True Crime Campfire - Whoopsie-Doodle: A Grab Bag of Epic F**kups

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

Winston Churchill once said, “Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.” That’s a nice sentiment—I mean, by and large it’s good to let failure be a learning experience, to not let it discourage you from following your dreams. But…hear me out here: What if you’re just a hot mess? What if every time you go from one failure to the next, you leave a pile of bodies in your wake? Can you be a little TOO good at failure? Should you sometimes maybe acknowledge “Hey, maybe this thing I’m trying to do isn’t one of my strengths”? I think some of the people in this week’s episode would have left the world a better place if they’d thrown in the towel.Registration is now open for CrimeWave 2.0! Visit crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE to get your discount code for $100 off your cabin and a private meet-and-greet with us! The cruise is Feb. 8-12, 2027.Sources:Jon Ronson, The Psychopath TestCBC news: https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/oak-ridge-st-thomas-psychiatric-treatment/IFL Science: https://www.iflscience.com/canadas-dark-history-of-giving-lsd-to-prisoners-69821Washington University: https://library.washu.edu/news/bizarre-but-true-happenings-at-the-1904-olympics-in-st-louis/Wikipedia, "Truth serum": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_serumCBC's "The Fifth Estate," episode "Psychiatric Treatment or Torture? The Oak Ridge Experiment"Hidden Persuaders: http://www7.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/blog/happened-oak-ridge-psychiatric-unit/Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of BeliefSmithsonian: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-1904-marathon-became-one-of-the-weirdest-olympic-events-of-all-time-14910747/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/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. We're going on another true crime cruise to the Bahamas, y'all, and this one is going to be twice as big as the one we did last year. Some of the biggest podcasts out there are going to be there.

Case file, last podcast on the left, true crime garage, sinisterhood, scared, death and obviously us and a few others too. Crime Wave 2.0 is happening February 8th through 12th of 2027 just a year away and you do not want to miss it. Everybody's going to be doing live shows, meet and greets, you're going to make new friends for life. And look, you haven't lived till you've seen me mowed through a cheesecake buffet, okay? It's the sight to behold. So stay tuned at the end of this episode for more information plus all the details on how to reserve your spot and save a hundred dollars on your cabin. Winston Churchill once said, Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. That's a nice sentiment.

I mean, by and large, it's good to let failure be a learning experience, to not let it discourage you from following your dreams. But hear me out here. What if you're just a hot mess? What if every time you go from one failure to the next, you leave a pile of bodies in your wake? Can you be a little too good at failure? Should you maybe sometimes acknowledge, hey, maybe this thing I'm trying to do isn't one of my strengths. I think some of the people in this week's episode would have left the world a better place if they'd thrown in the towel. This is whoopsie doodle, a grab bag of epic fuckups. Case 1. The 1904 Olympic Marathon Debacle. So, campers for this one, were in St. Louis,

Missouri, August 30th, 1904. It was the start of the first Olympic Games ever held. in the Western Hemisphere, and right off the bat, it was a little bit of a shit show. First of all, it was originally supposed to be held in Chicago. But when St. Louis got wind of this, they were pissed. The Olympics were scheduled at the same time as the World's Fair, which was in St. Louis that year. If they had the Olympics in Chicago, St. Louis worried that they'd steal a whole bunch of customers from the fair.

This would not do. So St. Louis basically said, listen, you bratworth loving bitches, if you don't let us oath the Olympics here, we're going to schedule our own big sports extravaganza, promo the hell out of it, and get twice as many people as you will. And for some reason, President Teddy Roosevelt got in on this too and backed St. Louis up. I don't know what his beef was Chicago was. As a former Chicagoan, it pains me to say this, but Chicago folded like a cheap suit. And I kind of guess I can see why. I mean, a big sports event plus the World's Fair, like that would be really hard to compete with. Fun fact about that 1904 World's Fair, by the way, it was Dr. Pepper's debut.

