Easter Bunnies 'n' Blood: The Bunny Man, The Medici and The Easter Massacre
Happy Easter everyone!
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Sources:
https://www.fodors.com/news/history/how-an-easter-murder-at-florences-most-famous-site-changed-the-renaissance https://www.americanhauntingsink.com/easter https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2022/06/06/easter-day-killer-11-family-members-dead-age-88/7538521001/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_(1950_film) https://wamu.org/story/17/10/31/true-story-bunnyman-northern-virginias-gruesome-urban-legend/
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Zevon Odelberg is a true crime podcast host and disability advocate. Zevon has cerebral palsy and he wants Kinda Murdery to be welcoming community for people with disabilities and for people living with challenges of any kind. Life can be hard, but being together makes it better.
Warning. Kind of Murdery contains adult themes, explicit language, and descriptions of
violence. It is not suitable for anyone, and we recommend you stop listening
now. Hello everyone, and welcome to Kind of Murdering, a true crime
podcast that's mostly about murder and always about the strange and compelling stories that arise
when the path less traveled twists to darkness and those who walk its shadows surrender
to violence and moral corruption. We have a perilous journey ahead, so thank
you for lending me your courage and good company. I'm your host, Zevan
Odelberg, and this is kind of Murdery Now. My personal associations with the
Easter holiday are overwhelmingly positive. Dying eggs as a kid, the joy of
the egg hunt and the clues that eventually led me to an Easter basket.
The happiness continued into my adult years as a father, watching my daughter's face
light up with joy as she followed Easter bunny clues of her own. Other
things are great about Easter two, gorging on baked ham, the start of
the baseball season, the cleansing feeling of hope and renewal that comes with spring,
and the lengthening of the days. I've got nothing but good things to
say about the Easter Bunny and his strangely incongruous holiday. Bunnies don't lay eggs
after all, but I'm one of the lucky ones. Not everyone or everything
has the same warm and fuzzy feelings that I do associated with huge humanoid bunnies.
Bunnies can be dark too. My favorite stuffed animal as a kid was
a fuzzy jack rabbit appropriately if unimaginatively named bunny, who I cuddled until he
was threadbare and his foot came off. So it should surprise no one that
Marjorie Williams nineteen twenty two children's story The Velveteen Rabbits that is ultimately a cautionary
tale about the dangers of cholera and culminates spoiler alert in the IMMO of the
title Bunny left me emotionally scarred. And that was just a tiny toy stuffed
rabbit. Setting aside just how violent bugs bunny can be when he gets his
dander up, or the fact that my daughter is obsessed with big Chungis.
That's chungishun gus. Big Chungis eats the world is what The video is called
go Ahead and Google It. It's worth pointing out the bunnies, especially giant
humanoid bunnies like the Easter Bunny, seem to have a close association with human
psychosis. There's the classic nineteen fifty Jimmy Stewart movie Harvey, adapted from Mary
Chase's play of the same name. In it, Stewart plays an eccentric named
Elwood p. Dowd who hallucinates a six foot tall and visible rabbit friend named
Harvey. The film's comedic misadventures begin when his sister attempts to have him committed
to a sanitarium because he's hallucinating a giant bunny. Of course. Then two
thousand and one gave birth to the classic cult film Donnie dark starring Jake Jillenhall
and featuring fran Kranz, who's been a guest on this very show three times.
If you haven't heard him yet, look for Franz episodes. They're great.
In Donnie Darko, the title character also hallucinates a human sized rabbit companion,
although unlike Jimmy Stewart's rabbit, this bunny man is explicitly creepy and speaking
of creepy bunny Men. Today's episode consists of three stories compiled from three separate
articles. The first is called The True Story of the Bunny Man, Northern
Virginia's most gruesome urban Legend, written for Wamboo dot Org by Ali Schweitzer in
two thousand and seventeen. Next, we'll move on to a renaissance Easter murder
published on April fifth of this year for fodors dot com entitled Murder and Mayhem
Mark This Sacred Easter Side in Florence and written by Rebecca Toy. And finally,
we'll finish with a notoriously horrific Easter massacre taken from an article entitled The
Easter Sunday Massacre. Horrors and Hauntings of a Holiday Night May published by www
dot American Hauntingsinc. Dot com. As always, all my sources are in
the show notes. So now, if you're ready, please join me as
I uncover what truths I can and solve what mysteries I may. Kind of
Murderies, Easter Bunnies in Blood, the Bunnyman, the mediciese and the Easter
Sunday Massacre starts. Now we begin with the story of Virginia's Bunnyman, an
urban legend that is associated with Halloween, and yet, by the very nature
of the legend's titled, the Bunnyman and Easter association is unavoidable, and so
I'm going to tell the story here. On Halloween night, don't go near
that bridge in Clifton, Virginia. You could get snuffed out by the Bunnyman.
