#499 - Hermit Horrors - Denio, Nevada
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This week, in Denayo, Nevada, when multiple people are found murdered in the desert, attention is focused on a man who lives in a hole in the ground and shuns society at every turn. Welcome to Small Town Murder. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder. Yay!

Oh, yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay indeed. My name is James Petrigallo. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wissman. Thank you folks so much for joining us today on our 499th episode. 499. Going to be the big one here coming up on Friday. The Express episode will be episode 500. Join us for a celebration. It's been seven years and 500 episodes. Wow.

And we're nowhere near the bottom of the barrel here. Nowhere near done. We can't wait. We can't wait for 500 more, but definitely check that out. Also, head over to ShutUpAndGiveMeMurder.com. First of all, tons of merch there, but also tickets to live shows. Hey! Last Batch was amazing. Durham and Nashville, thank you so much. You guys are great.

You guys are amazing. You're shut up and gives me murders were loud. You guys were all singing along to nobody, no crime. Bob Marley version beforehand. What a blast, man. Thank you, everybody. Great crowds and a lot of fun. We injured a woman, unfortunately.

Terrible. Yeah, we saw it. That was crazy. Yeah. So there you go. You will laugh so hard an ambulance might be required because it was for one particular woman, which is we're both sad and proud at the same time. As a comedian, if someone died in your audience from laughter, as sad as that would be, you're kind of like –

I'm good. That means I'm good. I'm going to make a trophy about it. We're going to do that. So, no. She's okay. We know that. That's why we're making jokes. She's doing great and a very nice person. So, thank you for doing that. Get your tickets. Minneapolis, you're up next. September 20th. Be our biggest show ever. You can do it.

Yeah. You can beat Chicago, and then we have Milwaukee right after that that's just about sold out. So if you want to get in Milwaukee, get your tickets right this instant. Also, Kansas City, we opened up more seats, so get in there. Everybody get your tickets and get in there at shutupandgivememurder.com. Patreon.com slash crimeinsports is where you get all the bonus material. All you have to be is $5 a month or above, a cup of coffee. The price of a cup of coffee, you're going to get so much more than coffee.

Your cup would be overfloweth with hundreds of back episodes that you'll get immediately. And, of course, new ones every other week. One crime and sports, one small-town murder. You get it all. You get it all. You get it all. This week for crime and sports, we're going to talk about all of the various New England Patriots cheating scandals. You don't even really have to be a big sports fan to remember all that stuff because it was so big. And then for small-town murder, we're getting back into Ed Gein. Ed Gein Part 2.

We're going to wrap up some loose ends and specifically talk a lot about the psychology of Ed Gein and what the hell was going on there. That's going to be a lot of fun. Patreon.com slash Crime and Sports. And you get a shout out at the end of the show as well. So you can't beat it. It's going to be wonderful. Quickly, we've got to do the disclaimer. Sure. This is a comedy show. It is. We're comedians. We are. We're going to make jokes. We are.

And people are going to die. For sure. Absolutely. Otherwise, the show would be a lie. The name of the show itself would be a lie. Small Town Survives. Small Town Almost Dead is not a great show title. Small Town Living. That's not a fun show. Well, that's like an HGTV show, but it's definitely not a murder show. We're talking about magnolia trees. Yeah.

What we do, though, what we go out of our way to do is we don't make fun of the victims or the victim's family. Why is that? Because we certainly are assholes, but we're not scumbags. And that's how that works. So it's a good deal. If you think that sounds like a good time, you're going to hear a wild show. If you think true crime and comedy should never, ever go together. I don't know why he clicked on this to begin with, but obviously you were drawn to it for some reason. Give it a chance. You might like it. Yeah.

try? If not, no bitching later. That's the deal. So that said, shut up. I think it's time for everyone who's left here. Let's all take a deep breath, arms to the sky, and let's all shout. Shut up and get me

murder. Let's do this, everybody. Okay. Let's go on a trip, shall we? Let's go. Oh, baby. We're going to Nevada. It's been a while. Hey. Nevada is a very difficult state to find small town murders in. Really? I'll be real honest. Is that right? It's the most difficult state out of the 50 we have to do. Really? Really, really hard because...

Most of the population is in Las Vegas or Reno, which are both too big. And otherwise, there's very little... There's not much going on there. But otherwise, there's very little...

stuff going on. It's sparsely populated. It's very sparsely populated, so it's really hard. It's like here in Wyoming because there's just no people there at all. And it's a giant fucking landmass state, too. It's huge. It's big. It's all like federal government owned land. They irradiated it with nuclear testing for years and years. Can't live there.

But there's some interesting formations and there's mountains and that is a weird place. This is Denio, Nevada. This is D-E-N-I-O. Looks like Denio, but of course, because it's small town murder, it can't be pronounced that way.

It's Denayo. This is in northwestern Nevada, right on the Oregon border up there. Right on the Oregon border. Yeah, it's weird because the closest town to here is Winnemucca, which we already did. Oh, yeah. And the murder doesn't take place in Denayo proper, but it's the last town you go to to get to this place in the middle of nowhere that we're going to talk about. So it's almost four hours to Reno. Yeah.

So a long time, three hours and 20 minutes to Elko, which was our last episode that we did in Nevada, episode 432, Broken Trust, Broken Skull. I remember that one. This shit stretches from Arizona to Oregon. To Oregon. Yeah, it connects the Pacific Northwest and the Southwest Desert. It's...

Nevada's a weird state and it's all kind of lowland desert in one area. There's huge mountains. The town we're going to talk about, Denayo's at almost 4,100 feet of elevation. Is that the Cascades or some shit up there? Yeah, it's up there. Yeah, it wouldn't be the Sierras. That's in

Would it be the Sierras? I don't know. It might be the Sierra Nevadas, James. The Sierra Nevada. I think it is because it goes through California right there by Reno. It's just up there, mountainy. Because that's where Reno is and the Sierras, I think. Yeah. Yeah. That's how that would go. This is in Humboldt County, not the one with the weed. Okay. A very dry, deserty one. The town of Denayo itself is small, 0.46 square miles. Its motto is the Blackfire Opal Capital of the World.

Well, what the fuck is that? Opal is the gem or not the gem, whatever the fuck you'd call it. Opal stone. Stone. There you go. And black fire opals a kind. And this is the capital of the world. This is all mining country around here. This is the place where people come with treasure maps in their hand and to go find the legend of some shit like that. This is some crazy like old west stuff.

Fantasyland, I would call this to a lot of people. There's a lot of hot springs around here, natural hot springs that people go to. So a little bit of history here. And God damn it, it's not easy putting together the stats on a place like this because there's hardly any people here. So it was originally in Oregon, this place.

They moved the boundary, huh? They moved the border, yeah. It was named after Aaron DiNio, who settled in the area in 1885. And this guy had been born in Illinois, traveled to California. He was a miller, a miner, and a farmer. And then he settled on the Oregon-Nevada border. He died in 1907, but the post office was named after him in 1888, and that's how the town got its name. Because there was really not a lot of other people here.

So they just name it after that guy, I guess. After World War II, a bunch of businesses relocated south of the – they basically moved the town south of the Oregon border to take advantage of Nevada's very loose laws for everything.

They had no income tax, liberal liquor laws. You could put slot machines and gambling in your place. Prostitution laws were more liberal. So the post office was moved even and then reopened in 1950 with a Nevada address. They were like, yeah. Listen, sometimes you got to have some strippers with your mail. We're in Nevada now. Well, strippers deliver your mail in this town. That's how they do it. They use your mailbox as a stripper pole and they hump it and shit and it's.

You're pretty excited to get your gas bill, I'll tell you that. Big pink feather on her hat. It's pretty odd. That's how you know she's the mail lady. The feather. You see it coming down the street and sticking out of the Jeep. So in this town, it's a census-designated place, which means there's no real governmental structure. This includes a post office, a community center, a library, and then the complete center of the town where everybody goes to.

to do everything is the Diamond Inn Bar. That's where it all happens. Really? The Diamond Inn Bar. Yeah, it's one of these places. We'll solve this over a pint. Nothing else to do there. We'll pass the hat to pay for the rec center. Yep.

Here's some reviews of this place that I found from because people stop in here because it's the only thing for hundreds of miles in each direction. So they stop and it's fucking fascinating and it's fascinating. And that's what people think, too. Here is Joe four stars, a place to stop and stretch and drink a cold beverage. All right. This corner is a welcome sight, especially driving through the Oregon outback, even though there ain't much to see here.

Ain't much to see here. There's a corner store that sells cold drinks and other food stuff. There's also a small hotel if you're looking for a place to get some shut-eye. Shut-eye. Shut-eye. Yeah. Oh, boy. This is a review from the 1880s, I believe. A very specific man wrote that. Ain't much of a place to get no shut-eye. Jeff gives it three stars. Good lunch, he says.

Oh, boy. Okay. I stopped in for lunch driving through the area. The lady at the counter was great. I ordered their burger and was not disappointed. Gas was a little pricey, a dollar more than I paid in Winnemucca, but they're the only show in town for about 100 miles in any direction. Only show in town. They say wild things out here. This is amazing. Yeah. People who live out here don't understand they're talking in other centuries terms. They say consarned it when they're upset. Yeah.

Dag gum. Dag gum. I stopped here for lunch again, but I make sure to fuel up in a larger town first. But by the time you get there, you need more. It's 100 miles away. And now they're the only show in town. The only show. Three stars. I bought a gallon there as an insurance policy. I'd never been in the area before. And all I can say is don't stop here unless you have no choice. They know they've got the market cornered and they're not shy about leveraging it to their customers' disadvantage.

Yeah, because it costs more to truck it out there, too. That's the other problem. I was lucky enough to not have to go in, but the gas was priced at a minimum of $1 higher than any other station I passed, which honestly seems fair because you're in the middle of nowhere. It's expected. You should have filled up back there. That's the choices you make. Fill up in Winnemucca and leave me alone. Shut up. So one star, nasty store owner. Here we go. We stopped her, by the way. We stopped her.

We stopped her to get snacks and take a short break. My sweetie went in TP to buy, I guess, to went in to buy snacks. And I took our dog out for a quick leg stretch. Two other dogs that were roaming around residents there, I assume, uh,

I live in a gas station, okay? So...

Stop saying that. Yeah.

Dad gum. My sweetie came out of the store and told her we are leaving, and she finally retreated to the store. This was uncalled for. We will never return. I don't think they expect you to, probably. You're passing through. They leave dogs off-leash to scare you away. Yeah, exactly. Get out of here. Nothing was posted. She was just cranky for no apparent reason. Okay. All right. People here...

Now, anywhere, and this is seasonal, too, because it gets fucking cold up here. It's 4,100 feet of elevation. So in the mountains, it's cold. So it ranges from anywhere from 20 to 47 is the population of this town. People. People. 20 to 40. Yeah, we're going to go on the 47. Let's say it's a...

It's a perfect season for this and everybody's here. 47 people. Yes, there are. Rather than give you the percentages of male and female, I'll just give you the actual number. There are 25 males and 22 females in the town. This is great. We know exactly. There are three lonely, lonely men in this town.

Three guys beating off. I hope they're gay. Let's just say that. Maybe they can fuck each other, but otherwise they're going to be sorely disappointed. There may be one. If they're not open to a polyamorous, there's one lonely dude. One lonely dude. He's like, damn it. Musician.

Median age here, 60.3. A little old. Oh, boy. This is a lot of older people come out here to live in the desert. I guess you've had it with society. To be done, to give up. Yeah, you're done. You've just had it with people. Everyone here, nobody's married, by the way. Zero percent married. Everyone is either single or widowed, one of the two, which is hilarious. No desert. Marriage ain't legal out here on the desert.

It's just unrecognized. Y'all can say it, but we don't believe it. It doesn't mean nothing. Yeah. You can just say it, and it means just as much as if you did it. It doesn't matter. Still filing single on that W-2. Tell you what. It's 100% white, people out here. Median income is $76,299.

That's median household income, which is much higher. Not much. $7,000 more than the rest of the country. The average household size, so people who live in a household, it's normally like 2.7 in the rest of the country. Here it's 1.6. So the average...

Dwelling does not contain two people. This is one dwelling that has roommates. It's fucking it up for everybody. Fucking everything up. Unemployment is low because there's nobody here. You know, cost of living is also lower than 100. It's eighty nine point two. So that's low. Median home value here is two hundred eighty one thousand six hundred sixty dollars.

It's not bad. It's high. And they break down the mean prices for the average prices for all the different houses, and whether it's a detached house or a mobile unit, I did find that. Maybe this is for you. Maybe you said, damn it, I'm tired of society. I'm looking for a place to hide out forever. Maybe you're wanted for something. Add it up to here with everything. Add it up to here. Well, we have for you the Denial Nevada Real Estate Report. ♪♪♪

The average two-bedroom rental goes for... It doesn't exist. It's a middle of the desert. Nobody's renting... There's not an apartment complex here, so you're not getting that. Everybody owns this shit. Here is a three-bedroom, two-bath, 300-square-foot hovel.

Say again? Three bedroom, two bath, 300 square feet. I don't know. I'm not going to even question it. That can't work. I think somebody got their numbers crossed here, but that's the listing. It's on one acre of desert, and the only picture of the house is blurry and from a long distance.

So very strange. $70,000. You see like heat waves coming up in the picture off the ground. You're like, what's happening? Next up, we have a one acre lot of dirt. Would you like to have a flat one acre piece of dirt, everybody? Park your motorhome out here. You can have it right here for the low, low price of $36,000. So move on in. I don't need that.

That is very cheap. It's not that bad. No, that's pretty good. And then finally, a three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,908-square-foot house. It's on Sunset Boulevard also, so, you know. Very exciting. All the stars. That's what the street is called, which is funny. And it's on 2.80 acres.

There are no pictures of the inside of it, so God knows what's in there. Who knows? It's a long ride to the Viper Room. Long ride to the Viper Room. Yeah, yeah. If you want to find a young star dead in a gutter, you're going to have to travel. It's a drive. $270,400 for that thing. Oh, good Lord. So it's still on almost three acres. But they're not showing us what's inside of it. No, no, no. They're just, I think, a structure and a roof, and they're like, that's all you need. There's no floor. I'm very interested. Yeah.

Things to do here. Well, we've said in the town itself, there's a community center, a library and the Diamond Inn bar. That's all really what's going on here. But they say that hunger. This is from a travel site. Hungry travelers weary from a long day exploring some of Nevada's impressive natural sites can warm their bellies with a famously juicy burger. Watch or wash down by ice cold beers at Denio Junction.

The nearby Diamond Inn Bar, opened in 1951, offers good food and bar entertainment such as pool, shuffleboard, cards, and bar dice. Bar dice? What the fuck is bar dice? I've worked in bars. I grew up hanging out. Never seen bar dice before. We played like CeeLo and shit, but not bar dice. That wasn't a game.

This feels like those stabbings a lot. Oh, God, yeah. Just outsider. What you doing? Yeah. Recreational activities include bird watching, photography, off-road vehicle use, fishing, recreational black opal mining. That's very fun. Recreational? It's better than medicinal black opal mining. I like it much better because, you know, you have to pay more taxes, but still, I like it better. Yeah.

Rock hounding, hunting, visiting all the hot springs, which we'll talk about, and camping in the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge. So this is Denyos Lake, the town you go to and can stay in because there's a motel if you're going to go out in this area and explore. It's like knockoff Sedona, huh? Kind of.

Kind of, yeah, except without the, yeah, I guess you could say that, without any of the things that are in Sedona. Yeah, without anything but hamburgers. Yeah, without like goods or services or anything, yeah. Sedona circa 1835. Yeah, exactly. They said the black fire opals found at these mines were designated as Nevada's state precious gemstone in 1987. Wow.

And it's one of only two spots on Earth where you can find Blackfire Opal gemstones.

And so that's why they stole because we got the best before the other one. We got the most of them. So a trip here, they say it's a once in a lifetime opportunities. Spend a day rock hounding at the Dig It Yourself Bonanza, Rainbow Ridge and Royal Peacock, Virgin Valley, Black Opal Fire or Blackfire Opal Mines. And also they say some of the best stargazing there possibly is. We have stars. It's dark here is what you're telling us. Guess where the best stars are, wherever it's dark.

