LPOTL (intro theme) There's no place to escape to. This is the Last Podcast On The Left. Rise from
your grave! That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? Oh shit!
MARCUS PARKS I'm ready to go as well, we're all ready to go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI New studio!
BEN KISSEL Ready to do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just three buddies starting from nothing.
MARCUS PARKS (chuckles)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And now we got a storefront in where? Brooklyn, New York. This is what my father always
dreamed what would happen, all right, being out here, being a small time businessman, that is
the New York dream.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And we're covering a man today who was living that dream. He had it all in front of him.
BEN KISSEL Uh-huh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He had a whole empire of shoes in front of him and what did he choose to do?
BEN KISSEL Oh, then we're starting the show now?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What did he choose to do? Snippety-snip, cut the penises off a bunch of little boys and ruin all
of it. How disappointed would your father be, Marcus, if he found out you did that instead,
throwing away a good business?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Extremely.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, I think so. All right everyone, this is the Last Podcast on the Left. I am Ben Kissel with
Marcus Parks. Henry Zebrowski, he traveled all the way from Los Angeles to christen in our
new studio.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh, here we go, look at me! (moans) You see what I'm doing?
BEN KISSEL Uh-huh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Rubbing my fucking asshole on these new chairs.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Are these chairs from a sponsor?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Which sponsor?
MARCUS PARKS I can't remember.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh, wow!
BEN KISSEL Great sponsor, they're a great sponsor and they're very nice chairs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So great. Ooh, I'm getting a tingle rubbing my b-hole against it. Um, speaking of rubbing b-
holes, this story is going to be... I'm going to call it a bit of a whopper.
BEN KISSEL It's a whopper!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a whopper.
BEN KISSEL Um, yes, we are here in the new studio in Brooklyn so if it sounds a little bit different perhaps
that's the reason.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We always do this.
BEN KISSEL We always do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's always like a new sound, a new vibe. It's like each studio is our new like... You know how
Willie Nelson has Trigger?
MARCUS PARKS Mm-hmm.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's like this is our old instrument, does that make sense?
BEN KISSEL Oh, I see, that's his dog.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL No, his guitar.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, he doesn't play...
BEN KISSEL He doesn't play a dog, huh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know those songs where he's got his dog on his lap and he pulls it's dick while it makes
yelps?
BEN KISSEL That's not how you get a dog to sing, c'mon, you give it treats, everyone knows that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, it's nice, but this story is something special.
BEN KISSEL This story is something, uh... It's a bit disgusting. A lot of folks have been wanting us to cover
him for a long time, the fellow we're gonna talk about. His name is Joseph Kallinger.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Actually, this is an underground topic, Kissel. Literally nobody knows what this is.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL No, that's not true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What are you talking about?
BEN KISSEL I've heard you guys talking about this for years.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, me and Henry have talked about it but nobody knows about this guy.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god. So you're telling me that you guys have perverted my brain to the point that I think
everyone knows about this guy?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah! It's called being indoctrinated. You've been groomed to be a true crime nerd now.
BEN KISSEL I swear to god if you asked me, Joseph Kallinger, I thought everyone was telling us to do this
story.
MARCUS PARKS Nope.
BEN KISSEL Well you guys have ruined me. You've ruined my entire mind!
MARCUS PARKS Well, Joseph Kallinger a.k.a. The Shoemaker was a wildly schizophrenic serial killer from
Philadelphia, who along with his 12-year-old son murdered three people and kidnapped nearly
a dozen others back in the mid 70s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Nothing makes me more relieved that I am not impenetrably insane than a story like this. I
know I'm insane-
BEN KISSEL Well sure, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You don't need to tell me how sane I am. I don't need your compliments.
BEN KISSEL Well I am happy that you immediately clarified that with yourself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL Because yeah, you are mentally insane, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But yes, what a relief to not be in the throes of very deep schizophrenia.
MARCUS PARKS Now, we're obviously not saying that schizophrenia leads to murder, nor are we saying
schizophrenics or people with mental illness are dangerous because they, and we, are not!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We are not dangerous!
MARCUS PARKS I am not a dangerous person!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The more you scream that though, the more dangerous you sound.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Mentally ill, yes. Dangerous, absolutely not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Definitely not dangerous.
BEN KISSEL No I feel completely safe with Marcus Parks surrounded by knives. Now, we don't allow guns
around, but knives, I think that's fine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No ranged weapons.
BEN KISSEL No ranged weapons whatsoever!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) But Joseph Kallinger was dangerous. Now, it's hard to say whether or not he would've
been a serial killer without having the delusions there to drive him, but the delusions definitely
had an influence on the severity of his crimes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Certainly didn't help! When you got your delusions literally being as Mickey, right, from Rocky,
going like, 'Get in there Rock, get in there!'
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If you have hallucinations that are doing that, but about murder, that's not the coach that you
need.
BEN KISSEL That's not. Now, oftentimes with schizophrenia people will have delusions of grandeur though,
right?
MARCUS PARKS Mm-hmm.
BEN KISSEL Think of themselves as the second coming of Jesus Christ...
MARCUS PARKS Possibly, who knows.
BEN KISSEL Wasn't that something with you, Marcus? Believe it or not, in the standup comedy world we
know a few people that might have so-called 'mental illness'.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well we have one friend in particular...
BEN KISSEL Definitely one that thought he was Jesus for a while.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He did, he did. He went off the rails. And I actually went and I listened to some... There's one
YouTube personality that does a lot of trying to transcribe the true symptoms of being locked
into hallucinations, both visual and audio, and man it sounds fucking harrowing. It sounds
rough. A lot of that shit, you see photorealistic shit right in front of you, telling you to do stuff
like set fire to your house, which we're gonna go through in this episode. And you're kinda like,
'Yeah!' In a way it's almost like, 'Oh yeah that's real, okay, yeah.'
BEN KISSEL Horrifying.
MARCUS PARKS Well Kallinger was given plenty of chances to get treatment before and after his crimes began.
But time and again, Kallinger was labeled as 'just fine' and got dumped right back out into the
streets.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's because Joseph Kallinger was a proud, small business owner, and I really do believe-
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL You think so?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI There's a part of it that... He didn't let anybody know what was going on inside his head, and
every single time anybody asked him, 'How you doing, Joe? How's it been going? I know you've
been accused of a lot of weird shit, but you seem to be constantly innocent of it. Why is that
Joe?' And he's just like, 'They just want to shut down my business! They don't understand that
I'm trying to pull myself up by my bootstraps!' Because also, if you look at a photo of Joseph
Kallinger he looks like Allen Ginsberg if Allen Ginsberg played for the 49ers.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, he's in much better shape, really not that unattractive of a character. Not by the 70s
standards, anyway.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But all of this shit was on the inside!
MARCUS PARKS Well that's not necessarily true, because the thing is about it... His alias 'The Shoemaker'
actually had very little to do with his crimes. He was called The Shoemaker because Kallinger
was an honest to god cobbler, one of the best in all of Philadelphia. And the thing is, he had a
nickname in shoemaking circles. His nickname? Crazy Joe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs)
BEN KISSEL I love it! When you're crazy by shoemaker standards, you gotta be a bit out there. But this is
what happened before automation. How many people would he have killed if a robot took his
job? The fact that he was busy working a 9-5 for the majority of days of his life probably saved
hundreds of lives.
MARCUS PARKS But on the other hand, the immense amounts of chemicals that he inhaled while working on
those shoes may have led to the bigger delusions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Maybe.
BEN KISSEL So he could literally be a schizophrenic on the stand, screaming 'the shoes made me do it'?
And the judge would have to be like, 'Technically they did.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The judge was getting his shoes fixed by him! It literally happened in the episode! The judge
was like, 'Well he's really good at making shoes.' And he's like, 'They call me Crazy Joe because
I won't stop at anything to make the perfect shoe! But also, at the same time, (singing) oh my
penis will not grow.'
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Oh my goodness, just make the shoes, Joe! Just make the shoes.
MARCUS PARKS But that talent in shoemaking came with a price. Joseph was an uncommonly good cobbler
because he was raised for the sole purpose of shoemaking.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sole purpose!
MARCUS PARKS Sole purpose.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a shoe pun, Marcus, did you see what you did?
MARCUS PARKS Holy shit I didn't. (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wow.
BEN KISSEL Honestly that's the sign of a true genius, just accidentally being able to make pens. Stephen
Wright is a multi-millionaire for doing things like that on purpose.
MARCUS PARKS Well as we know from a certain documentary that was just released, raising a child for a
specific profession while giving them only abuse is a pretty good way to fuck up a kid.
BEN KISSEL And that of course was the recent documentary about Doug Flutey.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Love Flutey!
BEN KISSEL Flutey Flakes, remember that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh I remember Flutey Flakes!
MARCUS PARKS Well you add that single-minded childhood abuse to schizophrenia and you got something
extremely dangerous.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Like that album! Dangerous!
BEN KISSEL It's really all coming together. So many synchronicities...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (hums Michael Jackson's 'Dangerous')
MARCUS PARKS But before we get to the story, let's acknowledge our source today. Our book for this series is
The Shoemaker by Flora Shreiber, written with the full and complete cooperation of Joseph
Kallinger.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a co-production! It's a co-production. Yeah it's me and Flora, but I'll tell you what, Flora
wouldn't exist if it wasn't for me, Joe, small-time business owner. I'm the best at making shoes.
I'm also the best at killing the entire world!
BEN KISSEL I guess so.
MARCUS PARKS Now the book is now out of print due to a lawsuit brought by the family of one of Kallinger's
victims because Kallinger got a 12.5 % cut of the royalties, but it is still well worth picking up
one of the old used copies.
BEN KISSEL Now I would love to see Kallinger on Shark Tank trying to make a deal with Mr. Wonderful,
talking about how he's got a great-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Listen to me, look at your bald head. I got a whole head of raven hair, it's absolutely
impressive, it's absolutely wonderful. Let me take a look at your delicate feet. If I get the angle
perfectly correctly you'll be the king of the universe and if not, I've gotta fucking cut your penis
off, I'm sorry Mr. Wonderful.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL 12.5 % royalty deal. Walking out of the Shark Tank with a deal.
MARCUS PARKS Now as far as serial killer origin stories go, Joseph Kallinger's ranks among the worst. Just like it
seemed as if Richard Ramirez's cousin Miguel was training Ramirez to be a serial killer, it seems
as if the Kallingers were trying to create an evil presence in this world. But the Kallingers were
not Joseph's birth parents. The sources are conflicting on who exactly his birth parents are, but
Schreiber claims that Joseph was the lovechild of Judith Brenner Skirty and a man named Tony
Patelli.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (Brooklyn accent) Ay, they call me Tony Squirts, cause all I do is the fun part of making a kid,
oh!
BEN KISSEL Oh my goodness, a little Andrew Dice Clay for a dad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh!
BEN KISSEL It's not, I mean Andrew Dice Clay as a person is much different than his character.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (Brooklyn accent) Absolutely not, I'm exactly the same, oh! My family is afraid of me, oh yeah,
ho, The Diceman!
