True Crime Campfire - Legend Has It: A Halloween Special with "Killer Legends" Filmmaker Joshua Zeman

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

It’s spooky season, campers, and what’s a better way to celebrate than to dig into some urban legends? You know the ones we’re talking about—the razor blades in the Halloween candy, the call coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE, Bloody Mary in the mirror. That kinda stuff. We all have our favorites. But what happens when the legend comes true? Do some of these stories have roots in real crimes? Well, we’re gonna find out—and who better to help us than Joshua Zeman, award-winning director of our *favorite* true crime documentaries, "Killer Legends" and "Cropsey?" This is “Legend Has It,” a Halloween Special Event.Legend: Poisoned Halloween CandyTrue Case: The Man Who Ruined Halloween, Ronald O'BryanLegend: The Bunny ManTrue Case: The Murder of Doreen ErbertLegend: A Corpse in the Haunted HouseTrue Case: Outlaw Elmer McCurdySources:"Killer Legends," 2014 documentary film by Joshua Zeman for Chillerhttps://medium.com/@crimewaffles/william-michael-dennis-the-murderer-in-the-wolf-mask-4ec6ebeb8f59https://research.fairfaxcounty.gov/local-history/bunnymanhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunny_Manhttps://research.fairfaxcounty.gov/local-history/bunnymanhttps://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/26/books/where-s-elmer.htmlhttps://www.npr.org/2015/01/09/376097471/the-long-strange-60-year-trip-of-elmer-mccurdyhttps://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/elmer-mccurdy/https://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2014/04/11/the_corpse_of_elmer_mccurdy_and_how_it_ended_up_in_a_long_beach_fun_park.htmlJoshua Zeman: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0954722/Follow 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]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become 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. It's spooky season, campers, and what's a better way to celebrate than to dig into some urban legends? You know the ones we're talking about. The razor blades. in the Halloween candy, the call coming from inside the house, Bloody Mary in the mirror, that kind of stuff. We all have our favorites, but what happens when the legend comes true?

Does some of these stories have roots in real crimes? Well, we're going to find out, and who better to help us than Joshua Zeman, award-winning director of our favorite true crime documentary Killer Legends. This is Legend Has It, a Halloween special event. So, campers, today we have one heck of a special treat for you. If you're a true crime obsessive like we are, the chances are you have seen and enjoyed the documentary films Killer Legends, or Cropsey, or the A&E series The Killing Season about the Long Island serial killer, or the Netflix series Sons of Sam about the crimes of David Berkowitz, they're all fantastic. And they're all the work of filmmaker Joshua Zeman, who I met recently when we were both guests on the confessional talking about Satanic Panic and who we have the privilege of hanging out with today, him and his dog, which is a bonus. And it's a huge deal for us because Katie and I are both huge fans going way back. So Joshua, welcome.

We are so excited to have you talking about creepy urban legends with us today. Thanks very much. Lovely to be here. Much appreciate it. Yeah. The killer legends, we were just talking before. we started recording is the first thing of yours I saw, I think, and it's just an absolute classic. It's one of those films that I can just watch over and over and over again, like

an old friend, A, because it's so well done, and B, because it's about urban legends and the way that they connect with real life and real crime, which is one of my favorite things to talk about in the world. It's fascinating. So we are going to talk about some of our favorite urban legends today and some real life, true crime connections. And Josh, one of the big ones you hear about this time of year is the whole poison in the Halloween candy thing, which is a total myth. It's been debunked and debunked. There's never been one flipping case where some random anonymous dude has put poison or razor blades or something in a bunch of Halloween candy just for creepo sheds and giggles. But nevertheless, this myth persists and persists.

And there is actually one real life case that I don't know if it created the hysteria, but it certainly didn't help, probably made it a lot worse. And it was one of the real life. And it was one of the stories that you told in killer legends, right? So tell us about that story, if you will. Right. This is the story of Ronald Clark O'Brien. Some people call him the Candyman. Other people know him as the man who killed Halloween. Right. It's a truly fascinating case. And as you say, you know, this is an urban legend that continues and persists. It's amazing. you know every year news reports will happen oh my god be careful and it's always like the drug du jour so this year yeah definitely you know this year it's fentanyl fentanyl somehow looks like skittles

and so um i i posted something the other day about newsmax being the first one uh in september newsmax came out and said oh my god be careful uh you know fentanyl looks like skittles. The irony here is that drug dealers are not freely giving out fentanyl when they could be making a lot of money from selling fentanyl. That's the funny thing, is that it would be so expensive to do that. And for what reason, like just for funsies, I guess. But when I was a kid, they would make us x-ray our halal.

Like, we would actually take it to, I forget where we took at the police station or something, and you could get your candy x-rayed because they were worried about razor blades. It's nuts. So every year, the police come by and all these news reports come on and say, check your candy, check your candy. Yet there's never really been a confirmed case of somebody poisoning Halloween candy except for Ronald Clark O'Brien. Yeah, who was aware of the myth, right? He basically was capitalizing on this. That's the interesting thing.

And basically our expert on this is a guy named Joel Best. Joel Best is an academic. And every year, he goes on television to say, this does not happen. This is not true. There's nothing. And every year they call him. It's the same thing. Every year.

He laughs. He's like, every year, people will call me and ask me. And every year, I will tell them it's not true. And then every year I will see news reports. So except this one time. October 31st, Halloween, 1974. A guy by the name of Ronald Clark O'Brien is in Houston, Texas. And we went to Houston, Texas to kind of tell this story.

He goes trick-or-treating with his kids. He's got this one kid, Timothy. He's got eight years old, and he's got, like, three other kids. They go to all these houses, and then at the end of the night, they are eating some of their candy. Timothy is eating a pixie stick, and suddenly he starts foaming at the mouth. Basically, Timothy had a pixie stick that was laced with potassium cyanide. Jesus Jones.

Rush to the hospital and the kid dies. Oh, God. Tragic, tragic story. The police come and they start asking, you know, what happened? What happened? And Ronald Carr-Gabarian, the father's like, I took him trick-or-treating. And I don't know what house it was. He tries to point out a couple different houses that he thinks maybe somebody was giving out the pixie sticks.

