RedHanded - Episode 219 - Halloween Special Part 2 - The Boogyman and the Boy in the Attic

Episode Date: October 28, 2021

This week we're bringing you part two of our annual Halloween story-swap. We've got two terrifying tales of true crime Halloween-horror including Thailand's real-life answer to The Boogyman..., and the infamous case of Ireland's "Boy in the Attic". Become a patron: Patreon Order a copy of the book here (US & Canada): Order on Wellesley Books Order on Amazon.com Order a copy of the book here (UK, Ireland, Europe, NZ, Aus): Order on Amazon.co.uk Order on Foyles Follow us on social media: Instagram Twitter Visit our website: Website Contact us: Contact See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hannah.
Starting point is 00:00:38 I'm Saruti. And welcome to part two of 2021's Halloween special, Insert Noises. Can I insert a noise? I don't know what it's going to be. I mean, press it. Oh, it just keeps playing until you press the button again. I see. No, it is.
Starting point is 00:00:58 Oh, does it? I think we might have some. Oh, my God. What is this? Witchcraft. We got sent. sent but first let's start with um we have obviously started a brand new show called sinister societies with the lovely spotify and podcast and it's out every single tuesday exclusively on spotify hannah and i talk about all sorts of cults secret societies weird organizations that are up to no good, stealing your money, pretending to be legit businesses when they are in fact cult.
Starting point is 00:01:26 Yeah, yeah. Or unsuccessful actors. There's a lot of that. There's a lot of that kicking about. And the reason we have sound effects as bizarre and out of place as they may have just sounded, because we've never pressed those buttons before, on this fantastic new audio interface that Spotify sent us,
Starting point is 00:01:42 which is very lovely of them. Thank you, Spotify. So thank you. And thank you to everyone who has been listening to Cine Societies already. If you haven't, go check it out. Go and check it out. We are coming to you from the past. As you are listening to this, we will probably be on our way to Glasgow for our live show,
Starting point is 00:02:01 our live tour, the empty-handed tour. I can say that now because we've released the tour art and if you have seen it already thank you very much if you're going to see it in the future congratulations you'll have a great time and with that i don't think we've got anything else to fucking say so i think it's my turn to go first oh the only thing i have to say it's always one it's always one i'm sorry is that if you weren't able to come on tour and you're like i'd quite like some tour merch. Or I'd love some merch that says No Fuck Boys on it because it is, of course, the empty-handed tour.
Starting point is 00:02:30 If you would like some of that, tour merch and the No Fuck Boys merch is now available on redhandedshop.com for all of your merchy needs. Yeah, so head on over, have a quick look at it. The No Fuck Boys jumper is all I wear now because everyone needs to know. And we also have a No Fuck Boys beanie. We've've got no fuck boys mug there's loads of stuff you can find fucking heaps and the best thing about the no fuck boys jumper in my opinion is that the font is quite small so people have to sort of squint to read it oh yeah and then they realize what it says and then they're like yeah yeah bitch it's because it's very wearable it's very wearable we kept that in mind because some of you were like stop putting swear words on your merch we can't help it so yeah go check it out there is as many
Starting point is 00:03:09 fuck boy merch variations as there are fuck boys out there so enjoy it and now let's get on with today's story swap okay mine is kids again uh-oh so i'm sorry actually you know what no i am i am sorry about it but mine is also okay well it, you know what you're in for, guys. What did you think this was going to be? A nice story about a kitten? Preparations, please. So, I am taking us to Thailand. And this is another one that's been sat on my case list for many, many moons.
Starting point is 00:03:41 It's kind of like, well, it's not kind of like. It's exactly a child eating boogeyman. It's kind of like well it's not kind of like it's exactly a child eating bogeyman it's kind of like exactly this yes it's exactly what it is every culture obviously has a bogeyman if you might have seen cropsy on netflix which is one of the ones that turns out to be true in costa rica they have they i mean they have a lot but like the one that i remember the most clearly it's always to do with if you're a bad man if you've done something if you have shame and guilt that follows you around you'll be walking home late at night you'll probably be drunk and you'll hear a chain behind you and it's a massive dog that's just stalking your guilt and there's also the classic one of um
Starting point is 00:04:20 the woman getting in your car and instead of you turn around and she's gone or she's a ghost in costa rica she's a big horse i'm sorry costa rica that's quite amusing it's like the one i've told probably on a halloween episode before that my grandma told me where they pick up the little kid put her on the back of their bike and then they turn around and she's a full-grown woman ah that's so scary they have a really similar one in costa rica also i used to like when i did like conversation classes, I obviously never did any work because I'm a terrible teacher. So I'd just be like, tell me some ghost stories.
Starting point is 00:04:54 So that's why I have a catalogue of Costa Rican ghost stories. I mean, that was five-year-old me with my grandma. And if you want to hear the little girl on the bicycle story, go back and listen to Halloween episodes of past. I've definitely spoken about it. I think in the Hindu one, maybe. Oh, yes. Oh, I sent you a very funny TikTok on Instagram. She doesn't check her Instagram, but I sent it. episodes have passed i've definitely spoken about it i think in the hindu one maybe oh yeah oh i sent you a very funny tiktok on instagram okay she doesn't check her instagram um but i sent it
Starting point is 00:05:09 watch it later okay i will um it's about tamils oh excellent um you're gonna hate it anyway so every culture has its version of the bogeyman sometimes they eat children sometimes they steal them sometimes they burn them do you know about shock-headed peter no so shock-headed peter is a german myth and what he does is he's got sticky up hair hence the name and if children suck their thumbs he comes in the nights and cuts their thumbs off with scissors bloody hell i know germany man that traumatic. Yeah. I've got even more for you. In Afghanistan, they call their bogeyman their Madar-i-Al, and it's a bogey lady who is a nocturnal hag who kills babies. Inuits have Lijurak.
Starting point is 00:05:56 I'm butchering these, but stay with me. Which is a shape-shifting creature who kidnaps children, I imagine, like the polar bear in The Terror. If you haven't watched The Terror, go. Go now. In Haiti, it's Met Minwe, who's a skinny man as tall as a house who roams the streets at night, eating anybody still outside. And in England, we've got fucking loads.
Starting point is 00:06:17 Depending on the region, there's Spring-Heeled Jack, Black Anise, Grindelow, there's bajillions. But in Thailand, there is only one bogeyman. There is only one name that sends shivers down the spines of children to this very day. And that name is... Seekway. And no, Seekway wasn't a shape-shifting horned demon with wings, or a hag hiding under children's beds,
Starting point is 00:06:40 or even a small boy with spiky hair and scissors. He was a man. And unlike the countless stories of bogeymen apart from Crop Street around the world, Siquet was very much real. And so were his victims. Born in 1927, he was the youngest of four in a farming family in the Shantou province of China. Siquet had a hard time of it as a kid. As I imagine, many children did in the 20s in China.
