Footsie

Hey true weirdos, at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. This little piggy went to market. There are websites like Feet Finder and Fun With Feet that sell pics of feet, the feet of more than hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurial amateur and pro foot models.

Buyers can sign up and engage with sellers to get exactly the kind of foot photos they want in their favorite categories. This little piggy stayed home. Maybe you're looking for pics of feet in soft fuzzy socks or bare feet, feet with flawless nail polish, feet with tattoos or scars. This little piggy had roast beef. Feet covered in soil or sand or whipped cream or spaghetti sauce.

The possibilities are nearly limitless. And this little piggy had none. There are creators on OnlyFans earning thousands of dollars every month off their feet. A quick Google search offers up advice on how to take the best foot photos, the biggest trends in foot pics, black and white photography is hot at the moment. You'd probably be amazed at just how huge the online foot photo community is.

But like everything else about human behavior, there can be a dark side to having a fondness for feet, a twisted side, even I hate to say it, a deadly side. And this little piggy cried wee wee wee all the way home. Let's start right off the bat with this. When it comes to having a fetish for any human body part, the feet win.

It's not even close. According to WebMD, about a third of people surveyed online have a fetish for a non genital body part or feature and feet outrank anything you've got. Your foot fans also call out shoes, socks and stockings as favorites. As far as why some people have a foot fetish, there are a couple of explanations floated by science.

The first is psychological. Something happened maybe in childhood that led you to associate feet with sexual gratification. That's the simplest and most obvious theory. The second theory is far more fascinating. Now that we have such incredible imaging technology, researchers can map the human brain in ways our ancestors could never have imagined.

They can see what parts of the brain light up with activity when you feel or see or taste or experience sexual arousal. It turns out that the part of the brain that deals with sensations in your genitals is right next door to the part of your brain that controls sensations in your feet. You know what that means? It means that for some people, seeing or feeling or even thinking about feet lights up the part of the brain that runs the genitals.

Isn't that super fascinating? The technical name for a foot fetish is podophilia. It's been around for as long as people have walked this earth. Lucius Flavius Philostratus, a writer in ancient Greece, penned a pair of poems on the subject. This line is from To a Barefoot Woman. Oh thrice charmed would I be and blessed if your feet would tread on me.

And from another of his poems called To a Barefoot Boy. Let nothing come between the earth and your bare feet. Fear not the dust will welcome your tread as it would welcome grass and we shall all kiss your footprints. Oh perfect lines of feet most dearly loved. Oh flowers new and strange. Oh plants sprung from earth. Oh kiss left lying on the ground.

You can see why Philostratus gets tagged as the first foot fetish dude in history. If you're dying listening to this because a foot fetish is your deepest secret, let out a breath. You have so much company and lots of very famous people share your fetish. The filmmaker Quentin Tarantino has gotten a lot of attention for the attention he pays to women's feet in his movies.

Here's Brad Pitt accepting his 2020 Screen Actors Guild Award for Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I want to thank my co-stars Leo, Margot Robbie, Margot Robbie's feet, Margaret Qualley's feet, Dakota Fanning's feet. Seriously Quentin has separated more women from their shoes than the TSA. Looking for something a little more highbrow?

How about Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky who's considered one of the finest novelists to have ever lived. His mistress said he was all over her little piggies all the time. Plus his books are loaded with instances of men flinging themselves to the ground and kissing women's feet. Then there's Elvis Presley. His foot fetish might have begun in childhood when at her request he would give his mother foot rubs.

The king called his mama's feet her little sooties. It's said that Presley's crew would evaluate women interested in a little romance with Elvis by first having a look at their feet. Both Ludacris and Pharrell are blunt about their enthusiasm for a lady's foot. So is Ricky Martin and Jack Black. If you're a fan of the TV show Fool Us with magicians Penn and Teller you might enjoy knowing that their current host the actress Brooke Burke has a real thing for men's feet provided they take good care of those doggies.

Baseball star Alex Rodriguez can't get enough and neither can rocker Tommy Lee who like Elvis started out young massaging his mama's tootsies. Since people are people and impulse control is hard it shouldn't be that big a shock to learn that folks are forever getting themselves into trouble over other people's feet. A water man is in jail tonight accused of breaking into women's rooms at a Nevada resort and rubbing their feet while they slept.

Neighbors in the North Valley say they had strange encounters with the suspect long before this University police say they're searching for a suspect in a really strange case here. FIU police say a man was caught smelling a female student's feet at the library. This is a flyer that is circulating around campus. They say someone reported seeing this man under a table and smelling a woman's foot.

The person also snapped photos here. Police say the victim didn't even know the man was there until they showed her. It's a bizarre case of assault and battery. It involves a man with an apparent foot fetish. The video gives you creeps. Police say the guy conned this woman into taking off her shoe and they believe there are other victims.

This email alert was posted after Amika Opuedu was arrested Thursday evening in Cal State San Marcos. His picture prominently featured. Escorted off campus twice before, this time he was hauled away to jail. A woman reported that he tried to caress, massage, or place the victim's foot or toes in or on his mouth without consent.

This video you'll see only on WPBF 25 News. A man, police say, is preying on young girls, targeting them for their socks. Now officers are asking for other victims to come forward. As Whitney Burbank explains, this is not the first time this former Jensen Beach High School employee has been accused of strange behavior.

Port St. Lucie police say a young girl was heading back from cheerleading practice here with her socks in her hands when a man approached her and asked her to hand them over. Port St. Lucie police say that man is Robert Van Wagner. Watch this exclusive surveillance video. Police say Van Wagner begs and pleads for the socks until he corners the young girl.

He actually forcibly took the socks from her and left the chair. That is right. This is the latest college campus to be dealing with this very bizarre situation. A man approaching women saying he's a licensed massage therapist and asking to rub their feet. Now this has happened twice here. Police are reviewing a security video trying to find some clues.

Joseph Jones appeared for his scheduled court date, but because of the extra charges added, he was cuffed and detained to ensure that he didn't get a case of cold feet before being called. The investigation and the process of dealing with this case, I've come across a number of things that I find very concerning about this individual.

New charges were added after three more women came forward telling police this man grabbed their feet and removed their shoes without permission. Like we said, a fondness for feet is totally common and totally your private business. Also totally harmless, you know, just so long as everyone involved is a consenting adult.

But as in all things, there are always going to be those people who make something vile or violent out of their fantasies and fetishes like the serial killer, Ted Bundy, who enjoyed bragging about his own feet, calling them the most attractive feet you've ever seen. What really turned him on though were socks, white socks to be exact.

He said that one of his fantasies was to have enough socks to be able to wear a new pair every day. He often purchased socks using stolen credit cards, admitting that he was definitely guilty of having a sock fetish. Even as he awaited execution by electric chair, Ted Bundy had half a dozen brand new pairs of socks keeping him company in his jail cell.

