#513 - Music Box Murder - Agawam, Massachusetts
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This week, in Agawam, Massachusetts, a creepy music box from 20 years earlier and a very strange letter of confession leads to the solving of the murder of a young woman who vanished into thin air. Welcome to Small Town Murder. ♪♪♪

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder. Yay! Oh, yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay indeed. My name is James Petragallo. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wissman. Thank you, folks, so much for joining us today on another wild edition of Small Town Murder. And we do. This is a wild, crazy...

Who would have ever thought this is the way you solve a crime and insane episode of small town murder as all of them seem to be. But again, yeah, it's wild again this week. I can't say, well, this one's not crazy because it is. Sorry. I'm trying. Yeah.

We really get an antique that is involved. That's fun. It's fun. Oh, this is really creepy and weird. So before we get to all that, head over to ShutUpAndGiveMeMurder.com. Get your tickets to live shows September 20th, Minneapolis, Minnesota. You are up next. The big, beautiful State Theater. And if you sell this out, it's going to be our biggest show.

show ever. So we're just really excited and we'd love to be able to tell everybody. Our biggest show ever was in Minneapolis because you guys have been so good to us over the years and thank you for doing that. The next night we're at the Paps but I think that's sold out now or there's like a couple singles maybe left or something like that. Get all your tickets because I'm telling you they're selling out. I can't wait to get back

on the road. I know. I can't either. I really can't. It's going to be a lot of fun. We have a few shows here in the fall and we're jacked for them. So shut up and give me murder.com. Get out there. Kansas City, we added more tickets there too. Austin, Boston, New York. They're going fast. Oklahoma City. Oklahoma City, I think, is about sold out too. So...

Never mind that one. I think that one's done too. Is it Oklahoma City that's on? I think so. Check it out though. Shut up and give me murder.com. They're on the website. We'll tell you all of that stuff here. Also, listen to our two other shows, Crime in Sports and Your Stupid Opinions. If you haven't been listening, holy hell has Your Stupid Opinions been crazy. And Crime in Sports. We just did some very fun old-timey.

crime-filled stuff on that, so check that out. And if you can't get enough of us, patreon.com slash crimeinsports is where you get all of the bonus material. We got a ton of it. If you're $5 a month or above a mere cup of coffee, you are going to get hundreds of episodes of back bonus stuff you've never heard. Sure. And new ones every other week. One crime in sports, one small-town murder, and you're going to get it all, baby. All of it.

All of it. And this week, what you're going to get for crime and sports, we're going to talk about this will be a fun one. The most inept teams of all time of all different sports. Biggest losers. Failure. It's just going to be a failure fest, which is so much fun. We can't wait for that. Lots of stuff to laugh at. Then for small town murder, we're going to go over some of this Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell mess.

And it's a whole boy is that deep too much to cover in one bonus episode. Obviously we could do like a 10 part series on those people, but we're going to go over some of the more some of the weirder stuff and some connections we may have had to it because her brother was a comic in Phoenix. And so are we. So,

At the same place. At the same places we've performed at and everything else. So we'll talk all about that. Patreon.com slash Crime in Sports. And you get a shout out at the end of the episode. Oh, you bet. Jimmy's going to mispronounce your name. We're going to thank you from the top of the rooftops or the end of the show, whichever comes first. And the bottom of our hearts.

And the bottom of our heart. That said, disclaimer time, this is a comedy show, everybody. It is. It's a comedy show. The stories are scarily and definitely real. That's the sad part. We wish we could make up stories like this and just have them be funny, but these are crazy stories. We are going to have jokes involved. Here's what happens, though. They don't involve the victims or the victims' families. Right.

Right. Yes, because we're assholes. Yeah, but? But we're not scumbags. So if that sounds good to you, you're going to hear a wild story with some funny stuff thrown in here. There's plenty to make fun of. There's nothing funny about actually killing somebody, but it's a lot of fun to make fun of a murderer. I got to say, it doesn't get any better than that. We have no other recourse.

So that sounds good to you. You're going to hear a fun story, a sick and fun story. If you think that true crime and comedy never, ever should go together, then I don't know. You might not like us, but you might. So stick around. Check it out. No bitching later. That said, I think it's time, everybody. All right. It's time to sit back. I don't care where you are. Let's all clear the lungs and let's all shout.

Shut up and give me murder. Let's do this, everybody. That feels good. Let's go on a trip, shall we? All right. All right. Let's do this. We're going to Agawam, Massachusetts. Well, where in the shit is that? Agawam is in kind of southern. It's right near the Connecticut border on the south in like western Massachusetts.

Oh, wow. So, yeah, not too far from there. Yeah, yeah. We're not usually over there. It's usually over by Boston somewhere or even in, like, northwestern Massachusetts a lot we've had. But not a lot in this area here. It's about 10 minutes to Springfield. So it's right outside Springfield. Oh, wow.

That's that. It's an hour 40 to Boston from here. So, I mean, if you're adventurous, still commutable. And then about an hour and a half to Ashburnham, which was our last Massachusetts episode, the old flame in the dominatrix.

Is that right? Yes, it was. It was our last one over there. I just found a place up there. I remember. I didn't realize. Yes. Maybe I don't want to live there. Must have been stuck in your head. See what happens. The old flame of the dominatrix. This is in Hampton County and area code 413. A little bit of history here, a little bit of the town stuff, and we'll get to this wild ass story. Yeah.

This is hilarious. The original purchase of this land, okay? This is what it was bought for from the tribe that originally had this land. Ten coats, like coats and jackets. This is what they purchased it for? This is the purchase price of this town site. Ten coats, ten hoes, and they mean the implement. The gardening tool. Yeah, they didn't just like, I'll give you ten of my hoes.

My best host. Ladies, out of the car. Let's go. No. You're going with the man. You're going with the chief here. That's it. No, that's not how it works. Ten hatchets, ten knives, and ten fathoms of wampum. What is that? How much is a fathom? Is it a thousand? I don't know. I was just going to say, it's a measure of C of like...

of sea distance, I believe. So I'm not exactly sure what a fathom of wampum is. Imagine if you found like something on like Facebook marketplace and you said, I'll give you a hundred fathoms of wampum for it. What the response would be to that. I have no idea what you're talking about. You could buy a town for that back then. Yeah. I bought all of this at Pawn Stars in Vegas. No fucking shit. So that's the,

That's a crazy deal. That's a great, it's a good deal. How many acres is it? How much land? Not sure, but it's a bunch. Cause there was some, it doesn't, it doesn't matter if it's just this town. Cause they were in the beginning. It was also West Springfield and Agawam were together and then they split apart in 1800. So we don't know what the original purchase was. A shitload of land. Okay.

It's a nice area, too. Not bad. Several swaths for a couple of fathoms. A couple of fathoms of wampum. I mean, what else do you want here? If you do decide to make an offer on that house, see how many fathoms of wampum they'll take.

Well, it already sold. Well, never mind. It was awesome. So they also had put a racetrack in there, a horse racing track, and Seabiscuit won the Springfield Handicap in record time in October 1935. Awesome. So that's pretty cool. The racetrack also operated for a while until betting was outlawed by a referendum in November 1938, and then they had to close that down too because nobody wants to just watch horses race. Yeah.

That's what's hilarious. Nobody's watching that for sport. It's just a famous person from here, Annie Sullivan, who was the Helen Keller's tutor, as you might.

Oh, okay. The lady that probably also didn't exist. Or the person that made up Helen Keller. Yeah, exactly. You were thinking of Virgil Earp's wife, I think. I was, yeah. I knew it. Because that's exactly where I went to, and I'm like, we're the same, so we're going to definitely think of that. Let's find out what people think of this place here. Because the town kind of plays a big role in this case here. So we'll find out what they think with some reviews of this town, because we've never been there and we don't know. I might have driven through here, but that's about it.

I may have gone for going through Connecticut before, but fuck. Who knows? Yeah, I think they go by so fast. That's the thing. It's just exits on the highway. Here's four stars. Such a homey town.

That's homey. They say growing up in a lot of a not a Holmesy town, a homey town. It's very Holmesy. Hey, Holmes. Such a homey town. They say growing up in a small town is what shapes you. And it's true. Well, wherever you grow up shapes you. And it's true. If you grow up in a city, it doesn't shape you at all. It does nothing. You're a gelatinous lump when you're 18. No shape. Okay.

You will find or you find and make your own fun, whether it's going on long drives or randomly to a Walmart or Target. In other words, there's nothing to fucking do here is what you're trying to say. It's a lot of wandering around. If making your own fun is randomly going to Walmart, that's not a lot going on.

It's pretty sad. Yeah, the people in this town, for the most part, are very nice, except when you bring up politics or some touchy subject to the Agawam forum on Facebook, and then stuff really goes down.

Yeah, the local Facebook. People keep to themselves until you involve everybody with fucking politics. Of course. On social media. Yeah. Where they're not even face to face with you. Yeah. Right. Every local, every small town's Facebook page is a shit show of people just arguing politics. It's all of those. It's basically the app next door, but like on Facebook because it's super, because you don't need next door. No. Because it's just your town.

Here is three stars, and this is a hilarious review of a town. I don't know if we have an animal control. That's a fascinating first line, by the way. I don't know if we have an animal control. I'm not sure. The only time I had an issue was when a possum showed up on my porch. What? Possum. What does that have to do with the fucking town, man? That's what I'm saying. The police came, put it in our backyard, and just shot it. Okay. Awesome. That's what they do.

I didn't know that was a... Police showed up and executed it in front of my family. You couldn't just push it into the woods? Like, there's a lot of woods. It lives around there, probably. I'm sure you all know what they eat. Just throw that over the fence, and it'll go get it. Well, who the hell would call anybody because a possum showed up on your porch? Just shoo it away. Get it out. Open the door. It'll go. Lock the door. It'll leave. Open the door. Put a couple pieces of bread on the steps. It'll be gone. Done. What's a possum eat?

Cats? I don't know. No, no, no. They eat anything. They eat whatever. Really? Vegetables and stuff? Yeah, we have possums outside of my place here. Yeah, and they eat mice and shit, too. They're handy to have around, actually. That's great, yeah. They eat a lot of predators. Snakes, I think they eat. Very poor handling. Shooting it in my backyard. Of the murder? Yeah. They didn't even clean up the crime scene. They put up a little square yellow tape. Good. Good.

Then they just left it in our yard and told us we had to dispose of it. They just like buck buck. And we're like, yeah, you get rid of that. We're heroes. It's like a mob hit. Two stars. Kids are exposed to drinking and alcohol. Not kids being exposed to drinking and alcohol. There too. If not in Massachusetts, Southwestern Massachusetts, where would you be safe? God forbid. Never watch a football game. They have ads for it constantly. Yeah.

Parents should be stepping in the way more to prevent it. That's exactly how it's written, the way more. And finally, one star, and this is a real, I love when they're really pointed at something. That's specific, yeah. The mayor has been in office too long and is a jerk. Damn, shouldn't be. Not only has he been there, I personally don't care for him. He's a real piece of shit. Many businesses have closed. There are too many houses and residents, but not enough jobs.

Okay, there you go. So that's all the mayors. Start one. Because the mayor of a small town controls all that stuff. He should get us all jobs. They definitely don't control the job distribution, I doubt. No. People in this town, 28,715. Oh, it's good sized. Good size, yeah. It's a good size, but it's also a very small town feel. Tight, yeah. These towns are kind of by themselves, so it feels small. Off in the woods.

Exactly. A few more females than males. Median age is 46 and a half, which is well older than the regular. It's about 38 normally in the country. It's about a little over 50% married, which is above the national average. It's not a town where you're like, I'm swinging, I'm single, and I'm going to go walk around Walmart randomly for something to do. Can't wait to find everybody and hook up. Average age is 46. Yeah, baby. This is going to be hot.

Hot swinging times in Agawam. High apple cider vinegar gummy sales. Oh, huge. Huge. Off the fucking charts. Nobody knows. The unemployment rate in this town is high, actually. Well higher than the national average.

Nationally, it's like below 4%, but here it is 8.5%. Oh, my God. So not enough jobs. That person was not lying. But the median household income here is higher than the national average, $78,619. Wow.

It's normally about $69,000. So that's good. The cost of living, $100,000 is regular or average. Here it's $96,000. So a little bit low. And the housing is pretty close to the national average. Median home cost here, $309,500. Okay.

And they're awesome houses, aren't they? Some of them are. Well, let's find out. What do you say? Oh, let's do it. Since you looked in Ashburnham, maybe you want to go to Agawam. I can't tell you how great a New England house is. So for you, Jimmy, and for all of you out there, we have for you the Agawam, Massachusetts Real Estate Report. ♪ music playing ♪

Your average two-bedroom rental here goes for about $1,300 a month, which is a little above the national average, but not terrible. Here's a two-bedroom, one-bath, 768-square-foot house. It is a... Trailer or house? No, it's a house. It's a house. Back then, they had these little houses. Yeah, it's like a cottage almost. Like, that's close to tiny house specs, 768. That's, you know, like that could... You could get on HGTV with some shit like that.

Apartments that are that small are like laughable. They're small. It's a small house. It's pretty outdated. It looks like a Midwestern basement all through it. Wood paneling fucking everywhere. It's clearly like, you know, grandma lived alone after grandpa died in this tiny house. Minimalist home. It's still nice and clean and grandma kept it up. You know what I'm saying? You're going to have to do some remodeling. It's not modernized. But $224,900 for that.

A little high. Is there 11 acres with that? Nope, that is less than half an acre. That's a lot of money. It's a little bit high here for sure. But then the bigger houses aren't that expensive. Here's a four-bedroom, two-bath, 2,268-square-foot house.

Wow, it's three of that house. Yeah, it's built in 1880, this house. Okay, so it's probably been added on to. And it has. It's been completely remodeled recently, you can tell, obviously. And they added on to it. It's a two-family house. Like, it's an upstairs-downstairs house. Oh, got it. It's a two-family house now, and it looks like they added a third unit, too, out back. I don't know if that's for storage or what it is, but $443,500 for it.

Okay, so there's three of that other house and it's only double the price. I mean, it's not terrible, so when you get into that mid-range. Then this, this isn't bad either, except I don't like the house because in the Northeast, I like an old-timey looking house. You know what I mean? I don't want a brand new-ish, sleek, modern house. That kid-cut house is fucking dope. This house is seven bedrooms, five baths, 6,025 square feet. A monster. That's gross.

It's on an acre of land and it's a total McMansion. Like there's no trees around it. Uh,

There's no fucking charm? No. Oh, God, no. The charm has been flushed away and replaced with quartz countertops in place of charm. It's got some ugly, smeary shit in the entryway, too. It looks like shit smeared on the walls. That's an art thing. I don't really like it. It's very, very... You wouldn't like this house. Neither of us would. $999,999 for that bad boy.

bad boy. One acre. That's one acre. Yeah. The house takes up a good chunk of it. So yeah, it's right in the fucking middle of all that. It's right in the middle. Yeah. You just have some lawn around you. Things to do in this town. Okay. Things to do. Not a lot going on as we found out driving around going to Walmart. So they do have Target. They do have the Big E Arena.

What is that? Here we go. It's I don't know. The Big E. And that's around the Big E Arena. I guess this is some kind of festival. They say music fans will enjoy top name concerts at the Big E Arena. Terrific. That's good. Top names. Top names. Also, shop till you drop here.

Yeah. Only at the big E can you go home with a set of steak knives, a hot tub, a sweater made from alpaca fiber, and maybe even a tractor. Yeah. What? Sounds like an Old West general store. Like, what the fuck is that? Four things you cannot find in the same building, usually. That's true. Usually not. No, you can't get those all together. Unless you go to Cabela's or something.

Yeah, and even they might not have the hot tub. They might not. I don't think they're going to have the hot tub. It may be inflatable. Yeah, that's it. With everything you could ever want all in one place, it's better than any mall in the world. Oh, great. I don't believe that. You know, it's like the internet, but live.

Feels like they haven't been to Minnesota yet. Yeah, no, I don't think so. There's a pretty good mall there, guys. Also, get your ag on. Oh, agriculture. Agriculture is one of the Eastern States Exposition's oldest traditions, and Farmerama is the heart of agriculture during the Big E.

Okay. Visit the chick hatchery, pet a goat, learn about the secret life of bees, and all things farming in the Stroh building. They got a secret life? A secret life. I think we covered that in the cartoon movie, right? I think we got that. Yeah, Jerry Seinfeld told us all about it. I think he really brought strokes over that whole thing, I think. He even brought Schwimmer with him, and somehow Schwimmer's drip character came through his voice. Yeah.

It always does. You can see his face. Yeah, you can see his boring, no smile face. I don't know. Yeah. Oh, my God. So there's an auction. There's all sorts of shit. Painting workshops, rock painting. Oh, boy. Painting a rock. Yeah, you actually are painting a rock. They also have a Pioneer Valley art walkthrough history.

currently displayed at the Agawam Library, take a walk through history by viewing our artist's rendition of historical places. At the close of the show, the art walk will be displayed at the Pioneer Valley Festival. I am bored already thinking about that. I can't think of any pioneers that were in Massachusetts. Let's find out some bands that are playing, shall we? Yeah. Top names? Well, we'll get to those in a minute. But this is on the emerging stage, the E stage, the emerging stage. We get Wynn and the White Light.

which is like three 22-year-old chicks. I don't know. They don't have instruments, so I don't know what they play. They're just sitting on a couch in their picture. They'd just be all a cappella. Reservations at 8, which looks like... The only way to put it is three complete douchebags. Let me show you what we have here. Elderly...

