Human F*ckery Human F*ckery

You said you wanted an episode on serial killers, and after months of absolutely heinous research (Kim cried), recording, and editing, it’s finally here: The Season Two Finale, “Forgotten Serial Killers,” featuring the stars of Netflix’s MINDHUNTER series.

Teams Kimberly and Edward endeavored to find tales of true “multiple murderers” not already discussed to death by other podcasts and documentaries…and our guest judges, both well-versed professionally in retelling the stories of mad killers, agreed they pulled it off.
Team Edward presents the blood-chilling history of The Red Ripper, a prolific monster hidden for decades by Soviet censorship and the first-ever Russian criminal to be caught in part by employing psychological profiling.

Team Kimberly transports listeners to the antebellum frontier, where a family of mysteriously antisocial colonists led by a charismatic daughter terrorized travelers riding the Osage Mission Trail, earning themselves the terrible moniker The Bloody Benders.

Our hosts were joined by MINDHUNTER headliners Holt McCallany (Fight Club, Alien 3, Blue Bloods, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning) and Michael Cerveris (Broadway’s Sweeney Todd and Assassins; TV’s Fringe and The Gilded Age), two guys who have made careers out of either playing killers, or playing the people who catch killers. In addition to the serial killer talk, they give us insight into working with cinematic masters like David Fincher; befriending Charles Mansonite Bobby Boselie; and learning from FBI profilers.

If you’d like to learn more about The Bloody Benders yourself, check out one of our sources for this episode: 

Hell's Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier

If you’d like to read the book MINDHUNTER was based on, you can find that here:

Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit 
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If you’re not already familiar with The Toybox Killer case, you’re about to be….and head’s up that it’s from the deepest, darkest, stankest part of history’s colon. You may need a fresh baptism afterwards just from listening.
If you’ve ever wondered why there’s such a loud movement to shut down social media accounts teaching misogyny, and backlash to violent pornography, this story is a great example. It’s also further argument AGAINST smacking kids around, and/or letting them be exposed to violent and emotionally unfit parents, because while the Toybox Killer may have been born with a screw loose, his upbringing only made things worse.
It all goes down in a bleak and dusty stretch of desert just outside Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
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This episode was written as an epic Pride Season gift to our beloved Patreon subscribers, but given recent Supreme Court rulings and the fresh wave of anti-LGBTQ+ mouth diarrhea that SCOTUS fuckery spawned, it seemed an important story to release into the wild. 

Because while it might sound like a joke, few things are more epic, gayer, AND more prescient in these polarized times than the largely forgotten sliver of wildly queer pro wrestling history called “The Goldust Era,” which officially began on October 15, 1995. 

There’s even a hero in this salacious tale of WWE executives exploiting homophobia for profit: Dustin Runnels, veteran pro wrestling superstar and outspoken advocate for LGBTQ folk. Runnels’ arc from a wounded little boy to Southern American hero, to the most hated man in wrestling, to redeemed role model and father of a trans kid is equal parts heartwarming and unhinged and is compelling even if you’ve never once watched a body slam live on Pay Per View. It’s also a major thread in pro wrestling’s long history of selling the gayest heat imaginable to audiences that, by and large, see themselves as heterosexual patriots with no ties to the LGBTQ community, despite participating in one of the most homoerotic art forms on the planet. 

Heads Up: There’s hate speech and LGBTQ slurs in this episode, and not because we condone it. (People really said some wild
shit on TV in the 90s.)
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We may ALL be struggling to survive the surrealist nightmare which is “post-Pandemic” 2023, but there’s still stuff to be grateful for. Not dying slowly of scurvy in the frozen Arctic, or roasting like a pair of hot nuts under a relentless Sahara sun, for starters. We’re also collectively blessed with an uncanny ability to adapt, overcome, and experience “Post Traumatic Growth,” which you gotta admit doesn’t suck. 

This month Teams Edward & Kimberly kick off summer—and seasonal travel—with a pair of swan dives into tales of human resilience in the face of our O.G. adversary, Nature. Kimberly unearths the story of Ada Blackjack, a 23-year-old Inuit girl coerced into a disastrous Arctic expedition with a bunch of inexperienced white boys and a housecat. Edward pulls out the harrowing journey of Mauro Prosperi, an ultramarathoner whose persistence in the face of adversity landed him in a desert cave drinking his own urine like a champ. 

The gang is joined by special guest judge TR Hendricks, a veteran Army intelligence officer and author of the fantastic new survivor thriller “The Instructor,” about a former marine using SERE school techniques to take on a surprise threat hidden in the Adirondacks. (It’s one of the best summer reads you’ll blow through this year, so grab a copy en route to the beach or pool.)

Buy TR's Book!: https://shorturl.at/xGIV8
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Full disclosure: When Edward proposed this interview back in March, Kimberly’s immediate response was “Why the fuck would we talk to Joe Exotic?” (She’s a delicate flower like that.) And it’s a fair question. While Tiger King was a savagely addictive and jaw-dropping series, it was also rife with animal abuse, unchecked misogyny, predatory sexual behavior, and Adults Behaving Like Children—all things neither of our hosts are fans of.
As our resident philosopher, Edward quickly pointed out how prison has palpably changed the manic antihero the world first met back in 2020. Once singularly focused on self-promotion, the Joe Exotic of 2023 has been campaigning heavily for prison reform over the last 18 months…something Human Fuckery can very much get behind. Mr. Exotic was placed in solitary confinement “for his own protection” under suspicious circumstances and held for roughly 18 months in an Atlanta-based federal penitentiary now under investigation for human rights violations, including breaches of the 6th (right to effective legal counsel) and 8th (freedom from cruel and unusual punishment) constitutional amendments.
Edward’s also a passionate advocate for the idea that people fundamentally NEED a “path to redemption” in order for life to be worth living and that giving each other the opportunity to express remorse and grow is part of “doing the work.” Since HF’s ultimate goal is to guide people toward more human decency, conversing with a man learning to advocate for others at age 60 to see how he’s grown seemed a potentially good learning experience.
So Gary set up a call to Butler Federal Medical Center, a prison for inmates with complex health issues, in North Carolina, where Joe Exotic is being evaluated for his second cancer diagnosis in as many years while serving his 21-year sentence.
Love him or hate him, there’s no question that Joe’s one of the breakout storytellers and characters of the last decade. Whether he’s achieved a full redemption arc yet is up to you to decide for yourself.
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He was hailed as “The Painter of Light,” a titan of pastoral landscapes which glowed whimsically from the windows of malls and Disney stores across America in the 1990s. But inside Thomas Kinkade, the famed born-again Christian artist behind one of the most commercially successful art entities ever created, lurked a darkness even he couldn’t cover with layers of shining lacquer. His tragic story of worker exploitation, belligerent self-destruction, and nostalgia gone awry was carefully hidden behind a wall of corporate money for decades but emerged from the shadows after Kinkade’s sudden and unexpected death back in 2012. It’s a piece of forgotten American art history so bent Teams Edward and Kimberly had to drop their monthly storytelling competition and join forces to share it with y'all correctly. If you’ve ever felt disillusioned with The American Dream, skeptical about so-called “Christian artists,” or creeped out by those relentlessly-cheery Christmas villages glowing in Hallmark stores every winter, hit play and listen as the veneer dissolves into truth far stranger than fiction. Featuring original music by Sergio Gonzalez Pagan.
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