#491 - Sibling Death Rivalry - Kalamazoo Township, Michigan
02:52:22 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.

Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com slash wondery. That's rocketmoney.com slash wondery. rocketmoney.com slash wondery. This week in Kalamazoo Township, Michigan, when bodies start to be found all over the place, no one could predict the strange story of two brothers that seem to have a disturbing competition amongst themselves. 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 for joining us so much on another insane edition. I'd say we have a crazy episode this week, but we don't need to tell you that. I think you get it. You know what it is. If you're tuning in, you understand it's insane. We will get to that. A really, really creepy one that somehow hasn't gotten more publicity. Another one that's like, how is this under the radar? Yeah.

This is insane. So we'll talk about all of that. First, before we get to that, shut up and give me murder.com. Oh, that's the site. Get your tickets. Live shows. Next one up is Durham, North Carolina, May 31st. Still a few tickets left for that next night in Nashville is sold out. So get your tickets. May 31st, Durham. Let's do this. We're going to have a

Rapidly approaching. Holy shit. And you guys are good down there. We know the North Carolina crowds, you're going to be up for the competition of who screams shut up and give me murder the loudest. You always are. And we appreciate that. And you guys always sing to Bob Marley beforehand. It's good stuff. So...

Thank you. We can't wait. Also get your tickets. Minnesota, Minneapolis. Be our biggest show ever if you sell this out. So Minneapolis, come strong and beat Chicago as the biggest show ever. So we'll tell everyone. Minneapolis is our biggest show we've ever had. It's a terrific place. It'll be fun. New York, Austin, Chicago.

Boston, Austin and Boston, and all those. Oklahoma City. Get all your tickets right now. We opened up some more tickets for Kansas City. So if you were looking for them and then they were sold out, there's tickets there now. Shut up and give me murder.com. Get them right today or tomorrow or, you know, when it's convenient for you. So, you know, ASAP.

Patreon.com slash crime and sports is where you get all the bonus material. Anybody $5 a month or above, you get hundreds of back episodes. You can binge on new episodes every other week this week, which you're going to get two, of course, one crime and sports, one small town murder, and you get all of it.

For crime and sports, it's theme park disasters again, everybody. Holy crap. You don't have to like sports for that. So check that out. Then for small town murder, we're going to talk about the craziest execution methods in history. What weird shit has people come up with?

That'll hurt real bad. Let's try that out on this person. We'll talk all about that. Patreon.com slash Crime and Sports. And you get a shout out at the end of the show. You bet. Or Jimmy will mess your name all up for you. So that'll be a good time. I'll do my best. That's fun stuff. Also, listen to Crime and Sports while you're at it. And also listen to your stupid opinions because holy shit is it hilarious. So check that out. Nice to be.

Oh, yeah. That said, disclaimer, this is a comedy show. It is. We're comedians. Right. We're going to make jokes and people are going to die. These things are going to definitely happen on the same show. Thing is, we do it tastefully. We try, yeah. Yeah, there's certain ways you could do it. Number one, we don't make fun of the victims or the victims' families either. Why is that, James? Because we're assholes. But.

But we're not scumbags. That's how that works. Other than that, I mean, there's plenty of good stuff to make fun of, especially murderers. They're a lot of fun to make fun of because who the hell decides to do that? So that said, I think it's time, everybody. Let's all sit back. What do you say? Let's all clear the lungs and let's all shout. Shut up and give me.

Let's do this, everybody, shall we? Let's do it, Jimmy. Let's go on a trip. Here we go. Let's go. We are going to Michigan, to Kalamazoo Township, Michigan. Is that different from Kalamazoo? Yeah, technically it's different. It's technically Kalamazoo Charter Township, but they shorten it to Township. That's a little long. It's kind of weird. It's in two separate chunks, this town, on the north end of Kalamazoo.

So it's kind of on the edge of Kalamazoo in two chunks that don't connect with each other. What's in Kalamazoo? Is there a college there or some shit? There's college stuff. Derek Jeter's from there. That's about all I know about it. I know nothing about it. I just know I've heard of it because it has a stupid name. Yeah, it's a fun name.

It's a funny name. I mean, and it's in southwestern Michigan, and it's an hour and 15 to Lansing, Michigan, and about four hours and 10 minutes to Onaway, Michigan, which is our last Michigan episode, The Merry Mutilator, back in December. So that was a fun one. Area code 269. It's in Kalamazoo County.

Right. So that's easy. We'll just keep using the fucking word. Yeah. So this town, it's great when they talk about the Kalamazoo Zoo. That's my favorite. One of our things to do is at the Kalamazoo Zoo. They love talking about it there. The koala exhibit? Yeah. They should call it the Kalamazoo and then have the zoo be in caps. Make it kind of cool. You know, we get it.

So it was initially organized, the town, under the name of Arcadia Township. Oh, not bad. Which sounds like a neighborhood in Arizona, in the suburbs of Phoenix. It exists there, yeah. Yeah, and it was an act of the territorial legislature. Then the same day they organized Kalamazoo County, initially Arcadia Township consisted of all eight northern tier townships in Kalamazoo County. Okay. Okay. But then they shrunk it because then Richland Township,

Set its own. They carved out a chunk for themselves. Once rich people land, it's over. That's it. And then in 1836, they just changed Arcadia Township to Kalamazoo Township on the same day that the town of Bronson was renamed Kalamazoo. So one day, a bunch of guys in town thought the word Kalamazoo was pretty fucking fun. Yeah.

And they were like, let's name a bunch of shit after that. What do you say? The next day they sobered up and they're like, we named our town Kalamazoo. Did we really do that? Yeah. And we sold all the animals from the zoo. Wow. Where's the money?

Dude, we got to stop drinking so much before these meetings. Like after the meetings, we should drink because we just named a bunch of shit Kalamazoo for hundreds of years now. I do love that that is a very Michigan thing, though. Nobody else, like there's a lot of towns in this country named that are the same as somewhere else. I'll bet Michigan's the only one that did this stupid shit. Not a lot of Kalamazoo's, probably.

So in 1837, Cooper Township set off too. So that's how you get this area. You get the main city and then a whole bunch of little townships. Wow. Here's a few reviews of this town here. Most of them are pretty good.

Here's five stars. A wonderful, quiet place to live. A nice location that is close to just about everything. Very safe and nice community to live in. We'll be the judge of that. We'll tell you whether it's safe or not with our stats. It's here, so it's not so safe. Not so safe. Four stars. Kalamazoo Charter Township is a great community to be a part of. There are the perks of living in the city of Kalamazoo, but being on the outskirts and having country-like living. It's the burbs.

That's a mouthful, man. It's a lot. It's a lot. The people are nice and super helpful. Everyone is always willing to help no matter the situation. How much help do you need from strangers? And no matter? That don't get paid for it.

Yeah. Because if you call the fire department and they come put out your fire, that's not everyone's willing to help. That's their job. You know what I mean? Or the police department come or the ambulance or something. You got like a sticky bolt that you can't get off on your brake caliper. Somebody's coming by? You need someone to get the other end of this fucking log to move it over there in your yard. Is that just people just show up? Is that everybody? He's just posted on the Kalamazoo site. That's it. Just post up. Three stars.

This is fucking great. This is 2015, this review is from, by the way, just to give you an idea. Currently, I live in a trailer park. Okay, that's your opening gambit here. Currently, I live in a trailer park, which is not the ideal place to live. Really. At least you noticed. It can be. It can be okay, but I don't think they live in a great trailer park, probably. If you're like, yeah, I live in a trailer park in Kalamazoo Township, Michigan...

You're not feeling like, oh, I'm at the top of my game right now. You're feeling like you're, that's a recovery move. Like, I just got a divorce. I'm building something up. I'm 22. Yeah, I'm saving. I'm 78 and, you know, didn't really. Right. Or I've saved and I'm stretching it all. That's it. I'm keeping this money. I'm going to give it to my kids. I might live to be 100. Who knows?

Right. I'm just going to live in this shit because I don't need much. That's possible. But with this economy, it's the best we can afford. Okay. 2015 economy, I guess. It was doing okay, wasn't it? Who the fuck remembers from nine years ago? I don't fucking know. Maybe. Sure. It was doing great. I have no clue. We were desperate starting a podcast. Yeah. It clearly wasn't that great. It wasn't great for us personally as comedians. I wasn't doing great. What is the economy great for comedians though, honestly? Yeah.

Especially where we were featuring for people and shit. That's not a great economy. Here's $100 for all your work. That's not a good economy. Thanks for being here. Thanks for being here. Two stars. You need to have a lot of specialization. That's it. That's the whole review. I don't know in what field or maybe to get a job. There's specific...

And I have no fucking special. Maybe it's a sexual thing. I'm not sure. Yeah. Specialization. Now, people in this town, I could not the normal sites that we do the towns for some reason. They don't have this town. They lump it all in with Kalamazoo itself. So I had to go to other sites and try to piece together the information. So there's spots where I don't have the normal information that I usually have.

people here, 22,705 in this town. Okay. Yeah. And, um, look at it. The race of the town is about 72% white, about 16% black, uh,

About 6% Hispanic. So that's a Michigan town. Median household income here is $59,288 a year, which is below the national average by about $10,000. But the cost of living is actually low is the thing. So that helps. The median home value here is $152,000.

That's incredibly cheap. That's very, very low. Absolutely. So maybe you're looking for a place to go. Possible. Maybe you're like, I've been looking for somewhere in western Michigan to be. Well, in case this is you, we have for you the Kalamazoo Township, Michigan Real Estate Report. ♪

The average two-bedroom rental here is $1,005, which is almost $300 less than the national average. Found some houses here. Okay, there's not a lot available in Kalamazoo Township, by the way. No? No. I found here's a three-bedroom, two-bath, no square footage listed.

It's a fascinating, fascinating thing. You can see pretty much, you can pretty much measure it out from the outside because it's clearly a manufactured home or a trailer of some kinds. It has that corrugated metal around the bottom, which is a bad sign. Yeah, not good. It's just keeping animals out from living under your house.

That means your house doesn't touch the ground. That's what that means. Yeah, there's no foundation is what that is. Are we making a foundation? Just put some metal around it. Just around the base of it. Fuck a foundation. It's easier. It's on cinder blocks, man. This is crazy. So it's kind of a place like that. It's like a pale yellow. It's ugly. No inside pictures at all. So this place is obviously...

We don't want you to know how big it is, and we don't want you to know what it looks like. That is marketing, my friend. It does tell you that it has one stand-up walk-in shower, which is probably a little square. It's probably not luxurious or anything like that. And it also says, good carpet throughout.

Okay. The carpet's good. Someone's old carpet is in there. You will have that. Someone else is stinking there. $124,900 for that. Whoa. Which seems a little bit steep here. It's probably about 1,200 square feet. Yeah. Seems like even for this market, it seems a little steep in this area. Oh, it's land. Yeah. Not much. It's like less than a third of an acre. It's just a plot. What the shit? A little plot. Here's a three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,248 square feet. It's on a third of an acre.

So it's kind of similar to the other house, except it's a house house. It's attached to the ground. Yeah. A little scary on the outside, I'll be honest. The outside kind of looks like on Halloween. The kids might avoid it. Yeah. But the inside is all redone, which is nice. It's all 100% redone, but it's $199,900. Okay. Next up, four-bedroom, two-bath, 1,520 square feet. Looks much bigger from the outside, though. It's a two-story. Oh, yeah.

It's got the pointy points in the roof. A-frame, yeah. In different spots. So it looks like a big house, but it's only 1,500 square feet. It's nice. It has a nice fireplace in there. Real nice kitchen cabinets that look like they're quality wood. Stuff like that. It looks like it was put together quality. $252,000 for that.

Any land? No. No. Not at all. No. No land. No. You're not getting land here. It's like a half acre or something like that, quarter acre, third of an acre. Quarter million dollars for this shit. Quarter million dollars. So there you go. That is the real estate report if you're looking to be there. Now, things to do in this town. This is important here. Okay. And if we're buzzing through this a little bit quicker than normal, it is because we have a whole lot of story to tell. Cool.

A whole lot of wild stuff. So the Sounds of the Zoo Music Festival. Okay. Yes. So it's not just animal sounds here. It's not? Nope. They aim to showcase local, regional, national, and international live music performances. Okay. They aim for it, but who's the national act that's on this year, James? Well, I'm going to read a few of them for you. Let's see here. We have Sophia McIntosh and the Sages.

That's a big one. Yolanda Lavender, which sounds like a 70s blaxploitation film. This Sunday in theaters, Yolanda Lavender. Hey, Turkey, get away from my and it's like gunshots and car chases. Big Afro. Lucas Powell.

Nope. I don't know. Peyton and Annabelle. That sounds pretty country. It does. Hannah Rose Graves. I don't know if she digs graves or that's her name. She raises them? I don't know. Nathan Walton and The Remedy. Okay. Okay. Pocket Watch. I prefer Pocket Robin. That's a better band. So far, not a single act is national. I don't know any of these. The Rebel Eyes or the Rebel Eves. Sorry. Minor Element.

Zion Lion, Zion Lion, the Gasoline Gypsies, which, I mean, that sounds like a cool name, I guess. The Ragbirds, which is like a 60s band gone wrong. Horald.

W-H-O-R-L-E-D. Horald. Like hoard except with an L in it. Harald? I don't know. Horald. I'm going to call it like your horn. W-H-O-R? Whore? Whore. Whore. L-E-D. Whore with an L after the R. That's what it is. Whored with an L. Oh my God. That's a weird band. I don't know that one. Flower God will be there.

That's good. Mushroom Jam will be in attendance. Headband

Ed Band Henny will be there. Yeah. Reagan, Isabella, and Alex Heffron. And, of course, Gemini Moon. You can't have a festival without them. And there's more in there. But, you know, that's what's going on. This is bad, man. That sounds. Or lead. I don't know what that is. And that's the only one I'm interested in seeing. Yeah. Because just what are we watching here? Yeah. Just to go, huh? What's happening? You're just going to scare the animals with that noise. That's all that is.

That is two hours of animal scaring. So the crime rate in this town we'll talk about here. I have the crime rates actually in very specific terms, which is kind of interesting here. Now, property crimes seem to be about on average here. A few more motor vehicle thefts, but less burglaries and stuff like that. And the thefts are right on count. Now, violent crimes, murder, rape, robbery, and, of course, assault, the Mount Rushmore of crimes here.

Seems to be pretty high. A lot of these are... Yeah, the assault rate is more than double the national average. What? The murder rate is twice the national average. Jesus Christ. But the rape rate is slightly high, but the robbery rate is like a third of the national average. Oh, that's very low. They're not going to rob you, but they absolutely will assault, murder, and rape you. That's not...

Maybe not in that order, by the way. You don't know. Holy. So that's what's going on there. That said, damn it, let's talk about some murder because... Here we go. There's a lot of murder to talk about today. Yeah. Let's talk about a couple of brothers and a weird family. All right? Let's talk about them. There's four kids in this family. Yeah. There's an oldest sister, a youngest sister, and then the two middle brothers. Right.

And they are Danny Arthur Raines, R-A-N-E-S is how they spell their name. Danny Arthur Raines, he's born October 20th, 1943, and Larry Lee Raines. And those are their birth names, Danny and Larry, not Lawrence and Daniel.

Danny and Larry. Yeah. Larry Lee. Larry Lee sounds like a serial killer, right? That is a bad man. Yeah, that does not sound good. Larry Lee reigns here. Oh, yeah. I don't know about that. Everybody in town has a story about Larry Lee. They all know Larry, and they do, actually. That's the thing about Larry Lee. Of course. There's a chimpanzee involved in this story, Jimmy. This is a fucking insane tale. A guy changes his name to a sitcom in a 70s band. He mashes together to make a name. Oh, my God.

This is a wild fucking mess of an episode. Okay. Great. So Larry Lee Raines, born March 22nd, 1945. So they're a year and a half apart, these two. They're the same. They're the same. A year and a half is nothing for brothers. Nothing. Nothing. So Larry is called Dumbo in school growing up.

Not because he's dumb, because he has big ears. Yeah. And this is during the, would Dumbo come out in the late 40s, I think. So this is, it would have been fresh in everyone's mind. Very fresh. Yeah. Everyone just saw it. Now the parents, okay. His mother works the evening shift in a paper factory.

Making paper, not newspapers. No, no, not a newspaper. Right. Yeah, it doesn't work at the paper. She works making paper. For paper. For paper. I just work for paper. Which one? All of it's a paper. Jesus. So that's what she does. It's a tough life for Larry and Danny here. And they rarely saw her, basically, the kids. Yeah, because... She worked at night the whole time. Right. She's sleeping all night. Yeah. So he...

said that his mother, Larry would later say that his mother was disorganized and just not equipped to deal with the family or any of the things that are in her lap, including their father, who was an alcoholic, abusive lunatic. Great. So that's always going to help. That's why she's out at night probably working. She's like, I'm going to get a job that starts right about when he gets home. Yeah.

I think because he's right about when he gets home from the bar drunk as fuck. Yeah. Apparently the father would just kind of torment the boys. He got mad really fucking easily. If the kids took, you know, an extra second to do what he asked, he would he would, you know, hit them. He'd also beat their mother. So he beat the hell out of everybody in the house, including the furniture, right?

He would just go destroy the fucking coffee table. He'd beat the shit out of everybody and then just go bash the coffee table in, too, because he's got so much fucking rage pent up. Yeah, how do you even talk to that guy or want any sort of relationship when he's beating up the Ashley furniture? Jesus, the Ikea wasn't that sturdy to begin with. Yeah.

I can't imagine they've got great furniture. Yeah. Even great furniture breaks real easy, man. Yeah. Well, back then, all furniture was pretty decent quality for the most part. They didn't really make a lot of pressed particle board shit. Not a lot of particle board shit. No, they had a lot of like- There was a lot of real wood. Yeah. There was a lot of like, I inherited this from my grandmother, this old table. It's like fucking carved and ornate. Heavy, all that kind of shit. Yeah.

while this is going on, he would also pick fights with other men all the time too, at the bar, at work, on the street. He's just a rageful lunatic. What happened, sir? He's an alcoholic version of Joe Pepitone's dad from Crime and Sports. Yeah. But,

But I don't know if he's as good of a fighter. So from what Larry said, he seemed to enjoy humiliating the boys and kind of tormenting them. That was his thing. He also liked to scare them and would like to force them to do things like drink alcohol when they were seven years old. Oh, what? Yeah. He would make the kids drink booze when he was seven, when they were seven. Why would you do that? That's just going to make you clean up puke.

