The Golden Age of Murder: A True Crime Podcast

The hosts look back on what was explored in the series, their further thoughts on the subject and what reflections doing it has brought on humanity and the specters that haunt our species and our lives together

To those who knew him David Parker Ray was a skilled mechanic and park ranger, the definition of trusty and reliable. To anyone else he happened to encounter David Parker Ray came off as a laconic, trusty buckaroo of the American southwest. He had no criminal history or shady reputation following him as he drifted around the American west in the last several decades of the 20th century, amassing what the world would learn was amongst the most prolific and depraved histories of sexual predation in recorded history. Ray was convicted of the kidnapping, rape and torture of 3 women but is suspected in the disappearances, kidnapping, sex trafficking and possibly deaths of dozens if not considerably more, from the mid 1950's to his 1999 arrest. Ray haunts the US southwest for the entire postwar era, from Harvey Glatman's macabre emergence to the dawning of the new Millennium

Interview with Dr Peter Vronsky, author of "Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present", the book which more than any other has been foundational to informing the development of this podcast series. Dr Vronsky talks about how he developed his theory regarding the historical and neurobiological roots of serial murder, and his chance encounters with two infamous serial killers, Richard Cottingham and Andrew Chikatilo

In the 1980s and 1990s Views on criminal justice shifted right-ward and one reason for this was that serial predators,Kenneth McDuff and Arthur Shawcross among them, were wrongly let out of jail and unleashed once again on the public. McDuff, known as the Broomstick killer, was sentenced to death in Texas in1966 for 3 murders. When the US Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972 and McDuff's death sentence had not technically ruled out parole, a parole board would go on to parole him in 1989 and he would go on to murder at least 6 women over the next three years. Similarly Arthur Shawcross, who had been jailed in 1972 for child murder, was paroled in 1987 and went on to murder 11 women before being arrested again. Along with other causes, these two cases are emblematic of an emerging consensus in the 1980s that the criminal justice system was not doing its primary job of protecting the public from dangerous predators, and helped usher in a period where the US became far more fearful and suspicious of each other

On July 22 1991, in an unassuming apartment complex in Milwaukee, police arrested Jeffrey Dahmer and removed barrels and vats containing body parts of his male victims. Dahmer, known popularly as the Milwaukee Cannibal, has since become a Bogey of popular American folklore for his predation on young men and boys and specifically for consuming their flesh. Between the years of 1978 and 1991 Dahmer killed 17 young men and boys and has entered American folklore as a true bogey of the modern era, though in truth he was in essence no different than the lunatics of medieval Europe or indeed of ancient antiquity and even beyond, reaching back into our atavistic past where we and neanderthals killed and ate each other

In the past 30 years there have been over 500 identified killings along the busiest highways and interstates in the country.  At least 25 serial killers currently imprisoned for murder are truck drivers though the total number is limited only by the length of paved road stretching from coast to coast. The most infamous is  Robert Ben Rhoades, a sexual sadist who kept women in an area of his long haul truck he had outfitted as a torture dungeon. Rhoades is known to have murdered several but is suspected of over 50, maybe hundreds. We also cover Keith Jesperson, also known as the Happy Face Killer, who was convicted of killing 8 women across the country, though he insists the number is 160

Among those victims criminologist Steven Egger refers to as the "Less than Dead" female prostitutes are the most represented demographic, especially those in high risk environments such as in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver or in Los Angeles, where at the height of the crack epidemic the targeting of those in crimed sometimes referred to as NHI, or No Humans involved. Lonnie Franklin jr, now known as the Grim Sleeper, was the primary figure among over a half dozen serial killers stalking black neighborhoods in LA during this time, one of them also being Samuel Little, the most prolific serial murderer on record in US history, who got out of jail in 1987 as the crack epidemic peaked and promptly killed 10 women, though this was but a small part of a minor epidemic of predation on those whose death meant less to society than if they had never lived

Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka are the most infamous criminals in Canadian history, a young couple who in the early 90's raped and murdered at least three teenage girls, the first of which being Karla's younger sister Tammy. Prior to this, between 1987 and 1992, Paul Bernardo was the predatory menace known as the Scarborough Rapist, who had viciously assaulted and raped at least 18. The dreadful crimes of Bernardo and Homolka, the glamorous seeming Disney couple described as "Love's Young Dream" continue to haunt the Canadian psyche to this day. With our guest Canadian English lecturer and writer Curtis Runstedler PhD.

While California may be the serial killing capital of the country the Pacific Northwest, stretching from northernmost California to Vancouver in Canada, has itself seen a great number of serial murderers. 20% of the world's documented serial killers are from this region, a whopping 277 from Washington alone. These include two of the most prolific, Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway. Ridgway, targeting prostitutes throughout the region, was convicted of murdering 49 and confessed to 71 though his total may indeed be higher. Though it is unknown if he killed any in Canada, Ridgway was known to patronize the sex workers of the notoriously rundown Downtown Eastside area of Vancouver where several serial killers were active. Among them was pig farmer Robert Pickton who himself killed 49 prostitutes before feeding their corpses to his pigs.

In the mid 1980's, in a cabin and associated bunker in  the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, ex-marines Leonard Lake and Charles Ng ran a deadly operation of abduction, torture and murder. Using a variety of aliases and schemes the duo killed many to variously steal their identification, possessions or in the case of an unknown number of women, to keep them as captives in a dungeon hidden in the bunker.The remains of 11 to an estimated 25 victims (if not more) were found on this remote property, all in service of enacting a sadistic fantasy Leonard Lake had dreamed of putting into action since he read John Fowled novel "The Collector" as a teenager. To this day the number and identification of many of the victims remains unknown