Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén - "The Kensington Strangler" Antonio Rodriguez

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

In 2010 a serial killer terrorized an area of Philadelphia known as the Badlands. Police swabbed hundreds of men for DNA before a CODIS backlog revealed they’d had what they needed all along. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Due to the graphic nature of this episode, listener discretion is advised. This episode contains discussion of rape, substance abuse, murder, and sexual assault. Extreme caution is advised for listeners under 13. It was a mild November day. Maybe the last one the city of Philadelphia would see that year. But Mary didn't notice the sunlight pushing through the clouds. Mary walked the stroll, a stretch of Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood, popular with sex workers. Her feet stuck to the sidewalk as she avoided garbage.

The L train roared above and Mary shook. Mary was on edge. She'd felt this way for weeks. She dipped a hand into her coat pocket and pulled out a cigarette. Mary hoped a smoke would do the trick and calm her nerves. A few other women huddled nearby could probably help with a light. But as Mary reached the others, her colleague's worried faces only inflamed her anxiety. They asked if Mary had heard about the dead woman on Cumberland Street.

Mary shook her head no. Her thumbs snapped at the lighter while the others kept talking. One woman heard the body was left out in the open, half naked and exposed. Someone else heard the dead woman was strangled. Suddenly, Mary couldn't breathe. The cigarette slipped from her lips and the lighter fell to the ground. Mary scrambled to pull her coat up over the deep purple bruises that dotted her neck, she held back tears and reluctantly met the other women's eyes.

Mary knew exactly what happened to the woman on Cumberland Street. Hi, I'm Greg Paulson. This is Serial Killers, a Spotify original from Parcast. Every episode, we dive into the minds and madness of serial killers. Today, we're looking at Antonio Rodriguez, also known as the Kensington Strangler. I'm here with my co-host, Vanessa Richardson. Hi, everyone. You can find episodes of serial killers and all other Spotify originals from Parcast for free on Spotify. In the first part of this episode, we'll explore how Rodriguez's early life and run-ins with

the law escalated his taste for risk. Later, we'll examine Rodriguez's frenzied three months of attacks during the winter of 2010. We'll also consider how he exploited Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood to terrorize its vulnerable women. We've got all that and more coming up. Stay with us. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Whether you're hiring for a role or searching for a killer, the hunt can be exhausting.

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Mako-sheetha, or Badlands. Over 24,000 acres of jagged cliffs, unpredictable clay floors and extreme weather made the Badlands an notoriously dangerous place to travel. But just because a place is difficult to navigate, doesn't mean it's impossible. In fact, if you observe any destination long enough, obstacles become easier to avoid.

You may even discover ways to use its inherent danger to your advantage. The acreage might be smaller, but the area known as the badlands in Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood can be equally treacherous. These badlands cover a stretch of blocks surrounding the stroll on Kensington Avenue and serve as the nexus of Philadelphia's the nexus of Philadelphia's sex and drug trade. There are a population of unhoused residents.

Many who struggle with addiction and other mental illnesses live on the street or find shelter in abandoned row houses and factories. Women with few protections engage in sex work for cash or a drug they need. Few are willing to report crimes or to cooperate with the police. In this part of Kensington, risk, uncertainty, and fear are facts of life. Antonio Rodriguez knew this when he violently raped and murdered women there in 2010. He knew exactly how to exploit the harsh realities of the terrain. After all, he'd grown up only blocks away.

Antonio Rodriguez was born as Alfred in 1988 in Camden, New Jersey. He entered foster care as an infant and moved across the Delaware River to Philadelphia. The details of Rodriguez's early life are murky, but here's what we do now. Rodriguez and his twin brother were placed with a Puerto Rican family in Kensington. The Rodriguez family adopted both boys around age five and changed Alfred's name to Antonio. We don't know much about Rodriguez's home life as a child, but we do have a sense of his experience growing up in Kensington. Peers and neighbors described Rodriguez as a social and energetic kid growing up on a block where everyone knew everyone else. As a child, Rodriguez often played basketball and football at a local park or completed his

homework in a library after school. As a black child on a largely Puerto Rican block, Rodriguez's neighborhood nickname was simply black. Regardless of intention, this may have communicated to Rodriguez from a young age that he didn't entirely belong. And more than anything, Rodriguez wanted to fit in. Antonio was someone neighbors knew by sight, and whose peers remembered him from a pickup game or two. But it's unclear if he maintained close friendships in the area.

