Episode 33: Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I’m your host Julie Mattson. On today’s episode, I want to share with you stories of two different men that had an obsession with blood. One, I was personally on the scene investigating, and the other is the infamous killer Richard Chase, also known as the Vampire of Sacramento, one of the most deeply mentally ill serial killers of all time.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
0:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies.
0:08 I’m your host, Julie Mattson.
0:10 Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine tingling, unusual and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
0:24 Do I have some stories for you?
0:26 Are you ready?
0:30 I thought that y’all might enjoy hearing a case that I actually had a couple of years ago and it was a local case that was a little bit different, very different from your average drive by shooting or murder suicide or natural death that we see every day at the medical examiner’s office.
0:53 But this was a man who actually broke into a blood bank.
1:00 Now the blood bank was next door to a gym.
1:02 So there was a man outside the gym who actually saw this gentleman get out of his car barefoot with no shirt on and a gun in his hand walked towards the blood bank door, which was all glass and bust the glass out and then walk through the glass through the door barefooted.
1:22 At this point, there’s blood everywhere, not normal.
1:27 So the gym goer, phoned 911 and when the police arrived on scene and he told them that this man had a weapon, didn’t really seem quite normal.
1:37 Number one, he’s breaking into a blood bank.
1:39 He’s barefooted with no shirt on, walking through the glass.
1:43 So the swat team surrounded the building.
1:47 One thing that we were a little perplexed about is why would someone break into a blood bank?
1:53 We’re trying to figure out why they chose that location.
1:58 There’s not money there, there’s not really blood stored there.
2:04 And so we’re trying to put two and two together to figure out why he chose this particular place of business.
2:12 Now, the nurse in me kept thinking, maybe he had been attempting to donate and was diagnosed with something that prevented him from donating like HIV or syphilis or hepatitis.
2:29 Maybe he was upset about that or maybe he came to attempt to donate, and something went wrong.
2:36 Maybe there was an altercation with a staff member or just something just trying to figure out what I mean.
2:43 It wasn’t for money, wasn’t necessarily for blood.
2:48 So we were trying to figure out what was going on.
2:52 Anyway, he actually shoots the locks off of all the closet doors in the facility.
3:01 And later we find that he had actually been drinking the simulated whole blood controls that are in small plastic tubes in these closets.
3:14 The intention of those is for the daily quality control of all the routine blood bank equipment.
3:23 It’s used in all the automated blood typing and antibody screening and all that stuff.
3:29 But I’m sure you all have seen them before, really small plastic vials of what looks like blood, but it’s actually simulated blood controls.
3:39 He shot the locks off of all these closet doors and was actually drinking those.
3:46 Eventually.
3:47 Of course, the SWAT team had the building surrounded and he goes into a bathroom in the very back of the building and shot himself in the head.
3:58 So none of it really made sense.
4:01 We were trying again to put two and two together.
4:04 Why did he break into a blood bank?
4:07 What was his goal in doing that?
4:10 So, reaching out to family later, we find out a lot of things which is where we get a lot of our information and a big part of my job at the medical examiner’s office is to interview family and ask questions.
4:24 And that’s the fun part of my job because I can be nosy and I’m getting paid for it and it’s okay.
4:30 I’m allowed to ask questions that we all wish we could ask, but we can’t, I find out that he is practicing vampirism and it’s not really something that his mom is aware of until she goes into his apartment to kind of find out what’s going on.
4:46 What was he doing before this incident occurred.
4:49 She was also trying to put all the pieces together.
4:53 She finds out that there are things in his home that indicate that he believed himself to be a vampire.
5:02 Generally, it is supposed that all suicides become vampires after death.
5:08 So he believed in his mind that even after everything that he had done that if he did shoot himself or kill himself, that he would become a vampire after he passed away, the use of blood actually separates the people that just want to dabble and experiment from the real vampires.
5:34 The use of blood is actually referred in several different ways.
5:38 There are blood sports, blood play, there’s blood lust and blood fetishism, which is an expression of sexual spiritual or recreational activities.
5:54 Now, blood rituals are a sacred act of worship and are fundamental to real vampire religious beliefs.
6:03 There are so many different ways that they are able to practice their beliefs.
6:08 Blood sports are one of the most dangerous aspect of their culture and unfortunately, are increasing in popularity.
6:18 Now, blood play involves cutting and then having someone lick or suck blood from your cut.
6:26 So it just shallow cuts to the skin and then someone will actually suck blood.
6:33 And I know we’ve all seen this and all the vampire movies.
6:36 There’s so many different ones, but it’s not uncommon at nightclubs to see people cutting and sucking each other’s blood, which is referred to as a feeding circle.
6:49 Now, blood play is intended to be a sexual activity and that is a form of intimacy that’s practiced among those individuals.
7:02 And then blood sports usually includes drawing blood with a syringe and then sharing it with your partner.
