Serial Killers On The Loose: 2022, Part II

It sounds like something straight out of a noir film -- an unidentified killer goes on a murder spree and vanishes, taunting the cops before disappearing. Unfortunately, this phenomenon isn't limited to the world of fiction. Learn more about murderers who remain on the loose in in the second part of this two-part update on serial killers who, as of today, seem to have escaped justice.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.

(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul.
Mission control decands. Most importantly, you are you. You are here,
and that makes this the stuff they don't want you
to know. Welcome back, fellow conspiracy realist. Earlier this week,
we began our sadly annual exploration of serial killers who

(00:48):
have yet to be apprehended. This is disturbing stuff and
as such it may not be appropriate for all listeners.
In previous episodes, Matt Nolan I discussed the rarity of
actual serial murderers. We discuss the legal definition of serial killers,
you know, the stuff that differentiates, say, a spree murderer

(01:12):
from a calculated murderer existing over time. We have also
looked at corruption and willful negligence on the part of
institutions that conveniently all too often turn a blind eye
to clear patterns, and we all of us hope we
can provide updates to these cases in the future. For that,

(01:36):
we need your help. Please listen closely. This is live fire.
Here are the facts. Let's just kind of throw everything
that you've seen in the media, you know, in fiction,
uh specifically, you know in fiction there's often with shows
like dexter Um, there's a certain glorification of serial killers.

(01:58):
I mean, he's a bit more on the vigil anti tip,
but even you know, there's a mystique and kind of
a mystery surrounding serial killers, like in movies like seven
for example, there they know something the rest of us
don't know. But then I appreciate you leaning into the
the very true um perspective that many of these folks
are severely mentally ill. They're damaged individuals and often are

(02:20):
not uh, the criminal masterminds they're made out to be
um in pop culture. Yeah, even somebody like Dennis Raider,
who successfully evaded capture for so long, dud. It had
nothing to do with his necessarily intelligence. It was more
in a few of the tactics that he had started

(02:41):
to use an employe and that's what kept him and
also being able to take extremely long cooling off periods.
I think that's what kept him from being caught for
so long. And that case is interesting because that individual
was apprehended due to a very simple error, literally sending

(03:05):
stuff that could be traced back to the church where
he worked. And also to compound the stupidity there, Uh,
this guy Dennis Rader wrote to law enforcements saying, hey,
I can send this to you anonymously, and they said, yeah, sure, pal,

(03:27):
go ahead, send it off. And then he got mad
when he got popped because he is, as you said, Noel, uh,
not intelligent. Very few of them are the myth of
a hannibal lecter, isnt nine just that a myth? We

(03:47):
also are going to talk a little bit about sample
size and the problem of figuring out the prevalence or
lack thereof, of actual serial killers. The people are rare folks, thankfully,
but they do exist. It's a matter of fact. There
may be one listening now. We won't know. Um, we

(04:11):
may never know. But you know, to the point about fiction,
maybe the best fictional depiction of these sorts of individuals
is found in the show mind Hunters. You guys remember
mind Hunters on Netflix. I think at two seasons, that's right. Unfortunately,
got canceled. I think it was pretty pricey. David Fincher
does a lot of takes, but uh yeah, really good.

(04:33):
That guy from who played was it Um the King
in uh in Hamilton's and also is in High School Musical,
he played a fantastic profiler in that show. Yeah. Mind
Hunters explores the genesis of modern profiling, and in that show,
the protagonist interview actual serial murderers with the aim being

(04:58):
to see what makes them tick. And in the age
of ubiquitous information, you are only one YouTube search away
from excerpts of interviews with murderers who were caught after
the fact, folks like Lonnie David Franklin Jr. The so
called grim sleeper. I'm saying so called because I have

(05:23):
some serious beef and dilemmas with with the way the
media identifies these folks. Typically, again, they exhibit lower than
average i Q. Right, And the ones that have been
caught are always on a degenerative spiral. Right, It's only

(05:44):
a matter of time. The vast majority, in some way,
you could argue, want to be caught. They want the notoriety,
they want the external validation. Above all, they want to
be important. And this second episode is not concerned with
that demographic. We all need to acknowledge that the conversation

(06:07):
surrounding quote unquote serial killers is unfortunately limited to only
those individuals who have been arrested, were identified, were charged,
if not convicted, of their crimes. So in this episode,
we're asking what about the other side of the equation,
what about the ones who can get away? We're gonna