BEN KISSEL I saw him outside of a Dunkin Donuts once, nice guy.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) No matter what the story is though, Kallinger was given up for adoption soon after his
birth in 1936 and spent the first two years of his life at St. Vincent's in Philadelphia. Now,
eventually Joe was chosen for adoption by two hard-bitten Austro-Hungarian immigrants
named Stephen and Anna Kallinger. The two of them had immigrated to America separately
but found each other in Philadelphia and were married for 12 years before they decided to
adopt a child just after they both turned 40 years old.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You see, that shows you that life is not over at 40. You can have your kids, you can still, you
can adopt a kid, your shoe making business is still going. I mean what a wonderful, incredible,
hopeful story this is.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Yeah. And of course they met on the really exciting dating app just for Austrians...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh, Strudel Date!
BEN KISSEL Yeah, Strudel Date, I think it was also Cold Beef was another that you could go to and that's
how they found each other.
MARCUS PARKS Well little Joseph Kallinger was not adopted out of any altruistic urge.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh.
MARCUS PARKS Nor was he taken out of any desire on the Kallingers part to form a loving family unit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh!
MARCUS PARKS For the Kallingers, adoption was a practical decision. A necessary evil because Stephen was as
sterile as a mule.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (Austrian accent) And that is how I like it!
BEN KISSEL Honestly somewhere a mule is like, 'I'm actually quite full of it.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (Austrian accent) Every sperm should be corpse!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) See, Stephen Kallinger had already been running a fairly successful shoe making
business in the Kensington section of Philadelphia. But without a child, he had no heir, nor did
he have the free labor that having a child provides.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. Yeah now I guess this is what's called 'old country thinking'. I'm not particularly sure, but
I feel like even on some level like, yes, children were essentially (fart noises) sharted out into
this world in order to help the farm, or the borscht factory or the rock quarry-
BEN KISSEL I don't know, a borscht factory? What kind of place is that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is the old country. Now they have borscht E-Zpass, I don't know what that is.
BEN KISSEL Yes, well, but this really isn't that uncommon. Children worked back in the day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But this was a little uncommon. Because you'd like to think that they'd pepper in a little 'I love
ya,' or give you a hug, or do anything. They legitimately viewed this kid as workforce and that
is it.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. From the moment Joseph was brought home, he began a lonely, solitary existence. He
was never allowed to play with other children and the only physical contact he received was
from the back of his adoptive parents hands. And the Kallingers were upfront with Joseph from
the moment he was able to understand why he was there. "You're here to make shoes."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (Austrian accent) That is why you're here!
BEN KISSEL This really is a horror movie beginning here.
MARCUS PARKS In fact, when a neighbor asked Anna why Joseph was never allowed to play with the other
kids, she said, quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (Austrian accent) He is not here to play, he is here to work. We gave him a home and he must
pay us back.
BEN KISSEL I mean honestly, it must really suck to have a negative relationship when you see shoes.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Because you see every person has two, and then how many people do you see a day?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But you and I have discovered, when you're oddly shaped, shoes is how we can be fashionable.
BEN KISSEL Oh absolutely!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We can go get sneakers and that's fun, and I have a nice, like a normal shoe size, so I can get
many different varieties of sneakers and I take a lot of joy from shoes.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, sure. Just kind of a subtle dig there on my not-so-normal shoes size, but you know, the
internet provides.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We all have different bodies.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) And any time Kallinger disappointed his adopted parents in any way, they had a stock
threat to hurl right back. "If you don't behave, we'll send you back to the orphanage from
which we rescued you."
BEN KISSEL Now I have a question, though. Can you really just do that?
MARCUS PARKS No you can't just send them back.
BEN KISSEL Is the orphanage like, it's a 30 day return policy?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You can leave a kid anywhere. I mean honestly, I know you're not really returning it to the
orphanage, but you can definitely leave a kid outside of the orphanage and then eventually
someone will come scoop him up or he'll get hit by a truck or he'll get put in a garbage can. I
don't know what happens to orphans. I know that it's all bad.
MARCUS PARKS Now of course Joseph got into trouble as all kids do, and the things he got in trouble for were
all normal parts of childhood, innocent stuff. But three incidents in particular led to another
incident that fucked up Joseph for life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI For. Fucking. Life.
MARCUS PARKS Forever!
BEN KISSEL I don't like it.
MARCUS PARKS Now it probably doesn't come as surprise that the Kallingers were staunch puritans in addition
to being tyrannical monsters. So when Joseph at 5 years old came home one day asking what
the word 'fuck' meant... Cause he's in Philadelphia, he's gonna hear the word 'fuck'.
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI West Philadelphia born and raised, the playground is where he spent most of his days. So he's
out there seeing, hearing what these kids are saying.
BEN KISSEL And he didn't even say the word, he just asked, 'what does the word mean?'
MARCUS PARKS What does this mean-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI 'Daddy, Mommy, what does fuck mean?' And they beat him within an inch of his life. And you
know what they beat him with, which is the thing I got thwacked with a couple of times... Anna
Kallinger had the big old wooden spoon from the old country, right. She used to fucking beat
him with this shit. And this was back when spoons were also used to fend off invaders from
your home.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Well they did have a double purpose, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It had carrots so deeply just kind of burnt into the back of it that they were like a gauntlet, just
fucking smashing you in the face with it. But that is what he got beat with quite bit, and a
leather strap.
MARCUS PARKS Mm-hmm, yeah. And they beat him for being a dirty little boy, cause he said a dirty little word.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And guess what that does? That plants a fun little seed in there, doesn't it? Saying, 'You're a
fucking dirty, naughty little boy so I'm gonna beat you with this spoon and ooh, we're gonna
punish your penis.'
BEN KISSEL Well with any luck you just become a chef. But no, this was back when spoons... Remember
when people used to buy things for life?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is what I'm saying!
BEN KISSEL They're like, 'This is our spoon.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is a family spoon!
BEN KISSEL And we don't even look at another spoon when we go shopping, we have our spoon. If our
spoon knows that you looked at another spoon, that spoon is going to attack and kill us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a big, gross, grimy spoon! It's not a new American spoon!
BEN KISSEL I love it.
MARCUS PARKS Well a couple of months after the 'fuck' incident, Joseph got into trouble for pulling a little
girl's pants down. I mean it's a curious, natural thing, kids do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I never did it but-
MARCUS PARKS I never did it either, but some kids do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I guess, good, sure.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) I was told that some kids do it.
BEN KISSEL Well, pantsing, and then everyone laugh.
MARCUS PARKS But again, he was labeled as a filthy, dirty little boy and again he was beaten. The third
incident, however, was not Joseph's fault at all but it had the most dire consequences. When
Joe was five years old he got the shit beaten out of him by a local bully, a girl. And while Joe
was being treated for his injuries it was discovered that he was suffering from a congenital
hernia. Now the Kallingers had assumed that Joe had been beat up by the girl because he was
once more being a filthy little boy. So, while Joe was admitted to the hospital to fix the hernia,
the Kallingers came up with a plan.
BEN KISSEL Oh no.
MARCUS PARKS As soon as they got little Joseph through the door from the hospital they sat him down and
had a talk about his "little bird".
BEN KISSEL Uh oh. If you tell me that they put a face on the spoon and they had the spoon and they were
just like, (high-pitched voice) 'This is Sarah the Spoon, she wants to know about your little
bird.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, dude. It's close.
BEN KISSEL It's disgusting.
MARCUS PARKS See in the Kallinger household, 'bird' was their euphemism for penis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Really? Really?
MARCUS PARKS So they told Joseph that the doctor had not only fixed his hernia, but had also fixed his little
bird. And when Joseph asked what had been wrong with his little bird in the first place, they
told him that a little demon had been living inside.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're not wrong!
BEN KISSEL I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're not wrong.
MARCUS PARKS They are wrong!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean, I know, to do to a kid, but I, I intimately know the little demon inside my bird, but
we're friends.
BEN KISSEL This is like... But he already, obviously schizophrenia, he was probably born with it to some
degree. This is all planting... This is not how to do it.
MARCUS PARKS No it is not. And they further extrapolated by saying that the demon makes your bird get hard
and when it does that the bird makes you do bad things which will eventually cause the devil
to drag you down into hell. So, they told this five year old boy that Dr. Dally, who had done his
hernia operation, fixed it where his bird will never get hard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS When Joseph asked what exactly the doctor did to his bird, his mother said, by Joseph's
recollection, quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (Austrian accent) It is a secret, but you won't have no demons in your bird because your bird
will always be SMALL, SMALL, SMALL, SMALL, SMALL!
BEN KISSEL Well very theatrical for an Austrian mom.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL So they're messing with this kid in every possible way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But this thing, because really it's not even purposeful to him. It's trying to make him this
obedient robot. They viewed him as something that would never grow, almost being like, 'You
are our property, you will take over the business when your father dies, and that's how this is
gonna go. You're gonna be good at this. We don't even really care if you get married. We don't
care whatever happens to you outside of this home because as far as we're concerned, you
won't leave.'
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS And this little bird being small, emphasis on the 'little', is what's going to drive Joe Kallinger for
the rest of his life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Maybe he'll put some spaghetti strands on the spoon, marry the spoon.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Yeah, I mean it was the Kallingers opinion that their adopted son was gonna grow up
to be a sexual deviant, and if he was a sexual deviant there's no way he's gonna be able to run
the store properly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah!
BEN KISSEL That's the biggest problem. I see.
MARCUS PARKS That's the biggest problem.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They don't understand that sexual deviants run most major businesses in the entire world.
MARCUS PARKS So they seriously thought that if they fucked him up in just the right way when he was young,
they could put a stop to all that. But, just as it was with Ed Gein and his mother Augusta, all
they did was make it a thousand times worse. See, right after the conversation about the bird,
immediately after, is when Joseph remembered having his first vision.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Think about how scary this is. You just had this weird ass conversation with your parents
where they're like, (Austrian accent) 'We had to pay a special doctor to do a special operation
on your little bird so that it could never be grown up ever again.' And you're sitting there like...
Even as a little boy you understand the importance of your penis.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, you do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You've been feeling it. It's going like, (whispering) 'Hey, buddy hey, let's get it going, c'mon,
let's grow up, right? Let's grow up.' But then all of a sudden you look into the mirror-
BEN KISSEL That's just, ugh...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's how my relationship is with my penis!
BEN KISSEL Is it like Chucky?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (whispering) 'Go out there and make some money, Henry, really go out there and give it to
them, give it all you got.' But you look in the mirror and all of a sudden your first photorealistic
hallucination just projects itself in front of you.
MARCUS PARKS Mm-hmm. After the talk, Joseph walked upstairs and looked into the mirror. There he saw his
father's curved lip shoe knife floating behind him. Slowly, the knife floated in front of Joseph's
crotch and vanished.
BEN KISSEL Whoa.
MARCUS PARKS Now as far as punishment went, the Kallingers didn't stop with the symbolic castration.
Stephen had a homemade cat o' nine tails that he fashioned out of leather and rawhide
shoelaces that he used on his son on a regular basis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And it was made out of shoe parts. Isn't that interesting? Your own punishment, you're literally
working on shoes all day, and then you get beat with shoe material every single time you say
anything out of line.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And Anna got in on it too. Once, in the presence of a customer and friend who later told
this story to Flora Schreiber, Anna hit Joseph in the head with a hammer four times for asking
if he could go to the zoo on a school trip.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, cause she was like, (Austrian accent) 'What are you doing going to your pleasure monkey
games in the middle of your workday? You should be writing and scribbling, you shouldn't be
seeing the bats, you shouldn't be seeing the turtles!' And then she starts beating him with a
fucking hammer and then locks him in his room.