Ted Bundy's fixation on white socks seems downright wholesome when compared to other perpetrators with a thing for feet. There's a long unsolved serial murder case in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They call this one the Eastbound Strangler. It was fall 2006, and over the course of five weeks, the bodies of four women, Kim Raffo, Barbara Breidor, Molly Dilts, and Tracy Ann Roberts, were found alongside the Black Horse Pike Highway.

Each was fully clothed, except for the feet. Law enforcement created a profile for the suspect that included the following. The lethal predator is a local male who is very familiar with the Atlantic City area and the disposal site of his victims. He has a very organized personality, which influences his personal and everyday activities, including his work.

He's very rigid and structured in his everyday life. A place for everything and everything in its place would be his motto. He has read and reads books on serial killers and has some knowledge of crime scenes and crime investigations. He has an extreme foot fetish and has a collection of women's shoes and the shoes of his victims.

The Eastbound Strangler remains at large to this day. Police theorize that he's gone dormant. And despite some tantalizing similarities to the Long Island serial killer, the man charged with those crimes, Rex Huerman, has been ruled out as the Strangler. If the Strangler has stopped killing, the police theory as to why is nightmare material.

They speculate that maybe he's settled down and is in a relationship with someone he genuinely cares about. They do say you can never truly know a person. And if that police theory is correct, somewhere out there is a woman or man who has no idea that they are sharing their bed and their life and possibly their size eight black suede peep toe slingback stilettos with a killer.

And then there's Dayton Leroy Rogers and Jerome Jerry Brutus, both serial killers, both with an ungodly, obsessive fixation on feet. And while the men committed their crimes decades apart, they shared a killing ground in common. Oregon Dayton Leroy Rogers is also known as the Molalla Farris murderer. The name comes from the location where he dumped six of the bodies of the suspected eight victims.

A stretch of privately owned forest land about 10 miles outside Molalla, Oregon. Rogers serial killing career spanned the years 1983 through 1987. Rogers preyed on sex workers. His M.O. was to head into Portland, where he would cruise the streets looking for a prostitute that fit his appetite. Rogers often selected very young women, those addicted to heroin.

Rogers would chat her up, slowly gaining her confidence. The two of them sharing a bottle of orange juice spiked heavily with vodka. Then it was time for a little drive to the forest just outside Molalla. Rogers had very specific tastes. He was into bondage and torture. And there are details, grisly graphic details, and we'll spare you those.

But you do need to know this. Rogers was really into feet. You could almost say he was a collector. At the time of Rogers' arrest, it was thought that his crimes were the largest serial killing case in Oregon's history. It took more than a month to seat a jury for Rogers' trial on six counts of aggravated murder. Some of the women who escaped testified for the prosecution, which is no small thing.

Confronting the monster who tried to kill you takes courage. And no surprise here. These victims were also being tried in the court of public opinion for having worked as prostitutes. Honestly, reading those news stories where the headlines were more focused on that than on Rogers' sadism and violence, well, how vile.

What kind of society does that? The kind built on the prudish sanctimony of the Puritans, that's what kind. The kind of society that punishes sex workers more than it does the customers who keep the world's oldest profession in business. In February 1988, Rogers' murder trial began. One survivor who testified against Rogers was Carol Van Sise, just 16 years old, the night she encountered Rogers.

The press called her an ex-hooker. Under oath, she described Rogers mixing up some vodka and orange juice before suggesting they take a ride to a cool spot he knew. Next thing she knew, Rogers was on top of her, tying her hands and ankles, threatening to strangle her, savagely biting her breasts and her feet. 33-year-old Roberta Favor, a former sex worker, told a similar tale with one creepy flourish.

Same vodka and OJ, same ride in the truck to the wooded Molalla Forest, but this time Rogers asked Roberta to get out of the vehicle. He wanted to watch her wash her feet in a nearby puddle. Mid-splash, he lunged at her with a knife, cutting her right forearm. Marie Johnson took the stand, describing how Rogers took her to the Molalla Forest, bound her and tortured her for six hours.

Weirdly, at the end of that, he carried her to the Molalla River and carefully washed the blood from her hands, her breasts, and her feet. Why he returned her to Portland alive is a mystery. The spot where he bathed the blood from her body was right near the spot where seven bodies of murdered women had been found in the summer of 1987, bodies that were nude, scarred with multiple knife wounds, and missing their feet.

Like Carol Van Sise and Roberta Favor, Marie Johnson somehow managed to escape death. As serial killers go, Rogers was either super inept or, more likely, so wildly distracted by the feet of his would-be victims that he couldn't stay on task, thankfully. His foot fetish definitely featured in his violent compulsions, but at the same time, that foot fetish just might have helped save the lives of many of the women he targeted.

The jury found 35-year-old Dayton Leroy Rogers guilty on all counts, and he was sentenced to death by lethal injection. The timing proved lucky for Rogers. The death sentence was overturned by the Oregon Supreme Court in keeping with a 1989 U.S. Supreme Court ruling regarding jury instructions in death penalty cases, which meant a new penalty trial for Rogers, and that took place in 1994.

In May of that year, a second jury decided that Rogers should be put to death for his crimes. Six months later, Rogers petitioned the governor of Oregon to commute his death sentence. That was a bust, but Rogers was no quitter. In 2002, he took another run at escaping execution by arguing that the jury in his murder trial was not representative of the population at large.

And once again, Rogers' death sentence was overturned. 2006 brought another trial, and again, Rogers was sentenced to death. By 2015, when Rogers once again returned to a courtroom in Oregon City, he had been sentenced to death three times, saw that sentence overturned three times. He was 62 years old by that point, and if he was hoping the time had made people forgetful of his crimes, had maybe sanded down some of the rougher edges, he was mistaken.

The state wasn't about to let anyone forget what Dayton Leroy Rogers had done to his victims. Prosecutors read the testimony of a survivor, Carol E. Dundum. They read it because by this point, Carol had passed away. Carol told police that she had been out with Rogers three times, and despite the fact that he had become increasingly aggressive with each encounter, she considered him one of her regulars.

I guess that even in sex work, the customer is always right. Ugh. It was easy for me to say, yeah, you can tie me up, because he hadn't hurt me the first time. And then came the night when Carol Dundum found herself in the fight of her life. The pair had driven in Rogers' car to a wooded area outside Molalla. Rogers bound Carol's wrists and ankles.

Then he began slugging her in the face with his fist, screaming that she was a slut. He was telling me that I was evil. I was scared. I was crying. The more fear I showed, the more aggressive he got. Somehow, Carol managed to free herself enough to throw the door of Rogers' truck open. She ran naked and terrified into the night, heading for what she hoped was the road.

Headlights. Waving frantically at the oncoming vehicle, Carol knew this was her only chance of surviving this hellish night. The driver who veered to a stop was an older man. He took her to the home of a friend. Carol knew she'd been lucky, knew that her regular was a bad guy. She just had no idea how bad. But she knew one thing, one strange thing.

At Rogers' 1989 trial on multiple murder charges, Carol Dundum testified under oath that Rogers began hacking at her foot with a knife while she was bound, growling, I'm taking your feet. A lifetime of movies and TV shows have a way of making us all a little desensitized to violence. But let's sit with this for a second.

