257 - Monster Machine

In this week’s episode, Karen and Georgia cover the revenge of Miriam Rodríguez and the Happy Face Killer.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Hello, Hello, and welcome to my favorite murder. That's Georgia Hartstar,
that's Karen Kilgariff. Let's do voices like this the whole time. Okay,
let us tell you about Drew Crime. That's my probos,
that's my movie pone. Don't you hate when those recordings

(00:37):
say I like talk as if they're a person. I
understand that when you're like, oh you're yes doctor, Yeah,
it's like you are sorry human? Yeah, can you say
that again? I didn't understand that you did it? You're
a monster machine.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
I like it when there's one in my car, No
Brag where you can press a button and then you
can say, call Laura Kilgarriff whatever, And I try to
talk like the machine so it understands me because every
time I'll go call Laura Kilgarriff and it goes, do
you want to call Laura Kilgarriff? Like, it doesn't. It

(01:13):
doesn't care how I'm pronouncing. No, it's not taking in that.
It only does it its way.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
I'm scared. I won't use Siri. Is that what it's called.
I won't use any of those Alexa alexi and dots and.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Alexei's the Russian version that's when you go straight into
the office with it.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
I was looking for new microwaves. This is thrilling content.
And they make them now where you can do it
with your phone, so it can be like, but that
doesn't make it. Do it as if you like, put
a mac and cheese in the microwave and like three
hours later you're like, now, heat that up, because you're
at the microwave when you put the thing in there.
So it does make any sense to be like I'm

(01:55):
on my way home and this morning when I left
for work, I put the meat loaf.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
In the micro way right, so I can zap it
for three minutes.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
Oh what a world.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
Also, that is that thing where I got a new
TV and they make you download an app to set
the TV up.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
No, it's impossible to fucking use a TV these days.

Speaker 3 (02:13):
It's And also I don't want to get involved.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
This is just this part of my life of technology
in my life.

Speaker 3 (02:19):
I don't want there's no app.

Speaker 2 (02:22):
I don't need that on my phone to help me
with the TV, which is the thing I'm trying to
watch to not look at my phone.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
Right, did you make trying to get away from the phone,
did you make j our millennial person. Help you with
it or would you figure it out?

Speaker 2 (02:36):
Download the app? No, I could do it myself. I
can download the Apple by myself. The great Tyler Perry
play that I love so.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
Much, funny step at the top, and then likes get into.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
The natural conversation in natural speaking voices. You know what
I really like are those podcasts that are that are
read by actors.

Speaker 3 (03:01):
Have you ever did true crime? Ones do it every
once in a while where it's like.

Speaker 1 (03:04):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's got just read their diary entries
and stuff.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
No, no, no, there's some that are hosted by people
who are clearly actors playing the part.

Speaker 3 (03:14):
Of like of the host of Like, don't you think
that's interesting, Janet?

Speaker 2 (03:18):
It's It's one of the weirdest choices in podcasting.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
Podcasting still figuring out its legs. I feel like I
feel like everyone was like, oh shit, we can make
money off of that. So they just like threw everything at.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
It, and then they went, let's get you know, because
this is just basically an audio experience. So let's let's
get the most distancing, cold voice of an actor that
we can get, right, Let's get one that you're you.

Speaker 1 (03:43):
I think you said this once where it was like
the actor is known for being gorgeous, why are you
casting them for their voice?

Speaker 3 (03:50):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (03:51):
We know, you know, we want to see your beautiful
face become live, lively and a motive.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, go bring your beautiful face to the screen place
where it belongs and leave us cave dwelling podcasters alone.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
We have faces for podcasting.

Speaker 3 (04:08):
And we are here for the not beauty contest.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
We're here for the for the voice beauty contest, and
not for face beauty.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
You're not going to go and cast us podcasters in
a movie because of our podcasting experience. It's not going
to go the other way around.

Speaker 3 (04:25):
So sure, because guys, what you can't do this yet?
It's all just talking, just talking and reading other people's work.
You can't do this.

Speaker 2 (04:34):
Oh no, that's actually literally exactly what they can do
called acting. Now, this is speaking of which because oftentimes
here in quarantine, I forget to put on the internet
at all. Now does this happen to you? This is
very private, but I'll say it to you and to
the other.

Speaker 1 (04:50):
Literally, tis what like my pits are? I'm sweaty right now?
So I do you ever.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
Find that your pits smell like the thing that you
ate the most the day before, So like yesterday I
made tacos and and then today it was just like,
who's it's the neighbor making tacos and it's like, no,
it's me.

Speaker 1 (05:05):
So I have a similar that doesn't happen to me.
But my pets always do smell like pizza, Like oh
when I have bo it's to me, it's like but
it's like the pizza delicious you'd get in high school
at the like student body meeting. So like square, square people, oily,
greasy pizza cool. Think you can have cheese or pepperoni.
That's all they have, right and oil?

Speaker 2 (05:28):
Do you know that this is a fetish subset that
we are playing into right now?

Speaker 1 (05:33):
Food pit talk, food body smells, Oh pit talk, all right?
Pretty cute armpits? I will say, Oh yeah, is that
a thing? Do people have? Unattractive armpits? I've never sew
my just grasping at something to feel good about myself.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
If you had to name three beautiful parts of your body,
it would be armpits.

Speaker 1 (05:57):
God damn it, what are you doing? Oh who are
you impeaching these days?

Speaker 2 (06:03):
Fucking man, oh man, just one person. Let's not get
into the thing that is sitting on all of our
backs like a little terror demon. I was, I was,
I hate and you know this to use the term
doom scrolling because it popped up and now literally every
person is saying it constantly, but it's very accurate to

(06:27):
the and I did it so much last night I
scared myself and became convinced someone was in the house.

Speaker 1 (06:32):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
And then I looked over and George could not have
been more stretched out and like just chilled out. And
then I was just like, it's if she barks because
someone closes a car door down the street, then you
don't have to worry about somebody being in the house
right now.

Speaker 1 (06:47):
Nothing says more that it's in your head than your
dog being stretched out and like realizing that the real
world in your house at least is safe right now.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
Except I got up and just did a check because
I was so freaked out, and the front door was unlocked,
so I was like, maybe that was it might have
been my subconscious going hey, hey, hey, get up off
this couch for one second, but good. But also it
is because Frank snores in this very bizarre way. That
sometimes sounds like someone is trying to scare you behind

(07:18):
you like he it's he's totally silent, and then he's
like and he makes this like demon noise, and I
was like, get I get all tense, and I'm like, oh,
it's fucking frank.

Speaker 1 (07:29):
Anyway, I keep thinking, I hear Elvis about to throw up,
because oh, he would do that. He threw up a
lot because he would he ate too fast and he
ate everyone's food and Siamese are like prone to that.
So you could tell when he was about to throw
up because he would just make these monstrous gagging noises

(07:51):
and then it kind of sounds like a toilet backing
up or something or like. So I keep hearing them,
hearing them not a lot and going on, and they'd
be like, oh, she grow up.

Speaker 3 (08:03):
That's how he's like making his presence known.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
Sometimes it's like people are in the afterlife and they'll
send a beautiful butterfly or whatever, but.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
Elvis is like someone was like, whenever my mom said
whenever I see a dragonfly, that'll be like someone posted
that on my comments, which I thought was really sweet.
So whenever you see a dragonfly, but mine is whenever
you hear wretching. Whenever you have the sound of wretching.

Speaker 2 (08:29):
When you instinctively are trying to grab like a newspaper
or something to throw down under exactly.

Speaker 1 (08:35):
Put them not on the bed and then just I
think maybe as a tribute, Mimi in the middle of
the night the other night threw up right between Vince
and I on our beds.

Speaker 3 (08:46):
She is, you know what, that's so beautiful of her.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
It's like she wrote you a poem that's a cat
version of like here says Uti Lugi.

Speaker 1 (08:53):
Yeah, speaking of doom. One of like a historical part
of this pod cast is closing. I'm sure you've heard,
uh Cafe one o one where we created this podcast
and where we became friends and sat for hours drinking
coffee and talking about true crime. And then that's right,

(09:14):
let's start a podcast. What would it be? It fucking
all happened at Cafe one on one in Hollywood and
they're closing.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
They're closing, but I can't imagine someone else. It's such
a perfectly renovated space. It's such a great like it
really was day and night kind of a hot spot
in such a cool hang place.

Speaker 1 (09:36):
You imagine the movie swingers. It's where they go when
they're drunk. And there's that beautiful scene. I just one
of my favorite scenes of what's an infants Fawn going?
You grows up and the neighbors has played a food.
I couldn't touch it. It's like one of my favorite scenes.
That's the one I won. Yes, pre pre renovations too.

(09:57):
It was this rad little place. I'm so bum for.
They had the best fucking tune them out ever.

Speaker 3 (10:03):
They really. We went there, We made people meet us there.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
We still had meetings there in the beginning.

Speaker 3 (10:08):
Took many meetings there.

Speaker 2 (10:10):
We also that was a great place to spot famous
people who were just trying to.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
Be chill right.

Speaker 3 (10:18):
Loved that.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
Yeah, so that's closed. Oil Can Harry's is closing too.

Speaker 3 (10:23):
I know.

Speaker 2 (10:23):
No more line dancing in Studio City for gay men
over seventies.

Speaker 1 (10:27):
Sorry. Gus Bar. Such a bummer.

Speaker 3 (10:30):
That was one of those places.

Speaker 2 (10:31):
It had been there so long and it was such
a like it was such a you know, like an
old tortoise of a place in the Studio City that
it was. It was a gay bar that had line
dancing but then basically hung around long enough to become hip.

Speaker 3 (10:46):
Yeah, and then the young people wanted to go there, and.

Speaker 1 (10:48):
It was like guyvy enough that it wasn't you didn't
it wasn't pretentious, right, I love that place. It's too bad.
And they had carried Okey upstairs.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
It's very sad and shocked and they're you know that
part of things where it's like whenevery we all will
talk about when everything gets normal again, or when everyone
has the vac scene or.

Speaker 1 (11:08):
Whatever, it's gonna be a whole another landscape. I mean,
who knows what it'll look like. We all have a
lot on our shoulders right now. We have we have
COVID fear, we have governmental takeover fear, we have violence fear.
We have extreme violence fear, extremely so extremists fear.

Speaker 2 (11:28):
Extremist fear, and people rationalizing and justifying extremism fear, which
is very upsetting to watch people make excuses or say
it's fine or I mean, there's.

Speaker 1 (11:38):
Call it a revolution, when that's not what that is. No,
that's it's lies. It's totalized. It's anarchy.

Speaker 3 (11:46):
Here's the good news.

Speaker 2 (11:48):
On PBS, they have rebooted All All Creatures, Great and
Small a series. Okay, and it is if you need
to run and you do away from modern reality. This
series is takes place in the Scottish countryside, so it
is the background is bright green, rolling hills, and it

(12:09):
is a young man who is becoming a country veterinarian.

Speaker 1 (12:13):
Okay, And I don't.

Speaker 2 (12:14):
Know what more you motherfucking want from me than a
recommendation like that, because my sister's the one who actually
was like, you need.

Speaker 3 (12:21):
To watch this. It's gonna make you feel better. Yeah,
and it really really did. It's like calming. It's it's soothing,
it's visually audio all of it.

Speaker 1 (12:29):
It's so good that sounds perfect for our times. Yes,
you know what I'm watching. That's kind of the exact opposite,
but still soothing in its messiness that I had. I
just vincent and I are binge watching it. I'd never
watched it before. It's the original British version of Shameless.
Oh did you watch that?

Speaker 3 (12:49):
I never have?

Speaker 2 (12:50):
No.

Speaker 1 (12:50):
First of all, you have to put subtitles on. It's Manchester.
It's the best accent, but I can't understand half of it,
and like the accent, I can standing. And also half
the words aren't things that we say, but right, so
it's fucking brilliant. It is so good and charming and lovely,
and all of the siblings. I want to hold them.

(13:13):
But I've never seen that. I've never seen the American
version of Shameless. It's great, is it? Okay?

Speaker 4 (13:18):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (13:18):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (13:18):
William h Macy, Ammy Rossam there, it's good.

Speaker 1 (13:22):
I mean, this is better. I haven't seen. I can't
even say that for sure, but I promise you it's
so Karen's you would love it.

Speaker 3 (13:30):
Where what are you streaming it on?

Speaker 1 (13:33):
I think it's Hulu. Let me look hold on Hulu. Wholu.

Speaker 3 (13:37):
Hulu comes out with the hits.

Speaker 1 (13:39):
You got to say. They do have a lot of
good stuff.

Speaker 3 (13:41):
They bring it, they bring it.

Speaker 1 (13:43):
Where do I find out Netflix? That's not right?

Speaker 3 (13:46):
Is it Netflix?

Speaker 1 (13:46):
The old one? British? I don't know Netflix, Shameless? No,
that's that's not it. It's Hulu. It's on Hulu. Shameless
British version are going to love it. It's it's nuanced
and funny and beautiful and sweet and sad because they're
like they don't have any money. Yeah, I mean, it's

(14:09):
really a beautiful show, and it's like all the horrible
things that are happening in the world. It's like it's
like concentrated the horrible things that are happening to them,
and they're this but they're this like family unit that
sticks together. Yeah, except for the dad who's a piece
of shit, but he's still fucking funny, right.

Speaker 3 (14:26):
That's which is how it is sometimes.

Speaker 2 (14:29):
And we I was just going to say, we love
Manchester so very much that god, we have done so
many or several amazing shows. Those audiences were the greatest.
That town is the coolest.