The police go, they look at the houses, and the police start to become really suspicious. Ronald Clark O'Brien, the kid's laid to rest. There's a memorial. Ronald Clark O'Brien, by the way, is very, quote-unquote religious. He sings in the choir. It is church in Houston, Texas. And, you know, the police are asking him, and he's like, look, this happens. all the time people poison candy well right police were actually pretty smart and they're like

no it doesn't happen all the time and and they and they so it's like the police are using the fact that the urban legend isn't real and busting him on this and he's like uh uh uh uh and so they turn around and they find out that incredibly the dad poison He poisoned his own son using the urban legend as the motive, if you will, for this. Like a mask. Yeah. Because he believed in it. Obviously, he thought it was real.

Or at least thought it was real enough that the cops would believe it was real. And that's always a red flag, as we've seen in case after case after case. When you have somebody trying to steer you in one particular direction in an investigation, that is so often a red flag that you're looking at your suspect right there. And he was just really weird He would go We went to the church And he was part of And he would

He did this whole like Ceremony at the church Where he sung these like hymns And he's bawling crying And it was just way over the top You mean like at his At his kids? Yeah yeah yeah

It was really like It was really weird And kind of like Over overtly religious And strange He's like And he's like The man

He said my son is going to have like this crazy stuff yeah over the top we spoke to the prosecutor um a guy and by the name of mike i forget his name but his nickname was machine gun he was like mike machine gun killing you know and he was a houston prosecutor and and we said oh we're here to talk about ron o'clock o'brien he goes that son of a bitch oh my god like they hated this guy because he killed his kid. So he's in Houston. He gets convicted and he goes to Huntsville, Alabama.

So Huntsville, Alabama is like the death row of death rows. Yeah, so I've heard. It's like a gnarly prison. It is like Monsters Ball type of thing. And so he goes and weirdly enough, like right as he's going to get executed, they, I guess there was a moratorium in the United States that we weren't going to kill people for a little while. Yeah.

So he gets saved for a little while. And then suddenly we decide to reinstate lethal injection. And he's one of the first guys to get, oh, really? Wow. Yeah, to get executed. And so it's everybody's like waiting. And there is a party outside of Huntsville.

Alabama prison. That's so fucked up how that always happens, you know, like, like people waving signs. And like when they executed Ted Bundy, it was like fry, Bundy fries. It's really, really wild. Well, this guy, not that I necessarily believe in capital punishment, but if there's ever a case for it. If there's ever anybody who deserved it, it was this prick. It's this guy. And so they killed him.

And when they killed them, like people were partying. They were wearing costumes because he's known as the man who killed Halloween. And so people wanted to take Halloween back. And so. Dushbag, seriously. And so when he was electrocuted, there was a huge parties all over Huntsville. There were parties in Houston. But he is known as the man who killed Halloween.

And so you can, while this was an urban legend through the act of what folklor is called Estension, which is the act of doing, he made it true. He made the urban legend true because he did poison somebody on holiday. And if I remember rightly, he had planned to poison both of his children, and it was just that the little girl didn't eat hers,

and didn't he have life insurance policies? It was just purely financial, which is as evil as it gets. Oh, it was a straight up money grab. You know. Astonishing. And he even went, they even went trick-or-feeding with the neighbor's kids. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Like, another kid could have absolutely died because they were given those pixie sticks out. Yeah. Which reminds me of another case, actually, of a woman named Stella Nickel who poisoned a whole bunch of different, like, Tylenol capsules or Excedrin Kedeket Capsules, something like that. Put the bottles all over town, all so that she could poison her husband for the life insurance money. People would think it was like a product tampering thing. Mm-hmm. so you know people do do that sometimes and it just blows my mind that you're willing to take out people who have nothing to do with it you've never met them just to try and hide your own crime so yeah he's about as bad as it gets what's interesting is that they called him the candy man but we all know that dean coral also i was just thinking about that also from houston is the other is the other guy who kind of gave out candy in a you know in a very nefarious way yeah fuck that guy Also, there's like five candy, candy men.

There's like a bunch of them. We found a bunch when we were researching. Yeah. Yeah. So fuck all of them. Totally. They are a lot of candy men. They can all die.

And what's very funny is, is right up until the end, he never, like, broke. He never broke about the fact that he had killed his kid. And so here's the interesting thing, right? The urban legend about poison Halloween candy is an urban legend about, it's a cautionary tale about the other. That person who lives in your neighborhood, the person who you don't really know who is going to come up and do something bad. Now, this was reinterpreted in the 1970s and 80s and 90s as Satanists.

The Satanists are the ones who are going to poison your family. Ironically, the guy who really did it was this Christian, you know, false Christian guy. So the moral of the story is that it's probably not Satanists who are going to be poisoning children. It's probably not drug dealers who are going to be poisoning your children. And if you're going to look at anybody, you should look at the people in the family. Right. Yeah, absolutely, always. I mean, almost always anyway.

Yeah, that's got to be astronomically rare for a parent to kill a child for insurance money. I mean, I don't even think I've heard of another case. Well, yeah, I have one other case. Angelica and Angela. Yeah, that's right. She choked her baby daughter in one of the other cases we covered, but that's just vanishingly rare. Now, one other thing that's interesting to note is that there have been cases where candy has, has been found with razor blades and pins in them.

Okay. But more often than not, according to Joel Bess, the person who's doing that is the kid or the parent of the kid. Right. Basically, they're calling attention to themselves because they know that they're going to get on TV. They know that people are going to pay attention to them. That makes sense. That makes some kind of horrible, disturbing sense. Absolutely.

And yeah, so as if Ronald Clark O'Brien was not already enough of an asshole for trying to murder his own children, he chose a method that was guaranteed to fuck up Halloween for everybody else for years to come. What an absolute prolapsed anus of a human being. So one of my favorite urban legends is Bunny Man. I don't know if you all have heard of Bunny Man, or I know you have Katie, but Josh, have you heard of Bunny Man. It really kind of sounds like it's going to be cute. Not so much Unless your idea of cute is really different for mine But this one

I used to live near here So that's how I heard it When originated in Fairfax County, Virginia And like all urban legends There are a few different versions of it The first one I heard Was that way back in the early 1900s They had to close down this local hospital

For the criminally insane That was pop up a lot in urban legends too And like move the patients to a prison In another town Right So they were, like, busing them all over there. They were just busing them around. And the bus crashed.

