He was billed as "Lobster Boy." He was convicted of murder. He never spent a single day in prison.

Grady Stiles Jr. was born in Pittsburgh in 1937 with ectrodactyly — a rare condition that fused his fingers and toes into claw-like extremities. He was the sixth generation of his family born with it. His father put him on a sideshow platform at seven years old. And in 1978 he shot his fifteen-year-old daughter's fiancé to death the night before their wedding, was convicted by a jury of his peers, and walked out of that courthouse a free man.

But before we get anywhere near a murder, you need to understand the world that made him.

This is the first of three episodes. Today we're going to Gibsonton, Florida — twelve miles south of Tampa on U.S. 41, across the Alafia River. For seventy years, "Gibtown" was the winter home of the entire American sideshow. It had zoning laws that let residents keep elephants in the front yard. A post office counter built low enough for little people to reach. A fire chief over eight feet tall, and a stretch where the police chief was a little person.

I'll teach you to talk like a carny — ten-in-one, bally, talker, tip, single-O, first-of-May, with it. I'll introduce you to the neighbors: Percilla the Monkey Girl and Emmitt Bejano the Alligator-Skinned Man, who named their property after their adopted son. Al and Jeanie Tomaini, the Giant and the Half Woman, who ran a fishing camp on the highway. Sealo the Seal Boy. Ward Hall, the King of the Sideshow.

And I'll tell you about the year Florida made it a crime for any of these people to earn a living — and about the man who fought it all the way to the Florida Supreme Court and won. That case was decided six years before a Pennsylvania judge decided the exact opposite thing about the exact same man's body. That's the whole series in two sentences.

IN THIS EPISODE 00:00 — Gibsonton, Florida. November 29, 1992. 03:30 — Welcome in 05:30 — How to talk like a carny 16:00 — The town they built 25:00 — The neighbors 36:00 — The year it was illegal to be looked at 44:00 — Seven generations: the Stiles bloodline back to 1805 52:00 — The act, the money, and the woman who married it 62:00 — The Lobster Family 68:00 — The turn: Pittsburgh, 1978 70:00 — Time Killer Files 72:00 — Close

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN What ectrodactyly actually is, how it's inherited, and how rare it is. How a traveling carnival sideshow was structured and what every part of it was called. How Gibsonton became Showtown, U.S.A. Why the 1921 Florida statute banning the paid exhibition of disabled people was struck down in 1972 — and who the named plaintiff was. And why Grady Stiles Jr., convicted of third-degree murder in February 1979, was sentenced to probation instead of prison.

SOURCES Pittsburgh Post-Gazette archive reporting. Joe Nickell, "Secrets of the Sideshows" (University Press of Kentucky, 2005). William Lindsay Gresham, "Monster Midway" (1953). The International Independent Showmen's Museum. New York Times and Tampa Bay Times obituaries of Ward Hall. Associated Press. AMC's "Freakshow" interviews with Grady Stiles III.

Where sources conflict, I say so on the record and tell you which way I lean and why.

TIME KILLER FILES I need help on this one. If your family wintered in Gibtown, worked the carnival circuit, or was "with it" in any capacity — reach out. I'm after the ordinary version of that town, not the sensational one. What was Gibsonton like on a Tuesday?

ABOUT Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton covers true crime, conspiracies, and hidden history — researched properly and told straight. Hosted from Derby, Kansas.

Follow the show so Episodes Two and Three arrive automatically. And if this one got under your skin, a rating and a review is the single biggest thing you can do to help other people find it.

Content note: this episode discusses homicide and domestic violence.

We told ourselves it was a British problem. It isn't. This happened here — four times.

In Part 1, a hospital electrician exploited a mortuary nobody was watching. In this episode, I bring the story home to America — and four cases that prove the same blank space in oversight exists on this side of the ocean.

🔦 Cincinnati, Ohio — Kenneth Douglas, a night-shift attendant at the Hamilton County morgue, abused the dead for years. He was caught only when 2008 DNA testing tied him to the 1982 body of 19-year-old Karen Range. His own wife warned his supervisor — and was reportedly told it was "county business."

