You said you wanted an episode on serial killers, and after months of absolutely heinous research (Kim cried), recording, and editing, it’s finally here: The Season Two Finale, “Forgotten Serial Killers,” featuring the stars of Netflix’s MINDHUNTER series.
Teams Kimberly and Edward endeavored to find tales of true “multiple murderers” not already discussed to death by other podcasts and documentaries…and our guest judges, both well-versed professionally in retelling the stories of mad killers, agreed they pulled it off.
Team Edward presents the blood-chilling history of The Red Ripper, a prolific monster hidden for decades by Soviet censorship and the first-ever Russian criminal to be caught in part by employing psychological profiling.
Team Kimberly transports listeners to the antebellum frontier, where a family of mysteriously antisocial colonists led by a charismatic daughter terrorized travelers riding the Osage Mission Trail, earning themselves the terrible moniker The Bloody Benders.
Our hosts were joined by MINDHUNTER headliners Holt McCallany (Fight Club, Alien 3, Blue Bloods, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning) and Michael Cerveris (Broadway’s Sweeney Todd and Assassins; TV’s Fringe and The Gilded Age), two guys who have made careers out of either playing killers, or playing the people who catch killers. In addition to the serial killer talk, they give us insight into working with cinematic masters like David Fincher; befriending Charles Mansonite Bobby Boselie; and learning from FBI profilers.
If you’d like to learn more about The Bloody Benders yourself, check out one of our sources for this episode:
Hell's Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier
If you’d like to read the book MINDHUNTER was based on, you can find that here:
Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit