March 29, 2022 • 34 mins
Joining us is journalist Lori Falce. Lori has over 20 years of experience, primarily in crime reporting. She currently serves as the opinion editor for the Tribune Review in the greater Pittsburgh area. Lori previously served as the deputy editor for the Centre Daily Times. In conversation with Lori, is producer Jeff Shane.
When a small town is rocked by a murder, a bored housewives’s secrets will prove to be the killer’s undoing. However, as the investigation takes many twists and turns the true motive for the senseless crime leaves everyone stunned.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Falling in love is the best feeling in the world.
You see stars, you feel giddy, But sometimes that makes
you do crazy things, and sometimes that means murder. Just
because the story starts out with once upon a Time
doesn't mean it ends happily ever after. Welcome to Crazy
and Love, a production of Katie Studios and I Heart Radio.
(00:25):
Today's guests are True cron producer Jeff Shane, joined by
journalist Laurie Falls. Laurie has over twenty years of experience,
primarily in crime reporting. She currently serves as the opinion
editor for The Tribune Review and the Greater Pittsburgh Area.
Laurie previously served as the deputy editor for The Center
Daily Times. She can be found on Twitter at Laurie Falls.
(00:49):
Episode twenty The Case of the Spoiled Wife, the Giving Husband,
and the small Town Murder Center Hall, Pennsylvania slogan is
quote a great place to call home and for a
little girl named Mirinda Heinzelman. It was adopted at a
(01:11):
young age into a well off family who owned a
local funeral home and child care facility. Mirinda wanted for nothing,
having been born into so little Mirinda's parents wanted to
make sure She had a stable and supportive life as
an only child. She got whatever she wanted, but it
didn't seem to go to her head. She was also
(01:33):
sensitive and caring. After graduating, she got two gifts, a
red Mustang and a job working at her mom's preschool.
At twenty, Mirinda was attending a local powder puff game
when she met twenty two year old Sam Boob. Sam
loved cars and couldn't help but approach the pretty girl
who drove the sports car. He asked if he could
(01:53):
take it for a spin. And while some guys might
come off as a little creepy asking a girl to
drive their car, Sam was carre asmatic, Mirinda said yes
and speeding through town, the two felt an attraction that
couldn't be denied. Sam came from a good Christian family
and had a stable job at a solid waste facility
(02:14):
where he was in charge of maintenance. Anyone who knew
him described him as handy. He could fix anything. Sam
used his skills to supplement his income, fixing cars and
flipping old tractors. He used that extra cash to shower
his new girlfriend with gifts. Siam once even gave Mirinda
a pink tractor In May two thousand and three, after
(02:37):
a year of dating, Mirinda and Sam made it official
and tied the knoon. Soon they bought a large, beautiful
home on a lot just outside of town. Mirinda loved
the kitchen and Sam the large garage where he kept
his tools. Over the next five years, the couple had
three children and by all accounts, a loving marriage. Here's death.
(03:02):
So while they seemed to have a good life and relationship,
like a lot of couples, Miranda and Sam also had issues,
and it seemed like for this couple of money was
a big one. That nice, big house that they lived in.
It turns out that Miranda's parents actually helped them with
the down payment, and there were months Miranda and Sam
struggled to keep up with the mortgage payments. There were
lots of times that her parents actually had to loan
(03:24):
the money to help cover part of the mortgage or
the full mortgage itself. And LORI, what do we know
about Miranda having grown up kind of spoiled for lack
of a better word, What was her perspective on this?
Do we know the area is really split In the
place where she lived, people either had money or they
had no money and there was very little in between.
(03:46):
And Miranda grew up, she didn't have to worry about anything.
There was no money problems at all, I mean, and
her parents are lovely people, her mother in particular as
a lovely woman and was absolutely we committed to trying
to take care of Miranda as best as they could.
(04:06):
Sam was the working class guy. He was the guy
who he might have things, but he worked hard for
absolutely everything that he had, and that was the one
thing that people talked about with him, how he was
committed to working hard to give his family the best
life that they could. And Miranda was almost more playing
(04:27):
house right. She was a stay at home mom taking
care of the kids. Do we know how she felt
about being alone while he was working all the time.
There was not a lot that came out like at
the time. There were things that that played out, you know,
over the course of the case. Up until things started happening,
there really hadn't been a lot of warning signs about
(04:49):
anything with Miranda. She seemed just as happy in their
life as he did. But we do know that she
was overspending, which was stressing the couple out. She was
because she almost didn't see it as overspending. She was
just spending, which was perfectly acceptable in her life up
to that point. She didn't really seem to acknowledge that
(05:11):
there were restrictions when it came to money. Do we
have any idea what she was spending on? Like what's
she going shopping? Was she remodeling the house? That's hard
for me to reach back for. I want to say
it was like just clothes and stuff, like impulse things.
And although she did have an interest in having the
(05:31):
house look nice, it was very much, you know, a reflection.
Just like she wanted the nice sports car when she graduated,
she wanted the nice house and have the house be
impressive to other people. After she got married, after six
years of marriage, Mirinda was feeling like the spark in
her marriage was gone. Maybe that's why. In August of
(05:53):
two thousand and nine, when a handsome stranger approached her
at a convenience store, she was intrigued. Outspoken and charming
Ron Heikel could have his pick of women, but he
wanted Mirnda. Between canned veggies and fruit, the conversation turned flirtatious.
Despite Mirnda telling Ron she was married, he persisted and
(06:15):
asked for her phone number. Maybe it was the feeling
of being wanted, or maybe it was a genuine connection,
but in any case, Mirnda said yes, But just who
was this mystery man who had eyes for the married mother? So, Laurie,
what do we know about Ron? Ron was kind of
the opposite of Miranda in almost everything. Where Mirnda had
(06:39):
a loving family that lived to take care of her,
Ron's family was his mother, who he watched be abused.
Where Mirnda never had to worry about money, Ron never
had a dime to call his own, and where Mirnda
always had people are looking out for her and really
(07:01):
never had any kind of instance where she was in
danger or or felt like there was any kind of
downside to her life at all. Ron had had you know,
close blows before. In fact, he had been in a
near fatal accident at one point. And other than the
(07:25):
fact that they seemed to have an attraction to each other,
they had very little in common. The one thing I
think that I found that they did have in common
was his brother had been adopted out, so maybe they
connected over she was adopted, he had dealt with adoption
in his life. That could have been something that bonded
over possibly and this accident. I read that it gave
him like a new lease on life, and he always
(07:46):
wanted to help others and see the positive and everything.
Ron is somebody who is very easily led to something.
