The Headstones & Microphones Podcast: Infamous

Sonny Barger was the fiercely loyal, counterculture icon who co-founded the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels and transformed the motorcycle club into a globally recognized, tightly structured, and fiercely independent outlaw empire.

David Meirhofer was a notorious Montana serial killer who kidnapped and murdered four young people in the early 1970s, famously becoming the first subject of a successful FBI offender profile that ultimately led to his arrest and confession.

James Huberty was a deeply troubled and heavily armed gunman who perpetrated the 1984 San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre, killing 21 people after a lifetime of mental decline, domestic instability, and overwhelming paranoia.

Osama bin Laden was the founder of the militant Islamist organization al-Qaeda, orchestrating the September 11 attacks and leading a global terrorist campaign against the United States and its allies until he was killed by U.S. forces in 2011.

Danny Rolling, known as the "Gainesville Ripper," was an American serial killer who murdered five college students in Florida in August 1990 and was executed in 2006.

Charles Whitman was an American engineering student and former U.S. Marine who became infamous for committing a mass shooting at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966, an act preceded by the murder of his wife and mother.

Ted Kaczynski was an American domestic terrorist and former mathematics professor who carried out a nearly 20-year bombing campaign against people associated with modern technology to protest the industrial-technological system.

Robert Hansen, known as the "Butcher Baker," was an Alaskan serial killer who abducted women, flew them into the remote wilderness, and hunted them like wild game before his arrest in 1983.

Donald Harvey was a prolific American serial killer and hospital orderly who murdered dozens of patients under his care by posing as a "mercy killer," though many of his crimes were driven by malice and a desire for control.

Edward Teach, better known as the notorious pirate Blackbeard, remains an enduring figure of maritime history, famed for cultivating a terrifying persona with his smoldering beard and tactical ruthlessness to strike fear into his enemies.

Charles Ray Hatcher was an American serial killer who confessed to murdering 16 people between 1969 and 1982 before dying by suicide in prison.

Dean Corll, infamously known as the "Candy Man," was an American serial killer who abducted, tortured, and murdered at least 29 teenage boys and young men in the Houston, Texas, area between 1970 and 1973.

Shoko Asahara was the blind, charismatic founder of the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo who transformed a yoga and spiritual group into a violent, apocalyptic movement, ultimately masterminding the deadly 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system.

Kenneth Lay, the founder and former CEO of Enron, became one of the most infamous figures in American corporate history after orchestrating a massive, multi-billion-dollar accounting fraud that led to the company's catastrophic collapse and his subsequent conviction on multiple criminal charges.

Mickey Cohen was a charismatic and ruthless Hollywood mobster who dominated the mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles underworld as the flamboyant West Coast lieutenant to Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel.

Known as the "Bandit Queen," Belle Starr was a notorious American outlaw who associated with famous desperadoes and became a legendary, stylized figure of the Wild West after her unsolved murder in 1889.

Joe Profaci was a ruthless, deeply religious American La Cosa Nostra boss who ruled his Brooklyn crime family for over three decades, but his extreme greed and heavy taxation of his own men ultimately triggered a bloody, fractured rebellion within his ranks.

H.H. Holmes, widely regarded as one of America's first documented serial killers, infamously constructed a custom-built "Murder Castle" in Chicago to lure, torture, and execute victims during the 1893 World's Fair.

Known as the "Teflon Don" for his uncanny ability to repeatedly evade criminal conviction, John Gotti ruled New York’s powerful Gambino crime family in the late 1980s with a flamboyant, media-savvy style before finally being convicted of murder and racketeering in 1992.

John Wesley Hardin was one of the Old West’s deadliest outlaws, a notorious Texas gunslinger who claimed to have killed over 40 men before ultimately being shot in the back.

Pol Pot was the brutal dictator of the Khmer Rouge whose radical communist regime orchestrated the Cambodian genocide, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people through forced labor, starvation, and mass executions.

Joe Bonanno was a powerful American mafia boss who led the Bonanno crime family for over three decades, famously operating with a corporate-style approach to organized crime and becoming one of the longest-surviving, original members of the Commission.

Morton Sobell was an American engineer who was convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in 1951 for his role as a Soviet spy alongside Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a crime he finally admitted to in 2008.

Known as the "Highway Killer," Larry Eyler was a prolific American serial killer who stalked the Midwestern Interstate system between 1982 and 1984, brutally murdering a minimum of 21 teenage boys and young men.

Juan Corona was an infamous California labor contractor with a history of schizophrenia who was convicted in 1973 for the brutal machete murders and secret orchard burials of 25 transient farm workers.

