A Killer Halloween /// Part 1 /// 880

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Speaker 2 Welcome to True Crime Garage. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, thanks for listening.

Speaker 2 I'm your host, Nick, and with me, as always, is a man who looks at life through the inside of a kaleidoscope. Here is the capital.
The unadjusted kaleidoscope.

Speaker 2 It's good to be seen and good to see you. Thanks for listening.
Thanks for telling a friend.

Speaker 2 this week in the garage we are very excited to be featuring graffiti highway double ipa by the good folks over at trogues independent brewing this hazy golden double ipa zigzags its way through citrusy and tropical aromas with four varieties of hops this is not a red stop light and go drive but a roll down the windows and punch it adventure abv 9.5 garage grade four

Speaker 2 and a quarter bottle caps out of five and let's give some thanks and praise to our good friends that are helping us drive the garage this week first up a big cheers to rachel in lehigh valley pennsylvania and a big wee like your jib goes out to kelly green in austin texas next here's a cheers to allie in madison wisconsin and let's stay in madison wisconsin for a double-fisted cheers we got justin and lori and madison everyone we just mentioned they went to truecrime garage.com clicked on the pint glass and helped us out with this week's beer fund for the beer run and for that we thank you yeah bw double r you in beer run

Speaker 2 you need more true crime garage for your earballs you need us to tickle your earballs check out our bonus show off the record on patreon and apple podcast subscription and that's enough of the business all right everybody gather around grab a chair grab a beer Let's talk some true crime.

Speaker 2 We have talked many times on this show about studying and discussing serial killers.

Speaker 2 There is a deep-seated need in many of us, coded in our DNA, to not just possess the ability to recognize evil, but to attempt to understand the dark side of human nature.

Speaker 2 People have a natural morbid curiosity to understand the monster. What drives an individual to commit such extreme acts of violence?

Speaker 2 Halloween is the season when we let the monster out. In fact, society encourages the monsters to come out.
And in some circles and at themed events, the monsters are celebrated.

Speaker 2 But not here.

Speaker 2 Not on this show. While we will be celebrating together in the garage for Halloween, We know the only time to celebrate the monsters is when they are defeated and when good triumphs over evil.

Speaker 2 This

Speaker 2 is True Crime Garage.

Speaker 2 So this week we thought we would hit the road and briefly visit some of the old serial killer haunts. So, we will be talking about some horrific killers, some well-known, others, not so much.

Speaker 2 For our first stop, Captain, let's go to a place that we both were very recently hanging out with fellow podcasters and having some late-night drinks with some of the beautiful listeners.

Speaker 2 We were in Denver, Colorado, home of the 2025 CrimeCon. So, our first serial killer is one of our our lesser-known subjects of the week.

Speaker 2 Vincent Groves, who reportedly was an excellent basketball player in high school, grew up in a middle-class suburb of Denver.

Speaker 2 He is said to be a hawking athlete who helped to lead his high school basketball team to the state championship game in 1972.

Speaker 2 Then he went off to Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, but that didn't last too long as he dropped out in 1974 and returned home to live with his grandmother.

Speaker 2 Now, he had a successful job as an electrician. This was with the Gates Rubber Company.
But apparently, here, Captain, Groves had two hobbies.

Speaker 2 One, drinking a lot, and two, hanging out with sex workers. It's believed that his many hours and days spent in the red light district led him to a criminal lifestyle.

Speaker 2 It's reported that Groves hung out in Lodo, short for Denver's lower downtown district. A young woman who Groves was associated with, her name is Jeanette Baca,

Speaker 2 she goes missing, and before too long, her naked body is found in the woods in Jefferson County, Colorado. This is in June of 1978.

Speaker 2 A few months after the body is found, Vincent Groves moved in with 21-year-old Norma Jean Halford.

Speaker 2 Norma Jean's car was found abandoned on a mountain road outside of Georgetown, Colorado on August 24th, 1979. The 21-year-old woman, Norma Jean, has not been heard from nor seen since.

Speaker 2 And it's been 46

Speaker 2 years now, Captain. Wow.
So somebody he associated with turns up dead. They find her in the woods.
And then a woman that he is living with ends up missing. He's on somebody's radar at this time.

Speaker 2 For what it's difficult to say, because he is out walking around, he's still working his job, and he's still up to his funny business in the red light district and his criminal behaviors and actions.

Speaker 2 This is when Vincent Groves meets and then later marries a woman. Her name is Janet Hill,

Speaker 2 but not Janet's best moment, I am sure, because the two are married for just five months when this goes down.