Speaker 1 (14:42):
Town, coolest, beautiful, beautiful, cool town. Our like cab driver
from the airport to our hotel was like one of
the hip, like we didn't even belong in his presence.
He was so cool, like he knew all the musicians,
used to play with this band. He used to go
to the what's the club called Hacienda And we were like, oh, sorry,
we're just these American assholes. Well, it's so.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
Funny because you asked that question where just like, oh,
we're excited to be in Manchester. We you know, we
kind of wanted to let him know that we got
the coolness and we knew the history. But then it
was just like he was like, well, yeah, I used
to hang out down there, Like he was like yeah.

Speaker 3 (15:19):
I was here for all that.

Speaker 1 (15:20):
I lived the movie twenty four hour Party people, if
you know a little intro, fucking great movie, and it
takes place and with all that noise.

Speaker 3 (15:28):
Yeah, and Steve Coogan has the funniest.

Speaker 1 (15:31):
Best Okay, let's get out of the kay good recommendations
and then let's go what else are you watching?

Speaker 2 (15:39):
I I'm switching around. Here's the problem. I keep starting
shows with subtitles. So I started Ragnarok I think that's
how you pronounce it, which is on Netflix, and it's
like it's almost like a teen it's really cool and
really good. But I kept I keep watching it going like, oh,
this is almost it's like a Riverdale. It's like the

(16:01):
Norwegian Riverdale, where it's like youngsters that are realizing their uh,
their Norse gods and Norse heroes.

Speaker 1 (16:10):
It's green.

Speaker 2 (16:11):
But my problem is, especially with the fucking troubles of today,
I'm watching it and then if you look down check
Twitter to make sure that you know, like that the
nothing's been breached. Then you look up and you don't
know what's going on because you've missed. You know, they
talk so fast and you have to just read yeah

(16:32):
constantly for thirty minutes to an hour. But it's that
show is great if you're looking for anything Ragnarok. I
believe Ragnarok r A G A nar Okay, Okay, I
mean it's the only thing that's going to be even
shaped like that on Netflix, so you'll find it. And
it's also really popular.

Speaker 1 (16:50):
Okay, so it's popular. Did you watch the Ripper documentary
on Netflix?

Speaker 2 (16:55):
I did? Fuck, Oh my god, that thing is on God.
They do it perfect, they did. They did because the
first it's four episodes, and I love it. The first
three didn't even introduce the man, the actual killer. It
was like about what happened in the victims and the
time and place, which I didn't understand.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
Was so so vital to the story. And then the
last episode is just like a little bit about who
he was, which I thought was great, and about how
poorly the investigation was done.

Speaker 2 (17:27):
They laid it out beautifully and in this way where
you meet the very first person you meet is the
child of the first woman who was made right. And
then you start, so he's first, and he's just like
she never came home type of him and his sister
went out to look for their mother. Yeah, because she
didn't come home, and he it looked like he was

(17:49):
maybe five or six. It's so heartbreaking and so beautiful,
but then you get into it's from the police perspective
and how they put together. Well, if she was standing
here and time of night and she was in this bar,
that means she's a prostitute, right, And they keep saying
the word over and over. Yeah, and they keep or
they call them good time girls in the newspaper, and.

Speaker 1 (18:10):
Then they point out the fact that all the jobs,
the industry jobs have disappeared from that town. So it
sees women who are trying to feed their children they're
not and which is like the problem you get when
you talk about, you know, women who are quote prostitutes,
is that you don't take into consideration the circumstances they're
in and that label. Oh and then the first victim saying,

(18:35):
like the first thing they said about her in the
press was she was a divorce as if they had
fucking anything to do with what happened to her. That
struck me immediately that she was a you know, twenty
three year old divorcee with five kids, and it's like,
what does her being? Calling her divorce was obviously away
for them to say something about her morality, you know
what I.

Speaker 2 (18:55):
Mean, correct as opposed to when when you hear about
it a little but more. The reason she had to
leave her husband is because he was a terrible drunk.
Of course he also it was that thing of he
was out of work or whatever, so he's drinking, he's
beating her up, and then he's hits the kids, so
they get divorced. It's like this thing where suddenly she's

(19:17):
taking the hit for these circumstances that are totally beyond
her control, and then she's just doing what it takes
to survive. And that's that thing that I think, slowly
but surely everyone's eyes are opening too, because someone tweeted
and was like I watched this and I kept going
sex work or sex work, and it's like, no, no, no,
When you watch this, you have to not to correct that. Yeah,
that's they're exactly right to say that from twenty twenty one.

Speaker 1 (19:41):
That's what we're doing now.

Speaker 2 (19:42):
But what you have to do is go into nineteen
seventy or whatever it was this was that time. Go
into that world. Understand where everybody who is now in
their sixties or whatever, mind even is coming from where
these men in the police department, whether they cared or
not dictated whether your case got solved.

Speaker 3 (20:03):
These the power.

Speaker 2 (20:05):
That these older white men had who had never it's
just like there.

Speaker 1 (20:09):
And the point was mind were calling we're saying sex
workers now is because when they said prostitute back then,
they meant something completely different than what we mean today.

Speaker 3 (20:19):
They meant don't care about that.

Speaker 1 (20:20):
Yes, And so when you hear the word prostitute and
you get super upset and offended, that's why we're not
using it anymore. But you have to use that back
then as what they said in the media and what
they called them to show you how little they cared
about these women.

Speaker 3 (20:34):
Or just or even the uh either. Some of them
didn't care.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
Some of them had like a real thing of like
how you know this kind of like I want to
judge these women, I want to push these women aside.
And some of them didn't understand their own like implicit
bias just from being in the position that they were in.
Some of them didn't get and then some did. There
was a couple of those cops who are kind of
you know it and very affected by it and very

(21:00):
much working against this entire system. It's just such a
great they. I those those documentary filmmakers are brilliant the.

Speaker 3 (21:09):
Way they laid that out.

Speaker 2 (21:10):
And by the time, oh Man, even having done the story,
I know, and knowing the story first of all, there's
definitely these pieces that I missed where I'm like, oh,
I wish i'd known that.

Speaker 3 (21:19):
I wish i'd read that.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
But here's what I remember is the part where those
women in that area who were like, fuck you stop
telling us. They because they did that just like they
did in Canada during the Scarborough rapist when they tried
to say women should now have a curfew, gave.

Speaker 1 (21:38):
Women a curfew, and women got fucking They were like,
fuck you fucking you do a curfew. You're the ones
that need healing women. Yeah, stop making women.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
You know.

Speaker 3 (21:49):
It's just so good and there's so much to learn
and there's so much good stuff in that.

Speaker 1 (21:53):
Definitely, and that's our episode for this week we covered Yeah.

Speaker 5 (22:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
Also huge spoiler alert alert everybody, but that's actually been
out for a while, so I feel like all the
people that would listen to this show have watched that.

Speaker 1 (22:08):
And you know, another thing I'd liked about it because
Vince was a little worried about watching it because he's
not as in the true crime as I am. But
they didn't have to show a single gory image. There
was not one single like upset. Upsetting, of course, but
like nothing gory happened. You didn't see any crime scene
photos that were upsetting. You didn't say anything like that.
It was. It was done so subtly that it was.

Speaker 3 (22:30):
It was, And the ones that they did show were
incredibly upsetting.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
Without being like graph Yeah, you didn't see it like
there was one where she's just her body was just
like laying down the street and they could just take pictures.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
That was that.

Speaker 3 (22:42):
It was a time where people could just walk up
to the crime scene too. It is like, isn't that
long ago? It doesn't seem it's just crazy. Yeah, watch
The Ripper for shirt.

Speaker 2 (22:52):
Yeah, but I was going to say, guess what's starting
today on Netflix, The Nightstalker.

Speaker 1 (22:59):
Oh yeah, excited. I'm so excited. Yes, there's so much
gory shit that to me, I'm a little afraid of gory.

Speaker 2 (23:08):
It's the fucking the Devil came to earth and began
to slay true men, women and children, old young. I
mean that man not to feed into that thing that
he clearly loved to try.

Speaker 3 (23:20):
To act like.

Speaker 2 (23:21):
But his crimes are some of the worst. When I
did that because I did him, Yeah you did. And
there's some that are you can't even talk about it.
It is so disturbing. He's it is so awful. But
the interesting or exciting thing to me is that I
remember it. I was there for it, you know, so
like that I'm excited to see. First of all, there's

(23:43):
it's so cal but then it's the Bay Area, Yeah,
and all those you know, there's all those real home
close to home type I can't wait to.

Speaker 1 (23:53):
He definitely hit Irvine, I think, or like close to
Irvine where I'm froude. But I think I was down
there too young to like really know too much about
was going on. Yeah, thankfully eighty five.

Speaker 3 (24:03):
You're a beat.

Speaker 1 (24:04):
I was five. Yeah, it's too young. I'm reading I
Can't Wait Cold, How to Do Nothing. That's really good.

Speaker 3 (24:13):
Who wrote that?

Speaker 1 (24:14):
It's this book by this woman named Jenny O'Dell, And
it's it's like kind of philosophical in a really cool way.
It's a it's a book that it's like it's kind
of like a self help manual. It's called how to
Do Nothing Resisting the Attention Economy. So it's kind of
this it's really philosophical more than like a self help book.

(24:35):
So it's pretty lovely and it kind of puts you
in this mindset of like what it means to actually
take care of yourself. It doesn't mean making it to
do list and getting everything. I have a self help
to do list of like or a self care to
do list to get shit done. And it's like, yeah,
I don't. That's just as stressful as a fucking regular
to do list, you know. Yeah, it's.

Speaker 3 (24:57):
That's really true.

Speaker 1 (24:58):
I'm enjoying it. I'm just started up. It's a nice
one so far.

Speaker 3 (25:01):
Oh that sounds good.

Speaker 2 (25:03):
I'm actually listening to an audio book that Banana Boy
Scotty Landis recommended to me, and I'm so excited that
he did because it's so good. It's Petty, that Tom
Petty biography, and it's written by Warren Zanes, who was
in the Del Fuegos I believe, and so he's it's
a musician, but.

Speaker 3 (25:22):
He is an unbelievably good writer.

Speaker 2 (25:25):
So he's talking about Tom Petty's life and career.

Speaker 3 (25:29):
Obviously, but the.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
Way he writes is so like I was listening to
it this morning while I was dying my roots, and
there was lines that he would read and like a
descriptor or a kind of like bringing together what it
was like for him to grow up with the family
he had in the fifties in Gainesville.

Speaker 3 (25:50):
Florida, And it's just these amazing descriptions. I'd be like, yeah,
I was like cheering the writing.

Speaker 1 (25:56):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (25:58):
Yeah, I'm working for a good book.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
And if you care about Tom Petty, which I believe
any red blooded American, wood Warren Zane's biography of him
is a beautifully beautifully written book.

Speaker 1 (26:10):
Oh, Vince is gonna love that. Vince just loved Matthew
McConaughey's autobiography seriously, Like the Beasty Boys biography is great.
Vince love shit like that. So that's perfect. Yeah, And
he loves Tom Petty of course.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
Yeah, Yeah, he's good Tom Petty. He never stopped writing
hit songs. He never never. He started when he was
like twenty and never stopped ever.

Speaker 1 (26:33):
Over isn't there? Yeah? Over and over and over again.
It's like the best songs you've ever heard.

Speaker 2 (26:38):
Yeah, And in hanging out at Largo in the two
thousands or whatever. Benmont Tench, who was the keyboardist for
the Heartbreakers, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers hung out there
and played there a lot, so I got to meet
him and talk to him and hang out with women. Oh,
he is one of the coolest chillst dudes. But also

(26:59):
like when he gets up and plays the piano, it
is such a vibe. It is such a like, yeah,
it's such something is happening, and like, yes, an amazing
and but he always has.

Speaker 3 (27:10):
Like this little smile on his face. He's just like,
is the cool.

Speaker 2 (27:13):
The first time I sat in the same booth as him,
I was just like, what is this life?

Speaker 1 (27:17):
Like?

Speaker 3 (27:17):
We believe that he's one of the Heartbreakers.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
So cool? Yeah, what else?

Speaker 2 (27:23):
One of our friends is back in the news, doctor Love.
Remember the story of the young man well he got
out of jail.

Speaker 1 (27:32):
In which one this was tell everyone, okay, doctor Love
is a story that I covered.

Speaker 3 (27:38):
I mean how long ago was it?

Speaker 1 (27:40):
Two years? I think a full year, year and a half.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeah, this is a pre COVID event in all of
our lives. And he's a young man who was pretending
to be a doctor to the point where he had
opened doctor's offices in Florida, Florida. Yeah, and he and
he got caught, and he got caught on the news,
and he then had his own press conference. It was

(28:05):
a real it was a real journey into the mind
of someone who just really wanted to be seen and
known as a doctor and was not qualified to be
one in any way. He went to jail for doing that,
I think a couple times, or at least once or whatever.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
He got out of jail, and then this just happened.

Speaker 2 (28:25):
He was arrested again on New Year's Day, Oh my god,
because he worked for a shipping company, and he started
calling the clients of this company and just having them
go ahead and wire the money directly into his bank account.

Speaker 1 (28:37):
Sure, it's it's that easy. Yep.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
He got caught doing that, and then he went ahead
and texted his boss saying, I'm doing everything I can
to fix this situation.

Speaker 3 (28:47):
I'm really sorry, and it's just like, no, you can't
do it. You can't do it. And the pretend like
it's it was a minor.

Speaker 1 (28:54):
Right, like a mix up, you know, and then admit
to it that basically, by intex you have to at
least call so there's no paper.

Speaker 2 (29:01):
Trayal good idea, good point, yes, for future, for all
our future of felonies.

