To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, please visit patreon.com/forensictales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. Saturday, June 10th, 2006. Two college best friends planned a fun summer night. Lori and Lindsey were set for pool, drinks, and a movie.
Lori goes to pick up some drinks on her way to Lindsay's house, but she doesn't show up. She doesn't return her calls. She doesn't return her messages. No one would ever hear from Lori Slislenski again. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 149, The Murder of Lori Slislenski.
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola.
Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.
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To support Forensic Tales, please visit patreon.com slash Forensic Tales or simply click the link in the show notes. You can also support the show by leaving a positive rating with a review. Now, let's get to this week's episode. Before this week's episode, there was a massive update on a case that we covered in an earlier episode on the show. And that is the case of the 2017 Delphi murders.
In February 2017, 13-year-old Abigail Williams and her 14-year-old Liberty German friend were murdered on a hiking trail in Delphi, Indiana. For the next five and a half years, their murders remained unsolved. Until last week. On Friday, October 28th, a man was arrested in connection to the murders.
Indiana State Police officers arrested 50-year-old Richard M. Allen of Delphi, Indiana, and charged him with two counts of first-degree murder. On Monday, October 31, Halloween, the police and Indiana prosecutors held a press conference to announce that Richard Allen was arrested in connection with the case. He is being charged again with two counts of murder.
The police didn't say much else at this press conference. The court has sealed the charging documents, and according to police and prosecutors, the investigation remains open. But as of now, a suspect in the killings of Abigail Williams and Liberty German is in police custody.
Over the next several months, there will likely be a lot more updates in this case, and I'll bring them to you as they unfold in future show episodes. But finally, after several long years, the man believed to be responsible for the Delphi murders is finally behind bars. Okay, let's get to episode 149. Saturday, June 10th, 2006.
24-year-old Lori Ann Slicinski had planned to have drinks and watch a movie with her best friend, Lindsey Braun. Lori and Lindsey became fast friends when they met at Auburn University in Alabama during their junior year. And after college graduation, their friendship continued when they started working together at a local mental health facility.
On the night of Saturday, June 10, 2006, the plan was for Lori to go to Lindsay's house to have a few drinks and watch a movie together. They also planned to go to the pool together the following day. Drinks, late-night movies, and pool time during the summer was something that they did all of the time.
Around 6.30 p.m., Lori called her friend Lindsay and said that she would stop by the store to pick up the drink mixes. She said she was headed to the local Walmart Superstore. Then after Walmart, she would come over. The plan was for Lori to be at Lindsay's house around 7.30 p.m., but Lori never made it to her best friend's house.
About 30 minutes later, around 7 o'clock p.m., Lindsay received a second phone call from Lori's number. But when Lindsay answered the phone, no one was on the other end. It was completely silent. Lindsay tried calling Lori back, but she didn't pick up. When her friend didn't answer, Lindsay assumed she must have pocket dialed her on accident and that she didn't mean to call her.
But Lindsay started to worry when Lori didn't show up at her house at 7.30. It was entirely out of character of Lori to bail on her plans. If she had changed her mind about her evening plans, she would have called and told her friend. She wasn't the type of friend to just not show up. Lindsay never heard from Lori that entire weekend. She tried calling Lori at her house, but she only got her answering machine each time that she called.
She left messages, but Lori never called her back. When Monday morning came around, Lindsay figured that she would see her friend at work. They both worked together at a local mental health facility. Although Lindsay thought it was weird that she didn't hear from Lori all weekend, she knew that she wouldn't skip work. But Monday morning was no different. Lori didn't show up to work either. She hadn't called in sick, and no one knew where she was.
When Lori failed to show up at work that Monday morning, Lindsay knew that something was very wrong. By Tuesday, Lori still hadn't shown up to work, so Lindsay drove to Lori's mobile home to check on her. She needed to find out why her friend wasn't showing up to work or answering interviewer phone calls, so she and another coworker drove to the house around 10 a.m.,
The first thing they did was knock on Lori's front door, but the house was completely silent. No one came to the door. And Lori's car wasn't parked where it usually was. Then Lindsay and her co-worker noticed that the front door was left unlocked. When they made their way inside the house, they saw Lori's small Yorkie dog, Peanut. Peanut was inside his crate, but there was no sign of Lori.
