Invader: A Story of Madness and Revenge

Home is the one place in the world that’s ours and ours alone. It’s the place we’re meant to feel completely safe and comfortable. The warm, beating heart of our lives. So when that sacred space is violated, where does that leave us? Can we ever really feel safe again? This is the story of one of the strangest home invasions ever investigated, and the aftermath that left two innocent people’s lives changed forever.

Join Katie and Whitney, plus the hosts of Last Podcast on the Left, Sinisterhood, and Scared to Death, on the very first CRIMEWAVE true crime cruise! Get your fan code now--there are only a handful of rooms left! CrimeWaveatSea.com/CAMPFIRE

Sources:
Court papers, People v Schmuhl: https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/circuit/sites/circuit/files/assets/documents/pdf/opinions/cl-2021-2333-schmuhl-v-clarke-va-doc.pdf
Court papers, Schmuhl v Clarke: https://law.justia.com/cases/virginia/supreme-court/2023/211114.html
The Washingtonian, Jason Fagone: https://www.washingtonian.com/2016/10/02/schmuhl-home-invasion-torture-session-one-lawyer-nearly-killing-another-washington-suburb-mclean/
True Crime News (formerly Crime Watch Daily): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3zTO-3TE_Q
NBC Washington: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/ex-lawyer-sentenced-to-45-years-in-home-invasion-torture-attack-of-former-boss-his-wife/18765/
Investigation Discovery's: James Patterson's Murder Is Forever, episode "Home Sweet Murder"

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Episode Transcript

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 (00:20):
Home is the one place in the world that's ours
and hours alone. It's the place where meant to feel
completely safe and comfortable, the warm, beating heart of our lives.
So when that's sacred space is violated, where does that
leave us? Can we ever really feel safe again? This
is the story of one of the strangest home invasions

(00:41):
ever investigated, and the aftermath that left two innocent people's
lives changed forever. This is Invader, a story of madness
and revenge. Also, if the sound is a little oft
in this one, we apologize. One of us basically lives
on the surface of the sun and she really really
needed to leave the ac.

Speaker 3 (01:01):
On this time.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
So campers for this one or In McLean, Virginia, November ninth,
twenty fourteen, Leo Fisher and his wife Susan Duncan were
having a peaceful night in Sue was cooking dinner. Leo
had flopped down in a comfy chair to read. It
was about six fifteen in the evening when Sue called
out from the kitchen, there's a car coming up the drive.
She said, that was strange. They weren't expecting anybody. A

(01:36):
few moments later, the doorbell rang. Sue had her hands
full in the kitchen, so Leo went to answer it.
He hadn't opened the door more than a few inches
when a man pushed it open all the way, sending
Leo stumbling back. Leo saw something black in the man's hand,
and suddenly he felt his body seize up and hit
the floor a taser. He could see the little probe

(01:58):
sticking out of his chest. While Leo was prone on
the floor, his limbs not quite working after having fifty
thousand volts shot through them. The man quickly shut the door,
then knelt and secured zip ties around Leo's wrists and ankles.
Hearing the commotions, Sue ran out from the kitchen, and
when she saw what was happening in front of her,
she screamed. The intruder put up a hand to stop her.

(02:21):
I'm from the Virginia sec. He said, I'm here to
arrest your husband. Sue knew that was a lie. There
was no Virginia SEC. The Securities in Exchange Commission was
a federal thing. She stared at the man. He didn't
look like any kind of law enforcement to her. He
was wearing a long black jacket and black tennis shoes

(02:42):
with fell crow instead of laces. He flashed her a badge,
but she only got a quick look at it, and
it didn't look real to her. Looked like a cheap imitation,
like something you'd buy at Halloween Express. Strangest of all,
the guy was wearing an Indiana Jone's hat. That was
the only way you could describe it. It looked exactly
like the one Harrison Ford wore in those movies. He

(03:03):
had it pulled way down over his face. The man
grabbed Sue and quickly bound her up with zip ties,
just like he'd done with Leo. Leo and Sue were
both sixty one years old, and the neighborhood they lived
in wasn't used to violent crime, crime of any kind. Really,
they lived in a beautiful house on Spicer Road, the
product of years of work Sue in finance. She'd just

(03:25):
retired and Leo as a partner at the law firm
of Bean, Kenny and Corman. They handled mostly trademark and
copyright stuff, not the kind of cases where you'd make
enemies of scary people like this. Up until this moment,
Leo and Sue wouldn't have thought they had any enemies
at all. Once he had both Leo and Sue tied
up on the floor in front of him, the intruder

(03:45):
spoke and yell. If I gave you all day, you
would never guess what came out of his mouth. What
do you know about the Knight's templar? He said. Leo
and Sue looked confused. The Knight's templar like from the Crusades. No,
the intruder said, like the drug cartel. Leo stared at him.

