And That's Why We Drink - E176 A Cheesecake Business Meeting and a Pop Up Seance Night Club

Episode Date: June 21, 2020

Our husks are here to stay this week! We've got another jam-packed episode with Em covering the Watseka Wonder, either a possession or possibly the product of a childhood crush. Then Christine covers the complicated and tragic case of Kendrick Johnson and the many angles and mishandlings involved with the case. We also recap some extremely stressful gift exchanges... and that's why we eat cheesecake!Please consider supporting the companies that support us!Join Thrive Market today and get up to $20 in shopping credit toward your first order when you go to thrivemarket.com/DRINKGo to Dailyharvet.com and enter promo code DRINK to get $25 off your first box!Go to Theragun.com/DRINK and get your Gen 4 Theragun today!

oh boy there's so many things to everyone's confused where are we where are we and why and how are you here what's going on you left me in la and then you could you just couldn't resist coming right back oh my god truly uh i long story short i just on monday decided no no okay we don't have to short short we have a podcast christy we don't know what short means first of all let's answer everyone's questions where the hell are we right now oh my goodness we are recording for the first time at the beautiful Cast Studios. Look at this background. There's LA.

We are in LA. I live right over there. No, I don't. But just pretend. Somewhere out there, you do. Somewhere within the 360 degrees of me, I live there. That's cool. Yeah.

Good for you. As do you, just a little further away. Just a little tiny bit further away. A little more to the east. But yeah, so we are in like an actual studio and it looks very professional you're confused there's nine different lights hitting us right now we just are kind of here like okay great someone else knows what they're doing i also once i think so christine and even knew that this was happening a lot longer than i did yes i was surprised with this information yesterday because as you can see,

those of you who just tuned in only a couple episodes ago found out that Christine moved away from California and yet she is here? I can't resist the charm of M. Well, no one can. Nobody can. That's true.

So who wants to tell their side of the story first of how you're here? Actually, I think you should just tell how you discovered that I was here okay so so obviously christine and i did not get to be together for our birthday this year basically what happened is uh for our birthdays uh since we weren't going to be together for many many reasons christine and i decided we were going to do a virtual gift giving extravaganza. Sure. And so I was instructed by Christine to send her gifts to her and she would send her gifts

to me and then we would open them up on Zoom or something like that. And I thought that was a great idea and literally never thought anything of it. And I had been sending gifts to Christine for a while and i hadn't gotten any gifts by the way on your end i was like okay like is christine not sending me presents like what is going on i had left them in la for my brother to bring that was the original idea i didn't know any of that i just knew that like i wasn't getting presents and in my head i did think at one point i was like christine is probably doing something really weird for my birthday that isn't physical. So like, that's probably why I haven't gotten any presents, even though I've shipped many to her.

And then eventually we were going to have our gift opening. And Christine said like, oh, well, I have some presents still in LA, you know, that Zandy's been holding on to. So he's going to hand them over to Eva and I'll have Eva film them, film you opening them. That way we can show that video. And then i'll film myself opening the video you know it was supposed to be this whole video thing and basically i was told like eva is going to film this so meet up with eva and then i did and when eva started rolling the camera i found all of these presents

in in the room and one massive present behind all of the presents. And so the tiny presents, I thought like, okay, well, I'm going to ignore the big present because that's clearly the grand reveal. I'm not going to open that one first and then have to open the tiny one. To be clear, none of this was my plan. This is all how it went, but this was not my plan. I opened the tiny presents and I was taking forever. taking forever and we're hamming it up in front of the camera i was trying i was like look i don't have my buddy here to banter with me so i have to do double the banter you're trying to guess what all the presents i'm trying to make it interesting and visually appealing to people so i was taking way too much time and i noticed eva was like really trying to like push me to keep she was

sweating she was acting weird and i was like what is to like push me to keep she was sweating she was acting weird and I was like what is your deal like we're just filming the opening presents and then I got to the big one and I was like oh I wonder what's in it and so I was kind of like trying to shove it around I was like this box is heavy as shit like what the hell did Christine get me and then two seconds later someone pops out of the goddamn box okay to be clear m started shoving the box and going holy shit this is so freaking heavy damn like trying to tip it over and i'm inside like trying not to fall and i was like this is heavy as furniture and i was like ouch first of all and oh my god poor eva is like oh no uh i saw eva panicking i was like what what is like what

is wrong with me i was inside you open one flap and i was like, what? What is wrong with me? I was inside. You open one flap. And I was like, ready. And then you closed it and went, actually, I'm going to guess what it is. And I was like, I can't breathe. Open the damn box. The whole idea was that you weren't supposed to open the other presents until I arrived on scene. And then we could banter together for the rest. But I hadn't necessarily told Eva that.

I guess I just kind of thought my brain waves had transitioned to her. And they didn't. So that was my fault. So listening, I'm in the box and Eve I was like which one should I open first and Eve was like any of them and I'm like no no no no no and uh you were like what's this what's this I wish Christine were here to explain it to me and I was like ripping my hair out yeah it was very comical but we did film it it's gonna be on Patreon I think um the whole time Eva just keeps zooming in on me in the box to see if I'm like breathing it was very comical but we did film it it's gonna be on patreon i think um it was the whole time eva just keeps zooming in on me in the box to see if i'm like breathing it was very very sneaky i mean first of all like usually you know eva's just so pure-hearted and like like i don't know if i

would necessarily consider her like number one stealth right but she like really like both of you i guess so you've decided you were just gonna fly out to la like two days ago on monday i was like i'm gonna fly out on wednesday surprise m and so I had no idea and they both kept it so quiet I had no idea what was going on oh my god I really had no idea I remember it was acting so weird I was like we're just opening presents oh my god Eva was like sending me like red alert sos and then literally I bought my tickets on Monday and I get a text two hours later from Em saying, actually, can we postpone our gift video to like another week? And I was like, actually, like we cannot.

So that was really awkward to try and lie. I felt like I was being very pushy, inadvertently tried. I didn't even notice. And I've said this so many times in the last 24 hours, but I'm just clearly so blindly loyal to anything Christine and Eva have to say. Like there were so many things in hindsight where I'm like, that was a weird sentence. Why didn't you, why didn't I wonder what you meant?

You were like so thrown. You were like, I feel like I, I'm like off my game. I didn't like catch on. I felt like I duped myself because I usually like to think I'm like spot on when people are being tricky like that. Didn't notice a goddamn thing. Yeah, I was pretty proud that it actually worked. I really didn't think it was going to work.

So anyway, I showed up and then we were like, surprise. Also, we're recording in person tomorrow for the first time in like months. So that's how we're here. Anyway, so it's all very exciting for us anyway. But I haven't seen you in so long. I really have gotten kind of emotional a few times with you in the room and not we keep getting like teary-eyed it's it's it's so sad i was in the elevator today in my apartment and i was like oh my god christine's here i was like oh my god and i am here i literally sprung out of a large box she threw lemons at me i was holding lemons inside the box

also and like i don't know it's just i told her i was like i've always wanted someone to jump out of a box from like across the country for me it's like the most like romantic thing i can imagine it's like the most like youtube late at night video to like make you teary-eyed but i will say and then i was like oh my god m on my bucket list from like middle school onward it has always said one of my bucket list items goal in life is to jump out of a or hide in a box as someone's birthday present and i was like you i knew you were the one who would appreciate it i did and i told christina i was like you have given me a reason to call all of my hometown best friends and my mother and be like i have lived out here and had five birthdays

in california and you have jumped out of no goddamn boxes and christine couldn't wait seven days like from moving out of the state my family was like you just got here I was like yeah see ya anyway that if that's not a friendship oh and then I you inadvertently by being here ended up actually getting one of your birthday presents early oh my god and then Em's like okay poor Eva oh god poor Eva poor Eva there was a let's just say there was a gift m was hiding in the apartment like our new you know where we are roommates now yes um in the podcast apartment and um eva was like well there's a gift like i know you're gonna surprise m and be in the apartment but like there's a gift that is like pretty you know in sight and m doesn't want

you to see it and i was like oh just throw a blanket over it and he was like well it's pretty big and i was like just put it in another room not knowing like it's literally a large piece of furniture eight feet tall 300 pounds and eva is like the size of a popsicle stick and like had to move this thing and i i had no idea christine was coming so i've been hiding it there thinking like well i have this whole apartment to myself and christine will never see it i was like just tell em that the the internet the wi-fi guy the internet guy had to uh move it so many storylines and i i i believed every one of them but so i was like okay well while you're here and he even put in all this work to hide this thing she was probably so mad that she was like i she had her own friends come

over to the apartment to help her move to call people to help her move it i didn't even know just for me to show it five minutes later oh my god um but uh so i you tell the story basically i walk in the room my eyes are closed and i was like okay open your eyes and i literally suddenly am transported to our childhood favorite blues clues you know you know the one with steve and i'm sitting there i'm standing there and i'm like oh my god and i'm like it's from blue's clues i'm like i know it's the wardrobe the blue it's a wardrobe literally the closet from blue's clues which i said in a recent episode i was like i found something for your birthday that has absolutely no relation to us or the podcast or anything basically i found this thing i decided in the middle of the night

i must own it and now i'm going to spin it in a way where it's a gift for you so i feel like i'm justified in this purchase it was literally it was literally like i just did this in the middle of the night the next morning allison woke up and i said we are renting a u-haul and you're taking the day off work and we're picking this up from s Anna. And it's literally the, it's the one, right? It's the one from the set of Blue's Clues. It's literally the, like Steve's like bedroom closet from. I thought Steve, I jokingly was like, is Steve in there? And I was like, well, actually, and I, for like a brief minuscule moment, I. You're not the only one who jumps out of things in this apartment. I really thought Steve was there. He was. What if it was a little blue, little doll oh and then em was like oh instead of blues clues it's booze clues

and we're gonna put i thought i thought booze but i think em meant actually wait that's we well it's a wardrobe there's multiple shelves i'll put wine on one and then em can put like you know fan art we'll keep our boxed wine and our spooky like haunted fan mail yes so in any case it's it's just like so wild and emma's like well um i hope whoever gets his apartment next uh likes blue blue's clues because i'm literally not taking that out by the way like as we all know rj is like the hulk and he so i literally found this thing in the middle of the night someone one of you out there tagged me in this post oh yeah by the way this they're probably listening like oh yeah you did it by the way you tagged me and this is you uh you caused this so uh some random person posted that they owned

this furniture and they had they were moving and they were literally leaving like the next day and they were like you have 24 hours to come collect this or it's going on the street. And I was like, well, I don't know why the person tagged me in this because I've never spoken on Blue's Clues, but they knew I would do something about it. And so I reached out to that person and I was like, is this still available? And she was like, yeah, it's like you have to get it tomorrow.

And I was like, okay. And so at one in the morning i got a u-haul because it's literally eight feet and 300 pounds and my little subaru was not gonna was not equipped for that and uh then i woke alice and up and i was like so i got a u-haul it's a long story but i'm now the owner of blues clues furniture and i need you to come pick it up it's a surprise for christine don't tell anyone i like how else it's like you didn't even need to explain it i just she got in that goddamn truck real quick she was like i'm in oh my god anyway it's a surprise for Christine don't tell anyone I like how Elsa's like you didn't even need to explain it I just she got in that goddamn truck real quick she was like I'm in oh my god anyway it's amazing I really she asked me at one point like why did you do this and I was like I don't

have an answer I was like it was midnight and I was bored oh my god so I found it and now it's ours and now it's been a weird 24 hours I guess and longer for em in the longer for both of us I guess you have to fly geo out now so we can take pictures of him in the wardrobe and he could be the new blue i know i know what i said anyway wow that was a long sorry i'm sorry but you know we never really did a real birthday episode so this is us talking about our birthdays we also haven't seen each other in person so like i'm kind of like having like like school kid crush on you right now. Like I'm just like so excited to be in a room with you.