It was a pretty gnarly crash. And by the time they got all the patients all rounded back up, they realized one had gone missing. They even have a name for the guy, Douglas Griffin. Griff was a dangerous, murderous guy, apparently. They threw out this big dragnet trying to find him, but it was no use, of course. Douglas was gone. Yeah, and in one version of the story, he apparently took out one of the fellow escapees on his way out.

So a month or so later, people started coming across these horribly mutilated dead rabbits in the woods. Aw. The bodies looked like they had human teeth marks in them. Gross. Douglas was eating live rabbits to survive. That's creepy. And then one night, Halloween night. horse.

Have you got a flashlight under your face? Yeah, I do. Yeah, I'm only disappointed that you got to say the hospital for the criminally insane. Right. So it's Halloween night and a group of teenagers went missing. And the next day, they found them all strung up and gutted hanging from the Colchester Bridge. And ever since then, People have seen the bunny man around this bridge sometimes with an axe in his hand.

And, yeah, like, he's supposed to be, like, dressed up as a bunny, I guess. And I'm assuming he's not, like, a fuzzy bunny. I'm picturing, like, the creepy thing from Donnie Darko. Like, that kind of bunny, that kind of funny. Actually, that bunny. And as you mentioned, there are other versions, too, though in some, he's left a whole trail of bodies in his wake, not just those initial, like, three murders. And in that version of the story,

he's killing to avenge the murders of his wife and young son years earlier. Yeah, and the interesting thing is the story didn't actually start making the rounds until the early 70s, even though it was in this version anyway, it was supposed to have happened in, like, 1906 or something. But nobody started telling the story until the 70s. And then a few years ago, there was this local, like, archivist slash historian named Brian Conley. And he decided he was going to figure out if this actually happened. So he did some digging around and found the real-life origin of the story. And, of course, it didn't actually happen in the early 1900s.

There was no Douglas Griffin, none of that. It actually happened in 1970 right around Halloween. And nobody was actually murdered, but a guy in a bunny suit did, in fact, terrorize people in this area around this bridge for like a two-week period. Right around Halloween. And the story is actually pretty scary. It's like the clowns. It's like the clowns. Clowns. It is like the clowns. Yeah, like that, that weird period in like, was it 2015 or something where just clowns would show up and freak people out.

Well, you know, clown, the thing about, and this is like one of my things, as you know, if you watch killer legends, you know that clown sightings is one of my like, you know, real, real rabbit holes, if you will. And so, you know, clowns, so, you know, the clown things happened in the 80s, and then it happens again in the 90s. Yeah. And then it happens. That's wild. So, in fact, it was so strange because when we did Killer Legends about clown scares, about there was another clown scare that happened just after that. And so I really think clown scares are, there's something about clown scares that are really weird. I mean, so, like, the one that we looked at in Chicago, and what was so interesting is that this guy was saying in the 80s, it was like tied to the white van.

It was tied to Homey the Clown. It was tied to Stephen King, it was tied to culture guys. And this guy was telling me, he's like, okay, look, the clown thing that happened in Chicago in the 80s, it's not like one group of people. He was like, there were kids in the ghetto that were freaking out, and there were like Hasidic kids. freaking out at the same time and there was no internet and he's like how did that happen how did this go from one group which totally did not hang out with the other group to hear and so that's what's so interesting about urban legends is they do have that weird like just osmosis like people just pluck them out of the air yeah they get around we we ended up taking a guy and

dressing him in a clown outfit and then drove him around chicago Just to see what would happen. And they were like a bunch of, there were like a bunch of older gangbangers on one street. And like we drove around the clown would wave. And they'd be like, yo man, that's not funny. They'd be like. It's freaking me out, man.

Yeah, he's like, stop fucking around. That is not funny, you know. And so we realized that we were playing with fire driving around. No shit. I was just going to say you're lucky you got out of line. So the bunny man. The real story is, you know, nobody got murdered, but it's actually scary enough. Like, the first instance was there a couple of, like, teenagers parked in a car doing what I assume teenagers have been doing in cars since the dawn of time, you know.

And suddenly this dude in a bunny suit just suddenly ran out of the woods in front of their car screamed, You're trespassing! And threw a flippin axe through their windshield, which sounds funny when you say it like that, but like probably wasn't really for the kids that happened to. but amazingly enough they weren't hurt but of course it scared the living bejesus out of them and they went to the cops about it and then over the next couple of weeks it happened a few more times like around that same bridge

guy in a bunny suit screaming about trespassing and just throwing axes at people he threatened to chop one guy's head off but that seems to be the true story anyway which I guess isn't quite as sexy as like the criminally insane serial killing bunny guy but still pretty terrifying when you think about it and this Colchester Bridge is

the place to go for all the local kids who want to scare the shit out of themselves in Fairfax County, of course. And this is something you talk about, Joshua, like kids checking out their local urban legend spots to, like, go ghost hunting and prove how badass they are or whatever. Did you call it legend tripping? Can you like go into that a little bit? No, that's it. It's a great term. It's what folklorists call it. They call it legend tripping like you're going to go trip on the light fantastic of the legend i don't know like where they came up with that term but i think it's the best term ever and yeah it's it's it's uh it's what we do it's what we do as kids where we go and we're like okay who's gonna go to you know mary rotten

tree's house you know or old old man foghorn i don't know whatever it is you know we had molly the psychic in my hometown. It was this poor woman just trying to go about her life. The psychic. So, like, the boys will do it. The girls will do it. Sometimes the boys and girls do it because, you know, the boy thinks, oh, she's going to be so scared and I'm going to show her what a tough guy I am.

There's all these kids do it. But what's so interesting is that when you really get into the idea of ghost hunting, which has become such a huge thing, really what they're doing. is legend tripping. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That's fascinating. Yeah.

