446 - I’m Michael Caine

This week, Karen covers serial killer cop Gerard John Schaefer and Georgia tells the story of the 2015 Hatton Garden Heist.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Hello, and welcome to my favorite murder. That's Georgia Hartstar,
that's Karen Kilgareth No no steps. Right after we say something,
it leaves you to say something.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Fuck, but it's hard to do this.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
That's the spot, guys. Georgia has brand new banks. Thank you,
this is thank you, thank you, this is breaking news,
new banks.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
I just cut myself up in my sink. Yeah, because
like we're trying to make the audio studio filmable so
we can put that footage up because people like video
podcasts these days. I have been on camera since before
the pandemic, when I was in my thirties. So now

(01:06):
now I'm dealing with forties Georgia, and so sometimes you
just have to come straight home and cut your banks off,
you know what I mean.

Speaker 1 (01:12):
And so teenage Georgia shows up and goes, you know,
we need bangs.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Right, you know, it'd be great. That's a lot of
face on camera. Maybe half Let's do half that face
on camera instead.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Let's do a bunch of banks. Maybe some scarves wrapped
around her necks.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
I feel like piercings always distract, you know, on a face.

Speaker 1 (01:32):
Yes, maybe, especially late in life. Piercing is very distracting.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
Like, oh, she's got a cool job. Probably she's got
one of those septum piercings, or.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
She's going through something right because she never had this
before yep, and now she needs it.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
It could be anything.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
I feel like, maybe more effective than a septum piercing
would be like we get a little whiteboard in the
studio and just write down what's bothering you that day.
Just write down the like part of of your Like
for me, it will be my next.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Oh yeah, the next there for sure. Being a woman
is like it's hard because we want to be like
casual about it and be like, I love myself. I'm
a feminist. I like the way I look. Beauty is
like a fucked up standard and then not anyone can
live up to it. And I want to look like myself.
And then you see yourself and you're like, no, that's
not what I look like, but not like that, but
that's not but that's not what I see.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Also, when I a full on TikTok addict, I am
watching like what seems to be sixteen year olds being
like here's this great moisturizer for fine lines and wrinkles,
where it's like ma'am, ma'am, it can't be you that's
telling me this. I can't. No, yeah, that and all

(02:44):
those kinds of things.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
Don't tell me your skincare routine if your skin is
already perfect, which I know is like the point, like
your skin is perfect because of your skincare routine. But
I want to see your fucked up skin when you're
still doing your skincare routine and it's not fucking working. Right.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
That's the thing that got me into Korean skincare was
all of the people who had like fungal acne or
sister acne that were like they went to it like
as a last resort and it actually worked. I mean,
you could join my church still.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
As TikTok Or is a Korean skincare Korean skincare church. Yeah, yeah,
I'm dabbling in it. I'm giving it a.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
Shot, okay, because I could put some products together for you.
Just tell me your complaints, let me know.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
That's our new stuff together, that's our new thing.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
Literally, the last time I had people over, I brought
my friend Chase Bernstein because she's a maximist to herself,
and I was like, do you know about this? Because
not only are these products great? They all cost twelve diars.
It's insane. And so I brought her into my bathroom
and just opened underneath the sink where it was like
a small TJ mass under the sink, because I have

(03:47):
to buy it if I see it. Yeah, I don't
need it, but someone's gonna need it.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
You're an influencer. You need to try it.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
This is swag I have to give away to continue
my Okay.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, well, this is a true crime podcast, is it?

Speaker 1 (04:02):
That's not true?

Speaker 2 (04:03):
Someone said it was once and then we just went
with it.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
I can't be the truth about this podcast.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
I have a true crime documentary I can recommend, so
we can cleasy on track for a hot second. Okay,
it's just a two part documentary called Into the Fire
the Lost Daughter on Netflix. Did you see the trailer
for this? No, it's so wild. Essentially, this woman who
when she was very young gave her daughter for adoption
finds out twenty years later that that daughter went missing

(04:30):
when she was fourteen, and then is like this badass
who's like, how has this not been solved? No one's
looked into this at all. Here I go and like,
with the help of you know, the sleuth's tracks down
what happened, and it's wild.

Speaker 1 (04:45):
I'm almost positive one of us covered that at some
point in the past eight years, because it sounds familiar,
like in a forensic files way, and then it also
sounds familiar in a one of.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
Us talking an we covered it.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
Man.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
Then I don't know what I'm doing.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
But that idea that this mother already had these regrets,
in these second thoughts and all these things. And then
when she goes to finally find that daughter that she
had been thinking about the entire time, she hears this
horrible news right and then takes up the cause. It's
like one of the most beautiful, tragic stories.

Speaker 2 (05:19):
And it's so sad because when it comes down to it,
she's like, I gave up my baby when I was
seventeen because I was convinced that I was giving her
a good life and these parents that needed her and
wanted her. And it turns out the calls coming from
inside the house. I mean, you kind of can figure
that out, but it's like she's so angry that that
didn't happen that she just fuels her and it's really amazing.

Speaker 1 (05:41):
A horrible thing. And then she actually gets to do
something about it.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
Right, totally, God damn it. When did you come from that?

Speaker 1 (05:48):
Wait? Sorry, which one of us covered it?

Speaker 3 (05:50):
You?

Speaker 2 (05:50):
Why don't I remember that there's fucking.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
Five hundred episodes. What do you mean I can't remember
what happened this morning?

Speaker 2 (05:57):
Okay? All right? So yes, Karen did cover it in
an episode. What was it? All?

Speaker 1 (06:00):
Three hundred and nine not counting? Is the key the
sixth anniversary special? Okay?

Speaker 2 (06:04):
Oh, okay, And I bet it was a great job.
So you should listen to that and watch the documentary.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
Listen. I'm taking this feedback as it stands, which is
I need to tell you stories better so that you
remember them for years and years and years.

Speaker 2 (06:18):
How many cans of wine deep was I when you
told that story? That's the most important question.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
Oh, I actually could follow that up with something that
is also true crime related in a way that I
thought was so touching and so beautiful. Well, first of all,
I just wanted to say, and I think most people
understand this at this point. It's been going on for
so long. We record this podcast on Monday and then
the episode drops on Thursday. Last week, we recorded the

(06:45):
episode the day before that debate, so we had no
idea what was about to happen, and we would have
absolutely been thrilled to talk about it. Yeah, when she
basically paused instead of calling him a motherfucker is what
one of the like most I think for me personally,
I'll just say therapeutic moments that I've had in a

(07:06):
while in terms of what is going on around us.
So everybody still has to try really hard and nothing
is for sure, but wow.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
It's so funny. Yeah, and the like the restraint that
she had as a woman had to practice in that
moment or in that entire thing that that clearly isn't
an equal thing. Are there restraint that we learn from
childhood because you have to seem a certain way or
no one's going to take you seriously? Is like it
was just on stage?

Speaker 1 (07:36):
Yeah. Well, and also just she's so overqualified, yeah, the
way it usually is for black women in this country,
which is, oh, I have to come up here and
do all this tap dancing to a person that some
say can't read.

Speaker 2 (07:51):
That's a that's just a like essentially a toddler could
have my job, or I could have the job I've
been training for for decades. So right, Yeah, let's see,
let's see how that goes.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
Anyway, it's good news. Yeah, I love good news. We
love some good news.

Speaker 2 (08:07):
Who we do.

Speaker 1 (08:08):
And then there was inspiring news because of the Emmys,
which I think happened last night or the night before Sunday.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
Probably last night, Yeah for us, last night.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
For us, it's last night. De Pharaoh Woonatie, who was
nominated for a Lead Actor from Reservation Dogs, one of
my favorite shows in the past decade, i'd say, And
he's the first Indigenous man to be nominated in a
lead acting category for an Emmy.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (08:36):
He showed up to the red carpet with a big
red handprint across his mouth to represent all the missing
and murdered Indigenous women that no one is talking about,
and it was fucking amazing, Like it looked incredible. Of course,
then everyone was talking about asking him about it, and

(08:57):
just like to take that moment that he could have
made all of himself, and I'm sure most people would
be like, Hey, this in and of itself, is this
incredible achievement that whole cast, Yeah, it's an incredible achievement
that all you guys are here and you were so
good in all those seasons of that show. But instead
he's just like, why don't we actually do something here?

Speaker 2 (09:17):
I mean inspiring, so beautiful, that's incredible. Oh I have
a little like a fun, cute little thing that we
can It's almost like a story that would be on bananas.
But it made me so fucking happy, and I feel
like majority of our listeners would rejoice that there's a
bed and breakfast in Scotland that lets you run a bookshop.

(09:39):
Like they have a bookshop, you rent it out like
as a B and b and like for a week
that's your holiday. I bet there's a cat. I bet
you could bring a cat. You just fucking It's a
volunteer run enterprise that lets visitors run their own bookshop.
How incredible is that? I saw that on BBC scott News.

Speaker 1 (09:58):
Sorry, do you have to balance that dr every night?

Speaker 2 (10:00):
Oh that's yeah, that's hard. I bet there's like a
if you need me, I'm here, but with a Scottish accent,
you know, background player, you know what I mean.

Speaker 1 (10:08):
It'd be great if there was a guy that kind
of looked like Gerard Butler maybe yeah, car again he
was he was there to balance the drawer and just
kind of like, don't worry about this part that you
don't like and go go run your bookstore.

Speaker 2 (10:20):
Also, when the money goes to charity for the whole bookstore,
the fuck man, I think so, or at least a
large part of it. Damn, this is that's it. That's good,
really cool. I'm going there now.

Speaker 1 (10:30):
Also that idea of like if you open a birthday
president and Vince was like, here's what the president is. Yeah,
you have a nervous breakdown of being so overjoyed.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
Yeah, that's a perfect vacation for me. I like this
idea of like vacations for people who don't like typical vacations. Yeah,
go do this thing that you've always wanted to do
that has nothing to do with like sitting by the
beach or drinking my ties.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
You know right. I bet you could still drink at
that bookstore. If it's your bookstore, you can drink all
you want.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
A nice mug of something boozy, that's.

