, She's a lot of things, a question
mark being one of them. I think what so often
happens in true crime is that when there are couple killers,
which is rare, our go to is that, oh, actually,
the woman must be under the spell of this horrendous
man and she's just either doing what she's told or
trying to impress him, or so desperately overwhelmed with how
(21:37):
much of a bad.
Speaker 5 (21:38):
Boy he is that she can't help herself. I don't
think that's Carla at all.
Speaker 4 (21:41):
I think it's we are trained to perceive women as
being so submissive that they couldn't possibly have the idea
on their own. Do I think she would have killed
without paul I don't think. I'm completely convinced. It's a no.
Speaker 5 (21:53):
I totally agree with her. I think Paula got there eventually.
Speaker 4 (21:55):
But I think we're too quick to write women off
as drivers of violent crime.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
I agree.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
It sounds like she would have been someone who would
have had maybe some kind of violence in her life.
It might not have been sexual assaults and murders, but something,
So it is concerning that she's out.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
I agree.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Yeah, I agree, because I think once she got a
taste for it, I think she realized how much she
enjoyed it, and she kept going. And I think if
she'd have got a taste for it outside of Pool,
the same thing would have happened.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Okay, let's move on to a different chapter. We've covered
couple killers. Now let's talk about a really unique case,
the toy box killer. Except he was never actually convicted
of killing anyone, right, Hannah, tell me about that case.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
So Stavid parkeray the toy box killer, and we, obviously
for Red Handed, have for the last five years been
eyes deep and really quite horrific stuff. But this is
the only one I ever dreamed about. Oh, like when
we first covered this on the show years ago, Like,
I have fully had nightmares for about a week, and
I think, for me, what is so horrendous about it
(23:10):
is that there's a woman whose name is Kelly Garrett.
She's very young, she gets married, and then after her wedding,
immediately after her wedding, she goes missing for three days.
Speaker 5 (23:20):
It's kind of.
Speaker 4 (23:20):
In the middle of nowhere, but it's in between Elephant Butte,
New Mexico and Truth or Consequences New Mexico.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
That is in the middle of nowhere, Okay, And she
goes missing.
Speaker 4 (23:31):
Yeah, so she just disappears, and then she's delivered back
to her house and her disgruntled husband and she's been
gone for three days, and he's like, where have you been?
I have been like through the roof, worried about you.
Where have you been? You've gone off, You've cheated on me.
She was like, I don't know.
Speaker 5 (23:45):
I can't tell you. I don't know where I've been.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
They get divorced, move on, and then years and years
and years later everything unravels with the case and there's
a videotape recovered from David Parkrey's property, and on the videotape,
it's a videotape of a woman being like brutally tortured
inside we call them caravans, you guys call them trailers,
and it's like kitted out as this like torture Dundon
(24:09):
And there's a CCTV video footage of this woman just
being defiled. And the woman in the videotape has a
very distinctive tribal swan tattoo on her calf. And parts
of this tape are released to try and identify this woman,
and Kelly sees it and she says, that's me.
Speaker 5 (24:25):
That's where I was.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
She didn't remember any of this.
Speaker 5 (24:28):
None of it. She had no idea where she had been.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Is this the right place to introduce David Parker Ray
and what we know about him exactly?
Speaker 4 (24:36):
David Parker Ray is frustrating for multiple reasons. Firstly because
he got away with it, and secondly, we just don't
know that much. It's estimated that he had up to
sixty victims.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
He went after less visible people like sex workers or
people just passing through, or homeless women or.
Speaker 5 (24:52):
Any of those.
Speaker 4 (24:53):
The less dead was his absolute target. The only reason
that anyone got on to him in the first place
was because one woman got away and she was running
down the street in Elephant Butte with a chain around
her neck in the middle of the day, completely naked.
Cynthia Vigil's her name, So that's the only reason the
police had any attention drawn to the situation at all.
(25:14):
But nothing really happens for quite some time. But what
he was doing was he had an array of accomplices,
including his daughter, his wife, his cousin Wow, and they
would pick up girls for him, essentially from a local bar,
deliver them to him in his trailer torture caravan. Did
he call it the toolbox or Satan's Den? Satan's Den
(25:35):
is what it said on the wall. Yeah, And he
would drug these women with essentially a central nervous system
depressant to make them forget, and some of them would
remember some things and some of them would remember absolutely nothing.
So he would drug them. He would leave them in
like a locked cupboard essentially, and then he would play
them a tape of him speaking saying, like all of
(25:57):
the horrendous things that I will not repeat, and then
he drugs them and then tortures them for as long
as he wants to and either lets them go or
one would presume they die.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
And that's the thing is, like, you actually don't know
how many victims he killed because there's just no set
number on how many people this actually happened to.
Speaker 5 (26:14):
And he got away with it. Yeah, yeah, totally scot free.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
What I don't understand is what motivation does his family
have to help, especially two women. Are they intimidated by him?
Speaker 4 (26:25):
The daughter, I think it was just an incredibly abusive
relationship and she just wanted to impress her dad. His wife,
Cindy Hendy, I think she was involved in it to
a lesser extent than someone like Karla Harmlker, but she
absolutely knew it was going on and didn't say anything.
Whether that's because she was scared of him. He was
a very domineering character, though.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
I think in any things you watch of him being
interviewed or if you watch his trial, it's very terrifying.
He is a terrifying man, and I think that stands
alone from even knowing what he did. He is a
very authoritative person. When you're looking at him, you would
be scared of this guy. And I think just looking
at his childhood, you kind of see where that because
(27:04):
he is a through and through sexual sadist, and I
think the reason we put him in the sex chapter
was that we really wanted to explain to people exactly
what a sexual sadist was and David Parker Ray, even
though we could have a pinpoint whether he'd killed anybody,
which he probably absolutely did, because you can't commit the
kind of violent offenses he was committing against individuals and
not accidentally at least kill some people, but that was
(27:25):
never really his end goal. And if you look back
at his childhood, he basically had a very violent upbringing.
His grandfather was an alcoholic who beat him almost every
single day, and he would cut out magazines from his
granddad's porn magazines.
Speaker 5 (27:39):
That were given to him. He didn't find them, they
were given.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Yeah wow, as part of his like becoming a man
from his grandfather, and he would cut all of these
pornographic images out of these magazines and then paste them
together in kind of just grotesque collages as a child.
So I think, obviously not everybody who faces trauma like
he did as a child goes on to develop sexual satism.
But I think at some point for David parkeray, violence
(28:06):
and sex and pleasure meshed together in a way that
he could never then pull apart again, and he leant
into it as hard as he possibly could.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
Let's pause here for a second, because I do want
to know a little bit about how this unravels for
him and the trial and how he.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
Gets away with this.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
But listening to these two stories that you're telling me,
and they're both terrible, and you had to write about
them and do research, and I just can't bring myself
to pick stories like that. My first book was about
John Reginald Christy, who was in your neck of the
woods from Timrillington place, oh yeah, who murdered all these women.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
And stashed them all over.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
That was pretty traumatizing for me to write, especially because
it involved, you know, the death.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
Of a little girl. And I have just said I can't.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
I don't think I can do those kinds of stories
as a really big project where I have to spend
a lot of time and research on them. So you're
talking about nightmares and all of that. Does any of
this put you off of true crime these particular kinds
of stories. Is it more difficult?