If he has decided on a course of action, then
that's the direction that he's going to pursue. And I've
heard a lot of people say that about his accident,
that he felt that that was a second chance, so
(08:08):
he was going to grab life by the horns. Well
it's interesting too, because I read that the whole reason
he actually asked for Miranda's phone number was it was
a bet between him and his friend. Yeah, and it
was part of that whole I'm not gonna let life
pass me by kind of thing. But ultimately, I think
while maybe it started out as a bet, it turned
into a real connection. Yes, we know they started texting
(08:30):
pretty quickly and frequently. Yes, it became a very fast relationship,
you know. And and I don't mean not just that
it was quick, but that it was tight, right, And
it started over text, but Ron at one point wanted
to not surprisingly meet and become face to face with her,
but she didn't want to do that because it would
(08:51):
be breaking the kind of the bounds of her marriage.
That was the story. The account is that she didn't
want to, but they're also a little bit of suggestion
that that maybe that was to bind him closer, you know,
it was a little coy, like she was playing hard
to get. Yeah, from what I read, she kind of
told herself that she didn't meet him in person, she
(09:13):
wasn't really doing anything wrong. It was just a friendship. Yeah,
that idea that it wasn't really cheating if it was
only a text. Yeah, but at the very least that's
an emotional affair, which right, I think most people would
agree that that's still a problem. But Mirinda had a
tendency to draw her own boundaries for things. Right, as
(09:35):
we know, she's used to getting what she wants. If
she wants to texta this guy, she's going to exactly.
On August two thousand and nine, at ten oh seven am,
Marinda called on She frantically told paramedics that her husband,
year old Sam was bleeding in the front yard. Through
her screams and tears, she told paramedics she was doing CPR.
(09:59):
Just before the call cut out, she could be heard saying,
I love you baby. When the paramedics arrived, they found
Mirinda crying in the driveway down just a bit further
just outside the garage, behind a park truck, laying face
down with Sam. He had been shot twice, first in
the side of the chest, then in the back. It
was a very brutal killing. There were burn marks on
(10:21):
his back, meaning the gun must have been very close
to him when it went off. Also, several of his
fingers had been blown off, implying that he had been
kind of putting his hands up to whoever shot him.
And so Laurie Center Hall, by all accounts, is a
very small, insulated community. I can't imagine brutal killings like
this happened very often, right, I can think of exactly
(10:44):
three in like twenty years. The thing about Center Hall
is it is a town in a very loose sense.
It is almost more of an intersection, and then it
has some houses coming off of it in an increasingly
rural like concentric circles. The community there has an incredibly
(11:08):
low crime rate. Violent crime is lower than that, but
if you are particularly the victim of crime or violent
crime in Center Hall, it is almost unheard of for
that to be something anonymous. The person who commits a
crime against you in Center Hall is almost certainly someone
(11:29):
who is known to you. But a guy like Sam,
who was so well liked and well respected in the community,
who would want to do this time. That was the
thing about this case that was engaging from the beginning,
because if you didn't know Sam, you knew someone likes Sam,
and the idea that if Sam could be killed in
(11:50):
this horrifically violent way right outside of his home, anybody
could be. And so it's a very small place, but
in August there was a fair in town which would
bring in a slew of new suspects. The Center County
Grange Fair and Encampment is one of the oldest grange
fairs in the country, and it is one of the
(12:10):
ones that is still practiced the way that that County
fairs used to be a hundred years ago. The fair grounds,
which are are not terribly far from the bub home,
the fair grounds become a literal tent city. There are
rows and avenues of old army tents that are set
(12:33):
up and people inherit their place at the fair the
same way that you would like in some places that
you would inherit your church pew. You inherit your space
at the fair, and people who live less than a
mile from the fair will still move to the fair
for ten days to live there. It's tradition, and there
(12:57):
are competitions to set up your went into the best house,
you know, and there are some people who they might
go home to sleep, but they still come and they
set up their tent like a little living room or
sitting room, so that they have a place that is
their base for those ten days, so that the kids
can run off to get a snow cone, or you
(13:18):
can go play bingo. But then everybody gravitates back to
their tent, and you know, you go walking around and
visit your friends at their different tents. It's a bigger
town because it pulls people in from all over the county,
but it's still in a sense of very small town.
But because it's pulling people in from other parts of
the county, there are a lot of people that you
(13:39):
don't know. You don't know if somebody is from rush
Township or from Snowshoe, or if they're a Carney who
came with the Midway people. And so the immediate thought
for the police was that maybe this was a robbery
gone wrong that a carney. As you say, I saw
an opportunity and Sam got caught in that crossfire. That
(14:00):
was an immediate thought because of the absolute rarity. There
was a period of time in Center County where we
went for more than ten years without a murder, and
that last murder that had happened had been a vehicular
homicide that was not, you know, strictly speaking, a murder murder. Yeah,
(14:23):
I read that crime. It's lower and center haul than
any other American community. We're going to take a break.
We'll be back in just a moment. This is the
(14:49):
kind of thing where a lot of places in Center
County you do not bother locking your door. You definitely
don't lock it during the day, but a fair number
of people don't lock it at night. And this is
the kind of thing where when this happened, you started
to be really aware of your front door, and you
started to be very aware of when you would see
(15:12):
a shadow cross in front of your window, because you're
not used to this being something that you had to
worry about. But rather quickly the police started talking to
not only fair workers, but neighbors of Sam and Mirinda's.
One of them had something kind of interesting to say,
which was that he thought that the couple was having
troubles and that he had seen a man coming by.
(15:34):
He didn't know who he was or what he was
doing there, but it definitely started to raise some potential
red flags for investigators. It is not unusual for the
investigators to have questions about what's happening in the home.
That's fairly standard. It's particularly common in an area where,
like I said, if you get shot, you probably know
(15:58):
who shot you. They were definitely going to look at
who knew him or who knew them. And another thing
that struck the investigators as odd was, as we know,
Mirnda told the nine on one operator on the phone
that she was doing CPR, but when the cops arrived,
she had no blood on her, which seemed weird, right.
(16:19):
The thing with one call was Miranda was speaking on
the call like Sam was still alive, Like she was,
you know, trying to keep him alive, that she was
working with him, you know, to to try and save him.
Aside from the fact that she didn't have any blood
(16:40):
on her, which kind of refuted what she was telling
the nine one one operator. There's also the autopsy said
from the beginning that Sam did not last. The first
shot was in the chest, and then it whipped him around,
and that's when he got caught in the side. The
first shot would not have kept him around very long,
(17:04):
but the second shot finished him off quick. There was
no opportunity for anyone to try and give help to him,
and that by the time the nine call was being made,
he was almost certainly gone. As detectives continued to look
at all potential theories, Sam's family buried him. At the funeral,
(17:26):
everyone was, of course emotional, but Mirinda was noticeably aloof.
