#485 - Adopting Murder - Cape St Claire, Maryland
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Oh, yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay indeed. My name is James Petrigallo. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wissman. Thank you, folks, so much for joining us today on another crazy edition of Small Town Murder.

I'm sure you're all still recovering from last week's regular episode. Wow. Because that was one of the... How do you get through it without doing that, though? You know what I mean? We've done almost 500 stories, and that's top three wildest thing that's ever... Absolutely awful. It's Rulo. It's Baraboo. It's up there. It's bad stuff. So...

Check that out if you missed it, by the way. But this week, crazy, crazy story for you. But before we get to that, head over to ShutUpAndGiveMeMurder.com. Get your tickets for everything. First of all, all the live shows. Durham, May 31st. Oh, boy. Get your tickets for that night. Durham, North Carolina. Nashville sold out the next night. Never mind getting tickets for that. And you definitely want tickets to the virtual live show.

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Glenn Dawson, Alex Karras. We'll get into a few. We'll touch on all of that stuff. A lot of fun stuff there. Then for Small Town Murder, really fun. We're going to dive down a conspiracy rabbit hole and talk about was Charles Manson a CIA asset that was put in place to discredit the hippie movement? I believe it. Well, let's check it out. I'm in already. A guy ruined his career and spent 20 years writing a book about it. So,

Let's figure it out. Maybe it's true. Patreon.com slash crime in sports. Right. And you get a shout out at the end of the regular show as well. So you can't beat it. Best five bucks in podcasting. That said, disclaimer time. This is a comedy show. Oh, by the way, first of all, listen to your stupid opinions. You don't have to like sports to listen to crime and sports. It's us being ridiculous and making fun of someone for two hours. You can't beat it. And then your stupid opinions.

I think it's the funniest hour in podcasting. It certainly challenges them. Get in there. Now, disclaimer time. This is a comedy show. It sure is. We're comedians. We're going to make jokes. People are going to die. Oh, for sure. They absolutely are. What we do, though, is we're tasteful about it.

We don't make fun of the victims or the victim's family. No, why is that, James? Because we're assholes. Yeah, but. But we're not scumbags. There you have it. That's it. And there's plenty to make fun of in this. I mean, think about it. We got murderers. We have usually some small town police force that doesn't realize someone's a murderer until they kill four more people. A specific investigator. A lot of people to make fun of in this show. So plenty of stuff to go on. We got plenty. That said, I think it's time. Oh, yeah. Let's do this, everybody, to-

Clear the lungs, arms to the sky. Let's all shout.

Shut up and give me murder. All right. Let's do this, everybody. Let's go on a trip. I'd love it. Shall we? Let's get on this, everybody. We are going to Maryland, to Cape St. Clair, Maryland. Okay. It sounds lovely, doesn't it? Yeah. It's like it's a nice area. It's outside of Annapolis. Sure. And it's kind of a- Crabs aplenty. Oh, the crabs here. Oh, the crabs. That's chips everywhere. And they're delicious, too. Yeah.

Itchy and delicious in this area. It's in Western Maryland, 15 minutes to Annapolis, about an hour to Baltimore. Sure. And an hour and 20 to our last Maryland episode, episode 442, the social media loving cannibal. Remember that guy? Yeah. I think we do. That guy was pretty nuts. Yikes. This is in Anne Arundel County. Oh. Which is what we've talked about before. Anne. Yeah.

Arundel. It's a lady named Anne Arundel and they named a county. So I always thought it was Anne Arundel, like one word. Yeah. It's two words? It's Anne, A-N-N-E, Arundel. Is that right? Yeah. You know, that lady Anne Arundel who owns the craft store. I've always heard Anne Arundel real fast. Yeah. Everybody says it, Anne Arundel. So you think it's like, oh, maybe it's a Native American word. Anne Arundel. No, it's not.

Fascinating. Meaning the bay that takes the crabs or some shit. No, it's just a lady. Area codes here, 410 and 443. A little bit of history, just a minute here because we got a deep story. Right. A little bit of history. In the early part of the 20th century, early 1900s, a doctor named Hugh H. Young, who was a doctor on the staff of Johns Hopkins University. Oh, big deal. He started buying up farmland. Right.

Really? He wanted to build a community around here. And his first community was called Permission Point. Oh, Persimmon Point. I thought it was Permission Point, which sounds like where teenagers go to finger each other. Going to take her up to Permission Point tonight. I think it's tonight. I don't know, man.

It is permission point. They don't agree to go there unless they're... How about Seeger's take on taking her up to permission point? Yeah, we're putting on night moves. I'm getting out the Thunderbird and we're going to get it on. Hell yeah. So this didn't really work very well. Only a few lots were sold.

And then the Great Depression came. Oh, no. Put it all on hold. Ruined Persimmon Point? Ruined Permission Point, I'm calling it from now on. Anybody there that lives there, even though it's not called Persimmon anymore, call it Permission Point because that's hilarious. And it broke the whole community, huh? Broke it up. Well, it just never really took off. He only sold a few lots. And then the Depression came, so no one was buying anything.

No one was like moving out to the burbs to spread out. They were, you know, terrified and shit in their pants. They had no money. So eventually though, after the depression and the war came on and then people started coming here and it's a suburb. So after a while people started, you know,

moving to the suburbs and reviews of this town. Let's find out what other people think. Cause what do we know? Uh, most of the reviews are very good here. There's not a lot of bad reviews to find. Here is five stars. Cape St. Clair is actually a wonderful family. Seventies like neighborhood. Seventies likes. So it's like, it's like what the wonder years later seasons. Like what are we talking about? A bunch of houses that look like, uh, a lot of formica detective tent, tons of green refrigerators. So,

70s neighborhood. River rock welded in front of a home. Not a lot of technology. No. And fireplaces, too. River rock everywhere. Sunken living rooms. What are we getting at? Conversation pits. Yeah, how about it? This is a place where a neighbor looks out for another neighbor. I guess like kids riding bikes and shit, I guess, is like 70s. It coined the phrase, it takes a village.

No, it didn't. No, it didn't. That's been around for thousands of years. Before America. Thousands of years, I think they came up with that. And it wasn't probably America. This town's stealing that? They're just trying to co-opt that? It's probably like a Greek philosopher or something. Confucius said that, and now they're trying to take credit for it or something. You know what I'm saying? It coined the term. It coined the term.

Fucking jerks. It could say it, you know, epitomizes the term. That would be a way to put it or something of that nature, you know, but not it coined it. Wait till you hear about that stitch in time. They've coined that too. Every idiom out there, they coined it here. Fucking assholes. Wow. I would never love anywhere else as much as here. Okay. You can say that. And I refuse to try. That's the other thing. I will not try.

Five stars. I've been blown away by this town. Is that right? I've been blown away by the town. No, I mean. The people. It's never positive. No. Yeah. Not good. The people, schools, beaches. And there's beaches, though. That's a pretty good town. That's helpful. I've never lived in a town with a beach.

Beach community sounds so great. It sounds so great. Yeah. Until you get there and then you're like, I don't like these people. The people that live there. Yeah. But I don't like the people that live around me now. I don't like the people that visit the beach community. You like the people that live around you now? No. No. What's the difference then? I got one guy that I like. Outside of that, everybody else, their houses can catch on fire. I would not care. Everybody else, you walk out and you're like, eh, squinting going, well, I don't know. I hope this one's not outside now. I'm going to talk to him.

I'm so glad my wife and I decided to raise our family here. Five stars. Four stars. I'm not 21, so I'm not into the bar scene yet, but I see bars packed all the time. Oh, they're not quite 21. Not yet. They just drive by going, man, soon. Looking at their watch. This is just someone who's chomping at the bit to be an alcoholic. Like, I'm going to be so drunk soon. Three stars. The community somewhat helps out, but it's not an amazing number of people.

If anyone helps out, that's pretty good. That's an amazing number. One is amazing. Yeah, wow. Some stranger helped me. Three stars again. This is the last one. I like that the weather is seasonal and can be both hot and cold. Yeah.

Yeah. That's really insightful. Thanks for that. Low bar. Wow. Thank you. Because if we didn't go there, we would have known that sometimes it's hot and sometimes it's cold. Yeah. You know, in Maryland in the winter, we've never seen the wire. Yeah. Bodie wears a big parka. You know what I mean? Always. Yeah. He's outside. He's cold. So.

So he's going to blow it on his hands. It's cold out. Yeah. It's chilly. And then in the summer, everyone looks real hot. They do. Yeah. It's weird. So people in this town, population 8,762. Tiny. So not a huge town, not a tiny, tiny town. Wow. For a beach community, that's nothing. It's a little pricey, too, is the problem. That's why. That's the riffraff. Right. And the lots are big, so it's one of those. A little more female than male. Everything's pretty average. The average age is a little bit older.

Median age is 42 and a half. A lot of married people. 60% married here, which is well above the average. Race of this town, 89.6% white, 1.1% black, 2.3% Asian, 5% Hispanic here. Religion, about 39% of the people are religious. And most here are Catholics. Yeah, it's going to be there because, as we know, Catholics are the Baptists of the mid-Atlantic world.

Crab farming regions. We know, obviously. The capital region. Yeah, we know. We know of the Naval Academy region. That's Annapolis. Unemployment rate here is under 5%. And median household income here is median household income $115,259. So pretty good. Pretty good. It's an average of $69,000 is the average in the country. So you're doing real well.

And the median home cost, you have to be doing well here. The cost of living actually isn't so far above the average. $100,000 is average here. It's $114,000. And the median home cost here, $445,600. Okay.

So a little bit pricey. That's one thing. But there's beaches. You know what I mean? You're not going to live anywhere decent by a beach and have it go, what a value. I got this at such a deal. Yeah. Why is it so expensive? Because the fucking ocean is here and there's a limited amount of beach. Right. So that's going to go for a lot. Yeah.

It's locked. I can get a place in Kansas. Well, there's plenty of land there. It's not up for, you know, that's why. Only make so much of the shoreline. That's all. So if we've convinced you, we have for you the Cape St. Clair, Maryland real estate report. All right. Your first house here, and this is the value quote unquote home. Four bedroom, two baths, 1,698 square feet. Yeah.

It is coming soon, so... It's not even on the market yet. Put your bids in, everybody. Yeah, this is... You got to get ready. Call the real estate agent. It was built in the 70s and has the fireplace wall. Does it? Has that... That rock? That rock fire... That sharp... The 70s rock fireplace wall. It has it. That's awesome. It's been updated, but like, you know, probably in 2006. Yeah. You know what I mean? So it's kind of not that...

Nothing spectacular about it, but it's decent in a nice area. $489,000 for that. For 1,600 square feet. Yeah, for 1,700 square feet. Next up, three-bedroom, four-bath, T-Bowl for each and every b-hole, damn it. 3,009 square feet. Oh, yeah. It was built in 2020, so it's new. Yeah. Only three bedrooms, but it's right on the water. Hell, yeah.

There's your house and like your yard is just goes around. Three bedrooms and 3,000 square feet. That's a great room. It's 3,900 square feet. It's big. It's fucking big. So it's beautiful. It's very nice. But $4,795,000. How do you do it? That's what it costs to live on the beach. Right on the water, man. Your whole property. It's not one little area. Your whole property is on the water.

Next up, this is just... That's the middle house? That's the middle house. Oh my god, this is crazy. Next up is just ridiculous. Six bedrooms, 11 baths. You can invite all the neighbors over to shit. You've got plenty of room for them. So the biggest Super Bowl party you've ever seen and you can still shit in your own toilet. Shit everywhere. You can shit in multiple toilets. And they're all yours. 15,737 square feet. Oh, man.

That's like fucking five houses. That's disgusting. Five big houses is what that is. That's a lot. That's on 20 acres. Uh-huh. And it's ridiculous. It's really nice right by the water. It's gorgeous. It's like one of these, like a fake chateau, basically. Oh, God. It is...

$14,995,000. I'm going to be honest, that's cheaper than I thought it was going to be. Honestly, yeah, but that's... Obviously. Who the fuck can afford that? That's, I mean, somebody who plays for the Wizards. Yeah. You know what I mean? Or like the Redskins or something. The taxes alone would fucking destroy you. Who's buying $15 million houses? That's unbelievable. You know, some hedge fund asshole or something.

Some lobbyist, maybe a D.C. lobbyist, lawyer, dickhead. Things to do in this town. Let's find it out. The Cape St. Clair Strawberry Festival. Yep. Another one of those. I love strawberries. So this is fantastic. There's a lot of festivals around them. If you look up strawberry festival, like every county in the country has a strawberry festival. Let's find out what's different. This one here. They say it's an age old event.

Tell me how long it's been going on. How many ages? It's not age old. There hasn't been this for... We've done this for a number of years. I'm going to say at the most 300. So somewhere between zero and 300. Age old.

Age old. They say it seems to be more and more popular each year. And if you're a resident, you know that summertime begins with the Strawberry Festival. Is that right? And it's a day filled with a parade, music. There's seven bands. Oh. And we have the names of them. We'll talk about that. Food games, crafters, contests, petting zoo, canine demos. Just making dogs do shit. I guess like sometimes they have them do the jumping things. Oh, okay. And like the...

I don't know. Plant weed on you, make them sit near you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See if they can sniff it out. They bring up like an SUV and they say, we've hidden weed in the passenger side door. See whose dog can fucking sniff it out. A silent auction. I don't know if there's auctioning strawberries or what. Strawberries in many forms. Okay. Custards, pies, cakes. Berries. Berries.

Berries, yeah. Parfaits. Shortcake. Shortcakes. Yeah. Cake cakes, I said. Cake cakes, too. Strawberry cake cakes. Long cakes and shortcakes. You know those. Yeah, long cakes, shortcakes, cake cakes. Traditional moon bounces. Okay. An obstacle course. Face painting a coloring contest.

Okay. A dunk booth. A lot of ties for first in that one. In the lines, you win, I guess. A Soka Scout, which sounds... That's not good. In Utah, you can't have that. If there's Mormons around, you're not allowed to have that contest. That means you just put it in a Boy Scout and leave it there. That's not good. Is this a wet Boy Scout contest? Yeah, I don't like that at all.

A wet Boy Scout uniform contest. Oh, God. They have pit beef. I don't know what that is. Is that food? I don't know if that's you fighting a pit. I got pit beef with that motherfucker right there. It's all that salt shit. Yeah. Or if they make beef in a pit. I don't understand. I hope it's the former. I hope they save it up. That'd be great. Bob ain't been trimming his hedges. Wait till this year's strawberry festival. I got pit beef.

I'm going to get Bob in the pit and it's on, baby. Take out a whole year's worth of frustrations on him. That's how it works. Hamburgers, hot dogs, snowballs, I guess ice cream, icy things, or a host of snowballs. The squishy ones. Oh, the coconut marshmallows. You hate them. I love them. I love candy coconut. Right. I couldn't love them if I wanted to. Make my mouth swell up and I can't talk or talk.

I love them. So that's not good. Strawberry jam jelly contest. Okay. So, I mean, you can – That's a lot of ties for first two, I imagine. You can bring jams and jellies? Both? Those are different things, man. They should be different categories. Is there a preserve category too? I don't know. That's what I'm saying. No, it doesn't say jam jelly contest. Decorated bikes, whatever that is. The Berriest Baby. Oh, Berriest Baby.

And, of course, we're going to see who will rule as the strawberry princess, obviously, as well. Now, the bands here. Okay. Let's find out what these people have to offer us for bands. Are they headlining somewhere? No. It doesn't say so, anyway. There's just a whole bunch of bands. Just a list of names. And a lot of them are like, you'll see. They're just genres. It doesn't sound like a specific band name. This one does. First one is Cold Brew 42. Okay.

Which sounds like a little coffee place somewhere. Yeah. You've been to Cold Brew 42? Yeah, that does. Yeah, it sounds like a little coffee shop. Or it's one of those micro brew shit bags. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Brings that hoppy shit. Cold brew, yeah, like some IPA bullshit. The Cape Tree.

That's a band, the Cape Tree. Then a band just called Easy Rock, which is a genre of music. That's like a Sirius XM station. That's not a band. And it says they play 70s and 80s rock. Easy Rock, they're called. Is it easy? No, no. Spelled out easy rock. Like easy listening. Just easy rock. Yeah, easy listening rock. Light rock. A lot of like foreigner and stuff. Like late foreigner, not early.

Let it like air supply in there once in a while. Just like some light stuff. You know what I mean? If you leave me now, you take away the... Just like Chicago. Stuff like that. Real light. Real easy 70s stuff. Hilarious. Jesus Christ. Dirk and the truth will be there. No. They kicked out the liar. The liar. He's like, I brought in the truth. Dirk is going to be there to tell you the truth. 24 Karat Rock.

I bet they play rock. We'll be there. It sounds like they play rock. Yeah. Then a band called Acoustic Cafe, which sounds like the name of a business. Right. Not a band. Acoustic Cafe? I don't know. That's going to be very soft. They'll play a Bob Marley song, but they'll also play. Oh, yeah, yeah. But it'll be a white lady singing it. Yeah. It'll be a 47-year-old white woman singing it. We be jamming. Yeah. Oh, she's got a flowy skirt on.

She's putting the Gs in. A lot of yoga. Yeah. That's the lady who's singing for 24 Hour Acoustic Cafe. People showing up being like, where's the menus? What's going on? You said it was a cafe. You know, bagels? What is it? Shit. Jesus. Also, School of Rock, which is the name of a movie. Right. Not a fucking actual. You can't do that. No. That's dumb. That's your bad. If Jack Black is not here, I'm going to revolt. If it's Jack Black and a bunch of children, great. Fine. Call it that. Put it that. This is not School of Rock.

So there you go. And which is funny because they probably maybe they were School of Rock first and are now angry like the person who's angry at Jelly Roll, which is fucking hilarious.

There's a wedding band very angry at Jelly Roll for being Jelly Roll because they were a wedding band that no one's ever heard of first. And they said now they've lost all their presence on Google. It's like, well, yes. And they're Jelly Roll, one word, and he is Jelly Space, capital R, Roll. They're so insignificant, though, that the internet won't acknowledge the difference. It'll just go, you're looking for Jelly Roll. We know what you're looking for. I'll bet Jelly Roll.

Before he popped on the scene, if I typed jelly roll into Google, they'd send me to a bakery in a cafe to go find a jelly roll. To the acoustic cafe to get a jelly roll. That's where you'd be at. Or a white lady tells me we'd be jamming. Yeah. Here's a jelly roll for you. We're jamming.