Starting point is 00:07:04 At least he was a boy. That's true at the age of 18 in 1945 he was drafted to fight under chairman mao against the imperial japanese forces when one day his unit found themselves trapped in a japanese siege for weeks on end i'm listening to hardcore history's pacific theater at the moment which is fascinating because obviously second world war education this country is very focused on the germans and what the british battle of britain the blitz blah blah blah so we don't learn anything about the american japanese fighting that all happened in the pacific and i was listening to it this morning on my way in and in like the pacific islands american
Starting point is 00:07:40 soldiers would sleep in foxholes in the night and the japanese soldiers would just creep up to their holes and scream at them or sometimes they would jump in the holes and gouge their eyes out with their thumbs oh my god and all of the other american soldiers are just lying there having to listen oh yeah and they're like marines in these like islands and dan carlin the hardcore history guy who's like he's interviewed a lot of marines and he was like the ones who will not talk all fought in the pacific so fascinating go and listen to the series it's amazing i mean hardcore history uh doesn't need my help but it's amazing i mean it is amazing and some truly truly scary stuff and you're right we don't learn any of that we just go egyptians tudors nazis yeah nazis bad churchill good and
Starting point is 00:08:20 then you find out when you're older that churchill a big racist. So he is fighting against the Japanese, which Dan Carlin has taught me was a very scary thing to be doing. I'm sorry, just about Churchill. Before people are like, well, he was just a man of his time. He caused and continued to propagate the famine in India that killed millions and millions of people, just saying. Oh yeah, he was really not very nice to Ireland either. Yeah, so it was when people are like, oh, well, you know,
Starting point is 00:08:43 he was just a man of his time. So obviously he was a bit of a right white supremacist yes and I will fight anyone on that so um rule Britannia I wonder what what is this button makes when your joke lands so well that your soundboard just makes you makes you realize what a piece of shit you are so sikwe is in this japanese siege for weeks and weeks on end and the food supplies ran out and with no other option sikwe's unit were forced to eat grass to escape the excruciating pain of starvation but the taste of grass not being a a cow, didn't agree with Seekway.
Starting point is 00:09:28 Instead, he decided to feed on the flesh of dead soldiers on the battlefield, and I will bet my bottom dollar he was not the only one. Oh, no. When you said grass, I was surprised. I was like, they were eating grass. I thought they were just eating each other. Oh, we got there quickly. Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:09:41 Just a salad starter and then a nice little human steak hey i would i'd eat you if you were dead i'd eat you would you if i had to survive and you were already dead um i feel like you go for the legs because i'm you know if i'm having chicken yeah i'm always a thigh girl i've got very muscular thighs yeah and you work out a lot you cycle a lot so i'd go for your thighs i think that's the best thing for you to do honestly I'm a dark meat bullshit dark meat girl not into the breasts
Starting point is 00:10:08 thigh straight to the thigh breasts are just sacks of yellow fat especially mine I'm holding them as I'm saying that she is
Starting point is 00:10:15 just to check that they are still there which unfortunately for me they are right so the following year on the 28th of December 1946 Sikwe snuck out
Starting point is 00:10:24 into a cargo ship and made his way to Thailand, where he picked up any odd job that he could, eventually ending up as a gardener a few hundred kilometres south of Bangkok. Occasionally, he'd travel up and down the country to other farms, picking up odd jobs, making some extra money. He was just a bit of a strange sort of drifty character, in both appearance and behaviour, and people around him weren't huge
Starting point is 00:10:45 fans he was an unsettling guy to be around but he was a weird guy not many friends bopping around from farm to farm about eight years he goes without without incident but we're not going to bore you with those eight years because that's not why we're here let's fast forward to early 1958 and the seaside town of non-fhrar. It was late on a Monday afternoon when a man named Niwa Bunyakan sent his eight-year-old son Sombun to go and buy some vegetables from the local Chinese gardener to use for dinner. Hours passed and as dusk approached Sombun still wasn't back. Concerned that his son had wandered off and got lost, Nawa asked his friends to help him search for Son Boon in the nearby woods. Time was of the essence. The sun was setting. It would be dark soon. It would be too dark to see
Starting point is 00:11:32 where they were going. But suddenly, as they made their way through the thick woodland, a smell filled the air. It smelled like a mix of beef frying and fatty pork on the grill, mixed together with some sort of pungent sulfurous smell like singed hair which is the worst smell in the world in my opinion it truly is no this is one of my favorite least favorite things we're going to the hairdresser really do they set your hair on fire it's all of the well apparently some of them do now there's like a whole trend where you can get your hair singed off i at the turkish barbers in harringay they burn men's ears i've seen they do they do do that it's just like when they use straighteners on
Starting point is 00:12:10 people's hair that's still a bit oh right right right yeah yeah stop it stop doing that immediately when i worked um i used to work at pole poach like a restaurant trade in london and in this sort of shift change between lunch and dinner service you put candles on the table to like signify the evening time and i had a tray full of candles and my hair wasn't as long as it is now but it was still you know reasonably long i must have been about 20 and i had this tray of lit candles and someone asked me something and i turned my head oh no and it just went oh my god stop that's like the real fucking horror story i mean obviously, obviously the children being murdered is awful. So my instant reaction was to just hit my head with my hands. And it went out and I didn't lose that much hair, but I stank.
Starting point is 00:12:54 To serve all these people their dinner being like, I'm sorry, I'm disgusting. Oh my God. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to light some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history. Presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, NASA embarks on an ambitious program to reinvent space exploration with the launch of its first reusable vehicle, the Space Shuttle. And in 1985, they announced they're sending teacher Krista McAuliffe into space
Starting point is 00:13:23 aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, along with six other astronauts. But less than two minutes after liftoff, the Challenger explodes. And in the tragedy's aftermath, investigators uncover a series of preventable failures by NASA and its contractors that led to the disaster. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Starting point is 00:13:42 Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery+. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it.
Starting point is 00:13:57 Lots of people don't. I didn't either, until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness. And inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts,
Starting point is 00:14:48 Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. In the near distance, Nawa could make out the flickering lights of a small fire and the silhouette of a man sat behind it. As he got closer, Nawa realised that the man was actually Sikwe, who was the Chinese gardener that he'd sent his son to just hours before. Nawa was relieved, hopefully he could give him some clues about where to find his samsambun, but the relief he felt quickly turned into horror as he looked down at the pile of brush Sikwe was burning, Sticking out from under the branches
Starting point is 00:15:25 and dried leaves was a leg. A child's leg. Well, of course it is. Good. He had found Sombun. So he's just walking through the woods looking and then he just finds this man
Starting point is 00:15:39 with a fire pot and his child's leg. Yeah, child's leg. For fuck's sake. And the air is filled with singed hair smoke. Good. Nawa, similarly to me, banging my own head,
Starting point is 00:15:51 began stamping out the fire and kicked the smouldering debris away, revealing the partially scorched and mutilated body of his eight-year-old son. Screaming, Nawa lunged at Sikwe, beating him bloody and pinned him down
Starting point is 00:16:03 as his friends went to alert the police. Over the next few days, the story of the gruesome killing made headlines around the country. Murder wasn't anything new in Thailand in 1958, but the details of this killing were unlike any other, and that was because Sikwe had disemboweled the eight-year-old Zambun. He started off by piercing his throat right underneath his Adam's apple and cutting straight through his trachea. Then he stuck a knife in his belly button and slit his abdomen wide open and he cut his abdomen all the way up to his throat.