MARCUS PARKS And another time, both Anna and Stephen together held Joseph's hands over a stove after he
stole a roll of quarters so he could pay other kids to go to the movies with him, cause he was
just that lonely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was a fucking ghost kid.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And if you see pictures of him at that time too, big wet eyes with dark circles around them. It's
like dark, dark hair, stooped, he was tall for his age. Look at Kissel, look at what it did to his
personality.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It turns you into this-
BEN KISSEL I don't even know, I can't make a shoe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, you have no skills either! At least they gave him a skill! This is where-
BEN KISSEL I mean, I can make, I can do, uh... Remember Krusty's? Krusty's?
MARCUS PARKS I have no idea what you're talking about.
BEN KISSEL That's a hell of a pizza. It's a pizza that actually comes in a, what do you call it...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You would literally be systematically eliminated if this turned into a dictatorship. You would be
one of those, it would be like, 'Oh he's chaff, so we can get rid of him.'
BEN KISSEL It's a powder and then you get it wet, and then it becomes pizza dough.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You talking about dough?
BEN KISSEL Krusty's dough, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're just talking about the concept of dough?
BEN KISSEL I'm just saying I can make that.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Well it wasn't just inside the house that Joseph was abused. When he was eight years
old, three older boys orally raped him at knife point in an empty metal tank that Joseph had
been using for personal sanctuary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well cause he, this is a common thread is that he likes hiding in holes. And this was a place he
used to go for sanctuary and then now it's been turned for him by all these fucked up little
boys.
MARCUS PARKS So predictably, when Joseph began to develop sexually at the age of 12, he did so violently.
When he began to feel sexual urges he found that he couldn't help but pair those urges with
fantasies of cutting open a woman's stomach or cutting off her breasts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And when those started making him hard, right, a part of it is that he realized, 'Oh this is cause
the doctor said, always, you'll never get hard.' Because that was what the surgery was
supposed to do. So this thing was helping him defy the orders of his parents in a way.
BEN KISSEL Yeah I don't think the doctor knew what his parents were telling him.
MARCUS PARKS No, no, not at all. But it also added an extra layer, because they told him, 'A demon lived in
your bird, we got an operation to get the demon out.' And so when he started getting hard,
turning like 12 or so, he was like, 'Oh, that's the demon. They didn't get the demon out.' So he
had this implanted in his head that a demon was living in his penis and then the schizophrenia
kicked in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS And all of this was also tied to the fact that Joseph never felt as powerful as he did when he
was holding a knife. Even when Joe discovered pornography he found that he couldn't orgasm
unless he had first stabbed the picture.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ding ding ding ding ding! It's a bit of a (whooshing sound) red flag. He also cut a hole in his wall
using the same knife, which he could only hold in his left hand, cause that was his power hand.
And he cut a hole in the wall cause that's where he would sort of place his penis inside of in
order to kind of demonstrate the action of having sex. And then his father would discover and
come and fucking plaster over it and beat him with the fucking cat o' nine tails.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, and then he'd cut the hole out again, and then the father would come and plaster it up
and he'd cut the hole... It was this weird kind of back and forth thing.
BEN KISSEL Interesting. They did a similar the in the movie Porky's.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, my father's favorite film.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, I know. And then also, they were beaten but by the female gym coach.
MARCUS PARKS Mm-hmm. And Kallinger couldn't reach orgasm unless he was holding a knife in specifically his
left hand. And soon Joseph was bringing those violent sexual tendencies out into the world.
When he was 12 he sexually assaulted a boy in pretty much the same way he himself had been
raped when he was eight years old. Concerning this development, Joseph said that when
normal things should have taken place, this quote unquote "other thing" developed. And that
other thing would only be exacerbated by Joseph's burgeoning mental illness. He said that the
demon that had supposedly been removed from his bird when he was five began speaking
directly to him.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He had audio hallucinations first and they were frightening. And he's also too young to
understand that this shit's not real. So all of a sudden he's just lost in this world of... He knows
nothing but pain and he's obsessed with tiny penises.
BEN KISSEL Right. Well his only friend is his tiny bird, I guess.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, dude. And honestly that's what all boys have when they start, and then you learn to
apply those friendships to humans.
BEN KISSEL No, usually you do have friends.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well yeah, but your first love is your penis as a little boy.
MARCUS PARKS No.
BEN KISSEL No, I think that's you.
MARCUS PARKS No, that's just you. No I did not fall in love with my penis first.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm not in love with my penis, no-
MARCUS PARKS My friend's name was Jason.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI My penis was like my Kramer.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Joe had continued to assault boys in his neighborhood and during one assault he
actually bit his victim's penis after the quote unquote "demon" instructed him to chew it off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And this is a buildup. He had been doing this stuff and also kind of daring himself to go into
this thing... We're seeing this very very early.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But during that time Joseph discovered something that actually seemed to make all
those bad feelings go away. When Joseph was 13 years old he discovered the joy of acting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Theater saves another boy!
BEN KISSEL Oh! Theater can save lives, absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Actors! You know actors are just so stable and reliable.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Right, right, well this could be a dangerous combo here, you know, with all the shoemaking
and the acting...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But the shoemaking and the acting, that's fucking Daniel Day Lewis baby! That's literally the
best actor. He quit acting in order to go to shoe making! Think about that. I wish Joe Kallinger
had heard that story.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, could've helped, could've helped.
MARCUS PARKS So Joseph tried out for a part in a YMCA production of A Christmas Carol on a lark, and was
surprised when he was cast in the part of Ebenezer Scrooge!
BEN KISSEL Ooh!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's the fucking shit baby!
MARCUS PARKS And he was even more surprised when he found that he was damn good at acting as well. Now
surprisingly, his parents allowed him to participate. And on the night of the performance
Joseph brought down the house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He fucking was really good!
MARCUS PARKS So after the play Joseph no longer wanted to be a shoemaker. He wanted to be an actor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I've got the chops, I've got the look, I've got the move, I've got my little penis that's telling me
all sorts of fun things about how to memorize lines, I got this.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, you never know.
MARCUS PARKS But when he told his parents about his revelation the next day, because they sure as hell didn't
go see him that night, all they did was mock him. They demanded that he act for them right
then and there in the kitchen. So Joseph tried out a soliloquy from Hamlet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI To be! Or not to be! Mommy and Daddy can you see? Can you see me perform, I got tights
on!
BEN KISSEL It's pretty good, pretty good.
MARCUS PARKS And as he attempted it, his adoptive parents sat there and heckled him, flicking water at his
face the entire time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (Austrian accent) One star, one star!
BEN KISSEL Honestly that is how you train a kid to get ready for the life of being an actor, which is almost
more different than acting.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL The life is the hard part with all the hecklers in the crowd, and in life in general.
MARCUS PARKS And when Joseph of course didn't do very well, they forbade him from ever acting again,
because he had been adopted for one purpose. Shoes.
BEN KISSEL Ah, it's still shoes!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (feminine voice) 'Shoes. Shoes, shoes bitch.' It always brings me back to that old YouTube bit.
(feminine voice) 'Shoes.'
MARCUS PARKS But since Joseph hadn't been socialized in any way whatsoever, he pretty much resigned
himself to a solitary life at like, 15.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah he's like, 'This is it, this is what I do.'
MARCUS PARKS Yeah he's like, 'This is what I do, this is my life. I get to go to the movies on Saturday morning
and that's it.' That was all he had. They let him go to the movies on Saturday morning.
BEN KISSEL So he just became a grizzled, grizzled shoemaker at the age of 15, bending over, covered in dirt
all day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They were hoping he was. But guess what man? The heart wants what the heart wants.
MARCUS PARKS Yup. And one of those Saturday mornings when Joseph was at the movies he met a girl named
Hilda Bishop, and a romance somehow blossomed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well, she was also really fucking weird.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI When they met each other, he was essentially, it's the love story from Addams Family Values.
BEN KISSEL Oh, yeah, that really was nice. That was nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He is what's-his-name's character, Krumholtz's character who is just this like, (muttering) 'My
parents don't really let me out often, and I can't do very much in my spare time.' And Hilda
was like, (Philadelphia accent) 'Yeah, my mom calls me a whore!' You know what I mean? She
was this weird lanky chick with brown teeth but you know, hey... Two steps forward, two steps
back. We come together because what?
BEN KISSEL Opposites attract. Although you did say that both of them were the exact same. To be fair.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yes, I'm sorry. Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Now at first it seemed like life was gonna turn around for Joseph. He'd come into his own in
the shoe store, and he'd got a work permit which forced his parents to pay him.
BEN KISSEL Hey, all right!
MARCUS PARKS Course now they charged him for room and board but still, small victories.
BEN KISSEL Small victory and, you know, if everything else wasn't so unbelievably messed up in this boys
life, that teaches some responsibility.
MARCUS PARKS Mm-hmm. Plus, things were going pretty damn good with Hilda. But around this time Joseph's
mind began to deteriorate.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS Out of nowhere, Joseph's body would begin twisting and turning like a snake, completely out
of his control. Then came the laugh. Completely unprovoked, Joseph would begin giggling
without joy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho.
BEN KISSEL Without joy?
MARCUS PARKS Without joy, yeah. Shreiber described it as a gothic belly laugh.
BEN KISSEL So what was the point of it? Why did he do it?
MARCUS PARKS There was none. It just came out of his mouth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was a tic.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, it was like a tic, like he said it came from a completely different place and came without
warning. He'd try to stop it, he'd put his hand over his mouth but it wouldn't end.
BEN KISSEL Huh. Okay, so-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah but it was not him laughing because he thought it was funny. It literally would come in
these episodes, you're gonna see-
BEN KISSEL But you know those people that just say force yourself to laugh, and then you're gonna end up
actually laughing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's scary.
BEN KISSEL That's what people recommend!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Who says this?!
BEN KISSEL I swear to god, people say if you just force yourself to smile, force yourself to laugh you will
feel better because it releases certain chemicals in your brain.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That sounds like B. F. Skinner shit, where it's like-
BEN KISSEL I don't know! I've seen it on some blogs.
MARCUS PARKS Now, Anna and Stephen had definitely noticed that their adopted son had started writhing like
a snake and laughing uncontrollably in the halls of their home.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL They did notice.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, but instead of getting the kid some help they just put a padlock on their bedroom door
and started sleeping with a baseball bat.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know what? Not unreasonable. Because at the time they viewed him as almost... He
immediately became an enemy. When they saw that he was having real trouble, the way they
talked about him was being like, (Austrian accent) 'He's evil. He doesn't know what he's doing,
he has no control over his body, he's evil and he is bad.' And so they could not contemplate
that he actually might need like a reach-out, like he might need some help.
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Well, yeah, I mean... Getting help, that would require Joseph to leave the store.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep!
MARCUS PARKS And even though the boy was slowly losing his mind, demonstrably losing his mind, still one
hell of a shoemaker.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Got the touch!