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Well for you? Moving forward now that You've had to
do this research for the book.
Speaker 4 (29:03):
It's an occupational hazard, and I think it's something that
people ask us often of like, oh, yah, how does
it impact your mental health and all of that sort
of stuff. I like, what it kind of doesn't. What
impacts our mental health is being stressed and not having
any sleep and people abusing us on the internet.
Speaker 5 (29:17):
Like that's the hard bit.
Speaker 4 (29:18):
Like the research and the reading is really really interesting.
But I think for both of us we just have
such a like insatiable fascination for how people work and
crucially what makes people frightened?
Speaker 5 (29:29):
Like what are we as humans afraid of?
Speaker 4 (29:32):
That even if we tried to step away from true crime,
I don't think we'd be able to.
Speaker 5 (29:37):
Yeah, no, I would agree.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
I think there's a lot of horrible stuff that happens
in the world all the time, and I think that,
like many people, Hannah and I are drawn to the
darker side of human behavior. Really, that was the key
point of the book as well. It's like looking at
the perversion of all of these very human things and
looking at the kind of extremes of human behavior. That's
what we're really interested in. It's not just like, oh,
getting off on this particular murder, but it's so gruesome.
(30:01):
It's like this idea of how what could possess a
person to do this? And again coming back to the
fact that there is no simple answer. Yes, with David
Parker Ray, you can say he was abused by his
granddad and all of these things, but that happens to
a lot of people who.
Speaker 5 (30:15):
Don't go on to do what he did. Right, Why
did he do it?
Speaker 3 (30:18):
And I think we'll never have the answer, of course not,
but I think for both Hannah and I, the intellectual
curiosity that we have towards these things trumps our fear
of them is probably why we keep going.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Okay, so back to David Parker Ray, Henna, tell me
what happens next.
Speaker 4 (30:35):
What happened is eventually David Parker Ray is put on
trial for crimes against Cynthia Vigil, who's the lady who's
running down the street in the middle of the day
with a chain around her neck. And then also a
lady called Angelica Montano who has actually picked up on
the highway by a police officer and she told him
I've just been locked in a caravan for three days
(30:57):
and this guy tortured me and now I don't know
why I'm going on what I'm doing, and he's giving
her a lift. But because she's a sex worker, he
doesn't believe her. He doesn't believe her story. He knows her,
he's seen her around, and he's like, oh, she's just
making up. And then years go by and it all
unfolds and he's like, actually, that sounds a bit familiar.
So he's tried for crimes against Angelica Montana and then
also against Kelly Garrett, the lady with the swan tattoo.
Speaker 5 (31:20):
But the first trial is a mistrial.
Speaker 4 (31:23):
So all twelve counts that are brought against him just
poof gone.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Why what happened? They couldn't agree. I mean, there wasn't
enough evidence.
Speaker 4 (31:29):
Or it was mainly evidence not being kept properly or
being submitted improperly. Okay, So the defense just managed to
poke quite a lot of holes and then eventually it
was a hung jury.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
And that's the problem is that David Parker Ray his
defense was always that those women consentially came to my caravan.
So because they never find any bodies, and the three
women that are linked in the charges, he says, she's lying,
she's lying, she's lying. They were all there consensually. They're
just saying it now because they're embarrassed. It's all coming out,
(32:03):
and that's basically his defense. So it kind of becomes
he said, she said. Because there are no bodies, there's
no proof that anybody was killed, and because these crimes
against these women had happened so long ago, there was
no way to prove what had actually happened. The forensic
evidence was lacking, the evidence that was there were stored improperly.
It was just a myriad of fuck ups basically throughout
(32:25):
the entire thing.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Did they try to pressure his family into flipping on him?
Speaker 3 (32:29):
His daughter, Yes, his daughter. They tried to pressure his daughter.
They it also gets Cindy Hendy, his girlfriend or wife,
to also turn on him. He did actually say that
his daughter had nothing to do with anything, and he
took the rap and he did go to prison for
some very minor charge.
Speaker 5 (32:46):
It wasn't for murder.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
Ray agreed to a plea bargain in which he was
sentenced in two thousand and one to two hundred and
twenty four years in prison for numerous offenses in the
abductions and sexual torture of three young women, So those
three young women, and basically his plea bargain was in
exchange for his daughter, Glenda Jean Jesse Ray basically not
(33:08):
being pursued oh wow, or not being pursued as strongly
for her role as an accomplice.
Speaker 5 (33:13):
I think it's interesting here to look at somebody who.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
Was quite clearly an extreme psychopath, but he still seemingly
loved his daughter because in the end, I guess you
could say that he had nothing left to lose, but
he did only agree that plea deal if they wouldn't
go after her anymore, even though she had helped him
lure young women to their fates.
Speaker 5 (33:33):
And yeah, he just died in prison.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
He served like hardly any years, and he just didn't
have a heart attack in prison.
Speaker 5 (33:38):
And never a murder conviction, just lots of other things.
Speaker 3 (33:40):
Never a murder conviction, Never a murder conviction. It was
just for the abductions and sexual torture. But even in that,
it was only because he settled on a plea bargain.
Had they gone to court, I don't know what would
have actually happened because there wasn't really that much evidence
that they could point to.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
So what did you learn from this case, Why was
he important in the book? I know you said he
went under the sex crimes chapter.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Sure.
Speaker 4 (34:02):
I think the reason we knew that sex had to
go in the book is that it fundamentally drives literally everything.
It's what we're programmed to do evolutionarily, as we're programmed
to procreate. And it sounds like brutalist, but it is,
after you peel back the layers of everything, fundamentally pretty true.
So if sex is such a driving force for everyone,
(34:24):
then it has to be a driving force for killers
as well. And I think what we discovered when writing
the sex chapter was that your sexuality starts developing a
lot younger than many people realize, and people who go
through sexual abusive children absolutely, by no means does that
necessarily mean that everyone who has been abused goes on
to be a killer.
Speaker 5 (34:43):
That's not what anyone's saying.
Speaker 4 (34:44):
But when it comes to a paraphilia like a harmful
sexual desire, when those develop, it is more likely than
not that someone will have had some sort of abusive
sexual disruption in their very early childhood. And then, just
as our childhood shapes all of us because of things
that happened to us, not things that necessarily we made
happen ourselves. It does shape you in the end, and
(35:06):
sex plays a huge part in who we all are
in the end, and for killers it was no different.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Yeah, and we actually discovered during the research that almost
eighty percent of serial killers who are currently incarcerated in
the United States are there on sexually motivated crimes, sexually
motivated kills.
