S2 Ep48: Children of Thunder

Violent Ends

History, True Crime

4.9 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2020

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Born in Lansing, Michigan in 1970, Glenn Taylor Helzer seemed destined for greatness. By his early teens, he was the spiritual head of his family and a rising star in the Mormon church. But Helzer chose a different path. One that led to him founding an extremist cult, and ended with body parts floating in bags down a river in Northern California.

Case: Children of Thunder

Theme Song: "Crowd Hammer" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
Intro/Outro Edits: Ben Goldman

RESOURCES:
People Magazine Investigates: Children of Thunder (S3/EP11)
True Crime with Aphrodite Jones: Children of Thunder (S2/EP9)
The False Prophet: Conspiracy, Extortion, and Murder in the Name of God- Claire Booth
Wikipedia
Murderpedia
findagrave.com
elvinbishopmusic.com
The Independent (Andrew Gumbel 6/15/04)
Los Angeles Times (John Glionna and Richard Chon 8/11/200)
The Berkeley Daily Planet (9/29/00)
The San Francisco Gate (Peter Fimrite and Charlie Goodyear 8/11/00)

Support the show (http://patreon.com/sodeadpodcast)

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a scream queen production.
0:13.0	I'm Jen Carpenter, and this is So Dead podcast.
0:17.1	Happy True Crime, Tuesday, Deadheads. Did I say Tuesday? I probably did. Anyway, happy day. As you guys all know, I was born and raised in Lansing, Michigan, which is a city that, unless you are from the area or were forced to memorize all of the state capitals in elementary school,'ve probably never heard of it's not a small
0:38.8	town but it's also not a big city we do have a few claims to fame though um it was the birthplace
0:47.5	of bert reynolds it was the birthplace of irvin magic johnson uh Matthew Lillard, who I am obsessed with,
0:57.9	and this fucker, Glenn Taylor Helzer, who would become the leader of a murderous cult known as the Children of Thunder,
1:05.8	which is incredibly offensive to me as a marble fan. Did I say marble instead of Marvel? Probably.
1:15.1	Again, we're off to a great start today, guys. As a Marvel fan, I do not like the fact that the
1:21.9	Children of Thunder was used for a cult name because Thor, as we all know or should know, is the god of thunder and his
1:30.6	children would never be engaged in this kind of fuckery. Anyway, this story that I'm going to talk to
1:37.6	you guys about today, I heard about in a strange roundabout way. I was most likely working on a podcast episode or a story for one of the
1:46.8	tours, but I was doing some work and I just had the ID channel on in the background.
1:51.9	You know, those voices are soothing. And I heard words that caught my attention, which was
2:00.8	Glenn Taylor Hilser was born in
2:03.4	Lansing, Michigan.
2:05.1	I think a woman might have said it, so she probably didn't sound like that at all.
2:08.9	But, you know, the mention of my hometown caught my attention.
2:13.1	I recorded the episode, didn't think a lot of it, and then decided to do some further research
2:18.3	to see if it would make a good podcast episode and holy shit. So here we go.
2:27.1	Glenn Taylor Helzer, who went by Taylor, was born in Lansing, probably in the same
2:32.5	hospital that I was born in, which gross, on July 26,
2:38.0	1970 to, sorry, so his parents' names were Gerald and Karma Helzer, but I wrote Gerlad,
	...

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