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Taking you beyond the headlines and into the disturbing world of stalking. Through in-depth conversations, real cases, expert insights and psychological analysis, Charlie & Jack explore what drives obsessive behaviour, how it escalates, and the devastating impact it has on victims.
NOTE: This is an experimental podcast series, created by AI and produced by a human!
Usually when we talk about a medical diagnosis,
there's this expectation of precision, like engineering.
Right, exactly.
You break your arm, the X ratio is
that jagged white line, and the doctor just
points and says, well, there it is.
That's the problem.
Yeah, it's binary.
I mean, broken or not broken.
It's clean, and it's comforting because we like
things to be visible.
We like them categorized into neat little boxes.
But then you step into the world of
neurodevelopment, trauma, and psychological fixation, and suddenly that
X-ray machine is utterly useless.
Oh, completely useless.
We're looking at a diagnostic landscape that is
murky, it's terrifying, and it's deeply unpredictable.
So today, we are looking at the ultimate,
original, overly attached fangirl.
That's certainly one way to put it.
I mean, forget the social media stalkers you
hear about today, right?
We are going all the way back to
1949, where all it took was a luxury
hotel room, a bribed bellhop, and a .22
caliber rifle.
Hi, I'm Charlie West.
And I'm Jack Mercer.
Welcome to Stalkers.
This is the podcast where we delve into
the truth behind the obsession.
We'll take you beyond the headlines and into
the disturbing world of stalking through in-depth
conversations, real cases, expert insights, and psychological analysis.
And we'll hopefully have a bit of a
laugh at the same time.
But that's not a guarantee because of that
thing called common decency.
It's worth noting that this podcast series has
been created completely by AI and a bit
of human tweaking.
You can find out more at carrotcruncher.com
forward slash stalkers.
That's carrotcruncher.com forward slash stalkers.
Before we get swept up in the whole
true crime spectacle of a hotel room shooting,
we really need to look at what this
case actually represents.
Okay, leotanus.
This deep dive is a serious historical exploration
into one of the very earliest recorded cases
of criminal stalking in American history.
It really is a crazy story.
It is.
It's a tragic, complex story that touches on
untreated mental illness, the crushing burdens of fame,
and a legal system that was just completely
and utterly unequipped to handle a crime it
didn't even have a name for yet.
Yeah.
So our mission today is to understand the
bizarre senseless shooting of Major League Baseball star
Eddie Wakes by a 19 year old typist
named Ruth Ann Steinhagen.
And we have a lot of material to
go through.
They really do.
We are pulling from a massive stack of
sources to get the full unvarnished picture.
We've got a fantastic Sports Illustrated true crime
excerpt by Rich Cohen.
Which is excellent.
Yeah.
We also have a deeply detailed Saturday evening
post article by Troy Brownfield, the transcript of
a documentary from the YouTube channel History and
Relics, a great piece for the Chicago History
Museum by Heidi Samuelson and of course the
encyclopedic timeline from Wikipedia.
We're really going to unpack not just what
happened, but the psychology of exactly how and
why it happened.
And what's crucial for you to understand as
we get into this is that this case
did more than just end a single man's
innocence or, you know, alter the trajectory of
his athletic career.
It changed everything.
It did.
It shattered the rather naive, trusting relationship that
existed between mid-century athletes and the American
public.
Oh, totally.
It fundamentally changed the physical boundaries between public
figures and their fans.
And as we'll discuss later, it was so
culturally shocking, so difficult for the public to
process that it eventually inspired Bernard Malamud's legendary
1952 novel and later the film The Natural.
Exactly.
Ah, yes.
A movie where Robert Redford hits a baseball
into the stadium lights in glorious slow motion,
classic cinema.
We will definitely be getting into how Hollywood
took this terrifying real life event and spun
it into a magical sports fairy tale later
on.
But first, to understand the crime, we have
to understand the victim.
We do.
And from the sources we have, the guy
sounds almost mythical before the shooting even happened.
Yeah.
I mean, who exactly was Eddie Waikis?
He really was a remarkable figure.
And to understand his appeal, you have to
look at his roots.
Okay.
Edward Stephen Waikis was born on September 4th,
1919 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He was the son of Lithuanian immigrants, and
he grew up in a really vibrant, multilingual
household.
Like how multilingual are we talking?
Well, Waikis spoke four languages fluently.
Wow.
Yeah, English, French, German, and Polish.
And he also had a very strong grasp
of Lithuanian, which was the language of his
parents.
Okay.
Let's just pause right there.
A major league baseball player in the 1930s
and 40s who is fluent in four languages.
It's impressive.
That completely shatters the stereotype of the uneducated
tobacco chewing rough around the edges ball player
of that era.
He sounds incredibly sophisticated.
He was known for exactly that actually.
He was a very sophisticated, well-read worldly
guy.
The reporters of the era absolutely loved him.
I bet they did.
He dressed in finely tailored suits, wore beautifully
shined shoes, and was just a smart, engaging,
thoughtful interview for the press.
So how did he get his start in
baseball?
He started out playing semi-pro bowl in
the Boston area, specifically the suburban Twilight League.
From there, he moved up to the Warumbo
Indians in Maine.
The Warumbo Indians?
Yeah.
It was a team sponsored by a local
woolen mill.
I love those old-timey baseball team names.
The Warumbo Indians.
It just sounds so quaint.
His classic Americana.
