True Crime Campfire - Idiot Box: Killer Kids Inspired by TV

Episode Date: February 20, 2026

In the cases we cover, there are types of relationship that frequently crop up between killer and victim, romantic partners or romantic rivals most of all. Sometimes, though, the relationship that is broken by murder is more shocking: a parent killing a child, or a child killing a parent. And sometimes that killer is still literally a child, someone you would never suspect to be capable of such brutal action. Case 1: The Murder of Jackie Bartlam. Case 2: The Murder of Gina Padilla. Tickets are on sale now for CrimeWave 2.0! Visit crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE to book your cabin, plus get $100 off and a private meet-and-greet with us! The cruise is from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida to Nassau, Bahamas, Feb. 8-12, 2027.Sources:https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/local-news/coronation-street-obsessed-killer-who-9828273 https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/daniel-bartlam-14-year-old-255698 https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/uk-world-news/chilling-story-coronation-street-obsessed-9289922 https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/02/teenager-daniel-bartlam-jailed-murderA&E's "Killer Kids" S1E14, “A Scream & Banana Split” https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-jul-23-me-58845-story.html https://www.cbsnews.com/news/2-guilty-of-iscream-i-murder/ https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-jul-02-me-52343-story.htmlFollow 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/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enTwitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome 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. Don't forget about our true crime crews, Crime Wave 2.0, February 8 through 12th, 2027. If you want to come on vacation with us and some of the biggest true crime and paranormal podcasts in the world, like case file, true crime garage, and scared to death, here's what you got to do. Tickets are on sale now, and they're going really fast, so if you want to go, make sure you get over to crimewave at sea.com slash campfire and book your cabin ASAP. You'll get $100 off plus a private

meet and greet with us. The great thing is you can pay all at once or you can set up a payment plan and pay it off over time. So get on it, y'all. That's crimewave atc.com slash campfire. In the cases we cover, there are types of relationships that frequently crop up between killer and victim, romantic partners or romantic rivals most often of all. Sometimes, though, the relationship that is broken by murder is more shocking. A parent killing a child or a child killing a parent. And sometimes that killer is still literally a child, someone you would never suspect to be capable of such brutal action. This is Idiot Box, a grab bag of killer kids, who took their inspiration from the TV.

So, campers, for this one, were in England, in the Nottingham suburb of Arnold, April 25, 2011. The nighttime piece of Georgia Drive was broken by flames licking out of an upstairs window, and the sound of children screaming. Neighbors who hurried over saw 14-year-old Daniel Bartlam standing outside, yelling for help, holding his six-year-old younger brother in one arm

and the family dog in the other. rescuing his brother and the dog was a simple act of quick-thinking bravery that would have been beyond a lot of panicking young people, but a dark cloud of dread still hung over the scene. Daniel's mother, Jacqueline, was nowhere to be seen and was presumably still inside the burning house. In fact, the fire had started in her bedroom and had burned so hot that Jackie's remains would only be identified from her dental records. The remains also confirmed to investigators that it wasn't the fire that killed Jackie. She'd been savagely beaten, struck seven times in the head with a hammer. But based on the story Daniel had told them, the police expected Jackie to have serious injuries. He said he'd woken up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and had surprised a masked intruder in the dark hallway.

Daniel had picked up a hammer that happened to be on the floor nearby and flung it at the intruder, who ducked it and escaped through an open second-floor window. Daniel hurried to his mom's bedroom, where he found her still and bloody on the floor, with the room already ablaze. The flames forced Daniel out of the bedroom, so he snatched up his little brother and the dog, and raced outside to scream for help.

So an unknown intruder broke in, beat Jackie to death, and set her bedroom on fire. Right there next to her charred body was the remains of the likely murder weapon, a heavy lump hammer. Except it wasn't the likely murder weapon, because the home office pathologists who examined Jackie's body had quickly determined that she'd been struck by the round head of a claw hammer and not the big square head of the hammer found next to her body. Someone had staged the murder scene, and badly. To be clear, though, the police didn't have to wait for the pathologist's report

to be skeptical about the story this kid Daniel was telling them. A masked murdering arsonist is something vanishingly rare, even to big city cops, never mind in this sleepy little suburb. And is someone like that really going to be scared off by a skinny 14-year-old boy? Probably not. Once the firefighters had the flames under control, the police searched the charred, waterlogged house. Hidden in Daniel's room, they found a claw hammer and a bottle of cleaning fluid that had been used on it recently. A day and a half after the fire, Daniel Bartlam was arrested and charged with his mother's murder. So how did we get here?

