Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén - Working Late Pt. 4: Business Leaders & Entrepreneurs
Episode Date: September 16, 2021The number of psychopaths who hold positions with "CEO" in the title would alarm you… even if it wouldn't surprise you. Today, we're turning our attention to the business world, where a termination ...doesn't just mean you're losing your job… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Due to the graphic nature of these killers' crimes, listener discretion is advised.
This episode includes discussions of murder, suicide, grooming, and sexual abuse involving children.
We advise extreme caution for listeners under 13.
Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.
Coming from the 1987 film Wall Street, this statement is as controversial as it is iconic,
a mantra of entrepreneurs and business leaders the world over.
Greed may be a deadly sin to some, but in the world of business, it's a virtue.
If you hear your boss quote Michael Douglas' character from this film on your first day at work,
you may find yourself wondering, am I too nice for the world of business?
Or does this business put the bottom line over the well-being of its own employees?
Almost everyone has worked for a horrible boss one way or another.
But what if the human cost of doing business is more than just losing your job?
What if, by going to work, you put your very life at risk?
The serial killers we discussed today may not be suave Hollywood-ready tycoons,
but they all achieved, or attempted to achieve, the American dream of starting their own company.
Because rightly or wrongly, they all seem to believe that being a CEO was a surefire way to get away with murder.
Hi, I'm Greg Poulson. This is Serial Killers, a Spotify original from Parcast.
Every episode, we dive into the minds and madness of serial killers.
Today is part four of Working Late, our six-part special on some of the most popular jobs held by serial killers.
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.
Typically, we dive into the minds and madness of a single killer.
and track their progression from childhood into violent adulthood.
But this series is a little different.
We're diving deep into the psychology behind six vocations that serial killers are drawn to
and looking at chilling examples of this psychology in action.
Today we're going to discuss the link between serial killers and business leaders.
We'll examine the mindset of the entrepreneur and why it's so easy to mistake a troubled person
for a visionary business leader.
Then we'll look into a number of different murderers who try to
their hand at business.
We often think of serial killers as those who only want to destroy.
Today, we'll see what happens when they attempt to build something of their own.
We've got all that and more coming up. Stay with us.
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So far in this series, we've told the stories of murderous police officers,
truck drivers, and laborers, men who use their occupations to find a safe space for their
impulses to flourish.
But what about those men and women who create their own opportunities for violence,
who display a truly entrepreneurial spirit when it comes to taking a life?
According to the Business Bible, Forbes, to be a successful start.
Startup manager, you must be a visionary, a risk-taker, willing to make sacrifices for your dream.
You must be persistent, know how to sell your products and services, and of course, value
your employees.
Many of these traits could also be applied to the most prolific murderers we've talked about
on this show.
Serial killers are often motivated by power over others.
Well, there's no power quite like economic power.
We all have an image in our head when we think of the corporate killer.
Odds are you're likely to picture something like American Psychos Patrick Bateman.
It's a very modern image, tied to the iconography of the Stock Exchange and designer suits.
But what if we told you that the murderous entrepreneur predates the American dream itself?
Our first example of a serial killer business person comes from pre-French Revolution Paris,
a woman named Catherine Dieh.
The years, 1660 to 1680.
The business, fortune-telling and chemistry.
DA entered the business world in the way most women did in the 17th century by marrying
a merchant.
Her husband, Antoine Maudoisin, owned a jewelry store and was, by all accounts, an exceptionally
poor businessman.
It seemed that he and Katrina were doomed to hardship until she took it upon herself to pull
her family out of poverty.
When the jewelry store failed, Catherine started doing
palm readings out of their home for a small fee.
This may seem unremarkable by today's standards,
but in 17th century France, superstition was in high demand.
We don't know what her profits were,
but she soon supplemented her burgeoning business
by selling chemicals and performing various illicit services.
It's said that she even performed abortions for women who were willing to pay.
Cautrin displayed many qualities that would define a modern entrepreneur.
She relentlessly pursued business opportunities,
that others didn't see, and she built a network of contacts both in the French aristocracy
and among fellow fortune tellers. However, in this case, networking was a double-edged sword.
She and a number of other merchants dabbled in more sinister wares.
Catherine became well known for supplying what was known as inheritance powders.
These were, to put it bluntly, poisons. Inheritance, of course, alluding to a motive for murder
that still hasn't gone out of style 400 years later.
There's no way of knowing how many victims Katrina claimed
through her business of poison selling,
but some estimates run as high as 2,000.