Did you all know Dr. Pepper was that old? I did not. It was also invented by a dentist, which is a damn good way to ensure job security. Right? Be like a heart surgeon owned in a barbecue restaurant. One of the big events scheduled that day was the Olympic Marathon, a 25-mile race, not the 26-mile version we run today, with runners from several different countries. It wasn't as global an event as we're used to nowadays, just because, you know, it was 1904, and it was a lot harder to travel across the world than it is now. But there were runners from Canada and Cuba and a couple from South Africa to compete with the Americans. And things were off to a rocky start pretty much from the jump.

Remember, this was summertime. Temps were in the 90s, and the humidity was god-awful. And obviously, we're not talking about a paved road here. They were running on a dusty-ass road. No doubt covered in sweat so the dust stuck to their skin. Ew. And to make matters worse, marathon officials who were monitoring the race were driving along the route ahead of them, like in cars. And of course, they're stirring up the dust.

It got so bad that the runners started dropping like flies. In some cases, literally. A guy named William Garcia collapsed and ended up in the hospital with internal hemorrhaging. From dust. The dust had filled up his esophagus and ripped the lining. of his stomach. Ah, that's just like the creepiest thing I've ever heard. Dude almost died. By the time he made it to the hospital, doctors said he would have definitely been dead in like an hour without treatment. Wow. From dust. That is bonkers. It was not an easy course to run. A lot of it was

uphill. Some of it was rocky. And the town of St. Louis was going on about its business despite the marathon, so the runners often had to leap out of the way of vehicles, which would then stir up more fricking dust. So it shouldn't surprise us to learn that of the dozens of people who started the marathon, only 14 finished it. Let me tell you about a few of them and their adventures that day. There were two runners there from South Africa. They were in St. Louis for the World's Fair and they ended up entering the marathon too. Their names were Lynn Toniani and Jan Mashiani, possibly Jan Mashiani. I'm not sure. Probably Jan Yon, yeah, because it's South Africa, right? They were members of the to Swana tribe and they were the first black Africans to ever compete in the Olympics. Very cool.

It's too bad it had to be this woman. And one of the two guys ran the race barefoot, which is impressive as hell. Like my arches hurt just thinking about that. They made history that day and both of them finished the race, despite Tanya getting chased a mile off course by, I swear I'm not making this up, a pack of wild dogs. Now, there are a lot of problems with modern sports, for sure. We've seen cheating scandals, steroids, murders, and all kinds of stuff. But what we haven't seen, not yet anyway, is anybody just straight up getting chased out of the stadium by a pack of snarling hellhounds. So all in all, I feel like that's progress, you know, onwards and upwards.

Like, did the marathon organizers piss off a witch? Like, I mean, all right. My favorite guy in the story is probably a Cuban dude. named Felix Carva Hall. In his day job, he was a mailman, but he was a talented runner in his spare time. To raise the money for the trip to St. Louis, he had people sponsor him to run all the way across Cuba. Dang. Imagine how hard that would be.

Hardest money you ever made. And yet, on his way to St. Louis, he stopped over in New Orleans. And the first night he was there, my dude, bet all his money on a dice game and lost. Felix. Bro. Oh boy. Most definitely a guy who lived by the drive it like you stole it motto. Do it feels good now and worry about it tomorrow.

So by the time he made it to St. Louis from Cuba, this guy had already had a rough week, hitching from Louisiana to St. Louis with barely a dime to his name. He also didn't have proper running clothes or shoes. So he just showed up to the marathon in a button-down shirt, a pair of dress pants, and a jaunty beret. Oh, and dress shoes. Imagine what hell those would be to run in. Fortunately for Felix, another athlete saw how woefully inadequate his gear was and helped

him cut his pants off at the knee, so at least he could run in shorts in the awful 90-degree weather. Oh, God. Now, because he'd lost all his money in a dice game on the way to the race, Felix hadn't eaten in like two days. Not really the ideal condition to be running. a 25-mile race in. Lucky for him, not long into the race, he spotted a car full of spectators by the side of the road,

munching from a big basket of peaches. This is the most 1904 story I've ever heard in my life. Running in dress shoes and a basket of peaches in the car. Felix trotted over and asked if he could have a couple, and these assholes actually said no. Like, what the hell, people? But Felix was undeterred. He just snatched a couple and ran off, grinning. and waving to the great amusement of everybody except the dickheads he'd stolen the peaches from.

