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Hey everyone and welcome back to the Into The Dark Podcast. I'm your host, Peyton Moreland. I'm so, so happy you are here. If you're watching on YouTube, please give this video a thumbs up right now. Please do it and leave a comment, turn on notifications so you can be notified every single time I drop an episode.
And if you are listening on audio on a podcast platform and can leave a five star review, that would be great. Honestly, if not, I'm just happy you are here. I'm happy you are listening. Thank you again for supporting the show. Jumping straight into my 10 seconds today. My knee is doing so much better. I can't remember if I talked about that.
on here but I was having pain in my knee I went and got an MRI I tore my meniscus you're probably like why are you happy about that I'm not happy about it but honestly it's been feeling better which probably isn't a good thing I still need to take it easy because they're suggesting surgery because it's a medium tear
Guys, I'm just going to try to rehab my way out of this one, okay? And I promise you, if in four weeks it's not feeling better, I will get surgery. Garrett kind of talked about this a little bit on his 10 seconds this week, but I want to talk about it here. Garrett and I have been watching a show on Amazon Prime called Landman. It's about...
oil, like families who work on the oil rigs, basically. I think all the characters are really likable. I feel like they've done a good job. So if you're needing a new show, Landman on Amazon Prime. And with that being said, let's just jump right into today's episode.
I think that on some level, everyone is afraid of monsters. And I'm not only talking about literal monsters, the creatures that lurk under your bed or prowl through horror movies. There are also metaphorical monsters who live among us too. People who do horrific, violent things without remorse or for no clear reason.
or those who let their greed, possessiveness, or sadism override their sense of right and wrong. You don't even have to listen to true crime stories for long to realize there are monsters among us, and they're not always easy to spot. And that is truly terrifying. So imagine the kind of place where you'd expect a monster to live, and I mean a literal one or a metaphorical one.
You might be picturing a remote wooded area. It's full of trees that cast strange shadows, swampy mud that sucks at your feet when you trudge through it, and definitely wild animals. There are a few places on earth that look exactly like that, including the South Canadian River.
Now, don't be misled by the name. It's called the South Canadian River, but it is not in Canada. OK, it weaves and winds through rural Oklahoma. OK, so we're in Oklahoma in the South Canadian River. This is a narrow waterway surrounded by leafy trees. Catfish swim through its shadowy depths. And the people who live near the South Canadian River, they're
Take full advantage of all that nature. A lot of locals love going noodling. That's the word for a particular style of fishing. People try to catch fish by putting their bare hands or feet into the water. Their fingers and toes look like bugs, so catfish bite their limbs and then the noodler can lift their catch right out of the river. They don't need poles or tackle boxes or any special equipment.
It's a really unique pastime and a way of life for the folks who live near the South Canadian River. And so now we're on July 9th, 2022. Pretty recently, okay? Acquaintances decided to go noodling. One of those men was named Jimmy Glenn Knighton and the other was Larry Sanders.
Now, Jimmy was 52 years old and he was a real outdoorsy type. OK, exactly the sort of person that you'd expect to be into fishing and noodling. He loved camping, hiking and finding opportunities to get away from it all. And when he wasn't in the great outdoors, he was running his own business. He also had children and grandchildren, including a son named Aaron.
In fact, Aaron was dating the daughter of his fishing companion, Larry. So Jimmy and Larry, the dads, had actually gone to high school together, but they'd lost touch somewhere along the way. When Aaron and Laramie began seeing each other, it actually brought Jimmy and Larry back into each other's lives. They reconnected. The two men still weren't like especially close friends,
But Jimmy was still a very generous person. And when he learned that Larry was out of work and needed a job, Jimmy offered him a position in his business. So he's helping his son's daughter's father out. Larry accepted the job and was all set to start that coming Monday on July 11th. Again, we're in 2022.