He no shit. Well, he would also. Yeah. Seven year old's not going to hold their liquor at all. And I'm real good at that. And he would make them drink whiskey. Oh, so it's not like have a beer. You know what I mean? Like it's whiskey. A kid can't handle whiskey. No, you're going to puke that up quick. That's sour mash doesn't sit.

Two sips, you're going to get a great buzz. Four sips, you're going to be sick for a day and a half if you're seven years old. You drink a Capri Sun or apple juice too fast and spin around, and you're spraying that. Yeah, kids are always throwing up. They're fucking...

They don't have, I think that thing that holds everything in develops at a later time. Whatever that diaphragm is that holds things down. The little flap, I'm assuming it's a flap of some kind. It's like the toilet flap that's inside the tank that holds the water in. It doesn't let shit come back into the tub, into the toilet. So he would also, dad would throw nickels and dimes on the floor and make the boys fight for them. Oh.

Oh, for Christ's sake. Literally fight for a nickel. I mean, in the 40s, that's a lot of money, actually. It's a lot of money, yeah. Or 50s, 1950s. That'll buy you things, yeah. That'll buy you something, but for him it was entertainment. For a nickel, I can watch children fight, which is a pretty sick thing to think here. Which is weird. They would fight until one of them was, you know, fucking...

Losing. Yeah. One of them lost. And his father, when Larry is nine, so Danny would be 10, almost 11. Yeah. His father leaves the family, which is probably the best thing for everybody. But a decade of that. Oh, that's their formative years are that. Yeah. It's not good. Not good. He moves to Florida to take a job as a gas station attendant. He had a lucrative offer, lucrative offer down in Fort Lauderdale. He had to get to, um,

This gas station needs somebody. Jacksonville's paying $1.25 more. I'm going. I'm going. You got to do it. When you're in a business like that, you have to go where the business is. You know what I mean? That's like radio. Yeah, it's like radio or comedy or something like that. You got to go where the gas stations are.

How long would you have to work there to make the move worth it? That's what I mean. To pay the move. He just wanted to leave the family and move to Florida, and he got a job at a gas station, and that's where he worked. He's done with the snow in Michigan. Oh, yeah. And his boys will kind of follow in his footsteps. One, Danny will work at a gas station later on, too. It's kind of like his career when he's in his 20s, which is interesting. The boys never get along, by the way. They're always fighting.

Really? And that has to be from their father's been pitting them against each other since they were born. So they're used to that. And they rather than team up and be like, fuck this guy. And what do we do? It's it's there. They the main event. Always. They had they completely took it separately and tried to fight their battle alone. So.

Most a lot of siblings get closer in this type of situation, but not them. They get they just get farther away. He. OK, here's one of their stories. They had a lot of troubles. One time, Danny said Larry threw a kitchen knife at him during a fight in their home. And he said, it missed me. And I threw it back at him. And his he also missed, too. So that's what's going on. There are children who.

With knives. Yeah. This mother goes to work at the paper factory and there's a couple of fucking wild boys that are literally throwing knives at each other in the house. This is a wild situation here. Um,

I guess the father also only had one functioning arm, which is wild. Did he have the other one still? It was attached, but it was just dangling there. It's a dead arm. Didn't really do much for him. He's got to throw it with his shoulder. I'm pretty impressed, actually, that he would fight men with one arm. That's pretty good. Even fighting a child with one arm is pretty impressive.

I'm more impressed that he somehow kept these kids from teaming up because you can't find two kids with one arm. And I think that's why he separated them. He wanted them to divide and conquer. Then I can dominate one and one rather than two. It's easily. And you're intimidating. Fuck out of here, Gimpy. Oh, my God. He he said, by the way, Larry said that one time his dad, when he was drunk, ran over the family dog with his truck.

Yeah. Yeah. Ran over the family dog with his truck. That was a real hard thing for the kids. Yeah, that's tragic. And he said, Larry said, I looked at the other kids and I thought, how could they be so attached to a dog to cry or have a tantrum? Larry didn't give a fuck.

He's already dissociated from emotions, man. He didn't feel anything he said. He didn't understand why the other kids were upset. He's like, what the fuck is wrong with you? It's a dog. Like, whoa. You are disturbed because an eight-year-old, that should freak them out good. You know what I mean? That should destroy him until he's at least nine. No shit. He went to Parchment High School in southern Michigan. This is both of them did. They both went to Parchment. About Larry. Like his papers.

Like the paper. Again, it's all paper up there. Paper just runs their life. Mom makes parchment. I go to parchment. Former classmate of Larry's said he had a friendly smile, but he was a bully.

which makes sense. He said these two were in art class together. And one time Larry came at this guy with a chisel. He tried to stab him with a chisel in art class. Those are so dull. That'll hurt so bad. No shit. An art class is like, you don't get a more chill class than that. Yeah. There's not like deadlines. You're fucking making things. And to be that angry and enraged in art class, you really got to have a lot coming in pent up. So this guy said he was trying to stick that thing in me. He,

He had this shit-eating grin on his face. Do I take him seriously or not? He was saying, I don't know what to do. Is this kid serious? Is he trying to really stab me in art class? That's a great example of what that smile was. Yeah, shit-eating grin. I don't understand what that smile is. He liked... Apparently, he...

Just like his father, he's learned from his father, he likes to scare the shit out of people. Right. And make them fucking uncomfortable and scared. And he thrives on the discomfort. He thrives it. Yeah. Someone does it to him, so he's now doing it to other people. That's what's going on here. Not to get too psychological about it, but that's what it is. Yeah.

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, SimpliSafe. SimpliSafe.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 one of the safest sponsors you could ever see.

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 Monitoring.

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 Quince.

Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash smalltownmurder to get free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com slash smalltownmurder. Now back to the show.

Now, they would visit a farm, the boys, apparently. There's a Mrs. Norman Hawley. It's from the 60s, this newspaper. So she doesn't get it. She doesn't even get a first name. Mrs. Norman is who she is. Mrs. Norman Hawley. She said that Larry used to visit the farm that her parents owned.

And she said, my father felt sorry for the boys and they came to the farm on weekends. And this woman said, Larry was always nice to me. He would do things for me such as shining shoes and running errands. But I didn't like him at first because he showed his mother no respect. So nice to these people outside the house, but he had no respect for his mother whatsoever and treated her like shit. What Mrs. Norman Holly doesn't understand is that that's what they were conditioned to do.

Doesn't get it. And I can't imagine that. What about the older and youngest girl that were in here, too? This isn't a household for a little girl. This is no. No, this is fucking crazy. So not good at all. Larry quickly turns to fucking off his life here. And some of it's not his fault. Like growing up with his father obviously isn't his fault and Danny either. But at 13 years old, he meets a woman.

Larry does. How old? 13. Yeah. Eighth grade-ish. Yeah. He meets a 23-year-old woman who's a divorcee with three toddlers.

And they have a romantic relationship. Oh, he's 13. What happened to her? What happened to her? Where? She's a divorced woman with three babies. And she's like, let me fuck this eighth grader. What? Her childhood. Wow. How old are those kids is 110? Because she's a toddler. They're toddlers. They're all under babysitter. They're all under four.

Whoa. She pumped three kids out, got divorced. The relationship produced three quick kids, divorced, and now she's like, I'm going to fuck a child. Jesus. How awful was the guy she was with that she wants to now be with somebody that can't do those things because they're a child? He's too weak. Yeah. This is from Larry. He says, 1030 every night I would be out of my bedroom window and I'd go down and hang out at Sue's all night. Her name is Sue. She was big on records.

We would sit around because this is what he was born in 45. So this is like 1958. So this is picture Greece. Greece takes place in 1959. So this is Greece. He said we would sit around and listen to records. And I liked her kind of music. Misty, Nat King Cole, that kind of stuff. Well, I'm a sentimental guy. We would sit and listen to music and talk.

You're not a sentimental guy. Your dog got killed and you wondered why you had no feelings about it. That's a great point. And you're not a sentimental guy. You're a child. And you're a child. Yeah, he's 13. You're a children. Yeah. She could be playing fucking Jim Jones albums. And as long as she's blowing you when you're 13, you think it was the greatest thing in the world. Yeah. No, put that Hitler album back on. I don't fucking care. Whatever. Yeah. Nuremberg, some shit. Whatever. Yeah. Blow me. I don't care. 13. You'd think you hit the fucking lottery, especially back then.

You didn't get sex. Some of these kids didn't get sex until they were 23 and married. When I was 17, getting anything regular, I was like, this is the best thing. Yeah. What are we doing? Imagine 13. Why go to work? Yeah. This is great. This is great. This is forever. So he said, quote, she had beautiful fingernails, almond shaped. What a weird thing to notice as a child. Let me...

Let me tell you about the night we decided to be lovers.

Oh, boy. Let's talk. We decided. Let me tell you about the night she decided to molest me. Let me tell you about that. Let's talk about the night that she did something terribly illegal. Yeah. Imagine this was we were talking about a 13 year old girl talking about this. You'd be like, oh, my God. The night we decided. We decided to be lovers. You don't get to. I was sitting on the floor and she was sitting on the couch and I was holding her hand, painting her fingernails. He's got a weird fingernail obsession.

No shit. He's got hands. Yeah. He's like, let me paint those for you. And just, and for some crazy reason, I just looked up into her eyes and kissed her hand. I was blowing on her fingernails to dry them. And it seemed like the thing to do. And I did it. And she just melted. Oh boy. She was forever saying, what am I doing with a kid? But with the lights out, I wasn't a kid. What? He could sling dick even at 13.

What am I doing with a kid? Yeah, what am I doing with this insanely illegal relationship that I'm involved in? What am I... Committing a felony. Yeah. So he would like basically kind of hang out with Sue all the time. And they were like almost like a couple that almost lived together. He was there every night. You can't tell anybody. Yeah. No, but he was always there. He would babysit for her children when...

They were at work. He would. He could relate. Yeah. Well, he would wash the dishes and do chores. She had just adopted a teenage kid that she also fucks. Basically, it's weird.

And he said that he would spend all his money on them. He'd buy the kids presents and buy her presents and basically any money he got, he would spend it on them. He's just being a father. Yeah. He's trying to be a dad at 13, which is creepy. Now, in the 60s, though, as this progresses, Sue's still around. He's always with Sue. But both brothers now, Danny and Larry, began dating the same girl.

Yeah. Everything's a competition with these two, whether it's a nickel on the floor or that girl or anything's a competition. Who had her first? Do we know? We don't know. But apparently it was a girl named Kathy. She'll come up again soon.

multiple times in this story and so will sue these women for some reason stick around these guys for decades I don't know why so I guess Larry now so Larry is like 14 years old 15 years old and he's dating a 26 year old and then he's got also a high school girlfriend that he's fighting with his brother about this is a lot of drama for a fucking sophomore you know what I mean and why would you you've got yeah a regular you got regular pussy at home what are you doing yeah yeah

You're going out with this girl with a Lisa Frank backpack. Come on, man. 26 year old knows tricks by now. This girl doesn't know what she's doing. What are we talking about? So Larry at 16. Okay. This is from his probation officer after this incident. Kyle Hazleton. He said Larry was 16 years old and he stole a car.

Now, the charges end up being dismissed, luckily for Larry. And this probation officer said, when I told him he was free, he broke down and cried. So that'll make him cry, but not the dog being killed. Wow.

He said that he the probation officer said he didn't think he should have been freed. He think he thinks at least he should have had been had to be sent to a psychiatrist. He's like, there's something wrong with the fucking kid. It was pretty obvious, but they didn't send him to anything. They didn't make him get any help. They just said dismissed. So then he's 17. He dropped out in the 10th grade. Yeah, because, you know, it's a lot of the pressure of being a family man and having a chick on the sides a lot for you when you're a sophomore. Yeah.

And he and a friend stole another car. Okay. They get arrested, and the judge gives him a choice, and they did this a lot back then, either juvenile hall or the army. Oh.

Take your pick, Chief, at this point. This is 1962, so this is before... You dropped out of high school. You're a big grown-up. Yeah, you're not in school. You can either go to jail or head out and be a real man. Head out and fucking, yeah, do that shit. So he joined the Army here, and that only lasts 11 months because he gets kicked out with a dishonorable discharge after a drunken assault on another soldier. Yeah, because that's a terrible idea to put a degenerate into regimented...

Well, scheduled... Some people it turns them around. Really? There are some people... Oh, yeah, there's some people that were fuck-ups and they went in the military and said the regimentation was what they needed and they liked it because those are people that if they got arrested and went to prison, they would have been okay too because they like regimentation. They like being told where to be and what time to be there because...

Their brains, you know, if they're fucked... I'm not saying people that join the military, that's why they join, but the people who join because they don't have anyone else to go, that's kind of what it is. Sometimes it helps them, and sometimes it completely breaks their brain, and their brains can't handle it. I just think it's fucked up that you're sending a person who has...

proclivities for doing things bad into a situation where we need them to be, you know, whereas the other place, the people that are going to deal with them are trained for that guy. Yeah, absolutely. Back then for that guy, there is no training necessary for that guy. It was do this, do that, or else you get written up and put in the fucking jail. You know, you get a good point. Court-martialed. There's no going to jail anyway. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. They just don't, you know, they're not going, Larry, what are you doing again? It's,

Fucking Larry. Here's pushups. Larry, clean the toilets. And Larry, get in the fucking brig. Those are your options. Larry, run. That's it. He gets repeatedly disciplined for misconduct and chronic alcoholism. He's always drunk.

In the army in his first 11 months. Meanwhile, while he's in the army... Oh, God. Danny marries Kathy and has two kids. Uh-oh. In 11 months? Marries her, has one kid, and then they end up having another kid. So, yeah, by the time Larry gets back in 11 months...

He's lost. Yes. His brothers married his girlfriend and impregnated her, and they're having children now. You went off to war and lost the battle at home. Not even war. He didn't even get there yet. This was just at base. This was in North Carolina or some shit. He just attacked some guy with a beer bottle, probably. So he comes back to Kalamazoo, and he asks Sue to marry him.

Marry me, Sue. Yeah, she's 28, 29. She said no. Nah, I can't. And back then, a woman with three kids who was single, they were looking to get married again. And she was like, not to you, though. I can't. You couldn't even hack it. You can't hack it in the army. You can't hack it in high school. What are we talking about here? So Christmas 1963 here, going into 64, he tries to kill himself.

Yeah. Larry's had enough. He's like, life has really not been a bed of roses here so far. It's been pretty shitty. He's had no opportunities. Well, he's had one. He's in the front seat of his 1958 black and white Plymouth convertible with the top up, though, not the top down. He stopped at Sears and bought a hose and hooked it up from the tailpipe into his car. And a state trooper found him...

In the front seat, groggy, half unconscious with the hose attached and came over and fucking did that. He spends 10 days in Kalamazoo State Hospital because they want to check him out because obviously he's got some problems. His mother insisted he be released and they released him after 10 days. So that's two opportunities to try to fucking help this kid and figure out what's wrong with him.

Fuck. They've blown it. They've blown it. So now he's out, and now he's an adult. So now nobody gives a shit. Now the help is going to be jail or get your shit together. Those are your options. There's no more, oh, what's wrong with you, young man type of shit. Right. So May 1964.

Larry is out west. Larry likes to ramble in Nevada. He'll end up. Oh, real west. All the way out there. And this is like, you know, 60s Vegas is a totally different Vegas. This is not good. It's a very small place. This is bleak, empty Nevada. It's one street on Vegas. Is he in Vegas? He'll go through Vegas and all around there. So he, okay. May 1964, early May. He's hitchhiking.

Because that's what he's doing. Yeah. And he gets a real odd ride here. A guy named Dave Pitts is the guy he gets a ride with. Now, Dave Pitts would travel and do all sorts of shows. He did tons of shit with the Ice Capades. He's an ice skater. And this is the best. Real nice guy. He's got a chimp named Spanky. And Spanky the chimp can also ice skate.

What? Yes. So he dresses up. I have these pictures. He dresses up in this crazy fucking costume with this like elaborate shit, like an animal. Like he's like, he looks like a lion. You know, like an ice skater. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like an ice skater without the chick though. His chick is a monkey. Right.

His chick is spanky? And then he's got Spanky the ice skating chimp with him. So he travels around the country doing shows with Spanky, ice capade shows and ice shows and all this shit. All right. That's what he's doing. But he's like a known guy. He's been on TV and shit. Wow.

Wow. He's like a known guy, Dave Pitts. You do that shit, it'll get attention. He's the only guy with an ice skating chimp. Yeah. Like if you go, we need something else in this show. I don't know, like something different, you know, just something that really catches the eye. How about a chimp that ice skates? Fucking perfect. How many of those are there? One. Spanky. And that's where he goes. So he's known as the world's only ice skating chimpanzee.

Now, he's driving a 1963 GMC Suburban Carryall.

Fuck yes. Which is a big old thing because he's got all of his shit in there. He's got trunks full of props, costumes, I don't know, chimp things. He's got a cage for that chimp in there. You can't just let that thing run around the car. Chimp is in the back seat in a cage as well, as we'll talk about. Yeah, so there's that. He's got all that shit, so he's got to have a big stuff here, a big car. So he and Spanky, Pitts and Spanky, were headed to Duluth, Minnesota to start rehearsals for their third season of the Ice Capades.

Hell yeah. So they were getting out there to do that. So they're the headliners, by the way. It's them and some Olympian are the headliners. Yeah. Who the fuck else can make a monkey skate? That's awesome. I'm also not following that no matter what I do. No, you don't follow children or animals. You certainly don't follow fucking animals doing human tricks. That's not, you don't follow that shit. You can't top that.

