#487 - Handsome, Charming & Deadly - Radford, Virginia
02:49:13 Share

Hey, everybody. Just going to take a quick break from the show and tell you a little bit more about one of our favorite things ever, Audible. Oh, audible.com or that app. The app is great, and I'm on the app constantly. Listening to Audible helps your imagination soar.

No.

There's more to imagine when you listen. And I'll tell you something that has set both Jimmy and I's imagination soaring. And that is the Lewis and Clark journals. We're both really into these right now. And as an Audible member, you can choose one title a month to keep from the entire catalog, including the latest bestsellers, the newest releases. New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash smalltownmurder or text

smalltownmurder to 500-500. That's audible.com slash smalltownmurder or text smalltownmurder to 500-500. Now back to the show. Music

Hey, everybody. Just going to take a quick break from the show to tell you a little bit about Angie. Oh, Angie.com. A-N-G-I.com. Absolutely. Angie. Good stuff. Angie's List is now Angie, the nation's largest home services marketplace, and they're here to help homeowners get all their jobs done well.

Angie, yes, they've helped over 150 million homeowners care for their homes. Whenever the project, big, small, indoor, outdoor, come to Angie, you understand, we both own homes and projects are difficult. And they pile up. They pile up, and Angie makes tackling the project simple from start to finish. Get started on the app, or you can go to Angie.com. That is A-N-G-I dot com. Get your job done well with Angie today.

And now back to the show. Okay, most Americans think they spend about $62 per month on subscriptions. But get this, the real number is closer to $300. That is literally thousands of dollars a year, half of which you've probably forgotten about. Thankfully, Rocket Money can find a bunch of subscriptions you've forgotten all about and then help you cancel the ones you don't want anymore. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions, unbinds,

monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so that you can grow your savings. Rocket Money has over 5 million users and has saved a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions, saving members up to $740 a year when using all of the app's features.

This week in Radford, Virginia, a celebratory night of dancing ends with a massive search for a missing young woman. But will all the evidence, dogs, psychics, and common sense in the world be enough to solve it? Welcome to Small Town Murder. ♪

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder. Yay! Oh, yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay indeed. My name is James Petrigallo. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wissman. Thank you folks so much for joining us today on another crazy wild, really crazy edition of Small Town Murder, as usual, as...

I mean, we're still catching our breaths from a couple weeks ago, our collective breath from Wisconsin. But there's a lot. This is twisted stuff here. But before we get to all of that, certainly want to say head over to ShutUpAndGiveMeMurder.com right now. Get your tickets to live shows. First of all, if you're listening to this, I think the virtual live show is still available. You can grab that. Also, get your tickets to regular live shows.

Because we are coming to Durham, North Carolina, May 31st. Still some tickets available for that. Next night in Nashville sold out. So Durham, get your tickets right now. We will see you there. Rest of the year, they're going fast. So get in there. Minnesota, Minneapolis, you can be our biggest show ever. Get those tickets right now so we can tell everybody when we're asked, what was your biggest show ever? Minneapolis. Let me tell you about it.

The Minnesotans came through, so we're very excited for that. Can't wait. ShutUpAndGiveMeMurder.com. Also, tons of merch up there and all sorts of neat stuff. So check that out. You definitely want some bonus material. Patreon is what you need here. Patreon.com slash CrimeInSports, which is the name of our other podcast that you should be listening to. That and also your stupid opinions. But that's besides the point. Patreon you definitely want. Anybody $5 a month or above.

You get it all. Everything. All the bonus stuff. Couple hundreds of there's hundreds of back episodes of bonus stuff to check in on and then new ones every other week. One crime and sports, one small town murder. And you're going to get it all this week, which you get for crime and sports. We're going to talk about the whole Otani gambling debacle. Yeah. Where they within like a week, they just decided, no, no, he's fine. Everything's good. Quickest investigation in baseball history. We decided he's wonderful is what we decided. Never mind.

And some other gambling incidents that were swept right on under the rug. The ones that weren't Pete Rose, basically. All of those. And then for small town murder, we're going to go down a big old conspiracy rabbit hole here. The whole group. We're going to dive on in. And the subject is, was Charles Manson actually a CIA asset that was doing everything he did at the bidding of the CIA for political means or whatever? That's a fundamental means.

It's wild. The guy ruined his life and spent 20 years writing a book about this whole thing. He's got some wild theories, and we'll talk all about them and some other CIA-related weirdness that goes on. So we'll talk all about that. That's patreon.com slash crimeinsports. And you get a shout-out at the end of the show as well. Oh, you bet. So you can't beat that. Jimmy's going to mispronounce your name. How's that for fun? Probably.

That said, let's get to the disclaimer. It's disclaimer time. This is a comedy show. We're comedians. There is terrible death. We can't help that. The show's called Small Town Murder. So that's going to happen. And we're going to make jokes. But the thing is, we try not to like Ghostbusters. You don't cross the streams.

There's nothing funny about the actual act of the murder. No one's really laughing at that part. It's the other parts. It's when a murderer has a terrible excuse or a police department doesn't notice that someone's obviously a murderer and lets them murder more people. There's something funny about incompetence and just insanity and hubris. So that's what we make jokes about. Everything like that. Small towns, because we're all from a small town. Who cares? It's roast time. It's fun stuff.

So that's how we do things. What we don't do, though, we go out of our way not to do, is we do not make fun of the victim or the victim's families. Oh, why is that, James? Because we're assholes. But? But we're not scumbags. There you go. That's how that goes. So if that sounds good to you, man, are you in for a wild story today. If you think true crime and comedy should never, ever go together, you might be in the wrong place.

It's possible. I would say. But you know what? Give it a chance. Let's see what you do. You don't know. And either way, no bitching later. That said. Not a single complaint. No complaining. That said, I think it's time, everybody. Let's all clear the lungs. What do you say? And let's all shout. Shut up and give me murder. Let's do this, everybody. What do you say? Let's go on a trip, shall we?

Yeah, let's do it. We are going all the way to Virginia this week. Yeah. And if we both sound a little off, it's because we are. We are both extremely ill. We caught something together. My life's a fucking disaster. We're just sharing it and giving it back and forth. And we're we're very, very sick. So we're trying our best. We in spirit. We're fine.

But our heads and the mucus content of them is not cooperating. We'll be all right, though. But we're going to Radford, Virginia, which right away I have to say the college that's here, Radford University...

If when studying murder cases every once in a while, one out of 50, 60 of them, there'll be a murderer that Radford University studied. And when they study them, they put together this whole like profile on them, starting with birthplace. We're parents together. What were their occupations? How many brothers? And it's just basically an entire biography. And it's the greatest thing in the world for someone trying to put together a true crime podcast. Yeah.

So they're wonderful. The people of Radford university for doing that for us. So I have to say that this is in Southwestern Virginia. It's about 50 minutes to Roanoke. And, uh,

About four hours to McLean, Virginia, which is our last Virginia episode. Episode 444, A Tale of Two Sisters, that one was. There you go. That was a wild episode. So this is... Oh, that was the gals that were switching places? Yeah, yeah. That was crazy, man. Those sisters were out there. So this is on the line of two different counties. It's so weird when they put a big place...

In the middle of two counties. It makes no sense whatsoever. It would be very complicated for, you know, garbage. The county goes down through the town? Yeah, yeah. It cuts right through. We've had it a few times. It's weird. The area code 540. And the motto of this place, the New River City. Yeah. The New River is here. So there you go. A little bit of history. It was named for Dr. John B. Radford.

So there you go. It was originally a small place here by the river. And basically it was a draw because there was fresh water and food in the river if you're traveling. Sure, sure. There you go. And then in the 1850s, they built the railroad through here and then the population spikes as... Yeah.

We see in these towns all the time. Water gets less fresh. Yep. Then in 1913, the Radford State Normal School came through. What is that? That is a women's college. They used to name it all the time Normal School.

What is that? A normal school. Jesus. What do you think? Okay. I don't know. I don't know why you call it that. Is it a school for any specific shit? Is it normal? Yeah, just a basic curriculum. I don't know. It was a woman's college. It's very normal. It was a woman's college. And then it became Radford College. And then in 79, it became Radford University. So the college helped, too. That brings more people in always when there's a college. Yeah.

And then in the 40s, World War II times, the military decided to build a manufacturing plant for gunpowder and ammunition here as well. Oh, no. Yeah, called the Arsenal. And people worked there for decades after that. Really? Yeah. Like, this happened in the 80s. And during the trial, a lot of the jurors, like four or five of the jurors, worked at the Arsenal. Just pressing bullets all day, huh? Yeah. I mean, I guess the military always needs bullets. I mean...

They got to have bullets. Yeah, those are key. Yeah. Even just to practice with, you need something. It's like a basketball team needs basketballs, you know? Yeah, you got to shoot at something. And the game, you probably need more for practice, I would think, you know? Just like... Yeah. Yeah, I bet you're right. I'll bet they fire more in practice than they do at people. You go to a basketball practice, there's like 14 balls dribbling around. In the game, there's one ball.

It's just constantly coming off the rim. Constantly. Constantly. Yeah. So reviews of this town. Let's find out what people think because we don't know anything about it. All we know is there's a college here. So this is like...

Whoever wrote this, I don't know if they're selling real estate in this town or what, but they love it. Five stars. They literally say, I love Radford. That's the first line. I'm a student here in my third year. I wasn't always going to come to Radford as I'm the first generation college graduate from my family. We come from a small town where everyone seems to just stay. It's a barefoot and pregnant kind of town, really. Yeah.

Jesus. That's where she comes from. Bleak. Bleak. I was engaged at 19 and ended up having an abusive relation by 21. This is a town review. This has nothing to do with this town. She's fascinating, though. I want to know more, but I mean, this is a strange... Everything about her. Niche.com is a weird place to put this information is what I'm getting at as opposed to a therapist.

She is fun to sit on a bar stool next to. Wow, I guess so. At 22, I decided I was going to move away, overcome the eating disorder I had developed and apply to the university. She is. Holy shit. Let's hear about her drug problem in a little while. Yeah, she's going to be like, I used to do meth and blow strangers. It was terrible.

That's going to be coming up here. She gets up from the barstool several times to go puke. Poor thing. I came here for the sole purpose of getting my degree and leaving, but Radford captured my heart. It does a bit more every day, to be honest. Whether it's the kind spirit around Christmas, the golden canopy of leaves in the fall, or the sweet smell of flowers on my run by Bissett Park, I fall for it each day.

This is the kind of small town I would never want to leave. I have never met someone who didn't feel even a little like I do about Radford, Virginia.

I want it. Well, let's talk about people who don't feel that way at all. She fucking wrote it up, man. She could have just scrolled more where she was putting this review. She would have seen plenty of people. She graduated college and then moved here. Well, she moved there for college and just didn't leave. She moved here at 22 to go to grad school at the college. That's amazing. Yeah. A lot of people stay where they are in college. That's very common. I live in Poughkeepsie. There's tons of people who went to Vassar and then liked it and stayed there because it's pretty...

So two stars here. The campus gets an email almost every two weeks describing some kind of attack on another person. Yeah, it's a college. Wasn't there a really bad attack there? Jesus. Every college. Colleges are just notorious. I carry mace with me in my backpack in case of a predator attack.

It sounds like that could be like a like an opossum or like a raccoon comes up. It's a predator. Anything people sharks sharks and always have to have someone pick me up or walk me back to my apartment as soon as it gets dark. I don't even like walking alone in daylight with no one around.

Wow. There are blue emergency phones, but if I have to dial the number first to get the police, I wouldn't have time and I would be taken slash dead. Jesus Christ. How fast are they snatching, folks? This person is just, she's already, I'm on the floor and bleeding out. That's all there is to it. She wrote herself off. Yeah, this is really a fatalist attitude about the whole thing. I mean, it's good to have your head on a swivel and be careful, but she's dead already. If this ends before it...

If one posted there's an unfinished word, I'm dead. I'm dead. That's it. One star. I've lived in this town for several years, and in all honesty, I hate it with a passion.

With a passion. With a passion. So the first person loved it, and this person hates it with a passion. I mean, the school staff suck at their jobs. Sucks. Suck, man. And the kids in the school are even worse. Yeah, this is a child. I would not recommend you let your kids go to school here. I'm currently on my second year of high school here, and I've been harassed on a daily basis, as have my friends.

Really? Don't say for what. Just maybe you're a dork. Have you considered that? I don't know. Fucking... Just kidding. Have you considered changing clothes? Yeah, I don't know. Maybe reinvent yourself. You know what I'm saying? Get a crazy hairdo. Put on some fucking cowboy boots, man.

If you consider dressing in all black and just kind of scaring people, that works too sometimes. Walk around with hand wraps. Yeah, people will just... Like you're ready to fight. People won't want to ask. They'll just avoid you. So, I don't know. Wear some Muay Thai shorts to school. Check that out.

Then you just look like a douchebag. Yeah, but they might not want to fight. No. Rub on your ear till it cauliflowers up. There you go. Yeah, fake a cauliflower ear. They'll leave you alone. Yeah, fake a cauliflower ear. If you're willing to start, that's all it takes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you still might be terrible, but no one knows that yet. Yeah, they don't know until they start the fight. They can't tell. How are they going to fucking know? So most of the places are disgusting and probably most likely about to collapse on themselves.

What? What does that mean? The whole town needs to be condemned, apparently, from a structural standpoint. Yeah, they got weak buildings over there. Very weak structures. People, 16,205.

Okay, and a vast majority of them, I imagine, are in the college? Yeah, the median age here is 23.6. It seems like everybody's in the college. It's only 25% married, which it's usually 50% married. 22.5% have children but are single, though, so they're still having some kids. Some accidents happen, yeah. The race to this town, 83.3%, white 9.3%.

1.6% Asian, 2.9% Hispanic. And religion here, it's lower because it's younger people. 38.6% religious. And it's spread around pretty good because these people are from all sorts of different places. Pentecostal, actually, is the number one religion here. What? Pentecostal. Yeah. So I don't know. My God.

Median household income here is $44,360, which is way less than the national average to be expected because it's college. So cost of living out of 100, it's 83. So not too bad. Median home cost here, $223,800, which isn't that bad. But they're weak homes. They're weak. That's what I mean. Well, that's why it's not that expensive. They're going to fall down. Bad trusses. No inspections. This is a no-inspection town.

So if we've convinced you, damn it, that you can't be anywhere else but Radford, Virginia, we have for you the Radford, Virginia Real Estate Report. The average two-bedroom rental here goes for about $880.

Okay, that's pretty good. You got probably a lot of rentals with the college kids, I would think. If here's a house, three bedroom, one bath, 939 square foot. Jesus. It looks like it possibly could collapse at any time, actually. It's so small. It's a small place and it shows no pictures of the inside. The outside looks old and dirty and crumpled.

Possibly if you could just push it over. Come have a look. Yeah, we got a three little pig situation going on with this fucking thing. Not great. $139,900 for that. Wow, that's steep. That's a little steep for that. I don't trust anything where the inside isn't even...

They don't even take pictures of it. Not even going to mention it? We'll leave that out. There's an inside. Whoa. Here's a three-bedroom, three-bath, so T-Bowl for each and every b-hole here. Yeah. 2,160 square feet. It's on nine acres.

Okay. Oh, my. That's very nice. Yeah. 9-8. That's a lot. Real nice. It's a nice house. It's got a nice garden around there. Inside, it could use some updating. It's got two different kinds of older-looking tiles that run into each other, type of shit like that. Older house stuff. Carpet that you could just want to yank right out of there. But decent still. $495,000 for that.

Nine acres. Nine acres, I think, is the selling point there. And then here's a five-bedroom, four-bath, 4,010 square feet. Okay. It's one of those, like, brick that's, you know, I'm sure the not real brick, just a brick facade. Fucking McMansions. That's all it is. The inside is exactly what you'd see in, like, if you watch House Hunters, it's every house they look at. It's nothing special, kind of boring.

Meh. Those same shaped windows, you know, that they all have. $879,900 for that thing. How many acres? None? None. It's like a half acre. This is bullshit. It's a no acre. Yeah. If that's on nine acres, then we're talking. But no, otherwise. Things to do. Here we go. The Radford Highlanders Festival.

Yeah. Scott of shit is what that is. Oh, is it? Yeah. Drinking and fighting type shit here. Yeah. Fuck. Yeah. The Highlanders are the Scots. And so the pictures of the festival on the website, it's all face paint. It's a lot of like burly guys and kilts is what you're going to say. Yeah. Dudes that will kick your ass. See, that's who I look out for. Fuck a guy in movie tie shorts.

Just because you went to Kohl's and bought a pair of shorts, I'm not afraid of you. But if you're walking around and you're like beefy and you're like, yeah, you're like, aye, and you got booze in your beard and a kilt on, I'm not fighting you at that point. Some chunks of peas. You don't even have underwear on. Yeah. You got shepherd's pie chunks in your scruff. Peas in your brain. Are those peas? He bends over to throw up and you see his asshole. That's a tough guy. You know, fuck with that guy.

It's got carrots and peas. They've been chewed up, but they're still in there. That's crazy. The peas are whole. Yeah. The peas are just like, they're whole still. They just fell out of the fork. The carrots got bite marks in them. They got bite marks in them for sure. So they have the famed heavyweight games.

Okay. The famed heavyweight games. Is that a tough man competition? Who knows what they did. That's all they say? That's it. Heavyweight games. You're supposed to know what that is. I think they throw like big fucking, you know, big hammers and axes and shit. I think it's just like crazy Braveheart shit that they're doing. Probably. Yeah, weird. I think there's a Brit killing competition. Whoever kills the most...

Bring your own brick to kill. Yeah, whoever kills the most Englishmen, I think, wins something. I'm not sure how it works. There's shepherding.

Just going to sheep herding. I'm going to show you that live entertainment, which we'll talk about vendors, festivals, food, the sheep and duck herding as well. You have to hurt a duck and make it hurt ducks. Oh yeah, you did. You've been to a fucking park with a bag of fucking bread before. That's the best way to do it. You just throw it on the ground. You go, here they are. Stay right here. That's all of them. Stay there for a while. That's all of them. Then my grandmother comes and stuffs one in the trunk.

