Disturbing History - Loving the Monster

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

Some nights the well runs dry, and I do what everybody does — I sink into the couch and let Netflix babysit me for a while. That's how I ended up watching The Worst Ex Ever, and that's how I ended up staring at the story of Wade Wilson, the so-called Deadpool Killer, a man who strangled two women to death in a single day in Cape Coral, Florida, and now sits on death row with two death sentences and a fan club.Because that's the part that put my jaw on the floor. Not the murders. The love letters. The fundraisers. The women all over the world begging a judge to spare him. And I knew right then I had to make this episode.This one is about hybristophilia, the unsettling and very real pull that draws people toward convicted killers, and the long, strange history that proves it is nothing new. We go back to the courtroom groupies of the nineteen seventies and Ted Bundy's wedding staged in the middle of his own murder trial.We sit with Richard Ramirez and the woman who sent him seventy-five letters and married him at San Quentin, with Charles Manson and the young follower handed a marriage license when he was eighty, with the Menendez brothers turned into heartthrobs by a streaming series decades after they killed their parents, and with Chris Watts collecting fan mail in his cell after smothering his own children.We follow it into the phone-screen present with the Columbiners and the true crime community, and we flip the mirror around with Jodi Arias and Aileen Wuornos to ask why this current runs so overwhelmingly in one direction. Then we dig into the why of it, the trauma and the rescue fantasy and the safety of a caged partner, before turning the light back where it belongs, onto the victims and the families who have to watch their killers become stars.A heads-up before you press play: this episode covers murder, cruelty toward children, sexual violence, and suicide, told plain and told straight. It is a heavy one. If that is not where your head is tonight, come find it another time. But if you want to understand something true and disturbing about the human heart, settle in. This is Disturbing History.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact,

this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner. of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew.

And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull it threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place.

History isn't just written by the victors. Victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. Three podcasts a week. A studio out here on 40 acres where I sit and talk into a microphone about the things that go bump in the woods and the things that go bump in the human heart. I love it. Wouldn't trade it for anything. But at the end of a long day of interviews, research and writing, I do what half of this country does at the end of a long day. I sink into the couch. I open Netflix. And I let the algorithm babysit me for a a while. That's exactly what I did a few nights ago. And what the algorithm handed me was a series called The Worst X Ever, and one of the episodes in it featured a man named Wade Wilson. Not the one

from the comic books, not the wisecracking mercenary in the red suit, the other one, the flesh and blood one they started calling the Deadpool killer because he happened to share a name with a movie character and happened to have a face full of ink that made the resemblance land a little too well. I sat there in the dark, and I watched, and somewhere around the middle of it, my jaw came loose from my skull. I've been doing this a long time, nearly 40 years chasing the dark corners of things, 16 of them wearing a badge. I thought I was past the point where a documentary could surprise me. I was wrong, because the thing that got to me wasn't the murders. It was the fan mail. While that man sat in a courtroom being tried for two killings,

Women all over the world were falling in love with him, writing him letters, raising him money, begging a judge to spare his life. And I sat there in the dark thinking, this can't be new. This can't just be one man in one floor at a courtroom. It isn't. And it never was. Tonight I want to walk you through one of the strangest, ugliest, patterns in the whole history of crime.

The women and the men who look at a killer, a real one, a proven one, and feel the thing the rest of us can't fathom. Love, devotion. A wedding ring passed through a prison mail slot to a man with blood on his hands. We're going back to the courtrooms of the 1970s, where women lined up to marry monsters. We're going to sit with the serial killers who collected marriage proposals on death row, the cult leader who got handed a marriage license at 80 years old,

the brothers who murdered their own parents and got turned into heartthrobs on a phone screen decades later. The father who smothered his own children and still gets love letters in his cell. And we're going to follow this thing all the way into right now, into the filtered photographs and the fan edits and the crushes typed out under a killer's mugshot, and we're going to try to answer the one question sitting underneath all of it. Why? Why do people fall in love with the worst among us? Let me tell you who Wade Wilson really is,

because the men behind these names get mythologized fast. and that mythology is exactly the disease I want to put under the light tonight. Wade Stephen Wilson was born in 1994. By the time he became a household horror, he'd already stacked up a criminal record that ran back more than a decade. Burglary, grand theft, firearms, the usual escalating grammar of a man learning to take whatever he wants. Then came the 7th of October in the year 2019.

Cape Coral, Florida, one horrific death. Two women's lives cut short. The first was Christine Melton, 35 years old. Wilson met her out at a bar the way any of us might meet a stranger who turns out to be a friend or turns out to be nothing at all.

They hit it off. The night wound down the way nights do. And sometime in the small quiet hours, in her own bed, in the one place a person's supposed to be safest in all the world, he wrapped his hands around her throat and he strangled her.

Then he stole her car, and he drove off. The second was Diane Ruiz, 43 years old. She was walking to her job that same morning. Wilson pulled up alongside her and asked for help finding a local school. The oldest trick there is, the request for directions. The little courtesy no decent person refuses. She got in the car to point the way. He strangled her too, and he dumped her in a field.