Speaker 5 (35:24):
It's exactly what Hannah said.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
Sex is such a huge driver if we wanted to
understand the way in which it influences killers. And it
comes back to what I was saying about that meshing
together a violence and sexual pleasure in the mind of
a serial killer or in the mind of a sexual sadist,
we should say, because actually for sadists often the death
part isn't really the part that they're interested in. They
want the victim of live as long as possible. And
(35:46):
that was actually another thing we really wanted to kind
of explain exactly what a sexual sadist was, because we
thought there was a little bit of misunderstanding about that
amongst some of our listeners from the podcast. So really
what we discovered was described so well by this gentleman
named doctor Lee Mella and we actually used his triangle
of sexual sadism to explain it in the book, which
(36:06):
is the idea that it's not actually the act of
inflicting the pain on the victim that.
Speaker 5 (36:11):
Gets the sexual sadist off.
Speaker 3 (36:12):
It's the reaction that the victim has to the pain
that's what turns the sexual sadist on. So it's the screaming,
it's the fear. It's the terror, that's what it is,
and the action is actually just a means to impart
that from them. And that's why you can have people
who are into sadism. But if it's consensual and they're
doing it with a consenting partner, that's okay, and it's
(36:35):
someone who's into masochism. But a true sexual sadist in
this sense can never have consent. It's not about the consent.
They can never have that because they would never be
able to find a victim that would be able to
withstand the level of pain they need to inflict. So
it's not actually about the consent. It's just about that
they would never be able to find somebody who would be.
Speaker 5 (36:52):
Okay with it.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
So yeah, that was really the key reason, and we
ended on sex because it felt like the right place.
It felt like we'd reach the peak of human motivators
at that point.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Why do you all think that this is important breaking
these down by chapter and these bits of information that
law enforcement have been gathering for years. I mean, this
is what the FBI did in the seventies by interviewing Edmund,
Kimper and Bundy and all of these people to try
to gather this information.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
But what do you think it is to what ends?
Speaker 1 (37:23):
What can we as listeners get out of this type
of information?
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Is it preventative how to stay out of situations or
spot things.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
I think we've always said it rd handed. We never
have like a grand motivation. We're not going to sit
here and say we're going to save your life if
you read this book, or we're going to change the
world of the way everybody thinks about true crime and
victims and killers. We would never hope to have such
grand ambitions for ourselves. I think the reason for writing
the book was purely as a reflection of all the
(37:51):
things we'd learnt and also as accidentally turned into a
bit of a mythbusting, but also because it felt like
a place that we could put down all of these
things from the perspective of not being experts. So if
anybody reads the book, you'll discover that we're not actually
telling it from the perspective of and we know all
of these things. We're actually trying to write it in
the perspective of people who were going on a journey
(38:13):
of discovery, who have at the start a lot of questions,
who yes, have more knowledge of true crime than the
average person, but who are going on a journey of
discovering things throughout the book. And that's what it was
meant to be. It's really meant to be for people
who are really interested in getting a broad perspective on
lots of different topics within the true crime space, but
(38:35):
not in a watered downweight. We just wanted it to
be from a non experts perspective because we have no agenda.
We weren't trying to say, hey, this thing I wrote
papers on for years might not actually be true. We
were free to kind of debunk anything and question anything,
and hopefully that's what we succeeded in doing.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
On the next episode of Wicked Words, Brandon Presser on
his tree up to a remote island and its murderous history.
Speaker 6 (39:04):
When they arrived on the island the mutineers. Eighteen years later,
eighteen years of solitude, only one of the men is left.
Folger asks this man immediately when he realizes that the
mystery of the bounty has been solved, where is everyone else?
And he says, swept away by desperate contentions.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
Who's going to rule the islands?
Speaker 5 (39:26):
So they all murdered each other.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
My new book, All That Is Wicked is available for
pre order now, including the audiobook. All that Is Wicked
is based on our first season of Tenfold War Wicked.
You might think you know the whole story of Killer
Edward Rulof's crimes, but there's so much more. My book
American Sherlock is also available. This has been an exactly
right tenfold War Media. The producer is Alexisamirosi. Our mixer
(40:03):
is Ryo Baum. Our sound designer is Andrew Epen. Curtis
Heath Is. Our composer Nick Toga did the artwork. Ilsabrink
designed the website. The executive producers are Georgia Hartstark, Karen
Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and
Facebook at tenfold More Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold more,
(40:23):
and if you know of a historical crime that could
use some attention, especially if it happened in your family,
email us at info at tenfoldmore wicked dot com. We'll
also take your suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked
Words
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
What we find in true crime often is when people
call killers monsters. Is this idea that if we can
distance killers from ourselves, from our own human urges, then
we don't have to deal with the reasons that these
people actually manifest, things like no access to healthcare, poor housing,
poor education, These kind of things the society is directly
(00:31):
responsible for.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast tenfold war Wicked on Exactly Right. I've
traveled around the world interviewing people for the show. I've
interviewed some people in person and some from my home
studio over zoom and they are all excellent writers. They've
had so many great true crime stories. Do you want
(01:00):
to tell you those stories with details that have never
been published? Tenfold More Wicked presents Wicked Words is about
the choices that writers make, good and bad. It's a
deep dive into the stories behind the stories. Hannah Maguire
and Saruti Bala are the hosts of the true crime
podcast Red Handed. On the show, they break down cases
(01:23):
that fascinate all of us, and then they wrote a
book based on their extensive research into the motives behind
some of the most famous murderers in history. First, tell
me a little bit about Red Handed the podcast, and
then we'll go into the book, and then let's talk
about these stories. So Handed, how do we summarize your
podcast for the folks who haven't heard it, So.
Speaker 4 (01:43):
If you haven't had Red Handed, it is a weekly
true crime show that now has many offshoots, and what
we try and do is cover cases from a geopolitical, economic,
social angle. So we've always thought, since when we started
the show about five years ago, no one goes around
murdering someone for no reason. There's always reasons behind this,
so we've always tried to sort of get behind that
lens to look at crime in a slightly different way.
(02:06):
And when we started five years ago, there just weren't
that many female voices in podcasting full start, let alone
British true crime female voices, so we were like, hey,
we could do that, and then we did in Serrudi.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
One of the offshoots of the podcast is this book.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Yes, and we decided that the book was going to
be sort of a culmination of all of the things
that we'd learned on Red Handed over the past four
years that we had been doing it up until that point.
So what the book was was looking chapter by chapter
at different factors that lead someone down a murdery path,
whether it's genetics, whether it's their childhood and upbringing, whether
(02:42):
it's sex relationships. Ultimately, it was meant to be kind
of a look at the things that make us human,
make us all human, but how those things get perverted
in the mind or experiences of a killer that end
up with them killing somebody.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Okay, we're going.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
To talk about two cases from your book, Sirrudi wants
to take the first one, the Ken and Barbiekullers.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
So, yeah, gosh, this one, it is so so so
well known. Absolutely, I think it is one of those
ones that just the picture alone it conjured up so
many things that people just became obsessed with this case.