Come on over at night. You can't see shit. You can't see shit but stars. Woo boy. That's just how it is. You can't see your hand in front of your face. And you can see migrating pronghorn antelope as well. Oh, that's cool. That's neat. I would say so. They say it's the fastest land animal in the world, which I don't know if that's true either. I think they're lying to us in this article. I don't think so. What about like a cheetah or a leopard or a cheetah? I thought they were supposed to be super fast.

What about the fucking gazelle? Pronghorn antelope is what it is. Oh, pronghorn. Migrating pronghorn antelope. That's the ones with the fucking... Twisty deals. Like a duck's dick. Like one of those. Yeah. Duck dick horns. A duck's legit got a drill on him. Oh, yeah, yeah. They have to... That's so the chick ducks can't get away, I guess. Threaded in. How terrible is their game where they're like halfway through it, they're like, I changed my mind.

No, you didn't. No, you didn't. That's disturbing. You're a yo-yo now. Let's get off the subject of duck rape and move on to something else here. Crime rate in this town, what we're interested in, property crime is about half of the national average. So I don't know who could be stealing or doing. Yes, it should be zero. There's 47 people here. Right. Bill, stop doing that shit.

Right. Everyone saw you. There's no one else here. And then violent crime, murder, rape, robbery, and of course, assault. The Mount Rushmore of crime also low. It is about three quarters of the national average. So again, and no one's even married. So as there, it's not like there's domestic disputes. Most people live alone for, you can't have a domestic dispute with yourself. I would think. Yeah. There's no victim, right? No, I wouldn't say so. So that was one of the most difficult,

like towns we've ever had to do the info on because it had to come from a little bit here, a little bit there. There's no, you know, main like area where you can get everything here. It's fucking cool as hell. I like that. That's neat. We normally have, you know, this could be, I think last week was like a suburb of Philly. You know what I mean? And now we're doing this. I love it. So here we go. Let's talk about some murder.

Holy hell. Do we have some weird, weird, weird shit this week? Let's get it on. Here we go. Let's talk about Ronald John Gress. G R E S S R J Gress Ronald. He doesn't like Gress though. He's going to, he's, he'd rather you call him a different name and we'll talk about that. He's got a name. He'd rather you call him as a last name. And then he has two nicknames that everybody else calls him, which is hilarious. Yeah.

Okay. We'll get into them as they come along. Okay. Now, old Ronald here, he's born in North Dakota in 1935. Hell yeah. So, okay, we'll talk a little bit about this guy. I found in 1952 here, because his family ends up in Oregon. He doesn't grow up completely in North Dakota. He ends up in Oregon. And in 1952, there's a court case that

where apparently someone is trying to adopt him. He's like 17, which makes no sense. Yeah, he's only got a few months to go. Yeah, someone is trying to adopt him, I guess, and they're talking about they want to give him the name. He's trying to be adopted and have his name changed from Gress to Ronald John Bunnell, B-U-N-N-E-L-L, which is a couple that's Helen and James Bunnell.

Bunnell who are trying to adopt him. And they're saying that there has to be a big court hearing because his parents are like fighting it now, even though they weren't before. So I don't know what ended up happening, but he, and he stayed grass. So apparently the Bunnells lost out. Um, he's known as being like an all American boy in high school, like type of deal. And it was talking late forties, early fifties, you know, Letterman sweater, that kind of door, you know? So handsome guy, athletic, uh,

Well-liked by people and, you know, all that kind of thing. And then he seems to be having a good trajectory in his career path, too. He's still living in Oregon. At some point, he works for Boeing for a while. Yeah. And at some point, he's a computer programmer in the 60s, which is the beginning of computers. So, like, he's on the cutting edge of this world.

brand new world changing technology. A block down to plug something into this computer. Oh yeah. The whole warehouse. That's, that's the computer. It's got, it's got eight megabytes of Ram, this whole warehouse. It's bigger than the plane. When you see back in the day too, they would have like a, literally an entire giant room filled with shit. And that was one computer with like 10 megabytes of Ram. And they were like, it's moving. It's so fast.

And a line of people in white lab coats and clipboards looking up at it, jotting shit down. Yeah, always looking up, putting their glasses on the end of their nose. Don't you wish you had a computer to put all this computer info in? Then at some point, he goes completely off the rails. Okay. So this is sometime between...

The late 50s, he would have graduated high school in 53. Sometime between 53 and 63, he works for Boeing as a computer programmer and then loses his fucking mind by 63. 1963, he's like potato farming in Oregon. So to go from being a computer programmer to a potato farmer is an odd transition. It's a weird choice. In 1963, he started telling everyone he knew, and he was positive of it, that 300 women wanted to marry him.

300 women were all trying to marry him. And he was like, I got to like, I got to lay low because I got 300 women trying to marry me. 300? Like he was on a reality show and like, you know, who wants to marry a fucking lunatic and who wants to marry a potato farmer?

And 300 of them are all over it. So it's because it's because their husbands were Spartans, James, and they're all dead. It's potato farming. Flavor of love is what he's got going on. He really hates it. Yeah. So that's what he's got. And he's telling everyone. Everyone's like, sure, Ron. Yeah. OK. 300 women want to marry you. OK, that's great. You know, you have manure all over your shoes. You know that, right?

Odd choice in number. 300. I mean, everybody's going to think you're a liar, right? Well, he doesn't think so. He thinks that people should believe him and is hoping to lead them into battle, all of them, like you said. So then in 1966, he is institutionalized.

Which makes sense. And it's not for thinking that 300 women love him. No, no, it's actually not for that. I'm sure that contributed to it. But the main the main factor that springboarded him into an institution was that he and his father got in a fight.

And his father came at him with a knife and he returned with a shotgun. So police entered a standoff between a knife-wielding father and a shotgun-wielding son. And then they talked to the son and he was like, 300 women want to marry me. And they were like, oh, we see who's the crazy one. And they put him in an institution. Yeah, because...

That's what happened. He looks like the winner at this point. Yeah. He's the smart one. But if you took them both aside and talked to him and one said, I don't know, he's acting crazy and I had to get a knife to defend myself and he got a shotgun and the other one's like, 300 women are trying to marry me. You'd be like, hmm, wonder who the problem is here.

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Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash smalltownmurder to get free shipping and 365-day returns. quince.com slash smalltownmurder. Now back to the show. No wonder. Then, so that's 1966. He's going to be institutionalized a couple of times between 66 and 68.

Couple different times. You really, in that time period, you gotta be out of it for them to put you somewhere. But also, you could be put away just based on a pretty light recommendation, too. It's not like now. Yeah, now you have to like, there's a, there's like, there's like a panel you have to go, there's a whole system. Back then, like a husband could just literally go to a mental institution and be like, my wife's acting wacky and they just take her away.

Guys used to do that all the time to get rid of their wives. That was like a big deal. Oh, fuck yeah. That was a huge, a huge deal back in the day. They wanted to get rid of their wives. James, I had to go through divorce. I was going to say, yeah. That would have been great. You had to go through a divorce to have the court say she's fucking wacky. Yeah. I needed a judge to tell her and it took years. It took years. So he is diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.

Which makes sense thinking that 500 women or 300 women want to marry. Come on. He's not that crazy. Come on.

So he's hospitalized a bunch. Then in 1968, when he's out, this is after a second hospitalization. And by the way, people will say that he's in remission from paranoid schizophrenia after this incident. He's going to be fine. He's going to be judged. That's a thing. He's going to be judged just fine. And they literally say it's in remission and he should be good. Remission. Remission.

Which I've never heard before from paranoid schizophrenia. I think it's pancreatic cancer. Well, that never goes into remission. You just ask Patrick Swayze. That one gets you fast. Yeah, that one gets you real fast. You're just done at that one. So that was Swayze's problem. Weak pancreas. That was his whole issue. Should have worked that one. Yeah, all this stuff. He's doing these kicks over his head. Pancreas. Chest looks great. Pancreas falling apart. See, you can't work it out.

So 1968, he is trying – he's eating a duck in a cabin in a deserted mining town. He's in a ghost town and he went to one of these cabins that he doesn't own. It's just a ghost town cabin. And he's eating a duck in there, okay? I think it was – I'm sure it was a l'orange. It was real classy, I'm sure. Crispy skin. You know how it goes. Yeah.

You don't think it was on a stick over a fire? Actually, I don't even picture him with a fire. I picture him just not even feathering it, just biting it with feathers coming out of the side of his mouth and a mouth full of feathers and meat. I think it was maybe a match. Trying to cook it. So the highway patrolman and a game warden showed up because they heard he was out there. And there's games.

This is the first time in this show the game warden's been warranted. Yes, he's not investigating a human murder. No, he's figuring out if this guy's got a license to be eating duck. Well, the game warden told him it's not duck season. Where'd you get that duck? There you go. Ain't duck season. And so old Ronald here...

If you think of a list of the craziest answers you could give for it's not duck season. Yeah. What's the best answer? You could even say I hit it with my car. It flew in front of my car and I hit it. So I ate it. It's dead anyway. Well, that's the most legal, I guess, to get you out of this. Like, I didn't kill this thing. It was just dead. And I'm eating it because I'm a disgusting fucking weird desert hermit. No good answer for this.

He comes up with probably the worst answer you could come up with as far as your mental stability. He said, well, the thing is, sir, Mr. Game Warden, I outrank you. So that's the problem. I'm actually an army general. Don't know if you knew this, but army general, and I'm on a special mission. And right now on this special mission, it gives me federal authority to open the hunting season early for myself.

So on behalf of the U.S. Army, I declare it hunting season. Thank you, guys. Have a good one. He should have gone with, well, I got it from where it is hunting season. Yeah, and I brought it here.

Nope, I'm an army general on a special mission with special authority, federal authority to be able to just open up hunting seasons when I see fit for my own needs to forage. When I need it to be, yeah. And they went, you can't hunt out of season here. Like, they just tried to ignore it. So he said, okay, and pulled out a 12-gauge shotgun, put it in the game warden's face, and pulled the trigger. And it didn't go off. Misfired.

Oh, my God. So the highway patrolman and the warden tackle him and take him to the ground because he just tried to, at very close range from three inches, blow the head off of a fucking game warden for telling him that he can't hunt ducks.

Who we found out is the most highest ranking officer in this task. Yeah. They're like, General, General, calm down. General, let us put the cuffs on you. Stop resisting, General. Wow. So this is special crazy here. He's put back in the institution there, obviously. But by the end of 1968, he's released. And all the doctors said that his paranoid schizophrenia, they got it all figured out.

He's good now and he's quote in remission now. So attempted murder, hardcore attempted murder. But they said even the cop was like, he's obviously out of his fucking mind. Like they didn't even take him to jail. They took him to the mental institution because they were like this dude saying he's a general and he tried to shoot me in the head. None of this is normal. Like it's crazy. It's not normal. So he's in remission, though. He's doing well.

Okay. So he's so in remission and doing so well mentally that over the next couple years, he just completely drops out of society and starts becoming like a weird, like minor who dynamites things. And probably for the best, this is the, yeah, that's what I mean. This guy doesn't need to be like on the morning train. You know what I mean? He doesn't need to be on the subway. We don't need this guy at all. Right. He 1970, he earns a new nickname. Here's one of his nicknames. Okay.

Now, in this newspaper article, they have his age completely wrong, but it's definitely him. He was he's from there. They have him as from Merrill, Oregon, but he was in near or or Rob or Avado. He was near, I guess, the town in Oregon. He's mining and he's injured in a dynamite blast.

He was caught in a premature dynamite blast 12 miles north of the Quinn River crossing near Orovato. It went on three? What happened? Yeah, it went too early. I guess it had a quick wick or something and he was gone. So it blew off a good chunk of his right hand and a good chunk of his left hand as well and peppered the rest of him with shrapnel from rocks. I mean, his whole face is covered in rock dust.

scars now and he's got I believe on one hand they're able to salvage the fingers and so he keeps all of them he just it's a little gnarled look in his hand the other hand he has three fingers now so he blew he ends up losing two fingers out of this the two middles I'll bet you but the crazy part is after this happened he walked a 12 mile switchback road and

Imagine this. Missing everything. That's how bad it was. Missing all of this and went to a ranch near the Quinn River and just entered the kitchen door. Just came through the kitchen door with three fingers in his hand hanging off and meat and blood everywhere and his face is totally covered in blood from all the rocks. The cook at this place, at this ranch...

turned around, saw him walk in and completely passed out, fainted. I would too. This is an old West. I mean, I know it's 1970, but still, this is like a ranch cook in the West. You know what I mean? Remember City Slickers? None of those guys would have passed out from anything.

Those guys were hardcore. That was the 90s. This is a man that spins a chicken before he makes it. He rings a neck and then makes dinner. Doesn't give a fuck. And he's like, oh. And he saw this man's hands and passed out. Passed out. So they also said if he would have not walked the switchback road and instead walked as the crow flies, he would have saved himself about half the trip. And it could have been six miles instead of 12.

Hilarious. Might have saved a finger. So they said basically they followed a trail of blood 12 miles. You could follow it. He just bled for 12 miles. They said if it had been warm out, he would have died.

Yeah, because the cold slows it down. Luckily for him, it was very cold and it kept the blood, coagulated the blood some even. It kept him from bleeding to death. And probably kept the fingers fresh enough to reattach. Yeah, the ones that were hanging off. I guess he had a broken left shoulder, cuts, abrasions all over him, and he went to the emergency room. The sheriff said it was a miracle that he survived.

That grass survived. Unreal. Two days later, they talk about the blood was congealed. The 12 mile trek was retraced by investigators and they said they follow the blood trail the whole time. It's wild. They said the distance down the mountain, he definitely shouldn't have gone the switchback way, but that's the way he went. And he was transferred to Veterans Hospital in Reno from the Winnemucca Hospital. And he was suffering from the broken shoulder and all that. And he's been in intensive care since then.

After this, all of his friends, all the other minors, they all call him Three Fingers after that. Old Three Fingers. Now he's Three Fingers Gress. Okay? Yeah. And he embraces it, too.

He'll call one of his sort of house later, the three-finger hot spring, he calls it. Really? Yeah, which sounds like he's going to finger you in a hot spring. With three of them. Get ready for three, guys. It's coming. The accommodating fist. Oh, my God. Yeah, so at, I guess...

One of his rancher there said that he was called him, quote, tougher than hell. He walked over seven miles through severe cold to seek aid. But they were all impressed with how tough he was that he lived. He should have died in the desert somewhere and he didn't.

So, yeah, TNT, that's a that's a big boy. Both of his hands a damn near blew his whole fucking shit apart. Oh, yeah. Very close to dying. I mean, very close to dying in multiple different ways. So from 1970 after the blast, I'm sure it took him a while to recover. I would imagine he was in for weeks in intensive care. So it took me a year. Yeah, that's it's got to take a while to recover. So over the next couple of years, he just recedes even farther from society and

Really? Into the desert. Into mining and hot springs action and all this kind of weird stuff. So he also earns a couple of new nicknames. So now he's Three Fingers, number one. He's also got – he's also named and we'll call it – we'll figure it out here. His nickname Straight Gut is what –

His buddies call him straight gut, straight gut. Yeah, straight gut. And he says, OK, so I'm Ronald Gress. I'm also three fingers and straight gut. But I want to change my last name legally because I'm not real into this Gress thing. I don't maybe he was still trying to get a new last name from his adoption from when he was 17. He changes his last name to Bristle Wolf.

Bristle wolf. Bristle wolf. Two words crammed into one word. Bristle wolf. So the bristles of a wolf, apparently.

Is there a breed of bristle wolf or is this just his made up thing? I feel like the bristle is in the desert and he's a wolf because he's, you know, a lone wolf out there. He's one of those guys that has like a fuck. If he had the money, he'd have a van with a wolf painted on the side of it. You know what I mean? In the 70s. Yeah. A big airbrushed fucking wolf howling at the moon. I wonder where straight gut comes from. If that's like. I have. I'll tell you exactly. Oh, yeah. All right. Yeah.

It's because of his crazy eating habits. One of his friends said that he came over one night and ate like 12 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches straight to the gut, straight gut. And we'll talk. He's got a quote from it. We'll talk to.