Daniel Bartlam was born in 1996, and his parents, Jackie and Adrian, got married three years later. They had another son, Dominic, in 2005, but by then the marriage was already on the rocks, and they got divorced the same year. Until now, Daniel had had a reasonably privileged upper-middle-class life. They lived in a big house, and he went to a fancy private prep school. But after the divorce, Jackie got custody of the boys, and things were tired. after a couple of years Jackie tried to pull 11-year-old Daniel from his expensive school, but he threw an absolute fit, and she somehow scraped together the thousands of pounds necessary to keep him at the same school for another semester.

And we should pause here to look at this, because it's revealing about both mother and son, I think. Daniel wasn't upset about changing schools because he'd lose friends. He never had very many of those, and it wasn't like he was being sent to some terrible Victorian workhouse where children were fed on gruel. I mean, we're talking about a good, high-achieving state school. But it wasn't a rich kid school, and Daniel really liked the status of going to a rich kid school. And the way he made his displeasure known was to berate and belittle his mom in a way that was much more like an abusive partner than a child. Again, he was 11 years old. In just a couple of years, Jackie would be scared of her son, and maybe she all.

already was. Also, Daniel's dad got him on weekends when they did lots of fun stuff and spoiled the kid with expensive gifts and gadgets. Jackie was the one who had to do the actual discipline and child rearing, so guess which parent Daniel liked better? Disneyland dad, right? Yeah, I was just going to say, in the U.S. we call that a Disney dad. Yep. We don't know the exact circumstances of his parents' divorce, but we know Daniel blamed Jackie for it, and he made no secret of it. So there are reasons why Jackie may have been softer on Daniel than a lot of us would think she should be. I'm pretty sure that if 11-year-old Whitney had ever tried to bully my parents into sending me to like a fancy expensive school or bully them into anything, really, that he just laughed and laughed.

A lot of commentators on this case imply that Jackie failing to stand up to her son was the reason why things turned out the way they did. But I don't buy that at all. It's an oversimplification of cause and effect, and if anything, a firmer hand might have brought on a dangerous confrontation even sooner. And speaking of over a simplified cause and effect, one of the aspects of this case that gets talked about a lot is Daniel's fascination with violent media. One British show clutches its pearls real hard about how, from the age of 12, Daniel was watching incredibly violent movies and playing 18 rated games, which might make you think he

was watching like dark web snuff films and downloading weird Japanese hentai games, but But then you dig a little bit deeper and find out he was watching like Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween and playing Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty. For God's saying. I mean, sure, these are all very violent and maybe not something you want your 12-year-old child consuming, but they're also very normal. Like every 12-year-old I've ever met has played those games. Kids with psychopathic tendencies might be unusually drawn to media.

like this, but the media doesn't create these psychopathic tendencies. I guess for some people, there's comfort in finding easy answers to the question, why did this happen? When the truth is often an uncomfortable one, that some people, even young people, are just fundamentally broken. Right. And not often. You know, this is a rare thing. But, you know, there are people that are just born with this predisposition. And if you want proof of that, people have been pearl clutching about what their kids are into since the dawn of humanity. Okay. When coffee first became popular, people wrote horrified articles and letters to the editor

about how it was going to be the downfall of civilization. Same with bicycle riding, dancing, women wearing pants, comic books, jazz, Elvis, the Beatles, heavy metal. I mean, the list goes on and on all throughout the ages. I'm sure if we looked hard enough, we could find some cave painting somewhere that translates to young men these days bash too many mammoth need to cut hair and get job. Yeah, there's like ancient Egyptian carvings that talk about how kids don't listen to their parents anymore.

Absolutely. We should probably, we should probably chill, you know? Yeah. And besides the media that had the strongest grip on Daniel's imagination wasn't a horror movie or a bloodbath video game. It was British soap operas. particularly EastEnders and Coronation Street. For those of you who aren't familiar with British soaps, roughly you keep all the melodrama and feuds and evil twins and stuff like that from the American shows, strip out all the glamour and glitz and make everybody clinically depressed.

Like, you know how, yeah, in the American soaps, there's like a very gauzy, like, filter that, like, makes all the diamonds and stuff, like, really spark. And then you have the British ones that just look dingy and sad. And they also tend to be shows that your granny watches with their average age demographic hovering around 60 to 80. So this was a weird fixation for a snot-nosed little twerk like Daniel. His brief YouTube presence had a couple of videos about the new IMAC, his dad bought for him and some clips from EastEnders, like nothing about video games or horror movies.

Daniel's new school was a Catholic school with school uniforms. One day in class, Daniel started shouting at his tie, which he called Fred, and yelled that Fred was trying to strangle him. He told the school counselor he was hearing voices that told him to hurt people.