Lindsay thought it was strange for Peanut to be home alone inside of his crate since it had been almost four days since she heard from Lori. She knew how much Lori loved her dog and she would have never gone anywhere without him. But she also noticed something else that was strange. Peanut's crate was completely clean and the dog seemed happy and appeared to be well fed. It was almost like someone had been taking care of the dog.
Otherwise, if Peanut had been left alone inside of his crate for several days, he would have been in distress and the crate would have likely been dirty. But it wasn't. Besides the crate and Peanut seeming happy, Lindsay noticed other strange things about the place. Lindsay remembered that Lori's dog, Peanut, wouldn't walk on the tile in the house. He was afraid of sliding around and slipping.
So Lori had rugs throughout her house so that Peanut could walk around without stepping on the tile. But when Lindsay went inside, she noticed that all of the rugs were gone. Lindsay also discovered that Lori's answering machine had been unplugged. So all the messages that she had left over the last few days weren't there.
And when she walked outside the house, she noticed that Lori's trash cans were missing and a few of her gardening tools were gone. A shovel and a rake. By this point, Lori's mom, Arlene, heard that her daughter hadn't been showing up at work. And just like her friend, Lindsay, Arlene knew that this wasn't like Lori. So as soon as she heard that her daughter missed two full days of work, she drove out to Lori's house in Auburn.
When she got there, she contacted the Auburn Police Department to report her daughter missing. But the police weren't too concerned at first. Lori was an adult, 24 years old, and she'd only been missing for a few days. So the police didn't think that this was a very big deal. Lori will certainly show up with when she's ready. But Lori never did. In fact, no one would ever hear from her ever again.
Lori Ann Slesinski was the youngest in her family. Her parents, Arlene and Casey, and older brother, Paul, were originally from New York State, but the family headed south to rural Alabama farm country when Lori was 13 years old. Growing up, Lori loved all kinds of animals, from cats to dogs to farm animals. She loved them all. She loved to play sports and was also incredibly smart.
So when it came time for her high school graduation, she graduated as valedictorian at the top of her class. After high school graduation, she decided to leave her parents' small farmhouse in Alabama and head to college. This was a big move for Lori and her family because Lori was the baby in the family and she was finally growing up and starting her own life. Lori decided to attend college at Auburn University in Alabama.
Auburn University is the second largest university in the state and is a big sports university known for its football. College was a big moment in Lori's life. It was the first time she lived away from her parents and brother, and it was time for her to figure out what she wanted to be.
She graduated from Auburn University with a degree in psychology and minored in criminal justice. Like high school, she excelled in college and graduated with honors. After Auburn University, she worked with her best friend, Lindsay Braun, at a local mental health facility. And by June 2006, she was missing.
While Arlene waited for her daughter at her trailer home, she got a phone call from one of Lori's friends, Rick Ennis. Daryl Richard Ennis, who went by Rick, was good friends with Lori. The two had met while Lori was a student at Auburn University, and Rick worked as a mechanic at AMF Auburn Lanes, a local bowling alley.
In college, Lori and her friends used to hang out at the bowling alley all of the time. So Lori and a few of her friends became close friends with Rick, and they continued to stay in touch and hang out even after Lori graduated. They had become such close friends that just before Christmas in 2005, about six months before Lori went missing, Lori called her mom and asked if Rick could join them for Christmas.
Lori told her mother that Rick didn't have any family and she didn't want him spending the holidays alone. So she asked if he could come and spend Christmas with them. Feeling bad, Arlene said, of course he could. So that Christmas, Christmas 2005, Rick spent the holidays with Lori and her family.
When Arlene saw her phone ringing, she wasn't surprised that it was Rick Ennis. They knew that they were good friends, so she figured that he was calling to see if she knew where Lori was. But she was wrong. Rick didn't ask for Lori. Instead, he said that he knew where Lori was. According to him, she had gone to make a big drug deal, and that's probably why she was now missing.
