Serial Killers with Ben Carter

Forbidden Knowledge
Forbidden Knowledge

Serial Killers with Ben Carter explores the lives, crimes, and investigations behind history’s most notorious killers. Each episode follows the timeline of events, examining victims, evidence, and law enforcement efforts through a structured, documentary-style approach. Analyzing motives, patterns, and psychological profiles, the series reveals how these crimes unfolded—and how they were ultimately uncovered. ⚠️ Listener discretion is advised. Unlock bonus content and full video episodes: https://www.patreon.com/theforbiddenknowledgenetwork

  1. 5 days ago

    Samuel Little: The Killer Who Confessed to Murders Across America

    In May 2018, Texas Ranger James Holland began interviewing Samuel Little, a convicted murderer serving life without parole in California, about the 1994 killing of Denise Christie Brothers in Odessa, Texas. Little had already been convicted in Los Angeles for murdering Carol Alford, Guadalupe Apodaca, and Audrey Nelson after cold-case DNA connected him to their deaths. For years, he denied being a murderer. Then he began talking. Little ultimately confessed to ninety-three killings across nineteen states, covering roughly 1970 through 2005. By October 2019, the FBI said fifty of those confessions had been matched or verified, and that analysts considered all ninety-three credible. The FBI called him the most prolific serial killer in United States history. But that designation does not mean ninety-three murders were proven in court. This episode follows the evidence: Little’s long arrest history, the Los Angeles DNA breakthrough, the ViCAP review that connected his movements to cold cases, Holland’s interviews, the Odessa guilty plea, the portraits Little drew of women he said he killed, and the continuing effort to identify victims whose names remain unresolved. The central question is not only how many killings can be proved. It is how so many women could die across decades before one national pattern was recognized. This podcast uses artificial intelligence in its research, writing, production, and narration. Episodes are editorially reviewed before publication. #TrueCrimeSerialMurderColdCaseInvestigation #SamuelLittle #Topic93MurderConfessions #FBIViCAP #JamesHolland

  2. 28 Aug

    Harold Shipman: The Doctor Who Killed Behind a Trusted Door

    Harold Frederick Shipman was a respected general practitioner in Hyde, Greater Manchester, whose patients often allowed him into their homes and accepted his medical explanations when illness turned fatal. In January 2000, he was convicted at Preston Crown Court of murdering fifteen women and forging the will of eighty-one-year-old Kathleen Grundy. Prosecutors proved that the murders involved substantial doses of morphine or diamorphine, and the judge recommended that Shipman remain imprisoned for life. But the criminal trial was only part of the case. The later Shipman Inquiry, chaired by Dame Janet Smith, concluded that Shipman had killed at least 215 patients over approximately twenty-four years. The inquiry also found serious failures in death certification, medical oversight, coronial procedures, controlled-drug safeguards, and policing. This episode follows the investigation from Kathleen Grundy’s death on June twenty-fourth, nineteen ninety-eight, through the suspicious will challenged by her daughter, solicitor Angela Woodruff, to the exhumation that revealed morphine and the arrest of Shipman on September seventh, nineteen ninety-eight. It also returns to an earlier warning: in March nineteen ninety-eight, Dr Linda Reynolds had already raised concerns about Shipman’s patient deaths. That investigation closed, and the inquiry later concluded that three patients probably would have survived had it been handled properly. The central unresolved issue remains why Shipman killed for so long, and how many people died before one daughter’s suspicion exposed him. This podcast uses artificial intelligence in its research, writing, production, and narration. Episodes are editorially reviewed before publication. #SerialKillerMedicalMurdererAbuseOfTrust #HaroldShipman #DoctorKiller #MedicalMurders #England

  3. 21 Aug

    H. H. Holmes: The Murder Castle and the Myth of America’s First Serial Killer

    H. H. Holmes, born Herman Webster Mudgett, became one of the most famous murderers in American history through a mix of documented crimes and powerful mythology. In Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, he built a strange three story structure later called the Murder Castle. Newspapers described hidden rooms, gas pipes, chutes, secret corridors, and basement horrors, and later accounts claimed he murdered dozens or even hundreds of World’s Fair visitors there. But the evidence is far less certain. This episode separates the record from the legend. Holmes was a trained doctor, a fraudster, a bigamist, and a manipulator who used false identities, insurance schemes, property deals, and personal relationships for gain. Several people close to him disappeared, including Julia and Pearl Conner, Emeline Cigrand, Minnie Williams, and Anna Williams. Historians generally treat several of these deaths as probable, though not proven to modern forensic standards. The strongest legal case was the murder of Benjamin Pitezel, Holmes’s business associate in an insurance fraud scheme. Holmes was convicted in Philadelphia and executed in eighteen ninety-six. The later discoveries of Alice, Nellie, and Howard Pitezel made clear that his crimes extended beyond fraud. The central unresolved issue is how many people Holmes actually killed, and how much of the Murder Castle story was built by Holmes, newspapers, and later retellings. This podcast uses artificial intelligence in its research, writing, production, and narration. Episodes are editorially reviewed before publication. #HistoricalSerialKillersTrueCrimeInvestigation #HHHolmes #MurderCastle #Chicago #HermanWebsterMudgett

