True Crime Campfire - Full-Tilt Boogie: The Crimes of Peter Braunstein

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

T.S. Eliot ends his poem “The Hollow Men” with the line “This is the way the world ends…not with a bang, but a whimper.” Spree criminals are always after the bang. Many see themselves going out in a blaze of glory, taking as many people with them as they can. Going down in history as some kind of dark antihero, shaking up the way we think, making us question our most basic values—leaving a big, smoking crater in the earth on their way out of it. These guys are legends in their own minds. Funnily enough, though, as hard as they try for the big bang, they often end up with the whimper. And there’s no better example of that than Peter Braunstein, a former playwright and fashion writer who--after being fired from his job at Women's Wear Daily--embarked on an outrageous crime spree. His ultimate goal? Kill Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour. Join us for the bizarre story of a grudge that spun out of control.Sources:"Friend of the Devil" by Aaron Gell: https://humanparts.medium.com/friend-of-the-devil-3726bd1ddc1cInvestigation Discovery, "I Almost Got Away With It," Episode "I Got to Pose as a Firefighter"Gothamist: https://gothamist.com/news/peter-braunstein-endures-fellow-prisoners-teasing-you-didnt-even-rape-herhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_BraunsteinFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. T.S. Eliot ends his poem, The Hollow Men, with the line, This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a wimper. Sprite criminals are always after the bang. Many see themselves going out in a blaze of glory, taking as many people with them as they can. Going down in history as some kind of dark anti-hero,

shaking up the way we think, making us question our most basic values, leaving a big smoking crater in the earth on their way out of it. These guys are legends in their own minds. Funnily enough, though, as hard as they try for the Big Bang, they often end up with the whimper. And there's no better example of that than the schmo in today's story. This is Full Tilt Boogie, the crimes of Peter Bronstain. Content warning on the first few minutes of this one, campers, for some sexual violence. Not a detailed description, but it's there, so listen at your discretion. So, campers, for this one, we're in New York, New York, Halloween, 2005.

A young woman was settling in for the evening after a long day at work when she heard a frantic pounding on her apartment door. She opened it to find a man in a firefighter's uniform, and behind him, a hallway full of sulfur-smelling smoke. Not what you want to see when you open your door at the end of a hard day. You'd probably be thinking, oh, shit, do I have time to grab anything before I evacuate the building? I'm sure she was expecting the firefighter to tell her to follow him to safety, but that's the That's not what happened. Instead, before the woman could react, the fireman suddenly pulled out a gun and a rag. A sickly sweet chemical smell hit her like a slap in the face as the firefighter clapped the

rag over her nose and mouth, forced her back inside her apartment, and slammed the door behind them. When she came back to consciousness, the woman was tied to her bed, undressed. The man in the firefighter's uniform was setting up a camera at the foot of the bed. he was wearing a black ski mask and some kind of badge around his neck I can only imagine the sick feeling she had at the sight of him as she shook off the fog of the chloroform he'd used to knock her out and realize what was happening

who was this what was he going to do to her and why we don't know this woman's name by the way it was never released in the media so for the sake of storytelling we're going to refer to her as Athena after the goddess of bravery because she earned it So Athena came too to see this strange masked man walking around her apartment as if he owned it. When he noticed she was awake, he quickly moved over to the bed with a roll of duct tape. He ripped off three pieces, one for her mouth and one for each eye, and now she couldn't see, except for a tiny sliver when she tilted her head just right.

She was terrified. She felt like he was working up to sexually assault her, but didn't seem to be able to get aroused. And then, bizarrely, he seemed to get distracted by her shoe collection. I've never seen this many shoes before in my life, he said. He spent what felt like a solid hour going through them, box by box, Herminolo Blonix and Jimmy chews. And then to Athena's horror, he decided he wanted to dress her up. The next 13 hours of Athena's life were a pure nightmare, as her attacker dressed her in different clothes and shoes, photographed her and sexually touched and harassed and molested

her. Sometimes he'd knock her out with the chloroform again, so she was in and out of consciousness. I can only imagine how sick that would make you feel. At one point, she came too to find that her assailant had turned on the TV and made himself a snack, just making himself at home in her apartment like he owned a place. And at one point, he took the duct tape off her mouth and started confiding in her. And Athena, realizing that this might be the best way to humanize herself and keep him calm, listened and sympathized, and confided in him a little bit too. She told him about how she'd gotten fired from her job a week earlier and had felt alone and depressed ever since. Smart girl. This seemed to calm him down for a while, but for hours, Athena's

attacker veered back and forth between rage and using her as his own personal therapist. It was exhausting, and through every minute of it, she didn't know if she'd make it out alive. Finally, after 13 straight hours of hell, the man in the firefighter suit rummaged through Athena's closet again. He grabbed a purple Gucci coat, her Louis Vuitton bag, $800 in cash and some prescription pills. And he left her a parting note. In lipstick on the mirror he wrote, Bye, hope things turn around for you soon. Once she was sure he was gone, Athena used her teeth to untie the parachute cord he'd tied her with, then called a close friend and asked her to come over. The man who attacked her had worn a police badge and showed up

dressed as a firefighter, so Athena was scared to call the police at first. She wasn't sure it would be safe. She felt safer once she wasn't alone in the apartment. And she finally let her friend go ahead and call the cops. But even then, once the officers arrived, the dispatcher had to really work hard to convince her it was safe to let them in. Bless her heart. That just breaks my heart to hear that. She's such a strong girl. Athena told the police that she didn't know her attacker, but he seemed to know her. At least he knew she used to work at the magazine Women's Wear Daily. He mentioned a couple of her former co-workers by name. And oddly enough, he'd told her his birth date at some point during the night.

