Disturbing History

Some nights the well runs dry, and I do what everybody does — I sink into the couch and let Netflix babysit me for a while. That's how I ended up watching The Worst Ex Ever, and that's how I ended up staring at the story of Wade Wilson, the so-called Deadpool Killer, a man who strangled two women to death in a single day in Cape Coral, Florida, and now sits on death row with two death sentences an...

He was the mouthpiece of God to ten thousand followers. To the FBI, he was a face on the Ten Most Wanted list. And to a Nevada state trooper working a dark stretch of Interstate Fifteen, he was just a nervous man in a red Escalade with a bad paper tag and a pulse he couldn't hide. This week I'm taking you inside the rise and ruin of the FLDS church, from its roots in the polygamy crisis of the eig...

In the winter of nineteen fourteen, a five-year-old girl named May Pierstorff stood on a train platform in Grangeville, Idaho, with fifty-three cents in postage stamps pinned to her coat. Her parents had just mailed her to her grandmother. In this episode, I dig into one of the strangest true stories in American history, the brief window between nineteen thirteen and nineteen fifteen when poor rur...

Before the Food and Drug Administration, before warning labels, before anyone had to prove a medicine was safe or even admit what was inside it, America ran on the bottle. This episode opens the cabinet on the patent medicine era, the long stretch of years when a quarter and a clipped newspaper advertisement could buy a family a cure-all that promised relief from nerves, weakness, pain, sleeplessn...

The word propaganda began as something holy. In sixteen twenty-two a committee of cardinals in Rome coined it to mean the spreading of the faith, and in this episode I follow that single word as it curdles across the bloodiest century human beings have ever managed to produce. This is the story of how mass persuasion got built, who built it, and the deeply uncomfortable truth that the most murdero...

On the night of June 9, 1912, in the small railroad town of Villisca, Iowa, someone walked into the home of Josiah and Sarah Moore and killed all eight people sleeping inside. The parents. Their four children, ages 5 to 11. And two young sisters, Lena and Ina Stillinger, who had only come over after a church program for a sleepover that should have ended with them riding home. The weapon was an ax...

In the high desert of Nevada, about twenty miles south of the town of Lovelock, a dry limestone cave holds one of the richest archaeological records in the American West — and one of the most stubborn legends in American fringe history: red-haired, cannibal giants, supposedly eight to ten feet tall, dug out of its floor and then hidden away by the authorities. In this episode I take a hard, eviden...

What happens when the most powerful man in the world asks his own government a direct question and still can't get a straight answer? When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he wanted to know two things: who really killed John Kennedy, and whether the United States was sitting on proof that we aren't alone. He handed the assignment to his friend Webb Hubbell, the third-ranking official at the Justi...

Walt Disney built the most trusted brand in the world, and he built it on top of a story the company has spent eighty years hoping you would never hear. Behind the castle, the cardigan, and the warm Missouri voice was a workplace that tore itself apart, a founder who treated a fair-pay dispute as a foreign conspiracy, and a man whose grudges ended up wired into the machinery of the Red Scare.  Thi...

The murder of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November twenty-second, nineteen sixty-three remains the most contested crime in American history, and at the center of the contest stands the man who became president before Air Force One left Texas soil. This episode of Disturbing History takes on the theory that refuses to die, the claim that Lyndon Baines Johnson helped engineer the assassination of t...

Ulysses S. Grant left the White House without a fortune, never took a bribe, and never sold an office, yet his administration produced more documented corruption than any presidency of the nineteenth century. This episode of Disturbing History continues our series on the dark history of presidential politics by walking straight into the Gilded Age and the Whiskey Ring, the federal liquor-tax fraud...

On New Year's Day 1927, New York City's medical examiner stood in front of reporters and accused the United States government of poisoning its own citizens. He could prove it, because the bodies were stacking up in his morgue. In this episode, we tear down the postcard version of Prohibition, the flappers and the jazz and the secret knock at the speakeasy door, and walk through what the thirteen-y...

