Ricky

what the actual f*ck. In 1978 a serial killer went on The Dating Game, smiled into the camera, and won. He had already killed at least five women, and he'd kill again within a year. The only person who saw it was the woman who picked him. She refused to go on the date. She said he was creepy. That's him in the video, introduced as a "successful photographer" who likes skydiving. Asked about his best time of day, he says nighttime, "because that's the only time there is." The audience laughs. Rodney Alcala was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder by an Army psychiatrist when he was 21, with an estimated IQ of 135. In 1968 he lured an 8-year-old girl into his Hollywood apartment and beat her with a steel bar. She spent 32 days in a coma. He ran, enrolled at NYU under a fake name, and took a job as a counselor at a children's arts camp in New Hampshire, where two campers recognized him from an FBI poster at the post office. He served 34 months. By the time he sat down on that stage, he had strangled a flight attendant in Manhattan and killed four more women in New York and Los Angeles. The host, the crew and the audience had no idea. A fellow bachelor later called him "a standout creepy guy in my life." Cheryl Bradshaw picked him anyway, then said no to the date. Nine months later, 12-year-old Robin Samsoe disappeared riding a borrowed bike to ballet class in Huntington Beach. Her friends said a stranger on the beach had asked to take their pictures. A police sketch went out, and Alcala's own parole officer recognized him. He was sentenced to death in 1980. The verdict was overturned. He was sentenced to death again in 1986. Overturned again. In 2010, at his third trial, he fired his lawyers and defended himself. He took the stand and for five hours asked himself questions, calling himself "Mr. Alcala" in a deeper voice, then answered them. He showed the jury his own Dating Game clip. In his closing he played "Alice's Restaurant." The jury took less than two days: five counts of first-degree murder. Death, for the third time. He died on death row in 2021, at 77, of a heart attack. One game show. Three death sentences. Zero executions. Was he too disturbed to know what he was doing, or so in control that he could charm a TV studio between kills?

jesus christ. Her two-year-old daughter had been gone for 31 days before anyone called the police, and it wasn't her who called. When they asked her where the girl was, she named a nanny who didn't exist. A jury still walked her out of the courtroom. That's her in the video, July 5, 2011, hearing "not guilty." Then the call she made from jail, played to the jury while her mother sat on the stand. Her daughter is missing. She wants her boyfriend's phone number. Casey Anthony was 22 and lived with her parents in Orlando, along with her daughter, Caylee. On June 16, 2008, she left the house with Caylee. She told her mother, Cindy, that Caylee was with a nanny named Zanny. Then that the three of them were on a work trip to Tampa. For a month, every time Cindy asked about her granddaughter, the story changed. On July 15, Casey's car turned up in a tow yard. Her father, George, said the trunk smelled like a dead body. That day Cindy called 911 and said she hadn't seen Caylee in 31 days. Casey told police the nanny had kidnapped her. The nanny's apartment had been empty for more than 140 days. Casey said she worked at Universal Studios, walked detectives into the building, and then admitted she hadn't worked there in almost three years. In August a meter reader named Roy Kronk called the sheriff's office three days in a row about something he'd seen in the woods near the Anthony house. An officer looked and said he saw nothing. On December 11, Kronk called again. It was Caylee, in a trash bag, with duct tape still hanging from the hair on her skull. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide, cause undetermined. Florida went for the death penalty. At trial her lawyer, Jose Baez, told the jury Caylee had drowned in the family pool and George had covered it up. He said Casey's strange calm and her lies came from years of abuse by her father. George denied it under oath, and the judge later barred Baez from arguing it in closing because no evidence had been presented. Casey never took the stand. On July 5, 2011, the jury found her not guilty of murder, aggravated child abuse and aggravated manslaughter. Guilty only of lying to police, four misdemeanors. With time served, she walked out of jail days later. Time magazine called it the social media trial of the century. Two of the four lying convictions were later thrown out. 31 days. One nanny who never existed. Not guilty. A mother too damaged to act like one, or a woman who lied so well that twelve people couldn't tell where the lies stopped?

