#481 - Layers Of Evil - Grass Valley, California
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This week, in Grass Valley, California, two teenage girls head out for a night of hanging out, but end up brutally murdered and disposed of. Theories of serial killers and cults pop up, but the truth is even crazier. Welcome to Small Town Murder. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder. Yay!

Oh, yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay indeed. My name is James Petrogallo. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wissman. Thank you folks so much for joining us today on another wild, crazy edition of Small Town Murder. No different this week. Wild stuff. A few things. Top of the show. First of all, if you're listening to this early, early release, there is still time to get to the shows in California, right near where this show is actually being broadcast.

Hurry up. Sacramento, April 5th, and San Francisco, April 6th. If you listen to it regular when it comes out, it's already over. We had a great time. Thank you for being a wonderful audience. Otherwise, tickets available for the rest of the year, including 4-20, April the 20th, virtual live show anywhere in the world. Can't make it to a live show? Let's say you're in Australia. No problem. No problem. We got you covered. Cuddle up with your nearest koala and put your...

Eat some wallaby paws or whatever you guys do down there. Watch out for the herpes. Anything you want, anywhere you are with internet. I think they have something, some horrible disease. I think that's koalas. Yeah, that's what you said, right? Okay, yeah. So there you go. I don't know. I thought I said wallaby, then I said wallaby paw. So we're on.

wherever you are in the world, just like a regular live show, but in your living room. We cannot wait. ShutUpAndGiveMeMurder.com and it's available for two weeks after that. So you can buy it and you can watch it as many times as you want. You can re-watch it. You can do anything you want with it. So check that out. We're very excited for that. So there's that. And then Patreon.com slash Crime in Sports. You certainly want to get

that. That is all the bonus episodes and it's very, very inexpensive. Anybody $5 a month or above. It's a mere cup of coffee. Right. We're going to give you your cup will overflow with with bonus and couple hundred back episodes and then new ones every other week. One crime and sports, one small town murder. And how much of that do they get? Jimmy? Every drop. All of it this week, which you're going to get for crime and sports. We're going to talk about this will be a fun one here. The trials and tribulations of Hulk Hogan. Okay.

He's not a lot of no real crime, but just I mean, his kid killed a guy and then his trials and plenty of tribulations. He's had trials and sex tapes and lawsuits. It's a lot going on there. And then for small town murder backed by popular demand, we haven't done it in a long time and

People have been asking for it. We're going to do weird small town festivals again. Terrific. Talk about all of those. That'll be a lot of fun. So we cannot wait for that. That's patreon.com slash crime and sports. And you get a shout out at the end of the show. So there you go. Disclaimer time. It's a comedy show. Yeah. We're comedians. We're definitely going to make jokes here. And people are going to die. But...

For sure. They usually happen in separate places. That's the thing. We make fun of, you know, a murderer. We have to make fun of the murderer. Maybe a bumbling police force that lets a murderer go for a while. We make fun of small towns. We're all from small towns, stuff like that. But what we don't do, what we go out of our way not to do is.

is we do not make fun of the victims or the victims' families. Why? Because we're assholes. Yes, but? But we're not scumbags. See how that goes? So if that sounds good to you, you are going to hear a wild story with some good stuff in it. If you think true crime and comedy should never, ever, ever cross paths...

We might not be for you because that's kind of what we are here. Either way, I think you should check it out and then no bitching later. Let's put it that way. Stole your complaint. That's it. That said, I think it's time, everybody. All right. I think it's time to clear the lungs. What do we say here? Arms to the sky. Let's all shout. Shut up and give me.

Let's do this, everybody. Okay. Let's go on a trip, shall we, Jimmy? Yes, we shall. We will be going on this trip in about 12 hours. So head to this exact area. We're going to Grass Valley, California. Do you know anywhere? Where's the Grass Valley? It is in eastern California up by Sacramento. Okay. So it's up there between Sacramento and Reno, basically. Or Tahoe, I should say, in that area. It's about an hour east of Sacramento. Okay.

Oh, I didn't realize Tahoe was that far north. I guess that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, it's all right there. It's about an hour 45 to Reno. So in between there. That's why when we do live shows in Sacramento, we get a lot of Reno people showing up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just screaming Sheriff's Department. We're like, what the hell is this?

And it's about two and a half hours to Terralinda, California, which was our last episode. It was a while ago here. Episode 411. That was her emo eyes have powers. That was a weird episode. Definitely check that out if you skipped that one. So this is in Nevada County. So they just gave up naming shit here. They're just like, just name it after the next state. It's close enough.

We don't care anymore. Let's pick a word. What's your favorite word? Pick a near state. Area code 530. The motto here, somebody didn't really take a lot of time with this. Naming anything, James. What's the matter? They told the town manager, come up with a motto. And they were like, how about this? And they said, sure, great. Put it on the website. It's a place to live and thrive.

Yeah. Which is annoying because it looks like it rhymes and it doesn't. It's really annoying to look at and read. And they just changed one word of everybody else's bullshit. That's it. And work, it should say. And play. Work and play. Yeah, it's the usual one. A little bit of history here. Grass Valley has had several names over the years. Yeah, this is not the original name. First, it was known as Boston Ravine.

which made no sense. Oh, yeah. That makes very little sense. Can't do that. Yeah, they later renamed it Centerville.

Yeah, that exists elsewhere too. It's kind of center of California-ish, you know, as far as east-west goes. Sure. That's from like the California gold rush era there. And then nearby there was Nevada City. And then gold was discovered in October of 1850. Okay. You know where it was discovered? This won't shock you. Gold Hill. Yeah, right. Where do you start looking for the gold? Well, let's start at Gold Hill and then we'll go. I thought we were.

Fan out from there. There's a gold valley we're going to get into and then gold mountain. And then after that, we'll look other places. So the population just spiked up here, obviously. That's why the San Francisco 49ers are the 49ers. It's fascinating what greed and the opportunity of being rich will do. Powerball, Mega Millions, all those things exist because of it. Yeah, look, go to when it's Powerball Day, when it's like over a billion dollars, go to any Circle K in Phoenix and it's going to be...

Try to buy a soda or put $20 on a gas pump because you can't find your debit card. Nope, nope. Good luck. So this went from having basically nothing to within two years it had a post office and a name and it was an official place. And it was renamed Grass Valley and no one knows why. Oh, okay.

Is it even a valley? I mean, it might be, but there's not many more grass than anywhere else. It's not like it's like, you know, the central, the grasslands or anything like that. It doesn't make a lot of sense. I don't think I've ever seen this area of the country be green either. It's always brown. It's always brown. It's all brown. Yellow grass. It's so crazy. You know, that land, that beautiful land between Sacramento and Reno in there. It's all, no one ever says that. Really sought after shit. Yeah.

The gold mining operations around here ended during World War II because that wasn't an essential war thing. So they didn't do that due to the War Production Board limitation, Order 208.

Stop that mining. There's an actual governmental order. Wow. That's the one. So after the war, they started cranking them back up again. But according to one guy who is a scholar on this, he said by the mid-1950s, mining was no longer profitable in what had been the richest gold mining district in California.

The richest. The most gold. Not enough coming out to make for all the equipment you need to do it. All fucked out. Yeah, it's all fucked out, as we always say there. So a lot of the people who came here were tin miners from Cornwall, United Kingdom. If you've seen...

Deadwood, the Cornish are the miners there always. They have groups of the Cornish. That was a big deal. Tin? Tin is that fucking valuable? I guess it was then. So a little bit of reviews of this town. Let's find out what other people think because we've never been here. We're going to be in Sacramento. We'll fly over Grass Valley, but I don't know. Yeah.

Anything else? So four stars. Grass Valley is where I was born and raised. Oh. Oh, yeah. It's not only a beautiful area, but has plenty of amazingly rich history with miners and just all around fun Grass Valley quirks.

Oh, works. The Del Oro Theater is a must, as well as Lazy Dog Ice Cream, both in downtown Grass Valley, the thriving center of Grass Valley. Sometimes there are a few interesting, and this is with asterisks around it, so I assume they mean sarcastically here, interesting folks here. But what town doesn't have some of those? It brings the fun in.

Oh, that's the town. Weirdos are always the fun. That's where the fun is. Yeah. Yeah. I need a guy with some quirks standing on a street corner, creeping people out. Well, I look at a small town like that, though. I look at it as what are who's your weirdest guy walking around all the time? Because that's going to be the personality of the town. It's, you know, that weird guy walks around. Sometimes it's a harmless, weird guy who just sits there and like waves at people. And sometimes it's somebody like screams at all ladies on the sidewalk. Yeah.

You can tell the vibe of a place there. Three stars. Grass Valley is a very small town. Everyone seems to know everyone and think that everyone's business is their business. That's bad. That's typical. Yeah. And then they say the trees are nice. That's a sentence after that. Tahoe is an hour away. Forget Grass Valley and just go to Tahoe.

Yeah. Anything that's within driving distance of Tahoe just being Tahoe. That's what I mean. Yeah, Tahoe's pretty with the lake and the mountains. It's fucking magnificent. Look at Godfather 2. Beautiful. It's a fucking destination for all kinds of people. Totally. One star, finally. I was born in cool California.

Okay, good for you. Cool California. Cool California. And raised over the canyon in Grass Valley, Auburn area. It used to be a lovely place with lots of nature scenes and lots of areas to go escape the city life of Sacramento and Roseville. You want to get out of that hectic Roseville area. As of the past... Traffic of Roseville. Oh, Roseville's out of control. As of the past six to seven years, Grass Valley has turned into an absolute pit, and pit is all caps,

There's drugs everywhere. You go and I personally, there's drugs everywhere you go and I personally, there's the punctuation's weird here. Yeah, I understand. I'm afraid to walk downtown as a teenage girl at the local high school because of the grass valley gangsters that quote run the streets. Oh, really? Yeah. They're very rough and very mean and very, very disrespectful to tourists and guests.

Wow. They just took over. They're like the cowboys in Tombstone. They just took over. Curly Bill and it's just over here. Sounds like somebody died. Wow. I wish the tourism in Grass Valley would come to a screeching halt for my own reasons, but knowing that it won't, I feel obligated to write this as a review as a write this review as a citizen of the area. This poor girl just wants to take a walk. It wants to take a walk in the gangsters that have the street gangsters.

Population of this town is 13,550. How much gang activity can be happening right here? Yeah. What are we talking about? We should be able to round that up pretty quick. It's crazy. Once there's everybody except for that girl. I was going to say, like, in L.A., there's way more than 13,000 gangsters. Never mind. Yeah.

This is crazy. So way more females than male. I'm talking 55% female here, which is a weird. These gals should shape ship. I mean, yeah. These fucking guys out. The guys are up. They have it too easy there. That's why they're like, well, I mean, it's 55% female. So we can bathe out and we want the numbers are working for me. Let's just say that.

So median age is a little bit higher. There's a lot of old people here. 85 and older is way over what it usually is. Less married people, more single with children people here. Race of this town, 82.4% white, 0.3% black.

Not a lot there. 0.9% Asian, 11.4% Hispanic. So it's a pretty for California town. It's people don't realize in central California, like out of the cities, it's mainly, you know,

It's mainly like, you know, descendants of Okies from that's who came here. You know, pretty frightening. Yeah. It's a dust bowl escapees that moved here and populated these 30 minutes away from the coast. And it's fucked up. Yeah. Oh, well, it gets messy there real fast. Yeah. Yeah. It goes from crack to meth fast, which is a real quick to meth.

Yeah. Religion in this town, 31.6% religion. So religious, so less than the average here. And the most here are other Christian. So I don't know what that is. It could be anything. But there's a few Mormons here, a couple of Lutherans, a Pentecostal thrown around there for fun. Just Jesus. Just Jesus-centric. Just Jesus-y people here. And the unemployment rate here is higher than the national average. The median household income is way lower.

Rest of the country, it's $69,000. Here, it's $44,906. Oh, no. Much lower. But the median home cost here, $497,400. That's crazy. You can add $44,000 a year. I don't know how that works. What the fuck is that? I don't know, but we'll find out here because we have for you the Grass Valley, California Real Estate Report. Real Estate Report

The average two-bedroom rental here goes for $1,700. So, pricey. It's outrageous. Pricey. Here is a one-bedroom, one-bath, 704-square-foot, ugly little blue trailer. Yeah. It is a sad, sad... It's like a faded blue, too. Like, the sun has really beat it. It's sad. Sad.

This is not a good existence. No. This is a place they, like, find somebody after they've, like, dropped out of the public eye. And they're like, where have they been for 30 years? You know where they've been? They live in a little blue trailer in Grass Valley, California. It's got... Gray Finkel's parents. Ugh. Bad carpet, fake wood floors. Not good at all. $62,000. Oh, my... Oh, my God. So, compared to $430,000, that's...

$60,000? $60,000. Well, it's a...

It's a shelter here. I guess you could buy a fucking sportsman pull-behind trailer cheaper than that, though. Buy a nice truck and sleep in it. I think it'd be better. Here's a, just if you want to build your own place, 24.97 acres, so 25 acres of hillside tree-covered land here. Okay. Okay, it's $229,000 at this place.

It's got, like, hills. It's got two creeks. But there's... What's the fucking draw? Well, it's a swath in the middle of a bunch of shit, too. So I don't know how you'd get, like, anything to it. You can't... It's in the middle of a patch of forest. So there's no road to it. There's no anything. What the fuck? Just a patch. Fly a drone over your land? Look at that. I own that. Isn't it pretty...

And then here's a three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,488-square-foot house. It's kind of your basic average house. Everything inside is beige or white. Everything. It's HGTV'd. It's...

Really weird thing, though, is in the master bedroom, there's a TV above the door, which I don't know how that works. I've never seen that before. You'd have to crank your head back. Yeah, that's great. Honey, this is a terrific show. My neck hurts, though. $825,000 for that thing. For 1,400 square feet. And it's got a concrete backyard, by the way. They better justify it. How dare you? Makes the trailer look affordable now, right?

Yeah. So things to do here. Okay. Here we go. The Strawberry Music Festival. Okay. Another one of these. Another one of these. Yeah. Strawberry Music Festival. It's a multi-day family-friendly camp out with activities and entertainment for all ages. And it's an annual reunion for a multi-generational community of music lovers, it says. So old people welcome.

All sorts of... They have audience participation at the Band Scramble and the Breakfast Club. Band Scramble. Band Scramble. I don't know what that is. You got to hurry and get on stage. Hog Ranch Radio is a pirate broadcast of performances and important information, so you can...

Get in on that. They claim you'll have magical musical memories here. So that's terrific. And when you're done there, go to the Sugar Pine Music Festival.

They didn't even give a single person that's on the show. No, none of them. There's not one person on there. I think it's like local bands. Yeah. Then the Sugar Pine Music Festival. They're going to tell you exactly who's on their stages here. Let's start out with Cal Tucky is going to play. California, Kentucky. I'm from California, but I play country music. Right. We get it. Yeah. We know what you're doing. Mike Campbell and the Dirty Knobs.

Yeah, Dirty Dicks. Do they know? Yeah, I don't think they know. After that, a band just called Lettuce. Just Lettuce. Not like a lettuce wrap.

Head of lettuce. Just lettuce. Plain old lettuce. Let us play. God damn it. Salty Sally is going to do two straight sets the next day. She gets two. She gets salty. Sally, you get armchair. Boogie is going to play. Yeah. Eddie Roberts and the lucky strokes. I want to mix the lucky strokes with the dirty knobs and see what we get. Lucky, dirty knobs. Stroking is what we're going to get. Heart attacks, cardiac arrest. That's what we're going to get. The dead winter carpenters are playing. Yeah. Uh,

There's also Broken Compass Bluegrass. Jesus Christ. And what else here? The Jennifer Hartswick Band. A day of torture, James. This is fucking horrific. I'm sorry. This will clear it all up. The Honey Island Swamp Band. Now that fixed it, right? Now it's better. Swamp? That's it. So there you go. That is things to do. Crime rate in this town. Yeah.

Who the fuck? I want to know, by the way, also Carol in Wonderland. There's somebody for you. These are all people that the only time they're on the radio is via pirate radio. This is music to off your family, too. Yeah. They don't even know that that's why they're playing, but it's happening all around them. They don't know that they're music. And also, there's a band called Diggin' Dirt.

as well. So they like dirt apparently. So I want to see lettuce play. That's what I do. I'll bet they're the shining star. Lettuce is playing. They're playing from nine 30 to 11 PM. They're closing out Saturday night on the Yuba stage. So yeah, I would say they're a big fucking deal.

Big, big deal. It's Saturday night. It's big time. Crime rate in this town, what we're interested in here, property crime is more than twice the national average here. Not great. And it's 13,000 people. James, there has to be gangs out of control. It must be. Well, then violent crime, murder, rape, robbery, and assault, the Mount Rushmore of crime here, is almost twice the national average.

So, again. That little girl that wants to jog might be absolutely right. She's terrified. Yeah, this sounds like a terrifying little town. Well, let's go back in time a little bit here. Okay. To a time when maybe it was less terrifying because there was less people here. This is by far. It's grown some because now it's a suburb of Sacramento. It's an hour away, so you can commute there. But there was a little less out here in the 90s. Let's talk about the 90s. Let's go back 30 years exactly. Yeah.

and talk about 1994. Oh, yeah. We all know what was going on in 1994. It was good. It was good. Boyz II Men. Ace of Bases ruling the world. It's a tough time. It's a weird time, 94. You had a transition. Hip-hop was becoming like coming into its own...

like commercially and becoming a thing and you had like grunge was kind of dying out and all that kind of thing. Michael Jordan and Larry Bird were playing horse for McDonald's food on TV. Michael Jordan was playing baseball in 1994. He wasn't even playing fucking basketball. Was it 93 they were doing that then? Yeah, it was before that. It was like the late 80s, early 90s. Yeah, like Dream Team time. The commercials, yeah. Yeah, that was in 92. The Dream Team, wasn't it? Yeah, it was around then. By 94, Jordan was playing baseball. He wasn't even playing basketball in 94. Jesus.