They're free. They're free. One of the bands is called S-Y-R, Sir or Seer or Sire. Sire. I'll bet it's Sire. Sire. We're Sire. We're going to play for you.

Hold on, I have to throw up. Look at me ball bag. Look at the back of me ball bag while I puke. He just sings and spits peas and carrots into the mic. Oh, man, it's covered in chunks of fucking shepherd pie. It's a Scottish Gallagher. It's like a Gallagher show at the end. It's just spread out everywhere. Oh, man. And there's also a band called Albinac.

Albinac? Albinac. Floyd Historic Dancer will be there. Floyd. One guy named Floyd. He's an old guy who dances. How do you do it? Floyd. Historic Dancer. One says Diddyville, Aaron Marshall, and Carl Jones.

Okay. They're going to change that name, I think. Diddyville. It sounds a lot like Diddleville. The Panjammers will be there. Oh, the what? Panjammers. Where are you jamming those? In the panhandle there. And then Marshall Page. Okay. Yeah, he's like, maybe people think we said Marshall Tucker and we'll show off. Marshall Tucker and Jimmy Page songs all day. That's what it is. That's all it is.

Fuck yeah. And Kinfolk with two N's. What? Yeah, we'll be there. And also the Claire Pollitt will be there for a Highland Dancing Workshop. Claire Pollitt? Pollitt. P-O-L-L-I-T. Pollitt. So there's that. And then also, if you're done with that and you've had it, go to the St. Albans Sanatorium.

It's like a ghost tour thing. Go to an old mental hospital where it's creepy and you get the shit scared out of you. Go see historic mental health issues. That's fun. They said broken toys litter the floor while old wheelchairs rust in corners beneath grimy peeling walls. The whole building has a dark, eerie air to it, making any visitor aware they're treading on grounds sullied by decades of horror.

Yeah, let's go dance around in there. It sounds great. A lot of fun. Historic mental health issues where they were taken advantage of and treated horribly. Come wander around. Oh, there's going to be evil shit in here. Come on. Fuck you. I bet it costs money, too. Great. I'm not going there ever. Oh, yeah. I didn't do it to you guys. Whatever happened.

They talk about what happened. Vulnerable patients were subjected to cruel and inhumane experimental treatments, which often left them permanently disabled or resulted in death from lobotomies or insulin-induced comas. Others were shocked via electroconvulsive therapy. Others were completely wrapped mummy style in towels drenched with cold ice water or left to soak in tubs for days at a time.

Come wander around. Come. Get out of your fucking mind. There's a snack bar. We got Hebrew national hot dogs. They're good. All beef. Oh, my God. Wow. Crime rate. Well, we're interested in here. Property crime just below average.

which is odd for a college town. Usually it's high in a college town because you've got the pissing in the streets and stuff like that. Then violent crime, murder, rape, robbery, and of course assault, the Mount Rushmore of crime, is above the average. Really? Yes, which is...

Watch out, kids. That's fucking, man, maybe those blue phones do need an update, just a 911 button. That's a rare occurrence, and it's true. Yeah, it's really weird. So that said, let's talk about some murder here. Okay. Oh, boy, is this wild stuff. So first let's talk about a young lady. Okay. Gina Renee Hall is her name. Yeah. She's born in 1962. Okay.

And we're going to catch up with her in her freshman year of college. But we'll talk a little bit about where she's from. She's from Coburn, C-O-E-B-U-R-N, Coburn, which is a tiny town in the mountains in the western part of Virginia over there. So it's in Wise County. They say it's the heart of coal country.

And it's right near the borders of Kentucky and Tennessee as well over there. So that's like the heart of Appalachia is what that is. That's, you know. Coal mountain country. Yeah. If you saw like American Hollow, this is like near where that is type of shit. So around 2,000 people usually in there. Everybody knows each other. Very friendly.

You know, it's 30 years behind the rest of the country, basically. Back then, especially, without the internet. Now you can kind of, it's a little easier to catch up now. But back then, you know, it's a little harder. They didn't even know that James Coburn existed. No idea. Hey, look at that. Look at us. That guy's named after us. So Gina, her sister, her sister's name is Delana, which is so hard. D-L-A-N-A.

Say again? Yeah. Both me and Allison both thought it was a typo and it had to be Diana. No, it's not. It's Delana. Delana, but with no, there's no apostrophe. And no letters there. No. Normally D's and L's don't follow each other in the beginning of a word. You can't go from D to L. You can go deadlock because those are like two separate things. But the D can't flow to the L. That shit just doesn't work. No. If you get a crossword puzzle and there's a D, you're pretty sure the next fucking letter is an L. You know what I mean?

You know that for a fact. It's like P and H. It's so strange. So she says about her sister, she's her older sister, Delana. Delana says, Gina was such a respectful, sweet girl growing up. When I say she never got in trouble, I mean she never got in trouble, ever. She was every parent's dream child. And there's kind of a reason for that, too. Gina has an accident at two years old where she's wearing pajamas.

Oh, no. And gets too close to a gas stove. No. And is horribly burned when she completely lights a flame at two years old. Yeah. Remember those? Yeah. Those footie pajamas? They were so flammable. Well, that's before everything had to be fire retardant for kids, too. So, yeah, we were just little fucking cotton balls waiting to go off into flames. I mean, that's all we were. If a house caught on fire, the kid would just burn to cinder in two seconds. Yeah. What was in there. It was flammable.

Fucking terrifying. So she catches on fire. They thought she was going to die. Yeah, those pajamas just weld to your skin. Oh, yeah. It's really bad. She's in the hospital for months and months afterwards. Oh, my God, the poor thing. They said that 75% of young patients in her exact condition would have died from shock or sepsis. So she's very lucky.

And she said that everyone was shocked. She went to the Charlottesville, Charlottesville's University of Virginia Medical Center burn unit. And they said she was like an inspiration to everybody there because I think a horribly burned two year old would be.

Yeah, that's tough to look at and be not root for. What kind of fucking monster are you to not root for that? No shit. There was a show there that when everybody kind of stuff. Oh, it was the Sopranos when Tony was fucking nearly dead. There was a little girl that was burned in the in the fucking unit. And everybody was like, whoa, like everybody. Even the gangsters were like, oh, shit.

that's you can't see that and just walk away no i mean it's a little girl so yeah uh she finally came home from the hospital and the whole town she was like the star of the town everybody there were signs up you know welcome home gina and people they drove home it was a nice thing her sister said everybody in town provided so much love and support for gina as she recovered from her burns gina was truly coburn's girl people seemed to really empathize with

with what she had been through and admired how hard she fought to recover. And she had a wonderful little attitude. She never felt sorry for herself.

So that's the type of kid who's not going to get in trouble because she's definitely going to feel like she's letting everybody down. Now she feels like she owes people shit, I think. I would anyway. So she had tons of skin grafts. Oh, Christ, they hurt so bad. Tons of them. She had lots of them, permanent scars on her right side, on her abdomen, her upper right arm, and her right thigh. Oh.

Oh, no. There's a lot of big scarring, especially her right arm from her shoulder down to her elbow, her right leg from her upper thigh down to her knee. Shit. But her worst scarring was along her torso, which from above her right breast to below her waistline was just very, very badly scarred and...

Yeah. It's crazy. That scar is like a smear of skin. It's so crazy what it does. It's Freddy Krueger. I mean, that's a burn person. It creates like pockets in there. It's so weird. I had a friend that was burned so horribly they thought he was going to die. And that was, I mean, the skin grafts, it was not pretty. It was ugly. I mean, he's happy to be alive, but it's fucking gross at the same time.

So at the same time, too, they said surgical excisions also had left an indentation over an inch deep running along the right side of her chest down to her abdomen. So she's got one of the good skin that they took. Yeah. Big, deep scars down there. Oh, it's all the way down. So it's hard.

So she would dress very conservatively. Even in the summer, she'd wear sleeves. Yeah, well, in the summer, too, that sun hurts on the scars. Yeah, on top. But she also didn't want anybody to see it. Didn't want anybody to see it, sure. Even if it was, you know, she would always do that. She wore long sleeves and pants, you know, with tights underneath, even in the summer. Right.

Hey, everybody. Just going to take a quick break from the show to tell you about one of the safest sponsors you could ever see, Simply Safe. SimplySafe.com. S-I-M-P-L-I-S-A-F-E.com. Totally. And if you're anything like us, you think a lot about the security of yourself, your things, your family, the people you love. It's a big deal. And I'm going to tell you about it.

Safety first. Safety first, especially like I know for me personally, after we had the house we were selling got broken into and everything got messed up and the plumbing and all this stuff was like, oh, my thank. Thankfully, we weren't there. And, you know, nobody nobody got hurt or anything like that. But, you know, I knew at that point, got to get some security because it's the world is crazy. And especially doing our shows, we understand that.

And luckily for us, when this happened, we were already doing a podcast and I knew about SimpliSafe. And we happen to have the best security there is. SimpliSafe is the best and we've trusted SimpliSafe to protect our home and our studios and everything else for years. And you know us, we're weird with research. I've researched. They are the best, by the way. Protect your home this summer with 20% off any new SimpliSafe system when you sign up for Fast Protect Monitor.

Just visit simplisafe.com slash small. That's simplisafe, S-I-M-P-L-I, safe.com slash small. There's no safe like SimpliSafe. Now back to the show.

Hey, everybody. Just going to take a quick break from the show to tell you a little bit more about one of our favorites, Quince. Oh, quince.com. Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com. That's right. And it's busy seasons. We're all going around. We're going everywhere in the summer. We're traveling. Your wardrobe's getting beat up a little bit. Let's be realistic here. We're not going to do, neither Jimmy or myself, we're not going to do total wardrobe overhauls here. This isn't like some sort of reality show. But you get...

A few things here to replace some stuff, and that's what we're doing. Replacing some worn-out stuff with some high-quality essentials at a very affordable price from Quince. And that's what we've done. And they have all the seasonal must-haves. We got some cool stuff. Jimmy, those linen pants. Oh, they are so comfortable. They are? Oh, boy.

You went for the outer. I got some undershirts, which I like because you need a comfortable undershirt. And these are really comfortable and soft. And I got some sunglasses. You can do it, too. Upgrade your wardrobe with pieces made to last with Quince. Go to quince.com slash smalltownmurder for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. That's QC.

Now back to the show.

So she was very much a gym class. She had tights on always. Yeah. That sort of thing. Because that would cover her up. And she's a pretty girl, too. That's the other thing. She's like five feet tall, 105 pounds, cute, attractive. If you're looking at her clothing and just looking at her in clothes, there's no way you can tell that she's got burns all over her. But she knows. And she's pretty self-conscious about it, too. Sure.

She said that she would cover herself in towels at the beach until she literally got to the water. And then she'd like drop it right by the water and get right in so no one would see her. So she's self... I mean, Jesus Christ, it's hard enough being a teenage fucking girl. Like, I mean, you're self-conscious about everything anyway. If your body is half covered in scars that literally make people fucking nauseous, that's hard. Most girls are...

Sensitive about the shape of the body and then let alone the texture of it. They don't want to go outside if they have pimples. Right. Never mind your whole body is scarred. So it's hard. Her sister said, quote, she could not have handled the emotional stress of having a physical relationship with somebody, meaning a guy when she's a teenager. And she never put herself in that situation. Really? Yeah.

Yeah, it's rough. She said when she was 10, she had to go back to the hospital for more skin grafts on her abdomen because of the grafted skin's inability to grow, to stretch as she grew, because your abdomen grows more than your arms, so...

It's hard. It's really hard for her. So she was really worried about whether she'd ever be able to. What if she became pregnant someday? Oh, then how's that stomach going to grow? That's what I mean. Would this skin just explode? Like she was so she was very worried about that. So she was didn't want to be pregnant at any time either. She was voted most popular in high school. How about that? Of the graduating class of 1979.

Everybody liked her. Yeah. One person said she had a lot going for her, for positive energy, enthusiastic. She's brightening up your day. She did a shitload of activities. This is exhausting. Fucking exhausting. Oh, boy. Tons of shit. She played tennis, golf, did gymnastics in high school on the team. In tennis, she advanced to the state championship her senior year in high school. So she's really good at all these sports, too. Right.

She had tons of friends that are teammates and all that sort of thing. People like working with her as a doubles person in tennis. She did great. So, like I said, her her her self-consciousness kept her from being in any kind of romantic relationships in high school, though. Her sister said she was extremely concerned about how her scars would change.

We play with a guy. He said she could not have handled the emotional stress of a physical relationship there. Yeah, she just kept saying it. So she said she'd only dated on one occasion. She said her high school prom was one of the times. Most of her dates were just friends. Most of the time they were boys she played tennis with.

They were just friends and they wouldn't go any further. And she said she only dated, her sister said she only dated like good looking boys who were like good athletes though. She wouldn't date any bums. Yeah. But she liked an athletic guy. That was what she's into. She's little, like I said, five foot. She's 107 pounds and good with her family, things like that. She taught gymnastics and tap dancing as well.

Really? Yes, she does that during that. In addition to all those sports, she has time to teach classes. Her family was real active at church, too, where she led a Bible study group and taught Sunday school classes. How many hours are in this chick's day?

She doesn't take a day off. This is fucking crazy. She works more than Jesus. It's so much. She's like, Jesus was a fucking slacker, first of all. Let me tell you something. Taking a Sunday off. Sunday my ass. Sunday is I work twice as hard. That's what I do. That's the way I do two things. I work a double for Christ's sake. That's how I get down. I pop a double off on Sunday and I'm ready to fucking roll. Teach the kids tap dancing. Teach them about the Lord. And I'm in.

Here we go. So throughout school, she also, by the way, she had jobs besides the teaching, too. She worked at the movie theater in the town, too. A day job. Yes. She worked the ticket booth and the concession stand. So in addition to that, she'd sell you a ticket, and then you'd walk in, and she'd be standing behind the concession stand with a different hat on offering you popcorn.

And then she'd tap dance it to your theater for you. This is fucking crazy. And then tear your stuff when you walked into the theater. Yeah, yeah. Where the fuck did you come from? And then you sit down and it starts and says, you know, this pictures and all that. And then she's starring in it too. You're like, wow, fuck, what is up with this chick? Yeah.

A film by her, by fucking, oh my God, that is a crazy. So she worked there. The owner of the theater, Jeff Kaiser said she was impressed. He was very impressed with her work ethic and interpersonal skills and her way she dealt with customers. She was very good, very mature for her age. And, uh, they said anytime she was on breaks from college, he said she was welcome to come on back and work some shifts here. So he said, even Thanksgiving, you come home for Thanksgiving, you want to work Friday night, get, come on in. Uh,

I'll pay you. So he said, everyone I know who knew Gina thoroughly thought she was great. She got along with everybody. She was always congenial with customers. She's the type of person that I didn't have to tell to do something. She knew it beforehand. She's just a great person. Yeah. Yeah. She's so nice. Even she found time in all of the shit she's doing.

Yeah. Found the time she had a little brother and he was nine when she graduated high school. She'd get her paycheck from the movie theater and she'd take him to buy comic books and stuff. She'd buy him comic books and a soda at the downtown drugstore there. Find time to have a little a little big sister date with her brother, which is cute as shit. You can't be doing all this charity outside the home if you're not doing some inside. Hey, take care of the kid, damn it. Teach him to tap dance when you're done with it.

Gina's aware. She knows. So her first semester of college was the fall of 79, and she went to Emory and Henry College, which is a very small school about an hour from Coburn. Only 1,000 kids go there. It's a very small school. That's like less than half the size of the high school I went to. So for college, it's very small. She wanted to go there because it was close to home and it was small, and she's incrementally branching out.

So after the fall semester, she decided that it was a little too small. I'd like to go to Radford University for the spring of 1980 because her sister, Delana, went there, just graduated, and now was returning for graduate school to pursue her master's in education.

So she's staying at Radford. So fuck it. I'm going to go. Yeah. She's like, I can room with my sister. Yeah. She's going to be there for four years. So I may as well be there for the next three. Sure. What the hell? Why not? Yeah. So she did. And, um, you know, she was, Gina was her, uh, major was nursing, which Radford had a strong program for, and it was about five times bigger than the, her other school, uh,

More socially, you know, stuff going on a little more popping off in Radford than in the small town she was from. So by 1980, she's a freshman continuing her education at Radford. She lives in Radford with Delana. And they were also even going to take summer courses this year as well in 1980. So they got done with the semester and they were going to do summer courses there.

That's par for Gina's course. Yep. She's known as, someone describes her as very beautiful, well-dressed, pleasant, soft-spoken, and popular with her peers as well as with older people. Uh-huh.

Just basically everybody. Just everyone likes her. Yeah. You could have just said, she's just a good chick. Everyone likes her. Everybody likes her. That's good. She didn't drink very often, didn't use drugs, wasn't known to smoke or use drugs or anything like that, never had to go to therapy or anything like that, never had any problems as a kid growing up, which is shocking because you would think,

with all the body stuff there'd be something there but she was always had a good spirit about it uh never like you know took off for two days with her friends without permission or anything like that everyone said she was never depressed ever always happy and upbeat she's so busy you wouldn't have time to be depressed yeah how do you even get how you even think about yourself yeah and how you're feeling what yeah it's busy when i'm the way from tap dancing lessons to the movie theater like when are you going to do that

So she's a college student. And on Saturday, June 28th, 1980, they just got finished with their finals, both of them, Delana and Gina.

And they've been taking summer midterm exams during this week from the 22nd to the 28th of June. And this is the day on Saturday. Gina finished her last exam and she's done with the year. Yahtzee. Last day of fuck schools out. Yes. She's fucking absolutely. Notebooks flying in the air. Fuck. Yeah.