I'm taking your feet. How does the brain even process something like that in a moment like that? And if you're wondering why Carol Dundum didn't ask that good Samaritan to take her straight to the police, fair question. Remember this. She was a sex worker with a substance issue. We're gross and judgmental today about that combination.

We were no less judgmental back in the 1980s. And maybe she was used to getting knocked around by the Johns. Maybe that was just part of the job, something you had to be tough enough to handle on your own. And let's please don't kid ourselves about what would probably have happened if Carol had staggered into a police station that night.

She was a prostitute. She'd gotten into Rogers' car of her own free will. She drank with him. So he roughed her up. What did she think was going to happen? Wasn't she asking for it? Stupid whore. Don't clutch your pearls. This is how women are often treated. Back then, and as much as it breaks my heart, now, Carol Dundum saved herself.

And then, many years later, took a swing at her attacker from the grave. On Monday, November 16, 2015, one more jury arrived at yet another verdict for Dayton Leroy Rogers. Right before his sentence was announced, Dayton Leroy Rogers was permitted to address the court. Now 62 years old and a shambling bag of self-pity, Rogers made a weepy nine-minute long plea for mercy.

There's not one minute of my existence that I don't think of those I hurt by my actions. There is never a day that I don't struggle from the very core of my heart and soul over the despicable acts I've committed. Rogers was sentenced to death for the fourth time. It was mostly a symbolic sentence since the state of Oregon has had a moratorium on execution since 2011.

But symbolic or not, family members of the victims felt it was more than just. A spokesperson for one family said that these women had suffered the most terrible deaths and that even Rogers' trials had been like living in a horror film. Horrible, too, for the good people of Oregon who just wanted to, you know, I don't know, go jogging in the rain and drink kombucha and not be summoned to jury duty over and over for a violent maniac with a thing for feet.

Horrible, but nothing new. Because long before there was Dayton Leroy Rogers, there was Jerome Henry Brudos, a.k.a. Jerry Brudos, a.k.a. the shoe fetish slayer. He might have been born in South Dakota, but his killing ground was in Oregon. How Jerry Brudos came to be fixated on women's feet and shoes isn't a mystery. He explained it himself, describing how it all began when he was five years old.

The teenage daughter of family friends was feeling unwell during a visit, so Jerry's parents suggested she go lie down on Jerry's bed. Little Jerry crept into the room and there she was, curled up asleep, still wearing her high-heeled shoes. The kid was mesmerized and worked up the nerve to try and slip one of the shoes off.

The girl woke up and was like, get out of here. But Jerry was hooked in many ways. Jerry had a kind of standard, weirdly miserable serial killer childhood. Dad was a spottily employed walking absence. Mom was prudish, pious, punitive and openly critical of the boy. Dr. Boy, Dr. Sigmund Boy. Mom was so indifferent to Jerry that he turned to a neighbor about her same age for a little bit of maternal affection.

She doted on him and encouraged his visits. And then tragically, this mother substitute died, leaving young Jerry bereft. Dr. Boy, Dr. Sigmund Boy to the nearest courtesy phone. Jerry understood full well that his enthusiasm for women's feet and shoes was big time unacceptable. His mother had beaten him brutally for bringing home a pair of rhinestone trim ladies heels that he'd found in the town dump and then modeling them for her.

Jerry wasn't yet in first grade and was already being told he was wicked and sick and disgusting. And then he got to first grade and tried to steal his teacher's shoes. Time and puberty only escalated and expanded Jerry's fixations. He hung out with a boy in his neighborhood who had sisters. That boy, get ready, liked to steal and sniff his own sister's underwear.

A pastime he introduced to Jerry Brudos. If reality really is a simulation, this is one of those times it needs to be unplugged and then plugged back in to see if that fixes it, because this is broken. Right around this time, Jerry became obsessed with female nudity. Too shy and awkward to actually speak to a girl. He instead tried to find ways to peep at them.

He began secretly photographing girls, adding their photos to his collection of stolen shoes and underwear. His mother didn't find those, but she kept a close eye on his bedsheets. If Mama Brudos spotted semen stains, the unholy evidence of Jerry's frequent masturbation, she'd lose it, screaming and hauling both bedding and boy to the washing machine.

At age 16, Jerry Brudos did something that really should have rung the alarm. But this was 1955, and it's possible that a lad digging an underground tunnel and hidey hole near his house just seemed like the behavior of an industrious young man with a passion for spelunking. But Jerry himself later confessed that he spent hours in his DIY underground lair, fantasizing about what he might do with a female captive.

And here's what he did when 16-year-old Jerry Brudos finally managed to lure a girl from the neighborhood to his house. He took her to his bedroom, donned a mask, forced her to strip at knife point, and then took photographs before bolting out of the room. When he returned minutes later, he said that an intruder had locked him in the family barn.

Can you imagine how terrified and freaked out that girl was? Can you imagine that happening to your daughter and you being like, Oh, settle down. You know how boys are. He likes you. That's how they show it. That's all. Stop being so dramatic. OK, but listen, that was just the beginning of Jerry's creepy teen crime spree.

He began luring girls, younger girls, to the Brudos barn. And by luring, I mean forcing, usually at knife point. He'd order the girls to strip. He'd take photographs. He'd lock them in the corn crib, shades of old yeller, while he changed clothing and slicked his hair into a slightly different style. Then he'd unlock the corn crib door, all aw shucks, apologetic.

I'm Ed, he'd say, Jerry's twin brother. Gosh, I'm awfully sorry for what my brother did. He's in therapy, you know, he's real, real sick. Gee whiz, it would be swell if you could keep this our secret. It sure would set Jerry back if this got out. He's trying so hard to get better. Maybe because it was 1955 and these were young girls, unworldly and scared half to death.

But all it took was a promise from Jerry's twin, Ed, that he would destroy the camera and they agreed. Not one reported these incidents to the police. We don't even know if any of these girls even told a parent. A year later, Jerry Brudos was arrested for the first time, charged with assault and battery on a 17 year old girl who refused his demand that she strip naked.

He beat the daylights out of the girl. An incident that was only prevented from going further when her screams caused a couple driving by to stop and intervene. Brudos spent nine months in a psychiatric facility where doctors diagnosed him with depression and a personality disorder and concluded that his sexual fantasies and fetishes grew from his hatred of his mother.

A hatred that extended to women in general. Paging Dr. Freud, Dr. Sigmund Freud. Is this thing on? Upon discharge from the psychiatric facility, Jerry Brudos returned to his parents' home and finished high school. He enlisted in the army but was found psychologically unfit for service and discharged within seven months.

From there, he tried a career as a radio station engineer in Corvallis, Oregon. Throughout all this, Jerry remained in his parents' home. But when his younger brother returned from university, Brudos' mother banished Jerry from the house to a shed in the backyard. One of the more fantastical plot twists in Brudos' early adulthood is this.