⚰️ Noble, Georgia — At the Tri-State Crematory, investigators found 339 bodies that were never cremated. Grieving families had been handed fake ashes. State law had exempted the crematory from inspection.

🕯️ Penrose, Colorado — Jon and Carie Hallford of Return to Nature Funeral Home stored nearly 190 decaying bodies and sent families fake ashes. Colorado was the only U.S. state that didn't regulate funeral homes — until this case forced reform. Both were sentenced to decades in prison in 2025–2026.

🎓 Boston, Massachusetts — Cedric Lodge, morgue manager at Harvard Medical School, stole and sold body parts from donated cadavers through a nationwide network. He was sentenced to 8 years in December 2025, and Harvard was cited for "extraordinary failure."

One question ties them all together: who was supposed to be watching?

⚠️ Content note: discusses abuse and mistreatment of the deceased. Handled factually, without gratuitous detail.

📩 Know a local case I should cover? Email me: JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com

▶️ Watch the video version on YouTube. Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton — true crime, conspiracies, and the stories that keep us up at night.

Sources:
U.S. Department of Justice (Middle District of PA) • U.S. Attorney's Office, District of Colorado • federal & state court records • WBUR • The Boston Globe • The Harvard Crimson • NPR • CBS Colorado / KKTV • Axios • TIME • WSB-TV • NewsChannel 9 • Georgia Public Broadcasting • case overviews via Wikipedia

🔖 true crime podcast, Kenneth Douglas, Hamilton County morgue, Tri-State Crematory, Ray Brent Marsh, Return to Nature Funeral Home, Hallford, Harvard morgue, Cedric Lodge, funeral home scandal

🔑 A hospital electrician held the keys to the mortuary — and for 15 years, no one was watching the room.

In 1987, two young women — Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20 — were murdered five months apart in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England. The press called them the Bedsit Murders. The case went cold for 33 years, until a familial DNA breakthrough in 2020 finally gave the killer a name: David Fuller, a quiet hospital maintenance supervisor no detective had ever looked at twice.

But when police searched Fuller's home, they uncovered a second, hidden crime that would expose one of the most disturbing institutional failures in British history — and force an entire country to ask a question most of us never think about: 🕯️ who is actually responsible for protecting the dead?

In this episode I trace how the Bedsit Murders were solved, how Fuller used an all-access swipe card to enter hospital mortuaries as many as 444 times in a single year unquestioned, why there were no cameras in the room, and what the official public inquiry concluded about a system where safeguarding the dead was, on paper, nobody's job.

This is Part 1 of a two-part series, Who Guards the Dead. Part 2, The Bodies Nobody Buried, brings the story home to America.

⚠️ Content note: this episode discusses murder and the abuse of the deceased. Handled factually, without gratuitous detail.

📩 Got a case I should cover? Email me: JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com

▶️ Watch the video version on YouTube. New episodes of Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton every week — true crime, conspiracies, and the stories that keep us up at night.

In this episode:

• Who were Wendy Knell and Caroline Pierce?
• How familial DNA cracked a 33-year-old cold case
• Who was David Fuller — and how he hid in plain sight
• The 444 mortuary visits nobody questioned
• What the David Fuller Inquiry found — and the reforms still pending in 2026

Sources:
Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) case statements • Independent Inquiry into the issues raised by the David Fuller case (GOV.UK) — Phase 1 report (Nov 2023) & Phase 2 report (July 2025) • GOV.UK government response updates (Dec 2025) • BBC News • Sky News • NBC News • The Guardian • Kent Police

🕰️ For four years, a stalker who called himself The Poet terrorized Wichita, Kansas — rhyming threats, a stabbing in a mall parking lot, a wreath set on fire on the front door — all during the height of the BTK murders. The city spent $370,000 and ran down more than 300 suspects. Then one weekend, the Chief of Police read the whole file and saw what no one else could.

This is the story of Ruth Finley 💛 — a soft-spoken phone-company secretary, a devoted husband, and a secret buried so deep that even Ruth didn't know she was keeping it. It's one of the strangest, saddest, and most human true-crime cases ever to come out of Kansas — and it happened just up the road from my front door in Derby.