Starting point is 00:16:35 Sequoia was looking for two specific organs. Oh, God. The heart and the liver. Why? Well, I'm going to tell you why. Why when cannibals are... Oh, sorry. Why when people are cannibals?
Starting point is 00:16:47 Do they always insist on eating the offal? We don't prioritize the offal of any other animal. No. No. But I feel like in Thailand and Vietnam, yeah, you're eating insides. In Korea, if you go and sit in a restaurant, there's like a little plate of like some pickles and some radishes and chicken bumholes. Well, you know what? Top to tail. I approve. If you're gonna
Starting point is 00:17:10 kill it, eat the whole thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And no one will tell you what it is until you've already eaten it. Sik-Hwae was looking for the heart and the liver, not because he was some sort of awful fanatic, but actually because a few years beforehand, Sekway had met a Chinese hermit. We don't have hermits anymore. You never hear about hermits. People self-identify as hermits. Yeah, I was going to say, I was like, do I throw myself under the bus?
Starting point is 00:17:31 I would say people, yeah, self-identify as hermits, especially the last two years. Yeah, but you live in a house. To be a hermit, you have to live in a cave, a wood. I see. You have to dress entirely in moss. Maybe you just don't hear about them because they're grossly underrepresented.
Starting point is 00:17:44 I mean, yeah, they're not going to tweet, being like, had a great fucking day at the waterfall. I demand more diversity for my kind in the popular media, please. So this Chinese hermit had no problem with how weird Sikwe was apparently because he gave him all of his knowledge and he actually told him how cannibalizing human organs can awaken a supernatural power within oh that'll do it sikwe only ever gave one interview to the media and in it he said that he believed truly and wholly that eating human livers and hearts would boost his vitality and lifespan so to fulfill this dream he'd taken somboons organs back to his home where he cleaned them and placed them in a bowl ready to cook them but then it dawned on him that this
Starting point is 00:18:25 was not ready steady cook time. This was go and get rid of the evidence time. You want to prioritize that. You don't want to be worrying about the evidence when you're cooking. You just want to focus on the cook. This is the thing. I think just clean as you go. It's good cooking tips. I agree. I clean as I go. I clean as I go because I'm just like, you don't want to get to the end. You've cooked a lovely meal and then you turn around and your kitchen looks like a bomb site slash your woods looks like a fucking abattoir for children. Clean as you go. So that is why his cleanup operation is why.
Starting point is 00:18:57 Si Kuei had been in the woods. He dragged the eight-year-old's body just out in the woods. But I imagine in rural Thailand, it's probably you can't see your hand in front of your face dark. And there he set it alight. During his police interrogation, which lasted a whopping 96 hours, Sikwe reluctantly told the officers every lurid detail of how he had killed Som Boon and feasted on his organs. But to their shock and their horror, his confession did not stop there. He went on to admit having killed and eaten five other children over the there. He went on to admit having killed and eaten five other children over the years. He said that he both enjoyed the taste and sought the magical
Starting point is 00:19:31 powers that their flesh could give to him. So here we are. The first one was on the 19th of May 1954. A 10-year-old girl named Nid Saifei was murdered in a village in the Tapsike district. Her body had been cut up and multiple organs were missing. No culprit was found at the time, until Sikwe confessed. Six months after that, on the 28th of November 1954, the body of a six-year-old girl named Mao Chu was discovered near the Suan Chitlada Railway Station in Bangkok. Her throat had been slit, but her heart and liver were left intact. Why did he leave the organs?
Starting point is 00:20:05 He didn't leave all of them. He took her genitals. Oh. Seekoe told Belize that he'd decided not to eat her heart because it was too small, and instead he just ate her esophagus. Moichu's mother had taken her out to enjoy a night at the opera, but after the show, Moichu had disappeared. Early the following morning, railway workers found her mutilated corpse. The only evidence of the scene was a single, bloodthirsty toe print.
Starting point is 00:20:28 Bloodthirsty toe print? I just made that word up. It was a single, it was just a bloody toe print. Just this toe print that's like trying to bite people. Dyslexia strikes again, my friends. I love it. I also keep trying to look down on my notes to see where we are. I was doing that last week.
Starting point is 00:20:43 And I'm like, what? What's that? What document have i got open actually sequa is a ravenous toe that hops around thailand leaving prints everywhere the toe print was no use to anybody bloodthirsty or not and the case was cold for three years until sequa's confession on the 31st of january 1958 and he said at night at around 8 p.m i the house alone. I went to look for a temple near Hua Lam Hong. I came across a young girl who was crying near the opera house. I went to comfort her and I asked her if she'd come and play with me and she agreed. So you didn't go to comfort her then? You went to eat her? Yeah, he went to eat her. He went to comfort himself. He went to go and give
Starting point is 00:21:18 himself magical powers. The girl complained that she was sleepy, so I carried her through the Hualampong station to Rongmong Road and across the Kasatsuk Bridge. I walked until the Mahanak intersection and then along the railway for about 300 steps. I laid the girl down and tried to wake her, and then I drew a six-inch long folding knife. I held the girl's body down, I covered her mouth with my left hand and stabbed her with my right. I stabbed her neck beneath her Adam's apple and the girl started crying. She wore a white shirt that I cut open. Then I cut her from navel to throat the same way I did to Sombun in Raiyong. Then I cut out her genitals, throwing half away and then keeping the other half in my pocket. Your pocket? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:22:06 He came out with a knife, but he didn't come out with, like, a bag. Carry bag, Ziploc, sandwich bag. Bag for life. But after that, he was done here. He went back home. Oh. Still more, I'm afraid. After the killing of Mu Chu, it was another six months until Si Kuei would kill again. On the 22nd of June, 1955, it was a seven-year-old kid this time,
Starting point is 00:22:25 found mutilated and raped in the district of Samur Yot. And this was the first of his crimes that showed any sort of sexual motivation. I was going to say. So it's the first time there's a sexual assault involved. I mean, yes, but also I think you could argue stealing an eight-year-old girl's genitals is probably sexually motivated also.
