Just Killing Time

🏰 THE MURDER CASTLE: H.H. Holmes - Myth vs. Reality 💀 🎪 Three miles from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Herman Mudgett built a hotel. The newspapers called it the Murder Castle. The legend says 200 victims. The truth: 9 confirmed deaths. 🔍 TONIGHT WE COVER: 💀 Holmes' real background vs. the mythology 🏨 What he actually built (acid vats were real, "100 rooms" weren't)...

⚡ TESLA: The World's Fair Genius & FBI's Most Secret File ⚡ 🏛️ In 1893, Tesla showed 27 million people wireless power at the Chicago World's Fair. Tonight: his complete story from Croatian village to FBI seizure. 🔬 DISCOVER: ⚡ How Tesla's AC system beat Edison & still powers your home 🥚 The mysterious spinning egg that defied physics 💰 Why he tore up a billion-dol...

🚜🏔️ EPISODE 13 — "THE LAST GREAT AMERICAN MUFFLER SHOP" — The True Story of Marvin Heemeyer, the Killdozer, and the Town of Granby, Colorado 🏔️🚜 🏪 1992. A man named Marvin Heemeyer buys two acres in a small Colorado mountain town for $42,000 and opens a muffler shop. He is, by every account, the best welder in the area. For a few years, things are good. 🔧 Then a concrete plant goes u...

✈️🌲 EPISODE 12 — "SKY KINGS: STOLEN PLANES, BROKEN MINDS, AND THE MAN NAMED BEEBO" 🌲✈️ This episode is dedicated to my father, Fred Harvey — the best father a daughter could ever have. 💙 🛩️ On November 12, 1982, my dad went to work at the Cessna Aircraft Company facility in Wichita, Kansas — and one of his coworkers stole a brand new Citation I jet. The mechanic had no flight training...

💋🌹 EPISODE 11 — "THE PINK PALACE AND THE BLACK HOUSE" — The Life, Death, and Enduring Mysteries of Jayne Mansfield 🌹💋 🚗 At 2:25 a.m. on June 29, 1967, a 1966 Buick Electra slid underneath a tractor-trailer on US Highway 90. The most photographed woman in America died in the front seat. Her boyfriend — who had been publicly cursed by Anton LaVey to die in a car accident within a year...

🚀 EPISODE 10 — "We Choose to Go" — THE SPACE SERIES FINALE 🚀 In 1962, the U.S. military fired nuclear weapons at the sky. They called the operation Fishbowl. Several tests failed mid-flight. After 1962, we never tried again. One year later, Kennedy promised the moon. Tonight, the biggest question this series has been building toward: Did we really go to the moon? Across 140 minutes, I...

🚀🔥 EPISODE 9 — "Babalon Working" — PART 3 OF THE SPACE SERIES 🔥🚀 🎃 Halloween night, 1936. A canyon outside Pasadena, California. A 22-year-old self-taught chemist named Jack Parsons leads a group of Caltech graduate students into a riverbed to test a primitive rocket engine. He calls his team the Suicide Squad. He chose that exact location because he genuinely believed it was a port...

In March 1955, Walt Disney put a former SS officer on prime-time TV — and 42 million Americans believed every word. His name was Wernher von Braun. His war crimes file had been falsified by the U.S. government under Operation Paperclip. And the man holding the microphone — Walt Disney — had been an FBI informant since 1940, a fact only confirmed when his 570-page FBI file was declassified under FO...

In 1945 we hanged the Nazis we caught. Then — quietly, with forged paperwork — we hired the rest. Operation Paperclip brought more than 1,600 German scientists to America after World War II. One of them — Wernher von Braun — wore an SS uniform while 20,000 concentration camp prisoners died building his rockets in a tunnel in Germany. Thirteen years later he was running NASA’s Marshall Space Flight...

For 30 years, the United States government maintained a fully operational secret nuclear bunker beneath the most famous luxury resort in America — and the entire town of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia agreed to pretend it wasn’t there. In Episode 6 of Just Killing Time, we go 720 feet underground into Project Greek Island — a 112,544 square foot Cold War relocation facility built to house ev...

In 1971, a shy folk artist in Louisville, Kentucky began making soft-sculpture dolls she called Doll Babies. She gave them birth certificates. Adoption papers. A personalized letter from the doll itself. She called herself Momma Martha. Her name was Martha Nelson Thomas — and you have almost certainly never heard it. Five years later, a 21-year-old art student from Georgia named Xavier Roberts wal...

Novel reading. Hard study. Laziness. Desertion by husband. Menstrual derangement. Grief. Those are the official, government-recorded reasons human beings were committed to the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane between 1864 and 1889. Not symptoms. Not diagnoses. Reasons. This is the episode where the Angel Makers machine comes into full view. Baby farms needed a supply of infants. Orphan trains...

Between 1854 and 1929, an estimated 200,000 children were loaded onto trains in New York City and shipped west. They were told they were going to new families. What they weren't told was that strangers would be waiting on platforms to look them over — and choose which ones they wanted to take home. They called it charity. They called it saving children. The word "orphan" was a lie t...

Before the Cabbage Patch Kids, there was Amelia Dyer. And she didn't give babies certificates. She gave them white tape — around their necks — and threw them in the Thames. In Part 1 of the Angel Makers series, we go back to where it all started: Victorian England, where baby farming was legal, advertised in major newspapers, and almost entirely ignored by the government for decades. We'...

On July 30, 1990, nine-year-old Nancy Shoemaker walked a block and a half from her home in south Wichita, Kansas to get her sick baby brother a 7-Up. She never came home. In the premiere episode of Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton, host Elizabeth Stanton — a Derby, Kansas native who grew up 12 miles from this case — tells the full story of Nancy's kidnapping and murder: the two killer...