Now obviously, and thank God for that, we can't get inside Daniel Bartlam's head, but I'm pretty confident that both of these stories, the sentient tie and the voices in the head, were bullshit. a way to get attention and possibly ask for help about his real problems. He also told the counselor he was depressed and angry and had frequent nightmares,

and that I absolutely believe. I'd like to think that if a school counselor actually thought a student was hearing voices telling him to hurt people, then they'd take drastic steps to get him some help, but I mean, who knows? Daniels, reported depression and anger doesn't seem to have initiated any kind of treatment. It can be very hard to diagnose psychopathic tendencies in young people. Anti-social behavior, a lack of empathy, a pattern of deception, obsessive interest. These are not so much uncommon in teenage brains, you know, as they're growing and changing. So when Daniel started getting even more moody and spending all his time in his room,

it didn't necessarily raise any red flags by itself. That's pretty much standard issue behavior for a 13-year-old boy, but other things did send those red flags up the flagpole. He wasn't voices in the head mentally ill, but it was clear. that all was not well inside Daniel's head. In 2008, Jackie started dating a new guy, Simon Matters, and the next year, when Daniel was 13, Jackie moved the family into a new house on Georgia Drive. This was a perfectly nice suburban place, right next to some fields and a park, but it was a small house and the neighborhood wasn't wealthy, so Daniel was furious at having to live there.

One afternoon, while Simon was helping Jackie pack up Daniel's room for the move, he made several really disturbing discoveries. Under his bed, Daniel had a few plastic trays where he kept his Star Wars and Doctor Who action figures. He had cut these up into pieces and then peed and pooped into the trays and cleaned himself up with towels that he hid under the bed. Whoa. Also hidden under there were bags

full of Jackie's underwear. His mom's underwear. Now obviously, this is a lot. the kind of behaviors that can indicate significant mental health problems. But there's also a decent chance that Daniel had just learned to enjoy shocking people. He knew Simon was going to go through his room and might have set things up to get a reaction. It's also possible that he might have been trying to preemptively create a record of mental illness to help him avoid the consequences of future crimes. To jump forward just a little, we're basing this on the fact that when Daniel ultimately came to trial,

both the prosecution and defense had examined by mental health experts, who agreed that he was not suffering from any kind of psychiatric or psychological ailment. The behaviors Daniel exhibited aren't the kind of things you just suddenly get better from, especially not after murdering somebody, which has to make you wonder if they were calculated theatrical acts. If anyone actually believed that Daniel was hearing voices telling him to hurt people, the defense would have been all over that, they would have absolutely brought it up at trial, and they didn't. Jackie, anyway, had a mental health assessment performed on her son at Thornywood Child and adolescent mental health services, which found no indication of mental illness. Though it's fair to take that assessment

with a pinch of salt, because they also determined that he posed little risk to himself or others, and this was six weeks before he killed his mother with a claw hammer, so... Great job. Daniel often argued with his mom, but those arguments started to get rage-filled and frightening. A few times, Simon had to physically step between them when it seemed likely that Daniel was about to hit his mom. Daniel started ripping plants out of the flower bed, and when Jackie painted some of the floors in the new house, he deliberately walked through the wet paint and tracked footprints all over the place. He also proudly showed Simon and Jackie a story he'd written. In the story, two boys were walking to school

when one started bullying the other one. After a kind of running battle on the way to school, the bullied boy stabbed his friend to death. Not the kind of story your mom puts up on the fridge to show off, right? Yikes. His soap opera obsession had focused in

on one character, Coronation Street's villainous teacher, John Stape. In a busy four years on the show, John has an affair with a student, kidnaps her, goes to prison, gets out, murder someone, kidnaps three more people, then flees, then comes back, kidnaps his former student again, then dies in a car wreck.

God dang, man. Save some villainry for the rest of us. And knowing how a soap opera's work, the death didn't take, you know? Oh, yeah. Yeah, he's got to kidnap some more people probably. The first death never takes. To Daniel, the important part was the murder. John Stap had been getting blackmailed by a woman, so he beat her to death with a hammer. A tram car had just violently crashed nearby killing several passengers.

John took his victim's body and planted it in the wreckage so that people would think the accident had killed her. That all sounds pretty familiar, doesn't it? Yep. And on April 25th, when Simon was out of town for work, the soap opera plot became terrible reality. Jackie was killed with a hammer. Then her bedroom was set on fire to cover up the crime. But unfortunately for Daniel, the fire didn't destroy the computer in his room. Daniel liked to think of himself as quite the tech bro, but 14-year-olds with inflated opinions of themselves tend to learn uncomfortable lessons when faced with actual reality.

