And That's Why We Drink - E198 The Chef's Kiss of Death and Some Juice Covered News

Episode Date: November 22, 2020

It's episode 198 and we've got lots of juice covered news for you! For starters, we're getting so close to our 200th episode and we can't wait to share the surprises we have in store. Then Em announces they've officially been diagnosed with ADHD and is reaping the benefits of their new medication, including both dry mouth and a laser focused deep dive into what it means to be drawn and quartered... which unfortunately happened in their story topic this week: the Charleston Old City Jail aka the most haunted building in South Carolina. Then Christine covers a story with a wild amount of footage pre-murder: the Watts family killings. We're also led to believe Nichol is the new Meghan... and that's why we drink!Check out Dakota Laden's winning mashup video Em talks about here! bit.ly/gamashupPlease consider supporting the companies that support us! Don’t spend a minute of your holiday season at the Post Office this year. Sign up for Stamps.com instead. There’s NO risk. With our promo code, DRINK, you get a special offer that includes a 4-week trial PLUS free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts.Just go to Stamps.com, click on the Microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in DRINK.Shop 15% off through Black Friday and Cyber Monday! Go to Felix Gray Glasses.com/DRINK to shop better Blue Light glasses at their best price EVER. Free Shipping. Free Returns. Free Exchanges.Join MILLIONS of happy HELLO TUSHY customers RIGHT NOW and have a clean butt with every flush. Go to HELLOTUSHY.com/DRINK to get TEN PERCENT OFF.Go to Vistaprint.com slash DRINK to get started on your unregiftable gift. The holidays are coming up! Don’t miss your chance to get an unregiftable gift. Get started today at vistaprint.com/DRINK. Get the Cloud Paint Duo by visiting Glossier.com/podcast/DRINK. For a limited time, new customers can get 10% off your first order. (certain exclusions apply)

hello and welcome excuse me don't interrupt welcome to a super sized episode apparently or so i've been told because yeah we both got lengthy episode stories. And this is where a lot of you usually appreciate where we say, if you're on a road trip right now, you are in luck today. Because you get an extra episode. Or if you're mopping the floors and you're not good at mopping. Yes. If you chose to do a deep clean today. Yeah. I will say, we also have some fun things to say beforehand.

Yes. A couple of, well, so we're as episode 198 i finally got the number before we started finally i only took 198 episodes yeah i watch that be wrong and i still haven't gotten it but like pretty sure it's 198 which means we're very scarily close to 200 it's wild it's bananas dare i'd say yeah so we're almost there we do have something planned i know some people are anxious for us, which I appreciate. But we do have a little something planned. So keep an eye out for that. Oh, and then we found out that like the week after is our 50th ever listeners episode. Yeah, it all pooled together very nicely. So Yeah, very weird.

This is a month of celebrations, some might say. Yes. Well, technically next month but okay well you know what that's okay it's what i say no one else has to say it it's just me right again time is uh irrelevant in this in this 2020 timeline we're living in um also i guess it's december not now but when when our 200th episode comes out it'll be december and that means uh it's the last month of 2020 so i guess that's also something to celebrate it's the last month of 2020. So I guess that's also something to celebrate. It's the kiss of death to this year. Just get out of here. We would just have like a fucking bonanza on the kiss of death and just make it about ourselves.

We tend to do that. It's called the chef's kiss of death is what I like to call it. Yeah, Em and Christine's chef's kiss of death that they just decided was suddenly about themselves. But because of the 50th episode, we're doing like a special theme that we already came up with for the first time we ever we actually came up with a theme in advance so that's new um and we told patrons about it already to get like a head start but um we're gonna announce that theme i think soon as well yes are we i don't know if we're announcing that yet or not maybe next episode maybe next okay next week okay um and oh because we found out this is the last episode before thanksgiving we're actually doing a black friday sale on our merch oh yes

oh wow i'm so glad you brought all this down christine i did it for one texted me before and said these are the things we need to discuss and i don't have my phone on me so it's all up to christine anyway but i appreciate you being so on top of it today i wrote it and then i spilled juice on it so it's hard to read but it does say black friday um and we did we patrons have had a promo code but for a couple days we're going to give everyone a promo code or not promo code but discounted on the website sure um and that's atwwdmerch.com and i think there's an even bigger discount on like our older merch like tour stuff i'm not sure yeah so just go there and you'll find out the details um so yeah i'm excited about that too yeah super fun um oh and then last thing that i just want to announce because this is like the

most exciting thing ever not really but for me it is that xenon m's protege finally has her own newsletter she sure does it's her her gossip uh her gossip tabloid if you will right her gossip column was turned into so i feel like from the moment xenon was born she decided she needed her own branded newsletter and we knew this we knew she was like destined for pr in some way like she's like she's all about it so uh we have a newsletter. You can sign up on our website. There should be. No, that's it's Patreon. Yes.

Yes. Sorry. It's a Patreon newsletter. We do have a regular newsletter. That's also freaking amazing. Which you can find on our website. A pop-up will show up. Yikes, Christine.

No, no, it's good. I have juice covered news, so I can read it to you from the juice covered news. I appreciate it. Well, this would be a good time to announce something I am very excited about. And also people can already probably tell. So I finally, Christine already knows about this, but I'm very excited to announce that I have officially been diagnosed with ADHD. And I am so happy. I am so, so happy because because I've always something's always felt off and then throughout this last year I know in many episodes I've been talking about how I uh you know felt like it was the real deal and it was really hard to get diagnosed and it was really hard to find

someone who would like listen to me and like help me and I finally um found someone and I'm trying medication and one of the side effects is having a foggy brain so that's why I found someone and I'm trying medication. And one of the side effects is having a foggy brain. So that's why I'm going to sound a lot more confused than normal. Until you sound a lot less confused. And so all of a sudden, the medicine works. Yes. Yeah. But no, so I want to apologize, because all of the side effects I've read online, most of them have already kicked in, including dry mouth and drowsiness. So I will be chugging a lot of water and yawning more than ever today. So, but it's not you, it's me finally.

Well, I'm very proud of you. Very happy for you. This is a long time coming and we are very pro mental health awareness and medication if you need it. Yes. And so I'm just very, very proud of you and happy. Thank you. I feel like I'm the only person who's like ecstatic that I got diagnosed with no attention disorder. But I I just I've known for so so long that something was

going on. And I it's just honestly, I already told this to Christine, but thank God for TikTok, because that's how I realized something was up. And like I knew there was things I I think I just kind of ignored my own symptoms for so long because I never thought anything was going on. And then through TikTok, my algorithm just got me to ADHD. And then I spent a long time going through just about any video hashtagged about ADHD and realizing all these symptoms were things that other people were experiencing. So if one good thing came out of this quarantine, it's that I discovered TikTok and was able to diagnose myself and get help. I'm so proud of you. Yay. Let's all clap for him.

Yay. What is it again? Snaps for insults or I don't know. Whatever. Snaps for medication. Snaps for fog for him. Yay. What is it again? Snaps for insults or I don't know. Whatever. Snaps for medication. Snaps for foggy brain. Yes. Anyway, that's my big update, but it's an update.

That's a huge one. Very excited to share. I didn't have that in my juice list. So I'm glad that you did. Look, together we have it all. So together we have a portion of it. We've got 1%. Yes.

So anyway, I just to uh also throw out so if if anybody was confused by that at all xenon gazette is on patreon yes speaking of adhd yes the xenon uh newsletter is specifically for patreon just in case people want to know but it's on patreon and and i made the little banner for it i'm very proud of it um which you should ongoing yap yap yap um snaps for christine on the banner it's incredible Patreon and, and I made the little banner for it. I'm very proud of it. Um, which you should ongoing. Yap, yap, yap.

Um, snaps for Christine on the banner. It's incredible. Em got medicated and I made a stupid banner at three in the morning, but that's what we do around here. We both kind of went completely opposite directions of what she does. We always end up meeting in the middle somewhere. we always,

but I will say too. Yeah, we do. And to Em's point about the newsletter on our website, um, we did, so we did announce our Halloween pet costume winners, and I mailed out, I hand-mailed out with stamps.com membership, I hand-mailed out all the, we surprise everybody with bandanas, and that's where we drink bandanas, for their pups and cats.

So sweet. Yeah. So anyway, just congratulations to all of those folks. And that's all. I didn't mean to step on your big mouth. No, I didn't mean to interrupt the Xenon thing, but I felt stupid that I just completely said the wrong thing. So I was like, let me defend myself now that I have a crush.

No, no. It's not stupid. We're very confusing. We just decide we have a newsletter and suddenly we have eight newsletters. So that's just kind of our brand. We just do that. We got two of everything. It just depends, you know, are you a patron or not?

How much access you have. Also, speaking of Patreon, if you are on our close friends list on Instagram, you will now know that I have started a new series called Tea Time with Em. I actually thought that was the big announcement. So then when you went ADHD, I went, okay, veering back. Many interesting things. No, so I'm now doing Tea Time Tuesdays where everyone knows already that I'm- Oh, it's so fun.

I've only been to one, but it's so fun. Yesterday was the first. You went to the debut, the premiere. I'm so proud that I got to watch it. And I've just, since I'm drinking tea and sitting there anyway, I posted something yesterday during my normal tea time. And I was like, while I'm drinking tea, let's spill some I posted something yesterday during my normal tea time. And I was like, while I'm drinking tea,

let's spill some tea. Who's got some like hot goss. And people were sending in some crazy shit, like, like family drama, all this. And so, um,

it's all anonymous. So if you are a Patreon member and you do happen to tune in on Tuesdays on my Instagram, if you would like to submit something and I, you know, I'll post about it, but it will be anonymous. No one will know it's you that said it. So it a it's a close friends exclusive it except I got to be part of it even though M usually deletes me from their close friends

at some shocking that you're you've been on my close friend I don't know how usually I delete because I have a present and then I forget yeah so it's always a good thing yeah I should stop complaining but anyway yeah M's tea time is so fun and there's just like people submit anonymous like hot goss and i was responding to m like whoa that's crazy it's just stuff people were submitting about like they're in laws people were sending there was one that didn't make it uh because i i forgot i left the submission form open all night so i forgot to like delete it so people kept submitting stuff for 24 hours i have like 3 000 uh like pieces of drama from people and some are like my neighbor murdered his grandparents and like late like left the corpses in the house for a few days like

that's not hot goss that's true crime that uh a few of them i i responded and i was like please submit your story to and that's why you drink.com you look at the link in the post yeah um anyway tea time is great too and now m's getting uh getting medicated and on tea time i mean it's gonna be a wild it's gonna be a fun time i got marvel mondays and i got tea time tuesdays and now i've got um what am i taking stratera every single day of the week. So it's always an adventure over here. Yes, it is. Anyway, I'm sorry for that long intro, but we warned you. So do you have any more updates before I go?

That is it for me for now. I mean, I'm sure I do, but let's like just leave them alone for now because it's time to talk about other things. I have one last one. You look very beautiful today. Oh my goodness. That's very kind of you. Thank you so much.

Your skin is looking fantastic. Oh, why thank you. I turned on a ring light. So that might be part of it. Nevermind. You're trash like normal. I just, it's just with a ring light this time. No, I appreciate it. Uh, I'm wearing my little rainbow kid surprise hoodie. So I noticed classy trash. So like a dumpster, like in your last episode. Like a dumpster, like in your last episode. So my story has been recommended quite a few times. Actually, someone in Marvel Monday last week also suggested this. So this is the story.

It's from Charleston, South Carolina, and it is the Old City Jail. And apparently it is, if not the most, then it's arguably one of the most haunted buildings in south carolina and that's one of the most haunted places in the country um and i guess let's just get into it we got we got a ways to go we're obviously um we're gonna get a cameo from bagel bites so stay tuned oh hell yeah why am i always surprised and i'm gonna say i don't know i think it's my actually this is these are the first notes i've done with adhd medication and it shows because i did a lot of random deep dives like i like really got committed to the information instead of just like you know just telling you one fact i was like what does that mean and then i looked up the history of it so we've got a lot of fun facts coming your way yeah So for all those judgy people who used to say it's not charming when they don't know

what they're doing. Well, here you go. Em's finally medicated. Are you happy? Finally, I know what I'm doing. Let's crack into it. Took 198 episodes. Oh, I have a couple little notes first.