I have a cousin that, I have a cousin that ghost hunts. And he and his wife, that's their, like, that's their, like, hobby. They have, like, nine to fives and they go on ghost hunting on the weekend. I see a van around town where we live all the time that says on the side of it, like, somebody, you know, paranormal investigators and they have, like, a website. And, yeah, they're, like, professional, like the ghost busters here in town, I guess. I mean I've never been Well I guess I have

I did go on a ghost tour In Edinburgh once And that was pretty freaky actually Sure But I've never been ghost hunting per se Well I think when we made Cropsey That's literally just what we were doing

In some of those things Definitely We were just going with a camera You know It was very interesting I made Cropsey Because I had seen Blair Witch Oh my God

Absolutely I could see where that would inspire But I was like okay but you guys made this up and I was in the folklore at the time I was like I could show you something that's real that will totally freak you out oh definitely because I knew I knew the real things that had happened at Willowbrook and I had seen that footage and I knew how horrific the reality of what was done to those patients and so I kind of wanted to make a real life Blair witch if you will. Yeah, that's a, that's a, I never made the connection, but now that you said it, I was like, yeah, absolutely. And while we're talking about Willowbrook, I do want to throw in,

since we're talking about, you know, homes for the criminally insane, you always have to take a beat when you say it like that. But, you know, mentally ill people are by far more likely to be the victims of violence than perpetrators. I just want to throw that out there. Yeah, we say that all the time. It's true. And that's why I said it like that, because it's, it's so absurd. It's always popping up, you know, the scary thing is that the person is insane. It's so,

you know, so stupid. Well, but it's also like, and that's something that came up with Cropsey as well. It's like, listen, you don't want to marginalize,

you know, the mentally ill. You know, it's a horrific, horrible thing. If you pull that apart and really do it from a smart, and understanding and compassionate and empathetic way.

What it is is that kids don't understand mental illness. Right. They don't understand how someone could be crazy because that person theoretically, and I use the, I'm air quoting the term, crazy. They don't understand. And so as a result, you know, they don't understand mental illness. And so that scares them. And they don't understand it.

So hence the reason that why. in a lot of urban legend culture, it's always about mental institutions because of the lack of understanding. Now, speaking to some urban legend experts, he will, I'm speaking about a guy specifically Bill Ellis, when he talks about it, I'm like, Bill, you're this expert, why do we have all these urban legends

about mental illness? And he says, it's because it's our biggest fear. it is our biggest fear that we will one day wake up and be air quote crazy right and that we can't we can't stop it we don't know why and it's this fear that we have that we will become that person and so i think that's really interesting in terms of not from a marginalizing way but from really getting into the tragedy and the understanding and the fear of mental illness absolutely and then there's the flip side of that where there's the urban legend about the person who is like a journalistic student or something like that and goes in to do an expose on a mental institution and ends up admitted and unable to get out yeah you know who goes in quote unquote faking and gets admitted and that's one of one of the ones I always heard about growing up as well and there been movies made with that premise and everything so it's interesting it's kind of the flip side of what you were talking about right And, you know, talking about legend tripping, there's a really interesting connection there.

There's a murder case from the 90s. It's an awful, brutal murder of a 12-year-old girl named Shanda Scherer by a group of girls from her old school. There was like a, I don't know, a love triangle, teenage jealousy, yada, yada, yada, and some mob mentality thrown in. It's a horrible story. But what made me think of it is the fact that the killers picked a local, legend tripping place for the murder. The Witch's Castle in Utica, Indiana. There's this whole story about how a covenant of witches used to live there. And the locals were all scared of them. So they burned the place down and the ruins are still there. And that's where they chose to kill

Shanda Sherer, poor kid. Yeah. And it makes me think of the Slender Man stabbing too. Do you remember that case, Josh? These two troubled, like middle school age girls got way, way into the urban legend of Slender Man, which was an internet urban legend, it was a creepy pasta, basically, like just a short story that kind of blew up, decided they wanted to do something to impress Slender Man and ended up stabbing their friend almost to death. Yeah. Which is just fascinating, then urban myth would be the part of the motivation for something like that.

That's where we get more into ostension. You know, the idea of acting on it makes it become that. Another thing that we looked at in Killer Legends was the... Texarkana murders, the Moonlight Murders in Texarkana, Texas. The Phantom, right. Right. So scary. And the movie, the town that dreaded Sundown, which was kind of actually in its day, the early precursor to the Blair Witch.

It was one of the first movies that kind of blurred the line between a true crime and a narrative. Okay. A fiction. Yeah, I can see that. I never thought of it that way before. But, yeah, that movie is so, so creepy. So what's so interesting is that every year, they show the movie about the murders in the park where the murders actually happen. Oh, holy shit.

And the whole town comes out. So the whole town is collectively legend tripping by watching the movie in the place where it happened and kind of reveling in that. Wow, that must be a hell of an experience. For the people who live there, that would be, I mean, that would be intense for me sitting in a place where it actually happened and watching the movie like that. What's interesting is that, you know, in this kind of urban legend, true crime culture that we're in, some people find that, you know, like, oh, my God, that's so wrong of you to do. Yeah.

Other people are like, no, we are actually really giving thought and homage to what happens. So it's all in the way that. that you, you know, your perspective on how you treat these things. Absolutely. And it depends on how you do it as well and what the spirit behind it is. But you're absolutely right. I could see that debate going on. But I could also see how for the people who live in that town,

it could be kind of cathartic to do that and kind of healing in a way to get together as a community and sort of re-experience that group trauma and realize, you know, you've moved on from it and it was years and years ago and I don't know I'd be together and just sort of have each other's backs I think that could actually be kind of healing and helpful in a controlled environment where you know that they're people around I get it mm-hmm um so I don't know if the bunny man legend made any impact on this uh this next guy but there's a real-life case that kind of parallels some aspects of that story and what did you call it joshua it's like a the Ascension. Ascension.

Ascension. Yes. The act of doing makes it real. Right. So since this is our Halloween episode and it happened on Halloween, we thought we'd tell you about it. Nobody was planning on sleeping well tonight, I hope. No, I'm good. I'll sleep when I'm dead.

