Episode 2 Transcript
It has come to my attention that this is the wrong episode as it was originally "Episode 2" Now I have to find out which episode THIS ONE is AND correctly find which episode this transcript belongs to. Last Updated: December 2, 2023.
Update 2: I'm a dumb ass. Original title restored. Into the Unknown is a slightly different yet sort of same thing. Post incoming. Last Updated: February 15, 2024
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BEYOND BIZARRE
Episode 2 “Vampires and Other Pets” Transcript
Note: Any slang or grammar irregularities are a direct result of the transcription
Jay Robinson: In the next hour, we're going to ask you to look at things from a totally new viewpoint. Together we'll delve into the world of the grotesque and the eccentric paranormal investigators who seek their quarry and the light will be shed centuries old mysteries. But wherever we travel, it'll always be: Beyond Bizarre.
The realm of the bizarre is one of extreme contrasts and startling incongruities that may shock or even offend. So be prepared; what you see and hear may be beyond your current experience. I'm Jay Robinson and I ask you to suspend your disbelief. Remember that this isn't fiction. Oh no. Simply another version of reality.
(into sequence)
Jay Robinson: Humans crave entertainment and it comes in countless forms. Somewhere inside many of us is the need to watch the bizarre and unusual. Those experiences that will transport us however, briefly outside ourselves and our comfortable ordered lives. In many cases, these are things we don't want to happen to us or things we dare not to ourselves, yet they grab our attention. No one understood this base human need more than the master. Chauvin Finniest barn.
Bizarre #1
Freakshow
Jay Robinson:. When the circus was imported to America in the 19th century, entertainment was at a premium. We embraced the concept, but it took the genius of PT Barnum to exploit that need and elevate the small traveling circus to a genuine spectacle. Barnum recognized that desire to experience the danger and repulsion of certain activities. Thus, he legitimized the freak show during his time, the front for decades. This bizarre form of Americana is making a comeback.
Jim Rose: A man with a vision has the unique ability to turn both phrases and stomachs simultaneously known as Jimmy the Geek in Venice Beach, California, Roseburg to Seattle and began to pack in customers like-minded performers came out of hiding, and a phenomenon was reincarnated.
Jim Rose: The reason I got in this is because I was, as a young kid growing up next to the state fairgrounds, they would recruit the neighborhood hoodlums to Vin soft drinks, et cetera. That gave us access to the last generations of side shows. A truer period when they had human marvels. People that could alter their bodies to do amazing things. And I can remember people walking out of the tent talking to themselves about, for example, the man that could put a blow torch out his tongue.
Jay Robinson: Born with normal bodies, the performers of the Jim Rose Circus sideshow, a self-made freaks.
“The Enigma”: When it comes up to, uh, my turn at bat, basically, everything just kind of goes a little bit different shade of color I suppose. Maybe a little deeper blue and, you know, I kind of go crazy. Yeah, I, you know, I basically growl and snarl; do my best to be my worst. The madness kind of takes over and, you know, you kind of lose control.
Jim Rose: (talking to a crowd) This is the world record, the enigma marked for life: the Enigma. And a forced smile (inaudible)
Jay Robinson: Rose has an understanding of human nature. It helps explain the popularity of this modern day freak show.
Jim Rose: 'Cause humans watch humans. That's why you have to look at a car accident. Anytime a human's in an unfamiliar situation it creates interest. And it was always my goal to put together a fast-paced, edge of the seat, car accident without the severed bodies. But, you know, it's my job to make the atrocities power.
Jay Robinson: Many would argue the palatability of the spectacle, but Rose in his true, played a throng. Some X generation trendies with primitive dispositions of their own.
Random Audience Guy: It's not just a circus of fakeness. This is a real circus. It's a circus of life. We're seeing it.
Random Audience Woman: Well, I wanted to see all the really gross and bizarre things.
Random Audience Guy #2: (offscreen) Yeah, they're freaks. It's unreal. I've never seen anything like this before.
Jay Robinson: Viewed from within our usual cultural context, these performers seem extreme at best throughout time. Many different cultures have engaged in similar activities in a desire to push the boundaries of human experience to find a collective awareness that perhaps gives special meaning to existence.