Antonio's visible yet distant presence on the block might be due to any number of economic, cultural, or innate factors. But knowing what we do about his future crimes does indicate what else might have been going on. Vanessa's going to take over on the psychology here and throughout the episode. As a reminder, she's not a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist, but we have done a lot of research for this show. Thanks, Greg. When Rodriguez later confessed to his crimes, he described them as a means of fulfilling his fantasies. For serial killers like Rodriguez, these fantasies may develop many years before they're finally acted upon. It's possible that his fantasies originated in childhood as a result of trauma, sexual or otherwise, either at home or in the community at large.

In an article titled Fantasy, Fusion, and Sexual Homicide in the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis, psychologist and professor Abby Stein notes that people who commit sexual homicide and who also rely on fantasy to fuel their desires often have a history of childhood trauma. According to Stein, after traumatic experiences, someone may develop fantasies through which a powerless child can generate a dream of sufficiency, which gives him a child. gives him or her a way of staying intact. If childhood trauma made Rodriguez feel powerless, it's possible he reacted to that feeling by dreaming up fantasies in which he was the one

dominating others. And if he found his social life difficult, retreating to these fantasies would provide a reliable way to manage his stress. This might also explain why Rodriguez seemed both present and distant from others. He was out in the neighborhood, but isolated in his mind at the same time. As he entered adolescence, Rodriguez grew into a slight and soft-spoken young man. He remained a constant presence in his neighborhood, albeit in a new location. Instead of playing sports, he spent his time near a corner on Mutter Street, only a block away from home.

That's where he began dealing drugs. According to former neighbor Matthew Padro, Rodriguez's parents found out that he was getting into drugs and they weren't happy about it. They didn't kick him out, but they tried to get tough with him. They didn't want drugs around the house. Despite his parents' attempted intervention, Rodriguez continued dealing. An adolescence spent breaking the law and subverting social norms isn't unusual for a future killer. In her paper, The Perfect Storm, mapping the life course trajectories of serial killers,

psychologist and criminologist Sasha Reed notes that, After learning to retreat from others and into the safety of fantasies, many men on the way to sexual serial murder graduate to a life of delinquency. With this theory in mind, it's possible that Rodriguez's drug dealing could have served the same emotional purpose that the serial killer's earlier fantasy world did. By breaking the law, he found that exhilarating sense of power and control from his fantasies out in the real world. We don't know if Rodriguez found any financial success as a drug dealer, but for a time he successfully broke the law without consequence.

But the thrill of evading the law ended when Rodriguez was 20 years old. In 2009, he was arrested twice on minor drug possession charges and put on probation. That meant he would have to regularly check in with the court or a probation officer. That same year, Rodriguez also found other companies. of trouble in the badlands. He was shot multiple times on a corner roughly six blocks from his childhood home. The shooting left a scar that extended from the base of his left ear down to the center of his throat. His injuries required a tracheotomy, a traumatic and often life-saving procedure. After the incident, Rodriguez was described as minimally cooperative in their investigation,

and the case remained unsolved. holding important information might have made Rodriguez feel powerful. For a moment, he had leverage over a system that otherwise controlled him via probation. But this momentary thrill couldn't erase his bleak reality. Facing a recovery of weeks or even months, Rodriguez was trapped inside. He relied on others for basic needs, and his body was physically controlled by pain. Antonio Rodriguez was helpless, trapped with this shameful knowledge during his recovery. recovery, Rodriguez's mental health likely took a turn for the worse. In a 2010 article titled Psychopathology and Resilience following traumatic injury, featured

in the Journal of Rehabilitation Psychology, researchers found that injuries perpetrated intentionally by another human being were consistently predictive of chronically elevated psychopathology. In other words, the intense psychological distress Rodriguez had already experienced would likely be amplified through his shooting and recovery. But the limits of Rodriguez perceived omnipotence didn't end there. Months after losing control over his own body, he would lose his freedom as well. On June 4, 2010, Rodriguez was arrested for cocaine and marijuana distribution. This time he was charged with a felony and spent the summer of 2010 in jail.