Speaker 2 This is from the October 2012 5280 magazine in a fantastic article by Robert Sanchez titled Chasing a Ghost.

Speaker 2 In part, it reads, by the summer of 1981, Vincent Groves and his wife,

Speaker 2 Janet Hill, were arguing frequently. On August 14th, 1981.
You'd think the majority of the serial killers we talked about never found somebody to marry, but it seems like most of them do.

Speaker 2 So if you're single, just remember there's somebody out there for everybody. Yes, that's true, Captain.

Speaker 2 As we said by this point, Janet Hill and Vincent Groves, husband and wife, are arguing frequently. On August 14th, 1981, So the couple's fighting again.
Nothing new here.

Speaker 2 This time they're fighting about a fishing trip. Vincent Groves planned to take a fishing trip with two friends and their 17-year-old daughter.
Her name is Tammy Sue Woodrum.

Speaker 2 Groves was taking a camper, which he had attached to the bed of a pickup truck that was parked outside of the couple's home.

Speaker 2 Janet Hill, his wife, is pleading with him to allow her to go along on this trip, but Vincent Groves

Speaker 2 refuses to bring her. He wants to go solo, so he grabs the keys to the truck and he says he'll be back.
He takes off for this fishing trip.

Speaker 2 The next morning, Janet Hill is homesick from work when Vincent Groves appeared at their home. He says he had something to tell her, but he wouldn't do it there.

Speaker 2 He says that he needed to tell her this in the mountains. Yeah, no thanks.
So she wants to know, did he have sex with the teenage girl? Was their marriage over?

Speaker 2 Janet Hill walked outside and waited for an explanation. Vincent Groves told her to get in the pickup, which was still connected to the camper.
She complies. Groves starts the engine and pulls off.

Speaker 2 They go off driving. He's silent as they drove toward the foothills of the mountains.
He finally made a turn into a meandering country road. This is near the town of Deckers.

Speaker 2 By then, it seemed to Janet Hill they'd been driving forever.

Speaker 2 Somewhere outside of the town, Groves finally began to speak, and then he started to cry.

Speaker 2 The fishing trip with the friends was, in fact, true, he told Hill. But first, he decided to pick up the teenager, Woodrum, and the two went to Boulder, Colorado to score some cocaine.
Party.

Speaker 2 When they had gotten the stash, they drove toward Frasier. So this is about 90 miles away.
They pulled off the road. One thing led to another, Groves said.

Speaker 2 The girls started shooting up, but she couldn't handle it. Something had gone wrong.
Groves is sobbing and crying, and he says that the 17-year-old girl, she had overdosed and she was dead.

Speaker 2 Janet Hill says she wanted to jump out of the truck and run. The girl, where was the girl? She wanted to know.
Vincent Groves looked at his wife and said the teenager's body was still in the camper.

Speaker 2 Now, at his wife's urging,

Speaker 2 Vincent Groves turned himself into the Lakewood Police Department and eventually was

Speaker 2 actually convicted of second-degree murder after.

Speaker 2 His Tammy Sue Woodroom drug overdose story fell apart. So the way that this works here, Captain, he tells police the same story or a very similar story that he told his wife.

Speaker 2 But the forensic evidence here showed that Tammy Sue Woodrum had been beaten, raped, and strangled.

Speaker 2 In court at his trial, evidence proved that the victim was drug-free, no drugs in her system when she was killed.

Speaker 2 So his story carries no weight at all, plus all the injuries and the assaults that they could prove happened prior and during her death.

Speaker 2 Prosecutors showed marks on the teenager's skin matched with, that matched up with Vincent Groves's belt.

Speaker 2 So, Groves is sentenced to 12 years in prison in the summer of 1982. Needless to say, Janet Hill divorced him.

Speaker 2 Groves,

Speaker 2 however,

Speaker 2 and we hear this so many times in these kinds of stories, Groves was a model prisoner.

Speaker 2 He

Speaker 2 taught classes, he took classes. Couldn't behave in the real world, but can be a model person behind bars.

Speaker 2 Well, it's amazing when you're doing all kinds of hardcore drugs, what you may get into, and all of a sudden when those no longer are available to you, it's easy to step in line, no matter how evil you may be when you're

Speaker 2 fueling the fire with substance abuse. Right.

Speaker 2 So because he's a model prisoner, lucky for you, Colorado, Groves received an early parole. So on February 13th, 1987, Groves was released from prison.
He had served just five years,

Speaker 2 just five years.

Speaker 2 for raping and killing an innocent 17-year-old girl. One that he knew, right? He knew the parents nonetheless.

