New York City, 1829. The kings of New York's organized crime world were the notorious Roach Guard Gang, and their founder, murderer and extortionist Teddy Roach. Roach was nicknamed The Devil for his unfiltered brutality, said to have been of Biblical proportions. But as bad as The Devil was, his deeds paled in comparison to that of his right hand man, Bill O'Malley, a murdering, hulking psychopath known throughout the 5 points area of the city as The Basher. Rich or poor, man or woman, no one was safe from the murder and mayhem dished out by the gang. And anyone crossing Teddy Roach personall ..read more

Our 2021 Halloween special edition celebrates the 83rd anniversary of Orson Welles' Mercury Theater on the Air broadcast that panicked the country, and lead to changes in broadcast rules for terrestrial radio worldwide. The First Fake News story in modern media history: The War of the Worlds.  ..read more

On this episode, Fatal Gothic hosts Julia Parker and Stephen Savage interview actress Mhairi Calvey and director Paul Dudbridge about filmmaking, their upcoming film, "Fear The Invisible Man", H.G. Wells and Jules Vern, and how the SteamPunk movement has brought Gothic Sci-Fi back into vogue.  ..read more

France, 1573. A number of children have been abducted and eaten by what local villagers believe is a Werewolf. Gilles Garnier, a local hermit, is caught red handed with a murdered child and put on trial. But no one is willing to step forth to act as his defense attorney before the dreaded "Witch Hunter Judge", Henri Bouget. No one that is except a 26 year old nun from Paris called Sister Marie Arquette. Sister Marie's task is to prove that, though the man is obviously insane, he is not a werewolf, and certainly doesn't deserve to be burned alive at the stake.  ..read more

After the Donner Party incident of 1847, Cannibalism became the big sensationalist news across the United States for a generation. The public was obsessed by it, and two men became infamous for their taste for human flesh and murder. Though Jeremiah Johnson would become a larger than life fictional hero of mythical stature in books and finally in movies, the real man was known as "Liver Eating" Johnson, and killing and eating the body parts of a reported 300 plus warriors of the Crow and Blackfeet Nations in battle was far from his only activity. He was known to kill Native women and children ..read more

Australia, 1835. The entire continent was at this time, for all intents and purposes, one giant prison colony. From the late 18th century until 1900, convicts from England, Ireland, and all of Great Britain’s worldwide domain, were routinely shipped off to the mysterious “Land Down Under” to serve out their sentences for crimes ranging from petty theft to murder. A prison break in '35 led to Australia’s first ever case of serial murder. Over the course of less than a year, ten innocent people, and perhaps as many as 5 more, were murdered in cold blood by an escaped convict named John Lynch, wh ..read more

England, 1657. The Civil War and the beheading of King Charles I has forced many Noble families into desperate straights, as Oliver Cromwell's Round Heads, along with the radical parliament, confiscated lands and fortunes that had been secure for centuries. Into this chaos arose a phenomenon known as The Highwaymen, former titled gentlemen who took to robbing pay wagons and travelers along the country's narrow roads after dark. The worst of these was no gentleman at all, but a woman who became known as The Wicked Lady Skelton, a Royalist aristocrat's daughter who murdered over 50 innocent soul ..read more

In the spring of 1881. Bass Reeves, the first black Federal Marshall in US history, was called upon by an old friend, Cherokee Tribal Policeman Charlie Next Moon, to help track down a man who had murdered in cold blood two Cherokee women and a white reservation school teacher in the Indian Territories of Oklahoma. Both men were seasoned lawmen, but neither was prepared for what faced them out on the murderer's trail. And even after witnessing the brutality of the killing fields of the Civil War, the horrors they would witness in their pursuit of this crazed killer would haunt them both for the ..read more

On this special episode of Fatal Gothic, co-host Stephen Savage talks one on one with author and Jack The Ripper researcher Simon Daryl Wood about his book "Deconstructing Jack: The Secret History of the Whitechapel Murders". Simon's theory about the Jack The Ripper murders of 1880's London has been turning the Ripperologist community on it's head, and earning praise for Simon's in-depth research and unique take on the subject.  ..read more

Throughout history, stories of families that murdered for money, or simply to satisfy a lust for blood, have caused sleepless nights for nobility and commoners alike. On this episode of Fatal Gothic, hosts Julia Parker and Stephen Savage explore some of the most notorious Killer Clans ever to haunt our nightmares. These include the Beans, Scotland's legendary Cannibal Clan, The Harpe Brothers, who are considered by many the first true serial killers in America, a century before H.H. Holmes, and Kansas' Bloody Benders, an immigrant family from Germany who, in the years following the Civil War ..read more