Jim Rose: You have to have a healthy dose of, of fear to do these things. See anybody can put their face in broken glass and let somebody stomp on the back of their head, but they're gonna come out looking like hamburger.
Jim Rose: (talking to circus crowd) ...form of entertainment. Thanks for coming (inaudible)
Announcer/Host: Ladies and gentlemen, Jim Rose. The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow!
Jay Robinson: With the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, one thing is guaranteed: What you see is what you get. Provided, of course, that you have the stomach for it. At the Venice Beach boardwalk where Rose got his start a carnival atmosphere rains daily. Here, there are no rules and no licenses required. There's no death of offbeat performers anxious to take advantage of the freedom.
Jerry Rubin: (accosting people in public) Watch my show or I'll kill you. Alright. One show only. Let's go. Come on people! I come from a dysfunctional family!
Jay Robinson: Jerry Rubin is Venice Beach's resident activist; a defacto historian.
Jerry Rubin: Venice Beach started naturally, no one invited people to come out here. Street performers and artists have been here. In the beat generation, there were poets and they had their struggles. People tried to restrict them, too. All I can say is that freedom is a fight and it's an ongoing fight, but while we're fighting for freedom, we can all have a good time too and enjoy ourselves.
Jerry Rubin: (talking to his audience volunteer) for sho And I'll tell you what, you stay the whole show. If you don't move, you don't get up, I’ll give you 50 bucks.
Audience Volunteer Guy: That'll work, man. That'll work. That'll work.
Jerry Rubin: But you can't move. If you move, you lose the money. All right. Let's see.
(He throws the machete?? On the ground and the volunteer jumps up out of instinct and walks away)
Jerry Rubin: Oh, you there? Come back. I was just kidding, homes. Come on, man.
Jay Robinson: People refer to Venice Beach as the street performing capital of the world. This is hard to dispute since people from all over the world come to the Venice boardwalk to see these unusual acts. And who would want to miss Charles Marsh? Self-described world's best topsy turvy yodeller. It may be the cheapest entertainment in town, but it's hard to deny the compelling nature of the very odd Venice Beach Street performers.
(end segment)
Jay Robinson: So far we've seen performers. Who do strange things just for the fun of it or for the challenge of pushing the envelope of acceptable behavior. But Fakir Musafa, the paternal master of the modern, primitive movement is not essentially a performer. Rather, he is on a more spiritual quest.
Bizarre #2
Body Play
Jay Robinson: Since his early teens, Akia has been involved in deliberate ritualized modification of his torso.
Fakir is publisher of Body Play Magazine for individuals who wish to use their bodies for self-expression and spiritual exploration. Fakir envisions ritualized pain as a means to achieve altered states, leave the body and enter what he terms: pure consciousness.
Fakir Musafa: I found out there are indeed what I feel are forces. Great beings. Something in the parallel universe out here that does have a great interest in those who would seek through the body, who would experiment and express through the body. It's alien to our culture, but it's rapidly being accepted and understood in our culture.
Jay Robinson: Fakir had his first out of body experience, the age of 17, which inspired him to embark on his personal spiritual quest through what he calls body play.
Fakir Musafa: Up until that time I had felt that I was my body. When I looked in the mirror, that was me. Now, when I looked at my body against the wall, I said, if that's not me, who is me? This was my first transformative experience. I colored everything that happened thereafter. After that, I didn't seem to worry very much. I felt somehow, a feeling, of invincibility about these things. So I continued on and I kept doing these body adventures making and laying on beds and nails piercing myself and pulling and ripping on it.
Jay Robinson: Fakir continued his experiments for decades, then began to expand to oriental practices.
Fakir Musafa: This was the arched framework with some hundred rods pierced into your chest and back where you dance around in an ecstatic state. We spent several days getting ready. I fasted again, I was sleepless. Went through the traditional preparations. And then early, like six in the morning, one Sunday morning, I did that. That was a fantastic experience. Again, I floated up out of my body while I was in this iron framework.
Jay Robinson: Raised in the Dakotas Fakir Musafa was greatly influenced by the Mandan and Dakota tribes and the Oki pa, or Sundance, the traditional rites of passage.