Or M, I really was worried I'd give you an actual like aneurysm when I jumped out of that box. I hugged you tighter than I think I ever have. Oh my God. I was scared that I like hurt you. I was so excited to see you. I haven't seen you in so long. But anyway, so I'm kind of sorry. Even when we were in LA, we didn't see each other.

That's like, it's so crazy. It's been forever. I, so sorry for the rambles. I'm just of sorry. Even when we were in LA, we didn't see each other. That's like, it's so crazy. It's been forever. I, so sorry for the rambles. I'm just like very excited. We're getting cheesecake after this. So we're just in a very good mood. Every time we have a business meeting, it's at Cheesecake Factory. We go to Cheesecake Factory.

Yeah. Cheesecake Factory, are you sponsoring this? Anytime we have to leave to do anything outside of our homes, we immediately go to Cheesecake Factory afterward. I don't know why. Every time. All right. Anyway, we're going to actually talk about real stuff.

Welcome to our show about death and murder. And like ourselves. Okay. So for the people who like us rambling in the beginning, I'm glad you had a good day today. But for the people who don't like it, I'm so sorry. You can start listening now. Right now.

I'm glad. Good. I'm glad you skipped. You missed some great tales, though. Okay. So my story i i gotta be honest speaking of rambles the last several episodes were like significantly longer than most of my stories did like a two and a half hour or two hour or i don't even know how long last

week i think the episode was two hours and 40 minutes which is unheard of for us and by the way like thank you cast yeah sorry but like it's uh that was just super long and so i thought i would relieve you and do just a quicker story this time around um especially because i have fear that like i'm not gonna stop talking if i find another long story so keeping it short a few people have requested this um a long time ago but this has just kind of been sitting in my notes so finally doing it and this is the story of the watsika wonder what's that apparently around the room like people there's nobody here usually when christine and i are in chairs with microphones we're on a stage

so just thinking like why do i feel so weird it's because no one's like here because we literally have like stage lights on us and we're in the same kind of chairs that we sit on on stage so we're expecting some like reaction like you know appreciation of our hilarity and it's just silent not a one applause that's fine um so to answer your question and everyone here everyone who's wondering yes uh the watsika wonder is uh america's first documented possession what yeah although i'm amazed you hadn't covered this yet me too or that i hadn't heard of it me too but i'm also uh i use possession lightly because this story is a little questionable okay um it's not as i guess scary as other possessions are because usually when you hear possession you

think like a demon story yes this is more of a medium trance story so uh the main character as we delve in her name is mary lurency venom lurency is l-u-r-A-N-C-Y. Lou Rancy. Lou Rancy. Sounds good to me. Well, apparently her nickname was Rancy. Rancid Rancy. Gotta love her. Well, I keep reading her name as Lunacy, and I was like, that's not right.

Oh, that's a more fun nickname. I'm surprised that all the nicknames like the kids on the playground could have called you. It was Rancy and not something else. Could have been worse. Anyway, Mary Lunacy. Nope. the kids on the playground could have called you it was rancy and not yeah something else so anyway mary lunacy nope you're the kid you're the bully on the playground that's me actually uh mary lurency venom and just to avoid that again we're gonna call her rancy for the rest of the show so uh rancy lived in wet sika illinois apparently it's not too far from chicago oh i've heard of that really yeah yes i knew that name sounded familiar but i have not heard that i just know nothing about this story though um well not lunacy ranci was born april 16th so torus april 16th is a an aries aries okay that's fine i guess um i love it aries my mom's an aries uh my step

mom's an aries oh we always say this yeah everyone else is like we know we know we know your entire family tree of astrology uh so rancy was born in 1864 and at 13 she starts telling her family that she's seeing and hearing people in her room at night. Good. Fabulous. I don't like that. Our future children will be screwed if anything. If my kid comes to me, especially at 13, like kind of out of the age where like children are seeing things. Like imaginary friend age.

Yeah. I'm like, okay, well, we're burning the house down. Yep. We're calling Christine and we're all getting a caravan. Call Aunt Christine. She'll pour the boxed wine. I know you're 13. It's okay. we all need it

right now uh so apparently this is a quote uh from rancy there were people in my room last night and they kept calling rancy rancy and i could feel their breath on my face so that's where i draw the goddamn line yeah breath um so she apparently heard here she kept hearing people calling her name at night and started sleeping in her parents room and a week later i guess she was fixing something with her mom she was with her mom doing something and she says i feel bad i feel so queer i can relate to both of those amen um so rancy fainted and then seized up oh shit and didn't wake up for five hours oh shit and when she came to so that she felt very strange and had no memory of the hours well obviously she was unconscious but she couldn't remember anything that had been going what happened yeah

um the next day she fell over again and she had rigid limbs um but she was at least conscious enough to be able to tell her family that she was seeing spirits around god and she had rigid limbs um but she was at least conscious enough to be able to tell her family that she was seeing spirits around god and she said that she was in heaven she's talking to them right now she's like i'm in heaven oh no and she could see uh angels and two of the spirits were her brother and sister who had already passed on oh shit um so other times during these spells uh rancie would speak in other voices and sometimes i mean sounds pretty possessed to me but people like like a woman from tennessee came out and started speaking and she started having a southern accent or she would speak in uh foreign languages like that's the one that freaks me out foreign languages like foreign

languages like when you it's like why should a 13 year old know this like proof that you are not doing this like she didn't learn mandarin i don't think so i don't know maybe um so she also began talking in her sleep and sleep not just sleepwalking sleep running correct incorrect that's the worst i'm actually super not afraid when someone with dead eyes is sprinting at you i stayed at my brother's apartment last night and i was like alexander i need you to lock the door because he used to sleepwalk so often and like when we lived in the same house i had barriers but now i'm sleeping in his living room and i was like i i will not abide by any sleepwalking he goes i don't sleepwalk and then he's like although i guess i wouldn't know since i'm by myself and i was like this is he should know now more than ever if something's like misplaced the next day

or that could be a ghost there's so many possibilities wait a minute so uh so she began sleep running oh no from the spirits in the house oh no no no that's extremely dangerous i don't like that uh and so oh she could also uh describe places that she's never been in detail which is implying like astral projection um but so she was talking about places as if she was there right now wow uh and also her personality started changing while she was in these trances again also implying that she was not herself um and although this happened so this started happening daily first of all this started happening like on a constant basis um and by september of that year it just kind of stopped out of nowhere and she was fine and then two months later it really came back in stride so uh november 27th november 27th 1877 she started having these

crazy stomach pains like apparently doubling over and they were like six to five to six times a day um and apparently the most painful attacks lasted two geez and this is a quote apparently quote she would double herself over until her head and her feet actually touched oh and when i so what that means is like she just bent over and her head was touching her toes but in the middle of the night i thought her head was like oh and i was like the other way well this is a possession story and i was like she's she's everywhere. Meanwhile, I knew fully what it meant. And I still went, how do you do that?

I know I can't even touch my toes. I really went the full like like demonic gymnast route where like I didn't even it didn't even cross my mind that like I could just just bend over normal way that your body actually bends over. Yeah, I really i really took a possession in the strongest way possible so uh she was in so much pain during this that she nearly passed out probably from bending backwards right her spine snapped in half probably um and so she nearly passed out uh from the pain but she stayed in a trance apparently this was like becoming her way of like meditating when in pain it seems but again she could see heaven and angels and spirits and her family uh basically said that these trances lasted like two months wow um two months

two months oh my god so now it's like january or february i guess and um she they were claiming that she could see spirits the entire time and the symptoms of like her seizures and her stomach pains kept persisting um and the family basically was told that they should consider sending her to a mental institution because doctors were not understanding why she could see angels and spirits and she must be insane um she must lunacy maybe there's actually quotes around that and that's like her uh-huh also lorenzi i've literally never heard that name either i wonder what it means maybe something relevant maybe not probably not though maybe it means stop reporting on me um so basically the the family was told that they should send her somewhere and their neighbor i think it was their neighbor or a

family friend but his name was asa and uh he heard about this his name was asa roff he heard about this and was very against the family doing this and it sounds like he was more of an acquaintance so like his opinion really shouldn't have mattered but he did approach the family and he said don't do it i had a daughter also named mary who also around mary's age was having very similar symptoms and also like lives near the same property it's all very weird but so asa said i had a daughter named mary who had the same symptoms i sent her away and she ended up not making it and so i'll tell you that story real quick mary roth was born in 1846 she's a libra um and at 13 she started having epileptic fits her family moved to watsika am i saying right watsika i think so and uh she started having epileptic fits her family moved to watsika am i saying right watsika i think so and uh she started having crazy symptoms including nausea rigid limbs she was catatonic

when she would sleep and she was having fits like this multiple times a day she would fall into trances and would act possessed and speak as if she were someone else and she showed signs of clairvoyance um she apparently at one point developed this obsession with blood that's not good and started putting leeches on her forehead no thanks on her forehead just like oh no um but she also started hearing voices so this is where it gets kind of controversial because it's like maybe she really might've been suffering. Like a mental illness. From some mental illness. And so.

I see. A lot of these possession stories seem to be kind of. On that. Walking a line sort of, or at least like you could see it both. You can at least argue it. Yeah. And so basically by 1865,

she had been hearing so many voices and she'd become so obsessed with she had been hearing so many voices and she'd become so obsessed with um apparently blood and harming herself that she died by suicide oh no apparently she originally tried she attempted suicide um but the so this is where it gets supernatural again is she attempted suicide but uh she only passed out um she had slit her wrist and um i don't know if she slit her wrist or she like cut her arm really badly but it was with the intent of hurting herself and when she came to um she had this like crazy super human strength and like five grown men at the hospital had to hold her down from fighting them off and keep in mind she was like less than 100 pounds and had lost a lot of blood yeah and so that was pretty interesting

also she had bandages on her eyes because apparently they were afraid of her like scratching her eyes while she while she was asleep or i don't really understand what she had done before to make them worry about that but so she had these bandages on her eyes and one of the other weird skills she had was she was able to see through them she had like x-ray vision yeah and so like and they were like me in that box like watching you with my lemons you could see it clearly and i didn't see it coming uh but so she uh could see right through her bandages and it became kind of this party trick that oh great like intentionally blindfold her as like carefully as possible and she could really weird and she could read letters like you could just hold a letter to her and she'd read it they would

show her like contents of an envelope she'd never seen before and she could see right through it what it was a very so between that and her like weird superhuman strength there's something something was going on or at least it seems that way her father agreed that like what no matter what it was he couldn't control it he was like okay we really probably should put her away just because like well then she's harming herself too it's like that's dangerous very good point so um so they ended up putting her away in the state asylum and uh unfortunately at 19 she actually did die by suicide and after that her parents became spiritualists trying to oh you know get in touch with her um so with that story in mind ace was like please don't

right that was a totally different story so he was basically retelling this to rancy's parents being like i lost my kid because i put her away um or at least that's what you know his belief on it and so uh he said at the very least before you put her away like talk to dr stevens he's like very well equipped with this he's also a spiritualist so he'll pay attention to those signs um and he basically said like she's not insane she's just a medium oh and so that's comforting i guess yeah it's better right so dr stevens uh decided to meet with her um or asa i guess coordinated them meeting up and dr stevens

was able to mesmerize her oh i don't like with a pocket watch i guess i don't know if that's different than hypnotism oh yeah that's true i thought mesmerized is what you are i didn't know you could be mesmerized wait a minute i need to go to sleep no but i know what you mean like i've never heard like as an action to do to somebody i've never heard like i'm mesmerizing you yes i've heard like i am being mesmerized like in the passive yeah yeah yeah. No, I'm with you. So then again, we don't know words very well, so.

