Anthony LaRette Jr. [serial killer]

Calvin

Welcome to the infamous edition of the Headstones and Microphones where we use AI to step into the past through a researched, first-person simulation done through creative story telling of history's most infamous people. Now, let’s meet our guest.

Calvin

Welcome to the podcast. Let’s start at the absolute beginning, where the public narrative hasn’t yet distorted who you were. When and where were you born, and what was your given name?

White Male Guest

I was born on October 1, 1951, in Topeka, Kansas. My given name was Anthony Joe LaRette Jr.

Calvin

What was your hometown and home life like as a child?

White Male Guest

I grew up as an only child to my parents, Gertrude and Anthony LaRette Sr. My early home life was severely complicated by physical trauma. When I was just five or six years old, I grabbed an ungrounded trailer hitch and suffered a massive electrical shock that knocked me completely unconscious and knocked out several of my teeth. Then, when I was around eight or nine, I was struck on the left side of my head with a baseball bat, which left me unconscious for an hour and a half. Those head injuries changed everything about my development and my behavior.

Calvin

Was there a story behind your name, or a nickname that stuck with you?

White Male Guest

Later in life, when I was drifting and committing crimes across different states, I used the alias "Mike Watson" to check into motels and hide my real identity from the law.

Calvin

What were you like as a child, and how many years of schooling did you actually attend?

White Male Guest

As a child, I struggled heavily in school. I had severe learning difficulties, including dyslexia and major deficits when it came to spelling and calculation. Following my childhood head injuries, I developed abnormal and aggressive behaviors, suffered from severe bed-wetting until I was sixteen, and began experiencing intense auditory hallucinations just before I went to sleep.

Calvin

Was there a specific moment when you realized you were fundamentally different from everyone else?

White Male Guest

It was during my childhood after those accidents. I started experiencing terrifying blackout spells. I would frequently experience brief auditory hallucinations—hearing the word "Burmashave" repeatedly chanted to me—and then I would suddenly wake up and realize I was completely lost, frightened, and scared, sometimes as far as twenty-five miles away from my home with no memory of how I got there. Doctors later mapped my brain and diagnosed me with psychomotor epilepsy and left temporal lobe seizure disorder.

Calvin

What’s a decision that changed everything for you, but felt small at the time?

White Male Guest

In 1977, I made the decision to leave a mental health facility unauthorized and completely stopped taking my prescribed anti-seizure medication, Mysoline. Without the medication keeping my temporal lobe seizures and post-ictal confusion in check, my stability deteriorated rapidly, and I turned heavily to drug abuse.

Calvin

Let's talk about your early run-ins with the law. Before the world knew your name for your most infamous actions, what was your very first arrest or interaction with law enforcement, and what were the consequences?

White Male Guest

My early run-ins involved inappropriate sexual behaviors during my youth, but my first major recorded felony interaction with law enforcement came in 1974. I was arrested and subsequently convicted for raping a woman in Lawrence, Kansas.

Calvin

At what moment did you realize your name would never be forgotten?

White Male Guest

It wasn't until after my arrest in August 1980 for the murder of eighteen-year-old Mary Fleming in St. Charles, Missouri. The brutal nature of the crime sparked intense pretrial publicity and a media frenzy that eventually forced my trial to be moved out of the county to Warrenton.

Calvin

Did fame make you more dangerous, or did it simply expose who you already were?

White Male Guest

The notoriety didn't make me more dangerous; it exposed a hidden trail of violence that had been escalating in the dark for over a decade. While the public only knew me for the Missouri case, the arrest pulled back the curtain on a violent multi-state journey driven by my worsening psychiatric state and escalating rage.

Calvin

Who do you believe betrayed you first: a person, society, or your own instincts?

White Male Guest

I felt entirely betrayed by my own mind and instincts due to my organic brain damage, but my escalation was pushed to the edge by a personal betrayal. In 1980, on my wedding anniversary, I walked into my home and found my second wife in bed with another man. The rage from that event completely consumed me, and my violent impulses spiraled entirely out of control immediately after.

Calvin

What was your most unique habit or a random fact about you that would surprise people?

White Male Guest

Back in 1965, before my life completely fell apart into violence, I was a highly active and competitive roller skater, though even back then, my seizure disorders would sometimes strike me right in the middle of a rink.

Calvin

What did the public never understand about the pressure you were under at the time?

White Male Guest

The public never understood the absolute chaos of my psychiatric history. During my trial, the jury was kept completely in the dark about my twenty-year history of organic brain damage, left temporal lobe syndrome, and institutionalization. My defense lawyer had zero prior criminal trial experience and failed to introduce any of my extensive medical and psychiatric records to explain the severe blackouts and hallucinations I was battling.

Calvin

Did you have any known rivalries that defined your career?

