Join the gang as we ponder the question: WTF is up with Wisconsin? Could it be the Florida of the Great North? Because it seems like a whole lot of iconic serial killers, mass shooters, and other mischief comes out of that place from Ed Gein to Jeffrey Dahmer to the Suitcase Killer...
Join us on Patreon at www.patreon.com/crimejuicygang for bonus episodes, unaired content, exclusive expert interviews, swag, and a peek behind the juice!
Join the gang as we ponder the question: WTF is up with Wisconsin? Could it be the Florida of the Great North? Because it seems like a whole lot of iconic serial killers, mass shooters, and other mischief comes out of that place from Ed Gein to Jeffrey Dahmer to the Suitcase Killer...
Join us on Patreon at www.patreon.com/crimejuicygang for bonus episodes, unaired content, exclusive expert interviews, swag, and a peek behind the juice!
What's the F*** is up with Wisconsin Ya'll?
[00:00:00]
Becca: Welcome to the CrimeJuicy Cocktail Hour. Tonight, we ask the age old question: What is up with Wisconsin?
Krista: All the time.
Becca: All the time. All these psychos, all these serial killers?
Krista: Can we just start with, I was just recently in Wisconsin. Somebody asked me, “When is the last time you checked into a hotel at four o'clock ever happened to you?” Apparently you're able to check in whenever and that is that normal, like, have you ever checked into a hotel before four o'clock anybody?
Becca: The psychopaths of Wisconsin Dells.
Krista: Maybe three, maybe 3, but like what? Sorry.
Becca: Krista recently survived Wisconsin. She went there. She was there. She didn't get serial killed she's back.
Krista: Although I did see a really horrific accident, it was, it was bad. We were backed up for about 20 minutes or so, and there was tow trucks and everything and flipped over cars, smashed cars. Somebody died there and I apologize for those people, but, I was in Wisconsin.
Becca: Yeah. I survived like a whole bachelor's degrees worth of school in Wisconsin, we love Wisconsin. Actually. We're not trying to hate on Wisconsin, but yeah,
Carrie: You did your bachelor degree in Wisconsin?
Becca: Yeah, down there on the border of Illinois and Wisconsin. So you got like Madison to the North, Chicago to the South and then the middle there's a random college and some other shit, but it was cool.
Carrie: That's great.
Becca: I didn't get serial killed somehow.
Carrie: I don't know how.
Becca: We're talking about Wisconsin because it's got a lot of serial killers that have come out of there, a lot of mass shootings that have happened, a lot of psychotic shit. And so I'm researching it and I'm like, is there really anything that fucked up with Wisconsin? And then we're reading about this and we're like, Whoa, this is crazy, like iconically messed up. So does Wisconsin actually have more serial killers and psychos than other states? Some stats:
A lot of the data I found about serial killers was based on the number of victims per state. It doesn't necessarily say the number of killers. So it's based on how many people are killed by serial killers per year. It's also based on population per population data. So it's like, how likely are you to be killed by a serial killer and Alaska of course, is the state where you're most likely to become a serial killer victim. Watch out, I guess. Then there was this other study by the Southern Methodist University where they gathered data on a sample of 1.6 million people, and they used the Hare Psychopathy Checklist - Revised to estimate the prevalence of psychopathy in each state - the continental states, they didn't do Alaska or Hawaii. Then Wisconsin clocked it at number 15 as the most psychopathic. You want to guess what number one was?
Carrie: What was it?
Becca: It was Maine. You're welcome. Stephen King. You're fucking welcome.
Krista: Hey, it's a beautiful place, but I haven't heard that it’s pleasant to live in. Have you ever been to Maine?
Becca: I haven't. I want to go, but that's where Stephen King bases like all of his like shit on right?
Carrie: Maine or Colorado.
Becca: Yeah. And then guess what number 48, the least psychopathic continental state was.
Krista: I'm probably not going to believe it.
Becca: North Carolina. I live there. I don't know if I believe it, but apparently we're not psychopaths.
Krista: You know, actually I don't believe that either you're in the mountains, they can't, there's no actual statistics.
Becca: We can't get statistics in the mountains. The cell reception isn't here. It tracks. We chose to research Wisconsin. Let's look up psychos in serial killers in Wisconsin. I heard there was a lot of them. There's a lot of them and the, the depths that they go to and the role that they play in American pop culture, as far as serial killers, as a mythology, as a story trope is ginormous.
Krista: Speaking of pop culture, those of you who are name brand lovers the man who killed Versace is actually from Wisconsin, Andrew Cunanan, he murdered his lover and I believe he murdered someone else and stole a vehicle and then drove to Florida and shot Versace on his step and then proceeded to kill himself. But he was from Wisconsin.
Becca: There you go.
Krista: You know, just, and it was wintertime. So I understand the lure to Florida right now. It is currently last time I checked the weather, it said negative 22.
Becca: They’re all like, I need an excuse to go to Florida. We don't have a business trip. Disneyland's closed. We got to fucking kill Versace.
Carrie: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. It is negative 22 right now?
Krista: Let me, let me confirm this for you.