Oh, smart. Good call, man. Way to fly under the radar. Did he give her his social security number two? Two forms of photo ID, maybe a set of dental records. He was probably hoping she'd write on his Facebook wall on the blessed day. With these details, a few others he'd dropped along the way and a few red-hot tips from the public, like the guy he bought the firefighter suit from on eBay, it didn't take investigators long to zero in on a prime suspect. Peter Bronstein, a playwright and fashion writer who'd been shit-canned from Women's Wear Daily a few years earlier

for abusing his credentials to get free tickets to fashion events. Bronstein also had a record. A couple years earlier, he'd gotten in trouble for harassing an ex-girlfriend, a fashion editor named Jane Larkworthy. And when we say harassing campers, we are low-balling it. We will get into those specifics later. Yeah, he'd gotten probation for that, which when we tell you about it here in a little bit, is going to chap your ass into smithereens.

You should get probation for, like, carrying a little bit of weed, not making a woman's life unmitigated hell for 18 straight months. But anyway. Now, the entire NYPD was after him. In a motel room in Hell's kitchen, Peter Bronstein all revved up to get going on the next phase of his big revenge apalooza on the fashion industry, came out of the shower and saw the story on the news. Huh? Poor puppy. The next phase of his plan would have to wait for now. He gathered up his

stuff and hopped on a bus to Cleveland. He found a motel for $100 a week next door to a to a topless bar. He introduced himself to the bar owner as a scout for a TV network, interested in using the bar for a show about a stripper who goes to our high school reunion. Was Romeo and Michelle 2.0? Fewer farcical hijinks, more titties. Money running out and fueled by the drugs he'd stolen from Athena's apartment, Bronstein figured he'd need to do a robbery soon. And once the heat died down enough, he'd get back to New York and on with the original plan.

Kill Vogue Queen Anna Wintour, thereby sticking it to a cruel and uncaring world that had cast poor Peter out into the hinterlands, naked and afraid, a pariah to the people he used to call colleagues. Yeah, translation, people didn't like him because of his shitty attitude and supersized bag of self-important bullshit, and he didn't get his way, which run through the Peter Bronstein filter equals a level of persecution approximately equivalent to the crucifixion. How dare you make me experience the consequences of my actions? I will have my revenge. But let's put a pin in old Pete's life on the lamb for a few minutes and get some back. on all this. Who is Peter Braunstein and how did we get here? Well, it's actually kind of weird that he was

working in the fashion industry. He doesn't come across to me as a very fashionable guy. He mostly wrote about the history slash culture of rock and roll and wrote pretty regularly for the village voice. How he ended up working for women's wear daily, I'm not sure, but I could have told him it was a bad idea. An alien could have told him that. Yeah, don't go where you know you don't belong. And then get pissed off when people fail to treat you like a golden god. You're getting what you should have expected. Like, I'm not going to try to be a sportscaster because I'd fit in about as well as the Pope in a Las Vegas brothel.

I will not roll up in there at ESPN and expect everybody to think I was the cat's pajamas and invite me out for drinks after work because I literally cannot name one NFL player past the year 1995. But Peter Braunstein, apparently, did just that at Women's Wear Daily. This guy has a sense of entitlement

the size of the goddamn Grand Canyon. So, anywho, he seems to have had his fingers in a lot of little pies over the years. He taught at NYU for a while, did part of a PhD, wrote plays, so maybe he was having trouble finding his niche. What we know for sure is that it was his time in the fashion industry that would start him on the downward spiral that you got a little peek of at the beginning of this episode. As Bronstein's former friend and colleague Aaron Gell wrote in his 2015 article, Friend of the Devil, Peter was a straight man in a workplace

mostly populated by women and gay men and as Bronstein himself once pointed out in an interview, a successful career in fashion is built on handshakes and parties. You have to network. Peter B. was more of a loner. And his contempt for the industry is obvious when you listen to him

talk about interviews now, so I assume it was obvious then too. It's not a huge surprise that people who worked their asses off to land jobs in that industry might take umbrage at that. Peter resented the fact that the people at Women's Wear Daily didn't embrace him like a long-lost son. They didn't invite him to their parties. Nobody ever asked him over for a spaghetti dinner. I swear to God, this is something he actually complained about, like specifically a spaghetti dinner.

So, according to the New York Times, in October of 2002, presumably after sewing plenty of little seeds of discontents along the way, Peter went a step too far. He used his credentials to try and get a free ticket to a Vogue event for his girlfriend, Jane, who was a beauty editor at W. Magazine. He was nasty to a publicist in the process and told to apologize. Of course, he refused, stormed out, and got fired the next day. Womp, womp, and he was not happy about it. Okay, in fairness to women's wear daily, every step of him achieving that pink slip was like picking the worst option in a choose-your-own-adventure book. Yeah, including going to work there in the first place.

losing his job did not do his relationship any favors and that relationship was a bumpy ride to begin with he met beauty editor jane larkworthy at a work event not long after 9-11 it was a karaoke party jane moonlighted as a cabaret singer and she sang something either fly away home or 10,000 miles he wasn't sure which when he told the story later whichever song it was jane had a gorgeous voice and she stared right at Peter for the whole song, and boy, she hooked him like a trout. He told writer Aaron Gell, Jane was the allegorical siren

in the textbook Femfetal, and I'm the doomed guy. Anybody else just roll your eyes so hard at her a little? Yeah, me too. You're going to roll him even worse when I tell you this. The first conversation they really bonded over was when Jane confided in him that she was having a bout of imposter syndrome.

