Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / 4 Serial Killers Who Terrified Entire Nations

Transcript

4 Serial Killers Who Terrified Entire Nations · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: Imagine, just for a second, your evening routine. You know,
0:04
you come home after a long day. You shut the
0:06
front door behind you, and you turn the dead bowl
0:09
until you hear that heavy, satisfying click.
0:12
Speaker 2: Right, that sound that just says you're secure exactly.
0:16
Speaker 1: Maybe you walk through the house, check the latches on
0:20
the ground floor windows, maybe pull the shades down to
0:22
block out the street lights. You do all of this
0:25
sometimes without even thinking about it, because it creates a boundary, right,
0:29
a physical, tagible line between the warmth and safety of
0:32
your living room and well, whatever unpredictable, chaotic dangers are
0:37
lurking out there in the shadows of the wider world.
0:39
Speaker 2: It gives you a sense of agency. It's comforting.
0:41
Speaker 1: It is comforting. But what if I told you that
0:44
this comfort is entirely an illusion. What if the real
0:47
danger isn't some recognizable movie monster hiding in a dark
0:51
alley waiting for you to walk by. What if the
0:53
most terrifying threat imaginable is actually the completely harmless looking,
0:58
boring guy sitting quietly across from you on your morning
1:01
commuter train.
1:02
Speaker 2: Or to take it even further, what happens when the
1:04
monster isn't roaming the streets at all. What happens when
1:07
a predator is already locked inside a maximum security prison,
1:11
completely removed from civil society, and yet is still somehow
1:15
racking up a body count that defies belief.
1:18
Speaker 1: It's mind boggling, and that is the core mission of
1:20
today's deep dive. We are unpacking a massive and frankly
1:24
chilling stack of source material detailing four of history's most
1:28
notorious serial killers.
1:29
Speaker 2: And we're looking at them across four entirely different nations
1:32
and four entirely different eras.
1:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, we are going to travel from the rigid, deeply
1:37
paranoid bureaucracy of the Soviet Union right into the chaotic,
1:41
lawless collapse of post Soviet Ukraine. Then we're heading over
1:45
to the sweltering, panic stricken suburbs of nineteen eighties Los Angeles,
1:49
and finally deep into the violent, overcrowded Darwinian prison systems
1:53
of Brazil.
1:54
Speaker 2: I think it's vital to state right up front we're
1:56
doing this not to just recount gruesome details for shock value,
2:00
but for a profound analytical purpose. Absolutely, this deep dive
2:03
is an exploration of the evolution of criminal investigation itself.
2:08
We want to look under the hood of this psychological
2:10
profiles of those who commit the worst crimes imaginable, And importantly,
2:15
we want to understand how different societies and their specific
2:19
justice systems and political structures react when they are faced
2:22
with unprecedented terror.
2:24
Speaker 1: Because what becomes overwhelmingly clear when you look at these
2:27
four distinct cases together is how the environment actively shapes
2:31
the killer and how the killer in turn exposes the
2:34
fatal underlying flaws in that environment. Perfectly said, Okay, so
2:38
let's unpack this with our first subject, because this particular
2:41
case completely destroys the myth of what a serial killer
2:44
is quote unquote supposed to look like. It proves that
2:47
monsters don't have fangs, you know, they wear the mask
2:50
of mundane everyday society.
2:52
Speaker 2: They really do.
2:53
Speaker 1: So we are going to Rostov on doahm. It's the
2:55
late nineteen seventies. This is a massive Russian metropolis, a gritty,
2:59
working class city of millions deep in the Soviet Union,
3:02
and our subject is Andre Chikatilo. He eventually becomes known
3:06
as the Butcher.
3:06
Speaker 2: Of Rostov, a truly infamous moniker.
3:09
Speaker 1: Yeah. But here's the thing. If you passed him on
3:11
the street, you wouldn't just not look twice, you wouldn't
3:15
look once. He was forty two years old when he
3:17
started killing.
3:18
Speaker 2: He was a.
3:18
Speaker 1: Balding family man, a school teacher. I mean, he was
3:21
a loyal card carrying member of the Communist Party.
3:25
Speaker 2: Which from a profiling perspective, runs completely counter to the
3:28
standard criminal profile that law enforcement uses both then and now.
3:32
How so well law enforcement and honestly the general public,
3:36
they want the killer to be an obvious, recognizable monster.
3:40
They expect a serial killer to be a young, physically imposing,
3:44
socially isolated outcast.
3:46
Speaker 1: Like the creepy guy living in a basement somewhere.
3:48
Speaker 2: Exactly, someone who looks dangerous. It makes the hunt easier
3:50
if the villain stands out from the herd. But Chikatila
3:54
was neither young nor strong. He was utterly unremarkable, and
3:57
that unremarkability wasn't just a coincidence. It was his primary weapon.
4:02
Speaker 1: I was reading through the files and it struck me
4:04
that he used his mundanity active camouflage. He wasn't hiding
4:07
in the dark, he was hiding in plain sight by
4:10
being the most boring person in the room. He was
4:13
the bureaucratic equivalent of a moth blending into birch bark.
4:16
Speaker 2: That's a great analogy, and the.
4:18
Speaker 1: Sheer scale of the tragedy that resulted from this camouflage
4:21
is just staggering. The final tally rests at an estimated
4:26
fifty two to fifty three victims, and this fourteen year nightmare.
4:30
It all begins in nineteen seventy eight with his very
4:32
first victim, a little girl named Elena. She had just
4:36
turned nine years old. It's heartbreaking here it is Chikatilo
4:39
spots her standing at a bus stop. He doesn't drag
4:42
her into an alley. He doesn't use physical force. He
4:44
simply walks up to her and uses a lure that
4:47
is as ancient as it is terrible. He tells her
4:49
he wants to show her a kitten and see.
4:51
Speaker 2: He leverages trust there, Specifically, the inherent intrust a child
4:55
in a structured, authoritarian society places in a mild mannered
4:59
adult figure. He takes her to his second home, an
5:02
isolated datcha. Now for context, adatcha in the Soviet era
5:06
was essentially a small state allotted garden plot or cabin
5:10
outside the city, and this is a crucial environmental detail.
5:14
Nobody knew he had this cabin. Yeah, not even his wife,
5:17
not his colleagues, not his friends, not his wife. In
5:19
a society defined by communal living, shared spaces, and constant
5:23
observation by neighbors and the state, Chickatillo managed to secure
5:27
a completely secret, isolated space where he could operate without
5:31
any eyes on him.
5:33
Speaker 1: And what happens in that dacha sets the template for
5:35
the next decade and a half. He attacks her, fully,
5:38
intending to rape her. But the psychological analysis of this
5:41
event and the sources shows that the assault doesn't go
5:43
as planned because Chickatillo is not sufficiently aroused. He realizes
5:46
he is impotent.
5:47
Speaker 2: Yes, and this is where the violence escalates from a
5:50
horrific sexual assault to pure, unadulterated savagery.
5:54
Speaker 1: He stabs this nine year old girl repeatedly in the abdomen,
5:57
then bizarrely puts her clothes back on and throws her
5:59
body into the Grushevka River. It's just horrific.
6:02
Speaker 2: This moment is the dark crucible of his pathology. The
6:06
psychological synthesis that occurs in that moment is terrifying. His
6:11
impotence doesn't stop his urges, It actually mutates them into
6:14
something infinitely worse.
6:16
Speaker 1: How does that work psychologically?
6:17
Speaker 2: Well, because he cannot achieve standard sexual gratification, his brain
6:22
rewires itself to replace that physical release with something far
6:26
more dangerous jeep down. What Chickatillo truly needed wasn't sex,
6:30
It was absolute power and control over another human being.
6:33
Speaker 1: So the violence becomes the release.
