The Cold Case of Bonnie Haim

This episode features Branden Morgan, the creator for the podcast The Devil Within which can be found on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and anywhere you find podcasts! 

Lexi also discusses the solving of the cold case of Bonnie Haim by her son. 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
This podcast discusses true crime, which may I tell violence,
and other material intended for a mature audience. Listener discretion
is advised. Hey, it's Kayla and it's Lexi, and today
we have a special guest, Brandon Morgan, who does his
own show called The Devil Within. So if you'd like
to talk to us about that and what you're promoting

(00:33):
and everything like that, would love to hear it.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yeah, great, Well, thank you again for giving me this opportunity.
I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
Well, I.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
There we go. Sorry, I was just doing some little
tech stuff on my end.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Oh yeah, So my show's The Devil Within, came out
around the same time that you guys started. I came
out in the summer of twenty twenty one. I was
on the Wondering Network for the first first two seasons.
Then I got the show back and it started off
as a limited true crime series. But I was very

(01:10):
new to podcasting. I had never done any podcasting before,
so I wasn't really aware of kind of the unwritten rules.
Because I'm a screenwriter, I'm a storyteller, so I'm not
a journalist. So the story that I was telling was
it happened to my hometown when I was a kid
in the eighties in Jersey, and a kid, my age,

(01:31):
fourteen year old kid lived down the block for me
murdered his mom and then killed himself in the woods,
and the investigation revealed that he was part of a
Satanic cult that nobody knew about, and so things in
the town got really really strange for a long time,
and it was something that never really made sense to me.

(01:53):
How could a kid my a I love my mom
I still do. How could a kid do that?

Speaker 3 (01:56):
And I never really had anywhere to put it.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
And then when I started writing, that was always a
story that I was tinkering with for twenty five years
trying to figure out how to tell the story, and
then I got the opportunity to do it as a podcast.
But the interesting thing about the story in itself is
that it's still technically an open case because there were
some really I don't want to say paranormal, other people will,

(02:18):
but there were some weird aspects to it that were
never fully explained, and so about halfway through and I
can understand why people were mad at me about some
of the more severe true crime fans were kind of
mad at me because it felt like I tricked them,
but I didn't do it on purpose. Because the podcast
series starts off as a legit true crime, investigative kind

(02:43):
of podcast. I'm interviewing police officers, I'm interviewing people who
were there that night. But then about halfway through, when
the facts run out, I just became a storyteller and
made it a kind of a cryptid New Jersey Devil
origin story. So by the end it's just a full on,
like horror podcast, right fictionalized.

Speaker 3 (03:04):
At the end.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
But so for the audience that I lost because it
wasn't a real, you know, bonafide true crime podcast, I
gained a lot from other of the podcasting genres. So
we just got really lucky and the show found a
huge audience and it opened number one and everyone was stoked,
and I got to do another season, which was great,

(03:27):
and they it was it got really I mean just
awesome and amazing for me. A kid from the Northeast
season two of my show Wonder, he gave it a
billboard in Times Square and.

Speaker 3 (03:38):
So that was yeah. I flew out there. I flew
out there.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
And I met my mom and I'm like, look, and
I like stood under it well, all the stupid shit
that people did, right, but that was me.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
It was great.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
And then I got the show back and I turned
it into a weekly and I've done about one hundred
weekly episodes and an additional full season last year, and
I'm halfway through a new season right now.

Speaker 3 (04:01):
So that's that's the devil with it.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
That's that's that's a lot. That's impressive. Like I that's
kind of crazy though about that kid that happened? What
in your hometown? You said, that's yeah, that's crazy. I'll
have to check that part of I.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
Yeah, well I'll give it to you in a nutshell
real quick. Tommy Sullivan fourteen, Okay, and where I grew
up in New Jersey, it's a It's New Jersey is
a blue state through and through. But I'm like, I'm
I'm the raspberry in the bowl of blueberries.

Speaker 3 (04:33):
In my town.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
It's a very conservative town, very Catholic town, and Tommy
kind of epitomized the place.

Speaker 3 (04:41):
He was a He was an altar boy at the
Catholic school. He uh was a.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
Straight A student. He was an all area athlete. He
was a wrestler, so he was he was like a
parent's dream kid. But everybody missed an obvious.

Speaker 3 (04:56):
Emotional or mental break that he was going through.

Speaker 2 (04:59):
Okay, because Thanksgiving of nineteen eighty seven, he was a
normal kid.

Speaker 3 (05:05):
Everything was fine.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
January ninth, six weeks later, he was this satanic murderer.
Okay wow, And in now was six or seven weeks
all of his behavior changed drastically. He got new friends,
he started dressing differently, listening to different music. And what
the police found on him he had written out a
contract between himself and the greatest demon of Hell that

(05:30):
called for him to murder his whole family and then
kill himself. So after he killed his mom, he's tried
to light the house on fire to kill his dad
and his little brother who was asleep, but they woke
up and they put the fire out. And then so
used his boy scout knife to kill his mom, and
he used the same knife to kill himself.

Speaker 3 (05:47):
And this is where it got really unexplainable.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
Because first he tried to cut his wrist right with
the knife, but the blade went between the two bones
of his arm, and so he just wound up just
like rendering his left tanned useless. Cut all the tendons
and the muscle and the everything, Okay. Then allegedly he
took that same knife and buried it under his left
ear and then dragged the blade all the way across

(06:12):
his throat to his right ear, severing his spinal column,
and he like turned himself into like a pez dispenser.

Speaker 3 (06:19):
Basically right, like he almost cut his head off.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
Okay, And every medical examiner or corner paramedic, anybody who
saw the body was like, Wow, who murdered this kid?
And They're like, no, because it was snowing out. It
was a fresh blanket of snow, no other tracks to
the body, no other forensic evidence that there was anyone
else there.

Speaker 3 (06:40):
So I had to go down as a suicide.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
But everyone's like, come on, really, he was one hundred
and six pounds, Like, how could he murder his full
grown woman and his mom? Yeah, and then also do
that to himself, right, So, and they came up with
three three possible you know kind of solutions. One was
that obviously someone else did it. They took a really

(07:03):
hard look at his father. Did his dad have something
to do with it? But no evidence. Maybe members of
the cult came and kind of finished the job because
Tommy wanted to leave. Who knows or this was the
Catholic Church's actual stance. The Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey
kind of swept in and they're like, this was demonic.

Speaker 3 (07:21):
Possession, clear cut case, we missed it.

Speaker 2 (07:24):
Sorry, Lucifer gave him the power of the strength to
like do all this and nothing to see here, move on,
and so they closed the investigation and that was it,
and so we're supposed to Yeah.

Speaker 4 (07:37):
That is intense. Like, my understanding is that archdiocese does
not readily claim things are demonic in nature or demonic possession,
like they're my understanding. You know, I'm not Catholic, but
my understanding of how they determine that is, like it
something has to be, i mean, beyond explainable for the
Catholic Church to officially be like this is demonic activity.

(07:58):
That's very shock.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
Very It's an excellent point, and you're one hundred percent right,
And so it has to be understood by high ranking
members of the clergy that this was the case.

Speaker 3 (08:10):
And so during I.

Speaker 2 (08:12):
Don't even want to call it an investigation because again
I'm not a journalist, okay, but I talked to a
lot of people for it, and one of the women
that I talked to was a woman named Sister Philhemina,
who was the principal of Tommy's school at the time,
and she told me her interview was chilling, really chilling,

(08:33):
because I'm not a I'm not Catholic, I'm not a believer,
but to hear her tell the story, it scared the
shit out of me, to be honest, because she goes
and she remembered it like it was yesterday. This was
thirty five years ago, and she remembers clear as day
and she goes, Ah, I.

Speaker 3 (08:49):
Had been I had noticed that something had changed in Tommy.
I had noticed it.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
And it was the last day of school before winter break,
and he was the last kid in my class. He
was walking out and I want to stop him, and
he wasn't answering to Tommy. I said, Okay, if Tommy's
in there, I need to speak to Tommy. She goes,
and this boy turned around and I wasn't looking at
a fourteen year old, innocent kid. I was looking at
something evil, okay. And I said, if Tommy's in there,

(09:15):
I need to remind him that exorcism is still a
Catholic right that's available to him.

Speaker 3 (09:22):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
She goes and then for just a second, the innocent,
young fourteen year old, blonde haired, blue eyed kid came
back with a sadness on his face and said, it's
too late, sister, and he turned around and walked away.
And a week later he killed his mother and killed himself.

Speaker 5 (09:40):
Yeah, oh my god.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
So she saw it.

Speaker 2 (09:43):
She saw it to the point where she needed to
remind him that exorcism was a Catholic.

