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Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Binged. I hope you guys are all doing good. I just want to say thank you so much for listening and supporting the show. It means so much to me. I know if you are from my other show, Murder With My Husband, you're
Venturing out and doing a solo show like BINGED was extremely scary for me. I just wanted it to be so good and so thank you for supporting and thank you for being here. You really have no idea how much it means. So last week I covered the case of Braylee Rae Henry in Oklahoma who made the quote
quote unquote mistake of entering a convenience store where a very troubled young man was working the counter. On impulse, he attacked her, killed her and drove her body away in her own car, dumping it on his family's property before fleeing the area and being arrested an hour later. Sadly, Braley isn't the only person who's ever made such a, again, quote, mistake.
The mistake of going about their lives and inadvertently crossing paths with someone who had the impulse and opportunity to kill them. And today's episode presents a story about yet another mistake that resulted in death, heartache, and destroyed lives. Let's get into it.
For young working class parents like Lisa and Jimmy Mandarick, life could be overwhelming. The exhausting balance between working full time and childcare can leave little time to come up for air. Both Lisa and Jimmy had to work not just regular jobs, but side hustles as well. During the week, Lisa worked as a forklift driver for a wholesale food company and Jimmy was a janitor for a manufacturing company.
And so they could better provide for their 18-month-old daughter, Devon, they also worked weekends cleaning offices. But in spite of this busy schedule and the additional round-the-clock job of being a new mom, Lisa still found time to volunteer for Meals on Wheels.
By all outward appearances, the Mandaricks were a happy, if overworked, young couple, and they lived in a comfortable home in the Heritage Ridge development in Limerick, Pennsylvania, which is a quiet, cozy township about 45 minutes outside of Philadelphia. Lisa and Jimmy had known each other since they were kids, and as their friends might tell you, Lisa had been in love with Jimmy since they were 10 years old. Although...
Things didn't work out quite as neatly as Lisa might have hoped they would. Despite being in love with Jimmy, when he was a young man, he got married to someone other than Lisa. Lisa believed this was a mistake and eventually Jimmy realized that indeed it was a mistake. He filed for divorce and shortly after, he married Lisa.
Their first child, their daughter Devon Marie, was born on February 4th, 1994, when Lisa and Jimmy were both in their late 20s. So they were young parents, but again, they appeared to be the very model of a happy family.
One Sunday afternoon in 1995 on September 10th, Lisa found herself with a few free hours. Well, free in that she didn't have to work, but she had errands to run and this was the only time she'd be able to clear them until next weekend.
So at around 3 o'clock that day, she told Jimmy she was heading to the Collegeville Shopping Plaza about 10 miles down the road just to buy some baby clothes for Devin, who was rapidly outgrowing her existing infant wardrobe, fast approaching toddlerhood. Jimmy gave her some money and a snack, a pretzel rod and a wafer cookie, and told her he would hang back and watch the Eagles game on TV while she got her shopping done.
Lisa gave him the baby's diaper bag because she told him she didn't expect to be gone long, not long enough to have to change the baby. I'll be right back, she said. And then she and baby Devin left. Three hours later, it was dinner time and Lisa and the baby still hadn't come home.
During this time, she never called Jimmy to say she would be running late, as she customarily would, so Jimmy grew concerned. He called Patty Jones, Lisa's friend, and learned that she hadn't heard from Lisa either. He then called other friends and family members, including his brother John and sister-in-law Cynthia.
After she talked to Jimmy, Cynthia decided to call the police, and so did Jimmy. Police met with Jimmy at his house and began a missing persons report for his wife and daughter. They checked the house for items like luggage and personal effects for any indication that Lisa may have run off with the kid, but her luggage, toiletries, and clothes were all there, seemingly undisturbed.
While this was happening, another police unit accompanied the Mandaricks' sister-in-law, Cynthia, the one who had also called the cops, to the Collegeville Plaza, where they found Lisa's 1988 Pontiac Firebird parked in the parking lot. But all the stores were closed by this point, except the Acme supermarket. So Cynthia went inside the supermarket and asked the customer service counter to page for Lisa.
It felt like a long shot, like when you can't find your car keys and end up looking in places like the refrigerator. But she didn't want to have to consider the alternate possibility that something terrible had happened to Lisa.
Because, as everyone in Lisa's life knew, she would never just run off with her baby. There was no other explanation for her sudden disappearance except for she had an accident of some kind somewhere, she was abducted, or she was met with foul play. And unfortunately, Lisa did not answer the supermarket page. She wasn't in the store.
It was now becoming apparent to everyone that something awful had to have happened. Lisa's car itself appeared undamaged. There was no evidence of any attempt to break into it, no indication of violence or any kind of struggle.