🔎 What you'll hear:

• The 1946 Fort Scott attack at the root of it all
• How BTK-era fear made an entire city believe
• The Poet's siege — the red bandana, the threats, the cruelty and the patience
• Chief Richard LaMunyon and the clue that cracked it
• The confession — and the doubt that never fully went away
• The buried childhood trauma that explains everything
• 📍 A personal Derby aside: the "Glen Hills" case I still remember

📍 A Wichita / Sedgwick County true crime story, told Kansas-honest: documented facts and personal opinion kept clearly separate, no padding, no guessing.

✉️ The Time Killer Files: Send me the false-stalker case from your own town — the phantom attacker everyone feared who turned out never to exist. You might hear it on a future episode.

⚠️ Content note: This episode discusses childhood sexual abuse and suicidal thoughts. U.S. support: call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline); RAINN 1-800-656-4673.

📚 Sources: Corey Mead, The Pursued (2025); Gene Stone, Little Girl Fly Away (1991); Wichita Eagle archives; Wichita PD case history.

🎧 New here? Follow the show and join the Time Killers — new episodes every week.

#TrueCrime #PoetOfWichita #RuthFinley #WichitaKansas #BTK #KansasTrueCrime #DerbyKansas #justkillingtimepodcast #elizabethstanton #derbykansas

She hid a spy pen to catch her husband cheating. It recorded her own secret affair instead.

On Mother's Day weekend 2020, Suzanne Morphew went for a bike ride in the Colorado mountains and never came home. Three years later, her remains were found by accident in a remote field locals call "the boneyard" — with a wildlife tranquilizer in her bones and her body moved at least twice. Her husband Barry has pleaded not guilty to her murder. His trial begins October 13, 2026.

This is the whole story: a crying husband and a $200,000 reward, a "chipmunk alibi," a deleted "I'm done" text, a deer tranquilizer called BAM, a district attorney who got disbarred, unidentified DNA tied to unsolved sex crimes in two states, and a cremation order police stopped one day before it happened.

As one law professor put it: nothing is what it seems.

I tell you what's documented, what's prosecution theory, and what the defense disputes — and I keep them separate, so you decide for yourself.

ACTIVE CASE: Barry Morphew has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent unless proven guilty at trial. This episode is sourced entirely from court filings, the grand jury indictment, preliminary-hearing testimony, the autopsy, and established news reporting.

In this episode:
- Who Barry and Suzanne were, and a marriage quietly falling apart
- The spy pen, the affair, and the last 24 hours
- BAM, the needle cap in the dryer, and "the only private citizen"
- The unidentified male DNA in Suzanne's car
- The disbarred DA and the collapse of the first prosecution
- The boneyard, the autopsy, and the second arrest under an alias
- The cremation order — and where the case stands now

TIME KILLER FILES: Have a case from your own hometown? A cold case, a small-town mystery, a story nobody talks about? Send it to me — I read every one.
Email: JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com (Subject: TIME KILLER FILES)

New episodes of Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, and YouTube. True crime, conspiracy, and the stories the official version leaves out.

Sources include court filings and the grand jury indictment in People v. Barry Morphew, the El Paso County Coroner's autopsy, preliminary-hearing testimony, CBS News and CBS 48 Hours, the Colorado Sun, 9News, the Mountain Mail, Fox News, and others. Full source list on the YouTube version of this episode.

🌊 It's one of the most beautiful lakes in America. It's also one of the deadliest. More than 700 people have died at Lake Lanier — and the reason why is hiding at the bottom.

💀 In this deep dive, I tell the documented, fully-sourced story of Lake Lanier, Georgia: the town that was flooded to create it, the graves the government admits it never moved, the woman in the blue dress who was seen for 30 years before anyone learned her name, and the 1912 racial cleansing of Forsyth County that was never punished.

If you've only heard the viral version of this story, this is the part it gets wrong — and the part that's far more disturbing than the myth.

