HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Chicago Rippers. Well I'm sitting next to a real Wisconsin Ripper right here, it's because of his farts.
BEN KISSEL
No, that's not true. This whole place smells like broccoli and it has nothing to do with me, Mr. Zebrowski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know. But that's the best joke I'm gonna have today. That's it.
BEN KISSEL
What an episode it's gonna be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's already out.
MARCUS PARKS
It's already out.
BEN KISSEL
Do you want me an intro right now? You usually do like 30 minutes or-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
30 minutes.
BEN KISSEL
30 seconds.
MARCUS PARKS
30 seconds.
BEN KISSEL
I mean the comedy is so good I could have it for 30 minutes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what everybody says.
BEN KISSEL
You know what they call me? The Chicago Ripper because of my fart.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I said Wisconsin Ripper, that's where you're from. It's different again, I do prefer the way I phrased it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because the audience always says more banter up top.
BEN KISSEL
More banter.
MARCUS PARKS
More banter. They love it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They love it.
BEN KISSEL
Less content, more banter.
MARCUS PARKS
One thing when I listen to a podcast, I always think I hope that they talk about bullshit that I don't care about for 20 minutes before they actually get to the topic I care about.
BEN KISSEL
And then they say well let's just jump right in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So speaking to that Marcus, what do you think of the new series of Top Chef?
BEN KISSEL
Welcome to Last Podcast on the Left everyone. Ben hanging out with Henry and Marcus. It's a hot day and indeed Henry is wearing his hot boy shorts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, look at them.
BEN KISSEL
Wow, those are something else. Your legs are in full bloom. It's summertime! Summertime indeed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My legs are just condensing.
BEN KISSEL
They're doing something.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See look at them. It's these meats that were tough. The meats the highest on my thigh towards my balls, that's the worst part of it.
BEN KISSEL
It's getting a little Meg Ryan, it's getting a little leathery there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh shots fired.
BEN KISSEL
No, not really. She's still beautiful to me. She faked an orgasm. Yeah, like women do that. Okay, here we go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unbelievable.
BEN KISSEL
Chicago Rippers Part 2.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I like that this was the, how do you put it? Maybe the least prepared top of this episode going into probably one of our most grisly stories we've told in years.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, very long time.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, man. I just into Marcus on the stairs the other day, you know what we do on the stairs, it's like a prison around here. And yeah, he said a couple of things we'll be talking about today and it's thoroughly disgusting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Because I gagged just thinking about the dog hair on the underwear last week.
MARCUS PARKS
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh it's gonna get worse than that.
BEN KISSEL
So we're all prepared now.
MARCUS PARKS
No, today is gonna get your goat.
BEN KISSEL
I don't want to think about animals in any way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't. Because yeah, I don't want a goat to have to witness any of this.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No. So when we last left the Chicago Rippers, their most devastating and shortest run of murders following the kidnapping and murder of Lorraine Borowski was just beginning. What came next was six months of pure mayhem on the streets of Chicago.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They had a very short career, the Chicago Ripper crew, but they made it count.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. Sounds like an XFL team.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Wow. Honestly I think the Chicago Rippers is their XFL team.
MARCUS PARKS
Now as we said last episode, the murders themselves got very little press while they were happening. That being said there are reasons behind that dearth of coverage outside of the harsh fact that the majority of the victims were black sex workers. First of all, Chicago had a lot of murders in the late 70s and early 80s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was kinda a hobby of theirs.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It was a big thing. Chicago hit its peak murder rate in 1974 at 970.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And between 1979-1981, the years in which the Rippers were active, Chicago still averaged 865 murders per year, 7 of which were related to quote unquote "sex and perversion".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And at first I was like that's actually not a lot.
BEN KISSEL
That's a lot. There's only 365 days a year.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But if you look at the amount of murders it's not a lot in there. But I wonder how much was reported, I wonder what is then done to a sex worker, does that count to them? Did they decide to let it all go? Because this is one of those. Did they decide that you have to have a legit person be murdered for them to count?
BEN KISSEL
That's just Chicago. That's not even counting Peoria.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that is true.
BEN KISSEL
A lot of bodies in Peoria.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. That is true, that is just Chicago proper. But the fact remains that the year in which the Chicago Rippers were the most active, the number of murders related to so-called sex and perversion, they more than doubled to 18 from the year before. So it's not like the needle wasn't being noticeably moved.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everybody was hustling.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But to be fair, it's not like these bodies were always being left in obvious sites where they'd be found immediately. Some of these were left to decompose in fields for months before they were discovered and others weren't found until one of the Rippers led police to the bodies themselves.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
In my personal opinion, the reason why there wasn't a lot of coverage is because nobody knew that there were 3-4 guys out there murdering.
BEN KISSEL
I mean also do you want to believe it?
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
I don't.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well because it's very scary.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. 3-4 Ramirez's out there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Horrifying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There are though, there are.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well I know. Well let's not think about it.
MARCUS PARKS
But according to Jaye Slade Fletcher, author of our source 'Deadly Thrills', the biggest reason why the Chicago papers didn't cover the Chicago Ripper murders sufficiently is because Chicago was simultaneously in the thrall of the Tylenol murderer.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa, that story is crazy. Did they ever find out who did that?
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not necessarily. Well...
MARCUS PARKS
Not officially.
BEN KISSEL
I think it was big Advil.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If there was anybody, if there was a suspect-
BEN KISSEL
Cui bono?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean Nuprin.
BEN KISSEL
Little yellow killer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Whoa, cool! He flipped it.
BEN KISSEL
I flipped it!
MARCUS PARKS
He flipped it. See back in 1982 at the exact time that the Rippers were ripping, 7 random people in the Chicago area died from taking Tylenol capsules that had been filled with potassium cyanide by persons unknown.
BEN KISSEL
Crazy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This story is fucking wild and we are sort of not fully but half burning an entire series.
MARCUS PARKS
Nah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because we're gonna go into this slightly.
MARCUS PARKS
We're not, we're not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But we need to do this story as a whole because it's fucking wild.
MARCUS PARKS
We will. Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's so crazy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean we're not burning this series any more than like going and reading a Wikipedia page is gonna prevent you, the listener, from listening to a series. We're definitely gonna do a full rundown on the Tylenol murders.
BEN KISSEL
I think we already solved it. Nuprin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nuprin.
BEN KISSEL
Where were you?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cui bono?
BEN KISSEL
Exactly.
MARCUS PARKS
Now speaking objectively, the Tylenol murder story had more legs when it came to selling papers because anyone could have been a victim at any time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's like when Joker in the first Michael Keaton Batman movie-
BEN KISSEL
Oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Like put poison in all the cosmetics in Gotham City. Smylex.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, let's see the guy try Branex.
MARCUS PARKS
Love that Joker. For example, the first known victim was a 12 year old named Mary Kellerman who was given a Tylenol after waking up with a cold. Her condition naturally got worse after taking the pill so she was hospitalized and she died the following day, without anyone making the connection of Tylenol death.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They thought she died of a stroke.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And then a few hours after she died, a postal worker named Adam Janus dropped dead after taking a Tylenol. But the cause of death was pegged as a massive heart attack. Overwhelmed with grief, and this is the huge tragedy-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, this is during the day when the whole family has arrived to grieve over this horrible sudden death.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Janus' brother and sister-in-law also took pills from the same bottle of Tylenol and they also dropped dead.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god. It's like the movie Clue with the cognac.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Don't drink it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And there was like in the county where all this happened, they only had like one medical official which was just this nurse.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And so this nurse like went to the house and said like okay, everybody stop taking everything. I need to look at the fucking pills here. And she looked, she tested, she's like this is it. It's in the Tylenol.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, silent cyanide.
BEN KISSEL
So she's like the hero of all of it.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh she really is.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS
Because even before she came out with it and they came out with it really quick, 7 people died.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was seven different people died.
BEN KISSEL
What a trip.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
8 bottles of Tylenol were purchased from 7 different stores, it was all over the place. They then figured out that it wasn't sourced at the production plant.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Someone was doing this at the site of wherever the pills were found. The whole city went into a panic.
BEN KISSEL
Well you have that person to thank for how difficult it is to open those G-D bottles today.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't mind it though.
MARCUS PARKS
You really do.
BEN KISSEL
I know.
MARCUS PARKS
That's the whole reason.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It helps.
BEN KISSEL
Kinda.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as I said, eventually 7 people would die across Chicago from taking Tylenol that had been tampered with. And to Jaye Slade's point, the murders coincided with the mysterious disappearance of one of the Rippers' non sex worker victims and that disappearance got lost in the shuffle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because Tylenol affects families.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And to them everybody loves these precious families.
BEN KISSEL
They do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everyone is like oh these children are the future. Well we'll see. Most of the time they spend it, they seem to be spending the future on TikTok.
BEN KISSEL
Well very brave statement, Henry. Very brave. It's actually mostly elderly people who are totally broken on TikTok.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, mostly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As we have seen, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
As we have seen. Well as a side note, the Tylenol murders have never been officially solved, although it is suspected that a con artist named James Lewis was the perpetrator because he sent a ransom note to Johnson & Johnson demanding $1 million-
BEN KISSEL
Oh wow.
MARCUS PARKS
To stop contaminating pills.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is the most simple way to talk about this story.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because James Lewis is a career con man.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Him and his wife. This story is fucking wild. It's got a lot of twists and turns and we can't get into it. But I think in my mind he did it. He's the one who did it.
BEN KISSEL
All right. It seems like he sent a ransom note so...
MARCUS PARKS
Well to the point of the continuing media coverage in lieu of the Ripper murders, an amateur chemist named Roger Arnold was named as a suspect in the Tylenol murders.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He looked evil.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he looked evil but he suffered a mental breakdown because the media hounded him so aggressively.
BEN KISSEL
That's not good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But he looked like, to be honest, he kind of had Nazi face. Right? Where you look at him.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very long drawn. It's the circle glasses.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the owly glasses.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
So they Richard Pearled him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A little bit.
BEN KISSEL
They're like oh you did it. And they haunted this poor man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They did.
BEN KISSEL
Also what is an amateur chemist if not a crystal meth maker? What is that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
What is an amateur chemist?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I do amateur chemistry every day.
BEN KISSEL
That's with hot sauce and salsa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I put some seltzer in some bourbon.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm like oh it's a smile cocktail.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that really helps. You throw in some Advil and then you smoke a bunch of weed and then you eat some Advil PM on top of the normal Advil. And then next thing you're like oh the family likes me again.
BEN KISSEL
Chemistry.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Ben, what kind of American are you to fucking tell me that I can't do chemistry in my garage?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's my freedom.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know if that makes you a chemist.
MARCUS PARKS
An amateur chemist.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I have a lab coat, I purchased it on the Amazon.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I got a little tag. It says Pharmacist H. Zebrowski on it.
BEN KISSEL
Sounds like that other guy we covered that blew himself up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in great distress, Roger Arnold set out to murder the man whom he thought had ratted him out, the bartender at his local.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was just like that guy hated me!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it's because you kept ordering Manhattans, this is a fucking dive bar, dude. You get beer, you get shots.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, true.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, the bartender at the local, he was some big fat guy named Marty Sinclair. Tragically though Marty Sinclair wasn't the only big fat guy in Chicago.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No way!
BEN KISSEL
What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What?
MARCUS PARKS
And instead of shooting Marty Sinclair, Roger Arnold shot another big fat guy named John Stanisha.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Yeah, he had Ditka face.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They went straight for him.
MARCUS PARKS
They were both almost exactly 350 lbs. And they both looked-
BEN KISSEL
Oh man, I shot the wrong fat guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh god. But if you put them both in a tub of water, they would displace the same amounts.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You could see why he was so confused.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well naturally. It's not so much a lineup as much of like a lay down.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well Rogers subsequently went to prison for murder while big fat John Stanisha is now unofficially considered the 8th victim of the Tylenol murderer.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know I got into a little bit of a research hole the other day about about how one of the secret benefits of being very big, being very fat, is that you're actually less likely to die of gunshot wounds.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And accidental death, like falling down.
