Elias

Most of them looked perfectly ordinary

[Elias @eliasholls]

At 8 months old, a doctor burned David Reimer's penis off with an electric needle during a routine circumcision. At 22 months, surgeons removed his testicles and his parents renamed him Brenda. Then the psychologist running the experiment started making him and his identical twin brother strip and

It was 1966 in Winnipeg, Canada. His mother remembers the doctor walking in and saying, "The penis is burnt." A couple of days later she saw her baby, and it looked "like a piece of heavy string, burnt right up to the crotch."

The parents had seen Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins on TV, telling the world that any boy could be raised as a girl. For Money a pair of identical twins was the perfect experiment, one raised as a boy and the other as a girl, and through the 1970s he published the case as a success under the name "John/Joan."

According to the twins and the author John Colapinto, at their yearly visits Money had them rehearse sex positions on each other, David on all fours and Brian behind him, and photographed them naked. At school David was called "cavewoman" and thrown out of the bathrooms, and as a teenager he told his parents he would kill himself if they took him back to Money.

At 14 they finally told him the truth. He said it was a relief, because he'd thought he was going crazy. He went back to being David, had the breasts the hormones gave him removed, spent years in surgery, married and raised his wife's three kids.

In the video below, David on 60 Minutes in 2000, and his mother on the day the doctor came out.

Two years after that interview Brian died of an overdose. Two years after that, in May 2004, David took his own life at 38. Money died in 2006 and never publicly admitted he was wrong.

His parents did everything the most famous expert in the field told them to. Are they victims too, or should they have seen it?

[Elias @eliasholls]

At 14, Joshua Phillips beat his 8-year-old neighbor Maddie Clifton with a baseball bat, stabbed her at least nine times and stuffed her inside the frame of his waterbed. He kept her there for a week, in his own bedroom, while his own parents joined the search for

the little girl from across the street. His mother handed out flyers with Maddie's smiling face. A police sergeant who came to the house the day before she was found talked to Joshua in that same bedroom, and remembers that "he sat on the bed, petting his dog." He called him "cool as a cucumber."

On the morning of November 10, 1998, his mother noticed fluid seeping from under his waterbed and a smell in his room. She pulled back the corner of the bed frame and saw two small feet in white socks, then ran into the street crying and flagged down officers. Detectives found air fresheners, rolls of tape and a bat hidden behind his dresser. Police had already searched that house three times, and the sheriff said they missed her "because of the way she was encased in the bed."

He told police it started as an accident. He hit her with a ball while they played, she wouldn't stop crying, and he panicked because he was afraid of his father, who he says was abusive. At his 2017 resentencing, prosecutors told the court he had been sexually aroused when he killed her.

In the video below, the night of his arrest on Jacksonville TV in 1998, and the moment in 2017 when he reads Maddie's family an apology in court.

He was tried as an adult and got life without parole in 1999. After the Supreme Court ruled against automatic life sentences for kids, he got a new hearing in 2017 and got life again, this time with a review after 25 years. In court he cried and said, "I had no clue what life meant, what death meant." Maddie's sister told him, "When you took my best friend, I lost my childhood too." In May 2026, at 42, he withdrew his request for a sentence review, saying he needs more time to prove he has changed.

Should a man who did this at 14 ever walk free, or is Maddie's mother right that "Maddie didn't get a second chance"?

[Elias @eliasholls]

From 20 months old until she was 13, Genie Wiley's father kept her harnessed naked to a potty seat in a small closed room near Los Angeles, and at night he straitjacketed her into a crib with a wire-mesh cover. He beat her whenever she made a sound. He never spoke to her, only growled and barked at her. Years later a researcher asked her on tape what she

Genie isn't her real first name. Scientists gave her that name to protect her. Her mother was nearly blind, and her older brother, terrified of their father, fed her baby food, cereal and milk without saying a word to her, because those were his father's rules.

On November 4, 1970, she was admitted to Children's Hospital Los Angeles, unable to speak and barely able to walk. Her father took his own life before he had to appear in court.