Speaker 2 Sorry, that I understand it was a different time period, but that is just far too soft on violent crime for this garage guy. By

Speaker 2 September of 1988, okay, so he's been out, what, a year and a half approximately, let's say a year and seven months by this point.

Speaker 2 He's back on the radar of detectives and police once again.

Speaker 2 Now, I hope you're seated here, Captain, because Vincent Groves, in September of 1988, one year, seven months after being released, he's a suspect in the murders of more than 20 Denver girls.

Speaker 2 Jesus Christ. Of whom had been strangled.
The investigators found that Vincent Groves was familiar with

Speaker 2 many of these victims.

Speaker 2 Maybe they couldn't prove all, but familiar and knew and had some association with some of these victims. And

Speaker 2 he was the last person seen with

Speaker 2 the victims in some of these cases.

Speaker 2 Results from a DNA test linked Vincent Groves to the murder of 19-year-old Juanita Lavota, whose naked body was found in April of 1988 in a rural area east of Denver, and 25-year-old Diane Mancera, whose body was found in neighboring Adams County near Interstate 25.

Speaker 2 This is west of Denver. He was convicted of both and received a life sentence for one of the murders and a 20-year sentence for the other.
If you're going to do the math on

Speaker 2 these new convictions compared to the old murder that he was in for, what do we think he'll get here? About 17 years?

Speaker 2 So thankfully, that doesn't appear to be the case. At the trials, prosecutors provided evidence that Vincent Groves likely had involvement in eight other murders in the Denver area.

Speaker 2 So they did this using testimony from witnesses and other persons there, and other evidence that placed Vincent as the last person seen with the victims before they were found dead or having disappeared, poof, gone forever.

Speaker 2 Now, keep in mind, even though they presented that evidence and that testimonies

Speaker 2 at that trial, these weren't charging allegations, right? There were no new charges that were actually brought against him. I think they were just kind of piling on

Speaker 2 for the sake of the jury and in hopes to really push to get a much needed conviction and get this guy locked up. You kind of dropped the ball the first time when you left, let him out too early.

Speaker 2 This is the type, though. To me, I don't know.

Speaker 2 I don't know if it matters when you let him out.

Speaker 2 If he falls back into the drugs, it appears that he's going to fall back into the sexual assaults and murder that we know he was not just capable of, but certainly guilty of on

Speaker 2 several counts. Yeah, it's almost like the drugs unleashed all his demons.
A little bit of good news here in this story. In the early 1990s, Vincent Groves began to have pretty severe health problems.

Speaker 2 So for much of his adult life, when he's outside of prison walls, Groves was known to deal cocaine, crack, and other drugs. He was very much using everything that he was pushing.

Speaker 2 Now, here's a news flash for the six o'clock hour: you can't continually use hardcore drugs without it having hardcore effects on your body. Right.

Speaker 2 So, Groves is diagnosed with hepatitis C and liver failure, from which he died on October 31st,

Speaker 2 Halloween, 1996,

Speaker 2 inside of a prison hospital near the city of Denver, Colorado. And nobody cried.
Well, you're right. I don't think anybody cried, but if there were people to cry, it might be the detectives.

Speaker 2 It might be some family members of other victims that were yet to be definitively linked to this serial killer.

Speaker 2 So, when Vincent Groves was dying, he's in the process of dying, detectives went to talk to him to see whether they would be able to solve the mystery of the fate of many other women associated with him or who they believe may have fallen victim to this monster.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 So, shortly before his death, Captain, Groves is asked, like they're trying to pull a confession out of him, begging him, asked to confess to other other murders, but he's such a nice guy that he refuses to do so.

Speaker 2 So he passes away. They suspected him of many more murders.

Speaker 2 Now, Vincent Groves' DNA was not in a national database, but the Lakewood Police Department's cold case unit actually had Vincent Groves' DNA on file.

Speaker 2 This back from

Speaker 2 their

Speaker 2 1981 Tammy Sue Woodrum murder that they convicted him on. So they have his DNA on this murder that they know he did.
He's convicted of it. He spent time in prison for it.
Not enough, but he was there.

Speaker 2 That DNA helped posthumously link Vincent Groves to the slayings of Emma Jennifer,

Speaker 2 age 25,

Speaker 2 Joyce Raimi, age 23, and Peggy Cuff, age 20, all who were found strangled dead in 1979.

Speaker 2 So these murders occurred before they got him for the Tammy Sue Woodrum murder. Also,

Speaker 2 they found witnesses.

Speaker 2 So now they have witness accounts tied to Vincent Groves.

Speaker 2 They're tying him to the 1988 killing of Pamela Montgomery, age 35. So they get multiple witnesses saying

Speaker 2 this is kind of a before and after here.

