Terror Talk: True Crime, Serial Killers and Horror

All horror is psychological. Today we discuss Run Sweetheart Run, Cocaine Bear, and The Invitation, plus our very own trivia game Horror Facts with Cath.

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What does it look like when a fourteen-year-old starts practising being a cult leader?

⚠️ Trigger warning: This episode discusses cruelty to animals, Nazism, mental illness, and suicide, including references to the deaths at Jonestown. Listener discretion is advised.

The final part of a five-part series on Jim Jones — the one where the warning signs turn into rehearsals.

Jim is a teenager now, in Lynn, Indiana, and later Richmond. He collects roadkill and preaches funeral sermons over it. When his friends get bored he recruits younger, more biddable kids. When those run out he holds the services in the middle of the school quad, where the other children are at recess and cannot leave — an audience that never consented and can't go.

Other boys in 1944 played army. Jim studied Hitler — not the politics, which he'd spend his adult life inverting, but the oratory and the obedience. He made his cousins goose-step and switched them when they didn't. Then in 1945 Hitler killed himself, Jim was fourteen, and he was struck by it. He talked about it for years. He called it a solution.

The episode also corrects the story Jim told about his own father for the rest of his life. James Jones was not a drunk. He had been in a mental institution in 1932 and kept receiving treatment — and his family preferred the town believing he drank, because drinking read as a choice and mental illness did not. Jim took the more dramatic version and used it.

In this episode:

• The animal funerals, and how the congregation went from friends to younger children to a captive schoolyard
• Lynetta Jones paying shopkeepers every weekend for what her son stole, and never asking him to stop
• Why intermittent reinforcement is the most destructive parenting pattern there is
• Hitler as a teenage idol — and why the 1945 suicide mattered more than the politics
• James Jones's mental illness, the drunk rumour the family preferred, and the abuse story Jim invented
• The baseball league a fourteen-year-old built, funded and coached — and the night it ended
• Richmond, Indiana: riding seventeen miles to preach racial equality at the railroad tracks
• Reed Hospital — the job he was genuinely, remarkably good at
• The narcissist's shattered sense of self: a mirrored ball made entirely of borrowed pieces

Clinical concepts: narcissism in adolescence · intermittent reinforcement · permissive parenting · the borrowed self · empathy as a manipulation tool · coercive control · the stigma of mental illness in the 1940s · savior complex

Source: Jeff Guinn, The Road to Jonestown

The Jim Jones series:

• Part 1 — Jonestown's cult leader and his parents
• Part 2 — Lynetta Jones, Lynn Indiana and Jonestown
• Part 3 — the KKK, faith healing and Jonestown
• Part 4 — narcissism, mirroring and Myrtle Kennedy
• Part 5 — Jonestown's cult leader as a teenager (this episode)

Also on cults: our Season 9 premiere, CULTS: Heaven's Gate, the Zizians & Jonestown Part 1.

Two licensed therapists — one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT.

Until then... sleep safe. 😴

🎧 Follow Terror Talk wherever you get your podcasts and join us on Patreon for bonus content and access to the compound.🌐 terrortalkpodcast.com | 💜 patreon.com/terrortalk📸 Instagram: @terrortalkpodcast | 🎥 YouTube: Terror Talk Podcast | 📘 Facebook: Terror Talk Podcast | 🎵 TikTok: @dark.psychology.girls🎶 Music by Mannequin Uprising

Search terms: Jim Jones teenage years · Jim Jones animal funerals · Jim Jones Hitler · Richmond Indiana · Lynetta Jones · intermittent reinforcement · narcissistic parenting · Jeff Guinn Road to Jonestown · Jonestown cult leader

#JimJones #Jonestown #PeoplesTemple #Narcissism #IntermittentReinforcement #TrueCrimePsychology #TerrorTalkPodcast

All horror is psychological. Today we discuss Grady Hendrix's book How to Sell a Haunted House, our new book club read Alice by Christina Henry, Skinamarink, Nanny, The Deep House, Wounds, plus our very own trivia game Horror Facts with Cath.

Website: https://www.terrortalkpodcast.com

Community Membership: https://www.patreon.com/terrortalk

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terrortalkpodcast/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TalkTerror/

Music by Mannequin Uprising

What happens to a child whose mother needs him to be a mirror?

⚠️ Trigger warning: This episode discusses childhood emotional neglect and narcissistic parenting. Listener discretion is advised.

Part four of a five-part series on Jim Jones, and the one where the psychology arrives.