Speaker 1 (11:03):
True, A mug of hot rum.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
Microwave mug of rum. It's not. It's just microwave in
the staff microwave. It smells like fish and chips. Microwave
your rum. Ooh okay, hey, let's talk about our business
that we run with Cass good Idea involved in it. Hey,
we have a podcast network. It's called Exactly Right Media.
Here are some highlights.

Speaker 1 (11:27):
Over on I Said No Gives. This week, Bridger's guest
is Sam Taggart, a comedian and the host of the
hilarious podcast Stradio Lab.

Speaker 2 (11:35):
If you missed last week's episode of Bananas with legendary
comedian Kathy Griffin, go check that out. And the meantime,
they're basking in the afterglow of Bananifest and so are we.

Speaker 1 (11:45):
I mean they should. What a success. Then over on
I Saw What You Did, Danielle and Millie discussed two
films this week, The Raid Redemption from twenty eleven and
from twenty fourteen John Wick.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
Oh Classic. Yeah, And our next throwback merch from Rewind
with Karen and Georgia is here. From episode eleven of Rewind,
We have a new Go Fuck Yourself Mug just for
you through September twenty fourth. Go pre order your limit
edition Go Fuck Yourself Mug. These won't last long. This
always sells out, so check that out at my favorite
murder dot com.

Speaker 1 (12:18):
Yourself is spelled incorrectly.

Speaker 2 (12:20):
Yeah, can you handle that.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
As it would. Well, it's the original print. Yeah, and
it is the way you say, it's spelled as it said,
which is something that's important to us as a podcast host.

Speaker 2 (12:30):
Near and dear to our hearts. Yeah, all right, your
first Yes, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:38):
This story. I actually found this. I think it was
on the now defunct website Twitter. No, I can't remember,
but it was like one of those ones where there's
like a picture and then there's like a couple facts
underneath it and it basically brings you to the Wikipedia page.

Speaker 2 (12:52):
Oh yeah, I love those.

Speaker 1 (12:54):
But it was a serial killer I had not heard
of before.

Speaker 2 (12:57):
It's not wild when that happened, they're like, yeah, I
thought I knew them all.

Speaker 1 (13:02):
I think it's just such a sign where it's like
there are so many and they're all so.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
Horrible, so scary when you realize that, you're just never Yeah,
it's an issue.

Speaker 1 (13:12):
It's a true issue.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:14):
So this story I'm going to tell you about today
is about a man who by day sought a career
in the priesthood, then in education, and then he ended
up in policing Jesus and all while committing heinous murders God.
The attorney who prosecuted this man called him quote the
most sexually deviant person I've ever seen. He made Ted

(13:37):
Bundy look like a boy scout.

Speaker 2 (13:39):
Holy shit.

Speaker 1 (13:41):
Decades after being tried and convicted for two homicides, this
man is still being linked to missing and murdered women
in Florida and beyond. I'm going to tell you the
story of Gerard John Schaeffer, the serial killer cop.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (13:59):
The main so used in today's research is the book
American Ripper, The Enigma of America's serial Killer Cop by
Patrick Kendrick. This is the exhaustive resource on this very,
very disturbing case. I love that Maren reads entire books
to cover these cases when she does research for me.

(14:19):
It's just incredible And I now want to read this
because this case you get just enough awful information to go,
wait a second, how did I not know every detail
about this? And just if you are writing in the
car with some people who maybe don't like true crime,
if there are children anywhere near you, do not listen

(14:40):
to this story with anybody. This is a very disturbing,
very very awful case. If you are easily kind of
freaked out, don't listen to this. So It begins in
March of nineteen forty six. That's when Gerard John Schaefer,
who will go by John most of his life, is

(15:01):
born in Nina, Wisconsin. He's the first child born to
parents Doris and Jerry, who then have two more children
after him, a daughter and another son. Doris is a
homemaker raises the children. Jerry works as a traveling salesman
and his company repeatedly transfers him to different regions around
the country, and each time he's relocated, he uproots his

(15:25):
young family and moves them with him. The Schaeffers first
leave Wisconsin for Nashville, then Nashville for Atlanta, and then
in nineteen sixty, when John is fourteen years old, the
family finally settles in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. So even though
he's still young, John's already dealing with complex emotional problems.

(15:45):
He has a lot of anger and a lot of resentment,
and he's known to hurt animals, which is something that
the kids in the neighborhood notice. He will eventually tell
doctors that he fantasizes about dying, and one of his
childhood friends, Gary Haynleine, who is also his next door
neighbor says, quote, he seemed to enjoy killing things. He

(16:08):
enjoyed shooting things, things you can't eat, songbirds, land crabs,
that sort of thing. End quote. Thanks. So along with
those habits, John is developing sadistic sexual fantasies that involve
hurting women. They seem to go hand in hand, so
the fantasies progress as he grows into early adulthood. When

(16:32):
he's about twenty years old, he seeks treatment for these
troubling thoughts, and in therapy he attributes his violent, misogynistic
fantasies to his father, Jerry. According to John, Jerry is
an abusive alcoholic who sets an awful example by constantly
cheating on his wife. It is possible these statements are

(16:53):
true because Doris will eventually go on to divorce Jerry,
citing quote drunkenness and adultery. But then at the same
time we're probably talking about a burgeoning psychopath, so it
could be everybody else's fault totally. John does say that
his resentment towards women also stems from his father. According

(17:14):
to him, it's because Jerry clearly favors his daughter, John's
sister over his sons. So by the late nineteen sixties,
when John's in his mid twenties, he seems to be
trying to figure out his life's path. In nineteen sixty six,
he tours the southeastern United States with a singing group
that's sponsored by a conservative organization aiming to quote glorify

(17:37):
wholesome patriotic American youth.

Speaker 2 (17:39):
Oh good job.

Speaker 1 (17:43):
This is where he meets a young woman named Martha.
Martha goes by Marty. The two wed two years later,
but the marriage is short lived and they get divorced
in nineteen seventy. So it's not totally clear why John
and Marty break up, but a friend of the couples
will later say, quote, Marty was a genius. John is

(18:04):
very intelligent, but he's a very competitive person. It was
hard for him to be with a genius like Marty.
End quote. All right. Kind of interesting though, that he
would be attracted to her, But also she's like in
this wholesome patriotic American singing group. Maybe at all just
they all got caught up in the show.

Speaker 3 (18:26):
Sure.

Speaker 1 (18:27):
So around the time this marriage ends, John, who was
raised Catholic, tries to join the priesthood, but he is
turned away from seminary school. After being told that he
doesn't quote have enough faith, it makes him extremely angry,
so angry in fact, that he turns his back on
the Catholic Church forever. Meanwhile, he keeps looking for a job,

(18:50):
preferably one that would give him power and authority over others.
So before long he becomes a teacher. Ay, he lands
a teaching job, but it's short lived. He's fired for quote,
trying to impose his own moral and political values on
his students. End quote.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
I mean, and it's in the seventies. Yeah, and it's
that bad, Like they didn't give a shit. You could
fucking hit a kid back then. So whatever he was
doing was like very true, extreme right, it had to
be crazy. And then also like you didn't have enough faith?
Like what was he not doing that someone could tell
if something was off, Like that just might have been
an excuse to be like, get this guy out of here.

Speaker 1 (19:31):
Yeah. I wonder if he had a particularly deep confessional
and they were like, oh, that's why you're here.

Speaker 2 (19:38):
Right, how do we get rid of this guy? You
don't like God enough? Get the fuck out.

Speaker 1 (19:43):
Of Yeah, please take this elsewhere. Please take this to
the local high school. So one of his teaching supervisors
would later say that quote, I told him when he
left that he'd better never let me hear of his
trying to get a job with any authority over other people,
or I do anything I could to prevent it.

Speaker 2 (20:04):
What did he do? Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
Unfortunately that person didn't try to prevent that job. And
what does happen is that John is dead set on
becoming a policeman. No kind of the worst case scenario,
just be a go to a.

Speaker 2 (20:22):
Call center and leave everyone alone.

Speaker 1 (20:25):
So in the early nineteen seventies, John Schaeffer is rejected
by multiple police departments, including the Broward County Sheriff's Office,
who pass on his application after he fails a routine
psychological test. Jesus something basic. Yeah, So he ends up
getting hired by the small Wilton Manners police department, based

(20:46):
in a Fort Lauderdale suburb. Wilton Manors just happened to
be in desperate need of officers right when John applied,
so it was like the perfect storm. So at first,
John seems to be finding his groove. Things at work
are quiet and steady. He even gets remarried to a
woman named Teresa, but within a year of being hired

(21:09):
by Wilton Manors PD, John is abruptly let go. The
Tampa Bay Times, who later interviewed his colleagues, reports that
quote supervising officers found him unreliable, a man who could
be found leaning against a pole eating potato chips when
he was supposed to be directing traffic around an accident

(21:29):
end quote. More troublingly, John is also caught quote running
female traffic violators through the department's computer, obtaining personal information
and later calling them for dates. End quote. Oh no,
we've heard about that happening through the police and police
officers doing that same thing. So in the summer of
nineteen seventy two, just two months after being fired from

(21:52):
the Wilton Manors PD, John somehow gets another job as
a police officer. This time he's hired by the Martin
County Sheriff's Department, which is also in South Florida, and
a month later, in late July, John is out on
parole when he sees two teenage girls hiking near Florida's
Jensen Beach. They are eighteen year old Nancy Trotter and

(22:13):
seventeen year old Paula Wells, who goes by her middle
named Sue. So Nancy and Sue are vacationing in this
area from out of state. So John sees them. He
pulls the cop corp over, rolls the window down, and
warns the girls that hitchhiking is illegal in this county.
This is not true. Nancy and Sue don't know this,

(22:34):
of course, and they don't think a police officer would
pull over and go out of his way to lie
to them. So when John offers to give them a
ride back to their hotel in the town of Stuart,
which is a few miles away, the girls see no
reason why they shouldn't take a ride from a cop,
like ostensibly the safest thing they could do, and also

(22:56):
it's Florida. It's boiling hot, you know. They're like, we
don't want to walk all the way back. The ride
back to Stuart is quick, and when he gets to
the hotel, John drops both girls off, but before he
drives away, he offers to give the girls a ride
back to the beach the following morning, and that way,
he says, they won't have to illegally hitchhike again. Nancy

(23:19):
and Sue are very grateful for this young officer's kindness
and they accept the ride, and the next morning, at
nine point fifteen, John arrives to pick them up as scheduled.
He claims he's on duty, but he's wearing plain clothes
and he's driving a civilian car. The girls don't think
much of it. Nancy says that then quote he asked

(23:40):
us if we wanted to see an old Spanish fort
that was on the river. We said, okay. End quote.
So John pulls off Florida's A one A highway and
onto a small dirt back road that leads to a
woodsy remote area. His car is now on a strip
of land known as Hutchinson's Island. It's about ten miles

(24:00):
away from Jensen's Beach. So he parks the car by
an old abandoned shed in the woods, and then his
entire demeanor completely changes. That's the thing I think about
in a lot of these stories too, that point where
survivors talk about a moment where the person that they
met completely disappears and this new, entirely evil person arrives.