So Charleston is one of the United States' most haunted cities, or it's notoriously one of the most haunted cities. And one of the main reasons for that, which I did not know, is one of the united states most haunted cities or it's notoriously one of the most haunted cities um and one of the main reasons for that which i did not know is because of how well preserved their historical buildings are i think they're one of the cities that have the most historical buildings that are still standing um and so one of the historical buildings by the way was poogan's porch which i talked about talked about 10 episodes ago. That was 186. Fun fact for you. And another one happens to be the Old City Jail, which is at 21 Magazine Street.

So one of the tour guide managers has said that another reason this place is so haunted is because it was built right next to an asylum and it is on top of a former graveyard. Good, good, good. So already hundreds of bodies have been at least placed here i don't know if they're still there and got you know exhumed or whatever but bodies have been in this space um so i the it was kind of hazy for me

but my understanding is that the building itself was built in 1738 but then in 1802 it became a jail so um before that time it was also a hospital a poor house and it was a home for runaway slaves um it had four stories it had an octagonal tower oh ah and it had a lot of windows but no glass it just had like iron bars. So like old school, old timey jail. Like just like how you imagine, like just a hole in the wall with bars on it. Great, great. Which, by the way, I did not know this is called iron glass.

What? Really? Because the window doesn't have glass. It just has bars. And so like you just call it glass because. They couldn't just say iron. They had to just throw glass into it. That's like the she she decor way it's like oh and we have an iron glass window yeah exactly oh you have rusty fucking bars got it okay it's like saying it's open concept but it's really just a studio apartment it's like saying it's cozy but it's like

cramped as shit yeah i think it's next to the bed it's fine so this place is also cozy by the way um if i'm gonna keep going with my realtor voice love it it's uh so this place was originally supposed to only hold 130 cells or 130 inmates um but during the civil war it became a prisoner of war camp for union soldiers and even though only 130 bodies are supposed to be able to fit over 300 dead and oh this is how cozy it was the cells were each three by three like three foot by three foot so it's basically like a like a standing cage essentially even like sit you could you could sit you couldn't really lie down you really were like just kind of huddled up okay yeah i guess it's like a meter.

A yard and a yard or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know, the American metric system. I get it. So in 1822, apparently there were so many escape attempts that they actually had the person who designed the Washington Monument come and reinforce the jail so people couldn't break out. That's like a very Nicolas Cage thing of like, okay, you built the Washington

Monument and all its secret tunnels. Well, we need you to build a structure that no one can escape from. I love it. We need to fortify it as we need it as sturdy as the Washington Monument. I feel like this is the next uh dan brown novel or something well apparently uh one of the this is just another fun fact one of the um inmates there his name was jacques alexander tardy and he was one of the most evil pirates of that time and he was known to evil apparently known to poison his victims so that's just oh no fun for you um so like i said it was a prisoner of war camp during the civil war union soldiers were overcrowded there some were even forced to sleep outside which i find ironic when you're supposed to be locked away in a jail but they

would just like i guess tie it to a tree or something i guess also like what's technically outside if you have iron glass as your fair who. Fair. I don't know. But so people were getting forced to sleep outside because it was so overcrowded they couldn't even cram more people into the cells. Oh, boy. And so between there being no, you know, nothing stopping them from, like, weather conditions coming into the jail and so many people were in there wounded. There was a lot of disease. There was a lot of illness. And so people were kind of wounded there was a lot of disease there was a lot of illness and so people were kind of dropping left and right um it this this jail was once called quote a dirty filthy

place unfit for human beings to live and it was also called quote the nastiest dirtiest filthiest lousiest place i ever was in by one of the inmates oh god so it's just a lot of death a lot of disease um apparently there was like maggots in the food and like it's just really gross um oh so this is a really large range but there are suggestions that hundreds to 14 000 people died here oh that is quite a range quite a range oh they think the exaggerated term is like 10 to 14 000 but um one historian only found records of hundreds so they're not really sure still a lot but yeah yeah still like not zero um and they said most of that was from disease and open wounds during the war oh how gross in 1886 there was a 6.8 magnitude earthquake and it destroyed most of the jail which got like two-thirds of the inmates to escape all at once

whoa um and it was led there the leader of the uh this escape was uh a female murderer like one of the only convicted female murderers of the time i don't blame her for wanting to get out of there man she was like i'm out no way am i staying here when you imagine being one of the one-thirds that didn't get out and they're like no so they missed my chance no no so they could have gotten out they just were scared to leave oh okay apparently it knocked down uh like a huge wall and so like this one woman was like i'm gonna climb over this rubble and just leave and 40 of them happened to be like yeah this is a good idea i'm gonna do that too and the other 20 were like oh i i'm not gonna i'm too scared you risk it yeah yeah okay that makes sense um but so that happened this also led to the tower i mentioned and the top floor being

demolished so the building today is only three stories so this is now where i try to tell you floor by floor what everything was for without going out of order do you remember that was so early in the podcast but like now we're on episode floor 11 and i was like wait what happened to floors 8 through 10 i was like we get to them later they're after floor 30. Oh, my God. Okay. So the first floor, where am I? Okay. The first floor was for, I guess, as the higher up you went on the floors, the more dangerous the inmates were.

So the first floor was known as the, quote, gentlemen criminals. Oh, nice. Because they weren't violent and they usually had a lot of manners and charm and were like doing their best to like get out of jail early. The second one was for like people who were in debt or thieves. And the third one was for like murderers, you know, people committing different acts of assault. So they were all separated mainly based on if they were violent or not but they were all at different times punished in really horrific ways um some of them being shackles being whipped a lot of them are deprived of food and water then again you're only being deprived of like food that had maggots in it so maggot food doesn't seem too different um over the years uh torture also became a big thing there

nope don't like that and executions happened on the site apparently there were gallows there so uh a few of the ways that people would be tortured here is they would be burned at the stake oh they would be branded and they would be drawn and quartered so oh no um the worst one was apparently for people of all of all the things like you could be a murderer you could be a rapist apparently if you were a horse thief if you fucking stole horses god forbid this is what would happen to you they would literally nail your ear to a post until they i guess i'm confused the the phrasing was um they would nail your ear to a post until the ear was finally sliced off i think that means like they would go one by one nails until like they literally basically cut your ear off through

putting nails into it or they just nailed it and then like ripped it off yeah i some you your ear is removed by the end that's not good no matter what it is but also that makes no sense to me like when you're thinking like a horse thief like maybe they mean like it's a horse who thieves maybe a horse thief i hope so probably not that makes a lot more sense to me they just like go around and steal pebbles from the ground or something and pebbles apples yes okay an apple thief i mean no it's not better because i also don't want a horse's ears to be nailed to anything but it's all just oh none of it makes sense uh it doesn't quite make sense and it really starts with the fact that they think a horse thief is the worst criminal you can be. Yeah, that's a little weird to me.

So, okay. So I said some of the torture was being burned at the stake, branded, and drawn and quartered. This is where my stratera kicked in. And so I was like, what is drawn and quartered? No, why did I have to take it? Stop taking that. I don't want to hear this. I'm done.

I've had enough of medicated M I got nice and laser focused on uh my notes or that's how my brain took this and so I was like well I'm working on my notes so obviously I'm doing the right thing and this is this work so I'm doing my job so I really got deep into the drawn and quartered because I really understood what I meant I just kind of assumed it was terrible I feel like it's one of those phrases we throw around but i don't really think too deeply just half bizarrely just all drawn and quartered um yeah so it began in the 14th century in england when people would betray the crown um that is where this originally came from and uh this these are the steps to being fully drawn and quartered okay where does the horse the horse come in? A horse does come in.

Oh! I knew it. Well, first he has to steal something. A pebble, yeah. A pebble, he gives it to an apple. It's a whole thing. And then a prisoner, the prisoner is hanged by their neck

until they are almost strangled. Okay. You then take that noose, tie it around their ankles, and then the horse pulls you to the execution site oh drawn drawn carriage okay except you're the carriage and horse drawn body yes exactly and i never i didn't even click i was like oh drawn that's what that means i didn't either so apparently uh the method ends up changing because the word drawn changed also because it just kind of meant like to pull something out versus like pulling something behind.

And so sometimes being drawn and quartered, I guess you found out like the day of, like they just rolled the dice and figured out which version of drawn you were going to be. They would pull you out to the execution site by a horse or or i guess just to say and or because you could get drawn both ways um they would then kind of uh pin you up um so that you couldn't move and then they would draw your intestines out of your body okay whoa then oh it's not. That's just the drawn part. Okay. Then once your intestines are out, but you're still like apparently alive. Well, that's not good.

They would cut off your genitals. And then with your intestines, they would take your intestines and your genitals and they would throw them in a fire and make you watch them burn up. And then they would behead you and then the rest of your body they would chop into four big chunks hence quartering i love at that point they're like now let's cut it in a it's like you've already done everything possible to destroy this person's body well then those big chunks of the body those the head and those four quarters uh they would preserve them with like some sort of spices to

keep birds from picking at it and then they would display those as a warning to other traders okay they'd spice them and then okay yeah they boil it they put add a little spice and then a little cilantro on top yeah and then uh and especially horrible situations if they didn't have like a knife to cut you apart, they would just tie each of your limbs to different horses and make them all run in different directions. That's the one I've heard of, which I was hoping was just a myth. And clearly it's not. So great. Super duper, duper, duper. Anyway, that is my deep dive on drawn and quartered. Don't you like that? I love that this is what happens when you take medication.

You like become me like you start looking medication. You, like, become me. Things are better. Grotesque, horrible things on the internet. Yeah. So, okay. So in 1911, we're back to the jail now. So in 1911, Daniel Duncan was the last man to be hanged at the jail. And then the gallows were removed.

So after 1911, there were no more gallows. In 1939, the jail closed after 137 years. Wow. And then, so I don't know what happened in between that, because that's the 40s all the way through the 90s. I'm not really sure what happened. I think it was just kind of open to the public or abandoned or whatever. Fun, yeah, you know.

Kids like us would just go traipsing through in the middle of the night, I guess. Certainly we would have, yes. In 1998, the American College of the Building Arts bought this property. And so I was like, building arts? What is the building arts? And it was literally a school for masonry and plaster and timber and blacksmithing. That's cool. Yeah.

So I would love to go to that school. That sounds dope. Yeah. But so they bought it until 2015 when the college moved. So from 98 to 2015, it was no longer available to the public. It was part of the school, which is weird now because i guess i'm not really sure of the timeline at this point i don't know if the the college moved but they still have some sort of like remote classes there but i watched bagel bites and they went in and there were still some

classes in session so i don't know if like the college keeps it as like just like a secondary location or something but it was weird to see on tv because half of it was like a full-blown old school old-timey jail and then the other half was like classrooms it's really odd you're like here's the volleyball court yeah it's like all those angsty teens were like school is a prison it's like well kind of nice try what my favorite part of the uh of this episode of ghost adventures by the way is that um zach was like as he was going around and being all dramatic there was like students in the background like just trying to work oh my god if you were one of those students can you please write into us and tell us your experience because i bet you literally one of them uh like he went up to one of them while she was working

and he like interrupted her and was like do you have any ghost stories here and she was like uh apparently there was one story she had where she walked away and then she came back and like there were like three scratches in her plaster project that she had just been working on that's not very nice it's terrible also like you imagine like my dog ate my homework. It's like, no, a demon fucked up my project. A demon scratched my homework, and I'm trying to get an A. You understand. I wish I had the behind-the-scenes footage or, like, the extra footage, DVD footage, where Zach went up to every other student who was like, no, I don't have a story. Can I get back to my homework i'm i'm already trying to be a blacksmith life is hard enough okay in 2020 there's no way okay so um when the when the student did say like oh well

i found these scratches in my plaster uh in my project this was the quote that zach said next because it's deliciously him can't wait were these the scratch marks from one of the prisoners recording their eternal sentence as they did on the walls of their cells aka like he thinks they're like tally marks because of how many days they've been in jail come on can you imagine if like you just ran out of spaces to draw tally marks Now you're ruining people's art projects. And you're like, here's a really easy wall to draw on. It's someone's homework. So, uh,

apparently any, so I, I watched a few episodes of different things for this and every single one of them really liked to hone in on this one main inmate. Um, so I'm going to talk about that real quick. The most notorious inmate across all television episodes, um,

is Lavinia Fisher, who was apparently one of, they said it was the first, uh, US female serial killer. Yes. I know of all about, not all about her,

but I do know about her. Oh, okay. Maybe you can, um, pitch in. Probably I can't help. Probably I can't help.

