Warning, this is a true crime podcast and is not suitable for all audiences.

Please use discretion.

This episode contains descriptions of suicide.

Please take extra care whilst listening.

A lot of the cases I cover on this podcast seem truly incomprehensible. In fact, most of them do.

The actions of people, the ways in which lives are taken, how people are manipulated and abused.

Well, after three and a half years of producing this show, I still find myself shocked and saddened on a daily basis.

But when I came across this case in a small, obscure corner of the internet,

I was certain this had to be fiction.

But as you'll know by now, if it's on this show, then it's very, very real.

I'm Naomi Channel and this is real.

Thank you. I'm In 2001, George Kenny became the principal of a high school in Florida called Northport High School.

Before working in education, George had been a musician and in the 1980s, he'd been a band director at another high school called Lemon Bay.

He'd worked his way up to principal position and he was well liked and respected by his students, their parents and his staff. But George had an unusual pastime.

He liked to practice hypnotherapy. He had trained at the Omni Hypnosis Training Centre in Florida and he was

enrolled in a program that says it includes over 100 hours of training. Part of the teacher's

training was how to practice hypnotherapy using required safety parameters. The director of the centre, Gerald Keen, said that

George was one of his most compassionate students. George had said he was training in hypnotherapy

for one reason, to help other people. He particularly wanted to use his hypnotherapy skills with his students

to help them beat anxiety around tests and exams and to also use it as a motivating tool.

George was proud of his newly acquired skill set and he was open and vocal about how hypnosis could help his students as well as his

staff. He didn't have a clinical licence to practice but he had completed his course and he was

...