Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén - Jeffrey Dahmer Special Pt. 1

Episode Date: December 23, 2019

He was one of the most infamous serial killers of the 20th century, murdering 17 young men between 1978 and 1991 through a variety of cruel and unusual methods. But how did Jeffrey Dahmer, one of the era's most monstrous killers, get his start?  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Details at Yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. Due to the graphic nature of this killer's crimes, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of murder, assault, sexual situations, and animal cruelty that some people may find offensive. We advise extreme caution for children under 13. I would like to say to Jeffrey Dahmer that he don't know the pain, the hurt, the loss, and the mental state that he had put our family in.

You took my 17-year-old son away from me. I'll never get a chance to tell him that I loved him. I'd have a chance to tell him that I loved him the last time I saw, which would be a year tomorrow. And I just wanted to know, you know, just why, you know, why would it be my son? I'm mad. This is how you act when you are out to go through this again.

Those were the families of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims, coming face to face with the killer during his sentencing hearing. Throughout the two-week televised trial, a parade of psychiatrists took the stand, trying to answer the question on everyone's tongues. Why? The experts described Dahmer with a litany of diagnoses, paraphilia, borderline personality, schizotipel, sexual sadist. The media pried into his family history, trying to pinpoint the trauma that turned a normal boy

into a cold-blooded killer. But is there any way to explain how Dahmer could drug, kill, mutilate, and cannibalize 17 young men? Or was he just born evil? Was he simply, as one victim's sister called him, the pure devil that walks our streets? I'm Greg Paulson. And I'm Vanessa Richardson. Every Monday, Vanessa and I co-host serial killers, a podcast original.

This week, Parcast is giving our listeners a holiday gift, a three-episode special on Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee Cannibal. Many of you have asked for this, and for good reason. Dahmer is one of the most infamous serial killers in recent history. Between 1978 and 1991, he killed 17 young men and turned his Milwaukee apartment into a shrine of human remains, all while remaining totally undetected by the police. At Parcast, we're grateful for you, our listeners. You allow us to do what we love. Let us know how we're doing.

Reach out on Facebook and Instagram at Parcast and Twitter at Parcast Network. And if you enjoyed today's episode, the best way to help us is to leave a five-star review wherever you're listening. It really does help. In this episode, we're looking at Dahmer's origins, the psychological and cultural, factors that led to his first murder, we'll try to understand how a child from a normal, loving Midwestern family became a compulsive killer.

Next, in part two, we'll tackle the question of how he kept killing for over a decade without getting caught. We'll explore his many failed attempts to stop himself and the red flags that went ignored by his family, psychiatrists, neighbors, and the Milwaukee police. In part three, we'll discuss the downward spiral that finally led to Dahmer's arrest. We'll also look at his place in the cultural consciousness and why he became such a source of fascination for true crime fans like us. Like all serial killers, Jeffrey Dahmer was at least partially a product of his environment. But unlike many of those other killers, his childhood was relatively normal and free of trauma.

He was born into a middle-class Midwestern family with two parents who loved him. Despite a few unproven rumors that swirled after his arrest, Dahmer maintains that he was never abused in any way. The factors that shaped this man into a monster were wider than his own individual circumstances. They were rooted in racism, homophobia, police misconduct, and a host of other social issues that can be difficult to confront. So in searching for the root of Dahmer's behavior, society was forced into a deeply uncomfortable self-reflection. Dahmer's crimes displayed the failings of the culture he lived in, and how dangerous those failings can be if left unaddressed.

But to understand where all those cultural factors come into play, we have to start at the very beginning. Jeffrey Dahmer's childhood was not perfect, but it was perfectly. ordinary. After his birth in May 1960, his mother, Joyce, recorded all his milestones in a baby scrapbook. For his first few years, he was a healthy, happy toddler. Joyce, on the other hand, had a hard time coping as a new mother. She had a history of anxiety and depression, and the stress of raising a child didn't help. She and Jeff's father, Lionel, argued incessantly from the moment the baby was born. Lionel, a chemist, was working toward his PhD.

He spent nearly all of his time at the lab to avoid dealing with Joyce's unstable moods. So Jeff was mostly left alone with his mother, who was sometimes so depressed she couldn't even get out of bed. To make matters worse, the Dahmer family was constantly uprooted due to Lionel's research. Not long after Jeff was born, the family moved from Milwaukee to Ames, Iowa. Then to Doyle's Town, Ohio. Then again, to the rural Bath Township, all in the span of eight years. The frequent moves did not help him socially. As early as first grade, his teacher noted that he was withdrawn, uncommunicative, and seemed deeply unhappy.