Speaker 3 (29:08):
And it's I mean, yeah, it's a the idea. And
I know that.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
You know, oftentimes when we talk about the criminals that
we talk about on the show, we're talking about in
intensely bad individuals, psychopaths, people that intend to hurt. This
is not the area that doctor Love is in. In
my opinion, Doctor Love is more of a person who
is trying to force the fantasy in his head out

(29:34):
into the world to make the world match what he
wants it to be. And there's nothing I relate to
more than that. Like, I look, I've already pre written
what I want to be happening. So could you all
just please be doing the part I wrote? You're saying
the wrong lines.

Speaker 1 (29:50):
Oh my god. I do literally seen this in action
when we're doing an interview and you don't like the
question that's been asked to us, and then you just
answer whatever question you think they should have asked us.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
Yeah, oh no, that's an old trick. That's not my idea.
I learned that long ago by the professionals. Hell yeah,
you don't answer the question they ask you, Jesus, what
would it?

Speaker 3 (30:12):
What would that?

Speaker 2 (30:13):
What would it turn out to be if you did that?
You have to tell them what you want them to
know the end. So I think he's in trouble again,
and I think he's going back. Oh three, I think
he has to go back. Yeah, three hots in a
cot right.

Speaker 3 (30:25):
We're sorry.

Speaker 2 (30:27):
You know, I think I think it's it's an unfair
that I have this kind of bias stored him, whereas
he's a.

Speaker 3 (30:35):
Criminal, just like other criminals.

Speaker 1 (30:37):
Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (30:39):
I feel like I get it.

Speaker 1 (30:40):
I know, I understand, I get it.

Speaker 2 (30:43):
I want it sometimes, you know, you want to be
a doctor so bad you just wear the jacket, you
rent the office and you're like, come on, I got
the posters, got the posters on the wall from the
different medicines.

Speaker 1 (30:51):
There's a lot of that in this podcast. There's a
lot of like there by the grace of God go I.
But then there's for Karen some there by the of
God I wish went I.

Speaker 2 (31:03):
Those are those are the other options I could have
had if I didn't get myself together enough to be
a podcaster. Yeah, I absolutely would have rented some office space.

Speaker 1 (31:11):
There's time there's time.

Speaker 3 (31:13):
Oh could that be my safety net is fraud?

Speaker 1 (31:16):
I want you to drink bag, Karen, don't ever, don't
ever put yourself in a in a box.

Speaker 2 (31:21):
There's so many of us that haven't, that are so
afraid of having imposter syndrome, when in fact, doctor Love
he has whatever the exact reverse the one eighty of
imposter syndrome is, which is like, no, bitch, I am
a docter.

Speaker 1 (31:35):
Do you think he's like sitting in the cell right now,
going like, I guess I shouldn't have done that, or
I'll never do that again.

Speaker 2 (31:41):
Fuck no, No, he's he's sitting in cell going I
didn't actually do it, You're wrong right?

Speaker 1 (31:46):
Or I did that wrong. I need to try harder
next time.

Speaker 2 (31:50):
Next time, I'm going to have them wire their money
into a third account that doesn't have my name on.

Speaker 3 (31:55):
Sure, baby, Now, should we do some bug exactly right now?

Speaker 1 (31:59):
Okay if you guys know this, But we have a
podcast network and it's growing and we love it and
it's just a family. It's so fun.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
All these shows are doing so good and their people
are really responding to them. Thank you guys so much
for supporting all of them, because they're all they're all
little stars in their own departments.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
Speaking of little stars in our department, Oh maybe Karen's
and Karen Kilgarriff and Chris Fairbanks have a podcast called
do You Need to Ride? Correct and the and it's
so much fun and they had a crossover episode with
Bananas Are the other podcast of that we have with
yea with weird funny News hosted by Scotty Landis and

(32:42):
Kurt Bronneller. And so Scotty was on do you Need
to Ride this week? That's right, and it's really really funny,
and Scotty's just a joy to be around. He he is.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
I said it to him on the show, is just
like you you're or maybe I didn't say to him
on the show, but I did tell him.

Speaker 3 (32:58):
I was like, you're just made.

Speaker 2 (32:59):
To be a podcaster because you're great at bullshitting and
chit chatting. But also his speaking voice is just it's
like ASMR.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
And did we talk about the fact that he looks
like Paul Holes. We've talked about that, right, No, he
fucking looks exactly like like a younger Paul Holes.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
He's a real Holes nephew. His pall holes like skateboarding nephew.

Speaker 1 (33:22):
And then on on the Bananas Instagram, which is so
funny because they're so good at social media. They posted
the photos of when Kurt took a He wanted to
give the flightless bird the gift of flight, so they
took they took a chicken on a air balloon hot
and there's photos of that on the Bananas Instagram.

Speaker 3 (33:44):
Yeah, it's all been it's all been recorded.

Speaker 4 (33:48):
Oh.

Speaker 3 (33:48):
Also, this podcast Will Kill You.

Speaker 2 (33:50):
See this podcast Will Kill You has been around since
day one, and so sometimes they don't get the love
that they deserve because they're a huge.

Speaker 1 (33:57):
Podcast that he goes great too.

Speaker 2 (33:59):
Yeah, they're a true hit, but like you know, they're
a stalwart, so they don't get the proper affection. So
this week they talk about the virus rubella, which is
used to be one of my favorite comedy references because
it's like a very weird, obscure children's.

Speaker 3 (34:15):
Disease that I used to love to throw around everyone.
It's a yeah. So that came out Tuesday, so so
listen to that. It's waiting for you.

Speaker 1 (34:25):
Speaking of smart, funny, brilliant women, the podcast I Saw
What You Did That came out recently, with Milli and Danielle.
This week they do they cover the two movies and
talk about the movie Bronson from two thousand and eight
and then the movie Wolf of Wall Street from twenty thirteen,
which I can't wait to hear them talk about. What

(34:45):
a fucking movie. And the theme for these movies is
not known for subtlety.

Speaker 2 (34:54):
I tried to watch Bronson once and I think I'm
going to listen to this podcast and then reapproach Bronx's
because it was it was hard for me to get through.
Uh So I think I'm gonna listen to what they
have to say about it and then reapproach with fresh eyes.

Speaker 1 (35:07):
That's perfect. I said, no Gifts is the guest this
week is none other than any Man, the incredible musician
who wrote the theme song for I said No Gifts.
So there's this whole, like, you know, insular thing. But
I also wanted to mention just in case you like
wanted to know more about Bridge.

Speaker 3 (35:25):
She's written other songs.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
I know that just kidding.

Speaker 2 (35:30):
The way that came out, it was like the amazing
musician who wrote the theme song.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
You know your one higher soundtrack for Magnolia, and she's
just incredible obviously. I mean, yeah, yeah, I recently. I
don't know how I didn't know this, but his Instagram,
which is Bridger Underscore, w did you know it's only
photos of trash that he takes in the wild. The

(35:55):
entire Instagram feed is photos he finds the trash he's
come upon in the world. It is photo after photo
a fucking weird trash.

Speaker 2 (36:07):
Bridger is truly, Yeah, he's truly one of the funniest
people on the planet. He is one of He is
a renowned like TV writer. Everybody that knows him loves
him and knows he's the funniest. We have a game
night that we do with a group of our friends
and we play quiplash.

Speaker 1 (36:25):
Yeah, and we had.

Speaker 3 (36:27):
It's the shit he does, but he so are we.

Speaker 2 (36:30):
He and I both had the same question, which was
a bad name for a US Navy ship would be
the USS blank? And I wrote the USS bomb me
and this was the USS Shannon, And then of course
he won that round.

Speaker 3 (36:46):
We were all crying laugh and it was just like
that's him in a nutshell. That's like Bridger is. He's
truly unique.

Speaker 1 (36:53):
You've met him. He's so proper and he's like, you know,
well dressed and very kind of subdued, and then it's
just photo after photo of trash. Yeah, it's I mean,
I love that brain. That's such a great brain to
do that.

Speaker 3 (37:07):
He doesn't have to like do a big dance now.

Speaker 2 (37:10):
I mean, he's just being funny and whether you join
in or not is not his promits right, he doesn't
really care.

Speaker 3 (37:15):
It's the greatest.

Speaker 2 (37:17):
So this is this is all leading up to our
new announcement, which we're very very excited about. We tweeted
about it yesterday. But it's so cool. The podcast Lady
to Lady is now going to be on They've been
around for a long time and now they're going to
be on the exactly right network and we are so
thrilled to have them. Barbara Gray, Brandy Posey, Tess Barker,

(37:42):
they're the three hosts. They are all brilliant stand up comics.
Tess is an amazing journalist, Brandy is an amazing comedy
show producer. Like they're all great and very powerful women
in their own ways, and now they're amazing podcast that
already has its own huge follow up and that's going

(38:03):
to be on our new episodes, right, and so every Wednesday,
they're going to have a comedic guest hang out in
their adult treehouse.

Speaker 1 (38:10):
They're going to play games, they're gonna have advice, and
they're gonna tell embarrassing stories and have all these tangents.
It's a really fun show.

Speaker 2 (38:17):
Some of their past guests include the great stand up
Bet Stelling, My Favorite Murder, a friend of the show,
Guy Branham, Scam Goddess, Lady Moseley, some of the great
comedy minds of the twenty first century.

Speaker 3 (38:31):
They've had tons of people on that show.

Speaker 1 (38:33):
So yeah, be sure to subscribe to Lady to Lady
to hear all their new episodes on Wednesday, and it's
available on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 3 (38:43):
And definitely stick around to listen to their trailer at
the end of this show, and then if you want
to follow them on Twitter, they're at Lady to Lady
Comedy or Instagram at Lady to Lady Comedy.

Speaker 1 (38:53):
Welcome Lady to Lady. That the exactly right family. Once
we're finally able to have a party in the future,
they're going to be a great addition to those parties.

Speaker 2 (39:01):
This party is going to be I say, twenty fall
of twenty twenty two, at this party, yeah, is going
to have everything.

Speaker 1 (39:09):
And then we have a new stay sexy Beanie and
this really cute like winter woven sweater in the exactly nope,
in the state. And that where am I in the
my favorite murder store at my favorite murder dot com.
So check out all the cute, new and fun not
just cute, interesting new merch we have there all the time.
That's right.

Speaker 3 (39:30):
It's the merch just keeps coming.

Speaker 1 (39:32):
It's right.

Speaker 3 (39:32):
I always check in on that store.

Speaker 1 (39:34):
I cannot do it.

Speaker 2 (39:37):
So the story I'm going to do this week is
the Revenge of Miriam Rodriguez. Okay, so basically what I'm
about to tell you is a very boiled down version
of this article that was published in December in the
New York Times, and it was entitled she stalked her
daughter's killers across Mexico one by one.

Speaker 1 (39:58):
I saw that I thought I had. I didn't read it.
I like text it to myself and then forgot.

Speaker 3 (40:04):
Okay, so I did.

Speaker 2 (40:06):
It was written by an investigative journalist named Azam Ahmed.
You should absolutely read that original article. It's an unbelievable
story and He is an incredibly talented and investigative reporter.
His writing has twice been submitted for the Pulitzer Prize.
It is an amazing read and obviously there's tons more
details in this article.

Speaker 3 (40:27):
I'm giving you the cliff Notes version.

Speaker 1 (40:30):
Great.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
I'd like to thank listener l El. Their Twitter handle
is at E s l I n zzz. So they
sent me the article the day it was published with
the simple message have you seen this?

Speaker 1 (40:45):
Great?

Speaker 2 (40:46):
So it's always like ooh yeah, so it was this.
The simplicity of the of the of the question made
me dive right in. Also got information from The Guardian
and the Wall Street Jour, Mexico News Daily, and a
socialist worker dot org. Okay, so this starts in twenty

(41:06):
fourteen fifty four year old Miriam Rodriguez. Oh, that's the
thing I wanted to say is, of course, pre apologies
for me taking French in high school at not Spanish.
So there's definitely going to be mispronunciations or just very
white pronunciations.

Speaker 3 (41:24):
My apologies. I'm going to do my best.

Speaker 2 (41:26):
I looked up a lot of these pronunciations, but it's
I every time you go like, I know how the
lady said it in on the YouTube pronunciation video. But
I don't have the guts to do what she did,
so yeah, I just feel stupid, Okay. Fifty four year
old Miriam Rodriguez Liz with their family in a small
orange house in San Fernando, which that's the city in

(41:48):
Tamo Lippis, which is the state in Mexico. It's her
and her husband and she has three children, Luis, Azalea
and Karen. So Miriam works really hard to support her family.

Speaker 3 (42:01):
She runs a.

Speaker 2 (42:02):
Cowboy apparel shop called Rodeo Boots in town, and when
she's not at that shop, she works as a nanny
for a family just over the border in Texas Many.
Just to give you the sense of what's going on
in this area of Mexico, lots of bars and restaurants
have closed because of the constant shootouts and gang violence

(42:23):
in that area. So the fact that they have this
Rodeo Boots is really something, and it must have been
a pretty successful store, because it was very difficult for
businesses to stay in business with the kind of violence
that's happening there. So this is the very oversimplified explanation
of this situation in.

Speaker 3 (42:42):
This area of northern Mexico. Very obviously, very oversimplified.

Speaker 2 (42:46):
Yeah, definitely read a Zama Med's article about this, because
he is actually an embedded reporter, so he really knows
it and explains it correctly.

Speaker 3 (42:54):
I'm just trying to give.

Speaker 2 (42:55):
You the general sense because we all hear about like
Mexican drug cartel and gang violence in that way. But
it's obviously it's incredibly it's layered, it's old, it's highly political,
and I have no true sense of it, just in
the simplified sense of.

Speaker 3 (43:13):
What's in this article.

