[SPEAKER_01]: Warning, this episode contains details that some listeners may find disturbing.
[SPEAKER_01]: At 3am on New Year's, 1980.
[SPEAKER_01]: an emergency dispatcher in St. Paul, Minnesota, received a call.
[SPEAKER_01]: The voice on the other end is high pitched, trembling, dissolving into Psalms as he speaks.
[SPEAKER_01]: The color says there's a girl, hurt badly, near the Mallberg Manufacturing plant of Pierce Butler Road.
[SPEAKER_01]: He does not give his name.
[SPEAKER_01]: When officers arrived, they found a 20-year-old college student, Karen Potek, lying in a snow bank.
[SPEAKER_01]: She was beaten so severely that her skull was fractured, her brain visible.
[SPEAKER_01]: But, she was still alive.
[SPEAKER_01]: The anonymous caller who directed police to her body,
[SPEAKER_01]: is the man who attacked her.
[SPEAKER_01]: Over the next two years, the same weeping, were more civil voice would call authorities again, and again, after every attack, after every murder, fleeting for forgiveness, begging to be stopped, promising each time that he would turn himself in.
[SPEAKER_00]: He never did.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a study of string.
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome back to the podcast, I'm your host Michael May.
[SPEAKER_01]: Unlike other serial killers who contact the authorities or the press or just seek out publicity, those killers tend to do it to demonstrate a narcissistic superiority.
[SPEAKER_01]: The case today that we were talking about is different because the killer seems to be reaching out with remorse asking for forgiveness,
[SPEAKER_01]: So, that is arguable because there are very intelligent profilers that debate why he was actually making these phone calls and we will discuss that later in the episode.
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, I am talking about the weepy voiced killer whose name was Paul Michael Stephanie.
[SPEAKER_01]: Paul Michael Stephanie was born on September 8, 1944 in Austin, Minnesota, a small agricultural town on the southern part of the state.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was the second of 10 children, and his family was deeply Catholic.
[SPEAKER_01]: His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother remarried when Paul was three years old.
[SPEAKER_01]: His stepfather, by multiple accounts, was brutal.
[SPEAKER_01]: If the children ever gotten the man's way, annoyed him, in any fashion, he would become violent, at least one account I came across mentioned hitting a kid so hard that he fell down the stairs.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tin Children, a small house with a violent man, and deeply religious.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the circumstance of Stephanie's upbringing.
[SPEAKER_01]: After graduating high school Stephanie made his way to Minneapolis Saint Paul the Twin Cities, in the mid-1960s, he drifted between jobs, shipping clerk, janitor, truck unloader
[SPEAKER_01]: But that relationship did not last.
[SPEAKER_01]: They divorced sometime in the 1970s and he abandoned his daughter, so I will admit I couldn't find more details on the relationship with the daughter so I don't know if it was quite abandonment or he just didn't communicate with her very often.
[SPEAKER_01]: But by 1977, Stephanie had been fired from his job as a janitor at the Mallberg Manufacturing Company in St. Paul.
[SPEAKER_01]: He would say that he lost a job because he had a history of epilepsy and he grew resentful and angry.
[SPEAKER_01]: He also had a girlfriend around this time and she left him to move back home overseas for an arranged marriage.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was very upsetting to Paul Michael Stephanie, and here you have a handful of years where he's lost his family, he's lost his job, he's lost his girlfriend, let's just say he was not in the best shape mentally.
[SPEAKER_01]: And just about three years after this firing, an anonymous call came from near that same machine shop that Stephanie had worked at.
[SPEAKER_01]: On December 31, 1980, Karen Potak was 20 years old.
[SPEAKER_01]: She was a college student and she had come to St. Paul to ring in the New Year with her sisters.
[SPEAKER_01]: After midnight, she left the party that she was at, and she was walking alone near the Mallberg plant when she encountered Paul Michael's Stephanie.
[SPEAKER_01]: Soon after, the dispatcher received the anonymous call from what would be called the weepy voiced killer.
[SPEAKER_01]: He directed emergency services to Karen's location, and because of that call, unique, and serial killer history here, Karen Potak survived.
[SPEAKER_01]: Though she was left with lasting brain damage, and Carrie's no memory of the attack.
[SPEAKER_01]: She had been beaten with an inches of her life.
