MONSTERS WITH FRIENDLY FACES: Serial Killers Who Blended Seamlessly Into Society
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Hold the kaleidoscope to your eye. Peer inside. One twist changes everything. A woman awakens in a grotesque, human-sized arcade game. A mysterious cigar box purchased at a farmer's market releases an ancient jinn who demands a replacement prisoner. An elderly woman possesses the terrifying power to inflict pain through handmade dolls.

An exclusive restaurant's sinister secret menu includes murder-for-hire and harvested organs. With each turn through these 20 tales, Reddit NoSleep favorite AP Royal reshapes reality, creating dazzling patterns of horror that entrance as they terrify.

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Troopers soon learned that a woman named Celia "Beth" Van Zanten had gone missing on December 23rd. Just 18 years old, she was on her way to a local convenience store when she disappeared.

At the crime scene, they found a woman who seemed to match her description: young, fair complexion, long blonde hair. Her wrists were tied behind her back with speaker wire. She had been sexually assaulted and her chest slashed with a knife. Somehow, before her death, she had managed to escape her assailant. She literally ran for her life. Her first fall was 50 feet from the presumed location of the murderer's car.

With her hands bound behind her and in snow three feet deep on a dizzying slope, he would have taken a superhuman effort to regain her feet and continue the descent into what must have seemed a black hole. She got within 10 to 15 feet of the waterfall, but somehow turned away at the last minute. In the days since she'd gone missing, temperatures ranged from a low of minus 5 to a high of 22. Beth had frozen to death.

What kind of monster could have done this? I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, Weirdos! This is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained, coming up in this episode:

Behind his quiet demeanor lurked a brutal killer. He was eventually caught, but perhaps not brought to complete justice. Though Robert Hansen admitted to murdering 17 people, one woman most all are sure he murdered is Beth Van Zanten, but he insists she was not one of them. He has confessed to a staggering 93 murders thus far, and the FBI believes all his confessions are credible.

Numerous women met a gruesome end on Robert Pickton's isolated pig farm. He confessed to the killing of 49, but there could be more. But first... By all observable accounts, Herb Baumeister was an admirable family man, living on a beautiful million-dollar estate and farm with his lovely wife and three children.

But they were also sharing that estate with a very dark secret that would eventually be revealed, thanks to one of their children accidentally stumbling upon the grave of one of Herb's numerous murder victims. We begin with that story. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness.

In the fall of 1994, Julie Baumeister's son Eric, the middle of three children she shared with her husband, Herb Baumeister, brought her a human skull. When she asked where he'd found it, he said that he got it in the woods of their 18-acre estate, Fox Hollow Farm, a few miles outside Indianapolis.

Julie asked her son to take her back to where he found the skull, and there in the woods she found a half-buried pile of bones, enough to make up an entire human skeleton. Her husband Herb was quick to allay Julie's fears, though. His father had been an anesthesiologist, and Herb said that the skeleton was nothing more than the remains of a medical school anatomical skeleton. Why they were in the backyard of the $1 million estate that the Baumeisters had bought just a few years before

Herb didn't say. It seems that there was a lot that Herb Baumeister didn't tell his wife. The two had been married since 1971. They had three children together, even though Julie would later confess that they had consummated their marriage only six times in 25 years of marriage. They co-owned a chain of Save-A-Lot thrift stores in Indianapolis, which donated some $50,000 a year to programs to help neglected children.

According to Julie, Herb was a devoted and even doting father, helping his kids with everything from schoolwork to making their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Every summer, Julie would take their son Eric and their two daughters, Marnie and Emily, to a lake house owned by Herb's mother. Herb stayed home during the week to keep an eye on the family business, visiting his wife and children on the weekends.

What Julie didn't know was that though Herb was working during the day, he was cruising the gay nightclubs of Indianapolis by night, picking up young men who were never seen again. In May of 1993, Indianapolis police began receiving missing persons reports. Gay men were disappearing in the area, and they had usually last been seen in the city's gay bars and nightclubs

Over the course of two years, 10 or more disappearances were reported, but the police had little to go on until Tony Harris, a pseudonym used to protect the witnesses' privacy, came to them with an unusual story. He said he'd met a man who called himself "Brian Smart" at one of the city's clubs and that the two had gone to Brian's estate in the country.

Once there, Brian had insisted that they participate in "autoerotic asphyxiation" — what Tony called a "strangulation fetish" thing — with the aid of a pool hose, an activity which Tony said had gone too far and almost cost him his life. Tony believed that Brian Smart may have been responsible for the disappearance of one of his friends, and when he saw the man again at an Indianapolis bar, Tony wrote down his license plate number and went to the police.

turned out to be the missing link they needed. The man who called himself "Brian Smart" was actually Herb Baumeister, and in November of 1995, police approached the couple at Fox Hollow Farm. However, with only one man's story of a sexual encounter gone awry, the police didn't have enough evidence for a search warrant, and Herb rebuffed them at the estate.

The police later approached Julie, his wife, at the Save-A-Lot store, where she also refused to let them search her property. She was initially shocked by the allegations that her husband was cruising gay nightclubs while she was away. However, Julie's suspicions were growing as her became more unstable. The once-successful Save-A-Lot stores were nearing bankruptcy now, and the couple was contemplating divorce. She also couldn't forget the human bones that her son had found on their property.