unreal. Four of her babies died in their sleep over ten years. Not one of them had a mark on them, and a jury still made her Australia's worst female serial killer. Twenty years later, the answer turned out to be in their DNA. That's her in the video after her pardon in 2023: "I have forever and will always think of my children." For two decades, the state of New South Wales had told her she killed them. Kathleen Folbigg's first son, Caleb, died in 1989 at 19 days old. Patrick nearly died at four months, was left epileptic and blind, and died of seizures at eight months. Sarah died in 1993 at ten months. Laura died in 1999 at 19 months. After Patrick, Kathleen phoned her husband at work and said: "It's happened again!" There was no physical evidence. None of the autopsies showed any sign of smothering. What police had was her diary. Her husband Craig found it and handed it over in 1999. In it she wrote about her struggles with motherhood, her frustration, her guilt. Prosecutors read those pages as a confession. At trial, when the jury replayed her police interview, she tried to run out of the courtroom. The prosecution also leaned on a rule of thumb from British pediatrician Roy Meadow: "One sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder, until proven otherwise." In May 2003 the jury found her guilty of three murders and one manslaughter. Forty years. On appeal it became thirty, with no parole for 25. She was kept in protective custody, and in 2021 another inmate beat her badly anyway. Then scientists looked at the DNA. Immunologist Carola Vinuesa found a rare mutation in Kathleen's CALM2 gene, which helps control the rhythm of the heart. Both girls carried it too. Mutations in that gene show up in roughly one in 35 million people. The boys carried a different pair of rare mutations, in a gene linked to fatal early epilepsy. A 2019 inquiry still found no reasonable doubt. In 2021 about 90 scientists, two Nobel laureates among them, petitioned for her release. On June 5, 2023, she was pardoned and walked out the same day. In December the appeals court quashed all four convictions. Outside, she said the system "preferred to blame me rather than accept that sometimes children can and do die suddenly." She had spent 20 years in prison. Four babies. One diary. Twenty years. Was that diary ever a confession, or just a grieving mother's worst thoughts, read by people who had already decided what she was?

holy sh*t. The man who produced the Beatles' Let It Be shot an actress in the mouth inside his mansion, then walked out the back door with the gun still in his hand. His defense: she killed herself. He later told a magazine she "kissed the gun." That's him in the video, charged with murder, reading a statement outside court: the "Hitler-like district attorney" was out to get him, and he wanted Governor Schwarzenegger, "a fellow artist," to step in. It took two juries and six years to answer him. Lana Clarkson was 40. In the '80s she had played the lead in Roger Corman's Barbarian Queen. By 2003 the roles had dried up, and for about a month she'd been working as a hostess at the House of Blues in West Hollywood to make ends meet. In the early hours of February 3, Phil Spector walked in. He was 62, the Wall of Sound, the Ronettes, a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer. She left with him in his limousine for his mansion in Alhambra. His driver waited outside. About an hour later, the driver heard a gunshot. Spector came out the back door holding a pistol. The driver, Adriano de Souza, called 911 and said Spector had told him: "I think I killed somebody." Police found Clarkson slumped in a chair, shot in the mouth. By that night Spector was home again, out on $1 million bail. Then came the explanations. In July 2003 he told Esquire her death was an "accidental suicide." In a 2005 deposition he said he'd been treated for bipolar disorder for eight years: no sleep, depression, mood swings. "I've been called a genius," he said, "and I think a genius is not there all the time and has borderline insanity." At trial a defense pathologist pointed him out to the jury: "He has Parkinson's features. He trembles." Prosecutors brought in women from the past 30 years who said that when they tried to leave his house, he pulled a gun on them. His lawyers called that ancient history and said Spector had only "acted erratically after a suicide." In September 2007 the first jury deadlocked, 10 to 2 for conviction. Mistrial. The retrial wasn't televised. On April 13, 2009, a second jury found him guilty of second-degree murder. Nineteen years to life. In prison he lost his voice to a disease of the larynx, and in January 2021 he died of COVID complications at 81, three years before he could have asked for parole. One gunshot. Two juries. Nineteen years to life. He called it a suicide, then a conspiracy, then borderline genius. Was he too sick to know what he'd done, or too famous to believe he'd ever pay for it?

what the f*ck. A man stabbed an actress ten times on her own sidewalk, so hard the blade bent, because he said God sent him. Seven years later, California was ready to let him out for good behavior. The whole time, he was mailing letters from his cell promising to finish the job. That's her in the video, May 1989, 22 days before his release date: "It is insanity to allow someone out who we know is patently dangerous." Two months later, another actress was dead. Arthur Jackson was a 46-year-old drifter from Aberdeen, Scotland. He saw Theresa Saldana in Raging Bull and decided she was his mission. He hired a private investigator, who dug up her mother's unlisted number. Then Jackson called her mother, posing as Martin Scorsese's assistant: there was a film role in Europe, and he just needed Theresa's address. He got it. March 15, 1982. West Hollywood, broad daylight. He came at her outside her home with a 5½-inch hunting knife and stabbed her ten times. One blow punctured a lung. The blade bent. People were watching, kids among them. The only one who moved was a deliveryman, Jeff Fenn, who heard her screaming, ran down from a second floor, and pinned Jackson to the ground. She spent four months in the hospital. Jackson said he was on a mission from God. He got 12 years for attempted murder, and from his cell he kept writing. In one letter he swore "on the grave of his dead mother and on the scars of Theresa Saldana" that he would carry out "this divine act." In another, to a journalist, he wrote that he would use others to kill her. Under the rules, none of that was bad behavior. Skipping a day of prison work would have been. So Saldana went public. She had already played herself in an NBC movie about her own stabbing. Now she pushed for a law that made threatening a crime victim a crime, and in December 1990 Jackson became the first man convicted under it. He stayed locked up. But by then a fan named Robert Bardo had copied his method, hired a private investigator of his own, and shot Rebecca Schaeffer at her front door. In 1996, after almost 14 years, America sent Jackson to Britain to stand trial for a robbery and murder from 1966. A British court accepted diminished responsibility and sent him to a psychiatric hospital, where he died in 2004, at 68. Saldana went back to work, earned a Golden Globe nomination for The Commish, and died in 2016, at 61. Ten stab wounds. Seven years. Not one mark for bad behavior. A man who believed God sent him to kill her, and a system that graded him on whether he showed up for work. Which one was really insane?