BEN KISSEL
It was not a research hole, it was 30 seconds live on Sirius Radio.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I did it after the fact. I was deeper, I looked back at it. Deeper, deeper. Into my material there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because your fat is actually kind of like... It helps.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it really helps. And in today's America, isn't that a benefit?
BEN KISSEL
Yikes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like that's why so many people survived on January 6th.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just the pure belly fat really protected a lot of organs.
BEN KISSEL
I just love that literally from your mouth to the presidency, he's just gonna have a whole conversation about getting kids fatter to protect them against the violence they face every day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's time to get fat again. Make America Fat Again.
BEN KISSEL
Yes. There we go, there we go. We are fat now. Have you seen pictures from the 70s?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we were fat then and we're fat now.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But let's continue to be fat.
MARCUS PARKS
Let's really get on this Wally train.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Really get on it.
BEN KISSEL
That's great.
MARCUS PARKS
Really get there. Now the Tylenol murders is a great fucking story and I didn't even get into a quarter of the intrigue.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
But perhaps most importantly as to why it got top billing over the Rippers, the Tylenol murders are nowhere near as disgusting or disturbing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why do you think many actors are chosen over me?
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like Tylenol murders, it was ready for primetime.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It really was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was easy.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean yes, people of course, they have an appetite for blood. They always have and they always will. But no matter how many so-called true crime booms come and go, the vast majority of people have a limit. And let me tell you my friends, today your limit will be tested.
BEN KISSEL
Take it to the limit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
For the first time ever, that's why we're giving out Last Podcast on the Left diamond class. This is what you get now.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You get a lanyard.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You get a sash.
BEN KISSEL
Show and tell them. They're gonna want it now.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is where we're at for this episode.
BEN KISSEL
I thought you were gonna say barf bag.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. If you're throwing up, turn off the show, you're weak.
MARCUS PARKS
You should. If you're throwing up, you're listening to the wrong show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Go find something that makes you happy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, go to the Pepto Bismol hour with Rachel Maddow.
BEN KISSEL
Oh that would be fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Stop listening to things that make you upset, it's not good for you.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Release yourself.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, Maddow won't make you upset at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. Sometimes I'm like let me get those bangs.
BEN KISSEL
There you go. There you go.
MARCUS PARKS
So on the same day that the Tylenol murders began in Chicago, a woman named Shui Mak was murdered by the Chicago Rippers just two weeks after the 8 AM kidnapping and murder of Lorraine Borowski. Now as it was with Lorraine, Shui Mak was not a sex worker because by this point, the Rippers were acting on near instinct, taking every opportunity to pick up and murder any young woman alone on the streets, no matter what she did for a living. So Shui Mak was a 30 year old Chinese immigrant who had been driving home with her brother Kent after they'd helped close down their family's Chinese food restaurant. Behind them in their own car were the owners of that Chinese food restaurant, Shui and Kent's parents. Tragically though Shui and her brother got into a tiff during the drive. So Shui's brother kicked her out of the car, thinking that her parents would see her and pick her up.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God I could never get away with that as a brother.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Just kick her out and say like oh yeah, mom and dad-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jackie, she grips onto the frame.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah, buddy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She's always grabbing at stuff. I'll fight her at the tire well. You can't get rid of her.
BEN KISSEL
No, I think she'd kick you out for sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So she's got an even lower center of gravity than me.
MARCUS PARKS
True.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So she can come up harder with the, was it a piledriver that they called that?
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Push up with the elbows.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So yeah, again because I'm so top heavy and bottom low, bottom little, the seat belt holds my gut but my legs actually only kinda stick out a little bit, kinda like Dorf.
BEN KISSEL
Just a little, yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so I am actually much easier to topple over out of a car than Jackie. Cause Jackie is more low set.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. And has a history of bullying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But that's kinda why you gotta whack her over the head with a sock full of pennies or something first if you're gonna do-
BEN KISSEL
Good luck.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Because again, she's looking through the pennies.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She knows where the pennies are, she hears them jangling.
MARCUS PARKS
But when Shui's parents arrived at their house after Shui's brother, Kent discovered that his parents had missed Shui standing on the shoulder.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah because it's very random that you kicked your sister out of a fucking moving car. I mean not moving but-
MARCUS PARKS
He stopped, he kicked her. And it's 2 AM. It's very late.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a big fight.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It must have been.
MARCUS PARKS
It wasn't that big. I think it was something like-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's sad.
MARCUS PARKS
He had moved a table, like he had stood on a table to paint something and she was mad and was like you can't do that, the customers eat there, blah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh is ee, at the restaurant. Restaurant fight.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was dumb, it was some dumb petty argument.
MARCUS PARKS
It was some dumb bar... Like the type of fight you see on Kitchen Nightmares. Like that sort of bickering.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My whole life is in this meatball soup establishment! It's my life!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Rubbish.
MARCUS PARKS
And of course-
BEN KISSEL
That was my impression.
MARCUS PARKS
This is rubbish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Rubbish.
BEN KISSEL
Rubbish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, that's your Gordon Ramsay impression?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, Gordon Ramsay. Rubbish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you wanna hear mine?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) Absolutely extraordinary.
BEN KISSEL
He never says that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, if you watch, I watch a lot of MasterChef. (British accent) It's extraordinary. He puts all words together.
MARCUS PARKS
Extraordinary.
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He puts all the letters in one.
BEN KISSEL
He never gives compliments.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He does.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's actually very kind.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, on the kids one.
MARCUS PARKS
On the kids one, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's constructive criticism and people can understand, if you're gonna be in the MasterChef kitchen, you need your head on a fucking swivel.
BEN KISSEL
No, it's not always constructive criticisms, sometimes he puts two pieces of bread on someone's side of the head and says what am I? And then that person has to say an idiot sandwich. What's constructive about that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See that's Gordon Ramsay on Hell's Kitchen. MasterChef, he's more of a leader and a guider. Hell's Kitchen he needs you to understand if you can't take the heat of Gordon Ramsey, then you don't belong.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is literally Hell's Kitchen.
BEN KISSEL
Let's get back to hell in Chicago in the 1970s please.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right, let's bring it back around.
BEN KISSEL
Here we go.
MARCUS PARKS
I didn't even get into my opinions of Kitchen Nightmares. I sacrificed them for the good of the show.
BEN KISSEL
Thank you. Let's just get right into it. Well let's just hop right in.
MARCUS PARKS
Let's just hop right in. Let's just get into it. Of course when Kent and his parents went back to pick up Shui, they found that she was gone.
BEN KISSEL
Oh no.
MARCUS PARKS
To her extreme misfortune, Shui Mak had been picked up by the red van driven by Robin Gecht and the Ripper Crew. Now according to Eddie Spreitzer, he and Robin had been driving around near 2 AM when they saw Shui Mak standing on the side of the road. Robin quickly told Eddie to get in the back and then he picked up Shui. And after driving for about 20 minutes, Robin stopped and tapped twice, which was the signal for Eddie to emerge.
BEN KISSEL
Horrifying.
MARCUS PARKS
And after pulling Shui out of the van, Robin and Eddie beat her before Robin cut off her breasts while Eddie held a wire around her throat. Robin then told Eddie to go grab a knife from the van but when he returned, he found that Robin was having sex with the wounds in Shui's chest.
BEN KISSEL
Ugh.
MARCUS PARKS
Robin then took the knife and cut open Shui's stomach, which was apparently too much for Eddie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
At that point, that was too much.
BEN KISSEL
That's the line?
MARCUS PARKS
That's the line. He got nauseous and returned to the van or that's what he claimed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And Robin joined him soon after. They drove off, leaving Shui Mak's mutilated body behind in the field where she was murdered.
BEN KISSEL
What's that conversation like? So that was a little weirder, huh? What the fuck, dude?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't believe a word Eddie says when it comes... It's hard.
MARCUS PARKS
When it comes to his participation and how much he participated?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Eddie Spreitzer in his confessions was trying to see... We'll get into this a little bit later on.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, we'll get into it far more.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The cops interrogated them in a circle, right, where they would go back and forth between each one in kind of what we call the prisoner's dilemma. In cop interrogation parlance, you go up to the one guy being like you know your other buddy already told us everything.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So that you can kind of figure out where all these lines are. Eddie Spreitzer always kind of had an eye on making sure Robin Gecht was still the most evil one.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They all knew that, they all knew to do that. So at any point, Eddie Spreitzer would think oh this is how I in a way... Because all human beings are fighting for a way to validate choices that you make even if they're bad, good and bad, right. You want to feel like you're correct. And so Eddie Spreitzer would say things, these weird qualifiers of like and that was too much.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or I wouldn't go that far. Even though you're already aiding and abetting one of the worst series of crimes in crime history.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But that was his way of saving face.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I think that later on the Satanic cult stuff would also be at the same function.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well quote unquote "Satanic cult" stuff.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
It would take four months for Shui Mak's decomposed body to be discovered by a trucker who somehow spotted the corpse from the highway when no one else had.
BEN KISSEL
Well that's a trucker for you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
They are good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's always looking for bodies.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That's what I always say, if I had a superpower it would be to know where all skeletons were at all times.
BEN KISSEL
That's good. What a superpower. What a useless superpower.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You like bones.
MARCUS PARKS
So that way I could lean over to Carolina, I could say like hey, there's a skeleton over there.
BEN KISSEL
Now why? Now that is the most useless thing I've ever heard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unless you think it would get her like crazy horny.
MARCUS PARKS
No, it would just be fun. And then we could just hang out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you think eventually at some point she would develop a form of sexual paranoia?
BEN KISSEL
It would be a curse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Eventually she'd be like we can't have sex here, there's too many skeletons here.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. And then you'd have to start lying.
MARCUS PARKS
There's no skeletons anywhere.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You scan, be like I can't see any skeletons over here.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's how you figure out where you're gonna have sex.
BEN KISSEL
You know the history of this country, right? You're gonna be haunted.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was nice cause when we showed up we have to create sort of a carpet of bodies.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just because the ground was so dirty.
BEN KISSEL
Cause no one else was here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, no one was here.
BEN KISSEL
All these people, why are they here? They're not here.
MARCUS PARKS
Well speaking of which, the site where Shui Mak was murdered, it was only a mile and a half from where Shui's brother had thrown her out of the car.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS
And by the time Shui Mak's body was found four months after her death, Chicago police had started to notice that out of the hundreds of murders they had to deal with, every once in a while a woman's body would show up with one or both breasts missing.
BEN KISSEL
Hey Sergeant Pepperoni here's the deal. Why don't you go sprinkle a little Tylenol on that body? We'll add it to the Tylenol.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. I mean now that I'm looking at her, the stomach's cut open, all right, face mutilated, breasts are gone.
BEN KISSEL
This is strong Tylenol.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This has gotta be Tylenol.
BEN KISSEL
It's gotta be Tylenol.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this of course meant that Chicago was unlucky enough to be dealing with a serial killer. It's always the last thing a police department wants.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They don't wanna deal with it.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Because they're so incredibly difficult to even investigate, much less solve.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
You always got to wait until they trip up. But that's the thing is that once they do trip up, you need forensic evidence in order to make sure that these guys get put away.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And a lot of times as we've seen again and again with serial killer investigations, the bodies get exhumed. And so the Chicago police were very upfront to the Mak family saying like hey, if you bury her, we're probably gonna have to exhume the body. The thing was is that the Maks were devout Buddhists.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And their beliefs stated that once a body is buried, it shall not be disturbed.
BEN KISSEL
Oh no.