English is not your first language and not mine when I'm a little sleepy. You can have it. You can have that. Not mine without cheesecake. That's it. We'll talk, we'll regroup later. We'll send an update at Cheesecake Factory. So Dr. Stevens apparently mesmerized her, maybe hypnotized her.

I will find out before I get a million tweets. I will figure this out. Just to see like what spirits Rancy was living with or dealing with. And pretty immediately saw signs in Rancy that when she was in these trances, she was turning into other people. For example, she was turning into an old hag. Those actual words, not mine. Sitting like an old hag. And she was turning into an old hag this was actual words not mine um sitting like an old hag and she was asking weird questions and she kept calling her parents old black dick and old granny

what so if that's not what you call your parents maybe you're not mesmerized i don't know maybe that's what mesmerizing does i don't think i want to be a part of it to be quite honest with you but so apparently she this persona what she said um he asked who are you and she said uh her name was katrina hogan she was a 63 year old german woman okay but then she very quickly changed personalities again to a man named willie canning who asked dr stevens if he liked smoking and drinking we don't know what his answers were by the way i think we know what his answer i think we know let's be real but like i mean also just to be clear like i am aware that this also sounds like another mental illness

situation because you know it could be multiple personalities or something like that i don't know if i'm using the right words disassociativeative identity disorder? DID, is that what that is? Yeah. Okay. So I don't know. It could be that. It could be something spiritual, but a lot of critics today say, no, she was actually having some mental illness. Sure, sure, sure. And so basically after the session,

Dr. Stevens said that Rancy, his report was that Rancy would go from morose and sullen to mystic and imaginary it sounds like me on a nice depressive day yeah um oh boy so uh after the session uh he wrote that report and he also told ranci like hey since as a believer in spirits he's like maybe instead of focusing on negative spirits stepping forward maybe the ones that are positive you know try to work more with those or like if you can't avoid them at least try to get closer to the ones that are positive that's interesting and uh rancy and asa was in the room for this because i guess he like wanted to see what dr stevens had to say keep in mind

this is like a neighbor or an acquaintance or something like he's just like a nosy ass neighbor infiltrating he's the most nosy neighbor truly he's just putting himself in this situation but he wanted to hear what dr stevens had to say and in front of asa rancy said well one nice spirit has kept showing up her name's mary roff which was asa's daughter whoa wait whoa goose cam and whoa so asa freaked out sure and uh apparently dr siemens was like well what does mary say when she's stepping forward and rancy was like mary wants to switch places with me temporarily and asa told her to let it happen asa was like well if that's my daughter talking you should let oh you should go to heaven or something and let my daughter take it out step

out of your physical form and let my daughter take your... Your corn husk? Leave your husk behind. Leave your husk behind. Let my daughter enter the vessel. Man, we never made merch of that. We shouldn't do that. Someone made that little picture.

Remember it was two ghosts and it said, leaving our husks behind. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it had like a sunset. Also, if someone could like make corn husk dolls of us, that'd be great. Oh, geez. But not like ones that could like maybe harm us or like a spiritual no bad intentions please i just send me corn i just want corn actually send me like corn chips maybe that would be excellent so uh so basically asa's like herd opportunity knocking at the door was like

this mofo had an ulterior motive this whole time it's like if you really think that mary wants to switch places with you and it might be helpful you know for your spiritual journey for you like this sounds really healthy for you exactly so with this agenda of his uh kind of convinced rancy that this was okay to do and so rancy allowed mary to possess her so instantly her personality changed to mary's at least according to asa and she did not recognize her own family so the venoms who were her mom and dad so she didn't recognize like like rancie didn't recognize her own family being like who are you um i'm mary like my that's my dad over there but she recognized asa oh my god uh also recognized everything pretty much about the roth family so um very quickly was showing obvious signs and

keep in mind again like this was an acquaintance so like she couldn't have really known too much about the roth family um but when asked rancy said uh so they asked like, oh, where's Rancy right now? If you're Mary, where's Rancy? Where did she go? How far did we push this? And Mary in Rancy's body said, Laurency is away being treated and will come back when she is restored to health, both mentally and physically.

And when Laurency is ready to return, Mary will leave. That's like what the grinch said when he took that christmas tree from that cindy loo who he's like i'm just gonna fix this up real quick it'll be right back it's going to the doctor it's getting it's like when your puppy goes to the farm oh but so uh basically it sounded like rancy was in like, on sabbatical or something. On sabbatical. And was currently being cured for her seizures and her stomach pains. Oh, I see. It was kind of, if Mary Roth was really speaking through Rancy, Mary was saying, she's slowly getting sicker and weaker.

And so we are going to switch places for a while so I can see my family while she is in the spiritual world. That's very convenient. It's like a nice little transfer of goods. family while she is in the spiritual world very convenient it's like a nice little transfer of goods yes it is yeah like next time i have a stomach pain it's like i don't mind going to like the pearly gates i'll take over for a few days like as long as we're not permanent here like i'm good you can leave your husk behind for a few minutes so uh basically like rancy will be back shortly like after these messages or whatever so uh both families were convinced that this really was mary uh she knew too much about the family and the she barely recognized the verums the verums like didn't know this personality that

was coming out of her uh she knew uh mary roth's nickname for her sister and her neighbors. She also knew very intimate friends and family and knew very intimate memories of them. She knew about old objects in the house. So she basically went to the Roth house and was like, oh, this is from when I was this age. And I looked like this. And this is what I did. Very like past lifey. Yes.

Yeah. And so she knew detailed stories about everyone in the family. She talked about her own death and funeral, saying she was there. She talked about when she cut her arm, and she pointed at the arm she currently had, which was Rancy's arm, and said, this is not the arm, though. That one is in the ground. Oh, goodness. Okay. Yikes. that one is in the ground oh oh goodness okay yikes um she also begged to stay with the raw

family since she was married and not rancy she was like i want to go live with my real family can you imagine that being like wait no no no no no parents like we didn't agree to this how did this happen yeah hold on a second you were having stomach aches and now you're also in with a neighbor you're moving in like across the street so i guess apparently like she was when she was staying with her with rancy's family rancy's family were like so sick of like this weird persona that they were like if it's gonna like do you some like good go over there we're so tired literally like please like if this is like we don't know what's going on if this if this really is a spirit then you should be over there with your family if you're our kid and just like pulling one up on us like we're so over it please go away

um but so she begged to stay with the roth family and she did and so mary possessed rancie's body for like four months what yeah the fuck 16 weeks holy crap some other website said 100 days which is a little too perfect but 100 days on the 100th day yeah it's very biblical uh but so she not only possessed rancie's body but rancie lived with the roth family for four months so imagine having the random neighbor across the street living with you for a month pretending pretending or maybe actually being like your dead relative this sounds like one of those crime like a crime movie where he's like you're my daughter now and it's like a different child yeah it's like adopting her as his own this is creepy absolutely not so apparently when she got to the house she even saw trinkets

of hers recalled stories played her favorite song on the piano which apparently rancy didn't know how to play the piano um she told stories about trips that they had gone on in incredible detail about i guess um asa asked about a trip to texas one time and she said yes pa i remember crossing red river and mrs reader's girls who were in our company oh i don't know it's creepier like that she knew that or the fancy talking back in the day definitely the fancy talking who were in our company um she also uh remembered friends by their maiden names because when she died a lot of them hadn't been married yet um weird she has oh this is a quote from her parents from mary's parents she has been

nothing but mary since she has been here and knows nothing but what mary knew and she still did not recognize uh rancie's parents and believed that she was living at home with her actual family she did also have some spiritual gifts so she presented uh some signs of clairvoyance apparently her brother got sick at one point or was hadn't gotten sick yet but she was like you need to take him to a doctor oh shit and then he got really sick and would have died if he didn't know about having to get medical attention early enough so um sounds sounds creepy to me if she could have also been guessing been like he's not looking looking well

um she also would still go into trances and many spiritualists actually invited rancy slash mary to their seances so they could ask questions about death which also like i'm not surprised like if you had someone walking around claiming that they were actually dead back right i gotta know some things like what's going on truly and during one of the seances apparently mary actually left rancy's body only for a second to possess another person in the room okay now she's going a little far with this whole position thing just like hub hopping you know how it is oh yeah this definitely sounds like a clubbing atmosphere a seance club you tell me how we would not want to be on the first of the list there.

Hang on. TM, TM, TM. Wait a minute. Strobe lights. If we ever do a pop-up, it's got to be a seance club. A seance club. Wait a minute. Okay, I'm into it.

Seance nightclub. We'll eat bagel bites and lemons. Okay, wait a minute. I got to slow down. I'm really into it. We'll jump out of the Blue's Clues wardrobe. Hang on. So this is ironic, the fact that uh she or not that's ironic

what is ironic is that although rancy's body throughout all this because remember she was sick and apparently her spirit is being healed elsewhere rancy's body is actually improving oh so it's almost like there really is like an angel inside of this body healing it. It's very weird, but like all of a sudden there's no more seizures, no more stomach aches. And this is something that had been going on for an entire year. No more like bending backwards. No bending backwards in either direction. No more sleep sprinting.

Oh, God. But so it seems like Rancey's actually healing. But what's the ironic part is that mary uh mary roth or the spirit inside of her refused to eat because she said that she got her quote nourishment from above oh dear oh dear no i don't know about that no no no no so she like wouldn't eat apparently near the end she started eating maybe like she was like okay rancy's body needs food yeah but it was weird that she's like malnourished, but also gaining health. So weird.

Apparently Mary was also really affectionate to the raw family. She would give them lots of hugs and kisses. What's weird to me is that they questioned this. They were like, why are you giving us so many hugs and kisses? But she's like, if you think, if you genuinely think this is like your dead daughter.

Yeah. When you like, maybe she wasn't very affectionate before. Maybe she wasn't. even they were like okay this is too much yeah they're like this child is literally from zero to 60. so uh apparently at one point mary told her mom uh or mary in randy's but i told mary's mom uh quote the angels will let me stay until sometime in may and so uh she said that rancy was getting better and wanting to return soon so on may 7th uh rancy came through again she i guess rancy peeked into her body real quick just to say hey and then she even was like i guess she realized that like she needed more time up there or mary needed more time down here and so she was like

i'll give you two more weeks so she got an extension on this rental extension and uh my god by may 21st so exactly two weeks later um asa wrote to dr stevens and this is a quote from his from his note to him mary is to leave the body of rancy today about 11 o'clock. So she says like they're like they're on a fucking schedule. She is bidding neighbors and friends goodbye. She tells me to write to Dr. Stevens as follows. Tell him I'm going to heaven and Rancy is coming home. Well, she says she will see your dear children in spirit life.