In fact, she was so successful that she might never have been caught at all,
if not for her clientele deciding to target the nobility.
In the late 1670s, she found herself at the center of
the affair of the poisons,
a conspiracy to assassinate key members of the French aristocracy,
A number of perceived culprits were sentenced to death, including Catherine, who was burned at the stake for witchcraft and poisoning.
Macab overtones aside, what Catherine Dia did on the streets of Paris in the 1600s is quite similar to what someone in Silicon Valley might do today.
She saw business opportunity and exploited it.
And she was far from the only one.
Earlier this year, we investigated a pair of business-minded killers.
In the 19th century, William Burke and William Hare saw a grisly opportunity for a business venture and grabbed it with both hands.
A local doctor, Robert Knox, required fresh corpses for his lectures on anatomy.
For an average of nine pounds a body, Burke and Hare supplied him with the necessary bodies.
Most of them, victims they killed themselves.
It was simple, deadly, supply and demand.
But we're not going to spend all day talking to.
about pre-second Industrial Revolution killers, are we?
A modern society couldn't enable a business like body sellers or street poisteners.
That's where we get into some interesting territory, because as the business world became more complex,
the serial killers who flourished there adapted with the times.
When we look at more modern murdering business leaders, we see a stark divide in motives.
This divide is between those who kill for profit and those who use their businesses as a
cover for their real passion. There's a unique thread connecting the two, but in order to find it,
we have to look at some monsters who might be hiding in plain sight. Before we continue with the
psychology for this episode, please keep in mind that neither Vanessa nor I are licensed psychologists
or psychiatrists, but we've done a lot of research for this show. Thanks, Greg. Another thing we should
note is that we're going to be using the word psychopath in this episode. It's a controversial term
among psychology professionals, but is necessary for our discussions today.
Now, of course, not all psychopaths are serial killers, and not all serial killers are psychopaths.
People like Katrina Dea may not even have been especially cruel for their time.
After all, she wasn't doing the killing.
Nevertheless, in recent years, psychologists and amateurs the world over have become determined
to understand what makes evil tick.
Of course, this has led us to realize that some people who may make people who may
become Birx and Hares 200 years ago are living among us. And they may be far more common than
you'd like to think, though they're hidden in plain sight. We've offered many different views on
what a psychopath is over the years, but for the purpose of this discussion, we'll be adhering
closely to a psychopath checklist devised by Dr. Robert Hare. No relation to William Hare of
Edinburgh, as far as we know. This is a psychological assessment tool used to determine if a given
individual is a psychopath, that is to say, devoid of empathy and perhaps more inclined to live
a predatory existence.
The Hare Checklist contains a number of questions on superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth,
empathy, impulsiveness, and various other related traits.
Today it's estimated that around 1% of the general population possesses a psychopathic personality.
This number gets far higher when you look at CEOs and heads of
In a 2021 article for Fortune magazine, Professor of Supply Chain Management, Simon Krum,
estimated that 12% of corporate senior managers are likely to be psychopaths.
There are over 3,700 companies listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange, and that's just
the tip of the iceberg.
If 12% of the companies listed there have a CEO who fits the mold, that's around 444 psychopaths
running publicly traded companies.
The possibilities are disturbing, to say the least.
In their 2006 book, Snakes in Suits,
Psychologists Robert Hare and Paul Babiak found that the psychopath can be an awkward fit in a business setting,
on paper. That is to say, they tend to lack realistic long-term goals
and are more likely to overstate their abilities.
In practice, of course, someone with grandiose ideas that fall short of expectations
might instead be seen as visionary rather than deceptive.
Especially in companies that are on shaky ground, who are looking to employ strong leadership
to set them on the right track.
Heron Babiak point out that a psychopath might slip through a job interview undetected.
They might even seem like an ideal leadership candidate, thanks to their persona.
This is the thread that connects the modern business psychopath with the serial killers
we're going to discuss today.
These are men and women who see themselves as vision.
and unique, despite perhaps having minimal qualifications.
And often their work history reflects their instability, right up until they decide to start
their own businesses.
We're going to tell you three stories about these sorts of serial killers, how they rose,
what they hoped to obtain, and how they fell, and of course, the lives they claimed along the way.
Coming up, we'll take a trip to Sacramento and a boarding house that had a few too many
permanent residence.
Once upon a time I thought I met Mr. Wright.
The only problem, he was a huge liar.
You were going out of your mind because you couldn't figure it out.
I'm Abby Ellen.