BEN KISSEL Okay, all right.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, so the Kallingers just let it go. It's like, 'Well as long as he can show up to the shoe store
everyday and do his work, who gives a shit.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, this is called what they do with Johnny Depp.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But even though he's propped up by two different, whatever those A-beams are, like he's got
C-clamps holding up his pants and shit.
MARCUS PARKS So soon after the writhing began, Joseph had his first full blown schizophrenic delusion. One
day, as he was working in the shoe shop, a bright light appeared before him, and in the center
was a figure that Joseph believed to be god.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god, so you're telling me at this age he is a shoemaker and he saw the Nike symbol in
that bright light? That's incredible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What?
BEN KISSEL That's the god of shoes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI For us. Some people like a Fila, some people like a Reebok, we like Nikes.
MARCUS PARKS I like New Balance.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, you don't like New Balance, Marcus, you have to wear New Balance because you have
frog's feet!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL He does have flat feet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That is why you have to wear them, you don't like them!
BEN KISSEL He could technically go to a real shoemaker who doesn't do all the horrible things that this
shoemaker will eventually do-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, I know!
BEN KISSEL And he will get you a little insert you can put into a shoe if you wanted, but just how-
MARCUS PARKS Feet are too wide.
BEN KISSEL All I'm saying is all he had to do was put a little swoosh, take some makeup, make a little
swoosh, and now he's a multi-billionaire.
MARCUS PARKS Well this is what Joseph later said the vision told him:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI "Joseph Kallinger, you are a special person and you must undertake a special mission. Already
through your orthopedic work you are easing pain in the feet. The feet are also the key to the
brain. Your mission is to control the brain through the feet. This is what I, god of the universe,
command you to do. You will use this method to heal yourself and heal mankind. You must
heal and save!"
BEN KISSEL I like that. I mean honestly, Dr. Scholls, I saw a commercial, they said the exact same damn
thing. I don't even think he's a real doctor, but nonetheless. Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I would love to see a schizophrenic's version of Dr. Scholl's commercial where it's just like god,
like in my imagination it's the cutout from Monty Python in the fucking clouds just going like,
'Heal your feet or end the universe!'
BEN KISSEL But really, bad feet, bad brain.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, you're talking like Joseph Kallinger!
BEN KISSEL No!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You've said several things-
BEN KISSEL Have you not gone to a store lately and they had the foot map out? As the palms are good for
reading, you can also read one's feet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You gotta read these books before we do the show so you can see the slippery slope you're
talking about.
BEN KISSEL I watched a lot of YouTube videos, they did not mention these in the YouTube videos.
MARCUS PARKS No, no.
BEN KISSEL They did not mention that god spoke to him about his feet. But you know, if you've got a bad
toe...
MARCUS PARKS Uh huh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is true, my grandmother used to monitor my sister and I, and she would go and she'd
poke us under the table very single time she felt we were eating too much or doing something
bad. But another thing she used to do is if we had our feet anywhere close to her, she'd grab
my shoes by the toe and be like, (Brooklyn accent) 'Your shoes are too big, they don't fit right!'
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL That's a grandmother thing to do. But that's also a really smart parent technique, get 'em two
sizes too large.
MARCUS PARKS You grow into 'em!
BEN KISSEL We know that.
MARCUS PARKS Well after Joseph had that vision, he now had a mission from god. And that mission was
something that he would work towards for the next 17 years. He would be the savior of the
universe and the instrument of salvation would be orthopedics.
BEN KISSEL Honestly man, this is just like The Hudsucker Proxy if everything turned out okay!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's true, it technically might've been the way Steve Madden actually started. It could've been
that but it's not Kissel.
BEN KISSEL Salvation through shoes!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No it's not though.
BEN KISSEL I know it's not but I actually think it's kinda true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a thing to think about. But the problem is, what we just said, does that sound really vague?
You're correct, cause it is.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause it's a nonsense mission from not god, the back of your head, which is not doing well.
BEN KISSEL But you go back in the day, you got a niche market, you're selling shoes, salvation through
shoes, that's a hell of a pitch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure, in the 1890s, yes!
BEN KISSEL No in 1960!
MARCUS PARKS Now by this point Joseph's parents were absolutely terrified of him. So their decision, just like
the decision made by Richard Chase's parents, was to let Joseph go off and move into a place
on his own.
BEN KISSEL Brilliant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is kind of what we've sort of discussed, we've been talking about this as we've researched
this show being like, 'Oh my god he's Richard Chase if Richard Chase could hold down a job.'
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. He's Richard Chase with a work ethic.
BEN KISSEL So do you think that his Austrian parents just did not understand whatsoever how they
messed this kid up and just thought to themselves or talked about how they just did too good
of a job? Of making him amazing at making shoes? Of creating just the greatest shoemaker
ever?
MARCUS PARKS They were quite proud of that and they never thought that they did anything wrong.
BEN KISSEL They're Austrian, I mean...
MARCUS PARKS But you know those people that just say force yourself to laugh an then you're gonna end up
actually laughing.
BEN KISSEL Well this is why your father's technique of when requested to do something, this is Henry's
dad, he would do it really bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, so you don't get asked again.
BEN KISSEL And then you don't get asked again, which I think is a great life lesson for every father to teach
his son. In no way does that make him reliant on another person and then that other person
becomes really sick and tired of you not being able to do anything around the house, and the
next thing you know you're alone forever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, you just have to make enough money where you can have a handy person come and fix
the thing because that's what you have to do.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Well in 1953, pretty soon after Kallinger moved out, he decided it was time to get
married. Now the Kallingers didn't approve of Hilda so they filed something called 'an
incorrigibility petition' to try and stop it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is like old-timey shit where you can really... Children were sort of considered your
property.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. You can still file an incorrigibility petition but it's just not done very often. It's filed when
a parent essentially loses control over their child. It is getting the law to declare your child
'incorrigible'.
BEN KISSEL Incorrigible! Okay.
MARCUS PARKS But since the judge couldn't see anything wrong with what Joseph was doing, the petition was
thrown out and Joseph was free to start a family of his own.
BEN KISSEL Of course the camera pans down and the judge is wearing some of those primo shoes.
Kallinger had it in the bank.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wink!
MARCUS PARKS But as you might expect, Joe didn't exactly have the right training to be a family man. Not only
had he spent most of his life in near isolation nursing violent sexual urges, but he was also just
17 years old, as was his new wife.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cause remember, during this whole time, every time he's been able to successfully have sex
with Hilda it is because he has gripped a knife in his pocket in order to get hard. He had to
literally charge himself up to even make love to this woman.
BEN KISSEL So literally that old joke of knife in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? And then just
be like, it's a knife.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is the contraption from Se7en.
BEN KISSEL Interesting, okay.
MARCUS PARKS Now, this started off as the best thing that ever happened to Joseph. They bought a house and
Joseph went to work for another shoemaker after promising to one day return to run the
family business. And the father was all for it, he was like, 'Go out, get some experience, just
promise to never open a shoe making business in my neighborhood.' Then in 1955 Joseph and
Hilda had a daughter and inexplicably named her Anna after Joseph's horrible mother.
BEN KISSEL Ugh.
MARCUS PARKS But that was when things took a downward turn. Joseph's household fell apart almost
immediately. Him and his wife started constantly fighting, Hilda was constantly putting down
Joe's penis size... Cause it had turned out to be very small.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was small.
BEN KISSEL Ah, unfortunate.
MARCUS PARKS It was small, very small.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But it wasn't like, medically small.
MARCUS PARKS It wasn't micropenis but it was, you know, on the shorter side. It was enough to bring it up.
BEN KISSEL You know this is why he should've befriended like, Bobby Dildo, who made dildos. And then
you could've exchanged shoes for dildos... I mean there's a lot of different ways that you can
have pleasure with a partner, the penis isn't the only-
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ever thought maybe for a second your pussy's too big? You ever thought maybe your pussy's
too big!?
BEN KISSEL Yeah he probably did do that and that's not appropriate.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah and they even, they had another kid which they again inexplicably named Stephen after
Joseph's father, but that only made things worse.
BEN KISSEL Yeah it's just, his children, everything's a trigger. Every time he has to call his kids he's
triggered about his past.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. And it's almost, in a weird way, of still searching for acceptance and love even though
you've been abused entirely, you're still like giving this thing that you know that they'd want to
try to see if maybe we can normalize this shit.
BEN KISSEL Right, of course. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS And Hilda had no maternal instincts whatsoever. She usually left the kids hungry, stewing in
their own filth, just leaving 'em in dirty diapers all day long. And there's no mention of it in the
book The Shoemaker but other sources say that Joseph was physically and mentally abusive
during the marriage and that's almost certainly true, that he was also abusive right back to
Hilda. And that may be why Hilda left Joseph in 1956 for a man named Hans Ibbler.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And when he found her when they were cheating, she just left. She was so scared or unhappy
to be with Joe Kallinger that she just lived in another dude's car.
MARCUS PARKS They had parked the car outside of a graveyard and she was just living in it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah I gotta do what I want! I do what I want! Look at this hatchback! This is my fucking
hatchback, you get away from it! This is my home!
MARCUS PARKS Well after that, the two of them filed for divorce and Joseph moved back in with his parents.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS Eventually he got custody of the kids and took them by train to see their mother and Hans on
the weekends. But on one of those train rides, Joseph met the woman who would be his wife
until the day he went to prison decades later. Betty Baumgard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI She was a lonely soul.
MARCUS PARKS Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Meeting another lonely soul. He came and I guess he dazzled her by saying like, 'I took a look
at your feet. Maybe there's something I could do to help because I feel like your toes are, you
know, they're in line with the devil!' And she's like, (feminine voice) 'You're funny.'
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Right, yeah. Well he's got the kids, he's got a job. He got custody of the kids, which is not
common for the man to be able to do that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But at the time it is a massive shame for a woman.'Oh, you're gonna marry this guy with a
fucking ready-made family?'
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Where they were like, they said it's a shame for a woman to marry a man with kids already
because then it's like, 'Oh, you're not gonna make kids of your own.'
BEN KISSEL I kinda like it better that way, you know.
MARCUS PARKS (chuckles) All out of the way?
BEN KISSEL Yeah, just have ready-made families, perfect, that's like Krusty's pizza dough.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Don't bring up Krusty's again!
BEN KISSEL It starts with a 'K'. Krusty's.
MARCUS PARKS Now as far as as Betty knew, Joseph was a perfectly normal guy who was just going through a
hard time. There were things that Betty didn't know about Joseph even in their most intimate
moments. See, Joseph had never gotten over the link in his brain between sex and knives. So,
he hid a small penknife in a bookcase built into the head of his and Betty's bed, and when they
had sex, every single time, Joseph would reach up into the bookcase and hold the knife in his
left hand.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just to juice it up! Like it's spinach, like he's Popeye.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL This is like when Costanza was trying to eat a sandwich in bed. Like in Seinfeld, trying to
combine his two loves. You know I wonder if he could've just been upfront with that. Cause I
mean, people have weird fetishes all the time-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs) I think it's a hard one-
MARCUS PARKS No you're saying 2019. In 1956 they didn't know the word 'fetish'.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's also hard to bring in knife play in the very beginning of a fucking relationship. I feel like you
need to build, I don't know.
BEN KISSEL No I know. Maybe just a-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Right?