Later that summer, Rodriguez was released from jail. He pleaded guilty to the felonies felony drug charges in mid-October and was sentenced to a year of probation. Because he was now a felon, Rodriguez's DNA was collected to be stored in CODIS, a nationwide FBI felon database. So all in all, Rodriguez spent much of 2009 and 2010, feeling weak and powerless. Then, after he was released from jail, he lost contact with his family and fell into homelessness in Kensington's badlands. There, he hunted for a war. way to recapture that intoxicating feeling of power and freedom.

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After his release from jail in August of 2010, 21-year-old Antonio Rodriguez became homeless in Kensington's badlands. For nearly two years, a craving for dominance festered in Rodriguez's mind, and eventually he was ready to satisfy that desire in the real world. Though it isn't her real name, Mary was working the Kensington stroll on October 30th, 2010, when she was approached by a John who called himself Anthony. He asked Mary to go on a walking date.

Walking dates are considered risky on the stroll, so most sex workers in the area prefer to engage with a John in their car. It's easier to jump out of a parked car in a high-traffic area than to escape an isolated alley or building. But to Mary, Rodriguez seemed harmless. he was slight, no taller than 5'9, and extremely soft-spoken, so she agreed to the date. When Mary entered an isolated lot next to an abandoned building, the seemingly timid John attacked. He strangled Mary until she lost consciousness.

Manual strangulation is a very direct form of asserting control over another person's body. For many serial killers, this need for power and control is tied to an interoperable. internal feeling of loneliness. In her paper, the development of serial killers, a grounded theory study, clinical psychologist Meherr Sharma observes that loneliness, power, and control are often interrelated feelings for a serial killer. When a killer physically controls or dominates someone else, they're making that person a part of themselves and fulfilling a need for belongingness. Rodriguez's decision to control his victims via strangulation make his connect back to his childhood. If his reaction to childhood trauma was retreating to fantasies

in his mind, he would have also found it difficult to make meaningful connections with others in the real world. As an adult, Rodriguez perverted that desire to belong when he strangled Mary. But strangulation wasn't the only disturbing aspect of Rodriguez's attack. Mary survived. She woke up feeling immediate relief when she realized she was alone. But But moments later, a new fear took hold. Mary's pants and underwear had been removed. She couldn't remember anything after Rodriguez strangled her and worried he had sexually assaulted her while she was unconscious. Mary didn't report her assault to the police. Sex workers in Kensington report that their safety is often ignored by Philadelphia law enforcement.

The Philadelphia Police Department denies this allegation, arguing that they do take matters of sexual assault against sex workers seriously, but that those instances aren't reported because women don't want to be arrested for drug possession or prostitution. Unfortunately, when Mary didn't report her attack, it communicated a dangerous message to her attacker. It confirmed that women in the badlands

abide by the same no-snitch policy that Rodriguez had stuck to after he was shot. And if no one was going to report him, there was nothing to stop him from doing it again. 21-year-old Elaine Goldberg wanted to be home with her family, celebrating 30 hard-earned days of sobriety and her re-enrollment in nursing school. But Elaine was in Kensington, dragged there by some invisible force in her brain. She'd relapsed and needed a hit.