What the... That's reservations at eight, huh? Yeah, there's just three douchebags there. That's what that looks like. Young men. The Corner Boys, which is three white guys, one of which has... Yes. Yes.

One of which has a banjo, and the man next to him is holding an accordion with a straight face. That's not what corner boys are. That's different. Hello Sister is playing there, which is three chicks that all look like their sisters. They're all thin and have long brown hair. Charlie Marie is playing, who is a woman, by the way, with what looks like a sort of a cowboy hat on.

And a folk music. And a kerchief around her neck, so kind of folky. But if you want folk, I think you're going to want Sarah the Fiddler. I wonder what she does. Not sure. What's she fiddling with? What's she fiddling? What's she fiddling around with? She just stands up there, like, adjusting her jeans around her crotch. I think so. I'm just fiddling. Can't stop fiddling. I don't know why. Oh, that's great, Sarah. Keep going. Keep going, Sarah. Leon Trout will be there. All right.

It looks like a band. That's it, huh? Leon Trout. That's it. What else we got? Derek Okanos. Cat Wolf. I'm waiting. Got anybody recognizable? E.T. County? What is it? The E Stage. Maddie Ryan. The 413s. Drop Party.

John Spignese band. They don't even have pictures of themselves. And then J-E-A-U-X. Jew? Joe? I think that's Jew. J-E-A-U-X? I think that's Jew. Isn't that Joe? It might be Joe, possibly. How many people go, and now we're coming to the stage? Jew! Jew!

He means Joe when they get out there. Yeah. I mean, we thought that it was pretty obvious, but I guess, yeah, looking at it in the retrospect, it's probably, he pronounced it right. Probably. We might be dumb. And then in the main building, you're going to get ludicrous. Of course he's everywhere. I had to put him on cause he's every, this show, he gets at to every one of these things. Ludicrous, uh, Dustin Lynch, uh,

Yeah, he's great. Brothers Osborne. Yeah, they're great. This is awesome. They look identical except one has a beard. Here's the thing, James. Every one of these guys, apart from Ludacris, it's obviously country. Well, yeah. Country shit, yeah. Big time rush. Yeah. Oh, what? That's a Nickelodeon thing. That's what they look. And also Public Enemy will be there. What?

Well, that is a wild lineup. That's a wild lineup. Different days, but still. You're going to have Brothers Osborne, Public Enemy, Big Time Rush. That's one weekend. Yeah. Wow. It's everybody you're getting there.

Crime rate of this town, what we are interested in here, we have property crime is about one-third below the national average. So pretty safe. And then violent crime, murder, rape, robbery, and, of course, assault. The Mount Rushmore of crime is about half the national average. That's great. Yeah, it's a safe place, nice little town. That said, let's get into this here. Let's talk about some people first. Let's talk about Lisa Zygert.

She is born March 24th, 1968. And Lisa was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, but spent most of her life in the Agawam area. She went to school there and graduated from high school there in 1986. And while she was in high school, she played saxophone and flute.

in the Agawam concert band, which would be difficult to play at the same time. Seems like you can't do both. Yeah. Both those instruments are taking up a good amount of wind from you. So you're going to have to do those separate. That's yeah. She, well, maybe she was very talented. We have no idea. No, but seriously, that's, that's, I don't know how to play either instrument. So for someone to be able to do both of those, I'm real impressed. If, yeah, it feels though like they're, they probably are similar. Uh,

Probably they have you blow wind and have different. You blow in it and finger it. That's it. That's it. Well, she's good at those things. And she also that was in the Agawam concert band. She also performed as a drum majorette for the school's marching band for two years. So that's another instrument she plays. Drums, flute, saxophone. Unbelievable. She should just make an album of all of her own stuff here. Good. One gal band. Yeah. She's also a member of the school's literary magazine and worked on the student newspaper. Wow.

Journalists too. I'm exhausted. I'm exhausted. Brilliant. As a teenager, I did nothing extracurricular. This sounds crazy. That's the other part. It's like she has so much happening inside her body turning her into a person. And yet she still has the ability to harness talent to do this. Yeah, and like artistic endeavors and shit. That's incredible. And she wasn't like slacking on everything else. She's also a member of the National Honor Society.

Hell yeah. And the American Field Services Program, which I don't know what that is. I feel like I should know what that is, but I don't. Sounds nice. So she is a busy, busy young lady. No kidding. And likes to keep churning here. She graduates in 1986 from high school. She went to Westfield State College, where she received a degree in elementary education. She wants to be a teacher. And she wants to specifically teach special needs kids.

Is that right? She's a fucking angel is what she is. You're talking about a hero here. Yeah. If you have, if you ever had a kid who was in, has any special needs and has gone to school for that, some of these teachers that do this are fucking incredible people. They really are. It's really amazing what they do. They can get your kid really out of a shell and it's something, man. So anyway, her mother, Dee-

would quote her quote is that she leases a good person with a beautiful smile who warmed a room when she walked in. Oh, boy. Oh, that's not good. Don't do that. That's not good. Yeah. You say that about somebody. You might as well put a target on their back. You better just turn the thermostat down everywhere you go. Teach your kid to be a little bit of an asshole. You know what I mean? You don't want anybody to say that.

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So in 1990, she started working as a teaching assistant in the Agawam Middle School where she worked with special needs students. So she does that during the day. And she's a certified teacher. That's the thing, too. She doesn't need to be an assistant. But at the time, in the early 90s, he...

here. This is, you know, 89. She graduates from there. There was a pretty damn good, solid recession at this time in the country. And nobody was hiring new teachers. They were all, everybody was pulling, cutting back on this type of thing. So she couldn't find a full-time job anywhere.

So she kept trying, but she was just working as a teacher's assistant all day and but still, you know, making an impact and everything. A friend of hers said we would go out, you know, to clubs and we would listen to music and dance and she had her favorites. But if we were in the car or even just driving and a song came on that she loved, she would pull over to the side of the road into a parking lot and just turn up the radio and get out and dance forever.

All right. Wow. She just lives in the moment. That's so cool. I've never thought to do that. Really?

This is great. Pull over. Fucking. I used to embarrass my kids and do dance breaks like in traffic. Yeah. Yeah. Just turn red. Yeah. No, no. I'd get out of the door and just make them very embarrassed. Yeah. Yeah. We've all done that shit to embarrass our children, obviously. Yeah. But that's as far as I'm not doing it. Taking it dead ass. You're not doing it like if me and you were driving, you wouldn't be like, oh, shit, James, this is my jam. And like pull over to the side of the road and get out just to dance. Yeah.

I need a gas station fast. Are you on E? No, no, dude. This is the best song. This is my shit. That's what I'm saying right now. Watch me shake my ass. She'll be twerking on the window. So...

There's a certain in the moment and certain just a love of life that you can tell just from that quote. This person must really enjoy life to be like... Having a good time. No matter what. I'm going to dance. She doesn't have a full-time job, and I'm going to dance about it. She has two jobs, too. She works at night. She's also a Sunday school teacher as well. God, Jesus. This girl is busy. This young lady...

She doesn't stop. She does not stop, which is a good sign that she'll probably get somewhere in life, which is just going to keep plugging away. So at this point now, by 1992, she's 24 years old, and she's very close with her family. She has a boyfriend, a long-term steady boyfriend named Blair. So, you know, she's got that going on. She's got a large group of friends that she hangs out with. Yeah, yeah.

And she works in the middle school, and she also works part-time at night in the evenings after school at Brittany's Card and Gift Shop, which is just a little tiny little box of a store. A little Hallmark store. Yeah, a little standalone Hallmark. Why can't I say Hallmark? Hallmark. A Hallmark store. I tried to get an accent, and it's a Hallmark store there.

She worked there in this place. It is like a Hallmark store and they have balloons. Balloons are a big part of their business. Snow globes and, yeah, balloons, cards. Reading cards, yeah. Little Hummel figurines and trinkets. The bullshit trinkets they give people and they throw away. Exactly. Or they put it on their shelf for a minute and then they throw it away. Why did they get this? Yeah.

Her brother, David, describes her thusly. She was kind of a big kid. She was very she was ready to enjoy life and see the silliness and things. It sounds like it. She'll pull over to the side of the road. The deacon of her church, where she taught catechism to second graders on Sunday, said she lived for children. That was her passion.

She loved, she liked teaching the kids in both environments. I mean, she couldn't get enough of the kids during the week. All week, this lady is overwhelmed with kids all day long. And she's like, give me more on Sunday. That's impressive to me, like, that you can tolerate that. Somebody needs to because I can't. Truly, yeah. Now, the weird thing is, at the end of March and into April, Lisa told a friend of hers that she felt like she was being watched at one point.

She said several times in the last... Yeah, well, yeah, there's always somebody. It's a holy ghost or somebody looking over my shoulder. She's always being watched, and she said she doesn't know if...

Number one. It's more than Catholic guilt. No, no, no. She feels like she's being watched when she goes places. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's way more than Catholic guilt. She feels like there's a person. Yeah, not like when she's fucking, she feels like somebody's watching. Just when she's at the gas station, she feels like somebody's watching her pump her gas, that kind of thing. I don't think Catholicism goes quite that deeply into the guilt of...

I just put like more in it. I shouldn't have done that. Premarital sex with her boyfriend. It says premium only. I said I'm going to get away with it this time. I only need half a tank. It'll mix with the premium. He's judging me right now. God damn it. Oh, shit. Now that's it. Now I'm in for double. Now I'm in for double. Fuck.

So, yeah, she said that she didn't know if it was even true or if she was just a figment of her imagination. Maybe something tripped her out. But she's got an eerie feeling. She's got an eerie feeling, but she's also self-aware enough to go, I might have just scared myself. You know, like you hear a noise and look into a dark room and you scare the shit out of yourself type of deal. She said, I don't know who it is, if it is anybody or if it's true or what.

But she just said something was very, very weird here. And she could be feeling like she's being watched, especially at work, because the storefront has big, large plate glass windows in front. So you can kind of see in the store. So people could that could make you feel like you're on display.

You know, a little fishbowl, a little fishbowl. I would say so. She did all of that. She, you know, is maybe at work. She felt a little creepy. April 16th, April, the night of April 15th. She works during the day and then she works at night at Brittany's at the gift shop as well. And then April 16th, her mom, Dee, says April 16th, the school calls and Lisa hasn't come in.

She didn't show up for work. Didn't show up on the 16th, and she never does that. She's pretty dependable. They gave her an extra 20 minutes in case a good song came on. Maybe she was...

Hitting a jam. Yeah, you never know. Like it was a block, like a three song, no commercials and three jams in a row. And they're like, she could be a little late, but never Casey Kasem just hit her with that one with a bullet. Oh man, I got to dance to this. So the, there was a call from Lynn, her sister. This is the mother saying the call from Lynn, her sister, Lisa is missing.

Apparently, a store employee named Sophia had called to report Lisa's car, her coat and pocketbook and artwork were all in the store, but she wasn't.

Her pocketbook's there. Her pocketbook's there. Everything's there. So the mom said Lynn and I went to the store hoping it was a mistake. Maybe she ran out for a minute or something, which I guess go check it out. So they're thinking about what happened on April 15th, the day before, besides tax day. Apparently she taught all day, like we said. She got in her car, drove over to Brittany's here, and this is at 353 Walnut Street.

So that's where we're talking about. It's she about 4 p.m. on a Wednesday. She gets there. And this is Easter's on Sunday, by the way. So it's Easter week here. So and Lisa, by the way, she's really pretty also, which is a yeah. Yeah. She's a pretty young lady. Very happy. Yeah. She's described here as it was mass live dot com and a very good article on this whole thing. And there she's described as a 24 year old with dark curly hair, freckles and blue eyes.

The life lottery? This gal nailed it. Pretty chick. Not bad. So she was scheduled to work until 9 o'clock, which is closing time for this joint here. They don't stay open late generally at Balloon Store. Nobody's coming in. You got any get well? It's midnight. I really need a happy fifth birthday now. I need it now. I'm a real shit dad. I'm terrible. I missed it. He's going to wake up to nothing. Yeah.

So apparently she spent a lot of her shift putting helium into balloons and stuff because there's a lot of people doing Easter stuff for some reason here, like balloons and shit. Yeah, pastel balloons go crazy. They do. Yeah. So at about 5.30, her sister Lynn came into the store to visit her, which is nice. And they get to hang out and talk for a few. And they talk a little bit. She talks about – Lisa talks about trying to get a job at –

You know, a full time job teaching and she's talking about her job at the school and they're just bullshit and chit chat and do all of that. You know, everything about a half hour they bullshit for. And then Lynn leaves the store and drives home. There's that. Now, a friend visited her also that night.

What a great life she has. Yeah, people stop him. But it's a small town. People just stop him by. Hey, I'll go in and pop in to say hi here. And she said that she had been disturbed by a tall, thin man with dark hair who was hovering.

in the store hovering and that she said that that lisa had said that she wished that he would go away because he was annoying basically yeah but um lisa had recognized the man and said oh he's been here before because the guy because the friend was like this fucking guy go away who is this fucking asshole and lisa's like no he's been here before he's looking for a present you know he said what he was looking for whatever so the friend was like yeah whatever and she leaves

Leaving this guy there. So the next morning, Sophia Maynard shows up. She opens the shop in the mornings. And when she drove up, she spotted Lisa's white Chevy Geo Storm, which is the most 1992 car you can drive. Sure enough, yeah. Holy shit. You forget that Geo was a Chevy at one point. Forget it was a car at one point. Never mind a Chevrolet product. Yeah.

Chevy Geostorm. They put their fucking Chevy logo on that car. Oh, those were... That was a suicide. The Storm. What a big mistake. And the Storm was the one that they thought was like a little sports car, too. Yeah. That was their little sporty one, the Geostorm. Yeah.

Because the Metro was like the little bubble car. Yeah, that was a little... Like a little Tykes. It went from a... Like a little Tykes car. But it was boxy, the first model, and it had a three-cylinder. Oh, that's right. Then they put the four-cylinder in it and it went to like... The rounded. It was the same thing as a Suzuki Swift. Yeah, that rounded. Like an egg. Like a bubble car. An egg with a pointed front end. An Easter egg car. Yeah. It looked like a hat, basically. Yeah, it looked like a baseball hat. A little front end with a big bubble. Yeah, the hat car. Yeah.

But she had the storm, which is the cool one, you know, for a geo. Yeah. So she sees that her geo storm is still there, which she doesn't work days, so that's weird. And then saw the store's open sign was still open on the outside of the door. She's like, that's strange. The front door is unlocked and all the lights are on.

We are open. We're open, which normally she's the opener. So she comes in. Everything's locked and closed. Shut off and all that. So she's like, what the hell's going on? The radio was on also in there. Radio's on. She calls out. She doesn't know. So she's like, I mean, the last person here had to be Lisa. So she calls out her name a few times but doesn't get any answer. So she walked up to the cash register and sees that there are her car keys and her purse.

OK, sitting right there. So she walked into the storeroom and noticed that the back door was open and several boxes were knocked over and like stuff was askew. Basically inside or outside inside the back doors open in the storeroom. There's boxes like knocked over and shit's weird. So she was like, what the hell's going on here? So she immediately thought there was a problem here. Ran out of the store, went across the street to Alvin's sandwich shop and screamed. Something's wrong. Call the police.

So this is a quote from her. She said, I saw her car and then I remembered that Easter weekend was coming up. We had planned to stuff some balloons and maybe that's what she was doing there. Maybe.

Maybe that guy came in early just to get up. Let's get a big balloon, fucking a big ballooning in at once and then we can relax. So I didn't really think much of much anything until I walked inside the store. You know, I called her name a couple of times and I figured she'd just pop her head out. She didn't. I came behind the counter. All of her things were there. Her drawings, her pocketbook, her car keys. And then I just kind of freaked out. I knew that something was wrong. So I ran out across the street to a restaurant and I asked them to call the police.

So, yeah, just something's not right here. Box is knocked over. And she doesn't. And if you're a young woman going into a store, you're not like, hey, motherfucker, who's here? Like, you know, you're probably like, oh, shit. If something happened to her, someone could be here and I'm next. So peace out. You know, I'd do the same shit if I'm her. So they get here pretty quick. The cops, by the way, it's a small town. Nothing much is going on. So especially on a Wednesday morning or whatever, Thursday morning.

So they pop in and they found they look closer because she just saw boxes knocked over. But they look at certain things and they see some evidence of a struggle here. Number one, knocked over boxes. Number two, shoe markings like scuff marks. Oh, scuffs. On the back door.

So they find that. Oh, so we kick, okay. Yeah, or somebody was being dragged, too. They found also, like, scuff marks on the floor, too, from shoes. That's very, they keep it real professional around here because the pizza place I worked at, when we took out the trash, we literally kicked the door open. Yeah, there was shitloads of scuff marks on that door. The cops saw that, and you're like, oh, my God, they kidnapped everybody. I think there's also on the back door shoe marks, too, on the back of the door.

