Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 395: Bob Berdella Part I - Gary Jewman

Episode Date: December 21, 2019

It's heavy hitter time once again as we cover one of the cruelest of all the torture killers: Bob Berdella, aka the Kansas City Butcher. Join us as we cover Bob's time as an art student, his first few murders, and the house of horrors from which all of his crimes were committed. 

Hey everybody, it's Jake and Holden from the Wizard and the Bruiser podcast. And we are coming to you live in the Midwest in January with page 7, and that's going to be happening on the 9th of January in Chicago at Lincoln Hall. Then you have the 10th of January in Pontiac, Michigan happening at the Grove Foot. And last but very not least, the Milwaukee show is happening on January 11th, and that's going down at the back room at Collectivo. Please join us. Great podcast, one unforgettable evening.

And we are going to be hanging out after the show. I want to see your pretty faces. I want to hang. I want to have a blast. And also you can get tickets at lastpodcastnetwork.com forward slash p7live. That's lastpodcastnetwork.com forward slash p7live. Be there. There's no place to escape to.

This is the last podcast on the left. Christmas Eve, I one day of work for 315 Charlotte Street. I wonder what the good little Bobby wants this year for Christmas. Oh, Bobby, you're awake. Yes, Santa, I don't go to sleep. Oh, Bobby, appears to be, I was supposed to, I imagine I was going to give you a gift, but it appears that you're on my naughty list for some, oh my lord, Bobby, you're not wearing any clothes.

What? Oh, hit some hair with a pipe. Oh, okay, time for my Christmas gift. Wait a second. You don't have a butthole. Whoa! Santa doesn't have a butthole. Oh my God.

Welcome to the last podcast on the left. Everyone, I am Ben staring at the beautiful face of Marcus. Hi, Ben. Hello, Marcus. And of course, we have Henry Zabrowski over there studying in Los Angeles. Yeah, man. Honestly, it's very cold. It was 57 degrees this morning.

Oh, how'd you even deal with it? How'd you even deal with it? Well, we thought that this was, I mean, what a good topic for the holidays. Sure. Right, boys. I think we finally really nailed it because what have we done in the past? We did, you know, Christmas murders. We did a revelation on Jesus many years ago, which is highly inappropriate.

I don't know if you should even go back and listen to that episode. Well, I thought that was a fairly good episode, Revelations. Oh, no, he's talking about the Jesus episode that we did a few years ago. I don't even remember that one. It was like seven years ago. Okay. There's a lot of hot takes in that. Okay.

Well, this episode, I think is particularly perfect for Christmas because it really shows everybody else how we feel about the holiday. Well, Henry, honestly, you have been getting into the Christmas spirit. I, I, a little bit. It's really bizarre. Marcus, have you noticed that? I have not. Henry on Side Stories was raving about Santa Claus.

He said he wants all the children forever and ever to believe in Santa Claus. And he was upset when I challenged the notion that Santa Claus was real or not. And I said, it's not real. He's not real. St. Nicholas, perhaps was real, right? But I really, you've changed. I do love the psychic entity of Santa Claus. You've changed.

His heart has grown. It has. It really has. Okay, everyone. Today's subject, this guy, I mean, he's, you know what he looks like. He looks like, you know the Chris Farley sketch where he has the heart attack and he vomits up the steak. Da Bears?

Sure. He looks like someone who roots from Da Bears. Don't worry. Doctor said I have a baker's dozen. And his name is Bob Burdella. Bob Burdella, a.k.a. the Kansas City Butcher was an art school dropout serial killer who captured, tortured and murdered at least six young men in Kansas City, Missouri between 1984 and 1987.

What is it with art school dropouts? Why are they all so dangerous? We got Hitler. We got Burdella. Is it just a failure to paint that makes them go crazy? We've talked about how actors and artists are incredibly dangerous people and people need to be more afraid of them. They can appear to be anything that they want to be if you put a different hat on them,

different accent. All of a sudden, is he from Jolly O'London? Oh, is he from South Africa? Is that man from South Africa? You know, you don't know what an actor is going to be. That's true. Much like John Wayne Gacy, Bob Burdella chose his victims from the fringes of society. Some were men dabbling in sex work to feed drug addictions, while others were just in

and out of trouble with the law. But all were young, thin, white and fair-haired. And just like Gacy, Bob Burdella had a reputation amongst the young male hustlers of Kansas City as a man who enjoyed injecting men with drugs and torturing them before letting them know. If you listen to any true crime documentary or read any article about Bob Burdella, they always call them hustlers. And it's not in the new self-actualized hustlers, let's embrace the idea of hustling.

This is back when it was still very shameful to be a hustler. Interesting, indeed. So they're not like the cast from Entourage. They're not out there hustling in Hollywood trying to make it in the business. They're closer to the cast of Entourage than the cast of Entourage would like them to consider themselves. But one thing about Bob Burdella, which I love, it's taken us a long time to get to him.

He has been, people have been asking us about Bob Burdella since the beginning of the show. And I remember when we first started, I think as you first start getting into serial killers. I think when I was somewhere like 12, 13 years old, and you kind of see his name as you go through your various, if I had the little yellow mass market A to Z encyclopedia of serial killers, and you go through Dahmer, you go through Gacy, you go through Son of Sam, these very iconic figures, but then you immediately bump up against the second layer of serial killers. That you start to realize that in my mind didn't fully realize until I got on the internet.

And especially with the advent of things like somethingrotten.com and 4chan, the very beginning of it. And I saw Bob Burdella again and again and again. And then realized that there's a whole second tier. And when I was younger, that is this, oh, this is kind of like the indie hipster serial killer layer that I'm first delving into. And Bob Burdella is kind of a big fucking doorway into that world. But these are the guys that are too weird to be really in the mainstream sphere of knowledge.

It's guys like Bob Burdella, Pee Wee Gaskins, Haddon Clark, Joseph Callinger. These stories are just too fucking strange and most of the time just too gross to really cover. And they're the ones that make people feel like too weird to really enjoy. Alright, well let's cover it then. That's great. What a wonderful little preamble for the disgusting tale to come. But for the most part, Burdella is somewhat unique in serial killer lore for the fact

that all of his murder victims were at the very least acquaintances. If not, out and out associates. Unlike Gacy, who knew only a few of his victims prior to their murders. Also unlike Gacy, Bob Burdella was no closeted blue collar killer who would quickly murder his victims and hide the bodies. Instead, Bob Burdella was an out and proud local character who ran a curiosity shop out of the local flea market. And Bob Burdella took his time torturing each and every victim from anywhere from a single

night to six weeks. Oh damn. You just have to have a sick to it attitude and you gotta be fun about it. You gotta be a good host. I guess. But the thing about Bob Burdella is that also as you read about him, you kind of expect him to be closer to a big crazy animal like Carl Pansram or somebody that's kind of like a character.

For me, I was expecting the fucking the most evil version of the Riddler ever. Right. I mean, his interviews are like hear him talk, but he's actually just so quiet and he's just so. What was the word we realized? Fussy. He's fussy. He's fussy.

And isn't that the biggest crime of all. But he was super out. He used to hand people pictures of men lifting barbells and he's like, take a look at this slack of sausage right here, isn't he? Kind of a fun boy. I wish he was over here slopping on my jelly and they're like, oh, Bob, you're being funny. You're being you're being it today. And he's like, yeah, I'm feeling it tug on my tail to see what kind of tiger I turn

it to. Oh my goodness. You can only imagine what would happen. We know all of these details about Bob Bridella because Bob Bridella took copious notes for every single one of his six murder victims, as well as Polaroid pictures of each stage of torture in addition to postmortem photos. Hmm. Now, of course, since Bob Bridella ran a curiosity shop that had all manner of skulls,

creepy art, and occult objects, the media tried rolling the Bob Bridella murders into the satanic panic of the late 80s, early 90s. And no media figure made more hay out of Bob Bridella than Geraldo Rivera, who featured Bob as a part of his 1988 expose, Devil Warship, exposing Satan's underground. Well, if you don't expose Satan's underground, he's never going to know he's got a booby butt. That is just wonderful. That's really fun, but you also got to understand, if you send an inspector down into the underground,

you better be careful of the kind of violations you find in that underground, because that's where you're going to kick up a lot of red tape inside if you want to buy Satan's house in order to refurbish it to your own wants and needs. Now that is more of an inside reference that Henry is trying to buy a house and he's going through some troubles. So that's why you've got it in here, you shoe-horned it. If you want to expose Satan's underground, you've got to understand, there might be some devilish violations in there, and you might have to go to the most dreaded city

department of permits in order to get a permit for an outdoor living situation. Honestly, that's the scariest place in the world. But when it comes to Geraldo and Bridella, who do you think got the butter moustache? Who are you giving the moustache? I'm giving it. Because Bridella has a moustache that I can see the cookie crumbles in the moustache. Geraldo, I think it's too greasy and it sort of goes down the face. I think it doesn't, I don't think it holds a crumble, and I feel like that is crucial

to a good moustache. How much crumble can you hold? I think that it depends on a style of moustache. Geraldo Rivera's moustache is obviously a businessman's moustache. It is one for, it is for outward people, it's for other people. But if Bob Bridella's moustache is for himself, it collects cum so that he can get at it later. Well Geraldo Rivera's moustache is a rip-off. It's a Yosemite Sam moustache, that's all it is, but Bob Bridella's moustache is quite

original if I might say so myself. So Bridella wins the moustache wars? I'm going to put Bridella over Geraldo any fucking day. I mean he murdered six men, Geraldo just gave our location for US military troops. You just fought for him. But when Bridella was asked point blank if his crime had a satanic angle, or if there was any truth to the rumor that he performed an exorcism on a child, Bridella Riley said, quote,

No, I've never exercised anybody. I don't even like aerobics. Come on guys. Hell yeah. Look at that. Look at that. Up top. Don't even like aerobics.

