This is exactly right. Hello and welcome to my favorite murder. How are you? Honestly, I'm going to say it out loud right now. How are you?

Good, bad. Somewhere in between us to say all of the above. Good.

You get to be all things. Yes. Good. Good, though. We're good. You know, as of a week ago, I feel a lot better and lighter and cool.

Oh, nice.

And. All those things a relief, it's a it's a joyous celebration, it's also a problem. But isn't isn't that how it is these days? Yeah, I'm being optimistic about the whole thing by not reading the news that much. Smart. Good. And I'm and I'm hoping in my naiveté that things will return somewhat to normalcy in the next year. But things have been so insane that normalcy is going to be insane. It just won't seem like it as much because things have been so insane.

True. I mean. I will say, just getting to sit, you know, the day they actually announced to sit in my house and just get to watch people around the world and in every city in America literally gathering in the streets, dancing in the streets. My favorite was very early on. So people were taking video in Manhattan and in Brooklyn where people were just wandering out of their houses and standing there banging pots and pans.

And then somebody took this great video of the first time. It's just like people kind of realizing, oh, we're doing this, let's do it. And then they're starting to just cheer, just cheer in the streets in in Manhattan. And then a US Postal truck comes around the corner and people go fucking insane. And that was like that moment was just like, yeah, this is this is the America I understand and know.

If you're listening to this a year from now, we're talking about the election, by the way.

All right. We're so we're so up against it. I drove we drove around the neighborhood fence was blasting supersonic. Yeah. Just for the fun of it. And our whole neighborhood, there's so much there's footage of it was going crazy and cheering feel this obviously, which is like a really liberal neighborhood. It was so much fun. It felt good. It felt it felt like pure and it felt like this weight had lifted off everyone and magical.

It's so nice, especially as the votes, you know, continue to roll in the margin of the win. The eight out of ten people believe Joe Biden was fairly elected. I mean, like this. That's the reality that we're now in. And I'm so relieved and happy not only to be in that reality, but for the people who were absolutely in danger because of this past administration. It's so it's I'm sure they feel intense relief. And then we also we really clearly have a ton of work to do, a ton of work to do in this country.

Absolutely. But I am in this moment, I'm proud of us. And and I feel so much more hope than I have in a long time for sure. I'm very, very proud of all the people, people we know and also just people out there that started organizing on the local level.

Yeah, just separate from everything. The storyline of Stacey Abrams having her election truly stolen from her in every way, shape or form. And she doesn't quit. She doesn't say, fuck you, everybody. She doesn't she goes straight back home and she starts fair fight dog, which please give your money to that if you even have any, because, holy shit, she got on the ground and reached out and started getting a hold of all those voters who have been suppressed for so long and and making such a difference.

It's it's so inspiring and amazing and not just her. Of course, one of the first things she did on Twitter is start naming all the other people that worked with her, that it's like that kind of impressive, really amazing leadership is so great to see. And so something you can get behind. Hope I can't stop talking about. Hope for some.

I know. Well, that's the feeling. It's really nice. And look, yeah, that's not the only thing that's been happening lately because my sister called to let me know that I appeared in my hometown newspaper and the column was called The Buzz. So my sister actually said it to me like so my Petaluma, California is my hometown hometown newspaper. The Argus carrier been going strong since Whoknows eighteen fifty five one time.

So she runs into our friend Lisa Johnston, who we went to high school with and and who's, you know, now lives near my sister. And she was like, did you see Karen in the Argus. And my sister's like, no. And she's like, You didn't, I didn't believe my sister. Right. Or was like Are you a bad sister?

She's just like, oh, we don't care about that. Right. The thought of of the thought of someone being like, you're in the fucking newspaper. That's like a once in a lifetime thing and you're just being like, I don't know, didn't didn't see it, not interested. And then she sent my sister the link and the picture. They used our picture. But in the book, you know, sorry, I'm the only one that's from there.

So Georgia got cut out. Amazing. I'm sure she is running to do do a story on me right there. They're answering whether to clap back the darker, scarier story. But I just want to say all of this brag of this bragging corner is to say thank you to the person who was only listed as staff writer. So I don't know if it's one if it's one Motorino or if there was three in the office. But this the right.

Up because it was about how the paperback book is coming out next year on my birthday. Right. Stay sexy and don't get murdered. Our book is coming out in paperback paperback. Why isn't it called the paperback? The book's actually made of plastic, but the cover is paper. So anyway, it's just about that. That's kind of the point. But within it, clearly, there were so many references, an insider thing, it made me laugh so hard to read it.

So I just want to say thank you, staff writer, whoever you are. And don't be afraid to send a message to the Gmail, letting me know what your actual name is, because you really gload me up to my hometown. Beautiful. I'm in the buzz section.

I mean, that's that's all market you want from your hometown. Come on. Absolutely.

I would love for Ervine to acknowledge me one time, just one instead of shutting the shit out of me. OK, I have a question for you. Did you did you watch?

I know you were like not totally keeping up with the vow, but did you watch it do this? Yes, I did. Back in India, Oxenberg her story about Nexium.

OK, turns out Keith is just a whole nother level of creep.

Now, here's what I have to say, because we talked about the vow on this show when it first came out. And I actually said things like, it's just amazing to see the people on the inside actually calling, calling all this behavior, calling themselves or whatever.

Yeah, no, they didn't. And when you want to do, I doubt they left things out that are not little things.

That footage of Keith Trinary talking about how raping a baby is only an issue if you apply morality to it. Right. And my child likes it and then doesn't find out it's immoral until someone tells them as if then that's OK.

He's a monster and it's like, hey, hey, look. What is this about? Yeah, because this is executive success programming. It was what it was supposed to be. What are you talking about? Why are you talking about it? You know, and it's so clearly like that's the breakdown in cults. Yeah. That's what starts to happen, which is you don't have to. Why are you applying morality to everything? Why do you why is the way you think so problematic?

Like he broke he broke those people mentally in a way where not one person in that room heard him say that. And you didn't hear a cough. You didn't hear anybody go, whoa, nothing. It's all right there.

I think Bonnie's face, any time they panned over to Bonnie, who was the original one who got the fuck out, she looks you can tell she's, like, inching her way. She's fucking crab walking out the door a little bit.

I feel like if someone made that statement, I. I would like to think and you know what? This is why this is how people get into cults, because they're thinking this way, which is very.

We have no idea. We have no idea. Yeah. After I reported my calories to you and stayed up all night playing volleyball, I probably wouldn't. But I'd like to think that if I heard something that fucked up, I'd go, hey, what are we doing? I hold up. Yeah.

Yeah, that was shocking. And it really it's interesting that they came out with that almost like a competing documentary, because that's the information people need to know, which they're insisting it's not. But I really liked it. It also made me and I won't spoil it. But there's a part in it that made Keith kissing everyone on the mouth even more disgusting than it was before dinner. And talk about does he like a toilet mess?

Was he dare to look at it? I honestly, I got past the episode, which I think is either two or three, where he starts saying that intensely fucked up stuff about what you can do to women, what you can do to children like all these things. And I just started getting that feeling of like, this is horrifying.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, oh, my God. And then it was like then it was the election week, so it was just like, I can't go back, I can't go back in. I need less toxic masculinity in my life. Not fucking more of it, please.

But what's that's what's fascinating about him is he's just this little bland guy like that idea when they I mean, lots of people have made this point and it's hilarious and true. They all the followers talk about what a genius he is. And I was amazing is and then when you hear the things he actually says, it none of it is genius, amazing or even original.

It's just the confidence he says it with. And that and the determination he says it with that makes you think he knows what he's talking about. You know, for people who clearly are there because they have low self-esteem, that's like really going to work on them.

Right. Right. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I honestly really like twenty twenty one years old. I definitely might have fallen for something. I don't know, maybe not. There was like what was it. Landmark Forum. Yeah. Friends went to that. I was like absolutely not going to that and I'm broke as fuck. How the fuck did they, how could they afford these classes that were thousands of dollars.

I know they took all their Battlestar Galactica money and sunk it right into that thing. That's so sad. I'm also let's see, what else are you watching or listening to or reading? I have been here's what I've been reading and watching. Nothing. And the wall as I place around my house staring and going like, what's going to happen? Yeah. I can't like I, I, I've been re watching stuff that I know is super familiar, just simply just so I can comfort zone out essentially.

What have you been saying.

Ten. Fifteen has been really comforting to me. The new season, the new season is supposed to be amazing. It's great.

And then I, I've had I've had this realization that when I now that I'm trying not to drink, there's like five extra hours every fucking day. It's crazy. It's crazy. Five extra hours.

