Inspire, Achieve, Repeat: A Grab Bag of Killer Motivational Speakers

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, campers, Grab your marshmallows, and gather around the true
crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie and I'm Whitney,
and we're here to tell you a true story that
is way stranger than fiction, or roasting murderers and marshmallows
around the true crime campfire.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Motivational speakers started really gaining popularity in the seventies and eighties,
the golden age of self help, and in recent years
they've been even more in demand, especially in the business world.
You can't swing a dead cat these days without hitting
some self proclaimed entrepreneurial guru who claims to have the
formula for success and would be happy to share it
with you if you sign up for their seminar for

(00:40):
the low low price of thousands of dollars or if
you buy their TikTok course. But you don't have to
get certified or trained to be a motivational speaker, and
their industry is almost totally unregulated, meaning anybody with a
megawat smile and a catchphrase can do it. And according
to a Harvard study, most of these guys folks more
on entertaining you than teaching you the way to win.

(01:03):
It all makes you wonder are the ones who claim
to have all the answers really so enlightened? Well, today
we're going to tell you about two who most definitely weren't.
This is Inspire, Achieve, Repeat a grab bag of killer
motivational speakers. Case one hired hand the killing of Jeffrey Locker.

(01:33):
So campers for this one were in New York, New York,
July fifteenth, two thousand and nine. Lois Locker was at
home when she got a call from her husband, Jeffrey,
at about ten fifteen pm. He wanted to let her
know that he'd gotten a flat tire just before getting
on the Triborough Bridge, which connects Manhattan to Long Island,
so he was going to be late getting home, but

(01:53):
Lois shouldn't worry. There was someone there who was helping
him and he'd be home soon. Jeffrey wasn't home soon.
When he hadn't shown up by the early hours of
the morning, Lois called the police to report a missing
but he wasn't missing for long. Early in the day,
a police officer spotted a man sitting still in a
parked car on a street close to the Wagner Housing projects.

(02:15):
In East Harlem. A closer look showed this was far
more serious than some one's sleeping went off in his car.
The man Jeffrey Locker was dead and looked to have
been killed with some serious brutality. His hands were bound
behind his back, and there was an angry red line
around his neck where it looked like someone had tried

(02:36):
to garrot him in the front of His shirt was
soaked in blood and cut multiple times. Jeffrey had been
stabbed again and again. What the hell happened here? East
Harlem is a tough part of town with one of
the highest murder rates of any New York neighborhood, But
for some one to be bound and possibly tortured in

(02:57):
his own car before being stabbed to death, that was
a startling and horrific death. Jeffrey Locker lived twenty miles
away in another world, the green suburban sprawl of Windmere
on Long Island. His wallet was still with his body,
although empty of cash, so officers were able to match
him with a new missing person's report pretty much immediately.

(03:20):
A pair of officers went to deliver the sad news
of Jeffrey's death to Lois and their three kids. Well
theoretically sad news. Anyway, neither Lois nor the kids seemed
particularly shaken up to learn that their husband and father
had been butchered in the city. They didn't seem surprised either,
No big emotional scenes, not much emotion at all. It

(03:43):
was like the detectives had stumbled onto a family of
Vulcans taking a long island vacation. After hearing about her
father's death, the locker's thirteen year old daughter said she
was going upstairs to go back to sleep. It was
one of the weirdest, most uncomfortable things the detectives had
experienced in their careers. Things stayed weird when the pathologist

(04:04):
and crime scene technicians examined the body and the car.
Jeffrey had been stabbed six times, with the injuries coming
in at an upward angle that suggested he'd been attacked
by someone sitting in the passenger seat right beside him.
The knife was what had killed him. The wounds on
Jeffrey's neck suggested an attempt to strangle him from the
back seat using a rope or cable, but for some

(04:26):
reason that had failed. It was a strange scene, and
why had Jeffrey even been in the neighborhood anyway. The
Wagner projects are right by the Tribrop Bridge where Jeffrey
had said he'd gotten a flat tire. But none of
his tires were flat, none had been recently replaced, and
there were no fingerprints around the wheel wells or on
the hubcaps where somebody changing a tire would touch. Jeffrey

(04:49):
Locker hadn't had a flat tire, he'd lied to his wife.
Jeffrey Locker was to all appearances a successful man, a
motivational speaker specialized in corporate work. He had a crunchier
kind of approach than many others in the field, emphasizing
that people should find work they really enjoyed doing. Many

(05:10):
clients came to treat him essentially as a therapist as
well as a business aid, spilling out their personal as
well as their professional worries. He was mostly well liked.
East Harlem is mostly a low income, Hispanic and Black neighborhood,
but it wasn't all that unusual to see white guys
in nice cars cruising around. There are a couple of

(05:30):
things that aren't so easy to buy out in suburban
Long Island, namely sex and drugs. An early thought among
investigators was that Jeffrey was there for one or the
other and something had gone badly wrong.