Oh, outside. Yeah. That's another thing. Yeah. So there is also a small amount of blood in the storeroom as well that they find. Uh-oh. So they're like, that's not great. I mean, it's better than finding a large amount of blood. Small amount's good. But if we're going better or worse, it's better. The cash register completely undisturbed. I mean, you could balance it out from the night before and it matched. Yeah.

Zeroes out. Yeah, zeros out. So that's interesting. So they don't think it's a robbery, obviously. People wouldn't leave a pocketbook, a car, and a cash register with money in it. There's like $100-something in it. There's no reason. So they spend hours. They basically do a...

fan out around the store and look in all of the like Westfield river in marshes and any spot that they know of. That's like, Oh, here's a spot with like a depression or like a, here's where you could toss somebody or whatever. So they look everywhere all around and they also have a helicopter. Everybody's on. I mean, this is, they spend the whole day looking for and they find nothing. Yeah.

Not a thing. Not a thing. They find nothing. No trace of her on the outside of the store. I mean, we've got all of our things, so we just got her really. Yeah. And that's what kind of sucks. At least if her car was missing, you know, look for her car. It's a lot easier to find a car than a person. Yeah, that's a problem.

Tough stuff. So one of the cops said there was an assault that took place in the store to gain some kind of control over Lisa. There's also a side door, and the side door led to an alley that they probably went out the side door and just pulled the car out and left from there. So somebody pulled up into the alley. Yeah. So...

They talk about customers who were there last night. Let's talk about them. One was from a person who'd been there at 8.20 p.m. and made a purchase and had a time-stamped receipt. 8.20 p.m. Lisa's alive and fine at 8.20. 40 minutes before closing time. Yeah, and she's not only alive and well, typing up, pumping in fucking numbers. She's pumping shit out. She's selling things.

So there was nothing unusual there. They said there was nothing that was out of line, nothing piqued their attention and said that they should call the police, the person that was there. They said everything seemed fine in the store. The second person was a customer who had gone in at 9 p.m. Imagine, so right as we're closing, you couldn't have needed a balloon at 7, you fucking asshole. Right.

And this was a woman at 9 p.m., and she said that the store was open, the lights were on, but nobody was in there. Okay. Yeah. She said that she heard some noise in the back room, though. So she said someone must have been there. But when I called out, hello, hello, nobody answered me. But I did hear a banging noise.

And then you left? You fucking, not only did you show up at closing time, you left after hearing a scuffle? Well, she heard banging noises and shit. She thought people were like stalking and moving stuff around because they were about to close because she knew she came in at nine o'clock. She knows she's an asshole, this lady. Yeah.

She knows what she did. This is all on me. All right. She knows what she did. Welcome back tomorrow. So she heard some shit banging around and nobody answering. And she took that as like, well, I guess they're not going to help me because it's nine o'clock. The store's closing. So I guess I'm out. She said she waited a minute. Nobody came out. So she left.

She took off. So that means that she heard Lisa being assaulted and being detained in the back there. She was in this. Imagine how shitty you'd feel. Horrible. If you knew that something was happening there and you were there and did fucking nothing about it. So we know that she was at least there at 9 o'clock p.m. Right.

So further investigation reveals that they believe that she had been horizontal at the floor and there were two kick marks from her shoes at the bottom of the door.

So this isn't like kicking when you do that. This is at the bottom of the door and it's flat. Yeah. The whole footprint at the bottom means you are on the ground. You're trying to kick the door open to get attention or that was probably the banging she heard. Or get away. Yeah. That was because when someone said hello, hello, and if she's being restrained, the only way if you kick the door a couple times trying to get attention, I'm back here. But no one is going to go, oh, I'll go in the back storeroom of this place. Back there? Yeah.

Would you do that? Yeah. Would you do that or would you take it as fuck you? It says employees only. I can't. I can't call. I'm sorry. I'm leaving now. It says authorized personnel. I don't think I'm authorized. I'm not even allowed to use the bathroom, it says here. That's for employees only. No public bathroom. I can't do it.

So, yeah, and I don't think if I just heard banging, I would take that as like, go fuck yourself. It's 9 o'clock. Leave. Yeah. That's the banging telling me to leave. Yeah, that's how I would take it. I mean, that's just me. I'm like, no one wants me here. I should go. You know what I mean? My money is not important. They just want me out. No shit. So another tip comes in from a witness who worked near the card shop here, worked near Brittany's.

This person said at 9.15 p.m. on that night, this woman was on her way home and she saw what they may believe could possibly be the killer's car or the kidnapper's car, whoever the fuck's going on's car. She said she saw what appeared to be a man and a woman to be struggling in the back seat. Now, there's going to be a lot of there's a lot of people are hurt. It's she originally, I think, says there's three people in the car.

She said it looked like two men and a woman.

And then she says, maybe it was one man and a woman. So for a long time, there's a lot of people who don't know if it's two people or one person that did this. So there's a lot of that's going to really cause a lot of confusion later on. So but that's what she said. She said the car had been pulled off the road and about a mile away from the card shop. And she thought it was just a carload of teenagers fucking around and drove on. That was her thought.

Nobody wants to look into anything. You know what everybody's doing, though? They're minding their own business, which I can't be. This is your fault, James. No, no, no. This is still better. This is still good. Because what's going to happen if she pulls over? Is she going to fucking work the whole thing? Yeah, she makes this her business? Ugh. Yeah, and now there's two people in the back of the car with the psychopath. That's not good. He's like, oh, good. I got two. Great. Look at me. It's raining gals. Yeah, it's raining broads over here.

So the vehicle is a late model, full-size Bronco or Blazer, either dark red or dark blue. That's what she says. So they, by the next day after they don't find her on the 16th,

They're starting to become pretty certain that she's a victim of some kind of foul play, judging by the scuff marks, the blood, and the fact that she disappeared and doesn't have her purse with her or her car or anything. So they widen the search with officers searching the banks of the Westfield River and traveling 60 miles into Connecticut to interview anybody with ties to Lisa at all. Is that right? Anybody, yeah. So they're just...

You know, trying to they're really grasping and that's just in the big net. That's the next day. So by the 18th of April, the day after that, two days after she's not there, police announced that she has been kidnapped and that they have narrowed the time frame of her disappearance to between 821 and 905 p.m.

Because 8-21 was the time stamp of that receipt. Right, yeah. And so they know that in the 9-05. They figure that is when that woman left the store sometime in there. They add that there could be a connection between her disappearance and an attempted kidnapping reported in West Springfield, which is right next door. Right there, yeah. On April 9th, a few days earlier. Mm-hmm.

So the rest of the week goes by. Friday goes by. It's Good Friday. Nothing. Saturday comes. Nothing. Nothing. Then Easter Sunday comes. So Easter Sunday, there's a man hiking with his dog. Oh.

Yeah, the smile that warms a room and a man walking with his dog are two bad things. Bad things happening. And it's crazy that she's kidnapped on, was it Good Friday? She's kidnapped two couple days before Wednesday, I think she was kidnapped. So this guy, it's a very muddy path in the woods. This is a couple miles from the gift shop, but deep in the woods in the mud. He tripped over

No. Of a human being. And it was Lisa that he trips over. Not looking where he's walking at all. Nope. Tripping over fucking bodies and shit. Wow. That's oblivious. I've heard so many weird stories like that. Have you ever heard the Ted Bundy story?

No. About somebody tripping over his body while he was right there. His body? Yeah, he was in the woods. He had killed somebody, and he heard people coming, and it was dark in the woods, so he just kind of tried to cover the body up with leaves quick and went and hid in a bush off to the side because people were coming down the fucking path, and it was a young couple. And it turns out it was Harrison Ford, actually. What? Yes, it was Harrison Ford. That's the weird thing.

He was walking, and as they were walking, it was a young couple, they tripped over his body that he had there. Was it running from a boulder, James? I don't believe any of this. Ted Bundy told it, and then later on Harrison Ford said, that was me. So that's how it came up. So Ted Bundy said this happened, though. He said somebody tripped over the body, but it was so dark they just thought it was like a root or a stump or something, didn't know, or even a deer or whatever the fuck it was, and they kept walking.

And he was off to the side like, oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck. And then he went out and took the body. There's a one man on the planet that's more handsome than me. Oh, Jesus Christ. Look at that guy. Look at the charisma on this guy.

Amazing. He's fighting the empire. He's fucking running from boulders. How about that guy could do a lot? This guy could be president. Don't fuck with his plane, I'll tell you that right now. Did you hear his voice? So fucking iconic. Yeah. Wow. And you'll never catch him. See him with eyes? You'll never catch him if he's trying to run from you.

So, yeah. That's amazing. After 2 p.m., her body was found. This is about 300 yards off of Route 75, which is less than a mile from the card shop. And this guy was walking a dog? He was walking his dog, yeah. And the dog didn't see it either. Didn't notice it. Just tripped over it. Apparently, it's not like a hunting dog or anything. Just a dummy.

The cop said that she is partially clad, meaning Lisa. She had on a pair of boots and some of her clothing had been pulled down, including a denim skirt that had been torn and it was torn not on a seam.

Oh, just anger rip. Yes. So they're going, this has to be a pretty good-sized, strong person. She's tiny. She's 5'2", 120 pounds. I mean, she's a small young girl, young lady. A hogan rip of a skirt. Somebody just tore a skirt like that. So they said that that was bad and pulled down. And there are signs of sexual assault, including blood and semen on the denim skirt that they're going to find here. Jesus.

So as they removed her body and other things from the scene, they found buttons. They found a blood-soaked white blouse that they think the buttons came from. It was torn off of her. And the denim skirt torn in half. So it was ripped off of her.

All the way up the waistband, too. But not at the seam, though. Yeah, not at the seam. Just torn like the Hulk got a hold of it. Not Hulk Hogan. Hulk, the fucking green guy. The green one. Yeah. They said that this was very brutal. And the fact that the skirt was not torn along the seams suggested this had to be a very powerful person that did this. And a rageful person. Somebody's mad.

I don't know who has that much raid and a boner at the same time. That much rage and a boner is a weird thing to walk around with. If you see someone raging with that in their pants, report them because there's going to be problems later. Wow. Wow. And this is an out-of-the-way area. I mean, this is... It's a mud trail. Like, you have to be from around here. So they said this has to be a local. Nobody would be driving through and know to come here. Yeah. No one would know this was here. So it's...

It's interesting. They found that because everybody in town always wants to think it's a drifter because they probably drifted in, did this, and then what? Drifted out is what they're hoping for. Right. And they never want to. Right. They want it to, whatever the ending is, they need it to be something that makes their place safer when this is over. They need to be gone. It can't be Bob from work. You know what I mean? Because that'll freak people the fuck out. I'll never sleep again. No. No.

So they look at her wounds and they said that her between the crime scene and her wounds, it suggested a real long and violent fight between these two because they clearly fought in the storeroom and then they clearly fought in the store. And they said out here, it looked like they were fighting too.

Right. So her hands were covered in deep defensive wounds, knife wounds. So she fought a lot and hard, like a lot of defensive wounds. So she did not give up. She wow. She had stab wounds around her shoulder and throat inches long and some more than an inch deep.

Good Lord. And another knife wound to her upper left leg. And they said total of nine, they believe, nine stab wounds total. Eight to nine. They can't quite tell. Her denim skirt and her blood-soaked blouse were pulled down toward her ankles. The cuts on her hands led the detectives to believe that she really fought hard here.

And did not go easy. And the autopsy believed that she... And the autopsy confirms that she was sexually assaulted as well. And because they discover foreign DNA, human blood, and sperm cells all over her body and clothing. Wow. So...

This guy doesn't know shit about shit. No. Reckless and vicious. And in 92, if you weren't like keeping up with scientific journals and shit, you didn't know a fucking thing about DNA. Right. Nobody knew anything in the mass public. Nobody knew about DNA really until OJ trial. That's when everyone was like, what's this shit? Before that, people had heard they had some thing. But 92, nobody really knew it.

And if they didn't have to disclose that that's how they caught you in a way for the public to not know about this shit. Oh, Christ. People believe in jizz everywhere for decades. We caught you and we know it's you. How? Well, we can't tell you, but we definitely know it's you. We certainly know. We don't want this to get out and everybody to be aware of it. Yeah.

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LinkedIn, the place to be, to be. So in 1992, DNA technology is there, but this is when you need like... It's forever. You need like a half gallon of blood to fucking get a DNA profile. It's not very good yet, but we know it exists and we can do some profiling. And we can narrow shit down. Yep. A little bit. You know what I mean? We can certainly exclude people. Exactly. And a little bit better than just by blood type, which is what we were doing before, which...

Two people have common blood type. It excludes nothing. It's stupid. So the town's reaction, they lose their fucking...

Ever loving, God forsaken minds. Yeah. And they're like, oh, my God, we're in a fishbowl with a murder. That's what all of them think. It's here is the director of religious education at the church. So this is a woman that knew Lisa for a long, long time. Lisa used to babysit her kids and then they worked at the church on Sundays and all that. So she says, I've just called all the children's parents and told them.

I can't imagine what's running through a child's mind, but probably the same as everyone else. Fear and disbelief and anger. She said that Lisa used to be a carefree teenager who would babysit for my kids and she was great with kids. And, you know, this is horrible. And even...

She would drive her youngest kid to school with her because she taught at the school and the kid went to school. So she'd pick up her neighbor's kid and take the kid to school with her even. So they called all the children and ruined their lives? Yes, called all the children's parents that she taught catechism to. Yeah. Hey, your teacher's not going to be there ever again. How about we just say she moved to Peru? Butchered. Butchered.

Butchered. Denim skirt torn in half, covered in semen and down by her ankles. Butchered. Eight, nine knife wounds. Horrible. Hand-torn denim. So eat your green beans. It's Cody's birthday on Friday, so there's going to be cupcakes. Anyway, so. No balloons. No balloons, though. But, you know, maybe bring a card.

So this spread throughout the town, young women and around the surrounding communities to like self-defense classes, like tripled in size. Yeah.

All these people wanted, all these women were looking for mace. They were walking into stores going, where can I get mace? Right. They're like, you need like a license for that shit. Go get a shotgun permit. Yes. People started locking their doors and freaking out and all this type of shit here. So then there was a problem. They thought another woman was missing here after that. And so people started freaking out and complaining.

Wouldn't open the door at all. Here's a woman named Carol Zoka of 1317 Suffield Street. She refused to open the door for an employee of Bay State Gas Company because she was frightened by the news of the slaying. And she said, I said, I can't open the door. I usually live here with doors unlocked, but no more.

She won't even open for the gas guy. She knows the guy. Ted, I'm sorry. I can't. You could murder me. I don't know. They shut me off. I can't even cook. Holy shit. They say here from the newspaper at Mitch's Home and Garden Place on Suffield Street, 21-year-old Chris Finn said she gets chills every time she drives by the spot where Zygert's body was found. The sales clerk said everyone who comes into the store is talking about the homicide. Really? That's weird. Is that right? Yeah.

The last homicide happened here, by the way, in like 1988 or 89, where some stepfather beat like a toddler to death. Google it.

Which is bad. That's horrific, but it's not near as... You're not scared of it. It doesn't scare you as an adult person who's not in this guy's care. He's a frustrated guy that's tired of making mac and cheese, and that kid pissed him off. Something like that. And he's a terrible father. That's not a sex-crazed murderer. This is a kidnapping rapist murderer. This is terrifying. Well, so bad. It's really, really scary. So they said that the thing that scares them the most also is that

The killer, the police said that the killer is well acquainted with the area and may even be a resident of town. They're like, how could this be possible? Oh, boy. How could it be possible? Robert Landers, a resident, said, I'm very concerned. I have four daughters here myself, and we have a killer on the loose.

A killer on the loose. They said another guy, Kerry Blackack, a junior at the high school, said, Nobody is going anywhere at night. We're too scared. I don't believe we have a drifter here, said one resident. I've lived here my whole life, and I've never even known about that field. So...

Wow. You got to be mad in Trent. Super local. Yeah. Yeah. Generations local. That's fucking. Are you local? You don't know how local I am. Great outdoors. Buddy, you don't know how local I am. Great outdoors. Chick about to get a pool skew in her ass. Level of local.

So ladies want weapon. They said the demand for mace, handguns, and other self-protection has increased like crazy since they found the body. A guy who owns one of these stores said it's been hard to keep up with the demand. The killing has reminded the entire community of its own mortality. You guys are all just going around...

Rose-colored glasses taken every day for granted? That's a great life, man. The weapons that are in demand. Mace, obviously, which is chemical spray. Pepper spray, which is weak mace, essentially. Yeah, you spray that on a tortilla. Yeah, that's pretty good. That's not as hot as ghost pepper, but okay. Yeah.