6:35
Speaker 2: Exactly torturing his victims, inflicting unimaginable pain, and crucially being
6:40
physically present at the exact moment their life extinguished. That
6:44
became his substitute for sexual arousal. The physical act of
6:48
sex was entirely secondary to the absolute godlike dominance he
6:51
felt when extinguishing a life.
6:53
Speaker 1: Wow, and once that switch is flipped, he doesn't stop.
6:55
By nineteen eighty one, he takes a new job as
6:57
a factory buying agent. Now this job in the context
7:01
of the Soviet Union. This position requires him to travel
7:04
almost daily by train throughout the entire region to secure
7:07
supplies for his factory. It's the perfect cover, it really is.
7:10
He is literally given a state sponsored ticket to Rome.
7:13
He can be anywhere at any time with a valid excuse.
7:17
During one of these routine business trips, he lures a
7:20
seventeen year old girl into the woods near a station
7:22
and stabs her. The next year he murders seven more people, men,
7:26
women and children. The bodies are found horribly mangled, often
7:30
missing organs, but for years the police have absolutely no
7:34
idea it's him.
7:35
Speaker 2: They were completely in the dark.
7:37
Speaker 1: Now this brings me to a huge question. I'm hoping
7:39
you can clarify this for me. We are talking about
7:41
the Soviet Union in the nineteen seventies and eighties. This
7:45
was a state heavily monitored by the KGB, deeply bureaucratic,
7:48
with a massive, terrifying apparatus for keeping tabs on its citizens.
7:52
You needed papers to go anywhere he did. How on
7:55
Earth does a single middle aged man murder dozens of people,
7:58
leaving bodies scattered across the countryside for fourteen years without
8:02
being detected by a surveillance state.
8:04
Speaker 2: It's a brilliant question, and the answer lies in systemic
8:08
blind spots and catastrophic investigative herbals. It wasn't that the
8:11
system wasn't watching, It was that the system was fundamentally
8:14
incapable of seeing him.
8:15
Speaker 1: Incapable.
8:17
Speaker 2: First, you have an immense ideological blind spot. The Soviet
8:21
authorities officially viewed the phenomenon of the serial killer as
8:24
a symptom of decadent Western capitalism.
8:27
Speaker 1: Wait really, so they didn't even think it was possible
8:29
there exactly.
8:30
Speaker 2: They believed that kind of localized individual depravity simply could
8:35
not exist in the utopian socialist society, so they literally
8:40
didn't have a conceptual category for him. When the body
8:43
started piling up, police were completely blinded by their own
8:46
ideological assumptions. They were looking for a gang of Western
8:50
influenced tooligans or a horrific monster.
8:53
Speaker 1: So they were looking for a boogeyman that fit their
8:55
political narrative rather than looking at the evidence in front
8:58
of them precisely.
8:59
Speaker 2: In fact, early on in the investigation, they found a
9:01
local man with severe intellectual disabilities who fit their biased
9:05
idea of a degenerate outcast. The local police brought him
9:08
in and, through immense coercion and torture, forced an innocent
9:12
man to confess to one of Chickatito's early murders. Oh
9:15
my god. Yeah, They closed the file, patted themselves on
9:18
the back, and executed the innocent man. They thought they
9:21
had solved it, which effectively gave the real killer a
9:24
license to keep hunting.
9:26
Speaker 1: That is just a profound tragedy.
9:28
Speaker 2: And second, you have the fatal flaw of Soviet bureaucracy,
9:32
the jurisdiction issue. Chikatila was riding the trains traveling from
9:37
Rostov to numerous other towns and regions to kill. Each
9:41
local police force was conducting its own isolated, paper based investigation.
9:45
Speaker 1: And they weren't talking to each other exactly.
9:48
Speaker 2: They kept their files locked in their own filing cabinets.
9:50
Nobody was zooming out to see the larger pattern. They
9:53
weren't connecting the dots because the bureaucratic structure was designed
9:56
to compartmentalize information, not share regional data efficiently.
10:00
Speaker 1: Okay, but eventually the sheer volume of bodies forces them
10:04
to act. I mean, by nineteen eighty three, the death
10:06
toll is at least thirty. The authorities finally realize they
10:09
have a regional crisis on their hands, and they get
10:12
what should have been the ultimate scientific break right.
10:14
Speaker 2: They do find physical evidence.
10:16
Speaker 1: Yes, forensics teams find minute traces of seamen on the
10:20
victim's bodies. They test it and it tells them the
10:23
killer has blood type A. This narrows the suspect pool significantly. Eventually,
10:28
the state launches this massive, desperate man hunt. One hundred
10:32
and twenty seven police officers, hundreds of informers at train stations.
10:37
They start pulling in anyone who seems even vaguely suspicious,
10:40
and during a sweep they actually arrest Andre Chikatillo.
10:43
Speaker 2: They had him right there, they have.
10:45
Speaker 1: Him sitting in a police interrogation chair. But then this
10:48
massive administrative failure happens. They test his blood, they look
10:52
at the results, and they let him go. How does
10:54
that happen? How does a scientific blood test fail?
10:57
Speaker 2: This is one of the most agonizing forensic tracks in
11:00
the history of chrininology. It comes down to a fundamental
11:03
misunderstanding of the science of the era, compounded by human error.
11:06
Speaker 1: Okay, walk me through it.
11:07
Speaker 2: When they tested Chicatillo's actual blood drawn from his arm,
11:10
it came back as type AB. The semen found on
11:12
the bodies typed out as type A. The police looked
11:15
at the two pieces of paper, concluded it was a
11:17
biological impossibility for him to be the killer, and released him.
11:21
Speaker 1: But wait, how could the semen be A and the
11:23
blood BEAB?
11:24
Speaker 2: Well, what the local police didn't understand were the mechanics
11:27
of biological degradation and a rare condition known as a
11:30
paradoxical sickrator. First, when biological fluids like seamen are left
11:36
exposed to the elements you know, rain soil bacteria for
11:39
weeks before a body is found, the antigens degrade. Oh
11:43
I see the B antigen in an AB sample can
11:45
break down faster, leaving only the A antigen readable by
11:48
the rudimentary tests of the nineteen eighties. Wow. And Second,
11:51
in very rare cases, a person can secrete different blood
11:55
group antigens in their bodily fluids than what is present
11:58
in their bloodstream. But the investigators didn't consult advanced geneticists.
12:03
They just saw a mismatch on a form.
12:05
Speaker 1: And that one clerical scientific error costs dozens of innocent lives.
12:09
Speaker 2: It did. It allowed a man who was already deeply
12:11
disturbed to feel practically invincible. He famously told psychiatrists later
12:16
that he felt as though God was personally protecting him
12:18
and guiding his hand.
12:20
Speaker 1: The psychological toll this fourteen year hunt took on the
12:23
actual investigators is just I mean, it's hard to fathom.
12:27
We have to talk about the chief investigator amrhan Yandiev.
12:30
He was the man tasked with sorting through this carnage.
12:33
The historical accounts described the stress on him as almost intolerable.
12:37
Speaker 2: You can't even imagine the burden.
12:39
Speaker 1: He was having vivid nightmares. He couldn't get the images
12:42
of the ravage, mutilated bodies out of his mind. He
12:44
was waking up in cold sweats. He famously said he
12:47
reached a point where he had two choices, go check
12:50
himself into a psychiatric facility or turned.
12:52
Speaker 2: To vodka, and he chose the vodka.
12:54
Speaker 1: He explicitly stated that a glass of it every night
12:57
saved him that without it he would have gone completely
13:00
certifiably mad. He lost fourteen years of his life, his
13:04
peace of mind, his soul to this.
13:06
Speaker 2: Hunt, which highlights the immense, invisible collateral damage of serial crimes.