Join me as I tell the story of one con man who entangled his lovers, friends,
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Now back to the story.
So far, we've spoken about for-profit murder businesses
and the idea of killers who lurk within the structures of corporate America.
But let's put those both aside for the moment and tell the stories that connect the two.
That is, the serial killers who made ends meet by running their own small businesses.
They may not be Fortune 500 companies, but these organizations made the perfect front for murder.
at least temporarily.
The years, 1978 to 1988, the business, a boarding house.
We all have this picture in our head of a boarding house matron,
a kindly older woman who practically adopts her neighbors.
She's a grandmother to all,
especially those with nowhere else to call home.
But in this particular case,
a woman who people assumed was a kindly landlady,
turned out to be something far more sinister.
Her maiden name was Dorothea Gray, though she went by Dorothea Puente for much of her life.
They're conflicting reports about Dorothea's early life, but what we do know is that by 1945, when she was just 16, her husband was the only family she had left.
After her first marriage fell apart, she gave her children away and moved on to her next partner.
Before she was 20, she already had a criminal record for forging checks, and in spite of multiple convictions and frequent trips to jail,
she never stopped trying to make a quick buck.
She started her first business when she was around 30, owning and operating a brothel in Sacramento.
Details are scarce, but the business came to an abrupt end when she was arrested and charged for illegal sex work.
She continued to drift in and out of both jails and marriages until the mid-70s,
and it was around that time that she moved into a house on 21st and F streets in Sacramento, a new venture.
This business was a modest one, but most definitely a business,
a three-story, 16-bedroom place that she turned into a boarding house.
Dorothea Puente was many things, a con artist, an opportunist, a pathological liar,
but she was not an unlikable person.
Shortly after moving into the neighborhood,
she ingratiated herself with the local community,
building her brand not as a multiple offender, but as a kindly open-hearted woman.
Dorothea doesn't appear to have owned the building, but no one seemed to object when she started taking in her own tenants.
Perhaps this is because she fit the image of the sweet landlady so perfectly.
But she wasn't a normal landlady. She had much more sinister intent than most.
Using her facade as a kindly hostess, Dorothea told her elderly residents that she would handle their mail and their money for them.
And in a sense, this was the truth, only she didn't treat it as their money.
money. Dorothea pocketed the cash for herself, including her tenant's unemployment benefits.
She bled her guests dry, and then, well, that's when things get murky.
Dorothea's building appeared to have a fairly high rate of turnover. She claimed that guests would
only stay there for periods of two or three months at a time. Of course, we have to take everything
she said with a grain of salt, because some of these guests simply disappeared.
Or died under, let's say, suspicious circumstances.
In April of 1982, Dorothy's 61-year-old friend Ruth Monroe moved into the new boarding house
Dorothea had started running, but she passed away before too long, seemingly of a drug overdose.
Her cause of death was ruled undetermined.
However, four months later, Dorothea was once again the focus of a criminal investigation.
In August, Dorothy was convicted of drugging.
theft, and forgery, and sentenced to five years in prison.
She was released two years early in fall of 1985,
and this is where her scam of a business seems to have taken its darkest turn yet.
In spite of her very recent arrests,
Dorothea remained a respected figure in the local community,
especially among social workers.
Her willingness to take in people with drug addictions
or histories of domestic violence was seen as evidence of her noble spirit.
She certainly marketed herself well because this seeming charity was a mask for her true intentions.
The term investigators later used to describe her tenets is shadow people.
That is to say, people who wouldn't be missed should they disappear under mysterious circumstances.
Among the people who vanished under Dorothea's care, the most obvious was a man who began
corresponding with her when she was in prison.
Following her release, he traveled to Sacramento to move in with her.
His family never saw him again.
Then in 1986, a fisherman found his body in a box on a riverbank,
not too far from Dorothea's boarding house.
His remains went unidentified for years,
and so Dorothea Plente's exploitative boarding house continued unabated.
That is, until a complaint from a social worker reached the Sacramento police,
on November 11, 1988, officers showed up at Dorothea's home to inquiret.
about the disappearance of one of her tenants, Alvaro Montoya.
Dorothea let them in, and before too long, the officers were exploring the grounds,
wondering why the backyard smelled so foul.
They set about digging and found out that Dorothea's backyard was more of a graveyard.
Buried there were the remains of seven former tenants.
As officers unearthed the bodies, 59-year-old Dorothea asked if she could go out for a cup of coffee,
The moment she was out of sight, she fled to Los Angeles, where she was apprehended five days later.
She was charged with nine counts of murder.