When Antonio approached Elaine, he must have seemed like the answer to her problems. Unfortunately, she was the answer to his. Elaine had no legal history of prostitution, so any guesses about her interaction with Rodriguez that night are just that, guesses. But she and all of the women Rodriguez killed did experience some form of addiction. It's possible that Rodriguez offered Elaine money or drugs in exchange for sex. In his eventual confession, Rodriguez said he was out looking for violent sex. He apparently found it with Elaine. In Rodriguez's version of events, both the sex and strangulation with Elaine were consensual.

When she stopped breathing, Rodriguez panicked and ran, but he still believed she was alive, like Mary. But the crime scene and autopsy told a different story. Elaine was discovered face down. She was naked below the waist, and her sweater had been pulled up over her bra. Police believed Rodriguez strangled and raped her from. behind, making it hard for her to fight back. The autopsy revealed that Elaine's body was raped a second time after she was dead. This suggests that Rodriguez's professed fantasy for rough sex, translated into strangulation

and rape. When we consider how this motive informed Rodriguez's abuse of Elaine's body after her death, it implies that he was a pseudo-necrophiliac, meaning that he didn't murder women specifically for the purpose of performing necrophilic acts with a corpse. In sexual attraction to corpses, a psychiatric review of necrophilia, authors Dr. Jonathan P. Rossman and Dr. Philip J. Resnick distinguish pseudonecrophilia from other forms of necrophilia. They explain that a pseudo-necrophiliac experiences a transient attraction to a corpse,

but corpses are not the object of his sexual fantasies. It's possible that Rodriguez engaged in these acts to be close to dead bodies. However, the fact that he also raped and manually strangled women before their death suggests that Rodriguez committed necrophilic acts as a form of sadistic opportunism rather than a primary goal. Whatever the truth about his motivations, one thing is clear. Rodriguez was engaging in reckless behavior that he didn't feel the need to cover up or hide. Perhaps after attacking Mary, he felt Elaine's murder would go unreported, even as he left her in an open lot. This time Rodriguez was wrong. The no-snitch policy of the badlands didn't seem to extend to a

bicyclist passing through the neighborhood on November 3rd. She spotted Elaine's body and called 911. Soon after, Elaine Goldberg received citywide press. Word of the murder also spread throughout Kensington, but the news didn't seem to dent Rodriguez's confidence. Just 10 days after Elaine's body was discovered, he met Nicole Piacentini, a 35-year-old mother of four who struggled with addiction. They ended up in an abandoned home on Cumberland Street. Nicole's body was found in the open doorway in a similar position to Elaine's, with one exception. Nicole's body was propped on her knees with her backside exposed. Police must have wondered whether the bodies were staged or posed.

As we've discussed in the past, staging occurs when somebody purposefully alters the crime scene prior to the arrival of police. Staging is often discordant and meant to confuse the homicide narrative. A killer might do it for a variety of reasons that include attempts to make serial murders seem unconnected. Another possibility was that Nicole's was posed. Posing a body refers to any action that would be considered a part of a killer's signature. In the most chilling examples of serial murder, opposed bodies, a composed body is a

communicative symbol, its purpose is to taunt law enforcement and the public with some dark message of grandiosity. The truth is, situations in which killers purposely stage or oppose their victims are rare. Rodriguez was not the rare killer with a message. The only meaning behind the way he left his victim's bodies is that they served the opportunistic sadism of his pseudo-necrophilia. After Rodriguez had committed rape and murder, he positioned a body in a way that made it easier for him to rape again. Then he left. Still, the way Rodriguez committed his crimes and the scenes he left behind did provide insight into Rodriguez as a killer. According to forensic psychologist Louis B. Schlesinger, Rodriguez's murders would be defined as compulsive.

This means that Rodriguez had a powerful internal drive to act out his violent, thoughts and fantasies. Within that category of compulsive sexual homicide are those killers who plan their crimes and those who commit them spontaneously. According to Schlesinger, compulsive murderers can be viewed as falling on a continuum. On one end are offenders who plan their crimes in exceptional detail and go undetected for long periods of time. On the other end are offenders who act out in an unplanned, impulsive, and spontaneous manner, and are typically apprehended after the first or second offense. Rodriguez falls somewhere near the center of this continuum. He wasn't a precise planner, thinking through consequences and outsmarting police.