But he wasn't just a novelty, you know,
he was playing so extraordinarily well that he
started turning major heads.
Oh, I'm sure.
In the summer of 1938, a Boston sports
writer named Fred Berry watched the 19-year
-old Waitcas hit and throw left-handed and
called him, quote, a natural.
Why, really?
Which is wild because that is literally the
title of the book and the movie decades
later.
Exactly.
The nickname started there when he was just
a teenager swinging a bat in Maine.
The mythology started early.
From there, he got a workout with the
Chicago Cubs through a local connection, and he
earned a professional contract with a $2,500
bonus.
Which was big money back then.
It was solid money during the Great Depression.
So he started grinding his way up the
minor leagues.
He hit .326 with the Class B Moline
Plowboys.
Another great name.
Right.
Then he went on to hit .303 with
the Tulsa Oilers.
He actually led the entire league with 192
hits.
Wow.
He finally debuted in the majors with the
Cubs in April 1941.
He had a brief struggle, got sent back
down to refine his swing, but bounced back
incredibly hard in 1942, playing for the Los
Angeles Angels in the Pacific Coast League, batting
.336. And here's where it gets really interesting
to me.
Blending sports with pop culture.
He was so graceful at first base that
sports writers literally called him the Fred Astaire
of first baseman.
He was that smooth.
He wasn't just catching the ball.
I mean, he was dancing around the bag.
And while he was out in Los Angeles
dominating the Pacific Coast League, he actually got
a taste of Hollywood.
He did.
Yeah.
He did the baseball action scenes for Gary
Cooper in the 1942 movie Pride of the
Yankees.
Which is a fascinating piece of trivia, but
it makes perfect sense when you look at
the logistics of filmmaking.
Right.
The producers realize that Gary Cooper, for all
his acting talent, didn't really swing or feel
like the legendary Lou Gehrig.
No, not at all.
He just didn't have the mechanics.
But Eddie Waikis did.
So they brought Waikis in as the stunt
double, basically, for the baseball action.
It's a great story.
The guy was just radiating this physical profession.
He's smart.
He's handsome.
He's playing in the majors.
And he's literally standing in for Hollywood royalty.
But then the trajectory of his life and
the entire world really shifted violently.
Right.
World War II.
World War II broke out.
And like so many athletes of his generation,
his baseball career was immediately put on hold.
And Eddie didn't just serve in some cushy
exhibition league stateside to boost morale.
Which was super common for a lot of
high profile athletes.
It was.
But he joined the U.S. Army and
was assigned to the 544th Engineer Boat and
Shore Regiment.
This wasn't playing catch in a uniform.
This was brutal, amphibious warfare.
Precisely.
He saw intense, bloody combat in the Pacific
theater, specifically in the campaigns across the Philippines.
He was involved in Operation Cartwheel.
Which was what?
Exactly.
It was a major military strategy to neutralize
the Japanese base at Rabaul.
He narrowly escaped capture by the Japanese on
multiple occasions.
And he was actually among the very first
Allied troops to go ashore at Wakiam in
Japan in September 1945, right after the surrender.
The sources mention he earned 10 commendable service
awards, including four bronze stars.
Let that sink in.
It's incredible.
Four bronze stars for heroism in a combat
zone.
And there's this one anecdote in the historical
record that just sounds like it was ripped
straight out of a Steven Spielberg movie script.
I know exactly the one you mean.
He's in the middle of a massive, chaotic
firefight in the Philicons.
The noise is deafening.
Artillery is raining down.
A fellow American soldier gets severely wounded and
is bleeding out rapidly in the mud.
Right.
And Eddie Wakes leads the relative safety of
his foxhole runs through active blinding enemy fire
just to find something, anything to close this
guy's wounds before he bleeds to death.
And what does he find?
Safety pins.
Safety pins.
He scrambles back through the gunfire with a
handful of safety pins, gets to his wounded
comrade and manages to physically pin the guy's
gaping wounds closed.
Just unbelievable.
Applying enough pressure to save his life.
It is absolutely astonishing.
It's an incredible testament to his bravery, his
selflessness and just his sheer presence of mind
under unimaginable stress.
The horrors he must have witnessed and compartmentalized
during that time are staggering.
OK, I have to jump in here and
play my usual cynical role for a second.
I had a feeling this was coming.
Because my alarms are ringing.
Just looking at the narrative here.
Is this guy for real?
What do you mean?
I mean, he speaks four languages.
He dances around first base like Fred Astaire.
He literally body doubles for Gary Cooper because
his swing is so perfect.
And then he goes to the Pacific and
dodges bullets to perform battlefield surgery with safety
pins.
That is the record.
Yes.
He sounds like a walking, talking piece of
wartime propaganda engineered by a government PR firm.
Nobody is this perfect.
Are we sure he didn't have some dark
secret?
Was the sports press just building him up
to sell tickets?
I completely understand the skepticism.
I really do.
It's just a lot.
You know, we live in an era of
hyper scrutiny.
Through a modern lens, we are deeply used
to our heroes having very visible, often highly
publicized flaws.
Exactly.
But the military records objectively support his service
and his decorations and the baseball statistics objectively
support his athletic talent.
Was he a flawless human being?
Of course not.
Nobody is.
He had his struggles.
But what's important here isn't just the granular
day to day facts of his personal life.
It's what he represented to the American public
at that specific moment in history.
Wait, kiss represented the absolute idealized post-war
American hero.