Speaker 3 (05:43):
Their suspicions narrowed down when a witness said she'd seen
Jeffrey buying condoms from a bodega the night before. His
cell phone record showed multiple calls to a local number.
So did Jeffrey have a regular East Harlem girlfriend he
was there to see? Under cover of a fake flat tie,
the police started canvassing the neighborhood's ladies of negotiable affection

(06:05):
to see if any of them remembered talking with Jeffrey Locker.
But then, just hours after the body had been found,
they got a break. The bank told them someone had
just used Jeffrey's bank card to withdraw eight hundred dollars
the maximum daily amount, from a convenience store. ATM Security
footage showed a couple, a man and a woman withdrawing
the cash. Was it Jeffrey's girlfriend and her pimp? After

(06:30):
police circulated images of the couple, it didn't take long
for a confidential informant to id the man police wanted
to talk to, Kenneth Minor. Kenneth was a minor league criminal,
a thief, and a low level drug dealer from the
Wagner projects, and police quickly picked him up. As is
often the case with people interrogated by the police, Kenneth

(06:52):
started with a blanket denial. They had the wrong guy.
That wasn't him on the security tape. There are thousands
of guys that looked like that. A couple things here.
One police are absolutely allowed to light to suspects, and two,
when you stab somebody multiple times, there's an excellent chance
you're also going to cut yourself. So the detectives had

(07:15):
a fake report from the crime lab made up and
showed it to Kenneth, telling him they'd found his DNA
in the car, and that was enough to get Kenneth talking.
He'd been hanging out on the street when Jeffrey had
pulled up, rolled down his window and called him over.
Kenneth figured the guy wanted to buy some drugs and
went over. But what Jeffrey wanted was something with the

(07:35):
potential to get Kenneth into a lot more trouble. He
wanted a gun. Jeffrey was a clean cut guy, and
Kenneth's first thought was, this dude's gotta be a cup.
Even when he had second thoughts about that Jeffrey just
weirded him out a complete stranger, eagerly asking him for
a gun. Kenneth decided to scare him off. He was

(07:58):
a big six foot four guy, and he knew how
to act scary. Jeffrey drove off, but he came back
twenty minutes later and asked to speak to Kenneth again.
Kenneth was curious. Now, usually when he scared someone, they
stayed scared. When Jeffrey asked him to get in the
car and listen, he did. Jeffrey didn't waste much time

(08:18):
in telling Kenneth what he wanted. As Kenneth later told detectives,
he wanted to do a Cavorkian as I'm sure many
of you know. Jack Cavorkian was a doctor who famously
advocated for voluntary euthanasia. When pressed on what exactly Jeffrey
had asked him to do, Kenneth said, he said, I
want you to kill me.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
Oh what the fuck?

Speaker 3 (08:43):
Even for hard boiled Manhattan homicide detectives, this was a
new story. Kenneth was an obviously intelligent guy, but he
didn't seem like the creative type who had come up
with something like this. Out of thin air. Still, they
defaulted to the standard cop reaction, this is bullshit.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:02):
The version they were leaning toward was that Kenneth had
decided to rob an obviously wealthy guy cruising the neighborhood.
He'd found Jeffrey in the car, then tortured him until
Jeffrey gave up the pin for his bank card. Then
Kenneth had stabbed him again and again and again and
left him for dead. But then the District Attorney's office
chased down the phone records from the night Jeffrey died. Remember,

(09:24):
he'd made multiple calls that night, and investigators initially suspected
they were to an East Harlem sex worker. In fact,
they'd been to a guy named Melvin Fleming.

Speaker 2 (09:34):
Melvin was a fifty five year old heroin addict and
occasional shoplifter who was living on the streets in East Harlem.
Four days before Jeffrey Locker had been stabbed to death,
he'd spotted Melvin panhandling for change outside of a bodega.
Jeffrey gave him a five dollars bill, more than enough
to get Melvin's attention and by a little of his time.

(09:55):
Once Melvin was in the car with him. Jeffrey made
it clear what he wanted. As Melvin later testified, he
informed me that he was looking for someone to make
him dead. Holy shit, what a sentence. Jeffrey explained that
he was in a deep financial hole and needed to
help out his family. He'd taken out extensive life insurance policies,

(10:16):
but they wouldn't pay out if he killed himself. He
needed to be murdered. He'd pay Melvin ten thousand dollars
to get hold of a gun and kill him, with
the money to be taken from his corpse after the fact.
Melvin said, sure, but he was lying. He had no
intention of getting involved in a murder or of hurting
Jeffrey at all. But this guy reeked of both cash

(10:39):
and desperation, and Melvin figured he could make some decent
money by stringing him along for a while. And he
was right. Jeffrey handed over a thousand dollars in neatly
bound bills as a down payment. Jeffrey had a preference.
He wanted to be shot in the head, quick and
hopefully painless. Maybe Melvin could do it. While Jeffrey was

(11:00):
kneeling down to change a tire, shoot him in the
back of the head, so Jeffrey didn't even know what
was coming. Melvin said that'd be no problem, but it
had taken him a few days to get a gun.
It was clear to Melvin that Jeffrey was ready, even eager,
to get this done. The two of them, apparently both
quite cheerful, drove around Harlem, scouting for places where one

(11:22):
of them could shoot the other in the head. I know,
it's the most bizarre story I've ever heard. It had
to be somewhere where Jeffrey's body would be quickly discovered,
but not so public that Melvin would get caught. Jeffrey
thought that outside a First Avenue bus depot was a
good spot, but Melvin spotted a security camera. No good.

(11:43):
Melvin gave Jeffrey his cell phone number and they parted ways.
They met up again four days later, and Jeffrey gave
Melvin another down payment, this time three thousand dollars. He'd
get the rest after Jeffrey was dead, which is what
Jeffrey expected to happen. That night, they cruised again. Melvin
testified that Jeffrey told him that they were aware that

(12:05):
he was going to do this here, but never clarified
who they were. He listened as Jeffrey made the call
to his wife, Lois and told her he'd gotten a
flat by the Triborough Bridge, but that there was someone
here to help him with it, setting up his preferred
scenario for all this to go down with Jeffrey shot
in the back of the head while changing a tire.