🎙️ WHAT YOU'LL HEAR
🛶 Why one lake accounts for roughly HALF of all drowning deaths in Georgia
👻 The Lady of the Lake — the true story of Delia Young, Susie Roberts, and a 32-year mystery
🔥 Forsyth County, 1912: 1,098 Black residents driven out at gunpoint, and not one arrest
🪦 The unmarked graves the Army Corps of Engineers admits remain on the lakebed
🏁 The racetrack that rises out of the water during droughts
🏞️ Cherokee removal, eminent domain, and the land that was stolen twice
✊🏾 The 1987 Brotherhood March: 20,000 people, the Klan on the courthouse steps
🦠 The antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the mud — one more way the lake can hurt you

❓ QUESTIONS THIS EPISODE ANSWERS
• Why is Lake Lanier so dangerous? — A flooded valley full of submerged roads, buildings, standing trees, and sudden drop-offs, plus 11+ million visitors a year, makes it Georgia's deadliest lake.
• Is there a town under Lake Lanier? — Yes: Oscarville and parts of Forsyth and Hall counties were flooded in 1956, and not every structure or grave was moved.
• Who is the Lady of the Lake? — Delia Mae Parker Young, drowned in 1958, found in a blue dress with both hands missing, unidentified for 30+ years until her friend's car surfaced in 1990.
• How many people have died at Lake Lanier? — More than 700 since 1956, with roughly two dozen bodies still unrecovered.
• What happened in Forsyth County in 1912? — A racial cleansing that expelled all 1,098 Black residents in three months, with no one ever charged.

🎧 ABOUT THE SHOW
Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton is a true crime and conspiracy podcast that pairs documented, deeply-researched history with one Kansas host's take on the stories the official version leaves out. Every fact is sourced. Every theory is labeled. You decide what it means. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.

📩 THE TIME KILLER FILES
Got a Lake Lanier story or a Forsyth County family history? A true crime or conspiracy from your own community?
Email 👉 JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com — Subject line: TIME KILLER FILES. I read every single one.

🔔 Follow the show so you never miss an episode.
Thanks for killing time with me. 🖤💛

🌼 In 1942, twenty million American families grew their own food, and let the dandelions grow because everyone's grandmother knew they were medicine. By 1955, the dandelion was a weed — a thing you paid a chemical company to kill. In thirteen years, self-sufficiency went from patriotic duty to a sign of a bad neighborhood.

What happened in between? It started at the 1939 New York World's Fair, where forty-five million people walked through a gorgeous, hopeful blueprint for the future — and never realized they were looking at a plan to turn free Americans into permanent customers.

🏛️ In the finale of the White City Series, Elizabeth Stanton follows the documents, names the names, and traces the most successful theft in American history: your great-grandparents' ability to feed and heal themselves, sold back to you one lawn treatment, one car payment, and one prescription at a time.

🧵 IN THIS EPISODE:

🚗 GM's Futurama — the most expensive exhibit at the fair — and the secret plan to tear out America's streetcars

🚎 National City Lines: how GM, Standard Oil, and Firestone dismantled the electric rail of 45 cities

🧪 DuPont's "loony gas" — the tetraethyl lead plant that drove workers insane — and "Better Living Through Chemistry"

☠️ Monsanto's 2,4-D: a herbicide built as a weapon to starve enemy nations, then sold to kill your dandelions

🪖 Operation Pink Rose, Agent Orange, and the dioxin Monsanto knew about

🥕 How the same government that begged you to plant Victory Gardens then outlawed them from the front yard

🏡 FHA Section 4.17: grow food in your front yard, lose your federally-backed mortgage

🌱 The dandelion: a thousand-year medicine (Taraxacum officinale — "official medicine") rebranded as a noxious weed

💊 JAMA, Dr. Morris Fishbein, and the campaign to scrub plant medicine from American medical schools

🛣️ Robert Moses, the 1956 Highway Act, and the deliberate engineering of car dependency

🧠 Edward Bernays again — the 400 campaigns, and the three clients at the center of it all: GM, DuPont, Monsanto

💸 The $180-to-kill-it, $120-to-replace-it household budget that exposes the entire scheme

They told us the future would set us free from the past. Instead it locked us into their marketplace. This is how. — Elizabeth