(06:30):
pause for a word from our sponsor and we'll return.
Here's where it gets crazy. We talked about the surveillance
state all the time on this show, and it is true.
If you are hearing this you live in a surveillance state,

(06:51):
you know you might be listening to this podcast on
your phone. If so, of course, thank you. But also,
your location is there, your your habits are there. You
know your phone knows you the abyss stairs back. So
it may surprise some of us to know that even

(07:11):
today in it is sadly, stupidly possible for an individual
to calculate and successfully carry out a homicide. There's a
brief but disturbing thought experiment we could set up to
explore this idea. Yeah, okay, who wants to take it?

(07:34):
It's solid though, it's solid It's true Ben did write
out this, uh description of how to serial kill. Well,
it's important to to, you know, identify the terms here
so we know what we're working with. Thought experiments here,

(07:54):
manual thought experiment. This is uh, this is in no
way just too real us condoning this. But yeah, but
maybe I think it's important, Matt Noel, it's important for
people to know this, this is plausible. All right, Well,
let's get started. Let's say you are an average individual

(08:16):
and you happen to be mail. You happen to have
an average or so height around an average height, average weight,
average build. Let's say you've got some kind of job
that requires you to travel, and generally when you travel,
it's two cities, cities that have a large population and
probably a relatively high death slash homicide rate. Yeah, alright,

(08:41):
so you're that person. You're the Honda Civic of America, right,
Someone who looks like you is everywhere and you are,
let's say, also tech savvy. You know your phone has
the capability to track you. You know also that any card,
a k on cash purchase you make can also be tracked.

(09:04):
But you also know the statistics. You know that st
Louis has about sixty nine murders per one thousand people
per year. You also know that places like Baltimore, New Orleans, Detroit, Cleveland,
and Las Vegas in that order, suffer from similar rates.
Knowing this information, would it be difficult for you to say,

(09:29):
attend to convention, a large sports game, any kind of
big to do under an official alibi. You're at work,
you know you're traveling, you leave your phone, a k
your location at your hotel, you head out into the night,
go on a night walk. Hey, everybody loves a good

(09:49):
night walk. But let's just say you were UM to
target someone on the fringes of society, like someone who
is without a home, UM, a sex worker, someone who's undocumented,
Folks who lack the kind of support networks UM and

(10:10):
frankly channels that they would even need to report uh
any crime to law enforcement because they stand the risk
of being out in and the prosecuted if they do. UM.
So this is this makes them unfortunately easy prey. So
that means that in this hypothetical, highly highly hypothetical situation,
UM you see it that way, you are identifying these

(10:32):
people as um easy pickings, the same way that you know,
you might someone walking alone at night might be targeted
as an easy mark, you know, for robbery. Um, this
goes further than that, you know, to to It extends
into like more of a big picture kind of like
how is this person going to Who's going to know
if this person goes missing, who's going to say anything

(10:53):
or do anything about it or even find out? How
long will this even go unreported? And you're you're banking
and hope that it will be quite a while, thus
allowing you to get away, get out of the area,
move on to other pastures. Once you get the hang
of this formula, then you kind of get yourself into
a routine of doing it this way, rents and repeat

(11:14):
a cycle. You know. That's why that's why interstates are
so dangerous in certain stretches of the United States and
Canada as well as Mexico, you know, all of North America, honestly,
and when we look at this stuff, we can begin
to assemble a pattern. The mission critical thing here is

(11:38):
for us all to acknowledge that the entirety of discourse
on serial murderers in the West today is based on
the people who got caught right and maybe they got
caught after they died. Maybe they got tied to some
DNA evidence. Maybe they turned themselves is in. Maybe, but

(12:01):
what about the ones who didn't. Uh, let's let's stick
with the interstate idea here. Let's go with some examples.
Let's talk about I seventy Interstate seventy in the spring
of nine two, kind of a long time ago. Now,
there was someone murdering at least six people in the Midwest,

(12:24):
and they tried to disguise these murders as garden variety
stick ups, but they were not smart enough to do so.
Each of these murders that we know of occurs just
a few miles off Interstate seventy. Now, if you are
a fan of road trips, you know that there is
a there's kind of a culture of interstate rest stops, right,

