Not Today: Amazing Stories of Survival

We deal with a lot of real-life horror stories, and because it’s real life, they’re often chaotic and cruel. Justice might ultimately be served, but more often than not, the victims are already cold in the ground. If someone is dead-set on killing you, there’s a very good chance they’ll succeed. In the most satisfying fictional horror stories, of course, there’s a survivor, someone who faces the monster or killer and lives to tell the tale, someone who finds deep wells of courage and resilience inside themself and defeats the horrors the world throws at them. And these stories are not only limited to fiction.

Sources:
Investigation Discovery's Surviving Evil, S3E7, “The Bathtub Killer”
A&E's Cold Case Files, S4E24, “Déjà Vu/Secret in the Well”
People: https://people.com/bathtub-killer-dateline-nbc-murders-texas-8659842
Court papers: https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/591471c6add7b04934373412
https://multco.us/news/susan-walters-who-fended-hitman-provides-guidance-multnomah-county-crime-victims-portal
Willamette Week: https://www.wweek.com/news/2016/08/17/a-hit-man-came-to-kill-susan-kuhnhausen-she-survived-he-didnt/
Investigation Discovery's Nothing Personal: Murder for Hire, "This Man Brainwashed His Friend into Killing His Pregnant Wife"
Oregon Live: https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2014/06/portlander_who_hired_hitman_to.html
The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker

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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):
We deal with a lot of real life horror stories,
and because it's real life, they're often chaotic and cruel.
Justice might ultimately be served, but more often than not,
the victims are already cold in the ground. If someone
is dead set on killing you, there's a very good
chance they'll succeed. In the most satisfying fictional horror stories,

(00:40):
of course, there's a survivor, someone who faces the monster
or killer and lives to tell the tale, someone who
finds deep wells of courage and resilience inside and defeats
the horrors the world throws at them. And these stories
are not only limited to fiction. This is not today
amazing stories of survival. So campers were starting this one out.

(01:13):
In Arlington, Texas, September seventeenth, nineteen ninety six, a little
after five o'clock in the afternoon, police responded to a
homicide call at the Pear Tree apartment complex. It was
a nice, well maintained complex, but behind the door of
apartment eight sixteen there was a nightmare. Christine Vu, a
twenty five year old elementary school teacher, lay dead, faced

(01:36):
down in her bathtub, which was half full of water.
She was naked and bound with duct tape, and she
had been sexually assaulted and manually strangled. Her living boyfriend,
Tang Chiku, was distraught. He had discovered Christine's body and
called police, but they were, at least for now, suspicious
of his story. Dang had come home from work and

(01:58):
tried to open the apartment door, but it was head
bolted from the inside and no one answered his knock.
He figured maybe Christine was in the bathroom, so he
went to his car for a cigarette before trying the
door again. Still no joy. Getting worried, he went down
to the apartment complex Jim, where there was a payphone,
and tried calling her, but she didn't answer, so he

(02:18):
went back and tried the door again, and this time
it opened. The dead bolt was no longer locked. Thang
hurried in and it was just a few seconds before
he found Christine dead in the bathroom. He called police
before the reality of the situation really sank in. Whoever
had killed Christine had still been in the apartment when

(02:40):
Tang first tried the door, and had only slipped away
when he'd gone down to the gym. It's easy to
understand why the police were dubious about his story. Intimate
partner killings are a lot more common than stranger murders,
and this magically unlocking door sounded like bs. But they
found a fingerprint on the dead bolt that didn't match
Stang or anyone who worked in the apartment complex, and

(03:03):
DNA retrieved during Christine's autopsy didn't match him either. He
wasn't the killer, but investigators had no idea who was,
despite a massive investigative and canvassing effort. Three months later,
on Christmas Eve, Wendy Prescott's family were getting worried. Wendy,
a twenty two year old teacher's aid, hadn't shown up

(03:25):
for a big family dinner at her aunt's house and
wasn't answering her phone. That wasn't like her at all,
And when she hadn't shown up by eleven PM, her
aunt and uncle drove over to check on her. At
her apartment again at the Pear Tree apartment complex. When
they let themselves in, they found Wendy in exactly the
same situation Christine Voo had been found a few months before,

