This is exactly right. Hello and welcome to my favorite murder, that's Georgia hard story, that's Karen Kilgariff. Let's do voices like this the whole time.

OK, let us tell you about true crime.

That's my problem. So that's my home movie.

Oh, don't you hate when those recordings say I like talk as if they're a person? I didn't understand that. When you're like, oh, you're a doctor.

Yeah. It's like you are sorry. You mean. Yeah. Can you say that again? I didn't understand that you did it. You're a monster machine.

I like it when there's one in my car. No Bragge where you can press a button and then you can say call Laura Kilgariff or whatever. And I try to talk like the machine. So it understands because every time I'll go call Laura Kilgariff and it goes, Do you want to call Laura Kilgariff like it doesn't it doesn't care how I'm pronounced. No, it's not taking in that.

It only does it it's way I'm scared I won't use Siri. Is that what it's called? I won't use any of those. Alexa Aleksi Dotson.

Like Alexi's the Russian version.

That's when you go straight into the Oval Office with it.

I was looking for new microwave's. This is thrilling content and they make them now where you can do it with your like phone. So it can be like. But that doesn't make you it is if you like, put a mac and cheese in the microwave and like three hours later you're like, now heat that up because you're at the microwave when you put the thing in there. So does it make any sense to me like I'm on my way home?

And this morning when I left for work, I put the meatloaf in the microwave. Right.

So I can zap it for three minutes. Oh, what a world.

Also, that is that thing where I got a new TV and they make you download an app to set the TV up.

No, it's impossible to fucking use a TV these days. It's and also I don't want to get involved. This is just this part of my life of technology in my life.

I don't want there's no app. I don't need that on my phone to help me with the TV, which is the thing I'm trying to watch to not look at my phone. Right. Did you make it away from the phone? Did you make Jay, our millennial person, help you with it or would you figure it out? Download the app?

I know I could do it myself.

I can download the app all by myself, the great Tyler Perry play that I love so much funny stuff at the top and then look good into the natural conversation and natural speaking voice is, you know, what I really like are those podcasts that are that are read by actors. Have you ever did true crime ones?

Do it every once in a while where it's like, yeah, yeah, it's this person. Just read their diary entries and stuff.

No, no, no. There's some that are hosted by people who are clearly actors playing the part of like of the host of like.

Don't you think that's interesting, Janet? It's it's one of the weirdest choices in podcasting.

Podcasting is still figuring out its legs. I feel like I feel like everyone was like, oh shit, we can make money off of that. So they just threw everything at it.

And then they went, let's get you know, because this is just basically an audio experience. So like, let's get the most distancing cold voice of an actor that we can get.

Right. Let's get one of you. I think you said this once where it was like the actor is known for being gorgeous. Why are you casting them for their voice?

Yeah, we don't you know, we want to see your beautiful face become lively and emotive. Yeah. Go bring your beautiful face to the screen place where it belongs and leave us a cave dwelling podcasters alone.

We have spaces for podcasting. We are here for the not beauty contest. We're here for the for the voice beauty contest and not recognize beauty.

You're not going to go in and cast us podcasters in a movie because of our podcasting experience. It's not going to go the other way around.

So sure to stay out of our fun. We guess what? You can do this.

It's all just talk is just talking and reading other people's work. You can't do this. Oh, no.

That's actually literally exactly what they can do called acting. Now, this is speaking of which, because oftentimes here in quarantine, I forget to put on the Internet home. Now, does this happen to you? This is very private, but I'll say it to you and to the other literally. Sounds like my pets are I'm sweating right now. So do you ever find that your pet smell like the thing that you ate the most the day before? So like yesterday I made tacos and then today I was just like, who is?

So is the neighbor making tacos? It's like, no, it's me, it's Joe.

I have a similar that doesn't have to me, but my pets always do smell like pizza, like, oh, when I have Bo it's to me it's like but it's like the pizza. You'd get in high school at the like, student body meeting, select like a square, square, square, oily, greasy pizza called thank you, can have cheese or pepperoni. That's all they have.

Right. And oil. Do you know that this is a fetish subset? No, we are playing into right now food. It's Toku body smells. Oh, Pitt talk. All right.

Pretty cute armpits it will say. Oh yeah. Another thing. Do people have unattractive armpits. I've never seen him. I just grasping at something to feel good about myself.

If you had to name three beautiful parts of your body, it would be armpits.

Do you. What are you doing? Oh I have. Sorry, who are you impeaching these days?

Fuck, man. Oh man.

Just one person.

Let's not get into the thing that is sitting on all of our backs like a little terror demon. I was. I was. I hate and you know this to use the term doom scrolling because it popped up and now literally every person is saying it constantly, but it's very accurate to and I did it so much last night, I scared myself and became convinced someone was in the house. Oh, my God. And then I looked over and George could not have been more stretched out and like just chilled out.

And then I was just like, drop. It's if she barks because someone closes a car door down the street, then you don't have to worry about somebody being in the house right now. Nothing says more than it's in your head than your dog being stretched out and like realizing that the real world in your house at least, is safe right now. Except I got up and just did a check because I was so freaked out and the front door was unlocked.

So I was like, that was yeah, it might have been my subconscious going, hey, hey, hey, get up off this couch once I but good. But also it is because Frank snores and this very bizarre way that sometimes sounds like someone is trying to scare you behind you like he it's he's totally silent. And then he's like and he makes this like demon noise. And I see like I get all tense and I'm like, oh, it's fucking Frank.

Anyway, I keep thinking I hear Elvis about to throw up.

Oh, he would do that. He threw up a lot because he would he ate too fast and he ate everyone's food. And Siamese are like prone to that.

So he you could tell when he was about to throw up because he would just make these monstrous gagging noises and then it kind of sounds like a toilet backing up or something or like so I keep here then hearing them not a lot and going, oh no.

And then be like, oh, you grow up. That's how he's like making his presence known. Sometimes it's like people are in the afterlife and they'll send a beautiful butterfly or whatever.

But Elvis is like someone was like whenever my mom said, whenever I see a dragonfly that'll be like someone posted that on my comments, which I thought was really sweet.

So whenever you see a dragonfly, but mine is whenever I hear retching, the sound of retching when you instinctively are trying to grab like a newspaper or something to throw down under. Yeah, exactly. Not on the bed. And then just I think maybe as a tribute, Mimi, in the middle of the night the other night, threw up right between Vince and I on our bed again.

She is you know what? That's so beautiful of her. It's like she wrote you a poem that's a cat version of like here's his eulogy.

Yeah.

Speaking of doom, one of like a historical part of this podcast is closing.

I'm sure you heard Cafe one or the one where we created this podcast and where we became friends and sat for hours drinking coffee and talking about true crime. And then. That's right. Let's start a podcast. What would it be in fucking all happened at Cafe one on one in Hollywood. And they're closing.

They're closing, but I can't imagine someone else. It's such a perfectly renovated space.

It's such a great like it really was day and night, kind of a hot spot and such a cool Hangu place.

You can imagine the movie Swingers. It's where they go when they're drunk. And there's that beautiful scene. I just one of my favorite scenes of what's the name Vince Vaughn going. Yeah. Grows up and you can see the neighbors, his plate of food. I couldn't touch it. And it's like one of my favorite scenes. That's the one. Oh, yes. Pre pre renovation to it was a rad little old place.

I'm so bummed for that best fucking tune them out ever.

They we went there, we made people meet us there. We had meetings there in the beginning, took many meetings there. We also that was a great place to spot. Famous people who are just trying to be Chely, right, loved that. Yeah, so that's close.

Oil can Harry's is closing, too. I know. No more line dancing in Studio City for gay men over 70.

Sorry, guys are such a bummer. That was one of those places that had been there so long. And it was such a like it was such a, you know, like an old tortoise of a place in Studio City that it was it it was a gay bar that had line dancing, but then basically hung around long enough to become hip. Yeah.

And then the young people wanted to go there and it was like Ivy enough that it wasn't you didn't it wasn't pretentious. Right. I left that place. That's too bad.

And that karaoke upstairs, it's very sad and shocking. And there you know, that part of things where it's like when we talk about when everything gets normal again or when everyone has the vaccine or whatever, it's going to be a whole nother landscape.

I mean, who knows what it will look like.

We all have a lot on our shoulders right now.

We have we have covid fear. We have governmental take over fear. We have violence, fear. We have extreme violence, fear, extreme, so extreme fear, extremist fear and people rationalizing and justifying extremism, fear, which is very upsetting to watch people make excuses or say it's fine or I mean or call it a revolution when that's not what that is.

No, it's like it's socialized. It's anarchy. Here's the good news on PBS. They have rebooted all all creatures, great and small a series, OK? And it is if you need to run and you do away from modern reality. This series is takes place in the Scottish countryside. So it is the background is bright green rolling hills.

And it is a young man who is becoming a country veterinarian.

And I don't know what more you motherfucking want from me than a recommendation like that because my sister is the one who actually feels like you need to watch. This is going to make you feel better. Yeah, I really, really did. It's like calming. It's it's soothing. It's visually audio, all of it. It's so good.

That sounds perfect for our times. Yes. You know what I'm watching. That's kind of the exact opposite, but still soothing in its messiness that I had.

I just Vincent, are binge watching. I've never watched it before. It's the original British version of Shameless.

Oh, did you watch that? I never have. No, first of all, you have to put subtitles on it's Manchester. It's the best accent, but I can't understand half of it. And like the accent, I can't understand. And then also half the words aren't things that we say, but.

Right. So it's fucking brilliant. It is so good, so good and charming and lovely. And all of the siblings, I want to hold them, but I'd never seen I've never seen the American version of Shameless.

It's great.

Is it OK? Yeah. Yeah. William H. Macy, Emmy Rossum. They're it's I mean, this is better. I haven't seen I can't even say that for sure. But I promise you it's Karen. You would love it.

Where what are you streaming it on. I think it's Hulu.

Let me get called on Hulu, Hulu. Hulu comes out with the hits.

You got to say they do have a lot of good stuff. They bring it here. They bring it. Where do I find out. Netflix. That's not right.

Isn't the old one British Netflix shameless.

No, that's. That's not it, Akula, it's on Hulu. OK, shameless British Virgin, you are going to love it, it's OK.

It's nuanced and funny and beautiful and sweet and sad because they're like they don't have any money.

I mean, it's really a beautiful show. And it's mean. It's like all the horrible things that are happening in the world. It's like it's like concentrated the horrible things that are happening to them. And they're this but they're this like family unit that sticks together. Yeah. Except for the dad who's a piece of shit. But he's so fucking funny. Right. That's which is how it is sometimes.

And we I was just going to say we love Manchester so very much that we have done so many or several amazing shows. Those audiences were the greatest. That town is the coolest town coolest. Would you like a cool town?

I like cab driver from the airport to our hotel was like one of the hip. Like we didn't even belong in his presence. He was so cool. Like he knew all the musicians used to play with this band. He used to go to the what's the club called Hacienda Hacienda. And we were like, oh, sorry, we're just these American assholes.