You know, when you feel like you're really not qualified, to do your job. You're just pretending and eventually everybody's going to find out what a fraud you are. Oh, hell yeah. I get that sometimes. I think, I mean, I think if you don't feel that sometimes, you're probably a narcissist. I don't think I've met anybody who doesn't occasionally

have that thought, you know? Bronstein later told Aaron Gell, I knew that women in power positions often felt fraudulent like impostors because they don't feel entitled to power the way men do. Words of wisdom from PDB, woman expert. You know how he became a woman expert, by the way?

I'll tell you. At the time he met Jane, Peter was in a nine-year committed relationship with a woman named Deborah, Ph.D. in history and women's studies. Now, when your girlfriend has a degree in women's studies, that basically means you have one, too. He told Gell that nine years with the babe feminist Deborah, had prepared him for Jane's womanly insecurity about her job. Barf! So he was in a relationship when he met Jane,

but he was married when he met Deborah and didn't stop him then either. What did I say earlier about his grotesquely oversized sense of entitlement? What Pity want? Pity take. So he and Jane began dating, fell hard and fast for each other. They felt like they had to keep their relationship a secret at first, since they were colleagues, but they were infatuated with each other and kept up a steady stream of Mooney emails, like a pair of love-struck teenagers. At the time he met Jane, Bronstein's career was on the upswing.

He had a couple of book deals in the works, one about disco, what about New York City in the 70s. But according to Aaron Gell, Peter was still living with his girlfriend, Deborah, and he wasn't as sure of himself in this new relationship as he seemed to be. He told his therapist he wasn't sure he was in love with Jane. He was worried he might end up regretting leaving Deborah for her. But he plowed ahead anyway. Left Deborah, moved in with Jane, and it didn't take long for them to go from picking out names for their future kids to... Ugh.

They took the express train to toxic relationship central. According to Jane, based on her testimony in court, Peter became controlling, even telling her what to wear. He liked her to wear high heels at all times, no matter how casual the occasion. And she was never allowed to just throw on a pair of sweats and put her hair in a messy ponytail to go out to the store. Although Peter was mostly submissive in the bedroom, wanting his women to say cruel, degrading stuff and pretend to be in a position of authority over him, he had a favorite fantasy that foreshadows the brutal crime he'd commit a few years later. He'd roleplay knocking Jane unconscious with a rag soaked in chloroform and tie her up with a scarf. He used parachute cord to tie up Athena, but other than that, his 13-hour assault on her matches up just about perfectly. Creepy.

That is creepy. From prison, Bronstein told Aaron Gell that ever since he was a kid, he'd been half in love with the idea of death. A death wish, he called it. He said it started when he got pricked by a cactus needle at 13 and end. ended up with a gnarly staff infection. He remembers watching dark purple red streaks snaking further and further up his arm as the infection spread, and somebody telling him that if it reached his brain, he'd die. He ended up in the hospital for a week or two, and he said that despite thinking he was probably going to die,

that hospital stay was one of the only times in his life when he really felt loved and cared for. Nurses brought him food and made jokes and made sure he was comfortable. And ever since then, he told Gell, love and death had been sort of fused together in his mind. As you might have sussed out by now, Peter's got some issues with his parents. Yeah. His dad was a womanizer on what sounds like a pretty epic scale, and according to Peter, used to make fun of him in public for being a virgin,

like when Peter was 15. Yikes. Yeah, and one time he told Peter he had to cheat on his mom because she was frigid. Oh, okay. Thanks, Dad. Thanks for sharing that. Anyway, back to Jane. After Peter lost his job, Jane picked up the financial slack, supporting him while he worked on his own creative endeavors, a book and an off-off-Broadway play about Andy Warhol. Because God knows that guy hasn't had his 15 minutes yet, right? What the world really needs is more plays about Andy Warhol.

Lord knows. Yeah, written by narcissistic men. who identify with Andy Warhol. Yikes. But despite Jane busting her ass to keep Peter kept in the style he'd become accustomed to, Peter wrote in his journal that he was, quote, the prisoner of Beekman Place, the building where they lived. His relationship with Jane had become unfulfilling, he wrote.

He wasn't feeling appreciated. Yeah, my guess is there wasn't shit going on to appreciate, my dude. Sounds to me like your girlfriend was. carrying your dumb ass. So surprise, surprise, their relationship didn't really survive his firing. Once, during a fight, Peter threw a complete mantrum, picking up bottles of wine and smashing him into a zillion bits on the floor. You know, like a mature adult. Jane said he was popping phenobarbitales like altoids during this period and his moods were scarily unpredictable. Another time, he tied her to a kitchen chair and tormented her, showing her a knife and threatening to use it.

Later, he had the nerve to tell Aaron Gell that she really should have left him after that. Oh, you think? Yeah, she should have. But did it occur to you, Pete, that she might have been a little concerned about how you might react if she did? Somehow the fact that he said that just makes it twice as infuriating to me. It's like, you're going to abuse this woman and then spout that ignorant shit. Like, well, why didn't she just leave? Because she was scared, ass basket.

That's why. Go piss up a rope. Yeah. You'll notice, campers. Peter's M.O. is literally being a misogynistic abuser and then telling the women he's abused how they should feel about their ordeal. Like, you've heard of the manic pixie dream girl.