You know that's how it is. So those are the bands for that thing. And then, of course, you have to have the Maryland Crab and Oyster Trail, which I would go to that in a heartbeat. For sure. The aroma of Chesapeake spice permeates the mountains of Maryland, too. Stop it. If you're looking to combine a number of signature Maryland experiences together, head west to the mountains for a scenic driver hike and end your day with a traditional Maryland crab feast. Hell yeah. Yes and thank you. How do I get there?

Yeah. Take me home. Take me home, Maryland Road. Now that we've had it, I don't want to crack them ever again. No. I need somebody to do it for me. Now that your friend did that for you. He was just cracking, handing us clumps of meat on a shell just there. And we were eating them like sultans. Now try this. Now try this. Oh, my God. This is the best. It was like sultans. He was dipping it in butter and then putting it up on a shell for us. It was like a little plate. Thank you. And then whatever that is inside of it that's called the mustard. He's like, try it with the mustard.

Oh, yeah. How's that mustard? Well, I don't care. It's delicious. It's goopy innards, but you're going to love it. And it was great. How is it so good? God damn it, it was the best thing ever. Crime rate in this town, what we're interested in. The property crime, a little low, actually. Yeah. About 20%-ish, as I would imagine it would be. Yeah, they've got money. They don't need to steal anything. It's pretty leafy and, you know, that kind of thing. Violent crime, murder, rape, robbery, and, of course, assault. The Mount Rushmore of crime is about one quarter below the national average as well. A quarter below.

Again, we have low. So it's safe. It's leafy. It's nice. Let's talk about some terrible, awful murder. This is brutal shit here. Let's talk first about a couple of people. All right. Let's talk about Robert Lee Swartz, first of all, here. S-W-A-R-T-Z. That's interesting. Swartz. Yeah. It's kind of like the...

the skater we did for crime and sports Wolfgang. He was Swartz. He was Swartz like that too. The, uh, the rapist figure skating coach. Yeah. He was awful. And figure skater. Remember he was diddling everybody. That guy is terrible. It was years ago. So check that out years ago. So Robert Lee Schwartz, Bob Swartz, Swartz. Yeah. That's going to Bob. Yeah. Yeah. A lot. Yeah. May the Swartz be with you. So,

So he's born in 1931 here. He is the middle child of three sons. His father is a college dean, mother a teacher, father a dean in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Very nice. Yeah. So he comes from like a very academically rigorous family. And they expect that from him as well. You're going to get your education too. You're going to get your education for sure. He –

ended up traveling a lot with his dad as you know dad had a bunch of jobs before settling in Pennsylvania and ending up in Maryland and he also ends up doing a lot too because he ends up in the Navy Bob joins the Navy so he sees the world a little bit then it's right after World War II I think between World War II and Korea

Oh, that little sweet spot of a nice time. We don't have to fucking fight anybody right this minute. We aren't stealing your kid. Yeah, that was better. Yeah. So he, uh, he goes there. He's going to later end up in Maryland. He is a stocky. He's about five foot eight stocky.

Balding in his 20s. All right. And I'm talking Homer Simpson. Yeah. Yeah. Not, no, it's a little, huh? Not you like, I'll just shave it. It looks better. You know, it was a little bit thin over here. I'm talking. The stubble is kind of sexy. It looks like I can grow it. I can't. Yeah. Nothing. But he's got nothing. He's got a ring around his head. Yeah.

Absolutely. The stubble shows age. Oh, yeah. No, no. It doesn't matter. He looks like he's got a Homer Simpson hair. That's no good. From a young age. 20s. In his 20s. It's going fast. So that's tough. He does four years in the Navy. Uh-huh. And he worked for several years on the distant early warning system in Canada and Alaska. Oh. So that's for like nuclear. Missiles and shit. Yeah. Missiles and shit like that. Very smart guy. Computer engineer. Oh.

So that's what he ends up becoming. Good Jim, Mr. Swartz. Real smart guy, makes a good amount of money, does things like that. Let's talk about a young lady here. Catherine Ann Sullivan at the time here. She goes by, well, when she's younger, she goes by Kate, and then later on it's just Kay.

Okay. She goes by Kay. She's born – she's about nine years younger than him-ish like that. She is known as – she's tall and intense. Oh. She is. She's like 5'11". Oh. Yeah. So she's tall and she's smart and she'll become a teacher. Oh, yeah, yeah. She'll tell you. She's the youngest of four children. She's from Iowa City, Iowa. Yeah. Yeah.

A whole lot of Iowa going on there. She was the valedictorian of her Catholic high school. How about that? Yeah. So she's an achiever, too. It's one thing to be smart and it's one thing to be rigorous, but certain people are— Be the best smartest. I have to be the valedictorian. That's a certain personality type of I'm going to be the achiever. Right.

And valedictorian isn't necessarily always the smartest. They're also the one that's like – They're just the one with the best grades. And super involved in community and all that shit too, right? I think it's grade point average. Is that all it is? I think that's all it is, yeah. Just the best one of that. I think it's the best grade point average. I don't think it has to do with the rest of the shit. It's not like a voting thing. It's not? No. Oh. I think it's like, you know, just – it's a score. Okay. 4.3, 4.2. You're the valedictorian. There's a matrix. Yeah. I think that's what it is. Yeah, I don't think – because then you –

You'd hear all the time that my kid should have been the valedictorian, but this kid did a, you know, they judge their community service. It's just grades. All right. Yeah, I guess that makes more sense. Yeah. Otherwise, kids would be.

parents would be killing each other for that lobbying for it yeah that means something to these kids and their parents campaigning yeah this is that's what they would do they'd have campaigns and the yearbooks would have like a an ad thing it would be like Variety magazine and Oscar season it would be awful nobody wants that I want it so they need more competition yeah people spending fucking hundreds of thousands of dollars on campaigns another reason for kids to feel bad about themselves yeah oh man now what do I have to do yeah

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And then she ended up teaching English and Spanish after college, as we'll talk about. Her one friend said she's the type of person that you notice the moment she walks in the room. She had a flair about her. Some would say she came on strong, but her friends liked her like that kind of a thing. It's like a strong coffee.

Yeah. Yes, it's strong, but you know what? It's bracing and refreshing. And you know it's there. And you know it's there, and she is honest. You always know how Kay feels about shit, too. Oh, really? Pulls no punches. I like that. She's like that. So she taught for a few years in Denver.

And then she goes to get her master's degree at the University of Maryland. Oh. And that's when she meets Bob, who was an electronics technician, and he was taking college courses for one of his jobs. And he never got his degree, though. He was just taking these courses and never finished here. So they met in a University of Maryland parking lot. Her brother said, this is Kay's brother, quote, she had this old Ford Falcon with rust spots on it. Right.

She was trying to cover up the spots with floral contact paper, and Bob walked by. She's putting shit for your shelves where you put your glasses on and your shelves to keep the wood from getting warped. Flowery floral contact paper. The first wrap. Yeah.

He said he was Bob was going through these cars and he was walking. He sees a tall woman leaning against a rusty Ford Falcon and put she's like I thought it was she was putting paper on the roof. She said he said, what the hell are you doing? Yeah. What are you doing, lady? Wallpaper that. And she looked up and smiled and said, quote, I'm wallpapering my four. Which I would think that was funny, too, if somebody said that, like, obviously, I'm wallpapering a Ford. What do you think? That's funny.

I love that she said my Ford and my car. My Ford, yeah. Wallpapering a Ford, obviously. What do you do in the parking lot? Why would she do this in the parking lot, not at her house? She had it in the backseat, and she's like, now's a good time to have it. Right now, in the parking lot. Stopped raining. And she said it was very quick and matter-of-fact, as he said, so he liked that. And she said she couldn't take the car's appearance anymore. It was all beat up and rusty, and she couldn't afford a body shop. Right.

So what the hell? She'd do this. So she'd hide them up under these yellow and green floral contact paper. And it's like 1967 to 68. So it's that psychedelic. Yeah. You know what I mean? You know, the flowers. You know what I mean? Those psychedelic flowers.

And Bob thought it was funny. He said to her, fantastic. He thought that was great. Thought it was awesome. It was like a white rusty car. Now she's got these spots of flower things. He's like, this chick is crazy. I like her.

So he found out that he liked her. Yeah. He said she was witty and original, different than other chicks and friendly. And he just liked her. He was like the idea to cover a rust with fucking cling paper. She's a character. She's fascinating. That's kind of. Yeah. That's like a romantic comedy movie character. Like Sandra Bullock would have played her in a movie. What are you doing? I'm wallpaper in my Ford. Yeah.

Forever after that. That's how Jesse James met her. Probably, yeah. Wallpaper in her forehead. So she decided to quit teaching school to earn her master's degree there. And by the way, she's 5'11", Bob's 5'8". She's super thin. Yeah.

And he's stocky and chunky a bit. And she's got short brown hair all the time. Everybody said she looked like she was like British, like a fashionable British lady. Everybody said she looked like back in the day. And she's nice looking though. She had big glasses, of course, big 70s glasses. Bob ended up going to class, but he said he –

He liked her. He thought about her. And he never talked to her again after that for a while until he saw her several months later in the cafeteria. And he walked over to her and sat and ate lunch with her. And they found out they had a bunch of shit in common. Both their parents are schoolteachers, both going for their master's degree in education. He's got a bunch of rust on his car and needs a wrap. Yeah, he'd like a nice, maybe you can help me out.

They're both graduate students. They're both, you know, smart. Yeah. They're both doing everything. They're earning room and board by living in the dorms and doing the R.A. shit. So they're getting that. Bob liked to talk a lot, but he said he liked listening to her. She's very fast talking and she seemed real smart. They had both of them have like deep religious beliefs, too. So they got into that and they agreed on that kind of stuff.

she's really Catholic. He's not. He's Protestant. So back then that was called a mixed marriage, literally. That was like, oh, Jesus Christ, that was a big deal back in the day. It's entirely different buildings and different experiences on the day of whatever. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. So he liked that she was direct and shit like that. He wasn't a ladies' man, let's just say. He was very – he's aggressive in all of his other –

but not necessarily with the ladies. He's a little more laid back. It's tough, man. It's tough. And again, too, he's not even 5'8". He's like 5'7". He's bald prematurely. Bald as shit. So yeah, he feels right away like everybody looks at him like he's too old when he's the same age as them or something. And he doesn't have that physically fit, handsome physique that everyone's looking for. He's probably got some insecurities. And if you're in college, you're walking around, you're probably seeing a lot of dudes that you're like, Oh, God.

Look at the pussy this guy gets. Forget it. Fucking dick, yeah. Walk on a college campus. Yeah. You will feel bad about yourself. He's 36 on a college campus, bald, looking like Homer Simpson. It's rough. He was in shape. He's not fat.

He's just a stockier guy and doesn't look like a 21-year-old model or anything. Yeah, he's 36. It's fine, yeah. So he also has, on the left side of his face, looks like a birthmark or a scar, but starts in about his left temple and goes down below his cheekbone. Oh, it's not getting better. Dark mark here. Yeah, Bob would...

tell people different stories about it all the time. The most common story was that it was a scar from a motorcycle accident, which sounds the coolest. That sounds the coolest, unless it was like I got in a fight in a bar and this guy cut me with a beer bottle. You know what I mean? It sounds cool when actually, when he was a baby, he fell and wedged himself between the crib and a steam radiator. It's a...

It's a radiator burn. Oh, my God. Yeah. Jesus. So it's really he couldn't even stay in a crib when he was a baby. And he's like, I was on a motorcycle.

Kind of. So it severely burned his face and darkened the skin in that one spot. The scar lightened up a little bit, but they said you noticed it immediately because it's right on his face. It's hard to not notice. Katie said that she told her friend that she met this guy that kind of seemed like a know-it-all. Her friend said what bothered her more was that he really did know it all.

He was like, he wasn't just coming across as a know-it-all. He actually knew shit. Yeah. Which was like, you asshole. Yeah. Quote, she said, you can't even go for a walk with this man, but what he doesn't have to name, when he doesn't have to name every leaf on every tree and what's growing on the ground. He knows all the plants. He goes on to explain all that stuff, and she just wanted to enjoy it, her friend said. She just wanted to have a nice walk, and he's like, that's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he would tell you what every piece of ground cover is. That's a turnoff, huh?

Which for an education person, I don't know. But Katie was in, Katie at the time, was in the last year of her two-year graduate program. And she told friends that she just wanted to get her degree. She would see Bob occasionally, but it was just casual. They'd hang out, have some coffee, go on a walk. And that was that. Learn about some plants. See him again a month later. Not a real, you know, not a hot and heavy courtship. Relationship. So.

So Bob would hang out with his friend, a younger dude with blonde hair who Kay called shallow and full of himself. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's like, maybe I'll get some runoff here.

He found himself a hot friend. Yeah. Bob found himself a handsome guy to be like, I'm hanging out with this guy. He's blonde and handsome. Perfect. In the summer of 1969, Kay got her master's degree in education. She's ready to go. She goes and moves into a tiny apartment outside Washington, D.C. Yeah. And yeah, they're all she's looking for a job.

Katie and her friend, they go on a big hunt looking for jobs and everything else. They were looking for applying for positions all over the world. Really? Yeah, they wanted to explore. Oh, relocate. That's not tied to anything. They were looking for places. Even Samoa and the Philippines, they applied to jobs there. Yeah, far away. Wow. So Kay said that maybe she thought she was thinking at this point, even though she went through all the school,

going to get her master's degree. Maybe she doesn't want to be a teacher after all. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, fuck, if you got ideas and plans, really, you're looking for jobs elsewhere. You don't go teach in the Philippines. She said, well, she said, maybe I'll join the air force. What? In 1969. That's a bad idea. It's a interesting idea for an educated lady who can have a job and different stuff. It's not like they're drafting a,

27-year-old lady teachers in 1969. It's an odd choice. Yeah. She took the qualifying test, but then decided not to enlist. There you go. She studied real estate, got a real estate license, but then said, I don't want to sell real estate. You got to really...

That's a lot of work, man. You have to have a certain personality to do that, too. You can't do that unless you're really that person who's like, I just want to show people houses. Yeah, look at that. Look at this. Those just high-end real estate people, I'm like, you lazy motherfucker. Yeah. You got to qualify before I'll show you a house. Fuck yourself. And you're going to what? Do a

guide me to a place to go sign paperwork and you're going to get 3% of this? Fuck you. Can you imagine me or you being real estate agents? No. You'd show somebody three houses and go, I don't know what you want.

I gave you good, better, best. Pick one. It's like the real estate report. I showed you some of this. That one's bigger. This one's less expensive. Have you ever seen fucking house hunters? You get three options. That's it. Just pick one, you fucking asshole. You want to see all of them, you fucking jerk? Oh, my God. You know which house you want already, don't you? Just buy one and move in, you asshole. If you don't like any of those, then go rent an apartment. You're living here.

Here's your paper. Sign it. I'm going to punch you in the throat. Here's your keys, you fuck. Oh, man. At one job interview that she had with real estate, she stood up to leave and felt she's thought a cold blast of cold air on her back. And then she realized after she left, she forgot to zip up her dress. Her ass was out. So like, yeah, from the top. So she's like, didn't get that job. That one didn't work.

Hilarious. So then by the end of the summer, neither she or her friend found work yet in all these permanent jobs they applied for. So they decided to just do sub teaching in the school year when it started to pay the rent. They need to pay the rent. So Kay didn't really see Bob much. But in the fall now, when she starts subbing and stuff.

She they start dating a little bit. And he didn't get his graduate degree. He just stopped going to school. He was done with that because he had other degrees. He was fine. So he was living in Beltsville, which is northeast of Washington. And he was an electronics instructor for the Bendix Corporation.

They still exist, but that sounds bad. Bendix sounds really bad. It sounds so bad. It feels like a company that's doing research to fix your bent dick. To fix your, yeah. What's it called? The Peronis. Fucking the Bendix Peronis Corporation. And then the Italians named a beer after it. Yeah, hey, drinking my bent dick. Having a sip of the bent dick.

He had broken his leg in a motorcycle accident recently. Oh, now he's got a real motorcycle injury. He probably fell out of bed. Yeah, he probably fell. He tripped going to the bathroom at three in the morning. He's like, ah, fuck. He kicked the radiator. Yeah, goddammit. These radiators. I won't have them in my house. Every time he just tells us it's a motorcycle. Oh, god. So he would hop around on a cast, and he, I guess...

He stopped calling her Katie. He said, you're 29 and you're like a sophisticated woman. Katie's kind of a girlish name. So he called her Kate. And then they got shortened to Kay, and that's what everybody ended up calling her after a while as Kay. So she was looking for a job, and she's looking everywhere. An employment agency found her a teaching job at Atlantic City High School in New Jersey. She's like, I don't really want to teach the sweat hogs probably, but...

You know, maybe not. But she did. She went to work there.

There after like the holidays of that year, she's going. Bob keeps in touch with her by phone, sees her now and then. And he was telling his friends, I'm going to marry this chick. But she was just very casually hanging out with him. Yeah. You know, just he's got a game plan. He said, yeah, he's going to marry her at Christmas. Kate K takes Bob home to meet her family in Illinois. Oh, big deal.

for her. Yeah. So after that, I guess Kay had talked to her friend and said, you going to be around in June? Will you be my maid of honor? Oh. So she said, I'm marrying Bob. She's going to do it. It went from we're not even seeing each other to two months later, I'm marrying Bob. Huh. I don't know what it was. I don't know if it was the

you know, the going home with the family or whatever it was, but they decided to get married and she's going to move with him to the Washington area in the spring. And that's that. So 1970, they get married. It's their first marriage for both of them. They're very excited. And then in 71, they buy a house. Okay.

In Cape St. Clair. Yeah. Which is, this is on the Broadneck Peninsula. Because there's Annapolis and then there's this little peninsula. It looks like an island, but it's connected to land. It's a little peninsula that comes out. And that's what. Broadneck. That's probably named after like some fucking oysters out there. I'm sure. Broad, yeah, something like that. A broad neck oyster, a broad neck clam or some shit. It's awesome. But that's what the high school's called too. She'll get a job teaching there. The house is at 1242 Mount Pleasant Drive. Okay.

So the neighbor, H. James Ferguson. Get the fuck out of here. You know you're in a fancy neighborhood when people use their first name as an initial. Yeah. I'm H. James. H. James Ferguson. Yeah. He said the day we moved in next door to them, Kay came over and said, we know how hard it is moving. I'll fix you dinner tonight. Wow.