  4. 14 Aug

    Albert Fish: The Gray Man and One of America’s Darkest Cases

    In June nineteen twenty-eight, ten-year-old Grace Budd left her Manhattan home with an older man who called himself Frank Howard. He had answered a newspaper advertisement from Grace’s brother, entered the Budd family’s home, and gained enough trust to take Grace away under the pretext of a birthday visit. She never returned. For six years, the man’s false identity gave investigators little to follow. Then, in November nineteen thirty-four, Grace’s mother received a letter. The writer claimed responsibility and appeared to know details only the offender would know. Police focused on the words, but also on the envelope and stationery. A small emblem linked the paper to the New York Private Chauffeur’s Benevolent Association, and that clue led detectives through a chauffeur, a Manhattan rooming house, a landlady, and finally to Albert Fish. Detective William F. King waited at two hundred East Fifty-second Street until Fish returned on December thirteenth, nineteen thirty-four. Fish was later connected through confession and investigation to the murders of Grace Budd, Francis McDonnell, and Billy Gaffney, though many larger claims about his crimes remain unverified. His nineteen thirty-five trial centered on whether severe psychiatric disturbance met the legal standard for insanity. The jury rejected that defense, convicted him of Grace’s murder, and he was executed at Sing Sing in January nineteen thirty-six. The central question remains why a man who had avoided detection for six years sent the letter that exposed him. This podcast uses artificial intelligence in its research, writing, production, and narration. Episodes are editorially reviewed before publication. #DocumentedSerialKillerCase #AlbertFish #GraceBudd #FrancisMcDonnell #BillyGaffney

  5. 6 Aug

    Gary Ridgway: The Green River Killer and the Case That Haunted Washington

    In July nineteen eighty-two, the body of sixteen-year-old Wendy Lee Coffield was found in the Green River south of Seattle. Within weeks, four more women were recovered in or near the same corridor. The discoveries began one of the largest serial murder investigations in United States history. Gary Leon Ridgway, an industrial truck painter from South King County, would later be convicted of forty-nine murders connected to the Green River case. But he was not a stranger to investigators. Years before his arrest, detectives questioned him, examined a truck lead tied to Marie Malvar’s disappearance, collected a saliva sample, and received a polygraph result that failed to reveal the truth. This episode follows the victims, the geography of Pacific Highway South and the SeaTac Strip, the creation and reduction of the Green River Task Force, the limitations of early forensic science, the preserved biological evidence that later became decisive, and the microscopic paint evidence connected to Ridgway’s workplace. It also examines the contested two thousand three plea agreement, which spared Ridgway the death penalty in exchange for guilty pleas and cooperation. Legal resolution did not answer everything. Some victims were identified only decades later through later DNA work, forensic review, genealogical research, or other investigative methods, including Lori Anne Razpotnik and Tammie Liles. Ridgway claimed more killings than his convictions prove, and the full number remains uncertain. The central question is how suspicion, evidence, science, and social neglect failed to meet sooner. This podcast uses artificial intelligence in its research, writing, production, and narration. Episodes are editorially reviewed before publication. #DocumentedTrueCrimeSerialMurderInvestigationFore #GaryRidgway #GreenRiverKiller #GreenRiverMurders #WashingtonSerialKiller