jesus christ. Marvin Gaye was shot dead by his own father, with the gun Marvin gave him for Christmas, the day before his 45th birthday. the judge let the father go home and said it was "all his fault." he meant Marvin. and in the video below, you'll hear the judge say it, and the father answer. Marvin Gay Sr. was a Pentecostal preacher. His son grew up singing in his church and getting beaten at home. "There wasn't an inch on my body that hadn't been bruised and beaten by him," Marvin said later. His father liked to tell the kids: "I brought you into this world, I can take you out." By 1983 Marvin was back on top with "Sexual Healing" and his first two Grammys. He was also deep in cocaine and sure someone was trying to kill him. He moved back into his parents' house in Los Angeles. That Christmas, he gave his father a .38 revolver for protection. April 1, 1984. His father was yelling at his mother over a missing insurance letter. Marvin went at him, shoved him, beat him. His mother pulled them apart. Minutes later, his father walked into Marvin's bedroom with the .38. One shot to the chest. Then he stepped closer and fired again. Then he went outside, sat on the porch, and waited for the police. Asked if he loved his son, he said: "Let's say I didn't dislike him." the defense: → doctors found a walnut-sized tumor in his brain → Marvin's autopsy: cocaine and PCP → photos of the bruises Marvin left on him → first-degree murder became voluntary manslaughter. he pleaded no contest the verdict: → November 2, 1984: six years, suspended. probation. no guns, no alcohol, for life → about 80 days in jail before bail. not one more → the judge: prison "will be a death sentence" → his lawyer, outside court: Marvin "met an end that Marvin engineered" → Marvin Gay Sr. died in a nursing home in 1998 A sick old man who fired in fear, or a father who finally kept his word?

no f*cking way. the man who shot George Wallace kept a diary. that diary became Taxi Driver. and Taxi Driver sent John Hinckley after Reagan. and a CBS cameraman was three feet away when the shots rang out. it's in the video below. Arthur Bremer was 21, a busboy from Milwaukee who got demoted for talking to himself. Months earlier, a court psychiatrist had already called him mentally ill, but stable enough to live in the community. March 1, 1972, he opened his diary: "It is my personal plan to assassinate by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace." He followed Nixon to Ottawa. Security was too tight. So he switched targets. May 15, 1972. Laurel, Maryland. Wallace finished his speech and stepped down to shake hands, against his Secret Service's advice. Bremer called him over and opened fire at close range. Wallace was paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. Three other people were wounded. the trial: → the defense: schizophrenia, legally insane, "no emotional capacity to understand anything" → the court psychiatrist: schizoid, paranoid features, but he understood exactly what he was doing → the jury needed 95 minutes. guilty → Bremer's last words in court: "Looking back on my life I would have liked it if society had protected me from myself." → 63 years, cut to 53 on appeal what came next: → his diary inspired the screenwriter of Taxi Driver to create Travis Bickle → in prison, he refused mental health treatment → Wallace forgave him and wrote him a letter. Bremer never answered → 2007: out after 35 years. May 15, 2025: his sentence finally ended, 53 years to the day Did society fail to protect him from himself, or did he just know the right line to say?

what the hell. he shot JFK's assassin on live TV, in a police basement full of detectives. his lawyer's defense: an epileptic seizure. and it's all in the video below: the shot, the panic, the verdict. November 24, 1963. Two days after Kennedy was killed, Dallas police walked Lee Harvey Oswald through the basement of their headquarters toward an armored car. Reporters, cameras, officers everywhere. Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner the Dallas police knew well, stepped out of the crowd and fired one shot into Oswald's stomach. Oswald died in the same hospital as Kennedy. At 11:17 that morning, Ruby was at a Western Union down the street, wiring money to an employee. At 11:21 he pulled the trigger. the defense: → star lawyer Melvin Belli took the case for free → his argument: Ruby was in a "psychomotor epileptic" fugue state and didn't know what he was doing → no knowledge, no malice, no death penalty → the jury, in Belli's words, disregarded "every bit of our psychiatric testimony" the problems: → a detective testified that Ruby told him: "I intended to shoot him three times" → Ruby said he did it to spare Mrs. Kennedy a trial. later he admitted his first lawyer told him to say that → to the Warren Commission, after crying about Kennedy, he said: "I must be a great actor, I tell you that." the verdict: → March 14, 1964: guilty of murder with malice. death → October 1966: overturned, new trial ordered → January 3, 1967: Ruby dies of a blood clot, cancer in his lungs, liver and brain, weeks before the retrial He never got a second trial, and nobody ever got a straight answer. Seizure, rage, or a great actor?