(24:24):
It's like a horror movie.

Speaker 2 (24:26):
Yeah, the moment you realize like, oh no, this isn't
what I thought it was. Yeah, it's so.

Speaker 1 (24:31):
Chilling and he the turn comes and Nancy and Sue
are shocked and horrified when John announces quote I could
dig a hole and bury you. There's no crime without
a body end quote. And then he says quote, I'm
afraid I'm going to have to put you under arrest
as runaways.

Speaker 2 (24:49):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (24:50):
End quote, and then he threatens to sell the girls
into a sex trafficking ring. He then instructs Nancy and
Sue to dump their purses out the car, and then
he orders them to step outside. He binds and gags
both of them, and when they are tied up, he
walks Nancy over to some thick tree roots. They stand

(25:10):
about ten inches off the ground. He tells her to
stand on top of them, and then he puts a
noose around her neck and he basically swings it over
a branch above her. And now Nancy is bound, gagged,
and basically with this noose around her neck, she's at
risk of hanging if she slips off these uneven tree roots.

Speaker 2 (25:31):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (25:33):
So she's basically trapped in trying to stay perfectly still,
and that is when he begins to molest her.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (25:42):
He threatens quote I could rape you right now, right here,
if I wanted to end quote. And then after a
few minutes pass he starts walking back toward where Sue is,
but as he goes, he tells Nancy that he will
be back for her. Nancy is a very strong, determined
young woman, so as she watches, standing on her tiptoes

(26:03):
on these tree roots, John wanders off into the woods
with her front Sue, and the second they're out of sight,
she spits the gag out of her mouth. She kind
of forces it out with her tongue and immediately starts
chewing through the knot that's next to her, that's around
her neck, so like g Yeah, her chewing creates enough

(26:25):
slack in the rope that she is actually able to
wriggle her neck out of the noose, and the once
she's free from the risk of hanging, she's able to
get all of her other binding ropes off. She actually
will later say quote, I didn't take very long, maybe
ten or fifteen minutes, but I still had the handcuffs on.
And then once Nancy gets free, she runs, Oh my god,

(26:49):
she's panicked. She's still handcuffed. She's rushing to escape through
the thick Florida underbrush. But Nancy is only thinking about
her friend Sue. She doesn't know where Sue is, if
she's still alive. All she knows is that she has
to go get help. So she comes to a river
and she throws herself in, and then she follows it

(27:10):
upstream for what would feel like an eternity. She actually
at one point gets stung by jellyfish, and then finally
she sees the highway in the distance, so she gets
out and runs toward the highway, all well, handcuffed, all
well handcuffed, Jesus, And also like Florida. It's like Florida swamp,

(27:30):
like everything in Florida. It's like the idea she's getting
stung by jellyfish in a river is insane. It's just
like so dangerous, oh so horrible. So she's running toward
the highway, and soon she sees a Martin County Sheriff's
patrol car driving toward her, and it's the same car

(27:50):
John picked the girls up in the day before. But
before Nancy can react, she sees John is not driving
that car. Instead, its Officer Robert Lewis Crowder, so she
flags him down. Officer Crowder tells Nancy that her friend
Sue also escaped and was picked up by a truck
driver forty five minutes ago.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (28:12):
Right. He then tells her Sue has already told the
police about how John Shaeffer abducted them and threatened their lives,
and they've been looking for Nancy ever since, and that's
why Officer Crowder is out patrolling the highway. Right.

Speaker 2 (28:25):
Then, Wow, that's wild.

Speaker 1 (28:27):
So now both girls are safe, and they find John
Shaeffer and they bring him in. But when his coworkers
ask him what he was doing, Shaeffer tries to cover
by writing off his actions as foolish. He claims he
was quote demonstrating the pitfalls and the dangers of hitchhiking,
and he says, quote he had gotten a little carried away.

Speaker 2 (28:49):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (28:51):
But John Shaffer's superiors are not buying it. He is
immediately fired, and then he's charged with multiple counts of
aggravated assaults. He's ultimately convicted and sentenced to six months
in county jail, followed by three years of probation six
months like six months, and also aggravated assault as opposed

(29:12):
to attempted murder. But here's the thing. Don't waste your
time getting upset at this, because it's going to get
much worse because after his trial, when they figure all
that out, he is allowed to post a fifteen thousand
dollars bond and live as a freeman for several months
until his jail time begins in January of nineteen seventy three.

Speaker 2 (29:35):
Fuck is that that piece of our fucking leo system
is so confounding?

Speaker 1 (29:41):
Well, and you have to I mean, just for the
observations of amateurs that have been telling stories to each
other like this for nine years. Practically it's racism, right,
because I don't think we've ever told a story about
the police letting a black man free on bond until

(30:02):
his aggravated assault term comes up. I mean, clearly, I'm
sure it was the privilege of having been a police
officer or something.

Speaker 2 (30:10):
Or it's also you can afford fifteen thousand dollars, which
back then was probably a fuck ton more money. And
so bail in itself is a racist act because it
really favors people who are privileged and have money and
opportunities to do that, you know.

Speaker 1 (30:26):
Yeah, And it also doesn't consider what it didn't at
the time, and maybe these considerations have been implemented. It
would be fascinating to talk to somebody who knew. But
the idea of oh no, no, this what he did
was not It wasn't some funny mistake. Yeah, this is

(30:46):
something that he has like that they would recognize the
behavior and the violence and the threat.

Speaker 2 (30:52):
But the point is he should be kept away from
society because he is a threat to it, not like
you know, and someone who has a drug chart is
locked up the whole time, where it's like, it's not
it's not equal.

Speaker 1 (31:04):
But those white cops are looking at this fired white
cop and going, well, he's not a threat to me.
So how much he wouldn't I wouldn't. So he wouldn't.
I mean, it's you feel like perhaps that could be
arguably and in my opinion, what they are thinking. Who knows.
It's also like you're saying, it's nineteen seventy two. His
jail time begins in the next year, so it's September

(31:26):
of nineteen seventy two. He's supposed to go to jail
in January of nineteen seventy three, so he's out on
bond and just two months after Nancy Trotter and Sue
Wells were abducted. Two more girls go missing in Fort Lauderdale,
sixteen year old Georgia Jessup and seventeen year old Susan Place.

(31:47):
And Susan actually was a student at the school where
John Shaeffer briefly worked as a teacher, although it's unclear
if they ever interacted or even knew each other, but
that is just a fact, so Susan's parents tell police.
The girls were last seen at the Place family home,
and Susan's mother, Lucille, actually watched the girl's head to

(32:10):
the beach with this man in his mid twenties who
went by Jerry Shepherd, and she watched them as they
climbed into his blue Dotson and pulled away. But from
the get go, Lucille had a weird feeling about this
Jerry Shepherd, so as the car was pulling away, she
ran outside and wrote down his license plate number.

Speaker 2 (32:31):
Look at her Wow.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
Yeah. And then Lucille has to hand this information over
to the police when her daughter never comes home from
the beach that day. Horrifying. What's more horrifying is it
takes investigators six months. It's not until March of nineteen
seventy three to trace this information back to the car's owner,

(32:56):
and that's when they find out it's not Jerry Shepherd,
it's a John Schaeffer.

Speaker 2 (33:01):
She had been missing, missing for fucking six months before
they put the most basic effort. This fucking woman went
out of her way to take precaution because she was
worried about her daughter.

Speaker 1 (33:13):
Her daughter's missing. Here's the car that took her away.
Here's the license plate. If citizen cannot do more, they
can't do your job for you.

Speaker 2 (33:21):
She's not a runaway. I haven't received a phone call,
no one's seen her like. This is not Oh my god. Okay, yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:30):
So by the time police do make this connection, John
has already been serving his sentence at the county jail
for two months, so they go down to talk to him.
John is questioned about the girl's disappearance. He denies having
anything to do with it, but this lie unravels very quickly.
A few weeks later, in April of nineteen seventy three,

(33:51):
men collecting aluminum cans in Hutchinson Island, the same area
where John took Nancy Trotter and Sue Wells, and they
find and the badly decomposed remains of two people who
have been clearly very brutally murdered. The corpses are tied
to the base of a tree at their torsos and

(34:14):
their heads were cut off, and those severed heads were
later found nearby a few days later. These remains are
identified by dental records, and the bodies in fact belong
to Georgia, Jessup and Susan place and their remains indicate

(34:34):
that they were tortured, hanged, and one of the girls
had been shot in the jaw, although it's unclear if
that happened before or after she was murdered. So now
John Shaeffer has been unmasked. Days after Georgia and Susan's
remains are found, investigators obtain a search warrant for John

(34:54):
Shaffer's house and his mother, Doris's house, where he stores
some of his belonging. Investigators need any evidence that could
connect John to Georgia and Susan's murders, and they do.
It's a purse that belongs to one of the girls,
and according to John's wife Teresa, her husband gave it
to her as a gift in September of nineteen seventy two,

(35:18):
this same month the girls went missing.