This is a gnarly case, though. The real life case that probably reminds me the most of Bunnyman is probably the murder of Doreen Erbert, which happened like she said on Halloween night. 1984. I was three, no, I was seven. What am I talking about? I was seven. Doreen was very pregnant. She was due any day now, but she was still helping her little four-year-old daughter, Deanna, get ready for trick-or-treating. They were all excited for Halloween, and they carved a jack-or-lanar, and it was sitting in the front hallway, a big bowl of candy for the trick-or-treaters and stuff. And Doreen and her husband Charles were getting ready to take Deanna out. So about, you know, 8.45, they came back from trick-or-treating. And Charles,

headed out to get some more candy for their own trick-or-treat bowl. He was going to come right back, but on the way he passed a friend's house, and they were having a Halloween party, and they were like, come on, Charles, come in just for a few minutes, you know, talk to him into it. And, you know, it was just shaping up to be a fun night for everybody. But then a little bit later that night, the Erbert's next-door neighbor heard this frantic banging on her front door. And when she opened it, there was Charles Erbert,

covered head-to-to-in-blood in a total panic, just begging her to call 911. and he'd just come home to find Doreen on the floor in a pool of her own blood. And he said, I think she's been stabbed. I can't find Deanna, their little girl. He had slipped around in her blood when he was trying to help her and he was just covered in it. He said she was still alive, just barely. I mean, just imagine walking in on that, y'all.

I cannot even fathom how awful that would be, especially not being able to find your daughter in the midst of all that. You know, she's four years old. So once the neighbor got 9-1-1 on the line, Charles ran back over to his place and ran around calling for his little girl. And finally, the poor kid came out from behind the couch where she'd been hiding. Until that moment, Charles thought his daughter might have been kidnapped. The paramedic showed up soon after and none of them would ever forget the scene they walked in on. pregnant Doreen Erbert had been essentially cut open and brutally wounded all over her head, arms, and torso. One of her hands had been severed.

Oh, my God. These weren't stab wounds. She'd been hacked and slashed with what they thought was probably a machete or an axe. It was right out of a horror movie. Yeah, and they could actually see, like, hack marks in the ceiling of the foyer, like from the weapon. Oh, my God. Yeah, like, you can see them. There's pictures, you can see these, like, deep gouges in the ceiling.

So somebody was swinging that thing. And one of the officers told investigation discovery that it took him a week to get the smell of blood out of his hair. Like, it was that bad. And he said he would never forget. They had this big jackalanturn that they'd carved, and it was just, like, grinning in the midst of just all this, like, sea of blood. Just, ugh, it is like a horror movie. And this is Halloween. Yeah.

It's just, ugh. But Doreen still had a pulse. So they rushed her to the hospital. Charles was, as anybody would be freaking out, yelling at the police and paramedics to let him ride in the ambulance with his wife. But, I mean, from the cop's point of view, here's this guy who's covered head to toe in blood. He's the husband of a woman who's just been brutally attacked, and they can smell alcohol on him. You tell me, would you let him ride in the ambulance with a victim? Probably not, but it's really heartbreaking that they didn't.

because Doreen didn't make it. She'd lost just way too much blood, and she died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. So, of course, the police immediately thought of Charles as the prime suspect, which you can understand why, but that fell apart pretty fast between the alibi from his friends at the Halloween party and the statement of little four-year-old Deanna,

who didn't, thank God, see the murder. She didn't see it happen, but she'd been right there in the room with her mom and witnessed the whole thing. She heard it. she told him that around nine o'clock her mom had answered the door to this big like aggressive sounding knock and at the door she said was a man in a wolf mask and at the sight of him her mom had said get out of this of this house but the man in the mask just kept coming and her mom had turned around to run and yelled for diana to run and hide and this brave smart kid dove behind that sofa and from there she heard what happened to her mother She said she remembered her mom yelling the name Michael and the man saying, I'm going to kill you. Oh, my God.

I know. That's horrendous. This poor kid, it's amazing that she remembered so much and then had the guts to testify about it later on. Right. I know. She's only four years old, but her memory seemed just crystal clear to the cops. Even the wolf mask, which struck everybody, is kind of weird. But, like, she just was so certain about what she had seen.

And there was plenty to back up her story, like the lack of forced interest. at the scene and then more importantly as they're searching around they find this bloody wolf mask lying on the ground outside the house like obviously the killer dropped down his way out of the door so she was dead right about that it wasn't a wolf mask so the name

Michael caught the investigator's attention immediately because they knew Doreen's ex-husband's name was Mike Dennis and as they started digging into Doreen's history with them they realized Mike hadn't exactly let go after the divorce she left her

him in 1977 and the court gave her full custody of their baby son Paul. Mike had been a pretty shitty husband apparently, but he was a good dad and he still saw Paul every weekend. And by all accounts, he kept carrying a torch for Doreen. She was the one that got away. So when Doreen got married again in 1978 to Charles Herbert, our boy Mike was not happy. He was even less happy. He was even less happy a year later when they had Deanna. Doreen had moved on. Mike, not so much. He pretty much just marinated himself in resentment and depression and rage. And that got much, much worse in 1980. One afternoon, four-year-old Paul was playing outside while Doreen watched him through the kitchen window. She took her eyes off him just long enough to put some dishes away. And in those few

moments. Paul somehow squeezed through the fence they'd put up around the backyard swimming pool. Yeah, and I'm sure you're going to probably guess what I'm about to say. Skip it if you need to. You know, we'll talk about it for the next minute or so, but this poor little guy fell in the pool and drowned. Doreen went back to the window to check on him. She couldn't find him. She ran outside to look, and by the time she realized what had happened, it was too late. So that, of course, was horrendous. And to Doreen's ex, Mike Dennis, it was all. her fault. Hers and the new husbands. He was just completely incandescent about it. He filed a lawsuit against them for wrongful death, and he lost, and he was furious about that. He started telling

people around town that Doreen and Charles had murdered Paul, like on purpose. So come and unhinged, obviously. He'd already been angry before Paul's death, and now it was just festering. And when he found out that Doreen was pregnant again in 1984, and then worse than that, found out it was a boy. He made a very grim decision. And when the police went to Mike's house to question him after the murder, he denied it, but they found a metric fuck ton of evidence. I mean, he didn't even attempt to get rid of anything. First, he had this big gnarly hackmark on his hand,

which is really common when there's any kind of stabbing or, you know, the killer will usually get hurt. And he made some, like, obviously bullshit story about how it happened that didn't make any sense. He was all disheveled and sweaty. And when they searched his house, they found bloody clothes, bloody bandages, bloody car keys, Doreen's blood all over the house and car. A loaded gun that he'd hidden behind the bed. Oh, and a receipt from a hardware store for the purchase of, guess what?