At the same time, thinking of Rodriguez as completely disorganized and spontaneous isn't quite right either. There was certainly planning involved in his attacks. He sought out vulnerable victims and took them to isolated places he knew well. He also fantasized about his crimes before committing them. With all this in mind, Rodriguez's crime scenes paint a picture of a man with a mind organized enough to plan murders, but not necessarily to plan them well. Whether that was due to a lack of intelligence, mental disorganization, or a singular overwhelming desire for aggressive sexual gratification, we can't be sure. What we do know is that Rodriguez didn't think about the evidence he was leaving behind. DNA was collected from both Elaine,

and Nicole's bodies, and tests confirmed that the same person was responsible for their attacks. But when Philadelphia police ran the DNA through the FBI's felony database, the results were disappointing. They didn't find a match. They should have, but due to a backlog at the state level, the DNA sample Rodriguez had given authorities in late October wasn't uploaded by mid-November, and that delay would have terrible consequences. When news of Nicole's murder broke, police and the public alike worried there was a serial killer in Kensington. Nicole and Elaine had been attacked only weeks apart by the same person who would probably strike again. Everyone was desperate to find him quickly, but other than DNA connection, there were no leads.

That's when Mary came forward about her October attack, and she described the Kensington Strangler in enough detail for a sketch artist to work their magic. A sketch of the strangler was released to the public and hundreds of tips poured in. Detectives descended into Kensington, some going door-to-door, others embedded as sex workers. Residents were still reluctant to cooperate with police, but found ways to protect themselves. Sex workers and women who engaged in other high-risk activities related to drug use, kept track of one another. Perhaps Rodriguez tried to convince women to walk to isolated areas with him during this same. time and was turned down, or perhaps he considered the risk it posed and didn't proposition

women at all. Whatever his reason, Rodriguez seemed to realize that his old way of targeting vulnerable women was no longer viable. But if he couldn't convince women to walk somewhere with him, he resolved to find another way to get what he wanted. Up next, Rodriguez's aggression kicks into overdrive, and police finally find the clue they need. Now back to the story. By mid-November of 2010, the Kensington Strangler was the most wanted man in Philadelphia. A police sketch resembling Antonio Rodriguez was everywhere. Local women were vigilant, traveling in groups, and the Philadelphia police had formed a

task force dedicated entirely to his capture. Without a DNA match in the United States, the United States. the FBI's CODIS database, Philadelphia police went searching in the community. In roughly two months, police interviewed and swabbed 272 men in Kensington for DNA. Somehow Rodriguez avoided both the overwhelming police presence and being stopped for a DNA swab. But his desire to dominate women lingered, and he was growing desperate. Accepting that he couldn't lure women to an abandoned lot or home, he decided to force them there instead. On November 23rd, an anonymous woman reported to police that a man grabbed her and held a box cutter to her neck.

He then dragged her into a vacant lot, demanded she undo her pants and began choking her. The woman screamed as loud as she could and the attacker fled. A week and a half later, on December 6th, another anonymous woman reported that a man pulled her into an alleyway, choked her, punched her, and hit her with a brick. This woman ultimately escaped with the help of scissors she had stashed in her coat pocket. Despite the sudden nature of these attacks, both women were prepared and used any means possible to fight off Rodriguez. The readiness and ultimate escape of Antonio's targets deeply frustrated his desires. According to a study of sexually sadistic serial killers published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, the sexually sadistic serial killer demonstrates an enduring pattern.

of sexual arousal to images of suffering or humiliation. When Rodriguez was unable to create a situation in which the women he attacked were not visibly suffering or humiliated, it may have created those same painful feelings in himself. Additionally, these sudden attacks of opportunity also meant they were disorganized and largely unplanned. After his second failed attack, footage of Rodriguez leaving the scene was caught on surveillance camera. Soon enough, gritty footage of Rodriguez obscured by a hoodie was top news everywhere in Philadelphia. Both survivors affirmed that their attacker's appearance matched the police sketch, but the authorities were still floundering.