On the one hand, she appeared to be crying, but
then there were no tears. Mirinda's parents explained her odd
behavior as stoic. She was now a single mother and
she had to be strong for her children. But there
was one person who wasn't buying it, Sam's brother Ben.
(17:51):
Here's Laurie, Sam's brother, Ben is really he was instrumental
in making a lot of the case come together. Not
that the police wouldn't have gotten there eventually, but I
think that Ben made it happen as quickly and easily
as it did, which was best for the family, particularly
(18:14):
the kids. He didn't think that her behavior made sense,
and it made him wonder about some of the things
that she was saying. Ben was unsatisfied with the pace
of the investigation and went to the station to share
his concerns. Ben believed Mirinda was having an affair and
that it had something to do with his brother's murder.
(18:36):
Ben offered to help the police in any way he could.
Ben was taking the information that he was getting from
the police and from the articles and from the police
reports and putting them together with the things that she
was saying and seeing where they didn't match. And so
he went to the police and said, I don't think
(18:56):
that this is what happened, and if there is a
way that I can help, I would like to help.
And that was when the police asked him if he
would wear a wire and go and talk to her
and see what he could get that way that they
weren't able to get from her in a regular interview,
and he got a lot he did. She volunteered quite
(19:16):
a bit in that conversation. That was when she admitted
that she had been talking to Ron. She said, you
know that it wasn't an actual affair, that they were flirting,
and that she was trying to protect her marriage, and
she didn't want to have it go too far. It
almost felt like from the beginning Merinda knew that this
(19:38):
was going to get unraveled, and she started laying the
breadcrumbs for the trail to head directly to Ron and
bypass her well right, She told Ben that she tried
to end the clocation they were having and that Ron
didn't take to that and he became obsessed with her,
and which would explain the man who was coming by
the house, the mysterious guy that would be Ron maybe
(19:59):
trying to it back with her and Ben. He was like, well,
who's Ron? Who is he? And Mirnda told him he
works at the fair and Ben actually said, you know,
let's go find him. Can you point him out? Which
Mirnda did readily. Right. Yeah, it was surprisingly fast that
she folded on that she was willing to I d
him for Ben, and the police followed immediately up on that, right,
(20:22):
and they brought Ron in for questioning quickly, and she
picked him out of the lineup immediately. Yeah, and then
as we know, Ron lawyered up, Yes, but it's just
so crazy to me, this is such a small place
and wearing a wire and you know, interrogating your sister
in law. It just feels like a movie. I can't
imagine what Ben must have been feeling, and how calm
he seemed doing it, is, I mean good for him. Yeah,
(20:44):
and he was there from Colorado. He had come, you know,
just for the funeral. He was not local, and sometimes
I wonder if being outside of it made it easier
for him to see what a lot of people who
were closer to the situation couldn't interesting, right, Like, he
didn't buy this life of the Miranda had been peddling
(21:05):
with the police circling in on Ron. They got a
warrant to search his trailer at the fairgrounds. Well, they
didn't find a murder weapon. They got something that was
even more valuable, his cell phone. On his cell were
hundreds of tacks between him and Miranda, which blew the
case wide open. The first thing police could surmise him
of the text was that the relationship between Ron and
(21:27):
Miranda was in fact physical, something she had denied. The
pair had texted about meeting up numerous times, But what
really stuck out to investigators were the text from the
morning of the murder quote, are you sure you want
the pond? Done, Ron wrote to Miranda, quote, I would
(21:50):
love to have a pond done, she replied, And so
after the pond exchange, Ron started asking Miranda about Sam
and what his movements would be, specifically that morning. Will
he lock the door when he comes in? He texted,
Probably the garage, she responded. Broun continued to text her,
I'm thinking before and you go to church for witnesses.
He went on, I'll need the key and please keep
(22:11):
your kids inside. He finished, You will have your pond
very soon. So pond LORI, I mean, I think we
can all agree as code for murder. It was, and
it was a completely ridiculous code because everything in front
of it and everything behind it completely negated the cag
nous of using a code word. Nobody needs witnesses for
(22:33):
the installation of a pond, and yet this is what
they went for. It was ludicrous and it was also
something that jumped out at family members like Ben early on,
because Sam was a very handy guy. If Mirnda wanted
a pond in the in the yard, Sam could have
put it in himself for free, very quickly. There was
(22:57):
absolutely no reason to hire someone to do this, which
only made it stand out all the more. But even
aside from Matt, this idea that they're texting about where
he is and what he's doing with the garage door
and the keys and all those things, and then just
throwing the word pond. I mean, what were they thinking
the kind of framework that it weighs for what was
happening that morning, Sam made breakfast for his kids before
(23:21):
he came out into the garage and got shot. It
shows that this was something that was understood from the
beginning that was going to happen. Yeah, it always strikes
me that those texts were occurring as she's sitting in
the kitchen watching Sam make breakfast for the kids, texting
her boyfriend about quote unquote pond knowing what's about to
(23:45):
happen is pretty tragic. But back to where we are
in the investigation, it was about to get much worse
for Ron because police tracked down his roommate, a man
named Kermit Butts, and he also had a lot to
say he did. Kermit was also hanging around the fair
and he had been involved with like facilitating meetups. He
(24:08):
had taken Ron to meet Miranda before. He was part
of the way that they were able to confirm that
there was in fact a relationship that went beyond text messages. Yeah.
At one point Ron had even told Kermit that Miranda
was the love of his life. Yes, so Ron, really,
it seems, by all accounts, was truly in love with Miranda.
How she felt, we don't really know, but Ron was
(24:31):
in it. He was, And I guess a theory kind
of going back to Ron's upbringing with the abuses, why
he would be so in love with Miranda? Did we
know anything about that Miranda had told him that Sam
was abusing her. Given Ron's history, it probably not only
made him angry at Sam, but pulled him closer to Miranda.
(24:54):
It made him protective of her. It made him not
question things that a rational person probably would have questioned.
And we should know that none of the abuse could
ever be corroborated. Not only was it not corroborated, it
was adamantly denied by everyone who knew Sam. And did
Kermit say anything to the cops in this initial meeting
(25:17):
about the actual murder? Kermit told the police that on
that morning Ron had asked him for a ride. Again,
this was something that was really not unusual. It had
become part of their relationship was that Kermit would take
Ron to meet up with Miranda, but on this occasion,
Kermit was actually asked to drop him off in a
(25:39):
different location. He had said that he didn't want to
be seen by the house at all, so he wanted
to be dropped someplace else so that he could walk there.