He went off to fight evil, survived the
worst of it, came back home to American
soil and seamlessly returned to America's pastime.
Yes, exactly.
He was the American dream, perfectly packaged in
a tailored suit and a baseball uniform.
Precisely.
And this pristine, heroic, hyper-stabilized image is
exactly why the crime that was about to
happen to him shocked the nation so profoundly.
It makes sense.
Put yourself in the shoes of an average
citizen in 1949.
You've just survived a decade of global trauma.
Eddie Waikis was the ultimate symbol of returning
to a happy, normal, peaceful American life after
the horrors of a world war.
He was the safe thing to root for.
Right.
To have brutal, senseless violence visit him, not
on a muddy battlefield in the Pacific, but
in a plush, luxury hotel room in the
middle of Chicago.
It shattered the illusion of post-war safety.
It meant nowhere was truly safe.
Which perfectly transitions us to the person who
shattered that illusion.
Because while Eddie Waikis was off fighting in
the Pacific, winning Bronze Stars, and then coming
back to build this glittering, highly visible baseball
career, a teenage typist in Chicago was eagerly
consuming all that press.
She was.
Twisting his public persona to fill a terrifying,
violent void in her own life.
Let's look at the mind of Ruth Ann
Steinhagen.
Ruth Ann Steinhagen was born in December 1929
to parents who had emigrated from Berlin, Germany.
She grew up in Cicero, Illinois, and later
moved to the Lincoln Park area of Chicago.
So a pretty standard Midwestern upbringing.
Very standard.
In 1947, she graduated from Jones Commercial High
School where she studied stenography, and she subsequently
got a job as a typist for an
insurance company.
By all outward superficial appearances, she was a
completely ordinary, quiet, 19-year-old girl living
a mundane life with her parents and her
younger sister.
But internally, there was a very specific pattern
developing.
The sources show she had a history of
these intense, overwhelming, all-consuming fixations.
It wasn't just Eddie Waikis from day one.
First, she became obsessed with the Hollywood actor
Alan Ladd.
Which wasn't entirely uncommon for young women, then.
No, sure.
But then she shifted her focus to a
Chicago Cubs outfielder named Peanuts Lowry.
And then finally, around 1946 or 1947, the
sources differ slightly on the exact date she
first saw him play at Wrigley Field.
Her obsession locked on to Eddie Waikis, and
it locked on hard.
And this wasn't a casual fandom, you have
to understand.
This wasn't just collecting baseball cards.
The behaviors she exhibited were extreme and highly
disorganized.
What kind of behaviors?
She turned her bedroom into what her own
mother later described to investigators as a shrine.
She had hundreds of photographs, newspaper clippings, and
box scores of Waikis.
Wow.
Police later noted that she had pictures literally
papering the ceiling of her bedroom.
So it was the last thing she saw
before she slept and the first thing she
saw when she woke up.
She kept a suitcase full of material that
she would just open and stare at for
hours at a time, completely detached from reality.
She also completely altered her own life to
mimic his background, which is where it crosses
from fandom into something much more unsettling.
Yes, the mimicking behavior is very concerning.
Because Waikis was of Lithuanian descent, she actually
went out of her way to start studying
the Lithuanian language.
Right.
Because he was from the Boston area, she
suddenly developed an intense daily craving for Boston
baked beans.
And to me, the creepiest detail of all.
She would set an empty place for him
across from her at the family dinner table
every single night.
That is deeply troubling.
She would talk to her mother about him
like he was her actual boyfriend, saying things
like, me and Eddie are going to get
married.
Which is a classic textbook manifestation of erotomania.
Erotomania.
Yes.
Today we understand erotomania as a delusional belief
that another person, often someone of higher social
status or a public figure, is in love
with them.
Or that they are destined to be together
despite having never actually had a meaningful interaction.
Okay, honestly.
Setting a place at dinner and eating a
lot of baked beans.
Let's be real for a second and look
at this through the lens of a teenager.
Okay.
We've all had intense celebrity crushes, especially as
teenagers.
Hasn't everyone papered their bedroom walls with posters
of a boy band at some point?
Or learned all the lyrics to his singer
songs?
Well, sure.
Poster collecting is normal.
Or pretended they were going to marry Justin
Timberlake or Harry Styles.
She was 19.
A lot of 19 year olds are dramatic.
She just really, really committed to the bit.
It sounds more sad and lonely to me
than dangerous.
I mean, where's the harm in eating some
extra beans and staring at a ceiling?
Erotomania isn't just a severe crush.
And we have to be careful not to
conflate the two.
It's a structural failure of logic.
How so?
Think of it like a computer virus that
completely rewrites a brain's operating system.
To a healthy brain, a celebrity is a
distant concept.
But the erotomanic brain runs reality through its
corrupted code.
The delusion becomes the primary reality.
So she couldn't separate fact from fiction?
Not at all.
Those behaviors, the shrine, the mimicking of his
culture, the dinner table setting are glaring, severe,
psychiatric red flags.
Not just typical teenage fandom.
And her family know it too.
Did they?
Oh, absolutely.
Her parents were so terrified by the depth
of her detachment from reality that in 1948,
they actually sent her to a psychiatrist.
Okay.
In 1948, sending your kid to a psychiatrist
wasn't exactly common or talked about.
No, it was highly stigmatized.
That means they were genuinely scared.
The stigma was massive.
So the behavior had to be intolerable for
them to seek medical intervention.