(12:26):
But before that, Melvin needed to get a gun. He
told Jeffrey he just had to pick it up from
a friend upstairs in an apartment building. Give me twenty minutes,
he told Jeffrey, and left him waiting in the car
and waiting. Melvin didn't come back in twenty minutes. In fact,
he didn't come back at all. Jeffrey blew up his phone,

(12:47):
but Melvin gave him the run around for two hours
until Jeffrey figured out he had no intention of coming back.
Mel Why did you do me like that, Jeffrey said
in his last call. The answer was obvious. Melvin gotten
four thousand dollars out of this weird dude and wanted
nothing at all to do with whatever happened next. Jeffrey
probably didn't give a crap about losing the money. He

(13:09):
was playing for much higher sakes than that he had
an existing five million dollar life insurance policy and over
the last couple of years, had taken out multiple new
policies totaling over twelve million dollars. If Jeffrey could get
someone to help him stage a convincing murder, he'd set
up his family for life. Taken for a ride by

(13:29):
Melvin Fleming, a disappointed Jeffrey cruised the streets searching for
someone to give him what he wanted, and he spotted
Kenneth Minor. Obviously, after hearing from Melvin Fleming, Kenneth's statement
that Jeffrey had wanted to do a Kivorkian rang a
lot more true to the investigators, but they still needed
to figure out just what the hell had happened.

Speaker 3 (13:51):
According to Kenneth, he felt sorry for Jeffrey. Jeffrey told
him about his financial struggles, about how he had to
look after his family, and that struck a court with Kenneth.
According to him, anyway, Kenneth Miner was a long way
from being a saint, and it's perfectly possible that he
just accepted what Melvin Fleming had refused the chance to
make some money by giving Jeffrey Locker the death. He

(14:12):
wanted just like Melvin, though, Kenneth told Jeffrey that he
first needed to get a gun, So Jeffrey gave him
sixty dollars and Kenneth went to a friend to get
the peace. And this just shows what a fish out
of water Jeffrey was in the situation. You are not
getting a gun for sixty dollars. What Kenneth got with
some liquor and cocaine and he got wasted. Hours later,

(14:35):
near four am, he wanted to get more money out
of Jeffrey and called him up. Jeffrey certainly had money,
but he desperately needed more of it. In January of
two thousand and nine, the Locker's joint checking account had
eighty four thousand dollars in it. By July, when Jeffrey died,
it had one thousand dollars. They were three quarters of

(14:56):
a million dollars in debt. In two thousand and nine,
of course, was right in the middle of the Great Recession.
If you'd lost a lot of money, it could be
hard to see how you'd ever get it back, especially
for someone like Jeffrey. Companies were cutting costs left, right
and center, and it was hard to justify spending cash
on bringing in a motivational speaker. And then there was

(15:17):
Lou Pearlman. In the early nineties, the entertainment world was
being conquered by new kids on the block, and Pearlman
thought I could do that well, not him personally. He
spent three million dollars on nationwide auditions, the end result
of which was the creation of the Backstreet Boys, who,
as you probably know, did quite well. A few years

(15:37):
later he repeated the trick with in Sync, who again
did quite well. But Lou Pearlman was a crook who
immediately started ripping his bands off, and in addition to
his Transcontinental Records label, he founded an airline and a
savings company which only existed on paper as a cover
for one of the longest running ponzi schemes in US history.

(15:58):
One of the things about ponzy schemes is that the
people who get in early can make a lot of money.
Jeffrey Locker had invested two hundred and fifty thousand dollars
with Pearlman and had doubled his money. Jeffrey had also
brought other people into the scheme. It all inevitably came
crashing down, and now Jeffrey was facing hundreds of thousands

(16:18):
of dollars in fraud suits. So Jeffrey was in a deep,
deep hole. And while the financial crisis must certainly have
added fresh urgency, Jeffrey had started buying his additional life
insurance policies a couple of years before that. In fact,
right after lou Pearlman was arrested and his Ponzi scheme collapsed,
that was when Jeffrey Locker started thinking that the only

(16:39):
way to help his family was to arrange his own death.
And did his family know It's hard to come to
any other conclusion than that, they absolutely did go. There's
an email to Lois where he tells her to hang
tough with the lawyers after he's gone, and one of
his teams sons texted Jeffrey a couple of weeks before

(17:02):
he died with the video thing, do one for my
sister as well. Remember you won't be there to give
her away or any of that. Oh my goodness, which
suggests Jeffrey was making farewell messages for his kids and
that Jeffrey and possibly Lois had explained the whole thing
to their kids, like, oh my god, how do you
sit down with your children explain to them that you're

(17:24):
going to take your own life like it's staggering. It's cruel.

Speaker 2 (17:28):
My god, I can't imagine. I guess absolutely bananas.

Speaker 3 (17:33):
No videos were found, by the way, their house was
never searched. There's obviously some serious moral questions here, like hey, Lois,
how about you try and talk about this. But nothing
Jeffrey's family did or didn't do appeared to be criminal.

Speaker 2 (17:49):
There's no question that what Kenneth Miner did was criminal.
He didn't come back with a gun, but he did
have some phone cord and possibly a knife. He said
Jeffrey had a knife in it glove box, and Melvin
Fleming said the same thing, but some detectives thought Kenneth
brought the knife with him. But the first plan was
the phone cord. To try and make sure there was

(18:10):
no question of suicide, Jeffrey had Kenneth tie his arms
behind his back with one length of cord. Then Kenneth
went into the back seat and tried to garrot Jeffrey.
But the phone cord was old and according to Kenneth,
it kept popping, kept snapping, so there was the knife.
Kenneth has been reluctant to repeat this sense, which makes

(18:32):
me think it's bullshit. But what he first told detectives
was that Jeffrey asked him to hold the knife steady
on the middle of the steering wheel, and that Jeffrey,
with his hands still tied behind his back, plunged his
own torso down onto the blade again and again. Yeah,
it seems a lot more likely to me that he
just asked Kenneth to stab him. The autopsy didn't provide

(18:54):
a definitive answer either way, But I mean, it just
makes more sense to me, doesn't it. Like, I don't
I feel like a lot of people would have trouble
doing that.