But along the way, Kermit realized that this was not
the same kind of meeting that he had been setting
up before. This was not a meeting up with your
girlfriend's situation. This was something bad is going to happen.
(26:02):
So he said, you know, I'm stopping. I'm not going
to participate in this anymore. But Ron got violent with
him and said that I'll kill you if you don't
take me there, and Kermit ended up waiting for him
while everything went down. He heard the gunshots and then
Ron came back, got in the car, and they left.
(26:25):
Let's stop here for another break. Sam's brother kind of
started this ball rolling, but Kermit really was the nail
(26:46):
on the coffin for Ron and Miranda. Absolutely involving this
third person in the whole situation was a really bad
move for Ron. Without Kermit, this would have been a
lot harder to pull together with Kermit story, police had
enough to make arrests. Sam was charged with first degree murder,
(27:08):
Mirnda was charged with conspiracy to commit murder, and Kermit
was charged with aggravated assault and assisting a murder suspect.
So at the trial, Miranda proclaimed her innocence, saying that
she was wrongfully accused, But the prosecutors had a different theory.
According to them, Mirnda had was a housewife who just
got bored with her life. She was tired of living
(27:29):
paycheck to paycheck, and she was hoping to benefit from
Sam's life insurance. Prosecutors also argued that Kermit was not
just an innocent by standard. The way he portrayed himself
to the police, they believed he was fully a part
of the murder plan. For his help in driving to
and from the murder scene, he was going to get
five thousand dollars from Mirnda once the life insurance policy
(27:49):
paid out. Yeah, and there was even more to it
than that, because Ron was clearly being played through the
entire thing. There was at least one additional man involved
in one of the biggest twists to an already dramatic case.
They ended up with a Perry Mason moment with a
(28:11):
surprise witness that shocked everyone, and that person was west Decker.
West Decker turned out to be Miranda's other lover. That
is another unforeced error that they stumbled into because Miranda
didn't discontinue that relationship while she was in jail. After
she was arrested. She called him from jail, which is
(28:33):
how they found him to call him as a witness.
What do we know about him? The relationship with Wes
predated the relationship with Ron, and what it seemed like
was she had a relationship with Wes and then she
used Ron to get rid of her husband so that
she could be with Wes. That is wild. I mean,
what was the reaction when all this came out? This
(28:57):
case became a soap oper every day for months as
arrests were being made and things were happening, little bits
and pieces were coming out. But when this went to trial,
you needed to get popcorn to watch what was being
uncovered every day. It was captivating. It was the kind
of thing that people were talking about did you see
(29:18):
what happened with the boob trial today? And it was
all becoming like really confusing because one of the prosecutor's
name was also Boob, completely unrelated to Sam's family. It
was bizarre. It was like an episode of Law and
Order twists that were coming out of nowhere. You honestly
could not make this stuff up because if you made
(29:40):
it up, someone would tell you it was ridiculous and
no one would believe it. I don't feel bad for
Iron because he's a killer, But in a way I
could see why you would sympathize with him because he was,
by all accounts, fully in love with Miranda. He had
been manipulated with something that was traumatic for him, which
was the abuse angle, and he thought they were going
to be together and she was just him the entire time.
(30:01):
I do not feel bad for run. I mean I
I feel bad for anybody who's manipulated into doing something. However,
during the appeals process, Ron has been challenging to work with.
He is very angry at not just Miranda, but at
the the entire justice system, and a lot of his
(30:24):
appearances have been on video, like not brought into the courtroom,
and he's very violently angry in his comments. Do you
think that's based off he just is so angry with
Miranda and her betrayal of him, or what he sees
as her betrayal of him. The whole thing has evolved.
I mean, Ron had a bad life and it only
(30:47):
got worse when he started making really bad decisions. And
I think that while it's easy for him to blame Miranda,
I think that his real anger is probably at himself
for allowing himself to just become involved this. Right, you
can blame the twenty seven year old girl that played you,
or you can recognize that you were the idiot who
(31:08):
got played brutal to be sitting there in the courtroom
as Wess is testifying, saying that he was with Miranda
and they were fully in love and all wrong could
do was just sit there and hear that. What do
you make of Kermit being so forthcoming with the police,
It probably wouldn't have as much to go off. I
think it's possible that the prosecution may have overstated some
(31:28):
of his involvement. This was a very poorly planned crime.
To suggest that a third person was involved in the
planning of the poorly planned crime is kind of silly,
and it's also the kind of overreached that that prosecution
has been known for. I think the eleven months that
he served and him pleading guilty to what he was
(31:52):
accused of were probably appropriate because he did participate. I
think that his cooperation was probably because he realized the
extent of what had happened, which maybe he hadn't really
known before. So you think he was not even like
the five thousand dollar thing was not even true. I
personally think it's more likely that he was offered five
(32:12):
thousand dollars after the fact and not ahead of time, right, like,
keep your mouth shut, Yes, here's a little payout. I
guess my last question for you is why do you
think Miranda would do this? I believe that Mirnda did
it because she got the life that she thought that
she wanted, and once she had it, it wasn't what
she really wanted, and all she wanted then was to
(32:35):
be free. I don't know that she even was going
to stay with West. I think that she just wanted
to cut everything off, and she thought the only way
to do that would be to kell Sam. Yeah, it's
not like she had a job she could quit. She
was a wife. The only way to quit being a
wife is to get rid of your husband. On March twelve,
(32:57):
two eleven, After just two hours of deliberating, the jury
found Marinda guilty. Ron was also found guilty for his
part in the terrible crime. Kermit pleaded guilty to hindering
prosecution and a murder plot. He served eleven months. The
mismatched murderous pair were both sentenced to life in prison
(33:20):
without parole. Unlike many other states, in Pennsylvania, no parole
means no parole. Ever, neither of them will ever get
out of prison. Now. The only sunset these two will
ever see is from a cell window. Shameless plug. If
(33:42):
you're enjoying Crazy and Love, leave us a review. Season
three of the Piked and Massacre Returned to Bike County
is in the works. We want to hear from you
for the upcoming season. Do you have a story to
tell a connection to Pike County or is there another
case local to Pike County that you can't let go of.
(34:03):
Please email info at Katie Dash Studios dot com and
don't forget to follow us on Instagram at Katie Underscore Studios.