James Taylor, who took time from his busy songwriting schedule. What? And, you know, fucking all that kind of shit of writing very boring songs that make me want to murder myself.

hang myself um here he is uh he talks about the he's the president of the massachusetts gun over uh gun association all right he was yeah different guy he took time out of that to of course be the head of that because that james taylor would definitely be the president of the massachusetts gun owners association i'm sorry gun owners action league

What the hell is that? I don't know. They sound like they shoot people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they were looking for an acronym. This guy said handgun permits have gone through the roof. And also, people want paint guns, which I don't understand why. Paintball guns or just paint guns? Paintball guns. No, paintball guns. Well, James, those are – They hurt, but not enough. If you really want to murder somebody –

Well, yeah, if they've got a gun, you're fucked. If they really want to murder you, you shoot them with a paintball gun, they're going to look and go, it's fucking paint, you motherfucker. And then they're going to come over and be really pissed off. Now they're going to torture you. Yeah. But they said that this paint might be able to help identify a person who attacked them later on.

That's genius. I didn't even think about that. Covered in paint. I didn't either. That's interesting. Now, the problem is there's other incidents since this has happened as well. People have started reporting incidents that have happened in the last month or so to them before the murder and after the murder. They receive more than 20 calls daily, the police,

And also a lot of other people with a lot of complaints about people being followed, women saying they've been harassed and that sort of thing. This is a sergeant here with the police force said a lot of women are reporting something they blew off a week or two ago where they felt they were being followed or attacked.

And now they're like, oh, shit, maybe this is the guy. An Agawam woman who lives near Lisa's Belden Court apartment said she was followed by an unknown man as she drove home one night. Then April 9th, a woman reported she was followed after driving from New England Health and Racquet Club in West Springfield. She pulled into a gas station and the man did not pursue her.

So he might have just been going the same direction. And then you pulled in there and he continued on home or he was following you. You pulled into a public place smartly and he left. That's possible. But after she left the station, he saw he saw her when she when he was traveling in the opposite direction, turned around and began following her again. Oh, my God. So that's not good on Route 20. So.

So the woman pulled into a restaurant on Route 20. That's a great. You think, oh, gas station. Maybe he was just, you know, pulled off into a restaurant here and get out of her car. He pulled in and got out of his car, too, and grabbed her and threatened to kill her if she screamed. This guy was fucking after her, man. Seriously was following her. How about that? He said, I'll kill you if she screamed. But the thing is, restaurant people saw this was happening in the parking lot and fucking ran outside, you

Hell yeah. And the guy ran away. It was like eight guys ran outside. Leave that fucking lady alone. We'll kick your ass. And he was like, oh shit. Yeah. He ran away. Um, so they said that they didn't, the sergeant said that he does not know why police failed to release the information about the attempted abduction earlier. He said it made, it may have been a clerical error. Yeah. But it might've helped, you know, that sucks. And,

And how about none of those people that interrupted that shit had a look-see at a tag? Anything. A tag. No license plate? Nothing. Was it an SUV? Was it a Bronco Blazer type vehicle? Perhaps an original SUV? Nothing? Man, Jennifer Collins, an employee of Healthy Habits Health Club in Agawam, where this is where Lisa exercised, by the way, her gym, reported that a man used to visit the juice bar of the all-women's club.

What the fuck, dude? He's like, the ratio here is outstanding. Let me tell you something. The acai here is the best in town. That's why I'm here. It's not the pussy. Guys, if there's an all-women's thing, it's because they don't want you around. That's why. It's women that don't feel safe around us, guys. And stop fucking it up. Well, you don't want to feel like... And I get it. I can understand why a guy would want to work out with all guys, too. You don't want to be like...

look, if I'm trying to do this, I don't want to worry about that. You know what I'm saying? And then there's also creepiness of the whole thing. Who knows? So, and then some people go to the gym because they like to meet people there. So, you know, these ladies are going not to meet guys. We can be assured of that. They're tired of meeting guys. Tired. They've met all the guys they're looking to meet here.

They're done with it. So that this guy used to visit this. The man never approached or bothered any of the women. But this the woman who ran it said that she felt like it was strange that the guy. Fuck, yes, would pop up and just hang out with all the women. And but he has not visited the club since April 14th, which is the day before Lisa disappeared. That's the last visit he made there.

which is very weird. I'm so glad all businesses have fucking cameras now. Yeah, but none of these places had cameras. The restaurant, Brittany's, the fucking, none of this shit had cameras. When I was robbed at gunpoint, no cameras. Yep, that's right. And then the director of the health club, and this is, talk about sweeping under the rug. No, no, it's safe. Because an employee said, yeah, we're all creeped out by this guy. The director of the health club, who refused to give his name, by the way. A fella, yeah.

He denied that a man had come into the club repeatedly at all. You know what you're talking about. These broads are crazy. They don't know nothing. Don't listen to them. It's perfectly safe around here. Get in here and buy a membership. $39.95 a month. Come on. Come on in. By the way, that'll never go away. No matter. I don't care. Same price forever. You could break your neck. You could be just a head sitting on a chair. You still got to pay. Sorry. You got to pay. Not our fault. It's going to ruin your life. It's going to ruin your fucking life. I'm sorry.

So April 20th, now, five days after this, a man tries to abduct a 13-year-old girl near here in South Hadley. This was approximately 8 p.m. The man grabbed a girl and pulled her into his car through the driver's side window.

Wow. Which is... Pulled up and grabbed her? Grabbed her, like, and started driving with her hanging out the side, probably, and then yanked her in the window. Like a drive-through. Yeah. Like, let me get... I'll take two double cheeseburgers and an eight-year-old. And a 13-year-old, please.

Yeah, and a 13-year-old. Chocolate, what is it, Frosty? Yeah. Yeah, Frosty. He released the girl, though, and drove off. I guess thinking, wow, that was a crazy thing I just did. I can't get her through the window because she's kind of big. Yeah. She'd been dropped off to visit a friend where this attempted abduction occurred. Police did not think this incident was related.

To Lisa's abduction. Yeah, they said they were still interviewing the girl. They don't know. They described the car as small or mid-sized white vehicle. She described the man as white, 25 to 30 years old, six feet tall, 200 pounds, wore a red baseball cap and had a scruffy face with several days of beard growth. And he may have a scar over his left eyebrow.

So there's that. April 21st, also, a University of Massachusetts junior was stabbed as well in the parking lot of the Hampshire Mall. They're saying this is the most widely publicized homicide since that one. Just stabbed up and left? No sexual assault? I think we talked about this. Maybe on a bonus episode. I think we did. We did, because Sharon Galligan was the name of the person.

Sounds familiar. Sounds really familiar. Stabbed to death in the lot of the parking lot of the Hampshire Mall after finishing her Christmas shopping. Yes. On December 18th. Her body was found the next day inside her car. Right. Six parking spots from the mall's main entrance. Yep. Believe me to this. I feel like that's it. Yeah. They theory theorize that she worked at the. By the way, this is the weird part is that 20 year old Galligan worked at a balloon shop in the mall.

Oh, my God. So they're like, this is what the fuck is going on. Same profession? Same profession. They thought that they think that she had fought off a sexual attack and that's why she was killed, basically. Which three years later, you might go, okay, you injure, sexually attack, then kill. That's how they might have gotten their whole- Lined up their M.O. right now. Got their game down a little better. Better than better, yeah.

So they devoted hundreds of hours to the case, interviewing known sexual offenders and studying similar crimes nationwide. Yet at that point, the case remained open and no charges were brought against anybody. So other unsolved crimes in the area, Millie Hart Rivera, a 23-year-old Amherst woman, found stabbed to death along a wooded stretch of Route 202 in Holyoke in 1988. Mm-hmm.

Police believe a Holyoke factory worker picked her up as she hitchhiked outside a bar and stabbed her to death. Her body was nude when found and sexually assaulted as well. Due to lack of witnesses and physical evidence, no charges were ever brought against that man.

Okay. Shana Price, 17, of Springfield was found strangled, beaten, and sexually assaulted in Blunt Park on Christmas night, 1990. So the holiday thing is weird, too, around holidays. 15 months later, police still said they didn't have a suspect or anything like that. What the fuck?

One detective said investigators tried to track Price's steps in her final hours to determine whether drugs or prostitution played a role in the case. They believe she may have been killed somewhere else and dumped in the park. Also, the body parts of an unidentified woman were found in Warwick on June 24th, 1988, about a mile and a half from the center of town. The arms, legs and torso of a white woman were found by a motorist near a rest stop off Route 78.

Imagine that. They said despite efforts by investigators and anthropologists from UMass, the woman's name, age, and cause of death still were a mystery. Good Christ. I don't want to live anywhere near here. No, this is terrifying down here. What is happening? And then an Agawam woman said she was stalked for two months.

Susan Reddington. Okay. This is a woman. She said she was stalked for two months before being confronted by a man who was following her.

Then she basically the man is following her. She pulled over. She got out to like confront the guy and he tried to attack her. So she ran away into a cornfield to get away from him. Oh, God, that's the beginning of a horror movie every time. And that's where cops because he was like, I can't run away, leave my car on the side of the road and chase this woman down. So that's where cops found her was in a fucking cornfield. And they said they were investigating her story. And they said that they don't believe there's a connection with the murder, though.

We got a lot of crazies out here. We got all sorts of crazies. She had said that she stopped at 1230 a.m. to try to get the man's car registration number. He confronted her. She kicked him and attempted to knee him in the groin, then fled into the cornfield to escape him. She's big. She's like six to 200 pounds. This woman, too, and took a self-defense class. Yeah, she tried to. Yeah, she's not fucking around. She ran 300 yards.

Into the dark and ended up, it's pitch black out there because it's midnight. She ran into a tree limb and knocked herself unconscious. And that's where the police found her, bleeding and freaking out in a cornfield. Wow, lucky they found her first. Yep, and they do have a suspect.

Which, look, here's the suspects. They don't have a, they have a sketch. Yeah, I mean, okay. It looks like an 1800s Englishman, basically. It's like sideburns with like a bowler on. It's very strange. Looks like Adam Carolla in a time piece. Yeah, from the 1800s. Yeah.

So they have Lisa's funeral and it's at the colonial funeral home. They've already raised five thousand dollars in reward money from donations from local businesses and community organizations with, you know, for information leading to the arrest of a killer. More than 16 investigators, including all eight members of the town's police departments, the whole department's eight people. All eight.

Oh, their detective bureau, I'm sorry, are assigned to the case. The FBI is also assisting in the investigation, and so is the Connecticut State Police, too, since it's so close to the border. Basically, here, everybody shows up at her memorial. They have, on April 23rd, more than 800 people attended her funeral. Oh, my God. That's a shitload of people, man. That is awesome. Yeah, that's fucked up. Yeah.

The weird part, by the way, the Sandra Redding thing in the woods, that was – the strange thing was it was on the same road.

It was off the same Route 75 that they found her. So when people drove up and saw the highway closed and saw cops and shit, they're like, oh, my God, there's more bodies off Route 75. So that spread insane rumors through town. Then they found out it was a woman and a guy, you know, may have tried to abduct her. Then people freaked out even more, even though the cops said this has nothing to do with it.

So it's pretty wild. The one policeman said, we want to make it very clear there's no tie to the Agawam case. There's no 75 murderer. Stop it. No. Done with that shit. They also said it took this woman, the unconscious lady in the cornfield, took rescue crews 50 minutes to wrap her in blankets and carry her stretcher 300 yards to the ambulance.

Oh, dodging a cornfield stuff? Yeah, through a cornfield. It's not an easy place to carry a fucking stretcher. Yeah. So there is Detective Mark Pfau, I guess. P-F-A-U. Pfau? Okay, I'll buy it. Yeah. He was the main guy working the case from the start. Lisa's case, anyway. He said plenty of calls and leads are coming in, but nothing is panning out at this point. It's just the way it goes. The first person they're really going to look hard at is...

Who do you think? Her fucking boyfriend, obviously. So there's rumors, by the way. These are all the rumors flying around town. All right. This should be fun. This is a big rumor that Blair, the boyfriend, had murdered her after she caught him and his roommate, Ed, fucking each other.

She walked in on him cornholing Ed. Oh, poor Blair. So he went there and fucking murdered her. Raped and murdered a woman when he's attracted to men. I'll show you how gay I'm not. Yeah. No, I don't think that happened here. He's obviously a top because he can rip jeans. He can tear them. Yeah. You should see Ed's jeans. He has not a pair left intact.

No, but the problem with this was Ed, his name is Ed Borgatti, the roommate. Ed Borgatti's father was a retired police detective. So everybody around town said that's what it was. And Ed's father was helping cover it all up.

For heaven's sake. So people are always looking for a conspiracy. That's a deep cut, man. Yes. But his detective father doesn't want everybody to know that this guy was cornholeing his kid. And so that's where the whole thing is. The murder of a young woman is covered up.

To protect a tryst between a couple of roommates. Wow. A little bit far-fetched. Truly, yeah. A little bit. Now, at the same time, he, the boyfriend, has an alibi because he has a CVS drugstore receipt. Atta boy. For like between the time. The time, yeah. Right in the window of the time that wouldn't have given him time to get there. Right.

But they could not rule anybody out, so they started to also search out for several health club members that said that there was a guy that used to stare at Lisa while she worked out before she joined this gym.

Another thing, a key had been missing from her key chain, by the way. Oh. So detectives tried to match various suspects' keys to Lisa's apartment door. So one of the things, whenever they would, they talked to hundreds of suspects, and one of the things they'd say is, we need your keys. And while they were talking to them, they'd take their keys and go try all his keys out on Lisa's apartment door to make sure that wasn't her fucking key. Okay.

So that's a very smart to do. One person reported the lady who was in the store reported hearing the sounds coming from the back room at night. And then there's a woman who said they saw a struggle in a car and that was on the way to and not very far from where her body was found. Oh, Jesus. She saw that. So that's two people that could have saved her and minded their own business, unfortunately.

So detectives here were able to rule out the boyfriend. Number one, he confirmed his alibi and he gave any kind of bodily sample that they asked for happily. And they ruled him out with DNA. His DNA did not match the DNA of the killer. So deal with it. Deal with that shit. I didn't cornhole my roommate. Well, maybe I did, but that doesn't mean I'm a murderer. But I ain't a murderer. I'm not a fucking murderer. Although Ed will tell you I murdered that ass because that's how good I am.

So at that point now, they're talking about other suspects. Well, who can we do? So they use DNA testing to eliminate any close male friends, relatives, or acquaintances, whoever she hangs out with. Nobody she knows. It's no one she knows well or nobody that at least someone she didn't, you know, her friends and family say she knows well. Yeah.

So they talk to other suspects. They find the man who visited the juice bar. Oh, no. They find juice creep. Yep. Acai creep.

He was the guy seen staring at her on several occasions also. And he was cleared out from DNA. He's ruled out. Also, a second man who they found there was a car wash. Somebody reported that night of the murder at a 24 hour do it yourself car wash. Seeing a man with a throwing out a piece of carpet at the car wash and cleaning inside of his car.

And they found that guy. He came forward and said, that was me. I didn't kill anybody. This is my car. You can check it out, do a DNA test. But I'm the guy on that mat. I got the mats. I'm the guy with the fucking carpet. That's not, not me. So they ruled him out as well. So they thought that was a really good lead. And it,

Got to nothing. Turns out it was nothing. Then they figure out authorities in Florida say, hey, you might have a connection to us. What? In addition to a lot of snowbirds coming down this way, we also have another issue. The abduction occurred two days. This Lisa's abduction occurred two days before the 10th anniversary of a case in Florida that was exactly the same.

Really? Yes. This is the disappearance of Lynn Burdick, who was a high school senior who vanished while working alone at a Florida variety store on the Mohawk Trail. Similar thing. Yeah. Two days from the 10th anniversary of the exact day of this happening. She went on Good Friday. Close. Yeah. I mean, around there. So nobody would know. We don't know. Could have been March that year. Yeah.

They said the thing that caught their attention was that the shop lights were left on and the door open in that one as well. In that case as well, despite a search for more than 100 people, she was never seen. And they ended up boarding up that store in Florida. They said that this is from a newspaper, although dilapidated and boarded up. The former barefoot peddler variety store reminds residents here that the worst crimes can happen anywhere.

He said it was from this little wooden country store at the corner of Central Shaft Road and the Mohawk Trail that Lynn Burdick, an 18-year-old McCann Technical High School student doing part-time work behind the counter, was abducted. Her brother came to the store and found an open door. The only difference is there was $187 taken from the cash register here. Oh, that's a little robbery, too. How'd they make $187 selling crap on a fucking trail here? I don't know, but...

The search for Lynn continued for months and months and months. She's never found. She was never found. She was dumped somewhere. And in Florida, too, she could have been fed to the gators. We have no fucking idea. Yeah. The mosquitoes can eat her. Yeah, it's down there. Yeah, absolutely. So they said that there was no windows and the one-room store was detached and alone then. So they also think the possibility that Lynn may have run away and not been abducted as well.

Okay. Yes. But one of the cops said she didn't run away. You had to know this girl. She was such a sweet kid. So they think she was murdered. Then again, though, a former longtime police chief down there says, I still say the girl is alive. I've always thought that. He thinks she ran away. Wow.

Very strange. He thinks she took one hundred eighty seven dollars and fucking jet lived, lived her life. So back up to Britney's card and gift shop May 6th, 1992. So less than a month after this happens, the Joseph O'Neill, who owns the shop, said he plans to permanently close the shop on May 30th.