Starting point is 00:22:44 I mean, maybe that's what started it. Yes, yeah. Four months after that, he struck again in the very same district. He's not bothered. He doesn't care. This time it was 10-year-old Nang Sali. And during the confession, Sikwe said that he used a folding knife to pierce her neck and then just left the body at the scene of the murder.
Starting point is 00:23:02 And then he went two years without killing another child. Maybe he got a girlfriend. But just as the mothers and fathers of Thailand once again began to let their guards down, the disemboweled remains of a five-year-old boy were discovered next to an iconic landmark in the town of Nakhon Pathom.
Starting point is 00:23:19 And this kid was called Siwee Choon. It was a Chinese New Year, this particular one, and Si Kuei met her while she was walking alone. Again, he carried her to a tree and then pushed her to the ground, covered her mouth with one hand and went with his free hand, used his favourite folding knife and slit her throat. Then he took her to a cave and dissected her body,
Starting point is 00:23:42 took out her liver and heart, and then carried the body back to a nearby temple and just left it there. Yeah, I mean, he's definitely just like fully in sexual mode now. Yeah, he's devolution station central. Siquet left more evidence at this particular scene than any of the previous murders, which may indicate that he might have wanted to get caught. We have seen that before because he knows he can't stop. And that would be his penultimate killing in his series of brutal child murders that only came to an end when he was caught
Starting point is 00:24:11 burning Son Boon's body. His trial was nine days long and it began on the 25th of March 1958. And Si Kuei held absolutely nothing back. He confessed to every single murder he was charged with and divulged every minute detail of his crimes. He was sentenced to life in prison because in Thailand mandatory clemency is granted for people who confess. But the prosecution weren't exactly ecstatic about that considering they had all of the evidence to get a conviction and he only confessed once they caught him. The appeals court agreed with their objection and Si Kuei was sentenced to die. After hearing this verdict he fainted on the spot a bit dramatic bit dramatic and he only came around when someone gave him a cigarette so maybe he just really
Starting point is 00:24:50 wanted a fag si kway spent the remaining years of his life locked up in bangkok's famous bang kwang prison which is otherwise known as big tiger and it's called that because it has a reputation for stalking and eating its prisoners how poetic i know there are poetic people at the time fun fact in the west however this prison is better known as the bangkok hilton because there's an australian tv show starring nicole kidman which i have not watched it's called bangkok hotel no it's not it's called bangkok bangkok hilton um i looked it up i haven't watched it but essentially it's a mini series and bangkok hilton is a reference to the hanoi hilton which is what american soldiers used to call a prison in north vietnam in the vietnam war and it's essentially the story of nicole kidman plays
Starting point is 00:25:34 this child who's like the product of an illicit affair between her mother and someone who was a pow in a japanese camp and he handed in his own men because they were planning to escape and after the war he's then court-martialed and then like shame blah blah blah and Nicole Kidman grows up thinking that he's dead and then when her mom dies she finds out he's alive and then she goes to find him and that's basically it and that's called Banquo Kilton. A much less fun fact and very sort of violation of human rightsy all All prisoners at Bang Kuang are required to wear shackles like leg irons for three months. The first three months they get there, they're literally shackled. And right up until 2013, all death row inmates were required to have leg irons permanently welded on them until the day of their execution.
Starting point is 00:26:22 Yeah, I mean, that is the most terrifying part of that. Well, all the kid murder, yeah, for sure. But like the idea of... My biggest fear when I was traveling was that someone would put drugs in my bag and then I would get caught and I would get shackled up in Bangkok Hilton or something. Like genuinely scared.
Starting point is 00:26:39 Yeah, yeah. Scared. It happens. It does. And it was here in the Bangkok Hilton that Seekway gave his one and only interview to a journalist. The reporter isn't named, but they described Sikwe as having a rather unremarkable appearance, because they always do. So he didn't really seem like he fit these
Starting point is 00:26:54 monstrous crimes. But the journalist said that he only looked normal until he opened his mouth. He had a habit, apparently, of scratching his head and yawning my brother does that when he's nervous he'll just like fake yawn if he's like uncomfortable or whatever okay so it's really annoying stop the fake yawning my god but apparently when si kwe yawned his snarling teeth were visible and his eyes turned to look like those of a beast poised to strike its prey. I believe this journalist went to the sensationalist school of journalism, and I am not sure that that is accurate. I just love the idea that when he yawns, maybe the most placid thing a person can do,
Starting point is 00:27:36 that's when CK looks the most terrifying. Yeah, exactly. Makes sense. This journalist asked CK why he targeted children, and he was very honest about it. He said because they were easy to lure and fool That is true That is why mostly
Starting point is 00:27:49 Obviously you can be a preferential paedophile But mostly child sex offenders are just like opportunistic Yes I love him He's a little kid who's on his own Crying outside a railway station On the 17th of September 1959 At the age of 32
Starting point is 00:28:03 The grand old age of 32, Siquet was executed by firing squad. So as long as your 32nd birthday is better than that, we're on the road for Saru's birthday. So it's going to be a... Well, we'll have fun. Yeah, definitely. No, definitely.
Starting point is 00:28:17 It'll be fun. And yeah, as long as I don't get executed by firing squad, I think it's been a bit of a joke. I think I can arrange that. To not be. Yes. Excellent. Outstanding. Because at the moment they're waiting for you in Manchester. But in a way,
Starting point is 00:28:30 Siquet's end was also his beginning. In what way? Because his bullet-ridden body was preserved and used for medical testing before it was embalmed and displayed in a glass cabinet in a medical museum in Bangkok. What?
Starting point is 00:28:45 It remained there for almost 60 years as a morbid attraction for tourists from all around the world. It was a visceral reminder to children that the bogeyman was real and if they didn't do their homework or go to bed on time, Si Kuei would unembalm himself and come and eat them. I mean, OK, when you were like, OK, this is the thing that everyone is scared of, all children are scared of in Thailand.
Starting point is 00:29:07 I was like, why? A case happened so long ago, how would kids know about it today? Just take him there. Look at this man in a jar. Be like, he's going to come and eat you. Oh my God. So the Forensic Science Museum,
Starting point is 00:29:19 where they've got him in a jar, is in Bangkok's oldest hospital. And you can go and see fetuses with congenital deformities in glass jars. You can see diseased brains. You can see amputated limbs and also a giant scrotum of a man who had elephantiasis. Let's go.