Like, for example, the fact that deleting files and clearing your search history does not scrub your computer clean of all incriminating evidence. Why don't people know this? Just why? One search could maybe be argued away as harmless, at least in isolation. People who got away with murder in shows. Although it does show how obsessed Daniel was with TV, he wasn't even looking up true crime cases. He wanted to see what screenplay writers had come up with. You know, we're the only factor determining whether the killer gets away with it

is if the writer chooses that that's how it's going to go. Daniel, hon, I think you'll find that your favorite soaps are not documentaries, okay? Another search was man kills wife and makes it, i.e. gets away with it. and then there was a straightforward how to get away with murder. Oh, boy. But the real gold was a story Daniel had written and then deleted,

which technicians were able to recover from his IMAX hard drive. In it, he describes Daniel Bartlam, who had been a character in a soap opera for 50 years, a black cat villain who got away with a string of murders and sexual assaults. Daniel wrote, The only place he couldn't get away with his bad deeds

was with Mother Jackie. So one evening, he made it look as, though there was a break-in and murdered his mother with a hammer and then set her in the family home alight. Bro. Brough. Buddy. Teenage killers, man.

Good God. Although we have seen this with grown-ass killers too. Remember Mark Twitchell? The Dexter killer. Another guy inspired by a TV show, by the way. And Christian Bala, that insufferable Polish intellectual, who wrote an entire ass book about the murder he committed. So we see this.

Why in God's name we see it? this I can't imagine because it is the dumb as shit you could possibly do, but there you go. After starting the fire, the fictional Daniel, just like the real one, got his younger brother out of the house and got the neighbors to call the police. In the story, Jackie's killer was never found, and Daniel went to live with his dad. In reality, he was inside a cell within a day and a half of the murder. Kind of surprisingly, he stuck to the masked intruder story for weeks, right up to when technicians recovered his fictional version of events from the computer. That's a lot longer than most young killers stick to their bullshit.

They usually crack like eggs. Yeah, this is actually creepy to me because usually a teenage suspect will cave to the tiniest bit of pressure, but not Daniel, which suggests to me that there's something else going on in that hit, like something a little rarer, a little more out of the ordinary. Mm-hmm. Even after the story came to light, Daniel tried to deflect any blame, saying he'd gotten into a screaming match with his mom and just lost control. That was also nonsense, obviously.

I don't think you can get better evidence of premeditation than a killer writing an exact fictional version of the murder beforehand. Yeah, I don't even know if you could call it fiction at that point. He called the guy Daniel Bartlam. Like, he didn't even call him like Samuel Hartlum, you know? I mean, it's just dead on. Here's what I'm going to do, right down to rescuing the brother and the dog. And, oh, Lord.

Daniel was, surprise, surprised, convicted of murder and given a life sentence, with the judge ordering that he serve at least 16 years in prison. That was in 2012, and in 2024, Daniel was moved to an open prison, which is often a precursor to release. So there's every chance that he'll be out soon. And I don't think there's any way to determine whether he's still dangerous. I mean, your brain is still developing. You know, your adult brain is substantially different to how it was at 4.4. On the other hand, Daniel really seems to have exhibited some psychopathic traits, and psychopathy is not something that we know how to cure. Not yet, anyway.

For our second case, we're in Linwood, California, a blue-collar city in the L.A. Basin, January 1998. Linwood had a significant gang presence at this time and could be a tough place to raise kids, but Mario Padilla's parents weren't worried about him going out and causing any trouble. if anything, just the opposite. Mario was 16 years old, but looked years younger, a quiet, shy-seeming little kid who'd rather stay in his room than go out and play. He never got in any trouble, and his mom and stepdad thought he was a great kid,

well-behaved, went to church with them without complaining. He was a mama's boy. The members of his extended family all described him as being devoted to his mom, Gina. And obviously, it's perfectly fine to be close with your mom, but also maybe it's safe. 16, you should be stretching those apron strings just to scosh. Maybe you should be getting in just a little bit of trouble, right?

Just a little bit as a treat. And I think that's what his family thought too. Like, come on, man. Get out of the house. Gina's sister lived just down the street. Her 14-year-old son, Samuel Ramirez, Mario's cousin, was Mario's best and probably only friend. Samuel was in a tough place in his life. His father had recently died of AIDS, and he was kind of adrift.

