Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries - 100. Real Life "Purge": Killers Inspired by Horror Movies

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

In 2016, Jonathan Cruz went on a four day killing spree inspired by the movie "The Purge". In 1985, Mark Branch wanted to live out his fantasy of being Jason from Friday the 13th. What causes some people to be inspired by horror movies to commit horrible acts of violence? TW: Suicide We made it to episode 100!! Thank you guys so much for everything, here's to the next 100 Subscribe on Patreon for bonus content and to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society. Patrons have access to ad-free listening and bonus content. And members of our High Council on Patreon have access to our after-show called Footnotes. Apple subscriptions are now live! Get access to ad-free episodes and bonus episodes when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Follow on Tik Tok and Instagram for a daily dose of horror. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So I have a question for you guys today. Do you think horror movies can make people commit horrible acts of violence? Well, it's something we've been asking ourselves since cinema basically started. And today I'm going to share with you some stories of people who felt, let's say, inspired to commit similar crimes after watching a movie. And if you're interested in this kind of darkly curious content, make sure to like this video, subscribe to this channel, and hit the notification bell so you never miss a video of My Dark Creation.

It's when your heart starts pounding. On June 2nd 2016, 20 year old Jonathan Cruz stood before a judge at the Marion Superior Court in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was being sworn in for the trial that would decide his fate. The prosecution that day planned to seek the death penalty. Cruz was a thin guy with a curly cropped haircut and a red starface tattoo next to his right eye. On May 12th of 2016, Cruz, who was 19 at the time, took to the streets with a plan to kill as many people as he could get away with. First, he moved along the 3900 block of North College Avenue in

the historic Green neighborhood of Mableton Fall Creek in the early morning hours, Cruz approached a 54-year-old man named Billy Boyd. Boyd, who was about to become a grandfather, was walking home after caretaking his own father who was sick with prostate cancer. That morning, Cruz approached the man whom he did not know at all and shot him twice in the head. Hours after leaving Boyd on the sidewalk, Cruz took a 15 minute drive to the east side of Hoosier City

where he encountered 40 year old Jay Higginbotham whom he shot multiple times as Higginbotham tried to run away. He was unfortunately pronounced dead at the scene. By the time the police arrived to the scenes of the two men who were murdered in broad daylight, Cruz was nowhere to be found. This horrible, senseless killing spree caught the attention of the news immediately, and soon his tattooed face was plastered everywhere. But instead of lying low to avoid being caught,

Cruz openly bragged to friends and family about what he had done. And for as shocking as his crimes were, it was actually a text that he sent his girlfriend that would make headlines and be used to explain Cruz's motives. He texted his girlfriend, quote, "'I purge every night now.

Purge was a direct reference to the blockbuster horror franchise that hit theaters in 2013. If you're not familiar, the premise of the Purge franchise, which has five movies and a short-lived TV show, is that one night a year, all crime is legal, including murder. The films take place after America faces a fictional financial collapse and a new political party takes over.

They believe that allowing Americans to purge once a year will decrease crime rates overall. And after reading these texts, people thought Jonathan Cruise had seen those movies and felt inspired by them to enact his own personal purge. And he didn't stop at two victims either. Police still didn't know where he was after he committed his first two crimes. And a few days later, on May 14th, he enlisted a friend to rob and pistol whip a stranger. Cruz then invited a female friend to meet him at a Wendy's,

which led to a confrontation that seemed like a recreation of a scene in the second Purge movie. Cruz cornered the girl in the parking lot, telling her that he would kill her if she left. Thankfully, just like happens in the movie, whatever he had planned next was interrupted by a bystander who helped the young woman escape. But Cruz still was not caught after this,

and the next day he would go on to shoot 44-year-old Jose Ruiz in the driver's seat of his Pontiac. Jonathan Cruz was finally stopped the following day. Cruz was ultimately sentenced to three life sentences in addition to 16 years for the robbery. He took a plea argument that removed the death penalty from the equation and the prosecution considered possible mental health factors