And I don't feel like shit in the morning. And my life is just kind of taken this weird turn. Like I come downstairs around 9:00 and it's just like self care time around 9:00.

Yeah. That's new too. Yeah. So been upstairs and watching TV. Usually I would have stayed with him drinking until fucking twelve thirty but instead of calm down I take a bath, I listen to podcasts a lot of like I'm really big on health or wellness podcast right now like mindfulness shit. And so I like mindfulness.

That's my new podcast, Mindfulness. Yeah. There you go. And then you're like, just be mindful.

I don't know even the picture and orange in your head, be that orange. The cure for chronic pain again is like this podcast that I'm loving. There's an episode about healing the wounds of childhood, which is like fucking oh, deep and relevant to everyone and then in sobriety. And so, yeah, it's just been it's been nice to be nice to myself. Not that it's going great. I got shitfaced on Saturday. It was a big mistake.

I had been shot. But I think I think the presidential election is more than valid. But I used it as an excuse and I knew I would. But yes. And and you will again. Yeah. And that's OK, because this is an imperfect path.

As a person who was rolled down this path, don't you start again and never look back.

And then that's the key. I definitely am. I also want to say, like I've been saying about I've been talking about all these books and podcasts I've been reading and listening to about quitte lit and everything. But I also feel like I should mention that a couple months ago my psychiatrist prescribed this medication for me that is supposed to help help curb cravings for alcohol specifically. So I don't want to seem like I'm this fucking sobriety unicorn that's just like doing it through reading and fucking literature.

It's not that easy. So you have a good psychiatrist and you need help. Maybe that maybe they'll prescribe it for you as well. Is it Wellbutrin? It's not Wellbutrin. It's specifically it doesn't it's not an antidepressant. It's not. Oh, it was originally for that to help curb cravings for and withdrawals from what's it called opioid one.

Yeah. For opioids and to kind of make it not work as well, which is really interesting. And then they found out it works for alcohol too. So, you know, it's just doing whatever works. I'm enjoying it. I'm excited about it. I feel like it's despite Saturday, it feels like a different you know, you've been with me for, you know, every time for the past five years that I've been like, I'm quitting again.

I'm quitting, I'm quitting. And I don't know, it feels different. And looking forward to, like, identifying why I was pouring alcohol. It's not like I always thought I drink. Because it's fun, it's always been a positive and because of this and because of that, and now I'm realizing, no, it's actually it's to subdue myself and to subdue my feelings. And so it's not fun. It's really not been fun for a while.

It's it's now an actually a negative. And I need to look at it that way.

True. Which is a difficult thing to do because then that means you don't get your little escape hatch.

Right. And also, I think the thing that that I talk about with my therapist all the time these days is these feelings we fear so much because they're from early trauma or a trauma moment at all. We fear them. We begin to cope around them. We build these crazy cassells of coping mechanisms around feelings that we're so afraid of. If we figure out the way we can allow ourselves to feel them and practice actually just feeling them. We realize the worst has already happened.

That's what my therapist has said to me. Like over and over for the past five years, the worst has actually already happened. You think you're anticipating something bad and like locking down in the anticipation. What your brain is actually experiencing is what already happened. And it's it can't be that bad again. It won't be that bad again.

So you have to give yourself over to, you know, stop turning away and avoiding and whatever and just kind of give yourself over to this is a big, bad feeling. And once you feel it, you go, oh, you have feelings, can't kill me. Maybe I was, in truth, truly being threatened before.

But right now, as I sit in my kitchen and, you know, I'm right here crying or grieving or someone saying something or doing something that just calls back to that time, you're not there anymore. You don't have to react as. That's right.

Who was traumatized? Like I'm about to cry because this is all this is everything I'm trying to learn right now and deal with. And I've twenty years. I like it all. It's some reason just hit me. It's almost like I'm coming out of a cult. For twenty years I've been covering that with alcohol and the thought of feeling the feelings and my therapist, I knew there was cause of those nice juicy feelings of love. And I first I was like, please don't use that word.

But now, like, I get it. And it is like, I can't I don't want to feel positive. I don't want to feel vulnerable.

And the love was a trap. We all know no positive is this thing that happens right before you drop off the fucking face of. Exactly. And that is a learned thing that as my therapist said a million times, your trauma brain knows the experience that you had when you were nine. And it never updates. It never updates. So that's how, you know, when you're when things are black and white, when things are desperate, it's life or death.

All those reactions, you're in trauma and so you go you like. I can't look, there's you know, I'm being threatened. And it's like, actually, if you can just even just pause. Yeah.

And just feel you're not being threatened and this feeling won't kill you. And I'm learning the self talk of talking to myself like a child like that child. You're OK now. I would just like to put a button on it by saying it's just really nice. Like, you know, we've been doing this for almost five years. Right. And you can get a lot of shit like tabled and worked out in five years if you start going to therapy now.

I feel entirely different than I did when when I when we started this and I was in therapy. The things I talked about and the way I talked about it was very different than how I talk about things. Now, I'm an anti religious person. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I love the idea. And this is can work for anything. Working out or quitting something or starting something is five years are going to pass anyway. It's you can't you can't put it off and not let the five years pass. They're going to pass. So where do you want to be five years from now. Work on. You know, that's now's the time to work on it.

And even if you just do little bits, I believe the Japanese call it Kysen, which is small improvements every day. So you don't it doesn't have to be, you know, this kind of big presentational American Idol kind of look at my victory actually, when we're in fucking quarantine, you know, it's more like when you get up and make your bed and then you leave the room and come back into the room.

It's so nice that you're like, oh, it looks so nice. Yeah. Or what happened to me the other day, which was a I can't. What did I have to go do? I think I had to go get a flu shot. And then when I came home, I had four minutes before we started podcasting and then some people working on my house showed up so I didn't clean. There was clothes on my bathroom floor like I was 15 years old and my and my bed wasn't made.

And it was so embarrassing. And I was just like, yeah, that's like the feeling of that isn't how I normally feel anymore, because I'm like taking care of things. And it was it was very like cut back to nineteen ninety five. We're just like, oh I don't do this anymore. One day you're an adult, like you're an adult now who takes care of her things and, and that shows how much more you care about your life and respect.

And also it feels. Good, which is if you never do it, you're just assuming it won't or it's a big pain in your ass where words like work, work feels good, improving things feels good. Like like taking care of yourself actually feels good when you're not doing it. I my big thing was I used to always be like, look, that I'm not doing that extra shit because I never thought for a second it would feel better than I felt.

Yeah.

That it never I didn't know I didn't have the experience. Yeah. Totally to know it felt better. My next step is to go to or to virtually go to an Allanson meeting. So that's that's my therapist kind of, you know, has has recommended that for me. So I'm going to be my thing of like I keep putting it off. I keep for like six fucking months. And it's that's one of those things where it's like take a bite, take a small bite of something and do it.

It's not that you can't do it, it's that you won't do it. It's not like I can't do that. I don't have time. No, I have time to do it because I'm not drinking. So I have those five hours. I won't I will not do it. And I need to because there's a lot to fear, because it's vulnerability. It's exposure.

It's it is digging back into hard feelings and bad feelings. You know, there's crying coming. You know, there's some kind of big or feeling. What if it doesn't work for me?

What if I'm so broken that it's not going to work for me? So I'm not going to do this. And I just tell you, is fucking classic alcoholism thinking I'm the one that's so broken it won't work for like I tried rehab once and it didn't work, so I'm not trying it again. That to me like an intervention. When I see that, it's like, no, no, no, try it again, you know. But it is look, I empathize with myself in that all that thinking, I've done the exact same fucking thinking because I'm a straight up addict.

I want to feel special. That's all I want. That's why I'm a motherfucking stand up comic. That's why I can't have enough podcasts. I can't get myself out there more because there is a big fucking hole. It's been there since day one. I've I've tried to figure out ways to fix it. A lot of them have gone very badly.

Many have been macaroni and cheese based, tons of regret's, tons of, you know, looking back and going, wow, you blew it.

And that's that's just kind of how it is when you have this specific thing. That's the sum total of life. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. Hey, I want to do exactly right.

Have you been trapped in your house for months? I can talk about anything. This is podcasting at its most self-indulgent question, especially since you and I.

The only person I talked to it pretty much is Vince and you these days. Mm.

So sorry guys. We have some stuff to talk about. We needed to work some shit out. Now we can press record. We haven't been recording. Wait see I was just let's see, we have a really exciting announcement. So first let's talk about the new merch design that we put up this week. So, yes, to celebrate this awesome, exciting week and turn of events, we just dropped a new design and it's of the fucking hooray.