Speaker 3 (19:02):
It's not impossible.

Speaker 2 (19:03):
People have certainly done painful things to themselves before. But
just it makes more sense to me than he just
said stab me, and he stabbed him. Kenneth Miner went
on trial in twenty eleven on a murder for higher charge,
with the prosecution arguing that it made no difference that
Jeffrey Locker was both the instigator of the killing and
a willing victim. Kenneth had accepted money to kill someone.

(19:26):
His defense argued that the killing was an assisted suicide,
which is a second degree manslaughter charge. Not murder. None
of Jeffrey Locker's family attended the trial. Kenneth Miner was
found guilty of second degree murder and given a sentence
of twenty years to life, but the case was immediately appealed,
and within two years an appellate court determined the trial

(19:48):
judge had improperly described assisted suicide to the jury. A
new trial started in twenty fourteen, but Kenneth took a
plea deal for first degree manslaughter in a sentence of
twelve years time he'd already served. He was paroled in
twenty nineteen, and his sentence expired in twenty twenty two. Unsurprisingly,
Jeffrey Locker's new twelve million dollar life insurance policies blew

(20:12):
up when the truth came out about his death. But
on his original five million dollar policy, the suicide clause
had expired, and as far as we know, his family
got that money. So wow, this is one of the
weirdest cases I've ever heard about in my life. And
you know that I've heard debate about this one that like, well,

(20:32):
you know, he just did what the guy paid him
to do. It's you know, it's not his fault, but
of course it is I mean, you can't do that,
even if somebody asks you to. You can't just stab
him to death. It's still illegal to kill someone, right.
He should have at bare minimum said no, I'm not
doing that. And of course what you would hope somebody
would do is call the cops, try and get this

(20:54):
person some help. But that's not what happened. Okay, So

(21:25):
moving on to case two. This is self help, the
murder of Robert Vendrick. For this one, we're in Phoenix, Arizona,
February eighteenth, two thousand and eight. Carol Vendrick was getting
really worried about her husband, Robert. He'd flown off to
California several days earlier to meet his friend and business associate,
Gary Shockey. Shockey was supposedly negotiating some big secret contract

(21:50):
with the US government for some kind of computer program,
and Robert had invested a lot of money into the
program to help get it started. Now they were both
supposed to go meet up with some people from the
government to finalize the deal. To Carol, it all sounded
like something out of a spy movie. They were going
to take a boat out to San Clemente Island to
meet up with these guys, and they weren't supposed to

(22:11):
talk about it to anyone. Robert had been so excited
when he kissed her goodbye on the day he left.
This deal was going to make them a lot of money.
But Robert hadn't come home yet, and she couldn't get
hold of him on the phone. Couldn't get hold of
Gary Shawkey either. It all made her very uneasy. She
wasn't sure about this shocky guy. Her husband had invested

(22:34):
a lot of money with this man over the past
few years and hadn't seen a dime in return. Yet.
Gary just kept promising him soon soon. Well. Now her
husband hadn't been on his return flight home, and Carol
was getting a sick feeling in her gut. She called
the police to report Robert missing. At that point, she
was just worried about her lifelong partner. She couldn't have

(22:56):
known what a bizarre nightmare she was about to be
drawn into. But we'll get to that. Let's talk about
this guy, Gary Shockey. Gary is your classic greed goblin.
The top priority in his life from young adulthood on
was to make a lot of money and to make
it fast and easy. The classic get rich quick thing,

(23:16):
and unfortunately for the people who would become his marks.
He had what a lot of con artists have charisma,
which is amazing to me. Based on the footage I've
seen of this guy, he looks like a cross between
like Ricky from Trailer Park Boys and Guy Fieri and
he just seems to ooze slime from every pore.

Speaker 3 (23:37):
But according to a lot of people who knew him,
he could talk you into anything. And I think we
have to believe the people who were there. Yeah, Sometimes
to get sucked in by a con artist's charm, you
really have to be there. And I think charm is
something that morphs overtime, like wolfish oily charm that would
have worked twenty years ago has been replaced by like

(24:00):
a poudy, chiseled charm that talks exclusively in uptalk on Instagram. Now. Yeah,
In the mid eighties, Gary got married and had a
newborn son, but Gary didn't stick around long enough to
be a dad. His son, Joseph, later told the show
American Greed that between the ages of six months and
seven years, he only saw his dad once. What a

(24:23):
prince right. I couldn't find out whether he paid child support,
but my money's on now.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
Yeah, I suspect no.

Speaker 3 (24:32):
One of Gary's hustles was selling vitamins and diet supplements online,
which he did pretty well at though he was like
a kid in a candy store with money, he spent
it as fast as it came in.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
Okay, why are scammers so obsessed with frickin vitamins and
diet supplements? I have lost count of the number of
con artists, And like MLM scammers, I've seen you rip
people off with some kind of.

Speaker 3 (24:57):
Like natural cure that they.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
You supposedly don't want us to know about, like that
Jilly Juice be At you remember her with the poop waterfalls.
I don't know why, but this stuff just seems to
draw these people in, like evil little moss to a flame.