He never engaged in conversation with the other children, and during recess, he just walked around the playground by himself. In fact, Lionel Dahmer had already noticed these problems. Jeff often sat motionless for long periods of time and spoke without any facial expression. Even as a toddler, he didn't enjoy playing games with others. Instead, he preferred games whose rules were highly defined and non-confrontational, games full of repetitious actions, like hide-and-seek. Lionel didn't think much of it. He assumed Jeff was just shy, and he would grow out of it eventually.

However, these behaviors might have been early signs of a developmental or personality disorder. Vanessa is going to take over on the psychology here and throughout the episode. Please note, Vanessa is not a licensed psychiatrist or psychologist, but she has done a lot of research for this show. Thanks, Greg. As an adult, Dahmer was diagnosed with a combination of schizoid, schizotipel, and antisocial personality disorders. The most prominent of these was schizoid.

According to the DSM-5, this disorder is marked by a pattern of detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of emotional expression. Someone with schizoid personality disorder will be uninterested in forming close relationships, prefer spending time by themselves, and have difficulty expressing their emotions either verbally or through body language.

Dahmer's flat expression and unwillingness to socialize fit these criteria perfectly. But there's also another possibility worth mentioning. Schizoid personality disorder is incredibly difficult to distinguish from autism spectrum disorder, formerly known as Asperger's syndrome. In fact, adults with autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, are often misdiagnosed with personality disorders because the symptoms can appear nearly identical. According to psychiatrist J. Arturo Silva, a diagnosis of ASD would fit Dahmer

because his social problems were rooted in an inability to participate in the interests of others or reciprocate social behavior. People with ASD tend to have very intense and restricted interests, which often involve mechanical tasks, rigid rules and structures, and repetitive actions. Just like the kind of games the young Dahmer preferred.

In many cases, the intense interests of people with ASD can be normal mundane hobbies like stamp collecting or computer programming. For Dahmer, it was collecting bones. Throughout his childhood, Jeff's father tried to get him interested in everything from playing tennis to joining the Boy Scouts. But after briefly humoring Lionel's requests, Jeff always abandoned these hobbies. The only thing he seemed interested in was dissecting dead animals.

Lionel, who of course was a chemist, didn't see anything wrong with this. He took it as a sign that Jeff was interested in science. One evening during dinner, 10-year-old Jeff asked his father, what would happen if they took the chicken bones and put them in bleach? Lionel jumped on this as an opportunity to connect with his son. After dinner, he collected the scraps and showed Jeff how to put them in a bleach solution to separate the bones from the flesh. It was a lesson Jeff would keep with him for the rest of his life. Happy moments like this were increasingly rare in the Dahmer household.

Joyce was taking massive doses of sedatives to cope with her anxiety. Often when Jeff came home from school in the afternoons, she would still be asleep in bed. When she was awake, she and Lionel were having screaming matches, throwing objects at each other, and musing about a divorce. The tension reached a breaking point in July 1970, when Joyce was hospitalized in a mental ward for a month. Jeff recalled, It made me feel on edge, unsure of the solidity of the family.

I decided early on that I wasn't ever going to get married, because I never wanted to go through anything like that. Jeff blamed himself for his mother's emotional problems. He knew that she'd been depressed ever since he was born, so he concluded that his birth was the cause of her distress. Family mediator Kathleen O'Connell Corcoran says that because so much marital conflict may be related to the stress of parenting, children often feel that somehow their behavior contributed to it.