Rick said that he and Lori grew marijuana together at Lori's mobile home. And the last time he spoke with her, she said she was headed to make a big marijuana deal. But Arlene didn't believe Rick's story. The Lori she knew wasn't a drug dealer. Sure, she might have smoked marijuana occasionally, but she wasn't a drug dealer.
Early Wednesday morning, June 14th, the Auburn police made a gruesome discovery. Four days after she went missing, Lori's car was found engulfed in flames at the dead end of an empty cul-de-sac outside a construction site not far from Lori's mobile home. Auburn firefighters quickly worked to put out the flames, fearing that Lori might still be inside the car.
But when the fire was extinguished, they discovered that Lori wasn't inside and she was still missing. The police focused their attention on Lori's burnt out car, searching for any clues that might help them figure out where she was. The car was found on a remote road near the bowling alley where Lori and her friends would hang out and where her friend Rick Ennis worked.
But besides the road and the bowling alley, there wasn't much else. There weren't any homes or apartment buildings, so the police didn't find any witnesses who either heard or saw anything suspicious. And the fire destroyed whatever evidence there was in the car. But one investigator did find something on the ground nearby.
This investigator found a hand-rolled cigarette butt about 30 yards away from her car and about 1,000 yards away from the bowling alley. The investigator collected the cigarette, hoping that it had something to do with the case. But after he collected it, nothing happened. So the cigarette butt got lost in the shuffle and was never tested. Investigators also found a gas can in the nearby woods.
They believed it looked similar to one of the missing gas cans from the bowling alley where Rick worked. Once the police discovered that Lori's car had been set on fire, their investigation shifted from a missing person to a possible homicide. Although they still didn't know where Lori was, they feared that whoever set fire to the car might have also done something terrible to Lori.
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Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash tails to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash tails. Investigators got their hands on a surveillance tape of a local Walmart superstore. According to Lori's best friend, Lindsay, Lori called her from a Walmart where she said she was picking up the drinks for that night.
So investigators contacted Walmart and reviewed the store surveillance tape. As they watched the videos, they spotted Lori. She's seen walking down an aisle pushing a shopping cart. But besides the other shoppers around her, she appears to be completely alone. Whatever happened to Lori happened after she left that Walmart. That security footage was the last known sighting of Lori.
Investigators returned to Lori's trailer home to conduct a complete search of the place. When investigators first went inside the trailer, they found several signs of a struggle. First were the black scuff marks on the wall. On several walls inside the trailer, investigators found scuff marks that looked like they were left behind by someone's shoes, like someone was kicking their legs in the air and hitting the wall.
Then there were the missing items. When Lori's friend Lindsay went to the trailer to look for Lori, she noticed that several rugs were missing and a few gardening tools were missing from the yard. This suggested to investigators that maybe whoever got into a struggle with Lori took the rugs and gardening tools with them. Finally, there was Lori's dog Peanut.
When the police searched Lori's trailer, she had been missing for several days. But when the police arrived and Lori's family arrived, the dog appeared to be well cared for. Someone had been feeding Peanut and taking him out to use the restroom. So whoever took Lori was returning to her trailer to take care of her dog.
The first tip the police investigated was the tip that came from Lori's friend, Rick Ennis. He was the one who told Lori's mom, Arlene, about Lori leaving to make a drug deal. He suggested Lori may have gone off to sell her share of the marijuana and added that she might have been dealing with some shady people. So the police wondered if they had anything to do with her disappearance. Maybe the drug deal was what went wrong.
But when they looked into this marijuana drug deal claim, they found no evidence of that. They also conducted a complete search of Lori's mobile home, and they didn't find any proof that Lori was dealing drugs or growing marijuana. So investigators were curious about why Rick seemed to have made this drug deal story up. So they decided to dig a little more into who Rick Ennis was.
And when they dug into his past, they uncovered a bombshell. Auburn police learned that when Rick was just 12 years old, a state trooper discovered him on the side of the road next to a wrecked vehicle. The car belonged to his parents, but when the state trooper got there, Rick was alone. There was no sign of his parents. When the officer approached him, he was carrying a backpack.
Rick admitted to the officer that he was the driver of the wrecked car, and he allowed the officer to search through his backpack. Inside the bag was a large kitchen knife, loose ammunition from a 12-gauge shotgun, and a .22 caliber pistol. The state trooper put the backpack in the back of his patrol car, thinking that the 12-year-old would be in huge trouble for stealing his parents' car and crashing it.