Wow. I don't even like aerobics. This guy is, he is something. I'm a funny guy. I'm a funny guy. You're kind of tall for me. Do you mind if I cut off your feet? You know what it is too.

The thing about Bob is that he's not, Bob was a curiosity collector and salesman. So they want to say Satanist. But it's more like if the founder of the guy that runs the Hyena Gallery in Burbank who sells all of this shit that you see in Bob's Bizarre Bizarre, if he started killing people, it's kind of almost putting a hat on a hat. It's kind of two on the nose. Right. I agree.

I agree. But when Adela himself proclaimed from prison, he was not a monster, but was rather, quote, a neighbor who had done some monstrous things. After all, it's not like he killed every day. To him, serial killing was an occasional dalliance. Okay. You're lucky it's only a hobby. If I could flip it, if there was a Patreon that I could've joined in order to kill as

many boys as possible, you know, let's see what the perks are and see what I could set up with the tears. I actually need some help with that. I need like an assistant, maybe like a young blonde boy or something, but I just keep running out of them. Furthermore, in his estimation, it wasn't even his fault that he'd killed and tortured all those men. It was actually the fault of the Kansas City PD.

Why? Because if police had done a better job, Bob wouldn't have been able to kill so many people. If you watch this interview with him, he did one interview because he died very quickly after he got into prison. We'll cover all that in the second episode, but he definitely says, he's like, they just don't understand how dangerous Kansas City is. There's guys like me everywhere. They just should've done a more due diligence.

They should've been out there because it's like, you know, they're out there trapped in there with people like me. All right. So he's blaming the cops, but could they have done a better job? Yes. Okay. Absolutely. I mean, it's definitely his fault, but we'll see you get into the game.

It's his fault. It's safely his fault. The cops could've done a better job without a doubt. All right. And it is possible, but unlikely, that Bob killed more than six. Between 1984 and 1988, Bob's killing years, 47 men went missing from Kansas City's main gay sex work spot, 10th and McGee, and none of those dudes have ever been accounted for. What is in the barbecue?

That's what we have to start asking ourselves. Oh no! Kansas City is a great barbecue, both of you consumed way too much of it. It's the best barbecue in the world. It's human meat! I tell you what, whatever the secret is, if I don't know, if I'm ignorant, see no evil, hear no evil, taste no evil, what am I doing here? I've committed no crime.

Let's just say what I said is true, and you're in Kansas City, and you see the barbecue, and you know it's a human. What are you doing? I would never capital K, no, get into human. You know what I mean? I mean really, like Bob Berdella was just a nerdy, pathetic, sexual sadist with a big old belly. I'd call him like an art school John Wayne Gacy.

Okay. That's perfect. I'm more or less just a local joke, both before and after his capture. A local joke? A local joke? Oh man. Jokes don't kill six people. Well, we'll get into how I guess funny Kansas City got after Bob Berdella was captured on

episode two. They got real funny. They got funny. He experienced a Kansas City comedy boom when he was committing his crimes, and this is true. We'll get into all that. But before we get too deep into the story of Bob Berdella, let's acknowledge our sources for today.

The first is Rights of Burial by Tom Jackman and Troy Cole. This book highly recommended legitimate true crime writing. The other, however, is a fantastic little documentary called Bazaar Bizarre, starring crime author James Elroy and distributed by Trauma. Yeah. Really? Yeah. It's honestly, this is what a good excuse to watch a documentary again.

Dogmeat and I both talked about how the last time I remembered watching Bazaar Bazaar, I don't remember watching it because of how high it was, and it's definitely one of those. Yeah. This movie is possibly the most tasteless, trashy, dong-hanging true crime documentary ever made. Hanging's a lot of dong. No way. A Trauma documentary with a lot of dong.

I don't believe it. It is without a doubt recommended if you want to see how trash is truly done. Trauma's the best at trash. I mean, it is a true crime documentary by way of John Waters. It's good, bad taste, as John Waters used to say. It's a nice. Yeah. Yeah.

Features James Elroy's band, The Devil Dogs. Man, they have got some good songs. I think they wrote an entire album about Bob Burdella. Dude, there's something about Bob Burdella that is captured in many songs, and then there's also another film called Burdella that was filmed in 2009, which I saw scenes from and don't watch it, because it's not good. It's unfortunately not good. There's a lot of animation in there, but mostly it's just a man with a pasted odd mustache

going, you want another hit, to a guy going, whoa, and then he gives another hit, and then it's slow motion of him pulling pants over butts, slowly licking the small of the back, putting the needles in, which is cool. I mean, again, this makes you horny if I can rock it out, but it is for certain audiences. Yeah. That is a strange birthday cake, my friend. So without further ado, let's get into the life of Bob Burdella. Please.

Bob Burdella was born in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio on January 31st, 1949, is the eldest of two boys born to Robert Burdella Sr. and Mary Burdella. I was really hoping you were going to mispronounce Cuyahoga Falls, because I know that. It's called Cuyahoga. And I was going to be like, uh, no, it's not Cahogia, or whatever you were going to say. It's Cuyahoga Falls. I'm from the Midwest.

I know that. But you pronounced it right, so I still had to make it up because you didn't pronounce it right so that I could correct you, but you actually said it right. Now Bob is a bit of an anomaly when it comes to serial killers in more ways than one. Unlike John Wayne Gacy, his closest analog, Bob Burdella did not come from an overly abusive home. While his father did occasionally fly into violent rages, Bob's childhood was not marked by a sustained campaign of abuse, nor was he said to be an abnormal child when it came

to animal mutilation or violent behavior, at least as far as we know. Okay. Do you think it's not normal for a father to sometimes occasionally fly into semi-violent rages? It seems that's what fathers do. I mean, it depends. Sometimes. It's tax season.

It shouldn't be done. It definitely shouldn't be a part of a household growing up. Well, it shouldn't be. A violent rage doesn't necessarily mean you actually get violent. A violent rage is just like, you just, God, just take the gun. My father was going through a period of time when he was sitting up on outside television show. Every once in a while, my mom would let my dad have a Super Bowl party because she

never liked it because she hated all of his friends because they were all just big, drunk, awful monster cops. And so, well, I remember the one time when he was just like, everybody, we throw it in his and outside party, it is in his and outside party. And he went outside and he was on this campaign of not cursing in front of the kids because my mom had yelled at him about it. And so he was out there going, son of a, you got, you got, God damn, like with this little television that he was trying to set up outside, and I watched him take this little television

and just throw it into the yard and just like, fuck, ah, wow, like doing these crazy noises that took years off his life. That never was mad. And then my mom went and stayed in the hotel. Well, she had a nice night. Those little TVs were horrible. And mostly, young Bob just sounded like a nerdy little pain in the ass. His teachers said he was an intelligent, if frustrating, student.

And from a young age, Bob had to wear thick prescription glasses to correct his severe near-sightedness. As such, Bob was a loner and neighbors who grew up around the Burdellas in Ohio speculated that his best friend was probably his mother. Oh, that's cute. His father, on the other hand, didn't really care for Bob. Why not? Because Bob wasn't in sports, unlike his younger brother, Danny.

Now Danny, that's a boy that's into sports. But father, isn't there a sport to watercolor? Listen, father, I was thinking about just the idea of, just the idea of capturing a pelican, not physically, because their beaks are just so snappy and so big. But the idea of capturing it with a photograph or capturing it with some sort of temperate paint that would be, dad, we're, oh, he's just at the bar already. He's been gone for days. You ain't my son.

You ain't my son. No, I remember, my father wasn't a big sportsman, but, you know, he kind of expected something out of a more, you know, a masculine child. He didn't understand that a child could be very intense and have a lot of intense emotions and love phantom of the operon. It's a little difficult. Sometimes you got to give your child a grow and become fully straight in his way. Yeah, I don't know.