(04:06):
We know you sent an e mail putting a hit
on somebody in that cartel for three hundred seventy thousand dollars.
The man said, I'm here to arrest you. Well, this
has to be a mistake. Leo said, you must be
looking for somebody else. My name is Leo Fisher. The
man nodded, I know who you are. He said, Now
get up, it's time to start your interrogation. He got

(04:27):
Sue and Leo to their feet and started shuffling them
down the hall to their bedroom. He ordered them to
sit on the bed. The man moved over to the
window and closed the curtains. There could be a sniper
out there, he said, I've had your house under surveillance.
He added, you don't seem to get out much. Such
a sickening thought that this man had been watching them
for who the hell knew how long, and now there

(04:50):
might be a sniper outside waiting to shoot them. None
of what this man had said so far made any
sense to Sue and Leo. Leo hadn't put a hit
out on any It was completely absurd. How would he
even know how to get in touch with a drug cartel.
But the man had more to say about hitmen. Somebody
had taken a hit out on Leo too, he said,

(05:11):
for twenty seven grand Leo was completely baffled. Somebody wants
to have me killed. I can't imagine who would do that,
Leo said, to his shock. The intruder started rattling off
the names of some of Leo's colleagues at the law firm,
asking about them like an attorney taking a deposition. Are
you the only one involved in the hit? Or are

(05:31):
there others involved? He said, are you aware that one
of your attorneys is having an affair with a client?
He asked if anybody else had access to Leo's computer
and email account, and then he said, didn't you let
somebody go lately? Well? Yeah, Leo said he had. Why
was she let go? The intruder wanted to know. It

(05:52):
occurred to Leo that neither man had mentioned Alesha's name,
yet the intruder knew it was a she he'd fired.

Speaker 3 (06:00):
And suddenly he realized he knew who the intruder was.
It was Andrew Schmule, the husband of a young lawyer
named Alicia, who he'd hired at being Kinney and Corman
about a year before. She was smart and charming. She
seemed to have a lot of potential. Leo had first
met Andrew at a holiday party when Alicia brought him

(06:20):
along as her guest. Andrew was an attorney too, though
he wasn't practicing at the time. Then the firm had
hired him for a short project, and he seemed to
do a pretty good job. Everything was fine for a while,
but before long Alicia's work performance started going steadily downhill,
and then in the summer, the firm found out that

(06:41):
Alicia had lied on a mortgage application listing her husband
Andrew as an employee of the law firm. She even
impersonated a human resources lady to verify that he worked there.
Andrew had done some temporary contract work for the firm
that one time, but it was just a quick little thing.
He'd never been an employee, So this was mortgage fraud
pretty much.

Speaker 2 (07:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:03):
Alicia had already been falling down on the job lately,
and the partners felt like this spoke volumes about her character,
but Leo didn't want to fire her At first. He
argued for giving her another chance, but he called her
in for a meeting about the fraud. He basically let
her know that she was on very thin eyes at
this point, that what she'd done could have hurt the firm,

(07:23):
that that was unacceptable. The next morning, when Leo got
to work, Andrew schmul was there and he was furious.
Leo showed him and Alicia into his office to talk privately,
but Andrew wouldn't listen to anything Leo had to say.
He just got more and more aggressive. His face was

(07:44):
beat red, and at one point he was almost shouting geez.
Leo asked him to leave over and over, but he
didn't actually go until Alicia said, Andrew, you need to
leave so I can keep my job. It was unsettling.
The guy had seemed unhinged.

Speaker 2 (08:01):
I'd have fired her ass immediately. Likes, she's lucky he
gave her a second chance.

Speaker 3 (08:06):
I know he did fraud, for God's sakes. Yeah, Like
lawyers have to be ethical, Like that's yeah, that's the
entire point of your job.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
But that shows you what a nice guy Leo is
and how unfair this whole thing is.