Speaker 2 (43:15):
Okay, So, the city of San Fernando sits in the
northern part of the Mexican state of Tamolepis. That state
shares its border with the southernmost point of Texas, and
there's two main highways that lead to the Mexico Texas
border that run through San Fernando. So San Fernando is
basically two hours away from the Mexico Texas border. And

(43:36):
because drug cartel's smuggle drugs into the US using this highway,
the location of the city of San Fernando has made
it the subject of cartel violence for decades. So this
is actually a lot like murder in the Bayou that
that series that I told you about, where basically it
was the tiny city, but because it was on this
highway in between New Orleans and like Texas or whatever,

(44:01):
that were just like thoroughfare for drugs, and so same
thing happening in San Fernando. In the nineteen nineties, some
local politicians decided to enlist the cartel's help in securing
and maintaining their power. But that cartel slowly made their
way into the political arena by demanding quotas in exchange

(44:21):
for their help. So they got public works contracts, they
they operated water works, they had transit and municipal police contracts.

Speaker 1 (44:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (44:30):
So then in twenty ten, tensions between different factions within
the Gulf Cartel over drug territories began to heat up,
and so there was a split, and the Zetas, who
were a group within that group, basically split off and
turned on their bosses. And so then the.

Speaker 2 (44:49):
Mexican government tries to declare its own war on drugs
and organized crime. But by this time the connections between
government and the cartels is too strong and they can't
just snuff out the cartels because they're already in power.
And so, according to Wall Street Journal. From twenty ten
to about twenty eighteen, roughly two hundred and fifty thousand

(45:11):
people have been murdered and about thirty seven thousand are
reported has disappeared. That are victims of this war on
crime that the government tried to wage on the cartels.
So former presidential candidate Josephina Vasquez Mota is quoted in
The Guardian is saying there are two governments here in Tamolipis.

(45:32):
There's a government from nine am to six pm, and
then there's another one from six pm to nine am.
The first was elected and the second imposes itself through kidnappings, extortion, disappearances,
bullets and death.

Speaker 3 (45:45):
So that's just the.

Speaker 2 (45:47):
General sense in the most oversimplified way of who of
what's at play. So Miriam's son Luis has moved to
the capital city, which is Ciudad Victoria, to open up
his own store, and her older daughter, Azalea still lives
in San Fernando, but she lives at her own house,
and then her younger daughter, twenty year old Karen, lives
at home with Mariam and her husband. So when Karen

(46:10):
isn't going to school, she helps her mom by working
at their family store. Okay, So, on January twenty third,
twenty fourteen, Karen's driving the family truck on her way
home from working at the boot shop, and she pulls
up to an intersection, waiting to merge into traffic, but
before she can, two trucks pull up on either side
of her, and a group of armed men get out

(46:32):
of the trucks. They force their way into Karen's truck.
One man gets behind the wheel and they drive off
with Karen.

Speaker 1 (46:38):
As their hostage. Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (46:40):
So they take Karen back to the family house, but
no one else is home there. Mariam is up in
Texas nannying, and so they they tie Karen up, they gagger,
and they throw her on the living room floor, and
then to everyone's surprise, there's a knock on the door.
It's Karen's uncle's mechanic who came by to fix the
family Truckuck. Fuck, So the armed gang is caught off guard,

(47:04):
so they now kidnap the mechanic as well, but then
eventually they end up letting him go.

Speaker 1 (47:10):
Do you know, sorry you might talk about this. Are
they targeted because they're like a family that owns a
business or is it just a random kidnapping.

Speaker 2 (47:17):
It doesn't say in this article or in the other
news stories that I read, but it would make sense
that because they own this business that clearly they have
money to be tapped, I would assume, But that sounds
like editorial.

Speaker 1 (47:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:31):
So when Mariam comes home, she finds Karen isn't there.
Then the mechanic comes tells her what happened. Miriam gets
all the details from the mechanic and soon after the
ransom calls begin. So an anonymous voice on the other
end of the phone threatens to harm Karen and come
after the rest of the family if the rodriguezz don't
pay a ransom. So the family assumes that this is

(47:55):
most likely the work of the Zetas, and they take
it very very seriously, and in fact, Miriam and her
husband go to take out a loan at the local
bank to pay the ransom. These kidnappings are so common
there's a bank dedicated to offering lines of credit for
paying ramps.

Speaker 1 (48:12):
Holy shit, And then you wonder if they're in on
it too, because they're getting interests on ransom fucking.

Speaker 2 (48:18):
I mean, it's not good when you have a bank
that's dedicated to a ransom. That's how common kidnapping and
this kind of stuff is.

Speaker 1 (48:27):
That's horrorfying.

Speaker 2 (48:29):
Yeah, So, following the captor's instructions, Karen's father drops the
money at a spot near a health clinic. Then he's
told to go to a local cemetery where he waits
for Karen to be released. She never comes. So this
is just the first of several ransom payments the Rodrigez
family is forced to make, and each time they come
up with the money, they leave it at the drop

(48:50):
off location, and yet Karen never appears. So after months
of this back and forth with false promises and mounting
ransom fees, Miriam's that's mun crazy. Yeah yeah, Miriam starts
to get angry. She finally finds a way to contact
the Zeta's directly and asks for a meeting. This is

(49:12):
a middle aged woman who's like, I'm going to call
the cartel myself.

Speaker 1 (49:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:18):
Surprisingly, they agree, so she goes to a restaurant in
town called Elle Junior is my way to pronounce it, okay,
where she meets a member of the Zeida's. He doesn't
give his name. He's described as a slender young man
with a clean shaven face, wearing a walkie talkie on
his hip. Miriam begs him to let Karen come home,

(49:39):
but he informs her of the Zetas have nothing to
do with this kidnapping. Instead, he offers to help Mariam
find Karen himself for a fee of two thousand dollars.
So Mariam's skeptical, but she has no other choice, so
she agrees to pay him this fee, and as the
meeting ends, she hears a voice on the walkie talkie
calling the man by his first name, which is so

(50:01):
In the days after their meeting, Miriam calls Sama to
check in and see how his hunt is going, but
after a week, he stops answering her calls entirely. Meanwhile,
she's still receiving calls from the people claiming to be
the abductors asking for more ransom money, usually to the
tune of about five hundred dollars, and the family pays
every fee goes to every drop site. Karen is never returned.

(50:25):
Their hope is starting to wane, and one morning, a
few weeks after their last ransom payment is made with
no results, Miriam comes downstairs and announces to Azalea that
she believes Karen is never coming back. She can feel
it in her heart.

Speaker 3 (50:40):
She knows her.

Speaker 2 (50:41):
Daughter is dead, so she now vows to hunt down
every last person who's involved with her daughter Karen's disappearance. Okay,
so now Miriam, armed with just this man's first name
and the memory of his face, scours her daughter's social
media trying to track down Sama. So don't know if

(51:02):
that's the correct way to pronounce Sama, but I'm just
saying it that way.

Speaker 3 (51:05):
She comes up empty.

Speaker 2 (51:06):
Handed, so she goes to the mechanic that got kidnapped
along with Karen that day. She describes Sama's appearance to
him and he confirms, yes, he was there that day
that Karen was kidnapped. He was one of those men.
So Miriam now knows that at least one of the
people that she's looking for, So she continues searching Facebook,
and then one morning, when she's lying on the couch,

(51:27):
she happens to run across a photo of Sama, and
in the picture, he's standing beside a young woman who's
wearing a uniform for an ice cream shop. So she
digs around and till she can find the name of
this ice cream shop. She finds out that it's located
and see your dad Victoria, and that's where her son lives,

(51:48):
which is two hours south of San Fernando. She spends
weeks staking out this ice cream shop.

Speaker 1 (51:55):
Holy shit.

Speaker 2 (51:56):
She learns the young woman's working hours, and she based
hopes that one of these days Sama's going.

Speaker 3 (52:02):
To show up to see her, and he finally does.
She knows this.

Speaker 2 (52:06):
She notices Sama arrived to pick up the woman after
her shift, and she discreetly follows both of them home
and writes.

Speaker 3 (52:14):
Down their address.

Speaker 1 (52:14):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (52:16):
Miriam doesn't want to go to the police yet until
she's collected enough information so that they can arrest him.

Speaker 3 (52:22):
So she knows this is all just kind of you know.

Speaker 2 (52:24):
So basically, she realizes she's going to have to collect
enough information to get the police to listen to her
and do something. So what she does is cuts her
hair dyes it bright red. She grabs her an old
uniform for when she used to work at her job
at the health ministry. She puts it on. She makes

(52:46):
a fake government id for herself, and she starts going
door to door in Sama's neighborhood, pretending that she's conducting
a pole So shit, she fucking ends up getting his
last name, and all the information she can about him
and what he does and everything from his neighbors.

Speaker 3 (53:05):
So she.

Speaker 1 (53:07):
That's brilliant.

Speaker 2 (53:09):
It's so fucking genius, and it's so like, you know,
this is You've woken up the fucking like the Tigris
in her, you have taken her child. Yeah, and she's
fucking coming for you. So she basically goes to the authorities.
No one will help her. She asks local police.

Speaker 3 (53:30):
They say no.

Speaker 2 (53:31):
She goes to the state police, they say no. Finally
she goes to the federal police until one officer there
who asked to remain anonymous in this story for fear
of retaliation. And that's really this is really a thing,
like I'm nervous to say the names of these sub
gangs in these cartels because this is serious shit and

(53:51):
these people are not This is not this is no
joke totally. Obviously, there are people in Mexico that live
underneath this fucking threat of violence and this threat of
just assassination all day every day and kidnapping and violence.
So finally, if one federal officer agrees to help her,

(54:14):
she gives him the file of information that she's gathered
on Sama. The officer says he quote, he's never seen
anything like it. The details and the information gathered by
this woman working all alone were incredible, So with this
officer's help, they're able to issue an arrest warrant. But
Sama must have gotten word that someone was asking about him,
because then that's when they realize he's skipped town. But

(54:38):
Miriam's not discouraged. She decides that she can use the
information that she has on Sama to try to track
down the remaining members.

Speaker 3 (54:46):
Of his crew.

Speaker 2 (54:47):
Using those same techniques, she builds a portfolio of names
and photographs from social media and creates her quote hit list.
So weeks later, it's September fi twenty fourteen, and that's
Mexico's Independence Day and Miriam's son Louise, is getting ready
to close up his.

Speaker 3 (55:06):
Shop in Sea Dad, Victoria.

Speaker 2 (55:09):
There's just one last customer in the shop, and when
Louise takes a closer look at him, he realizes it's Sama,
So he calls his mom, letting her know that he
has spotted him and that then he stealthily trails Sama
as he leaves the store. So Miriam alerts the police
and they corner Sama in the central plaza When they

(55:31):
go to arrest him, he tries to fake a heart condition,
but they make the arrest anyway, and once he's questioned,
he starts giving up names, and one of the names
he gives up is that of someone named Christian Gonzalez,
who's just eighteen years old. Wow, which is the other
part of this. It's such a bad situation that there's

(55:52):
a lot of people who don't have a choice. It's
that kind of thing where it's so extreme getting into
the cartel sometimes isn't a choice, right, and sometimes there's
kind of nothing else.

Speaker 3 (56:04):
Not to say it's justified or anything, but.

Speaker 1 (56:07):
Or you grew up in it too, like this might
see his entire family completely and yeah, who knows.

Speaker 2 (56:14):
But people are trying to survive, they're trying to get
by in this extremely, extremely violent and bad situation. He
so basically they arrest Christian Gonzalez. He's taken to the
station to be interrogated. Miriam's gone down to the station
so she can be there. She took her friend Idelia

(56:34):
with her. They're sitting outside the interrogation room. She hears
the boy ask for his mother and for some food,
so she's struck. Miriam struck by the realization that this
is just a kid, so she slips into the interrogation
for how dear she is. This woman is unbelievable. She

(56:54):
slips into the interrogation room, gives Christian basically her lunch,
which was some fried chick and she buys him a
coke and she tells her friend Adelia that quote, He's
still a child, no matter what he did, and I am.

Speaker 3 (57:08):
Still a mother.

Speaker 1 (57:09):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (57:11):
So Miriam wins Christian over and he ends up spilling
all the information that he has to the police. He
agrees to take them to the ranch where the victims
were killed and where the bodies are still buried. So
this ranch sits at the end of a dirt road.
It's not far from a barbecue spot where Miriam and
her daughter Azalea ate two days after Karen's kidnapping. The

(57:34):
ranch has since been abandoned as Mexican marines discovered this
cartel hiding spot and killed six of the gang members
there in a shootout, But there's still an old tractor
that marks the spot where multiple victims' bodies have been buried.

Speaker 1 (57:49):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (57:50):
So the investigators begin to dig there and Miriam goes
of course, because she's basically part of the police department now.
So as the investigators are digging, Miriam looks around the
property for signs of Karen. She finds bone shards, she
finds a noose hanging from a tree, and finally she
finds a stack of victim's personal belongings and among those

(58:13):
items she spots a seat cushion from the family truck
and then Karen's scarf. Her worst fears are now confirmed.
So when the forensics team tries to tell Miriam that
there's no sign of Karen's remains buried with the victims
by the tractor, Miriam refuses to accept that answer. She
presses them to re examine their findings for a full

(58:34):
year until they finally identify a piece of Karen's femur
among those remains, and Karen is now officially confirmed as
one of the dead Jesus. So, on her way home
from being at that ranch, that abandoned ranch, Miriam spots
someone she knows eating alone at the barbecue restaurant, a

(58:55):
woman named Elvia Bettencourt. Miriam knew Elvia from when she
was a little kid, and she knew that she had
a very rough childhood, she went through some terrible stuff
and because of that, Miriam used to give her Karen's
old clothes. So Miriam stops and asks Elvia if she's
heard anything about Karen. Elvia says she hasn't, So San

(59:18):
Fernando is not a big town. Almost everyone's heard about
Karen's kidnapping and disappearance. It suddenly dawns on Miriam Elvia
might be keeping watch over the ranch for the cartel.
So back at home, Miriam goes back to the social
media research and she finds Elvia is currently dating one
of the gang members who's on Miriam's list as one

(59:41):
of Karen's captors.