(12:50):
Like we all we've all been on the road and
we see, you know, a big gas station, of flying
j or a pilot or what's really popular are now BUCkies?
You guys hear about BUCkies. Yeah, those they're like really
popular in Texas. But they're like it's like a it's
like a gas station's last slash grocery store slash like

(13:10):
mini Walmart. In the cell y apparently right right, there's
this whole world of people that live kind of in
those gas stations, you know, that's where they stop and
get a shower, that's where they like answer their email,
et cetera. This person, and it does seem to be

(13:31):
one person, was not targeting those population centers. Instead, they
were looking for women working alone in specialty boutique stores. Yeah,
we can look at the first murder that happened on
April eight. The victims name was Robin fuldoer f u

(13:54):
l d A. You are. She was twenty six years old.
She was working at a payless shoe store when somebody
entered that store while she was alone. Besides this person, Uh,
somebody shot her and then put her body in the
back of the storage room or she was taken there
when she was shot. Uh. She was shot in the

(14:15):
store at all out one thirty PM and then discovered
about an hour and a half later during the day
during the afternoon. When you think about serial killings, you
imagine it's at night, it's in some place that's isolated,
and you're in a placement room. Maybe you shouldn't be
right if you imagine yourself being a possible victim of
something like this. You don't imagine it's while you're at work,

(14:38):
while you feel safe and you're just doing the regular
thing that you're supposed to be doing. Yeah, that's right.
And um, you know, he had a particular type that
he was targeting as well. Um, it's particularly focused on young,
small of frame, brown haired women. Uh. In all of
the cases, there was a little bit of cash stolen

(14:59):
possible as a subterfuge, you know, to to you know,
throw investigators off the trail, make it look more like
a stick up, you know, or just you know, mugging. Uh.
And in each case, the murderer targeted these very kind
of niche specialty stores. In particular, he was attracted to
stores with female identifying names, which is very interesting, especially

(15:23):
if they were presented in you know, on a sign
you could see from the street, because that would have
attracted imagine there's maybe some phone book trolling that went
they went into this as well, but maybe just seeing
it from the street would have would have been enough
to trigger a little bit of recon Yeah, there's there's
only one victim that doesn't fit that profile, as a

(15:44):
male victim who was killed while working at his mother's
ceramics store. And to your point, no, it does sound
like the guy was targeting places where he thought there
would be a woman working alone, maybe in the in
the slow shift in the cs the time of the
late afternoon. Investigators do suspect this killer assumed that there

(16:09):
would be a female identifying victim on their own in
the store they ran into a dude killed him anyhow,
and despite extensive media coverage, there have been no leads
on this case as of the time of recording, which means, again,
as we said in our previous episode, whomever is responsible

(16:32):
for this has either been arrested for something else, they're dead,
or they are in a dormant period, because they always
come back, unfortunately, and this leads us to a more
complicated case. If you go about a mile from Interstate

(16:54):
you will see a place called League City, Texas. In
Leagues City, Texas, there's a stretch of land about acres
or so with a very dark reputation. It is known
as the Killing Fields. Since the nineteen seventies, there have

(17:15):
been at least thirty bodies of murder victims found in
this area disposed of. This leads to investigators to suspect.
It is a dumping ground for not one, but multiple killers,
and most of these victims, strangely enough, fit similar profile,

(17:38):
mostly female, identifying anywhere between twelve to twenty five years
of age. And the strangest thing is that law enforcement
has I did conclusively like DNA based conclusively idd multiple murderers,
but still not all. Uh. It's astonishing that this case

(18:02):
doesn't get more investigation, doesn't get more acknowledgement. I can't
even call it a case. It's multiple cases, multiple cases. Yeah.
The location really is creepy. It's got a weird air
about it. It feels like some kind of burial ground
or graveyard. I mean it is literally right, we know
this place where many many bodies were dumped. But because

(18:26):
it was at one time used, um by people who
are trying to get oil out of the ground, I
thought you were I thought you were kind of making
a joke when you're saying it has uh like, what
was it a dark history? Because I was imagining the
oil that is underneath it, um. But to me, it's
the creepy factor of the killing fields is overwhelming because

(18:50):
you're the story as well, the location and the story,
because your mind goes to so many different places when
you think about multiple people using it as a dumping ground. Agree,
because that means we can logically assume that some of
these murderers were at some point aware that there were