Speaker 3 (08:20):
Right, and then for your husband to come in and
be so unhinged, and for her to just sit there
and like not say anything until it's clear that she
might be fired over it, it's just yeah. So even
after that second chance, Alicia's work performance continued to circle
the drain. By fall, Leo didn't feel like he had
a choice anymore. He fired her. He handed her a

(08:43):
severance check and told her she was going to make
a great lawyer someday, but she was going to have
to do it at another firm. That was just two
weeks earlier. Now Andrew was in their house, pacing back
and forth in front of them where they sat on
the edge of the bed. Leo didn't want to let
on that he recognized their intruder. Sue had begun to

(09:04):
cry softly. Andrew said, ma'am, you don't need to cry.
There's no need for you to be crying. You need
to stop. Leo knew he couldn't let her know he
knew who this guy was. If Andrew figured that out,
they might both be in a lot more danger. I
can handle this, he told himself. Every now and then,

(09:24):
between his weird questions about Leo's fellow attorneys, Andrew made
a phone call to someone they had no idea who.
He'd say stuff like yeah and no, not yet. Once
he said, well, the interrogation isn't going very well. Leo
isn't giving the right answers. When he hung up, he'd say,
I was just talking to my boss. It seemed clear

(09:47):
that Andrew was in no hurry to wrap this up
and leave. He was determined to get something out of
Leo Fisher. He kept asking questions about being Kenny and
Corman private stuff, and when he didn't get the answers
he wanted. He got visibly frustrated. It was incredibly nerve
wracking for Sue and Leo.

Speaker 2 (10:05):
About an hour into this weird interrogation, Andrew suddenly ordered
Leo and Sue to their feet and prodded them down
the hall into Leo's study, where he kept his computer.
He ordered Leo to log into bean Kinny and Corman's
private network, where all its secrets were kept, and for
the next forty five minutes or so, Andrew went through
email after email, obviously looking for something he wasn't finding.

(10:28):
He kept demanding to see different files, different folders. He
was getting angry, glaring at Leo. He accused him of
not looking at the right stuff, trying to hide something.
You're going to be in trouble, he told him. Several times,
Sue had to go to the bathroom and throw up
just from the stress and fear. Surprisingly, the intruder let
her go, cutting off her zip ties and then putting

(10:50):
new ones back on when she came out. At one point,
as she went between the bathroom and the study, Sue
saw the man open the front door and go out
onto the deck. She could hear him talking to someone,
a woman they both sounded stressed. Another time, she saw
him flicking the porch light on and off, clearly a
signal to someone who knew what it meant. Finally, their

(11:14):
intruder gave up on Leo's emails and ordered them back
to the bedroom. The tension was thicker than fog. The
guy was getting worked up, and his cell phone conversations
with the boss were getting testy. Sue looked over at
her husband. He was breathing really hard, the way he
did when his heart was hurting him. Leo had had
a heart bypassed just a year earlier, and she was

(11:36):
terrified at what this stress might do to him. Are
you okay, she whispered, I feel like I might be
having a heart attack, Leo said. Sue was horrified, and
she pleaded with the intruder to let her call him
an ambulance or at least a doctor. Unsurprisingly, he said no,
and then he got Sue up and hustled her out
of the bedroom. I have to separate you now. There

(11:58):
may be things your husband won't tell me in front
of you, he said, and shut her into the bathroom
by herself. It's only for fifteen minutes. Sue heard the
intruder say as he walked away, he must have seen
how upset she was getting, though, because a few moments
later he came back to the door. Look, you can
call out to Leo every few minutes if you want
to to make sure he's okay.

Speaker 3 (12:18):
And Sue did.

Speaker 2 (12:20):
She kept an eye on her watch, and every three
minutes or so she'd call out to Leo and get
his reassuring I'm okay. Meanwhile, Andrew's interrogation continued, Well, is
there anything you want to tell me now that we're alone?

Speaker 3 (12:33):
He said no.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
Leo said, who would succeed you at the firm if
you died? Andrew wanted to know. Leo couldn't say, you know,
there's another operation going on right now at one of
your partner's houses. The intruder said. That made Leo's blood
run cold. Then Andrew abruptly shifted focus. Do any of

(12:55):
your neighbors ever come over unannounced?

Speaker 3 (12:57):
He said?