And at some point, Jimmy offered to let Laramie live with him and Aaron too. So he's gonna let his son's girlfriend move in. And I'm not exactly clear on the exact circumstances, how old Laramie was, or if it was unusual for her to not be living with her own parents. But the point is, I'm telling you that Jimmy cared about people, okay? He's taking care of Laramie, he's letting her move in, and he's also taking care of her father.
even though they really barely know each other. Now you'd think that Larry, Laramie's dad, would be very thankful and grateful for the way that his life was now turning around. But Larry had a tendency to be a bit erratic and unpredictable. He didn't always respond to situations the way you'd expect him to.
- This may have been because Larry had a long history of drug abuse. It actually began all the way back when he was in high school, when he was friends with Jimmy the first time around. His sophomore year, he tried weed for the first time and before long he was smoking it regularly. And then in 1990, when Larry was 18 years old, he graduated to using meth and he eventually became dependent on it too. As the years went on, he began using both meth and weed all the time.
It should be no surprise that he got arrested again and again for different substance-related charges. And at one point in 2019, he was thrown in jail for public intoxication. And while he was in jail, he tried to find a way to smuggle meth in. He got caught and the police pressed more charges for the attempted smuggling.
But that drives home just how severe Larry's dependency was. He couldn't even go one night without meth, even while he was behind bars and under police watch. So by 2022, Larry's about 50 years old. He still abused both of these substances at the time, which might explain why his daughter is moving in with her boyfriend later.
The heavy drug use definitely influenced his thinking and decision-making. He had bipolar disorder, which his doctors thought was a result of his substance use. All of this to say, Larry needed help and support. And to all appearances, Jimmy, his long-lost friend, now back in his life, was there to give it to him. He was being a real friend, giving him a job, helping him find other healthier ways to spend time, housing his daughter. From the sound of things, this was a very
This was one of the reasons he'd even planned this noodling trip, to keep Larry company, to keep him busy, to try to break this habit. Okay, so Jimmy and Larry met up on the afternoon of Saturday, July 9th to go noodling. They headed toward the South Canadian River pretty late in the day, but it wasn't too late yet. They still expected to get some quality time in with the fish. Except a few hours later, Larry came back to Jimmy's house alone.
And he was driving Jimmy's truck. And since Jimmy's son and ex-wife were both actually hanging around the house, they saw the truck pull up.
and Larry's in it and Jimmy's not but they know that they went noodling together and they find this entire situation odd so right away his son Aaron could tell that something wasn't right Larry was very hyper he was talking really fast he was acting nervous almost paranoid so Aaron asked Larry straight up where is my dad and Larry looked at him and said he's not coming back
Eventually, Larry confessed that the reason Jimmy wasn't coming back, that he'd shown up to the house alone in Jimmy's truck was because he had killed them. He said it just like that, like it wasn't a big deal. He just confessed it. Honestly, it kind of sounded like he was bragging. There was no indication that he felt sad or regretful. And obviously, once Larry gives this confession, it was like the floodgates opened.
He just repeated himself over and over announcing, yes, I killed Jimmy and I choked him to death. Aaron lost track of how many confessions Larry gave, but he knew he had said he killed him definitely more than five times. And interestingly, Aaron and his mother weren't the only people that Larry had confessed to at this point.
Sometime that same day, Larry had talked to his daughter, Lara, me too. And during their conversation, he kept telling her that he had murdered Jimmy. He repeated his claim that he had choked him to death, but also said something about firing a gun twice. And again, he doesn't seem all that remorseful in that conversation with his daughter either. He insisted that he had done it for his own safety.
So eventually Laramie goes to Aaron's mother. Again, they're all at the house around this time. Larry is still at the house in Jimmy's truck. And Laramie says, no, he told me too that he killed him. And they are like, hey, we have to call 911. So the police got to Jimmy's house while Larry was still there.
Before they got inside, they saw Jimmy's car parked out front. And when police get there, they notice that there is blood on the tailgate and on the driver's side door. But clearly there is no sign of Jimmy in or around the truck. And then the officers went inside just in time to hear Larry tell Aaron that he had murdered Jimmy once again. So he's telling Jimmy's son that he had murdered his dad. He just won't stop telling the story. He just kept saying it.