Speaker 5 (03:15):
Understandably given what happens.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
We really tried to look at this book chapter by
chapter and look at different factors that influenced a person
on their road to becoming a killer. And this chapter
that links closest to the Ken and Barbie Killers Karla
Hamalka and Paul Bernardo is of course it had to
fit into our Relationships chapter. So I think one of
the things with Relationships is we really did a lot
(03:39):
of head scratching with this. What were we trying to say?
What was the point we were trying to make in
this chapter? And it really dawned on us that probably
one of the most profound things that can happen to
a person, one of the most profound sort of factors
that influence all of our lives is probably the romantic
relationship that we're in. That person is the one who
(03:59):
you spend them most time with. They can probably shape
your life in more ways than anybody else.
Speaker 5 (04:04):
So we thought, why should this be.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
Any different when it comes to killers, And we actually
found some interesting things out like, for example, Gary Ridgeway,
the Green River Killer, he actually during the time that
he was in his most happy marriage actually almost completely
stopped killing, and when he was in his two previous
very unhappy marriages, he was killing more than ever. I mean,
he does put it down to the fact that he
(04:27):
had the love of a good woman and that's why
he had stopped.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Doing it life circumstances precisely.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
And we also know that a similar thing happened with BTK.
So we were like, Okay, there are the killers who
slow down or stop when they feel that kind of
romantic love. Again, a misunderstanding that people think people who
are killers can't possibly feel love, when obviously they can
to whatever extent they do. Then we decided, but maybe
let's look at the ones where would both of the
(04:54):
people involved in a couple who go to kill have
done that had they not met each other. And it
was the kind of meeting of these quote unquote murderous
soulmates and the route they took together that we wanted
to explore here, and so we picked Carla Hamulka and
Paul Bernardo as our kind of key case study here.
(05:15):
So anyone who knows the case knows that Carla Harmulka
and Paul Barnardo met when Carla was very young. She
was working at the time as a veterinary assistant. There
was an unfortunate incident in her childhood where she threw
a hamster out of a window without a parachute. So, yeah,
troubling behavior from the offset even in childhood with Carla
because obviously kids have accidents with animals, but she didn't
(05:37):
show any remorse for it, which was probably a bit
of a worrying sign. So she meets Paul Bernardo in
a hotel when she's there and I believe her pet conference,
and he just happens to be in the same hotel.
Speaker 5 (05:49):
And for Carla, it was absolutely love at first sight.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
She was very much a woman who was very into appearances,
and I think Paul Bernardo was a particularly as much
as I hate to say, a particularly attractive man in
a very eighties kind of way. So the two of
them get together almost immediately, I believe the night they meet,
they actually go up to the hotel that they're staying
in some allegations, even in front of some of their friends.
(06:15):
So the two of them sort of get on this
whirlwind romance. Paul even moves in with Carla's family, and
everybody can kind of see that there is something a
bit off. He's quite controlling. He likes to tell Carla
how to dress, how to wear her hair, what she's
allowed to eat. Very obsessive, very possessive. But Carla seems
to like it, as far as people around her could tell.
(06:37):
She didn't seem to feel like it was a huge problem.
Then things started to get a bit out of hand.
Paul started to lose interest in Carla sexually after a while,
and so she felt like what she had to do
was keep upping the ante every time they were romantically
involved sexually involved, and pretty swiftly, you're going to run
out of options to keep up with a man who
(06:57):
had a voracious sexual appetite like Paul did, because he
wasn't just your average man, because, unbeknownst to Carla, at
least at the start, Paul was living a secret double
life as the Scarborough rapist, who was a notorious rapist
who had attacked multiple women during the view years that
he had been active, and as a Scarborough rapist, Paul
(07:18):
never actually killed any of his victims. He would blitz
attack women on the street, he would rape them, and
then he would say and make them say incredibly derogatory things.
He enjoyed absolutely the idea of, I believe, leaving a
victim alive afterwards, so that he would know that there
was still somebody out there suffering because of something he
(07:39):
had done. I think to kill them wouldn't have served
Paul's purpose because to him, he was a sadist. To him,
the idea that they were still out there suffering was
more of a turn on than if they were just dead.
So that was absolutely his emo when he was acting
separately from Carla.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
What happens the night that changed all of it when
they kill Carla's sister.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
So it's Christmas Eve and decides for Paul's Christmas present
that year, she is going to gift him her little
fifteen year old sister, Tammy, Hermulka's virginity. So Paul's at
the Hermulka Christmas party. Everybody goes to bed, and Paul, Carla,
and Tammy stay up much later than everybody else. They
(08:18):
slip her quite a few drinks and they lace it
with an animal tranquilizer that Carla has brought home from
the vets. Once Tammy passes out, Carla uses a rag
that's soaked in some sort of ether to keep Tammy
unconscious during the assault, and Carla films the entire thing
and films Paul Bernardo her abelieved by this point fiance
(08:39):
raping her fifteen year old sister, and even more horrifically,
Carla also gets involved with the rape and the sexual
abuse of her sister, and Tammy dies because she chokes
on her own vomit, and then, realizing there's not much
they can do, they just clean her up the best
they could. They dress her backup, take her down to
the basement, and then call the police, and unbelievably, the
(09:00):
police authorities, everybody just says, it's an accidental death.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
What did they think it was? What that she drank
something and choked in the middle of the night.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Yeah, Carla and Paul admit to the much lesser offense
of basically saying that, yes, they had been they shouldn't
have been, but they were slipping her fifteen year old
sister cocktails and that she had just got too drunk,
she'd passed out, and she choked on her own vomit.
Speaker 5 (09:21):
And this was.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Despite the fact that Tummy had a massive burn on
her face from the rag that had been soaked with ether,
and nobody seemed to wonder what that was. They just
said that it must have been because she was lying
in her own sick on the carpet.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
What about the parents. The parents didn't think something. They're
noticing all of this odd behavior with Paul. I guess
they don't think that these two young people are.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Capable of that.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
I mean, if they did, they don't sort of push
for this. Now there's nothing really said about what the
parents think. I think everybody accepts Carla and Paul's version
of events, possibly because it's just the least painful version.
I mean, your daughter's just died. Do you really want
to think that your other daughter and you'll soon to
be son in law, were involve killing her. I'm not sure.
(10:02):
But this passes by and nothing happens. And so after this,
Paul continues his activities solo as a Scarborough rapist, and
together he and Carla continue to kill more girls, and
always the way that they do it. When it's a
girl that they kill, it's always a victim that's known
to Carla. And this is interesting because when men tend
(10:24):
to kill or commit sexual offenses, they usually go after
victims that they don't know, and when women tend to kill,
they usually.
Speaker 5 (10:30):
Tend to kill people that they know.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
And I think that this is what kind of lends
credence to me that Carla was the one instigating the kills,
because she always is involved in the victim's selection and
looking at the victims she chose. It's always a girl
that she peripherally knows, like a friend of a friend
or something like that. And she always lures them to
a place like their house or something like that, because
(10:52):
the two of them move in together after the Tammi incident, possibly,
as you said, maybe there was some suspicion at home.