MARCUS PARKS
So these people had to go through the further indignity of having Shui's body stored in the medical examiner's facility until Eddie Spreitzer was convicted three years after her murder.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And then and only then was her body allowed to be laid to rest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
At least though, I mean the only thing I'll say is that this is a family that at least got some closure. Like a lot of these people got no closure because as we've talked before about sex worker murder, it's a myth that no one's looking for these people.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes it is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is absolutely not true. They have connections. They're not just sex robots.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They have friends and family that are also looking for them. It's just you need to have a police department that cares.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, most of the time if women are out on the street doing sex work, they're doing it because they have somebody that they're connected to.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because they have somebody that they're trying to take care of.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're trying to make money.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now investigators got their first real lead in the Chicago Ripper case in June of 1982. But at the time not enough bodies had been found to establish that a serial killer was loose. So the survival of a victim was not as big of a deal as you might think. Put differently, if you think that it's hard to get cops to investigate the murder of a sex worker before they start piling up, imagine how difficult it is to get cops to investigate one attempted murder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
So in June 1982, a sex worker named Angel York was on her corner on North Avenue when Robin Gecht pulled up alone in his red van, shoved a .45 in her face, and ordered her to get inside. After driving a few blocks to a deserted factory district, Robin forced Angel through a plywood door that separated the cab from the van's cargo hold. Now what's interesting about this attempted murder is that it's one of the few in which Robin acted alone or at least it's one of the few that we know of.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we all believe that he did something beforehand.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But it's doubly interesting because Robin specifically chose to not murder Angel York.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's almost like he couldn't do it without his little butt boys watching him do it as well.
MARCUS PARKS
Could be.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, was there anything like he wanted her to tell the story? Like was it like go tell the other sex workers that they should be scared?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know. No, no. Because he doesn't want them to be scared.
MARCUS PARKS
No, no.
BEN KISSEL
It wasn't like that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the opposite. He wants no one to know.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now after binding her feet and handcuffing her right hand to her left foot and her left hand to a shelf, Robin put duct tape over Angel's mouth and got undressed himself. He then pulled out a long knife, uncuffed one of her hands, pointed the gun in her face and told her to cut her own breast. Now Angel did as much as she could but she soon started to pass out. That's when Robin reached over and ripped the wound open before he had sex with the wound and ejaculated into it. He then covered the wound with duct tape and kicked Angel out of the van without killing her.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. So gross.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very gross, you're right.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I'm gonna say that's gross.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, you're pegging that correct.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I will say I'm glad at no point you're not like yum.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa, yeah. No that's nasty stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
Well security guards soon found her barely alive and she was taken to a nearby hospital where she gave a statement describing Robin and the van.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She was really fucked up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Oh yeah. Incredibly fucked up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It took a long time for them to get the statement but they did, they were technically on it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean they were on it in that they took a statement.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Not necessarily on it in they actually looked for the guy. I mean they took it down that he's a greasy little white guy, he's driving a red van, and she said that he had a roach clip hanging from his rearview mirror that held two feathers, a blue feather and a white feather. But it seems like the police just added the van to the 'watch out for this guy' pile.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They didn't say like holy fuck, we gotta go find this guy today. It's just like okay, watch out for a guy in a red van, he's been beating up hookers.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
And that's the most they're gonna do with it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now Robin Gecht was alone during his near deadly assault on Angel York. And as far as we know those were somewhat rare. From what it seems like, half of the charge that Robin got from these murders was in directing the other three members of the Ripper Crew to commit horrific acts. One possible example of this, if it is true, is what Tommy Kokoraleis claimed. Tommy said that Robin forced the other three members of the Ripper Crew to eat the breasts of their victims during Satanic rituals held in Robin's apartment.
BEN KISSEL
My goodness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's known as the Chicago cream doughnut.
BEN KISSEL
That ain't right. No, they're a zeppole people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They are a zeppole people, that is definitely a nippley zeppole.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
My goodness.
MARCUS PARKS
However these claims must be taken with an enormous grain of salt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'd do a loaf of salt.
BEN KISSEL
A big loaf?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A full sized crystal of salt.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So is this the time? Are we gonna uncase this?
MARCUS PARKS
Let's get into it. Let's get into the Satanic claims of the Ripper Crew, which of course everything that I read with the Ripper Crew-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's always Satanic murderers, the first thing it says.
MARCUS PARKS
The first fucking sentence in everything is always Satanic murderers, Satanic gangs, Satanic ritual, small cult.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Reporters love it. They just love to say it. When there was the whole Satanic Panic thing, we've talked about it, but it was an episode of American Occult that also features the Chicago Ripper Crew because everyone's very fascinated with this angle, like about whether or not they were an organized cult. And I'm just gonna say do you think that they're that organized to begin with?
BEN KISSEL
I don't think they're that organized, no.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't think they're organized, I don't think they're a cult, I don't think Satan had anything to do with it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He never does. He never does.
BEN KISSEL
He might, he might.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Anything to do with murder.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you're eating come out of a bucket, Satan might have something to do with it.
BEN KISSEL
I think so, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now while it is said that Robin had an altar of sorts in his attic and while it is said that a copy of the Satanic bible was found in his apartment-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was a best seller and it was also a huge thing in the 70s to have in your house.
MARCUS PARKS
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was like 'Be Here Now' or one of those other books where it was cool to have.
MARCUS PARKS
It was super cool to have, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
It made you super edgy if you had a copy of the Satanic bible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's like not it just makes you cool, super legit.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah, it's super cool now.
BEN KISSEL
It's so cool.
MARCUS PARKS
It's not an edgelord thing at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, not at all.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
No, it's really cool. I like those shirts, not today, Jesus. They flip it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is where the commercialization... We talked about this with Shane Morton when we were doing Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell because I remember we were always talking about, he's like one day the whole world's gonna be shouting hail Satan. And I didn't think it was gonna be like this.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Satan is very cute.
MARCUS PARKS
yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which I do believe he's fun but I don't think he's cute.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Yeah. I never thought Satan would be on coffee cups.
BEN KISSEL
Sure. He's not real is the ultimate thing there.
MARCUS PARKS
But while it is said that all those things were found in Robin's apartment, it's important to remember what we know about the Satanic Panic of the 80s and what we know about the patterns of the Satanic Panic. Specifically it's important to know how easily children were led on by investigators to make fucked up nonsensical claims.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I was flushed down a toilet, old grandma played the piano, all that sorts of bullshit.
BEN KISSEL
West Memphis Three stuff.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the thing, that's exactly the point that I'm getting to. In the case of the Chicago Rippers, we don't have a child but we do have someone with the intelligence of a child, namely Tommy Kokoraleis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you watch, there is a current interview of Tommy Kokoraleis when he got out of jail in 2019. And which is a long story that we'll talk a little bit at the end of the episode. But Tommy Kokoraleis is I Am Sam.
BEN KISSEL
Oh great character work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He did do a thing that they said that Ben Stiller should never do.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he went full. Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He is he is not the brightest egg in the dozen.
MARCUS PARKS
No, no, no.
BEN KISSEL
I think Sean Penn should have to be the character from I Am Sam every time he goes to Ukraine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It might help.
BEN KISSEL
It might help.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause he could teach them the simplicity of love.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't it nice?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because that's what the Russians need to hear.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They just need to see one happy... Sure he's a little simple, he's a little slow, but he gets something that you don't get which he understands sometimes you just got to take off your shoes, you gotta dance in grass.
BEN KISSEL
You have to dance in the grass. I Am Sam vs Forrest Gump. Let's see it in the news.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh Forrest Gump will fucking bury I Am Sam.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah. Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's a Vietnam hero.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He would fucking bounce I Am Sam's fucking head off the wall.
BEN KISSEL
True. He is an athlete.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. And an athlete.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. If you ever read the sequel to Forrest Gump-
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
I think was called Gump and Co.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
You would see that Forrest Gump, you know what he did eventually? He went into space with Raquel Welch and a chimp.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he went to space, dude.
BEN KISSEL
Again, it's not real. That is not happening.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think he's realer than god and Satan.
BEN KISSEL
Well he has a movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We got Tom Hanks. He has the outfit.
BEN KISSEL
Well that's true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So he can dress up as Forrest Gump and it's basically the same thing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now we're getting back into chaos magic.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, that's true. I do wonder if there's any Make A Wish kid who's just like I just want to see Forrest Gump. And then Tom Hanks has to just-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Show up?
MARCUS PARKS
Has to do it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well speaking of Forrest Gump, Tommy Kokoraleis had the Forrest Gump IQ, it was 75. Actually I think Forrest Gump's might have been 72.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) I've never met a mother who cared more about a child's education.
BEN KISSEL
Really talented work, Henry.
MARCUS PARKS
Well IQ tests, they're not the be all end all when it comes to intelligence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
I know that they're extraordinarily flawed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
But even so, a score of 75 doesn't inspire confidence in a man's cognitive skills.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what doesn't either? When you look at his eyeballs and he has the same eyeballs. You remember the kooky gremlin from Gremlins 2?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's got two big dumb eyeballs looking in the same direction.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They're constantly whirling around. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. That's him.
BEN KISSEL
Well that means he's thinking.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That's good.
MARCUS PARKS
See Satanic Panic cases-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When your eyeballs look like the things that mix up slushies at the movie theater, that's how you know you're really thinking.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Oh he's having an internal debate.
MARCUS PARKS
Well see Satanic Panic cases were notorious for creating massive Satanic conspiracies that had no grounding in reality. These conspiracies were often created through extended games of yes and that occurred between investigators and victims. Sometimes however that game would be played by investigators and suspects. And invariably those suspects weren't the brightest bulbs in the box and they were almost always people pleasers.
BEN KISSEL
Well now what if we, I know Orange Julius, what if I started a little restaurant called Julius Orange?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh my god. Tommy!
BEN KISSEL
TIme to investigate the murders.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But wait, first of all, wait a second. Did you just say Julius Orange?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, Julius Orange.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This simple murderer is the best business man I've ever met in my life.
BEN KISSEL
It would be really nice. It would be an affordable kind of nice sugary treat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We gotta send him to Russia. This guy's gotta talk to Putin.
MARCUS PARKS
Now according to Tommy's confession concerning the Satanic elements of the murders, the Ripper Crew would gather in Robin's apartment after his wife went to work. And there in the apartment, in the apartment's attic, they would worship something or other at an altar adorned with six red and black crosses.
BEN KISSEL
I didn't know apartments had attics.
MARCUS PARKS
Sometimes they do.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This was a multi floor.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Well after they were all knelt together around the altar, Robin would produce the breasts of murder victims from a trophy box. And while he read passages from the Christian bible-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To sully it.
MARCUS PARKS
Each man would masturbate onto a severed breast. Then after everyone-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know how it is.
BEN KISSEL
I know, I know. The old salty boob. Yeah, it's great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very good, very good.
MARCUS PARKS
After everyone ookied their cookie-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Robin would allegedly-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can you say gloobied the booby?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I guess you could.
MARCUS PARKS
You could, you could. Robin would allegedly cut up the breast and hand the pieces around for everyone to eat. That's what Tommy claimed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't like that. I don't like that at all. I want my own.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why do I gotta share? Why do I gotta share with Andrew?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. They like their peppers and they don't put ketchup on their hot dogs, they use tomatoes. Whatever. That is what they do.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Tommy said that while he was only involved in two murders, he participated in dozens of these rituals. And when police asked him why he participated so many times, Tommy said in all seriousness that Robin had supernatural powers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know Gandalf?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you know Gandalf?
BEN KISSEL
I don't know him like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I committed murders with him.
BEN KISSEL
Oh really? Gandalf would never do that.
MARCUS PARKS
No, he wouldn't. And Tommy was therefore afraid of what Robin would do if Tommy didn't go along with everything.