Speaker 4 (09:47):
Right, yeah, wow, And that's I mean, that would have
been nineties, so that would have been coming right off
the coattails of like the Satanic oh eighty eighth.

Speaker 3 (09:54):
It was peaking, this peak Satanic panic.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
Caldo Rivera wound up in my town on the front yard,
on Tommy's front yard, doing a segment for exploring Satan's
underground like that happened.

Speaker 4 (10:05):
In Yeah wow.

Speaker 3 (10:09):
So yeah, if you wound up becoming a cool podcast.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
In subsequent seasons, I've had to stick a little bit
more to the facts of different stories that I've done.

Speaker 3 (10:19):
But yeah, that's how it all. That's how it all started.

Speaker 4 (10:25):
Yeah, what a way to start, right, Yeah, what a way.
That's coming right out with a bang. I mean, like,
the most exciting fact about my hometown is that I
share my hometown with Taylor Swift's hometown, and that's much
more like innocent and cute than like, so my hometown
has satan in it.

Speaker 2 (10:45):
Well, I'll tell you something else about my hometown, which
is really crazy. So it was gosh, only sometime in
the last twenty years where the FBI altered their definition
of serial killers, right, it went from three to two.
Right now, you only need to have killed two people
to be considered a serial killer. So my small town

(11:05):
of twenty thousand people in one generation produced three serial killers.

Speaker 4 (11:12):
That's a lot crazy. I mean, I know, the United
States is like we have a higher like you know
how like Norway has like the highest concentration per capita
of like metal bands. We have the highest concentration per
capita of serial killers. But even then, that's a lot.

Speaker 2 (11:25):
It's seven thousand times the national average in my hometown. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's crazy. So Tommy's one because his mother and himself
that counts us too. Yeah, we had another guy that
murdered his parents for the insurance money, and then.

Speaker 3 (11:40):
We have another guy who.

Speaker 2 (11:43):
Murdered two girlfriends in eighteen months and then hanged himself
in prison. Yeah, all from like they would have been
like contemporaries of mine, Like we would have graduated high
school within two or three years.

Speaker 3 (11:55):
Of each other.

Speaker 2 (11:56):
Yeah, yeah, I know, I don't know what was going on,
and I'm back then in Jersey.

Speaker 5 (12:01):
But something in the water.

Speaker 3 (12:02):
Yeah, oh my god.

Speaker 4 (12:05):
Legitimately though, aren't there aren't there certain certain substances, like
certain metals that have found in like high enough concentration
can basically increase like psychosis and aggression amongst the population.
Like I feel like lead might be one of them.

Speaker 2 (12:17):
Lead was somebody with something mercury. But no, but there
was right, there was something else.

Speaker 3 (12:22):
I was just talking to my mom about it.

Speaker 2 (12:24):
I forget what it was, but there's something that can
that can make that flip, that switch flip in your brain. Yeah,
I gotta go kill people. Yeah, this didn't happen to me.

Speaker 3 (12:35):
Thank God yet No, yees. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:40):
But otherwise, great place to grow up, really close to Manhattan,
you know, grew up taking the train in the city.

Speaker 3 (12:44):
It's nice, but it's the country. It's it's nice.

Speaker 4 (12:48):
That's on the official travel brochure. Yes, come get an
incredible bagel and see Satan.

Speaker 2 (12:55):
You're right about the bagels right about and the pizza yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:01):
But here's the other here's the other good news about that.

Speaker 2 (13:03):
I mean, if you don't think I'm I'm just dumb
lucky enough already that first season. I can't say which
one yet, but it's currently in production as a documentary
series for a major streamer. But I can't say which streamer.
You'll see it, but you'll you'll you'll hear about it.

Speaker 4 (13:22):
That's exciting.

Speaker 2 (13:23):
Yeah, it's really exciting. It's really exciting. So and again complete,
I mean, just dumb luck.

Speaker 3 (13:31):
I was a writer.

Speaker 2 (13:32):
I had I had sold the television show to Sony.
I was on the Sony lot and just chilling and
thought that was going to be my career.

Speaker 3 (13:38):
And then the show got canceled.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
And now I'm just mid forties, no college degree, with
two kids and a mortgage that I need a job, right,
And so I had this little weird I'd written this
story out as a screenplay and and it got submitted
to a company that wanted it but wanted to do
it as a podcast, and.

Speaker 3 (13:56):
I needed a job.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
I said, yeah, one hundred percent, of course, whatever a
podcast is, I'll do it.

Speaker 3 (14:02):
And because I'd never even listened to a podcast.

Speaker 4 (14:04):
Before, you know, oh wow, Yeah, it.

Speaker 2 (14:06):
Was all just just really just dumb luck from from
beginning to end.

Speaker 3 (14:09):
And I'm just riding the wave as long as I
freaking can.

Speaker 4 (14:13):
That's pretty might as well.

Speaker 5 (14:14):
That's that's some good dumb luck.

Speaker 4 (14:16):
Yeah. Trust truly, like trust the process.

Speaker 2 (14:19):
Totally trust the process, totally write what you know. You
know you hear that all the time, right, what you know?
This is I knew, I knew this whole story back
to front. So it worked out.

Speaker 1 (14:29):
So so for everybody listening, where can can we follow
you on social media that they can look up and
see whenever everything's posted.

Speaker 3 (14:39):
I'm a little not on social media.

Speaker 4 (14:42):
Okay, I mean I get it. Yeah, kind of same
lately there.

Speaker 2 (14:48):
Is a devil within pod Instagram handled that I don't
think I've ever done anything on the best place is
just you know whatever, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever, and there is.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
My network has a small, brand new.

Speaker 2 (15:05):
YouTube channel, so you can you can find the devil
within on YouTube, and you can find the devil within
wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 (15:13):
And I might have to go kicking and screaming into
the social.

Speaker 2 (15:16):
Media space even though I really don't want to because
I think.

Speaker 3 (15:19):
It's a big it's a sewer.

Speaker 4 (15:21):
It is it is it really is?

Speaker 5 (15:23):
It really is?

Speaker 4 (15:24):
You just got a backstroke in it.

Speaker 2 (15:26):
I oh, gosh, I don't have my kids in there,
and I would feel a little bit of a hypocrite.

Speaker 3 (15:30):
But if I'm on the side, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (15:32):
Yeah, maybe if it's for business, I can talk my
talk my wife into it.

Speaker 3 (15:35):
But I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 4 (15:37):
We'll see what's a good hack.

Speaker 3 (15:39):
You know.

Speaker 4 (15:39):
I feel like once your kids get into social media,
if you're already on there being like kind of embarrassing.
I don't know. I feel like it's safety. I feel
like it helps.

Speaker 3 (15:48):
It could, it could, it could.

Speaker 2 (15:50):
But but so anyway, you know, I'm halfway through the
new season. It's about the night Stalker. It's about Richard Ramirez.
I live in LA It's a story that I'd wanted
to tackle for a long time. So all of my
seasons have to have some kind of demonic possession kind
of angle to it, you know, And that was a
big one. He thought he was doing the work of
the devil. So yeah, that's where that's going on right now.

Speaker 1 (16:14):
Yeah, Well, I can't wait to listen to that.

Speaker 4 (16:20):
Yeah, that's like, that's right up my alley. I'm such
a fan of Like I always say, my comfort like
genre for horror movies is like demonic possession.

Speaker 3 (16:28):
Oh cool, m well, you'd like season one.

Speaker 2 (16:32):
But I mean, so for me to be interesting, it's
I find it interesting. Yes, I find the human animal
interesting and what makes people murder and serial killers and
all that. But I'm also kind of a book nerd,
and so there's always some kind of literary kind of
parallel to my seasons, right, and when I and I

(16:54):
didn't know what it was going to be for this one,
but as I was interviewing people that lived in la
at the time that Ramirez was murdering people, they kept
saying it was like we were descending into hell because
it was like an unseasonably hot summer and uh, and
in the they it just kept going.

Speaker 3 (17:14):
The murders were just relentless.

Speaker 2 (17:15):
Every night on the news, it seemed like there was
a new thing and deeper and deeper into hell. And
and so it just reminded me of when I was
in high school when I was reading Dante's Inferno. So
I parallel It's nine It's nine episodes the Nine Circles
of Dante's Hell aligned really closely with the investigation.

Speaker 3 (17:36):
And the capture of Richard Ramirez, So like it or not,
you're going.

Speaker 2 (17:39):
To get at least a truncated cliff notes version of
Dante's Inferno when you listen to season four of The
Devil with it.

Speaker 4 (17:47):
So that's a really interesting parallel. Yeah, my wife went
on a rabbit hole about Dante's Inferno not long ago
and was going through a lot of it with me,
and it's just very, very fascinating piece of literary work.