(03:48):
naked bound with duct tape, face down in her bathtub.
The similarities were eerie for the investigators who worked the scene.
Christine and Wendy's apartments had exactly the same layout and
decorp the two bathrooms were identical. Imagine being anyone living
at the Pear Tree apartments, but especially a young woman

(04:09):
living alone. It was deeply disturbing when Christine was murdered.
Now that a second young woman had been killed in
exactly the same way, there was panic. People moved out
in droves. This didn't help police who were trying to
canvass everybody there and get DNA samples from the male residence.
A lot of people just got out as soon as
they could and left no forwarding information. There was really

(04:33):
no doubt that both crimes had been committed by the
same person, and DNA recovered from Wendy's body confirmed it.
Investigators also lifted another print, but as this one was
from a thumb rather than a finger, they couldn't match
it to the one from the other scene. These were
carefully executed crimes. Detectives were confident these murders were not

(04:54):
the killer's first crimes, but they didn't get any hits
when they ran the princes through the national aphis system,
and without any connection there, they were left with the
laborious task of going through residents of the Pear Tree complex.

Speaker 3 (05:07):
This produced a couple of leads that initially seemed promising
but didn't turn into anything useful. An ac repairman had
taken off work on the days of both murderers, but
he had perfect alibis for both. The guy who'd lived
across the hall from Christine Vu had subsequently switched apartments
to live right across from Wendy Prescott. This was bizarre,

(05:29):
but in the end it just turned out to be
bad luck. The poor dude had been so freaked out
about living across from a murder scene he'd asked to move,
and the apartment complex had put him across from Wendy.
Oh my god, what's the opposite of buying a lottery ticket?
That's what I recommend for this guy.

Speaker 2 (05:46):
Jesus.

Speaker 3 (05:47):
The case stalt. The police had no idea about the
identity of the serial murderer the press had dubbed the
bathtub killer two years later. In the early hours of
February twenty third, nineteen ninety nine, two year old Chima
Simone was asleep in her room in the Alpha Kappa
Alpha sorority house at the University of Texas at Arlington. Suddenly,

(06:08):
an overwhelming sense of dread snapped her out of sleep.
There was a man in her bedroom, his face behind
a pantyhose mask, a gun in his hand. Do what
I say and I won't kill you, he said. He
sexually assaulted her violently, then, with the gun pressed against
her head, forced her to perform oral sex on him.

(06:30):
Chimo was suddenly overcome with anger. It coursed through her
stronger than fear, and she bit his dick hard again
right The intruder screamed, then beat her badly enough to
swell one side of her face and split her lip,
but then he hobbled away. Despite what she'd just been through,

(06:50):
Chimo was able to give the police a good description
of her attacker. He was black, clean cut, and probably
in his mid twenties. The attack was quickly connected to
the nineteen ninety six murders by a weird coincidence. Wendy
Prescott's best friend was also a student at UTA, and
she lived at the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority house. In fact,

(07:12):
until recently, she'd been Chima's roommate. Oh my god, Well,
this friend told police she knew who had attacked Chima.
It should have been me, She said. It must have
been her ex boyfriend who had been stalking her. She
said he must have killed the other two women two.
As it turned out, though, that wasn't the case. Her
ex might have been a creep, but he had a

(07:34):
solid alibi for the night Sheema was assaulted, and his
DNA didn't match the samples taken from the victims. But
this coincidence got the Arlington PD and the campus police
sharing notes more quickly than they usually would, and it
didn't take long for the DNA to confirm what everybody suspected,
that Chima's attacker was the same man who had killed
Christine Vu and Wendy Prescott. Chima was lucky to be alive.

(07:58):
If she hadn't wounded him, maybe he wouldn't have beaten
her so badly, but he might have hung around to
kill her. Thanks to Chima. The physical description police were
working with included a distinctive feature, a recent significant injury
to his penis, a kind of wound that was definitely
going to leave a gnarly scar.

