Rewind with Karen & Georgia - 48: An Albert Fish Production - My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Hello, and welcome to Rewind with Karen and Georgia.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Rewind. Every Wednesday we recap our old episodes with all
new commentary, updates and insights.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
And today we're recapping episode forty eight, which we.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Named an Albert Fish production. Sorry, that's just a true
crime enthusiast. I know, I almost did a spit take.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
It's like that's the only Yeah, no one else cares,
but true crime.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Horrible and hilarious. You get that Stephen J. Cannell typewriter,
he throws the piece of paper in here, But it's
Albert Fish. This episode came out on December twenty first,
twenty sixteen, and that means it was conceived on March
twenty ninth, twenty sixteen.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
We do the math our podcast do they do they
go for nine months?

Speaker 2 (01:05):
Or do we like alien an egg? It's human? Podcasts
are human baby liketh of fertilization. I disagree. I am
an earth or whatever? What do I call it? You're
a flat I'm a flat fertilization.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
Yeah, anyway, let's listen to the intro of episode forty eight.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
That's right, nothing, It just feels like it's been a
long time. It does Oh it has it has been? Yeah?
Are we recordinges? Good? Good? Because we need to get
this figured out.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
It has been I guess we I guess almost two weeks.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
Sorry since like apartment record.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah, because we did our house show last week. Yeah,
that was a fun that was different.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
That was nuts. That was nuts. That was a break
from reality. It was super fun. We love you, Jamie Lee.
Jamie Lee's books coming out. That's right, thanks for being
ridiculous is coming out. I called it wet a lish.
What delicious you did with the absolute confidence. That's all
that matters is when you say stuff. Yeah. Yeah, they
should change the title right now. That's well, they might

(02:11):
have to, right Hi. This is my favorite murder. It's
a podcast starring Georgia Hartstark and Karen Kilgareff. Our sound
technician is a man named Stephen Stephen Ray Morris and
his mustache.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
And and is this is day four hundred and three
of Steven's mustache.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
We've been counting. He's doing it. He's going to grow
it all the way around his mouth. I think that's
my personal I thought you were gonna say, his head
just tie it in the back. Oh my god, why
is it nothing? Mustache. Fucking sounds like a nightmare. Yeah,
you have to do it now, Stephen, Stephen, only for you, Karen, speaking.

Speaker 1 (02:52):
Of only for us, Stephen brought Okay, Steven is like
does everything for us, does everything so fucking sweet and wonderful,
and also.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
Thinks about things like what's more than we.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
Do because we don't know, because we didn't know this
was going to be a thing, right, So but he did,
he did, and he he like was prepared for it.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
He prints things out for us, plans, but also he
brings us presents us this holiday present. We have a
non denominational holiday presence at our each seat on the couch.
So we decided we're going to open them on the
air with you guys. I know what this is gonna be.
Oh my god, it sounds God, is this fun? You

(03:27):
got a serial killer baseball card, true crime g men,
mass murders, serial killers and the gangs.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
And they're like, they're like baseball card package got Stephen,
I'm gonna fucking have a seizure.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
Rice is really good? Are these like old? Yeah? Like
these are like hard to find.

Speaker 3 (03:45):
From like the nineties.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
They think, Oh, I'm.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
Like I see people posts on the Facebook, Pa, like,
I've had these since the nineties and everyone's.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
Like fuck you, and you got like five packs of
them for both of This is really good? Is there
going there? I wouldn't eat it if it was I'm
going to and then I'll assue you if anything happened.
And then now there's a secondary, a bigger ones. He's
a classy man that gives you a small gift with
this bigger gift underneath it. Oh my god, Oh my god.

(04:14):
What is It's his memoir of what assholes we are?
But you get let's see it's the book. Oh my god,
this is the book of Vicky Morgan and Alfred Bloomingdale
in the Affair that shook the highest levels of government
and society. Oh my god. British one right.

Speaker 3 (04:29):
It was the woman in Washington, d c. You see
Dominatrix and the.

Speaker 2 (04:34):
Skin cover up That book is fucking shirt. Wait eighties.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
This one is by Larry uh Hannor. It's called Cults
That Kill Probing the Crime, The Underworld of a Coult Crime.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
Yes, these are good. My I thought for a second,
I thought this book was about uh, somebody that was
in the Bengals, because that's totally This was.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
Written in nineteen eighty eight. I'm so fucked like satanic panic.
This is so good, Steve, I call it, they say,
tonic pan.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
Stephen, we got your model of springle malts. We got
you this old wrapping paper. I'm sweating because I'm so happy.
That's really good. I can't wait. So I don't think
I should open. You give and you give, Thank you, Stephen,
shou the pack I get. Let's do this a good idea?

(05:30):
Oh god. Also when we talked about the plan was
that we were going to open these on the air,
and Stephen, would you say it would be good for okay?
Oh my god, Oh my god? What did you get?
What'd you get? Rid a cup? I got the Hall
Mills case, which on September sixteenth, nineteen twenty two, a
couple walking down a country lane near New Brunswick, New Jersey,

(05:52):
found two bodies lying under a crab apple tree. It
was Reverend Edward Hall forty one and Missus Eleanor Mills,
thirty two, member of his church choir. He had been
both had been shot, her throat had been cut. But
I've heard this story. This is we're only picking our
murders from these decks. Oh my god, that's this week.

(06:12):
It's rather only from the nineties and before is been done.

Speaker 1 (06:16):
Okay, mine, I have one Clifford Olsen who looks like
a real fucking piece of work.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
Look at him. Blah blah blah blah blah. Okay, that's
a dramatic painting. Let's see here.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
So November nineteen eighty, twelve year old British Columbia girl disappeared.
Her mutilated body was found a month later. In eighty one,
a thirteen year old girl vanished, followed by a sixteen
year old boy. A week later, the boy was found dead,
his skull crushed. And May, a sixteen year old girl disappeared,
and then in June a thirteen year girl, and then
in July. Jesus, I'm doing him for my next number murder.

Speaker 2 (06:50):
No spoilers, no, yeah, are you reading till the end? Fuck?
That's good, Stephen. And these are amazing cases.

Speaker 1 (06:56):
These are like treasures that I will treasure for her
than ever.

Speaker 2 (07:01):
And we're going to start trading them. I've never I've
never heard of half of these people.

Speaker 1 (07:04):
Jack the Stripper, I'm yeah, Jackie's stripper.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (07:10):
In fifty nine eight, I'm gonna. I'm going to rephrase
this go has sex worker Nice was strangled and clad
only in her slip was found near their Thames Thames, Thames.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
Shit, it's one of those ones. The only reason it's not.

Speaker 1 (07:24):
It's one of those famous ones that I should I've
been to and I should fucking know she was found.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
It should happened. Look, Sonny bean, remember I did that one.
This is the I am honestly like glowing right now.
This is best Christmas ever. See this is the best
manic cut ever. See Richard Cottingham. Wait a second, I'm juie,
what what Richard Cottingham is the one I just did

(07:52):
on the last episode. And then he walks through the
door you got out of jail already? Oh my god,
you did. I'm going to open all of these painting
makes him look way better than he actually looks in
real life. What do we have a hole?

Speaker 1 (08:05):
Okay, what if the next the minniesode is just us
opening these and reading them to each other.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
That's a great idea. Let's absolutely do that for real.
But these are amazing cases, dude, it's happening. And also,
look at how hot this guy is. Who's that? I
don't know. He's kind of like Mick Jaggery, but younger
tune in to the next minnesot Yeah, so.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
If the Minnesota, Yeah, holy shit, that's exciting your fucking angel.

Speaker 2 (08:29):
What's even what?

Speaker 1 (08:29):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (08:30):
I was going to say.

Speaker 3 (08:30):
They were very controversial at the time because they were
like people were obsessed with them.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
And I remember remember they had those the playing cards
of cold cases that they would give to inmates, oh yeah,
in the in prison, so that they would like be
playing with these cards in the fuck men and they
like read about the victim and be like this fucking
dude I was in prison with has admitted to this,
and like there, I think there are not a lot
but a couple cases that got solved because of that.

Speaker 2 (08:56):
That's a brilliant idea, isn't it. Yeah. I do remember though,
when these came out, it was like how dare you?
Was the kind of overall it was like so sick
with like the similar podcasts. We are the how dare
you podcast of today, but for different reasons.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
Where the where the our and our podcast comes with
a stick of shitty gum.

Speaker 2 (09:18):
That's right, our podcast. Listening to it is the same
thing as eating old powdery, pink, flaky, hard to chew
of baseball card gum.

Speaker 1 (09:30):
Remember when you would just like eat it out of
not spite, but just like I bought this, Yeah it's
I pack. Yeah, Vince By is the wrestling ones a
lot like the old school wrestling ones too, And yeah,
I think he burns the gum burns it.

Speaker 2 (09:45):
I don't smokes it. What if he just was like
addicted to Oh my god, vintage gum, the fumes of
vintage gum.

Speaker 1 (09:52):
That sounds like the new Like what like what parents
get told like they're the junior high kids are into now.

Speaker 2 (09:59):
You see old I'm in your kid's room on the
they're they're smoking it. I would just like to say
really quick that at that show we had so many
great people. It was crazy and we got to say hi,
so many awesome listeners which was really fun. And I
for good at well House, we have to give a yes.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
They they stayed late to like let us talk to
all the people who stuck around, and they were really cool,
like moving the line along.

Speaker 2 (10:27):
They didn't have to do that. They were No, they
were great. The whole staff was amazing. The whole staff
was great. Thank you Andrew for booking us. This was
our little our own booking long ago where we thought
this would be fun and we were right. Oh yeah.
I would just like to say my friend thanks to
my friend Carrie who came to see me and he
literally yelled hey over like five people and then walked

(10:48):
away because he didn't want to have to wait in line. Nice. Yes.
And same with my friend Colin, who apparently just sent
me a message saying yeah, I wasn't going to wait around.
And then my friend David Knowles, who you did meet,
who I've known since we were twelve years old. We
met in sixth grade. I went to the freshman winter
formal with him. He waited in line and he was

(11:11):
the second to last person in line, and when the
like third to last person walked away, I go, the
fuck are you do? I'm gonna see you after it
was like he waited, I probably thought everyone knew you. Yes,
I was like a friend, We're trying to say hi
in an organized It was so nice. We again got
a lot of fucking amazing presence.

Speaker 1 (11:30):
I got some of I just keep getting the best
cat toys. Yeah, ever, like that's the whole that's my
scheme for this podcast.

Speaker 2 (11:37):
Is to get free cat toys. We got a cat
toys and what was in that other bag in a
bigger bag? Makeup? Yes, oh that makeup. I also want to.
So we need to.

Speaker 1 (11:49):
If you go to our instagram, it's my favorite murder.
I post a lot of like the photos and stuff
of what people gave us in shoutouts, and so one
thing we got that I just need to fucking I
got in the mail and started opening it and I
was like, I can't open this.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
I'm gonna cry without Karen.

Speaker 1 (12:02):
So this person, this, this girl named Mollie has this
website called the urbansmith dot com and she makes this
like incredible jewelry and metalworking and like.

Speaker 2 (12:15):
These gorgeous things.

Speaker 1 (12:16):
And she made us these necklaces that are so beautiful
and delicate that they stay sexy on them.

Speaker 2 (12:22):
Yeah, they're are Twinsy's necklaces.

Speaker 1 (12:24):
And then she made me these two little charms that
look like if Elvis Remimi ever let me in my
fucking life put a collar on them without murdering me, that.

Speaker 2 (12:33):
Would you put these on it?

Speaker 1 (12:34):
And it's just these little beautiful monogram things that say
Elvis and me me that I'm gonna wear as a neck, like.