You'd have to be a human that could fly because he's the only ice skating chimp. You'd have to do something that no other human can do, which would be the gift of flight, I think, to match that. It's the only way you can match that. Have wildly shaped hands where you can rip faces off. That's what chimps do. And then freak out and rip faces off with hands and feet at the same time. Just tear fucking shit apart.

So Pitts plans to stop in Evanston, Indiana, to see his parents and show them his new car. And he's normal. He's used to this. It's 65. He goes to 65 cities a year. The dude's traveling in this car. So this is normal. Now, they left Pitts and Spanky, left Los Angeles before sunrise, and they drive to Vegas. That's the next stop.

Now, Pitt says he saw a young man with his thumb out hitchhiking. He said he looked like a, quote, preppy teenage college kid. He had short hair and just looked like a college kid that was on the run. And back then, hitchhiking, you didn't go, oh, Jesus Christ, when you see a hitchhiker. People were like, oh, look at that guy. Yeah, pull over, give him a ride. It was totally like a normal thing to hitchhike and pick up hitchhikers. There weren't near as many cars available either to own.

No, that's the other. Yeah, there wasn't as many cars. And there also was just, you know, this kid, he basically, he said he had like a James Dean pompadour. He looked like a kid from the mid-60s. He was a skinny kid. He's only 5'7 and skinny, Larry, too. So here's Larry on the side of the road. Dave said he thought he might be a Mormon missionary, actually. Oh. So he was like, maybe he's a Mormon missionary. I don't know. He goes, but he was driving these long stretches with just you and a chimp in the back. He started to get fucking...

And he's like, yeah, you talk to anybody. And he said the kid had a white shirt and black tie on, like either Reservoir Dogs or a Mormon. Yeah, one of the two. And yeah, so he pulled over and the kid said he's trying to get to Michigan. And the guy said, hop in. I can take you as far as Chicago. Oh, wow. Which you don't expect that. You just got your whole trip done pretty much. Yeah. You can take buses from Chicago. As far as Chicago. Isn't that past it? Well, I mean, no, because then Michigan would be...

Isn't Michigan on the other side? No. Michigan is to the east of Wisconsin. Okay. Wisconsin is next to Minnesota. Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan. That's how they go. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Chicago is past Michigan. No, but it's right. It's still over there. No, it's not. Chicago is not past Michigan. Chicago is right. Chicago is...

Follow the lake. Sorry. We were there. We drove from fucking Milwaukee to Chicago down the fucking lake. That's what I mean. It's right there. That's above that. And then Michigan's to the east. Why do you keep saying Milwaukee? That's west of Chicago, right? Milwaukee is north of Chicago.

Okay. Yes. And then northeast of Illinois is Michigan. Why are you challenging me on this? I know where the fuck it is, and I'm telling you. Just say, okay, that's where it is. You don't know, so don't argue. What are you talking about? My point is Chicago's east of Michigan, isn't it? No. Michigan is east of Chicago.

So I keep telling you, it goes Wisconsin, then Michigan. Wisconsin is above Illinois. Michigan is next to it over there. Wait. Moving on. I get it. Dave Pitts gets it. Fucking Spanky gets it. Spanky.

Spanky's in a cage and he understands. Spanky knows where we're going. Spanky. Spanky's like, in the back. I'll tear your fucking face off if you ask if it's east of Chicago again. That's amazing. I love it.

So he said, fuck it. Let's go. So here's Larry. He gets in the car. And Raines said, Raines didn't see. Larry didn't see Spanky at first in the back. He just thought he was getting in a thing. But then he heard him. Yeah. And Larry said, I get in. And there's this ungodly howling and screeching. And what? A chimpanzee? What kind of people is this? Is his response. That's funny.

It's only one people. Yeah, what kind of people is this? That's a weird way to put it, but you know, normally, he's probably done a lot of hitchhiking, probably never gotten in a car with a chimpanzee in it. That's new. Yeah, and I would jump the fuck out. What do you do? No, I'm not riding with this. That cage is secure, right? Jesus Christ.

So Reigns, though, Larry said he wasn't afraid. He thought he was cool because he had seen Spanky on TV. Oh. And he said, yeah, we do this ice. He goes, you're the fucking ice skating chimp guy? Holy shit, I've seen you. He was like, that's fucking awesome. Yeah. That chimp is amazing. Like, he thought it was cool as shit. So he'd seen him, and he's like, let's do it. But the problem is that Spanky, from the moment...

That Larry got in the car, Spanky did not like him and freaked the fuck out. He had a vibe on him and didn't like him and started fucking going crazy. He said that he would do a pant hoot, which is when they do their freaking out fucking thing.

And Dave's son later will say Spanky knew this person should not be in the van. Wow. Bad vibe from Spanky. And Spanky was like, fuck this, fuck this, get him out, don't like him, don't like him. So I would trust the monkey at that point, or the ape or whatever the fuck it is, the chimp. I'd trust the chimp.

So they go through Utah and into Wyoming. Let's not discuss the geography of where those are. This poor monkey is riding through all of this with this guy in the car, and he's panting and hooting and hollering. Yeah, so that's the thing. But he felt bad. He didn't want to drop the kid off and be like, the monkey doesn't like you. You got to drop you off in the middle of the desert. So they stop at a motel one night. Pitts and Spanky go inside, and Larry sleeps in the Suburban.

Okay. Now, Pitts will write a letter here about this whole thing, and he says that they crossed into Colorado, then Nebraska, and all of that sort of shit. I guess the second day, while they're driving through Colorado and Nebraska, Larry pulls out a pistol. Why? A chrome-plated Derringer. Wow. And he said, you see what I got in my hand? What?

And Pitts was driving. He goes, I can't see anything. I'm driving. And so then Larry puts the gun to his head.

And pulls it back and goes, you know what it is now? To his head. The driver's head. To the driver's head. Yeah. Puts it to Dave's head here. To Pitts' head. And Pitts said it looked as big as a cannon. This fucking thing. Any gun that's close to you looks pretty scary. So then Raines tells him, I've been killing people, by the way. That's what I've been doing out here when you pick me up. Yeah, I've been out here murdering people.

Yeah. He said, they said, well, who are you killing? It was like somebody, you know, brains is like trying to get it. He said, no, he said, no people like you who stop and give me rides. Oh boy. Which is terrifying. Yeah. Um, he said, he told him, Larry said, you know, the more people you kill, the easier it gets.

So I don't really give a shit about this. And Pitts was like, what the fuck? He looked over. He said he's a he called him a skinny kid with a weak chin. Later on, like this, this kid's a fucking serial killer. Are you talking about, you know, this weak chin, little fucking nobody?

You weak-chin little pussy. That needs to come back as an insult. People need to really know their role. When you've got a weak chin. Now weak chins, people just grow big beards over them. Not you. That's the thing. You have a good chin. You have a fine chin. You don't need a beard for chin purposes. People, if I see a beard, I go, 90% chance of a weak chin right there. Or they go and get a fucking implant. Yeah.

Or they do that, which is Jesus Christ. That's so creepy. Just grow a fucking beard at that point. What are you doing?

You're not Tom Selleck. Sorry. Just grow a fucking beard. I don't know what to tell you. But if they grow a Justin Bieber beard, then you got to fucking get the implant. You got to. Yeah. It doesn't work well. No. If you got that patchy shit going on, that's a problem. I feel so bad for those guys. I do. Well, you have no option at that point. No. You just... This is... I have to be shamed. No chin and that thing? Fuck. You poor thing. Poor fucking thing. You got to get a beard merkin, a chin merkin. Nobody's scared of you. No. No.

Even this guy, he's got a gun on him and he's like this weak-chin little bitch. Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah, weak-chin ass bitch. Holding a pistol, I'll kick the shit out of you. Oh, man. So Pitts says, okay, look, I got $150 in my wallet.

So you can have that. Obviously, you're robbing me. Or I open this fucking cage and we see what happens. Well, it's in the back. That's the other thing. Well, see, the thing is with this chimp, I'm sure it'll freak out and kill you if it wants to, but it's very trained to not maul people. Yeah, it's very docile. It fucking ice skates in front of you. It skates. It skates with music blaring and people cheering and kids yelling, and it's fine. So it's a pretty calm chimp.

So, Reigns, though, Larry says, no, that's good. I'll take the 150, but I'm not leaving. Uh-oh. He says, let me see your map. He looks at a map, and he said, oh, good, we're near a river.

So he said, tell you what I'm going to do. We're going to go to this river. I'm going to kill you and that chimp, and I'm going to dump you both in the river. Oh, boy. Which is fucking insane. So he tells him to pull over and orders him to open Spanky's cage. Open Spanky's cage. Open it. Open it. So he unlocks the cage, and they said, Larry would later say, the stench of chimp feces hit them both in the face as far as that went. Like, holy shit, that's a lot. Yeah, yeah.

He said, the chimp jumps out right away. This is what Larry said. Arms all around Pitts' neck, looking over at me just like a little kid. Like, the chimp is scared. Like, protect me from this guy. Even though this chimp could maul this fucking guy and rip him to pieces. He could tear both of them to pieces in a blink of an eye. Yeah, and then just jump around and fucking play with the gun and he could do everything. And the Suburban's his. And Suburban's his and he can go on to the next gig. I work alone now.

Dead weight he was. The guy was dead weight. So he orders, Larry orders Pitts to get in the cage with Spanky. You and Spanky get in the cage. Pitts begs him, please don't put me in the cage. There's shit in there. He says, nope, you're getting in the fucking cage.

So they get into the cage together. Larry locks them in and then rains here. Larry gets into the cab and he drives with these two trapped in the fucking in the cage. And Pitt said while he was in the cage, he said, I talked to Spanky like I always did as a father talking to his son, telling him that everything was going to be all right. Oh, God, that's so depressing. It's very much as.

So once they're in Kansas, Larry stops the Suburban and comes to the back. Oh, boy. And he tells Pitts this. Quote, how does it feel to talk your way out of death? So later on, Larry will say he couldn't bring himself to kill Pitts and Spanky. He said, this is what's fucked up. This is what's crazy. Think about this. The dog thing, yeah. No, he said...

Later on, he told a psychiatrist he saw something special in their human-chimp bond. They had this bond and he just felt terrible. He can't destroy it. Yeah, he saw a father-son relationship. He was like, what is that? That's so weird. Wow, that's amazing. And he didn't want to ruin it because he didn't have it. Isn't that weird? He didn't get angry at him for it. He did the opposite. It was so unfamiliar and beautiful to him, he couldn't break it. He couldn't destroy it. Isn't that weird? Yeah.

It's so fucking weird, is it not? So they end up spending the next 17 hours after that driving to South Haven, Michigan. They stop for breakfast at a roadside diner.

With the chimp. He fucking, they got out and ate breakfast and was like, don't say anything. I'm sure he had like the gun under the table at him and shit like that. So that's wild. Um, Pitt said he was terrified the whole time. He said it's stop signs or when a cop car would pull along. He said he considered jumping out of the suburban because he could have, but then he said, even if you do get away, then what happens to Spanky?

He didn't want to leave Spanky with this fucking guy, so he would go drive off and crash and kill Spanky or go shoot Spanky on a spite or whatever. So that's what he said. They get in the South Haven. Pitts is driving again now. So we've gone back to one here on positions. We have a mutual understanding and trust is built again. Yeah, it's a little Stockholm thing going on. So Larry tells Pitts to pull over.

The chimp trainer, he has no money there. So he asked him for $10 out of the money that he took from him. He goes, I don't have any money. You're leaving me here with no gas or food money. Can I at least have $10 out of the $150 I gave you? So Larry handed him $20. Said, here, take $20.

No, you can have 20. The fuck is going on here? I'm going to kill you and your chimp and dump him in a river. No, you guys are OK. You know what? Here's 20 bucks back. They become friends. They're going to exchange fucking information now. This is ridiculous. Yeah. So then Larry warned him. And I don't know how he was planning on enforcing this, but he said, you are not to tell anyone about this for two weeks.

Two weeks, and then I get to say whatever I want? Yes, because he said at that time, I'm going to kill myself. Oh. So once I'm dead, you can fucking say whatever you want. Yeah. He said, but if you do tell, I have your ID, and I know where to find you. I will come kill you. Is it a deal? It's a deal. And Pitts, I mean, the guy stays, he would say anything at this point. Yeah. Yeah, great. Sure. Yeah. No, no. Sounds good. Come to my house and fuck my mother. Absolutely. No problem. Yeah. That sounds great. No, I'll make an appointment and everything. It'll be great. She'll be waiting for you all trimmed up and-

Wow. So he gets away that way. Pitts takes off. He goes on to have a long career with the chimp. Never says a word? Oh, no, he does. He does. Yeah, later, but not right now. Later he tells people. He writes his daughter this lengthy thing. No, I think he does tell police about it, but he doesn't know who he is. He's just a kid. Great point, yeah. So he doesn't have any ID on him, and he's just some kid. And also, he doesn't know where the fuck he's going. He could be in Maine by now. 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. We get support from Dove. Hey y'all, it's your girl Kiki Palmer, host of the Wondery Podcast. Baby, this is Kiki Palmer. Let me cut to the chase. Did you know that in many states across the U.S., it's still not illegal to discriminate against people based on the way their hair grows out of their head? To deny Black folks from jobs and opportunities because they have braids, locks, twists, or bantu knots? That's messed

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

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

As far as I'm concerned, there wasn't. Guilty by Design dives into the wild story of Alexander and Frank, interior designers who in the 80s landed the jackpot of all clients. We went to bed one night and the next morning we woke up as one of the most wanted people in the United States. What are they guilty of?

You can listen to Guilty by Design exclusively and add free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Who knows? But later on in May, a 30-year-old man who's a schoolteacher named Gary Smock, S-M-O-C-K, goes missing. His wife reports him missing. This is May 30th, 1964. He's missing a couple days before that.

So this is 5 p.m. May 30th, 1964. It's a Saturday afternoon. A patrol officer, a cop, makes – there's a car, a Chevy on the side of the road that looks abandoned because there's nobody there. So he stops and he sees bloodstains on the bumper. Oh, shit. That's not good. And then he sees personal papers scattered in the front seat. So he's like, okay, there's something going on here. So he had the car towed to a police station.

They got a tow truck out there to tow it to a police station so they could look at it closer, not on the side of the highway. You know what I mean? So at that exact time, Mrs. Gary Smock, Gary Smock's wife, was in the police station making a missing persons report. And saw his car? And, well, at that time, she heard the cops talking about there's a car, blah, blah, blah. And she said, that sounds like my husband's car. It was near the Kalamazoo Zoo.

The Kalamazoo zoo. So he had been missing since the night before. Yeah. So they popped the car's trunk and inside is the body of Gary Smock, white 30 year old male face in a pool of fresh blood. They say just a mess. So from the items in the car, he was identified as Gary Smock. He's a 30 year old teacher from Plymouth, Michigan. He'd been shot in the head just below the ear twice. Yeah.

Okay. It's a 22 caliber bullet and there's two of them in there. Then a cord was wrapped around one wrist as if he'd been tied up at some point and broke the bounds. Untied, yeah. And his shoes were missing, not wearing any shoes. No shoes. And also they figure out later while talking to his wife that his watch is also gone. When they inventory all the stuff, she says, where's his watch?

So they estimate that he died pretty quickly from the shooting. And they said, though, it could have happened. It happened that day. It's fresh. Blood isn't even dry yet. So he said sometime between 6 a.m. and 2 p.m.

In the car, though. In the car. Yeah, it happened around here in the trunk, actually. So that's back there. They can only get murder time of death to about three hours now. That's in best conditions. They find the body early and all that. Back then, eight hours was a pretty good fucking window. So the police do door to door canvases of all the hotels and motels in the immediate area trying to reconstruct the last day of Gary's life here.

They learned Friday, the day before this, he'd been on his way to the home of his in-laws in Allegan after leaving an appointment in Battle Creek with the Chamber of Commerce. He'd been there looking for accommodations for a future Church of God youth convention and had a Chamber of Commerce map of local facilities in his car. So he was probably checking them out. He mentioned to the officials at the Chamber of Commerce that he had to leave to make it to a family dinner.

His wife, Thelma, heard from him around 6 p.m. Friday evening. He told her that he wouldn't make it home for dinner, but he'd be there soon. So, go ahead and eat without me. Make me a plate, whatever. Make me a to-go plate. No other sightings of him or contact from him until later that night when his car was seen at a Kalamazoo service station around 11 p.m. The attendant recalled seeing two people in the car.

Okay. Now, a palm print and a fingerprint were lifted from the car and later determined to belong to someone other than Gary or members of Gary Smock's family. Right. A foreign fingerprint. So police were hopeful they'd get a match here. There was another bullet recovered from the floor of the car's trunk. His wallet was empty and a check had been written on Friday evening in the amount of $11 to cash. Okay.

So he wrote a check for cash for $11 bucks, $11, which is a very specific number. Sure. Now, earlier that day, about 60 miles away in Elkhart, Indiana, a service station attendant named Charles Snyder, who's 33 years old, also was shot twice in the head with a 22. Oh, shit. 22 caliber twice in the head. Deuce, deuce. Um,

They said there's about half a tank of gas in Smock's car. They estimated the car had gone at least 100 miles after being filled at 11 p.m. So agencies from both states were trying to figure out if the same bullet, you know, these are from the same gun, basically. I don't know if these are connected. June 5th, 1964, a tip comes in to police about this whole matter.

And it's from a pretty fucking fun source here. Well, yeah. Apparently Larry, after all this, he went right back to Sue and

Yeah. He went to Sue. 30-year-old by now, yeah. And he ends up going and tells her everything that happened. Really? And Sue called her mother to tell her about it. Sue? And then a friend came over to talk about it. Her mother sent some friend over to talk about it. And somebody called police. So they said, we're calling the police. You need to turn yourself in. This is crazy. Blah, blah, blah.