And a few days later, that's where they found her. Two women. two throats, a few hours between them. He confessed the grisly details to his own biological father of all people, and it was his father who helped put the police on to him. A jury convicted him in the summer of 2004 on two counts of first-degree murder, plus a fistful of other charges. That August, a judge handed down two death sentences. Today he sits on Florida's death row, up at the Union Correctional Institution in Rayford, in a cell, with severely restricted movement, waiting on the slow machinery of appeal. That's the man. A double murderer

with swastikas tattooed on his face, a predator who used good manners as a lure. And that face, the ink, the dead-eyed calm he wore all through the trial, none of it scared these people off. If anything, it drew them in. There's a whole strain of this where the cruelty isn't a flaw to be overlooked. It's the attraction itself. The colder he looked on that courtroom camera, the harder some of them fell. And here's the part that put me on that couch with my mouth hanging open. While the trial was still going, while the details of what he did to Christine and to Diane were being read into the record, Wade Wilson was collecting fans. People started online petitions. People launched fundraisers, and one of them pulled in more than $86,000 for his defense.

People flooded the judge with letters from all over the planet, pleading for mercy, pleading for a life sentence instead of death, pleading for the man who'd strangled two strangers to be spared. On social media, they praised his smug, soulless courtroom stare like it was charisma, like it was strength. The prosecutor stood up at a press conference and said the thing that needed saying. She said it hadn't gone unnoticed that this defendant was being idolized by people somehow proud to mix their names with his, holding him up like some kind of positive representation of a man, when he was nothing but a vicious killer and about the poorest representation of a man there could ever be. She was completely right, and she was also describing something a whole lot older and stranger than one killer in one Florida courtroom.

Because Wade Wilson isn't the disease. Wade Wilson's a symptom. The disease has a name and it's got a history, and that history is what I want to walk you through tonight, all the way from the sorority houses of the 1970s to the glowing phone screens of right now. There's a word for it. Of course there is. We're a species that names its demons, and this one got its name back in 1986, from a sexologist named John Money, hybristophilia.

It comes from the Greek. The root is a word that means to commit an outrage against another person, married to the old suffix that means love or attraction. Put them together and you've got a clinical term for something that shouldn't need one. sexual and romantic attraction that gets switched on, specifically by the knowledge that the person you want has done something monstrous. Rape, murder, armed robbery. The worse the outrage, the hotter the flame.

Some folks call it the Bonnie and Clyde syndrome, after the outlaw lovers who shot their way across the Depression and died together in a hail of gunfire on a back road in Louisiana. It's a softer name for a hard thing and I don't love it, because it dresses the whole business up in romance, but the term stuck, and you'll run into it, so now you know it. The psychologists who study this draw a line straight down the middle of it.

On one side, you've got what they call passive hybristophilia, attraction from a safe distance, the letters, the photographs, the prison visits, the woman who falls hard for a man on death row, but wouldn't dream of committing a crime herself. She's drawn to the killer.

She'd never be the killer. On the other side, you've got the aggressive kind, and this is the darker branch. This is the woman who doesn't just love the outlaw, but rides with him, who helps, who lures, who becomes an accomplice. The real Bonnie to the real Clyde,

rarer but real, and every bit is deadly. I don't really care for tidy little labels doing the work that hard thinking is supposed to do. Hybristophilia isn't even in the big diagnostic manual the psychiatrists use. It's a description, not a diagnosis. And the experts who've spent their careers waiting through this swamp will tell you flat out that the word explains a lot less than it seems to. One of those experts is Catherine Ramsalant, a professor of forensic psychology who's written

whole shelves of books on the criminal mind. She said the word out loud plenty of times, but she's also quick to point out that it rarely tells you the whole story of why any one particular woman drives across three states to sit on the other side of a plexiglass barrier from a man who took a life. The person who dug the deepest into the Y though was a writer named Sheila Eisenberg. Back in 1991 she published a book with a title that says the whole thing in a single breath, women who love men who kill. And she didn't theorize from an armchair. She went out and found these women and she sat with them And she listened, and she talked to the psychiatrists and the lawyers and the social workers and the prison guards who orbited them.

And she found a pattern, a brutal, sad, consistent pattern. Almost without exception, the women she spoke to had been abused, early and badly, by their families, or their first boyfriends, or their husbands, sexually, physically, emotionally. sometimes all three braided together into one lifelong wound. These weren't thrill seekers slumming it for a good story. A lot of them were nurses and teachers. Women with ordinary jobs and ordinary faces and extraordinary damage. And here's the counterintuitive thing Eisenberg landed on, the thing that reframed the whole picture for me.

For a woman who spent her life being controlled by dangerous men, a dangerous man behind bars can feel like the safest relationship she's ever had. He can't come to her house. He can't show up drunk at two in the morning. He can't cheat, can't hit, can't follow her to work, can't do a single one of the thousand small violences that taught her what love was supposed to cost. She holds all the cards. She decides when to write, when to visit, when to answer the phone.

For the first time in her life, she's the one with the freedom to come and go. She's in control. And the caged monster, the one the whole world's, afraid of, is the one man who can never touch her, the same bars that keep the public safe, keep her safe from everything she's ever learned to expect from love. That's not romance. That's a trauma response wearing romance as a mask. And once you see it that way, you can't unsee it in a single one of the cases I'm about to lay out. Before I start naming names, I want to kill one comforting little idea. And that's the notion that this is some sickness of our particular moment.

It isn't. The technologies knew. The impulse is ancient. Women were mailing love and pity and marriage offers to condemn men long before there was a Netflix, long before there was a television, long before there was even a photograph to swoon over. Every public hanging in history drew its crowd, and somewhere in that crowd, reliably, there was somebody who found the doomed man magnetic, precisely because he was doomed. The outlaw, the highway man, the killer waiting for on the noose. These figures have tugged at a certain kind of heart for as long as we've kept any record of the human heart at all. What our age added wasn't the desire. What our age added was the delivery system. We took an old, quiet, shameful little impulse, and we handed it a printing press,

and then a broadcast tower, and then a phone in every pocket, and we watched it bloom into something loud and visible and endlessly renewable. So when I walk you through these cases, Don't think of them as some symptom of a broken generation. Think of them as the same old fire, just burning through better and better fuel. If you want to understand the whole strange orchard, you start at the root. And the root, the great American archetype of the killer with a fan club, is Ted Bundy. Bundy confessed to at least 30 murders across seven states in the 1970s. Young women, mostly, college students.