And she talked most lovingly about the separation about the separation to take place. And most beautiful was her talk about heaven and her home whoa so at least she like gave credit to a doctor down here before she like flew back up she was like you did this thank you props to you my friend everyone's going back where they need to these husks are staying here which these husks are here to stay so like that's even better i so i wonder like you would think at that point like if this story is being taken seriously by spiritualists when dr stevens had become like this massive superstar of like he like facilitated this whole thing yeah he like got a ghost and a

human to swap spots you'd think so i've maybe i'm just like maybe this is a total like blind spot on my end i've never actually heard of him and he's a big deal but i don't know about him well anyway punctual as ever at 11 o'clock uh rancie came back into her body and no longer recognized the roth family as more than just acquaintances and asked to go home to be with her family the venoms and according to rancie's mother when she came home is very weird rancie's mom said that rancie was now smarter uh more industrious more womanly and more polite than ever and could play the piano and complete the piano incredible really i almost can play it like a fiddle can play that piano like a fiddle uh but so more womanly that's apparently when you get to heaven you become more womanly and polite great not where i want to go no no thanks um so her health apparently was top notch and she no longer

ever suffered from seizures or stomach pains again wow um she ended up marrying uh soon after she has like a dozen fucking kids and lived in kansas whoa and uh she would actually sometimes go back to the roth's house uh just so like during seances maybe mary could show up like she could like use her body as a vessel for mary since they'd gotten so they'd gone on so well together oh wow um but so she would every now and then allow basically like guest appearances for mary at a seance um other than that there was no possessions or anything like that although there was talk of during um rancie's uh pregnancies when she was about to give birth and she was in labor apparently she would revert back into those like trances that she had when she was in pain and apparently she would start

acting like mary oh well that would make sense if it's while she's in pain if it's while she's in pain and she learned to like be mesmerized during her like bouts of pain and if mary was already always watching out for her to like heal her then while she was going through labor apparently like mary took the load she was like i got you don't worry oh my goodness don't we all friend though like here i'll step in listen i i see your labor and i'll raise you 10 contractions and then she had 10 12 kids and mary was like okay i didn't agree to 12 that's really why she had a dozen she was like my friend mary's got it don't worry it's true she's like it's actually pretty easy if you have a friend to take over for you so the raw family never stopped believing in the spirit of mary and they credit dr stevens

for everything that happened and curing rancy uh but in 1952 uh rancy lived in los angeles and at 88 years old she died um in 1879 back when this happened dr stevens actually wrote a book called the what's eco wonder uh which is who was how she he's the one that coined the term i guess and he called rancie quote the most remarkable case of spirit return and manifestation ever recorded in history which in 1879 probably was the most wonder wonderful thing in the whole wide world probably um in 1890 so about 10 years later um a member of the american society of psychical research uh said because anyway he was quoted saying i have no doubt that the incidents occurred substantially described in the narrative by dr stevens so they like agreed also but this was real um but in 1903 a psychologist named frank uh hoffman said that this was just a quote typical case of hysterical impersonation

um more recent theories or that you know there was some multiple personalities or did going on yeah um a lot of people say that it probably was just a case of mental illness or um maybe even acting up like truly just pretending like maybe just like as a 13 year old had some teen angst and didn't want to be in her house what's her name with the mongoose where she was bored yeah they think as a teenager maybe she was bored and she just wanted to go live with the neighbor for a while there's also maybe he had like better better popsicles well or a pool or something not the popsicles or the pool but the the main theory is that the roth family had a couple sons her age and she literally pulled the ultra scheme to just be in the room with like just wanted to be around

these cute boys and so she pretended that she was a ghost that she was of their sister their dead sister whoa okay listen she like definitely went above and beyond for the sake of like fulfilling this like this desire of like getting close to the to the boys but she also like really shot herself in the foot by thinking like if i impersonate your sister i have a chance that's what i'm saying like they're not gonna be i mean i hope not super too close to the sun that little tiny bit but so uh anyway many people theorize that she this was literally just a giant you know teenager scan a scam to uh get close to boys it is like brava brava nice to know that in the 1870s this shit was nothing has changed no imagine if she

had like a tumblr or a zanga oh my god uh the angst though i would feel the angst radiating she would love fall out boy oh yeah so uh anyway there have been two movie adaptations of this in 1996 there was a lifetime movie called buried secrets and in 2009 the siffy network um has a movie called the possessed that came out um apparently as of recent years a man named john whitman has been restoring the roth house um and apparently his him and some of the previous owners have also they've experienced some things they just can't explain in that house including voices strange recordings people have conducted seances there so they think it could just be residual from that but apparently in the town of watsika it is an urban legend now

that it is a demonic haunted house. And it's kind of customary for teenagers to try to knock on the door and wander around there. Anyway, that's the Watsika wonder. I had never heard of that in my whole darn life. Me either. My whole darn life. Or in my whole darn afterlife. Or in Mary's afterlife.

Or in any husk I've ever inhabited. None of them. Not a one of them not a one of them well thank you that was very entertaining now i have a story now i'm ready to be bummed out yeah now sorry that you were having a good time because you're no longer going to be okay let me wetten my whistle before i throw some commentary on you. Did you say wetten your whistle? Yeah. Is that another thing? Wet your whistle?

Wetten? Oh, I hear what you're saying. Just like the last episode with Anonymous, I got minimum, bare minimum sleep last night. So things coming out of my mouth are not things I'll remember before the cheesecake. Great. Well, you try to make sure I'm explaining this well, because it's really a lot. It's my whole I'm going to focus all my energy on this. And then there will be cheesecake. I'll dangle that in front of you.

You don't think that's not the reward here? Like, come on now. Okay. Today, I'm covering the death of Kendrick Johnson. Okay. And this has become this is an extremely controversial case, which is why I'm I'm very nervous about covering this one just because I want to do it justice and because there are so many different takes that people have had i like i'll just list the podcasts i've listened to this story on um crime junkie morbid my favorite murder and true crime garage all of them covered this all had a different take like slightly different or extremely different um christine by the way like the whole way here because now that she's

here we can like sit in a car together carpool and um but we the whole way here and yesterday when you surprised me the whole time has been like i'm so nervous i like i have a stomach ache over it i'm like so nervous because it's such a like important case and i don't want to drop the ball okay if that makes sense i think we can trust your research. But I hope just so you know, this is not we're not taking this lightly. She has made it very clear to me that like, this is a little nerve wracking as a as a presenter of research. Yeah, just because you know, it's really I can't really land on where I stand.

Exactly. And people have very Is that common? A lot of people don't know. There are just two sides that are like extremely like there are strong cases for both sides whether this was a an axe a tragic accident or a homicide okay and um people have very strong opinions about it so i think me being kind of in the middle i'm a little bit nervous because i'm like you don't want people to be mad

that you aren't swayed on one or the other yeah and i and i also feel like being on one side or the other would have the same effect i mean you can't win yeah that's that's just what sucks about this but that's okay i'm not used to winning don't worry um so anyway this is the death of kendrick johnson and this the reason i'm covering this now is i've known about it for a long time but this has kind of come into like back into the the media sphere because um because of all the demonstrations and black lives matter that's been going on um this case kind of has come back to light um it's being reinvestigated i don't know if it's being reinvestigated but it's being like looked at again um and so a lot of people have been like tons of people have been requesting this so here we go nothing okay january 10th so this takes place in 2013 okay in a place called

valdosta georgia and it's in a county called lounds county now i went and looked up lounds county um i just typed it in on google and I'm just going to read to you the first headlines that came up. So I just want to give you a little backdrop for what happened when I Googled the town. So the top headline said, perfect storm for when COVID hits. Neglected black communities in Alabama and Georgia see coronavirus surge. and georgia see coronavirus surge um and loudon county uh was among 19 historically black counties with rates of covid19 that were three times higher than average and according to nbc news this has caused obviously high unemployment rates uh poverty lack of access to basic things like medicine and even sewage and like that kind of thing um and it has all been exacerbated by the pandemic so

in that area right now it's obviously things are not looking good. Sure. Okay. And then on the other side, you know how we had that pandemic, then we all forgot about it and went on to the new pandemic, arguably. Now this one,

the second headline was basically an extremely blatantly racist remark made by the Lowndes County supervisor, Harry Sanders, who this Tuesday, so like two days ago, said after a three to two vote, so there was a three to two vote to relocate a Confederate statue to the local cemetery

and it failed. So three people, they outvoted the people who wanted to move this statue. And he told the commercial dispatch that, I'm just relaying the news here, folks, is what he said. Black people are dependent on society because they were taken care of during slavery. He said, quote, In my opinion, they were slaves. And because of that, they didn't have to go out and earn any money.

They didn't have to do anything. Whoever owned them took care of them, fed them, clothed them. Okay, work them. They became dependent and that dependency is still there the democrats right here who depend on the black vote to get elected they make them dependent on them holy that was literally this week 48 hours ago someone said that with their fucking chest and here we are just living life yep um so that was this county i'm just trying to give a back i'm sorry i'm like nervous i know like about to nervous laugh because this county. I'm just trying to give a back. I'm sorry. I'm like nervous. I know. Like about to nervous.

This is why I'm so overwhelmed by the story. It's impossible for me to believe that someone actually thinks that's okay to say publicly, let alone think it privately. I'm not shocked that someone thinks it's okay to say that. It just blows my mind that there are people out there who. It just hurts every time. Like it doesn't. It just.

Yeah. It just is. Wow. Okay. So those are the two. Starting real fucking starting real fucking literally this week the two big headlines and i just want to say that to give like a background because a lot of people were trying to explain the area and stuff and the history of the area but i feel like what what what who said that uh the lounges county supervisor harry sanders okay so if you know him give him a piece of our mind please stop being friends yeah that's a good point and that was from the clarion clarion clarion ledger um

just to give credit there uh so that's a little backdrop fun fact just swept me off my goddamn feet okay i'm awake now okay by the way good morning and it's just gonna get worse okay so january 10th uh in valdosta lowndes county georgia 17 year old kendrick johnson also known as kj he leaves his lowndes county high school class at 1 25 p.m when the bell rang this is like a little mini timeline to start off the story he's seen by various students and security footage heading towards the old gym so this high school has like an old gym and a new gym and both are used for different purposes he's heading to the old gym and a video time stamped at 127 shows kendrick entering the hallway to the old gym and a minute later he does he enters the gym and he proceeds out of the security camera's view oh i think okay i think i saw this is this

has this been trending on twitter this video okay i saw the video and didn't know what was going on okay well the video actually becomes like a main point of contention also so that's interesting i didn't i was i was swiping in like the middle of the night and i saw like a gym okay this is really fucked up but i saw like a random gym video and i was like oh it's probably like a basketball yeah because it looks like a basketball court right yeah yeah it's just like an old school gym i just thought it was like some like random like athlete video and i skimmed past it wow i'm an asshole no i mean it's go educate we're very overloaded these days on like the news stories and it just looked so different than all the demonstrations so i like didn't even look at

the video yeah it's most likely that's what this is i see um it was like a capture of him well i'll tell y you all you need to know don't you worry my excellent i'll revert back to that twitter and i see okay tell you the whole story but finally i kind of know what you're talking like i know a story like you have a context for it yeah it's definitely been huge on twitter and that's actually part of the reason that it's kind of back in the limelight um for lack of a better term okay so uh he's caught on camera um and that's kind of the last time he's noticed on any security camera uh a few minutes later three students enter the old gym and they head in the opposite direction and at 145 so he had left his class at 125 at 145 he is noted as absent from his

weight training class and at 4 30 uh the basketball team is in the old gym. They have a full practice. Everything goes as normal. However, Kendrick does not arrive home that night. He was supposed to go to the basketball game and come home afterward. And his mom, Jacqueline, or Jackie, and his dad, Kenneth Johnson, are like, something's wrong. And when they first talked to um authorities they're like well you know he's a teenager like he might after the basketball game maybe he went out with a friend

and so you know that's a very typical response because most of the time that is what happened like a teenager doesn't call home or whatever i mean i've done it yeah exactly exactly oh my god yeah we've done this i will say this story really did remind me of some of the stupid shit i did like not even that dumb but just like not intentionally dumb even but just like oh god like i'm very lucky that things there are so many times i've thought about like and this obviously has nothing to do with this particular story but there are so many times that like you know in high school i never necessarily snuck out but like i definitely like didn't go where i said i was like disregard yeah exactly i mean and i was just so lucky

and like that i thought like oh what could happen and then like exactly and that's why this case brings that up too because you're like people are like well that wouldn't happen it's like that like teenagers do dumb shit whether they're doing it on purpose or not i did so many dumb things me too and not even like bad like it wasn't like oh i'm i was using drugs it was like oh i like uh walked alone to the cvs to buy candy at two in the morning like not the smartest move but it in my head i was like what could possibly be candy like exactly yeah so just things like that where you're like oh god like the number of times things could have gone wrong and thankfully didn't. We're going to be really anxious parents someday.