He is literally the nightmare male feminist that we all know and avoid. You know, like the kind that we use all the right buzzwords and then once he's gained your trust, it's like a switch is flipped. Things escalated even more on November 22nd, 2003. police were summoned to Jane and Peter's apartment to find him with scratches all over his stomach. He claimed Jane attacked him. Jane said he scratched himself. The police arrested Peter and took him to Bellevue Hospital to be evaluated, and that, at long last, was the final nail in the coffin of their relationship. Now, obviously, we weren't there that night, we can't say for

sure if Jane scratched Peter or he scratched himself. Women can and do physically abuse men. It happens a lot more often than you think. So it's certainly not outside. the realm of possibility. But what we can say is he'd been abusing her for some time. Even he admits that. So I think it's likely that Jane was telling the truth, that Peter inflicted those scratches on himself. And even if he didn't, it's very likely to me that Jane was defending herself against a man who had proven himself to be violent and unstable. Later on, on the witness stand, Jane would tell the court that Peter had picked up a knife and threatened to, quote, mutilate himself. And that's why she called the police. So good call.

When Jane broke things off with him, Bronsteen moved in with his mother, and over the next 18 months, nose dived into a truly spectacular downward spiral. From his mommy's house, he made it his mission to ruin Jane's life, and boy, did he ever give it the old college try. He wrote caustic blog posts about her, calling her biohazard. He shared his twisted, squeezed through the coffee filter of narcissism version of their breakup in the infamous society gossip column, page six. sent her emails that said things like quoting from the Gell article here, your attitude sucks. You're an arrogant moron who tried to lock me up and is still

flouting my orders. Flouting my orders. Like he's a fucking brigadier general or something. Get bent, Bronstein. I hope you get a paper cut on the tip of your dick. Also, one out of ten, terrible insults, my dude. Your attitude

sucks? You are a writer for Christ's sakes. It's like, ooh, don't sugarcoat it. Tell her how you really feel. He sent similar emails to her friends and family, trashing her up one side and down the other. He posted nude pictures of her on the internet, made fake profiles for her on hookup sites

where he gave her elaborate fictional kinks. He wrote letters to her employers, posing as people who'd come across her nudes online. He warned potential contacts and colleagues about her alleged kinks and posted flyers around the neighborhood where she lived, warning people about her proclivities. This from the man who gets off on knocking women out with chloroform.

And oh my God, the phone calls. He called her, her family members, and her co-workers endlessly, compulsively. Sometimes all he'd do was sit there and breathe or play a recording of a woman having an orgasm. Sometimes he'd even stopped by a payphone to make a call on the way to the theater where his Andy Warhol play was running. Pretty good ticket sales, bad reviews in case you were wondering.

And just in case you didn't hate this sad sack of shite enough already, get a load of this. Peter would later refer to this as the most traumatizing time of his life. Well, you poor old thing! And in case, campers, that you are not fluent in audacity, this just means he didn't get exactly what he wanted. In classic Peter Bronstein form, he spoke to Erangel about his 18-month stalking campaign like it was a terrible burden to him. it really is like a job he said sometimes i didn't feel like stumbling out of my mom's place at three in the morning to call up jane's father from a phone booth just to hang up i wasn't in the mood walking around with this stupid tape recorder it lost its novelty after about a month but i made

myself do it the alternative was just walking up to her in broad daylight and blowing her head off he said and i'm glad i made the decision that i did ah yes the two classic choices when you break up with someone either harass them endlessly and make their lives of living hell on earth or just fucking kill them. It's got to be one or the other, right? God forbid, we just go on with our lives. I love that he talks about this, like, I'm so glad I did the right thing. You know, because killing is wrong. Those were not the only two choices, you dribbling, prolapsed anus. You do not get a cookie for not committing murder. Oh, God's sake. Years later from prison,

Bronstein wrote a letter to W. Magazine, in which he says that posting Jane's nudes wasn't harassment at all. It was, quote, part of a guy born in inspired romantic adieu. His true goal, he said, was to show the world that sex is messy. Yeah, you're right, Peter. You're a fucking artist. Sex is messy, campers. Mr. Bronstine would also like to inform you that water is wet, is green and pain hurts. If you've got any more profound truths for us that literally everyone already knows, shoot us an email. Yeah, I'm pretty sure you can boil down about 97% of all

art, literature, music, and drama in human history to the phrase, sex is messy. But by all means, educate us some more, Pete, and make sure you hurt somebody in the process. It's all you seem to know how to do. Guy Borden, by the way, is a a fashion photographer who liked using S&M imagery, right up Pete's Alley, I guess. So Peter ended up with a whopping three years probation

for traumatizing and terrorizing Jane for 18 months. Please join me in a rage stroke. And the indignity of actually experiencing minor, minor fucking consequences for his actions affected him profoundly.

Oh, my Lord. I felt like a criminal, he told Aaron Gell. Well, that makes sense, Peter, because you literally were. You literally are one. Literally were a criminal. So he started thinking, if the world thinks I'm a criminal, I might as well be one. Might as well go full tilt boogie with it, he said. Full tilt boogie. I feel like he only went partial tilt boogie, though, if we're being honest.

Like, not to be a backseat driver or anything, but eh. Our kind of tilt-bugging boy was pissed off at New York. He felt like it had rejected him, cast him out into the wilderness. So he started thinking, How can I really stick it to the Big Apple? To NYC. And the answer came to him like a bolt of lightning. Firefighters.

