Just Killing Time

💊 On July 15, 1962, The Washington Post called FDA reviewer Dr. Frances Kelsey a hero for keeping thalidomide off the U.S. market. What that front page left out: Richardson-Merrell of Cincinnati had already distributed more than 2.5 million thalidomide tablets as "investigational samples" to more than 1,200 American doctors, with no approval, no patient tracking, and no list for the government to check. 🕯️

In Episode 44 of Just Killing Time, Elizabeth Stanton follows the trail from a small town in Germany, to a Cincinnati sales force, to the front page of the Post, and to the American survivors still asking someone to admit...

💉 Episode 43: The Swine Flu Fiasco (1976), the pandemic that never came.

One Army recruit died. The U.S. government vaccinated tens of millions of Americans. The predicted pandemic never arrived. Reports of a rare paralysis did. 

😳 It starts on Monday, February 7, 1977, when CDC director Dr. David Sencer is told his career is over in front of cameras nobody meant to invite. Then we rewind eleven months to find out how it happened.

⏪ 🔎 IN THIS EPISODE 

• Fort Dix, New Jersey, a bet between two doctors, and Private David Lewis 🪖 

• Sencer's "action memo": 213 million pe...

🦷 Why is fluoride in America's water and toothpaste? Episode 42 tells the true history of water fluoridation: a Colorado dentist, an Alcoa chemist, Grand Rapids in 1945, Crest toothpaste, and the 2026 court fight. 💧

At 4:00 p.m. on January 25, 1945, fluoride went into the water of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a whole city became an experiment. 😳 It was planned to run fifteen years. Five years in, the government endorsed it anyway. From there the story runs through a 30-year dental mystery, an aluminum company's lab, a control city that quit, and the toothpaste on your sink.

This episode follows the money...

🧼🕯️ Episode 41: In 1847, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis cut deaths in a Vienna maternity ward from 18.3% to 2.2% with a basin of chlorinated lime. The medical establishment ruined him anyway. This is the true story behind the Semmelweis reflex.

At the end of July 1865, a Hungarian professor boarded an overnight train thinking he was headed to a German spa. Colleagues delivered him to a Vienna asylum instead. Within two weeks he was dead of blood poisoning, the very kind of infection he had spent his career fighting. 😳

A deep dive for fans of true crime, medical history, conspiracy and hidden hist...

🔪 "I suggested them not tell Howard anything about it." A doctor wrote that about a 12-year-old boy in 1960, days before a steel instrument was tapped through the bone above his eye with a hammer. The fee: $200. 🧠

This is the true story of the lobotomy and the part schools skip: it wasn't a hidden horror. Medical journals praised it, newspapers put it on the front page, state hospitals and the Veterans Administration used it, and a Nobel Prize committee honored it. 👏

🕯️ This episode is dedicated to my grandmother, Viola Reese.

🎧 Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton...

🧬 Who was Henrietta Lacks? In 1951, a 31-year-old Black mother of five went to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for cervical cancer treatment. While she was under anesthesia, a surgeon took two small tissue samples that no one had asked her about. One of them grew in a lab when no human cells ever had. Those cells, called HeLa, are still alive today, and they have been used in research on polio, cancer, viruses, HPV and genetics. Her family was not told for decades. This is the full story. 🎙️

In this deep-dive episode of Just Killing Time with Elizabet...

Before there was Tuskegee's whistleblower, there was Guatemala — and almost nobody knew about it for 60 years. 🩺

Between 1946 and 1948, the U.S. Public Health Service — under Dr. John C. Cutler — deliberately infected more than 1,300 Guatemalan prisoners, sex workers, soldiers, psychiatric patients, and orphaned children with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid, without consent, to test venereal disease prevention methods for American soldiers.

In this episode of Just Killing Time, Elizabeth Stanton walks through:

🔎 The failed Indiana prison experiment that led researchers to Guatemala

🔎 The direct inoculation methods used — including injections at the base of the skull

🔎...

🩸 They called it "bad blood." It was syphilis — and the U.S. government let it run untreated in 600 Black men for 40 years, on purpose.

