November 14, 2025 • 61 mins
Last week, we did our first-ever live show on the Crimewave true crime cruise! We covered three cases, a sort of "sampler platter" to give new listeners an idea of what kind of stories we usually tell on TCC. Case 1 is the bizarre story of a parody website that ended up bringing dozens of would-be killers to justice. Case 2 is the murder of chef Dan Brophy by his mystery-novelist wife. Case 3 is the true story of Stede Bonnet, bumbling pirate wannabe and possible boyfriend of the dread pirate Blackbeard. Thank you so much to IRL Events for the opportunity to perform live--it was a blast! Thanks too to Royal Caribbean for hosting us all.
Note: There were some visual aids that went along with these cases, so sometimes you'll hear the crowd laughing at those.
Patreon supporters will also have access to the half-hour Q and A session we hosted after the live show.
Follow us, campers!
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https://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/
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Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfire
Email: truecrimecampfirepod@gmail.com
MERCH! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.
Note: There were some visual aids that went along with these cases, so sometimes you'll hear the crowd laughing at those.
Patreon supporters will also have access to the half-hour Q and A session we hosted after the live show.
Follow us, campers!
Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfire
https://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/
Facebook: True Crime Campfire
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=en
Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfire
Email: truecrimecampfirepod@gmail.com
MERCH! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Hello, campers. Can everybody hear me?
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Probably not, because it's a cacophony in here at the moment.
All right, everybody's shut up. I have something to say,
So Hello campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the
True Crime campfire. We are your camp counselors. I'm Whitney
and I'm Katie, and we're here to tell you a
(00:47):
true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting
murderers and marshmallows around the True Crime campfire. This is
normally where the music goes back. We're coming to you
today from the middle of the Ocean on Royal Caribbean's
beautiful Liberty of the Seas. And this has been the
(01:09):
most fun I have ever had in my entire life.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
It's so fun.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
It's been amazing.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
It's been incredible to meet some of y'all in person.
It's amazing getting to hang out with these other rock
star podcasters. It's just been absolutely surreal. And we know
some of all today have probably never listened to us before,
so we wanted to give you kind of like a
charcouterie platter of the kinds of stories that we usually do.
One bizarre story one murder and a little bit history
(01:38):
at the end. So settle in, get comfy, and we'll
start with case one. The dark Web's not safe, but
we are. Some of the most important discoveries in history
happened by accident, Like penicillin. A scientist was so much
of a slob that when he went away for a
few days and came back to his labb he found
mold all over his petrie dishes. And then he noticed
(01:59):
that the molds seemed to be repelling bacteria, and bata
being bada boom, we got life saving antibiotics. My point
is sometimes we set out to do one thing and
end up with something much more spectacular.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
When he and a.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Few college friends decided to start a cyber security business together,
Bob Ennis had no way of knowing that their website
would one day lead to FBI and ATF investigations and
dozens of arrests. This is the sordid tale of rent
a Hitman dot com. Bob Innis initially wanted to solve
(02:32):
crimes for a living, but at the time he graduated
from the police Academy in nineteen ninety nine, no departments
were hiring, so he shifted to plan b it. He
and a few of his friends decided to start a
company offering basically white hat hacking services, meaning they would
try and hack your company's website to find the weak
spots and then they would tell you.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
How to fix them.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
So for less than ten bucks, Bob bought a domain
name for their website, rent a hitman dot com.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Hit just meaning like visits to the website.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
It was just supposed to be a funny, attention grabbing
name that he thought might attract clients.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
But the company didn't really go anywhere.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Everybody kind of dispersed, and in two thousand and five,
Bob tried unsuccessfully to sell the domain name, but for
some weird reason, nobody wanted rent a hitman dot com.
I can't imagine why not. So he just left it
alone and you know, kind of forgot about it. But
before he did, he posted an email address for potential
buyers to contact him if they were interested.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
And that was it for years. So the site just sat.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
There with this email address, and he didn't look at
it until twenty ten. In twenty ten, he decided, just
kind of out of curiosity to check the email and
see if anybody had gotten in touch and oh my god,
what he found were hundreds and hundreds of emails from
people wanting to hire a contract killer. Now, some of
(03:53):
them were obviously jokes, but a lot of them were not.
So just imagine what this must have been like for
this poor man, Like, never in his wildest nightmares did
he expect anybody to actually think he was running a
hitman for higher service on the surface web, for God's sake, Like, who.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Would be dumb enough to do that? And who would
be dumb enough to try hiring them? Right?
Speaker 2 (04:17):
Well, lots and lots and lots of people apparently. The
first email that stood out to Ennis was from a
lady named Helen, and it was just pages and pages
of not super coherent desperation. She said she was from
Great Britain, but she was stranded in Canada now because
her family had built her out of all the money
she was supposed to inherit from her dad, and she
(04:38):
wanted three of her relatives murdered, so she was trying
to get bang for her bug, right, And the next
part of the letter just gave Innis chills. She described
each person that she wanted murdered in great specific detail,
along with their addresses and this was freaked out, but
he didn't respond initially until Helen sent a second email,
(05:00):
this time with the subject heading urgent and even more
information about her intended targets.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
So he's like, all right, screw it.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
He reached out to Canadian police and it turned out
this was not Helen's first rodeo. She was already wanted
for some fairly major stuff in the UK, so the
Canadian cops arrested her.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
She spent like four.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Months in jail in Canada before they shipped her back
to the UK to face her charges there. And this
was the first arrest and conviction for renta hitman dot com.
And I'm sure Bob Ennis hoped it would be the last.
You know, he had no idea how many more were coming.
He decided to give the website a makeover, and we're
just gonna show you this.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Because it's.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Ah right, yeah, take a second, I know, yeah, it's
hilarious that anyone on planet Earth is dense enough to
fall for this shit, right, Like, how as you can see,
he writes the whole site, this character Guido Finelli's basically
(06:04):
like a cheesy Temu tony soprano, and he says stuff
like rent a Hitman's got the muscle to make your
trouble sleep with the fishes, really people, and he offers
senior and military and group discounts just like it's like
Hitman group on. And he promises total confidentiality, one hundred
(06:27):
percent HIPPA compliant and HIPPA of course meaning hit Man
Information Privacy and Protection Act of nineteen sixty four, which,
as I'm sure all of you realize, is not a
thing that exists.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
For the love of God, come on.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
People, reading comprehension is at an all time low.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
That is unfortunately true.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
But as ludicrous as this website is, people have been
hitting it up for years, right up to the present
day to try and avail themselves of its services. Some
people want asset extraction, meaning like just getting somebody to
cough up money or products, items, whatever. People have written
(07:10):
in from the US, Europe, the UK, even Indonesia.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
For some reason.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
He says he's gotten a really weirdly high number of
emails from Indonesia, so he must have gotten some press
over there or something. And one British lady wrote in
asking Guido Finelli if he could set her up with
one of his operatives.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
She really liked the idea, I guess.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Of dating a hit man and having him teach her
the ropes along the way, like it's mister and missus
Smith or something. My girl was trying to use this
website as her own personal combo of.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
Okay Cupid and course careers okay stupid.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Of course, there were plenty of kids who wanted to
kill their parents, So those of you all who have teenagers,
I'm sure you're thrilled to hear that. And in twenty twenty,
a fifty two year old woman named Wendy Wine had
a seriously pissed off they'll be in her bonnet about
her ex husband, which is not an unusual thing. But
what was unusual was that our girl, Wendy decided she
(08:09):
was gonna go on the old interwebs and find herself
a hitman.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
To take care of before her because you know, if.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
You want to hire a contract killer, it makes sense
to just google it, right, I.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Mean, preferably on your home computer.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Wendy surfed around for a few minutes until she landed
on renta hitman dot com and look legit to her right,
I mean, everybody knows that guys with names like Guidofanelli
have a direct line to a whole facebook of skilled
murderers for hiring.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
You just picked one.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
So she checked out a few of the website's reviews
from satisfied customers, like the one left by a lady named.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Laura who said she'd caught her hubs.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Cheating with the babysitter and well, you know, had him
taken care of. Wendy filled out renta hitman's helpful Request
for service form and include it a long rambling explanation,
and basically, the man she wanted ice her ex had
stolen allegedly twenty grand from her. So Ennas passed on
the info to the police in Wendy's town and.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
They took over the case. They picked out a detective
to play the.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Hit man, and they set up a meeting with Wendy
in a parking lot. And I might be wrong about this,
but I literally think it was a Wendy's parking lot.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
I think it was. I have to check.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
She showed and she brought a down payment, and that
was what they needed to arrest her. Because if any
of you all are familiar with hitman sting operations, when
money changes hands, that's when the suspect proves to them
that they're serious. So Wendy was caught red handed. She
eventually pled guilty, and she was sentenced to seven to
twenty four years in prison for attempted solicitation of murder.
(09:49):
And this is my favorite part of Wendy's story. The
judge at her sentencing, who is obviously one of our people,
took a minute to roast her dumbass. He said, if
the intent wasn't so serious here, this would be almost comical.
But it's not, obviously is I mean, go on a
little lot. It's a little funny. Nobody looking at could
(10:13):
have believed this website was real, the judge said, but
you did, Diane. So not only did Wendy get caught
committing a serious crime, but she got caught being an
absolute goober about it, which I don't think it gets
any worse than that, honestly. And of course there's more.
It was hard to pick just if you for this episode.
(10:35):
There's Deane Parkin, who tried to hire a hitman to
take out the woman she blamed for the breakup of
her marriage. This was just last year, twenty twenty four. Yeah,
her ex husband had had an affair with this lady
and at the time Diane discovered when a hitman they
were living together, and Dian just couldn't take it. I
can't have this get to the cops or no one.
I can't loose my kids, she told an undercover detective,
(10:58):
and a text message was, you know, do you want
to embarrass yourself in front of the hitman? It takes
two seconds to do a spell check. Loose my kids anyway.
I'm a writing teacher irritates me. So in a voice
call over WhatsApp, Dean said she was willing to do
anything to get this woman out of her life, even
if it meant killing her and burying her in a
six foot hole. When the undercover asked if she had
(11:21):
any ideas about how to carry out the murder, Dane said,
whatever's easiest, you know, if you want to make it
look like a suicide. She was really persistent and eventually
the detectives set up a meeting to seal the deal,
and Diane showed she brought a diamond ring and one
hundred bucks cash as a down payment, and she negotiated
(11:41):
with them that she'd pay the rest on a payment plan,
which I think is nice, right, I didn't know hitman
had buy now, pay later? Can you clarna a hit
I hear you can clarna a Domino's pizza?
Speaker 3 (11:53):
And now also, God help us all.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Dianne ended up sentenced to eighty months in prison and
an extra few years of probation. And then we have
Leif Everett Hayman, who thought his girlfriend's mom was too controlling.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
I know, right.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
He told rent a hit man he wanted her gone
off the fucking earth, but he only wanted to spend
like two hundred dollars. When an undercover ATF agent told
him he'd have to pay for the gun, Leif was like,
I have knives, I have a rock you could smash
your head in.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
With direct quote. He's just frugal. He's a frugal guy.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Leif Hayman ended up sentenced to ten years in federal
prison with three more probation once he gets out. And y'all,
these are just a tiny little droplet in the bucket.
There are so many more of these cases. There have
been dozens of arrests from this website. But not everybody
writing to rent a hit Man was interested in hiring
a hit man. Some of them wanted to be one.
(12:56):
In early twenty twenty three, Josiah Garcia was twenty one
years years old, an Air National guardsman with a baby
on the way, and in need of a job. So,
like any of us would do in that situation, he
went online and started looking for something that would fit
with his interests and skill set. You know, mercenary jobs basically,
you know, just standard stuff. What he found was rent
(13:17):
a Hitman dot Com, specifically the.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Careers section.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Which reads, why join us rent a Hitman Your point
and click solution TM is an equal opportunity employer, and
we mean equal. We don't even ask about your family history.
Our onboarding process piece of cake. It's as simple as
whipping up a Sunday gravy. Just fill out the form,
keep it honest or close enough, and our onboarding specialists
(13:46):
who might know a guy who knows a guy will
take it from there.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
God special skills.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Maybe you're good at cleaning up messes. Don't be shy,
lay it all out there.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
I am obsessed with the idea of mobster hr like
and so do you think they have to watch like
cheesy videos about sexual harassment like the rest of us?
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Like I'm obsessed. You know they would.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
It's all very corporate and this that I just read
you this seemed legit to Josiah, Bless his heart. I mean,
why wouldn't it right? You're not like you're gonna find
this shit on LinkedIn. So he filled out the application
for a field operative position. He attached his resume with
his Air National Guard work front and center. He put
(14:33):
himself down as an expert marksman. He attached some identification
documents with all his real personal info. I know there
are people that dumb out there, y'all, they walk among us.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Also, one of the fields you have to fill in
on the application is date you can start smashing kneecaps.
Convincing right, Josiah said he wanted to start as soon
as possible. He also wrote a few paragraphs to really
try and sell himself, and here's just a little excerpt
(15:08):
of his essay. I'm looking for a job that pays
well related to my military experience shooting and killing the
mark target, so I can support my kid on the way.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
What can I say?