13:11
The victims and their grieving families are the primary tragedy,
13:14
of course, but the investigators, who have to deliberately immerse
13:17
themselves in that level of psychological depravity carry a profound burdeny.
13:22
Andia was looking for hard evidence in an era completely
13:24
devoid of digital data. There were no CCTV cameras at
13:28
the train stations. There were no cell phone pings to
13:30
track movements. He was fighting a phantom using analog tools,
13:34
paper files, intuition, and sheer endurance.
13:37
Speaker 1: So how do they finally catch this phantom? It takes
13:40
until nineteen ninety. Chikatilo has killed over fifty people, but
13:45
his age is catching up with him. His impulses are
13:47
overwhelming his caution, and he starts getting sloppy. The murders
13:51
start clustering tightly around one specific regional train station, less cuz.
13:56
Speaker 2: The police realize this pattern right.
13:58
Speaker 1: So they decide to lay a massive trap, But this
14:01
time they learned from their mistakes. Instead of putting uniformed
14:03
officers out there, which would just scare the killer away,
14:06
they place plain clothes guards heavily camouflaged around the Leskus station.
14:10
They wait for days in the cold, and finally, in
14:12
the autumn of nineteen ninety, a man walks out of
14:15
the woods heading toward.
14:16
Speaker 2: The station, and he looks just like a normal boring.
14:18
Speaker 1: Guy exactly, but he has fresh scratches on his face,
14:22
he has faint bloodstains on his coat. The plane clothes
14:25
police stop him check his travel papers, and simultaneously other
14:30
officers find another freshly murdered body just a short distance
14:33
away in the tree line. They arrest him, But the
14:35
ordeal isn't quite over, is it not?
14:37
Speaker 2: At all? Because the Soviet legal framework was a ticking clock.
14:41
Under the law at the time, investigators only had ten
14:44
days from the moment of the rest to gather enough
14:46
heart evidence or secure confession to officially charge a suspect
14:50
with a capital crime.
14:51
Speaker 1: Only ten days. That's insane.
14:53
Speaker 2: If they failed, they legally had to release him again
14:56
for nine agonizing days. Yandiev interrogates chick Tilo in a
15:00
bare room. Chikatillo gives him absolute stone wall silence. He
15:04
doesn't confess, he doesn't brag, he says nothing. It's a
15:07
terrifying battle of wills.
15:08
Speaker 1: So what happens on the last day.
15:09
Speaker 2: So on the final day, with the clock about to expire,
15:12
yon Diev tries one last desperate psychological strategy. He completely
15:18
removes himself from the room and brings in a seasoned psychiatrist.
15:22
He gambles that the killer, who views himself as a
15:25
unique entity, might open up to a medical professional interested
15:28
in his mind rather than a cop interested in.
15:31
Speaker 1: His punishment, and the gamble pays off beautifully. Chickatillo finally breaks.
15:37
He confesses to fifty three savage murders, detailing crimes the
15:41
police didn't even know about. But then the trial begins
15:45
and Chickatillo puts on this utterly bizarre performance.
15:48
Speaker 2: It was pure theater.
15:49
Speaker 1: He starts acting like a deranged madman in the courtroom.
15:52
He takes his clothes off, he yells gibberous, he rolls
15:54
his eyes back. He's desperately trying to be declared of
15:57
unsound mind, legally insane, so he can get sent to
15:59
a state psychiatric ward instead of getting a bullet to
16:02
the back of the head.
16:03
Speaker 2: And the atmosphere in that courtroom was so volatile.
16:05
Speaker 1: The sources say it was full of enraged, grieving families
16:09
ready to tear him apart. In nineteen ninety two, they
16:12
actually had to weld together a special heavy metal cage
16:16
right in the middle of the courtroom just to hold him.
16:19
It was designed both to protect him from the mob
16:21
and to physically contain his theatrical outbursts.
16:24
Speaker 2: If we look closely at that courtroom behavior, it shows
16:27
a profound level of calculation, not insanity. Jikatila wasn't out
16:32
of touch with reality. He was actively manipulating it. He
16:35
understood exactly what the legal threshold for insanity was, and
16:39
he was pantomizing the symptoms.
16:40
Speaker 1: But it didn't work.
16:42
Speaker 2: No, the judge and the psychiatric evaluators eventually saw rite
16:45
through the performance. After a grueling six months of evaluation,
16:50
they declared him to be of completely sound mind. He
16:53
knew what he was doing, and he knew it was wrong.
16:55
In nineteen ninety four, the Russian state executed him, but before.
16:59
Speaker 1: The very end, allegedly made a highly revealing statement to
17:02
the authorities. He said, cut up my brain and examine
17:04
it so that there's nobody like me.
17:06
Speaker 2: Ever, again, that quote is so revealing it just stops.
17:08
Speaker 1: You in your tracks. Cut up my brain. It implies that,
17:12
even after everything, he viewed himself as a biological anomaly,
17:15
a tragic defect in the human machine, rather than taking
17:19
moral responsibility for his choices.
17:21
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate deflection of guilt.
17:23
Speaker 1: And that transitions us so well into our second case.
17:26
Because Chikatilo operated by hiding behind the strict, rigid structure
17:30
of the Soviet system. He used its predictability and its
17:33
bureaucracy as a shield. But what happens when that system
17:37
completely evaporates.
17:38
Speaker 2: You get a completely different kind of monster.
17:40
Speaker 1: Exactly as the Soviet Union collapsed in the early nineteen nineties.
17:44
That rigid structure vanished overnight, and our next subject didn't
17:48
hide in the bureaucracy. He exploited the resulting chaos. He
17:51
didn't use a facade of normalcy in a quiet city.
17:54
He weaponized the sheer, empty geography of a collapsed state.
17:58
We are moving to mid nineteen nineties Ukraine to look
18:00
at a man named Anatoly Onoprienco, who the terrified public
18:04
quickly dubbed the Terminator.
18:06
Speaker 2: The environmental contrast here is vital to understanding the crimes.
18:10
If Chikatila was a slow, methodical, creeping poison within a
18:13
stable system, Onoprienko was a localized nuclear detonation in a
18:18
completely destabilized one.
18:20
Speaker 1: A nuclear detonation is a good way to put it.
18:22
Speaker 2: We're talking about fifty two murders, but unlike Chikatillo's thirteen
18:27
year span, Onopranco killed fifty two people in just four months.
18:31
The velocity and density of the violence is almost unprecedented
18:34
in criminal history.
18:35
Speaker 1: The sheer speed is terrifying, and his methodology was utterly ruthless.
18:39
He didn't target vulnerable individuals at bus stops. He kicked
18:43
down doors and executed entire families in their homes.
18:46
Speaker 2: It was absolute slaughter.
18:47
Speaker 1: Let's look at one specific horrific incident in nineteen ninety
18:51
five in a rural village called Bratkovici in western Ukraine.
18:54
The chief investigator, Fedor Novak arrives at the scene. Novaqa
18:58
is a seasoned cop, a man used to seeing the
19:00
grim reality of murder, but even he is shattered by.
19:03
Speaker 2: What he find because of the scale of it.
19:05
Speaker 1: Right Onoprienco had broken in and systematically slaughtered the Kuchkov family,
19:10
a husband, a wife, and their two young children, and then,
19:13
as if wiping out a bloodline wasn't enough, he systematically
19:17
set fire to the house to destroy the forensic evidence.
19:20
While leaving, he spotted a fifth person, just a random bystander,
19:24
outside and shot them dead too, simply because they were
19:27
in his line of sight.
19:28
Speaker 2: This is where forensic psychology forces us to categorize him differently.
