Every Town - Broken From Birth, The World Made Him A MONSTER - Then He Made His Son One Too

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

Today we’re checking out a story about a Philadelphia shoemaker. He was a father of seven. And a man who listened to a floating head named Charlie, that instructed him to do some of the most vile things imaginable. 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/liQ-8agDcqE 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY: https://www.anangryboy.com 💀 MERCH: https://scary-mysteries-merch.dashery.com 💀 Scary Mysteries SECRET VAULT: https://www.patreon.com/c/scarymysteries/collections   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT⁠ 👁 Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg⁠ 👁 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald⁠ 👁 Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠  🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. Every town has a dark side. You do if you got out of here?

I would probably do the same thing all over again. What do you do? Try to murder everyone on a planet earth. In the winter of 1974 and into 75, a man and a boy knocked on doors across Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Jersey. And they posed as salesmen and looked professional enough, and so they were let inside. And once they got there, well, things changed up pretty fast because these two had a very dark mission in mind.

And that man was Joseph Callinger. And the messed up part is that the boy he was with was his 12-year-old son, Michael. And what they did inside those houses over six weeks is the kind of thing that's almost impossible to fathom. As to how a father looks at his own kid and decides to bring him along, well, that answer goes a long way back to the day Joseph was born in a band. and within 24 hours. Because you cannot understand what he became without understanding everything that was done to him first.

Hey guys, it's Andrew, and thanks for tuning in to every town where today. We're checking out a story about a Philadelphia shoemaker. He was a father of seven and a man who listened to a floating head named Charlie and instructed him to do some of the most vile things imaginable. So, let's head to Pennsylvania now. This is the shoemaker, the crimes of Joseph Callenger. Joseph was born back on December 11, 1935, at Northern Liberty's Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

A Sagittarius, as it were, he came into the world as Joseph Lee Brenner III, though that name only lasted for exactly one day. His father abandoned his mother right out the gate the morning after he was born. His mother, Judith, tried to hold on, but she was alone. broke and living in 1930s Philadelphia with no support, so she couldn't really handle him. Eventually, she had no choice. In little baby Joseph, he was placed in foster care and then an orphanage. He was two years old, maybe younger. The records across the board don't fully agree exactly when it happened.

But either way, both parents abandoned him early on. In 1939, when Joseph was three years old, a couple named Stephen and Anna Callinger adopted him. They were Austrian immigrants living in Philly. And so from the outside, it looked like a second chance. Family taking him in, a door opening where one had closed. Though it was not a second chance, as it turns out. What happened inside that home over the years that followed is the kind of thing that is genuinely difficult to read in full, even decades later.

Stephen Callenger gave his six-year-old adopted son a hernia by striking him, and that is just one sentence from a very long list. And Joseph was made to kneel on jagged rocks as punishment. He was locked in closets and burned with irons, whipped with belts, starved, and subjected to acts of degradation, and no child should ever be asked to survive. And all that is because the calendars, well, they never wanted to adopt because they wanted a kid. Now, they ran a shoe repair business and wanted someone to work for them for free. So as you can see from the very first day of his life,

Joseph had been handed from one form of abandonment to another, but one punishment to the next, and one shoe repair after the next. There was no safe person he had ever met, no stable ground or moment of love. And yet, something inside him still refused to go completely dark. As a boy, Joseph wanted to be a playwright, that sort of lingering spark he held on to of something bigger and better than the life he had. He read everything he could get his hands on, and in ninth grade, he played Ebenezer Scrood in the local YWCA production of a Christmas Carol.

And there was something alive in him that all of that cruelty hadn't managed to fully extinguish, but sadly, even if he didn't know it yet, the damage was done. It ran deep, and it would take years to fully surface, but when it did, the monster that had been created came out in full force. At 15, he started dating a girl named Hilda Bergman. His adoptive parents absolutely hated it, took him away from his bench. And likely as a big F-U, he went on and married her, and they had two children together. And then the marriage collapsed because by then the violence he had absorbed his entire life

was beginning to express itself outward. He was abusive to Hilda, and she left. He remarried, though, in 1958 at just 22 years old. It seemed he was trying anything he could to start a family of his own, one that could replace all the years he had nobody. His second wife Elizabeth would have five children with him. In Callenger, a boy who had been beaten and burned from the age of three, try as he might, began doing the same things to his own kids.

