The Phillips Head

This week we meet Will. Will finds a dead body in the small park where he walks his dog every morning. 

The dead body has a story. 

A tragic, gruesome story.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to the ten Minute Storyteller. That's me Bill Simpson,
your host, narrator and author. We hear at the ten
Minute Storyteller endeavor to entertain you with tall tales or
rendered swiftly and with the utmost empathy. We pledge to

(00:25):
pack as much entertainment, emotion, and exploration into the human
condition as ten minutes will permit. Mini novels on steroids.
The following account is based on real events. A few

(00:46):
changes have been made for narrative flow and integrity. The
Phillips Head Every morning, Will takes Moxie for a walk
in rock a By meadow. On this particular morning, Moxie

(01:07):
took off into the underbrush along the creek. She barked
and barked, and wouldn't return despite Will's commands. Finally, Will
Bush whacked down to the creek to see what all
the fuss was about. A body, That is what had

(01:28):
Moxie all a lather. A dead body, A dead man
lying half in and half out of the creek and
on the muddy embankment next to the body. A gun,
a pistol, some kind of revolver. Will didn't really know firearms.

(01:49):
The police recalled. They did their thing. The coroner arrived,
pulled the body. A cause of death was announced, suicide
by single gun shot. The dead man's family mourned. There
was a spouse and two young children, and the tragedy
was quickly forgotten except in Will's brain. Up there in

(02:14):
Will's brain, the dead body, lying half in and half
out of the creek, kept reappearing in the middle of
the night, while making the bed, while driving the kids
to school, while selecting a package of chicken at shop
right now, Will never, a particularly obsessive person, grew more

(02:37):
and more obsessed over the dead guy that he had
discovered down along the river bank. The guy's name made
it into the papers, and a Google search of the
dead man's name didn't reveal much beyond the news of
his suicide, but the surname, the surname Common with a K,

(03:01):
did provide several pages of links, including an obituary for
one Carl Common eighty two, who had died of natural
causes a few weeks prior to the suicide. Will read
the names of family members Carl had left behind, and

(03:23):
sure enough, the name of the dead man, Richard Common,
was listed as one of Carl's five surviving children. Had
Richard's suicide, Will wondered been a result of his father's death,
and if so, why A short business trip put the

(03:46):
brakes on Will's obsession, But upon returning home, the Google
searches continued, and that is when the discovery was made.
Nearly thirty years earlier, the Common family of Gladstone, New Jersey,
had briefly been in the news, the local news, the

(04:09):
national news, even the international news. Carl Common fifty one,
a husband and father of five children ages seven to
twenty two, a homeowner and housing contractor, had been taken
into custody by police after a domestic incident at the

(04:30):
Common family home on Pfizer Drive, And many years later,
Richard Common, just seven years old at that time, told
an interviewer what had transpired in the family home that
tragic evening. I was the only one home, just me

(04:54):
and mom and dad, just the three of us. I'm
not sure where everyone else was. Maybe ballgames, friends' houses,
maybe the movies. I was in the living room watching TV. Mom,
Mom and dad were fighting, yelling, yelling, you know, first

(05:15):
in the kitchen and then upstairs in their bedroom. Pretty
pretty common. I barely paid attention but then then my
father started shouting, Richard, Richard, come up here, come up
here now, right now. I want you to watch this. Yeah,
that's exactly what he said, he said, I want you

(05:36):
to watch this. Of course, I jumped up and raced upstairs,
because well, because Dad had a pretty short fuse and
you didn't want him to go off. It could get
it could get bad fast. So I got up there.
I got up there, and I walked into the room

(05:57):
and Mom was lying on the bed, crying and sobbing,
and I just stood there in the doorway, and that's
when I noticed she was tied to the corners of
the bed, you know, arms and legs, wrists and ankles,
and you can bet, you can bet. I didn't want
to be there. But Dad turned and screamed at me,

(06:18):
get the hell over here, get the hell over here.
You're going to watch this. And that's when he that's
when he that's when he started stabbing and jabbing this screwdriver,
this Philip's Head screwdriver with a long red handle, into
Mom's chest and neck and arms. And she was screaming,

(06:40):
I mean screaming, and I was screaming, and he kept
stabbing and jabbing and then into her face, right into
her face, her eyes and her cheeks. And that's when
I turned. I turned, and I raced out of that room,
but ran straight into the open door and I knocked myself. Facts.

(07:04):
Those were the cold, hard facts. Carl Common had murdered
his wife of nearly twenty five years with a red
handled Philip's headscrewdriver, and he had made his seven year
old son watch. He confessed as much to the police.
Confess that same day. I mean, hell, you can't make

(07:26):
this stuff up. But there's more. Carl was found guilty
but by reason of insanity, and so was reprimanded to
a state mental facility rather than a maximum security prison.
Carl spent quite a few years on the locked ward

(07:48):
of that facility. He had hundreds, if not thousands, of
sessions with psychologists and psychiatrists in an effort to understand
and why he had so ruthlessly murdered the mother of
his five children. Of course, such a horrendous act is

(08:11):
utterly impossible to understand beyond the realm of comprehension, and
so all those sessions were an absurd waste of time
and energy. And now get this, Carl found love in
the asylum. Yes, one of the nurses fell for the
man who had driven a Philip's headscrewdriver one hundred times

(08:35):
into his wife's chest, neck and face. Fell madly in
love with the man who claimed he had no memory
of doing so grisly a deed, no memory at all.
And this after Carl Common served many years in the asylum,

(08:56):
his doctors determined he had been re habilitated and should
be released back into the public. And upon his release
he married his nurse sweetheart and they lived happily ever after.
But what of Carl's youngest, little Richard, who'd been ordered

(09:19):
to witness his mama's bludgeoning. He tried to live with it,
he really did, grew up in a foster home, went
to college, found a job, found a girl, married that girl,
had a couple kids, a boy and a girl. Did
his best, he really did. He really tried to do
his best until that morning when he went out into

(09:43):
rock a by meadow, walked down to the creek, took
the gun he'd bought many years earlier out of his
jacket pocket, and blew his brains out. Humans, I mean,
let's just be blunt. Humans are a truly fucked up species.

(10:08):
I mean, the endless parade of atrocities we have inflicted
upon one another over the eons has to leave even
the most callous human being entirely stupefied. The story of
Carl Kammon and what he did with that screwdriver is
for me, the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

(10:34):
Where I wonder do we go from here? Thanks for
listening to this original audio presentation of The Phillip's Head

(10:58):
narrated by the If you enjoy today's story, please take
a few seconds to rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast.
The Ten Minute Storyteller is produced by Andrew Pliglisi and
Josh Kilani and as part of the Elvis Durant Podcast
Network in partnership with iHeart Productions. Until next time, this

(11:23):
is Bill Simpson, your ten Minute Storyteller,