An 18-inch machete. Oh, my God. Make sure you keep the receipt, guy. Great idea. Well played. I don't like to backseat quarterback murderers because, like, I really like when they fuck up. But Jesus Christ. And stunningly, it gets worse.

When they searched Mike's garage, they found two handmade coffins. That's the craziest detail I've ever heard in my life. I knew about it and I still just got chills. One for Doreen, one for Charles, plus body bags, weights, and a map of the San Francisco Bay. Yeah, handmade coffins. I can only imagine what a defense attorney is going to do with them. Like, I think at that point, you just got to tap out. Just, you're licked.

Like, he made coffins for them, okay? You're done. They also found a photo album with a picture of Mike wearing that same wolf mask at a Halloween party the year before. I know. It's like you could not ask for better evidence, could you? It's like, it's gift wrapped for the prosecution. Yeah.

In court, Dennis tried to say the murders weren't planned in a, advance and pled insanity brought on by grief over the death of his son, which was probably a pretty good defense. I mean, I can't imagine many worse things that might send somebody over the edge. Right. Of course. Clearly, Mike blamed Doreen for the accident, but the jury did not buy it, possibly because the murder was just so brutal and so obviously premeditated. Yeah, the custom made coffins make the it wasn't premeditated argument kind of hard to make. I guess he was planning on killing Charles too. I don't know why he didn't. Maybe just because he wasn't home and he didn't want to wait around. Yeah. That's creepy. So unsurprisingly, the jury found him guilty

and sentenced him to death. And as of the most recent source we could find, he's still on death role. Yeah. And that's an interesting one to me, as awful as it is. And it's actually a lot worse than we told you because some of the injuries that that poor lady had were just too, they were too bad to describe. And in fact, most of the sources that you find don't describe the worst things that happened to her because they're just unspeakable. But if you do want to know the full list, you can find it online. There's court papers that has all like the full catalog of injuries, but it is upsetting. So just be aware. But it's an interesting one to connect to the bunny man to me because of the wolf mask, obviously, but also because one of the versions of that bunny man,

has him killing to avenge his murdered son, which weird, right? So, Josh, we have one more story to tell you, and it's a doozy, but first, take a little detour. Which urban legends have made the biggest impression on you? I mean, obviously, this is something you're interested in. You've made, like, two documentaries about it. So did you tend to be drawn to the creepy supernatural ones like Candyman or the more kind of plausible ones, like the venomous snakes in the ball pit at McDonald's and the deep-fried rats at KFCs, killer clowns, stuff like that.

Well, you know, it's interesting that you mentioned that in connection with the revenge because that's, that really comes from the Cropsey legend. You know, the thing about urban legends, right, is that they're always evolving. They're very amorphous. And urban legends take little bits of storylines from another urban legend and they go on to this. So when you talk about the bunny man avenging a death, that actually comes from the Cropsey urban legend, the Cropsey maniac story in upstate New York. And that is, or at least in one of them, there's a judge, Judge Cropsey. And a bunch of campers accidentally burned down his cabin with

his wife and their newborn child inside. See, that's yet again. That's a newborn, death of a child, Murder of a child. Right. Death of a child and a wife. And Judge Cropsey, insane with grief, goes after the kids with an axe. And then there's an axe again, just like Bunny Man. So, right. It's fascinating. So the point is urban legends aren't necessarily very original.

They tend to pick up little bits of information. they tend to drop bits of information. Things will change with technology. So that's where something will become more of an inter-based, internet-based urban legend than, you know, kind of like on the telephone type of urban legends. So it's just so interesting that when you mentioned all that stuff, and I was listening, I was like, oh, that's from Cropsy maniac story.

Or the hook is the kid, the group. The hook urban legend, right? The hook urban legend is escaping from the mental institution, just like you said. And it's about the kids making out in cars. Right. But instead of the hookman, now the bunny man is going to come and throw an axe on your windshield. And that's about, you know, premarital sex. Yeah, scared of sexuality.

Right. Do not hang out in a car with a boy because. Because chances are something sexual is going to happen. And you know what? They're not wrong. Right. Hell no. Well, that's what the Zodiac killer was doing.

He was going around shooting couples in cars. As was Son of Sam. As was Carol Chesman, the red light bandit. Oh, yep. So, you know, these are all cautionary tales that are said for a reason. And it's just so interesting how they pick up little bits and leave little bits. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, you say it's not original, but honestly makes me wonder if there's some collective consciousness going on here, you know? Like you talk about how, you know, world religions, like the same kinds of stories will crop up all over the world in cultures that could never even have actually had any interaction with each other. And yet they'll come up with similar parables and stuff like that. I just think that's fascinating. I wonder if a big part of, you know, the story of, you know, being fueled by grief into doing something monstrous is based on our, like, subconscious, like, what would push us over the edge?

Like, what things would happen to regular KD that would make me do something horrible? So, like, we're kind of relating. And, like, urban legends are always based in, like, societal fears. I mean, vampires, especially Dracula specifically, was. based on the xenophobia happening in England at the time it was written about being afraid of the foreign other coming in and stealing your women and corrupting them. Taking your jobs and your women and... Exactly.

Right. Kissing them on the neck. Oh, God. Yeah, make them. Your Slavic, Slavic, right? Slavic, I guess. Slavic Devonair. Vaguely.