Crazy in Love is produced by Stephanie Lydecker, Jeff Shane,
Chris Graves, and me Courtney Armstrong. Editing and sound designed
(34:23):
by Jeff Tua. Crazy in Love is a production of
I heart Radio and Katie Studios. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stay safe, lovers,
Falling in love is the best feeling in the world.
You see stars, you feel giddy, But sometimes that makes
you do crazy things, and sometimes that means murder. Just
because the story starts out with once upon a Time
doesn't mean it ends happily ever after. Welcome to Crazy
and Love, a production of Katie Studios and I Heart Radio.
(00:25):
Today's guests are True cron producer Jeff Shane, joined by
journalist Laurie Falls. Laurie has over twenty years of experience,
primarily in crime reporting. She currently serves as the opinion
editor for The Tribune Review and the Greater Pittsburgh Area.
Laurie previously served as the deputy editor for The Center
Daily Times. She can be found on Twitter at Laurie Falls.
(00:49):
Episode twenty The Case of the Spoiled Wife, the Giving Husband,
and the small Town Murder Center Hall, Pennsylvania slogan is
quote a great place to call home and for a
little girl named Mirinda Heinzelman. It was adopted at a
(01:11):
young age into a well off family who owned a
local funeral home and child care facility. Mirinda wanted for nothing,
having been born into so little Mirinda's parents wanted to
make sure She had a stable and supportive life as
an only child. She got whatever she wanted, but it
didn't seem to go to her head. She was also
(01:33):
sensitive and caring. After graduating, she got two gifts, a
red Mustang and a job working at her mom's preschool.
At twenty, Mirinda was attending a local powder puff game
when she met twenty two year old Sam Boob. Sam
loved cars and couldn't help but approach the pretty girl
who drove the sports car. He asked if he could
(01:53):
take it for a spin. And while some guys might
come off as a little creepy asking a girl to
drive their car, Sam was carre asmatic, Mirinda said yes
and speeding through town, the two felt an attraction that
couldn't be denied. Sam came from a good Christian family
and had a stable job at a solid waste facility
(02:14):
where he was in charge of maintenance. Anyone who knew
him described him as handy. He could fix anything. Sam
used his skills to supplement his income, fixing cars and
flipping old tractors. He used that extra cash to shower
his new girlfriend with gifts. Siam once even gave Mirinda
a pink tractor In May two thousand and three, after
(02:37):
a year of dating, Mirinda and Sam made it official
and tied the knoon. Soon they bought a large, beautiful
home on a lot just outside of town. Mirinda loved
the kitchen and Sam the large garage where he kept
his tools. Over the next five years, the couple had
three children and by all accounts, a loving marriage. Here's death.
(03:02):
So while they seemed to have a good life and relationship,
like a lot of couples, Miranda and Sam also had issues,
and it seemed like for this couple of money was
a big one. That nice, big house that they lived in.
It turns out that Miranda's parents actually helped them with
the down payment, and there were months Miranda and Sam
struggled to keep up with the mortgage payments. There were
lots of times that her parents actually had to loan
(03:24):
the money to help cover part of the mortgage or
the full mortgage itself. And LORI, what do we know
about Miranda having grown up kind of spoiled for lack
of a better word, What was her perspective on this?
Do we know the area is really split In the
place where she lived, people either had money or they
had no money and there was very little in between.
(03:46):
And Miranda grew up, she didn't have to worry about anything.
There was no money problems at all, I mean, and
her parents are lovely people, her mother in particular as
a lovely woman and was absolutely we committed to trying
to take care of Miranda as best as they could.
(04:06):
Sam was the working class guy. He was the guy
who he might have things, but he worked hard for
absolutely everything that he had, and that was the one
thing that people talked about with him, how he was
committed to working hard to give his family the best
life that they could. And Miranda was almost more playing
(04:27):
house right. She was a stay at home mom taking
care of the kids. Do we know how she felt
about being alone while he was working all the time.
There was not a lot that came out like at
the time. There were things that that played out, you know,
over the course of the case. Up until things started happening,
there really hadn't been a lot of warning signs about
(04:49):
anything with Miranda. She seemed just as happy in their
life as he did. But we do know that she
was overspending, which was stressing the couple out. She was
because she almost didn't see it as overspending. She was
just spending, which was perfectly acceptable in her life up
to that point. She didn't really seem to acknowledge that
(05:11):
there were restrictions when it came to money. Do we
have any idea what she was spending on? Like what's
she going shopping? Was she remodeling the house? That's hard
for me to reach back for. I want to say
it was like just clothes and stuff, like impulse things.
And although she did have an interest in having the
(05:31):
house look nice, it was very much, you know, a reflection.
Just like she wanted the nice sports car when she graduated,
she wanted the nice house and have the house be
impressive to other people. After she got married, after six
years of marriage, Mirinda was feeling like the spark in
her marriage was gone. Maybe that's why. In August of
(05:53):
two thousand and nine, when a handsome stranger approached her
at a convenience store, she was intrigued. Outspoken and charming
Ron Heikel could have his pick of women, but he
wanted Mirnda. Between canned veggies and fruit, the conversation turned flirtatious.
Despite Mirnda telling Ron she was married, he persisted and
(06:15):
asked for her phone number. Maybe it was the feeling
of being wanted, or maybe it was a genuine connection,
but in any case, Mirnda said yes, But just who
was this mystery man who had eyes for the married mother? So, Laurie,
what do we know about Ron? Ron was kind of
the opposite of Miranda in almost everything. Where Mirnda had
(06:39):
a loving family that lived to take care of her,
Ron's family was his mother, who he watched be abused.
Where Mirnda never had to worry about money, Ron never
had a dime to call his own, and where Mirnda
always had people are looking out for her and really
(07:01):
never had any kind of instance where she was in
danger or or felt like there was any kind of
downside to her life at all. Ron had had you know,
close blows before. In fact, he had been in a
near fatal accident at one point. And other than the
(07:25):
fact that they seemed to have an attraction to each other,
they had very little in common. The one thing I
think that I found that they did have in common
was his brother had been adopted out, so maybe they
connected over she was adopted, he had dealt with adoption
in his life. That could have been something that bonded
over possibly and this accident. I read that it gave
him like a new lease on life, and he always
(07:46):
wanted to help others and see the positive and everything.
Ron is somebody who is very easily led to something.