Episode 37 of Just Killing Time takes you inside the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the U.S. Public Health Service's 1932–1972 experiment in Macon County, Alabama that has become the defining case study in American medical ethics and government betrayal. Host Elizabeth Stanton walks through the real, documented history: what syphilis and "bad blood" actually meant medically and culturally in the Jim Crow South, the brutal mercury-and-arsenic treatments doctors used before penicillin existed, and exactly how — and why —...

🪱 "The Germ of Laziness" — the hidden history of hookworm, the Rockefeller cover-up, and the disease America pretended it cured.

For three centuries, poor Southerners were dismissed as lazy, backward, and shiftless. The truth was a parasite: Necator americanus, the hookworm, quietly infecting an estimated 40% of the Southern population by the early 1900s. In this episode of Just Killing Time, host Elizabeth Stanton traces the story from Dr. Charles Wardell Stiles's 1902 discovery, through the New York Sun headline that branded hookworm "the germ of laziness," to the formation of the $1 million Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookw...

🩺⚖️ "Contain and eliminate" — two words buried in a federal court record that expose one of the most stunning hidden-history stories in American medicine. In this deep-dive episode of Just Killing Time, Elizabeth Stanton uncovers the true, documented story of the American Medical Association's secret Committee on Quackery, formed in 1963 with one internal mission: destroy the chiropractic profession before it could grow.

This episode is lovingly dedicated to Elizabeth's husband, Dr. Jason Stanton — a practicing chiropractor for over 20 years before his retirement — whose entire career unfolded inside the long shadow of a documented medical conspiracy most patients never knew existed...

🩺 How did a man who never went to medical school end up deciding the fate of American medicine? Welcome to "Bulletin Number Four" — the true story of the 1910 Flexner Report, the Rockefeller and Carnegie money behind it, and the century of plant medicine it quietly erased.

Abraham Flexner had a degree in classics. He'd never treated a patient. And in 1910, his 346-page report — Carnegie Foundation Bulletin Number Four — became the single most consequential document in American medical history. Within thirty years, eclectic botanical medicine and homeopathy were nearly wiped from accredited American medical education. 🌿

🔍 In this episode:<...

🩸 She went in for what she thought was an appendix surgery. She was 19. Kansas sterilized her — and 2,850+ other people — without full consent, under a law that stayed on the books for 52 years.

In this episode of Just Killing Time, Elizabeth Stanton uncovers the true, documented history of Kansas's forced sterilization program — one of the longest-running eugenics programs in American history, running quietly in our own home state from 1913 until 1965.

🔍 What's covered:

🩺 Dr. F. Hoyt Pilcher's unauthorized 1894 castrations at the Winfield asylum — before any law even existed ⚖️ Kansas's 1913 and 1917 sterilization laws, and how judicial oversight was deliber...

🪣 The first serial killer to hunt his victims on the internet sealed 8 women in barrels — and used forged emails to keep them "alive" for years. In June 2026, Kansas decided if he lives or dies. This is the John Edward Robinson "Slavemaster" story. 💀

John Edward Robinson Sr. was an Eagle Scout, a Sunday school teacher, a Scoutmaster, a father of four — and a lifelong con man responsible for at least 8 murders across Kansas and Missouri between 1984 and 2000. When he got out of prison in 1993 and discovered the earliest internet chatrooms, he became "Slavemaster" — trolling BDSM chatrooms under fake identities...

This episode is dedicated to my best friend who I call sister, Dena Tackett. We have driven up and down I-35 for each other for decades.

Right now, while this episode is live, a decision is sitting on Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt's desk that could put a mass murderer back on the street. In August 2026, a divided Oklahoma parole board voted 3-2 to recommend release for Verna Stafford — a woman who, alongside her husband Roger and his brother Harold, was part of one of the most brutal killing sprees in Oklahoma history.

In the summer of...

🔨 The Bloody Benders of Kansas: America's First Serial Killer Family | Just Killing Time

The Bloody Benders were a German-speaking family of four — Pa, Ma, John Jr., and Kate Bender — who ran a roadside inn on the Osage Trail in Labette County, Kansas between 1871 and 1873, and murdered at least eleven travelers before vanishing without a trace. Historians still debate whether their true victim count exceeds twenty. This week on Just Killing Time, host Elizabeth Stanton digs into the full, documented history of the Benders — the hammer-and-trapdoor murder method, the disappearance of Dr. William York that finally exposed them, the disco...