But then some horrible news rolled in. At around 6 p.m. that evening, two hikers walking on a trail in Valley Forge National Park stumbled upon the body of a baby girl about 12 feet down an embankment 50 yards from an access road. The baby was fully clothed and had visible bruises on her neck and head.
It looked as though someone had tossed her from a car on the access road from where it rolled down the embankment. Jimmy Mandarick was contacted and asked to come down to the hospital to identify the body, which this is just awful. He couldn't bring himself to go. He sent his brother John instead. And when John saw the baby's body, he positively identified it as missing baby Devon.
The fact that Jimmy couldn't or wouldn't show up to see his dead daughter's body felt shady to the investigators, who in fact were suspicious of the husband from the jump. But in recounting the afternoon to police, Jimmy had mentioned giving Lisa a pretzel and a cookie. And when they searched Lisa's car, they found the pretzel and the cookie in the back seat. So this worked in Jimmy's favor because here was something tangible that corroborated his story.
And when detectives talked to Jimmy and Lisa's neighbors, they confirmed that they had seen Jimmy's car in the couple's driveway all afternoon.
So, at least for now, this eased investigators' focus on the husband. Devin's body was taken to the medical examiner's office, where she was found to have a broken left clavicle and bruised scalp. It was determined that she had died from suffocation and strangulation, and a thorough forensic examination found absolutely no useful evidence in the way of fibers, hairs, or anything else.
The next morning, authorities began searching for Lisa in the 3,500 acres of the Valley Forge National Park, where her daughter was found. Helicopters scoped out the site from overhead while bloodhounds and cadaver dogs worked the ground below.
If indeed he had nothing to do with any of this, then this was undoubtedly the hardest day of Jimmy's life. Coming to terms with the finality of his baby daughter's death and still tormented by the uncertainty around his wife's fate. It was very likely she was dead, so an unbearable dread gnawed at Jimmy as the search continued into the afternoon without turning up any trace of Lisa.
Meanwhile, eight miles away, the Collegeville Shopping Plaza was abuzz with the news crews reporting on the missing mother and her dead baby. While detectives interviewed people who worked in the plaza, none of whom remembered seeing Lisa or her baby that day.
Based on what Jimmy had told them, detectives knew that Lisa had gone to the Collegeville Plaza to buy baby clothes for Devin. And there were two stores in the shopping plaza that sold baby clothes. One was Annie Says, which was a discount retail store similar to TJ Maxx or Marshalls. And the other was Your Kids and Mine, which was a mom and pop store that only sold children's clothing.
Now, your kids and mine was closed the day that detectives tried to go in. But Annie Says was open, so detectives went inside and talked to the manager and the staff. None of them remembered anyone resembling Lisa and her baby inside the store the previous afternoon.
But then police were contacted by a woman who had shopped at Your Kids and Mine the day before, the same day Lisa and her baby went missing, around 3:30 in the afternoon. And she distinctly remembered Lisa and her baby entering the store while she checked out with her purchase and left. The witness also told police that the male employee behind the register was intensely staring at her and the other female customers inside of the store.
It actually made her so uncomfortable that she couldn't wait to leave. And other female shoppers in the store, whom police would later talk to, gave similar accounts of a pudgy-faced male employee who stared at them while they shopped in the store, some of whom were so uneasy they just left without buying anything.
Your Kids and Mine was a new store in the plaza. It had opened less than a month ago, and it was owned by a woman named Ruth Fairley. When a detective contacted Ruth by telephone, she told them she wasn't in the store that afternoon. It was her 21-year-old son, Caleb, who had been working the register. And she was on the phone with him around 3.15 when he told his mother he had a customer and had to go.
The detective then asked to speak with Caleb Fairley, who got on the phone. When questioned by the detective, Caleb told them he didn't remember anyone fitting Lisa's description in the store with a baby that afternoon.
He told the detective that he had closed the store at around 5 p.m., drove home, and then by 7.30 p.m., he was on his way to a rock concert in Philadelphia. At this point, detectives began talking to other potential witnesses, and they learned from other employees inside the plaza that they had seen a man inside Your Kids and Mine vacuuming the floor after closing time.
And news crews who were at the plaza early the next morning had seen the same thing. A man vacuuming inside your kid's and mine. So there was a man vacuuming both the night Lisa and Devin were last seen as well as the following morning. At this point, police decided to serve a search warrant on your kid's and mine.