So instead of sharing his troubles with his family, and causing even more tension, he retreated further into his own private world. He invented a solitary game called Infinity Land. It involved marching little stick figurines around a black hole, represented by a tightly drawn spiral. If the figures touched each other, they would be swallowed up by the black hole and obliterated. We should be careful not to draw too many conclusions

from a 10-year-old's imaginary game, but in hindsight, the implications, here seem obvious. In Infinity Land, any kind of closeness or contact would result in total destruction. As a child, Jeff's solution to this feeling was to keep himself as far away from others as possible. But human interaction can't be avoided forever. And as he entered his teenage years, that mutual destruction started to seem inevitable. Up next, we'll look at Dahmer's ill-futable. faded high school years and his first taste of violence. Excema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with ebbglis, a once-monthly treatment

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He rolled into school wearing army fatigues and generally kept to himself, except in moments of bizarre class clownery, bleeding like a goat during class, pretending to have epileptic seizures, the kind of stupid pranks as classmates referred to as doing a domer. As we mentioned earlier, Dahmer's strange behavior could be a sign of any of the several personality disorders he was diagnosed with, or possibly autism spectrum disorder. In any case, he clearly had no regard for social conventions. It certainly didn't help that he started drinking at age 14, and before long, he was downing a pint of liquor a day. He kept a bottle of gin in his locker and filled up a styrofoam cup to sip on during class.

On the rare occasion when anyone asked what he was drinking, he simply replied, my medicine. While most teenagers would think of alcohol as a social lubricant, for Dahmer, it was a way to disconnect even further from the world around him. Biographer Brian Masters wrote that by this point, he had given up on the idea of contact and already secreted himself from the world. The new character he now displayed to the world, that of the unprecedented, predictable prankster was an invention manufactured to conceal and submerge his real self beyond detection. And concealing his real self was an urgent matter. At around the same time he started drinking, Dahmer also realized he was gay. Being gay was not really an option in 1970s, Ohio. In Dahmer's words, it was something that was to be kept hush-hush, not talked about, not even thought about.

So he kept it secret, constructing yet another barrier between himself and the rest of the world. This was a rational choice to avoid discrimination and violence, but it didn't mean he was free from psychological stress. According to Ilan H. Meyer and Laura Dean at the Columbia School of Public Health, queer individuals can be affected by internalized homophobia, the direction of negative social attitudes toward the self, leading to internal conflicts and poor self-regard. Hiding one's sexuality can protect against discrimination, but those negative social attitudes can become self-generating

and persist even when individuals are not experiencing direct external devaluation. In fact, psychologist Joanne de Placido notes that self-concealment is related to increased physical and psychological symptoms of stress, and negative attitudes and feelings towards same-sex attraction in oneself have been linked to depression, alcoholism, and other substance abuse. For the 14-year-old Jeff Dahmer, it also led him deeper into his favorite hobby, dissecting dead animals. He started collecting roadkill and taking the animals back to the shed behind the family house, where he would cut them open and separate the bones from the flesh,

just like his father had shown him. Notably, Dahmer never killed animals himself or hurt them while they were alive. He was apparently driven by curiosity, not cruelty. In his own words, I wanted to see what the insides looked like, so I cut it open. If all had gone well, Dahmer would have made an excellent taxidermist, but before long, he was wondering what it would be like to cut open a person. Now that he had his daydreams about dissecting a dead man, man on one hand, and his daydreams about sleeping with a living man on the other. It was only a

matter of time before the wires got crossed. Eventually, dead bodies started to crop up in his sexual fantasies. These urges would be classified as necrophilia, a sexual interest in deceased bodies or body parts. What causes necrophilia isn't exactly known, but it's often related to a need for control. Psychiatrist Jonathan P. Rossman, and Philip J. Resnick found that among the 122 cases they studied, the most common motive was to possess an unresisting and unrejecting partner. This makes sense for Dahmer, whose home life was spiraling out of control and whose social life was nearly non-existent.

According to psychiatrists Willem H.J. Martins and George B. Palermo, Dahmer's social isolation led to extreme loneliness. along with sentiments of failure, shame, low self-esteem, feelings of rejection, and of not being good enough for others. Because he felt unwanted and incapable of relating to others, he fantasized about situations where he wouldn't have to be wanted and where he would have complete control over his partner. At age 16 in 1976, Domer found the perfect target for these violent fantasies.

There was a jogger who ran past his house every day like clockwork. Dahmer didn't have any designs on killing or mutilating the jogger. All he wanted to do was lie next to him and cuddle, really. But the only foreseeable way that would happen is if he knocked the man unconscious. Once that idea had taken root, it blossomed into a fully-fledged fantasy. How would he do it? it. Hit the jogger over the head, drag him into the woods, lie there with him until he woke up. Only minimal harm done. Of course, Dahmer wasn't actually going to do this. Every time he thought

about putting his plan into action, he chickened out. But he had an eye for patterns, and he couldn't ignore that the jogger kept running by day after day. Until, after a few weeks, just a little. finally worked up the nerve. By this point, Dahmer's strategy was already planned out to the detail. Right before the jogger was due to make his rounds, he concealed himself behind the bushes with a baseball bat and waited. And waited. But the jogger never showed.

