Timesuck with Dan Cummins

In 1980, a camping trip at Australia’s magical Uluru sandstone monolith turned into an international media storm when nine-week-old Azaria Chamberlain disappeared from her family’s tent. Her mother, Lindy, cried out that a dingo had taken her baby. What followed was a decades-long battle of flawed science, media hysteria, wrongful conviction, and one of the most infamous trials in Australian history.

For Merch and everything else Ba...

Selena rose from an impoverished Texas childhood to become the Queen of Tejano music, breaking barriers and inspiring millions before her life was cut short at just 23 years old. This week, we’ll dive into her meteoric rise, her shocking murder, and also look at the dark dangers of obsessive fandom. From Selena to John Lennon to Dimebag Darrell and beyond, this is the story of when adoration turns deadly.

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On May 19th, 1977, 20-year-old Colleen Stan was hitchhiking from her home in Eugene, Oregon, to a friend's birthday party in the little Northern California town of Westwood. She was picked up in Red Bluff, California by a young couple, Cameron and Janice Hooker, who were out for a drive with their infant daughter. What followed was one of the most outrageous and lengthy periods of captivity I've ever heard of. 

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In 1933, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had his secret police goons round up hundreds of thousands of former farmers and he sent them into Siberia to create labor camps where they would be forced to work. Many would die along the way, including the over 6,000 unfortunate enough to end up on Nazino Island, where innocent people were dumped with no food other than raw flour, no clean water, no shelter, no medicine, and no protection f...

In the mid-1990's, convicted rapist Moses Sithole went on a murderous rampage in South Africa. He would blame his sadistic crimes on being falsely imprisoned for a rape conviction in 1989 for which he would serve four years. But he wasn't, of course, falsely convicted. He had been raping woman after woman after luring them out into a secluded area with the promise of a new job. The same con he would later use to lure nearly 40 wome...

In many ways, America's modern obsession with true crime began on March 1st, 1932, when the 20th-month-old-son of the most famous man in America, aviator Charles Lindbergh, was kidnapped from his fortress of a home. The press would cover the subsequent investigation and trial of the man responsible like the press had never covered a crime before. There was so much public interest in this case, that Charles and his wife would litera...

If you were lucky enough to have gone to New Jersey's Action Park before it closed in the '90s, you probably have the scars to prove it. This place was WILD. And while I understand why there are no longer parks around like it today, I also really, really wish I could've been there. This is a fun one! 

Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com 

Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v

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I have long dismissed whisperings of secret Satanic pedophile networks. But, it turns out there truly is an international group associated with a kind of Satanism reminiscent of 1980's Satanic Panic. It's called 764. It exists online. It's growing larger, seemingly, by the day. It's very real. And it's extremely terrifying.

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The Times Square Killer didn't just kill in Times Square. Richard Francis Cottingham committed at least six murders in New York State between 1972 and 1980, plus an additional thirteen murders in New Jersey between 1967 and 1978. While he primarily targeted sex workers, he also kidnapped women and girls as young as thirteen off of the street. Today we both look at his crimes and also, explore the interesting and seedy history of Ti...

Did you know that roughly a million people in Russia today make their living as some kind of wizard, witch, or folk healer? And that some of the most popular TV programs in Russia in the '90s were presentations of psychic healers and self-proclaimed sorcerers? Russians have a long history of believing in magic, with old Slavic spiritual beliefs surviving Russia's past Christian takeover thanks to Russia's system of dual beliefs. 

Me...

You'll be hard pressed to find a man who stood for his convictions more firmly than John Brown. John was an white abolitionist willing to do more to end slavery than any other man - of any color - in America in the 1850s. It wasn't enough for John to speak out against slavery, or to help freed slaves find freedom through the Underground Railroad. John felt that if slaveowners weren't willing to immediately free their slaves and ren...

Philadelphia's Holmesburg prison, before it was officially shut down in 1995, had been a house of horrors for much of its history. In addition to being grossly overcrowded and its prisoners being subjected to sometimes lethal abuse by prison officials... for over two decades - from 1951 to 1974, Dr. Albert Kligman performed wildly unethical medical experiments on its prisoners. Inmates were burned, infected with incurable diseases,...

Did you know that women's clitoral orgasms have the power to completely transform the world and turn it into a blissful nirvana free from pain and suffering? They don't, but, that's essentially what OneTaste founder Nicole Daedone preached at one point before she went to jail. For years, she put on clinics based around male attendees stroking female attendees clitorises in a very specific way designed to completely transform them.....

Patricia Douglas was a young dancer and an extra working in Hollywood during its so-called Golden Era when she was tricked into attending a party Tinseltown's most powerful studio, MGM, was throwing for the salesmen who were making it rich on May 5th, 1937. At this party, she was dragged into the parking lot and brutally raped by one on of those salesmen. The studio would bury her assault... but decades later her truth would finall...

Eric Edgar Cooke, nicknamed the Night Caller and the Nedlands Monster, was a serial killer who terrorized Perth, Australia from 1958 to 1963. He was incredibly hard to catch, because his MO was to not have an MO. Sometimes he ran over women in a stolen car. Sometimes he shot women. Sometimes he shot men. Sometimes his crimes were sexually motivated, other times purely opportunistic. He attacked one victim with an axe, another with ...

From 1932 to 1972, six hundred poor, black sharecroppers in Alabama were told they were being treated for "bad blood," when in reality, the US government was conducting an experiment on how untreated syphilis affected their bodies, a study that was supposed to keep going until every participant was dead. A study that would've kept going, had a whistleblower not exposed it. 

Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com 

Timesuck Discor...

On June 18th, 2023,  a deep-sea submersible called The Titan operated by the private company OceanGate mysteriously vanished while its CEO piloted four passengers who had paid $250,000 each to visit the wreckage of the RMS Titanic. When it was revealed that all aboard had died when the submersible imploded, the accident was reported as an unfortunate tragedy. And it was. But later, it would be revealed that it was tragedy a lot of ...

In the 1930s, an association of primarily Italian mafiosos and Jewish organized crime gangsters, based in Brooklyn, was formed for the purpose of putting distance between the underworld figures ordering hits, and the people carrying out those executions. This organization would come to be known as, Murder Incorporated. And this is their insanely violent story, loaded with crazy characters and their colorful nicknames. 

Merch and mor...

Did you know that US government is engaged in efforts to close stargates to other dimensions? Did you know that they engage in weather modification? Or that Arizona is part of Africa? Or that NBA players are synthetic robots and that we've all been inserted with nanobots at birth that keep us from being perfect? You would if you went to the right UNIVERSITY!! This is a fun one. Let's get weird. 

Merch and more: www.badmagicproductio...