I know all about her, but all of a sudden I know nothing. But nothing. Yeah. I've gotten a lot of requests to cover her. that's like i have very cursory knowledge okay i'll do a i'll do a quick synopsis and maybe it'll pique your interest um sure it will but so uh lavinia is the country's first female serial killer um so lavinia was married to a guy named john and in the early 1800s, uh, John ran a hotel called the six mile house cause it was six miles out of, uh, Charleston. And apparently for locals, uh, if you are in the Charleston area, uh, this location

is the, the property that it was on is now where the old Navy hospital in North Charleston was. That should mean something to you. It doesn't to me, but there you go. So at the Six Mile House, Lavinia was known to lure wealthy men into their inn. And from there, John would kill them. And then they would rob them and take their money.

It's very Bloody Benders. Yeah. Actually, you know, I was just talking about the Bloody Benders. I think they're one of my favorite stories you've ever covered i feel like i yeah i feel like i remember you you retained that one and i retained that one we don't retain many of them well they were also they also held the tale they're like for america's first serial killers or something yeah or or family family one of the earliest family serial i don't know i don't know the fact that there's different ranks is that's true they were just bad.

So keep in mind, Lavinia and John apparently were super popular throughout the town. And so anytime they even came across as suspicious, people would deny it and be like, oh, there's no way they would do that. So their reputation really helped them get away with this for a lot longer to a point where rumors even were circulating throughout the town. People were bringing evidence or at least their suspicions to the sheriff and like everyone was like no it's not them they are pillars of the community bingo pillar to killer and so uh the main story of what exactly was happening was that lavinia would invite traveling businessmen into their uh hotel um

for dinner and while they were sitting there she would kind of be flirting with them and ask them questions about their job to figure out just how much money they make and i guess if i wonder what like the cutoff was we're like oh you're too poor i don't want to it's not i feel like we'd be like we're podcasters they'd be like well can you leave please we don't actually we don't have any vacancies so there's no stew for you. Just get out. But so she'd figure out how much money they had. And I guess to her perspective, if they were wealthy enough, they would become prey. Yikes. And so she, after dinner, would offer them a cup of tea.

Not the kind that I drink on Tea Time Tuesdays. But it was actually made out of oleander. And I guess that would make them fall asleep really deeply so that then they, you know, John could kill them. How did he kill them? Do we know? So there are a few different rumors. The most interesting one is that the bed that she would bring them to to fall asleep was actually like on a trap door and underneath was like a pit of spikes oh so that's one of them another one is that like you know

they would just come in and chop you up or something or stab you to death sure the usual the usual kill i just googled it because i'm like really nervous that i covered it at one point and i'm just being like i don't know this story but I really don't think I have I don't think you have either okay good I just checked because I was like can you imagine oh god well we could both be wrong look I have foggy brain so I don't know you have an excuse so uh apparently this is interesting there was at one point they knew that Charleston a nearby town knew that Charleston needed some cleaning up i guess there was a lot of crime probably most of it was from lavinia um right and so a bunch of like vigilantes came in to like clean up the town and so lavinia and john laid low for a while and very quickly they were like oh there's not as much crime as we thought and they left jeez okay but

one decided to stay behind his name was david and he was like basically like neighborhood watch or town watch and very quickly after everyone else was gone lavinia tried to kill him john choked him and threw him out a window but david was able to escape and run off so he was one of the people who testified against them and then the other was a guy named john who asked for a room but the but lavinia said there were no vacancies until she realized that he was rich and then she was like oh no now there's an opening and so he got really suspicious so he um when she offered him tea he dumped it out when she wasn't looking and then he slept in the chair and not the bed because he was like kind of freaked out and so he woke up to the bed like either falling into a trap door or john breaking in at one of the two

can you imagine if you're sitting in a strange room and then the bed falls through the floor and then there's a pit of spikes really complicated for them to keep re-re like setting up every time a new bed the logistics you like logistics best case scenario you have like a hand uh like a a hand crank that where you bring that bed up every time that's right you got to keep pulley system it yeah yes yeah like dumb waiter situation or something um but so he ended up also testifying so uh where was i so once they were convicted the couple both ended up in uh isolation cells and then they were eventually brought to the gallows which is interesting because lavinia a woman at the time she thought that they were like gonna sign a pass

or something and like um and she they wouldn't execute her um their body count is estimated between 20 and 120 people but there were no bodies ever found so there is the argument that they also never did anything wrong at all oh um but it's pretty like understood they they just had like a basement full of spikes and a bed on a pulley and maybe not even that so there actually was in a one book did i write it down i don't think i did but there was a one author who like really went into their story and even said like under like very simple investigation like it didn't even need thorough investigation there is no trap door in their house there's no poison in their house there was nothing but also the controversy or the debate the rebuttal to that is like well

after they were convicted everything in their house was destroyed so like anything could have been taken or so we really don't know but it's assumed that they killed a lot of people i see um so just to make sure that she wasn't executed um when they said that she was going to the gallows, she allegedly wore her wedding dress to the gallows because she wants to remind them she was a married woman. And there was a law at the time that you couldn't execute a married woman. But then dainty old me. Yeah. Oh, no, I'm just I'm so I'm so fair and faint.

I just wanted to wear my mermaid gown one cut gown one more time my strap my strapless little shimmy shimmy you know um but so they did a little loophole on her and so they executed john first and so till death do us part she wasn't married anymore and so she allegedly died in her wedding dress so you can murder a widow i guess or execute a widow yep wow once again it's all about the man it's all about the man well what isn't so uh before lavinia was hanged her last words were something along the lines of like if you have a message for the devil i'll pass it on to him something really like kind of dark and it implied like oh she knew she was going to hell so she kind of admitted even in a wedding

dress that is the creepiest visual i bet when she wore the wedding dress to the gallows they were like well now we have to kill you because this is a spectacle like this is everybody came for a picnic this is fucking wild yeah like we we need to go through with it now well here's the even creepier part imagine a woman in a wedding dress who allegedly murdered 100 people now says like i'm gonna pass the message on to the devil and then before the executioner could do it she jumped from the gallows herself and hanged herself and apparently she struggled for like 15 minutes oh i just imagine the tool going flying yeah oh my god this is horrifying anyway so that's this

that's that's the the gist that's the broad strokes so um lavinia is said to be the like most powerful spirit at this jail um especially on the third floor that's where she likes to scratch people with three fingers which like also is the demon claw the trinity if zach were here and she likes to steal jewelry and shiny things um in 2012 there was one woman named christine uh-oh who took pictures when she was on the tour there and pictures that were at first seemed completely black later when they continued to develop there were the faces of john and lavinia which is super oh no um people also say that they have seen her staring at them from the third floor window and people have heard her screaming in the building in empty rooms yuck there's um one other

spirit that i just want to give a shout out to uh his name was denmark vesey um who was famous for leading a slave uprising in charleston um and became he became a free man at the age of 32 because he won the lottery and was able to buy his freedom amazing and uh which like i feel like at that time i'm shocked that he was like like, even allowed to participate in a lottery. That they, like, gave him the money, right? Right. Well, so he literally won his freedom. And he founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. Wow.

In case locals know what that is. And it quickly grew. I think it was, like, one of the biggest churches in the area for at least, like, freed slaves. Wow. the the biggest uh churches in the area um for at least like freed slaves and wow um in 1822 he hatched a plan which i'm totally on board uh to kill slave owners liberate the slaves and uh ship ship them to freedom in haiti and so i guess news got around town and the militia heard about it and imprisoned him for the rest of his life just for saying it just for saying actually even doing it okay got it and they heard it like through the grapevines so he right he could have just denied it but you know okay so i just wanted to give him a shout out

that like you tried your best a for effort and i'm sorry it didn't work out i would have totally been uh 100 behind you on that yeah um so now getting into the spooky stuff so there's a paranormal group called the uh league of energy materialization and unexplained phenomena research aka lemur oh i was trying to make it say lemon i was like l e m you were so close. I thought that's where we were going. You had the first three. I wouldn't even dare. You wouldn't have smelled it out.

I wouldn't even let you have the chance. No. But so Lemur, they wrote a full report about this back in 2017, I think. Basically, like history that they had heard heard of and i think they did their own investigation so they had their own um spooky encounters but they said that uh apparently in 2000 there were renovations and that kept the building sealed off and yet bare footprints would be found all throughout the sawdust ew which i hate um hate that. Also, many of the workers also saw an apparition of a guard with a rifle on the third floor. And these workers said that they started kind of getting familiar with this apparition.

And so I guess they started ignoring it until this apparition started charging at them. Oh, God. And then would vanish in front of their eyes. Because I feel like ignoring them is the safest bet. But then if it just is like no you must look at me it's like i want attention you do oh god um and so they also heard the sounds of chains dragging down the halls they heard a dumbwaiter um probably pulling up the bed full of spikes or something even though the dumbwaiter was completely non-functional they heard it working um also jewelry and other objects were disappearing but it never got found later

which is like the worst part of that because if it's a fun prank at least you get your shit back later yeah but this time it was like oh no it's gone forever yeah usually it like moves somewhere yeah your retainer story. My retainer, right. In the basement, apparently a man had his sunglasses knocked off by an unseen force. On hot days, the basement is so cold you can see your breath. Alarms will set themselves throughout, like, security alarms will set themselves off nonstop, and cops are always having to go to the building in the middle of the night and a lot of them have said that they go to check that there's not an

intruder and all the doors are wide open so they assume someone has broken in but just that the doors are opening by themselves oh god um apparently there's a apparition in ragged clothes seen wandering the halls there are a lot of electronic uh malfunctions so cell phones will disrupt uh a lot of cell phone disruptions will also happen where calls from unknown numbers come through the batteries will drain dead batteries will all of a sudden like be on a full charge the like turn phones on that were turned off um like i said doors are found open and closed on their own one heavy iron door literally fell off of its hinges for no reason during a tour um which is the most frightening if i run a tour and all of a sudden like a 300

pound door just fucking fell on the ground i would yeah the building's like falling apart around you i feel like that's very dangerous fucking mind i hope they have a good insurance plan because that's not great um one of the torture machines on that has ropes on it apparently every time they go tour guides will go down the ropes are in different positions are tied together i don't like the the notion behind that i don't like that they know how to tie knots still oh good point i don't like that they have the ability to operate torture machinery okay that from the beyond is arguably more it's all bad it's all bad both of it's bad um so uh people also get nauseous in the torture room. I'm not shocked about that. Visitors that actually work in corrections will usually feel the most sick and complain of this really gross smell that nobody else can smell. Weird.

And other visitors have seen orbs. They've been pushed and shoved. They've felt a rope moving around their ankles, almost like they're about to get drawn. People have heard voices whisper in their ears. They've heard their name being called. They're about to get drawn. People have heard voices whisper in their ears. They've heard their name being called. And on the main stairs, people report feeling like their arms are wrapped in saran wrap. Oh, ew.

Like you're stuck. And they've also. Oh, like a straitjacket. Oh, yeah. Maybe? Oh, that's actually probably what it is. Well, especially because you said there was like an insane asylum next door too. That's true. Okay.

Wow. I think you cracked that code. Great. Glad i can like read into this shit so well people also feel choking and a shortness of breath and one visitor was being choked so intensely that the tour guide thought she was going into cardiac arrest oh my god women feel hands clamping down on their shoulders that leave bruises and fingerprints. People will get bitten and you will see rope burns around people's necks. Oh, my God. On the third floor, there's still a wheelchair from the 1820s, which I don't know why that isn't in a fucking museum. Goodbye.

It's just hanging out in an abandoned building. But there's a wheelchair that is from the 1820s, and apparently the chair's owner died from cholera. So you can still hear and apparently the chair's owner died from cholera and uh so you can still hear coughing around the chair and also it has extreme cold spots and it will regularly move on its own and bump into people excuse me like do you fucking mind this is my place oh my god that's wild in the the morgue in the basement there's a little ghost boy named Jeremiah. Apparently, he will try to hold visitors' hands and slip rocks into your pockets as presents.