Speaker 2 (12:41):
They're so beautiful. They're really nice. So the Urban Smith,
I just wanted to give a shout out to whoever
gave us the color Pop lippy stick. Yeah, colour Pop brand.
We got eyeshadow and we got lipstick, but this lippy
sticks Color Pop lippy sticks in the color poison. I
think they wrote and said, I hope this is a
color that you can use because I've talked so much
about she knows lipstick. It's it's so perfect because it's

(13:02):
a really good color, but it also stays on. It's
like a stain. God bless a Mary. And we're not
and we don't, so yeah, don't worry about it. Yeah,
and so we always will. On the my favorite murder
facebook page, there were two meetups that I got to
look at this morning, one for Portland, Oregon, one from Austin,
and they were so cute. And the thing that kills

(13:23):
me is how much crafting people can they do? I mean,
is that the one that did the serial killer drawings?
That was I'm gonna have to look which one did
the drawing. Let's not have it on I'm sorry, wrote
it on this piece of paper right here. Portland did
the drawings.

Speaker 1 (13:42):
Partland, they did like coloring book.

Speaker 2 (13:45):
Serial Killers I love it. And on the Austin meetup
they had all kinds of crass, but my favorite was
they had name tags that said my favorite murder is
and then they wrote who their favorite murderer is on
the bottom. So one ladies like smiling, but it just
says Albert Fish. I love the idea that he's your favorite.

Speaker 1 (14:05):
That's such a great idea because then you can come
up to someone and be like, oh my god, I
know a lot about that one too, and then I
have to talk about it like and then it's not
awkward like at parties.

Speaker 2 (14:12):
That's the whole point. Dude. Everyone's doing it, Dude, I get.
I think that's all of our business. I'm live show shit,
there's some drama going on. We're not going to talk
about it. We're going to say that we have no
control over you have tickets, none shows or scalting. I mean,
we're really excited.

Speaker 1 (14:31):
They know that we're gonna there's gonna be more. If
we're not going to your city, it's because we're saving it.
We're saving the best for lass.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
That's right. It's because we don't choose where to go.
That's right. I'm not going to say the one state
I refuse to go to. I wouldn't. I'm not going
to don't get great.

Speaker 1 (14:48):
You'll know when we've gone to fifty fifty fifty.

Speaker 2 (14:51):
How many are there? Are there? Fifty two?

Speaker 1 (14:53):
No, that's cards in a deck. It's the cards and
a murder deck.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
Get back to the cards. What do you want to
talk about? I guess I think I just had an idea.
Let's harm what about merch of baseball hats with just
BA hats with just a single face of a murderer
on it? Like the drawering or like a fucking sketch.
I think it would have to be a drawing drawering.

(15:18):
Don't nobody steal this. I swear to fucking God, I
see this on If I see this on fucking Etsy.

Speaker 1 (15:26):
This this means we have tonight Sunday. We have to tell
Thursday to fucking make this. Goddamn have it.

Speaker 2 (15:30):
Stephen, mute it, Steven, Steven cats All and get on this.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
Please wouldn't you wear just That's a great idea, because
write a black hat and then just Albert Fish's face
on it.

Speaker 2 (15:42):
Is what I'm talking about.

Speaker 1 (15:43):
What if it was one of those beanies that you
pull over your face and it has.

Speaker 2 (15:46):
The eye in the mouth.

Speaker 1 (15:48):
Those are called ballaclaw And it just said my favorite
murderer is and you just pull it.

Speaker 2 (15:52):
And it's just like, this is intellectual copyright property. We
own this, own it, and we can prove it in
a law. Don't you steal the balaclava? Idea, we'll come.
What's it called balaclava, the thing that you pull over
that like bank rubbers use. That's I didn't know that's
what it was called.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
Yeah, we all come to every fifty fucking state and
fucking track you down.

Speaker 2 (16:14):
For the one because we're the one that I refuse
to go to. It's main. It's just kidding. It's not.
It's not it's it's no way, man.

Speaker 1 (16:20):
They got fucking lobsters anyway, that's lobsters.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
I actually love Maine and I've wanted to go there
since I was a kid because I used to read
these books called Meg. I think it was called Meg
of Maine, and we're going I think that was what
it was called.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
I would go to fucking Maine so hard. Yeah, let's just.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
Add a weird tour. Let's have a weird tour called
We're just like, we do what we want.

Speaker 1 (16:40):
Yeah, called we do what we want. There's not enough
people to fill whatever. Fucking nobody cares. They'll fucking like you.
They're just trying to get make a fucking living.

Speaker 2 (16:47):
We're gonna go to Maine. We're gonna go to a
night in New York. We're gonna go to Montreal, where
they don't like anything. We're gonna go to down to Way.

Speaker 1 (16:56):
Buying, California, which is the worst thing that ever happened
in my fucking life.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
It wouldn't be amazing to go to Irvine and not
sell any tickets.

Speaker 1 (17:03):
I go amazing, just be like, it's just all you know,
every girl who made fun of me in elementary school
gets in for free.

Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah, and they and they get in front tee extend
talk to each other. That be god, this is turning
into like an Albert Brooks movie.

Speaker 1 (17:18):
We an Albert Fish movie. Oh my, Albert Fish Productions.
Uh that's the best name for a production company. And
it's just a cartoon of him with all those pins
inside of him. Oh my god, he's girls.

Speaker 2 (17:33):
All right, do we have to do the murder part?
This is so fun. There are those who say we
do have to do it? Last time? You went first?

Speaker 1 (17:46):
Okay you pointed at me and then moved your finger
towards your I was just kind of ready to go
with whatever you said.

Speaker 2 (17:53):
I do love that.

Speaker 1 (17:53):
In the live episode at the at the venue, we
were like, how to ask the audience who went first
last time?

Speaker 2 (17:58):
And a bunch of like care Georgia, like they knew,
I know. It's so sweet. It's uh because they know
we don't know anything. That was so fun.

Speaker 1 (18:09):
And the craziest thing to me is someone who wasn't
there said at one hour and fifteen minutes and did
I hear Guy Brenham laugh?

Speaker 2 (18:16):
Oh we got like seven of those. That's that's amazing.
And then you did. Because there's people who are Guy Branham,
who is our friend and he's also a co host
of Pop Rocket, which a very popular podcast, but also
he's a well known comedian and he has the most
distinctive laugh that makes you want to start laughing. Yeah,
it's amazing.

Speaker 1 (18:35):
He's so nice, like this is this is how low
it is in la But he remembered my name when
he met after he met me, and Vince is the
same way too, where it's like he didn't have to
remember our name. Like that's how low it is, where
it's like, you remember my name. He's so nice.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
You're just looking for some decency. Yeah. Yeah. He read
How to Do Things with Friends and then Remember them.
He read that book. Yeah, all right. I just coughed
and burped at the same time. But I just want
to say I want to delay this one more minute
class act because I have defiance disorder. Is that a thing? Yeah?

(19:11):
I have it too. Yeah. I don't know what it is.
It's just that you can't do what people want you.
Oh my god, I have that. Yeah, it makes sense
with both of us. I'm learning a lot from you.

Speaker 1 (19:20):
Though I have it very bad. I'm learning that it's
okay from you.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
It is. I mean, it's fine because everybody has something.

Speaker 1 (19:27):
I once had a fucking soccer coach when I was
like in junior high hold his fist up to my
face and say you need to stop fucking being defiant
and I was like, fuck you.

Speaker 2 (19:35):
And did you walk away the hell? Yeah, that's right,
he's probably a f I was just going to say,
that's the show I'm working on right now, is Guy
Brandham show? That's the Yeah, it just makes it's I
don't have to be secret about it because I'm happy
that gets to have a show, and it's going to
be on True TV in like probably Spring called talk show,

(19:56):
the game show. It's going to be awesome.

Speaker 1 (19:59):
That reminds me of BoJack Horsemen of what was it like?
Celebrities do they know anything?

Speaker 2 (20:03):
What do they know? Let's find out that's the guy.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
Ranna deserves the show so much, so much.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
The guy is he's a fucking lawyer. Literally what, Yes,
he is a law degree. Shut up. Yeah, yeah, he's
smarter than everybody.

Speaker 1 (20:17):
Jesus National fucking Treasure and Murder Times.

Speaker 2 (20:23):
Okay, okay, we're back.

Speaker 1 (20:27):
I oh, Jamie Lee a huge apology for calling her book,
which is called ridiculous is it?

Speaker 2 (20:37):
It's ridiculous. That's the real name. That's the real name.
I kept calling it. And it still looks like that
to me. We delicious, right, they're both they both work.
Maybe if the book was about wedding cakes.

Speaker 1 (20:53):
It's like a different person than James, you know, than
the person who would write ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
So yeah, it's a totally different and it's bad marketing.
So there's that, and I apologize. I do like though
that you stated fuck writing a book, which then future
you it's like you could feel it coming.

Speaker 1 (21:13):
Oh, someone's gonna make me, someone's gonna make me. No,
I fucking I don't know why I would say that,
because that was like my dream, my whole life. But
it's just so daunting. I had to be forced to
write it for sure, even though I wanted to do it.

Speaker 2 (21:25):
So yeah, that's how writing is.

Speaker 1 (21:27):
It is, that's how anything is, That's how everything is.
Oh you want that work hard?

Speaker 2 (21:32):
No? No, now you ruined it. How about you hand
it to me? Are you listening to me? I can't
tell and I don't want to. Okay, we're gonna now
go into Georgia's story from this episode. It's about the
Starved Rock State Park murders.

Speaker 1 (21:57):
So remember we were talking about national parks and how
everyone gets murdered in non constantly.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
It's like, what the fuck I have one.

Speaker 1 (22:02):
For you today that I'd never heard about, and then
I you know, okay, they looked it up. Okay, here's
the name of the fucking state park. It's called Starved
Rock State Park.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
So immediately you're like, oh shit, can I guess where
it is?

Speaker 1 (22:16):
Yeah, Wyoming Illinois it sounds, but you know, they're probably
real close to each other, thank you, they're probably did
you see them meme someone made of It's just it's
a photo of what like Wyoming and it heads over
the top and whatever state is next to Wyoming.

Speaker 2 (22:33):
Because that's what you said. I can't pretend. I cannot pretend. Listen,
we're so smart and certain things, oh and so dumb
in most things, and yet defiant as fuck. So that's why,
fuck you, that's why we're still not starting this murder
Murder TV. Shit, damn it.

Speaker 1 (22:52):
Okay, start Rock State Park. It's a state park. It's
one hundred miles outside of Chicago. The reason it's name
this Okay, So it's a rock fortress on the Illinois River,
a band of and I'm going to say this wrong
and sound like such a fucking asshole, illinis Wick Indians

(23:12):
lived there originally in the seventeen and then in the
seventeenth century they're besieged by a bunch of fucking assholes
they like kind of lock them in, and so the
people who didn't die by trying to escape the Indians
were died from starving.

Speaker 2 (23:27):
So fuck yeah, dude, Okay, So on March fourteenth, nineteen sixty,
these three.

Speaker 1 (23:31):
Suburban housewives who are from a little bit outside of
this area.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
They're in Riverside.

Speaker 1 (23:40):
Three suburban housewives go to star Rock State Park for
a long weekend. They're all just like, let's get the
fuck out of here. One of the women had like
convolester husband through a heart attack. They needed to get
the fuck.

Speaker 2 (23:52):
Out of town.

Speaker 1 (23:52):
They wanted to go and enjoy the area's hiking trails.
It's apparently gorgeous. They're staying at the Starbrock Lodge. Excuse me,
like burped. So this is Lillian Etting Mildred Linquest. They're
both fifty and Francis Murphy, who's forty seven, the young one.
They they're wives of business executives, their mothers have grown children,

(24:18):
and they're prominent in their town for civic involvement and
their friends through the Riverside Presbyterian Church.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
So they're good fucking women, you know.

