Timesuck with Dan Cummins

You'll be hard pressed to find a man who stood for his convictions more firmly than John Brown. John was an white abolitionist willing to do more to end slavery than any other man - of any color - in America in the 1850s. It wasn't enough for John to speak out against slavery, or to help freed slaves find freedom through the Underground Railroad. John felt that if slaveowners weren't willing to im...

Philadelphia's Holmesburg prison, before it was officially shut down in 1995, had been a house of horrors for much of its history. In addition to being grossly overcrowded and its prisoners being subjected to sometimes lethal abuse by prison officials... for over two decades - from 1951 to 1974, Dr. Albert Kligman performed wildly unethical medical experiments on its prisoners. Inmates were burned...

Did you know that women's clitoral orgasms have the power to completely transform the world and turn it into a blissful nirvana free from pain and suffering? They don't, but, that's essentially what OneTaste founder Nicole Daedone preached at one point before she went to jail. For years, she put on clinics based around male attendees stroking female attendees clitorises in a very specific way desi...

Patricia Douglas was a young dancer and an extra working in Hollywood during its so-called Golden Era when she was tricked into attending a party Tinseltown's most powerful studio, MGM, was throwing for the salesmen who were making it rich on May 5th, 1937. At this party, she was dragged into the parking lot and brutally raped by one on of those salesmen. The studio would bury her assault... but d...

Eric Edgar Cooke, nicknamed the Night Caller and the Nedlands Monster, was a serial killer who terrorized Perth, Australia from 1958 to 1963. He was incredibly hard to catch, because his MO was to not have an MO. Sometimes he ran over women in a stolen car. Sometimes he shot women. Sometimes he shot men. Sometimes his crimes were sexually motivated, other times purely opportunistic. He attacked on...

From 1932 to 1972, six hundred poor, black sharecroppers in Alabama were told they were being treated for "bad blood," when in reality, the US government was conducting an experiment on how untreated syphilis affected their bodies, a study that was supposed to keep going until every participant was dead. A study that would've kept going, had a whistleblower not exposed it.  Merch and more: www.bad...

On June 18th, 2023,  a deep-sea submersible called The Titan operated by the private company OceanGate mysteriously vanished while its CEO piloted four passengers who had paid $250,000 each to visit the wreckage of the RMS Titanic. When it was revealed that all aboard had died when the submersible imploded, the accident was reported as an unfortunate tragedy. And it was. But later, it would be rev...

In the 1930s, an association of primarily Italian mafiosos and Jewish organized crime gangsters, based in Brooklyn, was formed for the purpose of putting distance between the underworld figures ordering hits, and the people carrying out those executions. This organization would come to be known as, Murder Incorporated. And this is their insanely violent story, loaded with crazy characters and thei...

Did you know that US government is engaged in efforts to close stargates to other dimensions? Did you know that they engage in weather modification? Or that Arizona is part of Africa? Or that NBA players are synthetic robots and that we've all been inserted with nanobots at birth that keep us from being perfect? You would if you went to the right UNIVERSITY!! This is a fun one. Let's get weird.  M...

In the summer of 1968, two young children, both under the age of five, turned up dead in Scotswood, a run down neighborhood of primarily government housing in the industrial English city of Newcastle upon Tyne. Initially, the first boy's death had been ruled an accident. But when the second died... they knew he had been strangled. And the coroner felt another child had been the one to do it. Sadly...

Ever heard the name Mike DeBardeleben? I hadn't either until very recently. This guy was something else. A prolific counterfeiter the Secret Service spent many years chasing. Also someone who kidnapped bank exec's wives and successfully held them for ransom. He also kidnapped and sexually assaulted numerous young women. And pulled off armed robberies. And randomly murdered some realtors. If it hur...

Do you recognize the name, Owsley Stanley? If you're not a devoted Dead Head, probably not. But he's the guy who met the Dead when they had just formed, supplied them with LSD, and helped them form their psychedelic, jam band sound. He also supplied LSD to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of others hippies. It was his LSD that would truly fuel the counterculture movement of the late 1960s. T...

Issei Sagawa aka the Kobe Cannibal, made a living for most of his life off of the infamy he attained... for murdering and then eating a young Dutch woman in 1981, when Issei was thirty-two years-old. Why didn't he spend the rest of his life in prison? And why did he want to eat her in the first place?  For Merch and everything else Bad Magic related, head to: https://www.badmagicproductions.com Ho...