Well, it's so funny because you ask that question, we're just like, oh, we're excited to be in Manchester. We you know, we kind of wanted to let him know that we got the coolness and we knew the history.

But then it was just like I was like, yeah, I used to hang out down there. Like he was like, yeah, I was here for all that. I lived in the movie 24 hour party people. If you had a little intro fucking great movie and it takes place and with all that noise.

Yeah. And Steve Coogan has the funniest, best dressed. OK, let's get out of the OK. Good recommendations and then let's go. What else are you watching.

I am, I'm switching around. Here's a problem. I keep starting shows with subtitles. So I started Ragnarok. I think that's how you pronounce it, which is on Netflix. And it's like it's almost like a teen. It's really cool and really good. But I kept I keep watching it going like, oh, this is almost like Riverdale.

It's like the Norwegian Riverdale, where it's like youngsters that are realizing they're their Norse gods and Norse heroes.

It's green.

But my problem is, especially with the fuckin troubles of today, I'm watching it.

And then if you look down, we'll check Twitter to make sure that, you know, like that the nothing's been breached.

Then you look up and you don't know what's going on because you've missed you know, they talk so fast and you you have to just read. Yeah. Constantly for thirty minutes to an hour. But that show is great if you're looking for anything. Ragnarok I believe Ragnarok, Ari, Jay and I are ok. OK. I mean it's the only thing that's going to be even shaped like that on Netflix. So you'll find it and it's also really popular.

OK, cool. Also to be popular. Did you watch the Ripper documentary on Netflix?

I did. Fuck. Oh my God. That thing is on it. God, they do it. They did. They did. Because the first that's four episodes and I love it. The first three didn't even introduce the the actual killer. It was like about what happened in the victims and the time and place which I didn't understand was so, so vital to the story. And then the last episode is just like a little bit about who he was, which I thought was great and about how how poorly the investigation was done.

They laid it out beautifully. And in this way, where you meet the very first person you meet is the child of the first woman who is right. And then you start. So he's first and he's just like she never came home type. Yeah. Him and his sister went out to look for their mother because she didn't come home and he it looked like he was maybe five or six. It's so heartbreaking and so beautiful. But then you get into it's from the police perspective and how they put together.

Well, if she was standing here and it's this time of night and she was in this bar, that means she's a prostitute and they keep saying the word over and over and they they keep or they call them good time girls in the newspaper there's and then they point out the fact that all the jobs, the industry jobs have disappeared from that town.

So it's these women who are trying to feed their children. They're not. And which is like the problem you get when you talk about, you know, women who are, quote, prostitutes is that you don't take into consideration the circumstances they're in and that label.

Oh, and then the the first victim saying the first thing they said about her in the press was she was a divorcee, as if had fucking anything to do with what happened to her.

That struck me immediately that she was at, you know, twenty three year old divorce with five kids.

And it's like, what does her calling her do? Vorst was obviously a way for them to say something about her morality, you know what, Amy is correct, as opposed to when you when you hear about it a little bit more.

The reason she had to leave her husband is because he was a terrible drunk, because he also it was that that thing of of he didn't he was out of work or whatever.

So he's drinking. He's beating her up. He's in the army. He's hits the kids so they get divorced. It's like this thing where suddenly she's taking the hit for these circumstances that are totally beyond her control and then she's just doing what it takes to survive. And that's that thing that I think slowly but surely everyone's eyes are opening, too, because someone tweeted and was like, I watch this and I kept going sex work or sex work. And it's like, no, no, no.

When you watch this, you have to not to correct that. That's their exactly right to say that from twenty twenty one. That's what we're doing now.

But what you have to do is go into 1970 or whatever it was, this was that time, go into that world, understand where everybody who is now in their 60s or whatever, mind you then is coming from where these men and the police department, whether they cared or not, dictated whether your case got solved, the power that these older white men had who had never. It's just like there.

And the point was my calling were saying sex workers now is because when they said prostitute back then, they meant something completely different than what we mean today. They men don't care about them. Yes. And so when you hear the word prostitute and you get super upset and offended, that's why we're not using it anymore. But you have to use that back then as what they said in the media and what they called them to show you how little they cared about these women or just or even the either some of them didn't care.

Some had like a real thing of like, how do you know this? Kind of like I want to judge these women. I want to push these women aside. And some of them didn't understand their own, like, implicit bias just from being in the position that they were in. Some of them didn't get and then some did.

There was a couple of those cops who are kind of, you know, very affected by it and very much working against this entire system. Really. It's just such a great they I those those documentary filmmakers are brilliant the way they laid that out.

And by the man even having done the story. I know and knowing the story. First of all, there's definitely these pieces that I missed were like, oh, I wish I'd known that. I wish I'd read that.

But here's what I remember is the part where those women in that area who are like, fuck you, stop telling us they because they did that just like they did in Canada during the Scarboro rapist when they tried to say women should now have a curfew with a curfew and women got fucking they were like, fuck you fucking you do a curfew.

You're the ones that need telling women, oh, yeah, stop making women.

You know, it's just so good and there's so much to learn and there's so much good stuff in that. Definitely. And that's our episode for this week.

We covered the rapper Ben, also huge spoiler alert, everybody, but that's actually been out for a while.

So I feel like all the people that would listen to this show of watch that.

And, you know, one of the thing I liked about it because Vince was a little worried about watching it, because he's not as into true crime as I am, but they didn't have to show a single gory image. There was not one single like upset, upsetting, of course, but like nothing gory happened. You didn't see any crime scene photos that were upsetting. You didn't say anything like that. It was it was done so subtly that it was it was the ones that they did show were incredibly upsetting without being, like, graphic.

Yeah. You didn't see like there was one where she's just her body was just like laying down the street and they could just take pictures.

That was it was a time where people could just walk up to the crime scene. It's it is like is it that long ago? It doesn't seem it's just crazy.

Yeah. Watch the Ripper for sure. And but I was going to say, guess what's starting today on Netflix? The Night Stalker. Oh, yeah. Excited. I'm so excited. Yes. Well, there's so much gory shit that to me, I'm a little afraid of gory. It's the fucking the devil came to earth and began to slay true men, women and children, all young. I mean, that man not to feed into that thing that he clearly loved to try to act like, but his crimes are some of the worst when I did that because I did him.

Yeah, you did. And there's some that are you can't even talk about it. It is so disturbing is it is so awful. But the interesting or exciting thing to me is that I remember it. I was there for it, you know, so like that. I'm excited to see. First of all, there's it's so cool. But then it's the Bay Area. Yeah. And all those, you know, there's just all those real hum.

Close to home type photos. I was I can't wait to he definitely hit Ervine, I think, or like close to Ervine where I'm from, but I think I was down there too young to really know too much about what's going on. Yeah, thankfully, five year I was five yards.

Ten I'm reading. I can't wait. Call how to do nothing. That's really good. Who wrote that.

It's this book by this woman named Jenny Odell and it's like kind of philosophical in a really cool way. It's a it's a book that's like it's kind of like a self-help manual. It's called How to Do Not Nothing Resisting the Attention Economy. So it's kind of it's it's really philosophical, more than like a self-help book.

So it's really lovely. And it kind of puts you in this mindset of like what it means to actually take care of yourself. It doesn't mean making a to do list and getting everything. I have a self-help to do list of like or a self care to do list to get shit done. And it's like, yeah, I don't that's just as stressful as a fucking regular to do list, you know.

Yeah, that's really true. I'm enjoying it. I just started it. But it's, it's a nice one so far. Oh that sounds good. I'm actually listening to an audio book that banana boy Scotty Landis recommended to me, and I'm so excited that he did because it's so good. It's petty. The Tom Petty biography really I want. And it's written by Warren Zanes, who was in the Del Fuego, as I believe. And so he's it's a musician, but he is an unbelievably good writer.

So how he's talking about Tom Petty's life and career, obviously.

But the way he writes is so like I was listening to this morning while it was dying my roots and there was lines that he would read and like a descriptor or a kind of like bringing together what it was like for him to grow up with the family he had in the fifties in Gainesville, Florida. And it's just this amazing description. I'd be like, yeah, I was like cheering.

The writing was so. Yeah, powerful. A good book. And if you care about Tom Petty, which I believe any any red blooded American would warn, Zane's biography of him is a beautifully, beautifully written advance is going to love that.

Vince just loved Matthew McConaughey.

His autobiography, seriously, like the Beastie Boys biographies, great love, shit like that. So that's perfect. And he loves Tom Petty, of course.

Yeah. Yeah, he's good. Tom Petty. He never stopped writing hit songs. He never, never he started when he was like twenty and never stopped.

Ever wasn't there. Yeah. Over and over and over again. It's like the best songs you've ever heard.

Yeah. And in hanging out at Largo in the 2000s or whatever, Benmont Tench, who who was the keyboardist for the Heartbreakers, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, hung out there and played there a lot. So I got to meet him and talk to him and hang out with him.

So he is one of the coolest chilliest dudes. But also, like when he gets up and plays the piano, it is such a vibe. It is such a like yeah, it's such something is happening in Israel and like. Yes. And amazing. And but he always has like this little smile on his face. It's just like is the cool.

One of the first time I sat in the same booth, the same I was just like, what is this life like.

I believe it is the Heartbreakers.

Yeah. So cool. Yeah. What else. One of our friends is back in the news. Dr. Love, remember the story of the young man?

Well, he got out of jail for which one this was televised. OK, Dr. Love is a story that I covered. I mean, how long ago was it a two year?

I think a little year. Year and a half. Yeah. This is a pre covid event in all of our lives. And as a young man who was pretending to be a doctor to the point where he had open doctors offices in Florida, Florida. Yeah.

And he and he got caught and he got caught on the news and he then had his own press conference. It was real. It was a real journey into the mind of someone who just really wanted to be seen and known as a doctor. I was not qualified to be one in any way. He went to jail for doing that, I think a couple of times or at least once or whatever you got out of jail.

And then this just happened. He was arrested again on New Year's Day. Oh, my God. Because he worked for a shipping company and he started calling the clients of this company and just having them go ahead and wire the money directly into his bank account. Sure.

It's that easy. Yep. He got caught doing that.

And then he went ahead in Texas, was saying, I'm doing everything I can to to fix the situation. I'm really sorry.

It's like, no, you. Can't do it, you can't do it in the pretend like it's it was a minor riot, like a mix up and then admit to it that basically by in Texas after at least call. So there's no paper trail. Good idea. Good point. Yes. For future for all our future felonies.

And it's I mean, yeah, it's the idea.

And I know that, you know, oftentimes when we talk about the criminals that we talk about on the show, we're talking about in intensely bad individuals, psychopaths, people that intend to hurt. This is not the area that Dr. Love is in.

In my opinion, Dr. Love is more of a person who is trying to force the fantasy in his head out into the world to make the world match what he wants it to be.

And there's nothing I relate to more than that.

Like, I, I, I look, I've already written what I want to be happening. So could you all just please be doing the part I wrote you. You're seeing the wrong line. Oh my God. I was literally seeing this in action.