BEN KISSEL
I do believe that might be kind of true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I have a theory, I have a super theory.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well Tommy elaborated, saying quote, and this is an exact quote, and Henry, I want you to do this exactly as he said it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. "He looks into your eyes and he tells you to do something and you just have to do it. You be real careful when you talk to him, Detective Sam. Don't you look into his eyes. He'll get you too."
BEN KISSEL
So Julius Orange. Now is that gonna be more of a pop up or something in the malls?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't like anything that pops up because I get scared.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Wow, you are too stupid to kill.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's the thing about the Satanic connection is that after really getting into this story, Tommy's confessions give me pause if only because I see a lot of parallels between him and Jessie Misskelley of the West Memphis Three. Jessie was himself a low IQ individual-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Who was led into a false confession of ritualistic murder that led to murder convictions and one near execution, all while the other two members of the West Memphis Three are like what the fuck are you talking about? I didn't do anything!
BEN KISSEL
I know. That was the saddest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes.
BEN KISSEL
I mean it was already so sad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But with the West Memphis Three, the majority were literally saying we had nothing to do with any of this. And one was kind of being led on by the police.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In this case the other three, they did come out and in confessions at first all said that this shit, some of this shit happened. Three of them out of the four said that they all consumed a breast that they had all came on.
BEN KISSEL
I mean I guess they're all closer to doing it than us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they recanted it. They all said after the fact that none of it was true.
MARCUS PARKS
Well to the point of your round Robin, the prisoners' dilemma that you said earlier, we'll definitely get into how Tommy came to confess to all this Satanic-
BEN KISSEL
Can you just not say come please?
MARCUS PARKS
Or quote unquote "confessed" to all this Satanic shit. But I think it was a case of the cops taking Tommy's Satanic shit because Tommy wants to please people.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
All he wants to do is see a smile on your face. And I say that-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or say good job, Tommy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, say good job, Tommy. Yeah. That's all he wants. And then the cops take the Satanic shit to another guy like Eddie Spreitzer who only wants you to be scared of him.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
And he wants a cop to look at him and go my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're the worst criminal I've seen since my father.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Actually it's part of the reason why I'm a police officer.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're so evil I feel I can confess to you.
BEN KISSEL
He just starts eating a pack of cigarettes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I gotta quit eating cigarettes.
MARCUS PARKS
And so Eddie and Andy, the other member of the crew, Tommy's brother, they both are like yeah, yeah, yeah, we did Satanic shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we did that too.
MARCUS PARKS
We did that shit all the fucking time, man. That's how fucking evil we are.
BEN KISSEL
So as an ego boost.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Because again, they're all tiny little fucks, right. They're all greasy little shitheads. You are now put in a supermax prison. What's a good way to keep everybody from fucking with you immediately? I'm a Satanic cannibal that has superpowers.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
What Dahmer did but it didn't really work out for him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it did not.
BEN KISSEL
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I always believe there's a middle way.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that there is a way when you are all doing... You are already at the peak of the most depraved actions a human can do.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, real bad shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And what we've known about every other serial killer for the most part, they have like lines in the sand, some of them do have lines where I don't do this, I don't do this, I don't do this. We see a lot of times like Ted Bundy denied the cannibalism even though at first he was like super all about it, he was super into it.
BEN KISSEL
And the necrophilia I think he denied too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. He tried to say no too.
MARCUS PARKS
But with Bundy asnt it just the necrophilia that he was into?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
But he didn't say anything about cannibalism.
BEN KISSEL
But he did do it when it comes to the killing of the young girl. He's like I would never do that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I would never do that.
BEN KISSEL
No, not that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Shit like that. But this guy, I think at some point you've been doing all this fucked up shit together.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This idea gets floated.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And we are all doing super evil stuff. Because I think that Robin Gecht, much like the CIA probably did in various sections of MK Ultra, this is true-
BEN KISSEL
You're gonna bring in MK?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Walter, what does this have to do with Vietnam? How the fuck in 10 seconds?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They purposely dressed up in Satanic robes so people wouldn't believe what they were doing, right. So they would say you're setting up these crazy scenarios and then they're doing the Bill Murray thing, no one's gonna believe you, because the guy was wearing a Bill Clinton mask or whatever.
BEN KISSEL
Right. And now back to Robert Gecht.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Robin Gecht.
BEN KISSEL
Robin Gecht.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He used this quote unquote "Satanic line" like it was a character that he'd bring out.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That would bring the other two. Because Eddie Spreitzer was on the same page as Robin Gecht and it would help bring dummy one and dummy two closer in for them all to believe that he has magic powers. He probably also liked the roleplay of it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I imagine at some point something like it came out and they were having some freaky dumb ass night together and they decided to do something "like this" quote unquote but it was never organized at all.
MARCUS PARKS
No. Well I think that they had a freaky deaky night where they ended up eating breasts but I think it was more just getting a little bit too drunk.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Who knows?
MARCUS PARKS
But I don't think there was any ritualistic-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think Robin Gecht is a far more canny criminal than the other three obviously.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh of course. But I think that all of the Satanic shit was made up in the room.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
I think it was all made up in the interrogation room.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, definitely.
MARCUS PARKS
But I do think it's definitely cannibalism because if you look at other ripper cases, the Red Ripper Andrei Chikatilo also, eventually these cases end up in cannibalism. Almost every single time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I mean he's already having sex with open wounds.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cannibalism is not that far.
MARCUS PARKS
No, it's really not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not worse. I actually think cannibalism is not as bad as that.
MARCUS PARKS
You know what? I'm on your side.
BEN KISSEL
Well tough to say. Tough to say. Tough to say. Tough to say.
MARCUS PARKS
See Eddie Spreitzer never explicitly implicated Tommy in any of the murders or the sexual assaults.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was there though.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the thing. The psychiatrists who have studied his case since his incarceration describe him as a people pleaser with again a very low IQ.
BEN KISSEL
Doesn't really sound like a people pleaser.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's not like he wanted to please everybody.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Is that like Mengele just trying to please Hitler? I don't know, is it? I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
As we'll discuss later, Chicago police weren't always the most ethical when it came to eliciting confessions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Now I will admit it is definitely a toss up as to whether Tommy was involved in the murders. Most likely he was, as you said Henry, most likely he was involved in at the very least sexual assaults at some point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I think he was there.
MARCUS PARKS
Possibly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I mean? During certain crimes he was there.
MARCUS PARKS
Certain crimes, yeah. But I don't think he ever participated in murders. But he definitely deserved to go to jail.
BEN KISSEL
Close enough.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He should probably still be in jail.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's free now and a Christian.
BEN KISSEL
Interesting, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, we'll get to it. But I will also say that I'm always suspicious when a confession is paired with unsubstantiated claims of wacky Satanic rituals.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We always are.
BEN KISSEL
Of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because I've been in wacky Satanic rituals and they're largely very nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And they're certainly helping your career out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were for a while.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And my point will be strengthened later in this episode when we discuss the original source of these cultish claims. Now after the attack on Angel York, all police knew was that they might be looking for a little guy with greasy hair driving a red van. But from what I can tell, they hadn't quite connected him to the Ripper murders themselves because I don't think they knew at this point that the Ripper murders had happened.
BEN KISSEL
Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't think they knew that a serial killer existed just yet, right after Angel York was found.
BEN KISSEL
Because I would make that connection if I did.
MARCUS PARKS
You'd make that connection.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now I would.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
But that ambiguity would change very quickly into certainty. After Angel York came sex worker Sandra Delaware, whose body was left under a bridge after being gang raped by Andy, Eddie, and Robin. As a final indignity before she died, Andy forced the neck of a wine bottle up her anus, then made her sit on it. He then pushed her down on the bottle, shoving it up into her innards and releasing a large pool of blood.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm sorry, Fernando.
BEN KISSEL
Ugh. God, it's disgusting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fernando is doing his best.
BEN KISSEL
These guys might be the nastiest fucking pieces of shit we've covered.
MARCUS PARKS
And there's still more to go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The Ant Hill Kids I still put up there.
BEN KISSEL
That's Roch Thériault, that crew there. There's something about this though that's really just so frightening.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
After Sandra was marketing executive Rose Davis, who's very public murder was arguably what finally brought the Chicago Rippers to the front pages of the Chicago papers.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. So how did they get a hold of her then?
MARCUS PARKS
Kidnapped her off the fucking street.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Just walking down the street.
MARCUS PARKS
She was walking down the street.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That became their MO.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was what they did.
BEN KISSEL
So they were just like sex workers, they were too easy. Let's go on to-
MARCUS PARKS
Not even because Shui Mak ran a fucking Chinese restaurant with her parents.
BEN KISSEL
Right, right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's whoever was easy.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's whoever was easy to them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, whoever's out. Because at this point Lorraine Borowski, they'd fucking followed her into her office at 8 AM.
BEN KISSEL
Right, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Their only MO, their only victim type is a young woman alone. That's it.
BEN KISSEL
That's right. And that guy in the liquor store, if he would have pointed to the van, that would have been a connection that the cops didn't have there either.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
So the cops were looking for a car.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Well they had the van idea but they didn't really know.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And again, 970 murders.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
There's a lot to look at and that's just murders. That's not even considering everything else that's going wrong in Chicago.
BEN KISSEL
Right. And that's just Chicago.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Rose was kidnapped off the street by Andy, Eddie, and Robin while she was walking to her car at 2:30 AM after she just stayed out late having drinks with a client. She's just a marketing executive. She was then taken to an alleyway where the Ripper Crew mutilated her extensively in public. When Rose's body was found half sitting against a wall in the alley where she was murdered, her nose and eye sockets were crushed, her jaw was broken, her face was unrecognizable. Again her breasts were slashed with such force that blood spatters were found in a 9 foot radius around her body and a piece of broken lumber had been shoved into her vagina up to the small intestine. All of this was done while she was still alive.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my gosh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they're all making each other one up each other. And then again, it's the fucked up thing, it's four on one.
MARCUS PARKS
Now at this point the cops definitely knew that there was a serial killer on the loose.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I would think so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Although they had no idea that the murders were actually being committed by a team of serial killers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which makes it so much harder too.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well kind of. But then also if you get one, you'll get all of them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah but you know that there's more than one.
MARCUS PARKS
But I would also say that having multiple killers might make it easier because there's more people to slip up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, it's just hard because the crimes themselves that are so nasty.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they are.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's so hard to parse through all of this stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
It really is. Yeah. I mean knowing what we know now, I would imagine that if this were to happen in modern day, I think they would be able to peg pretty quickly it's like oh there were four guys here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I bet you at this point they did know that it was multiple.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, probably. But that's the thing, they brought in Robert Ressler to consult.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They're like okay, we've got a guy, let's bring in the biggest baddest FBI behavioral science guy we got. Like Mindhunter. Was it fucking Tench in Mindhunter? The guy with the haircut?
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that guy's great.
BEN KISSEL
That's the guy?
MARCUS PARKS
The guy who was in Fight Club, yeah. That was based on Robert Ressler.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Ressler was spot on with his profiles at times. But when it came to the Ripper case, he sort of whiffed it. But he did guess that the killer was small and skinny, he also said that the killer had effeminate features and was most likely bisexual, perhaps even latently homosexual.
BEN KISSEL
Why did he think that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Probably because the destruction of the body and the sexual organs and the idea that you're punishing somebody for those with hate.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I want to be this, I want to have this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It got tripped up on that a lot.
MARCUS PARKS
He got tripped up on it, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There was a lot of that.
MARCUS PARKS
Robert Ressler, he was absolutely revolutionary but he was also wrong a lot.
BEN KISSEL
Well it's a social science, you're not gonna get it a hundo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There was also like at the time because they were just finally getting past true homophobia but they still were deeply embedded in transphobia.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And did not understand how any of that shit worked at all.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So they're always just being like yeah, obviously he was mad because he didn't have breasts.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it doesn't make any sense. It makes no sense.