It was shortly after midnight. The police receive a call from Arthur Booth who told them that Larry told him of a killing of a school teacher and showed me the murder weapon. Oh, boy. So he said Raines planned to commit suicide from remorse. So you might want to get over here and grab him before he blows his brains out. Yeah, before there's no justice. So Sergeant Thompson and Detective Duncan go to the apartment here, Booth's apartment, where he is, where Larry is.

They arrived just as Larry's walking out of the building. Oh, terrific. That's easy. Yeah, there he is. That's the guy we're looking for. And they ask him as they're walking up to him. They didn't they didn't like read him his rights or like, hey, you. They just said, did you kill Gary Smock? What? It's the worst police work ever. Did you kill Gary Smock as he's not even in cuffs yet? He's just fucking walking up.

It's an armed man if he did. Yeah. They've been told he has the gun right here. He doesn't have it out. They don't see it, but he could have it tucked in his waistband or something. And they're like, you kill Gary Smock. It's a Derringer. It could be on his wrist and he could just pop it out like a fucking like a cowboy, like a villain, like a like a villain in an Old West casino. You don't know. He said that Larry said, quote, Do you mean the school teacher? Yes, I did.

That guy kept walking. Yeah. He's like, yeah, yeah, that's me. That's that's I've been waiting for you. What took you so long? Yeah. Yeah. So they said, well, where is the gun? And he said, in my pocket.

And they were like, okay, will you put your hands behind your back and let us take it? He goes, yeah, sure. Oh, my God. No problem. No confrontation. Nothing. They're very lucky. Yeah, absolutely. So during the three-hour interrogation, they bring him in. He tells that he's killed other people. It's not just him. There's other people also. They said that they talked to him. He said he was quiet and clean-cut appearing. And they didn't even know if they believed him.

He's 5'5", or 5'7", 130 pounds. They said he talked freely, alternating between laughing and being serious. And they were like, is this dude for real? They didn't believe him. They were like, this can't be right. But he did have the .22 caliber pistol when he was taken into custody, which that's not good. So they talked to him more.

He said, well, I hitchhiked a ride with a 30-year-old father of two young daughters on the M43. That's Gary Smock. And he said that he pulled out his pistol and ordered Smock to stop on a rural road. Go over here and pull over. He said, I robbed him. And he said, well, how much money did you get? $3. Shit. This is for $3. Three bucks. Three bucks. This dude has a family, kids, $3. $3.

Is that the lowest amount we've heard anyone murder for? I think so. $3? And he took his shoes. By the way, he's wearing Gary Smock's shoes. At this time? At this very time. Oh, boy. He's fucking wearing a dead man's shoes. Oh, Jesus. Don't kill someone, steal their shoes, and then wear them to the police station to talk about it. That's not a good thing to do. What'd you take from him? Three bucks and these kicks. And these, yeah. Holy smokes. That's not good. Stop.

So he said that he forced Smock to get in the trunk after that. After he took his stuff, forced him to get in the trunk, and then he drove on. Larry drove with Smock in the trunk. Larry said he stopped when he heard Smock making noises and banging around the trunk like Billy Bats and Goodfellas. Right. Help. Help.

This went exactly like it went in Goodfellas. He drives to a side road where he said he's tied Smock's hands with a rope that he found in the car. So then he's got him laid down and his hands tied so he can't make that much noise. So then he shoots him twice in the back of the head. Good Lord. In the trunk, closes the trunk, drives on. With the body in the trunk, he drove to Elkhart.

where he obtained $100 in a holdup of a gas station where he shot the guy at the gas station, too. That was Snyder. So, yeah, he said he did that. And, yep, just shot him in the back of the head and killed him. He said that was pretty easy. Charles Edward Snyder, 33, is the gas station attendant in Elkhart. And he said, yeah, yeah, Gary's body was in the trunk, and I was in there robbing him and shooting him. Oh.

So he's on a little murder spree here. Yeah, he's got everything to lose. I mean, nothing to lose, but everything to lose. And he's talking like it's just, there's no consequences to this. It's fine. So he wants to talk to a priest. Really? And he'll talk to a shrink, too, which is what he really needs to talk to. So shortly after arriving at the station, he talks alone with a priest for about an hour.

And then after that, he was read his rights after he confessed and talked to a priest for an hour. Then he was read his rights. Why did they do that? Because it's 1964. I think the Miranda thing was going on right now at this moment. Yeah. 64 is the case. So they didn't. It's in the pay. It's in the news. But you didn't have to read a suspect's rights right away. There was a very gray area in when you could do that.

So he said he waived his rights, didn't care, and I did it. That's it. So he's arraigned between 3 and 4 a.m. He's advised by the judge of his right to an attorney, and he said, I don't want one. Really? Don't need an attorney. Yep. And he made a complete and formal confession in court, recorded by the court reporter,

The stenographer is doing this. Yeah. Write it all down. He's like, I'll tell you everything I did right now. And they're like, I guess. Fuck it. We got a guy typing. So sure. They're writing. So at 430 a.m., the Dr. Clarence M. Schreier from the medical. He's the medical superintendent of the Kalamazoo State Hospital was called and they said, please check this guy out. He's a psychiatrist. And so the doctor initially said, can you bring him back later in the morning? Little sleepy. Shit to do.

Shortly thereafter, he called back and said, all right, I'll be there at eight o'clock to examine him. So he brought the clinical director of the Kalamazoo State Hospital, Dr. William Decker, with him. And yeah, about six months earlier, when he tried to kill himself, he had been admitted to this hospital. And this Dr. Schreier had diagnosed him as a sociopathic personality.

Six months ago. So now he knows this guy. So just prior to the psychiatric examination, Larry stated to the assistant prosecuting attorney, who's also there middle of the fucking night, quote, you've mentioned something about an attorney. I think maybe I better have one. The assistant prosecuting attorney said no. He said, no, I can't do that for you. No magistrate's going to be available till 930 a.m. to appoint you an attorney because he doesn't have an attorney.

So no one's available to appoint you an attorney. So you can't have an attorney till 930 at least. So the doctors conduct a two hour psychiatric examination while he's waiting to get an attorney. So I guess, yeah, that's that's fucking crazy. So they the lawyer finally gets there at 130 p.m.

That's it. So seven hours after his arrest and during an interview with a psychiatrist, he says that casually, they said real casual that, yeah, after I killed Smock, I washed the blood off the trunk with a can of Coke or a bottle of Coke. Really? Just rinsed it. Got rid of that. And then I drove to Elkhart and I shot that gas station attendant. And they said, is there anyone else? Have you shot anyone else? This is a lot. It was a big day for a guy like you. Yeah. Yeah. And he said, yes.

How many? And he said, well, who? And he said, there was that Air Force guy. I think it was Pawpaw. I was robbing the gas station he worked at. Air Force as in like when airplanes were invented? Yeah, an Air Force guy who worked at a gas station on the side, apparently. And an old man called him Pawpaw, so he had to... Pawpaw was the place. Oh, okay. Not the person. So they said, anyone else? Yeah. And he said, yes.

And they said, okay, where, what? He said, some guy running a gas station in Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, one of those about a month ago. He doesn't even remember what state he was in when he killed the person. About a month ago. He said, anyone else? And he said, some guy in Las Vegas, near Vegas. He picked me up while I was hitchhiking.

That was the guy he killed right before Pitts picked him up. Yeah. He told the psychiatrist, they said, well, why were you doing this? He said, money. I just needed money. You know, robbed him. Of nothing at a time. Like very small amounts. Yeah. And they said, well, would you use the money for? And he said, stakes and booze. Stakes. Stakes and booze. Wow.

What the fuck are you a cowboy? What the fuck are you doing? Rolling in town. I mean, a bottle of whiskey and a big steak and a room and a bath and a lady. Holy shit. And it's nice. It's the sixties. It's a Tom and Jerry steak. It's gotta be with the bone in the middle. It's what's silly steak they had in the sixties. It's a bad cut. Oh man. He said steaks and booze. Um,

He said, wow, this is what he said. It sounds crazy, but I visualized it as a last supper. Before I died, this world owed me a last supper, which constituted my concept of a happy day, a steak dinner and to get drunk. So at the end of every time he kills someone, he decides he's going to kill himself and he's going to have this big last dinner. But then he goes, maybe I'll not kill myself. I'll rob someone else, have another last dinner. I don't know, that steak was pretty good. Let's do it again. Yeah.

That's what he does. He said each time... He's going to kill himself into having gout, man. He's going to be loaded down, heart disease. He's going to be a mess, clogged arteries. He said each time he changed his mind about suicide and decided to kill someone else instead.

I really like steak. What the fuck? I love steak and booze. You don't get it. Who's steak and being drunk? Especially in Vegas, man. You rob somebody, you can get a big old steak and some whiskey at one of these casinos. For nothing. He said, yeah, for like a dollar. He said, I turned myself in to get killed.

That's what he told the psychiatrist. Oh, he's had enough, yeah. He said, I didn't turn myself in to do time, all right? All right. He wants to be killed. Yeah, he wants a death penalty. He said, I thought they had the electric chair. Somebody told me they had the electric chair at Jackson Prison. They called it Jacktown, that it was in the basement of Jacktown. Jacktown sounds like there's jizz everywhere. That sounds gross. Jacktown. You are sentenced to Jacktown. Oh, man. No. Ankle deep in jizz. So chafed. All the time. You got to wear boots all the time. Yeah.

So they talked to him more and he said, yeah, the veteran guy he killed ends up being a guy named Vernon Laben who is 23 years old.

23 year old air force guy who also worked in this gas station and he didn't work he was just there i think i didn't think he worked there but he shot he got 200 from him this is at battle creek michigan as he killed the airmen um in addition he killed uh people in las vegas and kentucky was that other gas station that he didn't know the state it was in and he said that um

And no details were obtained in the other killings because they said we have limited our questioning to up to now to the smock case. He just volunteered the other stuff, the cop said. We've got proof of the smock thing. We've just got all this information for this. We were asking him about that and he's like, let me tell you about some other people I killed. Like, holy shit. So they have been looking for a murderer in the other case. Battle Creek has been looking for the Vernon Laben case.

He's a Custer Air Station airman, shot to death April 6th at a mobile station on West Columbia Road near the I-94, where he worked part-time to finance his night courses at Kellogg Community College and to save for his approaching marriage. Get it.

out of here this fucking guy yeah kid is working his fucking ass off working two jobs he's in the military working at a gas station nights to fucking get extra cash and someone comes in and fucking shoots him both Smock and LeBen were shot with .22 caliber weapons along with Snyder to the Elkhart guy

Also shot and robbed at the service station. Reigns here, Larry said that he traded a .22 caliber pistol used in the LeBend murder for the weapon that he used in the Indiana Elkhart murder and the Smock murder. So that would explain why the crime lab said that the slugs didn't match. He said, yeah, it's because I had two guns. I traded them. So two bullets have been found to be similar, but a final test has yet to be completed.

Now, they also talk about a possible sixth victim.

Maybe six. Maybe six. They talk about this. This would be the police talk about somebody, Donald Perkins, who's 27, another filling station attendant. They said that a bartender in the town he was in said that Larry resembled a youth who was in his tavern about the time of the shooting of Donald Perkins. So they're going to talk about that. Now, October 1964, they go to trial for Larry right away.

Yeah. For the murder of Gary and the murder of Edwards and the murder of LeBenn. Mm-hmm. Lowry pleads insanity. That's his plea. He's going to go insanity. Hmm. Okay. Yeah. The shrink says that he has a high normal IQ. Yeah. He said about 110, so in the normal range, high end of the normal. They said during this, this is Dr. Donald J. Carrick, University of Michigan psychiatrist. He interviewed him twice, he said, in the county jail, and he said that he

He was mentally ill when Smock was killed and mentally ill when he attempted to take his own life with the hose there and mentally ill at the present time. He said that Raines would remain mentally ill until he had proper psychiatric care. And he also said at the time of the Smock murder, Raines did not know right from wrong. He said he was driven by an irresistible urge to kill himself.

Irresistible. Irresistible. Yeah. Wow, man. He said it's traced to his childhood. He said he had Larry had confessed to the psychiatrist of five different murders. And he said in the end, they figured out that he chose victims who reminded him of either his father or himself.

One of those two, depending on who it was there. So he hates his father too. So during the trial, they have the psychiatrist. Danny also testifies, the brother.

He testifies about the knife incident when they were kids, so that's not good. He said that although he and Larry have never gotten along, he said, quote, I feel sorry for him and I wish I could take his place. Really? That's what he says. So the verdict comes in here and they find him guilty as shit. I mean, yeah. How's he going to argue that? Yeah. Other than saying he's really crazy, there's really nothing else you can do.

All the press there said he broke into a big smile when they read the verdict. A shit-eating one? A shit-eating grin. They didn't mention what he was eating when he smiled, but it was a grin of some kind. Broke into a big smile. Sentencing here. You, sir, may fuck off life without parole. Okay. He's 19.

No parole. End of story. End of story. He's fucked up. Yeah, I don't know how you're going to fix this guy. He's a fucking mess. Yeah, that's a life, though. He's 19. Holy shit. Now, as soon as he goes to prison, Danny breaks up with Kathy and hooks up with Sue, Larry's girlfriend.

That's what I mean. They're in constant competition. God damn it, Danny. Larry disowns them both. I want nothing to do with either of these assholes. Good news, man. It's very easy for you to disown everybody. You don't have to ever see these people. But he said he doesn't want anything to do with his brother ever again. Or this woman. Don't come to visit me. All that kind of shit.

He tries to off himself in prison as well here. Larry does. He smashed light bulbs and slipped slivers of glass into gelatin capsules that he swallowed at bedtime. Oh, man. So he could get them down, and that way they would go in his stomach and fuck him up. That is a bad way to die. That's not the way you would choose to kill yourself. That's the craziest...

Holy shit, man. That's dead serious. He said he woke up and he was fine. He was disappointed. He's like, what the fuck? I'm fine. Just fine. I don't know. So then he ate him and the fucking digested him. Then he works in the wood shop. So he tried drinking a bunch of lacquer thinner.

Why would you do that? Thought that would kill him. It says poison on the bottle. Right. That's why you're in the wood shop. Use a saw dog. Those are apparently you're supervised using. Yeah. So he said that he didn't die, but quote, the burp was horrible.

Which I can imagine. It's got an aftertaste. It's not like a wine that gets better as you swallow it. Worse than a seven-year-old drinking whiskey. So then he tried a trick that he heard about from other prisoners with a heavy book. He tied a string around it and then around his neck. And then you hang the book off the edge of your bed.

And people in prison told him that when he fell asleep, the muscles in his neck would relax and the string would choke him to death. Yeah. Instead, he just snored all night. He couldn't sleep. He couldn't fall asleep because it was uncomfortable. So he had to stop. He couldn't get it to work.

Yeah. So he appeals under a new state law here. The news, he appealed this here saying that the life in prison without parole, the new Michigan constitution grants a right of appeal to all convicted felons. This is how long ago this was. The clerk of the Supreme Court is expected to set a date for the hearing. He pled insanity. And yeah, he's saying he gets an automatic appeal. So he's going to try to do that. He does get used to prison, though.

Sure. Gets used to it. Before, he was really anti-drug. But before he went into prison, he said he believed that marijuana could lead a man to heroin and a violent death. I mean, anything could lead you to heroin and a violent death. He bought the whole fucking propaganda machine, huh? They got him. It was the early 60s. And then in prison, he started drinking homemade fucking prison wine made from potatoes.

So like vodka wine, that would be. And he said he's got real into that. And he said in prison, he wanted to nurture a brutal image. That's what he said.

He grew his hair long, grew a big beard and mustache and all that kind of thing. He's only 5'7". He tried to manson it, basically. Weak chin, James. Weak chin, skinny guy. He ends up getting up to as much as 235 pounds. Shit! Trying to be formidable. 5'7"? Yep, and he lifts weights, too, all the time. He's trying to look like a little scary guy here. Eventually, he lost weight. He fasted on nothing but black coffee for 29 days.

Imagine how jittery you'd be. Jittery and shitting liquid out. Oh, you'd be shitting coffee. So, yeah, he said that he frightened a lot of people, he said, because he killed five times. People never knew what he was going to do because he was like the – he killed the most people of anybody around in the prison. So they're like, Jesus. Yeah.

He said, people made it clear to me from the start that I was different, unique, and dangerous and not to be messed with, not to be hassled at all. And I really never was. But the mind trip of trying to grow into those shoes. That's what he said. He said early in his prison time, he built a miniature crossbow from rubber bands and the innards of a wind-up clock. Oh, no. Yeah, so he built a little slingshot gun, basically. And he's shooting that at people. Yup. I guess he...

He was involved in, well, then he hit it in the base of a wooden chessboard that he made with a false bottom in woodshop. Then he was part, he was the hit man in a plot to kill a convict here, another fucking person, a loan shark who had refused to lend any of these eight men money. So these eight guys get together. They choose Larry as the killer and they want to kill this guy. Larry says his crossbow was ingenious.

He said, and it would have worked, but one of the co-conspirators snitched and the crossbow was discovered and he was sent to solitary. He said a black, silent sensory deprivation cell.

Yeah. Just dark. He said it had a toilet and a sink, but they're cemented into solid blocks. The toilet didn't flush. They flushed it from the other side of the wall and they never flushed that stinking thing. It didn't have any water in it. It was just disgusting. Oh, Jesus. He said you had a sink that dribbled one single faucet that dribbled. There wasn't any handle on it. So whatever dribble they set up was the dribble you got.

What? That's all you got for water. He said, aside from that, you had a quarter-inch steel plate bed. He said, I slept on the floor. He said, it has double doors. It's soundproof, lightproof, and you're totally alone. You had one blanket and a pair of white coveralls and a pair of socks. That's all you had, literally. You amused yourself with a ball of dust. Just sitting here. He said, they put me in there another time for seven days for inciting a riot. Well, that'll happen. Yeah, you'll get in trouble for that. Don't do that. Yeah.

He said, they put me in there for seven days and nothing ever affected me that deeply in all my life. So this really affected him. That seven days of darkness is a motherfucker. He said, you couldn't have soap, water, toothbrush, toothpaste, nothing. No towels, no washcloths, nothing. You ever go camping when your hands get black and greasy and rancid and they start stinking because you can't wash them?