He's very hungry, and you'll understand the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches when we get to it. But at this point, he's completely ragged. He cuts his own hair, but not even like well. He's got big chunks taken out of it. Like he just grabs fistfuls of it and cuts it. Well, three fingers full. Three fingers of hair in there.

Figure if it's the right fingers, that's a scissor hand. If it's the correct finger. So he's all fucking crazy looking when he comes out of the desert with this crazy hair, all dirty with, you know, fingers missing and everything else here. He would be seen eating dead animals that he picked off the highway. OK. Yeah. He just eats like roadkill and scavenges meat from the dump.

From the dump. He's a coyote. He's a wolf. That's what he is. A bristle wolf. A bristle wolf. So he would walk all the way to Denayo, which is like 50 miles north of where he's hanging out, and walk all the way through the desert, 50 miles every month to cash his $185 a month disability pension checks.

Wow. Because of his mental illness. And his fingers, too. He gets $3 a mile he walks. It's got to take him 20 days to get there and back. And then 10 days later, he's going to turn right back around and go. He should just move to Denayo. This is wild. $180. So many of those times he would show up, his check wouldn't be there yet. Oh.

It was a problem with change of address at one point and the check stopped showing up. So rather than be upset with the federal government, he would start abusing the postal workers at the denial post office who were like, I don't know what to tell you, bro.

They didn't put it in here. Yeah. I don't know. I'm just here. I don't go to Washington and get it to the point where they would call the cops on him. And they're like, you know, this crazy desert person came out and the sheriff would have to lecture him. And, you know, all this, he never ends up being charged for anything. But multiple times the sheriff has to come calm him down, tell him to recede back into the desert.

and fuck off. Maybe you'll find your other fingers. What an interesting man. Oh, he gets even more interesting. He is a wild fella here. So he ends up in a place called Pinto Hot Springs. And it's really in the middle of nowhere. I mean, there's an article where these people went out to find it and it's not easy to find and

And it's really remote. It's really kind of you have to know where you're looking type of place without GPS. I don't know how the hell anybody found this fucking thing. Put it that way. Yeah. So this is how they describe West Pinto hot springs, which is right nearby. This is how it's described, like on the like a website for tourism, quote, a very large, stinky sulfur spring with milky white algae.

which sounds like a big hot jizz pit. That sounds disgusting. Sounds like a warning. Stinky, frothy jizz. That sounds great. Hot, too. We are the worst hot springs. That is terrible, and people go there.

Oh, God. It's stinky, too. It's sulfur. It reeks of sulfur. You can get diseases that way. I would say so. To describe what this place is and the remoteness of it, and I'm talking now, not even in 1973, now the remoteness of it still, here is something that somebody wrote from FindingNevadaWild.com. There's an article there.

There they talk about going to this and they also talk about what happened here. But they say, quote, a feeling of excitement that was then immediately followed by weight. Something definitely feels off around here is how they describe it. What's going on? This place is weird.

We didn't have time to soak or really even explore the grounds beyond the main cerulean pool that day. But after returning to civilization and pinging cell phone towers, we discovered our intuitions weren't wrong. And they talk about some things that happened there. He said Nevada beholds more. She says Nevada beholds more public lands than anywhere else, with a figure like 80 percent open to the general public to do just about whatever you want.

Because federal lands, you can do anything you want pretty much, as long as it's not permanent. You can go out for a night and fuck off. That's where people go shooting in Arizona. Yeah, it's illegal to begin with. Today, you can roam Nevada's public lands for free, at least in most cases where you don't need a special caving or prospecting permit. They said with one caveat, the federal government requires that you don't stay in one place for longer than 14 days maximum.

So you can camp and fuck around, but you can't live out there is basically what they're saying. There's no living on this land. So they changed this, by the way. That was in the late 1970s. They changed it to that. Before that, there was no rule there.

somebody abused it that much that they had to say 14 days, you guys. Yeah, Charles Manson. You know what I mean? He was living in Death Valley. That was all federal land he was living on back then, and that's where people used to just be able to go recede away from society and just sit on a plot and just use it. So you can't do that anymore. So they say, the way I understand it, this regulation is in place so people don't make a permanent or even semi-permanent living situation out there on federal lands for free.

But back in the 70s, when Ronald Gress was looking for a way to get away from everyone, no such rule existed. So they said Bristle Wolf, meaning Ron, was pretty resourceful. Surviving a northwestern Nevada winter above ground would be pretty brutal, hot water or not, because he figures out how to irrigate his shit with the hot springs water, by the way. We'll talk about this. So he said, I can't live out here in the winter. Too cold.

So what he does is right next to the Pinto hot springs, he digs a fucking house for himself. He digs,

Just digs a house out. This is a guy who doesn't even have all his fingers. This is a lot of work. Or maybe he just has the best digging tool ever. Just a little claw, yeah. He's got like one of those three-prong gardening fucking... Yeah, he's like a backhoe. Yeah, maybe. But I mean, I imagine it's hard to hold a shovel probably with this fucking thing. So he digs an underground two-room, eight-by-ten-foot home for himself.

So he splits 8x10 into two rooms. First of all, to dig an 8x10...

That's huge. That's a lot of room to dig for in the Nevada desert. How deep did he go? It's pretty deep. I don't know the exact level, but it's down there. Six feet or so. You have to use a ladder to get into it. Yeah, it's at least six feet. It's probably eight. It's probably eight. So then he made around it on the outside. He had two gardens with fruit trees and everything with irrigated water that he brought from the hot spring.

Unreal. So, yeah, he had a whole thing going on outside of his little hovel under the ground, which is pretty resourceful, I got to say. It's impressive. So they go on to say, even though basically everyone in the region knew and feared him, things went pretty okay for him out there for a while. Locals never got too close to him. And, of course, the Bureau of Land Management's 14-day rule didn't exist, so he could just live there. Nobody cared. Do whatever he wants. So he just dug a hole and sat in the fucking desert next to these hot springs.

I don't even know if it was a high desert and irrigated that. He used the water for himself as well, so he always had a water supply. It was hot water. He could shower and do all that kind of shit. Not that he did, but he could if he wanted to. Right. It smells bad, but he can do it. Some of the people around there, here's some memories of him. Beth Goodloe of Denayo remembered when he was living with some chickens in an old car.

He was living in an old car with chickens, just living with them. Not to eat, by the way, just to have with them. Oh, they're just roommates. They're just pals. Yeah, they pay part of the rent. That's the problem. He can't afford the whole utility bill without them. God, those stink so bad. He would feed them oatmeal and popcorn even though he had nothing to eat for himself. So he'd get oatmeal and popcorn and feed his chickens but not eat anything himself.

He's a weird guy. This lady said she once loaned him $50, which he paid back, and on top of it, insisted on paying her $5 in interest, even though she didn't want it.

He said, no, no, that's only fair. You lent me $50. If I borrowed it from a bank, that's what they charge me. He's an honest guy anyway like that. He doesn't want to steal anybody's shit. He could have went back into the desert and she would have went, whatever, $50 later. He won't ask me for money again. So several people describe him as very cunning and smart. One person said he's very cunning and smart, quote, but something's wrong with him.

No kidding. Yeah. It's called paranoid schizophrenia. It's a fucking problem. Yeah. A paranoid schizophrenic who was blown up. Who's been blown up. Yeah. That's the other thing. He's got some trauma on top of it. So he would live on this pension. But there was, I guess, about a two year lapse. And there was a lot of bureaucratic shit that was caused by a change of address where he didn't get any check for two years.

So for two years, that's when he was like living in a car with chickens and he had nothing. He had nothing. They said he nearly starved and just somehow got by on roadkill and shit like that. He said, like two of his friends said at one point, he told them about a hawk had a sage hen and was about to eat it. And he scared the hawk away. And so he took the sage hen and ate it. Thanks for getting that for me, hawk.

He's a hyena. He's definitely getting for scraps here. No shit. Yeah. So he's got his underground lair, obviously, that he likes to hang out at. A lot of fruit trees and gardens. It looks great from the outside. It's this beautiful spring with all these fruit trees. And then you're like, what's that ladder? That's got to lead into some weird shit. So, yeah, he heated it with water also, piped in and everything like that.

People that knew him knew to kind of stay away from him. One guy named a minor named Jim Cole who knew him out there. He said that he was a recluse. He feared people, but he loved animals.

He said this coal guy said he had given him a gun in case he needed to hunt things. He gave him a rifle. And he said that he didn't want to use it to kill food. He just didn't want to. He was really didn't wasn't into killing animals. No, he's sitting there keeping chickens alive while he's starving to death. He's an animal. Yeah. So they described how he would instead walk. And it's over 70 miles to Denayo. Yeah.

That's the closest town from this place. He would walk up there all the way there and hang out next to the town dump for several days before starting his trip home. And while he was there, he would pick through the garbages and eat meat off discarded bones.

At the dump. So someone threw it out. Then they put it in their garbage can and it sat there. Then it was taken. Then it went in the truck. Someone was eating that like eight days ago. Yeah, it's been a while. It's sitting in the heat and he's like, I'll eat it.

And his friend said that he would the whole time he was eating, all he would be doing is picking through it, looking for cigarette butts. And he would be cursing at the people who smoked their butts down to the filter because it left him nothing to smoke. These fucking assholes. He'd be like literally like these fucking cheap son of a bitches smoking it down to the filter like they can't go buy more.

That's a testament to how much of a hold cigarettes have on people. Yeah. Well, he would take the tobacco out and roll his own. Yeah, roll his own. That's what he would do. That's how much cigarettes got a hold on us. Yeah, especially if you're in the desert and there's nothing else to do but smoke. Collecting it.

Like outside of smoking and masturbating, this guy doesn't have a lot of activities he can really do. So they said before he left, he would fill up a paper sack with tobacco and take it back with him so he could roll his own back there. Jesus. Discarded tobacco. He just picked through everybody's. Pick through the garbage. They said the 150 mile round trip took him five days each way.

So like once a month he'd have to go do his check and pick through the dump. And that was like a, that was 10 days of his month week. Yeah. That's wild. Um, they said he carried most of his valuables with him all the time. He would take everything from the hole cause there's no way to guard his hole while he's gone. He always had two guns and a knife with him at all times as well as two five gallon, uh, containers, one with gasoline and one with water.

What motors he got to run? That's the thing. Why do you have all that gas, man? That's the thing. Maybe he can trade it. I don't know what it's for. And don't mix those up and take a swig out the wrong one, man. Oh, man. You better have those labeled real fucking well. So his friends also said that he had a huge love for animals, as proven by his chicken love. But they said that coyotes would walk up to him.

Like they were his dogs. Part of them. And also a white wild horse stallion came, just would come up to him and hang out with him.

A wild desert stallion would just come up because they knew him and they were like, oh, he's cool. Like he, he just made friends with a wild horse. All of his friends said they saw it happen. But as impressive as that may be to normal people that live in city, that's just, that's, that's so scary. You're in the desert that much that they just think you're another animal. Yeah. That's concerning as fuck, man. Well,

Well, the animals don't consider you a human. That's weird. Right. That's the point. They're not around people, so they're not. No, they shouldn't be OK with people. They think, oh, you're another animal. He's a bristle. Don't worry. They come over and gossip in their native tongue and tell you about how horrible people are. Yeah. And he's like, well, I'm an army general, but let me tell you something. I don't care for him either.

Unbelievable. A woman named Susie Montero of the Leonard Creek Ranch nearby there said that he would come pick through the ranch's dump as well. And she would let him because, I mean, he's got nothing else. At one time, she said he cut out portions of the hind quarter of a cow that had been dead for over three weeks and was teeming with maggots.

He ate the asshole out of a dead cow. He cut out a quarter of it and it was hauled to the dump because of the stench. It was affected. They could smell it in the house, so they hauled it to the dump. And he instead built a fire, cooked it, and ate it.

This man is strong as fuck. He is a, wow. Imagine the shits this guy takes with the weird shit he's eating all the time. I hope he cooked everything out. I hope he likes it well done. That's what I mean. You'd have to cook it to cinder, I would imagine. Yeah. So I saw that guy, the fucking guy who goes out and survives in nature, that show that used to be on. Yeah, Bear Grylls? No.

No, no, the other guy. No? I don't know. The other guy who's like really... Anyway, he'd go do all this. Survivor Man, that guy. Okay. That guy. He'd go out and at one point he picked up like a rotten, completely rotted fish and he hadn't eaten in like two days. Oh, God, don't. It was like half a discarded fish that a bear had thrown down. Oh, God. And he's like, I got to make it. He's like... Oh, Jesus. If you cook it completely dry, it's not going to make you sick, basically. You make it into jerky, you cook everything off of it.

it so it gets hard to eat he was like I was you know like it was like the turkey in Christmas vacation it was difficult but he it's better than dying in the stream yeah just a little get a little fucking tasty so yeah that's that's kind of what he would do and grow shit like that they described him they also they all they all called him straight gut by the way all these people yeah when straight gut came up they said he was a man of few words which is not surprising

They said, though, as the 70s progressed into 77 and 78, they said he started to appear more kind of genial, more open to conversation, more just kind of loosey-goosey and more human-like. They said that his pension got restored, so he was eating regularly, which probably will help keep you a little more sane, I would think. And I hope they gave him just a nice stipend of back

You know what I mean? Yeah, I don't. All the shit that he didn't get. I hope they gave him just like a windfall of three grand. That's possible because he bought a three-wheeler. He sure did. He did. He got a three-wheeler.

They said he talked more. They saw him laugh for the first time even. He would laugh at stuff. They were like, whoa. Hell yeah, because life's fun when you got a three-wheeler. Yeah, wee, woo. Those things are so fucking dangerous, too. They're so easy to fly off of and kill yourself. And that year, oh my God, there was zero suspension. They didn't give a fuck, no. The ass end of that thing just bounced around. He's going to the dump in that shit. Oh, boy.

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That's cvs.com slash stories. CVS, making healthier happen together. Yeah, he's starving all the time otherwise. The one guy who named him straight gut is Jess Miller. He's a minor. And he said, he sat at my place one time and ate 12 sandwiches and a whole jar of peanut butter and a whole bunch of other stuff. And he said that's how he started calling him straight gut.

A whole jar of peanut butter. A whole just with his finger probably. I'll eat it all.

They said that Jim Cole, the miner, said that he was a crack shot also with his gun. Great shot. Really good shot. But he only hunted if he was going to die of starvation. He didn't like that. He never hunted where he lived also, he said, for some reason. But he would go out farther. The guy who gave him the gun, Cole, said he gave him the gun to shoot coyotes, but he would never shoot them. He made friends with them instead, which is strange. Yeah.

He said, but Cole said after he moved away, Gress had to hunt to eat two rabbits a meal. And Cole said that Gress was a crack shot who never seemed to miss even rabbits. He'd hit them every fucking time, which is incredible. You have to be a really good shot to do that. They are fast, yeah. He also, see, with some people, he's a little more genial, a little more gregarious. And then with other people, not so much. Here are some people who...

Jesus fuck man. Four different people said they were threatened when they got accidentally too close to his dugout home.

Oh, here's some good Samaritans at one point. Okay. A guy named William Moser and his son went to dresses, went to bristle wolf. I apologize. Went to bristle wolves, underground lair to see if the wolf lodge went to the bristle of Larry, the lodge to see if he needed help fighting, fighting a brush fire that was nearby. Like you want us to help you? So it doesn't burn you out of your home.

He said that he was met by, rather than, oh, thank you, he was met by Ronald turning around with a shotgun pointed at them.

and cocking the hammer and everything, ready to go. Finger on the trigger, and they were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, okay, never mind, guess you don't need help. We were just trying to help, and they took off, and he didn't shoot them, which is nice. Two other people, Bill Henderson and Martin Northey, they said that they met Ronald also, and he had a shotgun as well, because they were exploring the hot springs near his home. They said that...

Ronald told them that they were trespassing and told them to leave. Remember government land. He is an army general though. So you think that way he might have the authority to enforce that. I'm not sure.

Wow. So then somebody who certainly wasn't trespassing, a Bureau of Land Management employee named Hal Green. It's Al's brother, Hal Green. Yeah. So let's stay together out here in the desert. Yeah. He approached Ronald in April of 1977 saying that you're trespassing on public land. You can't be here. And Gress told him that I don't want to talk about it.