For the first time in weeks, he had taken a rest day. Dahmer was so thrown off by the change in routine, he just went to. home. His first attempt at a violent assault had been thwarted, but it was only a matter of time until things boiled over. During his final years of high school, his life spiraled even further out of control. Lionel and Joyce finally pulled the trigger on a divorce in 1978, and Lionel moved out while their lawyers fought over who would keep the house. Jeff had turned 18 by this point, but the parents battled viciously for custody of his 12-year-old brother, David. Jeff had never been especially tied to the world around him,

but during the divorce proceedings, he disconnected entirely. When his parents were fighting, he went out into the backyard and hit sticks against the trees until they broke. At school, he was usually too drunk to stay coherent, let alone finish his work, and none of the teachers even seemed to care. There were still occasional flashes of his old prankster self. During a class trip to Washington, D.C., he called the office of Vice President Walter Mondale and somehow arranged a private tour of the White House for himself and a few of his friends. He even went to prom, although he ditched his date, disappeared for an hour, and came back drunk,

explaining that he went to McDonald's to get a cheeseburger. But for the most part, during a senior evening, Jeff's classmates described him as hollow and removed. When he wasn't around, they gossiped about how he'd eventually snap and either kill himself or kill someone else. They weren't wrong. According to Martens and Palermo, loneliness is a significant trigger for violent behavior,

and Dahmer was showing most of the warning signs, depression, social withdrawal, a chaotic family life, and substance abuse. If those signs are recognized early, children and adolescents can be helped before they grow into violent adults. Unfortunately, Dahmer's parents and teachers were sorely unfit for the task. A few weeks before graduation, in the spring of 1978, a teacher, Mr. Smesko, was walking out to his car after school. He saw Jeff Dahmer sitting alone on the grass, working his way through a 12-pack of beer. Three cans were already empty, but he did not look like he was having a good time. Mr. Semesco told Jeff, four years too late, that he shouldn't be bringing alcohol to school.

He'd have to report it to the guidance counselor. Jeff responded he was having a lot of problems, and he'd already told the guidance counselor about it. Mr. Semesco reasonably assumed the problems were related to Jeff's parents' divorce, so he didn't bother to pry any further. He left and let Jeff continue his solitary picnic. It seems inconceivable that this kind of behavior could go ignored for so long. Multiple teachers had seen Jeff drinking liquor during class, which was not only dangerous, but illegal.

Even the school librarian had voiced concerns about Jeff's lack of social adhesion, and yet nothing was done. If the school counselor had bothered to intervene, Dahmer could have been helped before he became a danger to himself and others. According to the American Counseling Association, while counselors typically aren't licensed psychiatrists, they can teach coping skills to help students avoid internalizing their negative emotions

before their inner turmoil turns into aggression. A study by the University of Chicago found that counseling programs that focused on self-regulation, impulse control and taking personal responsibility for behavior significantly helped to reduce violence within schools. But in the 1970s in rural Ohio, there was a lot less awareness about mental health and its connection to violence.

One of Dahmer's classmates compared their town to the movie The Steppford Wives. They were pretending that everything was wonderful and life was perfect. But that wasn't the truth of what was going on beneath the facade. problems like drug abuse and suicide were commonplace, but when totally ignored. As one example, the school faculty addressed the problem of students smoking cigarettes and marijuana during class by creating a designated smoking area outside. And despite the gossip about when Dahmer would finally snap, no one really believed he was dangerous. One high school friend later recalled he was obviously pretty damaged from the get-go.

There was strange behavior going on, but he was a smart guy, and he just made us laugh. He continued on. It didn't surprise me that he became a serial killer, but he wasn't my first choice from our class. When I heard the news that a classmate was accused of being a serial killer, Dahmer was my second guess. We can only hope that the first pick got the help that Dahmer didn't. We tend to talk about students like Dahmer slipping through the cracks, As long as they keep to themselves and don't cause any serious trouble, teachers will turn a blind eye to their behavior problems, mental health, or learning disabilities.