When you're doing an interview and you don't like the question that's been asked to us and then you just answer whatever question you think they should have asked us.

Yeah, that's an old trick. That's not my idea. I learned that long ago by the professionals. Hell, yeah. You don't answer the question. They ask you. Jesus, what would it what would that what would it turn out to be if you did that? You have to tell them what you want them to know the end.

So I think he's in trouble again and I think he's going back oh three.

I think he has to go back. Yeah. Three hots and a cot. Right. We're sorry.

You know, I think I think it's it's unfair that I have this kind of bias toward him where he's a criminal, just like other criminals.

Yeah, the. I don't know, I feel like I get it, I understand, I get it, I want it sometimes, you know, you want to be a doctor so bad, you just wear the jacket, you rent the office and you're like, come on. I got the posters, got the posters on the wall from the different medicines.

There's a lot of there by in this podcast. There's a lot of like there by the grace of God go I. Then there's for Karen some there by the grace of God I wish went.

I mean those are those are the other options I could have had if I didn't get myself together enough to be a podcast or. Yeah, I absolutely would have rented some office space this time.

This time. Oh could that be. My safety net is broad. I want you to dream big and don't ever don't ever put yourself in a in a box. There's so many of us that have that are so afraid of having imposter syndrome when in fact Dr. Love, he has whatever the exact reverse the one lady of imposter syndrome is, which is like, no bitch, I am a doctor. Yeah.

Do you think he's like sitting in the cell right now going like, I guess I shouldn't have done that or I'll never do that again. Fuck no, no.

He's he's sitting in a cell going, I didn't actually do it.

You're right. Or I did that wrong. I need to try harder next time. You know, next time I'm going to have them wire their money into a third account that doesn't have my name off shore, baby. Now, should we do something simple like.

Exactly. Right now?

OK, I believe you guys know this, but we have a podcast network and it's growing and we love it. And it's just a family. It's so fun. All these shows are doing so good and there people are really responding to them. Thank you guys so much for supporting all of them, because they're all they're all little stars and their own departments.

Speaking of little stars in our department meeting, Karen and Karen Kilgariff and Chris Frerichs have a podcast called Do You Need a Ride Caret? And there and it's so much fun. And they had a crossover episode with Bananas. The other podcast of that we have with you with weird, funny news hosted by Scotty Landis and Kurt Braunohler. And so Scotty was on. Do you need a ride this week? That's right. And it's really, really funny. And Scotty's just a joy to be around.

He he is is I sent it to him on the show was just like your your or maybe I didn't say to him on the show, but I did tell him I was like, you're just made to be a podcast or because you're great at bullshitting and chit chatting. But also his speaking voice is just it's like Azamara.

And did we talk about the fact that he looks like Paul Holes? We've talked about that, right? No, he fucking looks exactly like like a younger Paul Holes.

He's really Paul's nephew. His goals, like skateboarding nephew has been on on the bananas Instagram, which is so funny because they're so good at social media. They posted the photos of when Kurt took a he wanted to give the flightless bird the gift of flight. So they yeah, they took a chicken on an air balloon, hot air, hot air balloon. And there's some photos of that on the banana's Instagram. Yeah, it's all but it's all been recorded.

Oh. Also this podcast will kill you. See this podcast will kill you has been around since day one. Right. And so sometimes they don't get the love that they deserve because they're a huge podcast too. Yeah, they're they're a true hit. But like, you know, there are stalwarts, so they don't get the the proper affection. So this week they talk about the virus, rubella, which is used to be one of my favorite comedy references because it's like a very weird, obscure children's disease that I used to love to throw around every once in a while.

It's a yeah. So that came out Tuesday. So let's listen to that. It's waiting for you. Speaking of smart, funny, brilliant women, the podcast, I saw what you did that came out recently with Emily and Danielle this week. They do. They cover the two movies and talk about the movie Bronson from 2008 and then the movie Wolf of Wall Street from twenty thirteen, which I can't wait to hear them talk about what a fucking movie.

And the theme for these movies is not known for subtlety, but I tried to watch Bronson once and I think I'm going to listen to this podcast and then reapproach smart because it was it was hard for me to get through. So I think I'm going to listen to what they have to say about it and then reapproach with fresh eyes. That's perfect. I said no gifts.

The the guest this week is none other than Aimee Mann, the incredible musician who wrote the theme song for I said no gifts. So there's this whole, like, you know, insular thing. But I also wanted to mention, just in case you like, wanted to know more about braziers, she's written other songs.

I know that mean just kidding. The way that the way that came out, it was like the amazing musician who wrote the theme song. We're like, Yeah, you know, and also the one liner soundtrack for Magnolia. And she just incredible, obviously. I mean, yeah, yeah, I recently I don't know how I didn't know this, but his Instagram, which is Bridger underscore w did you know it's only photos of trash that he takes in the wild.

Mean entire Instagram feed. It's photos. He finds the trash he's come upon in the world.

It is photo after photo of fucking weird trash.

Richard is really he's truly one of the funniest people on the planet. He is one of his renown like TV writer.

Everybody that knows him loves him and knows he's the funniest. We have a game night that we do with a group of our friends and we play whiplash. Yeah.

And we had it's the shit he does, but he so are we. He and I both had the same question, which was a bad name for a U.S. Navy ship would be the USS Blank.

And I wrote the USS Bomi and it was the USS Shannon. And then of course, he won that round. We were all crying, laughing.

It was just like, that's him in a nutshell. That's like Bridger is extremely unique.

You've met him. He's so proper and he's like, you know, well-dressed and very kind of subdued. And then it's just photo after photo of trash.

Yes. I mean, I love that brain. That's such a great brain to do that. He doesn't have to, like, do a big dance now. I mean, he's just being funny. And whether you join in or not is not his problem. He doesn't really care. It's the greatest.

So this is this is all leading up to our new announcement, which we're very, very excited about. We tweeted about it yesterday, but it's so cool. The podcast Lady to Lady is now going to be on. They've been around for a long time and now they're going to be on the exactly right network. And we are so thrilled to have them. Barbara Gray, Brandi Posey, Tess Parker, they're the three hosts. They're all brilliant stand up comics.

Tess is an amazing journalist there. Brandy is an amazing comedy show producer. Like they're all great and very powerful women in their own ways. And now they're amazing podcast that already has its own huge following that is going to be on the roads.

Right. And so every Wednesday, they're going to have a comedic guest hang out in with their adult tree house. They're going to play games, they're going to have advice and they're going to tell embarrassing stories and have all these tangents. It's it's a really fun show. Some of their past guests include the great stand up that's stealing my favorite murder friend of the show, Guy Branum scam got us Lacey Mosley, some of the great comedy minds of the twenty first century.

They've had tons of people on that show.

So, yeah, be sure to subscribe to lady to lady to hear all their new episodes on Wednesday. And it's available on Stitcher Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts and definitely stick around to listen to their trailer at the end of this show. And then if you want to follow them on Twitter there at Lady to lady comedy or Instagram at Lady to Lady Comedy, Welcome Lady.

The lady with the exactly right family. Once we're finally able to have a party in the future, they're going to be a great addition to those parties.

This party is going to be, I say twenty follow.

Twenty, twenty two at this party is going to have everything and then we have a new stay sexy beanie and this really cute like winter woven sweater in the. Exactly. Nope. In the state in that. Where am I in the my favorite murder store at my favorite murder Dotcom.

So check out all the cute new and fun, not just cute, interesting new merch we have there.

That's right. It's the merch just keeps coming. It's always check in on that store.

I can't do it. You should take coloring your hair at home to the next level with Madison. OK, because I deserve gorgeous professional hair color delivered right to my door, starting at just twenty two bucks, outdated at home, hair color, or the time and expense of a traditional salon.

Many Madison Reed clients comment on how their new hair color has improved their actual incredible lives. Mm hmm. Women love the results. They get gorgeous, shiny, multidimensional and healthy looking hair. This is game changing. Omonia free color you can do at home and look as if you just came from the salon. Madison reads, Color is crafted by master Italian colors who blend nuances of light, dark, cool and warm tones to create over Fifty Five shades.

And like Karen, I know what you're thinking. OK, but how do I match my Karen color? Well, don't worry. Madison Reed gives you the tools that you care and need so you can color with Karen confidence. That's what I am looking for. Karen, level confidence here. And we have to really say, and this is the truth, the idea that Madison Reed gets your color so accurate, it's such good hair color, it's it makes your hair healthy.

And then they're just delivered, delivering it to you on a sweet schedule. So the second you see those routes, you're like, boom, here's my delivery.

Like, deliver this to me. And I have two colors that I go between on and I'm like, it's too dark. And then I go lighter and I'm like, I don't like myself like this. And it's both of them are the perfect thing that I want when I constantly change my mind. It's it's really nice. Yeah, that's great. So find your perfect shade at Madison Dasari and our listeners get ten percent off plus free shipping on their first color kit with code murder.

Ten, that's murder ten at Madison, Destry Dotcom.

Goodbye. So the story I'm going to do this week is the revenge of Miriam Rodriguez. OK, so basically what I'm about to tell you is a very boiled down version of this article that was published in December in The New York Times. And it was entitled She Stalked Her Daughter's Killers Across Mexico one by one.

I saw that. I saw the headline. I didn't read it. I text it to myself and then forgot, OK, so I did.

It was written by an investigative journalist named Azam Ahmed. You should absolutely read that original article. It's an unbelievable story. And he is an incredibly talented investigative reporter. His writing has twice been submitted for the Pulitzer Prize. It is an amazing read. And obviously there's tons more details in this article. I'm giving you the Cliff Notes version. Great.

I'd like to thank listener L l their Twitter handle is at its Elyon, so they sent me the article the day it was published with the simple message, have you seen this?

So yeah. So it was the simplicity of the of the, of the question made me dive right in.

Also got information from The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal, Mexico News Daily and a socialist worker again. OK, so this starts in 2014, 54 year old Miriam Rodriguez and I that's the thing I wanted to say is, of course, pre apologies for me taking French in high school and not Spanish. So there's definitely going to be mispronunciations or just the very slight pronunciations. My apologies. I'm going to do my best. I looked up a lot of these pronunciations, but it's I every time you go like I know how the lady said it in the on the YouTube pronunciation video.

Yeah. But I don't have the guts to do what she did, so yeah, I just feel stupid, OK.

Fifty four year old Miriam Rodriguez lives with her family in a small orange house in San Fernando, which that's the city in Tamaulipas, which is the state in Mexico. It's her and her husband and just three children, Luis Azalea and Karen. So Miriam works really hard to support her family. She runs a cowboy apparel shop called Rodeo Boots in Town. And when she's not at that shop, she works as a nanny for a family just over the border in Texas, many just to give you the sense of what's going on in this area of Mexico.

Lots of bars and restaurants have closed because of the constant shootouts and gang violence in that area. So the fact that they have this rodeo boots is really something. And it must have been a pretty successful store because it was very difficult for businesses to stay in business with the kind of violence happening there. So this is the very oversimplified explanation of this situation in this area of northern Mexico, very obviously very oversimplified. Definitely read Asama Med's article about this because he is actually an embedded reporter, so he really knows it and explains it correctly.