It was easy to latch on to his older cousin, and Mario got the novel experience of impressing someone as an older semi-authority figure. Mario and Samuel hung out at the arcade and rented horror and action movies from Blockbuster Video, all normal stuff for 90s teens. But then one day Samuel brought a knife to school. It was just a pocket knife, and in isolation that might seem harmless enough, although by the time we get to the end of this story, you might wonder exactly what Samuel was planning on doing with it. Linwood High School had a zero-tolerance policy for weapons on campus, and Samuel was expelled. Mario was now friendless and lonely at school, and he got depressed. And there wasn't much chance of him alleviating that loneliness. His parents might have thought he was a quiet, good boy, but at school his reputation was a little different.

Quiet, yes, but the girls thought he was a creep. One of those kids who's always staring at you too long and too hard, and even though he didn't say much, you got the impression that there was something ugly and furious behind those eyes. In the next generation's vocabulary, Mario Padilla had strong in-cell vibes, and the girl's instincts were right. He was a creep. He had a crush on a girl at school, Darlene. Darlene already had a boyfriend, so Mario tried to persuade her to ditch him. Not by actually talking to her, of course, talking to girls was not a skill Mario had at his disposal. He sent her poems and love letters, which I really wish we had access to because, you know, it's always

entertaining to see what these people try to write. Yep, we're looking at you, BTK and your god-awful poetry. And remember that dude who wrote a letter to his female co-worker that he wanted to eat her arms? You remember that one? Perry March. I want to eat your arms. What the hell? A teenage boy sending love letters to his crush might sound kind of sweet, but again, we'd really have to see the letters. For her part, Darlene was not impressed. She had no romantic interest at all in Mario. If I had to take a guess, she was probably nice to him a couple times, and that was it. Don't be nice to the weird kids, people.

I'm just kidding. I was a weird kid. I absolutely can't say that. But, you know, listen to your gut. Anyway, Darlene shot him down. Now, this is about as close to a universal human experience as you're going to get. Everybody gets shot down sometimes, but to a creepy little in-cell brain like Mario's, it was an unforgivable insult.

He sank deeper and deeper into an angry funk. His anger could have found almost anything to focus on, but what Mario glommed onto was the Scream franchise, which at the time consisted of just the first two movies. Spoiler warning for 30-year-old movies. Yes, you are that old, and I'm sorry. But in the first movie, a couple of high school boys killed their classmates. And the second is mostly the same deal, but in college, with the twist that one of the killers intends to blame violent movies for his crimes

and get famous during his trial. This is one of the most meta motivations I think we've ever seen. An offender basing his criminal acts on a violent movie where a killer falsely claims that violent movies inspired him. similar to Daniel Bartlam, a lot of commentary on this case is about how these terrible, bloody movies warp a kid's brain. But, um, guys, have you seen Scream 2? It's literally about a kid hoping to gain notoriety by blaming movies for his crimes. I know, right? I think that went right over a lot of crime reporter's heads in that case. Also, scream again. This is the second or third case we've covered where some dipshit was inspired by that movie. It's a shame, because it's a shame. It's a great movie. I love the Scream franchise.

I think it's wonderful. I think it's smart. Somebody's always got to ruin it for the rest of us. Just like Dexter. Awesome show. Like 50,000 different killers killed somebody because they were inspired by Dexter. Yeah. And I don't know why the crime reporters always like take the bait.

They have seen it before. But I think it's just easy. I think, you know, it sells. Well, it's just like Bundy when he finally confessed, like the day before his execution or something. And he tried to blame his murders on. porn. Like, and he found an audience for it because this, like, focus on the family. Very fundamentalist Christian activists interviewed him and like wanted to hear all about it. But Bundy was going to kill people regard. I promise you. Like, it's not because he looked at porn.

Yeah. And it's not because this kid watched the scream movies. It's just not. That's not how it works. Not at all. And I just wish that crime reporters would be more responsible about it. Yeah, absolutely. Me too. But they never are. Because it's, like you say, it's sensational and it sells. Yeah. For later, by the way, put a pin in the fact that another of Mario's favorite movies was Primal Fear from 1996. With another 30-year-old spoiler alert, Edward Norton's character in that movie fakes insanity to get away with a calculated murder.

Worth remembering. I love that movie. I love me a good twisty thriller. I had a whole binge one time. of just nothing but 80s and 90s thrillers. Oof, so good. Also, 90s era Richard Gear, nothing wrong with that.

No, ma'am. Yeah, Edward Norton is a treat in that one. It's so good. Oh, he's so good. It's a great movie. Anyway, Mario and Samuel like to watch the Scream movies again and again.