I picture them all like shaking their fists like an angry old man in a cartoon like, I'm sorry it. You reps going, you bring them peaches back. I love this guy, by the way. Like he just like, it was playful for him to grab the peaches and run off. I mean, he bet all his money lost it. He's wearing fucking loafers. It's crazy.

Committing petty theft, you know? Honestly, if it was any other kind of story, we'd be like making fun of him. But like, it's kind of delightful. It's just, I love Felix. You know, a couple of peaches aren't enough to keep a grown man going, especially a man who is burning as many calories as Felix. Seriously. Our guy was still rumbly and the tumbling. So when the runners came upon an apple orchard, Felix decided to take a little break-a-break and mow through a few apples.

Unfortunately, the apples he picked were past their prime, and poor Felix's stomach started cramping up something awful. He had to stop to, like, double over and groan for a while. And then he fell asleep. Pick a little nappy nap for about an hour. Like, is this a story from Aesop's fables? Like, what is happening? It is. The hilarious thing about this is, our guy still came in.

fourth in the marathon, fourth. Imagine if he hadn't napped or he had taken a shorter nap. He would have meddled. Seriously. That tells you a lot about the whole vibe of this race. People were dropping out left and right so much that even the guy who stopped for a nap ended up doing well. So instead of like, you know, slow and steady wins the race.

The moral is rest when you need it and you'll still do okay. There's a fun little post script to Felix's story. Two years after the marathon, he was on his way to compete in another race in Greece. And he just disappeared. Poof, gone. Nobody knew where he was or what had happened to him. It was a big story. People assumed he was dead, maybe even murdered.

But no, no, Felix was fine. A few months later, he popped back up on a steam. ship traveling back to Cuba. And he refused to tell anybody where he'd been. A man of mystery, R. Felix. Come on, man. I'm dying to know where the hell he was for those few months he was missing. And like what he was up to. Like we couldn't find out. It was a peach heist. Oh my God, you're so right. You know, we obviously couldn't figure it out aside from our very accurate guesses. Yeah, yeah. And stone fruit-related heists.

But, you know, like whatever it was, I am positive, there were some kind of wacky shenanigans involved. 100%. Yeah. The next guy I wanted to tell you about is Fred Lores. Fred was a bricklayer by trade and an avid runner, and he was one of the favorites to win the marathon. But about nine miles into the race,

Lores started cramping up pretty badly. And clearly a practical guy, he decided to flag down with the cars that was driving along the course and hitch a ride with them. They drove him 11 miles. 11. And at one point, stopped so he could go grab a quick beer. So my dude rode almost half the race in a car before thanking the drivers and hopping out to run all the rest of the way, all nice and refreshed. So it's no surprise that he reached the finish line way before anybody else did. The crowd went nuts and none other than Alice Roosevelt, the president's infamous daughter

who liked to gamble and ride around in cars with men and tended to dance on tables at parties, set fashion trends for the whole country, and had a pet snake named Emily Spinach, ran up to put the gold medal around his neck. Now, tell me, campers, if you were in this situation, would you come clean or would you just smile and wave and take the metal. I mean, we'd all like to think we'd come clean, right? But I bet if I'm being perfectly honest with myself, it's probably easier said than done. Like, imagine how awkward. Oh, like, hey, hey, everybody, I'm a piece of shit. So, yeah, our boy Lors was apparently planning on accepting his medal, that is, until somebody ratted him out. I mean, the guy rode for miles in that car.

Obviously, people saw him along the way. And he didn't even try to duck down and hide or anything. He He was like smiling and waving at people. So now everybody started booing him and yelling at him, and Loras tried to play it off like, guys, come on, of course I wasn't going to accept this gold medal. It was just a prank. I was just about to tell you. Sure, Jan.