He'd fake an injury, an arm in a sling, a set of a lot of, crutches, and he'd asked some pretty stranger to help him carry something to his car, and then the car door would close, and her world would end. He was handsome in a forgettable sort of way, articulate, a former law student, a man who could pass. That was the horror of him. He looked like the guy next door because, functionally, that's exactly what he was, and when he went on trial, the courtroom filled up with women who were in love with him. I mean that literally. During his Florida of trials at the tail end of the 1970s, Bundy got hundreds of letters from women professing their love, marriage proposals, nude photographs, and every single day there were young women in

that gallery. And a chilling number of them had dark hair parted straight down the middle, styled to look like the very victims the prosecution was describing. They came to be near him. They dressed like the dead to do it. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. One of those women was already in his orbit, though. A twice-divorced mother of two named Carol Ann Boone. She'd known Bundy years before, back when they worked together at a state office in Washington, before anybody knew what he was. She liked him right away, she said, thought he was shy with a lot going on under the surface. Their friendship stayed a friendship for a long time. It didn't turn into anything else until he was behind bars, and she'd decided, with a conviction

that never once wavered that he was innocent. She moved to be near his prison. She visited every week. She smuggled him money. And the story goes, she helped fund and escape. And later, she smuggled him drugs. And then, in 1980, she did the thing that made her a permanent footnote in the history of American crime. She married him, in the middle of his murder trial, in the courtroom itself. Here's how that even happened, because it's a piece of legal theater almost too strange to believe. Bundy, ever the failed law student, was acting as his own attorney. He called Boone up to the witness stand. And under an old Florida quirk, a marriage declared an open court in front of a judge and a notary, was legally binding.

So he had Boone bring a notary. He questioned her, and then he asked her, right there under oath, whether she'd marry him. She said yes, he declared them married, and it counted. They did all this during the penalty phase of his trial for murder. murdering a 12-year-old girl named Kimberly Leach. Hours later, that jury recommended he die. It gets worse, or sadder, or both. In 1982, while Bundy sat on death row,

Carolyn Boone gave birth to a daughter named Rose, his only known biological child. Conjugal visits were forbidden for a condemned man, so the how of it became prison legend, tales of bribed guards looking the other way behind a water cooler or in a corner of the visiting yard. However it happened, it happened. A serial killer of women became a father on death row

to a woman who'd married him in the very room where the state was trying to kill him. And you know how that story ends? It ends the way this whole ugly pattern tends to end once the fantasy finally runs out of road. In 1986, the marriage ended. The belief in his innocence that Carol Ann Boone had staked her life on

couldn't hold forever, and she divorced him. And she took their daughter and moved away and changed her name, and she spent the rest of her life trying to be invisible. And in the days before his execution, Ted Bundy finally opened up and confessed to a long trail of murders, the very killing she'd spent years insisting he could never have done. On the day Florida strapped him into the electric chair in 1989, he tried to call her one last time. She didn't pick up the phone, the love, whatever it had been,

Couldn't survive the truth. It almost never can. Because the love was never for the real man. It was for the man she needed him to be. If Bundy set the template, Richard Ramirez ran it back a decade later and somehow made it stranger. They called him the Nightstalker.

Through the middle of the 1980s, he terrorized Southern California and the Bay Area, breaking into homes in the dark, killing men and women, assaulting whoever he found, leaving pentegrams and satanic ravings behind him, like a signature. When they finally caught him, a crowd of ordinary citizens beat him half to death in the street before the police could get their hands on him. In 1989,

he was sentenced to death on 13 counts of murder, five counts of attempted murder, 11 sexual assaults, and 14 burglaries, and the courtroom, once again, filled up with adoring women. Groupies who came to watch a man who crept into bedrooms and did unspeakable things, and looked at him and saw a rock star. One of them was a freelance magazine editor named Doreen Loi. She started writing to him not long after his arrest, and she didn't stop. She sent him something like 75 letters over the span of 11 years. And in 1996, in a visiting room at San Quentin, she married him.

She believed he was innocent. Against a mountain of evidence, against the pentagrams and the confessions, and the beating in the street, she believed. When she talked to CNN about it in 1997, she called him kind and funny and charming. She said she believed in him completely. And she said, and I want you to really hear the reasoning here, because it tells you everything about the machinery of denial, that in her opinion there'd been far more evidence to convict O.J. Simpson, and we all know how that one turned out.

Her family cut off contact with her. She said she lived a lonely life, and in the end, even her fantasy couldn't hold. The marriage quietly came apart, and the two of them had stopped seeing each other by the time Ramirez died of cancer in prison in 2013. 75 letters, 11 years, a wedding in a room full of guards, for a man who broke into 13 homes

and left the people inside them dead. The bars kept her safe, and the belief in his innocence, the belief she built and maintained through sheer force of will, kept the fantasy alive. because you can't love the truth of a man like that. You can only love the lie you build on top of him.

But Bundy and Ramirez weren't freak accidents. They were the two most famous faces on what had become by the closing decades of the last century. Something close to an epidemic on American death rose. Take Kenneth Bianchi. One half of the pair, the newspapers called the Hillside Stranglers, who raped and murdered young women around Los Angeles in the late 1970s and left their bodies posed on the hillsides where anybody might find them.