Like everybody else who was alive at the time, 9-11 had deeply affected Bronstein. And for quite a while after 9-11, firefighters were basically, canonized by the public, especially in New York. They were quite legitimately regarded as selfless heroes. Bronstein decided to take that symbolism and piss all over it. He bought a firefighter's uniform on eBay. He bought an air gun, a fake police badge, chloroform, and supplies to make smoke bombs. And then it was time to choose a target. There was a woman he'd worked with at women's wear daily, young, beautiful, with a gorgeous collection of designer shoes. To Peter, she might as well have been the official mascot of the fashion industry. He didn't know her,

not really, but she seemed like the perfect target to make it look like one of New York's finest had committed a monstrous crime. And on Halloween night, Peter put his plan into motion. We already know how that went down, but we didn't tell you what was going through his head as he terrorized Athena for 13 hours. And we do actually know, because he told us. Or rather, he told journalist Aaron Gell, whose article Friend of the Devil

we've referenced several times already. Now, Aaron Gell, Campers, is a former friend and colleague of Peter Bronstein's. They were bros together at Women's Wear Daily. As Gell puts it, quote, two straight guys on the mostly gay or female staff of a fashion oriented publishing company, neither one

of us who seemed to have much of a future in the fashion world. Aaron tells us us straight out at the start of the article that he always kind of liked Peter Bronstine. And this article is something else, y'all. If you've been craving a good white-hot rage, go read it when you're done listening to this. I guarantee your head will explode before you hit page three. Just a fun little example to give you a little taste of what I mean. At one point in the article, Peter's telling Gell about how some of his fellow inmates resent him for being on America's Most Wanted, which we'll get to that in a little bit. They don't understand why he

got to be on the show. Quoting here from Gell's article, Peter went on, they'll be like, I was almost on it. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that. Almost. Really? Does John Walsh email you when you're almost on and say, you were almost on my show? No, he doesn't do that. There's no way you could almost be on it. It's like almost pregnant or almost dead. No, you're either on it or you're not. And the thing is, I'm not even saying it to be like, hey, look at me. I'm fucking awesome. I'm a rock star. It's just that I happened to be on the show. He looked ponderous for a second. I can't undo that. I wouldn't want to undo that. It's cool to be on that show. At the far end of the table, a clean-cut, exceptionally muscled guard sat

politely studying his hands in his lap. If I hear one more time, you didn't even rape her, he said, employing a whiny sing-song. Then he leaned back and shook his head. I mean, talk about damned if you did, damned if you didn't. At that, the guard and I both stifled a laugh. Oh, you stifled a laugh, did you, Mr. Gell? Please explain to us what's funny about that, because we'd love to understand. And so, I suspect, would the woman this piece of shit tortured for 13 hours? You think because their genitals didn't make contact that minimizes the trauma this woman went through? Guess what, sport?

It doesn't. Not even fucking close. But, you know, sometimes with jokes like that, I guess you just kind of had to be there. Huh, Mr. Gill? I'm sure we're just being sensitive. Yeah, sorry. I'm sure our illogical woman brains just can't fit your sense of humor between thoughts of shoes and the color pink. Of course not.

P.D.B. displayed a similar level of sensitivity, describing his attack on Athena, He said he wasn't really sure what his endgame was at the moment he shoved her back into her apartment and slammed the door behind them, but he figured he told Gell that, quote, it could have been a conventional rape murder thing. Oh, okay, one of those. I got it. Turns out, though, that his heart wasn't really in it, or so he claims. You remember we told you that at some point during the attack, he took the duct tape off Athena's mouth and they had a conversation, one in which, cleverly, the woman pretended to sympathize and relate with them. Peter later told Aaron Gell, she did the whole thing. therapy repertoire of sympathetic listening. She'd just been fired from some random job and she said, you know, the last week I just felt like I'd never been so alone in my entire life. And that's exactly how I'd felt for two years. And on some level, that was the turning point for me. She was now a human being. And once you humanize someone in a situation like that, the whole other

scenario, the triple X sex slave thing, that just goes out the window. When he tried to get aroused, he couldn't. He said, I guess it was just like burdensome on some emotional level. In fact, buckle up for this campers, he later told investigation discovery, quote, Sometimes rape sounds good on paper, but when you're actually in the situation, you're like, I'm just not feeling it. Oh, I would love to hear more about how rape sounds good on paper, Peter, you slug-brained fucking loser. I think you've probably figured out by now that this prick has zero remorse. He's on an episode of that show I almost got away with it. which, no, you didn't, you literally told the victim your birth date and left a massive

trail of evidence, but okay, and he is completely unrepentant. He's full of himself in that, like, pretend self-deprecating way where you know there's a massive ego behind all of it, so it makes it even grosser. She's just absolutely loathsome. Charmingly, at the end of the day, he had this to say about his assault on Athena, that he was, quote, the sex crime equivalent of the rich CEO who pays $5,000 for a hooker and then can't get it up and spends all night talking to her and crying about his problems at work. I was kind of like that guy. Sure, man, that's what that was.