By this point Jim is somewhere between six and twelve, living in Lynn, Indiana. His mother Lynetta — exhausted, entitled, eccentric, unpopular and controlling — has been forced to take a factory job she considers beneath her, and narrates her own persecution to anyone who will listen. His father, a war veteran with lung damage, is barely working and mostly sits at the pool hall. Jim isn't allowed in the house unless his mother is home. And his mother has told him he is special, that she has powers, and that he is a god.

Therapists Shannon and Cathy take apart what that does to a child — specifically mirroring, the thing infants get from an attentive parent and Jim Jones did not. What grows in its place is a boy who mirrors everyone else instead: if you like flowers, he likes flowers; if you fly planes, he wants to be a pilot; if you're a Nazarene, he quotes scripture back at you.

Which is how Myrtle Kennedy enters the story — the local woman who fed him, preached at him, took him to church, and whom he eventually called Mom. And how he ended up running a religious split down the middle of himself, telling his atheist mother he believed none of it while telling Myrtle he was a Nazarene at heart.

The episode ends on Max, the pilot who found nine-year-old Jimmy preaching to nobody on a tree stump in the woods — and what happened when the boy was caught being himself.

In this episode:

• Lynetta Jones as a narcissistic mother — the alternation between ignoring him and exalting him
• Why the mirroring rupture happens pre-verbally, and why that makes it unconscious
• Why narcissistic patients often can't tolerate being mirrored in therapy
• Myrtle Kennedy, the extreme Nazarene who took him in — and what he gave her in return
• Church-hopping: leaving mid-sermon, joining everything, believing none of it
• The religious split — one story for his mother, another for Myrtle
• Max and the tree stump: the shame of being caught wanting something for himself
• Why a man who never believed in God became a preacher
• Where the charm, the rapport and the oratory actually came from

Clinical concepts discussed: narcissistic mothers · mirroring and its failure in infancy · the narcissistic extension · gaslighting within the family · pre-verbal rupture · false self and borrowed identity · idealization and devaluation cycles · rapport-building as survival strategy

Source: Jeff Guinn, The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple

The Jim Jones series — all five parts:

• Part 1 — Jonestown's cult leader and his parents
• Part 2 — Lynetta Jones, Lynn Indiana and Jonestown
• Part 3 — the KKK, faith healing and Jonestown
• Part 4 — his narcissistic mother and Myrtle Kennedy (this episode)
• Part 5 — the making of a cult leader and mass murderer

Also on cults: our Season 9 premiere, CULTS: Heaven's Gate, the Zizians & Jonestown Part 1.

Two licensed therapists — one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT.

Until then... sleep safe. 😴

🎧 Follow Terror Talk wherever you get your podcasts and join us on Patreon for bonus content and access to the compound.🌐 terrortalkpodcast.com | 💜 patreon.com/terrortalk📸 Instagram: @terrortalkpodcast | 🎥 YouTube: Terror Talk Podcast | 📘 Facebook: Terror Talk Podcast | 🎵 TikTok: @dark.psychology.girls🎶 Music by Mannequin Uprising

Search terms: narcissistic mother · narcissistic parenting · mirroring psychology · Jim Jones childhood · Myrtle Kennedy · Lynetta Jones · Jeff Guinn Road to Jonestown · Peoples Temple origins · false self

#NarcissisticMother #Narcissism #Mirroring #JimJones #MyrtleKennedy #Jonestown #PeoplesTemple #TrueCrimePsychology #DarkPsychology #TerrorTalkPodcast

All horror is psychological. Today we discuss Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Ruins, The Happening, and Little Joe.

Website: https://www.terrortalkpodcast.com

Community Membership: https://www.patreon.com/terrortalk

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Music by Mannequin Uprising

What does it do to a daughter to learn her father is the man her mother was afraid of?

⚠️ Trigger warning: This episode discusses serial murder, PTSD, and the impact of violent crime on families. Listener discretion is advised.

The final part of a five-part series on Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer — and this one isn't really about him. It's about the two women who lived with him.

He was arrested on February 25, 2005, on his way home to have lunch with his wife. At almost the same moment, an FBI agent was sitting in a car outside his daughter's house in another state, waiting to tell her.

Kerri Rawson was twenty-six and at home on a day off. She nearly didn't answer the door — because her father, a code compliance officer, had taught her to be wary of strangers. The agent asked whether she knew what BTK stood for. She did: bind, torture, kill, a serial killer her mother had been frightened of decades earlier.