But the obsession didn't diminish.
It just internalized.
And it wasn't just happening inside her bedroom
anymore.
Where else was it happening?
She was actively stalking the Cubs clubhouse after
games, waiting in the shadows just for a
glimpse of him.
But she never actually spoke to him during
this time, right?
The sources indicate she never interacted with him
beyond perhaps getting an autograph in a crowd
or standing near him.
But her internal narrative was escalating violently.
She told her doctors about this later, didn't
she?
Yes, she later admitted to her doctors, quote,
I used to go to all the ball
games to watch him.
We used to wait for them to come
out of the clubhouse after the game and
all the time I was watching, I was
building in my mind that idea of killing
him, end quote.
That is terrifying.
She was nurturing a homicidal ideation right alongside
the romantic delusion.
They were two sides of the same coin
to her.
So what does this all mean?
What tips the scale from, you know, I
want to marry him and eat baked beans
to I'm actively planning to kill him.
What broke the narrative in her head?
The psychological trigger appears to be his trade
to the Philadelphia Phillies after the 1948 season.
That would be a trade.
To a rational fan, a trade is a
normal if disappointing part of the business of
baseball.
Players move all the time.
But to Ruth Ann Steinhagen, it was a
profound, deeply personal rejection.
Because in her mind, they were together.
Yes, she felt abandoned by her partner.
The sources say she cried hysterically for days
and then her logic completely and totally fractured.
She told her parents she was moving out
of their house in the suburbs and into
an apartment in the city to be closer
to him, which makes absolutely zero sense.
None because he had just moved to Philadelphia.
Moving to an apartment in Chicago doesn't get
you closer to a guy who is currently
living and playing in Pennsylvania.
Yeah, it's hundreds of miles away.
Exactly.
And that illogical leap highlights the depth of
her delusion.
Her fantasy world was entirely self-contained.
The physical reality of where Eddie Waitkis lived
geographically didn't matter as much as the psychological
proximity she felt she was maintaining by living
independently in the city where she first fell
in love with him.
That's wild.
She said, I knew I would never get
to know him in a normal way.
So I kept thinking I will never get
him.
And if I can't have him, nobody else
can.
Then I decided I would kill him.
That phrase, if I can't have him, nobody
else can.
It is so chilling and we hear it
so often in true crime today.
It's the ultimate possessive threat.
Her fantasy world was entirely inside her own
head.
But in June 1949, she decided she was
going to drag the real living Eddie Waitkis
right into it.
Unfortunately, yes.
Let's look at the encounter itself.
How did things actually go down and how
are things different back then that allowed her
to get so close?
Well, put yourself in the atmosphere of June
1949.
On June 14th, the Philadelphia Phillies were in
Chicago to begin a grueling 15 day road
trip, starting with a series against Waitkis' old
team, the Cubs at Wrigley Field.
OK, the stage is set.
Waitkis had a fantastic game that afternoon.
He got a hit, reached base twice, scored
two runs, and the Phillies beat the Cubs
nine to two.
Waitkis was having a phenomenal season up to
that point, hitting point three zero six and
actually leading the national all-star balloting for
first base.
So he's on top of the world.
He's beating his old team.
He's heading for the all-star game.
He goes out to dinner that evening with
a couple of his former Cubs teammates, Russ
Meyer and Bill Nicholson, just enjoying the Chicago
summer.
Right.
Just a normal night for a successful athlete.
Meanwhile, Steinhagen is setting her trap.
She had found out where the Phillies were
staying through the newspapers and she booked a
room in the exact same hotel for three
days.
The Edgewater Beach Hotel.
Right.
The very upscale Edgewater Beach Hotel on Lake
Michigan.
She checks into room 1297A on the 12th
floor.
Waitkis and his roommate, Russ Meyer, were sharing
a room down on the ninth floor.
And she meticulously plans her approach.
She had previously gone to a pawn shop
and purchased a used .22 caliber bolt action
rifle, a Remington Model 510, along with a
box of bullets.
How did she even get that inside?
She smuggled it into the hotel in a
large suitcase.
Unbelievable.
To calm her nerves while she waited for
him to return from dinner, she ordered room
service.
The Sports Illustrated piece specifically notes she ordered
two whiskey sours and a daiquiri and downed
all of them.
That is quite the heavy cocktail mix for
a 19 year old on a Tuesday night.
It's a lot of alcohol.
So she gets some serious liquid courage.
Then she bribes a bellboy five dollars, which
was a very decent amount of money in
1949, roughly equivalent to 60 or 70 bucks
today, to deliver a handwritten note to Waitkis'
room or leave it at the front desk
for him to find when he got back.
And the note is a masterclass in psychological
manipulation.
She doesn't use her real name, obviously.
She signs it Ruth Ann Burns.
Burns?
Why Burns?
She had somehow gotten a hold of his
high school yearbook years prior and knew that
he had grown up on Portland Street in
East Cambridge.
So she writes in the note that she
is from Portland Street.
Furthermore, Waitkis was currently dating a woman who
had relatives with the last name Burns.
Oh, wow.
So she's hitting all these subconscious familiarity buttons.
The note says it's extremely important she sees
him as soon as possible, that it's to
his advantage to let her explain.
And she promises a surprise.
Yes.
She tells him she's leaving the hotel the
next day, creating a false sense of urgency
and tells him to come up to room
1297 A.
Waitkis gets back to the hotel around 11
or 11 30 p.m. He gets the
note from the desk.
