Transcript
A (0:00)
Hi, I'm Jessi Pere. And I'm Andy. Cassette. Welcome to Love Murder, where we unravel the darkest tales of romance turned deadly. Our episodes are long form, narrative driven and deeply researched. Perfect for the true crime aficionados seeking stories beyond the headlines. Like the chilling case of Blanche Taylor Moore, the so called black widow who left a trail of poisoned lovers. Or the shocking murders of Chad Shelton and Dwayne Johnson, where family ties masked a sinister plot. Subscribe to Love Murder on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.
B (0:43)
I'm Brett.
A (0:44)
And I'm Alice.
B (0:46)
And we are the prosecut today on the Prosecutors. There is one thing you could say about Richard Chase. He never drank wine. Hello, everybody, and welcome to this October episode of the Prosecutors. I'm Brett and I'm joined as always by my vamp of a co host, Alice.
A (1:50)
Hello, Brett. Very, very fitting for October and also very fitting for this case. You know, I feel like if you're gonna listen to a true crime podcast, you don't need trigger warnings. But this one, this trigger warning, it is a run for the hills. If you think, you know, twisted, you're about to get into some of the truest of crimes, twisted crimes I've ever read in my life. And let me just be clear, this is the truest of crimes. There is nothing paranormal about it. What's so freaky about it is, in fact, it's not paranormal. It's not at all.
B (2:24)
Yeah. You know, we always say with these October episodes, people think they're not true crime. I mean, this one is true crime. This is horror. It's true crime. I can't believe they haven't made movies about this. I had never heard about this until somebody. People were recommending episodes. I don't know which one of you sick people recommended this one, but people were recommending episodes for Halloween.
A (2:46)
You know how they make like Netflix and HBO documentaries on like, Dahmer and all these other, you know, really twisted characters. I think the reason we haven't heard about this case is because it would not get rated to be able to be published to the masses because it's that disturbing. I actually think there's something to that. So, like, Dahmer is just gross enough that you can actually make a documentary about it. You cannot really make any sort of a visual representation of this because I don't think it would be allowed anywhere, dark or otherwise. Webinar.
B (3:21)
Well, it's a good thing this is not a visual podcast. Yay for the audio medium because today we are talking about the vampire of Sacramento, Richard Trenton Chase. And I think we've warned you enough, if you're still with us, to walk into this darkness. It's only going to get darker. This is the end of the light. I mean, this is the most cheerful it's going to be because it's all darkness from here on out. So. Richard Chase was born May 23, 1950, in Sacramento, California. His father, Richard Senior, worked as a computer specialist in McClellan Air Force Base, and his mother, Beatrice, was a school teacher, which sounds like just a delightful family to grow up in. Now, Richard, he was the eldest of two children, and he enjoyed a relatively normal life for the first part of his childhood at least. He was well liked. He had many friends. They had a birthday party where like 80 kids showed up, which is a lot of kids for a birthday party. So he was outgoing. He was part of the Cub Scouts, he played in Little League. Everything seemed fine. Now, this was true until the mid-1960s, when his mother, Beatrice, became convinced that her husband was having several affairs and also developed a drinking problem. Like, they would go out camping and she would claim there were women hiding in the bushes that he was having affairs with. So she had some paranoia going on whether or not it's true, and it's something that would affect Richard in these sort of developmental years. And look, when you talk about a case where you have somebody who is a serial killer, there's always a question of sort of nature versus nurture. And you got a little bit of both, as you're going to see in this case. And in any event, in 1973, the couple were officially divorced, though this was after both Richard and his sister were adults. And this is one of those things where I guess they kept the family together until the kids were grown. Is some of you who've been in that situation can be good. You know, I have friends who they graduated from high school and their parents got divorced, and they had no idea it was coming. And then I had friends who lived through some pretty terrible home lives and frankly wished their parents had gone their separate ways earlier. You never know how it's going to go. It seems like in this case, this was a very unstable family, even if they did remain married. But the fact of the matter is, Richard's problems began to manifest well before his parents divorced. He would later be said that he showed all the signs of the triad of serial killers. He liked to light fires, he liked to torture animals, and he had a bedwetting problem well into his teens. Now, no one knew that outside of his family, he had a relatively normal life until he was a sophomore at Mira Loma High School. And at this point, his personality took a drastic turn. Now, he had started dating, but he had difficulty with it, in part because he had chronic impotence. And this was a problem for him throughout his life. And he wanted to date, but it was just one of those things where, for whatever reason, he could not be aroused, except in extreme circumstances. We're going to learn about later. Now his grades started to suffer, and he began to experiment with drugs such as marijuana, LSD and amphetamines. And his disposition shifts with his appearance. It becomes slovenly in appearance. He's rude, he's inconsiderate. And the Richard Chase that people had known up till this point is gone.