What you did was a totally transactional encounter between consenting adults. I need a second, or I am going to fucking combust. Yeah, I don't think you're the only one. So, as we told you earlier, the next phase of the plan, once he left Athena's apartment, was to kill Vogue Queen Anna Wintour. Now, if you don't know who Anna Wintour is, dame Anna Wintour now, she's been editor-in-chief at Vogue since the 80s. The movie, The Devil Wares Prada, which came out two years before Peter's Little Rampage, was written by a former assistant of hers as a Romana clef. Anna drew a lot of ire at the time because well I guess she wasn't

super nice I'm not sure I don't really get it it seems like she's a capable woman power who isn't friendly and people don't like that yeah I mean look I'm not the biggest fan of the fashion industry okay and I suspect Anna Wintour and I have about as much in common as space aliens from opposite sides of the universe But in Peter's case, my guess is he was threatened by her because she's a powerful woman, period.

Yeah. To Bronsstein, Dame Anna represented everything wrong with the fashion industry. Even when Arangel interviewed him 10 years after his crime, Peter was still seething at the thought of her. He said, she acts like she has aristocratic blood. So do our cats. You want to come murder them too? This is not a thing that would bother somebody with any self-esteem, Peter. grow the fuck up. Anna Wintour

really stuck in Peter's Craw. He'd actually met her once at some sort of fashion show. She shook his hand, smiled as much as Anna Wintour ever does, and said nothing. Her greatest crime, though, to Peter, was that when he was working

as a journalist, she was one of the only editors that didn't take his calls. Because Vogue didn't need Women's Wear Daily. He'd been watching her for some time, following her home from work, studying his target, he planned the assassination meticulously, all the way down to his outfit. Quoting from the Gell article, an all-saints

duster, coal-colored, metallic, trench coat length. Oh my God, he's Dennis Reynolds from it's always sunny in Philadelphia. Him and his flippin'uster. Oh my God. He was going to use a knife, he said, to show that for all her aristocratic attitude, Anna Wintour was flesh and blood, just like everybody else. And he planned to leave a note on her body. It would read, sudden death is the new black. Christ alive. This guy is boring. Boring.

Okay. Are we done laughing yet? You might need a pause. Because I'm all right. All right. Sudden death is angry. Lord have mercy. It's not even good.

It's so trite. It's awful. You're a writer, Pete. God, okay. So, y'all already know that he checked himself into a motel in hell's kitchen to get ready to go after poor Olanna. But then he saw the news story about his crime and hauled ass to Cleveland instead, where he posed as a reality show producer from L.A. and spent a lot of time at a topless bar. He was drinking again and doing drugs, paying way too much money for lap dances, and he realized he was running out of money, and he'd need to do

some more crime pretty soon. He bought a handgun off a crack dealer at the strip club, thinking he'd try his hand at robbing some of the topless dancers. He described them to investigation discovery as walking ATMs. Well, fortunately for Peter, he quickly realized that this was a bad idea. which, yeah, have you met any exotic dancers? Whitney, you know he's never had a real conversation with them. He's only ever talked to them as a client. Well, first off, they know it's dangerous to carry a whole lot of cash around with them. And second of all, those women will cut you in no uncertain terms.

So, yeah, bad idea. Anywho, meanwhile, back in New York, detectives found a storage locker Bronstein had rented, searched it, and hit a motherload of evidence like you have never seen before in your life. Master criminal? Our boy was not. Gasp! He kept almost everything, the chloroform, the duct tape, the ski mask with his and Athena's DNA all over it, plus the stuff he stole from her apartment on his way out, her Louis Vuitton bag and whatnot. His ex-girlfriend slash stalking victim Jane was understandably terrified when she found out what Peter had done. She went underground, ditching her cell phone in favor of email with her

friends, and as for Athena, she never went back to living in her apartment. Who can blame her? And the other residents there were offered self-defense classes, just to feel a little safer. Two weeks after arriving in Cleveland, Peter figured it was time to get back on the move. He took a bus to Columbus, which he hated on site. But he didn't have any money left to go anywhere else, so that meant, in his mind, it was time to rob somebody. He chose a cab driver, hailed a cab, got in, brandished his gun. But unlike a cab driver in a movie might, but unlike a cab driver in a movie might do, this actual cab driver, for whom I suspect this was not his first rodeo, argued with him. And Peter suddenly realized he'd made a stupid mistake. This guy had just started

his shift. He didn't have any cash on him yet. Pete, bless his heart, panicked and tried to handcuff the guy. The cabby, seeing the cuffs, decided to nope out a situation. He just abandoned the cab and just ran hellb bent for leather away. And assuming the cops would be on their way soon, PDB fled the cab and hid at a nearby construction site until 4 o'clock in the morning. What a fucking dunce. Yeah.

Now, Camper's, as a follow-up to the farce that was Peter's attempt to rob this cabby, I'd like to present this direct quote from his interview on I Almost Got Away With It. As a fugitive, that was the first time in my life that I had to operate at peak capacity mentally. And I loved it. I loved every minute of it.

Peak. Capacity. Campers. It gets her every time. It gets her every time. Every time. Capacity. So, we'll come back to that.

Peter seemed to like the idea of crime more than reality. Once passing a church of Scientology, he thought he might come back later and raise some hell, do an armed robbery, whatever. Maybe that would show the public that he wasn't such a bad guy, that he was doing all this for moral reasons. Peter seems to have an obsession with being praised. and accepted by the public. He wanted fame and fortune and all that entails, but you know, he kind of sucks. He's clearly smart, vaguely talented as a writer, but he grew more and more

furious as others seemed somehow to ignore his genius. He wanted to be admired for who he was, not what he did, and anybody that didn't do that was personally sliding him. When he didn't get what he wanted, he decided his only choice was to lash out at everybody who'd done him wrong, and he still sees nothing wrong with that. Pathetic. With a knife-strapped to his ankle and a stun gun, his real gun, and what little cash he had left in a blue Hello Kitty backpack, Peter wandered around from town to town. For all his big talk about robbery, he mostly sought out free meals at churches. He couldn't afford the cheap motels anymore, so he became kind of transient. He stayed in an abandoned office building once or twice, then moved to the University of Cincinnati Library.