Fakir Musafa: I had also wanted, To be pierced and hung up like the Mandans where I grew up. This was a major ritual and this was a very, very, heavy piece of body play.
Jay Robinson: Fakir claims that during the intense out-of-body experience resulting from this ritual, he met his own great white spirit and was instructed to become a showman and role model. Though Fakir makes no claims to be a showman or entertainer. We see him here making one of his rare public appearances.
Fakir Musafa: What I'm doing here is showing people some possibilities. Um, at least they have the idea that there are things you can do that seem like very difficult or impossible to do with the body. And then you do it right there in their face and it makes them go home and think.
(End Segment)
Jay Robinson: This segment illustrates a unique lifestyle, which includes body play that is extremely dangerous, such an extraordinary ritual. It's best left to the realm of the bizarre.
Bizarre #3
Modern Primitive
Jay Robinson: People from earlier cultures experience the world differently than those of us in more contemporary societies. Their use of body alteration contribute to their transitional rites of passage. These rituals help them confirm community solidarity and the sacredness of common values.
Enter the modern primitives who culturally couldn't be further from those Aboriginal peoples, yet emulate their adornments to many of these body alterations might be considered nothing short of self-mutilation.
In the Heat Ashbury District of San Francisco, modern primitives gravitate to the nomad piercing studio where admiration and concern for those primitive cultures are translated into eccentric bodying art.
Blake Perlingieri: My prime focus in life right now is to, through my own personal body art and my business, to be able to reconnect people with the more ancient arts, which I feel that Western society is almost totally disassociated from. Piercing is very popular, especially on the coasts, you know, New York and San Francisco. But, it's not for primary reasons of, you know, people seeking spiritual enlightenment. It's 'cause it's cool and 'cause everyone's doing it.
Eric Jones: I just wish that more people understood their cultures and where they're from. You know, Native Americans stretch their ears, South Americans stretch their ears. Everybody in the world did it and nobody seems to, you know, realize their past,
Jay Robinson: Despite their looks and motives, be it their concern for indigenous peoples, the power of blending body and mind, environmental action or simply to be “cool”. These modern primitives possess an attitude that is both unique and at the very least, eccentrically bizarre.
(End segment)
Jay Robinson: One constant of mankind is our lifelong love affair with mysteries not content to let the unexplained remain that way. We strive for answers to our questions no matter how bizarre the outcome.
Bizarre #4
Cryptids
Jay Robinson: Do large elusive creatures prowl the periphery of human civilization? There's a population of prehistoric monsters inhabit a secluded island. There's a race of giant ape men dwell in the North American wilderness. Have carnivorous marsupials cheated extinction at Land's End? What other worldly creatures have remained hidden from mankind's relentless prying over the millennia?
The answers may lie in the efforts of intrepid intellectual explorers known as crypto zoologists. Jay Richard Greenwell of the International Society of Cryptozoology explains this largely unknown fringe science.
Richard Greenwell: Cryptozoology is the study of unverified animals, that is, animals which may be known to native peoples, but has not, they have not been scientifically verified by zoology. So what we try to do is see if there's anything to these kinds of reports, and we don't, we're not saying that all these animals necessarily exist. Perhaps very few of them exist. Perhaps none of them exist, but it's still worth checking out.
Jay Robinson: Discoveries of mystifying creatures often invalidate persistent native legends. Yet most crypto zoological fines are purely accidental For millions of years, the remote Indonesian island of Komodo has been home to a primordial species of Monitor lizard unknown anywhere else since the Jurassic period, some 130 million years ago. Rumors about giant dragons with vicious talons and shark like teeth persisted for centuries. Komodo dragons weren't studied by scientists until 1912. Although not the fire breathing creatures of mythology, the carnivorous Komodo dragons remain the fiercest lizards encountered to date. These amphibious carnivores have been known to consume humans. Leaving not really a trace.
In 1981, Richard Greenwell, accompanied fellow researcher Roy Mackel to the Republic of the Congo, in search of a legendary, semi-aquatic dinosaur like creature known as Mokele-mbembe. An elephant hunter led the bold explorers to a trail of the koala swamp that the hunter believed was made by a huge un-elephant like creature.