In there, you have to eat with your hands because you're not allowed to use any kind of utensils. You always prayed they would feed you something that would run or at least was small enough to bounce so you could get it in your mouth without touching it because you don't want to touch it with those meat hooks you got after seven days. Good Lord. So I came out and I said, no, I can't let them do that to me. So I made them take me back in. You will right now, you sons of bitches.

So I did 21 days because I had to show them and me they couldn't make me afraid and they couldn't control me with fear. So he forced them to be put back in the hole when he got out. Seven days. I'll do it again twice. Let's go. Let's go. That's good. I'm going to show you. Now, 1969, Danny, brother Danny, older brother. He is arrested and tried in Battle Creek, Michigan, on charges of kidnapping and assault while armed with a dangerous weapon and intent to rob and steal.

That's okay. This is a, in the connection with, he kidnapped a Kellogg community college girl and she escaped unharmed when he was forced to stop his car for something. She took off and ran.

He's found guilty of a lesser charge of felonious assault and sentenced to, you, sir, may fuck off three to four years in prison. Now, during that time, his wife divorces him while he's in prison. No, different lady. Not Sue, not Kathy. Different one. Yeah, they get married all the time and divorced.

So 1972, Danny gets parole. So he does about three years. He returns to Kalamazoo and gets a job as what, Jimmy?

Driver. Gas station operator. Yeah. There you go. Why'd he do that? I don't know. Why would they allow that? It's a gas station. They can do background check. It's a fucking gas station. That's a great point. It's the 60s. They aren't background checking shit. They aren't background checking anybody. Nowadays, you can barely get a background check when people are working with 20 kids, never mind a gas station. They don't fucking care. If you steal something, they'll just call the cops. It's all on film. They don't fucking care. It's not like that.

He's 29, by the way, Danny, at this point. He makes friends with a guy. I won't even call him a guy. He makes friends with a 15-year-old. Oh, Jesus. A 15-year-old who is currently a vagrant at the time. A homeless 15-year-old. It's a little street urchin kid? Yep. Named Brent Eugene Koster. K-O-S-T-E-R. Uh-huh.

He's got a bad family life. He's got a schizophrenic mother, an alcoholic father, and he's out on the street. Now it makes sense. Perfect. These two are going to be great together. In the 60s, I'm sure there was a great social structure set up for this child. A lot of stuff set up for these kids. Yeah, I'm sure. So jail is what they set up. Right. We got a juvie hall for you. And the Air Force. How you thought of the Army? Yeah.

So at 15, Brent was game for anything, he said. He didn't care. He was up for whatever. He's a street kid. He doesn't give a shit. He'd already stolen cars, committed over a dozen burglaries, and was completely out of control by 15 because he's living on the street.

So after meeting Brent, Danny provides him with a room in one of Danny's girlfriend's trailers. One of his girlfriend's trailers. He's got several girlfriends. I assume they're all in trailers. Not one of the rooms in his girlfriend's trailer. Yeah.

Yeah. One of his girlfriends has room extra. So basically he becomes his father figure here. I mean, he's twice his age, pretty much 29 as opposed to 15. So, I mean, he looks up to him as this role model, which is not great. July 17th, 1972. Now. Okay. He's been out of jail. He's hooked up with Brent. Danny and Brent are a little team. July 17th. Motorcycle riders in woods near Galesburg, Michigan. Uh,

come across an abandoned blue Opel cadet. That's the car. Remember those little Opels? It's a Dodge, right? Dodge Opel? Yeah, it's an Opel. Yeah, Dodge ended up being part of Opel. I think Dodge bought Opel maybe. Maybe. After a while or whatever. I think so. Um,

In the car, in the backseat of the car, they find the pretty decomposed bodies of two young women in the backseat. The car's registration is traced to a Chicago area man who had reported his daughter missing. So you got a pretty good idea who this might be. She went with her roommate to see her brother in Ann Arbor but never got there.

Okay. They were reported missing to the Chicago area police at July 5th while they were on a trip to Ann Arbor here. Fingerprints help identify them as Linda Clark and Claudia Bidstrup, B-I-D-S-T-R-U-P, both of them 19 years old, college students.

So they find them in the back. Like I said, this is off the M96. They find them. Now, the one is the daughter of a Chicago police detective. Uh-oh.

That's not good. The autopsy, they're so decomposed that they're unable to find a cause of death at the time from autopsy. But the ropes, later on they will when they look at the reports, but the ropes around their neck indicated they'd been strangled, though, because they both have ropes around their neck. They said they'd been murdered, it had to be more than a week before they were found. And this is in July. Summer in fucking Michigan? Yeah.

So the gas tank was full. So they surmise they couldn't have found their killer very far from here because the gas tank's full. So they started to check around the immediate area. And Jesus Christ. Now, on July 5th, Danny was at work at the Sprinkle Road service station there. And we'll tell you exactly what happened to these two girls. Linda and Claudia pulled up about 1.30 a.m. to get gas. And Danny was working at the station there.

Costa Brent fills their tank because this was in the full service days. You come out, somebody pops your hood, checks your oil, you know, fill the tank. Now Danny pops the hood. Okay. And Costa's filling the tank. What Danny does is he's not checking for fluids and all that motherfucker not run. He's dismantling a wire to the spark plugs and making the car sound as if there's a problem with it. Right.

He then had the girls drive the car into the bay of the garage so he could have a closer look at it. It's got to be something easy. I'll take care of it for you. Oh, he's so nice. Thank God. It's 1.30 a.m. What are we going to do? It ran perfect for you to get here. Now, all of a sudden, it's all fucked up. And they didn't know any better. So they're like, okay. So they did this. When they pull into the bay, Brent and Danny pull knives out. Danny tells them not to scream and he won't hurt them.

He then tells him to get into the back seat and he drives the car to the back of the station where it's totally dark back there. Right.

Now, Brent and Larry tie them up. One of them kept watch on the girls while the other one then went and attended to the customers. Remember, it's a gas station. It's open 24 hours. So when they got them all tied up, they had to say, you stay here. I got to go check somebody out. There's no automatic card at the pump shit. Six gallons in that Edsel. I'll be right back. I got to go. Yeah, I got to go check the oil on this fucking Studebaker. Hold on a minute here.

So, Brent saw, when he comes back, I guess, he sees Danny sexually assaulting Linda. And then later said that Danny told him that he'd also had sex with Claudia, too. So, he raped both of them, Danny did, he said. Then, Koster...

Rapes Linda in the van as well. Danny puts Claudia back into the car. And I guess that is where he told Danny tells Brent that it's time to kill her now. He said, it's time for you to quote, taste the medicine is what he told him and kill her. Yeah.

He had tried to strangle her with a rope, but he couldn't. He couldn't get the job done. Because it takes a while. And it takes a long time. He's a huge guy. He's 6'6". Really? Brent is a fucking gigantic monster. He's a big 250-pound 6'6", son of a bitch. He's very capable of strangling people. Yeah, he just can't really do it. But then Danny comes in and helps him, and together they strangle her. Teamwork, you know, makes the dream work, as we know. So then they turn to Linda...

And Brent manages to strangle her on his own. He manages to pull that off. He learned from watching. They put both women into the backseat of the Opel and cover them with a blanket. Then Brent drove the car by himself to a wooded area near Galesburg. He poured gasoline over it and lit a cigarette. Then he placed the cigarette on the floor of the car and

But left before he knew if it actually caught, which it didn't. It did nothing because it's the fumes, not the liquid. It's the fumes, not the liquid. It's sparks, not actual. And it's got to get hot. Yeah, there's many different reasons why that didn't work. When you see in a movie when someone, there's a trail of gas and somebody flicks a cigarette and it all, that really rarely would happen. If the cigarette hit right and the spark hit it, then maybe. I've tried flicking cigarettes in campfires and nothing. No.

You got to throw a flame in there. That's what does it. You got to throw a flame. Yeah, it doesn't really work. So that's what they do. He walks away and he hitchhiked back. Okay. So Danny then showed him money, two rings, a pair of earrings, and some photographs that he took from them. Why would you steal their photographs? They're not worth anything. To remember exactly their face. That's sick. That's sick. Yeah. Yeah.

When the car was found, the girls' purses were empty of money. The police thought that the incident could be related to another murder that we'll talk about here. All the victims had been similarly tied, but they said the girls from Chicago were too decomposed to determine whether they'd been raped or how they'd been killed. But we know they were raped, because we'll find that out later. So this is a lot here. Now, August 5th, 1972. That's July 5th this happens. Yes.

August 5th, we'll go to Pamela Fearnoy. She's a 19-year-old, another 19-year-old, from Kalamazoo, student at Western Michigan University. She leaves her apartment to go shopping. She leaves her apartment to hitchhike to go shopping.

Back then, hitchhiking was a common way to get around. Why was it accepted? They literally, people would be like, no, I'm just going to hitch. Don't worry about it. You want a ride? No, I'm hitching. They'd be like, all right, have a good one. Totally fucking normal, totally casual, totally fine until serial killers started coming about. Well, ones that we knew about. So she is picked up by Danny and Brent in the hitchhiking thing, which obviously is not good, and she's never seen again.

And we'll talk more about that later because there's plenty about that. So September 4th, 1972, Brent is arrested. For what? Well, even though Danny told him to keep his fucking mouth shut, Brent is 15. This is why, what do we say in crime and sports? Never have teenagers in your hit squad. And this is the reason why. Children are so bad at keeping secrets. They're terrible at keeping big secrets. So...

He apparently talked to several street workers. I don't know if they mean prostitutes or people who like sweep the streets or whatever the fuck it is. Street maintenance employees. But in September, on September 4th here, he talks to several of them, one of whom turned out to be a police informant.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's ladies. Yeah. So she tells the cops and Brent is arrested on September 5th, interrogated, and he readily admits his guilt in these killings, also implicating Danny, who was arrested later on that evening. So he tells about Pamela Fearnow. He said, you don't even know about Pamela, but there's a girl we took, Pamela Fearnow. She said they picked her up.

and they used a knife to take her against her will to a wooded area. Then Brent tied her up in the back of the van, covered her with a sleeping bag, and laid next to her as Danny drove. Creepy. Over a period of six hours, both of them raped her repeatedly. Good Lord, man. Then tied her up and took her to another wooded area near a lake. Koster said that while they drank beer, she had a glass of wine. Okay, okay.

What, did this turn into a fucking camping trip now? This girl's terrified. What the fuck is going on? By the end of the day, they finished the bottle of wine, he said. Then they went to a third area...

And at this point, Pamela began to scream and struggle against her bonds. She's like, this is obviously bad. It's not working. Yeah. I thought it'd be cool. They gave me wine. Everything's fine. And maybe they'll let me go. They're still doing the horrible things. I want out of here. This isn't going to work. So while she's screaming, Danny punches her in the stomach. And she still keeps screaming.

So then he put a plastic bag over her head to suffocate her. Oh, boy. This poor fucking girl. Jesus Christ, that's sick. What a sick fuck. So Danny left the van and Pamela was quiet. Brent follows him. Then Danny looked inside the van. Pamela was dead, it seemed. So they placed her away from the van on the ground. Danny said that he'd seen a police cruiser. So Brent ran away.

Apparently the police, the body is 20 feet from the fucking van. Wow. Danny says, oh shit, there's a cop. Brent runs away. The cops don't see Brent run away. They stop with Danny. They get out. They check his ID. They ask him for ID. Check his ID and then let him go. There's a fucking dead teenager 20 feet that way. Right fucking there. Right there. He's lucky he didn't stab her or something because he'd have blood all over him. Yeah. Really fucked. Yeah.

He encountered the same patrol officer four times before he returned to the trailer. Apparently four times. He kept seeing the guy.

So they head back, Brent and Danny head back to the trailer. Brent called him later to get a ride home. That's how he got home. So we don't know where the fuck he was out in the world. He took off from the cop and then he called later and said, hey, can you come get me? They went back the next day because they just left her over there on the ground. Yeah. So they go back the next day to move her to a more secluded area. At which time Brent said at that point he saw two ropes around her neck.

And he said, I only recall placing one there, so Danny must have put another rope on her neck and fucking strangled her. She hasn't even been found yet. Right. And they still don't find her right away because we'll talk about it, but Brent doesn't tell them where she is right away.

So at that point, Brent says, I got something else I got to tell you. What in the shit, man? How could you just do this so much in the 60s? So much. In the 60s, 70s, he said, Danny told me about something else that he did that I wasn't there for, but he told me that he kidnapped and raped a 28-year-old named Patricia Houck, H-O-W-K.

She's 28 years old and she's married and has a 17 month old son. March 17th or March 19th, 1972. This happened. Like I said, she's a housewife from Kalamazoo township. Right. And I guess, Jesus Christ, she was walking in a field in suburban Kalamazoo out there in township. There was a woman named Josephine Van Haften who found her body and

She didn't find her body first. The first thing she found was a 17-month-old child wandering aimlessly. Oh, no. And said, what's up with this? Said the child was dirty and bloody. But when she wiped the dirt off the child and the blood, the kid wasn't bleeding. No wounds. Somebody else's blood. Right. So she began to look for the child's mother. That kid is dangerous. Oh, my God. He's Dexter. He's fucking exactly Dexter. Covered in blood? What the shit? Walking around aimlessly. Yeah.

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+.

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. So this woman takes this child and looks around for a book. Call the police. I found a bloody baby. Call the cops. I'm out.

If I find a bloody toddler, I'm not looking for shit. There's a scene a little bit worse than finding a bloody toddler somewhere. Yes, that's what I mean. That blood came from somewhere. I don't want to see that. I am keeping the toddler alive until the cops get there. That's my job. And then I'm going, I am...

Well above my fucking pay grade here. I don't want to find shit. Whatever social service you put that child in, I'm moving away from there. Oh, fuck that. So Josephine, though, goes walking around with this baby looking for the mother and finds the body here, finds Patricia Houck's dead body behind a grain elevator.

Yikes. Ugh, man. That's fucking horrible. Apparently, Danny, who told Brent the whole story, had seen the woman go into a Topps department store.

and parked his blue Corvair van next to her car to wait for. Corvair made a van? I had no idea they made a van either. Oh, that sounds so dangerous. Your reaction was exactly my reaction when I read that and copied it to here. I go, Corvair's had vans? The problem is that the Corvair was discontinued because it was fucking dangerous and they exploded. A van? You're trapped in a van? That's dangerous. The whole family. I don't know.

Maybe the shit was situated in a different way. I don't know. Maybe a Pinto van wouldn't have been explosive because it went there. I don't know. The Corvair was a rear engine, so the van, if it's a rear engine, that's back there with the fucking gas. I don't know. That's dangerous. He's got a van. It's not a great van. It's a bad car. So an hour. He waits out there for an hour for her. Okay? An hour. At a department store. Wow. Wow.

Waits next to her car for an hour. That's a fucking sick, stalking fuck. It's not just I see a person. There's a lady hitchhiking. I'll pick her up and kill her. I saw that and he's hunting. This is crazy. So after an hour, she came out, put her son in the passenger seat because back then that was considered responsible parenting. Sit up front. Seatbelt, don't do that. That'll burn you. Half the cars didn't even have seatbelts. Throw your...

Throw your less than two-year-old in the front seat and go. So apparently when she came around to the driver's side, she put him in the passenger side, walked her into the driver's side. Danny got out, walked up to her and pulled a knife out. She panicked and fell into the car because she had the door open and went, oh my God, and like fell into the car. He pulled her out of the car and forced her to get into the van. Yeah. Okay. Where he ends up, this is what's fucking crazy. He takes the kid too.

Didn't leave the kid in the car. So he ends up tying her up and he rapes her and he leaves her bound with her hands in front of her and forces her into the front of his van.

He tries to strangle her, but she fights him back because her hands are tied in the front. So she scratches his face, marks him and everything. They struggled so hard they fell out of the ground from the van. They fell out of the fucking van. Holy shit. And nobody saw this. Nobody saw this. So Danny said he stabbed her in the back, but he said it didn't seem to have much effect.

So he said he did it again and gave the knife a twist this time to really make it worse. And he told Brent that did it and killed her. So somehow the child had gotten out of the car and was just standing by the van crying. Oh, boy. This is all in a department store parking lot. Yeah. Like, there's people around. This is fucking insane.

So Danny figured that the boy wouldn't... He wouldn't fucking be able to identify him because he's too young. He said, the kid doesn't even talk. Like, he's not going to fucking be able to identify me. So he's figured he'd leave him alone. Fuck this kid. Let him wander the fucking parking lot. I don't give a shit. So finally...

Hawk here, Patricia stops struggling and she ends up succumbing and dying here. Yeah. By the way, later on, the pathologist who performed the autopsy said that Patricia had died from a stab wound in her back that was so deep it had gone nearly through her entire body. Oh, boy. Almost poked out the other side. Almost ran her through completely. He also documented bruises on many different parts of her body and jaw and ligature marks around her wrist and neck.

And they found traces of semen on her underwear as well. So, yeah, Brent is in here telling this story. By the way, this guy did this shit and that shit. This is fucking horrifying, obviously. So Brent said that Danny showed him where the body was dumped and that after that they attempted to find other women in parking lots but were unable to find Danny.

good locations for doing this because he when he told Brent about it they were because this is before the other two before so he told Brent about it was like I got a great idea dude like I did this thing it's awesome you just find a woman walking in and you wait for him and you just take him and he was like cool that sounds awesome and then they decided that was going to be their MO so wow um

Now, so they get Brent an attorney. His attorney talks to the state. And his attorney says that you will be allowed to plead to second-degree murder to one homicide and get a reduced sentence if you say everything you know about this other guy here because you're 15. The other charges will be dropped.

So that's when Brent says part of the deal is he uses as a bargaining chip is I know where that body is. I know where fear now is. So I can show you that. So he told detectives about Danny's confession of the first murder. And so now he's the star witness. Yeah. So there's that. He also said Danny had bragged about how well the method had worked and said that we should do it together after he killed Patricia Houck.