Wow. Geez, now I got to talk to you through dinner, though. I'm putting my shit away. Like, I'll meet you. I want to hang out. You're my neighbor. We'll get to know each other. But all my shit's in boxes. I got a box here that says magazines, but it's all my sex toys. I need you to leave. Please, I can't unpack this with you here. And if I go over there to eat at your house, all I'm going to think is my house is full of unpacked shit that I have to unpack. No fun.

So Bob converts to Catholicism when they get married as well. Yes. Yeah. She's really, really Catholic. And he's like, whatever. I'll be Catholic then, too. But he's into it. They join the St. Mary's Church in Annapolis and become very Catholic.

It's the best thing you'll do for a hot chick, huh? Oh, that's a chick you like. Guys don't care about that. No. Religion, well, do we ever see on Seinfeld? George Costanza was like, whatever, I don't care. Latvian Orthodox, whatever. Don't give a shit. Never even heard of it. Sounds good. Sign me up. You're hot. I'll do what you want. That's what it is. Guys don't care. And women, too. They don't care. They convert all the time for people. That's true. Love will make you do shit. Whoever cares less about it is the one who converts, and that's how it works.

So he switches. He ends up being like big in the parish, too. Yeah. He also becomes a treasurer for a bunch of different groups here. Now they find out they can't have children. Oh, no. Kay can't get pregnant. Really? Yeah. It's her thing, though. It's her. Yeah. Barren womb. Oh, damn it. Yeah. No good. But they want kids.

They want kids. So they want to adopt kids. So at least they're putting their money where their mouth is. You know what I mean? And they were looking for, at first there was, they wanted like a ready-made family, like a group of brothers and sisters. Really? They got like a bunch of kids that like maybe their parents died in a house fire and they're just still standing on the front lawn. We'll come pick them up in the station wagon and take them home with us. It's fine. Car careened off the mountain on the way home from a speed trip and shit like that. All the kids in the back survived. The parents went right through the windshield. Yeah.

Some shit like that. So the Maryland Children's Aid and Family Service Society, they had a family of four brothers. Stop it. That was being offered up for adoption. Haunted off. Yeah. Like, you know, when they put puppies up. Yeah.

We have this, Bob. We have four brothers. This one comes with these three. Yeah. They said, we'll take them. Really? We'll take all four of them. And they were even planning where they're going to sleep in the house. It's a three-bedroom house. So they were like, okay, two boys in one, two boys in the other, blah, blah, blah. So they said, yeah, we could do that. You know what I mean? Wow. He's told his family, Bob said, he's just making up for lost time. He's almost 40 already. Great point. I could have four kids anyway. Yeah. And he said, yeah, I'll have twice as many kids as my brother now.

Right away. I went from two, went from two, nothing to four, two like that. Spent no time in the hospital. It's awesome. Yeah. Fucking great. No, I want to, I'm not awake at two in the morning changing diapers. So then a social worker called and said, after talking it over, we've had second thoughts about the brothers.

The social worker said, yeah, we think four children might be too much for you. You can't do this to children. That's well, I don't know if the children knew about it yet. Oh, so they hadn't been moved in yet. No, no, no, no, no. They weren't moved in. This is before they were supposed to hook up with them there. And they said, you know, quote, your marriage is going only going on three years. You know, when we're not sure you're ready to take so many kids at once. You have no kids. If you had three kids and you were fine with them, it'd be. Yeah.

But you have no kids. From none to four is a lot of kids. And if you've got no kids and you've been married for 15 years, you guys know what you want. Yeah, three. Everything's fine. They're worried about what if these two, what if the pressure of four kids breaks them up and now there's a four, you know. And he said, Kate will be disappointed, but, you know, I guess I understand. So they contacted several adoption agencies, but they learned that the waiting period for infants could be months or years. That's crazy.

Yeah. The months or years. I get you got to make sure and vet, but that's, but infants go quick. Yeah. There's an infant up and someone will take that thing. Oh, infants are right now. Immediate. Yeah. Well, before it's like six months old, pre six months old, they will swoop them up because they can pretend that's their baby. I don't mean, you know,

But they can feel not just like they've had somebody's kid dropped off. Sure, sure. Yeah, because that's all this kid will ever know. So it's a whole thing. And it's a possessive thing, too, probably. You want them to know who their parents are. That's me. Yeah. And then being called dad by a – I'm the only one that kid's ever called dad is a specific thing. That helps, yeah. Yeah.

I think that's what it is. So they set a huge waiting list for newborns. Forget about it. Like, you know, the ones that get pulled right out and handed off. Those are like you got to wait years for those tons of those. But, you know, six months, that's still months and months. Yeah. So most parents didn't want children over the age of two. That's the cutoff. Really?

Yeah, they don't want them to like where they were talking already. Wow. They want like a baby. Yeah. And then have the baby develop in their image. It's a human thing, I think. I can see that, but you are taking on the hardest fucking part of child raising. And I think that's it, too. I'd take a six-year-old in a second. Well, a six-year-old, though, has...

already has psychological imprints for good or bad. Yeah, you're right. So that's the thing I think that people think is even two-year-olds, some, you know, they could have a personality developed already that they, whatever. I'll take a six-year-old non-bedwetting, non-fire starter. How's that? That's the problem, yeah. Those are the six-year-olds that are available. That's what you get. Yeah.

So they said it was tough and they said it was a lot to get people. They said nobody wanted kids that were older than five. That's too bad. It's really hard to sell people on, which is tough. It takes a certain kind of person. Yeah.

So they adopt a young boy here. Okay. They adopt him at the age of six. Okay. So he's an easy one to get. I'm right. Yeah. Six. Well, maybe not. Okay. This is Larry. They adopt Lawrence as his real name, Larry, and they give him the last name right away, Larry Swartz. Yeah. And he had had a tough time. Really? He had been in a bunch of foster homes. Kay is his sixth mother. Oh, no.

No. Six months. That's what I mean. By the time a kid is six and they've been in this system their whole life, not even their whole life because he's only been in it since his three. He was three. We'll talk about it. He's gotten two a year. Yeah. Jesus. It's not good. It's really he's had a tough time. The worker told them we do have a boy who really needs a home. His name is Larry and I met him yesterday. I liked him a lot. He's small and dark skinned and very good looking.

He'll be seven in August. We've got to find him a new home as soon as we can. What does his looks have to do with it? He's a handsome child. You'll really want to molest. Not ugly at all. It's really great. Very weird. Odd as fuck. Kay said, well, where is he now? And they said with a family that was going to adopt him, but it just didn't work out. Hmm.

It wasn't his fault. They had their own biological children. I don't think they were able to accept an adopted child. And it's been hard on the boy. He knows he's not wanted. And he asked us to find new parents for him. And they said, is he in school? And he said, first grade, but he's being held back.

He couldn't concentrate. His teacher said he comes to school upset a lot, which, yeah. He's furious. Your home life is crazy. The world hates him. That's how he feels. He does things like eat other kids' lunches in the cafeteria. Atta boy. He'll just come and start swiping food. Because he's fucking starving. He's got a lot of weird food things of not eating and then overeating, and he's got a lot of weird food stuff. It's disgusting.

Which is security. Food security is an issue. Yeah, he probably doesn't know where his next one's coming from. So they said, we all think he needs a massive dose of love and attention. And if you guys want to do that, maybe that's what the solution is. Yeah. So they said, you know, we'll take a look at him. Sure. Bring him by. We'll kick the tires. Start the fires. We'll do it all, baby. Yeah. Kick the tires on him.

Run this motherfucker around the block. See how the transmission warms up. You know what I mean? Yeah. We'll step on it real hard, get it up to 60. Slam on the brakes. Zero to 60. See what the time is on that. See how the nose dives in the brakes. Let's see. See the body rolls and the turns. Yeah. Could have fucked up shocks. Let's find out.

So they said, why don't you and your husband come up to Baltimore? Yeah. And they said, yeah. They said if it works out, you could take him home for good the next weekend. They want him. He's going to be seven. Yeah. Like, they'll put him anywhere. Seriously. This kid's about to cry. He's on the vine. Yeah. Like, he needs to be picked immediately. The milk is curdling. Yeah. Now, the original story they hear is that Larry's parents are from India. Okay. Not true. Well, his dad is from India. Yeah. Yeah.

But his mom is not from India. And they said, yeah, it's just they're just India from India. They couldn't hack it in the country with the kid. Not true at all. Turns out his dad is a pimp from India, a New Orleans street pimp. And his mom is a chick that he picked up. So it's rough. Yeah. Apparently his mother's name, real mother's name is Sheila.

And she's a small, bleach blonde lady with blue eyes from California. Yeah. And she's in New Orleans hanging out here. She's 19 years old. Oh, my God. And she gets pregnant. And her boyfriend, his name is Luther Singh. That's his real – that's Larry's real father. He's described as several years older and incredibly handsome. 50. 50.

Not that old, but not 19. I think like 30, 27, something like that. And by the way, this is all from a book. I'll give you the title at the end here. But somebody wrote a book about this in 1989. Wow. So, yeah, they weren't going to get married or anything like that. He just knocked her up and that sort of thing. He was very handsome, she said. They met at Mardi Gras the previous year.

And he went, with a set like that, you're mine. You can really kick the tires of Mardi Gras. She got all his beads. Yeah, all of them. She described him as a dark, flashy stranger whose family was from India, so he wasn't even Indian. A pimp. Yeah, dark, flashy stranger. He was exotic and exciting, like pimps are. That's how pimps are.

They make it mysterious. Yeah. So they started living together by the end of Mardi Gras. So two weeks of Mardi Gras brought them together here. She moved to New Orleans just out of nowhere. She felt like it. She left Chicago in 1965 and went to work as a waitress down there.

And yeah, she was just turned 18. She's like, I know how to wait tables. I can work anywhere. I'm going to New Orleans. What a time to be alive. Yeah, just going. In the 60s. Go. You just pick a spot on the map. Just go. And if you've got money to get there, you'll start anew when you get there. You'll figure it out. It's fine. You'll make cash by the end of the night. Imagine doing that today. If you could wait tables, you could go anywhere. Yeah. You know? No, today, good luck. Oh, God, Jesus. You've got to have fun.

First and last. It's thousands of dollars to get there. Just to get an apartment, you need a first, last, fucking security. You got to have that. You got to have the money to get there. It's ridiculous. Storage unit now. You leave the house, it's $100. It's everything. So at 10 o'clock on August 24th, this is the day that he was born, that Larry was born. He's born a month early, and he weighs four pounds. Oh.

Oh, my God. He's very light. What is she doing? He's a month early. Yeah. So who knows what happens? Stress or whatever. Stress, drugs, alcohol, something. Something. Lawrence Joseph calls him Larry. And there's that. Yeah. But she doesn't really. She uses Luther's last name sometimes, but they're not really married. So there's a.

We don't know exactly what they named him. That's a tough thing here. So Luther, the father, then moved up to Washington, D.C., and she and the baby moved with them. And a social worker later asked Sheila why she continued to live with Luther since he was viciously beating her. And she said, quote, he was so handsome. I guess it was the physical attraction. He's just so cute. He's just so handsome. He's beating the shit out of you. Who cares what he looks like?

You should see his eyes sparkle. Well, this is like, why would you put up with this? She's crazy. Have you seen the tits on it? It's true. People, it's... Yeah. We're both... We're a horny people. That's what it is. What I've put up with for tits. Yeah. But after three years, she described him as just an awful person. Yeah. She packed up her shit one day and moved into an apartment with a couple of girlfriends in Silver Spring with the baby. Yeah. And that's how they ended up there. But...

It doesn't really work out because in the end, she ends up having to turn him into social services. And by the age of three, he already had exhibited emotional problems, chronic bedwetting. He's seen dad beat the shit out of his mom. He's had all sorts of issues. They find him eating food out of garbage cans, getting up in the middle of the night to make sure his foster family was still. He'd wake them up and make sure they were there.

Oh my God. Is that you? Okay. That's when he had to go to a foster place because he was so worried about who left and who's where. He's jumpy. By six, kids have had a lot of stuff going on. So he gets moved from foster home to foster home. Tons of shit going on and nothing's good. He...

During his stay with his first foster home, he appeared to do well, no problems eating or sleeping and that sort of thing. But the caseworker and foster parents decided that Larry should be moved to a home closer to his mother.

So they took him out of a home that he was doing well in to move closer to his mother. But... Who's not doing well. Who signed away parental rights of him. Yeah. Why move close to her? It's fucking insanity. Wow. So...

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CVS, making healthier happen together. 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.

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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. It's really crazy, man. So he ended up going to the home of Harold and Betty Hernan.

And he went in the house. He met his foster parents here. They seemed happy to have him, although their marriage was falling apart at the time. Fantastic. Yes. So they had other foster children there, too, which wasn't helping. Sheila demanded to see him, and the supervisor then drove her to the Heron's house to see the boy.

She can't demand that. Yeah. She wrote in the supervisor wrote in her report, Larry seemed to recognize her a little but paid not much attention to her. Wow. Because he's been in different – he's three. Your memory probably, you know – Refreshes. Refreshes a lot. Yeah. Your tape rewinds. Yeah.

So on October 16th, Dr. Julius Lobel, who's a doctor, he examined Larry, found him to be a normal child of small stature. He was barely three years old. He wasn't three feet tall yet. He only weighed 24 pounds. Oh, he's very malnourished. Very small kid. Only they said he had weighed one more pound than he'd weighed 15 months before. He gained a pound in a year? A pound in 15 months. Wow.

His foster mother told the doctor that he was a restless child with a short attention span and he still had toilet accidents. He still would have problems there. Then Larry went to see another doctor, a psychologist, who administered the intelligence scale test to him and said his social adjustment quotient on the scale suggested he was functioning at a level about four-fifths the average for three-year-olds.

And they said his IQ was about 85, placing him in the, quote, dull normal range. He is three, you guys. Yeah, just a little dull. Jesus Christ. Give him some time. Yeah, give him some time to bud here. He needs to bloom. Love him. Water that plant. Yeah. What the fuck? That's what I'm saying. He needs some fertilizer, some something. He's just, they left him...

He's grown in a sidewalk crack and it hasn't rained in three months. And they're like, he's looking a little wilted. I don't know. Give him some Oreos for Christ's sake. Spoil him a little. Yeah. They said the doctor said it's likely this child has had some tendency toward hyperactivity. And this needs to be further evaluated before a definite statement can be made about the possibility of some central nervous system dysfunction. Oh.

It was of interest to note that the foster mother probably covertly rejecting the child and has difficulty accepting it. She doesn't know she's rejecting him? Yes. The foster mother is probably, yeah, she's outwardly not, but inside she doesn't want this kid. What? She's sorry she got him. So another foster home he goes to. Oh, my goodness. They were very excited to have him there, but they were struggling with money.

They were the Weaver family and they said, quote, it's still a day to day struggle with him. He wets the bed and he hasn't let me through that barrier that he's got around him. He just hasn't become a part of the family like we expected him to. We got to give him a minute. Yeah. He's so little. Yeah. After two years, they still hadn't signed the adoption decree. They were still like doing a test run on him here.

So it's very weird. Either they or the agency could call off the adoption at any time before that. So they asked them, do you think that you'll ever not do this and call it quits with Larry? And they said no. And the wife, that's what the man said. And then the wife said, I don't see it now, but two years down the road, if everything's still the same, I don't know how I'll feel.

A kid can feel that. Yeah. So you either have to be in 100% or not. But you can't be like, I don't know, I'll hedge my bets and if the kid's pretty cool, then I guess I'll be his mom. Yeah. Kids are so good at picking out who likes them and who doesn't. They've got that gut feeling that we ignore. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

So at one point, the Weavers went to the doctor, took him to the doctor in March 72, and Larry had a broken arm. Oh? Yeah. This is some problems with the mom because he couldn't stop bedwetting, and she was yelling at him so much, and then she wouldn't talk to him for long stretches of time, and she ended up breaking his arm.

She was yanking him around or something. She got really mad one day, snatched his left arm and twisted it behind his back while she was screaming at him. Oh, my God, and it broke. And he tried to squirm and break free, and then his bone cracked, and he had a bone in his upper part of his left arm snapped. Poor little guy. Yeah, he was in a big cast for weeks. And at the hospital, in the report, it said, twisted and injured left arm. And the x-ray revealed the fracture. That's fantastic.

Fucking. And they said in the report, cause he couldn't stop bedwetting. That's fucking horrible. So that's who they get. Larry. Wow. That's who this family, the Swartzes are going to bring in. Bob and Kate are bringing in poor little Larry. Bringing in poor little Larry. Larry's had it tough. And then a few months later they adopt another young man too. Really? Yup. A little boy named Michael.

And Michael, he's six months older than Larry. Okay. So they're the same age? They figure, yeah, same age. Maybe they'll get along and be brothers. You know what I mean? Yeah.

But that's not even Irish twins. So even if they look close to alike, they're never going to feel like brothers. No, no, but they could be. If they're close enough in age, they could be. They could feel happy together and be friendly, but they won't ever be brothers. But I mean, even if they're best friends, great. Yeah, that's good. You know what I mean? Great. And if they're this age, they grow up together, they'll feel like brothers after a while. It's us against the world, man. That's what I mean. Especially if they're both from shit.

environments. Michael had been in seven foster homes already. Oh, Christ. Yeah. He is of Native American descent. So they're just like, we just want anybody with any kind of Indian in them. We don't give a shit. A couple of guys that Ben Franklin would confuse for each other. That's what we want. That's what we want. People who would, let's put them together and go, Chris Columbus, which is which? Let's find out. They're the same. Yeah.

St. Vinter. So he had Michael loved Indian arrowheads and he kept them with him. Oh, really? Yeah, they're like his prized possessions. He's very tall. Michael will be six foot six when he grows up, by the way. Oh, boy. Tall kid. Shit. So, yeah, they pick him up. And, yeah, Michael, I guess they said when they came to get him,

They had to go into the office and do paperwork and shit, and he was waiting outside for them. Holding his bag. Let's go. He's got an arrowhead in one hand and his bag. Fuck the paperwork. Let's just go. Yeah. I guess Michael was pissed off because he just wanted to leave. He goes, this guy just showed up, and he wants to take me home. Let's go. This place sucks. He seems better. He said he hadn't lived with a father since.