BEN KISSEL
Well as we learned with Richard Speck, you can get some titties.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh that's the easiest thing.
BEN KISSEL
I'll get you a pair of titties right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I got them right now.
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this profile from Robert Ressler unfortunately led police to a hairdresser with the fantastic name of Jacques Monaco.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How would I ever murder anyone? I was at the gala!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, Jacques Monaco ain't killing no one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, Jacques Monaco is going to the loafers store.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He just wants to be at the pool with a fucking martini.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, Jacques Monaco.
BEN KISSEL
I'm not saying I want to wait on him when he comes into the restaurant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He might be very specific.
BEN KISSEL
Little bit of a James Corden type. But I don't think he's a killer.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Jacques Monaco lived in one of the buildings that was separated by the alley in which Rose Davis was killed and abandoned.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
During the Josie Martinez mixer? There is no way I was there.
BEN KISSEL
So literally they were just like who lives close here? Jacques!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right, let's arrest that gay. There we go right there, you can tell by his scarf.
BEN KISSEL
Got him, Dano. Lock him up.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it was. Robert Ressler came in and said you're looking for an effeminate guy, so they just knocked on all the doors.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hello! Immediately like-
BEN KISSEL
We got him!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We got him!
BEN KISSEL
We got him!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well that's the thing is that Jacques Monaco said that he did hear quote unquote "commotion" outside but he said that he didn't call 911.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, 970 murders. That's why he didn't call 911 is because it's really fucking dangerous out there and you don't want to get involved.
BEN KISSEL
Hear me out, let's play Phantom of the Opera real loud, see who comes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's me.
BEN KISSEL
You're arrested!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they'll find out he's so gay he's straight.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS
Finish it for me. (singing) The music-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) Of the night!
BEN KISSEL
Well you didn't sing it well enough, you've been canceled.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No!
BEN KISSEL
Sorry, Phantom.
MARCUS PARKS
That's the thing. They talked to Jacques Monaco, he said he didn't call 911. They found that suspicious but they eventually let it go when it became obvious that a man such as Jacques Monaco could ever be guilty of such a crime.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm sorry, it's currently the spring, I was wearing my whites. I would never kill a woman in my whites.
BEN KISSEL
I believe it, Mr. Monaco.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the murder of Rose Davis was obviously reckless and we can assume from both this and the Ripper crew's next murder that they and especially Robin Gecht were starting to feel invincible. Case in point, on October 6, 1982, Eddie was driving the red Ripper van through a Puerto Rican neighborhood while Robin rode in the passenger seat. They spotted three guys at a phone booth and Robin told Eddie to slow down. Completely on impulse and without any motivation, Robin pulled out a .38 special and a rifle and just fired five shots at the guys, told Eddie to speed away.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Just full Natural Born Killers behavior.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just total mayhem.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, total mayhem. Killed one guy, shot him in the head. Paralyzed another guy, shot him in the head. The third guy ran off.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And when the Ripper Crew was caught, Eddie, he copped to these crimes but he's like I don't know why he did it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let me just put it this way, okay. Robin, not a nice guy.
BEN KISSEL
Not a nice guy at all. Seems a little impulsive as well.
MARCUS PARKS
But as it always goes with serial killers, it's when they get reckless that they get caught. And hours after the drive-by shooting, Robin would pick up his last victim. This one however would survive to positively identify her assailant.
BEN KISSEL
All right!
MARCUS PARKS
Beverley Washington. A sex.
BEN KISSEL
That's good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's is good.
MARCUS PARKS
Beverley Washington, a sex worker walking her usual corner on North Avenue and Throop, got picked up by Robin after he offered $25 for fellatio.
BEN KISSEL
Ooh, who's that? Not today, fellatio.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What?
BEN KISSEL
Bye fellatio.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That doesn't make any sense.
BEN KISSEL
Bye fellatio.
MARCUS PARKS
I get it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh now I get it, bye Felicia.
BEN KISSEL
Fellatio Kissel, that's gonna be the name of my first born.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bye Felicia makes sense.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Beverley agreed. But once she walked through the plywood door separating the cab from the cargo, Robin pulled his gun and told her that if she only did what he said, she wouldn't get hurt. Now Beverley was a seasoned woman of the night and she figured that she'd run across what some girls called a hooker freak. Some so-called hooker freaks were guys who got off on humiliation. They like getting peed on, they like getting told that they were a bad widdle boy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sometimes you are and you gotta be corrected by a stern woman.
BEN KISSEL
I mean who knows?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unfortunately that's just the rules.
MARCUS PARKS
That's just what happens.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how it's gotta be.
BEN KISSEL
I mean I definitely get more stressed out during tax season.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But some, like Beverley assumed of Robin, they like to hold a gun to a woman's head while she screamed, it was a request. But there wasn't anything particularly dangerous about the gun scenario ao long as the gun wasn't loaded.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
As Beverley had discovered in the past, it's just a fantasy. Some guys just gotta get it out.
BEN KISSEL
Beverley could have really been needed there on that set of Rust.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Truly.
BEN KISSEL
Really could have needed her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Really could have been. Honestly that is a very seasoned sex worker.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just getting a gun pulled on you, being like all right. Oh no, don't kill me. Okay, let's get it going.
BEN KISSEL
My Instagram feed has just been this 70 year old sex worker and she's just been talking about all this stuff. It's been very interesting. Biggest cock she ever saw, 11 inches. She called it a two hander, couldn't fit in any of the holes. She doesn't do anal, she licked it like a lollipop. That's what she said.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you have her information?
BEN KISSEL
No, she's on Instagram.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com. What's her name? What's her handle?
BEN KISSEL
I don't know but it's all over my Instagram.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Reach out to Kissel. Reach out to Ben Kissel.
BEN KISSEL
I think our phones have been talking, now I'm getting the GILF.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, now you're getting the GILF disease?
MARCUS PARKS
I'm next. I'm just gonna let it happen. I'm not gonna look for it, I'm just gonna let it happen.
BEN KISSEL
Let it happen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, the way you do it is that you be half asleep, look at your phone, you're like oh boobies, click on it, see the face. You're like oh a very old woman.
BEN KISSEL
Not too shabby.
MARCUS PARKS
But with Robin, once the knife came out Beverley knew that she landed in a bad spot. And when Robin forced her to swallow a handful of pills, she had no idea whether or not she was ever gonna wake up again. But wake up she did the next morning on North Maplewood, where a homeless man found her. Her left breast had been removed so completely that her ribs were visible and her right breast was attached only by a few strands of flesh. But the important thing was that Beverley was still alive. She was taken to the nearest hospital where she was stabilized, although she was unable to speak when detectives arrived. Anxious to get whatever information they could, they asked her a series of yes or no questions, telling her to blink for a yes and shake her head for no. They soon confirmed that she had been picked up by a greasy little white guy in a red van. And before long they had her writing words describing her attacker. Mustache, blue jeans, flannel shirt, greasy hair. When asked to describe the van, she wrote roach clip, rearview mirror, two feathers, white, blue.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now we got him.
BEN KISSEL
If only we've heard about this before.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I've been too focused on my goddamn Julius Orange business. It's failing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I tell you what, I've been hollering outside the offices of Nuprin for the last two weeks.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
For the truth!
BEN KISSEL
I know.
MARCUS PARKS
And with that, Beverley's descriptions matched those of Angel York's. So police had everything they needed to narrow the search. Although there were apparently a shit load of red vans in Chicago.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
BEN KISSEL
How many are we talking here? Like 1000? I mean still it's narrower.
MARCUS PARKS
A lot. I mean it's narrowed down and I would imagine Chicago, like most metropolitan police departments in the late 70s, early 80s, were vastly under manned.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, no, it's because the Chicago Bears, red/blue, there's probably a lot of red vans in there, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Chicago Bears aren't red/blue at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Aren't they red/blue?
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
No, they're like blue and then I guess there's a little bit of-
MARCUS PARKS
They're brown.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, those are the Browns.
BEN KISSEL
No, they're not brown.
MARCUS PARKS
No, it's the Chicago, are they red?
BEN KISSEL
No, they're like a dark navy blue with a red, or an orange, it's like orange.
MARCUS PARKS
Chicago Bears?
BEN KISSEL
Why the fuck are we-
MARCUS PARKS
They're orange and black.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just saying.
BEN KISSEL
Orange and dark blue.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Blue.
MARCUS PARKS
Sometimes it's dark blue.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And red.
BEN KISSEL
He was trying. He was trying. And he didn't mention the CIA, the was trying not to mention MK Ultra.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I did good.
BEN KISSEL
And so you did do good. Super Bowl Shuffle.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Remember that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, I remember that.
BEN KISSEL
Remember that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh whoa, simpler times.
BEN KISSEL
Super Bowl Shuffle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Simpler times. All they had to do was go on a Jay Leno show and dance. And that's all football players had to do back in the day.
BEN KISSEL
That's right.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean I guess to that point Henry, they did pull over a lot of orange vans.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you.
BEN KISSEL
Maybe they pulled over The Fridge.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I am right sometimes.
MARCUS PARKS
They pulled over pink vans, copper vans, maroon vans, whatever was even close to red.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a spectrum.
BEN KISSEL
Any van.
MARCUS PARKS
But on October 20th, two officers pulled over a red van with a plywood partition and a roach clip hanging from the rearview mirror. And dangling from the roach clip were two feathers, one white, one blue. But driving the van was Eddie Spreitzer. And even though Beverley's description was of Robin Gecht, the van was exactly as she described it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know all this happened while Barack Obama was in Chicago.
BEN KISSEL
Right. Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I blame him.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's another smirch on his presidency.
MARCUS PARKS
Actually no, I think he was actually in Hawaii.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I cannot believe Barack Obama would allow this to happen.
BEN KISSEL
He did that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He should have been in Chicago.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
I think he was in Hawaii.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh he was on vacation? Oh just soaking up the rays?
BEN KISSEL
Yep, he could have solved it.
MARCUS PARKS
That's where he grew up, he grew up in Hawaii.
BEN KISSEL
Mostly in Hawaii.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh nobody grows up in Hawaii.
BEN KISSEL
A lot of people do. I was just listening to my-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, they're all shipped in.
BEN KISSEL
I was listening to my Kevin & Sluggo on the way over here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yours.
BEN KISSEL
Hawaii. Yeah, it's my favorite show. Hawaii, the number one most expensive place for a home. The median home, $680,000 to buy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, remember there's less homes. It's a tiny island.
BEN KISSEL
Anyway. So I guess he didn't grow up that poor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is back in the day though.
MARCUS PARKS
Interesting. Barack Obama moved to Chicago at the end of 1982 after the Chicago Ripper murders.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Should have been there.
BEN KISSEL
He could have solved it!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Should have been there. Where was Michelle?
BEN KISSEL
Bo! Goddamnit, Bo.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Eddie wasn't the coolest cucumber.
BEN KISSEL
No, I don't think any of them are cool cucumbers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Robin Gecht is, we'll get to that here in a second.
BEN KISSEL
Maybe a smoother criminal.
MARCUS PARKS
yeah, maybe so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(stuttering)
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, Eddie stammered and stuttered his way through the entire stop and he immediately said this is not my van.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's Robin Gecht's van! This is Robin Gecht's van! Robin Gecht, G-E...T. All right? It's Get.
BEN KISSEL
Get.
MARCUS PARKS
And he immediately gave the cops his address.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's right here, 666 Asshole Avenue. Go over there, go get him!
BEN KISSEL
So remember, when you get pulled over Eddie, don't tell him anything about me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Robin Gecht did it!
BEN KISSEL
Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm sorry, I had to get it out.
MARCUS PARKS
Well when they arrived at Robin's house, Gecht was at ease. He was smiling, he showed no sign that he knew why the cops were there. But regardless, he matched Beverley Washington's description of a greasy little fuck perfectly, so they hauled his ass in. Beverley easily picked him out of a lineup saying that's the bastard.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they brought him-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To her at the hospital.
