After Dark: The Route 40 Killer

There are few crueler ways to harm someone than through poison. It turns your own body against you, making you a prisoner in a failing shell. Being poisoned can be terrifying, agonizing, drawn out for weeks or months…or it can push you out of consciousness and falling towards death as quickly and easily as turning off a light switch.

In last week’s episode, we met John Smith, a lying, manipulative weirdo who almost certainly had killed his missing second wife, Fran. Towards the end of that episode, we learned that John had been married before, to a young woman named Janice Hartman—and that Janice, just like Fran, had gone missing, never to be seen again. We started that episode with a grim discovery six years after Janice’s disappearance—the skeleton of a young woman in a plywood box beside a country road in western Indiana, her legs cut off below the knees. This week, it all comes together.

If there’s one old folktale that finds a frequent echo in true crime stories, it has to be ‘Bluebeard,’ about a man who marries and then murders a series of wives. It’s a pattern we’ve seen time and again, with both killer husbands and lethal wives, most often driven by greed. That, at least, is something comprehensible—there are some killers driven by urges so cold and petty that it’s hard to even recognize them as human.

All of us have some tensions and frustrations with our families, and that’s fine. It’s just normal human nature. But for some people, these rough edges to everyday family interactions become absolutely unbearable, an insult to their overinflated sense of importance. And those resentments can seep like poison through every particle of their being until it's all they can think of.

Do you think people will still be talking about Scott Peterson or Chris Watts in a hundred years? How about five-hundred? Probably not, right? But there are some acts of cruelty and depravity that echo down the centuries, becoming entwined with myth and legend. This week, we’re going to take a look at two of these famous perpetrators.