Yeah, she was in a great mood, and she just wanted to party it up tonight. She wanted to go out dancing at the Marriott in Blacksburg. That's where the hot spot is. At the Marriott? At the Marriott. The Marriott's got a bar. What's happening? At the Marriott.

going to party at the Marriott in Blacksburg, by the way. Jesus. Yeah. That's where she's going. So she's jacked about it too. That is the hot spot. They got like a club there. Going to the Marriott. Going to the Marriott, baby. Hell yeah. Jesus. So she wants Delana to go with her, but Delana said she's too tired. All the tests and she's, I don't have enough energy for the Marriott. Yeah. The Marriott sounds well beyond my energy level here, but, uh,

The Marriott? Maybe if it was the Hyatt, I could consider it, but not the Marriott. I won't go there. That's crazy. I know some shit's going to happen there. Too much. So Gina takes a shower, puts on her makeup. She gets dressed. She puts on a purple Danskin bodysuit. You know, one of those, like, you know, those are like a one-piece bathing suit type deal with a V in the back. White, high-waisted, straight-legged Bobby Brooks pants and a white Wrangler jacket.

That's some 80. That's a 1980. A white jean jacket is some very 1980. White pants and a purple bodysuit. Confidently mid-cycle going to the Marriott. Fuck yeah. Let's do this. What the hell is she? Fucking Suzanne Somers is what she is. Yeah. Give her a Thighmaster. She can move some units. You know what I mean?

So and then she had a pair of velvety purple shoes as well, like purple velvety shoes. She covered up all her scars and burns and everything like that. That's an outfit. That's an outfit. Yeah, she's going out. This is going out tonight type shit. She's not kidding. She said, how do I look? Her sister said, you look great. I love the way the shoes match your purple top. You look you look hot.

And a white jacket popping on that purple? Hell yeah. So she had almost left, but then she forgot her ankle bracelet and said, I can't go dancing without my ankle bracelet. Okay. Need that. It's a gold bracelet, gold ankle anklet with two interlocking gold hearts on it. Okay. So that's her bracelet here. And she said, that's my dancing anklet. Can't leave without that.

So her sister, Delana, lends her her car to go out. It is a 1975 brown Chevy Monte Carlo. My Christ, that's a big car. That is a big old shit boat. You betcha. Oh, man. It's a big old shit boat.

Eight miles to the gallon. Yeah. It's not even fast. Just a big shit box. 25 feet of trunk and hood. It's so much trunk and hood. Yeah. You got to really know how to drive that thing to know where your clearances are. You got to swing that front end around. Man. Yeah. You want to turn into a parking spot. You start turning real early. About four or five spaces early. You got to really get it going. It's like a boat.

It's not just going to turn into the space. You got to get it started well ahead of time, drifting there. So she had to move the seat way, way up. Her sister is about four or five inches taller than her. Delana is. So when she gets in her car, she always has to pull it five feet tall. If you've ever driven with someone five feet tall, Sarah's five foot one. So when I go to drive her car, I have to, it's like 30 seconds of meh.

On the button with the seat moving back until I can even get in it comfortably. But you're right, and you're doing that while standing on the fucking pavement. Yeah. Oh, I can't. I couldn't get in there. It would be impossible. You can't do it. I have to put it all the way back and then down. It's got to go down some too. Okay, there we go. So...

She's got the way a tiny person drives. Sometimes when you open the door, you just go, yeah, look around and be like, who gets in this? How? How do you do it? And if you hit something big, the airbag would just be wearing it. Oh, God. Fucking engulf your head. It would explode me. It's so dangerous. There'd be no room for that thing to get to explain. No. Fuck. So she had to do that. Her sister couldn't even get behind the wheel until she moved the seat back when she would get in it after Gina drove it.

So she leaves about 10 p.m. So she's going out for some. That's a Marriott type of time to leave right there. Yeah. It's a Marriott shit. I'm getting. You leave the house at 10 p.m. Fresh. You're getting. You're having a night. You're getting fucked up tonight. You're going to dance. So she does this. This her sister said this is the only time she ever remembers Gina ever going out socially by herself.

She never went out by herself ever. She said it was either with her or with some friends or something like that. She never just said, I don't give a fuck. I don't care if I'm not going with anybody. I'm driving there and I'm going dancing tonight. This is how well she did on those finals. Good for her. Well, she's feeling confident and she's feeling like she can...

She can get out there. You know what I mean? So she didn't even – the sister said she didn't even think that Gina was meeting anyone she knew at the Marriott. She knew that was where the club would be popping and she could fucking get some dancing and that was it. So when she's there, we'll talk about this, she's going to meet a young man there, a few years older than her. He's about nine years older than her actually. Steven Madison Epperly, E-P-P-E-R-L-Y, Epperly. Yeah.

So he's born 1953 and everyone said, great first impression guy.

Yeah. I mean, he's he's a big athletic, very good shape, works out all the time type of guy, real square jawed, you know, short hair, firm look, firm handshake and, you know, look you right in the eye kind of cat. You know what I mean? And green eyes and, you know, just very nice looking kid and everybody likes him. So he's about six foot tall, 200 pounds with muscle.

Sure. 200 pounds, and he works out constantly. So he's one of those guys here. He was from, he's from Radford. He's a Radford guy. His family's pretty working class. A lot of kids in a small house type of thing. His family's been here. He's the third generation of his family to grow up here in Radford. So, you know, his father's a World War II veteran,

Is that right? Yeah. And he works at the arsenal there. And he worked in the janitorial department of the powder plant as a foreman. So he's the boss of the shit cleaners. The boss of the shit cleaners and the, I guess you sweep powder sweepers. I'm going to call toilet refillers. It was some dangerous shit. I guess they said to do that around there. They had to clean the workstations too and shit like that. Sure.

He would take the boys. He's got brothers. He's got an older brother and sister and a younger brother. Stephen does. And his dad would take them hunting. And he loved to hunt and fish and be outdoors and all that kind of shit. Backwards kind of guy, yeah. Into all that. So his mother was a housewife, stayed at home. And she's very religious, very active at the Baptist church.

where all the kids had to go mandatory attendance every Sunday. Yeah. Yep. One of the friends said all of the neighborhood kids thought the world of Mrs. Epperly, meaning the mom. She was like a second mom to so many of the boys she grew up with. She was a good mother and just a lovely person. So in elementary school,

Stephen is known by the teachers as a high energy boy, quote unquote, and a handful. Yeah. He's got like ADHD, but in the 60s they just said handful. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of energy. He won't sit down. That's it. Yep. And he had difficulty focusing and paying attention, easily distracted. And his parents just thought his mom just said he's all boy. That's all it is.

What? He wants to be out running around and, you know, scaring up game, you know, like a fucking, like a hunting dog. He's got a lot of energy. He can't help it. It's the dick. He's like a German short-haired pointer. He just needs to get out there and sniff things. You know how it goes. Yeah. So, all boy. His energy, but the thing that was good is they said, let's put him in sports. Mm-hmm.

Which is good. The problem is if he's energetic and just a spaz, that's not going to work. But if he could actually be good at sports, this will work. And it does. You can wrangle him and point him in a direction. He plays baseball, basketball, football, tennis, track. He does everything. What's the deal? All year round, something to keep him busy and get his energy out. But football is his favorite. Loves football. Loves the physical contact. And he's the kid that hits the hardest of all the other kids. Really? Yeah.

Throws his body into shit and just destroys kids. And so he's really good in football at high school there. He graduates from Radford High in 71, and he made the all-district team at defensive end. Yeah. On offense, he played split end and was the team's leading receiver his senior year as well. And he also set a school record in the half mile for the track team as well.

Wow. He's a real fucking athletic guy. They said that he could always push through the pain barrier. Yeah. In class, he was kind of shit.

They said he wasn't dumb, but he barely had a C average. They said he was respectful. He'd fuck off sometimes. He was kind of hyper, so he'd misbehave sometimes. Sure. Sounds like when the objective is retain information and then recall it, that's tough. But when the objective is tackle that man, oh, I got you, Cubs. Yeah. Yeah.

And he just doesn't care about it either. He likes football more and this is hard for him. And a lot of times kids don't like doing shit that's hard for them. Yeah. And I think that doesn't help either. And he actually has a hard time chemically doing this too. When the brain is not, you can't just run with the brain. You know what I mean? It's things it has to do. He pretty much had to get seized to be able to stay on the football team, I think. And that was all he was trying to get.

Basically, James, you're a student athlete, but you're a student first. You're a student first. He's a no, no, no, no, no. This is a football. Come on. What are we talking about here? I'll do what I got. Yeah. Jesus Christ. So an old teammate called him, said he had a screw loose and said that he was always flying off the handle as well. He had a crazy fucking temper.

Crazy temper. And I don't know what it is, but I think later on there's a possibility that some steroids are involved here because he starts really going fucking batshit with things. Raging out of nowhere? Yeah, just way more than you should or way more than it was normal. So one of a couple of these instances, when he was 18, he got in an argument at home with his younger sister, his sister, who was 15, named Jane. Oh, wow. He hit her.

And then his mother came over and tried to break it up because, you know, you don't want your son hitting your daughter like that. And he became violent and started beating up his mom as well. Is that right? Beat up his sister and his mom. So mom called the cops to the house and he was arrested and processed for domestic assault. Yeah, you can't do that. But within an hour, because it's like 1969 or some shit, 1970, within an hour...

The mom had talked the cops into just dropping the whole thing and leave it all alone. Just never mind. Sorry. There I scared him. Good. Yeah, that should be good. He's 18. He's not nine. You know what I mean? Yeah. So that kid straight. Yeah. His coach told him his best option would be to go to a two year junior college for football to truck because he's he's not big enough.

None of the big colleges are going to pick up a 6-foot, 200-pound defensive end. Very common. Not fast enough, really, to be an offensive player in college, so you've got to build yourself up. He said there you can bulk up and then transfer to a bigger school later on. You can mature. Your body can mature. So he does that. He goes to Ferrum Junior College.

And a couple of his friends go there with him and he ends up going there to play football and also fighting a lot. Really? Yeah, he did a lot here. When he graduates from high school, right away he really starts fighting a lot and starts getting very aggressive with women. Really? Yeah. A friend of his said Steve would get into a fight and turn into an absolute lunatic, a raging animal. It would take three or four guys to pull him off the other guy.

What the shit is fucking nuts. Um, other times his friends said, this is a teammate quote, Steve and I would sometimes double date with girls or group of us guys would go out with, uh, with all of our dates together, group dating, you know, kids do. He said, Steve and his date always seemed to get along well, nothing out of the ordinary, but then the next day he, we would hear God awful stories from the girls about how the, at the end of the night, Steve had forced himself physically on his date. Um,

You know, raping and such. But in 1971, they call it forced himself on. Called it unwanted attention. Yeah, that's it was wild. Like, well, I mean, I did go on a date with him. People would say back then, which was, you know, crazy shit. So he said the first time it happened, we kind of gave him the benefit of the doubt. But the second time word got around pretty quick and he was excluded, excluded from the groups after that. Really? Yeah. Don't bring the rapist with you. We're not going to.

It's hard to say, oh, cool, yeah, you got a friend for my friend. How about for my rapist friend? Anybody that he can rape? Anybody like on the karate team maybe? She can maybe fend him off possibly. Maybe somebody wearing Muay Thai shorts with cauliflower ears. Maybe possibly. If that's who shows up for his dates, he'll delete himself from these dates. Yeah, yes. Oh, shit. Never mind. This is going to be rough.

So more temper stories here. A teammate of his who named Mark Burton worked with him also at a part time job in the college cafeteria. He says, quote, One morning, Epperly and I are working the breakfast shift shift in the cafeteria. It's like 7 a.m. People are half asleep and students are quietly eating breakfast. I hear this loud ruckus and look up to see a student running across the cafeteria with Epperly sprinting after him, yelling and chasing him.

That's why you're at a JUCO, because if you could catch him, you could go to a Division I school. You've got to go to a junior college because you can't even catch a kid in the cafeteria. That's the problem.

Yeah.

Epperly is still all worked up. I turn him around and look him in the eye and say, what are you thinking? You know that coach will kick you off the team if you get into a fight with a student. Yeah. But I could just tell by the look in his eyes that at that point he didn't care. He just wanted to catch the guy and beat him up. My God. No impulse control here. And he also bulks up, too, by the end of that fight.

Really? Yeah, and he grows a little bit too. He's now actually six feet tall, 200 pounds, and he was only 5'11", 175 when he graduated from high school. So 25 pounds to gain in a year.

not even a year. That sounds like you've had some help to me. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like it having these rages where you're chasing some fucking biology major across the goddamn cafeteria is insane. You can't do that. It's fucking nuts. So that's how he is. So he comes home to Radford for the summer after his freshman year and hang and, you know, starts talking to his high school friends again. And people said he came back huge and just real self-confident now bigger than ever. And, uh,

ego to go with it one of his friends is an old high school teammate said quote badass when he came back from ferrum that first summer steve epperly had turned into a real badass and it seems like the simplest disagreement with someone would escalate very quickly once he flipped the switch he was not turning it back okay yeah uh there's a bars and nightclubs they'd hang out at and uh

He was a guy that didn't want to blend in, his friend said. One teammate said Epperle always had an ego, but by then it had developed into a massive ego. Said he wanted people to pay attention to him when he went out. He was real. Yeah. He wants to really strut and fucking peacock that shit. He said he was still lifting weights regularly and definitely had the look of a college football player. Big guy, a hey, look at me attitude. Okay.

And he would also keep fighting and fighting. And they said he loved he always wanted to pick up girls at bars and parties. He was always just going out to pick up chicks. So they said he people he had a real reputation not only at college now, but also at home for being sexually aggressive. One of his friends said, quote, he had the belief that if a woman went on a date with him or left a bar with him, she was going to put out for him.

It was a foregone conclusion, one way or the other, either willingly or unwillingly. That's what a friend said of him. Jesus, that is disturbing.

So he ends up transferring to Virginia Tech to try to make it on the football team as a walk-on. That's a pretty big football school. I mean, that's where Michael Vick went to college there. A lot of guys did. It's a very big school. It's a very big football school. And a couple of his friends, too, were already playing there. His high school teammates were already there, a few of them. So he wanted to go there. A guy named Bill King, specifically, who we'll get into here in a bit. But, yeah.

They said he didn't know if he could make the squad because he's kind of small and not very fast, but he said he's going to try to do it, try to be a 1975 walk-on. And his tenacity and the way he threw himself at shit, the coaches loved him. He's a fucking psycho, so they love him. I mean, if you're undersized, you better be nuts in football. Yeah. You can certainly make up for undersized with a –

Attitude, but be overwhelming achievement. Yeah, that's the way to do it. If you're really good at whatever you do, then size doesn't necessarily matter. And you have to have so much, put so much effort in that they, oh, Jesus Christ, how do you turn this guy away? How do you tell this guy no? He's never going to go. He's going to sleep outside if we fucking turn him away. He's never going to go away. I've got to take a nap at some point, and he's going to fucking murder me in my sleep. I guess just let him play for a while. Just give him a uniform, I suppose. Seems like he likes it.

So he played actually in the Virginia Tech spring game in 1975. They said also a lot of his reputation came from the fact that he would constantly go streaking through the dorms at Virginia Tech.

Always nude this guy. Nude. Nude guy. Which nowadays that's we go, ooh, that's dangerous. That's a red flag. That's a precursor for sexual assaults and shit like that because nowadays it is. But in the 70s, streaking was considered funny. That was just funny. Yeah. A guy running with his dick and balls flopping was considered hilarious.

Look how vulnerable he is. It's so funny. You could just grab a hold of that and yank it off. This guy, like, running with his, like, arms up, with his dick and balls flying. Everyone's laughing. Hey, look at Billy in his fucking ball bag. All right. The guy's got his dick out. This is so funny. Yeah. It was considered fucking hilarious. And at some point in the 80s, it wasn't considered hilarious anymore. Now that man's armed. Now that guy has a fucking, he's got a, like a, like a sex offender record. He has to, like, register if he does that.

So when the 75 fall season came, he didn't see any game action. They put him on the practice squad. But still, he was on the team. He made the team as a walk-on. He's basically Rudy, but an asshole. Rapist Rudy is a good way to put it. Maybe that's the name of this episode, Rapey Rudy. Yeah.

Looking for a way to simplify your family's back-to-school journey? Have lunch with Pack-It! Pack-It freezable lunch boxes and bags are designed with EcoFreeze technology, patented freezable gel that is built into the walls of the bag, eliminating the need for those annoying and often lost or hard-to-find ice packs. With Pack-It solutions-oriented products, food and drinks stay cool for hours, making it easy to prepare and pack healthy lunch options.

Shop cool styles, patterns, and colors on Packet.com. Use coupon code PACKET20 for 20% off. That's P-A-C-K-I-T and the number 20 for 20% off your purchase.

Make Packet the first stop on your back-to-school journey. Hey, podcast listeners! Great news! All your favorite comedy podcasts can be enjoyed ad-free on Amazon Music. Listen to your favorite music, plus top podcasts, completely ad-free on Amazon Music, included with your Prime membership. Dive into a world of laughs by downloading the Amazon Music app for free, or go to amazon.com slash adfreecomedy. That's amazon.com slash adfreecomedy to catch up on the latest episodes.

without the ads. 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 misogynistic.

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

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

So by the end of this, though, his eligibility for college football had run out. Uh-oh. It was all run out. So you could have five years and four playing years, and he was done. He had four playing years. He used them up in JUCO, so he couldn't do anything. So he is a dangerous guy. Let's talk about some incidents he had here. April 22, 1976. This is right kind of at the end of football here.

A woman is awakened at 3.15 a.m. to the sound of someone outside her bedroom window, which is, I think, every single lady's worst nightmare, probably, I think. Probably it, yeah. At Terrace View Apartments in Blacksburg. She looked out the window and saw Steve out there, and they had dated three months earlier, so she knew him. She knows this guy, yeah. What the fuck are you doing out there? He said, let me in, I'm in trouble.

I'm hiding. So she doesn't know. Guys are chasing him. The cops are chasing him. So she said, fuck, yeah, go to the door. She opened the door and he comes in. And pretty much as soon as the door gets closed behind him, he throws her to the floor and rapes her. Oh, my God. She knows him.

And obviously knows who he is and calls the fucking police afterwards. Oh, yeah. She said that when she started to scream, he put his hands around her neck and was pushing pretty hard and saying, don't scream or I'll kill you. This is a very dangerous person that is willing to do that. Who the fuck is 315 a.m.? I'll go knock on this chick's window and then I'll rape her and threaten to kill her. Who the fuck thinks that?

