Plague of Strength

I think it goes without saying at this point that humanity is a colossal dumpster fire, and we have few redeeming qualities as a species beyond the fact that dogs and cats like some of us… and we have a propensity for culling our own numbers when need be. This series is about those people- the people who take it upon themselves to trim the fat from our numbers, either out of a desire to do the world some good or just because they’re crazier than a bag of wet cats (likely the latter and almost invariably making things worse).

The Killer Workouts series highlights the people whose workouts might not have killed anyone (rhabdo rarely does), but the people who came up with them sure as fuck did. We’re talking jacked motherfuckers who turned into vicious slaughterbeasts for one reason or another and the workouts that had them looking fantastic while picking up corpses and putting them down again.

Even prior to developing his taste for raw human souls, absolutely no one who ever met Craig Titus liked that prick. He was the type of inconsiderate diva who would pin in the back seat of a rental car and then leave his uncapped needles coated in his VD of the week on the seat for others to sit on. He was the type of guy to blot the fucking grease off his pizza, and the type of dickhead who’s smug about the fact brings his own bottle of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray to restaurants.

Not only that, but he was just a stupid prick in general- his idea of conversation was looking at himself in a reflective surface and muttering “uh huh” when other people spoke, though it was not because he was thinking deep thoughts for himself- the man is as close to intellectually disabled as a person could be and manage to feed themselves. In short, he was exactly the type of guy to commit a murder in a city that rivals London for the amount of constant surveillance it has, then to purchase all of the materials for disappearing the body in his own car and using his own credit card, with a body pretty obviously in the trunk… and the type of guy to tell all of his followers on Myspace that he was planning to flee to a non-extradition country and provide them with the gate number of his flight so people could see him off before he fled. Thus, if you met Craig Titus and didn’t hate the motherfucker, it meant that you were more likely than not to have committed armed robbery and home invasion in your life, and that you’re the type of shitty person most people think Russia’s Black Dolphin prison was invented (and not in a cool HH Holmes-meets-Carl Panzram way).

“Craig Titus kind of had the moniker of the bad boy of the fitness world. He kind of had a temper; he didn’t play by the rules.”

Which I suppose is how a news anchor who wanted to deathmatch-fuck 2005-era Titus describes one of the most unpleasant shitbirds in a sport packed to its erect nipples in pathological narcissism. Another, more accurate, way to describe him is “a person you instantly despise and want to jerk the steering wheel and smash the back half of the car into a fucking bridge abutment to horribly maim, but not kill, the orange fuck knuckle littering your back seats with uncapped pins.”

In spite of his general intolerability, Titus was beloved by bodybuilding fans because he was a dickhead golden boy everyone believed destined for the Olympia crown- the champion Jay Cutler actually became shortly thereafter with a very similar build and overall look, but somewhat less of the attitude that Titus had.

A living embodiment of the E-Town Concrete line, “I’m here to win / I ain’t trying to make friends / so lose the smile / there’s no need to pretend,” Titus had a hard time winning his pro card simply because everyone (except for badass Aussie giant killer Lee Priest, who liked him for the fact he didn’t take the shows too seriously) fucking hated him. He won his first show with such ease that it seemed he was destined for greatness, but endless hard fucking by the judges made it apparent that if Titus was gonna be a fucking prick, the judges were going to punish him for it.

Craig Titus Vital Statistics

Height: 5’9″

Weight: 240-250lbs (in-season); 270lbs (off-season); ~180lbs (after three months in jail)

Arms: 21″

Best Lifts: I honestly couldn’t track down any of his maxes, but dry as shit, one week out from a show in 1996 (so quite a bit lighter than at his biggest), he was hitting the 140s for five or so on incline dumbbell press and had some of the prettiest squat form you’ll ever see.

Number of victims: 1

Date of Murder: June 22-27, 2007

Date of Arrest: December 23, 2005

Date of Birth: January 14, 1965

Victim Profile: Melissa James, 29 (his personal assistant)

Method of Murder: Undetermined

Location: Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

Status: Sentenced to 21 to 55 years in prison on August 22, 2008

Infamous for once saying, “Dude, you don’t get this big without doing steroids,” Titus eventually won his pro card after battling some seriously tough competition in the form of Dennis Newman (a dude who was literally Superman but of whom you’ve likely never heard because right after getting his pro card he was diagnosed with leukemia), the late monstrous humanoid Mike Francois, future Mr. O Dexter Jackson, and Phil Herndon, who was essentially the Fantastic Four’s Thing prior to becoming an intolerable natty bitch.

True to form, Titus was almost immediately sent to prison on drug charges (steroids and ecstasy) after winning his pro card, so his entrance into the pro ranks was somewhat delayed. As such, after winning his pro card in 1996, Titus didn’t compete again until 2000. Titus made steady, if incremental, progress over the following five years, and because of his All-American good looks and his ridiculously abrasive attitude, Titus was constantly in the magazines doing training shoots- good looking plus “edgy” equals profits, it seems.