Speaker 2 (12:59):
And then you have a lot of cash in the house,
don't you? Twenty two one hundred thousand dollars. Leo shook
his head. No, we don't keep cash like that. You
have gold bars, don't you? Andrew said no? Leo said
but the question sparked a tiny bit of hope. Maybe
if they could give him some money, he'd go away
and leave them alone. We don't keep money here, Leo said,

(13:21):
but we can go to the bank. The next thing
Leo knew, Andrew was knocking him flat on the bed
and pressing a pillow to his face. As he struggled,
he felt a sharp, slicing pain across his throat and
stab after stab to his head and left shoulder. Like
a lot of couples who've been married for a while,
Leo and Sue had cute nicknames for each other. He

(13:43):
was Pie and she was Muffin or Muffy. Alone in
the bathroom, she suddenly heard a scuffle. She burst out
of the bathroom and into the bedroom, where she saw
the intruders straddling Leo stabbing him. She screamed, and the
attacker whirled around and said, get out.

Speaker 3 (13:59):
Don't come out here.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
Leo said, Muffy, he's murdering me. This moment of pure
horror stopped the assailant in his tracks for a second.
He stopped stabbing just long enough for a little chuckle.

Speaker 3 (14:12):
Muffy, what is this?

Speaker 2 (14:14):
The Muppets hilarious A joke maker, the s guy. It's
not even funny, Like, it's not even funny. Ugh, get
off him, Sue yelled and ran toward the attacker. Two
things happened all at once. Leo Fisher rolled off the
bed and hit the floor, bleeding from multiple knife wounds
all over his torso. And Andrew Schmull raised a silver gun,

(14:37):
a Cobra three eighty, and shot her. The bullet and
Sue's own words tore across my scalp to the bone,
and she hit the floor. Leo thought she was dead,
and he could feel himself bleeding out. There was a
T shirt on the floor, and Leo grabbed it to
press it against the awful gash in his throat. Andrew

(14:57):
saw him do it. He kicked Leo in the head
his heart as he could. You're gonna die, he told him.
Then he casually stooped down and picked up the shell
casing from the floor. After that initial moment of pain
and shock, Sue realized she was still alive and got
up onto her hands and knees. There was a phone
on the other side of the bed, and she started
crawling toward it. Andrew saw her and left on top

(15:20):
of her.

Speaker 3 (15:21):
He stabbed her over and over in her neck and
shoulders and back. But Sue Duncan is one hell of
a fighter. She kept getting up and crawling toward that phone.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (15:32):
Four or five times she did it, and every time
Andrew would jump on top of her with the knife,
stabbing and stabbing. Finally, Sue realized she needed to play dead,
and he fell for it. At last, he left her alone.
Moments later, Sue and Leo heard the front door open,
bleeding profusely. Sue made her way to the alarm box

(15:53):
on the wall and hit the panic button. Then she
called nine one one Hello, Susan said, home invasion. Sue
Duncan and Leo Fisher, home invasion. Please come right away.
We have two cats, she told the dispatcher. Please save them.
Oh my god. This whole story is heart wrenching, but
I think that's the part that gets me the most.

(16:15):
Sue thought she might be dying, and she was worried
about her cats because their attacker had left the front
door open when he fled.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
Oh god, I relate to that so hard though. That's
what I'd be thinking about too, probably. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:25):
So if I'm gonna die, save my pets.

Speaker 2 (16:27):
Yeah, don't let them die. Right.

Speaker 3 (16:30):
As they waited for help, Leo looked over at Sue.
She was slumped against the desk in the study. There's
blood all over her glasses. I love you, we had
told her. He managed to stand up and stumble out
the front door. He collapsed on the porch. Soon he
saw the flashing red and white lights of a police car.
In a few moments, he was surrounded by cops. Save

(16:52):
my wife, please, he said. He was going in and
out of consciousness. The cops immediately smelled gas. Apparently Andrew
had poured some on the carpet before he left. I
guess he was going to set the place on fire,
then change his mind.

Speaker 2 (17:06):
God for that.

Speaker 3 (17:07):
One cop, who was also an EMT, later talked about
how much blood there was in the bedroom. There were
spatter and cast off, and one huge puddle that had
already congealed into jelly. Until they saw blood coming out
of her neck, they assumed Sue Duncan was dead. As
they loaded Leo into an ambulance, a cop stayed with him,
his fingers still pressed to the wound on Leo's throat.

(17:31):
I know who did this, Leo said, Blood leaking from
his mouth with every word. Andrew schmol s h m
u h l. He's the husband of a former employee
of my firm. He gave the Malicia's name. Sue was
still clueless about who their attacker was and what his
motives might have been.