I'm just trying to give you the general sense because we all hear about like Mexican drug cartels and gang violence in that way. But it's obviously it's incredibly it's layered, it's old, it's highly political. And I have no true sense of it, just in the simplified sense of what's in this article. OK, so the city of San Fernando sits in the northern part of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. That state shares its border with the southernmost point of Texas.

And there's two main highways that lead to the Mexico Texas border that run through San Fernando. So San Fernando is basically two hours away from the Mexico Texas border. And because drug cartels smuggle drugs into the U.S. using this highway, the location of the city of San Fernando has made it the subject of cartel violence for decades.

So this is actually a lot like murder in the bayou, that that series that I told you about, where basically it was a tiny city, but because it was on this highway in between New Orleans and like Texas or whatever, that was just like thoroughfare kind of for drugs.

And so same thing happening in San Fernando. In the 1990s, some local politicians decided to enlist the cartel's help in securing and maintaining their power. But that cartel slowly made their way into the political arena by demanding quotas in exchange for their help. So they got public works contracts. They got they operated water works. They had transit and municipal police contracts. So vetted. Yeah. So then in 2010, tensions between different factions within the Gulf Cartel over drug territories being.

And to heat up and so this there was a split and the Zetas, who were a group within that group, basically split off and turned on their bosses. And so then the Mexican government tries to declare its own war on drugs and organized crime.

But by this time, the connections between government and the cartels is too strong and they can't just snuff out the cartels because they're already in power. And so, according to The Wall Street Journal, from 2010 to about twenty eighteen, roughly two hundred fifty thousand people have been murdered and about thirty seven thousand are reported as disappeared that are victims of this war on crime that the government tried to wage on the cartels. So former presidential candidate Josephine Vazquez Mota is quoted in The Guardian as saying, there are two governments here in Tamaulipas.

There's a government from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and then there's another one from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 a.m.. Wow. The first was elected and the second imposes itself through kidnappings, extortion, disappearances, bullets and death. So that's just the general sense in the most oversimplified way of who of what's at play. So Miriam, son Luis has moved to the capital city, which is Ciudad Victoria, to open up his own store. And her older daughter, Azealia, still lives in San Fernando, but she lives at her own house.

And then her younger daughter, 20 year old Karen, lives at home with Mariam and her husband. So when Karen isn't going to school, she helps her mom by working at their family's store. OK, so on January 23, 2014, Karen's driving the family truck on her way home from working at the boot shop and she pulls up to an intersection waiting to merge into traffic. But before she can, two trucks pull up on either side of her and a group of armed men get out of the trucks.

They force their way into Karen's truck. One man gets behind the wheel and they drive off with Karen as their hostage. My God. So they take Karen back to the family house, but no one else is home there. Miriam is up in Texas nannying. And so they they tie Karen up, they gather and they throw her on the living room floor. And then to everyone's surprise, there's a knock on the door. It's Karen's uncle's mechanic who came by to fix the family truck.

Fuck. So the the armed gang is caught off guard, so they now kidnap the mechanic as well. But then eventually they end up letting him go.

Do you know sorry. Are you might talk about this. Are they targeted because they're a like a family that owns a business or is it just a random kidnapping?

It doesn't say in this article or in the other news stories that I read, but it would make sense that because they own this business that clearly they have money to be tapped, I would assume. But that sounds like editorial. Yeah. So when Miriam comes home, she finds Karen isn't there, then the mechanic comes, tells her what happened. Miriam gets all the details from the mechanic and soon after the ransom calls begin. So an anonymous voice on the other end of the phone threatens to harm Karen and come after the rest of the family if the Rodrigues's don't pay a ransom.

So the family assumes that this is most likely the work of the Zetas and they take it very, very seriously. And in fact, Miriam, her husband, go to take out a loan at the local bank to pay the ransom. These kidnappings are so common, there's a bank dedicated to offering lines of credit for paying ransom believe.

And then you wonder if they're in on it, too, because they're getting interest on ransom, if I can.

I mean, it's it's not it's not good when you have a bank that's dedicated to ransom. That's how common kidnapping and this kind of stuff is. It's horrifying. Yeah. So following the captors instructions, Karen's father drops the money at a spot near a health clinic. Then he's told to go to a local cemetery where he waits for care to be released. She never comes. So this is just the first of several ransom payments the Rodriguez family is forced to make.

And each time they come up with the money, they leave it at the drop off location. And yet Karen never appears so after months of this back and forth with false promises and mounting ransom fees. Myriam's that's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Miriam starts to get angry. She finally finds a way to contact the Zetas directly and asks for a meeting.

This is a this is a middle aged woman who's like, I'm going to call the cartel myself. Yeah, surprisingly, they agree. So she goes to a restaurant in town called El Junior is this is my way to pronounce it, where she meets a member of the Zetas. He doesn't give his name. He's described as a slender young man with a clean shaven face wearing a walkie talkie on his hip. Miriam begs him to let Karen come home, but he informs her the Zetas have nothing to do with this kidnapping.

Instead, he offers to help Mariam find Karen himself for a fee of two thousand dollars. So, Mary, I'm skeptical, but she has no other choice. So she agrees to pay him this fee. And as the meeting ends, she hears a voice on the walkie talkie calling the man by his first name, which is Sarma. So in the days after their meeting him, Miriam calls Somma to check in and see how his hunt is going.

But after a week, he stops answering her calls entirely. Meanwhile, she's still receiving calls from the people claiming to be the abductors, asking for more ransom money, usually to the tune of about five hundred dollars. And the family pays every fee goes to every drop site. Karen has never returned. Their hope is starting to wane. And one morning, a few weeks after their last ransom payment is made with no results, Miriam comes downstairs and announces to Azalea that she believes Karen is never coming back.

She can feel it in her heart. She knows her daughter is dead, so she now vows to hunt down every last person who's involved with her daughter, Karen's disappearance.

OK, so now Miriam, armed with just this man's first name and the memory of his face, scours her daughter's social media trying to track down Samah. So don't know if that's the correct way to pronounce Sam, but I'm just saying it that way. She comes up empty handed. So she goes to the mechanic that that got kidnapped along with Karen that day. She describes Sam as a parents to him and he confirms, yes, he was there that day that Karen was kidnapped.

He was one of those men. So Miriam now knows that at least one of the people that she's looking for. So she continues searching Facebook. And then one morning when she's lying on the couch, she she happens to run across a photo of Salma. And in the picture, he's standing beside a young woman who's wearing a uniform for an ice cream shop. So she digs around and until she can find the name of this ice cream shop, she finds out that it's located in Ciudad Victoria.

And that's where her son lives, which is two hours south of San Fernando. She spends weeks staking out this ice cream shop. Holy shit. She learns the young woman's working hours. And she basically hopes that one of these days Sam is going to show up to see her and he finally does. She knows. She notices. Salma arrived to pick up the woman after her shift and she discreetly follows both of them home and writes down their address.

Oh, my God. Miriam doesn't want to go to the police yet until she's collected enough information so that they can arrest him. So she knows this is all just kind of, you know, so basically she realizes she she's going to have to collect enough information to get the police to listen to her and do something. Yeah. So what she does is cuts her hair, dyes it bright red. She grabs her like an old uniform for one. She used to work at her job at the health ministry.

She puts it on, she makes a fake government ID for herself, and she starts going door to door in Sam's neighborhood pretending that she's conducting a poll. So shit, she fucking ends up getting his last name and all the information she can about him and what he does and everything from his neighbors. So she was brilliant.

It's so fucking genius.

And it's so like, you know, this is you've woken up the fucking like. The Tigris and you have taken her child and she's fucking coming for you. So she basically goes to the authorities. No one will help her. She asks local police. They say no. She goes to the state police. They say no. Finally, she goes to the federal police until one officer there who asked to remain anonymous in this story for fear of retaliation.

And that's really this is really a thing like I'm nervous to say the names of these sub gangs in these cartels, because this is serious shit and these people are not this is not this is no joke.

Totally, obviously. Right. The there are people in Mexico that live underneath this fucking threat of violence and this threat of just assassination all day, every day and kidnapping and violence. So finally, finally, have one federal officer agrees to help her. She gives him the file of information that she's gathered on Salmo. The officer says he, quote, He's never seen anything like it. The details in the information gathered by this woman working all alone were incredible.

So with this officer's help, they're able to issue an arrest warrant. But Salma must have gotten word that someone was asking about him because then that's when they realize he's skipped town. But Miriam's not discouraged. She decides that she can use the information that she has on Samah to try to track down the remaining members of his crew using the same techniques she build. She builds a portfolio of names and photographs from social media and creates her, quote, hit list.

So weeks later, it's September 15th, 2014, and that's Mexico's Independence Day. And Miriam's son, Luis, is getting ready to close up his shop in Ciudad Victoria. There's just one last customer in the shop, and when Luis takes a closer look at him, he realizes it's Samah. So he calls his mom, letting her know that he has spotted him and that then he's stealthily trails Samah as he leaves the store. So Mirriam alerts the police and they corner Samah in the Central Plaza.

When they go to arrest him, he tries to fake a heart condition, but they make the arrest anyway. And once he's questioned, he starts giving up names. And one of the names he gives up is that of someone named Kristian Gonzalez, who's just 18 years old now, which is the other part of this. It's such a bad situation that there's a lot of people who don't have a choice. It's that it's that kind of thing where it's so extreme.

Getting into the cartel sometimes isn't a choice. Right. And and sometimes it's there's kind of nothing else not to say it's justified or anything, but or you grew up in it, too, like this might his entire family completely.

And yeah. Who knows.

But people are trying to survive. They're trying to get by in this extremely, extremely violent and bad situation. So he so basically they arrest Cristian Gonzalez. He's taken to the station to be interrogated. Myriam's gone down to the station so she can be there. She took her friend Idalia with her. They're sitting outside the interrogation room. She hears the boy ask for his mother and for some food. So she struck me. I'm struck by the realization that this is just a kid.

So she slips into the interrogation room.

Oh, dear. She is. This woman is unbelievable. She slips into the interrogation room, gives Christian basically her lunch, which was some fried chicken, and she buys him a Coke and she tells her friend Idalia that, quote, He's still a child no matter what he did. And I am still a mother. Oh, my God. So Miriam wins Christian over and he ends up spilling all the information that he has to the police. He agrees to take them to the ranch where the victims were killed and where the bodies are still buried.

So this ranch sits at the end of a dirt road. It's not far from a barbecue spot where Miriam and her daughter Azealia ate two days after Karen's kidnapping. Well, the ranch has since been abandoned as Mexican Marines discovered this cartel hiding spot and killed six of the gang members there in a shootout. But there's still an old tractor that marks the spot where multiple victims bodies have been buried. Oh, my God. So the investigators begin to dig there.

And Miriam goes, of course, because she's basically part of the police department now.