You might, yeah, it must have been interesting for your father as soon as he found out his son couldn't breastfeed because he was too weak. No, no, you didn't understand that I was saving to do it for pleasure. Good lord. Get off of my wife. My son instead of sports, Bob likes staying inside. He liked reading books. He liked painting.

He loved to expand his vast coin and stamp collection. Okay. Bob also spent a fair amount of time writing the various pen pals around the world, which is what first piqued his interest in foreign artifacts. All right. Also kind of like a very, very, very urgent, maybe the original version of like talking to people on the internet. Because when you're pen pals, you can be anybody that you want.

Did you guys have that? We had a foreign pen pal program in elementary school and I remember just lying to this kid in Somalia, just saying shit, just whatever. I think I might have said, yeah, I'm Henry McDonald. Yeah. I'm an heir to the McDonald fortune. We're a milkshake rich. Yeah, we did that, but I guarantee you that our teachers never sent our letters.

Because I remember writing the letters and I never, we never got anything back. Nope. I think it was just in the trash. Yeah. Yeah, I think Mrs. Hasty probably threw those fucking letters away now that I think about it. Why did I even write my personal feelings down for this random person who I thought could be a friend?

You were writing to the child soldiers of the Congo. They're not getting letters. They like the thought of it, but Bob, you see now, right? He begins dissing himself. He can lie about whatever he wants, anybody he wants. And then the collections began immediately. That will come into play later. But even though Bob was said to be a devout Catholic as a child, said he was overall a

good boy. Okay. First of all, this is the first side of sociopath. A child would be like, I am a devout Catholic, you're eight years old. You can't be. That was me. That's insanity. So far, this is all me.

Oh, dangerous. Yep. And Bardella claims that everything changed when he saw the 1965 film adaptation of the serial killer's favorite book, The Collector. Wow. I don't like when they do this though. When they blame art. When they blame movies.

Of course. Of course. Because it just reflects poorly on everything. Yeah. I mean, long time listeners of the show will remember The Collector from our Leonard Lake and Charles Ang series. And Bob Bardella shares more than a few traits with the long deceased Leonard Lake. Pretty much so.

But to give you the clip notes on The Collector though, the movie and the book are about a lonely young man named Fred Clegg, who captures a woman he works with named Miranda and keeps her in the basement until she gets sick and dies. Every serial killer's dream, the idea that they will love you, I'll make them love you. Make them love me by putting them in a prison. But my question is, is that how does the author of The Collector feel about this shit? Did they even know? Like, do you think about, like, because I don't think J.D.

Salinger ever talked about his connection, what more truly did a little bit. I think that's why he became a recluse when he said the, why his book, Catcher in the Rye for John Lennon. Why Catcher in the Rye? Yeah. Like, why was that an inspiration to killers? I think that J.D. Salinger did what a lot of normal people would do.

When he's like, I wrote this great book, you all took it wrong, you're not mature enough as a society for my art, I'm going to stare at a fireplace for the next 30 years. Well, he definitely was like that. He became very cruel. Yeah. J.D. Salinger, it definitely soured him on the human experience. Yeah.

A bunch of people taking his work and flipping it. But this, The Collector guy, I wonder if he had women in his basement. He seems like, no, he's just a writer. He just wrote a bunch of different novels like The French Lieutenants Woman, The Magus, The Ebony Tower, Mantisa. The French Lieutenants Woman is the most awkward book title ever. I think that's technically, is that an adaptation of the, was it Captain Mangalore's Mandolin with Nick Cage?

Captain Mandolin, Captain, Captain Mandolin's Mandolin, Captain Moretti's, Captain Moretti's, Captain, I think it's Dr. Mangalore's guitar. I think it's Captain Carelli's Mandolin. Yes, I read it. Why do I care about Captain Carelli's Mandolin? I don't know. No, I'm looking at a picture of John Fowles right now, the author of The Collector, and he looks like the guy from the video like, I'm trying to enjoy a succulent Chinese meal.

You are resting here and I was enjoying a succulent Chinese meal. Take your hands off of me, police officers. Well Bridella claims that when he saw the adaptation of The Collector in 1965, something switched on deep inside and he was there after forever changed, which is just a big pile of serial killer horseshit. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that wasn't the reason why you did it, the reason why you did it was because you loved to hug in a way that was criminal. Yeah, indeed.

What actually had an effect on Bridella was the death of his father. On Christmas Day, 1965, Robert Bridella Sr. had a heart attack and died two days later at the tender young age of 39. Damn, okay, what a gift. You're just sitting there watching your father in a Santa hat struggling as you die and you're just a young Bob Bridella eating hot dogs, just going, is there something wrong, daddy? You look sick. And he's just like, stop eating hot dogs at night, Bobby.

How many times am I going to tell you you look like the Michelin tire man? Daddy? Daddy? Well, more Christmas gifts for him and his dad's little TV that the mom bought. Pretty soon after, Mary Bridella remarried and within just a few months, Bob went from dealing with the death of his father to dealing with the new dad stepdad that he absolutely hated. But the event from Bob's teenage years that probably had an even more pronounced effect

on Bob was when he was raped by a co-worker while he was working as a line cook at a local restaurant. Damn. Very similar to Carl Pansram. The idea that that's what he said was the first thing that taught him that violence and subjugation of others was the way to equalize your standing in the world. But Pansram did seem to have it a bit rougher. Much rougher.

Yeah. Yes. Yes. That was the first event when he later spoke with psychiatrist, maintaining that it was quote unquote, society's fault that he became a serial killer. But there's no doubt that this had a horrifically negative effect on Bob's psyche. Right. But what was it about the mid-60s and stuff like the way my mom talks about being molested

by priests, it was like a thing, it was like a coupon you got in the mail the way she describes how often it was and how much this shit happened. I know that things have changed quite a bit and that's what it's very good that the optics have changed. But the way all these people have been like, yeah, yeah, that happened to me. Pushed me down inside the fry machine and he made love to me. But it's like you have to be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's like a massive thing. And it's kind of a thing that you did to six grown men in your house.

You don't think it has anything to do with your crimes. Yeah. It's like, no, no, it's TV. TV did it. Live from your grave. Live from your grave. Two years later, Bob graduated from Cuyahoga Falls High School, moved to Kansas City and enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he quickly became annoyed with the

drug-adult hippy lifestyle that pervaded college campuses in the late 60s. So he's not even a cool nerd. No. He's not even someone who doesn't play sports because they're too busy getting high behind the dumpster. No. He had to be an antisocial personality no matter what it was. Even when it was cool to be antisocial.

But even though Bob didn't do drugs, he found he was a pretty savvy drug dealer. So he started selling weed, pills, and amphetamines to his fellow students, and he even started growing out his hair and wearing gaudy clothes. Okay. And it was said that Bob loved being the center of attention, and according to writes of burial, he would quote, dance outlandishly, but not necessarily well. And honestly, that must have been incredible to find close to size in that time period because it's incredibly hard to find 70s vintage if it's a belly.

Yeah, that's true. Now even though this sounds like Bob was coming out of a shell, the problem was that no one liked Bob because Bob was a sarcastic, pretentious, overbearing art school dickhead. And one of his many dubious performance pieces, he had an audience of students and teachers stand on chairs and put bags over their heads. And with their faces covered, he'd walk up to each one and scream obscenities. You bitch. Shit ass.

Shit ass. Fuck tart. Fuck farts. Fuck farts and ass. Ass and shit. Shit. Fuck. Fuck.

Fuck. Shit. That might be my favorite art exhibit of all time. I don't. You like that? This is you sat down in a class. You've the least popular kid in class who has been probably screaming about how, you know, Da Vinci sucks, you know what I mean, it's like those kind of guys where he hates

every single thing that's classic and he hates all that stuff. So he's like, so today we're going to do a big boy art exercise. I hope you guys are ready for it. I hope your minds are opening up for it and everyone's going to like, OK, Bob, stand up on your seats. We're all going to act as ghosts in the trees and he puts a bag over everybody's head and you have to sit there because it's fucking class. It's hard.

He's using this as a purpose. He's doing this on purpose to scream obscenities in people's faces and he is manipulating the sacred agreement between a performance artist and its audience of, I will allow you to squirt blood on me, but I must believe on some way this means something like I have to. You have to somehow convince me that this means something. Oh, it means something. You have hepatitis C now. I know.

I know. But I could just see the teacher just being like, you got a C, Bob. What do you mean? I broke ground today. You did nothing, Bob. You just said shit. You said fuck shit like five times. That was a big deal.

We're coming out in the 50s. It's very conservative time. You got to get it out. After that, Bob got cruel. His next project was a small maze and anyone who entered the maze was handed a baby chicken. Waiting for them at the end of the maze was a short film on a loop of a different baby chicken who would be shown pecking at food before someone off-screen blew it away with a shotgun.