Speaker 2 (18:16):
Right before they closed the doors, Leo thought he saw
paramedics loading Sue into another ambulance, and then he lost consciousness.
Andrew Schmuhl's life had changed a lot in the two
years before the home invasion. Ever since childhood, he'd always
been an energetic, athletic guy with lots of hobbies and interests.
After undergrad, he signed up for the army and went

(18:36):
to law school. There was a first marriage somewhere in there,
but it didn't work out, and that's pretty much all
we know about it. In law school, though, Andrew met
Alicia Pere. She was a lot like him, lots of
energy and interests. She was a blogger, She was a
skilled violinist, somewhat unlike Andrew. Alicia had a big personality.

(18:56):
Andrew had always had a close circle of friends, but
came off as a little socially awkward. Some of their
classmates at law school were confused when they found out
he and Alisha were together like those two really well
yeah really. They got married and in two thousand and
nine they both graduated with their law degrees. Andrew started
working as an Army lawyer. It seemed like life was

(19:19):
going great, headed in just the direction they wanted. But
then in twenty twelve, Andrew fell during Pete and really
messed up his spine. No matter what meds he took,
and he took a lot, the pain just kept coming,
and over the next couple of years it got worse.
He had to take a medical discharge from the Army
and go on disability. It wasn't much money at all,

(19:40):
as disability usually isn't, so Alicia had to carry the
financial load for both of them, and they were relieved
when she got the job at being Kenny and Corman.
Alicia was even able to talk the firm into giving
Andrew some contract work, but of course we already know
how all that worked out. Crappy work performance, attempted mortgage fraud,
et cetera was actually Andrew's idea to try the mortgage fraud.

(20:03):
Just pretend to be someone. He texted Alicia Hell make
up an accent. By the way, I know, I bet
she did too him.

Speaker 3 (20:10):
It was awful.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
So by the way, some of the quotes in this
episode come from direct courtroom testimony and some come from
an article in The Washingtonian by Jason Fagon. When Alicia
was fired, it was a huge blow to both of them.
They were having some financial issues stemming from Andrew's divorce
from his first wife, so they really couldn't afford for
Alicia to be unemployed. Andrew had actually done like one

(20:34):
hundred and twenty days in jail for falling behind on
these like divorce payment issues, so you know, you would
think that they would be extra careful not to do
anything that might put Alicia's job at risk, right, But no,
apparently not. This was his bright idea. Andrew was pissed.
He was in bad shape healthwise. Besides the chronic back pain,

(20:56):
he was also having issues with low testosterone and kidney stones.
He'd been through it the past few months and now
here this asshole law firm had the gall to fire
his wife. You'd make more money from a gender discrimination
lawsuit than you will from that severance package they gave you,
he told Alicia, let's get you an employment attorney stat

(21:16):
in a text, He called Leo a worthless piece of
sniveling shit and said that by the time they were
done with Bean, Kenny and Corman, I want your name
on their goddamn door. And it's so absurd because, like
in that article by Jason Fagon, he talks to other
female employees from the law firm and like, there's no
basis for this gender discrimination like they treated their female employees. Fine,

(21:40):
it's just something that Andrew's little fevered brain came up with.

Speaker 3 (21:44):
It's ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (21:46):
Evidently though he and Alicia had changed the plan at
some point from a lawsuit to a home invasion. Makes sense, right,
I mean, what else could you possibly do. Once the
investigators had the name of Leo Ensues a time hacker,
they put out an APB for Andrew and Alicia Schmuol's
suv and it did not take long to find it,
less than ten minutes. In fact, a couple of Canine

(22:10):
cops saw the suv and lit up their lights, but
it picked up speed. The officers could see that there
was a woman in the driver's seat and in the
passenger seat there was a man who was clearly in
the process of taking his clothes off. Both driver and
passenger looked pissed off. Finally, they must have realized how
futile it would be to try to outrun the cops,

(22:30):
because the suv pulled into a mall parking lot and stopped.
A moment later, the passenger side door swung open and
outstepped Andrew Schmool. The officers could not believe what they
were looking at. Andrew was wearing nothing but a diaper.
They ordered him down to the ground, but he ignored
them and started walking off toward the mall.