So let's talk about some young ladies here. Okay. Let's talk about, this is just like the teenage girl who didn't want to walk through town because of the gangsters. One young lady named Dawn Renee Donaldson. So Dawn Donaldson. Both the young ladies we're going to talk about have alliterative names. Fantastic. Dawn Donaldson. Easy to keep straight. And Chrissy Campbell. Yes. I was like, thank fuck. That makes it so much easier for me to remember everybody's name. Dawn is 16 years old.

Okay. She was moved here from Montana with her family when she was nine. Oh. She's been here seven years. They're from Polson, Montana, and I guess they still go back for the summers. She would still all the time go back to spend her summers there so she could go swimming and boating with her grandfather at Flathead Lake. Okay.

Not bad. Her mom said, I was a single parent, the economics weren't good there, and I had read, I think in Money Magazine, about Grass Valley being one of the top 10 small towns in the country. You did not read that in there. What the fuck? Nice place to be, good schools, climate, and economy. I don't believe it.

When you see articles that say top 10 this and there are people that see that and go, I'm moving there. And they just back up and go there. Isn't that amazing? It fucking works. They do it all the time. Based on an article. Can you imagine that? That's why. I could not. Because I'd unseen too. Didn't even visit. Just packed it up and moved. And in 94, it's not like she could go really in depth and go on Google and fucking dive in and none of that stuff. Right.

The Internet in 94 was AOL chat rooms. That's what the Internet was. It was a lot of jerking off dudes. For normal people, unless you were like a supercomputer nerd that was on the other shit. Then there was also stuff. But yeah, she was a single mom and just said, well, Money Magazine says it's a great place to be on there. I'm shocked. She said, I'm kind of sorry we left Montana. I'll probably go back there someday, Linda says. Okay.

So she meets and marries while she's in Grass Valley. She meets a man named Marie Donaldson. So that's where the Donaldson came from and started her own sign painting business in Grass Valley. So that's what mom was doing. Dawn liked Montana and was always telling her mom she'd like to move back eventually here. So she got into rodeo barrel racing.

Yep. Because her stepfather was a steer wrestler. I shit you not, this is real. Murray. By himself? Yeah. How did she meet Murray? Murray was like taking down a wild animal and she was like, that's hot. That's how mom met Murray. Yeah. So a steer wrestler? I didn't know that was a title. Yeah. Does that need to be done for some sort of, you know, not agricultural, but some sort of...

farming business is that a yeah is that part like you have to wrestle it to the ground before he can do that or is this like for show like is this like rodeo where it's not really a necessary it's gotta be that right it can't just be like well steers are out of control that well call the wrestler get him over here yeah put him in line he he gets in there comes over like knee pads on he's like come on cuts a promo first he's like i am gonna make you into ground beef that's right

He's coming off the top barbed wire rope. That's right. Oh, my God. The ribs. Oh, I'm going to cut them and eat them. They're going to be so succulent from your body when I wrestle you to the ground, brother. I'm so good when you cut this steer up. It will already be tender. Everything will be like filet. I'm going to make a roast out of your rump tonight. That's what's going to happen when we get together in the squared circle, baby.

It's got to be some sort of rodeo thing. I've never heard of that. I have no fucking idea. I've seen guys fucking manhandle them with their hands and bring them to the ground by grabbing their rack. I know that was a special job. Yeah, I didn't know that was like the- Bring in the wrestler and he comes in. All right. That was an event in the rodeo. Wow.

So she got it's got to be in the rodeo because that's how she got into barrel racing. And that's a rodeo event. So that's all I can imagine. Dawn's got sisters. She's got four sisters ranging from three to 20 years old.

Well, son of a bitch. So she's in the middle there somewhere out of five girls. Five girls. Oh, my God. Anywhere from three to 20? That's bananas. Three to 20. Linda is raising five girls. Oh, God. Think about that, man. Wow. That is something. So the family here in Grass Valley, they have several horses. They have a six-acre property. Hell, yeah. Where they keep several horses, which that's expensive to keep horses. Steer wrestling and sign painting must pay very well.

He's got to be the fucking intercontinental champ of this shit. I'm telling you. Oh, he's got a belt. He's got a belt for sure. Yeah, it's a big belt. Don, at one point as a teenager here, worked for, speaking of athletes, worked for retired professional football player Russ Francis. Remember Russ Francis? Do I remember him? He has a tight end. I don't know if you remember him, but he's a...

a tight end. He was a big player. 49ers. Really a good player. He had cattle ranchers and shit? Yeah, apparently so. He played for the Niners. So this is outside of Northern California here. And I believe he did some wrestling in the mid-80s as well. I think he was in the WrestleMania 2 Battle Royal, if I'm not mistaken. How about that? They had a bunch of football players. They had Fridge, Perry, and like

A bunch of guys like that. Can't wrestle a steer, though. Gotta hire people for that. He ain't a steer wrestler, tell you that much. He hires a 16-year-old girl to do that. Yeah. Now, Russ Francis used to be a neighbor of theirs until he moved away. So they lived in a neighborhood with a retired 49er. They're doing well. In the early 90s after all those Super Bowls and everything. Do you think she does, like, those elaborate sign paintings on the side of buildings of the brick buildings that are, like,

Like, mad impressive? I don't know. Maybe that. Maybe. I mean, how much steer? It must be hard to wrestle a steer. So you got to get paid a lot. I wouldn't want to do it. It doesn't seem like something I would do. I'd be afraid I'd get gored. I guess when Dawn was working for a Russ Francis, she would take care of his horses and also help with the housework as well.

Oh, so she was like a horse tender slash housekeeper, which is a strange job that I've never heard of before. Her mother said she was really connected with animals when she was a kid. She even had an iguana that she was really close to. Really? She just likes animals. Iguanas are weird.

Fucking... I've never met a nice one. They're weird. They bite. They whip you with their tail. Oh, that tail is vicious. It'll cut you. My stepfather had one and it got out of its cage and we thought it was gone. And then like a month later, it was just hanging off the blinds. But...

It was small when it escaped, and now it was like a full-size fucking iguana. So now there's just this giant, terrifying iguana just hanging on the blinds. We're like, ah! We were like, it had been just creeping around the house for months, two months. Eating God knows what. God knows what. Every cricket and bug, and it's Arizona, so there's always shit. Oh, God, yeah. Who knows what it was fucking eating? Scorpions. Enough to get big, I'll tell you that much. Did you ever lose a cat, maybe? Maybe.

My mother's a little lap dog gone. I don't know. Maybe that's what happened to it. Hey, everybody. Just going to take a quick break from the show to tell you about one of the safest sponsors you could ever see. Simply safe. Simply safe.com. S I M P L I safe.com. Totally. And if you're anything like us, you think a lot about the security of, of,

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Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash smalltownmurder to get free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com slash smalltownmurder. Now back to the show. So, holy shit. Dawn is estranged from her birth father, doesn't meet her birth father until she's in her teens. Yeah. So that's connected with animals, her and her mom, steer wrestling stepdad, and an out of the picture dad is how...

Her whole thing is going here. She's a student at Silver Springs High School. Okay. Which is a... I don't know why she's here. This is the strange part. Okay. It's a very small school with about 70 students in it. Huh. And it's primarily for...

high school students who are pregnant or young mothers. Oh, so either they're pregnant or just had kids and they're 16, but she's not pregnant and has no kids. I'm not either of those things. Neither of those things. So out of the 70, I don't know how many of them have no kids and aren't pregnant, but Dawn is in that group. I don't understand why she's going to the school, but who knows here? Um, no, no,

It's high school. It's regular day school. You go, hmm. It's not one of those Phoenix strip mall, fly-by-night high school programs. Yeah.

Paradise Valley used to have school at night for the girls that had babies and couldn't be there during the day because they had shit to do. I remember that. Yeah, that's... Remember being in like 10th grade and there'd be like the pregnant girl and you're like, oh no, what's going to happen there? I remember being very worried and thinking, oh my God, somebody did that. And like, we're the same age. She must be terrified. Because if I did that to her, I'd be fucking terrified. Yeah.

He better be here sweating it, too. He better be one of these boys running around here. Man. Dawn, though, she wasn't interested in motherhood or any of that shit. She was talking about joining the Marines. Wow. Yeah. She's like, I'm going to go. I mean, she's already doing barrel racing, and she does rugged shit. She hangs around a steer wrestler, for fuck's sake. I mean, you know. She does interesting shit, too, every day. Yeah.

From the school she goes to to the jobs she does, it's all bizarre anyhow. It's all very strange. She's very energetic and gregarious, but she also, at night, she likes to sit down and take it easy and quiet. She likes to write poetry as well. Do we have any? No, we don't have her poetry, but she writes poetry. Yeah, that's what I really wanted to hear, a 15-year-old's poetry. You know what I want to hear? A teenager's poetry. Nothing more than that.

If I go my whole life. That's all we have for the next two hours for you guys, just teenage poetry. Teenage prose. It's all about, you know, they didn't have what I wanted in the cafeteria. Yeah. Bobby doesn't like me. It's a funeral sonnet. Yeah. I don't want to hear it. That would be the worst show ever if we were like, I'm going to read many, many paragraphs of this young lady's poetry.

Maybe that's our next show. Did you ever go out with a girl in high school who wrote poetry? Yeah. Oh, it was a nightmare.

I went out with a girl, had a whole book of it and wanted to fucking read it to me. And it was all about how her sister was mean to her and her other sister was, it was a fucking mess. She was a twin and a middle child. Oh God. The thing about poetry is boy, do they want you to hear it? Oh, they want you to hear it. And this girl was, had an older sister and a younger sister and then was a part of a set of twins in the middle.

Yes, and the twin was like a state fucking champion track athlete and had straight A's and all, and this girl was just like, I'm sad, and just wrote poetry. She just needs somebody to talk to her. And wanted to tell me about it. Great. That's what I want at 17. Oh, shit.

So, yeah, she returned, Dawn did. She had just come back in 1994. She's a nice girl, Dawn. She went and spent two weeks in Oregon after the school year ended taking care of her grandmother. Oh. What a nice kid, right? Yeah. I don't know if there was any barrels to roll while she was up there, but...

She's got a lot of time to write some poetry, though. Yeah. So she comes back to Grass Valley after this two weeks, and she wants to hang out now. She wants to see her friends, wants to go party. She's been sitting with Grandma in the middle of nowhere in Oregon for two weeks. Very little excitement. She's bored. In 94, one thing I will say is we were teenagers in 94. You wanted to go do shit and smoke weed and get out and...

and get the hell out of your house, basically. There was no internet, so there was nothing to do at your house. Watching the same videos over and over and over again. Dr. Dre video with the leaf blurred out. Thanks. This is what I want to watch over and over again. And the copyrighted Raiders logo. Great. This is what I'm seeing now. We know what it says. I know what that is. We know what's in his hand. I know that one says White Sox.

We know it's in his hand that smoke's coming out of that's making Warren G. giggle. We know what that is. Guess what? We're not stupid.

I'll bet that's Old English by his foot, too. You don't have to blur the label. That's why BET was great. They didn't blur out shit. They didn't? Fuck no. BET didn't blur out shit. So you watch BET, they're smoking joints, weed leafs, and socks logos. I didn't even know about BET until I was like fucking 16. It wasn't. I guess it's Arizona. Yeah, it wasn't. There's like eight black people in Phoenix. Never mind. That makes sense. It wasn't very popular.

That would make sense. That's regional. I'm sure down the cable list it was rated very low in Arizona. I assume you're probably right. There was a Spanish version that was much higher rated, I'm sure. So her friend that she's going to hang out with is Christina Maria Campbell. Chrissy, she goes by.

She's also 16. And, yeah, she's about to start her junior year in high school, just like Dawn. And apparently Chrissy had moved here about three years ago, and her and Dawn became friends pretty fast. Yeah. Where's Chrissy from? Right away. Well, we'll talk about Chrissy. She's got a very interesting origin story. She's got like a superhero origin story here. So they were really good friends. They'd go out together, hang out to the mall or whatever that teenage girls do. They do sleepovers together. Yeah.

So, Christina had been adopted as an infant. Yes. Her parents are Kathleen and Douglas Campbell, who adopted her from Mexico City when she was an infant. Oh. Yeah. So, she was like in a Mexico City orphanage, this girl. Yeah, it's tough. So, the family included two other daughters as well that they had. I think they're natural children here. Okay.

Doug, her father, Douglas Campbell, said, I had a tough stepfather, and ever since I can remember, I wanted to raise a child and maybe give her or him a break. Oh, that's nice. I'm going to have kids and be nice to them. I'm going to fix this balance in the universe here. I'm going to care about some kids. That's really, not if I have kids, I'll be much nicer to them. I'm going to go get some kids so I can be nice to them, so I can fix this. I'm going to make sure I have them.

Right? The psychology is very A to B on that one. I mean, it's pretty obvious. So the family, they lived in San Jose for a long time. Hell yeah. And three years ago, they moved to Grass Valley, he says, for its lifestyle.

Oh, not that it all went bad for us in San Jose. No, he said he wanted to slow down and have it. He said San Jose was a hectic place and it was a lot of it was dangerous there, too. And he said that, quote, I came up here not only because I'm in my early 50s because they adopted her when they were in their 40s.

Right. So they weren't going to have any more kids of their own, so they were older parents. Well, he'd have rode it out for 20 years. He was about to quadruple his property value. Yeah, yeah, but he'd also have to live there for another 20 years. And then what was he going to do, sell it and die? He's in his mid-50s already. Good point. Yeah, he's going to be 70. Ah, there, I sold my house. Now I can die happy. Now I can get my...

Now that I just want to sit down and I'll go somewhere that I love to sit down. No, he's got three daughters and he wants to raise them in a safer environment and all that kind of shit. So he says also to slow down and have a safer environment. That's what he wants is going down and chill out. Take it down a gear, basically. Sure, sure. Semi-retirement type of deal, I think. So her father said that Christina didn't make friends very easily in Grass Valley.

So it was hard for her to make friends. She said her father said that Christina didn't hang out with, quote, flocko people and had never gone to a party. That's what she called them. Flocko people. Doesn't that mean fat? I don't know. I thought it did. But I don't know. I'm not sure. But her father said she'd never even gone to a party.

Dawn was the more adventurous one, and Christina was kind of the more reserved one here. She was artistic and liked to do things like that. Her stepfather said, we pursued things she liked. She played the piano, and she liked to do pencil drawings. They are throughout the house. She's pretty gifted. So that's what she does. Doesn't like to hang out with flocco people. And the father said also there was –

there wasn't hardly any other Mexican people in Grass Valley. Yeah, that's tough. And she said, she looks Mexican. I mean, so she said, too, it was hard just to get into groups of kids that were already established. She is Mexican, isn't she? Yeah, she's from Mexico. Yeah, actually Mexican. So the other thing, too, when you move in a small town, it's harder because all the groups are established.

Yeah. Things aren't as fluid. Things are pretty set. So when you come in, there's already groups of kids that have been hanging out for years, and it's hard to infiltrate that, I would think. You know, it's hard. Yeah.

And they all have stories from fucking when that kid was eight. We're now fucking 19. And it's so weird. They grew up together. They know each other. They all went to the same elementary school in a small town. And they were all there when they earned their nickname. It's weird. And then you come in and they're everyone's kind of like suspicious of you. Who's this fucking asshole now? You know, so I could see that. So there were Christina just had her first boyfriend and their relationship just ended.

here in July of 1994 first heartbreak fuck first boyfriend first heartbreak and she went she was gonna go stay overnight at her friend Dawn's house here to you know write some poetry it was one of those things yeah she's sad she wants to go her and her friend are gonna write poetry together yeah I know a girl perfect for you right now watch dad wrestle a steer in the front yard that'll make everybody that'll make everybody a little more upbeat I think here

So July 23rd, 1994 here, they're together at Dawn's house and they've had tons of sleepovers. So this is very normal here. And they're going to leave the house sometime that evening.

The parents do not know their leave. They just kind of slip out, which is very 1994 teenager. That's, you know, you just take out or is it the doors open? You guys are, they're allowed to leave. They just don't tell anybody. They don't know. No, they're not allowed to go out at night and not tell anybody. She's 16. And these are, these are good parents that keep track of their kids. They're not just like, I don't know. Fucking kids been gone a few days. She'll turn up. Yeah.

She goes out with her boyfriend. I don't know what the hell they're doing. Like, they're not like that. These are parents that pay attention and actually care about their children. So Don dislocated a screen for this. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. So that or just wait until everybody went to sleep and snuck out of the house. That seems. And it's a big house, too, with a big property. So who knows if they thought they were going outside to look at the horse and.

They slipped away. You don't know here. So they leave the house at some point. Here is a her sister, Shani, as that's how she goes by S.H.A.N.I. Shani, Shani Campbell. This is Christie's sister. She wrote a thing about her here in a blog that she has.

And she says that the sister here, Shani, says she didn't really go anywhere during the summer months because her friends didn't live nearby. She's explaining the town at the time. She said where we lived, an unplanned trip to the grocery store, which took 30 minutes one way, was as exciting as it got, even for most summer days. Oh, boy. There's nothing here at the time. We're out of eggs. Yay. Yay. We're going to town.

Fuck yeah. Baby, where's all the shit paper? Are we out? Oh, yes. It's a milk run. I'm going to ride my dirty ass into town. All right. It's stanking. Oh, man. I can't wait. People are going to smell me coming to town, boy.