In September 1961, he got married. His bride was barely 18 years old and her name was Ralphine. Marriage didn't make an honest man of Jerry but it temporarily halted his stalking of other women. He had a woman of his own now and for a time, that seemed to satisfy his increasingly perverse appetites. Jerry forced Ralphine to do housework naked except for a pair of high-heeled shoes.

He photographed her from every angle and she acquiesced, agreeing to or maybe just allowing whatever sexual ritual or kink he demanded. Ralphine was pregnant when the couple married and by the time their daughter was toddling and talking, Ralphine no longer had the energy or interest to play X-rated shoe model for her husband.

So relatable. Then she got pregnant again. And in May 1967, while Ralphine was in the hospital giving birth to a son, her husband was following another woman home. He'd been drawn to the high-heeled shoes she was wearing. Jerry Brudos broke into her apartment and choked her until she lost consciousness. Then he raped her, taking her shoes with him when he left the apartment.

This was the beginning of Brudos' serial killing career even though this victim survived. Her body limp, her total surrender, that feeling of utter control and domination. This is what he had been seeking all along. If only somehow he had been stopped right there. If only his arrest one year later for breaking into the women's dorm at Oregon State University and stealing women's clothing had been enough to break in.

But no. Linda Catherine Slawson, Jan Susan Whitney, Karen Elena Sprinker, Linda Dawn Salee. All dead at Brudos' hands. From 1968 to 1969, the town of Salem, Oregon was his candy shop. The four women Brudos abducted and murdered were all young. Slawson was the eldest at 23. All were strangled to death in the basement or garage of Brudos' home.

The home he shared with Ralphine and their two daughters. He tortured each of his victims, photographed them, dressed their corpses in various pieces of lingerie, different pairs of shoes. Took photos of that too. Brudos committed necrophilia in every single case, enjoying the complete command he finally had over each woman.

Before dumping their bodies in the Willamette River, Brudos hacked a few souvenirs off three of his victims. You want to guess what body part he kept? How he later confessed to masturbating while stroking his macabre mementos? Brudos would have had more victims. He tried and failed to abduct at least two other young women.

Thankfully, his crimes unraveled fast. On May 10, 1969, fishermen on the Willamette found the body of a young female, later identified as Linda Dawn Salee. Police launched an investigation, which ultimately led them to another female student at Oregon State. She had a story to tell. She'd agreed to a date with a man. A man that behaved strangely.

A man who gave her the creeps. A man on that date who casually asked her, How do you know I wouldn't take you to the river and strangle you? So she agreed to notify police if Brudos ever called again. And you know he did. The pair made plans for a date that very night. Cops arrested Brudos as he strolled toward the meeting point.

And it all came crashing down from there. A search of Brudos' rented home turned up a huge stash of women's underwear and clothing. There was a list of telephone numbers, all belonging to college sororities and women's dorms, and a pile of Polaroid pictures. In some, the women were alive and bound naked, except for high-heeled shoes.

In others, they were clearly and obviously deceased. On the fireplace mantle in the Brudos' living room was one of the most horrific things law enforcement had ever encountered. A severed, humid breast heavily epoxied. The living room, where Brudos watched TV with his family, his wife and their two children, then ages seven and four.

Jerry Brudos never stood trial. Just three days before his trial was scheduled to begin, he agreed to plead guilty to three counts of first-degree murder. Three counts, and not four, because Brudos was never tried for the murder of Linda Slawson, despite his confessing to that crime. There simply wasn't enough evidence to make the charge stick, and Slawson's was the only body never to be recovered.

In his plea, Brudos acknowledged that his crimes were deliberate and premeditated. Jerry Brudos was sentenced to three consecutive life terms in prison. Just two and a half months later, on August 29, 1969, Brudos' 25-year-old wife, Ralphine, was indicted for first-degree murder in the death of Karen Sprinker. Brudos had sworn up and down that Ralphine knew nothing of his crimes, and she had denied it as well.

In September 1969, Ralphine Brudos stood trial. The jury was shown a dozen color photographs and slides of Ralphine naked, except for her high heels. It had to be mortifying. I did that, she said, because he was my husband, and I had to. The weight of that simple statement put herself in her shoes. Not only had Ralphine learned that she was married to a killer, that she had children with that killer, a killer who tortured his victims in her home, and then violated their dead bodies.

Now she stood accused of being his accomplice. The jury ultimately acquitted Ralphine of all charges, but the state came at her again on charges of accessory after the fact of first-degree murder. That charge didn't stick either, but the cloud of suspicion that hung over her never totally dissipated. Jerry Brudos was packed off to the Oregon State Penitentiary, where he remained until his death in 2006.

Liver cancer is what got him. He was 67 when he died, the longest-serving inmate in the Oregon State Penitentiary. From all accounts, he was a well-behaved prisoner, using his engineering skills to work on the prison computers and vending machines and cable TV system, none of which protected him from being assaulted by his fellow inmates.

Sex offenders don't fare well in prison, and Jerry Brudos was no exception. He got a little taste of what he'd served up to the four women he murdered, but only a taste, because he survived those assaults. He lived to tell, though he never named a single assailant. Did his time ten toes down, as the saying goes. Brudos also never stopped hoping that his conviction would be overturned, never stopped attending his parole hearings, even though he'd been informed in 1995 that he needed to just let it go, because he would die behind bars.

He would never be free. A hard blow. A disappointment for sure. But Jerry Brudos could always return to his cell and comfort himself with the special reading materials the prison permitted him to order, catalogs packed with photos of women modeling lingerie and high heels. Brudos declared his love for his wife Ralphine until his dying day, but she was long gone.

Upon being acquitted in 1969, Ralphine divorced Jerry, scooped up her kids, moved, changed her name, and cut off all contact with her former husband. But his victims? For them, Jerry Brudos had nothing. No remorse. No compassion. A psychiatric evaluation of Brudos diagnosed him with psychopathy. Not much of a surprise there.

Devastating proof of that came in an interview Brudos gave to a former detective named Jim Burns. Burns asked if Brudos felt at all sorry for the women he'd tortured and killed, whose corpses he'd desecrated. Brudos responded by taking a piece of paper from the table, crumpling it and chucking it on the floor, saying, I care about those girls about as much as I care about that wadded up piece of paper.

You could argue that maybe websites like Feet Finder and Fun With Feet give people like Dayton Leroy Rogers and Jerry Brudos a safe outlet for their fetishes. Wouldn't that be a candy-coated rainbow of a world? But the truth is, we're animals. And in the animal kingdom, there will always be predators. And prey. A fixation on feet didn't drive those perpetrators to murder.

It's all more complicated than that. Which is why you have to be ever alert and aware. Why you have to stay on your toes. And if something feels off, make tracks. Don't drag your feet. Get out of there. But if you just happen to have a taste for tootsies, and you ain't hurting nobody, well, you do you. You keep saying you've got something for me.

This little piggy went to market. Something you call love, but confess. This little piggy stayed home. You've been a-messing where you shouldn't have been a-messing. This little piggy had roast beef. Someone else is getting all your best. This little piggy had none. These boots are made for walking. And that's just what they'll do.