If he has decided on a course of action, then
that's the direction that he's going to pursue. And I've
heard a lot of people say that about his accident,
that he felt that that was a second chance, so
(08:08):
he was going to grab life by the horns. Well
it's interesting too, because I read that the whole reason
he actually asked for Miranda's phone number was it was
a bet between him and his friend. Yeah, and it
was part of that whole I'm not gonna let life
pass me by kind of thing. But ultimately, I think
while maybe it started out as a bet, it turned
into a real connection. Yes, we know they started texting
(08:30):
pretty quickly and frequently. Yes, it became a very fast relationship,
you know. And and I don't mean not just that
it was quick, but that it was tight, right, And
it started over text, but Ron at one point wanted
to not surprisingly meet and become face to face with her,
but she didn't want to do that because it would
(08:51):
be breaking the kind of the bounds of her marriage.
That was the story. The account is that she didn't
want to, but they're also a little bit of suggestion
that that maybe that was to bind him closer, you know,
it was a little coy, like she was playing hard
to get. Yeah, from what I read, she kind of
told herself that she didn't meet him in person, she
(09:13):
wasn't really doing anything wrong. It was just a friendship. Yeah,
that idea that it wasn't really cheating if it was
only a text. Yeah, but at the very least that's
an emotional affair, which right, I think most people would
agree that that's still a problem. But Mirinda had a
tendency to draw her own boundaries for things. Right, as
(09:35):
we know, she's used to getting what she wants. If
she wants to texta this guy, she's going to exactly.
On August two thousand and nine, at ten oh seven am,
Marinda called on She frantically told paramedics that her husband,
year old Sam was bleeding in the front yard. Through
her screams and tears, she told paramedics she was doing CPR.
(09:59):
Just before the call cut out, she could be heard saying,
I love you baby. When the paramedics arrived, they found
Mirinda crying in the driveway down just a bit further
just outside the garage, behind a park truck, laying face
down with Sam. He had been shot twice, first in
the side of the chest, then in the back. It
was a very brutal killing. There were burn marks on
(10:21):
his back, meaning the gun must have been very close
to him when it went off. Also, several of his
fingers had been blown off, implying that he had been
kind of putting his hands up to whoever shot him.
And so Laurie Center Hall, by all accounts, is a
very small, insulated community. I can't imagine brutal killings like
this happened very often, right, I can think of exactly
(10:44):
three in like twenty years. The thing about Center Hall
is it is a town in a very loose sense.
It is almost more of an intersection, and then it
has some houses coming off of it in an increasingly
rural like concentric circles. The community there has an incredibly
(11:08):
low crime rate. Violent crime is lower than that, but
if you are particularly the victim of crime or violent
crime in Center Hall, it is almost unheard of for
that to be something anonymous. The person who commits a
crime against you in Center Hall is almost certainly someone
(11:29):
who is known to you. But a guy like Sam,
who was so well liked and well respected in the community,
who would want to do this time. That was the
thing about this case that was engaging from the beginning,
because if you didn't know Sam, you knew someone likes Sam,
and the idea that if Sam could be killed in
(11:50):
this horrifically violent way right outside of his home, anybody
could be. And so it's a very small place, but
in August there was a fair in town which would
bring in a slew of new suspects. The Center County
Grange Fair and Encampment is one of the oldest grange
fairs in the country, and it is one of the
(12:10):
ones that is still practiced the way that that County
fairs used to be a hundred years ago. The fair grounds,
which are are not terribly far from the bub home,
the fair grounds become a literal tent city. There are
rows and avenues of old army tents that are set
(12:33):
up and people inherit their place at the fair the
same way that you would like in some places that
you would inherit your church pew. You inherit your space
at the fair, and people who live less than a
mile from the fair will still move to the fair
for ten days to live there. It's tradition, and there
(12:57):
are competitions to set up your went into the best house,
you know, and there are some people who they might
go home to sleep, but they still come and they
set up their tent like a little living room or
sitting room, so that they have a place that is
their base for those ten days, so that the kids
can run off to get a snow cone, or you
(13:18):
can go play bingo. But then everybody gravitates back to
their tent, and you know, you go walking around and
visit your friends at their different tents. It's a bigger
town because it pulls people in from all over the county,
but it's still in a sense of very small town.
But because it's pulling people in from other parts of
the county, there are a lot of people that you
(13:39):
don't know. You don't know if somebody is from rush
Township or from Snowshoe, or if they're a Carney who
came with the Midway people. And so the immediate thought
for the police was that maybe this was a robbery
gone wrong that a carney. As you say, I saw
an opportunity and Sam got caught in that crossfire. That
(14:00):
was an immediate thought because of the absolute rarity. There
was a period of time in Center County where we
went for more than ten years without a murder, and
that last murder that had happened had been a vehicular
homicide that was not, you know, strictly speaking, a murder murder. Yeah,
(14:23):
I read that crime. It's lower and center haul than
any other American community. We're going to take a break.
We'll be back in just a moment. This is the
(14:49):
kind of thing where a lot of places in Center
County you do not bother locking your door. You definitely
don't lock it during the day, but a fair number
of people don't lock it at night. And this is
the kind of thing where when this happened, you started
to be really aware of your front door, and you
started to be very aware of when you would see
(15:12):
a shadow cross in front of your window, because you're
not used to this being something that you had to
worry about. But rather quickly the police started talking to
not only fair workers, but neighbors of Sam and Mirinda's.
One of them had something kind of interesting to say,
which was that he thought that the couple was having
troubles and that he had seen a man coming by.
(15:34):
He didn't know who he was or what he was
doing there, but it definitely started to raise some potential
red flags for investigators. It is not unusual for the
investigators to have questions about what's happening in the home.
That's fairly standard. It's particularly common in an area where,
like I said, if you get shot, you probably know
(15:58):
who shot you. They were definitely going to look at
who knew him or who knew them. And another thing
that struck the investigators as odd was, as we know,
Mirnda told the nine on one operator on the phone
that she was doing CPR, but when the cops arrived,
she had no blood on her, which seemed weird, right.
(16:19):
The thing with one call was Miranda was speaking on
the call like Sam was still alive, Like she was,
you know, trying to keep him alive, that she was
working with him, you know, to to try and save him.
Aside from the fact that she didn't have any blood
(16:40):
on her, which kind of refuted what she was telling
the nine one one operator. There's also the autopsy said
from the beginning that Sam did not last. The first
shot was in the chest, and then it whipped him around,
and that's when he got caught in the side. The
first shot would not have kept him around very long,
(17:04):
but the second shot finished him off quick. There was
no opportunity for anyone to try and give help to him,
and that by the time the nine call was being made,
he was almost certainly gone. As detectives continued to look
at all potential theories, Sam's family buried him. At the funeral,
(17:26):
everyone was, of course emotional, but Mirinda was noticeably aloof.