Speaker 1 (24:27):
They're like, we deserve like this is this is their
what's it called?

Speaker 2 (24:33):
When they yeah, Cairl's Weekend. Yes, I just had that
feeling right as you finish that last sentence. But they're
all gonna die. Well, yeah, it was the and you
know what that feeling feels like to me and I
remember what we're doing. It feels like when the dentist
puts the lead blanket over you when you get your
X rays taken. So then it's just like oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:53):
And you're like this lead thing isn't going to do
anything too. It's like that lead thing where they're like,
this is probably it's gonna maybe yeah, but anyway, Yeah,
that's it. This is the lead blanket of sadness.

Speaker 2 (25:06):
Yea. They check into the lodge, they put.

Speaker 1 (25:08):
Their luggage in their rooms, and then they have lunch
at the lodgees like beautiful restaurant, and then they're like,
we're going to go for a hike, like post lunch hike. Okay, Well,
that evening, Lillian's husband is supposed to hear from his wife,
and so he doesn't, and he calls the staff and
the staff is like, well, no, we saw them, but they're.

Speaker 2 (25:28):
Not in the room right now. They'll call you tomorrow.

Speaker 1 (25:30):
The next day he calls again and the staff again
says like, oh no, you know, we saw them at
lunch and they're here.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
They're just probably out.

Speaker 1 (25:37):
And then the next day there's a snow a crazy
fucking snowstorm, and so this dude, Lilian's husband named George
is like, go into my fucking wife's room and see
if she's there. They check the rooms, their luggage is
all packed, their car is still in the same place,
like they clearly hadn't been there in two days. So
George calls law enforcement and volunteers them out and they

(26:01):
start a search party. And at the time this local
newspaper reporter hears about it. He fucking skidaddles over there
and he drives into the park and he comes across
some kids near a ravine who are shouting. And it
turns out these like local camp had been hiking and
these like teenage boys found bodies on one of the

(26:24):
nearby trails, which is like, dude, you poor kids.

Speaker 2 (26:28):
So what's found?

Speaker 1 (26:31):
And the fucking newspaper guy goes up there scoop of
the fucking century and it was called the crime of
the Century for a while. He finds the mutilated bodies
of Lillian, Mildred and Francis. They're laying side by side,
partially covered with snow. They're on their backs under the
ledge of a small cave, and their lower clothing had
been torn away and their legs were spread apart, which

(26:53):
we know is a fucking sadistic as fuck way to
leave someone. They had all been beaten viciously on their
heads and two were tied together with heavy twine. They
were covered in blood and their legs were blackened with bruises. So,

(27:13):
because this had happened two days earlier and then there
was a snowstorm, there were several inches of snow covering
the whole area, which means all this fucking evidence they
could have had was lost. But they did some digging
and they found a ton of blood beneath the snow,
and they found a frozen tree limb that was streaked
with blood, and they thought that was the murder weapon.

(27:34):
And then also a trail of blood led from a
different area into where the women's body were found, so
they thought that the bodies had been dragged and positioned
under the sledge. The corner said the women had obviously
been obviously been quote molested, but they couldn't they couldn't
find any evidence of rape because it had been so
long and it had been snowing.

Speaker 2 (27:55):
Let's see, and it seems that the time of.

Speaker 1 (27:58):
Death was pretty shortly after they had left the lodge
after lunch, and there was no motive for the murders
because the women had left all their money and jewelry
in their room, and so maybe the killer got mad
when he found out that there was nothing on them
but the strap to the camera. They brought a camera
and binoculars, and the strap to the camera was broken,

(28:18):
and there was photos of them like sight seeing on
the camera which you can see online.

Speaker 2 (28:24):
Oh, so the strap was broken, but the camera is
still there. Yes, so it wasn't robbery.

Speaker 1 (28:29):
No, yeah, or maybe it was attempted and the women
fought back something. So there were no suspects for eight months.
And so the county state attorney, whose name was Harold
no Harland, Warren Harland, that's a fucking amazing name, used
his own money and purchases the microscopes, the microscope and
begins like doing this crazy study of.

Speaker 2 (28:51):
All the evidence. Sorry I missed what year this was,
Oh nineteen sixty, Oh okay, he buys he buys his
own microscope. And also everyone's name is something that's old fashioned.
Oh yeah, it's like these are all older people in
nineteen sixties.

Speaker 1 (29:06):
So he got no, they're all like, you know, from
the thirties or whatever exactly, Okay, So he buys his
own microscope. He begins studying the evidence and he's like,
the twine is gonna fucking tell me something.

Speaker 2 (29:20):
Where is this twine from?

Speaker 1 (29:21):
And he finds that there's two kinds of twine, a
twenty fly cord and a twelve ply cord, and he
starts at the first place he can think of, which
is at the lodge, and he brings him to the
manager of the cord and he's like, does this look
familiar to you? And it turns out the manager's like,
I think those were from the restaurant. And they go
back into the fucking area where the food is kept

(29:44):
in the fucking pantry, and there's the fucking twine, same
fucking twine.

Speaker 2 (29:48):
So they don't have to go far to find who
ever did that.

Speaker 1 (29:50):
They do not, so they had originally Warren had originally
thought that the killer either worked at or had access
to the lodge.

Speaker 2 (29:57):
But all the lodge employees have been given polygraph tests.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
And they all passed, but he calls them back for
another round of testing, and that is when a former
dishwasher named Chester Otto Weager was brought in, Like that
name combination because he has a middle name.

Speaker 2 (30:15):
Well, yeah, they always named the middle name. But Chester
Chester's not a good not a good name. W e
g e Erger Chester Wiger. You don't name your child
in a name that has the same two letters at
the end on both.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
Names, Chester Weiger. Oh, is that a thing? It's my
personal thing.

Speaker 2 (30:32):
I see that. No, I get that. I've never thought
about that.

Speaker 1 (30:35):
So he's a former park employee and he had quit recently,
like over the summer to go paint houses with his father.
But while he was working there, he served meals to
the police and reporters while they were like looking up
for evidence and shit. So they give him a light
detector test and the tester, who's like this really they

(30:57):
brought in like a really good tester. They said his
face turned white after during the testing, Chester walks away
and the tester said, that's your man.

Speaker 2 (31:07):
Ooh yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:09):
So Wegger's twenty one. He's a small man. He has
a wife and two young children. He had resigned that summer,
and lodge employees reported seeing scratches on his face, but
he had passed several light detector tests already.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
I mean, because ultimately we know that light detector tests. Ready,
they're fifty to fifty, right, they're only right half the time.

Speaker 1 (31:31):
Yeah, now we know this, And there's a reason they're
inadmissible in court is because they're they're.

Speaker 2 (31:37):
Not They're based on your heart rate. And if you
are like a sociopath or something, you won't have a
reaction to. You won't be nervous to tell a lie.
You won't care.

Speaker 1 (31:47):
And if you truly believe what you thought you saw.
So like, if it's a witness who's like, I fucking
saw a man in a red jacket, I know I did,
And if they believe that, they're going to not have
been being deceitful, right, even if.

Speaker 2 (31:59):
It's not true, I won't have the physical reaction.

Speaker 1 (32:01):
Yeah, I think someday that I think someday witness testimony
is going to be just like l detector tests, where
it's like this isn't admissible because.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
Everyone's a little bit reliable. Yeah, we're all a little wrong.
I think that's actually a good thing to remember. Yeah.
I always think I remember things always and I'm positive, positive, yeah,
and then I'm wrong.

Speaker 1 (32:20):
Well, it's the same thing of like how people say,
like there's three sides to every story your side, their side,
and the truth. And it's like, you know, the argument
that you and I got into sounds this way from
me and sounds that way from you, and you have
to be like, well, somewhere in the middle is really
what happened?

Speaker 2 (32:35):
And you can't you have to know that you don't know.

Speaker 1 (32:38):
Yeah, the other person's this is a psychology podcast. It's
true though, so smart, I know, like, how do we
even but not about states, about feelings.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
Pardon me, I just thought it'd be perfect.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
I was gonna make that one quiet, but I figured
I'm putting my jacket back.

Speaker 2 (32:57):
You're cold. It's so loud. I know this is bank.
It's not good for audio. Stephen, have a blanket. There's
a blanket right there. I barely I pee on it once.
Please are you cold? Yes? Caring? Behind you is a
thermostat please form not peen on. Right there.

Speaker 1 (33:13):
But the thing that looks like a fire hazard from
the nineteen fifties, Yeah, click that little thing up.

Speaker 2 (33:19):
This was worth it. Taboom click that up.

Speaker 1 (33:24):
No, No, to the left the little switch. Yeah, up
there we go to see the fire and the wall
right there. It's I need to move. This is an
old this is the night my favorite murder got lit
on fire.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
All right, okay, okay blah.

Speaker 1 (33:43):
So they're like, it's totally him, and then he was like, hey,
I have I just happened to have this buckskin jacket,
and I want to admit that it's covered in quote
dark stains and it later turned out to be human
blood on this jacket.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
I don't even was just bringing this up.

Speaker 1 (34:01):
Yeah, I don't know if that's totally you know how
it happened, But somehow they found a buckskin jacket that
was covered in dark stains a habit to be human blood,
but in nineteen sixty it could not be typed or
matched to a specific victim, which is like, come on,
you guys, get it to fucking gether.

Speaker 2 (34:14):
They're like, we can't. It's only nineteen sixty. It's just bloodstains.
At this point, we just want to go to the moon.
That's all we care about.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
The same movies, which is actually similar. Her parents failed us.
So he does further polygraph tests again he's fucked, and
he fails them all. So they investigators begin checking into
similar cases in the area, and they come across a

(34:42):
reported rape and robbery that had taken place a mile
from Starved Rock in nineteen fifty nine, the year before,
a seventeen year old girl had been sexually assaulted and
she had been bound with twine, similarly to the Starvebrock women. Okay,
and then I you know, in all my like weird
digging of like old articles and shit, the one place

(35:05):
I found, in one place, this information that the attack
had been reported by two teenagers, a boy and a girl.
The boy said they had been robbed while the girl
was sexually assaulted. They told the cops about it, and
the officers didn't believe their story, and they sent the
couple away with a cursory investigation, saying that they thought

(35:27):
the story was made.

Speaker 2 (35:27):
Up, that they were robbed, that they were robbed.

Speaker 1 (35:31):
And she was fucking sexually assaulted. They were like, you
little lying seventeen year olds, get the fuck out of here,
you know what I mean, Like, why would you fucking
make that up? Let's get attention.

Speaker 2 (35:42):
Yeah, I mean that's what That's what they used to
say stuff like that back then.

Speaker 1 (35:45):
Right, Yeah, so maybe they had shouldn't pay attention to
that anyways. So the victim, the female victim, has brought
a stack of mugshots. She's sorting through them and when
she sees the photo of Chester, she starts to scream,
which is so chilling. Yeah, So they get a restaurant
for him on the rape because they can't prove the
murders yet, so they get him off the streets and

(36:08):
then they have him in custody. They start questioning him
about the rape, and then they press him about them murders,
and they keep keep him in the interrogator in the
interrogation room for hours.

Speaker 2 (36:18):
At two a m.

Speaker 1 (36:19):
He finally asked to see his family and then he confesses.

Speaker 2 (36:30):
But before that, he's like, really quick though, again, I
have a buckskin jacket. I just wanted you guys to know.

Speaker 1 (36:37):
It's the blood from the buck that was fucking killed
for this jacket.

Speaker 2 (36:40):
I'm just going to bring this up real quick because
I want it's pretty cool jacket. Yeah, Like, I just
want you guys to like admire my jacket. Okay, anyway,
I'll go back to my confession. So he confesses. He
says that he got scared.