On June 24, 1996, while Herb was out of town, Julie allowed the police to search Fox Hollow Farm. She could never have imagined what they would find. In the woods behind the 11,000-square-foot Tudor House, police unearthed more than 5,000 human bones in what one researcher later described as a scene like a bomb went off in a people factory. The remains had been burned and buried, and the search to find them all took two weeks.

At the same time, Herb had disappeared. Perhaps aware of his imminent arrest, he had fled to Canada, where his body was found July 3, lying just outside his car in Pinery Provincial Park. He shot himself in the forehead with a .357 Magnum, leaving behind a three-page suicide note that described his failing business, his family's financial woes, and his marital troubles, but made no mention of the grisly crimes of which he was now the prime suspect.

Police found the remains of at least 11 men at Fox Hollow Farm, eight of which were eventually identified. Each of those eight had disappeared during the time when Julie was out of town with the children and Herb was at home alone. If that was all, it'd be chilling enough, but that wasn't the end of the nightmare.

In 1998, a witness identified a photo of Herb Baumeister, saying that he had seen Baumeister leaving an Indianapolis nightclub with Michael Riley in 1983. Riley's body was later found in a stream near I-70. Riley's murder was one of nine killings between 1980 and 1990 which the police believed were committed by the same person, but which remained unsolved.

The victims, all of whom hailed from Indianapolis, were found strangled to death, their nude or partially nude bodies dumped into shallow streams along the I-70 corridor. This led authorities to conclude that Herb Baumeister had also been the so-called I-70 strangler, bringing his total body count up to around 20 and making him one of the most prolific serial killers in Indiana history.

"If somebody has any information, we'd be happy to look at it," Hancock County Sheriff James Bradbury said of the case. "But Herb Baumeister is the only suspect we have. Not everyone was as convinced." "They just decided to take some stuff out of old files, dust it off and say we solved this," Ted Fleishaker, the publisher of a newspaper serving the Indianapolis gay community, told the Associated Press. "It's a neat election-year ploy," he said, "to get some sheriffs and some people who are incompetent re-elected."

During the time that the I-70 killings were committed, Herb and Julie Ballmeister had been married for a little over 10 years. By 1984, midway through this killing spree, their third child was born. In 1988, Herb borrowed seed money from his mother to start his first save-a-lot thrift store. Their finances were doing well, and their marriage was apparently stable. "We did everything together," Julie was later quoted as saying. "He would push the mower and I would trim the bushes.

Yet, if the police are correct, and Herb Baumeister is also the I-70 Strangler, he had a sinister and deadly secret life that he was hiding from his family, stretching back over a decade. That doesn't mean Herb's dark side was without its own warning signs. When Herb was a young man, his father had secretly taken him in for psychological testing, which reportedly diagnosed Herb with schizophrenia, a condition for which he was never treated.

Six months after his marriage to Julie, Herb's father had him committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he spent nearly two months. Julie didn't object, saying that Herb was "hurting" and needed help. In 1985, Herb was accused of committing a hit-and-run while drinking and driving, and in 1986 he was charged with auto theft and conspiracy to commit theft.

Before starting the save-a-lot thrift store chain, Herb held a variety of jobs, where his strong work ethic clashed with occasional fits of anger and bizarre behavior. While working at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles from 1974 until 1985, Herb Baumeister managed to work his way up to the rank of program director, but his coworkers also noted odd behavior, including one report of him urinating on a letter addressed to the governor or possibly on the desk of his supervisor.

While he owned the Save-A-Lot stores, employees reported that he would sometimes disappear for long stretches of the day, occasionally returning with alcohol on his breath. He was, in turn, described as a hot-headed boaster, always trying to impress people, a perfectionist given to unprovoked rages, and a gregarious family man who loved old cars. It seemed that those who knew Herb Baumeister saw completely different sides of him.

When he was younger, he worked as a copy boy at the Indianapolis Star, during which time he and a friend also co-owned a second-hand hearse. Gary Donna, a former co-worker, was later quoted as saying that people often asked, what's the deal with this guy? I just said, well, Herb's just Herb, Donna replied. Of course, in the years that followed, evidence came to light to suggest that Herb's seemingly harmless eccentricities were much more sinister than just Herb.

Shortly after the police searched Fox Hollow Farm, Julie and her three children moved back to the house in Indianapolis, where she and Herb had lived shortly after their marriage. Fox Hollow Farm, which the couple had once seen as a utopia where their children could rollerblade without having to worry about cars coming around the corner, was now a grisly crime scene. Happiness as we knew it is never going to return, Julie told People magazine.

It wasn't just one family's cherished memories of home that were lost when the dark secrets of Fox Hollow Farm were revealed. In the years since the Baumeisters left the estate, dozens of people have reported that the farm is haunted, with some even claiming that the spirit of Herb Baumeister himself still walks there. In 2009, Fox Hollow Farm was bought by a couple with the perhaps grimly ironic last name of Graves

They paid $987,000 with the help of a silent partner, though the property had been put on the market for $2.8 million in 2004. The legal term for such a property is "psychologically affected." While laws regarding psychologically affected properties vary from state to state, in Indiana, sellers don't have to volunteer information about a property's sordid history unless they are directly asked.

But it's also unlikely that many buyers in the area won't already be aware of the sinister reputation of Fox Hollow Farm, hence the steep discount. If you don't mind its bloody history and possible ghostly occupants, Fox Hollow Farm would certainly seem like a steal at just under a million dollars. The 11,000-square-foot house features an indoor swimming pool, a five-car garage, stained glass windows, and two libraries.