He said they could grab a girl, rape her, steal her money and valuables, and then kill her. It's so easy.

What a fucking disgusting thing to say. It's fucking insane. So Brent said, sure. So they put together a kit with knives, trash bags, and ropes and went out cruising. They are the hillside stranglers, these two. This is very rare for people to be rape murdering in pairs like this. It's very rare. It's a hillside strangler rare. There's a thing of like...

the superiority thing of like raping somebody you don't want to rape with somebody else that's not no that's weird Lake and Eng and the Hillside Stranglers are the only ones I can think of and the Hillside Stranglers were at least related so that they were cousins so that made sense yeah but this one is this is gross this is just crazy he needs like a little assistant um

So he said they had once parked in front of a movie theater for four hours looking for an opportunity. Four hours. And then often they would just drive up and down the road looking for female hitchhikers. What sick fucks. They passed the time. They said talking about sex and killing women. That's all he talked about was what they're going to do, how they're going to rape and kill these women.

And Brent said that Danny initiated most of it, which I believe. Because he's 29, yeah. Yeah. So the next day, Danny is arrested here. And...

He's definitely arrested. Also, at this exact time, okay, within a week of this, Larry wins his appeal. Really? Remember Brother Larry? He won? He won his appeal. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Michigan Supreme Court ruling that a defendant must be advised of his right to an attorney and to remain silent before he's interrogated. The Miranda thing came to bite them in the ass. Before he's interrogated in a psychiatrist examination. And they ruled that Larry Raines was entitled to a new trial.

So at this time, they are in jail together. They meet at the same time because he's being held over. They take him back to jail for that. And Brent's and Danny's waiting for his. So he's bound over. He's sitting in a maximum security cell when Danny was brought in for his shit. So for a brief period, they had adjoining cells. They actually had fucking cells next to each other, which we should have done from the time they were nine, probably. Yeah.

This is crazy. So in October, they find Pamela Fearnoy. Brent said he was bothered by what they had done. He's 15. I would hope that would bother him at 15. Yeah, but he feels so powerful doing it, I imagine. Yeah, that's fuck. They said, though, it was weird because it took them until October 18th. Took him before until he showed them the body. Yeah. So that's where I think because he was waiting for the deal. Like you make the deal and I show you where the body is. It's probably his lawyer telling him not to say anything yet.

So the police knew she was missing because her friends reported her missing and they hadn't heard from her since August 5th. By the way, July 5th, August 5th. It's weird on the fifth of the month. They go out murdering. So her remains were when they found her, they were skeletal.

Yikes. In October because she went the whole summer out there and animals and everything else. It doesn't take anywhere near that long for that to happen. It's crazy how fast it happens. It's fucking wild. It turns out the jawbone helped make the identification. It was Morrow Lake, which is less than a mile from where the two girls there, the other two 19 year olds were dumped.

So he said shortly after Brent said shortly after the murder in August, he had broken off with Danny because Danny wanted him to steal a car and go to Florida. And he was afraid that Danny had it in his mind to kill Brent. Like it's you've outlived your usefulness. I don't need a witness walking around. So he also told him about how can all of that and reigns his charge with that. So Danny's charged with four murders now.

Yeah, this is fucking disturbing. Between the two of them, they've got nine to 10. So yeah, they're talk all about it. Uh, they talk about heat. Brent goes into detail about, uh, picking up Pamela fear now as hitchhiking from her campus to, from near campus to a shopping mall is where she wanted to go. And they held a knife to her and drove her into the woods. He talks all about that. And, um,

It's fucked up, man. It is fucked up. The plastic bag is how they did it. That's fucking terrible. Danny facing two more murder charges, obviously, with Linda and Claudia. A lot of murder charges. November 3rd, 1972, Larry pleads guilty in a retrial.

Oh, he's going to take a plea so you can get parole. Well, he's going to try. He's trying to get resentencing for this. So, yeah, they said he received a new trial because he wasn't allowed an attorney. And so they're going to do this. And they say, you, sir, may fuck off. Life in prison, no parole again. Eat dicks. Fuck off. Same thing. Same thing. New trial, same result. He pled to try to get sympathy. Nothing. Nope, nothing. Not getting shit. Wow.

So March 73 is the Patricia Houck murder trial. And the big star witness is Brent, obviously, because he's got all the details. So he testifies, shares all the connections of everything. All the girls goes through a list of what they did in great detail. Horrifying. The fucking details are disgusting, obviously, here. He said, yeah, I was a friend and we took pictures.

He told me about them taking Pamela Houck and raping and murdering this one, killing that one.

Kathy testifies. Remember Kathy? Yeah. They fought over in high school. Yeah. Uh, Kathy is Danny's former wife. She testifies. She said that a few days after the Pamela Hauk murder, she noticed a scratch on her husband's face while they were riding in a car. He claimed it happened when he torn down a garage for his mother and stepfather, but he also said it scared him having it on his face, which she didn't understand. Yeah. Why would that scare you? He,

He also admitted to Kathy in the car that his mother suspects him of killing the women at Topps. Why? The woman at Topps, Patricia Howe. Why would mom be so close to judge? Mom told me she thinks I did it and I better have a good alibi. Okay. Yeah. So Danny's attorney tries to undermine Kathy by getting her to admit that she's seen a psychiatrist and has smoked pot. Oh.

Oh, boy. So she's unreliable. Completely unreliable. She smoked weed once and went to a shrink. If that was the case, nobody would be able to testify in court anymore. Everyone has done one or the other, right? Credibility shot. Shot to shit.

So there is not a lot to go on here other than just evidence, evidence, evidence, evidence. So much fucking evidence. I mean, it's overwhelming for multiple murders. They find him guilty of murder, of multiple murders. Now, of Pamela's murder for now, just for now.

Now, Danny, while awaiting sentencing for this and awaiting his other trials, because he's got more coming. He has some trouble in jail. Oh, what did he do? Well, he was taking a shower, so he wasn't in the cell. When the cell was searched by police. Yeah, no, he wasn't attacked. This is different. A deputy found some torn up paper in the toilet.

Imagine your job is to go through a prisoner's toilet and scoop paper out of it and then put them together to fucking see what it says. Imagine that was your job. Puzzle piece that. Puzzle piece a prison toilet fucking soaked. Disgusting. Does it say you should have gone to college? Yeah. It says the pension isn't worth it.

He said, this is what it said, quote, Do you know any married woman who could use $500 for taking the stand and saying she was with me on the night of the Houck killing? One who would have a reason to remember that, whatever the reason was, Knight will stand up in court and also remember that I had a Band-Aid on my left cheek and I told her I scratched it while tearing down a garage. So not only, I need someone to testify that they were with me that night and I already had the scratch on my face when they got together with me.

It has to be a Saturday night I was with her. She must be strong so the cops can't break her no matter what they say or do. Also, she will have to go to the newspaper office, the Gazette in parentheses, and look in past issues for the date and all the back pictures of me so she will know me when she sees me. He's saying, you know, a stranger, just somebody I could pay $500 to.

Wow. Let me know as soon as you can, as all visits and phone calls in New Jail are to be taped. If you know of anyone, at least get me her address so I can handle the mail through Contos, which is his lawyer, I think. The money will come when my feet hit the streets. So do it on spec. I won't pay you up front. But if this gets me off, even though he's charged with multiple other murders...

He's acting like if he gets off on this, then he can just skate and he's fine. And he's going to go make money. So they find that and they go, hey, stupid. That's a long note, too. That would take forever to put together. Yeah, hopefully it was only in like four pieces. Hopefully it wasn't in a real fucking lot. And you're like, oh, man.

Mixed in with shit specs. Yeah. It's gross. So sentencing comes around. You, sir, may fuck off life in prison with no parole. How about that? No parole. Now, Brent is going to be sentenced to life with parole because he's 15, 16 at the time. Not only was Danny sentenced to life in prison, imprisonment in solitary confinement at hard labor is what they gave him.

He gets to be with nobody and make little rocks out of big rocks? And then go sit in a fucking room by yourself. Oh, God. That is a good sentence for a guy like this, man. Oh, Jesus.

Wow. And while he was in jail awaiting trial, they found out right after sentencing, he attempted to procure a contract killer to kill a witness as well. Of course he did. So he tried to bribe someone and try to kill a witness, which is also extra charges, by the way, that they're charging with now. So he also tried to arrange to have another witness perjure himself in his favor. And lie for me.

And lie for me. So April 1973, Linda Clark and Claudia Bidstrip killings here. He pleads innocent to those. Really?

Wasn't me. All Brent, huh? All Brent. That kid's crazy. I don't know. He's the one who said he did it. I don't know what you're talking about. He's huge. He scared the shit out of me. Fuck. I had to do it. Yeah, I'm a little guy, you know? So July 1973, the Pamela Fearnow trial. Danny's trial for the murder takes place here, and Brent again, key witness against him. He offers details about the time they'd spent with her, how they assaulted her, how they killed her. It matched all the physical evidence that they had. It's, you know, it's what happened.

Also taking the stand were two men who discussed the incident with Danny during a stint in the county jail. Talked about it too. Richard Fee, Dick Fee is his name. There's a fee for this dick. This dick costs money. He's 17, by the way. Really? Danny needs to stop trying to hang out with teenagers. They put a 17-year-old in the same, with a straight-up murderer. Multiple murder. Yeah.

It's fucking wild. What the fuck? 70s are a wild style time, man. What did this kid do? Well, he said that Brent had asked him to lie and say that Brent had told him that he lied about Reigns' involvement. So that's what he said. So Danny goes to the guy and says, say that he asked you to lie and all that kind of shit.

He said that he'd been with the woman. Danny had told this guy that he had been with this woman, but only for sex. And when he'd gone to get beer and wine, then Brent killed her. Oh, he just went on a beer run and he comes back and it's, you know, fucking Lenny over here from of mice and men killed this fucking moron. I killed her. And he was like holding her limp head next to her.

And another guy named Lee Keaton said that Danny asked him before the first trial to hire someone to kill Brent. Not good.

This is not good. He's really bad at this. He is. Verdict comes in guilty as fuck for killing Pamela. You, sir, may fuck off life without parole again. Okay. Yeah. He's fucked. Yep. August 1973. I love how July 1973, they're going to try him for that. And August, they're going to try it just like he killed someone in July and then killed someone in August. Well, it's wild that they're getting him for every case when they've just got his brother in there.

just rocked up. He's not getting out ever, but they've got Danny for doing, but then, I don't know, man, Danny's maybe a worse person. Oh, he's a worse. He's a sick fuck. Someone that kills for money. Yeah. Yeah. There's a psychological thing about this, my dad or whatever, that sort of thing. But, but,

what if he had a lot of money? Would he still do this? Right. Probably not. Probably not. This guy's killing for sex. He's killing for power and sex and fucking he, he enjoys this shit. He enjoys fear. He enjoys all of this. He's a sick motherfucker. Hmm.

Larry's less sick, but Larry's a much bigger idiot as we find out later on. Yeah. Also, Larry's Larry's using weapons like guns. This guy's using up close and personal shit. And he's not just a bag. And he's also using a person as a weapon. Like a 15 year old is a that's his weapon. He's using that as a he's using him as a personal hitman. Do you know how horrifying it is to put a plastic bag over someone's head and hold it till they watch it? Yeah.

You have to be a sick, heartless motherfucker. It's one thing to stab somebody fast in the dead or shoot them. To do that, you have to be like, I mean, they're practically talking to you for fuck's sake. They're looking right at you. It's crazy. So anyway, yeah, he said that I guess they had made plans to

He had already testified, Brett does in this case here. In this case, there's a lot of damning physical evidence, a blanket belonging to Danny that covered the bodies, and the rope used on their next matched rope that he had given to his stepfather. It's his rope. In addition, a patrol officer saw him in that area by the van. Four times. That was a different one. That was fear now. Okay.

So at the last minute, because of all the physical evidence, he pleads guilty or no contest to second degree murder. They allow him to plead because they already got him on to life without parole. So they're like, fuck it. We'll save some cash here. So, yeah, they do that. These are the two women that were found by the motorcyclist. Sentence comes around here. And let's see what do you think they're going to give him here? Oh, that's another. That's another life, right? You, sir, may fuck off life without parole times two.

Because he killed two. Yeah. That's two. That's four. Oh, boy. That's four licenses. No parole. This is very, very bad. He told a reporter on the way out when they asked him about it, he said, quote, there's really nothing to say. I mean, it's pretty cut and dry. I'm going to be here a while. I fucked up pretty bad. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's all of those cases. 1975, Danny's going to appeal. This gets way weirder, by the way. You're going, this is wrapping up short. No, it's not. They said, get the fuck out of here. Nobody cares. Yeah. You have so many life sentences. Fine. One of them will take off. Now what? Go fuck yourself. So 1976, Larry finds love. Where?

On his birthday, he married Danny's ex-wife, Cassie. What a patient man. Chimps, marriages, this is a wild fucking story. If you take the gross parts out of the murder shit, this is just a fun story. This is a fascinating family. Fascinating. On his birthday, they get married, which is fucking hilarious.

1979, Danny's going to appeal again. Apparently he had a lot of time to do some legal research in his prison cell here. He's in Marquette Branch Prison in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. So he's in the UP up there. He argued that two convictions for the Houck murder constituted double jeopardy. So it was because he got two life sentences for that.

So in 1979, Judge Donald Anderson canceled the second degree murder conviction and with it went one of his life sentences. So he got rid of one of the life sentences. Now he has four. He's going to try to whittle them all down. Whittle them down to what? None? What are you going to get? Even if you have one, well, fuck, I got four out of the five. Tough shit. I'm going to beat them all on a peel.

So in 1981, the Supreme Court set aside the other conviction in the case. So that's fucked up. There is no conviction for that case on record, even though he told people about it, kidnapped a woman from a fucking department store parking lot and raped her while her kids cried outside. Technicality, double jeopardy. Uh,

It goes. Wow. They ruled that the judge trial judge had failed to tell jurors that they could consider second degree murder. So they didn't do jury instructions as a possible verdict while they were prepared for the charge of murder while perpetrating rape. That decision meant the prosecution could either retry him on the same count or give him a sentence of second degree murder, which carried the possibility of parole.

Two of his other three sentences did as well. Only the fear now connection would conviction after all the appeals would be his only life without parole appeal. Oh, only life. So he only has one life without left. The prosecutor believed that retrying an old case like that would be super difficult since the primary evidence was testimony from a convicted murderer who's also serving a life sentence. So he opted to take the sentence and just say, fine, life with parole for this one. Great.

They said that they could only hope that he couldn't think of a way to undo the fear now conviction because then he could get parole. He continues, by the way, Danny, this entire time has continued to insist that he's innocent. He didn't do it. None of it. Even the shit he pled guilty to, he said he didn't do.

And he also got some researchers to go over the investigation with him, and they would criticize the investigators for believing Brent's story so readily. Oh, my. They believed it because it fits physically. Right. That's what I mean. He knew shit that nobody else knew. But he's got these people saying that that's not true or that it shouldn't be. It's all Brent. Yeah. Yeah. They should have just said it's all Brent. Okay. Yeah.

1980s come around. Now that's Danny. Back to Larry here. Larry changes his name in the early 1980s. If I gave you a million guesses, you would never guess his fucking new name. Nope. Monk. First name Monk. Monk Steppenwolf.

the like the born to be wild magic carpet ride band so just pick the name of a sitcom in a 70s band or half of your animal now that's it's a fraser steely dan that's who i'm going to be from now on seinfeld black sabbath it's fine what the shit holy shit why do you do that monk steppenwolf monk steppenwolf okay

It's because he read a book. That's why. August 1986, Larry's going to explain all because the Detroit Free Press do a fucking like an eight-page article on him. I'm going to read you some of the choice excerpts here. Wow. Here we go. Well, here, you want to hear about Larry's day? Yes. What's his day like in prison in the 80s? It's got to be horrible, right? He gets up each day at about noon. Yeah.

Doesn't go to bed until about 4.30 or 5 a.m. So he lives like me, basically. Does he work all night? Well, he's got to be in Compton soon, James. Putting together true crime stories all fucking night. Is that what he's doing? Since there's no electricity in the cells from midnight to 3 a.m., he has attached his 12-inch RCA black and white TV to a battery. So he has battery power on it. Occasionally, his favorite show is Late Night with David Letterman.

Dave was great. He watches fucking Letterman. I know. That's what I mean. It's really an insult to Dave. Gotta keep up with the shit that's happening out there, James, with all the pop culture and new movies coming out. She gotta do it.

Fuck, I'm going to get out of here one day. Otherwise, your name is Monk Steppenwolf and you sound like you're really behind the times. You're resigned to just being in here. But he said late at night, the TV is only on to provide the light so he can write at his desk. He's been writing his plan to fix the criminal justice system. Let me repeat. He knows how to do it. For the last several months, he's been writing his plan to fix the criminal justice, the whole thing. Yeah.

It would require all convicts to choose a rehabilitation program or incarceration. He put it as going to school or playing hooky.

He said those who chose prison could play basketball, soak up the sun and screw around for their whole lives if they wanted to soak up the sun. But those who choose rehabilitation would work at meaningful jobs for eight hours a day, spend three hours a day doing community service, i.e. making toys for kids, for example. That's what you want. The fucking murder elves. Perfect. Yeah.

That's exactly what you need. Yeah. I need a bunch of guys building Swiss Army knives for my children. Excellent. Or a power wheel. Holy shit. And another three hours a day in group therapy. To be released, a convict would have to prove that he has learned to care again. That's a real vague. Learn to care. That's very vague.

Very vague. He said it might take a year, 10 years, a lifetime. They got to get like a heart tattooed on their belly or something. Yeah. Or a mom with mom in it. I forgave her now. A little rainbow or a moon. Oh, God. They say, quote, as he writes an earplug from his Hitachi radio and tape player. Haven't heard that brand name in a while. Hitachi? Yeah. That's...

That's just a dildo now, isn't it? I think so, yeah. Otherwise, Hitachi should really sue if it's not. We used to make fucking electronics, and now it's just pussy vibrators. This is wild. Yeah, these make fridges, for Christ's sake. Yeah. From his Hitachi radio and tape player, pumps music into his head. He owns some 30 tapes. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is his favorite. Okay.