Speaker 5 (10:58):
They lure them home again. It's very similar.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
They always dose the victims with some sort of animal
tranquilizer that Carla provides, they rape them, and then they
kill them. There is one victim who's only known as
Jane Doe, probably because she survived, who was let go,
but the other girls are all killed.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
I was going to ask that, what do you think
made the change from leaving the victims in humiliation to killing?
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Was it the addition of Carla.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
It really felt to me like when Paul acts alone,
he doesn't kill, He rapes, and he releases because that's
his sadistic side.
Speaker 5 (11:29):
Is what he enjoys.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
But when Carl is involved, apart from the Jane Doe case,
every single victim dies. And we can only theorize about this.
But the only theory that I could come up with
that we wrote in the book was the idea that
was there something linked to Carla's jealousy. I mean, Paul
was raping these women, but was it linked to some
sort of perverse jealousy on her part that these women
(11:50):
had been with her man and she wanted them gone,
she wanted them killed.
Speaker 5 (11:53):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
She brought them to the relationship so she could idea
all of them, but that does make sense. Remind me, please,
of the age difference between these two when this starts.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Is she a teenager or is she in her early twenties.
Speaker 4 (12:05):
She's I think she's seventeen when they meet. She's very
very young, and he's not much older.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
I believe he's in like his early to mid twenties,
so she's still like pre college. But he has a
job at PwC, so they're not hugely a part. But
what you do see is that Paul is very immature
for his age as well, and he also was very controlling,
so it's not surprising that he was drawn to a
girl who was I believe at least five years younger
than him.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
And what was his background? Did you know much about
his family?
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Yeah, his background is a little bit more of a mystery.
But what we did find was that Paul Bernardo, he
was so Karla Hamulka's childhood was very normal, She had
very loving parents, She had a very normal upbringing. Nothing
sort of untoward really happened. The only thing we can
find was the Hamster incident. But Paul's background is very,
very different. So Paul he grew up in a household
(12:53):
where his mum had actually had an affair, and well,
his father was very abusive and his mother had an affair,
and Paul was the result of this affair. But he
didn't know this until he was a teenager, and one
day it sort of comes spilling out of the family
sort of closet as it were. He discovers who he
really is, and then immediately his parents are sort of
(13:15):
very especially his father, very hostile towards him, calling him
a bastard, obviously looking up Paul as a reminder to
him of his wife's infidelity. But his father was incredibly
abusive before this as well, lots of beatings, allegations of
sexual abuse towards Paul's sister in the household, for which
she did take him to court when she was an adult.
But I don't believe he was convicted, so I know,
(13:37):
we can't say that, We'll have to say it was
allegations of But the allegations that his sister made was
that Paul's father used to rape her in front of
the entire family.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
Nothing good going on in that family, unfortunately, And from
a very young teenager, Paul was very sexually deviant. His
diaries were found by his mother and other people and
were obviously came to light after his crimes did. But
he was writing in there things about wanting to abduct girls,
wanting to abduct virgins.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
So a lot of violent sexual behavior.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Yes, he drew lots of pictures of bondage, lots of
very very aggressive sexual behavior from being a young teenager.
And these things obviously coupled with then the frustration and
the rage that he felt, no doubt, the abuse that
he suffered at home. It culminated in him becoming the
Scarborough rapist at a very young age. He started doing
that when he was in his early twenties, which is
(14:31):
again very unusual. You typically don't see a zerial offender
starting to offend with crimes like that that early. Surely
they usually build up to it with things like vandalism,
and peeping toms and voyeurism and things like that, but
he kind of skipped straight ahead to what he wants
to do.
Speaker 5 (14:48):
So that's kind of Paul's background.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
We don't know, or at least I couldn't find much
more that was sort of solid evidence about Paul's background.
And he had a very dysfunctional relationship with his family,
which is why he saw of just moves into the
Harmulka family quite quickly, and then we don't really hear
about his family too much after that.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
So you have a question at the beginning of your chapter,
which is essentially, would either of these people have done
this had they not met It? Sounds like part one
of that answer is certainly yes for Paul, wouldn't you think?
Speaker 3 (15:20):
It's really complicated And we did actually have lots of
conversations about this, And I think that what we typically
see with cereal rapists is they don't often kill at
the start because that's not what really does it for them.
But eventually, maybe after the first time they're caught for
a rape, they usually learn, as horrendous as it is
to say that the way to get away with rapists
to not leave a victim. So I think that Paul
(15:42):
would have eventually started killing, if only as a forensic countermeasure.
But the Carla point is the interesting one because I
really find it hard to shake the idea that he
only killed. All the victims only died when Carla was involved,
and Paul continued acting as a Scarborough rapist after he
started killing, so it wasn't like, oh I love that kill,
(16:02):
let me now try it again and again and again.
As we see with serial killers, he only does it
when Carla's there. But would Carla have killed if she
hadn't met Paul, I don't think so. I think she
would have been She basically has a very extreme personality,
and I don't think she would have ever been in
a super functional, great relationship. The people who knew her
saw her as being quite a difficult person.
Speaker 5 (16:24):
But would she have killed, I don't think so. I
guess we'll never know.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
And I think also the other thing to say about
Carla is a lot of people some people want to
paint her as purely a victim in this as she
paints herself, But things like when she went in to
report Paul, she only did it after he beat her
so badly that her eyes were both completely black, and
she ended up in an emergency room, and when she
went to go and report him to the police, on
her wrist she was wearing a Mickey Mouse watch, and
(16:51):
that Mickey mouse watch belonged to one of the victims.
Speaker 5 (16:54):
That is trophy.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
Keeping behavior if I ever saw it, surely, and by
this point Paul and her were apart. He wasn't then
making her do it for his pleasure or his excitement.
She chose to put that watch on herself. And we
know she was involved in that killed because there's video
evidence of it that was just found too late for
criminal conviction. So she knows what that watch was. It
(17:16):
wasn't like it was just a present from Paul and
she put it on. So I don't know. I find
it hard to buy and I don't really think many
people are saying it these days.
Speaker 5 (17:23):
But Carla enjoyed it, There's no doubt about that.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Tell me the end of this story.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
So they've killed Tammy, she's fifteen, but no one seems
to be suspicious. Then they go on and Carla's luring
women in who she knows, and Paul is sexually assaulting
them and then they kill them. How many victims are
we talking about and then how does this begin to unravel?
Speaker 5 (17:43):
They killed three girls.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
First was obviously Tammy Harmalk in nineteen ninety then they
wait a few months. In the following year, in nineteen
ninety one, they kill a fourteen year old girl called
Leslie Mahaffey, and then they actually wait another year until
nineteen ninety two to kill their final victim, who was
fifteen year old Kristin French.
Speaker 5 (18:01):
And the pressure starts.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
To build, as I think, their relationship starts to deteriorate.
So Paul had always been controlling an abusive towards Carla,
but the physical abuse really started to ramp up. I
think again, because Carla was constantly trying to up the
ante and keep him interested. But I think a man
like Paul Bernardo, he could only be so interested for
so long in one woman, even if it was Carla.