19:32
We often use serial killer as a catch all term,
19:35
but the behavioral analysts who studied this case make a
19:38
distinct point to separate Onoprienko from a standard serial killer
19:43
like Chikatilo. Onnoprianco is categorized much more accurately as a
19:47
repeat mass murderer.
19:48
Speaker 1: What's the main difference there, Well, let me explain.
19:50
Speaker 2: A standard serial killer usually targets one specific type of
19:54
victim to fulfill a deep internalized psychological fantasy, usually involving
19:58
a cooling off period.
19:59
Speaker 1: Between kills, like Chiicatilla, waiting months or years exactly.
20:04
Speaker 2: Onoprianco's goal wasn't localized intimate torture. His primary aim was
20:09
the complete tactical eradication of the family unit in one swift,
20:14
overwhelming action. He was rating them for valuables, yes, but
20:18
the violence was total and his secondary aim was purely pragmatic,
20:22
the elimination of absolutely anyone who could bear witness.
20:25
Speaker 1: So no signature, just efficiency.
20:27
Speaker 2: Right, There was no psychological signature other than total destruction.
20:30
If you were close enough to see him, you had
20:32
to die. It was military style extermination.
20:35
Speaker 1: And the geography of this extermination campaign is insane. He
20:39
didn't stay in one village or one city. He utilized
20:42
the sprawling, crumbling train and road networks to travel across
20:45
the entire country of Ukraine. Years later, When investigators finally
20:49
gathered all the case files and pinned the crime scenes
20:52
on a massive map of the country, they realized something chilling.
20:55
The killings formed a gigantic intercepting cross stretching across the
20:59
entire nation.
21:00
Speaker 2: It's a terrifying image, a literal geography of terror.
21:02
Speaker 1: But initially, this widespread, fiery devastation completely through the police office.
21:07
Scent investigator in Nevak didn't even think they were dealing
21:10
with a single serial killer at first. He told his
21:13
superiors they were hunting a heavily armed, highly organized gang.
21:18
Speaker 2: And you have to look at the socio political context
21:20
of the nineteen nineties to understand why Navok made that
21:24
very logical assumption.
21:25
Speaker 1: Because of the Soviet collapse.
21:26
Speaker 2: Yes, the Soviet Union had just dissolved, the economy was
21:29
in free fall, unemployment was rampant, and law enforcement was
21:33
severely underfunded. In this power vacuum, underground organizations, mafias and
21:38
violent gangs were roaming the Ukrainian countryside brutally fighting for
21:42
territory and resources.
21:44
Speaker 1: So home invasions were somewhat common.
21:46
Speaker 2: Home invasions, executions and torching the homes of victims to
21:49
destroy evidence that was the trademark tactical signature of these
21:53
post Soviet racketeers. It fit the existing pattern perfectly. It
21:58
was actually much easier for the and the terrified public
22:01
to believe that a heavily armed syndicate of five or
22:03
six men was doing this, rather than accept the terrifying
22:07
reality that one single, unstoppable individual was capable of this
22:11
much widespread carnage.
22:12
Speaker 1: Wait, hold on, This is where it gets really complicated
22:14
for me. Once they finally realize it's just one guide
22:17
doing all of this, the obvious question is why, what
22:20
is the motive?
22:21
Speaker 2: It's a dark path to go down.
22:22
Speaker 1: Now we know Onoprianco had a brutally traumatic childhood. His
22:26
mother died when he was four years old. His father,
22:28
unable or unwilling to care for him, abandon him. He
22:31
was raised in a state run orphanage where severe beatings, neglect,
22:35
and cruelty were just the daily reality. He never experienced
22:38
a safe home.
22:39
Speaker 2: The trauma was immense, definitely.
22:41
Speaker 1: But when he is finally captured, his stated reason for
22:44
wiping out these families has nothing to do with his childhood.
22:48
He claims that a higher being or god spoke directly
22:51
into his mind and ordered him to terminate exactly three
22:55
hundred and sixty five human.
22:56
Speaker 2: Lives, which is quite a claim.
22:59
Speaker 1: So I have to ask, if a man is sitting
23:01
in an interrogation room calmly telling police that the voice
23:04
of God commanded him to murder three hundred and sixty
23:07
five people, doesn't that automatically mean he is legally insane.
23:11
That sounds like the literal, textbook definition of a psychotic break.
23:14
Speaker 2: To me, you would absolutely think so. But the legal
23:17
system and the psychiatric field view insanity through two completely
23:22
different lenses, and this is a vital distinction to understand
23:25
when looking at these apex predators.
23:26
Speaker 1: Okay, lay it off for me.
23:27
Speaker 2: In a clinical setting, a psychiatrist might diagnose someone experiencing
23:30
auditory hallucinations as psychotic. But in a courtroom, we use
23:34
something called the legal threshold for insanity, often rooted in
23:37
historical precedents like the not in rule the non rule. Yes,
23:41
for a jury to declare someone legally insane, the defense
23:45
must prove that at the time of the crime, the
23:48
killer was suffering from such a severe defective reason that
23:51
they literally did not know the nature of what they
23:53
were doing, or if they did know it, they didn't
23:55
know it was legally immoraly wrong.
23:57
Speaker 1: Oh I see.
23:58
Speaker 2: Let's look at the statistics to RI from the experts
24:00
who analyze these cases. Out of over one hundred and
24:04
ten major serial killer cases reviewed, ninety nine point nine
24:08
percent of serial killers are not legally insane. They may
24:12
be psychopaths, they may be sociopaths, they may be deeply disturbed,
24:16
but they know exactly what they're doing. Onoprienco is the
24:19
perfect example of this.
24:20
Speaker 1: So because he was taking steps to hide his crimes,
24:23
it proves he knew society viewed it as wrong.
24:26
Speaker 2: Exactly he was, as the forensic profilers put it, crazy
24:30
like a fox. If on a Preenco were truly disconnected
24:32
from reality, driven purely by uncontrollable, blinding, auditory hallucinations of God,
24:37
he wouldn't possess the sharp cognitive presence to meticulously torch
24:41
the houses to destroy forensic evidence. He wouldn't have the
24:44
rational forethought to select deeply remote, isolated locations where he
24:49
wouldn't be easily discovered by patrols. He wouldn't be able
24:52
to strategically map out his movements across the country's transit
24:55
system to avoid roadblocks. His claim of hearing voices was
24:59
nothing more than and a desperate, highly calculated defense strategy.
25:03
It was an attempt to avoid taking ultimate moral responsibility
25:07
for the absolute calculated evil of his actions.
25:10
Speaker 1: That makes perfect sense. He was trying to play the system.
25:13
But before they could even get him into a courtroom,
25:15
the Ukrainian government had to stop him, and their response
25:18
was basically a full scale declaration of war on a
25:21
single citizen.
25:22
Speaker 2: It was unprecedented.
25:23
Speaker 1: They launched the biggest, most intense manhunt in the country's history.
25:27
Two thousand local and national police officers, completely overwhelmed, called
25:32
for backup. The state deployed three thousand fully armed military
25:35
soldiers to comb the countryside. They had soldiers patrolling the
25:39
quiet village streets day and night, checking ideas, creating conditions
25:43
that looked exactly like an active war zone. They deployed
25:46
plain closed spies into local taverns and markets.
25:49
Speaker 2: Massive mobilization.
25:50
Speaker 1: And after all of that immense mobilization, how did this
25:53
militarized dragnet finally catch the terminator? Through a simple, unavoidable
25:58
mistake in the weather. While on the run, Onopranco broke
26:02
into a home and shot two more victims. But he
26:05
didn't realize it. It just snowed. As he fled the scene,
26:08
he left a perfect, uninterrupted trail of footprints in the
26:11
fresh snow.