On May 19, 1992, seventeen-year-old Amy Fisher shot Mary Jo Buttafuoco on the front porch of her Massapequa, New York home. Amy Fisher was having a relationship with Mary Jo's husband, Joey Buttafuoco, that began when Fisher was sixteen and Buttafuoco was thirty-five. The case became a national tabloid sensation known as the "Long Island Lolita" story.

In this episode of Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton, Elizabeth breaks down the fully documented facts of the Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco case: how their relationship began at Buttafuoco's Long Island auto body shop, how Fisher was steered into escort...

She paid fifteen hundred dollars to have her husband killed. Then she sent flowers to his funeral. The banner on them read: "From your loving wife."

Gibsonton, Florida. November 29, 1992. A fifty-five-year-old man sits on his couch in his underwear watching a movie, cigarette going, glass of iced tea beside him. At some point he pauses the tape, and nobody has ever been able to tell me why.

Outside in the dark, a seventeen-year-old neighbor is looking at him through the window.

The man on that couch was Grady Stiles Jr., the sideshow performer...

A jury convicted him of murder. Then a judge asked the state where to put him, and the state said it couldn't take him.

Pittsburgh. September 27, 1978. A fifteen-year-old named Donna Stiles buys her wedding dress at the Allegheny Center Mall with her stepmother and her eighteen-year-old fiancé. The ceremony is the next morning. Eight hours later that boy is dead on the sidewalk in front of her, and her father is watching from the living room window.

His name was Jack Layne. He was eighteen. He lived four blocks away on Peralta Street on Pittsburgh's N...

He was billed as "Lobster Boy." He was convicted of murder. He never spent a single day in prison.

Grady Stiles Jr. was born in Pittsburgh in 1937 with ectrodactyly — a rare condition that fused his fingers and toes into claw-like extremities. He was the sixth generation of his family born with it. His father put him on a sideshow platform at seven years old. And in 1978 he shot his fifteen-year-old daughter's fiancé to death the night before their wedding, was convicted by a jury of his peers, and walked out of that courthouse a free man.

B...

We told ourselves it was a British problem. It isn't. This happened here — four times.

In Part 1, a hospital electrician exploited a mortuary nobody was watching. In this episode, I bring the story home to America — and four cases that prove the same blank space in oversight exists on this side of the ocean.

🔦 Cincinnati, Ohio — Kenneth Douglas, a night-shift attendant at the Hamilton County morgue, abused the dead for years. He was caught only when 2008 DNA testing tied him to the 1982 body of 19-year-old Karen Range. His own wife warned his supervisor — and was rep...

🔑 A hospital electrician held the keys to the mortuary — and for 15 years, no one was watching the room.

In 1987, two young women — Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20 — were murdered five months apart in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England. The press called them the Bedsit Murders. The case went cold for 33 years, until a familial DNA breakthrough in 2020 finally gave the killer a name: David Fuller, a quiet hospital maintenance supervisor no detective had ever looked at twice.

But when police searched Fuller's home, they uncovered a second, hidden crime that would expose one of the most disturbin...

🕰️ For four years, a stalker who called himself The Poet terrorized Wichita, Kansas — rhyming threats, a stabbing in a mall parking lot, a wreath set on fire on the front door — all during the height of the BTK murders. The city spent $370,000 and ran down more than 300 suspects. Then one weekend, the Chief of Police read the whole file and saw what no one else could.

This is the story of Ruth Finley 💛 — a soft-spoken phone-company secretary, a devoted husband, and a secret buried so deep that even Ruth didn't know she was keepin...

She hid a spy pen to catch her husband cheating. It recorded her own secret affair instead.

On Mother's Day weekend 2020, Suzanne Morphew went for a bike ride in the Colorado mountains and never came home. Three years later, her remains were found by accident in a remote field locals call "the boneyard" — with a wildlife tranquilizer in her bones and her body moved at least twice. Her husband Barry has pleaded not guilty to her murder. His trial begins October 13, 2026.