White Male Guest

My primary adversary was the St. Charles prosecutor, Donald L. Kohl. He aggressively pursued me, upgraded my charges to capital murder, and fiercely dismantled my defense's alternative theories at trial by using graphic crime scene photographs to ensure I received the death penalty.

Calvin

What personal battles were you fighting privately while the world was watching?

White Male Guest

Privately, I was fighting severe mental illness, drug addiction, and the horrific aftermath of a failed suicide attempt. Just days after the murder in St. Charles, hallucinating that I had killed my wife, I tried to end my own life by stabbing myself three times in the chest and slashing my own neck.

Calvin

What was your darkest moment, and was there ever a time you wanted to walk away from it all?

White Male Guest

My darkest moment was in the St. Charles County Jail in April 1981. I was desperate to escape my reality, so I conspired with my father to hire men to attack and kill the guards who were scheduled to take me to the hospital after I planned to feign an illness. The escape plot completely collapsed when the man my father offered four hundred dollars to turned out to be a police informant.

Calvin

What truth was hardest to escape when you were alone at night?

White Male Guest

The hardest truth to escape was the sheer scale of the lives I had destroyed. For years, I kept it hidden, but by late 1988, the weight of what I had done caught up to me. I contacted investigators from Florida and Missouri and gave detailed, recorded confessions, providing the exact layouts of the homes and the precise details of how I had taken the lives of women like Jeanette Wade and Betty Brunton.

Calvin

When the law finally closed in, how exactly were you brought to justice? Walk me through the final arrest, the charges that ultimately stuck, and the legal outcome of your trials.

White Male Guest

After the murder of Mary Fleming, a police sketch led authorities to identify me. On August 7, 1980, they tracked me down to my sister's house, where I tried to slash my neck and wrist before being taken into custody. I was charged with capital murder. After a swift trial where my attorney called zero defense witnesses, the jury deliberated for just over an hour, found me guilty, and recommended the death penalty. Justice Edward Hodge sentenced me to death.

Calvin

What’s the craziest rumor ever told about you, and what part of your story has been exaggerated the most?

White Male Guest

During my trial, my defense team tried to float a story that I was merely an accomplice to a mysterious male hitchhiker who was the actual killer, and that I had only killed the victim by accident. The prosecutor easily exposed these stories as completely fabricated, conflicting myths.

Calvin

What is the biggest misconception people have about your life?

White Male Guest

The biggest misconception was that I was a calculated, clear-minded monster acting with full competence. The reality is that I was a severely broken individual with extensive, documented brain damage and epilepsy who spent years bouncing between prisons and mental institutions like Mount Park Hospital and Phoenix State Hospital.

Calvin

What would surprise people most about your ordinary, human side?

White Male Guest

People might be surprised to know that I briefly tried to live a structured, ordinary life. I joined the U.S. Army in 1968 to serve my country, though I was ultimately discharged very quickly once the military realized the severity of my mental illness.

Calvin

When, where, and how did you pass away?

White Male Guest

I passed away on November 29, 1995, at the Potosi Correctional Center in Missouri. My life was ended by the state via lethal injection.

Calvin

Was your downfall caused more by your own flaws or by the world changing around you?"

White Male Guest

My downfall was caused by my own horrific, violent actions, compounded heavily by a catastrophic failure of my own biology and a legal system that completely overlooked my severe mental incompetence and brain damage when deciding to execute me.

Calvin

What past regrets did you carry with you to the end? If you could erase one decision from your life, would you—or was it necessary to become who you were?

White Male Guest

In the final years leading to my execution, I carried massive regret for the families of my victims. I tried to clear my conscience by confessing to thirty-one murders across eleven states, helping authorities successfully close fifteen unsolved cold cases to provide some semblance of answers to the families I devastated.

Calvin

What scared you more: getting caught, losing power, or being forgotten?

White Male Guest

Near the end, what scared me most was leaving the world without answering for the full scope of my actions, which is why I spent my final years on death row opening up to detectives to confess to dozens of unsolved crimes.

Calvin

When you look back now, do you see yourself as the villain, the hero, or something in between?

White Male Guest

I look back knowing I was a villain who brought immense tragedy to innocent people, though I spent my final days trying to cooperate with the law to at least bring truth to the chaos I left behind.

Calvin

Do you have any closing remarks about the interview or the stories you shared that you would like to share with the listeners before we sign off?

White Male Guest

I just hope that by finally laying out the truth of my actions and the reality of my broken mind, it brings some closure to the past and shows how critical it is to address severe mental trauma before it destroys lives.

Calvin

And that wraps up another conversation from beyond the grave. Thanks for joining us on The Headstones and Microphones Podcast. Remember—Do better with the life you have been given and choose to do good in this life. Please help spread the word by sharing and following the pod.