Speaker 3 (22:52):
The cops drew their guns on him and brought out
the dog, and God persuaded Andrew. He lay face down
on the pavement. After the costs picked their lower jaws
up off the ground, they cut them. It was strange.
He seemed totally fine at first, answering their questions in
a clear voice. When they asked him if he knew
why they'd put him in handcuffs, he said, I can't

(23:14):
talk about that. But not long into the conversation his
whole demeanor changed. He looked kind of dazed. He kept
saying stuff in German. Have you taken anything, one of
the officers said, Andrew rattled off the list he was
on the fentanyl patch for chronic back pain, plus de

(23:34):
lauded muscle relaxer as a blood pressure med to stosterone.
Duke was a walking pharmacy. Later, they'd find out that
he had an incontinence problem the result of a surgery
to take out a kidney stone. That explained the diaper.
The officers had called for an ambulance, and as the
paramedics worked on him, they found one of the fentanyl
patches stuck to his arm. Later they'd find one under

(23:58):
his diaper. Double dose.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
And by the way, there's some dispute about that incontinence
issue in the trial. The prosecutions theory was that he
put that diaper on so that he wouldn't have to
take bathroom breaks during the home invasion, so he wouldn't
have to let himself out of their sight. And I
think that's actually worth considering.

Speaker 3 (24:17):
Yeah, I think that's a that's a good point. You
see that a lot, Oh, yeah, I've seen it twice
in cases like this, which I feel like is a lot.
It's like it's like that two Nichols audio. It's like,
it's weird that it's happened twice with the astronaut. Uh
stalker you know. Mm hm. The driver, of course, was

(24:39):
Alicia schmool The cops deposited her in the back seat
of one of the cruisers while they searched the SUV.
I don't know why, but people in the back of
cop cars never seem to remember that they're being recorded.
Alone in the back of the car, Alicia dropped her
head and said, oh God, the computer. The officers made

(25:01):
a mental note to look for a laptop. Thanks Alicia.
The Schmoolz SUV was a gold mine of evidence. Like,
if this was a movie, a choir of angels would
have started singing as soon as they opened the driver's
side door. Yeah, like it would have probably glowed like
the briefcase, and yeah, an investigator couldn't ask for more.

(25:26):
They found the taser, the gun, the blood stained knife,
Andrew's bloody clothes, which he'd soaked in ammonia in a
pathetic attempt to clean them. They found zip ties and
rubber gloves. They found a nylon rope in the pocket
of the shirt Andrew had tossed on the floorboard. They
found a length of wire with the ends tided knots,
and black electrical tape wrapped around the knots a grot.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
Jesus Murphy.

Speaker 3 (25:51):
That's creepy. Yeah, that's what it sounds like. Yeah, I
can't think what else it could be. They also found
a list in Andrew's handwriting handcuffs, two bottles Nike will,
two Packspenadryll, one adult diaper. I guess that was for him,
two adult sleeping masks. And I think that kind of

(26:12):
gives credence to the theory that the diaper was so
he wouldn't have to leave them, because.

Speaker 2 (26:20):
Why why didn't he already have some? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (26:22):
And would why would he add that to the list
of his creepy kidnapping list home invasion list? Absolutely, like
if that was just something he regularly did and had
And okay, this part, if I had to have a
favorite thing about a home invasion, this would be it. Okay.
They found that badge Andrew had flashed it to. The

(26:44):
badge itself was plastic, the kind you get for like
a bachelorette party. It said Pecker Inspector, Department of Erections.
It had a dick on it.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
Oh my god. Okay, Well, you know, if you're gonna
commit a crime, you want to do it with some dignity, right,
you want to give us some gravitas?

Speaker 3 (27:09):
Nah? Do it like they would in the next installment
of the Hangover movie. Like, okay, so they've already found
a bunch of stuff, but they found a ton of
other stuff too, like mountains of evidence pointing to both
of them. So you get the idea. Basically, Andrew and
Alicia might as well have gift wrapped the SUV and said,

(27:29):
here's everything you need to convict us. Go nuts, And
then there's this. Two days before the home invasion, a
CCTV camera caught Miss Alicia buying that taser with cash
so as to not leave a paper trail. Of course,
at a different store, she bought Nike will Benadryl and
adult diapers. Andrew bought a couple of burner phones for

(27:52):
them to communicate with. So, yeah, these two were going
down and going down hard. In case you were wondering,
Leo Fisher and se Duncan both survived the attack after
a lot of painful medical care, and they would be
the star witnesses at trial.

Speaker 2 (28:08):
Now. I know we all thought their love was eternal,
but it didn't take long for Alicia and Andrew to
turn on each other. I know it's heartbreaking. Each blamed
the other for masterminding the attack, each accused the other
of nasty behavior. Alicia claimed Andrew was controlling and abusive,
and Andrew claimed Alicia had drugged him on the night

(28:29):
of the attack. Because they were going after each other,
the prosecution decided to try them separately. At his trial,
Andrew's defense attorney argued that he did in fact carry
out the home invasion, but it wasn't his fault though,
because he was delirious from his meds and didn't remember
most of it involuntary intoxication.