Making no friends in the effort, Titus fought and clawed his way to prominence as a pro and a celebrity trainer. As he closed in on what seemed to be an inevitable Olympia title, Titus got into it with former WWE heavyweight and real-life bad motherfucker Booker T in Gold’s after Booker T failed to rerack his weights (a fight Titus lost after sneaking Booker T with a weak punch and then got dropped by a single punch from 6’4″ 260lb Orlando Jordan), and engaged in an endless war of words with bodybuilder-turned-MMA-fighter Phil Baroni after tuning up a member of the Lion’s Den in the parking lot outside of a bodybuilding show. He was also the personal trainer for fellow dickhead Vince Neil of Motley Crue for his reality show-driven comeback, as well as the after-party coordinator for most of the major IFBB shows.

Though you’d think the latter bit would endear him to his fellow bodybuilders, that was not the case- everyone from UFC fighters to WWE stars to bodybuilders to random pedestrians hated Titus. More people in Seattle like Donald Trump than do random Earthlings who like Craig Titus. Hell, AOC would get a ticker tape parade in Alabama before you could find a hundred people who wanted to be within 500 yards of Titus if there wasn’t free coke/meth/E involved.

However undeniably awful he was, however, he looked like Hitler’s wet dream and he was never fucking dull, which is how he ended up on the cover of more than 100 magazine covers.

“Whether you worship the guy or think he’s a jackass, you have to admit he makes the boring sport of bodybuilding a lot more exciting. Craig is now 36 years old, so I wondered if he was finally getting sick of his whole bad boy image.

‘I like it as long as they are talking about me,” he replied. “I’m in print all the time so at least people never forget who I am.’

Over the past couple years the gossip columns and bodybuilding websites have had plenty of material to work with regarding the long-running feud between Titus and King Kamali. The 2001 Pro Ironman, in particular, sold a lot of tickets based on some fans hoping to see an onstage fistfight.

‘Actually, I am getting a little sick of the whole Kamali thing, but he just won’t quit,’ bemoans Craig. ‘King doesn’t know when to stop, and I won’t tolerate his crap much longer. The latest episode where he called all the athletes who didn’t go to the meeting in Columbus a bunch of cowards was pretty bad. Just because he can’t figure out how to make money in this sport, he wants to drag the rest of us into his problems. If he was smart he would just keep his mouth shut and let his physique do the talking’” (Harris).

Tragically, the Kamali-Titus brawl never came to be, and Kamali continues to suck out loud to this very day. Titus, however, is a man from who you never hear, because he’s perhaps the single worst criminal this side of that retard in Florida who fed an alligator meth. That’s not to say the man was stupid as a general rule, although had you met him you would think he was a full-blown Idaho potato. As it turns out, the ability to get incredibly jacked and lean is not necessarily indicative of one’s intellect. If you can’t be smart, you’d better be lucky, and that’s what Titus was initially- he managed to hitch his cart to some of the best in biz when it came to training, and benefited as a result.

“I worked with Dorian for the 2001 Olympia, and he showed me how to get that dry, grainy type of conditioning- but I came in flat and looked too small,” reveals Titus. “That taught me that with my type of physique I have to be full or else I look like shit. I am always thirsty for knowledge, so the next year I worked with Milos Sarcev. He gave me a lot of excellent advice and I was able to come in much fuller at the 2002 Olympia, yet still with that detail. During this past off-season I consulted with Chad Nicholls on nutrition and made some new mass gains.”

Unlike the vast majority of modern lifters, Titus realized that one size does not in fact all. Like a chubby chick at that slutty clothing store Rainbow, he decided he was gonna need to tailor the shit to fit him rather than just expecting it to fit him off the rack. And tailor it he did- he was grooming himself to battle Jay Cutler for preeminence in the sport and looked to have a shot at doing so.

Sadly, however, he got in his own way once more. Titus and his hot-as-fuck wife, having weathered the storm of his myriad missteps and fights, decided to do what any epically misguided and horny motherfuckers do- get a live-in third for extra sex without the difficulty of tracking it down as the club closes (it is possible to make that shit work, but not with three professional narcissists). He and Kelly Ryan picked up a “personal assistant” named Melissa James for their coke/meth/E-and-test-fueled shenanigans, as anyone who’s ever tried it knows, having two attention whores in a single domicile is a recipe for disaster, and as it happens, adding a third into the mix seems to end in murder.

