There is something incredibly unsettling, but also intriguing about a person who is able to convince

and control people to help do their bidding whenever they want.

To be able to control someone in such a way, to manipulate them and convince them that

this is the right thing to do in this moment, it's scary at the best of times,

but especially so when what they're convincing someone else to do is murder.

This is Red Rum, stories about the true victims of crime.

I use news archives, documentaries and court documents to make these episodes,

and so they're accurate to the source material I can find.

You can find all episodes as a podcast or YouTube version in the show notes.

Just another bit of a warning on this one. Some of the victims are as young as 12, 13, 14 years old,

so if you're particularly sensitive to hearing about that, I would skip this one.

The perpetrator at the centre of this case murdered 28 people at the very least. The sheer

magnitude of his crimes is shocking in itself, but what I found pretty unbelievable was how he was

able to do this. The first thing he needed to do was figure out how to get boys

to trust him and there's nothing children love more than candy, chocolate sweets. He used his

position running a candy store to start grooming and luring boys in. And once he was well

practised at that, he found a new and even more sinister way to

get boys to trust him. He brought on two accomplices. Both were young, both were groomed,

and both were paid $200 every time they brought him a new victim.

This story begins all the way back on Christmas Eve of 1939 when a woman called Mary and

a man called Arnold had their first baby together. They named him Dean and he was the apple

of his mother's eye. But things were not good in the family home. Dean's father Arnold was an

...