The guy at Blockbuster video probably got sick of the side of them. In November of 1997, Mario started calling Darlene, using an electronic voice disorder to disguise his voice. They were creepy, scary calls like, I've been watching you and you're going to die. Calls like this were far from unknown in the days before caller ID,

letting ineffectual losers like Mario exert some degree of power and control over other people. Darlene hung up on the first call, so Mario called her right back and snarled, How dare you hang up on me? I'll let it go this time, but the next time it happens, you'll die. Jesus. I think it's likely that Darlene did put two and two together. there, you know, I turn down that creepy guy at school and now I'm getting these terrifying phone calls. But for one thing, that's the kind of realization that people are very good at talking themselves out of. We've seen it dozens of times where someone's first instinct is to

blame someone close to them and then immediately say, nah, I'm being ridiculous. We've seen a number of cases like that. Remember Matt Baker, the preacher who killed his wife? And she literally told her therapist and one of her friends, I think he's going to kill me and to kind of, oh, no, come on, that's ridiculous. And then he killed her. So this happens. The other thing is, Darlene was scared. She was a 16-year-old kid getting phone calls threatening to kill her.

It makes perfect sense for her to be too scared to report what was going on. Mario found that it was a real thrill to terrify Darlene. Yeah, dude. It's clear you really did have deep and true romantic feelings for this girl. Amazing that she wanted nothing to do with you. God. In fact, tormenting Darlene was so much fun for Mario that he expanded to include two other girls at his school and enlisted Samuel to help him. Samuel basically followed his older cousin all the way down the rabbit hole, copying his behaviors and obsessions.

I think you can look at this, partly at least, as an extreme example of peer pressure. Samuel's dad, remember, had died recently, and to some degree he replaced that older male figure with his loser cousin. But I think you can also look at this as a kind of fully ado. Two close, isolated figures growing to share the same grudges, persecution complexes and delusions. One of the girls they targeted was Anna, one of the most popular girls in school. The other was a girl they didn't know at all. The only reason they went after her was because she had a vague resemblance to Drew Barrymore, who was a victim in the first screen movie. Oh, my God, dwebes.

fucking dweeps. By the way, when I was in the eighth grade, I got a whole series of creepy prank calls like this where the guy would say stuff like, give me some of that pus. And he would call me by name. And he'd say, let me have some of that good stuff. It was an adult man's voice, too, like not a classmate. This was a grown man. I never found out who it was or why he was bothering a 13-year-old girl, but thank God he eventually just stopped. I had nightmares for a while. it was freaking awful. And back then, you could hide your number by pressing star something before you would call, and that's what he did because we tried a star 69 and, yeah, didn't work.

So freaking scary. And I had a gut feeling that it might be this one janitor at our school. And for years, I was like, no, it's probably not. But then I read the gift of fear and he said, your first instinct is probably right. So I bet I was right. And I wonder how many other girls he did it too, whoever did it. Oh. Mario had Samuel slide a letter Mario had written to Anna under the classroom door and watched as she read it.

Roses are red, corpses are blue. When jingle bells ring, my sin will come true. Heaven sings an angel's sin. You have sinned. It's time to die. Let's play a game with simple rhymes. My favorite game is called You Die. Just remember, I'm always watching you.

Show this to anyone and I'll cut you like. a fish. That's one of the lines from the scream movie and they got it wrong. It's all gut you like a fish, you fucking idiot. Do you know how to scream? I hope you do, because it's more exciting if you do. You must be wondering what I want. What I want is so simple. Nothing much really. I want to know what your insides look like. Ew, also, was that supposed to be a poem? Because I'm sorry, but the scantion is a hot mess on that thing. Yeah, they gave up on the This game like two lines in. Like really, really pathetic effort, boys.

See me after class. Also, just blatant plagiarism. Like, there's two or three lines in there from Scream. Make up your own shit, little dweeb. Anna, of course, burst into tears and ran out of the room, which was exactly the reaction that Mario wanted, the creepy little goblin. Ooh, a reaction from the pretty girl. What a big, powerful man I must be.

Sad little twat. Mario and Samuel continued their campaign. of terror against the girls. They told their parents and everyone was scared, but nobody called the police. This wasn't necessarily a community where people viewed the police as a helpful presence, and that might well be because they freaking weren't, you know. Remember at the start of the story when we said Linwood had a gang problem? Well, some of those gangs were made up of cops. Like literally, it was a big scandal. With more targets, the harassment was even more exciting. But one of the traits common to people with psychopathic tendencies is that they're easily bored.