(18:25):
She would do things like and this is a grotesque,
but she would dress up in Tammy's schoolgirl clothes when
they would have sex, and things like this. She was
trying everything she could to keep him interested. But I
think he started to slip. Their relationship became more and
more abusive, and as I said, he eventually put her
in hospital after one physical attack on her, at which
(18:47):
point her parents were like, enough's enough. And also the
police was starting to connect the dots because he had
left so many women alive who he had raped as
the Scarborough rapist that one woman actually came forward and
gave a perfect description of him, and the police artist
that drew the sketch it looked so much like Paul
Bernardo that people that Paul Bernardo knew were making jokes
(19:08):
that he looked like.
Speaker 5 (19:09):
The Scarborough rapist.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
So her parents are like, this is enough's enough. Now
you need to tell the police that Paul Bernardo did
this to you. And by this point, obviously the police
are obviously also suspecting him of being the Scarborough rapist.
Speaker 5 (19:23):
There's a DNA breakthrough and they're on to him.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
And Carla knows that her time's up because she knows
that she's been involved in the murders, so she gives
him up very much in order to save herself. And
the surprising thing is she told the police about the videotapes,
even though she knows she's in the videotapes. The unbelievable
thing is that the police don't find the videotapes. Yeah,
they don't find them, so they have to go ahead.
(19:48):
They get Carla on some very minimal charges.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
So there is no other evidence other than.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
They had DNA because when Paul had been committing the rapes,
they had DNA from that. It was just that when
they took his DNA sart It's something ridiculous, like they
took Paul Bernardo's DNA sample and it sat there for
years not being tested because they took so many DNA
samples from all the men in the area that they
didn't actually work their way through them. So eventually DNA's
starting to connect Paul to the crimes, and the police
(20:16):
need Carla to basically work with them. She was going
to be their star witness in the Paul Bernardo case.
So she gets a very very lenient sentence and she's
actually free today and she's not even on the sex
offenders registry.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
What How's that possible?
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Because she wasn't convicted of a sexually related charge, so
she was never put because they found the tapes of
her sexually assaulting her own sister after she had already
been convicted. And she basically apparently now even works with
children in schools, So that's pretty horrifying. But Paul Bernardo,
he was convicted and he's very much in jail.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Ianna, you can jump in on this too. Did you
guys both discuss this together? You discussed this together and
concluded what that it was likely that Paul was going
to continue on with or without a partner, but that
Carla was a big old question mark. You certainly can
have psychopathy. You could certainly be a sociopath and never
be violent. What we're wondering, right is would she have
(21:13):
been capable of doing this on her own? And we
just aren't sure.
Speaker 4 (21:17):
I think yes, She's a lot of things, a question
mark being one of them. I think what so often
happens in true crime is that when there are couple killers,
which is rare, our go to is that, oh, actually,
the woman must be under the spell of this horrendous
man and she's just either doing what she's told or
trying to impress him, or so desperately overwhelmed with how
(21:37):
much of a bad.
Speaker 5 (21:38):
Boy he is that she can't help herself. I don't
think that's Carla at all.
Speaker 4 (21:41):
I think it's we are trained to perceive women as
being so submissive that they couldn't possibly have the idea
on their own. Do I think she would have killed
without paul I don't think. I'm completely convinced. It's a no.
Speaker 5 (21:53):
I totally agree with her. I think Paula got there eventually.
Speaker 4 (21:55):
But I think we're too quick to write women off
as drivers of violent crime.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
I agree.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
It sounds like she would have been someone who would
have had maybe some kind of violence in her life.
It might not have been sexual assaults and murders, but something,
So it is concerning that she's out.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
I agree.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Yeah, I agree, because I think once she got a
taste for it, I think she realized how much she
enjoyed it, and she kept going. And I think if
she'd have got a taste for it outside of Pool,
the same thing would have happened.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Okay, let's move on to a different chapter. We've covered
couple killers. Now let's talk about a really unique case,
the toy box killer. Except he was never actually convicted
of killing anyone, right, Hannah, tell me about that case.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
So Stavid parkeray the toy box killer, and we, obviously
for Red Handed, have for the last five years been
eyes deep and really quite horrific stuff. But this is
the only one I ever dreamed about. Oh, like when
we first covered this on the show years ago, Like,
I have fully had nightmares for about a week, and
I think, for me, what is so horrendous about it
(23:10):
is that there's a woman whose name is Kelly Garrett.
She's very young, she gets married, and then after her wedding,
immediately after her wedding, she goes missing for three days.
Speaker 5 (23:20):
It's kind of.
Speaker 4 (23:20):
In the middle of nowhere, but it's in between Elephant Butte,
New Mexico and Truth or Consequences New Mexico.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
That is in the middle of nowhere, Okay, And she
goes missing.
Speaker 4 (23:31):
Yeah, so she just disappears, and then she's delivered back
to her house and her disgruntled husband and she's been
gone for three days, and he's like, where have you been?
I have been like through the roof, worried about you.
Where have you been? You've gone off, You've cheated on me.
She was like, I don't know.
Speaker 5 (23:45):
I can't tell you. I don't know where I've been.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
They get divorced, move on, and then years and years
and years later everything unravels with the case and there's
a videotape recovered from David Parkrey's property, and on the videotape,
it's a videotape of a woman being like brutally tortured
inside we call them caravans, you guys call them trailers,
and it's like kitted out as this like torture Dundon
(24:09):
And there's a CCTV video footage of this woman just
being defiled. And the woman in the videotape has a
very distinctive tribal swan tattoo on her calf. And parts
of this tape are released to try and identify this woman,
and Kelly sees it and she says, that's me.
Speaker 5 (24:25):
That's where I was.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
She didn't remember any of this.
Speaker 5 (24:28):
None of it. She had no idea where she had been.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Is this the right place to introduce David Parker Ray
and what we know about him exactly?
Speaker 4 (24:36):
David Parker Ray is frustrating for multiple reasons. Firstly because
he got away with it, and secondly, we just don't
know that much. It's estimated that he had up to
sixty victims.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
He went after less visible people like sex workers or
people just passing through, or homeless women or.
Speaker 5 (24:52):
Any of those.
Speaker 4 (24:53):
The less dead was his absolute target. The only reason
that anyone got on to him in the first place
was because one woman got away and she was running
down the street in Elephant Butte with a chain around
her neck in the middle of the day, completely naked.
Cynthia Vigil's her name, So that's the only reason the
police had any attention drawn to the situation at all.
(25:14):
But nothing really happens for quite some time. But what
he was doing was he had an array of accomplices,
including his daughter, his wife, his cousin Wow, and they
would pick up girls for him, essentially from a local bar,
deliver them to him in his trailer torture caravan. Did
he call it the toolbox or Satan's Den? Satan's Den
(25:35):
is what it said on the wall. Yeah, And he
would drug these women with essentially a central nervous system
depressant to make them forget, and some of them would
remember some things and some of them would remember absolutely nothing.