And this little piggy... One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you. Cried wee-wee-wee all the way home. Ha ha ha! Next time on True Weird Stuff... Wasn't that long ago that people born with a disability had no options, no medical treatments, no accommodations, no way to make their way in the world except for one place, the Circus Sideshow.

On the next True Weird Stuff, the story of Ella Harper, the Camel Girl. Special thanks to Elizabeth Jordan for singing on this episode, to our voice talents Don Morgan, Ashley Palmer Fischer, and Kary "Doc" Bowser. So Sherry, I can't help but wonder how you came upon this as a subject for an episode. Well, you know, so as I mentioned in another after chat, my Instagram feed, I went through a period where my Instagram feed was choked with this one guy who had a foot fetish. So, you know, we do our day job, the one that actually barely pays our bills, is a syndicated radio show that's carried around the country and around the world on Armed Forces Radio. And so I get a lot of follow requests and follow back requests from people who listen to the show.

I've learned that there are some people you cannot say yes to because they're, hello my dear, how are you? They're just there to hit on you or scam you or whatever. But for the most part, I always follow back. I follow back this listener who, I mean, I've never known anybody with a foot fetish that I know of and I've certainly never seen anybody devote their entire Instagram to pictures of women's feet. And I discovered from this guy's Instagram that this is a business and you can make a ton of money. And that there's all these different specific foot fetish flavors and categories.

Like my man here on my Instagram likes a wrinkly foot. So if you're going like, you mean like an old lady's foot? No, no, no. Like some people, if you can picture it, if they squinch up their foot, it gets all wrinkly. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. That foot wrinkle thing, apparently it just drives some people right the hell out of their minds. And he also had a thing for baby oil. Like he loved to see a really baby oil glistening foot. And he didn't have like, I saw through this man, I saw a couple hundred different women's feet. And the only thing that was consistent is he liked them wrinkly and he liked them oily.

Beyond that, all shapes, all sizes, polish on, polish off, classic red, you know, payment designs, tattoos. I mean, he just had his thing. And so one day as I'm scrolling for the millionth time past this man and his lady's feet, I thought, what? Like I'd heard it was the most common fetish. What makes it the most common fetish? And so I did this big deep dive and that's when I learned, and we touched on it right at the beginning of this episode, could've done a whole episode on, the connection in the brain, the feet. Like imagine your genitals, all the parts of your brain that control sensation in your genitals, shares a duplex with the part of your brain that shares all the connections with sensations in your feet. And in some people, a wall gets knocked down and they're one in the same. Once you know that, you're like, oh, well, yeah. And if that's you and what gets you hard is a foot, then that's just what gets you hard.

And you don't know any different, right? I mean, we are who we are and that's just your wiring. And of course for other people like Jerry Brudos, you know, things happen early in life that kind of turn you that way. And so then I said to myself, well, if it's that common a fetish and that powerful a driver, why don't we have more foot fetish crimes? At Max and I, there's a TV show that, oh my god, please let it come back, Mindhunter.

Jerry Brudos was one of the killers that was profiled on this TV show, Mindhunter. Just an incredible, you should watch, binge it, it's so good. So I was familiar with Jerry Brudos but did not realize the extent to which he was driven by his foot fetish. And then what are the odds that in beautiful Oregon, land of good looking, healthy, kombucha drinking joggers, you would have not one but two foot fetish serial killers.

And so I thought, well, yeah, let's do a foot fetish episode but let's bring those guys in as well. But I don't want anyone listening to this and I hope I made that point in the episode. If that turns you on and you're not hurting anybody, you don't need to feel embarrassed or ashamed of that. Ain't nothing wrong with you and ain't nothing wrong with that, truly.

If that's what does it for you, that's what does it for you. You know, Max, live your life. But here's the thing, you can't capture a woman and cut off her foot. See, that's where you went too far. Well, you can but you really shouldn't. And nowadays, if you want to look at, let's say that your specific thing is a wrinkly foot dangling at the end of a pair of skinny jeans holding a freshly plucked daisy between its piggies. You can find that on the internet right now probably for free. You do not need to go capture someone, keep them in your basement and cut their foot off like these guys did.

So I just thought it was interesting the convergence. And you probably knew this about Ted Bundy but a lot of people don't realize that Ted Bundy had a weird fetish. So I loved the foot fetish thing I was aware of but it's almost, and I think you alluded to this, it's almost charming that he had a sock fetish because you go, well, that sounds pretty harmless. It's just a guy likes socks. He wants to have a different pair of socks every day. It's a little OCD and white ones, okay.

It's a little weird but okay. But there's so many twists with that guy. Now you talked about the Atlantic City Killer, the East Pound Strangler is his name and I'm guessing it's a guy. I am aware of this case and you said something interesting. It's like he did it for a while and then he stopped. So why is that? Why is it that he did indeed stop? And I think there was a rule of thumb at one time about serial killers is they will do it until they are caught, imprisoned or die. That they're so driven by it. But we found that the Golden State Killer, he stopped and then went on and lived a life where he wasn't doing this for the end of his life or towards the end of his life before he was imprisoned.

Same is true with BTK. He stopped and then of course, I still think he wanted to get caught. Well, he wanted you to know what a badass he was. Dennis Rader, the BTK, I think he wanted it to be a legend and he couldn't stand... It's one thing for BTK to be on the serial killer trading cards, but the fact that you didn't know that Dennis Rader was BTK, I think he found that intolerable.

I'm with you on that. Yeah, he wanted you to know who he was. He really did. His daughter, by the way, that poor woman has... Oh, my heart. Her life has been so ruined by that because there's pictures of him walking her down the aisle. Well, at this point, he had killed a whole bunch of people and there he is smiling in his tux and he's got her on his arm. She has been...

It ruined her life. It ruined her marriage. It's been very difficult for her. It really has been. I follow her on social media and the number of times that my heart is broken for her because people are so unkind. The number of people that have come at her as though she shares her father's guilt is appalling. That's its whole own... She won't talk to people anymore.

She won't. She's done interviews on News Nation because I've seen them before. Yeah. She has talked about it some, but I get the feeling that sometimes she does and then she sort of relives it and then she reels back some from it. Understandably. I can't imagine the trauma of that. I just can't. The thing about Jerry Brudos' wife, when you started talking about that and, of course, I didn't know that part of the story. I thought you were going to say that they got her as an accomplice because... No.

They tried. It's unfathomable to me that they wanted to have her as an accessory to this. Just because he was involved she was playing along with whatever his fantasies were under the umbrella of in a committed married relationship she was doing that and it's like, okay. But why humiliate her in court that way? I don't understand that. I think that they couldn't. So this is the 1980s, which I know for some people feels like yesterday, but it was actually nearly 50 years ago. It was a minute ago.

I think that at the time law enforcement and maybe a good swath of the public could not wrap their heads around how these murders which were not swift, these women were tortured and brutalized. They were happening in the basement of her home and in the garage. There's no way she didn't know. There's no way she wasn't part of it. I think that was the thinking.