Speaker 1 (36:58):
He tried to grab the women's pocketbooks and they fought
him and he hit them, and the pocket book turned
out to be the camera that was around her neck.
He thought it was like a pocketbook. So he gives
them that that interesting detail. Then he says they were like,
why did you drag the women into this ledge, into

(37:19):
this cave, And he says it's because he had spotted
a small airplane flying low over the park and he
was afraid it was a state police plane, so he
moved the body so that they could not be seen.
And he had said it was a red and white plane.
So a few days later, the cops and the detectives
go to the airplane base and look at the log

(37:39):
books and there's a fucking plane flying over that fucking
park at the exact moment that was red and white. Whoa,
that's some ship that only he could have known. Yes, right,
and he told on himself. He convessed, Yeah, he confessed.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
Okay, okay.

Speaker 1 (37:56):
But then right after his first meeting with his quarter
point attorney, he changes the story and says that he
was innocent of all charges, that the investigators had coerced
him into confessing, and that they fucking held a gun
to his head and made him sign every single one
of the papers.

Speaker 2 (38:11):
I mean I can see that too, you. I mean,
back then he said, I know.

Speaker 1 (38:15):
He was so scared that he signed the papers away,
saying they had fed him the information about the airplane
and he wasn't even in the park at the time
of the killings. He later said, the police at the
park saw me every day and I passed every test
they gave me. But the months went by and they
wanted a conviction, so they beat me into signing it.
I wasn't even I wasn't ever at the park when

(38:37):
it happened.

Speaker 2 (38:37):
I was done wrong except for when you rape that
girl that time, just yeah, okay, but yeah, yes, however, okay.

Speaker 1 (38:45):
So he's brought to trial in nineteen sixty one, they
seek the death penalty.

Speaker 2 (38:49):
A year later, they the jury.

Speaker 1 (38:52):
Finds him guilty for one of the murders they only
tried him for, which is weird.

Speaker 2 (38:58):
Maybe they thought they couldn't get him on all three.
Well it's all the same evidence, you know what I mean.

Speaker 1 (39:03):
And then they ended up like not bringing him up
on chargers for the rape too.

Speaker 2 (39:06):
So like this poor girl who was like you.

Speaker 1 (39:08):
First thought I was fucking lying, and now you're not
even gonna fucking try him for this shit.

Speaker 2 (39:12):
Wow, poor fucking girl. But if he goes down for
those at least something on the other ones. Then he's
in jail forever. Maybe they had to Yeah, okay, here's
the problem with that.

Speaker 1 (39:23):
Oh so he sentenced to a term of life in prison.
And then the jurors get dismissed, and the and the
reporters asked them if they knew that a life sentence
in Illinois meant that Wigger would be eligible for parole
in a few years. And it turns out that the
mint the like the normal life sentence for murder in

(39:45):
Illinois was ten years at the time.

Speaker 2 (39:48):
What, yeah, I don't know if it still is. It
might still be.

Speaker 1 (39:52):
No, and jurors were like, wait, what the fuck. They
were like, we would have fucking sent him away.

Speaker 2 (39:56):
Wait, that's like a thing. Everyone that's going to jail
is seventy or something. It doesn't make no sense. Life.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
A life sentence is the hardest quotes that have ever
been quoted. Life sentence is such bullshit. It makes you
feel and think a certain thing. It's not fucking true.
Seven fucking years. It's like you're eligible for parole immediately,
and you just keep sucking it's It's not a thing.

Speaker 2 (40:22):
A life sentence is not a thing. A life sentence
is not a thing. You are full of shit. Life
sentence is like is a is a Can I just
remind you that lawyers listen to this? Okay? I just
would you want me to text guy right now? Text guy? Okay?

(40:42):
The idea of a life sentence like this is my favorite.
We're going it's not like we're going, we're going outside
the podcast. It's like we're doing an outside line.

Speaker 1 (40:52):
A life sent I want to call a friend, a lawyer.

Speaker 2 (40:55):
I'm doing it.

Speaker 1 (40:55):
A life sentence means life sentence, but an actuality. In
majority of states, it really just is it's a sentence,
but it's not an actual what's the word.

Speaker 2 (41:07):
It's not going to give you fifty to seventy five
years like like it would take up a person's life exactly.

Speaker 1 (41:12):
You're not actually going to be in prison for your life.
All right, both of you on your phones now, I
just want to fucking point out.

Speaker 2 (41:20):
I mean, no, I'm just texting. I'm texting the outside
and I ask you a question. So we're just going
to see if guys, even Steven, what did you find?

Speaker 3 (41:28):
I found that it was much more complicated than I
thought it was. I thought I thought life imprisonment was
life and no. The first thing was on a message board.
It just said, that's a really good question, what is
life imprisonment in Illinois?

Speaker 2 (41:39):
And oh you didn't get a mean, I didn't get
an answer.

Speaker 1 (41:42):
The whole thing right now, It just says that.

Speaker 2 (41:46):
Okay, well we know that it changes states to date, right, yes,
so I also this is Illinois specific, right, So so.

Speaker 1 (41:53):
I mean the jurors were set like, do you know
that life imprisonment? A life sentence in Illinois means that
he'd be eligible for parole in a few years.

Speaker 2 (42:02):
So that's the thing.

Speaker 1 (42:03):
You get life in prison and then you're fucking eligible
for parole and in this case in Illinois, get parole
after ten years.

Speaker 2 (42:11):
Oh okay, so that's right. Well, I mean, is that
what you're about to tell me he got parole? No?

Speaker 1 (42:16):
Oh okay, no, no, no, no, umm blaviti blah. So
they said they would have given the electric chair.

Speaker 2 (42:25):
Oh shit, blah blah blah. So okay, let's see.

Speaker 1 (42:30):
The whole prosecution was based on his confession, which predated
Miranda warnings that are required today.

Speaker 2 (42:36):
Wow, I didn't realize Miranda warnings for that recent Yeah, okay,
they're based on a guy named Miranda. Like how John
Wayne's real name is Priscilla is No, it isn't, yeah,
or Miriam, that's my middle name. It's a girl name.
What really? M hmm, It's Jewish okay, blah blah blah

(42:58):
blah okay.

Speaker 1 (42:58):
So then at some point, so he from the moment
he was in prison, is saying he's fucking innocent and
that some woman had a deathbed confession that was never
like corroborated, corroborated, corroborated. He's maintained his innocence. He's seventy

(43:19):
seven and he is the third longest held inmate in
a state prison, having served a life sentence since nineteen
sixty one. He's been requesting paroles since nineteen seventy two.
It's fourteen times that he's been up for parole.

Speaker 2 (43:31):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (43:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:32):
And he's always.

Speaker 1 (43:33):
Saying and if he said that he did it, he
probably would have been paroled because part of getting paroled
is accepting responsibility for your crime. Yeah, and he fucking
refuses to do it. DNA tests were requested, but so
there was a fucking hair found in the victim's fists
and the bloodstains on the coat they were requested testing

(43:54):
in two thousand and four, but the items had not
been properly preserved and thus no longer your head held
evidentiary value, which she seems like bullshit, right, like you.

Speaker 2 (44:04):
Can fucking find it in there somewhere. Well, but it
sounds like what they're saying is like instead of putting
it in a ziploc bag, they put it in one
of those sandwich bags that folds over at the top,
where it's like those don't work for sandwiches, why are
they gonna work forever?

Speaker 1 (44:16):
Well, I, you know, I look this this case up
on Facebook to see if anyone was like talking about
it as her hometown murder, and one guy whose nam
I fucking can't remember, was like, uh, this is my
hometown murder. And these items, the jacket and the fucking
branch that had been used to kill them, were brought
to schools to show children. No, yeah and so and
like the books kinjacket comes back yeah. Like the guy

(44:40):
was like, the guy worked for the Innocent Project, Innocence Project,
and he was like the reason these fucking things couldn't
be tested is because one of the fucking investigators had
like one of the pieces of evidence on his wall
as a trophy, and he's got brought like the guy
was like, my mom remembers these being brought into school
and you could like touch them and fucking learn about
the market.

Speaker 2 (44:58):
Get his many little kid fingerprints on there. Yeah, possibly can't.

Speaker 1 (45:01):
Pretty smart if that's a fucking tactic.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
Yeah, because this was back when Yeah, yeah, no one knew.

Speaker 1 (45:07):
So it was so recent he well as less than
a month ago. He was up for parole again.

Speaker 2 (45:14):
Jesus, how old is this mother?

Speaker 1 (45:16):
Seventy seven? He was up for parole again, and he
got denied. And one of the only living jurors left,
Nancy Porter, who's ninety two, said that she now finds
the confession implausible because she thought that Wager, who was unarmed,
who was only five 't eight, could have been overpowered
by the three women, which I think is such bullshit.

Speaker 2 (45:36):
That's not how fucking crimes work.

Speaker 1 (45:37):
Like you intimidate these three, you know, quiet women who
go along with what you're telling them to do, and
intimidate them like it doesn't matter how big you are.

Speaker 2 (45:47):
No, no, no, no, that's like that's like acting like
every crime situation is the same, and yeah, this person
is a criminal. He could have lured them to a spot. Yeah,
cracked and one of them on the head scared the
shit out of the other two.

Speaker 1 (45:59):
Like he tied two of them together. So you're overpowering
two of them. The weather Woman's not gonna leave. I mean,
it's not like they're going to fucking ninja him, like,
you know, overpower him.

Speaker 2 (46:08):
And that's the same thing with the Richard Speck case
where he went into They couldn't understand how her There
was so many women in his room and he he
kept them all in that room and then took them
out one by one and and it's like, because it's
a psychological thing, he scared the shit out of them.
He scared them.

Speaker 1 (46:25):
And he kept saying, probably if you go along with
what I'm trying to do, I'll let you go.

Speaker 2 (46:29):
I'll let you go.

Speaker 1 (46:30):
And so that, you know, especially back then when you
got to be fucking polite to everyone, you go along
with it, hoping.

Speaker 2 (46:37):
You just want this situation to end. Yeah, I mean that. Yeah,
that's crazy.

Speaker 1 (46:40):
Yeah, Okay, So silver lining, So the crime lab is
now one of the finest in the state because of
the shoddy work from the Starbarrock case. And someone said
the state crime lab was less equipped than a high
school chemistry lab at the time. And this is from

(47:00):
Steve Stout, who wrote a book called The star Rock Murders.
This crime is more important than not because it changed
the system of criminal investigation in Illinois. And then I
went on readit and there was a guy who said
there was a guy named or a woman named Bedpan three.

Speaker 2 (47:17):
I know she. I don't know what's going on with her.

Speaker 1 (47:20):
You know she's a woman because she says my well
maybe not, she says, my husband, and I fucking.

Speaker 2 (47:23):
Assume oh right, right, you know hey, like I mean,
not trying to come on everybody. She says, there's a
huge like there.

Speaker 1 (47:31):
Was a bedpan, a bedpan one, and a bedpan two
already taken the other two.

Speaker 2 (47:35):
No, this is the third best bedpan. Yeah, this is
a huge.

Speaker 1 (47:39):
There's a huge number of people from this town in
my surrounding area that I think he's he was a scapegoat.
Her ex's husband's grandfather was a judge during the time
than not during this trial and told me that there
was no way in helly did the crime. The bodies,
from what I remember reading, had animal slash dog bites
that were just left unexplained. Theories include that a business
owner who is from another nearby town who had very

(48:02):
had very large, well trained dogs was a possibility because
he inexplictedly immigrated back to his home country right after
the murders, leaving his entire family behind. Another theory is
that the women's wealthy Chicago businessman husbands paid someone to
have them killed in the park for various nefarious reasons.
The only real consensus is that pretty much no one
at the time or years later believed it was Weger.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
Uh. I don't think it's the husband having them killed
because the way they're mutilated and left with their legs open. Yeah,
and if Weger was a rapist and was the rapist
that raped that girl, it would be more in line
with a person who has uh is a rapist has
this She was similian, yeah, and basically escalating.