And on top of that, Larry was acting very twitchy, very high energy, pacing around like he couldn't sit still through the confession. So right away, the officers handcuffed him and bring him to the station for questioning. The good news was that the police already had an outstanding warrant against Larry for some other past drug related charges. So they had plenty of cause to hold him while they tried to get to the bottom of what had happened. I mean, this is a murder investigation and where's Jimmy?
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Larry is not in the right frame of mind and it's impossible to get a straight answer out of him. He was certainly talkative, but the words he was saying did not make sense. So they had to rely on traditional police work to figure out what happened. And they start their investigation by scouring the banks of the South Canadian River.
But after hours of trudging through mud and underbrush, the police found nothing. This point, the sun was setting. So they called off the search for the night. And the next day on a Sunday, everyone would begin looking again. Now on that Sunday, they do find Jimmy's body. Okay. He has been murdered.
But his remains weren't in or near the river. They were at the side of a road. Based on the state of his body, the investigators knew Jimmy hadn't died there by the street. He had been killed somewhere else, possibly near the river, and then dumped here. Which is a little odd, because why are you going to move the body and then immediately confess to doing it? He was still talking, admitting to what he'd done.
In fact, at this point, Larry even told the police exactly where to find Jimmy's body and drew a map for them. But by the time he explained it in a coherent way, Jimmy's remains had actually already been located. The map didn't change anything in the investigation. Either way, Jimmy received an autopsy and the coroner learned more about how he died. It was obvious he had been in a fight. There were scratches all over his arms and a very deep cut on his nose. However, his cause of death was suffocation.
which fit what Larry had been saying about choking him to death. So now not only did he know where Jimmy's body was and confessed to it, he also had confessed to the right cause of death. Now at this point, the police felt like some parts of the investigation were clear. They knew who had done it thanks to Larry's repeated confessions. And since they had him in custody, they didn't have to go through an extensive manhunt. However, when the detectives
tried to ask Larry about his motive, which is gonna matter when you go to court, the story he told was just wild. According to Larry, he was suspicious of his friend Jimmy from the very start of the noodling trip. There were signs according to him right at the beginning that Jimmy was planning to hurt or kill him. I'll be honest right now, these signs don't make a lot of sense, but they added up in Larry's mind.
It started right when they arrived at the river. It was a hot July day, but Jimmy didn't have any water with him, only beer. And according to Larry, that struck him as weird and he was worried about getting dehydrated. So he opened the cooler in the back of the truck and grabbed some bottles of water and sports drinks.
He didn't spend very long at the cooler, but somehow when he looked up again, Jimmy was really far away from him, like unnaturally far, almost like he'd run to the riverbanks to put as much distance between himself and Larry as possible. So once Larry got to the river, he saw more weird behavior, according to him, from Jimmy. See, this part of the river was surrounded by tall, rocky cliffs. And at the top of one of these cliffs, Larry's
Larry spotted either a horn or a pipe. It was truly bizarre. There was no reason whatsoever for this random musical instrument to be lying on top of a cliff above a river.
So then somehow Jimmy got to the top of that cliff. He was standing right next to the horn. And according to Larry, he either blew into it or yelled into it. The details changed each time Larry told the story, so it's hard to say. But right after Jimmy made the pipe noise, he just walked away, putting more distance between himself and Larry. So in Larry's mind, this could only mean one thing.
According to him, the Piper horn that Jimmy had picked up and blew was a device that summoned Bigfoot. That's what he tells police. He was summoning Bigfoot.
Larry actually believed that the woods along the Canadian River were full of Sasquatches. Multiple Bigfoots, okay? So not only does Larry believe in what would some call a tinfoil tale of Bigfoot or Sasquatch, he also believed that these creatures didn't only eat people. They lived in this forest, they ate people, and they demanded human sacrifices.