He goes, well, you don't have to talk about it, but you got to get off the fucking land. And he turned around with a shotgun and said, quote, I'd rather shoot than talk about it. Oh, boy. Which you go, well, that's fair. Well, I'll be seeing you then, I think. I got to run. I got to go. I didn't bring one of those. What do you say to that if you're this guy? Yeah.

the guy said that the BLM, the Bureau of Land Management, decided not to attempt to evict him because then they said, where else was he going to go? He was going to go to another place in the desert. It was going to be whack-a-mole with this guy. Or he was going to go to the town and bother everybody. So they said, just let him live out there and fuck it. Who cares, basically. He pulled a fucking shotgun on a government agent and they were just like, I don't know. It's more trouble than it's worth. Never mind. You're going to die one day, so whatever.

Oh, my God. Another guy named Harry Culliard. He was a deputy sheriff and he and another deputy sheriff went to investigate reports of a man frightening housewives in the Leonard Creek Ranch area by going from home to home asking for food.

He wasn't threatening them, but the sight of them, when he knocks on the door, you open it. This guy just fucking walks 70 miles through the desert and he's covered. Plus his face has scars all over it from the rocks. He's got three fucking fingers. His hair's all fucking mangled. He's got maggot meat on his breath. And he's like, can I have food? You're going to get freaked out. Yeah. It's weird.

And the hand is very off-putting. It's off-putting, yeah. So this Culliard said that they found Ronald, whom they described as raggedy-looking, which is probably an understatement. They talked with him for a while and asked him to accompany them into town for further questioning.

which, you know, that's reasonable, right? Sure. So Ronald had a different idea, though. Rather than the reasonable thing of just going to the police station and talk to them more, he instead turns around and tries to stab the sheriffs with a butcher knife, just hacking away at him. He's like, I'm going to carve you like maggot cows and just fucking goes after him. This is the third attempted murder.

Yeah, he does this a lot. You come near him and you get too close to him, he will try to kill you. That's all there is to it. He'll try to shoot you. He'll try to stab you. He doesn't care if you're a cop. He doesn't care if you're a cop, a federal agent, just some guy. It doesn't matter. Everybody's ready to get killed here. So they ended up, they said it was completely unprovoked. They were just asking him to come to the station. They weren't touching him or anything. He just freaked out. So then they jailed him for resisting arrest after that.

Not attempted murder. Not attempted murder. Resisting arrest. Assault with a deadly weapon. There's all kinds of things. Which that tells me they were like, if we charge him with attempted murder, we're going to have to have him in the jail for a while. We're going to keep him for a long time. This gets him the fuck back to his hole as soon as possible and we don't have to worry about it. And hopefully teaches him a lesson not to do this anymore. Maybe, which probably not. Not true.

Here is another neighbor. She said he always carried that gun, and whenever he talked to someone, he'd raise the barrel a little, like to point it at you. I don't want to talk to someone looking down the barrel of a gun. What? He's like a fucking Yosemite Sam or something now. Yeah. Just crazy. After howdy, neighbor, that's what we get? Slowly raising it until it's in your face, and you're like, yeah, so I'm...

The stars have been nice, right? Yeah, they're all right, the stargazing ears. Well, I'm going to get going. Why are you fighting that? I'm going to get going now. Thanks. Have a good one.

One of his neighbors is a guy named Pete Cacheneau, C-A-C-H-E-N-A-U-T. And he's from France, so it's going to be a no, Cacheneau. Pete is 75 in 1978, where we'll catch up with our story here. Born in 1903? 1903 in Cacheneau.

Erysée in Erysée, France. He's from that man was a teenager when the Titanic sunk. Yeah. He remembers that shit. Good Christ. He was like, oh, fuck. They're going to draft me for World War One. I got to stop the Kaiser right now. Yeah. So, yeah, he's he's from there. He's got a lot of brothers and sisters, like I think a brother and five or six sisters. He's got all sorts of family. Everybody stayed in France except for Pete.

Yeah. Pete moves to he has a weird fascination with the American West. He's read a bunch of books about that kind of thing. And a lot of people back then, there was so much literature about the American West in the late 1800s and early 1900s that people were just fascinated by it. When he was a boy, this shit was still unfolding. Exactly. And as he came out, it was kind of less that way because as 20th century came on, it was

A lot less, but it was still more than France. It was still the old West, more than France. So he decided he wanted to be out there. Everybody said he was a huge, big time mountain man. He moved out there when he was about 25 and spent the last 50 years as a mountain man. That's what he did. So he went from France to being a mountain man. They said he was a trapper, a prospector, a sheep herder. He did it all.

Real land Jacques Cousteau. Yeah, a Jacques Cousteau of the land. And he's French and everything. There you go. Which is hilarious to hear a guy with a French accent who looks like a desert fucking scumbag. You know what I mean? I only know a few of them. Desert rat who's got a French accent. It's weird. Yeah. You know a few desert rats with French accents? I only know a few. Or a few guys named Pete.

most of them that are in america that are that are beneath the fray are cajun yes exactly down there it's different or very few out west or west virginian one of the two usually the people that are like rural in the west have a fuckload of money and they own like you know 400 acres or some shit and they have a lot of money it's not a lot of sports cars and sport yeah shit you wouldn't expect

So he does all this. He's also a miner in the Black Rock Desert area where the Pinto Hot Springs is. There's about five residents and he's one of them. Pete is one of the five residents. One guy who's lived out there said he knew Pete for about 30 years and said he's a prospector, lived in the desert. He's he also knew Ronald, this guy. And he said that Pete would visit him occasionally. They knew each other.

This guy also said that he would visit the hot springs. Jim Cole also said about Pete, quote, a real mountain man and a top-notch trapper who always had time to stop and talk. Yeah, good guy. At 75, he was in tip-top shape. He said, you should have seen him climb a mountain, and he could look at tracks and tell me how long ago they'd been made. He's a trapper and a tracker. I don't want to see a 70-

He's going to die out there. Yeah, I want to see that guy climbing a mountain. Every heartbeat is like a hold your breath because it's going to explode. You can't do that. I'm terrified. I'm going to have to build a skid to drag his ass down. Oh, they'll just roll him back then. They don't care. Skid. Fuck that. They're not going to get a helicopter out there. Let him return to Earth. Yeah, he loves it out here, everybody. He's been out in the mountains. Let's just let him stay.

So he had a mountain cabin back in the hills between the Black Rock Desert and Denayo. And he also had five trapping cabins scattered throughout the area. So when he was out trapping, he'd have a place to rest there. So he lived primarily in the mountain cabin in the hills out there.

And everybody said it was beautiful. It was sage-covered hills. It was tucked away beneath some shade trees. It was nice. Trapping and tagging. Just what he wanted to do, man. Hell yeah. He also, here, will talk about, they said, this is from a newspaper article, quote, a small garden nearby was watered by a spring which ran a few feet from the cabin. It's rippling waters cascading down the hillside.

This sounds like a movie set, like a little cabin, a little stream next to it. It's fucking ridiculous. Sounds like Timothy Oliphant's joint in Deadwood. I was just going to say it sounds like Deadwood. There's a big fish in there. There's a big trout. That's the nice part. He said one trapping cabin is located almost directly across from Battle Creek Ranch. It's a natural cave formed by a rock overhang, and Pete enclosed it.

He enclosed a natural cave to make – that way he didn't have to dig out anything. Genius. It's already built. Already built. Just needs a front door. Except for a small entranceway with whatever materials were at hand, including old car doors he built this with. So it doesn't look great. And I have a picture of it, by the way. Really? It doesn't look great. Well, not at all. But it's – yeah. They said just inside the entrance are a pile of stones –

and a soot-covered boulder, and that's where he would cook on this boulder. They said a wooden door separated the main living area from the entryway, and they said inside the walls, roof, and floor were all rock. Everything was rock. How did he ventilate this to be able to build a fire inside and not, you know, fucking succumb? Yeah.

You fucking cross your fingers. You're a mountain man. Yeah. What are you going to do? It's in the front, by the way. He has the fire by the entryway. So I think he just starts like open, shooing the smoke out the door, I think is how he does it. They said the cracks filled in with the stones and cement make it weather tight as well. He said a flat rock at the back of the cave served as a perfect place for a bed, a flat rock.

He sleeps on. They said a rickety table was bare, save for an empty cracker box and partially filled whiskey bottle. Like if he went in his house, that's what you'd see. Cracker whiskey. No crackers, though. Just the box. Well, he cooked all the crackers. That's why he cooks his crackers. He sautés them in whiskey. That's all he's got.

Toast some and dip some. That's it. He said he lived a simple life, and he loved it out there, obviously, because he lived there for 50 years, and he made a very comfortable home for himself there. Holy shit. Nice.

Now, here we go. Now, 1978 comes along and we're talking about back to our guy Ronald here, Bristle Wolf. They said that he loved it out there. It was his ideal life. But as 78 comes along, people started saying that he started to look a little too thin and not very healthy. Ronald here, Bristle Wolf. They're like, he started to look kind of bad.

May of 1978, he closes his checking account in the Winnemucca Bank, which is weird because he's had this open for years and years and years. So May 78, he just closes it down.

Now, some people come to this area in June of 1978. About June 6th, they leave. And this is Richard Weese, W-E-E-S-E. He's 40 years old, old Dickie Weese. And his wife is Judy Warren Weese. She's 31 at the time. And they come to this area with, in their hand, clutching a treasure map passed down by Richard's father.

And Richard's father has buried some shit for them to find, huh? Yeah. Apparently Richard's father was some kind of Spanish explorer or something. I don't know, but there's...

He's given him this map, and we'll talk about where the map came from and what he's looking for because it's an actual thing that a lot of people have looked for. It's a big deal. Yeah, this is their treasure hunting here. So Richard came from a long line of prospectors and miners in Colorado. That's where his family's from. So his younger brother said he was always looking for the end of a rainbow.

So quick money is what he's looking for, the quick fix. He's a blonde guy, about 5'11", 180, not a big guy. He spent most of his life prospecting and working a mine of his own. So that's what he would do, prospecting. He carried on, I guess, his family settled in Colorado in 1848, and they'd been miners and prospectors since then.

Unbelievable. The original wave of people going there. The real gold rush. The real gold rush. They just stayed there. So ever since he was a small child, he's been into mining, which is interesting. When he's 10 years old, his father acquires a map of

of this area for this specific gold hunt that they're going on. It's gold. It's gold they're looking for. And his father never got to do it here. Now, Weiss here, Richard, when he was from Longmont, Colorado, and he joined the U.S. Navy before he graduated from high school. So he ran away from school to join the Navy. Wow.

Then he got his GED later on, though, so that's fine. He followed, after he got out of the Navy, he worked for eight years as a laborer and then went to a business school in Denver to become a computer programmer, just like Bristle Wolf here. I'm really into mining. Let me be a computer programmer. That's strange programming.

Career choice. Historic technology where you spin a tin top in a circle and try to get the soot out or, you know, go run coke. You take a pickaxe and hit a rock with it. Yeah. Or this. A few years after that, or I'm sorry, during that time, he married for the first time, had three sons, Randy, Kerry, and Chris. And then he got divorced and he started a heavy equipment business, which left him a lot of free time.

Yeah. Now, with this free time, he likes to pursue mining because that's what he likes to do. That's what he wants to do. Yeah. He worked the Ladybug, which is a uranium mine, which had been in the family for more than 25 years. Uranium, right? It's his own mine? Yeah, his family's mine. They bought it. So I don't know how...

can you just grab uranium out of the ground and put it in a bag? Like, I don't know what's... If you own the land that it's beneath, I guess you can do whatever you want with it. I mean, and not die? Is it going to give you cancer or something? I don't know. What the hell do I know about uranium? I know that shit's bad for you. It sounds bad. I don't know. It seems bad. Don't they make, like... Yeah, that's what they... That's the fuel for a fucking... Yeah, that's what I mean. A

Anything that's nuclear, that's the fuel for it. Can you just have a glove and pull it from the ground? Like, I don't know if that's...

I don't know if Homer was doing it the right way. I don't know, man, but that sounds dangerous, but that's what they're doing. So he found gold in addition to the uranium and then worked the mine until it played out in the mid-70s. And then you've got to wonder which one's more valuable, the uranium or the gold. Who knows? I don't know what the uranium market is like at all. I don't even know if it'll kill you. Probably the two most valuable things in that mine. Probably, yeah. If he can find diamonds, he's really got something there.

He's really going through it. If he finds diamonds, he's really got a gold mine there. Let me tell you something. We don't know how his father got the map, but he, Ronald, remembers venturing into the desert area of northwest Nevada in search of this treasure. But the trip was cut short when this Ronald was seven when they were doing this, and he got the measles during the trip, so they had to go home.

Yeah, because that was years and years and years ago when that shit was problems. And his father never returned. Imagine that. Never went back. And then when his father died in the late 60s, he passed the map on to Richard because he knew that Richard would be the only one that would probably go after this. Because the brother didn't give a shit about mining. He didn't care about it.

So measles. Yeah. You go mining, you get measles. So he made Richard made at least two trips to the desert to search for this lost gold. And then he's going to make another one here in 1978 with his new wife, Judy. Okay. Judy, by the way, she's 31 and she's known as just liking to do everything, loves people, loves

Likes to do shit. Very adventurous. Yeah. For him, it's perfect. Cause she's like, where are we going? Exploring in the great. Sounds good. She's into it. She liked cross country skiing and golf and all this kind of shit. Uh, her career was in real estate though.

So real estate and gold mining is what she's into. And she married Weiss on her 31st birthday, which was August 31st, 1977. So about eight months before eight, nine months before they come out here. And then she ended up kind of she didn't really work much anymore because he made really good money and they wanted to explore and stuff. So she was like, fuck it. Fuck real estate. Let's do this.

So her brother Jack said that she loved hanging out with Dick. His name was Dick. That's what they called him, Richard, by the way. And that she liked doing what he liked to do, too. The brother said it was quite a change for her. She wasn't excited about mining, but then it didn't upset her either. If it was what Dick wanted to do, it was all right with her. She just loves Dick and doesn't care about...

Anything else. Just a big fan of Dick and that's all. That's all we can do. Good for him. And for both of them. Everybody's having fun. So June 6th, 1978, they leave for their treasure hunt. They take off. They travel through Montana and Idaho and Washington.

And she would call home every four days to tell her family what was going on. They were still alive and, you know, whatever. So she talked about how they were going to look for a gold mine while they were there. That's when she called from Denayo. The gold mine they're looking for is the blue bucket treasure. And this is a big deal, the blue bucket treasure, as we'll talk about. So they have this map. It's been around for years. The father's been saying this is where the fucking gold is. Yeah.

So he's excited. They get to Denio and they talk about it with the Denio hotel proprietor. Tell them all about why we're here. We got this map and we're here to fucking pan gold and we're going to get rich off of this. And we're looking for the blue bucket full of this shit. And I'm sure this guy's heard it a few times running the motel. He's like, great, I'll take your money every day you're here and don't find it. You too, you say. You too. Interesting. I'll sell you some picks and shovels if you want to.

So the story of the treasures here, I'll give this from a newspaper article. The story begins with a wagon train slowly making its way across the Black Rock Desert in October 1845.

The 40 wagons were en route to Oregon, once part of a much larger train, but they had split at the present-day sites of Winnemucca. At the present-day Winnemucca is where they split, with most of them traveling on to California and these people making a northern turn to Oregon. Yeah.

So the constant threat of Indian attack, the Paiutes from this region, the Paiutes here, they were very cautious. So they were trying to...

you know, stay safe and all that. So they were four days into the black rock and entered a Canyon so deep that the oxen had to be doubled up and the wagons hauled up the steep sides, one wagon at a time, too steep. They entered a steep ass Canyon. Um, they said children scampering alongside, picked up some pebbles and threw them into a blue bucket hanging on the side of one of the wagons. Um,

For a time, the pebbles were forgotten. Okay. From that point in time, there are two versions of what happened next. One say the pioneers traveled onto Eureka, California, where a miner recognized the rocks for what they were, gold. Gold, yeah. The other says that later in the passage, several wagons turned over, losing the blue bucket and its unknown treasures. So...