On the one hand, she appeared to be crying, but
then there were no tears. Mirinda's parents explained her odd
behavior as stoic. She was now a single mother and
she had to be strong for her children. But there
was one person who wasn't buying it, Sam's brother Ben.
(17:51):
Here's Laurie, Sam's brother, Ben is really he was instrumental
in making a lot of the case come together. Not
that the police wouldn't have gotten there eventually, but I
think that Ben made it happen as quickly and easily
as it did, which was best for the family, particularly
(18:14):
the kids. He didn't think that her behavior made sense,
and it made him wonder about some of the things
that she was saying. Ben was unsatisfied with the pace
of the investigation and went to the station to share
his concerns. Ben believed Mirinda was having an affair and
that it had something to do with his brother's murder.
(18:36):
Ben offered to help the police in any way he could.
Ben was taking the information that he was getting from
the police and from the articles and from the police
reports and putting them together with the things that she
was saying and seeing where they didn't match. And so
he went to the police and said, I don't think
(18:56):
that this is what happened, and if there is a
way that I can help, I would like to help.
And that was when the police asked him if he
would wear a wire and go and talk to her
and see what he could get that way that they
weren't able to get from her in a regular interview,
and he got a lot he did. She volunteered quite
(19:16):
a bit in that conversation. That was when she admitted
that she had been talking to Ron. She said, you
know that it wasn't an actual affair, that they were flirting,
and that she was trying to protect her marriage, and
she didn't want to have it go too far. It
almost felt like from the beginning Merinda knew that this
(19:38):
was going to get unraveled, and she started laying the
breadcrumbs for the trail to head directly to Ron and
bypass her well right, She told Ben that she tried
to end the clocation they were having and that Ron
didn't take to that and he became obsessed with her,
and which would explain the man who was coming by
the house, the mysterious guy that would be Ron maybe
(19:59):
trying to it back with her and Ben. He was like, well,
who's Ron? Who is he? And Mirnda told him he
works at the fair and Ben actually said, you know,
let's go find him. Can you point him out? Which
Mirnda did readily. Right. Yeah, it was surprisingly fast that
she folded on that she was willing to I d
him for Ben, and the police followed immediately up on that, right,
(20:22):
and they brought Ron in for questioning quickly, and she
picked him out of the lineup immediately. Yeah, and then
as we know, Ron lawyered up, Yes, but it's just
so crazy to me, this is such a small place
and wearing a wire and you know, interrogating your sister
in law. It just feels like a movie. I can't
imagine what Ben must have been feeling, and how calm
he seemed doing it, is, I mean good for him. Yeah,
(20:44):
and he was there from Colorado. He had come, you know,
just for the funeral. He was not local, and sometimes
I wonder if being outside of it made it easier
for him to see what a lot of people who
were closer to the situation couldn't interesting, right, Like, he
didn't buy this life of the Miranda had been peddling
(21:05):
with the police circling in on Ron. They got a
warrant to search his trailer at the fairgrounds. Well, they
didn't find a murder weapon. They got something that was
even more valuable, his cell phone. On his cell were
hundreds of tacks between him and Miranda, which blew the
case wide open. The first thing police could surmise him
of the text was that the relationship between Ron and
(21:27):
Miranda was in fact physical, something she had denied. The
pair had texted about meeting up numerous times, But what
really stuck out to investigators were the text from the
morning of the murder quote, are you sure you want
the pond? Done, Ron wrote to Miranda, quote, I would
(21:50):
love to have a pond done, she replied, And so
after the pond exchange, Ron started asking Miranda about Sam
and what his movements would be, specifically that morning. Will
he lock the door when he comes in? He texted,
Probably the garage, she responded. Broun continued to text her,
I'm thinking before and you go to church for witnesses.
He went on, I'll need the key and please keep
(22:11):
your kids inside. He finished, You will have your pond
very soon. So pond LORI, I mean, I think we
can all agree as code for murder. It was, and
it was a completely ridiculous code because everything in front
of it and everything behind it completely negated the cag
nous of using a code word. Nobody needs witnesses for
(22:33):
the installation of a pond, and yet this is what
they went for. It was ludicrous and it was also
something that jumped out at family members like Ben early on,
because Sam was a very handy guy. If Mirnda wanted
a pond in the in the yard, Sam could have
put it in himself for free, very quickly. There was
(22:57):
absolutely no reason to hire someone to do this, which
only made it stand out all the more. But even
aside from Matt, this idea that they're texting about where
he is and what he's doing with the garage door
and the keys and all those things, and then just
throwing the word pond. I mean, what were they thinking
the kind of framework that it weighs for what was
happening that morning, Sam made breakfast for his kids before
(23:21):
he came out into the garage and got shot. It
shows that this was something that was understood from the
beginning that was going to happen. Yeah, it always strikes
me that those texts were occurring as she's sitting in
the kitchen watching Sam make breakfast for the kids, texting
her boyfriend about quote unquote pond knowing what's about to
(23:45):
happen is pretty tragic. But back to where we are
in the investigation, it was about to get much worse
for Ron because police tracked down his roommate, a man
named Kermit Butts, and he also had a lot to
say he did. Kermit was also hanging around the fair
and he had been involved with like facilitating meetups. He
(24:08):
had taken Ron to meet Miranda before. He was part
of the way that they were able to confirm that
there was in fact a relationship that went beyond text messages. Yeah.
At one point Ron had even told Kermit that Miranda
was the love of his life. Yes, so Ron, really,
it seems, by all accounts, was truly in love with Miranda.
How she felt, we don't really know, but Ron was
(24:31):
in it. He was, And I guess a theory kind
of going back to Ron's upbringing with the abuses, why
he would be so in love with Miranda? Did we
know anything about that Miranda had told him that Sam
was abusing her. Given Ron's history, it probably not only
made him angry at Sam, but pulled him closer to Miranda.
(24:54):
It made him protective of her. It made him not
question things that a rational person probably would have questioned.
And we should know that none of the abuse could
ever be corroborated. Not only was it not corroborated, it
was adamantly denied by everyone who knew Sam. And did
Kermit say anything to the cops in this initial meeting
(25:17):
about the actual murder? Kermit told the police that on
that morning Ron had asked him for a ride. Again,
this was something that was really not unusual. It had
become part of their relationship was that Kermit would take
Ron to meet up with Miranda, but on this occasion,
Kermit was actually asked to drop him off in a
(25:39):
different location. He had said that he didn't want to
be seen by the house at all, so he wanted
to be dropped someplace else so that he could walk there.