So, yeah, they did all of that, and she said that she was, quote, half jealous and half happy that Chrissy was going, quote, to town. Okay. And she said, that's what you call civilization when you live in the middle of nowhere, town. So that's, yeah, going to town, which is not even a big town, just to the town. Right. She said, even though I was stuck at home with no future plans of adventure...

I knew Chrissy had been held up in her room for the past week or so after her boyfriend broke up with her. So jealousy turned to gratefulness that she was getting out. So she was like, oh, man, yeah, Chrissy needs to get the fuck out of the room. She's been in there, you know, writing, making pencil sketches of her sadness. We need to do this. Yeah. This is not good. Her sheets are gross and crusty. We got to get her out of there. Permanent body line in the sheets.

She said she called Chrissy her best friend. She said, yeah, they were only two years apart, two years younger. She said so, you know, they'd fight and everything like that, but she'd also help her and take care of her. She said Chrissy would go in the public bathrooms with her because she was afraid to go in public bathrooms alone when she was a teenager. Yeah. She said that she would yell at her, though, for using her makeup or for coming into her room, you know, just like every teenager. Yeah.

Teenage things. Teenage. Don't come in my room. You can't come past this point. Did you use my makeup? These are typical things here. Unless she said that her sister's favorite thing in the world, Chrissy's favorite thing is when her sister would do her fire marshal bill impression. How 90s is that? Big Jim Carrey fan. How 90s is that? Do all that shit. Then you could come in and use her makeup. That's fantastic. That's fucking funny.

So she said that, like the past week, her sister was basically in hibernation, she called it. She said, I had to bring dinner into her room for her a few times because she wouldn't come out to eat. She just sat in there. That's depression. Jesus. Yeah, that's first depression.

Yeah. She doesn't know, oh, yeah, this happens, and then you feel better after a while. She's like, this pain will never stop. Right. I didn't know that an overload of processed sugar would fix this. I had no fucking clue. Apparently it does. I had one jolt colon. I'm feeling much better now. It's the 90s, baby. Go get yourself a jolt and get back out there. Come on. Grab a jolt and a carton of Haagen-Dazs. You're going to be so smiley real quick. And put on BET. Nothing is blurred out. Yeah.

And they loved rap music, too. Dawn would bump it from a room. She loves rap music. So these are girls that we would have hung out with. The way they're described, I'm like, oh, I would have hung out with these chicks. Oh, they're into in-loving color teams. Yeah. They get the jokes. Yeah, you're doing impressions. I don't even care if it's a hacky thing that everybody else was doing at the time. If you got a half-decent impression as a teenage girl...

I like you. We're going to be friends when I'm a kid. Throw me some homie the clown. Let's get after it. That didn't sound good. That sounded like an adult saying that. If you do this as a teenage girl, I like you. I meant that from a 15-year-old's mouth, not from my mouth now. Not from a man in his 40s because that would be fucking weird. I want a line of talent show girls at your front door. Yeah, I don't need that at all.

Me closing the fucking curtains. Get out of here. No. It was a joke. Fucking weirdos. You think I work for Nickelodeon? Leave me alone. I was just kidding. Just kidding. I meant when I was younger. When I was your age. What? You weren't even born yet, so go away. Because I'm your mom's age. Man. So she said, the sister said she was familiar with Don. Yes.

She said she'd stayed at their house a few times, so she knew her from that. She said she never heard of a guy they were supposed to hang out with that night that she was going to sleep over at dawn. It's a guy named Sam. She said she didn't know anything about Sam except that they were supposed to hang out with him. Okay.

So I guess she said that Chrissy was hanging out with Don that day. And the sister said, quote, at this point in my life, I would have been labeled a goody two shoes. Someone who didn't break rules, thought sex was gross and certainly wouldn't be drinking or smoking. She said every time Chrissy talked about sex, I would gag and squeal.

Yet be amazed at how grown up she was compared to me. It was a big difference between 16 and 14. There is, yeah. Junior and freshman are a big, big difference there. She said even though two years separated us, she said she, meaning Chrissy, had started smoking cigarettes a few months prior, and I just thought it was the worst thing she could do.

Every teenager. If you were a hangout kind of a kid, you smoked cigarettes back then. There were cigarettes around, yeah. She said, even though I was a brat, I never once told on her and she would freely smoke around me and tell me when she was going to do something she wasn't supposed to do.

Her sister was helping her cover her tracks and shit here. She said, as we stood in my bedroom, she proudly gloated how a boy was picking her up and how she was going to smoke weed for the first time this weekend. So she's psyched. Yeah, she was like, I'm hanging out with a boy and smoking weed. It's going to be weed. It's very 16-year-old girl. So she said she grabbed a tiny bottle of alcohol my aunt had given me purely for decoration and

as drinking in my opinion was just wrong i don't know if it was a pretty little bottle or some i don't know what it was one of those like a fifth of fucking why would you give a why would you give a 13 year old a bottle of crown royal and go isn't that velvet bag nice like what a weird thing to do you can store things in there as a decoration it's just weed that goes right

I guess she said anything else go in a crown Royal bag other than weed, like you bowls and shit like that. You keep in there glass things. Yeah. We all things for weed. If you, maybe if you're a classy crackhead, you can keep your crack pipe in there. Maybe. Yeah.

I don't want to get scratched. Very classy. I don't want to break my crack pipe. This is my favorite one. So she said that she drinking, in my opinion, was just wrong. And she started sipping it like the badass older sister she always lived up to be. We only stood there for several minutes before a little truck pulled up beside our property.

I watched from my window as her four foot nine inch frame. She's a tiny girl. Four foot nine inch frame dressed as always in her big, long, baggy gangster white pants. Gangsters in quotes. Nineties pants, big, giant fucking baggy pants and black T-shirt walk toward a little yellow beat up truck. Cool chick is what it sounds like. You know what I mean? Like I said, we were teenagers. We'd be like, that's a cool chick right there.

So Christina goes to Dawn's house to spend the night, like we said, but then they're not there in the morning.

The next day, Linda Donaldson, Dawn's mom, said that the family without Dawn and Christina went to a rodeo because it was planned. Yep. You know, Papa's wrestling some steers. You got to be there to support. He's the he's the Brahma bull right now because the rock doesn't exist. Plus, he could get gored. And this might be the last time we're going to see him. So let's get in there and we all got to go. Give dad our support here.

So she said, quote, I had no idea they were planning on leaving. She said that she didn't think her daughter ran away or anything. She just she thought the girls got up earlier and left. She didn't even think they left the night before. She had no idea what happened. 5 a.m. They're out down at the diner getting biscuits and gravy or some shit. Maybe they went out for a walk or to somebody's house or maybe there was an event. Who the hell knows? But she said we were all happy. She just left with her purse.

So she just left, took off, took her purse. That was the only thing missing there. And there's no phone back then or anything. So did she take her phone with her? None of that. They said they only realized that the girls weren't there when they checked on the girls the next morning. They looked all around. And when they came back from the rodeo, they still weren't around. There's no note there.

There's no cell phones to text them, where are you, none of that kind of shit. So later on, they go to the police and report them missing that afternoon because they can't find them. Right. Which, I mean, I get it, I guess. You know, if they're not normally kids who wander off, like if it was me as a teenager, eight hours of not hearing from me, don't call the cops. I could be doing anything. But if your kid is, like, you know, reliable and not a fuck-up, then probably you should...

Even in that case, if you're a girl, if it's a girl and I haven't heard from her in 10 minutes, I'm finding out where the fuck she is. If it's my daughter, it's different. If it's my son, I'm going, what is this asshole doing now? That's what I'd say. Who do you think you are walking away and not telling me? That's the conversation we have. My father would have never thought for one second of time that something had happened to me. He would have just thought I was doing something bad, not paying attention and listening. That's all.

Doing something I'm not allowed to know about because I'll have to yell at him about it. He wouldn't have said, I bet he's in danger. I'm worried about him. That wasn't what it was. And if he is in danger, it's of his own volition. Because he's a jerk-off. That's what he would have said. He's 6'4". He's fine. No one's fine. He'll handle himself. He brought this upon himself. Yeah. He's an idiot. And then he'd be mad at me rather than being worried about me. That's the difference here.

That's the answer. They look for them, look for them. No one can find them. Oh, boy. They disappear into thin air. What? So they say, well, where the fuck did they go? So through the teenage grapevine, they...

Find out that they were last seen by a friend because they got a ride apparently from Dawn's house to a friend's house and that dropped them off in that beat up yellow truck. Same truck. Same same beat up yellow truck. Now, this friend said that the friend dropped them off at a guy named Samuel Strange's house.

Really? Sam Strange. Oh, my God. Yeah, they had just started. They've known each other a long time, but they just started kind of hanging out. Sam has known the Donaldson family a long time, like since he was a kid. Sam is 21 years old, by the way.

What? Which is not okay. That's a no-go. That is a no-go. I remember the 21-year-old with the 16-year-old girlfriend, and it was fucking weird. Weird guy, yeah. You're like, that's a weird, strange guy. So Sam Arola Strange, A-R-O-L-A is his middle name, Arola Strange. So yeah, they had just started hanging out. He'd known the Donaldson family for about seven years, though, so he'd known them a long time.

And has just started hanging out with the daughter, which seems creepy. He met her when he was what? 12? No, he was seven years from 21. So he was 14. And she was what, nine? That's weird.

That's weird. It's too weird. Yeah. If they were 35 and 30, who cares? But this is 21 and 16 are very different. He's equating it as she was a child then, but so was I. So as they age, he sees them as the same person. You're not. No. 21 and 16 are not in the same ballpark as far as life experience, maturity. You've got bills, and she's looking forward to getting a license. That's weird. Sam should have bills, but he's kind of a fuck-up.

That's the problem with Sam. Yeah. He drives a 1978 Ford Courier pickup truck. Ford Courier pickup truck. I don't know. It's a shit pickup truck. It's a dilapidated hunk of shit. I know that much here. Just a normal ass pickup truck? Yeah, nothing crazy. Apparently he had not been around his family for the last couple years. He'd just kind of gone and hung out with the bad crowd. Oh, boy.

And he just recently been allowed back into the family home. Oh, he earned it. Not only to come back, but to live there as well. And it was with the explicit agreement that he would not associate with certain friends and promised he would, quote, maintain a clean and sober attitude.

Yeah. In other words, Sam's been a fuck up for a few years here and not a great influence on two 16 year old girls, especially one who's pretty innocent and just kind of is excited to smoke weed for the first time. You know what I mean? Yeah. This is not the crowd. Clearly the one that smokes a lot of weed. Yeah. This guy's probably paid for three abortions already. You know what I mean? And he doesn't need to hang out with them. Weed is the least of his problems. It's something super. It's something heavier than that that he's used to.

Absolutely. So the cops go talk to Sam and they say, you know, what of it, motherfucker? Like, where's she at? Where's the girls? And he said, oh, they did come to my house that night. Oh. He's very cooperative. He wasn't, you know, didn't hide or anything. He said they did come to my house. They stayed there for about 20 minutes, maybe a half hour.

And he said after that they took off and they said they were going to hitch a ride into town. Oh. Which sounds like something that you do in 1967, not 1994. Yeah. Hitch a ride into town. 30 minutes away? Yeah.

By 94, by the time I was in my teens, I knew hitchhiking was not an option. Yeah. That was, you will get murdered. The 80s had happened, and bodies were everywhere. And they all started by putting their thumb out. But two teenage... But then again, I'm also... I grew up an hour from New York City, not in the middle of nowhere. You know what I mean? So maybe in a rural area, it's different. You can trust people more. I'm not sure. I do remember walking home from school, and anytime anybody was joking around, they would put their... You know what I mean? People would...

walking down the busy street hitchhiking and people were laughing at it. What are you doing? Yeah, obviously. What if they stop? Yeah. If they stop, you've got to run away because that means they're trying to molest you. Yeah. That's probably what we would do if they stopped. Run the other direction. Holy shit. Run. Uh-oh.

Guy's got his dick out already. He pulled over with his pants down. Holy shit. We were just kidding. So Sam Strange says, quote, they said that they he said they walked away saying they were going to hitchhike to Grass Valley to party. That was the quote he gave.

So they said, well, where were you the rest of the night? And he said, well, I was home and I stayed home and watched TV. They stopped by for a half hour. They were like, anybody see you at home watching TV? No, not at all. His parents were out. They were gone out of town. So he had the house to himself. So he's like, it was just me by myself watching TV. That's not good. No. And you can't like check his internet activity then to make sure he was doing shit because there is none. There's none of that. So we can't check his Netflix queue and see what he's been watching. And if he had something on, none of that shit. Yeah.

So they were like, that's – so two girls come over. That's coming one day, right? Yeah, absolutely. They're cracking a case that way some day. Absolutely. They're totally going to be doing it. What were you doing? You were watching – well, it says here you weren't watching that. It says here you were – Google was asking you if you were still watching. Yeah, and your computer was activating Pornhub. You're a liar. So they said you're –

You have no witnesses that saw you. Two girls who are now missing were last seen with you. Right. And you have no fucking alibi. And nobody can corroborate anything you said. You're kind of a scumbag, too, in town. And you're not trustworthy. We're going to have to go ahead. And there's inconsistencies in your accounts. One minute you said this. Next minute you said that.

We're a little leery of this. We're going to have to ask you to take a polygraph test. Oh. He says, no problem. Takes a polygraph test, passes it with flying colors. Oh. So, okay, well, moving on. Where'd they go party? You know what I mean? I guess we were wrong.

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That's cvs.com slash stories. CVS, making healthier happen together. Then 12 days later, after these girls. Almost two weeks. Two weeks later, no sign of the girls. Oh my God. As you can imagine, being a parent of. Losing their fucking minds. Losing their fucking minds, yeah. So before they are finally found, actually, they're found dead.

About 100 feet off of Ponderosa Way, south of the Highway 20. They'd just been dumped in a remote area.

It's an area where people dump garbage and teenagers go to party. It's a known like because nobody else would go there except if they're dumping garbage. So it's to disappear. Yeah. You can go back there hide behind the garbage and smoke weed and drink 40s and all that kind of shit. So that's where they're found. It's a remote area. It's about four and a half miles from Sam Strange's house. Oh.

And his house is on the outskirts of Grass Valley, and he has some acreage too. These people all are on the outskirts, and they have horse properties basically. So the girls were hidden under styrofoam panels on top of a trash heap. Gross. They were literally thrown in the garbage. Yeah.

Just two teenage girls just tossed on a trash heap. And that's the way they were hiding them, just styrofoam boards on top. That'll do it. Trash on top of them. Yep, trash on top of them. Yeah, no one will notice. It'll mix in with all the other trash. That's disgusting. Both the girls have been murdered here. They didn't die of natural causes and then throw themselves on a trash heap. They had crushed skulls.

Oh, dear God. As a result of multiple blunt force trauma injuries to both of them. Their skulls were shattered, they said, both of them. They were just fucking destroyed. They'll find out they have an idea of what the murder weapon could be. They believe it's an axe. They believe these girls were... Like a maul? Like a maul. These girls' skulls were just destroyed by somebody. There's no...

No proportional universe where this is like a thing that you should do. This is horrible. There's nothing where it's like even... That's not even... They were trying to rob me, so I didn't... There's no self-defense that you can justify that level of violence. That's fucking crazy. It's horrific. This is the middle of the summer in California. It's very hot. They've decomposed heavily and the blows... Back away from the ocean like that? It is fire out there. Oh, yeah. It's hot. Oh, it's 100-something degrees out there. Yeah.

And they had to be identified through dental records and DNA because you couldn't even identify them, how badly their skulls were destroyed and the fact that they had decomposed a lot. So, yeah, they said they'd been dead for at least a week. And they said it was odd because this is a favorite party spot for the area's teenagers. So it's odd that nobody would have come across this in a week and a half in the summertime when kids go to the party at night.

even during the week. Somebody came across it and probably just said something like somebody threw a cat in that pile or something. Maybe. Yeah, something smells. Oh, that smells. Oh, this place smells. I guess teenagers, we don't care. We wouldn't care. We wouldn't look for it. Let's investigate to make sure there's no dead people. Where's the free alcohol? That's where I'll be. You just walk over there where the smell is less. That's what you would have done.

Honestly, it's sad to say it, but that's we weren't looking because otherwise then we'd have to call the cops and then they come and then we have to hide the beer in the weed. Yeah. And fuck that. No way. Nobody. Nobody thought there's probably a body in there. They just thought there's an animal in there. That's what everybody would say. It stinks. They make a joke about that dude farted and then they'd move 30 feet to the east and that would be that.

You didn't shower today. You stink, bro. Kenny farted, man, again. Jesus. Dude, you got the rankest farts, bro. Seriously. We shouldn't have gone to Denny's before we came out here. What crawled inside you and died? I'm not having any fucking idea. Jesus, that's so fucking horrible. So they, in addition to, oh, by the way, they said there is no evidence just to make sure that Dawn was pregnant.

Because at first they were like, she went to the pregnant girl's school. She's probably pregnant. Also, no evidence of sexual assault, sexual assault to each victim. And we'll make sure there's a difference between someone having sexual activity and someone being assaulted. So, yeah. So there's no like forced evidence of forced sexual assault here. So they also say that there is no blood at the dump site at all.