That is crazy. He was not in trouble. Nobody was chasing him. No. He was just hunting. He was hunting. See if we can get this chick to let him in. She had an infant son in the house at the time, too. Oh, my God. Sleeping in one of the bedrooms who was awakened and began crying, and that's when he stopped and let her go check on the baby. Basically, go shut that fucking kid up so I can continue to fucking assault you, which is crazy. She picked up her son and just ran out of the apartment.

Oh. She just, boom. He wasn't paying attention, I guess. I don't know if he was drinking or what, but she took off and ran to the closest apartment she could, called the police, and said, holy shit, come help, there's a psychopath there. Right. He's arrested and taken to the Montgomery County Jail and charged with rape. They got him. Hey, look at that. Yeah, all done. Yeah, this should be, what, a few years till he's out of prison at least, right? This is terrible. He had no money for an attorney, and his parents, though...

pulled all their money together to get him the best lawyer they could. They got him a lawyer who was so kind of well-known in the town, he ended up being named a judge the next year, so he's the best lawyer in town there. And he told the police that the sex was consensual.

And three months earlier when they dated, he said that they also had consensual sex one time. So he only had sex with this girl one time in the past. He knew her that well. He said that time was consensual as well. So, you know, it's both consensual what she's talking about.

So his right to a jury trial and the case was ruled on by this judge here. And in a non-jury trial, they ended up doing this. So he waived his right to a jury trial. They do a bench trial because judges don't get overwhelmed by details. They don't get emotionally involved with shit. The judge dismisses the rape charge due to insufficient evidence. All right.

Because, you know, women normally run out of their apartments screaming with their kids after consensual sex, banging on apartment doors saying, please call the police. That's normal. He said it was a type of he said, she said case that makes it very difficult for the prosecution. And I don't know. So dismissed.

Wow. Thank God DNA exists today. That's a crazy fuck. But again, he's admitting that they had sex. I don't know. But he said it's consensual. How do you get to the truth there? You know what I mean? How do you get to like a conviction there? Because holy shit. Back then you had to, like five people had to witness the rape for you to get in trouble for rape back then. It was fucking crazy. Wow.

So he dodges a real bullet there, I would say. No shit. So four months later, though, on August 15th, 1976, he is visiting a pool at Draper's Meadow Apartments near the Virginia Tech campus. He starts talking with a 19-year-old female student about the pool, you know, fucking Mackinac and shit.

According to her, he seemed very friendly and really nice. Well, yeah, so did Ted Bundy. That's what they do. He told her that he and his roommates were a few blocks away. They lived at the McDonald Street apartments a few blocks away, and they're going to be throwing a big party later. So, you know, he's going around.

Recruiting people for the party. Yeah. She said, no, no, that's okay. But he said, no, I'm telling you, it's going to be a great party. You understand. Yeah, there'll be people you know there, I'm sure. It's going to be awesome. You can't get booze. Let us get it for you. Yeah, we're going to party. There's all sorts of good stuff here. And finally, she said, okay, fine. Yeah, what the hell. Now we're talking.

She said she'd – so she follows him to his apartment when they leave the pool. Oh, right now? Yeah, let's go. We'll go to the party now. Yeah, it's starting now. That's why I was trying to grab people and round them up. But he only rounds her up, so –

She followed him home in her car where he invited her into the apartment to see his new bar and fish tank. I just got a fish tank. Who wants to watch my fucking Tetris swim around? When's the party start? Exactly. Sometime later? Where's the rest of the party? And she said, well, you know, I don't know. I thought there was a party. And he said, oh, come on. Come on in. It's a fish tank. I'm a guy with a fish tank. How harmless can I be, you know? Come feed some krill. Yeah. So they enter the apartment. Uh-huh.

And he slams the door and immediately grabs her by the arm and forces her onto the bed in his bedroom. God damn it. And rapes her again and rapes this one now. So she said he grabbed me by the neck and strangled me is what she said later on.

And I thought he was going to kill me because it didn't seem like he was ever going to let go of my throat. Oh, God, yeah. He was over me, pressing on my throat, going, shut up, shut up. I knew he would kill me. He had already made that clear. She was unconscious. She went unconscious. He choked her out. Yeah. He choked her out. She said, I just passed out, blacked out for a minute. And he said that after that...

He got weird. So that's not even the weird part. That's, uh-huh. That's the violent part. Uh-huh. Then she said, quote, I don't know what came over him, but he just got off me and he said, oh my God, do you know that I raped you? Yeah. Pretty aware of it, asshole. Yeah. I would imagine she does. And I said, no, no, no, because I was scared for my life and I really thought it seemed his eyes were wild looking. And he said, do you realize that rape is a felony and I can spend the rest of my life in jail?

So she was trying to act like, no, no, no, I was into it. No, it's cool. She said, and I said, no, no, I won't report you. I swear to God, I wouldn't do that. And he said, look at my wrist. Do you see this? And she said he had a slash mark on each wrist. And he said, I've tried to commit suicide twice. And do you know what I'll do? You know what it'll do to me if they put me behind bars? It'll kill me. I'll kill myself.

So she said, I figured if I could, if I could sympathize with him and try to persuade him that I wouldn't report him, that he wouldn't hurt me. Yeah, that's smart. She said, so that's what I did. I told him everything I could think of to make him believe that I wouldn't press charges and I would just forget about it.

So he said, oh, my God, I'm in so much trouble. He said his parents had put everything they had into him and he was not turning out right and that everything was going wrong. And then he was a senior at tech and he was going to graduate and not be able to get a job because he has rape charges and he's a fucking asshole. He just had a complete spiral spin out in front of this chick. And she's like, I'm the one who just got raped. I need to fucking hear this.

You're fucking bullshit. Yeah. He had a very sober. He had the traumatic experience after the rape. That's why. That's how fucking whack this guy is. It all resonated real hard right then. Just, oh, my God, I'm a piece of shit.

It's wild. She says, quote, he said, I'll just kill myself. And at that point, he got down on his hands and knees beside the bed. And I was laying there afraid to move. And he said, look, this is awful what I've done to you. You can have anything I've got. You want the keys to my car? You can have my car. Take anything in my apartment. You know, it's yours. I've done this awful thing to you. So he starts trying to, like, buy her off with shit.

You want my car? Yeah, I want the rape mobile. Give me that. That'll be great. I'll love to drive that around. Hmm. He needs the rape to happen for him to be able to have his moment. Yes, yeah. But then now that he's done it, now he's like, now how do I make this go away without cops? That's what I think it is. I think this is all an act. Yeah. Yeah.

This is all he does what he does. And then he's like, well, this girl, I talked to her for a while. And this is the type of dude psychologically. He knows how to work women because he's been doing it for a long time. Yeah. He he said, OK, this is a chick who's nice. She needs stuff. And I can maybe get her to do this. That's why he picked her out to begin with, I feel like. So he said, yeah, I've done this awful thing to you.

Holy shit, man. That's fucking wild. I was going no, no. And I was looking around for my clothes trying to get out of there. No, no, no. You're great. Yeah. Bang. Door closes behind. She runs to the cops. He sat down on the side of the bed, started to put his clothes on and said, I'm going to go down to the police station with you and I'm going to turn myself in.

Okay, what do you say to that? Yeah, and she said at that point, I didn't know what to believe because here was this guy who just tried to kill me and now he was going to go with me to the police station and turn himself in. We're going to walk in together and be like, yeah, hi, I'm the rapist here. Yeah, he's a rapist.

That's insane. She said at that point, she just didn't know what to do. I said, no, I'm not going to the police. The last thing you want to do is spend more time with this guy. Man, what a great answer. Yeah, even if he's going to go with you. But she thinks he's full of shit and he's just trying to see if she's going to go to the cops or not. And if he goes, she said, okay, yeah, he would have killed her probably. Right.

So she said, no, I'm not going to the police. I grabbed my clothes and took off out the door and ran down the steps. She later did go to the police, though, and reported the sexual assault. He is arrested and charged with rape. No money for an attorney. Again, his parents fucking, you know, get the again, hire the same guy or the guy. They can't hire that guy because he's a judge. So they hire somebody else who's a very well-known lawyer. They're mortgaging their house for this idiot.

He's not worth it. By rape charge two, it's now him. You know what I mean? Fool me once. You know what I'm saying? Now you get a job and pay for this because this is great. Now it's you. Now you're going out raping people on my dime and I'm not having that shit. I'm not going to pay for you to fucking do this. This is crazy. Yeah, I bought your freedom for your rapes already before. I'm not doing it again. Embarrassing enough, you have my name. Now I got to. Yeah, this is gross. So his lawyer's legal strategy was to put the victim on trial.

Yeah. Obviously. Yeah. So he tried to discredit her, brought up in detail her sexual history and criticized the fact that she had a she had a couple of beers at the pool, didn't you? Oh, boy. You were drinking out there, meeting up, going back to apartments with strange men to have sex with them, just like you did with all these other people. OK, that's what they're doing. Yeah.

She cried on the stand, and I guess the lawyer implied that he was wearing a bathing suit, that her wearing a bathing suit under her clothing into the apartment meant she wanted it. Which is the weirdest thing I've ever heard, because...

You can wear a bathing suit in public, but you can't wear underwear in public. Right. So a bathing suit is demonstrably less sexual than underwear. Than underwear, yeah. And a step above being naked, James. Yeah, that's the other thing. Which is generally the time when you want it. Yeah, when your pussy's out. That's when you're really looking for it. When everything's just exposed. It's you going, look at these. Do these do it? Hey, what about that?

Okay, so the judge even asked, his lawyer asked the judge to sequester the jury during the lunch recess even. He said he was safeguarding against the jury learning of his previous rape charge.

We want him going out to the fucking cafe there down at the little town diner and hearing that, oh, that boy's raping again, huh? Heard you're on trial with Raperly. I mean, Eberle. Oh, you know old Raperly. He said, this is the lawyer, he said, I had known Mr. Eberle had been in similar trouble before that, and I didn't want them to go out at lunchtime and talk to their friends or call home or whatever and have them be reminded of it or learn the fact that he had been in similar trouble before. Mm-hmm.

So the jury deliberates for three hours and they come back not guilty. What in the fuck? Acquitted. Walk free, young man. Walk tall. So...

You know what I'm saying? Like that's, that's, I don't like the word similar in that case either. A nectarine and a peach are similar. You know what I mean? Well, a tangerine and an orange similar. These are, these are an orange and an orange. This is the same thing. This is exact. This is definitely oranges to oranges here. So he's fresh out of court and he is, there's a, he's in a senior year of Virginia tech in 77 and 78 and,

He's part of a carpool group that commutes to school. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, from Radford up to Virginia Tech there. So occasionally they get stuck in a lot of traffic on the way there. On a few occasions. And then we chat. Oh, no, no. As they sat in traffic, he was pissed off. He would get fucking enraged in traffic, Epperly here.

He's going to be late to class. As one friend said, he would, quote, get out of the car he was riding in, run to the vehicle stopped in front of them, open the driver's door, pull the driver out of the vehicle, beat him repeatedly with his fists and then get back in the car he'd been riding in as if nothing ever happened.

What is that going to do, man? Unless you run five miles up and punch the first guy, you're really... And then keep punching as you go back to your car. Yeah, it's a lot of punching. You can't get there. The guy in front of you isn't the cause of the traffic. That's the thing. The car is still there, man. Yeah. So logic isn't the order of the day. It's I need to get this out of my body and onto somebody, whether it's with his fists or his dick. So finally, spring of 78, after seven years of college...

He finally graduates. Is that right? Seven fucking years. He got a four-year degree in seven years. That's Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds. Yeah. Right? That's who's in college for seven years. You don't get a discount for that. No. It's so much. He's 26 years old. Uh-huh.

And his parents couldn't be more proud of him. Twice acquitted. Seven years and two rape charges, and he finally graduated. Our boy. Shit, with an associate's. Wow, bachelor's. Yeah, he got a bachelor's degree. Okay, yeah. Seven years. People get a fucking medical, they get a law degree in seven years. Seven years, yeah. That's like a specialty, a graduate degree.

So, former classmate of his likened him to Clint Eastwood in the movie The Outlaw Josie Wales. How so? He said he lived by the feud. That's why. Wow. He could hold a grudge for years. Lived by the feud. By the feud. Like people came in and massacred your family and then you're like, someday I'll get revenge for that. Like Kaiser Soze or something. It's fucking crazy. I am Inigo Montoya. Yeah.

Yeah, that's who he is, though. That's exactly it. He could hold a grudge for years. One of the many well-known stories about Steve had to do with a guy who had bullied Steve way back when Steve was a freshman in high school. My Christ. When they were 14. Still harboring him.

Well, he said. 11 years later. Yeah. He said, quote, well, it's like 10 years later, late 70s. Steve's now in his late 20s. So, Christ, it's probably 13 years later. Steve's in a car at a stoplight in town, looks at the car beside him and recognizes the guy. Oh.

Oh, he better floor it. From high school. He jumps out of his car, runs up to the other car. The guy's in there with his wife and kids. It is 13 years later, man. Bangs on his car window and starts threatening him. You remember me? And the guy's probably like, no. Who the fuck are you? You're really big. What the fuck are you talking about? Yeah. What you got to say to me now? And the guy fucking sped away because he was terrified. He's got a giant lunatic.

You know, you don't want to fight with your kids in the car usually. No, no. You don't want to be...

Beaten to a pulp in front of your children. Yeah. If I lose a fight, the last people I want to lose it in front of are them. Yeah, especially if they're small. That's going to ruin them forever. Yeah. What are you going to do, ground me? Because you're not going to hit me. No, got nothing. What do you want, Dad? I'm going to call that guy from traffic to come over. I know you drop your right a lot, and you've got a pretty weak chin, so I know some things about you. I know you've got that scar on your face. Yeah.

So Eberle has a hard time finding jobs. He goes through a series of shit jobs that are beneath his...

His degree and qualifications and even intelligence, which is a common theme with people like this. Yeah. They get angry about it. Yeah. He's a delivery man for an office supply place. He's got his substitute teaches at Pulaski County High School. What? They hire a fucking two time arrested racist to substitute teach for children.

Wow. In 1979, though, he was hired by the Geisen Caldwell Agency, which was a real estate firm owned by the former mayor of Radford. And they were, you know, it was big shit. So he gets a job with them and he thinks he's hot shit. He gets his real estate license. Yeah. Gets better clothes and he's trying to sell houses and doing his thing. They put a big half page ad of his in the Radford News Journal in April 1980. Yeah.

But in several months as an agent, he fails to sell or even list a single property. He does nothing. Listed nothing. Couldn't even get someone to list a house with him or sell an existing sale house. Nothing. Does nothing. Couldn't even walk into a place and go, my client will take it. None of that. And he's working on straight commission, by the way. So he makes no money. Oh, shit. Shit.

So by the summer of 80, he said, fuck it. By the time, by June of 80, before this night at the club, at the Marriott here, he is and starts working as a grounds maintenance worker on the campus of Radford University. He mows lawns for a living. He mows lawns, yeah, with the seven years of college and everything else. Which in 1980, nowadays, that's not even that abnormal. But in 1980-

If you were some decent looking, well-spoken kid with a college diploma, you can get a fucking job. You can get a good job somewhere that you can make a living, but it's not like that anymore. But he said that, uh, friends and coworkers said that, um, he was the best educated landscaper in the entire state.

Probably in the country. It's fucking crazy. The pay sucked. So he went into debt and he got credit cards, ran them up, and he kept living with his parents because he had no money. So he's almost 30. He's living with his parents with a maintenance job and a college degree. So things are not going well for him. No. No. One friend said it was starting to wear on him a little that he was pushing 30 and still living at home.

Now, these are the conditions that we find him in where Gina walks in and meets him. Okay. She sees an athletic, good-looking, smiley, handshaky kind of guy. She has no idea who he is. Not whatsoever. And we know how she's pretty fucking innocent, Gina. She doesn't have a lot of street smarts here.

So, at the club, she runs into Stephen Epperle and his childhood friend and also Virginia Tech football player, Bill Skipper King. Skipper. Like the fucking, his brother's name is Cricket. That's his nickname, Cricket and Skipper. Or Barbie. Yeah. Skipper was the tall one, right? Or was that the Barbie knockoff? No, Skipper was, I think, Barbie's babysitter, the little girl.

That skipper was, yeah, like the nun, but it was like a Barbie doll size, like a little doll. No, she was tiny. But I mean a little doll, whereas Cricket was the tall, Cricket was the one that walked around, right?

like the fucking around like the fucking like a two foot no no but like a two foot high creepy little like fucking oh like oh like it had motors in it and shit yeah yeah it talked and shit it was like i don't like that no it was like a baby teddy ruxpin strange i don't like that molester fucking fill-in tool i don't know what it was but creepy looking fuck doll instead yeah that talk to you in a little girl voice that's creepy yikes

So they're all at the Marriott Hotel. And Bill and Steven have known each other since they were both small children. They played football all through high school together. They know each other. Bill King here, Skipper, said that he and Epperly planned to go to the Blacksburg Marriott for a night out.

And Skipper picked him up in his car at about 10 p.m. because Steven doesn't seem to really have a car also. That's the other problem. He doesn't have any money, James. If he had a car, he could put gas in it. You can't even fucking list a house. Never mind sell it. Right.

He they drove first to the home of Skipper's mother and stepfather and to they have a home on Claytor Lake. It's a fucking beautiful lakeside house. Absolutely gorgeous. One of these places where you're like, holy shit, like what kind of people live here on the side of a lake? It's beautiful. Fucking gorgeous. So they were they had to stop over there because his parents.

mom and stepdad were on vacation and they had to stop to make sure the house was secure because there'd been some vandalization in the area and it's summer and there's a lot of people out on the lake.

So he did this. He would go check on it, and he found everything was fine. So after that, Skipper and Steve, they drive to Blacksburg to go to the Marriott. Okay. So they get to the Marriott at about 11 p.m. So Gina's been there a little bit for a little while. They join up with three of their friends. One of the friends knows Gina. Got it. That's how Gina becomes part of this group. Okay.

With them. Okay. Neither. Now they King Skipper King and Steve had never met Gina before though, but right away, Steve and Gina hit it off.

