For 30 years, the United States government maintained a fully operational secret nuclear bunker beneath the most famous luxury resort in America — and the entire town of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia agreed to pretend it wasn’t there.
In Episode 6 of Just Killing Time, we go 720 feet underground into Project Greek Island — a 112,544 square foot Cold War relocation facility built to house every single member of Congress while the rest of the country burned. Behind a door marked “Danger: High Voltage Keep Out,” a 28-ton blast door. Beyond that: 1,100 assigned beds, 18 dormitories, a 400-seat cafeteria with fake windows, a decontamination shower, a TV studio with a seasonal Capitol backdrop, and a “pathological waste incinerator” that was in fact a crematorium.
We trace the story from a Kansas boy stuck in Nebraska quicksand in 1919 — a young Dwight Eisenhower on the Transcontinental Motor Convoy — through the Interstate Highway System (whose first completed section was, of course, in Kansas) and into the hillside behind The Greenbrier. We meet Forsythe Associates, the fake TV repair company staffed by Pentagon-cleared intelligence operatives who maintained the bunker for three decades. We sit with the moment the bunker was completed — six days before the Cuban Missile Crisis — and was deemed too dangerous to use. And we follow reporter Ted Gup’s tape recorder onto the hotel manager’s desk in 1992, and Katharine Graham’s response when the White House asked her not to publish: “Don’t worry. We’ll do what we believe is right.”
Somewhere in America right now, there is almost certainly another one. A normal member of Congress, as the Washington Post’s Bill Arkin put it, “knows nothing.”
This is a standalone episode. A boy from Abilene. A grid of Kansas roads running to the horizon. And a bunker under a ballroom that was built for a war that never came.
Sources include: The Nuclear Museum, Civil Defense Museum, The Washington Post, National Archives, Eisenhower Presidential Library, Federal Highway Administration, and Kansas Geological Survey. Full citations on YouTube.
Runtime: approximately 65 minutes • Category: True Crime / History / Conspiracy • Explicit: Clean
If you’ve ever felt like the official story just doesn’t add up, you’re in the right place. Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton unravels true crime cases and the conspiracies lurking beneath them — one uncomfortable truth at a time.

In 1971, a shy folk artist in Louisville, Kentucky began making soft-sculpture dolls she called Doll Babies. She gave them birth certificates. Adoption papers. A personalized letter from the doll itself. She called herself Momma Martha. Her name was Martha Nelson Thomas — and you have almost certainly never heard it.

Five years later, a 21-year-old art student from Georgia named Xavier Roberts walked into her craft fair booth. What happened next built a two-billion-dollar empire, sparked the most violent toy riot in American history, and stamped one man's signature on the backside of every Cabbage Patch Kid ever made.

This is the finale of Angel Makers. A four-part investigation into the hidden system that processed America's most vulnerable children across a hundred years — and somehow ended up in a mass-produced doll with a Georgia birth certificate.

In this episode:

• The real inventor of the Cabbage Patch Kid — and the funeral where her dolls filled the front pew

• Babyland General Hospital — the "Imagicillin" birth ritual, the preemie ward, and the signature branded on every baby's body

• The 1983 Cabbage Patch Riots — the Wilkes-Barre baseball bat, the pregnant woman trampled in New Jersey, and the adults ripping dolls from children's hands

• The names on the birth certificates — real children, real 1938 Georgia birth records, assigned to dolls

• The full reveal — baby farms, orphan trains, asylums, Cabbage Patch Kids. Same bones. Different clothes.

• A final tribute to Nancy Shoemaker, the nine-year-old girl who started this show

The language of institutional child transfer had been woven into American culture for a hundred years before a young artist in the Appalachian foothills built a hospital out of an old medical clinic and told children they were adopting a nameless baby. He wasn't thinking about Amelia Dyer. He wasn't thinking about the orphan trains. He wasn't thinking about Elizabeth Packard. But the ritual he created came from somewhere — and a generation of children recognized it in their bones.

Receive the nameless baby. Give it a name. Promise to love it. Mean it.

This is Angel Makers, Part 4. The series finale. Born in a Cabbage Patch.

If you've ever felt like the official story just doesn't add up, you're in the right place.

For Nancy. For Martha. For the nameless ones.

Subscribe to Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton wherever you listen — Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, iHeart, Amazon Music, and Pandora. Follow on TikTok and Instagram @justkillingtimepodcast. Send your Time Killer Files — your Cabbage Patch Kid's name, your orphan train ancestry, your family's asylum stories — and Elizabeth may read yours on the show.

Explicit content. Listener discretion advised.

Novel reading. Hard study. Laziness. Desertion by husband. Menstrual derangement. Grief.

Those are the official, government-recorded reasons human beings were committed to the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane between 1864 and 1889. Not symptoms. Not diagnoses. Reasons.

This is the episode where the Angel Makers machine comes into full view. Baby farms needed a supply of infants. Orphan trains needed a supply of children. And to get that supply — somebody had to remove the mothers first. The asylum was how they did it.

In Part 3, we cover the real archived admission log from the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane, the Illinois law that allowed a husband to commit his wife with his signature alone and zero evidence of insanity, Elizabeth Packard — locked away for disagreeing with her husband's theology and who changed commitment laws in four states, Nellie Bly — who faked insanity to get herself committed to Blackwell's Island and came out weeping that she couldn't bring everyone with her, and Rosemary Kennedy — lobotomized without her consent at 23, hidden from her own family for twenty years, and whose stolen voice became the foundation of the Special Olympics.

One historian called the Victorian asylum "a museum for the collection of the unwanted." By the end of this episode, you'll understand exactly who was being collected — and what happened to the children they left behind.