Yep. So thing title kind of. Yeah, it's so cute. It's designed by a friend of the family, Rudy Cowlick on Instagram and Twitter. She's incredible. And so you know her if you were at the fan weekend. Right. She was. It's her name's Hilary and she was the one there doing the stitching for everybody if they bought a jacket. Yeah, she is. She does her stitching and she's super talented artists. Such a good artist.

So we have mugs, sweatshirts, t shirts. So check out the new fucking her design. It's it's fucking cute. I really love it. It's it looks like balloon. It's like you loon's. It does.

It's a real eerie feeling. Yeah. Well then also so we had a brand new podcast premiere. I saw what you did, Melida Chako and Danielle Henderson. It's a film podcast. It just dropped on Tuesday. Yeah. Yesterday or two days ago for when you hear this and if you haven't heard it yet, it's called esteemed dirtbag's and they talk about two. They have like a double feature where they discuss these movies. You can go watch them beforehand and then listen to the conversation.

You can do it afterwards or maybe you've already watched it. It's such a good podcast, you guys. These they're just fucking badass women that you will love listening to. I feel like it's your new Going for a Walk podcast or cleaning the House podcast where it's two friends talking about something they're really passionate about and excited about and they have a lot of knowledge of. And at its heart, it's just really about the two of them nerd out on something they're both excited about.

Plus, yeah, plus a grandma plus an incredible great. My segment at the end, which is a fucking already a hit like Daniels grandma, is the sorry sorry million Danielle, but Danielle's grandma is the breakout star. She is a horror, movie loving grandma who gives advice. It's it's just a great podcast.

So give it a try. Like you're like the new one in rotation. That's like makes you feel good, you know. Yeah.

And, you know, great review and subscribe so that they get so they get, you know, put on the charts.

Yeah, you're right. The more reviews you have, I think the more the higher on the chart and the more stars you get, the higher you get on the charts. And subscriptions like all of that matters and counts for people podcasting. It's really it's a it's a cool thing you can do to like to like pay for your free podcast. Right, exactly. And it's and it really does actually impact. And these guys deserve it, you know, mean it's like such good work.

Yeah.

So if you have a chance, please rate review and subscribe. We have nothing to do with it. But but putting it on our network and we're proud of that alone. Yes. All right. Creative.

I had a little something to do with calling Molly and being like. Excuse me.

That's true. That's true. All right. I take it all back. No, no, sorry. I had to go again. Can I just have some attention and credit for every goddamn thing that happens in the world? You may. Thank you.

I can you may cry and crying. Is that everything? Hmm. I believe it is, yeah. I mean, it's a lot to think I know. Is that everything. Forty two minutes. Is that everything? You're the first person I've seen or talked to all week long. I know I put a dress on for you.

I have been, I spent the entire day and like ratty pajama pants and my like my dad's sweater from the like nineteen eighty six New York Marathon.

And I look at myself and I was just sad my mukluks on and I was like, who is this girl. Do you want, who is this person. Let's say you dressed it up. So I put a dress on. You had this great idea recently that we make some videos for the fan cult and yours was that I put on dresses up like what I would be wearing if I actually went outside and saw people, all those outfits, beautiful vintage dresses.

I have not stopped thinking about how exciting that's going to be. Yes. For two weeks. So great. Steven, it's you, I think. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was going to say the I haven't I haven't done laundry in so long that when Slayer's sent us our Everybody Slayer's shirts.

I've been wearing all the shirts since a week of just all these like and I'm not like a metal guy here and you know, you're. No you're not. Oh that's shocked. So it's just like every week, like going out to get groceries, just like the devil, you know, like clothes scare children.

That's when, you know, he needs to do laundry.

Yes. Fucking Larry. I love that.

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Goodbye. All right. Oh, OK. This is heavy. Oh, this is a heavy one. This is one that I'm sure you've heard of throughout the many years I've been a murderer, you know, and a true crime. This is a story I've seen on many TV shows and heard many times, but never really thought of it as a story that I should do. But it's also one of those ones where there's details in it that pop into my brain on a regular basis.

And I didn't think to do it and tell the incredible survivor in this story, started doing a ticktock account and told her story through Ticktock and is this incredible survivor and an advocate. So I have this incredible ending already. And now it's her being this incredible person and owning, you know, owning what she went through. And so I wanted to share it. So this is the survivor story of Kara Robinson, June 24th, 2002. It's a normal hot summer day in suburban Columbia, South Carolina.

15 year old Kara Robinson is at her friend Heather's house. They're going to go to the lake that day and hang out. So before they leave, Heather's mom is like, can you just water the plants in the front yard before you go? Kara offers to do it while Heather goes and gets ready for the lake. So she's out front watering the lawn.

And but unbeknownst to Kara, there's a murderer stalking the streets in broad daylight. Originally, he had come to town looking for a different girl, one that he had targeted for weeks, taking notes as he followed her routine, targeted her, stalked her. But on that day when he was ready and went to snatch her, she wasn't around.

And actually that morning he had put his his mother and wife on a plane to Disney World and had taken the week off of work unbeknownst to them, and was like preparing to take this girl premeditated, horrifying, OK.

But instead, he couldn't find the girl. So instead he drove around looking for just another victim. He's in his mother's bright green Pontiac Firebird. And he's specifically targeting that neighborhood because he believes that the young girls there live sheltered lives. So they're easier targets. They go more willingly. So eventually he notices Kara. She's pretty blond and shorts in the front yard. Kerry notices him drive up and thinking that she's someone he's someone she knew. She smiles at him and kind of comes towards the car and he gets out of the car and asks Kara, like, are your parents home?

And he has this like some magazines and kind of makes it seem like he's a magazine salesman, you know, kind of unassuming. He's in a button down shirt and a baseball cap. He's completely unassuming, normal looking, of course. But when he approaches Kara to hand her one of the magazines, like he gets a little too into her personal space and she gets a strange feeling about him immediately. And sure enough, as soon as he gets close enough, he pulls out a handgun and presses it to the side of her neck and forces her quickly into the back seat of his car, just like that.

But what the man didn't know was that instead of picking a sheltered suburban victim, he had fucked with the wrong girl. And between the two of them, she was the only one who was going to survive. So there were neighbors who witnessed Kara leaving with the man. But to them from far away, it looked like she was going willingly with him.

So initially when law enforcement called, they, of course, just think she's a runaway.

And what the neighbors hadn't seen, though, was that in the back seat of the car, there was a huge Rubbermaid container and the man had forced Kara to get into it and like a fetal position and put the lid on it. So she's completely hidden. Yes. So it's dark. It's cramped, but like almost immediately, Kara is determined to survive. And so she automatically starts taking note of everything going on. So every turn that's being made, every stop sign, she knows the town really well.

She can tell when they got on the interstate. He drives about 10 to 15 minutes, pulls the car over like on the side of the road, and he opens her container and he calmly tells her he's going to tie her up and gag her. So he binds her wrists and ankles. He gags her, he puts her back in the container, drives a couple more minutes before parking, and she's listening to every sound going happening, just totally aware what's going on.

He comes to the backseat, picks up the container and drags it across what Kara says feels like concrete. So Keira hears the door slam and when he takes off the lid there in his apartment, so he opens a container.

He tells her that he's going to take the gag out, but keep the restraints on and. Don't fucking scream or make any noise, I have a gun, but she's still focused on her escape, so she looks is looking around the apartment trying to get any information that'll tell her who this fucker is. And she starts trying to look at his mail and see what his name is. There's a fucking magnet on the fridge of the dentist that he goes to.

My dentist is Jesus.

I know. And she memorizes. This is insane. The serial number of the Rubbermaid container.

Fuck, yes, she does you every piece of information carefully.

And it's almost like I bet in a way that was what's making her making her calm. In a way she had a job she could get a job to do. Yes. You could not panic. So amazing. But but but oftentimes we can't control that. That's like in an animal response. So somehow the way she did it, which is so brilliant, is like, is she hyperfocus? You know, like it's it's awesome. Yeah. Everyone reacts differently in a traumatic situation and no one right way is wrong or right.

But this is just what how she did it. And I think it's inspirational. It's inspirational. So she is still focused on her escape. She tries to like chat with him to get information about him. And so she gets him to talk about himself, his time in the military. There's like a bunch of bird cages around and like lizards. So she asked questions about his pets. The man also asked Cara about her life. And he's like, got a little pen and paper and is like taking copious notes about her life, asking her if she has a boyfriend, you know, all these details about her life.