Speaker 2 (35:20):
I forgot he was married, and that is so troubling,
Like yeah, oh my god.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
But that's not all. It turns out that John is
sitting on with all of these things that they find
in his house, in his mother's house, He's sitting on
an arsenal of incriminating items. Journalist Yvette Cardozo, writing for
the Fort Lauderdale News, reports quote the officers found two

(35:47):
gold crown teeth, small bones much like wristbones, a sorority pin,
charm bracelet, a photograph sketched over magazine pictures, rope rifles
and hunting knives.

Speaker 2 (36:01):
Jesus end the bones suggests he went back to the
scene of the crime, you know, like went back. M
that's so chilling.

Speaker 1 (36:11):
And just that list of items is a textbook mixture
of trophies from victims and possibly murder kit supplies, and
the sketched over magazine pictures refers to random pictures of
women pulled from magazines and newspapers that John has labeled
with words like adulterys and street walker. In others, he's

(36:34):
drawn images of nooses around their necks. There's disturbing photos
of women that have been executed returned letters John has
sent himself posing as a researcher, requesting information on urination
and defecation that takes place during prison orchestrated executions of women.
What craven is one word you could use its base.

(36:57):
It's just the basest, most disgusting.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (37:01):
So of course it gets worse because investigators find a
so called manuscript that include several pages of various stories.
So it's essentially like he's trying to write like a
book of short stories, but they're all just vile, and
they're all written from the first person, just like.

Speaker 2 (37:21):
It's like a journal almost that he's trying to pass
off as like a.

Speaker 1 (37:25):
Yeah, reporter Evett Cardozo says, quote, the stories tell of
hanging women, shooting them, hacking them to pieces, of sinking
one body in a rock pit lake with a shotgun blast,
and of having sexual intercourse with the bodies months after
the slaying end quote. So essentially this is a serial

(37:48):
killer just writing out his plans.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
Yeah, oh my god, it's so depraved. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:55):
So some of these stories are clearly made up. Others
read like diary entries, like you said, mentioning very specific
locations down to local road names. In one story, John
gives a how to on killing women that eerily mirrors
his attack on Nancy Trotter and Sue Wells. So here's
the writing from that quote. He will need an isolated

(38:17):
area accessible by car and a short hike away from
any police patrols or parking lovers. The execution site must
be carefully arranged for a speedy execution once the victim
has arrived. Ideally there would be two sawhorses with a
two by four between them, a noose attached to the
overhanging limb of a tree, and another rope to pull

(38:39):
away from the two by four, preferably by car. The
victim could be any one of the many women who
flocked to Miami and Fort Lauderdale during the winter months.
End quote. So this is a man that hates women
so very much, so so much that this is what
he's spent is time writing in notebooks as if anybody

(39:04):
is asking him how he does it. The idea of
that the depth of that misogyny and hatred is the
thing that should be talked about, and this is the
thing that everybody should talk about more when they're talking
about or that should be underlined more when we're talking
about true crime and we're talking about these serial killers,

(39:26):
these men that go on and on repeatedly killing women
like this, it's a disease.

Speaker 2 (39:31):
Yeah, it's a funny, you know. It goes along with
the like question we always get asked or that you
always hear, like why do women love true crime? And
it's like, because it's so often perpetrated against us, and
we're terrified and want to learn everything we can so
we can feel like we have some kind of control
over our lives. There's some kind of power over what
can potentially happen.

Speaker 1 (39:52):
You know.

Speaker 2 (39:52):
It's not that we're voyeurists who are like, you know,
gawking at something. It's like this keeps happening, and we're
so aware of it, and it's you know, it's known
to us since childhood that we're potential victims to any
fucking misogynist man who has a bad day, you know.

Speaker 1 (40:11):
Right, and also to a cop like and then to
someone that would in your community pull over and offer
to help you that you would assume you could be
helped by.

Speaker 2 (40:22):
Yeah, your buddy, and yeah, you think he's a great
guy and he would never do such a thing, and
he's married and all this shit. It's like terrifying.

Speaker 1 (40:29):
Yeah, So prosecutors are now building a case against John
Schaeffer for the murders of Georgia Jessup and Susan Place.
And as they do, investigators start looking for links between
John's belongings and any open cases involving missing or murdered
women in South Florida, and they find them. So investigators

(40:50):
recover items belonging to two missing nineteen year old hitchhikers
and their names are good Enough and Barbara Wilcox. These
women were loud seen alive in January of nineteen seventy three,
just one week before John started his jail sentence.

Speaker 2 (41:07):
Wow, so that time, mother fuck.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
Like out on bond yeap. Colette and Barber's skeletal remains
are found by a truck driver alongside a canal in
nineteen seventy seven.

Speaker 2 (41:22):
Oh wow, so not for a while, not for a while.

Speaker 1 (41:25):
And the remains were bound together with wire and the
bodies were missing part of their skulls. So police also
find a piece of jewelry belonging to a fourteen year
old girl named Mary Briscolina. Mary had gone missing while
hitchhiking to a restaurant in October of nineteen seventy two

(41:48):
with her friend, Elsie Farmer. Elsie was just thirteen years old.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
Oh my god, babies.

Speaker 1 (41:55):
In January of nineteen seventy three, shortly after John reports
to prison, those girls' bodies are found by construction workers
in a large overgrown field, and there remains show signs
of horrific torture and mutilation. Then investigators find newspaper clippings
about the nineteen sixty nine disappearance of a local waitress

(42:18):
named Carmen Marie Halleck. Soon, a dentist will confirm that
the gold teeth found at John's mother's house belong to Carmen.
A woman named Carmen even pops up in one of
the most disgusting and disturbing stories from John's so called manuscript. Wow.
I'm going to leave out the details.

Speaker 2 (42:37):
They're horrible, yeah.

Speaker 1 (42:39):
But basically in the story, he describes luring an unsuspecting
woman by asking her out on a date. Once she
accepts this invitation, she meets up with him wearing a
black cocktail dress. Carmen Hallock was last seen wearing a
black cocktail dress and her remains have never been found.

(43:00):
Also find a charm bracelet with the name Lee etched
into it. Immediately, investigators suspect that this bracelet belongs to
a twenty five year old woman named Lee Hainline Bonnadees.
Like Carmen, Lee was reported missing in nineteen sixty nine.

Speaker 2 (43:14):
So they had this like string of women missing, and
like then this guy kidnaps and assaults these two girls
who get away, and they don't like, got no point
with someone, like why are all these girls missing?

Speaker 1 (43:31):
Right? That if it wasn't for Susan and Nancy getting away, yeah,
and like fighting their way out and getting their way,
and you're right, and that mom.

Speaker 2 (43:40):
Yeah, that mom who fucking wrote down I mean, yeah,
what a hero.

Speaker 1 (43:45):
That was the beginning. That was like truly yeah, they
were like, oh, what's happening here? Yeah, and then suddenly
it's like, oh, there's murders every possible place there could be.

Speaker 2 (43:57):
It's like instead of putting the pieces together and solving something,
they just had to clean up this mess that they
hadn't even realized was on their fucking doorstep, you know. Yeah,
And because of that, all these women were horribly murdered. Yes,
it's just not fucking fair. And I'm and I yeah,
this is infuriating.

Speaker 1 (44:15):
Okay, it's definitely infuriating. Also, the name Lee Hanline Bonnadez
of the name Hanline sounded familiar from the beginning of
this story. Gary Haynline was John's next door neighbor and
friend who would talk about John murdering things that didn't
you know, oh songbirds and stuff.

Speaker 2 (44:36):
Uh huh.

Speaker 1 (44:37):
Gary was friends with John. Lee was Gary's sister whoa
So there was a point in time where John claimed
that Lee quote teased him as a child by undressing
near her bedroom window. Now it seems much more likely
that he was a peeping tom, which we know is
an early indicator of serial killer behavior peeping toms killing animals,

(45:02):
fires fire. In the late nineteen sixties, shortly before she
went missing, John had reconnected with Lee and they had
become platonic friends. He occasionally played tennis as a group
with Lee and Carmen Halleck the woman in the black dress. Fuck.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
Like, he's just like strangers or people, I know whatever,
He's just yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:26):
So, in nineteen seventy eight, a portion of Lee's skull
is discovered by hunters and is described as having at
least three bullet holes, but it was not conclusively identified
as belonging to Lee until two thousand and four. Wow. Yet, incredibly,
this is not the exhaustive list of victims linked to

(45:47):
Gerard John Shaeffer. Dozens of missing and murdered women in
Florida and beyond, and even some men will eventually be
connected to him.

Speaker 2 (45:57):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (45:59):
So John Shafe is ultimately charged with two homicides, the
murders of Georgia Jessup and Susan Place, and that fact
might sound shocking given all this evidence linking him to
these other disappearances. But if the problem is, as it
always is, that evidence is circumstantial, The bodies of many
of John's suspected victims won't be found for years, if

(46:21):
at all, and prosecutors know it's too risky to bring
murder charges against someone when there's no body, especially if
that suspect like John Schaeffer, isn't admitting to any of
the crimes. That said, prosecutors feel like they have everything
they need to secure John's conviction for the murders of
Georgia and Susan. This time, John is kept in jail

(46:43):
without bond, as he awaits trial.

Speaker 2 (46:46):
Imagine that as.

Speaker 1 (46:47):
The news spreads about the horrific crimes that he's accused
of orchestrating, people across the country seethe. When the case
finally goes to trial, the atmosphere in the courtroom is
extremely tense. At one point, the proceedings are abruptly suspended
after a bomb threat is called in at the courthouse.
Then an anonymous caller threatens the local police, saying, quote,

(47:10):
if the jury does not convict Schaeffer, the jurors should
be shot end quote.