Speaker 3 (59:43):
He's in jail.

Speaker 2 (59:44):
This man is in jail for a different crime, so
Miriam starts tailing Elvia on her jail visits, and at
the same time, the police look into Elvia's phone records
and find that some of the ransom calls to the Rodriguez'
home had come from elva house, whoa they secure in
a restaurant and they arrest her on the way home

(01:00:05):
from visiting her boyfriend in jail. So basically for the
next three years from twenty fourteen to twenty seventeen, Miriam
continues her hunt for the names on her list. Some
of them are already dead or in jail for other crimes,
but anyone still free is considered fair game, and even
the ones who've moved on from their life of crime.

(01:00:26):
So there is one man who had been a florist
before joining the cartel, and since he'd left the gang,
he'd gone back to selling flowers by the border. By
the border of Texas. Miriam manages to befriends some of
this man's relatives and they basically tip her off to
where and when he sells his flowers on this bridge

(01:00:47):
leading into Texas. So when she gets there, she spots him,
but now he's selling sunglasses. She gets close, he recognizes her,
he takes off running. This middle aged woman chases this
man down and tackles him to the ground.

Speaker 3 (01:01:05):
She pulls a pistol out of her purse.

Speaker 2 (01:01:08):
And says, if you move, I'll shoot you, and she
holds him there for almost an hour until the police
finally come and arrest him. This is a movie, and
it completely is a movie. Another one of these people
that she tracks down is a man named Enrique Flores,
who is now a born again Christian who Miriam tracks

(01:01:29):
down to a small this small town of Aldama. There
she befriends his grandmother, who points her in the direction
of Enrique's church. Mariam finds him there one Sunday morning
and corners him. When the members of the congregation beg
Miriam to show him some compassion, she fires back, where
was his compassion when they killed my daughter? So now

(01:01:52):
Miriam's starting to gain a huge reputation in the area,
of course, because as much as they all want cartel
violence to end, and no one citizen has ever been
brave enough to stand up to them or especially take
them on, not until Miriam Rodriguez. So soon other families
whose love once have been kidnapped and haven't received any

(01:02:13):
help from the authorities start to band together behind her.
A group of six hundred families calling themselves the San
Fernando Collective for the Disappeared, begin working together to search
for missing loved ones.

Speaker 1 (01:02:27):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:02:28):
While most respect Miriam's tenacity, many also fear for her life,
saying that she's playing with fire going up against the cartels.
But to that, Miriam says, I don't care if they
kill me. I died the day they killed my daughter.
Oh I want to end this and I'm going to
take out the people who hurt my daughter, and they

(01:02:48):
can do whatever they want to me. Oh so, she
she's not fucking around, okay. So around midnight on March
twenty second, twenty seventeen, twenty nine inmates tunnel out and
escape from the prison and see you Dad, Victoria, Miriam
finds out that one of the killers that she put
behind bars for murdering Karen has escaped. So racting quickly,

(01:03:13):
the authorities managed to recapture ten of these inmates by
nine am the next morning, but according to the state,
the killer Miriam fears the most has been recaptured. Still
concerned for her and her family's safety, Miriam asks the
police for special protection. They promised to send extra patrol
cars to the Rodriguez's home and business. Luis and Azelia,

(01:03:34):
Miriam's husband and daughter, are still worried, but despite the
rising dangers around her, Miriam presses on with her.

Speaker 3 (01:03:41):
Search for her daughter's killers.

Speaker 2 (01:03:43):
So by April of twenty seventeen, this has been three years,
Miriam tracks down yet another gang member involved in Karen's kidnapping.
This time it's a woman who has since left San
Fernando for Sea Dad Victoria, where she's taking a nannying
job for a family. Miriam stakes out the woman's home
from her car for days, she waiting for the woman

(01:04:06):
to show so she can make her move. At one point,
Miriam wears down her car battery listening to the radio,
and she has to call her son Luis to kind
of like quietly and secretly come and give her car
a junk while she's sitting out there. When the woman
finally does emerge, Miriam alerts the police. They descend on

(01:04:27):
the house and they arrest the woman and Miriam is
running up toward them as they're arresting her, and she
trips and fractures her foot. No, she's just fucking going
for it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:38):
Cheezs.

Speaker 2 (01:04:39):
So it's a month later. It's May tenth, twenty seventeen,
and that's Mexico's Mother's Day. So Miriam is coming home
at about ten twenty one pm.

Speaker 3 (01:04:50):
Her foot's still.

Speaker 2 (01:04:51):
In the cast, so she's using crutches, so she parks
on the street and she's hobbling out of her car
and slowly making her way up to her house. Before
she can get to her door, a white Nissan truck
pulls up behind her and they fire thirteen rounds at Miriam.
Her husband inside the house here's this and runs out,

(01:05:12):
only to find Miriam laying face down in the street,
her hand tucked inside her purse reaching for her gun.
An ambulance arrives quickly, but Miriam dies on the way
to the hospital.

Speaker 1 (01:05:22):
This is not how I expected this to fucking holy
yeah shit.

Speaker 2 (01:05:26):
Yeah, well yeah, I mean, this is a woman who
took on the drug cartel. That's serious. Yeah, So having
made such a name for herself, Miriam's death really makes
an impact. Over the course of the next few months,
police track down and arrest two of the hit men
responsible for murdering her. The third killer puts up a

(01:05:46):
fight he is ultimately gunned down by the police. Though
the hitmen are all brought to justice, the question of
who exactly put out the hit on Miriam remains a mystery,
and it's one that plagues her son Luis for months.
But that if he pushes too hard to find them,
death will also come for him, so he takes a
slightly more patient and low key approach to seeking justice,

(01:06:09):
and justice does come one last time for Miriam and Karen.
One month after Miriam's murdered. In June of twenty seventeen,
the police in the state of Vera Cruz arrest another
suspect in Karen's murder. This time it's a young woman
who'd run off to Vera Cruz with her young son
to work as a taxi driver. Police were able to
find her by using the information Miriam had gathered before

(01:06:32):
her own murder, technically making this arrest her final capture.
So Miriam's son Luis vows to pick up where his
mom left up, helping other families to find their missing
loved ones. He's careful not to make the same mistake
that led to Miriam's death. Rather than trying to punish
cartel members, he and the families he works with focus
on getting their missing loved ones returned alive, and over time,

(01:06:56):
the strength of that collective fades. Crime conditions and San
Fernando remain largely the same, and the members of the
collectives splinter off into their own separate, smaller parties. But
the people of San Fernando are deeply affected by Miriam's
bravery and dedication, so much so that they honor her
with a bronze plaque in the city's Central Plaza when

(01:07:17):
all of a sudden done, Miriam Rodriguez is responsible for
the arrests of ten people who were involved in the
kidnap and murder of her daughter Karen. And that is
the unbelievable story of Miriam Rodriguez, the grieving mother who
single handedly took on the cartel to avenge her daughter's death. Wow,

(01:07:38):
can you believe that shit?

Speaker 1 (01:07:41):
Good job. Yeah, I'm going to do the Happy Face Killer,
Oh wow, Yeah, which I think I didn't totally understand
for a long time because there's also the Smiley Face Killer, Yeah,
which I was like, uh, it doesn't seem like is
maybe real? I don't really understand it. But then I

(01:08:01):
kind of realized that there's these two stories. I'm going
to do the Happy Face Killer, which is an absolute
fucking serial killer true story. I got info from an
old La Times article by Barry Siegel, a Daily News
article by Mara Bowson, BBC ABC News, Mental Floss article
by Bess Lovejoy, a Rolling Stone article by Laura Barcella,

(01:08:23):
and then a podcast called Happy Face, which I will
talk more about later. January nineteen ninety in Oregon, a
woman in her late fifties named Laverne Palvinak was ready
to end the abusive relationship she was in with had
been in for ten years with her living boyfriend named
John Saucenovski. So Laverne she had already had a history

(01:08:48):
of reporting her boyfriend to the police on phony charges
every time they fought, and actually eight months earlier, in
the spring of nineteen eighty nine, she had called the
FBI and falsely accused him of robbing banks. So it's
like kind of to get him in trouble and get
him out of the house. Maybe that's what she would do.
In January nineteen ninety she's ready to get rid of

(01:09:08):
him again, So this time around Laverne, who in the
nineteen ninety nine made for TV movie The Happy Face Murders,
was played by a very disheveled Anne Margaret. If you
can believe it, oh wow. I know. She's an avid
reader of mysteries and true crime books, so she loves
all that stuff. And she had read some details in
the newspaper about the recent discovery of the body of

(01:09:30):
a local woman who had been discovered on January twenty second,
nineteen ninety. She had been discovered by a student from
mountain Hood Community College, who had been bicycling along the
Old Columbia River Highway. It's east of Portland, and she
had found this the body of a woman lying on
the side of an embankment, and the woman had been beaten,

(01:09:51):
sexually assaulted and strangled. So the victims identified through sketches
shown on the media as twenty three year old Tanya
Bennett from Portland, Oregon. And Tanya was described as friendly
and outgoing and someone who'd never met a stranger, and
she had last been seen alive by her parents on
January twenty first, and the day before she was found,

(01:10:14):
and then she had been at a bar that night. So,
reading about this, Laverne devises a plan to pin the
murder on her boyfriend, thus sending him out of her
life into prison.

Speaker 3 (01:10:27):
So on February I know she ain't got it right.

Speaker 1 (01:10:29):
No, that's not a good plan. No, So on February fifth,
nineteen ninety, she anonymously calls the police department, claiming she
had overheard a man in a bar bragging about committing
the murder, and so she told him the name of
her boyfriend, and who was a thirty nine year old
John Sonovski, but they had misspelled his name, and the

(01:10:51):
report that was taken down, so the sheriff's office isn't
able to follow up on the tip. And so Laverne
waits a week and she's like, what the fuck, calls
them back and this I make get the name correct.
And so law enforcement begins investigating John as a potential
suspect in the murder, and they were able to find
employees at a cafe who did recall a frequent customer

(01:11:12):
identified as John, boasting that he had murdered a woman
he met in a bar. So he was it seems
like he might have been actually taking taking what's the
word responsibility for this and bragging about it, and a
waitress told police that quote. He was laughing. He thought
it was all a big joke. So John, though, denies

(01:11:32):
having anything to do with the murder, and Laverne kept
changing her story. And this is like a grandma type
by the way. It's like the law enforcement they go
over there and she like makes them coffee and she
seems really helpful, and you know, this like little old
lady type of person. So they're like, it's not like
she's some you know, criminal that they shouldn't be trusting.

Speaker 3 (01:11:53):
Sorry, she's old.

Speaker 1 (01:11:55):
She's like, she's fifty fifty years old. She's in her
late fifty. Kay, sorry, yeah, grandma type, though I said,
just wearing a she's wearing a sweater. Reversals exactly. Shampoo nut,
she got a shampoo set, got it. Got'm not wearing
tons of eyeliner with black hair, got it. She's in
her late fifty. I think she's like fifty nine as well,

(01:12:15):
so you know, she's like a grayle And it's also
warning the Pacific Northwest. I feel like fifty late fifties
is a different person.

Speaker 2 (01:12:23):
Treading very very thin, nice, very thin. Nice me and
everyone in the pan dubs.

Speaker 1 (01:12:31):
All right, well listen, if you're still listening, let me
keep telling you.

Speaker 3 (01:12:37):
You're not curious, right.

Speaker 1 (01:12:40):
That's why I explained that she's a grandma type, is
because I don't. Okay, here we go digging so and
Laverne keeps changing her story as well, so they should
see that something is fishy, but they don't. And she
then goes on to make up the story that John
forced her to take part in the rape and murder
as well. All these different stories. But long story short,

(01:13:02):
despite no forensics or physical evidence, no details that hadn't
been published being brought to light by Laverne and several
conflicting eyewitness accounts, and continuing to alter her story and
then finally recanting her confession and admitting that she was
trying to frame her boyfriend. Both Laverne and John are
tried for the murder of Tanya Bennett. Both of them yeah,

(01:13:25):
and so I think Laverne was like, oh shit, this
is not what I expected to happen. And Laverne is
ultimately convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison for
her alleged role in the crime, and John, seeing that
they were able to sentence this little old lady, he's like, well,
I'm fucked sorry, so plead. He cuts a deal and

(01:13:46):
pleads no contest to felny murder and kidnapping, which lands
him a life sentence. So during the trial a piece
of evidence comes to light. So while they're both locked up,
so they couldn't have done this themselves, someone had been
confessing to Tanya Bennett's murder. The first confession showed up
inside a restop bathroom in Livingston, Montana, where someone had

(01:14:07):
scrawled the message quote I killed Tanya Bennett January twenty first,
nineteen ninety in Portland, Oregon. I beat her to death,
raped her, and I loved it. Yes, I'm sick, but
I enjoy myself too. Two people took the blame and
I'm free.

Speaker 3 (01:14:23):
WHOA.

Speaker 1 (01:14:24):
That is really fucking spasados.

Speaker 2 (01:14:27):
Like if you walked into the bathroom, you would just
be like, okay, get me some police tape, Like this is.

Speaker 1 (01:14:33):
Just I think. It's not like I killed z and Zo.
It's like, here's fucking detail. So I think that's why
people have it in soon. Another message, which discovered in
a restop closer to the actual where the crime had
happened in Umatilla, Oregon, that said quote, I killed Tanya
Bennett in Portland. Two people got the blame, so I
can kill again. So both messages were signed with a

(01:14:56):
really distinctive happy face sketch and the author is untraced,
so it's basically like the happy face where you put
a circle around it, you know. Detectives, which is like
the creepiest thing to sign with a sign of fucking
confession to murder.

