Bloody Angola: A Podcast by Jim Chapman

In this episode Jim Chapman brings you to Alaska and tells you the story of Israel Keyes. Jim covers the disappearance of Samantha Koenig in Anchorage in 2012 and the investigation that followed, including the ransom scheme and the evidence later linked to him. Jim also dives deep into Keyes  background, military service, and adult life, along with the violent behavior and confessions that shaped the case. 

Timestamps
05:12 Wilderness to Extremism
10:38 Soldiers See the Rage
20:05 Samantha Koenig’s Last Night
26:43 Ransom Scheme Unravels
30:13 Murder and Body Disposal
39:14 Confession and Charges
41:08 Failed Escape Attempt
43:19 Victims Revealed 

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On the afternoon of November 21, 2021, downtown Waukesha, Wisconsin, was packed for the city’s annual Christmas parade. Kids in baseball uniforms. Bank employees handing out candy. The Milwaukee Dancing Grannies in sequins and pompoms. Then a red Ford Escape came down the route and did not stop.

In the span of a few blocks, Darrell Edward Brooks Jr. struck dozens of people. Six were killed. More than sixty were injured. The dead ranged from 8-year-old Jackson Sparks, marching with his brother and the Waukesha Blazers, to 81-year-old Wilhelm Hospel, walking with the dance group his wife belonged to. Three members of the Dancing Grannies — Virginia Sorenson, 79; LeAnna Owen, 71; and Tamara Durand, 52, in her first parade with the troupe — never made it home. Jane Kulich, 52, was walking with a Citizens Bank float.

This episode reconstructs that Sunday: the domestic fight earlier that day, the low cash bail that had put Brooks back on the street, the barricades he ignored, and the five-block path of the SUV. It also traces the two decades that came before it — battery, domestic violence, prior incidents involving vehicles, and open Milwaukee felony cases that never kept him locked up.

In 2008, a young man from Chillicothe, Ohio, slit his girlfriend’s mother’s throat, sat on the couch, and watched her die—then set the apartment on fire. He called himself “Box Cutter.” Prosecutors wanted death. A psychologist’s finding about his IQ took it off the table. He went to prison for life. That should have been the end of the story. It wasn’t.

In February 2016, Casey Pigge carved a cinder block out of his cell wall at Lebanon Correctional Institution, talked his cellmate into a “card trick,” and beat Luther Wade to death. He later said he wanted a cell to himself. Officials still put him on a prison bus. Two days after he pleaded guilty to that killing, he sat in the back of a transport vehicle with no cameras and no line of sight to the officers up front. Using a restraint chain, he strangled and smothered 61-year-old inmate David Johnson while other prisoners watched. When it was over, Pigge boasted: “I guess you never seen that on a bus before.” A year later, in another February, he and another lifer used homemade shanks to stab a Lucasville correction officer 32 times. The officer lived. Pigge did not stop talking about killing again.

On November 15, 2017, 24-year-old Sydney Loofe left her Lincoln apartment excited for a second Tinder date. She posted a Snapchat: “Ready for my date.” She never came home.The woman she matched with was Bailey Boswell.
Sydney didn’t know Boswell lived with older boyfriend Aubrey Trail — a career criminal prosecutors said was already looking for someone to kill. Boswell lured Sydney to a basement apartment in Wilber. There she was strangled with an extension cord, cut into 14 pieces, stuffed into trash bags, and dumped along rural roads. For three weeks her family and the FBI searched. Then the bags were found.
Store video showed Trail and Boswell buying saws and bleach while Sydney was still alive. 
Trail was sentenced to death. Boswell got life. In 2024 her conviction was upheld. Sydney just wanted a second date. What she walked into was a trap set before they ever matched.

Timestamps:
03:51 Sidney Loof
14:26 Aubrey Trail’s Criminal Past
18:27 Bailey Boswell’s Fall
25:21 The Wilbur Basement
29:00 Tinder Trap Set
38:07 Trials and Verdicts
41:37 Justice After Loss

In January 1958, a 19-year-old high school dropout from Lincoln, Nebraska named Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate went on a murder spree that left eleven people dead across Nebraska and Wyoming. 

Starkweather, who idolized James Dean and styled himself as a rebellious outsider, and Fugate, who claimed she was a hostage, left a trail of bodies that included a teenage couple, a wealthy industrialist and his wife, a traveling salesman, and a young couple in Wyoming. The killings were brutal, impulsive, and seemingly without clear motive beyond rage, alienation, and a twisted desire for notoriety.

Timestamps
03:20 Starkweather's Early Years
06:59 Rebel Without Rules
11:22 First Killings Begin
13:20 The Bartlett Murders
16:36 Help Turns Deadly
19:38 Final Chase Ends
26:28 Execution Day

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