Something that would be extraordinary and horrifying to most of us quickly becomes, eh, for them. It's why with a lot of serial killers, you see a rapid escalation to bizarre levels of cruelty and depravity. The rush of power Mario and Samuel felt at scaring these poor girls soon wasn't enough for them anymore. On January 13, 1998, Mario got to be able to. up, had a shower, had breakfast, and went to school. Or at least, that's what his parents thought he was doing. Instead, he walked down the street to meet up with Samuel at his house. Today's the day, Mario said, we're going to do a scream. They weren't kidding. They already had knives, but they really wanted to go the whole nine yards. They wanted full costumes of ghost face from scream, each of

them in the robes and the mask. Once they got the costumes, they'd go to school, change into them, and kill the girls they had on their list. But they didn't have the money to buy the costumes. That was okay, though. Their plan included a way to handle that problem. Mario's family lived in a ground floor apartment with a small patio that they'd put a fence around for a little bit of privacy. Mario and Samuel climbed over the fence and looked through the blinds at their first victim as she worked on the computer. Mario's mom. Gina. The boys snuck in. Holding his knife, Mario crept up behind Gina and clapped his hand over her mouth. With the other hand, he sank the knife into her chest. Gina started fighting and they both

fell to the floor. She bit her son's hand, kicked over a coffee table. Samuel grabbed his aunt's legs and lay across her while Mario kept stabbing again and again. One time so hard, the knife went all the way threw his mother's body and broke on the cement floor. Samuel scrambled to the kitchen and grabbed a steak knife, handed it to Mario. He stabbed his mother in the neck over and over until she stopped fighting. Can you freaking imagine? Looking up at your son and nephew and realizing that they're trying to stab you to death. And this is a son you thought was a good boy, like the type to never get into trouble.

This is the first time in his entire life he's acted out like, this and it's gone from zero to murder. I just can't even imagine what that must have felt like for her. Mario had stabbed his mother 40-something times. He and Samuel thought she was dead. Mario went to the bathroom to try and wash away the blood, but then over the rush of water in the sink, he heard his mom sob out, my son, my son, why? God bless her sweetheart. So Mario took the bloody washcloth in his hands and shoved it into her mouth, then stabbed her again and again until he was sure she was dead. Just 29 days earlier, Gina had given birth to Mario's baby sister, who was upstairs in a crib in the bedroom. On the chest of drawers beside the crib was a cute little piggy bank with carousel ponies on it,

where Gina had been saving money for anything the baby might need. There was $140 in there, which Samuel grabbed. That was what they'd killed Mario's mom for. for $140, which this makes no sense to me. You're comfortable with murdering your mother, but you're not comfortable with shoplifting a couple costumes. It's just bizarre to me, that they went right to murder. And that just really suggests to me that that's what they wanted to do. Because if you have no conscience about killing a bunch of people, for sure you have no conscience about stealing a couple of costumes. It's just absolutely bizarre to me. They left the apartment and headed for the Green Line Metro.

On the way, they sucked the bloody washcloth into a drain pipe. They crept into someone's backyard and stabbed the steak knife into the ground in an overgrown area by the fence. They hid the broken knife in another drain pipe and stashed some of their bloody clothes behind the public library. Then they got on the train and headed for Torrance, where they knew they could buy the costumes they wanted. Gina Castia had been stabbed by her son 45 times. but she wasn't dead. As she lay bloody on the floor, she was able to get a hold of the phone, gourd,

and tug it until the phone fell off the table. She managed to dial her husband and tell him what happened. He told her to hang up and call 911 and that he was coming home right away. Gina called 911 and told the operator, My son, he's 16, he just stabbed me. I'm bleeding. Oh, I'm bleeding. Oh, my goodness.

When the police arrived, they kicked in the door. The apartment was washed and blood. She was in the floor beside the couch, the phone beside her. She was already a lot weaker than she had been when she'd called 911, and she could no longer speak. When a deputy asked her who had done this to her, she managed to point at a framed photo she kept on her desk of Mario as a cute little kid. An ambulance rushed Gina to the hospital,

where doctors struggled to try and save her life for an hour and a half. But she'd just been stabbed too many times. she'd lost too much blood. There was nothing they could do. Mario and Samuel, meanwhile, had had a busy morning. By the time their train reached Torrance, they weren't hungry, so they went to a gas station to get a snack. In 1998, most transactions were still done with cash, so gas stations had a lot of cash on hand,

which is to say, they got robbed a lot. And if you worked behind the counter for any length of time, chances are you got a sixth sense about which customers were sketchy. and the guy working at the gas station in Torrance definitely got that feeling about Mario and Samuel. They had fatally stabbed Mario's mom just an hour or so ago, and now they were hunched over their gas station nachos being weird and furtive. They radiated bad vibes. At the very least, they were clearly skipping school.