At first glance, there were no obvious signs of any kind of struggle inside of the store. They looked at the journal tape from the cash register, which showed the dates and times of recent transactions, and the last transaction from Sunday, September 10th was time stamped 3:39 PM.
and matched the items and account given to them by the witness who had seen Lisa and Devin as she was paying for her items. The store itself was exceptionally clean, unsurprisingly given how vigorously it had been twice vacuumed. So the next thing police searched was the dust bag of the vacuum cleaner. Inside, they found long brunette hairs superficially at least similar to Lisa Mandrick's hairs.
And later analysis would show that these hairs had been forcibly ripped out of someone's head by the roots. In the front of the store, police found pornographic videotapes behind the front counter. They also found stacks of pornography with what appeared to be blood and long black hairs similar to the ones found inside the vacuum cleaner.
and they found peepholes drilled into the walls of the dressing rooms. And when the store was scanned with an ultraviolet light, a large stain appeared on the carpet in the back of the store, behind some clothing racks. The carpet was cut away for analysis and sent to the lab.
Meanwhile, the detectives wanted to interview Caleb Fairley. He was starting to seem like a pretty good suspect. They asked him to come down to the station and Caleb agreed. When he showed up and sat down in the interview room, the investigators noticed something odd about this young man who was pretty much altogether odd. But what stood out to them was that Caleb was wearing a thick coat of makeup on his face.
Detective Richard Pafel left the room and came back with a wet paper towel. Do me a favor, he said to the young man. I'd like you to wipe that makeup off your face. Caleb nervously took the paper towel and began wiping. And slowly, as if by magic, a face full of fresh scratches revealed itself. For the investigators, this was a hair-raising sight.
They counted what appeared to be a dozen fresh fingernail scratches, the kind someone gets in a violent struggle. Where'd you get those scratches? Detective Pofal asked. Caleb explained he'd gone to a rock concert the night before at a club in downtown Philly called The Asylum. And while in the mosh pit, another attendee accidentally scratched his face up. Pofal asked Caleb if he had gone to the concert alone or with someone.
Caleb answered he'd gone to the concert with his friend, Christopher LaFleur. Obviously, Christopher was then contacted and he informed police that Caleb had told him a different story.
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Chris said that when he had asked Caleb about the scratches when meeting up before the concert, Caleb explained he had been taking out the garbage in the alley behind the shop when he stumbled upon a fight involving six people. Ever the hero, Caleb said he tried to break it up and got scratched up in the continuing scuffle. Chris also said that Fairley asked his friend to lie to his parents and tell them he'd received the scratches while dancing at the club.
And then later that night, when they returned to the house, the first words out of Caleb's father's mouth were that it looked like Caleb had raped a woman. Police then served a search warrant on Caleb's car and the Fairleigh home where Caleb lived with his parents, James and Ruth.
In his room, they found a trove of disturbing items revealing that Caleb lived in a fantasy world of roleplay and sexual violence. Under his bed, they found violent pornography depicting sadism and abuse. They found erotic toys, strange sexual devices, and vampire paraphernalia. Caleb was fixated on vampires, and the investigators would learn he liked to dress up as a vampire.
and they found a t-shirt depicting a pair of vampires flanking and sucking on the neck of a raven-haired woman who bore a striking resemblance to Lisa.
They also learned that Caleb was obsessed with Dungeons and Dragons, which in the 1980s and 90s had become the catcher of the rye of live-action role-playing games, and that it was associated with multiple killers whose connections to Dungeons and Dragons were played up in the media, leading to a widespread moral panic that I think we can now comfortably say was a bit unfounded.
And in the investigation into Caleb Fairley, his affinity for Dungeons and Dragons was the least compelling thing detectives came across. Inside Caleb's car, police found more long, dark hairs, much like the hair found inside the Your Kids and Mine in the vacuum cleaner and on the stacks of porn.
They ran Caleb's background and they found that the 21 year old who had been a choir boy in high school had no criminal record. However, there had been a complaint against him three years earlier for sexual harassment and assault. And though charges were never filed, the woman who filed the complaint alleged that Caleb had said lewd things to her and grabbed her butt. And that same year, 1992, a second woman had made a similar complaint.
But the police didn't seriously investigate either. Shortly after Your Kids and Mine was searched, lab results came back on the carpet samples cut from Your Kids and Mine. The large stain that was observed under UV light was a saliva stain, and the DNA matched that of baby Devin Mandarick.
They also found smaller stains which turned out to be semen, which DNA analysis revealed to be Caleb Fairley's semen. You'd think that this would be enough to arrest Caleb for first-degree murder,
But it wasn't. Because from a legal standpoint, it was insufficient evidence. And that's what authorities need to consider before filing charges. Is this an airtight case? Or can a defense team make a reasonable legal argument for their client's innocence?