7:10 Supposedly in this vampire world, once blood is exchange, that person is committed to a religion are a group.
7:20 A lot of people who participate in this vampire culture will carry around vials of blood.
7:28 And that’s so that their vitality doesn’t diminish, and their magical powers don’t subside.
7:36 Now, a lot of people who practice vampirism end up committing crimes from vandalism to murder.
7:43 A lot of them don’t, I mean, you never know.
7:46 It’s just like every culture you have good, and you have bad.
7:50 But we see a lot of things forensically when we go to a scene where we suspect that someone is practicing this lifestyle.
7:59 Now, some of the things may not be that different from what we would see at the home of a drug addict.
8:07 So for example, forensic evidence that’s unique to the vampire scene would be maybe human blood in vials indicating that they had received blood from somebody, a friend or purchased it or whatnot and they have it in vials in their home with the intent of drinking it.
8:29 Needles used to remove blood if they’re sharing needles as well.
8:33 And that would be something that we would also expect to see in a scene where there are drugs involved as well as razor blades.
8:43 Typically, we would see a razor blade if someone was snorting cocaine or that kind of thing.
8:50 But in these cases, a razor blade would be used to slit the wrist so that they could suck or lick the blood off of someone else or even themselves.
9:00 Now, we may see false teeth that look similar to the things that we see at the party stores during the Halloween season, things with the big teeth that people would wear at Halloween.
9:16 We might also see knives, swords, sometimes dramatic clothing or something that we would consider a little bit different robes.
9:29 We might see chains or restraints or whips, metal claws that attached to your fingers.
9:39 And I know that we’ve all seen the unusual colored contact lenses where there’s no sclera or there’s no white, it’s all just a solid black or a solid red.
9:51 So we might see unusual contact lenses at a scene so we can kind of piece all these things together and kind of figure out what’s going on.
10:00 And we may also see books.
10:01 Most likely we would see books where they have been studying different practices.
10:06 It wouldn’t be unusual to see gothic items, coffins, skulls.
10:13 Again, not everyone who has these items would practice vampirism, but these are things forensically as far as evidence that would be unique to a vampire scene.
10:25 And we may even see silver jewelry with like large stones, multicolored stones and that kind of thing.
10:33 Now, it is believed that real vampires don’t actually possess supernatural powers, but they are actually individuals who claim to have a medical condition that requires them to drink blood, to sustain themselves or to stay alive.
10:49 A lot of people who manifest this behavior start to notice it around puberty and then they become reliant on drinking blood themselves because they accidentally discover that it actually offers a remedy for them being tired and feeling drained.
11:14 It makes them feel better.
11:16 They might bite their lip and then realize that they do get a sudden burst of strange energy from the metallic taste in their own blood.
11:26 And then that starts to kind of heightened their awareness.
11:30 And then they began to start wondering, hey, maybe there’s something to be said about this and they continue to live that lifestyle.
11:39 So it’s very different.
11:41 Again, the scene itself was a little confusing.
11:45 At first, we were trying to figure out what was going on and why someone would break into a blood bank.
11:50 And then again, didn’t have any real answers until it was all said and done.
11:56 We actually were able to visit with the family.
12:00 And I kind of wish that I had been able to go to the scene to go to his apartment, see what all was there and exactly what it looked like.
12:07 But I have an idea.
12:08 There were a lot of these things that we talked about as far as razor blades and fangs and needles and human blood and vials and those, these types of things present at his house.
12:22 And I’m sure that his mom was a little shocked when she got there and found it because I don’t think she was really aware that he was living that lifestyle prior to this.
12:31 I think he kind of kept to himself and work nights and that type of thing.
12:37 A lot of times again, we don’t know what goes on behind closed doors, but this is something that she discovered.
12:43 And so I was doing a little research and I found a gentleman back.
12:48 He was a serial killer and he killed six people in the span of about a month between 1977 and 1978.
12:58 He lived in the California area.
13:01 He was nicknamed the vampire of Sacramento.
13:03 And that’s because he drank his victim’s blood and then actually cannibalized their remains.
13:09 So he was also called the Dracula killer or the vampire killer.
13:14 He was a native of Sacramento and he was pretty much a psychopath.
13:22 By the age of five.
13:24 He was a really heavy drug user as an adolescent and became violent, you know, in his early years.
13:33 And then he developed hypochondria when he got older.
13:38 He complained that his heart would stop beating.
13:41 He would say someone stole his pulmonary artery, which we know you can’t have your pulmonary artery stolen.
13:47 But he would say someone stole his pulmonary artery.
13:51 He would hold oranges on his head because he thought that the vitamin C would be absorbed by his brain, and he shaved his head because he thought that his bones in his head were separated and were moving around a little bit different little fella.
14:10 He left his mother’s house because he thought that she was trying to poison him.
14:16 And he rented an apartment with friends.