Speaker 2 And you don't want to be witnessed doing either one of these things. So Pamela was last seen by a credible witness with Vincent Groves

Speaker 2 before

Speaker 2 her time of death, shortly before her time of death. And then later,

Speaker 2 there's another credible witness who saw her body dumped in an alley from a car that matched Vincent Groves' car. So the second witness never sees Groves or can't identify Groves.
However,

Speaker 2 can identify, yeah, can't identify his vehicle. And

Speaker 2 look, you put those two things together there, and it puts him on a short list, such a short list that it has to be him. I mean, I couldn't imagine who else would fall onto that list.

Speaker 2 And here's the thing:

Speaker 2 he's an easily distinguishable guy.

Speaker 2 So at six foot five inches tall and close to 230 pounds, the former athlete made for one big, powerful predator.

Speaker 2 Quote, he was in a position to use his size against most women, said Denver police cold case detective Milas Yearling.

Speaker 2 Yearling, who went on to tell the LA Times that even though Groves is dead, Solving the cases has helped give his victims families closure.

Speaker 2 Quote, they're surprised that we're contacting them, and then they're grateful that the cases have been solved, end quote. Then we have Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey.

Speaker 2 He said of Vincent Groves, quote, in my 30 years' experience, he is the worst homegrown serial murderer, end quote. Morrissey said investigators have circumstantial evidence.

Speaker 2 linking Groves to up to 26 additional homicides. He has contacted authorities elsewhere in the state of Colorado to make sure Groves' DNA profile is available for further investigations.

Speaker 2 So while cold case detectives and the DAs were chasing a ghost, as the 5280 magazine put it, I like to think of it as the ghost of some of the victims led the investigators to where they needed to go to find the killer.

Speaker 2 One more thing from the Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey. He said, quote, this man destroyed lives.
He destroyed families. We figured that he was killing two women a month.

Speaker 2 He was maybe the most prolific serial killer in the state of Colorado. I believe we'll link him to more, end quote.

Speaker 2 Well, some of these serial killers are not intimidating by their physical stature, but when the fight is on, they have a rage and a sickness that's hard to compete.

Speaker 2 It's hard for the victims to fight off that kind of vicious attack. But here you have an individual that is intimidating

Speaker 2 physically

Speaker 2 and, like you said, athletic background. So, with

Speaker 2 that athleticism, plus his rage, and plus the sickness, a lot of people

Speaker 2 fell victim to his evil ways. And the fuel on the fire in a lot of these cases

Speaker 2 is probably the drugs, too, right? Because cocaine and crack are not the kind of drugs where you're like, oh,

Speaker 2 let's do some cocaine and then read a nice book under a tree and take a nap. No, this is, this is,

Speaker 2 if, if you're a raging homicidal maniac like this guy, this is a recipe for,

Speaker 2 as we can see here, not just disaster, but

Speaker 2 pure evil. And then not even

Speaker 2 the willingness to confess to one, two, or any murders

Speaker 2 on his deathbed. All right.
Trick or treat here, Captain.

Speaker 2 Choose.

Speaker 2 I'll go with trick.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 A riddle.

Speaker 2 I go all around the world, but never leave the corner. What am I?

Speaker 2 Sounds like the captain in the garage.

Speaker 2 I am a postage stamp. A stamp can travel all around the world on an envelope, but always remains in the corner of the envelope that it is on.

Speaker 2 But I'll give a treat for you and for the listeners, too, just for playing along. We mentioned Lodo in Denver.
Yeah. When Vincent Groves ran there, it was a rough, rough area.

Speaker 2 So originally officially known as the Union Station neighborhood until the Denver Post writer Dick Kreck first referred to it as Lodo

Speaker 2 in 1983 in a column that he wrote, and he was referring to lower downtown Denver.

Speaker 2 And I wanted to give Lodo its props because while when Groves was running the streets of Lodo, it sounds like a pretty nasty, terrible place. Yeah, sounds like my kind of place.
Well,

Speaker 2 lower downtown Denver has become a national model of how a decaying city neighborhood can be converted into a thriving residential, retail, and recreational district.

Speaker 2 So people that live in this area or have visited there know that this is the Coors Field area. So if you are there, my treat to you is to go to the Cherry Cricket.

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Speaker 2 All right, we are back. Talk hands in the air.
Cheers to you, and thanks for liking and subscribing to the podcast. Cheers to you, Colonel.
Cheers to you, Captain.

Speaker 2 We continue to get positive reviews on iTunes and on other platforms, too.