Speaker 2 (08:17):
Adrian Fields, a twenty two year old postal worker, had
been terrified as soon as she'd heard about the bathtub
killer back in nineteen ninety six. The killings took place
just a short drive from her apartment. She had this
weirdly intense feeling, He's going to get me. I'm going
to be next. Adrian had had an abusive childhood and
she was scared a lot, but the bathtub killer shook

(08:40):
her up in a way that just would not let
her go. She couldn't stop thinking about him or shake
the conviction that he was going to come after her.
She was barely sleeping. She was afraid of the dark
and had to have the TV and bathroom light on.
When she did sleep, it was on the couch in
the living room so she could keep an eye on
both the front door in the patio door. She got

(09:02):
up again and again during the night to make sure
the doors were locked. Often, her older sister, Fanita would
have to come over and spend the night with her,
Adrian felt like she was going crazy. Two weeks after
Wendy Prescott had been murdered, Adrian couldn't take it any more.
With her sister's help, she packed up and moved out
of town to nearby Grand Prairie. She felt secure in

(09:24):
her new apartment for a while, but before long she
started to have another worry that someone was following her,
stalking her. Her fears about the bathtub killer started to
come trickling, then flooding back. And just to step back
for a second here, from the fact that we're including
her in this story, you might have already guessed that

(09:45):
Adrian was not just being paranoid here. Abusive childhoods can
sometimes lead people to develop a hyper awareness of the
moods and intentions of others. She didn't know it, but
Adrian had actually met the bathtub killer. Something in that
interaction had informed her, even if only on an unconscious level,
that she was face to face with a monster who

(10:08):
had the darkest of intentions towards her. But imagine you're
the friend or sister of someone like Adrian who's convinced
she's going to be the next victim of a serial killer.
You might sympathize and the understanding of her fears, but
I mean, do you take them seriously when weeks and
months passed. The most likely reaction is that you think

(10:28):
this person that you care about is just paranoid to
a degree that it's upsetting her life. It can get
kind of frustrating. Older sister Fanita told her get a grip,
but she couldn't. She was living in fear, sensing that
someone was watching her, hunting her. Y'all know we talk
a lot about intuition. We did a whole episode on

(10:50):
it a while back, the Gift of fear, and the
truth is Adrian's intuition was screaming at her. She knew,
of course, that her fears were disrupting her life. She
tried to break free of them, writing herself a letter
filled with determined hopes for the future. I am going
to sleep in the dark. I will not be afraid
any more. She called up her family that night and

(11:11):
told them about her new resolution to live free from fear.
Fanita asked if she wanted her and her boys to
come over and stay with her, but Adrian said no,
she was starting her new life tonight and she was
going to get a good night's sleep in the dark.
It was October twenty sixth, nineteen ninety nine. Adrian woke
in the dead of night to the sound of the
lock on her patio door being popped out. Soon after,

(11:35):
she heard heavy, regular breathing in the darkness. She screwed
her eyes shut and desperately tried to tell herself she
was dreaming. Eventually, though, she couldn't take it any more
and spun around, opening her eyes to stare at the
bedroom door. The man who had been standing there in
the darkness immediately started running right at her. He clamped

(11:58):
his hand roughly over her mouth, then pressed the cold
muzzle of a gun into Adrian's back. Do you feel that?
He said? If you keep screaming, I'm going to hurt you.
He was calm, cold as ice. He assaulted her for
the next two hours. When he caught Adrian looking outside,
he said, where are you looking at the window? My

(12:20):
friend's coming to meet me.

Speaker 3 (12:21):
Adrian said, no one's coming over here. He said, no
one ever comes over here. How did he know that?
He had been watching her, following her for a long time.
When he asked her her name, Adriane said Sarah. He said,
how about we call you Adrian. He knew all about her.

(12:43):
Adrian had been terrified of exactly the situation for years,
scaring herself by imagining how things might go. Because of that,
she thought a lot about what she'd do, how she
might get out of this alive. And again, I think
that quick instinctual reading of a person helped her out
because her answer was, I'm going to talk to him.