Whoa. And sometimes, but not always, the people watching would involuntarily squeeze the baby chicken they were holding, hurting it if not accidentally killing it. That's not on, Bob. That is on the first. No, it is. If I see something. What?

You think that's a bad take? I think that's a horrible fucking take. Why would you squeeze the chicken to death if you see a chicken die to volunteer? Because they're scared because they're suddenly seeing a chicken being killed on screen and it's an extremely loud shotgun blast and they don't know what the fuck to do with a baby chicken. What a horrible take. I honestly, I don't think I would squeeze the chicken to death.

It's different because you're used to holding things gentle because you've got big hands and you've been learning to how you have to hand a delicate Bud Light can all the time without crushing it just in the pressure of the gravity of your knuckles. You are hyper aware of accidentally crushing something with your huge hands. Okay, alright. The rest of you don't think about it that much. Okay. You have the same sized hands as I do, Marcus.

If I had a duckling in my hands for more than 15 minutes, I might accidentally kill it at any time. Just sit near, just because of my blood pressure. Okay, alright. The thing was that Bob Redullo was sitting there at the exit to the maze watching people, waiting for them to accidentally squeeze the thing. He loved every fucking minute of it. I love seeing you do it.

I love seeing you do it. You didn't want to do it, did you? Strange art. Now, not a single person was impressed with what Bob was doing, but Bob maintained that the problem was everyone else and that no one got his art because it was, quote, too challenging. Oh. So remember what you sound like when you say that about your art as a listener.

Remember that. Remember who else said that? Well, in his last piece, he brought a living duck to campus, chopped off the head in a courtyard, and danced around the corpse chanting nonsense. Where's he getting all the poultry? You can buy, Paul. Oh, man. Yeah, I can get you a duck as soon as you want.

Well, honestly, I want one in 10 minutes. I can't. I'm recording a show right now. Okay, after the show. I will postmates a duck to you. We don't even advertise for postmates. Even though Bob did eat the duck that night, the administration was not necessarily dazzled by Bob's daring exhibitions.

When I was in school, art school, very, I went to an art school kind of that had a big art program. There was someone who crucified the squirrel, and it wasn't allowed into the art exhibit because it was a health violation. But he's not a serial killer. He's a kindergarten teacher. Well, I mean, that's fine. It is a health violation.

It is, but I'm just saying if art students are weird. It's a fine line. Again, it just, it works or it doesn't work. You really have to do a lot of work to make a performance art piece remotely legitimate. I do appreciate performance art, but I've seen some that it was just a guy going, I remember that one time we did a comedy show with a performance artist who walked on stage. Again, I don't know what it stood for. He was completely nude.

He was in roller skates. It was on July 4th, which so I do think that this is a part of it. He pulled, he rolled up American flag out of his asshole, which he was there for hours. He was there for hours. The show was late. I remember we were all there. No one was in the audience and he was expecting to blow minds. He pulled it all out.

It was all covered in shit and he was just like, and it was just murder fest. Just like watching, just going, God, man, we rehearsed whole sketches. We learned a bunch of lines from this. You did it the hard way. He did it the right way. So in 1969, Bob dropped out of art school, still convinced that he was a misunderstood genius. And it was around this time that Bob Bardella also put down a $100 down payment on the house

at 4315 Charlotte Street, which would eventually be the location where Bob would kill six young men. Did you say $100? No, it's 1969 in Kansas City. What has happened to this country when you can put a down payment on a house for $100? It's a problem. It's a problem. It's a real big problem.

It's a real problem. But this is one of those examples of a house and a killer being kind of symbiotic. They really are important to each other, like Ed Gein, like John Wayne Gacy, of Jerry Brutus, where there's something about, I'm not blaming the house, but there's something about this combination of the two where he found his lair. And then once he decided to make this his base of operations and his playground, it became this inner world. Literally he would compartmentalize his mind physically.

He would create an area where the attic of this house became a place that people did not go to. And if you did go to it, sometimes you didn't get out of it. Damn. So to support himself, Bob Bardella worked full time in the restaurant business and eventually became a manager or a chef at all sorts of classy restaurants in Kansas City. This is the first artistic thing he's ever actually done. Absolutely.

And another chef. Another chef. What is it with the chefs? We've gone this entire show without talking about chefs and then suddenly we got two in a row. Damn. But these changes did not make Bob any less of a dickhead. He delighted in saying rude or gross shit to anyone around under the guise of being

shucking, especially if someone new had showed up. But according to the people around him, the effect was not shock, but rather embarrassment. For Bob? Just that Bob was around. They were just, being around him just brought your quality of life down. Absolutely. But Bob was not necessarily concerned with other people. He was more interested in objects.

While working as a chef, Bob began collecting artifacts and antiques from around the world, curios like shrunken heads, primitive art, and various occult items. And all throughout the 70s, that's pretty much all Bob did. But the only significant thing to happen to Bob in that decade, as far as we know, was that Bob came out of the closet and began living openly as a gay man in Kansas City. Oh, honestly, probably not easy to do in the 70s. It's a difficult position to take. And I feel like, again, it speaks more to his, I want people, if I can't get a positive

reaction out of you, I want to get a negative reaction out of you. So he did it for both reasons, number one, just being like, I am who I am, which technically is good. It is good that he did that. Absolutely. But he also did it to be in your face. Like he did it purposefully to do it, which again, I think politically is very important. And nowadays, I mean, but in this, but with Bob Bridella, it is not, he wasn't thinking

like that. I think that all of his shit was just him just trying to be as wild as possible. Right, right. And in 1981, Bob Bridella quit the restaurant business and became a full-time antiques dealer. That was the year that he rented out a stall at the Westport flea market and opened up Bob's Bazaar Bazaar. It does roll off the tongue. And this is where the true legends about Bob Bridella begin to grow because he had all

of this wicked looking shit. Half that was fake, but it went with this sort of this vibe, right? It being like, I have an inside tip. All I do is collect creepy things and all I do are creepy things. It's fun. I just stay on brand. Right, right. Here, Bob became the unpleasant know-it-all gatekeeper, lord of the flea market and scourged

to collectors of the macabre everywhere. And Bob did have some cool shit for sale, but a particular interest to us are the human skulls that he sold. Where did he get those from? Well, let's see. And it goes without saying that as soon as Bob's crimes came to light, anyone who bought a skull from Bob's Bazaar Bazaar came forward to make sure they weren't in possession of a murder victim.

But predictably, all the skulls Bob sold at his shop, except one, were fake. And even the real one was far too old to be a victim of the Kansas City Butcher. Nice. I guess that's a good thing. Yeah, it's true. Sure. Yeah? Marcus, have you done the same with your piles of human skulls?

Tested them to make sure none of them were fake? No, no, no. The opposite to see if they're murder victims. Marcus. Yeah, Marcus, why is the first thing you ask is, also, do you have a pile of human skulls that I don't know about? I don't have a pile of human skulls. I have a human jaw bone that I was given in England, and that was tested to make sure

that it was not a murder victim, it was a plague victim. And I do have some cufflinks that are made from human skulls, but those have not been tested and they're glossed over anyway, like they're very processed. Yeah, and the human skull doesn't look like a cufflink, so it's fine. It's fine. It's fine. With fake skulls notwithstanding, the bazaar only occasionally turned enough profit to cover Bob's mortgage.

To shore up costs, Bob started renting out rooms in his home, although it sounded like an absolutely fucking awful place to live. See Bob was what you'd call a classic horror. Besides all the junk he bought or stole to sell at the bazaar, his house was also filled with stacks and newspapers, brown paper bags filled with magazines, garbage bags full of clothes, and just plain rotting garbage. And hoarding, much like gaining a lot of weight in a very short period of time, was what they also went down with Bob Bridella in this period of time, which is that he would constantly

lament about how that's why he said he needed to pay for sex workers because he didn't believe he could attract anybody because he gained a lot of weight. But a lot of what this supposed to be, it's kind of like a comfort thing in a way, in a perverse way. It's creating shields all around you where if people don't want to come into my home, what that does is that it shows you, I'm telling you fuck you first, so that you can't tell me fuck me afterwards. So you can come into my home and it's totally disgusting you want to be in there.

It's like we've been in these, we've been in these stores, we've been in these houses Marcus. Yeah. We love these places technically. Actually, I would say if there was any serial killer who I might have become a victim of, it might be Bob Bridella. Really? Yeah.

Go to his store and he's like, you know what, this stuff is cool, but you should see what I have back at my house. Yeah, but Marcus, he would be rubbing all over your rump, he would be doing things. I don't think he'd be rubbing all over my rump. You don't think he'd be rubbing on the rump? He waited until you got to the house to rub all over your rump. Yeah, but then you would have to do, you would just lean in and be like, but he's got magazines. No, I wouldn't lean in.