Interesting. No blood. So they think that the killings occurred elsewhere. They got dumped and must have been held for a minute, too, to make all the blood be gone because they don't find any blood here. They said, this is one of the sheriff's people, said they were virtually unidentifiable. We ID'd them through their DNA. The speculation started brewing all over the county. There was a concern about a satanic group about a hitchhiker murderer. Yeah.

draining bodies. And yeah, immediately these two teenage girls are like, Oh my God, they could have been like sacrificed by a satanic cult. I like how they don't, they think satanic group or some like, you know, drooling hitchhiker murderer rather than just maybe just a pervert who's out there. You know what I mean? Nowadays we'd go, okay, who's the, who are the local perverts? We start there and say, this is satanic group would be like,

The 50th thing we talk about. Could it have been, I don't know, satanic group maybe? I don't fucking know. I don't know. We've exhausted everything else. Yeah. We've exhausted everything else. But two 16-year-old girls found in a heap, I assume some sick fuck did sexual things to these girls and had to disappear them. That's the first thought.

And this is how a lot of the small town, especially in small towns, how they thought, because this was around the time the West Memphis three stuff happened. This is all the same time period where in a small town, something happened to teenagers. That was a little weird. They'd go satanic group. It's got to be a cult. Probably. It happened once. It's got to happen every time. Every time. Yeah.

And I would assume, too, in California, they'd probably be after the whole Manson family and everything. They're probably a little touchier to shit like that. You got the Zodiac killer, the Manson family and fucking all these people. So they said there was a concern about this. People started freaking out. They also said this is the police report based on the autopsy. The victims were attacked in a police in a blitz type fashion and probably didn't know they were in danger until it was too late.

Because there's no defense wounds. There's nothing like that that would show they were in a fight. They were just rushed. They got bum rushed. And also, I think in the back of the head is where they got cracked. Oh, fuck.

So they said FBI agents who reviewed the crime scene photos noticed a conspicuous absence of any defensive type wounds on the victim. That's why they also they thought maybe it was a cult situation where they would bind them or something. They said the manner in which the girls bodies were concealed seemed to indicate that the killer knew the local terrain. Hmm.

He knew to go to the spot there where people dump garbage and dump it because no one, you know, is going to say they were there because they're either there to party or illegally dump garbage. So it's that sort of thing. They said that the evidence indicated that the murders were probably an act of spontaneity and the crime had not been well prepared. They said no graves have been dug and the battery type mechanism of fatal injury indicated an unsophisticated attack.

Okay, yeah. It's true. If you're going to murder someone and say, what's the most efficient way? Blows to the skull with an axe are not it. You know what I mean? They're not. Gun, a knife, you have a plan. This isn't somebody who's killed 20 people probably is what they're saying. Unless that's like their favorite thing. What he's into. Yeah. That's what they said. The fact that no graves are dug and all that just seems like somebody who probably hasn't done this a lot. Yeah.

So the school, the pregnant girl school that she goes to, the superintendent said it's a horrible tragedy. We've had the kids get in accidents and all sorts of things, but we've never had murder before. It's horrible, horrible, horrible. And then he says violence is everywhere. It's come to the foothills. Okay.

Violence has come to the foothills. It has visited us. Man. So Douglas Campbell, Chrissy's dad here, he said that it's, quote, it is totally absurd what happened. It's a weird way to describe it. Absurd? Absurd's kind of amusing almost. Yeah. It's a punchline. Yeah. It's a joke. It's a word that.

It fits comedy more than tragedy. Well, it's something that's absurd is so strange that it comes around the corner and becomes kind of funny. You know what I mean? This isn't really... This ain't funny at all, Doug. No, this is just horrible. The other guy had it horrible, horrible, horrible. I think that's the right quote the guy said there. So...

He said that Douglas Campbell, he said, my daughter's a reserved young woman. She's never even been to a party, which I don't think he knows everything his daughter's doing, too. That's the other thing. To my knowledge. Yeah, as a lot of people did. In the 90s, much harder to keep track of a teenager. Yeah. You can't call them every five minutes. You can't go share your location right now. You can't do any of that shit. It's just...

They said they'll call at 8. I don't know. Hopefully they call. That's all you can do. They said when they're done, they'll call. Yeah. I guess they're not done? It's so fucking weird. He said he's very worried now for the 14-year-old, Shannon, the one that we read the blog entry from. Yeah. He said that he's going to watch every step she takes now. He won't let her out of his sight. Oh, that poor thing's life. Oh, Jesus. He said, in a way, I feel sorry for her. Frankly, I'm not going to lose another one. So...

She is in the house for the remainder. Yeah. He's in the back seat everywhere she goes. So I feel bad she's not going to have any fun, but she's not dying on my watch. Sorry. She's making it to 18 and she can do it on her own. No shit. So the next day and that day, the evening news is on television news and the local news and it is.

A huge story, obviously. I mean, in a small area like this, they were informed of the victims' names and people, the phone lines lit up with tips. People call in like crazy. And this is one of those things that people, even if they have no information, they want to be helpful.

Yeah. So they think maybe this will be helpful and they end up clogging shit with unnecessary information that isn't helpful. But they're trying to be helpful. They said that they had nine investigators from local and state agencies that were just on the phones as much as they could be. Nine people just taking calls. They put a call center together basically for this. So they said they didn't know how long it would take.

to figure this out, but the, the cops said that they didn't know how many dozens of interviews had to be completed with phone tip people. He said he would be surprised if the person or people who fatally beat their young women were strangers to the County. He said, this doesn't occur up here. Like it doesn't Sacramento. Uh,

Doesn't it? Doesn't it? He says he didn't remember another double homicide in his whole 20 years on the force. This is the only one. Yeah, that filthy fucking heathen pit Sacramento.

Man. Dystopia of hedonism. If you've been to Sacramento and we have to perform and we'll be there in a couple days, it is like, it's just a boring city. No offense, it's fine, it's just fucking boring. The original Night Stalker was caught there and he was able to blend in because he was just a boring fuck at the end. He was like, where can I go where nothing happens and I can blend? Sacramento! I'll go be boring somewhere.

Yeah, it feels like a giant business complex or something. It's a weird town. It's strange. Interesting. It's a strange place. So the cops said the community is very concerned as a result of the two deaths. The patrol officers are saying people are telling them, we moved up here because we didn't think things like this happened here. Well... And that's... Both girls ended up here because...

One Money magazine said it was a nice, safe place, and the other guy moved here to be safer. Right. Exactly. And to have a slower pace of life and everything. So they talk about a possible witness here. There's a woman named Connie Haskins who is the day manager at Mr. Pocket's Billiards in downtown Grass Valley. Oh.

Oh, yeah. What's that place like? I think it's where a lot of kids hang out. Yeah. At night, it's just all children. Arcade games and shit. Yeah. It's all kids. She says she remembers Dawn Donaldson coming in at one point accompanied by a young man around the time she was reported missing.

She said that Donaldson offered her high school security ID, her ID card, to hold the security collateral for the pool balls and the table. She said, the reason I remember it is because I spelled her name Don, not Dawn. Oh, D-O-N? That's why I work at a fucking Mr. Pockets and I'm an adult because I hear Don and I go, D-O-N. Here you go. Fucking idiot. Okay.

She said, I got her talking about her school. She said, this is what she said. She said, quote, right now my life's a mess. That's what Dawn had said to her about school. She seemed real nice, just a regular kid. It wasn't that long ago. So there you go, Dawn. Jesus Christ. Well, her last name starts D-O-N, right? It's Donaldson. Yeah, yeah. Dawn Donaldson. She thought it was Don Donaldson.

dip shit dip dip shit over there so who the hell did this they're really wondering who did it um

Like I said, they just think it's a local so that it scares the shit out of everybody even more. Well, it's got to be a local because no drifter comes into town and knows where they dump trash. Nobody knows that. Nobody knows. You've got to live there a couple years before you go, that's where I can throw an old refrigerator. Okay, now I know. That's where the old toilet goes. Exactly. So the September of 1994 comes around. Almost two months go by. Oh, my God.

With nothing. They have nothing. They're doing terrific. They're just doing great. So they go back to Sam Strange to talk to him since, again, he's the last person we know of that really definitely saw them. At this time for the last couple months, he's been working as a dishwasher and a waiter for $6 an hour. Yeah. At the Hilltop Estates Retirement Community. Yikes. That's no good. Man, getting badgered and getting no tips.

That is torture every day by probably an elderly woman that just wants cock fucking with him. The hard part about that is if you deliver 20 meals, that means you delivered 60 meals because you had to take it back three fucking times because it wasn't cooked enough. It was cooked too much. Fucking complain about it. There's no bread pudding on this. Oh, my God. It was a mess.

So they found a black plastic trash bag, a black trash bag. Very slow. Very slow to make sure. You take your time. That's right. This was recovered from the crime scene that they had. Once they process it, they found blood specks on it. Okay. It was found near the bodies at the crime scene, as well as some fingerprints. Now,

One of the bags contained, quote, a large amount of blood in the bag. Okay. Found near the bodies. And that's the bag they found a fingerprint on. Yeah. Now, the fingerprint is Sam Strange's.

That's not good. Nope. That isn't good at all. Whose blood is in it? They believe it's the girls' blood in there because they think the bag was used to transport them there. Right. They were taken there in a bag and then just dumped out. And that's, yeah. But if there's like raccoon blood in it, then we have- Yeah, yeah. It could be parts of somebody else. That's just where Sam dumps his shit. Yeah. That's where Sam dumps his raccoon blood, his raccoon corpses. Yeah.

He's an amateur taxidermist, and he dumps his failures out there. The ones that look cartoonish. Yeah, he's like, I tried to make a jackal open. That shit didn't work at all. I ruined three animals trying to do that shit. I just threw them out.

I wonder if I put moose horns. It didn't look right. Too heavy. How would that rabbit carry those? Come on now. Imagine hopping with moose horns now. That's just silly. So...

They also found carpet fibers, vegetation, leaves and things of that nature, and animal hairs on the bodies that were, and this is the problem here, were similar to or and consistent with, there's no actual scientific certainty here, with samples taken later at Sam Strange's home.

So fingerprint and similar characteristics to multiple fingerprints. The fingerprint's more important, but yeah, I get it. That's big. So they have fingerprint and that on one hand. On the other hand, they have cooperative pastel eye detector tests. So they're like, they're very confused here. Yeah. So a search of his property now, because they're going to go search him here.

leads to traces of blood being found in his car and below his porch. Uh-oh. In that truck? In the truck, yeah. So this blood, again, they're going to connect to Don and Chrissy here. The blood in his truck and the blood beneath his porch. Uh-oh.

That's not great. Now, these bags, according to the Department of Justice criminalist Faye Ann Springer, were found to contain flakes that appeared to be dried blood. And in one of the bags, a hair was recovered that was found to be similar to the hair of Christina Campbell.

That was 1994. So much. There was DNA, but you needed like a lot of it. Like a hair had to be totally intact with the root for it to be any good. And a lot of time. It takes a lot. It took forever and blood. They needed a lot of blood like to run something. They would destroy a whole sample to do it. Whereas now they need a tiny minuscule amount that they can. Yeah.

There were cases that they held based on the examiner telling them, if we wait a while, there's better technology happening. If we use this now, it's going to destroy it and we don't know if we'll get anything out of it. Absolutely. Those people wait for years for that kind of shit.

Now, blood spatters in Sam's pickup truck and on his toolbox and an oak leaf linked to his house. It's the same vegetation from his house was found out there, as well as plant material found on the girls' bodies as well. Okay. So now all of this, they also found unidentified, they couldn't get anything out of it, maybe it was washed or something, unidentified blood stains on Sam's denim jacket as well. Okay. Yeah.

And then they found some in the soil near his house as well. Okay. That's a lot of blood.

It's more samples than I'd like on my property, yeah. One part of blood, maybe you can explain your way out of that, but there's fucking blood everywhere. Yeah. Blood on me, blood on the truck, blood on the soil. Blood under my patio? Under the patio. Oh, no. Like it leaked beneath the panels. Oh, no. That is bad. Under there. This worked, yeah. Those girls hanging out under my patio, I told them not to hang out under there. Like, what else would you say at that point? Then it gets worse. Oh, no.

Then they search everywhere on the property, including a pond that's on the property. Because there's acreage. It takes them a long time to search all these acres. They find a pond. Out of the pond, they pull an axe out of it. And so they believe this is a weapon that would fit the exact specifications of what would have caused this damage to the head. You can't tell, but...

This is what the medical examiner said. I believe this type of instrument would have caused it. Then they found the axe after that. In the fucking pond. There's no explanation for that. Nope. It was a large wood-handled axe, sharp on one side, blunt on the other. And divers found it in a pond toward the rear of the property. So it was way fucking far away. Way back there. But there's nothing on the axe to physically connect it to the killings. Yeah.

There's no blood. There's no hairs. There's nothing in there. So they have an ax that is consistent, but I guarantee you everybody that lives out there has an ax just like that. I have three axes just like that. How many do you have? You know what I mean?

You don't live in the woods. I don't know if you have as many axes as me. I just got the one. Yeah, I got a few axes and they're all like that. None of them are in a pond anywhere near my house. It's not one of those fucking three foot long ones you probably have. I got a bunch. I got small ones, big ones. We got hatchets. I got all sorts of shit over here. Mine would be probably considered more of a hatchet. It's only maybe 18 inches at best. I've split logs.

It's an actual... You got one of those, yeah. Fall bunion axes. It fucking hurt, man. It hurts your shoulders bad. If you're not used to cutting wood, that will... Yeah, that's a fascinating weapon because not only does it do damage on that end, but on the other end, it's doing damage. It's doing damage, yeah. On a 43 to 45-year-old man, it's doing damage on the shoulder. It's going to hurt, yeah. He's going to be hot. He's 21, though. He could swing that thing for days. He's great, yeah. He's having a ball with that shit.

So they found that nothing to connect him, but based on finding a consistent murder weapon and the blood and the spatters and the leaves. Oh,

Oh, boy. They decide to arrest him. Really? They arrest him at his home, which seems like they'd want to find something else to arrest him for and hold him for a while and build this up. That feels like they got pressure for it being months old and they got nothing. Oh, they definitely do. They have a lot of... This is a small town. This isn't like a big city where there's been 10 other murders since then and people have forgotten. They're like, what? Have they caught who the fuck got those girls yet? Yeah. This is just two cute 16-year-olds are gone. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, there's been teenagers going, please catch this person so I can leave the house because my parents won't let me. Feels like I've been in Oregon with an old lady for the last six months. Jesus Christ. Might as well be in Oregon with old people. So they arrest him at his home, and he's booked on two charges of homicide, obviously. Oh.

And, yeah, so a cop said, quote, in a case like this, a lot of different people could be questionable. But he was a strong suspect because nobody else saw the girls after they left his place. That is thin still. I don't know what it is. He denies it. He says, I didn't have anything to do with it. And he passed a test. That's what I mean. He was interviewed several times. He always did it. He said that –

The problem is, though, he just said, yeah, they're here for 20, 30 minutes. That was that. But then after a few more interviews, he starts saying, but OK, there was this. OK, there was that. Because they said, where else did you hang out with them? You were seen with them recently. And he said, yes, the day before this interview.

I, we went to another house where I got some marijuana. He said that he had taken the girls to this house to pick weed up with him the day before. And so they were planning on smoking weed that night because he got some that day, the day before. Yeah.

So, according to records, Sam telephoned a friend that day as well here. And the friend corroborated and actually said this and they confronted Sam with it. And he said, yeah, okay, I did that because his friend told him he did it. He telephoned his friend that day boasting that he could have sex with the girls if he wanted to. I could bang both these girls if I want to. Okay.

He said, but you should come over and get one because these girls are, you know, they want to hang out and party and maybe we can fuck them. You know, you would do that if you're 16. If you're 21, that's just disgusting. Weird. Yeah. You know what you do? Go to a bar and pick up an adult woman and fuck her. Yeah. Go buy drinks for somebody like the rest of us.

That's creepy. You'd rather have teenagers over to give him weed and give him booze because he can buy beer. It's not even fair. That's fish in a barrel. Go with somewhere where there's other adults that can buy drinks for people and see if anybody fucks you. Don't compete, motherfucker. Yeah, compete. Get out there.

Jesus, this is America. God damn it. Compete. Yeah. So, yeah, he did that. His friend said, no, no, thanks. I'm not into it. I don't want to, which he's probably an adult that said, I don't want to fuck 16 year old girls. That's OK. Yeah, that seems weird to me. Thanks. That sounds illegal. No, thanks. I'm not trying to go to jail for this. Jesus Christ. So they said that the defense has been able to put forth some evidence that is.

Because right away they start finding some stuff here that his lawyer finds. One is a backpack described as the one Donaldson was carrying when she entered the strange residence that night. So her friend said she was wearing this backpack when he dropped her off at Sam's house. Watch her walk into Sam's house with this backpack on. This backpack turned up in the Donaldson home.

What the fuck? Meaning that says- They got back home. That they came back home and went back out again. That would say that. So that's very interesting. That turned up later in the home. They found it when they were saying she was- Because they were saying, we never found the backpack she had and blah, blah, blah. And that would help together. And then the parents said, we found the fucking backpack. It was in her room. Uh-oh. So-

Also, a motorist driver says at a preliminary hearing that they saw two these two girls, just as they're described, hitchhiking on Highway 20 the morning after the guy said he dropped them off at Sam's house. Like early in the morning, they were hitchhiking after that.

Okay. So that's not – and the girls are – you'll see pictures of them on social media. They're in a small town. They're distinctive looking. She's the Mexican girl, and this one is – you can tell her. So it's that deal. So that's two really interesting factors here. Yeah, that's not good. It says they might have gone home, dropped some shit off, and then went back out again to hitchhike.

Yeah, police need to do much better work than this. Yeah, this is bad. So Campbell's dad, Douglas, here, this guy's really fair, man. The people here in this case, both families, they're incredibly thoughtful and smart people, they seem like to me. So Douglas, the father, said, we're happy to see someone at least as a suspect, but at this point it's too early to make any judgments one way or another.