26:12
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate irony of criminal investigation. You can
26:16
deploy thousands of troops, but it often comes down to
26:18
the smallest, most mundane physical detail. Four and a half
26:22
months of absolute country wide terror ended simply because of
26:26
footprints leading directly to his cousin's apartment where he was hiding.
26:29
Speaker 1: Just incredible.
26:30
Speaker 2: The military raided the home. They found the primary murder weapon,
26:33
a sowd off shotgun. They found stolen valuables and jewelry
26:36
from the victims. Cornered with irrefutable physical evidence, he finally
26:40
dropped the act and confessed.
26:42
Speaker 1: The conclusion of his trial is a fascinating character study.
26:45
He sat in a metal cage in the courtroom, much
26:48
like Chickatillo, but his demeanor was totally different. He barely
26:52
spoke a single word during the entire four months of
26:54
court proceedings. He just stared blankly. But when the final
26:58
verdict came down, finding him guilt of fifty two murders,
27:01
he finally spoke.
27:02
Speaker 2: And what did he say?
27:03
Speaker 1: His quote is just chillingly arrogant. He looked at the
27:06
judge and said, I am a workingman, I am an
27:09
execution man. He showed absolutely zero.
27:12
Speaker 2: Remorse, total detachment.
27:13
Speaker 1: Now, it is crucial to note the legal landscape in
27:16
Ukraine shifted heavily during this exact time. The judge initially
27:20
sentenced on Opranco to death by firing squad. However, shortly
27:23
before his scheduled execution, Ukraine made a major geopolitical policy change.
27:29
In order to align their human rights standards with the
27:31
European Union and gain entry into the Council of Europe,
27:34
they officially abolished the death penalty. Because of this systemic shift,
27:38
his sentence was automatically converted to life in prison, which meant.
27:41
Speaker 2: He simply sat in a solitary cell, alive and breezing,
27:45
while the nation he systematically terrorized had to grapple with
27:48
the aftermath of his actions. Yeah, he eventually died of
27:51
a heart attack in prison seventeen years later in twenty thirteen,
27:55
but the damage he did to the collective psyche of
27:58
Ukraine was permanent. He proved unequivocally that under the right
28:02
destabilized conditions, a single determined man could simulate the destructive,
28:08
chaotic force of an entire armed gang.
28:11
Speaker 1: So on a pranco weaponize the sheer, empty geography of
28:14
a collapse state. But what happens when you take away
28:17
that isolation? What happens when you drop a predator? And
28:20
not in the empty snow drifts of rural Ukraine, but
28:23
in the most densely populated, media saturated, sweltering city on Earth.
28:27
We are shifting our focus from eastern Europe to the
28:29
United States.
28:30
Speaker 2: A completely different theater of terror.
28:32
Speaker 1: It is the blistering summer of nineteen eighty five in
28:35
Los Angeles, California. A massive, suffocating heat wave hits the
28:38
city and people are desperately trying to stay cool. Remember
28:42
this is the eighties. Central ac isn't in every home,
28:45
so families are leaving their screen doors unlocked and their
28:47
ground floor windows open at night just to catch a breeze.
28:50
Speaker 2: And that environmental factor is absolutely crucial here.
28:53
Speaker 1: Those open windows, meant to let in the cool air,
28:56
become the entry points for an agent of pure, unadulterated chaos.
29:01
Richard Ramirez, forever known to history as the Nightstock.
29:05
Speaker 2: You really cannot separate the crimes from the environment that
29:09
heat wave created a widespread vulnerability in the city's physical defenses.
29:13
Millions of people simultaneously lowered their guard just to be comfortable,
29:17
and Ramirez exploited that vulnerability with terrifying efficiency.
29:22
Speaker 1: Over the course of just six months, he committed fourteen
29:24
to fifteen highly publicized murders, and the driving.
29:28
Speaker 2: Force behind his crimes wasn't a methodical plan. It was
29:31
a chaotic, volatile cocktail of heavy narcotics, testosterone, and adrenaline,
29:36
intensely fueled by pornography and violent interactions with prostitutes.
29:40
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this chaos because profiling Ramirez was incredibly difficult.
29:44
The investigators described it as trying to solve a jigsaw
29:47
puzzle where the shape of the pieces keeps actively changing
29:50
in your hands while you were holding them.
29:52
Speaker 2: It was a nightmare for law enforcement.
29:53
Speaker 1: Detective Frank Salerno was one of the lead investigators on
29:56
the task force. Now, the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit generally
30:00
operates on the premise that serial killers have a type.
30:03
They usually target a specific demographic like Chicatillo targeting runaways
30:08
and children, or they use a specific ritualistic signature weapon.
30:13
It creates a pattern and patterns help police narrow the search,
30:16
but Ramirez completely shattered the mold they really did. He
30:20
was radically unpredictable. He didn't have a set victim type.
30:24
He killed men, women, the elderly, young students, and his
30:27
methods they were completely all over the map. One night
30:30
he used a small caliber handgun, the next night he
30:33
used blunt force instruments like heavy tire irons or hammers.
30:36
He used large hunting knives to cut throats. He strangled
30:40
people with.
30:40
Speaker 2: Telephone cords, which creates an absolute investigative nightmare. In the
30:44
FBI profiling system, offenders are generally categorized as either organized
30:49
or disorganized.
30:50
Speaker 1: And what's the distinction.
30:51
Speaker 2: Organized killers meticulously plan their crimes, bring their own weapons,
30:55
and carefully hide the bodies to delay discovery. Disorganized killers
31:00
act on sudden violent impulses, use whatever weapons of opportunity
31:03
are lying around the house, and leave the bodies right
31:06
where they fall.
31:07
Speaker 1: So where did Ramirez fit in?
31:09
Speaker 2: Ramirez was a terrifying hybrid of both, which confused the profilers.
31:14
He planned his burglaries, but the violence once inside was
31:17
entirely disorganized and opportunistic. When the methodology constantly shifts, the
31:22
local police have a terrible time linking the crime scenes together.
31:26
They treat a shooting on Tuesday in a bludgeoning on
31:28
Thursday as two separate local crimes.
31:30
Speaker 1: That makes it so much harder to track.
31:32
Speaker 2: The behavioral analyst noted he was a multi dimensional killer.
31:35
The sexual assaults, while horrific and almost always present, were
31:39
secondary to the main event. The primary motivation, as investigators
31:42
eventually concluded, was simply the kinetic act of killing itself.
31:46
The violence was his drug.
31:47
Speaker 1: And the brutality was astounding. Take the case of sixty
31:51
four year old Vincent Czara and his wife. Ramirez broke in,
31:55
murdered them both, and then took the time to disfigure
31:59
the wife postmortem, physically carving.
32:01
Speaker 2: Out her eyes unbelievable cruelty.
32:03
Speaker 1: To add to the terror, he began leaving occult pentagrams
32:06
scrolled in lipstick on the mirrors and walls at the
32:08
crime scenes. So what does this all mean for the
32:12
detectives on the ground. It means they are dealing with
32:15
a sadistic opportunist who is actively terrorizing a metropolis of millions,
32:20
and they have almost nothing concrete to work with, no pattern,
32:23
no specific weapon, no target, demographic, but.
32:26
Speaker 2: Detective Salerno and his team did manage to find a
32:28
few very thin threads in the dark.
32:31
Speaker 1: They did. They connected the first two shootings Marina Hernandez,
32:35
whose roommate Dale Okazaki was killed in their home, and
32:37
Silely and Yu, a young student who is shot in
32:40
her car on the freeway just an hour later. They
32:42
link these two seemingly random events via forensic analysis of
32:45
the bullet casings.
32:46
Speaker 2: A crucial piece of forensic work.
32:48
Speaker 1: And then crucially, they get their golden ticket. At a
32:51
bloody crime scene, they find a single, perfectly preserved footprint.