A monster by any measure you care to use. And from behind bars, he picked up a devoted pen pal named Shirley Joyce Book, and in 1989, the two of them married while he served out a life sentence for strangling girls. Tex Watson, Charles Manson's right hand, the man who did much of the actual killing on those two long nights in 1969. Watson was convicted of seven murders, and behind the walls he married a woman named Kristen, and back when the rules still allowed it, before California banned conjugal visits for lifers, the two of them had four children together.

He found religion, got himself ordained as a minister, ran a prison ministry with his wife. A man who helped butcher a pregnant actress and her friends built himself a family and a pulpit, inside a maximum security prison, one visit at a time. Angelo Buono, the other hillside strangler, who got married in a prison waiting area in a ceremony that lasted about five minutes. Scott Peterson, who murdered his pregnant wife, Lacey, and their unborn son, and dumped them in the San Francisco Bay just before Christmas. He got his first marriage proposal from an 18-year-old woman within hours of arriving on death row. The ink was barely dry on the sentence, and already a stranger wanted to be his bride. and the machinery that connects these women to these men has only gotten smoother with time.

There are websites now, whole directories built for exactly this purpose. A friend or a family member on the outside posts a lonely inmate's profile, his photo, his interests, his crimes sometimes softened or just left off altogether, and the letters start to roll in. It's a marketplace. It runs day and night, and the men who committed the most spectacular crimes are the ones whose mailboxes overflow. Because in this economy, notoriety isn't a liability. It's the product. So when I tell you a double murderer down in Florida pulled in $86,000 and a stack of love letters, I don't want you filing it away as some bizarre one-off. It's just the newest entry in a ledger that runs back decades, and that ledger is long and it's getting longer every year.

Now let me take you somewhere the fantasy gets so undiluted. It all. almost stops making sense. Charles Manson. He didn't personally kill Sharon Tate. He didn't personally hold the knife at the La Bianca house. What Manson did was arguably worse. He took a collection of lost young people, mostly women, and he hollowed them out and refilled them with his own madness until they'd murder strangers on nothing but his say-so. The Tate and La Bianca killings in the summer of 1969 were carried out by his followers at his direction, and they horrified a night. nation. He was convicted in 1971, and he spent the rest of his life in California prisons. And decades later, when Manson was an old man with a swastika carved into his own forehead,

a young woman fell in love with him. Her name was Afton Elaine Burton. Manson renamed her star. Of course he did, because renaming his acolytes was one of his oldest tricks. She was raised in the middle of the country, and in 2007, at 19 years old, She sold what she had and moved clear across the country to Corker in California, just to be near his prison. She visited him every weekend for hours. She ran websites in his name. She even shaved her head in the same fashion his female followers had shaved theirs at the trial back in 1969.

A devotion echoed across half a century. She called him the most handsome man in the world. She said the first time she ever saw him, she thought he was the cutest thing. and in 2014, the state of California went ahead and issued the two of them a marriage license. He was 80, she was 26, 53 years between them, and one of the most infamous killers who ever drew breath sitting on the older side of that gap. The wedding never happened. The license expired after 90 days, and the reason it fell apart is the single most disturbing detail

in a story already made of disturbing details. By some accounts, part of the plan had been for Star, as his legal wife and next of kin, to take possession of his body after death, and to put his corpse on display in a glass case. Like a preserved saint, like linen in the tomb, a shrine for the pilgrims to come and gaze upon. Even Manson himself, in a rare moment of something like honesty, waved the whole thing off as garbage. Trash for public consumption, he called it, said they were just, playing it up. The sister of one of his victims put it plainer. She said the whole thing was insane, and she asked the only question that matters. What would any young woman in her right

mind want with an 80-year-old man who did what he did? Manson died in 2017. There was no glass case. There was no shrine. There was just a young woman who'd handed a decade of her life to the emptiest man in America and gotten nothing back but a name he made up for her. Take the Menendez brothers, Lyle and Eric. In August of 1989 in a mansion in Beverly Hills, they took shotguns and they killed their own parents, Jose and Kitty, in the family living room. They spent the money for months and they lied to the police and they blamed the mob and eventually the truth came out and in 1996 they were convicted of first-degree murder and

sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. And both of them, from inside prison, got married. Lyle married twice, first a former model who divorced him when she found out he was writing to another woman at the very same time. Then a magazine editor named Rebecca Sneed, who went on to become an attorney. Eric married a woman named Tammy in a prison ceremony in 1999. These men who murdered their own mother and father found women on the outside, willing to build a whole life around a mail slot and a visiting room. But the Menendez story isn't frozen back in the 1990s, and that's exactly why it belongs in tonight's episode more than almost any other case. Because in the fall of 2024, Netflix

dropped a dramatized series about them and a documentary right alongside it, and something extraordinary happened. A whole new generation, kids who weren't even born when the murders happened, discovered these two handsome young men on their phones, and a tidal wave of sympathy came rolling in. Their claims of childhood sexual abuse, dismissed and mocked back at the original trial, got a fresh and far more receptive hearing in a world that had learned some hard lessons about who gets believed and who doesn't. The pressure built. The Los Angeles District Attorney recommended that a judge take a look at their sentences, and in May of 2025, a judge,

cut their sentence to 50 years to life, which made them eligible for parole for the first time in three decades. Now, I want to be fair here because this one isn't the same animal as the others. The renewed interest in the Menendez case isn't simple hybristophilia. A lot of it's a real and reasonable reckoning with abuse and with how the courts of the 1990s handled it. That's a legitimate debate, and thoughtful people land on both sides of it. But if you spent any time down in the comment sections, and I did, because that's the job. You saw the other thing threaded all the way through it. You saw thousands of young women who weren't debating the finer points of California sentencing law. You saw fan edits. You saw crushes. You saw two brothers

turned into heart throbs. Their mugshots run through soft filters, their crime sanded down into a tragic little romance. The line between compassion for abuse survivors and infatuation with famous killers got very, very blurry, and a lot of people crossed it without ever noticing they had. For the record, both brothers were denied parole in August of 2025, and a judge threw out their bid for a new trial the month after. The board found them a moderate risk, so the story's not over, but it stands as a warning about how fast this machinery moves now. A streaming release, a hashtag, a filter, and a killer becomes a crush in the space of a single autumn. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