I put this detail in the episode. Sometimes I hold back on stuff that's really horrifying just because it's just so hard to listen to. But I put the detail about the epoxied, severed human breast on the mantelpiece in there because that was one of the things that I think tripped the wires for law enforcement. Like, lady ain't no way you don't know what's happening here. But Jerry Brudos completely denied any involvement on his wife's part and of course she completely denied any involvement. And there was a dynamic at play that she testified to that I think even now is hard for people to get their head around.

Anyone that's grown up in an abusive home where there's domestic violence, physical and psychological and emotional, anyone who's been in that kind of relationship themselves understands what Ralphine was saying when she said, I had to do those things. He was my husband. I had to do those things. Because when you're in that environment, and I grew up in that, when you're in that environment you're so broken down. The abuse doesn't begin on the first date. The water gets hotter by degrees. Your boundaries are so crushed. You're so broken down. You're so terrorized. She was very young when they married. She was 17 when he dated her, 18 when they married. She was a young, inexperienced woman.

And by the time she was put on trial in 1989 as accessory to murder, she was only 25. And she had been in that house with him being forced and being degraded over and over and over again. And it's very easy to sit on the outside of that and sip your drink and say, well, why didn't you leave? Why didn't you just tell him no? And I think that that dynamic, which is very much alive and well today, was even more pronounced then. I mean, if you go back and look at the press coverage of the Dalton, Leroy Rogers crimes and Jerry Brudos, what you see over and over and over again are the victims being attacked in the press.

Hooker claims assault as opposed to serial killer on the loose, right? And as we know today, this is still very true today, sex workers are often preyed upon and their cases are not as robustly investigated and their deaths are not as mourned. We have very much, and I hate them so much, we have that good girl, bad girl, I hate them, the Puritans, that good girl, bad girl dichotomy in our culture. Well, she's a whore and she was drinking and she got in his car. What did she think was going to happen?

Instead of looking at the perpetrator, we litigate the victims. And so poor Ralphine Brudos is on that stand, 25 years old. Her children have been taken from her and placed in foster care while she went through this legal hellscape. And they are showing the jury these degrading photos of her vacuuming in her high heels with this vacant look in her face and demanding to know if she wasn't an accessory to murder, then how does she explain this? And as a survivor of that world, my, I can't even tell you, like my heart broke.

I was filled with incoherent rage on her behalf. Jeez Louise. One of the things that I like that you did is you named the victims. I think that it's so often the case with this where we're so fascinated, it's not the right word, but I'll use it. We're fascinated with what has happened, the monstrous nature of what's happened and how that could have happened or how a human being could be so twisted that they felt the need to do this, that we become so fascinated with that we forget about the victims.

And like you said, the same is true with Rex Huerman. You talked about him, the Long Island serial killer who was just caught. And of course, I know it's just my nature. I'm fascinated with all things serial killers. So I knew about those cases before they ever caught him. And by the way, his wife is standing by his side and I'm like, okay, I guess if you feel the need to do that, but the case is really strong against him.

If you're looking for a podcast about Rex Huerman, by the way, there is a very good, the guy is really good. He's really even. He goes really in depth and it is very victim-centered as well. It's called Lisk, L-I-S-K, the Long Island serial killer. And I highly recommend that if you have any interest in that case as well.

I have this weird, weird thing where like, I almost don't want to talk about, I almost don't want to do cases where the people are still alive. Do you know what I mean? I feel, I don't know. I have such an uneasy relationship with, I'm such a true crimeaholic in every way and always have been. But I have an uneasy relationship with it from an ethics standpoint.

Like, I don't like, like I feel kind of gross, you know, making entertainment in quotes out of it. And we're doing that, you know. And so it's this, we try really hard with this show to be super victim and survivor-centered and super respectful of that. But there is an ickiness to it for me that I struggle with. But I think that there's a lot of people who have interest in it.

I'll say this because I, you know, I have been always fascinated with all kinds of things with crime and serial killers. I've always had some fascination, but I think there's a lot of really good, well-meaning people that are not bad people who have an interest in this. And, you know, you can't help but be interested in how did that happen?

Well, I have that magical thinking relationship with it. Like, if I pay attention to this, then I can protect myself. Which is, you know, magical thinking. And, you know, I'm just wired to be like, you know, creepy. What can I say? I'm just wired for that. But I do try and it's not always easy, especially, so in these cases, which are pretty contemporary, even though they're in the 1980s, it's much easier to find the names of the people that were victimized. But seeing them portrayed as whores and junkies and drug addicts and bad girls who should have known better is kind of devastating.

I mean, it's really hard. I spend a lot of time in a time machine working on true weird stuff and it's uncomfortable the way that we handled things in the past and then it leaves me grief-stricken that so little has changed going forward in the future where we're still talking about, well, what was she wearing? Had she been drinking? As though there's any cluster of variables that gives you license to rape a person and assault that person and take their life. As if there's any combination that kind of okays that.

But that's sort of the vibe in our culture. You know, we always are looking for, well, he did violently assault her, cut off her feet and then rape her corpse. But was she drinking? Do you see how awful that is when you pull back from it and to be a woman and to be like, oh my god, you gotta be kidding me. You gotta be kidding me. A little bit of faith in humanity that the man that came along after she escaped from him, that he came and took her to a friend's house.

Well, at least there's somebody good in this story that was able to help her out given the circumstances. That man whose name is unknown, that man is very instrumental. You know, we all play our part. Some of us have a small walk on with no lines and some of us are the stars, right? But we all play our part and the part that he played was instrumental in the conviction that ultimately put Dayton Leroy Rogers away because Carol Dundon lived to tell until she did. And even in death, her testimony convicted him for the fourth time and made sure he would never be a free person again.

So that good Samaritan had a very, very important part to play even though he doesn't get his name billed in the credits or any lines. And I wanted to make a point of addressing in the episode, why did she insist on being taken to the police station? I mean, you understand that, right? I do understand it, yes. Yeah. I mean, girl, you're a whore and you're drinking and what did you think was going to happen when you got in his car? And then, of course, the sex workers are always held to a different legal standard than the customers.

That's still true today. So, I think that sometimes as time goes by, we forget the old ways. Some of them are still the current ways, but we forget the context that these events happened in and you have to bring that context forward and go, hey, yeah, remember when this shit went down and nobody looked the other way? And let me talk about Jerry Brutus for a second. So, he was arrested. He had this lengthy teenage career as a freaking pervert and kidnapper and, you know.

And that was all kind of expunged when they sent him to the psychiatric facility for nine months. And then, you know, he gets kicked out of the army. He can't even make it as a radio engineer. Max and I can tell you that you don't need plentiful social skills in that career at least. Except the engineer that helps us with this podcast.

Well, he's the exception, but no, he's literally the exception. He really is. In every way. And then he goes and, you know, now he's kind of experimenting as an adult with scratching some of his more violent and deviant itches. And he did get arrested. And at the time, now, so this is in the 60s. At the time, if police had went, jeepers, I don't know, man.