Same punishments, same hierarchy of fear, the same house he had grown up in just with a different address and his name on the door. His life became chaos, and through the next decade, he cycled in and out of mental institutions. Amnesia, depression, and blackouts, he said, left him with no memory of what he had done. He was ultimately diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. His IQ tested at 82, which is below average, and state psychiatrists recommended he be supervised. As in their, they knew he was violent and needed someone to be there to keep him in check. He just couldn't help himself.

And in 1972, his children went to the police, and Callinger was arrested in charge with child abuse. While he was locked up, he begged his kids to take it back, and eventually they recanted every allegation. Then he was released. He went back home, back to the cobbler's bench, back to his family, and tried to maintain. And he did so for a bit, but the voices in his head, they never stopped talking. By 1974, something had seriously shifted in Joseph. The voices he described had become constant. A disembodied floating head, he called Charlie, followed him everywhere he went, holding conversations with him and giving him instructions.

God, as it were, was speaking to him, telling him things and giving him a mission. And in July of that year, he took out significant life insurance policies on his own sons. And what happened next is where this story crosses into territory that is genuinely difficult to process, even by the standards of everything that came before it. Callinger enlisted the help of his 12-year-old son, Michael. He told him about God telling him what he needed to do. And Michael, at such a young age, just had to trust his dad. Together, they lured a 10-year-old boy from the neighborhood named Jose Colazo to an abandoned building.

What they did to Jose and that abandoned factor. is not something that needs to be described in full. He was 10 years old. He was tortured, mutilated, and he was killed. And his death was initially ruled unsolved. And there was no apparent connection between the Callenger's and the boy, and so the case sat without answers. And then not even a month later, one of Callenger's own sons, Joseph Jr.,

the same boy who had gone to the police two years earlier and then recanted, was found dead in an abandoned building. And Callinger told police the boy had run away from home. The insurance company looked at the timing and looked at the policy and refused to pay out, and they suspected exactly what it looked like. And police investigated, but they couldn't conclusively prove homicide at the time, and so no charges were filed. But when investigators later pieced together the full picture of who Joseph Callinger was

and what he was capable of, while both boys were counted among his victims. Joseph Jr. and Jose Colazo would each be named in the three murders Callenger was ultimately charged with, but it doesn't mean he didn't have a whole lot more victims. It all started escalating in the fall of 74. Joseph had his son Michael under his thumb, and this kid, growing up in the way he did, had no reference point for normal. His father was telling him they had holy work to do, and so he did it. And the method was the same every time, and Callenger

and Michael would walk up to a front door, knock, and introduce themselves as salesman. A man and a boy, unremarkable and non-threatening, and that was their intention. Like vampires, though, once they got invited inside, everything changed. Over the following weeks, the Calengers hit four houses across Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Jersey, and they would get inside, round everyone up, and force them to strip. And then they bound them. with lamp cords, appliance cables, whatever was in the room. Once the victims were restrained and helpless,

Callinger would then go to work. He robbed them, he assaulted the women, he made victims perform acts on each other at gunpoint. He had a specific obsession with feet and shoes, demanding victims display their feet, handling their footwear, behavior that survivors described as deeply strange, even in the context of everything else that was

happening. And the violence, it was extreme, but it wasn't chaotic. It was controlled, almost ritualistic, as if Callenger was working through a checklist that only he could see, because in his mind, he was following orders. These four attacks were as follows. November 22nd, Lyndon Mould, New Jersey. First house was empty, so they moved on to a second. They broke in, tied a woman named Joan Cardi to her bed and assaulted her. December 3rd, Susquehanna Township, Pennsylvania. Five hostages bound at Knife Point during what was essentially a bridge party. And they stole $20,000 in cash in jewelry

and slashed one woman's chest with a knife. December 10th, Homeland, held a woman named Pamela Jass captive in her own home and forced her to perform axe on Callenger at Gumpoint. In January 6th, Dumont, New Jersey, same pattern. A woman named Mary Rudolph was assaulted. But no one was killed in any of these, and they were left to live another day. And through all of it, 12-year-old Michael was right there beside him.