He said he also has parents who have feelings just as we have as parents. Great point. Yeah. So he said, yeah. Consideration for other people. Yeah. And he said, I don't know if this kid did it or not. They have him as a suspect. But before we say hang him in the public square, I'm going to think about his parents are worried now. You know what I mean? So...

It makes sense, man. Linda Donaldson, Dawn's mom, said that Sam had known her daughter for years and that Dawn had begun hanging around with Sam a couple weeks prior to her death. He was at Dawn's memorial service. Okay. He showed up there, which you got to have some big fucking balls. That's some mob shit to kill somebody then show up at their memorial service. You either are married to them and you want to get away with it or you're like in the mafia. Or you...

You either didn't do it or you super fucking did it. Or you're cold and cold as fucking ice. Yeah, super did it. Yeah. Linda said, quote, I remember he came up to me after the service and squeezed my hand. He said he was so sorry. It's still hard to imagine him doing it. To go, not just to stop by, to go there, mingle, see the bodies, and then go to the mother. You got to be a cold mother.

I mean, literally a mob boss does that. That's fucking cold. Or a serial killer, one or the other. That is cold. Linda said that she was surprised when investigators told her that Sam had been arrested. She said, quote, the investigators really didn't tell me much. I understand. I didn't want to hurt the investigation. But she'd like to know why they arrested a family friend. What's the evidence that you've got that does this? She said she hopes they'll be

She said, I want this to come to an end. I want to know what happened and why. I need to know, as anybody would. Murray, the stepfather...

He reacted with anger. He's a steer wrestler, so... Yeah. You know, they don't take no guff. They don't take no guff. I mean, imagine if he can wrestle a steer to the ground. This is not a man you want to trifle with. This kid has no fucking chance. Murray will fuck you up. Yeah. And Murray said, quote, We knew this young fellow. He was a friend. He's been an acquaintance of this family for years. I'm very angry right now. I realize it doesn't solve anything. We need to learn from this and protect our children. We have to listen to what our kids are saying."

Well, the kids weren't saying anything. That was the problem. They were just trying to rebel and have independence out there. But imagine the next year he wrestled. I feel bad for that thing. Oh, Ferdinand, you're in trouble. He twisted its head off and spiked it on the ground. It was an accident. He didn't even do it to gloat. He just popped one off. He was twisting his head.

And it just spun off the cow's body. The cow's body fell to the ground. And he held it above his head by the horns like a trophy. And put it on. Yeah, while blood dripped upon him. I will bathe in thee. Hook them horns. That's right. Now, Bill Schultz is the Nevada County Supervisor.

His 21-year-old daughter was murdered four years earlier in San Diego. Oh. So he said that he feels good about the arrest. He said, at first, I wasn't comfortable with the fact that the arrest came so slow. But when my daughter was murdered in San Diego, it was the same way. These officers do it methodically, and they do a good job. You've got to get evidence first. Yeah.

If you arrest somebody and then you don't have evidence and you have to let them go, it looks terrible. Something tells me that case in San Diego is a little more evidence. Yeah, a few more, too. A few more people getting murdered down there. So now Schultz said that on several occasions he gave a ride to Dawn. He's given rides to Dawn. He said the most recent encounter was about a year ago on a rural road. He said, I told her, my God, Dawn, you've got to stay off this road.

You can't be hitchhiking on the fucking road in the middle of nowhere. You're going to get murdered. And she said she told him that her friend's car ran out of gas and she couldn't get home. Typical teenage things, he said.

So, wow. So he's like, I've seen her hitch. So she does hitchhike. That's the other thing. She's been known to hitchhike and seen hitchhiking. The county supervisor, David Tobiasen, said he hopes everybody can relax now after this arrest. That's the other thing. I think this arrest was made. We got to arrest somebody because people are freaking out. Yeah.

So we have to. He said, this is a quiet rural community and we're misled into thinking these things can't happen here. Most certainly they can. It's a sheltered area as far as crime. And it's upsetting to see this happen to two young ladies. We were in shock. Yeah. Now, can Sam afford a lawyer, do you think?

No, he is 21. He's a 21-year-old who makes $6 an hour serving, complaining old people their dinners. Oh, God, Jesus. And then washing up afterwards, washing their dishes, too. He lacks the resources to hire expert witnesses to do his own physical tests on the physical evidence. He says he does not have the funds it will take to pay a lawyer through a lengthy murder trial, either. Right, right.

And so, you know, this is a lot here. Now, the prosecutor, the prosecutor, the prosecutor starts out saying he's going to seek the death penalty, but then backs off of it. Really? Yes. And so no, no death penalty, he says. He's not seeking the death penalty. I think because you have a better chance to convict if the death penalty is not in there because this evidence is weak. And yeah, this is bad.

It's bad. And people, even if they're not sure, they'd much rather send someone to prison on 90% evidence, that 90% sure, than death row. Yeah. Death row, you need like...

five people watch this guy cutting her head off or has to be a serial killer. That's the only way you'll get a lot of people who are just reasonable people to say, I want to kill someone. Someone can get killed because I said so. It takes a lot to push normal people into that. It's got to be a very personal and the victim's got to be a very vulnerable and like ugly situation. And if you're capable of still doing that, then yeah, we don't need you.

We don't need it. So the town is actually divided as fuck over this. Wow. People are on Sam's side or the girl's side. It's one or the other. I mean, it's one of those. They said that some people took a look at the circumstantial evidence and said he's definitely guilty. And some people said this is bullshit. They're just using this kid as a scapegoat. He didn't do anything. He passed a polygraph.

And I'm a fan of getting it right as the next guy, but if you fuck this up and convict this guy, and then there's somebody worse that does even worse shit... That's the problem. Now that's a really bad thing. If you do have a cult or a hitchhiker murderer, you got bigger fucking problems now. Fuck yeah, you do. Much bigger than this asshole. So he's been...

without counsel because he had a court appointed attorney named Scott Fielder who will come back later on. He withdrew from the case telling the judge he couldn't adequately represent his client at the going county rate of $50 an hour.

because that's not just for him. That's for researchers. And there's a lot of people working under that for $50 an hour. It's much less than a lawyer would charge for a murder trial. I mean, it's just way less. So they said that there was a court session attended only by Sam and his parents. He had no lawyer. So, yeah, they said that the Nevada County opened bidding on the defense counsel seat.

So they basically said, who, anybody out there, is there a lawyer in the house that'll do this for 50 bucks an hour? Which is not what you want in your murder trial as a defense attorney here. So they're trying to find that at least five attorneys, including two men who counseled him through municipal court proceedings, submitted proposals for the jobs. They have five people putting them in. I'm sure they're people who are just in demand and great, brilliant attorneys. Yeah.

So the judge said he's been studying what he called the novel nature of some of the proposals. Some of them are like proposing maybe money later or like different deferment plans. I'll take a hog. Yeah, they're trying to. Yeah, basically a nice pig like in Hollywood.

Something. We'll do that because otherwise they said like they're all trying to get around the fact that they are only charging or only paying $50 an hour. Jesus Christ. So pre-trial hearings begin on the admissibility of human and plant DNA collected during the investigation. A court hearing here. The prosecutor, this is the prosecutor saying this, mind you. Yeah.

He says that this was, quote, a classic case of circumstantial evidence held together by two threads. That sounds like something the defense would say, right? Yeah. Don't don't tell me how weak your shit is. Threads. It's it's kept together by threads means that it's about to explode because it's not tenable. Yeah, that's that's what that means.

Weird. He says botanical evidence connecting the victims to the residence and two plastic bags bearing his fingerprints found near the bodies. The prosecutor said the inference being that those bags were used literally as body bags to transport the girls from where they were killed to where they were found. Now,

They're waiting for the DNA to come in. They don't have DNA. They can't have a trial until the DNA comes in. Not only was DNA slow anyway back then, but it's even slower when the OJ Simpson trial is completely blocking up the labs of every state fucking laboratory that does this. Yep. The OJ trial backlogs the entire state of California's scientific things because they were doing everything. And that was the most important thing possibly in the world back then for them.

So they said that it's delayed months because of OJ Simpson. Two criminalists from the State Department of Justice's DNA lab testified before a judge that the demands of the ongoing Simpson trial forced them to relegate the Nevada County case to a back burner. Two dead teenagers. Back burner. Back burner. I mean, it's horrible that fucking that Nicole and Ron Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were killed. That's terrible.

But they're also adults. Yeah. And it's a domestic situation. It doesn't seem to be something that's causing any grief anywhere else. I doubt OJ is going to be on the street murdering people is what I'm getting at, other than them. Whereas whoever killed these two. Who the fuck knows what they're capable of. If they're out there, they are going to kill a lot more young, vulnerable girls. Like, that's horrible. There's no way this stops. I don't care who's famous. Fuck that. But.

The criminalist, Mernay Montgomery, characterized the strange, meaning Sam Strange, not the odd, DNA evidence as complex, but said she had completed all the PCR testing and on day this week presented prosecutor with the results. And that's the PCR is the chain reaction shit, the polymerase chain reaction. It's relatively new type of DNA testing at the time. So now it's old baloney.

Bullshit. Not bullshit, but it's, you know, they have better ways now. Obsolete as fuck. Yep. The prosecutor said he couldn't comment on the test results, but court documents and testimony revealed the preliminary reports submitted that it matched one of the victim's blood to two items found in his pickup. Oh. How do you explain that?

That's a tough one. Blood in your truck, man? Blood in your pickup truck in the bed. The judge heard testimony of that person, Montgomery, and the Department of Justice lab director and took into submission the defense motion for the suppression of DNA results, which I don't know why you would...

What reason could you give? We don't need evidence in this trial. Let's do it the old-fashioned way. Stinking evidence. Let's do this the old-fashioned way, damn it. All this newfangled technology is ruining everything. I like he said, she said. Feels good. Yeah, yeah. They said the OJ time. There's only four caseworkers in the lab that do all this shit.

And they said that the backlog grew from 73 cases in October 94 to 100 cases by early 95. They're 100 cases back because of OJ.

unbelievable um that is fucking amazing so they said that they were given the case work in december 94 but didn't actually begin examining the evidence till june 95 hundreds of lives holding the balance holy shit so sam's mom let's talk about her because she is a character tell me why kathy strange is her name she's a policeman's daughter she's uh

Which I always found this. Officer Strange? Officer Strange. Officer going to get me some strange. Boy, oh boy. Now, she's a policeman's daughter, and I always find that... This is going to sound shitty, but I'm going to give a fuck.

female relatives of police officers are the pushiest fucking people. If they get pulled over, they're like, I have all this. I know a guy who's telling me his wife does this because she knows all these cops. She'll whip out like all the different cards and be like, just pick one of these already. Hurry up because I'm not fucking getting a ticket from you. That's how they are. It's fucking amazing. Yeah, I just picture that. Yeah, just...

Yeah. Her name is Cat Strange. That's like two slang terms for pussy. Yeah. Cat and strange. That's fun. That is fun. Well, she runs a personal awareness consulting business, which I don't know what that is. The fuck?

They say it's successful. Yeah. Like a life coach? No. Worst. It's knowing your surroundings kind of personal awareness. That shit. Like for safety, for like keep your head on a swivel, recognize threats, shit like that. Oh, like defense stuff? Yeah. Except not teaching you to fight? Right. Don't know how to fight. Just put yourself in good situations. And then go to another class to learn how to fight back in case you're in a bad one. There you go. But give me money too.

Jesus. She said she'd been running this business out of her home. It was very successful. But as a result of the murder, she's lost all her clients. I wonder why. Because it's at her house, that house where they say that two girls were murdered. And a boy that did. Also, that's the other thing. If she knows how to keep you safe, he knows how to keep you not safe based on her fucking things. Yeah, he knows.

And they also confiscated all sorts of shit in the house. They confiscated her confidential client records there as well. So she doesn't even have all their info here. She doesn't even know who her students are. No, more on Kathy to follow. Don't worry. So the trial starts out, okay? Yeah. Here we go. Opening statements, come on. And this will be a real interesting trial. The prosecutor...

This is how they start it. Screams in the night. A bloodied oak leaf and fingerprints on a matched pair of trash bags prove that Samuel A. Strange bludgeoned to death two Grass Valley girls.

That's right. Screams in the night. Screams in the night. Bloodied oak leaves. He's really trying to set a scene here. Sure is. He compared, he talked to him as a guy next door type. And in his opening, he said that Strange's guy next door qualities remind him a lot of Ted Bundy. So he threw the Ted Bundy stank on him in opening statements. See him? Ted Bundy. Right out of the gate.

Yep. He said, warn the jury bites nipples off and shit like that. Cut a head off. Fuck it. Come back a week later and fuck it again. Oh, that is gross. He said he warned the jury not to judge a book by its cover. Well, he seems fine, but he's not. So the defense in a, in their opening statement, uh,

showed two photographs, put two photographs up of two men that we haven't talked about at all, two men's photographs, and said, quote, these are the faces of the two men who murdered Don Donaldson and Christina Campbell. Two? Two guys, specific ones with fucking pictures. Where the fuck do they come from? He said that Strange is falsely accused of these killings.

And that at the close of this trial, I will ask you to send a message to these men that their day of judgment is coming. The people in the photos. Meaning Sam didn't do it. He then names the two men.

Which we'll get into who they are. We get support from Dove. Hey, y'all. It's your girl, Kiki Palmer, host of the Wondery Podcast. Baby, this is Kiki Palmer. Let me cut to the chase. Did you know that in many states across the U.S., it's still not illegal to discriminate against people based on the way their hair grows out of their head? To deny black folks from jobs and opportunities because they have braids, locks, twists, or bantu knots? That's messed up.

And today's sponsor, Dove, agrees. That's why Dove co-founded the Crown Coalition in 2019 to advocate for the passage of the Crown Act. Crown stands for creating a respectful and open world for natural hair. And the Crown Act is legislation which prohibits race-based hair discrimination in workplaces and schools in the U.S.

Dove is driving awareness by advocating for petition signatures and supporting the Crown movement to create a society where black hair is not only accepted, but respected and celebrated in all of its beauty. Join Dove in taking action to help end race-based hair discrimination by signing the Crown Act petition at dove.com slash crown. That's dove.com slash crown. Was there a crime committed?

As far as I'm concerned, there wasn't. Guilty by Design dives into the wild story of Alexander and Frank, interior designers who in the 80s landed the jackpot of all clients. We went to bed one night and the next morning we woke up as one of the most wanted people in the United States. What are they guilty of? You can listen to Guilty by Design exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

And said that each, neither of them has an alibi. Neither has an alibi. They both lied to police and showed signs of consciousness of guilt. One had expressed a sexual interest in one of the victims and the other had threatened to kill her. And that actually did happen. What the fuck?

Opening statement. By the way, Scott Fielder's back on the case. They must have upped his price, but he's back. Either that or he went, this is getting pretty high profile. I better get in there. I'll take 40 an hour. Yep, he's the one displaying these pictures. He said, these are the faces of the two men who murdered the girls. The district attorney said he's known for some time that the defense posture would be, quote, some other dude did it.

But he said he's still waiting to hear the evidence to support either one of these guys being suspects. Is that the only place on earth that you can do that? Just like accuse somebody? Yeah, open court. A defense attorney can do anything. They can say anything they want. The president killed his wife, not him. Jesus. You can say anything. It's not slanderous. You can just do whatever you want in open court to defend yourself. He's standing there in court just going, Can you believe this? What the hell?

Anything. Tom Brady did it. I just pick a person. And Tom's sitting in court going, oh, what the fuck, man? Yeah. What the hell, man? I'm trying to find another model to marry. So the prosecutor said, I was more intrigued by what they did not say, talking about the defense attorney, suggesting that the prosecution's major pieces of physical evidence were not really refuted in the opening statements here.

Let's take a mid-trial crazy break for a second, shall we, before we get into this? How so? Well, Kathy Strange, remember her? She did some strange shit here. Yeah. Yeah. Cat Snatch did some strange shit. She...

During her son's trial, she went to a family therapist. Oh. Okay. This family therapist then called warnings in to the judge, the prosecutor, and two sheriff's investigators who had been working on the case. What's Kathy B.

Well, they said he told them that if the jury returned a guilty verdict, Kathy Strange, quote, wanted to reserve the right to take out. That was the term she used, the guy said, to take out those people responsible for putting her son in prison. So she said, they find my kid guilty. I'm killing all these motherfuckers. Cat minge. What the fuck? Wow. Wow.

So he said the prosecutor said that he carried a revolver for a year because he was afraid of this lady and know how crazy she was and that the judge installed a metal detector outside his courtroom right after that. Is that right? Yep. Because of her. But Kathy says she denied that she was said she would take anyone out. She said the therapist overreacted when she told him a conviction would be, quote, crossing my line.

And she said, quote, they did cross my line. I know I'll read. I'll be retaliating right now. She retaliates by starting with somebody else, a giant recall campaign for the sheriff, the judge, the prosecutor, for everybody involved in everything. Recall campaign. Yeah. Back to the trial now. OK.

Who are these two guys he's talking about? Well, they are Damian Scott Graham, another 21-year-old, and Alan Pettis, another 21-year-old that he knew and hung out with, Sam. Sam claimed that Alan Pettis killed Dawn, after which both Dawn and Damian killed Chrissy. And he said he saw the Chrissy killing, but he didn't see the other one. He didn't see Dawn getting murdered.

He says that he cleaned up, he helped clean up the crime scene and dispose of the bodies to protect these two guys. But he didn't kill anybody. Okay. According to Sam, he didn't go to the police because they said, well, why wouldn't you go to the police?