And they start dancing and they dance for a while, about 30 minutes of dancing, four or five songs, they said. So, I mean, that's a whole thing they're doing here. They're getting into it. He's sweaty. Yep. So then they left the dance floor and Gina walked back to the table where she had been sitting before. And they went their separate ways for a while. They danced for a bit. She went and sat down. He went and talked to some people and, you know, they mingled around. And then after that, Steve ends up re-approaching her about twice more and

just to talk to her or whatever. And then about an hour later, they end up talking a little bit more and they're just like sitting, talking to each other. So according to Skipper here, Steve invites Gina to come back to the lake house. Cause that's, that's a spot they have because the parents are out of town. So yeah, King had discussed, they'd been talking about it earlier and the plan was basically if we get chicks, we're bringing them back to this lake house because that's a

Good place to party and swim and fuck. You know what I mean? Yeah, because Wi-Fi internet cameras don't exist right now. This is going to be great. This is going to be amazing. Yeah, we're going to have a debaucherous fucking naked frolic in the backyard and jump in the lake and skinny dip. Your mom can't see me rail her over your fucking jet ski hood. Or into your mom's bed is probably more likely what's going to happen. Yeah, or there.

Right on the kitchen island. Yeah. So they discussed it, and King said, I knew he was living at home. If he wanted to pick up a date and he needed a place to go, I had told him that the place was open if you want to go there. So about 1230 a.m., Steve approaches Skipper in the club here and says, hey, let me get the key to the lake house. This chick wants to come back with me. So Skipper said, I have to go get it. I left it in the car. I left that key in the car.

So then he headed toward the front door to go out to his car and get the key. Steve walks with him in the same direction with Gina a few steps behind, walking with them. They get to the front door, and just before going outside, this is the first time Steve actually introduces Skipper to Gina. By the way, this is Gina. Gina, this is my boy. This is my boy Skipper. And Gina said, how are you doing? And he said, I'm fine. And then they all walked out of the club and headed toward Skipper's car in the parking lot.

As they walked, Steve asked if he could take the car, too. Oh, take your car. Mind if I just leave you here? And he said, no, it's a stepfather's old Thunderbird. So it's an old. Oh, like a 50s Thunderbird. Yeah. Like literally till your daddy takes the T-Bird away. And that's what he's got. Yeah.

My daddy's going to take the T-Bird away. I can't do this. These guys are not living in reality. No, they don't get it. In their late 20s, trying to fuck college students while driving their parents' cars and taking them back to their family lake house. You guys are 10 years late for this shit. It's pathetic. It's fucking pathetic. A, 10 years late for this, and B, 30 years early for this. Yeah. One or the other. You got to take your wife back to your lake house. That's what you're supposed to do.

Get jobs, assholes. And buy your own cars and lake houses, you fucking losers. Your parents were like fucking saving money for lake houses and shit when they were your age. You're a jerk off. You're doing nothing. So he says, no, you can't take my fucking car. That's crazy. So he said, you can use my house, but you can't have the car. Now, by the way, he wasn't drinking, Steve, at all. Really? Really.

Skipper said that he hadn't drank in about four years because Steve gets, quote, a little hyper when he gets drunk and gets into fights twice as much as when he doesn't get drunk. That's not called hyper. That's called aggressive. Yeah. He said a little hyper. He said he didn't see him drink anything alcoholic that night. Okay. So then Steve turns to Gina and says, do you mind if we take your car? Yeah. And Gina says, sure, why not? Yeah.

So, Skipper says, quote, she seemed to be confused as to what car was going and exactly who was going. I think when she came out, she thought maybe I was driving them or she didn't know what was going on. So, she was confused. So, this is the thing that is a little weird here. Now, her sister, Delana, Gina's sister...

is adamant that Gina would never, ever, ever, ever have left the club voluntarily with a guy and gotten a car with him, period. Which I

You know what? I'm not trying to. I understand that it's her sister and she thinks she knows her. But if she's younger than her and of a certain reputation to her, maybe she wouldn't tell you that she would do that. But she's also a normal, healthy 18 year old girl who's been out dancing and grooving with some guy and maybe is attracted to him. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Maybe she wouldn't go with a stranger, but maybe she didn't consider this person a stranger at this moment. One of her friends knew him, too. So it wasn't like she just met him and he was a stranger from nowhere. She was introduced to him by a friend. So at this point, we're all in a big friend group. And when you're in college and when you're that age, if a friend of yours knows somebody, that's your friend, too. Like, it doesn't matter. You know this person. And and it.

Not to – you don't want to, but maybe you give him the credit of he's a good predator and he made her feel comfortable. That's the other thing. Yeah. Ted Bundy used to make perfect strangers feel comfortable. You know what I mean? And they wouldn't go with strangers usually. No. But this guy isn't a stranger. He had a broken arm and he seemed so nice and kind, a big smile on his face. He's got a real estate smile. That's the thing. That's what they do. He can't sell real estate, but his fucking ad looked perfect. I mean, he looked A-okay. You betcha.

So the sister said she must have been deceived, tricked, or physically forced to leave the club. There you go. She probably was. But I don't think so because from everything from this point out, old Skipper King seems to be very honest about everything. And this is his story saying we went outside. They were together. I mean, everybody saw them dancing all night, talking all night. I think he just had a good game. And, you know, she wanted to hang out with him. And that's being tricked. And that's fine. Yeah, yeah, it's being tricked. But she's saying, like...

You know, he said, hey, I'll just we'll go out for ice cream and I'll bring it right back or something like this. No, but she said no one knew my sister better than me. There's no way that she would have left that bar on her own free will with some 28 year old guy. She just met. No way. Gina was not naive.

But she kind of was, though. If she hasn't hung out with a lot of guys, and this guy has been doing this for 10 fucking years, being a bar scumbag and college football player and all that, those guys are a different type. And a 30-year-old guy with a lake house? He probably didn't say it's his dad's lake house. No. He probably said, we got a lake house. I have access to a lake house, yeah. Either way, they drove out of the parking lot here. He's driving her car. He's driving the money car. Yeah, because she's got drinks, yeah.

Well, no, no, because he knows how to get to the house. Oh, and he knows where it's at. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think she was drinking either because she's only 18. Back then, I'm not sure what the law was in Virginia because a lot of states had 18 as the drinking age, but I don't know what Virginia's was. So I assume she seems too responsible to be drinking if she had her sister's car, though. Great point. She was drinking a lot anyway. So King there, Skipper King, just goes back into the club and rejoins his friends there. The lake, by the way, is really nice. It's a 4,000-acre lake.

That's a big lake. With miles of shoreline and woods and beautiful houses. It's sailboats on it and people fishing. It's fucking gorgeous. So very, very nice. This is at 4955 Weaver Road, which is perched on a big hill with a beautiful view of the whole lake. Wow. Gorgeous.

1 a.m. comes around, which is pretty much right when they get to the beach house or to the house here, Lake House. Delana has been asleep for a while when the phone rings and she's awoken. And she said that Gina called and said that her voice was very uneasy and kind of out of character nervous.

is what she said. So this is the conversation. She said, Delana? And she said, yeah. Gina? Gina said, yeah. Delana said, where are you? And she said, I'm out at the lake. And Delana said, well, what are you doing at the lake? And she said, I'm looking at it. What the fuck do you think I'm doing with it? Draining it. Drinking it. What the fuck do you think? Yeah. I'm looking at it. I'm looking at it. What do you think? Delana said, who are you looking at it with?

And she said, Steve. And Delana said, please hurry home. And suddenly, this is what Delana said, suddenly the phone on Gina's end hung up and the line was dead, which is just she hung up. That's all it was. So the weird part here is, though, that conversation, it sounds very much like she's talking to her mom.

Gina is talking to her mom. That's a, that's I'm calling home conversation. Who are you with? Steve? Well, who is Steve? Is it the way that you have to get, you have to ask every question like a court case to get the answer out of the kid. They won't just tell you, I went to the lake house with a guy named Steve. I just met and we're hanging out looking at the, they don't say that. Well, you didn't ask me that as the excuse they can use later. So that tells me that, yeah,

She might be kind of like, kind of leave me alone here. I'm trying to be an adult. You know what I mean? Leaving a few things out because it's none of your business. Yeah, but she said it was, she sounded very uneasy and very out of character and nervous. It's a two minute conversation about 1 a.m.

So by 4 o'clock in the morning, Bill, at 3.15, he called a chick and she answered to come over to the lake house and swim and fuck him. This is crazy. Skipper? Skipper. That's how kind of game Skipper's got. Boy. He gets done at the club and he's like, I will call this chick. She woke up, woke her up at 3 a.m. and she's like, I'll be right there. Hold on. Let me put my swimsuit on. You're not going to believe it. I struck out at the Marriott. Wow. Wow.

And that's what happened. They get there, a woman named Robin Robinson. She's just so sad about her name having Robin in it twice. Old Pocket Robin here coming over. Four o'clock in the morning, and they see that the brown Monte Carlo's parked in the driveway and that there's no lights on in the house.

So King enters the door here, enters the home through the upper level and closes the doors and turns on the kitchen light because he wasn't trying to bust in the living room. I guess Steve was in the den on a lower level and he called upstairs. Bill, is that you? Yeah. And King didn't see him, but he calls back. I've got somebody with me and we're going down to the dock to go swimming. In other words.

Don't come out there because I'm going to be getting blown. There's going to be tits out there. Yeah, and I don't – my tits for the night, not yours. So stay in there. These are not community titties. Stay inside. No, no, no. These are my lakeside titties, and you can't have any access to them. I do not plan on sharing this meal with you. Nope, not at all. So Steve replied, well, we've got to leave. And King said, that's okay. You don't have to. You can hang around. We're just going swimming. Like, you don't have to get out of the house. It's cool.

Steve said, well, she's got to be getting back, meaning, I guess, Gina. So Robin looked down the stairs at that point, the girl that Steve was with, the woman he's with, and sees Steve down there. The girl that King was with looks down and sees Steve down there and says he's in pants but no shirt and he's wiping his shoulders off with a blue towel. That's what she saw. She didn't see Gina at all down because it was just him standing there.

So they ended up, King and Robin, they go to the dock, and Robin goes swimming for about 15, 20 minutes. While they're out there, Steve comes out to the glass doors facing the lake and flashes the lights momentarily. In other words, put your titties away. Yeah, yeah. I'm coming out, so no fucking right now. Here I come. And then calls out, Bill, I'll see you later. We're leaving. Okay. Okay. There's no lights on indoors, and nobody, they couldn't see anything. They just heard him. He flashed it. They heard him yell. Yeah.

So they didn't hear the car start, and they said it was out of their view. So who knows? It's a big property, too, so that makes sense. About five minutes later, King and Robin enter the house through the glass doors in the back, and just inside, King had no shoes on. He stepped in a wet spot on the carpet. He pulled some cushions onto the floor so he and Robin could lay on them, and again he noticed his foot was in something wet.

Yeah. So he's mentioned it to Robin and he thought it was water. He said, I assume they went swimming. He had a towel on and they probably went swimming, came in all wet and got the fucking carpet wet here. So no big deal. Maybe they left a wet fucking towel on the ground or whatever.

So he continues. He and Robin, whatever, are doing their thing. The next morning, June 29th, Sunday, King drives Robin home at 10 a.m. And he picks up his four-year-old son because King's got a four-year-old kid and returns to the lake house to take the kids swimming.

Okay, now, shortly thereafter, Steve shows up in his own car. So he does have a car. Followed by two other friends. King is swimming with his son while the other guys are throwing horseshoes. That's what they're doing. So he said that Steve's always welcome at the house and he's fully familiar with it. Yet for some reason, he came down all the way to the dock, Steve does, to ask King if it's okay for him to go inside and get a drink.

Which is weird. So King goes, yeah, what the fuck are you talking about? Of course she can't go in there. Didn't you bring a girl back here to have sex last night? Yeah, I clearly don't care. There's a line? That is a line before, can I get a drink? Come on, man. We're adults taking advantage of my parents' generosity. There's no limit to this. Go ahead. We're destroying my parents' house. What are we talking about? Yeah, go ahead. Fuck, I got cum all over their floor. It's gross. Yeah.

So he said that Steve remained in the house unusually long to get a drink. Yeah. And when he popped back up, he asked him, did you fall in a hole or something up there? What the hell happened? And Steve answered, well, I couldn't find an opener. That's what he said. Oh, okay. There's a whole bar set up, so probably an opener there.

So sometime before 7 a.m. on this Sunday morning, so this is hours earlier because they left at 10 a.m. He was driving. King drove his girlfriend home there. So sometime before 7 a.m., a Pulaski County sheriff's deputy saw a brown 1975 Chevy Monte Carlo parked alongside the road of Hazel Hollow Road near a point where a railroad trestle crosses the New River into the city of Radford.

The trunk is open. Now, the cop said not concerned at all because that's where fishermen park to fish off the riverbank. So it's probably somebody getting their cooler out, bringing it down. They're going to come up and close their trunk and get something else out. So the cop just keeps driving, doesn't notice, doesn't take too much note of it. Around lunchtime, a guy named Jerry Eugene Ross, who was a notorious local car thief and car burglar. Yeah, because we know all three of his names. Yep. He has a dozen larceny convictions. Yeah.

Yeah. And at this time, two upcoming trial dates for breaking into cars and stealing shit. Okay. So he and his girlfriend drive along this road, pass under the trestle, and they're always looking for a place to break in, and he finds this car sitting there. Trunk open? Get out. Trunk open. Makes a U-turn, parks behind it, gets into the car. It's unlocked. He rummages through it. Idiot. Delana had left her purse under the front seat. Uh-huh.

when she lent it to Gina and also Gina's purse was under the front seat so he scored both fucking purses both purses got back into the car within a minute and he told his girlfriend quote easy peasy Japanese and he drove away

I just got a whole bunch of evidence that could make me look like an asshole. Easy peasy. Easy peasy. Japanesey. In jail. On murder charges forever. On murder charges. So the cop passes by again. The same cop passes by after midnight. This guy's got a long fucking shift from 7 to past midnight. No shit. And the car's still there.

It's still there. Oh, he might be on night shift. So he might, that might be the next night. It's still there. The truck, the trunk is still open and the driver's windows down.

So he radios it in now because most fishermen don't leave it parked there for a day. It's rare, yeah. And it's belonged to a party named Hall, which is their last name. It's Delana's car in Coburn, Virginia. It's not reported stolen. So he goes, shrugs his shoulders, drives away. Not stolen. Somebody left their car here. That's their fucking problem, not mine. It's not a no parking zone. Nope. So Gina doesn't show up by Sunday evening. Now Delana's freaking out.

She's freaking out. So her and she calls up two friends of hers, Robert Lent and Craig Runyon, and they go in searching for the car and they find it. Oh, it's in the same spot that the cop and the burglar had seen it near the trestle on Hazel Hollow Road. The one friend stayed with the car while the others went into Radford to get the police. Now, the

The guy who stayed with the car noticed there were empty plastic cups, matches, and other trash in the car, and that the door pull was ripped off the driver's side. Oh, my God. So when you close the door. Yeah. Back then, they all had that little strap handle thing. You know what I mean? Is it the door pull on the outside or on the inside? No, the inside. The inside. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The phone. Yeah. They had that fucking close up by that. The phone one. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, like a little strap, but it's strapped to both sides or strapped down. So they find that, and that's odd. The driver's window is open, and the seat is pushed all the way back.

OK. All the way back. So we know Gina's not the driver. Yeah. No. But also the burglar might have fucking moved the seat around to search for shit under the seat. There is that. Yeah. Which makes sense, too. So, yeah, they thought this was strange, basically. And Delana said that the car had been clean, vacuumed and freshly waxed when Gina left with it.

Oh, it was a detailed clean. Talk about a waste of time. Yeah. Waxing a brown 75 Monte Carlo.

Talk about polishing a turd. You're literally polishing a turd. You're literally polishing a turd. Holy shit. A 50-foot long turd. A 50-foot long turd. So by Tuesday, people are freaking out. No Gina still. Yeah, that's right. No sign of her. So now lookouts are being broadcast everywhere, being broadcast on the radio. Her sister actually calls a radio station and says, hey, put a thing out saying we're looking for this girl. And they went, no. No.

They said, if we did that every time some college chick went and hung out with her friends, that's all the radio would be. We can't do that. So she went to the station and said, I'm not fucking leaving until you do this. And they ended up doing it. So they put that out. Now, King, Skipper King, he hears the description of the car on the radio and goes, oh, shit.

I know a car. Yeah, so he goes over to Epperly's job here and says, hey, you should report that you were with that girl. Go to the cops so they won't think you have anything to hide. Like, I know you didn't do anything, but go to the fucking cops because there's something wrong. That girl's missing, and you don't want them to think it's you. So Steve's response was, who did you tell about this? Oh, my God, Steve. Which is a terrifying response. Yeah. Yeah.

So King told him that there had been discussion on the matter in the weightlifting club where they worked out. Yeah. So Steve said, well, I'll tell you what, man, do me a favor. Go back down there and tell them not to say anything and just kind of talk it down and don't broadcast it that I was hanging out with that shit. Shut them up, would you? Be like super suspicious. Like really like make it make everybody really wonder what's going on. Do me a solid right now and fuck this whole thing up. Yeah.

We gotta get looked bad. 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.

No, it's hysteria. It's all in your head. It's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since The Witches of Salem? Or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here. Something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical.

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.

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+.

So the police, they find out from a bunch of people because King talks to them. He has nothing to hide. And he went right to the police, didn't do anything shady, and said that Epperling was with them. And they trace her steps. They can tell quickly that she left with him. So they find that out. Now,

They interviewed Epperling Epperly and he said he driven Gina from the Marriott to the house in the car. And then as soon as they arrived, she called her sister. He said he overheard his, her tell Delana that she was at the lake with Steve me and that she wouldn't be out all night and that she'd be home in the morning. He said that he went to the dock where they were swimming, but Gina refused to join him as we know why. Right.

Right.

So it's not going much further than just some fondling. Yeah, my shirt came off once before and it scared me. And I'd rather not go through that fucking trauma again. Either that or somebody maybe just, you know, somebody had sex with her and then didn't talk to her again and, you know, made her feel bad. Maybe told people she was weird or something. Who knows, man? Or talked about her scars or anything. That's what I mean. It could be any of a million different things.