He writes it all down. And eventually she also overhears some having a phone call with his wife.

Oh, yeah. So Cara. And we, of course, know what's coming next. He makes her take a bath. Part of his M.O. is that he has her shaved her pubic hair and then he rapes her repeatedly over the next several hours. Hmm. And later he makes her smoke pot with him and take a Valium kind of to make her sleepy. And when it's time for bed, he uses fuzzy handcuffs on her wrists and, you know, like, I know, like sex or fuzzy cuffs, as if it's consensual sex.

Pretending. Yeah, right.

And he has rope, shackles her to the bed frame and he uses a D ring, which is like the hiking skirt skirt on hiking rings that a lot of like hipsters use as, you know, as key chains and shit.

Yeah. Like a little carabiner. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly what it is because I like that.

So I know because you're a rock climber, I love to climb rocks.

So he attaches that to the rope around the fuzzy handcuffs. Our hands are raised over her head and he ties that to the bedpost. She also has a restraint on her leg that's attached to the bottom of the bed and then he falls asleep next to her. When Cara wakes up in the middle of the night, it's still dark out. He she hears this man, like, lightly snoring next to her. And immediately she's like, this is my chance.

She doesn't hesitate. So without making much noise, she is able to reach the ring and bring it to her mouth and uses her teeth and her tongue to unscrew it the Caribbean out. And then I remember watching an episode of some show where she talked about how because the handcuffs were fuzzy, it made it easier to slip her hand out of.

Yes, they're not fucking real handcuffs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So she does that. She takes off her ankle restraint. She slides out of bed without waking him up. But she she has to go through the apartment to the front door, which is messy. She's like walks into it, you know, a vacuum. She's so scared she's going to wake him up and the door, the front door, the apartment is heavy. And she knows that once it opens, he's going to hear it and he's going to wake up.

So as soon as she walks out the door, she fucking books it and she runs through the apartment complex as fast as she can and bare feet. She makes it to the parking lot. She flagged down a car that's passing and she tells what I'm sure are the two completely shocked dudes in the car that she had just been kidnapped and needs a ride to the police station. She still has the fucking handcuffs. On one hand, you know, God and the men, of course, let her in and drive her to the police station.

Thank God. Yeah. When she arrives at the Richland County sheriff's substation, still with the fucking fuzzy handcuffs on one of her wrists, the deputy there does not believe her story because, remember, they thought she was a runaway.

Yeah, but when she's there fucking in person being like, not only did I not run away, but I was just raped multiple times. And you need to go.

Yeah. And this is not how you treat a fucking. Oh yeah. Victim of violent crime, let alone a fucking.

Let's get some training going, go about it. Well, you'll hear this when she insists she's not making it up, he calls her mom to check and says, we have your missing daughter. And Kara could hear her mom on the other end of the line. And she's like, that's the first time I really got emotional. So they fucking finally believe her. OK, so they're going to take her to the hospital. But before they do that, and this is kind of unreal as well, they drive her back to the apartment complex because they want her to point out which apartment she had spent the last 18 hours being assaulted and raped in.

So it almost seems like a traumatization, right?

You would think. Sorry, will you tell me again what year this is? This is 2002. OK, so she's not able to identify exactly what apartment it is. Of course, her mind had so much other stuff going on that she doesn't remember. But she and it's a huge apartment complex.

And she and she also got dragged in in a plastic bin. Exactly. And she she didn't walk in. No. And she ran the fuck out, too. Yeah. And you know, those apartment complexes that are so complicated and. Yes. But she is able to remember one specific detail from the apartment of all the things she had been memorizing that she thought might help. And so she told them that there had been a hairbrush in the apartment that had long red hair in it.

So when the deputies give this a little bit of info to the property manager of the apartment, the manager is immediately like, oh, I know who that is. She has long red hair and she lives there with her husband.

So they're able to fucking figure out what apartment it is based on.

A little teeny, tiny bit of info that Kara was able to gather her observations.

Amazing. So, yeah, it turns out that the red hair belonged to Kara's captor's wife. So by the time the cops arrived, the course, the man is long gone. But investigators learned his identity. He's thirty eight year old Richard Mark evidence. They get a search warrant. They go through every inch of his apartment. They find tons of porn, and they also find a metal foot locker that's kind of like hidden away and locked. And they are able to pry the lock off.

And inside the Metal Foot Locker, they find newspaper articles that come from Spotsylvania, Virginia. And the headline is about the bodies of two sisters that had been found in a river in the area almost six years prior. Oh. So they're like, oh, and that's when police realized that, Kara, isn't this piece of shit's first victim? And they call in the FBI. And a manhunt for serial killer Richard Mark Evans is launched. Whoa. All right.

So let's go back to his first known murder victim just about six years prior on September 9th. Nineteen ninety six and over four hundred miles away in sleepy rural Spotsylvania County, Virginia, about 60 miles south of D.C..

And then so I checked, of course, the my favorite murder email. And there was just tons of people talking about these cases and how much they affected the town and their lives and their childhoods. So Christie said, I grew up in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, which isn't exactly a happening place unless you're a civil war buff, in which case it's the shit. It's usually a very safe place to be. But that changed pretty suddenly in the mid 90s.

And then a listener named Ali said in the 90s it was nothing but Woods Civil War battlefields and a small shopping mall. So tiny town, you know, the kind of we don't lock our doors. Nothing bad ever happens here.

Sure. So 16 year old Sophia Silva was a junior at Cortland High. She loved anything that was purple and she wanted to go to cosmetology school when she graduated. On that day, Sophia comes home from school. She sits down on her front porch with a grape soda and her homework and starts doing her homework. And her older sister is inside and doesn't hear or notice anything out of the ordinary. But when she comes out to check on Sophia, all that's left is the unfinished can of grape soda and Sophia's homework.

And seemingly without a struggle, her sister has vanished.

So this really incredible listener named Remy wrote us. Here's what she said. In September nineteen ninety six, my friend Sophia Silva was abducted from her front porch while doing her homework. Sophia and I were friends since I moved to Virginia in sixth grade. She was a sweet, bubbly and kind soul.

Five long weeks of agony, wanting to know what happened to her, looking for answers, hoping the nightmare would end, and praying for her to come home. We waited. One day in October, I came home from school and noticed Sofia's missing posters from my car windows were gone. I was. To my house, angry that they weren't there, I stormed upstairs and as soon as I saw my mom's face, I knew Sophia was never coming home.

Oh, to this day, I count her disappearance and murder as the worst time in my life. It permanently changed who I was in a small way. I hold on to guilt about not pushing her to be a part of the color guard that year. If she would have joined, she would have been at practice that day and not at home. And then it says a 16 year old's guilt. Yeah. Which obviously she must be must know in her heart that that's not possible.

But it's so hard to convince yourself of those things.

And it's part of grieving. I think it's what people do to kind of run, what could I have done? What should I have done? And it's almost easier to compartmentalize it like that instead of deal with the wave of grief, especially when you're a teenager. It's almost like the loss of control. You're almost searching for one little thing that you could have controlled.

Right. Despite the best efforts of police, they weren't able to locate her until her body was found by farmers in a marsh. Six weeks later and 20 miles away, she'd been wrapped in a white cover.

And law enforcement lets the public know that her pubic hair had been shaved off, which, of course, just horrifies everyone.

And she's recognizable only by the purple nail polish on her fingers. The water in her lungs matches the water in the marsh, which just shows that she had been drowned where she was found. And since there had been zero signs of a struggle, police, of course, figured Sophia must have known her killer. Otherwise, she wouldn't have gone willingly, which we now know that's not the case.

Yeah, there's just there's never a struggle when someone pulls a gun on you or there's rarely a struggle. That seems clear, but easy for me to say. Right.

So they questioned family and neighbors and it leads them to a man named Carl who had been painting houses a couple of houses down from Sophia. And he had previously been charged with indecent exposure and, quote, visiting a body place, which I don't fully understand what it sounds like.

You know, like this. Yes. And eighteen, sixty two.

You can't visit a body place to Fuks, a body place there isn't. I don't want a body place around here. Twenty five years ago. Body, do I? Oh, I thought you meant like the morgue or something. Oh no body doesn't like not.

Yeah, yeah. That's from the twenty so that's ridiculous. Right after obtaining a warrant, police search Carlie's van and they find hair fragments and quote, purple flakes they believed to be from Sophia's nail polish. And so after comparing the evidence found in the van to evidence found on Sophia's body, the Virginia Commonwealth forensic lab in Richmond announces that the results are a match and connects Carl to the murder of Sophia Silva. So Carl is charged. He's held in jail as they build a case against him.