And that brings me to the case that lives right next door to Wade Wilson in my mind. Because it's so recent and so raw and so exactly the same shape. Chris Watts. In August of 2018 in Frederick, Colorado, Chris Watts strangled his pregnant wife, Shanan. She was 34 years old and 15 weeks along with their third child. Then he smothered their two little girls. Bella was four. Celeste was three. He loaded the three bodies into his truck

and drove them out to an oil and gas work site where he used to be employed. And he buried his pregnant wife in a shallow grave, and he pushed his daughters down into crude oil tanks. He did all of it because he wanted out of his marriage and into a new life with another woman. There's no ambiguity in this one. No claim of self-defense.

No disputed evidence. No reasonable. doubt. He confessed. He pleaded guilty. He's serving five life sentences. And the love letters started showing up almost immediately. Within days of his arrest, women began writing to Chris Watts. By the time the district attorney released the case documents, there were dozens of these letters, more than 60 of them, and a good number were exactly what you're dreading. Women told him he had one of the kindest faces they'd ever seen. Women told him they knew in their hearts he was a good guy. One woman sent a photograph of herself in a bikini on a beach.

They covered the pages and doodled hearts and little hashtags. Team Chris. Chris is innocent. I love him. So cute. A man who smothered his own babies and pushed them down into oil tanks. And there were women signing their letters. I'd be the happiest girl alive if you wrote me back.

And according to the reporting, he did write back. Sources said he answers the women, that he trades racy letters. that he sends and receives, because he's got nothing else to do, and it feeds his ego. He murdered a pregnant wife and two small children, and he's sitting in a Wisconsin prison collecting fan mail and photographs, like a washed-up celebrity signing autographs at a card show. A psychoanalyst who looked at the women writing to Watts said something that ties this whole episode together in a knot. She said they're not so different from the people who fall for celebrities,

but that it runs deeper than that. She said a lot of the research points right back to the same place Eisenberg landed decades ago. Some of these women grew up in violent households. And in those households, they learned to fuse three things that were never meant to be the same thing. Power, aggression, love. They learned that the man who hurts you is the man who loves you, because that was the only version they were ever shown. And so a killer, a man dripping with power and aggression,

reads to some broken part of them as the truth. truest kind of love there is. That's not a moral failing. That's a wound. But it's a wound that keeps aiming itself at monsters. Now I've got to take you somewhere newer and in some ways, worse. Because everything I've described so far ran on paper and pen and prison visits. So what happens when you hand this ancient sickness a smartphone? You get the column biners. On the 20th of April in 1999, two teenagers named Eric Harris and Dylan Kleibold walked in to Columbine High School in Colorado and murdered 12 of their fellow students and a teacher before turning the guns on themselves. It was, at the time, the deadliest school shooting in American

history, and it carved a permanent scar into the culture. It changed how we build schools, how we run our drills, how we talk to our own children about the worst thing that could happen to them, and it birthed a fandom, because Harris and Klebold left behind an unusual amount of material. Journals, home videos, The infamous basement tapes, web pages. They documented themselves in a way that once it all leaked out into the world, handed a certain kind of lonely, angry, hurting teenager something to sink into and obsess over. And obsessed they did. The subculture that grew up around these two dead killers calls itself,

among other names, the Columbiners, and it's been thriving on the internet for a quarter of a century now. It started on message boards. It moved to YouTube, and when YouTube, crack down on it, it fled to Tumblr. And from Tumblr, it spread out onto TikTok and Instagram, and everywhere else the young people gather now. The numbers are hard to pin down, but the serious estimates run into the tens of thousands of active participants worldwide, and the activity spikes every April around the anniversary, like a black flower that blooms

right on schedule. And a slice of these fans aren't researchers, and they aren't morbid gawkers. They're in love. They post pictures of ha'clock. They post pictures of ha. Harris and Clebold run through soft, dreamy filters, draped in flowers softened into something tender. My sweet boys, the captions say, they deserved better. They write fan fiction. They draw fan art. They confess in plain words to crushes on two young men who committed mass murder. One girl wrote that she cared more about Eric and Dylan than about 90% of the people around her.

Another wrote that she was in love with the dead school shooter and wondered out loud what on earth had happened. to her. Dave Cullen, who wrote the definitive book on the massacre and has spent his life studying it, has watched this fandom up close, and he put his finger on the exact same engine I've been describing all night long. He said the young women are drawn to the poor, misunderstood, tragic, shy, awkward outsider. The boy who was just led astray, the one who could have been saved, if only by my love. Which is a near perfect echo of the woman driving across the country to a death row visiting room. Same fantasy, younger face. And I want you to hear one more voice on this, because it's the one that ought to end the argument. Sue Klebold is Dylan's

mother. She lost her son, and she spent the rest of her life carrying the unbearable weight of what he did to other people's children. In her memoir, she wrote about the letters. Girls flooded the family with love letters. Young men left messages on the answering machine calling her murdered son. a god, a hero. And she said, in an interview, that she was appalled that anybody could look at that tragedy and see romance or heroism. The mother of the killer sees the truth.