You'll see later. I don't think I would have had the choice. Oh. Dogmeat. 15 years ago though, you wouldn't let him at least touch the top of your butt. Just to see the thing. Everyone experiments in college. It's a little, you would at least sound like I was letting every man who said hello rub

on my butthole. Oh my goodness. It's not true. I'm talking about guys with skulls for you to see. That's what I'm talking about. Make out with a couple of guys in college and all of a sudden you're a Charlie Dick horse. Well, I think there's nothing wrong with being a Charlie Dick horse.

Get out there. Have a lot of fun. That's your paragraph. Good. Gracious. Well, Bob also had a bunch of big chow dogs and the whole house was littered with huge piles of dog shit because these were big dogs. You got to take them outside.

Yeah. And that was the condition the cops found the place in when they busted him in 1988. Back in the early 80s, it probably wasn't quite that bad. Not as much Duke yet. Not as much Duke just yet. But then he was spending most of his time in his attic and then he was kind of going back and forth for meals, but that's when he was full on amateur scientist mode. Well, he wasn't going back and forth to the Duke.

He wasn't eating the poop, was he? No, no. Who knows? Back then, Bob Redella was renting out rooms to vulnerable young men who were in and out of trouble with the law. And Bob was doing it under the guise of performing a community service. For the most part, his neighbors applauded him for it, just like neighbors used to applaud John Wayne Gacy for giving jobs to underprivileged kids, even if those kids sometimes disappeared

without a trace. Kids run away all the time. They always run away into shallow graves. How many times these kids I see a nice 16-year-old kid, he runs away, puts a plastic bag over his head, puts a bunch of clown makeup all over his dick, and he throws himself in the river. That's what these kids do. John, you're dressed as Pogo.

It's a 10-year-old's birthday party. Can you just not say this in front of all these kids? I'm the entertainer. You're the entertainer. I'm the entertainer for the night. See, Redella's scam was to exchange rent for help around the house or the flea market, but usually that exchange also included sleeping with Bob Redella on the regular. And if Redella trusted someone enough, that guy will become a street liaison for Bob,

someone who would look for other vulnerable young men on the street and bring them back to Bob's house to quote-unquote, party. He had his own Ghislaine Maxwell. Isn't that nice? Yeah, he did. He did. That's how a lot of these predators work. They find one person to find other victims.

Also, I just want to put this out there. She's still free. If you ever, if you feel like arresting anyone, feel free to go out there and get Ghislaine Maxwell, whatever you want. Go get her. I've been hanging out outside the internet to see if she shows up at several locations. But it's so weird how this shit is baked in to the scenario. I now fully believe that John Wayne Gacy had accomplices.

You think so? I am pretty certain that he at least had one accomplice that helps him because it happens again and again and again. Dean Coral, the same thing happened with him, they hire a group of vengeful orphans to go bring in more hustlers into the house. And it's baked in. It's so weird. You see the same exact parallels.

He got in good with the neighborhood. Bob Riddell has started a neighborhood watch. Most neighborhood watch isn't just like, I'm going to watch you jerk off now. I'm going to stare through your window and watch you masturbate. It's a neighborhood watch. I'm doing this as a public service. Once Bob got young men to his house, he would drug them, have sex with them, and send them on their way.

One lodger named Philip Bukovic, who was lucky enough to get by with just living there, said that he saw up to 10 young men come in and out of Berdella's house in the short time he lived there in 1982. Honestly though, that neighbor sounds like a Snoopy Christian. No, he lived in the house. Oh, he lived in the house. Yes. He was a lodger.

He was a Cato. Do you know what lodger is? I don't really know that term though. I mean, I understand what you're saying now, but no, I haven't really heard that term that often. No. The movie, The Lodger. I think it was about Jack the Ripper.

I don't know. Bowie had an album called The Lodger. Wow. I love that album. Yeah, he had that song where he coughed up a kernel of corn that was lodged to the back of his throat. Can you imagine being fucking your roommate, Phil? Yeah.

You know, you're sitting on the living room surrounded by dog shit, and Bob comes in and be like, this is, I think his name is Trigger. It's like a line of kids coming in, meanwhile you're just being like, hey, Bob, could you not eat my groceries when I put them in there because I label them with a Phil, if you would. Those are my protein pancakes. Oh, my goodness. Another young man named Jeff Marcus said his brother, Jeb, was once almost tied up by Bridella and Bridella's car.

In other words, Bob Bridella was escalating and experimenting to see what he could get away with. And as we said, Bob Bridella went against type when it came to choosing victims, and his first murder victim was someone he actually knew. His name was Jerry Howell, and he was the son of one of Bob's fellow flea marketeers. Bob knew this guy's father for fucking years. And you brought up a good point, Marcus, when we were talking about how it's kind of the inverse of the normal serial killer move, like what happened with Israel Keys, where

a lot of times they start with total strangers and they start turning towards the people they know because their berserker modes on the inside is turning up the heat and they're trying to get at whoever is easy for them. They're also trying to turn up the danger a little bit. Let me see. Because if you kill someone you know and get away with it, you get a little bit more of a jolt than you do with killing a stranger. All right.

Yeah, and dog meets you now. What? What? What was that? What was that? Now, Jerry certainly falls in line with the rest of Bob's victims when it comes to a criminal record. And Jerry was by no means a bad guy.

He'd really only gotten in trouble for fighting and stealing lawnmowers. But since Jerry needed legal help from time to time, Bob gained control. And eventually, the two started sleeping together. Now, as it goes time and again with serial killers, Bob's first murder was ostensibly an accident. Bob claims that the whole thing started when Jerry didn't want to have sex one night. So Bob drugged him to get his way. Yeah, like an accident.

It doesn't really seem like an accident to me, but OK. No. Well, the drugging is not an accident, but the death, as we'll see, quite possibly could have been. OK. According to Bob, Jerry's rejection had become a recurring issue. And Bob is starting to get frustrated. So he filled Jerry with volume, animal tranquilizers, and liquor before tying him down and raping

him. But once Jerry was tied down, Pradella found that he loved being in absolute control. And in order to gain even more control, Bob started taking meticulous notes of every single thing he did to Jerry. And I believe Bob's notes that become more and more ordinate as they go, they are a way of him remembering every single thing that happened during these encounters as a way to like a methadone for after this, where he started jerking off just looking at the notes.

And I mean, that's because these guys are total pussies, right? Bob Pradella can't handle anybody telling him no because it's whole like he just believes he's better than anybody else in the universe. So he's like, well, how could you possibly reject him? And then the idea of just being it being easy once he's fucking out. Besides carefully noting what drug he injected into howl and how much each dose was, Pradella also noted every time he sodomized Jerry, as well as the position that he did it in, including FF for frontfuck or BF for buttfuck.

Oh. I mean, I don't know how to react, it is weird, it is weird, I'm going to say that. Yeah. A lot of times I use BF for best friend. Yeah, sometimes. BFF, if we're going to be friends for a long time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yep. Yep. I've got another good work here at the precinct in Kansas City. Wow. But the weirdest was CF. Okay, hold on a second. CF. CF.

We got frontfuck, we got buttfuck. Chokefuck. No. Oh, and that's actually a very good guess. Carrotfuck. Yeah. What was that? Carrotfuck.

Yeah. It's exactly what it sounds like. Bob. Yeah, vegetables into this, speaking of Seinfeld, that's like what, when Costanza tries to eat the sandwich in bed, he's bringing food into bed, it's just like that fucking episode of Seinfeld. I don't know, I'm just trying to fill the airwaves. Yeah, I mean, he sodomized each and every one of his victims with vegetables, either

carrots or cucumbers, for reasons known only to him. And the only way we would know if it's a carrot or a cucumber is that he took pictures, Polaroids, every single time he did it. This is a rare first. We've been doing this show for almost 10 years. Yeah. And then we have never heard of this before. This is a first.

Wow, this is, so this is, he's a strange guy. A strange guy. Yeah, that's a strange guy. Yeah, all right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Odd duck. I am just trying to absorb it. I just didn't know we were going to be talking about cucumber fox, carrot fox.

But concerning the situation with Jerry that Bob found himself in, he said this. I think from the point that I tied him up on, I was viewing the situation as irreversible. What was I to do? Untie him, let him get up, either let him go willingly or have him escape. And at this point, I guess I just figured that I had burned my bridges. And this is what was going on, and I stayed involved with the situation. Jerry Howell endured 28 hours of torture at the hands of Bob Berdella before he finally died, either from an overdose from all the medication or from exfixiating because the

gag in his mouth blocked the vomit coming up from his throat. But according to Berdella, none of this was torture. According to him, the real torture wouldn't start until victims three or four. But no matter what he called his actions in the lead up to Jerry's death, Berdella now had to get rid of a body. So he dragged the body down to the basement, hung it upside down from a beam, and took a few polaroids before getting to work. First he situated a large cooking pot under Howell's head and began draining blood from

the body through incisions on the jugular vein. He then left the body draining while he went to work that Saturday, Saturday's big flea market day. Can't miss that. Big day. Oh yeah, these human skulls aren't gonna sell themselves, so I better get over there immediately. That evening, he came back home, put on his cook's apron, and went down to the basement to finish the job.