(13:04):
Why are you doing this? She said, The devil keeps
making me do it, the creep said. She kept talking
to him like you talked to a person, instinctively, knowing
that it would make her real to him, not just
a puppet in his fantasies. It's a lot harder to
hurt someone if you see them as a fellow human being.
While he was raping her, the man had ordered Adrian

(13:27):
to have sex like there's no tomorrow. Afterwards, She said,
is there a tomorrow? Of course there is, he said,
but is there for me? Adriane said. There was a long,
long pause as the bathtub killer weighed the question, enjoying
her terror. Yes, he said, eventually and left. Adrian called

(13:53):
nine to one one right away and then fell apart.
It didn't take long for investigators to tie this attack
in with the others. Eight months later, the killer's penis
was still badly scarred by Chimis Simone's teeth, and she'd
seen the scar. DNA evidence soon confirmed the connection, so
investigators now had more than a physical description of the

(14:15):
man they were hunting. Thanks to Adrian Fields, they had
a much deeper understanding of his psyche. The net was closing.
They would have caught him soon enough, but technology accelerated
the process. In nineteen ninety nine, the FBI was in
the process of introducing its advanced fingerprint system i APHIS.

(14:35):
In the summer of two thousand, the Arlington investigators ran
the prints from the original murders again, and this time
they got a hit. Twenty seven year old Dale Devon
Channett had been arrested and fingerprinted in nineteen ninety nine
for burglarizing a car stereo store in a Dallas suburb.
Next to nothing was uncovered about his early life. He

(14:57):
was a manual laborer and forklift operator from Louise's Siena
who moonlighted as a bouncer at a local club. That
was where he chose his victims. If a young woman
caught his eye. He'd ask to see her id before
he led her into the club, so right away he
got her name and her address. Then he'd stock her
sometimes for months and even years in Adrian's case, before

(15:20):
brutally assaulting her. After his arrest, he was linked to
at least three more rapes. His crimes were executed so
calmly and confidently. There were almost certainly others farther back
in his history that we still know nothing about. We'll
probably never know how many.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
Dale Chanet was charged with Wendy Prescott's murder. If a
DA feels like they've got a strong standalone case, they'll
sometimes keep additional crimes in their back pocket, just in
case anything strange happens during the trial, and with a
fingerprint and DNA evidence, Madude did not have a chance
in hell. He was found guilty and in January of
two thousand and three, sentenced to death by lethal injection.

(16:03):
Despite numerous appeals where he represented himself, Chanette's sentence was
carried out on February tenth, two thousand and nine. It
just happened to be Adrian Fields's birthday. Obviously, this is
a horror story, and the horror of it has always
stuck with me. But what sticks even more is the
incredible courage of these women who survived every woman's nightmare.

(16:25):
Shima fought back with her anger and her teeth. Adrian
fought back with her ability to talk to her attacker
and humanize herself to him. Both of these women are
heroes in my opinion, and without them, this waste of
carbon might never have been caught. Now, for this next case,

(17:07):
we're in Portland, Oregon. Susan Kunhausen was fifty one years
old and an er nurse at Providence Portland Medical Center.
On September sixth, two thousand and six. She'd just finished
her ship, so, as you can imagine, she was pretty wrecked. Still,
she wasn't quite ready to go home. She wanted a
little chill out time. She went to the Perfect Look

(17:28):
hair salon on East Burnside Street, about halfway between the
hospital and her house. An hour later, hair done and
spirits lifted, she headed home to acute one story Cape
cod on Southeast Alder Street. Susan went in the back
door as she usually did. The alarm started beeping and
she turned it off right away. She noticed a note

(17:48):
by the microwave It was from her husband of eighteen years, Mike.
It said Sue haven't been sleeping, had to get away,
went to the beach. He said he'd be back Friday
or Saturday, and signed the note love me, and I
should say here by the way. I don't really understand
this part of the story, because, as you'll see in
a minute, Susan was living by herself at this time,

(18:09):
separated from Mike, so I don't know if he just
still had access to the house and came over sometimes
or what. I probably anyway, Susan went through the house
and out the front door to get her mail. It
was a warm evening and she stood in the yard
for a couple minutes going through the envelopes. When she
went back in, she kicked off her shoes and noticed
it was really dark in the bedroom. She wondered if

(18:31):
she'd forgotten to open the curtains that morning. She went in,
and she'd only gone a few steps before a man
leapt out from behind the bedroom door and charged toward her.
In other circumstances, he might have looked harmless, a chubby,
pink faced dude with silver hair and a beard. He'd
have made a great Santa claus At one of your
cheaper moles. Now he looked furious, crazed. He had yellow