Speaker 1 (48:46):
I don't disagree with the fact that it sounds like
if I didn't know any of the suspects, I would
think it was at least two people.

Speaker 2 (48:54):
Yeah, you know, yeah, but who knows you get you
crack somebody over the head with a stick when you're
and you're you're with your two friends somebody gets cracked
over the head and then you're like and suddenly there's
like some wild man that's like sit down and I
have to tie you up, and I mean, for sure
it's over. He probably did it, but yeah, he probably

(49:17):
did it. But the it is interesting that whole thing
of like you can't really base it on what the
polygraph says, and you can and you do have to
be suspect. Now what we know these days of how
police interrogations used to go. We've all seen La Confidential.

Speaker 1 (49:35):
It's a pity that DNA can't figure this one out.

Speaker 2 (49:38):
Yeah, that's amazing. That's such a good story.

Speaker 1 (49:42):
Yeah, Starrock murders and also such a creepy name, star
Rock Murders.

Speaker 2 (49:46):
Oh for sure. Yeah, yeah, we're back. This is one
of your stories that I think about all the time.
Do you yes, because it was so kind of like
the pictures in my mind of where they were when
all this was happening so disturbing. Do you have updates? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (50:06):
And just three innocent women, you know, going on a
little fucking girl's trip together to nature, like yeah, which
just I think this one a lot of people because
the thing is, a lot of people don't think that
the person who was convicted, Chester Wager, did it. And
in fact, in twenty twenty, after sixty years in prison,
Chester Weger was granted parole and released from prison.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (50:30):
Yeah, So his lawyers continued to push for new proceedings
because they want to prove his innocence of the murders,
because he's still claiming he was innocent and that the
confession was coerced. So then just this last May May
twenty twenty five, a mini trial was set and it
introduced new evidence that was not available decades ago. And
some of that evidence is really fascinating. Is a woman

(50:52):
came forward and said that her grandfather on his deathbed,
so we have a deathbed confession. Another one that he
was in the mob and he had people killed before,
and that he said that he had one regret to
his granddaughter. He said that he knew that Chester week.

Speaker 2 (51:09):
Or was innocent.

Speaker 1 (51:11):
And she claims that her grandfather went on to confide
in her that it was registered hits referring to the
murders and asked her to help prove like on his
death but help prove this man's innocence, which is wild.

Speaker 2 (51:27):
It's not enough.

Speaker 1 (51:28):
It didn't sway the court that much because it's just
kind of, you know, it kind of.

Speaker 2 (51:34):
It's one one guy's story, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (51:36):
And like why would he tell his teenage daughter that
and not other you know, and not bring the police
in or something like that. So that's just like a
little interesting bit.

Speaker 2 (51:46):
But who would have contracted to have those women murder?

Speaker 1 (51:49):
So the women's husbands were like wealthy businessmen, So to me,
that's like a bigger difference than if they were just
like working class people.

Speaker 2 (51:57):
It's like you could see a little bit.

Speaker 1 (51:59):
Of something nefarious going on, perhaps a message being sent.
And the husbands also like had connections in, you know,
with politicians and stuff like that, so who knows. It
doesn't seem like a mafia hit type of murder though,
you know. Yeah, like they don't do it like that.
They don't not bring a fucking weapon to the place

(52:21):
where they're going to kill people, you know.

Speaker 2 (52:23):
Yeah, And I don't know, it just feels like a
bad movie that the mafia to have to go out
into like a park and writing nature like that. Yeah,
I don't think so, I don't either.

Speaker 1 (52:34):
And like also they probably would have noticed someone was
following them. Why wouldn't they just kill one of the
husbands or you know, it's just yeah, right, isn't.

Speaker 2 (52:42):
That the thing with the mob They did hit family members.

Speaker 1 (52:44):
Yeah, it doesn't sound very mob like to kill three
innocent wives of Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:51):
They don't do women children. I thought we had a
code of conduct here.

Speaker 1 (52:55):
It's yeah, it sounds like a brutal kind of opportunity,
like kind of opportunity. So that doesn't mean that this
guy did it, but that's what it sounds like.

Speaker 2 (53:04):
Yeah, Okay, it's hard. It feels like deathbed confessions have
more weight than just normal, right, regular life confessions, which
is like, what if they have dementia, what if they
are fining? What if you which fucking morpheme you're on
when you're like on your deathbed. Oh I cannot wait.
I can't wait.

Speaker 1 (53:20):
It's going to be so they're gonna be like, we
can't give her enough, she's she just.

Speaker 2 (53:26):
Asks for more, just keeps hitting that button, bottomless pit.

Speaker 3 (53:30):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (53:30):
And there's also an HBO documentary about the Starbrocks murders
called The Murders That Starved Rock that came out in
I think twenty twenty one, and it.

Speaker 2 (53:40):
Tells the whole story. I highly recommend it.

Speaker 1 (53:43):
All right, Well, this is one story that you were
like on in the beginning when it first started, like
this was like one of your like I think that
you like knew something was up, and so this is
you and you we'd have talked about it already, but
you are going to cover the story about Sherry Peppini.

Speaker 2 (53:59):
This is when I wanted to be a breaking Newsgaster,
good luck. So mine this week is a worrisome because
it's the case that I brought up the week before

(54:20):
last and I didn't really know anything about it, but
I just wanted to cite it to you, and it
was the Sherry Peppini case. Yes, So it's an amazing
thing because I went into such a like black hole
on the internet today that I had that thing happen
where I was reading. It was light outside when I
was reading, and the next thing I knew, it was

(54:41):
pitch black in my house.

Speaker 1 (54:43):
Turned yet because you didn't get up to turning the lights.

Speaker 2 (54:45):
On exactly, and I hadn't really looked around, so that
when I looked up, it was like I was sitting
in a pitch black room. It was kind of scared.

Speaker 1 (54:51):
It's just a really depresnestly. It's like one of my
depression triggers.

Speaker 2 (54:55):
Yes, that where you where you let just the light
fade away. I jumped up and turned to lamp on.
I have dogs. It wasn't too bad, but like.

Speaker 1 (55:03):
If anyone had come, like looked in the window and
seen what you were looking like reading about I'm not
killing this girl.

Speaker 2 (55:09):
Yeah she's crazy, she's going to kill me. But here's
because the reason that it it was, you know, hours
and hours of reading in all these different websites, is
because this case goes has so many levels and it
is crazy. Like when I first started talking to you
about it, I just wanted to kind of be like,

(55:29):
it's that crazy case and it's got some twists and turns.
But because I didn't really know specifics, I kind of
was like just gave up. Well.

Speaker 1 (55:35):
I love that I really don't know. I know that
everyone's talking about it. You mentioned it to me. I
love that you're filling me in on every like I
have nothing. I just want to fucking hear this. I'm excited,
all right.

Speaker 2 (55:44):
So I'll give you the I'll give you the overview, okay,
but essentially what we're talking about here in one way,
and this is what people are being so careful about it,
because yeah, but there's no proof that it's anything but
a woman who has been victimized. And what I really
like about that is that there are people who are
being so fastidious as to make sure that no one

(56:06):
is accusing a victim of a crime of doing anything.
That being said, there is insane amounts of evidence that
something is wrong with this case. It's really suspicious. It's
very suspicious, and it's not it's just interesting. So we
will talk about facts, and I'll just try to be

(56:28):
very clear about what facts are as opposed to hearsay
or anything, and just try to remind you every seven
minutes that we're talking about a victim and that this
isn't you know in nowhere were trying to give an
opinion about this. I just find this case to be
incredibly fascinating. Okay, So here's what we know. It's a

(56:51):
woman named Sherry Peppini, who is a thirty four year
old married mother of two who lives in Redding, California,
disappeared while she was jogging on November second, and she
reappeared three weeks later on the side of Highway five
before dawn on Thanksgiving Day, one hundred and fifty miles
away from where she was taken. She was beaten, she

(57:11):
was bloody, and her hands were chained behind her back.
Fuck yeah. She told police that she had been kidnapped
by two Hispanic women in a van who tortured and
starved her. Now on. So, after she was found, her husband, Keith,
gave interviews to both Good Morning America and twenty twenty.

Speaker 1 (57:33):
Wait I'm okay already questions. She said that the entirety
of her captive, her being captured was by two Hispanic women.

Speaker 2 (57:41):
Yes, the entirety of it. Yep, let's just go with
the facts. On. On those interviews, Keith hit her husband,
said his wife's captors, two Latina women, kept their faces covered,
spoke Spanish with the majority of the time. They beat her.
They broke her nose, they her hair, They starved her.

(58:02):
He claimed that Sherry had lost fifteen percent of her
body weight and that the captors quote unquote branded her,
which led to speculation that the kidnapping was part of
a sex trafficking operation. So after she was found, a
woman saw her again at four am on the side
of the road called nine one one She gets taken

(58:24):
to the hospital and her injuries include bruises, a broken nose, burns,
and starvation, but she was discharged several hours later. She
tells police that she was held captive, and she describes
the two latinas as one being old, one being young,

(58:46):
one had curly hair, one had straight hair, one had
thin eyebrows, one had thick eyebrows. Once she was released
from the hospital, she and her family left Redding, the
town that she lives in, for an undisclosed location to
avoid media attention. And Sherry herself has not been seen
by the media since her.

Speaker 1 (59:07):
Disappearance shot on Thanksgiving.

Speaker 2 (59:10):
Yeah, since like, she's basically not been seen by the
media at all. So they've seen the pictures of her
which are from her wedding day, which are seven years prior.

Speaker 1 (59:20):
So she hasn't given any interviewser it hasn't been seen.

Speaker 2 (59:22):
No, just her husband. So her husband went on twenty
twenty and Good Morning America, and he told the whole
story for her, And which makes sense for a victim
who is traumatized and needs to be away from everything, Yeah,
makes perfect sense. But did he need to do that? Well?

Speaker 1 (59:40):
True, Like, if that's the case, then she doesn't want
to be it needs to be away from it.

Speaker 2 (59:45):
Well, they and that's what they told people is basically
she got out of the hospital and then they left
town and told everybody that they are doing it to
avoid the media. And then he relatively soon after, goes
on both too, you know, major national television shows.

Speaker 1 (01:00:04):
Okay, do you want to Okay, so I'm gonna hold
my cents.

Speaker 2 (01:00:07):
All right, Yeah, you're like justin accrue it and listen
because it's interesting. Like so remember, uh, there are actually
websites that normally dive right in two cases like this,
the kind of Nancy Grace style cases who will not
entertain anything except for that Sherry Peppini is a victim,

(01:00:28):
and anybody saying anything different, that's the like you can't
talk about that, which is a stance. I mean, it's
just like a way to do it. But of course
Reddit is not like that because Reddit entertains anything at
all times and you can say what you want. And
so there's Reddit is the place I found a lot

(01:00:49):
of this information. The Shasta County sheriff actually recently came
out to say he believes Sherry Peppini's story, but he's
said that in direct conflict with an earlier statement where
the sheriff's office communications officer said they weren't ruling anything out.

(01:01:09):
So no one knows if he said that to fix
what somebody that was just basically answering the phone and
talking the Huffington Post said, or what. But there hasn't
been much movement the Shasta County. No, no, none of
the police up there have been warning people. They haven't

(01:01:30):
put out in any kind of APB about these two
Latina women. There haven't been warnings to other women about
being careful or this is what you need to look for.
That says a lot. Yeah, okay, uh so basically it
won't go over like this is the way they the

(01:01:52):
timeline problems essentially, so the day that she went jogging,
like the day that her husband, Keith realized that she
was missing, he was at work and he came home
from work and she wasn't there and the kids weren't there,
and instead of calling her, he said, he because sometimes
I think the reason is I was confused by this,

(01:02:15):
but basically that sometimes reception is bad up there, which
makes sense because it's like way up north of Sacramento. Yeah,
that he pinged her phone instead with find my iPhone. Okay,
So then he realizes where the phone is, and it's
a mile away from their house where kind of near
where their mailbox is, which is if you've grown up

(01:02:36):
in the country, it's that thing where like your house
is way up here on some weird, long, dusty road,
and your mailboxes are in a long line with a
bunch of other people's mailboxes down the.

Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
Road, like you go to your mailbox when you're driving
up your driveway exactly right.

Speaker 2 (01:02:49):
A mile seems far to me, but I don't know, okay.
And also this is like I was looking at a
map of Redding and there's there's nothing. I mean yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:02:57):
Also, the like the group that neighbor it's like put
mailboxes together.

Speaker 2 (01:03:02):
It has nothing to do with where your house is,
kind of right, exactly, yeah, because neighborhood neighborhoods don't exist there.
It's like all these houses just kind of like they're
probably ranch style houses spread out. Fuck that man, So
I want neighbors to hear me screamary at night. So
he says he called his mother and he I can't remember.

(01:03:26):
But basically it's just this weird thing of why wouldn't
you just call her phone? Yeah? And like okay, So
he basically he pings her phone, finds it. Uh, and
it's at the corner of Sunrise Drive and Old Oregon Trail.
And when he gets there, he immediately takes a picture
of it. It's sitting her phone, of her phone. Uh,

(01:03:50):
it's sitting, it's sitting with You're just gonna keep saying that.
I know that's no, no, no, you can't, but I'm
just saying, there's a lot of that. Yeah, there's headphones
sitting on top of the phone, on top of them,
very neatly, it says, And he takes a picture of it.
So the police said that it looked staged. They commented
on that early that said it looked staged, but he

(01:04:12):
didn't touch the phoney like whatever. And a lot of
people on these threads were talking about if your significant
other was missing in a way that you really felt
was real, you would grab that phone and start looking
at what are the last calls? Anything? All right? So
then he files a missing person's report, and in all

(01:04:32):
in every way he talks about her, instead of saying
kidnapped or missing, he keeps using the word taken. Liam
Neeson style. Okay, So then they put up five days
after she goes missing, they put up Sherrypepini dot com
and it's a website. Five days sorry, go ahead, it's
just a website about the whole case. Please help us

(01:04:55):
find her. She's missing, with her picture and everything else,
all the information, what she's wearing and the whole thing.
And ten days after that, this letter goes up on
that website and it's from an anonymous donor and it
says that it says like, I'm an anonymous donor. I'm
offering an undisclosed reward for Sherry's immediate release. My middleman

(01:05:17):
is Cameron Gamble, who's an international negotiator who also happens
to live in Reading the fuck right. So this is
I think this is the part now separate from people
saying please protect a victim who has been victimized. Absolutely,
but this is the part where everyone's like, this thing

(01:05:38):
stinks to high Heaven because when you go on there's
a really great article that was on The Daily Beast
called like Things you Should Know about the shady private
investigator involved in the Sherry Poppini case, And it's amazing
because it's all about him and how like it's really

(01:05:58):
there's lots of great information there's that he has on
his website, Cameron Gamble dot com. He's a guy that's
trying like he has his organization. It's supposedly a nonprofit
profit organization called Project Taken, and it's about dude, it's
about warning women or like telling women what to do

(01:06:21):
in case someone tries to kidnap them. What the fuck?
So all of these things are like just they just
are very suspect. It's just all very a little bit
like a movie and a little bit I don't think.

Speaker 1 (01:06:34):
So to coincidental, very coincidental.

Speaker 2 (01:06:37):
And also in the best case scenario, what this person
did in this anonymous donor that put this letter up
on their website was basically trying to circumvent law enforcement
and say if you have for I will give you money,
just bring her back. Week questions ask exactly they don't
use that phrase, but it's basically saying we don't have

(01:06:59):
to deal with the police, like, if you can have
the money, just bring our back.

Speaker 1 (01:07:03):
Kisses the police off so much because if that's actually
the case, then other women are in danger and you have.

Speaker 2 (01:07:08):
Not Yeah, you can't do it.

Speaker 1 (01:07:09):
That way, you've just eliminated all the suspects because you're
being a fucking asshole.

Speaker 2 (01:07:14):
Well, it just it doesn't work that way. It doesn't,
And it's like somebody making up a new way to
do it and then going like I'm anonymous, I'm anonymous,
the amount of money is anonymous, please use my middleman. Yeah,
none of those things I think really line up, and
then it goes against law enforcement. Okay. So after she's

(01:07:34):
found in the family asked for privacy, several family members
grant a Daily Mail interview, which is the British newspaper,
I believe, and someone also sells a picture of her
kids on Thanksgiving to the Daily Mail, and then of
course her husband does both interviews.

Speaker 1 (01:07:51):
Do they know who sold it or is it anonymous?
They say family members. There's no one specifically named in
her twenty In his twenty twenty interview, her husband Keith
says her signature long blonde hair had been chopped off,
but she was described as having long hair by the
nine to one one collar and a lot of people

(01:08:13):
bring up like who has signature long blonde signature is
to as compared to what like, dude, it's not She's
not like you know, Gwyneth Paltrow or whatever, it's she's
a mom. And even if it is, it's like, why
didn't the collar describe her as having that? And he
said the exact. This guy seems to pick up phrases

(01:08:34):
that sound coerce or not coarse likehearse thank you, but
also just weird, like it's that thing where people get
a weird feeling.

Speaker 2 (01:08:45):
And that's the thing that like, I what we're now
talking about that are in direct contention with each other
is the weird feeling you have when you think someone's
lying versus a victim trying to tell their story.

Speaker 1 (01:08:56):
And I'm not everything I've heard doesn't. It makes the
husband sound suspicious, not her, right, it sounds like this
fucking happened to her.

Speaker 2 (01:09:06):
Well, yeah, I.

Speaker 1 (01:09:08):
Don't think, like nothing makes me think that this that
she isn't actually a legitimate victim.

Speaker 2 (01:09:14):
So basically, when he gives these interviews, there's experts that
are experts in like whatever reaction or whatever facial facial
reaction recognition or whatever that say his crying is completely fake,
Like he does these things where he bursts out into tears,
but he makes the noises and his eyes get a

(01:09:35):
little bit red, but there's no actual streaming tears.

Speaker 1 (01:09:37):
Yeah, that whole fucking study is fascinating to me.

Speaker 2 (01:09:41):
I love that shit. Yeah, like micro expressions and stuff
like that, like the way they know people are lying amazing.
It's pretty interesting. But I also think that that's interesting
because that happens on TV shows a lot where people
are supposed to be crying, like in acting. But it's
a really hard thing to do to fake cry. It's
really hard even if you meet and want to do it,
so like you can, but we're all used to it

(01:10:03):
where it's like people like I'm just really you know,
and you make the noise, you can do the voice
and everything, but to get the stuff to come out
of your eyes is really hard to do.

Speaker 1 (01:10:12):
Yeah, but you can still see it, Like I have
a really hard time crying, and there's moments where I'm like,
it's okay to do this thing, but you you're trying
so hard not to but you can hear it in
the voice.

Speaker 2 (01:10:22):
Well, the key the key of real crying. I learned
this in an acting class. One times. Tell me is
trying not to cry, because that's the real thing people do.
Try not No one ever wants to really cry. Oh,
so sitting and I don't know this man, and who
knows what's really happening. None of us know. Again, I'm
just going to keep saying none of us know what's
really happening. But most of the time, if you're being

(01:10:44):
interviewed and you're talking about something that happened to a person.
And also he'd already gotten his wife back home. Yeah,
so she she hadn't died, and yes she had been
a victim of something terrible. But he was acting like
he was sobbing, but he wasn't actually sobbing, which is
just not a natural for people to do, especially a man.
I'm sorry to say. They have less permission to have emotion.

Speaker 1 (01:11:06):
You do a thing where you're like, sorry, give me
one second, and you rein it back in and then
you continue to talk and it's like, just give me
a moment, and you think that they're going to cut
it out or something of the.

Speaker 2 (01:11:15):
We've all seen all of these shows a million times.
Of the show you know what it's. It's they talk
and then their lip moves in a weird way, and
then the eyes go and the water is there, yeah,
and then breaks their voice break embarrassed about it, and
it's a very hard thing to fake. They're trying to
get a point across and they can't. And guess what again,
all of this theory there. Okay, So in his interview

(01:11:42):
for twenty twenty, he calls people who would doubt Sherry's
story subhuman. Okay, he doesn't call her attackers anything. What. Yeah,
that's amazing, but it's He also said when he was
on Good Morning of America, he said, I understand people
want the story, pictures proof that this was not some

(01:12:03):
sort of hoax plan to get money or fabricate a
race war. I do not see a purpose in addressing
each preposterous lie. Yes, brought up race war? He initially
he did, No, no, no, this is him and that's
the thing that everybody was saying of, just like of
all those other things. Yes, yes, yes, we get it.
You don't have to address every life. You're right, what wait,

(01:12:24):
why are we talking about a race war? What the fut?
On Good Morning fucking America?

Speaker 1 (01:12:30):
This should have vetted this shit out of him.

Speaker 2 (01:12:32):
So okay, now we're going back to this idea, which
is a real fucking thing that happens in this country.
Sex trafficking. It's horrifying, it really happens. It's still kind
of mysterious. Nobody really knows what it looks like, what
it means.

Speaker 1 (01:12:48):
It's very like nobody knows who it happens to. And
it happens to people that don't that it's not why
it's not visible.

Speaker 2 (01:12:55):
Yeah it's not.

Speaker 1 (01:12:57):
Yeah, so we're all like it never happens because it
happened to people who are It has to begin.

Speaker 2 (01:13:01):
With yes, that's right, runaway kids. But the thing that
that's true is it usually happens to younger women. This
woman is thirty. Sorry I said it.

Speaker 1 (01:13:13):
People who won't miss the victims or won't be believed
when they said that there's a victim, or it's a
runaway you know, people who are at risk, at risk, yeah,
and under something something.

Speaker 2 (01:13:28):
So But the other thing is one of her injuries
was reported that she was burned, as if she it liked,
you know, because as if she was branded for this
sex trafficking. But real sex trafficking is the branding is

(01:13:48):
just a word that they use for They tattoo them.
They don't brand them like cattle.

Speaker 1 (01:13:54):
Because they want them to. They want to sell these women.
They don't want to ruined their their Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:14:01):
That no, that's exactly right. I mean, well, a, they
don't want to ruin their bodies. They don't want to
cut their long, beautiful blonde hair. That's a fucking selling point, exactly.
They don't want to beat them up and break their nose.
Those are all selling points, right, But also the idea
that someone wouldn't actually know the insider information that tattoos
are how you brand, not with a brand like quote branding.

(01:14:23):
It's like branding is a quote? Yes, what the fot so?
So we're just adding up poles, we're just mentioning things
or the reason people are suspicious, got it? Uh? So
the other now we turned to her social media. Okay,
oh my god, she had a wedding blog on which

(01:14:44):
she claimed that she had never lived with a man.
But she's actually had been married and was divorced in
two thousand and seven. Shit, So people are citing this
as just kind of times before. This isn't. She's been
described as a super mom, as the best person in
the world, old as sweet, you know, all American. There's
this picture that's been painted of her by him on

(01:15:06):
the In these interviews and so people are just trying
to cite other things that maybe would contradict that and
inconsistencies exactly. And one of them is that that this
very blatant lie that she was basically trying to make
it seem like she'd never married before. And it's like, well,
why lie it.

Speaker 1 (01:15:23):
It's not that that's a light on your fucking personality
that makes it that you should be kidnapped.