And the prosecutors are like, this is a fucking easy win, right? Wrong. Because seven months later, on May 1st, nineteen ninety seven, while Carl is still in jail, two more local girls, sisters vanish in similar circumstances on May 1st. Nineteen ninety seven, 15 year old Kristen Lisk and her 12 year old sister Katie get dropped off by their school buses outside their house as normal. Kristen, who is a high school freshman, played soccer, loved ladybugs, and Katie, who played clarinet and hoped to be a cartoonist one day.

I mean, she's this little little girl, their new latchkey kids, and they have the rule that as soon as they got home, they needed to call their dad to let them know, you know. Yeah. Yeah. So when that call didn't come, Mr. Lisk automatically knew something was wrong. He heads home immediately from work. And he got as far as the front yard where he finds his daughter's discarded book bag.

And knowing this is definitely not a runaway case, thankfully, law enforcement and over fifteen hundred volunteers from the community search for the Lisk sisters, so sadly, their bodies are found five days and over 40 miles away in the south, Anna River in Hanover County.

So, like Sophia, the girls had been shaved and they both had water in their lungs, although the water is shown to be bath water, which means they were killed at another location. At the time, it was obvious that the two cases were the work of the same man. All three girls had been brazenly abducted during the day outside of their homes after school without any struggle, and the other moms were similar. So it came as no surprise when DNA samples from both the crimes matched each other.

So Carl, who's hanging out in prison, he's released after the original findings from his van are retested and shown to be incorrect due to several mistakes in lab work, which is that thing we always talk about, where it's like you can't completely trust DNA sometimes, right?

It's not a given that everything's fallible because humans are fallible. But despite the DNA evidence, authorities are unable to match it to a killer. And the town, of course, this little town is in a frickin panic wondering when what they call the Spotsylvania killer will strike again. And of course, it changed everything about the way kids were parented. You know, it's the late 90s, so there's still some of that, the stranger danger, but also the freedom that we had without helicopter parents.

And it just changes everything. So much so that the movie Kiss the Girls was put out then and they refused to put it in the local theaters because it just was so triggering. Ashley, from our email, wrote, As a brunette middle schooler, just like the victims, I spent several years wondering if today would be the day I was snatched. I studied the faces of lone men. I memorized license plates. The local parents organized to ensure an adult was always with the kids at each bus stop before and after school.

I literally thought about this killer every day for years, she says. I learned early on that the worst people hide in plain sight. So she she wrote about how she had wanted to be an FBI profiler when she was little. And she said, instead of that, I pursued a path that led me to my current job doing forensic interviews of children who have been sexually, physically or otherwise abused. Wow. I hope that by working to stop these perpetrators earlier in their trajectories and getting abused kids the help they need while they're young, we can prevent the next serial killer from taking more innocent lives.

So the murders were featured on America's Most Wanted. And one hundred and fifty thousand dollar reward is offered for information, but no one comes forward to tell them anything useful. So for nearly six years, the Lisk Silva Task Force followed more than eleven thousand leads. Check the DNA against more than four hundred thousand convicted felons, obtain dozens of search warrants and looked into countless suspects. The case never goes cold because the task force never stops working on it.

And wow, I know. Incredible, right? Each week, investigators from the FBI, the Virginia State Police and at least two local sheriff offices meet at the FBI office in Fredericksburg to strategize.

Wow. So, as I said, nearly six years pass without answers until Cara Robinson runs out that fucker's door. Yeah. Into the night and escapes her captor. Law enforcement goes through his metal foot locker. As I said, they find evidence that links him to murders in Spotsylvania, Virginia. And so that's when they realized, Richard, Mark Evans is a serial killer. So I'm not going to go too deep into his fucking life because there's no rhyme or reason.

As we always say, there's he had a fucked up childhood. Some people become neurosurgeons and some people become serial killers. And there's no answer in his life. And I don't want to focus on him. So I'll just say, essentially, he seemed like an ordinary guy to some people, except for the women who worked with him, who thought he was a controlling creep. He was a Navy veteran. He had a high IQ. He was honorably discharged.

He had a job. He had friends, son of an alcoholic. You know, all the all the details that were used to his mother had left his father to marry a convicted rapist and murderer. And he had several sexual harassment claims filed against him by female coworkers in nineteen eighty seven. He had been arrested for the first time for exposing himself to a 15 year old girl.

And both of his wives were teenagers when he much older, married them.

In fact, his current wife, the redhead, had been seventeen and he was thirty six when they started dating. Seemed so desperate now to find evidence, investigators tracked down his wife and mom, who I said. Or at Disney World and of course, are shocked this is happening when question Evan, its a sister tells detectives that he had contacted her and had told her everything and that he was in a motel about 30 to 40 miles away. So she gives him up and they immediately dispatch a team to the motel.

When they get there, he's gone. And another relative had let him know the police were coming. And throughout this whole manhunt, that two day manhunt, his family, who know that he is a rapist and murderer, cover for him. And they put out an APB and ping his phone, which is now in Jacksonville, Florida. So they know he's heading south and his car is eventually spotted and a high speed chase ensues. He eventually stops near the waterfront in Sarasota, Florida.

Police, he kind of like sticks one arm out, like he's surrendering. They try to get him out of his car to surrender peacefully, that he's not getting out of his car. So they seek a police dog on him. And after being bitten multiple times by this dog, he puts the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger, killing himself. So police are able to forensically link Bonnet's to the disappearance and murder of the Lisk sisters and 16 year old Sophia Silva.

Fibers from Ivanna that's furry fucking handcuffs used on Carra are also found on the three other girls. Amazingly, Kristen lists palm print is found on the inside of his truck five years after her abduction.

Wow. God.

And investigators say that in the Metal Foot Locker, along with the newspaper headlines, they find detailed notes that he wrote himself while carefully planning the abductions. You take copious notes on the girls he was stalking and carefully planned each abduction. And the pressed white button down shirt he wore during his attacks was in there. He suspected of other rapes and murders and supposedly the FBI like all over the country, anywhere he's been, he is suspected and supposedly the FBI was trying to link him to other cases, but it seemed like that's kind of stalled out or maybe it didn't match.

It didn't say anything about if they put him in his his DNA and CODIS or not. But it seems like something that would be obvious to do. His wife tells deputies she had always wondered what was inside that footlocker, but he had forbade her from ever opening it. And she says that she still loves him. Wow. OK, so remember that one hundred and fifty thousand dollar reward that was offered in the Lisk and Selvam murders?

Mm hmm.

Well, the families of those girls happily presented Cara with the reward money. Oh, I know her saying she was a hero. Mr. Lisk said Patty and I were robbed of our children. And all of you in our community were robbed of your trust in our fellow man. And then Remy from earlier said, Kara is a survivor. Without her, we wouldn't have the answers to my friends, Sofia's murder or Kristin and Katie's murder, which he was conclusively linked to after his death.

To her, we will be eternally grateful. Following her escape, Kara and her family become close with the Richland County Sheriff, Leon Lott, who himself has daughters, and he kind of takes her under his wing. He said, quote, She was a survivor and she was a fighter and she was a warrior and she wasn't going to be a victim. In the summer of twenty three, Sheriff Lott offers Karar, who's looking for a high school job, an administrative job in the Richland County Sheriff's Department, so she works there through college while she studies to become a teacher.

But she loved working at the sheriff's department and decides that she's going to combine her passions and become a school resource officer. And so she joins the police academy.

And at this point, she was only known as Kara because she was a minor when this all happened. And so during her time at the academy, her case actually taught in one of the classes. Wow. Where the professor doesn't know that she is the Carah from the case. At the end of that class, Kara goes up to the professor and says that she's the khera from that story. And it seems like it's the first time she really comes forward and claims claims it.

And Kara ends up receiving an award for courage and bravery. And at her graduation from the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy, where she's the only woman in her class, she gets a standing ovation from her peers. So during her career as a school resource officer, Kara investigates sexual assault and child abuse cases and also goes into victim services. Today, Kara Robinson Chamberlin is married and has taken time off work to raise her two young sons. But she also wants to pursue a career in motivational speaking to share her stories and inspire others, so then wanting to make a documentary to share her stories.

She recently started a ticktock account to see if she could build a following on social media. And she started making videos and sharing her story and answering questions from viewers. And it went fucking viral. That's how I saw it. Yeah, it's credible. And she is she is so inspiring and it's so powerful. And she always has this big, bright smile on her face. I mean, yeah, she's an incredible woman. She's very candid about addressing what are normally taboo topics, like how to support trauma survivors, her views on law enforcement and how to deal with your own stress and trauma.