32:55
They run it through their databases and identify it as
32:58
an Avy brand athletic shop. They painstakingly tracked down the
33:02
manufacturer and the distribution logs, and they realize something incredible.
33:06
Only one single pair of this specific model in size
33:10
had been sold in the entire Greater Los Angeles area.
33:13
Speaker 2: It was a massive lead.
33:15
Speaker 1: Huge They knew exactly what the killer was wearing on
33:17
his feet. But well, here's where the arabites them. It's
33:21
nineteen eighty five. There were no CCTV cameras in the
33:24
sporting goods shop that sold the shoes. There are no
33:27
credit card digital tracking systems to pull a name. They
33:30
know the shoe, but they don't know the face. The
33:32
lead goes completely agonizingly cold.
33:34
Speaker 2: It is the definition of agonizing For law enforcement. They
33:37
have a definitive, unique piece of forensic physical evidence, but
33:41
the technology of the era cannot close the loop.
33:43
Speaker 1: While the police are hitting these frustrating dead ends, we
33:46
have to look at the psychology of the man creating
33:49
this city wide terror. Ramirez didn't emerge from a vacuum.
33:53
He had a horrific, violent background that deeply wired his
33:57
brain for sadism.
33:58
Speaker 2: The developmental factors are he.
34:00
Speaker 1: Was severely beaten, often to the point of unconsciousness, by
34:03
his father, starting at the age of five. As a teenager,
34:07
he was heavily influenced by an older cousin, a Green Beret,
34:10
who showed him polaroids of mutilated women from Vietnam, and
34:14
who later actually shot his own wife point blank in
34:17
the face, right in front of Ramirez. On top of this,
34:20
he was actively rebelling against a deeply religious, strict mother.
34:25
Speaker 2: Right, and I imagine that rebellion against his mother's religion
34:28
manifested in the satanic symbols. Right.
34:30
Speaker 1: The lipstick pentagrams, the hail Satan rhetoric he yelled at victims.
34:34
It seems like he was a religious fanatic just for
34:36
the other team.
34:37
Speaker 2: That's the common perception, But the expert psychological analysis in
34:41
the source material strips away the theatricality of his satanism.
34:46
They point out a critical truth, going around breaking into
34:49
houses and murdering random civilians is not a standard part
34:52
of actual organized Satanic religious practices, So it's just a
34:56
cover for Ramirez. The satanism was a convenient Eddy clok.
35:00
It was a self created justification for his underlying sadism,
35:03
his need to torture, and his inherent brutality. It gave
35:07
his chaotic, drug fueled urges a dark theatrical framework that
35:11
made him feel powerful and important. But the core driver
35:15
was always the physical violence itself, the rush of the kill,
35:18
not some deep theological devotion to the devil. He was
35:21
playing a character.
35:22
Speaker 1: That brings us to the hunt, and specifically one of
35:24
the most unbelievable investigative blunders I have ever heard of
35:27
in the history of true crime.
35:29
Speaker 2: Oh, this part is just frustrated to even talk about.
35:31
Speaker 1: It's August nineteen eighty five, the City of La is
35:34
in an absolute fever pitched panic. Gun sales have skyrocketed.
35:39
People are buying guard dogs. Ramirez feels the heat of
35:42
the intense police presence, so he shifts his hunting ground
35:45
north of San Francisco. He attacks a couple there, leaving
35:48
his signature satanic symbols.
35:51
Speaker 2: It couldn't help himself.
35:52
Speaker 1: Detective Sileerno, down in La hears about this through the wire.
35:55
He immediately flies up to San Francisco, walks into the
35:57
local precinct, and shares all the highly sensitive classified intelligence
36:01
the LA task Force has painstakingly gathered. He tells the
36:05
San Francisco police about the specific gun caliber they are tracking,
36:08
and most importantly, he tells them about the unique Avius shoeprint.
36:13
He is trying to build a cohesive, statewide net to
36:16
catch this guy.
36:17
Speaker 2: He was doing exactly what a good investigator should do.
36:19
Speaker 1: Right now, you, the listener, put yourself in Detective Serna's
36:23
shoes for a second. Imagine you have spent months hunting
36:25
a ghost, you haven't slept. You finally have this one
36:28
golden piece of evidence, the shoe print, and you are
36:31
sitting in your hotel room and you turn on the
36:33
evening news, and.
36:34
Speaker 2: You watch the political apparatus completely detonate your investigation on
36:38
live television.
36:39
Speaker 1: Yes, the mayor of San Francisco, attempting to calm the
36:42
panicked public and show strong leadership, holds a massive televised
36:47
press conference. She announces a ten thousand dollars reward for information,
36:53
but in doing so, without consulting Seerna or the primary
36:56
task force, she publicly reveals the highly sensitive details of
37:00
the investigation. It's just astonishing, she tells the public, and
37:03
by direct extension, the night stalker himself, about the exact
37:07
caliber of the gun and the exact make and model
37:10
of the Avias shoeprint they are looking for.
37:12
Speaker 2: I mean, I cannot imagine how Salerno kept his head
37:14
from exploding. The historical accounts quote him saying it was
37:17
hard to express his feelings that somebody in high office
37:20
could be that unbelievably dumb.
37:22
Speaker 1: Because what happens immediately Ramirez is watching the news. He
37:25
realizes his shoes and his gun are tying him directly
37:28
to the crime scenes across the state, so he acts immediately.
37:31
He destroys the shoes, he gets rid of the physical evidence.
37:34
He walks onto the golden gate bridge and throws the
37:36
primary murder weapon into the bay.
37:38
Speaker 2: That one press conference designed to look like a political
37:41
victory could have permanently ruined the entire case.
37:45
Speaker 1: It reset the investigation back to zero, but thankfully science
37:50
and a tiny bit of luck finally caught up with him.
37:52
A vigilant teenager in la spotted a highly suspicious car
37:56
driving through his neighborhood and wrote down the license plate.
38:00
He's found the abandoned car, and forensics managed to pull
38:03
a single, clear fingerprint off.
38:05
Speaker 2: The rear view mirror, a massive break.
38:07
Speaker 1: Now, in nineteen eighty five, fingerprint databases weren't instantaneous digital
38:11
systems like they are today, but they got a hit
38:13
on an old analog file they had on Ramirez for
38:15
a petty auto theft years prior. Finally, after months of terror,
38:20
the ghost had a name. He had a face. They
38:22
took his mugshot and splashed it across every newspaper and
38:25
television screen in the entire nation.
38:27
Speaker 2: And his capture it's straight out of a Hollywood movie.
38:30
Speaker 1: It really is. It wasn't a heavily armed swat team
38:33
creeping into his house at dawn. Ramirez had been out
38:36
of the state for a few days and didn't realize
38:39
his face was everywhere. He stepped off a bus in
38:41
East La walked into a convenience store, and the people
38:44
in the neighborhood recognized him instantly.
38:46
Speaker 2: They recognized the night soccer.
38:48
Speaker 1: He tried to run, He tried to carjack a woman,
38:51
but a mob of everyday citizens literally chased him down
38:54
the street. They beat him with a steel pipe and
38:57
subdued him in the middle of the street until the policeved.
39:01
The responding officer said it was a real mob scene.
39:04
They honestly thought the crowd might lynch him right there
39:06
on the pavement. The people of Los Angeles had finally
39:09
had enough, and they took their city back.
39:11
Speaker 2: The societal response there is incredibly revealing. When the formal
39:15
systems of law enforcement and political leadership failed to protect
39:19
the populace, the populace eventually bands together, reverting to a
39:23
primal communal defense mechanism to eliminate the threat themselves.
39:27
Speaker 1: The trial that followed three years later was a complete
39:30
media circus. Ramirez played it up, drawing a pentagram on
39:34
his hand, flashing it to the cameras and yelling Hail Satan.