I think. On the ghost side. I was raped by Linda. It's already happening with Allison. Every time she's not near me, I'm like, where, where are you? Meanwhile,

you're like, where's Christine? And I'm literally in a box, like at your feet. I need to start like divvying up my priorities instead of them all focused on like, like one or two people right now it's allison and my mom i'm like where are you and with you it's like she could be on the goddamn moon who the hell knows i could be anywhere she could literally be in a box

that i'm currently kicking and calling heavy as shit this is heavy as furniture m says i i wish there was a camera a small stool is still furniture Christine that's how I wish you were like trash bin you were like Eva did you carry this like did you have to help Alexander carry this in the apartment she's like yes we had two people carry it was so close to not having to lie anymore she was like whatever it takes to open the goddamn lid that's what I was thinking too by the way anyway so Jackie and Kenneth talked to authorities and they're like, well, you know, he's probably just out. And they're like, no, no, no, this isn't like him. He would have told us if he was going out with a friend. And the next morning, Jackie goes to Lowndes

High School and he still has not returned home overnight. So she's like, something's clearly wrong now. And so that's on the 11th. She goes to the high school. She reports her son is missing to the staff. And one to the high school she reports her son is missing to the staff and one of the staff members starts helping her print flyers they're like we need to get his face out there and like um get the message out so this is basically the beginning of when this case begins starts to be like woefully mishandled to the point that it's just like infuriating total negligence just like a lot yeah just a lot of like come on you know okay this just wasn't handled properly so first someone comes rushing in and

uh kj's mom is doing these flyers with a staff member and someone else comes rushing in and she who's not supposed to hear this hears the person say a body was just found in the gym and the school's on lockdown. And so, of course, she, Jackie, like her heart sinks into her stomach probably. And she's like, oh, my God, that must be my son. Like he's missing. And they found a body in the gym. So what had happened is 1030 a.m. So that was a little more than 21 hours after Kendrick was last seen entering the gym.

Two students, so they had, okay, you know wrestling mats, those really thick ones? So they had these wrestling mats that were usually horizontal, and they had just had winter break, and over winter break, the school had cleaned up the gym and had put the mat mats up upright so like vertical now they were stored in a corner and um they're about six feet tall when they're vertical and rolled up and they have a 14 inch like diameter hole in the center when they're rolled up okay so that's like the open numbers again sorry yeah so they're when they're rolled up and put on their side against the wall basically they're six feet tall and they have a 14 inch hole okay in the middle where like the you know it's been rolled up and like i said

they're usually oh sorry like i said they're usually horizontal now they've been put up vertical to like clean up and um at this school the the school charges students to use lockers like you need to which okay what the actual hell is that about first of all that seems like really i mean maybe that's like i don't understand i've never lived that i can't but i can't imagine that that would even be why are you charging people to use the facilities like their children like they need to put their their textbooks somewhere and not get stolen so they have to have books but they can't just put them somewhere they also have to pay for the books and pay for them okay that's weird right okay maybe i just don't know anything about that but it sounds real off it sounds not

yeah it doesn't sound fair to someone who didn't have to do that no exactly and so i mean that being said they students would often use these mats with a 14 inch hole to hide their stuff in there fair i would do that too oh one million percent and so like you would just stick like your uh gym clothes or your water bottle whatever you throw a goddamn kit kat in there throw a kit kat in there exactly thank you um and so that's what they would use them for and i was like okay that makes sense i would definitely do that yeah why would you hide thing like i hid my stuff in all sorts of weird places and i didn't have to pay for a locker i was just lazy like that was literally the end of it um so anyway the the mats are up and one of the students is kind of on these they're not real bleachers they're like two layer bleachers like like just really dinky like you can pick them

up they're like metal bleachers but they're only two levels and one of the uh students is kind of standing up and she looks over at the mats and she notices that one of them has something white sticking out of it okay and she leans over to look and it's a sock and the sock is attached to a foot and the foot is attached to a body correct okay and it's not a disembodied foot which i know you also don't like i mean no matter what i don't like that there's a person alive or dead hiding in that thing yes so there's a person inside the mat they call for the teacher and one of the students calls 9-1-1 while the other student and the teacher push so it's in the back of these mats. They push the other mats out of the way, pull that one down, and they find the body of Kendrick inside this mat.

Wow. Okay. So very intentionally hidden. He's in there. Yeah. You couldn't see him from just standing on the floor of the mat. So not knowing anymore, and this is like nothing against your research skills, but my perception as a listener right now is that it sounds like a homicide right because it's it was there was clearly an intent to hide this dead body right of like sticking it all the way in the

back and covering it up with more mats right okay so that's right so that it's one of these weird cases where on the surface you're like well obviously this is a homicide and then when you get way more into the details you're like there's like doubts that kind of pop up. Really? Okay. Yeah. So they pull it down. They reveal the body of Kendrick. His arm is outstretched inside the mat.

And there's a pool of blood drying on the floor beneath where the mat was. Where was the blood coming from? I will tell you. Okay. It's not great. But I'll tell you. No area is good. No area is good. There are other places other places that are specifically it's not leeches on your forehead it's much worse than that gotcha okay um so the teacher starts to pull kendrick out of the mat but he's like no this

student is dead i'm gonna stop touching it and call call 911 right i don't want to touch it yeah yeah it's like nothing you can do he was like like going to save them, but then he's like, you know, this is too late. So, um, the school is placed on lockdown and on January 11th, 2013, Kendrick Johnson is pronounced dead. Now I'm going to just tell you a little bit about Kendrick.

Um, he was born October 10th, 1995 to Kenneth and Jackie. He was always described as kind of a quiet and well-mannered, um, kid when he met new people, but he was like a jokester among his friends and family he was really talented athletic athletically and academically apparently he really loved math which I was like Jesus who loves math but okay that's immediately an

upstanding character I like see gold stars I know like oh my god he played for the Lowndes County high school football and basketball teams and his Mark, said that after high school, Kendrick wanted to go to college and play professional football. And this actually wasn't even a far reach. Like, it might sound like a pipe dream to some people, but he was extremely talented. And Valdosta is actually the hometown of at least 15 NFL players over the last 30 years. So something's in the water at this point. Holy crap. Besides, you you know a racist

supervisor but right something else is going on um just get you into football and the athletic prowess please just avoid all the horrible things going on around you yeah so um uh so Lowndes County High School's program is considered among the top in the country so it was actually you know a legitimate goal for him to have um so the old gym was taped up as a crime scene obviously to secure any evidence um i will say okay well so according to the sheriff whose name will come up um a few times his name is chris prine um according to him any location of a deceased individual with no apparent medical condition is deemed a crime scene essentially so if you find a body

we don't know what happened automatically this is a crime scene which is fair totally um unfortunately was not necessarily treated quite as much as it should be as why would it scene why would it though why would it why would it though really in this day and age um and then the sheriff also stated that the you know it did appear that there had been evidence you know moved around and whatever but most of that was done when they discovered the students discovered kendrick pulled him down not knowing yet you know this is a crime scene they had already obviously they messed with things not knowing what they were doing trying to help you know so that was cordoned off um so here's kind of, again, the mat is six feet.

Kendrick was five foot 11. He was positioned head first down the center of the rolled up vertical tumbling mat. Head first. Okay. One arm was like this reaching and the other one was up by his side. Okay. And he had headphones wrapped around his hand his there's a okay this is just it just starts to get so wacky and weird um there's a pair of

sneakers i'm actually going to show you you got you guys can google these pictures i don't want to put some of these photos on the video because they're extremely graphic some of them and i don't want anyone to accidentally watch this or have a kid watch this if you they're extremely graphic some of them and i don't want anyone to accidentally watch this or have a kid watch this if you they're i will say too this is important the family themselves released these photos so they're comfortable with people viewing them this well they probably want people to see what happened to their kid exactly and so like if you want to google it like it is pretty gruesome some of it but it definitely gives you a better idea of what happened so i mean i guess first i'll just show you a picture of kendrick the the printer i think

was a little wonky handsome looking dude he was a very handsome looking dude and wait so he's handsome an athlete and likes math goodbye i know i know and so that's him ah shit i'm trying to find okay so it's hard to see but there his body was found in the mat see i see and his feet are sticking out so that's what the the sock is what the girl had seen and now do you see these sneakers yeah random pair of sneakers kind of wedged next to his legs covered in blood no that's sorry that's just the color of the um the shoe oh sorry yeah there's no blood yeah yeah yeah there's no blood there um but so there's but so he's wearing shoes when you look in you just see his socks his feet with socks one of the socks like partially off and a pair of sneakers kind of wedged next to his and they're not his or they are his i you know i don't know i

think they are his i mean okay so here's the thing because i would think it sounds like if this were a murder someone wrapped him up and then realized you could still see his shoes and so they like just took them off and shoved them in there someone tossed the shoes in after after him yeah right yeah yeah so that's definitely the first thought that people had um my my like question about this is if if he was wedged in this mat and his feet were kind of sticking out and he was like trying to get out i can see being able to kick your own shoes getting taken off yeah and his sock was halfway off like i can see how that maybe he was struggling to climb out of right yes okay stuck so that's my personal view of it.

It looks like it could be either, honestly. Yeah. And so that's why this whole case is like, well. You know, sign one that there's a little confusion. Yeah. It just gets more and more confusing. And so to clarify, I don't know if this is even clear yet. Basically, the theory is that Kendrick was going to get his shoes that he had in this mat and had reached and had gotten stuck in the mat. You know how I was saying students hide stuff in the mat to keep them.

Yes. And the mats are usually horizontal. He like kind of dove on. Oh. And now they're vertical. I see. And I'll give more detail on that. i see and i'll give more detail on that but that's essentially where the confusion lies of like was this a freak accident or was this someone put the body there it really could have been just a freak

accident right it also really could have been a murder yes but exactly i see and it's really such a drastic difference of situations and the fact that the case was mishandled makes it so much more of a conspiracy quote-unquote or at least makes it more of a viable option to a lot of people because it's like well things didn't get handled right so right um so again he's kind of turned like this with his arm out um now i have this is the graphic photo would you like to see it would you like to see it sure okay it's it's it's pretty gruesome it's of um his face and what was wrong with the face is very bloated and disfigured because he was upside down and blood was pooling yes so just a okay it's really graphic but and also the

printer the color made it really wild but there's um at the bottom here wow it doesn't even look like a face no it's really and like seeing him like there's his mouth it's hard to see but like you know all i think of is the poor parents yes exactly and like from the beginning they were in such a bad position because she's in the you know student teacher lounge or teacher lounge or whatever and she hears someone say there's a body in the gym like that's how she finds out her son is dead you know like and then that's what and then to go check like it's still it's pretty unrecognizable yes yeah they literally said it looked nothing like him it looked i can confirm and this was a day after he had been last

seen so it's upside down that whole time i mean like think about being upside down for five seconds exactly and so that's okay there's more like sciencey explanation later but just to give you an idea of like what they found when they pulled his body out that's what it was now this is strange too so there was a sneaker found so he has a sneakers wedge behind his legs there's also a sneaker found kind of underneath where the mat was on the floor with a on top of a pool of blood what there's a sneaker on top of a pool of blood like presumably the one he was reaching for uh-huh but there's no blood on the sneaker uh-huh so it's like on top of the blood right but there's no that makes me think again that it's a murder yeah so then but then god damn it but then part of me is like well how would that even happen in