Speaker 3 (25:12):
Because people always want the next thing that's going to
make them healthy and fit, Like just go to the doctor,
eat a balanced diet, and take a grocery store brand
multi vitamin and that'll get you like ninety five percent
of the way there, guys, it's fine. By the time
Gary started his vitamin business, his son was a teenager
and he was interested in getting to know his dad,
so he moved to Florida to reconnect with him, and

(25:32):
he ended up spending a lot of time in Gary's
office watching his dad work his salespeople. He was amazing
at it, Joseph said later, a born leader, and he
worked on his persuasive skills studying the methods of famous
motivational speakers and self help gurus.

Speaker 2 (25:46):
Doesn't me or is that creepy? Like it's just given
aspiring cult leader for me.

Speaker 3 (25:52):
If you want to learn to speak in public better,
it's not a bad idea, but like taken in totality,
it's on the culty side of the scale for sure. Yeah,
it's that episode of the Office where Jim tricks d
White into watching all the dictator speeches before his speech. Like,

(26:12):
that's exactly what it is. He started building a rap
as a motivational speaker himself, jassing up crowds of eager
entrepreneurs with deep thoughts like when you put your mind
to something, you can accomplish anything that you want to accomplish.
Oh wow, man, I've never heard that one before, Gus.

(26:34):
I've never said that to a twelve year old before.

Speaker 2 (26:38):
You've never seen that on a poster at hobby lobby before.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
With a with a kitten on it or something, kitten
in the rocket ship or something. And like many scammers
before him, Gary intuitively understood that if you wanted to
sell yourself, you needed some kind of a hook. The
sparklier and more original, the better. One day Gary saw
an ad for a course in firewalking. Yeah, I mean

(27:06):
when you literally lay down a bunch of hot coals
and walk across them. The training was in Vegas, so
to Gary it was a win win. He ended up
getting certified as a firewalking instructor, and in two thousand
he got himself on Primetime TV by breaking the Guinness
World Record in firewalking. My dude walked one hundred and

(27:27):
sixty five feet across a bed of coals that Guinness
had recorded at eighteen hundred degrees fahrenheit and his feet
came out of it. Fine.

Speaker 2 (27:37):
Yeah, which, holy damn, that is hot. So supposedly, as
long as you just keep on trucking across the coals
and don't slow down too much or stop, you're all
good and it's not gonna like burn your feet down
to little blackened stumps. But I do not get it,
because I have run across plenty of hot pavement in
my day, okay, and that shit hurts like a fsh

(27:58):
no matter how fast I've run. So I really don't
understand how this works. But I guess I'm just gonna
have to take science's work for us.

Speaker 3 (28:06):
Yeah, I think it still hurts. I think you're just like,
it doesn't doesn't like to blister you. And I think
I think part of the I think part of the
the illusion is that you're you keep a straight face.
I think that's I think that's it. Yeah, you know,
it's like, yeah, it's not like laying on a bed.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
I'm gonna try it.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
No, No, no, I would never It's like laying on a
bed of nails. It's not like laying on a bed
of nails, where like you just have to lay flat
and not like adjust your body weight at all and
it doesn't hurt. No, it's not like that. It still hurts.

Speaker 2 (28:34):
I don't want to do that either.

Speaker 3 (28:36):
You could, it wouldn't hurt yet. No, you know, I
was thinking about this though. We've had a lot of
MENSA members, but I think I think this is the
first time we've covered a killer who's been in the
Guinness Book of World Records. Like, correct me if I'm wrong,
but I think this is.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
I think so.

Speaker 3 (28:55):
This is. This is like the spiritual opposite of MENSA membership.
His Guinness Book of World Records.

Speaker 2 (29:03):
You know, Guinness should have a dumbest Murderer category and
they should let us be the judges.

Speaker 3 (29:08):
Please us, get back to us, please. So this became
Gary's big gimmick, and his appearance on Live TV scored
him a level of name recognition that it would have
taken years and years to gain as a motivational speaker
on the seminar circuit. Oh you're the firewalker guy. It

(29:28):
was perfect. It made him seem cool and way more
interesting than he actually was.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
And by the way, done this remind you so much
of James Arthur Ray or other self help guru who
ended up getting somebody killed, remember with the sweat Lodge
gone wrong. One of his big techniques, if you recall,
was to get people to do stuff that was out
of their comfort zones, like bungee jumping or breaking boards
with their fists. It would give his followers this little
adrenaline rush and little sense of pride and achievement, and

(29:57):
that would make them more susceptible to his bullshit. Worked
really really well. But Gary could never settle on one
path to the riches. He was obsessed with getting. He
was constantly shifting from one hustle to the next. He
got into satellite radio, real estate, energy, drink software, more
diet stuff. So his business ventures were like a little

(30:19):
dabble here, a little dabble there, And like a lot
of scam artists, he was constantly pulling up stakes and
moving to another part of the country. Seems a little
unfocused to me, but that didn't stop him from touting
himself as a motivational speaker and results coach, whatever the
hell that means. And he always had a squad of
eager salespeople working for him, people who had fallen under

(30:39):
his spell and believed him when he said he could
make them rich. He was talking his salespeople into investing
with him too.

Speaker 3 (30:47):
Feels a little bit like getting high on your own supply.

Speaker 2 (30:50):
Yeah. So Gary was collecting investors like Pokemon for his
various business ventures, and he was promising them the world
twenty or thirty percent returns on their money. Now, I
know at least some of all's eyebrows just hit the
ceiling because we've seen this before, haven't we if it
seems too good to be true, Folks, it is, But
for a lot of the people Gary Shockey worked his

(31:12):
charms on, those big fat numbers were just too tantalizing
to pass up. In two thousand and one, Gary made
a contact that must have made his heart skip a beat,
a guy named Brian Garvin. Brian had created a software
program that could trol the Internet for email addresses and
grab him up like fish in a great, big net.
With a humongous database of addresses. Like that, Gary could

(31:35):
fish in a ton of new people to help him
market his companies. This is a thing called affiliate marketing. Ideally,
it's a way to make passive income by marketing somebody
else's services or products for commission. I suspect it's a
mixed bag in terms of results.