Then the scientists came. A government grant paid a team of psychologists and linguists to find out whether a child who had grown up without language could still learn it, and the lead researcher and his wife took her into their home. On their film she points at things, jumps when she's told to and says, "Dead father. Father dead." When Marilyn Rigler tells her, "Your father is not living," she asks, "Not living?" Then Marilyn asks what she sat on when she ate her cereal at home. "In the potty chair," Genie answers, and when Marilyn asks where she slept, the answer is the same: "Potty chair."

In 1974 the money was cut off. In 1975 she went back to her mother, who couldn't care for her, and then into one placement after another where, as a ward of the state, she was abused again and lost much of the language she had learned. In 2008 ABC News reported that she was 51, in her sixth placement and speechless again.

In the video below, Genie on the researchers' own film, the linguist who worked with her, and her brother John in 2008: "I would expect a lot more from my parents than what they gave me."

Was the study the first time anyone really helped Genie, or just one more room she was kept in, this time for science?

[Elias @eliasholls]

@JPS1479049 new york doesn't have it. the judge gave him the max, 25 to life, then an appeals court cut it to 18

[Elias @eliasholls]

At 16, Dylan Schumaker was babysitting his girlfriend's two baby boys when 23-month-old Austin wouldn't stop crying during a diaper change, so he pushed a pillow over his face and hit him in the head three times. Austin died four days before his second birthday. At his sentencing Dylan sobbed, "I would give my life for Austin," and then the judge read out

Their mother was at work that day, March 19, 2013, in Springville, New York, and the younger boy was only 3 months old. Austin was found unresponsive and died of blunt force trauma. The judge later said that while Dylan was watching the boys that day, he was texting about buying drugs and chatting with his girlfriend.

At his first court date Dylan wept, looked over at his own mother and told her he was sorry and he loved her, and outside the courthouse he blurted out, "Mind your own business." His sister told a TV station he had simply snapped after two kids were "dumped on him."

His lawyer asked for manslaughter, which meant up to 15 years, and blamed his anger and his "inexperience in babysitting." In December 2013 the jury convicted him of second-degree murder. On January 10, 2014, he started crying before he even sat down: "I didn't mean to kill Austin. I can't take back what was done. I wish I could."

Then Judge M. William Boller read from a phone call Dylan made to his mother from the holding center on July 23, 2013: "I am a 16-year-old blonde. Probably all I have to do is cry in front of the jury and they're going to feel sorry for me." The judge called him a manipulator and a deceiver and gave him the maximum, 25 years to life, while Austin's mother sobbed every time Dylan spoke.

In the video below, Dylan crying at his first hearing, "mind your own business" on the courthouse steps, the tears at sentencing and the judge reading out the call.

In 2016 an appeals court cut his sentence to 18 years to life, citing his age and the lack of guidance from his parents.

Were his tears real, or was he doing exactly what he told his mother he would?

[Elias @eliasholls]

@HuwhitePrussian their mom was at work. his own sister said afterwards the two babies got "dumped on him"

[Elias @eliasholls]

@0x_gaavi @grok no movie that i know of but theres the book as nature made him by john colapinto, thats where most of this came out

[Elias @eliasholls]

At 8 months old, a doctor burned David Reimer's penis off with an electric needle during a routine circumcision. At 22 months, surgeons removed his testicles and his parents renamed him Brenda. Then the psychologist running the experiment started making him and his identical twin brother strip and

It was 1966 in Winnipeg, Canada. His mother remembers the doctor walking in and saying, "The penis is burnt." A couple of days later she saw her baby, and it looked "like a piece of heavy string, burnt right up to the crotch."

The parents had seen Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins on TV, telling the world that any boy could be raised as a girl. For Money a pair of identical twins was the perfect experiment, one raised as a boy and the other as a girl, and through the 1970s he published the case as a success under the name "John/Joan."