Carrie: Are you serious?
Becca: She's not in Wisconsin. She's safe.
Krista: Yeah, I am safe. I will mark myself safe, if anybody needs it. No, it says, well, it's it says it's sunny. Cause normally we record at night it's in the afternoon. So it's like throwing me all sorts of off. But right now it is currently one.
Carrie: It says it's currently one degree.
Krista: But it feels like negative 11, and then later after sunset and it’ll feel like negative 15? Tomorrow is going to be seven with a low of a negative eight.
Becca: And that's why people kill people in the Midwest.
Krista: Like and no, you know, I was surprised there aren't any more. Add COVID on top of it, we’re stuck inside of her houses. Cause if you go, I mean, what are, you could mummify a body and like get away with it for a while, but what happens in the spring time?
Carrie: Dude, you guys know there's some crazy stuff going on with this pandemic right now behind closed doors.
Becca: What I was looking at so I started researching serial killers of Wisconsin, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I looked at mass shootings because mass shootings don't count as serial killers. Since 2004, there have been at least 12 mass shootings in Wisconsin. Wisconsin is the seventh highest state for mass shootings in the country, but it only counted seven of the instances. I don't think it's accurate metrics. November 21st, 2004, six people killed when Chai Veng shot eight people while deer hunting in Northern Wisconsin. March 12th, 2005, seven people killed in four wounded when Terry Michael Ratzmann opened fired at the Living Church of God's service before killing himself. June 9th, 2007, five people killed in Delavan when Ambrosio Analco shot his twin boys, his wife, and her sister and a friend before killing himself. October 7, 2007, six people killed one wounded when forest County Sheriff's Deputy Tyler James Peterson went on a rampage in his ex-girlfriend's apartment, then killed himself. July 4th, 2008, four people killed two wounded and assault rifle attack where three men fired into a group of a hundred people at afterparty in Milwaukee. August 5th, 2012, 6 people killed four wounded when Wade Michael Page shot up a Sikh temple, then killed himself. And then seven years later, another wound victim died of complications from that gunshot. October 21st, 2012, three people killed four wounded, one Radcliffe Haughton rampaged through his wife's salon and then killed himself. So he shows up at work, her work, kills everyone kills himself. What a dick. May 3rd, 2015, Sergio Valencia Del Toro – what a name, I swear - were killed three people injured one when he opened fired on a trial bridge, then shot himself. March 6, 2016, Dan J. Popp shot three neighbors, March 22nd, 2017 Nengmy Vang killed his wife's divorce attorney, two of her coworkers and a police detective then shot himself. Then was shot during a standoff and died on April Fool's Day of that year. July 28th, 2019, Richie German Jr. killed three family members and a young women he was trying to kidnap and then killed himself and injured two others in the process. February 26, 2020, five people killed at the Molson Coors in Milwaukee, then the shooter killed himself. And then since then we got Kyle Rittenhouse, that little shit, but he came up from Illinois. And then Steven Zelich the former cop who was the Suitcase Killer who killed two women who came to see him to do his consensual BDSM 24/7 slaves to find out he didn't have a safe word and killed them.
Welcome to Wisconsin. This isn't even the serial killers.
Krista: No, not at all.
Carrie: Wow. Oh, okay.
Krista: So hold on. I have one…
Carrie: Can you give me the, the split split apart there?
Krista: Yeah. The cop. Yeah.
Becca: The suitcase one?
Carrie: No. Okay. So some of them were cops and some of them were lovers, it was.
Becca: Oh, scorned lovers and cops. A lot of these were ex cops. It was interesting too, because with the mass shooters, a lot of their rampages ended in suicide. This is not the case for serial killers, which I think is interesting. You know, it's something they learned to live with versus something they're like rampage, rampage, rampage, I'm out. But a lot of these were cops. A lot of these were scorned levers.
Carrie: What would you say the percentage would be, would you say it was more cops or more scorned lovers?
Becca: There's a Venn Diagram going on for sure.
Carrie: Okay. We should do that. Venn Diagram, Krista for our website in our, in our Facebook and our Patreon subscribers. So we'll work on that Venn Diagram and the personas.
Krista: [00:10:00] What about Excel spreadsheets?
Becca: We love Venn Diagrams. Yes. With mass shootings. Wisconsin is home to a handful of notorious serial killers and some lesser known ones that we're going to share with you today. General ones, we got David Spanbauer. He's an interesting one. He's one of those people that went into prison when he was 19 for – it was the sexual assault murder.And he was in and out of prison throughout his life. And every time he got out and he like raped and killed someone.
Krista: There was no reform at all for him there. Yeah. There's also a Julian Carlson and this is an old school one. He killed a Frank Lloyd Wright's mistress and children in 1914. There was, he gave no reason, no reason at all. He killed them by setting them on fire and with an axe and also died of starvation present a year later. He was from Wisconsin. There was also - we got more - there's Walter Ellis. His killing lasted from 1986 to 2017.
Becca: He was the Northside Strangler from Milwaukee. Right?
