Splintered Minds: The Psychology of the Unthinkable

In 1965, sixteen-year-old Sylvia Likens moved into a crowded Indianapolis home for twenty dollars a week. Within months, that house became the site of the most brutal child torture case in state history. What started as late payments and small punishments spiraled into a closed world of beatings, humiliation, and group violence that no one outside the door stopped.   This episode strips the case d...

He didn’t stalk. He turned doorknobs. Locked, he walked away. Unlocked, he walked in—and Sacramento became a hunting ground.    This episode dives into the collapse of Richard Trenton Chase, the “Vampire of Sacramento”: a man convinced his organs were vanishing and his blood was turning to dust. From animal blood rituals and delusions about stolen arteries to random door checks that ended in slaug...

June 29th, 1978. Bob Crane—star of Hogan’s Heroes—was found bludgeoned to death in his Scottsdale apartment, a cord around his neck and severe head wounds from a blunt object. There was no sign of forced entry.   Crane had been living a double life: beloved sitcom actor by day, consumed by his obsession with sex and videotaping by night. His friend, video technician John Carpenter, often joined hi...

March 26th, 1997. Rancho Santa Fe, California. Thirty-nine people are found dead in a mansion, lying neatly in rows. Black clothes. Matching Nike sneakers. Faces covered by purple shrouds. No signs of struggle. They called themselves Heaven’s Gate—and believed their souls had boarded a spacecraft trailing the Hale-Bopp comet. Their leader, Marshall Applewhite, promised they’d ascend to a higher ex...

Inside Apartment 213, loneliness took physical form. Jeffrey Dahmer wasn’t driven by rage or revenge—he was driven by the fear of being left alone. This episode of Splintered Minds peels back the myth of the “monster” to reveal the psychology beneath: how obsession with control twisted into ritual, how the hunger for connection became an act of possession. Through real case detail and clinical ins...

A quiet home. Two brutal murders. One daughter accused. More than a century later, the name Lizzie Borden still cuts deep. In this episode of Splintered Minds, we strip away the nursery rhyme and the myth to expose the psychology beneath the axe: power, repression, class, and the breaking point of a life lived under control.