That's cute. Which I think is adorable. Yeah, if he's not a demon, then that's adorable. Well, then he starts throwing rocks at you. Oh, well, okay. That's less adorable. So I don't know if the rocks were meant to be presents or if they're like, oh, now you have a target. Like, now I know, like, you're someone I want to throw rocks at.

Oh, no. I'm not sure. But you can also feel cold spots in the basement that are about waist high or, like, child size. So a lot of people think that's Jeremiah coming near you. It's sad because I don't know if I should be if i should feel warm about it or scared i'm like i mean i definitely feel scared well that yeah okay i'm scared a hundred percent but i also want like can 50 of it be like sweetness i'm not like is there a sympathy empathy line or is this just a demon or is he tricking me yeah um so the old city uh jail also once held union soldiers from the massachusetts regiment which apparently fun fact is the same unit that was depicted in the movie glory in the

80s um okay so that was that was the same uh unit of soldiers that were in this jail and these soldiers presence have been picked up in the morgue through spirit box sessions they'll talk to you a lot apparently they regularly ask for morphine which like sounds cool if it's a um like a residual haunting where it's like just playing a memory over and over but if it's like an intelligent thing and it's still asking for morphine like like is it still in pain are they yeah that's a good point i'm hoping it's just like a like a memory on repeat versus like you still be like addicted in the afterlife or like i don't know i don't know either or are they just like oh i want a drink i want some morphine like just

go go i got nothing else to do right i don't know but so I think that was super interesting. Also, the the the tour website for the Old City Jail, as of three days ago, says that during quarantine, they've been hosting Facebook Live tours of the jail. So if you would like to check that out, they're known at their tour company is called Bulldog Tours. And I just googled Old City Jail Facebook Live. And it was the first link on Google. So we should do it. It seems fun. It's just like I think they just walk around and you can. That sounds cool. Yeah. It's also a smart way like during quarantine, like people can like go on the tour without going on the tour. Yeah, I love that idea.

So a few episodes I watched for this were BuzzFeed Unsolved, Ghost Hunters, and then obviously our favorite Bagel Bites. And obviously on BuzzFeed Unsolved, they got some blips on the spirit box they heard unexplained bangs in nearby rooms and they think they saw a weird apparition although i think it was just a security guard um it was like too human um but yeah uh but so that's what i found from them on ghost hunters um which is interesting ghost hunters and ghost adventures have this in common the for some reason the old city jail like won a contest and like it's it's prize was it got to have an episode on the show um so for ghost hunters uh the old city jail won the show's america's hometown ghost hunter contest okay that's cool

which like if you're already this haunted like why do you need to like prove yourself like why do you send in a resume to like be on the show when they should already want to come here but anyway they experienced intelligent knocking so asking for a response and getting one um they got really heavy unexplained thuds and bootsteps and door slamming where if that wasn't like the pa making noise around if that was legitimate it was very creepy um they also heard uh an evp of someone whistling the main storyline that was super spooky during all this was that one of their literal their pas or one of their like crew members who's not supposed to be an investigator but just like holds the camera um she was getting fucked up like they were scratching the shit out of her no that's awful and they were doing like

interviews with her and she was like i've never seen anything paranormal i've worked here for a long time i she's like i'm just trying to make it make it in the industry i'm just trying to make it big and also um i guess the before the investigation when they were doing a tour of it um like a walkthrough the manager said that oh most of the things here happened to women and she was the only woman in the crew that night so um there was another woman but she had made it very clear like you were not allowed to touch me i feel very uncomfortable and this poor pa or camera person was like i didn't even know i had to say something so i'm just getting like torn up um scary so she got scratched a little bit at first and then very quickly she had to literally leave the site because she had like scratches all up and down her arms um god one of

them uh one of the other investigators went to the space where that happened to her and very quickly he felt burning and scratches and they put a flashlight on him and there were rope burns around his neck okay um they then all heard movement and they saw movement outside the doorway and they legitimately thought it was just like oh that's the camera person walking by and then the crew was like no no like we're we're not over there like so they saw something and didn't even think it could be ghostly and then when they double checked there was no one there oh no um they heard a door open and close very loudly another crew member tapped out like they're dropping like flies like there was like seriously people were like i don't want to be here um and then they all end up going back down to where that camera person got scratched and they all see something like pitch black moving

through the door it like even moves past a light source and it blocked the light source um and right after that the same crew member who was getting scratched up starts feeling burning again and she had scratches on her stomach her neck and her back and both investigators um saw the black mass again and she felt something touching her as they were closing out and ending the investigation this is like a violent place yeah well at least if you're that one person for sure right right um and then last but not least i'm gonna give us a little snippets of bagel bites so thank god this is season five episode 10 if you're interested um these are this is some information that i didn't see anywhere else but apparently the conditions

were so bad at this jail that one of the residual sounds people hear a lot is walking, but it sounds crunchy. And apparently it's because there was a terrible lice problem back then. And so the sound is similar to what people have reported where the sheriff walking past the cells and stepping on lice eggs and so um during their like during their free time they were in jail so during all of their time

during craft hour craft hour one of the things a lot of the union soldiers that were uh prisoners here they would just kill time by um just shaving each other all day so lice couldn't get on them oh god that's so gross and also remember maggots in the food and like dirty water and apparently the latrines were overflowing all the time um and it was super crowded and there was wounds and disease um and the tour guide said that people also regularly hear footsteps running down the halls and cell doors slamming and empty rooms when they're locking up at night um other tour guides said that he oh this was really creepy one tour guide said that he was looking in the

window of the guards room and saw an apparition of lavinia staring back at him and then he realized that it wasn't an apparition on the other side it was her reflection behind him ah no no no no no no um when asking about lavinia's spirit during the interview like during the walkthrough interview portion zach is quoted saying i somehow seem to attract psychotic evil women sorry that hit a little too close to home for me well i heard him say and i went oh i'm gonna have to go back and write that one down that's too on the nose put that on a magnet for christine's fridge here in case you need it for your red bubble account here it is i do i somehow seem to attract psychotic evil woman from zach and then put my face under it in my twitter account the the tour

guide was like good for you zach like literally didn't know what to say good for you and then zach was like no it's not a good thing oh my god so uh then he was on a different level in this episode because then he apparently like was all antsy about investigating that night he like needed to ghost hunt immediately so in the broad daylight they go to like downtown charleston i guess and went on a horse-drawn carriage and he asks the coach driver to just drop them off at a random haunted location for them to investigate during the day um i skipped that part of the episode because for all i know it's a location i'm going to cover later and i

didn't want to get into it but he does investigate a location um earlier in the day but before they got dropped off um they're talking to the coach driver and the horse pees all over the street and zach asks if he can be the one to drop the urine marker on the street for like the street cleaners he's like very excited about it he was like oh can i do it right before i guess he had learned what a urine marker was where if i also grew up in um right you know a town that did horse-drawn carriages so i i've seen them on the streets before but they're like these little like flags and like whenever a horse you know goes in the street you throw one on so that way when the cleaners see the little flag oh i didn't know this they know you could

they know like what to clean up they know it's literal horse pee and not water or something. And now it's Zach's new hobby. Got it. He lost his fucking mind. And then when the horse peed everywhere, he was like, can I throw the urine marker? This is us on a TV show. No, no, no. You're supposed to be doing the actual content of the show. So he got to throw the urine marker.

That was his favorite thing in the world. And then he must have really given himself a big head because he started talking about uh horse bathroom tendencies and he asked the coach driver quote when a horse takes a shit in the bag i noticed the bag jumbles up kind of like you're tossing some salad do you get the vaporous fumes that come back up through here aka can you smell the horse poop when you're standing behind the horse when he pooped right and the driver said yes and then aaron went quote so far i haven't learned anything about the city i've only learned about poop

oh my god this is really i love this this is like next level i won't be able to eat salad for a while let's just put no it's not i wasn't going to eat salad anyway but yeah not planning on it anymore so when they investigate the jail here's my last really fun fact like super super fun fact okay so when they decide to investigate the jail remember i said there was a theme and that they were there were contests for both of these shows ghost hunters had a contest well ghost adventures also had a contest and it was called the music video mashup challenge which i don't remember but apparently when they were filming that season they had this challenge where people could submit music videos and like i guess like overlay ghost adventures quotes or i am so

angry i didn't know about this when it was happening so i have the link i have it on my phone i'm gonna send it to eva and we're gonna put in the show notes for this episode so you guys can all watch it um i'll also text it to you later this guy literally tried to dress up like zach bagans had the faux hawk tried to totally recreate the intro uh like that my name is zach bagans and like but it's funny like he's he made it like a parody so he's like standing next to someone with a white sheet on him like so he looks like a ghost um but so here's he so sorry go ahead so i was gonna say that the guy the video i'm gonna show that was the entry winner and so the well so okay i feel like that means ZB has a good sense of humor,

right? If he like let a parody win, I think so. And right. Well, what's really fun about it is that, so the contest winner, you got to then go explore,

uh, you got to investigate with them. So I'm so angry. I didn't win. Well, you're going to be even angrier. So the, the person that,

um, that won this challenge and submitted the video that we'll have in the show notes his name was dakota he was 16 at the time his contest entry name was your dad's awesome music video um just so you know what he was what he thought that was gonna be the winning title and it was so it worked um dakota was 16 at the time so since he was underage his dad also went and so they both investigated with zach together i'm so happy about this the best the best fun fact i think i've ever had is this about dakota so at the time he was 16 this was in 2012 and i thought oh i'm gonna instagram message him and i'm gonna ask him

like what his like what his experience was if he could tell us anything about zach and then i found him on instagram and then i realized oh he's verified and also he is like he has like a lot of followers so i don't think he's gonna get back to me but i was like why does he have so many followers he later went on to be the producer editor and star of travel channels destination fear what so which is precious because i kind of think of destination fear is like a spinoff of ghost adventures normally i would say it's rigged but if he was 16 when he won like it's not like at that point he was already working for travel channel no they were all like the only way i found that's amazing the way i found his last name was through a bunch of articles who were like aspiring filmmaker dakota and i was like oh he makes it he like has his own show that is so cool and the super precious part of this all

is that in this episode because he's like a teenager like he didn't really know what he was doing zach teaches him how to use night vision, which he uses on his own show now, which is just like... I am thrilled by this information. It was just like, in Zach Bagans' world, it was the sweetest thing I've ever seen. Yeah, this is precious. History writing itself.

It's beautiful. But so Zach's crew taught him how to use night vision, and now he uses it a lot on Destination Fear, which is on Travel Channel, just like Zach. And I looked, they follow each other on Instagram. And Zach only follows 33 people. And Dakota is one of them. Wow. Sorry, that was loud.

So holy cannoli. I did not message Dakota and get any hot goss. That's for another Tea Time Tuesday. Yeah, don't harass him, please, on our behalf. Because that doesn't work for ZB. and it probably won't work for dakota but it was really really cute to see like a 16 year old who like ends up making it i doing that exact thing story that's so cute so uh while he's there uh during this investigation zach asks lavinia to complete her final words because remember she said like oh if i you know if you have a message for the devil let me know i'm gonna see him in a second

so in a second in the hot sec and so um zach said you know your final words what were your final words again if you have a message for and then the spirit box said the devil so that's pretty terrifying yeah it is they also saw mist and then they kept hearing knocking um and later there was a very loud crashing sound like something huge had been thrown um and then they got an evp saying you make me mad that's awful that wouldn't be the first time zach is also quoted because he was talking to dakota and his dad and i guess they were wondering if they were like how much investigating they were really going to be doing or if they were just going to watch Zach. And Zach says, quote, guys, you didn't want a birthday party in McDonald's.

You want to lock down with us. So, dad, we've got a room for you. And then they locked the dad in to like by himself for an hour in an empty room with equipment. Oh, my God. You know, Zach prepared that statement like i'm so proud of it this isn't your average mcdonald's birthday party so they lock dakota's dad in a room by himself and while he's alone they hear this huge unexplained crashing banging next to the room which they still never figured out um they also bring dakota to lavinia's area

and zach says the quote he's he's introducing lavinia to dakota and says quote there's a spirit here her name's lavinia lavinia was a psychotic bitch and she killed a lot of people i just choked on my own spit like you're talking to a 16 year old by the way like yeah wow are you trying to like get on his level or something i love that he got rid of the dad first before he said that. Well, then. Locked his dad away. Then he leaves Dakota with a digital recorder in Lavinia's area and says, like, okay, now try to talk to her and, like, get some information. And Dakota says, quote, Lavinia, my name is Dakota, and I'm a lot hotter than Zach.

