Timesuck with Dan Cummins

Liar, liar, pants on fire. Wow! I have never read about someone who told lies - big lies - more often and consistently than Casey Anthony. On July 5, 2011, a Florida jury found Casey Anthony “not guilty” of counts one through three regarding first-degree murder, aggravated manslaughter of a child, and aggravated child abuse. However, many people, including myself, think she definitely killed her y...

Ted Kaczynski, aka "The Unabomber", is an American domestic terrorist who conducted a seventeen-plus-year series of attacks, using mail bombs to target academics, business executives, and others. This mathematical genius wanted to destroy man's dependence on technology. Luckily, he failed miserably. The Unabomber bombing campaign killed three people and injured 23, starting in the late 1970s and l...

South American serial killer Pedro "Monster of the Andes" Lopez was convicted of killing 110 girls in Ecuador in 1983. He claimed to have killed roughly 350 between Ecuador, Peru, and his native Columbia. He spent only fourteen years in prison for those 110 Ecuadorian murders and then another three years in a Columbian psychiatric ward for additional murder conviction in that country, and then he...

Should we banish pedophiles to an actual island? That's essentially what Washington state has been doing since 1990 with the Special Commitment Center for sexually violent offenders deemed to be at a high risk to re-offend. McNeil Island is about two miles off the coast of Tacoma and has about 240 dangerous sexual predators living on it. If we're not gonna put these people on an island, what shoul...

The Black Panthers! A very controversial civil rights group originating in Oakland, California in 1966. Formed by young revolutionaries Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in response to police brutality that become commonplace in Oakland. Based on the teachings of black nationalist Malcom X, the Black Panthers became a national organization that aggressively sought social justice for black Americans. The...

The Black Death killed between 25 and 75 million people in Europe alone in just over five years! This terrifying outbreak of the plague killed roughly 1/3 of the entire world’s population, dropping it from an estimated 450 million down to around 350 million. It's been labeled by various historians as The Greatest Catastrophe Ever. And we explore it's spread, how it killed you, who it killed, how i...

The Mothman is a strange creature reportedly witnessed mainly in the Point Pleasant area of West Virginia between November 12, 1966, and December 1967. It’s described as a winged, man-sized creature with large reflective red eyes and large moth-like wings. Sometimes it appeared to have no head, with its eyes set into its chest. Was it real? Is it just folklore? Did anything strange roam the West V...

Born on December 18, 1948, in Burbank, California, Edmund Kemper, at age 15, killed both his grandparents to "see what it felt like." He turned himself in and was sentenced to a state mental healthy facility where this killer with a genius level IQ manipulated psychiatrists into thinking he was cured. The 6'9" 280lb murderer almost immediately began a gruesome murder and necrophilia spree. One of...

Whopper of a tale for you today. Battles, incest, murder, betrayal, and more! Born in 69 BCE, Cleopatra VII was part of the Macedonian dynasty that took over rule of Egypt in the late 4th century B.C. A dynasty full of a PREPOSTEROUS amount of incest and murder. SO much. During her reign, she forged political alliances and became romantically involved with Roman military leaders Julius Caesar and...

November 24th, 1971. The day before Thanksgiving. Dan Cooper, also known as DB Cooper, shows up at the Portland, Oregon airport looking like your average business traveler. Over the next few hours, he pulled off the most mysterious airplane hijacking in US aviation history. He took $200,000 in ransom money from the FBI, jumped out of a plane and disappeared into the thick forests of the Pacific No...

Happy New Year's Eve! We take a look back at 2018 and a look forward to 2019 today on Timesuck. We also find more inspiration in the tales of Nick Vujicic and Bethany Hamilton. Nick was born with Tetra-amelia syndrome - a rare disorder characterized by the absence of arms and legs. But he hasn't let that stop him from learning to skateboard, surf, swim, "walk", and even jump. He's incredible! And...

Malvika Iyer had both her hands blown off by a grenade when she was thirteen years-old. The blast also turned her legs into a mangled mass of blood and bone. Alex Lewis lost both legs, both arms, and part of his face to a savage and rare infection. And both of them swear their lives are now better than they were before. What would you do if something that tragic happened to you? Would you give up?...