that maybe had clouded his judgment. But many felt like something else had influenced Cruise's mind. The Purge movie. This is Heart Starts Pounding. I'm Kaelin Moore, and today I want to tell you some stories about people who felt inspired by movies, mostly horror movies, to go commit crimes. Now as a lover of the horror genre myself, you guys know this, I know that these

movies don't inspire the average, everyday person to commit atrocities. No. What you'll find in this episode is that many of the people who feel compelled to reenact scenes from these movies in real life don't really do it with the same ethos or logic of the film. In The Purge, purging takes place one night a year, and there's kind of a larger societal reason that it happens in the films. In Cruise's world, he was allowed to purge every night, as he said in his text message, and it's not really purging if you're the only one doing it

and no one else knows it's happening. Let me be clear, that is just murder and you should go to jail for a very long time for that. Okay, we're going to get into it and as always, listener discretion is advised. If you ever want more info on that, you can always check the content warnings in the description of the episode and make sure to stick around to the end of this episode for a new final segment that I'm going to try out with you guys called One Dark Thing, where I talk about the one thing

that's really gotten my attention this week. This episode is brought to you by Nutriful. I wanna talk a second about something I actually think about quite a bit, like every time I wash my hair, and that is hair thinning. I could never pull off a successful art heist because I would truly leave behind so many hairs and everyone would just know it was me.

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Women hair growth supplement for 6 months. 86%. Start your hair growth journey with Nutrifol. For a limited time, Nutrifol is offering our listeners $10 off your first month subscription and free shipping when you go to neutrophil.com and enter the promo code HSP pod. Find out why over 4500 healthcare professionals and stylists recommend neutrophil for healthier hair. I want to tell you guys about a new podcast that I like called Panic World. Panic World is hosted by internet culture writer Ryan Broderick from the Garbage Day

newsletter and it breaks down the biggest moral panics, conspiracies, and online witch hunts. So my favorite episodes are the ones that they did on if the Tide Pod Challenge was ever real, which spoiler it's a lot more complicated than you think, and also the episode they did on the viral marketing of the Blair Witch Project, which is very fascinating if you love the movie like I do. Panic World gives you answers to the questions you wish you didn't need to ask. You can check it out wherever you get your podcasts. On October 24th, 1988,

high school student Scott Landry woke from a nap to the sound of his landline ringing off the hook. He wiped the sleep from his eyes and he got up to answer it. It was his mother and she sounded frantic and upset. She told Scott that one of his classmates, Sharon Gregory, had just taken her life. Sharon?

Sharon Gregory. The news hit Scott like an atom bomb. He had just spoken to her on the phone, not more than what, a few hours ago? At around 10 a.m. that day, Sharon, an 18-year-old community college student, had called Scott in tears. She was upset that her car wouldn't start

and she wouldn't be able to get to class on time. "'Where are your parents?' he asked her. "'Why can't they just bring you? She told him that her parents were at work and not home, and that her boyfriend couldn't come get her because he was in class at the high school and they wouldn't let him take her call. She would figure something else out, she said, and hung up. The two lived in the small town of Greenfield, Massachusetts, where everyone kind of knew everyone. It wasn't uncommon to get a call from a neighbor or a friend in the middle

of the day asking for a favor, so Scott really didn't think much of it. But he was shocked to hear that Sharon had taken her life just moments after that call. Was it actually a cry for help? Was something else going on? Scott was confused and he was devastated. He felt like he was maybe missing something in the story though, like a key piece of information about what had happened. And Scott was not alone in that. Because over at Sharon's home, a detective was arriving, Joseph LeChance. And LeChance also felt like he was missing something. LeChance arrived at the home of Sharon Gregory around 1230 PM, just after her sister found

her body. He didn't really know what to expect from the scene other than a teen girl was found dead in a bathtub, but what he found was much more intense than he could have imagined. Sharon had been stabbed multiple times and her throat had been slashed. It's unclear who first assumed that she had done this to herself, but I would be shocked if a detective saw this and immediately ruled it as self-inflicted. And it seemed like LeChance was wary of that cause of death as well because he started asking around. He ended up speaking with her neighbor just to see if he noticed anything strange that

day, and he did. He said that around noon, he noticed a Chevrolet Chevette he didn't recognize parked in the driveway. A young man got out, around Sharon's age, with brown hair, around six feet tall. The boy walked inside, was in there for maybe five minutes, and then walked out, got back in his car, and drove off. Not long after that, the neighbors saw Sharon's sister pull into the driveway, and around 10 minutes after that, the police arrived. Luckily, one of the officers on the scene remembered an interaction he had with a boy in town from years ago.