According a local lore, the bunny Man's Bridge is one of the most
dangerous locations in northern Virginia. Hang around there until midnight on Halloween and you
may be butchered by the bunny Man. Every teenager in Clifton knows the legend
of the bunny Man. The story goes like this. In nineteen oh four,
there was an asylum not far from the bridge. Clifton residents didn't like
the idea of mental patients near their new homes, so they got the asylum
shut down and all the patients were taken by a bus to Lorton Prison,
except the bus swerved and crashed. Authorities were able to locate all the inmates
on the bus except for one. The escape mental patient was named Douglas Griffin.
After the crash, he disappeared weeks passed and rabbit corpses began appearing in
the woods. Douglas was apparently eating bunnies to stay alive. This went on
for a while, then one Halloween night, a group of kids were hanging
around the bridge. They reported seeing some sort of bright light or orb and
then in a flash, they'd all been strung up like bunnies, gutted and
hung from the bridge. The missing mental patient was, of course, assumed
to be the killer. As the rumor goes, if you go by the
bridge on Halloween night at midnight, you'll end up just like those bunnies.
Of course, this sounds awfully unlikely. For one, there was never an
asylum in Clifton in For another, nineteen o four was an awfully early time
for buses to be on roads. But it's been said that every urban legend
is based on a kernel of truth, and the bunny Man is no different.
Here is what Fairfax County Archivist Brian Conley says is the bunny Man legends
genesis event. In nineteen seventy, some sixty six years before the supposed origin
of the bunny Man, a couple was parking a driveway not far from the
train overpass when they had a terrifying encounter. Someone appeared very quickly, yelled
something having to do with trespassing, and through a hatchet at the car.
The couple didn't get a very good look at the person. All they really
got was that he or she was dressed in white or light colored clothing and
may or may not have had something on their head. When the story made
the papers, that something on their head became bunny Eers. From there,
the story started to morph quickly. Within a few years, children were swapping
stories about a man in a bunny suit chasing kids through the woods with a
hatchet. Like a game of telephone. The story went from one person to
another, taking on increasingly imaginative details. Today, the Bunnyman legend has traveled
far beyond Fairfax County. There are Bunnyman t shirts, Bunnyman beer, and
a Bunnyman horror movie franchise. And even as Conley's research on the true story
of the bunny Man has circulated online, some people refuse to believe he's telling
the truth. There are people who are convinced that the story the urban legend
as told about the escaped mental patient is true, Conley says, and that
he and Fairfax County are trying to cover something up. Conley himself admits that
while it's fun doing the research to debunk the bunny Man legend, it's even
more fun to believe it. I have to agree with him. There.
Here's hoping that worrying about the bunny Man won't keep me or any of you
awake on this Easter Sunday night. All right, let's move on to our
next story of Easter Mayhem, the Medici Easter Sunday murder mob. Now standing
in the reverent silence of Florence, Italy's Duomo, it's easy to imagine the
awe fifteenth century citizens felt at Bruno Shelley's new and miraculous, free standing dome.
Yet a very different scene filled the cathedral's cavernous hall on Easter in fourteen
seventy eight. As the Catholic Mass moved to the sacred moment of communion for
the thousands in attendance, jealous conspirators stabbed Florence's most influential and charismatic brothers.
Today, if you walk through the one of the city's most famous sights,
you can still catch glimpses of the murder that shaped its power and beauty.
The rival Pazzi families plot to overthrow the Medicis included power players from Italy's city
states, including Pope Sixtus the Fourth. Initially they seemed successful. Giuliano Medici
was clearly dead, stabbed so many times that witnesses swore he was gone before
he hit the cathedral floor, but a wounded Lorenzo Medici, the up and
coming patron of the world famous Renaissance artists and kingpin of the Republic of Florence's
money machine, escaped deep into the cathedral. The chaos and bloodbath that immediately
followed changed not only Florence, but the entire political balance of Italy from Naples
to Milan. Wander the streets and think of the horror. Everywhere you see
beauty and art that came from this family, meaning the Medicis, who were
patrons of so many great artists. You see the art, but in truth,
it was surviving a murder and coming out on top that made Lorenzo Medici
magnifico. This according to art historian Claudia Romeo, Florence was the bank for
most of Italy and Europe during the Renaissance, with plenty of resentful debtors.