Okay. It's no wonder this kid ended up being a success. okay it's no wonder this kid ended up being a success and uh so anyway they soon hear really heavy footsteps upstairs in real life in real time not just on the digital recorder and also dakota sees a light fly by at the same time his dad gets an evp of a man yelling and screaming next to him even though he didn't hear it in real life um and there were there was a male EVP that said, let me out. I want to go. At the same time as that EVP, two, or no, not at the same time. That was just one EVP. Let me out.

I want to go. And then two of the cameras at a different time, they both had fresh batteries and then they died. And then right afterwards, Aaron got really sick and an EVP got caught of someone saying, get off of him. Almost as if they were making him sick. Gross. And then right afterwards, Aaron got really sick and an EVP got caught of someone saying, get off of him. Almost as if they were making him sick. So anyway, that was a lot.

But that was the old city jail in Charleston. Wow. That was good, Em. I'm sorry that was so, so long. No, I mean, I'm sorry to everybody else because mine's also long. But wow, that was good, Em. that was next level stuff thank you i i that information about dakota that was also uh a deep dive move that i usually wouldn't have done but i i really felt like i'm gonna get some information out of this kid and then i found out

yeah i found a completely different information it's like clearly worth it i wow i mean that's the kind of stuff that uh that i like to hear the the really random shit um wow good job i love that how's your dry mouth doing it's gonna be a lot better now that i'm not talking anymore so okay i had texted m earlier and i said um like i have a really long story it's a big or I said it's a big story. And Em was like, I'm really excited about mine, too. So I was like, we're going to have a double whammy here. Yeah, at least it's a good episode. Like if you're halfway through your road trip already or like you're halfway through cleaning

your bathroom, I hope it's looking great. I hope you're having a good time. Wow. Get ready for part two. I wish podcasting inspired me to clean, but it like certainly does not. I wish podcasting inspired me to clean, but it certainly does not. Anyway, so this is a story that has also been requested just a shit ton. I am beyond excited to cover this because it's just one of the more horrible stories.

What is it? What is it? It's the Watts family murders. I don't know. Wait. Oh, I know this. You do? I know this. Oh, oh good are we talking about chris watts the guy yes okay yeah yeah yeah i yeah yeah yeah yeah i don't know enough

i will watch the documentary no i will be okay i know the very very very general story so you are going to still blow my mind i'm very excited about this okay oh my gosh i'm excited oh my gosh this is so cool okay it was a big one so um there was a documentary that came out recently uh on netflix called american murder the family next door and it was directed by jenny popplewell it's on netflix um i have watched it twice now and i don't often watch things twice so that's saying something um it is one in my opinion one of the most compelling true crime documentaries i've ever seen um and i think it's mostly because there's this added level of horror in that they use mostly firsthand footage like from so um well you'll see more but it's it's like very. What I think what I'm catching is like, I remember they interviewed him a lot before they found out the truth.

And so it's like you can look at original footage and see like, you could do like a lot of behavioral. Yeah, there's. Well, basically there's like firsthand stuff from years before anything happened. So a lot of footage from their family, their lives, like before. She used social media a lot. So there's just a ton of like background stuff we get to see as part of this documentary

to kind of like flush out their whole lives before this crime took place. Got it. And you are going to talk about the ghost, correct? What? Oh, no. I don't have that in here. I forgot about that. Okay. We can talk about the ghost, correct? What? Oh, no. I don't have that in here. I forgot about that. Okay.

We can talk about that. That's the only thing I know because everyone was tagging me in. Yeah. We got to do a bonus. Oh, fuck. I didn't even think to look that up because the story is already so goddamn long. That's okay. Maybe we can do like a bonus thing or something.

Okay. Okay. So let me just get into it. So even though we are talking about it today i do recommend highly to see this uh documentary because just seeing it is way different than just hearing about it um so highly recommend it so on the morning of monday august 14 2018 we're in frederick colorado a woman named nicole atkinson decides she's going to text her friend shenan watts uh nicole had dropped shenan off at 2 a.m the morning before that night or like that morning yeah um they had

gone to an mlm conference in arizona no comment like a direct direct sales i know she's the victim so let's not say anything negative i think that's a whole nother episode uh topic so um they and nicole decides to check in with shenan uh because during the trip to arizona she had been like really on edge she hadn't been eating she hadn't been drinking um and so she was like i'm just gonna check in on her make sure she's doing okay so they uh she and nicole had met selling thrive which is an mlm like a mostly weight loss supplement they're like these little patches uh their friendship had blossomed because they both had kids a similar age um they would have a lot of play dates with their kids and they became really close really good friends so shenan was an avid social media user which is part of the reason that

we have so much footage of her and her family um and she responded to texts usually really quickly so when she didn't respond to nicole's message um it was a little strange so nicole texted her again a half an hour later and nicole knew shenan had a doctor's appointment that morning so she was like hey how'd it go? Nothing. No word from Shanann. So two hours go by. She's still not hearing from her. And she's like, something's off. She just feels it. It's like a spidey sense. She's like, I know something's going on. Sure. So she texts her, I'm very worried about you. I'm coming to your house. And that was at 1146 a.m. So Nicole gets to the watts household at 12 10 uh nobody seems to be

home which is odd because shenan works from home um so she also hadn't responded to any messages still at this point so nicole calls the police and says and also calls uh shenan's husband chris who's 33 and he rushes from his job as an operator for a company called Anadarko Petroleum, which is an oil and gas company. And he had been at work since he left around 515, 530 a.m. that morning. So he knew nothing of where Shanann could be, apart from the fact that she had a doctor's appointment scheduled and potentially a play date scheduled so the police arrive around 140 um and this is kind of where a lot of the footage comes from too because the police in the documentary they use police body cam footage uh from that day to like tell the story so all that footage is in it it's

really fascinating okay yeah it's really cool so they i mean you know cool in its own way but right i gotcha so they have this um their body cams on so you get to watch this all happen unfold in real time um so they arrive around 140 chris arrives and lets police into the house uh shenan isn't there the two kids aren't there there is no trace of where they could have gone the house is immaculate they soon find shenan's phone in the house and chris says this is her lifeline she works from home this is her lifeline so very weird that it would be at home and he also comes out of his daughter's rooms and says they left their blankies like their blankies are here which they would never leave the house without they also find shenan's purse on the kitchen counter and nicole notices that uh shenan's lufus medication is in the purse so like everything she fucking

needs is like here okay exactly so she's like that's even a bigger red flag than the phone like she needs her medication right so then uh chris also finds her wedding ring on the nightstand but there's no note or anything the house is clean um so the police kind of go around to neighbors houses and ask if anyone has like camera footage from an outdoor like a ring doorbell or a nest camera or something and uh they find a neighbor who does have some footage and when they watch it back the only thing they can see is chris's car leaving at 5 15 sorry 5 17 a.m specifically okay um and so at this point they're like hey do you have any clue where she could be and chris just says we recently had an emotional conversation not even a fight but that's that's it that's all i can think of so now just to give some background on um the couple shenan and chris themselves so the watts family um they were portrayed this is very cliche but they were portrayed as like

the perfect uh picture perfect family americana bread and butter. Totally. Like very beautiful, happy, two kids. She posted a lot of, like daily basically vlogged their lives on Facebook. It was just like a constant stream of like what they were doing every day. And she, you know, worked from home for this MLM. So she was posting like those kind of streams. She was posting about the kids and their activities i imagine that would be really really useful as a cop like when yeah like it's like and a documentarian okay that also yeah as a filmmaker it's like look at all of this

footage we have firsthand yeah but yeah i mean as a cop you can see like everything about their their dynamic like their back and forth i mean we're going to talk about some of it too and how it played into it and you can see i mean you can see like their life events unfold their vacations their life their life yeah their whole life so um shenan described in one facebook video for example this is a good example of that that chris had added her on facebook several years ago and she thought what the heck i'll never meet him he's just a facebook friend i have a million of them and i'm like so he literally out of the that's how they met he out of the blue added her on facebook which is just to me kind of odd i know some people do that but right and is there do we find

out that there was a reason to that like oh okay he thought she was cute and added her and like pre very that's a very like almost myspace move or like a tumblr move like i don't have to know you and so she said like oh i have a million of them um and then she says but the thing about facebook is then you finally meet the person and i'm like well you usually don't i would say i would argue how often are you just meeting strangers from facebook yeah it seems like not the greatest idea but i mean it worked she and chris started to date um apparently she was very like hesitant about it and she pushed him away a lot she would always give him an out but he was like always sticking around he went to her colonoscopy with her wow and as someone who has

a partner who went to their colonoscopy i can tell you that it's much appreciated is it i've always wanted is that i feel like i would be more uncomfortable i don't know why well they're not like watching it but it's like allison look me in the eyes while something goes on my tushy just just no i mean with me in this moment because you can't drive afterwards so you don't want to take it over home i mean you know like i didn't know you couldn't drive after i guess that well you're being sedated yeah you know i so as someone who's never had one i know none of those things have even crossed my mind but okay yeah so good to know i mean also blaze works in in medicine so i mean maybe it's different but i have thought i was like if something really traumatic were to happen to any part of my body i think despite how close you are or allison is i was like i kind of just want blaze there and that's it

i don't blame you for one goddamn second i don't. I think most of my family would feel that way as well. Like, Christine, you can stay home and watch the cat. Oh, my God. So he always stuck around. And then she's like, you know what? He never left my side. He was always there for me. So that's when I knew he was the one.

She had already gone through a pretty awful divorce. And she had gone through a really hard time emotionally and had been diagnosed with lupus. And so she'd already gone through like a really, really rough patch. So when she met Chris, it was sort of like this godsend in her mind. And they got married on November 3rd, 2012 in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. And then they moved to Colorado together. So apparently she had been told at one point in her life that she couldn't have kids, but the two of them did have children and she was like ecstatic. This was all she ever wanted. They had Bella, who was born December 17th, 2013, and Cece, who was born July 17th, 2015.

Okay. So it's just like this very cliche social media thing of like, oh, they post the sweetest family photos at holiday pictures and like it's just you know a very sweet family insta perfect insta perfect exactly and she shared how much she like doted on her children her husband they had a dachshund named Dieter uh the he's very cute and the the little girls with the dachshund is just precious um and so the most exciting news that she had shared recently was a video of her surprising chris with the news that she was pregnant with their third child oh okay so she wore a shirt that said oops we did it again and held the pregnancy, the stick thing.

And when he walked in the room, she had like the camera rolling and when, and it was on Facebook live and it was just a lot of pressure. So when he walked in the room, he's like, oh, I like your shirt and laughs at it. And then kind of realizes like, oh, really? And she's like, really really it's just a little bit weird i mean i don't think anyone would act natural in this scenario it's kind of awkward but like i don't know it felt weird it didn't seem like he was excited or yeah it felt a little cold or like a little bit like apprehensive neither of them were very i mean she was kind of like hey look

and he was like oh he was just like another one sort of which you know i mean i'm like i get they were they were already which i'll mention later in like really big financial debt so like i get that it was probably a big stressor but also this was weird to me it was just awkward i guess and like pretty silent and this is she did choose to share it though so i mean who knows um so he looks at the test and says so pink means and she was like uh it means positive we've done this before homie like you know what it looks like well he goes oh so but is it a girl and i was like do you really think that okay that's the first red flag isn't that weird i'm like that's not a thing right like i don't know well there's a i this is kind of outdated now because in tiktok world like after two weeks

something's outdated but like a month ago there was this huge trend where like girls were asking their boyfriends like basic questions about oh i do remember that and like they could not get it together so like maybe this is one of those things but like after two kids shouldn't you know like how like when gender can even be announced and all that that's the thing that threw me off excuse me not gender or sex right that's that's what threw me off is like you already have two of them like right you should know how this goes you know how the peeing on the stick works at this point but okay so you know who knows it's just a little bit awkward but anyway they're having their third kid and he had wanted a boy because they had two girls. So, you know how I said earlier, like, oh, she had this appointment and Nicole had texted her and she wasn't answering, which is when she knew something was wrong.