In spite of the unwholesome reputation of the place, the Graves family says that they love their home, with Vicki Graves describing it as "a lifestyle." The Graves and their sons work as housekeepers, groundskeepers, and do-it-yourselfers to keep the sprawling property in top shape. They recently sold eight acres of the property to Noah Herron, owner of the Urban Vines Winery and Brewery, who intends to break the acreage up and sell off three lots while also building a home for his family.

"I wanted to make a joke at the city council meeting and say that we hope we don't find any bones while we're building, but I decided to keep it professional," Herron told the Indianapolis Star. "If Herron's concerned that the history of the place is going to make it hard to sell, he doesn't show it. We asked neighbors around there if they've ever seen ghosts and they said no," he told the Star. "So we're good." He may have been asking the wrong neighbors, though.

Even the Graves, who still live on 10 acres of the property and who generally shrugged off the suggestions that it's haunted, may not be as skeptical as they once were. According to the Chillicothe Gazette, weird things started happening about a year after the Graves family moved in.

Rob Graves said that the psychics who had visited the property shocked the sudden haunting up to the presence of Joe LeBlanc, one of his colleagues at the Tom Wood Porsche Audi dealership who had recently moved into an apartment above the Holmes' five-car garage. LeBlanc was around the same age as many of Baumeister's victims. "I'm Catholic," Graves was quoted as saying. "I don't even like talking about psychics, but that's what they say."

According to the Gazette, the psychics also say that the place is haunted by at least four of Baumeister's victims, not to mention Herb Baumeister himself. "They say he stands at the window in the living room," Rob Graves said. On his iPhone is a recording taken by one of the paranormal investigators who toured the property of what they claim is Herb Baumeister's voice, saying that he "took a pipe to the skulls of his victims."

Members of the Graves family are far from the only ones who've reported strange goings on at and around Fox Hollow Farm. The blog "Real Evidence of the Paranormal" records a veritable litany of accounts supposedly drawn from the Graves family and their friends

Reports of strange dreams, misbehaving vacuum cleaners, and the figure of a man in a red t-shirt blend with more sinister tales of apparitions walking without legs and the feeling of cold hands trying to choke LeBlanc in the pool. The estate has appeared on ghost hunting shows such as "Paranormal Witness" in 2012 and "Ghost Adventures" in 2014, not to mention being the focus of a feature-length 2011 documentary

"The Haunting of Fox Hollow Farm," directed by Dan T. Hull. The particularly adventuresome can even take haunted tours of the property, hosted by American Haunting's Ghost Tours. Their website calls Fox Hollow Farm "one of the most terrifying locations we have ever investigated." They claim the Graves family found even more human remains on the farm and that they've witnessed apparitions and heard voices, knocks, and footsteps in the house.

In 2015, the Graves family agreed to allow the haunted attraction company to bring five annual trips to the house at around $90 per person. According to Troy Taylor, the founder of American Hauntings, Fox Hollow Farm has never disappointed, with groups that visited the farm reporting everything from voices and footsteps to feelings of being punched, pinched, and even choked.

"Even if you don't believe in ghosts," Taylor told the New York Daily News, "there's no denying that a sinister Paul hangs over this farm, if for no other reason than it was a place where evil once lived." Up next: Robert Hansen admitted to murdering 17 individuals, but many believe there's another brutal murder under Hansen's belt that he insists he had nothing to do with.

In the 1960s, a man named Robert Hanson decided to make Anchorage, Alaska his home. The seemingly timid man was a reputable business owner who ran a bakery in an Anchorage mini-mall and lived quietly with his wife and two children. Hanson quickly became known for his skill at hunting, a hobby he enjoyed on the side. In fact, he set several local records.

At the time, nobody knew he also hunted and killed at least 17 women between 1971 and 1983. His particularly brutal exploits, coupled with his trade, gave him the apt nickname after his crimes were discovered as "The Butcher Baker." When Hansen was finally arrested, investigators found a map covered in X marks behind the headboards of his bed. Each X marked a woman's grave.

As part of a plea bargain, Hansen later cooperated with authorities to recover the bodies that he'd hidden in the wilderness. He confessed to 17 murders, although some estimates place that number much higher. He refused to identify all of his burial locations, and to date, only 12 of the 17 bodies have been found. Hansen was a cold and calculating killer, which explains why he went undetected for so long.

Although he first targeted any woman who had the misfortune of striking his fancy, he soon learned that prostitutes and strippers were prime targets. Anchorage was changing quickly in the 70s, as the construction of the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline drew in migratory workers with disposable income, as well as opportunistic sex workers. Sudden disappearances weren't uncommon in this transient environment.

As the seedier areas of Anchorage flourished, Hansen knew that his victims wouldn't be missed. The years passed, but it was business as usual for the Butcher Baker, who hadn't yet aroused suspicion. Hansen likely would have continued to kill and escape justice if one of his intended victims hadn't escaped. Seventeen-year-old Cindy Paulson ran away from Hansen in 1983 as he was trying to load her into his plane and take her out to his cabin.

presumably a euphemism for the vacant Alaskan wilderness where he gunned down his victims. Paulson later told police that Hansen had offered her $200 for oral sex and then pulled a gun on her as she got into his car. He drove her to his home where he proceeded to torture and rape her. After casually taking a nap on a nearby couch, as Paulson was chained by the neck to a post in the basement, he loaded her back into his car and drove to the airport.