Do you believe that all non-vegans should die? In part for their needless murder of senseless people like.... cows? And in part because their predatory, cruel, EVIL behavior is providing a model for a future AI program to treat humans like a mindless food source once it inevitably takes over the world? If so... you'd make a good Zizian! This is a weird one.  Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions...

This week we cover the life and crimes of the most prolific serial killer in US history, Samuel Little. A monster the LAPD once dubbed "The Choke and Stroke Killer." Before he died in 2020 at the age of 80, he confessed to 93 murders. And the FBI have confirmed 62 of those murders and counting. Who was this guy? And how did he keep getting away with murders across America for over three decades? ...

Did you ever watch the Staircase docu-series on Netflix? Or the 2022 HBO MAX adaptation? I watched both, and still wanted to learn more about the divisive trial over the murder of Kathleen Peterson. Did her husband Michael kill her? Or was he railroaded by a justice system that held a grudge against him? Or, did Michael kill not only Kathleen, but also a woman in Germany years earlier? And did he...

In the 1960s, Natalie Wood was one of the world's leading actress, her star shining as bright as Elizabeth Taylor's. She'd been acting since she was a small child, appearing in movies like Miracle on 34th Street. She'd starred opposite James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, and she'd been linked romantically to Warren Beatty, Michael Caine, Elvis Presley, and Dennis Hopper. And her husband, actor Ro...

The Bone Wars, also known as the Great Dinosaur Rush, is what a period of intense fossil hunting in the late 19th century came to be called, thanks primarily to the intense and bitter rivalry between two of America's most prominent early paleontologists, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. These two men, who started out as friends, would end up destroying each other's and their own live...

Have you ever heard of La Luz Del Mundo? a.k.a., LLDM? a.k.a., The Church of the Living God, Pillar and Support of Truth The Light of the World? Naasón Joaquín García, the leader of this church based in Guadalajara, Mexico (that some estimates claim has up to seven million members worldwide) is currently in prison after being found guilty of three counts of the sexual abuse of minors. And he is aw...

Remember when a bunch of dogs saved hundreds of human’s lives in Alaska a century ago? In January of 1925, diphtheria, a deadly disease, swept through the village Nome, Alaska… killing multiple children. The town was frozen in for the winter. No roads in or out. No ships able to break through the ice in the sea around it. No planes able to fly through a winter so cold, temperatures on the ground w...

Ever heard of Gary Heidnik? Pop culture wise, he's made a much bigger impact than most murderers, but few seem to know his story. This literal genius, who was also schizophrenic, joined the army, became a nurse, made hundreds of thousands of dollars in the stock market, crushed whatever college courses he took, formed his own successful church, and dug out a pit in his basement to store women he'd...

You've undoubtably heard of Dr. Seuss. The author of The Cat in the Hat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Green Eggs and Ham, Horton Hears a Who! The Lorax, and so many other classic works of children's literature. But... how much do you know about Ted Geisel? Ted is the man behind the pseudonym, and he lived a very interesting life. And he wasn't able to make a living as the author of children's...

Would you choose to have an identical twin? Someone who looked so much like you, that even your own mother couldn’t always tell the two of you apart?  Someone whom friends and even lovers couldn’t distinguish you from? Someone who experienced the world in a way so similar to your own, that no one else could ever possibly be able to relate to you quite like they could. Could be fun! But as you'll s...

Today we talk about moral panics. Specifically, the "Video Nasty" moral panic that happened in the UK in the early 1980s, and then again in the 1990s, when there was widespread fear that by kids watching horror movies with titles like Cannibal Holocaust, Flesh for Frankenstein, I Spit on Your Grave, and The Last House on the Left, they would literally be turned into rapists and killers. Was there...

Pee Wee Gaskin's diminutive size of 5'2" tall and 130 pounds soaking wet didn't stop him from brutally killing at least eleven people, and possibly up to 105. The South Carolina serial killer murdered for a lot of reasons: revenge and personal vendettas, fits of rage, but mostly to satisfy a deep-rooted urge to rape, torture, and kill young women.  An urge Pee Wee called, his "bothersomeness.”  Me...