Speaker 2 (15:19):
I enjoy doing what I do, so if I can
find a job that's similar to it, such as this one,
put me in coach, and he had one more thing
to add to his application. He wanted Guido to know
that in the Guard his nickname had been Reaper, you know,
because of his insanely accurate marksmanship. I bet it was
actually Beaker, like from the Muppets, but I can't prevent.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
And you know, he gave himself that nickname.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Yeah, come on, guys, you call me Reaper.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Remember I told you no nicknames cannot be requested, they
can be bestowed otherwise it's sad.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Now.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Initially, Bob Innis thought this one might be a joke.
Put me in coach seriously, but it quickly became clear.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
That this dipshit was dead serious.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
So Ennis passed on his info to the FBI, and
an undercover agent took over communication as rent a hitman's
field coordinator.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
First, the agent tried to give.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Josiah an out. He was like, you know, you have
a lot going for you. Are you sure you want
to do this? He wanted to know if Josiah thought
he could handle the psychological impact of murder, like could
you kill fifty people and still live with yourself? Josiah said,
that's rookie numbers for the Reaper, and I'm sure the
(16:39):
agent died a little inside from cringe because I did.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Okay. The undercover said, well, what about torture? What about like.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Taking a finger or an ear as a trophy. If
that's what the client wants, could you do that? Josiah
was all forty. He was like, yeah, if it's possible
and I can do it, I'm no problem. This guy's
expecting a baby. It's scary, right, And after some back
and forth, Josiah agreed to perform his very first hit
for the company for a fee of five thousand dollars,
and on a Wednesday morning, our guy met up with
(17:09):
his contact at a park, the contact, of course, being
the undercover FBI agent. The agent handed Josiah a dossier
on his intended target, just a guy they made up
out of thin air. It had pictures of the guy,
info about his routines, and an upfront payment of twenty
five hundred dollars.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
He'd get the rest after the job was done.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
And our boy did not bat and I he was
just like, okay, you need a picture of the body
for proof.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
That's some cold shit right there, right yikes.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
So, needless to say, once the money changed hands, agents
moved in to put the habeas grab us on our
aspiring hit man, and I wish I'd been there to
see his little face when he saw all those FBI jackets.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Coming at him, you know, like out of the tree
line looking down on the ground. Oh, it was so fun.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Despite initially trying to weasel out of consequences by saying
I was just gonna take the money, I wasn't really
gonna do the hit, Josiah eventually pled guilty to using
interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder for hire.
He could have gotten ten years in federal prison, but
because he took the plea, he got off super easy.
He got five years of probation, two of which he
(18:15):
has to spend in like a halfway house type of place,
which I'm sure is no picnic, but it's a lot
better than ten years locked up.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
So if you ever happen to listen to this, Josiah, honey,
my advice to you is get smarter.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
So yeah, a parody website leading to real arrests and
prosecutions and saving hundreds of lives. You cannot make this
shit up. Bob Innes's day job, ironically enough, is in
pest control, which is hilarious to me because if I
were gonna take out like a Craigslist add as a
hitman for hire, I would one hundred percent put something
(18:54):
like discreete pest control.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
In the title.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
The killer Catching business has taken its toll on Bob, though.
A few years ago he told ABC News, it really
makes you wonder who's out there. Are they your neighbors,
are they your business associates, or they your ex spouses?
You never know and it is unsettling, right like remember
to Catch a Predator with Chris Hansen, like in the
early two thousands. That's how I felt after watching that
(19:19):
for the first time.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Like these creeps are everywhere and you don't know who
it is. There's no way to know.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
And according to an Australian study, about two percent of
all murders are murders for hire. So there are a
lot of these folks out there, more than we'd like
to think. So I think we're lucky to have people
like Bob on our side.
Speaker 4 (19:37):
We absolutely are. And now we move on to case two.
This pen is the barrel of the gun, so campers
for this one. We are in Portland, Oregon, June second,
twenty eighteen. That morning, a professor walked into Dan Brophy's
cooking class at the Oregon Culinary Institute. Sixty three year
(19:57):
old Dan was a born teacher. He loved his students.
They loved him right back.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Right.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
Yes, this was a guy who everybody agreed could easily
be working as an executive chef anywhere he wanted, But
that really wasn't how Dan rolled. His attitude was, Life's
not about money, It's about doing the things you love
with the people you care about.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
He worked part time at.
Speaker 4 (20:20):
A friend's restaurant as a head chef for like some
extra cash, but it wasn't his passion. He loved gardening,
and his garden was so prolific that he could sell
herbs and vegetables to his students for their projects or
just like for their home. He also raised chickens and
turkeys for eggs and meat. And this picture is my
absolute favorite picture of him, with him cradling his red
(20:42):
hen and a chef's jacket.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
It's just so cute.
Speaker 4 (20:45):
He was also first in line to do a job
for someone at a discount or even free, and he
constantly gave back to his community. He was a truly
curious soul, and he embodied something that I think is
an important quality in a person, which is just doing it.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
Like he was interested in mushrooms, so he learned how
to forage. He wanted to learn how to dig for clams,
so he figured out how to do that. He wanted
to learn how to make a natural insecticide, so he
started growing tobacco in his own garden so he could experiment.
He would later teach these skills to his students to
connect them with the food that they were cooking.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
Dan was like that sweet, crunchy wizard and lord of
the rings, you know, like rat AGAs I think was
his name. Just good vibes all around, Like I would
not be surprised if this man had birds landing on
his shoulder, like snow white.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Just a sweetheart to the core.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
If not birds, just chickens, I think maybe chickens.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (21:38):
That morning, when one of Dan's colleagues stepped into the
kitchen for a chat, a smell hit him, the kind
that puts your lizard brain on high alert, sharp and metallic.
There on the floor was Dan Brophy in a pool
of blood, shot once in the back, and as the
force spun him around, shot again in the chest. Investigators
(21:59):
were frustrated with the crime scene pretty much from minute one.
A search of the kitchen and the school turned up nothing.
The killer had clearly brought the gun. And then Dan's wife,
Nancy showed up in her gray Toyota minivan. Someone had
called her to tell her that there was police activity
in the institute, and she sped over there in a panic.
(22:20):
When she introduced herself, the police didn't even ask why
she was there, just pulled her to the side and
asked her to wait. And when they told her that
her husband had been killed, she seemed devastated, and as
they drove her home, investigators couldn't help but feel sorry
for her. The poor woman just lost her husband, who
would have done something like this. Investigators weren't suspicious of
(22:42):
Nancy at first, and if you look at her you
can see why. She kind of looks like the grandma
whose entire personality is being a grandma. Like this woman
absolutely owns a shirt that says, my favorite people call
me grandma.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Right, you are right about this, but I will point
out it looks like somebody's mema until she opens her
mouth and you figure out what a condescending hose bag
she is.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
It's very true. We will find out about that in
a moment. As far as anyone knew, Dan and Nancy
were happy, even though they were opposites. Dan was reserved,
Nancy was talkative. Dan was a planner, Nancy was spontaneous.
Dan was frugal, Nancy was a spender.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Dan was a little bit country, Nancy was a little
bit rock and roll.
Speaker 4 (23:29):
They made it work, though, and Nancy had the same
can do attitude that Dan did. When she started a
catering business, it took off like a rocket. Some tax
returns reported the company making more than five hundred thousand.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Dollars some years.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
She also wanted to be an author, so she started
a blog and again self publishing books. Her focus was
romantic suspense, and while it was certainly her passion, it
never seemed to take off.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
Her Amazon.
Speaker 4 (24:00):
Oh yes, oh yes, her Amazon reviews were good, but
there were only like ten of them, and there's only
ten of them to this day. And listen, I don't
think they belong in the king shaming corner, all right,
but it's certainly kink shaming adjacent.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Yeah, it's like kink shaming breezeway, you might say, And
like I said, the police didn't suspect her at first.
Speaker 4 (24:30):
When they asked her where she'd been on the morning
of the murder, she said she and Dan had like
pottered around for a while until he left around ten
after seven. After that, Nancy insisted she hadn't left the
house until she heard about the incident at the Culinary Institute.
They asked her if she and Dan owned a gun.
They did, but it was just collecting dust on a shelf.
(24:50):
They never used it. When the police took her home,
they asked to see the gun. It appeared to have
never been fired, which I actually didn't know was possible
to tell.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
But apparently it's the thing.
Speaker 4 (25:02):
The culinary Institute didn't have any security cameras, which is
nuts to me, but the restaurant next door did, and
in the surveillance video they saw what appeared to be
Nancy Brophy's gray minivan driving by at seven oh eight am,
driving towards the Culinary Institute, and then again at seven
twenty eight am, driving in the opposite direction. According to
(25:24):
the police's timeline, Dan was killed a little bit after
he disarmed the alarm system at seven twenty two am. So, yes,
that's interesting, no.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Interesting, And I want y'all to remember that this woman
is a mystery writer, okay, one who apparently is unaware
that places have security cameras.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
So they decided to do a little more digging on
Nancy Brophy, and y'all they found a gold mine. The
first thing they noticed were the money problems. Nancy and
Dan had almost no savings and they were living paycheck
to paycheck. Nancy's catering business had taken a hit after
nine to eleven and they'd had to downsize considerably. A
(26:07):
fire had destroyed Dan and Nancy's house and they had
to wait for over a year for it to be rebuilt.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Really a fire, huh, that's interesting?
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Hmmm, yes, yes it is.
Speaker 4 (26:17):
I don't have any proof that there was anything shady
about this fire, but it is interesting.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Yeah, And by interesting, I mean yep, she started that
for the insurance money, allegedly.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
Allegedly. We would never we would never say anything like that. So, yeah,
money was a problem. Nancy was a spender. If it
was in her account, it was hers to spend. In fact,
her and Dan's retirement was totally drained. And these are
people in their sixtiesfying. Dan had mentioned money troubles to
(26:49):
one of his work friends, but he didn't seem worried
if he had to work until he dropped, he was
completely fine with that. He wasn't stressed. But we don't
know how much Dan actually knew about his wife's spending habits.
Nancy had thousands of dollars in credit card debt, they
were struggling to pay their fifteen hundred dollars a month mortgage,
(27:09):
and they'd taken out a loan against a life insurance policy.
One of the things that stuck out to the investigators
was that they were paying one thousand dollars a month
on life insurance. That seemed awfully high for a couple
struggling to make ends meet.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Yeah, you can't make your mortgage, but you're dropping a
grand a month on the life insurance policy.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
That is sketchy.
Speaker 4 (27:32):
Then, almost immediately after Dan's murder, Nancy filed her claims
with the life insurance companies, and apparently one of them
asked if they could get some kind of confirmation from
the cops that she wasn't a suspect in Dan's death,
an exoneration letter.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
She got real squirrely about.
Speaker 4 (27:49):
It, and when she asked the detectives about it, they
were like, hm hmm, yeah, we're not doing that. No.
Nancy must have realized they were suspicious of her at
that point. And then.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
There was Nancy's blog on there.
Speaker 4 (28:06):
She promotes her books, talks about writing, and roommates about
her life. In her about section, she wrote, I live
in the beautiful, green and very wet Northwest, married to
a chef whose mantra is life is a science project.
As a result, there are chickens and turkeys in my backyard,
a fabulous vegetable garden, and a hot meal on the
table every night. For those of you who have longed
(28:28):
for this, let me caution you. The old adage is true.
Be careful what you wish for. When the gods are
truly angry, they grant us our wishes. Here she's talking
about the ten pounds she gains every year from his cooking.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
But like, what weird wording?
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Right? Yeah, yeah, Nancy, I'm sure the gods were furious
when they send you this amazing man that cooks restaurant
quality meals for you every night, You poor thing.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (28:59):
She later testified she didn't cook a night in their marriage.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Oh that's a dream.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
That's gold right there.
Speaker 4 (29:05):
The most interesting post was a guest essay she wrote
for a friend's website. She called it how to Murder
your Husband. Yeah, yeah, it is a doozy. As a
romantic suspense writer, I spend a lot of time thinking
about murder and consequently police procedure.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Do you.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Really here's the thing, okay, nance honey, If if you
are going to publish a blog post called how to
murder your husband, I'm sorry, you're screwed.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
You can never do.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
It because they are going to be onto you immediate.
Like we know, we're screwed, Like we can no matter what,
never do anything out of him, because the first thing
the detectives are gonna see is true crime podcasters.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
So we're you know, we're out of the game.
Speaker 4 (29:55):
Okay, she continues, After all, if the murder is supposed
to set me free, I certainly don't want to spend
time in jail. And let me say clearly for the record,
I don't like jumpsuits and orange is not my color.
And I'll read you a couple of examples from her
motives lists. It's a it's a weirdly long post money
divorce is expensive and do you really want to split
(30:17):
up all your possessions? Or if you married for money,
aren't you entitled to all of it? The drawback is
that the police aren't stupid. They are looking at you first,
so you have to be organized, ruthless and very clever.
Husbands have disappeared from cruise ships before. Why not yours?
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Which one of y'all's thinking about it? Stop it? Not
on my watch?