I told you guys it's a wild story, but it's only gonna get wilder. Larry also concluded right then and there that Jimmy was definitely working with these monsters. Larry believed that Jimmy had lured him into the woods using the excuse of a noodling trip to sacrifice him to a Sasquatch and that he had then summoned Bigfoot using that pipe. And now he was walking away because he wanted the beast to come to the banks of the river, see Larry alone and undefended and eat him.
Again, Larry concluded all of this based on the fact that Jimmy was a fast walker and that he'd made some kind of noise on a musical pipe.
Either way, he didn't want to be anywhere near that area when the Bigfoot showed up. So he waded across the river to the opposite shore. He figured he'd be safe on the other side. And to all appearances, this really did spoil Jimmy's alleged plan. He began begging Larry to get back in the water, basically to leave the safety of the far bank. He kept pointing at shadowy spots in the river and telling Larry that he saw fish in the darker areas.
They were too far away for Larry to catch anything from the shore, except apparently Jimmy told Larry he might be able to catch them if he swam out to them. So basically Jimmy's telling Larry, hey, there's fish in there right there, go get them. But Larry at this point does not believe a word Jimmy is saying. He figured that as soon as he got into the water, Jimmy would grab him, hold his head down, drown him. So he would stay put and Bigfoot could get him. Now, according to Larry, this is when he sees it.
As he's panicking about all this, he's paranoid. About 50 yards downstream, give or take, Larry says he sees Bigfoot. It was 12 feet tall, had black fur, and it was climbing into the river like it was planning to cross over and get Larry.
Or maybe it was waiting for Larry to fall into the water so the current would carry him right to him. Now, naturally, Larry's terrified and he still thought that Jimmy was to blame, that he'd drawn the Bigfoot to him by blowing into that horn. So he asked Jimmy what was going on and Jimmy has no idea what he's talking about. He's like, I don't see anything. Maybe Larry was imagining things, but Larry didn't think he was. He figured that Jimmy was lying to just mess with him.
Now to make matters worse, around this time, Larry realizes there isn't just one Bigfoot standing nearby. There were three, according to him, a black one, a brown one, and a red one.
And through all of this, Jimmy was still acting like he didn't see them. In fact, he had turned and walked away. He said something about wanting to talk to some other fishermen who were setting up further downstream. Like he didn't realize that Larry was in danger or he didn't care. Now again, Larry didn't believe that Jimmy was as innocent as he was acting. He thought Jimmy knew exactly what was going on and that he was leaving Larry alone so he'd be defenseless if the Sasquatches attacked.
So at this point, Larry decides he needs to do something about this. So he chases after Jimmy, yelling at him to get back there and protect him. When Jimmy didn't listen to his pleas, Larry picked up a stick or a bit of a log and hit Jimmy with it.
Now at this point, Jimmy begins fighting back and the battle that followed was long and brutal. Both men were fighting for their lives, but if there were any other fishermen around, nobody intervened. Maybe it was late enough in the day that the South Canadian River was abandoned by now. I'm not sure. I
I do know that for over an hour, the two of them brawled in the mud, kicking, hitting, and biting, doing anything they could to get the upper hand. Larry was convinced that if Jimmy won the fight, he'd kill him. And then he'd toss his body into the river and Bigfoot would feast on him. But for what it's worth,
I don't think that's true. It seems more like Larry was paranoid, hallucinating, either having a mental health crisis or a drug-induced crisis. And Jimmy had nothing to do with Bigfoot and these sightings and a sacrifice. In fact, I have to imagine that from Jimmy's perspective, Larry was acting weird and then attacked him out of nowhere. He probably had no idea what was going on, but he was just fighting to protect himself.
At one point, Jimmy reportedly reached for Larry's face like he was going to scratch him. So Larry wrapped his arms around Jimmy's neck and squeezed. Now, according to his confession, Larry didn't mean to kill Jimmy. He was just trying to get the situation under control and force his companion to acknowledge what was really going on. He had set him up. He saw that the three Sasquatches were still there watching this battle play out. So while they stared, or while he imagined they were staring, he kept squeezing and squeezing Jimmy's neck.