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI How do you bring up knife play?
MARCUS PARKS I dunno why you're asking me (laughs).
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're the closest-
BEN KISSEL I dunno who does knife play, I'm sure that there are couples that have that kind of wild stuff
going on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're the kinkiest person I know before, from the back in the day.
MARCUS PARKS True.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So I wondered if you ever... But you don't stab people right?
MARCUS PARKS No I don't (laughs). No, I've never stabbed anyone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm just asking.
BEN KISSEL Just asking questions.
MARCUS PARKS I know, I know.
BEN KISSEL Okay, so that's... So he cannot separate these two things.
MARCUS PARKS He cannot, no.
BEN KISSEL Very bizarre.
MARCUS PARKS And when Joseph was 22, right after he and Betty were married, he had his second major
hallucinatory episode. A figure with a black cloak and a witch's hat appeared to him, again, as
he was sitting at his workbench.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (chanting sound) It's so scary, this thing just kind of unfolding itself in front of him. It's like you
stop, and you stare, it's like one of those weird scenes from Mandy or something when the
fucking sludge music comes in.
BEN KISSEL Ooh, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS The figure pointed to the space next to him and told Joseph to watch carefully. So as clear as a
movie screen, Joe saw a vision of himself as a child with his two adoptive parents. They were
raking leaves, and once they were raked into a nice pile, Stephen set the leaves on fire. The
flames grew and spread and the more Joseph watched the more excited he got. Then, when
the vision was over and done with, the figure in black gave Joseph a command. "Go home at
lunchtime and burn down your house."
BEN KISSEL Ugh, all right. So this is the last thing he needs now is to just... Let's bring fire into the mix! You
already love knives.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was one of his favorite memories as a boy, watching the flames grow, Kissel, don't take this
from him.
BEN KISSEL But the smell of burning leaves is not good. It smells very bad.
MARCUS PARKS Mm-hmm. So when noon came that day, Joseph followed the instructions and went home.
Once again, the figure in black appeared and flames shot from his mouth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (gasping sound)
BEN KISSEL Geez.
MARCUS PARKS So, Joseph went to a shed connected to the house, lit a match, and threw it in a can of paint
thinner. And the whole time, Joseph was just as hard as the dickens.
BEN KISSEL Oh my goodness!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And that's the thing is that the turkey timer goes off every single time he thinks he's making a
right decision. So every single time he feels like he's like, 'Okay, I'm on the right track, this is
fine.' Because it goes (slide whistle noise) and it's like as it pushes it's like his full strength
meter. I was playing Street Fighter V with Holden and you see that little bar fill up and then
you can do a special move?
BEN KISSEL Uh huh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That was his penis.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, yes. Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS And in fact, Joseph was so excited by the idea of arson that when he retold the story to Flora
Schreiber, talking about the ecstasy and the power of burying everything he owned, Joseph
came in his pants right then and there.
BEN KISSEL And she put that in the book, huh?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah (laughs).
BEN KISSEL If I was the author I woulda left that part out, out of respect.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's literally him, 'And the flame was getting bigger and bigger and oh! The flame was like a
bunch of feathers tickling the bottom of my feet, oh!' And he is fucking... You're in a jail cell
and you literally have a fucking... You're Flora just like calmly staring, making notes while the
guards are all just trying to look forward cause he's going, 'Oh! It's gonna go! It's gonna go!'
MARCUS PARKS So after the house was gutted, Joseph and Betty moved into a house on East Fletcher Street in
Kensington and life continued along nicely. Joseph, he started winning awards for his shoe
making skills.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's fucking crushing it!
BEN KISSEL Really? He's getting some medals, all right.
MARCUS PARKS Soon after that, he and Betty had their first of five children, a little girl named Mary Jo. But
four months later, Joseph had an episode. He blacked out and ended up in Hazleton,
Pennsylvania, 70 miles northwest of Philly without any idea how he'd gotten there.
BEN KISSEL Honestly, who among us has not blacked out and ended up in Hazleton, Pennsylvania?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL That has happened to everyone in the world.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I do remember when you ended up in the wrong hotel in, what was it, Oklahoma?
BEN KISSEL Indianapolis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh, Indianapolis, yeah. Yeah that does happen. Isn't it called dissociative fugue or is that old
school shit?
MARCUS PARKS Well the thing is about the author, Flora Schreiber, she also was the author of Sybil, and a lot
of the claims that she made in Sybil concerning multiple personality disorder were not
necessarily debunked, it's just kinda been (braking noise) shifted to the left a little bit. He has
dissociative episodes and things like that. And dissociative disorder as it is is not schizophrenic.
It's not schizophrenia, like multiple personality disorder is not schizophrenia, they're two
extremely different things.
BEN KISSEL It's a complex thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I know it's complex, but amnesia is a weird symptom, right, can that happen?
MARCUS PARKS Amnesia can be part of schizophrenia.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Okay.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS So Joe was found and was hospitalized for nine days. He was eventually released but since he
got no help whatsoever from the state, he figured it was up to him to quote unquote "correct
himself" through orthopedic experiments.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's the eye of the tiger, it's the thrill of the fight. C'mon feet, we're doing this from the heels
up.' He really thought, 'I'm gonna go my thing, I'm gonna make the perfect pair of shoes, and
when I get these perfect pair of shoes on my feet, not only is my family gonna love me, my
parents are coming back, I'm gonna be completely adjusted, we're hitting the top, we're gonna
be the new Dr. Scholl's. Fuck Dr. Scholl's!'
BEN KISSEL Well, I don't know. It sounds like in some other world he coulda been the My Pillow guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's doing great!
BEN KISSEL I dunno if you know what the My Pillow guy does though now, he says doctors recommend a
good night's sleep is the best thing for your health. And what's the best thing for your good
night's sleep? MyPillow.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL So theoretically he's trying to say that My Pillow is the best thing for your health. But if you do,
if you are sick, just My Pillow is not gonna save you. Go to the doctor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wasn't he addicted to crack cocaine?
BEN KISSEL He was for a little while, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well Joseph was fully and totally convinced that all of his problems and the
problems of the entire world could be corrected by placing a wedge in the heel of a shoe that
would adjust the slant of his foot to harmonize with the function of the brain.
BEN KISSEL Again, great sales pitch! I'm walking into the store without a cool pair of shoes, I'm walking
into the store just half-brained, and then I talk to this guy, I'm walking out full-brained,
because he gave me the right pair of shoes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I gotta tell ya, oh you're my biggest customer, I'm so happy to see how many gallons of shoes I
can make to fit. You're huge humongous. Ah, beautiful feet. Look at this. Now tell me my
fellow schizophrenic customer, do you wanna also wear a pot on your head or uh, do you
maybe wanna introduce me to your friend Flora that's standing next to you, or uh...
BEN KISSEL I'll do the pot on my head.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Okay let's do this!
BEN KISSEL Yeah, thank you.
MARCUS PARKS But Joseph's obsessions went beyond just feet. He became obsessed with bowling, and
installed 12 foot long, 4 foot wide bowling alley in the room where he and his wife slept.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's becoming more and more like Michael Jackson each movement.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI All night, him bowling in the room, being like, 'Ah! My toe went over the line, no! It can't go
over the line!'
BEN KISSEL It really is remarkable. If you tell me next that he starts a group called NO MA'AM, he is
beginning Al Bundy as well. Bowling, shoes, hatred it seems of women in general. It's all
coming together.
MARCUS PARKS And he also started filling the house with junk. See Joe always had a thing for discarded
objects, so he filled his family's home with various pieces of machinery and electronics that he
found in the garbage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He thought he was adding more projects.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. He would bring these huge, gigantic, like 10 foot long pieces of machinery and just plop
it down into the living room and just say, 'deal with it.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Meanwhile Betty is like, (feminine voice) 'He's so funny.' Like she... I dunno what this woman's
shit is.
MARCUS PARKS And his family continued growing as well. A few years after Mary Jo was born, along came
Joey, Michael, and Jimmy. But at the same time the hallucinations continued, specifically
hallucinations about fire. A voice from the darkness that Joseph knew was the devil kept telling
him, "Set fire to your house. Set fire to your house." And he did it. Four times.
BEN KISSEL Just one time you wanna hear the counterpoint, 'Put the fire out in you house. Put the fire out
in your house.' Now is it possible, and this is like totally an ignorant question here, but is it
possible that he could receive things that were less negative? Every now and again-
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, of course he did! He had the mission to save the entire world though orthopedics.
BEN KISSEL That's good. That's good!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's still not good, because you're not going to do it. So what we're gonna find out is that you're
setting yourself up for a fall.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah it's not good, but it's positive.
BEN KISSEL No and it is also actually kind of real, orthopedics have greatly improved society.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It would be really nice to hear just one like, (whispering) 'Go run a half marathon.'
BEN KISSEL Yeah! Why not? That would be a good one.
MARCUS PARKS Now the first three fires that Joe set in his home didn't do much damage, but on the fourth,
when Joseph was 30 years old, he finally pulled it off and burned his own family's home to the
ground.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hard as the dickens.
MARCUS PARKS He was charged with arson but never did any time. And so, with nowhere else to go, Joseph bit
the bullet, permanently moved back into his childhood home and took over his father's shoe
shop for good.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Think about this. This was your prison as a boy. You got out and you built this whole other life,
right. Now you moved your parents out, they left, so it's now your house, but you are a deeply
ill human being that is now replacing your own parents in your mind. And you are beginning
this, you get this like power complex, you literally defeated this one section, now you are the
shoemaker.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Yeah, I mean it only made the trauma worse. Cause I mean Joe was, let's say, unstable at
the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL It sounds like it, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Well, he continued his experiments to try to help but each experimental heel that he tried
needed a test walk. So Joe would go on long walks in the middle of the night. But Joseph got
lonely, so he'd shake his kids awake and force them to go on walks with him, and to make it
interesting, he turned the walks into garbage hunts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Garbage hunts! And this is where Marcus is like, 'Well actually this is kinda fun, yeah.' You get
to be woken up in the middle of the night to him going, 'Wake up, wake up. It's time to test my
feet! It's time to test the feet!' And then they go out there back and forth, walking, and him
going like, 'I'm not well yet! I'm not well!'
BEN KISSEL Yes, garbage hunt. This sounds kind of like an episode of Bob's Burgers.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL I could see the whole family loving to go on a garbage hunt.
MARCUS PARKS And whenever anything interesting was found, it was brought back to the house on a little red
wagon and got added to the pile. Now Betty never went on these walks, but she had a
different part to play. Her job was to bring Joe tea while he was working on his experiments,
cup after cup. Sometimes as many as 30 cups a night.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Pretty soon the paranoia started to take hold. Joseph became terrified that someone was
gonna get his kids like they got him. Or get his wife, like Hans Ibbler had got Hilda. Or that
someone was gonna break into his house and steal his experimental ideas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because he was the king of this castle.
BEN KISSEL Right.
MARCUS PARKS He was the king of this castle and no one was gonna come in and gonna ruin his... He needed
to establish dominance.
BEN KISSEL I mean, you know, I... Did you ever see Flubber? Do you remember what they did to Jerry
Lewis' character in Flubber? They stole everything from him, using him on the basketball court,
and that was really, that helped him win a championship!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This truly is a fucking x-rated, horrible version of Flubber.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Right!