So who actually won the race? Well, it was a guy named Thomas Hicks. Hicks had a day job. You would probably never guess if I gave you a whole day to do it. He was a professional clown. Yeah, we don't have any pictures of him in his clown gear, unfortunately, so I can't tell you if he was like the terrifying kind or the goofy kind, but that was what he did for a living when he wasn't running marathons. They're all the terrifying kind. I mean, I'm not going to argue with that. Hicks was in the lead pretty much right away and stayed there for a good portion of the race, but there was one minor obstacle in the way of his winning.

As if these poor runners did not have enough to contend with between dust, tornadoes and packs of wild dogs, this shindig was apparently being run by a group of cartoonishly evil mad scientists, and these guys had decided to turn the race into a little science experiment, without telling the subjects of said experiment, of course. So apparently in the early 1900s, there was this hypothesis going around that dehydration could actually make an athlete perform better. I know, just stay with me. I can kind of see where this might have made sense to them back then, just because I know dehydration can make your muscles stand out a little more.

Bodybuilders use that trick sometimes before a show, but obviously it's dangerous nonsense. The head of the marathon that year, James Sullivan, decided to use Hicks to test out this theory. So this poor bastard was sweating his insides out, begging for water, and they just wouldn't give them any. Sadistic assholes. They literally set up one water. station for this entire 25-mile course, and it was 12 miles in. Instead of water, they offered Hicks brandy, which obviously would have made the dehydration worse and prepared to gag egg egg whites.

Oh, so gross. God, doesn't that make you want to throw up? Brandy and egg whites in scorching summer heat and probably seasoned with plenty of road dust, just the viscous liquid. I can't do it. Yeah, and also rat poison. Yeah, I didn't mention that part. Yeah, our wacky mad scientists also decided to use our marathoner to test another hypothesis that a tiny amount of strychnine could sort of supercharge the body. I'm sorry. Who was in charge here? Final Fantasy's Professor Hojo?

Yeah. Should we also add a little radiation just to see what happens? Yeah, and it was a small amount they put in there, but I'm going to level with you. That does not make it a whole lot better for me. If I'm trusting you to get me through a marathon in 90-degree heat, I'm going to have to ask that you not put any amount of rat poison in my eggs. I really don't think that's a big ask. Now, I'm not a researcher, but I work with researchers, and I'm pretty sure this experiment had certain flaws. It did not meet the standards of rigor that we would ideally like to see.

Where's the control group? Where's the baseline info on this guy's normal performance levels? You know, sans poison and dehydration. What are you comparing these results to? Oh, what's that? You didn't give a shit about any of that. You just kind of wanted to see what would happen if you poisoned the guy a little bit. Okay, yeah, that makes much more sense.

Yeah, let's say one of the guys does become the flash. Was it the liquor? Was it the egg whites? The rat poison? The massive amount of dirt he just inhaled because he sped past. him in your car. Like, maybe James Sullivan just had a thing about clowns. He's like, oh, yeah, guys, didn't you know?

Poison is actually totally good for you. So I'm going to give this guy a little bit just to help him stay at the top of his game. But, like, secretly he's just twirling his mustache. Like, that'll be one less clown in this Godforsaken city. Also, like, a little side note about James Sullivan, like, he was super racist. He's like super extra racist. He did an entire book about like white athletic superiority. Yeah.

He was a bad guy. He was not a nice man. He was not a nice. I mean, if the rat poison wasn't indicative enough of his badness. Oh, mighty. So like before long, this poor runner was in bad shape. Muscles cramping from dehydration, covered in dust and dirt, begging for food and water and hallucinating from rat poison.

By the time he made it to the finish line, his trainers had to hold him up and help him lurch across it. But our guy was still standing. Talk about Aya the Tiger, right? This man could play hurt. He earned that gold medal. These dehydration is good for you, idiots.

Didn't learn their lesson, by the way. In a book he wrote five years after the marathon, the genius who came up with the theory said, don't get into the habit of drinking and eating in a marathon race. Some prominent runners do, but it is not beneficial. Probably not if you're feeding them rat poison. And I'm sorry, saying prominent runners. Like, I would love for you to run a marathon.