They don't know. They said years later, some of these people came to realize, holy shit, that we had gold. What the fuck are we doing? We were stuck in a big giant gold fucking pit. God damn it. How did you not see it? God damn it. So a party was organized to return to search for the lost gold. But east of Granite Creek...

The Paiutes attacked and killed all but two of the people that were looking for the gold. Oh, boy. So then another party set out, managed to avoid the Paiutes, scoured the area for weeks without finding anything. Then in the 1920s, grandsons of those people who originally came out also were searching for it.

And they said in the newspaper article, in all probability, the desert with landslides and flash floods probably revealed the treasure for a minute. Then a landslide probably covered it up again. That's probably why they couldn't find it, basically. And that people were still searching for it in the 1970s. This 130-year-old treasure.

But if it's so prevalent that children are just picking it up and throwing it in a bucket, it's got to be everywhere or it doesn't exist. Yeah, one of the two. They said if it did exist, it was probably a flash flood that exposed it and then it probably got covered back up again. That's why no one's been able to find it because people have been looking for it for centuries now or more than a century. So June 16th, 1978. Oh, by the way, in Denayo, the motel they're staying at, five bucks a night.

What? Five bucks a night, even in the 70s. 78. That seems cheap even for the 70s, right? So they're staying there. And I guess his daughter, Dick's daughter, is getting married and they're planning to go to this wedding soon. They're hoping to attend. But they never make it to the wedding. And everyone was like, hey, where the fuck are they? They didn't make it to the wedding.

So, but they said that she said they didn't know if they could make it. So everybody was kind of like, well, they might just still be in the desert. So then she didn't telephone again. It's been more than her normal four days and she hasn't telephoned. So they're like, this is interesting. No one can find them. No one can find them, their map, their jewelry or their small poodle. None of them. They're all gone. Or the dog. Or the dog here. So anyway.

Sometime during June 16th, Judy ended up, she called her brother in Colorado telling him of her whereabouts. And she told of her husband's treasure search and blah, blah, blah. And they said they're hoping to be home in two days for the wedding, but then they don't show up. Now, at some point here, by the way, Pete would come by for a soak in the spring once in a while. Our guy Pete.

Pete comes sometime in the next two weeks. Pete comes by and bristle wolf would allow him to come in because he knew he had arthritis and he was like an old mountain climber. So he would do that when he shows up. He finds two dead bodies. Pete does out there just laying in the desert, less than a hundred yards away from Ronald bristle wolf's joint there. So he's like, holy shit. Bristle wolf pops out from underground and shoots Pete to dead.

blasts him with a 30-30 shotgun just fucking blows pete away so shoots the fuck out of pete here okay um now there's three people in the desert he goes back into his hole and doesn't do anything just leaves the people in the desert and pete's dead oh he fucking blasts him with a shotgun yeah dead so the people at the denial hotel knew something was wrong when the weases don't return to their room

So the hotel guy reports them missing, and the sheriff's department said they took a motel room June 15th, left the next day to find the claim, and when he didn't get back in five days, the clerk called the sheriff's office and said, hey, you might want to look for these people. So two men here are out rock hounding. What was that?

Looking for Rocks, I think. Oh, Looking for Rocks. Okay, got it. Yeah, Looking for Rocks in the Pinto Mountain Hot Springs Saturday morning on a Saturday morning. And they come across...

Multiple corpses. Yeah. Three bodies. They look around and they're smart. They go, rather than hang around and ask questions, they go, I don't want to be the fucking fourth and fifth. Yeah. Yeah. They jet. They go. Like stumbling onto a Native American grounds where there's like heads hanging from trees. You just leave. I'm going to get out of here. I'm going to go ahead and leave. Who did this? Yeah. This is a picnic spot. This is great.

No one should be angry here. No. So they went to Winnemucca and told the police in Winnemucca what happened. And they bring out all these different deputies and a whole bunch of people and a coroner comes out. They, you know, this is unexpected. So as they approach Winnemucca,

The area. Sure. Bristle Wolf is there in his cave still or in his underground lair. He pops out, hops on his three wheeler and takes off with his gun, by the way, with his 30 30 here takes off. The problem is it's a very cold morning for some reason. It's chilly up there. And it was the coldest spot in the nation that day, by the way. Yeah. Yeah.

And this four three wheeler just wasn't real great in the cold and was having a hard time getting going. Yeah. He couldn't get above about 10 miles an hour. So the deputies had four wheel drive vehicles that could go well over 10 miles an hour. And they just surrounded him and did all of that. He wouldn't stop until they fired three warning shots. And then he finally stopped. They were like next to him going, stop. And he's like, fuck you. Give him the finger. It keeps going. And then finally they bucked off three shots and he was like, okay, I guess.

He raised his hands up when they got to him. They didn't say a word to him. He raised his hands and he said, quote, I don't know a thing about it. About what? About what, sir? And they took him into custody. Okay. Now, they find the bodies of the Weeses here, of Dick and Judy Weese. They are filled with maggots by now.

They've been in the desert for at least eight days, they're figuring. They were searching for the claim, and they didn't. They said they probably got killed right after, right when they got here, basically. They got from denial. This guy popped up, didn't recognize him. Who knows? They probably might have tried to engage him in conversation. Hey, do you know where this, because on a map, do you know where this is or whatever? And he said, I know where my shotgun is. Fuck you. He actually shoots them with a .22 brush gun.

which is that a friend gives him to shoot coyotes, and instead he uses it on them. That's what he wrestles his rabbits with. And then on the 30-30, he used on Pete. That's that long rifle that the guy riding on the Wells Fargo coach would carry. Yeah, exactly. It's a big one. That's a powerful rifle. Yep, that's what he shot Pete with. Yeah, and then the 22, the other one. So, yeah.

Also, what they can't, they find everything they can. He also shot the dog, too. He shot the poodle. Oh, you hate poodles. Don't act like you care. Jimmy literally says poodles should not exist. And I don't fucking, I don't like them and consider them dogs. Don't act sad about it. I feel bad for the family. They love it. They're dead. So everyone who loves it is dead. I don't know how to love it. It won't let you love it.

Yeah, you're petting its skin. It's weird. It's fucking weird. So yeah, no, the poor poodle. They find everybody. Dick, Judy, Pete, and a poodle. All dead, which is very sad, obviously. Yeah, he even shot the poodle. That's crazy. So they're all in a pile out there?

The three, the Weeses and the dog are, and then Pete is half in his truck. Basically, he showed up, parked right by there, and Ronald just shot him before he even got out of the truck. Just boom. He saw the bodies, and maybe he was running back to the truck. Possibly. His truck door is open, and he's got one leg out of the truck when they find him. Oh, boy. And he sat out there for days like that, just rotting in the sun. Oh, boy.

So, by the way, the one thing they don't find on the Wiese's is the treasure map. They don't find the treasure map. Yeah, that's gone. I wonder. What the fuck? Well, this guy likes prospecting, too. So he's like, hmm, a treasure map.

Now it's turned into a silly movie or like a cartoon where I'll kill him and take his treasure map. And that's what he's doing now. And then Pete came. He's like, you're not getting my gold neither. Pow. And shot him. It's my gold. All mine. Wow. Like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. So the prospector on the Arizona lottery. Yeah, we heels kicking together. So Pete is in his truck with the right door open and one leg outside. That's what he is.

And he had rheumatism and he just went there to take a bath. That's all. The autopsy shows that he had died several days before the couples as well. They have a big funeral for him. All his minor buddies have a big funeral for him in Winnemucca. Now they have the capture. They have the 15 mile an hour chase and all that. The reaction of the fellow desert weirdos we'll talk about.

They don't seem very surprised here. Jess Miller and Jim Cole, the miners we've talked about, friends of everybody here, Bristle Wolf and Pete, they said, quote, there were five of us living out on the Black Rock Desert. Now there's only two. And the reporter said, okay, well, two, because who's the fifth? And he said, oh, there's a guy named Cecil who went to the hospital recently. Cecil got sick. Why are we talking about Cecil in the newspaper? What about...

So these two are now the only people left out here. One's dead, one's in jail, one's in the hospital. The gun, .22 caliber slugs are removed from the bodies of both Dick and Judy Weiss here. They were too badly corroded to link them ballistically to Reese's gun.

Hmm. They said. Now, but they said they did find a single .22 shell casing near Judy Weiss's body that they know was fired by his gun because there's a small screw in place of a firing pin. He had to, like, doctor the gun to make it work. And it makes a very distinct mark on the casing. Wow. So that's how they match it up ballistically there. His gun broke, so he just put a fucking metal screw in there. Put it in there. That'll work. What the?

It worked enough to kill people. That's a resourceful fella. I would never know. I'd just throw the gun away. Nope. He's like, I guess it's broke. Nope. He fucking fixed it. I guess when you live in a hole in the ground, you got to be resourceful. Yeah. You figure how everything works. Yeah. If you can irrigate hot springs to your own uses, I think you're definitely...

Probably pretty good at stuff like that. And the 3030 slugs removed from Pete's body are definitely matched to the shotgun that he was using. So he's fucked. It looks like. Yeah. Yeah. He is sent immediately to Lakes Crossing Mental Hospital.

Pretty much because he's a loon bag. And they're trying as the authorities try to piece together what happened. They just pulled this guy out of a hole in the desert. They're like, he looks fucking nuts. Let's put him in here for a while. Right. So we figure everything out. What's going on here? They're in the newspaper. They call him a hermit who lives all around in a series of hovels, dugouts and old car bodies. And they said they're ready to charge him with triple murder.

I guess so. They said that he was moved to Lake Crossing after he went to jail for like five minutes, and they were like, he's definitely too crazy for here. Yeah, we can't do this. We're not going out for this. This is nuts. So he's in the hospital for about six months. Really? Before, on December 26th, 1978, he is declared incompetent to stand trial at that point. Okay. But that's not for good. That's just for now, as we'll get into it here. So yeah, they said that he was...

Psychiatrist declared him incompetent. The psychiatric, once it changes, then he'll be returned. So as soon as he's sane, they can bring him in for trial here. We'll fix this. Yeah, we'll fix him up, put some pills in him, and get him on trial. It was a three-person sanity commission. A sanity commission. Imagine being sat before a panel that's called the sanity commission. We...

If we have ever in this country needed a fucking sanity commission more, it's right now. Get me a sanity commission. Just all over the place. And I want it simple like that. Three. So that's two to one and we're done. We're not doing any of this six to seven group bullshit. No appeals. That's it. No.

We've called, we've deemed you nuts. Fuck off. I can't take it anymore. Get out. These were doctors, Thomas Stapleton, Donald mold and Jay Chappelle. And they said that they all believed that he has symptoms of schizophrenia still, and they consider him mentally incompetent to assist in his own defense. That's the, well, no, Dr. Lynn B. Giroux of Reno was called. Now that's the prosecution is using that guy. That's the, the state's guy. Uh,

He says that he thinks he's fine. He says he thinks he's competent to stand trial. So they said, well, what if he they asked him this, though? What if he was acquitted? Was he fit to be returned loose to society? And he said no.

And he said, but then how the fuck is he fit for? No, that doesn't work then, stupid. But that was the prosecution's argument, stupid. So immediately after this, he's returned to Lake Crossing where he's being held. Finally, in August of 1979, 14 months later, he's finally found competent to stand trial. Now what they need is a prosecutor.

They need a prosecutor who's tough. They need a prosecutor who's fair. They need a prosecutor who's not afraid to get in the middle of Mike Tyson's carnivorous meat ear biting spectacle and get right in there and push him aside. The only guy that could possibly prosecute this case is Mills Lane. Let's get it on. Come on.

Mills Lane is the prosecutor and it is the boxing referee Mills Lane, who I always heard was a lawyer before he was a boxing referee, but never believed it. Here he is prosecuting a murder case. Yes, exactly.

So, the tiny, if you don't know, he's the boxing referee. He's a small guy, bald head, little gray hair around it, and he talks like this. Let's get it on, he says before every fight. He's the referee for Celebrity Deathmatch, the claymation show. There you go.

There's that because he was the ref for the Tyson Holyfield fight where Tyson bit his ear. So that's how he became a celebrity death match guy. Yeah. And they just had his voice going, let's get it on before every one of the things. That's it. That's it. So, yeah, he is. He'll leave his job as chief of detectives for the Washoe County Sheriff's Department to take over the prosecution.

That's what Mills was doing? Chief of detectives. And then he was a prosecutor and then a judge. Mills has seen some shit. Yeah, and then he's watched grown men beat the living shit out of each other right before his eyes. So that's why he's a good judge, I guess. So I guess that's what they're saying. He's finally ready. Now,

I guess he spent all his time in the mental institution. Mills Lane says this, quote, he's different. He's odd. But he's sane under the legal definition. Let's get it on. They were like, Mills, calm down. All rise. All right. And they said, sure, he's wacky. He said, touch gloves. Now get back in your mental institution. Sure, he's wacky. So am I. Yep. So he's wacky. Who ain't wacky? Ever seen Mike Tyson? He's the wackiest son of a bitch I ever met. He's put him on trial.

So the defense disagrees, obviously. They're like, he's fucking nuts. They're like, you know. We don't want to do this. They said he won't tell us what happened. He won't talk to us. The defense said he won't help. Like we say, hey, you know, what happened here and here? He just doesn't say anything. He just won't talk. He just won't help us. This is Marty Wiener as his lawyer.

Marty Wiener. So he's the state deputy state public defender. And he said, it's not helping us any. He's he pleads innocent by reason of insanity. That's what they're going to do for him here. Wiener said he's frustrated. He's a frustrated Wiener. This guy.

Right. Right.

That seems like he's certainly insane. Totally. One psychiatrist said Gress' refusal to tell what happened, quote, was a rational choice and that he wanted to commit suicide through the judicial system. So they're saying he doesn't want to say what happened. He wants to be given the death penalty and be killed. That's what a psychiatrist said. But Wiener disagreed.

Saying a suicide. He said a suicidal man wouldn't have walked seven miles in severe cold to seek aid after being blown up by dynamite. But that was eight years ago. Also, right? Yeah.

Plenty of people who kill themselves didn't want to kill themselves eight years earlier. Yeah, and anybody who commits suicide doesn't want it that way. No, they don't want to die of blood loss in a cold desert probably. That's not what they're looking for. Nobody explodes their fucking hands and stares at them as they bleed out. That's not a normal one, no. I've never heard of somebody saying, that's it, I'm going home and taking my fucking hands apart.

You know what? I'm going to just blow a couple of parts of me off and hope I bleed to death while I walk somewhere. That's better, I think.

So Mills Lane said the trial will be this sounds like he's a boxing referee. This is so great. His career path was set from the beginning. Quote, will be a battle of the shrinks, a battle of the psychiatrists. Ten rounds. Now let's fight fair. Keep it above the waist. Now touch gloves and come out fighting, Docs. Let's go. Let's get it on. See you on pay-per-view August 7th. That's the one.

So jury selection during that Mills Lane and Marty Wiener are fighting a lot. Unreal. Mills has to fight Wiener. So Mills accused Wiener of asking improper or relevant questions of prospective jurors. And Wiener claimed that Mills was trying to twist his words.

The judge here got in the middle of it and told Wiener to go ahead with his questioning, advising him he will object, he will twist your words, and he will do the same thing before this trial is over. In other words, that's the game. It's all in the game, babe. That's his job. Yeah. You twist each other's words and I decide who's right. That's it. So just do your thing. Out of the five people on that day that they questioned for possible jurors, all but one said they'd heard of the case, but they all said that they could consider the charges fairly.

Which should be hard because he's put out in the paper as crazy hermit weirdo. I mean, that's literally crazed hermit kills people. Like, that's what they know of the case. He's a crazed hermit. He's not even a man.

It's not easy. A crazed hermit who calls himself Bristle Wolf, they say. They make him sound even crazier than he is, honestly. An underground fucking lodge. It's not good. So the trial's going to take place in Winnemucca, because that's the nearest place to the courthouse.