Oh, man. Eventually, it's a good album. Nothing to say wrong about that. Eventually, he will type his letter on his $700 used IBM Selectric bought with special permission several years ago. $700. Who the fuck bought him that? No matter what he's doing, his TV's almost always on. Quote, as a companion, he says. He also likes to tune into PBS to watch the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour. He watches Jim Lehrer fucking give you the news. Other talk shows and nature shows. Yeah.

He said he always loved the woods. Why would they say that? I always loved the woods. Well, Larry didn't kill anyone in the woods. He did. He took people into rural areas. Trying to look for rivers and shit. If I allow my mind to go to the world, I dream of the woods. If I allow my mind to escape prison. Drift out of here. I guess I probably dream of a place where I'm in control. That goes without saying. Yeah.

Yeah. You're in control in the woods. There's a gun in your hand. Like the passenger seat of a truck? Of a suburban with a monkey in the back? With a stranger driving? And the only thing that challenges me for control is Mother Nature. Chain me forever to a fire watchtower somewhere. It'd be heaven. Okay. Deal. Deal.

Sounds excellent. Have you seen a fire watch tower? That is frightening shit out there in the middle of the woods like that. Chain him up there. Let him fucking starve to death and have birds peck at his fucking car. I don't give a fuck. Fuck this guy. Yeah, but hikers fucking stumble upon those things. He'll make those people disappear even if he's chained to it. Oh, shit. Hopefully he'll be dead before that. He said it'd be heaven. He's allowed to leave his cell at designated times each day to go to work, the mess hall, or the yard, and to make his allotted 15-minute freebies.

phone call, which he must schedule 24 hours in advance or to have a visitor. He more often chooses the solitude of his cell. Really? He avoids the mess hall because, quote, it's very authoritarian and arbitrary and regimented and I don't need all that garbage. It's prison. Yeah, you got to keep people from stabbing each other with fucking eating utensils. Yeah.

You're telling me there's a hierarchy around the survival necessity of food? Is that right? You know where most violence takes place? Probably in the mess hall. It's the mess hall. It is. It's the mess hall or the yard. Those are the two places. It's where you're in closest proximity of each other. You're fucking touching hip to hip.

That's where there's hundreds of inmates and three guards and they can't possibly fucking police. That's when I control that. Yeah. Nope. No way. Uh, he says he doesn't like it. For example, when female guards routinely squeeze his genitals to check for contraband, is that the way you check for contraband? Yeah.

What's in here? What happened to lift your nuts and turn around and cough? What happened to that? They're just grabbing and squeezing. What's up, big boy? Anything in there now? Hold on a second. Let me get it. Nope, I don't think so. What is that? That's my testicle. All right. He said, that's not my idea of a good way to finish a meal. I mean, it's mine if it goes further than that.

He says he snacks in his cell. He said breakfast might be a pizza roll stolen from the kitchen. And we don't mean Totino's pizza roll, a pizza roll. Cause we used to, that's what elementary school used to serve us too. Yeah. Half a hamburger bun piece of fucking yellow American cheese on it with some sauce on top of that microwaved. So the cheese slightly melts. That's what a pizza roll is. Yep.

Stolen from the kitchen, bought for a buck, or bought for a buck from a profiteer. Occasionally, he has what he calls breakfast in bed, which is a dozen pancakes with syrup stolen from the kitchen by a friend, heated in the cell block microwave by another, and delivered to his cell by a third. He's got a lot of people doing him favors. How's he doing that? We'll find out, because he's got money. For dinner, he might have a bowl of cereal while watching the news with milk made from coffee mate and tap water. Oh, yeah.

Oh, boy. That sounds nasty. He drinks coffee, quote, about three gallons a day. Oh, my. Made from instant coffee and tap water. Nothing stays in his system for more than, what, 45 minutes probably? Impossible.

He no longer goes to the movies either, the movies in jail that they show. He said, I just don't like the auditorium. I don't like the sound system. I don't like the way it's managed. I don't like the people that go in it. He's a control freak. No shit. Yeah. If he can't control it, he doesn't want to be a part of it. It's not the way I would do it, so I won't go. Yeah. I don't know if they do it on the streets, but in here, but people in here, they have to comment on everything.

I don't know if they, yeah. It's waiting to see social media, Larry. Where do you see when you post a fucking podcast and see what people say? Throw an opinion on the internet, Larry Bear. Wow. It's going to get bad. Yeah. We have a whole show based on the fact that everyone has to comment on everything. It's called your stupid opinions. He said, I figure what the hell in a couple of years, I'll get a, I'll get it on TV. I got time to wait.

The movie. Yeah. You know, no need of the rental. Said he rarely hangs out on the yard where convicts are prohibited from walking on most of the grass or uses the prison library. He just doesn't go anywhere where he's not in control. Right. Yep. He said nothing you'd want is there, meaning books. He said he reads Time and Newsweek when he can get a hold of one. Occasionally he borrows a Playboy for the articles and interviews. Yeah, I read these.

He literally said that. He says he finds the women unarousing. Okay, yeah. They're not hot. All right. You're in prison. Yeah. You show me any woman's tit, I am so excited in prison. I'm beating off to that, for sure. He said, too professional, too posed. You're in prison. Are you...

Kidding me. Are you fucking joking? How much tit are you seeing? Well, wait till you see what else, hear what else he does, because you're like, too professional and posed? Okay. He reads three newspapers, subscribing to the Free Press and the Jackson Citizen Patriot and borrowing the Detroit News from another con. He said, I'm interested in the newspaper primarily for the editorial viewpoint section. What do you care? Why? You're in prison. I thought you hated opinions. He said, then obviously the cartoon page.

What's his favorite cartoon? Beetle Bailey. Calvin and Hobbes. Is that right? He said, they're always getting into some shit. I love it. They're some funny little dudes. They don't exist, man.

So they talk about Sue now. And he said, I've tried to use a lot of theories to understand myself, those quaint, ever so perfect explanations, and they just don't wash in the final analysis. This is monk Steppenwolf talking. Yeah. The,

The bottom line is that I didn't give a damn. I didn't care. My world was destroyed. I had nothing whatsoever in this world that I thought was of any value. When you don't care and your world is gone, it's just a matter of time before people's worlds become unimportant to you. If you don't care about you, you can't care about others. So she did this to me. Well, there you go. They said it's been decades since he's loved Sue, but he can remember how he once felt about her and her children and their home. He said, quote, I almost don't want to call it love now.

He said cannibalism is what it was. He said, God, that family was a feast for me. I had starved all my life. That's what it represented. And I had to devour the whole thing. A family life. She's not beating the shit out of the kids. There's no crazy guy. It's a household where the mother's nice to their kids and parents watch out for their kids and everything.

He just wanted to be a part of it. Yeah. But he had to have sex with a woman, an older woman to do it. So he said, was I mentally ill? Talking about his trial. He said, if a dog with rabies bites you, is it wrong? It's diseased. And I think you can be rabid in the pursuit of happiness. Oh, the disease causes you to bite people? Is that what you're saying? Yeah. That's the disease. So he's got a disease that caused this all. So, you know.

Here's from the article. No one knows Monk Steppenwolf, and he hardly knows anyone, and that's how he prefers it because it's not real.

When his mother and sister visited him in March, they talked, and he said, of trivialities. He believes his mother is getting senile and wanted to see her son once more before she dies. That was his thought that he told the paper. She still sends him $10 checks for his birthday and Christmas, and he still calls her twice a year or so. Occasionally, I say I love her. The problem is I've never felt it inside.

Doesn't even love his mother. What is going on? Doesn't even love his mother. He said no one else has visited him for the last several years except his woman whom he met several years ago when she worked at the prison where he lived. He fucking talked to prison. I knew it was against the rules. I didn't know it was against the law. Love after lockup call back there. He's, huh. Mom's the only one who visits him, only one that brings him money. Doesn't love him.

I can't bring myself to it. Nope. I think mom was just as much a victim as everybody else. Yeah. And you can't really blame her for in the fucking 40s and early 50s, she couldn't extricate four kids from this fucking situation while working nights at a paper factory and all this. I mean, she's trying to stay alive, for Christ's sake. You can't be mad at her. So he said that this woman, they've been together. They've been in a serious relationship for about three years now. Oh, wow.

He said he hasn't seen his brother Danny since jail in the early 70s and he never wants to see him again. No interest. Yeah. He said, why'd you change your name to Monk Steppenwolf? Great question. They said it was Danny's crime that persuaded Larry it was time to get rid of the Reign's name. He said that? Yeah, he's ashamed of Larry. It was Danny's crime. He's judging people. Judging people. Larry. Of all fucking Larry. Really, Larry? Come on.

He said, quote, it represented everything bad. The way I was brought up, the family, all those circumstances. So in 1972, after the state Supreme Court overturned his conviction on a technicality, he agreed to plead guilty, like we said, and go back to prison. He said on two conditions is what he agreed to. Mm-hmm.

If he could be sent to the Ionia Reformatory, considered easier time than Marquette, where he's been for six years. And if he was allowed to legally change his name to Monk Steppenwolf.

On a magic carpet ride. Which is hilarious because that's when that was big. So the first name, he says, represents the hermitage part, the secret, the inner me that is studying, trying to comprehend what is going on in the world and in me and in everyone else. There's a monk inside of me.

Yeah, not just a big Tony Shalhoub fan. No? No. He really believes he's a religious fella. And then Steppenwolf is the title of a 1929 Herman Hesse novel. It is the tale of Harry Haller, a strange and wild, a strange, wild, shy man who calls himself the Steppenwolf. Haller is disgusted with life and yearns for death as a release. He is confused by his human instincts for warmth and love and his animal instincts for power and savagery.

Doesn't know why he's a psychopath. Steppenwolf the convict first read Steppenwolf the book in 1967. Ten years later, he tried again but found it sad and boring. Too bad he changed your name to it. A book you don't even like. Yeah, it's sad and boring. Imagine a movie you watched. You didn't even like it, but now you named yourself after it. I'm Zoolander. Yeah, I'm Jimmy Zoolander.

He said, I asked to him to read it once more, meaning the author of this asked him. He said to me when he was through, I met myself in a dark cave. In red pen, he annotated a paperback copy, marking other marking passages he liked. So he says that he doesn't like to get close to people. He said there's an emotional distance even between him and his boss, who's a guard with whom he works every day and jokes and feels at ease with, works in close quarters with.

He said he never gets over familiar and is always a little leery of how to deal with me. That's a good position to have him in. Not too close. Yeah. He said he doesn't bother to associate with short term prisoners.

He said, most of the people on my rock, there's 37 people on his floor. He said, I don't talk to unless they've been here more than two years or for some reason they've imposed themselves on me. Because I figure you're probably not going to be here very long anyway. And if you're here for two years, then there's a fair chance you'll be here for a while. So then I'll go out of my way. Okay.

Said friendship for a month or two doesn't serve any purpose because everybody learned everybody you learn to care about leaves. This is his psychology is so on the table. It's ridiculous. He hates when people leave him. Yes. Think about that. Every relationship you form, you lose it. It's gone. So after so many years, you just say, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't need that shit.

Bro, that's life. That's life. He just described life. He doesn't like life. Yeah. He doesn't like human emotions because you can start caring about people in prison. I've met a lot of people that are my kind of people. Yeah. Criminals, murderers. But I'm not going to I'm not going to get this thing. He thumps his heart with his fist. I'm not going to get this thing. Oh, emotions ripped up and stepped on every time some clown wants to get parole. Yeah.

Don't break my heart. They don't want to be here with me for the rest of eternity? They want parole? They want to go fuck their wife? Take my best friend from me? That's not fair. Wow. His women have known him in the most narrow sense. The scenery is always the same. They never see where he sleeps, eats, and writes. He spent both honeymoons in the visiting room, quote, trying to see what we could get away with, he said. See if he can come. Yeah. Yeah.

Because the human brain is crafty and the body is eager. His first marriage ultimately was consummated in the upstairs public visiting room at the Ionia Reformatory, 25 or 30 feet from the nearest human being, 50 feet from the nearest screw, which is a guard if you don't know.

He said feet must remain on the floor, according to the rules. Coats are not to be draped over laps. Despite the rules, anything is possible, he says. He says he shies away from it now. He said, quote, it's disrespectful to my woman. To what? Try to fuck her there? Try to fuck her in the visiting room. Instead, his love affairs are built on talk and fantasy. Is his dick not working? What's going on?

He said, one of the tricks to do time, one of the key essential tricks is you never leave here in your mind. You stay here. You bring women to you. You bring things to you. Too painful to go outside. He said, I'm fantasizing in my cell about a woman, for example. She's going to be in my cell. That's his fantasy. He wants a woman in the cell with him? Because otherwise, if he's out like in a bar or something, then that's outside the walls and that's too much. He said, I'm going to ask her to sit down. What a tepid fantasy. Want to have a seat?

And then there's a guard coming. Hold on. You have a seat right there on that seatless toilet. Oh, it's nice. Watch out for the paper torn up. He said, want to sit on the bed? Go ahead. Kick back. Let's talk. This is his fantasy dialogue. Yeah. It all takes place here. When somebody leaves, it's her, not me. I send her home outside the walls.

That's important. Psychologically, you can screw yourself up by going in and out and in and out and in and out. Not sex. Yeah. In your mind of going in and out of prison. It gets crazy. I knew that for the first two years.

He talks about killing. He said, look, I can tell you precisely how it feels to stab someone, run a knife right through their heart and back out of their back. I've never done it, but I can describe it in blood-curdling detail that would make you believe I've done it and believe I'd do it again. You've done it. I think so. He said, a lot of people don't know I've never hurt anybody. Pardon? What?

What's that now? A lot of people believe I've killed people since I've been in prison. Most people believe I'm a hit man, a mafia hit man. It's a rumor that got started years ago, and I've just never done anything about it to kill it. I don't believe that. No, but if people thought that, great, they'll leave you the fuck alone. You want people to think that. He said, I had made up my mind I was going to be a hit man. That's a lucrative profession in here, taking people out. He said he was going to do it.

He was going to actually do it. He said, as far as I'm concerned, if I got to be in here forever, well, damn it, I'm going to live good in here, make some money. He says, but I never cut anyone. Shoving a knife into someone, it's not easy. I didn't do it. I didn't know if I could do it or not, so I had to find out. Okay? What? There was this kid that worked down the hall from me, and I just talked him into it. He said, let me stab you. Yeah. Yeah.

I raised my eyebrows, meaning the author raised his eyebrows, and he said, I'm a very persuasive guy. I talked him into letting me cut him. He wasn't an extremely intelligent person, and he went for it. He found somebody with a 76 IQ and said, let me stab you. I'll give you a fucking honey bun. He said it was just a slice on the arm, a rending of flesh. Okay, so the author of this article says, I don't believe him and ask him what the other prisoner got in return.

And he goes on, Larry says, an association with me, he says, as if I'm stupid not to see it, the author. But why would someone want to bleed for you? And he said, God, a lot of people want to bleed for me because I'm somebody.

In here, I have position. I have prestige and place, and even more so back then. Think about the fact that most of the guys in prison are followers. God, you can do some horrible stuff with people in here. He's too smart to be in with these fucking idiots. He needs to sit by himself, this fucking guy. They said, what have you been up to? And he said, he considers most of his power to be intellectual and verbal, the power to persuade.

He says that's how he got an associate's degree from Montcalm Community College program. It's a joke because I'm ignorant in so many ways. Math, I know virtually nothing beyond the most basic. Trig and geometry, come on, those are French names. English, a dangling participle, what would I do with it? I wouldn't even know.

But he knows way more, by the way, he speaks than 90% of the people in there. Partisible? Come on. That's what I mean. Then he says, it just so happens that I'm glib. Fucking glib. Go around a prison and ask everybody if they know what glib means. And two fucking people in there will answer yes. And it's because their lawyer said it to them.

Yes, exactly. Don't sit in here looking glib. They're going to convict you. Don't use glib answers. Answer my questions when I ask you, when you go on the stand. He said that I'm glib and I have a good vocabulary and I can write reasonably well and I can spell, persuade, and I'm capable of sincerity.

He said, Third Street Smitty, who's a con he met at Marquette in the late 60s. Third Street Smitty. I love that. He said, he was my intellectual mentor. He was articulate and unusual in that sense. Back then, convicts didn't strive to be articulate. It was much better to have finesse with a knife than with words. Now he talks about sex.

He said he learned from this guy to manipulate weaker Khans, to play games with their heads and with his own. He said, I learned you can draw blood with a tongue as well as a knife, and probably more adeptly, so I went in that direction instead of the other. The pen is mightier than the sword, he said. Yeah.

My words are even mightier. He said, Meaning someone that can be fucked. Yeah.

Veteran cons told him shortly after he arrived, get you a kid, settle down because you're going to be in here a long time. Meaning find someone to fuck for a long time. Find a wife. Yeah. Find someone to abuse. But he said, despite his inability to do all this, he said he felt queasy about sex with the guys, even though he doesn't feel queasy about murdering people. He said some parts of the human body were made for certain functions and have no other use. And it's dirty.

He does say oral sex is different, though. That's a whole different thing. I won't stick in anybody's butthole, but he said, there's something about that that I think the positions that occasionally can be used for things other than sexual, for dominance, meaning getting someone to suck your dick. He said, I've tried probably five times in 22 years, meaning had...

Men blow him in prison. He says in 22 years he's had sex with four women in prison. Really? Four. Two of them worked at the prison. Yeah. Yeah.

And two were from the outside, including his first wife. He has a son, by the way, that we find later on. Oh, yeah. Matthew Steppenwolf. I shit you not. Since prison. Yep. While he was in prison. He said, sometimes I wonder if sex is all that important after all. It really does become a secondary consideration. If you live in a fantasy world and you're looking for fantasy materials, not reality materials, reality material is nice. It can be converted into fantasy material, but I'm much more likely to look

for Fantasy Fuel. He says he's been loan sharking in prison. That's how he makes money. He said, yeah, he charges 50% interest for two weeks. That's how he does it. So he said, that means if I give you a buck 50, or you give, you got to give me a buck 50 for every buck I give you, and that's 50% covers my 20% losses. He says, I don't get rich as Midas, and I don't have to bust nobody's dome about some money. The officials appreciate that.