And she's also answered messages from sexual assault nurses and law enforcement as well about how to best support trauma victims instead of triggering them.

Mm hmm. So although she now understands that her captor, having killed himself, was probably a good thing when he originally killed himself, she was actually pissed off and disappointed when she was on America's Most Wanted. She said, quote, I wanted to go to trial and let him see me again and know I was his downfall.

Mm hmm. And she said I wanted him to know that choosing me was the biggest mistake he ever made. Hell, yes. Was. And he fuckin knew it. I'm sure he fucking knew it. And that is the survivor story of Kara Robinson. Chamberlain fuckin congratulations.

Kara Robinson. Chamberlain. I mean, nothing better than a survivor story. Nothing better than when those survivor stories turn like the subject of the survivor stories. Turn around and then take all of that strength, all of that wisdom, all of that hard won experience and help other people that need the help so badly.

And a beautiful, very easy to argue that she saved the lives of so many girls after her, you know, just by escaping. She stopped him in his tracks. He she had it down. He would putting her into that container. That's it's bone chilling, the level of planning of how he wasn't going to get caught. And clearly, he had been studying it and he it had worked before. Like that is you're exactly right. She saved so many lives.

Yeah. And the brazenness of broad fucking daylight in front of their houses, you know, it's it's.

It's just unthinkable and she was able to escape, and it's unbelievable her her ticktock name is Kara Robinson Chamberlain and she's also on Instagram. And yeah, she's I can't wait to see what she does next. She's really she's an inspiration. Yeah. Great. Great story. Yeah, that was really good. Yeah.

So I got information from a bunch of great sources. True Crime Daily, an article by none other than Elizabeth Smart. Yeah. A medium article by Lisa Marie Fuqua, a New York Daily News article by Mara Bobe son and BuzzFeed News article by Stephanie McMeel, Washington Post. There's a bunch of great articles in the freelance star, which is at Fredricksburg Dotcom, and then there's a podcast called Viall Virginia that I listen to that is super delightful. The host of that is I want to hang out with her.

She's great. And then there's a whole book about this case called Into the Water by Diane Fanning. Wow.

As you were telling this story, and especially when you got to the part about the long red hair, I have seen Cora tell this story on a TV show. I was assuming it was I survived it, but it is. She's on survived. She's on Forensic Files. She's I mean, she's on all of them. And I. Yeah. And the way she you're right. The way she speaks and the self-possession and the kind of like power she is, it's powerful.

It's self-possessed. It's in that kind of like that presence where it's like it's almost like I guess what happened to me. It's not this kind of like it's like it really is.

It's her story to tell for other people. There's this intense strength and positivity in it. It's she's a very impressive person. It's it's so exciting to hear to hear it like that because it didn't it wasn't familiar until it got into. Yeah. Into that Donmar. So interesting that she took this took some time before she came public with it, like until she was ready to be inspirational for other people, which I think is so interesting. It's I can't remember who said it, but it's show your scars, not your wounds.

And so she dealt with it the way she knew how, which was to become law enforcement, which is so incredible and inspiring. And I mean, yeah, it's yeah, she did it. She really did it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Support for my favorite murder comes from our friends at Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans, getting a mortgage is a necessary part of the home buying process for many, but it doesn't have to be a hassle.

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So this story you might remember, we do we dabbled into it for one moment and the Minnesota this week.

Oh, so we I read an email from a listener who was telling us about a different story, but then went into because they're from Huntsville, Alabama, and they were like, this is the only crime my town is known for. But then she went and told, I think, a grandma story I can remember. So the next day on Twitter, a listener named Nicole and I, S.H. Ollie, she tweeted at me or handle's at MADD, underscore ethnic.

And she said on the many. So today you said you hadn't heard of the University of Alabama at Huntsville shooting in twenty ten. I'd love to hear you cover the story. The lady had such a strange back story. Oh, my gosh. Huntsville Huntsville is my hometown and UAH is my alma alma mater. And it's something we will never forget. Wow. So that's that's what we're doing this week. It's the University of Alabama at Huntsville shooting and sources a f f Huntsville, the Huntsville Times, a New York Times article by Shaila Dewan, Stephanie PSol and Katie Zezima, NBC News, ABC News, Murder Pedia and Wikipedia.

And then, of course, our friend Nicole, who was like, do it.

Don't just don't just skim over it. And Nicole was so right. So here you go. I mean, yeah. So it's a little before three o'clock on February 12th.

Twenty ten and fifty five year old biochemistry professor Debra Moriarity is on her way to a biology department meeting at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. OK, so she heads into the Shelby Center for Science and Technology, which is the which is the building they're in. And she goes up to a conference room on the third floor where that department meetings being held. There are thirteen people in this meeting. So there's the chairman of the biology department gappy, Padia.

There's Associate Professor of biology, Maria Ragland Davis. There's Associate Professor of biology, Adria Johnson Senior. There's Biology Professor Lewis, Rosalio Cruz Vera. There's biology professor Joseph Lihe, their staff assistant, Stephanie Montecarlo. There's Associate Professor of Biology Joseph NG, and there's assistant professor of biology Amy Bishop Anderson. So like you in that room, this is a huge group of very smart people, or actually a small group of hugely smart people, is what I should say.

So it's a very standard. Like staff meeting. The group discusses upcoming events, scheduling classes, budgets. Deborah Maretti later describes it as, quote, a really laid back, mundane kind of faculty meeting, one of the easiest faculty meetings we've ever had. But about 30 to 40 minutes into this meeting, the calm is broken as forty four year old assistant professor Amy Bishop Anderson rises to her feet, pulls out a nine millimeter handgun and begins to shoot her colleagues.

And it isn't just random firing around the room. She starts with the person closest to her and moves down the row, shooting her colleagues in the head execution style.

Got so Deborah Moriarty immediately drops to the ground, like instinctually drops to the ground and goes under the table. But then she will she'll later explain. She actually then once she's under the table, begins to crawl toward the shooter and grabs at her legs like she needs. She said it was just she saw that she knew shooting. She knew she had to stop her. So she just crawled under the table, back out and grabbed at Amy Bishop's legs.

Amy steps aside. She pulls her leg free. Now, Deborah's just exposed there. Boston, Amy standing in the doorway, Deborah's on the ground. Amy turned the gun on Deborah and Deborah starts begging for her life. She asked Amy to think of her family, to think of all the time she's helped her. She offers to help her again. She begged her and begged her not to shoot. But Amy is unmoved. She points the gun at Deborah's head and pulls the trigger.

Deborah hears two clicks. The gun doesn't go off. Oh, my God, either either it jammed or Amy ran out of bullets. But either way, the group saw that Deborah had moved toward Amy in this way. So they came up behind her. And in that moment where the gun stopped working, they push Amy out of the conference room, slammed the door, lock it and then barricade the door with the table and with the refrigerator that's in there while someone else calls nine one one from inside.

So that's how we start. Now we go back. This is Amy Bishop Anderson. She's born April twenty fourth, nineteen sixty five in the middle class Boston suburb of Braintree. She grows up like in a Victorian house. Her father is an art professor at Northeastern. Her mother is active in local politics and she has one younger brother. She's really smart. And after high school, she gets into North-Eastern. There she meets a fellow student named James Anderson.

He's studying computer engineering. They graduate in nineteen eighty eight and then they get married. So then Amy, after getting her undergrad degree, goes on to get her PhD in genetics at Harvard in nineteen ninety three. Her academic work sounds impressive and very complicated. Like her dissertation at Harvard was titled The Role of Metho Zaytoun in the Respiratory Burst of Phagocytes. Sure, sure. Sure. Sounds very fancy. But actually, an anonymous source at Harvard, several actually biology professors looked at it and said that the work sounds much more impressive than it actually is.

And many feel that based on that work, she shouldn't have been given her doctorate at all.

The people who know her socially said she seemed extroverted and fun, but when you first met her, but that she was prone to random, huge, angry outbursts. All of that doesn't seem too damning on the surface until you learn about her past, which no one knew about until this shooting on December six. Nineteen eighty six, when Amy's twenty one years old, she and her father get into an argument. So Amy's mom is out horseback riding. Her brother's washing his car in the driveway when the arguments over her father heads out to the mall to do some Christmas shopping and Amy goes up in her room, but she doesn't calm down.