Speaker 4 (30:48):
Crime of passion in anger, you bash his head in
or stab him with a kitchen knife. Most of the
time there's a trail that leads directly to you. Every
murder leaves clues. A crime of passion does not look
like a stranger was involved, And who is left to
clean the blood from your carpeting? And then under options
(31:09):
to consider? She's a full service advice columnist. I think
she lifts a whole bunch of possible murder weapons. And
I'll just read you a couple guns loud, messy, and
require some skill. If it takes ten shots for the
sucker to die, either you have terrible aim or he's
on drugs. Poison considered a woman's weapon. Arsenic is easy
(31:36):
to obtain and worse, easy to trace. It takes a
month or two to kill someone, plus they're sick the
entire time. Who wants to hang out with a sick husband?
Speaker 2 (31:46):
Which I think this is interesting because y'all are true
crime nerds, you know what I'm talking about. That shows
how little she understands about murder and criminal psychology, because
for a lot of poisoners, watching the process is part
of the fun.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
For them.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
It's a way that they can torture their victim without
laying a hand on them, and some of them will
draw it out on purpose.
Speaker 4 (32:08):
I find it easier to wish people dead than to
actually kill them. But the thing I know about murder
is that every one of us has it in him
or herself when pushed far enough.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
Okay, Whitney, do you have any any critiques?
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Just a couple.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
My main critique is how delulu she is about her
own intelligence. Like, maybe you could not have been worse
at getting away with murder if you've done it on purpose,
But you go ahead and give us some advice on
how to slip under the police's radar.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
She just kills me with this hi, and her tone
is so smug.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
It always is.
Speaker 4 (32:46):
Yeah, Now the police were ninety nine point ninety nine
nine percent sure they had their girl. The money problems,
the life insurance, and the blog were painting a pretty
clear picture. The only problem was the murder weapon. But
then the police seized Nancy's computers and they found mountains
of research into ghost guns. Now, this is one of
(33:08):
the scariest things I researched for TCC. Ever, a ghost
gun essentially is a gun you build yourself from a
kit the advantage for a murderer, and this is illegal now,
but in twenty eighteen, these guns were not required to
have serial numbers. Yikes, getting your hands on one was
as easy as buying one of the kits. So Nancy
(33:29):
just went to ghostguns dot com Yeah, clicked add to
carte and when the police searched her storage unit, they
found the kit. Only the barrel had been taken out
of the box. It looked like Nancy took the barrel
from the ghost gun and put it on the handgun
that she and Dan owned and used this Franken weapon
(33:50):
to kill him and make it look like their gun
hadn't been used. So when the cops asked her about
the kit, she told the detectives. She bought the gun
for a book she was writing, like for research. She
wanted to learn how it worked. Uh, okay that a
check just said where's this book?
Speaker 3 (34:09):
Then outline it's.
Speaker 4 (34:12):
Not written yet. I keep on my plots and my
noggin until it's time to write them down. Okay, Nancy, sure?
What about your appearance on the surveillance tapes around the
time of the murder? Detective, don't you know that trauma
causes memory loss and I just don't remember if I
(34:33):
left the house, and I'm not saying I did, it
was to go right at a Starbucks, so that's probably
where I was.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
Cool Nancy, what Starbucks? I don't remember.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
To be fair, there are approximately seventeen Starbucks on every
city block in the Pacific Northwest, so she might have
been telling the truth about that one.
Speaker 3 (34:54):
She gets one, that's fine, it's one.
Speaker 4 (34:57):
These wishy washy explanations went over like a balloon. And
it gets worse. When the cops talked to Nancy's friends,
they said she'd been telling them that Dan had been
killed by a homeless person who walked in off the street.
Why had she said that, Well, that's the only thing
that made sense, is it though?
Speaker 3 (35:16):
Is it now?
Speaker 4 (35:18):
It didn't take long for them to put the Gravis
on Old Nancy and charge her with secondary murder. At trial,
Nancy decided that she was going to take the stand
in her own defense.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
Of course.
Speaker 4 (35:32):
Yeah, yeah, every time, every time, exactly, And y'all, it
is a masterclass in not reading the room. Like, first
of all, she gets up there and she's giggling and laughing. Yeah,
like she's it's like she's on a convention panel and
(35:53):
not her own damn murder trial. And her lawyer tries
to establish like some kind of action for Dan, but
it sounds like Nancy just wants to focus on herself.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
That poor defense attorney was fighting for her life during
that direct exam. She was trying so hard to like
ranch this woman away from the mirror for two seconds
and talk about Dan, the victim in the case, but
it was just a no go.
Speaker 4 (36:18):
Yeah, when she did talk about Dan, it was always
in relation to her. I'm sure she thought she was
coming across as charming and believable, but context matters, and
the context is that you are testifying about your husband's
murder at your own trial. Not exactly the time to
try to sell yourself as an author. Every answer she
(36:40):
gave was paired with what I'm sure she thought was
a charming story about how in love she was. It
all sounded very well rehearsed, but on cross examination the
mask slipped. Clearly Nancy felt she had better things to do.
Every question the prosecutor asked was just so stupid to her.
(37:02):
She could believe the audacity and this bitch refuses to
give a straightforward answer. Like the first thing the prosecutor
asked her was whether she owned a purse at the
time of the murder, and she just goes no.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
He goes, oh, okay, did you carry a wallet?
Speaker 4 (37:18):
Then no. Finally he just asked like how she carried
around all her shit, and she like kind of smirks,
and she goes, I kept all my cash and my
cards in my bra yew man, do not pay anyone
with your boob sweat covered money. Were you raised in
(37:40):
a barn?
Speaker 1 (37:41):
She needs to be under the jail just for that.
Speaker 4 (37:45):
And several times during her testimony, Nancy insinuated that the
other people testifying just must be remembering wrong. Meanwhile, her
entire testimony hinged on her memory not being accurate about
the day of the murder, like she has this true
narcissists allergy to looking bad, and even when she does
admit fault, like when she talks about her spending habits,
(38:06):
she frames it as like a cute quirk, not a
life ruining addiction.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
She thinks she's adorable, like narcissists often do. It's so annoying.
Speaker 4 (38:15):
The prosecutor pressed her on the gunkit that she bought
and how each piece worked, and for every question it
was I don't know, I don't know. The answer is
I don't know. Sure, Jan, I guess all that internet
research was for nothing. As the cross examination continued, Nancy
got more and more irate. This did not do her
(38:37):
any favors with the jury, and that was obvious to
everybody except her. It's clear that Nancy thought she was
the smartest person in the room, and I think she
was the only one surprised when she was convicted of
second degree murder and sentence to life in prison. Which
doesn't bring Dan back. But one of Dan's students, one
of the many who loved him like a father, continued
(38:59):
his annual pie bakeoff tradition in his name every holiday season,
just like Dan always did. She has her students bake
pies for people in need. Last year, her high school
students made and collected over a thousand pies, which were
donated to sixteen nonprofits around Portland. Dan's legacy lives on
(39:22):
in every slice of pie, every neighborhood garden, and every
act of kindness. Nancy Brophy can't do anything about that, right.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
So for our last story, we're going to be right
here in the Caribbean, but we're going back in time
about three hundred years to the golden age of piracy,
when ruthless captains fell upon the transatlantic trade routes.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
With terrible efficiency.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
But ruthless and efficient aren't really the best adjectives for
the subject of our story. Maybe tried cringe or dumber
and a bag of hammers.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
One of those who probably worked better.
Speaker 2 (40:21):
Steed Bonnet was born into a life of luxury in
sixteen eighty eight on his family's Barbados sugar plantation. His
parents died when he was six years old, and he
inherited their entire four hundred acre estate, and for the
first twenty nine years he just lived a boilerplate life
for a young aristocrat wife, kids, and then just before
(40:45):
his thirtieth birthday, he ran away to sea to become
a pirate.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Now why, we don't really know.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
People could make huge amounts of money from piracy, but
Steed was already stupid rich, so it seems like he.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Just did it because he was bored.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Awe, honey, It was a tedious having everything money could buy,
but Steed doing something weird was not necessarily a surprise.
Charles Johnson wrote his famous book A General History of
the Pirates Pirates with Y, just a few years after
Steed Bonnet's career, and according to him, Steed's friends thought
quote that this humor of going a pirating proceeded from
(41:23):
a disorder of the mind which had been but too
visible in him some time before this wicked undertaking, and
which is said to have been occasioned by some discomforts
he found in.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
A married state. Translation a.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
The cheese had been slidden off the man's cracker for
quite some time, and beasts nobby folks on Barbados really
liked to gossip about each other's marriages. We didn't have
Wi Fi back then, so Johnson also notes that Steed
knew shit all about seafaring. Everything he knew came from
books he loved to read, even set up a library
(41:56):
in his cabin on the new ship. He read to
his mostly illiterate every evening, whether they liked it or not.
Come on, chaps, gather around, I'm going to read you
a store.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Eh. This one is called Winne of the Pooh.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
I bet they pretended to hate it, but they secretly
looked forward to it all day.
Speaker 4 (42:15):
Yeah, you know, they'd brought their little pillows and blankets snacks.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
Read is the one about marrying her little lambs.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
Suh are.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
I don't know how parates are.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
I actually kind of suspect this whole banana pants scheme
of running off to join the pirates came from Steed
reading really romanticized pirate and sailor stories as a kid.
But just to reiterate, at this point, this is a
grown ass man.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
So don't read.
Speaker 2 (42:42):
Books kids, it'll turn you into pirate. And also, don't
have more money than common sense, because it'll enable you
to actually chase after the dipshit daydreams. You got no
business chasing, So Steed bought a sloop. He armed it
with ten guns and hired seventy men to sail with him.
Them a regular salary. Now none of this was correct, Okay,
(43:04):
Hirates stole their ships, they didn't buy them, and their
crew worked for shares of the loot, not a salary.
But I mean they weren't gonna turn down easy money.
So one night Steed's new ship slipped silently away from Barbados.
He called her the Revenge. If Steed actually had anything
in his pampered life to feel vengeful about, it is
(43:24):
lost to history, but chances are he just kind of
thought the name sounded cool, which I have to admit
it does.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
I'm not gonna idea.
Speaker 4 (43:32):
Initially, the Revenge actually had some success, plundering five ships
off the Eastern seaboard, but the crew was uneasy. Yeah,
it was obvious that Steed was in way, way over
his head. I mean, look at the guy. Yeah, and
they've just gotten lucky so far. And that luck ran
out off the coast of Florida when Steed ordered an
(43:53):
attack on a Spanish merchant ship. But it turned out
the merchant ship was actually a well armed man war
and as soon as the Revenge raised their black flag,
a Spanish started blasting. Steed was knocked unconscious almost immediate.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
Home blessed bar.
Speaker 4 (44:14):
Half his men were heard or killed, and the revenge
barely escaped to limp away to Nasau. Known as the
Republic of the Pirates, it wasn't ooh, it wasn't a republic,
of course. It was controlled, if at all, by powerful
pirate captains who agreed on a shared code of conduct
to keep everybody civil. I mean, for a pretty loose
(44:37):
definition of civility, basically, don't commit murder in the street.
Speaker 3 (44:44):
Fair. It was all bars, brothels and gambling.
Speaker 4 (44:48):
Houses, the whole wild place kept from falling apart by
only the authority of the captains. The arrival of a
weird aristo like Steed Bonnet, half dead and on a
half destroyed got a lot of attention, and Steed in
particular caught the eye of a captain who had recently
carved out a terrifying reputation.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
Blackbeard. Blackbeard or Edward.
Speaker 4 (45:13):
Teach was once an officially sanctioned privateer who wreaked heel
upon enemy shipping during one of the Anglo French Wars,
and when the war was over he just kept on plundering.
Blackbeard was a big, intimidating guy, but he was also
sharp as a pin, and early in his career he
figured out that if he developed a scary enough reputation,
(45:35):
he could avoid a lot of hard, potentially fatal work. Ideally,
ships would just surrender as soon as they saw the
flag of the terrible pirate Blackbeard.
Speaker 2 (45:45):
And Blackbeard really knew how to play up the scariness.
He wore six loaded pistols strapped to his chest, He
tied colored ribbons in his long black beard, and sometimes
he would hang thick, slow burning fuses over each ear
so they glowed red on either side of his face.
Speaker 3 (46:03):
Which I mean, to me, sounds like a good way
to set your beard on fire.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
But dude, sure, so if you were superstitious, he looked demonic,
and if you weren't, he just looked dangerously insane.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
But either way, these little bits of theater really work,
you know, And like, listen, it's you got him.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
It is kind of cute, Like I just imagine him
like getting ready in the morning before a raid, hyping
himself up, tying his ribbons in his beard, and prepping
his guns, like he's just getting ready for his day
on stage. You know, I think he gave himself a
little peck talk right before.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
You know, like it's like, Okay, who's the biggest scariest
pirate you are? That's right, now, go out there.
Speaker 3 (46:41):
And slay He is one hundred percent the theater kid
of piracy.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
Yeah, he was a big dude too.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
So just imagine you're on the other ship and you
see this giant figure with like a ratted beard with
ribbons in it, and then all you see is these
two red things at eye.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
Level, like, oh my god, that's terrifying.