Since he was three or four either. So it's been hard. He said he didn't like his father at the time. His father, when he was a small child, three years old, used to beat him with a board, a wooden board.

So he said he hardly remembered his mother because she just disappeared one day, abandoning him and his sister and his brothers to be with the, you know, wood beating father over here. How do we know she abandoned them? And dad didn't just hacksaw Jim Duggan her in the fucking garage. Yeah. And she's hitting the kids with the board.

But this is how Michael is. Yeah. When our guy here, Bob, came outside, he found Michael using his arrowhead to scratch the orange paint off the roof of a Datsun truck. Ah, somebody's carving it. Yeah, he's just scraping the paint off of it. Is he carving it? So Bob came out and said, what are you doing? Yeah, it's like...

Holy shit. That's crazy. That's somebody's property, man. Yeah. He's had a hard time, Michael. I mean, he is he stayed on the average less than one year in each foster home. This is his seventh. Like we said, I'm not counting his natural family. That would make it eight. Everybody rejected him for one reason or another. One of his parents is dead already or one of the parents of the foster people. One died. So the other one gave him back.

Another couple said he was unmanageable. Another woman accused him of stealing money from the pocketbook of a visitor in the foster home. He was six. Yeah, what's he going to get? He should be able to manage that at six. Yeah. You should be able to tell them why that is and then with structure over time, help them understand that that's not right. Yeah, you can't just steal. Unless your kid is Ted Bundy. Right. You know what I mean? I don't know. He's carving his name in cars. He's just scraping paint. He was just absentmindedly scraping paint off. Just taking chunks off of it. Yeah.

So the first weekend with the Schwartzes was billed as a visit, a weekend retreat kind of thing. And he later said, I was just there to check it out. And I met Larry, meaning the new kid. He said it was fun. I had a good time. Larry said, hey, man, we're going to Disney World next week. If you come with live with us, you can go.

So Michael said, I went. I was like, fuck, I'm with a family that goes to fucking Disneyland. Hold on. I got a brother who's like my own age and we're going to Disneyland. And we're the same tint. Holy shit. Yeah. This is fucking phenomenal. Absolutely. He was jacked for this shit. That's the thing. I've seen both. They look like brothers. Do they?

Yeah. If you saw them and they went, we're brothers, you'd go, okay, one's short and one's tall is the only thing. You just assume the taller one's the older brother. That's it. But I mean, and I know brothers who are, you know, full grown. One is 6'6", and one's 5'9". Yeah. It's just the life. I mean, I don't know.

So they were, I guess the mailman was tall. Yeah. It was Carl Malone who came in. The actual mailman. Yeah. And the mother was 13, as Carl Malone likes them, as we know, from the bonus crime and sports. The two boys were immediately tight. Yeah. And they were well-liked in the neighborhood. Larry was a newspaper boy. Yeah. Delivered newspapers. Michael would rake leaves and mow grass for money. Yeah.

and nice and helpful to their parents. And they were like, holy shit. And Larry told Michael, don't worry. It's not such a bad place once you get used to it. This is pretty sweet setup we got here. So that's also nice. He had like a guy, you know, doing like some recon for him, Michael, when he came in. This place is much chiller than everywhere else. Yeah, look, we've both been in a lot of shit. This place is, all right, you're going to like it. Food's on time. Food's on point. No garbage cans. Nobody's beating me with a board yet.

So they shared a bedroom, the boys, and the third bedroom was free for guests. And we're going to have another kid later on we'll talk about. Jesus. Strict rules, though, also. And these, for the age they are, make sense. No leaving the neighborhood. Why?

One block in all directions. That's fair. Tons of mothers have been telling their kids that for 100 years. Stay in the neighborhood. Stay within this street and that street. Around the block is all you get. Whichever direction you go. Around people we know. Yeah. So less likely to be snagged and taken away. But then again, how funny would that be? Not funny. How ironic would that be?

At this person that nobody wants and he can't get taken. And they go outside and he's kidnapped. He's like, Jesus Christ. Now there's a swell of rushing of emotions. People all want me now. What's going on? You'd be so confused. Yeah. And even more confused if they sold you into the sex trade. All these people every day. Somebody wants me. What the fuck? Yeah. Now I'm always wanted. Always in demand. Yeah.

That is gross. So one block, no television except on weekends, which is rough for the late 70s. Yeah, because kids in the morning is when the shit's on. Yeah, no soda or candy. Well, during the week, though, that's school time. You concentrate on school and you do your homework. Well, when you're eight, there's not a lot of homework to do. In the morning, though, before school, there's always kids programming. No, no, no. We're going to put classical music on the radio. Lights were out at 8 o'clock on school nights.

8 o'clock bedtime, which that's just family to family. That varies. They had to help their mother with housework. Michael had to mow the lawn and take out the garbage because that was his thing. They each got an allowance from doing their work, $1 a piece per week, and they could spend it as they wanted except for candy and soda, obviously. Yeah.

And she would give them extra money for raking the yard or doing everything. So they had a responsibility thing. The relatives noticed the bond between Larry and his mother at family get-togethers. One relative said, Larry would hang around Kay and try to do things for her. I would see her, for no reason at all, go up and hug Larry and hold his hands.

Like, try to be nice to him. Kay's brother said he liked both boys, but he felt bad for Michael. He said he could tell Michael seemed very awkward and unsure of himself. And they said a lot of that is because he was very tall for his age. He's tall and gangly. Doesn't feel like he fits into anything. Into anything. Let alone this family. Yeah, and he's, like, new and he feels like he's going to get cast aside also. So they said that this uncle said that he tried to single Michael out for, give him special attention. Not in a perverted way, but special attention. The uncle stuff.

And try to be extra nice to him. Hey, let's take the kid fishing. You know what I mean? Let's take him out with us for the day. Let's go eat some ice cream. Yeah. So the boys started bickering, as kids the same age would do. Larry couldn't really physically contend with Michael because he was much smaller than him. One time, Kay was watching, and Larry and Michael were wrestling around in the yard and fell down to the ground. Yeah.

Larry broke away, got up and started running and ran right into a tree. Oh, she turned around to look to see where Michael was and ran into a fucking tree. Clark fell down unconscious. Yeah.

Like a cartoon. Yeah. Like a Benny Hill movie. Like ridiculous. Pow. I'm surprised he didn't step on a rake and have it come up and smack him in the face. Yeah. After he came to, they diagnosed him with a concussion. Yeah. So he's got that. Now, Kay blamed Michael and was pissed off at him. Really? Yes. So she yelled at him. He got mad and said, fucking no way. Yeah. And she slapped him.

She slapped Michael. Michael called her a bitch. Attaboy. And she told him to go to his room, and he did. Then Bob got home. Oh. And it was wait till your dad gets home because Bob heard that he called Kay a bitch. Yeah. And he wasn't tolerating that. He yelled at him, and basically he hit him four or five times, punched the child. Oh.

Hard, like punching a 10-year-old. Really worked him over. Oh, my God. How dare you call my wife a bitch like he's at a biker bar or something. You don't say that about my old lady. You don't finger my wife's cutoffs. Like, that was weird. Yeah. So 1979, they adopt another kid. Okay. A three-year-old, they figure, because they do a little Natalia Gray thing with her. Oh, check some teeth. Well, a three-year-old orphaned Korean girl named Ann Lee, who they call Annie. Yeah.

She was four, according to her adoption records, and they listed her birth as October 1973, but they said she seemed way too tiny to be four. They suspected that her birth date was probably wrong, so they decided she was three and gave her a new birth date of October 1974 instead of 73. All right. So they figured the extra year would give her more time to break the language barrier before she started school. We'll just pretend she's younger. We'll give her an extra year. We never get an extra year. To learn English. Yeah.

So, I mean, and at three, you pick that shit up quick, too. She'll be speaking with a valley girl lilt in fucking six months. Are you kidding me? Yeah, in vocal fry. Oh, my God. Like, hey. She did. Yeah. So the kid didn't know how old she was. So she always thought she was a year younger than she actually was because they told her that.

On their car, they have a Chevy Chevette. Yep. You know that's hot shit with an everyone deserves adoption bumper sticker on there. Bench seat in the back for all the adoptees. All of them. Come on in, kids. Now, the boys, education's a big deal for them with these boys. They're very smart. Bob and Kay, no, they're not, but the Bob and Kay are smart, and they want the kids to be smart. The boys are very smart. Unfortunately, they're not.

Michael was a smart one, actually. Michael was smart, quick learner, did well in school. Larry, not so good in school. Larry's a little stunad, we'll say here. Well, he's seen his mom get the shit punched out of him. Yeah, that doesn't make you dumber, though. No, but it'll certainly make you. It'll give you emotional problems. It doesn't make your IQ drop. Certainly give you less drive than had you not seen it. Drive, yeah, yeah. But the teachers think he's dumb. Really? They think he doesn't have it.

Even the parents, he's just dull. Dull normal, dull. He's just always a little dull. Even if mom hadn't gotten decked, the ability is not there. It's just, yeah, he's not terrific. So Michael, though, excelled in school, and they thought that he was under-challenged. So they had him jump from the second to the fourth grade. A two-year jump? Well, they skipped the third grade.

They had him skip the third grade. But not like at the beginning of second grade? No, no, no. Yeah, he goes from second and instead of going to third, he goes to fourth. Got it. So they said usually kids don't skip those grades. Yeah, those are, yeah, it's rare. So that's a different one. So they said one social worker said, frankly, I'm surprised the school allowed, I guess, no, it was in the middle of the school year, the social worker said. I don't know why I didn't know that from my notes. From the middle of second to the middle of fourth then? Yeah. Yeah.

And they said that was highly unusual. Incredibly. To go to third would have been one thing, but not... Skip all that too? To skip to go to fourth, they said that was real weird. I guess they just said those kids are about his height. Yeah. Literally, like he looks like those kids. And he said the word decimal. Yeah, so we were like, hmm, he might be the one.

So it doesn't work out. He's smart, but he's emotionally in second grade. Right. Fourth grade is a different emotional wavelength by everybody here. He's immature. His grades drop. Disciplinary problems increase because he's frustrated because he can't do anything. He would have impulsive fits of anger. He'd be disobedient. And they said at that point he didn't understand right from wrong, he seemed like, because he was just out of his element again. So Larry, Larry's different.

Michael's smart, but he has these emotional fits. Larry, everything's under the surface. Calm,

mild mannered, follows the rules at school, follows at home, no disciplinary problems, kisses Kay's ass. Yeah. Clearly the favorite son. Uh, but he's a shit student is the only thing, no matter what he does, he can't do it. He's just not good at it. He's like, I'll kiss ass instead where they had to get two kids with the qualities that they want one kid to have. Yeah. Yeah. They found out he has some learning disabilities and he was placed in special education classes, which made him do better. I knew what he was, how to teach him a little bit better. Uh,

1980 problems with Michael get real bad here. And Larry will confirm this, that Michael gets all of the brunt of all of dad's anger. In 1978 and 1979, Bob beat Michael, according to Larry, 20 or 30 times. That's a lot of ass kickings. That's more than a boxer takes. That's too much. But when you open the door to punching. It's crazy. Close fisting children. Yep, I said it.

Close fisting. It's much more cruel. I've said it before. Fuck my stupid tongue. Close fisting children. It certainly teaches them a lesson, James. They know to study harder at that point. We better stop whatever hurts that. Horrifying. Yeah, don't do that to kids, please. Don't close fist them.

But to get punched, it opens a door and a barrier. It breaks down a wall of like, no matter what I'm going to do, I'm going to get punched for it. So whatever. And Michael ended up having a room downstairs in the basement, and that's where these beatings would take place. They said they would take Annie over to a neighbor's house before he'd beat him up.

Like it was a scheduled thing. So it wasn't like I lost and I hit the kid. Oh, God, what happened? This is like I'm kicking his ass. Take the girl to any vacation time. We got to go. Larry could hear Michael screaming, he said, from these beatings. At first, Larry would ran to his mother and said, isn't that a Christ? He's killing him down there. And she said, stay out of it and go to your room.

So Larry, after a while during these beatings, he couldn't take it anymore. He said the distress of the of scaring his brother scream and he would run out of the house and go hide in the swamp in the woods behind until he thought it might have been over until it was enough time. He said he couldn't watch one time, though. His father threw his mandolin at Michael in the backyard. He plays the mandolin. Yeah. I don't know if it's that or he was slicing potatoes. I'm not sure. Yeah.

And just missed him. Uh-huh. And another time he lost his temper and knocked Michael to the ground on the walkway beside the house outside. So Larry was saying, sometimes I couldn't avoid seeing it. It was just happening. Michael's just the target of all this rage. When he knocked him down, Bob kicked him over and over again. Oh, come on. Like he owed a gangster money. Right. So he said he kept kicking.

and Michael would roll from one railroad tie for the next, crashing down the steps because that's how they're set up, these steps. And yeah, he said that for weeks, Michael complained his ribs hurt. He was probably broken. He was being kicked and pushed downstairs. He said Michael started hating his father and he wasn't shy about expressing it. One day he told his mother after one of the beatings, quote, you know I could kill dad. Ha ha.

Like, I'll kill him in his sleep. He's 5'7 at best. I'll fucking kill this guy. She said, what? And he said, I could kill him if I wanted to. Yeah. Dad would come home one day and I would be standing behind the door with a knife. He'd open the door and I could kill him because he wouldn't know I was behind the door.

He has thought about this a lot. This is what happens when you beat people. When you beat people intensely over a long period of time, they start fantasizing about how to fucking stop that. So Kay was like, what the fuck? She didn't think he was serious at all, but she was upset and told Bob about it, which I'm sure earned him a beating.

Likely, yeah. So that's very tough. Now, Michael keeps getting in trouble. He wouldn't follow the rules. One night he asked him if he could go out and see a few of his friends. They said no, so he snuck out of the house.

He got home around 10 o'clock and he was locked out of the house. He knocked. They wouldn't let him in. Yeah, I beat to open the door. So he kept he was knocking and knocking and started yelling, let me in. Kay opened up the window and said, he can't come home anymore. You're not allowed to come home anymore. Anymore. And then the next day she reported him as a runaway to a social worker.

Yeah, because he wasn't there. He was like, well, yeah. He was given a choice by the social worker to move into a foster home or to go to juvenile court, which would likely mean he'd be going to a juvenile detention home. He said he'd rather move into a foster home. And the Schwartzes were like, well, he's no longer our fucking kid. We don't want him anymore.

So Michael's had it tough. So he moves in with another foster family about 15 years away, his ninth. 15 years away? Or 15 miles away. Yeah, it was his ninth home in 13 years. That's what I was trying to say. That's a long ride. It's a long time. Then a month later, after he's in this home, he and his friends break into a house. Michael. He's like 15. Yeah. And stole a radio and two log splitters.

then went into another house and did $2,000 worth of property damage in an unoccupied house. They broke windows, ripped out wiring, and bashed the plumbing in. They just fucked a vacant house up. They broke into another house the next morning and tried to steal a bunch of shit. And the owner's grandson drove by and noticed a front window pane was broken. So he went inside and caught...

Michael, in the act of putting a camera in his pocket, cops came, arrested him, obviously arrested all of them. They were felony breaking and entering theft, malicious destruction of property, all this type of shit. He's moved into the Palmer family boy's home.

which is a state licensed emergency shelter. It's rough, man. There's nothing going right for him at all. Nothing going right for him at all. Later on, the Schwartzes are described as a well-meaning but peculiarly ill-equipped family to deal with these boys' problems. Yeah.

Now, that's they talk about also that people find out that he's been beaten repeatedly. And he said that one of the social workers said Michael told me he was abused physically and Larry would be there hovering in the corner like trying. Oh, God, Jesus, like all freaked out. That's wild. And Michael used to run away after the beatings and that kind of thing, too. So it's really hard for him. Now, the courts.

say that delinquency was one of the only three charges minors could face in the Maryland juvenile court. And the other ones were being a child in need of supervision and assistance. So you can't really charge. Yeah, it's a, that was the time at the time how it worked. So after he left the Swartz home, obviously they declared him a child in need of assistance because Michael's parents are unwilling or unable to give him proper care and attention to wit. Michael's behavioral problems in school and at home have made it impossible for his parents to deal with his problems. Um,

So, yeah, a few weeks after his 14th birthday, that's when they declared him a child of need of assistance. And he was placed in a state-licensed juvenile center.

So over there. So that's not great. No. In May of 1980, a few months after he moved into the youth center, he wrote a letter to the Schwartzes. What did he say? This is fucking sad. Dear Ann Larry K. Bob, hello. I imagine you are all mad at me, but I would still like to keep in touch. I've graduated from high school and I'm going to Frostburg College because he went and took some thing. Yeah.

I'm going to have a lot of fun there. How is Ann and you all? How is Ann? He says it twice. How is Ann and you all? How is Ann? I have a broken arm and wrist. I hope you all are having a good time. I am. I am independent living where we live with no supervision. Michael Swartz. He's still using their name because that's his legal name. He's got a broken arm and hand? Yeah, who knows what he did. He said, P.S. Right back and send a picture of the family and one of Ann.

Both the boys love Anne, by the way. They're both real protective over her and real... I mean, they've been her, I think, is the thing. Yeah. She's got it much easier than they did, and they want to make sure that it stays that way. Yeah. Larry is horrified that his parents did this. He's like...

I thought we had a family going on. Yeah, I didn't know we could just... Just decide we don't like someone anymore. Punch people and tell them out. This freaks him out because he's like, oh, fuck. What about me? Exactly. He said it made him feel very insecure. Yeah, vulnerable. He was scared that one day they'd just throw him out if he did something wrong the same way they did with Michael. And Dad doesn't have Michael to punch anymore. No. What if it's me now? He never beats Larry either. Really? That's the other thing. Larry said never beats him. I don't know if it's because he's small. Hmm.

Or because he's not, he doesn't fight back. I think there's some psychological inferiority feeling of Bob beneath a taller, bigger kid. It's going to make him feel like he's in charge. Possible. Or that's a possibility. Or I think Larry is just, if you yell at Larry, he'll go, okay. He won't say you bitch. Yeah. Whereas Michael will be like, fuck you. That's not right. And then he'll get beat up. Whereas Larry will go, okay, that's fine. I'll just go to my room now.

That's the way he does it. So he's not really, it's hard to get that angry at Larry to beat him because he won't like won't escalate it with you. So, um, at this point, Larry's relationship with his mother starts growing.