[SPEAKER_01]: At the time, police log the call, notated the hysterical high-pitched voice, and filed it away.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had no name, no suspect, no connection to anything that would help the case, not yet.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to take some time to talk about these phone calls because they are central to this story and defining the deeply strange elements in this case.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is no other case quite like it that I have come across in American criminal history.
[SPEAKER_01]: serial killers rarely report their own crimes, they don't call 911 from payphones and confess or ask to be caught, they don't apologize and the ones who do communicate with the police or the media, the Zodiac BTK killer for examples, they do it for control, for power, for the thrill of taunting investigators, what Stephanie did was different.
[SPEAKER_01]: His calls feel like genuine
[SPEAKER_01]: So he's not taunting police.
[SPEAKER_01]: He showed remorse.
[SPEAKER_01]: Remorse from a man who could not stop killing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Kimberly Compton was 18 years old.
[SPEAKER_01]: She had just graduated high school in Pepin, Wisconsin, a small town on the Mississippi River, and traveled to St. Paul, Minnesota on June 3, 1981.
[SPEAKER_01]: She was looking for a job for a fresh start for the rest of her life.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was her first day in the city.
[SPEAKER_01]: Three boys were playing near a freeway construction site that afternoon and found a young woman's body partially concealed in the brush.
[SPEAKER_01]: The medical examiner's report would show that she had been stabbed 60-1 times with an ice pick.
[SPEAKER_01]: The wounds were concentrated on her chest, stomach, and inner thighs.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sadly, there were a lack of additional clues for investigators to develop a suspect list.
[SPEAKER_01]: 48 hours later, though, a call came in.
[SPEAKER_01]: The same weeping, barely comprehensible voice, high pitched and trembling.
[SPEAKER_01]: Police initially thought it might be a prank, but one detail stopped them cold.
[SPEAKER_01]: The caller mentioned an ice pick, and that detail had never been released to the media,
[SPEAKER_01]: They traced a call to a bus depot phone booth, they went to investigate that phone booth, but they couldn't find anybody, couldn't find video tape security footage, anything like that that may help them identify this caller.
[SPEAKER_01]: Days later, they got another call.
[SPEAKER_01]: The same weeping, barely comprehensible voice, I pitched, trembling, saying, I don't know why I had to stab her, I'm so upset about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And after this call, the press now had a name, the Weepy Voice Killer.
[SPEAKER_01]: For about a year, there didn't seem to be any activity from the Weepy Voice Killer, and then a 32-year-old woman, Kathleen Greening, a school teacher, was found dead in a bathtub in her Roseville home, a suburb of St. Paul.
[SPEAKER_01]: and would stay that way for 15 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: Spoiler alert, Stephanie murdered Kathleen Greening, but here is why people didn't connect the dots at first.
[SPEAKER_01]: Stephanie did not make a phone call for this one.
[SPEAKER_01]: The death looked on its surface just like a tragic accident.
[SPEAKER_01]: and because it didn't fit this profile of the Weepy Voice Killer, there was no connection being drawn, but Kathleen Greening's address book, as they will find later, contained an entry, Paul S. and his phone number.
[SPEAKER_01]: This means Stephanie knew Kathleen Greening, we don't know why or how they knew each other.
[SPEAKER_01]: and we don't know what triggered him that day to drown her in her bathtub and walk away.
[SPEAKER_01]: The state bureau of criminal apprehension eventually reclassified her death as a homicide, the truth would not emerge until 1997.
[SPEAKER_01]: On August 5th, 1982, Barbara Simons was 40 years old.
[SPEAKER_01]: She was a nurse in Minneapolis, and on this particular night she walked into the hexagon bar.
[SPEAKER_01]: There she met a charming, dark-haired man who asked her for a cigarette.
[SPEAKER_01]: She gave it to her.
[SPEAKER_01]: His name, Paul Michael Stephanie, as she left the bar with Stephanie later that night she allegedly told a waitress, he's cute, I hope he's nice since he's giving me a ride home.
[SPEAKER_01]: The next morning, a paper boy on his route spotted a woman's body along the banks of the Mississippi River.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was Barbara Simons.
[SPEAKER_01]: She had been stabbed multiple times.
