Holiday Break: How a Nuclear Lab Helped Catch a Serial Killer

Serial Killers

Spotify Studios

True Crime, History, Education

4.6 • 30.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2024

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Happy holidays, listeners! We're starting off our winter break by bringing you an episode from our colleagues at Science Vs about how a notorious murder case was solved with help from an unlikely source: a nuclear weapons lab. It’s the 1990s at a medical center in California, and patients are dying. At first, this doesn’t seem strange — it’s a hospital, and deaths happen. But then rumors start to circulate about a particular health care worker: difficult or needy patients in his care are ending up dead. The cops get involved, but there’s a huge problem: there’s no hard evidence. Until the so-called “Lab of Last Resort” steps in. Crime Junkie host Ashley Flowers joins us as we speak to analytical chemist Armando Alcaraz, former Detective Sergeant John McKillop, and Dr. Ian Musgrave. Keep up with us on Instagram @serialkillerspodcast! Have a story to share? Email us at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, the host of Science Verses.
0:05.0	And on Science Verses, we tell these bonkers science stories that matter to you and me,
0:12.0	whether it's a story about how much protein you need to eat every day,
0:17.0	what is happening in your brain as you dream?
0:25.8	And stories about serial killers.
0:32.1	To find us, just search for science versus that science VS on whatever podcast app you're using.
0:42.5	And so today I'm telling you the story of how a lab that designs nuclear weapons helped catch a serial killer.
0:50.2	Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Verses.
0:59.7	Today on the show, how a lab that designs nuclear weapons helped catch a serial killer.
1:10.5	And if you're going to do true crime, you better bring in the true crime queen. Host of crime junkie, Ashley Flowers,
1:14.1	welcome to Science Versus. Hello, I'm so excited to be here. So something that a lot of people
1:20.5	might not know about you is that you graduated from biomedical science. That was your degree.
1:26.0	It was. And we are twinsies. We both have this degree.
1:29.0	I thought I really wanted to be a doctor when I was young. And I was, I think, fortunate enough to have to
1:36.2	work full time to put myself through school. And I worked at a hospital for all five years and went to
1:41.7	school at night. And I got to work side by side with residents,
1:46.2	who you have to be before you're a doctor. And I was like, oh, that's not the life I want.
1:51.7	Right. I made a bit of a pivot. And I finished my degree with actually a focus in research.
1:58.2	And so what do you like about science? I like facts. And I think so much in life
2:04.4	can be so subjective. And what I love about science is it feels like there are real answers
2:11.5	and not just opinions. Like there are sometimes things get to be black and white. And that's not
2:17.4	very often do you get that. Yes. black and white and that's not very often
	...

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