Speaker 2 I keep thinking that's going to stop someday, but no, the listeners are hard to do. We're going to go with ones from time to time.
Yes, we do. But our listeners are warriors, right?

Speaker 2 We got a whole army of warriors out there who you got to fight for your right to garage, and they do. All right, Captain.
Cheers to the people in the back.

Speaker 2 Cheers to everybody out there in listener land. Cheers to all the folks.

Speaker 2 You know, maybe you're listening to this after you just took your kids out for Beggars Night and you just need to wind down on the back porch or in the garage with a beer.

Speaker 2 We hope that we are doing that beer and your earballs some justice here tonight? So, we started off westerly

Speaker 2 on our beggar's night adventure. Let's move easterly.

Speaker 2 We'll go to Plainfield, Wisconsin.

Speaker 2 So, true crime author Johnny Trevisani encouraged us to use some pages from a couple of chapters.

Speaker 2 He is the writer of the recently released book, The Serial Killer Travel Guide Across America, Your Coast to Coast Tour of terror, which is the inspiration for this garage episode.

Speaker 2 So from Plainfield, Wisconsin, you know where we are going because if true crime were a town, well, then

Speaker 2 this disgusting, pathetic little man would be the talk

Speaker 2 of said town. Edward Theodore Gein, the butcher of Plainfield.
Some say the ghoul of Plainfield. I say serial killer and body snatcher.

Speaker 2 Now, that's a hobby that you don't see too often anymore. Some good old-fashioned body snatching.
Well, he was also a creative type. He liked to make furniture and clothing items.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 He wasn't just sitting around doing nothing.

Speaker 2 He was busy. He was very busy.
All right, from the book, The Serial Killer Travel Guide Across America. Here we go.
Ed Gein, aka the Playing Field ghoul, kills two plus.

Speaker 2 His span of activities, according to Johnny's book, is 1944 to 1957.

Speaker 2 We should point out that beyond the body snatching, the grave digging, the grave robbery, and the two murders, he's suspected of all kinds of other stuff. And his

Speaker 2 shenanigans were so out there

Speaker 2 and crazy and weird that I think it's kind of difficult to

Speaker 2 get a great idea of everything that he may have done. And maybe some of that goes to

Speaker 2 his much-debated level of psychosis. So, from the book, here it reads: Gein, Ed Gein, aka the Plainfield ghoul, was born in La Crosse County, Wisconsin.

Speaker 2 His parents eventually purchased a farm in Plainfield. The family moved to the farm to prevent outsiders from influencing their sons, which was, in retrospect, a shitty idea.

Speaker 2 He needed some outside influences. Ed Gein left the farm only to go to school.

Speaker 2 His mother preached to her boys about how immoral the world was, and that all women except for her were nothing but whores.

Speaker 2 While Gein was an awkward child, often laughing to himself for no reason, his awkwardness did not matter a whole lot as his mother didn't allow him to have friends anyway.

Speaker 2 Gein's father died in 1940 from heart failure, and in 1944, a brush fire occurred near the farm, and Ed's brother,

Speaker 2 his brother went to try to put out this fire, and later, Ed Gein reported to the police that his brother was missing.

Speaker 2 They organized a search party, and Ed Gein led them directly to his missing brother, who lay dead with bruises on his head. The whole, my brother is missing.

Speaker 2 Oh, and there's the body vibe caused investigators to believe that possibly Ed Gein had killed his sibling, but was never charged.

Speaker 2 That's something, if you go back way in the garage archives to episode, I believe it was episode 49.

Speaker 2 This was back when we were still learning how to turn on a microphone. We covered Ed Gein's case.
Well, we knew how to turn them on. We just didn't know which direction to talk into them.

Speaker 2 Didn't know how to turn them off, apparently, either, because we've done about 800 episodes since. Yeah, we talked about this, and I feel like

Speaker 2 when we were talking about this portion of the Geen story, that this part might have been a little lesser known or less reported at the time. And one that was a bit of a shocker for me, I recall,

Speaker 2 when discovering this little tidbit of information. But after his brother's death, Ed Gein lived alone with his mother, who eventually died in December of 1945.

Speaker 2 And then after that, Ed Gein is going to live on the farm all alone in that that house. And that's when,

Speaker 2 as the captain put it, little Eddie got creative. Well, Ed is very hard to research because I believe the legend of Ed Gein is probably bigger than the actual facts of Ed Gein.
Agreed.

Speaker 2 And the different individuals or

Speaker 2 the different movies and characters that his legend inspired then become basically amplification

Speaker 2 to the legend of Ed Gein. The book continues on.
It says in 1957, Plainfield hardware store owner Bernice Warden disappeared.