He's confused, but intrigued.
I mean, who wouldn't be?
He checks the hotel registry.
See, she really is registered from Portland Street,
Boston.
He actually calls the room from a house
phone first.
He asks what it's all about.
She sounds sleepy on the phone and refuses
to discuss it.
Just telling him to come up for a
surprise.
OK, let's just pause and be entirely real
here for a second.
Here we go.
The guy gets a vague cryptic note from
a mysterious woman at 1130 at night offering
a surprise.
And he just goes up to her room.
Alone.
Yes, he does.
I mean, he kind of walked right into
this one.
Yeah, if a guy is a famous, handsome
athlete and he's thinking with his lower half,
assuming this is just a late night hookup
with an eager fan, you can't be totally
shocked when the situation goes wrong.
We need to be very careful not to
veer into victim blaming here.
I'm just saying it wasn't the smartest move.
You have to understand the historical context of
baseball in 1949.
Today, athletes have layers of private security, restricted
floor access in hotels.
Key cards that only work for specific floors
and strict team protocols.
Right.
In 1949, players lived much closer to the
public.
They hung out in hotel lobbies, playing cards.
They took public transit to the stadiums.
They interacted with fans constantly.
So a fan slipping a note to a
player wasn't weird.
Not at all.
There was a well-known established subculture of
female fans known colloquially as baseball and these
women who followed the teams from city to
city and frequently tried to socialize or spark
romances with the players.
OK, so groupies, essentially.
Essentially, yes.
The idea of a fan being overly eager
or seeking a romantic encounter was incredibly common.
But the concept of a fan wanting to
murder an athlete, that was virtually unheard of.
It just wasn't a thing people worried about.
It wasn't in their paradigm of risk.
It wasn't on the menu of human behavior
as far as they were concerned.
Wait, because genuinely believed, according to his roommate,
Russ Meyer, that this woman was a friend
of his girlfriend, Ruth Ann Burns, or someone
from his hometown in trouble.
Oh, so he might have thought he was
helping someone.
Exactly.
He thought he was walking into a social
visit or perhaps a harmless albeit forward fan
encounter.
Not a lethal trap.
That makes a lot of sense.
It's easy to judge with 21st century paranoia
where we assume the worst of every mysterious
text message.
Yeah.
So Wakes goes up to the 12th floor.
He knocks on the door of 1297-A
Steinhagen Answers.
She's wearing a silky robe.
Wait, because walks in, walks past her toward
a chair near the window.
Yes.
What's this all about?
And she says, I have a surprise for
you.
Wait, because later told investigators that she had
the coldest looking face he had ever seen
in his life.
No expression at all.
A complete flat effect.
She steps over to the closet, pulls out
the .22 caliber rifle and points it directly
at his chest.
And Wakes still thinks it's a gag.
Because again, fans don't shoot players.
He puts his hands up with a half
smile and says, what goes on here?
Is this some kind of joke?
Yeah.
And according to a different count, she says,
either you're not going to bother me anymore
or if I can't have you, nobody else
can.
And then she pulls the trigger.
She doesn't hesitate.
Wham.
She shoots him right in the chest.
The bullet piercing his lung and lodging dangerously
close to his spine.
The immediate aftermath is surreal, horrifying and deeply
tragic.
Wakes slumps against the wall.
He looks at her and asks, oh, baby,
why did you do that?
Steinhagen herself later said she didn't believe she
had actually shot him at first because he
just stood there for a second before collapsing.
She literally asked him where he was shot
and he told her he was shot in
the guts.
And here is where the reality of her
violent fantasy completely breaks down.
Her original plan, she later admitted, was to
stab him with a knife and then use
the gun to shoot herself.
Right.
And murder, suicide.
But he had sat down too quickly when
he entered the room for her to stab
him effectively.
So she shot him instead.
Now he's bleeding out on the floor and
she decides it's time to kill herself.
But she can't find another bullet.
She fumbles with the gun and loses her
nerve.
So instead of a murder, suicide, the scene
twists into this grotesque macabre realization of her
romantic delusion.
So disturbing.
She kneels down on the floor next to
him.
She gently holds his head in her lap.
She places her hand on his.
She tells him, I've dreamt and dreamt about
killing him.
And there I was holding him in my
arms.
Don't you see all my dreams had come
true?
Makes my skin crawl.
He's bleeding out, suffocating on his own blood,
begging for help.
And she's living out a twisted romantic comedy
in her own head.
It highlights the complete break from reality.
But then she does the one thing that
actually saves his life.
She leaves him there, goes over to the
hotel phone, calls the front desk and calmly
says, I just shot a man.
Then she walks out into the hallway and
screams, Eddie Waitkiss, the ball player, has been
shot.
I shot Eddie Waitkiss.
She even told investigators later that she was
profoundly annoyed that nobody came out of their
rooms immediately.
Annoyed?
Yes.
She felt like she could have just walked
right out of the hotel and escaped down
the stairs.
But she didn't.
She waited on a bench near the elevator
for the police to arrive, almost proud of
what she had done.
The hotel staff rushes up, calls an ambulance
and Eddie is rushed to Illinois Masonic Hospital
and then later transferred to Billings Memorial Hospital
for more specialized care.
He undergoes a harrowing series of surgeries.
They nearly lost him multiple times.
They did, yeah, on the operating table.
But eventually they successfully remove the bullet from
near his spine.