A boy that happened to match that exact description and had seemed a bit troubled. A boy by the name of Mark Branch. Lachance was able to get the Branch's address and his mother answered the door when the officer arrived. Do you know where your son is? The detective asked. The woman admitted that she didn't. She actually hadn't seen him since around 1030 that morning.

He should be home by now but wasn't. He asked the woman what kind of car her son drove and without hesitation she responded, a Chevrolet Chevette. That was all Lachance needed to get a warrant to search the house for any information regarding the crime. He was at that point sure that Mark was responsible for Sharon's death. He just needed to figure out why and how this all happened. And once he stepped foot into Mark's room, he felt like he had a pretty good idea at least of the why. The boy's room was like a shrine to Jason,

the slasher character in the Friday the 13th movies. Mark had multiple hockey mask replicas of the mask Jason wore in the movies. He had Jason dolls, Jason posters, multiple of each of the VHSs from the franchise, and even a Jason greeting card. And if you haven't seen the Friday the 13th films, Jason is a character who was thought to have drowned when two camp counselors weren't paying attention.

Turns out he survived the near drowning and is now an unstoppable killing machine, violently hacking away at teenagers while wearing the signature hockey mask. The detective noted that Mark's room was full of other horror collectibles, as well as a plethora of adult films. And a clerk at a local video rental store confirmed that Mark only took out gory horror movies and adult films. The more violent, the better on both accounts.

Across town, Scott Landry got another phone call, this time from Detective LeChance, who wanted to know if it was true that Scott had been with Mark the day the murder took place. Scott confirmed that he had, and then asked if it was because Mark had something to do with Sharon's death. The detective asked Scott why he thought that, to which Scott replied, quote, because he always talked about wanting to live out the fantasy of being Jason. Scott and Mark, apparently, would watch these horror movies together, but Scott always felt like Mark was overly obsessed with them. They weren't just escapism, they were like his fantasy. The

day of the murder, Mark was actually at Scott's house when he got the phone call from Sharon saying that she was home alone with no access to a car, and he must have seen that as an opportunity because after that he told Scott that he needed to be dropped off at home so he could go pick up a check from the stop and shop grocery store where he worked. Scott had no idea that Mark was not going to the store. Scarier still, no one had any idea where Mark was. Not his mother, not his friends, not the school. What followed was

not only a manhunt, but a mass hysteria in the town. Locals started decrying horror movies. They felt like Mark had been hypnotized by the Friday the 13th movies. A professor at the University of Massachusetts actually said in an article that, quote, there is a strongly established linkage between children's exposure to violence on TV and violent behavior. Some locals even tried to blame it on the Satanism they swore was sweeping through the nation. This murder happened in the late 80s during the Satanic Panic, though there was no evidence at all

that Mark was connected to Satanism. But a little piece of this puzzle that was ignored by the media at the time, who wanted to frame this like Mark was a normal kid who fell under the influence of evil horror movies, is that Mark was most likely already suffering from some form of mental illness. Mark was attending a high school for troubled youth in the area, and his mother came forward and said that he had attempted to take his own life once before.

Scott told LaChance that Sharon and her twin sister had been known to make fun of Mark, both to his face and behind his back, and that one day Sharon approached Mark and asked him what the papers he was holding were, and he told her that they were the results of a psychological examination that he had done. She asked if she could see them. He said she could, but only if she promised not to show anyone. Apparently, Sharon took these papers home and cut them into pieces

because two of the pictures from Mark's exam were found in Sharon's room, but the rest of the results were missing. Scott believed that Mark may had gone over to Sharon's to get the results back. And to this day, no one has any idea what those results were because those papers were never found.