Speaker 2 Ed Gein was known to be the last person who was in the store before she vanished. So the cops decided to talk to him.

Speaker 2 When police searched Ed Gein's property, they found her decapitated body in a shed hung upside down. Her torso was, quote, dressed like a deer.
It's shocking to me.

Speaker 2 Okay, so we're talking about some old cases here when it comes to the Ed Gein story. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's really shocking to me that some of the books that discuss him either in short form or long form talking about a smattering of serial killers or just focused in on Ed Geen solo. I'm shocked.

Speaker 2 This picture is is somewhat readily available of this upside down, decapitated, naked body who's dressed like a deer, basically split down the middle.

Speaker 2 I don't want to go into too much of a description there, but it's readily available enough to the point that, you know, the bookshelves sitting behind me right now,

Speaker 2 when we have company over, especially if they have small children, these doors are shut.

Speaker 2 These doors are shut because it's images like that that I do not want somebody to stumble upon because you cannot,

Speaker 2 you cannot

Speaker 2 unsee that. Well, I'm going to say something, and I hope it doesn't come off insensitive.

Speaker 2 But I think one of the pieces of the equation of Edgen is that he lived on a farm and that he came from a family of farmers. So

Speaker 2 I think some of the actions towards these victims or slash just bodies, which you could argue is a victimization of a dead person that shouldn't have been dug up like Ed did.

Speaker 2 But a lot of these things that we see, he was basically treating these victims as animals.

Speaker 2 And you would see that, you know, in farmers, especially back in the day, using every piece of these animals for their own survival. So, and this list may vary depending on where you go.

Speaker 2 And I think that there's, I kind of hesitate to report this list because, like I said, I've seen it. If you go to four or five different sources, you're going to see

Speaker 2 slightly different versions of this

Speaker 2 list according to what police found

Speaker 2 when they searched his home, searched the farm, the garage, the shed. But according to the serial killer travel guide across America, it says here,

Speaker 2 after searching the house, police found four noses, human bones and fragments, nine masks of human skin,

Speaker 2 bowls made from human skulls, ten female heads with the tops sawn off,

Speaker 2 human skin covering several chairs, the head of a woman named Mary Hogan in a paper bag, Bernice Warden's head in a burlap sack, nine vulvas in a shoebox, skulls on his bedpost, organs in the refrigerator, a pair of lips on a drawstring for a window shade, a belt made of human female nipples, a lampshade made from the skin of a human face.

Speaker 2 So he had told investigators that over the years he had gone to graveyards dozens of times to exhume recently buried females.

Speaker 2 female bodies and then brought the bodies home where he's doing these activities here. So I want to go to, let's jump from the travel guide here.

Speaker 2 Next, Captain, let's go to the late, great Martin Fido. I'm not sure how many of our fellow American listeners will know Fido, but I would bet that many of our wonderful UK listeners will know of him.

Speaker 2 Martin Fido was a brilliant professor, a great true crime writer of several books, and a brilliant ripperologist. Fido penned many wonderful biographies, but it is his work.

Speaker 2 It is from his work for his 1986 book, Murder Guide to London, that after he studied the memoirs of senior Scotland Yard officials like Sir Robert Anderson, that we learned that police suspected that the ripper was a poor Polish Jew, their words, please.

Speaker 2 And we start to learn about contemporary suspects like Kosmensky, Aaron Kosmensky, and then later David Cohen. One of Fido's books, which was one of my first true crime books, this was from 1993.

Speaker 2 It's titled The Chronicle of Crime, the Infamous Villains of Modern History and Their Hideous Crimes.

Speaker 2 And this book, Fido grabs a snippet of a major crime, something reported nationwide and worldwide, and these from all around the world, these stories and of the time period.

Speaker 2 The book covers both the 19th and the 20th centuries.

Speaker 2 So the headline that he put in 1957 for the Geen

Speaker 2 arrest

Speaker 2 is Farmer Cross-Dressed in Dead Women's Skins. And then it has a

Speaker 2 similar list of what we just covered, of an inventory of what was found on the farm or in the house.

Speaker 2 And Fido goes on to write, when questioned, Ed admitted to digging up the bodies of numerous women from the cemetery to assemble his collection. And in addition to Mrs.

Speaker 2 Warden, he had killed bar proprietor Mary Hogan in 1954. Yeah.
Now, I guess at the time in 54, her disappearance had been put down as a possible,

Speaker 2 possibly connected to her connections with the Chicago underworld.