All the same, they continued requesting DNA samples from men in the area. Rodriguez must have realized that this new strategy would only lead to capture. He stopped attacking women on the street and reverted back to his old method. Rodriguez likely understood that women living with addiction might be desperate enough to walk alone with a strange man in Kensington. He just needed to find one. Casey Mahoney was a 27-year-old mother trying to get clean so she could regain custody of her son. She had come to Philadelphia for rehab, but was kicked out because she didn't have insurance. Casey was alone in Philadelphia, seemingly with no way to get home.

She ended up homeless in Kensington just trying to survive. Her body was found on December 15th, near train tracks, in the same position as Rodriguez's other two victims. But two important details distinguish this crime scene from the others. First, Casey's death had clearly come after an all-out fight. In addition to injuries on her neck, police found bruises on her legs and other defensive wounds on her body. With his other attacks, police believed that Rodriguez simultaneously raped and manually strangled each woman from behind.

He created a situation that prevented them from fighting him off. Perhaps Rodriguez lured Casey there with the promise of drugs rather than a walking date, which would have made it harder to initiate sex. We can't know for sure what happened that night, but it seems clear that his plan was derailed. The second difference in this crime scene concerned the DNA evidence. Similar to Rodriguez's other attacks, Casey was raped while she was alive, and then again after her death. This time, there was no semen left behind. For a moment, it seemed like Rodriguez was adapting.

But that moment didn't last long. Steps away from Casey's body, police found a used condom that matched DNA from the other attacks. Additionally, because of Casey's struggle with Rodriguez, his DNA was under her fingernails. Rodriguez later explained that he knew police were looking for DNA evidence, so he used the condom. It isn't clear why he then left the condom behind. Like we said earlier, he certainly put some thought into his attacks, but he wasn't a strategic mastermind.

After this murder, Rodriguez was afraid of capture, not only from police, but from the community at large. Two days after Casey's death, a group of at least 12 residents patrolled the streets, watching out for neighbors and searching for the Kensington Strangler, and the threat of vigilante justice in Kensington was real. Only a year before, locals severely beat a man who raped an 11-year-old girl

after they recognized him from a police photo. All of Kensington was after Rodriguez, which meant that the badlands were no longer a safe haven for his crimes. The familiar terrain Rodriguez had exploited was now weaponized, and it was coming for him. But after Casey Mahoney, Rodriguez stopped attacking women, and the Kensington Strangler case stalled. But one day in mid-January changed everything. That's when the state of Pennsylvania made it through the backlog of DNA data and added Rodriguez's to the database. After months of running DNA through CODIS on a weekly basis,

the Philadelphia Police Department came back with a hit. Antonio Rodriguez was the Kensington Strangler. Now they just needed to find him. Police prepared search warrants for three previous addresses, but non-produced Rodriguez. They spoke with his family, but they hadn't spoken to him for the better part of a year. No matter who the police interviewed, old police.

peers, neighbors, acquaintances, the answer was always the same. No one knew where Rodriguez had been recently or where he was living. The truth was, Rodriguez had been homeless for months. He slept in various abandoned buildings in the badlands, but none of his family or acquaintances knew exactly where. For detectives, it was yet another dead end. When police couldn't find Antonio Rodriguez, they worried he would strike again. So on genuinely, On January 17th, they released his name and photo to the public, calling him a strong person of interest in the case. Officers hoped that everyone's desire to catch the Kensington Strangler would supersede

their difficult relationship with Kensington residents. They waited for a tip. The anonymous call came roughly 20 minutes later. Rodriguez was in an abandoned house on Mudder Street, the same street on which he'd sold drugs as a teen. When detectives arrived, they saw Rodriguez through the front window. He was standing in the kitchen with several other people, completely unaware he was being watched. The others in the house let detectives inside, and as they entered, Rodriguez left out the back door.