So he would drug them. He would leave them in
like a locked cupboard essentially, and then he would play
them a tape of him speaking saying, like all of
(25:57):
the horrendous things that I will not repeat, and then
he drugs them and then tortures them for as long
as he wants to and either lets them go or
one would presume they die.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
And that's the thing is, like, you actually don't know
how many victims he killed because there's just no set
number on how many people this actually happened to.
Speaker 5 (26:14):
And he got away with it. Yeah, yeah, totally scot free.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
What I don't understand is what motivation does his family
have to help, especially two women. Are they intimidated by him?
Speaker 4 (26:25):
The daughter, I think it was just an incredibly abusive
relationship and she just wanted to impress her dad. His wife,
Cindy Hendy, I think she was involved in it to
a lesser extent than someone like Karla Harmlker, but she
absolutely knew it was going on and didn't say anything.
Whether that's because she was scared of him. He was
a very domineering character, though.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
I think in any things you watch of him being
interviewed or if you watch his trial, it's very terrifying.
He is a terrifying man, and I think that stands
alone from even knowing what he did. He is a
very authoritative person. When you're looking at him, you would
be scared of this guy. And I think just looking
at his childhood, you kind of see where that because
(27:04):
he is a through and through sexual sadist, and I
think the reason we put him in the sex chapter
was that we really wanted to explain to people exactly
what a sexual sadist was and David Parker Ray, even
though we could have a pinpoint whether he'd killed anybody,
which he probably absolutely did, because you can't commit the
kind of violent offenses he was committing against individuals and
not accidentally at least kill some people, but that was
(27:25):
never really his end goal. And if you look back
at his childhood, he basically had a very violent upbringing.
His grandfather was an alcoholic who beat him almost every
single day, and he would cut out magazines from his
granddad's porn magazines.
Speaker 5 (27:39):
That were given to him. He didn't find them, they
were given.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Yeah wow, as part of his like becoming a man
from his grandfather, and he would cut all of these
pornographic images out of these magazines and then paste them
together in kind of just grotesque collages as a child.
So I think, obviously not everybody who faces trauma like
he did as a child goes on to develop sexual satism.
But I think at some point for David parkeray, violence
(28:06):
and sex and pleasure meshed together in a way that
he could never then pull apart again, and he leant
into it as hard as he possibly could.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
Let's pause here for a second, because I do want
to know a little bit about how this unravels for
him and the trial and how he.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
Gets away with this.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
But listening to these two stories that you're telling me,
and they're both terrible, and you had to write about
them and do research, and I just can't bring myself
to pick stories like that. My first book was about
John Reginald Christy, who was in your neck of the
woods from Timrillington place, oh yeah, who murdered all these women.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
And stashed them all over.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
That was pretty traumatizing for me to write, especially because
it involved, you know, the death.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
Of a little girl. And I have just said I can't.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
I don't think I can do those kinds of stories
as a really big project where I have to spend
a lot of time and research on them. So you're
talking about nightmares and all of that. Does any of
this put you off of true crime these particular kinds
of stories. Is it more difficult?
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Well for you? Moving forward now that You've had to
do this research for the book.
Speaker 4 (29:03):
It's an occupational hazard, and I think it's something that
people ask us often of like, oh, yah, how does
it impact your mental health and all of that sort
of stuff. I like, what it kind of doesn't. What
impacts our mental health is being stressed and not having
any sleep and people abusing us on the internet.
Speaker 5 (29:17):
Like that's the hard bit.
Speaker 4 (29:18):
Like the research and the reading is really really interesting.
But I think for both of us we just have
such a like insatiable fascination for how people work and
crucially what makes people frightened?
Speaker 5 (29:29):
Like what are we as humans afraid of?
Speaker 4 (29:32):
That even if we tried to step away from true crime,
I don't think we'd be able to.
Speaker 5 (29:37):
Yeah, no, I would agree.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
I think there's a lot of horrible stuff that happens
in the world all the time, and I think that,
like many people, Hannah and I are drawn to the
darker side of human behavior. Really, that was the key
point of the book as well. It's like looking at
the perversion of all of these very human things and
looking at the kind of extremes of human behavior. That's
what we're really interested in. It's not just like, oh,
getting off on this particular murder, but it's so gruesome.
(30:01):
It's like this idea of how what could possess a
person to do this? And again coming back to the
fact that there is no simple answer. Yes, with David
Parker Ray, you can say he was abused by his
granddad and all of these things, but that happens to
a lot of people who.
Speaker 5 (30:15):
Don't go on to do what he did. Right, Why
did he do it?
Speaker 3 (30:18):
And I think we'll never have the answer, of course not,
but I think for both Hannah and I, the intellectual
curiosity that we have towards these things trumps our fear
of them is probably why we keep going.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Okay, so back to David Parker Ray, Henna, tell me
what happens next.
Speaker 4 (30:35):
What happened is eventually David Parker Ray is put on
trial for crimes against Cynthia Vigil, who's the lady who's
running down the street in the middle of the day
with a chain around her neck. And then also a
lady called Angelica Montano who has actually picked up on
the highway by a police officer and she told him
I've just been locked in a caravan for three days
(30:57):
and this guy tortured me and now I don't know
why I'm going on what I'm doing, and he's giving
her a lift. But because she's a sex worker, he
doesn't believe her. He doesn't believe her story. He knows her,
he's seen her around, and he's like, oh, she's just
making up. And then years go by and it all
unfolds and he's like, actually, that sounds a bit familiar.
So he's tried for crimes against Angelica Montana and then
also against Kelly Garrett, the lady with the swan tattoo.
Speaker 5 (31:20):
But the first trial is a mistrial.
Speaker 4 (31:23):
So all twelve counts that are brought against him just
poof gone.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Why what happened? They couldn't agree. I mean, there wasn't
enough evidence.
Speaker 4 (31:29):
Or it was mainly evidence not being kept properly or
being submitted improperly. Okay, So the defense just managed to
poke quite a lot of holes and then eventually it
was a hung jury.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
And that's the problem is that David Parker Ray his
defense was always that those women consentially came to my caravan.
So because they never find any bodies, and the three
women that are linked in the charges, he says, she's lying,
she's lying, she's lying. They were all there consensually. They're
just saying it now because they're embarrassed. It's all coming out,
(32:03):
and that's basically his defense. So it kind of becomes
he said, she said. Because there are no bodies, there's
no proof that anybody was killed, and because these crimes
against these women had happened so long ago, there was
no way to prove what had actually happened. The forensic
evidence was lacking, the evidence that was there were stored improperly.
It was just a myriad of fuck ups basically throughout
(32:25):
the entire thing.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Did they try to pressure his family into flipping on him?
Speaker 3 (32:29):
His daughter, Yes, his daughter. They tried to pressure his daughter.
They it also gets Cindy Hendy, his girlfriend or wife,
to also turn on him. He did actually say that
his daughter had nothing to do with anything, and he
took the rap and he did go to prison for
some very minor charge.