He said it's grief over the death and the fact that that's all people. It's just a spectacle now. Everyone's just coming to. They're not buying anything. For the next 30 years. Yeah. The next 30 years, everybody is going to drive by and go. Remember when that lady disappeared from there and then was found horribly beaten and murdered? Remember that? Remember that? Anyway, what do you got for balloons? What do you got for my Lars right now?

Even just passing it in the car. Yeah, Dad, we know. Yeah, we know. Don't tell us again. Hey, right here, I know, Dad. Yes. I carry pepper spray. Yes, we remember. You told me. You taught me how to throw a right hook. I understand.

So they also, in June, June 3rd, 1992, still haven't found her yet. They found her, still haven't had any. They don't have any solid suspects. No leads, yeah. So they said a community gathering to raise money for her scholarship fund was held. The event was limited to 200 people, and they said they were pushing to have June 6th dubbed Lisa Zagert Day, which is difficult because June 6th is already a day, isn't it? Is it a day? I don't know. Isn't June 6th? Yes, I believe it is. Is it a day?

June 6th? No. Is there anything in June? Is there a holiday in June? Yes. Gregorian – I don't know. It doesn't say anything. I thought it was. What is special about June 6th? It's D-Day, James. D-Day. That's what it is. Yeah, you're right. Thank you. Yeah, that's what it was, D-Day. I knew it was something big.

Nothing happened that day, James. Nothing happened. I'm like, I think it did. I think we might have invaded an entire continent. Which is a pretty big thing, Jim. No, nothing. June. There's nothing in June, James. First big push to beat the Nazis, I believe. So, yeah.

A few beaches were occupied that day, Jimmy. It was a beach day that day. That's all it was. A lot of guys. It's June. It's summer. It's June. It's summer. A lot of guys going out getting some sun. It was fun on a Sunday that day, Jimmy. Lots of guys with pails and snorkels, Jimmy. That would have been a different invasion. Sandcastle day. Jesus.

So maybe pick a different day for Lisa Day. Yeah. Yeah. Than a day when other people died too. It's also a day marked with like horrible shit. Yes. And remembrance of a lot of people's sacrifices. Maybe we pick a different day here. Let's go 7th. Let's go April 15th. It'll cheer people up for taxes. At least there's a nice memory of a nice young lady. It's a better day. Yeah. Jesus Christ. So they are trying to raise money for all this. They said there's the Saints from Chicopee will provide musical entertainment.

Okay. The Saints is the name of the band. They are from Chickapee. They're not called the Saints from Chickapee, which would be a very bad band name. The Saints of Chick's P. Chick's P. They said, we want to keep it rolling. We want June 6th to be Lisa Day. I don't know about that. Yeah. He said, I don't see it as an annual thing, but I would like to see it this year.

What do you want? Fucking every 10 years? What do you want? Yeah. And they're also putting together a scholarship that will contribute to the college education of students from this high school that she went to who want to become teachers. That's great. And the school also dedicates a courtyard in her memory as well. Beautiful. Yeah. So the city, the town, the city council approves $35,000 in additional overtime for the police department.

This isn't like a big city's police department where they have some budget overages and shit. It's a small town, so they have limited money to spend. They can't just go into debt. So the money will allow detectives to work daily double shifts and will allow two additional patrolmen to be on the roads during second and third shift. Um,

One officer will patrol the Walnut Street extension area and surrounding condominium and apartment complexes. And the second will use the police four-wheel drive vehicle to patrol the dirt roads and remote wooded areas around where she was found. Wow. In case there's somebody sneaking back to dump again or somebody, you know, doing whatever. This better not be a McNulty dump just to get all this overtime. Yeah, this is a vacant houses shit here tying red ribbons.

They said also this is in response to fears that he might be a resident of the town. Yeah. They said we may have a killer on the loose on the streets and I want our force to be as visible as possible. I love it. Chief said, yeah, we might have a killer on the loose. Black and whites everywhere. That's right. And they said they also installed a new tip line at the police department, which has generated a flood of calls. They said we're encouraging anyone with any information, no matter how trivial to call. That could be big.

Then there's also a non-abduction as well that we'll talk about. The director of Healthy Habits, who we talked about, denied published reports that police were interviewing workers there.

Remember we talked about the... Yeah, the guy at the gym. So the director said, no one has been interviewed here. I wish people would leave us alone. We're innocent and we've already lost enough business because of this. We're trying to do burpees. Let us see. What the fuck here? Jesus Christ. So this is the director saying, no, no, there was never a creepy guy. There was never anything, even though they talked to the guy and there was a guy and he was cleared. This guy's saying never...

Not us. Leave us the fuck alone here. You're ruining our business. January 1993.

Noelle DeSolaris. Okay. Or DeLores, I'm going to say, because it's Dez-Lores. So DeLores. Oh, like a French spelling. Yes. 22 years old in January 1993. She's a nursing student living with her parents near Longmeadow. And she has been just glued to this investigation. It's on the news, every newspaper article.

She's a young woman who's in the wheelhouse of this girl, you know, a potential victim. So she's wanting to know if they caught the guy or what.

So she said she was glued to TV coverage and everything like that. So by January 1993, she was in a patient's house here working as a home health aide when a breaking news update came on the television screen. She thought it was maybe about Lisa's case, so she paid attention. She learned it was another local case that was unfolding here. Reporters were interviewing a man that said his infant son had been abducted.

Oh, she said, Oh my God. She told her patient, I know that guy. The father who was on the news was a guy named Gary Shara, S C H A R A, who she used to date when they were students at long meadow high school in 1986. So he's a young man too. Yeah. Same thing. Um, now by the way, uh, this woman here, Noel, her brother is an FBI agent. Okay. Uh,

Actually, one of the agents that worked the Boston Marathon bombing as well. Oh, is that right? Yes. So that's interesting. Now, Gary, Gary's born in 1971. We'll talk about here. Now, they talk about this woman here, Noelle, said she remembers first seeing Gary in his junior year, their junior year. He was fit and athletic. She used to run track, and she was much faster than him, she remembered. Oh, hell yeah.

He had just moved to the area from California and didn't have many friends, but they apparently had a mutual love of Agatha Christie novels.

Like most high school junior boys, loves Agatha Christie. I read a bunch of them, but it wasn't. It was just because that's all that was there. That's what was there. No, he loves them. Goes out and seeks them out. Wow, riveted. And they ended up going out for a while because of this. Because obviously Agatha Christie will bring you together. Agatha Christie got him laid. Got him a fucking blowjob. Can you imagine? Now, Gary's got an interesting backstory. He was an orphan.

Foster home to foster home and then adopted at a young age here. I guess his adopted parents had taken custody of him as a small child after he went to multiple foster homes in California and the family eventually moved to Massachusetts for his high school years and that's when she met him here. Now, his inner circle of friends said that

He wasn't like a cool guy, quote unquote, Gary. Pretty hard to be when you grew up in foster homes. Well, not only that, he's into Dungeons and Dragons, which we've talked about before, and also really, really into Batman.

Really? Super into Batman. The comic books. Oh, okay. Yeah, the comic books because back then you only had the Adam West Batman and the comic books. That's it. There wasn't a cool Batman floating around out there. Yeah, cool Batman didn't start until 88 or 89? But he thought of himself like Batman because he was an orphan. His parents were killed.

So in his mind, he and Batman have the same origin story, and he tells everybody that. He's Bruce Wayne. He says he's Bruce Wayne, but poor. He's like entry-level job Bruce Wayne. Minimum wage Bruce. Bruce Minimum Wayne is what he's called.

He's the penguin, is what he is. Yes. But he thinks he's Batman. He wears Batman shirts all the time. And this is as he's an adult, too. He's always wearing a Batman T-shirt. So when 89 rolled around, it must have been like heaven for this guy. Finally, all the bat merchandise is available. What?

They said he was a likable guy, you know, decent guy, not a weirdo or anything. He's into sports, was decently athletic, although he never joined any organized teams in high school. But you could get him to play some pickup basketball or something. He wasn't a spaz or anything.

His friend said, nothing you'd ever consider weird. He didn't smoke cigarettes, didn't drink to excess, didn't use drugs, which is weird in Massachusetts. Yeah, it's pretty bizarre. To grow up at that time in Massachusetts and not drink booze and smoke cigarettes is a little bizarre. I'm going to be honest with you. He graduated in Longmeadow High School in 1987, and he married a woman named Joyce McDonald. But they will have quite a rocky relationship.

rocky marriage here. A little bit about Joyce, because you got to know first, you don't know why now, but you need to know a little about Joyce's background. She came from a family of 10 kids that moved around all the time because their father was a freelance organ and piano business consultant. Oh, Jesus. I've never, we might as well be a shoe cobbler. What the fuck do you do? Where's the, where's the market for that? The consultant consultant.

And moved the family from state to state. I guess where all the piano consulting was. Yeah, there's one that sells every year. You got to get to that state where it sells. How would you know you need an organ and piano business consultant?

Because you bought an old church? Yeah. Does he set up pianos? Does he help them figure out how to sell pianos? Does he tune pianos? Repair? I don't know. But Gary is always working customer service jobs. It's got to be a lot of school district work. You know what I mean? Because that's where the piano is. They don't care if those are in tune. Yeah.

Yeah, it's just some woman with a teacher that just bangs around on it that's not real great, but she makes songs happen.

And Gary, sometimes he works like day jobs, sometimes night jobs. He had a job at Champion Sports Bar in Springfield and Storotown Tavern and Wild Apples Cafe. Yeah, a lot of waiting jobs. Just bounces around. Anyway, a week after Noel sees Gary on TV, actually not even a week, a few days, he calls her. What? Out of the blue, Gary calls her and asks her out to dinner.

What about your kid, dude? Isn't your kid abducted? Yeah, I just saw you on the news. Is everything cool with that? Want to go to Chili's? Not really. This is so weird. Want to go to Wild Apples? I fucking get a discount. So she thought it was weird, but she was like, wow, they hadn't seen each other since high school. But she remembered she always liked him, and they didn't have a bad breakup. He didn't do anything wrong. So just kid shit. So she said, yeah, what the hell? I'll meet him a few days later at a place in Chicopee, a historical restaurant and banqueter.

Hall named Collegian Court in Chicopee. She said when Gary walked in, he was still tall and thin. And when they started to talk, she just realized he seemed like the same kind of shy guy she knew in high school. Same nice guy. Everything was great. During dinner, he pulled out his wallet and showed a photo of his infant son. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. This is my missing son. She said, oh, yeah, I was going to say, well, he should be showing it to everybody who can possibly see it. It shouldn't even be put away yet. No, he should be carrying it. He should have like a shirt with his picture on it, like.

In the wire when someone gets killed. Yeah. So she says, oh, he's so cute. I think it's awful that he's been abducted. I truly hope you're both reunited soon. Why are we sitting here? Why are you out looking for your son? This is nuts. So Noelle said she felt sympathy for him, and she knew that he was trying to rekindle the romance, but she was a little reluctant to get involved with him again because she thought, this is the best, she thought at the moment he's got a lot of baggage. Yeah.

you know, abducted son and all. But then she's like, I don't know. He's got a lot going on for me. That's kind of too much. Wow. Elizabeth smarts dad out dating. I don't think he was in the dating pool. Probably not.

So a month later, the mystery of the abduction was solved when police found his son alive and well. Oh, where? With his mother, with the boy's mother, Joyce. What? Remember Joyce, piano consultant's daughter? Yeah. Apparently she just took the baby and went to Seattle.

Now, this will make sense in a moment. She did not have custody of this child. As a matter of fact, Gary had full custody. This is a kidnapping. It's not good. Yeah. So then this is like, okay, well, at least it's not somebody else abducting somebody. Yeah. So...

At the same time, though, now, though, this, you know, the ex-wife here, Joyce, is talking to the cops saying she needs to talk to them about something. The cops back in our whatever the fuck it is here. Amway. Amway. Back in Amway, Massachusetts. Yeah. So the Joyce, the wife, told her attorney that she suspected Gary may have murdered Lisa. Yeah.

So I was trying to keep my kid away from him. She said, you know that murder case from the store there? I think he did it. She said any time news came out, any time any news came out, he would be glued to the television.

But that's so did everybody in town. That's the problem with that. They were like, well, that's not that weird. Everybody does that. My guy was one of the cops said, like, my brother and father do that, too. It doesn't mean they did it. Yeah. And the investigators. Yeah. I'm investigating this and I'm glued to it, too. I'm just reporting all the shit I already know. And I know more. It's I know more than I'm telling him. She also the attorney also said he needed to know every single little detail about the murder and progress of the case and catching the murderer.

Okay. It seems like a local story that a lot of people would be interested in. Joyce also knew that Gary had been unaccounted for during the time of the murder and that he returned late that night home with scratches on his hands and no explanation for his whereabouts. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. She said he kept came home in the middle of the night that night when she went missing and Joyce asked him about,

You know, where the fuck have you been, dickhead? We have a new baby and all this shit. Not at the time, but she was probably pregnant. And he couldn't give her a good explanation about where he'd been. She said he'd seemed all amped up that night, too, in the middle of the morning. And she noticed cuts on his hands. And so she called her sister.

I don't know why she called her sister or her own sister, but she did. But she said everybody liked Gary. He's a tall guy, has no record, is a good father to his baby. So the cops are like, I don't get it. Like, we're not getting, yeah, this guy's a creep or he's had any past run-ins. This feels like an ex-wife and ex-husband feud and she's just making wild-ass accusations. Huge accusations. Then...

She said, well, he does do weird stuff in the bedroom. Okay. She said outside the bedroom, he might be totally normal. But inside, she said he always pushed the envelope, sometimes would hold a knife to her throat as part of role playing games, which that's a weird game.

I don't like that at all. That's a strange game. I don't like crime games like that. I don't like where any accident... Like, I slip a lot. That's the other thing. I'm clumsy. I'm fucking clumsy, that kind of shit. That's like Richie Aprile and Janice when Janice goes, I mean, he unloads the gun most of the time. Most of the time. A lot of times I can't even keep this thing inside there. I'm not pretending I'm raping him. We're not doing any of that. I'm not doing that.

So what does that make me? What's my fantasy? I'm a monster? No.

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Sorry. I don't want to accidentally hurt you. No, it's the other thing. A lot of times I'm accidentally doing things right. I'm not going to fuck this up and everything's going great and then I stab you in the carotid artery. That's not good. So, yeah, anyway, she's very suspicious. She said that would happen and they play role-playing games and maybe this was further off.

She also said that in August of that year, four months after the murder, they had a big fight and that the Longmeadow police had visited their home. So she's thinking, you know, she said Joyce was hiding in a bathroom. This is what the police said. Joyce was hiding in the bathroom and refused to come out. She said through the door that she was fine and didn't need medical help, but she wouldn't come out.

Police records say this. This is from a cop. Quote, I arrived and spoke with Mr. Shara. He stated he went to Lil Peach with his wife. I assume that's a restaurant. When they were coming home, they had a fight. He dropped her off at the hill near Barbara Lane and then proceeded home. He dropped her ass off. Get the fuck out. She said, just stop the car. And he said, all right, fuck out then. That's what happened.

Unlock? Go ahead. A few minutes later, Mrs. Shara came in the house screaming. Her blouse was torn and she had a few scrapes on her side. She wouldn't let her husband see her.

That's that's her story. That's his story that she can't. Oh, man, I don't know what happened. She came in. I tried to speak to her through the door of the bathroom. She stated she was fine and that nothing happened. I asked to see her and that she stated that she didn't want to see anybody. She stated she was fine and didn't want any medical treatment. I advised Mr. Sharer that if he finds anything else out to contact the department, if you find out you beat the shit out of your wife, let us know, please.

So then a few months later in November 1992, that's when the couple split up and the court awarded Gary custody of the son. This is because Joyce is, and everybody says this, her family, friends, is a raging alcoholic. Raging alcoholic. Like...

Bad alcohol. That's usually the only way mom's losing custody is if she's got a dependency on something. She didn't even fight the decision. Yeah, she's like, yeah. She's a mess. She was probably too drunk to fill out the paperwork. She probably didn't show up because she was in a stupor. You never know. So then January 1993, she got permission for a non-custodial parent visit with her son, who wasn't even two years old. She put them both in a cab and they went to the airport and went to Seattle. Wow.

Where she got an apartment near her mother and disappeared from everybody. Incredible. So that's who we're talking about. So through her attorney, she makes the claim that she thinks Gary killed Lisa, saying that he had an unusual obsession, like we said. Now, the the Agawam police never heard of him before.

The Longmeadow police went to the house once, but they never heard of this fucking guy. He has no criminal record. There's no evidence of him being linked to any crime ever. So they were like, oh, shit. And by the way, they said the cops said they take it more seriously. But they said since the beginning of the investigation, detectives were flooded with tips from investigators.

ex-wives and former girlfriends saying their boyfriend, husband. And it's... Sometimes it's spiteful and sometimes they actually think that. They're like, oh my God, I dodged a bullet. Yeah, right. And this guy, you know, he did this weird shit and I didn't realize it till now and that's what they do. So they said that they...