MARCUS PARKS So Joseph turned his house into a fortress, what he called "Joseph Kallinger's Castle". All the
cellar windows were covered in steel and every window from the first floor up was covered
with hinged steel gates locked to the side of the house. Some windows were even bolted with
flat steel plates and covered in cement.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now you're also... You're his customer, right. Let's say you're in Philadelphia, playing some b-
ball out on the street. You look and you see this shoemaker everyday, that you enjoy, Joe, you
know, he did a great job for your wedding shoes, you know what I mean-
BEN KISSEL Oh yeah, sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And he did a great job and he's up there, and he is fashioning the front of his home with
gigantic Fort Knox-style steel plates that he is sautering and cementing just in front of his
home, it's like, 'Just wanna make sure no one steals my brain ideas!' And you just have to be
like, 'Cool, yeah, all right, oh. Shoes will be ready by Friday?' 'By Friday! I'm absolutely
obsessed with them, I made my wife psychic!' And you're like, 'Oh, okay, cool, all right.'
BEN KISSEL Well they are great, great shoes. You know these companies, they keep their secrets under
lock and key.
MARCUS PARKS They do. And this paranoia didn't stay inside the house. Joe started having paranoid delusions
about his neighbors. He imagined that the building across the street, where state
representative Harry Comer had his offices, was actually a secret CIA outpost specifically put
there to spy on Joseph Kallinger.
BEN KISSEL You know, everyone made fun of Tom Hanks from The Burbs, they said, 'Oh, you're being
crazy, there's no way your neighbors are murdering people, putting them in their furnace.' And
what were they doing? Murdering people and putting them in their furnace. Also, let's be
honest, Harry Cummer? Yeah, something's going on.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL I don't think this guy is on the up and up, that's all I'm gonna say.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think his name is pronounced 'Comber'.
BEN KISSEL Whatever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly, I think his name is pronounced 'Comber'.
MARCUS PARKS You're probably right, it is probably not 'Harry Cummer'.
BEN KISSEL I am representative Harry Cummer, um, vote for me or you'll know why they called me that.
MARCUS PARKS Now, Harry Comer had actually known Joseph since he was a baby, and when Joseph had gone
to trial for arson, Comer was a character witness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Having to go into court and being like, 'Joe's a good guy, um... I'm not sure why he burnt down
his own house...' Because there was no insurance for him to get. He got insurance from
another building of his that he burnt down, he burnt down a shed that he owned. But they
were like, 'So there's not really any reason?' And he was just like, 'I've got to do it to have sex!'
And they're just like, 'He's just stressed out.'
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Yeah, interesting.
MARCUS PARKS But nevertheless, Joseph started smashing Comer's office windows in the middle of the night
with ball bearings.
BEN KISSEL (chuckles) This is what happens when you-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass, Harry! This is what happens.
BEN KISSEL I actually like the TV version better.
MARCUS PARKS This is what happens when you meet a stranger in the alps.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs)
MARCUS PARKS And Cummer was none the wiser.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs) I just...
MARCUS PARKS Comer, sorry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Comber.
MARCUS PARKS I keep saying "Cummer".
BEN KISSEL Well how is it spelled?
MARCUS PARKS C-O-M-E-R.
BEN KISSEL That could go either way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's Comer.
BEN KISSEL That could go either way.
MARCUS PARKS Well Comer was none the wiser, cause Joseph even helped him board up the broken windows.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I can't believe that people would just do this to random victims. It's like someone was trying
to infiltrate a CIA operative kind of location that's happening across the street from the best
shoemaker in the universe!
BEN KISSEL Interesting, I mean, you know, it would've been a dead giveaway if he threw shoes through the
window.
MARCUS PARKS Oh, yeah.
BEN KISSEL So I guess he knew what he was doing.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, he knew to cover up his tracks.
BEN KISSEL Keeping it quiet. Yeah, literally.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's not a Mega Man villain with shoes.
BEN KISSEL Right, right.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Every time that Joseph would help Comer replace the glass, the next night he'd be out
there will ball bearings again, breaking the next one. He did it again, and again, and again, until
finally Comer replaced the glass with pretty much bulletproof shit.
BEN KISSEL So if you're Comer aren't you just like, 'My neighbor, he loves it when he has to come and help
me fix my windows. Like he laughs and says, 'This won't be the last time!'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's just fun to spend an afternoon with you, you know? Just really kinda spend the afternoon
and wonder where you put the microphones inside of my asshole.
BEN KISSEL Interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But no, it's... What do you do when you're Comer, having to constantly redo your windows and
being like, 'Huh. Well, my shoes are due Friday and I just feel like if I could just get, once I get
the shoes out of there then we can handle this whole thing. But I need those shoes, those are
my lucky shoes.'
BEN KISSEL No neighbors were like, 'Oh yeah, we see him every night go out and smash all your windows.'
MARCUS PARKS Well he was doing it from the window of his house.
BEN KISSEL (chuckles) God, honestly...
MARCUS PARKS He was throwing it across the street.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Man, that is a dream come true though, just to be able to take your neighbors windows out
and get away with it.
MARCUS PARKS Well after the bulletproof glass was put up, I mean, Joe had no recourse, or at least he thought
he had no recourse. So, to escape the watchful eye of the CIA, he covered up all the windows
on his store with dark screens. And this action only made Joseph's problems worse, cause the
screens cut off both light and air from the outside, meaning that this man, who was already
suffering from full blown schizophrenia, was now working day and night in an unventilated
room, constantly inhaling glue.
BEN KISSEL I don't want to be anything, I don't wanna be like Mr. Get On My Soapbox and start talking
about how Nike makes their shoes, but it's still the exact same way. But instead of a man it's a
bunch of children in countries that don't have a lot of economic means.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. Cause they work with enthusiasm.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Ah, I see.
MARCUS PARKS But can you imagine that? I mean he is already full blown schizophrenic and then he becomes
an unwitting glue huffer.
BEN KISSEL That is the worst kind, if you can imagine that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (chuckles) It just seems... I think he kinda liked it.
BEN KISSEL Well I mean, the smell of glue, you know... What was the, uh, rubber cement!
MARCUS PARKS Mm-hmm. Rubber cement.
BEN KISSEL Oh the kids were all... Sixth grade was the year of rubber cement!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL That was crazy!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No I had this black bag filled with the old school poison markers, like the old school art
markers.
BEN KISSEL Oh I remember those.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just sticking your head in there, man, what a good afternoon you'd have.
BEN KISSEL Yeah we had no idea what we were doing. I think they took rubber cements out of school,
though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's just got that (chanting) wah-wah wah-wah wah-wah.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS Well, huffing glue may partly be the reason of why Joseph started the hole.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS At the beginning of 1969, Joseph bought a house on East Hagert Street to use as a warehouse.
But he also planned to turn it into both his own private retreat, place to get away from the
wife and kids, and as a pathway to hell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes!
BEN KISSEL So this is NO MA'AM.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL So he is Al Bundy.
MARCUS PARKS Well this is where maybe you could say it gets dark.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It starts getting real dark right about now.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS And so, on the command of the devil, Joseph forced his five children to rip up the floorboards
of this house in the middle of February and dig a 20 foot hole straight into the ground.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And this is where Marcus called me, we were going through this stuff and he was just like,
(whispering) 'Henry, Henry, Henry.' And I was like, 'Marcus, what are you doing? It's 1 o'clock
in the morning, why are you calling? Is everything okay? Are you okay? Is Carolina okay?' And
he's like, 'They had a dream childhood. Joe Kallinger used to wake his kids up in the middle of
the night just to go dig strange holes!'
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And I was like, 'This is not a fantasy! This is not space camp.'
MARCUS PARKS Uh you're misrepresenting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah?!
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Interesting. Although I could actually see that being the tale, what's your point-counterpoint
Marcus?
MARCUS PARKS No, I just said like, it wasn't insane. If he wasn't a crazy serial killer, ripping up the floorboards
of an old house and digging a hole straight down into the ground and your dad's helping you
out and he's putting up all the supports, and you don't know what the hole is for, all you know
is you get to dig a hole with your brothers and sisters. How much fun is that?
BEN KISSEL Yeah...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI In the first hour the song like, (singing) 'Work together. C'mon c'mon...' I can see how the
Sister Act II montage is kinda happening. But in hour six of digging the hole when the sun is
coming up and you're still like, 'Deeper! You gotta dig deeper, kids. Gotta get in there and I
gotta see China.' Because that's what he did say. He was like, 'I wish I could dig a hole so much
that I would come out on the other side and then, oh, this whole world would slide inside of
this hole.'
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But as he's doing this monologue to himself, the kids are just just like, 'When can we stop?
(nervous laughter) Is it over yet?'
MARCUS PARKS In reality it would be terrifying and awful and abusive, but in a dream world you got a garbage
digging daddy.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (laughs) Garbage digging daddy!
BEN KISSEL Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS That's in a dream world though, that does not exist.
BEN KISSEL Oh, of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Can you imagine wife swap with this guy?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Hmm. Yes. And of course the earth is full of molten lava, so that doesn't make it very fun. You
don't come through the other side.
MARCUS PARKS Well when the hole was finally done, Joseph banished the children from the home forever. He
would climb a ladder down to the bottom of the hole with only a candle for light and stick the
candle into the mud walls.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now this is the only place he can feel any sort of peace. He said by this point the shop and the
house were so filled with noise in his own head that he's like, 'I got to get to the message, I
got to get to the center of the message!' And then he would climb down into this hole and be
like, 'This is where I could actually... Oh okay, this is nice.'
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Well maybe it was actually all of the glue that was being in the air there.
MARCUS PARKS It could be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Could be.
MARCUS PARKS But once he got down into the hole, he would either masturbate or defecate or both and he
slowly began to fill the hole with his own semen and feces as a part of a twisted personal ritual
that only made sense to him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Okay.
BEN KISSEL Well how much would you have to crap to fill a 20 foot hole?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's the point.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's why you gotta make the hole as deep as you can so you don't have to worry about the
supply and demand of the shit that's needed here.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But he used to sit in his hole and literally be like, 'Okay, where's a spot that's missing? Ah,
there's a spot.' (farting sound) And he would just shit a turd out and he would literally believe
it to give him power. And every time he shat and he would come on the shit, his own shit, and
he would be like, 'Okay. That's nice.' It's like having a cup of coffee.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, but... I don't know what that solves.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's like doing 25 minutes on the elliptical for him.
BEN KISSEL Okay, interesting.
MARCUS PARKS And then one night, as he was in the hole, the voices came.
BEN KISSEL In the hole? That's his safe space!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's the problem!
BEN KISSEL Did the voices know that's his safe space?
MARCUS PARKS He heard a voice that sounded very similar to his own say, and this is just a partial reading of
what Joseph said, quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (nonsensical chanting)
MARCUS PARKS It went on and on and on like that.
BEN KISSEL Sounds like something Ash read in the Book of the Dead. It's crazy.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) Yeah, just nonsense word after nonsense word. And Joseph said that he had no idea
where the voice was coming from. And then finally he pressed his index finger to his own
throat and discovered that the words were coming from his own mouth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Think about how scary that is, all right. Now, again, step back. Take a zoom out.