And so you would imagine this would be a big deal in a small town like that in Winnemucca. Everybody's going to be a part of it. It's not. They don't care. Nobody gives a shit. The judge said that the case has attracted as big an audience as he can remember, but he said that the people, the locals in town don't give a shit. And the newspaper goes around saying,

And they say in spite of the national media attention and the presence of at least one television camera crew, most in town said interest had waned with the passage of time since the killings because the victims weren't local. So fuck them. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. 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 US, it's still not illegal to discriminate against people based on the way their hair grows out of their head? To deny black folks from jobs and opportunities because they have braids, locks, twists, or bantu knots? That's messed up. And today's sponsor, Dove, agrees. That's why Dove co-founded the Crown Coalition in 2019 to advocate for the passage of the Crown Act.

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by signing the Crown Act petition at dove.com slash crown. That's dove.com slash crown. 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, 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, well, yeah.

You know, 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. They said, here is one, this article, they say, the majority of Winnemucca's residents spend more time talking about the draft inflation, Afghanistan and Iran. This is 1980, by the way.

One guy says the world's problems are of more interest to everyone about everyone right now. Bristle Wolf seems kind of insignificant compared to that. She's doing a pedicure, by the way, while saying that. I swear to God, she's giving a pedicure. One guy, the guy who Teddy Fulgate said at the Sears catalog store where she works. This is what she said. Quote, I think most of the talk is about whether we're going to have a depression or World War Three.

So 1980 is 1980. Yeah. People were freaked out about Russia and having a nuclear war with Russia. And then the economy was in the toilet. So another guy, Dave Dunaway at Western Auto Store, said, we don't talk about it here because my partner is one of the jury. That's how small the town it is. Yet they don't care about it.

When the subject of his guilt or innocence comes up, he says, quote, everybody's got a different opinion. But he did add that Gress is scary. He's a scary guy. He said that the topic over coffee break at the store was possibility. The main topic they would talk about was the possibility of a revived military draft.

Let's just wildly speculate rather than talking about the one interesting thing that's ever happened in our fucking town ever since the beginning of time. A genuine threat to any of us if we any of us went up that fucking hill. Totally. At the Winnemucca Hotel, the owner said all everybody's talking about is the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

I love how these people are super into geopolitical news stories in the middle of the desert rather than the thing that's happening right in front of them. They said there are the perennial topics around town. Quote, the cowboys talk about the girls. The girls talk about the cowboys. That's a man at the boondocks club said that. Yeah. Absolutely.

At the bar, another guy said that he met Ronald Gress before the killings and said that he saw the recluse repairing his three-wheel cycle. He thought it was home-built, like he made it himself, the three-wheeler. He said he wasn't real friendly, very odd. He didn't want a whole lot of conversation. You're lucky he didn't shoot you. Yeah.

So 1980, the trial's going to happen here. Here we go. Now, Mills Lane says because of the aggravating circumstances in Pete's murder, that he's an elderly person and he's a friend and all that kind of thing, that he's going to ask for the death penalty for that killing, Mills Lane said. Okay. Yeah. In addition to the death penalty, they can also choose from life or life without the possibility of parole. Okay.

They got their choices here. Now, the jury is consisting of 10 women and two men. That's the jury. So not guilty by reason of insanity is his all. All three are going under one trial. One trial. Yeah. It's all one one deal. And opening arguments were there. Like I said, 10 women, two men in the openings. They call him a this is Mills Lane calls him a most dangerous killer of three people,

That's what he is. And the prosecution or the defense's whole case is he's a frightened man who only wanted to be isolated from society. And these people scared him and he didn't know what he was doing because he's crazy. So Mills Lane said here that one psychiatrist described Kress as, quote, the most dangerous man he ever examined. Really? He did just get his psychiatry license like three weeks ago. But he still he said never examine. Second guy he's interviewed.

Second guy, first guy was just a little sad. But this one, different. Dangerous. Yep. He described it. He said this couple went here. They went about while he was tending his garden. And he must have shot him. And they said that's what they thought happened. They said that he left the bodies just 150 yards away from his front door. Just left them there in the middle of the desert. Does that seem like a cold-blooded killer in Calculate? It doesn't seem very sane because he didn't try to hide it.

Right. And he just left it right there. That's what I mean. Most of the time when they do like sanity, when they're saying, did you know right or wrong nowadays? One of the things they say is, well, he tried to cover what he was doing. He tried to get away from the scene. He tried to pull the body. He put something on top of it. This guy didn't do any of that. He just left him there. But they are saying that he shot Pete to cover up those murders.

That's why he shot them. But it would have been easier to just move them so they weren't in the middle of the fucking where everybody can see them. That's an easier way. That speaks to an insane man who genuinely is scared that people are on his property. He's a little loopy, I think, is what's going on here. So his defense attorney described him as a classic tragedy of paranoid schizophrenic

of a paranoid schizophrenic who ran from society to a remote desert home in a desperate but intelligent attempt to isolate himself. I'm too fucked up for society. Gonna put myself over here. They also, Mills Lane also really hits the, that he killed the dog hard in the opening. He said, even the killing of the poodle was premeditated.

He's not charged with any kind of animal abuse, though, which is strange. Really? I guess when you're up for the death penalty, that's kind of a minor charge, probably. We'll skip that one today. Yeah. He said that he's going to show how Ronald Gress had attacked, assaulted, and threatened three or four other people who wandered near his place, and this was just par for the course for him. These are the people we talked about. The defense said that, listen...

I don't deny that my client is a, quote, suspicious and fearful man who manifests those traits through aggressive behavior toward people who invade his isolation. He said the essence of the tragedy is that no man can separate himself completely from society.

True. He said that he called him a paranoid schizophrenic. He said he was trying to escape society in the desert. And he, you know, he said that he ran from organized society as we knew it in an intelligent attempt. So the gun, they get the gun guy. He testifies that the 22 caliber slugs removed from the bodies of the victims were

Like I said, were corroded, but the shells completely link it to the gun. He also testifies about the 30-30 slugs and all that. So ballistically, it matches up. The lawyers start fighting at one point.

And the judge had to dismiss the jury and call the two lawyers on a sidebar. Mills, Wiener, calm down. Let's go. Shut the fuck up, both of you. How's that? Wiener told the judge that he wanted his client to have a fair trial and to be tried on admissible evidence. Mills Lane said, the day lying becomes admissible in court is the day I pack my diploma and go someplace else. Must have been very soon after that because he was a referee most of the time.

The day I start getting in between two sweaty men trying to kill each other. That's what I'll do when this happens. The judge ordered the two to confine future disagreements to outside the courtroom or before his bench. Either ask for a sidebar or fight it out in the fucking parking lot, but don't bring it in here while the jury's here. How about that? I love this judge. Listen, assholes.

So Lynn Giroux is the prosecution's psychiatrist here, and she said the recluse here, this guy, prefers to be known as Bristle Wolf, number one. He made that clear when I talked to him. He is a paranoid schizophrenic, but that's okay because his disease has been in remission since 1968. Right. It didn't show at all when he was shooting people for no reason and hiding in the desert, but...

He said that it's been in remission. So this is ridiculous that we're even having this whole discussion. He did say he was the most dangerous man that he'd ever examined. It's that guy. He testified that he committed two acts of premeditated murder and knew it was wrong when he did it. He said that he's not crazy. He just can't control his impulses. That's the problem.

And where's the map? That's where we never find the map. Who knows where he hid it, too. He didn't hide the bodies, but he hid the map. Like, that's very childlike. You know what I mean? Right. Got to make sure I keep this because it could get me rich one day. I'm going to get rich and go find gold. The psychiatrist said he gets an impulse and goes boom. An extremely dangerous quality. Yeah, because the boom is a shotgun. So that could be dangerous. Or in his hands. Yeah, or dynamite.

He also said that Ronald tried to escape when the sheriff's deputies came for him because he knew he was wrong and was trying to get out. I think he was just over. He didn't have the firepower to fight them all off. So he left too many. Yeah. Yeah. And he said that he called the second and third shootings in the desert an act of premeditated murder to cover his actions in the first.

So he's saying he killed Richard and then killed Judy and then waited and that Judy was to cover up killing Richard and the dog and all that. He says, quote, Ronald Gress is not crazy. He's fully recovered. Oh, well, great. Recovered. Imagine what he'd be like if he was crazy. Can you imagine that? Holy shit. What else can he do? Dig toward the center of the earth? It's the guy that eats the asshole out of a bowl, James. A maggot ridden bowl.

Wow. Dead fucking cow. He said he occasionally experiences what he terms as, quote, scars from the delusions he suffered in the 60s when he was actually afflicted with schizophrenia. Not now where he's all better, obviously. OK. So every once in a while, it gets like a little hiccup, he says, like a little flashback. So he said the second and third murders were to cover up the first, he said, because he was trying to get away. That was that.

The defense shrink has a different, obviously, different say in this whole thing. They talk about this Donald A. Mould of Reno is their psychiatrist. He says that he would suffer relapses of his schizophrenia for the rest of his life, and you can be in remission from it, but...

You're not really it's not gone unless you're medicated properly and observed properly that it comes and goes and pops up and is bad for a while and kind of goes underground for a minute. And he said that under treatment for it is what you should be.

He said this will happen for the rest of his life and he's going to be always be dangerous unless he's under constant treatment. That's what he needs. He needs to be seeing someone. He needs to be on medication. That's that. So this guy said that he's a classic paranoid schizophrenic who will never recover from it. He said he's convinced that he's not faking the disorder and that he is among one third of the of its U.S. victims who will have recurring episodes of delusions and hallucinations.

Okay. So we don't even know what the fuck he was. He doesn't even know what he was doing out there. He said that Gresh shows other effects of the disease as well, such as disconnected thoughts and deterioration of personal hygiene and appearance. Because remember, the people said in the last episode,

A few months before the murders, he didn't look like himself anymore. He was skinnier. He was dirtier. Scraggly? Is that what they called him? Scraggly, yeah. He just looked like shit. They said persons with the disorder follow nomadic lives removed from other people, and that's exactly what he did. He said that he believes that there is a 70% to 80% chance that Gress would have failed a sanity test at the time of the killings.

and would not know as a rational person would know that it was wrong to do that.

In his opinion, he was crazy at the time of the killings and didn't know they were wrong. He might have been completely delusional and thinking that these people were fucking aliens that were coming down to take his gold or some shit. Like, who knows? Is he implying that they blew it by not interviewing him then and finding out if he was? No, there's no way to know because it's 10 days after. He said if right before he pulled the trigger, you gave him a sanity test because the whole point is why?

Was he saying at the time of the killings? That's what they're trying to decide in court. So he's saying if if I had to guess, I'd say no, probably not. I think he was delusional. He said that he didn't think that Gress would appreciate the act as murder, but as defending and interference with his lifestyle.

Which, yeah, either way, off the street is a thing that we need here with this guy. I can certainly see the argument they're making. I don't like it. Definitely. It makes sense. So he's definitely fucking nuts and he's been diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. So, I mean, that's where you have delusions and hallucinations and literally not knowing what's real and what's not. So if you're he's the definition of crazy, this guy in terms of legally certainly needs help.

So they talk about him being hospitalized three times in Oregon. This isn't a new thing that he just made up out of his ass. We have paperwork from three different visits saying this is the problem. The psychiatrist said his disease is controllable with medication and that –

That he, Gress, has actually responded well to the treatment when he was hospitalized. He was doing fine. He said, but there's no quarrel when the medication wears off. He is an extremely dangerous person. He said, don't get me wrong. When he's not on his medication, fucking, you know, run for the hills because he's coming. Pictures now. Mills Lane showed pictures of his living quarters.

To show the, you know, show him what he was doing. I had a rustic. He called it rustic living quarters. That's rustic. All right. Rustic chic. Yep. A cluttered two room dugout home beneath the desert heated by water piped in from the nearby hot springs. That's rustic. All right. With a nice barn door.

Nice one. He said he wanted to see the design of the living quarters because it showed that he had an ability to think. Look what he did. He dug a hole in the ground. The defense also attempted to block the pictures from being admitted into evidence because he said, quote, his ability to think is not an issue in this case. He can think. It's just as he know he's in reality. That's the difference. Does he know what he thinks? Also, they want to include pictures of the bloated corpses that have been in the desert for years.

Dear Lord. Eight to 10 days. The public defender claimed that the pictures were shown in an attempt to unfairly prejudice the jurors and that the pictures of the slain poodle in particular, quote, didn't prove anything. He's not charged with that is what they're saying. It's irrelevant to this. That is a little bit inflammatory, right? It's a little bit, I would say here. There, look at this little poor little dog. Yeah.

And her little dog, too. The man's the Wicked Witch of the West, everybody. Look at him. It's one of the fluffy white ones. It's white. So he also showed, Mills Lane said that he showed the evidence that, quote, a dog was killed because Mr. Gress didn't want anything to leave the hot springs where he did his deed.

He basically said he killed the dog so it wouldn't be a witness. Now, that's fucking ridiculous. Even silenced the dog. Come on. Yeah. Jesus. So they said that this is from the newspaper. Jurors in the triple murder trial earlier recoiled as they were shown gruesome pictures of the three victims. This is before you'd see, like, you know, autopsy shows on television. So.

They said district judge, Judge Llewellyn Young overruled defense objections and allowed the prosecution to show the bloated bodies of an old prospector and a gold hungry couple and their poodle taken after they had lain in the desert sun for more than a week. Jurors appeared shocked by the pictures, some clenching their teeth and others seeming to fight back tears as they viewed the grisly scene. Good God.

That's why they argue whether this is inflammatory or not. State public defender Marty Weiner claimed unsuccessfully that the pictures were shown in an attempt to unfairly prejudice the jurors. And there's that. One thing they do, the defense is saying, look,

He's fucking crazy. We have all of his paperwork saying he's crazy. We got psychiatrists saying he's a paranoid schizophrenic. We got it. It shakes. It bakes. It fucking dices. It cuts. It's got it all. As far as the crazy scale goes, he's got it all. They said. And the main thing that, you know, he's crazy. He insists on calling himself Bristle Wolf.

In court. And he says, my name is Bristlewolf. He gets mad when they call him Gress, and they're like, that's fucking crazy. His name isn't Bristlewolf. His name is Gress. He insists it's Bristlewolf. He's nuts. So that helps that he's crazy. Now, at one point, though, Mills Lane comes into court with the paperwork for his legal name change and says, no, no, no, no. His fucking name is legally Bristlewolf.

So he's not crazy. He's right, actually. He knows, yeah. He knows his name, and he knows his name's Bristlewolf because he had to fill out fucking forms and shit for it and pay money and go to court. Nice work, Mills. That's pretty good work. He said he discovered a Bristlewolf was his correct name while in a Veterans Administration hospital through a process of deduction. They said they figured it out, and then they went backwards and found the name change documents.

It's fucking interesting. So I love this from the newspaper. The news that triple murder suspect Ronald Gress is legally named Bristle Wolf surprised a courtroom audience here at the trial second week. Special Prosecutor Mills Lane produced a document showing that Gress, an eccentric Black Rock Desert hermit, that's something you want to be known as, had legally changed his name in 1973. So he said it was an effort to rebut defense claims that the name Bristle Wolf was one of Gress's delusions.

It's not. So is he going to testify? Do you send... He's got to, right? How the fuck do you send this guy on the stand? No, you can't. You can't get up there. No. I mean, he's not... I don't even know if he could have a conversation. I don't think he's capable of it. I mean...

I mean, if he goes up there and tries to talk, it's just going to further convince that jury that he's not. Well, maybe there's that. Maybe you put him up there just to further convince them, look, this guy's not okay. If you're the prosecution, you don't need him up there. You don't want him to because all he could do is convince them he's nuts. Yeah, right. Because otherwise, we know it's proven he did the killings. There's no doubt about it. They're his guns. The ballistics are all there. He definitely did it. No one's doubting that. It's just a matter of whether he's nuts or not. Right.

I mean, but then the defense, what if he gets up there and he's like, yes, sir, how can I, how can I answer your inquiries? And he starts like speaking, well, well, when I was a young boy, see, and he just starts talking, the jury's going to be like, what the fuck? So the defense attorney, Martin Wiener, he tells a, he tells a reporter that he wanted to put Bristle Wolf on the stand, even against his wishes, right?