So as the investigators are digging, Miriam looks around the property for signs of Karen. She finds bone shards, she finds a noose hanging from a tree, and finally she finds a stack of victim's personal belongings. And among those items, she spots a seat cushion from the family truck. And then. Karen Scarf. Her worst fears are now confirmed, so when the forensics team tries to tell Miriam that there's no sign of Karen's remains buried with the victims by the tractor, Miriam refuses to accept that answer.

She presses them to re-examine their findings for a full year until they finally identify a piece of Karen's femur among those remains. And Karen is now officially confirmed as one of the dead Jesus. So on her way home from from being at that ranch, that abandoned ranch, Miriam spots someone she knows eating alone at the barbecue restaurant, a woman named Elvia Bettencourt.

Miriam knew Elvia from when she was a little kid and she knew that she had a very rough childhood. She went through some terrible stuff. And because of that, Miriam used to give her Karen's old clothes. So Miriam stops and asks Elvia if she's heard anything about Karen. Elvia says she hasn't. So San Fernando is not a big town. Almost everyone's heard about Karen's kidnapping and disappearance. It suddenly dawns on Miriam LVM might be keeping watch over the ranch for for the cartel.

So back at home, Marianne goes back to the social media research and she finds Elvia is currently dating one one of the gang members who's on Miriam's list as one of Karen's captors. He's in jail. This man is in jail for a different crime. So Miriam starts tailing Elvia on her jail visits. And at the same time, the police look into Ulvaeus phone records and find that some of the ransom calls to the Rodriguez's home had come from Ulvaeus house while they secure an arrest warrant and they arrest her on the way home from visiting her boyfriend in jail.

So basically, for the next three years, from twenty fourteen to twenty seventeen, Miriam continues her hunt for the names on her list. Some of them are already dead or in jail for other crimes, but anyone still free is considered fair game and even the ones who've moved on from their life of crime. So there was one man who had been a florist before joining the cartel, and since he left the gang, he'd gone back to selling flowers by the border and by the border of Texas.

Miriam manages to befriend some of this man's relatives and they basically tip her off to where and when he sells his flowers on this bridge leading into Texas. So when she gets there, she spots him. But now he's selling sunglasses, which she gets close. He recognizes her, he takes off running.

And is this middle aged woman chases this man down and tackles him to the ground. She pulls a pistol out of her purse and says, if you move, I'll shoot you. And she holds him there for almost an hour until the police finally come and arrest him. This is a movie it completely as a movie. Another one of these people that she tracks down is a man named Enrique Flores, who is now a born again Christian who Miriam tracked down to a small the small town of Aldama.

There she befriends his grandmother, points her in the direction of Enrique, his church. Miriam finds him there one Sunday morning and corners him when the members of the congregation beg Mariam to show him some compassion. She fires back. Where was his compassion when they killed my daughter?

So now Miriam starting to gain a huge reputation in the area, of course, because as as much as they all want cartel violence to end, no one citizen has ever been brave enough to stand up to them or especially take them on. Not until Miriam Rodriguez.

So soon, other families whose loved ones have been kidnapped and haven't received any help from the authorities start to band together behind her. A group of six hundred families calling themselves the San Fernando Collective for the Disappeared begin working together to search for missing loved ones. Now, while most respected Miriam's tenacity, many also fear for her life, saying that she's playing with fire, going up against the cartels. But to that, Miriam says, I don't care if they kill me.

I died the day they killed my daughter.

Oh, I want to end this. And I'm going to take out the people who hurt my daughter and they can do whatever they want to me. So she she is not fucking around.

OK, so around midnight on March 22nd, twenty, seventeen, twenty nine inmates tunnel out and escape from the prison in Ciudad Victoria. Miriam finds out that one of the killers that she put behind bars for murdering Karen has escaped the ship. So reacting quickly, the authorities managed to recapture 10 of these inmates by nine a.m. the next morning. But according to the state, the killer Miriam fears the most has been recaptured, still concerned for her and her family's safety.

Miriam asked the police for special protection. They promised to send extra patrol cars to the Rodriguez's home and business. Luis and Azealia Merriam's husband and daughter are still worried. But despite the rising dangers around here, Miriam presses on with her search for her daughter's killers. So by April of twenty seventeen, this has been three years. Miriam tracks down yet another gang member involved in Karens kidnapping. This time, it's a woman who has since left San Fernando for Ciudad Victoria, where she's taking a nannying job for a family.

Miriam takes out the woman's home from from her car. Four days, she waiting for the woman to show so she can make her move. At one point, Miriam wears down her car battery listening to the radio, and she has to call her son Luis to kind of like quietly and secretly come and give her car a job while she's sitting out there. When the woman finally does emerge, Miriam alerts the police. They descend on the house and they arrest the woman.

And Miriam is running up toward them as they're arresting her and she trips and fractures her foot. Oh, no, she's just fucking going for it. She's so. It's a month later, it's May 10th, twenty seventeen, and that's Mexico's Mother's Day, so Miriam is coming home at about ten, twenty one p.m. her foot still in the cast. So she's using crutches. So she parks on the street and she's hobbling out of her car and slowly making her way up to her house.

But before she can get to her door, a white Nissan truck pulls up behind her and they fire 13 rounds at Miriam. Why her husband inside the house hears this and runs out only to find Miriam laying face down in the street, her hand tucked inside her purse, reaching for her gun. An ambulance arrives quickly, but Miriam dies on the way to the hospital.

This is not how I expected this to fucking holy shit.

Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, this is a woman who took on the drug cartel. That's that's serious. Yeah. So having made such a name for herself, Miriam's death really makes an impact. Over the course of the next few months, police track down and arrest two of the hitmen responsible for murdering her. The third killer puts up a fight.

He is ultimately gunned down by the police, though the hitmen are all brought to justice. The question of who exactly put out the hit on Marium remains a mystery. And it's one that plagues her son Luis for months. But he knows that if he pushes too hard to find them, death will also come for him. So he takes a slightly more patient and low key approach to seeking justice. And justice does come one last time for Miriam and Karen.

One month after Myriam's murdered in June of twenty seventeen, the police in the state of Veracruz arrest another suspect in Karen's murder. This time, it's a young woman who'd run off to Veracruz with her young son to work as a taxi driver. Police were able to find her by using the information Miriam had gathered before her own murder, technically making this arrest, her final capture. So Miriam son Luis vows to pick up where his mom left off, helping other families to find their missing loved ones.

He's careful not to make the same mistake that led to Myriam's death. Rather than trying to punish cartel members, he and the families he works with focus on getting their missing loved ones returned alive. And over time, the strength of that collective fades. Crime conditions in San Fernando remain largely the same, and the members of the collective splinter off into their own separate, smaller parties. But the people of San Fernando are deeply affected by Miriam's bravery and dedication, so much so that they honor her with a bronze plaque in the city's central plaza.

When all is said and done, Myriam Rodriguez is responsible for the arrests of 10 people who are involved in the kidnap and murder of her daughter, Karen. And that is the unbelievable story of Miriam Rodriguez, the grieving mother who single handedly took on the cartel to avenge her daughter's death. Wow.

Can you believe that kind of shit?

Not the job. Yeah. I'm going to do the happy face killer. Oh, wow. Yeah, which I think I didn't totally understand for a long time, because there's also the smiley face killer. Yeah. Which I was like. It doesn't seem like is maybe real. I don't really understand it. But then I kind of realized that there's these two stories. I'm into the happy face killer, which is an absolute fucking serial killer. True story.

Mm hmm.

I got info from an old L.A. Times article by Barry Siegel, a daily news article by Mario Babson, BBC ABC News Mental Floss article by Best Lovejoy, a Rolling Stone article by Laura Barcella, and then a podcast called Happy Face, which I will talk more about later January nineteen, 1990. In Oregon, a woman in her late 50s named Laverne Pasternak was ready to end. The abusive relationship she was in with had been in for 10 years with her live in boyfriend named John Sosnowski.

So Laverne, she had already had a history of reporting her boyfriend to the police on phony charges every time they fought. And actually, eight months earlier, in the spring of nineteen eighty nine, she had called the FBI and falsely accused him of robbing banks. So like kind of to get him in trouble and get him out of the house, maybe that's what she would do in January 1990. She's ready to get rid of him again.

So this time around, Laverne, who in the nineteen ninety nine made for TV movie The Happy Face Murders, was played by a very disheveled Ann-Margaret, if you can believe. Oh, I know. She's an avid reader of mysteries and true crime books, so she loves all that stuff. And she had read some details in the newspaper about the recent discovery of the body of a local woman who had been discovered on January 22nd. Nineteen ninety. She had been discovered by a student from Mount Hood Community College who had been bicycling along the old Columbia River Highway east of Portland.

And she had found this, the body of a woman lying on the side of an embankment. And the woman had been beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled. So the victims identified through sketches shown on the media as twenty three year old Tonya Bennett from Portland, Oregon, and Tonya was described as friendly and outgoing and someone who'd never met a stranger. And she had last been seen alive by her parents on January 20 first and the day before she was found.

And then she had been at a bar that night. So reading about this, Laverne devises a plan to pin the murder on her boyfriend, thus sending him out of her life into prison. So on February one, she got it right. Now, that's a no no good plan. No. So on February 5th, 1990, she anonymously calls the police department, claiming she had overheard a man in a bar bragging about committing the murder. And so she told them the name of her boyfriend and who was thirty nine year old John so Nevsky.

But they had misspelled his name in the report that was taken down. So the sheriff's office isn't able to follow up on the tip. And so Laverne waits a week and she's like, what the fuck calls them back? And this time they get the name correct. And so law enforcement begins investigating John as a potential suspect in the murder.

And they were able to find employees at a cafe who did recall a frequent customer identified as John, boasting that he had murdered a woman he met in a bar. So he was it seems like he might have been actually taking taking what's the word responsibility for this and bragging about it. And a waitress told police that, quote, he was laughing. He thought it was all a big joke.

So John, though, denies having anything to do with the murder. And Laverne kept changing her story. And this is like a grandma type, by the way.

It's it's like the law enforcement, they go over there and she, like, makes them coffee and she seems really helpful. And, you know, this is like little old lady type of person. So they're like it's not like she's some, you know, criminal that they shouldn't be trusting. Sorry.

She's old. She's like she's fifty fifty years old. She's in her late 80s. Sorry grandma type though.

I said she's just wearing us, she's wearing a sweater over her shoulder. Exactly. The was not it. She got it. They're not wearing tons of eyeliner. Black hair. Got it. She's in her late fifties. I think she's like fifty nine as well. So you know she's like a stereotype. And it's also warning in the Pacific Northwest. I feel like 50 late 50s is a different person treading very, very thin ice, very thin ice.

Me and everyone in the doves.

All right. Well, listen, if you're still listening, let me tell you if you're not serious, right.

That's why I explain that she's a grandma type is because I don't. OK, here we go.