(18:57):
rubber gloves on his hands, and he was gripping a
red and black clawhammer. This wasn't a situation that needed
a Sherlock Holmesyan leap of logic to figure out the
sky was here to kill her. Susan had had a
kind of chaotic childhood. Her dad was a cook in
the Air Force, and he and her mom split up
when Susan was in the second grade. Between two parents,

(19:20):
one of whom had to go wherever the military sentim.
Susan and her brother grew up in Colorado, Arizona, California,
and Nevada. Always a new town, a new school, new
friends to make, and that can often lead kids to
either extreme introversion or extraversion, and with Susan it was
the latter. She was outgoing with a big, contagious laugh

(19:40):
you could hear from across the room. She loved going
to comedy clubs. Susan became first a licensed practical nurse
and then a registered nurse. She moved to Oregon in
the early nineteen eighties, ultimately settling in Portland, the one
area of Susan's life. Where things weren't sparking was La Passion.
In nineteen eight eight, a friend and Susan's mom talked

(20:02):
her into taking out a personal ad in Willamette Week.
It said someone Different, single white female, thirty three, overweight
but not over life seeks single male who wants more
out of a relationship than just slender. She got a
bunch of replies. One read, Hi different. My name's Mike.
I'm a thirty nine year old divorced, white male. I

(20:23):
enjoy most things in nature, from wandering in the ape
caves at Mount Saint Helen's to walking on the beach
at sunset.

Speaker 3 (20:29):
They spoke on the phone for the first time on
January thirtieth, and Susan marked the date in her day
planner with a smiley face. For their first date, they
went to the botanical garden and fed the ducks and
the squirrels. They got along great, always going out together
for hiking and fun stuff like that. Within a year
they drove down to Reno to get married. Mike had

(20:51):
grown up in Portland. He told Susan he'd fought in Vietnam,
although she came to doubt that later. It's not clear
whether he ever actually he went overseas, but Mike's military
records had him marked down as a switchboard operator, and
that's perfectly fine. He still served, but he was making
it sound like he was out in the jungle with
an sixteen like Rambo. Soon after their marriage, Mike got

(21:16):
a job as a janitorial supervisor for Oregon Entertainment, the
parent company of a local chain called Fantasy Adult Video.
And let's not think too deeply about what a janitor
for that company was cleaning.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
Up ros why.

Speaker 3 (21:35):
The bloom fell off the roase pretty quick once they
got married. While they were dating, Mike had managed to
summon up the pretense of joy, but he was fundamentally
a miserable person. He liked to tell susan life's a
shit sandwich and every day you take another bite until
you die.

Speaker 2 (21:53):
Oh that's nice imagery. He sounds fun.

Speaker 3 (21:58):
A real Debbie Downer. Yeah, you know, they weren't going
out hiking anymore, weren't really going out at all. Mike
just like to sit on the couch, chain smoke and
drink endless cans of diet coke.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
It's every woman's dream.

Speaker 3 (22:15):
You know. I really like to see that dating really
hasn't changed, Like nope, men have men have on my
for online dating, men have like five photos of like
one thing they did like five years ago, and they
use that on their dating profile. And usually it's like
fucking fishing, you know, And then they say I love

(22:38):
hiking and then you're like, Okay, when's the last time
you did hiking? And they're like, oh, you know nineteen
ninety three. Yeah, you're like with my parents when I
was five, and you're like, oh, okay, cool. So it's like, man,
so they that's why it's important to like get get

(23:00):
out of that like honeymoon face. Really see there's yeah,
see them for what they really are, because man, you
gotta you gotta see, because you would not believe. It's
like if you if you've never been on a dating app,
which I think many of our fans are married and

(23:21):
have been for a long time. Like it's fishing photo
fishing photo fishing, photo hiking photo from pre pandemic.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
I've heard that, like I've seen memes about it, so
it must be true. Let's be a lot of those
fish holding up a fish profile pic.