Her attorney maintained that while the individuals had died under her care,
Dorothea was only guilty of failing to report their deaths because she knew that running a boarding house would be a violation of her parole,
not because she was culpable.
Prosecutors also claim that she had stolen $87,000 worth of unemployment payment.
from her victims, which would be worth around $200,000 today.
An impressive profit for any small business, but I wouldn't look to Dorothea Puente's story
for financial advice. All of her earnings were extremely short-term and taken without any thought
to what the consequences would be. Not only was she a pathological liar, a thief, and a murderer.
She was also bad at business. And instead of a golden handshake, she spent the rest of her life
behind bars.
Our next murderous entrepreneur found a little more success than Dorothea.
He started his business the same year that the boarding house murderous was taken into custody
for murder.
The years, 1988 to 1996, the business, a thrift store.
Herb Baummeister was a far better business owner than Dorothea Puente, but like her,
he took some time to find his footing.
He was born in 1947 in Indianapolis.
and his childhood was, for the most part, uneventful.
Except for one detail, Herb liked to act out in peculiar ways.
As an adolescent, he once found a body of a dead crow
and placed it on his teacher's desk as a sort of macabre prank.
Through his youth in the 1960s,
he was remembered as an odd kid with a strange imagination.
Some records indicate that he was taken in for psychological evaluation at a very early age.
The doctor noted symptoms that indicated he might be skilled,
schizophrenic, although we have no records to show whether his parents acted on this information.
Herb graduated high school in 1965, but dropped out of college after one semester. From there,
he displayed a relative lack of ambition, bouncing from job to job from his late teens through
his late 30s. One bright spot in his brief college life was when he met Julie Sater. The two of them
bonded over their shared conservative beliefs and eventually married in 1971. Throughout his
adult life, Herb suffered from depression and mood swings, which became so intense that on at least
one occasion he was committed to a psychiatric hospital for an extended stay. Whether this
treatment helped him or not, it's difficult to say. But something began in the early 1980s that
may have been connected to Herb's erratic behavior and rocky mental state. Bodies started appearing
along Interstate 70, which passes through Indiana and Ohio. All of them were men. All of them. All of them.
were strangled.
Now, as we mentioned in our episode on truck drivers,
freeways are unfortunately a common place for killers to dispose of their victims,
but the fact that all of these men were killed in the same way
and that all of them were either nude or semi-nude seemed to indicate a connection.
Frustratingly, police had little other evidence to go on.
The unknown murderer earned the name the I-70 Strangler.
Meanwhile, Herb was starting a business.
Around 1988, he borrowed $350,000 from his mother in order to open his own thrift store.
He and Julie named the stores Save a Lot.
In a later interview, Herb's attorney claimed that both Herb and Julie were smart and socially
conscious people. Of their annual profits, they donated around $50,000 a year to local charities.
From the outside, Herb's store seemed to be a normal, functioning business.
One store blossomed into two, and it seemed that.
perhaps the Baumeister's days of living paycheck to paycheck were over. However, what Julie didn't know
was that starting a business could be more than just a job for her husband. It could also be a cover.
When you're the CEO of a company, even a small one, your time is your own. The lack of oversight
would undoubtedly appeal to anyone living a double life as a closeted gay man, especially when
they have a wife and kids back home. Herb's double life would not become clear to
Julie until the early 90s, and the truth was far more shocking than his repressed sexuality.
Because he may have been the I-70 Strangler.
Coming up, we'll finish Herb's story and discuss one final murderous mogul.
Now back to the story.
In the early 1990s, Indianapolis' queer community was plagued by a monster they couldn't name.
For almost a decade, gay men had been disappearing.
Sometimes their body showed up on the side of the I-70 highway.
Sometimes they were never seen again.
The presumed murderer was known as the I-70 Strangler,
and all the while, the man now widely believed to be the strangler
was busy running a retail business.
After some initial success, Herb Baummeister's stories began to show diminishing profits,
and the pressure was getting to both him and his wife, Julie.
On top of the business, Herb and Julie were raising three children,
which added an additional layer of stress to the whole situation.
Eventually, it all got to be too much.
Herb filed for divorce in February of 1991.
However, Herb decided not to follow through.
Not long after the divorce filing, he purchased a farm called Fox Hollow
and seemed intent on keeping the family together.
And it worked.
Given their rocky finances, buying a farm was a huge risk,
but it makes sense in this context.
Julie believed it was a haven for them and their children,
a place to escape from the bustling city life.