Digging so and Laverne keeps changing her story as well. So they should see that something is fishy, but they don't. And she then goes on to make up the story that John forced her to take part in the rape and murder as well, like all these different stories. But long story short, despite no forensics or physical evidence, no details that hadn't been published being brought to light by lovern and several conflicting eyewitness accounts and continuing to alter her story and then finally recanting her confession and admitting that she was trying to frame her boyfriend.

Laverne and John are tried for the murder of Tonya Bennett.

Both of them. Yeah, so and so. I think Lorraine was like, oh, shit, this is not what I expected to happen. And Laverne is ultimately convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison for her alleged role in the crime. And, John, seeing that they that they were able to sentence this little old lady, he's like, well, I'm fucked.

Sorry. So he he cuts a deal and pleads no contest to felony murder and kidnapping, which lands him a life sentence. So during the trial, a piece of evidence comes to light. So while they're both locked up, so they couldn't have done this themselves, someone had been confessing to Tonya Bennett's murder. The first confession showed up inside a restaurant bathroom in Livingston, Montana, where someone had scrawled the message, quote, I killed Tonya Bennett January twenty first nineteen ninety in Portland, Oregon.

I beat her to death, raped her, and I loved it. Yes, I'm sick, but I enjoy myself to two people, took the blame and I'm free. Whoa. That is really fucking space. And it's like if you walked into the bathroom, you would just be like, OK, get me some police tape. Like, this is just I think it's not like I killed someone.

So it's like, here's fucking detail. So I think that's why we have then soon another message was discovered, an arrest up closer to actual where the crime that happened in Umatilla, Oregon, that said, quote, I killed Tonya Bennett in Portland. Two people got the blame so I can kill again.

So both messages were signed with a really distinctive happy face sketch, and the author is untraceable. So it's basically like the happy face where you put a circle around it, you know, detectives, which is like the creepiest thing to sign with a sign, a fucking confession to murder.

That's all murderers are creepy. I mean, there's creepy detectives in the process. So you'd be like you'd think you'd see this and be like, oh, the people we have locked up are innocent. Right. But the text of the prosecutor in Portland make a really good point that maybe one of an unknown friend of John and Laverne had wrote the graffiti in an effort to cast doubt in their guilt. You know what I mean? Like, there's no way which I think reasonable.

Yeah.

First I was like, oh, but the killer confessed.

And it's like, well, not really. Yeah.

So the judge bars the message from the trial. It's saying it's hearsay. There's no evidentiary value and therefore cannot be introduced in John. On the first trial, which at first I was like, what? And then there's it's total hearsay. It's literal.

Writing on the bathroom wall is literally about as hearsay ish as I think you can be. Exactly. So it's Laverne had never falsely confessed, though, or perhaps if law enforcement had questioned her confession a little more and looked a little deeper into it, perhaps the serial killer who is to become known as the happy face killer would have been caught before at least seven more women became victims. Well, because, unfortunately, the real killer was still out there.

So let's talk about the happy face killer. His name was Keith Hunter Jesperson, and he was born on April six, 1955, in Chilliwack, British Columbia. I mean, it's all the same stuff we've always heard. It's absolutely horrifying. Of course, his father was an abusive piece of shit, domineering, violent, alcoholic, and specifically singled out Keith for abusive treatment over his siblings. So it was all directed at Keith. The family moved to Sellar, Washington, when they were young, while Jespersen had trouble fitting in and making friends because he ended up being as an adult, six foot six inches tall.

So even as a little kid, he was huge and in fact, his brothers nicknamed him or which just like so shitty.

So he had a hard time making friends and fitting in. And that nickname stuck with him. He was shy, had no friends played by himself. He would often get into trouble for behaving badly, sometimes violently, and we'd be severely punished by his father, including beatings with a belt, sometimes in front of other people to humiliate him. And in one case, it says he received an electric shock from his father as a kid. Oh, Jesus.

I know.

And beginning as young as five years old, he would capture and torture animals, which seem like kind of a normal thing in the family, like they would hunt animals and skinned them.

So it wasn't like he was kind of hunting and capturing maybe. But torture is just that's where it goes off the rails. So I think he got comfortable with it. And so torture was his next step.

Just just to just as a side note, though, as as empathetic as we want to feel about this, the beginning of the Tom Petty biography is all about how his dad used to beat the living shit out of him when he was five years old.

So, again, and most of the people listening to this know this, but has nothing to do. Right? So you become. That's right. It's not an excuse I'm giving up.

I, I feel like we have to give a little background, but I don't want to dwell on it and say they made him a serial killer because that's not that's not what happens to most people who have these horrific childhoods completely. No, Senator, there's no excuse for it at all. Yeah, he would set fires to houses and wooded areas. He said later, he said he often thought about what it would be like to do the same kinds of things to humans.

And he even tried to, as a child, attempted to kill two other children who had crossed him as a little kid like hell went under the water and like, yeah, so we've got some flags going up, some bright red flags. So despite all of these issues, he graduates high school. He gets a job as a truck driver. He gets married, has three kids and seemingly lives a normal life. But a 1992 truck driver seems to be in a lot of these stories.

No offence to truck donors and truck driver.

We're not we don't need 50 year old women and truck drivers mad because what else is there really in the world?

But I swear, there's just a well, it's easy access to to women and you and you have no ties to the places you are, which I think in part in his mind made it. He realized that, you know, yeah, it's an easier way. I feel like probably serial killers become truck drivers more than truck drivers become serial killers.

Yes, I would. One hundred percent agree with that, that I think it's a one way street coming from just from the regular part of my state's uncomfortable serial killer. You're not like breaker breaker. I just got this idea right.

It's not like I'm a family man who drives a truck breaker breaker. It's like I'm a serial killer.

But this reminds me of the young woman that I met when I was in Hawaii who is a truck driver who listens to us, who was about the least serial killer person I've ever met. Was she in her 50s? Do we have a double down married before?

She was not, but she was on her honeymoon. So maybe that was she was hiding behind that. The the glow of love.

Can we get truck drivers who listen to a podcast to tell us the creepiest stories from the road? Because I bet it gets so creepy late at night.

Your feelings between you just tell us if you've ever driven in the night by a child in a wet nightgown on the side of the road with their arm sticking straight out or something.

And or like if you picked up someone creepy hitchhiking that you shouldn't like, we need those stories. Yes. So it was what they call that is a reverse large.

Marge, if you if someone got into your truck. That's right. You're the innocent bystander because you're allowed to be you're allowed to pick up hitchhikers if you're a truck driver. I feel like that's the only time it's appropriate that we need to hear those stories, please.

All right. But also, stop hitchhiking. What's why don't hitchhike, please.

OK, so seemingly lives a normal life. In 1990, after 15 years of marriage, Jespersen and his wife get a divorce and that same year he begins to kill. So he was thirty five years old. He's superimposing six six weighs almost three hundred pounds or like now 240.

That's not almost three hundred pounds.

Numerically, she went around to Florida. Is the is the little old lady of ladies in their 50s. Come on. That's right. So heart. OK, so he began working as an interstate truck driver at this point after relocating to Cheney Washington. And he soon realizes that his job affords him the opportunity to kill without being suspected.

Uh, so his first known victim is the woman from the beginning of the story, Tonya Bennett. According to his later account, he first met her in a bar near Portland, Oregon. He invited her over to his house where he lived with his girlfriend, who is also a truck driver.

And so she was out of town and allegedly, allegedly, according to him, they had consensual sex. But it's like, do you believe anything you say? No, no. And then he says that an argument started that ends with him beating and then strangling her to death in order to establish an alibi. He goes he then goes back out for drinks to make sure everyone fucking sees him, you know, and then he goes back to dispose of Tonya Bennett's body and her belongings and clean up the scene.

And he's back on the road the next day. And Tonya's body was found a few days later. At the time, there's no suspects and no leads at all in Laverne's confession. So when Jespersen reads in the paper about Laverne's confession and the attention it's getting them, this fucking megalomaniac gets jealous. And he doesn't he doesn't feel guilty that she people are going to prison for his actions. He wants the credit for it. And that's why he scrawls those messages in the bathroom at a rest stop.

Yeah, guilt guilt isn't going to be coming into play in this story at all for a serial killer. That's right. And when that doesn't give him any attention, he does it in the second one closer to home. So he doubles down on confessing because he wants attention. Yeah. So in the years following the couple's conviction, more women disappear in the area and Jespersen begins writing letters to media and police departments confessing to his murders. He's one of those Zodiac Killer guys, and he signs each letter with that same smiley face.

And so the journalist working on the story for The Oregonian, Phil Stanford, Dub's Jesperson, The Happy Face Killer. So a six page letter was sent to The Oregonian that describes the murders of five women and the locations of their bodies, part of the letter read, quote, In a lot of opinions, I should be killed and I feel I deserve it. My responsibility is mine and God will be my judge when I die. I'm telling you this because I will be responsible for these crimes and no one else.

It all started out when I wondered what it would be like to kill someone, and I found out what a nightmare it's been so eager to confirm the murders that the killer had anonymously confessed to. In those letters, Phil Stanford, the journalist, begins getting a hold of law enforcement in the jurisdictions that the killer had claimed to have murdered and check if they had any that fit those descriptions. And he finds that there indeed had been murders that fit the anonymous writers descriptions with details only the killer would know.

So they weren't in the papers, thus confirming that the anonymous happy face killer was actually indeed a serial killer.

So we got this fuckin journalist on his tail. Can you imagine, two, if you're putting it together as that, Phil Stanford, the great journalist for The Oregonian, going like, yeah, here's my theory. Oh, my God, my theory is real life, right? Or like he's like, satisfying. I can't print this. Let me just check a couple of things and then. Oh, fuck. You know.

Yeah, yeah. Wait, just really quick.

Remember the murder in Oregon podcast? Don't talk about it because it means OK, is it the same, is it that same journalist. And there's more than one reporter asked you.

Oh you're fucking right, I'm shit. And we're going to get to more of that. So he was did murder in Oregon, which were all guys.

He's legendary. Legendary. Good. And when we talk later about the podcast Happy Face, which is the first season, is all about this case, which I'll tell you more about. It's really good. And we'll talk about murder in Oregon as well. But it's really good. And I definitely suggest listening to it.

I will say there's a lot of horrible violent details that I'm not including in this story because it's just it's unnecessary in my story, but it is necessary. And there's so if you want more details, listen to that deep dive. If you want the violent deep dive. Right. Right. So, yeah, I feel Stanford confirms these other murders and he knows he's dealing with a serial killer. So Jespersen had committed his second murder a year and a half after killing Bennett on August 30th.

Nineteen ninety two, the body of a woman he had raped and strangled was found near Blythe, California, set central California.

I think that's the desert. I think that's out in the desert. OK, kind of on the way to Vegas. No man's land, I feel like.

Right. And she was then and still remains a Jane Doe, though. I know the Jespersen later says he remembers her name is being Claudia. A month later, the body of 32 year old Cynthia Lindros was discovered near Turlock, California, along Highway ninety nine.

And his fourth victim was twenty six year old Lori Ann Pentland of Salem, Oregon. Her body was found in November nineteen ninety two, having been strangled.