On January 6, 1949, two starving Japanese machine gunners walked out of the caves on Iwo Jima and surrendered to American airmen who had no idea they were there. The war had been over for more than three years. They're where this episode ends, and they're the reason it exists. Before them came the battle. This one goes deep into the fight for a stinking scrap of volcanic ash 650 miles south of Tok...

For weeks this show has lived in the corridors of power, among presidents and spies and the men who shaped the country from behind closed doors. This time we leave all of that behind and walk into a restaurant parking lot in suburban Detroit, where on a hot Wednesday afternoon in the summer of 1975, the most powerful labor leader in America climbed into a car and was never seen again. Jimmy Hoffa...

In this episode of the Disturbing History presidential series, we cross out of settled history and into living memory to examine the presidency of George W. Bush through the architecture of the War on Terror. Beginning with the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the fear that reshaped American government overnight, we trace how that fear was translated into law, policy, and ultimately a global app...

The nation wept for Warren G. Harding in August 1923. The funeral train crawled home through crowds that stretched for miles, mourners singing hymns by the tracks, certain they were burying one of the most beloved men ever to hold the office. They had no idea what they were really putting in the ground. Within a year, the floorboards of that respectable house started to creak, and the bodies that...

This week we step away from the corridors of presidential power and head into the North Georgia mountains, to a hand-built stone castle on Taylor's Ridge and one of the most misunderstood crimes in the state's history. On December 12, 1982, Dr. Charles Scudder, a brilliant former Loyola University pharmacology professor, and his partner Joseph "Joey" Odom were robbed and shot to death inside Corps...

Everyone knows George Washington was the first President of the United States. Technically true. But it's also a sleight of hand, because fourteen men held the title of President before him, and almost no American today can name a single one. Tonight on Disturbing History, we walk through all fourteen, the men who chaired the Continental Congress and the Confederation Congress during the years the...

Dwight Eisenhower is the president most Americans remember as the calm grandfather of the nineteen fifties. The general who beat Hitler. The man who built the interstate highways. The smile under the bald head. But underneath that famous reassurance, his administration ran something most Americans were never told about. A young intelligence agency, a brand-new doctrine called plausible deniability...

The story of the Foo Fighters of World War Two is one of the strangest, best-documented, and least-resolved cases in the history of military aviation. In the late autumn of nineteen forty-four, pilots of the United States Army Air Forces, flying night fighter and bomber missions over Europe, began returning to their bases with reports of glowing objects that paced their aircraft, performed seeming...

Most people think they know Watergate. They don't. They know the headline. The break-in, the tapes, the resignation, the wave from the helicopter on the South Lawn. They know the word. They've seen the photograph. What they don't know is that the burglary was never the story. It was the doorway. In this episode of Disturbing History, we walk back into the White House for another stop on our tour o...

In the late afternoon of November twenty-first, 1986, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and his secretary Fawn Hall stood inside an office a short walk from the Oval Office and fed classified documents into a shredder. They jammed the machine. They smuggled pages out in her boots. They were trying to outrun a federal investigation that was already moving down the hallway toward them. What the...

On the day after Christmas, 1862, 38 Dakota men were hanged from a single scaffold in Mankato, Minnesota. It remains the largest mass execution in American history. The man who signed the order was Abraham Lincoln. He signed it the same month he was finalizing the Emancipation Proclamation. This episode is the second in our presidential series, and it's about how mercy and brutality can run throug...

Andrew Jackson sold himself as the champion of the common man. His face has been on the twenty dollar bill since 1928. There are statues of him in city squares from Tennessee to Washington. He's been claimed, in successive eras, by Democrats and Republicans, by progressives and conservatives, by every politician who ever wanted to wrap himself in the language of populism without owning what that l...

This episode contains discussion of child abuse, physical and sexual violence against minors, and descriptions of deaths in state custody. Listener discretion is advised. For more than a century, the state of Florida ran a place in the panhandle town of Marianna that called itself a school. It opened on January 1, 1900 and didn't close until June 30, 2011. In those one hundred and eleven years, it...