She gets angry and she gets more and more angry. And then she decides to go into her parent's bedroom where her father's unloaded shotgun is sitting. In its case, he bought it a year earlier before joining the local Braintree Rifle Club with his son. And Amy's never used the gun before. But she does know that her father keeps the shells to the shotgun in his bureau. So she grabs the shells and the shotgun, takes it all into her room and loads the gun.

She doesn't know how to work it specifically. And once she loads it, she accidentally fires a shot inside her own bedroom and blasts two holes in the wall. So she covers up those holes, like with a book cover and a Band-Aid tin. And then she goes downstairs into the kitchen and she finds her mom and her brother standing by the sink and the stove. And they're kind of confused. Amy's holding a shotgun. She tells them that she has a shell in the gun, but she doesn't know how to unload it.

Her mother tells Amy not to point the gun at anybody, but as she does, Amy turn toward her brother and the gun goes off. She shoots her brother in the chest and kills him on the spot and then runs out of the house, still holding the gun and heads over into basically toward town. So she ends up in the parking lot of a Ford dealership. And a mechanic who's working there in the body shop named Tom Pettigrew notices Amy wandering around with a shotgun.

He approaches, asks her what she's doing. She points the gun at him and tells him to put his hands up. As he does, she says, I need a car. I just got into a fight with my husband. He's looking for me and he's going to kill me. So when the police arrived, they find Amy wandering with the gun in a newspaper distribution agency's parking lot. So basically just some spot nearby, not the Four Seasons landscaping total landscape.

Don't forget, it's total all kinds of landscaping based. They report her as being frightened, disoriented and confused. One officer tries to get her to drop the gun. She won't listen until a second officer approaches her from behind and she realizes she basically she's surrounded, she's taken into custody and. Questioned, she tells the police about the argument that she had with her dad, but before they can get any more answers from her, Amy's mother arrives and tells her not to answer any more questions.

Yeah, her mother then tells authorities what happened in the kitchen. And ultimately, Amy's brother's death is ruled an accident. Amy walks free and no charges are ever filed against her. Wow. So obviously, have they charged Amy with weapons or assault felonies? She would have had to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, which maybe could have led to a mental health diagnosis and treatment and maybe further violence could have been prevented. But none of that happens. And there is further violence.

In December of nineteen ninety three, just after Amy earns her PhD, Harvard Medical School professor and physician Dr. Paul Rosenberg gets a package in the mail. And when he opens it, he finds two pipe bombs inside. Somehow, miraculously, those bombs do not detonate when he opens this package. When the postal inspectors dig into the investigation, they discover that Rosenberg has recently dealt with a disgruntled employee at the Children's Hospital, Boston, where he works. And that employee was Amy Bishop Anderson.

Dr. Rosenberg was Amy's supervisor in the neurology lab. And during a review, he let her know that he felt that she, quote, could not meet the standards required for the work. She's enraged and reportedly she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown after being told this, and she basically resigns from her position. So she's not open for criticism. She won't be told anything about what she's doing wrong.

She basically can't handle kind of real advice. Yeah, yeah.

Which is so crazy because you think someone with that level of education has some kind of handle on, you know, on themselves. But, you know, mental illness doesn't discriminate against people, you know. Right, exactly. It's not it's not about that at all. It's it has nothing to do with that. And also, it's just so interesting that something so intensely tragic happens in her family. And the family doesn't put her anywhere for her own good.

Doesn't. Yeah, I don't know that that part's very interesting to me. So the Bureau of Alcohol, I mean, I will say this, though. It's incredibly tragic. And I think if you were in that family, you would have to tell yourself that was an accident. Right? Right.

And maybe it was maybe it was in the beginning. Who knows?

So the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives conducts a joint investigation with the postal inspectors. And they get word that Amy's husband, James, after hearing about Rosenberg's negative review of her work, tells an unnamed witness that he would like to shoot, stab or strangle Rosenberg.

So the investigators question Amy and James at length about these pipe bombs, but they insist, but the couple insist they're innocent. James says he did not threaten Rosenberg and that he, quote, wouldn't know the guy if you walked into a bar. So the investigators, they get search warrants and they go to look through Amy and James is home where they discover a book. Amy's been working on one of the three novels that she will end up writing but never publishing.

And this one is about a woman who killed her brother and hopes to redeem herself by becoming a great scientist. OK, James says, quote, It's just a novel.

A medical thriller is the best way to describe it. But it turns out Amy second cousin is the author, John Irving Shet.

So right. He's one of my favorite authors. He's great. He's he's really talented. So she basically believes because she's related to him, she also possesses talent, which could be true. But so basically she goes to writing workshops and basically believes that writing is going to be her ticket out of academia. So clearly, there's a lot of pressure for her to be something that maybe she didn't want to be or wasn't comfortable doing. And then she kind of went into writing like this will be, yeah, this is my escape.

She's not delusional because she actually did get a degree, you know, but it's also a little, like, fanciful. Well, it's I feel like it's a thing a lot of people deal with these days where everybody wants to be the the very best. Right. So it's not good enough that you're it's not good enough that, you know, you need to be given notes and people tell you there's ways you need to improve. It's like the second someone says, yeah, you're not doing great and you need to improve this.

People are just like Ogleby, because I was supposed to be the best.

And in my mind, I'm the best, which just you can do that. But it isn't the best way to live because. Everybody fucking needs to take some notes. Everybody does. Yeah. Except me. So later, investigators come back to search the house again, but Amy and James refused to let them in and essentially, basically, they have to break in through a window to get in, to get into the house, to go through it, even though they have a warrant.

Wow. But aside from her book, they don't find any incriminating evidence inside the home in regards to these pipe bombs. And when they're asked to take a polygraph test, the couple refuses. Their lack of cooperation adds to the suspicion, but without any hard evidence against them. After years of searching, this case goes cold. No charges are ever filed. So in 2002, and this is a bit of a left turn, but she goes with her husband and their four children.

Yeah, four children. They go to IHOP in Peabody, Massachusetts, which I'm sure we'll have listeners that are like it's Peabody or some fucking Massachusetts loves to not pronounce. It was silent. It's just a body. And how dare you?

Not now when another woman. OK, so they're in Iowa. She goes to get a booster seat for one of her kids. Another woman's already there getting the last booster seat. So when that happens, Amy loses it. She starts screaming and swearing at this woman, demanding that she give Amy the booster seat. And when the woman is like, I fuck you, I'm sure Amy attacks her. She starts punching, repeatedly, punching this woman in the head, screaming and screaming.

I am Dr. Amy Bishop. Oh, my God.

You just never know who you're. Who you're dealing with? Yes. You never know. Oh, my God. And also the idea that four children watched her do that. Breaks my heart. It's it's scary.

So traumatic and horrifying. So Amy's arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault and disorderly conduct. She pleads guilty. She's given probation. The judge recommends that she attend anger management classes. But for some reason, the case is quickly adjudicated, which means the charges are dismissed. None of it ends up on her record. She never attends any anger management classes or goes away. So this then brings us up to two thousand three. So Amy applies for a job of at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and she lies on her resume.

She says that she worked at Harvard for two years, two years longer than she actually did. But her resume is still impressive enough to land her a tenure track biology professor job. And at first, of course, everything's fine. Amy seems to be well liked by her colleagues and students. She's described as funny and extroverted and knowledgeable and enthusiastic, but it doesn't take long for that to change. Soon, the university begins receiving complaints from students that Amy's are unresponsive teacher.

And these are the two complaints. She's unresponsive. And then she includes questions on the exams that have nothing to do with what they've been taught in class.

Oh my God. Which is just very specific and very hilarious. It's kind of like she's fucking with all of us. And should it be her?

She wants her office hours suck.

Yeah. Name the four syrups that are served at IHOP. Yeah.

And you're just like I'm a biology major. So, of course, Amy, as as she usually is, is defiant in the face of these criticisms because God forbid, anyone tell her to fuck and tighten up her game. So by 2006, grad students are leaving her lab in droves. No one wants to deal with her that may. She ends up actually kicking a student out of the lab. And when that student tells her that they're going to return their keys and the notebooks the next day, by the way.

And I think everyone knows this, but none of this makes sense to me.

I've known all of these things I'm talking about now. I just heard other people talk about office hours. What do you share? Notebooks. What are you talking about? Why do they have the office? I guess you get to to the lab. You get to go to the lab any time you want and fucking test it. Congratulations, smarty. But anyway, that students like. All right, well, I'll bring my keys in and my notebook.

And tomorrow, Amy calls campus police to force the student to return them these items immediately. So meanwhile, Amy's fighting an uphill battle to earn her tenure. One of the requirements is publishing a certain amount of academic papers. Amy is more focused on inventions and patents rather than publishing.