She would scream at him twice as much now. What? And he would try to figure out a way to get back into her good graces, but he couldn't figure it out. So he seemed, Larry said at the time he thought the only people in the world who don't like him are his parents. In school he's very popular. Right.

That's the thing. Yeah, in school he's popular. He's known to his teachers. He's not smart, but he's known as polite, good-looking, easy-going. He's good-looking. He keeps coming up. Yeah. Well, he's also a two-sport athlete. He's co-captain of the soccer team. Yeah. You know what I mean? He's doing okay in that regard, but he goes home and they hate him. What the fuck? So they said his friendly nature made it, you know,

I guess that's the only way he survived here. So they would talk. He still talked to Michael on the phone all the time. They stayed in touch like they were brothers all the time, which is very interesting. Tensions start to increase, though. Larry has more arguments with his parents, become a very regular occurrence. They fought over his sports because they thought that being co-captain of the junior varsity soccer team took away from his studies. You know, yeah.

Student-athlete. Student is the first word. So you shouldn't play sports, but also it's also good for you to do that. It's also his identity, and it's what's keeping him afloat because he's not good at school, and this is where he's accepted. Well, if he's decent at soccer, too, maybe that and a C average will get him into a half. Yeah.

half-assed junior college or something rather than just nothing. But an academic C average, he's middle of the road. He's co-captain, meaning he's one of the two favorites on the team. Yeah, they at least like him. And respect him. I think it's good for a kid's confidence to be good at something like that. Absolutely. So he often would get grounded to where he was only permitted to go to school, church, and attend his wrestling matches and soccer events. Jesus. Socializing with his friends was kind of out. No.

When he managed to be able to go on a date, they always hated the girls that he asked out. Of course. They wouldn't like him. So his school work got worse and worse. Uh-huh.

They said he wanted to be his parents' favorite, but it didn't quite work. At one point, he told them he wanted to be a priest. I'll be a priest. Because he thought that's what they wanted. So they were thrilled, and they sent him to a seminary to begin his first year of high school. And that didn't work because his grades sucked, and they recommended that he not return after failing to maintain a necessary grade point average.

And they were very upset with him. So he went from having five D's and a couple of C's and then, you know, it gets worse and worse. Just D's basically. My parents would have been like, you passed. Good job. Thank you. That report card right there is a Wissman report card. Yeah, mine too. Just enough to get by. Yeah. That's it. And he said once Michael left, he said this was like –

Michael's like a sponge for their lightning rod. And now that he's gone, now they're concentrating on Larry and he's like, fuck, Ann's too young. She can't do anything. So they said when they left, um, when, when he left Michael, they started yelling at me for low grades. I never understood why there was such a change. It was,

It was the same grades I was getting. Lightning rod for criticism now. Yeah. But going into high school, they get lower and lower and lower. His father wanted him to go to the Naval Academy. Bob wanted him to go there. But his grades, you have to have good grades to get in there. Bob said, don't you understand how important this is? You'll never get anywhere if you don't do better. We know you can do better. If you don't pull yourself together, you're going to turn out just like your brother, they tell him. Oh.

Kicked out of the house is what he thought of when he got that. Somewhere else. Somewhere else. Now, later on, too, they'll retest him. His IQ is 87. It is low. He's just not that smart of a guy. That's it. He's just not that bright. Mm-hmm.

That's fine. But, I mean, he's not going to go to the Naval Academy. No matter how hard he tries, he's not going to learn trigonometry. This is not going to happen. Yeah. This is not well anyway. So by 1983, Kay is teaching English at Broadneck High School while he is an engineer for General Electric Company in Lando. Wow. Doing very well for themselves. She had taught a semester somewhere else and then at two different schools, and now she's at Broadneck. So is Larry. He goes to Broadneck High. Yeah.

So they changed their will at this point. And in the wills, they leave their worldly belongings to the other spouse if one died. In the event that the other spouse also dies, the will names Larry and Annie as the co-heirs. This is a key change because they took out Michael.

They even put in a clause, I direct that no portion of my estate should go to Michael Swartz, a child whom I adopted but who has since returned to foster care and the guardian's name below for Lawrence and Ann are not responsible for Michael's care or support. They don't want anything to do with him. Fuck him. Yeah. Yeah, that's rough.

November 1983, Michael's having a tough time doing his thing, but Larry's trying to get his footing under him. Larry, Ann comes up to Annie, little Annie, comes up to her mom with pink pills and said, I found these in Larry's jacket. What? Kay said, well, I knew it wasn't, you know, Advil. No, it's an oblong tablet covered with brown and red spots. What is that? On one side, it was stamped PKS, and on the other side was 20 slash 20.

Okay.

I don't use speed, but he said I was my friend was giving him to another guy and I was going to be in his class. So he said, will you give these to them? And turns out he actually did take some speed, but he didn't feel anything.

from it because he's hyperactive so it actually calmed him down it chilled him out yeah it was like Ritalin so he was like he couldn't figure out why he wasn't like buzzing like everybody else it didn't do anything for me well that's there's an explanation so they yelled at him told him never to bring drugs home again and all that kind of thing they ended up taking it in and asking a pharmacist can you tell them what it is so they tested it and turns out that it was nothing it was some shit that somebody made to look like something to sell the kids yeah to steal their money

Burn bags, basically. So that's pretty fucking funny. There's another time when he's hanging out with his friends and they go to Denny's. And Kay is convinced they were drinking. At Denny's? They went out. They weren't just at Denny's. They went out drinking and they used that as an excuse. So the one kid, the friend, told his mother, we weren't drinking, Mom. Neither of us were. She believed her son. But Kay said, no, they were drinking. Larry's lying.

And she yelled, this is in front of, the two moms and the two boys are there. Oh, boy. And this is happening. And she's telling Larry in front of these people that he's ruined her life. What? She said, you're never going to amount to anything. You won't be able to go to college because no college will ever accept you. You just wait and see. John, his friend who she was hanging out with, he'll go off to college and leave you in his dust. You finally pulled John down to your level. Okay.

And the other mother was like, dude. Don't you remember college? There are plenty of drinking going on. Yeah, this is fucking crazy. So then she brought him home and Bob freaked out. Bob said, you should have been thrown in jail and vomited on and urinated on and given hard labor. Then you would learn what life's about like I did.

What you need is labor, physical labor, back-breaking labor. Then you wouldn't be going out at night like this because you wouldn't have the energy. Right. You'd be tired. Vomit on your face and piss on your chest. Oh, my God. So the mother's still standing there throughout the other kid's mother and the kid, and she's like –

They just wished vomit and piss on him. The mother went down to talk to Kay and said, I'd be glad to help you take care of Larry. I'll do anything you need to help. And Kay said, I just don't know what we can do about him. He's beyond help. He went to Denny's. The kid went to Denny's and he gets C's. Beyond help. Urinate on him. Poor kid had bad curly fries. Hard labor. You want him pissed on.

Holy shit. They said, Kay, if things are that bad, why don't you have him do his next semester over on the eastern shore and he can live with us. He'll take off some of the pressure. Very nice. And she said, no. No, we'll piss on him. No, we'll keep him here.

So shortly before Christmas, Michael is confined at the Crownsville. It's a mental like a criminal mental place for evaluation after he drew a knife and threatened a counselor at the Fellowship of Lights, an emergency shelter for homeless and runaway kids in Baltimore. At the shelter, he drew a knife, pulled a knife on a shelter worker, a counselor and threatened him.

That's where he's at at this point. He's in a fucking homeless shelter in Baltimore. He's got a blade and he's not afraid to pull it out. And what have you done to me? He's surviving. I mean, that's what he's doing. Larry, though, all everybody on the outside says it looks like he's the model son, popular, nice star athlete doing all this shit. But they're not happy with him at all, obviously, here.

they would criticize him in front of friends and all that kind of thing. Everybody said, no matter what one person said, universally, people said, Larry would say nothing except, are you finished? May I go to my room? He'd take all the shit. Wouldn't say anything. You go, is that it? Okay. I'm going to go in my room now. You done yelling at me. You wouldn't talk back though. Uh, another time he's hanging out with a friend here and, uh,

Okay. Wow. There was a school. I guess there was supposed to be a big snowstorm that night. Yeah. And school's not going to happen. It's one of those we're getting two feet of snow. We know that tomorrow is a snow day. So Larry called home to ask permission to spend the night at a friend of his with a group of friends who were hanging out at a friend's house. And the parents knew and they were letting the kids stay over. They planned to watch Superman 2 on VHS that they rented back then.

that night. Is that the one with the ice caves? I think so. Yes, The Fortress of Solitude. Yeah, yeah, that's that one. That's not the Richard Pryor one. It's a bad one. It's the middle one. Yeah, it's cheese. It's all cheese. I mean, it's that era of, I watched it a hundred times when I was a kid, but it was always, yeah, it was always crappy. The Russian weird guys? Because there was three is getting mixed up in there too. I'm not sure. I don't know.

So all the kids called. Their parents got permission. Larry calls last, and Kay was not having it. The mother could hear Kay shouting over the phone, and Larry saying, I'm not lying. She asked me to stay. The mother said I could stay. I'm not lying. So Kay demanded to speak with the mother. So this mother, Susan, gets on the phone, and Kay says, what's going on? What are the boys doing tonight? And she said, well, they're going to go out sledding for a while and then come in and watch a movie.

Which seems fine. Very normal. She said, Kay said, Larry's not to be trusted. I don't want him spending the night there. What is going on? She said, they'll be supervised. Don't worry. All the other boys have permission. It's totally fine. She said, you know, we were going out sledding. We came in. We rented Superman 2. Yeah. And Kay said, Superman 2? Absolutely not. Now, I didn't know that you were watching that movie. You're watching sacrilegious stuff, too.

And she said it was about the because he sacrificed his superhuman powers for the earthly pleasures of Lois Lane's love. All that Lois Lane pussy. Yeah. She said, I would assume that you would think that was as inappropriate for kids as I would. It's Superman. Who is it for?

It's a comic book movie, lady. Jesus. She said that movie shows Lois Lane in bed with Superman. Oh, come on. Look at her, though. They don't have sex. No. But she said this, quote, everyone knows they just had sex and the movie doesn't say one word about preventing pregnancy. The last thing this world needs is another abortion or unwanted baby.

Don't worry. It'll go right through her. Wow. The movie doesn't. But yeah, right out of her back. There's no way she's going to accept that. Like a 44 slug. It'll blow her back. Yeah. For real. Forget about it.

The movie doesn't bother showing that when a baby's born, it may be adopted one day and some fool will have to take care of it. That's what she told. Everything she could. Superman, too, can be taken back to this. It's crazy. It's Adrian, for Christ's sake. Yeah. The least fuckable woman on the planet. Don't worry about it. Yeah. She says the mother said, but it's rated PG and the kids are 16 and 17 years old. They're not four. Right. And that PG is today's like.

fucking further than G it's fine cartoon movies they used to allow a lot back then yeah yeah yeah really yeah and Goonies all the kids were smoking and cursing it was fine that was PG so she just said that she the mother's friend's mother said she felt embarrassed for Larry because all the other kids were looking around like dude your mom's crazy she said there's no nudity anywhere in it there's not even a mention of sex like it's fine and she said nope

Meanwhile, Michael's in and out of hospitals. He got a job at a Popeye's Chicken in Annapolis, but overslept one morning and they fired him. Yeah.

The chicken's got to be made. It's got to be made. Those sandwiches aren't ready. People will riot. That's the problem. We've learned that. We've learned it. People will kill each other over a sandwich. It flies off the shelves. It's fucking delicious. I'll kill you for chicken. It's delicious. So less than two weeks later, he was sent to the Crownsville Hospital for psychiatric evaluation. He's found to have no mental illness, but he also has no home, so they just keep him there for a while. God.

Larry also got a job at a fast food restaurant before Christmas. He was hired at the Chesapeake sub shop, make sandwiches. He was only there a few weeks. The assistant manager said he just didn't work out. Food is not his line of work. Too dumb to make sandwiches. Oh, my God.

When the food service industry is not your line of work, that's – He just shrugs it off. Yeah. One of his friends said he was never one with big problems. If there was anything on his mind, he would have talked to me about it because we shared problems, even family problems. I think he's kind of quiet in his own way. But with people he knows, he's very caring. He's always there to listen. I've talked to him many times. Okay. So if you're nice to him, he'll be nice to you. Sure, sure.

I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around. She's like, I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. It's like doubling and tripling and it's all these girls. With a diagnosis, the state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.

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Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. She struck him with her motor vehicle. She had been under the influence and then she left him there.

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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.

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Seems normal. Things seem average here. Kay and Larry have a little disagreement about a girl that Larry had taken out on a date. She did not approve of her and did not want Larry to go out with her again.

Hussie. Yeah. Apparently. So this argument ended and then Bob yelled at Larry for messing with his computer and destroying some work he had completed. Deleted something or Bob was really pissed off and this got really bad yelling, screaming, all sorts of shit like that. When this got over, when he said, are you finished? Can I go to my room? Larry went up to his room and drank some rum that he had hidden up there.

To take the edge off. They got this kid drinking like a stockbroker after work. He's like, Jesus, tough day. Margin calls. One more. I put it up. Let's go slamming drinks down, throwing papers in my face saying sell, sell, sell. Holy shit. So then 7 a.m. the next morning, Larry calls 911. Oh, wow.

And he says, my parents are dead. You might want to send someone over here. And they said, and what do you think is wrong with them? Do you think I need to send an ambulance? What do you think's wrong with them? And he said, I have no idea. I just saw him lying down there. My mom is outside.

And they said, on the ground outside? And he said, yes. They said, okay, I'll send an ambulance here. They said that the woman in the 911 call said that the caller had extraordinary composure. And he sounded grown up, not childlike. He was just like very businesslike. His tone was matter of fact. They said it was like he was talking about what he had for breakfast, just normal. She said, do you want to stay on the line with me for a few minutes? And he said, all right. Sure. Sure. What's going on here?

So, yeah, they arrive. And when they arrive, they find Larry holding Annie and Annie and Larry are by the front door. Annie's holding hands with Larry said Larry is very composed. He calmly leads them into the house. They said, where are your parents? He said downstairs. And, you know, she's right there down the little girls right there. And Annie's

and hanging out with him. She's eight at this point, nine. We don't know, eight or nine. She could be 35. Nine, I think. They said she seemed right. There's a newspaper article that said, quote, her narrow eyes looked frightened.

Why include that? Did we tell you she's Korean? Why not just say she was frightened? She appeared frightened, obviously, as a small child. Her narrow eyes looked frightened. Even through her Ching-E-Chong, Ching-Chong eyes, I could see. Even inside her soulless Asian eyes, I could see something.

That squinty shit exuded sadness. I could see it through her godless communist slanty eyes. I could see it all. It's like so fucking crazy. I could see the reflection of a mushroom cloud in her eye. I could see it. Like Nagasaki coming to pay its respects.

Then the next sentence is even fucking better. Oh, no. She wore her hair, her dark hair pulled back and had a cute face like an oriental Barbie doll. Oriental. We get it. She's fucking Korean. It's just funny. They don't mean anything bad by it. It's just hilarious. Oh, that's amazing. What year is this? Fucking 1985. This is taking place. It's fucking hilarious. Her narrow eyes. Narrow eyes. Looks frightened.

Jimmy's eyes are narrow right now, too, because they're closed with tears coming out. Her narrowed, slanty, godless communist eyes. I can see it. That's awesome. Jesus. That's so funny. So they asked Larry, what happened? He said, I don't know. I just came in and found them downstairs. Yeah.

So he beats the shit out of me. He told, I guess he told a neighbor that he spotted his mother's body in the yard when he looked out of his second floor bedroom as he was getting ready for school. He saw his mom out in the yard, in the yard, in the yard. And she was in and he was in another second floor bedroom. And, you know, he went and got her. So the emergency team goes down. They find Bob first. Actually, Bob is dead.

He is lying inside a small basement office covered in blood, several gash marks on his chest and arms. Jesus. Covered in blood. And he's fully clothed, but his legs are like wide open in a weird way. Okay. So they walk through the dining room in the kitchen and they find a stairwell descending into a landing that opened into the large basement recreation room.

They found a ping pong table, a bar, upright piano, quarter ice, your typical basement, black vinyl armchairs, but no people. Then they head toward the sliding glass door, open the door, and that's when they said they saw feet. They said they were spread unnaturally far apart.

And this is where Bob is in the small room. And they said they had to enter the tiny room. It's an office off the stairway landing and turn right. A stocky man lay sprawled on his back between an ironing board and an overturned typing stand. One arm was twisted back underneath his hip. He looked as if someone had dumped a bucket of blood on him. Wow. Blood fucking puddle. With an arm behind his back. Like here. Yeah. He fell on it. Yeah. They said that there were big red blotches all over his shirt.

He had a big, wide, stupid, you know, 80s tie. They said his tie was laid. It was loosened and was askew kind of in his armpit. Blood streaked his bald head and face. And he just looked terrible. They said everything was in disarray around the body. There was a lamp that was sideways on the carpet. Books and papers were scattered everywhere. He had a brown buckle loafer on his right shoe, but his left foot was missing its shoe. Yeah, they said it was...

Very strange. The shoe was balanced oddly on its toe, leaning up against a shelf across the room like he got tossed over there. They said they checked his pulse and they noticed that he had holes all over him. They figured it was gunshot wounds. Really? This guy's been shot a bunch of times. They saw a pair of blood-smeared glasses and a gold and pearl tie pin there. Yeah.

No pulse. And then they hear, I found one out here. Oh, boy. Okay. They go to Kay. She's in the backyard. She is nude. Hmm. Except for one sock. Really? One sock. And they said it appeared she looked like she was partially scalped. Wow. The way her hair or the way the skin was taken off her head. And her neck had several deep lacerations. Wow.

Now, completely against police protocol, one of the paramedics felt bad because she was not only killed and naked, but she was also – legs were spread very wide as well. So he covered her up with a blanket, which is not crime scene etiquette at all here. We need fucking – Preserve everything. You need trace evidence, physical stuff, and he just put hairs –

fucking fibers. I'll just pair. Let me fuck all that up for you there. That's here. It's a, a, a tarp of different shit and just lay it on her. Just lay it on her. Yeah. Whatever's been in my trunk. Yeah. My stuff, all my shit on there. Who knows? So they said they described her as stripped and stretched into an unnaturally spread Eagle position in the snow behind the family home. Oh, it was out in the snow, which is wild. And the father was in a similar position in the basement. Yeah.