They didn't require ID. There, he could read history books, steal from students' bags, and drink free coffee. Eventually, though, security got wise to him and kicked him out. So he moved on to Xavier, another university nearby. Remember, campers, peak capacity. Mind like a steel trap. Reflexes like a cat. We are in the presence of greatness. Uh-huh.

One night, he decided to hide out in the Xavier library until everybody left so he could spend the night. He hadn't slept in a couple days, peak capacity. And he really wanted a nap, so he would. wedged himself behind a coke machine at 12.45 a.m. The library closed at one and waited. Eventually, all the students and staff left, and it was just Peter and the cleaning lady. And this was a very thorough cleaning lady. A cleaning lady who, you might say, was operating at peak capacity. It was taking her forever to clean the place. Bronstein was getting tired and sore, hiding behind the vending machine, so he finally

snuck into the men's room because the cleaning woman had already been in there. He figured he'd hide out in there until she went home. He slipped into a stall, sitting cross-legged on the toilet so his feet wouldn't show under the door and waited. The toilet kept flushing, so he put a sock over the sensor to block it. But then the cleaning lady came back in. She was done, but her last task was dumping her sudsy water into each of the toilets. She approached his hiding. She approached his hiding place, closer and closer, until finally she opened the door. In his fugitive diary, ew, Peter describes the moment from the perspective of the cleaning lady. You open the second stall to see a white man in a black skull cap, dark sunglasses,

and a gun in his hand sitting on the toilet seat in the lotus position with only one sock on. you freak out there's no script for this but you can't panic gotta stay cool so you mutter oh excuse me sir as if you're the intruder then you close the stall door and hightail it the fuck out of there you jump in the elevator and hit the lobby button hard you can hear the strange dangerous half barefooted man behind you he's left the bathroom and is heading towards you trying to cut you off but the elevator doors close in just the nick of time you're freaking out you get to the lobby but he's already made you it up the stairs. He says, come over here in a dangerous voice. He's not exactly yelling, but he seems really angry. When she slipped through my grasp, the first thing I did was yell, damn it, at the top of my lungs and then bang my skull-capped head on the bookcase a few times. All I wanted was some fucking sleep. And now I've got to do the absolute last thing I want, which is to run back downstairs, get my other sock. Sorry, get my other sock. fetch my gear bag from behind the neighboring Doritos machine and get the hell out of there.

Peak capacity. Later, when somebody asked him why he didn't kill the cleaning lady, he said that it went against the code. Okay, holding a terrified woman captive and sexually molesting her for 13 hours is not against the code, but killing the cleaning lady is. Got it. Yeah, I'm taking notes. Good, good. The next day, Peter finally. managed to do a robbery right. Finally. This time, he found a psychiatrist in the phone book,

because, as he told ID, he'd paid a lot of money to therapists over the years, and it hadn't gone well. I wonder why. He went to the guy's office, threatened him with a gun to get his ATM card and pin number, tied him up and duct tape his mouth shut. Then he took his cash and got on a bus to Memphis, Tennessee. It had been two and a half weeks since he invaded Athena's apartment. In Memphis, he was able to rent a motel room and check whether his case was still on TV. It was. The news people were calling him the fire fiend, which sounds like a Batman villain from the 50s, and there was a $12,000 reward for his capture. Later, in the Gell article, Peter seemed miffed that the price on his head wasn't bigger. Aw, poor kid. He was miffed in general that the people of New York

were so eager to see him caught. He said he felt like it was an entitled attitude on their part, which is just the weirdest shit I've ever heard in my life. Yeah, Peter, I actually do feel entitled to go after sexually violent trash and lock them up so they can't hurt anybody else. You, on the other hand, feel entitled to revenge for some non-existent horseshit conspiracy you made up in your own hit. Which one of us wins? I think it's me. In Memphis, Peter tried on yet another new identity. Mark Joffrey, Hurricane Katrina survivor. He felt like he could identify with the Katrina victims. He felt displaced, too. Wow, way to make an unprecedented human tragedy all about you.

Anywho, it was in Memphis when Peter made it onto the TV show America's Most Wanted. He wrote in his Fugitive Diary that he couldn't wait to go out in a blaze of glory. Suicide by cop. This diary is a trip, by the way. In one excerpt, Peter tries to frame himself as some kind of working-class hero. He wrote about a time when a black woman on the bus gave him, quote, a large double handful of her skittles, adding that this seems to be a national black eating

habit. They'll consume sweets whenever, wherever, people with very little sharing whatever they have with you. Okay, number one, for God's sake, just take the fucking skittles, Peter. Not everything has to be documented for posterity, okay? And number two, one woman offers you sweets and suddenly it's a national black eating habit? Charming. You know, maybe you fit in with New York's fashionally, a little bit better than you think, scusbag. Little tip, since you fancy yourself the John Dos Passos of fashion literature, writing about black people like you would describe a penguin and national geographic, not a great move.