So he said fine, and he said that they left then the house with her driving the Chevy. With her driving is important because it's back to where a guy who's about six feet tall would drive. He said that he directed her, and she drove him to his house in Radford where he got out, gave her directions to return to her apartment from there, and then went to bed.

Now, her sister, Gina's sister, said that she drove around Radford long enough to know the area and wouldn't have needed directions home from there. Not from there. Yeah. From that place. So also that day, Steve has another conversation with somebody with a close friend of his named William Cranwell. And he asked if Cranwell's brother, who's an attorney, might be available to represent him.

Oh, you need an attorney. Yeah. Cranwell said that he requested. Cranwell said, I don't think so. I don't think he does stuff like that. So Cranwell then he then asked Cranwell if if and when I talk to my brother is what Cranwell said to ask him if there was anything that he could do to him if they didn't find a body. That's what Steve said. If and when you talk to your brother, ask if they can do anything to me if they don't find a body or is it no body, no crime? No.

Is that indeed, in fact, the rule? No body, no crime. Why does everybody think that's a thing? Telling everyone. Because it was back then, though. We'll find out. Yeah, I guess so, yeah. There certainly was a first case that...

changed it, but it's still so wild. Oh my god. Swimming in the lake. So yeah, that's what they asked. As they walked outside to his car, he repeated the request again. Steve repeated again, like we said, and then he was certain, the friend was certain that Steve referred to, quote, a body or the body, and that it was not prompted by anything that Cranwell had said, and that Steve was the only one who used the word body. What the fuck, man?

So that's not good. No, that's very bad. So July 2nd now, this is all going on. They're discussing King again, Skipper King. He's talking to the police again and accompanied them back to the house on the lake.

Because now they're not just looking, maybe she's at a friend's house, whatever. Now they're like, okay, where was she? And sack it up. If I'm his parents, I am furious. You have brought police to my home. Police to my lake house. To my respite, you son of a bitch. Well, they're out of town on vacation at Myrtle Beach. So different water they're going to. Oh my God. Yeah. Quite the life they're living. They're killing it. So-

And King says, I found this broken ankle bracelet on the floor, this bracelet at the time, he says. It's a gold bracelet with interlocking hearts. Yeah. And he gives it to the police.

And the police ask the sister, what was she wearing? And the sister describes, boom. And they said, well, is this a similar bracelet? And it is now. And they all everybody in the Davis family, King's family or King's family there said that they never saw that before in the house. So it's like it was there. So they say we got to talk to Steve again.

So they advise him of his rights. And then Sergeant Hall, interrogating him, advises him of his rights and just flat out accuses him of killing Gina. Because you killed that fucking girl, didn't you? He said, shit, no, I didn't kill that girl. What are you talking about? That's crazy. Well, who would do that? That's nuts. So he said, no, you killed that girl.

And then Steve just shut the fuck up and sat there and wouldn't say anything. He's very silent. Doesn't say no, doesn't protest, just silently sits there. You were just accused of murder, man. If I did not kill a girl and you're saying I killed a girl, I am going to argue with you a lot about that. I'm not just going to go, nah. Nah. Yeah. If you said I watched a show I don't like, I'll argue with you to the end of time. Never mind killed a girl.

Don't fucking tell me I like fucking impractical jokers or whatever. I don't want to watch that shit. And The Office. I don't fucking know.

So he said that the cop then advised him to cooperate with him. Cooperate with me because the silence is a bad sign. Like I said, you're innocent. You protest. You don't sit there silently. I accused you twice. You didn't protest. I know what you did. So let's just talk about it. Let's get it out. He's...

He's just acting like it's all on the table. And the cop says, quote, think about how your cooperation will affect the jury. Yeah. Think about that. And Steve says, I'll think about it. Steve, what are you doing, man? Bad answer again. And then they don't arrest him. What? Yeah, I'm going just on the way you were here. I'm arresting you. We'll figure out the rest later. This is crazy. We'll find some proof at some point. We'll find something. I have a feeling you're not that smart, stupid. Basically.

Based on this interview, I'm going to say just based on that. So July 3rd, 1980, the Sergeant Duffy with the Virginia State Police finds the contents of Gina's purse concealed under a brush pile along Hazel Hollow Road.

It was just tossed out the window by the guy who stole it. Right. The purse. Fucking asshole. Yep. 10 feet off the highway and the purse, everything was bunched together. Nothing was scattered. This included her checkbook with, with, with its final entry dated June 28th. So they know she's hasn't done shit since then. July 5th comes along. So they all had a nice fourth of July holiday. And then the fifth comes and King now Skipper King talks to Steve and he's like, listen, um,

You know, he said that night he was saying Steve tells him when we were talking in the house, when you were upstairs and I was downstairs drying off, Steve says, you did hear her, didn't you?

You heard her down there. She was with me at the time. And King says, I didn't. I didn't hear her. I don't know what you're talking about. Then he says, did you kill her, bro? Literally says, did you kill her? Yeah. And he says, this is his response. Quote, Bill, I don't know anything about it. We'll just have to wait and see. And then walked away.

I don't know anything about it. We'll just have to wait and see. And then just walked away like someone didn't just accuse you of murder. Did you kill a young woman in my parents' house? In my parents' house. You son of a bitch. It's a real wait and see situation right now, Bill. I don't know what I'm supposed to wait and see. What is this, a fucking to be continued sitcom? No. Shit. This is acid. Did you murder in my mom's house? You can't murder in my parents' fucking lake house.

Do you understand this is set up as this amazing lakeside fuck pit and you're just ruining it? You're destroying the sanctity of my parents' fuck pit? This is not cool. They had equity, man. It's all gone. It's all gone. No one wants that house. If you murder it in there, nobody wants that house. Nobody wants it. We're going to have to knock it down like OJ's house. Is that what you want? So that's pretty wild. King then said after that, they talked about it and he said, well, what happened between you guys if you didn't kill her?

And he told Steve said that they just started kissing, did a little fondling through the clothes and that's about it. And then he went swimming and no, you know, he wouldn't join him. Oh,

He then goes, and Steve fails a polygraph test. Uh-oh. Yeah. Fails a polygraph. The tests show that he lied in response to the questions, do you know where Gina Hall's body is, and did you kill Gina Hall? Those are two bad questions to fail. Those are the worst ones to fail at. The worst questions you could ever not answer. Good. Did you kill a girl and conceal her body? No. That's not good. Uh-oh.

Wow. Now the police want to go over the lake house with a fine tooth comb here. Yeah. So as they do, they find minute bloodstains on the concrete driveway on a walk in front of the glass doors facing the lake on a light switch in the mid-level bathroom off the den on the leg of a chair on a pair of brown shoes on a golf shoe on a dustpan on a matic, which if you know what a matic is, it's a fucking pickaxe.

Oh, God. A pickaxe. One of those like you would dig a railroad with if you were, you know, in the 1880s. So and a matic that was beside the refrigerator and on the refrigerator door. OK, that's a lot of blood in a party house. In a lot of varied places. Yeah. They said that the fridge had been wiped nearly clean, but a faint blood smear were visible along along it with hairs and fibers as well.

A hair was caught in a cleat of a golf shoe beside the refrigerator as well. A hair is caught in it, and there's blood on it. Okay. There's a blood stain on the inner refrigerator door gasket as well.

Oh no. And this is from a report. The refrigerator door exhibits streaked beige staining, which has been, has the appearance of being wiped, diluted blood staining, human blood of insufficient quality for determination of blood type was identified on the refrigerator door. Five Caucasian head hairs removed from the door are similar to the hair from the curlers that they got. They got samples of her hair to compare to, uh,

There are two Caucasian hairs and three Caucasian hair fragments could not be associated with any of the submitted hair samples present with the hairs removed from the refrigerator door are two coarse, brilliant trilobes and synthetic fibers like from a blanket or a shirt or something. Then a large blood stain about 18 inches in diameter was found in the living room carpet just inside the glass doors.

It had been partially cleaned up and was bleached out to a faint pinkish color. How did Skipper not see that? These parents are the fucking, they're so pissed. Yeah. So pissed. Yeah. Jesus Christ. The police testify later on that these items would not have been apparent to a casual observer. They weren't easily noticeable. Yeah.

They said that and they asked the people who own the beach house, the parents, the lake house, if it had been left very clean. And they said there was no reason for there to be bloodstains in the house because they generally don't have blood. They said very few bloodstains when we left.

So Delana is trying to find her sister. And that's when she goes to the radio station. And she said, when I got to the radio station, I told them why I was there and met the station's manager. I explained the situation. And yeah, I said I knew it was the best hope to get the word out. And apparently it worked. Yeah. So they did it at the top and bottom of every hour. So volunteers joined in the search for Gina. A group of five friends from her hometown came over to look.

And they discover a blue towel in heavy undergrowth 10 feet from the railroad tracks near the trestle. Where the car was. Yeah, the towel has bloodstains and contained fibers identical to the carpet at the lake house in the living room. Oh.

That's interesting. It was identified later on by King's parents as an identical towel that was previously unused and is currently missing from the home. I wonder if that's the one that Robin Robinson saw him dabbing his shoulders with. Blue towel, exactly. Also missing from the house was a blue and white towel, a roll of toilet papers, a toilet paper, or paper towel, paper towels. Who the fuck knows the exact number of paper towels rolls they have in their house?

I have no idea how many... If one of my paper towel rolls was missing, that would be a mystery that would go down for the ages. I don't know. I don't live in chaos, though, where I don't have... No, I have them. Yeah, yeah. I don't buy paper towel rolls when I'm down to Taco Bell napkins. No. I see a few left and I buy more.

I probably got eight, seven. I don't know. There's some. We have a closet with paper towels and toilet paper. I have no fucking idea. There's a bunch of it in there because God damn it, I'm not going to be left without it. I'm never going to ever, ever, ever be caught with my pants down. Oh my God. Also a can of Dow bathroom cleaner with a green plastic cap.

And a large handmade quilt, they said, is missing. But they don't release the quilt to the public. The public does not know the quilt's missing, only the rest of the things. They later found the green plastic cap here on the bathroom cleaner by a trash can in the furnace room. She thought it was weird that it was there, so she gave it to the police because it wasn't where they left it. Then they find a shoe.

A police sergeant finds a shoe on the Radford side of the river near the end of the trestle. At this point, Delana Hall's friend, the sister, contacts her and says that, listen, you should contact this psychic that was on the Donahue show, the Phil Donahue show. Okay. They said that he was from somewhere in the Midwest and he gets uses psychic abilities to solve several high profile cases. Maybe he knows where Gina is.

So she said, got nothing else to lose. So she said she'd do it. She learned his name was Jerry Stewart. He was 37 years old. He's from Des Moines. He's a big showman. And he was actually known as a decent psychic, actually. Knows some shit. So she gets his phone number, tells him about the disappearance. He immediately told her he had positive feelings about his ability to help.

Weird, right? You're thinking, I don't know anything. I don't know about this one. In the initial conversation, he gave a description to Delana of the person he thought murdered Gina. Okay. Now, he also, he weighs about 625 pounds, this guy. Stewart? Yeah. Big old dude. Is he the big giant guy that was on Nathan for you? That was doing the house thing?

Remember that haunted real estate agent lady who brought that guy in? He died, that guy, recently, but I don't know. This guy, no, 31 in 1973. He'd be much older, this guy. So he ended up getting gastric bypass surgery or gastric surgery, whatever they did in 1973. Just remove your stomach. Just staple your throat shut. Yeah. You get to taste it and spit it out. That was good. You drink the juice of whatever you have.

So while he was there, he had a near-death experience where he flatlined on the table. And after the surgery, he said that he gained the psychic ability. Yep. So he's been working as a psychic entertainer at nightclub lounges throughout the Midwest and even did some shit in Vegas. Yeah.

And he goes from table to table, interacting with guests, giving them impressions. He was receiving psychic readings. You know what it looks like. Yeah. You're going to get laid tonight. Those kind of. Yeah. Yeah. That was right there. He took her out. He spent a lot. He started billing himself as the world's number one psychic and even had his own nationally syndicated radio show. And then he was on TV all the time. And that's how they found him. So he gets to town and he says, take me to the lake house. Oh, here we go.

On the way there in a police car, the detective, there's a detective and another officer. He has to be blindfolded. Blindfold me. I don't want to know. Okay. He's got to get his all of his psychic shit in order here. Psychic ducks in a row. Yeah.

So the cop then says this. This is Detective Jackie Roop. Quote, we pull up to the lake house. He's blindfolded and he gets out of the car. Maybe trips and falls probably. Yeah, tripped over a curb. We didn't tell him shit and he just fell all over the place. Walked into a wall. Walked into a tree. He drowned himself. He just walked into the lake. We were like, nope, the house is okay. It's a damn good thing. He got out of the car and then a bus hit him.

So he said he gets out of the car, points in the air, blindfolded, and says, there's a tree right there with a dead limb. Sure enough, he was pointing directly at the dead limb of a tree. That got our attention. Okay. I guess he wanted to prove himself. So he then entered the lake house and immediately told the police that something was missing from the house. He goes on. He said, it's a blanket.

Goes on to describe in detail the colors of the blanket and said, Gina Hall is buried in that blanket. Arrest him. Take him in. He did it. How many people have you killed, sir? Right.

So this was one of the details that investigators had not disclosed to anyone outside the police that there was a missing quilt from the master bedroom. And this guy had accurately described all the colors of the quilt. How the fuck does he know that? That's wild. So later in the day, while sitting in a police cruiser, he accurately provided the description of an area along Hazel Hollow Road near the railroad trestle where the car had been found already. Yeah.

He said the killer either buried Gina near there or had been in that area with her body. The police were so impressed with this shit, they were actually asking him questions. They were like, holy shit. They actually called for cadaver-sniffing dogs to search right there because they said she might be buried there.

The psychic then leads the authorities to several other sites along the river that were searched and never found. At one point, he went into a deep trance-like state, and when he came out, he said he's 100% confident in his general impression of where the body was.

He said she's not in Claytor Lake. She's not in the river. He said she was buried near the water and also says that the body could be partially buried. Okay. Why do you get all that information and then not tell us who fucking did it? That, they don't know. How do you know all of that but not a fucking name? That's the ways of the psychic universe. It's not how they work. Bullshit. We have to figure some things out for ourselves, man.

man nightmare man how do you know so quilt and and it's missing and and a tree limb who did it who the fuck did it so they they said the they're gonna sit down with steve and they said they didn't think it would be a good conversation but they're gonna try okay they said they're gonna sit down and talk to him and uh they said please help us tell us where she is

The prosecutor was prepared to offer him a plea bargain. 20 years in jail if you show us where the fucking body is and plead guilty. We'll give you 20 years. Yeah. We find it and you are fucked, man. He said no. I don't know what you're talking about. Then they bring in a guy who's John Preston, a retired Pennsylvania state trooper, qualified as an expert in the training, handling, and reading of tracking dogs. Now they're bringing in dogs. Mm-hmm.

So there's all sorts of, you know, he's been an expert witness in 17 states and has all sorts of shit. His whole resume. He's done it a long time. He works with a male German shepherd named Harass, too. Harass, which is probably not what you should call your German shepherd's police officers. Harass.

Perfect. That's actually the perfect name. You got one called Police Brutality? Yeah, I got one called Beating Me With A Club. Is that one? You got me there?

So this had been used in over 150 criminal cases throughout the United States. Harass has, too. He had successfully followed trails as old as 21 days, they said. So he had, in 1978, followed an elderly man who was missing for nine hours through the streets of a town for seven blocks, finding him unconscious despite three feet of snow being on the ground and currently falling. Oh, boy.

So it's pretty impressive, this dog. So they get there about midnight on July 10th. Neither of them were familiar with the area, meaning him or the dog. And they were not told of the existence of a suspect or anything. They just said, look around. So they take him to Hazel Hollow Road where the Chevy was found. The dog scented on underwear taken from Steve. Yeah. Okay. The dog began casting a search. So they're looking. Does anything smell like this guy around here? Yeah.

Within 100 yards, the dog indicated that he picked up the scent and he was seeking it. This is I found Steve over here. He leaves the road, heads up a path up the grade to the trestle and crosses the new river into Radford following a walkway on the right side of the tracks.

He followed a route through Radford, going to an area under Memorial Bridge on Route 11, retraces his steps along the tracks to a railroad switching area, goes around a box factory following a gravel path to a main thoroughfare, passing through the New River Valley Shopping Plaza, part of a 24-hour car wash that's there, through other streets, across intersections, through a private lot, and finally turned up on the walkway leading up to the front porch of a house.

The door walked up to the front door of the house and sat down and stopped. They said, interesting. You know whose house it was? Fucking Steve's. It's fucking Steve's house. Holy shit. He just walked from the car all the way to his house. Underwear. Unbelievable. Sniffed him out.

So they go, wow, this fucking dog is pretty goddamn impressive. So, yeah, the shoe, they said Gina's shoe, the two towels, the bundle of clothing that we haven't talked about yet that had been recovered at previous times. The trail followed by the dog led the trackers closely past each of the locations of where everything is found of all of her shit. Unbelievable. Yep. They said the dog's behavior indicated three lengthy pauses where the person tracked and had lingered on the trail.

The first of these was on one third of the way across the trestle over the river. The second was under the bridge. The third was the railroad switching area.

So forensic scientists who are hair and fiber experts and biochemical analysis bloodstain people, serologists, were furnished with the exhibits in the case and everything like that. Of all the bloodstains taken from the house, the lake house, which were capable of identification, they're all found to be type O blood.

Okay. Which is what Gina is. Gina is type O blood. These included the stains on the carpet lights, which is shoes, dustpan, mattock, fridge, all that shit. So the fridge couldn't be tested. Sorry. The last three items were spattered by tiny droplets. Blood spatter, not drops. Not like dripping. Unlike the large drops, they said. The cleat of the golf shoe contained a Caucasian pubic hair, unlike that of Steve's, though. Okay. Okay.