Speaker 3 (31:52):
And I suspect part of the reason emails are unusable
now because you're flooded with marketing emails.

Speaker 2 (32:00):
Yeah, but Gary was a major fan. Using Brian Garvin software,
he managed to hook thousands of people, hugely expanding his
marketing force. He and Brian made a good team. They
even published an e book together which is still available
online for two bucks called Gary Shawkey's Secrets become an

(32:20):
Expert affiliate marketer Overnight, a title that should have been
a blazon red flag for anybody thinking about buyinet. In
the book, Gary called Brian Garvin his number one student
and claimed that by marketing Gary's products, Brian was making
almost two hundred grand a year. Brian himself later told
American Greed, I did make some money with Gary Shockey,

(32:41):
but that money was about seven or eight grand.

Speaker 3 (32:44):
So just a slight exaggeration.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
It just a teeny weeny little one. The description of
this book on Barnes and Nobles website is something to behold,
full of grandiose claims and bizarre capitalization choices. And Gary
didn't stop at one book. He also wrote an autobiography
called If I Can, Anybody Can. The description reads, in part,

(33:09):
this is the story of acclaimed motivational speaker, Internet marketing guru,
and three times Guinness Book World record holder Gary Shackey.
His life story, as told in his own words with PJ. Russell,
is a heart wrenching, in depth look at his trials
and tribulations and how he ultimately achieved success by overcoming them.
Crackling page turning tension throughout makes it impossible to put

(33:31):
this one down. Ooh yeah, red hot affiliate marketing action
Baby Whooo, you know it's just hot as a pistol.
It also says, in nineteen ninety seven, Gary was inducted
into the International Who's Who of business professionals and entrepreneurs. Today,

(33:51):
Gary Shackey is one of America's top entrepreneurs and personal
results coaches. Uh huh and interesting that in this Year
of Our Lord twenty twenty five, the description doesn't mention
anything about, you know, fraud or murder.

Speaker 3 (34:05):
HM. In his autobiography and in his motivational speeches, Gary
claimed he was making four million dollars a year and
bragged about all his fancy stuff like a nine thousand
dollars Rolex. Problem was, all those people who signed up
for his affiliate program were shelling out money for investments, goods,

(34:27):
and services that were nothing more than figments of Ghargehar's imagination.
One of his more disgusting scams allegedly was raising money
for a camp for special needs kids. The people who
donated claimed the camp never materialized.

Speaker 2 (34:46):
Wow, man, real nice, What a gaping asshole.

Speaker 3 (34:50):
Yeah, Gary Shockey wasn't a successful entrepreneur. He was a scammer,
plain and simple, and eventually, inevitably people started to catch on.
Angry posts started popping up in Internet forums accusing Gary
of fraud and theft. Even his buddy, Brian Garvin, his

(35:11):
number one student, got fed up and cut ties with him,
so did his teenage son. The thing about fraud is
you gotta keep new money coming in constantly to stay
afloat and keep the scam going. So when one investor
figured out the game and bailed, Gary had to bring
in a new one pretty dang quick. And in late

(35:32):
two thousand and two in Phoenix, Arizona, he met a
guy who was pretty much tailor made for him, a
retired software systems analyst and granddad named Robert Vendrick. Robert
was a sweet guy, much beloved by his wife Carol,
and their two kids and three grandkids. He wasn't a
big personality, not a big talker. He was pretty much

(35:53):
Gary Shockey's polar opposite in that way, but he was
always looking for ways to help people he cared about,
maybe sometimes to his detriment. Robert's wife, Carol later testified
in court that Robert was a little too trusting for
his own good. She said he was quote somewhat naive

(36:14):
from his growing up in Indiana on a farm, somewhat gullible,
and that wasn't his only vulnerability. Vendrick was constantly in
search of the business venture that would make him great
financial success. He was always on the lookout for opportunities,
and he'd gotten sucked into some unfortunate stuff in the
last couple of years, stuff like pyramid schemes. In other words,

(36:39):
Robert Vendrick was prime real estate for Gary Shockey, exactly
the kind of mark he loved to get his grubby
little hands on. We don't have time to get into
all the details of this because it's a grab bag episode,
but suffice it to say, over the next five years,
Gary skimmed Robert over and over again. It was always
some new, exciting investment opportunity that was guaranteed to pay

(37:02):
out huge returns, and Robert kept getting sucked in, propelled
by his trust in Gary, his desire to leave a
bigger inheritance to his wife and kids, and probably by
the sunk cost fallacy too, where you think I've put
too much into this to back out now. Gary kept
promising those big returns. It was always zoom soon, It's

(37:24):
right around the corner. By two thousand and six, our
boy Gar was in some deep financial shit. He'd burn
too many bridges. Nobody was willing to invest with him anymore,
except for Robert Vendrick. For some bizarre reason, he decided
to set up shop as a bail bondsman slash bounty hunter.

(37:45):
You know just what anybody would do if they fell
upon hard times.

Speaker 2 (37:49):
Sure, but his new business didn't work out any better
than the old ones said this time because Gary got
a little too excited chasing a bail jumper and decided
to fire a shotgun over the guy's head. So Gary
got arrested, charged and convicted for improper use of a firearm.