The guy is breaking into dormitories and stealing underwear. We might need to look a little more closely at this. Oh, and look here. We looked just one extra step and we found that he was a teenage perpetrator who was remanded to a psychiatric facility for nearly a year. If more had been done in that moment, how might this story be different if he had not gotten a slap on the wrist?

Right? I mean, you have to ask the question. But then you've got to remember the context. In the 60s, you know, hey, if a man wanted to steal your panties, I guess you should be flattered. I don't know. Wasn't that a thing at one time? Yeah. So, all right. Let's stay with Jerry Brutus for a second and let's go back another step. How about the neighborhood kid that got off on his own sister's underwear and introduced Jerry to that delightful pastime?

Now, that's an example of not every freak show gets caught or turns violent. For all we know, that kid grew up to be a panty-sniffing pervert for the ages who just never escalated. Right? Right. Now, let's go back one more step with Jerry Brutus. His mother, oh my God, threw him out of the house and made him live in a shed.

How about his little DIY underground lair? Why didn't that catch anyone's attention? How about locking girls up in the corn crib in the family barn and then pretending to be his own twin? Does that not sound like a plot out of a horror movie? It does. Doesn't it sound like, ugh. But I think also, as you said before, at that time, people didn't report stuff. You just sort of like, oh, I don't want to raise a ruckus about this. A lot of times because, well, I can't really prove what happened, you know? I'll tell you what happened, but I can't really prove it and they wouldn't be able to arrest him anyhow. I can tell you that, now that's before those girls were teenagers. That's before my time.

But in my time, if I had come home and told my father that story, my father would have said to me, what did you do to lead him on? And then it would have been, you need to shut your mouth or everyone's going to think you're a whore or a slut or loose. So those girls, let's get our context goggles back on. Those girls who didn't tell the police or a parent, you know why? Because they knew from their social, the way they were socialized in our post-puritanical dystopian hellscape, they knew that they had somehow brought it on themselves. Maybe it was what they were wearing. Maybe they blurred it. Maybe they should have known better than to go back to the barn with that kid. It was their fault.

That is the thing you hear women say time and time again is they blame themselves for this. And while women are blaming themselves, perpetrators are growing increasingly more confident and escalating. And again, not every person with a kink, you know, goes off the deep end. A lot of us are walking around nursing a little bit of a kink. And that's just part of the great human kaleidoscope, okay? And hindsight is everything, right? Hindsight is everything with a guy like Dalton Rogers and Jerry Brudos. It's with hindsight that you put all the pieces together. In the case of Jerry Brudos, I feel like there were some glaring neon signs very, very early on.

And if you want to learn anything from Jerry and his very, very toxic and unhealthy relationship with his mother, here's what you learn. You can't beat it out of a kid. Like if your kids, if you see your kid and your kid's up to some stuff that concerns you, you can't beat it out of the kid. You can't punish it out of the kid.

None of that. It's how they're wired. Yeah. But again, and now let me show some grace to those people and remind you that when Jerry Brudos was a child in the mid to late 1940s, there was no such thing as sending your kid to therapy. There was no child and family development therapeutic center for kids. I'm not even sure we had guidance counselors in high schools back then. There was no therapy.

And Jerry being sent to a psychiatric facility, that's not the same thing as Jerry getting care or help at all. Because psychiatry has come a very long way since that time and our understanding of the human being, the human mind, the human psyche has come a very long way at that time. I mean, for all we know, and we don't because, you know, their medical records, for all we know, a lot of Jerry's therapy while he was inpatient was designed to get him to stop jerking off. I mean, I hate to say it that way, but do the work and you'll see how much of that psychiatric care in those facilities was nuts itself.

Like, one flew over the cuckoo's nest, right? Like, nuts. I mean, look at the episode we did on Georgia Tann, who turned Western State Hospital in Tennessee, which was an inpatient psychiatric facility, she turned it into a human trafficking baby mill. Those women were being systematically raped and their babies were taken from them and sold. You have to ask yourself, what kind of environment do we have here if such things are possible not once or twice, not for a year or two. Georgia Tann was running a systematic rape and trafficking operation out of Western State Hospital for 30 years. And guess what?

She didn't do that by herself. No, that's my point. Max, just because we sent Jerry Brudos away doesn't mean anything. We have no idea what kinds of treatment modalities were in play, but we do know this from a historical standpoint, psychiatry in 1947 was not what it is today. It's a very different thing. And this is not to point blame, but you have to ask the questions. You have to say, well, maybe if we saw what he was doing before he escalated to murder because there was, and Jerry Brudos, it's really interesting if you're into the true crime and the serial killer psychology thing, you can watch the escalation from early childhood. It starts out with curiosity and then it starts out with sampling and it moves to peeping and then it moves to abduction and then it moves to stalking and then it moves to rape and then it moves to strangling and then it moves to murder. And you can track it on a perfectly straight line. The Golden State Killer was very much like that.

Talk about that. Yeah, because when he started out, he's had different nicknames, but I'm going to butcher the name of California Visula? Visalia? Anyhow, he was called Visalia Ransacker was what he was called. So this guy was going into homes and ransacking them and people went, this is kind of crazy and he moved on from that and peeping and eventually he was raping and killing. And not only was he doing it, he was going into a home where there was a man he was tying the man up, putting dishes on him so that if he moved while he was doing what he was going to do, he would threaten to kill them, which he ended up doing anyhow.

I mean, but he is a great example of somebody who was like, then he started doing this and then he started doing this and then he started doing that. The pattern where you watch the pattern of escalation and you see all the places in that pattern, in that line where intervention might have been possible, but of course again, hindsight, right? Have you ever seen, there's a really great little movie called Minority Report, which stars Zinu's minion of Scientology on Earth, Tom Cruise. Have you ever seen the movie Minority Report?

I have, yes. With Tom Cruise and Samantha Morton. So here's the basic premise of Minority Report. I love this movie. And it's very prescient in a lot of ways because Tom Cruise is moving through a world where we're all tracked by advertisers and marketers. And as he moves through the world, billboards come to life and speak directly to the products.

You know the part I'm talking about? Right, right. That he would use and all. It's a very dark dystopian movie about technology and predictive technology. And the premise is this. There are these people who are gifted with precognition and they are able to see a crime before it occurs. And then law enforcement is able to arrest the perpetrator before the crime is committed. So it's a very moral, it's a very slippery moral slope. Because technically the crime has not occurred. And the penalty for being caught in this precognitive act of violence is, it's like your life, right?

So here we have this entire society where people are not just being tracked by their whereabouts but all of your preferences and your products and everything you're into is known. And that information, that data is following you and anticipating you and your every move. And you will not commit that crime because we're going to bust your ass before you have a chance to. So when you think about Jerry Brudos and the Golden State Killer and you look at their beautiful straight line escalation pathway and you say to yourself, we could have gotten him here, we could have gotten him there. But then you're in the world of Minority Report. Because first of all you can't always know. By even like a real deviant thing like I just caught you standing outside the window jacking off into a pair of espadrilles while peeping at grandma, that is not proof that you're going to commit a violent crime.