Speaker 3 (23:40):
And it's like if listen, some ladies love fishing. Okay,
a lot of women don't. You're trying to attract women here, gentlemen,
but you know, do you whatever? That's I'm off my soapbox,
that's fine. Whenever Susan went out on her own, he'd
grill her about where she was going and what she

(24:01):
was going to do. He'd go through her bank statements
she made more money than he did, and get all
persnickety about little things that Susan bought herself. If this
marriage was a horse, you'd shoot it. It was a
little lame, but Susan stuck it out all the way

(24:24):
till September of two thousand and five, when she decided
on something that would be utterly alien to Mike. She
wanted to be happy, I know. She kicked him out
and Mike went to live with his dad, so Susan
was living alone when the stranger rushed at her with
a raised hammer in the darkness of her bedroom. What

(24:46):
would you do in that situation? Most of us would panic,
which is absolutely the normal response. But Susan had been
an earnurse for nearly thirty years, which meant, among other things,
that she'd seen some shit. Oh yeah, not everyone who
comes into an er is calm and in control. Susan
and the other nurses had had regular self defense classes,

(25:09):
and reacting coolly at a crisis was almost an everyday
experience for them. Still in her blue scrubs, as her
attacker started swinging the hammer down, Susan stepped in close
so the blow would have less force. Still, the hammer
smashed into her left temple. Who are you? What do
you want? Susan yelled. He just kept swinging the hammer.

(25:32):
Susan was five inches shorter than him, but had a
weight advantage. She slammed into him, trying to push him over,
but he pushed her up against the bedroom wall and said,
you're strong.

Speaker 2 (25:42):
He yeah, she is. With a moment to think, Susan
fully realized she was in a fight for her life.
Adrenaline and anger flooded through her, and she shoved her
attacker back. Who sent you? She yelled. He tried to
hit her again with the hammer, but she wrestled it
from him and smashed it down four times into his head.

(26:03):
He didn't fall, though, and he managed to grab the
hammer back, so Susan grabbed his throat with both hands.
Who sent you here? She screamed into his face, squeezing hard.
His face went from red to purple and started turning blue.
Susan realized she was killing him, and she got scared.
She got up and tried to run for the front door.

(26:24):
Her attacker had no qualms about killing. He jumped up,
raced after her, and caught her in the hallway, spinning
her around and punching her twice. Susan fell down. He
stood over her with the hammer in his hand, and
Susan bit him hard on the leg. She was thinking
five steps ahead if she was going to die, she
wanted to leave teeth marks on this creep so he

(26:45):
could be identified, not that she was planning to die.
She managed to knock her attacker down and they wrestled
on the floor. She kept biting him on his arm,
his sighed, his thigh, and quite firmly on his junk
through his pants. Even as they struggled, Susan tried to
stick her hands in his pockets, looking for some kind

(27:05):
of id she could toss somewhere so the police could
find it later. Finally, as they struggled, Susan managed to
hook her leg around her attacker and lever herself on
top of him. She got her left arm around his
neck and pulled it in tight. She yelled, tell me
who sent you here, and I'll call you a fucking ambulance.

(27:26):
The man just growled at her. Susan had already let
up on the guy once and been attacked by him again.
She wasn't going to make that stain mistake again. She
kept her arm tight around his throat till he stopped moving.
Then she grabbed the hammer and raced to her neighbor's
house and got them to call nine one one. You
might have already guessed from the way she kept asking

(27:47):
who had sent him, But Susan had immediately jumped to
the conclusion that her attacker was a hitman hired to
kill her, and she wasn't keeping quiet about who she
thought was behind it. On the nine one one call,
her neighbor tell the dispatcher, she expressed a concern it
may have been her ex partner who sent the person.
It didn't take long for police to identify Susan's attacker.

(28:10):
Ed Hafey was fifty nine years old, a Vietnam vet
from a privileged family, and a terrible human being. By
nineteen ninety one, his once promising life had spiraled into
a mess of violence, meth production, and burglary. He was
already in jail on drug and gun charges in March
of ninety one, when he was charged with arranging the

(28:31):
murder of his ex girlfriend, Georgia Leie Dutton earlier in
the year. In nineteen ninety four, he pled guilty to
conspiracy to commit aggravated murder and served nine years before
being released in two thousand and three. What the hell?
Nine years? He literally tried to kill somebody. Nine years.
That's frickin' pathetic. Anyway, he moved to Portland to try

(28:52):
and start over, and he needed a job. With Ed's record,
not many people were going to jump with the chance
to hire him. But in July two thousand and four,
good old Mike Kuenhausen hired him to clean the floors
at Fantasy Adult Video. This was a year before Susan
kicked Mike out and two years before the attempt on
her life. But I'm very confident that Mike was already

(29:13):
thinking about killing his wife, and that's why he hired
at Halfey. His murder rap was a bonus for Mike.
He'd have his very own hitman to keep in his back. Pocket,
just in case they needed one.