Speaker 3 (17:58):
I mean, it's one of the greatest poems ever written.

Speaker 2 (18:00):
First of all, it's one of the greatest love stories
ever with between Dante and Beatrice, who was a real
person who he barely knew in life, but wrote her
into eternity because of his unrequited love for her.

Speaker 3 (18:13):
So that is incredible.

Speaker 2 (18:15):
And then just visiting all of the separate the different
circles of Hell and what their sinners are there for
and what their actual crimes were. And the disgusting thing
about Ramirez is that he checks every single box, every
single box with what he was doing and how he
lived his life and the crimes that he committed. So

(18:39):
it's one of those one of those like kind of
literary illusions that I thought I was gonna have to
shoehorn into the story, but then it just wound up,
it wound up aligning almost perfectly.

Speaker 3 (18:48):
So it's I've.

Speaker 2 (18:52):
Had a lot of fun writing it and and and
researching it, and it's it's been great.

Speaker 3 (18:58):
It's one of my favorites so far.

Speaker 1 (18:59):
So yeah, wow, yeah, so everyone you have to check
that out when it comes out, because he's putting a
lot of work into that.

Speaker 4 (19:06):
Yeah, a lot of work, a lot of work, but
it's a good.

Speaker 3 (19:10):
Kind of work, you know. Yeah, it's I love it.
I love it. So tell me about what you guys
do a little.

Speaker 5 (19:18):
Bit more, uh, with just the show?

Speaker 3 (19:22):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (19:22):
Yeah, alrighty, So we kind of focus on a little
bit of everything. Really started out as true crime. I
had another host, my friend Ashley. Then I invited Alexi along,
and she's very much into like your cryptids and your
paranormal stuff like that, and I bring the downer true

(19:42):
crime stuff usually she really does.

Speaker 2 (19:45):
Yeah, a little bit of everything, Lexi, what's your favorite cryptid?

Speaker 4 (19:51):
Oh, oh my god, always a good question. What is
my favorite cryptid? Actually? It is a lesser known Pennsylvania
cryptid called the squank, And basically it's this hairless dog
like pig like creature that is extremely ugly and very
aware of its appearance. And it's very hard to find
because it's crying all the time because it knows it's ugly,

(20:13):
and so you can't catch it because it's always wet
with its own tears, and you can't track it down
or see it very often because it's constantly hiding from
sight of others because it's just that insecure. And I
just think that's very endearing. Somewhere in Pennsylvania which.

Speaker 3 (20:27):
Woods, it's not an urban creature. It's a woodland No.

Speaker 4 (20:30):
Yeah, it's definitely like a like a swamp slat, which
is funny because it's not like Pennsylvania's known for swamps.
So it's definitely more of like a mountains wilderness creature.
So if you ever in the wilderness and you hear
like animalistic sobbing, it's probably a squad And good luck
finding it.

Speaker 2 (20:47):
All right, And forgive me if this question offends you,
but because I don't know your level of belief encryptids,
but which cryptid do you think has the best chance
of actually actually existing.

Speaker 4 (20:57):
Oh man, it's such that's such a good one. Which
one is the best chance of actually existing? Honestly, probably
any of the ape cryptids, like the skunk, ape Yetti, Bigfoot,
simply because it just makes the most evolutionary sense. I mean,
we're talking about, effectively, what could be like a missing link,

(21:19):
And it would be a little surprising for something that
you would assume would be like an apex predator, to
be so undiscovered by people, But I feel like it
could happen, especially if it was something endangered. That one
just makes the most for the most boring reason possible.
I feel like it makes the most sense to me.
The one I feel like I really want to be
real would be like the really crazy ones, Like I

(21:43):
would like, there's so many cryptids that are simply like
a dinosaur that's still alive. Like I think there's a
cryptid in the Congo that's effectively like, this is just
a dinosaur, and I want that one to be real
so badly.

Speaker 3 (21:55):
Aren't alligators basically dinosaurs that are still alive?

Speaker 4 (21:59):
Yes? Effectively?

Speaker 3 (22:01):
Yeah, that's pretty great. I read one. I did an episode.

Speaker 2 (22:06):
I don't even know if you call them cryptids, but
they're the Tommy Knockers.

Speaker 3 (22:09):
Have heard of the Tommy Knockers.

Speaker 4 (22:11):
I actually don't know if I've heard of that in
the name sounds familiar, but it's not like conjuring an event.

Speaker 2 (22:15):
There was a Stephen King book called the Tommy Knockers,
but it had nothing to do with the I guess,
I guess the cryptid it's uh.

Speaker 3 (22:22):
They allegedly live in the.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
Mines in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado that.

Speaker 3 (22:31):
When there's a cave in, you'll.

Speaker 2 (22:33):
Hear them knocking to let you know that you're okay,
because they're going to alert the rescuers where you are.
They're like these fairies, I guess, for want of a
better term, that lives in, that live in the mountains
and that protect miners.

Speaker 4 (22:53):
They sound friendly. I mean, I'm kind of I'm into that.

Speaker 3 (22:56):
Yeah, they sound friendly. I agree, I agree.

Speaker 2 (23:00):
So, but those that was I'd never heard of them before.
I'd never heard of anything like that ever. So, uh,
Tommy Knockers was an interesting revelation to me. And I hope,
I hope they're real.

Speaker 3 (23:10):
I hope.

Speaker 4 (23:10):
Yeah, Oh same, I'm gonna have to look into that one,
I hope.

Speaker 3 (23:14):
But I doubt it.

Speaker 4 (23:16):
I think we have a Patreon episode actually that we
did like a year and a half ago about the
Jersey Devil. That one was actually really fun, just because I,
frankly I find the lore to be like hilarious. Yes,
what like mother leads yes, where she's just like I
hate this child before it's born, and then she gives
her to a devil and she's like, ah.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
Killed everyone in the room and then escapes out the chimney.

Speaker 4 (23:38):
Yeah reverse Santa Claus, Yes, yes, and.

Speaker 2 (23:43):
Then it it patrols the woodlands of Jersey and steals
cattle and has you know, a forked tongue in cloven
hoofs and yeah, that's.

Speaker 4 (23:51):
Like I've been to Jersey, like I believe it. Yeah,
well i'll see that on the boardwalk.

Speaker 3 (23:57):
Here's some which boardwalk see or wildwood because you never know?

Speaker 4 (24:02):
Oh definitely wildwood.

Speaker 2 (24:03):
Okay, great, So something strange. I realized something strange when
I was researching season one because that was I mad,
like I said, an origin story of the Jersey Devil.

Speaker 3 (24:15):
And it was one of those moments.

Speaker 2 (24:17):
Where I was like, did I actually discover something that
no one knows?

Speaker 3 (24:23):
This is really strange.

Speaker 2 (24:24):
So what I found out was every Jersey Devil sighting
that's I guess you could say legitimate. But what that
was like written down by someone other than the person
who claimed it? Okay, from colonial times when Jersey was
just a travel corridor between Boston and Philly, right when

(24:45):
people first started seeing and reporting some beast, every sighting
is within two weeks of either the winter solstice or
the summer solstice. Like there aren't any springtime or autumnal
sightings of the Jersey devil. Okay, So, as a writer
that cracks open a door a little bit, I went, Okay,

(25:05):
there you go, there's pagan truth to this whole thing, right,
because that's when the Pagans are celebrating mule or the
celebrating the you know whatever. And uh, and there's some
pagan ritual that's able to summon this demon that's here
for only a short amount of time.

Speaker 3 (25:21):
And so there we go.

Speaker 2 (25:23):
And so I found that really really interesting in terms of,
you know, the frequency of the sightings and the timing
of the sightings. So uh, that was that was a
cool little gift of my research.

Speaker 4 (25:39):
That is really interesting.

Speaker 3 (25:40):
Maybe's real.

Speaker 4 (25:45):
I'm easily convinced. I'm like a skeptic about real things,
but I'm very easily convinced about the paranormal.

Speaker 3 (25:51):
Yeah, what about.

Speaker 2 (25:54):
So are like do you consider like vampires and werewolves
to be cryptids or mythological beasts or what that they
fit in your.

Speaker 3 (26:01):
In your lexicon.

Speaker 4 (26:02):
See, I have no idea where I would draw the
line between like folklore and cryptids. That's a tough one because,
like I mean, initially I would be like, okay, I
would consider that folklore. But I think I think were
wolves toe the line a little bit more because you've
got things like the Michigan dog Man, and then you're
kind of like, well, that's effectively a were wolf, and

(26:23):
it's hard considered a cryptid, so that one's like a toughie.
I feel like they're kind of in a gray area.
I absolutely love wear wolves and I will watch literally
any movie with a werewolf in it, Like I just
that's just like my favorite piece of folklore. And I
have like a ranking of my favorite movie were wolves
with the Twilight Werewolves actually at dead bottom because that's

(26:45):
just a big wolf. And I like the Twilight movies.
They are a guilty pleasure of mine. But like that's
a regular dog yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:52):
Yeah, it's not a were wolf. All right, here's a question.
You ready give me your mount rushmore of cryptids?