Known as the "Hell's Belle" of midwestern serial killers, Belle Gunness lured dozens of wealthy suitors and husbands to her Indiana farm in the early 1900s, only for them to vanish alongside their fortunes.

Felipe Espinosa was a 19th-century Mexican-American outlaw who waged a brutal, religiously motivated guerrilla war across Colorado, murdering over thirty Anglo settlers before being tracked down and killed by legendary scout Tom Tobin.

Henry Debosnys was a 19th-century intellectual, linguist, and suspected serial killer who was hanged for the brutal murder of his third wife, leaving behind a series of uncrackable, cryptic cryptograms and sketches that continue to mystify historians.

Ed Gein was an American murderer and body snatcher whose gruesome crimes in 1950s Wisconsin horrified the nation and served as the primary inspiration for infamous fictional villains like Norman Bates, Leatherface, and Buffalo Bill.

Known as "Deacon Jim" for his pious, churchgoing persona, James Brown Miller was one of the Old West’s most prolific and ruthless contract killers, who used a shotgun as his signature weapon before ultimately being lynched by an angry mob in 1909.

Carroll Edward Cole was an American serial killer who confessed to murdering at least 14 women and was executed in Nevada in 1985 after famously waiving his right to appeal and requesting the death penalty.

Captain William Kidd was a Scottish privateer turned pirate who was executed in 1701 for piracy and the murder of a gunner, cementing his legacy as one of history's most infamous maritime figures.

Bill Doolin was a notorious American outlaw who transitioned from the Dalton Gang to founding his own "Wild Bunch," a ruthless group that terrorized the Oklahoma and Indian Territories with a string of high-profile bank, train, and stagecoach robberies during the mid-1890s.

Ted Bundy was a prolific and manipulative American serial killer who confessed to murdering dozens of young women across the United States during the 1970s while often exploiting his deceptive, charismatic persona to evade capture.

Paul Castellano, the corporate-minded "Boss of Bosses" who led the Gambino crime family, favored white-collar racketeering over street violence until his extravagant lifestyle and isolation prompted his infamous assassination outside Sparks Steak House in 1985.

Carl Eugene "Coral" Watts was a prolific American serial killer, often referred to as the "Sunday Morning Slasher," who is suspected of murdering dozens—possibly over 100—women and girls between 1974 and 1982.

William Bonin, known as the "Freeway Killer," was an American serial killer who murdered at least 14 young men and boys in Southern California between 1979 and 1980.

Benedict Arnold was a distinguished American Revolutionary War general whose pivotal contributions to the cause are irrevocably overshadowed by his infamous decision to defect to the British in 1780, forever cementing his name as the quintessential American traitor.

Tokyo Rose was the collective nickname given by Allied troops to various English-speaking female broadcasters, most notably Iva Toguri D'Aquino, who were coerced into beaming Japanese propaganda to demoralize American soldiers during World War II.

Karl Marx was a 19th-century German philosopher and economist whose radical critiques of capitalism and co-authorship of The Communist Manifesto laid the ideological groundwork for modern socialism and communism, reshaping global politics and history.

Samuel Little was an American serial killer who, according to the FBI is the most prolific in U.S. history, having confessed to 93 murders committed between 1970 and 2005.

Anthony LaRette Jr. was an American serial killer and rapist who confessed to dozens of murders across the United States before being executed by the state of Missouri in 1995

Lee Harvey Oswald was a deeply disillusioned former Marine and Marxist defector who fundamentally altered American history by assassinating President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

A football superstar turned pop-culture icon, O.J. Simpson became globally infamous when his 1995 trial for the brutal murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman transfixed the world, leaving a complex legacy defined by racial division, celebrity obsession, and enduring controversy.

Henry Hill was a notorious Lucchese crime family associate turned FBI informant whose life of high-stakes heist operations and subsequent betrayal of the mob inspired the classic film Goodfellas.

Robert Franklin Stroud, known as the "Birdman of Alcatraz," was a brutally violent double-murderer who became a self-taught ornithologist and author during his 54 years of near-total solitary confinement.

James "Whitey" Bulger was a ruthless Boston crime boss and long-term FBI informant who built a violent criminal empire in South Boston while systematically manipulating law enforcement to eliminate his rivals.

Butch Cassidy was a charismatic and clever American outlaw who led the "Wild Bunch" gang in a legendary series of bank and train robberies across the American West and eventually South America.

Charles Manson was a manipulative cult leader who orchestrated a series of brutal murders in 1969, forever cementing his status as one of America's most notorious criminal figures.

David Koresh was the self-proclaimed messianic leader of the Branch Davidians, a religious sect whose stockpiling of weapons and controversial practices led to a fatal 51-day siege by federal authorities near Waco, Texas, in 1993.