He miraculously survives.
But while the medical crisis was stabilizing, the
legal and cultural shockwaves were just beginning to
crest.
It was a huge media event.
So how does the justice system handle a
crime?
It doesn't understand.
Was there a massive televised public trial?
If this happened today, it would unequivocally be
the trial of the century.
You'd have Walt Wahl cable news coverage, instant
true crime documentaries, TikTok sleuths analyzing the hotel
layout.
Oh, absolutely.
But in 1949, the legal process unfolded very
differently.
We really need to focus on this question.
How does a public trial affect a stalker?
The fascinating, complex answer in this case is
that there wasn't one.
Wait, what?
She shoots a famous baseball player, a war
hero, point blank in the chest in a
hotel room, confesses to it, and she doesn't
go on trial.
Let's look at the legal timeline.
She is arrested that night in the hallway.
The very next day, reporters and police are
aggressively questioning her.
She tells police she doesn't really know why
she did it.
Just a deadline.
She tells an assistant state's attorney she wanted,
quote, to do something exciting in my life
and that the tension had been building inside
her for years.
She even tells reporters that killing someone was
meant to relieve that nervous tension.
OK, my outrage meter is off the charts
right now.
Yeah, she shoots a national hero because she
is bored and wants something exciting to do
because she has some nervous tension and she
avoids prison.
I understand why that's upsetting.
How is that justice for Eddie Wakes?
Yeah, she basically gets a slap on the
wrist.
I completely hear your frustration and it's a
very natural reaction.
But it wasn't a slap on the wrist.
It was the strict application of psychiatric law
as it existed in 1949.
Walk me through it.
On June 30th, 1949, just over two weeks
after the shooting, she was arraigned.
Her defense counsel presented a petition stating she
was unable to cooperate in her own defense
and didn't cognitively understand the charges against her.
They formally requested a sanity hearing.
And the court disagreed without a fight.
They brought in a highly respected court appointed
psychiatrist, Dr. William Haynes.
He examined Steinhagen and testified in front of
the judge that she was suffering from schizophrenia
in an immature individual.
The immature individual.
That's not like they're just calling her childish.
Like she threw a tantrum.
It sounds dismissive to our modern ears, but
we have to understand the mechanics of 1940s
psychiatry.
When they labeled her immature, it wasn't an
insult about her being a brat.
What was it, then?
It was the clinical terminology of the era
for a personality that hadn't developed the standard
ego defenses required to separate internal fantasy from
external reality.
Her brain literally lacked the architecture to understand
consequence.
I see.
Based on that explicit medical testimony, the chief
judge of the criminal court of Cook County,
James McDermott, directed the jury to find her
legally insane.
So she doesn't go to jail.
Where does she go?
She was ordered committed to Kankakee State Hospital,
a psychiatric facility in Illinois for treatment.
The grand jury had officially indicted her for
assault with intent to murder, but the judge
struck the charge with leave to reinstate.
What does with leave to reinstate mean in
practical terms?
Like they could bring it back.
Yes.
It meant that if she ever regained her
sanity, if she was ever deemed cured and
released from the hospital, the prosecutors explicitly reserve
the right to re-file those criminal charges
and take her to trial for the shooting.
OK, so it was hanging over her head.
But this is where Eddie Waitkiss makes a
deeply personal, crucial decision.
When she was eventually declared cured years later,
Waitkiss completely refused to press charges.
But why?
Why let her off the hook completely?
Why not seek vengeance or at least legal
justice?
She ruined his life.
Because you have to think about the psychological
mechanism of a trial.
A public trial gives the stalker exactly what
they desperately want, a permanent, highly public connection
to their victim.
Oh, it forces the victim to sit in
a courtroom, lock eyes with their attacker, relive
the trauma on the stand and be forever
linked to them in the public record and
the press.
Eddie Waitkiss recognized this.
He told the assistant state's attorney he just
wanted to forget the entire incident.
He wanted to sever the connection entirely.
That is actually a brilliant if heartbreaking insight.
By avoiding a trial, he completely denies her
the spotlight.
He starves the delusion.
Exactly.
But if we connect this to the bigger
picture, the lack of a public trial meant
the public never got any closure.
The public didn't get to see a villain
punished.
People were just left wondering, why did this
happen?
Right.
There was no satisfying narrative end.
And Eddie never really got justice.
It just left this lingering, unresolved ghost over
the rest of his life.
Exactly.
The lack of a neat legal resolution left
a cultural wound.
And let's look at the stalker's epilogue.
Steinhagen was confined and treated at Kankakee State
Hospital for just under three years.
Only three years.
Yes.
She received electroshock therapy and hydrotherapy, which were
standard treatments then.
In 1952, she was declared cured and released.
And because Eddie wouldn't press charges, she walked
out a free woman.
Three years in a hospital for almost killing
a man.
That is mind blowing.
What does she do after she got out?
Did she relapse?
Did she stalk anyone else?
Amazingly, no.
She moved back in with her parents and
her younger sister on Chicago's north side.
In 1970, they bought a modest home in
Albany Park, Chicago and just lived a normal
life.
She lived an incredibly quiet, highly reclusive life.
She shunned all publicity.
She vehemently refused to speak to reporters for
the rest of her life, even hanging up
on them or slamming the door.
She never married.
A neighbor thought she worked an office job
for 35 years, but no one really knew
for sure.