Krista: Yep. He raped and killed seven women throughout his time. And then there was Robert Wright. He killed between six and eight, there isn't a definite number, from 1987 to 1988, he killed the elderly for monetary gain. So there's also that, that was, I mean, he was just a psychopath that just needed to F off, but then let's not forget most recently there are a lot of kidnappers, but not as many serial - there's more serial killers and kidnappers. There was the Jamie Closs situation with James Peterson who - her parents - and kept her for 88 days. So we got that factor going on there too.
Carrie: Wasn't was the Gypsy Rose's boyfriend one from Wisconsin?
Krista: He was, he was, he was, yeah.
Becca: And like, we're not even, and this is like all the way down the list and we're finally coming around to Jeffrey Dahmer.
Krista: He killed the most 17.
Carrie: He is my favorite.
Becca: He was just trying to find someone who would love him.
Krista: Abandonment issues, man. In the right person, they can manifest into wanting to create zombies and then eating them. So that they're always with you.
Becca: And that wasn’t the only cannibal killer of Wisconsin. Another one is Ed Gein, who I'm also abandon - I don't know. I don't think it's abandonment issues, but mommy issues, he was also a cannibal. He decorated his house with parts of his victims. Dude. He was actually buried at the first the graveyard of the first graves that he robbed.
Krista: With his mother.
Becca: It’s poetic.
Krista: You know, he told, he told people that he did it because his mother in his house, his house was a total disaster, like a hoarder situation, but his mom's room was completely boarded off and clean. But he said that his mother kept telling him that if he could find the right body, she would come back to life.
Becca: Making the jacket out of flesh. Yeah. Ed Geinof Wisconsin. And I think this is why Wisconsin really stands out is it really does influence serial killers in pop culture. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was based off of Ed Gein. Psycho’s Norman Bates was based off of Ed Gein. Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill was based off Ed Gein. Like, three of the top serial killer horror movies based off of this one dude from Wisconsin, whose mom isolated him growing up to the point where all of this happened, he was terribly isolated.
Krista: His IQ was not very high. Even his brother described him as not being - he definitely needed adult supervision his entire life.
Becca: Yeah. And he had to go to the psychiatric institute to get to the point where he was competent enough to stand trial, like several - and he ended up dying and the Mendota Mental Institute, right?
Carrie: Correct. Yeah, he did not go to prison. He was very, he was a terrible head case, unfortunately. Yeah, not exactly sure what he had. They really didn't give him a real diagnosis either. Correct? Krista?
Krista: No, but he's he did, he did get sentenced to a mental facility and died in a mental facility.
Carrie: So they must have labeled him at least insane.
Becca: Yeah. I mean, it seems like he saw people as corpses already.
Krista: Yeah, he did really only kill two people though. He's probably where the defiling a corpse came from.
Becca: Can't really do anything bad, bad to a corpse. Oh my God. He was creative. He was creative. He had like heads mounted. He studied taxidermy. He practiced it on bodies that he dug up. Um…super into human taxidermy. You've got these iconic serial killers, all from Wisconsin. And then you've got some other ones that are near and dear to our twisted little hearts that we're going to share with you.
Carrie: Do you want to go first, Krista? Or you want me to go first?
Krista: You go first.
Carrie: My killer of course is Jeffrey Dahmer. Who - what did he kill? How many did he kill? Seven, 17, 17. When they found his stash in his apartment, there was remains of 11 different men. So –
Becca: They take his refrigerator to the police station.
Carrie: I bet they did. I would have, I would have just taken the whole thing too. I would've pulled a Russian cannibal couple. Like, yeah, look, just take the whole fridge down there. He really isn't a sad, like in a way. So what happened? I think with Jeffrey, his parents were in Ohio and they decide to just break up the family. I believe he was 18 though. It was before he left for the army. It shouldn't have been that big of a deal, but for him, the abandonment was deep because he didn't have a place to go back home to. Does that make sense? That was a bad age for him, 18. And then he goes right into the military where we have some instances with him in Germany raping men, you know, giving them drugs, whatever, getting them drunk, that kind of stuff.
He comes home, he's doing his thing. He can't go back home. He wants someone. Just wants someone and that's why he's drilling holes in their head and pour it in hydrochloric acid or whatever. And when they do, he's going to consume them, because then he can keep them forever. It's really an interesting case. He was cute in a way, I thought he was cute. I mean, you know, he looks like kind of in a way, Ted Bundy-ish, to me, only a blonde. With glasses, you know, very unassuming. Not drop dead, gorgeous, not like a total panty dropper by any means
Becca: He seems like the kind of person who's like cute in a way that's humble.
Carrie: Correct.
Becca: And probably has a bigger dick than Ted Bundy.
Krista: For sure. He probably has a big old…
Carrie: Or did.
Krista: Or did.
Becca: Yeah. He's like, you're going to come home with me. I don't give a fuck. Like I'm wasted, my dick’s not getting up, but you're going to love me forever.
Carrie: Yeah, he looks like, he looks like somebody you could go with and be okay with, you know what I mean? He really, really does. And that's what I really liked about Jeffrey Dahmer's whole situation, I guess, was that unassuming, whatever. And the cops let him, let him go all the time.