(19:11):
other operators involved, right someone, probably multiple people, I knew
that other people they may have never met. We're killing
folks and putting their bodies in this area, and they
went with it and they got away, and right now,

(19:32):
you know, to be clear, folks, this is not a
dan on Texas law enforcement. This is not a hit
piece on law enforcement in general, honestly, because the professionals
there are working with the best information they have. Unfortunately,
they don't have all the information they need, which is

(19:53):
where you play a part. Not to sound too much
like we're America's most wanted or something, but this is
a problem. The evidence is out there somewhere, and it
is quite possible to bring closure for the survivors of
of these victims. I would say, not to soapbox. Yeah, agreed, um,

(20:16):
and uh, We've certainly seen longer time periods past than
this with with some resolution. So here's hoping that that
they do get the justice, at the very least the
peace of mind that that they deserve. Is creepy to
think it is so close to Houston to guys like
it's it's the suburbs of Houston in the place we're

(20:36):
talking about, densely populated area. M This is troubling, troubling stuff.
But we didn't want to end on a nihilistic note,
so we're gonna pause for a word from our sponsors.
Stick with us, folks, we'll be back with something like

(20:56):
good news mhm. And we've returned. Let's stick to the
interstates here in the US, but let's get a little
bit of good news I sixty five. You know, we
can at least bring some closure here. Someone did get caught,

(21:19):
not in the perfect way, and people still died, but
almost like the end of True Detective Season one, someone
got identified and hopefully this brings a little bit of
closure to the people involved. That's right. A gentleman by
the name of Harry Edward Greenwell. For decades UM has
been wandering through Um, Indiana and Kentucky, targeting women in motels. Um.

(21:47):
The search for Greenwell began in nine when the first
known victim, age forty one, was found assaulted and shot
to behind the Super eight motel in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. UM.
Greenwell was a native of Kentucky. He spent time in
prison for robbery UH, and then he worked on the

(22:10):
railroads across the Midwest for years. UM. He died without
answering for his crimes at home UM the age of
sixty eight from cancer in Iowa. So certainly not the
type of and that someone of that level of depravity deserved.

(22:32):
We're not here to pass judgment per se. But it
doesn't seem right. UM. But there is good news because
just this month, right as we record this episode, law
enforcement have conclusively linked his d NA to the crimes. UM.
The I six killer was determined to be Greenwell. So

(22:54):
even though he's not with us anymore and he in
life evaded the law, at least the victims families know
who did it and that he's not out there at
large anymore. I would say the alternative that being the
alternative is uh is far, far worse. Um. It's not
the most comforting news in the world. But there's something

(23:17):
you know, to add to give a little bit of closure,
uh and a feeling of some as semblance of justice
for the survivors. Yeah. And as a side note, when
Harry Edward Greenwell did die at sixty eight, that was
two which you know, when you think about it's been gosh,

(23:39):
I's been nine years since since his death. But at
least they were able to find him, much in the
same way they were able to identify the the Golden
State Killer a k a. The original night Stalker. Um.
I'm really hoping that technology continues, like forensic genealogy and
some of the other techniques, continues to catch people. And

(24:00):
even if it is like this with the case of
the just identifying who the person was, even if it's posthumously,
because it's it's at least that tiny little bit of
knowing or understanding what occurred. Agreed, and here for now
our story pauses, Folks. We would love to say it

(24:22):
ends here, but unfortunately this is not the case. If
you were anyone you know suspects, they may have encountered
something like the cases we outlined this week, and particularly
if you feel local law enforcement has ignored reports, please
do contact us and stay safe. We want to make

(24:44):
sure that we keep eyes on these sorts of cases
because they're real. They're real. It's actively stuff they don't
want you to know. Here's how to find us online.
I'm sorry. You can find us on Facebook where we
have the group Here's where gets crazy. Great place to
reach out to some folks and start to threat about
this very episode. We'd love to hear what you have

(25:06):
to think so much to unpack here in terms of
the future of DNA being used. Take through these these
you know, twenty three and me type tests, and we
know there's a double edged sword with those kinds of things,
and there's a sort of a slipper slope where there's
positive outcomes, but there's also privacy concerns. So let us
know what you think about that. If you don't want

(25:26):
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(25:46):
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(26:22):
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