Basically, detectives placed these allegations into that category of look into it, but it's an ex type of deal. Also, she kidnapped a kid, so she looks like she's an alcoholic who took a kid 3,000 miles from home. She's a dick. And might be trying to get custody of the kid a little bit more now. I may be an alcoholic kidnapper, but he's a fucking rapist murderer. He's a rapist murderer. Yeah, that's what it looks like. Denim-tearing rapist murderer.

So they talked to her family, and even her own family said, I wouldn't take much of what she says seriously. Did you smell her breath? Her family said long history of alcoholism, and at least one relative said that she was convinced that her relative was just being a, quote, crazy drunk, like always. Oh, boy. So this is...

You know, can't believe her. There's no court or police records indicating that Gary mistreated their son or wife. In fact, he was awarded custody. So interesting. Now the ex-wife says, but, but, but, but, but. I get that you're saying that, yes, it might have been he could have been anywhere else on earth that night. But you don't understand. He gave me this.

Oh, and she presents a music box thing. It's like a carousel with a blue horse in it that plays music. And she said, it's he gave me this that night. He came home late with this. They sell these at Brittany. They understand they fucking sell these here. Boy.

So this is fucked up. He told her that a little old lady with gray hair had sold it to him, and she said she had no reason to doubt the story. But now adding two and two and four and six and fucking all this together, we're getting Lord Calvert multiplied by Jack Daniels, multiplied by equals by by bitters equals. Fuck. Yeah. And blades to my throat. I'm not not real. I don't like it.

Yeah. So this music box, that's that night he came home with this shit. How weird is that? But Gary's attorney said they're going through a nasty divorce and custody battle and she's out of her fucking mind. By the way, do we mention she's a huge alcoholic? Smell her breath.

So they said the cop said at this point, we take it as far as we can. And barring anything else coming in, we don't have enough to get a search warrant or a subpoena to get Gary in and have him give us our DNA. So they don't have any way to compel him to do this. They have a next. They have a hundred other people saying my ex-husband did it. So what the fuck?

So the same collection of police reports here, they talk about basically there are people in her family here. Her mother, Joyce's mother, Gary's wife's mother, said that she's a recovering alcoholic. You –

She's transitioning back to her surname. She wants a divorce and all this. She's struggled with alcohol abuse, but she's not crazy. So you might be able to

Believe her. Take some of it, yeah. As the years go by, though, we find some real weird stuff that she does. Joyce! Apparently, at one point in 1998, she's shit-faced drunk and locks herself out of her apartment in Seattle. Sure, that happens. She attempted, she lives on the fourth floor, and attempted to scale the balconies leading to her apartment. Drunk.

And clung to a railing as her elderly father, who lived in the same building, tried to get her back in off the porches there and couldn't do it. And she fell to the ground and suffered horrible injuries but survived. Wow.

Yes. They said she was drunk. She flailed. They said she spent eight months in a medically induced coma at a specialty hospital. She landed on her fucking head. Yeah. She came out of it but had all kinds of injuries and was always in pain. She kept drinking and taking pain medication and isolating herself from her family. Joyce would eventually die of

alone in her apartment from alcohol-related problems in 2014. But she basically just added pain meds to her roster of shit now. Now she's an alcoholic who also takes them. So October 27, 1993, Unsolved Mysteries gives 10 minutes to Lisa's disappearance. Get after it, Robert Stack. 10-minute segment here, and they say that it raised new questions and offered new details. They said that...

Tons of tips came in, but nothing really added up to anything. Then the second airing of it, March 10th, 1994, yielded basically no leads whatsoever. The only thing they had was it kept coming in that the boyfriend fucked his roommate and the father covered it up because he's a detective.

Because that is a fun story. Yeah, that's a real, it's a fun one to go into. I mean, it's ridiculous. You want it to be true just for the fun story. You just do, just because it's fun. 1995, they have another vigil. 1996...

Police identify two suspects based on a psychological profile developed by FBI agents. Great. The news comes after detectives Macy and Anthony Malone traveled to Quantico and spent three days briefing 10 agents on evidence from the case. That leads nowhere, by the way.

Nice profile, guys. They say the profile's just very vague. Yeah. It's a vague profile. Yeah, of course. A lot of them are. It's Holden walking in the room and go, we're looking for a black male. We're looking for... What the fuck? Looking for a white male, 30s. Oh, well, that'll...

That's everybody. So July 1st, 1996, there's friends. They have a big golfing day to raise money for her memory to do scholarships and all that. 140 people played in a golf tournament here. It's the Lisa Ziegert Memorial Fund, and it raised about $4,000.

At a golf tournament. So they're still doing that. Got drunk and had a nice day and nothing else. Had a blast. Well, while that was happening, detectives were trying to get a better profile. They said they laid out all their evidence of the crime. And they said shortly after she was killed, the FBI did a profile on her killer. But the information then was also vague.

But they said in those three years, profiling has gotten better. Yeah. So let's try again. The thing is, we need better evidence. That's all. There's just no evidence. We have evidence. We're missing keys. Physical. Right. But we're missing stuff. Yes, exactly. 1997, they're still not giving up. They say they work the case. There are cops that say they work the case daily.

Yeah. In this town, there's not a lot of unsolved murders bopping around, so they got to do it. They review old information, tracking down new information. Here, the police refused to release names of several suspects. They continue to investigate. Lawyers for a convicted rapist named Ronald C. Harrison said he was the subject of inquiries, but he was cleared a year ago there. They said, by the way, during the

They release white balloons in all these vigil, I guess, because she pumped up balloons, I think. Okay, so let's litter in her honor. Yeah, let's send rubber. Let's kill a bunch of birds in her honor. What the fuck? So in 2000...

There's, there's been a reward. Now there is a hundred thousand dollar reward that was posted in 1999. Okay. Uh, the, it was the Berkshire power company announced the reward on the seventh anniversary of her disappearance. And they said, maybe a hundred grand, I'll get somebody to come forward. Oh yeah. They said, you try not to get too enthusiastic or hopeful because there's a letdown a lot of times, but we're hoping that's what the D said. Diane, uh,

Lisa's mother. Somebody get that news to Joyce. That'll buy a lot of, a lot of George Dickel. Oh man. So much Dickel. Joyce could be, she could get pickled and Dickel that time. She'll be dead by 2001 if she gets this. No shit. So D says the highs and lows can get you. I can imagine if you're, someone's missing and then, Oh my God, did they find something? No, they didn't. That's gotta be exhausting after years.

She went on to say, I think I was more surprised that more information didn't come in. I don't know if somebody knows something, but maybe feeling scared to come forward. They said, even if you think it's insignificant, you never know what little piece of information can pull the whole thing together. That's true. 2001, Mark Pfau there, Pfau or however you say his name, who's been working this case here, said,

He still takes all the calls. He tries to like collate all the fucking tips and get everything in order. And all the leads have led nowhere. And he had been in 2001 been promoted to detective sergeant. And now he's taking over the case completely. And he's determined to revive it, he said, because the original lead investigator retired. And he said now he's going to try to maybe fresh eyes. He can.

There we go. Stir it out. Yeah. At the time, by the way, when the guy was on the force and when this happened, they didn't even have a computer in this police force. There was not a computer at the police department in 1992. You got to raise your taxes. Not one. You guys got to have shit. Everything was typed and logged by hand. Oh, my God. Can you imagine?

So 2002, the cops want to talk to Gary. They want to get him out of the way here. They questioned him when his wife brought it up 10 years ago, but he just was like, I don't know what you're talking about, and that was that. So now, this is 2002, he comes into the station because they requested he come in to talk to him. He comes in wearing a trench coat and gloves and refuses to touch anything, keeps his hands in his pockets the whole time inside gloves.

Dude, that is the most suspicious thing you've ever done. The weirdest thing you've ever fucking done ever. He might as well have been jerking off under his trench coat. That would have been less suspicious. So he had declined an earlier request to sit down for an interview, but this time he agreed. So he shows up, like we said...

He's trench-coated, gloved, and hands in pockets, but very polite and cordial. Very polite and cordial. But they said, tell you what, dude, we can get this over with, and you'll never hear from us ever fucking again. DNA sample, babe. Spitting this cup. One swipe on that cheek, boy, we'll never hear from us again, or you'll only hear from us ever again. We'll either nobody or always. Yeah.

Yeah. Which if you didn't do some, you go, fuck. Yeah. Let's get it over with. I want to talk to you guys. He said, no, I will not give you a DNA sample. I said, why not? And his excuse is the most wonderful excuse I've ever heard. Why I don't want my DNA sampled. It's amazing. Is it because I don't want you to frame me for a bunch of things? No, it's it's way dumber than that.

Because that is possible. You think, I mean, who knows? He said, I'm scared of being secretly cloned. He's afraid they're going to clone him.

I heard about this sheep dolly. I don't want you guys making more of me. He's afraid they're going to make a bunch of Gary's. That's what they're going to do. You can't make more of me because I'm a rapist and murderer. That'll be so bad. No one wants that. Oh, my God. That's like making more of those Terminator robots. Don't do it. Got to kill the one and get it over with.

So he was scared of being secretly cloned. Secretly. We're going to do it in a secret. The police have their different rooms, and then they're like, nobody go back there. That's the clone room. Everybody out. I don't want to be walking through a Hannaford picking up apples and then see me. I don't want to grab the same apple as me. I can't do it. So.

So he'd spent the last two decades basically just, or the last decade, just being working jobs, working in the restaurant business, customer service at a rental car agency at Bradley International Airport. Oh, no. His friends, though, because they talk to people that know him, describe him as very docile and, quote, nicest guy you'll ever want to meet. Nicest guy in the world. Everybody says that about him. Real gentle guy, nice guy. 2003, they're still working it.

They say they have a three-foot-high file on the case at this point. Really? Really.

They've interviewed hundreds of people. So it's crazy. They say that they meet with other law enforcement officials 10 or 12 times a year working on cold cases like this. They found themselves reviewing funeral photos in the archives of the newspaper a couple months before this based on a tip from an unsigned letter. Like, look in there for someone who doesn't belong. The guy was there, yeah. But they said nothing checked out. They followed every lead, couldn't find any. Also, 800 people. That's crazy to look at.

That's so many. How are you going to look through that? And how are you going to say that people just didn't show up because they were... Because they're curious and sad. And this is the social event of the fucking season. Let's be honest here. Let's be realistic. Yeah.

So the one cop said, whenever we drive by that shop where she worked or see one of Lisa's friends, we think of her, and that goes for all of us. They said that though the days after the abductions and slayings grew into weeks and then months and then years, there's still answers to be had. We can solve this thing. So one cop said, I think that the answers are in front of us. It's just a matter of getting that break someday. Absolutely. Someday. 2004.

They're trying to get an amendment passed, actually. This is Dee, Lisa's mother. Yes. I'm campaigning for the passage of a victim's rights amendment for the U.S. Constitution. Oh, okay.

That's yeah. Well, let's read it here. This is from The Republican, that same newspaper armed with information kits about the amended parts of the Constitution that benefit those accused or convicted of crimes. Diane Ziegert has been calling and visiting lawmakers and law enforcement officials to gain support for the resolution now pending in the U.S. Senate.

She has been visiting groups of senior citizens asking for their support. Recently, she mailed 120 letters to members of the Massachusetts delegation signed by constituents who support the constitutional change. There are 15 amendments for the defendant, she says. The defendant or the accused is mentioned 23 times in the U.S. Constitution, and the victim is not mentioned once. That's because there's nobody coming after the victim that way. Right.

It's not that you can't. That's a victim's rights are supposed to be, uh,

You know what I mean? Yeah. It's because that's because of the persecution from England. That's why they did that. Yes, that's what I mean. People were being persecuted, right. But this basically, I don't know what they're going for because what are they saying? You have to investigate their killings? They're doing that already. They're trying, yeah. It's like saying make murder illegal. It is. They should certainly make hurting people against the law.

It's very, yeah. But I understand. I can see what she's. I get the point of it, but I don't get the practical application of it. There is no solution to that. Even if there's an amendment, they worked as hard as they can. They're trying to find it. Like, there's no way to go, oh, there's a constitutional amendment. Fuck, I better interview that guy again. I don't think anybody's doing that. Homicide detectives love solving homicides. They love it. It's their whole thing that they do. What they did is fucked with the wrong family. Yeah.

This lady is not going to stop until there's some sort of resolution. I get it. I don't blame her at all. And I can't blame her. Plus, they've never found the killer at this point. So you're just looking for something to fucking do to make some progress. I totally get it. She's just throwing punches into the wind, and she hates it. This is a nightmare. I can't imagine. We breezed over it. But I can't imagine having your daughter missing for, not missing, but the killer missing for 10 years. It's just unsolved. 10 years.

Your daughter missing for three days and you find her near a holiday that matters a lot to Catholics. And so that ruins that for her for the rest of her life. It's destroyed. And there's clearly a fucking monster in the wind for 10 years.

It's fucking one thing if she was found like in the river and there's no evidence and they couldn't find her or something. But they have DM fucking A, man. Like that's got to be so frustrating. She goes on to say, we realize that amending the Constitution isn't done lightly. It's actually extremely difficult. We went through all the steps you have to do. But it was deemed necessary to amend it for the accused. Well, that's the Bill of Rights. That was the – yeah. Yeah.

And I have no argument. There's more later. And I have no argument with any of those rights. They are there for a reason. The Victims' Rights Amendment does nothing in any way to diminish or remove any of those rights that have been granted. I don't understand why.

I still don't understand. Does she want it to be guilty until proven innocent? Is that what she wants? I don't understand. I don't get what the amendment, what they're trying to do. They never passed anyway. They never got an amendment. That's a huge deal to pass an amendment. And victims' rights, we all have them anyway. Like, give them right away before you're a victim. Especially socially and societally. It's all about that. I don't know what she's looking for. 2005, family's getting a bit impatient.

And I don't fucking blame them. I don't. Clothes are very important. Like we said, she's going for amendments. She's going for scholarships. She's trying to get anything. She says that she is hoping a member of the Licensed Private Detectives Association of Massachusetts will reach out to her family like they have with other missing people and things like that. She said that, you know, she said, it's not that I don't appreciate the efforts of state police detectives, but it's been almost 13 years.

Excellent point, T. Matt, I don't appreciate you trying, but I don't know if your effort is one thing. Yeah. I don't know if you have the skill or talent to do this at this point. Yeah.

I'm still a Broncos fan. I love watching them, but it's been years. Yeah, it's a long fucking time. Not a lot of Ws happening right now. Nope. It's rough at this point in time. We're trying quarterbacks and it's not working. It's a struggle. So she goes on to say she understands budget cuts and dozens of other cases keep investigators busy, but also, you know, she'd like to find out who killed her fucking daughter because, you know, who wouldn't? She says, but who knows what someone else might find? Fresh eyes also. Mm-hmm.

So 2008 police question. Oh, my God. Question Gary again. 15 years. 16 years after this murder. They said, anything to say for yourself, Gary? He said, I didn't do it. I know that much. He said, I didn't do it. He said, I don't really read newspapers. They said, have you been seeing what's going on? And he said, I only really scan the headlines, so I don't know. And he was sitting well away from the table in the interview room. Again, he's...

Would not touch anything and refused to even touch the bottle of water they put before him. Hilarious. Wouldn't touch anything. They said, again, extremely polite, extremely cordial. They said, though, that his attire and behavior seemed odd. Was he wearing a fucking... A trench coat with his hands in his pockets. That's his get-an-interrogated outfit. Was he wearing a pickle up his ass or something? Yeah.

He was wearing just like a Siegfried and Roy outfit. It was really weird. Shoulder pads. Shoulder pads the whole thing. It was very strange. They said one police trooper said on the video he looked like someone who was trying to avoid giving DNA. Like, I'm going to sit back here. Yeah. Now, when they're sitting him down, one of the cops says, I think this may be the first time we're getting your side of the story as to why she's linking you to the homicide back here. Yeah.

And Gary said that he had no idea why his ex-wife would claim that thing other than the divorce. And he said when she said that and you guys asked me, quote, I went, what? What are you talking about? Like, wait, what the this is new. First, he said I was trying to fuck your sister. And now this it's this is crazy. I don't want to deal with you. So Gary walked out of the station again. They said, how about some DNA? He said cloning technology is even better now. No, no.

It's outrageous. They'll make 100 of me. Absolutely not. Can't do it. No can do, chief. So 2009, by the way, this is kind of neat. Students with visual impairments will get some help from the Lisa M. Zygert family, which has donated a software program. Fantastic. Valued at $795.

Diane, the mother, said that the donation is one of many that have come from a fund established in 1992. She said they've given away about $75,000 since the fund's been established. That's fantastic. That's fucking great. Lisa's still doing work. That's great. Still helping kids, which is nice. They're trying to do something, though. So the mom said this was kind of special. It was donated in the memory of the father of a dear friend of ours who knew Lisa, and he became blind in his later years. Oh, that's so cool.

This helps visually impaired. And the picture in the paper is a kid with glasses on. Look at this. Sitting two inches from the screen typing. Poor kid. I can't see shit. It might as well. There might as well be a bubble coming out of her mouth. Fuck, I relate so hard. And I see you when you're doing shout outs.

2010 Unsolved Mysteries. They get their own episode, babe. The whole day. Oh, yeah. The whole 30 damn minutes of this. The whole thing. Yeah, this is the non-Robert Stack. This is the newer ones now. Yeah, because Stack's dead. Obviously, he died. This one generates hundreds of completely false leads.