BEN KISSEL Oh I'm sorry you just stepped on your human feces.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh, I'm saving that one. That was in such a fun shape, it was shaped like a question mark.
BEN KISSEL No I know, that's why I told you about that, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I saved just a little dollop of poop on there to give it the punctuation mark.
BEN KISSEL I know, I know, sorry about that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But you look at this. He has his own separate space, he has dug a 20 foot hole into an actual
building. It is filled with his cum and shit. You are so sick that you don't understand you are
actually talking. That you are hearing these voices, but it's you talking to yourself.
BEN KISSEL And he only understood when he felt the vibrations of his neck, right?
MARCUS PARKS After he felt the vibrations, yeah.
BEN KISSEL Now I don't think this question matters and nor should I really be asking it, but if he had to
pee, did he get out of the hole or did he-
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm not disgusting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, i can't be pissing on top of my shit and my cum. That's
my shit and my cum. My piss, that goes in the toilet.
BEN KISSEL So you put, okay so...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're my favorite customer. I'll always remind you of that. And thank you so much for
coming to my living room.
BEN KISSEL I know, I'm a size 14, you charge me double, I know what happens.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Do you want a cup of coffee?
BEN KISSEL I would, is that, you've...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, you want some? Yeah, yeah, c'mon, we're hanging out.
BEN KISSEL If it's actual coffee, I'll have some.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, yeah, that's coffee, yeah (farting noise).
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL I see you pooping in the mug.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You can see me do this?
BEN KISSEL Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Are you from the fucking CIA?
BEN KISSEL Can I have my shoes please?
MARCUS PARKS Well on another night after that, after taking a particularly large dump in the hole... because
he said that the bigger the dump, the better the idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And he said he had a dump that was so big that it released him entirely. And I'm not gonna say
I don't understand, because-
BEN KISSEL This is the Thinker!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI There are some times, cause you ever done this? And I'm gonna say this for the casual viewer,
if you're not a person who tours for a living. But sometimes you get outta the hotel, and
you've gotta get outta there, you've checked out, you've been drunk on a lot of beer, maybe
you ate something at 12:30 at night, right, you're on tour.
MARCUS PARKS Touring life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And you gotta wake up and you know, like, ugh... My shit's gonna come, at some point, and I
gotta space it out.
BEN KISSEL It's gonna have to, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And I like when you get on that plane for the first time and you just unleash a couple of dirty
snakes.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL On the plane.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, dude. And those are talking about, 'Get these motherfucking snakes off this
motherfucking plane!' I do. By flushing them. But you do feel like, huh. Like your shoes are
bigger.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, absolutely. When you really get... You feel cleansed, for sure. I read that Gwyneth
Paltrow, that's all that Goop is about!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI God, her pussy's gotta be so strong.
BEN KISSEL I have no idea.
MARCUS PARKS Well after Joseph took that particularly large dump, he decided that it was time to bring the
punishments of his childhood to the lives of his own children.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS See, the Kallinger kids weren't exactly what you'd call 'model students'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
MARCUS PARKS Joseph and Betty had raised a family of chain smoking, teenage, Philadelphia street toughs. I
mean these were hooligans. They stole from the blind, they snatched purses from old ladies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And they're 10.
MARCUS PARKS They're between 10 and 14 years old.
BEN KISSEL They're The Little Rascals. They're just like The Little Rascals.
MARCUS PARKS Horribly violent thieves.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, if The Little Rascals were real, they would have knives.
BEN KISSEL Of course they would!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They'd be like, 'Yeah! Let's burn it down, daddy, yeah!' They're ready to go.
BEN KISSEL I mean, what can you expect, they don't get any sleep at night, they're surrounded by garbage,
hanging out with their dad digging holes all night.
MARCUS PARKS No, I'm not blaming the kids here. They were raised in an absolutely horrific environment.
They started to fend for themselves and they went feral. But the only methods Joseph knew as
far as discipline went were physical, painful, and cruel. So he set up the cellar of his home as a
straight up torture chamber. And all this came from the time he spent alone in his literal shit
hole.
BEN KISSEL You know I really don't appreciate when they call it a shit hole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is my sanctuary!
MARCUS PARKS He used rope, rubber hoses, straight pins, strips of leather, and taking influence from his
father, a homemade cat o' nine tails. Joseph called this stuff his quote "educational materials",
and he took it seriously. In fact, he said that he took this just as seriously as he'd taken his
experiments with the hamsters.
BEN KISSEL With the what?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The hamsters.
BEN KISSEL With the hamsters.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS This takes a little bit of explaining. Remember, Joseph had received a commandment from god
to save mankind through the miracle of orthopedics.
BEN KISSEL Again, positive. Don't mind that one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure.
MARCUS PARKS And Joseph, he'd never stopped trying to crack the code. In fact, when Joseph's father was in
hospice in 1971, Stephen died with Joseph vigorously rubbing his feet, trying to keep the old
man alive just a little longer.
BEN KISSEL Felt good though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Joseph Kallinger just rapidly like, 'Come on daddy! Get these feet back and going, oh daddy!'
(kissing sounds) Like licking the thing. And then the father going, (Austrian accent) 'Please let
me die. Please let me slip away.'
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Who doesn't love a good foot rub, though.
MARCUS PARKS Well one of Joseph's favorite things to say was this:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The feet control the brain. They're god's magic gift to us.
BEN KISSEL I agree with him! The feet do control the brain.
MARCUS PARKS And to really give you a peek into the mind of Joseph Kallinger, we're gonna read excerpts
from The Shoemaker in which I will play Flora Schreiber while Henry will play Joseph talking
about those experiments with the hamsters. And Henry is gonna read this verbatim.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is verbatim. And this is a part of... People wonder where these characters come from, if
we're gonna make up all these characters, we're gonna talk about these people. I really
wanted to showcase a little bit of what Joseph Kallinger is really like so you can see that there's
very little exaggeration.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. There is nothing added here, there are no jokes. This is verbatim what Joseph Kallinger
told Flora Shreiber.
BEN KISSEL Did he like the hamsters cause they had four feet?
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're gonna find out.
MARCUS PARKS You're gonna find out everything he knows about the hamsters. All right. "Joseph, in what way
did you take this experiment seriously?"
HENRY ZEBROWSKI "Well, I'd already done over 40,000 experiments, most of them on myself, some on my wife
and kids. I'd even talked the mailman into letting me put wedges into his shoes, so I did a few
on him. But I'd never done experiments on animals before."
MARCUS PARKS "What were you gonna do with them?"
HENRY ZEBROWSKI "I was gonna make little shoes for their feet and little wedges to put into the shoes. I figured
I'd get a lot of information that way. I wanted to do an experiment on the connection between
a hamsters feet and their brains. Now if they listened to me and did what I told them, then I
would've known that the wedges and the little shoes that I made for them were doing them
good by giving them greater durability and intelligence. They'd be obedient to me, their
master. When I got them home to East Fletcher Street, I saw that there was no way I could
make shoes and wedges for my hamsters. Their feet were too tiny. But I knew I could go on
with the second part of the experiment, the connection between obedience and intelligence,
even without the shoes. To make sure I didn't get the hamsters mixed up... They all looked
alike you know, the same color brown, same size hamsters... I put a nametag on the right rear
leg of each one. I called them Winkle, Popsicle, Jelly Roll and Humpty Dumpty. Then I put them
into a large cage with a small wheel in it. I knew the best way to test their intelligence and
durability was on the wheel. If they had intelligence then they would listen to me. If they had
durability, they'd listen and survive. To obey is the one test of intelligence, to survive is
another, right? Right?"
MARCUS PARKS "Joseph, how in the world did you expect the hamsters to listen to you when they don't speak
any human language?"
HENRY ZEBROWSKI "I spoke to them in English like I'm talking to you! I pulled up a chair right next to the cage and
I sat down. I told the hamsters everything I was going to do. It was very important to the
future of mankind, I said, that they obey me. I told them their feet were too small for me to
make shoes and wedges, but I promised to make them little hats and suits even though I'm not
a tailor, if they listened to me and survived. Flora, they understood every word I said."
MARCUS PARKS "What did the hamsters answer you?"
HENRY ZEBROWSKI "Nothing. That was my second disappointment with them. First, I found I couldn't make
wedges for their feet, then I couldn't get them interested in my experiment. They didn't even
perk up their ears when I told them about the hats and the suits. But I knew they understood
me, all right, they played foxy to throw me off my guard. They didn't listen, they didn't seem to
want to get it. While I talked, they ignored me."
MARCUS PARKS So Joseph decided that he wasn't gonna be ignored anymore.
BEN KISSEL Oh, man. Honestly, these hamsters... Can you just imagine being one of the hamsters though,
just looking at him, being like, (whispering) 'What the hell is going on guys? This guy is just
screaming, what are we supposed to do?'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's if Ratatouille was in Saw.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs) So Joseph forced the hamsters to get on their little hamster wheel, then he'd sit and
poke them with a pencil for hours, forcing them to run until one by one they all pissed
themselves and died.
BEN KISSEL This is so ridi-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is what I'm talking about! It's perfect for us!
BEN KISSEL Honestly though, it's like, make 'em the shoes if you're gonna force 'em to run that much.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're too slow. Well, you sound completely insane. But I coulda made them suits.
MARCUS PARKS Now this was, of course, a failure of an experiment. But had Joseph succeeded, he was gonna
build a huge laboratory with wheels big enough for elephants and lions, prisoner and mental
patients, all wearing his special wedges.
BEN KISSEL This is straight up though, if they had stayed Austrian, if they were around during the Mengele
era, he would've been the shoemaker of Auschwitz. He really woulda been, because these
experiments are so wackadoo.
MARCUS PARKS Well later on, in the second episode, he uses techniques that he said he learned from the
nazis.
BEN KISSEL Ugh.
MARCUS PARKS And in this experiment, as goofy and as cruel as it is, Joseph had crossed a line. For the first
time, Joseph had killed another living thing. And even though he didn't know it yet, this was his
first step towards murder. And it began with his kids. The punishments started getting even
worse, cause Joseph started taking them down to the cellar one at a time, but only after
midnight when a huge clock with a skull where the number 12 should be emerged from the
darkness. Now the clock hallucination would always be preceded by an itch in Joseph's left
palm. When he felt this itch, he knew his kids had done something wrong, so he'd wait until
after midnight, then he'd shake them awake and take them down to the cellar where they get
straight pins thrown at them, whipped with the cat o' nine tails, whatever he felt like doing
that night.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He had this one thing that was like a box of rocks. He would collect this thing, like a cigarette
box, one of those weird little pallet things and he's have them kneel on it for hours.
MARCUS PARKS Then in 1972, the voices changed. It was no longer the voice of the devil that was commanding
Joseph to do things.
BEN KISSEL It was the voice of Dom DeLuise.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Honestly we all just laughed at Dom DeLuise while he was dying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS See, Joseph could resist the devil most of the time, because it was the devil. Those commands
were mostly urges. So he only followed the advice of the devil when he felt like it.
BEN KISSEL But god was the soul and the brain guy, right?
MARCUS PARKS God was telling him to do good things.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI God was his boss.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. But on New Years Day when Joseph was 35, the same figure that had appeared to him
when he was 15 showed back up and said, quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI "Joseph, I control you now."