While Hansen was getting his light aircraft ready for takeoff, Poulsen made a run for it, leaving her sneakers behind as proof that she had been in his vehicle. She managed to flag down a passing truck driver in spite of the fact that her hands were cuffed in front of her. Disturbed by the dishevelled appearance of the barefoot and handcuffed young woman, the driver gave her a ride to a nearby hotel at her request and called the police shortly after he dropped her off.

In spite of Paulson's testimony, however, Hansen wasn't immediately arrested. When questioned by police, he claimed that Paulson was just a lying prostitute trying to extort money from him. The police didn't doubt that a respectable business owner and family man had more credibility than a teenager performing sexual favors for money. What's more, Hansen's friend John Henning provided him with an alibi that, for the moment, cleared him of any suspicion.

However, Detective Glenn Floth was, even then, on the trail of a killer. He just didn't yet know that it was Robert Hansen. Floth had been placed on a task force to investigate several bodies which all seemed to have been the work of a single killer. Even though Hansen started killing in the 70s, the first body wasn't discovered until 1980 when construction workers found a body near Eklutna Road. Ultimately dubbed "Eklutna Annie," the woman remains unidentified to this day.

In his 1984 confession, Hansen claimed that "she" was his first victim. With no leads to go on, Detective Floth worked with FBI agent John Douglas, one of his first criminal profilers. He asked Douglas to draw up a psychological profile of the suspect who was targeting young women. After investigating the crime, Douglas suggested that the man Anchorage police were looking for was an experienced hunter who would have kept mementos of his human prey.

The man might stutter and would have a history of being rejected by women. The description fit Hansen to a T. As a young man, Hansen had been afflicted with particularly severe acne, which left his face scarred. He spoke with a stutter and had felt shunned by the girls at school. He had also had several run-ins with the law, although none of his prior crimes pointed to his capacity to kill. In 1960, Hansen had finished school but continued to hold onto the rage of his boyhood experiences.

His hatred led him to burn down the school bus garage in his hometown in Iowa, after which he was jailed and served divorce papers by his first wife. After remarrying and making a fresh start, Hansen managed to buy his bakery in Anchorage with the money he received from committing insurance fraud.

Armed with the killer's psychological profile, along with Paulson's testimony and the knowledge that Hansen owned a plane that could access the remote areas where victims' bodies were disposed, Floth was finally able to obtain a search warrant. After combing through Hansen's home, plane and cars, police found trophies of his victims, not unlike the souvenirs he kept of the animals he hunted.

In addition to jewelry that Hansen had saved from the women he killed, police found a rifle that matched the victim's gunshot wounds and a map of the burial sites. Hansen initially denied his crimes, but the evidence was overwhelming. He was charged with murder.

The fate of the missing women who crossed paths with the Butcher Baker was finally solved. Hansen eventually confessed that he abducted women, raped and tortured them, much as he did Cindy Paulson, then brought them to remote forest locations and hunted them down with a rifle. He also admitted to raping more than 30 women during the same decade. He confessed to 17 murders, although that number could be much higher.

The grisly exploits of the Butcher Baker proved fertile ground for books and even a film. Walter Gilmore and Leland E. Hall wrote one of the definitive books on the subject, Butcher Baker: The True Account of an Alaskan Serial Killer. The 2013 film, The Frozen Ground, was also based on Robert Hanson's killings, with John Cusack playing the murderous Baker opposite Nicolas Cage as an Alaskan state trooper and Vanessa Hudgens as Cindy Paulson.

The arrest of real-life Robert Hanson caused ripples of shock in his community, as no one suspected their local baker and a father of two children to be capable of such repugnant crimes. His name was scrubbed from the record books of the Pope & Young Club, a leading hunting organization which initially insisted his hunting prowess was connected to his crimes but later sought to distance themselves from the hunter of animals and humans alike.

After the long hunt for the Butcher Baker, justice was swift and harsh. Robert Hanson was charged with the four murders which were easiest to prove. He was found guilty and sentenced to 461 years in prison, in addition to life sentences without the possibility of parole. He died in prison in 2014 at the age of 75. Unfortunately, there's another dark path in the murder spree of Robert Hanson. At least most people believe so.

But Hansen denied it. Christmas Day, 1971, in Anchorage, Alaska, broke at a balmy 40 degrees above zero, a welcome relief from the Arctic cold front that gripped the city only days before. At the height of the storm, gale force winds snapped power lines and lifted a 20-by-20-foot cornice off the side of a mountain, depositing it in the middle of Seward Highway.

But now, with the promise of blue skies, folks in Anchorage were propelled out of their houses and into the light. Among those driven into the sun were Gary Lawler and his brother Dennis. They'd traveled south on the Seward Highway along a strip of water called Turnagain Arm to take photos of the wilderness that lay at their feet. Armed with Dennis' ancient camera, they decided to stop at Bird Point, one of their favorite spots, and then work their way north again, taking photos along the way.

Almost by chance, they stopped at McHugh Creek State Park, 12 miles north of Bird Point. Built between two intersecting ridges on either side of its namesake creek, there was a waterfall that Dennis wanted to capture. On a small ledge about 20 feet below a picnic area, he found the perfect spot: a steep overlook that cast the gnarled creek bank in a perfect cone of sunlight.