Speaker 4 (27:00):
Oh, my mount rushmore of cryptids. At least for North
American cryptids, I'm gonna have to go with uh sasquatch, mothman,
Jersey devil, and then probably something southern.

Speaker 3 (27:16):
Yes, that's it.

Speaker 4 (27:17):
Good, like Florida cryptid. Ugh, Unfortunately I can't think of
anything like.

Speaker 2 (27:23):
Particularly like the American Southwest, American Southwest.

Speaker 3 (27:27):
I would say Picabra would be my fourth.

Speaker 4 (27:31):
That's a good one. That's a really good one. I
was trying to think like Ozark, but nothing was coming
to me. So I'm gonna yeah, let's throw Chopicabra up
there for the fourth one.

Speaker 3 (27:39):
Yeah, that's cool. All right.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
So no Lochness on there though, huh well North American.

Speaker 4 (27:45):
Right, I guess there would be CHESSI I mean that's
the Chesapeake Bay Sea monster, so like that one would count.
She's not as popular as her Irish sister.

Speaker 3 (27:55):
There's a there's another one.

Speaker 2 (27:58):
Oh what is that up north? The Vermont the lake
in Vermont that borders Canada.

Speaker 4 (28:06):
Oh, that's it's one of the Great lakes, right, like
one of the Great Lakes is said to have a
sea monster in it.

Speaker 3 (28:11):
Really interesting sea monster in that one.

Speaker 4 (28:13):
Yeah, I feel like Kayla's might have might have done
an episode on that on the couch, Yeah, I'd say so.
And she doesn't even pay rent.

Speaker 3 (28:24):
Wow, who's that?

Speaker 4 (28:26):
That's that would be my dog Luna. She was found
running a muck on my uh coworker's property one day
and now she lives on my couch rent free and
she's allegedly as she nu. But she has the personality
hit she really did, thank you, she does. She has
a personality of a pit bull like she wishes I

(28:46):
had a pouch like a kangaroo so she could live
in my skin, which, if you know she news, is
very atypical of them.

Speaker 3 (28:52):
Wow, oh, good looking dog.

Speaker 4 (28:55):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (28:56):
We're trying to lure to stray cats into that house
now because the rainy seasons come in and we've been
feeding them for a little while and I really want
them to be okay.

Speaker 4 (29:07):
Oh good luck. Yeah, it's usually it's pretty easy with
a little lunch meat. That's what I've found in my
years of t and ring cats, a.

Speaker 3 (29:17):
Little bit of lunch meat. Okay, it's good to know.
I will are.

Speaker 1 (29:22):
We ready to dive into today's topic whatever LEXI had
for us ready?

Speaker 4 (29:27):
I feel like I'm duping you guys a little bit
because I did actually cover a true crime case today
that's not normally you shocked. I stumbled across it earlier
today and I was I was like so fascinated, and
I was like, I have got to dive into this today,
like this is what I want to talk about. So

(29:49):
today I'm actually going to be talking about a case
that was cold for over two decades that was finally
solved completely on accident by the victim's son. So this
is the case of this is going to be about
a very tragic disappearance, murder, and then eventual discovery and
then justice finally brought for a bright, beloved and brave

(30:12):
woman named Bonnie Hame. Is this something either of you
are familiar with?

Speaker 3 (30:17):
Nope?

Speaker 4 (30:18):
No, all right, well let's dive in. So Bonnie Hame
she was born Bonnie Lynn Peshiudo in Jacksonville, Florida, on
May twenty first, nineteen sixty nine. Unfortunately, relatively little public
record appears to exist regarding Bonnie's early life, which is
a shame because honestly, one of my favorite parts of
covering true crime cases is really discussing a person's life

(30:41):
outside of the crime that happened to them. But it's
also not necessarily uncommon for there to just be limited
public record about people, especially if they're very young. And
these cases are very old. But I do know that
she was married young to a man named Michael Hame,
and the two of them had a son to named
Aaron Fraser. So Aaron's last name differs from his parents

(31:04):
because shortly following the crime that occurred to his mother,
he did not stay with his father. He was adopted
by another family and had taken their last name before
I read that. It was before he was even six
years old. So Bonnie and Michael did not have a
peaceful marriage. Michael hid his abuse of Bonnie extremely poorly
and had multiple witnesses to his bad treatment of her.

(31:28):
So during their marriage, Bonnie and Michael both worked for
Michael's aunt, Evan Ham, and uncle whose name I was
unable to find on multiple sources for some reason. But
Evanne stated during the initial trial over Bonnie's disappearance that
Michael was regularly verbally abusive towards Bonnie at work and
around others, so once escalating to physical violence in an

(31:49):
incident where Michael had intentionally slammed Bonnie's hand into a
car door, resulting in multiple broken nails and significant pain
following the incident reported by Bonnie. And this might not
sound particularly extreme, but the way that abusers tend to
work is they often keep their abuse a secret in
an attempt to gaslate their victims and kind of convince
all the other people in their life that the abusive

(32:10):
party is actually a really good person, so that no
one expects that they have a victim at home that
they're controlling, manipulating, and harming. So this also helps abusers
successfully isolate their victims by convincing others that like, oh,
there's no way anything bad could be happening. They're such
a nice person, which is something we hear about serial
killers and abusers all too frequently in true crime cases.

(32:31):
I mean, I know whenever I think. I was having
conversation with an old coworker of mine. We were talking
about a recent crime and they were like, oh, my gosh,
but they always seem like such a nice person, And
I was like, don't they say that about everyone? And
she kind of thought and she was like, yeah, I
guess they say that about like every criminal and serial killer.

Speaker 2 (32:46):
Huh.

Speaker 4 (32:46):
And I'm like, yeah, so that's tactical.

Speaker 1 (32:49):
We were just discussing that about Charles Harrelson our last episode. Yeah,
everyone said he was so charming and everything, and I'm
like it sounds familiar.

Speaker 4 (32:57):
Yep, exactly exactly. So the fact that Michael was so
public with his horrible mistreatment of Bonnie shows that behind
closed doors, something far darker. It was happening to Bonnie
at the hands of Michael. So Bonnie was very smart.
She had been laying the groundwork to leave Michael for
many months prior to her disappearance. She'd opened a new
checking account separate from Michael under her name only, which

(33:19):
at the time was something that was only legal roughly
two decades prior to her disappearance, and she also had
her bank statements mailed to her job instead of her
home so that Michael wouldn't find out about it. But unfortunately,
Michael still did find out about the bank account and
became enraged at Bonnie, and Bonnie did close the checking account.
She remained adamant about leaving Michael to rescue herself and

(33:43):
aaron from his abuse and simply switch from a formal
bank account to keeping money with a friend to save
up a large enough stockpile to eventually divorce Michael and
escape their shared residence so that Bonnie and her son
could be safe. And in nineteen ninety two, Bonnie appeared
to be in the home stretch. She was able to
put a deposit on an apartment and had enrolled her
son in a new preschool to sever the grip that
Michael had on her son, her and their son, But unfortunately,

(34:07):
on January sixth, nineteen ninety three, Bonnie had arrived home
from work at seven thirty pm and had planned to
go over to her aunt in law's place, Yvanne, around
eight thirty pm that same night, to finalize some plans
they had for a mutual friend's baby shower. So Evianne
had received a call from Bonnie round eight thirty that night,
and Yvanne recalled that Bonnie was crying and seemed significantly

(34:29):
upset and stated that she would not be able to
come over and that her and Michael had gotten into
a large fight. Evanne had asked Bonnie if she wanted her,
you know, to call Bonnie back later that evening to
check in, but Bonnie had declined, and the following morning,
around seven a m. Michael had called Bonnie's work and
informed them that she would not be in that day,
as Bonnie had left the premises the prior night. Michael
also didn't arrive for work that same day, claiming to

(34:51):
be sick. So it just Suspicions began to arise as
Bonnie's purse, along with many of her belongings and identification,
were found buried behind a dumpster at a red roof
in only five miles from her house, and it was
discovered by a maintenance worker at the motel, and oh,
Michael was notified of his of this discovery, he formally
reported her missing to local law enforcement. Already, I'm suspicious.

(35:15):
Why does it take your wife leaving and then someone
else finds her person, You're like, yeah, I guess I
should report.

Speaker 3 (35:22):
Her at a red roof in. That's at a red
roof in. That's an issue.

Speaker 4 (35:27):
By exactly, there's one in my town, and it does
not have a good reputation for happy things happening in
and around.