But along the way, Kermit realized that this was not
the same kind of meeting that he had been setting
up before. This was not a meeting up with your
girlfriend's situation. This was something bad is going to happen.
(26:02):
So he said, you know, I'm stopping. I'm not going
to participate in this anymore. But Ron got violent with
him and said that I'll kill you if you don't
take me there, and Kermit ended up waiting for him
while everything went down. He heard the gunshots and then
Ron came back, got in the car, and they left.
(26:25):
Let's stop here for another break. Sam's brother kind of
started this ball rolling, but Kermit really was the nail
(26:46):
on the coffin for Ron and Miranda. Absolutely involving this
third person in the whole situation was a really bad
move for Ron. Without Kermit, this would have been a
lot harder to pull together with Kermit story, police had
enough to make arrests. Sam was charged with first degree murder,
(27:08):
Mirnda was charged with conspiracy to commit murder, and Kermit
was charged with aggravated assault and assisting a murder suspect.
So at the trial, Miranda proclaimed her innocence, saying that
she was wrongfully accused, But the prosecutors had a different theory.
According to them, Mirnda had was a housewife who just
got bored with her life. She was tired of living
(27:29):
paycheck to paycheck, and she was hoping to benefit from
Sam's life insurance. Prosecutors also argued that Kermit was not
just an innocent by standard. The way he portrayed himself
to the police, they believed he was fully a part
of the murder plan. For his help in driving to
and from the murder scene, he was going to get
five thousand dollars from Mirnda once the life insurance policy
(27:49):
paid out. Yeah, and there was even more to it
than that, because Ron was clearly being played through the
entire thing. There was at least one additional man involved
in one of the biggest twists to an already dramatic case.
They ended up with a Perry Mason moment with a
(28:11):
surprise witness that shocked everyone, and that person was west Decker.
West Decker turned out to be Miranda's other lover. That
is another unforeced error that they stumbled into because Miranda
didn't discontinue that relationship while she was in jail. After
she was arrested. She called him from jail, which is
(28:33):
how they found him to call him as a witness.
What do we know about him? The relationship with Wes
predated the relationship with Ron, and what it seemed like
was she had a relationship with Wes and then she
used Ron to get rid of her husband so that
she could be with Wes. That is wild. I mean,
what was the reaction when all this came out? This
(28:57):
case became a soap oper every day for months as
arrests were being made and things were happening, little bits
and pieces were coming out. But when this went to trial,
you needed to get popcorn to watch what was being
uncovered every day. It was captivating. It was the kind
of thing that people were talking about did you see
(29:18):
what happened with the boob trial today? And it was
all becoming like really confusing because one of the prosecutor's
name was also Boob, completely unrelated to Sam's family. It
was bizarre. It was like an episode of Law and
Order twists that were coming out of nowhere. You honestly
could not make this stuff up because if you made
(29:40):
it up, someone would tell you it was ridiculous and
no one would believe it. I don't feel bad for
Iron because he's a killer, But in a way I
could see why you would sympathize with him because he was,
by all accounts, fully in love with Miranda. He had
been manipulated with something that was traumatic for him, which
was the abuse angle, and he thought they were going
to be together and she was just him the entire time.
(30:01):
I do not feel bad for run. I mean I
I feel bad for anybody who's manipulated into doing something. However,
during the appeals process, Ron has been challenging to work with.
He is very angry at not just Miranda, but at
the the entire justice system, and a lot of his
(30:24):
appearances have been on video, like not brought into the courtroom,
and he's very violently angry in his comments. Do you
think that's based off he just is so angry with
Miranda and her betrayal of him, or what he sees
as her betrayal of him. The whole thing has evolved.
I mean, Ron had a bad life and it only
(30:47):
got worse when he started making really bad decisions. And
I think that while it's easy for him to blame Miranda,
I think that his real anger is probably at himself
for allowing himself to just become involved this. Right, you
can blame the twenty seven year old girl that played you,
or you can recognize that you were the idiot who
(31:08):
got played brutal to be sitting there in the courtroom
as Wess is testifying, saying that he was with Miranda
and they were fully in love and all wrong could
do was just sit there and hear that. What do
you make of Kermit being so forthcoming with the police,
It probably wouldn't have as much to go off. I
think it's possible that the prosecution may have overstated some
(31:28):
of his involvement. This was a very poorly planned crime.
To suggest that a third person was involved in the
planning of the poorly planned crime is kind of silly,
and it's also the kind of overreached that that prosecution
has been known for. I think the eleven months that
he served and him pleading guilty to what he was
(31:52):
accused of were probably appropriate because he did participate. I
think that his cooperation was probably because he realized the
extent of what had happened, which maybe he hadn't really
known before. So you think he was not even like
the five thousand dollar thing was not even true. I
personally think it's more likely that he was offered five
(32:12):
thousand dollars after the fact and not ahead of time, right, like,
keep your mouth shut, Yes, here's a little payout. I
guess my last question for you is why do you
think Miranda would do this? I believe that Mirnda did
it because she got the life that she thought that
she wanted, and once she had it, it wasn't what
she really wanted, and all she wanted then was to
(32:35):
be free. I don't know that she even was going
to stay with West. I think that she just wanted
to cut everything off, and she thought the only way
to do that would be to kell Sam. Yeah, it's
not like she had a job she could quit. She
was a wife. The only way to quit being a
wife is to get rid of your husband. On March twelve,
(32:57):
two eleven, After just two hours of deliberating, the jury
found Marinda guilty. Ron was also found guilty for his
part in the terrible crime. Kermit pleaded guilty to hindering
prosecution and a murder plot. He served eleven months. The
mismatched murderous pair were both sentenced to life in prison
(33:20):
without parole. Unlike many other states, in Pennsylvania, no parole
means no parole. Ever, neither of them will ever get
out of prison. Now. The only sunset these two will
ever see is from a cell window. Shameless plug. If
(33:42):
you're enjoying Crazy and Love, leave us a review. Season
three of the Piked and Massacre Returned to Bike County
is in the works. We want to hear from you
for the upcoming season. Do you have a story to
tell a connection to Pike County or is there another
case local to Pike County that you can't let go of.
(34:03):
Please email info at Katie Dash Studios dot com and
don't forget to follow us on Instagram at Katie Underscore Studios.
Crazy in Love is produced by Stephanie Lydecker, Jeff Shane,
Chris Graves, and me Courtney Armstrong. Editing and sound designed
(34:23):
by Jeff Tua. Crazy in Love is a production of
I heart Radio and Katie Studios. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stay safe, lovers,
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