Dennis struggled to focus the camera from this awkward perch, pushing it deep into his ribcage to maintain his balance. Then, behind a bush no more than 10 feet in front of him, he spied what looked like a mannequin. Dropped at an odd angle and partially covered with snow, he craned his neck forward to get a better look. It was a body: a young woman, nude from the waist down, a soft cover of downy snowflakes across her exposed thighs.

Back in the parking lot, Dennis told his brother about his gruesome find. "Are you sure?" his brother asked. "Because if it's a body, we'll have to report it to somebody," Dennis said. In 1971, boomers were taking over the streets of downtown Anchorage, lured by the promise of the "Get Rich Oil" discovered on the North Slope.

Along 4th Avenue, which comedian Bob Hope once called the longest bar in the world, they packed the bars and saloons, looking for drugs and drinks in places with names like the Silver Dollar and the Nevada Club. But that's not all they were looking for. There were nights when the Cadillacs were parked three deep so the prostitutes could ply their holiday trade. Three miles south, in Spenard, massage parlors were springing up like mushrooms

The parlors were barely disguised fronts for prostitution, run by men who kept a pistol close at hand. No place seemed safe. No one seemed safe. Already that year, an 18-year-old real estate secretary had been confronted at her apartment by a man who wanted to force her into sex at gunpoint. She screamed, the assailant ran, and her roommates called the police. Anchorage was turning into a cop's nightmare.

For Sergeant Walter Gilmore of the Alaska State Troopers, that Christmas Day would be the worst. He didn't realize it yet, but he was about to experience his first brush with future serial killer Robert Hansen. The sergeant was just finishing the last knot in his tie when the phone rang. He was fresh from the shower after a day of cross-country skiing with his family and on his way to his in-laws' house for Christmas dinner.

"Sergeant Gilmore, this is dispatch," the female voice said, detached and professional. "We've been advised that a woman has been found dead in McHugh Creek Campground. Patrol is on the way, sir, but we wanted to alert you. Christmas dinner would have to wait." Troopers soon learned that a woman named Celia Beth Van Zanten had gone missing on December 23rd. Just 18 years old, she was on her way to a local convenience store when she disappeared. At the crime scene, they found a woman who seemed to match the description.

Young. Fair complexion, long blonde hair. Her wrists were tied behind her back with speaker wire. She'd been sexually assaulted and her chest slashed with a knife. Somehow, before her death, she'd managed to escape her assailant. She literally ran for her life. Her first fall was 50 feet from the presumed location of the murderer's car.

With her hands bound behind her and in snow three feet deep on a dizzying slope, it would have taken a superhuman effort to regain her feet and continue the descent into what must have seemed a black hole. She got within 10 to 15 feet of the waterfall, but somehow turned away at the last minute. In the days since she'd gone missing, temperatures ranged from a low of minus 5 to a high of 22. She had frozen to death.

In the parking lot, investigators found a collage of tire prints spinning in lazy, concentric circles, indicating that the woman's abductor had been looking for her. With the rain starting to drizzle, Gilmore watched dismally as the evidence melted before his eyes. The police ended up taking photographs instead. Their seen search of the surrounding area, meanwhile, turned up a silver belt buckle and, later, a black leather belt. In the snow near the body, investigators also found tufts of yellow tissue paper.

That was all they ever found. Their next move was to canvass Beth's neighborhood and interview family members. Everyone they spoke to offered statements that were soon contradicted. Her brothers seemed to be stoners who barely noticed Beth's comings and goings. Gilmore's best suspect was Greg, her Alaska-native foster cousin, who lived with the family and was said to have a "fractious relationship" with the victim.

Out clubbing and drinking the night Beth disappeared, Greg had allegedly arranged for her to babysit for one of his friends. His accounts of his whereabouts the night of December 23rd ranged from vague to imprecise, though he was rarely alone during a long night of carousing. Worse yet, although Greg claimed to have talked to Beth at the house on the night of her disappearance to ask about babysitting, her brothers said they never saw him.

The most anyone could say with certainty about Beth's foster cousin was that he was drunk that night. So drunk that Anchorage police eventually stopped him and his friends and made them take a cab home. Neighborhood witnesses, meanwhile, report seeing Beth as late as 11 o'clock the night she disappeared. She was hitchhiking.

Some of Gilmore's investigators thought that's precisely what this was: a hitchhike-type case where a stranger picks up a woman and brutalizes her, confident his identity will never be learned. Sergeant Gilmore worked the case for 24 hours straight before he got his first break. He was at his makeshift office in a trailer, the schoolroom clock nearing 2100 hours. The place was silent, nearly empty. Suddenly, the intercom came on. "Sergeant Gilmore, line 2."

On the other end of the line was a senior officer in the troopers. JP was one of the first Alaska natives to join the troopers, a man whose exploits in rural Alaska were legendary. When he called, you listened. "Hey, look," he said, "I've been hearing about that dead girl down to Bikiu Creek. I think I got an informant that may be able to help you." JP told Gilmour that the informant might have been working the street. Gilmour said he'd talk to anyone,

Only later did he learn that the informant was JP's daughter. Sandra Patterson was 18 and working the streets to pay for her heroin habit. She told Sgt. Gilmore that on the night of December 19th, she was in the parking lot of the Nevada Club where she was kidnapped at gunpoint by a man who said that he'd kill her if she didn't do what he wanted. She described him in detail: "between 23 and 28 years old, probably 5'8 or 5'9. Slender. Wearing horn-rimmed glasses."