BEN KISSEL
Oh god. I'd be like can you get him out of here?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no, she started screaming. It was like a scene from a movie.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where they brought him in and she starts freaking out and then they just pull him right out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. So Robin was arrested and since Eddie was driving the van, he was arrested too. Reportedly when Robin was told he was being arrested, he responded with an open mouth and put his hand to his chest as if to say moi?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Moi? Me?
BEN KISSEL
Oh my. Honestly he's acting like a real Monica.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's no way I could have done this, I was at Juana Martinez mixer. It's the white season, I can't be killing people when I'm in my whites.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah? I don't know if you were invited, buddy.
MARCUS PARKS
However all they could charge Robin with was aggravated battery, deviate sexual assault, armed robbery, and kidnapping.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because she didn't die, this first one did not die.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that a lot?
MARCUS PARKS
It's a lot but it's not murder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not enough. No, it's not enough.
MARCUS PARKS
And Robin, he said nothing except to ask for a lawyer when he was questioned.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS
He just kept saying lawyer, lawyer. Never said anything, never confessed to anything ever.
BEN KISSEL
If you're the cops, you gotta be like say the word lawyer if you're guilty.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Got you! That's where I got you!
BEN KISSEL
Yes! Nice!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Robin Gecht and John Wayne Gacy are the same type of, I mean obviously asshole.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But this type of criminal where they want their crimes to die with them. It belongs to them. John Wayne Gacy, I'll explain why, I went back through a bunch of his shit recently. I think it's the 30th anniversary of his execution is today.
MARCUS PARKS
Jesus.
BEN KISSEL
Is that right? Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I believe that John Wayne Gacy was executed... I know it was May 10th.
BEN KISSEL
Well he definitely didn't leave a good corpse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, he did not.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. That is one big old fried chicken right there.
MARCUS PARKS
30 years next year. It's 29 years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
29 years.
BEN KISSEL
Wow! May 11th.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean 10th-11th, you know they do it at midnight.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They do it at midnight. But John Wayne Gacy was such a control freak that he wanted to make sure even his narrative entirely owned by him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He didn't want anybody to fucking go and he didn't want anybody to be able to know.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because he felt that confessing would lower himself to these police officers.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's obviously one of the worst bastards.
BEN KISSEL
I was just wondering, are there any buildings that John Wayne Gacy built that are still there?
MARCUS PARKS
Gotta be.
BEN KISSEL
There must be.
MARCUS PARKS
A ton.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Oh that's weird.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But even though Robin Gecht refused to cooperate in any way whatsoever and just kept deflecting and deflecting, Eddie Spritzer was a different story.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I mean I thought it was really weird when Robin brought up Hunter Biden's laptop. And it's like buddy-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're on it. And then they really got into a hard discussion ebing like yeah, yeah, we do need to talk about Hunter.
BEN KISSEL
Let's look into it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well after being pushed, Eddie fell to pieces and filled a 78 page written statement detailing his relationship with Robin Gecht and the murders that they'd committed together as the Ripper Crew.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
From what Eddie said, the first actual murder occurred when they picked up a sex worker, then they blindfolded and gagged her. Robin then just shot her in the head. Which tracks with what we know about escalating serial killer behavior. Starts very simple, then gets much more ornate as it goes on. The disposal method however was quite different. Lord knows where they got them from but allegedly Eddie, Andy, and Robin chained bowling balls to the victim's neck and feet like it was a fucking Popeye cartoon before they threw the corpse into a body of water.
BEN KISSEL
It's Chicago, there's a lot of bowling.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that it's a bowler town.
BEN KISSEL
It really is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And again, due to diabetes, due to certain things, Chicago is full of different various foot diseases.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Knee problems.
BEN KISSEL
Vascular disease.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I see a lot of bowlers just quit on their way to the lane.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just being like fuck this, I gotta get a sitting down sport. I gotta fly drones for the army, like I can't do this.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So they would just leave their bowling balls.
BEN KISSEL
I mean I would imagine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like seeing a pile of headshots in LA jammed into a trashcan.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. I forget there's that one bar that puts them all up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Residuals, they used to.
BEN KISSEL
But isn't it after you leave LA, like after you fail as an actor they put your headshot up? But I would assume that most bowling alleys, 80% of them bowling balls ain't used. There's only so many good bowling balls in a bowling alley.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. That's true.
BEN KISSEL
Only so many get the fingers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Are you talking about, are these like nepo balls? Balls that just kinda just live?
BEN KISSEL
I feel like there are balls that are more, when you're hunting for your ball at a bowling alley, some do (whispering) pick me, pick me, pick me.
MARCUS PARKS
They do.
BEN KISSEL
And then you're like sweet, look at the holes on that one.
MARCUS PARKS
They do whisper.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I like the ones that are translucent.
BEN KISSEL
Oh those are cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They are cool.
BEN KISSEL
I like the one with the rows in it like Bill Murray's character.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Bill Murray in Kingpin, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That movie's good.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I wish that we were talking about Kingpin instead of wine bottles. But let's just jump right into it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Let's just jump right in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's just get right into it.
MARCUS PARKS
Let's get right to it. Well when it came to the known murders, Eddie vacillated between taking responsibility and removing himself from the process altogether. He claimed to have once vomited after Robin beat a woman with a hammer, that was presumably Rose Davis. But Eddie also admitted to cutting off breasts and he admitted to having sex with the gaping wounds. But concerning Eddie-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's whatever was convenient for him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Whatever made him sound more like a badass at the time. But concerning Eddie's wishy washiness, a woman who had known him for six years said that she called him a sissy for one reason or another just on a random day, they were talking about something like Eddie you're such a sissy. And Eddie responded by saying that he wasn't a sissy-
BEN KISSEL
No I'm not.
MARCUS PARKS
Because he'd quote "killed a couple of broads" and he'd quote "cut their tits off" and that it was quote "very messy".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well I guess I take it back.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. I thought you were a sissy, turns out you're a real hunk.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're cool.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
But by the time Eddie finished with his first statement, he'd given up seven murders and one aggravated assault, which investigators felt they could use against Robin Gecht as leverage.
BEN KISSEL
Leverage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Most powerful force in the universe.
MARCUS PARKS
But according to what Eddie claimed later, years later, the interrogation process was far worse than a gentle conversation. According to his story it took five days for him to break during which a detective named Flynn psychologically and physically tortured him.
BEN KISSEL
I don't care.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We don't care.
BEN KISSEL
I'm really sorry to say this, this is one of the rare times where I'm just like slam his fucking head into a table.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, wail on him. Beat him.
BEN KISSEL
I don't care.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean the problem is that it destroys everything for court. Like that's the true issue.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The idea that it took him five days to break, bullshit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bullshit. I think that he was ready to sing. He was already being like Robin Gecht's van! Robin Gecht's van!
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like he was already doing it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But yeah, I don't think they were gentle with him.
MARCUS PARKS
No, absolutely not. But from what Eddie said, Detective Flynn took him out to the woods and forced him to dig a grave.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure, sure. Cops are definitely, they're super activated.
BEN KISSEL
I'm gonna give whatever abuse these cops wheeled upon these people, I'm gonna give them what they call a Mulligan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
On one. This is the one.
BEN KISSEL
Just the one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
You can beat the fuck out of all these guys.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Eddie was allegedly pushed into the grave and the detective kept firing his handgun near Eddie's head again and again. They said the cop had to reload three times.
BEN KISSEL
That didn't happen. Also that didn't happen.
MARCUS PARKS
That didn't happen.
BEN KISSEL
No way did that happen.
MARCUS PARKS
This whole story, you're just gonna keep saying that didn't happen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh that didn't happen.
MARCUS PARKS
That didn't happen, that's not how it happened.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well because they don't have to go to ornate means to be completely frank.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We know what they do. They literally all they have to do is leave you in a room.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's it. That's all it takes to break a person is you can leave him there for three days. You don't have to do this shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Everyone has a vice. Mostly everyone has the vice of in need of water.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. You put him in a stress position. That's what they do.
MARCUS PARKS
Well after running out of bullets, the cops then allegedly took Eddie to a car wash and used a pressure hose to remove the grave dirt. That's why no one saw-
BEN KISSEL
What is he fucking Farva from Super Troopers? My ass.
MARCUS PARKS
That's why nobody saw a dirty Eddie Spreitzer was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Powdered sugar.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It's delicious.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Delicious.
BEN KISSEL
It's delicious.
MARCUS PARKS
Then once the detective's shift was over, Eddie was taken by two more detectives to an abandoned house where they beat him for hours. Then after he passed out, he said that they pissed on him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh okay.
BEN KISSEL
Shut the fuck up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You could do this at the station.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They could just do this at the station. No one's gonna say anything.
BEN KISSEL
So this is basically him saying I only confessed under this duress. This is what it took me to confess.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I felt Satan's strength through me. And that's the only way I'd succumb.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the thing though is that it sounds pretty extreme but it's not that far fetched when it came to the Chicago Police Department.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. They definitely beat the living fuck outta that guy.
BEN KISSEL
And there's still black sites to this day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
You don't want to be there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. During the 70s and 80s, Chicago cops, and this is documented, they used cattle prods on suspects' testicles, they would suffocate them with plastic bags, they would burn them with cigarettes, they beat them senseless, all to illicit confessions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah but that was at the station.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they didn't have to take anyone out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, that was happening right there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
But what doesn't wash when it comes to Eddie's story is that he told them about at least two murders that the cops hadn't attached to the ripper at all. And Eddie himself led police to the mausoleum where the body of Lorraine Borowitz had lain undiscovered for over a year.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, he was singing like a fucking songbird the entire goddamn time.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As soon as he arrived he was drinking milkshakes Henry Lee Lucas style. He doesn't want to say it. He doesn't want to know.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was probably the opposite. They just treated him like a fucking king.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, seriously.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're bringing him burgers and shit while he's just prattling off every detail he can possibly imagine. I don't know, I think that they probably whacked his head a couple of times.
MARCUS PARKS
Probably, I'm sure, yeah. But the Chicago police, they usually reserve their extreme coerce confessions for black men, especially in the 70s and 80s. Eddie Spreitzer was very white. And besides, if anyone was going to be tortured into a confession, it was gonna be Robin Gecht because he was the only one who was explicitly described by two near victims.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he was the guy basically.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And when Robin Gecht was questioned, he was always friendly but he remained adamant that he was the real victim here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We gotta just think about this. Look at the description, mustache, greasy, disgusting.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unbelievable.
BEN KISSEL
I can't believe they criticized my greasy hair. This is genetic, I shower every single day.
MARCUS PARKS
After being shown pictures of known victims, Robin dismissed them. And even after Robin was shown that Eddie was actively cooperating with police, didn't even flinch, didn't fucking phase him a single second.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Instead he would well up during descriptions of murders, he'd give them puppy dog eyes and say that he'd never hurt anyone in his life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fucking piece of shit.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And interestingly once Eddie heard that Robin was denying everything, Eddie took his lead and changed his story saying like yeah, Robin never hurt anyone ever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're all playing games now.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Instead Eddie was now saying that the real killer was his ex-girlfriend's brother, his coworker, Andy Kokoraleis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Me? Not me!
MARCUS PARKS
Andy, not Tommy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean I think that they're pretty similar in my mind.
BEN KISSEL
They're the Kokoraleis family.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Technically Andy was the smart one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. That's like Marcus is the handsome one out of us.
BEN KISSEL
I guess so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's the heartthrob.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Is that right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you're the moral strength.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I'm the fucking...
BEN KISSEL
What are you?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The brains.
BEN KISSEL
The brains of the operation.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. If we're fucking depending on this smile for our dollars...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Some people like it.