Then more than six months later, in July 1993, his fifth victim was found in Santa Nela, California. She, too, remains a Jane Doe. And because of her, quote, street person status, the coroner originally considered her death a drug overdose. And her death wasn't considered a murder until Jespersen later took responsibility for her murder as well. I know. It's just sad, sad stories.

More than a year later, in September 1994, another Jane Doe was found in Crestview, Florida. The remains consisted of mostly bones of a woman that investigators believe had been approximately 40 years old at the time of her death. And over twenty five years later, both Jane Doe still haven't been identified. Jeff Jespersen claims this one was named Suzanne. So let's get let's get murder squad on those cases for real also. Well, I wonder, too, if you if this was part of the truck driver thing of like he was picking up people or he was intentionally choosing people that wouldn't immediately be sought after or missed.

That's exactly what happened.

In January 1995, Jespersen had given a ride from Spokane, Washington, to a 21 year old named Angela Surprize of Oklahoma City. And approximately a week into the trip, Jespersen raped and strangled her and her body was not found for several months because she hadn't been reported missing because she was, you know, kind of a drifter and she is thought to be his seventh victim. So, yeah.

So the only reason he was finally caught was because his final victim was someone who could be tied to him.

And he even admitted that that was a mistake he made. He knew that because he had no connection to these other women that he could kill as much as he wanted. But he, like, lost his temper. So he says. And so so he killed this next victim. On March 11th, 1995, the body of 41 year old Julianna Winningham was found along a Washington state road, having been strangled when investigators looked into her life of several people were able to give the name of Julie's longtime boyfriend, Keith Hunter Jesperson, now 40 and still a long haul trucker.

And he was then looked into by law enforcement. Washington Sheriff's Department Detective Rick Buckner questioned the trucking company that Jespersen worked for for a long time, and they provided him with Jespersen travel itinerary, which connected the time and location to where Julie's body had been found. Wow.

And then I looked in our Gmail account and there was a email from a murderer, you know, named Shayna, and she wrote, The trucking company that sent this piece of shit out on his jobs was the same company my dad worked for as a dispatcher, as in the person who sends the truckers out on their merry little murderous ways. So not only did my dad unwittingly send this man to the places where he committed these crimes, he took my mom to the fucking company barbecue, where she sat across a picnic table from this creepy mother fucker.

Seriously, what the hell, dad? Jake loved my father to pieces. He's a great man. Needless to say, my mom definitely got a weird vibe from this dude and kept the convo short so her dad might have been one of the people that gave this information to law enforcement that put him in prison. Yeah. So Jespersen was questioned but not arrested due to lack of evidence immediately. And he wouldn't talk. And so wasn't until a week and two failed suicide attempts later on March 30th, nineteen ninety five that he finally turned himself in.

And the reason he did that was because he hoped it would get him leniency. So like everything for himself, not for closure for the families. So they don't think that way. No. And while in custody, Jespersen starts spilling the beans. He reveals details of his murders. He makes claims of many others, most most of which he recanted.

But he. Also, a few days before his arrest, law enforcement had gotten a hold of a letter he had written to his brother in which he had confessed to having killed eight people total over the course of five years, and they think that this is the real number of people he killed. And so law enforcement is able to connect him to those cases around the country. And it turns out back in 1990, he had been exonerated of charges stemming from a rape he had committed in Mount Shasta, California.

So it seems like there was also probably a lot of attacks as well. A woman had come forward to report that a man had raped her and attempted to break her neck. And then when he hadn't been able to and because she had her baby with her and he allegedly didn't want to kill the baby as well, he let them both go. And since he had given this woman so much information about himself, he was easily identified as Jespersen and had been arrested and interrogated.

And a charge was filed against him for sexual assault. But then he was released and they were like, well, just make sure you appear in court about this charge. And of course, he doesn't appear he takes off. And so a felony warrant is issued and he is eventually caught in Iowa, but, quote, the cost of extradition wasn't worth it. Yeah. So he's not exonerated and all charges are dropped because of this. So if anyone questions why women don't fucking report their rapes and pursue charges, here's a perfect example of why it's too expensive to exonerate him back to California.

So the charges are dropped.

That's insane. It's insane.

And it also is, again, a reflection of acting as if that like a sexual assault charge is not that big of a race, like it's not on par with murder in some some people's minds. It doesn't make sense when clearly a person who is just amoral enough to be sexually assaulting women or I like absolutely has the capacity to do much worse and much more.

Right. Or it's like a one off thing or I feel like men, these fucking macho men sometimes are. It's like, oh, this is a situation she shouldn't have gotten herself into. And it's a one off thing when really it's like if someone is able to do those things, they will they will never stop. And if you teach them a lesson that they can get away with it, why would they be right?

And it yeah, it's insane. The whole thing has to be approached so differently because it's it's clearly that's not the first time he's done that. Right. It's not the first any person that would do something like that and be successful in doing it clearly has been practicing for a while and should be taken off the street. Absolutely. It's the same as the Ripper documentary where it's like women did come forward and say this happened and they were sent away and it could have been stunned.

They were shamed, they were publicly humiliated, and they were like all those things.

And then he went. They were murder. They were laughed at.

There was the girl that got attacked that lived through it and knew what he looked like. And they basically told her, you don't know what you're talking about. I mean, that kind of shit is like, yeah, yeah.

So in November 1995, Jespersen pleaded no contest to Bennett's murder and had Previte, but had provided enough convincing evidence of his guilt during his confession. Like, for example, he had led law enforcement straight to the long lost purse that had belonged to her. He had checked it in the wilderness and so they were able to find it exactly where he told them it would be. And so so Laverne and John Self Norske were released finally, which is the release from prison for Bennett's murder.

And it does seem like the prosecuting attorney and law enforcement did work hard to get them out of prison because it wasn't a given. It wasn't like they were like, well, maybe they were part of the murders. Maybe they had something to do with it as well. They actually had to work really hard to get them exonerated. Right. Because once you're retired, it's called that's how it is. They're not going to go back on that. No, you can't you can't overturn a jury conviction very easily, even if someone else goes to prison for the murder.

You know, so that happens, thankfully. And they had been in prison for four years at that point. Well, Laverne dies of heart failure in March of 2003 at age seventy. So Jespersen is serving three consecutive life sentences at the Oregon State Penitentiary and in Salem in September 2009. He's indicted for murder in Riverside County, California, and is extradited to California to face the charges of the murder of the Jane Doe that he committed in life. So goodbye.

Fuck off. Let's really quickly talk about Jespersen daughter. So his daughter, Melissa Moore, was 15 in 1995 when her dad got arrested and it all came flooding out who he was.

She and I were the exact same age, too. So can you imagine being 15, which is fucking hard enough without having to find out your dad is a serial killer?

Horrible. They got so horrible. Horrible. She wrote a memoir in 2008 called Shattered Silence and says she originally felt like a ton of guilt and responsibility about what her father had done. And of course, when people at her high school found out she was ostracized. So she had to change high schools a couple of times. Yeah. And she learned not to tell anyone about who her father was because she was scared that they would think that she was like her dad so she wouldn't even tell boyfriends about it as she got older.

And she says she was just as perplexed as everyone else that he turned out to be this monster. It sounds so similar to the BTK that BTK is daughter, right? Well, no, they were living double life. Yeah. And he was had been a good father, aside from a couple incidents of extreme animal cruelty, which I will not get into, but they get into in the podcast's fucking horrific.

And also he would inappropriately and explicitly talk about his sex life with his children a lot. So she's on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2009 to promote her book. And she says that after that, she started receiving correspondence from a ton of people who had family members who were also killers and kind of felt ashamed and couldn't talk to anyone about it because they felt judged. And so they were thanking her for telling her story and wanted advice, you know, from her how to feel less ashamed, how to talk to their kids about what, you know, these people had done who were in their lives.

And she was the only person that they could talk to. So she says she starts to travel to meet these people and speaking to them on the phone and that gave her meaning and direction. And because of this, she's created this, like, network of like three hundred people who have these experiences, who have no one else to talk to. And she'll like connect them with other people who have similar experiences. And they have this, like community now, which is really lovely entirely.

It's they're they're the victims, too. But there's that kind of societal you know, there's like the snap judgment part that they often, I'm sure, fall victim to or at least the things that I've read. So, yeah, I think that's really beautiful. It's also that kind of thing. If there's only the people that have gone through it that can help you with the shame of it and help you bring it out into the light. So the fact that she kind of spearheaded that is really a testament of her kind of strength.

And that's really a lovely gesture. And she also went and met some of the family members of her father's first victim, Tonya Bennett, because she said she just wanted to know more about her life and who she was, which is really amazing. And then when she was on an episode of Twenty Twenty, she said, quote, Being the daughter of a serial killer puts everything into question, am I worthy? Do I have a right to exist?

When he took so much away from other people? If I'm happy, is that a slap in the face to the victims families? I don't want it to be so. Then she does a 12 part podcast called Happy Face.

It's done along with Lauren Pacheco from Murder in Oregon, who's just an incredible investigative journalist. And they speak to Melissa's mother and they just get the story of how it happened and what happened. I'm still in the middle of it right now. And they tell the story of her father and the family's trauma. And like from the podcast, you get the sense that she's just this she's really authentic. She's really open and forthcoming with her story. You know, you don't hear the shame.

You hear this person who wants to share what happened to them to try to help other people who lived through trauma. It's really inspiring. You know, it's it's for people who have experienced any kind of trauma and who are survivors in their own way. Her openness and her path to coming to terms with what happened is really inspiring. And she's now an expert on the topics of recovery from trauma, domestic violence and serial violent crimes. And she's an Emmy nominated crime correspondent for the Dr.

Oz Show. And in twenty sixteen, Melissa Moore released her second book.

It's called Hole A Guide to Self Repair. And in it, she describes and provides tools to reframe your trauma and to regain confidence. And she lives now in California with her husband and two children, and she doesn't have any contact with her father. And that is the story of the happy face killer. Wow. Yeah. Oh, God, I know.

Heavy stuff. Yeah. Well, great job. That was I mean, it's so weird that we haven't done that one before because I hear about it all the time. I also feel like I saw her. I think she hosted a show on like IID or one of those. Yes, that was about the family members called murder of serial killers. It's called murder in my family. Yeah. All right.

To wrap it up with some fuckin harangues. Yes. Do you want to tell us our fucking big fucking hurry?

Yeah, well, so I looked up, I found the tweet, and today we are recording on January 13th.

And that is the fifth anniversary of this podcast when it was released that amazing five years, five years, five years.

The tweet was by that corner. Underscore netsuke, I believe is how you pronounce that Conner. Thank you.

Thank you. I like your track tracking our news that way. Is that a paper anniversary or or do we buy each other diamonds?

I'm not sure. What we need to do is put it in the calendar. So this does not surprise us for the next six year anniversary. We'll give each other presents. Will you remind us to put it in the actual calendar so that we remember? It's kind of a good accomplishment. Five years, five years of consistently doing a podcast where we volunteered to do homework for every episode is for me personally a gigantic accomplishment.