Speaker 3 (01:15:11):
That's well, murderers are creepy. I mean there's creepy.

Speaker 1 (01:15:14):
Yeah, detectives in the process so you'd be like you
think you'd see this and be like, oh, the people
we have locked up are innocent, right, But detectives and
prosecutor in Portland make a really good point. That's maybe
one of like an unknown friend of John and Laverne
had wrote the graffiti in an effort to cast doubt
in their guilts, you know what I mean, Like, there's
no way, which I think reasonable. Yeah. At first I

(01:15:36):
was like, oh, but the killer confessed, and it's like
not really. Yeah, So the judge bars the message from
the trial. It's saying it's hearsay, there's no evidentiary value
and therefore cannot be introduced in John on le Verne's trial,
which at first I was like what and then yeah,
makes there's it's total hearsay.

Speaker 3 (01:15:56):
It's literal writing on the bathroom ball.

Speaker 2 (01:15:58):
It's like literally about his here say ish as I
think you can be exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:16:02):
So, if Laverne had never falsely confessed, though, or perhaps
if law enforceman had questioned her confession a little more
and looked a little deeper into it, perhaps the serial
killer who was to become known as the Happy Face
Killer would have been caught before at least seven more
women became victims because unfortunately, the real killer was still
out there. So let's talk about the happy face killer.

(01:16:25):
His name was Keith Hunter Jessperson, and he was born
on April sixth, nineteen fifty five in Chilliwack, British Columbia.
I mean, it's all the same stuff we've always heard.
It's absolutely horrifying. Of course, his father was an abusive
piece of shit, domineering, violent, alcoholic, and specifically singled out
Keith for abusive treatment over his siblings, so it was

(01:16:48):
all directed at Keith. The family moved to Sella Washington
when they were young. Well, Jessperson had trouble fitting in
and making friends because he ended up being as an
adult six foot six inches tall, so even as a
little kid he was huge. In fact, his brothers nicknamed
him Egor, which is like so shitty, So we had

(01:17:09):
a hard time making friends and fitting in, and that
nickname stuck with him. He was shy, had no friends,
played by himself. He would often get into trouble for
behaving badly, sometimes violently, and we'd be severely punished by
his father, including beatings with a belt, sometimes in front
of other people. To humiliate him, and in one case

(01:17:30):
it says he received an electric shock from his father
as a kid. Oh Jesus, I know, and beginning as
young as five years old, he would capture and torture animals,
which seemed like kind of a normal thing in the family,
like they would hunt animals and skin them. So it
wasn't like like he was kind of.

Speaker 2 (01:17:51):
Hunting and capturing. Maybe, but torture is a disduck's where
it goes off rights.

Speaker 1 (01:17:57):
So I think he got comfortable with it, and so
torture was his next step.

Speaker 2 (01:18:02):
Just to just as a side note, though, as empathetic
as we want to feel about this, the beginning of
the Tom Petty biography is all about how his dad
used to beat the living shit out of him when
he was five years old. So again, and most of
the people listening to this know this, but has nothing
to do, so you become that's.

Speaker 3 (01:18:21):
Right, it's not an excuse.

Speaker 1 (01:18:22):
And giving up. I feel like we have to give
a little background, But I don't want to dwell on
it and say they made him a serial killer, because
that's not That's not what happens to most people who
have these horrific childhoods. Completely. No, there's no excuse for
it at all. Yeah, he would set fires to houses

(01:18:42):
and in wooded areas. He said later he said he
often thought about what it would be like to do
the same kinds of things to humans, and he even
tried to as a child, attempted to kill two other
children who had crossed him as a little kid, like
held one under the water and like, yeah, so we've
got some flags going, we have some bright red flags.

(01:19:05):
So despite all of these issues, he graduates high school,
he gets a job as a truck driver, He gets married,
has three kids, and seemingly lives a normal life.

Speaker 3 (01:19:14):
But in nineteen nine, Flo truck driver seems to be
in a lot of these stories. No offense to truck.

Speaker 1 (01:19:21):
Don't defend truck driver.

Speaker 6 (01:19:22):
We're not.

Speaker 1 (01:19:22):
We don't need fifty year old women and truck drivers mad.
That's because what.

Speaker 3 (01:19:27):
Else is there really the world? But I swear there's
just a well.

Speaker 1 (01:19:32):
It's easy access to uh, to women and you and
you have no ties to the places you are, which
I think, in part in his mind made it. He
realized that, you know, yeah, it's an easy way. I
feel like probably serial killers become truck drivers more than
truck drivers become serial killers.

Speaker 2 (01:19:51):
Yes, I would one hundred percent agree with that, but
I think it's a one way street coming from right,
just from.

Speaker 1 (01:19:58):
The serial killer part. Hey in my seat's uncomfortable. I'm
gonna start serial killing. You're not like break or breaker.
I've just got this idea, right. It's not I'm a
family man who drives a truck breaker breaker. It's like
I'm a serial killer.

Speaker 2 (01:20:13):
This reminds me of the young woman that I met
when I was in Hawaii, who is a truck driver
who listens to us, who was about the least serial
killer is person I've ever met with.

Speaker 1 (01:20:24):
She in her fifties. Do we have a double down?

Speaker 2 (01:20:26):
She was?

Speaker 1 (01:20:27):
That would be cool?

Speaker 2 (01:20:29):
She was not, but she was on her honeymoon, so
maybe that was she was hiding behind that the glow
of love.

Speaker 1 (01:20:36):
Can we get truck drivers who listen to this podcasts
to tell us the creepiest stories from the road, because
I bet it gets so creepy late at night.

Speaker 2 (01:20:44):
You're writings between thank you Just tell us if you've
ever driven in a night by a child in a
wet nightgown on the side of the road with her
arms sticking.

Speaker 1 (01:20:53):
Straight out for something, and or like if you picked
up someone creepy hitchhiking that you shouldn't have, Like we
need those stories.

Speaker 3 (01:21:01):
Yes, So it was what they call that is a
reverse large marge.

Speaker 2 (01:21:04):
If you have right, if someone got into your truck,
you're the innocent bysander.

Speaker 1 (01:21:09):
Because you're allowed to be You're allowed to pick up
hitchhikers if you're a truck driver. I feel like that's
the only time it's appropriate. Correct, We need to hear
those stories, please, all right.

Speaker 3 (01:21:17):
But also stop hitchhiking.

Speaker 2 (01:21:19):
What's what?

Speaker 1 (01:21:19):
Don't hitchhike? Please? Okay. So seemingly lives a normal life.
In nineteen ninety, after fifteen years of marriage, jess Person
and his wife get a divorce, and that same year
he begins to kill. So he was thirty five years old.
He's super imposing six six weighs almost three hundred pounds,

(01:21:40):
or like, no, to forty. That's not almost three hundred
pounds numerically, let me tune around that forty is the
little old lady of ladies in their fifties. Come on,
that's right, it'd be so hard, okay. So he began
working as an interstate truck driver. At this point, after
relocating to Chain, Washington, and he soon realizes that his

(01:22:03):
job affords him the opportunity to kill without being suspected.
So his first known victim is the woman from the
beginning of the story, Tanya Bennett. According to his later account,
he first met her at a bar near Portland, Oregon.
He invited her over to his house where he lived
with his girlfriend, who was also a truck driver, and
so she was out of town, and allegedly, according to him,

(01:22:28):
they had consensual sex, but it's like, do we believe anything?
You say no, no, And then he says that an
argument started that ends with him beating and then strangling
her to death in order to establish an alibi. He
then goes back out for drinks to make sure everyone
fucking sees him, you know, And then he goes back

(01:22:48):
to dispose of Tanya Bennett's body and her belongings and
clean up the scene, and he's back on the road
the next day, and Tanya's body was found a few
days later. At the time, there's no such specs and
no leads at all intel Lavern's confession. So when Jessperson
reads in the paper about LaVerne's confession and the attention.

(01:23:09):
It's getting them. This fucking meglomaniac gets jealous, and he
doesn't he doesn't feel guilty that two people are going
to prison for his actions. He wants the credit for it,
and that's why he scrawls those messages in the bathroom
at a rest stop.

Speaker 2 (01:23:24):
Yeah, guilt isn't going to be coming into play in
this story at all for a serial killer, that's right.

Speaker 1 (01:23:30):
And when that doesn't give him any attention, he does
it in the second one, closure to Home. So he
doubles down on confessing because he wants attention. Yeah. So,
in the years following the couple's conviction, more women disappear
in the area, and Jessperson begins writing letters to media
and police departments confessing to his murders. He's one of
those Zodiac killer guys. And he signs each letter with

(01:23:52):
us that same smiley face. And so the journalist working
on the story for the Oregonian, Phil Stanford, dubs Jessperson
the happy face killer. So a six page letter was
sent to the Oregonian that describes the murders of five
women and the locations of their bodies. Part of the
letter read quote in a lot of opinions I should

(01:24:14):
be killed, and I feel I deserve it. My responsibility
is mine and God will be my judge when I die.
I'm telling you this because I will be responsible for
these crimes and no one else. It all started out
when I wondered what it would be like to kill someone,
and I found out what a nightmare it's been. So
eager to confirm the murders that the killer had anonymously

(01:24:34):
confessed to in those letters, Phil Stanford, the journalist, begins
getting a hold of law enforcement in the jurisdictions that
the killer had claimed to have murdered in to check
if they had any that fit those descriptions, and he
finds that there indeed had been murders that fit the
anonymous writer's descriptions, with details only the killer would know,
so they weren't in the you know, in the papers,

(01:24:56):
thus confirming that the anonymous happy Face killer was actually
indeed serial killer. So we've got this fucking journalist on
his tail.

Speaker 2 (01:25:04):
Can you imagine too, if you're putting it together as
that drudge? Phil Stanford, the great journalist for the Oregonian,
going like, yeah, here's my theory.

Speaker 1 (01:25:12):
Oh my god, my theory's real, like right, or like
he's like satisfying it, or I can't print this. Let
me just check a couple things and then.

Speaker 2 (01:25:19):
Oh fuck you know yeah, wait, just really quick, remember
the Murder and Organ podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:25:25):
Don't talk about it yet because I'm gonna talk.

Speaker 2 (01:25:27):
Okay, is it the same is it that same journalist?
And there's more than one reporter at the Oh you're
fucking right, shit, And we're going to get to more
of that.

Speaker 1 (01:25:39):
So he was that did murder and Oregon, which we're
all guys, he's legendary, legendary, so good. And when we
talk later about the podcast, Happy Face, which is the
first season is all about this case, which I'll tell
you more about. It's really good and we'll talk about
Murder and Organ as well. But it's really good and

(01:26:01):
I definitely suggest listening to it. I will say there's
a lot of horrible, violent details that I'm not including
in this story because it's just it's unnecessary in my story,
but it is necessary in theirs. So yeah, if you
want more details, listen to that for deep dive if
you want the violent deep dive, right, right, So, yeah,
Phil Stanford confirms these other murders, and he knows he's

(01:26:23):
dealing with a serial killer. So Jessperson had committed his
second murder a year and a half after killing Bennett.
On August thirtieth, nineteen ninety two, the body of a
woman he had raped and strangled was found near blythe California.
It's at Central California.

Speaker 2 (01:26:39):
I think that's the desert. I think that's out in
the desert, Okay, kind of on the way to Vegas.

Speaker 1 (01:26:45):
No man's land. I feel like right. And she was
then and still remains a Jane Doe. I know. The
Jessperson later says he remembers her name as being Claudia.
A month later, the body of thirty two year old
Cynthia Lynn Rose was discovered near Turlock, California, along Highway
ninety nine, and his fourth victim was twenty six year

(01:27:08):
old Laurie Anne Pentland of Salem, Oregon. Her body was
found in November nineteen ninety two, having been strangled. Then
more than six months later, in July nineteen ninety three,
his fifth victim was found in Santa Nella, California. She
too remains a Jane Doe, and because of her quote

(01:27:29):
street person status, the coroner originally considered her death a
drug overdose, and her death wasn't considered a murder until
Jessperson later took responsibility for her murder as well. I know,
it's just sad sad stories. More than a year later,
in September nineteen ninety four, another Jane Doe was found
in Crestuth, Florida. The remains consisted of mostly bones of

(01:27:52):
a woman that investigators believed had been approximately forty years
old at the time of her death, and over twenty
five years later, both Jane Does still haven't been identified.
Jessperson claims this one was named Suzanne, So let's get
the let's get murder squad on those cases, right for real?

Speaker 2 (01:28:12):
Also, well, I wonder too if this was part of
the truck driver thing of like he was picking up people,
or he was intentionally choosing people that wouldn't immediately be
sought after or missed.