Which is, a judge will never allow that because that's an automatic appeal thing. Yeah, that's going to win an appeal. Force a guy to testify, you know, that's your right to not testify. It's literally your right to remain silent. So he said that he wasn't sure his client understood what being on the stand means and he asked the judge to explain it. So he's trying to get the judge to say it's okay to put him on the stand against his will.

Which is fucking nuts. The judge finally doesn't allow it, basically, because he doesn't want to testify. He doesn't have to testify. He's the client. It's his case. It's his life. So during the closing arguments, Mills Lane said the one word to remember is dangerous. Dangerous. He said that Pete was shot after the Weeses to prevent arrest, which is one of the aggravating circumstances needed in the death penalty. And he said that Bristle Wolf had shown no remorse, which is another condition of it.

The defense had called witnesses who'd known him while he was confined at the mental hospital here. A senior psychiatric nurse there said his condition had improved greatly while he was at the center and that he gradually began to open up to them as a person.

Which is fine, but it's not whether he's sane now. It's whether he was sane at the time of the murder. So, yes, if you put him in a hospital setting and give him medication for a year and a half, he'll probably be in a lot better shape as if he was getting no medication and living in a fucking hole in the ground eating maggot steaks.

Maggot burgers? Maggot burgers something. I don't even know. Maybe it was like a maggot stew or maggot chili. You can make a nice chili out of that. You wouldn't even see it in there. Boiled it down to some burgoo, right? I would fucking hope so, yeah. You'd have to boil it first and then to get the maggots off of it and then instead he grilled it. You medium rare that. That's not good. No, no. You're cooking that until it's leather, I would think. Oh, boy. It's got to be. So the jury deliberates for nine hours.

It's not even that long. Which is not that long, but for this case, it's decent. It's a whole day. Not only is it a day, the guy comes out at like 4 o'clock in the morning and they reach a verdict. They don't let the jury go home for the night. They go just deliberate. They've been deliberating since 7 p.m. and they fucking 4 o'clock in the morning and they come back with a verdict.

Wake his ass up and tell him to come in here. But that's a strategy that a lot of judges used to use because it would make the jury come to a decision because they were so tired they wanted to get out of there. You're not going anywhere until you get this done. Keeps them from negotiating for days at a time. So they're like, yeah, we got it. So they say Bristle Wolf sat stern-faced as he had throughout the entire trial. And the jury returned a verdict of...

Guilty of murder. Three counts. So first degree murder.

During sentencing, Mills Lane says, obviously, we need the death penalty. This is what it's made for. He cruelly shot his friend who just came over to soak his arthritic bones in the hot springs and the whole fucking deal. And the defense goes, dude, this guy is nuts. Come on. He didn't hunt anybody. This is just a lunatic protecting his property. That's what it feels like. He didn't go out looking for this. In Florida, this would be a legal shooting, probably. Yeah.

You know what I mean? I'm not even kidding. This would be considered a stand your ground. Texas, too. I was just reading in Texas. They've extended it to basically if someone fucking grazes a blade of grass on your front lawn, you can just shoot them with no warning. And it's considered perfectly legal. So I'm just saying in the law in some states, Arizona's not far behind. I know. It's huge like that. I know. Totally. So they come in with you, sir. May fuck off three life sentences.

consecutively. Oh, boy. So they go, we won't put him to death, but we will make sure he never, ever, ever, ever, ever gets out. Yeah. So three consecutive life without paroles. That's a lot. That's that's you made your point, I think, with that. Oh, man. So December 27th, 1980. This is the day after sentencing. OK, literally the day after there is a civil suit filed.

Not suing him. What are you going to sue him for? His three-wheeler? Are they suing Bureau of Land Management? It seeks compensation. The family of Judy Weiss names the Bureau of Land Management as defendant because the woman, along with her husband and prospector, were shot on public land.

And they let him stay there. And they knew that they alleged that the the Bureau of Land Management was negligent in not removing him from the land because he was a public danger. And they left. It would be the same as if you left a big open, you know, electricity thing, a big open box, a transformer or something. It's the same thing. They're saying Doug dug a hole in your driveway and let people come over.

And fall in it. Yeah. It's irresponsible. So they said that the conviction is being appealed right now. His conviction, the suit is filed by Mrs. Weiss's parents, Robert and Frida Warren of Longmont, Colorado, and three brothers. And they seek...

in excess of $10,000 for each surviving family member, which doesn't sound like a lot, honestly. It feels like a pretty interesting thing. And right below this article of all this tragedy is some very funny advertising that I got to show you quick. Here is one that is very bad. It's a picture of a cartoon Chinese man, and it says, the Mandarin man is back.

Excellent Chinese food at reasonable prices. Then next to it is a

Some kind of, I believe it's a strip club. Is it a naked piano bar? It says Dancing Cocktails Entertainment featuring live on stage Breakaway. It's a piano bar Tuesday through Thursday, 7 to 12. But then it's this. And it says, call regarding Sunday night, quote, talent showcase. Oh, boy. Which sounds like it's amateur night there. And you can just come by and take your tits out. Come on in and flop them out. Yep.

So 1982, Bristol Wolf is back in court fighting the fact that he was ruled sane. Attorney Robert Bork, who I believe is the guy who – isn't that the guy that was nominated for the Supreme Court in the 80s who actually didn't get confirmed because he was a nut? Yeah.

He's in the state's public defender office. He had to advance a lot in five years for that to happen. Challenging that you're not sane feels like the most sane thing you can do. You filed all this legal paperwork. Yeah, that feels pretty sane. Yeah, it's really hard to find those papers and fill them out. You couldn't just look online for forms back then. That would have been really hard. That's super sane. This whole appeal feels like we got it right. Oh, shit.

So they said that the the McNaughton rule, which is the insanity rule that says you have to be not know anything about, you know, not know the difference between right and wrong and not know what planet you're on and shit for determining the defendant's ability to distinguish right and wrong was out of date and should not have been applied in his trial.

They argued, the prosecution argued that they did act correctly in calling him competent. And they said the high court has ruled consistently in favor of the McNaughton rule and previous challenges. And they requested that if the court ruled against the rule in this case, that the decision not be made retroactive because of the number of cases tried under the rule. So basically, if you do do this, make sure it's just going forward because otherwise you are going to fuck everything up.

Yeah. Because it's the state Supreme Court there before, so they could change the laws of the state by ruling that. Retroactively, this could set precedent and fuck up a lot of things. Yeah. They decide, he's crazy, but still stay in jail. Crazy guy. That's how it works. Next up, we got to talk about a guy named Al Brown.

Al Brown is a guy in the eighties that somehow, um, he's does, he, he's a writer and they're trying to get into the, this was the Sundance festival back then, but it was before it was the Sundance festival. It was the Sundance Institute slash Utah arts council, 1982 playwrights conference, which I believe is all in the festival now. Um,

This guy gets in as a writer and he said they say a project inspired by a newspaper article in the Salt Lake Tribune was the entry card for this brown. It's called Bristle Wolf, he calls it. And it concerns a man named Ronald Dress, currently in prison in Nevada, accused of murdering three people, not accused of. He definitely did. And burying their remains by his dugout home. No, if he buried them, he might not have gotten caught. So this guy is all off.

He said that Bristle Wolf has been described as a brooding, silent hermit and friend to the wild horses of the desert. Brown said, I reread that Trib article several times, then cut it out and kept it. I've been fascinated by it ever since. Is it just a small story in an out-of-the-way town, or was Bristle Wolf speaking for all of us when he said, I'm innocent?

Oh, dude. Okay. I'm all for art and stuff. Yeah. But he's not speaking for all of us. He's a guy who lives in a hole in the desert. Are you out of your fucking mind? He's not my Laura. You pretentious asshole. No. I don't need this. This is just so pretentious to say that. This is why people hate fucking artsy people because of this. Because of pretension.

So he says, what is it about people that are different, that live apart and alone by their own rules? Are they us or are we them? They're them and we're us. And you're an asshole. That's what I'm going to say. Them, us, asshole. One, two, three. It's the first guy to snap a piece of kale and start gnawing on it. Fucking asswipe. Yeah, this is you pretentious dickhole. Yeah.

Jesus Christ, he said, I don't know, but this man's situation raised a lot of questions for me, and I want to create a full-length play to answer this one question. Is it the insanity of loneliness or the loneliness of insanity that drives us to commit an act of desperation? Well, I'll tell you what it is. It's a guy who's a paranoid schizophrenic, so he lived in the fucking desert and then shot people. It's very simple. It's not...

It's not this big philosophical question that you're going to answer with art. You can answer it with medication. Lithium will solve this problem. He independently sentenced himself to exile. He couldn't handle society, and he knew it. No, he knew it, and that was actually, I think, that he didn't want to. I don't think he wanted to kill people. No. I think he was out there and nuts and crazy.

I don't know if jail's the right place for him or what, but we find out that he certainly doesn't want to be in jail here by 1987. Well, Monday, August 24th, 1987, there is an article about him being beaten severely over the head with a broom handle by another convict in prison. Imagine this guy in prison. You're in prison.

Think about it. You're in the most isolated spot. You rule everything around you. You live like shit, but it doesn't matter. And then they put you in this fucking box with another person, and it's all people. The showers, the cafeteria, it's all people. Someone's yelling at you. They're in charge of you. They're telling you when to do things. He must have had a terrible time. And that's a guard. And then you have other people yelling at you, telling you they're in charge of you. And they're...

They're supposedly equal to you. And he didn't get death, so he's not alone. He's just with everybody. He's just in gen pop at this point. Convicted of murder. He's 51, and he was beaten several times over the head by a 33-year-old named Reggie Bell during a fight Sunday in his cell, too. He was in his own cell. Oh, God.

And he was treated at the Carson Tahoe Hospital before being returned to the prison infirmary. They said that Bell, I'll read the article, quote, Whitley, who is the warden, Harold Whitley, Whitley said that Bell, a black, claimed he attacked Gress, a white, after Gress used racial slurs and spit on him.

But the warden says, actually, our internal investigation shows Bell was taking personal property from Gress and he was strong arming him and Gress didn't want it anymore. So this guy beat him with a broom handle and said, fuck that. You're getting I'm taking your shit. Basically, you old fucking weirdo. So in prison, he is inmate number one, four, nine, three, seven in Nevada there. Now, in 2003,

There's an article here, by the way. This has tentacles that connects to other shit. Oh, boy. Okay. 2003, there's an article. This is kind of the legend of Pete, as they call it, is the way it goes here. Now, Pete apparently had gone to the bar in Denio, and the barkeep had told a prospector that Pete –

Back in the day, had found a cave that was brimming with Indian artifacts, ancient shit that you could sell for a lot of money. Pete Cousteau, what do you got? So that's what Pete was talking about. Now, this bartender told a man named Jack Lee Harrelson that.

That, you know, about this whole thing. And he so Harrelson looked for it, but he didn't find the cave. Then a few months later, Harrelson found a crevice that they excavated. It was at Elephant Mountain, which is southwest of Pinto Hot Springs. So there's Jack Harrelson and Pam Harrelson here. Husband wife combo. So.

Pam said that they sat at the Denio Junction Motel having drinks with Marge Stevens, a local they had befriended a few months earlier. At the bar, Marge produced an arrowhead given to her by a friend who was Pete. Pete had given it to her years before this. She said this had come from the Black Rock Desert. And immediately, Jack and Pam are like, they're connecting the two things together.

Pete's the guy who told this guy about the artifacts. This lady has an artifact. This shit's real. Was he trying to find that too? Yeah, we're going and looking for one-eyed Willie right now. Like this is happening. Yeah. So once they do that, Jack and Pam started asking, could you tell us more? Do you know how to get to the site? Marge didn't know much, but she knew enough to send them in the right direction. Mm-hmm.

So they took several months to find the site that had produced the arrowhead. And it's a cave near Elephant Mountain, like we said. So they searched on foot and also in Jack's Chevy Blazer. They discovered it in May of 1980. This is, well...

It's hard for everybody to see there. This is before the trial. This is two years after the shooting. So, I mean, there's still very fresh shit going on here. So after spotting two owls hunting mice near the entrance of the shelter, they saw mice. The owls drew their attention to the mice, and they saw where the mice were running, and they were like, there's shit in there. So there's an open space in there. So they do that. It was six feet deep and two feet high and sat atop a steep 75-foot cliff.

run of shattered volcanic rock. So it's a tough climb and a small area. Pam said it was hardly a cave back then. You could crawl in and bang your head, but there wasn't room for two people. It's like a coffin. Yeah, it's a coffin basically. So the Haralsons using shovels and five gallon buckets and a sifting screen were

They set to work on this shit, basically. By the way, later on, they'll figure out the Bureau of Land Management will figure out that this was one of the five most important archaeological cave sites in the Great Basin. And they're fucking it all up.

They're just in there with shovels, just ripping it open. Ripping it apart. Actually, Congress had reacted to a lot of this with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990. This is a law targeting traffickers and pressuring museums and other federally funded institutions to work with tribes to return and rebury skeletons where they belong. So first, the Harrelsons here, first they found a cowhide.

Like, okay, that's man-made. Then they found some corn kernels and shell casings. And they're like, ah, white man shit. And they said, literally, this is white guy shit. This isn't Indian shit. So then they started digging a little deeper and they started finding arrowheads and broken arrow shafts.

They're like, now it's... Get the fuck out of there. Now it's, oh, no, no. Now let's get bigger buckets. Let's get bigger buckets. Yeah, no, they're not thinking... We're getting close to pots now. We're going to get haunted forever. They're like, yeah. The deeper they dug, the older the shit they found. Yeah. They just kept digging. It was layers and layers of history. Wow. Pam said there was something in every bucket.

And also, every bucket is a huge federal crime, too, is another thing. Yeah, that's what it is. Every bucket, what's in there is a felony. It is. It's absolutely what it is. So one day in 1984, so four years they're working on this. Good Lord. They unearthed a burden basket, it's called. It's a woven hamper that ancient Native American women wore like a backpack and

And a conical container in which they could see the outline of a small head. It's a baby cock. It's a fucking, yes. This is now digging up an Indian burial ground. This is Q the horror movie. Like Q poltergeist and every other fucking thing that ever happened. This is insane. Why would you do this? This is crazy. Pam said we found them early in the weekend so we hid them in the sagebrush until it was time to go home.

She said she worried all the way back to Oregon. Stealing baskets was one thing, but this was taking, they were pretty sure, actual bodies. God damn it. This is not good. She said, what if we get in a wreck? And he said, oh, nothing's going to happen. Don't worry about it. Like, we'll get caught with bodies. That won't be good. Yeah. Jack didn't know how to open the sealed containers. Because you're supposed to be. You're not supposed to open them. That's why. So he contacts, like, I don't know how to open coffins when they're in the ground and sealed. Good reason for that, stupid.

So he contacted some pot hunting friends that did this all the time, one of whom had worked at the La Brea Tar Pits. And they all got together in his garage and they opened up the burden basket and pulled out small like funeral type artifacts, a bowl, a knife, a rabbit net. Then they remove the remains of a small boy.

I'm not doing this. I'm done when I got the mummified remains of a boy. He was tiny. They said probably around four years old. Not a skeleton. They said he had leathery, mummified skin. Assholes. Yeah, they preserved him, and they're taking this out of the ground like this. This is horrifying. This is an important child to somebody, you fucking monsters.

Horrifying. It's a young. Yeah. Wow. Cypher who's worse, them or her old Beowulf? No shit. Who's weirder? So then the conical basket, they take a young girl out of that. Oh, no. They said she was older, maybe 10. Her knees pulled to her chest. Pam said her long black hair was still there. She had teeth, too.

Carbon dating would reveal that the children had been buried around 2,000 years ago. 2,000. 2,000. B.C. they were buried. Fucking B.C. Dude, they unearthed two... These things have been resting for 2,000 years and they fucked it up. This is disgusting. Unbelievable. So Pam took the baskets into the bathroom and scrubbed them clean with pine salt.