Eventually, Mark was found hanging from a tree in the nearby town of Buckland. Police ruled it a suicide, but some people in town believed that someone may have gotten vigilante justice on behalf of Sharon. The crime itself left the whole town reeling, but the local teens who knew Sharon wouldn't really be given time to heal because many of them were put on trial within the Greenfield

Court of Public Opinion for being Satanists. Others had to explain their love of horror movies to their parents who were terrified that they would also go on to commit heinous murders. And while this kind of feels like a thing of the past, like maybe today we don't really vilify people for the media they consume, well, that's just simply not true. A more modern version of the mania people felt surrounding the 80s slasher movies can be found within a more modern one, the Dark Knight trilogy. Films that were deeply entangled in controversy. The first film in the franchise, Batman Begins, came out in 2005. The Dark Knight, the second one, came out in 2008. And then the final film, The Dark Knight Rises, came out in 2012. Well, not explicitly in the horror genre.

The villains in the movies are scary and visceral, and they get brought up a lot when you're looking at the history of movie copycat killers. The weekend that the second movie in the Batman trilogy opened, The Dark Night, a gunman opened fire on a theater in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 and wounding 70. At the time, media outlets erupted in panic. I don't know if you remember this, but they were claiming that the gunman had dyed his hair a wild shade of red, which they thought was an ode to the film's villain, the Joker.

Rumors spread immediately afterwards, claiming that the shooter also told an officer, quote, I am the Joker. All of these rumors were proven to be false. And contrary to popular belief, the shooting was actually unrelated to the contents of the film. The gunman merely chose the theater because he knew it would be full. But that didn't stop the general public

from wondering if the Joker had some sort of evil influence. Another tragedy related to the film that also had to do with the Joker was Heath Ledger's passing. Ledger played the Joker and passed away from an accidental overdose before the second movie, the one that featured his character even came out. Ledger was just 28 when he died and when someone that young and that talented dies,

people like to try to fill in the blanks. They like to try and guess what happened. Maybe it's because we're obsessed with happened. Maybe it's because we're obsessed with celebrities or maybe it's because we're scared that the same things might happen to us. Either way, the leading theory as to why Ledger overdosed was that the role he was playing in The Dark Knight, the role of the Joker, was so psychologically hard to play that he relied on prescription drugs to manage insomnia and stress, and that reliance led to an accidental overdose.

And again, this made people fear that the character was kind of capable of poisoning people's minds. The Joker character is a chaotic evil supervillain with a twisted red smile, the edges of which have been cut deep into his face. He blows up buses and hospitals, he kills with no regard, and he lives on the fringes of society. His main goal seems to be to get the lawful Batman to break his moral code. And for some reason, the Joker has also been a character that people have really clung to.

I've seen lots of Joker memes passed around the internet, usually in spaces where you find a lot of teen boys like Reddit and 4chan. He's kind of become a hero to people who want to inflict chaos and pain onto the world. And unfortunately, the fear that he was encouraging people to commit acts of violence is not completely unfounded. There were multiple incidents that popped up globally after the movie's release. Like, for instance, this story, which starts in January 2009 at South Vermillion High School in Bloomington, Indiana, six months after the second movie in the trilogy premiered. It was the dead of winter in the Midwest, so the kids were all bundled up inside. It was an otherwise totally normal day when all of a sudden one girl whose name hasn't been released because she was a minor when this happened, but for this story we'll call her Kate, raised her hand and asked for permission to go to the bathroom. The teacher let her go and went back

to teaching, but a few minutes went by and Kate didn't come back. And then a few more minutes went by. Still, no Kate. No one really thought much of it, though it was strange that Kate was gone for so long. But then, as the teacher was writing something at the board, she heard a few students gasp behind her. And there, in the doorway, was Kate, looking almost unrecognizable. Her face was caked in white paint and she had deep black circles drawn around her eyes and blood dripped down the corners of her mouth and onto her shirt.

While she was in the bathroom, she had taken a razor to her face and carved her lips into a twisted smile, mimicking the Joker's signature look. And there in her hand was a kitchen knife. Kate lunged towards her teacher, who quickly grabbed a cart on wheels in front of her and pushed it against the girl.