Yeah, vaguely Slavic men stealing your women. and making them and converting them to their whatever. Right. I mean, that was, but that was also about, you know, again, sex. For some reason, a lot of it comes back to sex, you know. Oh, for sure. For some reason. Women do not go out and have, you know, relations with strangers

because they might just suck your blood. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Or throw an axe through your forehead. Definitely. Or something. Yeah. So many urban legends.

are about sex and so many of them Or fear of the other seem to focus on Yeah exactly It's like those are the two big categories Right sex Fear of the other

The furner Yep Absolutely it's just such interesting stuff I was always drawn to the True Crime ones But man have we got one We're gonna wrap up on And we have Katie to think for this one

Because it's both fascinating And fucking hilarious I was screaming Reading about this one I like I don't it's wild so one of my favorite urban legends is the corpse in the haunted house now when I was a kid one of the playground rumors was that a friend of a friend of a friend went to a haunted house and saw a real skeleton like just kind of plopped in the middle of all the other spooky props yeah I've absolutely heard this one too and it's always like no I swear to God this happened to my cousin his girlfriend's uncle like it's always something like that but i heard this one too growing up and it always used to stress me out anytime we'd go to a wanted house like oh god what if i see a dead body exactly yeah and it probably didn't happen to my friend's friend or your cousin's girlfriend or whatever

but there is a real case this one's based on and buckle the fuck up it's bananas you're gonna love this story so much. Oh, I can't wait. Okay. So, the year is 1976. The crew of the show, the six million dollar man, were at the Pike Amusant Park in Long Beach filming an episode where Steve Austin

had to ride a haunted ride. Yeah. The ride had this long, dark tunnel where, like, plastic skeletons and shit would pop out and scare the fuck out of everybody and their little train cars went down the track. Just, you know, good clean heart attack-inducing.

fun. Yeah, I'm sure it's, I'm sure it was very safe. Okay. It was, it was 1970s. Of course it was safe. So anyway, they were filming and one of the crew noticed this bright neon orange mannequin hanging from a noose over in the corner. And he didn't like the placement of it. It was it was fucking up a shot. So he went to move its arm and the arm came off. And they got a closer look at this thing that just had broken off in the camera guy's hand. Oh, Jesus. They realized, this ain't paper machet. This is an actual human arm, like really desiccated and old, but, like, they could see the bones and dried out muscle and skin.

Holy shit. So obviously, like, this is a human body. So they, the crew, like, called the cops because, yeah. And they took, they took this body back to the coroner's office. and they went to work trying to ID the body. Like, I guess thinking it was more recent than it was. It was a male adult, almost completely mummified, like really well preserved, and it looked like he died from multiple gunshot wounds.

So that was weird. And when they dug out the bullets, they were old, like really old, like from the early 1900s old. And then when they checked the dead man's mouth, they found all this like stuff in there like just this random assortment of stuff like they found a 1924 penny in there and some like crumpled paper and then they found these like ticket stubs from a wax museum and that ended up being the key to unlocking this guy's identity his name was elmer mccurdy and y'all elmer mccurdy was probably one of the unluckiest poor bastards of all time he was born in 1880 in Washington, Maine to 17-year-old single mom, which is, you know, really, really rough anytime, but was really rough back then. So his childhood, I'm guessing, would have probably sucked and probably not really going to be the inspiration for any, like, Norman Rockwell

paintings. So Elmer turned to the bottle to help him deal, which made it hard for him to hold down a steady job. And when he finally did land a gig as a lead miner, I mean, you can see where this is going. He got tuberculosis from it. And at that point, Elmer apparently just said, fuck it, I'm turning to crime. I'm turning to crime. Poor Elmer. Poor Elmer. Now, I don't know if I can get through this part.

And I just, I want to send my shout out to Elmer for being maybe just, I love you, man. I love you. So every good criminal has a specialty. And Elmer was just not a good criminal. I mean, he still had a specialty. It was explosives, or more specifically, blowing up safes. He was just really, really bad at it. One time, he was trying to blow up a safe at a bank, and he just blew up the whole bank instead.

Bless his heart. In fact, the only thing still standing after the dust settled was the safe. Which is just like, if that ain't some wily coyote shit right there. Like, oh my God. Of course, to be fair, he was probably real drunk at the time. It's fair. For being honest. It's fair.

I'm picturing him peeking around a corner to look at what he's done. And then the bank just collapses. And the safe is still there. I just, I can't. That image has fueled me for days. That's a sad trombone moment if there ever was one. It really is. But of course, you can't keep a good criminal down.

Problem was, like we said, Elmer wasn't a good criminal. A good criminal. In what would be his final heist on October 7th, 1911, he tried to hijack a train. Like literally, this man, he was. He was shooting for the moon because if he missed, he was going to land among the stars. Like, you should put him on a motivational poster in a seventh grade English classroom. So this train was carrying about 400 grand, which translates to today's cash about 12 million bucks. Yeah, good, good money.

But when he got to the safe, he didn't blow up the train this time, it was empty because it was. it was a sting. The cops were waiting for him. Of course. Another sad trombone moment for our boy, Elmer and his accomplices tried to run, but they left a really easy to follow trail. And early the next morning,

they found Elmer drunk, hiding out in a barn. When he saw him coming, he fired at him, and there was a shootout. Elmer caught a fatal bullet to the chest. So they took his body to the local funeral home, but nobody showed up to claim it. He didn't have any family left, and his friends were, you know, co-conspirators.

They didn't love the idea of showing up to claim him and maybe running right into the cops again. Right, so Elmer's body just kind of sat there, which is really kind of sad, isn't it? Now, the funeral director was this dude named Joseph Johnson, and he figured, hey, you know, I've been wanting to play with this new embalming technique where he makes arsenic in with the embalming fluid. Let me just practice on this guy.