Because all the baby's saliva proved was that Devin was in the store, maybe drooling. And the semen stains didn't prove murder or sexual assault, plus there was porn there. The most it proved was that Caleb Fairley was a pervert. Despite careful forensic processing, no DNA from Lisa Mandrick was recovered from inside of the store. And in 1995, DNA analysis wasn't advanced enough to test the hair found in the vacuum cleaner,
which at best was only microscopically similar to Lisa's.
But while this evidence wasn't enough to file formal charges, it was a powerful tool that investigators could now use to confront Caleb Fairley, who by this point had retained an attorney. But much to the surprise of investigating authorities, that attorney, Mark Steinberg, approached the first assistant district attorney, Bruce Castor, and made a proposal.
Caleb had acknowledged that he knew where Lisa Mandrick's body was and he could lead authorities to her if prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty. For Bruce Castor, it was a tough decision, but he recognized that the more time that passed before recovering Lisa's body, the less forensic evidence they'd be able to recover. And no one wanted to risk Caleb getting away with such a horrendous double murder.
So he accepted the deal. And Caleb's attorney presented a map which led authorities to an industrial area not far from your kids and mine, behind a gym where Fairleigh would go to work out. And hidden in some brush was the body of Lisa Mandrick, three weeks shy of her 30th birthday. Nude from the waist down with her black lace top pulled up around her neck,
Her body was posed in a sexually provocative position, her hands showed signs of trauma, her fingernails were broken, and some had even been ripped completely off, suggesting that she had put up one heck of a fight for her life. Which was consistent with the feisty, forward personality her loved ones had described.
Her ribs were broken and bruises were visible all over her body. At the medical examiner's office, it was ruled that Lisa had died from manual strangulation.
Fibers from Lisa's blouse were collected and analyzed and found to be consistent with the shirt Caleb had been wearing on the day of the murders. Skin cells were also collected from beneath Lisa's broken fingernails, and the DNA from those skin cells matched Caleb Fairley's DNA. It was also found that Lisa had been sexually assaulted after death. As a result of this discovery, Caleb Fairley was charged with two counts of first-degree murder, aggravated assault, and
and abuse of a corpse. Most of the people who knew Caleb fairly from school and various jobs saw him as a weird dude, but somehow hadn't pegged him as a killer.
And this also wouldn't be the first time tragedy had stricken the Fairley family. Six years earlier, when Caleb was 15, his four-year-old brother David's insatiable curiosity had led him to climb a desk in his parents' study where he found his father's semi-automatic pistol, began playing with the gun, and accidentally shot himself in the stomach.
The boy was airlifted to the hospital where surgery failed to save his life. The situation was investigated and ultimately no charges were brought against James Fairley, the father. Caleb had been especially close with his younger brother and he took the loss of his kid brother hard. His neighbors and friends believed he never really got over it.
At school, Caleb was bullied and he was ridiculed by girls. Not many people paid attention to him and if they did, they would pick on him. This is what one former classmate recalled. He was made fun of for his weight, his clothing, his lack of style, and his social awkwardness.
He was a loner and a weirdo, and when he was bullied or harassed, he would never fight back. He would instead just meekly ask to be left alone. And despite being in the gifted program, a lot of his peers and neighbors thought he seemed slow and lacking drive and talked in a goofy manner.
And a rumor began circulating around school, one that haunted the halls of Upper Dublin High School for months, that Caleb had been caught masturbating in the school bathroom. As he got older, his friends observed him habitually behaving toward women in a way they would later describe as "leering and vulgar." Caleb was only known to have ever dated one woman, who later told police that Caleb had an intense hatred for his mother.
His mother was a verbally abusive control freak who belittled Caleb, called him stupid, told him he had no common sense and couldn't do anything right. After high school, Caleb enrolled at Westchester University and majored in computer science, but he dropped out in the middle of his first semester. He then enrolled at Montgomery County Community College, but dropped out of there too.
He held a few menial jobs at restaurants, but he was routinely bullied and picked on by coworkers. It reached a point where he would only work for his parents, in his father's pharmacy and then at his mother's new clothing store. And by age 21, Caleb Fairley had retreated almost completely into fantasy. A rich, dark fantasy world into which he escaped the emptiness and frustration of his painful, meager existence.
And that fantasy world involved sadistic sex, vampires, rape and torture.
For him, Lisa Mandrick was the ideal woman. Like the woman on his t-shirt had stepped out of the screen print and into the real world. He admitted to police that after he realized Lisa and her baby were alone in the store with him, he waited till they were in the back of the store behind some tall clothing racks out of street view, and he quietly locked the front door, flipped the sign around to display that the store was closed,
and suddenly attacked Lisa, who put up more of a fight than he expected, scratching and clawing at his face all the while he strangled her slowly to death. Obviously, he then had to strangle the baby and then assaulted Lisa's body.