Greenwell and Mackels observed tree branches broken at a considerable height and a trail that led to the water with no corresponding egress. Circumstantial evidence, at best. Later, the Congolese zoologist on the expedition returned to the Likouala Swamp and reported actually seeing the legendary creature.
To date, no reliable evidence has come to light. However, the swamp is virtually inaccessible and covers several thousand square miles. Could such a creature reside undetected? Who knows what other extraordinary creatures still define discovery while lurking in the unknown. Perpetually shrouded and mist, a remote mountain wilderness in Southeast Asia is home to one of the world's most mercurial mammals. A creature so secretive, it has never been photographed in its natural habitat and so elusive it wasn't known to the outside world until 1992. The World Wildlife Fund sponsored a scientific expedition to survey animals of the isolated and mysterious Vietnamese rainforest.
Here in the Vu Quang Nature Reserve, the expedition team encountered villagers who displayed trophies of a large deer-like animal, completely unknown to biological science. Subsequent DNA tests verify the Vu Quang Ox as an entirely new genus and species. Not since the Cambodian Kouprey was identified over a half century ago. In 1937, had another large mammal been discovered by western biologists. The discovery of the Vu Quang Ox is a remarkable event.
Little is known of its behavior because the dense jungle is violent with its blood sucking parasites is so hostile to human invaders. Confiscated from hunters this young calf was the first living specimen of Vu Quang ox to be studied. Most bizarre characteristic of this new species is its unique facial flaps.
In 1994, a live example of the Giant Muntjac, a new species of deer, was discovered in the forest making the Vu Quang Reserve a treasure trove for zoologists. From what obscure locale, the next bizarre example of a crypto zoological phenomenon emerge? What manner, or beast, will it be one that's already considered extinct?
In 1936, the last known Thylacine or Tasmanian tiger died in captivity, appearing to be a cross between a fox, wolf, tiger, and hyena. It was actually related to the opossum. They were officially judged to be extinct. Various sightings over the years indicate this phantom marsupial may yet survive, and the crypto zoological controversy rages, is it dead? Or still alive? This enigmatic creature continues to evade a definitive verdict of science.
One of the most bizarre quests in modern times is for the legendary Bigfoot or Sasquatch. Tales of this gigantic, extraordinary hominid have persisted for centuries. Bigfoot is by far North America's most mystifying crypto zoological puzzle.
Virtually every state and province has had reports of fullest(??) anthropoids lurking around the perimeter of human settlements, and many accounts are supported by gigantic footprints.
Richard Greenwell: This track here is from Grays Harbor County in Washington State and they were brought here by a deputy sheriff. They made a cast of these footprints, which we have here at the society. You can see the crack here in the ground. A cast is like a negative, so we're really looking at, at, at the left footprint rather than the right.
Jay Robinson: The Bigfoot proto human theory is perhaps not totally farfetched. There've been several thousand sightings, small manner of human beings. Could they all be mistaken? Thousands of Bigfoot tracks have been discovered over the years near settlements and in remote wilderness areas. Either as sophisticated hoax has been perpetrated for centuries or where in our forest world gigantic proto humans tenaciously clinging to survival? If they exist what an incredible and bizarre discovery that would be.
(end segment)
Bizarre #5
Séance
Jay Robinson: What happens when we die? Is there life after death? If so, what form does the afterlife take? This is possibly Ben's most basic puzzle, but the moment we become aware of our own mortality, the question nags. We seek the answer in a variety of places where many of the comfort of religious beliefs supplies the answers. Others take a more bizarre route and try to go directly to the source. As it were.
The séance can be considered one of the traditional methods of attempted communication with the dead. Harry Houdini was obsessed with the idea of communicating with his dead mother and spent years unmasking unscrupulous mediums. His personal quest was never fulfilled.
Technologists on the other hand, have typically turned to electronic means of the attempt. Even the venerable Thomas Edison spent his later years constructing a device that he was hopeful would help the spirits communicate with a physical realm. Not a believer in ghosts, Edison merely wanted to give spirits, if they existed, a better opportunity to express themselves. Shrouded in secrecy, his device was either unsuccessful or unfinished at the time of his death in 1931.