14:18 His roommates complained that he was drinking too much.
14:21 He used a lot of LSD smoked.
14:23 A lot of, we’d walk around the apartment nude even when they had company, they wanted him to move out.
14:31 I mean, who wouldn’t, I mean, we don’t want high drunk new dude running around our apartment when we got people over.
14:38 So once he was alone in the apartment, he started capturing and killing animals, which again happens with a lot of serial killers initially, like we saw with Jeffrey Dahmer’s, but he would sometimes mix okay.
14:54 This is gross y’all.
14:55 But he would sometimes mix the raw organs with Coke ca Cola in a blender.
15:00 Can you imagine?
15:02 I mean, I don’t think so.
15:04 But anyway, he thought that by ingesting these creatures, he was preventing his heart from shrinking.
15:11 So that had a lot to do with his issue with hypochondria.
15:16 He was in a psychiatric facility back in 1973 and then in 76 he was involuntarily committed to a mental institution, and he injected rabbit’s blood into his veins.
15:30 And so he was taken to a hospital and then the staff nicknamed him Dracula because he obviously had a fixation on blood and then he broke the necks of two birds that he caught at the institution and then drank their blood.
15:47 So he also extracted blood from dogs with stolen syringe.
15:52 This dude was weird.
15:53 So he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia Somehow.
15:58 After treatment involving psychotropic drugs, he was deemed no longer a danger to society, and he was released to his mother’s custody in 1976.
16:12 Now guess what?
16:14 His mother weaned him off of all of his medication.
16:17 And then he got his own apartment.
16:19 He shared the apartment with friends initially and then eventually over time, they all moved out and left him on his own.
16:28 A later investigation uncovered that in mid-77, he was stopped and arrested on a reservation in Nevada covered in blood, a bucket of blood was found in his truck and it was determined to be cow’s blood at that time.
16:46 And so no charges were filed.
16:48 But in December of 77, He actually killed his first known victim was a drive by shooting.
16:57 The victim’s name was Ambrose Griffin.
16:59 He was a 51-year-old engineer.
17:01 He had a couple of kids.
17:02 Two weeks later, he tried to break into the house of a woman but couldn’t get him because the doors were locked.
17:09 He told detectives that meant that he was not welcome.
17:13 He was caught and chased off by a couple returning home as he went through their belongings and urinated and defecated on their furniture.
17:24 So this dude was, yeah, a little bit different.
17:26 So in 1978, he broke into a house and shot Theresa Wallen, who was three months pregnant at the time, he shot her three times.
17:36 And then he actually had sexual intercourse with her corpse while stabbing her with a Butcher knife.
17:42 Now he removed multiple organs, drank her blood and then again on January 27, same year, 1978, 4 days later, he entered the home of a 38-year-old, encountered her friend who he shot and then he shot her six-year-old son and her 22 month old nephew.
18:06 A visitor knocked on the door, startled him.
18:09 He ended up leaving in a vehicle.
18:13 They discovered that he had left handprints and shoeprints in the house, and he was arrested afterwards because of that.
18:19 Shortly afterwards, when they searched his apartment, they found that the walls and the floor and the ceiling and the refrigerator, all of his eating utensils were actually soaked in blood.
18:30 This guy was weird.
18:32 He stood trial on six counts of murder and he wanted to avoid the death penalty.
18:37 So the defense tried to have him found guilty of second degree murder, which would ultimately result in a life sentence.
18:46 Basically, the case hinged on his history of mental illness.
18:50 They tried to prove that it wasn’t premeditated that he had medical issues.
18:54 He was found guilty of six counts of first degree murder And was not guilty by reason of insanity and sentenced to die in the gas chamber.
19:05 Now, his fellow inmates realized how extremely violent his crimes were and we’re really afraid of him and they tried to talk him into killing himself.
19:17 So really odd.
19:19 But in 1980, he was actually found dead in his prison cell.
19:23 An autopsy revealed that he had committed suicide with an overdose of prescribed medications.
19:31 He didn’t necessarily believe himself to be a vampire, but he did strongly believe in cannibalism and drinking blood, very similar things.
19:43 And also with his nickname being the Dracula killer, the vampire of Sacramento or the vampire killer a little bit different.
19:52 There are people that practice these different lifestyles, which is very unusual.
19:59 And again, a lot of times the symptoms start to manifest around puberty.
20:06 Again, we see that with a lot of serial killers, a lot of people start focusing on killing animals before they eventually resort to killing people.
20:16 So I thought that was a little bit different.
20:18 That’s a scene that I really did have not Richard Chase, not the Dracula killer, but the man who did believe that he was a vampire and broke into the blood bank.
20:31 So very different.
20:34 And it’s kind of interesting to see all the different forensic evidence that we find on scene and how we go about categorizing it and trying to figure out exactly what’s going on behind the scenes.
20:47 Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies.
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