Loving the Monster

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 series decades after they killed their parents, and with Chris Watts collecting fan mail in his cell after smothering his own children.We follow it into the phone-screen present with the Columbiners and the true crime community, and we flip the mirror around with Jodi Arias and Aileen Wuornos to ask why this current runs so overwhelmingly in one direction. Then we dig into the why of it, the trauma and the rescue fantasy and the safety of a caged partner, before turning the light back where it belongs, onto the victims and the families who have to watch their killers become stars.A heads-up before you press play: this episode covers murder, cruelty toward children, sexual violence, and suicide, told plain and told straight. It is a heavy one. If that is not where your head is tonight, come find it another time. But if you want to understand something true and disturbing about the human heart, settle in. This is Disturbing History.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [email protected] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.