Speaker 2 (46:59):
I would poop my Seriously, though, how many times you
think he said his beard on fire?
Speaker 1 (47:03):
Like it had to have an at.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
Least once at least at least ships would surrender as
soon as they heard that the dread pirate Blackbeard was
after them. Blackbeard wanted loot, and he wanted to get
it with as little fuss as possible. A fierce reputation
was a lot more useful for that than a cannon.
And although there's no question at all that he was
a tough son of a bitch, Blackbird's tally of murders
(47:26):
on the high seas was actually zero. Yeah, so he
would threaten murder, and he kidnapped and robbed and extorted,
and one time he chained and whipped a captain to
make him tell Murid hidden the money on board the ship.
We're not making a case for Saint Blackbeard here. This
is some bad dude, but actual murder.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
As far as we know, this cutthroat did not actually
cut any throats.
Speaker 4 (47:46):
As Blackbeard and Steed got to know each other, Blackbeard
could immediately tell that Steed knew jack shit about captaining
a ship. He talked to Steed's crew and, with their consent,
put one of his own men in charge of the revenge,
and then Blackbeard brought the injured Steed on board his
own ship. In his book, Charles Johnson said that because
(48:13):
Steed wasn't used to all the hard knocks of pirate life,
black Beard convinced him that he'd be better off coming
to live as a guest on his ship instead. He
could do whatever he wanted, he wouldn't have to work,
and he'd get to sail the high seas and see
the world.
Speaker 3 (48:28):
Which sounds kind of nice, right.
Speaker 4 (48:32):
Steed could take it easy and recover from his injuries,
and his new friend Blackbeard would take care of all
the nasty hard work of actually being a pirate captain.
Of course, Steed might not have had any say in it. Yeah,
it could have been a case of do this or
I'm going to leave your dumbass in Nasau to fend
for yourself.
Speaker 3 (48:51):
And Steed was like, hmm.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
Sure.
Speaker 4 (48:56):
So Blackbeard, with no struggle and no blood build added
a nice new ship to his little pirate fleet. So
what was going on here? If you've seen the show
The Fantastic Our Flag means Death, you'll know that. In
their version there's a romantic relationship between Blackbeard and Steed, which,
like a lot of pirate stories, is based on evidence
(49:17):
that's kind of flimsy but still compelling. It's pretty much
from two things from Johnson's book that we already shared,
the part about Blackbeard bringing Steed on board his own
ship and treating him surprisingly gently and kindly, and the
quote where Steed's former neighbors gossiped about him being quote
uncomfortable in marriage. If you were a writer in the
(49:41):
early seventeen hundreds and you wanted to let your readers
know that a fella wasn't exactly as straight as an arrow,
saying they were uncomfortable in marriage might be how you
did it.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
Uncomfortable in marriage, Wink wink, Right, like like, hey, you
know that guy Derek. Yeah, I hear he was uncomfortable
in marriage. He left his wife to go join the pirate.
Go join the pirates would actually be a good euphemism.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
I think we should see if that'll take all. I agree.
Speaker 2 (50:08):
So, if Steed and Blackbeard were in a relationship, they
were probably in one of the safest situations in the
whole Western world.
Speaker 1 (50:15):
For a gay couple.
Speaker 2 (50:16):
There's some debate about how prevalent and accepted gay relationships
were on ships at the time, but it seems fair
to say that the answer was more than on shore. Now,
we're going to go off on a quick little tangent
here before we get back to Steed and Blackbeard. Pirate
ships were known as almost exclusively male societies. But we're
going to tell you what we know about the life
of one of the few female pirates we know of,
(50:38):
and based on what we know about her, we think
there are probably a lot.
Speaker 1 (50:42):
More of them that we've never heard about.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
Mary Reid had a hell of a life, and we
don't have time to do her justice here, unfortunately. But
here's the short version. Mary was a woman, but from
an early age she dressed and presented herself as a
boy so she could presume men's careers versus sailor than
a soldier.
Speaker 1 (51:02):
There she fell in love with the guy she shared
a tent with.
Speaker 2 (51:05):
Would have loved to be a fly on the wall
for that initial conversation. They got married, and when her
husband died, Mary moved to the Caribbean and she wound
up as a pirate on the ship of Captain Kalico
Jack Rackham, where, unbeknownst to her, she was crewing alongside
another woman disguising herself as a man, Rackham's lover, Anne Bonnie,
(51:26):
and this led to some serious soap opera style drama
on this ship. See Anne Bonnie was a fiery last,
and by fiery I mean horny.
Speaker 1 (51:35):
So Mary Reid is laying low on this pirate.
Speaker 2 (51:38):
Ship pretending to be a dude, and this other lady,
also pretending to be a dude on the pirate ship,
develops a crush on her because.
Speaker 3 (51:46):
She thought she was a guy.
Speaker 1 (51:47):
So she sidles up like, hey, handsome, guess what I'm lady.
I just love this so much, it's hilarious.
Speaker 2 (51:56):
In that moment, Mary realized she had to come clean
to Anne Bonnie, like, ah, shit, I'm sorry, I'm a
lady too. When Captain Rackham got wind of his girlfriend's
little crush, he was like, I'm gonna cut his throat,
so to calm him down, and had to let him
in on the secret too. And just imagine how much
this blue Captain Rackham's mind right, like, oh yeah, no,
(52:17):
don't worry man, he's a lady too. Like at that
point he has gotten to wonder just how many of
his men you know, ain't it was probably just him in.
Speaker 1 (52:26):
Like fifty seven women, just him and a bunch of ladies,
and drag.
Speaker 3 (52:35):
The Shakespearean messiness of all this aside.
Speaker 4 (52:38):
Both Mary and Anne were completely successful at passing for men.
The only people who knew the truth were the people
they told. It wasn't until they were arrested and found
to both be pregnant that the secret came out. And
think about the craziness of this. These two ladies on
(52:59):
all the high just happened to bump into each other, Like,
what are the odds of that?
Speaker 3 (53:05):
Well, we don't know the odds.
Speaker 4 (53:07):
Because we don't know how many women led similar lives
without ever being discovered. I imagine a lot of them,
because you know what, else are you gonna do sit
at home, work on needle.
Speaker 3 (53:18):
Point fuck that. I can understand why women would do this.
Speaker 4 (53:22):
Yeah, especially if you're poor, if maybe your husband died
and you don't have a way of making money, Cut
your hair, wrap up your boobs, get dirty, wear some pants,
and hit the high seas er I mean er.
Speaker 3 (53:38):
All right?
Speaker 4 (53:38):
So back to Blackbeard and Steed. Steed leaned into it.
He read his books and wandered around the deck in
his bathrobe. Was he free to leave? Probably not, But
he also wasn't just tossed over the side or marooned
on a desert island. Black Beard already controlled Steed's ship,
(53:59):
So why did he keep Steed around? Black Beard was
absolutely not just a nice, helpful guy, always helping out
dudes in trouble.
Speaker 3 (54:08):
So if he kept.
Speaker 4 (54:09):
Steed around, it was because he liked being around him.
Whether that was a platonic connection or gay as hell,
we will never know for sure, unfortunately, but I.
Speaker 3 (54:20):
Know what's in my head, cannon, Okay.
Speaker 2 (54:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (54:25):
By now, black Beard had cemented his rep as the
big daddy pirate of the Caribbean, culminating in him taking
on the whole damn city of Charleston, South Carolina, blockading
the port until they gave him the precious treasure he wanted,
not gold or jewels, but medicine now.
Speaker 2 (54:44):
Medicine at the time included some new American things like tobacco, coffee,
and chocolate, although not always in the way you might expect.
Speaker 1 (54:52):
Want to know where the phrase blow smoke up your
ass comes from?
Speaker 2 (54:55):
No too bad back in the day, So if you
went unconscious, they used to literally take a bellows and
blow tobacco smoke up your ass to try and revive you,
which I imagine was very effective and in addition to
all the fancy new American things, medicine at the time
(55:17):
also included some old European favorites like stag penises and
the ground skulls of people who died violent deaths. Given
the choice, I think I'd go for the chocolate doctor
rather than the stag penis doctor. You know, to each
their own.
Speaker 1 (55:30):
It's probably just like the.
Speaker 2 (55:31):
Difference between an MD and a DO or something, But
I feel like I would want to check the certifications, like, Okay,
did you go to stag penis.
Speaker 1 (55:38):
University or really want it chocolate factory?
Speaker 2 (55:42):
So anyway, what medicine Blackbeard needed is lost to history.
But when the wreck of his ship the Queen Anne's
Revenge was found in nineteen ninety six, one of the
discoveries was a metal urethral syringe with traces of mercury
inside it, because for centuries, injecting mercury up the dick
(56:03):
hole was a common treatment for syphilis.
Speaker 4 (56:05):
Oh, I think I just saw everybody lash a little yeah. Yeah,
good old eighteenth century medicine.
Speaker 1 (56:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (56:13):
Soon after this, the Queen Anne's Revenge ran aground on
a sandbar in Beaufort, North Carolina. Now, if there is
one thing Blackbeard was, it was a damn good sailor.
He would not make this kind of mistake on accident.
This was on purpose. It's like, oh, no, we have
run aground. We are helpless here on the sandbar. The
Queen Anne's Revenge could no longer be sailed another of
(56:34):
his ships, The Adventure was almost entirely wrecked, so Blackbeard
sent Steed inland to speak to Governor Eden and get
pardons for them both, while Blackbeard stayed back to recover
whatever he could from the grounded ships. Most likely he
just wanted to feel out whether this whole pardon deal
was going to happen, or if Eden would just you know,
string Steed up. But Governor Eden was really happy to
(56:56):
grant the pardons though, if they promised to give up
Hiates and Steed his job well done headed back to Beaufort.
When he got there, he found that Blackbeard had done
him dirty, and not only him, Steed's whole crew and
hundreds of Blackbeard's own men were abandoned on the sandbar.
Blackbeard had taken everything of value from the two wrecked
(57:17):
ships and then plundered and damaged Steve's Revenge for good measure,
and sailed off in one of his still functioning ships,
which just you, son of a how could you do
your boyfriend like that?
Speaker 4 (57:29):
Blackbeard had betrayed Steed and hundreds of sailors, all of
whom were pisd yep. They wanted to knock the now
more aptly named Revenge back into shape and go get Blackbeard,
which would Negate that shiny new part in Steed had
in his hands. But it turned out that Steed wanted
petty vengeance more than he wanted to return to a safe,
(57:50):
law abiding life, which I think we.
Speaker 3 (57:52):
Can all understand.
Speaker 4 (57:53):
Yeah, absolutely, I kind of can't blame him, Like I'd
want to go get his ass too. Like, first, the
Revenge got back into plundering game to try to make
up for the booty black Beard had stolen from them,
And now that he was fully committed to it, Steed
turned out to be a pretty good pirate captain. Like
they took ship after ship, and you know, he learned
(58:13):
from the best, right, right, But Steed Bonnet would never
get the chance to go after Blackbeard. The Revenge was
cornered in the Cape Fear River by two ships commanded
by a Colonel Rhett. All three ships ran aground on
sandbars and the low tide and for the next six
hours traded musket fire. Rehet's ships were lighter, though, and
(58:35):
when the tide came in, they floated free. First, Steed's
position was now hopeless. He told his men to go
down and set fire to their powder source so that
the Revenge and everyone on board would go up in
one spectacular explosion. He's like, come on, chaps, let's go
out in a blaze of glora. No, thank you, we're good.
(58:57):
His crew was like, nah, no, we're not doing that.
And instead, when Rhett got close, Steed meekly surrendered. He
had a brief moment of freedom after he bribed his guards,
and he and one of his crew ran off disguised
in women's clothing, but they were chased down once again
(59:18):
by Colonel Rhett and recaptured. Twenty nine of Bonnet's crew
were found guilty of piracy and hanged. Steed received the
same sentence, but his execution was delayed seven times.
Speaker 2 (59:30):
Uh yeah, mostly because the people of Charleston had come
to pity him. Steed's sanity, which had never really hung
from the sturdiest hook, had slipped entirely since his imprisonment.
But finally Governor Johnson of South Carolina was like, look,
we just got to do it so we can stop
talking about and stop arguing about it, and he ordered
that the deed had to be done, and Steed was hanged.
(59:52):
He was buried alongside his crew in unmarked graves in
local marshland. This was about eighteen months since he'd given
up his life of permanent ease and comfort on Barbados
to run off and play pirates. I can't think of
many better examples of fucking around and finding out right.
(01:00:12):
Steed Bonnet our Fafa King. So there you have it,
a little sampler platter of the kind of stuff we
like to talk about on True Crime Campfire. It has
been so much fun to do this live. It's our
first live show ever. Actually, we're so excited and we
(01:00:37):
want to shout out IRL Events for making this happen
for all of us. The staff have been working their
asses off. We just appreciate them so much. And the
biggest thank you in the universe for our campers. We
love you to the moon and back.
Speaker 4 (01:00:51):
So that was a wild first ever live show, wasn't in, Campers.
