Just Killing Time

🔪 "I suggested them not tell Howard anything about it." A doctor wrote that about a 12-year-old boy in 1960, days before a steel instrument was tapped through the bone above his eye with a hammer. The fee: $200. 🧠 This is the true story of the lobotomy and the part schools skip: it wasn't a hidden horror. Medical journals praised it, newspapers put it on the front page, state hosp...

🧬 Who was Henrietta Lacks? In 1951, a 31-year-old Black mother of five went to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for cervical cancer treatment. While she was under anesthesia, a surgeon took two small tissue samples that no one had asked her about. One of them grew in a lab when no human cells ever had. Those cells, called HeLa, are still alive today, and they have been used in research on poli...

Before there was Tuskegee's whistleblower, there was Guatemala — and almost nobody knew about it for 60 years. 🩺 Between 1946 and 1948, the U.S. Public Health Service — under Dr. John C. Cutler — deliberately infected more than 1,300 Guatemalan prisoners, sex workers, soldiers, psychiatric patients, and orphaned children with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid, without consent, to test vener...

🩸 They called it "bad blood." It was syphilis — and the U.S. government let it run untreated in 600 Black men for 40 years, on purpose. Episode 37 of Just Killing Time takes you inside the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the U.S. Public Health Service's 1932–1972 experiment in Macon County, Alabama that has become the defining case study in American medical ethics and government betrayal....

🪱 "The Germ of Laziness" — the hidden history of hookworm, the Rockefeller cover-up, and the disease America pretended it cured. For three centuries, poor Southerners were dismissed as lazy, backward, and shiftless. The truth was a parasite: Necator americanus, the hookworm, quietly infecting an estimated 40% of the Southern population by the early 1900s. In this episode of Just Killing...

🩺⚖️ "Contain and eliminate" — two words buried in a federal court record that expose one of the most stunning hidden-history stories in American medicine. In this deep-dive episode of Just Killing Time, Elizabeth Stanton uncovers the true, documented story of the American Medical Association's secret Committee on Quackery, formed in 1963 with one internal mission: destroy the chiro...

🩺 How did a man who never went to medical school end up deciding the fate of American medicine? Welcome to "Bulletin Number Four" — the true story of the 1910 Flexner Report, the Rockefeller and Carnegie money behind it, and the century of plant medicine it quietly erased. Abraham Flexner had a degree in classics. He'd never treated a patient. And in 1910, his 346-page report — Car...

🩸 She went in for what she thought was an appendix surgery. She was 19. Kansas sterilized her — and 2,850+ other people — without full consent, under a law that stayed on the books for 52 years. In this episode of Just Killing Time, Elizabeth Stanton uncovers the true, documented history of Kansas's forced sterilization program — one of the longest-running eugenics programs in American histo...

🪣 The first serial killer to hunt his victims on the internet sealed 8 women in barrels — and used forged emails to keep them "alive" for years. In June 2026, Kansas decided if he lives or dies. This is the John Edward Robinson "Slavemaster" story. 💀 John Edward Robinson Sr. was an Eagle Scout, a Sunday school teacher, a Scoutmaster, a father of four — and a lifelong con man...

This episode is dedicated to my best friend who I call sister, Dena Tackett. We have driven up and down I-35 for each other for decades. Right now, while this episode is live, a decision is sitting on Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt's desk that could put a mass murderer back on the street. In August 2026, a divided Oklahoma parole board voted 3-2 to recommend release for Verna Stafford — a woma...

🔨 The Bloody Benders of Kansas: America's First Serial Killer Family | Just Killing Time The Bloody Benders were a German-speaking family of four — Pa, Ma, John Jr., and Kate Bender — who ran a roadside inn on the Osage Trail in Labette County, Kansas between 1871 and 1873, and murdered at least eleven travelers before vanishing without a trace. Historians still debate whether their true vic...

On May 19, 1992, seventeen-year-old Amy Fisher shot Mary Jo Buttafuoco on the front porch of her Massapequa, New York home. Amy Fisher was having a relationship with Mary Jo's husband, Joey Buttafuoco, that began when Fisher was sixteen and Buttafuoco was thirty-five. The case became a national tabloid sensation known as the "Long Island Lolita" story. In this episode of Just Killin...