So you write I mean, and she actually does earn some brief fame in 2008 because she develops a mechanism that essentially keeps nerve cells alive longer so that researchers have more time to conduct experiments on them. Imagine getting famous for that. Ultimately, though, in March of 2009, because she didn't publish any papers, she's denied tenure at the school. This is going to shock you, Georgia, OK? She doesn't take it well.

Rather than absorbing constructive criticism, she lashes out. She believes she's been robbed. She lobbies for a revote. She tries convincing everyone to change their minds.

It's it's it's such a shame journey. So like in and kind of controlling in that way where a panel of people have decided you aren't good at this thing. Right. But you're going to go around and tell them how. But they're wrong, right. Everyone's wrong. But the rules don't apply to you. They play everyone else. It's you're a narcissist, megalomaniac. And you cannot handle the idea of being less than even though you actively, like, almost try to prove that you're less than.

Well, yeah. You're just demonstrating or just that you didn't get to the booster seat in time. You weren't. You have your hands free and fair is fair. You didn't win. So when no one changes their minds, Amy hires a lawyer and files a discrimination complaint against the university, claiming that they're denying her tenure because of her gender. So take us all fucking down with you, Amy. Way to go.

This is unfounded. Of course, she loses again. Jesus driving the final nail in the coffin of her career. She has no evidence. There's no real evidence, probably. Well, it's that gives all of these people a chance to come forward and go, oh, actually, here's the real reason and that actually happened. Many of those people are women who are saying it. So it's like I'm a doctor. It worked out fine for me. Here's the difference.

OK, so so basically, this is she's just sued for tenure and lost that she is. So she still has to finish out the school year.

Well. Right, so she knows come spring, she's out of a job, she's failed, she's gone into rage, denial, she's doubled down, she's tried to sue and she failed again. Sounds familiar. These are the events that took place directly before that faculty meeting on February 10th, 2010, where she opened fire on her colleagues back. OK, so we're going back now to the day of the shooting after basically the group of colleagues have pushed her out.

So she's now barricaded outside of the third third floor conference room. So she calls her husband to come pick her up shot and then heads downstairs, not realizing, of course, the police have already been called. A few minutes later, Amy's arrested right outside the Shelby Center for Science and Technology. So police enter the building, they search it. They find her nine millimeter gun in the second floor bathroom. So she was present. Yeah. Yeah, she she dumped it.

And the medics on the scene treat the victims. And three of those, Bluey's, Virgilio Cruz, Vera Joseph Lee and Stephanie Montejo Leo are critically injured and taken to the hospital. Another three gappy, Padia, Maria Reglan Davis and Adrià D Johnson Senior are dead at the scene. And when news cameras catch Amy as she's taken from the police precinct to the jail later that night, the reporters ask her about the killings and her response is, quote, It didn't happen.

There's no way they're still alive. Well, so she's denying it to the very end.

Like, this is a person who's like it's my reality or nothing to the detriment and death of people around her. Just just unbelievable. On February 15th, twenty ten, Amy Bishop Anderson is charged with one count of capital murder and three counts of attempted murder. She pleads guilty and her legal team starts building their insanity defense. The news of the shooting in Huntsville prompts officials in Braintree to reopen the nineteen eighty six cold case of the shooting death of Amy's brother.

The statute of limitations has passed on some of the lesser potential charges. But on June 16th, 2010, Amy is indicted for with first degree murder for for the death of her brother. And two days later, on June 18th, Amy attempt suicide, but she survives. So then in 2012, one of the victims spouses writes a letter to the presiding judge of this case saying that while they have suffered greatly, they don't see a benefit in ending Amy's life.

So Amy's lawyers use that letter to convince the judge not to seek the death penalty. So in September of 2012, Amy Bishop Anderson pleads guilty to all charges. And later that month, she's sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Today, she's 55 years old and resides in an open dorm style prison cell under medium security. So after all of this, Associate Professor Joseph NG, who is one of the shooting survivors, credits Deborah Moriarity for ending the shooting attack.

He says, quote, Moriarty was probably the one that saved our lives. She was the one that initiated the rush.

But Deborah Moriarity, however, rejects any credit, saying that Amy's gun jamming was the ultimate saving grace. She says, quote, That's not being a hero. That's just God looking out for you. Yeah. Days after the attack, Dr. Moriarty goes back to working at the versity. Yet when asked by CNN if she thinks the university should ramp up its security efforts, she says this. There is evil in the world. It is unfortunate the good people are hurt by that.

But a university is a place of free thought and freedom to explore ideas and to search out new knowledge. And you don't want to put anything in place that dampens that.

Wow. So five years into her sentence, Amy Bishop files a 50 page court document requesting to change her guilty plea. This is the quote from an article on NBC News that cites AF Huntsville and the Huntsville Times. It says, quote, Bishop has since reconsidered her guilty plea, filing numerous court documents complaining about her lawyers saying that she was mentally ill at the time she entered the plea blaming schizophrenia, allergies and steroids. And then in one of these documents, she she included a handwritten note referring to the shootings as, quote, a terrible crime and saying that she was, quote, terribly sorry for the victims and their families and my family.

So that actually came out as this article that said Huntsville shooter. Apologizes for crime.

So Joseph Lihe, who is one of the survivors, and he actually was shot in the head on, he he lost vision in his eye and he had neurological problems, but he survived. When he heard about that or was told about it, he rejected Bishop's apology and he said this, quote, Dr. Bishop has ceased to exist in my world. She just doesn't exist anymore. Do I think she's truly sorry? I think she truly wants to get out of prison.

That's what I think. Joseph Lahey's, survivor of this horrible attack, passed away from a heart attack on October 15th. Twenty seventeen. Dr. Debra Moriarity recently retired from the university, but she occasionally returns to the lab for voluntary research. She just loves she loves that science. She she keeps going back. Wow. And then this past February 12th of twenty twenty, UAH paid tribute to the victims and survivors with a 10 year anniversary day of remembrance at the school.

And they honored the victims, Dr. Gappy Padia, Dr. Maria Ragland, Davis, Dr. Adriel Johnson, senior and survivors. Dr. Joseph Lihe, survivors of the shooting, Dr. Joseph Lihe, Stephanie Monticello, Dr. Lewis, Rosalio Cruz, Vera, Dr. Deborah Moriarity and Joseph NG. And that is the horrible story of the University of Alabama at Huntsville shooting. Wow.

Wow, great job. That is bananas. I just thank you. I had never thought of that at all. Didn't have mind to do it. Yeah.

And thank you, Nicole, because I will say that tweet Nicole sent, it was the sentence of that lady has a weird back story that got me, because sometimes in these I don't I don't feel drawn to like the mass shooters. It's such a you know, it's just so dark. It's it's almost like one explosion of this narcissism of like I deserve revenge. I deserve to even the score. The whole thing is so, so dark.

But this was fascinating that this is a person who had a very distinct history of violence that just kept getting out of it or lying that then built to this.

Well, great job. Thank you. Should we just do one big fucking hurry? Because today we're recording on Veterans Day.

Yeah. And I think our our fucking parade today should be thanking people who have served in the military, who are currently serving in the military, all the all the brave men and women who either are veterans or are currently serving because their work is invaluable.

And I feel like they never they rarely get the credit unless it's Veteran's Day or Memorial Day.

You put your lives on the line for us and we appreciate you. We do so fucking Harry. Thank you so much. Love that. And thank you, everybody, for listening and for, you know, hanging out to what's now turning into our true crime comedy podcast with forty five minutes of therapy, discussion of the. Oh, yes, it's true crime comedy therapy.

Let's add something else while we're at it. Let's add a beverage, true crime, comedy, claratyne beverages, corn, teen recipes. So, yes, let's do it. Mocktails in recipes.

Yeah, I love it. Yeah. Can I just shout out a non-alcoholic beer right now and what a fucking saving grace that thing is. Love it, try it. It's the best. It really works if I can. Totally does. Because half the time in this I learned this basically when Starbucks began to get popular. What I realized was I just wanted a drink in my hand as a thing to do totally. So it's like it isn't necessarily sometimes the habit, the action of the habit.

You can just do that and it satisfies you. You don't have to actually do that.

Completely works. It's so true. Yeah. Thank you guys for listening and for hanging out during our therapy session. Thanks, Steven Rae Morris for all. Thank you. And this thanks to Jay and Lilly for their research. Yeah. Great research this week. Yeah. You know what? You know what? Everybody stay sexy and don't get murdered by Elvis.

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