But like with many of his plans, this one wasn't sound. When he made it outside, Rodriguez saw more police officers waiting in the back alley. There was no escape. Police arrested Rodriguez using a warrant issued back in December for a parole violation. Maybe the details of the warrant made him believe he could walk away relatively unscathed. His confusion with the warrant might also be why, when interviewed by police, Rodriguez initially denied the string of assaults and murders. But then they told Rodriguez about the DNA evidence identifying him as the Kensington Strangler.

He immediately changed course. He confessed to four murders, though DNA evidence only connected him to three. It's possible that the fourth murder he confessed to was that of Mary, the woman he attacked in October. Maybe he thought she was dead, but it's also possible he got away with other attacks we don't know about. During his confession, Rondriguez recounted his crimes and said that he didn't mean to kill anyone and knew he needed to stop. He even cried at times. This image of contrition conflicts with Rodriguez's history and behavior. We don't know the details, but it's been reported that Rodriguez had a history of mental illness.

From what we do know of his life, we can see that Rodriguez may have exhibited many traits of antisocial personality disorder. He showed repeated disrespect for social norms and the law, aggressive behavior, and a reckless disregard for the safety of himself and others. level of impulsivity and a failure to plan ahead also appear in each of his attacks. Still, Rodriguez cried and displayed regret in his confession, seemingly betraying the most well-known personality trait of a person with antisocial personality disorder, a lack of remorse. However, this visible remorse can also be explained by another diagnostic feature of the same

disordered personality, manipulation. Psychologist and Professor Nassau. Nancy McWilliams explains that antisocial people have not learned about feelings in the emotionally grounded way that most of us do. Instead, they acquire emotional speech as a kind of second language that is used to manipulate others rather than express inner states. Rodriguez's history of behavior may display an ability to use emotional speech as a second language. He would have learned this when attempting to blend into his childhood neighborhood and in navigating the drug trade on Mutter Street. He then weaponized a quiet voice and calm demeanor as he convinced various women in Kensington he wasn't a threat. However, his tactics didn't help him escape justice forever. In August

of 2012, Rodriguez was found guilty of first-degree murder in the cases of Elaine Goldberg, Nicole Piacentini, and Casey Mahoney. After a psychological evaluation, the details of which were never made public, Rodriguez and prosecutors agreed to a non-jury trial in order to avoid the death penalty. Rodriguez didn't speak at his sentencing. He could only watch helpless, as the judge ordered him to three consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. Then he was transferred to the Rockview State Correctional Institution. For three months during the winter of 2010, the Kensington Strangler dominated the badlands. He exploited its many dangers to make women there feel weak and powerless.

Now, a prison cell dominates him, and for the rest of his natural life, Antonio Rodriguez will be there alone, powerless, and weak. Thanks again for tuning into serial killers. We'll be back soon with a new episode. For more information on the Kensington Strangler murders, amongst the many sources we used, we found both the coverage at the Philadelphia Inquirer, And the Investigation Discovery Homicide City episode dedicated to the Kensington Strangler extremely helpful to our research.

You can find more episodes of Serial Killers and all other Spotify originals from Parcast for free on Spotify. We'll see you next time. Have a killer week. Serial Killers is a Spotify original from Parcast. Executive producers include Max and Ron Cutler, sound design by Michael Motion, with production assistance by Ron Shapiro, Trent Williamson, Carly Madden, and Aaron Larson. This episode of Serial Killers was written by Justine Ferrara, with writing assistance by Tony Goodman and Joel Callan, fact-checking by Cheyenne Lopez, and research by Brian Petrus

and Chelsea Wood. Serial Killers stars Greg Poulson and Vanessa Richardson. It's been said that love is a many-splendered thing. That is, until it's not. Season two of criminal couples discover true stories of couples who turned their love lives into a life of crime. Lies and deceit are just the beginning. Follow the Spotify original

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