After binding her hands with leather shoelaces, he drove her south on the Seward Highway. Along the way, he kept pulling off the road, telling her he wanted to make love to her. He tried to kiss her, made her strip down so she couldn't escape, said that he wanted to slash her bra with his knife. She kept telling him, no, I don't want to do that in the car. He finally got a motel deep into the Kenai Peninsula at Cooper Landing, 98 miles south of Anchorage. They tried to have sex, but he failed to orgasm.

Sandra didn't want him to snap again. He'd already slapped her hard across the face, and her passivity seemed to thwart his pleasure. He expected her to fight, just like other girls he'd had. From the way he acted, she was sure that he had killed them. On the way back to Anchorage, he threatened to kill her if she ratted him out. Once, he drove her deep into the wilderness, and she had to talk him back.

In those days before computers, cops had what they called the "asshole book" with photos of every pervert and predator they'd come across. Sandra scanned it page by page and column by column. "That's it," she finally said. "That's him." Him was Robert C. Hansen, later known as the Butcher Baker. Gilmore learned that he'd been arrested barely a month before on the assault with a deadly weapon charge involving the real estate secretary.

When he kidnapped Sandra, he was out on his own recognizance, awaiting trial for the November incident. This man had no shame. Sandra, meanwhile, was ready to speak her piece. "You know," she said, "I may be doing something that some people don't think is totally acceptable, and it may not be, but that's not why I'm here. I'm here because that Robert Hansen guy is probably a premeditated, cold-blooded killer who's killed before." Sandra stubbed out her cigarette with force before continuing,

He said he killed before, and everything he said was absolutely true. Everything he said he would do to me came true. Everything he said he would do, he did. Every threat he made, I believed. And if he says he's killed people, I believe he's killed people. And if you've got a young girl who's been killed around the same time and in the same area, then I believe it was Hansen who killed her. I believe he'll kill me, too."

When the Anchorage police interviewed Robert Hanson on December 29, 1971, he claimed to have only vague memories of the Patterson incident, at one point claiming, "I can't remember going down there to the Nevada Club. Just doesn't seem like I would just before Christmas." Then he abruptly called off the interview, saying he wanted to talk to his attorney and his doctor.

he was already moving toward a psychiatric defense in the case involving the real estate secretary, he'd use the same explanation for the rape and kidnapping of Sandra Patterson. By the time of his sentencing in March of 1972, Hanson had convinced the judge that he wasn't so dangerous after all. He was married and had a child after all. His church friends testified to their high regard for him. His employer told the court that he was a capable and willing worker.

His psychiatrist persuaded the court that these offences were related to Hansen's manic depression. As the judge put it at Hansen's sentencing, "I believe that this offence was committed, as the doctor tells us, during a period of disassociation, which he states is a condition which arises from your mental condition." Robert Hansen would perfect the "upstanding citizen" defence, drawing upon it each time he had a suspicious run-in with the women of Anchorage. It worked.

The Patterson case was dismissed in exchange for a no-contest plea in the assault of the real estate secretary. Robert Hansen was convicted and sentenced to five years' imprisonment on the condition that he continue to receive psychotherapy because, the judge noted, your condition is one that may be treatable. He was paroled November 1, 1973, less than two years later. Robert Hansen steadfastly denied his involvement in the death of Celia Beth Van Zanten,

During his 1984 confession, he was asked about taking a girl to McHugh Creek in 1971. Hansen blurted out, "Vanzanten case," then said, "No, I didn't have nothing to do with that. They asked me about the Van Zanten case when I was in trouble with the Pattersons girl back in 1971, but no, I didn't have nothing to do with that." The murder of Beth Van Zanten has never been solved, but the similarities between her abduction and Sandra's are worth noting.

They were taken to the same area. Their hands bound. They were stripped to prevent escape. Their bras slashed or threatened to be. They were sexually assaulted. It should also be said that Beth Van Zanten's house was within a mile of the real estate secretary's apartment. Hansen had cruised that area before.

Indeed, Hansen admitted to stalking women throughout his criminal career, starting with the real estate secretary whom he spotted in downtown Anchorage and then followed home, and continuing through Sandra Patterson and many others. Sandra Patterson's words were prophetic. Twelve years later, Robert Hansen admitted to murdering 17 women, though police believe he killed many more. The tragedy was that for a brief moment in 1971, there had been the opportunity to stop him.

Instead, he became the worst serial killer in Alaska history. When Weird Darkness returns, he's confessed to a staggering 93 murders thus far, and there could be many, many more. We'll look at one of America's most prolific serial killers, Samuel Little. Also, numerous women met a gruesome end at the hands of a local pig farmer. But did Robert Pickton actually kill 49 women on his farm?

Or could there be even more? His name may not be as well known as some of America's most famous serial murderers, but the FBI believes Samuel Little is the most prolific serial killer in the history of the United States. Little has confessed to a staggering 93 murders. The FBI has verified 50 of the killings thus far and believes all of Little's confessions are credible.

If Little's confessions are true, he will have claimed far more lives than Gary Ridgway, better known as the Green River Killer. Ridgway was convicted of 49 murders in Washington state, which represents the highest number of murder convictions for an American serial killer. When Samuel Little was arrested in 2012 at a homeless shelter in Louisville, Kentucky and charged with the murders of three women, he maintained his innocence, even up through his sentencing in September of 2014.