To cut through the joints, he used butcher knives. But when it came time to cut through the spine, Berdella used a chainsaw to remove the head. He's like American Fatso instead of American Psycho. Isn't that nice? Where are the roommates? Where are they just there, just being like, oh, Bob's in the basement, chainsaw on a Christmas tree again. They're doing the powerful roommate horse blinders, like the power of a roommate's horse blinders

cannot ever be insurmounted, you never count on a roommate to completely ignore what's happening upstairs because you don't want to know. Phil is, God knows what Phil's trying to do. He's got his synthesizer band, Gary Juman, it's all fun, it's like a full Hanukkah theme synthesizer band that he's working on. He's got three or four other gigs going, like he's just trying to kind of make it go and he hears him going, oh, this is just, you wouldn't believe how difficult it is to remove a human head.

I just, I'm sorry about the noise, him coming in with a fucking chainsaw covered in blood just being like, do you remember the guy I brought up here? He was kind of funny, right, like he's trying to be like, do you think he liked me? And Phil is just staring at Mario Kart, just like playing Mario Kart, just trying to get through Saturday. Oh my God. Well, when Bob Riddella committed murders, no one was ever living with him. There was a, because people would usually only last like maybe a month or two before

they were like, fuck this, I can't deal with this guy, I can't deal with this house, I'm out of here. And a lot of the people coming in and out, they were drifters as well. They were usually either on drugs or bad alcoholics, and so they would move on. Or Bob would kick him out just for not being lazy and not paying rent. Or he'd fucking kill him. Sometimes they were the roommate. Now, once Bob was done, he wrapped the body parts in newspaper, stuffed them in trash

bags, stuffed those in empty dog food bags, and finally put all of it in the four big trash bags. He then left what used to be Jerry Howell on the sidewalk for the Monday morning garbage pickup. Garbage men are on the front lines of a lot. They see a lot of things that we pretend to throw away. Yeah. Oh no, this is his M.O.

We're going to find out that he used, what we pay our good tax money for, he used that garbage system to get rid of all of his victims. He just tossed them in the garbage and the garbage men just take it. And because if you do it, I guess, I mean this is brutal even say this out loud, but if you do it fast enough, then they don't begin to smell yet, then they kind of just seems like it's big bags of meat, which is, ugh, you know, if you're throwing up bags of meat, I'd like to meet that millionaire, because I try to keep as many, I keep meat for as long as possible.

I use the meat. Yeah. You have a very poor man's vision of what wealth is, but by meat, by meat, and I'm going to throw it away. I could throw away a hundred pounds of meat this week, I'm going to say pretty good. How much meat you've drawn away, oh, this is good ass gray meat. Oh my God, he might as well just put the body in a cardboard box and wrote the word free on it.

Yeah. Like this is very dangerous. Yeah. But I'm surprised he's so brave with the first murder to just be like, yeah, let's put it on the curb. Yeah. I think he's ignorant more than anything. And if you look at Luca Magnata, I watched the documentary series at Netflix last night,

he did the same shit where it was first murder and he left the body in a very, very conspicuous place. And it's mostly, I think, God of just no practice, no clue what they're doing. But on the other hand, that wasn't what got him caught, he did it six times and it worked six fucking times. So who's the dummy now? Who's the dummy now? It's always a great final statement before you're shot by the cops.

Who's the dummy now? Booge, booge. Now, when the Howell family realized that Jerry had gone missing, they immediately suspected Bob Burdella because Jerry had been in and out of Bob's life, they've been having fights, they've been having tiffs and Bob Burdella was a creepy fucking guy. He's been trying to buy their friend for a month. But even though Paul Howell told cops that Bob Burdella murdered my son, cops did fucking nothing.

I'm like, no, don't have enough evidence. So if you find some evidence, if you find something, then let us know, if not, he'll show up eventually. Isn't that your job, officer? Aren't you supposed to find the evidence? No, no, no, I oversee when citizens do investigations. I oversee within a night, I have a gun. But I didn't go to school or anything to find evidence.

I don't know forensics. You better get smart real quick, all I got is a gun. Did you see that fucking in the Satanism thing with Geraldo, with the father of this young man? Yeah. When he does it in the most brutal way possible, he just grabs the father by the shoulder and he's like, how does it feel? Your son was chopped up and left in the garbage and the father is just like, not good.

I don't feel great. God, Geraldo. He's the fucking worst. The whole thing, it's on YouTube in seven parts, I think, like seven, 15, 10, 15 minute parts. It's worth watching. I mean, it is the trashiest fucking, it's trashier than the Bob Bridella documentary. But Geraldo did break that scandal when it came to the facility.

The Cropsey. Yeah, yeah, yeah, out in Staten Island. That was the one good thing he did. That was one, I'm just saying, it's one good thing. Now, at first, Bob Bridella said that he was sickened by what he'd done when it came to Jerry Howell and the pictures in the notes stayed hidden for months. But slowly, Bob started taking him out to sneak a peek and before he knew it, he was masturbating to both the pictures and the notes.

He made his own porn. Yeah. Wow. Yes. I mean, this is something that serial killers do. BTK made his own pornography. He called it his slick ads. That's right.

Yeah, because he would take laundry ads and he would draw the ropes and all that shit over him, which is very strange because it's a way to even make pornography involuntary, whereas these women did not sign up to be bondage models, but BTK made them bondage models. What a douchebag. You're right. I am right on that, yeah. Well, after an appropriate cooling off period, Bob Bridella killed again.

On April 12th, 1985, about nine months after the murder of Paul Howell, Bridella murdered a man named Robert Sheldon. Sheldon was a heavy drinker and had been in and out of Bridella's house for months by the time Bob had decided to kill him. The motivation, Bob said, was that he was annoyed. Honestly, God damn it, his name is Sheldon. No, I'm just thinking of Big Bang Theory. I know.

I can't. I hate the fact that he has to tell me he's joking by saying Bezinga. He furiates me. Life from your grave. Life from your grave. So on April 12th, Bridella injected his victim multiple times while Sheldon was drunk, but the dude's tolerance was so high that all of this shit only made him a little stumbly. So this was also like the morphine, all the other drugs and stuff?

It wasn't morphine. I mean, I can't remember the name, like sometimes it was ketamine or various other animal tranquilizers that he just fucking happened to get a hold of. Well, Bob decided to wait and two days later gave Sheldon a pill that had the equivalent of five volumes in the capsule. Why are they selling these? He's getting them through prescriptions, he's getting them through doctors. He's getting all these volumes through doctors.

And once Sheldon was unconscious, Bridella took off his pants, tied his legs together at the ankles, and carried him up to the third floor bedroom. Once there, Bob raped him and injected drain cleaner into Sheldon's left eye to permanently blind him, which made him easier to control. After that, Bridella took a hot needle and burned the word hot into Sheldon's back. But all he was doing there, he said, was putting his mark on the victim. And the word itself was not significant. After that, he gave Sheldon a soap and water enema and sodomized him with a carrot, taking

Polaroids the whole time. What the fuck? He then decided to take even more control, using a caulking gun to fill up Sheldon's ears to render him completely deaf. Then, Bob went to sleep and left him there, tied up. Still alive. Oh, very much still alive. Oh my God.

In a way, this is more of a pondering thing. Isn't it weird that it's almost vaguely childish, that the experiments are very like a kid would with a toy, where he has this body and then he's kind of doing shit, because it did seem to be, he had like a plan, like he came up with, I want to do this, this, this, and this. These are things that I'm either extensively fantasizing about, right, where he's building the story in his own mind, almost like a, it is an art project to him. Like he thinks like we're going to do all this stuff, but it's also weirdly like handling a dog, where he wants to, I don't know where does the plan begin and where is he just fucking

riffing? I don't know if there was ever a plan. Not really. The plan that he had was he always had penicillin on hand, because all of this torture and shit that he was doing to him, a lot of times infections would set in, they'd get fevers, so he would inject them with penicillin to keep them alive a little bit longer. Because for him, the kill was not the point. Like the, it was all about the process, the kill he couldn't give a shit about.

This is disgusting, but did he eat the vegetables? Did he like eat the carrot? Was that like part of the- You know what? He didn't make that note. He didn't note it. He didn't make that note. Okay.

Well the next morning, Bridella brought out a series of hypodermic needles and experimented with acupuncture to see which spots could produce the most pain. Then it was off to the flea market for a hard day's work. Gotta move these skulls, gotta move the, there's so many Johnny Depp candles that need to be sold. Yeah, absolutely. And when he got home, he returned to the needles, still protruding from Sheldon's skin, because he didn't take them out.