It's proof that you're gross, but it's not proof that you're going to commit an act of violence. So as much as we wish, we look backward and we wish that people had been interrupted and disrupted we have to accept that unless we're going to live in the world of Minority Report, we have to accept that we can't make assumptions. Because there are plenty of people, including my Instagram foot fetish buddy, there are plenty of people who are just beside themselves with joy at a wrinkly foot in a soapy bubble bath who are never going to hurt a living soul.

Do people who have matching kinks ever get together? I wonder. It never seems like they do, but I guess we don't hear about them. Yeah. You know, I think they don't. Lamar and I Lamar is one of our co-workers. I bet he's glad to be brought into this conversation. Lamar and I were talking and we're like, why is it that these people don't find each other?

Why don't they find each other? Why do they find their opposite and then drive that person crazy? And I guess that's just a human nature thing, right? I guess. I don't know. That's a whole other episode I have. Yeah. I mean, it's a fair question. Like, why don't they find each other? I just, you know, part of being a person is being kind of weird and a little bit twisted. Because aren't we all a little bit weird and a little bit twisted? Don't we all, like if we're honest, don't we all have a little something something that we'd rather not share with the world? No, Sherry, I have no idea what you're talking about. Boy, I think we just learned something about you.

I think that people need more well, whatever they need, they need less shame. Like my foot fetish buddy on Instagram, who if he listens to true weird stuff, probably ran off the road. But you notice I didn't call out his Insta handle. My foot fetish buddy, I speak directly to you when I say, you enjoy that? You're not hurting anybody? You're paying those women money for those photos and videos of their feet and you're enjoying that in the privacy of your own home? I don't know.

Are you one of those guys that something happened to in childhood? Is your brain, is your foot and genital duplex connected in your brain? I don't know. I don't know. But you're not hurting anybody. And I just wish that you could enjoy that with less shame. Because I think that part of it, if you look at Jerry Brudos in particular, that kid from early was shamed and shamed and shamed and shamed and shamed and shamed.

So was John Wayne Gacy, by the way. There's similarities between these two stories. Yes. And I now want to speak directly to our Puritan forebears. There's not any left. Shame was the name of their game. The Puritans believed that society could be controlled by shame. Shame and threat of damnation. But the interesting thing about the threat of damnation with the Puritans was they believed in predestination, which meant if you were born destined for hell, they wanted nothing you could do about it. Which is just part of the reason why I despise them. But this idea of controlling people through shame persists in our culture to this day.

To this day. If that's your thing, you live your life. And please remember that Feet Finders and Fun With Feet is a click away on your device. And you do not need to follow people around in public. My Aunt Rosemary, I'll end with this. My Aunt Rosemary, my dad's only sister, was this beautiful teeny tiny little Italian lady. She was five foot one inch tall. Itsy bitsy teeny.

Just a beauty. And she had teeny tiny little feet. Teeny little feet. And she was very self-conscious about her height. She wore high heels every day of her life. So much so that when she got older, she couldn't wear flat shoes because her doctor told her that she had atrophied her Achilles tendon because she'd spent her whole life on her tiptoes like a Barbie doll. So this woman loved Kmart like Peter loved the Lord. She could go to Kmart three times a week just to look.

I don't know why. Any more than I can explain why some of y'all get off on a wrinkly foot. But she loved Kmart. And so she's at she would go after work some days. That would be her decompression before she came home. She would leave work and she would do a couple of laps around the Kmart and maybe she would buy like a copy of Cosmo and some nail polish or whatever. So she's walking out of the Kmart one time. And this was in New Jersey. So she's walking out of the Kmart and she's heading to her car, which was a two-toned Mercury Cougar if you can picture it. Very gangster. Of course it was.

And she is heading for her car with a cigarette in one hand and her car keys in the other when this man approaches her. Excuse me, excuse me. And she takes the cigarette out of her mouth and she says, Are you lost? And he said, I've been watching your feet and they're so beautiful and I wanted to know if I could lick them.

And my Aunt Rosemary, being a South Philly girl by birth, takes another drag on her cigarette and says, Get away from me, you pervert. And the man fell to his knees in the parking lot of the Kmart. And my Aunt was wearing candies. Women will know what I'm talking about. They're a high-heeled slide. They're back in style right now. They were really big back in I guess the 80s. She was wearing a pair of candies.

He dropped to his knees on the parking lot of the Kmart and began licking her foot. As my Aunt is now, remember what I said, she's tiny. She's five foot one inches tall and she's got her handbag and her car keys and her Miracle 100 and she's kicking the man with her other foot. He's slobbering and licking her foot and she's kicking him with the other one and screaming and some people heard and came running over and they chased the guy away and he goes running off.

As my Aunt told me, he went running off toward the Dunkin' Donuts which is how you know this is a true story because the details are all so flawless. My Aunt gets in her Cougar and she comes home and she walks through the door of the house and announces that she has to go wash her foot because a pervert just licked it at the Kmart and my Grandma rolled her eyes to the sky and said, Jesus Mary and Joseph, can we just have a day?

I thought she was going to say, you know men and their filth. My parents were split up and I was living with my Grandmother. When my Aunt came out of the bathroom and sat down at the dinner table, she told us the whole story and my Grandmother just shook her head and said, your Father was in the Navy and he told me what filth meant. There's nothing too filthy for a man. Then she took a hit off her cigarette and we all ate our rigatoni and that's the end. There you go.

That's how strong the compulsion is. That guy didn't have Feet Finder and Fun With Feet and Only Fans and Instagram. He had the Kmart in Brooklawn, New Jersey. He attacked my Aunt. Today you would call the police and at least file a report. She was so grossed out. I can only guess where his mouth has been. Of course, my older brother is like, yeah, on some other lady's foot because he thought it was hysterical.

I tried to do better for my own children. Alright, go forth with all 10 of your little piggies if you have them and we'll see you on the next episode of True Weird Stuff when we pay tribute to an extraordinary person by the name of Ella Harper, better known to you maybe as the Camel Girl. Thanks for listening. True Weird is waiting for you at TrueWeirdStuff.com and follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter.

Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2024. Now! Media. All rights reserved.

All wrongs remembered. Looking for something a little more highbrow? How about Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. You almost got it. You were almost there. Dostoevsky. Is it Dostoevsky? Dostoevsky. Here we go. We should have all outtakes of me mispronouncing Russian names. And then there is Dayton Leroy Rogers and Jerome Jerry Wait a minute. I spelled it Dayton in the script. It's Dalton.

Hang on. Let me just confirm. Yeah. I'm a moron. I know you're in turn. You know what your internal voice just said? She's not the moron you are. You should have caught it. If you see it, you own it. In other words, if you see it in somebody else, you own it. When you do that, I'm going, no, don't do that. It's just a mistake.

No, it's because I'm a moron. Moron. Stupid moron. Alright, here we go.