Oh, this way. And this wastes the cops time for months. Yeah. This whole thing is they have to chase down every lead and they're all a load of shit. So it's all a lot of people go. And I think it's my my brother, my cousin, my boyfriend, my ex-boyfriend. Talk to Ed. Yeah. Have you talked? Have you talked to fucking old cornhole Ed over there?

Now, 2013, remember Noelle? Remember our friend Noelle there? She saw on TV about his kid. Yeah, she was working doing shifts at several teaching hospitals in Boston. And during that time, she met a surgeon, fell in love, and got married. Wow.

That a girl? So she didn't really see Gary anymore, except at a high school reunion or there was a reunion dinner that one of her friends planned that wasn't an official high school reunion, but she ran into him there. But she married a surgeon, has a house down the Cape. She's doing great. She's doing just fine. Lots of lobsters and oyster in her life.

She saw Gary at an event in 2013 and said he was much heavier now. Really? Like close to 300 pounds heavy. Oh, it went sad. And he has diabetes now as well, which isn't helping. Yeah. And yeah, she said that, you know, she's married now and hadn't talked to him in a while. So she just gave him a quick howdy ho. How you doing there? Hello. Hello.

Then by March 2015, she's in the middle of a divorce with her surgeon husband. Shit isn't going so well anymore. No, but she's getting that house down the Cape. Well, maybe if she didn't have a prenup there. Yeah. Which 2010. Yeah. He might have had a prenup on her. And those houses aren't worth near as much as they were a few years ago. No, no. He wrote her a Dear John letter and told her that he was ending the marriage.

He said, quote, I love you as a friend, but not as a wife. Oh, shit. I'm not going to live for years in a bad marriage or relationship again. Oh, no. So I've been married once. That didn't work. Thought the second time's a charm. And I said, you know what? Fuck this. A letter is fine. Letter is fine. So Noel isolated herself for several months until her friend invited her to another reunion dinner from high school.

She took it as an opportunity to see some people and get out of the fucking house and maybe not be so weird. So she sees Gary again. She said Gary had lost a whole bunch of weight and looked great now. Wow. Got his shit together. So she said they had dinner together and toward the end, he wrote his phone number down and gave it to her.

And said, you know, I'd like to get together sometime with you. So she said, all right, this is nice. Somebody's interested in me. And she said, quote, I know Gary and his family. It's not like meeting some stranger on Snapchat. I've known this guy since we were 15 years old. This is easy.

Things are going great. Few months of dating. She felt that she had met Mr. Fucking the one, Mr. Right. Romantic comedy shit here. This is beautiful. Crazy. He had a steady job as a shuttle driver for Enterprise Rental at the airport. Not exactly a surgeon, but he works. The mortgage is paid or at least rent, whatever. He works and that's important. That's all. Yeah.

He loves animals, which is big for her. She's got two rescue dogs, and so she needs a guy who's really good with animals. He's really good with animals and especially good with children as well.

She said at a birthday party for her friend's two-year-old son, Gary played with the kid the whole day. She thought he might be overcompensating because he didn't have contact with his own son who was living in Seattle with relatives. And when she asked him, Gary claimed that those relatives had poisoned his son against him. Poisoned him. Yeah.

Gary was an attentive boyfriend. They said she'd get sick. He'd be there with a bowl of soup in no time. Fucking ready to go. They decorated Christmas cookies over holiday. It's a dream. It really is. It's a dream. It's a dream. Even Gary even drove one of her pets to the animal hospital after the dog had a seizure and collapsed. Oh, my God. And then comforted Noel when Noel decided she had to put the dog down because it was very ill. Made her a nice clam chowder. Sure.

She said that when they were hugging about this, she noticed he had tears streaming down his face as well. He was crying too. He's over someone else's dog. That's what a nice guy he's in. He's also, like I said, really into Batman. Really into Batman. Still?

hugely into even more now oh in the 2010s he's like this has been my time i've been waiting for this forever years of batman she said he had a collection of batman t-shirts all the batman t-shirts and whenever they went out to dinner he always wore a batman shirt that time i always have to get my best bat clothes on gotta go back to the bat the bat cave and get my oh my god t-shirt

His bat shirts he's got to get. So she did notice some odd behavior. Number one, she thought that Gary suffered from anxiety around crowds. When they went to the Boston Marathon together two years after the bombings, she recalled that Gary became uneasy when he saw how tight the security was lined up along the route because it was post-bombing. She was a little taken aback when he got upset and refused to walk through the police checkpoint.

She said that he was just pale with fear. So as time went on, she went to she started to wonder why was it crowds or what's going on? One day she recruited Gary to to drive her a wheelchair bound patient to the girl's senior prom. It was a young girl in a wheelchair. Will you drive her to the senior prom and show for her there?

So this is at a country club. After the dance, the team struggled with the ramp and nearly fell out of the chair. Gary rushed to the girl's aid and saved her from basically catapulting out of the chair and onto a sidewalk. He grabbed her at the last second and saved her. But they called 911 when the police arrived, though, because it was protocol of if you have a patient, you have to call 911 if there's any incident to get her checked out.

Right.

Also, he's not into sex, really. No? She said he's really not interested in sex. Maybe she should put like a Joker makeup on. Maybe that'd be different. Maybe he'd get into it. Have you tried dressing like Michelle Pfeiffer? Well, she said at first I thought, oh my God, it must be me. Was I not dressed right? Does this cat suit fit poorly? What's going on?

Did I not look right? She said she thought it was strange, but she enjoyed his companionship and didn't want to end the relationship because she liked him. She accepted the fact that he saw her as a kind of a platonic girlfriend.

They just kind of sat and watched TV together. That's what my ex-husband did, so whatever. Why not? So she had someone to spend time with, and that was fine. And she thought that Gary seemed like a safe bet, so why fuck with it? He doesn't drink. He doesn't smoke. She said that his idea of getting wild was wearing a T-shirt with a Bengal tiger print on it.

That was like not a... Swap meet shirts? Not a Cincinnati Bengals? I think so. Not a Bengals shirt. A swap meet shirt. Instead of his normal Batman. And for him, going real crazy was rocking out to Billy Joel.

Yeah. He loved the song, which I... Fuck, that's great. Yeah, I love Billy Joel. He's a rock god. I want to rock out to Billy Joel. And he loved the song Innocent Man and would often hum it for hours at a time. What? An innocent man. Whose favorite Billy Joel song is Innocent Man? Never heard that. Nobody's favorite song. Not Vienna, not scenes from an Italian restaurant, not fucking any of that shit. No, not... Downeaster Alexa? Nothing? You're running with Innocent Man? Innocent Man. That's weird. So...

She wanted Gary to meet her family, and Gary was interested in meeting the family, especially wanted to meet her famous brother, Rick, who was the FBI agent who he led the investigations of the Boston Marathon bombings, not just as a part of the team. Wow.

She said he's told her your brother, the FBI agent. I got to watch out for him. You know, like joking around like, oh, boy, you know, you mess up around that guy. So Gary charmed her whole family, including FBI leading investigator brother, thought he was a great guy. They met on Easter at Easter dinner and the family saw after the first marriage ended for Noel poorly. They said, this is great. Gary is the perfect guy for her. She seems so happy.

2016. No. Yes. Police are now knocking out cold cases like nobody's business because we got DNA to a really family thing, too, is working out. They can do that. They can go on the Internet and find out.

So they meant they were able to put together a digital composite image of the killer. Yeah. Some basics based on his genetic material. They said a white man of European extract with some freckling, dark eyes, black or brown hair. That's what they mainly found. They said all evidence and leads previously developed in this case are now being evaluated in view of this new forensic development.

They know that for sure. That's genetics. Yeah, that's DNA. That's what shows up on the ladder. That's it. They said with the mission renewed here, they said that they began poring over voluminous stacks of case files, focusing their attention on 11 suspects who matched the digital composite and had refused to provide a DNA sample in question. There's 11 of those people that hit the middle of that Venn diagram. 11. Oh.

That's a lot. So after taking the case to a grand jury, they received court orders granting permission to force any unwilling suspect to provide a DNA sample. Whoa.

No, let's go. Yep. Authorities sent the DNA sample. They collected at the crime scene to a lab and conducted, conducted the phenotyping or phenotyping, which determines the physical characteristics. Now they test all the proteins and get the characteristics that come up for each. It's amazing. Crazy. That's cool. That's pretty goddamn cool. Yeah. They're going to be like, and he likes Cocoa Puffs pretty soon. They're going to get very specific. Well,

With a penchant for cookie crisp. He just loves it. I'm telling you. That's what it is. It's cookie crisp. Gary is on this list, of course. He'd been repeatedly questioned. Doesn't want to be cloned, if we remember correctly. He is one of 11 suspects. So they want to do that. They said we had to strategize about how could someone commit such a heinous crime and not do it again and not get caught.

So they said it might have because they ran this his that the offenders did

data, uh, G DNA through the database and it's coming up in no other unsolved crimes or solved crimes. Never done it ever again. Either that or was more careful about didn't leave buried them all. Nobody's ever found them. Yeah. Yeah. Got better at what they were doing. So they said, so the focus became the refusals. The vast majority of people we contacted were cooperative and had no problem providing DNA samples. Yeah. Gary is working for the Bradley international airport enterprise rent a car. Uh,

At this point in time here, he is also working at Hofbrau Haus, which is a German restaurant as well. So September 13th, 2017, they visit his residence in West Springfield. He's got a roommate in a two-bedroom apartment.

At the front door, it's a two-family home. It's just like the house number two of our thing. They have the first floor. And then the second floor is another place. The man says that Gary's not home, but I'll tell him you stop by. Sure.

Later that day, Gary called Noel and asked if he could stay at her place for the night. Well, with the heat around here. Yeah. Those things are getting hot. I got to go on the lam here. But he had never spent the night at her home during the week while he was working. It's a school night. Why would you come over? Yeah. He told her the traffic around his street was intense because of the hordes of visitors flocking to the gates of the Big E Fair. Hmm.

What we talked about and things to do. Goddamn Brothers Osborne. See, why do you think... Come on! Fucking Ludacris is here. Fucking... Flava Flav is in the house, man.

He worried about being late to work the next morning, so he wanted to stay there. He showed up at Noelle's house 20 minutes later. They watched TV, ate dinner. The next morning, she woke up before dawn and got dressed for work while he slept and gave him a kiss goodbye, and that was that. Later that day, she returned home at 4.30 and noticed that Gary wasn't there, but his wallet, watch, and a handful of coins were on the kitchen counter.

which guys grab their wallet and watch when they leave somewhere. She thought that's weird. His car isn't in the driveway. Why wouldn't he take his wallet with him? That's strange. So she, yeah, she tried to call his cell phone, but it was shut off. So she couldn't even leave a message.

So she went upstairs, took a shower, changed out of her work clothes, walked downstairs, then noticed a clipboard belonging to Gary on the coffee table. Attached to it was a letter with Noel's name at the top. I'm not reading another fucking letter. She thought she thought it was another Dear John letter. She was like, are you fucking kidding me, man? Again? I don't even warrant talking to face to face. What have I done?

So then she finds out, oh, this is way worse than a Dear John letter. What is it? Quote, you are going to find out some awful things about me today. Oh, no. Today. They will tell you I abducted, raped, and murdered a young woman approximately 25 years ago. It's all true. Oh, my God. All of it.

I had no intention of killing her when I grabbed her, but events spun out of my control. She fought. That's what it was. Yeah. That was it. And in the eyes of the law, it's all the same. Yeah. What is it? No, I was just going to rape her.

Oh, he was just going to rape her. I mean, it wasn't even mean to kill her. That's all. Yeah, it's the same. It's worse. It's out of control, you guys. It's fucking worse if that's why you did it. Yeah. And in the eyes of the law, it's all the same. I have never regretted anything so much.

I always knew one day it would catch up to me, and now it has. I received a text from my roommate last night that the state police were at the house with important papers for me. That will be a warrant to take DNA, and that will send me away for life. I have never really been or felt normal. From a very young age, I was fascinated by abduction and bondage.

What? Yep. I could never keep it too far from my mind for long. On that fateful day, I let myself do something terrible. I've never forgiven myself of that. I also never did anything of the like again, which is probably true. If he's baring his soul right now, he's saying he did it. I think I believe it. And he's not planning on going to jail for it, so as we'll find out here. Right.

I hated what happened. I despised myself. I thought of turning myself in hundreds of times over the years, but I truly am a coward. Today it will all end. I will either take my own life or face the music as it were. And then a big fancy G he writes for Gary.

The next two pages are his last will, which, by the way, is not valid in Massachusetts. It's a handwritten will at the end. Holographic will, I think they call it. Also, you've got a roommate. What could there be to will? Yeah, honestly. Your bedroom set? What do you got? Your Ikea dresser? The enterprise rental car clerk in his 50s? Come on, man. Jesus Christ. So they said that...

This he expressed remorse. The next two were a last will and testament and a letter to Lisa's family as well, saying that he could never apologize enough for taking their daughter's life and siblings. He said, I never expect or deserve your forgiveness, but I hope knowing who I am and knowing I am gone will bring you some closure and peace. I'm truly sorry. G.E.S. Gary Edwards. So at first, Noel doesn't believe this.

I don't know why you wouldn't believe a murder confession letter. He wrote to the family, ma'am. She said, I thought he was having a psychotic breakdown and that he'd only imagined that he had committed this heinous crime, that he was just pretending that he did this. Who pretends this? Who pretends to rape and kill a girl 30 years ago? It's the craziest thing I've ever heard in my life. Is there...

Perhaps his playlist of Innocent Man on repeat. Over and over again. Come on, lady. But he listens to Innocent Man. He doesn't listen to Wraith and Killed That Girl decades ago. I never heard him put that song on once.

He didn't play uptown girl. He played innocent man. He played innocent man. Jesus Christ. So she heads to the police station, though. She got into her car and heads to the state police barracks in Westfield. And she's crying and asking to speak with someone working on the Lisa Ziegert case. Investigators were very stunned because...

You know, she just shows up with this. They said they never police said eventually they figured DNA would find a killer, whether alive or dead or something. But they never thought they'd see a confession, especially a written one. They never thought that whoever keeps it for this long is going to keep it. They're going to deny it. And especially to his girlfriend. So they interrogate her into the night to make sure she's not nuts. Basically, they ask her hundreds of questions, including where the fuck is Gary?

She said she's afraid he committed suicide and was hanging from a tree somewhere. And then she added at the end of this, I still love him very much. Oh, my God. Noel, this fucking Noel. Good God. So then the Pafow or Fow guy gets a call from state police, gets in the squad car, goes over to the barracks, reads the letters himself.

And he's like, holy fucking shit. He said, it's him, isn't it? He turned to them and says, this is the guy. This is the fucking guy. He said, the hairs on your neck are standing up like you knew this was real. It didn't reveal a full confession. He didn't go into details. But between that and DNA, pretty good case we got here. Not bad, yeah.

And so the detective said, I've been around a long time and it seems like he's trying to clear his conscience is what he's trying to do. So they said that, you know, the Fafau guy said, this is crazy because I'm the one who visited Joyce McDonald Schar's relatives in Seattle. Yeah. When they told him that she got a music box like the one sold at Britney's there. I was there for that. I held that fucking music box. I had her saying it's him.

25 years ago. Yeah. So police have only great thing Joyce ever did in her life was that that's it. That was tried to get your fucking attention, man. Yeah. And then she ended up she's dead by now. Yeah. So they still have to find Gary. He's on the lamp. Right. I don't know where the fuck he is. So they and now it is to lose. No, but very easy to find because I just ping a cell phone. Yeah. Yeah. He probably doesn't know that. No, they track him by GPS coordinates to Stafford Springs, Connecticut.

Okay. Which is just past 10 p.m. when they find his black Honda Civic in the parking lot at Johnson Memorial Hospital. Wow. The plot thickens. Yeah. No sign of Gary in the car, but they do find a note on his dashboard saying, to whomever finds my body, I apologize for any psychological trauma incurred. Please call Massachusetts State Police. Thank you, GES.

Where are you, Carmen Sandiego? This is a nightmare. He is unflinchingly polite and cordial. I'll give him that. I mean, honestly, he really is a polite, cordial guy. Turns out he is inside the emergency room having his stomach pumped because this complete fucking dildo. No way. In the most piss poor suicide attempt in the history of the world. Parking lot?

Took a handful of ibuprofen. What are you, a 19-year-old girl? He took a bunch of Advil. And then in two seconds after he got it down his throat, he got terrified of dying and ran into the emergency room and went, help me, save me.

I just ate 12 Advil. I'm going crazy. Okay. I mean, your blood will be slightly thin and you probably won't have a headache for a couple days. I don't know what to tell you. Your period cramps are gone, sir. Yeah. Ibuprofen, you can take large or like Tylenol. If you took a handful of Tylenol, two days later, you'd drop dead.

Is that right? Yeah, Tylenol is a different type of drug, whereas Advil, ibuprofen, is a different thing completely. Yeah, there's people that do that. Take a bunch, then you drop dead like a day and a half later from Tylenol. Wow, ibuprofen is incredibly safe for that. You just can't take it every day 25 times a day. Then your kidneys will fall out. You'll get yourself an ulcer. It'll fuck your whole system up.