The metaphysical torch, dropped by this great inventor when he died, was picked up by others and continues to this day. One notable example, from a company called Meta Science, is SpiritCom, or spirit communicator. Devised in the late 1970s by Woody O'Neil with the alleged psychic assistance of the deceased physicist, Dr. George Mueller. O'Neill's channeling abilities enabled him to receive enough information from Dr. Mueller and other spiritual entities to develop the SpiritCom. Together, O'Neill and Mueller are said to have provided one of the first conversations between a human being and spirit being using a mechanical device.
This is a recording which they describe as the voice of the spirit talking through the SpiritCom.
On-Screen Caption as
“...how much better it would be not only to be able to speak, but to visualize the subject as well…you understand, William?”
Jay Robinson: Though endlessly fascinated with the supernatural children delight being frightened by ghost stories. These days, movies, television of literature are filled with haunting images and stories of angels and near death experiences.
People are frequently distressed when they perceive they are in the midst of paranormal happenings. Professional Ghostbusters are often called in to determine if these occurrences are of supernatural origin. They employ such devices as thermal radiometers, oscilloscopes, magnetometers, and video surveillance equipment.
The Banta Inn in Banter, California was constructed in 1879. The last 25 years has been the seed of a number of paranormal phenomena. In other words, it seems the Banta Inn is haunted. Current owner, Joan Ballard, tells us about it
Joan Ballard: …And we've had many incidents. We've had a change stack in the cash register. Objects moving, candles lighting, doors slam, doors open. We've had sightings by three different people. We've had bells ring in the kitchen.
Jay Robinson: Joan believes the entity bedeviling the staff and customers of the Banta Inn is Tony Gucken, the previous owner who died of cardiac arrest behind the bar in 1968. To find out more about the curious happenings at the Inn, Joan contacted the Office of Paranormal Investigations in Orinda, California.
Random Secretary Lady: Alright, good.
Jay Robinson: Lloyd Auerbacher, psychologist with eminent credentials and his associate director, Barbara Gallagher, traveled to the Banta Inn to investigate the phenomena. They also enlisted the aid of veteran Parapsychologist Kerry Gaynor.
Interview Lady?: I wanna thank you for sitting down and answering
Jay Robinson: While the staff is being interviewed, Kerry and Lloyd set up the equipment.
Kerry Gaynor: Well, it's pretty much an everyday happening. It's nothing to see pots and pans fly, beer bottles fly. He never does anything to hurt anyone. It's just mischievous.
Another woman: Once in a while, the door will lock by itself, the front door, and usually if that's, if there's some sort of little incident or something, it's like, um, Tony the ghost, they'll look after whoever's here. So therefore we didn't have to deal with them anymore.
Interview Lady??: Thereby separating the people who were fighting.
Kerry Gaynor: Right, right. Yeah.
Interview Lady: You mentioned the coin stacking.
Kerry Gaynor: Yes. In the cash register.
Interview Lady: Can you tell me about what the significance of that is?
Kerry Gaynor: From what I understand, he had a habit of stacking the coins, and he would stack them in the till himself, and this was just a little quirk that he had.
Lloyd: One of the more unique facets about this particular case happens to be people over the years who did not know Tony Gucken who were able to pick him up out of a lineup, so to speak, out of a photo lineup. We came through with a Japanese psychic by the name of Iko Gibo. Mrs. Gibo, who had not been to this place, did not know anything, apparently saw the ghost of a man in the front bar area. When I brought her in the back room, I asked her to look around the room and tell me if anything looked familiar or anyone looked familiar. On the wall, there are a number of photographs, including photographs of individual people, couples, groups of people. She picked Tony Gucken out with one quick look around the room.
That's happened a number of times. People have been able to pick him out, having seen supposedly an apparition and not seen what he looked like, and not knowing that this picture was Tony Gucken. They've been able to identify that that's important because that means that something else is going on. Whether there's a ghost here or not, there is something going on that allows people to identify who this ghost supposedly was without having known anything about this place.
Jay Robinson: Setting up the equipment is a complicated affair. Video cameras with built-in recorders are aimed at probable locations. A thermal radiometer is adjusted so that a base temperature reading can be taken. A baseline magnetometer reading is set on the oscilloscope. Then, the painstaking search begins for areas with abnormal readings. Soon, Lloyd detects a mysterious and inducive electromagnetic field.