Becca: Send people back in there where it's like, no, you go back in there to be with Jeff where you'll be safe. He's got like half naked dudes running out like, he's trying to kill me. And they're like, no, no, no. You go back there where you'll be safe and then he eats them.
Krista: Oh my gosh.
Carrie: You're just drunk, sir. Go back into the apartment. You'll be fine in the morning. And they're, you know, they're not fine in the morning.
Becca: They’re not fine, they're drunk, but they're not fine in the morning. I think the other interesting thing about Wisconsin is because it is Wisconsin, and also because of, you know, having lived there, it is a very drunk state.
Krista: Yeah. Yeah.
Becca: That's a, state-based around being drunk, you wander around Wisconsin. I have never once gotten lost in the city of Madison because all roads somehow lead back to the Capitol. My drunk ass has been lost in Madison. I used to go to those Halloween parties, the ones that ended in tear gas, but I always found my way back to where it was going, because all roads lead back to the Capitol somehow and buses are free often after 6:00 PM because they know you're drunk. So. It's - they care of you.
Krista: For a long time we used to have to drive from Minnesota on Sundays to not have to only go to bars for alcohol if we forgot to go on Saturdays.
Becca: Yeah. The Wisconsin run where you go to , Oh my gosh, what's the next - Hudson we drove to Hudson to get booze at Hudson
Krista: Somerset.
Becca: Yeah. Somerset.
Krista: Stillwater? Whatever, you know, wherever they let you buy alcohol.And they'd always be like, god dammit!
Becca: But like when Minnesota legalized buying booze on Sundays, Wisconsin was like, it's what you miss us now, you miss us now? And they're like, yes, we do. More about Jeff?
Krista: Yeah, let's talk about Jeff. What, like Jeff was an interesting character. He he could have been a really nice guy. He started getting drunk when he was young, though, really young.
Carrie: Yeah he was bored in Ohio. He was very bored. He he did go stay with his grandmother for a while and they found that he had been chopping up people there and packaging them up. He [00:20:00] actually took pieces of the bone outside and chopped them up or sledgehammered them to pieces. He liked to take pictures on his victims. That's pretty typical behavior.
Krista: Yeah the whole Polaroid thing of.
Carrie: Yeah, because that experience of dismembering people actually started to arouse him as well, which surprised him. He hadn’t thought he was going to be aroused by that part of the process. At first he thought that that was going to be a chore. But then it, it really started turning him on, I mean really, really turning them off. And so the dismembering part was not a problem for him after the first one or two at all. Quite the opposite, quite turned in to part of it, I believe.
Krista: And it's like, Oh, I crossed that line. Oops.
Carrie: Yeah. His desire to obtain a perfect sex slave is why all these boys died. He was trying to find someone to be with him. And to love him. In a way it was kind of romantic.
Becca: Are you the one?
Carrie: Are you the cannibal type of brains, brain pan, you know,
Krista: But at the same time science, he was a curious cat, what else?
Carrie: Didn’t he work at a chocolate factory?
Krista: Yeah, he made candy.
Carrie: He was like a cute little blonde Willy Wonka man. You guys. I mean, we, I still can't get over him. I love Jeffrey Dahmer’s story. Him getting killed in prison with the broom handle. I mean, that was kind of sad.
Becca: He was the model prisoner and his like inmate – co-inmates were like, no, fuck no. He's going to eat us and like kill them.
Krista: Wasn't one of them tied to one of the relatives of one of his victims as well.
Carrie: Hmm. That's a, that's not a confirm, but it is a rumor and I believe it's true. I believe that whoever had it done or had it in there, they, they knew some things that they shouldn't have known because the cops are not the cops, the guards…He shouldn't have been where he was at by himself. And there was some other people involved, not just prisoners, you guys.
Krista: What kind of prison? Central? Private?
Carrie: No, he should not have been alone with that mop bucket for one minute. At least talk to camera, at least on camera, you know, but I'm with I'm with Becca, you know, there was, there was also the the whole, no he's going to eat us. What if the power goes out to him? That type of thing, right?
Krista: People are so stupid. No, but hey, you know what, like we said, you killed Bob, eat his food first and then eat Bob.
Carrie: Yeah. We could have gotten some more information out of Jeffery though. There was some tests he needed to have done they didn’t get to. There was a couple of people that I think he should have talked to a couple of psychologists. A couple of investigators.
Krista: He ate a lot - he ate a lot of human meat. I think the physical effects of that on his body.
Becca: He ate the brains too, he probably broke the code and ate the brains and got the prions and got the Mad Cow.
Krista: No. Like, I want to know, that would have been interesting to know, if it had any long-term effects after he stopped eating it, did his body, but did his body go through withdrawals from not eating it?
Becca: Well it's so interesting too, because one of the things that Wisconsin's known for is the cannibals. We got that one. We got Gein or Gein or whatever.
Krista: Yeah, yeah. They like to, I mean, it goes great with the cheese, I guess like a nice charcuterie board.
Becca: Yes. It's like a little brain segment.
Krista: Some eyeballs, some nicely thin cut eyeballs.