When he was finished, he carried both their bodies through the back door of the store and placed them in his car, then drove toward Valley Forge National Park, and while passing through it, he drove to his gym, where he "posed" and left Lisa in the brush behind the building. Then he returned to the store, cleaned and vacuumed, and accompanied his friend Christopher to the rock concert.
Caleb admitted to also returning to the store the next morning to vacuum again. But Caleb insisted that the murders were not premeditated, and so he pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and the case went to trial. His court-appointed defense attorney openly acknowledged that Caleb had committed the murders, but that he was only guilty of third-degree murder because he did not intend to kill the victims.
If you're going to commit some kind of premeditated murder, you don't do so during store hours in the back-to-school season at 4.15 in the afternoon. This is what his defense attorney argued to the jury. He claimed Caleb had become blinded by rage at Lisa fighting back and scratching his face, and this erupted into homicidal violence.
The prosecution countered this by pointing out how long it takes to manually strangle a human being to death. The prosecutor also pointed to how Caleb had locked the door, closed the store, and blitz-attacked Lisa, killing her and then her defenseless baby. The trial lasted for about a week. It took three hours for the jury to return a verdict of guilty on all four counts.
and Caleb Fairley was sentenced to life without parole. He is currently serving out his sentence at the State Correctional Institution in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. He has filed numerous appeals, all of which have been denied.
In 1996, a Limerick area mother of two named Ginger Child raised $500,000 and helped build what was named the Mandrick Memorial Playground, which was dedicated on September 12, 1998. Three years to the day Caleb Fairley was charged with Lisa and Devin's murders. Lisa and Devin Mandrick are buried together in a single casket in St. Patrick's Cemetery in her hometown of Norristown, Pennsylvania.
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Now, the band Caleb had gone to see on the night he killed Lisa was the Electric Hellfire Club. In a 2017 post on the band's Facebook page, the band's frontman, Thomas Thorne, wrote that he had recently been reminded of the Mandrick case and he remembered having actually interacted with Caleb Fairley after his show in Philadelphia that night.
He claimed that after the show, a big guy with a pudgy face, whom he later recognized as Caleb Fairley, had approached him, and he immediately noticed the guy's face had scratch marks all over it, which Thorne claimed were oozing with blood. Thorne asked him what had happened, and Caleb replied that someone had scratched him in the pit.
Thorne didn't recall much moshing that night, so the explanation he claimed rung false. Well, looks like you really pissed somebody off, he told the kid who stared blankly back at him.
Thorne found him creepy, and after the kid didn't reply, he shot back, Well, I hope you got her number, before walking away. But he claimed that his keyboardist, Shane Lassen, stuck around to talk to Caleb, who asked Shane if he could help him establish a more personal relationship with Satan. I've tried everything, Caleb said. The Necronomicon, the satanic rituals, nothing works.
at which point Shane also bailed on the interaction. I don't know. Do you believe this story or do you think it's a fabrication or at least embellished just for the sake of having a cool story to tell? Let me know what you think in the comments, but I just thought it was a weird tie to this case. Now, before I go, you'll notice at the top of the show how I kept repeating the word mistake, which I'm sure you recognize was a deliberate choice at the service of a point I was making.
When I was researching this case, I was struck by the language in one of the Philly Inquirer pieces written more recently about the case. It says, Lisa Mandrick was 29 when she made the grave mistake of taking her 19-month-old daughter, Devin, to browse at a children's clothing store in nearby Collegeville on a Sunday in 1995. The grave mistake.
Now, it certainly was a mistake, just like the mistake Braylee Henry made when she entered the wrong convenience store at the wrong time. Or like the Golden State Killers victims made the mistake of letting down their guards by falling asleep in their own beds. But it's the kind of mistake only supernatural foresight could have allowed these victims to avoid. An error of timing, maybe. An error of unforeseen circumstance.
Because going into a store to do some shopping is the kind of mistake every single one of us has made and will continue to make again and again. Every day, if these are really mistakes, we make mistakes in the way we go about living our lives. Never knowing if the movie theater or restaurant we've chosen by the evening will also be chosen that night by a mass shooter.
or if the next retail shop we enter will have a Caleb Fairley behind the counter. The only real mistakes in these equations are the people who are somehow programmed to prey on and kill other human beings. It's never the victim's fault. And that's it for this week. Join us next week as we hit refresh and introduce a whole new theme for our next two episodes. You're not going to want to miss them. I'll see you then.