And the attacks kept escalating, each one bolder than the last, and Callenger growing more confident or more compelled or maybe both. And then they came to Leonie. in New Jersey. And that's ultimately where it ended with a bang. January 8th, 1975. The calendars forced their way into the home of the Romaine family on Glenwood Avenue using the same approach that had worked every time before. Within minutes, they had the residence at gunpoint, bound, stripped, and on the floor. And then, throughout that afternoon, well, people kept arriving. It was friends, family, people stopping by just to visit on a Wednesday.

And each one who knocked on that door walked straight into it and was added to the group. And by mid-afternoon, eight people were bound and helpless in that house. The eighth to arrive was a 21-year-old nurse named Maria Fashing. She pulled up around 2.45 p.m., stopping by to visit her close friend, Randy Romaine. She had no idea what was waiting on the other side of that door. As she was grabbed the moment she got inside and bound with the others, and then Callinger gave her an order. He told her to perform an act of mutilation on one of the male hostages who was tied up and helpless on the floor in front of her.

Maria, she said no. And so Callinger slashed her throat in front of everyone. And she died on the floor of that house at 21 years old because she refused to play Callenger's twisted game. And while Joseph was killing Maria, something extraordinary was happening on the other side of the room. Edwina Romaine had quietly been working at her restraints the entire time. She got it loose enough to get herself out the door and into the street. She was hopping because her feet were still tied, screaming words like gun and basement into the void. A neighbor named Lucy Bavakwa saw her collapse on the sidewalk, and that's when she called the police.

By the time officers arrived, the calendars were already gone, though. The father and son had fled on a city bus together. Two people now among ordinary commuters on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. They dumped the knife along the route, and then the pistol. They also got rid of a bloody shirt and a trash can. And that would ultimately be their undoing. That bloody shirt was really the thread that unraveled everything because it had a small detail that told a big story.

detectives found a little laundry tag on it with the initials K-A-L. They tracked it to a dry cleaner in Philadelphia who recognized it immediately, while that shirt belonged to Joseph Callenger. And from there, the whole picture came together pretty fast. The eyewitness accounts placing a man and a boy at every scene, the pattern of attacks across three states, all in the vicinity of the Callenger home. And then, his background, of course, domestic violence, child abuse, a mental health record that went back years, and a son whose death had never been explained.

You murdered your own son? Yes, I did. Why did you do that? He was a sacrifice. I was to murder three million people of the planet Earth, and he was a sacrifice to see if I could murder one of my own. Joseph and Michael were arrested on January 17th, 19th. 1975, nine days after Leonia. Callenger was charged with three counts of murder, Maria Fashing, his son Joseph Jr., and Jose Colazo.

At trial, he pleaded insanity saying God had ordered him to kill. He described Charlie the floating head and claimed he was just a vessel following divine instructions. He had no power to refuse. These voices from God, these hallucinations, do you still experience them? Yes, I do. Often. Often. Well, the jury took less than an hour to find him, saying, and on October 14th of 1976, Joseph was sentenced to life in prison. Michael, 12 years old during the spree and 13 at the time of the arrest, was ruled to have acted under his father's total domination and sent to a reformatory. When he turned 21, he moved out of state and changed his name, whatever he carried.

from those months he carries it alone and in private. He's never spoken publicly about any of it. A woman named Flora Schreiber was the author behind Sybil, the groundbreaking book about a woman with multiple personalities that had become a cultural phenomenon. In 1976, she started interviewing Joseph in prison. What began as a journalistic project turned into a year's long relationship conducted through letters and phone calls

that reportedly cost her $1,200 a month. It completely consumed her, and nearly destroyed her financially, and it produced one of the most unsettling true crime books ever written. In 1983, she published The Shoemaker, The Anatomy of a Psychotic. It was a meticulous and deeply disturbing attempt to understand how a man becomes what Callenger became. She traced everything, the adoption, the abuse, the violence, the voices, the floating head, all of it, trying to answer the question that cases like this one always leave hanging in the air. How does this actually happen? Well, that answer, as always, is not simple and neat.