BEN KISSEL
I think it's more about the content. I do. I think people overlook us.
MARCUS PARKS
Now while Andy was being looked into, Robin was ill advisedly let out on bond after a middle- aged woman that he was having a sexual relationship with took out a mortgage on her house to bail him out.
BEN KISSEL
Oh wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can't believe that they did that, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Crazy.
MARCUS PARKS
Almost immediately. He went out and picked up a woman. This woman named Cynthia Smith, immediately went out and picked her up. She recognized Robin too late as the guy who'd slashed a friend of hers. She went to go and try to open the door, Robin had removed the passenger side door handle.
BEN KISSEL
Oh gosh.
MARCUS PARKS
And now it's insane to think that nobody in the police department was put on Robin's trail.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Nobody was like hey look out for that guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They just let him go.
MARCUS PARKS
Just go follow that guy.
BEN KISSEL
It literally should have been a detective like me in a dress, whistling, being like come on, boys!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just don't understand how he was allowed to get bail at all.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't understand how that was even possible. I guess she mortgaged her house so it must have been $100,000.
BEN KISSEL
Wow, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It must have. Yeah, she mortgaged her house. Yeah, it must have been fucking insane what his bail was. But Cynthia Smith got lucky. When Robin picked up his homemade glass hatchet and tried stabbing her in the face with it, she clawed her way past Robin and made it out the driver's side door. Robin sped off. Soon after Andy Kokoraleis was brought in for questioning. He also confessed before the day was out, going into detail about how the crew had kidnapped women and stabbed them with everything from knives and razors to tin cans and can openers.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS
Before it was all over, after the hours of talking about fucking amputated breasts and wound sex and all this horrible shit-
BEN KISSEL
No shit, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
Andy Kokoraleis had confessed to 18 murders.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Including those of Rose Davis and Lorraine Borowski.
BEN KISSEL
So he more than doubled it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. And also what was weird, he's going through it and then he would hit them with some weird facts about how like the original name of the character was supposed to be Glenn Borland?
BEN KISSEL
Glenn Borland, that's crazy, man. Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
From Home Improvement. That's fact.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
That show is not even out yet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
No, it's really not. He knew a lot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He did.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow, he really did. Saw into the future back when Tim Allen was still a cokehead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa. Where was he during all of this?
BEN KISSEL
He was actually selling cocaine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Doing cocaine as well, right?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I guess so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He better be.
BEN KISSEL
He's a mule.
MARCUS PARKS
Now up till this point from what I can tell, nobody had mentioned Tommy Kokoraleis in their confessions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But when detectives investigated Robin's whereabouts during the murders that Eddie and Andy confessed to, they found that the crew partied at the Rip Van Winkle Motel. This was where they'd committed their first known murder. And when they partied there, outside of the murder of course which they did often-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
There was usually fourth guy who also rented a room with Eddie, Robin, and Andy.
BEN KISSEL
Gotcha.
MARCUS PARKS
That was Tommy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Tommy. But before that Tommy Kokoraleis is not on their radar at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And once cops started speaking to the manager at the Rip Van Winkle, the manager said that he suspected that these four men were quote unquote "cultists".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
So when cops caught up to Tommy, their line of questioning focused on Satanic ritual behavior, that's where they began.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Therefore once the cops talked to poor dumb Tommy long enough, he began admitting to Satanic ritual behavior to make the cops smile.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And also they lie to you. They lie.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They'll say stuff like we'll get you out of here. Like this is our time to help you.
BEN KISSEL
Help me help you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the whole thing, being like this is the time for you to tell us this story. They'll lie to a dumb person and say like all you gotta do is tell us everything.
MARCUS PARKS
And we'll let you out of here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We'll let you out of here. And then they're like okay, well now you're a Satanic murderer. So you're not going anywhere.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Takes two to tango. I think these people want to get it off their chest too.
MARCUS PARKS
I know Eddie Spreitzer definitely did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And then Tommy saw shit and helped, I think he saw shit and helped and then decided to just also felt super guilty, he wanted to get out of it.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the only murder that Andy confessed to was the one that involved the Rip Van Winkle, the murder of Lorraine Borowski. The cops showed him a picture of Lorraine and Tommy said that he and his brother Andy had taken her for a quote unquote "one way ride" out to the Rip.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he was a fucking shithead.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then later on he'd go to recant everything too because he's another one of these, which makes him extremely dangerous in my mind is the fact that now that he's released. Ah, I gotta wait.
MARCUS PARKS
Now incredibly Robin Gecht was not charged with any murders. While he was implicated by the three other members of the Ripper Crew in multiple slays, there was no physical evidence tying him to those murders because he'd covered his tracks very well. Remember he washed out the entire van after every single murder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We said Gacy's main issue was that he buried the bodies underneath his home.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he said the only way to make sure you get away with the crime is to not have any body.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Well Gacy had a lot of evidence then.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He did.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
26 pieces of evidence.
MARCUS PARKS
And that's the other thing is that Robin Gecht kept his mouth shut from start to finish. However there was the grievous assaults against Beverley Washington and Angel York. And by the end of it, Robin Gecht was sentenced to 150 years in prison once you put all his crimes together.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Robin Gecht is still alive.
BEN KISSEL
Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He still maintains that he's innocent of all the Chicago Ripper murders.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's awful. It's just the worst trait of any serial.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Technically he's up for parole in the year 2042. He'll be 89.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, he's not going fucking anywhere.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah well. 89, he might make it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't think he's gonna go anywhere.
BEN KISSEL
He's not even that old right now.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, not really. And in a further injustice, he's also the only member of the Ripper Crew who wasn't charged with and therefore was never found guilty of murder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Wow, that's crazy. But he was like the ringleader.
MARCUS PARKS
There was no evidence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it's because they didn't have that direct evidence.
BEN KISSEL
What about all the other people being like yeah, I was doing it with Robin Gecht, it's his fucking car.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But again, you're looking at the three of them and as soon as anybody meets any one of the rest of them and you're all like oh, you're terminally stupid.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Well not only that but you look at what you got him on already.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
You got him on 150 years, he's not getting out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we got him.
MARCUS PARKS
And you look at it like is it worth a trial?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Is it worth-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fucking this up?
MARCUS PARKS
Because all they have is just the confessions of these other three guys.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
That's all they got. So it was like what's the fucking point?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we got him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. In 1984, Eddie Spreitzer pled guilty to the murders of Rose Davis, Shui Mak, Sandra Delaware, and Rafael Tirado. Eddie was sentenced to death in 1986 but his sentence was commuted to life in prison in 2003. He's also still alive.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Andy Kokoraleis however was not so lucky.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good.
MARCUS PARKS
He took his case to trial for the murders of Rose Davis and Lorraine Borowski and was therefore also sentenced to death. But while Eddie Spreitzer managed to play the appeal game long enough to stay alive, Andy did not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Was he just like get on with it, expedite it?
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, he's a moron. He's literally just a fucking, he just was truly very stupid.
MARCUS PARKS
He was the last person to ever be executed in the State of Illinois.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
He was killed by lethal injection on March 19, 1999. He became a political football between anti death penalty and pro death penalty proponents.
BEN KISSEL
They should just give him some Tylenol.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They did, they did. So I'll get into this.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So a listener pointed me towards this book. So if you were the person who sent me this recommendation, no one else had sent me this, this book is one of the craziest, most fucked up books I've read in a minute. It's called 'The Last Victim', it's by Jason Moss. And 'The Last Victim' is about this young man that was a precocious college student that became fascinated with serial killers. So what he wanted to do was he wanted to figure out how to communicate with serial killers and basically find out the kind of what he called like hunting technique of the serial killer. How does one get trapped by one of these serial killers? What goes down in the moments before a serial killer murders you?
BEN KISSEL
Was it in goodwill or was it like a Kohberger thing?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it was in goodwill.
BEN KISSEL
Was he studying to... Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well people talked about this. Now he died by suicide after the fact. But what he would do is he would approach and it started with his relationship with John Wayne Gacy.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where he would research John Wayne Gacy, start writing letters to John Wayne Gacy from the character point of view of what he considered to be like his ultimate victim. So John Wayne Gacy, he sent a letter to John Wayne Gacy saying I'm 18 years old, I'm bisexual, I'm confused with my sexuality, my father beats the shit out of me. All fake, all of it completely put together.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And basically led John Wayne Gacy on into saying like so I'm so confused and I don't know what to do and I hear your story and I'm so compelled by it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He ends up in this year long relationship with John Wayne Gacy writing letters to him.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Eventually John Wayne Gacy sets up this whole thing to come visit him at the prison. He goes to visit him in prison, John Wayne Gacy has bribed several officers to do this in a sort of conjugal visit which Jason Moss was not aware that was gonna go down like that.
BEN KISSEL
Oh no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He arrived, he then basically becomes almost John Wayne Gacy's last victim by essentially almost being raped in a jail cell by John Wayne Gacy. It's fucked.
BEN KISSEL
No!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it goes into he plays all this like you kind of just see what this crazy predator John Wayne Gacy is. And Jason Moss also then admits I was way over my head because I underestimated him because he is just this doughy fuck.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is how he lived his whole whole life.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he got away with so much shit. He's this kind of affable-
BEN KISSEL
Polish Day Parade dude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's a shapeshifter.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's very easy to forget that he is John Wayne Gacy.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He is a master criminal and shithead.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Even when he's doing the interview where he's like and this is the rope trick, when he's doing it you're like well let's see how this goes. He's a fucking clown, he's a clown!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Playing the game. It ended in him taking his dick out, forcing himself on him, taking his dick out, stroking it being like you know how many little shits died for this cock? Is what John Wayne Gacy said.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yuck.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because he would pull out his dick, he'd be like hey, take a look at that, 7 inches, mushroom cap head. Look at that right there, it's nice, fits real snug in an ass. That was like his thing he would roll to the kid.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Kept saying it, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Real nasty.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
It's John Wayne Gacy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Its John Wayne Gacy, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
John Wayne Gacy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It wasn't romantic.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so it was rough. So when this episode happens, it freaks him out.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But guess who's John Wayne Gacy's neighbor? Andy Kokoraleis, who John Wayne Gacy would affectionately call Koko, right. He'd be like call Koko over there, he's a couple of bars short of a candy store.
MARCUS PARKS
Chicago guys, you know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He would just joke on him and stuff. So John Wayne Gacy, everybody had nicknames and everybody loved him because he would again shapeshift.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But Andy Kokoraleis, when Jason Moss goes to sit with Andy Kokoraleis, he's like this is an entirely different beast. John Wayne Gacy, unassuming, you kind of go in there and then you're switched. He watched it turn on, like watched him become Pogo, right?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But this one, he's like Andy Kokoraleis, you're looking at a guy who literally is just a giant wall of meat that was obviously very dangerous but mostly just like I don't really know what's going on in here. And he's like John Wayne, he's like you know JW, he's crazy. He's a funny guy. Like his thing.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But eventually John Wayne Gacy apparently had this thing called PMA, right. Where you got to keep a positive mental attitude.
BEN KISSEL
Wow!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. He's a big Bad Brains guy.
BEN KISSEL
PMA! All right!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, Gacy loved Bad Brains.
BEN KISSEL
Positive mental attitude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But Kokoraleis was saying all these Gacyisms to Jason Moss. So it's like oh like John Wayne Gacy was like grooming him too.
BEN KISSEL
Weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like it was this thing where it was the way his mechanisms worked. So Andy Kokoraleis was following John Wayne Gacy around like he was a puppy dog in jail.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But this book is crazy. And a lot of people are talking about what are the ethics talking about Jason Moss. Like why was he doing this? Is it cool to do? He was doing this as a young man.
