The Golden Age of Murder: A True Crime Podcast Golden Age of Murder

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

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

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

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

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

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