We'll be back to your regularly scheduled programming next week,
So lock your doors, slight your lights, and stay safe
until we can get together again around the True Crime Campfire.
Patrons this week get to hear our live q at A.
Patrons of our show get every episode ad free at
(01:01:12):
least a day early, sometimes more, plus tons of extra
content like patrons on the episodes and hilarious post to discussions.
And when you join the five dollars nup categories, you
get even more cool stuff a free sticker, a rat
enamel pin, or fridge magnet. While supplies last virtual events
with Whitney and me, and we're always looking for cool
stuff to do for you, so if you can, come
join us at patreon dot com, Slash True Crimecampfire
Hello, campers. Can everybody hear me?
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Probably not, because it's a cacophony in here at the moment.
All right, everybody's shut up. I have something to say,
So Hello campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the
True Crime campfire. We are your camp counselors. I'm Whitney
and I'm Katie, and we're here to tell you a
(00:47):
true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting
murderers and marshmallows around the True Crime campfire. This is
normally where the music goes back. We're coming to you
today from the middle of the Ocean on Royal Caribbean's
beautiful Liberty of the Seas. And this has been the
(01:09):
most fun I have ever had in my entire life.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
It's so fun.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
It's been amazing.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
It's been incredible to meet some of y'all in person.
It's amazing getting to hang out with these other rock
star podcasters. It's just been absolutely surreal. And we know
some of all today have probably never listened to us before,
so we wanted to give you kind of like a
charcouterie platter of the kinds of stories that we usually do.
One bizarre story one murder and a little bit history
(01:38):
at the end. So settle in, get comfy, and we'll
start with case one. The dark Web's not safe, but
we are. Some of the most important discoveries in history
happened by accident, Like penicillin. A scientist was so much
of a slob that when he went away for a
few days and came back to his labb he found
mold all over his petrie dishes. And then he noticed
(01:59):
that the molds seemed to be repelling bacteria, and bata
being bada boom, we got life saving antibiotics. My point
is sometimes we set out to do one thing and
end up with something much more spectacular.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
When he and a.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Few college friends decided to start a cyber security business together,
Bob Ennis had no way of knowing that their website
would one day lead to FBI and ATF investigations and
dozens of arrests. This is the sordid tale of rent
a Hitman dot com. Bob Innis initially wanted to solve
(02:32):
crimes for a living, but at the time he graduated
from the police Academy in nineteen ninety nine, no departments
were hiring, so he shifted to plan b it. He
and a few of his friends decided to start a
company offering basically white hat hacking services, meaning they would
try and hack your company's website to find the weak
spots and then they would tell you.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
How to fix them.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
So for less than ten bucks, Bob bought a domain
name for their website, rent a hitman dot com.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Hit just meaning like visits to the website.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
It was just supposed to be a funny, attention grabbing
name that he thought might attract clients.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
But the company didn't really go anywhere.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Everybody kind of dispersed, and in two thousand and five,
Bob tried unsuccessfully to sell the domain name, but for
some weird reason, nobody wanted rent a hitman dot com.
I can't imagine why not. So he just left it
alone and you know, kind of forgot about it. But
before he did, he posted an email address for potential
buyers to contact him if they were interested.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
And that was it for years. So the site just sat.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
There with this email address, and he didn't look at
it until twenty ten. In twenty ten, he decided, just
kind of out of curiosity to check the email and
see if anybody had gotten in touch and oh my god,
what he found were hundreds and hundreds of emails from
people wanting to hire a contract killer. Now, some of
(03:53):
them were obviously jokes, but a lot of them were not.
So just imagine what this must have been like for
this poor man, Like, never in his wildest nightmares did
he expect anybody to actually think he was running a
hitman for higher service on the surface web, for God's sake, Like, who.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Would be dumb enough to do that? And who would
be dumb enough to try hiring them? Right?
Speaker 2 (04:17):
Well, lots and lots and lots of people apparently. The
first email that stood out to Ennis was from a
lady named Helen, and it was just pages and pages
of not super coherent desperation. She said she was from
Great Britain, but she was stranded in Canada now because
her family had built her out of all the money
she was supposed to inherit from her dad, and she
(04:38):
wanted three of her relatives murdered, so she was trying
to get bang for her bug, right, And the next
part of the letter just gave Innis chills. She described
each person that she wanted murdered in great specific detail,
along with their addresses and this was freaked out, but
he didn't respond initially until Helen sent a second email,
(05:00):
this time with the subject heading urgent and even more
information about her intended targets.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
So he's like, all right, screw it.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
He reached out to Canadian police and it turned out
this was not Helen's first rodeo. She was already wanted
for some fairly major stuff in the UK, so the
Canadian cops arrested her.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
She spent like four.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Months in jail in Canada before they shipped her back
to the UK to face her charges there. And this
was the first arrest and conviction for renta hitman dot com.
And I'm sure Bob Ennis hoped it would be the last.
You know, he had no idea how many more were coming.
He decided to give the website a makeover, and we're
just gonna show you this.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Because it's.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Ah right, yeah, take a second, I know, yeah, it's
hilarious that anyone on planet Earth is dense enough to
fall for this shit, right, Like, how as you can see,
he writes the whole site, this character Guido Finelli's basically
(06:04):
like a cheesy Temu tony soprano, and he says stuff
like rent a Hitman's got the muscle to make your
trouble sleep with the fishes, really people, and he offers
senior and military and group discounts just like it's like
Hitman group on. And he promises total confidentiality, one hundred
(06:27):
percent HIPPA compliant and HIPPA of course meaning hit Man
Information Privacy and Protection Act of nineteen sixty four, which,
as I'm sure all of you realize, is not a
thing that exists.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
For the love of God, come on.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
People, reading comprehension is at an all time low.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
That is unfortunately true.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
But as ludicrous as this website is, people have been
hitting it up for years, right up to the present
day to try and avail themselves of its services. Some
people want asset extraction, meaning like just getting somebody to
cough up money or products, items, whatever. People have written
(07:10):
in from the US, Europe, the UK, even Indonesia.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
For some reason.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
He says he's gotten a really weirdly high number of
emails from Indonesia, so he must have gotten some press
over there or something. And one British lady wrote in
asking Guido Finelli if he could set her up with
one of his operatives.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
She really liked the idea, I guess.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Of dating a hit man and having him teach her
the ropes along the way, like it's mister and missus
Smith or something. My girl was trying to use this
website as her own personal combo of.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
Okay Cupid and course careers okay stupid.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Of course, there were plenty of kids who wanted to
kill their parents, So those of you all who have teenagers,
I'm sure you're thrilled to hear that. And in twenty twenty,
a fifty two year old woman named Wendy Wine had
a seriously pissed off they'll be in her bonnet about
her ex husband, which is not an unusual thing. But
what was unusual was that our girl, Wendy decided she
(08:09):
was gonna go on the old interwebs and find herself
a hitman.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
To take care of before her because you know, if.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
You want to hire a contract killer, it makes sense
to just google it, right, I.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Mean, preferably on your home computer.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Wendy surfed around for a few minutes until she landed
on renta hitman dot com and look legit to her right,
I mean, everybody knows that guys with names like Guidofanelli
have a direct line to a whole facebook of skilled
murderers for hiring.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
You just picked one.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
So she checked out a few of the website's reviews
from satisfied customers, like the one left by a lady named.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Laura who said she'd caught her hubs.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Cheating with the babysitter and well, you know, had him
taken care of. Wendy filled out renta hitman's helpful Request
for service form and include it a long rambling explanation,
and basically, the man she wanted ice her ex had
stolen allegedly twenty grand from her. So Ennas passed on
the info to the police in Wendy's town and.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
They took over the case. They picked out a detective
to play the.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Hit man, and they set up a meeting with Wendy
in a parking lot. And I might be wrong about this,
but I literally think it was a Wendy's parking lot.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
I think it was. I have to check.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
She showed and she brought a down payment, and that
was what they needed to arrest her. Because if any
of you all are familiar with hitman sting operations, when
money changes hands, that's when the suspect proves to them
that they're serious. So Wendy was caught red handed. She
eventually pled guilty, and she was sentenced to seven to
twenty four years in prison for attempted solicitation of murder.
(09:49):
And this is my favorite part of Wendy's story. The
judge at her sentencing, who is obviously one of our people,
took a minute to roast her dumbass. He said, if
the intent wasn't so serious here, this would be almost comical.
But it's not, obviously is I mean, go on a
little lot. It's a little funny. Nobody looking at could
(10:13):
have believed this website was real, the judge said, but
you did, Diane. So not only did Wendy get caught
committing a serious crime, but she got caught being an
absolute goober about it, which I don't think it gets
any worse than that, honestly. And of course there's more.
It was hard to pick just if you for this episode.
(10:35):
There's Deane Parkin, who tried to hire a hitman to
take out the woman she blamed for the breakup of
her marriage. This was just last year, twenty twenty four. Yeah,
her ex husband had had an affair with this lady
and at the time Diane discovered when a hitman they
were living together, and Dian just couldn't take it. I
can't have this get to the cops or no one.
I can't loose my kids, she told an undercover detective,
(10:58):
and a text message was, you know, do you want
to embarrass yourself in front of the hitman? It takes
two seconds to do a spell check. Loose my kids anyway.
I'm a writing teacher irritates me. So in a voice
call over WhatsApp, Dean said she was willing to do
anything to get this woman out of her life, even
if it meant killing her and burying her in a
six foot hole. When the undercover asked if she had
(11:21):
any ideas about how to carry out the murder, Dane said,
whatever's easiest, you know, if you want to make it
look like a suicide. She was really persistent and eventually
the detectives set up a meeting to seal the deal,
and Diane showed she brought a diamond ring and one
hundred bucks cash as a down payment, and she negotiated
(11:41):
with them that she'd pay the rest on a payment plan,
which I think is nice, right, I didn't know hitman
had buy now, pay later? Can you clarna a hit
I hear you can clarna a Domino's pizza?
Speaker 3 (11:53):
And now also, God help us all.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Dianne ended up sentenced to eighty months in prison and
an extra few years of probation. And then we have
Leif Everett Hayman, who thought his girlfriend's mom was too controlling.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
I know, right.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
He told rent a hit man he wanted her gone
off the fucking earth, but he only wanted to spend
like two hundred dollars. When an undercover ATF agent told
him he'd have to pay for the gun, Leif was like,
I have knives, I have a rock you could smash
your head in.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
With direct quote. He's just frugal. He's a frugal guy.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Leif Hayman ended up sentenced to ten years in federal
prison with three more probation once he gets out. And y'all,
these are just a tiny little droplet in the bucket.
There are so many more of these cases. There have
been dozens of arrests from this website. But not everybody
writing to rent a hit Man was interested in hiring
a hit man. Some of them wanted to be one.
(12:56):
In early twenty twenty three, Josiah Garcia was twenty one
years years old, an Air National guardsman with a baby
on the way, and in need of a job. So,
like any of us would do in that situation, he
went online and started looking for something that would fit
with his interests and skill set. You know, mercenary jobs basically,
you know, just standard stuff. What he found was rent
(13:17):
a Hitman dot Com, specifically the.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Careers section.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Which reads, why join us rent a Hitman Your point
and click solution TM is an equal opportunity employer, and
we mean equal. We don't even ask about your family history.
Our onboarding process piece of cake. It's as simple as
whipping up a Sunday gravy. Just fill out the form,
keep it honest or close enough, and our onboarding specialists
(13:46):
who might know a guy who knows a guy will
take it from there.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
God special skills.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Maybe you're good at cleaning up messes. Don't be shy,
lay it all out there.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
I am obsessed with the idea of mobster hr like
and so do you think they have to watch like
cheesy videos about sexual harassment like the rest of us?
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Like I'm obsessed. You know they would.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
It's all very corporate and this that I just read
you this seemed legit to Josiah, Bless his heart. I mean,
why wouldn't it right? You're not like you're gonna find
this shit on LinkedIn. So he filled out the application
for a field operative position. He attached his resume with
his Air National Guard work front and center. He put
(14:33):
himself down as an expert marksman. He attached some identification
documents with all his real personal info. I know there
are people that dumb out there, y'all, they walk among us.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Also, one of the fields you have to fill in
on the application is date you can start smashing kneecaps.
Convincing right, Josiah said he wanted to start as soon
as possible. He also wrote a few paragraphs to really
try and sell himself, and here's just a little excerpt
(15:08):
of his essay. I'm looking for a job that pays
well related to my military experience shooting and killing the
mark target, so I can support my kid on the way.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
What can I say?
Speaker 2 (15:19):
I enjoy doing what I do, so if I can
find a job that's similar to it, such as this one,
put me in coach, and he had one more thing
to add to his application. He wanted Guido to know
that in the Guard his nickname had been Reaper, you know,
because of his insanely accurate marksmanship. I bet it was
actually Beaker, like from the Muppets, but I can't prevent.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
And you know, he gave himself that nickname.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Yeah, come on, guys, you call me Reaper.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Remember I told you no nicknames cannot be requested, they
can be bestowed otherwise it's sad.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Now.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Initially, Bob Innis thought this one might be a joke.