But after asking a couple of questions, the patrol officer learned that Rick had done something far more terrible than simply stealing his parents' car. The officer asked Rick where his parents were. Twelve-year-old Rick Ennis looked straight into the police officer's eyes and said, "'I killed them.'"
At only 12 years old, Rick Ennis confessed to shooting his mother in the face and beating her to death with a baseball bat. He then covered her face with a blanket and placed a rose on her chest. He also admitted to waiting with a shotgun for his stepfather to come home before he shot and killed him. After he murdered his parents, he lived with the bodies inside their house for two full days.
During that time, he even took himself to school. When detectives asked Rick why he killed his parents, he said he was angry at them for planning a move. He said they were moving to a different town, so he would have to switch schools and make new friends. So instead of moving and leaving his friends, he decided to shoot and kill them.
After his confession, Rick was convicted on two counts of murder, but he didn't spend much time behind bars. Since he was only 12 when the murders happened, he couldn't be tried as an adult. Instead, his case was heard in juvenile court, and in accordance with Alabama criminal law, Rick was sentenced to juvenile prison until he was released after turning 21 years old.
That means that he served less than 10 years in juvenile prison. Once he turned 21, he got a job working at the bowling alley near Lori's house in Auburn. Lori's mom, Arlene, was completely shocked when investigators told her about her daughter's friend's past. She knew Rick didn't have any parents, but she had no idea it was because he killed them.
She also didn't believe that her daughter knew about her friend's checkered past, because if Lori had known, she would have never been friends with him. Lori's best friend, Lindsay, told investigators that before her friend disappeared, Lori had confided in her that she had received a love letter from Rick. The letter expressed his feelings for her and said that he wanted to be more than just friends.
But according to Lindsay, Lori didn't return the same feelings. She wasn't interested in Rick romantically and was going to talk to him about the letter. But before Lori could speak to him, she went missing. Once investigators learned about Rick's past and the love letter, they brought him in for questioning three separate times. The first time the police interviewed him, they noticed scratches on his arms and hands.
In one of the photographs taken by investigators, you can see scratches on one of Rick's arms that looked like someone had scratched him. But when the police asked him how he got the marks and scratches, he said he didn't remember. Investigators also searched Rick's car. Inside his car, they found fuzzy handcuffs, a knife, and cleaning supplies, including Clorox, Febreze, and a bathroom scrub brush.
but they didn't find anything directly linking him to Lori's disappearance, so the investigators had no choice but to let him go. Detectives brought Rick back in for questioning two more times, but each time he denied having anything to do with it and said that he didn't know where Lori was.
They also asked him about his love letter, and Rick admitted to them that he had written the letter, but had told friends that Lori didn't feel the same way. According to Rick, he was okay with just being friends with Lori. He said he wasn't bothered by being rejected. But investigators didn't believe his story. They suspected that he knew more about Lori, but he just wasn't saying.
The only problem was that the police didn't have any direct evidence linking him to any crime. Rick Ennis may have become the prime suspect, but the police could do nothing. Investigators knew about Rick's checkered past involving the murder of his parents, but without any direct evidence and without a body, the police didn't have enough to charge him with anything.
So after his third interview with detectives, he was once again free to go. And sadly, that's when Lori's case went cold. Lori's case was cold for the next decade, 10 long years. Although investigators still considered her friend Rick Ennis a person of interest, they didn't have enough solid evidence against him.
Not long after Rick's third interview with the police, he moved out of Auburn, 200 miles away, to Huntsville, Alabama. He moved into an apartment with a roommate, Abram Sisson. Rick and Abram worked together at a Ruby Tuesday restaurant in Huntsville. While Rick went on with his life in Huntsville, Alabama, Lori's family and friends struggled to cope with what happened to Lori.
They had no idea what had happened to her or who was responsible. For 10 years, they wondered if they would ever be able to answer these questions. But in 2016, a break in the case came. In 2016, Mark Whitaker, a special agent with the Alabama State Bureau of Investigation, started a cold case unit and began investigating Lori's case.