And every summer, Herb made this farm a haven of his own.
In the fall of 1994, the police heard an ominous story.
Earlier that summer, a man who will call Derek was cruising for a hookup.
He encountered a guy who introduced himself as Brian Smart.
Together, the two of them drove to Brian's home to spend the evening together.
Speaking to the police, Derek described the Fox Hollow Farm
in detail and how this so-called Brian Smart liked to use it.
That night, the businessman repeatedly pushed Derek into participating in auto-erotic asphyxiation.
He survived the encounter, but left the estate shaken.
Frustratingly, Derek's story didn't give police much to go on, besides the description of
Brian at his home. But in the fall of 1995, Derek spotted Brian again and took down his license
plate. Following up on the lead, police approached Julie at one of the Save-A-Lot stores. By then,
they'd drawn a line between Derek's story and the I-70 Strangler, and they wanted to find out
more. Julie was unsettled by their visit, but she didn't have anything to tell them. Sure that her
husband had nothing to hide, she eventually consented to a police search of the farm in June of 1996.
Meanwhile, Herb's behavior at the store had become increasingly erratic and nervous. Then,
the day after the police started searching the farm, everything changed. Herb told his employees
to gather in the parking lot at the end of the workday to collect their checks. They waited for over
an hour, but Herb never showed up. He was nowhere to be found. While the disappearance itself was
unsettling, something else popped up that drew everyone's attention. Police uncovered the remains
of at least seven people buried all over Herb's 18-acre farm. By the time, by the time, by the
time police found Herb, it was too late to ask him any questions about the bodies. He had died
by suicide in Ontario, Canada. Technically, the I-70 Strangler case remains unsolved, but investigators
strongly believe that Herb was the true culprit. Unsurprisingly, Save a Lot didn't outlive
its problematic owner. Like John Wayne Gasey's PDM contractors, once your owner is connected
to a series of murders, there's no recovering from that PR hit. It makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense
that someone like Herb would want a thriving business like Save-A-Lot.
Stability is appealing when it comes to employment,
and there's nothing more stable than a thriving business.
One where you can duck out of the office every day
to commit a murder without anyone thinking twice.
It's difficult to say why exactly Save-A-Lot started failing as a business
before the police caught up to Herb.
Even though the employees described him as erratic and nervous,
his business was far better managed than Puente's boarding house.
Perhaps Herb just wasn't a good businessman.
Earlier in this episode, we listed a number of aspects that define a successful startup.
One of these is sacrificing for your dream.
But Herb didn't seem to be the type of person who wanted to sacrifice any part of his life.
To be fair, maintaining a family in life, a multi-acre farm, and a hobby as a serial killer,
doesn't lend one to a focused mindset when at the office.
For our final story of the day, we're going to talk about someone who will,
was utterly focused when at work, so much so that it may have been work that made him the killer he was.
The years, 1963 to 1970. The business, a candy shop.
The Coral Candy Company was an unorthodox business. Its predecessor was a family-run candy business called the Pecan Prince,
which the Coral family ran out of a garage in small town Texas.
The youngest employees of this company were deemed Coral and its company.
were Dean Coral and his brother.
Even as he grew older, Dean displayed the single-mindedness
that someone like Her Baumister lacked.
Dean's parents divorced in the early 1960s,
and his mother founded the Coral Candy Company
in the Heights region of Houston.
By then in his early 20s, Dean found himself
in the role of manager.
At first glance, he seemed perfect for the job.
He was extremely dedicated to the work
and put a great deal of effort into charming the children
who came in to buy candy.
On one occasion, he built a giant green frog whose eyes lit up when the phone rang.
Coral became known as the Candy Man for how frequently he gave free candy to kids in the area.
He even let them into the back room of the shop where he had a pool table.
This is where things take a turn for the unsettling.
What was taken for benign friendliness soon developed into the disturbed.
Coral used his position at the company to proposition younger men.
It's rumored that this included his fellow
employees. Though there were complaints, they often went ignored. Coral's mother relied on him heavily
in the management of the business, and she refuted any suggestion that her son wasn't straight.
Sometime in the late 1960s, Coral began grooming a boy named David Brooks. Brooks, who may have
seen Coral as a father figure, was eager to please, and Coral took advantage of that eagerness to ruin
the boy's life forever. Grooming is not an often-used turn.
when it comes to corporate bullying, but the use of power dynamics to make people feel helpless
is absolutely a feature of abusive workplaces. Coral enticed Brooks into a number of sexual acts,
and it seemed that his power over Brooks was absolute. But before we get into what happened next,
we have to talk about what became of the company. In 1968, Coral's mother closed down the candy
company and left Texas. Coral stayed behind but seemed to have no interest in founding another
corporation. Carl's relationship to the business world was almost like Herb Baummeister in reverse.