Eventually, Jimmy stopped fighting back and his body went slack, but Larry didn't let go. He didn't want to finish the fight until he knew Jimmy would never be able to hurt him again. So he held him until Jimmy's skin turned blue. Then and only then did Larry loosen his grip. Obviously by that time it was too late and Jimmy was dead. Are you guys missing out on a show that everyone is talking about? Okay, here's the thing. All the time I come across a show online that I want to watch, but then it's on a streaming service that I don't have. And
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And the investigators didn't believe a word of the account about killer Sasquatches and human sacrifices. The real question here is, did Larry believe what he was saying? Was he hallucinating or experiencing a break from reality when he killed Jimmy? Or was he now just telling a wild story to lay the ground for an insanity defense?
Obviously, a mental health professional met with Larry to get a sense of his emotional state. And the physician learned that Larry was a big believer in Bigfoot. He always had been. Even when he was sober, he was convinced that Sasquatches were real and that they lived in the woods around the South Canadian River. However, when Larry was high on drugs, he became terrified of these monsters. His beliefs became even more intense and frightening.
So it stood to reason that if he was high when he went into the woods that day, he might have had a hallucination about a Bigfoot attack. The story he told the police might have been a real accurate description of what was going on in Larry's head. But here's where things get interesting. According to Larry, he was not high when he killed Jimmy.
He told police, no, I used meth three or four days before the murder, but I didn't take anything that day. It's impossible to say whether that's true or not. Remember, they didn't drug test him. His behavior was certainly strange. Everyone who talked to him after the homicide said he was frantic, almost wild. He had high energy. Now, one officer later testified that they didn't think he was acting like he was under the influence. But another detective told the press that Larry came across like he was high on something, probably meth.
In fact, the early reporting described Larry as either drunk or high at the time of his arrest. I'm not sure why they didn't do a drug test, but by the time the psychiatrist met with Larry, it was too late to determine if he was on drugs, but they did make one other important ruling.
They determined that Larry did know the difference between right and wrong, which means in the eyes of the law, he is fit to stand trial. He could be held accountable for what he'd done. My personal question is, Larry might in that moment have known the difference between right and wrong, but did Larry know the difference between right and wrong on the day of the murder? It's just a thought. I'm not taking a side. Tell me what you think about that in the comments.
So Larry asked for a public defender and then waived his right to a jury trial, meaning he'd argue his case to a judge alone. Now, from the beginning, it was clear that he intended to plead not guilty. And in the meanwhile, Jimmy's family had to grapple with their grief.
It's always terrible to lose a loved one to violent crime. But to make matters worse, when Jimmy's murder made the news, because of the defense of it being there was a Bigfoot attack, he was sacrificing me, people started to treat it like a joke. I mean, it is wild. His murderer had killed him because he was afraid of a Bigfoot attack. As silly as it sounded to some people, there was still a very real,
Very human victim in this case. In an interview with the press, Jimmy's ex-wife said, he's still a person and he has a family and they have feelings. He's not just a news story and he's not a Facebook joke and he's not any of these things. He's so much deeper than that. Still, obviously, when the murder trial began in the spring of 2024, the testimony wasn't all focused on Jimmy and the tragic loss of his life.
Larry's mental health was a big theme. He couldn't plead insanity, but he did try to convince the judge that he'd killed Jimmy in self-defense.
According to his lawyers, this was not because Jimmy actually attacked him, but because Larry had believed he was in danger. And Larry continued to behave erratically all through his trial. From day one, he ignored his attorney's advice. Keep in mind that Larry couldn't afford a lawyer on his own, so it's not like this was someone he'd hired by himself. The state had appointed the lawyer, and Larry needed permission if he wanted to change his representation.