So, yeah, they're looking. They see basically outside in the snow, it looks like red slush outside the door, blood and snow. And that's when they see her naked. Her body, they said, described it as her skin appeared as sickly gray against the snow. One green knee sock pushed down around her ankle.

They said her arms were pulled up to her ears and her legs were pushed far apart like her husband's. And they suspected that she'd been raped as well here at this time based on what they saw. There was a white eye patch hung over her left eye. They said across her neck were a series of bloody gashes and on the crown of her head was a gaping moon matted with hair and blood.

big fucking thing. They said they've seen a lot before. These are firemen that respond to this kind of thing, but this shit was wild, they said. Yeah, this is disturbing. They said it looks like somebody put a gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger and blew the top of her head off. That's what they were, they figure happened.

So they surveyed the backyard, a tan moccasin upside down in a dog food bowl, a green tarp pulled over a small oval swimming pool, blue flannel pajama suit, red stained and rumpled in the snow. Probably what she was wearing the house. They said it sat halfway down an incline with a carport in the main living quarters upstairs facing the street and a large recreation room downstairs opening into a fenced rear yard.

They said, and then there was woods behind that where the swamp is, where Larry would hide. So they said they went back in and they're looking at Bob. And at one point somebody said, you know, someone could still be in the house. Great point. We should probably check the rest of the fucking house. There's children here. So that's good. But they're firemen. They're like, see if the police radio in. Where the hell are the cops? They're not there yet. What?

Wow. No cops here yet. These are just the firemen paramedics. My parents are dead. All right, we'll send the paramedics. Yeah, cops will be there eventually.

They'll make the call if we need cops. Yeah. So Larry's sitting up there with Annie sitting on his lap. And they said, where were you last night if you weren't here? Because he said, I just came in. And he said, I was here, Larry said. So they said, I thought you said you came in and found your parents. He said, I woke up and I couldn't find them. Then I went in downstairs. I came in the basement. And they said that. And he said, so you mean you were here all night and you didn't hear the shooting? And he said, no.

Yeah. That's it. Yeah. They, they, you know, asked him that they're like, okay. Um, so Larry spoke with this officer. He, you know, he's telling them, Hey, I know I woke up at seven, 15 minutes after my sister. And, she told him that I can't find mom and dad. Yeah. So he said, I went looking for him and I looked out the window. I saw it through the, out the back window and that's when I called the cops. So yeah, they said it seemed like he was in a daze. They let him outside to the carport, figuring a little privacy might help. Um,

And at one point he said in a low voice, they're dead, aren't they? And they said he had no emotion behind it, just they're dead, aren't they? And he said, yes, they are.

And they were like, oh, they were checking him. They thought he was in shock because of the way he was acting. Like, he must be in shock. They were checking him out medically to make sure he was not in shock. They said, well, why don't you cry some? It may make you feel better. You know, things like this are hard for anyone to take. And he said he just kind of leaned against this tree there. And he said, it all seems like a dream, like it never happened. Just real weird. Real fucking weird. Yeah.

So they were like waiting for him to find... Because people do that and they break down, but it's never happened. No emotion at all. I mean, yeah, but a kid like this, he might be like a Dexter by now where like you don't really have the emotion to give at this. He's had a lot of crying already. He's all cried out. He may have cried his last tear. So...

it's a lot. Um, the, I guess there was a, the County dog catcher was trying to catch two dogs in the snow too. Uh, the smaller one went to Larry. Larry picked them up and carried him to the dog catcher's truck. It's their dog. The larger one ran after somebody else. And, uh,

Larry said, here, Herc, come here. It's his dog. But the dog growled and then kind of... Wouldn't come near him. Calmed down. Then Larry came. He put a leash on him. The police officer had pulled his gun on the dog earlier. Jesus, that didn't shoot it. Now they were asking Larry, what should we do with the dogs? Like, who do we take them to? And he said, he shrugged and said, put them to sleep, I guess.

What? Which is a crazy thing for a 17-year-old to say. How do you get... Larry! The cops, they just stared at him and was like, what the fuck is wrong with this kid? That's not right. Yeah, so he was like, we won't do that. We'll put the dogs aside and give them to somebody. And then he told Larry to go sit in his cruiser.

And then the guy, one cop went over to a detective and said, you've got a bad one here. There's a nude woman out back and a dead man in the basement. Before you go down, take a look at that boy. He's the one who reported it. I'm no homicide detective, but there's something wrong with that kid. He's too calm. Yeah, and he's telling us to murk the dogs. He just said, fuck him. I don't care. What's going on? They also noticed a spot on his hand, like a little wound. And they said, what's that spot on your hand? And he said, what? Oh, nothing. Just something I got in the kitchen the other day.

And they said, how long have you lived here? Since I was six. He describes, you know, all that shit. They said, your sister's adopted too. No, no, no, she's not. They're real. They were actually Korean. You just couldn't tell you fucking idiot. Yeah. She's adopted. It's amazing. Uh, when you are part everything, sometimes kids just pop out. It's so weird. Sometimes they're Korean. It's real thick, super Korean. Yeah. Like they've been rolling the dice, trying to get a black boy, like an, like an Oriental Barbie doll. You never know.

Jesus Christ. You can't tell from her thin eyes that we ain't kin? No shit. So they also said, you got another brother too, we heard. Michael, what's up with him? And he said, well, Michael's been placed in a state mental hospital. And they said, what kind of trouble did he get into? And Larry said, I don't know. He broke into homes. He's pretty heavy into drugs. Lately, he's been worse doing PCP and stuff like that. I heard his friends smuggle it into him in Crownsville.

And they said, who are his friends? And he said, I don't know. They said, you don't know the names of the guys smuggling stuff to him? And he said, no. He just told me my friends bring it to me. I don't fucking know. So they said, why don't you tell us everything that happened?

And he said, well, and he said, you know, it's exams. He said he went over to his friend's house, played chess for a while, went sledding. Shortly after five, he came home, studied in his bedroom, ate at seven. They said, any arguments last night? He said, dad got mad because I messed up one of his computer disks. I'd been fooling around with a friend and we must have messed it up. Wasn't a big deal. He said, Michael's been calling a lot lately, though.

He said that Michael hates mom and dad. And mom told me she was afraid Michael would come one day and kill her and dad. He's like, I don't know if maybe that's something you should look into. He said his parents had no idea that he talks to his brother on the phone and would not have approved of it. And his brother had made threats against his parents on the phone to me. He said, quote, Michael is emotionally disturbed.

And he said when his sister woke him up last night because she heard screaming, he said his sister woke him up at 11 to 1130 and said, I hear screaming. And I told her, you're dreaming. Go back to sleep. And then she came in and slept in my room. And he said she does that a lot. If she gets scared, she'll come in and sleep in my room. So whatever. So they said, you slept in the same room. He said, yes. I said, OK, what happened this morning? So they woke up and he told me she couldn't find him because they're going over it with him a couple of times.

She said he said I grabbed Annie and covered her eyes, which didn't take very much at all. According to the story, I brushed my teeth, put the dental floss. Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Dice Clay joke. And there you go. So he said, I told saw my mom through the window. Well, I'm surprised they didn't put that in there at the time. It's fucking hilarious.

They said, did you go downstairs at all? And he said, no, you didn't go into the backyard to check on your mom. He said, no, Annie and I stayed upstairs and got dressed while we were waiting for you guys. So they, they arrived to test his hands for gunshot residue, which he has none. They use, so they do that. Um, they, uh, they, they, he said last night, other than Annie and said what she heard, did you hear any noises? He said, only our dogs barking out back, but they do that a lot.

He said, you know, I don't know. He said the dogs had been in the backyard when he went to bed running around. He said, but the small dog didn't bite, but the big dog occasionally bit strangers. He said Michael could get around him, though, because he knows Michael. So they said, has anybody in your family been arguing? He said, no, everyone's been getting along with there's been some big arguments. Dad gets irritable. And he said, me and dad don't get along very well. He's always yelling at me. And the cop said, OK. And I said, thanks for helping. We need to talk to your sister.

So they talked to the sister. Yeah. And she said she heard her dad making strange noises crying help, help at 1130 last night. Mandarin or Cantonese? That's what I mean. Yeah, you never know. What language is that? Are we talking Korean here? Yeah. They said, are you sure it was 1130? She said, I looked at my watch. Okay. She said it was 1134 when I woke up. So she knows exactly what time it was. She's got a time, yeah. Yeah, she's very efficient and...

You really never want to be on Saturday Night Live, do you? I'm making fun of them. Yeah, I know. Anybody takes it the other way, kiss my dick. I don't fucking care. Sorry. Don't tell me you didn't fucking laugh first. Shut up. It's fucking great. It's very efficient. I'm surprised they don't add that to the thing. She's quick with numbers. As an efficient girl, very good with math. Ridiculous.

So they said, what a clever girl. What'd you do then? I built an abacus. That's what I did. I built a Samsung so they don't catch on fire. This is fucking amazing. So she said, I ran outside to the carport. There was a guy in the backyard walking away. He had a shovel over his shoulder and it was dripping blood.

And she is so young to have seen that. Holy shit. She's eight or nine. We don't know. And she would like bury her head in Larry's shoulder while she said stuff. Cause it was a lot. And they said, what did this guy look like? And she said he had black hair curly on top. It came down to his shoulders and, uh, he was humming like he was glad or happy. Like fucking, uh,

It's a weird thing to hum while you do that. So now they look at Larry. He's got curly black hair, long and bushy, came down to almost his shoulders. So they said, well, what did his face look like? She said she hadn't seen his face, but she noticed he wore blue jeans and a gray sweatshirt with broad neck printed on the back. Okay.

Like the high school. Right. So they said, was it like the gray sweatshirt that Michael has? And she said, I don't know. And he said, well, how tall was the guy? That's a good thing because Larry's only like 5'9". He's a little guy. So you can tell whether it's one. And she was, Annie looked at Barr, confusion pinching her round face.

Every time. Bar, who is six feet, rises up and walks over to the ping pong table and says, as tall as I am. And Annie said, taller. And Larry's only 5'9". Yeah. And then Larry looks at the cop and says, Michael's real tall. And he's got the same hair as me, too. He said, he's 6'4", 6'6", something like that. And they said, was he as tall as Michael? And Annie said, uh-huh. He looked like my brother. Michael, that's not good. And they said, you mean Michael? And she said, yes. Oh.

Anyway, and Larry, then Larry says, Michael does lots of drugs. So he said, you told us your brother's at the Crownsville Hospital. If he's in there, he can't get out, can he? I mean, he's locked up. And Larry said, oh, he can get out. Yeah. He said he recently left the hospital and came by the neighborhood for a visit. He was around. And he said that detectives said that, you know, he's been able to get drugs in and out of the hospital. They don't really keep them in there.

So they trace a trail of bloody footprints. Apparently, Kay had run nearly a mile through the streets, yards, and woods this night to run away from the nude with one sock on, ran through the whole fucking neighborhood screaming bloody murder. And then came back? And ended up circling back to her own yard. Oh, my God. And, well, I guess at some point she was caught up to and she was dragged back to her house, but she was on her way back there anyway. Yeah.

So they have footprints that they're trying to figure out. They track the footprints, readily identifiable because one foot was bare. Yep. And she went past more than two dozen houses in a circular path. 30 houses almost. Back to some woods behind her house. So that's what she did. And they believe she was attacked in the woods and then walked back or dragged back to her fenced yard and was killed beside the swimming pool. Right.

So they think that she was injured before she fled because there's blood along the streets, a blood trail in the snow and on the streets. And they believe she was naked as she fled because her pajamas were found near the house along with one sock left behind. Right. So the cops go door to door for clues. Um,

H. James Ferguson says, that's a bizarre tragedy to have next door. There's always the thought in your mind that there's somebody out there and they might come back. On the other hand, there's the thought that this might be the safest place in the world with all this going on. Who'd come here and do something like that? On the other hand, you just slept through something horrific right next door. Ran through your front yard. Yeah. For sure. He said he heard voices outside when he got home shortly after 10 p.m. and his own dog barked briefly about an hour later, which is when she would have been running by. Right.

She said that another woman, their other neighbor, said she heard one of the Schwartz's dogs bark at about 11 p.m. And she said, I'm afraid it's going to be a sleepless night for me tonight.

And one of the neighbors said she took Annie into her house while the crowd gathered and the crime scene was done after they talked to her. And the neighbor said, I don't think this has touched Annie yet. She seems to think her parents are okay. She doesn't get it, like what's going on here, which is possible. Yeah. Another, the Reverend Milton, Reverend Kevin Milton from the church said it's a complete mystery and a tragedy. Bob was certainly one of the top leaders in our parish. Right.

They said it's another neighbor said it's really the most shocking occurrence. It's a nice middle class community. Nothing like this happens here. Yeah, it didn't occur to me to be frightened until everyone asked, are you scared? Yeah. And even think about it before that. So all the neighbors said one neighbor said all of us who live on these two streets ask ourselves, were we up that night?

We ask ourselves, why didn't we look out the window? Had we looked out the window, none of us are the type who would have walked away from the window. We would have helped. You would have had to – you have to stop going over in your mind the what ifs. Yeah, but – yeah. And if you got a dog that barks at strange shit, maybe check out why – you know what I mean? Why have the dog if –

Isn't usually the dog part of a security force? Security force, yeah. You would imagine that they would at least keep people away. Yeah, you go, hey, what's going on? No, people just go, shut the fuck up. He's screaming in his face. Shut your fucking mouth. Shut up, fucking dog. Why'd you get it? Someone comes in and stabs the shit out of him. Perfect.

And a lot of times these murderers avoid places with dogs. Right. I remember Richard Ramirez was like, a dog, I'm out. I leave. I don't need to fucking that kind of trouble. That's a man that loves murder. He smells like a goat and loves murder. And he's like, I'm not fucking with dogs. They bite you. Goat smelling murder lovers. Yeah, they bite and they alert others. Oh, yeah. I want quiet and murder. Yeah. Yeah.

So January 21st, 1984, Ann and Larry are sent to live with neighbors here. Just a couple of neighbors across the street. They're sent to live with them because they can't stay in a crime scene basically. They said these were the Swartz's closest personal friends they go to live with.

Now, Michael's the main subject, suspect here. They said they asked, did you remember seeing Michael here? They go to the hospital and ask the people in charge there. Do you remember seeing Michael here last Monday night? And they said, yeah. One guy said he worked the shift ending at 11 o'clock that night. And I remember I said goodnight to him when I left around 1115.

Okay. There's no way he could have been there. The exact time this is going on. So they're like, huh. And he said, if that was correct, then the Annie statement about the neighbors and everybody, everything happened at about 1130. It's looking like.

Doesn't seem like he could have got over there. And then the supervisor volunteered that another nurse had seen Michael on the ward, too. That nurse was off duty at the moment and had mentioned to the supervisor after the murders made the news that she's Michael was there. So the cops asked the supervisor to lock them in Michael's ward and leave them alone.

They wanted to see if it was secure. They said it was an open large room with long rows of beds. So it seemed like a Marine Corps barracks, the one guy said, when he was in the Marines. They checked the windows. Each had a locked heavy metal screen. They saw that the bed was visible from the nurse's station at the end of the hallway, also Michael's bed. Unless he escaped through a window, he would have had to sneak past the attendant who was right outside the room and peek.

past several more locked doors down the corridor. They said, no fucking way Michael did this. He was here. Period. Done. Yeah, you're locked away. You're not doing it. So they said they have no suspects. None. Yep. They said as far as the children go, they have just about totally ruled them out, the one cop said. It's not the fucking nine-year-old Korean girl. Right. Probably. Ask Chun-Li if she did it, would you?

So they said, any arrests coming? And they said, we don't know. Everything will work itself out. The police are double and triple checking everything. Turns out they'd had way more than they said, and they were just sandbagging. Really? Yeah. They talked to Annie again.

And they talked to her and she talked about the broad neck sweatshirt and all kinds of things like that. And they asked her a bunch of times and they said, tell me again. And she said, my brother told me to come back in. So I came back in and called Sandy. That's one of that's a small dog. She said, did you tell your brother anything then? She said, yeah, I told my brother that daddy was lying outside in the snow and he told me that I was dreaming.

So now it's that they said, well, describe the man you saw. She repeated her earlier description, long sleeve sweatshirt with broad neck printed on the front and, uh, and back. And it resembled one of the ones that her brother Larry has like his wrestling shirts.

They said the man – they said when she said the man was carrying a shovel, they said, what did it look like? And she said, like our shovel. And they said, do you know how to draw? Are you an artist? And she said, I guess. Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm more of a math girl, but sure. Sure.

I draw more engineering. Yeah. She said, they said, could you draw me a picture of the shovel you saw? And so they grabbed the notebook and she sketches it out. They said most of them, they look like shovels and not, not wood splitting malls because they find a wood splitting mall and

In the woods, in the swampy area, with blood and Kay's hair on it. Oh, no. So they're asking that. And they're like, well, what do you use it for? And she said, we used it to put our gate up around our pool and we use it for digging stuff out. They said, you ever use it on wood? And she said, no. They said, you didn't say anything to your brother outside seeing somebody outside, or did you? And she said, I totally forgot to say that. No.

So they said, you forgot that. Okay. So what did you do then? You went back to sleep? And she said, I don't remember that. They said, well, anywhere you went. Okay. What'd you do next? She said, I think I went back there to bed. And she said, it was like an hour and a half later. My brother threw up. I woke up and heard him throwing up Larry. And they said, where were you when he threw up? And she said on his beanbag chair, because that's where she would go sleep. And she said, okay, was he in bed or in the bathroom when he was throwing up? And she said he was in his bedroom.

And she said that he she woke up and he told her she was just dreaming. Go back to sleep. You're just dreaming. I'm not puking. He said, did you tell me? Did she tell you to do anything? And she said, he just told me to go back to sleep. He said, when did you ask for your pillow? She said, I don't know when they said, did he ask you for your pillow? And she said, uh-huh. And he said, they said, why? She said, I don't remember.

And they said, did you get it for him? No, I had it with me. And all this type of shit, the pillow. By the way, they find out she's been stabbed almost 20 times and bashed over the head repeatedly with a large, heavy maul. And the father has just shitloads of stab wounds all over him, covered in stab wounds. So that's what's happened. He wasn't beaten, just stabbed to fuck. The target of the rage is her. And she's naked and obviously displayed in a very specific way.