Speaker 3 (35:35):
Oh, that's somewhere you end.

Speaker 4 (35:37):
Up exactly, Yep, exactly, So Bizarrely, Michael didn't seem at
all concerned about Bonnie's disappearance or the strange way her
belongings were found buried behind a dumpster, and only seemed
to care about the money he felt Bonnie was hiding
from him. So Michael had given a statement to Detective
Hintson that Bonnie had left home in her car at
eleven pm January sixth, nineteen ninety three. He called his mother,

(36:01):
Carolyn Ham, to care for Aaron, three years old at
the time while he went to go look for Bonnie.
Carolyn reported that he was only gone for forty five
minutes and then just kind of went to bed, didn't
contact police, didn't seem worried nothing. Detective Hinson was thoroughly
unconvinced of Michael's half assed alibi, and, as we would

(36:22):
later discover, for very good reason, Hinton had a hunch
he would discover more information nearby the motel where Bonnie's
belongings were discovered, and he was correct. So Bonnie's car
was found near the Jacksonville Airport near the red roof
in and Hintson offered the following statement after investigating the
vehicle quote. What was unus unusual was the positioning of
the driver's seat, which appeared to be farther back than

(36:44):
it would have been comfortable for Bonnie. It was more
in relation to someone about Michael Ham's size. After the
vehicle was processed, we found a shoeprint on the driver's
side floorboard. It was a very pristine print unquote. So
the police investigation confirmed that the footprint didn't belong to
an athletic shoe owned by Michael Haym. Shockingly, Bonnie's own

(37:05):
parents seemed to come to Michael's defense, stating, quote, if
it's his footprint, I'm sure it means sorry. I'm not
sure it means anything. My footprint is in my wife's car.
That doesn't mean I've ever done her any harm unquote.

Speaker 1 (37:18):
That's your daughter and she's missing, right.

Speaker 4 (37:22):
I was reading this so thoroughly annoyed, Like I'm just
looking at this, and I'm like, I I can't imagine
having the same response. You know, if that was my
own child, I would be fully jumping down that man's
throat at any opportunity.

Speaker 1 (37:39):
Yeah, it just sounds like they just wanted to defend
him for some reason, even though I probably know about
the abuse if everybody else knows.

Speaker 4 (37:46):
That's what I thought. I see and something I really
oh sorry.

Speaker 3 (37:50):
Maybe he's really good at gas lighting everybody. Did he
have everybody fooled that he's this great guy?

Speaker 2 (37:55):
It?

Speaker 4 (37:55):
What was crazy is it seemed like his own family
was significantly more suspicions of him than his wife's family,
So that I'm wondering if he, like you said, maybe
he really focused on manipulating his wife's family and then
just kind of drop the mask around his own family. Well, yeah,
very they knew.

Speaker 3 (38:14):
They knew him his whole life, so they knew better
than to fall for any.

Speaker 4 (38:16):
Of his bs that might be it too. Yeah, I
didn't even consider that. They were kind of like, yeah,
we know him and he's m Yeah. But again, also
something I said, I think in like two episodes ago,
when Kayla was covering the Smart school Boy nine case,
I was like, when you become a parent, you realize
there's a lot of parents out there that don't seem
to like or care about their kids. And I got

(38:38):
to wonder, if they let this woman marry this man
presumably close to eighteen, if that might have been kind
of the scenario here. Wow, But you know again, completely
dissatisfied with the explanations provided by Michael and Bonnie's parents,
you know. And again I should take this time to
emphasize that Michael's own family suspected Michael had a heavy

(38:59):
hand in bondi disappearance, while Bonnie's parents seemed to stand
firm in his innocence. Detective Hinson took additional steps to
uncover the truth about what happened to Bonnie by having
three year old Aaron meet with a child psychologist to
be questioned about what he witnessed between his parents and
night of his mother's disappearance. So Aaron gave some very
damning statements to the child's psychologist, which included, quote daddy

(39:21):
hurt mommy unquote, quote daddy shot mommy unquote, and quote
my daddy could not wake her up unquote.

Speaker 3 (39:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (39:33):
I mean, kids say some weird stuff, but not that.
But not that weird, not that, not that. No, Like,
you know, we were in the car the other day
and my child asked me if she could marry beetlejuice,
you know. And that's the kind of weird stuff I
expect to hear from like a three year old or
four year old, But I've never once heard out of
that child's mouth. Oh someone shot someone. Wow.

Speaker 3 (39:57):
When my oldest daughter was three four three.

Speaker 2 (40:02):
We're driving through Hollywood and someone cut me off and
I haunt the horn and threw my hands up, and
from the back seat, I hear.

Speaker 3 (40:09):
Dick move man. What No, don't you you don't. I mean,
you're right, but you don't get to say that. Yeah,
just because you hear me say it all the time,
I mean, yeah, stop it.

Speaker 2 (40:23):
So, yes, but no, never, never I saw someone shoot someone,
or yeah I didn't wake them up.

Speaker 4 (40:30):
Yeah, yes, that's like something a kid could make up either, right,
Like I find that kids will repeat what's said to
them or repeat what they witnessed, or when they make
up stories, they tend to be very fantastical with them,
like like, and they tend to be very nonsensible, you know.
So it's like he's either saying that so something he

(40:51):
heard or he witnessed. It just doesn't seem like a
lie that a child would tell. But unfortunately, because he
was three, you're a little limited on kind of how
you can use that testimony as evidence in court, which
was sort of the issue that Detective Hinson was running into.
So and again, Detective Hinson, which seemed to be far

(41:15):
more on Bonnie's side than her own parents, stated, quote
from what Aaron told us that day. My only conclusion
was that there had been a domestic fight and that
Michael Hame had killed his wife and he had removed her,
and that their three and a half year old son,
Aaron Hame, had witnessed this. Unquote wildly enough. This is
what Bonnie's own father had to say in response, quote,

(41:36):
the credibility of a child is something that you have
to judge in perspective. He said, a couple of things
that we know were not true, like mom's cars in
the lake. We know her car wasn't there.

Speaker 1 (41:47):
I mean, he's three, he'd be wrong once, but like, yeah, right,
like let him get some details mixed up.

Speaker 4 (41:56):
Yeah. So Interestingly enough, though, there was an important piece
of evidence that was found a few years later in
a body of water. Aaron had stated to his foster mother,
the woman who had eventually gone to adopt Aarren, that
he remembers a shotgun being thrown from the car window
and into a lake below. Authorities were informed of this,
and in nineteen ninety five that shotgun was found in
the lake, and it had matched a shotgun that was

(42:18):
found in Michael's home earlier in the investigation. Hauntingly, one
of Aaron's statements as a child was that he remembers
being forced to help his father hide the remains of
his mother and even drew a picture of Michael's shooting
Bonnie in the stomach. This was a picture he had
drawn on more than one occasion. Yeah. Yeah. While as

(42:39):
an adult, Aaron claims that he has no memory of
the incident, which is likely a combination of him being
three years old and PTSD, which is known to cause
memory loss, but when he did discuss it as a child,
his story remained consistent, indicating he was unlikely to be
lying about what he witnessed. Aaron also allegedly wrote about
the incident when he was in eighth grade, so even
in his testimony as an adult, Aaron says he always remembered,

(43:03):
basically that something was done to his mother by his
father's hand, even if the details were something that were
forgotten over the years, which sounds very typical of PTSD
to me.

Speaker 5 (43:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (43:16):
You know, I'm not a mental human mental health professional,
but I do be having some CPSD myself so like
them some of the symptoms.

Speaker 2 (43:28):
What is your earliest Do you have any super early memories,
Like what's the earliest earliest, earliest memory where you know
it happened, where you could like draw a picture of
it if you needed to.

Speaker 4 (43:38):
Weirdly enough, I have two. One of them is eating
apple sauce under the table at the apartment that my
family lived in at the time. I think I was
about three. Why I was eating apple sauce under the
table was beyond me. And the other one was coming
home from I think daycare with my mom and opening

(44:00):
the door and seeing my cat Cleo on the back
of the couch and being super excited to see my cat.
And those are my earliest memories.

Speaker 3 (44:09):
I have a pet.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
Memory also, my earliest memories being like two and a half, uh,
going with my dad and my older brother to get
what would be my dog for the next fifteen years.

Speaker 3 (44:20):
I remember that like it was yesterday.

Speaker 4 (44:22):
Oh wow, and two and a half. That's young, Tayla.
What's the youngest that you have, like a clear memory?

Speaker 2 (44:28):
Oh boy, are you going to Kanye us? And like
you remember you have in utero memories.

Speaker 4 (44:37):
That wouldn't surprise me. I knowing, Tayla, I don't.