No family was more influential than the relatively new house of the Medici. Giuliano
and Lorenzo's grandfather, Cosimo Medici, put Florence on the economic map, the
proof of that sword above the city, the creation of Bruno Shelley's miraculous dome
that the Medici's championed even at twenty nine. Lorenzo Medici was cunning and charismatic,
a clever politician and poet. The people of the city loved him and
his brother Giuliano, but the diminished Pozsi family was seething with jealousy and their
own dangerous connections. In an age when it wasn't unusual to massacre your rivals
at a dinner in their honor, the Possis set their minds to murder.
It was hard to get to both brothers simultaneously, but killing one just wouldn't
do. If one brother went down, the other could simply step into his
place. So after a few postponements, the Posi conspirators agreed on eastern mass
at the Duomo. What might seem like sacrilege, what is certainly sacrilege,
was easily soothed the way, because the pope was in on the plot and
the priests aided with the attack. Remember this was an age in the Catholic
Church where the pope was essentially omnipotent and you could functionally just buy your salvation.
So no matter what sins you committed, no matter what the Bible said,
if the pope said it was cool, or if you gave the church
enough money, you really didn't have to worry about your own damnation, or
so they believed at the time. So with the pope and the priests backing
their plan, the Pozzis had no concern for their immortal souls. Near the
altar in the Medici's place of prominence, the assault started. Giuliano twenty four
was stabbed nineteen times by a swarm of men. The priests attacking Lorenzo only
managed to graze his throat before he was hold away by a friend. Lorenzo
and the friend fled to the sacristy on the left of the altar, barring
the heavy door, chaos erupted. Those in the back of the cathedral only
knew something terrible had happened. People ran screaming into the streets as fast as
word could travel. The city's alarm bells began to ring. Giuliano was dead,
maybe Lorenzo was two. Most citizens did not know if they two were
under attack. In the cathedral's piazza, where people today sip coffee, takes
selfies and dodge tricky salesmen, citizens fled from the architectural wonder and scattered into
the narrow streets. The worst of the bloodshed was about to erupt. While
armed squads of Medici men raced to the Duomo to reinforce the family, the
head of the Pozzi family, Jacopo, headed to the main piazza at the
Palazzo Vecchio. Here, at the fortress turn palace turned government office, he
called on the citizens of Florence to overthrow the Medici. Yet, as historian
and author Laura Martinez describes an April blood Pazzi was doomed. The papal reinforcements
did not arrive in time, and the conspirators gravely overestimated Florentine resentment toward the
Medicis. The city turned on them instead. The Palazzo Vecchio was built for
protection, and it is as ominous as the Duomo is elegant. It's easier
to imagine carnage. Here, Florentines hurled the first captured conspirators out of the
second story windows below, where modern visitors ponder statues like Perseus beheading Medusa.
The frenzied mob waited. The crowd stripped and mutilated the bodies with a gruesome
rage that put those statues to shame. More conspirators, including the Pope's nephew,
were hanged from the ramparts of the palazzo. In the coming months,
over eighty men were strung over the walls, many next to rotting bodies.
Even the Bargello, today a sculptural museum with works from the Medici sponsored artists
like Donatello and Michelangelo, had bodies hanging when there wasn't enough room at the
palazzo. Florence had resolutely chosen the Medici family. The Pozzi name was dead,
stricken from records, and forbidden in conversation. The Pozzi family crest was
chiseled off the walls. Jacopo Pozsi was reburied many times, as angry citizens
would unearth him and prop his remains by the family door. Pope Sixtus set
out to exact revenge on Florence with his army. Yet Lorenzo managed to secure
an unthinkable alliance with the ruthless King of Naples, startling even the kings of
Spain and France. Rome stood down. The Medici, who has always used
arts as a tool for propaganda and self promotion, came out stronger than ever
before, and art, most created by the geniuses that the Medici's cultivated,
sprung up everywhere. After these violent scenes, Lorenzo Medici commanded international respect as
the balancing figure of Italy and no longer had to play a humble public servant.
His famous garden and grove house sheltered and encouraged artists like Bodicelli, Da
Vinci and Michelangelo, and he sent them to work in Rome, Milan,
Venice. To make a point. He spread in Europe the image of Florence
as the new Athens, the place where classical culture had come back to life.
For their support, the Medici family was painted and some of the most
famous works in the world. Infamous treason executions were painted on the walls of
the Bargello Palace of Justice to shame the families who'd participated in the sacrilegious plot.