Becca: You just gotta do it like a truffle. Like layer it over like an entire, I don't know.
Carrie: I'll let you guys eat the eyeballs. Do not touch the brains.
Krista: Can we make a liver pate? Hey, no, I'm joking guys.
Carrie: You can have the liver too. You can have that. I do not want you girls eating the brains of anything, of any kind, anywhere. The prions survive. The prions survive the digestive track somehow. And we don't know how and
Krista: They travel right up to your brain.
Carrie: They go into your brain and they float around in the cytoplasm until something grabs it to replicate and then it'll replicate it. It could take three to five years. It could take 30 years. We don't know.
Krista: You could start acting like the person you ate without knowing really why.
Becca: Like he was an asshole. That's why I ate him. And now I'm like him.
Krista: Like when you get a heart transplant or liver transplant. Those people are like, now all of a sudden I enjoy this and I never did before.
Carrie: Actually it gives you a degenerative disorder. You're going to start shaking, you're going to start – you can’t remember.
Krista: What if you didn't know you had this? What if my, okay, someone's going to hate me for this, but what if Michael J. Fox is a cannibal and they're just telling us he has Parkinson's - Parkinson's disease is a real thing, but what if, this is a completely in total hypothetical situation. Do not chop my head off anybody.
Becca: This is a CrimeJuicy conspiracy.
Carrie: We really need to know we really need to know. Because if that's the case, then something else can survive it too.
Becca: Krista, who are your serial killers from Wisconsin?
Krista: Well, Walter Ellis is only because his is the longest stretch of time and he was very unassuming. He seemed to have a very normal, normal-ish kind of life.
He was African-American and he did stick within his race as well. He didn't kill white women. He was the typical rape-kill, strangle so that they couldn't tell. Winter is a great place for hiding bodies long-term because when they do thaw it kind of, or when they freeze, it stops the rotting process. And then when they do finally thought at the time of death is hard to determine even more so cause then you add the thawing and the water and then the critters that come out cause they're hungry. I think that's why it took him so long. He is still in prison. He sentenced to life, but I want to know. So can somebody explain this to me?
Carrie: Oh, he's dead.
Krista: Oh, he is dead.
Carrie: He did die. Yeah, it says he died in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Krista: Okay. I apologize. Yeah. So he did, he is, he had, he did pass away in prison. But his charges, he only really got convicted of two charges of murder. And then the rest out of the seven were - so two out of the seven were murder and then the rest were intentional homicide.
Becca: I saw that what's the difference?
Krista: Intentional homicide. What, what is the difference? Can you please tell me the difference?
Becca: I don't know. I'm going to look it up really quick.
Krista: Cause I'm like murder, right? Murder…
Carrie: Intentional homicide equals murder.
Becca: So killing a person that may or may not be illegal. That's weird.So it's okay. No weird. So homicide is like one person kills someone else. You're intentionally killing someone else, but it's not murder. Okay. I gotta look up the definition…
Krista: So what, were the first two accidents? So, or like he didn't plan to kill them, but killed them. And then the other ones were well after I killed the other two, I decided I liked it. So now…
Becca: Well that was the weird thing about the Suitcase Killer. Was his name? The Suitcase Killer. Got to find his name. Oh, Steven Zelich. So the first woman that he killed, she was 19. He met her on, I think it was Fetlife. She traveled from Oregon to be with him in Wisconsin to be his 24/7 slave in BDSM master, slave relationship, which. Isn't a bad thing. Other thing in the BDSM community is getting references is encouraged. If you're trying to do power play with someone, you should talk to someone who has done power play with this person before to see what it was like. Consent is huge in the BDSM community.He solicited this woman from out of state to come and live with him and be a slave take care of her, all that shit. He ends up, they do breath play where it's strangulation’s involved control of breath kind of thing. And he says he killed her by accident, freaked out, shoved her back in her suitcase, brought her out of the hotel. Her remains were starting to be mummified when they found her. And then the second woman that he murdered, he also met her on a kink site. The first girl that he killed, he said by accident, she didn't have safe word. They didn't establish a safe word. He never subsequently established a safe word. A safe word’s something that you say that means stop.
Krista: Pineapples.
Becca: Pineapple something that isn't like, no stop, whatever, you know, shit you say when you're in pain because you're consensually in pain. He never had a safe word with her. He killed her by accident, and he never thinks it's a good idea to get a safe word in the future. The second woman he kills, she's from Minnesota. He brings her over to Wisconsin or they're supposed to be together in Wisconsin, but he starts to tell her to erase herself. The agreement that was that they were entering into a 24/7 master slave relationship, and he asked her to start erasing herself, and then she ends up accidentally dead. The whole soliciting people from out of state to come and join you somewhere where they don't know anyone was really sketchy. And the first rule of BDSM is get a safe word.
Carrie: Always have a safe word, folks
Becca: The suitcase killer was also a former cop.
Carrie: Another cop.