Speaker 2 So it doesn't sound like Gein was at the top of the list of suspects, but if I recall correctly, he was somebody that was mentioned because I think somebody had either seen him going into the bar or leaving the bar.

Speaker 2 They saw his truck outside. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And Fido goes on to write, Ed ate parts of his corpses.

Speaker 2 Weirdest of all, at full moon, he liked to dance, dressed up as a woman in mask, wig, waistcoat, and greaves with a vulva held to him by panties.

Speaker 2 Sheriff's officers

Speaker 2 wondered with a shudder as they explored the half of the house Ed had sealed up. These rooms turned out to be those inhabited by his

Speaker 2 Puritanical mother. preserved exactly as they had been at the time of her death.
Then people realized that Mrs. Hogan and Mrs.
Warden slightly resembled the late Mrs.

Speaker 2 Gein, who had always taught Ed that women were bad and sex was wicked. Ed has been sent straight to the lunatic asylum without anyone pausing to consider a trial.

Speaker 2 I believe these are the only two killings that he ever confessed to.

Speaker 2 But like you said, we believe he's responsible for the death of his brother

Speaker 2 and possibly many others. But when they find

Speaker 2 these victims that he dug up that weren't victims of his murder, but victims of his grave robbery, I think that's where it got very convoluted for investigators to decipher what he was responsible and what he wasn't responsible for.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and the one thing that's great about this book, The Chronicle of Crime, there's often a picture

Speaker 2 that is typically grabbed from a newspaper, but there is a picture here of Ed Gein, and he's wearing a flannel hat. He looks like your typical Wisconsin farmer of that time period.

Speaker 2 He's the police were nice enough to let him put on a jacket and gloves.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and he just looks like you're kind of your regular Joe. It comes from such a small town that I think everybody tried to be nice to everybody.
And even though he was a little bit of

Speaker 2 the town weirdo,

Speaker 2 I think think he was,

Speaker 2 yes, but I think he was nice and polite to people.

Speaker 2 So that's where law enforcement wasn't really suspicious of all the activities he was doing. And also he's out on the farm.
And if you just don't have visitors, then there's no way of people knowing.

Speaker 2 And a lot of these farms, it's just not commonplace to just pop on the property and start looking around. Well, and you're exactly right.
And he was even polite with the police.

Speaker 2 And he, like we said, he's kind of the local oddball. And

Speaker 2 don't you hear that? It's like, oh, yeah, he's, he's weird, but he's harmless. And I think that's what everybody kind of considered Ed to be for most of his life until his mother passes away.

Speaker 2 And then they find

Speaker 2 out that he's been killing women and he's got all this horrific stuff in his house and farm.

Speaker 2 Now, I do want to jump real quick to this is from Mary Brett's book titled Out of the Mouth of serial killers this is page 139 here and she's talking about ed gean here and these are some of the things that he said

Speaker 2 so regarding the bernice warden's murder or murderer i should say when he is questioned by police ed gein's response is quote it must have been someone pretty cold-blooded that had committed that murder in Ed's opinion.

Speaker 2 And then when he's asked about the missing woman, Mary Hogan, which we would ultimately learn is likely his first victim, he says, quote, she isn't missing. She's at the farm right now, end quote.
So

Speaker 2 he's not

Speaker 2 going way out of his way to try to hide the facts of the case. And I guess why would he,

Speaker 2 regardless of what you think his state of mind is? I mean, they're finding the evidence, plain and simple, right there on his farm in in his house.

Speaker 2 And then I'll go to one more book for Ed Gein here, Captain. This one's by Paul Anthony Woods titled Ed Gein Psycho.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 2 this is unbelievable. This is from the very back of the book here.
Go for it. Unbelievable.
I can't,

Speaker 2 this will never make any sense to me

Speaker 2 in any context at all. But there is, according to his book, Ed Gein Psycho, there is an Ed Gein fan club, an Ed Gein fan club.

Speaker 2 So you can get a certificate of membership, which is a certificate with your name on it that says that this certifies that blank,

Speaker 2 let's say the captain, this certifies that the captain is a member in good standing of the official international Ed Gein fan club and has been registered as an official member entitled to all membership benefits.

Speaker 2 I have no idea what those benefits would be, but one apparently is this certificate of membership.

Speaker 2 And then it's dated and then it would be signed by the president of the official International Ed Gein Fan Club. There was a limited edition t-shirt.

Speaker 2 This is Gallery of Horror, and it has Ed Gein's picture on it. And there's also buttons and stickers and all those kinds of things.
And

Speaker 2 we're not going to go to this city or state on our little adventure here this week, but the mailing address for the Ed Gein Fan Club is out of Tempe, Arizona. Wow.
What's up, Tempe?