BEN KISSEL Oh no.
MARCUS PARKS And Joseph knew that this was the voice of god. From then on, Joseph felt as if he had no
choice but to follow the commandments of the voice he was hearing no matter how awful or
violent those commandments might be. The first violent episode came just a few weeks after
god took over. Now Mary Jo and Joey, hoping to escape the abuse that they were suffering at
the hands of their father, ran away from home. They'd been gone for two days before Joseph
decided to go out looking for them. So he put his 45 automatic pistol into his belt, hailed a taxi,
and directed the driver to troll the streets looking for a couple of teenagers.
BEN KISSEL Is that normal for a taxi driver? At some point aren't you just like, 'Am I trolling for you to
murder someone? I don't wanna be complicit in that so, do you have destination or...?'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI My destination is straight to the pits of hell!
BEN KISSEL Oh!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh, okay, okay. No I think taxi drivers were more pliant back in the day.
MARCUS PARKS Well finally, Joseph saw his kids coming out of a movie theater with a couple of friends. So
Joseph jumped out of the car, pointed his gun into his own children's faces, and told them to
get in the cab. When they got home Joseph told Betty to take little Jimmy and little Michael
out to get pizza and not to come home until he said so. See Joseph had begun to develop what
you might call a crush on his own daughter. He never did anything sexual with her, but prior to
this incident he had begun what he himself called "a courtship".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He said, in his own words, "I began to notice she's a beautiful young lady. And she seems to be
held in esteem by other men in the neighborhood. But I won't let her have them! I wouldn't let
her have them."
BEN KISSEL Well thank you so much for coming on the Stern show once again Mr. Trump, really appreciate
you being here. Howard said he loved it. Howard said he loved the way you always talk about
his daughter. Anyway, you know you're gonna be president in five years!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No shit!
BEN KISSEL Yeah, no kidding, right?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah the two of them, they hung out, they went to the movies, they went to dinner, in essence
they were dating.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well she was just hanging out with her father. He was dating her. And he'd buy her jewelry,
and he would do all this kind of stuff where she was this pure thing to him.
BEN KISSEL Great, okay, so now we're... Are we talking about Leaving Neverland again? What's going on?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No! Never again!
BEN KISSEL Okay, all right.
MARCUS PARKS And strangely, during those few weeks, Joseph said he didn't have a single hallucination.
Although that may have just been a way for him to justify dating his own daughter to Flora
Schreiber.
BEN KISSEL Maybe.
MARCUS PARKS Maybe?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Maybe Marcus.
MARCUS PARKS Not sure. Cause there are other things that he fully admitted to that are much worse than this.
Now, we have no way to know if really any of this is true, but when Mary Jo left Joseph had
break. And now he was gonna get his revenge on behalf of the god living inside his head who
told him to do all this. First, he took Joey to the kitchen and handcuffed him to the fridge
before dropping a butcher knife on the floor just out of reach just to scare him. Then, he took
a spatula from the kitchen and a rope from the cellar and returned to the living room where
his daughter was waiting. He forced her to strip down to her underwear, then he bound her
wrists and ankles with rope. After that, Joseph brought out his kerosene stove and turned it,
setting the spatula on the flame. After leaving it there heating for five minutes, Joseph picked
it up and under his god's command, burned his daughter's bare thigh. And while he was
burning her, he was saying over and over again in a sing-song voice, "You will never run away
from me again."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (singing) "You'll never run away from me again little girl, my little pancake. You'll never run
away again." Can you imagine that? And your other kid is just fucking handcuffed to a
refrigerator watching you burn your daughter. And a part of it is, he said, that it was so she
couldn't have sex with other boys. Because there was another family that was becoming close
to those kids.
MARCUS PARKS The Strong family.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The Strong family. And he was watching them. Again and again, literally driving past going,
"Get away from my kids!" And, you know, bad daddy.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, crazy stuff happening.
MARCUS PARKS Then he took the spatula back to the kitchen, washed it, and returned it to the drawer. After
that, he turned his attentions back to Joey. He took the hammer, removed the metal head,
and beat his son with the wooden handle. Then when he was done, Joseph went down to the
cellar and corrected himself with orthopedic experiments.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yup. And you saw that he did the same thing too when he said to his son, "I'm saving you.
Because my mother hit me with the head of the hammer."
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And after he was done he came back up and gave each of the kids $5 in coins for their
troubles.
BEN KISSEL All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Saying like, I'm sorry I had to educate you.
MARCUS PARKS And when Betty finally called, Joseph told her to come back home, and the whole family sat
down for a pizza dinner. The thing was, it could've been a lot worse. Joseph didn't follow his
god's complete instructions. What the god delusion had actually told Joseph to do was to
shove the burning hot spatula into his own daughter's vagina to quote, "sizzle out the badness
so the goodness would come back." And over the coming years those instructions would get
more and more dangerous, more and more brutal, more and more insane, until finally they
resulted in three murders including the murder of one of Joseph's own children.
BEN KISSEL Yup.
MARCUS PARKS And that's where we'll pick back up next week on The Shoemaker Part 2.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Woo!
BEN KISSEL All right there it is. Interesting story. This guy seems to have, seems like a perfect storm at this
point, what's going on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We haven't even gotten to the fucking murders.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're gonna show... This next episode is one of the most... Cause what I think is very
interesting is how this happened over a very small period of time, which is very similar to
Richard Chase. What you see with other serial killers is that they develop their methods and
then they hone them and then they have their rest periods and they do all that kind of shit
where one happens, they get it out of their system, and then the desire builds back up. Where
with him is that we're going to see what's going to happen. The shift in his hallucinations are
gonna up the tempo of all of his activity.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. All three of his murders happen over a period of I think about six months.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS But the last murder could have been 10. But we'll get into all that on the conclusion, on the
next episode.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. All right that'll be next week. The Shoemaker Part 2. I wonder if his shoe... Does he
have any shoes that he made? I wonder if there's any still out there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI There must be!
BEN KISSEL There has to be, cause these were shoes that lasted a lifetime.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah there probably is, yeah.
BEN KISSEL Probably are.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, Kallinger shoes.
BEN KISSEL Kallinger shoes, all right.
MARCUS PARKS And I wanna thank UK Neil out there in England who first turned us on to the Shoemaker-
BEN KISSEL See, UK Neil! That's what I was talking about at the start of the show!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well we both have one, we just have copies of this book somehow, and you're reading it and
it's this deepening, kind of sickening feeling of just being like, 'Wow. Like this is what happens
when you lose control of somebody who has unbridled, untreated mental illness and also has
known nothing but pain.'
BEN KISSEL Did they even have drugs? Like pharmaceutical drugs to treat something like this at this point?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean you could fucking dope him up with Thorazine and shit.
BEN KISSEL But I mean that's not really... That don't really work if you wanna have the functioning lifestyle
still.
MARCUS PARKS I mean he needed intensive therapy and hospitalization. Considering his extreme childhood
abuse, this guy just didn't have a fucking chance.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Nah.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS But speaking of the UK!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Speaking of not having a chance.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh! We've got some exciting news.
MARCUS PARKS We're coming back to England!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah dude! We're coming back to England, we're coming to Australia. We're not doing the
specific dates yet but we're coming to you, and we wanna know... They are booked and they
are coming out the pipe like a couple of inspirational books.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah all the dates are gonna be on the website, lastpodcastontheleft.com this Monday, so you
can see all our dates there. But yeah, we're coming to England, we're coming to Ireland, we're
coming to Scotland-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're coming to Scotland, we're coming to Australia. And also, do we have fans in Stockholm?
MARCUS PARKS And in Berlin.
BEN KISSEL Berlin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Do we have fans there? If you are there and you wanna see us, let us know because we have a
couple of potential dates and we wanna know if y'all wanna see us there because we'd love to
go to Berlin, love to go to Stockholm.
BEN KISSEL Love to go to Stockholm, love to go to Berlin. So if you're a listener there, reach out and we'll
try to make those shows happen. I cannot wait to get back to the UK and cannot wait to see
Australia for the first time.
MARCUS PARKS It's gonna be great, it's our World Tour! Two countries!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, Back in the Habit, baby!
MARCUS PARKS We're missing key portions of the world, but we are, yeah. For us this is pretty big.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah! We've never been asked to go other countries.
MARCUS PARKS No, no. Except for the last time we went to another country.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That was nice. But we asked them, essentially.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah but we've also got a ton of US dates coming out too. So we're not just going to other
countries, we're gonna be coming to a ton of... I think we're gonna be doing 10, 11 cities in the
United States this year. We got a lot of dates coming up and all of those are gonna be
announced very, very soon.
BEN KISSEL Gonna be fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Also wanna say thank you to Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell on Adult Swim for sponsoring
the first leg of our US tour. We're excited to see you...
MARCUS PARKS Did you just thank yourself?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I guess so.
MARCUS PARKS (laughs)
BEN KISSEL Well thank you-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't make these decisions!
BEN KISSEL Adult Swim, yeah. They're sponsoring the first leg of the US tour, absolutely awesome. Your
Pretty Face is Going to Hell, when can people watch it Henry?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're coming out Friday, May 3rd. It is finally being released. We are fucking so excited, we've
had these in the can for a fucking while. But I'm really, really excited for you guys to see these
batches of episodes cause I think they're really fucking good.
BEN KISSEL Awesome. Make sure you check those out. Wanna thank everyone who came out to our show
at The Bell House, really exciting, always wonderful to see all of you!
MARCUS PARKS Yes, thank you very much.
BEN KISSEL And can't wait to see you in beautiful Nashville, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. We're
gonna have a great time.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL So yes, thank you all so much for listening, we absolutely love ya. Keep on supporting all the
shows here on the LPN network, feel free to go to iTunes, rate and review, all that kind of
stuff. It really helps us out, it makes our parents think that we're really doing it. Cause they still
don't believe that this has ever been a recorded show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL It's hard to have people understand what we do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No it means a great deal. Thank you guys for your constant support, thank you for giving to the
goddamn Patreon for all that horseshit.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely, we have a fun interview Henry and I do with the dude behind Hellyer, which is a
really fun documentary about the Kentucky Goblin, so check that out this week. And yeah. Top
Hat for everything political, check out Page 7 if you wanna hear the beautiful Jackie Zebrowski,
just check out all the shows on the LPN network.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Anything else?
MARCUS PARKS You can go follow Last Podcast Network @lastpodnetwork on Instagram and Twitter and we'll
let you know when new episodes of shows come out.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, if you wanna get ready for our batch of tours this year go to lastpodcastlive.com and
watch last year's live show.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah!
BEN KISSEL It's really fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah fuckers. Hail Satan!
BEN KISSEL Hail yourselves!
MARCUS PARKS Hail Gein!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hail me.
BEN KISSEL Megustalations one and all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Honestly support your local business even if they're run by absolute, total maniacs.
BEN KISSEL I mean who knows? I don't even think there's a shoemaker around anymore.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, there's one around the corner from here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But now they're very expensive.
BEN KISSEL Oh, I see.
LPOTL (outro theme)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This show is made possible by listeners like you. Thanks to our ad sponsors, you can support
our shows by supporting them. For more shows like the one you just listened to, go to
lastpodcastnetwork.com.