Three young girls were kidnapped, raped, and strangled to death near Rochester, NY in the early 70s. Carmen Colon, Michelle Maenza, and Wanda Walkowicz. Their crimes became referred to as the Alphabet Murders or the Double Initial Killings due to the first letter in their first name matching the first letter in their last name. No one has ever been caught but there are a variety of disturbing susp...

Harriet Tubman! One of the most important conductors on the Underground Railroad. A brave, inspirational human being who escaped slavery in Maryland and ran to freedom in Pennsylvania in 1849 and then spent years helping hundreds of others do the same. She also helped the Union Army during the Civil War - working as a spy and nurse among other roles. After the Civil War ended, Tubman dedicated her...

Founded by Scottish immigrant Allan Pinkerton, Chicago’s first police detective, in 1850, the Pinkerton Agency quickly became one of the most important crime detection and law enforcement groups in the United States. The pioneered the concepts of undercover work, criminal surveillance, and building an actual criminal database. The Pinkertons performed many of the same duties now regularly assigned...

The Hatfields and the McCoys repeatedly attacked one another in the rural Tug River Valley separating West Virginia and Kentucky for over a decade in the late 19th century. Two patriarchs - Devil Anse Hatfield and Ol’ Randall McCoy - let their hatred of one another infect first their entire families and then an entire region of the country. Governor pitted against governor. West Virginia versus Ke...

The Federal Reserve Act. The Bilderbergers. The Freemasons, Wall Street, and the Council on Foreign Relations. The National Security Act of 1947. Area 51. The Trilateral Commission. Agenda 21. The Greys! The Reptilians! The Protocols of Zion! The Denver Airport! Are they all pieces of a much larger, sinister puzzle? And, if not, why do so many people think they are? The origins of the New World Or...

It's the 100th anniversary of WW1! The Great War. The War of Nations. The War to End All Wars. If only that were true. What a war it was! It was a war unlike any other fought in the long history of Europe. New technology - tanks, flamethrowers, fighter jets, poison gas, and more. And it was unprecedented in scope - over 65 million troops would be mobilized over the course of the four years. Over 6...

Did Russian Scientists seal five prisoners in an airtight chamber and dosed them with an experimental stimulant gas to test the effects of prolonged sleep deprivation in the 1940s? Did these prisoners lose their minds, scream until they'd torn their vocal chords, start eating their own flesh, attack guards who tried to release them, and die soon after the gas was turned off? Or, is this just an ur...

The "true" horror stories of Ed and Lorraine Warren have turned into more than a billion dollars worth of scares at the box office between The Conjuring, The Conjuring 2, Annabelle, and Annabelle: Creation. Today, we take a look at the real tales behind the Hollywood creations and also dig into the lives of the "demonologists" who swore all of these hauntings have been all too real. Happy Hallowee...

On February 29th, 2000, in the small, rugged town of Aberdeen, Australia, forty-five year old mother and grandmother Katherine Knight stabbed her live-in boyfriend thirty-seven times. Then, after showering, changing, and withdrawing $1,000 out of his checking account from a local ATM, she skinned him, hung his skin up on a meat hook, and cooked up various parts of his body with the intention of fe...

Alexander Pichushkin insisted he’d killed sixty-three people after being apprehended in 2006 but authorities only had enough evidence to convict him of forty-eight murders. The bodies of other victims had vanished. He killed his first victim in 1992 and didn’t get caught until 2006. Not only was he not remorseful, he was proud. He was disappointed that he wasn’t convicted of killing more people th...

During an oppressive heat wave in August 1892, prominent Fall River residents Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally murdered in their home; each dealt multiple and savage blows to their heads with a hatchet. Were they killed by Andrew's strange, thirty-two year-old daughter? A lot of evidence points to her being the killer. But, she was acquitted. I for one, think Lizzie was probably guilty. But wi...

In 1587, Englishman John White led a group of 118 colonists to what was supposed to Roanoke Island. One hundred fifteen of those colonists were never seen again after White returned to England to get word to Sir Walter Raleigh that the colonists desperately needed supplies. On August 18th, 1590, John White returned to Roanoke three years after leaving to get those supplies and found the settlement...

Andrew Jackson. Seventh president of the United States. First president born to immigrant parents. Only president to serve in both the American Revolution and the War of 1812. First president to be a resident of a state other than Massachusetts or Virginia. A hard-nosed son of Scotch-Irish immigrants who was quick to throw down in a duel. He fought in the Revolutionary War at the age of 13 and the...