Further evidence of Tony's presence occurs when the bartender checks the cash register.
Lloyd and Joan: These weren't stacked. No. You see how he's stacking right here? I know. Good job, Tony. See the quarters. Look at all that.
Random Investigator Guy: Do you feel the Tony's around right now?
Joan: Yeah, I do.
Jay Robinson: On one video recording, a place mat was seen floating off the table just at the same time there was some sort of electronic interference, was it activity or a stray breeze?
Lloyd: Tonight we came into the restaurant for another try to see if we could pick up any phenomena. Joni at one point did feel that Tony was around and we did for a short time get some very unusual readings on the magnetometers. It's kind of hard when you're here only for a short time to really hope for anything, but we had hope for something to happen as we normally do.
But we did talk to a number of people and including the bartender who had a experienced, several experiences here, and it's the people, the witnesses themselves, that are the best evidence in many respects. Although we really wanna try to see something happen. It's talking to the people and hearing things along the way that help us determine if there's any sort of pattern or anything we can do next and how we wanna proceed with the future investigations.
Jay Robinson: For the time being, the mysterious happenings of the Banta Inn remain just that: mysterious. As long as paranormal phenomena occur and until we have the definitive answer to life after death, the quest will continue no matter how bizarre the circumstances.
(end scene)
Bizarre #6
Forensics
Jay Robinson: It's been said that dead men tell no tales. However, for a growing and controversial group of graveyard hunted detectives, it is no longer the case. From the high tech tools of modern forensic science, these specialists are coaxing secrets from the dead and these are sometimes the tales of murder, mayhem, and butchery. Do you have the ability to solve mysteries of the grave that are hundreds of years old? (chuckles) I guess you'd have to call it beyond bizarre.
If you were asked to think of a famous detective, you might come up with a character like the fictional Sherlock Holmes, who was infinitely methodical and logical in his search for the truth. These days, the truth is often stranger to fiction. Today's investigators for sometimes solved crimes that definitely can be called bizarre.
Today's forensics sleuths bring an arsenal of modern technological weapons to bear upon the mysteries of the dead, as well as an infinite variety of skills. Some investigate water related fatalities while others specialize in bringing to light the secrets of the long dead, using clues from badly decomposed bodies and even small fragments thereof.
Take the bizarre case of a woman who brutally stabbed her husband to death. And burned their residence to conceal the crime. She arranged a hasty funeral with no autopsy, but 15 years later, a witness came forward who cried murder. The man's remains were exhumed and said to forensic anthropologist, Dr. Douglas OwlsLey at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC
Dr. Douglas: And as we begin to do this, one of the things that we note is that there are a number of ribs that show an abnormal appearance. On the end that would be on the side, we note that there is a complete incision, a cut that is sliced from the top of the rib completely through it. In other ribs on the left side, this is the left 10th rib, it also has a knife cut that is sliced completely through the rib. Okay. In examining these edges, you can tell that this bone has been sliced completely through. It's a very clean cut. It's the type of cut that would've been done with a fairly large knife.
Jay Robinson: As a result of Dr. Owsley's forensic examination, the woman was convicted of murdering her husband. These days where the extraordinary range and power of modern forensic techniques, arson is no longer a foolproof way to cover up homicide. In another even more bizarre case from Dr. Owsley's files, a killer incinerated his victim for two full days.
Is certain that all traces would be obliterated with only minute pieces of the body remaining the murderer was in for a rude awakening.
Dr. Douglas Owlsly: For one thing, we can determine that this is an adult, that it is human, and by examining the changes that have occurred in this rib fragment, we can estimate the age of this individual as being between approximately 24 and 40 years of age. This is consistent with the missing person. Who was 34 years of age at the time of her disappearance.
Jay Robinson: The only remaining bodily evidence three charred two fragments were mounted and subjected to precision high-tech evaluation. The dental remnants was scanned with an electron microscope. Dr. Owlsey determined the fragments were consistent with dental records of the missing woman. In addition, The container used to burn the corpse was also traced to the suspect.
Dr. Douglas Owlsley: From this evidence, the jury convicted the man of murder and he was given a sentence of 21 years to life imprisonment.