Paula Dietz had been married to him for thirty-four years. She met him at church and married him within months. Six weeks after the birth of their first child, he murdered the Otero family.

In this episode:

• Why he pleaded guilty when Ted Bundy fought — and what the absence of relational drama tells you
• "Joseph Otero had a daughter. I had a daughter." — what he said at the plea hearing, and how he seemed to enjoy telling it
• The neighbor, Marine Hedge, and what Kerri remembers her father saying: don't worry, we're safe
• The pastor's phone call, the yellow legal pad, and her mother writing "He's confessing" and underlining it
• Her pap smear used as DNA evidence, and her childhood dog dug up to see if he'd buried anything with it
• PTSD, lifelong gaslighting, and the work of separating the father who raised her from BTK
• Stephen King's "A Good Marriage", her fury about it — and her father praising her for it: "she reminds me of me"
• Paula's emergency divorce, granted without the standard sixty-day wait, and the life she had to disappear from
• 175 years, El Dorado Correctional Facility, a possible stroke, and a book by his daughter he will never be allowed to read
• And at the end, why we're all here: "our culture is completely fascinated with the shadow"

Clinical concepts: PTSD in the families of offenders · betrayal trauma and lifelong gaslighting · narrative repair and integration · secondary victimization by the justice system · the shadow, and what draws us to true crime

Sources: Katherine Ramsland, Confession of a Serial Killer · Kerri Rawson, A Serial Killer's Daughter: My Story of Faith, Love and Overcoming · Roy Wenzl, Wichita Eagle (2022)

The Dennis Rader series — all five parts:

• Part 1 — the BTK Killer's childhood in Kansas
• Part 2 — Jack the Ripper, the double life, and the thing he called Rex
• Part 3 — the Otero family, the victims, and the BTK letters
• Part 4 — why he stopped for years at a time
• Part 5 — Kerri Rawson, Paula Dietz, and prison (this episode)

Also in this lane: our five-part series on Jim Jones, and our Season 9 premiere CULTS: Heaven's Gate, the Zizians & Jonestown Part 1.

Two licensed therapists — one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT.

Until then... sleep safe. 😴

🎧 Follow Terror Talk wherever you get your podcasts and join us on Patreon for bonus content and access to the compound.🌐 terrortalkpodcast.com | 💜 patreon.com/terrortalk📸 Instagram: @terrortalkpodcast | 🎥 YouTube: Terror Talk Podcast | 📘 Facebook: Terror Talk Podcast | 🎵 TikTok: @dark.psychology.girls🎶 Music by Mannequin Uprising

Search terms: Dennis Rader · BTK Killer · Kerri Rawson · A Serial Killer's Daughter · Paula Dietz · BTK arrest · betrayal trauma · Stephen King A Good Marriage · Katherine Ramsland · El Dorado Kansas

#DennisRader #BTK #KerriRawson #PaulaDietz #BetrayalTrauma #PTSD #StephenKing #TrueCrimePsychology #DarkPsychology #TerrorTalkPodcast

All horror is psychological. Today we discuss a small Sundance recap, Bones and All, House of Darkness, The Old Way, Sorry About the Demon, Take Back the Night, Maneater plus our very own trivia game Horror Facts with Cath.

Website: https://www.terrortalkpodcast.com

Community Membership: https://www.patreon.com/terrortalk

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Twitter: https://twitter.com/TalkTerror/

Music by Mannequin Uprising

Today we discuss the Hulu series The Killing County.

IMDB: In a big city with the soul of a small town in the depths of California, after a terrible shooting in a hotel makes the Ramirez family question everything they know about their city: Bakersfield.

Website: https://www.terrortalkpodcast.com

Community Membership: https://www.patreon.com/terrortalk

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Twitter: https://twitter.com/TalkTerror/

Music by Mannequin Uprising

All horror is psychological. Today we discuss M3gan, A Classic Horror Story, 616 Wilford Lane, plus our very own trivia game Horror Facts with Cath.

Website: https://www.terrortalkpodcast.com

Community Membership: https://www.patreon.com/terrortalk

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terrortalkpodcast/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TalkTerror/

Music by Mannequin Uprising

Today we discuss the Hulu series How I Caught My Killer.

IMDB: The real-life stories behind unique homicide cases with in-depth interviews, authentic archival material and cinematic recreations all packaged together into a fresh spin in the genre.

Website: https://www.terrortalkpodcast.com

Community Membership: https://www.patreon.com/terrortalk

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terrortalkpodcast/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TalkTerror/

Music by Mannequin Uprising