a murder like i guess i imagine that like there was i don't know actually i don't know because then i'm like but then who would say it's just such a weird strange thing and i mean i guess like it feels like the shoes were a secondary situation aside from it so it feels like he died and then the shoes kind of got tossed in there yeah well these shoes were the ones that were like underneath where he was reaching for the pair of shoes above him were there were two pairs of shoes to be clear oh my god which again is confusing because it's like well if he was wearing shoes and then why are there other random shoes but it's for his gym class maybe like he needed a certain pair of shoes for gym versus basketball versus football who knows um it's just there's so many questions that

weren't answered or weren't like properly investigated yeah right away okay sorry i know i'm all over the place um no so there's no blood on the sneaker and in addition to the sneaker in a pool of blood on the floor of the gym blood is also discovered on a sweatshirt a sneaker and another sneaker oh yeah one of the okay i'll just preface this right now one of the sneakers they thought had blood turned out to be paint so that the sneaker with blood was kind of a red herring red herring correct literally literally okay but there was blood on the uh wall of the gym and in a trash can on some tissues in the bathroom huh so he had a sweatshirt there as well that seemed to have some blood on it but instead of taking that into evidence they just like gave that back to his family they're like here's a sweatshirt by the way

and i'm like that could have been such important evidence there's blood on that like what are you doing it sounds like that john mulaney bit of like like cops at like cops before dna timing like there's a pool of blood over there gross mop it up back to my hunch yes exactly like there's literally a sweatshirt in this crime scene that they were so intent on naming a crime scene and then they just like hand the hoodie back to his family and they're like here you go and they give the parents ever try to give it back and be like can you investigate well at that point it's already been you know contaminated um so they never collect it never test it they do test the blood on the wall and it is not kendrick's dna interesting however they never tested against

anyone else so it could very well so stupid yeah so it could be an assailant or like someone who you fought with who knows but it's they never test it they're just like oh well it's not kendrick's anyway but the blood in the bathroom trash can it turns out a girl had been a color guard practice and had gotten hit in the nose and had a nosebleed so that was pretty much explained the tissues in the bathroom okay but not the wall not the wall but part of me the people who did look at the blood on the wall it was like a smear or something and like it's just kind of an old decrepit gym and like right who knows i mean it could just be an old they thought it was just like an old

stain left there from which obviously is staying foul but like it's a gym it's a high school gym i'm like i don't know how clean that place is i don't know if it was behind those mats like who knows if anyone's clean back there so i don't necessarily think that like it even necessarily but they still as it should have looked into it we shouldn't be saying it may not have anything we should be saying like oh no this was verified as so-and-so's blood and was not involved like we should be that sure and we're not um so again they did uh test the blood in the bathroom and it was uh it did come from a female so they were able to kind of rule out that that was his also um now against protocol again um which states that the county coroner must be summoned immediately in cases of sudden violent

or unexplained death lounge county coroner bill watson was not notified until six hours after the body was discovered which why bad so bad so that was not good um a friend of kendrick's who in the paper and we also have to remember these kids are all minors so that makes it so much more complicated you can't just like test people's blood or like look at you know release video footage because they're children so it's like it adds a whole layer of complication to this whole thing but so oh my god i want to make sure my photo isn't just like in the camera. A friend of Kendrick's who's labeled student C in the case files tells investigators that he and Kendrick shared basketball shoes and that they stored them in the mat to avoid

locker fees. So that could be the second pair of shoes? So that is believed to be the shoes that he was trying to get to. Believed? Couldn't they just ask the guy like, are these your shoes? No, they were. He said these were mine and kendrick's shoes um and so presumably that's kind of what was if this was a freak accident he was trying to reach the shoes that were a couple feet or whatever down into this mat um that was usually horizontal and was now vertical right um and so another student corroborated this like yes kendrick and

this other student share those shoes and those are his basketball shoes so that would explain why he was getting a different pair of shoes um from inside the mat on january 14 2013 before even getting the official coroner's report in weeks before any dna results came back sheriff prine concluded that kendrick's death had been accidental so pretty much immediately he was like this was an accident and that kind of set the tone for the whole thing because it was like there's so much unanswered they didn't even get the coroner's report back they didn't even try they didn't even have dna yet so like it just was like jumping the gun so quickly to say it was an accident so that's part of the problem too and their theory is that

prior to christmas break students were asked to roll up the mats put them in the corner with the others his shoes were in there this pushed the mat with kendrickson students see students sees sneakers to the back where the other mats were now in front of it unable to tilt the mat and get the sneakers um he thought he could just climb up and grab he climbed on top tried to reach down and slipped into the mat causing him to asphyxiate and causing him to asphyxiate now a lot of people at this point say well that's impossible because there's many reasons people say it's impossible which is a i've heard people say who is stupid enough to do that again he couldn't get the mat down a lot of people say why wouldn't you just knock it down

there were a ton of mats it was in the back i mean it makes sense to me it sounds especially as a teenager like you're like i can reach it yeah and you're like whatever i don't need to get help i can reach it it's like when you're like you're a teenager and like yeah you could probably scoot past people in the movie theater or can you climb over the chair yes like climbing over chairs or like even like why not just saying like i could probably walk down the stairs but i'm gonna jump from this ledge exactly one just to see there's just another thing like that and so it's really i would have done that like if me too and that's why every time i listen to these shows and people were like who would do that i'm like i would for sure would have done that i absolutely would i would have done that for sure

i probably have i've probably done something equally stupid i mean how many times have you like dropped your phone charger behind your couch and instead of moving the fucking couch you like throw your god i start like climbing down it exactly so if he and and again people say why didn't he knock it over because there were these mats are heavy they're like those wrestling mats yeah it's not like you can just tip it over it's like you need to hoist it down he really didn't have a really much of a choice no unless he had someone there to help him to help move all these no it's taken forever and then put them all back exactly and just climb in the there it was in the back like behind a bunch of others so he would have had to

take them all down and he's an athlete he probably thought i'm strong enough to pull myself yes exactly something happens and he probably would have been and then some people say well the opening's 14 inches his shoulders are i think either 17. Yeah, he sounds like a broad dude. Yes, and he was. But again, if you put one arm and you reach down, you can angle yourself to fit in a smaller space. So that would explain that. And I know a lot of people probably are not happy

with me countering these, but this is just where it gets complicated. I mean, that's a valid... If I didn't know that the other option was there was like a homicide that story is easily explained yeah like you can explain it away exactly and also like given the um the town that you yeah you know the way you described it earlier it sounds like it sounds like it's a town where people probably didn't really want to investigate something like that

and could have easily just come up with that story to cause an accident yeah and yeah and i think the fact that became part of the huge conspiracy exactly they just explained it away because they didn't want to investigate yeah and it wasn't thoroughly looked at which even if it was an accident it deserves to be explained like the parents deserve to understand what what the hell happened yeah even if it's an accident they deserve to know what kind of accident and like yeah and to be sure that it's an accident like if you're saying it's an accident like prove that it's an accident but i do understand that argument they're like back and forth of it yeah so that's where i stand a little bit of like well you know i would have done something dumb like that and so what would have happened is he would have put his arm down to grab the sneaker, like either gone too far and like tipped in or or somehow wedged himself in.

But the problem was he would have blocked off oxygen because he's so broad. You know, if he got stuck like that and slid or something, you know, he would have gotten stuck and he did asphyxiate you know if no oxygen in there right um and also you're so broad you're blocking any other oxygen yes you're just kind of blocking it and then a lot of people say well why didn't he scream for help picture being in the back of all of these mats in an empty gym in an empty gym no one's gonna hear you people came like 15 minutes later but even the a like maybe he had already asphyxiated by then. B, if you're in this mat, surrounded by other mats, these are, again, these are like thick ass mats. Also, let's like argue that like if you're down inside in the back of really thick ass mats, like that's soundproof.

Well, yeah, you don't even know if other people are there. Yeah. And like the opening is 14 inches, but like the whole mat is much bigger and there's a ton of them and if you don't have oxygen how are you even screaming to get right help so like and if you're choking i just right and i just feel like a little bit you know it's to me i'm like it does it does make sense and like people say why wouldn't he have done i'm sure he did i'm sure he did try to scream if this was an accident. I'm sure he would have.

We're talking a lot about this side of the argument. Yeah. But we don't, that doesn't mean that we necessarily agree that this is definitely what happened. It's just, this is one side of an argument that does have some good points. I think it's a valid, I think it's a valid side to the case. And I know, I mean mean you'll see later where other people stand um but I guess I've just been a little frustrated listening to some versions where I'm like but it it really is possible I really think it's possible and I think it's not

impossible because I remember how stupid I was exactly and like not to say that he's like stupid for doing this but like just making like random choices of like oh i'm gonna stick my hand down there yes you know i can reach it yeah yeah exactly so i know okay i'm glad that you understand where where i'm a little bit like no we don't want to offend anybody or anybody's opinion we're just trying to give i'm really not side to the story ample time and both sides have very very strong like have very strong supporters and proponents. So I know either way, people are going to be on their side or who knows. But I'm just trying to see all points.

So even if he tried to wiggle the mat horizontal, the position of all the other mats would have prevented it from tipping over. Right, it's stuck in there. It's stuck there. The padding would have muffled his cries for help. So I showed you the facial disfigurement and swelling yeah so there was blood and vomit also and what would have happened is that the position of body like you said was upside down and if you're hung upside

down that long blood begins to come out of your orifices so eyes nose mouth um and the fluids would have pooled uh in his head and then eventually leaked which is such a bad word um yeah you know we said skin slippage which again happens in this too later oh yikes uh oh it happens right now um okay so part of the disfigurement of his face was actually due to the autopsy. Because when they cut your scalp, it kind of moves where your skin is. Right. And Elena, who's an autopsy tech, explained that in the Morbid episode where she was like, you know, that's just how this, that's probably why that would have happened. Like part of the, I don't want to like misquote her just in case. But that's part of the reason don't want to like misquote her just in case but that's part

of the reason that his face looks like that because they cut his head open is that i think the scalp gets cut and it like skin peel slippage like yeah i know it's a terrible word sorry i it's it's not fun um but also a huge part of the facial swelling is because he was upside down if that makes sense and bleeding you know so anyway it's all bad it's all so bad that's i'm having a hard time wrapping my head around like every horrible ankle i know i know and this is like all i've thought about for four days straight now so i'm like no wonder you've like glad to get it off my chest you've made decisions like fly across country and hide in boxes. You're like, this is all I'm capable of. I'm just going to go in this box for a few hours. The following day, the forensic pathologist from Valdosta Lounge Regional Crime Lab turns over their report to the sheriff.

And again, the sheriff had already made the conclusion that this was an accident. Now the coroner's like, or the forensic pathologist is like, okay, here's my report and it does support the sheriff's conclusion that kendrick died from something called positional asphyxia and that there were no signs of trauma to the body so positional asphyxia is kind of like this weird cover-all term it's very rare it just basically means like you asphyxiate from i guess position a position yes literally yeah yeah yeah that checks out with positional yeah i think it's like if your head is turned a certain way and you block oxygen or you're upside down i guess um so at this point jackie and kenneth uh kj's parents are believe their son was murdered i mean

i don't blame them after all of this there's like barely you know within a day they're like i mean like we just took a lot of time to like explain that like the valid points of that argument but there's still a lot of holes to that argument and picture not even like being told there's being told like oh he was found in this mat anyway it was an accident here's his hoodie it's like yeah like when you have questions yeah it's like so dismissed blood is on the goddamn wall yeah well that too exactly so so anyway they believe their son was murdered. Their suspicions began prior to the actual investigation because Kendrick was black. Everyone investigating was white. And obviously that doesn't inherently mean anything. But to his parents, they were like, is this why now when the case starts to be dismissed a little bit?