Wow. He also says that he smokes weed. What? Yeah. He says he's got some weed from a bunch of hiding places. He said, I went into smoking pot as a tranquilizer, a pacifier. Matter of fact, it was either Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve of my 18th year in prison, not birthday. A mellow buddy just gave me a couple joints and said, you got to try it. I tried a couple times before that, but never got any kind of buzz. But those two made a huge difference. He said, this time it got to me.

Pot allows me to survive in this craziness. There's a lot of pressure on me, a lot of self-generated pressure to make a decision about my life, to decide which way I'm going to go. Who cares? You're in prison forever. You're never getting out. He said, I'm at a crossroad. I've been there, stalled for about three years now, trying to decide, and I got to go. No, you're not busy, Bo, and you're staying there forever. Fuck yeah. He also says that he thinks about being a prison vigilante. Uh-huh.

He says, I have the capability to kill people. Not everybody has that. It sounds crazy, but a number of times I've thought someone out of a sense of needing some purpose and maybe somewhat out of an I'll show you type of thing that what I should really do is, look, I know who the bad guys are in here. I live with them, and they talk to me. They tell me they want to go out and kill somebody and when they want to go out and rob somebody. What I should really do to protect society from those people I know are bad and who are getting ready to get out of here is,

I put the bad guys out before they get to you. I stick them in the heart before they can get out the door. I don't know how you get that. He also says that the death penalty, he said, I saw on the news the other night a woman was talking about Ted Bundy, because this is 86, so he's, it's big. I guess she was from the town he had killed someone. She was lamenting the fact that he could only be killed. Why not torn limb from limb and tortured? Wow, that was on the news?

He said,

They said, well, you wouldn't go out whining like a baby. He said, quote, I'd go out cussing, kiss my ass. Shit, I would. I have to. So after this article comes out, he is placed in protective custody because he told a bunch of shit about prison and all the other prisoners want to stab him now. He's like that.

That guy that had born to be bad or whatever? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Born to be bad. That guy, what was his name? God damn it. He was in a documentary talking about how great prison is, doing coke off some dude's thigh. Well, he was loving it. Yeah. And they had to put him in protective custody after that shit, too. Yeah, you can't just do that shit in public, but he was trying to show off. Yeah.

By the way, a month later, his brother Danny has an editorial in the Detroit Free Press about his brother's article. And he says he denies everything that had. He said, my mother's not senile. Our father never made us fight for nickels and dimes on the floor. My mother loves us. She's fine. She's traveled thousands of miles to visit and only to be rejected by him.

Yeah. He said it's his self-serving falsehoods intend to portray a person who is unloved and overly abused by his family and society. Hence, he became a man hater and a murderer seeking revenge. In any case, my family was not responsible for what monk Steppenwolf chose to do with his life. Yeah.

He said, my father's violent example did have some influence, but he's still responsible for his own bullshit, basically. He says that. 1987, there's a book in the works. Oh? It's a book written by Conrad Hilberry and Emmanuel Tenet. It's called Luke Karamazov is the name of it because they changed the brothers' names to Karamazov. Oh.

In the book here. So this guy, he goes and talks to Larry and all this type of shit. So he's a poet, this guy, normally. But he's decided to write this story as to how he's going to get into shit. Okay. This is the story, yeah.

1992, Michigan is looking into the fact that there's bodies from 1960, from the 1970s that they still haven't solved the cases. So they're going to check into Danny to see if maybe it's Danny. 2017, Matthew Steppenwolf goes on a crime spree in Kalamazoo County. What? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Steppenwolf is related to two convicted killers, Monk Steppenwolf. It has to be his son because he's the only guy named Steppenwolf. So there's no other, not like it's a family name. Yeah.

He's going there and Danny Raines. Investigators say Matthew Steppenwolf started a fire at a home off East G Avenue in Cooper Township after he robbed a Sitco gas station at around 930 p.m. Following that fire, they say he went to a home off Monterey Drive where he got into some kind of altercation with a family there and shot a woman in the chest. He shot a woman in the chest. A 49-year-old lady named Betty Jo Brewer. Betty Jo, you shot in the chest.

Following the shooting, he then carjacked a car on Drake Road. So now he's carjacked somebody near Kalamazoo Central High School before eventually crashing into a tree in climax at around 1130 a.m. That's some kind of climax. Yeah.

After shooting the woman, this is the rest of the day? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He did. Yeah, it was a whole big crime spree. They took him into custody. Schools were locked down as a precaution during this whole thing. They said because of the magnitude of the situation, some of the dynamics and the unpredictability, that's why they put him on lockdown. So that's the kid. It definitely flows here. 2021, Brent is paroled. Stop it. They paroled Brent.

At his hearing, his last hearing, he admitted there was no doubt he deserved to spend the rest of his life in prison, agreed with the judge, told him during his sentencing. However, he said he wanted a chance to contribute to society as a free citizen. Oh, my God. It's been 48 years or something. I don't care. I don't either. Fuck him. He said, I would like to be given the opportunity to serve the rest of my remaining days in a free community rather than die in prison. I bet you would. I'm sure you would.

I realize what I did. I realize it's horribly wrong, but there are circumstances that got me involved in this. And one of them is, I mean, I know it's rare, it's rare form to blame the co-defendant, but I was, well, shall we say under the influence? Not I did. I not I know what I did. He said, I accept responsibility for that. But if it was not for my co-defendant, I would not be sitting here.

He said he absolutely did everything that he did. He said, I was hesitant, but I'm knee deep into this crime. He expressed remorse. He said, it must have been horrible. I know that I can't even begin to realize the pain and suffering that they went through. The only thing I can compare it to is when I lost my father and my mother and the pain hurt that I went through. But I can't imagine it would be nowhere near nowhere to compare to what families went through.

So he's an adult. They let him out. He's 64 years old. Good Lord. Spent 48 years in prison. He'll be fully discharged from his sentence in January 21st, 2025, by the way. Done deal, huh? Done deal. So what he does, the attorney general here, the prosecuting attorney said he was very troubled by the Department of Corrections choosing to release an admitted serial rapist and serial murderer. Yes.

So February 6th, 2022, Danny dies in prison. Really? 78 found unresponsive at the Lakeland Correctional Facility, pronounced dead at the hospital. Yeah. Unresponsive in the cell. 2023, a movie comes out. He went that way, which is directed by Jeffrey Darling, inspired by the novel, Luke Karamazov, that the guy wrote. Oh.

based on the real-life account of this whole shit. It's based on the account of Dave Pitts, the animal trainer, who's the sole survivor of this whole fucking thing. So March 2024, Brent is offering rides. He's doing ride share. Like Uber? Like he's his own Uber. Brent's Uber is what he made up here. He can't work for Uber, so he's got his own.

He's handing out cards offering impromptu rides that say, quote, cash up front or wheels don't roll on the business card. You don't get to make the call, man. No, it's an Uber without Uber. And they said that photos of his business card and information of his past were shared on social media. They asked him and he said, no comment. Yeah, I pick people up, strangers and shit.

parole people said that they are going to put a stop to this rideshare shit. And they learned about it because they said there'll also be special condition added to his parole. Barring such activity said, quote, he is not approved to perform this type of work. He said, Costner did not, or Costa did not report that he was attempting to work in this capacity, but an agent became aware from social media.

You can't be picking up strangers when you picked up raped and murdered strangers. He had a chauffeur's license. Holy shit. How fear? No. Remember fear now, Pamela, her sister said, I'm not sure how the state of Michigan gave him a show, a chauffeur's license. If you're giving rides to people, men, women, you know where they live. That's kind of eerie to me knowing that he killed three women raped and killed three. I'd be afraid that he would do it again. Yeah.

No shit. I would fucking say so. So, by the way, several people who knew or spoke with Danny surmised that his competitiveness with his brother Larry was the thing that triggered his murder spree. Is that right? Larry had gotten a lot of publicity in 64 and then even more with his successful appeal and he was getting even more. So it was right around the time that

Danny began his own thing. So they say that, yeah, there's that. Monk is still in prison, though. He's still there. MDOC number 113052. If you want to look him up. He won. He's there. He outlasted everybody. There you go. That's Kalamazoo Township and just a crazy ass story. That's fucking insane. That whole tale, isn't it?

I can't believe it's real. A little older than usual, but it sounds made up. It sounds like I made that whole shit up, but it would have taken way longer to make it up. I'll tell you that. That's a hell of a story to make up. So there you go. If you enjoyed this, tell the world about it. Get on whatever app you're listening on, and please give us a review. It helps a lot. Tell us your favorite pizza topping on your review. It doesn't matter. Say, I like sausage and meatball, and I'll go, great. That's good, too. Perfect.

So do that definitely and hang out with us. Follow on social media at Small Town Murder on Instagram, at Murder Small on Twitter, at Small Town Pod on Facebook. Follow, go to the website, shutupandgivememurder.com. Tickets for live shows, Durham, May 31st, North Carolina, come strong. Nashville sold out the next night. But also there's Minneapolis, Austin, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, New York. Get your ticket Milwaukee. It's almost sold out Milwaukee too. Yeah.

Get your tickets right now for that. Definitely. Certainly want Patreon. Patreon.com slash Crime and Sports. All the bonus material. Great stuff. Anything you want. Anybody $5 a month or above, you get everything that we put out. Hundreds of back episodes. New ones every other week. This week, what you're going to get for Crime and Sports, which you also have access to, theme park disasters. Sure. Who doesn't want to know about that? For small town murder, we're going to talk about the craziest execution methods in history. Yeah.

That's going to get real weird. So can't wait for that. We'll be chit-chatting about that. Check that out. Patreon.com slash crime in sports. And that said, Jimmy, hit me with the wonderful people who have signed up for Patreon and have been our fucking heroes. Hit me with them right now. This week's executive producer are David Cook, Samara, Samara, Samara, Slocum, Slocum, Carly wrote a back.

She did. And yeah. You guys, we can't do this without you. So we can't tell you how much we appreciate you guys. It's truly amazing. And our best friend, Jelly Roll, also a giant executive producer because he's so nice to us talking about us on- Jelly Roll was a great show.

Amazon and other podcasts. He's what a great guy. He did an interview and said that we were his guilty pleasure podcast. And he had the look on his face was the look of someone telling about something that they really like. These guys are hilarious. And I was like, this is great. Thank you. What a good guy, man. Thank you. Other producers this week are Kelly Snap and Alexis Snap. I don't know if you know this, but she graduated from pharmacy school, James. Congratulations. Did you know that? Count those pills.

Peyton Meadows, Povelius, Povelius, what is this, man? Povelius Besebius. Wow, good one. It's a great person. Wonderful. Yeah, they send messages all the time, and I forget where they're at. Hungary? Turkey? I don't know.

Somewhere. Those are very different places. Donate all the time. Thank you. Pavilas. Emily Jones. Ethan Preston is a handsome boy. Janice Hill. Teresa Vanover. Amy Peppers. Morgan Robinson. Jeanette Blankenship. Gianna Giannina. Vescovi. Sciordi. Kiana with no last name. Esther Peerdaman. Peerdaman?

All right. Uh, Vicki Vout, uh, Rod McKenzie, Jack, Jack Moretti, Sydney Steele, Joyce Sullivan, Kim Bordegossi, Bordeges, Bordagis. Hey, there we go. Mandy S. Holly Nelson, Charles Halleck, Hadjic. Uh,

London Hunter, Kevin Campbell, Monica Yeaton, Melissa. Nope, that's Missy Kidner. Kidner, Sherry Webster. Oh, no, those are two different people. Sherry Webster. Jessica with no last name. Danielle Chris. Betty's mom, Alan Braun. Keaton Rickey. Rickey? Right, Rickey. Julie Fidon. Tequila Rose XXX. I don't know if that is a website or not. Good for you. All right. Pizza Pockets. Doug. Design tattoos. Yeah.

Not draw them, just design them. No, just design them. Alex Roberts, Rishi Shandell, Stephen with no last name, Scott Wiley, Don Spear, Clayton Bumfrey, Michael DiPinto, Courtney P, Sierra Smith, Audrey H, Sam Tucker, Sam Richardson, Brenda Bohannon, Trevor Wright, Olivia Musick, Zane Gregory, Laura Comstock, Shea

Shay Cotter-Brown, Whitney Harrington, Audrey Cantrell, Jared Katz, Dawa with no last name, Garrett with no last name, Latanya McKenney, Paul Langer, Helen Jaroach, Kelly, nope, that's Becky, Becky Myers, Washington Guy, Canes30, Shannon Graham, Liz Baker, Illinois Murder Turkeys, Erica Medina, Eric Medina, sorry, MJ, the letters M and J, Steve, Steve, Michael Jordan, anything.

Probably. Steve Ainsworth, Debbie Cobb, CyFYI. Is that Cy-Fy? All right. Tucker Johnson, Phil with no last name, Erica Frazier, Kimberly N., Rachel, Rochelle with no last name, Song Heaven, Nika, N-I-C-C-A. I'm not doing it. Maleroni, Trisha Lynn Griffin. Nietzsche. Nietzsche. N-I-C-C-A.

Kate M., Vicki Paxton, Kim Duffy, Stephanie Bones, Andy McEwen, Madeline Babowich.

Jason. Nope, that's Justin. Rolison. Rolison. Sherry. Shernack. Lorakitis. Lorakitis Boys. Jeffrey Wilson. Aaron Graves. Seth DeVries. Mark Krause. Garrett. Manna. Janae. Jenna. Jenna Crete. Daniel with no last name. Lori in Maryland. Lana Urell. Kelly with no last name. Kim Davis. Glad. Nope, that's Gad. Zinzing.

Betsy Powers. Dick Burns II, James. Beth. I've got to have that. Yeah. The old lady who gave you some weed in Milwaukee. Do you remember that? I don't remember that. I do. Yes. Thank you for that. Yes, I do, actually. It's a good weed? Oh. Yeah. Nice people. I remember that. But it's Beth. That's her name. Emma Roberts. Jennifer Hall. Sondra Ewing. Lindsay W885. Meg with no last name. Soraya Pariah. Liz.

Linda Delfini. Matt Horse. Rashael. That's probably Rachel. With no last name. Autumn Schmitz. Schmititis. Beverly Middleton. Michael. I got diagnosed with Schmititis. It's bad. It's bad.

It's right there. I got it in the schmatitis. My foot's never going to recover from the schmatitis I got. Michael Gonzalez, Heather Carter, Suzette Wheeler, Ashley with no last name, Scott Schwend, Jennifer, nope, that's Jefferson, Ingram, Kat Camacho, Marie Callender. All right.

I get you. I know what you're doing. Colby with no last name. Mariah White. Right. Dirty Al Green. Dirty Al Green. Dirty Al Green. Al Green. He's filthy. Al Green, but dirty. Divine. Devaney. It's Divine, D.C. That's what that is. Randy Brown. Jackson with no last name. Kristen McNeil. Connor Pale. Pamela Doherty. Paula Welch. Melinda Wilson. Akiko Schoen. Christine Guggenberger. Emma Burns. Dylan Smith.

Margaret Wright, Shaqtee. Is that Shaqtee? Yeah. Brittany, oh boy, Renee. Jordan Collard, Joel Lee, Moon, I think. Tyler Harris, Autumn Davis, Stephanie Marie. What is this? Alexandra Paradise, Zachary Rydell, Patrick Bakies, Jagger, Muay, Penny, Jack, Mick's kid.

Penny with no last name. Elliot Tilden. Josh Stanley. Bree B. Jenny Becerra. Sarah Goldsmith. Justin Simmons. Nick Vargas. Sherry Holm. Emma Louise and Rice Jones. Ellen T. Crosby. Anna. Oh, it's Rice. Reese Rice. Anna T. Contreras. Oh, Anna Contreras. Ellen T. Crosby. Rosie Cheeks. Megan Hale. Hale? Haley. Haley Ray. All right. Emily Revelles.

It's falling apart. Heather with no last name. Stephanie Huber. Fred with no last name. Claymore with no last name. Garrett Bowman. Jamie Southard. South Hard. South Hard. Melinda Shocker. Shatcher. Hunter McLeod. Drew with no last name. Jeannie Ray. Scott Campbell. Mindful Movement. Damian Davis. Melissa Lelaney. Leah Crago. McGuire Detlefson, I think it is. And Tristan Yacklin is...

he lost his battle to depression, man. And it's fucked up. And thank you so much, John, for spending that time with us. Thank you for being a part of this. Tristan, I'm furious. And if you've got fucking anything, you guys fucking talk to somebody, reach out. Don't,

I wanted to say to Jason Fuller, too, and Jason Fuller and his family, too. That was a bit of a tragedy. Super fucked up, man. I'm real sorry. I'm thinking about you guys. Yeah, man. Yeah, sorry. You, your wife, you guys are really nice to us and have known you for so long. The victims are the ones left behind, man. Don't do this to people. It's fucking horrible. Get help. Reach out.

Do all that shit. Look, you're doing it because you're feeling like a burden. You're not, and don't feel like that. If I knew the words, I'd fix it. Listen, if they're two hours into a comedy show, or two and a half hours into a comedy show, and they're

And right now they're considering it. We've done a terrible job, really. We've really fucked this up. We've really fucked up if you're this far into the show. So we'll put it that way. So hopefully we haven't made it worse for you. Seek help, for sure. Talk. Talk it out. It's not worth it.

Thank you so much, everybody. You wonderful, crazy bastards. We love you like you couldn't fucking believe or wouldn't believe. So thank you for all that you do for us. If you want to follow us on social media, head over to shutupandgivememurder.com. It's all right there. Keep coming back. Keep finding us. Tell your friends. Post about it. Do all that shit. And until next week, everybody, it's been our pleasure. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

She struck him with her motor vehicle. She had been under the influence and then she left him there.

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

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

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