The gas station attendant called the cops. The Torrance officer who showed up thought he was dealing with a couple of runaway teens. He called up Samuel's mom and said, said, we believe we've got your son who's a runaway. His mom told him, those boys are wanted for murder. They just killed my sister. God Lord. So obviously, the boys were arrested. And it's hard to know what would have happened if that one guy at the gas station hadn't been listening to his spidey senses. Seriously, right? Like, good for that guy so much. This is yet again, listen to your gut. People, listen to your gut. Mario and Samuel had every intention of going through with their plan to

kill their classmates, but they had no idea that Gina had initially survived their attack and called the cops on them. I assume there was a police presence at the school after that. One way or the other, though, it's highly likely that they would have hurt someone else, even if they couldn't get to their intended targets. When he was interviewed at the Torrance police station, Mario didn't so much as crack as just blurt everything out immediately. He told them the whole story, how much he loved the screen movies, his threatening letters and phone calls to the girls at school, how he planned to kill them, and how he actually did kill his mother. He showed no remorse at all. The main thing he was interested in was whether his story was making waves. Is this on television? He said, did it make the

news? You sick little fuck. Gross. And that was the genesis of the whole thing. Mario Padilla was a loser, a nobody, a weak, angry little boy who decided he was going to get noticed. The only regret he expressed was that he hadn't been able to get the ghost-face costumes before Christmas because the original plan had been to kill the girls at school over the holidays. His letter to Anna, remember, had read, Roses are red, corpses are blue, when jingle bells ring, my sin will come true. Mario's confession also made it clear that someone else had been supposed to die. His stepfather, Pedro Castillo, almost always came home for lunch,

but on the day of the murder he'd gotten busy at work and had to stay there. Unbelievable. Mario and Samuel had been planning to kill him too. So that added a fourth count of conspiracy to commit murder. Mario's movie influences were clear in the run-up to his trial. Like one of the villains in Scream 2, he tried to make the trial into a circus about movie violence, but the judge refused to allow any mention of the Scream movies. So Mario, like the killer in primal fear, tried to claim he was mentally ill. Based on the planning and sophistication of Mario's crimes, the judge refused that too.

That seems to be really common in cases like this, by the way. We've seen it a lot with school shooters like Nicholas Cruz. You can watch his interrogation video online and you can see him trying to act crazy. He's the Parkland shooter. When the detective goes out of the room, like he'll glance up at the camera and realize he's being watched and suddenly start making weird faces and hand movements and mumbling to himself, freaking dork. It also seems to happen a lot that mass killers, especially teenage ones, kill their parents before they kill their peers. So these guys actually fit the pattern pretty well, even if they didn't actually get to act out their full plan. Anyway, the insanity defense didn't work for him and it didn't work for Samuel either.

Mario was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. As of a couple years ago, the most recent update I could find he was still in prison. His cousin Samuel got a lighter sentence due to being 14 at the time of the murder. He got 25 years to life, and we couldn't find any current info on him. But my guess is he's probably out by now, just because of the number of years that have passed. I mean, he's probably out. I don't know for sure, though. So what do we make of this?

The movie Scream was obviously an inspiration to Mario and Samuel, but that was in the shape of their planned killings, not the killings themselves. If there had been no scream, I believe they would have still tried to kill people. It just would have been in a different way. To quote the movie itself, movies don't create psychos. Movies make psychos more creative.

Which, I have to say in this case, hard disagree because they were just blatantly plagiarizing right down to the flippant costume. That's not being inspired. That's just plagiarism. There's a difference. These two craved notoriety. they wanted to be infamous.

But the truth is, they were just a couple of sad sacks who were mad because they couldn't get girls, who felt powerful when they could scare the girls they felt rejected by. They'd probably had an in-cell manifesto if they'd been smart enough to write one. God, in this getting exhausting by now? How many of these little shitts do we have to put away before people finally get the memo that you're not going to get anything out of a crime like this except decades in prison or dead, one of the other? Nobody's impressed, kids, I promise you, except maybe for fellow saddos like yourselves. The maturity of toddlers plus untethered anger and a clear lack of empathy for anybody besides themselves.

It's a recipe for darkness, and it doesn't get much darker than this case. Now, two families are forced to live with the aftermath for the rest of their lives, and in the end, the only person they hurt was the one who loved them from the bottom of her heart, and the baby who never got to know her. 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 Patreon supporters. Thank you so much to Jen, Skeleton, awesome, Amanda, Zatar, Laura, and Glenn.

We appreciate y'all 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 more, plus tons of extra content, like patrons-only episodes and hilarious post-show discussions. And once you join the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker, a rad enamel pin, or fridge magnet while supplies last, virtual events with Katie and me, and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us at patreon.com slash true crime campfire.