Starting point is 00:29:35 Okay, we do not even need to go to Bangkok to see that. Where do you see it? So you go to the Royal College of Surgeons on Lincoln's Inn Fields in London and you go to the Hunterian Museum, which is my favourite museum. I can't believe you haven't been i've never been oh my god okay it does it stinks of formaldehyde but like so you go you go literally into the royal college of surgeons and then they give you a little visitor's pass and then you can just wander and look at all of these
Starting point is 00:29:58 fucking weird i love it and they i don't know if there is any more because i haven't been for a few years but there's a little surgery machine where you can like put your hands in and then like, like pick up little things to see how like dexterous you are. It's a good time. Like operation. Exactly like operation, but with actual surgical tools. And Hannah and I actually did spend a few hours a couple of Fridays ago just sat downstairs in our WeWork drinking beer and playing operation because why not? It hard and like half the pieces were missing like half the little plastic pieces
Starting point is 00:30:28 were missing so we were just like screwed up as a paper and put it in there but that just made it harder um but anyway oh my god i didn't know that this was even a thing the hunterian museum is hands down my favorite museum in london why have i never been i don't know why i've never told you about it i didn't even know about okay when can, when can we go? Let's go right now. Let's go. Fuck this. Let's fuck off the tour. Fuck it all off.
Starting point is 00:30:48 Let's just go to the Hunterian Museum. Oh my God. Yeah. Okay, as soon as we're back from tour. Yes. Please, let's go to the Hunterian Museum. Okay, done. Done.
Starting point is 00:30:58 Okay, great. That was easy. So even if we did go to Bangkok though, we couldn't see him because last year there was a petition with more than 11,000 signatures to the hospital demanding that his corpse be removed and that he was given some dignity in a proper funeral, which is fine. But you can still go and see the giant. There's a giant in the Hunterian Museum. Yep.
Starting point is 00:31:16 And it's actually really sad because it's his skeleton, obviously. But there's a little plaque saying the giant's name and blah, blah, blah. And that he had requested to be buried at sea so he wouldn't be displayed. And they displayed him anyway. Oh, that makes me sad. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of stuff like that in the Hunterian Museum. Well, it's every museum.
Starting point is 00:31:34 Every museum I walk around, I'm like, where did this museum, well not this museum, where did the British steal this from? Yeah, and there's actually like a bit more controversy around Si Kuei's death than just his corpse being displayed to scare children a lot of people have questioned the credibility of his confession despite him openly saying that he was never coerced to do so and also because of all of the evidence but a lot of people still uphold that si kuei was just a victim of the red scare which was a fear of the chinese communist insurgency in Thailand at the time, which I can buy. Also, at the time, Thailand did have a bit of a reputation for scapegoating migrant workers. But, you know, we don't know.
Starting point is 00:32:13 He definitely did something. But regardless, the story of Si Kuei, the child-eating bogeyman, will forever be cemented in Thai folklore and Thai history and the world. And now you know. I love it. I also love that you're about to go on jury service and maybe to get you out of it we can just play this segment where he's just like well i don't know we probably did something we did something no i'm just i'm just gonna fucking jazz it and be
Starting point is 00:32:33 like well it's probably some black kid stole a bun to feed his family just gonna let him off what is it when he's like again peep showep show. And he's like, well, you know, no smoke without fire. There you go. We'll get you out of jury duty yet, Hannah. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudian Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime and there's much more to come.
Starting point is 00:33:15 This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On The Media. To listen, subscribe to On The Media wherever you get your podcasts. He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Sean Diddy Cone. Diddy built an empire and lived a life most people only dream about. Everybody know ain't no party like a Diddy party, so. Yeah, that's what's up. But just as quickly as his empire rose, it came crashing down.
Starting point is 00:33:50 Today I'm announcing the unsealing of a three-count indictment, charging Sean Combs with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, interstate transportation for prostitution. I was up. I hit rock bottom, but I made no excuses. I'm disgusted. I'm so sorry.
Starting point is 00:34:06 Until you're wearing an orange jumpsuit, it's not real. Now it's real. From his meteoric rise to his shocking fall from grace, from law and crime, this is the rise and fall of Diddy. Listen to the rise and fall of Diddy exclusively with Wondery Plus. Okay, right. Excellent. Yours was very foreign. Yep. I am leaving England. Okey dokey.
Starting point is 00:34:34 I'm taking us to Ireland. Okay. Today. So my story today has been on my list for quite a number of years since I heard about this case, but I've always just struggled to find enough information and then I finally did find one very good source for this which is why it is coming to the surface today I can't wait so it's it's good in the most awful way that's what Halloween's about I know um so it is absolutely unbelievable and I am pretty confident that most of you won't have heard of it. So as I said I'm
Starting point is 00:35:06 taking us to Dublin today specifically to 1973 in the suburb of Palmerstown in Dublin and it was here that a crime so unspeakable occurred that literally no one talks about it. The other day this just popped into my head I was out I think at a gig or something somewhere in Soho. And those two Irish guys outside. And I was talking to them. And they're like, yeah, like the restrictions are so much heavier in Dublin. So like coming here is mad. It's just like normal life.
Starting point is 00:35:34 And I was like, oh, where are you from? They're like, we're from like the wood green of Dublin. I was like, oh, tell her. Oh, dear. So no, I don't know too much about Palmerstown. What I have read is that in 1973, it's quite like a close-knit area. It's quite working class,
Starting point is 00:35:49 very conservative, very religious. But you know, that was most of Ireland, but specifically this area, like that was just the general vibe. And like I said, no one spoke about this crime. No one speaks about this crime. And actually when this killing happened, the only nearish full account of this case
Starting point is 00:36:06 that was reported at the time was published in the Montreal Gazette in Canada in French. So why not? Fine. I don't understand. Basically, this case, when it happened, for the large part,
Starting point is 00:36:18 was completely swept under the rug. And those aren't just my thoughts. Basically, anyone who brings this case up today inevitably has to ask, and again, not not my words but the words of irish journalists why ireland found itself unable to cope with this particular case and why it was almost completely covered up okay is it is it what fucks people what fucks irish people up it's a god thing it's got to be yeah i mean basically i suspect that in large part it was due to the quote-unquote satanic nature okay that old that old chestnut and also i think it's probably to do with the fact that both the victim and the
Starting point is 00:37:01 killer were children and actually this case came up again into the sort of consciousness into the sort of discourse when anna creasal was killed yeah so uh if you haven't listened to our episode on anna creasal we covered it god probably last year um it's well worth a listen to so yeah i think basically the crux of why it was probably covered up is that early 70s in ire Ireland was not exactly a super chill time or place and I think they just weren't ready to have a lot of conversations about this particular story. No it was it was not not filled with joy and dreams. Unfortunately. Now so like I said I would have loved to actually turn this case into a full-on episode but there
Starting point is 00:37:40 just isn't enough information out there. The only place you'll get anything on this story at all is the most comprehensive book that is out there that i read by an author called david malone and it is called the boy in the attic i would definitely recommend this book especially because david spends a lot of time exploring and digging into the kind of cultural and religious impact of this case in ireland yeah malone's anone's an Irish name he knows what he's talking about. Exactly and it's more time than I have to go into and he's obviously more Irish than I am so it's well worth a read. And also can I just come back to the paper that did publish it in Ireland. The only paper that mentioned this case led with the headline boy seven is found dead and in the column it says, it is believed the death was accidental. The boy's name was John Horgan.