That's amazing. Look, we did homework. I never did homework.

I've never fucking done homework. And I remember very distinctly, deeply resenting the homework I had to do on this podcast.

But we've made it worth so many words, so many words written down.

I mean, I honestly, we started this podcast and I honestly thought I was going to be able to remember off the top of my head stories and then just talk through them the way I felt like I wanted to. Yeah, because we knew everything about everything. Sure, we knew everything. So we were just going to do that. Yeah. Just like talk it through. That's why the first time, the first time I did Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka that Ken and Barbie murdered.

Yeah. It was a devastating failure. You had to redo it.

If there's a very huge developmental arc in this part, I feel like we've basically written multiple thesis papers. So we're basically college graduates at this point.

Yeah, junior college graduates for sure. For sure. At least. I mean, at least we have a certificate.

Can we get a certificate of accomplishment? Do print us up a certificate of some kind and just one of those ones on the Kinko's website. That'll be good. Just something something with our names in it.

I actually found I put it right up there. Hold on my second.

I'm so excited for whatever this is going to be. I know we're going to be this is the only certificate that I have of any any kind from my from my education. And it literally it says academic achievement up top. And you see the school.

Yeah. This is a certified what does it say?

This is to certify that the student his name appears above and that's my name, OK, has maintained an exceptional standard of scholarship and has only and has duly earned this honor. And then you type in what the honor is, was the and it says drama.

Oh my God. That's like that's called foreshadowing. I feel like for real.

It was awarded this day, fourth of June. Nineteen eighty eight.

Oh my God. Drama.

I got the drama circuit. Typical. Everybody heard that Edward J. Cavanaugh, the president of I mean the principal of our high school and Adrian's dad.

Oh can I say that I found recently, like my, um, my Montessori like report card, you know, from when I was like five. And in the notes it says, like, what's something special about Georgia? And it says Georgia likes to tidy while the other kids have naptime. So I feel like as children we both like already known how we were going to be when we grew up. I cleaned I cleaned the area while other kids slept.

Georgia had a very young age and age. You go ahead and sleep.

I'm gonna go ahead and wipe down some surfaces and help the teachers. Yeah, exactly. You're just chilling out and having a snack.

Oh, it's explains so much. OK, uh, do you have fucking trays you want to read. You might go first. Want me to go first. You can go first. OK, this is from. Hello, it's Claris from the family. Oh hello. Hello there. From the phone call she says twenty was a long one for us all. After nine months of being unemployed, I finally got a job again and at an animal shelter and then a bunch of emojis.

I will be an adoption counselor, a.k.a. a matchmaker for pets and their new owners. Another cute emoji. My lifelong dream that has been delayed once again by covid is to care for endangered species such as lions and. Chimps, this is the best next step for me, and it means so much that I can help animals in need, the first paycheck that I am able to donate will be in Elvis's name.

Isn't that sweet? Thanks for getting through life with me and all your amazing advice. Love you guys so much. And then it says in parentheses, Karen, quote, You've got to let your juices marinate. It may take a long time. Something you've said that inspired her. Sweet. Thanks. Hello, Claire, it's Clarice. Congratulations on your job. Let me have you.

Let me have a kitten. I just like this. She's getting paid for a job like that. Really does sound like something cool to do that you would just like. Well, you're really this way.

So I think this dog would be really this this for you. That's how I got Dotty at Santita or we like went in and one of the volunteers and I was like, I want this.

And he was like, you got to meet Lucy Liu Doddy. And it was done.

This starts my fucking her and says twenty twenty. Tried like hell to break me in April. My husband was laid off. Then on August 2nd, he had a series of heart attacks at age thirty five, leading to open heart quadruple bypass on August 14th, the day he was supposed to be released to go home, he suffered a massive stroke, killing two thirds of his brain. They said that he was paralyzed on his right side and blind in his right eye.

He'd never be able to walk again or talk again. Well, here we are at the beginning of twenty twenty one. Tomorrow, he graduates from cardiac rehab. His only deficit is his speech. He is slowly relearning language and starting to be able to put together sentences. So my fucking hair is his ability to say, fuck you. Twenty, twenty. Casey.

Oh my God. Casey sending you healing vibes. Wow. Yeah. Casey, what are your about us? The fact that you were able to even type that and send it in means you're stronger than all of us put together. Keep it up.

I'm so glad to hear that your husband's only deficit is speech where people have the capacity to heal and and to do so many things that, you know, that there's some I love those stories where doctors are like doctors are saying this is the only thing possible. And then there's people like just break those expectations totally. So congratulations and and, you know, stay strong.

Yeah, incredible. This is from this is from Instagram, from Brembo.

Moralez My fucking hair was being able to be part of giving Christmas gifts to formerly homeless LGBTQ young adults. My wife and her coworkers raised over thirteen hundred dollars to buy Christmas gifts for youth in an organization called Thrive, which helps get LGBTQ young adults into housing and teaches them life skills along with helping them with their mental and physical health. I'm so grateful I was able to be part of making these young people's Christmases amazing, and I'm so proud of my wife for organizing all of this.

That's incredible. That's great. Yeah, that's a beautiful story. No, I mean, that's. I love that. That's that's very cool. And that's so generous like. Yeah, it's to make some make sure someone else's Christmas is good, like using your energy to do something like that. That's beautiful. This one is from Michelle Soups and it says, I got myself this 20 21 true crime page a day calendar and immediately thought of MFM when I saw that Mary Vincent was the first story for January 1st.

One of the most jaw dropping and amazing survivor stories I've ever heard. I'm trying not to look ahead, but I'm curious to see what other stories they have. Hopefully a lot more badass survivor ones. Yes.

Michel Soups, it's so incredible how inspiring Mary Benson's story has been like throughout the life of this podcast. It's the one that always comes up as the like, memorable, incredible story, which is like, yeah, that's what we want it to be about, not about fucking asshole serial killers. And like the creepiest ones.

Well, that's you know, if we're talking about, like, the things the things we've learned over five years, it's that thing that we've been fed through crime over the years, being interested in it. We've been fed it one way, the way that it kind of started to be familiar.

I think it's we've been fed it to be scared of it. But then in the 90s, there almost became the strange fetish of like the killers themselves when it was like people were buying John Wayne Gacy, painting that kind of bullshit that kind of was like, oh, that means somehow your rock and roll or something. And so it has been you know, for me, it's a real honor to be able to dig into these stories and go, no, no, I'm not.

That's not why I'm here, that this story, the part of my interest in this fascination has to do with the fact that these were real people, that this is real loss, that these are this is human life, and this is what some people go through. It gives you unbelievable perspective on your own life and how you should actually be taking things and remembering things comparatively. But also there are these unbelievable survivor stories of people who have overcome because I was just watching, I survived.

And she is in season one. And Mary herself tells that story herself. And it's it's incredible. It's unbelievable. And it's. Yeah, it's really yeah. She's she's really a beacon. Definitely. Anyways, I feel lucky that we get to share these stories and that people give us the benefit of the doubt. And our and our listeners know that what we're trying to convey is empathy and gratitude and hope. And, you know, and that's what we're here for.

Yeah. Yeah, totally. It's been an honor. Yeah. It's been a real fucking journey. I mean, it has been quite, quite something. You know, who knew that? Just our podcast, our hang out podcast chitchat would would become the thing that it was. And thank you all for listening, each of you individually for caring, listening, playing ball, getting in here and being here with us. There's some people out there that have been here with us since the first fuckin episode, which is how Larry had to think about.

Yeah, there are people that we've met in the meet and greet lines that live shows who are just like since day one. Like there's I can definitely remember that happening a couple of times, like, are you kidding me?

You know, like we stop and scream at people's faces because they somehow happened upon it. Somehow we're searching through to your crime and where they're from and we're still blown away every fucking day that this has gotten to where it's gotten that we have that our lives have been completely changed, completely changed in the past five years.

And the most amazing way and we are so grateful for that every fucking day. I can't I can't believe that this is my life now.

It's I know it's beautiful. It's pretty nice. And Stephen, thank you for being there for the I think you came in an episode, what, four and three quarter years.

I believe it was episode nineteen oh nine.

Really? Yes. We had to go along that far without that thought. Oh, that sucks.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Stephen. You have been such a a quiet and necessary part of the show and so we appreciate that so much. Not that quiet. Quiet.

That was an event like. Yeah, you fill in some little blanks that we just have to myself. I cut all that out. Thank you. There is a third track that that will eventually be that would be fucking hilarious if this entire time there's a commentary, Mike Stevens releasing a commentary to a mystery science theater. Oh, what a commentary track. Work on a podcast you're just hearing. It would be chaos.

Yeah, it doesn't it doesn't work. I think people have tried it, actually, and I don't think it works. We go. Yes. Thank you, Stephen, for there's really it was really nice knowing that in the very beginning. I think we. Is Georgia Zoom, and I think we would just like hit record and see what happens. And so now there's when Stephen showed up and was giggling along and paying attention and taking notes and into it, it just really that's really helped everything so much.

Thank you. All right. Well, it's our anniversary, so we're going to go party. That's right.

But until we see you again, please stay sexy and don't get murdered by Elvis. Do you want a cookie?

Hi, I'm Babs Gray. I'm Brandy Posey. And I'm Tess Barker. Tune in to our podcast, Lady to Lady, premiering on the Exactly Right Network Wednesday, January 27. We're three stand up comics in real life friends. And every Wednesday we host the coolest hang on the Internet. It's like a party for your ear holes. Each week we invite some of the funniest comics and writers to join us in our adult Treehouse Games advice and the occasional deeply embarrassing personal revelation that we can't take back because now it's online forever, as guests include people like Alison Rosen.

I'm 95 years old. We didn't have apps in my day. But upon hearing about Rya, I think because it's selective, there's a tiny part of my brain just in the background being like is what I make it on that. I mean, I almost think that we should do one of those things. We combine the three of our faces into one person and she does see how she does get it. All right, let's get her on there, see what's up.

Marilyn Hristo, the attendant comes up to me and kneels down and goes, just pretend that Jack Bauer is at the bottom of the ocean and he needs you to unlock a reference to the largest credit TV credit that I have.

Lacey Mosley, there's a lot of cool stuff which you what's what's the perfect vampire officials where you get blood, your own blood. Yes. Oh, well, it's your own blood. That's your own blood. Yeah. The only problem with getting it is that you have to do it to somebody else to stay right here. Exactly. Vampires with be up here just like this one bites by three of your friends and over 300 plus female identifying artists. Don't worry, we'll let the occasional guy sometimes like canaries rescued.

Are you supposed to disappoint a Chihuahua? I have to you in. My husband has this kind of Naval Academy attitude. He's like, we got to show some discipline and some structure. Like I didn't get a Chihuahua to not be codependent with it. Check out the network premiere of Lady to Lady on Wednesday, January 27th on exactly right. Subscribe now and Stitcher Apple podcast or wherever you like to listen if you like what you hear right is a review and if you don't like what you hear.

We're not supposed to say that. Oh, can I say lady to lady, subscribe now.