Speaker 1 (01:28:27):
That's exactly what happened. In January nineteen ninety five, Jessperson
had given a ride from Spokane, Washington to a twenty
one year old named Angela Surbrise of Oklahoma City, and
approximately a week into the trip, Jessperson raped and strangled her,
and her body was not found for several months because
she hadn't been reported missing because she was, you know,

(01:28:48):
kind of a drifter, and she is thought to be
his seventh victim. So yeah, so the only reason he
was finally caught was because his final victim was someone
who could be tied to him. And he even admitted
that that was a mistake he made. He knew that,
because he had no connection to these other women, that
he could kill as much as he wanted, but he
lost his temper, so he says, and so so he

(01:29:10):
killed this next victim. On March eleventh, nineteen ninety five,
the body of forty one year old Julie Anne Winningham
was found along a Washington state road, having been strangled.
When investigators looked into her life, of several people were
able to give the name of Julie's longtime boyfriend, Keith
Hunter Jesperson, now forty and still a long haul trucker,

(01:29:32):
and he was then looked into by law enforcement. Washington
Sheriff's Department Detective Rick Buckner questioned the trucking company that
Jesperson worked for for a long time, and they provided
him with Jessperson's travel itinerary, which connected the time and
location to where Julie's body had been found. Wow. Then
I looked in our Gmail account and there was a

(01:29:54):
email from a murdery no named Shana, and she wrote
the trucking company that sent this piece of shit out
on his jobs was the same company my dad worked
for as a dispatcher, as in the person who sends
the truckers out on their merry little murdery ways. So
not only did my dad unwittingly send this man to
the places where he committed these crimes, he took my

(01:30:17):
mom to the fucking company barbecue where she sat across
a picnic table from this creepy motherfucker. Seriously, what the hell? Dad?
JK loved my father to pieces. He's a great man.
Needless to say, my mom definitely got a weird vibe
from the dude and kept the convo short. So her
dad might have been one of the people that gave
this information to law enforcement that put him in prison.

(01:30:39):
Yeah yeah, So jessperson was questioned but not arrested due
to lack of evidence immediately, and he wouldn't talk, And
so wasn't it until a week and two failed suicide
attempts later on March thirtieth, nineteen ninety five, that he
finally turned himself in, and the reason he did that
was because he hoped it would get him leniency. So

(01:31:00):
like everything for himself, you know, not foreclosure for the family.

Speaker 3 (01:31:04):
Of course, No, they don't think that way.

Speaker 1 (01:31:06):
No, And while in custody, Jessperson starts spilling the beans.
He reveals details of his murders. He makes claims of
many others, most of which he recanted, but he also
a few days before his arrest, law enforcement had gotten
a hold of a letter he had written to his
brother in which he had confessed to having killed eight

(01:31:29):
people total over the course of five years. And they
think that this is the real number of people he killed,
And so law enforcement is able to connect him to
those cases around the country. And it turns out back
in nineteen ninety he had been exonerated of charges stemming
from a rape he had committed in Mount Shasta, California.
So it seems like there was also probably a lot
of attacks as well. A woman had come forward to

(01:31:51):
report that a nan had raped her and attempted to
break her neck, and then when he hadn't been able
to and because she had her baby with her, and
he allegedly didn't want to kill the baby as well.
He let them both go, and since he had given
this woman so much information about himself, he was easily
identified as jessperson and had been arrested and interrogated and

(01:32:13):
a charge was filed against him for sexual assault. But
then he was released and they were like, well, just
make sure you appear in court about this charge, and
of course he doesn't appear. He takes off, and so
a family warrant is issued and he is eventually caught
in Iowa. But quote, the cost of extradition wasn't worth it. Yeah,

(01:32:33):
so he's not exonerated and all charges are dropped because
of this. So if anyone questions why women don't fucking
report their rapes and pursue charges, here's a perfect example
of why it's too expensive to exonerate him back to California,
so the charges are dropped. That's well, I emitting insane.

Speaker 2 (01:32:51):
It's insane, And it also is again a reflection of
acting as if that like a sexual church is not
that big of a vice, like it's not on par
with murder in some some people's minds. It doesn't make
sense when clearly a person who is just amorl enough

(01:33:13):
to be sexually assaulting women, yeah, or like absolutely has
the capacity to do.

Speaker 3 (01:33:20):
Much worse and much more.

Speaker 1 (01:33:21):
Right, Or it's like a one off thing where I
feel like men, these fucking macho men sometimes where it's like, oh,
this is a situation she shouldn't have gotten herself into,
and it's a one off thing, when really it's like,
if someone is able to do those things, they will,
They will never stop, and if you teach them a
lesson that they can get away with it, why would.

Speaker 2 (01:33:38):
They You're right in it. Yeah, it's it's insane. The
whole thing has to be approached so differently, right, because
it's it's clearly that's not the first time he's done that, right,
it's not the for any person that would do something
like that and be successful in doing it clearly.

Speaker 3 (01:33:56):
Has been practicing.

Speaker 1 (01:33:57):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:33:58):
It's the same should be taken off this.

Speaker 1 (01:34:00):
Absolutely, it's the same as the Ripper documentary where it's
like women did come forward and say this happened, and
they were sent away and it could have been stun they.

Speaker 2 (01:34:08):
Were shamed, they were publicly humiliated, and they were like
all those things.

Speaker 1 (01:34:12):
And then he went they were a murder they.

Speaker 3 (01:34:14):
Were laughed at.

Speaker 2 (01:34:15):
There was the girl that got attacked, that lived through
it and knew what he looked like, and they basically
told her, you don't know what you're talking, right, I
mean that kind of shit is like yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:34:25):
Yeah, sick. So in November nineteen ninety five, jessperson pleads
no contest to Bennett's murder and had provided but had
provided enough convincing evidence of his guilt during his confession, like,
for example, like he had led law enforcement straight to
the long lost purse that had belonged to her. He
had checked it into the wilderness, and so they were
able to find it exactly where he told them it

(01:34:46):
would be. And so so Laverne and John Sofnovsky were
released finally, which is a release from prison for Bennett's murder.
And it does seem like the prosecuting attorney and law
enforcement did work hard to get them out of prison
because it wasn't a given. It wasn't like they were like, well,

(01:35:07):
maybe they were part of the murders, maybe they had
something to do with it as well. They actually had
to work really hard to get them exonerated.

Speaker 2 (01:35:12):
Right, right, Because once you're right, it's called that's how
it is.

Speaker 3 (01:35:16):
They're not going to go back on that. Now.

Speaker 1 (01:35:18):
You can't overturn a jury conviction very easily, even if
someone else goes to prison for the murder, you know.
So that happens, thankfully, And they had been in prison
for four years at that point. Wow. LaVerne's of heart
failure in March of two thousand and three at age seventy.
So Jessperson is serving three consecutive life sentences at the

(01:35:40):
Oregon State Penitentiary and Salem. In September two thousand and nine,
he's indicted for murder in Riverside County, California, and is
extradited to California to face the charges of the murder
of the Jane Do that he committed in blythe So goodbye,
fuck off. Let's really quickly talk about Jessperson's defy. So,

(01:36:01):
his daughter, Melissa Moore was fifteen and nineteen ninety five
when her dad got arrested and it all came flooding
out who he was. She and I were the exact
same age too, So like, can you imagine being fifteen,
which is fucking hard enough without having to find out
your dad as a serial killer?

Speaker 3 (01:36:18):
Horrible?

Speaker 1 (01:36:19):
Thank god so horrible. She wrote a memory on two
thousand and eight called Shattered Silence and says she originally
felt like a ton of guilt and responsibility about what
her father had done, and of course, when people at
her high school found out, you know, she was ostracized.
Says she had to change high schools a couple times. Yeah,
and she learned not to tell anyone about who her

(01:36:41):
father was because she was scared that they would think
that she was like her dad. So she like wouldn't
even tell boyfriends about it as she got older, and
she says she was just as perplexed as everyone else
that he turned out to be this monster. It sounds
so similar to the BTK, the btk's.

Speaker 3 (01:36:58):
Daughter, right, Well, no, they were living double lot, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:37:02):
And he was had been a good father aside from
a couple incidents of extreme animal cruelty which I will
not get into, but they get into in the podcast.
It's fucking horrific. And also he would inappropriately and explicitly
talk about his sex life with his children a lot.
So she's on the Oprah Winfrey Show in two thousand

(01:37:22):
and nine to promote her book, and she says that
after that she started receiving correspondence from a ton of
people who had family members who were also killers and
kind of felt ashamed and couldn't talk to anyone about
it because they felt judged, And so they were thanking
her for telling her story and wanted advice, you know,
from her, how to feel less ashamed, how to talk

(01:37:43):
to their kids about what you know, these people had done,
who were in their lives, and she was the only
person that they could talk to. So she says, she
starts to travel to meet these people and speaking to
them on the phone, and that gave her meaning and direction.
And because of this, she's created this like network of
like three hundred people who have these experiences who have

(01:38:04):
no one else to talk to, and she'll like connect
them with other people who have similar experiences, and they
have this like community now, which is really lovely.

Speaker 2 (01:38:13):
Entirely, it's they're the victims too, but there's that kind
of societal you know, there's like the snap judgment part
that they often I'm sure fall victim too, or at
least the things that I've read, So yeah, I think
that's really beautiful. It's also that kind of thing of
there's only the people that have gone through it, that
can help you with the shame of it and help

(01:38:33):
you bring it out into the light. So the fact
that she kind of spearheaded that is really a testament
of her kind of strength, and that's really a lovely gesture, right.

Speaker 1 (01:38:43):
And she also went and met some of the family
members of her father's first victim, Tanya Bennett, because she
said she just wanted to know more about her life
and who she was, which is really amazing. And then
when she was on an episode of twenty twenty, she said, quote,
being and the daughter of a serial killer puts everything
into question. Am I worthy? Do I have a right

(01:39:04):
to exist when he took so much away from other people?
If I'm happy? Is that a slap in the face
to the victims' families? I don't want it to be. So.
Then she does a twelve part podcast called happy Face.
It's done along with Lauren Bright Pacheco from Murder and Oregon,
who's just an incredible investigative journalist, and they speak to

(01:39:27):
Melissa's mother and like, just get the story of how
it happened and what happened. I'm still in the middle
of it right now. And I tell the story of
her father and the family's trauma. And like from the podcast,
you get this sense that she's just this real she's
really authentic. She's really open and forthcoming with her story.
You know, you don't hear the shame. You hear this

(01:39:47):
person who wants to share what happened to them to
try to help other people who lived through trauma. It's
really inspiring, you know, it's it's for people who have
experienced any kind of trauma, who are survivors in their
own way. Her openness and her path to coming to
terms with what happened is really inspiring. And she's now

(01:40:09):
an expert on the topics of recovery from trauma, domestic violence,
and serial violent crimes. And she's an Emmy nominated crime
correspondent for The Doctor Oz Show. And in twenty sixteen,
Melissa Moore released her second book. It's called Whole, A
Guide to Self Repair, and in it she describes and
provides tools to reframe your trauma and to regain confidence.

(01:40:31):
And she lives now in California with her husband and
two children, and she doesn't have any contact with her father.
And that is the story of the Happy Face Killer.

Speaker 3 (01:40:41):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:40:41):
Yeah, ugh good, I know.

Speaker 3 (01:40:47):
Heavy stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:40:48):
Yeah, well, great job that was.

Speaker 2 (01:40:50):
I mean, it's so weird that we haven't done that
one before because I hear about it all the time.

Speaker 3 (01:40:55):
I also feel like I saw her. I think she
hosted a show.

Speaker 2 (01:40:58):
On like ID or one of those channels that was
about the family member.

Speaker 1 (01:41:03):
It's called serial killers, It's called murdering my family.

Speaker 2 (01:41:07):
Yeah, yeah, all right, we wrap it up with some
fucking hoorays.

Speaker 1 (01:41:10):
Yes, Stephen, do you want to tell us our fucking
our big fucking horay.

Speaker 5 (01:41:14):
Oh yeah, well, so I looked up I found the
tweet and today we are recording on January thirteenth, and
that is the fifth anniversary of this podcast when it
was released, that.

Speaker 2 (01:41:26):
Amazing crazy five years, five years, five years.

Speaker 5 (01:41:31):
The tweet was by at Connor underscore Nitziak, I believe
is how you pronounce that?

Speaker 3 (01:41:37):
Connor?

Speaker 1 (01:41:38):
Thank you?

Speaker 2 (01:41:38):
Thank you?

Speaker 3 (01:41:40):
There we're track tracking our news that way.

Speaker 1 (01:41:43):
Is that a paper anniversary or do we buy each
Olther diamonds?

Speaker 3 (01:41:47):
I'm not sure.

Speaker 2 (01:41:48):
What we need to do is put it in the
calendar so this doesn't surprise us anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:41:53):
Yeah, next six year anniversary will get each other presents.

Speaker 2 (01:41:56):
But even will you remind us to put it in
the actual calendar so that we remember. It's kind of
a good accomplishment. Five years, five years of consistently doing
a podcast where we volunteered to do homework for every
episode is for me personally, a gigantic accomplishment.

Speaker 1 (01:42:15):
That's amazing. Look at we did homework. I never did homework.

Speaker 3 (01:42:20):
I've never fucking done homework.

Speaker 2 (01:42:21):
And I remember very distinctly, deeply resenting the homework I
had to do on this podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:42:26):
But we've made it work. So many words, so many
words written down.

Speaker 2 (01:42:32):
I mean, I honestly we started this podcast and I
honestly thought I was going to be able to remember
off the top of my head stories and then just
talk through them the way I felt like I wanted to.

Speaker 1 (01:42:43):
Yeah, because we knew everything about everything.

Speaker 2 (01:42:45):
Sure, we knew everything, So we were just going to
do that, Yeah, just like talk it through. That's why
that the first time, the first time I did Paul
Bernardo and Carla Homolka the kenon Barbie Murders, it was
a DEVS dating failure.

Speaker 1 (01:43:01):
You got to redo it.

Speaker 3 (01:43:02):
There's a very.

Speaker 1 (01:43:03):
Huge developmental arc in this podcast. I feel like we've
basically written multiple thesis papers, so we're basically college graduates
at this point.

Speaker 2 (01:43:15):
Yeah, junior college graduates for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:43:18):
For sure. At least, I mean, at least we have
a certificate. Can we get a certificate of accomplish? Can
we do?

Speaker 2 (01:43:26):
You print us up a certificate of some kind and
just the one of those ones on the Kinko's website,
that'll be good. Just something something of our names in it.
I actually found I put it right up there the
whole time.

