Loving the Monster
About this episode
This episode explores hybristophilia and the phenomenon of people being drawn to convicted killers, highlighting historical and contemporary examples.
Some nights the well runs dry, and I do what everybody does — I sink into the couch and let Netflix babysit me for a while. That's how I ended up watching The Worst Ex Ever, and that's how I ended up staring at the story of Wade Wilson, the so-called Deadpool Killer, a man who strangled two women to death in a single day in Cape Coral, Florida, and now sits on death row with two death sentences and a fan club. Because that's the part that put my jaw on the floor. Not the murders. The love letters. The fundraisers. The women all over the world begging a judge to spare him. And I knew right then I had to make this episode.This one is about hybristophilia, the unsettling and very real pull that draws people toward convicted killers, and the long, strange history that proves it is nothing new. We go back to the courtroom groupies of the nineteen seventies and Ted Bundy's wedding staged in the middle of his own murder trial. We sit with Richard Ramirez and the woman who sent him seventy-five letters and married him at San Quentin, with Charles Manson and the young follower handed a marriage license when he was eighty, with the Menendez brothers turned into heartthrobs by a streaming…
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