Starting point is 00:38:29 And as you will go on to see, there was nothing accidental about his death. He was very much murdered in cold blood. Right. There's not even any question, there's not even an ambiguity. I don't know why they said that. It's very, very strange, but let's get into it. So yeah, despite what you will hear in some places or read in some places, this case is very much true, even though it seems
Starting point is 00:38:51 to have slipped somewhat into the realms of urban legend, which is so bizarre. Okay. So true, true urban legend. So on the 17th of June, 1973 in Palmerstown, a man named Terry Hawken had to take his wife to the hospital. So he asked his neighbours, the Bales, if they wouldn't mind watching his little boy John for him. The Bales happily agreed and sat little John down in their garden with their pet bird to watch and play with until their own kids got home. At around 6pm, the Bales' granny granny because also in this village everyone lives in like multi-generational households so it's like all the kids the parents the grandparents everyone's living together yeah it's very charlie bucket vibes absolutely and so the bales's granny noticed that little john was missing from the back garden and like i said it's a very close-knit community
Starting point is 00:39:41 in palmer's town so as soon as the balalesers raised the alarm that John was missing, the whole area came out to look for him. At around 7pm, Terry Horgan, so this is John's dad, comes back from the hospital and was met with a state of panic in his neighbourhood. Because by now, by 7pm, everyone was seriously worried that either David was maybe lost in nearby fields or possibly had had an accident in one of the many like construction sites that are scattered around the area. They try, look for him, no luck and so at 9.30 the Gardie were caught. When they arrived they spotted Terry Horgan yelling at a teenager. It was a Bales's eldest son, 16 year old Lorcan. Apparently Lorcan had been the last person to see John,
Starting point is 00:40:26 so of course the Gardie questioned him. Now, one of the investigators was a man named Detective Sergeant Jim Noonan, and he noticed that as he was interviewing Lorcan, the boy was being a bit odd. He seemed almost a bit too cool and collected when everyone else in the town seemed scared. The Gardie were also a bit suspicious of where Lorcan had said he had last seen John because the teenager said that he had seen the seven-year-old standing by a gate about to go into a field and when they dragged Lorcan outside to show them
Starting point is 00:40:55 exactly where he had been standing they realised that from that spot you couldn't see that gate anyway. So lots of conflicting stories, he's making himself look very suspicious. So now the guardie tried to plead with Lorcan, telling him, if you know something or you saw something, even if you're scared, you need to tell us. According to Jim Noonan, Lorcan now looked a bit awkward, fiddling with his jacket sleeves and not making eye contact. So the investigator casually stated, well then, we'd better search the house from top to bottom. So obviously Lorcan is the Bales' elder son and that's where John was last seen.
Starting point is 00:41:33 So saying we're going to search the Bales' house. To which Lorcan Bale whispered, okay, I'll show you where he is. And then Jim Noonan says, where is he? And Lorcan says, he's in the attic he's in the attic I did spoil it by telling you that the name of the book kind of yeah David Malone's book is called the boy in the attic but this is what Lorcan says I still feel like that is quite a shiver sending up your spine moment when Lorcan just looks at them and he's like okay fine I'll show you where he is and what detectives
Starting point is 00:42:02 found up in the Bales family attic was like nothing anyone could have imagined seven-year-old john horgan's body was hanging arms outstretched from the rafters his wrists had been lashed with red cord to wooden beams either side of him giving him the look of having been crucified no yeah again i'm telling you guys this is real this has really fallen like i said into the realms of urban legend people continuously talk about this like it's not true it absolutely fucking is there are lies out there some people have said that he had been his wrists and ankles had been nailed to the wooden cross but like this is horrific enough we don't need to make it worse like this is bad enough and the
Starting point is 00:42:45 nails aren't what kills you yeah exactly it just gets worse because little john's body his head had even had some cord tied around it and tied up to a nail that was behind him to stop his head just like falling down so that he was looking straight out when the detectives walked up into the attic. John Horgan was also completely naked except for a tie hanging around his neck. Like a business tie. Oh no. We never really find out why the tie is around John Horgan's neck but it is. So as the detectives walked up into the attic and struggled to take in what was in front of them. And as their eyes adjusted to the dimly lit room, they noticed what else was up there. Because it's not just this horrific scene. Is it Jesus? It's... Is it Jesus related? Is it the opposite of Jesus? Yes, it's all of the above. In the centre of the attic, there was a silver chalice, bookended by two tall white candles.
Starting point is 00:43:50 In front of this chalice was a bowl filled with sand, on top of a sketch of a pentagram. Next to this, there was a clock which had been stopped at 5pm. The time, as investigators would later discover, was the time of John's death. Fucking hell. I know. And on this, to put it mildly, weird altar, there was also a bronze bell and a carving knife, some incense and an old mustard jar filled with dried petals. Also, there was a lump of charcoal and you'll like this, or not like it, but might find it interesting two tarot cards okay which ones the devil and the lovers okay i was gonna look up what they meant devil is not actually devil-y and lovers probably no the the i'm gonna get my book so i always carry around with me the
Starting point is 00:44:38 beginner's guide to tarot and the lovers it's not really to do with romantic relationships it's more to do with an alignment of goals an alignment of rhetoric politics that sort of thing um so if you're looking at it in a sort of relationship context it's like you're on you're on the right like your your world views are the same you want the same things so i'll find the devil page first the devil's a lot more to do with like cardinal desires it also depends which way up it was oh i don't have that information well so this is what it says in the beginner's guide to tarot the devil an often misunderstood card the devil is not about the source of all evil in christian myth but the inner wilderness that we
Starting point is 00:45:18 all possess that generally needs tempering the devil is associated with temptation addiction selfishness but also clouded perceptions that arise from an enslavement to outmoded ideals. Oh, okay. Well, two points on this. One point, I will say that the detectives definitely freaked the fuck out when they saw this scene. Understandably, absolutely. And even a seasoned investigator, you would freak the fuck out. And I think that possibly they would take zero comfort i love the idea of you being like the terror consultant to be like it's not actually anything to do with the devil guys it's actually just about our inner wilderness yeah and then being like it's not bringing me any comfort whatsoever but what i would say is quite interesting is that what you're saying about the kind of challenging of outdated ideals.
Starting point is 00:46:07 I wouldn't give the killer that much credit or nuance. But what I would say is possibly that's what he thought of himself as we will go on to discover. And I think in like, where are we? 70s Ireland? 73, yeah. If, honestly, if my dad was still alive, tarot cards would not be in the house like it's no like it's so it's not even like a my grandparents generation thing it's and obviously that's not everyone's experience but that's my experience but um no if my dad was still around there's absolutely no way
Starting point is 00:46:35 i'd be fucking with the occult in any way shape or form that's so funny what is less funny is what else they found up there um so aside from all of the stuff I just listed, the detectives also discovered a large pan filled with human excrement. Oh, good. Mm, yes. So to Jim Noonan and the other Gadi, it looked a lot like what they had stumbled upon was a black mass.