[SPEAKER_01]: The wounds were circular, consistent, with a Phillips screwdriver or a nice pick.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two days later, the call came.
[SPEAKER_01]: That changed everything, because now police knew that they had a serial killer that reached out to the FBI and a criminal profiler offered an assessment.
[SPEAKER_01]: The caller was regressing during the calls going into what she described as a juvenile state.
[SPEAKER_01]: Meanwhile the bartender at the Hexagon Bar gave police a description of the man who left with Barbara Simons, late 30s, 6 feet tall, dark hair, dark eyes.
[SPEAKER_01]: investigators ran a photo line up and the bar staff were able to identify Paul Michael Stephanie.
[SPEAKER_01]: But police couldn't arrest him just yet.
[SPEAKER_01]: There wasn't quite enough evidence to do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they put him under surveillance.
[SPEAKER_01]: Denise Williams was 19 years old.
[SPEAKER_01]: She had been engaged in sex work for most of her teens.
[SPEAKER_01]: And on the 9 August when he first 1982, all Michael Stephanie approached Williams on Hinnipin Avenue in Minneapolis.
[SPEAKER_01]: He offered her $100.
[SPEAKER_01]: She accepted and they drove to his St. Paul apartment.
[SPEAKER_01]: He paid her $40 up front.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he offered her a ride back into the city and she accepted.
[SPEAKER_01]: It took back Rhodes rather than the freeway, which might not seem like it's an unusual situation, but Williams started to feel like something wasn't right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Stephanie apparently began talking about his sexual fantasies and he pulled over and stopped the car.
[SPEAKER_01]: He reached into the glove compartment and took out a screwdriver.
[SPEAKER_01]: He stabbed Denise Williams 13 times, one wound punctured her lung another her liver, but Denise Williams fought back.
[SPEAKER_01]: She found a glass bottle in the car and she smashed it across Stephanie's face.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the chaos she was able to get out of the vehicle screaming.
[SPEAKER_01]: a man who lived very nearby heard the screams, came running over, and physically tried to stop Stephanie from attacking Denise Williams again.
[SPEAKER_01]: She was able to get away, and that the gentleman himself, feeling like he was in danger ran back to his house, and called police.
[SPEAKER_01]: Stephanie fled.
[SPEAKER_01]: He drove home, but then he realized this gash, on his head, was very severe he was covered in blood, and so Paul Michael Stephanie.
[SPEAKER_01]: suspected serial killer under active police surveillance, calls and ambulance.
[SPEAKER_01]: In authorities, recognized his voice.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is how Stephanie was caught.
[SPEAKER_01]: The story goes that when one of the detectives working the case presented the Weepy Voice Killer case file to Stephanie and showed him photographs of the victims, apparently Stephanie's voice spontaneously shifted into that high-pitched distinctive sounding voice from the phone calls and authorities were, again, able to recognize the voice.
[SPEAKER_01]: from the Weepy Voiced Killer.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that was it, everybody knew that he was the serial killer.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was charged with the murder of Barbara Simons and the attempted murder of Denise Williams.
[SPEAKER_01]: He pled not guilty.
[SPEAKER_01]: The trial was in 1985 and at the time, voice analysis technology was not as sophisticated as it is today, so they couldn't use that to definitively link him to the recordings
[SPEAKER_01]: But his ex-wife, his sister and a woman who had lived with them, they all testified that they believed the weepy voice killer on the recordings was Paul Michael Stephanie.
[SPEAKER_01]: Additionally, the prosecution had eyewitness testimony.
[SPEAKER_01]: The bartender has an example who saw Simon's leave with Stephanie that night, and Denise Williams, of course, identifying her attacker.
[SPEAKER_01]: Paul Michael Stephanie was convicted of 2nd degree murder in the death of by resimins in the attempted second degree murder in the attack on Denise Williams.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was sentenced to 40 years for murder 18 years for the attempted murder a combined sentence of 58 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: Investigators knew or strongly believed that he was also responsible for the murder of Kimberly Compton and the beating of Karen Potac.
[SPEAKER_01]: But
[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't have enough evidence compiled that they thought they could use in trial for those murders.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, Stephanie went to Oak Park Heights, Maximum Security Prison.
[SPEAKER_01]: He never admitted to the Weepy Voice Killer calls.