I would love for you to run a marathon without water, please. Seriously. So that is the cluster fuck that was the 1904 Olympic marathon. Moving on now to Case 2. Bad Trip, the horrors of the Oak Ridge Experiment. In the 60s, a Canadian psychiatrist named Dr. Elliot Barker was becoming the darling of the discipline, with fellow psychiatrists pretty much hanging on his every word and super excited to see what he'd come up with next. Yeah, be careful what you wish for.

Oh, yeah. Let me just tell you about a couple of Dr. Barker's influences. New approaches to psychotherapy that fascinated him and inspired the madness that was to come, at Oak Ridge. These are mostly techniques that rose out of the human potential movement of the 60s, which focused on teaching people to tap into this nearly infinite pool of potential

we're all theoretically born with. I mean, it's a nice idea, but it took some psychologists to very strange places. One of these therapists was a guy named Paul Bindrom in, I know this will shock you, California. Paul's passion project

was nude psychotherapy. He hosted these therapy retreat type events, which I suspect were not cheap, based on the idea that, as he put it, physical nakedness facilitates emotional nakedness. Oh, boy. So this dude would get a bunch of people in a room, have them strip butt-ass naked, put one of them in the middle with their legs in the air, and have everybody else stare at their bare crotch as New Age music played in the background for hours, like 24. hours. God. Every now and then, he gesture at the person's junk and say, this is where it's at. This is where we've become so damn negatively conditioned.

He also had his patients wrestle each other, still naked, and encourage them to have conversations with their genitals. If that ain't the most 1960 shit I've ever heard in my life, I don't know what it is. And it's interesting because it reminds me a lot of some stories I've read about. about El Ron Hubbard, Scientology's founder, before he started the cult, when he was just traveling around, hanging out with various groups of oddlings and gathering inspo for what would become one of the largest and creepiest cults in the world. Like, for example, Hubbard spent a lot of time with Alistair Crowley and his entourage, having orgies and trying various substances

and whatnot. The story, by the way, is from John Ronson's book, The Psychopath Test, which, if you haven't read it, is a rocking good time from start to finish. Read it. And this next story is from Ronson's book, too. Another Dr. Elliot Barker really admired was Dr. R.D. Lang, a pioneer in the field of radical psychiatry, as they called it then, who ran a place in England called Kingsley Hall. Lang was chums with Dr. Timothy Leary, and if you don't know who that is, look him up. I'll just give you the cliff's notes here. He was a character, and he was real obsessed with psychedelics, especially LSD. This may have been where the idea for Oak Ridge first sprouted in

Elliot Barker's head because Timothy Leary liked to hang out with the patients at Kingsley Hall, most of whom suffered from schizophrenia. Although, he didn't necessarily think of them as patients. Dr. Lang had a couple of strangely contradictory ideas, at least in my opinion they seem contradictory. He had irreverence for people with serious mental illness, like kind of like people did in some ancient cultures. He thought they had some kind of special understanding of the world. But then he also believed he could cure them if he, as his son told John Ronson, let them work through their madness so it could take its natural course without intervention. It's a thought, right?

I swear to God, some of these people are just like having a dream at night, like a weird dream. And then they wake up like, what if we just tried this? Why not? It's like a cyst. Your psychopathy is like a cyst. You just got to drain it and it'll get better. God Almighty. And he was rightfully skeptical about stuff like lobotomies and straight jackets and sedation. I mean, mental hospitals were scary at that time. So at Kingsley Hall, patients and doctors mingled together with lots of opportunities for creative expression and deep conversation. They got to dance and paint and play music and have poetry readings. Sean Connery came to hang out once or twice. I mean, it all sounds awesome, actually. You can hang out with 007. But the thing was, Dr. Lang himself was not a well guy. He was a serious alcoholic and battling some major mental

health demons of his own. He was in no position to treat patients. He needed to be one himself. And the fact is, you can't manage schizophrenia with poetry. It might help, absolutely, but it's not going to get you stable. When Sean Connery and the light came to visit, the staff would make sure they didn't see the more seriously ill patients, like the lady in the basement who obsessively smeared the walls with her own poop. Back to Dr. Elliot Barker, up-and-coming young Canadian psychiatrist.