These two guys just killed these two girls. He said he was too scared of the retaliation. Oh, yeah. Them and their friends and family. Yeah. Yeah. You know, they will murder you with an axe. Investigators said there was no evidence that pointed to either of their involvement in the murder besides their inconsistent stories and and threats, apparently. Now, they bring Damian Scott Graham up on the stand and he testifies. And that's detrimental.

But not the prosecutor doesn't call him. The defense calls him and they're going to grill him, put him up there, grill him on the stand. Who knows if he looks slightly guilty that that doubt could be enough to get a juror to say not guilty. You know what I mean?

OK. But if he looks really solid, then you look like an idiot at that point. That's the problem. He said he didn't know how they died because they asked him, do you know how they died? And Damien said, I have no fucking idea. And so did Alan. He said, quote, no, I did not. When they were asked if he had anything to do with the homicides, both of them answered all the questions they were asked and nothing. They didn't come up with anything. They just said, nope, didn't do anything.

They said they appeared to be nervous and uncomfortable, as you would be when you've been accused of murder in open court. But they said the defense attorney said, which girl died first? And he said, I don't know. Fucking beats me. Fuck what I know. Then they asked Graham, quote, did the girls have their shoes on when they were murdered? There's a thing about not finding their shoes, which is interesting.

And his reply to that was, I have no fucking idea. I don't know anything about this. I don't know. So neither of them could account for their whereabouts on the night of July 23rd. And both people, both of these guys gave conflicting and inconsistent statements to investigators. Okay. So both of them, until the evidence came out, the physical stuff, both of them are more suspicious than Sam to me. Yeah. But you can't tell me where you've been. Yeah. That's not good.

Graham, apparently in the detective's notes, they found that during an early interview when no details of the killings were commonly known, this was right after they found the bodies. Graham asked the cop if the girl's shoes had been found, which is they were like it was in the detective's notes that he asked him about the shoes. And he was like, why the fuck would you ask that? Yeah.

And the defense attorney here says that he wants to argue to the jury that Graham's question betrays a signature fact known only to the killer. But the prosecutor claims that he could have received that information from any number of sources.

Not public sources, though. Yeah. I don't care how he knows it. The fact that he does know it. It's the only way you'd know. Right. Yeah. There's no official outlet that this is coming out in. So I don't like that at all. Why would you ask that? The fact that he knows it is frightening. Yeah. Even if you read that in the paper, why would you ask that? Did they ever find your shoe? I wouldn't fucking ask that. Who cares? Weird thing. Yeah. Ask me these questions and I can deny and get the hell out of here. I'm not going to start asking questions about shit. That's crazy. Yeah.

So they claim that. Now, in the closing arguments, the prosecutor told the jury that the physical evidence linking Sam to the killings is comparable in strength to the cable that supports the Golden Gate Bridge. Oh, it's that strong now. Not a thread anymore. It's a fucking cable that you hang steel from. Yeah. Yeah.

And you drive fucking 18 wheelers across it. It's a strand, but it's a strong strand. It's several strands in that one strand. Wow. They said that. And when you look at all the strands woven together, they do not break apart. The strands of cable, when put together, hold up in this case. Okay. Now, like I said, he had called him Ted Bundy before.

He said that Strange must have snapped the night of the killings. That's what happened. He said, we'll never know why. And he said that it's probable that Dawn and Chrissy just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jesus. He said, whatever happened, it started inside the Strange house. However, the bloodletting was outside. He said it must have started in there, brought them outside, and then beat them to death and left them out there.

He had said trace evidence found in the girl's bodies, wisteria leaves, plant stem fragments, pine needles, blades of grass and animal hairs match samples from Strange's yard.

That's only four and a half miles away, too, though. So how different is the foliage? Unless he planted all those things that are not common in this area, then that's a problem. They could have been killed in somebody else's yard fucking half a mile away. That is the same shit in it, too. You know, that's the problem here. So...

They said the black plastic trash bags, one contained a mixture of the two victims' blood. Both bared Sam's fingerprints were found at the dump site. That's so bad. They said the victims were, quote, stuffed together into the trash bags, which were consecutive bags off the same roll. He double bagged them.

And they came off the same roll. That's not good. Nope. And loaded into the bed of his pickup truck. They said several smudges were discovered, several smudges of blood discovered in the pickup truck. And he said that, told the jury, one that turned out to be a mixture of the girl's blood and one that proved to be just Chrissy's blood in the smudges.

Jesus. Right.

It actually, though, I thought about that and it doesn't make sense because he said that the guys were there. But that actually would make sense because if he said we got weed, they came over. I gave them a joint or I gave them a couple of balls where it's and they took off.

You're a teenager. You stopped by a lot of people's houses for 20 minutes back then. You stopped by to grab weed from people all the time. Yeah. It happens all the time. Or a six pack or a 40 or whatever it was. And you can't be a scumbag and just pop in, grab the weed and leave. You feel like a jerk. You got to hang for 20 minutes. And the guy getting it for you doesn't want you to stick around any longer. No. They'd rather you be a scumbag, give me my money and get the fuck off my property. Well, they want you to stay for 20 minutes so the neighbors don't think they're selling drugs. But other than that. Oh, there's that too. Yeah. There's that. Yeah. Yeah.

So he said then he brought out the axe that he found. He said it was fished out of the murky pond on the strange property. Is it important that the pond is murky? The type of water matter. Yeah. And he said it was the murder weapon. He said the elements washed away the traces of the killing. But the most incriminating thing about this axe is where it was found.

Yeah, it was thrown away in the muck. Now, the defense attorney in his closing argument, he attacked the integrity of the prosecutor's office. He's going right. Kathy Strange is right in his ear. I mean, I'm sure. And alleged that two uncharged friends, as we talked about, Alan and Damien, are the evil human beings who actually committed the crimes. And they said Sam is innocent. This is crazy.

He said the real killers ran into the hitchhiking girls after they left Sam's house that night. Then they killed the girls not too far from the residence in an area where the same foliage would be.

And that would account for the plant particles. Then they said that these guys came over covered in blood, familiar with Sam and Sam's pickup truck. They borrowed two plastic bags from the open toolbox that was in the rear of the truck because that's where the bags came from. Leaving behind drops of blood that would incriminate Sam, but it was on them from murdering them.

They said that would also account for Sam's prints on the blood-filled bags he recovered from the area. He had touched them earlier when he got another bag. But not both of them.

So that's the argument. Now, the verdict comes in here. Deliberations start out. It's eight men and eight women, four men sitting on this jury here. Three days of deliberations happen. Oh, boy. That's a lot, which there's a lot to go over. It really is. They ended up differing in the degree. First degree murder. I guess they end up finding him guilty here.

Yeah. ...of first-degree murder for Chrissy's murder and second-degree murder for Dawn. Okay, so plan one, yeah. They thought that Dawn was a rage-killing...

And that Chrissy just was killed because she was there and he had to kill her after that. So that would have been the first degree. And then the other one was whatever. Now, he's got a girlfriend, by the way. What? I don't know if he had a girlfriend before or after or during or what. But her name is Casey. And as they announced the guilty, she screamed no and cried uncontrollably. Like one of those mothers on the first 48 who found out their kid is dead in the street and they run out. That's exactly like that.

How old is she? His age? Age appropriate? Or is she 15? Old enough to be in court and not have him get an extra charge tacked on. Old enough to display publicly, I would say. Yeah, old enough for it to still just be murder and not statutory, too. Throw that on there. Now, sentencing comes around, and this case has just started here in reality because...

At this point, Sam says he wants a new trial before sentencing. Okay. Yeah, I would say. Because his attorneys forced him not to testify. Oh, he wants to talk. Yeah, he said, I wanted to testify. My attorneys told me not to, and if I was able to tell my story, then they would have believed me. Explain all this. Yeah. Yep. He said that, quote, they told me we were winning. They told me not to testify. They told me that me taking the stand didn't fit in with the defense they had presented.

They told me we were winning. I love that. They told me we were winning. Now, they would advise him whether he needs to testify or not. That's what a lawyer does. But at the end of the day, it is your fucking decision whether you want to testify or not. I love it. I love it. They said that we were winning. They said we were winning. Yeah.

That's his first thing. You got to peek at the judges' scorecards on a boxing tournament. Don't fuck it up. Yeah. I'm up four rounds to two. We don't need this shit. But no. I don't need to testify. I can just rope a dope and get out of here. Yeah. So, like I said...

whether they advise you to or not, if they're not letting you, you can say, Hey judge, I would like to testify and my lawyers aren't letting me. And the judge will fix it for you. Yeah. You're allowed to tear right. They'll let you testify and they'll probably kick your fucking lawyer off the case.

So he has a motion for a new trial. The judge here says that the lawyers now are going to be called to testify about it. They have to have a whole hearing over this now. Oh, boy. So they said, did his lawyers mislead him into remaining mute, depriving him of effective assistance of counsel? If they said we're winning, that's not great. A great job.

Don't worry, we're winning. But the prosecutor says he changed his strategy when the trial didn't turn out to his advantage. That's what he did. And Strange, though, said if I had to do it all over again, believe me, I would be standing up screaming. He said, I want to testify. Now they let him in this hearing. He has to testify about wanting to testify.

And he does. He insisted. He gets up there and he says, yes, I remember that night. He said my only role was an aider and a better and a cleaner up of the mess. That's all I did. They said, did you ever think of calling the police? And he said, I never thought of calling the police. Not once. I just didn't want to die. Okay. Yeah. Those guys were going to murder him next. Yeah.

He said he stuck to his lie and, quote, promised myself I would never come forward because the real killers are two friends and had threatened the lives of not only me, but my mother, my father, and my 12-year-old brother as well. I'll kill your whole family. Yeah. So his father, Guy Strange. Okay. Wow. This is Guy Strange and Cat Strange. Strange guy. Strange guy. Strange come a guy. Mm-hmm.

He also testified saying that Sam moved closer to and became more protective of his family when information about the girls began to come forward. Like it seemed like he was worried about something like, you know, being murdered by two real murderers or, you know, getting caught for murder would be the other thing why he was acting weird. Probably both are a good reason to act weird. And neither is evidence for either side.

Fucking not at all. So according to Guy Strange, Sam had been somewhat distant from the family and began calling to see what everyone was doing and especially where his brother was and what he was doing after the murders. He kept saying, why is he there? Where's he going? He said that was weird that he was doing that. So Guy said that when the whole thing was going on and they were focusing on the property and searching, that Sam broke down in tears and said, Dad, I didn't do it. I didn't do it.

Because his dad said, why are they here? Did you do this? Did you do something? And he said after hearing from his son what had happened the night of the murders and the killer's threats, he said that Guy Strange armed himself and installed a security system in the home and moved his young son to a private school as well. Locked it up. So now he's got the whole story. Now he's this new story of exactly what happened. And now he's got more details as well. He says, now I'm going to admit exactly what happened.

The prosecutor says they don't find it credible, says it doesn't make any sense here. They said no. Strange says that he says this is what his motion says, quote, Sam Strange wanted to admit the lies that he had told in the first seven weeks of the investigation and tell the jury what actually happened the night of the killings. But according to a statement of facts offered to the court, the attorney, his attorney told him that he was going to be acquitted, that the only way they could lose the case is if he testified.

You're the only way you could lose this for us. He said we're winning. Yep. Sam claims he was, quote, never informed that the decision to testify was ultimately his and not his lawyer's. He said he didn't know it was his decision. Wow. His lawyer said that he couldn't ethically respond to the investigation. He said that particular issue will need to be dealt with by a court. But he does say that he believes that Strange does deserve a new trial, even if it's not for that. He deserves a new trial, and I hope he gets one. Yeah.

So his new attorney here said that strange indicates now Sam says he felt like a zombie for weeks after bagging and disposing of the bodies of Dawn and Chrissy. He said he didn't kill the girls, but he was there when they were bludgeoned and hacked to death. That's not good.

That sounds really bad. According to his description of the killings outlined in his motion, two victims were dropped off at his home on July 23rd, 1994. Now, this is the real, real story he's saying. This is like the for real story. This is not good. He said, and they had been joined there just before midnight by two of his friends who had meth and beer.

That's Damien and Al. They came over methed up with extra meth and beer. If you're at like a hanging out with two girls smoking weed party, you turn the lights off and pretend you're not home when those guys come over, right? I'm going to hook up with one of these chicks and get stoned. I don't need you here. Two methies showed up to...

A party of a man that's 21, his party consists of two 16-year-old girls. Two 16-year-old girls. Now there's three 21-year-olds and two... That's horrible. Hey, guys, it's only midnight. Let's all go to the bar. Girls, we'll drop you off on the way. Good night. We'll send you to your parents. Yeah, we're going to go find girls who have...

You know, know how to have a fucking experience. Basically, really throw one at me. Yeah. We're going to have girls that have jobs and grudges to fuck out right now. Fuck a grudge out against their father. You haven't had enough time to build up yet. So later on in the evening, Strange said he was with Chrissy in a room next to the garage of the residence.

When one of the friends knocked on the door and told and got strange to come with him and said that they had accidentally broken something. When he followed strange, followed his guest outside. He saw his friend standing quote, just beyond the prone figure of Dawn Donaldson. And the guy told him she's dead. So Sam said he approached Dawn's body though, and gave her a tap with his shoe and told her to stop fucking around.

He gave her like a nudge and go, stop fucking around. What are you doing? Don't fucking pretend you're dead here. Oh, boy. Yeah. He said, though, the realization that she was actually dead sent him into a kind of shock. He said he was in a zombie like state. Quote, the world appeared two dimensional and cartoonish. He went into a dissociative state. He's saying here the world's flat. Yeah. World is flat. Fucking up is down. Black is white. I don't know.

But when he said he asked them why they harmed Dawn, his friend said, quote, because she was such a bitch. Okay. Doesn't sound like her. Number one. And number two. So what? She's 16. You just came over. Fucking leave then. What are you talking about? You can't kill people because they're a bitch. That's crazy. Yeah. She's a baby.

Wow. The two friends said they were going to kill Campbell now because she's a witness. So now we got to kill the other one. We got to kill Chrissy. And when they found her outside the room in the garage area, one of them hit her with a hammer belonging to Guy Strange is what Sam said. Took one of Guy's hammers, my dad's hammer, and fucking whacked her. While she laid on the garage floor, Strange's other friend hit her with an axe, it says, and finished the job.

And they both warned him that if he opened his mouth or refused to help them clean up, then they could just as easily kill him, his little brother, and his parents. We can kill you all and make this whole fucking scene go away. And it'll just look like some psychos came in, but it won't be us. He said he was ordered to dump the girls' bodies, quote, someplace...

And he complied by wrapping them in trash and trash bags and carrying them in the toolbox of his pickup truck to a familiar place, which was the hangout dump site there. Like we know, he said he discarded the girl's shoes, makeup bags and clothes in the woods.

He also said he discarded Dawn's backpack in the bushes off Retrack Road, which is weird because her backpack, I don't know, she might have had two backpacks that were similar or what, but that's weird. And the axe and hammer in a pond near his home. So he said they didn't find the hammer when they dove. There's a hammer in there too, he's claiming.

So that tells me he used a hammer and a fucking axe. That's what that was, which makes more sense. The hammer's a better starting out hitting tool. Because it would be hard to swing an axe at somebody's head and have them knock it out of the way unless they weren't seeing it coming. Right. And then a second one, when your friend drops and you hear it and you see a man holding an axe, that second shot ain't going to happen. No. Whereas a hammer is much more, if you can punch, you can hammer. You know what I mean? Yeah.

So the motion says Sam decided he would die before he would come forth with the information he held. Well, then that would make him die. So he wouldn't die. So what are you talking about? Sam was terrified that even if he went to the police, his family would still be in great danger from the killers. From the killers, not only the killers, but their brothers, their family and associates in the drug world.

Oh, really? Well, they have drug world associates. The prosecutor said this new account just doesn't ring true to him. He said this doesn't sound true. It sounds like he's narrating what really happened and adding people to distance himself from the actual crime. At the same time, though, how did both of those guys have fucked up stories? Yeah, and how does one of them know that shoes are disappeared? That's the other thing. That's what I'm saying. Oh, boy.

I don't know what's going on here, but I feel like if this was the truth, he would have said I'm going to come out with this a long fucking time ago. Yeah. This wouldn't be like mid trial. This would be OK. These guys and I'm innocent and I'm scared of them, too. Please protect me. You know, that's a way to not go to jail. I would think in his brain. Grandpa's an officer, though, and he's afraid of that. Yeah, that's fucking ridiculous. So the ruling on that, whether he's going to get a new trial or not here, they said now that's going to be held off for a couple of months while they figure it out.

So they said that they're going to give Strange and his new attorney time to come up with legal authority that would permit gathering of post-trial evidence because they want to gather more physical evidence. Sam wants to force the district attorney to collect hair and blood samples from the

Damian and Alan here. But the district attorney said the defense proposition places him, quote, in a moral dilemma. I can't ask a judge to issue such a warrant without believing Sam Strange. And I don't believe Sam Strange that I don't like. That means that to me says he thinks there's a chance that's true. Yeah. You can't say that out loud. Nope. Everybody said the quiet part. Yeah. Yeah. You just got to say, I don't know. The justice of the system did its job.

That's the problem. The issue with that is, yeah, no, you could easily test that shit then to go to prove he's a liar. Prove it. None of that shit matches anybody. How about that? I'm not testing it because I know I did the right thing. That's not okay.

But saying, yeah, that's so weird without believing Sam Strange and I don't believe Sam Strange. Then prove him wrong. That's the point. Right. You're the prosecutor. You can prove him wrong and say, and then it looks worse. You go, we proved he made up a big lie and tried to put two innocent people in here. What a piece of shit this guy is. Right. Makes him look worse. He'll get the death penalty for that shit.