Speaker 3 (29:25):
A few weeks before the attempt on Susan's life, Mike
lost his job. We don't know why exactly, but I
wouldn't be surprised if his bosses took a closer look
at his recent hiring decisions and found out that, thanks
to Mike, they now had a convicted murderer on their books. Also,
Fantasy Adult video was transitioning to just being fantasy, ditching

(29:47):
the porn tapes and concentrating on sex toys and lingerie,
with an emphasis on clothes for strippers to wear on stage.
They were aiming for a female customer base, and sad
creepy Mike wasn't really the vibe were going for. Anyway,
Mike was out of work and apparently wasn't living with
his dad anymore. The financial squeeze was on. Susan had

(30:11):
changed the beneficiary on her life insurance policy from Mike
to her brother, and had made sure that Mike knew it.
But they were still married and for now they still
shared ownership of the house on Alder Street. They'd paid
off the mortgage and it was worth around three hundred
thousand dollars. If Susan were dead. Mike would own it outright.

Speaker 2 (30:32):
She was so smart by the way to change her
life insurance and to tell him she did it. That's
the part a lot of people seem to forget. It's
useless if they don't know, because if they think that
they're going to get money, you know what I mean. Like,
she clearly knew she might be in danger to do
that in the first place.

Speaker 3 (30:47):
She's a savvy lady.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (30:50):
Detectives looked through Susan's house after the attack, but they
missed something in the basement. It was understandable. I guess
the basement was a cluttered mess and home invaders I'll
usually leave things lying around. But the next day a
friend went with Susan to help her pick up some
of her belongings and noticed a backpack down there.

Speaker 2 (31:09):
Inside this thing was a bottle of Hershey's syrup, two
hundred dollars in cash, some diabetes pills. Nice juxtaposition with
the hershey syrup. There a day book and an envelope.
The daybook entry for September fourth, two days before the attack,
said call Mike. Scrawled on the envelope was Mike's cell
phone number.

Speaker 3 (31:30):
Records from the security company showed that someone had deactivated
the alarm, then reactivated it shortly after while Susan was
at work. She hadn't changed the code after she kicked
Mike out. It was the date of their anniversary, twelve ten.
Mike had let at Halfy in, then wrote the note
Susan had found by the microwave and left, reactivating the alarm.

(31:50):
Halfy had hidden down in the basement, and close to
the time Susan was expected back, he'd amped himself up
for the crime. An autopsy showed that he'd had a
nearly full amount of cocaine in his system by the
time Susan killed him. So I'm thinking, like, maybe the
confusing note was to set the scene for detectives later
when they were wondering why the security system off and

(32:12):
back on again.

Speaker 2 (32:12):
Yeah, I thought of that, But it's so dumb because
what if it doesn't work. What if, you know, he
just attacks her and she manages to chase him off
or something, you know what I mean, Like, it just
doesn't make a lot of sense to me. But Mike
is dumb, So I'm not surprised that he would do.

Speaker 3 (32:26):
I mean, it's it's clear that he didn't think much
of Susan, like he didn't think.

Speaker 2 (32:31):
Yeah, absolutely of her. So right, he did not know
what was going to happen here at all.

Speaker 3 (32:37):
Yeah. On the day of the attack, Mike had driven
to the coastal resort town of Lincoln City and got
a room at a hotel. He didn't stay the night.
Though Susan's struggle with her attacker obviously made the news,
and for Mike, the most pertinent fact was that she
was still alive and Ed Hafey's body was right there.
It wouldn't take long for investigators to tie him to Mike,

(33:00):
and he knew it. Mike drove back to Portland that
same night, and the next day bought a three fifty
seven magnum revolver from the Silver Lining's pawn shop. On
September eighth, two days after the attack, Mike left a
typically self pitying note at his dad's house. All I
ever wanted was to be loved, and every time I
had it, I fucked it up.