Inspired by all he'd learned about radical psychiatry, Barker felt confident he could solve the problem that it had eluded society so far. How to cure psychopathy. In 1965, he took a job at the Oak Ridge Hospital for the criminally insane in Ontario.

They had a specific psychopath unit, which is interesting. The PCR, the quote-unquote psychopath test hadn't been invented yet. And our understanding of psychopathy wasn't the greatest at the time. Yeah, it's very likely that some of the guys in that unit were not psychopaths at all. Yeah, some of them were basically just troubled teenagers, but some of them definitely were psychopaths. There was serial killer Peter Woodcock who murdered three children. Mob hitman David La Riviere, convicted of killing a woman while she lay sleeping in bed next to him.

Jim Motherall convicted of beating a 15-year-old with a tire iron, serial rapist William Brennan. So we're talking about some bad dudes. Dr. Barker, fresh out of med school and all excited to roll up his sleeves and get crack in, decided he knew just what it would take to cure these guys. He wanted to try a bizarre Franken treatment he'd sewn together from all the avant-garde psychiatrist methods that inspired him. We already talked about a few of those. For example, we know Barker liked R.D. Lang's idea of a therapeutic community where patients were active participants in their own care and in the care of other patients. This isn't a bad idea on its face. I mean, people should be proactive in their own care, and group therapy can be great. But what Barker had in mind was a little more than group therapy. It was sort of a lunatics running the asylum type approach to treatment with the patients acting as each other's therapists. very convenient for a place that didn't have nearly enough doctors on staff. Free labor.

Woo-hoo. Yeah, where have we heard that before? I know, right? Yeah, and there's something else we haven't mentioned yet. Dr. Barker had also made a careful study of behavior control techniques, specifically the ones used in a Chinese prison camp he visited on his world tour of radical psychiatry, stuff like truth serums, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation. Yeah, anybody else just get a sick feeling in your tum-tum?

Yeah, me too. Yeah. There's no real truth serum, by the way. Several drugs have been used that way, from scopolamine to LSD to sodium pentothal. But there's no real trustworthy evidence that any of them make people more truthful. In fact, they can make people much more suggestible, which seems like a great way to elicit false confessions. And of course, the CIA used LSD in their infatiful. M.K. Ultra mind control project, which is a rabbit hole way too deep for us to go into now.

But we're planning to do a whole episode on it sometime down the road. So stay tuned. Yeah, M.K. Ultra is one of my brother's obsessions. We might have him on to talk about it with us. He is hilarious. Y'all would love him. And we are a lot when we get together. Anyway, in psychiatry, the use of these drugs was called narcosynthesis. And fortunately, we don't do it anymore. Well, no why? Because it's considered a form of torture. Great, right? So Oak Ridge lovingly turned its psychopaths over to Dr. Barker, and everybody expected it to go great. He renamed the unit the social therapy unit, which I admit sounds way better than psychopath unit. Better for the brochures. And so began a nightmare that would last for 15 years. And like so many fuck-ups

before it, it started with a fundamentally flawed theory. that psychopaths, often smooth and charming on the outside, could be cured if we could just bring their madness to the surface so they could work through it. This is where the acid came in. Dr. Barker ordered a big old batch of it from a lab, with permission from the government, of course. He picked out a few psychopaths to serve as his very first guinea pigs,

all young, smart guys with good verbal skills. And then he told them to strip naked and tossed him into the room that would be their home for the next evening. 11 days and live forever in their nightmares. The Total Encounter Capsule. Sounds like an erectile dysfunction supplement or like a private room in a strip club. Or like what a sci-fi nerd calls his penis. Yeah, that's what I'm going to start calling my lady Jane, the total encounter capsule.

So weird. So just imagine this if you can. You are book naked. You're locked in a windowless room full of people who have committed. but it's serious violent crimes. The walls are padded, and the padding is bright green for some reason. You're dosed with LSD or scopolamine, and you're told not to hold anything back. Guided through endless therapy sessions, where you have to dredge up your biggest traumas and darkest secrets and listen to everybody else's.