This definitely tells me this prosecutor is very fucking worried that at least some of this is true, that maybe the three of them did it together. Sam's not as innocent as he says he is, but the other two are involved, and it's not the way he said it happened in court, meaning the prosecutor, and now he's got to redo the whole fucking thing. So that's what I'm thinking.

The judge, though, decides that he will not get a retrial. No more retrial here at all. But he will do him a favor. He will do Sam a favor. He's going to strike one of these special circumstances on the murder that would have gotten him life without parole in prison. So now the worst he can get is life, but not life without parole. With parole. With parole. So the judge said there is no evidence to prove which girl died first.

So he took away the first degree murder because he said, we don't have proof of that. And the prosecution does not fucking know that they're just making that up. He said that it stands to reason that one of them was killed first. One of them's got to die first, obviously. But unless you know which one and can prove that's the way it happened, you can't just say, well, that must have happened. So a first and a second, it has to be specific. So he said that the jury found that one killing was an act of explosive violence. I cannot find a first degree murder to have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

He said,

If they're both murdered, you have to assume one was murdered after. I wouldn't even say the first one was planned. If the first one was an accident, the second one's absolutely planned. If there's two, then one of them died second. I don't give a shit who's...

Who's on the signing second? The problem is the law does. The law needs that, huh? The law needs you to... Well, you can't just charge him with... He has to be charged with first-degree murder of so-and-so. Okay, all right. So if you can't prove... You can't just say double murder?

If you can't, no. You can, but then it's this. It's two second degree murders. That's fucked up. Otherwise, you have to prove which one was killed first and then which one was planned. They have no way of proving that. Okay. That's the thing. Yeah. It's a stupid technicality. That's crazy. It makes sense in logic, I guess. I suppose. Not normal logic, but legal logic makes sense. Because you got to have it right.

And that's our system. We have to be right. Yeah. And otherwise the appeals process would take this whole thing apart is the other thing. So now since he struck down the circumstances there, special circumstances, each murder is a maximum 15 years to life. Okay. So obviously the prosecution is asking for them to be consecutive. And the defense is asking them to be obviously at the same time concurrent. Okay.

He's got supporters, Sam does. He's got acquaintances and family rallying to his support. They're collecting signatures on petitions, picketing the courthouse, writing letters to the local newspaper, etc.

It's a lot. The judge said, but a trial and a motion for new trial is not about what moms and dads and friends or even a whole community feel or think. We don't ask for a show of hands as to who thinks he does or doesn't get a new trial. Yeah. Based on legal shit that I decide. Yeah.

Yeah, show of hands seems. Yeah. Everybody gather. What do you think, y'all? Town square time. Bailiff, would you count those, please? Oh, Jesus Christ. That seems like a lot. This is going to be hard. Can you all gather up into groups of five with people you agree with, please? I can multiply that really easy.

The judge said Sam was found guilty by 12 citizens of this community and the verdict must stand unless found constitutionally deficient. And that's not the case here. He said you were represented by two competent attorneys and you might disagree with certain things, but that's the way it was. Yeah.

So prosecution wants consecutive sentences. They say these deaths resulted from separate violent acts to not do so, meaning give consecutive sentences, would be to deny the existence of one of these girls. That's a fair point. Yeah.

The Campbell's older sister, Chrissy's older sister, Wendy, in a plea to the court said, please give him the maximum sentence. Talk about holding her as a baby and said now 18 years later, her life seems like a short, sweet dream. It's hard to comprehend. I'll never see her pretty face or hear her little laugh again. I want Sam strange to think about Chrissy all the days of the rest of his life and pointed at him to gave him a right to the fence, right to the face there. The defense, though,

They don't agree. The defense attorney says, certainly there's nothing like this in his character. Yeah. Oh, there is this. That's the problem. That's a problem. He said, Sam is not being callous by not expressing remorse. He knows this was a horrible crime. He feels bad about it, but he covered up the crime and he knows he did wrong. Like he's not going to feel remorse for the murders because he didn't murder anybody. It's just the coverup. So yeah, that's how that goes. He then speaks as well. Said anything to say before you're fucking sentencing here? Yeah.

And he says that, yes, he does. He didn't kill the girls. He still denies it. But he says he definitely tried to hide their bodies. So he did something. He said about the families, I understand their loss. I didn't do it, but I can understand how they feel.

I want to give them my full apology for what I did do. I feel ashamed. What I did was wrong. That's all there is to it. I know I can't change their minds about what they say or what the prosecutors believe, but I know the facts because I was there. Regardless of how they feel about me, I'll be there for them. They can write to me. I didn't kill them. So he's like, they want to write to me. I'll fucking, I'll tell them when I didn't kill him and we'll talk about it. I'll tell them what happened, but I didn't fucking do it. And it's these people, which I never heard a guy in his life.

Like, allocution, fucking offer the families, you guys can write me if you want. That's a really arrogant, weird thing to say. The judge says that, quote, this conviction that has occurred will stand unless another court rules otherwise. Then he said, in my 26 years, that's a bad way. If you're getting sentenced and the judge starts out by telling you how long he's been doing this. Yeah, I've been on the bench this long. Oh, God.

He's not going to say, in my 26 years, I've never seen a more innocent person screwed over so horribly. That's not what he's going to say during sentencing. I've never watched injustice unfold before my very eyes. I've never watched the sun of justice set upon an innocent man so clearly as it has in this situation.

That never is what it is. Never. He said, in my 26 years, I've seen many cases where someone swore they were innocent and the facts were overwhelming. I believe that you, under the law, were responsible for these killings. You, sir, may fuck off 15 years to life consecutive. Oh, he got him. So he got him on the consecutive there. Uh-huh.

Post-conviction interview is what convinced the attorney general that he was the only killer. That's what the attorney general says. He says that a post-conviction interview of him convinced him that he acted alone. He said that Sam had a grant of immunity that would have shielded him from prosecution for anything he said in this statement. Because they said, the attorney general said, I'm not the district attorney. If what you said is true, I want to fucking know it because I want to get these killers off the street.

And yeah, so he said that despite a grant of immunity that would have shielded him for prosecution, that Strange, quote, attempted to deceive or simply refused to answer direct questions posed by investigators. And Kathy Strange, Kat Strange, said, we're not a bit surprised. We really don't believe the investigation was done in good faith. We think Attorney General Daniel E. Lundgren's office is basically covering his tail politically.

It sounds like he may have done it and he threw the finger at these guys and then given immunity, he can't say that they did it because that destroy. He can't say that he could. It'll destroy all of his ability to appeal, though, is probably what he feels, right?

I don't know. I don't think so. I don't know what it is. It makes no sense, to be honest with you. Yeah, why would he... He had all the fucking... I don't know. He had all the reasons in the world to make this guy believe him. That's what I don't understand. So...

In the recall effort, by the way. Yeah. They got thousands of signatures gathered during a recent Nevada County recall attempt. And she, Kathy, called them expressions of loss of faith in the criminal justice system. This decision will serve to further divide us, the people, and them, the government. Oh, now it's us versus them. There's a group of people out there in this country. A big group of people, too. A group of people that, like...

They love when people get arrested and they love long sentences and they love law enforcement and stuff unless it's anything with them. Until they fuck up. And then not only are they innocent, everybody's corrupt. Everybody's corrupt. Fuck it. It's true. And you'll see regular people all the time fucking do that. All the time. You should arrest, give them the fucking chair. But if they get pulled over for going 20 mile an hour over the speed limit, they're like, how fucking dare you pull me over? Yeah.

I mind my like the law doesn't apply to me. It applies to people I deem bad. What the fuck is wrong with you? Those are the people that crack their window and go, no, I can hear you. Yes. Just those are the sovereign citizens. Yeah. Watch. Watch on patrol. Any Friday or Saturday night, you will come up with a bunch of people who are like, I love the cops with fucking I support the police bumper stickers go. Fuck you. You pick fuck in their face because they pulled them over and not somebody else. It's amazing how quickly that happens.

So, yeah, that's what she says because, I mean, her dad's a cop for Christ's sake. Right. And so it wasn't Officer Strange because it's her dad. So she took her husband's last name. Yes, she took. So it's Officer whatever maiden name. Yeah. Who the hell knows what that is there. So he is. He did a terrible job. So she then after the trial added the superior court judge, John Darlington, to the list of people she wanted recalls. I thought the judge oversaw it fairly honestly for everything he did. He had to kind of play impartial. He's the judge.

So when you start a list of elected officials, you're treading a fucking line there that any any slight misstep can get you locked the fuck away with a with a list of names. I mean, that's evidence enough that you're a fucking monster.

So, yeah, other recall leaders are not only her, but a guy named Don Minnick, who is the father of Mike Minnick. And he is a lather, meaning he runs a lathe, and a deacon of the U-Bet Red Dog Community Church. The U-Bet? The U-Bet. U-Y-O-U-Bet. Red Dog. Red Dash Red Dog. It's sponsored by a casino and cheap beer. Yeah. From the 90s. They made this church.

Community church. He said he voted for both the sheriff and the prosecutor. Even 20 years ago, he and his wife organized a community association to cooperate with law enforcement in the remote area. See what I mean? These are the people who, when it goes against them, they go, no!

I'm on there. No, I support this. This is not so fucking weird. He said, if anybody had told me I'd be doing this, I'd have told them you're out of your gourd. Yes, because now it's about you and you bet everybody else they've been fair with. But I'm the one person they haven't been fair. That's that's that's what you're saying when you're one of those people. Unbelievable.

It's a selective only me. So the sheriff was elected for the first time in 1994. He says he inherited the investigation and most of the accusations concern conduct by his deputies who weren't even I wasn't even in charge. They just got there and not even my personal actions. He says they claim I have bad cops working for me. I don't want bad cops working for me.

He said he denied prejudice. This is great. I'll read right from the paper. Arbaugh denied prejudice against people who, quote, like to live in the woods. Is that what it said? It's an exact quote from the newspaper. Ah, that means somebody said, he's just prejudiced against us because we like to live in the woods. That's exactly what it was because that's the accusation. So he denied. They asked him, are you prejudiced against people who live in the woods? He said, uh-uh. I'm not prejudiced against people who choose to live in the woods. No.

He did concede that they don't get the same level of law enforcement because, quote, you've got to concentrate your resources on where most of your people and most of your problems are. You can't have 10 patrol cars wandering around the woods. It's not going to work. You're in the woods. I'm not coming out there.

If you call, we'll come. It'll take a minute. It seems like you went to the woods for your privacy. Now you got it. Leave us alone. That's part of living in the middle of nowhere. You go, how long would it take an ambulance to get to me here? That's some shit you should think about before you move. That is a time that I'm comfortable waiting.

Yep. He said, quote, I have not received calls. I can't do anything about complaints unless I know about them. All are taxpayer citizens and deserve service that is to be provided for them. Yeah. Kathy does a hearing and she testifies. Oh, my God.

Oh, yeah. Oh, she most huge testimony. This is in the recall hearings. She cited a list of contradictions in the investigative and court records of her son's case and recounted her efforts to date to get a new trial for her son, who is now in Calipatria State Prison. She pulled then she pulled off her wig.

She's wearing a wig? Well, because she has cancer. Oh, Jesus Christ. She pulled off her wig to show her bald head and announce that because she's dying of cancer, she will not live to see the outcome of this. Then she said, I ask you as a community to take the baton from me. I'm asking all the people who cared enough to come out to keep caring and writing letters.

Oh, cat. A guy named Felix came to the front of the auditorium and publicly told her, I will be one of the guys who picks up the baton and writes letters asking for the reopening of the case. I'd like everyone to stand up if they're going to write a letter. And most of the crowd stood up and cheered. Did she hand him her wig as the baton? She tossed it to him as she walked off like, take that. Carry that. Pow, bitch, what's up? What a terrible, poor thing. I feel so horrible for it. Yeah, it sucks.

Whatever cancer she's got is going to kill her. This is fucked up. It's a lot. Is the cancer making her fucking even more loony? You know what I mean? I don't know. Ah, Jesus. Fuck. Poor thing. I bet her other kids would probably like her to just spend some time with them while she's dying. Yeah, I'm sure her stability is certainly questionable. She feels like it's her last mission in life to get her son out of jail.

She said, this is the way. Oh, no, this is that guy who stood up. He said, this is the way to take on the dysfunctional judicial system. We will lance that boil. That's what we are doing here tonight. We have lanced that boil of corruption. We will see some action, I'm sure. Just to be sure, write those letters. Oh, don't say it like that. She is saying that the whole case is hampered with her son's case between coziness between the judges and prosecutors. Okay.

She said it's a small town, but when the judge and the district attorney play golf together, it may not be appropriate for them to be in the same courthouse patting each other on the back. That's every courthouse there is because judges and all of the judges used to be lawyers. So a lot of them have worked together. They know each other. They come from the prosecutor's office. They come from defense. Happens all the time. The whole point of these judges and the lawyers is they're all sworn in. There's a lot of times...

and prosecutor against each other are best friends. Yeah. It doesn't matter. In court, you're doing a thing that you're fighting for your... Guys in football are best friends. It doesn't mean you don't try to tackle him when he's got the fucking ball. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Every sport or any competition... If you're in a competition in a...

In an industry, you know everybody that does that. Yeah. You know all these people. That's what I mean. In a small town, how would you keep people in a small exclusive group, meaning lawyers, from hanging out with each other? That's insane. That's fucking insane. So, I mean, I get what she's saying, but that's just the way it is. And you had no problem with it up until now is the thing, too. Right.

So she is determined to get a new trial. She wants all of that shit. She said that she would be in like Safeway handing shit out at the post office. At one point she had a wheelchair. She's dying and they're still... She's still handing out flyers and everything like that. She said, I want to die in peace. And so she said, I can't do that if my son's not getting a new trial. So...

Yikes, that's wild. Her presence in public settings has produced, though, 10 new leads which she passed on to investigators. She said, although it would be more comfortable to be in bed at a time like this, it's more important to accomplish whatever I can for my son while I still have life left. Yeah, she had breast cancer that metastasized to her liver. Oh, no.

Now her liver has over 50 tumors surrounding it. Oh, Jesus Christ. Horrible. So the state had reopened the case twice, and the district attorney's office now accepts the possibility that new evidence may exist. That's what she says. She said, I don't know that I'll live to see it in my lifetime because I don't have much time left. Sooner or later, the right thing will happen. I believe that. So now the prosecutor said that

The strange case was the most challenging of the six murder trials he prosecuted. Total. Yeah. Said, yeah. The defense attorney said this was, quote, the worst case I ever handled. Far and away the toughest case I ever had. He said there's a lot of issues that prevented a fair trial, including the admissibility of some evidence.

Yeah.

He said that the sheriff's office didn't investigate fully because it had honed in on Strange and that was that. He said they had tunnel vision. It was a tough, tough case. I feel great sorrow about what happened to those girls.

And the one who handled the appeals process, mostly arguing ineffective assistance of counsel here, he said that he did get a favorable response after an evidentiary hearing, which he said was extraordinary. He said, quote, the judge felt strange, gave a logical explanation, putting two others at the scene. He was not the perpetrator. He was the accessory. The judge agreed he should have testified. Objectively, it would have made a difference. It would have made a difference. Yeah. I don't know how much of a difference, but.

Yeah, the judge said that the defense was doomed without his testimony. And they said that the petitioner's testimony was a necessity to tie up and mitigate forensic evidence. And a different judge disagreed, and the appeal was denied. Okay. So he's finally up for parole in 2013. Is that right? That's when he's up for parole. That is 15, no, that is like 20, almost 20 years, almost 20 years, 16 years or so.

He is, or no, because it should be 19 since he got arrested. The parole here is denied in the first runaround. You're not going to give him parole right away. No, no way. 2014, he has another parole hearing. Every year it's going to come up. He's got them every three years, actually. So he's got one in 2015 that's moved up from 2016. So 2014 isn't a parole hearing, but-

But he keeps, even in his parole hearing when he went up, he was still blaming the other two guys. Really? Wasn't me, wasn't me, wasn't me. Yeah.

But the problem is now by now, the families of the victims are they're not as one. They're divided in what they think. Really? Dawn's mother, Linda, Linda and her sister, Amber, believe that Sam did this. But the Campbell's aren't sure about it. Chrissy's parents don't know. Oh, boy. Doug Campbell says that he's come to believe Sam's account over time, especially after he talked to Kathy Strange.

And read the manuscript she wrote about this case. She wrote a fucking book about it. He said, quote, it was a whodunit. People didn't know, was there a killer in our midst? Yeah, but you're taking the words from somebody that has certainly- That has a lot in this. Yeah, vested in this. Skin in the game. Right. Yeah. Super biased. So he went on to say, we still don't really know what happened or why.

And they said there was never any evidence to implicate the other two guys. They said they knew Don and Chrissy, but there was nothing to support that they had anything to do with the murders. We all felt he formulated the story based on the evidence we were able to acquire that the other guys did it and he helped had to help under duress.

So the family said, this is very difficult. The one, the mother here said, Sam doesn't have a conscience. We know he had a part. He came to our house after the bodies were found before we knew he did it. He was friends with Dawn's sister, Rika. How could he come to our house and act like nothing happened? He came over to be like, oh, have you heard anything yet from the cops? What do the cops think?

Man, Kathy there, Kathy Strange, they talked about her and they said Sam's mom was everywhere. He said, my mom, this is, oh, this is, oh, I'm sorry. This is, I believe, Campbell's mom here. Campbell's brother said Sam's mom was everywhere. My mom didn't want to go to the grocery store. Yeah. Yeah.