Speaker 5 (32:46):
It wasn't for murder.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
Ray agreed to a plea bargain in which he was
sentenced in two thousand and one to two hundred and
twenty four years in prison for numerous offenses in the
abductions and sexual torture of three young women, So those
three young women, and basically his plea bargain was in
exchange for his daughter, Glenda Jean Jesse Ray basically not
(33:08):
being pursued oh wow, or not being pursued as strongly
for her role as an accomplice.
Speaker 5 (33:13):
I think it's interesting here to look at somebody who.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
Was quite clearly an extreme psychopath, but he still seemingly
loved his daughter because in the end, I guess you
could say that he had nothing left to lose, but
he did only agree that plea deal if they wouldn't
go after her anymore, even though she had helped him
lure young women to their fates.
Speaker 5 (33:33):
And yeah, he just died in prison.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
He served like hardly any years, and he just didn't
have a heart attack in prison.
Speaker 5 (33:38):
And never a murder conviction, just lots of other things.
Speaker 3 (33:40):
Never a murder conviction, Never a murder conviction. It was
just for the abductions and sexual torture. But even in that,
it was only because he settled on a plea bargain.
Had they gone to court, I don't know what would
have actually happened because there wasn't really that much evidence
that they could point to.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
So what did you learn from this case, Why was
he important in the book? I know you said he
went under the sex crimes chapter.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Sure.
Speaker 4 (34:02):
I think the reason we knew that sex had to
go in the book is that it fundamentally drives literally everything.
It's what we're programmed to do evolutionarily, as we're programmed
to procreate. And it sounds like brutalist, but it is,
after you peel back the layers of everything, fundamentally pretty true.
So if sex is such a driving force for everyone,
(34:24):
then it has to be a driving force for killers
as well. And I think what we discovered when writing
the sex chapter was that your sexuality starts developing a
lot younger than many people realize, and people who go
through sexual abusive children absolutely, by no means does that
necessarily mean that everyone who has been abused goes on
to be a killer.
Speaker 5 (34:43):
That's not what anyone's saying.
Speaker 4 (34:44):
But when it comes to a paraphilia like a harmful
sexual desire, when those develop, it is more likely than
not that someone will have had some sort of abusive
sexual disruption in their very early childhood. And then, just
as our childhood shapes all of us because of things
that happened to us, not things that necessarily we made
happen ourselves. It does shape you in the end, and
(35:06):
sex plays a huge part in who we all are
in the end, and for killers it was no different.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Yeah, and we actually discovered during the research that almost
eighty percent of serial killers who are currently incarcerated in
the United States are there on sexually motivated crimes, sexually
motivated kills.
Speaker 5 (35:24):
It's exactly what Hannah said.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
Sex is such a huge driver if we wanted to
understand the way in which it influences killers. And it
comes back to what I was saying about that meshing
together a violence and sexual pleasure in the mind of
a serial killer or in the mind of a sexual sadist,
we should say, because actually for sadists often the death
part isn't really the part that they're interested in. They
want the victim of live as long as possible. And
(35:46):
that was actually another thing we really wanted to kind
of explain exactly what a sexual sadist was, because we
thought there was a little bit of misunderstanding about that
amongst some of our listeners from the podcast. So really
what we discovered was described so well by this gentleman
named doctor Lee Mella and we actually used his triangle
of sexual sadism to explain it in the book, which
(36:06):
is the idea that it's not actually the act of
inflicting the pain on the victim that.
Speaker 5 (36:11):
Gets the sexual sadist off.
Speaker 3 (36:12):
It's the reaction that the victim has to the pain
that's what turns the sexual sadist on. So it's the screaming,
it's the fear. It's the terror, that's what it is,
and the action is actually just a means to impart
that from them. And that's why you can have people
who are into sadism. But if it's consensual and they're
doing it with a consenting partner, that's okay, and it's
(36:35):
someone who's into masochism. But a true sexual sadist in
this sense can never have consent. It's not about the consent.
They can never have that because they would never be
able to find a victim that would be able to
withstand the level of pain they need to inflict. So
it's not actually about the consent. It's just about that
they would never be able to find somebody who would be.
Speaker 5 (36:52):
Okay with it.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
So yeah, that was really the key reason, and we
ended on sex because it felt like the right place.
It felt like we'd reach the peak of human motivators
at that point.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Why do you all think that this is important breaking
these down by chapter and these bits of information that
law enforcement have been gathering for years. I mean, this
is what the FBI did in the seventies by interviewing Edmund,
Kimper and Bundy and all of these people to try
to gather this information.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
But what do you think it is to what ends?
Speaker 1 (37:23):
What can we as listeners get out of this type
of information?
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Is it preventative how to stay out of situations or
spot things.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
I think we've always said it rd handed. We never
have like a grand motivation. We're not going to sit
here and say we're going to save your life if
you read this book, or we're going to change the
world of the way everybody thinks about true crime and
victims and killers. We would never hope to have such
grand ambitions for ourselves. I think the reason for writing
the book was purely as a reflection of all the
(37:51):
things we'd learnt and also as accidentally turned into a
bit of a mythbusting, but also because it felt like
a place that we could put down all of these
things from the perspective of not being experts. So if
anybody reads the book, you'll discover that we're not actually
telling it from the perspective of and we know all
of these things. We're actually trying to write it in
the perspective of people who were going on a journey
(38:13):
of discovery, who have at the start a lot of questions,
who yes, have more knowledge of true crime than the
average person, but who are going on a journey of
discovering things throughout the book. And that's what it was
meant to be. It's really meant to be for people
who are really interested in getting a broad perspective on
lots of different topics within the true crime space, but
(38:35):
not in a watered downweight. We just wanted it to
be from a non experts perspective because we have no agenda.
We weren't trying to say, hey, this thing I wrote
papers on for years might not actually be true. We
were free to kind of debunk anything and question anything,
and hopefully that's what we succeeded in doing.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
On the next episode of Wicked Words, Brandon Presser on
his tree up to a remote island and its murderous history.
Speaker 6 (39:04):
When they arrived on the island the mutineers. Eighteen years later,
eighteen years of solitude, only one of the men is left.
Folger asks this man immediately when he realizes that the
mystery of the bounty has been solved, where is everyone else?
And he says, swept away by desperate contentions.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
Who's going to rule the islands?
Speaker 5 (39:26):
So they all murdered each other.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
My new book, All That Is Wicked is available for
pre order now, including the audiobook. All that Is Wicked
is based on our first season of Tenfold War Wicked.
You might think you know the whole story of Killer
Edward Rulof's crimes, but there's so much more. My book
American Sherlock is also available. This has been an exactly
right tenfold War Media. The producer is Alexisamirosi. Our mixer
(40:03):
is Ryo Baum. Our sound designer is Andrew Epen. Curtis
Heath Is. Our composer Nick Toga did the artwork. Ilsabrink
designed the website. The executive producers are Georgia Hartstark, Karen
Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and
Facebook at tenfold More Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold more,
(40:23):
and if you know of a historical crime that could
use some attention, especially if it happened in your family,
email us at info at tenfoldmore wicked dot com. We'll
also take your suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked
Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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