Becca: Another cop. Yeah going back to the whole like intentional manslaughter or intentional homicide manslaughter or whatever, I didn't mean to kill her. We were just doing dangerous breath play with no safe word, all right. But twice or I don't, I just didn't get it. What intentional homicide is that [00:30:00] sounds like murder. Cause murder is premeditated – murder’s killing someone.
Carrie: I mean, do you have, what else can we call it? I mean, yes.
Becca: Intentional homicide. That sounds like the definition of murder. Right?
Carrie: Whoever comes up with these words. Just, just use less syllables please.
Becca: Well, and that was the same with well, the, the serial killer that I looked into with Wisconsin You know, they're a big thing, Michael Tenneson he, his lawyers did insanity defense mitigation. He was born with fetal alcohol syndrome and they said that it severely impaired his personality and they're like, okay. That severe personality impairment was he kills people.
Krista: No. Is that a, is that a thing? Is that, is that really a thing?
Becca: It impaired my personality. Well, he's an interesting character because so in March of 1987 Michael Tenneson, he’s from Holmen, Wisconsin. He was in the process of serving a felony sentence in Lacrosse and he escaped while out on work release. He went out on work release and never came back. 10 days later, he broke into the home of 73-year-old Lila Bush, and he killed her, killed her son, killed the son's girlfriend. Then he traveled to Denver, Colorado where on March 21st, 1987, he was partying with these. It was really cute on Murderpedia. It was like they were at a beer and cocaine party. So…
Krista: Oh the classic beer and cocaine party.
Becca: One of those beer and cocaine parties. And he was partying with these two guys that were in their early twenties and he ended up shooting both of them in the head while they were sleeping it off. And then he sold one of their cars. Of course, it was noticed that he was driven or driving around in a car of someone who was found shot dead. He was arrested in Colorado. And then on March 18th, 1988, he was convicted of murdering the two men, plus aggravated robbery and aggravated grand theft auto theft. Then he was sentenced to 104 years. Colorado had the death penalty and they were gonna try him for the death penalty, but the mitigation, they were like, he's got fetal alcohol syndrome, he's got a serious personality defect. And they were like, no, he kills people. But then one juror - they have to have like a unanimous decision to kill them. One juror was like, no, I've got this gut feeling that we shouldn't kill this guy. He survives and it gets commuted to a life sentence. And then on June 14th, 1988, he got extradited to Wisconsin where he was convicted for a triple murder and some other felonies, but Wisconsin doesn't have the death penalty.
But since his imprisonment, he's actually been kind of kicking ass. He started writing this monthly column for Biddle Publishing Company where people can write him and ask him anything. And his intention was to start an open dialogue with the public about controversial issues and hard topics and to address crucial problems within the criminal justice system. And It was interesting. Cause I think he definitely took his whole my-life-has-been-spared to heart thing. He starts this column and people write into him and some of the questions are like, Hey, my boyfriend just got out of prison and he's like acting this, this, and that way, help me. And he gave them really good advice, like these are things you should be compassionate about. This is some shit you should not put up with. This is how you can help him. Here's some support groups. He's been part of like internal prison rehabilitation efforts. He actually, he did. He's been selling his water paint, watercolor paintings. He's got his watercolor paintings up for sell for prison art stuff. He worked on an album and a prison benefit show with Die Jim Crow Records as part of this multicultural music project. He's been featured in art magazines and books. And he even wrote to the Governor of Colorado, Governor Romer on behalf of Gary Davis, he was up for the death penalty. And he wrote this really, really thoughtful letter about the death sentence and how it's okay, you're going to kill him for like…You know, he's like I killed five people and I'm alive. He raped and murdered one person and you want to put him to death. You want to premeditate his murder for 10 years and do a state sanctioned, killing? You want to commit first degree murder on this person in call it justice? And he didn't quite write it that way, but it was a really thoughtful letter.
Gary Davis did end up receiving the death penalty, his sentence didn’t, wasn't commuted, but I thought it was a really, you know, you listened to him talk, I watch like a YouTube video of him talking right before he started recording this album. And I mean, I do think it's an example of someone who was rehabilitated, you know, and he's got a life sentence. Rehabilitation means that he gets to like, with his life in peace in prison, you know, he's not out there in the world, but I think it does speak to like, and he said too, he's his rehabilitation process, he's had to fight the penal system every step of the way. I think it's an interesting thing that harkens back to…
Krista: In what way? Like when he would ask for help, what is it like they would refuse it?
Becca: I guess basically any like rehabilitative, like - my dogs, making weird noises - he didn't go into detail about it in his letters, but he did do a column for this publishing company for a while and I thought it was pretty cool. And yeah, I dunno. I dunno. It's you know what we were talking about in a previous episode, My Brain Made Me Do It. What do we do when people's brain chemistry affects their behavior? And yeah.
Carrie: One moment, pause. Say it one more time.
Becca: What do we do when people's brain chemistry affects their behavior and makes them do fucked up shit? And I think that's why, you know, you look at instances like Rwanda, where they have truth and reconciliation commissions and those have been really effective. And again, I dunno, I dunno. I think, and, and a big part of his column was to start a conversation about the criminal justice system and essentially do an overhaul of it because it is corrupt. It is dysfunctional. It - I don't think its goals are clear. No, no. And we're learning more and more about who we are as human animals. And I think the criminal justice system does need to change based on what we're learning.
