American pop culture in the 1920s and 1930s was on the verge of a new sort of entertainment. Cultural shifts and breakthroughs in technology had led to a steady stream of new kinds of books, comics, music, and magazines, but it would be film that transformed popular culture forever. The ghostly images watched with strangers in the dark proved to be powerful enough to incite as well as to entertain. 

Soon after films gained popularity, Americans began to use them to frame their history and their identity, as well as to literally project their fears and anxieties. 

And among those fears were the fears of the Devil. 

When the Devil first began to appear in early American movies, his story was part of a heavily Christianized moral lesson. The same couldn’t be said for Europe – where filmmakers were using satanic lore to create fantastic and uncanny imagery, but American films were much tamer and much more puritanical. They steered mostly clear of explicitly supernatural subjects and used theaters as fire and brimstone pulpits instead.

At first anyway… because as the imagery onscreen eventually began to reflect satanic themes, audiences responded and darker days for the cinema were soon on the way.

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John Torrio was finally exactly where he wanted to be. 

With his uncle, Big Jim Colosimo out of the way, his business expanding across the South Side of the city and into the suburbs, and his trustworthy young right-hand man, Al Capone, at his side, he was ready to start dividing up the Chicago into territories. With all the various gangs that already existed in the city eager to jump into the liquor business, Torrio knew that it would be impossible to keep the peace without a plan...

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A mother. A bathtub. A death ruled suspicious.

In 2012, Lisa Cutler was found drowned in her Mount Zion, Illinois home while her children slept upstairs.

At first, it looked like an accident.

But more than 20 bruises… a failing marriage… and over a million dollars in life insurance told a different story.

Was it a tragic fall— or something far more deliberate?

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John Torrio was ready when the new Prohibition law went into effect, but he seemed to be the only one. He was waiting impatiently for everyone else to catch up. He’d been predicting Prohibition to his friends and business associates for months and knew it would be how organized crime could amass untold amounts of wealth. To take something that had always been legal, and make it illegal, especially a vice like alcohol, and then expect Americans to adhere to the letter of the law was incredibly naïve. Torrio knew that by taking advantage of Prohibition, it was a way for people like himself to become millionaires. 

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The strange and sometimes sinister world of America’s homegrown religions, faith movements, and cults is filled with bizarre characters. There are many that most listeners have undoubtedly heard of, but what about the cult leader who actually became a king?

In 1847, the only man ever crowned king within the continental United States began his rule from a secluded island in Lake Michigan. James Jesse Strang was a religious leader, politician, attorney, teacher, writer, and newspaper editor, who attracted more than 2,500 followers to a place that he ruled with an iron hand.

After being ejected from the Mormon Church, he created his own sect, for which he served as prophet, seer, and revelator and built an organization that he hoped would rival the church of Brigham Young in Utah.

But his strange adventures as a church leader and king would eventually lead to his assassination and the fall of the only kingdom that’s ever existed within the United States.

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She was only a few feet from safety.

On a freezing December night in 1975, Carol Ann Rofstad never made it inside her sorority house. Instead, she was found beaten and dying beside the building the next morning.

Her murder shocked the Illinois State University campus — and may have been connected to a series of disturbing attacks on college women.

Nearly half a century later, the case remains unsolved.

This is The Girl Who Never Reached the Door.

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The date when a shaft of divine light came down from the heavens and transformed Franz Edmund Creffield from an obscure, backwater evangelist into Prophet Joshua the Second remains a mystery. We also don’t know the exact spot where the spiritual ordination occurred but – we do know that it occurred in 1903 in Corvallis, Oregon.

History has shown us that trouble tends to follow in the wake of modern-day prophets and if the prophet come with an Old Testament beard and a desperate need to chase after the skirts of young women, then the trouble is sure to be multiplied and, of course, lurid and salacious, too.

This particular backwoods prophet had both the beard and the taste for women, but it was said that he also had tremendous power. In fact, when he raised his voice in holy anger, as he did on one memorable occasion, the city of San Francisco shook horribly, then fell, trembling and smoking into ruin, becoming one of the greatest disasters America has ever known.

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John Torrio was 31 years old when he first came to Chicago to free his uncle by marriage – Big Jim Colosimo – from threats by Black Hand gangsters. But Torrio’s service went beyond that. He was soon reorganizing and expanding Big Jim’s vice rackets and while they continued to thrive for a short time, trouble was on the way.

On the other side of the city's powerful people, William Thompson ran for mayor with the wide-openness of a champion athlete on the side of truth, justice, and the American way. He actually vowed in this first campaign that "I am going to clean up Chicago," but by this third campaign, his picture was hanging in Al Capone's office, and the gangster was donating as much as $250,000 for Thompson's re-election...

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On Easter Sunday, April 13, 1895, parishioners at the Emmanuel Baptist Church in San Francisco were shocked when a closet was opened that contained the mutilated body of a young woman. Police detectives who were summoned to the church expected the corpse to belong to a 20-year-old woman named Blanche Lamont, a member of the church’s congregation who had gone missing 10 days earlier.

But it wasn’t her. Instead, the dead woman was 21-year-old Minnie Williams, who was also a member of the church.

And that wasn’t all the two young women had in common. Both had last been seen with the church’s handsome and well-liked Sunday School Superintendent, a man named Theo Durrant – who soon earned a nickname from the press. They called him “The Demon in the Belfry,” because it was almost impossible for anyone to believe that the brutal murders could be the work of an ordinary man.

He had to be one of the Devil’s minions, escaped from the fiery pits of Hell. 

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How well do you really know your neighbor?

In Decatur, Illinois, 1964, evil didn’t break in—it lived inside the house. On a cold February night, a family argument ended with a hatchet, a triple killing, and a manhunt that stretched from Illinois to Florida.

This is The Hatchet House—a story of blood, silence, and a terrifying truth: sometimes the monster isn’t out there…

…it’s already home.

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James “Big Jim” Colosimo ruled the Chicago underworld longer than any man in the city's history. The money he raked in from the many enterprises that he controlled was conservatively estimated at $50,000 a month for about eight years. Colosimo was a strange character and a man who helped usher in Chicago's organized crime era – although he’d never actually live to see it. 

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