Soon enough, however, Little would confess to a stunning litany of murders. Little's 2012 arrest wasn't his first run-in with the law. A drifter, he had been arrested more than two dozen times in 11 states by the time he was 35 for crimes ranging from assault and attempted rape to fraud and attacks on government officials. That was in 1975. By then, authorities now suspect, his decades-long string of murders had already begun.

Samuel Little was born June 7, 1940, in Reynolds, Georgia. By his own account, his mother was a prostitute. Little grew up in Ohio and served time in a juvenile detention center after breaking and entering in Omaha. Much of what we know of Little's early life comes from his own accounts. He claims to have worked as a cemetery caretaker and ambulance attendant, and to have taken up boxing during his various stints in prison. He even says that he was a prizefighter for a time,

What authorities now know is that beginning in 1970 and stretching into the early 2000s, Little was murdering women across the United States. It was a Texas Ranger named James Holland who got Samuel Little to confess. Over the course of more than 700 hours of jailhouse interviews, Little confessed to some 93 murders. The FBI has verified at least 50 of these slayings and believes that all of them are accurate.

During the interviews, Little drew dozens of detailed portraits of his victims in chalk pastels – portraits that the FBI has since sought help from the public in identifying. Thanks to Little's confessions, prosecutors have been able to close homicide investigations dating back decades and bring closure to the families of dozens of victims. Over the course of those hours of interviews and drawings, a chilling picture emerged.

From 1970 until his arrest in 2012, Little crisscrossed the country, picking up vulnerable women and strangling them to death, one after the other, in states all over the United States, from Ohio to Arizona, Florida to California. "Where did you kill the most?" Texas Ranger James Holland asked him. "Oh, that's easy," Little replied. "Florida and California."

When Holland asked how many he killed in Los Angeles alone, Little replied, "Approximately 20." Little has thus far been convicted of eight murders. While this is less than the Gary Ridgway's confirmed 49 murders, Little has admitted to killing as many as 93 people, and there's strong evidence to believe he's telling the truth. "Nothing he's ever said has been proven to be wrong or false," Holland said of Little's numerous confessions. "We've been able to prove up almost everything," he said.

Discussing Little, Holland points out the man's lucidity, his near-photographic memory. Indeed, this is perhaps how he is able to keep the details of so many victims straight after all these years. "He basically takes a photograph in his mind of exactly what he sees as he leaves them," Holland said of Litney's uncanny recall. Right now, Little remains in prison in Lancaster, California, where he is serving consecutive life sentences.

During his incarceration, he has been convicted of five additional murders, with who knows how many more in the works. Investigators and prosecutors are taking full advantage of Little's cooperation, working day and night to identify as many of his victims as possible. At 79 years old, Little's failing health underscores the need for decisive action on the part of investigators.

"Even though he's already in prison," Cristi Palozzo of the FBI said, "the FBI believes it's important to seek justice for each victim, to close every case possible." As Little's health and memory begin to slip, the possibility of closing all the cases that he might be linked to dwindles. Yet prosecutors and investigators continue to work with the convict, pushing him to produce more sketches and reveal the details of his crimes, in the hopes that they can close additional cases that have remained open for years.

Through all of his confessions, Little has treated his crimes lightly and evinced Little in the way of motive. "God put me on earth to do what I did," one detective recalled him saying. "He made me." "I don't think there was another person that did what I like to do," Little said of his crimes. "I think I'm the only one in the world. That's not an honor, that's a curse."

Little preyed almost exclusively on vulnerable women – sex workers, runaways, drifters, women who are too often overlooked by society and whom Little believed would also be overlooked by investigators. For many years, Samuel Little believed he would not be caught because he thought no one was accounting for his victims, Palazzolo said. Ranger James Holland, who elicited from Little his many confessions, had a more chilling explanation. He was so good at what he did, Holland said.

"You know, how'd you get away with it, Sammy? Did the crime left town?" To extract the confessions that have helped to close so many cases, Holland turned to some unusual tactics. He convinced Texas prosecutors to waive the possibility of the death penalty, and in the interview room he supplied Little with pizza and Dr. Pepper. When asked why he would treat a serial killer so well, Holland replied that there was greater good at work. "I can say that we have one case solved, or we can have 93 cases," Holland said.

As to why Little ultimately confessed to him after having maintained his innocence for so long, however, Holland sighed and offered a simpler explanation: "Maybe Sammy just liked me." For now, Little remains in prison and continues to cooperate with investigators, proffering new drawings of potential victims for as long as his failing memory and health will allow. While the FBI considers him the most prolific serial killer in American history, they still need your help in identifying as many victims.

If you have any information linked to Little's confessions, you can contact the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI or you can submit a tip online at tips.fbi.gov. And if you'd like to see some of Samuel Little's drawings or maps of the crime scenes, I have a link to that page from the FBI in the show notes.

In 2007, Robert William "Willie" Pickton was convicted of murdering six women and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 25 years, the longest sentence that he could possibly receive at the time. He was charged with the death of many more and, while behind bars, admitted to an undercover officer that he had killed 49 women and that he wanted to bring that number up to an even 50.

The details of Robert Pickton's crimes, which included the discovery of human remains in trash cans, feeding bodies to his pigs, and possibly even selling human flesh mixed with pork for public consumption, shocked the country and the world, and were uncovered by one of the largest serial killer investigations in Canadian history.