Carrie: I was told that it is the legal system, not the justice system.
Becca: Yeah.
Carrie: It’s not justice, it's just the legal system. They know it, they know it inside and they know it outside. We've got to have some change. We've had hell this whole last year now all of our movements and everything, which we all know has to happen, because if they don't do it, nothing's going to change. So I really liked the serial killer’s attitude that he had.
Becca: He's he has an interest - He's really cool. He's still got those death eyes, you know, there's shark eyes where it's like, you still got their shark eyes.
Krista: No, let's say him. And then here's another hypothetical situation with Kim Kardashian. We'll call Kim Kardashian, see what she's doing and she'll pull her star lawyer shit, get him out of prison. And then watch them kill somebody else. And it'll be a whole Stanko situation where he'll be, Oh, look, I wrote this book!
Becca: Psychopaths do great in prison. Cause it's structured.
Carrie: They can't have liquor at least, not supposed to, they do get liquor in jail though or prison. They do. Yeah, you can get stuff, but a lot of them choose to just follow the straight and narrow, especially when they're on death row, because you get better food on death row. You get better treatment on death row. You get better. It's quieter.
Becca: He’s in for life. He’s like I ain't going nowhere. This is, this is what I got.
Krista: It's cleaner. The water's better. People treat each other differently.
Carrie: They really do because everybody's on death row. They don't try to fight as much.
Becca: But he wasn't on death row. He was, he was just a lifer.
Carrie: Oh, he just got a life. Okay.
Becca: Yeah. Yeah. He got a commuted cause one juror was like, I got this gut feeling. I shouldn't kill this man.
Carrie: Really?
Becca: Yeah. One juror. It was like unanimous, except for that one juror that was like, you know, I don't think so. 104 years seems like.
Krista: Let's see what he does.
Becca: Yep. And he's like, I'm going to make an album. I'm going to do some watercolors. They're actually really good watercolors. Krista, who's your serial killers from Wisconsin?
Krista: We talked about Walter Ellis who had the longest stretch. And then like I said earlier I brought up Julian Carlton who killed seven and it was Frank Lloyd Wright's mistress. He gave no reason and Walter Ellis just like to rape people and didn't want people to find out. He killed them. Yeah. He was the longest stretch of time. He figured out how to get away with it, I guess. Out of all of them. But there is a strange amount of mass killers that people are just like, I'm going to go on a shooting spree today and kill a bunch of people. Oh. Because someone left me or who was it? Peterson. His victims were ages 14 to 20, not even adults. Really.
Becca: He was the Deputy Sheriff, the Forest County Deputy Sheriff who went on a rampage in his ex-girlfriend's apartment. Killed six people. Yeah.
Carrie: So he was a cop too? Yeah.
Becca: Yep.
Krista: And then there was Wade Page. He was a white supremacist. He went into the Sikh temple and shot six people. Who else? The list goes on like this and people will be like, Oh, it's because there's so many [00:40:00] guns and gun control. No, no, no, no. We're not going there.
Becca: No, not there. And gun control is it kind of controls not the answer to this because these guns. They're just it's it's it's not, it's not actually related. It seems like it's related, but it would just be oh, hammers, kill people to you or whatever.
Krista: Ed Gein didn't kill the gun.
Carrie: Have you guys shot an automatic weapon? you can. Most, some motherfuckers down in a second, it'd be real hard to do that with a hammer.
Krista: But you can with a car too.
Becca: You can, and they have.
Krista: Like and then they blow it up. Not only do you get hit by a car there blows up. Wisconsin is. It's a beautiful land, but treacherous watch out. You might get murdered, possibly. And a lot of these overlap too, that at any given time, there might be five or six serial killers in Wisconsin.
Becca: Well, again, we're talking about Venn Diagrams. We're talking about - and a lot of these. Oh, I mean, a lot of the mass shooters that we've been seeing have been police officers, which hearkening back to the gun control is not the answer. Like gun control wouldn’t stop these people from having weapons, gun control wouldn’t stop these people from going on rampages. Like that's not the issue here. We're talking about those who are in the state that their feelings are more important than your fucking life. And that's an entirely different issue.
Carrie: That's an entirely different mindsets, sweetheart. That's what it's all about. I love it.
Becca: Iconic serial killers. We've got Dahmer. We've got that one dude that Buffalo Bill, Norman Bates and Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre all based on. You've got an entire genre of serial killer horror on out of Wisconsin. Not even from fucking Texas.
Krista: There's a couple other movies that some of those are based on two, but the, the skin, the skin, the skin, and the, the dishes of skulls and stuff. He did, he did have bowls, soup bowls, spoons.
Becca: Well, and that was an interesting thing about Ed because he started off as a grave robber and then he moved on to killing people. But really his thing was he wanted to practice taxidermy. He wanted to make lamps. He wanted to make clothing. He wanted to make utensils and like soup vessels and shit.
Krista: He wanted his mommy.