Next time: Angel Makers Part 4 — Born in a Cabbage Patch. The finale. The full reveal. Every thread pulled to the end.

If you've ever felt like the official story just doesn't add up, you're in the right place. Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton unravels true crime cases and the conspiracies lurking beneath them — one uncomfortable truth at a time.

⚠️ This episode contains discussion of forced institutionalization, lobotomy, child separation, and historical abuse. Listener discretion advised.

Between 1854 and 1929, an estimated 200,000 children were loaded onto trains in New York City and shipped west. They were told they were going to new families. What they weren't told was that strangers would be waiting on platforms to look them over — and choose which ones they wanted to take home.

They called it charity. They called it saving children. The word "orphan" was a lie they told to make the whole thing easier to swallow.

This is Angel Makers, Part 2: The Orphan Trains. Part of a multi-episode series tracing the machinery America built to process unwanted children — from the baby farmers of Victorian England to the streets of 1850s New York, all the way to a small medical clinic in Cleveland, Georgia in 1978. You'll have to keep watching to see where that thread ends.

In this episode: — The world that built the trains: 30,000 homeless children on New York City streets, the immigrant families who couldn't outrun poverty, and the prisons the city used instead of solutions — Charles Loring Brace: the Yale minister who genuinely wanted to help — and also believed Catholic immigrant children were genetically inferior and potentially dangerous — What actually happened on those platforms: children in their best clothes, lined up for inspection, selected or left behind like livestock at auction — The ones who were never chosen: disabled children, older children, children who weren't white enough for Protestant Midwestern farm families — The Catholic Church's counter-system: the Baby Trains, where families could specify gender, hair color, and eye color when requesting a child — The darkest parallel: while the orphan trains ran west, the U.S. government was running its own version for Native American children — with a stated policy of "Kill the Indian, Save the Man" — Why the trains stopped in 1929 — and it wasn't because anyone decided the system was wrong — The direct line from the orphan trains to the modern American foster care system, and why the same failures keep appearing under a different name — Concordia, Kansas: the end of the line, the children nobody picked, and why 50+ bronze statues of those children now stand permanently in the streets of a small Kansas town

🔎 If you think you might be a descendant of an orphan train rider — start here: orphantraindepot.org. The National Orphan Train Complex in Concordia, Kansas holds over 8,000 rider records and handles 250 research requests every year.

📬 TIME KILLER FILES: Are you a descendant of an orphan train rider? Do you have a family story that got hushed up — a great-grandmother who arrived in Kansas on a train and nobody talked about it? A name change in the family tree nobody could explain? Send me your story: [YOUR EMAIL / SUBMISSION LINK]

⏭️ MISSED PART 1? Watch Angel Makers, Part 1: For a Small Fee — Victorian baby farming, Amelia Dyer, and the Butterbox Babies: [LINK]

⏭️ NEXT TIME: Angel Makers, Part 3 — The asylums. The stolen mothers. The women declared insane for reading novels and disagreeing with their husbands. And the children left behind when the locked door closed.

—

Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton is a true crime and conspiracy podcast covering the cases, the systems, and the uncomfortable truths the official story leaves out. New episodes on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.

🎙️ Hosted and produced by Elizabeth Stanton 📍 Based in Derby, Kansas

JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com

Subscribe so you don't miss Part 3.

Before the Cabbage Patch Kids, there was Amelia Dyer. And she didn't give babies certificates. She gave them white tape — around their necks — and threw them in the Thames.

In Part 1 of the Angel Makers series, we go back to where it all started: Victorian England, where baby farming was legal, advertised in major newspapers, and almost entirely ignored by the government for decades. We're talking about the women who took in infants for a "small fee" — and what happened to those babies when nobody was watching.

This episode covers:

🪡 The system that made baby farming possible — the 1834 Poor Law, the workhouses, and the laws that stripped single mothers of every option except desperation

🪡 Margaret Waters — the Brixton Baby Farmer, the first to hang, and the woman whose execution changed almost nothing

🪡 Amelia Dyer — trained nurse, serial killer, and quite possibly the most prolific murderer in recorded history. Up to 400 babies. Thirty years. Three names recovered. The rest: unknown.

🪡 The Butterbox Babies — Nova Scotia, Canada, 1928–1947. A minister, a midwife, and a maternity home that sold healthy white babies to wealthy couples from New York — and starved the rest in butter boxes.

🪡 The thread — baby farming, orphan trains, asylums, and Cabbage Patch Kids. Same bones. Different clothes. We're just getting started.

Plus — your first Time Killer Files prompt: Tell me about your Cabbage Patch Kid. And does it feel different now?

Content note: This episode contains detailed discussion of infant death, child neglect, and systemic exploitation of vulnerable women. Listener discretion advised.

Just Killing Time is a true crime and conspiracy podcast hosted by Elizabeth Stanton, a Derby, Kansas native with a personal connection to the stories she tells and a deep belief that the forgotten deserve to be remembered.

New episodes drop every Tuesday & Thursday. Find us on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Submit your Time Killer Files at JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com.

On July 30, 1990, nine-year-old Nancy Shoemaker walked a block and a half from her home in south Wichita, Kansas to get her sick baby brother a 7-Up. She never came home. In the premiere episode of Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton, host Elizabeth Stanton — a Derby, Kansas native who grew up 12 miles from this case — tells the full story of Nancy's kidnapping and murder: the two killers (Doil Lane and Donald Wacker), the court records, the decades-long fight by Nancy's father Bo Shoemaker to keep her killers behind bars, the 22,000-signature petition, and the haunting willow tree at Beech Elementary that connects Nancy to another lost Wichita child 28 years later. This is Episode 1. This is for Nancy. Submit your Time Killer File: JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com. Content warning: kidnapping, rape, and murder of a child.