Speaker 3 (28:50):
Bitch, please and listen.

Speaker 2 (28:53):
I've literally been on a couple of the meds he
was on years ago, like for a while, and there
is no way in hell. You might be sleepy, you
might be a little out of it, but you are
not going to be a zombie just primed to be
a killing robot at somebody else's behest. That is not
what those meds do, and that's basically what they were suggesting.
They called Andrew a suffering veteran and argued that Alicia

(29:16):
was quote an aggressive person who sought out confrontation. Why
didn't she get her ass in there and do it.
Then Andrew's mom testified that she'd seen Alicia hit and
kick Andrew, and of course this was Alicia's beef. She
was the one who got fired from being Kenny and Corman.
She was the one with all the inside baseball on
the firm and its partners. Andrew didn't know any of

(29:37):
that stuff without her. He was just stoned to the
gills and it made him scared and paranoid and suggestible.
Both Sue Duncan and Leo Fisher took the stand to
relive their nightmare for the jury. They did a great
job of countering the defense's argument about Andrew's medication delirium.
He was completely fine, they said, totally in control of

(29:58):
himself when they we saw a video of him in
the cop car after the attack, though they could see
that he looked pretty blitzed at that point. Of course,
he could easily have just taken a handful of pills
and slapped on those two fentanyl patches. As completely bizarre
as this attack was, the Indiana Jones had the Pecker
Inspector badge all that weird stuff about the Virginia sec.

(30:20):
There was plenty of evidence that it was premeditated and
at least some evidence that he knew he might end
up killing Leo and sue. Why else would you bring
a loaded gun a knife of friggined garrot. And you know,
I have huge sympathy for anybody with back pain because
I have it myself, and it's fucking awful. It sucks
on a good day and on a bad day you'd

(30:40):
just hate in life. But guess what, Andrew, Leo Fisher
didn't push you down on that icy sidewalk and make
you hurt your spine. Leo didn't ask your dumbass wife
to commit mortgage fraud.

Speaker 3 (30:50):
You did, And.

Speaker 2 (30:51):
Your freaking meds did not turn you into a mindless
killing machine programmed by Alicia. And exactly none of your
problems were Leo's fall or sues. The jury agreed. They
convicted Andrew of seven charges abduction, burglary, firearms charges, malicious wounding,
and others. The judge sentenced him to two consecutive life sentences,

(31:14):
adding up to ninety eight years. My dude, we'll never
see daylight again. One other interesting thing that came out
at Andrew's trial. A former coworker of Andrew and Alicia's
at Bean Kenny and Corman told the jury that Andrew
told him he'd hurt his back when an ied explosive
device went off, So, you know, like I was wounded

(31:35):
in the line of duty, and you know, big dramatic
story like from a movie or something. In reality, he'd
slipped on some ice. Okay, he slipped on ice, and
whereas Andrew had testified about his horrific, incapacitating chronic pain,
the coworker told the jury about playing in a softball
game with Andrew and watching him hall ass around the bases.
He played just fine, no sign of pain or disability whatsoever.

(31:59):
Interesting for her part, Alicia claimed she had no idea
what Andrew was doing inside Leo and Sue's house that night.
She was just waiting in the car outside, blissfully ignorant.
Andrew had told her he was just going to try
and negotiate her a new contract, which is why he
needed to be wearing a freaking weird hat pulled down
over his face and carrying a taser. Yeah, it all

(32:20):
makes perfect sense, sure, Jane, and I think after watching
Andrew get absolutely pounded into dust at his trial, Alicia realized.

Speaker 3 (32:28):
She was cooked. She ended up pleading guilty to two
counts of aggravated malicious wounding, two counts of abduction, and
one count of burglary with a deadly weapon. The judge
gave her forty five years in prison. She cried at
her sentencing hearing, said she wished she could have done
something to stop the attack. Mm hmm. Sitting in the gallery,

(32:49):
Leo and Sue didn't seem impressed by her tears. Leo
had lost thirty to forty percent of his total blood
volume in the attack, and when he got to the
hospital he was bleed, eating profusely. Blood was pouring out
of his mouth. He was in hemorrhagic shock and needed
an emergency transfusion. The doctor who treated Leo on the

(33:09):
night of the attack said that it was a case
where minutes mattered. Leo came very close to dying that night.
The doctor also said he'd never seen a wound like
the one in Leo's neck. The attacker, he said, must
have held mister Fisher down and moved the knife back
and forth across his throat. The surgeon had to do
a tracheostomy. It was an uncommonly violent attack.