But in this case, there weren't really any cracks to slip through. There was no system in place at all to handle troublesome behavior before it got out of hand. When the school year ended in May of 1978, Jeff barely slid by and graduated. Over the summer, while Lionel and Joyce were finalizing their divorce, Joyce took young David and moved to Wisconsin. Lionel was still living on his own at a motel about 10 miles away, which meant Jeff had the house to himself. Now, literally abandoned by his entire family,

Dahmer's sense of rejection kicked into overdrive. He later recalled, it was at this time that he remembers having strong, desires of not wanting to have people leave him, and he began hating to sleep alone at night. With nothing else to occupy his time, Jeff's mind was haunted by fantasies about that jogger he'd come so close to attacking. His desire for closeness with another person was growing stronger until it consumed almost every moment of his day. And with those innocent thoughts, the darker urges to kill and dismember were never far behind.

He tried to push the violent thoughts down by drinking. This became a self-perpetuating cycle. The more he drank, the deeper he was drawn into his inner world. And there was no one around to pull him out. At this point, he'd lost nearly all hope for a sexual outlet that didn't involve hurting, killing, or otherwise incapacitating people. But he thought that if he somehow stumbled upon a willing partner, say a handsome hitchhiker from out of town,

he could handle that without any violence. He could just pick the hitchhiker up, invite him back to his place for a few beers, and there were a few different ways things could go from there. But at least a few of them didn't end with any casualties. This was a pretty tame fantasy compared to the rest. and it would have been fairly realistic if there were more gay hitchhikers in rural Ohio.

But as it stood, Dahmer resigned himself to the fact that his dreams would never become reality. For the first few weeks after graduation, Jeff fell into a steady and solitary routine, waking up, drinking himself into a stupor, and falling asleep. One afternoon, in the middle of June, he decided to liven things up

by driving to a theater to see a movie. And as he was driving home at about five o'clock that evening, he saw a lone figure in the evening sun, walking along the side of the road, a young hitchhiker shirtless in the summer heat. Jeff couldn't believe it. Dreams do come true. Coming up, Jeffrey Dahmer's fantasy turns into a nightmare.

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now streaming only on Disney Plus. Now back to the story. 19-year-old Stephen Mark Hicks was on his way to Chippewa Lake, Ohio, for a rock concert. It was 30 miles west from his home in Coventry Township, too far to walk, but not too far to hitchhike. By 5 p.m., he had made it to Bath Township, which was 16 miles north, not west, and finding another ride in the right direction was proving difficult. He stuck out his thumb as another car passed. Miraculously, it stopped and circled back. The driver was a young man about his age. he told Steve to hop in.

He didn't have anywhere to be, so he could drive him all the way to Chippewa Lake. Actually, they had some time before the concert. Why didn't they go back to his house and have some beers before getting back on the road? His parents were out of town, and he had the place to himself. Stephen accepted.

The driver introduced himself as Jeff Dahmer. At the Dahmer house, Jeff and Stephen grabbed a few beers from the fridge, which was otherwise empty, and took them up to Jeff's bedroom. As it turned out, the two of them had both graduated from high school earlier that month. Stephen had just turned 19. He liked rock music, and he was on his way to meet up with his girlfriend. Just like that, Dahmer's hopes came crashing down. This was the perfect chance encounter he'd been dreaming of

for months. A good-looking hitchhiker from the next town over, right around his age, they get along well. They're alone together, having a good time, and it would only end in rejection. Stephen had his girlfriend, and Jeff would be alone forever. After a couple of hours, the sky was getting dark, and Stephen said he'd better get back on the road. That was when Jeff snapped. He couldn't let him leave. He couldn't bear another rejection. So he grabbed a barbell and hit Stephen in the back of the head.

Stephen was still conscious. He started fighting back, and Jeff panicked. He knocked Stephen over the head again, then pressed the barbell against his throat, strangling him until he stopped breathing. Two hours ago, Jeff thought he'd met the love of his life. Now, he was standing over a dead body in his parents' house. This was a disaster.

But maybe things weren't all bad. At least Stephen didn't leave. He was still here. And he wasn't going anywhere. Jeff hadn't planned to kill Stephen. He claimed that something just came over him. But even if the murder wasn't totally, premeditated, it was alarmingly similar to the fantasies he'd been hiding for years.