Put me in coach seriously, but it quickly became clear.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
That this dipshit was dead serious.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
So Ennis passed on his info to the FBI, and
an undercover agent took over communication as rent a hitman's
field coordinator.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
First, the agent tried to give.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Josiah an out. He was like, you know, you have
a lot going for you. Are you sure you want
to do this? He wanted to know if Josiah thought
he could handle the psychological impact of murder, like could
you kill fifty people and still live with yourself? Josiah said,
that's rookie numbers for the Reaper, and I'm sure the
(16:39):
agent died a little inside from cringe because I did.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Okay. The undercover said, well, what about torture? What about like.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Taking a finger or an ear as a trophy. If
that's what the client wants, could you do that? Josiah
was all forty. He was like, yeah, if it's possible
and I can do it, I'm no problem. This guy's
expecting a baby. It's scary, right, And after some back
and forth, Josiah agreed to perform his very first hit
for the company for a fee of five thousand dollars,
and on a Wednesday morning, our guy met up with
(17:09):
his contact at a park, the contact, of course, being
the undercover FBI agent. The agent handed Josiah a dossier
on his intended target, just a guy they made up
out of thin air. It had pictures of the guy,
info about his routines, and an upfront payment of twenty
five hundred dollars.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
He'd get the rest after the job was done.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
And our boy did not bat and I he was
just like, okay, you need a picture of the body
for proof.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
That's some cold shit right there, right yikes.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
So, needless to say, once the money changed hands, agents
moved in to put the habeas grab us on our
aspiring hit man, and I wish I'd been there to
see his little face when he saw all those FBI jackets.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Coming at him, you know, like out of the tree
line looking down on the ground. Oh, it was so fun.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Despite initially trying to weasel out of consequences by saying
I was just gonna take the money, I wasn't really
gonna do the hit, Josiah eventually pled guilty to using
interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder for hire.
He could have gotten ten years in federal prison, but
because he took the plea, he got off super easy.
He got five years of probation, two of which he
(18:15):
has to spend in like a halfway house type of place,
which I'm sure is no picnic, but it's a lot
better than ten years locked up.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
So if you ever happen to listen to this, Josiah, honey,
my advice to you is get smarter.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
So yeah, a parody website leading to real arrests and
prosecutions and saving hundreds of lives. You cannot make this
shit up. Bob Innes's day job, ironically enough, is in
pest control, which is hilarious to me because if I
were gonna take out like a Craigslist add as a
hitman for hire, I would one hundred percent put something
(18:54):
like discreete pest control.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
In the title.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
The killer Catching business has taken its toll on Bob, though.
A few years ago he told ABC News, it really
makes you wonder who's out there. Are they your neighbors,
are they your business associates, or they your ex spouses?
You never know and it is unsettling, right like remember
to Catch a Predator with Chris Hansen, like in the
early two thousands. That's how I felt after watching that
(19:19):
for the first time.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Like these creeps are everywhere and you don't know who
it is. There's no way to know.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
And according to an Australian study, about two percent of
all murders are murders for hire. So there are a
lot of these folks out there, more than we'd like
to think. So I think we're lucky to have people
like Bob on our side.
Speaker 4 (19:37):
We absolutely are. And now we move on to case two.
This pen is the barrel of the gun, so campers
for this one. We are in Portland, Oregon, June second,
twenty eighteen. That morning, a professor walked into Dan Brophy's
cooking class at the Oregon Culinary Institute. Sixty three year
(19:57):
old Dan was a born teacher. He loved his students.
They loved him right back.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Right.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
Yes, this was a guy who everybody agreed could easily
be working as an executive chef anywhere he wanted, But
that really wasn't how Dan rolled. His attitude was, Life's
not about money, It's about doing the things you love
with the people you care about.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
He worked part time at.
Speaker 4 (20:20):
A friend's restaurant as a head chef for like some
extra cash, but it wasn't his passion. He loved gardening,
and his garden was so prolific that he could sell
herbs and vegetables to his students for their projects or
just like for their home. He also raised chickens and
turkeys for eggs and meat. And this picture is my
absolute favorite picture of him, with him cradling his red
(20:42):
hen and a chef's jacket.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
It's just so cute.
Speaker 4 (20:45):
He was also first in line to do a job
for someone at a discount or even free, and he
constantly gave back to his community. He was a truly
curious soul, and he embodied something that I think is
an important quality in a person, which is just doing it.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
Like he was interested in mushrooms, so he learned how
to forage. He wanted to learn how to dig for clams,
so he figured out how to do that. He wanted
to learn how to make a natural insecticide, so he
started growing tobacco in his own garden so he could experiment.
He would later teach these skills to his students to
connect them with the food that they were cooking.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
Dan was like that sweet, crunchy wizard and lord of
the rings, you know, like rat AGAs I think was
his name. Just good vibes all around, Like I would
not be surprised if this man had birds landing on
his shoulder, like snow white.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Just a sweetheart to the core.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
If not birds, just chickens, I think maybe chickens.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (21:38):
That morning, when one of Dan's colleagues stepped into the
kitchen for a chat, a smell hit him, the kind
that puts your lizard brain on high alert, sharp and metallic.
There on the floor was Dan Brophy in a pool
of blood, shot once in the back, and as the
force spun him around, shot again in the chest. Investigators
(21:59):
were frustrated with the crime scene pretty much from minute one.
A search of the kitchen and the school turned up nothing.
The killer had clearly brought the gun. And then Dan's wife,
Nancy showed up in her gray Toyota minivan. Someone had
called her to tell her that there was police activity
in the institute, and she sped over there in a panic.
(22:20):
When she introduced herself, the police didn't even ask why
she was there, just pulled her to the side and
asked her to wait. And when they told her that
her husband had been killed, she seemed devastated, and as
they drove her home, investigators couldn't help but feel sorry
for her. The poor woman just lost her husband, who
would have done something like this. Investigators weren't suspicious of
(22:42):
Nancy at first, and if you look at her you
can see why. She kind of looks like the grandma
whose entire personality is being a grandma. Like this woman
absolutely owns a shirt that says, my favorite people call
me grandma.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Right, you are right about this, but I will point
out it looks like somebody's mema until she opens her
mouth and you figure out what a condescending hose bag
she is.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
It's very true. We will find out about that in
a moment. As far as anyone knew, Dan and Nancy
were happy, even though they were opposites. Dan was reserved,
Nancy was talkative. Dan was a planner, Nancy was spontaneous.
Dan was frugal, Nancy was a spender.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Dan was a little bit country, Nancy was a little
bit rock and roll.
Speaker 4 (23:29):
They made it work, though, and Nancy had the same
can do attitude that Dan did. When she started a
catering business, it took off like a rocket. Some tax
returns reported the company making more than five hundred thousand.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Dollars some years.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
She also wanted to be an author, so she started
a blog and again self publishing books. Her focus was
romantic suspense, and while it was certainly her passion, it
never seemed to take off.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
Her Amazon.
Speaker 4 (24:00):
Oh yes, oh yes, her Amazon reviews were good, but
there were only like ten of them, and there's only
ten of them to this day. And listen, I don't
think they belong in the king shaming corner, all right,
but it's certainly kink shaming adjacent.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Yeah, it's like kink shaming breezeway, you might say, And
like I said, the police didn't suspect her at first.
Speaker 4 (24:30):
When they asked her where she'd been on the morning
of the murder, she said she and Dan had like
pottered around for a while until he left around ten
after seven. After that, Nancy insisted she hadn't left the
house until she heard about the incident at the Culinary Institute.
They asked her if she and Dan owned a gun.
They did, but it was just collecting dust on a shelf.
(24:50):
They never used it. When the police took her home,
they asked to see the gun. It appeared to have
never been fired, which I actually didn't know was possible
to tell.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
But apparently it's the thing.
Speaker 4 (25:02):
The culinary Institute didn't have any security cameras, which is
nuts to me, but the restaurant next door did, and
in the surveillance video they saw what appeared to be
Nancy Brophy's gray minivan driving by at seven oh eight am,
driving towards the Culinary Institute, and then again at seven
twenty eight am, driving in the opposite direction. According to
(25:24):
the police's timeline, Dan was killed a little bit after
he disarmed the alarm system at seven twenty two am. So, yes,
that's interesting, no.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Interesting, And I want y'all to remember that this woman
is a mystery writer, okay, one who apparently is unaware
that places have security cameras.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
So they decided to do a little more digging on
Nancy Brophy, and y'all they found a gold mine. The
first thing they noticed were the money problems. Nancy and
Dan had almost no savings and they were living paycheck
to paycheck. Nancy's catering business had taken a hit after
nine to eleven and they'd had to downsize considerably. A
(26:07):
fire had destroyed Dan and Nancy's house and they had
to wait for over a year for it to be rebuilt.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Really a fire, huh, that's interesting?
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Hmmm, yes, yes it is.
Speaker 4 (26:17):
I don't have any proof that there was anything shady
about this fire, but it is interesting.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Yeah, And by interesting, I mean yep, she started that
for the insurance money, allegedly.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
Allegedly. We would never we would never say anything like that. So, yeah,
money was a problem. Nancy was a spender. If it
was in her account, it was hers to spend. In fact,
her and Dan's retirement was totally drained. And these are
people in their sixtiesfying. Dan had mentioned money troubles to
(26:49):
one of his work friends, but he didn't seem worried
if he had to work until he dropped, he was
completely fine with that. He wasn't stressed. But we don't
know how much Dan actually knew about his wife's spending habits.
Nancy had thousands of dollars in credit card debt, they
were struggling to pay their fifteen hundred dollars a month mortgage,
(27:09):
and they'd taken out a loan against a life insurance policy.
One of the things that stuck out to the investigators
was that they were paying one thousand dollars a month
on life insurance. That seemed awfully high for a couple
struggling to make ends meet.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Yeah, you can't make your mortgage, but you're dropping a
grand a month on the life insurance policy.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
That is sketchy.
Speaker 4 (27:32):
Then, almost immediately after Dan's murder, Nancy filed her claims
with the life insurance companies, and apparently one of them
asked if they could get some kind of confirmation from
the cops that she wasn't a suspect in Dan's death,
an exoneration letter.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
She got real squirrely about.
Speaker 4 (27:49):
It, and when she asked the detectives about it, they
were like, hm hmm, yeah, we're not doing that. No.
Nancy must have realized they were suspicious of her at
that point. And then.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
There was Nancy's blog on there.
Speaker 4 (28:06):
She promotes her books, talks about writing, and roommates about
her life. In her about section, she wrote, I live
in the beautiful, green and very wet Northwest, married to
a chef whose mantra is life is a science project.
As a result, there are chickens and turkeys in my backyard,
a fabulous vegetable garden, and a hot meal on the
table every night. For those of you who have longed
(28:28):
for this, let me caution you. The old adage is true.
Be careful what you wish for. When the gods are
truly angry, they grant us our wishes. Here she's talking
about the ten pounds she gains every year from his cooking.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
But like, what weird wording?
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Right? Yeah, yeah, Nancy, I'm sure the gods were furious
when they send you this amazing man that cooks restaurant
quality meals for you every night, You poor thing.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (28:59):
She later testified she didn't cook a night in their marriage.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Oh that's a dream.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
That's gold right there.
Speaker 4 (29:05):
The most interesting post was a guest essay she wrote
for a friend's website. She called it how to Murder
your Husband. Yeah, yeah, it is a doozy. As a
romantic suspense writer, I spend a lot of time thinking
about murder and consequently police procedure.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Do you.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Really here's the thing, okay, nance honey, If if you
are going to publish a blog post called how to
murder your husband, I'm sorry, you're screwed.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
You can never do.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
It because they are going to be onto you immediate.
Like we know, we're screwed, Like we can no matter what,
never do anything out of him, because the first thing
the detectives are gonna see is true crime podcasters.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
So we're you know, we're out of the game.
Speaker 4 (29:55):
Okay, she continues, After all, if the murder is supposed
to set me free, I certainly don't want to spend
time in jail. And let me say clearly for the record,
I don't like jumpsuits and orange is not my color.
And I'll read you a couple of examples from her
motives lists. It's a it's a weirdly long post money
divorce is expensive and do you really want to split
(30:17):
up all your possessions? Or if you married for money,
aren't you entitled to all of it? The drawback is
that the police aren't stupid. They are looking at you first,
so you have to be organized, ruthless and very clever.
Husbands have disappeared from cruise ships before. Why not yours?
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Which one of y'all's thinking about it? Stop it? Not
on my watch?
Speaker 4 (30:48):
Crime of passion in anger, you bash his head in
or stab him with a kitchen knife. Most of the
time there's a trail that leads directly to you. Every
murder leaves clues. A crime of passion does not look
like a stranger was involved, And who is left to
clean the blood from your carpeting? And then under options
(31:09):
to consider? She's a full service advice columnist. I think
she lifts a whole bunch of possible murder weapons. And
I'll just read you a couple guns loud, messy, and
require some skill. If it takes ten shots for the
sucker to die, either you have terrible aim or he's
on drugs. Poison considered a woman's weapon. Arsenic is easy
(31:36):
to obtain and worse, easy to trace. It takes a
month or two to kill someone, plus they're sick the
entire time. Who wants to hang out with a sick husband?