Speaker 5 (01:43:38):
My second I'm so excited for whatever this is going
to be.

Speaker 1 (01:43:41):
I know what goun it be.

Speaker 2 (01:43:43):
This is the only certificate that I have of any
any kind.

Speaker 3 (01:43:50):
From my education.

Speaker 2 (01:43:52):
And it literally it says academic achievement up top.

Speaker 1 (01:43:55):
Oh you see that school? Yeah, this is to certify
what does it say?

Speaker 2 (01:44:00):
This is to certify that the student whose name appears
above and that's my name has maintained an exceptional standard
of scholarship and has only and has duly earned this honor.
And then you type in what the honor is it
and it says drama.

Speaker 1 (01:44:19):
Oh my god, that's like that's called foreshadowing.

Speaker 2 (01:44:23):
I feel like for real, it was awarded this day,
fourth of June nineteen eighty eight.

Speaker 1 (01:44:27):
Oh my god, drama.

Speaker 2 (01:44:30):
I got the drama circtificate. Everybody heard that Edward J. Kavanaugh,
the president of I mean, the principal of our high
school to Adrian's dad.

Speaker 1 (01:44:39):
Oh, can I say that I found recently like my
monassory like report card, you know, from when I was
like five, And in the notes it says like, what's
something special about Georgia? And it says Georgia likes to
tidy while the other kids have nap time. So I
feel like as children, we were both like already known
how we were going to be when we grew up.

(01:45:02):
I cleaned, I cleaned the area while other kids slept.
Georgia had CD. Well this very young age, and add.

Speaker 3 (01:45:11):
You go ahead and sleep.

Speaker 2 (01:45:12):
I'm gonna go ahead and wipe down some surfaces and
help the teachers. Yeah, exactly. You're just supposed to be
chilling out and having a snack. Oh it's explained so much.

Speaker 1 (01:45:22):
Okay, Uh, do you have fucking raise? You want to read?
You wanna go first? Want me to go first?

Speaker 3 (01:45:27):
You can go first?

Speaker 1 (01:45:27):
Okay. This is from Hello. It's Clarice from the fan
Cold Hello, and though Claris from the fan Cult, she
says twenty twenty was a long one for us all.
After nine months of being unemployed, I finally got a
job again and an animal shelter, and then a bunch
of emojis. I will be an adoptions counselor aka a

(01:45:50):
matchmaker for pets and their new owners. Another cute emoji.
My lifelong dream that has been delayed once again by
COVID is to care for endangered species such as lie
and chimps. This is the best next step for me,
and it means so much that I can help animals
and need. The first paycheck that I am able to
donate will be in Elvis's name. Isn't that sweet? Thanks

(01:46:14):
for getting through life with me and all your amazing advice.
Love you guys so much. And then it says in
parentheses Karen quote, You've got to let your juices marinate.
It may take a long time. Something you've said that
inspired her so sweet. Thanks. Hello, Claire, it's Clarice's congratulations
on your job. Let me have you Let me have

(01:46:34):
a kitten.

Speaker 2 (01:46:35):
I just like she's getting paid for a job like that.
That really does sound like something cool to do that
you would just like, well, you're really this way, so
I think this dog would be really this this for you.

Speaker 1 (01:46:46):
That's how I got Dottie at Santa de org You like,
went in and one of the volunteers and I was like,
I want this, and he was like, you got to
meet Lucy Lou.

Speaker 3 (01:46:53):
Oh it Dottie, and it was Dottie.

Speaker 1 (01:46:57):
This starts.

Speaker 2 (01:46:57):
My fucking hooray, It says twenty tried like hell to
break me. In April, my husband was laid off. Then
on August second, he had a series of heart attacks
at age thirty five, leading to open heart quaduple bypass.
On August fourteenth, the day he was supposed to be
released to go home, he suffered a massive stroke, killing
two thirds of his brain. They said that he was

(01:47:18):
paralyzed on his right side and blind in his right eye.
He'd never be able to walk again or talk again. Well,
here we are at the beginning of twenty twenty one.
Tomorrow he graduates from cardiac rehab. His only deficit is
his speech. He is slowly relearning language and starting to
be able to put together sentences. So my fucking hooray

(01:47:39):
is his ability to say fuck you twenty twenty Casey.

Speaker 1 (01:47:43):
Oh my god, Casey, sending you healing vibes. Wow, Yeah, Casey,
what you're about ass The fact that you were able
to even type that and send it in means you're
stronger than all of.

Speaker 3 (01:47:58):
Us put together. Keep it up.

Speaker 2 (01:48:00):
I'm so glad to hear that your husband's only deficity
speech with people have the capacity to heal and to
do so many things that you know that there's so
I love those stories where doctors are like, the doctors
are saying this is the only thing possible, and then
those people like just break those expectations totally. So congratulations

(01:48:21):
and you know, stay strong.

Speaker 1 (01:48:25):
Yeah, incredible. This is from This is from Instagram from
Brimo Morales. My fucking horay was being able to be
part of giving Christmas gifts to formally homeless LGBTQ young adults.
My wife and her coworkers raised over thirteen hundred dollars
to buy Christmas gifts for youth in an organization called Thrive,

(01:48:47):
which helps get LGBTQ young adults into housing and teaches
them life skills along with helping them with their mental
and physical health. I'm so grateful I was able to
be part of making these young people's Christmases amazing, and
I'm so proud of my wife for organizing all of this.
That's incredible. That's great. Yeah, that's a beautiful story. No,
I mean that's I love that's that's very cool.

Speaker 2 (01:49:10):
And that's so generous, Like yeah, it's to make some
make sure someone else's Christmas is good, like using your
energy to do something like that.

Speaker 1 (01:49:20):
I really see.

Speaker 3 (01:49:20):
That's beautiful.

Speaker 2 (01:49:22):
This one is from Michelle Soups Uh and it says
I got myself this twenty twenty one true crime page
a day calendar and immediately thought of MFM when I
saw that Mary Vincent was the first story for January first.
One of the most jaw dropping and amazing survivor stories
I've ever heard. I'm trying not to look ahead, but

(01:49:42):
I'm curious to see what other stories they have, hopefully
a lot more badass survivor ones.

Speaker 1 (01:49:48):
Yeah, Michelle Soups, it's so incredible how inspiring Mary Vincent's
story has been. Like throughout the life of this podcast,
it's the one that always comes up as the like memorable,
incredible story, which is like, yeah, that's what we want
it to be about, not about fucking asshole serial killers
and like the creepiest ones.

Speaker 2 (01:50:09):
Well that's you know, if we're talking about like the things,
the things we've learned over five years. It's that thing
that we've been fed true crime over the years being
interested in it. We've been fed it one way the
way that it kind of started to be premarried.

Speaker 1 (01:50:24):
I think it's we've been fed it to be scared
of it.

Speaker 2 (01:50:26):
But then in the nineties there almost became the strange
fetish of like the killers themselves, when it was like
people were buying John Wayne Gacy painting that kind of bullshit.
That kind of was like, oh, that means somehow your
rock and roll or something, and so it has been
you know, for me, it's a real honor to be
able to dig into these stories and go, no, no,
I'm not that's not why I'm here, that this story,

(01:50:50):
that the part of my interest in this fascination has
to do with the fact that these were real people,
that this is real a loss, that these are this
is human life, and this is what some people go through.
It gives you unbelievable perspective on your own life and
how you should actually be taking things and interpreting things comparatively.

(01:51:13):
But also there are these unbelievable survivor stories of people
who have over because I was just rewatching I Survived
and she is in season one and Mary herself tells
that story herself and it's it's incredible, it's unbelievable, and
it's it's really Yeah, she's she's really a beacon.

Speaker 1 (01:51:35):
Definitely. Anyways, I feel lucky that we get to share
these stories and that people give us the benefit of
doubt and our and our listeners know that what we're
trying to convey is empathy and gratitude and hope and
you know, and that's what we're here for.

Speaker 3 (01:51:50):
Yeah, yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (01:51:51):
It's been an honor. It's been a real fucking journey.
I mean it has been quite some quite something. Who
knew that just our podcast, our hangout podcast of chit
chat would would become the thing that it was in
Thank you all for listening, each of you individually for caring, listening,

(01:52:13):
playing ball, getting in here and being here with us.
There's some people out there that have been here with
us since the first fucking episode, which is hilarious to
think about. Yeah, there are people that we've met in
the meet and greet lines at live shows who are
just like since day one. Yeah, Like there's I can
definitely remember that happening a couple times of like, are

(01:52:33):
you kidding me? You know, like we stop and scream
at people's faces because they somehow happened upon it.

Speaker 3 (01:52:39):
Somehow. We're searching through true crime and we're there from.

Speaker 1 (01:52:42):
And we're still blown away every fucking day that this
has gotten to where it's gotten that we have, that
our lives have been completely changed, completely changed in the
past five years in the most amazing way, and we
are so grateful for that every fucking day. I can't
I can't believe. But this is my life now. It's
I know, it's beautiful. It's pretty nice.

Speaker 2 (01:53:03):
And Stephen, thank you for being there for the I
think you came in an episode what three quarter years.

Speaker 5 (01:53:11):
I believe it was episode nineteen.

Speaker 3 (01:53:13):
Oh really, Yes, we had to go along that far
without you.

Speaker 1 (01:53:18):
That sucks.

Speaker 3 (01:53:19):
That sucks.

Speaker 1 (01:53:20):
Yeah, thank you so much, Stephen. You have been such
a a quiet and necessary part of the show, and
so we appreciate that so much. Not that quiet quiet
that wasn't I that like, yeah, you fill in some
little blanks that we need. I'm just having to myself,

(01:53:40):
but I cut all that out. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (01:53:43):
There is a third track that will eventually be.

Speaker 2 (01:53:47):
That would be fucking hilarious if this entire time there's
a commentary track. Steven's releasing a commentary truck, mister science Theater.

Speaker 3 (01:53:55):
Oh I want a commentary track work on a podcast?
You're just tearing. Yeah, it does it.

Speaker 2 (01:54:01):
It doesn't work. I think people have tried it actually,
and I don't think it works.

Speaker 1 (01:54:05):
Good.

Speaker 2 (01:54:05):
Yeah, thank you Stephen for there's Really it was really
nice knowing that in the very beginning, I think it
was Georgia's zoom and I think we would just like
hit record and see what happened.

Speaker 3 (01:54:16):
And so now there's.

Speaker 2 (01:54:18):
When Stephen showed up and was giggling along and paying
attention and taking notes and into it.

Speaker 3 (01:54:25):
It just really that's really.

Speaker 2 (01:54:27):
Helped everything so much. You all right, well that's our anniversary,
so we're going to go party. That's right, But until
we see you again, please stay sexy.

Speaker 1 (01:54:37):
And don't get murdered. Goodbye, Elvis. Do you want a cookie?
I'm Bab's Great, I'm Brandy Posy and I'm Ted Barker.
Tune into our podcast Lady to Lady, premiering on the
Exactly Right Network Wednesday, January twenty seventh We're three stand
up comics and real life friends, and every Wednesday we
host the coolest hang on the Internet.

Speaker 3 (01:54:57):
It's like a party for your ear holes.

Speaker 5 (01:55:00):
Week.

Speaker 7 (01:55:00):
We invite some of the funniest comics and writers to
join us in our adult treehouse for games, advice.

Speaker 3 (01:55:05):
And the occasional deeply embarrassing personal revelation that we can't
take it back because now it's online forever. Past guests
include people like Alison Rosen.

Speaker 4 (01:55:15):
I'm ninety five years old. We didn't have apps in
my day, but upon hearing about Rayah, I think because
it's selective, there's a tiny part of my brain just
in the background being like, what would I.

Speaker 1 (01:55:25):
Make it on there?

Speaker 3 (01:55:26):
I mean, I almost think that we should do one
of those things. We can mine the three of our
faces quoting to one person, and then she does.

Speaker 1 (01:55:34):
She does, get her on the let's get her on there.
See what's up? Mary Lynn Rice Hope.

Speaker 6 (01:55:40):
The attendant comes up to me and kneels down and
goes just pretend that Jack Bauer is at the bottom
of the ocean and he needs you to unlock the
reference to the largest credit TV credit that I have.

Speaker 7 (01:55:54):
Lacey Mosley, there's a lot of cool stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:55:57):
Which have perfect and partificials where you get blow your
own blood. Yes, oh well least it's your own blood.

Speaker 1 (01:56:03):
It's your own blood. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:56:04):
The only problem with getting it is then you have
to do it to somebody else to stay right.

Speaker 7 (01:56:08):
Pyramids, Yeah exactly if you compis were the original pyramid skids.

Speaker 1 (01:56:15):
One bite bit three of your crist.

Speaker 7 (01:56:20):
And over three hundred plus female identifying artists, don't worry.
We let the occasional guy in sometimes, like Henry Zebrowski, Now.

Speaker 1 (01:56:27):
Are you supposed to discipline?

Speaker 4 (01:56:30):
I am a suaha too?

Speaker 7 (01:56:31):
And my husband has this kind of naval Academy attitude.
He's like, we got it, show him some discipline and
some structure. I'm like, I didn't get at Chihuahua to
not be codependent with it.

Speaker 2 (01:56:39):
Check out the Network premiere of Lady to Lady on Wednesday,
January twenty seventh.

Speaker 1 (01:56:43):
I'm exactly right. Subscribe now and stitch your Apple podcasts
or wherever you like to listen.

Speaker 3 (01:56:48):
If you like what you hear, write as a review.

Speaker 1 (01:56:50):
And if you don't like what you hear, we're.

Speaker 3 (01:56:54):
Not supposed to say that.

Speaker 1 (01:56:56):
Oh can I say? Lady to Lady? Subscribe now,