⏱️ CHAPTERS

00:00 🎬 Cold Open — From Victory Gardens to chemical lawns

00:00 🚗 The blueprint: Futurama and the war on the streetcar

00:00 🧪 The poison partnership: DuPont, Monsanto, chemistry as a weapon

00:00 🥕 The government betrayal: Victory Gardens to mandatory grass

00:00 🌱 The dandelion conspiracy: turning medicine into a weed

00:00 🧠 The playbook: a word about Edward Bernays

00:00 🏘️ The suburban prison: engineering car dependency

00:00 🧾 The perfect crime — and the bill we're still paying

00:00 📬 Time Killer Files

📩 Got a Victory Garden memory or a fight with your HOA over a front-yard garden? Send your Time Killer File to JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com

🔔 This is the finale of the White City Series. Subscribe and start from Episode 1 if you're new.

📚 Sources include: United States v. National City Lines (1949) • DuPont Company Archives (Hagley Museum) • Monsanto / Agent Orange litigation records • USDA Victory Garden publications • FHA Property Standards manuals • JAMA archives • Federal Highway Act of 1956 records • Robert Bogdan and contemporary reporting

#truecrime #conspiracy #history #1939worldsfair #monsanto #dandelion #victorygarden #suburbs #carculture #bigpharma #podcast #JustKillingTime

🔥 At 5:12 in the morning on April 18, 1906, the San Andreas Fault tore open and San Francisco came down in under a minute. Then the fires came. And before the smoke had even cleared, the most powerful men in the city had quietly agreed on a story — that it was the fire that did it. Not the earthquake. The fire. Because fire was insured. Earthquakes were not.

That was the first lie. Nine years later, the city threw the biggest party on Earth to celebrate two great American triumphs — rising from the ashes, and finishing the Panama Canal. Both were sitting on top of bodies and lies that powerful people spent a fortune making sure you would never count.

🏛️ This is the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition — a world's fair built on two enormous lies. In this episode of Just Killing Time, Elizabeth Stanton follows the documents, names the names, and introduces the man who took these grubby cover-ups and turned them into a science you are still living inside today: Edward Bernays.

🧵 IN THIS EPISODE:

🔥 The 80% the USGS later confirmed — how much of the destruction the earthquake actually caused, and why the city buried it

📨 The telegram sent just six hours after the quake that set the "fire" narrative in motion

🎩 Mayor Eugene Schmitz, political boss Abe Ruef, and the railroad's hired photographer

📄 The earthquake exclusion clause — and how Hartford paid investigators bonuses to reclassify claims as "earthquake" so they could deny them

🕵️ The Pacific Coast Adjustment Bureau: a written cartel agreement to pay the powerful and deny the poor

⚖️ Margaret Sullivan, the widow who beat Hartford in the California Supreme Court — and still died in poverty

💰 Bailey Willis, the geologist paid $25,000 (over $750k today) to say the ground was safe

✍️ The building-inspection reports physically rewritten in different ink to erase the earthquake

⚒️ "Gold roll" vs "silver roll": how the Panama Canal hid more than 19,000 deaths

🧨 The Culebra Cut explosion that killed 23 men — and was officially recorded as 6

🚬 Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew: "Torches of Freedom," the United Fruit coup in Guatemala, and the birth of manufactured consent

🌉 How the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake collected the bill — in the exact neighborhood they built on the lie.

They rewrote a disaster while a quarter of a million witnesses were still alive. This is the story of how they pulled it off — and who paid for it. — Elizabeth

📬 Time Killer Files

⚠️ A note: this episode discusses mass death and the deliberate erasure of thousands of Caribbean canal workers. Told with care, but please listen accordingly.

📩 Got a family story or a modern cover-up that fits? Send your Time Killer File to JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com

🔔 Subscribe for the full White City Series and new true-crime-and-conspiracy episodes every week.

📚 Sources include: USGS Professional Paper 1515 • National Archives (Pacific Coast Adjustment Bureau; Panama Canal Zone records) • Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley • Stanford University Archives • Charles Evans Hughes, Report on Insurance Practices (1907) • Edward Bernays, "Propaganda" (1928) • Mary Comerio, "Disaster Hits Home" (1998)

#truecrime #conspiracy #history #1906earthquake #panamacanal #edwardbernays #worldsfair #sanfrancisco #propaganda #podcast #JustKillingTime