She successfully retreated into the shadows, completely maintaining
her privacy until she died of an accidental
fall in her home in 2012 at the
age of 83.
The Chicago Tribune only found out about her
death months later while checking death records for
an entirely different story.
So she lives this long, quiet, peaceful life
until she's 83, completely fading into obscurity.
She got a second chance.
But what about Eddie Wakes?
Well, his path was different.
While she faded into the shadows for six
decades, he was forced to step right back
into the glaring spotlight of professional sports.
What happens to Eddie?
Physically, his recovery was nothing short of miraculous,
a testament to his sheer athleticism.
After spending a grueling month in the hospital,
he returns to Philadelphia in July 1949.
Just a month later.
Yes.
The team holds an Eddie Waitkiss night where
20,000 fans give him a massive standing
ovation.
It's incredibly emotional.
He receives a new car, a television set,
golf clubs and a bronze first baseman's glove.
He sits out the rest of the 49th
segment to rehab, but returns for opening day
in 1950.
And he doesn't just return.
He dominates.
He's the lead off hitter for the famous
Wiz Kids Phillies team.
He plays almost every game, leads the team
in scoring with 102 runs.
They win the 1950 National League pennant.
They go to the World Series against the
Yankees.
And he is rightfully named the Associated Press
comeback player of the year.
It sounds like the absolute perfect Hollywood triumph
over tragedy.
Outwardly, yes, it was a triumph.
But internally, the psychological toll was devastating.
He had survived the bullet, but he couldn't
survive the trauma.
Because you can't fix that with surgery.
Exactly.
The X-ray couldn't show the damage to
his mind.
He developed what he ominously called an awful
doubt.
He was deeply paranoid.
He kept agonizing over why he went to
that room, why a random fan wanted to
kill him.
He couldn't make rational sense of an irrational
act.
The sources, specifically his roommate Russ Meyer, noted
that Eddie turned heavily to alcohol to cope
with the PTSD.
The physical comeback was there, but the spark,
the joy of the game was completely gone.
It really was.
He faded from baseball, playing for the Orioles
briefly before retiring with the Phillies in 1955.
And then tragically, he dies of esophageal cancer
in 1972 at just 53 years old.
He never got to have that long, quiet,
peaceful life that a shooter got.
It is a profound historical tragedy.
She lost his peace of mind the very
moment he knocked on that hotel door in
1949.
Which brings up a huge question for me
regarding policy in society.
A major national sports star gets gunned down
in a hotel room by a fan.
The public is terrified.
Did they immediately pass anti-stalking laws?
Did hotels lock down their lobbies and install
security?
Did Major League Baseball change its policies on
fan interaction?
This raises an important point about how slowly
the law reacts to psychology.
The short answer is no.
There were no immediate sweeping laws passed in
1949.
Really?
Nothing.
In fact, the term stalking as a legal
concept didn't even exist in the lexicon back
then.
The legal system viewed this merely as an
isolated case of assault by a mentally insane
person.
It was treated as a bizarre anomaly, not
a systemic threat.
So nothing changed at all legally?
Legally, no.
But culturally, the impact was massive and immediate.
The event sent a permanent shockwave through the
sports world.
I can imagine players were freaked out.
The Boston Globe noted it had a, quote,
profoundly anti-aphrodisiacal effect on traveling athletes.
Players were suddenly terrified of the very fans
they used to socialize with.
The baseball anis weren't so fun anymore.
Exactly.
The famous sports writer Al Stump wrote panic
pieces with sensational titles like baseball's biggest headache
dings.
It effectively ended the era of innocent, unpoliced
fan access.
So the players just built invisible walls around
themselves?
They stopped hanging out in the lobbies?
Yes, they withdrew.
And furthermore, while the law didn't change in
1949, the event was so significant as a
case study in targeted violence that decades later,
in 1992, the United States Secret Service used
this exact case as the oldest incident in
their major study on preventing assassination.
Wait, the Secret Service, the people who protect
the president, why were they looking at a
baseball player from 1949?
Because the behavioral mechanics of an assassin and
a stalker are incredibly similar.
Oh, that makes sense.
The Secret Service analyzed exactly how Steinhagen fixated
on her target, how she gathered intelligence through
newspapers, how she bypassed security, and how she
used familiarity to manipulate him into a vulnerable
position using his hometown and the girlfriend's last
name.
Yes, they mapped her timeline to create behavioral
markers for modern threat assessment.
So while it didn't create a stalking law
in 1949, the Waco shooting became the very
genesis of how modern law enforcement profiles and
prevents celebrity stalking today.
That is fascinating.
Mm hmm.
But because the legal system and society in
1949 simply didn't know how to process this
chaotic, senseless, random crime at the time, pop
cultures stepped in to do what pop culture
does best.
Rewrite the ending.
Rewrite the ending to make us feel better.
Which brings us to the story of The
Natural.
In 1952, a writer named Bernard Malamud published
his first novel, The Natural.
It was heavily and obviously inspired by the
Waco shooting.
Decades later, in 1984, it was adapted into
the famous film starring Robert Redford, Glenn Close,
Robert Duvall, and Kim Basinger.
The parallels are not exactly subtle.
In the story, you have Roy Hobbs, a
baseball sensation with a legendary bat called Wonder
Boy.
He is called up to a Chicago hotel
room by a mysterious woman dressed in black,
Harriet Bird, played by Barbara Hershey in the
movie.
She has a silver bullet.