Speaker 2 What are you doing? What are you doing? Now, don't blame Tempe for this club. Just one person in Tempe.

Speaker 2 And who wants to wear a shirt with Ed's ugly mug on it?

Speaker 2 You know what I mean? Like,

Speaker 2 that's kind of

Speaker 2 bizarre. Let's put an ugly man's face on my t-shirt.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 But again, the legend of Ed is going to keep growing because the amount of fabrications

Speaker 2 and just blatant lies that this Ryan Murphy project, the Ed Gein monster on Netflix,

Speaker 2 people are going to watch this eight-part series and think that this is somewhat factual. Because I think some people go, well, it's about a real person,

Speaker 2 so it has to be based on facts, just like a documentary, and it's not. And

Speaker 2 there's a whole thing towards the end where he's in communication with Richard Speck, another serial killer. And

Speaker 2 what the show is claiming is Richard Speck was in contact with Ted Bundy before

Speaker 2 some of the Ted Bundy murders. And then it...

Speaker 2 Then it shows Ed talking to the FBI saying, hey, I think this guy you should look into is this guy, probably goes by the name Ted, probably drives a Volkswagen Beetle, and

Speaker 2 he's been in correspondence with Richard Speck. And so when they caught Bundy as a part of the monster series, it shows Ed going, hey, I did something good in this world.

Speaker 2 But there's no evidence that Ted Bundy wrote Richard Speck, and we have no evidence that Richard Speck even wrote Ed Geen. Yes, that's absolutely correct.

Speaker 2 And we would have to believe, there's every reason to believe that all of that mail would have been

Speaker 2 very meticulously, meticulously monitored.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 one thing that always will stick with me with Ed Gein, not just that picture that I had mentioned of the victim hanging in the shed. You can't unsee that.

Speaker 2 But one thing that is unfortunately tattooed on my brain, having read about him as a youngster, is the portion of the story where they say that he would dress up in these skin suits or portions of these skin suits and dance in the moonlight or dance in the graveyard at night in the pitch black.

Speaker 2 For now, because for most of my life, having read that when I was young, anytime there's a song that mentions, you know, dancing, dancing in the moonlight or dance by the light of the moon, There's a whole bunch of them that Moondancer, there's all kinds of songs that are that are like that.

Speaker 2 My

Speaker 2 freaking brain goes to an image of

Speaker 2 like a silhouette shadow figure of

Speaker 2 Gein dressed in skin suit or as a woman dancing in the graveyard or

Speaker 2 with the big moon right in front of him. Like, I cannot.

Speaker 2 I don't know if there's enough beer in this garage to get that, that out of my head for some reason.

Speaker 2 But anytime from that day on to this day, that's what I think of when there's a moondance song that I hear. Well, like you said,

Speaker 2 this image,

Speaker 2 a real life image,

Speaker 2 you won't ever be able to get out of your head. Well, the eight-part Netflix docu.

Speaker 2 The eight-part Netflix monster Ed Gein series has probably a thousand images. I'll never be able to get out of my head.

Speaker 2 And eight episodes that I'll probably never be able to get off of my Netflix app.

Speaker 2 All right, trick or treat here, Captain, before we wrap up. Let's go with a treat.
All right, for treat, and we'll circle back to your trick. You're not getting off that easy.

Speaker 2 According to Johnny Trevasani in his great book, he says, before you leave the Plainfield, Wisconsin area, make sure you check out the annual Pentonwell-Palooza ice fishery and raffle that takes place in January at the Lure Bar and Grill.

Speaker 2 And he says, if you've never checked out an indoor ice fishing tournament, this is your chance. And they have cash prizes for

Speaker 2 the tournament as well and raffles that go along with this. $10

Speaker 2 goes to the

Speaker 2 I think it's, he puts $1,500 as the top cash prize, but I would imagine that would probably change from year to year.

Speaker 2 But indoor ice fishing sounds absolutely fantastic to me. And here's your trick, Captain.
Another riddle: what happens once in a lifetime, twice in a moment, but never in a thousand years?

Speaker 2 Once in a lifetime.

Speaker 2 Sex.

Speaker 2 The letter M.

Speaker 2 I had sex once. Just

Speaker 2 let it wait now.

Speaker 2 Thanks for joining us here in the garage. Stick around for part two.

Speaker 2 More fascinating and disturbing facts of serial killers. And until then,

Speaker 2 be good, be kind, and don't litter.

Speaker 4 That was Foggy Mornings. Up next is Let It Sleep on Back to Bed Radio.

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