Speaker 2 (01:15:28):
It's well, it's not the eighteen hundreds, so you don't.
But but this is long before, Okay, So it's kind
of like saying, it's just kind of trying to show
a thing that maybe this is a person who doesn't
have a problem throwing up a lie. Yeah, but it
could have been put up her or him. This is her,
this was her wedding blog. Okay, But then I will

(01:15:51):
contradict that just in fairness to say, Reading is a
small town and there could be people that don't like
her and are trying to defame her because she is
in this spotlight and she is in a bad place.

Speaker 1 (01:16:04):
And you know what I want to say, like I
was engaged before Vincent I got married, and at this
point in my life, I'm like he was really just
a boyfriend like it was you know, like you get
married and you're like, this was stupid.

Speaker 2 (01:16:15):
We were young.

Speaker 1 (01:16:15):
It's like, wasn't a real marriage? And you say it
wasn't because it doesn't fucking matter. Sure that makes sense totally. Yeah,
are you just you get to write whatever you want.

Speaker 2 (01:16:23):
On your wedding blog. There's plenty of ways to argue
the other way for sure. Now, there was a blog
post written under her maiden name, which is Sherry Graph
on a skinhead website in two thousand and seven, and
it was a story about her getting jumped by three

(01:16:47):
Latino men and five Latina women and her fighting all
of them off, and the whole thing was kind of
about why can't she be proud of being white? Oh no,
this is where Now here's the thing. Her father says
that someone else wrote it, and is it being an

(01:17:07):
impostor and trying to make her look bad? But I
feel like the second you start saying the word skinheads,
and that is part of things. Now, this also is
in this like northern central California. This is the area
where stuff like this takes place.

Speaker 1 (01:17:26):
I mean this is there is there probably is a
big it's a huge Latina community there.

Speaker 2 (01:17:33):
It's actually reading apparently is like ninety seven percent white.
Holy shit. So now I read that, though, I mean
that might not be exactly right, because I read that
in all of these posts that I was reading. That
might not be exact. Yeah, there's definitely a big Latina
community because it's most of these are farming communities. And

(01:17:55):
I'm just saying what I'm reading. But this now on Reddit,
there all these people who claim to be from reading
and who went to high school with her. Oh my god.
So basically I won't get into that. Now I realize
I probably shouldn't get into the details of these stories
because this is straight up slander. This is gossip. There's

(01:18:15):
no way to prove that people went to high school
with her. Yeah, there's no way to prove that she
wrote that post. Actually, I don't know if there's any
way to prove that she wrote that post. They can
prove that someone with that name wrote that post at
that time, but they can't prove it was her right,
fingers on the keys right exactly all right.

Speaker 1 (01:18:35):
But however, it it ties these two stories together.

Speaker 2 (01:18:40):
Yes, it just is a yes, exactly Okay. This thing
with the people that talk about her nobody is being malicious.
Most of the people say, this doesn't seem right, and
here's what I know about this person. But I hope
we find out the truth. Nobody is on there like
in any way. But I mean, but also that's a

(01:19:01):
good way to try to seem trustworthy is to not
be malicious. But most of the people said that in
high school she needed to be the center of attention,
and she would sometimes pretend to have heart problems if
other people were getting too much attention. And so one
of the stories was they were camping and a girl

(01:19:21):
had a hypothermia. She was stayed in the lake too
long and had hypothermia, and they as they were rushing
her to the hospital, all of a sudden, Sherry had
heart palpitations and now she had a problem too. It
was like, there's a couple of stories like that where
it's like kind of comes out of the blue in
a very convenient way. Again, unproven. Who knows who these

(01:19:44):
people are that are writing this. It leads up to
one that is a fact, and one that is that
I'm kind of freaked out. What tell me it's the
disappearance of a girl named Tara Smith on October twenty
second nineteen ninety eight, then sixteen year old Tara Smith,

(01:20:04):
a high school student in Writing, California, left home to
go jogging, only never to be seen, never to be
seen again. Tara's father believes that a local man who
was Tara's romantic interest may have been responsible for her disappearance.
He said on the night of her disappearance, she had
plans to meet with the then twenty nine year old
martial arts instructor Noroy Zinc all No to end their relationship.

(01:20:27):
He was married No and had a child, if not
two children, and he had also served a year in
jail for rape. Oh my god, please her father children.
Her father found an unmailed letter in her room after
she disappeared that prompted his theories about Zinc. In the letter,

(01:20:48):
she tells him she knows she'd made a huge mistake.
She never should have gotten involved with him, but this
letter was never delivered, and rather than give him the letter,
we believe she wanted to confront him in person to
break it off. Zinc told authorities that Tara had asked
to meet him near her home and then when they met,

(01:21:09):
demanded two thousand dollars from him. He refused and she
got angry, and then she asked him to drop her
off at the corner of Old Alturus Road, an old
Oregon trail, eight miles from where Sherry Peppini had been taken.
That's a lot of miles, he said. He then went

(01:21:30):
to hang Glider Hill to pray, and he returned home
at eleven thirty pm. Tara's father went to his house
after Tara didn't return. Tara not Tara, and Tara's father said,
Zinc is an avid four wheeler guy. He knows the
back roads. He had five and a half hours to
get rid of the evidence. He's been smart enough to

(01:21:53):
keep his mouth shut. The police have not been able
to move ahead with the case. It's heartbreaking and very frustrating.
The guy still lives in Reading. Almost twenty years have
passed and he has gotten more comfortable, changed his name
and thinks people have forgotten. Oh, you haven't forgotten. And

(01:22:14):
while he was missing, while she well, Sherry was missing,
her husband Keith asked Tara Smith's father, Terry, for advice.
Keith came to me and we spoke for about an hour.
The father of the missing girl told the magazine, I
just told him to stay strong for kids and not
assume law enforcement has the answers and to push them.
It was obvious Keith was torn up, and I believe

(01:22:37):
he was confident he'd get his wife back. Tara Smith
was a schoolmate of Sherry Peppinie. Wait. They went to
school together. They went to high school together, the two girls. Yep,
the girl that disappeared went to high school with Sherry Peppinie.

Speaker 1 (01:22:53):
Fuck, tell me more.

Speaker 2 (01:22:55):
That's it. That's it. It's basically shit. It's basically there's
no conclusion to be drawn from it except for that
it's an exact parallel of the same story. So we
don't know where they are, okay. But one could argue that.

Speaker 1 (01:23:12):
I don't have any feelings.

Speaker 2 (01:23:16):
Against or for Sherry.

Speaker 1 (01:23:19):
I just think that the husband sounds suspicious as fuck.
I'm not victim, I don't. It sounds like she was
a fucking victim. But whether it's of the crime that
she that is claimed that she went through, or this
fucking husband who sounds like a piece of work, I
don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:23:39):
Uh. I think that this is one of those kinds
of stories that anything could be possible, like the thing
everyone online keeps saying is it's a total gone girl situation. Yeah,
And in that I would say it's that you just
don't we just don't know. But the thing is that
it's to me, It's what's interesting is law enforcement does

(01:24:00):
seemed to be moving overtly forward with any kind of
like with anything. Maybe there, maybe they are, and they're
just not being like they're vocal about it.

Speaker 1 (01:24:11):
The fact that they haven't worn the community to be
on the lookout or to be careful or that this
thing is happening to speaks volumes to me.

Speaker 2 (01:24:19):
Yeah and okay, so what was I gonna say? Yeah,
I don't know. The whole thing is just like creepy.
It's super creepy. And there's a lot The thing that's
interesting is there's a lot of stuff cropping up. Like
when I lived in Pedaluma, we would hear gossip all
the time about about Polyclass's family and because it was

(01:24:42):
there was always someone that knew, an insider that had
something to tell you, Oh, here's the gossip, here's the
insider information. And that it's like urban legends where that
kind of stuff people like to talk about it when,
especially when you don't know what the answer is heurizing
about this and trying to put it together is very satisfying.

Speaker 1 (01:25:02):
Here's my thing, Okay, here's the major thing. To me,
what the thing that sounds more likely is not two
Hispanic women kidnapping O mother and wife off the fucking
street and solely they're just not doing that.

Speaker 2 (01:25:21):
What's the other Well, because also the husband said that
she said they had they had their faces covered.

Speaker 1 (01:25:28):
Right, So how'd you know their Hispanic or have eyebrows
that are a certain way.

Speaker 2 (01:25:31):
Well, I mean, we don't know how they were covered,
but why would you walk up to two people in
a car with their faces covered.

Speaker 1 (01:25:37):
The Hispanic women? It just sounds it's one of those
things where it's it just sounds it's so insulting to
Hispanic women, and I fucking.

Speaker 2 (01:25:45):
Don't see it. And then there's this man.

Speaker 1 (01:25:49):
It sounds so much more likely that the husband, who
is trying to get a lot of fucking attention and
saying really fucking incriminating weird shits and hiring people who
uh who skirt around law enforcement and has something to
do with this, is so much more likely than two
fucking Hispanic women who have no fucking reason to kidnap

(01:26:09):
this woman and didn't.

Speaker 2 (01:26:11):
Well, that's a ransom, right right, they let her go.
There's no point. That's why everybody feels like it stinks
that there's no point to it. It's not like the
idea that they don't she's not saying where she was
in the meantime, there are no details about there's absolutely
no detail that she has given the police about where
she was, what happened? What? Like they were saying. Somebody

(01:26:33):
was saying, what state was she in?

Speaker 3 (01:26:34):
Like?

Speaker 2 (01:26:35):
Were her nails cut? You know? What did her clothes
look like? Were they the same clothes that she left in?
Like all almost.

Speaker 1 (01:26:41):
Sounds more likely than me, is that these things happened
to this woman, these exact things she's saying. It just
was someone else and they scared her into saying that
it was to Hispanic women.

Speaker 2 (01:26:52):
I disagree because the list of injuries that she gives,
No hospital would let you leave two hours after you arrive.
It doesn't make sense because if you have burns, that
means you might have infection. You have to get you.
If you've been starved, that means you are the hydrated,

(01:27:12):
so they have to rehydrate you. They need to put
antibiotics into you. And also you're in shock, You've just
had this terrible thing happen.

Speaker 1 (01:27:19):
You're going to do a rape kit, which takes hours
and hours.

Speaker 2 (01:27:22):
Right, I mean unless there's no word about that whatsoever.
There's absolutely no word about that, but they're not going
to it's it doesn't make sense that at no hospital
would let somebody just walk out like, look, I'm fine
after the list of like how badly she was beaten
an injured.

Speaker 1 (01:27:39):
The victim to me in this and the thing I
want to protect is that it is the two Hispanic
women narrative. I just don't think that's fucking fair to
especially with the skinhead tie. It pisses me off that
she would that that would be the narrative.

Speaker 2 (01:27:55):
And then I'll just remind that the skinhead tie could
be some weird red herring just to say it. Who
knows what that is? I mean, anyone can write her name,
you know, who knows what that was?

Speaker 1 (01:28:06):
Cock man.

Speaker 2 (01:28:07):
It's it's such a but as you dig into the story,
you know, it goes into like when I was in
that stuff where it's like, oh, people that went to
high school with her said she was this, said she
was yeah. But then I'm like this is gossip. This
is gossip, This is shitty gossip. What would people say
about me if you know, if it was me in
the same situation.

Speaker 1 (01:28:26):
The shit that people say that about us would be
it would be upsetting.

Speaker 2 (01:28:29):
But to come back around to the parallel story of
a girl she went to high school with that actually
did disappear. And this is the other thing I will
read that someone someone did say on Reddit that I
actually really liked. Someone said I actually work with human
trafficking victims now, and it really pisses me off that

(01:28:51):
the whole world is freaking out over this one woman.
Yet there are thousands of girls that go missing and
are sold into sex trafficking every year right here in
the US, and they aren't even in the news. I
really really hope that they figure all this out and
the truth comes out, whatever it is. Fuck man, a
fucking man. I mean, yeah, shit, if it brings light

(01:29:17):
to the fact that sex traffic actually does happen, that'll
be great. But I feel like there's a lot of
people who are like armchair detectives like you and me,
who see who smell a rat and go there's more
to this story, and they're not talking. Yeah, and also, oh,
the last thing is they started to go fund me.