Wild tripping balls, and presumably trying not to stare at the other guy's weaners. It must have been an absolute fever dream. They couldn't even get out of the room to eat. The staff, I swear to God, drilled holes in the walls and stuck straws through them so the inmates could eat, I guess, protein shakes or something like that. There was nothing in this room but the four walls and like a toilet. There were no books, no radio, no TV, no windows. It gets worse. Dr. Barker, bless his heart, decided he didn't need to be hands-on with this little experiment.

He just sat in a chair behind a one-way, mirror and watched, like a scientist at a research lab, watching a room full of howlermonkeys. Inmates could order treatments for each other, including the ones involving booze and acid. Absolutely, bonkers nuts. They could also design punishments for each other. One punishment for lack of full enthusiastic participation in the total encounter capsule was to have to wear a little girl-style dress. I hope Barker was taking good notes, because so far this would make a great instruction manual for how to create a serial killer. As if this thing wasn't already a circle of hell,

the hospital also allowed tour groups from local high schools to come gawk at the inmates in the capsule. That must have been fun for everybody. Sounds like a field trip idea from The Simpsons. Hi, I'm Troy McClure. Such a weird idea. Like, the guys are buck naked in there, and they're like trapes in these. kids pass the one-way mirror, just bonkers. Another one of Dr. Barker's great ideas was to handcuff or strap two inmates together for

hours and hours at a time. The idea was that they would bond, support, and quote, trips it each other during the LSD experiments, with, again, no doctor there, no nurse, just in the capsule with the other inmates. They had to do everything together while they were like this, even go to the bathroom in the open toilet in front of God and everybody. One guy told John Ronson that he ended up at Oak Ridge when he was a teenager for stealing a car while on acid. This kid was not a psychopath. He wasn't violent. He went on to have a perfectly normal life after this.

He was just a kid who did a stupid thing. And during his time in the Total Encounter Capsule, he ended up cuffed to a serial child killer. Jeez. Some of the guys in the program did seem to make progress, at least for a while. But as the program went on, things got weird. They hired a new psychiatrist whose methods were more extreme than Barkers had been. At one point, he dosed the entire population of the ward with LSD and forbade the guards from doing anything about it. God.

An entire psych ward full of murderers and rapists on acid, running around, clawing at the walls, whatever they felt like doing. And the guards were just told to leave them alone. Yeah, they fired that psychiatrist after that. What a shame. Another feature at Oak Ridge was the MAP program, which stood for motivation, attitude, and participation. Should have been called malice, atrocity, and punishment. One former patient described it to the CBC years later. They would strap your legs together and you'd be put on the floor and you had to maintain a perfect T-square position, he said.

You aren't allowed to move unless you ask for permission. Well, I know I feel motivated, don't you? And I know this is going to shock you, but psychopaths don't always treat other psychopaths with kindness and compassion. One former patient who was sent to Oak Ridge when he was just 16 told the CBC, it didn't matter if you cried. There was no compassion. There was no recognizing you as a human being who's had enough. This guy wasn't a violent offender. He was a runaway who'd escaped his group home because he was being abused there. He turned 17 in the total encounter capsule. The other inmates made him a little happy birthday banner out of toilet paper, which is kind of nice.

But later the same day, another inmate sexually abused him. He told the CBC, I didn't know what a pedophile was. When I went there, I was a virgin. Oh, God, poor kid. And here's the thing, like some people have said, well, you know, they deserved it. their psychopaths. Some of he might be thinking, well, shit, I wouldn't mind seeing Chris Watts go through some of this shit. He deserves it. And I mean, he does deserve it. He's a horrible human being who murdered two children and his wife. But there are a couple of major problems with that. First,

not all the inmates were violent offenders, and not all of them were adults. And also, they were going to let them all out at some point. And what kind of shape you think they're going to be in when they step back into society after this? One of the most outrageous things they did was send patients slash prisoners from Oak Ridge to the St. Thomas Psychiatric Hospital to be therapists slash teachers in a special unit for female offenders. Male inmates who had just been through Oak Ridge's LSD-fueled rehabilitation program. No qualifications whatsoever to be therapists. And some of these guys had convictions for rape and other violent crimes, like fucking yikes. One woman told the fifth estate that these Oak Ridge patients had near total authority

over the female inmates, and they weren't shy about using it. They acted like they were the experts, she said, like they were holier than now. She talked about trying to leave the room during a session one time and being chased down by a couple of the men, tied down to the mattress and left there for the rest of the day. They use physical restraints freely if the women didn't want to comply with some part of the treatment. They used the method that had been used on them at Oak Ridge, where they'd cuff two women together and make them stay like that for hours. Imagine being handcuffed to another patient who's freaking out and screaming and throwing a tantrum.