Speaker 2 (47:14):
Okay, so people actually did react to what we're reacting to.

Speaker 1 (47:19):
Yes, I think people reading those stories, it's like this
system kept saying, don't worry about it. Why don't you
calm down this, don't make such a big deal about
it or whatever. In total, there are six people on
this jury, three men and three women, and they are
subjected to hours of horrific, devastating details from these crimes,

(47:42):
including having to hear from the grief stricken parents of
Susan Place and Georgia Jessup, as well as the civilians
who found the girl's remains out in the woods. It
is very traumatizing.

Speaker 2 (47:54):
Obviously, Yeah, we're going to talk about that much like
the PTSD that the jury is on a hoorific murder trial,
are you know? Absolutely, but they're subject to and what
they walk away knowing is just life changing.

Speaker 1 (48:07):
It seems like, I mean, I've said stuff in this
that I'm like, there's stuff that was on this page.
I'm like, let's just not say it. We just know
it's horrible, right, those people had to listen to every
detail like as the police found it.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
Yeah, see the photos, I mean, geez.

Speaker 1 (48:25):
The jury also hears from Nancy Trotter and Sue Wells,
who actually come back to Florida to testify against John Schaeffer.

Speaker 2 (48:33):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (48:34):
And then prosecutors present a video re enactment of Nancy
and Sue's abduction, just to show the jurors what John
Schaeffer is truly capable of and this very special level
of violence against women that he was out there trying
to practice on anybody who had happened to be walking

(48:55):
down the road.

Speaker 2 (48:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:57):
But on the advice of his attorneys, John Shaffer does
not testify. His defense team does its best to wave
off the damning evidence against him in arguably offensive ways.
For example, John's lawyers claim the brutal manuscript he'd written
is merely their client's exercise in creative writing, And in
response to Nancy Ensue's testimony, the defense doubles down on

(49:19):
the claim that John was just trying to teach the
girls a lesson about the dangers of hitchhiking. Every other
piece of evidence or testimony is dismissed as purely circumstantial, regardless.
In September of nineteen seventy three, the jury declares Gerard
John Shaeffer guilty on two counts of first degree murder.

(49:41):
According to a journalist who is in the courtroom at
the time, John Schaeffer shows zero emotion when the verdict
is read, and then, as Patrick Kendrick reports, quote, as
the court guards led John out of the courtroom, bombarded
by flashbulbs, in questions from the press, he smiled into
the cause cameras end quote. John will tell reporters that, quote,

(50:06):
that's the roll of the dice. I had a good defense,
but I'm innocent, okay, quote friend.

Speaker 2 (50:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:12):
Meanwhile, the jurors seem grateful to finally put this horrible
murder trial behind them. One member of the jury, who
asked not to be named, tells Saint Lucy News Tribune
that quote, I just want to forget about the whole
thing now. I hope you understand.

Speaker 2 (50:26):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (50:27):
So coincidentally, Gerard John Shaeffer is convicted one year to
the day that Susan Place and Georgia Jessup were last
seen alive. Wow fast, yeah, is fast a year later,
and that fact is not lost on Susan's mom, Lucille,
who tells reporters, quote, you know when they brought the

(50:48):
verdicts in, it was probably about the exact time he
murdered Susan and Georgia last year end quote. And then
on October fourth, when John Shaeffer is sentenced to two
life sentences, again, Lucille points out the significance of this
specific date. She says, quote, It's very ironic, isn't it.
October fourth is Susan's birthday. She would have been nineteen.

Speaker 2 (51:11):
Oh my god, yeah, my poor mother.

Speaker 1 (51:15):
So just two months after John Schaeffer begins his prison sentence,
his wife, Teresa, divorces him and, in a weird twist,
immediately marries his defense lawyer. What yeah, what.

Speaker 2 (51:29):
Is it iman that I want to hear more about?
How the fuck that happened.

Speaker 1 (51:34):
Right, Well, you got to figure the defense lawyers have
to give him, like a fair defense, that's what defense
lawyers do. But he's sitting there going, you were given
the purse of one of these victims, like this isn't
it isn't real. I mean, and she is a victim too.

Speaker 2 (51:52):
Absolutely, I'm hoping it's an empathetic connection. I just think
like it would almost make more sense if she were
like that it was with the prosecutor, you know, not
the right. In my mind, it's like, wow, that's that
seems like a trauma bond in some way.

Speaker 1 (52:07):
Yeah. So, meanwhile, John begins to flood the Florida court
system with appeals, each of which are summarily rejected. I
added the words summarily. I don't know if that's so smart.

Speaker 2 (52:19):
Not sounded perfect.

Speaker 1 (52:20):
It sounded pretty smart, yeah. Next, John attempts to sue
just about any journalist or public figure who dares to
mention his name, and he loses every single one of
those legal battles. As the years pass, John pathetically starts
bragging about the number of people he's murdered. He never
publicly admits to killing anyone, but at one point he

(52:43):
writes to a friend in a private letter which you're
in jail. But he writes, quote, I am not claiming
a huge number. I would say mine run between eighty
and one hundred and ten over eight years and three continents.

Speaker 2 (52:57):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
The rest of this quote is him describing and in
these details that I don't want to repeat because they're
so disgusting, like so disgusting. And basically he's writing it
like it's just hey, how are you. I'm fine, like
just a regular letter. It's like like a conversation. That's

(53:19):
fucking wow, horrifying wow. And that's such a short period.

Speaker 2 (53:24):
Of time too, you know, in eight years. Yeah, And
like if that woman hadn't written down that license plate number,
because he was only going to jail for six months, yep,
he would have been a jail for six months. He
would have been right back out. Like literally, he would
have killed so many more women if if that woman

(53:44):
hadn't written down his license I hadn't thought really quickly,
you know what I'm going to do real quick, jot
this down.

Speaker 1 (53:48):
Talk about following your gut in the most important way,
which is what would it hurt to rut? You can
write down what would it hurt, just have it throw
it away.

Speaker 2 (53:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:59):
In the number of nineteen ninety five, John Shaeffer is
found dead on the floor of his prison cell. He
was stabbed over forty times. Wow. His killer was a
fellow inmate named Vincent Rivera was already serving a life
sentence plus twenty years for a double homicide. He got
another fifty three years for this murder. And it's unclear
why Rivera killed John, although it's suspected John was targeted

(54:23):
because he was a cop and or a prison informant
and or a serial killer.

Speaker 2 (54:30):
Or this fucking the worst fucking person to be around.

Speaker 1 (54:33):
Yeah. He'd been harassed by other inmates who quote had
repeatedly thrown human waste at him and twice set his
cell on fire.

Speaker 2 (54:42):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (54:43):
Gerard Jones. Shaeffer leaves behind a horrific, despicable legacy of
cruelty and hatred and misogyny. And contrary to his claims,
it's believed that he killed at least eleven people and
as many as twenty eight Wow. And to this day,
investigator are still linking Jane Does to John Shaeffer. As

(55:03):
recently as June twenty twenty two, a fifteen year old
girl named Susan Gayale Pool was finally identified through genetic
genealogy and is believed to be one of Shaffer's victims.
Susan one missing from Fort Lauderdale around Christmas of nineteen
seventy two, which is in the same window when John
was out on bond insane. Her mutilated body was found

(55:28):
tied to trees off of Florida's A one A Highway.
And it's easy to believe there are more victims out
there that just haven't been located or identified yet. Yeah,
and that is the story of the serial killer Cop
Gerard John Schaeffer.

Speaker 2 (55:44):
Wow. Yeah, that's a fucking heavy one. That's just that
shit sticks with you. Good job.

Speaker 1 (55:53):
Wow?

Speaker 2 (55:53):
Do you want to go in a different direction?

Speaker 1 (55:55):
I love too. Would you please take all of us
in a totally different direction?

Speaker 2 (55:59):
Get in my clown car. We're going to make a
fucking ewie and we're going to talk about the largest
burglary in British legal history. How about let's go there instead,
sho great, perfect, All right, let's talk about a fucking heist.
Here we go. So this is the story of the
largest burglary in British legal history and surprising but also

(56:20):
kind of not surprising notorious old timers who almost pulled
it off.

Speaker 1 (56:25):
Hey I've seen this movie.

Speaker 2 (56:28):
Guess who's in it? Michael Kine. Of course he is.

Speaker 1 (56:34):
I'm Michael like you.

Speaker 2 (56:35):
Kind of couldn't make this movie unless he agreed to
be in it, you know what I mean.

Speaker 1 (56:39):
Yeah, I hope Judy Dench is also in it.

Speaker 2 (56:41):
Oh yeah. So this is the story of the twenty
fifteen Hatton Gardens safe deposit heist.

Speaker 1 (56:46):
Oh, safe deposit, safe deposit story.