(38:09):
The bail bondsman had to bond himself out of jail,
and he lost his license. And in the midst of
all that stress, Robert Venderick contacted him again about his
investment money. When were his returns going to come in soon? Soon?
Gary promised, just like he always did. But Robert wasn't
born yesterday, and by now years had gone by with

(38:30):
lots of requests for money, lots of promises, and zero
to show for IT. He was starting to get nervous,
But then one day Gary told Robert he had an
incredible new opportunity, one that would make them both rich.
He was developing a top secret computer program that the
US government was interested in buying. He described it as

(38:50):
people tracking software, which sounds creepy as shit, but also
like something the government would absolutely want to buy homeland
security specifically. This was in the post nine to eleven era,
where contractors were making obscene amounts of money selling stuff
to the government, so it was totally believable that they
would get a large amount of money for Gary software. Now,

(39:12):
Robert Vendrick had no way of knowing that Gary's IT
knowledge wasn't even within a light year of where it
would need to be to develop a program like that.
By two thousand and eight, Vendrick had given Gary Shockey
over one point two million dollars, most of his in
Carrol's life savings, all without getting a dime in return.

(39:33):
For a long time, Carol wasn't aware of how much
he'd invested. When she did find out the amount after
she picked her heart back up off the floor, I
assumed she demanded that before Robert had anything else to
do with Shaki. They needed to have an attorney look
at all the transactions he'd had with this guy over
the years and all the paperwork relating to this Homeland
Security deal. Gary assured Robert and Carroll that once they

(39:56):
closed the deal with the agents from Homeland Security, they
were going to get far more money back the one
point two mill plus six hundred thousand dollars a year
for five years. With their savings depleted, desperate to recoup
their money, Robert jumped at the opportunity. But surprise, surprise,
it wasn't long before Gary got in touch with Robert
with a big urgent request. He needed one hundred thousand

(40:20):
dollars to finalize the deal to open an account at
Wells Fargo Bank. Now why this would be necessary to
secure a government contract, I can't imagine. But Vendrick went
ahead and wired him the money forty grand, of which
he had to borrow from his brother. So here's the
situation Gary was in. He'd lost his bail bondsman license,

(40:40):
which was his only real source of income at that point.
He was struggling real hard financially, living in a ratty house.
He hated. He was in trouble with the law for
firing that gun at the bail jumper. Plus there were
some rumblings that the SEC was poking around some of
his former business dealings, talking to some of those pissed
off investors he'd left in the dust. And now the

(41:02):
one investor he had left his human atm Robert Vendrick
was telling him he tired a lawyer to go over
all their business dealings with a fine tooth comb shit.
Once Vendrick wired that one hundred K to Wells Fargo,
Gary said it was time to go to California to
meet with the agents from Homeland Security, give them the software,

(41:22):
and get a big juicy check. The meeting was to
take place on San Clementing Island, which is owned by
the Navy, about fifty miles out from the mainland. Robert
was excited. This was going to make all those years
of disappointment worth it. He kissed Carol goodbye and got
on the plane. When he met up with Gary in California,
Gary had already bought a somewhat decrepit boat for one

(41:45):
thousand bucks. It was called the Odyssey, and Gary had
bought an anchor and a Jolly Roger flag to give
the thing of it a flare, y'all? What kind of
a turnip buys a boat for murderous purposes and then
decides to outfit it with a pirate flag, big old
scutlon crossbones flapping in the breeze. Great job, man, way

(42:05):
to stay inconspicuous. It's very on brand for Gary, though.
This guy thinks he's so clever. Probably just went a
little joky joke with themselves so he could feel superior.
That sick prick, What a fucking loser, nerd M. He
could have just been a cosplayer and avoided all of this. Also,

(42:26):
why would you buy a boat for one trip? Why
not charter one? Could it be because you had a
sinister intentions and you didn't want any witnesses. Unbeknownst to Robert,
Gary had also brought a little bag of supplies for
their voyage, a depth finder, a paint tray and roller,
a first aid kid, oh, and one other interesting little detail.

(42:50):
The guy who sold Gary the anchor was confused about
why he chose it. It was an anchor designed for riverboats.
It wouldn't be worth a dam on the ocean. On
February sixteenth, Gary and Robert boarded the Odyssey and set
out for San Clemente Island. Security cameras on the marina
captured them boarding the boat. They also captured the boat

(43:12):
motoring back to the dock, and Gary Shockey deboarding alone.
Robert Vendrick was never seen again. Obviously, Gary was a suspect.
Early on, Carol told the detectives all about all the
money her husband had invested with him over.

Speaker 3 (43:27):
The past five years. She told them about this supposed
top secret contract with Homeland Security, which the investigators were
able to quickly find out did not exist. Gary's initial
story was that his good buddy Robert had gotten seasick,
so he'd dropped him back off at the marina. He
seemed concerned about his missing friend. Under pressure, Gary admitted

(43:50):
that yeah, yeah, he'd been using Vendrick free years, promising
big returns on non existent investments. He drawn the older
man into twenty different business schemes over five years, and
not a single one of them had earned Vendrick any money.
By the way, when somebody's willing to admit to something
that skevie and illegal, it should get your antennae hummin.