BEN KISSEL
It's dangerous, dude. When you start flirting with these people, they do have power in the sense that they don't give a fuck.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well he also went straight to the the home of the Minotaur.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He went straight to the center of the labyrinth.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, he did. He jumped right into the final stage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it was really very scary but he did get to see the mechanism. And basically John Wayne Gacy kept admitting to all these crimes. Once he was hard, John Wayne Gacy became that guy.
BEN KISSEL
Right, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so you can kind of see how those mechanisms are at play and all this kind of shit. But it is just wild. But yes, Jason Moss ended up committing suicide. It's very sad, very sad story.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you know, he was traumatized by his own hand. He didn't know what he... He was in shock and and traumatized.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because then John Wayne Gacy wouldn't let him go.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because then he tried to cut him off, he tried to like ghost John Wayne Gacy. But John Wayne Gacy is calling his house, he's got his weird lawyer friend. John Wayne Gay tried to pawn Jason Moss off on his lawyer, like to go stay in a room to go visit John Wayne Gacy.... This is all again, this is in 1992/1991.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So they go to go stay before visiting him in jail and the lawyer has only rented one room and Jason Moss who's been playing off like he is this burgeoning street hustler, it's all fake. He's a nerd.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's just a very smart kid.
MARCUS PARKS
College kid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
College kid. And this guy, basically John Wayne Gacy was trying to get him to fuck the lawyer and then he was gonna come fuck me and then this guy was gonna be basically railed on by all these jail guards. It's all highly corrupt. It ended up revealing a lot of shit.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean that's the thing about these episodes when you hear about it like when we talk about quote unquote "deep dives" on serial killers, we are barely scratching the surface on what actually goes on with these people. We're barely scratching the surface about what actually happens, what's actually inside, what they do, what their daily lives are like, what they're like in prison afterwards.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
We don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
John Wayne Gacy had 50 guys on the line, all fulfilling fantasies for him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So he was playing out all these various fantasies for all of these various people, people writing him, everyone's kind of lying. Richard Ramirez, he had a relationship with Richard Ramirez. Richard Ramirez was saying like I got a network of cult people around the world that are doing my murders for me.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you don't know whether or not that's a real or not. It is interesting though to like poke in and see their fantasy structures.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He talked to Jeffrey Dahmer. Jeffrey Dahmer just wants dick pics.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jeffrey Dahmer was just like just straight up, things are really lonely in here.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he was an oddly simple creature.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, yeah. And of course they did inspire perhaps some murders.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes. I think that Richard Ramirez was openly looking for people.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because then when Jason Moss wrote to Richard Ramirez, he wrote this thing being like I'm looking to be taught in the ways of evil.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He wrote this super cringey thing.
BEN KISSEL
Oh buddy, you gotta be very careful, dude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But Richard Ramirez bought it hook, line, and sinker.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But again, is it all real or is it just a part of these extended fantasies from inside a cell?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well all I know is we need a spinoff series on it and I'm sure Peacock will allow it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I really think so.
BEN KISSEL
That'll be great. Follow that rabbit hole.
MARCUS PARKS
Well we got Robin.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
We got Eddie, we got Andy, but then there's Tommy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Poor, simple Tommy.
MARCUS PARKS
See even though Tommy Kokoraleis was sentenced to 70 years for the murder of Lorraine Borowski as part of a plea agreement, his sentence was cut in half for good behavior in 2017. He was denied release that year only because he had nowhere to live. But two years later in 2019, a church in Aurora, Illinois, the home of Wayne's World-
BEN KISSEL
I know.
MARCUS PARKS
Agreed to take Tommy under their care. That is where he remains and that is where he will likely die.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Until he reoffends.
BEN KISSEL
Why the fuck is he out of prison?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it was old timey law. I guess because he was sentenced to 70 years and I believe it was because he was not sentenced to murder, because he was not guilty of murder explicitly. He was allowed to get off on half time on some old Chicago rule on good behavior.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So 35 years, he was let out. But the dude does not cop to anything.
MARCUS PARKS
Nothing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He believes that he's just like I'm totally innocent, I did not do any of this. Which to me, I don't know why-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like if he could have owned up to something and have said something I'd kind of trust that maybe he's rehabilitated.
BEN KISSEL
I don't think so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But if you don't...
BEN KISSEL
How do you rehabilitate-
MARCUS PARKS
No, he shouldn't be out. No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, the church is doing it for bragging rights to show how much they quote unquote "care" for points, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like they just want him to... So this church community is allowing this predator in the middle of it. I don't know, that's my opinion.
BEN KISSEL
We'll see how that goes.
MARCUS PARKS
But there's a huge contradiction right in the middle of this whole fucking thing.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because the church is saying we believe in forgiveness, we believe in rehabilitation. And at the same time Tommy Kokoraleis is saying I didn't do anything.
BEN KISSEL
He's not asking for forgiveness.
MARCUS PARKS
No he's not, he's not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he also straight up says he doesn't believe in god.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's literally openly saying I'm using these people.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they're like we're fine with it because technically we're I guess supposed to be.
MARCUS PARKS
Well they get points.
BEN KISSEL
Seem like suckers to me.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean that's the thing.
BEN KISSEL
He's very dangerous.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's very dangerous.
MARCUS PARKS
There's such better ways to spend your fucking time and your money.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
If you're a so-called Christian, there's such better ways to spend your time and money than to fucking take care of a guy who was connected to the Chicago Rippers!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. He was one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Even if he was the dalmatian of the fire truck, he was one.
MARCUS PARKS
All right, you're taking care of the mascot for the Chicago Rippers.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
There's such better things you could do if you're a fucking Christian.
BEN KISSEL
Well and of course it's very difficult to do these things without a little encouragement. And isn't that what a mascot brings? Halftime shows, first quarter. Ooh, he's gonna dunk.
MARCUS PARKS
The story however ends with another coincidence. It's not as big as the Gecht-Gacy coincidence but it's a coincidence nonetheless.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which also didn't go deeper into that. I don't know. Something must have gone down in some way that John Wayne Gacy was specifically talking to Andy Kokoraleis after the idea that Robin Gecht and him worked together. There was something, I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's John Wayne Gacy playing with everybody.
MARCUS PARKS
I seriously think it's John Wayne Gacy leaning over to Andy and going like no shit, Robin? I knew him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I knew him!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like I worked on a job with him. Cool! Like I don't think it went any further than that. Like small world. That's what it is, it's a small world conversation.
BEN KISSEL
It is a small world.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because of the anniversary they also just had a interview with a guy that was a survivor of John Wayne Gacy and this send chills up my spine. It's part of why I think that something, why he had either accomplices or somebody else in there, they believe that he might have been connected to like 100 murders.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like he was trolling. He was in Indiana, he was in Kansas.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was in a bunch of different places too because he used to travel for work. John Wayne Gacy was I think largely one of the... That's why he is what he is.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's why in pop culture he's probably one of the biggest villains in human history.
BEN KISSEL
Let's just hop right in here. Let's just hop right in. Yeah, he's the nastiest.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in 1999, Robin Gecht's son David Gecht was charged with first degree murder in the gang related killing of a man named Roberto Cruz. David spent 22 years in prison despite the fact that witnesses on the scene said that Cruz was killed by two large Latino men.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Must have been some kind of Latino.
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
MARCUS PARKS
David Gecht, besides being white, was even smaller than his father, he was 5'5". He is definitely not a large Latino man, much less two.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Maybe spiritually.
BEN KISSEL
You never know.
MARCUS PARKS
But he'd confessed after being beaten by a detective named Ronaldo Guevara. Guevara had also threatened Gecht's then pregnant 18 year old girlfriend, allegedly telling her that she would have to give birth in jail if she didn't implicate David.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's definitely a bad last name to have to be inside of a police station with.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I would have changed it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
As it turned out though, Guevara was a grade A piece of shit who has had seven convictions overturned since 2017 due to misdeeds involving false confessions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unbelievable.
MARCUS PARKS
And there are 20 more being investigated. In fact one of his victims was exonerated a month ago.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is what being a bad cop leads to.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Guevara would choose random men tangentially related to the murders he was investigating and plunge them into a near Kafkaesque nightmare of beatings and threats that all ended in false confessions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause he doesn't want to do his fucking job.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. He was just fucking lazy and just wanted the clearance rate.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
As a result, David Gecht spent 22 years in prison. He was exonerated just last year, coincidentally having experienced in real life what was likely only a fantasy to his father's partners in murder.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow. Let's just get right into it.
BEN KISSEL
Hop right in.
MARCUS PARKS
Let's just get to this, let's get to the meat of it right now.
BEN KISSEL
Well there it is, the Chicago Rippers. I don't want to hear the word meat. This is wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's rough, man.
BEN KISSEL
They're nasty.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Chicago.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You actually wonder why it took us so long to get to this story and it's because we had to piece it together.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We had our whole team working on it. Shaw crushed this.
MARCUS PARKS
Thank you, Shaw, yeah, research assistant Shaw. Joel crushed it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Joel crushed it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It took a lot to put together.
MARCUS PARKS
And I will also admit we probably got a lot wrong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure. I mean it's only off of Robin Gecht's or Eddie Spreitzer's confessions, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then you have it's only 'Deadly Thrills' is the only place where it's all put together in one go.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like we look at the police reports but you are only as fucking trustable as the source. And then if the source is the Chicago Ripper Crew-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How true is it? I don't know.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. All right everyone, well thank you so much for listening. I hope you've learned I don't know what.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well to keep a positive mental attitude.
BEN KISSEL
PMA.
MARCUS PARKS
PMA.
BEN KISSEL
Even if you're killing a whole bunch of sex workers or children, you just want to put a smile on your face.
MARCUS PARKS
PMA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You just need to remember because a smile on the top, you know what it does for you, sometimes it makes you smile come out on the bottom. And I mean my fucking asshole.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, yeah, that would be that. Let's see. Do we have anything? Thanks for listening to all the shows. Anything to announce? Oh I have some dates I should announce.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, this is a direct quote from John Wayne Gacy. "I am a PMA type person, positive mental attitude. I don't have time for negative thinking. Death is negative, so why fill your head with that? Lying is negative, so I have no time for that."
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
But what about all the murders, John?
MARCUS PARKS
No, that's negative. That's negative thinking.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that was a frame up job! It was a frame up job because of my connections to the goddamn Carters! It was a frame up job!
BEN KISSEL
July 30th I'll be in Ontario, California.
MARCUS PARKS
California.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And when you got to Ontario, California, are you gonna talk about how John Wayne Gacy was innocent? Is that a part of the structure of the show?
BEN KISSEL
Well that's the point of the show.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow. Good.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. It's JWG? And then October 4th I'll be in Brea and then there's some other dates that I have. I don't know if I wanna plug the shows on this episode. But yes, anyway. Anything else do we have? What have we got?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, next week we're gonna get super spooky.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, spooky.
BEN KISSEL
Oh good, I could go for some ghosts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I'm excited.
BEN KISSEL
Everyone is like you guys don't cover enough blood and it's like well I think we're good for a minute.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well we did this and then we got true crime and then we got a big history series. And we're gonna be doing more true crime this year too. We're doing our international series which we're waiting on, we got some info coming in.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're working really hard over here at the true crime factory! We're working pretty hard at the podcast facilities!
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed. What will Fruit Roll-Ups roll out next? Welcome everyone to the show, let's just hop right in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's just get right into it. Chicago Ripper Crew. How do they even wear one pair of jeans?
BEN KISSEL
Oh lord. Hail yourselves everyone!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail Satan.
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein!
BEN KISSEL
Megustalations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) Hail me.
BEN KISSEL
Don't write any letters to these people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) Don't touch my breasts and leave my sweet breasts alone. I love my breasts entirely whole. You like it?
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah, very nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Give me one more Phantom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) The music of the night!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Yep. Sorry buddy, the lights are out, Broadway is closed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It will never be over for the Phantom!
BEN KISSEL
It's done.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.