Timesuck with Dan Cummins

What do you think you know about Amanda Knox? Do you think she was a sex-crazed party girl who got away with the murder of Meredith Kercher in Italy in 2007? That's what I thought before I dug into the research for this episode. I do not think that anymore. The case against her is the sloppiest murder trial I've ever looked into. Outlandish investigative bias, ridiculous crime lab mistakes, and a...

Today we dig into the history of Dungeons and Dragons and look at what influences Gary Gygax and others drew from to create such an immersive and addictive RPG experience. We'll examine the long history of wargaming and fantasy literature to understand where games like D&D come from. And I'll lay out exactly how D&D came to be associated with Satanic influences. Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!...

We take a look this week at the incredibly inspirational life of Helen Keller. She accomplished SO much despite completely losing her sight and ability to hear at the age of just 19 months. Had the miracle worker Anne Sullivan not entered her life when she did, I don't think we'd know Helen's name today. Anne's life - also so incredible. Their intertwined story got me all fired up. We also take a...

Josef Mengele was a great guy! Just very misunderstood. Wait, no. I'm thinking of someone else. Josef Mengele was a MONSTER. His complete and total lack of empathy for anyone not a member of Hitler's nonsensical racial purity dream boggles the mind. He saw his experimental patients at the Auschwitz  concentration camp as nothing more than lab rats who happened to kind of look human. His experiment...

Herb Baumeister was VERY likely the I-70 Strangler, killing a suspected nine boys and men between 1980 and 1990. And then, over the next six years, he seems to have killed at least another twenty-five men and boys and buried them on his Indianapolis area property. And now this property - Fox Hollow Farms - is reportedly VERY haunted. Today we explore what we know about Herb's life, go over the man...

Evangelical End Times pastor Mike Bickle founded the International House of Prayer in 1999, later renamed IHOPKC, in Kansas City after saying God had told him to do so in a series of prophecies. Former members have referred to it as a cult. Is it? Or is it an organization, with its focus on modern day prophecy,  where cult leaders can easily recruit followers?  In 2012, IHOPKC member Bethany Deato...

Strange and thought provoking episode today! In the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s, animal behavior researcher John B Calhoun ran a number of experiments on rodents regarding how their behavior would be affected by increased urbanization if all their basic needs were made. The results were terrifying. Crowded rats and mice became increasingly violent and lost their reproductive instincts to the point t...

The Pacific War may have been even more brutal than the War in Europe. Imperial Japan had a ferocious fighting force, they despised their enemies unlike even the Nazis, and they arguably tormented locals unlike any conquering army in modern history. The stories of local civilians being raped, tortured and killed en masse are truly disturbing. We also examine disturbing acts committed by the allies...

Another whopper of a topic that could not be more action packed. WW2. Going over the war in Europe today - as much as we can in roughly three hours. The scale of WW2.... so massive.  Over sixty million people died. OVER sixty MILLION. More people killed in less than a decade than all the people killed in two centuries of Mongol invasions. On numerous occasions, over 100,000 people would die in a s...

So much to go over in under three hours! Why are indigenous women on reservations in the US being killed at a rate ten times the national average? Why are indigenous women in Canada being murdered six times as often as other women?  The answer is complex. It goes back to the first Europeans who colonized the New World and the precedents they set for the treatment of native women. And in the US, mu...

On October 25, 2012, NYPD Office Gilberto Valle was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit kidnapping after his estranged wife Kathleen had turned her computer over to the FBI following using spyware and uncovering Gil's sexual obsession with cannibalism. He'd been sharing photos of her and other women with other cannibalism fetishists and writing in graphic detail about how badly he wante...

How much do you know about America's first documented serial killers, The Bloody Harpes? Micajah and Wiley Harpe went on a crazy murder spree out on the western American frontier, starting in late 1798. The murdered men, women, children, and even babies. And they'd been bad, murderous men long before their final year of terror. They'd ran with a gang of river pirates, they'd been members of a Tory...

Today we cover the formation of the infamous Bloods and Crips gang rivalry. How did it get started? Why did it begin in South Central Los Angeles in the late 1960s and early 1970s? The Crips were founded by two high schoolers named Raymond Washington and Stanley “Tookie” Williams, who formed an alliance to protect their neighborhoods from other young people who were harassing them. And then very q...