Jay Robinson: Forensic anthropologists are literally rewriting the history of the famous and the infamous. In 1874, a lone prospector emerged from the San Juan Mountains of Colorado without his five companions. Their bizarre fate was to become a ghoulish tale without equal of the annals of the old west. The survivor of that Ill faded expedition was Alfred Packer, jailed on suspicion of murder, he confessed and then escaped before being charged.
Traveling artist John Randolph located the grizzly murder scene and sketched it for a national publication. Afterwards, Randolph buried the remains and the published sketches spread fear and horror throughout the West. Packer was captured nine years later and was convicted of mass murder. He was initially accused of cutting up the bodies so he could eat their flesh.
Alfred Packer became the most notorious cannibal of his time. Did Packer really commit that heinous crime or were the bodies consumed by wild animals? James Starz, a law professor of forensics at George Washington University led a team of forensic detectives search out the answer to that very question.
The well-preserved bones were inventoried and evaluated the Human Identification Laboratory at the University of Arizona. Dr. Starz presented the findings from that expedition to a class of law and science students
Dr. Starz: talking to students: And here you have George California noon and the marks in his skull. Would you believe, 115 years in the ground, and you can still see the hatchet marks as clearly defined as you do? He had 16 hatchet blows in his skull. Every one of the four skulls had multiple strikes from a hatchet. As you see here, there are marks. This is the cannibalism. You can see the marks, little nicks here and there. Nowhere near like the kind of trauma that was inflicted by the hatchet that he used. So clearly these were de-fleshed, and in all probability, they were def fleshed for the purposes of being cannibalized.
Jay Robinson: Although he was convicted, Packer was later pardoned. But 115 years later, the barren bones of his victims spoke with a clear voice about murder and cannibalism.
(end segment)
Jay Robinson: People die in every possible medium and circumstance. Sometimes it's death by accident. But all too often death is a more sinister face, and it frequently requires a specialized forensic investigator to make the determination, accident or murder.
Bizarre #7
Aquatic Forensics
Jay Robinson: Fatalities that occur in aquatic environments demand investigators who understand the specialized environment of water. These investigators work in a gravity free medium devoid of fingerprints, subject to different forces with those of dry land. Tom Ebro of Aquatic Risk Management is such an aquatic detective.
Tom Ebro: I was Los Angeles County's aquatics director back in 1965 when I first started working with the medical examiner's office as the deputy coroner. It was Dr. Thomas Nagucci that personally provided me the specialized training and experience in such things as aquatics, death, investigations, and chain of evidence, protocols and on scene evidence gathering precision.
And I still remember walking those holes of the dead and working together with the forensic pathologists doing just scores and scores of aquatics-related autopsies.
Jay Robinson: As an underwater specialist, he has investigated diving accidents, shark attacks, and homicides. In a Washington state drowning, a man named Randy Roth lost his second wife in an apparent boating accident. His first wife had also ostensibly died accidentally. Tommy Ebro was called in to evaluate and reconstruct the man's version of events.
Tommy Ebro: Well, this was a murder investigation. As an aquatic expert, I was called in to work with the King County Sheriff's Office to evaluate the claims that Randy Roth was making.
Randy Roth: (archival interview footage) She was holding onto the side of it, in attempt to climb in, and I had informed her that I would swim around to the other side and hold the opposite side so that she could. It would be stabilized and she could climb back into it. And at the time she was holding the rope when the weight came by, it did in fact contribute to flipping the raft over while she was holding onto the raft for support. She was floating face down when I was at, when I righted the raft.
Tommy Ebra: So we analyzed each detail of the versions that, uh, he offered, uh, regarding what happened to his wife. And we investigated and we actually. Uh, reconstructed all the events on the lake and it didn't square with the truth.
Jay Robinson: Randy Roth almost got away with murder, but due to Tommy Bro's efforts, he was instead convicted of murder.
(end segment)
(concluding segment commenced)
I do hope you have enjoyed your excursion into the realm of the strange and unusual. We now return you to your well altered lives but remember to expect the unexpected. For when one has touched another reality, the possibilities suddenly become endless, don't they?
(chuckles)
I'm Jay Robinson, and I'll be waiting until next time to take you on another journey beyond bizarre
(chuckles)
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