(44:12):
Chances are they're admitting to this skiviee thing to deflect
suspicion on something much worse. Gary denied having anything to
do with Robert's disappearance. I've never killed anybody, he said,
I've never thought about killing anybody. He denied knowing anything
about any government contract or computer software, but he told

(44:32):
them he noticed something strange. The last time he saw Robert.
He had a duffelback, Gary said, and it was full
of cash. Robert said, it was four hundred thousand dollars.
I have no idea what it was for. His story
changed drastically when the detectives froze the Wells Fargo account
with that one hundred k in it. Gary was beyond

(44:54):
pissed about it. I'm entitled to that money, he told
the detectives. Robert gave it to me. It's front money
for my business. It's fine. Uh Nope, they said they
weren't going to unfreeze that account while Robert Vendrick was missing.
Soon after that conversation, Gary contacted the detectives with some
great news. Robert's fine. He said, he's in Mexico. I

(45:17):
just met up with him last night, and he wanted
me to tell you guys that he's okay, and you
should unfreeze that bank account so I can get my money.
Oh well, in that case, no problem, I'll get right
on okay. So hey, Gary, what the hell was Robert
doing down in Mexico? Gary spun quite the tale about that,

(45:40):
like something out of a Hitchcock movie. It was a
complicated story, but involved a message from a mysterious bartender,
false identities. But the crux of it was that Robert
was in the early stages of dementia and he didn't
want his family to see him deteriorate, so he was
running away to spend his last days on the beach
in Mexico under a fake name.

Speaker 2 (46:00):
The thing was, besides the fact that it made no
sense for Robert to abandon his wife and family with
no explanation, investigators had found his stuff right where he
left it in the hotel room, most significantly his insulin. Now,
why would a diabetic go anywhere without his insulin? And
if he wasn't planning to go back home to his
wife in Arizona, why was there a return plane ticket

(46:23):
to Phoenix on his night stand? And why was his
passport still at home? You'd need that to get across
the border. To Mexico, wouldn't you needless to say, investigators
didn't find Robert Vendrick in Mexico or anywhere else. When
Gary brought them a handwritten note supposedly from Robert saying
he was in Mexico and didn't wish to have any
contact with his family or the police, the detectives had

(46:45):
it analyzed and found that it didn't even come close
to matching Robert's handwriting. What they did find was the Odyssey,
and they noticed a couple of interesting things, one a
missing anchor and two a missing rope. And when they
spoke to Gary again, he changed his story about the
computer program. Oh yeah, we were going to sell that

(47:07):
software to the government. A. Yeah, that's why Robert fronted
me that hundred grand, which I still need. By the way.
During that interview, even Gary acknowledged that his stories didn't
make a lot of sense and that if a jury
heard all this, they'd probably think he killed Robert. On
February twelve, two thousand and nine, they put the habeas

(47:27):
Gravis on Gary Shockey and charged him with the murder
of Robert Vendrick, and, bless his heart, Gary couldn't manage
to just sit in jail, keep his head down and
wait for trial. He did what so many dipshits before
him have done, decided to confide in his new prison bestie,
and that Campers is how we know the awful story

(47:50):
of what really happened to Robert Vendrick. They set out
for San Clemente Island on the morning of February sixteenth,
Robert thinking his life was about to change for the better.
He was looking forward to bringing a big check back
home to Carol. She'd be so happy. Gary's focus, however,
was elsewhere. He was preoccupied with his little hand held

(48:12):
depth finder. When he was finally satisfied that they were
in deep enough water, Gary killed the engine and then
he tackled Robert fastened a belt around him. I cannot
even imagine what Robert must have felt when he looked
over and noticed what the other end of that belt
was attached to an anchor. Quickly, efficiently, Shocky hoisted Robert

(48:36):
up and just dropped him over the side of the boat.
Under the weight of the anchor, he sank like a stone.
Robert drowned, helpless to claw his way back up to
the surface. It's one of the most terrifying ways to
die that I can imagine. Gary waited a few minutes
to make sure his victim wasn't going to resurface. Then

(48:57):
he started his engine back up and tooled back to land.
His trial went on for three months, but the jury
didn't need more than three hours to convict Gary of
first degree murder and sentence him to life without parole. Unfortunately, though,
or maybe fortunately, depending on how you look at it,
he didn't end up spending much time in prison. Just

(49:18):
a few years into his sentence, Gary Shockey had a
heart attack and dropped dead right there in his cell.
Oh it hurt like a bitch. Doesn't bring Robert back
to his wife, or his kids or his grand babies, though.
So what have we learned, folks? We've got two stories
about people who put themselves out there as great leaders,
who had all the answers. But in both cases, underneath

(49:40):
that polished exterior was a deep, deep darkness. In Jeffrey
Locker's case, it was a deep well of pain and hopelessness,
and in Gary Shackey's just pure malignant greed. For me,
it's another reminder of one of the main lessons I've
learned in my life so far. That the people who
claim to have it all together are often the biggest

(50:01):
messes you will ever meet. Nobody knows the secret, okay,
we're all just figuring it out as we go along.
And despite these two god awful stories, for the most part,
I actually find that kind of comforting. So that was
a pair of wild ones, right, campers, You know we'll
have another one for you next week, but for now,
lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until

(50:23):
we get together again around the True Crime Campfire. If
you haven't booked your spot yet on the Crime Wave
True Crime Cruise from November three through November seventh, get
on it, y'all, it's coming up soon. Join Katie and
Me plus last podcast on the Left, Scared to Death
and Sinisterhood for a rock and good time at sea.
You can pay all at once or set up a
payment plan, but you've got to have a fan code

(50:43):
to book a ticket, So go to Crimewave at sea
dot com slash campfire and take it from there. And
as always, we want to send a grateful shout out
to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so
much to Selina, Caroline, Jessica and Jeremy. We appreciate y'all
to the moon and back. And if you're not yet
a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get

(51:03):
every episode add free at least a day early, sometimes
even two, plus tons of extra content like patrons only
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(51:25):
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