  6. 31 Jul

    Edmund Kemper: The Co-Ed Killer Who Explained His Own Mind

    Edmund Emil Kemper III is one of the most documented serial murderers in American history, not only because of the crimes themselves, but because he later described them in calm, detailed interviews with investigators, psychiatrists, journalists, and FBI researchers. This episode examines Kemper’s known chronology: his birth in California in nineteen forty-eight, the murders of his paternal grandparents when he was fifteen, his confinement and evaluation at Atascadero State Hospital, the distinction between release from institutional confinement, continuing juvenile-authority supervision or custody status, and later residence with his mother, and the murders in the Santa Cruz area between nineteen seventy-two and nineteen seventy-three. It names his known victims, including Maude Kemper, Edmund Kemper Senior, Mary Ann Pesce, Anita Luchessa, Aiko Koo, Cynthia Schall, Rosalind Thorpe, Alice Liu, Clarnell Strandberg, and Sara Taylor Hallett. The episode also explains the legal outcome: Kemper’s confession, his insanity defense, the jury’s finding that he was legally sane, and his life sentences. It then turns to the FBI Behavioral Science Unit, including Robert Ressler, John Douglas, and Ann Burgess, and asks why Kemper’s interviews became so influential in the study of sexual homicide. The central unresolved issue is not whether Kemper ever told useful truths. He did. The harder question is how to separate evidence from performance when the most articulate source in a murder case is also the person with the strongest reason to control the story. This podcast uses artificial intelligence in its research, writing, production, and narration. Episodes are editorially reviewed before publication. #DocumentedSerialMurderHistoryOffenderPsychologyF #EdmundKemper #EdKemper #CoEdKiller #CaliforniaSerialKiller

  7. 24 Jul

    Dennis Rader: The BTK Killer Who Hid Behind Ordinary Life

    Dennis Lynn Rader lived for decades in and around Wichita, Kansas, as a husband, father, veteran, church leader, and municipal compliance officer. Behind that public identity, he was the offender who called himself BTK, a name he created from the phrase Bind, Torture, Kill. Between nineteen seventy-four and nineteen ninety-one, Rader murdered ten confirmed victims: Joseph Otero, Julie Otero, Josephine Otero, Joseph Otero Junior, Kathryn Bright, Shirley Vian, Nancy Fox, Marine Hedge, Vicki Wegerle, and Dolores Davis. Kevin Bright survived an attack in April nineteen seventy-four and became an important witness. This episode follows the documented timeline of the Wichita-area murders, the communications Rader sent to police and media, the long silence after nineteen ninety-one, and the renewed messages that exposed him in two thousand four and two thousand five. It explains how investigators used the Vicki Wegerle evidence, surveillance, vehicle information, digital metadata from a purple floppy disk, church records, and familial DNA to identify and arrest Rader in February two thousand five. Rader pleaded guilty to ten counts of first-degree murder and received ten consecutive life sentences. Kansas law did not allow a death sentence for crimes committed before capital punishment was restored in the state. Some later claims and possible connections have been reviewed, but no additional murder has been conclusively confirmed as a BTK case. This podcast uses artificial intelligence in its research, writing, production, and narration. Episodes are editorially reviewed before publication. #SerialKillersWithBenCarter #SerialKillerCaseHiddenDoubleLifeOffenderCorrespo #DennisRader #BTKKiller #WichitaKansas

  8. 17 Jul

    The Zodiac Killer: The Code-Writing Murderer Who Was Never Caught

    Between December nineteen sixty-eight and October nineteen sixty-nine, an unidentified murderer attacked people in Northern California and then used newspapers, telephone calls, symbols, and coded messages to claim public attention. Five people were killed in the confirmed Zodiac attacks: David Faraday, Betty Lou Jensen, Darlene Ferrin, Cecelia Shepard, and Paul Stine. Two others, Michael Mageau and Bryan Hartnell, survived and gave investigators crucial accounts. The confirmed cases stretched across Lake Herman Road near Benicia, Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo, Lake Berryessa in Napa County, and San Francisco’s Presidio Heights neighborhood. The investigation crossed multiple jurisdictions and was complicated by changing methods, limited witness views, disputed letters, uncertain fingerprints, and evidence collected before modern DNA standards. Some communications contained details or physical proof, including pieces of Paul Stine’s bloodstained shirt, while other claims remain unconfirmed. This episode follows the attacks, the newspaper letters, the four hundred eight and three hundred forty ciphers, the investigative failures and breakthroughs, and the continuing caution required around suspects such as Arthur Leigh Allen and others. In December twenty twenty, three codebreakers solved the long-unsolved three hundred forty cipher, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed the result. The message became readable, but it did not reveal the killer’s name. This podcast uses artificial intelligence in its research, writing, production, and narration. Episodes are editorially reviewed before publication. #SerialKillersWithBenCarter #UnsolvedSerialMurderAndCodedCommunications #ZodiacKiller #CaliforniaSerialKiller #SanFranciscoBayArea

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Serial Killers with Ben Carter explores the lives, crimes, and investigations behind history’s most notorious killers. Each episode follows the timeline of events, examining victims, evidence, and law enforcement efforts through a structured, documentary-style approach. Analyzing motives, patterns, and psychological profiles, the series reveals how these crimes unfolded—and how they were ultimately uncovered. ⚠️ Listener discretion is advised. Unlock bonus content and full video episodes: https://www.patreon.com/theforbiddenknowledgenetwork

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