While Herb appears to have started murdering before his business venture, Coral began after.
It was as if the business showed Coral his true passion, and that's the passion he spent
the rest of his life trying to sate. Between 1970 and 1973, Coral sexually assaulted, tortured,
and murdered young boys throughout the Heights area. Estimates place,
his victim count at almost 30, maybe more. The crimes became known as the Houston mass murders.
What made his reign of terror especially chilling was that he didn't act alone. David Brooks was by his
side, helping him lure children to their violent ends. Coral later obtained a second teenage
accomplice, Elmer Wayne Henley, who he met through Brooks. Although the company was no more,
it seemed that the power dynamic that Karl reveled in, in his business life still existed.
In his dynamic with the boys in the candy shop, Koral had created a distinct image for himself.
He was the insider, someone who could provide access to an exclusive club,
even as he graduated from pool table to a plywood torture board.
His victims, like his accomplices, were mostly teenage boys.
Karl would choose them, and his assistants would lure them into a place where they could be raped
and then murdered. Some of these victims are even former workers from the Coral Candy Company.
The abuse fostered under Coral as a manager undoubtedly carried into his practices as a serial
killer, and it's important to point out that his accomplices, though undeniably guilty of murder
and sexual assault, were victims of his abuse as well. And eventually, one of his accomplices snapped.
On August 8, 1973, the police received a phone call from Henley.
he claimed to have killed a man.
That man was Dean Coral.
Henley had shot him multiple times with a 22-caliber pistol.
When Henley threatened Coral with the gun,
Coral had reportedly taunted him,
saying that he wouldn't have the nerve to pull the trigger.
Coral had failed item number nine on the Forbes list of successful startups.
He hadn't valued his employees.
He'd done the very opposite.
Although Dean Carl's life as an entrepreneur lasted less than a decade,
It managed to color his entire life.
There are ways in which people influence the business they work in,
but it's equally important to consider how a business influences a person.
Coral's success at the candy store is reflective in a sense
of how companies in need of management can misidentify a quality candidate.
To his mother, Coral was good with kids,
so he made the ideal manager,
a monster who found the perfect environment to suit his taste.
This raises a disturbing question.
How do we determine if a business is creating such an environment?
Perhaps the answer is that the businesses we described today were chaotic and unstable
because they were run by chaotic and unstable people.
In their book, Snakes in Suits, Heron Babiak claimed that
the goal of a psychopath's game is to set up a scam within the organization's structure
that can fulfill their need for excitement, advancement, and power.
When someone creates the ideal source,
circumstances for a toxic person to flourish, who knows what could happen? Will they be satisfied
with the power play of a corporation, or will they still need to sate a more visceral urge?
So if you go off to start your own business or want to begin climbing that corporate ladder,
be wary of the people you see day to day. The chaotic, the egotistical, and the manipulative
may be seen as true entrepreneurs in a corporate structure, but in practice, this is a
This sort of entrepreneur tends to fizzle out when they start their own company.
None of us can entirely protect ourselves from exposure to dangerous individuals, but what
we can be is more educated about how antisocial personality traits can help one succeed in business.
The killers we discuss today are small fish.
Who knows what those with real power in the business world are capable of?
The ability to make a person disappear entirely?
the resources to commit a crime so perfect that we never even hear about it, or maybe something
more mundanely cruel, like ruining their employees' lives on a whim.
It pays to be aware of the harm that business leaders can do, because in the corporate world,
serial killers are not the only type of monster.
Thanks again for tuning into serial killers.
We'll be back soon with the fifth episode of our Labor Day special.
on we discuss the dangers of a killer cop, and next time we're taking a look at a career
with even deeper roots in violence, one that trains to kill.
You can find all episodes of serial killers and all other Spotify originals from Parkast
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 Cuddler, sound designed by Carrie Murphy,
with production assistance by Ron Shapiro,
Trent Williamson, Carly Madden, and Bruce Kitovich.
This episode of Serial Killers was written by Robert Teamstra,
with writing assistance by Joel Callan and Kate Gallagher,
fact-checking by Anya Bayerly,
and research by Brian Petrus and Chelsea Wood.
Serial Killers stars Greg Poulson and Vanessa Richardson.
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