She asks him if he will be the
best there ever was.
And when he says yes, she shoots him
in the gut, derailing his career for 16
years.
What's fascinating here is how Malamud takes the
raw, chaotic, depressing facts of the Waco's case
and imbues them with mythological, almost Arthurian legend
elements.
Arthurian legend.
Yes.
The woman in black represents temptation.
The silver bullet represents magical destruction.
The bat Wonder Boy is essentially Excalibur.
And Roy Hobbs' quest is a quest for
greatness.
I have to admit, I get incredibly mad
when I think about this adaptation.
Why is that?
Because Hollywood takes a genuinely terrifying, depressing, true
story about severe mental illness and a victim
whose actual life was ruined by PTSD and
alcohol ending in a tragic early death at
53.
And they turn it into a magical sports
fairy tale.
I see your point.
Where Robert Redford hits a home run into
the stadium lights, sparks fly everywhere in slow
motion, and he walks off into the sunset
with his high school sweetheart.
I mean, I love Robert Redford, but that
is incredibly disrespectful to Eddie Wakes.
They erased his real gritty trauma just to
make us feel good about baseball.
I completely understand why it feels dismissive of
Wakes's actual lived suffering.
It sanitizes the horror.
But if we analyze why society creates these
stories based on human psychology, it makes a
lot of sense.
How does it make sense?
Myth making is a primary essential mechanism for
how human beings process senseless tragedy.
Explain the mechanics of that.
Why do we need the myth?
Think about the erotomania computer virus analogy we
used earlier.
Society's collective brain also has an operating system
and it demands order.
In real life, Eddie Wakes was shot for
absolutely no reason.
There was no moral lesson, no test of
character.
It was just chaos.
A sick woman with a gun.
And that's hard to accept.
That is terrifying for the public to accept
because it means we are all vulnerable to
random meaningless violence at any moment.
Malmood's story changes the narrative to a test
of purity.
In the myth, Roy Hobbs is shot because
he fails a moral test.
He falls for the temptation of the woman
in black instead of focusing on his destiny.
And because it's a test, the story gives
the hero a chance to eventually overcome that
trauma to return and fulfill his potential.
That is a profound insight.
So the movie is basically a massive coping
mechanism for the public.
It gives a meaning to the meaningless.
Yes.
It allows us to say he was shot
to test his greatness instead of the terrifying
reality, which is he was shot because a
teenager got ahold of a rifle and a
hotel room key.
It's a way of mourning the loss of
White Kiss' immense potential by imagining a universe
where that potential is ultimately gloriously realized.
Even if delayed, it imposes order on chaos.
It builds a narrative bridge over the abyss
of random violence.
Well, to lighten the mood a little bit
after all this heavy psychology and tragedy, let's
sprinkle in some of the trivia from our
sources about the movie itself because it's a
classic.
Did you know that the train depot used
in the 1984 film, The Natural, located in
South Dayton, New York, is the exact same
train depot they used a few years later
in the John Hughes comedy planes, trains and
automobiles?
I did see that in the History and
Relics documentary.
Also, the steam locomotive they used in the
movie of the Grand Trunk Western 4070 was
actually brought in all the way from Cleveland
to give the film an authentic period touch.
And speaking of Cleveland, the Cleveland Indians 1980
Rookie of the Year, Joe Charbonneau, actually had
a role as an extra in the film.
He played a cop who passes a secret
note from Glenn close to Robert Redford in
the stands.
It's just funny how these real baseball threads
weave into the fictionalized version of a real
baseball tragedy.
It shows how deeply the Waytka story permeated
baseball culture, blurring the lines between the history
of the sport and the mythology of the
sport.
It became part of the DNA of baseball
lore.
OK, let's unpack all of this and bring
it all together as we wrap up.
Think about the parasocial relationships you see online
today.
Put yourself in the shoes of a modern
Internet user.
It's very relevant today.
People think they truly know their favorite athletes,
Twitch streamers or pop stars just because they
watch their content every single day.
They know what they eat, what their pets
are named, where they go on vacation.
They build an entire deeply emotional relationship in
their head that is completely one sided.
And Eddie Wakesh's story is a chilling historical
reminder of what happens when that illusion of
intimacy turns into a solitary, violent obsession.
Absolutely.
The mechanisms of human psychology, the fixations, the
delusions, the structural logic failures haven't changed since
1949.
Only the technology has.
Wakesh wasn't targeted because he did something wrong.
He was targeted simply because he was visible.
Which leaves me with one last thing for
you to mull over.
Imagine if Ruth Ann Steinhagen had access to
the Internet, Twitter or TikTok in 1949, if
she was posting her bedroom shrine photos on
Instagram.
That's a terrifying thought.
Would her obsession have been caught and stopped
earlier by the digital footprint she left behind?
Would modern threat assessment algorithms have flagged her?
Or in today's algorithm driven world, would she
have found a community of thousands of other
obsessed fans to egg her on, validating her
delusions in an echo chamber until they boiled
over into violence.
It raises a deeply unsettling question about whether
our modern connectivity cures isolation or if it
just magnifies and weaponizes our fixations.
It really does.
Next time you're scrolling and feel like you
really know a celebrity, maybe take a step
back and remember the girl who set an
empty place at the dinner table.
That just about wraps up this episode.
Don't forget to tell them about our release
schedule.
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For more information about this AI created podcast
series, please visit Caratcruncher.com forward slash stalkers.