So they go over and they keep asking her questions. And she said that Larry did not go downstairs. They said, did he stay with you? Uh-huh. We stick together, she said. And she said, I want to go home. And they had to end the interview because she didn't want to talk anymore. She's like, I'm tired of talking about this traumatic shit. Terrible thing, yeah.

So, police found a gray sweatshirt, broad neck on the back, in a washing machine at the house. Oh. Wet, still in the washing machine. It had been washed but not dried. Okay. They didn't like that. Okay.

They issue a warrant also on the basis of a fingerprint comparison that linked Larry with the bloody handprint found at the murder scene on the sliding glass door. It was a bloody palm print right on there. They took his fingerprints and took it to the FBI lab and compared his prints with the bloody handprint, and it's a match. So that's not good. Yeah.

His hand in blood. In blood on the door. That's what they were saying. Did you go down and talk to them or do anything? Did you go down and try to shake them? Hey, Dad, wake up and then come in and open the door? He said no. He said no. They go, okay, well, then your handprint shouldn't fucking be there. If he said I went down and checked on him and then I came in the house, they'd go, fuck, well, now what? But no. So they said, okay. Now, at this point, Larry is with a friend of the family's who's a lawyer and is acting as his lawyer as well and his caretaker at this point. Okay.

Yeah, this Baradal guy or Baradel. And they talk to him to talk – they want to talk to Larry. And this guy is his guardian, so they have to talk to him first. Yeah.

So they also find a pair of wet, bloody dock sider shoes belonging to Larry in the house as well. Boat shoes. Boat shoes, yes. Another boat shoe person. And also some of the clothing in the washing machine. They also found his footprints in the blood-soaked snow near his mother's body. Larry! Not good. They also said the footprints around the body there matched the dock siders that he wore, bloody fingerprints on the door.

It's not good. The same swamp that he goes and hangs out in, that's where they found the mall tossed in there. And if there wasn't enough evidence, also, they're going to arrest him. And when they do, he tells everybody in jail that he killed his family. And he tells it to psychiatrists as well. Larry.

Now, they said they were sandbagging this and holding it back because they said his demeanor was common and seemingly unconcerned. The first paramedic actually said that he was scared for his life because he thought Larry was going to kill him when he was looking at the bodies because he thought he was like lowering him in because he thought he did it because he was real cold. That's hindsight. He said, who the fuck knows?

They said that he gave conflicting reports to police. At one point, he said he had arrived home that morning, and later he said he'd been home that night before but had been bombed because he drank a bunch of rum. Yeah.

So, they said they announced he wasn't a suspect. They did that to protect Annie because they didn't want him to do anything to Annie because she's a witness. So, they had to be cool about the whole thing. And his lawyer said, I'm not of the opinion that he is a threat to anyone and especially not to Annie. If I'm convinced of anything, I'm convinced of that. Okay. So...

They arrest Larry, like I said, and they said nobody else but Larry was involved. It's a one-person crime. People fucking are like, what the fuck? This is crazy. Family friend said he's not highly emotional. He's a quiet child. I don't understand this. This is weird. One kid at school who's on the wrestling team with him said, I don't even know if I'll go to school tomorrow.

Everyone will come up and say how sorry they are. And I don't know if I can take it. This is a good friend of his from the wrestling team. The junior class president who attends church with Larry and his friends with him says that nobody believes he did it. He's like class OJ. They said no one thinks he did it. It is too horrible for anyone in our school or any of Larry's friends to come to grips with. It's just too big.

People flew in. Relatives fly in from around the state to see him as well. One of his cousins said he was the model son. He's so mild mannered. All of us trusted him. Right. We can't absorb it. One said funeral draws 500 people, by the way. Big old funeral. Yeah. Kay's family comes to town and they treat him like shit, they said, which is weird. They were like, that's strange. Yeah.

Weird. The one cop said, did you see how they treated those kids? They didn't even talk to them. Hey, man, Annie. This is before he was arrested. He said, I couldn't believe they didn't show more attention or concern for those kids. They're relatives, for Christ's sakes. But the lawyer said that they probably think of them as family pets. They probably look at them as Bob and Kay's children, not part of their family. So these are what the weird shit they're doing. We're not talking to those kids.

So they talk again about the marks on Larry on his hand. And they said, Bob's not going down without a fight. Bob's it was the Navy. He's a tough guy. He punches kids, James. He'll knock a kid out. And they asked Larry, what happened to your hand? He said, I burned myself frying hamburgers. And he said, okay, that's fine. They said it looked more like a burn than a scratch. So they actually believed him there. And, uh,

The cousins asked him questions. They said, do you have any idea who did this? And he said, no, I really don't. They said, who would want to kill them? And Larry said, well, my mom had a run-in with a kid at school.

Because he's a teacher. And they said, what, over grades? And he said, yeah, he's kind of a troublemaker. Mom was mad at him about something he'd done. And the police are checking on him. They said, do you think Michael did it? He said he could have done it. Who knows? Said, how likely do you think Michael did it? Do you think there's a 50% chance? And he said, I don't know, probably more. 60% chance? And he said, maybe 80? 87? 83.4% chance? Yeah.

Or the kid at school. I don't know. Larry's lawyer, though, says they're saying he did it because he had wet clothes in the washer. The guy said, quote, good Lord, the kid lived there. He had a right to wash his clothes. At least wait for the FBI to determine if there's blood on the clothes. Come on, man.

And they said, well, what about the fingerprints? And he said, well, all right, let's wait until there's an ID on the prints. Don't jump to conclusions. You've got to make sure absolutely sure they're Larry's not just here. The FBI has got to see it. He said he never went down to look for his father and got confused where he was when he saw his mother. And the lawyer said, listen, you're talking about murder. Remember, that's traumatic. The boy, this boy's brain could have been denser than a London fog.

This guy's hilarious. He might not have remembered what day it was, much less what window he looked through. Because first he said it was his room and then he said it was the kitchen. He could have run around the house in a panic, maybe even run outside, getting his hands and shoes bloody when he looked at his mother, then blocked it all out. Let's face it, it's circumstantial. Much of this can be explained away. The detective, Detective Barr's response to that is, quote, give me a break.

He said, the boy can't explain everything away. There's too many inconsistencies. He's lying. Larry ends up starting to fill his attorney in on some details. And he starts telling him, you know, you got to start talking to me. You got to start filling me in. I'm your buddy and your lawyer here. Yeah.

So they end up talking to him and they tell him, look, the police don't believe your story. They think you're lying and here's why. They go down all the holes in his story. How could he have known his father was dead if he never went downstairs? That's a part of it. How could, did he really expect anyone to believe that he slept through all this when everybody else woke up in the neighborhood? That he told Annie she was dreaming. What about that? They said, you know, lawyers often tell juries false exculpatory statements are evidence of guilt.

And they said, we got to you've told police some fucking bad stories. So we got to figure this out here. Let's talk about it. And he said, come clean. He said, this is why the police are going to arrest you, Larry. This is the point. You're getting arrested for this. You're not telling us something. You're not telling us anything. And he said, let it go. It's over. We love you. It's not going to change that. You've got to let it go.

So Larry then says, yes, I did it. He screams, yes, I did it. Crying and sobbing uncontrollably. The first drop of emotion anyone has seen from this child in 10 years since he's six year old. He's never broken like this. He finally snaps. He dropped his whole body, weeping uncontrollably. And the lawyer said it was like a lifetime of sorrow coming out in one breath.

And all it took was, these are the reasons they don't believe you, Larry. Yep. All right, well. Fuck. Uncork it. Larry said, he wouldn't stop hitting me. He wouldn't stop hitting me. Oh.

And they said they didn't ask him, what do you mean? They didn't ask him to explain anything because he told the lawyers earlier he hit Michael, but he doesn't hit me. Right. So they said he was dry heaving and like fucking just, I mean, it was like a full-on meltdown. Holy shit. Yeah, dude's having a meltdown. And they said he's not really any conditions to answer questions at the moment. We should get him to a psychiatrist, I think, is probably the best. Probably. Yeah.

So he's Larry explained to the psychiatrist that he had trouble expressing emotion since he was small. He made an effort to hold things inside because he feared the consequences of letting things out. Right. He said, quote, before I came to live with the Swartz's, it seemed every time I gave my opinion or showed any emotion, I got moved to a new home. Yeah. He's like, I'm just going to be cool. This is when police find out about.

How they handled the different the children, how they were raised, the abuse and things like that. One person said they were strict with their children, but at the same time, they were very kind to them.

But they also beat the shit out of Michael a lot. Punched him. So Larry goes into a two-man cell and into a four-man cell. His roommates like him. His cellmates, they think he's okay. Decent guy. They say he's always on TV, on the local news. So they're like, oh, there it is. Your murder's on TV. They tell him. He's like, oh, yeah. He liked watching himself on TV. They said he thought that was cool.

Yeah. They had a black and white set that he could watch there. And he said, Larry, you're a TV star now. Yeah. So they said he was very messy, didn't clean up his shit in jail and all that kind of thing. He wouldn't clean up his shit. They'd go, pick up your shit. And he'd go, oh, stop bitching. You're always bitching at me. So now he's like, oh, you're not my mom. I'll fucking kill you like my mom.

So he let his personal appearance slide. He would stop shaving and shit and not combing his hair, just kind of getting lazy. Gets tons of letters. Chicks are sending him massive amounts of letters, man. They wrote everybody. People writing the lawyers and the prosecutor, writing him, he's innocent, he's too handsome, all this shit. Wow.

So they want blood from him. They need a blood sample. So they have to go to court to try to get a blood sample from him. They talk about Larry, you're up for the death penalty here. And he said, quote, it never really occurred to me that I could get the death chair. I'm really afraid of the death chair. Yeah, you should be. That's not good. The death chair. Then finally, he says what he did.

He says it was my wrestling shirt, my sweatshirt that Annie saw. Yeah. She said that's what it was. They analyzed that this for they detected no blood on one shirt, but other clothing items they detected blood on, including a towel, a pillowcase and a blue curtain that was found outside. He said that he didn't know why there was a curtain out there. He doesn't remember why he put a curtain out there. He doesn't know why.

Yeah. No idea of what that is. He also said they tested everything for vomit and found no trace on the pillowcase or anything else found in the woods. So they were like, what's up with that? I thought you threw up. Your sister said you threw up.

So they said he couldn't explain why his clothing was scattered into three distinct piles. They said, did you make more than one trip into the woods? And he said, I don't think so. He only remembered going outside once in front of his house to get rid of his clothes. He remembered tossing the mall and the knife in the swamp behind the house and said he was, it was earlier in the evening immediately after the murders when he dragged his mother's body outside. He only remembered going outside two times. He said the whole night was a blur though. He doesn't remember.

He said shortly before the murders, his parents thought he was studying in his room, but he was really drinking rum that he had hidden in a Pepsi bottle in his dresser. And they said, why were you drinking? And he said he'd been studying for exams. He said, I didn't want my parents to find the rum. I wanted to get rid of it. So I drank it. They said, that's odd. They said, how much did you drink? And he held up his right hand and did three fingers. So like that much rum. All of it. It's a lot of rum. Plenty of rum for a 16-year-old, 17-year-old.

So he said, I really can't remember a lot of details. He said he drank the rum in his room, went to the basement laundry room to put his clothes in the washing machine. After he left the laundry room, he passed through the family room where his mother was watching TV.

She called out looking for him and said, how'd your exams go today? He knew he had failed Spanish and was in danger of failing two more courses. So he said, I think I did pretty, pretty well on one, but I think I flunked Spanish. She said, Oh, Larry, knowing you, you probably failed them both. You'll probably fail them all. Oh my God. She sounds like Olivia Soprano. Oh, knowing you, you probably failed both. You'll probably fail them all. Bah, Jesus. Yeah.

So he had two more exams the next day, including driver's ed, and he was mad at his parents for telling him that he couldn't get his driver's license until he passed all his courses. He said he stood a few feet behind the chair where she sat with her back to him, and then he noticed the mall. He said in one confession, he said he was on the floor by the sliding glass door. In another version, the mall was by the hearth.

So they said he couldn't tie that down. He told a state psychiatrist that his mother's retort infuriated him. He said she was very sarcastic. I was very mad at her sarcasm. So he said there was a quote, there was a wood splitting mall there. She was sitting and watching TV with her blue pajamas on. I got the mall and I hit her in the back of the head and dropped the mall. She was still sitting there. There was a little table in front of the TV with some silverware and a steak knife on it.

She was breathing sharply. I could hear that real loud. I did not care anymore about anything in the world. I picked up the steak knife, stabbed her, and got her around the neck. Holy shit. When I saw her blood, I felt like good in a sense because I finally did something about them yelling at me. I did not feel good because I don't like blood. I had blood on my hands. Not much. Then he said I started growling like a dog.

Dog boy now? What is happening? You better watch out. Your sister doesn't hear that. She'll be fucking in the walk tomorrow. Obviously, I'm kidding. Fuck off. What's the worst one I could do? It's that. Jenny almost died.

No, he said, then I saw my father standing there. He was in his computer room in the basement. He was stunned. I was standing right in front of him with a knife in my right hand. I stabbed him in the left chest around his heart. Before he even knew what was going on. His father was like, yeah, just like, what the hell? He just started stabbing him because he knew he was going to be pissed.

He screamed and fell back into his room and shut the door. I pushed the door open. He was still standing up. I stabbed him again twice and shut the door. Then I came to my mind and said, oh God, oh God, about 20 times. Then I thought I wanted to get rid of everything, not to be caught. I took my mother's wrist, dragged her out of the room into the snow, took her clothes off because I wanted to get rid of the fingerprints on her clothes.

Okay. Okay. By the way, the running around was him outside. That's the fingerprint. That's the prints they found. He lost one of his shoes at one point. So she said, oh, God, this is so weird.

Okay. Dragged her out into the snow, took her clothes off because I wanted to get rid of the fingerprints on her clothes. I bent over and fingered her twice. What? Why? What is that? Why did you finger your dead foster mother? What is that? I don't know. And that's a fascinating choice of words. That's her exact quote. I bent over and fingered her twice. What is that? Two fingers? I don't understand. That's fucking weird. Just one in and out. I don't know.

He said, I was ready to throw up. Thanks. I am too. Yeah. I'm right there with you. Well, that's the only normal response. Yeah. That's the one.

He said, I backed up, picked up the mall with one hand and a knife in the other hand. It was a revenge feeling. I took the knife and mall and threw them in the swampy area. Then I thought about and my sister. If she wasn't there, there was no reason in the world to go back in that house. I passed by my mother's body, went in, took off my shirt and shorts. And he was there and told me she heard a scream. I told her that she'd been dreaming and she went back to my bed and slept there.

I couldn't sleep that night. I wished everything was a dream, but I knew it wasn't. I threw up once on the pillow, then went to the bathroom and took off my shirt and shorts. I wanted to get rid of them. They said, why would he... The one psychiatrist said, why did you put your finger inside your mother after you killed her? And he just said, he shrugged and said, I was so mad that I felt I had to do something real bad to her. That's what he said. He said that... That might be the closest we ever get to...

the explanation of rape at all. Yeah. I don't know that. Or at least this. Yeah. In this regard, they said that he, he said his next memory was seeing them all come down in a slow motion on his mother's head.

And the lawyer said then he remembered what he thought was extremely loud breathing, which I think was not the case, but almost like a roar. And then seeing the knife on the table and being afraid that his mother's loud breathing would wake up Annie. He didn't want Annie to see this. So he had to stop the noise, which is when he started stabbing. That's what the lawyer says. Then he remembered hearing his father yelling for help. It sounded very distant. And they said, you know, that's what happened. So anyway, that's his explanation. Jeez. That's what he fucking did.

Which is insane. That's too much, Larry. Yeah, that is. Wow. So it's just a straw that broke the camel's back kind of thing. And he said that he said to him, it seemed like he was viewing himself or somewhere from like up on the ceiling or in the corner in the wall. It was like a like a surveillance camera watching the whole scene.

And psychiatrists say that that's evidence of a bit of a psychotic reaction. Yeah. They said then he turned around and sensed his father was there and somebody somebody was there. He saw his father standing with what he called a blank look as if not comprehending anything. Then he heard himself or heard a growl like a wolf or a dog or whatever and realized it was himself. And his lawyer said, I think he remembered stabbing his mother once or twice and stabbing his father maybe one or two times.

He sensed himself taking one giant step and his father falling back into the computer room. He stabbed his mother 17 times. Right. That's he's, he's glossing over what he did, but a lot of people, even they lose track, they lose track. Yeah. Even like police officers and whatever, they don't know how many shots they fired. They just don't know. They'll say, I let off two rounds and their guns empty. No, you didn't. You let off six. Oh shit. Even if they missed and it's not like a,

a trial. Like it's just, it's just a report and they'll think they only fired off two and they fired off six. It's just how it is. Your, your brain blocks certain shit out. That's it. Yeah. So,

Wow. He's, they said, what were you thinking? And he said, I wasn't thinking right. He said, just impulses were coming to me. Thoughts were coming into my mind, being, and then another thought would come into my mind, drag her outside. This is stupid. Then thinking, are there going to be fingerprints on the sleeper? I got to take the sleeper off. Now that's stupid. Throwing that down. Now I can see that happening. It wasn't like I was saying, I got to do this. I got to do that. He was just like, it was just, his brain was in a million different fucking places. Yeah.

So this is a lot. Now, they asked about the bear trail of bear footprints, and he claimed he had no knowledge of the tracks and couldn't remember what he wore on his feet when he ran outside to hide the evidence, which is the running around the house. But he did recall a couple of things. He said, when I came back on the carport, my feet were burning. And the next day I found a gash on the bottom of my foot. I had no idea where it came from.

They said, when did you notice the gash? And he said, when I was at the police station, I felt this numbness on my toe, took my sock off and there was a deep gash on my toe and I couldn't remember cutting it.

So they said when he got the cut, he was probably barefoot, didn't remember getting cut. So he was probably repressing the memory of being outside is what the psychologist said. So who knows? Because he had to have done it. It's definitely him. And it matches up too. They said that his shoe size matches the tracks here. So that's because his mother and his feet were only a half inch apart inside. So they confused it. Wow. The lawyer said he describes an explosion going off in his mind.

Holy shit. So they're going to charge him, obviously. Yeah, clearly. And they said his attorney says his bizarre confession combined with his memory gaps said he must have had a psychotic reaction. You know, it's in the throes of a psychosis. This is a mental problem. And that's what we should plead is insanity. So, yeah, he said he liked to keep all of his emotions wrapped up. He said Larry couldn't cry because when he had a temper tantrum in his own mind, he'd be moved the next day.