According to the twins and the author John Colapinto, at their yearly visits Money had them rehearse sex positions on each other, David on all fours and Brian behind him, and photographed them naked. At school David was called "cavewoman" and thrown out of the bathrooms, and as a teenager he told his parents he would kill himself if they took him back to Money.

At 14 they finally told him the truth. He said it was a relief, because he'd thought he was going crazy. He went back to being David, had the breasts the hormones gave him removed, spent years in surgery, married and raised his wife's three kids.

In the video below, David on 60 Minutes in 2000, and his mother on the day the doctor came out.

Two years after that interview Brian died of an overdose. Two years after that, in May 2004, David took his own life at 38. Money died in 2006 and never publicly admitted he was wrong.

His parents did everything the most famous expert in the field told them to. Are they victims too, or should they have seen it?

[Elias @eliasholls]

@EricHimes23 brian overdosed in 2002, he'd been diagnosed schizophrenic by then. david was 2 years after

[Elias @eliasholls]

@DrLeachman and for like 20 years it was in textbooks as proof it works. truth only came out in 97

[Elias @eliasholls]

@rita67581607 australia hasnt executed anyone since 1967, the worst he could get was life and testifying got him the version with parole

[Elias @eliasholls]

James Vlassakis was 18 when he helped kill his own half-brother, one of four murders he admitted to in Australia's "bodies in the barrels" case. On October 8 he walked out of an Adelaide prison centre, because testifying against the others bought him a shorter sentence.

In May 1999 police opened the vault of an old bank in the small town of Snowtown and found eight bodies in barrels of acid. Ringleader John Bunting, his friend Robert Wagner and their circle had killed 11 people in Adelaide's northern suburbs during the 1990s, and Vlassakis was the youngest of them.

Bunting was his mother's partner, and the papers describe a teenager groomed into the group's violence. The half-brother he helped kill, 21-year-old Troy Youde, was a man Vlassakis said had sexually abused him as a child. He also pleaded guilty to the murders of Fred Brooks, Gary O'Dwyer and David Johnson.

He was the only one of them to plead guilty, and he became the prosecution's key witness. Bunting and Wagner got life without parole. In 2001 Vlassakis got life with a 26-year non-parole period, backdated to his arrest.

When that period ran out, the Parole Board said yes. The South Australian government tried to block it and lost in September, and in May a court lifted the order that had hidden his face for 25 years. He is believed to be the first serial killer in Australia to be paroled.

In the video below, the news footage from Snowtown and the morning he was filmed leaving the centre.

He can't contact the victims' families, there are places he isn't allowed to go, and he's on a curfew. The nephew of one victim said seeing him out in public gave him "flashbacks."

He gave up the men who did the worst of it. Should that buy a serial killer his freedom?

[Elias @eliasholls]

@WotDog93 they didn't, he died in a hospital in valledupar in 2023 still serving. the scary part is the law said he could've walked

[Elias @eliasholls]

Luis Garavito, "the Beast," killed at least 189 Colombian children and kept a diary of each date, place and age. In 2016 he told a reporter he'd be out in eight years. "Killing 200 children comes very cheap," the reporter said. "For what I did, very little," he replied.

For years he moved around Colombia posing as a monk, a street vendor or a homeless man to get close to his victims, and investigators say he could change who he was from one day to the next. He confessed in 1999, and the courts handed him sentences that added up to 1,853 years and 9 days.

Colombian law capped that at 40, and then he started helping prosecutors. An investigator in Pereira says he drew the spots step by step, "as if he had a GPS," and they found remains without him there. A senator said that cooperation brought his 40 years down to 24.

So by the time Spanish reporter Jon Sistiaga sat down with him in Valledupar prison, Garavito was 60 and counting. The investigator told Sistiaga there is no life sentence in Colombia, and when asked if Garavito could kill again if he got out, he said yes.

He asked for parole in 2021 and was denied, tried again in 2023 and was refused, and died in custody that October.

In the video below, Sistiaga asks him if he should be afraid, when he's getting out, and whether the price was fair. When the interview ended and the guards cuffed him again, Sistiaga says Garavito smiled and sent regards to his children.