Starting point is 00:47:01 Yes. So I claim to be no expert in this particular field i know it's very nuanced but i did look up what a black mass is and i've also really i also really enjoy the book the exorcist by william peter blatty i think it's a fantastic book obviously the movie is great but if you haven't read the book i would highly recommend and he talks about black mass and things like that and then what it is in a very basic sense and i might be wrong but it's basically i've got you i know what black i know what black mass is thank god basically my understanding is that it's a ceremony or ritual carried out in different ways by different satanic groups and there's obviously a lot of hysteria about these rituals from like religios but really
Starting point is 00:47:41 as far as i can see black masses are a way to mock catholic mass yeah it's a direct inversion yeah so that's why you have the crucifix upside down yes that's why you still need to have the chalice there that's why he's got the human excrement it's kind of just like a mockery of the catholic mass so doing everything in inverse like just making fun of it so i don't know if they actually think it's going to call upon the devil but as we talked about in the satanic episode like most people that's not what they're trying to do but catholics are you know have always been very scared of black masses which is why the tabernacle which is where the eucharist is kept has a lock on it because in order to like carry out a black mass you need the eucharist so like it's sort of kept under lock and key specifically for black mass
Starting point is 00:48:23 what's a eucharist uh the um the body and blood of christ oh okay yeah yeah so like the wafers and the wine are kept in the tabernacle at the back of the church and then during mass it is unlocked and then you can eat of the blood and flesh of christ i see okay yeah and that's also why the silver chalice is there because it's like an important part of the black mask interestingly this silver chalice went missing from a local church that had a break-in that is where you would find a chalice exactly exactly the catholic church has got enough fucking chalices okay they can spare one they come and get it back of course they do and this actually brings us on to the next part of the story because some places do state and i did read this and feel a bit like oh my my god, I don't know if
Starting point is 00:49:05 this is true or not, but I'll give you both sides of it. Some places state that the Gardie was so freaked out by what they had found that they immediately called the local priest and let him completely take over the crime scene. Some places report this, this is not what John Malone says happens, so it's hard to know. The places that claim this also say that apparently the guardi let the priest even cut down John Horgan's body and remove items from the crime scene before they could have been, you know, investigated any further and just take them away to either be disposed of or to be consecrated or whatever. I can't verify this, like I said, and I don't want to pretend like that is exactly what happened. It could be from people who are like anti-religious propagandists or whatever saying, oh my God, look how hysterical it was.
Starting point is 00:49:50 But it also could have happened. I don't know. It wouldn't surprise me. I think something important to clarify specifically about this era is there was a lot of mistrust in the government. There was a lot of mistrust in the government there was a lot of mistrust obviously like there's a lot of underground IRA activity everything's in secret like nobody knows who to trust blah blah blah all that does is put more power in the church yeah because the church becomes the the source of truth um and obviously this is Dublin but the more rural you get the more power the priests had and still
Starting point is 00:50:26 have in some places so it would not surprise me at all if they were just like this is a problem we don't know how to solve let's call the police oh yeah the priest even the priest police the police just to reiterate like how Palmerstown like how specifically kind of these households in particular were very very conservative very religious the Bales's family um which is where the little boy goes missing so Lorcan Bale they church twice a day before you go to work kind of situation and no English in the household only Gaelic which apparently at the time in 1973 was rare so yeah yeah no that's um yeah that is a very like Ireland has no one speaks Gaelic really anymore it's taught in school but not in the same way I don't know
Starting point is 00:51:14 it like it's I think it's important though to like preserve languages I mean I don't speak a fucking word but um there it's it's hard to oh yeah I know I absolutely I think it was more interesting because what the newspapers i had read and what david malone says in the book is that now there's kind of this revitalized interest in the language and they're teaching in schools and people are really you know regained a passion for it but in 1973 it was very rare to see a household oh yeah we do not speak english in this house so that just gives you a flavor of kind of how kind of i guess it probably goes hand in hand with being probably quite religiously conservative as well and that is in this house. So that just gives you a flavour of kind of how, kind of, I guess it probably goes
Starting point is 00:51:45 hand in hand with being probably quite religiously conservative as well. And that is the household that we're dealing with. So the priest was definitely called. How much he took over the scene of the crime, I don't know. But the priest was definitely called and uh this priest was monsignor richard mulholly and he wasn't just an ordinary priest either no monsignors are not none they're very they're big balls priests they are big balls priests and this guy was even more of a big balls priest because he was actually head of opus day in ireland at the time christ yeah and he is a personal friend of the Horgans, whose little boy has been found. Wow. Okay.
Starting point is 00:52:28 So he is there. He came to the house, obviously, to support the Horgans, who he knows, but also to take the chalice back, because, like I said, it had been stolen from a local church a few weeks before the murder. Now, everybody's kind of freaking out because of the religious-slash-satanic nature of the crime itself. Understandably, it's a horrific thing. But what really happened? Well, this is what Lorcan, 16-year-old Lorcan,
Starting point is 00:52:52 confessed to the Gardie. He said, I had a cup of coffee that day that Terry dropped John over at ours and I thought about how I was going to kill him and hide his body. This is 16-year-old. He then apparently went down into the garden and asked John if he wanted to go and look for rabbits with him. The young boy excitedly followed him into the field and once there Lorcan told John, seven year old John, to stick his head in a rabbit warren and when he did Lorcan pulled out a wooden club that he had brought with him. Mercifully I think we can say John John died immediately. But Lorcan didn't know this.
Starting point is 00:53:27 He didn't know the little boy was dead. So he gagged him. And then he shoved his body into a bag that he had brought with him and began dragging John's body back to his house. A couple of kids actually saw him that day while he's dragging the body because he just does this in broad daylight. Where kids hang out in this field hunting rabbits so it's not like he's doing it in the woods in the middle of the night and he just told all these kids that he was carrying firewood to go home
Starting point is 00:53:54 so once lorkhan got david's body home he dragged the child into the attic and put him on display he then went back downstairs and pretended like everything was perfectly normal. Once everyone was distracted by the search party, Lorcan slipped away, went back up into the attic and cut all of John's clothes off. And Lorcan was a weird kid. He was. He had a reputation for being a bit of a loner and from childhood he'd been quite sickly. He'd been in and out of hospital for quite a while when he was young. Everyone who describes him describes him as quite pale and gaunt and he was also quite slight in every sense probably because he had been quite unwell when he was a child. But aside from this it's really hard to pinpoint the specific reasons that he went so off the rails.
