Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
I want to let you know about a podcast that I think you're going to love from my friend Josh Hallmark, who you might know from True Crime Bullshit. I was just in the Berkshires to celebrate the opening of Josh's brand new studio, Both And, and I got to hear the first episode of Unsafe Spaces before it premiered. This is a show you don't want to miss. Unsafe Spaces is a serialized podcast that explores crimes that corrupt and exploit the places that are meant to feel safe.
The first season, Tampa's Missing Men, focuses on a series of disappearances and murders within Tampa's gay community and possibly beyond in the two gay men who are committing some of Florida's most heinous crimes with shocking impunity.
Unsafe Spaces is just as obsessive and investigative as true crime bullshit, while also focusing on the factors that led to and enabled the crimes, and then helped capture the pair of killers involved. It's a holistic, heartfelt, and often very personal look at how these crimes happened. I'm going to play a clip from Unsafe Spaces that Josh shared with me, and I encourage you to go subscribe wherever you're listening. Let's violate the world. Let's bring our fantasies to realities.
I'm extreme, calculated, and loving. Easy to make them vanish with no link to us in the least. Easier to find a loner guy. Less connection. I'd do a choke hold from behind. You hold him down, strap him up, not to be found again. He wasn't going to be going back.
These are quotes from America Online instant messages between Master Scott, whom we now know is Scott Schweikert, and Dom Dude 4 Sub, who we now know is Steven Lorenzo. Whenever I take on a new case, the first question I find myself asking is, "How did we get here?" What series of events, both personal and anthropological,
created an environment for these crimes to have occurred? And in this case, the answer is a lot more complicated than in others I've covered. Because in order to understand these crimes, we have to understand not just gay culture, but society's effect on it. We have to understand power dynamics in couples. We have to take a look at law enforcement's and media's roles in crime.
It's often a challenging, convoluted, and heartbreaking study in humanity. And so, it's hard to know just where to start. Because more often than not, beginnings are just the reverberations from a coalescence of events that came before. Few things rarely begin anymore. Usually, they just carry over. But for now, I guess we'll start with December 22nd of 2003.
On December 22nd, 2003, there were two different missing persons cases filed with the Tampa, Florida Police Department. The first was of 26-year-old Jason Rodney Galehouse, a gay man who had recently moved to Tampa from Sarasota, Florida. Jason was reported missing by his roommate at 11:25 a.m. on the morning of the 22nd.
his roommate reported that on the night of Friday, December 19th, he, Jason, and two of their friends, a couple, had gone out bar hopping in Tampa. The four of them eventually ended up at 2606, a gay bar on North Armenia Avenue, in the early morning hours of December 20th. Because the four friends had driven to 2606 together, Jason didn't have his car with him, and when it was time to leave, Jason told his friends that he didn't need a ride,
because he was going to go home with two guys he'd met at the bar. It was the last time that Jason's friends saw him, and unfortunately, none of them saw either of the two men that Jason left the bar with. Detective Carlos Lastra was the responding officer in Jason's missing person case, and he took the disappearance seriously. Immediately following Jason's roommate's interview and affidavit, Lastra went to Jason's place of work.
a flower shop where Jason was a floral designer. And upon interviewing Jason's boss, he learned that Jason hadn't been to work in three days, which was very unlike him. In a follow-up interview with Jason's roommate, the one who had reported him missing, he told Lastra that he had known Jason for years, that they were childhood friends back in Sarasota. He let Lastra search the house that he shared with Jason and another roommate,
And when pressed about Jason's life, he admitted that Jason had been to the hospital on two different occasions for drug overdoses. But that had been years prior. He said that since then, Jason no longer used GHB. GHB is a depressant drug that slows down messages traveling between the brain and the body. It's also a party drug, and often referred to as the "date rape" drug. But he said that Jason did still occasionally snort cocaine.
and that Jason had been going to 2606 every weekend for the past several months. He said that Jason did have a habit of using recreational drugs and hooking up with guys from the bars, and he confirmed that after reaching out to friends, no one in their friend group had seen nor heard from Jason since he left the bar that night. The second missing persons report that was filed with Tampa PD on the 22nd was for 26-year-old Michael Wacholtz.
Michael had recently moved to Tampa from Tarpon Springs, Florida, about 40 miles away northwest. He was working as a waiter at Bahama Breeze. According to his former roommates, Michael was a happy-go-lucky guy who'd recently reconnected with his estranged mother and had begun dating again after a breakup the previous year. They said that Michael had started going out with men he'd met in internet chat rooms and that it was something they worried about. But it was Michael's new roommate,
Fred Van Dannebiel, who reported him missing when he failed to return home from a night out. According to reports, Michael was last seen in his red 1992 Jeep Cherokee, leaving his Bay Club apartment in Tampa's Rocky Point neighborhood between 11:00 PM and midnight on December 20th, almost 24 hours after Jason Galehouse was last seen leaving 2606. It was unclear where exactly Michael was headed that night,
He spoke with several friends on his cell phone after leaving his apartment, but only said that he was going out for drinks. Michael's cell phone and Jeep disappeared with him, and there'd be no signs of Michael, nor any major leads in his case, for two weeks following his disappearance. Now, there are a few different things at play in the production of this podcast. For one, I am a gay man, around the same age Michael and Jason would be now.
So it's hard not to experience this investigation or see the people involved through a personal lens. Second, and more critical, the only way to discuss this case holistically is to share as best I can the gay experience and gay culture writ large. It's a defining factor in both this story and in the spaces we'll be discussing. And, despite how media often portrays it, homosexuality is not a monolith.
So throughout the season, I'll be playing conversations I've had with gay men across the country and of all ages about their experiences and how those experiences have defined their relationship with homosexuality, their relationships with other gay men, and their identity as a whole. This is a part of a conversation I had with an old friend, Eric Schmidt, about drug and alcohol abuse amongst gay men.
Drug and alcohol abuse runs pretty rampant within the gay community, or at least it did when, you know, when we were... I think it still does. And, you know, for me, I can only imagine that that comes from... Or I will speak for myself, like, when I have over-imbibed or...
put myself in risky positions with substances it was because I didn't feel comfortable in my own skin or I had self-loathing or lack of confidence and was just afraid and needed something to take my head away from my body I guess yeah and I wonder if that has been your experience as well I
Absolutely. I would say absolutely. I think also, again, going back to that, we don't date as teenagers. We don't learn how to form intimate relationships with people as teenagers. And then drugs and alcohol sure do make that easier. I think a lot of my drug use was very wrapped up in the perceived intimacy of teenagers.
either getting high with somebody using with somebody the sex that we were going to have while we were while we were high um absolutely um went hand in hand with me being able to move into a sexual space that i you know didn't get in the shallow end of the pool on i'm sending my aunt tina money directly to her bank account in the philippines with western union
She's the self-proclaimed bingo queen of Manila. And I know better to interrupt her on bingo night, even to pick up cash. Sending money direct to her bank account is super fast, and Aunt Tina gets more time to be the bingo queen. Western Union, send money in-store directly to their bank accounts in the Philippines. Services offered by Western Union Financial Services, Inc., NMLS number 906983, or Western Union International Services, LLC, NMLS number 906985. Licensed as money transmitters by the New York State Department of Financial Services. See terms for details.