She screamed for her students to get out of the room and most of them did, but a few boys stayed back and were able to actually get Kate off of their teacher. The 17-year-old was eventually brought to a mental health facility for treatment, but the school never really understood why she did what she did. I don't know how often high schools actually try

to understand students' behaviors rather than chalking it up to them being teenagers, but clearly there was something about the Joker character that really stuck with Kate. Enough for her to mutilate herself during school hours and attack her teacher. And Kate wasn't the only high schooler to do something like this. In 2016, a 15-year-old girl in Hampshire, England, told one of her friends one day she planned on killing their other friend. She said in a message that she did not care, quote, if they blamed it on the Joker or Columbine, they didn't inspire me. They motivated me.

Apparently, though, the friend she told this to didn't believe her and didn't feel the need to alert anyone at their school. But that same day, the 15-year-old cut the corners of her mouth into a bloody extended smile, put on a bandana, and lured one of her friends to a secluded part of their school, where she stabbed her in the chest. The victim did survive. Luckily luckily it was not a very deep wound, but this was just another incident on a growing list of so-called evidence that the Joker was making people more violent. The debate over whether or not the violent media we consume influences us to become more

violent ourselves is long, complicated, and still ongoing. For the first 70 years of cinema history, the line of violence shown in movies and violence in society is almost parallel. In the 1920s, homicide rates were increasing year over year, but then started decreasing around 1930 and basically stayed on the decline through the 1960s. 1930 also marked the beginning of something called the Motion Picture Production Code,

also known as the Hays Code. The Hays Code was a list of censorship guidelines that movies had to adhere to, mostly regarding sexual content and violence. And as a result, violence on screen plummeted, along with murder rates in the US. And then, in 1968, the Hays Code was lifted, and movies were allowed to show more on screen than they ever could before. And you see this in the movies from the 70s, like The Godfather, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and a ton others. It was open season. It was around that time in the 1960s

that homicide rates in the US started climbing again. And a bunch of researchers looked at this chart and said, clearly violence on screen causes violence in real life. And this went on throughout the 80s, which is when our first story took place. But then something really strange happened in the early 90s. Homicide rates in the US started plummeting, and violence on screen started increasing. Not only that, but the world was being introduced to violent video games, which also sparked cultural panic amongst parents and teenagers.

Just ask anyone who bought Grand Theft Auto, I was told that that game was going to be the downfall of civilized society. But despite that, homicide rates kept falling and movies and games got even more violent. And yet, crime rates and homicide rates still went down. Cultural critics and researchers alike then had to rethink their analysis. And what they found is much more nuanced.

A 2017 Oxford research paper by Nikki Phillips concluded after reading over 50 recent studies on the relationship media violence has on real-world violence, quote, while there seems to be some consensus that exposure to violent media impacts aggression, there is little evidence showing its impact on violent or criminal behavior. Nonetheless, high-profile violent crimes continue to reignite public interest in media effects, particularly with regard to copycat crimes. Basically, consuming violent media can impact someone's level of aggression, but it's not really going to impact whether or not they're going to commit violent crime or other crime. People who commit these copycat crimes are typically more likely to commit violent crimes anyways. And what often

gets left out of the story of the 15-year-old girl in England who stabbed her friend is how she also mentioned that the voices in her head had told her to attack. Clearly, she was suffering from some sort of serious mental disturbance. It wasn't just the film that inspired her. And the same went for Mark. He had serious mental health issues. But like Nikki Phillips says in her paper, every time one of these tragedies happens, we have the same conversation. Society wonders if the film is

having a bad influence. If normal, everyday people are becoming inspired to commit heinous acts of violence. Even though the research that we currently have does say otherwise. And I bring all of this up because I want to do more episodes like this in the future, but I don't want anyone to draw any conclusions that just don't exist. And I imagine that a lot of us here in our little community love horror movies. I know you guys do. I see your avatars on Patreon and Instagram and YouTube, and like 10% of them are characters from horror movies. And I think that that is awesome.

Okay, now we're gonna do our final segment, One Dark Thing. So I wanted to try something a little extra in today's episode. You guys send me a lot of stuff and I love when you do. But recently, a lot of you have sent me the same bizarre and potentially paranormal occurrence, and I just needed to dedicate a segment to it. So there's a new podcast out there called The Telepathy Tapes. Maybe you've heard of it. And it makes the argument that telepathy is real.

