Bloody Angola: A Podcast by Jim Chapman

In 2008, a young man from Chillicothe, Ohio, slit his girlfriend’s mother’s throat, sat on the couch, and watched her die—then set the apartment on fire. He called himself “Box Cutter.” Prosecutors wanted death. A psychologist’s finding about his IQ took it off the table. He went to prison for life. That should have been the end of the story. It wasn’t.In February 2016, Casey Pigge carved a cinder block out of his cell wall at Lebanon Correctional Institution, talked his cellmate into a “card trick,” and beat Luther Wade to death. He later said he wanted a cell to himself. Officials still put him on a prison bus. Two days after he pleaded guilty to that killing, he sat in the back of a transport vehicle with no cameras and no line of sight to the officers up front. Using a restraint chain, he strangled and smothered 61-year-old inmate David Johnson while other prisoners watched. When it was over, Pigge boasted: “I guess you never seen that on a bus before.” A year later, in another February, he and another lifer used homemade shanks to stab a Lucasville correction officer 32 times. The officer lived. Pigge did not stop talking about killing again.

In January 1958, a 19-year-old high school dropout from Lincoln, Nebraska named Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate went on a murder spree that left eleven people dead across Nebraska and Wyoming. Starkweather, who idolized James Dean and styled himself as a rebellious outsider, and Fugate, who claimed she was a hostage, left a trail of bodies that included a teenage couple, a wealthy industrialist and his wife, a traveling salesman, and a young couple in Wyoming. The killings were brutal, impulsive, and seemingly without clear motive beyond rage, alienation, and a twisted desire for notoriety.Timestamps03:20 Starkweather's Early Years06:59 Rebel Without Rules11:22 First Killings Begin13:20 The Bartlett Murders16:36 Help Turns Deadly19:38 Final Chase Ends26:28 Execution DayJoin Bloody Angola on Patreon for Commercial Free Early Releases and more here: www.patreon.com/bloodyangolapodcast

Part 1 of a 2 Part SeriesFor more than three decades, Wichita, Kansas lived under the shadow of a killer who named himself. He called himself BTK—Bind, Torture, Kill—and he made sure the police and the public never forgot it. Between 1974 and 1991, Dennis Rader murdered at least ten people, often in their own homes, binding them, torturing them, and strangling or suffocating them while living a completely ordinary suburban life.This episode traces the full arc of the BTK case: the brutal first murders of the Otero family in 1974, the years of taunting letters and packages, the long silences that turned the case into one of America’s most infamous cold cases, and the arrogant return to communication in 2004 that finally undid him. We’ll examine how a single floppy disk and a digital metadata trail led investigators straight to a church computer… and how familial DNA sealed the identification.It’s the story of a man who believed he could control everything—his victims, the police, the narrative—until one careless slip proved him wrong. A deep dive into the double life, the psychology of control, and the painstaking investigation that finally stopped BTK.Timestamps00:38 BTK’s Hidden Childhood02:45 The Otero Murders06:06 Early Signs of Obsession12:10 The Double Life Deepens18:19 First Kill Revealed19:42 The Otero Home Attack26:07 Catherine Bright’s Fight32:29 Shirley Vian’s Final Hours35:40 Nancy Fox and BTK42:35 The Next Victim AwaitsJoin Bloody Angola on Patreon for Commercial Free Early Releases and more here: www.patreon.com/bloodyangolapodcast