Right. So that appointment was actually an ultrasound appointment. So that's kind of why Nicole, like, she wouldn't miss this appointment like this is not something she would voluntarily miss gotcha okay that makes sense so she was about 14 or 15 weeks along according to chris and another uh fact that was not shared on their perfect family social media is that the watts family was about four hundred thousand dollars in debt yowza So that was not good. Big bucks. Big bucks. And so now she's pregnant again. That's an added stressor, I would imagine.

Which I don't know what that experience is like, finding out that you're going to have a baby. But I imagine if you are that deep in the red, like 1% of you is scared shitless at the very least. Yeah. I mean, I would imagine any anytime you're having a baby, there's probably a lot of like apprehension about like your life's changing. Yeah.

How the fuck are we going to do this? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, exactly. I think it's just when you put everything on the internet for everybody to like parse through and analyze and, you know, it's just, it's hard to say. It's hard to say. through and analyze and you know it's just it's hard to say it's hard to say but so on august 14th 2018 which is the day of the disappearance um the police called chris to get some information about

his wife and two girls so they can post alerts throughout the neighborhood neighborhood and they bring a sniffer dog named cody cody's my new best friend in this whole story. I know. Welcome. We're now a trio because wow, I'm obsessed with him. They brought him to the house, but according to the handler, she is seen in the footage and she says like, maybe this is just me, but this house seems way too immaculate for like a house basically with two kids living in it right like something's being covered up and or cleaned or she just says like it seems weirdly clean and then the dog doesn't find anything so that's kind of where they leave it um so press also interview chris for a missing persons report and again you can watch this footage of him on the news basically

saying uh you know Shanann if you hear this please bring the kids home I want you home I think I remember that yeah that one's a pretty famous one and there's definitely a lot of analysis on that online as well which is kind of interesting okay um and then Chris goes into the police department to be like formally interviewed so uh they focus police focus on the quote-unquote emotional conversation that he brought up earlier when he's like it wasn't a fight it was an emotional conversation okay um which now he's calling an emotional argument so they're like huh well can you tell us what we're gonna pull on that string basically so apparently a couple months ago shenan and the kids had gone to stay with her parents in So they're like, huh, well, can you tell us? We're going to pull on that string, basically. So apparently a couple months ago, Shanann and the kids had gone to stay with her parents in North Carolina for six weeks over the summer.

And Chris didn't join because he had to work. And then he joined the last week of the six-week trip. So for five weeks, he was at home alone. Okay. So it's kind of a timeline here so shenan and the girls flew out to north carolina in late june and then july 31st he came out for a week to join the family then they all returned on uh they all returned to colorado after that week and then on august 10th shenan flew to arizona for the mlm conference damn and travel bug before seriously and then the 14th is when she was dropped off by nicole and got it the rest is history yep so during this trip to north carolina was basically

like the last big family trip before they disappeared um so apparently on this trip before chris arrived shenan had gotten into an argument with chris's parents her in-laws okay not good uh shenan and the kids had gone to visit his parents who also lived in north carolina and cindy chris's mom brought out ice cream for everyone that contained everything little cc was allergic to so she's allergic to a whole lot of ingredients and the ice cream was like and this girl's very young and so this is very dangerous right she's allergic to a whole lot of ingredients and the ice cream was like and this girl's very young and so this is very dangerous right she's not gonna know what she can and can't eat and all that yeah exactly so shenan saw this as reckless um she basically accused cindy i mean she like

blew up about this she accused cindy of basically trying to kill her child and cindy was like it was a harmless mistake i didn't know about her allergies which then shan was like how could you not know you're her grandma and you've been with her also like they were together for like a long time right like yeah or i don't know i don't know how long they'd been there they were visiting one day so i don't know if they've been there before or not gotcha because they were there to visit her parents but then one day they took a trip to visit his parents yes you did say this which is like when this kind of blew up into this big mess but yeah i mean you'd think that grandma would know especially at least if they're close like if yeah you know you'd think so you'd think so so essentially this turns in this huge argument and

cindy kicks them out of the house um and shenan sends chris a text saying you should call your dad and tell him you did not appreciate your mom putting your daughter at risk today and chris replied i will call him and tell him what i think about this it's not fucking cool at all because it is the kids i will set this right okay so rift, a little bit of a rift. Yeah. One could say. So this was not set right. Unfortunately, on July 15, 2018, it was Cece's birthday party and her grandparents didn't show up. So Chris's parents didn't show up to the party, which I found kind of mean because it's like it's still your granddaughter. You don't agree with your daughter in law or whatever. whatever yeah if your granddaughter wants you to come to her birthday

it makes me sad that they didn't go yeah like kind of just like get over that little problem and yeah go to your grandkids party a lot of people don't agree with their in-laws right but i don't know this is none of my none of my beeswax this is for m's tea time i should just shut my mouth yeah just like anonymously write about it on my tea time and i'll i might i'll give you my opinion later i might link to this episode and just let you take it um so it just was sad because she's a little girl she's like super tiny and her grandparents don't show up to her party um so and shenan was clear that they were invited so it wasn't like she had uninvited them or anything um so that at this point they're thinking okay well maybe this is what pushed shenan to leave right the kids maybe she was like done with his family and like that he wasn't standing up for

her like maybe that could have been it um and there was actually already uh a history of family friction or like a rift i guess as i said earlier many riffs maybe maybe just like a giant like cracking yeah yeah like that earthquake that split up pangea just i was gonna say like like the squirrel and ice age like yeah yeah this was the acorn from ice age this whole family yeah and they just kind of got dropped right in exactly that's like the perfect analogy ice age it's like okay so how would you describe this family um the acorn from ice age i would just say that it's so good you're all the riffs whatever yeah yeah okay yeah yeah so there's already a riff because um according chris his mom never thought shenan was quote good enough for him uh to the

point that chris's family didn't even attend their wedding oh my gosh in north carolina like again they just didn't show up which is like yikes yeah and apparently he they were like police were like well why doesn't she like or why don't they like shenan like you know what's the deal why don't they yeah why don't they think she's good enough and he was like well they thought that she took me away from them a little bit and they they were mad that she we moved to colorado and i'm like that is not enough of a fucking reason but also it's kind of backwards of like you know oh well that they feel like i'm not they feel like i got taken away and so now they're pushing away from the time that they do have with me like that doesn't really totally make sense

no it it's it doesn't and it's like I I mean it's hurt it sounds hurtful to me like I don't know I don't think that's it just seems like very wow this is a shock of a century I don't think there's a healthy family yeah okay to put it mildly correct it's the acorn for my sage talk about another acorn wow this squirrel is just hoarding them so uh anyway so there's this family rift already happening it's just getting worse because now she's trying to visit with the grandkids and it's blowing up she's getting kicked out of the house it's just bad but now they're missing and so chris is now in this awkward position um and police are like does your at this point they're like well does your gut feeling tell you that shenan and the kids walked out or were they

taken out and chris replies at first i really thought maybe she was just at somebody's house just decompressing but after today with the onslaught of all the police cars, all the news, all the canine units, it's making me lean the other direction that someone took her. But if someone took her, it would have had to have been someone she knew because there's no sign of anything like being disturbed or broken. Right. Like, according to the storyline, according to the current storyline, Nicole dropped her off at like two in the morning and then three hours later, he went to work. Right. Yeah. There was like,

yeah. Which I assume the cops at some point have asked him like, Oh, when you left, was she in bed or something? So. Right, right,

right. And that was, he said like the last time he saw her was she was in bed. He went to work. No clue what happened. Right. Okay. Except he knew about the doctor's appointment,

yada, yada. Okay. Exactly. So that was kind of, and the timeline is backed up by the video footage doctor's appointment, yada, yada. Okay. Exactly. So that was kind of, and the timeline is backed up by the video footage. She is, you can, there's doorbell footage of her walking into the house with her suitcase at two in the morning. And there's video footage of his truck leaving the driveway. Weird. So then, well, I guess maybe I'll get to it. Nevermind.

I was, it's a mystery. I was going to say like, well then it's, I know you're going to get to it. Don't worry. I know, but it's, it's, that's the part say like well then it's i know you're gonna get to it don't worry don't worry i know but it's it's that's the part where you're like what the like i'm so excited to answer the questions okay good well tell me my little squirrel my little just juggling all the acorns for me right now you know how bad i am at juggling Don't bring it up. Okay. So anyway, so on the topic of this, of relationships, the interviewer kind of kind of takes a turn and he says to Chris, Hey, so you've lost some weight and you've kind of gotten really fit. And then he says, quote, you can imagine when guys start cheating or want to cheat.'s what happens and chris is like i've never cheated on my wife he makes that very clear and he says you know i was 245 pounds

and now he's about 180 so he's like oh so he didn't just lose some weight he like yes he got like buff like he he got jacked like he works out a lot which is also part of you see all the facebook live stuff and like he's his routine has a lot of exercising involved now gotcha um so he keeps insisting like no i would never cheat and uh they call his supervisor luke epple at work who says he's never indicated or said anything to me that would make me think that he was cheating um so they're like okay that's kind of a dead end for right now so they're kind of stopping on that front but uh it turns out after going through some text messages between shenan and her friends uh shenan was still concerned about chris's loyalty so even though he's swearing up and down he had nothing

his boss is saying no he was loyal to his wife as far as i could tell uh text messages from shenan to her friends uh indicate that she was suspicious let's just put it that way okay so during her trip to north carolina she had a lot of exchanges um with friends and with chris uh he kept claiming to have missed or not seen her calls and facetimes um and she sent one text that reads forget not getting my calls you fucking call your kids when you wake up you have not called one time since we've been here on your own um so he keeps apologizing he's like oh the facetime call went to my work phone. I didn't see it. It's just a lot of excuses. A lot of back and forth.

Yeah, just a lot of BS. And he's like, I'll call the following morning. But it's like your two kids are gone for six weeks. Like, you think you'd call every now and then. Yeah. I would think. Check in. Just to at least say hello.

At least every couple days just to say what's going on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And unfortunately, even when he joined them finally in north carolina for that last week things did not improve this is again all on video she has him arriving at the airport she has them going to the beach taking the kids to the beach for the first time all on camera and chris had become very cold and standoffish uh she texted her friend quote he kissed me once since he's been here that was a that was at airport i kissed him no grabbing my ass hugging or anything i want to cry and then another text

which reads kids in bed i took a night shower means i want sex and he knows it he's over here doing fucking oh sorry it says ducking because of the autocorrect but just to clarify he's that's the most relatable part of this whole story that's probably the the one part i absolutely can be like oh i've been there i'm like no one has ever meant to type ducking right okay right apple jesus okay um he's over here doing ducking push-up challenge instead of discussing anything or fucking me i'm over here crying in silence he's never been doing ducking push-up challenge instead of discussing anything or fucking me i'm over here crying in silence he's never been like this five and a half ducking weeks no sex unless he was getting it somewhere else so she's pissed uh and scared because she's like he's not even like coming near me right um however chris was adamant that he was not with anyone else

and her friends were like hey maybe he's just having a tough time. Like, he wouldn't cheat on you. Just like, you know, stay strong, yada, yada. conference and she had written him a note and they show the whole handwritten note i'm not going to read the whole thing on the video or on the documentary but it said it included i miss holding you these last five weeks have been so hard i missed watching you play with the kids i don't want to lose you ever i will be civil and get along with your mom we just all need to have mutual respect i will do anything for you the last thing on earth is for you to hurt you deserve the world and i don't like it when you hurt it hurts me i will fight for our marriage so like so that so remind me that was a letter that he that she left for him yeah so she wrote that letter before the um mlm conference oh yeah okay and do we know that she actually wrote this yeah she wrote it to him when they got back to colorado

and she's like i'm heading on a work trip. You're watching the kids. And she texted him, your letter's on the counter. And that was the letter that she left him. I don't know if he faked it or something. Oh, no, no, no. That was a letter she had written a week before all of this. Got it. So clearly Shanann is wanting to make this right and work on this.

And is committed to the relationship. Yes, fully. And I remember she's also pregnant with their third kid. Right. So ultra committed currently. Yeah. Yeah. So back to present day.