Speaker 2 (31:46):
Which I think this is interesting because y'all are true
crime nerds, you know what I'm talking about. That shows
how little she understands about murder and criminal psychology, because
for a lot of poisoners, watching the process is part
of the fun.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
For them.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
It's a way that they can torture their victim without
laying a hand on them, and some of them will
draw it out on purpose.
Speaker 4 (32:08):
I find it easier to wish people dead than to
actually kill them. But the thing I know about murder
is that every one of us has it in him
or herself when pushed far enough.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
Okay, Whitney, do you have any any critiques?
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Just a couple.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
My main critique is how delulu she is about her
own intelligence. Like, maybe you could not have been worse
at getting away with murder if you've done it on purpose,
But you go ahead and give us some advice on
how to slip under the police's radar.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
She just kills me with this hi, and her tone
is so smug.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
It always is.
Speaker 4 (32:46):
Yeah, Now the police were ninety nine point ninety nine
nine percent sure they had their girl. The money problems,
the life insurance, and the blog were painting a pretty
clear picture. The only problem was the murder weapon. But
then the police seized Nancy's computers and they found mountains
of research into ghost guns. Now, this is one of
(33:08):
the scariest things I researched for TCC. Ever, a ghost
gun essentially is a gun you build yourself from a
kit the advantage for a murderer, and this is illegal now,
but in twenty eighteen, these guns were not required to
have serial numbers. Yikes, getting your hands on one was
as easy as buying one of the kits. So Nancy
(33:29):
just went to ghostguns dot com Yeah, clicked add to
carte and when the police searched her storage unit, they
found the kit. Only the barrel had been taken out
of the box. It looked like Nancy took the barrel
from the ghost gun and put it on the handgun
that she and Dan owned and used this Franken weapon
(33:50):
to kill him and make it look like their gun
hadn't been used. So when the cops asked her about
the kit, she told the detectives. She bought the gun
for a book she was writing, like for research. She
wanted to learn how it worked. Uh, okay that a
check just said where's this book?
Speaker 3 (34:09):
Then outline it's.
Speaker 4 (34:12):
Not written yet. I keep on my plots and my
noggin until it's time to write them down. Okay, Nancy, sure?
What about your appearance on the surveillance tapes around the
time of the murder? Detective, don't you know that trauma
causes memory loss and I just don't remember if I
(34:33):
left the house, and I'm not saying I did, it
was to go right at a Starbucks, so that's probably
where I was.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
Cool Nancy, what Starbucks? I don't remember.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
To be fair, there are approximately seventeen Starbucks on every
city block in the Pacific Northwest, so she might have
been telling the truth about that one.
Speaker 3 (34:54):
She gets one, that's fine, it's one.
Speaker 4 (34:57):
These wishy washy explanations went over like a balloon. And
it gets worse. When the cops talked to Nancy's friends,
they said she'd been telling them that Dan had been
killed by a homeless person who walked in off the street.
Why had she said that, Well, that's the only thing
that made sense, is it though?
Speaker 3 (35:16):
Is it now?
Speaker 4 (35:18):
It didn't take long for them to put the Gravis
on Old Nancy and charge her with secondary murder. At trial,
Nancy decided that she was going to take the stand
in her own defense.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
Of course.
Speaker 4 (35:32):
Yeah, yeah, every time, every time, exactly, And y'all, it
is a masterclass in not reading the room. Like, first
of all, she gets up there and she's giggling and laughing. Yeah,
like she's it's like she's on a convention panel and
(35:53):
not her own damn murder trial. And her lawyer tries
to establish like some kind of action for Dan, but
it sounds like Nancy just wants to focus on herself.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
That poor defense attorney was fighting for her life during
that direct exam. She was trying so hard to like
ranch this woman away from the mirror for two seconds
and talk about Dan, the victim in the case, but
it was just a no go.
Speaker 4 (36:18):
Yeah, when she did talk about Dan, it was always
in relation to her. I'm sure she thought she was
coming across as charming and believable, but context matters, and
the context is that you are testifying about your husband's
murder at your own trial. Not exactly the time to
try to sell yourself as an author. Every answer she
(36:40):
gave was paired with what I'm sure she thought was
a charming story about how in love she was. It
all sounded very well rehearsed, but on cross examination the
mask slipped. Clearly Nancy felt she had better things to do.
Every question the prosecutor asked was just so stupid to her.
(37:02):
She could believe the audacity and this bitch refuses to
give a straightforward answer. Like the first thing the prosecutor
asked her was whether she owned a purse at the
time of the murder, and she just goes no.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
He goes, oh, okay, did you carry a wallet?
Speaker 4 (37:18):
Then no. Finally he just asked like how she carried
around all her shit, and she like kind of smirks,
and she goes, I kept all my cash and my
cards in my bra yew man, do not pay anyone
with your boob sweat covered money. Were you raised in
(37:40):
a barn?
Speaker 1 (37:41):
She needs to be under the jail just for that.
Speaker 4 (37:45):
And several times during her testimony, Nancy insinuated that the
other people testifying just must be remembering wrong. Meanwhile, her
entire testimony hinged on her memory not being accurate about
the day of the murder, like she has this true
narcissists allergy to looking bad, and even when she does
admit fault, like when she talks about her spending habits,
(38:06):
she frames it as like a cute quirk, not a
life ruining addiction.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
She thinks she's adorable, like narcissists often do. It's so annoying.
Speaker 4 (38:15):
The prosecutor pressed her on the gunkit that she bought
and how each piece worked, and for every question it
was I don't know, I don't know. The answer is
I don't know. Sure, Jan, I guess all that internet
research was for nothing. As the cross examination continued, Nancy
got more and more irate. This did not do her
(38:37):
any favors with the jury, and that was obvious to
everybody except her. It's clear that Nancy thought she was
the smartest person in the room, and I think she
was the only one surprised when she was convicted of
second degree murder and sentence to life in prison. Which
doesn't bring Dan back. But one of Dan's students, one
of the many who loved him like a father, continued
(38:59):
his annual pie bakeoff tradition in his name every holiday season,
just like Dan always did. She has her students bake
pies for people in need. Last year, her high school
students made and collected over a thousand pies, which were
donated to sixteen nonprofits around Portland. Dan's legacy lives on
(39:22):
in every slice of pie, every neighborhood garden, and every
act of kindness. Nancy Brophy can't do anything about that, right.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
So for our last story, we're going to be right
here in the Caribbean, but we're going back in time
about three hundred years to the golden age of piracy,
when ruthless captains fell upon the transatlantic trade routes.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
With terrible efficiency.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
But ruthless and efficient aren't really the best adjectives for
the subject of our story. Maybe tried cringe or dumber
and a bag of hammers.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
One of those who probably worked better.
Speaker 2 (40:21):
Steed Bonnet was born into a life of luxury in
sixteen eighty eight on his family's Barbados sugar plantation. His
parents died when he was six years old, and he
inherited their entire four hundred acre estate, and for the
first twenty nine years he just lived a boilerplate life
for a young aristocrat wife, kids, and then just before
(40:45):
his thirtieth birthday, he ran away to sea to become
a pirate.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Now why, we don't really know.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
People could make huge amounts of money from piracy, but
Steed was already stupid rich, so it seems like he.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Just did it because he was bored.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Awe, honey, It was a tedious having everything money could buy,
but Steed doing something weird was not necessarily a surprise.
Charles Johnson wrote his famous book A General History of
the Pirates Pirates with Y, just a few years after
Steed Bonnet's career, and according to him, Steed's friends thought
quote that this humor of going a pirating proceeded from
(41:23):
a disorder of the mind which had been but too
visible in him some time before this wicked undertaking, and
which is said to have been occasioned by some discomforts
he found in.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
A married state. Translation a.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
The cheese had been slidden off the man's cracker for
quite some time, and beasts nobby folks on Barbados really
liked to gossip about each other's marriages. We didn't have
Wi Fi back then, so Johnson also notes that Steed
knew shit all about seafaring. Everything he knew came from
books he loved to read, even set up a library
(41:56):
in his cabin on the new ship. He read to
his mostly illiterate every evening, whether they liked it or not.
Come on, chaps, gather around, I'm going to read you
a store.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Eh. This one is called Winne of the Pooh.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
I bet they pretended to hate it, but they secretly
looked forward to it all day.
Speaker 4 (42:15):
Yeah, you know, they'd brought their little pillows and blankets snacks.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
Read is the one about marrying her little lambs.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
Suh are.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
I don't know how parates are.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
I actually kind of suspect this whole banana pants scheme
of running off to join the pirates came from Steed
reading really romanticized pirate and sailor stories as a kid.
But just to reiterate, at this point, this is a
grown ass man.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
So don't read.
Speaker 2 (42:42):
Books kids, it'll turn you into pirate. And also, don't
have more money than common sense, because it'll enable you
to actually chase after the dipshit daydreams. You got no
business chasing, So Steed bought a sloop. He armed it
with ten guns and hired seventy men to sail with him.
Them a regular salary. Now none of this was correct, Okay,
(43:04):
Hirates stole their ships, they didn't buy them, and their
crew worked for shares of the loot, not a salary.
But I mean they weren't gonna turn down easy money.
So one night Steed's new ship slipped silently away from Barbados.
He called her the Revenge. If Steed actually had anything
in his pampered life to feel vengeful about, it is
(43:24):
lost to history, but chances are he just kind of
thought the name sounded cool, which I have to admit
it does.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
I'm not gonna idea.
Speaker 4 (43:32):
Initially, the Revenge actually had some success, plundering five ships
off the Eastern seaboard, but the crew was uneasy. Yeah,
it was obvious that Steed was in way, way over
his head. I mean, look at the guy. Yeah, and
they've just gotten lucky so far. And that luck ran
out off the coast of Florida when Steed ordered an
(43:53):
attack on a Spanish merchant ship. But it turned out
the merchant ship was actually a well armed man war
and as soon as the Revenge raised their black flag,
a Spanish started blasting. Steed was knocked unconscious almost immediate.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
Home blessed bar.
Speaker 4 (44:14):
Half his men were heard or killed, and the revenge
barely escaped to limp away to Nasau. Known as the
Republic of the Pirates, it wasn't ooh, it wasn't a republic,
of course. It was controlled, if at all, by powerful
pirate captains who agreed on a shared code of conduct
to keep everybody civil. I mean, for a pretty loose
(44:37):
definition of civility, basically, don't commit murder in the street.
Speaker 3 (44:44):
Fair. It was all bars, brothels and gambling.
Speaker 4 (44:48):
Houses, the whole wild place kept from falling apart by
only the authority of the captains. The arrival of a
weird aristo like Steed Bonnet, half dead and on a
half destroyed got a lot of attention, and Steed in
particular caught the eye of a captain who had recently
carved out a terrifying reputation.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
Blackbeard. Blackbeard or Edward.
Speaker 4 (45:13):
Teach was once an officially sanctioned privateer who wreaked heel
upon enemy shipping during one of the Anglo French Wars,
and when the war was over he just kept on plundering.
Blackbeard was a big, intimidating guy, but he was also
sharp as a pin, and early in his career he
figured out that if he developed a scary enough reputation,
(45:35):
he could avoid a lot of hard, potentially fatal work. Ideally,
ships would just surrender as soon as they saw the
flag of the terrible pirate Blackbeard.
Speaker 2 (45:45):
And Blackbeard really knew how to play up the scariness.
He wore six loaded pistols strapped to his chest, He
tied colored ribbons in his long black beard, and sometimes
he would hang thick, slow burning fuses over each ear
so they glowed red on either side of his face.
Speaker 3 (46:03):
Which I mean, to me, sounds like a good way
to set your beard on fire.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
But dude, sure, so if you were superstitious, he looked demonic,
and if you weren't, he just looked dangerously insane.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
But either way, these little bits of theater really work,
you know, And like, listen, it's you got him.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
It is kind of cute, Like I just imagine him
like getting ready in the morning before a raid, hyping
himself up, tying his ribbons in his beard, and prepping
his guns, like he's just getting ready for his day
on stage. You know, I think he gave himself a
little peck talk right before.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
You know, like it's like, Okay, who's the biggest scariest
pirate you are? That's right, now, go out there.
Speaker 3 (46:41):
And slay He is one hundred percent the theater kid
of piracy.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
Yeah, he was a big dude too.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
So just imagine you're on the other ship and you
see this giant figure with like a ratted beard with
ribbons in it, and then all you see is these
two red things at eye.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
Level, like, oh my god, that's terrifying.
Speaker 2 (46:59):
I would poop my Seriously, though, how many times you
think he said his beard on fire?
Speaker 1 (47:03):
Like it had to have an at.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
Least once at least at least ships would surrender as
soon as they heard that the dread pirate Blackbeard was
after them. Blackbeard wanted loot, and he wanted to get
it with as little fuss as possible. A fierce reputation
was a lot more useful for that than a cannon.