Families found their children's remains because of that deal. Was it worth it, or should a man like this never have been offered a single day off?

[Elias @eliasholls]

17-year-old Carla Walker was taken from her boyfriend's car after a Valentine's dance in 1974 and found strangled three days later. Police questioned her killer that year and let him go after he passed a polygraph. He lived less than a mile away for the next 46 years.

Her boyfriend Rodney McCoy was beaten with a pistol in the front seat. Her brother Jim was 12, and he went with his parents to the morgue, where he still remembers his mother's scream: "It was like an animal sound." Their father died in 1987 and their mother in 2015, and neither of them ever learned who did it.

Glen McCurley owned a .22 Ruger that matched the magazine left at the scene. He told police it had been stolen from his truck, passed the polygraph and went home, and after the murder he bought a new magazine for the gun he said was stolen. In 2020 a genealogy lab gave detectives his last name, officers pulled a McDonald's straw out of his trash, and the DNA matched what was on Carla's bra.

When detectives came to his house he was 77 and joked with them at the door. "You sure got the wrong fellow, cuz I ain't never killed nobody." When he tried to give himself an alibi, his wife cut in: "That's not true, Glen." In the interview room he said he had never seen her, never met her, never talked to her, and then they asked him how he killed her.

In the video below, the bodycam at his door and the interview room, with Jim talking about his sister.

In August 2021, on the third day of his trial, he changed his plea to guilty and got life. He died in prison in 2023, at 80.

Police had his gun and his name in 1974. Did a polygraph let a killer walk, or did they just stop looking?

[Elias @eliasholls]

At 7, Isaac Rogers says Wayne Williams stepped from behind a wall and blocked him on an Atlanta stairwell. His 16-year-old brother vanished after walking him to the school bus. Williams was never tried for a single child, and police closed many of those cases anyway.

Between 1979 and 1981 the official list grew to 30 names. Almost all of them were Black children and young men between 7 and 28, and 29 of them were dead. Patrick Rogers was found in the Chattahoochee River on December 7, 1980.

On February 27, 1982, a jury convicted Williams of killing two grown men, 21-year-old Jimmy Ray Payne and 27-year-old Nathaniel Cater, and the sentence was two life terms. After the verdict police attributed other deaths to him and closed many of those files, even though no jury had ever ruled on them.

Some of the mothers never accepted it. Camille Bell, whose son Yusef was killed, told CNN, "Even if it takes 30 trials, I don't care." Catherine Leach, whose son Curtis Walker was killed, said, "Wayne Williams didn't kill our children. No! And we want justice."

In 2019 Atlanta reopened the evidence, and by 2021 officials said they had gone through about 40% of it. No public result has settled the case.

In the video below Williams explains what he meant by "drop shot," the same words he was reminded he'd used for poor Black children. Then Isaac Rogers describes that stairwell, and he says he doesn't know about all the victims but he is sure about his brother.

Williams still says he didn't kill anybody. His next parole review is in November 2027.

Did Atlanta catch the man who killed its children, or did it just close the file on them?

[Elias @eliasholls]

@Twins030671 and in 2006 he went on tv saying he wanted to get into congress to protect abandoned kids

[Elias @eliasholls]

Richard Chase, "the Vampire of Sacramento," killed a pregnant woman in her home and drank her blood out of a yogurt cup. Four days later he killed a mother, her 6-year-old son, a family friend and a 22-month-old baby, then cut off the baby's head.

More than a year before the first murder, a worker at the psychiatric home where Chase lived told his superiors that Chase was killing small animals and birds and drinking their blood, and that he would "graduate to larger animals and eventually to people." The staff called him Dracula. In September 1976 he was released to his mother anyway. "We all raised hell about it, but it didn't do any good," a staff member later told FBI profiler Robert Ressler.

His first victim, on December 29, 1977, was a man shot while unloading groceries outside his home. The pregnant woman was Teresa Wallin, 22. The baby was Evelyn Miroth's nephew David, and his body was found two months later. Six people in four weeks.

