Far Side Chats

There’s a reason whodunits are so popular... Why mystery novels fly off bookshelves or download with lightning speed into our eReaders. We love finding the clues and connecting the dots. Investigators and armchair detectives alike want to revel in the experience of naming the culprit. The human race craves resolve. We itch to find out the who, what, when, where, and why. I think that’s why I’m truly a little obsessed with today’s story - there is no resolve...and it’s been over 200 years.

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Today we’re talking about Ed Gein, in full Edward Theodore Gein, American serial killer whose gruesome crimes gained worldwide notoriety and inspired numerous characters in books and horror films - most notably Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

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Very few abandoned buildings can evoke anxiety, fear, and outright horror that accompanies the simple mention of their name. An insane asylum is one of those places. From campfire stories, TV shows, horror movies, and spine-chilling novels, asylums hold an especially terrifying place in our psyches and tend to invoke our most primal fears.  Justifiably so–the stories told about these historic halls of horror weren’t just pulled out of thin air or dreamt up by the twisted minds of storytellers. The true history of our world’s insane asylums may be just as terrifying as the darkest recesses of our imaginations would have us believe.

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Keith Raniere, self-help guru, founded NXIVM (pronounced "Nixium") in the 1990s and sold courses to an estimated 17,000 students. In 2017, the bizarre, cultish group that made headlines for recruiting women to be “slaves” and “masters” closed after its leader, Keith Raniere, was denied bail after appearing in court.  On June 19th of this year, Raniere was convicted of all charges.Disclaimer: This episode deals with heavy topics involving sexual assault and violence.

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For more than a century, a peculiar physical condition known as ectrodactyly has afflicted the Stiles family. The rare congenital deformity makes hands look like lobster claws as the middle fingers are either missing or seemingly fused to the thumb and pinky.While many may have viewed this condition as a handicap, for the Stiles family it spelled opportunity. As far back as the 1800s, as the family grew and produced more children with unusual hands and feet, they developed a circus: The Lobster Family, which became a carnival staple throughout the early 20th century.But one son, Grady Stiles Jr., would give the Stiles’ family a different, morbid reputation when he became a murderer.

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Today we’re talking about a cold case regarding a murder that’s been unsolved for 20 years.

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From 1959 to 1965, a killer named by the press as Jack The Stripper, murdered between six and eight women. To this day, over fifty years later, the crimes that became known as the Hammersmith Nude Murders remain unsolved.

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Is it chasing us? That thought coursed through Betty and Barney Hill’s minds as they drove down the empty winding country road in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. It was a September night in 1961, they hadn’t seen a car for miles, and a strange light in the sky seemed to follow them.

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Welcome back Far Siders! We’re covering part 2 of Project Pegasus. If you haven’t already listened to Part 1, you should go back and do so now, or this episode won’t make any sense. In part one of this series, it was claimed that CIA “White Hats” had begun in 1980 to groom Barack Obama as a future U.S. President, while simultaneously grooming Andrew Basiago to follow him later into the White House. Let’s jump right in.

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Get your tin-foil hats ready for today's case, because we're talking about time-travelling presidents and secret government technology. There's so much to cover that we're breaking this one into two parts.

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