Starting point is 00:54:40 His family were super religious and super conservative like I said but that wasn't exactly unusual in Ireland in the 70s and some of the other kids had actually reported that lawken had killed small animals and used their bones to make jewelry classic ding ding ding ding they pissed the bed as well oh this is the thing so much of this story i just can't pad out because we don't know we don't know what happened but one story one of his friends from school said that apparently someone had left their dog tied up to a lamppost while they went into a shop and law can went over and choked the dog to death with its own leash before the owner came out and then ran away oh my god i know this is what i'm saying and i find it hard to believe
Starting point is 00:55:19 that in a town or a community this tight-knit that people didn't know that he was doing stuff or that who was the one that was doing this again i feel like there was a lot of sweeping things under the rug unfortunately the other thing that's also very unclear is how exactly law can became interested in the occult because you know david malone makes the point that they didn't have the internet then so it's not like he just got interested in that way and some of the the detectives and David Malone himself make a weird point of being like, well, how could somebody who was brought up in a Catholic household become... I was like, who would have become interested in this if they hadn't been brought up in a Catholic household?
Starting point is 00:55:54 This is the thing. This is the... I never understand this argument because like, you cannot have angels without demons. Like you're told about it all the time. And you're consistently told that firstly, you were born bad and there's nothing you can fucking told about it all the time and you're consistently told that firstly you were born bad and there's nothing you can fucking do about it and secondly you're surrounded by imagery of stuff like that and i like i am sure that like the spookiest people on earth are former catholics like because it's so filled with folklore and superstition and myth so it doesn't surprise me
Starting point is 00:56:24 at all if anything i think catholics go harder than anyone else yeah i would be more surprised if he hadn't been brought up that way and also like you literally believe you're eating jesus yeah and this is the thing isn't it that what you're asking somebody to believe in catholicism and then what you the core tenants of like what you have to believe in catholicism and what you would need to believe to be what this kind of person thought they were being in terms of an occultist are similar. The power of the Bible, because if you didn't believe in the power of the Bible, it doesn't play a role in this black mass or whatever he was doing. If you didn't believe in a God, you couldn't believe in the devil. So it is the exact kind of profile of a person that would do something like this and claim these were the reasons.
Starting point is 00:57:04 Absolutely. Completely. Absolutely. Like it's such a ridiculous argument yeah and i think people find it very hard or found it especially then quite hard to understand which i do empathize with so a lot of people did say that oh he'd been hanging around with some adult occultists and they were the ones that had convinced him to murder this there are Because there are so fucking many of them hanging around in fucking Dublin. Like it's just not true. There was like you know like one of those like witchy shops. That sells like crystals and stuff. There was one of those near where I grew up.
Starting point is 00:57:33 And my Catholic friends weren't allowed to go in. And that's like you know I'm 31. Like it's not. And that's in this country. Yeah absolutely. So there really is a lot of superstition around it but like i don't believe that you can consistently tell a community that the reason that women can't be priests and therefore the most powerful person in the community is because of eve and because they are bad like i don't
Starting point is 00:58:02 believe that you can tell people that and it not fuck them up i really don't oh yeah i mean that's one thing from like a very feminist issue angle but it's like a myriad of things you're asking people to believe not even related to that and then expect them to maybe have completely rational ways of processing other things that happen for example a lot of people at the time including the monsignor we talked about believed that law can had been possessed by a devil or a demon or the devil and that's why he had killed and i'm like that's probably not what happened here but again i can understand why people would jump to that conclusion if you've been asked to believe all of these things and then you're
Starting point is 00:58:40 confronted with something so horrific of course you would so eventually law can, Lorcan was convicted of the murder of John Horgan. Thankfully, he didn't sort of get away with it by saying that, you know, he was possessed. And he actually only ended up serving about nine years, though. He is actually now a free man. And since Ireland was certainly not an option for him. No, I wouldn't have thought so. Once he was released, I believe that he actually now lives in London. Oh, good.
Starting point is 00:59:07 Yes. You can catch him down the London Irish Centre. At that museum we're going to. Yeah. Yeah. But as far as I can tell, to be fair to him now, he was convicted. He served his crime. And David Malone, the author of the book, The Boy in the Attic, did actually track him down and interview him.
Starting point is 00:59:22 That is the last part of the book. And he doesn't seem to have been in trouble again with the law and he just seems to be quite like an introverted insidey kind of person but it's quite interesting that while he was in prison apparently he managed to steal paint from like the arts department or whatever of the prison and he painted pentagrams all over the ceiling walls and floor of his room again how much of it is just like a teenager wanting to freak everybody out yeah and like well i'm not gonna say how much of it is like the devil because obviously it's not but you know what i mean like he but how much of it does he actually believe versus how much of it is he doing just to freak people out i don't know because
Starting point is 00:59:58 again there's just so little information on this case but i do want to end with what i thought was like the part that also sent more shivers down my spine because although he hasn't been in trouble with the law again since and he seems to have been rehabilitated possibly as much as anybody who had committed a crime like that can be if it is true but back then as a teenager it seems that law can bail wasn't planning on stopping after the murder of little john Horgan at all. Because a few months after the killing, some kids were playing in the field where John had died, and they found a canvas bag stuffed inside a rabbit hole.
Starting point is 01:00:34 Inside, there were some porn mags, some odd items like a knife and a candle or whatever. But there was also a piece of paper with a list of 10 children's names on it. And John Horgan's name was one of them. Oh my God. The others were all local kids who all had blonde hair and blue eyes, just like John Horgan.
Starting point is 01:00:58 And it's so scary in the book. David Malone speaks to the kids who are now adults, because this is the 70s whose names were on that list and obviously everyone is convinced that Lorcan Bale was basically just going to kill all of those kids and they're like it could have been me it's fucking scary that's terrifying yeah so that is the case of the boy in the attic and the murderer of John Horgan whatever you see anywhere it is true it's not an urban legend.
Starting point is 01:01:25 But if you do Google it, you will find almost no information. So go buy that book, I guess. Thank you, Mr. Malone. Yeah, absolutely. So that brings us swiftly to the end. To the close. Of this year's Halloween extravaganza. Thank you so much for joining us.
Starting point is 01:01:41 Thank you for joining us if you came on tour. If you would like any more Red Handed content content head on over to patreon.com slash red-handed where we upload tons and tons and tons of extra content every single week you can choose the pledge level you want to support us at and then as required you will get corresponding amount of bonus content if you're like that is not enough and i'd love to hear you guys talk about cults then head on over to Spotify where you can listen to our brand new exclusive podcast Sinister Societies where we talk about exactly that.
Starting point is 01:02:12 Quite. We'll see you on the other side. Also known as November. Goodbye. Bye. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, There were many questions surrounding his death.
Starting point is 01:02:47 The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding,
Starting point is 01:03:25 I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery Plus. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I
Starting point is 01:03:58 came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me. And it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy
Starting point is 01:04:14 and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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