He left them in there all fucking day. And he hooked the needles up to an electric transformer and shocked Sheldon again and again and again. And the whole time, Sheldon's hands were bound with piano wire so tightly that it probably would have caused permanent nerve damage, which would have rendered Sheldon's hands absolutely useless. And Bob says the reason why he killed Sheldon was because he came home one day from the flea market to find the aforementioned Philip Bukovic up on the roof doing some work he

was supposed to have done months earlier. Oh, we're gonna fight about this now? We're gonna fight on this now that I'm actually doing the work? It just feels like if you had a sense of urgency about the work that we would not have been in this situation right now where you're on the roof and I have a man tied up on my bed in the attic. What? What?

What? Bob? It's a metaphor. You know it's a metaphor. It's about I have a lot of things, I've got a lot of irons and a fire. So get up there and finish the work, G.D. Phil, what do I gotta say here? Wow.

To get to motivate you. Well, Bob's logic was that Bukovic was probably gonna become an in and out of the house to use the bathroom while he was working on the roof. Sure. And it was only a matter of time before he accidentally either stumbled upon or heard Sheldon tied up in Bob's bed. So with Bukovic up on the roof, Pradella went inside, tied a plastic bag over Sheldon's head and suffocated him.

Like I said, the kills weren't important. It was just like, okay, now I gotta get rid of this one. Right. And Bukovic hung around for another hour and a half having no idea what was going on inside. This is scary. Yeah. That's not scary. You never know what's coming up.

It's terrifying. Yeah. It's terrifying. It's scary to have roommates. Yeah. But on the left, Pradella dragged the body down to the third floor bathroom, used a boning knife to amputate the arms and legs, and left the rest of the body in the bathtub to finish up the next day.

Once daylight came, Bob used the chainsaw to remove Sheldon's head, which got stashed in the freezer. After a couple days, Bob removed it and buried it in his backyard. He wanted the skull. That's what you do with, if you have, speaking as a bone man, if you have the head of an animal and you want the skull, the best thing to do to remove all the flesh and all the dead, get everything decomposed, you just bury it underground. You just leave it there.

Do you think that this is something that our audience needed to know? Do you really believe that anyone listening needs to know how to get a skull, transform a head into a skull? Well, technically, it's the most constructive thing we've learned today. I'm upset that I know it. I didn't know that, but that's what you did to make sure it was super clean. I think that it's appropriate that it's the most goth way possible. Yeah.

So all the bones eat it. The most goth way possible is if you get the beetles or the ants, is that you get the head, you put it in a box with these special ants or these special beetles that you can order online, you put them in the box and then the beetles and the ants will pick the head clean of all the flesh. Uh, yeah. I'm looking for those Dahmer ants. They're like, they like human skulls and human meat.

Well, what do you do with the beetles then when they've gotten the taste for human flesh? You got to burn those beetles. You got to get rid of that box of beetles, right? Oh, right. Absolutely. You could do whatever you want with the beetles. There's no laws against what you can do with the beetles. They're going to ramp it all over your toes.

They're going to ramp it all over your toes. You got your beautiful wife in the other room while you've got a, you've got a fish tank filled with beetles absolutely jam-packed with human flesh. Now ready for more. No, it's a, when did it come into me having a human head that did not have the flesh removed left? I'm not talking about humans. I'm talking about farm animals.

I'm talking about, you know, dead bodies that you find on the ranch. Of course. No, I understand. Definitely not, it's never a thing called escalation. I've never heard of that in our years of studdling, of studying serial killers. Well, since it wasn't trash day just yet, going back to the Bridella story. Since it wasn't trash day, Bridella stuffed the rest of the body parts into bags and stored them in the basement where it was a little cooler, lest the smell of decomposition overtake

the home. And then once Monday morning came, because Monday morning's trash day, the body was set out on the curb and the garbage man took it away completely oblivious to what was inside. From the sounds of it, decomposition might make the house smell better to cover up all the dog shit. That's an interesting question. Would I rather smell dog shit or rotting flesh? I didn't even ask that question.

What is going on? Oh no, and dog shit is the answer I have to say in this weird scenario. It is definitely very controversial Harry Potter jellybean flavors that I was honestly very concerned about. Now as we've mentioned a few times, Bob took Polaroids at every stage of his process. From the sex to the electrodes to the vegetables to the postmortem, Bob had records of everything. And when the cops finally raided Bob's house, they found over 300 Polaroids under his mattress. The problem the cops had, though, was that Burdela's face wasn't in any of the pictures.

Oh my God! But you know what? What are the odds? Like, what? Oh my goodness! Why are these cops working for him? How are they going? Okay, whatever.

Well, once Bob got captured, the cops were thorough. All they had in these pictures, they had an arm, they had a leg, sometimes a big belly, which left it wide open for the defense to say, you know what, maybe someone else took these pictures. Look under your bed right now. Maybe have a bunch of Polaroids, have a bunch of decomposing bodies, you're a serial killer. I don't know, man. Sometimes they are, it's all makeup.

If you work in the FX community, a lot of times it's makeup. But with Bob Burdela, they were really trying to pin him down, because I was, I read an article from 1988 in the New York Times that talked about the defense's whole thing, being like, anybody's penis or belly could have been in those pictures. My client, yes, he is shaped like a pear with a silly mustache and funny glasses, but just because his very unique sensual body I might have, it doesn't mean that he is, in fact, well, actually, you know what, I'm looking at his belly right now, it's actually completely exact like this.

There you go. So to cover all their bases, the Kansas City police stripped Burdela naked and made him recreate the positions in the photos so they could be sent to the FBI for matching analysis. Okay. Which side do you want? Which side's my good side? You guys got proper lights to get my undercarriage? It's just the area where my belly folds over my penis area, and when you flip it open,

you can see the weird dark creases underneath in the between. It's a rough day to be in the FBI, though. You just got a box sent to your office and be like, hey, Rua, you're on it this week. All right. During this process, the cops would study each photo, then place Burdela's arm or leg in the same position and snap a comparison photo. But what? Okay.

And it just seems like they're working hard, not smart. I'm just going to say that. They're doing the last podcast way of police work, where you're just working way too hard. They even took pictures from his chest. They're looking down at his big, fairy belly. Yep. You should see my phone is full of them. There's so many that you could pick.

There's just one copy, like, sometimes it's good to be an officer of the law. Get over here, big boy. But you know that Burdela was loving this shit. Yeah. Oh. One time, they made him sit naked on a stool with his legs spread apart to recreate the position he'd take during anal sex. Oh, yeah, man.

Okay. Seriously. Was J. Edgar Hoover still in charge of the FBI? This just seems like they are using these photos for themselves. They had to match all the photos. They had to be thorough. This is right here, as I call my char-bootery. As you can see, you can see right here, I'm doing the full, yes, Gloria Gaynor, I am just

all out there for everyone to see. Can you see how the shadows affect my balls? They're all just staring at it, just hard-eyed FBI guys. Yeah, show more of your asshole. Yeah. It sounds like an American, American, oh my goodness, what is it, American Eagle? American Eagle. American Express photo shoot, American.

American Apparel. Oh, yes. American Apparel photo shoot. There we go. I don't shop there. They don't have any clothes. And their extra-larges are smalls. Uh-huh.

I hate American Apparel. It's true. They are very small. It's out of fucking business because the owner was a pedophile. Oh, yeah. Big surprise. Look, Shocker, he makes children's clothes for adults. In another photo, they had Berdella grab a cop's gloved finger to simulate the angle

of someone shoving an object into another person. Hey, watch this, Danny. When he grabs my finger, I'm gonna fart. Oh, man, I shit. Some days, it's great to be an officer of the law. In these photos, they found weren't just a Berdella's murder victims. One guy identified in the photos as Homer Roloff said he met Bob at the flea market and would sometimes do work in exchange for Valium's.

Once Berdella asked Roloff to climb a ladder to do a little work on the roof, but Roloff refused because he was afraid he'd fall and die. To this, Berdella said, quote, well, I know how to get rid of the parts. I'm a funny guy. Everybody loves me. I'm a life of a party. Yeah, you laugh. Laugh.

Laugh. Laugh. Laugh. Because everyone just laughed it off, Bob Berdella murdered again just two months after he killed Robert Sheldon. Comedy was different in the 80s. You think? Because John Wayne Casey was the same way.

You're like, awful. This victim's name was Mark Wallace, and he'd previously helped Bob with some yard work. Now, Wallace was going through a hard time. He'd recently been dishonorably discharged from the Marines, and he developed a hard drinking problem. And when a thunderstorm came during a bad drunk in June of 1985, Wallace hid out in Berdella's tool shed. So when Berdella's dog started going nuts, Bob checked out the shed and found Wallace

hiding inside. Did Berdella know this guy? Yeah. Oh, he did. So the guy was like, I'm going to go hide out in Bob's place. Yeah. Okay. So it wasn't just a random coincidence, because that would have been a message from God in

the mind of Bob. Just be like, God wants me to kill again. They just show up now. He knew this guy. Okay. And after bringing him inside the house and talking to him for about an hour, Berdella injected Wallace with a tranquilizer at Wallace's request. Berdella then kept him drugged, and eventually took him up to the upstairs bedroom, tied

him up, and began the whole process anew. This time, Bob connected alligator clips to electrodes and attached the clips to Wallace's genitals. So he just, what do you like? He liked to watch him shake. He liked to watch him in pain. Yep. He liked to watch him scream.