What? Pine salt. That's what the material is made to. These stink like a dead body. Oh, man. You know what? I'm going to put some pine salt in here. Holy shit. What's that shit we got? OxyClean. Yeah, spray some of that on there. The other pot hunters were just amazed by what they found. None of them knew where the cave was, and Pam said, we never told anyone.

but at least one friend warned them against continuing the dig. The one person said, you ought to stay away from it. This is serious stuff. Not only criminal wise, but also, you know, just,

It's fucked up. What are you doing? Just on the inside. Shouldn't you feel scummy? Shouldn't that feel like a felony? You're disinterring baby corpses. This is fucked up. Like, that's messed up. So Jack shrugged it off, Pam said. He was like, whatever. No, fuck you guys. Don't care. Finding shit that's worth a lot of money. Once the baskets were clean and dry, they planned to display them in a glass case he had built.

But what do you do with the tiny corpses? Yeah. Yeah. So I would say, so he didn't know what to do with those. Then there's a guy named Lloyd Olds. Okay. O-L-D-S. Jack buys into Lloyd's opal mine in the area. He's got an opal mine. Yeah.

A few years after buying in, Jack charges that Lloyd has been mismanaging the company and tries to take control of the mine himself. Jack Harrelson. Hostile takeover. Hostile takeover. It's the Bonanza Opal Mine. And it was never – that's the name of it anyway. It wasn't meant to be a commercial moneymaker. It was run as a private campground for people to just do it for fun. Take it off, yeah.

You pay to stay there, then you can go in and look for rocks and do whatever you want. There's a lot of places like that. It's called Bonanza, like the TV show. Like the TV show. But the Harrelson had found some valuable opals, and he wanted to sell thousands more shares, but they didn't want to. Lloyd didn't want to. So Harrel tried to start a shareholder rebellion against him, and then that didn't work. That didn't work. So he sets up.

What? What is going on? I want to be the mayor of Toontown. Yeah, that's what this is, so...

He ends up trying to get these guys to two guys that he found to kill Lloyd. Now, the next day, these two guys knock on Lloyd's door. Yeah. And they take him outside and they bring him up to Gardner Ridge. Okay. They dig a shallow grave. What? What?

with Lloyd standing there. They threw him in the grave. They threw leaves and needles and stuff like that and then started taking pictures of them and then helped him out of the grave because those are cops and they're doing this to convince this guy he's dead.

This is the end of white men can't jump at this point now where they had to take pictures of what? Same thing. That's what's going on. They helped him out. They're both cops. He looked dead in the hole. They said, all right, that's about it. That'll do. So they brought him back home and they said, don't fucking come outside for a couple days. Lay low. Yeah. Be cool. Some naps.

So they went to Jack Harrelson and showed him the photo. Yeah. We did what you wanted. He started laughing. What? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Like an evil laugh.

He said, and I quote, it's too bad they couldn't have just gutted him and left him in the middle of the street because that son of a bitch deserves it. But this will do one down, three to go. He's got a list. He's got a list of other stockholders that are bigger stockholders. Oh, my God. It'll never be suspicious that all of them are murdered except for you. That'd be one standing. That's wild. So he said Harrelson took the picture and threw it in the fire. It was like, don't need that. He's dead.

So this is at his friend's house. He's showing his friend the picture. Look, see, they killed him. They should have gutted the son of a bitch. His friend's like, whoa. So his friend wanted him to leave at one point, but Harrelson didn't want to go. So at one point, his friend called somebody else up and said, I got to let the guy know you're happy, is what he said, because he's the guy who set him up with the cops, this guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So he calls a cop to go. He's here. And he really he's he he he's thrilled. You guys did a great job. So, yeah, he said, no, no, hurry up and come over. He's real excited. So he said, OK, they finished their coffee. And Jack said, all right, bye. And he walks out the front door, opens the door, and there's a fucking SWAT team waiting for him.

He's ordered to lie down on the porch, and he just stood there. He wouldn't lie down with the SWAT team there, which is a way to get shot. They don't shoot him. He's held without bail, charged with conspiracy to commit aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder, and four counts of solicitation to commit murder. He pleads not guilty. He won't go to trial for all this for years. He won't be convicted until 2005 of this crime. Why?

But in 1996...

He goes to trial for the artifacts and a jury finds him guilty of looting Indian burial caves in Nevada. And the crime was too old to prosecute under the federal archeological resources protection act, but they convict him on state charges of theft. And what else do you think? Desecration of remains, abusing a corpse and tampering with evidence. Yes. Even though they're 2000 year old, still right. Corpse corpse, man. Yeah. Fuck with them. That's it.

2005, Harrelson was convicted of retrial in a retrial. Cause he, the first time was a mistrial, uh, to, of trying to hire a hit man to kill Lloyd olds there. Um, the evidence came from tape recordings of conversations of him going, they should have gutted him and left him in the street and him telling the cops what to do with them. He's a scumbag, man. Yup. Uh,

Harrelson gave the informant for the hookup a jar full of opals valued at $10,000 to pay for the hit. He paid for a hit with rocks. We've never heard of that before. A small tech, 499 episodes for someone to pay for a fucking murder with opals. And rocks. And rocks. His defense attorney argued he was the victim of entrapment.

And because the hit man never existed and the tape recordings of the murder plans represented the musings of a lonely man who never had any intentions of going through with them. That's their defense. That's a wild defense. Oh, my God. He he's also charged with wanting a judge to state police officers and another partner in the Opal mine to be killed as well. Yeah, he's got a list, man.

He is found not guilty of wanting the judge, the cops, another partner to be killed, but guilty of trying to have his partner killed there. He said it, but all right. I mean, why not? 2012, Jack Harrelson dies in prison. That's what he got out of it. 2013, December 11th.

Ronald Bristlewolf dies in prison as well. Oh, really? Yep. He's dead too in prison. Damn it. They both die within a year of each other in prison in Nevada, which is so strange, I think, here.

The ghosts came back and got him, it feels like. That's what I mean. Yeah, because that's what happens when you're stealing babies from their graves, you fucking weirdo. Native graves is crazy. I'm not big into like, oh, the ghosts. That's fucked up, man.

Baby burial grounds? I'm going to go, nah, this is a Scooby-Doo episode. I don't want to deal with this shit. This is crazy. Fuck that. And so deep into that cave, it feels like it was sacred to them that they would put the children safe in the cave. It's like a mausoleum. It's the same thing as, that's what I mean. They were securing them forever. You can't go get them in there. This is a spot that will be secure forever. Then they closed it up with rocks and everything. They made it so this was a private thing never to be tampered with.

By the way, that story, it's in a lot of different places, but they had a really good rendition of it in Outdoor Magazine is where I got a lot of that info. Really? The Harrelson story with the babies and all that. Oh, I was going to say, what are you, reading Field and Stream, too, for the kids? Yeah, I'm reading Guns and Ammo. I'm just, you know, I'm reading Trout and Bass Weekly I got going on. It's pretty good. I got to keep up on it.

And the other one, there was a lot of good information about the springs and everything from findingnevadawild.com. That was those people who showed up at the springs and said something was wrong here.

They wrote a book here. A guy named Frank Bergon wrote a book called Wild Game in 1995, and it's a, quote, fictionalized account of this exact – which a lot of people write these books. It's exactly the story except they might throw in a couple of crazy details that didn't actually happen, and they call it a fictionalized account. I think so they don't have to, like, give anybody money for anything in their story. Okay, maybe, yeah. I think that's what it is. Richard C. Weiss is –

buried, I believe Judy is as well, in Mountain View Cemetery in Longmont, Colorado. And Pete's buried in Winnemucca.

So there you go. The two criminals, I don't know where the fuck they're buried, but it doesn't matter. Who gives a shit? There you go, everybody. That is Denio, Nevada, and some weird desert shit. What a place. What a place. See, every once in a while we got to do some real weird out there shit like that, and then we're back to the suburbs one week, and that's what we do. And that's what we've been doing for almost 500 episodes.

It's unbelievable. If you're happy about that this week, by the way, like we said, our next episodes are 500th episode. So make sure to not only listen, but also maybe share it, share it that week and say 500. We got to, cause this is a big, it's a big deal to be able to do 500 episodes. And sure is. We want to thank you first of all, for making it so we could do 500 episodes and making it.

I mean, anybody could do 500 episodes, but to actually have people listening to them for 500 episodes is huge. Creating a demand of people that want 500 is unbelievable. Exactly. And people that want 500 more. It's even more crazy. That's what I'm saying. So thank you. Thank you. That's exactly what we're trying to get at here. Thank you for what you do for us. And maybe this week, give a review on whatever app you're listening on. Do that. Maybe say, for 500, let's give them a review. You know, I think we've earned it, maybe. So do that, whatever app you're listening on. If you don't think so, then fuck you. I don't care.

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This week is no different. You're going to get one crime and sports, one small town murder like always, and you get access to it all. This week for crime and sports, the New England Patriots, multiple cheating scandals we'll talk about. So many, and that'll be a lot of fun because we both hate the fucking Patriots, and we'll talk a lot of shit. It'll be a good time. Then for small town murder, we're going to talk about Ed Gein again. Ed Gein part two. Maybe the only guy weirder than Bristle Wolf.

Boy, oh boy. If Gein was from this area, that's who he would have been. He would have been this guy. He would have dug a hole in the ground and sat in it. So definitely check that out. We're going to get into more of the psychology of him and the...

resolution of what happened to his house and all that kind of shit because, you know, who the hell wants to live there? So do that. That's patreon.com slash crime and sports. And you get a shout out as well. When do you get that shout out? Right now. Right motherfucking now. Jimmy, please, if you would hit me with the list of the most wonderful people who have hung out with us for $500.

fucking episodes and subscribe to Patreon. Hit me with them right now. This week's executive producers are Kevin Spilker, Raymond Russ, and Sean Carter. Thank you all so much for what you do. You're amazing. Jay-Z gave us money. Very nice. Thank you, Jay-Z.

He's got plenty to go around. We appreciate it. Other producers this week are Blackjack Mulligan and Blackjack Lanza. Oh, the Blackjacks. Blackjack Mulligan's a big wrestler. He also got busted for counterfeiting money at one point. So we're going to talk about his whole family on a bonus episode. Tremendous. And also Fearless Fosnick. Another one? Yeah. He's fearless. That's all I know.

I don't know. Pink Meadows, Cassie Wright. Happy birthday, Garrett. Happy birthday. Travis Novotny. Dan Ward is back in the Navy. Congrats, Dan. It took him, I don't know, he said after 17 years? That's a long time to be out of it. Is that what our Navy's made up of? Old guys? How old are you? If you're our age, I don't want you in our, in combat probably. Yeah, it's frightening, Dan.

That's terrifying. Good luck to you. Garginez, man. Janice Hill. Frank the South African Bird Washer is back. My girl Brandy down in Florida. She's terrific. Catherine Stumberg Laugh Head, I think. Taylor Clegg and Goth Brooks. Oh, Kip. Hey, Goth. What a guy. Thank you so much. Absolutely. Great to see you. I would have come out with you guys if I did not have to be at the airport at 6 o'clock in the morning. Yeah. That was bad. Yeah.

Ginger Thomas, Holly Vinson, Heather Riley, Michelle Grizz, Stephen with no last name, Jeremy Rigalski, Alexis Molnar, Rob Mansuetti, Mansuetti Grizz. Awesome. Mansuetti.

Christy Conklin, Hunter Rainville, Nicole Miller, Tyler Ringer, Sophia B., Mark Saunders, Elizabeth Williams, Isaac Hopkins, Abby with no last name, Carrie with no last name, Kelly Grostein.

Oh, and she got two new Patreons. Thank you, Kelly. That's so nice of you. Wow. You're gifting one? That's lovely. What a nice person. That's so sweet. Rachel Schaefer, TP123, Kevin Carrier, Crystal Reimer, Lane Calder, Allie Staples, Miranda Casper, Gabby and Jace's mom, Pamela Eckstein, Judd, or maybe it's Jude, no last name, Rachel Marcion, Abby Matracia.

uh, Courtney, Courtney Murphy, Rachel, Danielle Bauer, Harriet, Harriet with no last name. Uh, uh, Sebastian Ainsworth, Cassie Jones. Oh Jesus. I clicked a window. God damn it. Cassie Jones. Here we go. We're right on track. Here they are. Cassie Jones. She's right there. Kevin Parsley, uh, squizzy, squizzy with no last name. Jennifer Eisenhower, Lewis, uh, mash met Zach with no last name. Wilma finger do, uh,

Really? Finger don't. That's what it says. Finger do not. Zach Marks, Ice Chanel, Jennifer Miller, Hambone Jones, Laura Clifton, Cameron Blair, Amelia Briggs, Chris C., Teresa Martin, Julie Kaiser, Blanton Unger, Megan Sutton, Christy. Nope, that's Ricky. Ricky Kacic, Sarah Plinkton. Old Christy Ricky.

Pilkington. Sophia with no last name. Kate Whittemore. Emily Wood. Casey with no last name. Helena Gray. Matthew Dyer. Mark Ryan. Sarah Callen. Leanne White. Christina Fox. Jasmine Soto. James Lucchese. Lucchese, maybe. Becca Rauer. Sherry Thompson. Megan Lasur. Bobby J. Nicholson. Julian Sparrow. Kelly Lynch. Janine Hildebrand. Billy B. Charlie Dwight. Amber Mondraghan.

Bonnie Hunt, Katie Simmons, Holly Karovich, Becca Martin, DMW912, Virginia Sanders, Courtney Benson, Padre Paul Ballin, Christy Jackson, H&G, the letters HG, Jimmy with no last name, Sky Atterbury, Micah Reynolds,

Rachel Kidney, Jennifer Chappelle, Car Bomb, Eli Bloom, Morgan Scoton, Heather Levings, Ron Jennings, Alex Schmidt, Alex Henderson, Matt Eichelberger, Chrissy Fowler, Lorenzo Migalara, Benji Will, Brad Dunifin. Hey, Brad. Hello, Brad. Kathleen Comer, Kennedy Daly, Molly Varley, Martha Pavilek.

Good fuck. Nicole Schaefer, Blake Adams, Karen McGuire, Tara Kersey, Michael Fosjenbauer, Dustin Kisling, Molly Golick, Kevin Cabada, Jordan Whaley, Mandingo. Don't like saying that at all. JoJo Loves Didi, Anal Weiss, KC Wolin, Shelly with no last name, Justin

Justin Coomer, Trevor Thomas, Delray Curry, Scott M, Danny, we love Jimmy Gleason, uh, Timberland, Sage, a stone, Sage stone, Douglas Lee, Shelly, shell bell, Brent Reed, Joe with no last name, Bailey Grunberg. Uh,

Elizabeth Hansen, Steve Brown, Brandon Jones, Matthew Plew, Michael Vondron, Celeste Smith, Caleb Smith. They're probably from the same family. Martin Christensen, radium suppository. That's gross. T. Britt, Bonnie Christensen, probably Martin's friend, wife, maybe sister. Who knows? Michael Kaler, Mary Schutz, Emma Bell Hinkle, Brian Zielinski, Jason Timms.

Megan Pease, Pease maybe. Tyler Baines, Tyler Daly. What? Rachel? Nope, that's Rich. Rich Summers. Tristan Ellis. Justin Pearson. Pearson? That's a lot of Rs. Lisa King. Riley with no last name. James Sagona. Morgan Hernandez. Matthew Whittemore. Tim White. Jess Housley. Jordan Pass. Gemma with no last name. Helena Johnston. Brooke Hernday. Douglas Chenault.

Tynan, Tynan Bennett, Stephanie, no, yeah, Stephanie, Stephanie, that's a fascinating, Carrier, Don Thompson, Ramsey with no last name, AJ, Deanna Baker, Mike W., Heather S., Cheyenne, Daphne, Son with no last name, Ryan Haglin, Maddie Keener, Eric Bailia, and all of our patrons, you're fucking amazing.

Thank you so much, everybody, for all that you do for us, for all that you've done for us. And we're going to keep these episodes coming with another 500 and then probably another 500 after that, maybe. You never know. I can't see us going away anytime soon.

We do about 100 a year now with the Express, so that's about 10 years for another 1,000 episodes. I think we'll get there. So there you go. Come hang out with us. You want to hang out with us on social media, you can do that. ShutUpAndGiveMeMurder.com has the links to everything there. Thank you for hanging with us. Tell your friends. And until next week, everybody, it's been our pleasure. Bye. ♪♪♪

Was there a crime committed?

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