Fast forward the investigation. No sign of Shanann. No sign of the kids. Police are canvassing their flyers. News broadcasts with headlines like pregnant woman vanishes with two daughters they're asking for any signs any clues from neighbors and then about two days after the disappearance on august 15th uh chris has agreed to come in for a polygraph test So this test is conducted by Agent Tammy Lee. And we like

Agent Lee. So she welcomes Chris. I just love watching this footage because it's just like you just can see what's going on and she's just such a badass. So she welcomes Chris to the test and she's very nice, very calm and she says, I want you to have confidence

in the fact that you had nothing to do with this disappearance. We're going to find that out today. And obviously, I mean, I hope that you know that if you did have something to do with their disappearance, it would be really stupid for you to come in here and take a polygraph today. Right? Like, it would be really dumb. Like, you should not be here right now sitting in this chair if you had anything to do with Shanann and the little girl's disappearance. Okay? I love it.

I love it i love it and he's like she's like patting his arm like just being very like comforting and she says the coolest thing about this is right now there's only one person in this room that knows what the truth is and in about five minutes there's going to be two of us that's the coolest part okay so i'm like he's given the full spiel of like this is what this means she did and you're about to take she did a great job of making it look like he was the good, like, I mean, like, typical, typical, you know, badass woman of like making the guy look like it's his, he made the decision himself. But really, she's like, it's up to me.

Yeah. We're gonna get this out. Isn't this really cool and exciting? Isn't this fun that I'm gonna find out whatever I need to in a second? But it's all up to you however you this is your game right yeah yeah yeah so uh the questions begin with is your first name christopher just obviously baseline questions and then they delve into did you physically cause shenan's disappearance chris says no are you lying about the last time

you saw shenan chris says no and then she has to stop the test. And she says, your breathing is all over the place. Like calm down, take a breath. Let's like start over. Which like it could, it could have been if he were to be innocent, like he's still having to talk about like his missing wife and children. So the breathing is understandable.

I think even the fact that the baseline wasn't getting like, yeah, because he was so all over the place. Yeah, exactly. I don't think it was a reliable start because he was all over the place because like if you're already freaking out about what's your name i would okay i just like side note one of like my dream jobs i've always wanted is to be a polygraph examiner really all the way i like only like two weeks ago i was like looking at like polygraph college just because like polygraph college it's like like you have to take like all these courses and get like truly certified and all that but like it's gonna be one of those things that never happens but part of me is always like gemini thing i've ever heard i just want to

have the power to find out if people are lying to me i just want to know you know what's out there i want to know what i don't want you to have that power over me i just it's like one of those things where i think like damn in another life i would have definitely tried to do that but that would be cool i don't think i can though because i i think at least the programs i was looking at you have to have specific like psychology backgrounds before you wonder if you have like an illegal forensic right right okay yeah you have to have like a forensic degree to even get into polygraph stuff and i have like a forensic degree to even get into polygraph stuff and i was like well i'm not gonna get that yeah maybe once you're medicated for

another couple weeks you'll get into it bingo what if you just started college you're again you were like actually i've gone back to college christine now like what's so funny about college is like now that i'm out of it now i realize all the classes i wish i took i know that's very frustrating but that's why we have skillshare i literally take skillshare courses that i that i think myself i wish i could have taken this that's not a joke skillshare i would like you to uh open up a polygraph course a polygraph branch thank you oh boy so speaking of the badass polygraph examiner um so agent lee said i don't think she's the examiner i don't know she's asking the question so maybe i don't know whatever so uh she says start over your breathing's all over

the place they get back on track and she finishes the question the interview with the question do you know where shenan is now to which chris replies no so she leaves the room with the data and the next time we see her is when she returns with another agent and agent lee opens with so it is completely clear that you were not honest during the testing and i think you already know that you did not pass the polygraph test okay so now we need to talk about what actually happened and i feel like you're probably ready to do that but despite this chris is like i didn't i didn't lie to you on that polygraph i promise to which the other agent says chris time to stop which i love wow

and then there's the nail in the coffin which is agent lee saying there's a reason you feel sick to your stomach when people hold stuff inside it makes you physically ill and i can just tell from your face i could tell from the second that you walked in that you were wanting to just come clean and be done with this wow i love her i she was like she knew she was like i'm gonna manipulate this guy like i'm gonna i'm gonna pretend like i'm all sweet and sugar-coated but i already know this guy's fucking guilty the power is just the power that's what i want from this polygraph course oh boy so eventually in a burst of confession chris says i've been cheating on shenan and they're like okay but they're also like yeah we know it's like i first of all we

knew a second of all that's arguably not the worst thing that's going to come out of your mouth today yes so that's not quite where we headed, but I guess it's a good start. Yeah. So he admits that he's been cheating and the police already know this. And they had not asked about it in the polygraph. So it wasn't that. But they had already heard from a woman named Nicole. Oh, the one who dropped her off? A nicole so that's where this gets a little bit like uh confusing um a lot of nicole's spelled in a lot of wild ways uh so plot twist is

police already knew this so they revealed that earlier in the day they received a phone call from someone with crucial information this uh person is one nicole kessinger okay and she is chris's girlfriend whom he had been cheating on shenan with and uh so we have nicole atkinson was the friend who dropped her off and is like her bff okay and then we have nicole who's the other woman right right right so uh i'm not sure the best way to go about how are how are each nicole spelled okay uh the first nicole is spelled i think it was spelled n-i-c-k-o-l-e okay and then what's the second one this one is n-i-c-h-o-l so there's nicole with a k and nicole with an h i don't know if that's even i'm trying to think of ways to define them okay there's mlm nicole and then there's girlfriend nicole

yes girlfriend nicole okay yes good idea that's how we'll do this okay good good good good so there's like yeah mlm bff nicole and then like that there's bff and then there's gf yeah gf yeah so nicole gf kesinger prefaces her interview with the fact that no one including chris knows that she had come into the police station but she thinks chris is a really good guy and she's worried about his wife and his kids so they had actually met in june of that year so it's august they'd met in june as co-workers at anna darko and chris had told nicole that he had two daughters but had also framed his marriage that he was in the process of separating and that he was sleeping in the basement and that they weren't together anymore which is

total bullshit i mean he made that up completely and nicole actually only found out through the media that shenan was 15 weeks pregnant so she didn't even know that this was so it actually adds a lot to when he found out that she was pregnant uh he was already sleeping with this other woman no that makes total sense now yeah yeah so it just adds a whole because he was thinking like he's probably also thinking this is on facebook live what if in some way my girlfriend sees me on facebook live right now being told that too yeah like and you're you're wondering like oh is he gonna find a way out like a divorce and then suddenly she's like now we're having another baby it's like uh that complicates yeah but but

girlfriend nicole probably thought like oh he's separating and a lot of people date when they're separated so exactly so he said oh no like we're we're separated i'm sleeping in the basement we're in the process of getting a divorce. All bullshit. So she didn't even know Shanann was pregnant. And when she found this out on the media, she was like, OK, I got to tell the police like my part in this and let them know that, you know, what I know. So it turns out Chris had spent not only the weeks while Shanann was in North Carolina

with Nicole, but had also seen her on Saturday while Shanann was away on her work trip uh with her Nicole so right MLM they were both with different Nicoles Nicoles exactly these troublemaker Nicoles I'll tell you um Shanann did have an inkling that something was up that weekend because she told her BFF Nicole that uh Chris had booked a babysitter and said he was going to a Rockies game with some friends. But when Shanann checked their joint bank account, she noticed he had spent $63 for his dinner at Lucky Dog Cafe. And she was like, that's a lot for one person's portion. Right, right.

So she asked him like, oh, what did you have? And he said, a salmon and a beer. And so she did the very... A salmon that was also once king. Yes. The king salmon. Yes. The king salmon. Yes. So she did the thing that you and I would do, which is look up the menu and calculate how much it would actually cost to get a salmon and a beer. And it was not anywhere near $63.

So it turns out he and Nicole had actually been on a date, which obviously she didn't know that, but she was like, something is off. Yeah. So Nicole had come in and revealed all this information uh and so police didn't have to ask him about her in the polygraph because they already knew this information from her um so although obviously it was admirable for her to come in and say like and help move the case along uh it is worth noting that we also know now about her internet search history before she went in and i originally learned this from uh the crime junkie episode

on this case and it turns out that in uh on july 24th so this was like several weeks before the disappearance she googled man i'm having an affair with says he will leave his wife on august and to be clear she had deleted all of this before going into police. So that looks shady. Yeah, she deleted all of the information and all the texts and everything. So it's like she probably felt a little weird about obviously admitting all of this. On August 4th, she searched for over two hours for wedding dresses. So she was in a different headspace yeah she had a quick

quick plans she had very intense plans coming up she had a different intense is the right word on august 8th she searched uh for topics related to marrying your mistress and after the murders on august 13th and 14th there were hours and hours worth of searches for shenan's name and can cops trace text messages so she's probably like ironic that i know i know they're like oh that's fun it's like very meta yeah they also found thousands of photos hidden in a fake calculator app on chris's phone which were of her nude semi-nude like bikinis just like you know i remember discovering that app in my mind being blown isn't that creepy at my i have a friend who has a lot of that but like

it's uh oh just for like it was in when we were teenagers or not teenagers but i guess in college and uh he was like in case my mom ever borrows my phone, I don't want her to like see my nudes. So it's not like for nefarious. No, no, no. Well, I guess, you know, whatever you deem nudes that you're just saying to people. Saying you don't want your mom to see nudes is not, that's doing God's work, in my opinion, hiding your nudes from your mom.

In that, in terms of that, though, I thought it was a genius app. Like you get to like pick your own like math equation you type in and it's like the password. And I was like, that's so smart. Yeah, there's also one for domestic violence victims that's like disguised. I think it's like a pizza app or something that you can like order pizza from. And it's so smart. I don't know the name of it. So smart.

So I don't know if you know who amber fry is uh she was the quote-unquote mistress in the lacey peterson scott peterson case oh so that's only relevant because nicole had also been searching amber fry and did people hate amber fry oh shit well a little too late for that. She's like in that position now. She's the Amber Frye of the story. Mm-hmm. So after that, this is where she doesn't look as good. She also searched what kind of book deal Amber Frye got.

Oh, no, no. That's not a good look. That's not cute. Not a cute look. Not a cute look, especially when this whole family is like missing and potentially dead. So anyway, there was a note that Chris had written to Nicole while his family was in North Carolina that said, Nikki, wow, where do I even start? The first day I saw you, you took my breath away. The first day I had the guts to talk to you, I got lost in those stunning eyes.

The first day we hung out in the park together i knew i was addicted the first time we kissed i knew i'd met the most amazing unique and electric woman ever we have a lot of firsts together nikki and i want to keep having them with you and then quote all night till the sun comes back i want to love want to love want to love you like that love chris and as a closeted pop country lover, I remember when that song came out and I feel kind of gross about it now. Yeah. That's by Kanan Smith, circa 2014. I guess that's their song. So if it's your song too out there.

That poor country singer is like, motherfucker. He's like, come on, I just wanted one hit single. I just wanted to make it on the radio. Now you got to make it weird. God, he's always got to, Chris is always going to make it on the radio now you gotta make it weird you gotta god he's always gonna chris is always gonna make it weird yeah um so then this is where shit kind of hits the fan in the actual interview itself because uh they're like we already know you're cheating like nicole contacted us um and at this point he gets really upset and agent lee whips out a picture of cc and

bella and says these are your baby girls and you have not shed one tear. Explain to me. You're crying with your wife that you're leaving her, but you don't cry that your two little baby girls are missing. Right. And he says, well, I hope they're still around somewhere. And she's like, but they're not with you. You're not reading them bedtime stories. Like, they're not here.

Right. And you don't seem upset. Explain it to me. And then the investigators pushed back at him and said did shenan do something to them and then did you feel like you had to do something to shenan and he is so agitated that he says i want to talk to my dad can i talk to my dad and it turns out his dad had uh flown from across the country to be there um so they're like okay we'll leave the room you talk to your dad can you please tell your dad what happened they send his dad in and

this all again on camera i was gonna say please god i hope this was recorded all recorded i mean they were probably like great yeah talk to your dad please let's make you feel safe here yes so this is the conversation chris says i don't want to protect her and chris's dad said do you know what happened did she hurt them and chris yeah. And then I had to kill her. So he then reveals to his dad that Shanann had smothered the children. And then he freaked out when he saw them and did the same thing to her. Oh, shit. So this poor dad is just like, wait, what? Like, totally.