The childhood abuse was real and severe enough to cause lasting psychiatric damage in almost anyone. The paranoid schizophrenia diagnosis was almost certainly genuine rather than a legal strategy. And Charlie, the floating head, was in all likelihood, a real psychotic phenomenon and not something Callenger invented for the courtroom. But here's what makes Joseph harder to reduce to a simple story of mental illness. See, he planned. He selected targets carefully. He posed as a salesman and chose his moments. This was not a madman yelling in the streets.

A good listing year and tried to help people. He brought his son as a deliberate participant. He tried to collect on an individual. insurance policies he had taken out in advance. These are not the actions of a man who has lost all contact with reality, but rather the actions of a man whose reality has been so completely warped that it had become something almost entirely its own, with its own logic, its own rules, its own divine instruction manual. A Shriver maintained her correspondence with Callenger until her death in 1988, and the book was

later the subject of a son of Sam lawsuit, brought by one of the victim's families on the grounds that Callinger had received royalties from it. A judge initially awarded the family earnings, not just from Callinger, but from Schreiber and Simon and Schuster as well, leaving Schreiber nearly $100,000 in personal debt on top of everything the project had already cost her. A later appellate ruling scaled that back to Callinger's royalties only, but the damage to Shriver, had already been done, and she spent the last years of her life carrying the financial weight of it all. Callenger himself appeared on TV with Geraldo Rivera. Rivera asked him about his desire to kill. Do you think you'd murder me, Joe? Yes. That's gruesome, Joe. That's horrible. Yes, it is. And you

don't blame me if I say, I hope you never get out of this place. I hope I never do either. And Joseph spent the rest of his life behind bars, though he did not go quiet. In prison, he made multiple unaliving attempts. At one point, he even set himself on fire, but that was quickly extinguished. His behavior was so violent and unpredictable that he was pulled from General Pop and transferred to a mental hospital in Trenton, New Jersey. Then he transferred again to one in Philadelphia, and then back to state prison. And the system kept moving him around because nobody quite knew what to do with him.

And like I said, he was a unique case in no way. Nobody wanted to be responsible for what happened if they got it wrong. At one of the hospitals he was in, they actually gave him a job in the shoe repair shop. They may have thought it was a good idea to give him some semblance of what he had on the outside and the rehabilitation sense. But that also gave him access to a whole bunch of curved, sharp knives, the same ones that had been his weapon of choice his entire adult life. Thankfully, they took him off shoe duty permanently when they realized this. And finally on March 26th of 1996, well, Callenger suffered a seizure and he choked to death on his own vomit.

He was 60 years old when he died. The Callenger case changed very little at the systemic level. There were no sweeping law reforms in its wake or national investigations into how a man with his history had been allowed to remain in the community and retain custody of his children. That's mainly because, well, we never know exactly how a person is going to green. grow up, change or not change, persevere or withdraw. In Joseph's childhood, with every punishment, the message being sent to him was clear. You do not matter. You are nothing. And pain is what the world is made of.

A different people would have different responses to that. And Callenger's was one of agreement. He became a man who gave the world back exactly what it had given him. Joseph is now forever known in the press and in true crime history as the shoemaker. It's a neat little label that when you hear it, it's almost non-threatening. It puts a container around something that otherwise resists containment, and that's kind of interesting. Because what Callenger actually was, was something more complicated and more troubling than a label can hold. He was a man who had been broken open at the very beginning of his life, and he was never put back together correctly. So that's going to do it for today's episode of Everytown.

Hope you enjoyed it. If you did, man, you want to support us. Simple subscribe will do. Remember to come back next week for another episode filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.