He liked to watch him in pain. And it also kept him awake. It reminds me a bit of the grim sleeper as well. Yeah. Because he loved the torture. Mm-hmm. Marcefully, though, Wallace's ordeal was the shortest of all, because Berdella had pumped so many drugs into his system so fast, Wallace, like Berdella's first victim, asphyxiated

on his own vomit. But the problem was, Sunday night, trash collections come in Monday morning. You got to get this done. Yep. So instead of taking his time like he had before, Berdella pulled an all-nighter and dismembered the body in time for the Monday morning pickup. And that's where we'll pick back up for part two of Bob Berdella. Oh my, honestly, this guy, we have, I don't know what kind of weird netherworld you guys

are living in right now, but these past few killers that we've been talking about, you're right, this is like, this is a six man of the serial killer squad. This guy, uh... Yeah, he's, you know what? Like Berdella pulling an all-nighter and dismembering the body in time for a Monday morning pickup, you too can grab last minute Christmas gifts if you go into the last podcast of the time. Are you going to plug our merch page like this? This is how you're going to plug our new merch page?

I think it's important, it's a holiday season. Get tickets for the last book tour on the left. We're going to 19 cities in 30 days. Yeah, that's a great, great idea. It's big for us. It's a huge thing. I think we are, we are so excited, last book tour on the left all throughout all of April. Yeah, all of April.

We are super excited. We're going to be on the road. Tickets are on sale today. Go to lastpodcastontheleft.com to see all the dates we're going to. Let's see here, this is going to be from April 7th to about May 3rd. Are you going to list all 19? Let me see if I can do it in one breath. Okay.

All right. New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Richmond, Durham, Atlanta, Chicago, Nashville, St. Louis, Houston, Austin, Dallas, Lubbock, Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. You did it. You did it. Yeah, we're going to Lubbock. I am so excited to be in the land that built Marcus Parks.

We're going to go digging. We're going to go, let's bury a cow skull, we can go bury cow skulls. Yeah, this is the hometown show. So guys, I really fought for us to come to Lubbock on this tour and, you know, because I wanted to put my money where my mouth was all those years ago talking about how no one ever comes to Lubbock. So, you know, I wanted to come to Lubbock to, you know, do a show so we could play for all the people that live in New Mexico and Oklahoma and all the small towns that are

around Lubbock, Texas. So come on out, support, please support that show. It's going to mean the world to me if you guys come out to that one. We are so excited to be there, absolutely. And Marcus did physically fight both Henry and I to get us to Lubbock, which is very exciting. I appreciate it. Come out this Saturday, December 21st because Ed Larson and I had Classy Night Out in the

Pac Theater. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. It's 9 p.m. It's free, but donations are accepted. We're going to have a lot of fun joking around. I'd like to give another special thank out and a shout out to French Quarter Phantoms. They gave us a fucking huge hookup and they were, I mean, honestly, one of the best ghost tours I've ever taken. I would say it was the best ghost tour I've ever been on.

It was fantastic. If you're New Orleans, go to French Quarter Phantoms, they're the fucking best. And thanks to everyone who came out to our live performance, our live taping of this year's special in, of course, beautiful New Orleans. You guys could not have been sweeter and better and we were just so thrilled to be celebrating our last couple of shows with all y'all in New Orleans and we all, I think all three of us fell in love. Beautiful place.

Just a gorgeous bunch of people and great culture, great food, great drink. Loved it. It was so much fun, man, honestly, and I can't wait to go back. The audiences could not have been better and kinder and warmer. This is our last show before LPN is going to take a break for Christmas for the holidays. And so I just want to say, guys, fucking do your best to be good to humankind. Don't be like Bob Bridella, let him go. I'm going to say right now, if you have a captive in your attic, just for Christmas,

let him go. Let him go. There you go. Let him go. Just know that give one back. See, this is what I've been talking about. He's in the Christmas spirit. Yeah.

This is ridiculous. Usually he'd be like, keep him longer. Drug him, drug him. But now he's like, let them go. Isn't that nice, Henry? See, I'm growing. You really are growing. You really are growing.

Yeah. You really are. And so we will be off. The network will be dark the 21st through the 30th. But then all the shows that you love will be back in your life. Yeah. We'll be back with part two of Bob Bridella on January 3rd. So thank you all very much for a fantastic year.

This has been amazing. It's been ridiculous. We've been able to tour the entire fucking world. We did what? Seven countries this year. We did 51 live shows over the course of 2019. This is our book. 2020 is going to be fucking great.

This is going to be one of the rare years where New Year's I'm actually going to. I'm going to try to remember everything that we did this year. I was trying to unpack it. I was talking to Burke yesterday. I was like, Australia, the UK, I mean this whole year was just so insane. And of course. And it's meant. Yes.

It's meant so much to us because this year we went through the, honestly, the highest highs and lowest lows that we've ever had. We've lost KB this year. January 22nd. That was the kickoff of the year. That was the day that we found out Kevin had passed. And I just, you guys have been there for all of it. You guys have supported us and it's meant so much.

And we can't wait to start 2020 hardcore with Bob Bridella part two. And again, already ramping up. We have so many fucking fun ass topics coming up. Like I am, I think I'm more excited for 2020 in terms of topics than I've been not in a long time, but it's like we have stuff that's like lined up that we've been kind of waiting on. Yeah. And I'm really, really excited to get down the guts of it.

Absolutely. A lot of mind blowing subjects for y'all coming in January or coming in 2020. Yeah, we've got actually, we've got every episode until mid April planned out already for 2020. We're going to be doing some shit that people have been asking us to do for forever. We're going to be redoing some things that we tried in the early days, but didn't quite pull off. We're going to be doing them proper.

And also, if you guys are coming out to one of our live shows for the book tour in April, remember that you can pre-order a signed copy of the book when you buy your ticket. Yep. Absolutely. I mean, we're right now in the process of signing 16,000 pages, but we, yeah, we'd love for you guys, when you come out to the show, we'd love for you to buy our book as well to, you know, to pre-order the book. That'd be fantastic.

That's it. It's going to mean the world for us for y'all to read this thing. Well, we wanted to get it on the New York Times bestseller list, and we're not doing it the fake way like all those other books that are sold like, you name it, when it comes to, when I worked over at Fox News, they would just get piles and piles and piles of books and boxes and boxes, and then they'd be like, we bought in bulk, and then they can be on the New York Times bestseller list. That's how they cheat.

That's how they scam the system. But as always, we're doing it the right way, the organic way, to the best of our abilities. So please get this book, because honestly, Henry and I can attest Marcus Parks, he blew his, he damn near blew his brains out working on this damn thing. Yes. And I want you to support his fucking ass. And also, because it counts when you get the book, the pre-order this way. Yes.

The pre-ordered back of the day when they first kind of came out, we don't want to thank you for your support, but they don't, it doesn't count now, it technically counts, unfortunately. Unfortunately. So if you can, fucking hit it, that would be incredible. Absolutely. We also want to thank, and you'll see this in the book, amazing artist, Tom Neely. Tom Neely fucking killed it. So good.

Incredible art. So good. You guys are going to love this book. We're so proud of it. It's been a labor of love and awesome. All right, y'all, we'll have you. One more, one last little shout out. If you're looking for, I'm not just saying this as a fucking help for you, if you're

looking for a fun watch this Christmas, and you're just looking for something that may be either upset the family or something your family would love, check out Joe Bob Briggs, Christmas special on Shudder. He just did Silent Night, Deadly Night 2, and it is so worth it. It is one of the best, bad, good movies I've seen in a long time. It's been so long since I've seen it, and it is so worth it if we just fucking laughed our asses off while we were watching it last night. Joe Bob Briggs.

If you want to listen to the interview we did with Joe Bob, you can give to our Patreon and then that interview is there along with many, many other interviews. All right, everyone. Thank you all so much for listening. Thanks for supporting us this year. Have a wonderful holiday, whatever you're celebrating. Try to get along with people as much as you can. And if you're in a fight, you know what you do?

Just get up there and leave. Dizzy, you leave the room. You leave the room. Go get some seafood somewhere or something. It's not worth it. Okay, everyone. Hail yourselves. Hail Satan.

Maghustalations and meow, meow, meow, and we're in soft pants today. You are. What does that mean? Soft pants. They're sweatpants. Athleisure. This show is made possible by listeners like you. Thanks to our ad sponsors, you can support our shows by supporting them.

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