39:37
Speaker 2: In the courtroom but the theatrics couldn't save him from
39:40
the physical evidence they eventually compiled exactly.
39:43
Speaker 1: He was found guilty and sentenced to die in the
39:46
gas chamber. He spent twenty four years sitting on death
39:49
row in San Quentin, ultimately dying of natural causes liver
39:52
failure in twenty thirteen before the state could execute him.
39:55
Speaker 2: So Ramirez was finally stopped when civil society banded together
39:58
in the streets.
39:59
Speaker 1: Right, but what do you do when a killer is
40:01
already locked away from civil society? What happens when the
40:05
predator is placed inside a steel cage and instead of
40:08
being neutralized, he turns the cage itself into his own
40:11
personal hunting ground.
40:13
Speaker 2: It's a terrifying concept.
40:14
Speaker 1: This brings us to our final subject, a man whose
40:17
body count is so astronomically high it almost defies comprehension.
40:21
We are heading south to Brazil, looking at a timeline
40:24
stretching from the early nineteen seventies all the way to
40:26
the twenty tens. The man is Pedro Rodriguez Filio, known
40:30
famously as Pidino Mattador Adrenal.
40:33
Speaker 2: Matador represents a completely different paradigm of serial murder compared
40:36
to the other three. The official sources confirm over seventy
40:40
one victims, but strongly suggest based on his own admissions
40:43
and prison records, that the true number is well over
40:46
one hundred.
40:47
Speaker 1: Over one hundred people.
40:48
Speaker 2: To understand him, you have to understand that his pathology
40:51
was forged in a crucible of intense, relentless domestic violence.
40:56
He grew up on a rural farm in Brazil, where
40:58
his father regularly beat him unconscious. This wasn't just childhood abuse,
41:03
It was a fundamental rewiring of his developing brain's understanding
41:06
of the world. In his home, violence wasn't an aberration
41:10
or a failure of communication. It was the primary accepted
41:14
tool for conflict resolution.
41:16
Speaker 1: It warped his worldview entirely from day one. He didn't
41:19
know anything else. His first kill happened when he was
41:21
just fourteen years old. The behavioral experts note that this
41:24
is incredibly young. Most serial killers start experimenting with murder
41:28
in their early to mid twenties. But at fourteen, Padernio
41:32
murders the vice mayor of his.
41:33
Speaker 2: Town, and the reason why is.
41:34
Speaker 1: Critical right because the vice mayor had recently fired his
41:38
father over allegations of food theft. Padrino picked up a
41:41
shotgun and exacted lethal revenge to protect his family's honor.
41:46
And here is the crucial environmental factor. Because it was
41:49
rural Brazil in the nineteen seventies, where vigilante justice was
41:53
somewhat culturally ingrained and formal police resources were stretched incredibly thin.
41:59
Based basically got away with it. He shot a politician
42:02
and just walked.
42:03
Speaker 2: Away, which is the absolute worst possible reinforcement a nascent
42:07
killer can receive. Psychology tells us that behavior followed by
42:11
a reward or a lack of negative consequence will be repeated.
42:15
At fourteen, he learned that lethal violence was not only
42:18
highly effective at solving his problems, but it was also
42:21
consequence free.
42:22
Speaker 1: He fled his hometown and moved to Moggidas, Cruiz's, a
42:25
city largely controlled by violent drug cartels where the police
42:28
barely ventured. He didn't hide his violent nature, he monetized it.
42:31
He became an enforcer and a hitman for the Brazilian
42:34
drug mafia.
42:35
Speaker 2: He found a specific socioeconomic environment where his violent pathology
42:39
wasn't a crime, it was a highly valued professional skill set.
42:42
Speaker 1: He used murder as a life skill. It's terrifying. How
42:46
does a justice system even begin to rehabilitate a mind
42:49
that views killing not with remorse but as a good
42:53
thing that has happened, a job well done.
42:55
Speaker 2: It's nearly impossible.
42:56
Speaker 1: But he also operated under a very specific, twisted moral framework.
43:00
He wasn't completely chaotic like Ramirez. He had a strict code.
43:04
He absolutely refused to kill women, and he refused to
43:08
kill children. He targeted other criminals, rival gang members, and murderers.
43:13
The sociologists who analyzed his case attribute this to a
43:16
deeply ingrained sense of South American machismo and honor culture.
43:20
In his twisted mind, women and children were innocence to
43:23
be cherished and protected. Men were the warriors you fought
43:26
and killed to prove your absolute dominance, and.
43:29
Speaker 2: That deeply ingrained code led to one of the most
43:31
gruesome and symbolically loaded events we have in this entire
43:34
deep dive. Pagrino is eventually arrested and sent to prison
43:38
at age eighteen. While he is serving his time, he
43:41
discovers that his own father is also incarcerated in the
43:43
same prison.
43:44
Speaker 1: System, and why was his father in there.
43:46
Speaker 2: Because his father had recently murdered Padrina's mother, hacking her
43:50
to death with a machete.
43:51
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
43:52
Speaker 2: By killing the mother, the father violated Padrino's ironclad, unwritten
43:56
rule against hurting women. So Padrino orchis of transfer it
44:00
gets to his father's cell an exact savage revenge. He
44:04
stabs his father to death in the prison. But he
44:06
doesn't just kill him. He cuts his father's chest open,
44:10
physically removes his heart, and reportedly bites into it, chewing
44:13
a piece of it before throwing it away.
44:15
Speaker 1: It is absolute visceral nightmare fuel. I read that and
44:18
had to put the notes down. What is the psychology
44:21
behind eating a piece of your own father's heart?
44:24
Speaker 2: This brings up a fascinating point about the anthropological symbology
44:27
of violence. When we look at cannibalistic acts and violent offenders,
44:31
it isn't about physical sustenance. It is about absolute consumption
44:35
and dominance. By consuming a piece of the heart, he
44:38
is symbolically saying I own you, Your strength is now mine.
44:42
You will always be with me, but I am the
44:44
one in absolute control. It is the ultimate final assertion
44:48
of power over the very man who used to beat
44:50
him unconscious when he was a helpless child. He literally
44:53
consumed his abuser to become the ultimate apex predator.
44:56
Speaker 1: And he became exactly that inside the Brazilian prison system.
45:01
We generally think of a prison sentence as the end
45:03
of a serial killer's career, but for Padrino, it was
45:07
just a target rich environment. Over his decades of incarceration,
45:12
he killed at least fifty three fellow convicts across nine different.
45:16
Speaker 2: Prisons, fifty three murders inside a prison stagers.
45:19
Speaker 1: He would kill them for the most trivial, mundane reasons imaginable.
45:23
It wasn't always gang warfare. If a cellmate was snoring
45:25
too loudly and keeping him awake, he would kill them.
45:28
If someone was chewing their food too noisily, he would
45:31
stab them.
45:31
Speaker 2: Just absolute control over his environment.
45:33
Speaker 1: The primary investigator on his case, Manuel Do Santos, express profound,
45:38
deep helplessness when discussing this era. He explained that if
45:41
someone kills out on the street, the police can hunt them,
45:44
but if someone kills inside a maximum security prison, the
45:47
outside police are totally powerless. The laws of civil society
45:50
completely vanish at the gates, and the laws of the
45:53
prison block, which were violently dictated by Padrino Matador became
45:56
the only laws that mattered.
45:58
Speaker 2: He thrived in that environment because the prison system stripped
46:01
away all the complexities of the outside world. There were
46:04
no jobs to hold down, no bills to no social
46:06
norms to navigate. It was an environment of pure, primal
46:10
Darwinian survival, and he was undeniably the fittest and the
46:14
most ruthless.