The fans, safe behind their screens, see a love story. This isn't harmless. I need you to understand that it is not harmless. In 2019, right around the 20th anniversary, an 18-year-old woman named Saul Pius who'd become infatuated with Columbine and with Eric Harris, flew from Florida to Colorado.

She bought a pump-action shotgun. She was reportedly obsessed, and she wanted to be close to the place, close to him, in what turned out to be the last hours of her life. They found her body up in the Colorado Mountains, dead by her own hand. The Columbiners were the beginning, not the end. What grew out of them is now called the true crime community, and its darker corners idolize a whole rotating cast of mass murderers, with that same devotional energy.

After the Parkland school shooting in 2018, in which a young man murdered 17 people, teenage girls started writing him fan mail. They built blogs and chat rooms and private servers just to talk about their obsession. One of them described him, a man who gunned down 17 human beings, as just a person that the system failed,

and there's an even uglier branch. Some of these online cults aren't romantic at all. Some of them, like the network that grew up around the man who murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston in 2015 are explicitly political, explicitly racist, explicitly built to celebrate the killing as some heroic act in service of a hateful cause. That's not highbristophilia. That's recruitment. That's a movement using a murderer as a mascot. And it's its own distinct horror. What I want you to see is the through line.

From the sorority house murders of the 1970s to the school shootings of the 2000s, from ink and paper letters to filtered TikTok edits, the same broken impulse keeps finding new outlets and new killers to attach itself to. The technology changes. The wiring doesn't. By now you've probably noticed something about every case I've laid out. The killers are men and the admirers are women. And that's not an accident of which stories I happen to pick.

That's the shape of the whole phenomenon. The people who research this will tell you plainly that high-bristophilia, the romantic pull towards somebody who's killed, shows up far more often in women drawn to male criminals than the other way around. It's lopsided, badly lopsided. And that lopsidedness is itself one of the most revealing facts in the whole subject, so I don't want to just skate past it. But your question tonight was about women and men both.

So let me turn the mirror around and ask the harder version. Do men fall for women who kill? The answer's yes. But it's a smaller yes, and it comes with a twist that tells you something important about how differently we treat male and female violence. Take Jodi Arias. In the year 2008, she murdered her ex-boyfriend,

a man named Travis Alexander, out in Arizona. And when I say murdered, I mean an act of almost unbelievable ferocity. She stabbed him nearly 30 times. She slid his throat. She shot him in the head. And then she spun a web of lies about it that took investigators a long time to cut through. Her trial in the year 2013

became a full-blown national spectacle, wall-to-wall coverage, largely because the case was soaked in sex and obsession and betrayal. And because Jody Arias was young and photogenic and eerily composed up there on the witness stand. And the men came running. While she sat in jail awaiting trial, she had something like 27 supporters video chatting with her, some of them snapping screenshots of her smiling into the camera.

Ten of them eventually got banned for using fake identities just to keep the calls coming. Since her conviction, she's kept right on receiving fan mail from around the world. Some of it love letters, some of it explicit, some of it from men who reportedly propose marriage to her on a weekly basis. A convicted killer who stabbed a man nearly 30, times, fielding wedding proposals like a celebrity fielding autograph requests. So it runs in both directions. But look close at what's driving the male version, because it isn't quite the same engine. The men writing to Jody Arias are, by most accounts, drawn first and foremost to her looks,

to the sexualized packaging of her case, to a young, attractive woman, made famous by a lurid trial. That's a shallower, more familiar kind of infatuation. It's a lot closer to ordinary celebrity worship pointed at a criminal than it is to the deep, life reorganizing devotion that drove Carol Ann Boone across the country, or kept Doreen Lyo writing for 11 years. And here's the proof of that difference. Consider Aileen Warnos.

Warnos killed seven men in Florida at the turn of the 1990s, working the highways, and she's often been called America's first female serial killer, though that titles more marketing than fact. She got famous. truly famous, books, documentaries, a Hollywood film where an actress won an Academy Award for playing her. Florida executed her in the year 2002, and Aline Warnos did get a great deal of male. She had fans, but here's the part that cracks the whole gender question wide open. Her fans were mostly women, and they weren't by and large sending marriage proposals and bikini photographs. They were drawn to her as an outlaw, as a symbol,

as an abused woman who turned her rage back on the men who prayed on women like her. It was ideological. It was political. It was a kind of dark, feminist folk hero worship. It was almost never romantic. That's the asymmetry in a nutshell. Most women who kill get almost no male at all. The researchers point this out over and over. The typical woman on a long sentence is often a battered woman who finally struck back. and she doesn't get parades or proposals. She gets silence. The lonely heart's letters,

the wedding rings coming through the mail slot, the fantasy of saving the caged beast with the power of love, that river runs overwhelmingly in one direction, toward the men. Why? I've got my suspicions, and the psychologists have theirs, and they overlap.

A woman who fantasizes about taming a dangerous man is drawing on a story our whole culture has been telling us, her since she was a little girl. Beauty and the Beast. The good woman who reforms the bad man. There's no matching fairy tale pointed the other way. We don't raise little boys on stories about the tender hero who saves the murderess with his devotion.

And a dominant, violent man reads to a certain kind of wounded psyche as a protector. However insane that sounds when the man in question is a strangler. A violent woman doesn't slot into that same primal script. She threatens it. So yes, men fall for killers too. But when they do, they're mostly falling for a face and a scandal. When women fall, a frightening number of them are falling for a rescue mission,

a fantasy of control, and a wound they've carried since childhood. Same word. Two very different diseases. So let me do what I always try to do on this show, which is stop describing the monster and start dissecting it. Why? Why does this happen? Why has it always happened? I don't think there's one clean answer.