This is the whole story: a crying husband and a $200,000 reward, a "chipmunk alibi," a...

🌊 It's one of the most beautiful lakes in America. It's also one of the deadliest. More than 700 people have died at Lake Lanier — and the reason why is hiding at the bottom.

💀 In this deep dive, I tell the documented, fully-sourced story of Lake Lanier, Georgia: the town that was flooded to create it, the graves the government admits it never moved, the woman in the blue dress who was seen for 30 years before anyone learned her name, and the 1912 racial cleansing of Forsyth County that was never punished.

If you've only heard the viral version...

🌼 In 1942, twenty million American families grew their own food, and let the dandelions grow because everyone's grandmother knew they were medicine. By 1955, the dandelion was a weed — a thing you paid a chemical company to kill. In thirteen years, self-sufficiency went from patriotic duty to a sign of a bad neighborhood.

What happened in between? It started at the 1939 New York World's Fair, where forty-five million people walked through a gorgeous, hopeful blueprint for the future — and never realized they were looking at a plan to turn free Americans into permanent customers.

🏛️ In the finale of the White...

🔥 At 5:12 in the morning on April 18, 1906, the San Andreas Fault tore open and San Francisco came down in under a minute. Then the fires came. And before the smoke had even cleared, the most powerful men in the city had quietly agreed on a story — that it was the fire that did it. Not the earthquake. The fire. Because fire was insured. Earthquakes were not.

That was the first lie. Nine years later, the city threw the biggest party on Earth to celebrate two great American triumphs — rising from the ashes, and finishing the Panama Canal. Both were si...

In 1904, the St. Louis World's Fair displayed over 1,200 human beings as living specimens in what became the largest "human zoo" in American history. Nineteen million visitors paid to see people from around the world exhibited as examples of "primitive" human development.

In this episode of Just Killing Time, Elizabeth Stanton exposes the systematic dehumanization that occurred at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. This wasn't fringe entertainment—it was mainstream American science, supported by the Smithsonian Institution, major universities, and the U.S. government.

THE ANTHROPOLOGY DAYS: On August 12-13, 1904, the fair held athletic competitions between ethnic gr...

Nikola Tesla demonstrated wireless power to 27 million people at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Then J.P. Morgan pulled his funding, Tesla died broke, and the FBI seized his papers within hours of his death.

In this episode of Just Killing Time, Elizabeth Stanton separates documented history from conspiracy theory in the Tesla story. What really happened at Wardenclyffe? Why was Tesla's work classified as "Most Secret"? And how does a Kansas farmhouse connect to the greatest suppressed technology in electrical history?

This isn't about free energy conspiracy theories—it's about documented suppression, the War of Cu...

👶 THE BABIES IN THE SIDESHOW: When Power Failed & Love Worked 💔

🏛️ Buffalo, September 6, 1901. President McKinley shot at 4:07 PM. 300 yards away: Martin Couney saving premature babies in glass incubators. The president dies. The babies live.

🔍 TONIGHT: 👶 Martin Couney: saved 6,500 babies over 40 years (may not have been a real doctor) 🔫 McKinley assassination complete story + the X-ray machine nobody used 🧬 Eugenics movement at the SAME fairs arguing "weakling" babies should die 🏆 First Fitter Families contest: Topeka, Kansas, 1920 (judging humans like livestock) ⚖️ Buck v. Bell: Supreme Court legalized forced sterilization (never overturned) 💕 Lucille Horn: 2 pounds at birth, lived to 96, five children...

🏰 THE MURDER CASTLE: H.H. Holmes - Myth vs. Reality 💀

🎪 Three miles from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Herman Mudgett built a hotel. The newspapers called it the Murder Castle. The legend says 200 victims. The truth: 9 confirmed deaths.

🔍 TONIGHT WE COVER: 💀 Holmes' real background vs. the mythology 🏨 What he actually built (acid vats were real, "100 rooms" weren't) 👥 The 9 confirmed victims by name—including the Pitezel children 🕵️ Detective Frank Geyer's 3-month hunt across North America ⚖️ Holmes' $7,500 confession to Hearst papers & gallows recantation 🏢 The post office that stands there now (employees won't go to basement)

Part of the Whit...