Imagine how scary that would be for both of the patients. Not only did they put these guys in positions of authority over the female patients, they housed them on the same ward. One survivor of the program told the Canadian show The Fifth Estate, I was terrified, and so were a lot of the other girls that were in there. Everybody was afraid to even go to sleep at nighttime because the guys were always wandering around later than everybody else, and they were having relationships with other women there.

Relationships is one way to put it. At least one woman got pregnant during this time. This program went on for six years, from 1977 to 1983. During which time, according to the lady who told the mattress story, two women confided in her that they'd been raped by male patients. One of these women was disabled. It would have been physically very hard for her to resist any unwanted advances. There's no way to prove or disprove that story now, but it is not hard to imagine it happening.

Now, we've been pretty hard on old Dr. Barker, and I think he deserves it to a large extent, as do the other doctors who participated in this bullshit over the course of its 15-year run, but it's worth remembering that insane asylums, as they used to call them, were absolutely horrific in the decades before this. The goal was never to treat the mentally ill patients it was to control them. Hence, heavy sedation, frontal lobotomies, restraints, etc. Barker's approach seemed like a new way of doing things, radical but at least focused on treatment and rehabilitation. A lot of doctors and researchers were excited about LSD at the time.

So, let's find out. How did these patients do after they graduated from the program? Well, in the 90s, some researchers looked into the Oak Ridge experiment and took the time to meticulously research every inmate that had been released after their time. there. Their findings were stark. Not only did the treatments at Oak Ridge not make these guys better, it made them worse. According to John Ronson, under normal circumstances, about 60% of criminal psychopaths reoffend after being released from incarceration, but in the population released from Oak Ridge, 80% reoffended. Some ended up right back at Oak Ridge. Ronson tells us about a few of the guys who committed further violent crimes after going through Dr. Barker's treatment regimen, and I don't have time to give you as much detail as he does. Read the psychopath test

if you want more specifics, but I'll give you a thumbnail sketch. One guy got out and kidnapped a teenage girl, sexually assaulted her, and threw her off a bridge. Another attacked a teenage girl, sexually molested an 11-year-old, and kidnapped and murdered a little boy, all within a few years of his release. Peter Woodcock, the serial child killer, murdered a fellow patient at Oak Ridge because he'd rejected him sexually. Choped him up. Not really stuff. Woodcock did an interview about Oak Ridge later. He said the program made him way better at manipulating people and better at hiding his dark side.

As John Ronson put it, it had taught him how to be a more devious psychopath. All those chats about empathy were like an empathy-faking finishing school for him. And we know this about certain types of personality disorders, antisocial personality disorder included, that therapy can make them worse for that very reason. that it gives them a better vocabulary to manipulate with. It's interesting. So Dr. Barker's big experiment didn't go great. Surprise, surprise. And it's interesting to see psychedelic therapies sort of come back into the public eye lately.

Like microdosing LSD got a lot of attention a couple of years ago. Lots of people are trying psychedelic mushrooms. And studies are being done on the effectiveness of psychedelics in a therapeutic setting. And I'm all for it. If they find a way to make it work, just as long as we don't forget the less. lessons of Oak Ridge. So there you have it. A pair of big, sparkly, leave a smoking crater in the earth bookups. Hope they made you feel a little better about your own attempts at greatness this week. I know they did me. Okay, let's get back to business. Crime Wave 2.0, February 8th through 12th,

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Again, that's crimewave at sea.com slash campfire. Get on over there and get your discount code now. 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 Ian, Colleen, Jen, Christina with a K, T. O'Neill and Lindsay. We appreciate y'all to the

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