She paid fifteen hundred dollars to have her husband killed. Then she sent flowers to his funeral. The banner on them read: "From your loving wife." Gibsonton, Florida. November 29, 1992. A fifty-five-year-old man sits on his couch in his underwear watching a movie, cigarette going, glass of iced tea beside him. At some point he pauses the tape, and nobody has ever been able to tell me w...

A jury convicted him of murder. Then a judge asked the state where to put him, and the state said it couldn't take him. Pittsburgh. September 27, 1978. A fifteen-year-old named Donna Stiles buys her wedding dress at the Allegheny Center Mall with her stepmother and her eighteen-year-old fiancé. The ceremony is the next morning. Eight hours later that boy is dead on the sidewalk in front of he...

He was billed as "Lobster Boy." He was convicted of murder. He never spent a single day in prison. Grady Stiles Jr. was born in Pittsburgh in 1937 with ectrodactyly — a rare condition that fused his fingers and toes into claw-like extremities. He was the sixth generation of his family born with it. His father put him on a sideshow platform at seven years old. And in 1978 he shot his fift...

We told ourselves it was a British problem. It isn't. This happened here — four times. In Part 1, a hospital electrician exploited a mortuary nobody was watching. In this episode, I bring the story home to America — and four cases that prove the same blank space in oversight exists on this side of the ocean. 🔦 Cincinnati, Ohio — Kenneth Douglas, a night-shift attendant at the Hamilton County...

🔑 A hospital electrician held the keys to the mortuary — and for 15 years, no one was watching the room. In 1987, two young women — Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20 — were murdered five months apart in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England. The press called them the Bedsit Murders. The case went cold for 33 years, until a familial DNA breakthrough in 2020 finally gave the killer a name: David Fu...

🕰️ For four years, a stalker who called himself The Poet terrorized Wichita, Kansas — rhyming threats, a stabbing in a mall parking lot, a wreath set on fire on the front door — all during the height of the BTK murders. The city spent $370,000 and ran down more than 300 suspects. Then one weekend, the Chief of Police read the whole file and saw what no one else could. This is the story of Ruth Fin...

She hid a spy pen to catch her husband cheating. It recorded her own secret affair instead. On Mother's Day weekend 2020, Suzanne Morphew went for a bike ride in the Colorado mountains and never came home. Three years later, her remains were found by accident in a remote field locals call "the boneyard" — with a wildlife tranquilizer in her bones and her body moved at least twice. H...

🌊 It's one of the most beautiful lakes in America. It's also one of the deadliest. More than 700 people have died at Lake Lanier — and the reason why is hiding at the bottom. 💀 In this deep dive, I tell the documented, fully-sourced story of Lake Lanier, Georgia: the town that was flooded to create it, the graves the government admits it never moved, the woman in the blue dress who was...

🌼 In 1942, twenty million American families grew their own food, and let the dandelions grow because everyone's grandmother knew they were medicine. By 1955, the dandelion was a weed — a thing you paid a chemical company to kill. In thirteen years, self-sufficiency went from patriotic duty to a sign of a bad neighborhood. What happened in between? It started at the 1939 New York World's...

🔥 At 5:12 in the morning on April 18, 1906, the San Andreas Fault tore open and San Francisco came down in under a minute. Then the fires came. And before the smoke had even cleared, the most powerful men in the city had quietly agreed on a story — that it was the fire that did it. Not the earthquake. The fire. Because fire was insured. Earthquakes were not. That was the first lie. Nine years lat...

In 1904, the St. Louis World's Fair displayed over 1,200 human beings as living specimens in what became the largest "human zoo" in American history. Nineteen million visitors paid to see people from around the world exhibited as examples of "primitive" human development. In this episode of Just Killing Time, Elizabeth Stanton exposes the systematic dehumanization that occ...

Nikola Tesla demonstrated wireless power to 27 million people at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Then J.P. Morgan pulled his funding, Tesla died broke, and the FBI seized his papers within hours of his death. In this episode of Just Killing Time, Elizabeth Stanton separates documented history from conspiracy theory in the Tesla story. What really happened at Wardenclyffe? Why was Tesla's...

👶 THE BABIES IN THE SIDESHOW: When Power Failed & Love Worked 💔 🏛️ Buffalo, September 6, 1901. President McKinley shot at 4:07 PM. 300 yards away: Martin Couney saving premature babies in glass incubators. The president dies. The babies live. 🔍 TONIGHT: 👶 Martin Couney: saved 6,500 babies over 40 years (may not have been a real doctor) 🔫 McKinley assassination complete story + the X-ray m...