I think there are several, braided together and the mix is different for every single person caught in it. But here's what the evidence keeps pointing back at. The first thread is the one Eisenberg pulled on the hardest, and it's controlled disguised as love. For a woman shaped by abuse, the caged killer is the one man on earth she can love without being destroyed. He can't reach her.

She sets every term. The relationship lives entirely on her schedule and inside her fantasy. And for somebody who's never once in her life held the power in a relationship, that's intoxicating. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The prison wall isn't an obstacle. The prison wall is the entire appeal. The second thread is the rescue fantasy.

And this one runs through just about every case I laid out tonight. Carol Ann Boone believes she could see the real Ted. the shy, sweet man hiding under the surface. Doreen Loi believes she could save an innocent from the machine. The Columbiners believe their love could have turned two killers back from the edge. It's the oldest story women get taught. The fairy tale that a good enough woman can heal a bad enough man. That the beast turns back into a prince if only somebody loves him the right way.

Aim that story at an actual monster, and it becomes a slow suicide of the self. Catherine Ramsland, the forensic psychologist I mentioned earlier, laid out the menu of motives about as well as anybody ever has, and it's worth hearing her break it down, because it isn't one thing. It's a whole buffet of broken reasoning. Some women, she said, believe they can change a man as cruel and powerful as a serial killer. Others look at the killer and see the little boy he used to be, and they want to mother that boy. To nurture the child, they imagine, got twisted into the monster. A few are cold about it and just want the spotlight, the book deal, the movie money that comes with being attached to a famous name.

And then there's the one Ramsland called The Perfect Boyfriend, and this one's almost funny in how bleak it is. She knows exactly where he is every hour of every day. She knows he's thinking about her, because what else has he got to do? There's no laundry to wash. There's no dinner to cook. There's no man coming home drunk. no accountability, no compromise, no morning breath, no argument about money.

She gets to keep the fantasy charged up and perfect and unspoiled for years, because reality never once gets to intrude on it. The relationship's flawless precisely because it isn't real. He's the perfect partner because he's only ever a partner inside her own head. A paper doll she writes love onto and never has to truly live beside. There's even a school of thought argued by more than one psychologist. that some of this reaches all the way down into the oldest wiring we've got. The idea goes that across the long, brutal span of human history,

a dominant and dangerous man was a man who could protect a woman and her children from all the other dangerous men. And that some faint echo of that ancient calculus still fires in the modern brain, even when the woman knows better, even when the dangerous man in question is sitting behind glass for strangling strangers. I take that theory with a grain of salt about the size of my fist. because we do love to blame the caveman for things the culture taught us last Tuesday. But I won't throw it out entirely, because the pull's real, and it's old,

and it doesn't much seem to care what the rational mind knows. Then there's the plainest thread of all, and it's just fame. Stupid, ordinary fame. These men are famous. Their names are known in every household in the country, and fame is a drug that doesn't much care how it got earned. A woman who's felt invisible her whole life writes a letter to a man the entire world is watching

and he writes her back and all of a sudden she matters. She's connected to something enormous. Somebody who studies this called it the market of death. That species-wide fascination with wounds and violence and horror the same instinct that slows traffic to a crawl beside a wreck on the highway. Most people just slow down and gawk.

A few clobes. right into the wreckage and try to marry it. And underneath every one of these threads sits the one that keeps coming back, no matter how many times I turn the thing over. Trauma. That word won't leave, because the research won't let it. Power and aggression and love, welded into a single lump back in childhood by people who should have known better. That's the wound that keeps aiming itself at monsters. And no amount of my cop's contempt changes the fact that most of these women aren't villains. their casualties who never got treated and their fantasy of loving the caged killer

is a symptom of an injury that happened to them a long time before they ever heard his name. There's one more piece of machinery I need you to see because it runs quiet underneath every single case and it's the piece a cop notices before anything else. Denial, the flat refusal to believe. Go back through the whole hour with me. Carol Ann Boone stood up and swore

she'd never once seen a single thing in Ted that suggested he could hurt a person. Doreen Liyoy looked at a mountain of evidence against the night stalker and announced she believed in him completely. Chris Watts, who confessed to smothering his own babies, got letters signed with the words he is innocent, hearts drawn in the margins. The belief in innocence isn't a side effect of the love. The belief is the load-bearing wall. It's the thing that keeps the whole impossible structure standing. because you can't love the truth of these men. The truth's unbearable. So the mind does what a frightened mind does.

It builds a second man, an innocent man, a misunderstood man, a framed man, and it moves into that second man and locks the door behind it. Every fact that threatens the fantasy gets explained away, reframed, dismissed as a setup, a conspiracy, a rush to judgment. And the heavier the evidence gets, the heart of the believer digs in, because at that point, admitting the truth would mean admitting she gave her heart, her money, sometimes years of her life,

to a monster. And that's a bill most people will do just about anything not to pay. Watch what happens on the rare occasion the wall finally comes down. Bundy confessed, and Boone was gone. She didn't soften. She didn't stay. She took their daughter and she vanished and she wouldn't pick up the phone. The love couldn't survive the truth for one single day, because the love was never aimed at the truth in the first place. It was aimed at the beautiful lie, and when the lie died, everything built on top of it died right along with it. I spent 16 years in law enforcement. I sat across the table from men like these, not the celebrities mostly, but they're smaller cousins, the everyday predators who never made it onto Netflix. And I'll tell you the one thing that interrogation room told you.

taught me that I've never once been able to shake. The charm is the weapon. Ted Bundy was charming. Chris Watts had a kind face. Wade Wilson had a following before the gavel even came down. That's not a coincidence. And it's not some tragic little irony. It's the mechanism. The men who are best at getting close enough to kill are by grim necessity. The men who are best at getting you to drop your guard. The very same skill that let Bundy lure a girl to his car with a fake cast is the skill that let him lure a courtroom full of women into loving him. Predators are charming because charm is how predators hunt. The face is the trap.

I watched it work in real time more than once. A man who'd done something unforgivable, sitting across a scarred metal table from me, and inside of 20 minutes, he'd found the soft spot. He mirrored my posture. He remembered some little detail I'd let slip in passing and fed it right back to me an hour later, like it was a gift. He made me. A trained investigator who knew exactly what he was,

want to like him. That's the talent. It isn't warmth. It's a hunting behavior wearing warmth as camouflage, and it doesn't switch off when the cuffs go on. It just goes looking for a new target. When that interrogation room empties out, that same instrument goes to work on some lonely woman writing letters from three states away,

and she never stood a chance, because nobody ever trained her to see the seam. And the streaming era has poured gasoline all over this. In a way, I don't think we've fully reckoned with yet. Because a documentary is an intimacy machine. You sit there in the dark, alone, close to the screen, and for two hours, a killer's face fills up your whole field of vision. His voice is right there in your ears.

You learn his childhood, his heartbreaks, his supposed reasons. The camera lingers on his eyes. by design, by the very grammar of the form, you come to feel like you know him, like you've been let in on something private and true. Psychologists have a name for that one-way bond, the parasycial relationship, that feeling of closeness with a person on a screen

who has no idea you're alive. It's the same machinery that makes people cry when a celebrity dies, pointed at a murderer, night after night, series after series, and for a small and vulnerable slice of that audience, the manufactured intimacy tips right over into something that feels exactly like love. They didn't fall for a man. They fell for an edit.

There's even a whole market feeding on the far end of all this, and it frankly turns my stomach. They call it murderabilia, an underground trade in the artifacts of famous killers. Their letters, their paintings, their hair clippings, locks of it sold off like relics of a sceptive. saint. Collectors pay real money for a signature from a man who took a life, and the victim's advocates have spent years fighting to shut the whole trade down, and it just keeps crawling back,

because the appetite's bottomless, and the profit's real. We turned murder into a collectibles hobby. Somewhere out there, right now, a man's autograph is worth more because of how many people he killed. And here's what the fantasy always leaves out, every single time. It leaves out the victims. We've spent this whole hour on the killers and the people who love them, because that's the question I set out to answer. But I refuse to close it without turning the light back where it belongs, because the market of death has a way of making us forget that these weren't characters. They were people.

They had names, and they were the whole point. Christine Melton was 35 years old. She went out to a bar and met a stranger and was kind to him, and she died in her own bed for it. Diane Ruiz was 43 years old. She was walking to work and a man asked her for directions to a school and she got in the car to help because she was a decent person. And being a decent person cost her everything. Those are the two women at the center of the Wade Wilson story. Not the smug tattooed face on the screen. Not the $86,000. Not the letters to the judge. Two working women in Cape Coral, Florida, who trusted the wrong stranger on the wrong day, and whose names

almost nobody remembers, while the man who strangled them has himself a fan club. And there's a whole second layer of cruelty in this that we almost never talk about. A mother buries her daughter, a husband buries his wife. A family drags itself through the worst thing that will ever happen to it. And then, right in the middle of that grief, they've got to watch the man who did it become a star. They've got to see the fundraisers. They've got to read the letters begging a judge for his life. They've got to scroll past the filtered photographs and the crush edits and the strangers online swearing up and down that the killers misunderstood.

That he's innocent. That he's a good guy who deserved better. Deborah Tate spent decades of her life going to parole hearing after parole hearing for her murdered sister Sharon, while young women mailed love letters to the man who orchestrated the slaughter. That's a second wound. delivered over and over for years by people who'll never once have to look the family in the eye. The fascination isn't free. Somebody always pays for it, and it's never the killer.

That's the thing that put me on the couch with my jaw on the floor. Not that a killer can be loved. History told me that a long, long time ago. What still gets me, after nearly 40 years of staring into this stuff, is the arithmetic of attention. The killer gets the documentary. The killer gets the letters. The killer gets the crush edits and the innocence campaigns and the marriage license. And the women he killed get a couple of sentences of context before the story hurries on to the next twist.

We built that arithmetic. All of us. Every single time we make the monster the main character. And yes, I hear the irony in my own voice. I just spent an hour doing it, putting Wade Wilson's name in your ears, telling you the shape of his crimes. I'm not standing above this thing. I'm standing right in the middle of it,

same as everybody with a microphone and a true crime feed. The only move I know that keeps it honest is to refuse to let the killer be the last word. So if I've got one thing to leave you with tonight, it isn't a diagnosis, and it sure isn't a tidy little bow. It's a redirection of the eyes. The next time a case like this one comes across your screen,

and it will. Because there's always a next one. I want you to do the hard, unglamorous thing. Look past the killer. Go find the names of the people he took. Say them out loud if you have to. Because the monsters have always had their admirers. What the dead need is witnesses. Christine Melton, Diane Ruiz, Shanan, and Bella, and Celeste Watts, 12 students and a teacher in a Colorado high school, and all the others, going back and back and back, whose killers got famous while they got forgotten. Those are the names that deserve to be remembered. The rest is

just noise from behind the glass.