When police searched his apartment they found blenders with blood in them and a calendar with the word "Today" written on the dates of the murders and on 44 other days.

In the video below, Chase sits on the witness stand at his 1979 trial while that hospital worker describes what he warned about, then the judge explains why the baby's murder alone was enough for the death penalty.

Chase told an FBI profiler that Nazis and UFOs were poisoning him and turning his blood to powder. The jury convicted him of six murders and found him legally sane. In December 1980, on death row, he saved up his prescribed pills and swallowed them all at once.

Was Richard Chase too sick to be put to death, or did the jury get it exactly right?

[Elias @eliasholls]

@0xsonl and they actually had chikatilo in 1984, knife and rope in his bag. let him go over a blood type

[Elias @eliasholls]

Andrei Chikatilo, "the Butcher of Rostov," murdered 52 women and children and was sentenced to death from an iron cage. His first victim, he confessed, was a 9-year-old girl he lured to a secret shack with chewing gum. The Soviet Union had already shot another man for her murder.

On December 22, 1978, in the mining town of Shakhty, he stabbed Lena Zakotnova three times in the stomach and strangled her, and two days later she was found in the Grushevka River. Police had blood in the snow by his shack and a witness who described a man just like him talking to Lena at the bus stop. Neighbors had even seen him at the shack that evening.

They arrested Aleksandr Kravchenko instead, a 25-year-old laborer who at 17 had raped and murdered a 10-year-old girl. He had an alibi, home all afternoon with his wife and her friend, until police told the wife she'd be charged as an accomplice and the friend with perjury. Both changed their stories, and Kravchenko confessed, then took it back at trial.

He got death, then 15 years on appeal, then death again after the girl's family pushed for a retrial, and he was shot in July 1983, while Chikatilo went on killing until 1990.

In the video below, Chikatilo sits in the cage at his 1992 trial while the victims' mothers scream at him from the benches. Then the judge reads out his death sentence and asks if it's clear to him. "Clear," he says.

Chikatilo confessed to killing Lena and was convicted of it. In 1993 Russia's Supreme Court threw that count out for lack of evidence, and Kravchenko was cleared after his death. Officially, nobody killed Lena Zakotnova.

Was Kravchenko an innocent man the state murdered, or a child killer who got what he had coming anyway?

[Elias @eliasholls]

@Darren12006774 fair, guralnick did the homework. adding dream boogie to the list, thanks

[Elias @eliasholls]

Sam Cooke was shot dead by a motel manager in Los Angeles in December 1964, and five days later a coroner's jury ruled it justifiable homicide. The only witnesses were the woman who pulled the trigger and the woman who had run off with his clothes.

He was 33 and one of the biggest Black stars in America, the voice of "You Send Me" and "Wonderful World," and he ran his own record label. "A Change Is Gonna Come" came out after he was gone.

That night he drove a woman named Elisa Boyer to the Hacienda Motel on South Figueroa Street. She told police he took her there against her will and tried to force himself on her, so when he went into the bathroom she ran, grabbing his clothes on the way out.

Cooke went looking for her in a sport jacket and one shoe. The manager, Bertha Franklin, said he broke into her office and grabbed her, so she shot him. By her account he said "Lady, you shot me," kept coming, and she hit him with a broomstick until he went down.

In the video below Cooke sits with Dick Clark eight months earlier and says the best thing that could happen to him would be hits for the young singers he works with. "I will knock on wood," he laughs. Then the coroner's report, and the pathologist Cyril Wecht walking through Franklin's version.

Police found $108 in a money clip in his Ferrari. Muhammad Ali, his close friend, said that if Cooke had been Frank Sinatra, the Beatles or Ricky Nelson, "the FBI would be investigating." Etta James saw his body before the funeral and wrote that "no woman with a broomstick could have inflicted that kind of beating against a strong, full-grown man."

Was it self-defense in a cheap motel, or a story a jury signed off on in five days?