They're like, well, that probably has something to do with it. a little bit right they're like well that probably has something to do with it um and so on january 16 2013 a vigil is held at a park in valdosta and a civil rights organization called the southern christian leadership conference or the sclc and the naacp step up to help the family and they launch their own investigation good yeah so they're like you know what we'll we'll support you we're gonna look into this on our own with our resources so that's great um the family gets an attorney who suggests that you know had kendrickman white the case may have been handled differently i fully i'm on board with that theory i think if this were like now i'm just quoting all these different podcasters but karen from

my favorite murder said like if this were you know a blonde cheerleader who's found upside down yeah you know or what have you we could probably sense that this may have been a little more looked into than no thousand percent kendrick so in any case um they also request the georgia bureau of investigation gbi or that the fbi take over the case and at a rally in april um to demand justice for kendrick jackie and kenneth block the entrance to the lounge county courthouse and they are arrested and found guilty of a misdemeanor so this is just like they're already in this like battle with law enforcement they are holding a rally and they're arrested which now this is ringing very similar to things going on today um and then in mid-April, this is interesting,

the coroner, whose name is Bill Watson, he steps out and he's like, hey, I have some misgivings about how this was handled. And he says, according to CNN, he slammed the handling of the case by the Lownes County Sheriff's Department. And his issues included waiting six hours to notify him which yeah that's no good I mean when the coroner himself is like what's going yeah the

coroner's like why didn't you tell me sooner right right what were you doing for six hours not investigating not telling me yeah uh moving the body prior to the coroner's arrival that was his other issue and then finally evidence was tainted when kenneth uh kendrick's dad was there kenneth and they unzipped the body bag to show kenneth his son like before he was even taken from the scene which i'm like when he looked like that picture too like and that's actually where the picture comes from ken like has that photo from... Oh my God. In any case, he was like, this was all wrong. And obviously you can't just unzip a body bag before taking it away.

You're tainting evidence. There's more people around. You can't do that. You just got to take it, preserve it, bring it to the coroner, let him handle it. He was not happy with the way things were handled. On May 2ndnd after the official ruling of accidental death and the closure of kendrick's case a march was held in front of the high school and the official ruling um even though bill watson said he had doubts his uh conclusion that this was

positional asphyxiation was included in the final ruling. And at the request of KJ's parents, the Johnsons, the official report was finally released in mid-May of 2013. And despite contradictions between the paramedics report and the crime scene reports that have now been released, and there's like iffy, iffiness on like the there's just contradictions. iffiness on like the there's just contradictions um the school wouldn't release their surveillance video because they're like well there's surveillance cameras in the gym we want them now obviously that sounds very sketchy but again these are minors like these are children and so the school probably is in a weird position of like we can't just give away publicly these videos of our students. Like, there's, I think that there's partially that reason to blame as well for why they were hesitant to give up the video footage. However, the video footage becomes a huge controversy. The thing on Twitter. Yeah, probably.

Okay. Is it a person in a white shirt and a person in a yellow shirt? Oh, no, it's just one part it's just kendrick oh maybe i never saw what if you were just watching a basketball game i really was just watching like wow espn's got some crazy conspiracies going on right now 30 for 30 uh okay um let me just okay what am i gonna say now okay what am i gonna say now that i have no that's the constant in my brain that's literally everyone's constant when they listen to this podcast what are they gonna say now what what roller coaster ride are we on today hey big secret we have no idea we don't even know it's just gonna

come out it's the michael scott thing where he's like sometimes i just talk and i find the end of the sentence on the way exactly exactly so um at this point that the johnsons retain the services of a noted civil rights attorney named benjamin crump and they they released the photo of kendrick's face to the public in an effort to be like pay attention to this case it's not getting enough attention it is and it it worked um the public was outraged there was a little bit of confusion because the photo looks like he's been beaten and so people assumed like this this child was beaten you know and it's being dismissed because of his race however you know even the johnson said like yeah we know that his face wasn't swollen from the beatings this is right from the scenario that he was in exactly

so um the public is outraged rightfully so and uh on june 6 2013 a judge granted the johnson's permission to exhume kendrick's body for examination by an independent pathologist so they were like we want to look at this again um from a new angle so this guy named dr william anderson is hired to perform the second autopsy and um on september 3rd the johnsons through their attorney released the results of the autopsy anderson had concluded that kendrick had died of unexplained apparent non-accidental blunt force trauma to the neck what he had found a one inch bruise on kendrick's neck as well as some soft tissue damage and so this is just like upside down like turn right it's upside down this new guy is saying like no it was not asphyxiation he was so this is an ignorant question because and i

don't think you can answer it either because neither of us are pathologists well because neither of us are pathologists but like how does a bruise last that long how like how long have you been buried like nine months yeah how i not that like i guess when your body's dead it's not healing itself anymore but like there's a does a bruise from the last day you're around stick around that i imagine it would if the skin were damaged and the blood vessels were damaged maybe and it didn't it can't repair yeah i guess so i just blows my mind that you should see a scratch from like three years ago and it's like oh it's still there that's a really good question and there was soft tissue damage so that maybe was a signal too maybe um but yeah i don't know i'm not trying to i didn't think about that i wonder if it's like

your blood vessels can't repair last blaze later yeah blaze like i don't fucking, I'm not trying to discount that. I wonder if it's like your blood vessels can't repair. We'll ask Blaze later. Yeah, Blaze is like, I don't fucking know. I'm not a pathologist. So in any case, they're like, holy shit. So the Johnson family demands a homicide investigation based on the second autopsy. And they, the family and their attorneys, assert now that Kendrick was beaten to death in another location

by a classmate and his brother and they call out by name these two boys named brian and brendan bell oh my god and they say brian and brendan murdered like beat kendrick murdered him and then put his body in the mats in the mat after his death so holy shit the complicating factor among all the other complicating factors is that brian and brendan's dad was an fbi agent oh my god with the lowndes county sheriff's department oh no so now they're saying you know it was a cover-up it was a cover-up yeah and they literally are saying rick bell this this fbi agent this dad was trying to cover up his son's murder or so now it's this racially charged yes okay yeah i see exactly and that he's trying to cover up his own son's uh

crime true so the johnsons believe and this is what they allege that brian one of the boys and kendrick had had a recent fight on the bus and that brian and brendan were so angry they wanted revenge and therefore beat him now according to other students there had been a fight between brian and kendrick uh it was on the bus and like they said and it was basically it stemmed from yo mama jokes oh my god so i guess they were saying yo mama jokes and uh it got a little out of hand uh-huh and they got into like kind of a mini fight but it turns out that hadn't happened that was 18 months before okay and they were it was not it was not like a recent thing that happened right so that kind of was conveniently left out of like this assertion that like they had had a fight and he was angry because that

had happened 18 months before um but they had allegedly according to a lot of witnesses uh bermain friends were very much over it they had voluntarily paired up for a science project recently like it didn't seem like this was a long-lasting fight that right that like had you know impacted their friendship day to day however kendrick's parents are like no they weren't friends but then brian and brendan were like of course we were friends so it's it's like he said it's very hearsay yeah yeah so it's unclear i mean a lot of people said like of course they were pals but who knows you know i mean the the johnson say they didn't they didn't know about these boys and they weren't friends with her their son so they weren't like best friends but they could have been like acquaint good acquaintances at school or they could have been

or not yeah it's like so unclear because everyone has a different they knew each other that's what we know they did know each other everyone can agree they knew each other and had kind of a fight a year and a half yes before this happened yes okay exactly um so on october 10th the a judge finally orders the release of the school surveillance tapes. Okay. So that same day, the Johnson family and their attorneys reveal that the second autopsy also discovered that Kendrick's organs were missing from his body. Shut the fuck up. And had been replaced.

Is this a joke or is this real? With newspaper. What? It's just like it doesn't well i'm so i i'm not that's not funny i'm just like truly in shock what are you talking about okay that is a totally different that's a totally different crime someone harvested his organs no and no one noticed what's going well no notice so there's that but um no so essentially the funeral home had okay rewind help me help me oh my god so my god apparently it is an old okay currently if you remove organs for embalming you fill the body typically with cotton oh or sand sawdust okay however in

like the 70s potentially even later um oftentimes newspaper was used to fill to retain the shape of the body because you're taking all these organs out and you're collapsing on yourself basically so they use newspaper this is definitely an outdated practice it's definitely not illegal so it's like perfectly legal and people are like why would they use this outdated practice one of my thoughts which i've heard on other shows too is that this funeral home had offered free services to the family they were like you know what we want to do this for free maybe they were kind of cutting corners or like doing it not as modern and whatever as some places would do it do it the old school way um however so that part got explained a little bit

i literally just thought there was like a whole fucking but where are the organs okay i thought that's still an issue okay so we're i'm still kind of right here i'm like 100 right where did they go first of all his family is like hold on this is like also when did this happen was this like that was at the second autopsy when he was taken out of the ground like nine months later but in the first autopsy he had all of his organs so or do we think it happened and then like they took his organs they put him in the mat there's a lot of talk about well they signed up the funeral home signed off that they received the body with organs there is there's there's signature that they signed off to say we got the body with the organs in it is there an argument that that could have been forged so there's an argument that either i mean there's not wrong or

whatever but but what happened oh my god i know and so the funeral home they got they got misplaced at some point they got misplaced okay um or straight up stolen they said every organ from pelvis to skull was missing pelvis to skull i think they mean the organs between the pelvis and the skull every organ in between was missing right but like your brain heart lungs intestines and yeah god um the funeral home said now they never received them the gbi the georgia bureau of investigations whose crime lab conducted the first autopsy assert they sent the organs they later relent and admit that the organs were deemed to decompose through natural process and the pathologist bill watson had discarded them okay so now there's that legal it's so i don't think it's i don't know if i don't expect you to know that i don't know if it's illegal i think it's very

immoral or i don't know the right word like wouldn't you want to ask the parents exactly it's not fair to the family to not say by the way your son's missing his organs and we didn't tell you and also like he's completely deflated without newspaper and he's stuffed with newspaper like it's just like this body just sounds like his body just sounds like it was so disrespected in so many fucking ways and his family just keeps getting like re-traumatized like whether again in the end like whether this was an accident or a murder like this family is going through hell and back. It's just really traumatic. So they said, Kenneth, his dad, said, when we buried Kendrick, we thought we were burying Kendrick, not half of Kendrick.

So they were completely blown away by this news that he's missing his organs. And at first, there's this back and forth of like well who has them and then the path then the first guy bill um who ruled asphyxiation was like oh yeah i threw them i discarded them so you know it's just another thing that's like what you know and it could be just kind of a freak thing as part of the case but these all add up to like this whole case is just a mess on october 31st 2013 u.s attorney michael moore announced that there would be a federal investigation into kendrick johnson's death and the johnson's attorney requested a coroner's inquest to reclassify kendrick's cause of death from accidental to homicide based on the second autopsy so they're like let's re-look into this re-look that's not a word um let's like reinvestigate this and change the uh change it to a homicide um i also want to note i meant to say this earlier but i do want to note that the bell brothers um brandon and brian

brendan and brian um and their father have not ever been accused of a crime by law enforcement or prosecuted um just so i'm you know not incidental that well no so the family is saying like they did it but i want to be clear that like oh okay no law enforcement has said this they're not it's just their theory on what yeah so the johnsons are saying this i'm not saying this and i'm not saying that they were ever indicted for this or even tried for this got I don't want to be sued for slander. A lot of people get sued in this story. They have been accused of this crime by the Johnson family in multiple filings of the same lawsuit since 2015. And they ended up suing a lot of publications

for defamation. And they countersued the Johnson family for like the legal fees they had to pay and damages it's just like a lot of back and forth legal stuff so i want to give a disclaimer that the johnsons are the only ones like who've officially accused them of this crime so this request to reinstate this as a homicide is denied the governor opts to wait for the report from the federal investigation to make a final decision, the investigators. So this is where things where I was like surprised a little bit. Um,

so the SCLC, which is that civil rights organization, uh, the Southern Christian leadership conference who had stepped up with the NAACP to like do their own investigation. Right. So those investigators and the president of the local chapter closed their investigation and concluded that Kendrick's death was accidental and there was no cover up.