Speaker 2 (56:50):
Yes, yes, open those boxes, bitch Okay. The main sources
for the story are an article from The Guardian by
Duncan Campbell, an article from Vanity Fair by Mark Seal,
and an episode of the podcasts Scotland Yard Confidential, and
the rest of the sources can be found in our
show notes. So it's just after midnight on the morning

(57:11):
of April third, twenty fifteen, or in London, it's the
Friday morning going into the Easter weekend, which in the
UK is what they call so darlingly a bank holiday,
which just means the bank's closed, all the businesses are closed.
It's a long weekend. So there's a man named Kelvin Stockwell,

(57:32):
he's the main security guard for Hatton Gardens Safe Deposit Limited.
It's a in London's Diamond District and Hatton Gardens specializes
in the safekeeping of jewels, gold and cash, pretty much
anything it's customers don't want touched. As we've learned, the
customers are mostly other jewelers in the Diamond District because
they don't want to keep their merchandise on display and

(57:53):
out at night, so they tuck it into the security
of these safe deposit boxes every night. And it's said
that the hat and Garden Safe Deposit is the best
security in the area. We've heard that before, very similar
to the story in Antwerp that you covered in episode
four to forty one. Aim for the basement, so Kelvin,

(58:14):
the security guard, his home and his apartment, locked up
the shop for the long weekend. At six pm that evening,
everything should be fine. All the loots stored in the
basement vault lined with safe deposit boxes. The boxes are
behind two alarmed iron air lock gates, an eighteen inch
metal door, twenty inch thick concrete walls, and motion sensors
inside and out. So like that can safe as shit,

(58:37):
you know, classic safe deposit box area, right, So like
I shouldn't even have a story here. That should be
the end of it, and no one got in right
the end. Michael Caine. It was a really short movie,
but he was great in it. So when Kelvin gets
a call from one of the facilities owners saying that
he just got a call from the monitoring company that

(58:57):
the alarm had been triggered, he's shocked. He gets in
the car and heads over. But when he gets to
the shop, it's totally normal, looks like how he left it.
There's no sign of force entry at the door. It's
the dark and quiet inside. He calls his boss and
he's like false alarm, and then he heads home for
the long Easter holiday. So here we are after that
long holiday. It's eight am on Tuesday, April seventh. Kelvin

(59:18):
gets his asked to work, and as soon as he
gets downstairs to where the boxes are, he sees that
something is very wrong. The wooden door that leads to
the hallway that leads to the safe deposit boxes is
smashed open. Why is it wooden? I don't know. It
must be like the I think it's like the first
door to the safe. You know, to the like area
area probably right, yeah, right, like an office door almost

(59:40):
you would think.

Speaker 1 (59:40):
It's almost like you have to ask yourself how safe
do all the doors have to be? Right?

Speaker 2 (59:46):
Right?

Speaker 1 (59:47):
Just that main safe door? Sit?

Speaker 2 (59:48):
Kay? Like how far out are we talking that you
need to go, like to the bathrooms? Like I don't yeah,
so like it's not on them.

Speaker 1 (59:55):
Where does security end and where does it begin?

Speaker 2 (59:57):
Exactly? Beautiful question. So there's tools, dust, hoses, debris and
bits of pipe all over the floor, a big mess.
The vault door is still closed, but in one of
the walls of the vault there's a gaping hole just
wide enough for like a finish man to squeeze through. Oh,
I know, you like to measure things by kind of

(01:00:17):
finish man squeeze through. How many finish men could squeeze
through this hole?

Speaker 1 (01:00:21):
You know, finish like from Finland.

Speaker 2 (01:00:23):
No, like thin on the thin side of thin.

Speaker 1 (01:00:27):
One bass player thin yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:00:29):
Yeah exactly. So those twenty inch concrete walls on all
sides of the vault were impenetrable when the vault was built.
We're not talking about today's fucking money. We're talking about
nineteen forty six walls.

Speaker 1 (01:00:44):
Oh, they had no idea, which I.

Speaker 2 (01:00:47):
Guess we're diffend somehow. Yeah, I mean you think they'd
hold you know, but I guess they have like a
fifty to seventy five year limit of how well of
the tools that could be made to break into them.

Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
Yeah, lasers.

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
Wait, lazers, what years twenty fifteen? Oh, some lasers.

Speaker 1 (01:01:04):
There's no way forty six can hold up against twenty fifteen.

Speaker 2 (01:01:07):
I didn't even know what we were gonna have.

Speaker 1 (01:01:09):
Remember, you get like you get vintage clothes, and everything
is like sized down. It's like human beings merely seventy
years ago were way fucking smaller than they are now. Yeah,
it's weird.

Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
I see, I'm always vintage shoes are hurt so hard
to find because every woman had a size five fucking
foot back then.

Speaker 1 (01:01:29):
Yes, the waists on most of those dresses. I'm like, well,
I guess if you have a waist, this is fun.

Speaker 2 (01:01:34):
But I'm hungry looking at that waist.

Speaker 1 (01:01:37):
The fuck. So Actually, a nineteen forty seven finish man, right,
very different than today's.

Speaker 2 (01:01:44):
That's so true. So Kelvin bends down and peaks through
the hole, and a wall of safe deposit boxes has
been overturned and is on the ground, and the box's
inner drawers are stacked all over the floor. There's actually
a photo of this that I think we can include
in the socials. It's a fucking huge mess and it's
clear the vault's been ransacked.

Speaker 1 (01:02:05):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
So the press loves this story. Everyone's like kind of
impressed by it because it's like nostalgic, like an old school,
you know, vault breaking. People kind of love that shit.

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
Everyone loves a heist. Yeah, look, you don't want your
stuff stolen, but if it's some rich people's stuff that
they're just hoarding anyway, right, let some wiy you know, talented.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
Michael Kane fucking motherfuck.

Speaker 1 (01:02:33):
If they want it bad enough, let him have it.
Let a finish man have some jewels.

Speaker 2 (01:02:38):
And a finish finish man, please please. So London used
to be home to a lot of professional criminals who
attempted and often succeeded at crimes like this routinely, Like
this was a fucking regular thing. But with better technology
to deter thefts, better forensic technology and of course London's
intense network of CCT be foot they love that shit

(01:03:01):
over there. This kind of thing doesn't happen much anymore.
So everyone, the press and the public eat it up.
It takes a while to total up the value of
all the stolen goods, but it comes out to be
worth in today's money, in today's US dollars, seventy seven
million dollars that they stole shit and fucking safe deposit
boxes worth it. Yeah, But because it's all diamonds and shit,

(01:03:24):
you know, it's not like ant Mergori's fucking camdble sticks.

Speaker 1 (01:03:28):
But doesn't it seem like like even the Antwerp one
that we just did wasn't that high. No, it felt
like it wasn't. But I also can't remember, but it
felt like it wasn't that crazy.

Speaker 2 (01:03:40):
I feel like because people took their blot like jewelry
stores took their loot every night there instead of like
having it in the back of their oh, you know, store,
is probably a lot more. Yeah, I don't, but I
don't remember, And it makes it the biggest jewel heist
in British history. Some people speculate that this is the

(01:04:00):
work of the Pink Panthers. Hey, that's an audacious gang
of jewel thieves, who we of course know personally, not
really personally, but know the story of from Exactly Right's
podcast Infamous International, the Pink Panthers story, So go fucking
check that out.

Speaker 1 (01:04:17):
You like your haste, You're gonna love that series. It's
real good.

Speaker 2 (01:04:21):
What real good. So the investigation is handed over to
London Metropolitan Police's Elite Flying Squad, which handles organized crime
and major burglaries. And they're called that awesome name because
they were formed originally to fly between London's burrows, not
to be tied down to anyone specific borrow, so cover

(01:04:42):
the whole damn thing. Because there was no sign of
forced entry at the front of the store, investigators initially
believed the burglars had help from an inside figure. They
figure out that the thieves had been able to disable
two different alarms, but not before one alarm sent a
silent signal to the monitoring company, which was the one
that kel and had checked off and then said it

(01:05:03):
was fine and left. So when that went off, they
were like already in there, basically, oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:05:08):
And they just everyone froze.

Speaker 2 (01:05:10):
I think, yeah, I think they were drilled. Now let's
freeze and not move and it'll look like a false
alarm and then we can keep going, which is pretty smart.

Speaker 1 (01:05:18):
Fuck it must have been so scary on the inside
of that, I know, like nobody's christ so sneezing.

Speaker 2 (01:05:23):
Investigators can also tell that the robbers access the basement
by taking the customer elevator up to the second floor.
They just took an elevator, they jammed it there and
then climbed down through the shaft into the basement where
they forced the doors open. Okay, so like the shaft
of the elevator wasn't secure, and then from the equipment
left scattered on the floor in the state of the

(01:05:45):
safe deposit boxes, it's clear that the thieves had used sledgehammers, crowbars,
and angle grinders to open the box, so they just
went for it. But before they did that, they had
to get themselves into the vault, and police can see
exactly how they did that too, directly underneath the gaping
hole in the wall of the vault. The thieves have
left behind a highly specialized drill with a diamond bit.

(01:06:07):
How ironic that they use a diamond bit to get
to fight.

Speaker 1 (01:06:10):
And they don't take it with them.

Speaker 2 (01:06:13):
That's a thing of like, you know, the Tiffany fucking
skylight in the house was worth more money than they
had in debt. Like, that's that's like the drill bit.
It's actually one of your favorite drill bits. It's called
a Hilty d D three point fifty. You love that
all the Hilty.

Speaker 1 (01:06:28):
That's the one that I use for my really important heist.

Speaker 2 (01:06:31):
Yeah, you always say it's the Porsche of diamond bits.
It's kind of annoying you say a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:06:37):
Look, I'm trying to stop.

Speaker 2 (01:06:40):
This kind of drill didn't exist when the Hat and
Garden Safe Deposit Limited opened in the forties. Like they didn't.
They couldn't even fathom this kind of fucking drill.

Speaker 1 (01:06:49):
Bit somewhere maybe sometime in the future when they use
the things that are in the boxes to break into
the box. Maybe, But until then, let's not worry about it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:58):
I bet they'll remodel this place in the New York
two thousand, Like we don't need it. It doesn't need
to be one hundred years you know.

Speaker 1 (01:07:04):
Yeah, they're gonna have flying cars, TVs inside of their eyes. Right.

Speaker 2 (01:07:09):
These drills cost several thousand dollars and are used in
big construction projects, and basically you can't just pick one
up at the Hardware store, so when they try to
trace it, it had been stolen from a construction site
just four months prior and only half a mile away
from Hatton Garden, So clearly they were like planing this thing.
There's footage of the men who took the drill because

(01:07:31):
of CCTV, but you can't tell who they are. When
investigators go to look for the CCTV footage from the
vault itself, they find that the company's hard drive had
been ripped straight out of the wall. Oh and all
the footage from the Safe Deposit company is gone, but
footage from neighboring businesses is available, and as it starts
to come in, investigators start to piece together what happened.

