Episode 613: Latoya Ammons and the Demon house

On the afternoon of March 26, 1997, the San Diego County Sherrif’s Department received an anonymous call through 911 reporting a mass suicide at an address in Rancho Santa Fe, California. A single sheriff’s deputy was dispatched to the address and knocked on the front door, but got no response. Finding a side door to the home unlocked, the deputy entered the house and was horrified to discover nearly forty bodies of adults, all of whom appeared to have taken their own lives in what appeared to be some kind of ritual. Not since the terrible mass deaths at Jonestown decades earlier had Americans seen such a bizarre and ultimately tragic occurrence and few were able to understand how such a thing could have happened in the modern age. What could have caused so many people to willingly give up their lives, and who was he enigmatic man who’d convinced them to do it?

In the early hours of March 13, 1964, twenty-eight-year-old Kitty Genovese returned home from work and parked her car in a lot near her Queens apartment, completely unaware that someone was following her. As she approached the door to her apartment building, Kitty’s stalker ran up behind her and stabbed her in the back twice before being scared off by a neighbor who yelled from his window. Wounded, Kitty managed to get to the back of the building, but her attacker soon returned and brutally assaulted her. By the time an ambulance arrived an hour later, it was too late; Kitty Genovese died before she reached the hospital. Kitty’s murder and the arrest of her killer, Winston Moseley, were quickly overshadowed by what were believed to be the facts of the attack, primarily the widely held belief that at least thirty-eight neighbors had seen the assault or heard Kitty’s cries for help and did nothing. Despite there having been no evidence to support that belief, the narrative quickly became about urban apathy, with the death of a Queens bartender merely a footnote. The murder of Kitty Genovese is one of the most notorious violent crimes in modern American history—not because of the details or circumstances of the crime, but because of the legend and mythology that has built up around it.

In the early summer of 1984, seventeen-year-old Gary Lauwers was murdered by his friend Richard “Ricky” Kasso in the small Long Island suburb of Northport, New York. Lauwers was stabbed more than thirty times in the attack and his body showed signs of what appeared to be torture. The death itself was shocking to the tiny community of Northport, but the details that emerged in the wake of Kasso’s arrest would shock the entire nation.

In late 1916, while treating a group of patients at his psychiatric clinic at the University of Vienna, Dr. Constantin von Economo began noticing the appearance of strange symptoms that he could not account for. At the same time, in France, Rene Cruchet began noticing similarly strange and unexpected symptoms in his patients. Though the two men had never met and knew nothing of one another’s patients, they would come to learn they were both witnessing the emergence of a new mysterious disease that would soon affect millions of people around the world. The illnesses documented by von Economo and Cruchet would eventually come to be know as encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness, a strange condition that caused profound lethargy, hypersomnia, and a wide range of other frightening symptoms. Between 1919 and the early 1930s, millions of people all around the world contracted the illness, with nearly half of all cases resulting in death, and many more suffering long-term effects; yet a cause of the illness has never been established and the terrifying epidemic appears to have faded from memory not long after the disease itself ostensibly disappeared.

Weirdos!! On today's episode Alaina announced the third chapter in the Wren Muller series- The Butcher Legacy . Be sure to visit to PREORDER NOW by visiting butcherlegacy.com. Order NOW to get exclusive signed editions from BN.com AND the Special Edition from Target! In the winter of 1980, wealthy socialite Martha “Sunny” von Bulow was found unconscious in the bathroom of the mansion she shared with her husband, Claus, in Newport, Rhode Island. An ambulance was called and Sunny was rushed to the nearest emergency room, but paramedics and doctors were unable to revive her and Sunny would remain in a coma until her death in 2008. At first, Sunny’s coma was a mystery to doctors, but soon suspicion fell on her husband, Claus, who appeared indifferent to her condition and was openly carrying on an affair with another woman. The family launched a private investigation and eventually turned up strong evidence they believed implicated Claus in the attempted murder of Sunny, but, as they soon learned, believing it and proving it were two very different things.