No such hairs from Gina were available for comparison, so they didn't know. They didn't have her pubes in a fucking brush, unfortunately. However, the embedded blood smeared on the refrigerator door themselves, that was too worn out. But the five head hairs were identical to Gina's, the one they found in the fridge. The mat from the trunk of the Chevy contained type O bloodstains, head hairs identical to Gina's, and pubic hairs unlike his.

Unlike Steve's. The blue towel found in the woods was stained with a type O human blood, contained six head hairs identical to Gina, two pubic hairs unlike Steve's, and many synthetic fibers identical to those in the living room carpet. Someone's dropping pubes everywhere. Everywhere. All over the place. The green plastic cap from the can of Dow Cleaner contained a hair identical to Gina's.

So we got a lot going on here. A lot of blood, different places. The next day they take the dog out again. They spread out six blue towels of similar appearance at the Radford high school auditorium before the dog was admitted to the room. He was scented on Steve's underwear again.

He ran in and ran immediately to the towel, which had been found in the woods and refused to leave until ordered to do so. He's like, no, but this is the one I found it. This is it. That's it. Um, so that's a lot now. So that means it not only has blood and hair, it also has the same scent as the underwear. Steve sent, it's got Steve's shit on it. July 12th, 1980. Uh, the, the,

They take the dog, which had not been inside the police station here. This is at the Radford Police Station. They take it into the parking lot, which contained numerous vehicles. After the dog had been scented on the blue towel that had been found in the woods, he made a casting search through the parking lot until he came upon the driver's door handle of Steve's parked car.

After pausing there, he tracked into the police station coming directly into the door of the office, which is where Steve was sitting. I know where he is. I found this motherfucker. I know where he lives. Motherfucker, I'm going to hunt you forever. I found his house. And he had scrambled eggs for breakfast. I'm telling you, now I'm just showing off. Now I'm just showing off. I know. He might be pre-diabetic. I don't want to alarm him. Watch out for that. Tell him to talk to his doctor.

So when informed of the dog's performance on all of this stuff, they said they've walked to your house from all the dead girl stuff or all the missing girl stuff. They tracked from your car to here. They went right to here, blah, blah, blah. He put his head down on his arms. He just collapsed onto the table, which is the most guilty thing you can do in an interrogation room. And repeated three times straight, quote, that's a damn good dog. That's a damn good dog. Ha, ha, ha.

That's a damn good dog. Three times. Just shaking his head and burying his head in his hands on the fucking desk. Where'd you get that goddamn dog? That's a damn good dog. That's a good boy. That's a damn good dog. We've had Friendly, the leg-finding dog. We've got some good dogs. This is a real good dog. Nobody's ever told him they're a good dog, though. Oh, no, no. He's a damn good dog. Yeah, it's a good boy. That's a fucking good boy, man. There you go, buddy.

So a group of high school students from Christianburg found the blue and white striped towel that was missing. Right, right. Between the New River Valley Shopping Plaza and the river. A short distance away, they found all the clothes Gina had worn that night, too. Tied into a damp bundle and stained with blood. Oh.

The clothes have been exposed to the weather until they were found on July 19th. So it's been a couple, three weeks here. They were found to be stained with blood, but by that time they couldn't determine the origin or type. But we can infer it's probably hers. You can do it now. Fuck. Fuck.

The jacket had bloodstains on the right. Yeah, now you can do it. On the right breast and in the shoulder blade area in the back spreading across the right side. Shitloads of blood coming from someone's head. There's no holes in the jacket. So it's not like someone was stabbed through the jacket. This is coming down from the head. The trousers, the pants, contain bloodstains, two head hairs identical to Gina and one hair identical to Steve's. Uh-oh.

Now, this is the head comparison of hairs is such not an exact science, by the way. Yeah, it really isn't. It's nowhere near that. Now it is obviously. Back then they would just look at them. Yeah. Yeah. Similar. Right. So they said, like, especially if you had like dark, coarse hair, it's it's really hard to tell. The lighter the hair, they said, the easier. And he's got light hair. So that's helpful.

Gina has type O. He has type A blood, they said here. The synthetic fibers similar to those in the carpet of the Davis house were found in the trunk of the Chevy, on the door, in the blue towel, and on Gina's clothing, including her panties, including her underwear. So her pants were off. Steve at this time is laying low in Ohio.

After that's a damn good dog, they didn't arrest him. Really? Nope. They let him go. He takes off to Ohio here. He had been in Roanoke before.

hanging out at a friend's house here. And his friend requested that he keep a low profile. So neighbor neighbors wouldn't know that, you know, he was there and he's harboring this guy. So he spent a lot of time watching TV, left the house regularly to go running, usually at night or in the early morning when it was dark, he'd lift weights in a gym and do that by early August.

Word got out that he was living there, so he receives a death threat in that week, a hand-delivered note to the mailbox saying, you got a fucking murderer in here, we're going to kill him. Yeah, you better get out of town. Followed up by a strongly worded anonymous phone call, as it's put to the home. We would appreciate you leaving. So Epperly decides to move to Columbus, Ohio, sneaking out under the cover of darkness on August 5th. He said he did it for safety reasons.

He goes there. His older sister, Vicki, lives there, I guess. Investigators were informed that he had gone there. Oh, that's Vicki, I'm sorry, told them that he went there. I had that mixed up in my notes. So Stephen here and family, he has relatives there. One was his cousin, Ray, and his wife, Dolores, Ray's wife. And so he's going to go there. So he's hanging out.

While he's living there, five days after he gets there, a 25-year-old woman named Vicki Coke goes missing. Oh?

Yeah, she's an attractive school teacher last seen on August 10th at her apartment in the Apple Ridge apartment complex in Circleville, Ohio. The windows and door to her apartment were locked and there's no forced entry as if she willingly let the guy into the place. Her abandoned car was discovered a few days later a mile away. A month later, her body was found hidden in a cornfield next to the township.

They had no evidence of anything that could do that. But where the car is, everything is so similar to Gina Hall. It's fucking ridiculous. And it's five days after he got there. So they're searching for the body. They're thinking it might have been in the water. They pictured an entrapment scenario where her body had potentially been dumped in the river and eventually become trapped underwater below an undercut boulder and then held submerged by a steady current. They won't let it go off.

So they get giant fucking lights so they could see. They get helicopters so they can see everything. They search this place up and down and they can't find shit. She's not in the water. Not a fucking thing. No, they cannot find her anywhere. So police end up calling off the search for her. Really? They looked everywhere they could. They said there's nowhere else to look. There's no new developments. Yeah.

And they said they have to call it all off. If we get a tip, we'll dig somewhere or look somewhere, but we're not going to actively search. That sucks. So her father puts up a reward. And now people come out of the woodwork looking for it because they all want the reward. And so he told the cops, I'd appreciate it if you play up the reward. Let's get some volunteers out here. I want to find my daughter. Yeah.

So they said that their water in this area was shallow enough that you could see the bottom except where holes are. So they said, you know, they looked in those holes. They tried to dive and do all that. They couldn't find anything. So they finally decide to arrest Steve in September. They finally arrest him, which is wild. Three months later. Yeah. Now, there's only been one case in Virginia history where someone's been charged without a body.

One case. One case, but that is a completely different story. That was in 1967. It was the murders of a brother and sister. The bodies were never found, but two men were convicted of the slayings because one of them, or there was three suspects, and one of them turned state's evidence and told on the others. So they had somebody saying what happened. That's different than just nobody and they're saying, I don't know what you're talking about.

So it's very different. This is the first time they're ever going to charge someone with murder with no witnesses, with no body. Oh, this is the first in Virginia history here. So it's a big fucking deal. Yeah. The prosecutor said, as far as proving a death without a body, when the facts and circumstances at hand are clearly indicate a death occurred and it was by criminal means, then you can proceed with the prosecution.

They said the amount of blood found in her car, at the lake house, on a very nasty weapon also, that Matic, that fucking pickaxe. They said, plus her unexplained absence for no reason, no history of emotional problems, no history of running away. Right. Didn't use her money. Right. Yeah, it's a little bit crazy. Her clothes from that night soaked in blood. I mean, that's a problem. That's a problem. And the dog going right to his house. Yeah.

He writes the judge a letter. Steve, he's not having this. He says, dear sir. Yeah. I would strongly request that the case of the Commonwealth of Virginia versus Stephen M. Epperly be terminated immediately. Yeah.

The following reasons will support and will qualify my request. My attorneys, he names them, have not followed my request and desires in this proceeding. They are and have been totally unprepared for a case of this magnitude. The following examples, case in point, and methods used by my attorneys will prove my claim.

Since my first meeting on September 10th, 1980 until the present time, my many, many requests for dog experts, blood experts have been ignored and refused by my attorneys. As to the best of my knowledge, the first time my attorneys contacted a dog expert was after I gave them a telephone in Kansas and also pleaded with them to contact a bland correction dog handler.

After the contact was made, these people were not subpoenaed, even though the information could have been very helpful. The only contact was made by phone, and it was after the trial had commenced. My opinion is this is an example of gross neglect regarding my defense. I need a dog expert.

I need a dog expert. Yeah. So he also asked that the jury be sequestered to the extensive publicity that the case has received. He said all this, he's going, it's a long thing here. I begged them many times to go over to the lake house, but they did not think it pertinent to the case. The first time they saw the inside of the house was on December 10th, 1980, the same day that it's, he's fucking out of his mind. So,

The trial comes up, and they're going to trial. Like I said, first, no body, no crime. Wow.

And they said that the way they made it okay is they're saying that the – they say, quote,

The unlikelihood of such a voluntary disappearance is circumstantial evidence entitled to weigh equal to that of bloodstains and concealment of evidence.

So they said the fact that, you know, a body was never recovered. They said the fact that a murderer may successfully dispose of the victim, the body of the victim does not entitle him to an acquittal. That is one form of success for which society has no reward. You're very good at hiding bodies. You don't get any medals for that. I'm sure on Easter you're wonderful, but today you're the best. You go to jail.

So a forensics expert here testifies she determined blood found in the trunk of the car and in and around the lake house matched the blood type of Gina. Bloodstains matching her blood were found on the matic, the golf shoe, the den, the carpet, the blue towel, the light switch. She said she could not determine the type of blood that was found on her clothing and or the other areas of the house, including walkways outside, a refrigerator, a chair leg and a giant stain in the fucking thing. That's a problem.

We can assume they're all related, though, because they weren't there before. Yeah, they're probably all the same. Yeah. She said she also found hairs matching Gina's Gina in the trunk of the car, refrigerator door, slacks, towel, cap of the bottle, cleaning fluid of cleaning fluid. So the evidence they bring in evidence of her character because they have to bring that in to show that she wouldn't run away for no reason. Because the defense is whole defense is she's not even dead. What are you talking about?

So they have to say what a what a, you know, upstanding person she is because she never disappear. She wouldn't disappear. And now he's going to object to that, saying that it's, you know, prejudicing the jury talking about what a wonderful person she is. The dog defense lawyers say that the tracking dog was used 11 days after Miss Hall disappeared and heavy rain periodically through that time should have washed the scent away and they don't buy any of this dog shit for a minute.

How the fuck did the dog go to his house then? How did it know where he lives? I mean, I'm more convinced by the dog than I am by the man that knew about the blanket. That dog don't speak English, man. Nope. It just knows that this guy lives here and I'll find him anywhere.

So they interview the Captain Williams, this guy. It's a cross-examination here by the defense counsel. And they said, you went down there and talked to him, meaning Steve, before you went to the cabin. And he said, yes, sir. And what discussions did you have? And they said, in reference to taking a polygraph. Because he said, just clear yourself. Take a polygraph and we'll clear you and that'll be that. And then he said, what happened after that? Did you see him anymore that day? And he said, I don't recall seeing him anymore until later that night.

So after he's excused, this lawyer questions two more witnesses, and then he moves for a mistrial because two witnesses ago, this police captain mentioned the word polygraph.

Seems like that would have been much more effective if the second he said polygraph, you said mistrial, mistrial. You're not allowed to put that in there. But instead, he waits then. On the fourth day of the trial, he writes the judge a letter requesting that his counsel be relieved and move for a mistrial and the appointment of new counsel. Call a mistrial, new counsel. The court denied the motion and said that the counsel had been giving him an energetic and effective representation.

Now, the case goes to the jury at 4.35 p.m. on an afternoon without any defense at all. The defense puts up no witnesses. Really?

which happens sometimes. They'll say, we have no witnesses and they just depend on their closing. You have to prove that I murdered somebody with no body and circumstantial evidence. We aren't going to say shit. You go ahead. Yeah. Their thing is they didn't prove it. That's what they said. And later on, he said, we're not required to, when we just decided not to is what the defense attorney said. But they do have closing arguments in,

In closing, the prosecutor told the jury that he believed that, you know, Steve persuaded Gina to leave the Marriott Inn about 1230, drove to the house, attempted to have sex with Gina, but was rebuffed. And then he beat her to death, wrapped her in a bloody quilt and somehow hit it. He said, that's what it brought. That's what brought it all. All here. Sex. This man's raw desire for her and her rebuff. And he killed her.

He had to have done it. That's your only conclusion, that he beat her to death. Goodness knows how many times he had to hit her before he did her in. Oh, God. Yep. He had told police that he was with her that night, but that's, you know, come on. The defense in their closing argument said the only link between them is one head hair found on her pants that was similar to him. And that's true, actually.

They don't have anything else really because he didn't bleed or anything like that. So it's no, they have one head hair connecting the actual scenes that they found and him. Okay. Now, no body, one hair. Yeah.

And a whole lot of the most circumstantial evidence of all time. Like he's got a mountain of it. Yeah. It's not good. It's so much. Yeah. We could just get him DNA and it'd be done today. It'd be easy. But yeah. Um, the verdict comes in guilty of first degree murder. Yeah. So it's the first time in history in Virginia. Wow. Nobody, no crime as old Bob Marley would say. So,

Sentencing comes around, and maybe he should have taken that 20 because you, Sal, may fuck off life in prison with parole.

I thought they were going to fucking hang him. No, no, no. No, they definitely can't go for the death penalty without a body. They knew that was a stretch. They're like, they'll convict him, but kill him? People will go, what if she just pops up one day after we execute him? She's like, man, I've been in Saint-Tropez for the last five years. My tan is great. I just needed to get away from all this bullshit. We're really going to have egg on our face. I went on a date with that guy. I left his house. On my way home, a very rich man

Just took me to San Tropez and said, throw your clothes in the ocean. We're going. Fuck your Monte Carlo. Hop into my Ferrari. We're going to the airport. And next thing you know, here I am. You can't kill a guy. If I'm a lawyer, I'd stand on that. Let that person walk in here today. I'll do his time for him. Yeah, that's the thing. I'll go into jail for him.

Now, the jurors, they talked to them after. Was it hard to, you know, was it difficult decision? And they said not at all. They said there was no doubt once they all the jury was in complete agreement as soon as they started deliberations. One jury said jurors said everything fell into place. We didn't have any reasonable doubt. I was hoping he was guilty or I wasn't hoping he was guilty, but I was hoping we wouldn't get into a situation of guilty or not guilty. Yeah.

So he said, yeah, they said as the evidence mounted, added to it and pieced it together until the end, there was no bond to link all the pieces together. He said, really, it was a combination of the whole thing that did it. I couldn't take one part and say that did it. But certainly the testimony about the dog was a very important factor. Sure.

He said, believe it or not, I had formed no opinion when I went into the courtroom this morning. Tried to not deliberate beforehand. It was only 90 minutes of deliberating, which isn't very long. He said when we came into the courtroom, we wanted to give him as much as possible. So, yeah. So there we go. Now, he wants, after this, he said, well, give me another polygraph. I'll pass this one. Okay. Because that's all we have.

He said, I was told that the tests of my polygraph were inconclusive. And then later on, they're telling everybody that I failed. Yeah. Yeah. He said he accused the guy of embellishing the results and trying. And so he wanted a hearing to get another lie detector test, which does nothing to do with legalities. Yeah. He said, I took the test in July 80. If I flunked it so badly, why'd they wait till September 9th to arrest me?

Good question. They're not admissible in court. That's why. Yeah, but they should. He might have killed a girl while he was waiting for them. That's the problem here. He said he wanted to take a new lie detector test because he thought the test was tainted by the fact that it was given by state police. He said he believes state police manipulated the test they gave him and because they wanted so desperately to arrest somebody for such a nice young girl's death.

So he said, independent lie detector, fucking bring it on. He said, I'm innocent. I'm very disappointed. I did not receive a fair trial. Okay. So he wants to appeal based on insufficient evidence. He said there's no malice, which is a requirement for first degree murder. Because he said, how can you prove malice if you don't even know what I did to her? Okay.

Can't prove that testimony about the tracking dog that followed the scent. He said that's it's unreliable character witness testimony about her should be ruled irrelevant comments by police officers on the witness stand about the harshness of the sentence should be judged prejudicial. The mention of a polygraph test and these shit court court appointed attorneys I had and I didn't get my change of venue. Yeah, all those things.

I'd like some peas, please. Yep. So they talk about that. He said, we hold that dog tracking evidence, this is the court, is admissible in a criminal case after a proper foundation has been laid to show the handler was qualified to work with the dog. They said in here, we were happy with what they brought in. That's it. He also says that the officers were told, and this is true, the prosecutor before the trial instructed the three police officers not to speak with the defense counsel.

Which is crazy. You can't do that. About anything. Don't help them. Don't talk to them, which is ridiculous because you're a cop. You get paid with tax dollars, so you work just as much for someone accused of murder as you do for the district attorney. You work for the same amount. So you don't have a dog in this race. Your dog should be justice. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Truth. Honesty. Truth. Yeah. So...

Apparently, the counsel failed to interview the three officers or to renew a witness gagging contention. One of the officers later testified against him. And during the subsequent hearing, the prosecutor admitted that even after the Supreme Court modified the order, he may very well have instructed officers not to speak with defense counsel. So that's actually bad. The court says, who cares? Fuck them. Affirm.

We don't give a shit. Yep. It's a unanimous decision. He says that he's pissed off. He says, quote, I'm going to take it as far as I can till I get a fair trial. I'll take it all the way to the Supreme Court. Quote, I was framed. I can prove this dog did not lead anyone to my house.