(01:07:52):
So here's what happened. Just after eight pm on the
night of Thursday, April second, a white van pulls up
outside the Safe Deposit building. Three men get out, all
dressed like construction workers in yellow vests, so like so smart.
If someone were like walking down the street, they'd be like,
these our workers are supposed to be here.

Speaker 1 (01:08:08):
I feel like those yellow vests are probably good to
have around no matter what.

Speaker 2 (01:08:12):
Yellow vests and a ladder like you can get in anywhere, right.

Speaker 1 (01:08:15):
Maybe and maybe some of those big kind of two
big gloves, you know, they're like workmen's gloves that almost
no one has that like leather ones.

Speaker 2 (01:08:23):
Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's only eight pm, so there are
passers on the street, but none of them give them
men a second glance. They just look like they're supposed
to be there. So two of the men walk past
the main entrance, and one of them, holding a big
bag on his shoulder, is blocking his face. He opens
the door with seems like with the key, Like it
almost seems like there's more information here than they get,
but like maybe there is an inside person I don't know.

(01:08:46):
So that man goes to the back of the building
and lets the others in through the fire exit, and
the men walk through a hallway that was shared with
another business, and they were picked up on that business's
security footage. I think they thought it was part of
the bank one, and so they didn't try to hide themselves.
So the footage shows a total of six men, all
disguised as workers, all with their faces covered by dust masks.

(01:09:10):
Immediately police notice that this is not the Pink Panthers,
first of all, because those guys are like.

Speaker 1 (01:09:15):
Young and fun right, they're young, they're fun. They do
things to get like CCTV footage to go viral. Right,
they're not trying to hide anything. No, no.

Speaker 2 (01:09:24):
And also these robbers seem old. Oh the exposed skin
they can see looks wrinkly, and there are flashes of
white hair. Some of them are moving slowly like they're
seemingly in pain, as you do when you're fucking older. Hey,
one of them is having breathing difficulties. All he brings
in bags of heavy tools through the fire exit. And

(01:09:46):
there's also the one who enter through the front door
is also wearing a red wig. So by nine pm
the robbers are inside the building and are no longer
visible on this one camera. They reappear at eight am
on Friday morning. So that's how it took him like
twelve fucking hours to do the the mess they'd made
to do. Oh okay, yeah, But the thing is when
they show back up at eight am, they're empty handed.
They don't have any of the equipment they brought in,

(01:10:08):
nor do they have any bags of loot. Of seventy
seven million dollars worth of loot, you know, which is
probably a lot. The investigators keep scrubbing through the footage,
and when they get to the night of Saturday, April fourth,
the night before Easter, they discovered that this audacious gang
of seemingly old dudes come back to the scene of
the crime the fucking following satur like that following night,

(01:10:31):
which like does not happen. Professionals do not do that.

Speaker 1 (01:10:34):
No, that's what serial killers do.

Speaker 2 (01:10:36):
Yeah, So actually only four men come back, and it
appears that two out of the gang decided it was
too risky to come back, so only four guys come back.
The investigators figure out that the thieves hadn't had their
right kind of equipment that they needed to knock over
a wall of the safe deposit boxes that was against
the concrete they had drilled through, so they come back
with a more specialized hydraulic pump to finish the job.

(01:10:57):
So they hadn't gotten their loot yet, and they're like,
we did, it's all this work.

Speaker 1 (01:11:01):
They delt go get a different tool and come.

Speaker 2 (01:11:03):
Back, and it took them from when they left Friday
morning till like Saturday evening to get that tool.

Speaker 1 (01:11:11):
Like, Jerry, if you could call me back, this is
actually pressing I do, don't I really don't.

Speaker 2 (01:11:17):
I know it's Eastern. I know you're having your what
do they call it, You're having your.

Speaker 1 (01:11:21):
Bank holiday with your family. But if I could just
borrow that diamond head drill bit right.

Speaker 2 (01:11:28):
So on the footage from that night, they're finally seen
leaving with garbage pails and garbage bags presumably full of diamonds, jewels,
gold and cash that are had been that had been
stored and then now empty safe deposit boxes. So they
got what they came for two nights, two nights ago.
But the biggest break from this second wave a footage
comes when investigators see street footage of two of the

(01:11:49):
burglars arriving back on the scene in a white Mercedes,
not the white rental van from the first night. Of course,
London has an automatic plate recognition system bob blah blah,
they're able to track the car. They track it and
they find it parked in front of a nondescript house,
and they're floored when they see who comes out of it.

Speaker 1 (01:12:09):
I literally have seen this movie, have you really? Yeah? Yeah,
you know, I love the British and their entertainment.

Speaker 2 (01:12:16):
Of course you have so the hat and gardens heist,
you know, it feels like a throwback to a different
era in London crime. And that's because it is the
man police see going back and forth to the Mercedes
with all the loot that they track down, you know,
in that house, turns out to be a career criminal

(01:12:37):
named John Collins who goes by Kenny and guess how
old he is?

Speaker 1 (01:12:41):
The first numbers that popped in my head was seventy six,
seventy seven.

Speaker 2 (01:12:45):
Oh shit, good one seventy seven. That's like my dad's age.

Speaker 1 (01:12:52):
Right, it might be because I saw the movie that right.

Speaker 2 (01:12:54):
Well, yeah, that's a weird specific thing. Or how old
is it? Michael Kine? I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:12:58):
Oh, I'm Michael.

Speaker 2 (01:12:59):
He's not Michael. I love do it again.

Speaker 1 (01:13:02):
I'm Michael Kane.

Speaker 2 (01:13:03):
Thank you. I don't think we gave you enough credit
when you it's not good at all.

Speaker 1 (01:13:07):
No, it's literally it's it's an impression of somebody else's impression.

Speaker 2 (01:13:10):
Basically, right, okay, but we get it. So he's not
played by Michael Kane. He goes by Kenny and police
have long assumed him to be retired from fucking doing
shit like this, cause he's seventy seven. Kenny Collins had
been involved with robberies going back to the nineteen sixties.
He'd been in and out of jail lots of times
over the years, but he'd been out since nineteen eighty eight.

(01:13:31):
And as investigators follow Collins around London, he leads them
right to his accomplices and it's a veritable who's who
of London's most infamous heists. Yeah, it's like they are
trying to make a movie. Seriously.

Speaker 1 (01:13:43):
Yeah, they were trying to keep Michael Kane in.

Speaker 2 (01:13:45):
Business since right, I think went t him first and like,
if we do this and pull this off and then
get hot, will you play me? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:13:51):
Will you please help us get the movie.

Speaker 2 (01:13:53):
Right, Yes, get the movie made and then we'll do
the heist.

Speaker 1 (01:13:56):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:13:57):
So at a pub, Collins meets up with a seventy
six year old man named Brian Reider and that who
Michael Caine plays. And maybe that's why you thought he
was seventy cents Cary.

Speaker 1 (01:14:06):
I'm Michael Kaye. I was right.

Speaker 2 (01:14:11):
So this guy, Brian Reader is a legend. He had
been involved with the robbery of Alloyd's Bank in nineteen
seventy one, which he was never caught for. He had
lived on the Lamb in Spain's coast to del Soul
for many years, taking advantage of a last extradition agreement
between the UK and Spain. I'm sure it was the
most beautiful time of his life.

Speaker 1 (01:14:32):
I'm real.

Speaker 2 (01:14:33):
And after returning to London, he was ultimately nabbed in
the nineteen eighty three Brinks Matt robbery, in which thieves
dropped gold bullion that would currently be worth about one
hundred and fifty million dollars from a.

Speaker 1 (01:14:46):
Warehouse Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (01:14:49):
It was while he was serving time for these bullion
capers through the nineties that Reader is said to have
first hatched the plan for the Hatton Garden heist, but
he didn't wind up following through until decades later after
his wife Lynn died of cancer. Oh and some people
think that he was mostly motivated just by grief or
boredom and maybe the desire to pull off one last job.

Speaker 1 (01:15:12):
He was like kind of fuck it all.

Speaker 2 (01:15:14):
Yeah, Like Lynn was like, I need to stand on
the straight and narrow, and he's like, gotcha, and he did,
and then she passed and he was like, what's it
all worth?

Speaker 1 (01:15:24):
Also, I swear to God, I think when you start
doing stuff like that. I can only compare it to
like going on stage in front of a bunch of people. Yeah,
but you just the adrenaline becomes its own thing. Or
it's like you want a shot of that again, You
want to like get that feeling again.

Speaker 2 (01:15:41):
Hell yes, nothing will ever match it. So police figure
out that the first guy, Kenny Collins, who was not
in great health, posted up at an office building across
the street from Hatton Garden and acted as a lookout.
And they also figure out that Ryan Reader was one
of the two men who did not return to the
scene of the crime to finish the job. That could
possibly be because he was seventy six and carrying a

(01:16:03):
bunch of heavy fucking loot out of a you know,
might not be the best idea.

Speaker 1 (01:16:09):
I think it threw his back out. It sparked his
gout exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:16:16):
So the Flying Squad, you know, the policemen, follow Collins
to another pub where he meets up with two other men.
These men two are familiar to the investigators. When is
a sixty seven year old named Terry Perkins. He's known
for the nineteen eighty three Security Express robbery, where he
and others rob cash from an armored car. It's so funny.
It's like these are like the who's who of this thing.

Speaker 1 (01:16:39):
They're like the basketball champions from high school and it's
like they're from the member the championship where they've played
this guy exactly exactly heighst Championships.

Speaker 2 (01:16:48):
Then it's something to think that these are all lovable
like working class heroes and you know, in many ways.
But they did hurt people. I will say. In the
Security Express robbery, the group poured gasoline on the driver
and shook a bottle of matches in his face until
he gave them the keys.

Speaker 1 (01:17:04):
Very traumatizing.