Speaker 2 (33:34):
Yeah, it doesn't really sound like somebody who's verily sentient
on drugs does it.

Speaker 3 (33:39):
Sue was more stable when she arrived at the er,
but she was still in rough shape. The doctors had
to put staples in her head. Later, she said she'd
never forget the sound that made as the night wore on.
Sue's condition deteriorated. In addition to the gunshot wound, she'd
been stabbed seven times, and they couldn't seem to stop
the bleeding. Andrew's knife had severed her external jugular vein.

(34:04):
If an excellent trauma surgeon hadn't gotten to her in time,
she would have died. Both Leo and Sue would have
ongoing medical problems because of what Andrew did to them,
terrible scars, limited range of motion in different parts of
their bodies, Sue in her neck, Leo in one of
his arms. Before the attack, Sue had been getting treatment
for arthritis, and she'd been doing a lot better. After

(34:26):
the attack, all that progress was ruined. One side of
Leo's mouth droops slightly when he smiles, and he has
trouble eating because the left side of his tongue is
numb from nerve damage. Damage is most likely permanent. He
struggles to speak sometimes and that's just the physical stuff.
After Andrew's trial, Leo Fisher gave a statement, Sue and

(34:49):
I are enormously grateful that the jury has convicted Andrew
Schmul on all charges brought against him that he has
received in an appropriate prison sentence. He told the press,
we simply want our lives back. We never want to
become thought of as people who were attacked by these criminals.
I don't blame you.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
Yeah, And you know, we can and should talk about
how amazing Leo and Sue were that night, how brave
and strong, and how they kept their cool and saved
themselves and each other. And you can see from every
part of that story how much they loved each other.
We can see this in some lights as a story
of human triumph. And it's really tempting to do that

(35:26):
and just leave it at that, because it makes us
feel good, like it's all been put right. But the
thing is that kind of shuts the book on the story,
doesn't it, Like, look what a couple of badass survivors.
Good for them, and I'm so glad they've ridden off
into the sunset. Leo and Sue lived after multiple surgeries
after reliving their horror in court, having to sit and

(35:46):
watch the man who tried to kill them get up
on the stand and pretend like he didn't remember any
of it. They lived, but they didn't get to ride
off into the sunset. In court, Leo said that he
didn't used to be the kind of person who hated anybody,
but once Andrew and Alicia schmul got done with him,
he was They left a roiling pit of rage in

(36:07):
his heart and he didn't know what to do with it. Sometimes,
he said, he just wanted to scream. Sue, who had
once been a social person, didn't have any interest in
going out anymore or seeing her friends. She had nightmares
about home invasion and murder, a man coming to kill
her in the night. What we're getting at is what

(36:27):
they went through at the hands of their attackers changed
them inside and out, left deep scars, and that's something
they've had to live with every day since. We get
to walk away from this story and feel glad that
some degree of justice was served, but the survivors got,
in a way, a life sentence. I hope very very

(36:49):
much that they're doing a million times better now than
they were at the time of the trial, and As
for Andrew and Alicia, I think the best we can
hope for is that they've had the time to confront
their own demons, that they've learned to take accountability for
what they did. I hate to say it, but I'm
not holding my breath. So that was a wild one, right, Campers.

(37:12):
You know we'll have another one for you next week,
but for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and
stay safe until we get together again around the True
Crime Campfire. And if you haven't booked your spot yet
on the Crime Wave True Crime Cruise from November three
through November seventh, you really got to get in on it.
They have like so few rooms left, so if you
want to go and you've been putting it off, go
get your tickets. Join Katie and Me plus last podcast

(37:34):
on the Left, Scared to Death and Sinisterhood for an
amazing time at seat. We had a call with the
cruise folks last night and we are so excited. It's
going to be so much fun and you know, I
just cannot wait. And you can pay all it once,
so you can set up a payment plan, but you've
got to have a fan code to book a ticket,
so go to Crimewave at seed dot com slash campfire
and take it from there. And as always, we want

(37:56):
to send a grateful shout out to a few of
our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Ace Meyer, Wayne,
which all sound like the names of cool fighter pilots
from World War Two. I love it, and THEA and Kevin.
We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And if
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(38:18):
day early, sometimes more, plus tons of extra content like
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