Mark Whitaker and his cold case unit wanted to see if they could uncover any evidence that might have been missed 10 years earlier. And when they combed through the case files, they found something. Looking through the evidence, Agent Mark Whitaker's partner, Agent J.W. Barnes, stumbled upon a crucial piece of evidence, a 2007 forensic report.
About six months after Lori disappeared, several items collected from Lori's trailer were collected and sent to the lab for forensic testing. And in early 2007, the lab released its forensic report on the items they tested. According to the report, male DNA was found inside Lori's trailer home in two separate places.
The police found blood on the interior part of her front door and a semen stain was found on her bedsheet. When both the blood and the semen were tested for DNA, they came back as a match. The same person who left the blood on the interior part of Lori's front door was the same person who left the semen stain on her bedsheet. And the 2007 forensic port confirmed that person was Rick Ennis.
Although the police finally found something that linked Rick to Lori's trailer, that wasn't enough to make an arrest. They needed something that could directly tie him to her disappearance. So the cold case unit continued to dig through the case file, looking for anything else that might have been missed. Then they found the cigarette butt.
The cigarette Butt found near Lori's burnt car all those years earlier was logged into evidence in the case file, but was never tested. Once the cold case investigators discovered this, they immediately sent it for forensic testing. In 2018, test results revealed that the cigarette Butt matched Rick Ennis' DNA.
This was exactly what they needed to move forward because this was the one piece of evidence that directly tied Rick to the burn scene. So now they had his DNA and semen inside Lori's trailer and his DNA at the location of where her car was burned. After all of these years, the police and prosecutors finally had enough evidence to link him to Lori's disappearance and presumed murder.
Once they gathered everything they had, the Alabama State Bureau of Investigation turned it over to the prosecutor's office, which also reviewed it. And they determined that they did have enough evidence to secure a conviction, and they indicted Rick for Lori's murder in August of 2018, 12 years after she was last seen on that Walmart surveillance video.
Alabama state investigators located Rick where he lived in Pillett, Virginia, and on August 5, 2018, a task force of U.S. Marshals arrested him on first-degree murder charges. At the time of his arrest, he was living a normal life. He was working for a company making portable living structures and was engaged to be married. For Lori's mom, Arlene, his arrest was bittersweet.
Her family was relieved that the person responsible for Lori's murder was finally caught, but it also meant that they had to accept that Lori was never coming home. Immediately after Rick Ennis' arrest, additional tips kept pouring into the police. The first tip came from a man named Terry Booth.
Terry Booth was an old friend of Rick's, and when he heard about his arrest, he decided to call Agent Mark Whitaker's cold case task team. According to Terry Booth, he and Rick had a conversation years earlier while having drinks at a bar.
During their conversation, Rick told his friend that he had to get rid of someone. But he didn't say who or what he meant. He just said that he had done something to a woman in Auburn and that he had to, quote, get rid of her. At the time of the conversation years earlier, Terry thought that his friend was joking. But when he found out that Rick had been arrested for murdering Lori, he realized that his friend was serious.
Right before prosecutors were set to deliver their opening statements, the trial against Rick Ennis was halted due to the pandemic, and Lori's mom, Arlene, suffered more tragic losses. While her daughter's killer waited to stand trial, her son and Lori's brother died from cancer, and then her husband, Casey, passed away from complications from COVID-19.
But even after so much loss, Arlene was still determined to seek justice for Lori. Rick Ennis was just as determined, but instead, he was determined to prove his innocence.
When his trial finally began in March 2022, he pleaded not guilty and was ready to claim his innocence. And he wasn't the only one. His fiancée, Elena Atkinson, also believed he was innocent. She stood by his side throughout the entire trial. The prosecution's case against Rick relied heavily on forensic evidence.
The jury heard testimony that Rick's DNA was found in several key places inside Lori's apartment. The first was that his DNA was found in blood on the front door of Lori's trailer. Prosecutors argued that the only way Rick's blood could have gotten on the front door was if there had been a struggle inside the trailer. They also pointed to the black scuff marks on the walls that also suggested a struggle.