His grandchildren are dead. Oh, my gosh. His son did it. Killed his daughter-in-law. It's like just such a horrifying moment to watch. So then, of course, the two agents come back in the room and they're like, all you have to. And she's like rubbing his back. And she's like, now you just have to tell us where they're at so we can get them out of the cold.

Yeah. She's just like heartbreaking. He reveals that his family is at the oil site that he had been working at called Servi 319. And that was a location he had driven to at 5 17 in the morning oh oh with them okay in the truck so uh he hadn't been driving to work he was disposing the bodies he buried shenan in a field nearby and then put his daughters in an oil tank and there was like a tiny hole that he was able to put them in and he shenan didn't fit and so he buried her body and so where was really horrific where was the doorbell footage of that like wouldn't they have had he like garage oh okay i was gonna say there's foot there's footage of

uh him his car leaving the garage driveway i see in the dark but interestingly enough in the early footage the neighbor says like he never parks in the driveway he i see in the dark but interestingly enough in the early footage the neighbor says like he never parks in the driveway he always parks on the street he's like he's never like the neighbor was like something's up also he's talking a lot like this isn't normal which i'm like that neighbor knew it that also makes me well that's like it's like key evidence right there but also it makes me think then like so he how do i if he already parked in the garage and not on the street then he went into the house that night planning to kill her not knowing about the children that's what it sounds like wait sorry say again so so if he was

saying like oh well i like she came home and then i saw that she strangled the kids or smothered the kids. Uh-huh. I would think so he parked on the street because he always does, went in and then saw that. Versus like, oh, I'm going to like I feel like driving into the garage shows intent before he even went into the house. So that story wouldn't line up. Oh, good point. That's a good point. Like, why would the car be in the garage already unless he already planned on killing her not knowing whether or not she smothered children that's an interesting point i will say though that i'm sure it was not the only time he parked in the garage i feel like it

was like the neighbor said oh he always parks on the street i feel like it was like the neighbor said, oh, he always parks on the street. I feel like it probably wasn't like, oh, he's never parked in the garage. It's just like it's more common. But yeah, I don't know. It just makes me think. Yeah, you know, you're right. Like, that is weird. That is weird that it would already be like he already moved it into the garage. Maybe it seems like I don't know, like he had a plan and didn't want the doorbell or

he didn't want the ring or whatever he used to to see it. Yeah, very weird i hadn't thought of that m that's a good point well i am a detective so uh the interviewers are like okay we need more information from you and she says you're good with the public knowing that shenan killed her daughters and he says i did not hurt those girls and uh agent gra Graham says what it looks like is that you got a new life and the only way to get the new life was to get rid of the old life and I think that you killed these girls before their mom came home and then killed Shanann I think we're very close to the truth but not quite there yet so the news broke that uh publicly that Chris had uh confessed to the killing of Shanann and uh they hold a press conference there's this really

sad vigil for the whole family where her brother frankie um says a few words it's very heartbreaking and it's just awful because you know at this point chris is alleging that shenan had murdered her own children and her family is like having this vigil and they're like just so you all know like my sister would never ever ever hurt her children right um so they're having to defend her at her own vigil it's awful and so three months later november 6 2018 um chris watts was found guilty of murder in the first degree as to shenan watts murder in the first degree as to bella murder in the first degree as to celeste and in the first degree as to Celeste, and unlawful termination of a pregnancy as it relates to Nico Watts,

which was the name of their little boy that they were having. And three counts of unlawful tampering with a deceased human body. So he pled guilty to all of the above in order to not face a death penalty and also because he fucking did it. Also, here's a final question.

Here's a question here's a question so do we think maybe he suggested the baby name and got it from the girl he was sleeping with behind his wife's back nico and nicole ew do you think he suggested it and like it was like actually gonna be like after you his mistress or something it's too close the name is too close he had to have thought about it but also she had a nicole too so maybe she was that's true i don't know after my friend i just ew that's weird too many too many names that sound the same here without why is everyone named nicole okay that's the real question what's wrong are we are we adding a

new megan to the list oh yeah and why are all the nicole's here it's like spelled like with like umlauts and shit seriously join the megans yeah all right so uh it was only on february 18 2019 oh sorry i want to also add that the judge made a statement after uh he had pled guilty that said this is the most inhumane and vicious case that i've handled out of the thousands of cases which i have seen and anything less than the maximum sentence would depreciate the seriousness of this offense wow so uh in february like months later an agent goes to talk to chris in a follow-up interview in jail and chris finally tells the story of what happened that night oh okay and it's very dark so I want to warn you,

it's very upsetting to hear, especially if you're watching the documentary, to hear him say it out loud. So I'm just going to read it. Okay. Janann got home at like 2 o'clock. I just had a feeling like she knew what I did. Saturday night was the last straw,

going out with somebody and using our actual bank account card and just not trying to hide it at all. I felt her get into bed. She started rubbing her hand on me, and we ended up having sex. When I woke up later on in the morning, I pretty much told her I didn't think it was going to work anymore. And she was like, what happened? What was last night?

She was like, I knew there was somebody else. I couldn't just say, yes, there is somebody else. Then she said, you're never going to see your kids again. You're never going to see them again. Get off me. If I'd never met Nikki Kessinger, would i have ever thought our relationship was bad probably not i told her i didn't love her anymore that's when it happened she told me to get off her and then i put my hands around her i felt like it was already something in my mind that was implanted

i was gonna do it when i woke up that morning and i i was going to do it when i woke up that morning and it was gonna happen I had no control over it. Why couldn't I just let go? Then Bella came into the room. She asked, what's wrong with mommy? She had her little pink blanket over her. Shanann was on the bed, but she was face down. I put Shanann in that sheet and carried her downstairs

and pulled my truck up. Oh, so he pulled the truck up, I guess. Okay. Well, there's that. After all that. Oh my gosh. My bad. I think in, okay, now I feel like such an ass because i think in the footage he says he never loads stuff into his

truck so maybe he was like oh i load some stuff for work so maybe that's what it was sorry i just made that way more complicated than i needed to be um i put the girls in the truck sitting in the back with that bench seat shenan was on the floor the kid said is mommy okay i said she'll be fine when i was driving up there they were just sitting there kind of asleep or kind of just holding on to each other laying in each other's laps okay this is just where it gets fucking awful honestly i try to picture that whole ride it's like 45 minutes to an hour ride out there couldn't i have saved my girl's life i wanted all my life to be a dad just to have you know kids and they love me when we got out there cc was first i put the blanket over her head bella said what happened to cc every time i close my eyes i start

to see her saying daddy no and that was it oh yikes so that was his full confession of what happened um it's like truly one of the most dark disturbing tales uh i've covered um i will say shenan's family and a lot of other people don't agree with this story because uh shenan's dad frank said my daughter even though she was pregnant is a fighter i still say he did this while she was sleeping because he would not look the way he looks right now if she was up because he they said like oh didn't she fight back and he said no she just laid there and everyone was like if you were choking her to death like yeah we we know her she wouldn't just lay there like she would have scratched you or right and there's photos like he has not one scratch on him so a lot of people think he did it while she was sleeping and it

wasn't even an argument he just was like i'm doing this right now and that was that um so anyway that puts like all the body cam footage and everything where he's going i don't know here's her phone and the blankies like into such new grim perspective yep um it's it's just really fucked up so obviously the thing most people can't wrap their heads around is like the motive of like well can't you just make a fucking get a fucking divorce right you know what i mean it's like when you just walk away from this relationship yeah like so unnecessary um and after he had disposed of the bodies he had made several phone calls right away he unenrolled the kids from school uh he contacted a realtor to try and sell the house he had like plans he was going going yeah and then he even texted nicole about their future together like yeah he was he was on it um so she for her sake um i

believe went into witness protection program so we don't i guess there's she's not a nicole anymore so maybe she's a megan now who knows she's absolutely a me Megan that's for sure yeah so I mean that just sucks to get drawn into that you're like oh I'm just dating a guy at work and then it's like well apparently not yeah uh it's a lot worse than that so this is like that whole family annihilator thing we've talked about in the past of like there's a whole psychological thing behind family annihilators um and so according to good housekeeping chris is continuing to live out his sentence in wisconsin he was transferred there because of security concerns i mean he murdered his own little children i don't think that bodes well for you in jail no um so when so there's a

book written last september by a woman named sherilyn cadle called letters from christopher uh and he basically writes to her about how he murdered his family, his family and his, about his obsession with Nicole. And he says, quote, all I could feel was now I was free to be with Nikki. Feelings of my love for her was overcoming me.

I felt no remorse. The darkness inside of me had won. It was still in me though. I thought maybe permanently I felt evil swallowed up by this thing inside of me. I felt like I could kill anything and be justified for doing it holy shit wow so woof um so shenan's family they were very they've been like bullied and harassed endlessly online uh people have made fake accounts of shenan there's so much victim blaming it's disgusting i like it made my stomach turn

there's like footage of people on tv talking about it being like oh she drove him to snap like she was a bitch like she was so controlling and i'm like oh my god it's bad it's really bad and so her poor family has dealt with like a lot of fucking harassment um people make fake uh shenan facebook accounts it's like really terrible um but they for what it's worth they recommended this uh documentary and said they were really thankful they got to be a part of it and they think it's like one of the only ones that have given shenan like her own side of the story and not shown her as like some i don't know evil controlling bitch that made him snap which like that's not a thing but whatever um so anyway it's just it's all just very fucking

sad um the end of the documentary finishes with like just this is this is the statistic we end on which is that in america three women are killed by their current or ex-partner every day parents who murder their children and partner are most often men. And this crime is virtually always premeditated. So I also want to add, just as a last note, if you or someone you know is the victim of domestic violence one of their earlier apps at least, where you can text them and then if you close out of the app, it completely deletes. It like goes incognito. So if your phone gets grabbed from you, they can't see what you were doing. When you go to that website, it has a pop-up window and says like, do not proceed to this website if you don't want anyone to see your computer. If anyone's going to look at your computer, you don't want

them to know, get off this website and text this number. Right. Exactly. Because they're like, even if you wipe your browser history, as Nicole learned, like they can still see it. People can, you know, find a way to look at it. So yeah, exactly. So if you do go to the website, they give you that number as well. And then the last little thing i don't i don't think there was too much information about it it just went viral because it was in this documentary but that there oh yeah apparently i haven't seen the documentary so i'm probably going to take it completely out of context but there was footage of um chris there was a ghost aspect to this and that there um in the documentary there was footage of chris kind of talking in his house with the police i think it was with the police it was a

body cam footage yeah and everyone every and you can see it for yourself in the documentary behind him right in the middle of the doorway there is definitely a little girl walking past the doorway and there's like a something flashes by it's definitely a human body which is super creepy so everyone swears this is like some of the most like convincing paranormal evidence a lot of people have written said like oh maybe like someone on set brought their kid for the day and like hid them and like tucked them away into another room or or not on set because it was literally a movie some like one of the cops i was like sorry sorry sorry one of the cops had like their kid with them on quote set sorry in their house um well i wonder too because nicole was there i don't know if she brought her kids i mean maybe but i don't think so they're the story has been that they're tucking

their kids away um or that someone that was there tucked their kids away while they were talking to police but a lot of people are like no that's like for sure like that i think a lot of people want to believe it's the ghost of the kids yeah i haven't uh sorry wow my filmmaking brain on set oh it was the the people on set that day what was wrong with me the police the police were on fucking side only watched it one time but i had also uh seen it i've definitely seen that one clip because everyone tagged me in it and it is yeah if it is a ghost it's very fucking creepy oh here we go a lot of people think it's nicole's daughter okay nicole's daughter okay or you know like the director, the producer. It was wrong of me. Yeah. So anyway, sorry.

Okay. So it's possible or it could be the daughter. I'm not sure. It looks like people debate it, but I've only seen it one time. I don't even remember. But you can let us know what you think. Yeah. Online.

I'm sure we're going to get tagged in it all over again with this episode now. Yes. Anyway, thank you guys so much for this very long episode. But you know what? Hopefully you had a good time. We had a good time. And we're just leading up to the big 2-0-0. The big 2-0-0.

So if you would like to follow us, our social is atwwpodcast. Our website is in that's why you drink.com. You can find pretty much everything on those two things that's right you can find us there and we will see you next week for 199 for 199 and then 200 okay and then 200 and that's why we drink yay Yay!