Speaker 2 (01:17:05):
Yes, the really traumatizing. They didn't have fired him though.
These three robberies, Lloyd's Bank, Bringsmatt and Security Express are
among the most infamous in British history. So it's just like,
let's get the gang.

Speaker 1 (01:17:17):
Together, yeah, like Olympic style.

Speaker 2 (01:17:19):
Though, Yeah, being a grandpa isn't doing it for.

Speaker 1 (01:17:22):
Me, right, I need understandable. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:17:26):
The other man at the pub with Collins and Perkins
is a fifty nine year old named Daniel Jones. Jones
doesn't have the same like you know, lengthy criminal history
or pedigree, but he is younger and in better health,
and investigators are pretty sure that he's there to do
any heavy lifting that the older men couldn't do. And
I mean, this is such a guy richie fucking plot

(01:17:47):
of a movie.

Speaker 1 (01:17:48):
Yeah. I was going to say that younger guy sounds
like that's where our Jason Statham gets to come in
and help the oldies.

Speaker 2 (01:17:55):
Yes, that is generous, though, Let's just say in what way?
They just look like dads. They look like British dads,
you know what I mean, like except for the except
the Michael King guy who is hot, Like they're just
British pasty, your British dad.

Speaker 1 (01:18:10):
That's all the better.

Speaker 2 (01:18:12):
Yeah, but they're very normal looking people.

Speaker 1 (01:18:15):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:18:16):
So I also love that, like we need someone younger
to carry shit, Let's get a fifty eight year old,
fifty nine year old. You know, it's like that shows
you like what how bad? How bad they were? Oh no,
shit against fifty nine year old. I just like, I'm
forty four in my back hurts, so like you know, yeah,
it's not you get a twenty eight year old, not
a fifty fucking whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:18:36):
You're old. And also they were like, can you help
me with this email? And he's like now I actually can't.
I can't ask your daughter.

Speaker 2 (01:18:44):
There's a fifth man that they find out was involved.
He's a fifty eight year old named Carl Wood, and he,
like Jones, was relatively youthful, so he was also tasked
with carrying heavy equipment. And he also didn't return to
finish the job. So it was just the four men.
The sixth man, the one who wore the red wig.
His identity continued to elude police. When police first hear

(01:19:08):
the other five men talking, they refer to him as Basil.
Seems like they don't even know his identity, which is
so usual suspects of him, you know, Basil. Scotland Yards
surveils the men, they put cameras on them and shit,
and they learn Terry Perkins, Danny Jones, and Kenny Collins
are planning to meet on May nineteenth to divide up
their spoils. Like they talk, They talk like fucking schoolgirls

(01:19:29):
about this shit with like no no thought that maybe
we're being recorded by the police.

Speaker 1 (01:19:35):
And also they have no idea that what's up even exists.
They can't do it anywhere else besides like on the phone.

Speaker 2 (01:19:43):
Right at a pub. They like go to the pub
they always go to put a camera in there and
record them. It's just like, ah, not complex.

Speaker 1 (01:19:51):
They love their pubs over in England, they really.

Speaker 2 (01:19:54):
Do amen, Okay. So on May nineteenth, two hundred officers
rate twelve differentreses with warrants to arrest the five known
burglars and three other men who worked with them. After
the fact, police find Terry Perkins, Danny Jones, and Kenny
Collins like the man guys together at a dining room
table with a gold smelter set on it and about

(01:20:16):
four million dollars worth of gold between them, about to
fucking burn that shit down and sell it.

Speaker 1 (01:20:21):
Yeah. I make little rings, fun necklaces.

Speaker 2 (01:20:25):
That's they're all making best friend necklace charms.

Speaker 1 (01:20:28):
Ah, I love heisting with you, best heisters. What a
heist it's been.

Speaker 2 (01:20:36):
So basically everyone gets arrested and the five men are
charged along with the three accomplices, and Brian Reader, Danny Jones,
Terry Perkins, and Kenny Collins all plead guilty. They first
pretend that they don't know each other, and then they
show them the video of them at the pub drinking
together and it's like okay. They're all sentenced to between
six and seven years in prison. Three out of the

(01:20:59):
four men and Carl wood Or later found guilty as
for a basl. This mysterious sixth man, he evades law
enforcement for another three years with about fifteen million dollars
worth of stolen goods nice, which is about two thirds
of the spoils. So he goes and has some fucking fun.

Speaker 1 (01:21:15):
Was Basil an inside man? I wonder, like, why did
he get so much money?

Speaker 2 (01:21:21):
I don't know. I think they were, like some of
them were holding on to it because they were in
the process of splitting it up and doing things with it.

Speaker 1 (01:21:27):
So like, oh, hold this big bag over here.

Speaker 2 (01:21:29):
Right, let's luck leave this one for last.

Speaker 1 (01:21:32):
Yeah, calls the police, grabs the bag.

Speaker 2 (01:21:36):
Right. So finally, in twenty eighteen, a fifty seven year
old man named Michael Seed is arrested. Police find hundreds
of thousands of dollars worth of jewels and gold bricks
in the apartment that he lives in in London as
like not far away, as well as an electric smelter,
and he's ultimately convicted. He's Basil, by the way, He's

(01:21:56):
ultimately convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison, and
so even more if he doesn't repay six million pounds
in damages, which is about eight million dollars today. So
what would you take seven years or you have to
pay six you get to keep.

Speaker 1 (01:22:11):
That eight didn't he have fifteen? Doesn't ve him was
seven million?

Speaker 2 (01:22:15):
Yeah, well I bet he spent a shit ton of
it right.

Speaker 1 (01:22:19):
Still it's millions of dollars.

Speaker 2 (01:22:20):
It's a lot of dollars.

Speaker 1 (01:22:22):
Like Lefton was seven and he's spent four. He still
has three million bills. I think we all know. No
one with money now goes to jail. That's the whole thing.
That's why everybody wants money.

Speaker 2 (01:22:35):
Yeah, we've been trying to teach everyone that for eight
and a half years.

Speaker 1 (01:22:38):
It's I mean, and also that's why it'll this is
semester to change because it's a fucking scam. It's just
not fair. It's just not fair.

Speaker 2 (01:22:48):
So Hatt and Garden Safe Deposit Limited has since sadly
for everyone, gone out of business. But a plan is
in the works to move the entire preserved crime scene
of the basement vault we have the photo of to
a museum that people can actually go visit, yes, which
is such a mess at sid OCD. Person like myself's
worst nightmare. I mean, it's not something I want to

(01:23:11):
look at, you know, I want to the story of
the heist has been adapted into two different movies, with
one with Michael Kain, of course, and a limited series,
and that is the story of the Hatton Garden Heist,
the largest burglary in British legal history, and a real
life one last job for a crew of notorious thieves.

Speaker 1 (01:23:32):
I mean they actually were imitating art because obviously I
never believed that one Last heist really existed in real life.
That seemed like a bit of a construct, but now
we know it actually did happen recently.

Speaker 2 (01:23:51):
Do you think that all of them, especially Brian Reader,
who was played by Michael Kaine, would do it all
over again because he got to be played by Michael Kay. Yes, honor,
an honor to be played by Michael Kine.

Speaker 1 (01:24:04):
You did something with your life to the degree that
Michael Kine's getting involved in telling others about it.

Speaker 2 (01:24:11):
Yeah, maybe his late wife Lynn is looking down from
heaven being like you cheeky so and so.

Speaker 1 (01:24:17):
Yeah, I love it when you break the law. Baby.

Speaker 2 (01:24:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:24:21):
No, she's the one that wanted him to stop. She'd
be like you, son of a bitch.

Speaker 2 (01:24:26):
But he did, he did it. He waited, he did waiting.
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:24:30):
But that would piss her off even more because she's like, oh,
that's just manipulative. If you get now I'm doing an
Irish accent. That doesn't make sense. That was a beautiful
button of you know what. You're never too old.

Speaker 2 (01:24:42):
Come on, guys, too old? Yeah? One last in you?
One last what in you?

Speaker 1 (01:24:47):
There's a lot of people sitting around there like, oh, no,
I'm forty one blue Blue Bluff. Well what about Michael
Kaine's friend.

Speaker 2 (01:24:54):
I'm Michael Caine who fucking filmed the movie Kane, who's
still active on Twitter.

Speaker 1 (01:24:59):
God bless this soul.

Speaker 2 (01:25:02):
We should all strive to be a little more like
Michael Caine.

Speaker 1 (01:25:04):
I agree, I agree.

Speaker 2 (01:25:06):
Thanks for listening to this episode, this long ass episode.

Speaker 1 (01:25:09):
This is one of those episodes. It's going to get
you on a nice like a car trip VERSTI. But
only if you're by yourself or around someone that is
absolutely that got you into this podcast, right, No new people.

Speaker 2 (01:25:25):
No, like even your dog maybe shouldn't listen to this.

Speaker 1 (01:25:29):
No, being bossy with your boyfriend and being like you
have to live this isn't one of those.

Speaker 2 (01:25:32):
This isn't his, this isn't for him.

Speaker 1 (01:25:34):
Oh wait a second, we're saying it at the end
when it doesn't matter. It's too late. Guys, thanks for
being here with us. We love you.

Speaker 2 (01:25:43):
We do stay sexy and don't get murdered.

Speaker 3 (01:25:47):
Good Bay, Elvis, do you want a cookie?

Speaker 1 (01:25:58):
This has been an exactly right product.

Speaker 2 (01:26:00):
Our senior producer is Alejandra Keck.

Speaker 1 (01:26:02):
Our managing producers Hannah Kyle Crichton.

Speaker 2 (01:26:05):
Our editor is Aristotle Oscevedo.

Speaker 1 (01:26:07):
This episode was mixed by Leona Sculace.

Speaker 2 (01:26:10):
Our researchers are Maren mcclashan and Ali Elkin.

Speaker 1 (01:26:13):
Email your hometowns to My Favorite Murder at gmail dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:26:16):
Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at my Favorite
Murder and Twitter at my favee Murder. Bye Bye,