Speaker 1 (44:41):
Really like, I don't really remember much of my childhood.
I guess like I've been in a brain fog for
a couple of years because of these meds I'm on,
so that this kind of buzzy sometimes, But I don't know.

Speaker 5 (44:54):
I guess, like around, I.

Speaker 1 (44:58):
Kind of remember being like five ish, having my cat,
speaking of pets, like I found her, like they brought
her home.

Speaker 5 (45:07):
Her name was Angel. She was found out of steel
mill my mom worked at. She was in her create.
Dad let me play with her. Mom was mad because
she was feral, but she let me play with her.

Speaker 4 (45:19):
So it's fine, very like typical, like mom, dad dynamic.
I feel I like that all of her earliest memories
have to do with pets.

Speaker 3 (45:26):
Yeah, I know. Did Angel stay with your family for
a long time?

Speaker 5 (45:29):
I had her for eighteen years?

Speaker 3 (45:30):
Oh wow? Great beautiful?

Speaker 5 (45:32):
Yeah door cat?

Speaker 3 (45:34):
Or did she did she stayed at the door? Yeah?

Speaker 5 (45:37):
No, she she after I picked, after she was brought home.
She was no longer. She was just a little tordy kitten.

Speaker 2 (45:43):
Yeah, because she knows that it's shitty out there and
she's got it good on the inside.

Speaker 3 (45:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:47):
Oh yeah, absolutely smart angels smart.

Speaker 5 (45:50):
Yeah, she was.

Speaker 3 (45:51):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (45:52):
I feel like that's a testament though, like those early
memories like they can be like like like just really
powerful and really stick. And I think the biggest thing,
especially like with this story, is is like the story
that we tell stays the same. It doesn't alter like,
oh maybe this happened, or maybe this happened, or maybe
this happened. It's that consistency, which I think ended up
helping this case as it kind of went farther on

(46:16):
because they had all that history from the initial occurrence.
So mind you, like Carolyn, Oh, go ahead.

Speaker 2 (46:23):
Let me add one thing to that, because I'm not
a mental health expert either, but I've spoken to several
and I heard one really interesting description of our memories
is that every time we remember something important.

Speaker 3 (46:37):
That happened to us.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
We're remembering the previous time we remembered it. We're not
remembering the actual event. We're remembering it in layers. So, say,
if I have that memory of getting my dog when
I was two and a half a thousand times in
my lifetime, I'm actually only remembering the nine hundred and
ninety ninth time exactly how I remembered it.

Speaker 3 (47:01):
That, you know what I mean.

Speaker 4 (47:02):
So it's like, that's really interesting.

Speaker 2 (47:04):
There could be some dilution of the event, you know,
like if you could attach emotion to it, or you
could make the carpet in the room a different color,
or you can make it warm outside when it was
cold or whatever, and that will now become the new
memory of it. So it's it's I don't know if
there's proof of that. I don't know how they would

(47:25):
prove that, but I just found that theory to be
really interesting.

Speaker 4 (47:28):
I wonder if that's how I kind of wonder if
that's how Aaron ended up. Even though it seemed he
had such a clear understanding and such a clear memory
of what happened for so long, why now in adulthood
he's you know, he's like, I don't remember the specifics
of the incident. That would make a lot of sense
because I imagine something like that your brain wouldn't want
to hang on to. Sure, Wow, that's really interesting, So

(47:53):
mind you. Carolyn Michael's mother and Evan Michael's aunt, they
were both highly suspicious that Michael had caused Bonnie's to
say appearance, and that she may have or and that
he may have even murdered Bonnie that night. Bonnie's parents,
especially her father Robert Pashuto, continued to believe that Michael
was isn't innocent, and that Bonnie was still alive and

(48:15):
had simply run away and abandoned her son until the
remains were discovered decades later, so much the police's frustration,
especially to Detective Hinson, there simply was not enough evidence
to determine that Bonnie was deceased or that Michael had
killed her. Quote Basically, she just wasn't happy and she
wanted to leave, and I couldn't stop her from leaving, unquote,

(48:37):
stated Michael on his wife's disappearance. Bonnie was declared legally
dead in nineteen ninety nine, so shortly after this incident,
Aaron had gone to live with his aunt, Liz Peek
due to Michael's parental rights being terminated after a judge
determined that Aaron was unsafe to share a home with
his father where he witnessed such significant abuse, and was

(48:57):
later adopted by the Fraser family. Aryan would spend much
of his life suffering from PTSD due to what he
witnessed the night of January sixth and the abuse he
witnessed his mother and her at the hands of his father.
It was kind of unclear in the sources I was
reading whether or not Aaron was subjected to any of
that physical abuse himself. It is likely, but it's just
not determined in the sources. So Michael he moved to

(49:21):
North Carolina, where he remarried and lived freely, basically thinking
he got away with it while his son suffered horribly
and his family and Detective Hintson remained unconvinced of his innocence. Frustratingly,
Michael had collected on Bonnie's life insurance policy after she
was considered legally deceased in nineteen ninety nine, which he
effectively coasted off of until he was later arrested under
suspicion of Bonnie's murder. Following the discovery of new evidence

(49:45):
twenty one years later, Aaron, Detective Hinson, Yeah and Evan
would all be vindicated in their beliefs that something major
was missing regarding the case, so Aarin and his adopted
family would go on to sue Michael for the tr
Aaron had endured while living with his father and his childhood,
and was awarded a multimillion dollar settlement in two thousand
and five, which included Aaron's childhood home in Jacksonville, Florida.

(50:09):
So in twenty fourteen, Aaron had begun renovations on the property,
which included digging up a pool in the backyard, and
in December twenty fourteen, Aaron had uncovered what he believed
to be initially a piece of a coconut under a
concrete slab on the property. Upon further investigation, Aaron quickly
realized it was not a coconut at all, but the
top portion of a skull.

Speaker 1 (50:32):
Let's just add some trauma to the trauma.

Speaker 4 (50:35):
I know, yeah, I mean, I mean he did, he
really did, so you know, spoiler. But I'm sure that
you all can figure out that that was, in fact, yeah,
his mother's remains. So DNA testing on the remains confirmed
what we've all figured out by now, that that was,
in fact Bonnie him unceremoniously laid to rest by her

(50:55):
murderous husband in that same spot over two decades prior. Interestingly,
a lease agreement in two thousand written by Michael Ham
when he rented out the property forbid any tenant from
doing any digging in that spot in the backyard or
any renovations.

Speaker 3 (51:12):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (51:13):
Yep, so that was pretty damn it.

Speaker 3 (51:15):
You too, guilt.

Speaker 4 (51:17):
Exactly like tell tale heart levels of guilty.

Speaker 3 (51:21):
Absolutely, h she just put a concrete slab over it.

Speaker 4 (51:25):
Basically yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:27):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (51:27):
So Michael Ham was arrested in twenty fifteen, and then
his bail was posted shortly after and he was able
to walk free until his trial began in twenty nineteen,
following numerous delays. And this whole case is full of
some pretty infuriating quotes, and the opening statement from Michael
Haym's defense attorney, Janie Warren is no exception quote. We
agree she's dead. We agree that's our body in the backyard,

(51:48):
but they have to prove to you that he did it. Unquote.
She also said, quote when you listen to the evidence,
ladies and gentlemen, and when you're finished, you're gonna see
the lack of evidence in this case far outweighs any
evidence they brought you.

Speaker 3 (52:04):
H Okay.

Speaker 4 (52:07):
So that did not end up being accurate at all.

Speaker 3 (52:10):
Okay, So there was a mountain of evidence.

Speaker 4 (52:12):
Probably a ton. So the reason that Michael was able
to be put on trial for the murder in twenty fifteen.
Because I found this interesting is because back in the nineties,
Michael was never actually brought to trial for the murder
of Bonnie Hame, only questioned on her disappearance at the time.
So since you can't try someone twice for the same crime,
it's actually very lucky that they did not attempt to

(52:33):
try him in the nineties when the crime occurred, because
now with the new evidence, they were able to convict him,
and back then I have no idea if they would
have actually had enough evidence to convict him. So during
the trial, evidence was also brought forth that a twenty
two caliber rifle casing was found nearby where the remains
were discovered, and while the exact details of the murder

(52:53):
could not necessarily be determined, Assistant State Attorney Alan Mssrahi
argued that it was undeniable that Bonnie Hame was shot,
killed and buried in a shallow grave on the property
by Michael Hame. So Aaron and his adoptive family, along
with members of both Michael Hame and Bonnie Hame's family,
had testified against Michael during the trial. Possibly most incriminating

(53:14):
is that two inmates that Michael was jailed with following
his initial arrest, testified against Michael as well, since he
had confessed to and described the murder to those two
men during his time in custody prior to the trial.