If you look closely, you can still find defaced posy crests. Conversely,
you'll see the triumphant medicis in art and name everywhere. The bloody dramas
of an era that we now hold as the height of beauty are still hidden
in plain sight. And let me just say that for the posies and the
Pope to think that an entirely Catholic country would be on their side after they
arranged a brutal murder at the hands of priests at Easter mass I mean,
that's the height of arrogance. The disrespect that shows towards people's religious beliefs is
just pretty absurd. All right, let's move on to the Easter Sunday massacre.
The Ruppert House at six three five Minor Avenue in Hamilton, Ohio is
the scene of the deadliest family massacre in American history. Easter Sunday in nineteen
seventy five was like any other in Hamilton, Ohio. Children hunted for eggs,
mothers made last minute in preparations for family dinners, and entire families were
dressed in new clothes to attend morning church services. For the Rubbert family,
the days started out happy. They worshiped together at an early service and then
gathered at six three five Minor Avenue in Hamilton, named middle class community about
thirty miles from Cincinnati. But what happened that afternoon March thirtieth, nineteen seventy
five went down in American history as the deadliest shooting ever to occur in a
private home, and it left a grimm and troubling haunting behind. James Urban
Ruppert was born on March twenty ninth, nineteen thirty four. His early life
was sad and abusive. His mother, Charity, often called him a mistake
because she'd wanted a done. His father, Leonard, was a violent man
with a quick temper and little or no time or affection for his two sons.
Leonard died in nineteen forty seven, when James was twelve and his brother,
Leonard Junior was fourteen. Leonard Senior wasn't missed. Junior became the head
of the family and, according to James, picked on him incessantly. James
did poorly in school, had few friends, and was always smaller than his
brother. As an adult, he was only five foot six inches and weighed
one hundred and thirty five pounds. At sixteen, James was so unhappy at
home that he attempted to take his own life by hanging himself with a sheet.
He failed and resigned himself to an unremarkable life. Okay, I'm going
to pause the story for just a moment. This is extremely tragic. To
remind you, as I nearly always do, of the free three digit number
Lifeline number nine eighty eight, that you can call twenty four hours a day,
seven days a week to receive immediate counseling for substance use, mental health
or suicidal thoughts. So if you find yourself in crisis, please do call
nine eight eight, program it into your phone now, and please do always
remember that the world is a better place with you in it. All right,
let's get back to the story. So James has unsuccessfully attempted to take
his own life, and as he got older, his resentment for his older
brother grew. James flunked out of college after two years, while Leonard earned
a degree in electrical engineering and excelled in sports. To make matters worse,
Leonard married one of the few girlfriends that James had ever had, with whom
he had eight children. Ouch Leonard had a great job with General Electric,
where James, at forty one, was unemployed in living with his mother.
On top of it all, James owed money to his mother and his brother,
from whom he'd borrowed large sums after losing what little he had in the
stock market crash of nineteen seventy three and seventy four charity. His mother was
frustrated with his inability to keep a job and his constant drinking, and she
threatened to a victim. The threat seems to have been what finally sent James
over the edge. On March twenty ninth, James's birthday, witnesses later reported
seeing him shooting at Canns with a three fifty seven magnum along the banks of
the Great Miami River in Hamilton. He went out later that night at the
nineteenth Whole Cocktail lounge, where he talked with employee Wanda Bishop. She later
recalled that James seemed deeply depressed and talked about his mother's demands on him and
her threat of eviction. He said that he needed to solve some problems.
He left the bar at eleven pm that night and later returned. When asked
if he'd solved his problem, he replied, no, not yet. He
stayed until the bar closed at two thirty am in the morning. On Easter
Sunday, james older brother, Leonard, and his wife Almah brought their eight
children, ranging an age from four to seventeen, to see their grandmother at
the house on Minor Avenue. James stayed upstairs, sleeping off his night of
drinking while the children enjoyed an Easter egg hunt in the front yard. Afterwards,
they came inside and while Charity, Almah, and Leonard finished punch preparations,
the children played in the living room. Around four pm, James woke
up, loaded his three fifty seven Magnum two twenty two caliber handguns and a
rifle, and went downstairs. He entered the kitchen, where he shot and
killed Leonard, Almah, Anne, Charity, his nephew David, and his
nieces Teresa and Carroll were also in the kitchen. He killed them two.
James then rushed into the living room, where he killed his niece Anne and
his four remaining nephews, Leonard the Third, Michael, Thomas, and John.