So they said they were dealing with, meanwhile, Kathy, they said, was more vocal. And the victim's parents said, we were just dealing with grief. You know, people heard their side of the story more than ours. And the one guy said, it did rub me the wrong way that friends were even saying Sam didn't do it. Like, their friends were like, you know, that guy didn't do it. Now, the mother, I believe, ended up moving away to Montana for a while before coming back to Nevada County, Dawn's mother. Yeah.

She said, I can handle it better now. The first two years, I didn't want to go into town. Someone would say they were sorry and I would break down. Oh, God. She said, Dawn had many good friends in the area and Chrissy was one of them. She loved being with family and friends. She was always talking on the phone. She always stuck up for the underdog.

And her brother said she was a great big sister. Mother said, um, uh, it's a small town. I see a lot of her friends who have grown up. They have families. And then by then, because this is 20 years later, she said her friend, Crystal named her daughter after Dawn and just realized that her daughter is now about the same age as Dawn when the murders happened. Oh boy. Sam has no idea how much pain he caused to so many people. They said holidays are really hard and all that kind of thing. And, uh,

Yeah. Doug Campbell, Christie's dad, said what he had to say at the hearing was very believable. It's what his mother stated in her book that she wrote 20 years earlier. Sam was hanging out with a group of losers in 1994 and had been allowed to move back into his home. He knew if he screwed up again, his parents would no longer allow him in the house. Well, it's better than being in prison. That's why the bodies were moved and not disposed of where they where he put the axe.

He went on to say, Sam was there when these two young girls were murdered and he was the one who dumped the bodies and cleaned up the house. He was scared and very stupid that night and should be in prison. But there are two other very guilty buddies of Sam that killed the girls. Sam was a friend of Dawn and had no motive to kill her. I believe there are people in Grass Valley that know what happened that night but are afraid to come forward. I think that Sam, to think that Sam did this alone is ridiculous. That's what he said. Okay.

He also said about Kathy, she truly believed her son was not a killer. She was bright, aggressive lady. I actually liked her. So he liked the killer's mom. Yeah. He said it's obvious. Uh, it's obviously brought up some bad stuff, but I wanted to know, I felt more relieved that I read the book. I read it three times. Really? Wow. That is wild. Um,

Yeah, he said that she was a follower, but she worked hard to get good grades in school. I deal with my guilt over my lack of supervision of Chrissy every day. She was 16, man. There's not much you can do at that point. It took me two years to say my daughter was murdered. He said, I went through therapy to come to grips with what happened. You don't get over it. You just learn to deal with it. And they said that he said it was her alive, hating you.

That's well, they would have been over by now. She'd like you by now. Now you'd be great friends. You'd be babysitting her kids. Yeah. But she would have with down payments and things for locking her up all the time. Yeah. It's so more years. Two more years of that. Don't blame yourself. You didn't kill her. They did.

He said attending the parole hearings was therapeutic. I never heard anybody say that before. He said it felt good that we went in and said the things we said. We got it off our chest. I'm not a person who holds grudges. I guess not. I think he deserves to be in prison. I know he won't get out this time, but he's made some progress. I'm not concerned. He's been there for 20 years. I'm more concerned with completing the story.

Wow. They said that he says also that Shannon, the sister, Chrissy's sister, really believes Sam has been hurt enough and it's time to move on. Wendy, the other sister, thinks they should keep him in prison until the truth is told. Will it ever come out? I really believe along the road someone will talk. We don't know. Fuck. We don't know. Fuck all. Wow. So, yeah. Again, they said another relative said, I do believe he did it. I don't believe the two other guys were even there.

And the cops said, we worked the case for about three months. A full division worked it solely. All we did was this case until we made the arrest. And they wrote a letter. The cops wrote a letter also opposing parole, said setting him free right now, he's a threat to public safety. We don't know what happened. Did one of these girls set him off? It could happen again, possibly. If he came out and he said he did it, that would be different.

Yeah, so he's told two completely different stories. One of them's got to be a lie, so he's got to be good at lying because they both seem just as plausible. How did one of those boys know that the fucking shoes weren't found? How did they not know that? I don't like that at all. How did they know that? That's fucking crazy, man. The other question is, if they did it, why is there not a fucking single fingerprint of theirs on a bag?

That's yeah. Where's that? What? They had gloves all of a sudden. What do we got all fucking gloved up? But they were dripping blood all over the place, though. Yeah, right. They're bloody, but they keep their fingerprints under wraps. So, yeah, they said the father, one mother said. But after a while, I thought that it would be too easy. He doesn't get to hug and love his family just like we can't hug and love Dawn. He can see his family. We get to look at pictures and a lock of hair. They said he should get out. Never.

Yeah, they also said that they put up a memorial monument to her in a Montana cemetery. And the mother said, it's a beautiful place with a view of the Mission Mountains and Flathead Lake. That's where I will scatter her ashes. Yikes. 2015, up for parole. He maintains that he's innocent, innocent, innocent.

That's it. Just innocent. I don't know what you're talking about. And he is denied parole there. You're going to have to cop to it, man, to get out. 2018 parole hearing. Both of Chrissy's sisters, Shani and Wendy, both attend the hearings. Yeah. And Wendy said it's been a long journey. And...

She said, I believed he needed to serve some hard time for his role. He didn't call the cops. He watched my sister be murdered and did nothing. Even if that's true. She said she always believed that he didn't commit the murders, Wendy said. But Wendy said she believed Strange made good use of his time in prison, noting that he's graduated from a course to become a drug and alcohol counselor. And Shani made a huge long statement, wrote this long letter saying,

Very poignant letter talking about I respect everybody and all that sort of thing. But they said that. So I ask that if you believe Sam is ready, give him the chance to make something positive of his life and perhaps be able to help others that are on the wrong path. He, in turn, could quite possibly save the lives of many people.

Parole approved. What? Yeah, the families are even on board now. So, I mean. Did he admit it at least? It's not over yet. Okay. Shani said, it took me 15 years to get to this point. I hated Sam. I wrote his family horrible letters. I wish death upon him. I was so angry for many years. It's been a long, long transformation to me personally. She said, I no longer see him as a monster, but as a human being.

She even wrote a long blog post about him being granted parole. And she said, hearing the gruesome details of how Chrissy was murdered is not difficult for me. In fact, I want to know every single detail. I want to know the last moments of her life. I think I deserve to know that, and I am ready to know.

So, yeah, she said it was hidden from me when I was a child. She talks about what he said. She said he talked about some of Chrissy's conversations with him in the last two days of her life. Her making fun of white people. She was Mexican and her family was white. So she's making fun of her family.

Her telling him how to rock music, how rock music sucked and rap music was better. Yeah, corn sucks. And that the reason they ended up in the room together was because of an ice tea. He wanted to play Body Count. It was an ice tea rap rock album. He wanted to play Body Count. He had the Cop Killer track and he was like, I'll play that shit for you. He wanted to play for her. He's like, what about this? This is both. This is right. We can get along.

Yeah, these details, even the graphic ones, are healing to me. I stared at Sam throughout the hearing and saw someone like I feel I know personally because I kind of do. Through our letters, I've gotten to know him personally, his daily activities, his goals for the future. So, yeah, she goes on to say that she's proud that he's tried to better himself and has a concrete plan to return to society and a support system. So...

The decision to deem him ready for parole doesn't mean he gets out. Now there's 120 days where it gets reviewed and the governor can say no. So, yeah, that's how that goes. But they say that he took responsibility in 2015, the last time. Oh. Yeah, the shanty says this time he flat out, last time he said he accepted some responsibility, but this time he said he was fucking responsible. Okay.

Shani said this time he flat out said he was part of my sister's murder because he watched it and didn't protect her and that he was an accomplice. He really took responsibility where he didn't fully do that before.

She said, I'm excited for him. I think he's ready to embark on his life. I think it will be scary for him. He's got a lot of obstacles. I hope he succeeds. Oh, boy. Governor Jerry Brown said, I hope he goes back to fucking jail. He reversed the parole decision and sent him back to jail. Holy shit. They do that all the time. They did that to the Manson women for fucking 30 years. Yeah. Those chicks. All the time. Boy, did they get the raw deal.

I hate when they do that. Why have a parole board? What's the point? Why bother? Just send it all to the governor. If he's got time to look over the shit, what are we doing? Put the, put the envelopes on his desk and have him make a choice. So 2020 is up for parole. This time he gives more details. Yeah. Yeah. He says he really gives bad details too. He says at the time he was having sex with multiple underage, underage girls, including one that was 14 years old. All right. Uh,

It's fucking all sorts of girls. On the night of the murders, he said he had consensual sex with one of the victims. I think it's Chrissy because that's when he keeps saying he was with the whole time. Moments before he watched her get bludgeoned to death and did nothing to intervene. So he's not saying he killed them, but he's saying now what actually that he was having sex with them. He says he discarded their possessions into a field where trash was dumped and all the blood was found. And, you know, he was apologetic. And the

The family said he says, I don't think I deserve anything. I'm asking for mercy. That's what he said. Chrissy's sister said, I don't want I didn't want to say yes, free him. But now I've come to the realization I wholeheartedly believe it. That's Wendy. That's the one that really did. She came around to she said, I think Chrissy would agree with us. I don't think she would want him to be here forever.

These are nice people. These are incredibly kind, nice, sweet people. Wow. I think she'd be like, fuck that guy, but you guys can be different. That's fine. Parole this time is granted. Yeah? Yep. This time it goes under review, and they let him out, actually. Wow.

He actually is. He's released on supervised parole, and he'll be on supervised parole for a long time. So there's that. Dawn's family did spread her ashes over that lake and all of that. So that, everybody, is Grass Valley, California.

And a weird ass tale that we still don't know what the fuck happened. And we'll never know. I think a good assumption. I don't know. Is he a pedophile? He's a pedophile, right? He's 21 and fucking high school kids. Admitting to having sex with lots of them. Yes. 14? Fuck that. He probably had some weird shit where he was fucked up for a few years. And he thinks in his mind he's 17. But you're not 17. You can't fuck 16 year olds. You are 21.

Was he in prison for over 20 years and then now still thinks he's 21? Do you know what I mean? That's what I mean. Oh, boy. That's possible. This could be bad.

The guy that we knew, I knew the girl that he went out with. She was like 15. He was like 22. And his whole thing, his mother was a crackhead who like he was in like foster care for years and like slept in a closet and all this shit. So he thought he was 15 in his mind, which didn't matter because he was still 22. It was gross. So we had one, too. And he was just he's a weird kid. Such a weird kid.

Fucking weird. He biased booze. Yeah. And then she broke up with him and then he kept hanging around trying to get her back. It's like, dude, go to work. Yeah, get a fucking job. Go home and go to bed. You've got work in the morning. Go find some 35-year-old to bang. She'll throw it at you. So there you go. If you like the show, give us a review on whatever platform you're listening on. It helps so much to do that. Head over to shutupandgivememurder.com.

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This week's executive producer of Donnie Jones, Brian Lourette. Paris wrote, Ro, she got a new job. Congratulations, Paris. Kyle Norweg and Venera Boone. Thank you. I think it's Boone. It's B-U-N. It's probably not Bun. Venera, thank you. You're an angel. Thank you so much. Thank you. Other producers this week are Peyton Meadows, Patrick Fitzgerald, and Gerald Fitzpatrick, James. The best combo in the business. Jesus, the Irish are coming strong here.

Joseph Armstrong in Wheeling, Virginia. He was very excited about that episode. Sophie, content. Content? Content. No, that's not it. Be careful, Jimmy. Careful with your tongue. Sophie, thank you. Jim Ignatowski. Oh, Reverend Jim. Eric Sass.

And Janice Hill. Thank you all. Truly other producers this week are Kelsey Duncan, William Plummer, Chrissy Warren, Tammy Beaver. All right. Imogen. I'm again. Imogen. Danielle with no last name. Kelly Backman. Acacia Holyfield. Tyler Kamek. Ryan Anderson. Jason Campbell. Probably not that one. Wendy White. Impossible to be that one. Really, right? Isn't he dead? No. Jason Campbell. That was a quarterback. Yeah, yeah. Quarterback of the Redskins. Number 17. Number 17.

I hope that guy is part of this. Laura Pence. Oh, boy. Christopher Sanchez. Anna Kay. Carla Ramirez. Tyler Lafferty. Kyle Cox. Rachel Helton. I hope that's Todd's kid. Ramonda Dawn. Ramonda? Ramonda. Ramonda.

Elizabeth Murray, Ham Slammer. Ew. What? Jesus Christ, man. Kristen W., Tina Sheets, Rick Smith, Victoria Guthrie, Carrie Jackman Gordon, Nora, and Larry the Guide Dog. That is fucking amazing. If Larry is your guide dog, that's fucking adorable. Thank you, Nora.

Myra Nash, Shana Hemwell, Hemwall. What? Jackson Rowe. Hemwall? What? That feels dirty. Karen Benjamin, Abby with no last name, Christopher Oglesby, Quinn Moore, Jesse, Jesse Barnett, Candace Bone, Jenny Sharp, Lori Goff.

I think that's Goff. Bobby Swedish, Sweetfish. Sarah Emerson, Swedish. Those are delicious. They are delicious. Karen, but she's not grim. Diane Larcell, Brian C., Deve Rivera. Kylie Schmidt,

Joel Barnhart. Victoria... Nope, that's Heather. What? Heather Berg. Victoria Wersbach. That's why. Lindsay with no last name. Miranda Starstrakuzi. Stacey Simone. Simone? Simony. Justin...

Woodley, Jacob Carruthers, Tiffany with no last name, Brian Gallivan, Stepany, Stepany, Stepany, Stepane? I don't know what that is. It's got to be Stepany. No, no, no, 2023. I don't know, 2023. Alex Tapley, Betsy Perez, Ken Craig. This episode brought to you by the letter M. Trish Fares, Elizabeth Duclos, Catherine with no last name, Charmaine Breckenridge,

Rebecca, that feels, all right, that's royalty. I don't know. Rebecca Mayfield, probably not any relation of Mayfield. Jeremy? Yeah. Jeremy's wife wouldn't give us money. No, she hates us. She hates us. She's very mad. She's very upset with us. She should be looking across the dinner table to direct her ire, yet she, we're the ones. All right. Look next to you in bed, sweetheart, not over here.

Denise Montoya, Nick Cox, Jessa with no last name, Megan Kim, Nathan Everard, not Everhard, there's no H, Melissa Skeen, Timber Wolf, Emily Hinderaker, Jennifer Love, Nicole Buckley, Kelsey with no last name, Gabrielle Lux, Dustin, Deuston Kiesling, Julianne Forcan, Yvette Mabee?

James Sinkhorn, Ross Carter, Kelly Akers. Four cans. How about it? Good for you. Chicken Total Recall only had three. Yeah, man. That's awesome. Sorry. It just struck me for some reason. My juvenile brain is funny. Kelly Akers, Dan McIntyre, Chelsea Neely, Scott Michael Ferry. I wonder if a doctor's ever put a few on a chick. Jerry B. Put some extras up there. Donna. Okay.

I thought you might want five, six of them. I put them in there. I wanted to give you some mutters. Jordan Faber, Ryan Goldstone, Carl Atkins, Rachel Weatherby, Les with no last name, Ingrid Coutet, Jessica Davis, author Piper Lee Ione? Ione?

All right. Ion. Lisa Clark. Was that that chick that made... Wasn't that Lisa Clark? Lisa Frank. God damn it. Day Mac, just the real one. Jonathan Duarte, Carla Taylor, Catherine Mazzaferro. Mazzaferro. Mazzaferro. Mazzaferro.

Lee Arnold. Hey! It feels like a song. Yeah. Meredith Bryan, Veronica Horton, Daniel Cor... Oh, boy. Cover Blast. Cover Rubilis. Cover Rubias. Mark Daigle, Joey Goodman, Scott Deslaroyas. That guy's on...

Where is he? I've seen that name. Zach Vandenboom. He's on social media somewhere. Where is that guy? James Cormany. Nate Assman. Well, good for you. Teddy Middleton. Megan. That's a cool name. Ask me about. Brendan Hockmuth. Hockmuth? The Pamster. That's fun. Laura with no last name. Sarah McCormick. Adrian Duhannick. Duhannick.

Do and Chick. Do and Chick. Do and Chick. Adrienne, she's Do and Chick. Hey, good job, Adrienne. Chris Garavito. Tamara Carrington. Yeah, Carrington. Fawn Grooms. Andrew Cheadle. Chris, no last name. Kyle with no last name. Noel Dawkins. Dawkins. Loey Lusk.

That's a, wow. Lowy? Is that a real name? And all of our patrons, you guys are unbelievable. Thank you so much. Thank you, everybody, so much. We appreciate all that you do for us all the time. Can't wait to see you at live shows. Keep coming, hanging out with us, and doing all that shit. We cannot wait. Follow us on social media. Head to the website. There's a drop-down menu. Do that. Hang out. Keep coming. And until next week, everybody, it's been our pleasure. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

If you like small town murder, you can listen early and ad free now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen early and ad free on Amazon music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery dot com slash survey. She struck him with her motor vehicle. She had been under the influence that she left him there.

In January 2022, local woman Karen Reed was implicated in the mysterious death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe. It was alleged that after an innocent night out for drinks with friends, Karen and John got into a lover's quarrel en route to the next location. What happens next depends on who you ask.

Was it a crime of passion? If you believe the prosecution, it's because the evidence was so compelling. This was clearly an intentional act. And his cause of death was blunt force trauma with hypothermia. Or a corrupt police cover-up. If you believe the defense theory, however, this was all a cover-up to prevent one of their own from going down. Everyone had an opinion.

And after the 10-week trial, the jury could not come to a unanimous decision. To end in a mistrial, it's just a confirmation of just how complicated this case is. Law and Crime presents the most in-depth analysis to date of the sensational case in Karen. You can listen to Karen exclusively with Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.