That's what it's about. So they were like, okay, but he's still got a... I mean, if you kill two people, you're going to get moved. You're going to get moved somewhere else. Yeah. Especially if they're the two people that pay the bills. Right. So the prosecutor said that he only recently learned of the alleged abuse in the home. So he needs a minute to think about this. The shrink here says that his insanity defense...

Sounds good because he suffered this one person diagnosed him as chronic undifferentiated schizophrenia. Oh. And they said it's a mental illness that profoundly distorted the way he perceived, thought, and felt about the world. Often appears in adolescence and characterized by things such as hallucinations and delusions and dissociation. So they said he might have experienced an acute psychotic episode caused by that.

They do another test. He's got an 87 IQ, like we said. So they said, you know, he's functional and all that kind of thing. But, you know, not the brightest bulb on the shelf. That's fine. So, yeah, they're trying to. By the way, the family is such a weird reaction. Some of the people are like, well, I mean, he's part of the family. And some of the people are like, fuck that kid. And all of them are shocked. They're like, he never even gets mad. I've never seen that kid raise his voice. Like, I don't understand it. He's the calmest kid ever.

They the fingerprint reports to come in and they revealed that the three prints lifted inside the house didn't match those of Larry or his parents. And the location of at least one of the prints seems significant on the inside of the doorknob of the computer room where his body was found. It was a partial palm print appeared to be in blood.

So they said they couldn't figure out who that matched up to because it didn't really match anybody. But they said it could have been a paramedic. It could have been somebody. And they put a fucking blanket over. They weren't going by policy there. So he's charged with two counts of second degree murder.

Oh, boy. They want to take the jurors to the scene to show them everything. Show them what happened, yeah. Yeah. They talk about neither lawyers thinks they need to change a venue. That should be fine. Both of them think this place is okay? It's fine. This shouldn't get any publicity or anything. This kid fingered his dead mother in the yard. That's fine.

They set a trial date, and Larry says, quote, after I read an article in the paper about the trial date, I started shaking all over. If I start thinking about the trial and what could happen, if they say I did things I could get two life sentences, it could go a lot of ways. Now he's starting to have clarity of thought. That's weird, right? Strange. They said they're going to take Annie's testimony in writing and not make her testify because she's been through enough. That's heavy.

He wants to plead insanity, but the prosecutor won't take the plea. So they're going to go to trial. Then during jury selection, they come to an agreement on a deal. That's when it happened. Yeah. The prosecutor said, I'm not saying Larry Swartz wasn't a very disturbed young man. I'm not saying he didn't have to be or he didn't have cause to be disturbed as a result of conditions that allegedly surrounded his home.

He said, but over and beyond anything else, two people were very brutally murdered, and I can't let a jury forget that. So there you go. So they come up with a deal, a plea bargain. That says he'll drop the insanity defense, but they're going to –

put him in a hospital to see if he can be in jail and if not they're going to put him in a psychiatric facility until they can get him well enough to put him in prison until they can get him well enough to put him in prison exactly the Pawtuxent institution no Pawtuxent not Pawtucket like there not Rhode Island Pawtuxent P-A-T-U-X-E-N-T institution would offer him appropriate treatment that might be able to have him have a normal life someday

Okay. So that's what his lawyer says. Sentencing, two counts of second-degree murder. His lawyer said that – or, yeah, his attorney said strict parenting. They pushed him to be a model son. He said you had well-meaning and well-intentioned parents who were ill-equipped because of their own personalities to deal with the problems Larry had. They said that Larry turned out to be the kind of child his mother least wanted to adopt.

She told social workers that as a teacher, she would have difficulty dealing with a dull, normal child because she would have a tendency to think he could have done better. That's before she adopted anybody. And the lawyer said that's exactly what she got.

Holy shit. Kids are dipshit. Yeah. Yeah. Larry's cousin said, I think Larry was more in tune to being a drinker and having a sex life, and that was basically in conflict with his parents. Although there were tensions in the family, he was never mistreated. This is a cousin who lives out of state, by the way. Having a sexual relationship. He wanted to get laid at 17. That's what he wanted. Now, the judge says the crimes were terrible, but...

He says, from all appearances, you seem to be a normal, average, everyday 17-year-old boy. He said, but psychological evaluations by a series of doctors indicate that under the facade of normalness, there's a great deal that was abnormal. He says that, and the state's attorney said he's obviously a very troubled person. He's sick and needs treatment. That's the prosecutor. So you, young man. Oh, boy.

They fuck off. He is sentenced to two 20-year terms, concurrent though, so same time, 20 years, and then suspended eight years in each case. So 12 years in prison.

What? The maximum was 30 years for each count. Yeah. He gave him 12 years total. And some of it he gets to spend in a psych ward. Yes. Getting well. Yes, exactly. This kid's on the street. We'll talk about it. Oh, my God. I got this coming up in one second. So Larry's attorney said, I think Larry had pent up within him all that he could hold. It just happened to burst out that night. The event wasn't so significant as the fact that it was about to happen. Holy.

Holy shit. And then the newspaper said, the handsome 18-year-old Swartz showed no emotion as he took the stand. Handsome motherfucker. Fucking amazing. So family members said, I think the defendant lived in a family that aspired for him to be a student and an athlete, and he was more interested in drinking, drugs, and sex. What is going on? I don't know. Michael at that time was attending night school and working at a restaurant. Oh, he's doing great. He ends up graduating from college, but we'll talk about him. Because then in 1990...

Oh, no. A book is written. Sudden Fury is the name of the book that's about this whole thing. That's a lot of these quotes came out of Van Damme movie. It's a sudden fury. Seagal's breaking necks. Michael is supposed to appear on Sally Jesse Raphael show to promote the book, make an appearance to talk about it. But he's not unable to make it because he's arrested for murder.

Who did he kill? Michael, at the time, by the way, had recently fathered a child and was paying child support. Then he became unemployed after he broke both his shoulders in a motorcycle accident. What?

He had odd jobs, including a carpenter, cab driver, gas pumper, fast food place. The worst. He had agreed to appear on the publicity show, but then he couldn't. The author said he was excited. It was his moment to shine. Yeah. He's still at square one. Yeah. He hasn't even advanced anywhere in life. He tried to join the Army, but didn't have a high school diploma, and he had a juvenile record, so they didn't really want to take him. He hooked up with an idiot named Ronald L. Scoats, S-C-O-A-T-S, 31 years old.

And Schwartz here, Michael said that this guy, Scotts, was on parole from a murder sentence he was serving in Florida and that he had threatened this man, Robert Austin Bell, who was 57. And he had a big thing of change that had $50 of change in it. And I guess Scotts told this guy on July 9th, 1990, that he'd kill him if he didn't give you give me all your change.

$50 and change. $50 and change. He said scoats had been drinking heavily. When they were both carrying knives, they went into Bell's house. Michael said he was shaking the man's hand when, quote, Ronnie just started stabbing him for no reason. I reacted to that and just started stabbing, too. That's...

Your reaction? I guess I'll start stabbing. All right. He was stabbed 48 times. Oh, boy. Over $50 worth of change. Yep. So that is fucking horrible. The next door neighbor recognized scoats after scoats allegedly walked over to him before the incident and said he had brought some items for Bell. Just let you know, I'm here to see this guy. I'm going to kill him. That's a dumb. These fucking people were the scoats had lived with Bell until he was tossed out about a month ago.

So the neighbor went in and found the guy on the floor. They said Swartz gave a complete confession and implicated everything. Stop stabbing. I'm going to see the lady with the red glasses. An eight to 10 inch blade knife was killed. They both had the same knife, like similar knives. Wow. During his bail hearing, Michael, the judge asked, quote, do I know this defendant? And then said, I might have set bail for your brother.

Yeah. This is the same judge. So in court, Scotts is sentenced to you, sir. May fuck off life without parole. They had sought the death penalty for him. Lucky. But they didn't seek it for Michael. Really? Michael is sentenced to you, sir. May fuck off 25 years to life.

I'm sorry, life in prison with a chance for parole. So, yeah. 1993, a movie comes out. TV movie, A Family Torn Apart, starring Doogie Howser.

What? And the guy from the Big Bang Theory, the Johnny Galecki guy. Darlene's boyfriend and Doogie Howser are in this. Yeah. Neil Patrick Harris stars as Larry. Yeah. Obviously. Very Indian man. Yeah. They said this is the crazy part. The director said and the writer, the people who made the movie said we did a dramatization based on the case, which was based on the book. We had to change certain things because they would have just seemed too far fetched. Like what?

Like just some of the crazy stuff. This story is so crazy. They went, this, we can't make a movie. That's too crazy. Nobody will believe it. Nobody will believe it. So that's what ended up happening. That's that. 1993, Larry is paroled. Holy shit. He received his high school education and two years of college before being paroled. He was released from a work release center and he served nine of 12 years.

That was that. He had been at the House of Correction in Jessup before that. He went to Jessup? Jessup after the psych hospital. They said he does not live in Anne Arundel County. That's all that we'll say. His lawyer, Baradel, said, I don't think Larry's a threat. You have to understand this was a kid who was never in trouble. I don't think he'll ever be in trouble for the rest of his life. He's not a chronic offender. He had this one horrible incident. It's a pretty fucking bad one.

It's a pretty bad incident. Finger raped a dead woman. His mom, for Christ's sake. 2004, Larry has a heart attack and dies. What? At 38. Dead. What? Yep, dead. He had an eight-year-old child, and he was married with an eight-year-old kid and dropped dead at 38. 38? Done. Larry's dead. As far as I know, Michael's still in jail. I'm not sure. Holy shit. There we go. How's Annie?

She's doing nails. You knew it was coming. So there you go. That is Maryland, everybody. What a town. That's a fucking crazy story. What a story. So that's a wild story. Can't believe it. Holy shit. If you like that story, certainly tell us about it. Tell the world about it. Get on whatever app you're on and just give us a nice review. Five stars. Say something fun. Tell us your favorite flavor of jelly.

Or jam. Or preserves. Pick one. Just tell us. It doesn't matter. Do that. Find us on social media. We are at Small Town Murder on Instagram, at Small Town Pod on Facebook, at Murder Small on Twitter. So check us out there. Definitely you want to listen to crime and sports. Yeah. And you want to listen to your stupid opinions. Yeah.

for fucking sure. You want to go to shutupandgivememurder.com? You want to get your tickets for live shows? Tons of shit coming up. Durham, May 31st. That's our next regular live show. But April 20th is the virtual live show. You're thinking, I can listen to this when it comes out. It's already April 20-something. It's still there. You can still get it. It's available for two weeks after the 20th as well. Get your tickets. It's going to be so much fun, just like a regular live show, except you're in your goddamn house. Best one yet. Awesome shit. So check that out, shutupandgivememurder.com.

This guy.

And the fact that they were just like, oh, I guess it's just the assistant. Let him go. Okay, it's the interpreter. Come on and play. Nothing to see here. Look at him hit. Nothing to see here. And we'll talk about other gambling scandals that are not Pete Rose from the past and the new one that just happened in the NBA. Oh, boy. Talk about that. And then for Small Town Murder, we're going to talk about Charles Manson. Was he? Was he?

We're going to talk about down a conspiracy rabbit hole here. Was Charles Manson really a CIA asset that was put in this situation to do exactly what he did to discredit the hippie movement? We don't know. Let's get into it. A guy spent 20 years ruining his life and writing a book.

So we'll talk all about that. That is patreon.com slash crime in sports. So get that right now. Keep hanging out with us. And you know what else you'll get? A goddamn shout out. You know when that happens? Right now. Right fucking now. Jimmy, hit me with that list. This week's executive producers are Jordan Bennett, Haley Walls, Thomas Smith. Happy birthday.

Happy birthday, Thomas. Happy birthday. Sherry Blythen. Kyle Norwig got himself a mortgage. Good for you. Hey, good for you. And Denali York, thank you all so much for everything you do for us. Thank you. You are terrific. You guys are the best. Other producers this week are Sophie Content. Content? Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. Content. content. Content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content. content.

Be careful, Jimmy. Careful with that one. She said it's cuntent. This is one of our patrons, Jimmy. Let's keep it light. You're terrific. Janice Hill, Ria Sparks, Tuesday Mize, Jason Munch, Nick Jameson, Mitch Callerby, Kate Clark, Blake Lehman, Laura Rhodes, Terry with no last name, Helena K, Joe Devine, Denise Briceford, Michaela Holtzclaw, Jenisaurus XO.

Ray Hauner, Shannon Hall, Megan O'Neill, Maxine with no last name, Adam Angeloff, Angeloff, I guess maybe? Calvin Maddox, David, David Hines, her Sofship. Okay. I believe her name is Sophie. Oh,

D. Connor, Catherine Damon, Domorod, Corey Rizzo has two different ones. Thank you, Corey. Darwin Harder, Uncle Kenny, Danik Chaitalain,

Michelle McCorkle. Emily with no last name. Michelle Fournier. Jasmine Williams. Lance Morin Schlager. Kelsey Brown. Clara Bella. Christine Reynolds. Mary and Anne. Anthony Shock, I believe. Annie. Oh, boy. What is this? Annie Vogel. Paul Jeremiah Hayes. Lucy Davies. Julie Lindsay. Ken Allen. Hayden Thorne. Angela Nath. Neith, I think. Rikita Parker. Male Lady Julie. Jenny. Fuck.

All right. It's not Julie. Thank you. Sorry, Julie. Rick Jordan. John Shea. Edgar Palma. Lloyd with no last name. Javier with no last name. Julia Foodman. Casey Widerholt. Rebecca Banks Gilbert. Melinda Melina. Melina Peters. Mold Children.

Charities LLC. Mold Children. Are there mold children? Are they pulling children from the ground? I don't know. Are their eyes not open all the way? They may be sick. They have charities. Jonathan Emerson, John Britton, Sarah Noah, Tony the Guitar Geek, Art

Bro. Mahaj. What? Missy. Missy. Reynolds. Reynolds? Is that a real last name? Is it? Is it Reynolds and I fucked that up? It's possible. You ever hear Petrogallo before? Could be. Could be a name. You don't know. Andy Tease. Kathy with no last name. Mackenzie with no last name. Stacey Arguello. Deke or Dyke or Dick. I'm not sure. One of the three. Let's go Deke. Probably. Marcy Barger. Marcy Barger.

Aaron Adkins, Stephanie Kite, Puccino, Bellini, Ailey. Ailey with no last name. Allie. It's probably Allie. Woo Beat, Prinny Miller, Markeith. No, it's Markeith. That's a cool name. Markeith, I've heard. Yeah. Yeah.

I think there's a murderer named Markeith. There's an offensive lineman named Markeith, too. Yeah, there's a Markeith. There's an investigation, discovery, interrogation where his fucking eyes are hanging out of his face because they tackled him. Yes, yes. That guy's name is Markeith. Amy Reeves, Bo Cephas, Ray Ray. I hope it's not that Markeith. Cheyenne with no last name. Irvin, Irvin, Joseph. Hope your eye's better. I don't know.

Maybe you should have kept that money to make that eye better. Yeah. Unless you've got so much money and so many eyes. Irvin Joseph Bergeron. Sonia Montgomery. Kyla Wilson. Paul Minotti. Aaliyah Taylor. Keith with no last name. Catherine Ramirez. Maja Berlin. Lulu Dropo. Abby Van Roy. Chuck.

Gilbraith, Cameron Greenweight Green Wade, Greenwald Joe Jenks, I don't know Brad Grensinger, Blazin' Bob Mandy with no last name, John Labath Cody Crompton, Caroline Bennett Suzanne Kendall, Derek Baker Heather Archer Matthew Sharp Mike Mix, Reggie W Night Horse, Miranda Levinides Jeff Martin, Bill Jaram Lorraine Rain

Lorraine Rain. Yep, that's true. Nick Arum. Rachel with no last name. Wade Carpenter. Genevieve Rittenhouse. Kara Avent. Jillian Smith. Tammy Van Oppen. Amy Wetzel. Anna Maria. Abigail Edgar. Joseph Tamburo. Heather with no last name. Dylan Clary.

Kristen Ellen. Shit, is that her first name? All right, that might be two first names. I'm not sure. Kevin Carroll. Billy Sale. Could be. Maybe her last name's Ellen even. Laura Barton. Kim Castro. Morgan W. Con-claxity. Crops. Con-cl- All right. Con-cle- City. Oh, yeah.

Morgan with no last name. Jamie LaFoya. Like the lady from ESPN, is it? There you go. Michelle. I hope that's Michelle's family. Zach Meineke. Meineke. Meineke. Meineke. He's got oil change money.

Off their money. Yolanda with no last name. Matthew with no last name. Graciano Johnson. Jake with no last name. Molly Doster. Madison Greco. Sandra Dugan. Titty Laws. Justin Bottles. Lisa B. Julie Rotondo. Darren Kuhn. Amanda Gross. Eileen Warden. Lucas Legault. Josh Mills. Haley Kroll. Orange67RS. I'll bet you that guy drives a Camaro. Yeah.

Jessica Scarpa, Cleo Wright, Letitia Hernandez, Thomas Whitcomb, Eric Westfall, Wade. Nope, that's Made Davey. Madey Davey, Wesley, Ford X23, Hester. I believe that's Devin's family. You guys, and all the patrons, obviously. Every last one of you, you're terrific. Thank you so much. Thank you, everybody. Wow.

Thank you so much. You're unbelievable. Wonderful bastards. God damn it, we love you. You want to find us on social media? Yes, thank you. Head over to shutupandgivememurder.com, drop down menu, find out links to all that shit. Come follow us. Come hang out with us. Keep coming back. See you then. Until next week, everybody, it's been our pleasure. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

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Scammers are best known for living the high life until they're forced to trade it all in for handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit once they're finally caught. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the host of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of some of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away.

We've covered stories like a Shark Tank certified entrepreneur who left the show with an investment but soon faced mounting bills, an active lawsuit filed by Larry King, and no real product to push. He then began to prey on vulnerable women instead, selling the idea of a future together while stealing from them behind their backs.

To the infamous scams of Real Housewives stars like Teresa Giudice, what should have proven to be a major downfall only seemed to solidify her place in the Real Housewives Hall of Fame. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Scamfluencers early and ad-free right now on Wondery+.