Becca: He wanted his Mommy, and you know, it was interesting because they tried to - there was one of those things, Oh, he just wants to be a woman. And then it was like, no, he just wanted his mom. hHe wanted to maybe be his mom, but mostly he just wanted his mom. You can't blame this on his, it's not a gender identity. It's a dude you raise in a fucked up situation who discovered taxidermy was a great hobby. And do you think it's amazing that he was buried in the first, in the graveyard of the first grave that he robbed. I thought that was…
Krista: I had sympathy for him.
Becca: Yeah. Sympathetic. And then, yeah, going back to Wisconsin's number 15 on the prevalence of psychopathy per state. And yeah, so we're just getting an interesting situation and like the Midwest, being from the Midwest, people call it fly-over country. They don't think shit's going.
Krista: Shit’s going on all the time. All the time. There's there's stuff going on all over the place. And some of it is very scary because there is open space for people to get away with certain things that you can't get away with.
Becca: Where I went to college, it was right in between Milwaukee and Chicago. So if you were in some shit and needed to get out of town, you ended up in Beloit. Working for the Sexual Assault Recovery Program, there was a mindfuck cause there was like a level of anonymity, a level of I'd done something so bad I got to get outta town here. I am. I'm still myself, you know?
Krista: Oh, yeah. That this whole stretch from Minneapolis to Chicago is an interesting stretch because if you're in Chicago in trouble in Chicago, you either end up in Milwaukee or Minneapolis, or if you're in trouble in Minneapolis, you either end up in Milwaukee or Chicago.
Becca: It's like this. Interesting.
Krista: Yeah, it's a very, it's very messy, dangerous triangle too.
Becca: Oh, yeah. And there's some amazing places. And there, you know how in Wisconsin, something I love about Wisconsin that's also really creepy is how they've got these road signs that say Wisconsin Fun Next Exit, but they don't tell you what the Wisconsin Fun is
Krista: When I want to Wisconsin this last time it said 597 people dead on Wisconsin Highways. That’s what the signs were saying what I was there. I was like, Okay.
Becca: You ever go to Moe's Almost Famous Diner? It's only open - I don't think it's open year-round, but it's great. It's on the 94, 90 through Wisconsin.
Krista: So we drove, we didn't tell the kids so 45 minutes until we got there what we were doing.
Becca: So Krista just did a surprise trip for her kids to Wisconsin Dell's.
Krista: It's fun. It's been year. It's been a long, long time.
Becca: So she was like we're going to go get COVID-19 vaccines and they're like, no, we're, it's not our turn.
Krista: And they knew, well not, they didn't know, but now don't hate me.
Becca: Krista survived the Dells, she didn't get serial killed and they had a lovely vacation.
Krista: And we’re not licking things or like going a bunch of places, doing a bunch of crazy things. Keeping ourselves to ourselves. We just needed to vacation for our family.
Becca: Not trying to cannibalize?
Krista: No. And there were some people where I'm all like, dude, y'all need to watch your children. That's hard because I'm all for raising your children how you want. But when they start invading my space or my children's personal space and making us uncomfortable, it gets hard. It's really hard. So it does. That’s the hardest part about going on vacation with your children.
Becca: It always seems like a good idea at the time. And then at times it feels like it's a terrible idea. And then it turns into a great idea again.
Krista: Oh no we had a great time. I decided to drink, well, I didn't drink a lot, but I had, I had a Bloody Maria and then they had Caribou Lou’s on their bar menu. I was like, okay, I’ll have a Caribou Lou. And then I got drunk. So then me and Ella, I don't know, all parents will know this, that, Going on a Lion Hunt.
Becca: Gonna catch a big one.
Krista: Yep. Yep. So we're doing that throughout the hotel room and playing and coloring and, and having fun. And then I pass because, it was time. That was like, I'm so tired. The kids love it.
Carrie: And I love the song too.
Krista: It was a good time. Wisconsin's beautiful. So if you do get a chance to go. Go drink some beer, go, go, have some actual cheese curds. Oh so delicious.
Carrie: It’s worth the risk folks, it’s worth the risk.
Krista: And Wisconsin Dells is really fun. Milwaukee is fine. There's a lot of cities that I cannot pronounce.
Becca: Milwaukee is fun. Madison is a blast. It's beautiful. Go to college at Beloit. It was it was great, but watch out.
Krista: They might getcha. Maybe a little bit.
Becca: Don't be a lampshade!
Krista: No, but I mean, if you really, I don't know. I've, I've I think my head was a good shape to maybe a cereal bowl. Okay. Right.
Becca: And I guess if you're going to tell you, like, make me a lampshade.
Krista: I'd like to be a baking dish.
Carrie: I'd be a drum.
Becca: Drum's a good one.
Krista: I enjoy that.
Carrie: I’d enjoy it. Get banged all day.
Krista: Yes. Yes. Yes, that that is the dream. Isn't it?
Carrie: Living the dream!
Becca: In Wisconsin, where dreams come true!
Carrie: Get it on, bang a gong.
Becca: Wiscon.
Krista: Basically, go to Wisconsin, it’s beautiful, don’t get eaten.
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