Second was his DNA found in a semen stain recovered from one of her bedsheets. Prosecutors believed that before Rick killed Lori, he sexually assaulted her. They also pointed to the love letter that Rick wrote Lori shortly before her disappearance. But according to Lori's friends, she didn't feel the same way about him. And for the prosecution, this showed motive.
Finally, there was the cigarette butt found only a few hundred yards away from Lori's burnt-out car. And when the cigarette was tested for DNA, it was Rick's DNA. But Rick's defense had its own explanations for the forensic evidence. Rick's defense attorney, William Whatley, said the cigarette butt didn't come from the burn scene.
William Whatley argued that the police could have taken the cigarette butt from inside Rick's home and planted it at the crime scene. According to his defense, there was no evidence that the cigarette butt was collected at the burn scene. Their defense also centered its case around the victim, Lori herself.
Rick's defense painted Lori as a known marijuana drug dealer, and they claimed Rick and Lori grew marijuana together inside of her small trailer home, and that her illegal drug dealing could have been what got her killed. Rick testified in his own defense, and when he took the stand, he insisted that he had nothing to do with Lori's disappearance or murder.
He admitted to the jury that yes, he did write the love letter shortly before he disappeared, but Lori only wanted to be friends. He also said that this didn't bother him. Instead, he said that despite Lori not having any romantic feelings for him, they shared a sexual relationship. According to him, that explains why the police found his DNA in a semen stain on Lori's bedsheets.
He admitted that the two of them were intimate, but said that he had nothing to do with her disappearance. As for the items the police found inside his car, the knife, fuzzy handcuffs, and cleaning supplies, he said that it had nothing to do with Lori either. He claimed he was moving and packing, and that's why he had all those cleaning supplies.
He also explained the scratches and marks the police found on his arms when they investigated him 12 years earlier. According to Rick, the scratches he had back in 2006 were caused by his dog. After the prosecution and defense rested, the case was turned over to the jury to decide. The 12-member jury and four alternates included 13 women and three men.
They listened to Lori's mom, friends, and coworkers testify. They also heard testimony from Rick's former roommates, coworkers, friends, law enforcement, and forensic experts. And after two full days of deliberation, they returned a verdict.
Rick Ennis was found guilty of the murder of Lori Selinsky, and on April 14, 2022, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Although Rick Ennis has been convicted of Lori's murder, what exactly happened to her remains a mystery. Even after all of these years, her body has never been found.
Police, prosecutors, and Lori's family can only speculate about what happened. Prosecutors believe that based on the love letter, Rick wanted to be more than just friends with Lori, but she didn't return the feelings, and this angered him. On June 10, 2016, Lori planned to go to her friend Lindsey's house to have drinks and watch a movie.
A surveillance camera inside the Walmart captured Lori shopping around 6.30 p.m. Prosecutors believe that either Rick was waiting for Lori outside the Walmart or she stopped by her house before heading to Lindsay's. Either way, Lori never made it to her friend's house, and that's when Rick attacked her. Based on the scuff marks on the wall and Rick's blood on the front door, they got into a fight.
Then he sexually assaulted her, leaving his DNA behind on her bedsheet. After he assaulted her, he killed her. Although the exact cause of death isn't known, some speculate he used the missing phone cord from the answering machine to strangle her. Once she was dead, he disposed of her body. And to this day, the location of her remains is a mystery.
After Lindsay was gone, he stayed at her trailer. While there, he got rid of the rugs that might have contained more blood evidence. He also stayed to feed and care for Lori's dog, Peanut. Four days after Lori disappeared, Rick abandoned her car in an empty lot near the bowling alley where he worked. He burned her car to destroy any evidence. But he made one crucial mistake.
He left a cigarette butt containing his DNA behind. That small piece of evidence linked him to the burn site. Immediately following his conviction, Rick Ennis filed an appeal. He and his fiancée maintain his innocence and claim that he had nothing to do with the murder. As of today, his appeal is pending.
Rick Ennis has now been convicted of three murders. The murders of his parents when he was a kid, and now the murder of his former friend Lori. If it wasn't for a small amount of DNA found inside Lori's trailer home and the cigarette butt near her burnt car, he might have gotten away with the perfect murder. To share your thoughts on the murder of Lori Slesinski, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook.
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