Before he became known as one of Canada's most prolific serial killers, Robert Pickton was described as a pretty quiet guy who, along with his brother, owned a pig farm in British Columbia. A worker on the farm later called it a "creepy-looking place." In 1998, the brothers were sued by the local government over zoning ordinance violations for neglecting the property and turning one of their slaughterhouses into an event venue.

In 1996, the two brothers had registered a non-profit organization called the Piggy Palace Good Time Society, a disturbing name in hindsight. Its stated aims were to organize, coordinate, manage and operate special events, functions, dances, shows and exhibitions on behalf of service organizations, sports organizations and other worthy groups.

In practice, the farm played host to a variety of raves and wild parties which were held in a converted slaughterhouse. Among those known to frequent the parties held at the Picton's farm were sex workers from Vancouver and members of the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club. In 1998, the Pictons were served with an injunction banning any future events on the premises, and their non-profit status was revoked the following year.

Five years before he was arrested and charged with murder, Robert Pickton was faced with another charge: the 1997 attempted murder of sex worker Wendy Lynn Eistetter, who informed police that Pickton had solicited her services and brought her to the farm. There, he handcuffed her left hand and stabbed her in the abdomen. Eistetter managed to escape, disarming Pickton and stabbing him with his own weapon.

At the hospital where both were treated, hospital staff used a key found in Pickton's pocket to unlock the handcuff on Eistetter's wrist. The attempted murder charge was eventually dropped, reportedly because prosecutors believed that Eistetter's ongoing drug use made her an unreliable witness. Pickton's clothes and rubber boots were seized by police during the initial arrest and kept in a storage locker for more than seven years.

They weren't tested for evidence until 2004, when they were swabbed for DNA and found to be a match for two missing women. From 1983 to 2002, more than 60 women disappeared from Vancouver's downtown Eastside, an impoverished community. It was an ongoing crisis that seemed to have no end in sight, although Pinkton had been on the police's radar for quite a while.

On February 6, 2002, police finally searched the Picton farm in an unrelated search for illegal weapons. Both Robert Picton and his brother were arrested, and the police obtained enough evidence for a second warrant in relation to the ongoing investigation into Vancouver's missing women. While the two brothers were ultimately released, Robert Picton was kept under surveillance. On February 22, Picton was arrested again and charged with two counts of first-degree murder.

During their initial search, police had found personal items belonging to some of the missing women. Once Pickton was behind bars, the charges began to stack up. First, three more charges were added, then four, then more and more until Pickton had accrued a total of 27 first-degree murder charges.

The details of Robert Pickton's heinous crimes were under a publication ban for nearly a decade, and so it wasn't until the ban was lifted in 2010 that the extent of Pickton's depredations became public knowledge. When they did, a grim and terrifying picture came into focus. Pickton was linked to murders stretching as far back as 1991, long before his arrest for the attempted murder of Wendy Lynn Eistetter and continuing for many years after the altercation.

Police had found a variety of human remains on the farm, many of which were difficult to identify because they had been left to rot or fed to hogs. Among the grisly effects described in Picton's eventual trial were human skulls that had been cut in half with hands and feet stuffed inside.

night vision goggles, human remains stored in garbage bags, Spanish fly aphrodisiac, and a loaded revolver with a dildo attached to the barrel, which Pickton later claimed was used as a makeshift silencer. Investigators also found more than 80 unidentified DNA profiles on the property. Robert Pickton was ultimately tried and found guilty of six counts of second-degree murder.

The other 21 charges were stayed for a later date, but never tried, as Pickton had already received the maximum possible sentence. The trial brought to public attention a number of missed opportunities for the police to investigate Pickton sooner and put an end to his killing spree. Besides his arrest for the attack on Wendy Lynn Eistetter, there had been several other attempts to bring Pickton's activities to the attention of the authorities.

According to Vancouver Police Detective Constable Laura Mershenner, the police had received a call to an anonymous tip line in 1998, indicating that Pickton should be investigated in relation to missing women in the area. In 1999, authorities received another tip, stating that Pickton had a freezer filled with human remains on his property. Pickton was interviewed following the 1999 tip and police obtained his consent to search the farm, but the search was never conducted.

In 2004, before Picton's trial had ever begun, the government issued a warning that Picton may have ground up human flesh and mixed it with pork that he sold to the public. During a press conference in 2010, Deputy Chief Constable Doug Lepard issued an apology to the families of the victims. "I wish that all the mistakes that were made we could undo," he said, "and I wish that more lives would have been saved."

So, on my behalf and behalf of the Vancouver Police Department and all the men and women who worked on this investigation, I would say to the families how sorry we all are for your losses and because we did not catch this monster sooner." In 2016, a book called "Picton" in his own words went up for sale on Amazon. While the 144-page book's author was listed as Michael Childress, it was actually a handwritten manuscript that Picton had smuggled out of prison.

Childress had simply typed it up and added his byline. Pickton maintained his innocence in the book, which was eventually pulled down by both the publisher and Amazon after a public outcry. "It's his kind of shenanigans," the father of one of his victims said. "The guy never goes away." Thanks for listening! If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do.

All stories on Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find links to the stories or the authors in the show notes. And all articles used in this episode were written by Oren Gray for the lineup. Weird Darkness is a registered trademark. Copyright Weird Darkness. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Matthew 7, verse 12.

So, in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you. For this sums up the Law and the Prophets. And a final thought: Strong people stand up for themselves, but stronger people stand up for others. Chris Gardner, I'm Darren Marlar, thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.