Okay. So this is their direct quote from the SCLC. Over 100 people would have to be lying and telling the same story for two years, risking the loss of their jobs, their retirement, jail time. I think the murder theory is not only false but also ridiculous and based only on wild speculation and outright fabrications and then they go on to say that the johnsons and their attorneys have quote not been entirely truthful in their statements so again these are the people that stepped up to like help and be on their side and now they're not not the statement i expected not at all and so now they're totally pulling out and they're like listen we don't think this was a murder we think

they're in the wrong and are going like way out on a limb here accusing all these people right driving their you know fees into the ground that kind of thing so they kind of step totally out of the picture and for three years between november 2013 and june 2016 the fbi conducts their own investigation under three different u.S. attorneys. And this is like a two and a half year to three year period. They investigate the Bell brothers. They investigate their parents, including the FBI agent. They conduct interviews.

They have witnesses testify at grand juries. and on november 2013 the johnson's attorney hold a press conference and they're like hey these surveillance tapes we have are doctored and cnn reports this too they say the tapes believed to be doctored and edited with missing time stamps and disappearing students like they just kind of cut out what however and when you watch it you can see that like suddenly the students there suddenly they're not okay however here's the explanation for that so the valdosta daily times did their own independent review of the surveillance tapes and say hey they weren't doctored they're just really crummy systems and essentially choppy choppy feeds so not quite i mean that too but uh essentially standard film rates are like you know

24 frames per second or 30 frames per second uh or even 60 for sporting events this one this camera was one frame per second so essentially if you walk through in a second you're only on there once because it just you know every second is a new frame and so it it looks like people are disappearing out of the frame but it's just such an outdated and the entire system seems to have been really not maintained and the time stamps were off and so there is an hour of footage missing that much is clear it is not clear if this is just because the system hasn't been properly maintained or if someone intentionally doctored it and this goes back into what the sclc was saying of like if this were doctored you know 100 people would have to be in on this and like lying and like

involved so again that's another one that's very controversial this piece of evidence because it's like yes the the video footage is not good right i mean this it doesn't it doesn't help no it does not help no help and um you know it's they're also like motion activated so like that could explain why there's missing time maybe they're not recording if nobody's in the frame right maybe it's not that i really believe it's motion censored but you know it is oh it was saying yeah okay it only if it says if there's certain number of pixels of movement then it'll start recording okay i know if like motion sensor was too high tech for like that it might be so but uh yeah exactly so it's like again this is one of those things where i'm like there's a seed of doubt you know where i'm like i don't know that it was doctored i mean

nobody really does unless the person who doctorate doctored it knows um and only one of the two servers that had surveillance in the school had accurate time stamps so the valdosta daily time staff and tech cross-referenced the recordings that lacked time stamps with those that did and actually did figure managed to match up the timeline exactly additionally only one of the service files could be opened by the family and the attorneys without like the actual software um so they only had a portion of it which again i argue they should be given all of it but whatever i think so too um the newspapers journalists and their independent tech experts concluded that the footage had not been tampered with okay so again we have a back and forth we have all these

independent people then we have cnn on the johnson family side so it's like i mean it talk about a headache it is a correct very very big headache um the footage also shows brendan bell in a classroom across campus at the time of kendrick's death okay so at least that one is so he has an alibi um that's pretty solid but if you're arguing well the tape is doctored then that goes out the window exactly so there's no there's no solid so frustrating verifying information right and brian for what it's worth also has an alibi he was on a bus to a wrestling meet 150 miles away he weighed in there and competed there so he was so he definitely has on that trip yes what so come on christine i know oh God. Okay, so the timeframe of the bus log was called into question. So the Johnsons and their attorney

came forward with a log and said, look, the bus did not leave until later in the day. We have proof by this log. Turns out this log was submitted at the beginning of the season months before and was like an estimate or like a request for when they would leave. So there's no rightful information on.

No, so there is. Oh, okay. Like the actual time and the wrestling meet itself was at 4 p.m. And that's corroborated. And even though this log says, oh, no, like they left way later. That was like a request months before or a guesstimate. And so that kind of just didn't work either. It's like, okay, it's proven that he was on this bus

to this match so yeah that's pretty much he does have an alibi so january of 2014 an investigation into the funeral home concludes and finds that um although you know it's not the best practice and there are other alternatives nothing the morticians really did was illegal so like they cut corners perhaps with the newspaper but like it wasn't illegal technically and then the following month um the johnsons filed a suit against the funeral home which i don't blame them for not telling them what was going on for not giving them real information um about their own son. In March 2014, CNN announced they had gotten an emailed anonymous tip sent to police via a Georgia Open Records act request.

The tipster said they overheard classmates talking about killing Kendrick. What? And law enforcement investigates this tip. The tipster is found and he admits he was lying. And he is indicted for lying to police i found these articles he's actually indicted for lying to police in 2015 but his mother states that her son is mentally ill and didn't really understand what he had done um and so this was a hoax essentially oh my god okay then in july of 2014 the johnson sued the school district um for failing for failing to investigate this fight on the bus 18 months prior uh-huh and the bell family meanwhile so

this is brendan and brian's family yeah they file a five million dollar defamation suit because against this website called ebony.com and its publishers and crime writers for accusing their sons of murdering kendrick and again they're minors and they might be 18 at this point but b like they're pretty solid alibis so right it's like i mean yeah it's really really interesting that their dad was also like probably on the original investigative team as an f agent. But like also you can argue that like they have alibis and they're probably just like leave our fucking kids alone. Yeah. And it's with kids. It's harder.

I'm like the fact that they do have a pretty clear alibi and like later I'll the Johnson's like take it back. So it's like, you know, oh my goodness. So essentially they filed a suit for defamation which i think is fair if you're if you really didn't murder anyone like you can't you know it's hard for a place person if there's one thing i learned in journalism school you can't just accuse someone of murder without you have to say alleged or you have to say right you know, this is my opinion, not fact, because otherwise you can be sued out the wazoo. And the Johnson family, meanwhile, they file a $100 million civil suit, a wrongful death civil suit. And they file this against a number of defendants, including Sheriff Prine and multiple members of local law enforcement, the city of Valdosta, the Bell brothers and their parents, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and several John and Jane Does that aren't mentioned by name.

And then in April, May 2016, the Bells and many of the defendants in the Johnson suit sue the Johnsons for over $850,000 in attorney fees and a million dollars in damages for defamation. So now they sued all these people. Now all these people, including the Bells, are suing them for a million bucks for defamation. And finally, in June of 2016, the Department of Justice's investigation into Kendrick Johnson's death ends and the FBI has found that there is insufficient evidence to pursue criminal charges.

Okay. So the Johnsons refiled their suit. Now they have filed 41 different suits. Holy crap. So this is just like, I tell you, I'm covering like six. There were like 41. Oh my gosh. Okay.

Wow. The following month, the Johnsons were ordered to pay around 300k in attorney fees to those that sued them for defamation and attorney fees and the johnsons themselves admit that there was no actual evidence okay for their lawsuit they just have a hunch or they had yeah they thought it was true right but they had to admit like okay we understand there was no concrete evidence in january of 2018 the johnsons filed to exhume kendrick's body for a third autopsy so this is the second time they're exhuming his body dude i know it's really really just well his family wants another autopsy so they have him exhumed again um for the third autopsy and in november of 2018 this autopsy confirms the second autopsy

which said non-accidental blunt force trauma to the right neck and right thorax so this one agrees with the second one okay so they out of their three opinions two of them corroborate each other yeah are saying this was like blunt force trauma non-accidental now i have half a page left i promise i know this is so much i'm sorry no you're good so a witness whose name has not been released but whose name was verified by journalists on an affidavit came forward and revealed that an unidentified individual that they knew was experiencing roid rage when they struck kendrick in the neck with a 45 pound barbell holy shit they also allege that kendrick's organs were removed as part of a conspiracy to keep the actual cause of death a secret oh my god and they say they were threatened to keep quiet so they're

unidentified this individual so this is just another tip yeah another person coming forward and saying but again like you're right it's like a tip. Like, there's no proof. Like, they can't really do anything with this, you know. So that's kind of where the case was. Now, recently, there's been renewed interest in Kendrick Johnson's death. And this helped a petition to reopen the case reach 1 million signatures on June 8th of 2020. And obviously, this is in the midst of current demonstrations. The petition gained circulation through celebrity tweets there were a lot of tweets about this including kim

kardashian so you may have seen it on twitter at least scrolling past it's very possible and then on june 11th of 2020 this is very recent a johnson family attorney tells first coast news that they believe the investigation was closed under suspicious circumstances fueled by pressure of retired FBI agents. So this case is now getting like a lot more traction than it has in a while. Again, I don't know what's true. I mean, most people don't know what's true. And some people have very strong opinions. I can see why. I can see why both could be the truth. Every single one of them makes some sense. Yeah. And like also no sense.

And also literally no sense at all. No sense. And so this has been like really a weird one for me personally, because I've just listened to so many different opinions and read so many conflicting thoughts that like. How can you even, I don't even think you would have the right sense to have an opinion after listening to everyone else's exactly i feel like i just can't bring myself to

to you know blindly pick one or the other like i feel like i there's so many inconsistencies this case was handled so poorly and like again i think you know this does play into the current issues because there's race involved whether we like it or not and the case was just not handled well so whether okay that being said there are a lot of unanswered questions which who knows if we'll ever get answers um the case was not handled properly which in and of itself is tragic to me yes the family was traumatized one thing we can confirm in this entire story is that it was not handled yes big mistakes were made um and uh the family obviously went through hell and are still going through hell um and so whether kj was indeed murdered or whether it was a freak accident um it's heartbreaking and tragic and um hopefully his family gets some more concrete answers

soon i mean that's at least wildly educational hopefully i think you've covered you've covered all sides of this argument i really tried to find every possible bit but then i was like this is already like nine pages long i don't want to like keep adding to it well last week was was my really long one so there we go let's just bolt about and never do this again next week it's gonna be like each of us have one page like a paragraph and we'll just have to sit here and look pretty that's easy i well thank you for that i didn't know about that so feel educated there's so many stories going on right now it's hard to keep up it is and like i know i've said this but like i'm really trying to make a concerted effort to be more diverse with my stories that I pick.

And part of me is like, you know, this is probably going to be covered on a ton of shows now because it's becoming more relevant. But I did want to just do my own take on it. So here we are. Well, I have no competition on people reporting the What's Seek a Wonder right now. So you're like the groundbreaking reporter. Should we start a twitter campaign listen someone make a twitter about mary roth's ghost inside of rancy oh my god bring her bring

her back to her husk just a just a corn husk twitter page actually all right well we're you know gonna go eat some cheesecake that's all i'm here for right now not not even christine i'm just here for the cheesecake i was promised she'd pay if we uh if i came here so all right happily happily we deserve it thank you so much for listening thank you for listening and watching how maybe if you are and also sorry for any any vibes that have been totally obliterated today yeah oops um but yeah other than that maybe go eat some cheesecake. That's what we recommend. Remotely with us in spirit. And that's why we eat cheesecake. Eat cheesecake. Okay.