And then they said, well, what proof do you have? And he said, you'll see it in court, which he never has. Wait and see. Yeah. People, when they have evidence, they cannot wait to show it to you generally. You know what I mean? So he said that he didn't get a fair trial. The jurors were allowed to go home each night and were exposed to news accounts. He said it was the main event. The spotlight was on that jury.

1985. Okay. Still no Gina. They bring in more psychics here. They don't find her. More psychics, more psychics. People would say, the sister said, people would say they had a dream or a vision and then the cops would have to check it out because who the fuck knows. Never find it, though. One guy, Frank Connor, who's the Pulaski County Sheriff, says it's not a mystery where she is. No? He said, quote, I know where she is.

Put the handcuffs on that man right now. Lock him up. Turn around. Put him in the same pen as him. Yeah. Where's the dog? Harass? Get over here. Sniff his ass, would you? They were together that night then. He said, I know where she is, the dump. Oh? He said that Epperly slipped her body into a trash bin. He said, I've seen them empty those things. They don't look at what's inside. Big dumpster. Boom. Outside of a store or something. So, yeah.

Yeah, the whole thing's a fucking mess when they're looking for it, too. The reward went up to $12,000. So they said bounty hunters, kids, teenagers, college kids. The one guy said the woods were full of people. It was mass confusion. Everyone was out to claim reward money. Jesus, you're going to get yourself shot in the woods. Yeah, accidentally or on purpose. 1991, Epperle's attorneys say that the dog handler's a fraud. He's a fraud.

Yep, they say he lied about his credentials and may have faked his dog's tracking abilities as well. Oh, okay. In a 1986 hearing, the handler, Preston, admitted it was possible his dog was trailing the scent of a police officer instead of Epperle. It was possible. That's not good. So they said now there's evidence that Preston lied about his training. His attorney says, this is Epperle's attorney, he should have never been allowed to testify, much less as an expert in dog tracking.

They said that his testimony destroyed the fundamental fairness of the trial and tainted the whole thing. Because the dog is what the jury said, you know, locked it in. But this isn't really new evidence. In 1983, the Roanoke Times and World News revealed that Preston's credentials were questioned by other dog experts. Many of the cases he testified in were being thrown out because indications that he faked tracking results. That's not good. No.

They filed an inch thick stack of affidavits, letters, and transcripts indicating that Preston lied about credentials, faked his dog's abilities. Much of the new evidence was gathered for a murder appeal in, of course, Arizona. The evidence presented there prompted the Arizona judge to order a new trial and denounce Preston as a, this is a judge said this, a superior court judge, a liar, a charlatan, and a fraud. Oh, shit. This is not good at all.

An Arizona judge said that? That's what I'm saying. Wow. In 1990. That takes a lot. You've got to be a real piece of shit in 1990. You've got to be a real asshole for them to say that to a cop. Five Symington was around. Oh, God, yeah. They were on like their fourth straight indicted governor at that point. It was a fucking disaster. Wow. So that's how that goes. And they say, no, fuck off still. His appeal gets thrown out anyway.

Really? Oh.

He said his grandfather witnessed what he believed to be two men dismembering a body in Meadow Creek and that they were driving in a white van. He believed the woman to be Gina Hall, and that's what sparked the search. The sister said, and that's when the miracles began. That's when the truth came unveiled. That's when pieces of the puzzle started showing up and started fitting together. And now I have the truth. It's like if I need something or I need another piece of the puzzle, it comes.

So she I guess this is a forensic anthropologist, Dr. Arpad Voss, who invented an instrument to detect DNA buried beneath the surface.

Since then, Gina's remains have been discovered across eight locations throughout the New River Valley using that device. Get out of here. Yep. What we would like to do is take each one of those locations and start zeroing in on the miles, zeroing in by the miles, and I would just pull over and let him out and let him just scan until he narrowed it right until the feet away to the very location.

They found her DNA on top of Draper Mountain at a lake house on Claytor Lake, the lake house on Hazel Hollow Road along Meadow Creek. And they found part of one of Gina's bones at the exact place where Epperly used to hunt every weekend.

They say that some of the locations were on their radar back then, but not all of them. And she said, when people come to understand what this instrument is, it's a world changer. That's what I like to share. Just imagine we're not looking at cold cases. We're trying to find children that have gone missing. This is huge. So not only did the instrument hit on Gina's DNA...

Also hit on another young lady's DNA. Who's that? With Gina. What? Angela Radar, who went missing from Roanoke in 1977. They thought she was a runaway and they stopped fucking looking for her.

Yeah. Do you think he got all three of these girls? Yep. They said, do we have proof? No, but we have an instrument that we put in a sample of Angela from her family and we find her on a ridge near the same valley. We find her in a different location that we are currently investigating and we find her at the Creek. That tells me we've got more victims and we've only checked Gina and Angela. Unbelievable. Yeah. That's at least three probably guy. Wow.

2021, he's up for geriatric parole. What? He's 69. He's up for geriatric parole. That's not geriatric enough. Yeah, come on, bro. Geriatric in your 60s? This guy's got tea times and jogging appointments. Fuck out of here. My dad rides a fucking Harley. He's 67. It's no problem. What are you talking about? Does yard work and rides a Harley. 69 in a geriatric? Fuck you.

He has been periodically reviewed to see if he's eligible for parole, and he's not. They never give it to him. They never give him a hearing. Virginia outlawed parole, but his thing is before that happened. Okay, grandfathered him. So, yeah, one of the guys here, this is Griffith. Which one is he? Oh, the Commonwealth attorney, Justin Griffith.

He said, Mr. Epperly should know by now that as long as I'm in office, we will meet him at the gates of parole with a visceral objection. Yeah, he was last turned down for parole in 2019 and he has turned down again. And he said, I'm sure Richmond will give him another chance. And I am damn sure we'll be ready to fight that one as well.

Now there's a book about this whole thing called under the trestle by Ron Peterson jr. And had some good information in it that we used here. So good job on that. Ron Peterson jr. So there you go. That is Radford, Virginia. And one fucked up beast of a case. Probably a serial killer. Yeah. Yeah. If they found those three, there's more. Oh yeah. Think about over time. He's been to colleges. He's been here, there. And the thing about murderers like that, uh, when rape is the thing, uh,

But when you're caught twice, now you got to make sure that you can't get caught. You learn not to get caught. That's what happens. Killers progress in their shit. They go, oh, I can't do that. That gets me caught. You kill them and they don't tell on you. Nobody says a thing. And then they found that girl's body. And oh, no. Oh, if they don't find a body, then it's easier because that was before that. Oh, boy.

Yeah, it's disturbing. So I don't know how many fucking girls this guy might have killed, but I think it's a few. Oh, my God, it's so many. We have no idea in the 70s and early 80s how many of these people are out there. Without DNA, we're never going to know. So there you go, everybody. If you enjoyed that story, you're a sick fuck, but you also are kind of sick fuck because it's a well-told, crazy, interesting story. I understand. Check it out. So if you do enjoy it, though, certainly give us a review. Give five stars on whatever app you're listening to. It doesn't matter what.

the hell you say. You just say something nice. Who gives a shit? Say something. Be nice to us, goddammit. We like it. Head over to shutupandgivememurder.com. Merchandise is there. Tickets to live shows are there. You can still get the virtual live show. It was available for two weeks after the 20th, so you can still grab that right now. And in addition to that, you can get

You know, other tickets to other live shows. Tons of live shows we have out there. Durham, May 31st. You're up next. Nashville the next night sold out. So if you want to see us, Durham's the place to go. Do that. That is shutupandgivememurder.com. Patreon.com slash crimeinsports is where you get, let's face it, all the good stuff. All the bonus shit. Anybody $5 a month or above, you get hundreds of episodes immediately to binge on. And the other thing we're doing now, all of our old virtual live shows are

They're all on Patreon now. You can watch all of them. So you can watch all those old ones. We won't put them up for like six months after we do them. Or when we do one, we'll put the last one up or something. Yeah.

That way, you know, we do want you to buy them. But later on, if you've already had them or it's been two years ago, they're on there. So even more shit on Patreon to get. Patreon.com slash Crime and Sports. New episodes every other week this week, which you're going to get for Crime and Sports, which you'll also be able to hear. We're going to talk about the whole Otani gambling debacle. And other times they just swept shit under the rug when it was inconvenient for the league.

We're going to do that. Not Pete Rose, the rest of them. Then we're going to go down a huge rabbit hole for small town murder. And this is a crazy conspiracy rabbit hole of was Charles Manson actually a CIA asset that did everything he did at the bequest of the CIA to ruin whatever. So we'll talk all about that and some other CIA related murder things. A guy spent 20 years trying to...

flesh this theory out and pretty much ruined his life. So we'll talk all about that. Patreon.com slash crime and sports is where you get all of that. You also want to follow us on social media.

Do that. We are at Small Town Murder on Instagram, at Small Town Pod on Facebook, at Murder Small on Twitter. Follow us there. Do all of that and get your shout out if you subscribe on Patreon. Jimmy, hit me with the names of the most wonderful fucking people in the world who would never, ever, ever dismember us and bury us with other people. Please hit me with them now.

Well, this week's executive producers are Teresa Fernandez, Jordan Bennett, Rebecca Mitchell, Jill King, Tyler Russell, Deirdre Robinson, Janice Craft, Khalifa Goodwin, Olive and Wine Boutique, Christine Lake, Kyle Buell, Michael Wojciciu, Linda Craft, Shannon Proctor, Christy Kelly, Claude Cavallo, Margaret Lawrence, George Defize.

caitlin ayers and aaron hymes uh kyle norwig celia o'brien jacob carrabo isaiah archuleta and jennifer uh our friend jennifer's son uh logan passed away and uh no terribly sorry sorry thank you all so much for hanging out with us those you guys thank you going above and beyond is like

I can't tell you guys how, how, how rad you guys are. Seriously. The, the, the live show was terrific. Uh, we had, we had some issues, uh, and the way you guys come through to like extra support this show is like, you're fucking awesome. Yeah. We were, we were pretty destroyed and pretty upset with some of the five minutes out of two and a half hours, which is ridiculous. We didn't want to, we didn't want to do that. We,

We don't want to leave anything on the table that looks shitty to you guys. We want to put together a perfect show for you. So we're happy you liked it. And sometimes things happen. And you guys were incredible. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Other producers this week, Tiffany Ellison, Sharon Durr, Kathy Murphy, Rachel Bell, Catherine Collado, Shannon DaSilva, Dirty Dick, Daryl Dingus, Bill and Mandy, Bampiani, Nikita Escobar, Jamie Manchia,

Michelle Neff, Caitlin Young. Is it Caitlin? It is Caitlin. Amy Jones, Anna Karafas. Karafas. Karafas? Karafas. I don't know. Sounds better. It's Italian, I think. Pronounce it Karafas. It'll be cool. Nathan Foster. Oh, I bet you're right. Yeah. I think it's Greek. With a K, it's Greek. No, it's a C. That's why I thought it was Italian. It's still probably Greek.

And some bunch of fucking vowels. It might be shortened, too. Yeah, maybe. Nathan Foster, Lori Knack. Nake, maybe. Brian Bustard. Bustard. Marissa Silk. Silicic. Silicic. Silic...

Christy Dietrich, Anna Lee, Brianna Studebaker, Juniper Moon Farm, Caitlin Wilson, Liz Vasquez, Matthew Henkel, Peyton Meadows, Captain Lou Albano, Esquire, the Shockmaster, Little League Coach of the Year. Falling through the fucking drywall. Good job, Sean. Little League Coach of the Year, Morris Buttercrud, Morgan McPherson, Andrew Welmers, George DeFise. I said that. Janice Hill, Reed Wilson, Tanner Miracle. Is that right?

That may be a correction. Auto-corrected. It's possible. Afton P., Chris Powell, Julie Fobion, Anna Alford, Robin Hinton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton, Hilton,

Porkasaurus. I like that. Sounds great. I want to eat the porkasaurus. Uh, Jane Seeley, Cynthia, James, Tracy, Schlake, Christina Smith, Leah Montgomery, Clarissa Jones, Tony Stroop, Jeffrey Warren, Charles Reeves, Kenneth Tackett, Denise Gibbs, Ian Parkis, Parks, maybe David Freese, uh, Bennett,

Ben Fletcher, Lisa, Lisa Lundo, Stroander, Melissa Mooney, Davis Butler, Misty Webster, Billy Duncan, Zach with no last name, Cynthia Spears, Willie Skelly, William Skelly, Willie Skelly, uh, Christina, Aitan, Aitan, uh, Jenny, uh, Megs, Meigs, uh,

Melina Denno. Niecy with no last name. Maria W. No, it's just Marie W. Amy Toussaint. Tussin. She might be. Yeah, it's Tussin. It's some Tussin. From the Robitussin fortune. Bubby with no last name. Victor Schneider. Jeremy Roberson. Amy Fenton. Tussin money. Get some of that Tussin. Laura with no last name. Lindsay Ginn. Kieran Badoja. Badola. Willie. Will Tonking. Yeah.

Aaron Hodges, Scott Hawkins, Ollie Rex, Caitlin King, Debbie O'Donnell, Lisa Ingram, Scott Conyers, Alistair Milne, Natalie with no last name, Ben Patterson, James Huck, Karen Gillespie, Brenda Cocotte, Ramiro Perez, Kelly Beck, Joseph Hartigan Jr., Elizabeth Overby, Jody Mason, Daniel Vickery, John Jerashuchuk,

Autumn Broyles, Sarah Williams, Matt Edwards, Fedra, Fedra Carmela, Erica Schmidt, Martin with no last name, Devin Zook, Sam with no last name, Lee Van Cornette, Heather Wright, Stephanie Sagey, Rachel J, Talia Shaw Booker, Connor Sandifer,

Taylor Monroe, Nicole Strickland, Mickey Klingenberger, Elena with no last name, Kimberly McKnight, Crystal with no last name, Kiri with no last name, Mark Selasky, Catherine Walker, Julie Cargill, not your North Carolina pilot. I don't know what that means. Mark with no last name, Bria Celeste, Kate Carachio, Kariko, Courtney Burchard,

Gally, Gally Langerak, Langer, Langerak, Susan with no last name, Carrie Bean, Colin Cox, Madeline Bryant, Terry, Jerry, Tony with no last name, Callie Angiquero, Angiwero, uh, Ann McMahon, Lee, uh, Lee Nelson, Laura Mazzuca, Trevor Green, Jonathan Kunze, Jen with no last name, Christopher McColl, uh,

Sarah Booth, Isaiah Archuleta, Sean Jernigan, H. Pittman, Heather Peshek, Dallas Luttmer, Kristen Blevins, Brooke would know last name, Melissa Pike, Stacey would know last name, Stacey would know last name, Amy Smith, Roxanne Lance, Melanie Bowling, Kathy Nielsen,

Vanessa Reveles, Justin Merchant, Michael Crossman, Levi Stiles, Brandon Clark, Chris Charlie, Charlie Sims, Bailey Robinson, Caleb Go Stars, hashtag Go Stars, Rebecca, I think that's the North Stars, James. I think probably, yeah. Rebecca Basagera, Hillary Harris, Zach Rades, Cynthia Wolfe, Tracy P., Heather Daniel,

Melissa with no last name. Deborah Williams. Via? Via Abira. Cooper Williams. Ariel Lee. Oh, boy. Nazgul. Nazgulay. Diana Davidson. Jimmy Jabs. What? Rebecca Ross. No, I do not. Lisa Haluch. Ellen Crane. Roberto. Robert. Robert.

Boozo. Robert. Holy shit. Gwendolyn Hammerson. James Ford. Matthew White. Jen Frisch. Talia S. Jude Cope. Cope, maybe. Cassandra Nolan. Brad Gilchrist. Leanne Fell. Tiffany with no last name. Amy Mott. Knox Bog. Knox Bog. Katie Poblocki. Judy Reynolds. Bailey Desjardines. Desjardines.

uh, Donnie Genovese, uh, Kyle Allison, TM Dutch, 1965, Caitlin and Dalton, Joshua Doherty, Alyssa Cullen, head, the head, he'd headed, headed for you. What does that mean? Uh, Cindy, Cindy Lundy, uh, Melissa Mattson, Jesse Nelson, Jacob Nellins, uh,

Elton P. Clark, Skylar Smith, Therese with no last name. Kelly with no last name. Lisa with no last name. Nora with no last name. Susan McFarland, Brian Henrick, Heinrich, maybe Mark. Nope. That's Marina. Mazza, Mara Zaza, uh, Mark Turnage, uh, Kyle Frohman, uh,

Brittany Zorn, Stephanie Riddle, Jolene would know last name. Christy would know last name. Ryan Sushemi, Sushimemi, Sumisehi, Sashimi, Ryan Sashimi, Jessica Richardson, Mike and Carl Christensen. Uh,

Michelle, Lauren Stevens, Misty Hughes, Deez with no last name. I imagine it's nuts. Clayton Kreitz, Juan Apollinar, Matt P., Deborah Phipps, TJ Minker, Hey K., Tony Kozlowski, Catherine De Los Santos, Graham with no last name, Jeremy Z., Tim with no last name, Spencer Peterson, Jenny Gilbert, Taylor Van Epps,

Poop Liquor, James. Taylor Richens. Mae Vee. Finally. Dennis Metier. Troy with no last name. Tino with no last name. Angie with no last name. Jennifer Fairweather. Jade Palace Guard. Stephen Keating. Dana Perkins. And Kerry Washington. But more importantly, all of our patrons, thank you so much.

Thank you, you wonderful, wonderful group of fantastic lunatics. We fucking love you so much. Thanks for what you do for us. Holy shit. Thanks for always swarming around us and having our backs whenever we need you. We really fucking appreciate that. You want to follow us on social media, it's all at shutupandgivemeaburger.com. There's links to everything. Do that. Keep coming back. Listen to Crime and Sports. Listen to your stupid opinions. And we'll be with you all fucking week. Have fun. Do that shit. And until next week, everybody, it's been our pleasure. Bye. Bye. Bye.

If you like small town murder, you can listen early and ad free now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen early and ad free on Amazon music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. Was there a crime committed?

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