So as the trial started Larry complained to the judge that he felt like his lawyer was doing a bad job and not helping him and the judge asked Larry for specific examples and evidence of his lawyer's supposed incompetence. Of course Larry couldn't come up with anything so the judge ignored his complaints and the trial went on. Then his attorney told Larry that it would be a bad idea to testify. This is something you see a lot in trials we know this and when Larry's attorney advised him not to do it Larry
Larry turned around and fired him, except the firing didn't stick. Again, you need permission to change to a different public defender. And the judge overruled it because, again, there was no evidence that the attorney had done anything wrong. And he didn't want to delay the trial. And he'd have to if Larry needed the time to hire someone else and build a brand new case.
So Larry was stuck with this attorney, but he continued to ignore his recommendations and he took the stand as a witness. And during his testimony, he told the same wild story that he had originally shared with police about Jimmy summoning a Sasquatch by blowing into a horn. Larry talked about how frightened and confused he felt and he admitted he had thrown the first punch, but he only attacked Jimmy after the three Bigfoots appeared in response to Jimmy's noise. He added that he had no choice but to murder Jimmy.
In his mind, if he let Jimmy live, Jimmy would have betrayed him, killed him, and fed him to Bigfoot eventually. And according to Larry, at trial, he still believed all these things were true, so he thought he should be found not guilty. But through it all, it was still clear that Larry knew murder was wrong, and according to the prosecutors, he had committed a murder.
The self-defense argument didn't hold. After all, he could have stopped choking Jimmy once Jimmy passed out. At that point, he was safe and Jimmy couldn't hurt him anymore, even if Bigfoot was around and was real. He didn't have to keep his arms around his neck. He didn't need to wait for Jimmy's skin to start turning blue. By his own admission, he'd made sure Jimmy was dead before he released him, meaning the act was willful and intentional.
It was just like his lawyer had warned. When he testified in his own defense, he basically admitted that the homicide was purposeful. That Jimmy did not die on accident, but because Larry had held his arm against his neck until he knew he was dead.
So the judge found him guilty of first degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. This is a very harsh sentence, but it was exactly what the prosecutors had been asking for. It was clear that they wanted Jimmy to go away for a long time. In their closing argument, the assistant district attorney actually said there was a monster in the woods that day, but it wasn't Bigfoot.
So, was Larry a monster? He certainly did monstrous things. And in the eyes of the law, he knew they were wrong, so he was guilty. He's paying the price for his crimes. But again, I go back to, did Larry do it?
The difference between right and wrong on the day of the murder, we truly believe that he was going to die. Is this a mental health crisis or did Larry knowingly killed Jimmy and then try to cover it up? If Larry is to believe his motive, he was hallucinating. I mean, we know what happened wasn't real, but to him in his mind, it could have been real and mental health and true crime.
is really not a black and white thing. It is a gray area that changes case to case. There are people out there right now suffering from similar issues, people who hallucinate and self-medicate and cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy. Most people with mental health conditions aren't violent or dangerous.
I don't want to make it sound like we need to be afraid of people who could be suffering, but it's real that people are haunted by monstrous ideas and terrors. They don't lurk under our beds or in scary movies. They're not technically real, but they can still inflict true, genuine, irreversible pain. I wanted to talk about this case because it's something that we haven't really discussed until more recently when it comes to true crime, mental health and true crime.
I mean, you could plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but how do you determine if someone is insane or not if it's not on the actual day that they committed the crime? Well, I personally have had times where
My brain is telling me something that might not be true in real life. It's obviously never been to this extent. And as we do know, if you willingly do drugs, I know that addiction is formed, but at one point you did willingly choose to do drugs that then can cause hallucinations and mental health crises. But this is a tough conversation, you guys. It's a tough conversation. And I think it's one we should have.
So again, leave in the comments what you think about this case. But before we go, I don't want to forget Jimmy. Okay. I know that there is a lot of conversation around Larry, but Jimmy died here.
Either way, Jimmy died. He was murdered. And Jimmy's family has to live with that. And on top of that, Jimmy's death has been made a joke when, in my mind, murder and mental health or drug addiction is not something to joke about. So let's remember Jimmy and his family today. Jimmy for who he was, someone who was trying to help someone out. Thank you so much for going into the dark with me today, and I will see you next time. Goodbye.
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