[SPEAKER_01]: He never acknowledged the other attacks.
[SPEAKER_01]: He denied everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is, until December 1977.
[SPEAKER_01]: Stephanie had been diagnosed with melanoma, skin cancer that had already spread throughout his body.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had less than a year to live, and he had one request.
[SPEAKER_01]: He wanted a photograph of his mother's headstone.
[SPEAKER_01]: But in exchange for that photograph, he agreed to talk.
[SPEAKER_01]: He confessed to the attack on Karen Potac.
[SPEAKER_01]: He confessed to murdering Kimberly Compton.
[SPEAKER_01]: He confessed to the murder of Barbara Simons.
[SPEAKER_01]: He confessed to the drowning of a woman in a bathtub, but he could not remember her name.
[SPEAKER_01]: So police worked backwards.
[SPEAKER_01]: They went to the County Medical Examiner's office and began researching every fresh water drowning in the relevant timeframe.
[SPEAKER_01]: And after days of searching, they found the case.
[SPEAKER_01]: greening.
[SPEAKER_01]: The 33-year-old school teacher found in her bath tub in 1982 officially ruled an accidental drowning.
[SPEAKER_01]: Stephanie though knew details about the apartment about the dust scene that only the killer could have known, and again they also found his phone number in her address book.
[SPEAKER_01]: He also mentioned that there had been one more murder
[SPEAKER_01]: of woman he had drowned in a bathtub, somewhere else, and that it's a woman that he could not identify.
[SPEAKER_01]: Investigators research that case, but they've never been able to confirm a match for this fifth possible victim.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there is reason to believe that there is another victim of the Weepy Voiced Killer that has not been identified.
[SPEAKER_01]: Paul Michael Stephanie died on June 12, 1998 in the infirmary of Oak Park Heights Maximum Security Prison.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was 53 years old.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I want to come back to the one question, the thing that makes this very unique case.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why did he make those phone calls?
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the FBI profilers who worked the case, special agent Larry Brubaker, explained that this had to do with Stephanie's
[SPEAKER_01]: where the act of confessing your sins even anonymously, even to a 911 dispatcher, rather than a priest, may have functioned for Stephanie as a release, a confession to be absolved for the evil things that he did.
[SPEAKER_01]: Stephanie himself, near the end of his life, confirmed some of this.
[SPEAKER_01]: He told investigators that he heard a voice in his head that said Paul, it's time to kill.
[SPEAKER_01]: and after the murders he said he would go to a Catholic church and sit in the back and cry.
[SPEAKER_01]: His mother, he said, had always told him, if something hurts you, go to God.
[SPEAKER_01]: Another FBI profiler offered a different point of view on this saying that the calls represented a cat and mouse dynamic, a way of asserting simultaneous guilt and power.
[SPEAKER_01]: The caller is telling you I did this, but it's also kind of saying you can't catch me unless I turn myself in.
[SPEAKER_01]: So he's both confessing and taunted.
[SPEAKER_01]: What's striking to me when reading through all of these accounts is how completely compartmentalized his violence appears to have been.
[SPEAKER_01]: He functioned a daily life.
[SPEAKER_01]: He went to work.
[SPEAKER_01]: He lived his life normally and then it's like a switch would go off and he would kill.
[SPEAKER_01]: He talked about it a little bit where
[SPEAKER_01]: He would say he'd be with a woman and have no intention of doing anything violent, and then just very suddenly he would have to kill her, and detectives have theorized that something possibly triggered him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the theories that's been floating around is that all of his victims were wearing red.
[SPEAKER_01]: So something about a woman in the color red would set him off.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's also
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever is behind this bizarre behavior, I want to highlight the two women that survived his attacks, Karen Potac, and also Denise Williams.
[SPEAKER_01]: who was able to find that glass bottle and instinctively and quickly, safer self by attacking Paul Michael's Stephanie, and she is in every meaningful sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: The reason Stephanie was caught.
[SPEAKER_01]: When you cover terrible people in these true crime stories, it feels really good when there's one or two badass people that fight back.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've just listened to a study of strange, consider helping us keep the lantern lit, illuminating the unexplained by subscribing to our sub-stack, just head to the support tab at a study of strange.com.
[SPEAKER_01]: Until next time, stay curious and stay strange.