For four months in 1974, 28 year old Paul John Knowles went on a reckless murder spree across the United States that claimed the lives of at least 18 people. He killed men, women, seniors, and small children. He strangled some, shot others, and stabbed still others. Some crimes were sexual, and some weren't.  The man who had spent more than half his life incarcerated in some form for a variety of...

Is Bayer AG really EVIL? Or have they, like a lot of companies done both really good things - like marketing aspirin and other valuable medicine around the world - and really bad things, like market heroin after they knew it was dangerous, and perform deadly drug experiments on concentration camp victims? Yeah - that last one is real, REAL bad. But - how many corporate hands are truly clean? How m...

The name The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God might not sound familiar, but in the world of cults, it should be. Only one cult in modern history has ever had more people die in its final act, the Peoples Temple's Jonestown Massacre.  778 people died in Uganda in early 2000 - murdered by cult leaders who had failed to correctly predict the day the world would end and the...

Get ready to meet one of my comedy heroes, but only if you can handle a LOT of profanity. George Carlin, following the path of his mentor, Lenny Bruce, kicked the doors of censorship down so people like myself could have careers in comedy, and not worry about being arrested for saying something "obscene."  Today, we learn about the amazing, prolific, inspiring life of George Carlin - how a boy rai...

Ronald Dominique confessed to raping and murdering 23 boys and men between the ages of 16 and 46 between 1997 and 2006 across six Louisiana parishes. When he was caught, investigators were shocked by... how harmless and unintelligent he seemed. How did THIS guy do what he did for so long?  In part, he was able to do what he did because he targeted the poorest members of one of the poorest area of...

Emotional episode today! At least for me.  We examine the Catholic Church's long history of sex scandals, including extremely troublesome recent coverups, how the priesthood came to be, whether or not celibacy is a realistic expectation, how the priesthood may entice pedophiles to join, and so much more. We'll examine the history of the church's views on sexuality. Why did they choose celibacy for...

In June of 2015, 48-year-old Dee Dee Blanchard was murdered in cold blood. Her murderer snuck into her bedroom at night and stabbed her in her sleep... seventeen times. A brutal crime. But, based on how Dee Dee had treated her daughter Gypsy Rose, was her murder justified?  For twenty-three-year-old Gypsy's entire life, her mom had been telling others she was sick. And convincing doctors and other...

Long before German con artist Anna Sorokin aka Anna Delvey captured America's attention thanks to the popular Netflix series, Inventing Anna, another German con artist tricked numerous members of NYC's upper social circles, and caused a lot more harm, including killing one person for sure, and very likely two people: Christian Gerhartsreiter aka Clark Rockefeller. Clark lived well  under various a...

Randy Kraft might just be the most brutal and prolific serial killer you've never heard of.  Convicted of sixteen murders, prosecutors felt they had enough evidence to charge him with forty-five killings. Most now assume he killed at least 67 victims. And he did so horrifically. A true sexual sadist, Randy targeted young men and boys from 1971 to 1983, removing the genitals of many of his victims...

The story of this little known cult is WILD. Was the cult leader, Terri Hoffman, capable of some kind of actual mind control? It honestly feels possible. This New Age guru who spoke of reincarnation, astral planes, transcending the trappings of your Earthly bodies, and fighting "black lords" in other non-physical planes of existence seems to have broken down the minds of numerous followers and pus...

Steve Irwin, better known as the Crocodile Hunter, was a wildlife enthusiast and conservationist, owner of the Australia zoo, and a TV icon loved all over the world. Known for his signature catchphrase, “Crikey!,”  and his classic khaki uniform, and a LOT of personality, Steve Irwin became a household name. A brand, actually. He also seemed like a huge nut to many. More akin to a reckless Circus R...

As a couple, Gerald and Charlene Gallego turned their dark sexual desires  into a murderous rampage that left at least ten young people dead in California, Oregon, and Nevada between 1978 and 1980. Some of these were girls as young as thirteen - barely teenagers - sexually assaulted before being murdered in a remote location. Nine women were raped before being bludgeoned or shot to death… and one...