46:15
Speaker 1: But the legal framework surrounding his incarceration is where the
46:19
story takes a truly baffling turn. Under Brazilian law at
46:22
the time, which was designed heavily around the philosophy of
46:25
rehabilitation rather than endless retribution, the absolute maximum sentence any
46:31
human being could serve in a prison was thirty years,
46:34
regardless of the crimes committed.
46:35
Speaker 2: Regardless of the crimes.
46:37
Speaker 1: The courts managed to tack on an additional four years
46:39
in his case for crimes committed while inside, but eventually
46:43
the math catches up. The clock ran out when he
46:46
was fifty two years old, having murdered dozens of people
46:49
inside the state's own facilities. The legal system was required
46:52
by its own constitution to release him.
46:54
Speaker 2: Which sounds completely utterly insane to anyone standing outside that
46:59
specific legal system. They are opening the gates for a
47:02
man with a body count nearing one hundred now. The
47:05
experts do note that as psychopaths age into their fifties
47:08
and sixties, some of their volatile violent features tend to
47:11
soften their testosterone drops they lose physical energy. But still
47:15
he was back walking the streets as a free man.
47:17
Speaker 1: He was eventually rearrested in twenty eleven on charges of
47:20
inciting prison riots and kidnapping from years prior. When the
47:24
police went to his house to arrest him, they geared
47:26
up for a blood bath. They fully expected a shootout,
47:29
but when they kicked the door in, he just surrendered quietly.
47:33
He gave up without any resistance. He was almost proud
47:36
of his legacy. He wasn't angry at the cops for
47:38
doing their jobs.
47:39
Speaker 2: He felt he had already won.
47:40
Speaker 1: Investigator Dos Santo said that finally putting him back behind
47:43
bars felt like scoring the winning goal in the final
47:46
minute of the World Cup. It was the absolute peak
47:48
of his long career.
47:50
Speaker 2: Yet even that victory was temporary because of the strict
47:53
structure of those maximum sentencing laws. He was released yet
47:56
again in twenty sixteen. He spent his final years living
48:00
a surprisingly unobtrusive free life in Brazil, even starting a
48:04
popular YouTube channel where he talked about his life and
48:06
advised kids to stay away from crime, before he was
48:09
eventually assassinated by gang members in twenty twenty three. His
48:13
life and his releases are a stark, uncomfortable reminder that
48:16
justice systems are mechanisms of law and procedure, not necessarily
48:20
mechanisms of absolute moral balance.
48:23
Speaker 1: Okay, we have covered massive ground today. We have traveled
48:26
from the freezing bureaucracies of the Soviet Union, to the
48:29
collapsed infrastructure of Ukraine, to the sweltering panic streets of
48:32
Los Angeles, and finally to the brutal, enclosed Derwinian ecosystems
48:37
of Brazil. It's time to bring these four completely disparate
48:40
environments together and synthesize the ultimate takeaways from this deep dive.
48:45
Let's look at the overarching themes. First. I think we
48:47
absolutely have to talk about what I call the myth
48:50
of the mastermind.
48:51
Speaker 2: I agree completely. Pop culture movies and novels love to
48:54
portray serial killers as these brilliant evil geniuses playing a
48:58
complex four D game of chess with the police. Think
49:01
Hannibal Elector, but Across all four of these historical cases,
49:04
we see that is rarely the reality. These killers were
49:07
largely opportunistic predators. They didn't succeed for so long because
49:10
they were intellectually brilliant. They succeeded because they benefited from massive,
49:14
gaping systemic flaws in their environments.
49:16
Speaker 1: Exactly, Chikatila wasn't a genius. He thrived because Soviet bureaucracy
49:20
refused to acknowledge he could exist, and because a lab
49:23
technician misunderstood a degrading blood sample on a Prianco hid
49:27
within the chaotic, violent vacuum of post Soviet gang warfare.
49:31
Ramirez exploited the lack of nineteen eighty CCPV and a
49:34
politically motivated disastrous press league from a mayor Padrino. Matador
49:38
utilized the unmanageable, overcrowded violence of the Brazilian prison system
49:42
and the strict, inflexible sentence in caps. They were parasites
49:46
feeding on the specific weaknesses of their specific societies.
49:49
Speaker 2: And the toll it takes on the people trying to
49:51
patch those weaknesses, the people trying to hunt them down,
49:54
is devastating. We cannot ignore the personal destruction of the
49:57
investigators Frank Celaire in la sleeping with a loaded gun
50:02
on his nightstand because he was terrified the nightstalker would
50:05
come for his family. Almrhanyandiyev in Russia, drinking a glass
50:09
of vodka every night just to keep his mind from snapping,
50:12
losing fourteen years of his life in his sanity, to
50:14
the butcher of Rostov.
50:16
Speaker 1: Manuel dos Santos in Brazil, viewing a simple arrest not
50:20
just as a job, but as a World Cup victory.
50:22
Because the stakes were literally life and death. Every single day,
50:25
the hunters inevitably pay a piece of their own soul
50:28
to stop the predators, which.
50:29
Speaker 2: Brings us to the core relevance. For you, the listener,
50:32
why does studying this dark, heavy material matter. It matters
50:36
because it highlights the sheer, life saving importance of forensic
50:39
and systemic evolution. We learned from these tragedies. We learned
50:43
the critical nature of a single shoeprint in La or
50:46
a set of footprints in the snow in Ukraine. We
50:48
learned the vital, absolute need for cross jurisdictional communication, so
50:52
that police in one town are talking to police in another.
50:55
Speaker 1: And it completely reframes our understanding of the criminal mind.
51:00
Serial murder is almost never about legal insanity or hearing
51:03
voices or serving the devil, as we saw the statistics,
51:06
ninety nine point nine percent of the time, it is
51:09
about deeply ingrained pathological needs for power, control and absolute
51:13
physical dominance over another human being. Understanding that pathology, stripping
51:18
away the myth of the monster and seeing the broken
51:20
human underneath is the very first step in building investigative
51:24
systems that can identify and neutralize them before the body
51:27
count rises.
51:28
Speaker 2: It is about seeing the reality of the threat, not
51:30
the Hollywood movie version of it.
51:32
Speaker 1: I want to sincerely thank you the listener for joining
51:35
us on this incredibly intense exploration of the source material.
51:38
We've navigated some of the darkest corners of human history
51:41
today and we hope it has given you a profound,
51:43
nuanced understanding of how investigation, psychology, and society intersect when
51:48
faced with absolute terror. But before we go, I want
51:51
to leave you with a final lingering question to mull Over.
51:55
It's something that builds on everything we've discussed today.
51:57
Speaker 2: It's a really important thought experiment.
51:59
Speaker 1: Think back to investigator Yandiev in the Chicatillo case. He
52:02
bitterly lamented the total lack of digital data and surveillance
52:06
cameras in the nineteen eighties Soviet era. He felt that
52:08
if he just had cameras at those train stations, if
52:11
he just had tracking data, he could have caught the
52:13
killer on day one and stopped the decades of killing. Well,
52:16
today we live in exactly that world. We live in
52:19
a society completely saturated in high definition ring cameras, digital footprints, GPS,
52:25
phone tracking, and instant global communication. It is harder than
52:28
ever in human history to physically hide your movements.
52:31
Speaker 2: That's very true.
52:32
Speaker 1: So here's the provocative thought for you. Does this modern
52:36
all seeing surveillance state actually stop the deep psychological impulse
52:40
of the power and control predator or does it merely
52:43
force that ancient pathology to evolve. Are we actually safer
52:47
behind our locked doors on our security cameras, or are
52:49
we just creating a high tech environment that will eventually
52:52
breed a new, hyperadapted type of killer, one who doesn't
52:55
hunt in the physical shadows of a train station, but
52:58
who learns to hunt entirely within our day digital blind spots.