Killer Thriller: When you need to be afraid of your father.
misSPELLING
iHeartPodcasts
4.3 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 15 February 2026
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Actress/Director Elisabeth Röhm takes us inside two true crime stories where the threat wasn’t a stranger, it was a father.
Larry Ray, newly out of prison, was allowed to move into his daughter’s college dorm and slowly take control of her friends. How his manipulation starts as “help,” how shame and exhaustion chip away at identity, and how smart young people can lose themselves without realizing it.
Then, she unpacks the unimaginable horror behind Girl in the Basement: 24 years of captivity, seven children born underground, and the one medical crisis that finally exposed a family’s darkest secret.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:10.7 | Amy Robock and T.J. Holmes present. |
| 0:13.5 | Killer Thriller with your host, Alisa Donovan. |
| 0:18.7 | Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Killer Thriller. |
| 0:21.7 | We're picking up my conversation with Elizabeth Rome, digging into two cases where abuse and control went unchecked for years, inside a college campus and inside a family home. |
| 0:32.6 | All right, let's talk about devil on campus. |
| 0:36.5 | Now, devil on campus, the Larry Ray story, quickly, for those of you who don't know, |
| 0:43.2 | Larry Ray infamously moved in with his daughter on the campus of her college and became a cult-like leader of her group of friends. |
| 0:50.6 | It is incredibly disturbing. |
| 0:53.7 | I can't express how disturbing it is. He forced some of them |
| 0:57.9 | into prostitution, for his own financial benefit, amongst a host of other things. And this |
| 1:04.6 | movie also is so good. And this gets into, you know, cult like behavior, abuse, all kinds of things. |
| 1:14.9 | But first, I just want to start with, this happened at Sarah Lawrence. And you went to |
| 1:21.2 | Sarah Lawrence, right? Yeah. So this hit very close to home, no? It did, it did. My stepmother had said to me, did I read the article that had just come out called the Lost Children of Sarah Lawrence in the Cut? |
| 1:35.1 | And I said, nope. |
| 1:36.7 | And she sent it to me. |
| 1:37.9 | And I thought, and no judgment necessarily of my alma mater. |
| 1:46.6 | But my mother went there as well. I served on the board of Sarah Lawrence when I was on law and order. I love this school so much. How in the world |
| 1:52.4 | could they have allowed this to happen? I am a mother of a teenager. I cannot imagine that, |
| 1:58.6 | I mean, no checks and balances, |
| 2:01.6 | that this father who had just been released from prison |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from iHeartPodcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of iHeartPodcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.