So they search his apartment and they search his girlfriend, Noelle's home. As the officers swarmed her place, Noelle calls her brother, who's the FBI agent who was driving to his corporate security job at Penske Corporation. He must be retired. He's retired from the FBI.

And she said, Gary's under arrest for the murder of Lisa Zygert. Now I have police coming to my house looking for evidence. And he told her, what the fuck do you want me to do about it? He turned his car around to come back, but he said, he told her, she said, what should I do? And he said, be compliant. What the fuck do you think you're going to do? Let them in. You have FBI agents fucking swarming your house. What are you supposed to do? Well,

Also, that guy was at Christmas last year. How did I miss that? That's what I'm saying. This is a guy fucking leading a huge investigation, sat next to a murderer and went, great guy. Finally, my sister met somebody nice. You found a tiny little bomb juice maker in a boat in the backyard of somebody's house. This idiot? Two and a half decades. The guy sitting next to you is a jeans ripping murderer. Fucking unbelievable. Unbelievable.

So she said, of course I'm going to be compliant. I can't believe this is happening. How could I have dated him for more than two years without knowing who he really was? Am I gullible? And he told her, quote, we all like Gary. Baby, I'm trained in this shit. I like to do. Trust me.

So while they're searching for his shit through her house, she tells them this is his toothbrush and a full syringe used to treat his diabetes. Bingo. So if you need DNA, this might be where to get it. Oh, we've got him. We're all right. Yeah, we're good. They searched the well under her house as well, and including every cereal box in her kitchen cabinet, they really searched hard here.

In the end. Are they looking for the prices? What are they looking for in the cereal box? I don't know what evidence they're going to find in a cereal box. They're looking for DNA evidence. There's no other evidence. He's not going to have like a selfie of him next to the body hidden in the Lucky Charms box. Every week he moves the sock he took off of her into the new fucking Kashi box. Well, we're out of Froot Loops. Better move this into the Apple Jacks. What the fuck are you talking about? What are you doing?

Very strange. They're looking for a man. Oh, man. You know that's going to happen. So they end up getting saliva from the toothbrush. Right. And they run it. And sure as shit, that matches. And they said, Pafow said, when we finally put him in a jail cell, he sat on the bench, leaned up against the concrete wall, and just exhaled.

It was finally over. There was no more looking over his shoulder. Basically, they think this tormented this guy for 25 years of being terrified of being caught. Not so much guilt. Who knows if it was guilt or just fear of being caught. But either way, this guy had felt this shit for 25 years. The anxiety of it. Good. Yeah. Fuck. I hope he wasn't having a great life.

Pulling over, dancing to songs and shit. Fuck him. I hope he put on that 150 with fucking shitty food and guilt and fear. Oh, yeah. So for the next few years, too, they cycle his DNA through the FBI's combined system every week, comparing it with all these samples, and they've never had one other hit. Nothing. Wow.

This is it. He did it once and said, oh, God, that was horrible. Never did it again. But still, once is enough. Asshole, you can't kill a fucking young girl like that. That's nuts. So Noel's mom here, Dee, said, we will just never know. I don't know why he chose her because he won't talk. He just he won't say why. He just says, I did it. And that's that. You know, I did it. Leave me the fuck alone.

Did she remind him of someone? Was he angry about something else and just walked into the store? All the girls Lisa went places with said they never remembered seeing him before.

So he was not like a common person. They showed pictures of him from back then and they went, don't remember that guy. Just blended into the background. I've never seen him before. Back then, too, like I saw his high school senior pictures from the yearbook. He looks like wallpaper, just blends right in. Nothing about him stands out back then. So a relative of Gary's who didn't believe his ex-wife now.

The relative says she's wracked with guilt because she doubted Joyce's story. Initially, just thinking Joyce is an alky. And she said, quote, I always thought maybe she was just being a crazy drunk, but she wasn't. She was right. She was trying to save her son's life. There it is. And she's a crazy drunk. Those things don't need to be mutually exclusive. That's the thing. They can exist at the same time. This is fucked up. Two days after the arrest, Noelle celebrates her birthday. Yay, happy birthday. What?

She receives a bouquet of flowers at her home, opens it up, and it's from Gary. He ordered them before he was ever arrested. Oh, shit. Yeah, he did it ahead of time. Already ready to go. She's about to be reminded of me in 48 hours. He already paid for it, so they delivered it, even though he was in jail. And she said that she was, you know, obviously freaked out. Tormented, yeah.

He continued to send her cards and letters during his incarceration. She said he went to jail. And at that point, part of me was still thinking of him as my boyfriend. I couldn't make that change in my head that he wasn't.

Then after a few months, she went to the jail, sat there, sat across from him with the telephone through the plexiglass and said, you lied to me and to everybody for 25 years. I'm going to come back someday and you're going to tell me why you did this. You owe me that. I think he owes the family that. He doesn't owe you shit. He owes me that.

You went out for a year. Like, who cares? Not only do I deserve it, but everyone else who's a part of this nightmare that you've created deserves it. The Zygert family will never have their daughter back. She had a whole life ahead of her. And Gary just stared blankly at her, never said a word. She got up and left, stared at her.

Her life is also a little fucked up here. She said that she maintains a low profile, doesn't do any media interviews really, and didn't want to appear at any of his court hearings. She also said she's in debt because of her divorce and was terrified that she was going to lose her job because, quote, who wants a nurse that had dated a murderer caring for their critically ill child? Yeah.

She looks bad by. Yeah. She also wrote a letter to D to Lisa's mom and said, I know that nothing can ever bring your daughter back, but I hope that you are at least comforted by the fact that justice has been served. And D telephoned her and thanked her for that. Really? For helping the cops do this and not being an asshole. D said she went to the site of the body dumping just to see what what Gary to get him out of her head. Yeah.

She said, Gary, yeah. Right.

Gary, again, is the answer to that. She said she had to get professional help here. She fell into a deep depression. She said, quote, my life is pretty horrible right now, but I have my friends and family, and without their support, I don't even know why I'm here. Dee said that? No, that's Noelle. Gary...

Their friends said this is all of his friends said, no, no, this is crazy. They even said his interactions with women. He was always kind, funny, gentlemanly, chivalrous, never weird, never creepy. All of his friends said they could not find a single thing that even in retrospect looked weird. Yeah. Not even. Oh, now. Yeah. That's what killers do. That's what he does. Yeah.

One friend said,

Well, he fucked up and he knows that's going to come up, man. That raises flags. His former boss at the restaurant said he was a good looking kid. Reasonably good personality. Reasonably good personality. He's very honest. If you ever want to know the truth, ask this guy. He said there was nothing, nothing to suggest that he did such a thing.

Now, when he first gets arrested in 2017, he pleads not guilty. But then by 2019, when trial is about to come, he changes his plea to guilty.

You have to. Gives up. Yep. And prosecutors, this is the first time Lisa's mom has seen the confession letter. She hasn't seen it before. They finally show her. And she said, my first reaction to the letter, I thought, this is absolutely frightening. Just frightening. And it's amazing it didn't happen again. But I'm glad he wrote it because it's him saying, I did it, and him writing it and him signing it. That makes it pretty. Aside from his admitted preoccupation with abduction and bondage,

No clues. And D says, we just will never know. I don't know why he chose her. Did she remind him of someone? We don't know. So sentencing comes around. You, sir, may fuck off life without parole. Yeah. You're done. It's over.

Yeah. One of the cops who often went to the cemetery, he said, to talk to Lisa during the investigation brought a single rose to her grave after Gary was caught. He said, I put a card on it. It just said, Lisa, it's done. Rest in peace. And I put it on her stone because it's done.

You could have just said that. She can't read. Also, that's mad creepy for anybody that comes to visit. Like, what's done, man? I don't like this. That's almost just like performative to me. Yeah. You could have just said that privately. It's done card sitting on top of a gravestone. It's like, golly, man. Does Hallmark make that card? Yeah.

You know what I mean? Is that card even on Etsy? Can you find that? Your murderer has finally been apprehended. Is that a card you get? Justice is served cards. So after he sentenced D and this is this is amazing that this woman said this because this D really is a real honest lady that seems to tell you how she feels. She said they said, do you feel great? And she said, relieved, but also let down. Oddly, she said, it's like, OK, so what do I do now?

Because this whole time it felt like Lisa's been there because she's had a purpose. So now it's just what? Now there's nothing. What do you do? It's almost like this kept...

Her having a purpose. She said, what do I do now? I can't fight anymore for justice for Lisa because now we have that. But for so long, it consumed a lot of our lives and mine in particular because I was the face of our fight. But now we are thinking we'll finally go on a trip somewhere because we won't worry anymore that we'll get some important phone call and have to turn around and come back.

They haven't done a vacation in 25 years. She's worried she's going to get out or some shit. Yeah. No, now she's not. But she was worried that before, if they ever went away, they'd get some update on the case. They'd have to come back. Now, here is the thing. On the Unsolved Mysteries page, under the comments, some people had some good points. One is, why didn't they do a paternity test with the child with Gary's fucking kid? Yahtzee. Why didn't they ask the ex? Hey, Joyce, since you have access to the kid and think he did it.

Let's get a swipe from your kid. Why didn't they do that? They never even. Fowl. Fowl. Fowl. It's very, very fucking interesting. Great. And there's a lot of people who insist there was another person involved.

Don't know why. A lot of people. There's a book written called No Tomorrows, where this is one of the stories they talk about, by Joanne Connors Wade. It's a bunch of Massachusetts Northeast cases and abduction murder epidemic. It was written in 2006, so before the resolution of it. And the only way to get it is on paperback for $23 on Amazon. So that ain't happening. And that, everybody, is...

Agawam, Agawam, Agawam, Agawam, Massachusetts. And one fucked up hell of a goddamn weird story. It's so sad that, I mean, somebody on the Internet just goes, why didn't they do this? Yeah, duh. The whole FBI didn't think of that. The whole police department. Maybe they did. And maybe, I don't know. Maybe she wouldn't allow it. Why? She was trying to put him in there. Maybe the kid didn't. Maybe they got to the kid.

and he was an adult already? No, because the kid was born in like 93. So the kid wouldn't be an adult. She should have been able to get it any time. Yeah, still 2011. I don't understand it. So whatever the fuck it is, there you go. That's the case. If you like the show, please tell the world about it. Tell everyone about it. Tell social media about it. Tell your friends about it. And of course, leave a review on whatever app you're listening on. It helps so much. Give five stars and say something nice. You can't tell you how much that helps the show. So we really appreciate when you do that.

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This week, what you're going to get for crime and sports, we're going to talk about this will be very fun. The most inept teams of all time. It's a lot of failure. We'll skip that old Buccaneer team. We did a whole episode about the 70s, but there's plenty of other losers that are fun to talk about. And then we will talk about for small town murder, a little bit of the Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell mess. Yes.

There's some specific points we'll talk about that are just fucking nuts. We have to, we have not touched on that at all. And it's, and it'll take years to discuss the whole thing. We may as well just talk about the scandal. You could do a whole podcast. Yeah. We'll do the stuff about, and we know stuff about the comedian brother and all that shit. And,

And her weird, we'll talk about her weird philosophies and stuff. Patreon.com slash crime and sports is where you get all that. And you get a shout out. You bet. When do you get that? Right motherfucking now. Jimmy, hit me with the names of the most wonderful God people on this earth who have given us money and listened to our shit and keep coming back for more. Hit me with them right now. This week's executive producers are Kurt Burkhart. Thank you, Kurt. That was...

Unbelievably kind. You're so nice. You're a good dude. Jason Fuller, love you, man. I hope you're doing well. Hang in there. Keep going. Fight the good fight. Elena Zemel, Sharon Jones, Jasper McIntyre, and his new bride, Annie. Congratulations. Rock star Rod Campbell in Victoria, Australia is fighting his ass off, James. And, uh...

He updates me from time to time on Facebook, but he's got a terrible cancer, but he's honest to Christ, beating the motherfucker out of it at 49 and facing it in an incredibly brave way. Good for you, Rod. It's amazing to have you along. Fuck yeah. Brittany Benoit Colquitt also.

And, yeah, that's the exact. You guys are amazing. Thanks for everything you do. Other producers this week are Liz Vasquez, Peyton Meadows, Mikaela Estrada, I believe. Monge is back. Is it Monge? Hey, Monge Sanji, yeah. Is that it? Did we determine that's how you pronounce that? I don't know. Oh, I don't know, but he's never corrected us on it. That's what we've been saying for eight years now, so, yeah. It could be Mon-hey, I don't know. Hey, Monge Sanji.

I have no idea. Yeah. Great guy. Uh, Janice Hill, Greg Walsh, not George, uh, Audrey Conway, Remy Martin, Julie Delano, Delano, maybe, uh, Delano. Uh,

Elaine Leroy, Kelly Burton, James Narzovich. Yeah, that's true. Nicholas McComb, Caleb W., Lisa Anderson, Linda Stranges, Ryan L., Brianna Diageu, Diago, Chloe, Noel Farr, Tim Rogers, R. McCoola, four. I don't know. There's three others, evidently. Maybe he's the fourth. Alan E., Bree Jones. What is this? Oh, boy. What did I write? Raiju. Raiju.

Benjamin Krause, Chum Bucket with no last name, Kate Goring, Robert McClimas, Ashton Perkins, Tiffany Simon, Lisa Duvall-Florian, Thiedman, Emily C., Zachary Miller, Kyler Manter, Renee Repic, Spa, 64822. There's a lot of Spas, evidently, 64,000 of them. Bong Queen, XOXO.

XO. She loves and kisses or hugs and kisses. Loves and kisses. Borg queen. That's what it is. Not bomb. Whoops a daisy. Ha ha.

Dana with no last name. Christopher Legault. Kate with no last name. Tyler and Ariana Minor. Crystal Sheffield. Nicole Gandolfo. Brett with no last name. Taylor Grossi. Bethany Svenby. Ora Guzman. Jessica Chico. Jeff with no last name. Josie Chavez. Jonah Hanji. Oh, boy.

Tracy Smith, Joe Boyd, Dina Hollister, Crystal Lukens, William Foles, Megan Burrells, Christina Little, Jacob Eve, Phyllis Spence, Alex with no last name, Savvy Travy, Amber Moore, Nicole Martin, Heather with no last name, Josh with no last name, John Taylor, Megan Ellsmore, Shell with no last name, David Alden, oh boy, Adel Steinsen, Paul Adler,

Paul Adelman, John Anderson, Anna Chamboles, Fuzzy Zeller, Nina with no last name, Joseph Pope, Tiffany Naffet, Zach Cole, Justine with no last name, Tracy Wood, Kayla Branstetter. Yep, Branstetter. Kelly Howe, J. Kill,

Caitlin Chessie, Mary Ann, Mary Jane, Mary Jane Beatty, Nicholas Saeed, Robbie Pistol, Neil Carlton, Patrick with no last name, Laura McGeechan, Brett Sawyer.

Scott Peterson, probably not, but possible. Maybe. He could be a big fan, even though we've talked mad shit about him. Probably a piece of shit, but not this one. Matt Renfer, Catalina with no last name, Valerie Hillard, Yvette Ramirez, Jason Bethoud. Bethoud.

Beat Howd. All right. Catherine Cohen. Laura. Nice work. Laura Goldfarb. Brian Langston. Marilyn Copeland. Jacob Woolman. Amanda with no last name. Jason Grunspan. Adrian Ybarra. Shen with no last name. Kimmy with no last name. Rudes and Holes. Holes. Rudes and Holes. Gabriela. Mattias. Matthews. Rochelle. Rochelle Williams. Mark.

Cole Mann, Willie Wiley Matthews, Jamie Hebb, Katie Gouge or Goge. It's probably, I don't know. It's probably something else. It's probably, I don't fucking know what I'm doing. April Thornton, Rogelio, Rogelio, Rogelio.

rodgelio it's rodriguez is his last name so it doesn't matter he knows who he is charlie benet motherfucker charlie bennett katherine bennett probably two of the same family bennett uh tiara speth lenita green yep uh dallas perrin stephanie hall london mitchell kurt jurgens oh boy that's a tough all right alan

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Janelle Dutile, Derica, Derica, Derica Richard, Derica. It's Derica, right? The fish fingerer. The fish fingerer. My Christ. Emily Borgi, Thomas Richardson, Brittany Benoit Colquitt. I said that. Tyra Gode, Gode, and all of our patrons. You guys are fantastic. Thank you.

Thank you so much, everybody. You guys are fucking awesome. We cannot thank you enough for all that you do for us. You keep this train going forward and you keep us afloat. So thank you for all that you do. Keep coming back and doing more and we'll keep pumping out as much cool stuff as we possibly can. And we will keep doing that every single week. You want to follow us on social media? It's all on shutupandgivememurder.com. Keep coming back. And until next week, everybody, it's been our pleasure. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye.

I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around. She's like...

I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. It's like doubling and tripling, and it's all these girls. With a diagnosis the state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, well, yeah. Yeah.

Is this the largest mass hysteria since The Witches of Salem? Or is it something else entirely? A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios, Hysterical.

Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.