And although there's no question at all that he was
a tough son of a bitch, Blackbird's tally of murders
(47:26):
on the high seas was actually zero. Yeah, so he
would threaten murder, and he kidnapped and robbed and extorted,
and one time he chained and whipped a captain to
make him tell Murid hidden the money on board the ship.
We're not making a case for Saint Blackbeard here. This
is some bad dude, but actual murder.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
As far as we know, this cutthroat did not actually
cut any throats.
Speaker 4 (47:46):
As Blackbeard and Steed got to know each other, Blackbeard
could immediately tell that Steed knew jack shit about captaining
a ship. He talked to Steed's crew and, with their consent,
put one of his own men in charge of the revenge,
and then Blackbeard brought the injured Steed on board his
own ship. In his book, Charles Johnson said that because
(48:13):
Steed wasn't used to all the hard knocks of pirate life,
black Beard convinced him that he'd be better off coming
to live as a guest on his ship instead. He
could do whatever he wanted, he wouldn't have to work,
and he'd get to sail the high seas and see
the world.
Speaker 3 (48:28):
Which sounds kind of nice, right.
Speaker 4 (48:32):
Steed could take it easy and recover from his injuries,
and his new friend Blackbeard would take care of all
the nasty hard work of actually being a pirate captain.
Of course, Steed might not have had any say in it. Yeah,
it could have been a case of do this or
I'm going to leave your dumbass in Nasau to fend
for yourself.
Speaker 3 (48:51):
And Steed was like, hmm.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
Sure.
Speaker 4 (48:56):
So Blackbeard, with no struggle and no blood build added
a nice new ship to his little pirate fleet. So
what was going on here? If you've seen the show
The Fantastic Our Flag means Death, you'll know that. In
their version there's a romantic relationship between Blackbeard and Steed, which,
like a lot of pirate stories, is based on evidence
(49:17):
that's kind of flimsy but still compelling. It's pretty much
from two things from Johnson's book that we already shared,
the part about Blackbeard bringing Steed on board his own
ship and treating him surprisingly gently and kindly, and the
quote where Steed's former neighbors gossiped about him being quote
uncomfortable in marriage. If you were a writer in the
(49:41):
early seventeen hundreds and you wanted to let your readers
know that a fella wasn't exactly as straight as an arrow,
saying they were uncomfortable in marriage might be how you
did it.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
Uncomfortable in marriage, Wink wink, Right, like like, hey, you
know that guy Derek. Yeah, I hear he was uncomfortable
in marriage. He left his wife to go join the pirate.
Go join the pirates would actually be a good euphemism.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
I think we should see if that'll take all. I agree.
Speaker 2 (50:08):
So, if Steed and Blackbeard were in a relationship, they
were probably in one of the safest situations in the
whole Western world.
Speaker 1 (50:15):
For a gay couple.
Speaker 2 (50:16):
There's some debate about how prevalent and accepted gay relationships
were on ships at the time, but it seems fair
to say that the answer was more than on shore. Now,
we're going to go off on a quick little tangent
here before we get back to Steed and Blackbeard. Pirate
ships were known as almost exclusively male societies. But we're
going to tell you what we know about the life
of one of the few female pirates we know of,
(50:38):
and based on what we know about her, we think
there are probably a lot.
Speaker 1 (50:42):
More of them that we've never heard about.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
Mary Reid had a hell of a life, and we
don't have time to do her justice here, unfortunately. But
here's the short version. Mary was a woman, but from
an early age she dressed and presented herself as a
boy so she could presume men's careers versus sailor than
a soldier.
Speaker 1 (51:02):
There she fell in love with the guy she shared
a tent with.
Speaker 2 (51:05):
Would have loved to be a fly on the wall
for that initial conversation. They got married, and when her
husband died, Mary moved to the Caribbean and she wound
up as a pirate on the ship of Captain Kalico
Jack Rackham, where, unbeknownst to her, she was crewing alongside
another woman disguising herself as a man, Rackham's lover, Anne Bonnie,
(51:26):
and this led to some serious soap opera style drama
on this ship. See Anne Bonnie was a fiery last,
and by fiery I mean horny.
Speaker 1 (51:35):
So Mary Reid is laying low on this pirate.
Speaker 2 (51:38):
Ship pretending to be a dude, and this other lady,
also pretending to be a dude on the pirate ship,
develops a crush on her because.
Speaker 3 (51:46):
She thought she was a guy.
Speaker 1 (51:47):
So she sidles up like, hey, handsome, guess what I'm lady.
I just love this so much, it's hilarious.
Speaker 2 (51:56):
In that moment, Mary realized she had to come clean
to Anne Bonnie, like, ah, shit, I'm sorry, I'm a
lady too. When Captain Rackham got wind of his girlfriend's
little crush, he was like, I'm gonna cut his throat,
so to calm him down, and had to let him
in on the secret too. And just imagine how much
this blue Captain Rackham's mind right, like, oh yeah, no,
(52:17):
don't worry man, he's a lady too. Like at that
point he has gotten to wonder just how many of
his men you know, ain't it was probably just him in.
Speaker 1 (52:26):
Like fifty seven women, just him and a bunch of ladies,
and drag.
Speaker 3 (52:35):
The Shakespearean messiness of all this aside.
Speaker 4 (52:38):
Both Mary and Anne were completely successful at passing for men.
The only people who knew the truth were the people
they told. It wasn't until they were arrested and found
to both be pregnant that the secret came out. And
think about the craziness of this. These two ladies on
(52:59):
all the high just happened to bump into each other, Like,
what are the odds of that?
Speaker 3 (53:05):
Well, we don't know the odds.
Speaker 4 (53:07):
Because we don't know how many women led similar lives
without ever being discovered. I imagine a lot of them,
because you know what, else are you gonna do sit
at home, work on needle.
Speaker 3 (53:18):
Point fuck that. I can understand why women would do this.
Speaker 4 (53:22):
Yeah, especially if you're poor, if maybe your husband died
and you don't have a way of making money, Cut
your hair, wrap up your boobs, get dirty, wear some pants,
and hit the high seas er I mean er.
Speaker 3 (53:38):
All right?
Speaker 4 (53:38):
So back to Blackbeard and Steed. Steed leaned into it.
He read his books and wandered around the deck in
his bathrobe. Was he free to leave? Probably not, But
he also wasn't just tossed over the side or marooned
on a desert island. Black Beard already controlled Steed's ship,
(53:59):
So why did he keep Steed around? Black Beard was
absolutely not just a nice, helpful guy, always helping out
dudes in trouble.
Speaker 3 (54:08):
So if he kept.
Speaker 4 (54:09):
Steed around, it was because he liked being around him.
Whether that was a platonic connection or gay as hell,
we will never know for sure, unfortunately, but I.
Speaker 3 (54:20):
Know what's in my head, cannon, Okay.
Speaker 2 (54:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (54:25):
By now, black Beard had cemented his rep as the
big daddy pirate of the Caribbean, culminating in him taking
on the whole damn city of Charleston, South Carolina, blockading
the port until they gave him the precious treasure he wanted,
not gold or jewels, but medicine now.
Speaker 2 (54:44):
Medicine at the time included some new American things like tobacco, coffee,
and chocolate, although not always in the way you might expect.
Speaker 1 (54:52):
Want to know where the phrase blow smoke up your
ass comes from?
Speaker 2 (54:55):
No too bad back in the day, So if you
went unconscious, they used to literally take a bellows and
blow tobacco smoke up your ass to try and revive you,
which I imagine was very effective and in addition to
all the fancy new American things, medicine at the time
(55:17):
also included some old European favorites like stag penises and
the ground skulls of people who died violent deaths. Given
the choice, I think I'd go for the chocolate doctor
rather than the stag penis doctor. You know, to each
their own.
Speaker 1 (55:30):
It's probably just like the.
Speaker 2 (55:31):
Difference between an MD and a DO or something, But
I feel like I would want to check the certifications, like, Okay,
did you go to stag penis.
Speaker 1 (55:38):
University or really want it chocolate factory?
Speaker 2 (55:42):
So anyway, what medicine Blackbeard needed is lost to history.
But when the wreck of his ship the Queen Anne's
Revenge was found in nineteen ninety six, one of the
discoveries was a metal urethral syringe with traces of mercury
inside it, because for centuries, injecting mercury up the dick
(56:03):
hole was a common treatment for syphilis.
Speaker 4 (56:05):
Oh, I think I just saw everybody lash a little yeah. Yeah,
good old eighteenth century medicine.
Speaker 1 (56:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (56:13):
Soon after this, the Queen Anne's Revenge ran aground on
a sandbar in Beaufort, North Carolina. Now, if there is
one thing Blackbeard was, it was a damn good sailor.
He would not make this kind of mistake on accident.
This was on purpose. It's like, oh, no, we have
run aground. We are helpless here on the sandbar. The
Queen Anne's Revenge could no longer be sailed another of
(56:34):
his ships, The Adventure was almost entirely wrecked, so Blackbeard
sent Steed inland to speak to Governor Eden and get
pardons for them both, while Blackbeard stayed back to recover
whatever he could from the grounded ships. Most likely he
just wanted to feel out whether this whole pardon deal
was going to happen, or if Eden would just you know,
string Steed up. But Governor Eden was really happy to
(56:56):
grant the pardons though, if they promised to give up
Hiates and Steed his job well done headed back to Beaufort.
When he got there, he found that Blackbeard had done
him dirty, and not only him, Steed's whole crew and
hundreds of Blackbeard's own men were abandoned on the sandbar.
Blackbeard had taken everything of value from the two wrecked
(57:17):
ships and then plundered and damaged Steve's Revenge for good measure,
and sailed off in one of his still functioning ships,
which just you, son of a how could you do
your boyfriend like that?
Speaker 4 (57:29):
Blackbeard had betrayed Steed and hundreds of sailors, all of
whom were pisd yep. They wanted to knock the now
more aptly named Revenge back into shape and go get Blackbeard,
which would Negate that shiny new part in Steed had
in his hands. But it turned out that Steed wanted
petty vengeance more than he wanted to return to a safe,
(57:50):
law abiding life, which I think we.
Speaker 3 (57:52):
Can all understand.
Speaker 4 (57:53):
Yeah, absolutely, I kind of can't blame him, Like I'd
want to go get his ass too. Like, first, the
Revenge got back into plundering game to try to make
up for the booty black Beard had stolen from them,
And now that he was fully committed to it, Steed
turned out to be a pretty good pirate captain. Like
they took ship after ship, and you know, he learned
(58:13):
from the best, right, right, But Steed Bonnet would never
get the chance to go after Blackbeard. The Revenge was
cornered in the Cape Fear River by two ships commanded
by a Colonel Rhett. All three ships ran aground on
sandbars and the low tide and for the next six
hours traded musket fire. Rehet's ships were lighter, though, and
(58:35):
when the tide came in, they floated free. First, Steed's
position was now hopeless. He told his men to go
down and set fire to their powder source so that
the Revenge and everyone on board would go up in
one spectacular explosion. He's like, come on, chaps, let's go
out in a blaze of glora. No, thank you, we're good.
(58:57):
His crew was like, nah, no, we're not doing that.
And instead, when Rhett got close, Steed meekly surrendered. He
had a brief moment of freedom after he bribed his guards,
and he and one of his crew ran off disguised
in women's clothing, but they were chased down once again
(59:18):
by Colonel Rhett and recaptured. Twenty nine of Bonnet's crew
were found guilty of piracy and hanged. Steed received the
same sentence, but his execution was delayed seven times.
Speaker 2 (59:30):
Uh yeah, mostly because the people of Charleston had come
to pity him. Steed's sanity, which had never really hung
from the sturdiest hook, had slipped entirely since his imprisonment.
But finally Governor Johnson of South Carolina was like, look,
we just got to do it so we can stop
talking about and stop arguing about it, and he ordered
that the deed had to be done, and Steed was hanged.
(59:52):
He was buried alongside his crew in unmarked graves in
local marshland. This was about eighteen months since he'd given
up his life of permanent ease and comfort on Barbados
to run off and play pirates. I can't think of
many better examples of fucking around and finding out right.
(01:00:12):
Steed Bonnet our Fafa King. So there you have it,
a little sampler platter of the kind of stuff we
like to talk about on True Crime Campfire. It has
been so much fun to do this live. It's our
first live show ever. Actually, we're so excited and we
(01:00:37):
want to shout out IRL Events for making this happen
for all of us. The staff have been working their
asses off. We just appreciate them so much. And the
biggest thank you in the universe for our campers. We
love you to the moon and back.
Speaker 4 (01:00:51):
So that was a wild first ever live show, wasn't in, Campers.
We'll be back to your regularly scheduled programming next week,
So lock your doors, slight your lights, and stay safe
until we can get together again around the True Crime Campfire.
Patrons this week get to hear our live q at A.
Patrons of our show get every episode ad free at
(01:01:12):
least a day early, sometimes more, plus tons of extra
content like patrons on the episodes and hilarious post to discussions.
And when you join the five dollars nup categories, you
get even more cool stuff a free sticker, a rat
enamel pin, or fridge magnet. While supplies last virtual events
with Whitney and me, and we're always looking for cool
stuff to do for you, so if you can, come
join us at patreon dot com, Slash True Crimecampfire
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