He killed each of his victims by first taking a disabling shot and then
finishing them off with a shot to the head or the heart. The massacre
took less than five minutes to complete. Oh my god, this is awful.
James sat in the house for three hours before he called the police.
When they arrived, he was waiting for them just inside the front door.
The police described the scene as a slaughter house. There was so much blood
splashed about that it was dripping through the floorboards to the basement. To this
day, stains can still be seen on the wood. The murders shocked the
small community and made headlines across the country. Those who knew James never believed
he was capable of such violence. He was a quiet, unassuming man and
a perfect neighbor. James was arrested and charged with eleven counts of aggravated homicide.
He refused to answer any questions and was very uncooperative. He made it
clear that he planned to offer an insanity defense. Prosecutors believed that his plan
was to plead insanity and then, after being cured, to be released to
inherit the three hundred thousand dollars that he would be entitled to. Is the
only remaining living member of his family. The original trial was held in Hamilton.
A three judge panel found James guilty of eleven counts of murder and sentenced
him to life in prison. A mistrial was declared and a second trial was
held in Finlay, Ohio, about one hundred and twenty five miles north,
because it was decided that James could not get a fair trial in his hometown.
Sounds accurate. The second trial began in June of nineteen seventy five,
and prosecutors offered new evidence about james target and statements about quote solving his problem
unquote. In July, he received a new sentence of eleven consecutive life sentences
in prison. James appealed and a new trial was granted. In nineteen eighty
two, Defense attorney Hugh D. Holbrook, convinced his client was insane,
personally funded the hiring of expert psychiatrists from all over the country. On July
twenty third, another three judge panel found James guilty of two counts of first
degree murder his mother and his brother, but found him not guilty of the
other nine counts by reason of insanity. He received one life sentence for each
guilty count, to be served consecutively between nineteen seventy two and nineteen seventy six,
the death penalty had been suspended in the United States as a result of
a pending US Supreme Court decision, so James could not be sentenced to death
for his crimes. I just wanted to mention I'm not aware of the history
of Ohio jurance prudence or how it works, but I've never heard of a
three judge panel before. I thought everyone was entitled to a trial by jury.
But if anybody knows anybody in Ohio, if anybody knows the deal with
this three judge panel thing, I would love to hear from you. Reach
out to me kind of Murdery at gmail dot com, or go ahead and
call the kind of Murdery hotline eighty eight Murdery and tell me what's going on
with these three judge panels. Also, please call eighty eight Murdery to tell
your kind of Murdery story to inspire an episode of the show. Okay,
let's get back to James Ruppert. So he was sentenced to two life sentences
for the murder of his mother and his brother. Thankfully, those sentences were
to be served consecutively and not concurrently. He was sent to the Alan Oakwood
Correctional Institution in Lima, Ohio. He had his first parole hearing in nineteen
ninety five, but his release was denied. His second parole hearing in two
thousand and fifteen, his release was denied again, and he died just last
year on June fourth, twenty twenty two, while incarcerated at the Franklin Medical
s Or in Columbus, Ohio. If he were still living, his next
parole hearing would have been twenty twenty five. Going back in time now to
nineteen seventy five, in the wake of the murders James Roberts, eleven victims
were buried in the Arlington Memorial Gardens in Cincinnati. A year later, the
house at Minor Avenue was open to the public and all of the contents were
sold at auction. It was cleaned up, carpets were placed over the bloodstains
that could not be removed, and it was rented out to a family that
was new to the area and had no idea of the horrifying events that occurred
there. The family quickly moved out. After leaving the house, they claimed
to hear voices and strange noises that they couldn't explain. Lights turned off and
on, doors slammed, and thudding footsteps were often heard coming down the stairs.
They were not the last to move in and leave quickly. A number
of other families moved in and out of the house, and none stayed for
long. All of them reported sounds and voices that could not be explained.
The house was abandoned for several year years, but the last family that moved
in reported nothing out of the ordinary. Whatever eerie haunting had plagued the previous
tenants was finally over. Perhaps the echo of the shocking events of nineteen seventy
five, which seemed to leave an indelible mark on the house, had finally
faded away, and perhaps now after nearly fifty years, the spirits of the
Ruppert family can finally rest in peace. Oh that is one awful Easter story.
I apologize. Well, Happy Easter everybody. I'll see you back here
on Thursday, April thirteenth for another brand new episode. Thank you so much
for joining me. I'm Zevan Odelberg and this has been kind of murdery
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