Speaker 1 (53:27):
I've heard that in so many cases I've researched. They're like, yeah,
I'm just gonna tell my life.

Speaker 3 (53:32):
Stupidity of criminals.

Speaker 4 (53:34):
Yeah, which is nuts because my understanding is that if
you testify against someone going on trial, like as as,
like an inmate or an incarcerated person, don't they oftentimes
bargain with you by like minimizing your sentence.

Speaker 3 (53:49):
Listen.

Speaker 2 (53:50):
They jailhouse confessions make up so many convictions for that
very reason, right, Like you'll tell me through the bars,
like oh I did this, and you know, to try
to act tough, and that guy goes and say, listen,
I've got information, give me a color TV or knock
six months off of my time or whatever. Because everybody
just wants to get out of jail. Nobody gives a shit.
You think there's loyalties in there.

Speaker 4 (54:11):
Yeah the way yep, yep, yep. And I'm wondering if
it's that, like you said, it's trying to be tough.
But I'm wondering if it's off. Was also they're like, oh,
this is an unofficial person. I can be safe telling
these people because that's not going to come back to
bite me in the ass.

Speaker 3 (54:24):
Yeah, and it does, you know, I mean, why do you?
I just it's weird. So many people.

Speaker 2 (54:29):
It's like I was speaking to an investigator who said
her favorite people in the world, right are are convicts
who hear confessions and disgruntled ex wives. So many, so
much evidence is given by by pissed off x wive Yeah,
and by and by convicts who are trying to do

(54:50):
right by themselves.

Speaker 3 (54:51):
Yeah. I mean that's wow.

Speaker 4 (54:53):
I believe it. Wow, I believe it. I believe it.
So Bonnie Ham was finally brought to justice, and twenty
nineteen when Michael Ham was sentenced to life in prison
by Judge Stephen Whinnington for second degree murder of Bonnie Hame.
He was fifty two at the time. Yeah, early twenties
when he murdered her, and fifty two when he was

(55:15):
finally sentenced.

Speaker 3 (55:17):
And so he's in the Florida correctional system.

Speaker 4 (55:21):
Yep, yeah, wow, yep. So when this case was still cold,
it was actually also briefly covered on an episode of
Dateline where Michael Hame declined to offer up a statement. Yep,
because they were they were covering it as a cold case.
And this is actually why it's really satisfying when old

(55:43):
cold cases get solved, and it's partly why I enjoy
covering cases like this and why sometimes, you know, true
crime media like Dateline, cold case files, et cetera, you know,
can be beneficial in keeping attention on these cases until
new evidence can be discovered leading to the truth. And
if I'm not mistake, I'm pretty sure that speaking of
new evidence to old instances, I think there was new

(56:05):
DNA evidence discovered in the disappearance of John Man a ramsay.

Speaker 3 (56:10):
Ooh, I haven't heard that.

Speaker 4 (56:12):
I feel like I saw that recently.

Speaker 3 (56:14):
That would be that would be man, That'd be crazy.

Speaker 1 (56:17):
I remember seeing something like that, but I didn't do it.

Speaker 4 (56:20):
I think they said that they were able to construct
a full DNA profile of the killer.

Speaker 2 (56:26):
Wow, are they using like that genetic genealogy that's that's
running rampant right now and solving all these cases?

Speaker 3 (56:33):
I hope so that.

Speaker 4 (56:34):
I don't know, I will admit it. I didn't read
far past the headline I think it was behind a
paywall when I was looking at it, but that might.

Speaker 6 (56:42):
Be it wow wow, because I remember when that when
that went down, like I was, you know, in my
early twenties, probably when all that Gambre stuff was happening.

Speaker 2 (56:54):
And we were all just waiting, wait, like we're going
they're going to find the bad guy.

Speaker 3 (56:58):
They have to. It's a little el How does that
not get solved?

Speaker 2 (57:03):
Yeah, you know, it's just oh man, So going back
to this case, like that kid's got a great story,
Like if Dateline did a cold case on it, everybody's
gonna want, you know, the how the story ends.

Speaker 3 (57:19):
It's amazing how.

Speaker 4 (57:20):
The story ends. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, and finds his
mom geez yeah yeah. And it's I was, you know,
I was, I was reading some statements from some of
the other articles where they had said, you know that,
of course, it was very satisfying that they finally have answers.
He was brought to justice. What they've all known has

(57:42):
been validated, you know, but a lot of them we
were sort of very solemn about it because they were like,
you know, we have this, but it doesn't bring Bonnie back.
And I imagine that's you know, especially for you know,
that's your mom. I imagine that's probably the place where
you're at, where you're like, this is satisfying, this is justice.
But I'm sure you're not necessarily happy, you know, yeah,

(58:05):
being happy about it?

Speaker 2 (58:06):
Yeah, right, there might be some closure, there might be
some All right, I can move on from this chapter
in my life.

Speaker 3 (58:12):
I can say goodbye.

Speaker 2 (58:13):
I can I can rest easy in the knowledge that
I wasn't hallucinating this my whole life, that I was
right even as a three year old. You know that
I can trust my powers of recollection. I mean, there
could have been some some satisfaction in it, but the
whole backdrop of all of it is sadness.

Speaker 3 (58:31):
His mom was brutally murdered by his dad.

Speaker 1 (58:35):
Oh gosh, yeah, did you say how long is that
was sentenced?

Speaker 3 (58:42):
Life?

Speaker 4 (58:42):
Life? Life in prison? Originally I think they were going
to try and go for like a twenty six year sentence,
because that's how long it was between the murder and
the conviction, and the judge's like, absolutely not life in prison?

Speaker 3 (58:55):
What do they call it? LWOFS? Did you get life
without parole? You know?

Speaker 1 (59:00):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (59:00):
I didn't know. There's a nickname for it.

Speaker 2 (59:02):
Yeah, ol wop baby, Yeah, Okay, I don't think so.

Speaker 4 (59:09):
I don't think there was any any parole opportunity that
I could see in any of my sources. Usually what
we'll do is, whenever we cover true crime cases, we'll
go ahead and we'll include all the sources in the
show notes, just in case there's anything we overlooked, anything
we missed, because we don't we don't have a team.
It's just Kayla and I. Yeah, it's just the two
of us.

Speaker 2 (59:29):
That's more background work than I do. Okay, you're at
least trying. Okay, I don't. I just like, I heard
this from this guy, so I'm going to talk about it.

Speaker 4 (59:38):
That's kind of why it's fun to do like the
cryptids and the conspiracies sometimes because I'm like, here's my source.
It's a Twitter thread from someone who might have undiagnosed schizophrenia.

Speaker 2 (59:48):
My source was a guy at the truck stop who said,
I saw this you know in the woods.

Speaker 3 (59:54):
You know, I mean, but you know, my my hometown.

Speaker 2 (59:57):
Other than three serial killers, we also have our very
own cryptid within only within our small town. It's the
half man, half deer beast that that haunts what's called
Sparta Mountain Road. There's this old wagon trail road. Because
I live in like in a valley and to get
out of the valley you have to go over mountain

(01:00:19):
or you know, a long route out of it, and
so there was this before there was a proper road over,
there was this like switchback wagon trail that you can
still drive on. And apparently that's where the half man
half deer runs around and you know, does half man
half deer stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:00:37):
Yeah, so.

Speaker 4 (01:00:40):
That is terrifying. There's there's the little research on the
Jersey deer man and the Michigan dog man.

Speaker 2 (01:00:47):
Yeah, if you're a cryptid expert, maybe see what you
can what you can uh, well, you can dig up
on that person.

Speaker 4 (01:00:53):
But I should start doing that. I should just start
going to truck stops with a little microphone and being like,
tell me, what's the what's the most messed up thing
you've seen?

Speaker 2 (01:01:03):
But what is the What year was this case? You
just we were just talking about. Adjudicated. When was he sentenced?

Speaker 4 (01:01:10):
He was sentenced formally in twenty nineteen. The murder occurred
in nineteen ninety three.

Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
Ninety three, sentenced in nineteen Wow, justice crazy, Yeah, Justice
and that's a cold case. That wasn't that didn't hinge
on DNA evidence. Yeah, it was just someone literally just
digging in their backyard.

Speaker 4 (01:01:35):
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:01:37):
Wow, Wow, that's impressive. It's really impressive. Great story, well told.

Speaker 4 (01:01:43):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:01:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:01:44):
I did did some heavy research on this one because
I didn't want to, you know, miss any of the details.
And it's so funny. I hated writing like research papers
and stuff in school, and I'm like, oh, now I
do it for a hobby in addition to like my
full time job and my other responsibility.

Speaker 3 (01:02:00):
So my wife tells me.

Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
She goes, you realize you're like you're writing like papers
every week. Like it's like you're in college with I
wouldn't know, but okay, I'll take your word for it.

Speaker 4 (01:02:12):
That is what college is, like. It's so many papers.
That's what that was a nice thing about tech school
is when Kayle and I were in tech school, everything
was multiple choice. I was like, I don't have to
write a paper. This is so cool.

Speaker 2 (01:02:23):
Who so, where in Maryland are you? Lexi Cala told
me you're in Maryland.

Speaker 4 (01:02:29):
M yes, I am north Hold on northeastern Maryland. So
I am also like you said, I'm gonna I'm in
a little, a little red county of an otherwise incredibly
blue state, like what you had said with Jersey.

Speaker 3 (01:02:44):
Yeah, so you're pretty close to Jersey.

Speaker 4 (01:02:47):
Yes, yeah, I think to the Jersey border. Let's see,
I'm in an interesting spot because I'm only I think
I'm less than an hour away from the pencil, maybe
a little over an hour away from the Pennsylvania border,
less than an hour away from the Delaware border. And
i think I'm like an hour and some change away
from like Jersey.

Speaker 2 (01:03:06):
Yeah, yeah, great, And Kaylee're you say West Virginia? Yeah,
so a friend of mine, former boss, grew up in
West Virginia and he lived in a really interesting.

Speaker 3 (01:03:21):
Either in it or near an interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:03:23):
Place where it's like a tech blackout, like a Wi
Fi blackout area, like by design, you're not you didn't
you know?

Speaker 1 (01:03:31):
I'm in the northern part, like right minutes from PA
and three minutes from Ohio.

Speaker 2 (01:03:36):
Yeah, there's like no cell towers and like the satellites
aren't allowed to go over this one part.

Speaker 3 (01:03:42):
It's you can look it up.

Speaker 2 (01:03:43):
It's really really strange, and everybody who works there it's
just all landlines. There's no cell phones, there's no Wi Fi,
there's no Internet like nothing.

Speaker 4 (01:03:51):
Yeah, a spooky, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:03:53):
It's really spooky. Has something to do with national security,
I don't know whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:03:57):
It sounds like a southern West Virginia sense what happens
in certain parts of West Virginia just kind of stays there.

Speaker 2 (01:04:05):
There's another interesting West Virginia story that I think you
guys would like and you should cover.

Speaker 3 (01:04:08):
It's called The Third Rainbow Girl. Have you ever heard
of that? That story? There was a book called The
Third Rainbow Girl.

Speaker 2 (01:04:15):
It was from back in the like Summer of love,
like late sixties. Two girls, like flower girls, hippie girls,
were hitchhiking to go to like some music festival, and
there was a third girl that joined them on their
like hitchhiking trek to get there, and she wound up murdered.

(01:04:36):
And it was like a generation later, an investigative, a novelist,
journalist woman wanted to kind of figure it out because
there were whispers that it was a really early anti
LGBTQ hate crime in some small town in West Virginia.

Speaker 3 (01:04:57):
But then maybe it wasn't.

Speaker 2 (01:04:59):
And then it just became this kind of journey of
self discovery for the author herself who then realized that
she was gay or finally came out, and oh, good
for her, and while the whole time trying to solve
like this murder, I really beautifully written story that the
novel was was was terrific. I tried to get the

(01:05:20):
rights to do it as a podcast a couple of
years ago, but then the audiobook was coming out and
it would be too similar to a podcast. But I've
always wanted to tell that story.

Speaker 3 (01:05:31):
Is a really really.

Speaker 4 (01:05:31):
Cool story that is really interesting. It almost sounds like
something that. Shoot, what's the other podcast that I feel
like Kayla and I we've swapped segments from them. Is
it Beyond the Rainbow? The podcaster that I think specifically
covers like like crimes of the LGBT community. She's got
a really cool podcast. It's very interesting niche that sounds

(01:05:54):
very like up her Alley.

Speaker 2 (01:05:56):
Yeah, that's that's That's a super cool niche true crime
but specific to that. Unfortunately, there's probably a lot of
freaking content for that.

Speaker 1 (01:06:04):
Yeah, I think she does crimes committed by that community
and towards that community kind of both.

Speaker 2 (01:06:14):
Yeah, there are some vicious crimes by that community who,
like the Versace case. Remember all that his boyfriend killed
him Geoanny VERSACEI I got the steps of his mansion
in Miami.

Speaker 3 (01:06:26):
You guys don't remember that crime.

Speaker 4 (01:06:28):
I don't know that now. I got to be writing
these down for future content.

Speaker 2 (01:06:34):
The fashion design or the podcast about it a long
time ago. Yeah, Geony Versaci was gunned down on the
steps of his like Miami Beach mansion by his boyfriend.

Speaker 3 (01:06:45):
Wow. Yeah, and then sent shock waves through that. Yeah,
really interesting story. I wish I knew that.

Speaker 2 (01:06:53):
Oh man, there was something really crazy about it that
that's escaping me right now. But you guys are just
making me feel very old because I was young when
these when all of these stories broke and you're like.

Speaker 3 (01:07:04):
What what are you talking about? I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:07:07):
Yeah, but check it out, check out, do it LEXI.

Speaker 3 (01:07:13):
Do what you just did here next week on Johnny Versaci.

Speaker 4 (01:07:17):
You love it, on it, on it great, beautiful.

Speaker 2 (01:07:21):
I'm going to check in to make sure that you
gave it its due to due diligence.

Speaker 1 (01:07:26):
Well, that was a really interesting case, agreed, and it
was really great having you on the show. I think
if you guys are ready to wrap it up, we
can wrap it up.

Speaker 3 (01:07:37):
I'm ready. All I have to say is I love
cold cases that are solved because the same something that
I talk about a lot is.

Speaker 2 (01:07:50):
How many if you talk to cops enough, right, and
investigators and forensic people, how many people get away with it? Yeah,
there's so many times that people just and only it's
not even talking about deathbed confessions where people are like,
all right, I'm about to die. When I was nineteen,
this happened and I'm sorry and then they died.

Speaker 3 (01:08:11):
Whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:08:11):
I'm talking about people who are smart enough to keep
their mouth shut forever and just get away with shit
like all the time, you know, and hopefully with where
technology is going, those numbers.

Speaker 3 (01:08:23):
Will go down.

Speaker 2 (01:08:25):
So but I love when cold cases are solved. It's
so satisfying.

Speaker 3 (01:08:30):
And when people are brought to justice, I love it
so well done.

Speaker 5 (01:08:36):
Yeah, that was a good case.

Speaker 1 (01:08:37):
He picked My job did drop Whenever you said he
got a true crime case.

Speaker 5 (01:08:41):
For us this week?

Speaker 4 (01:08:41):
I was like, I know it's not typical. I will
mix it up. I'll mix it up next week. I'll
do something cryptity.

Speaker 2 (01:08:50):
He Thoughtady found a coconut. That was I mean, it
was very well written, and you know, theater of the mind.
It was very effective.

Speaker 4 (01:08:58):
I enjoyed it. Yeah, that's kind of my job kind
of dropped when I read that in the in in
kind of the case is that, oh he thought he
uncovered a coconut in his backyard And I was like, oh, okay,
so something round, hard and furree. I'm like, I don't
think that was a coconut. Yeah, yeah, yeah, wow.

Speaker 3 (01:09:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:09:21):
My heart just like sank with the realization.

Speaker 2 (01:09:23):
O listen, thank you for having me and for letting
me blather on about my stuff like you let me
be a me monster for the first like ten minutes.

Speaker 3 (01:09:32):
So thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (01:09:33):
I really appreciate you and your listeners.

Speaker 3 (01:09:38):
Yeah, this was great. This was awesome. This was awesome.
It's a lot of fun, lots of fun.

Speaker 5 (01:09:45):
All right.

Speaker 1 (01:09:46):
Well, I think that was twistingly wicked.

Speaker 4 (01:09:50):
Honestly, I think that one was pretty cathartically wicked.

Speaker 1 (01:09:54):
That was whoa all adjectives at the end to describe wickedly.

Speaker 3 (01:10:00):
I'm sure everyone does that.

Speaker 4 (01:10:03):
Oh we haven't actually done that one yet before. We
haven't done wickedly wicked.

Speaker 5 (01:10:07):
That's a good one, all right.

Speaker 2 (01:10:09):
It's for my Boston brothers, where everything is wicked. Okay, wicked.

Speaker 4 (01:10:18):
Cynthia Arrivo is manifesting in my house. The more we
say it.

Speaker 3 (01:10:24):
That was a great movie. But I really enjoyed that.

Speaker 5 (01:10:29):
All right, thank you guys for listening. Catch you next time.

Speaker 3 (01:10:33):
Bye,