And not only that, through a series of experiments they run on the show, they actually claim that nonverbal autistic people are the most likely to be experiencing it. I know, it sounds wild, but in this podcast, the host, Kai Dickens, who I looked into and she's described as a filmmaker, writer, and director, but she meets with multiple families, all who have never met each other before and don't know that the other families exist, but they all believe that their non-verbal autistic

child has some level of telepathy. Usually it's the mothers that feel like their child can read their mind. Telepathy is described as the vicarious transmission of information from one person's mind to another without using any known human sensory channels or physical interaction. And in the podcast, this looks like a few different things. Like there's this one child named Akil who's able to type out using a computer a randomly generated number that was only shown to his mother, not him. There's actually footage of this on the podcast's website, which you do have to pay $10 to watch. I found that a little bit strange. They said it was to protect the privacy of the people involved, especially because they're minors, which is a great

idea. It's just that asking people to pay to watch videos doesn't really protect anyone. I don't think $10 has ever stopped the wrong person from accessing something, but that's fine. I paid to see the videos because I felt like I just needed to see this for myself. And it is kind of wild to watch. Akil does not see these numbers that are being randomly generated.

And yet, sitting a few feet away from his mother, he's able to type them out on his computer. Let's please multiply two numbers and see if he gets it. Okay, what is it? Nine, zero, zero. Is this telepathy? The other experiments I saw included a boy who could select on a letter board

a number that was just shown to his mother, not him. And another experiment showed a young girl named Maya who could put colored popsicle sticks into the correct piles while blindfolded. But these experiments both included some sort of interaction from one person to another, like someone is holding up the letterboard in the air for one child.

So it kind of moves around and Maya's mom is actually holding her face while she selects what pile to put the popsicle sticks in. So it could be that her mother is moving her around a bit and this could subconsciously affect what number the child chose or what pile Maya put the sticks in. And now some of you might already know this, but telepathy has actually been studied for a while with

varying results. One study suggested actually that dogs may have a form of telepathy when researchers told dog owners random times to return home, they noticed that dogs would go to the door when the owner started thinking about going home. So your dog might actually be able to understand and read your thoughts. And another experiment on telepathy is called the Gansfeld experiment, where one subject who was called a receiver would sit with halves

of ping pong balls covering their eyes and red light being shined at their face. They would listen to loud white noise on headphones as a way to try to really reduce the amount of external sensory input that came into them. And then they would try to receive a message coming from another person called a transmitter who would be in another room. The idea was that when you limit our sensory input, we can receive telepathic messages from others.

And this suggests that all of us are telepathic. We just have so much noise coming at us at all times, we can't process the signals. The people doing this research said that unequivocally, it proved that ESP, or telepathy, is real. People successfully received messages from others doing the Gansfeld experiment. But outsiders looked at this experiment, felt like it wasn't really controlled enough to say either way. For instance, the rooms that the people trying

to transmit the word from weren't soundproof, and it was believed that the receiver may have heard the word. And that's kind of the same thing that I would say about this podcast. The host is not a researcher. She's a great storyteller, but she's not a researcher. She does experiments on children

that have a lot of room for error. Maybe what she's not a researcher. She does experiments on children that have a lot of room for error. Maybe what she's finding is real. Just reading the comments on the episodes, a lot of families feel validated by what she's found. But in general, I would suggest being skeptical as you listen, especially when experiments are being done on vulnerable members of a population,

as is being done in this podcast. But I will say, while I watched some of the clips, Akil typing out a word or number that was only shown to his mother, not him, did kind of blow my mind. I don't know how he can do it, and maybe there really is something happening outside of our understanding.

I am curious, though, if any of you have listened and feel like the telepathy tapes reinforces something that you've felt about one of your loved ones. Anyways, that's all I have for you today. Join me next week for a story of a very bizarre disappearance that just had a huge update in the last few weeks. I'll see you here next week week and until then, stay curious. Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by Kaylen Moore. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown.

Additional research and writing by Marissa Dow. Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grace and Jernigan, the team at WME and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out heartstartspounding.com.