Nor was Kelly Ryan just some random normal broad- like Titus, she was a jacked party beast who was a darling of the magazines, seemingly everywhere you looked and yet rarely if ever atop the podium. The two married in what seemed to be an inevitable meeting of hot bodies in the fitness industry and seemed poised to become a wildly unlikable but unbelievably fuckable duo. Yet in spite of their success with the magazines, serious success onstage eluded them both harder than a week off from doing boatloads of party drugs. Even with Titus toned down and “mellowed out,” the man always seemed to be tinkering with the idea of pulling a full blown War Machine and just rampaging through Vegas like an orange Godzilla.

The Murder

Apparently, it didn’t take long for the man to go thermonuclear over some dumb shit. After whatever fucking James did with one or both members of the married couple (it’s still up for debate as to the nature of their relationship, but if you’ve got a hot broad in a house full of steroids and party drugs, I can guarantee you literally everyone is fucking everyone), James stayed on as their personal assistant in hopes it would allow her to reopen her shuttered dance studio. As such, she apparently worked herself like a slave until going unpaid left her in a situation where she was both unfucked and proverbially fucked.

Whether their meth budget soaked up the party proceeds or they just thought they could fuck her out of cash because they were hot and jacked is pretty much immaterial because whatever their motive, Melissa James was pissed. Threats were levied [going to the cops about the drug-crazed lunacy going on in their household would have ruined them financially, if not legally], and Craig Titus wasn’t one to stand for any sort of threat out of anyone, be that person a 115 pound dance instructor or a 260 pound weightlifting, breakdancing acrobat.

Surprisingly, Kelly Ryan was the first to respond, and did so in spectacular fashion, tasing that tiny broad repeatedly while Titus listened from the other room. When James failed to stop breathing from the 250,000 volts of electricity his dumbass wife had already pumped into her, Titus strangled her with both the belt from a shower robe and a speaker wire, but James refused to die harder than Robert Patrick refused to lay down for Arnold. This little jazz-dancing strumpet had apparently crossed the wrong pair of unlikable psychopaths, however, so they held her down and wrapped her entire fucking head in duct tape like Titus’s name was Hadden Clark. And then, just for good measure, they shot her full of morphine “so it would look like a suicide.”

Having slaughtered their very own Rasputin, the two idiots were confronted with the fact that they had to disappear this jazz-handed Terminator and what follows is perhaps the dumbest fucking cover-up of a crime in the entirety of recorded human history. Had they left their wallets at the scene of the crime with a written confession they could hardly have fucked up the disappearance of this broad’s body worse, and perhaps the only saving grace of the era in which they committed their crime is that they were prevented from live Tweeting and streaming all of the halfwitted proceedings thereafter.

And with that, I’ll conclude Part One of the Craig Titus entry into my Killer Workouts series. If you missed the original article on Chris Benoit, check it out here. Thanks for being patient over the holidays- as I mentioned previously I wrote around 50 articles for this site, a book (and its two rewrites), and around a 100 articles for the website Bodybuild3r in 2019… and that was fucking rough. I needed a couple of weeks to recharge the batteries a bit, as I’m sure you can all imagine.

The next part of this series should probably drop in the next couple days, lest you worry you have to wait too long for the conclusion to this criminological masterpiece.

And as always, help a motherfucker out and hit up my Patreon if you feel like this shit is worth keeping porn-and-gore filled, rather than sanitized for advertising. If you already do, I really appreciate the support of strength sports counterculture- we’re the only motherfuckers keeping it alive at this point.

Sources:

Harris, Ron.  Bad boy bis and tris- Craig Titus and his titanium guns.  Muscular Development.  25 Apr 2007.  Web.  26 Nov 2019.  https://www.musculardevelopment.com/training/1035-column-archives/titus-talks/695-titus-talks-july-2003.html

Kihara, David.   Bodybuilder, wife get prison in slaying.  Las Vegas Review Journal.  3 Aug 2008.  Web.  5 Jan 2020.  https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/bodybuilder-wife-get-prison-in-slaying/

McCarthy, Melissa.  Assistant found dead in torched car in desert: bodybuilders busted.  True Crime Daily.  23 Sep 20916.  Web. 15 Dec 2019.  https://truecrimedaily.com/2016/09/23/assistant-found-dead-in-torched-car-in-desert-bodybuilders-busted/

Murderpedia. Craig Michael Titus. Murderpedia. Web. 5 Jan 2020. https://murderpedia.org/male.T/t/titus-craig.htm

The Wrestling Professor.  Booker T vs Craig Titus.  Armpit Wrestling.  22 Jul 2016.  Web.  24 Dec 2019.  http://www.armpit-wrestling.com/booker-t-vs-craig-titus/

Titus, Craig.  Titus talks.  Iron Magazine.  18 Sep 2012.  Web.  28 Dec 2019.  http://www.ironmagazine.com/2012/titus-talks-6/

Liked it? Take a second to support Jamie Chaos on Patreon!