Of course, Peter also used this experience to go back to his favorite pastime, crying about New Yorkers. He wrote that it contrasted with, quote, the selfish indifference of those overcompensated fashionista assholes in NYC, who wouldn't give me the time of day when I was hurting and reaching out for some help. I didn't even want anything material from them, just the proverbial shoulder to cry on,

just someone to invite me over for a spaghetti dinner and some conversation, but evidently, that was too much to ask. Ha! Yeah. Yeah, I reckon it was, because you are clearly insufferable. Anyway, Peter avoided capture for six weeks,

about which he still remains infuriatingly smug, which is hilarious to me. You got caught, bro, who cares if it took him a few weeks to do it? Two factors would be his downfall. First, when he got to Memphis, he sold his blood to make some extra cash and used his real ID, with his real name.

Peak capacity! And not long after that, a woman on the street recognized him from America's Most Wanted and called the police. They came a runnin, and at 2.45 p.m., an officer attempted to put the habeas grab-us on Peter.

Peter said, I'm the person you're looking for, then stabbed himself in the neck with his knife. Officers used pepper spray to take him down. From the sidewalk, in a growing pool of his own blood, Peter begged the officers to kill him. To this day, he says he's suicidal. I have my doubts about that, judging by his attitude on I almost got away with it,

but who can say? At any rate, he didn't die. Didn't stab himself well enough. Peter received 18 to life for sexual abuse, arson, robbery, and kidnapping. The heaviest of those charges was kidnapping. which only applies in the state of New York if the victim is held for more than 12 hours. Peter was in her apartment for 13. Gell called this a legal technicality.

Campers, I think it's time to talk about partiality and true crime reporting. The article we gleaned a lot of information for this episode from is a brutal read. Not only because Peter Bronstein is the human equivalent of the dirt on the bottom of my shoes, but also because Aaron Gell seems enamored with him, if not enamored, at least persuaded. He talks about Peter's crime like it wasn't that bad. Well, he didn't actually rape her. But then it took him until the very end of his research

to actually ask Peter what he did. He called the kidnapping charge a technicality as if consideration should be taken that Peter wasn't terrorizing her for the entire time. time. He just chemically sedated her and watched TV. It was fascinating reading this article when I did. I had read it a few years ago when Whitney shared it with me, but this time I read it at the same time I was rereading Ann Rules the stranger beside me, the seminal work on serial killer Ted Bundy. As some of you know,

Anne Rule knew Bundy. She considered him a friend. But when the first description of the killer came out, she did suspect him and even reported him to the police. When he was first arrested, she had a hard time reconciling the man she thought she knew with the monster that the investigators claimed he was. Her book is a gold standard of how to write an impartial, not in biased, but impartial piece about a criminal you know. She empathizes with Bundy, his imprisonment in a very human way. But she never, ever, ever excuses what he did to those girls and never lost a sense of how dangerous her old friend could be. On the other hand, there are times when Gell seems eager to excuse Peter to trivialize the things he did, the things he threatened to do, the things he describes with the kind

of glee you'd expect from a kid describing a trip to Disneyland. I'm not sure why. It could be because he identified with his friend? A straight man out of place in the world of fashion? I don't know. But if you do read the article, keep in mind that it is not a good example of unbiased media. Yeah, I needed like a run around the neighborhood after I was done. I had so much like just angry energy. So I think you'll see what we mean if you read it. So prosecutors in Ohio offered Bronstein a plea bargain. If he accepted, they'd let him serve his sentence for the armed robbery he did there, the cab driver, concurrently with his kidnapping charge in New York. Unfortunately, for Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater, he never learned to shut the hell up.

So he was quoted as calling Cincinnati a backwater whose police officers were so dukes of hazard and said if he ever got out, he'd go on a homicidal rampage. So there went that. He got 23 years to be served only after his sentence in New York is done. So most likely, he ain't going anywhere for a good long. time. In prison in 2008, Peter made contact with a 16-year-old girl he calls Salander, a cool kid who did his bidding on the outside. And yeah, we do mean he's called her after the girl in the dragon tattoo. Yeah, that's Salander. Salander gave him all the latest gossip, or at least whatever she could find out, about his old cronies in the fashion world, and despite the fact that Peter

was 47 at the time, and she was 16, they wrote erotic letters back and forth. which, Jesus Christ, that's creepy. Mm-mm. Ugh. Despite the sex talk, Peter described his relationship with her as father-daughter, and bragged about being her evil life coach. Wherever this girl is, well, she'd be a woman by now, we feel fairly certain she's figured out what a disgusting twat he is by now,

and we hope she's doing well. When Erangel asked Peter if he was sorry for his crimes, Peter said, the question itself is a trap. No one gets out alive. If I answer, no, I'm a cold-blooded monster. If I say yes, people think crocodile tears, and then I'm a liar, monster, and a wimp because now I'm flip-flopping. Plus, I approach it as foremost a philosophical question, and my long answer tends to be intellectual, a rumination on selective empathy. So this time around, I'll just cut to the chase by summoning the immortal words of chantus Edith Piaf. No, I no retryin. translation no i'm not sorry to this day peter wants to kill annawinter and he told investigation discovery that if we let him out of prison tomorrow he'd go get a steak dinner then pick right up where he left off so let's hope he stays right where he is forever in a day in the meantime pete i think i'm going to go enjoy a nice steak dinner you can get back to your commissary granola bar or whatever pdb so that

was a wild one right campers you know we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the True Crime Campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Elena, Tarim, Margaret, Tosh, Ashley, Amy, and Corinna. We appreciate you to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes even two, plus an extra episode a month. And once you hit the $5. up categories, you get even more cool stuff.

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