And now that he'd done it, he was going to make the most of the situation. Once his panic subsided, Jeff laid down next to Stephen's body and ran a hand over his lifeless chest. After a while, he stood up and masturbated onto the corpse. When he was done, he had to confront reality. He'd killed him at him. There was no way to undo it now. All he could do was dispose of the evidence. As soon as it was dark, he dragged Stephen's body outside and stashed it in the crawl space beneath the house

until he could figure out what to do with it. He didn't sleep at all, racked with panic over what he'd done. He later recalled, I was out of my mind with fear that night. I didn't know what to do. I had gone to son. such an extreme.

The next morning, he went down into the crawl space with a knife. He hunched over and set to work, dismembering Stephen Hicks exactly as he'd done to dozens of animals before this. First, the arms and legs. Then the head. Then he slid open the torso and looked inside. When everything was cut up into manageable pieces, the body parts were tossed into triple-lined garbage bags. Jeff took the clothes and ID out into the yard and burned them in a trash barrel,

so they'd never be found. Later that night, he would dump the body in the ravine about 10 miles away. No one would see him. And even if the body was found, they'd never suspect him, Jeff Dahmer, the quiet kid on the other side of town. After a few beers for strength, he loaded the garbage bags into his car at about 3 a.m. He'd only made it a few miles down the empty rural road when he saw flashing lights in the rearview mirror. Police. Jeff pulled over.

The cop told him he was swerving onto the wrong side of the road. Had he been drinking? Soon another police car was pulling up on the shoulder. The officer had called for backup. Jeff tried to remain calm, as if there wasn't a dismembered body in the back seat. Luckily, he was lucid and. enough to ace the sobriety test. He got out of the car, walked the line, put his finger on his

nose, and the cops were satisfied. He was free to go. Then one of the officers sniffed the air and asked, what's that smell? He shined his flashlight into the back seat and the beam reflected off the black plastic bags. The officer asked what was in the trash bags. In a stroke of inspiration, Jeff replied, trash. He explained that his parents were going through a rough divorce, and their screaming was keeping him awake. He needed to get out of the house, and his mom asked him to take the trash to the dump earlier that afternoon.

So he figured he might as well use that as an excuse to take a drive. It was an impressive story, perfectly designed to paint himself as harmless and sympathetic. The strategy worked, and it would continue to keep him out of prison. for 13 years. The cop told him the dump was closed at that hour, so he'd better go back home. He wrote Jeff a ticket, and they were on their way. If the police had bothered to look in the bags, the story of Jeffrey Dahmer would have ended there. Instead, this same failure to intervene would repeat itself over and over in the coming years

years as the body count rose from one to two to a dozen and more. Dahmer recalled that night in Ohio, that one impulsive night, nothing's been normal since then. It taints your whole life. After it happened, I thought that I'd just try to live as normally as possible and bury it. But things like that don't stay buried. Once it happens the first time, it just seemed like it had control of my life from there on in. In our next episode, we'll look at Dahmer's desperate attempts to keep himself from killing again, and the moment when he finally gave in.

From there, his violence spiraled out of control, while police, social workers, family, and the community at large ignored all the clues that there was a serial killer on the loose. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, check out our podcast, serial killers, which you can listen to for free on Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

To stream serial killers for free on Spotify, just open the app and type serial killers in the search bar. And don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Parcast and Twitter at Parcast Network. We'll see you next time. Dahmer is a lot of. the special Parcast Studios original episode created by Max Cutler. It is executive produced by Max Cutler, sound design by Russell Nash,

with production assistants by Ron Shapiro, Carly Madden, Freddie Beckley, and Joel Stein. This episode was written by Kate Gallagher, with writing assistants by Drew Cole, and stars Greg Polson and Vanessa Richardson. Spring isn't just about clearing clutter, it's about changing the air. Shura makes it easy to refresh your space, mindset and how your home feels with transportive fragrances inspired by a terrace in Santorini,

a French lavender field, and more. Get started with a free Purea plus diffuser when you subscribe to two cents monthly for a year. Shop now at pura.com. Do you want to hear something spooky? Some monster, it reminded me of Bigfoot. Monsters Among Us is a weekly podcast featuring true stories of the paranormal. One of the boys started to exhibit demonic possession. Stories straight from the witnesses mouths themselves. Something very snake light lifted its head out of the water. Hosted by me, your guide, Derek Hayes. Somehow I lost eight whole hours.

Listen now on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.