Why not, right? And it worked, like, really well. Basically, mummified our boy. And Johnson was so proud of his handiwork that he wanted to show it off. So he just stood Elmer up in the front parlor of the funeral home and started charging people a nickel each to see him, which, holy shit. But it gets better. Apparently, Mr. Johnson was a man.

of, I'm just going to call it whimsy, because after a while, he put a pair of roller skates on Elmer and started wheeling him around to chase the children, which I wish we could have found out whether like this delighted the children or landed them in therapy, but we couldn't figure it out. Do it again. Do it again. I know. It was probably dependent on the kid, you know. I got to give props. I mean, that is some next level weekend at Bernie shit right there. So hats off, man. hats off. Would this have delighted young Josh's imagination or would you still be doing

like art therapy projects about it if somebody had chased you with a dead guy on skates? I would have loved it. I think I would have loved it. I was a weird little dark child, so. I think I would have, too. I am unfortunately delighted by it to this day. I feel guilty about poor Elmer,

but honestly, like, I feel like maybe he would have enjoyed it. Like, first of all, Elmer. Elmer is far more famous than he ever would have been now. Oh, that's the interesting thing about it is because his life began after he died, really. And, you know, speaking of which, this is where, this is where shit kicks off. This is, holy fuck. So at some point, like, presumably while Johnson's like wheeling this corpse around chasing a child. Right.

He's in the midst of one of those. Whimsical moments. This dude shows up and was like, yo, I am this guy's long-lost brother. And how fucking dare you use this as a carnival act? How dare you? Right. Two weeks later, Elmer was the main attraction at West Texas Carnival. So, yeah, there was no long-loss brother.

This was a flim-flam man who saw. Good con, though. Seriously, like righteous indignation? Good, good job. That was clever. Flim flam. Flam. It was a good flim flam.

Not a term that gets used enough. No, absolutely. I think it needs to be in our modern lexicon. So his new resting place had him traveling the U.S. propped up next to the two-headed calves and the bearded ladies. And once, speaking of being more famous after death, next to an exhibit of Billy the Kid labeled as an act. outlaw. So, like, he got to be super famous. Oh, he said that I know he would love. Yeah.

Yeah, being known as a famous outlaw. Elmer had been pretty much a total failure at life, but now that he was dead, everybody loved him. For decades, he made the rounds all over the country, passed from carney to carney. One time, a carnival employee ripped off his arm and chased his secretary around the office with it. What is this impulse? I don't know. Take this dead body and, like, it uses for funsies, I guess, like you do. I think it was the lead that was just permeating everyone. It peaked in the 70s for sure, but I think just lead was everywhere and people were like, oh, you want to put lead on your face ladies for makeup?

Oh, that very well could have been. If you add lead, if you add lead bullets to your water, I don't know, it just feels. In the late 60s, Elmer changed owners again. This time, they put him in a haunted house. These, I guess, inventors drilled a hole in the back of his neck, which they said made yellow goo ooze out, which is, you know, yeah, disgusting. That's lovely. And they hooked him up to some kind of contraption that made him, quote, twitch and jiggle.

Jesus Christ. They call him the thousand-year-old man, presumably like pretending he was still alive. and by that point, no one remembered his name. Yeah, and finally, finally, he ended up in the laugh in the dark ride at the Pike Amusement Park in Long Beach, California, you know, painted with a few coats of bright orange glow-in-the-dark paint and hanged from a noose. And there he hung until that day that the $6 million man crew

discovered that he wasn't actually made of plastic and called the police. And finally, after an entire second lifetime of being treated like a cheesy prop, Elmer finally got a proper burial in Guthrie, Oklahoma, which is the place where he died. And they put him under six feet of concrete, just in case any clout chase and assholes decided to get cute and try and steal him, which you absolutely know somebody would have. So, yes, there is actually a real case where a dead body was used as decor. And like a lot of the stories we cover on this show, the truth in this one is way stranger than fiction. So it's interesting because it kind of hits on that same thing that most urban legends do, which is that something in not. It turns out to be something deadly or terrifying.

And so basically it seems like what urban legends really want us all to know is that the world wants us dead. The world wants you dead. It's one of the interesting things that we kind of discovered in the urban legend world is that urban legends like to take crimes or mysteries that aren't solved or like crimes without a motive or like a murder where there's no. where we don't know who the killer is because that allows them to take this open-ended story and roll with it. You know, like, oh, there's just enough mystery there

so we'll add our piece. Like, oh, it's this guy and it's because of this reason that these murders happen. And I guess that's how they end up the crazy quilts that they are, right? It's like the franken stories that they are where somebody will add a little piece here, a little piece there, and they just keep growing

and growing and morphing and morphing. But they're so much fun, and I've always loved talking about urban legends, and that one with Elmer was awesome. Poor Elmer. I know, bless his heart. I don't know. I can't decide whether I feel sorry for him or whether I feel like he got exactly what he would have wanted.

I'm not sure, but we all want to be famous, right? Or we want to be remembered. So, Josh, before we go, tell us what are you working on right now? where can we find you? Where can our listeners find you if they want to pick your brain or get updates on what you're working on, et cetera? Yeah, you can find me at Twitter at J-O-S-H-Z-E-M-A-N. I'm always on Twitter, always around, always checking in my DMs.

And right now, working on some more urban legend stories, in fact. So this has been an amazing conversation for me. Some more true crime stories, of course, after Sons of Sam, which you could see on Netflix. And interesting, maybe even, I like to do a pallet cleanser every now and then of all the crime with some animal stories. So now working on a little animal story. So we'll see. We'll see what comes next. Yeah, and you did a documentary with Leonardo DiCaprio called The Loneliest Whale, which is the one thing of yours I haven't seen,

because I know it's going to make me sob like baby. I did sob like a baby for like an hour. It's just a different type of legend. That's a legend about a lonely whale. It's so good. It's guys, y'all, I have no words. I was a whale girl growing up. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a horse trainer slash ballerina slash marine biologist. And I was obsessed with whales and this movie just like, it was like a hug from.

you know, tiny little eight-year-old me. And it was so good, so good. Yeah, seriously, y'all, if you're not familiar with Josh's work, I've never seen anything that wasn't absolutely riveting. And so go watch everything. I just got my mom watching The Killing Season, which was an A&E series about the Long Island serial killer. And she's been texting me, her theories on LISC.

I think she's going to crack it, so stay tuned. And Josh, thank you so much for hanging out with us today. It has been so much fun. the highlight of my month so far. And yeah, we really, really appreciate it. So those were all wild ones, right, campers? You know, we'll have more 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 we also want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Laura, Alexis, Demi, Heather, Soren, Lauren, Beth, Sydney, and Adrian.

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