(01:29:40):
Somebody else started to go fund me and in seven
days they made forty thousand dollars for the family. Uh huh.
Something fucking smells fishy. I mean, and it's in the
it's in his sister's name.

Speaker 1 (01:29:55):
This man, this dude, like, I'm not even looking at her.
This fucking dude, Well we have the big dude is
saying enough himself to be incriminated.

Speaker 2 (01:30:06):
Nothing to do with her.

Speaker 1 (01:30:07):
She might have she might have been a fucking pawn
in his game, and.

Speaker 2 (01:30:12):
Or vice versa, or a third choice that we don't know.
It's just so fascinating because when these things get presented
on the news I think back to like that I
saw this just briefly in passing and it was her
blonde hair and big smile and this mother is missing
and everybody's talking about it across the nation. And then

(01:30:37):
it basically is like, Okay, here's the.

Speaker 1 (01:30:40):
Story, and then the end, and everyone's like, well, wait
a second, Yeah, we need to make sure that we
fucking updates as much as we gets as soon as
we get information about this. We need to updated because
this is one of the things that like you never
hear about again, and it's like.

Speaker 2 (01:30:53):
Oh, well, they all want to fuck in prison. Also
the International Kidnapping Expert is that part in the middle.
Oh someone said this on Reddit, but is like this
is this is basically a Coen Brothers movie. It's like
these Karen Goodman. I mean it doesn't. It's like somebody
coming in and being like, I am on behalf of

(01:31:15):
an anonymous donor. I am here to say you can
come to me and you don't have to go to
the cops, which the cops up there must have lost
their fucking shit.

Speaker 1 (01:31:24):
I have a degree in international kidnapping things I am.

Speaker 2 (01:31:30):
My major was Liam Neesening.

Speaker 1 (01:31:32):
Karen, that's our new fucking title for Listen. If anyone
gets kidnapped and you need someone to fucking intervene on
your behalf.

Speaker 2 (01:31:40):
Don't go to George.

Speaker 1 (01:31:42):
Come right here, Karen and George and my favorite murder
like we are on this with fucking wild speculation.

Speaker 2 (01:31:47):
We arsonal experience. There's going to be a lot of
we're mad at you for saying this, that and the
other thing. But I misspeak this story. I think we've
cleared it at every level. But this story is fascinating.
You can't deny amazing. There's something else going on. It's fascinating.

Speaker 1 (01:32:06):
Motherfuckers, everyone's a mother. What is fucking wrong with people?
Just like live your fucking life. I'm sorry, I'm really angry.
It's just like, can we not have a fucking moment.

Speaker 2 (01:32:20):
Not being total pieces of shit? Can't it just be Christmas?

Speaker 1 (01:32:24):
Can't it be fucking Sees candy and fucking True crime,
fucking playing Car.

Speaker 2 (01:32:30):
And Elvis and fucking meme? Like, can we please?

Speaker 1 (01:32:34):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:32:34):
I hate it. The answer that you get served up
every week is no. No.

Speaker 1 (01:32:39):
No answer is nine no no moments nine. Uh well,
speaking of moments, anything that happened to this week?

Speaker 2 (01:32:46):
Shit? Oh I forgot. I always forget. I'm sure really
think it through all right?

Speaker 1 (01:32:52):
Well, I think every week it's gonna be nephew for
me because we have a cheat family, I know, right,
but I have a specific one. We had our family
Hanka party last night, and my nephew who's won, and
my other nephew who's six, we like, I like made
them all play a game to get We all played
a game and it was like, because I didn't want

(01:33:12):
my six year old nephew to feel left out and
I want my one year old nephew to like have
memories of my six year old nephew and like, so
I fucking anti fucking.

Speaker 2 (01:33:21):
Georgia, like totally killed it. What game? Just scare the baby?
Did the baby? Like? I loved to scare the baby? Yeah,
of course it was great. It was great. That's good.

Speaker 1 (01:33:32):
Yeah, it was just like made made my heart feel good.

Speaker 2 (01:33:35):
I had kind of a magical moment which was I
was turning to get onto the one on one freeway
and as I passed the mobile gas station which is
right on Koanga there right there, Yeah, I think it is,
there were three men doing their nightly what is it tis?

Speaker 3 (01:34:06):
There?

Speaker 2 (01:34:06):
There were three men facing east.

Speaker 1 (01:34:09):
Oh my god and doing their nightly Islamic prayers.

Speaker 2 (01:34:14):
That's gorgeous. And it was they were doing it because
they it was just basically the Furthest corner away from
the guests pumps that they could you.

Speaker 1 (01:34:23):
Have to be at a certain time, you have to
stop wherever you are and do the prayers right.

Speaker 2 (01:34:27):
And it was it was the Furthest. Corner and it
was like kind of around the corner, so it wasn't
like people could see them or whatever. But they were
also doing it in front of the mobile symbol, so
it was lit up for me. As I turned to
look at it, it was lit up in front of
that symbol like a movie. It was one of the
coolest things I've ever seen.

Speaker 1 (01:34:47):
What a beautiful moment to remind you that there's more
than just this traffic and this and driving, and there
is at that moment someone is having a spiritual connection
with the universe that has nothing to do with your
surroundings and their surroundings.

Speaker 2 (01:35:02):
They're taking some time out to do that. And also
that this is fucking America. That that's what we're supposed
to be able to see in America. That that's what
you should want to see. And that's a great thing
to see.

Speaker 1 (01:35:15):
And thank god we live in a city, Los Angeles
that doesn't interfere with that. Yeah, that that supports that, and.

Speaker 2 (01:35:23):
And it is open good with that, It's fine with that. Yeah.
I felt very grateful.

Speaker 1 (01:35:28):
That's fucking gorgeous cool, And I played Scare the Baby.

Speaker 2 (01:35:34):
Meanwhile, I'm scaring this ship out of my Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:35:40):
If you go to iTunes and you can, you can
rate with you and subscribe us, and you know, it's
great it helps us, but but fuck man. Thank you guys, guys, iTunes,
my favorite, murder Instagram, my favorite. I don't know, just
thank you, thank you, thank you so much. Thanks to
Stephen Ray Morris of the per Cast, Audi Engineer and
Good Gifts. You guys are amazing. Thank you for listening. Elvis,

(01:36:04):
you want to wait, you want to wait.

Speaker 2 (01:36:06):
Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday, Happy Holidays, Elvis, you want
to cookie? My cookie?

Speaker 1 (01:36:13):
All right, stay sexy, don't get murdered. Bye, Okay, we're back.

Speaker 2 (01:36:23):
I wonder if there are any updates, Karen. It's nothing
but updates. This has been a breaking story for fifteen years.
It's crazy, and I think it is really one of
the last. I think it's the second to last white
woman panic story. I mean, I shouldn't say last. It's
always the vibe, but that thing, the way it broke
on the cover of People magazine, when nothing was corroborated,

(01:36:45):
nothing was factual, and they just ran with this disappearance
story that turned out to be this fake. I just
think it was kind of like the It feels like
one of the last gasps of that entire God forbid
a blonde. Anything bad happened to a blonde right totally,
So if you didn't know spoiler alert, the whole Sherry

(01:37:07):
Peppini thing was fake. It took them about four years
to crack this case after the disappearance and the return,
and what they did was they found a DNA match,
which basically made everything unravel. They found DNA on Sherry
and they then matched it to her ex boyfriend, James Reyis,
who basically she had faked this entire thing for so

(01:37:29):
she could run off and be with her ex boyfriend
in Coast to Mesa.

Speaker 1 (01:37:33):
Let me tell you, guys about Coast to Mesa.

Speaker 2 (01:37:35):
It's like, it's cool, it used to be cool.

Speaker 1 (01:37:39):
It's not one of the ones that you would like
run away for. It's not a city would run away
from your life for. I'll tell you right now. And
they keep in the documentary that they show the outside
of the apartment and it's like you ran away for no.

Speaker 2 (01:37:50):
Yeah, Okay. It's that kind of thing where like when
Facebook first came back and everyone started talking to people
from high school and it all got real kind of fraught,
you know what I mean. It has that vibe of
like Sharia was way up and reading, yeah, and she
was a mother and a wife and maybe not that
much was going on, and then this guy rolls back
into town and she's like, I'm giving it all up

(01:38:11):
for Coasta Mesa. It's the thing of like be careful
what you wish for sort of, you know, and also
be careful who you accused, because of course, the first
thing she tells cops is it was two Latina women,
one long hair, one short air, one old, one young.
All that shit that sounds so fake. So anyway, Sherry
Pepini was charged with making false statements to a federal

(01:38:32):
law enforcement officer and engaging in mail fraud because she
got thirty thousand dollars from the California Victims Compensation Board,
so she was really in that storyline for a little while.
She was arrested for all of this, and in September
of twenty twenty two, she was sentenced to eighteen months
in prison for all of that, and she had to

(01:38:55):
pay that three hundred thousand dollars in restitution for the
government fund that they expended looking for her. Totally shit man.
And then in April of twenty twenty two, her husband Keith,
filed for divorce and got full custody of their son
and daughter. She has visitation rights. She got out of
prison in August of twenty twenty three. She's a guess

(01:39:18):
on parole till twenty twenty six, and her husband Keith,
is in a Hulu docu series called Perfect Wife The
Mysterious Disappearance of Sherry Peppini, where Keith gets to tell
his side of the story. Oh we watched it, did you? Yeah? Yeah,
it was what'd you think it was? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:39:36):
It was crazy, it was We were both very pins
and I were very much like there was a lot
of what the fucks? Yeah, being said, what the fuck?
You know, like, but why would your brain go to
that conclusion then or why would you then do this
next step? It like just boggles the mind in a
way of like for people who aren't this way.

Speaker 2 (01:39:55):
Did they talk about the thing where she went to
high school with a girl who disappeared and there was
like a lot of of parallels to her story and
the girl that actually disappears. They do, Yes, I forgot about. Yes,
they totally talk about that, which is so weird. It's
just kind of gross. Yeah. So but again, kind of
that thing where it's like it just is the perfect

(01:40:16):
anxiety inCider where it's like you're doing this on a
national stage. Totally thought you were just doing a thing
to get out of having an affair.

Speaker 1 (01:40:24):
Yeah, no, all right, well we did it. We've done
it and again once again.

Speaker 2 (01:40:30):
I mean, we can only say so much about our
own episode, and it's other people's opinion that really matters.
We just did it. True, We've done it twice now,
Like I mean, we just keep doing it. It's insane.
So if we want to rename this one, which we don't,
kis and Albert fish Production is the best name of
all time, but if we did, we.

Speaker 1 (01:40:49):
Could possibly name it Day four hundred and three, which
is Steven's mustache's age.

Speaker 2 (01:40:55):
Also the how Dare You podcast, which was just something
I said to Steve and I did say to Stephen
all the time. I love that how Dare You? Podcast?

Speaker 1 (01:41:03):
Is great defiance disorder which you have. And then I
think me saying I do too means I don't. I
think if I actually had it, I would have said
to you, I don't you know what I mean because
I'm defining you.

Speaker 2 (01:41:16):
But I didn't.

Speaker 1 (01:41:16):
Absolutely, yeah, totally, all right, Well, thank you guys so
much for listening.

Speaker 2 (01:41:23):
And stay sexy and don't get murdered. Goodbye, Bye Elvis.
Do you want a cookie?

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Rewind with Karen & Georgia - 48: An Albert Fish Production

Episode Transcript

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Georgia Hardstark

Karen Kilgariff

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