Speaker 2 (33:22):
Puppy Kins did our best laid plans, go old titties up.
Blessy's hoart coming right on the heels of him buying
a gun, This obviously had authorities very worried about what
Mike might do to himself, But five days later a
sheriff's deputy stopped him in the parking garage of the
Sunnyside Medical Center. Mike claimed he was checking himself in.

(33:43):
I had nothing to live for anymore, he told the deputy,
and involuntary psychold soon followed, and shortly after that, an
arrest for conspiracy to commit murder. He denied everything, but
Mike Kuenhausen's goose was pretty much cooked. He's an idiot.
Ed Halfey had tried to involve an old cell mate
in an insurance scam and taken the buddy to meet Mike.

(34:07):
He backed out as soon as was clear they were
talking about murder, and was happy to identify Mike to
the police. Ed didn't have a car, and a friend
had once driven him to an Appleby's parking lot so
Ed could talk to Mike. Another witness happy to talk
to the police. Finally, in August of two thousand and seven,
Mike pleaded guilty. Susan meanwhile said of herself, I'm doing

(34:29):
a life sentence for picking a bad husband. She was
anxious after the attack, always looking over her shoulder. She
always sat where she could see the door. She made
a habit of switching up her driving routes and would
circle around if she thought some one was following her.
She moved to a new house on a cul de
sac and put gravel all around it so she could
hear if anybody came close. She got a gun and

(34:51):
practiced shooting. She knew Mike was due to be released
in twenty fourteen. He still claimed to be innocent, said
he'd only pled guilty to avoid a longer He should
have gotten a longer sentence. It's hard not to think
he got off easier than he should have just because
Susan managed to kill his hit man before he killed her.
He shouldn't have been rewarded just because he picked a
shitty henchman. But Mike would insist to the dwindling number

(35:15):
of people who cared enough to listen that he was
the real victim here. Susan was terrified as Mike's release
date came closer and closer. He'd made a mistake and
hired the wrong guy. He wouldn't make that same mistake again.
But in June ninety two days before release, Mike Kunhausen
died in prison of prostate cancer. Susan's story was big news.

(35:41):
People called her a hero. She didn't feel like a
hero though didn't really understand why people thought that. Her
boss at the hospital told her, they're not calling you
a hero because you killed a man. They're calling you
a hero because they want to believe, given the same circumstances,
that they too might survive. That is so perceptib I
think that's absolutely true. Stories like Susan's give us not

(36:04):
only hope, but courage too. I think, just to know
that there are people out there who fought back in
one I'm sure their victories come at a pretty steep
price post traumatic stress, fear, trouble trusting people. But a
lot of survivors use their experiences to help other people. Susan,
for example, she changed her name, by the way, from
Kunhausen to Walters, gives motivational talks, teaches self defense tactics,

(36:28):
and works with police departments to provide better services for
victims of crime. And she's also worked with her local
PD to develop a system to warn victims when their
attackers are about to be released from jail. So, if
you ask me, hell, yeah, she's a hero. All the
women in this episode are and I love how every
one of these survivor stories is different. You know. Some
of them survived by just kind of instinctual brute force

(36:53):
reaction and just you know, anger fueled courage, and some
by an instinctual understanding of their attack and his motives.
There's more than one way to fight back, y'all. At
the end of the day, the only thing that matters
is that you make it out of there alive if
you possibly can. Now, I'll leave you with this. Susan's
still out there advocating for the survivors of crime and

(37:16):
for victims' families. And if you ever hear this, Susan,
we think you are a certified badass. And we hope
you're thriving. We hope you all are thriving. So that
was a wild one, 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 we
get together again around the True Crime Campfire. And today

(37:36):
we want to wish a very happy thirtieth birthday to
our listener, Adubaya. We hope you have an amazing day,
ideally with lots of cake and ice cream and as always,
we want to send a grateful shout out to a
few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Ali, Sarah,
Meghan and Jelena or possibly Yelena, I'm not sure which.

Speaker 3 (37:54):
We appreciate.

Speaker 2 (37:55):
Y'all to the moon and back, and if you're not
yet a patron, you're missing out.

Speaker 1 (37:59):
Patrons of our.

Speaker 2 (37:59):
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