And That's Why We Drink - E276 Christine Junior and Our Flatlined Sanity

Episode Date: May 22, 2022

It's episode 276 and our sanity has finally flatlined! Also, Wyoming, we love you and we see you. And might have forgotten all the other states that start with W just because we were asked to list them. This week Em covers the wild hauntings of the Wyoming Frontier Prison. Then Christine tells the gut-wrenching story of the murder of Lucille Johnson aka the Lego Murder. And lastly, go buy tickets to the Beach Too Sandy, Water Too Wet live show - if they sell out, Alexander promised Christine could buy the American Girl doll who matches her, trashy-classy headband and all... and that's why we drink!Buy tickets here! https://www.beachtoosandy.com/

you okay yeah i i'm having such a wild 48 hours in my brain i don't know what's going on but i just feel so off oh Oh, well, mercury is retrograde right now. And I think that's part of the problem, at least for me. Well, you just, you just said that, that it, and I was like, oh, that might be it. I, but like, yeah, yesterday, every single thing was like wrong in my head. Like every single thing I got confused by, even if I had information about it and I just like would like, I feel like there were so many times where even you and I had miscommunications because my own brain would just stumble for no reason. And I don't know what's going on in my head.

Yeah. Yesterday was rough all around, at least in our sphere. We had all sorts of mishaps and miscommunications and confusion and like missing links. And Oh my God, it was, yesterday was a, yesterday was a bad day for us. Not you and I,

but like just like behind the scenes stuff, trying to figure things out. Yeah. But I, I also feel like my own brain wouldn't let me like contribute as much as I was trying or I would try. And then like, maybe I was overthinking and then I would like backpedal on myself by act like I ended up being so counterproductive by trying to be

productive anyway I also just woke up so I haven't processed yesterday so I just still feel weird about how stupid my brain was working and I don't know I just feel weird for no reason well I had to take a klonopin and go lay in my bed in the dark and count to 100. So I feel like I was there with you. And yeah, our manager called and was like, my friend says Mercury is in retrograde. And I was like, well, your friend is correct. Is your friend a millennial? Because it's the first thing I always want to use to complain about things. to complain about things. Oh, well, I'm sorry. You were frazzled. I was right there with you. I feel like I just was missing chunks of information too, but I feel like you were more on top of it because I even, there were, I don't even know how many times anymore. I feel like there were times yesterday where I was like, I need to just call Christine and figure this out. And then there were times where I did and times where I didn't. And both times,

like nothing got solved for me. And not because you weren't being helpful, but because my own brain was like moving at like 5%. I don't know. I don't know what was going on. But like, I just yesterday, I remember thinking halfway through, I was like, today's just not my day. I think if I told everybody, I don't want to work, I probably I'd be equally useful. Like, I just felt so weird. And so I don't know what was going on. I don't know if it's like part of like COVID, like maybe I was having a brain fog day or something, but I don't know. I have no idea, but I just felt really weird. So I'm sorry if I was annoying yesterday. I weren't, it was rough. Everyone was annoying. Including everything was annoying. I should say

it was like one of those days where I feel like everyone was pulling their hair out and nobody else could fix the problem. Maybe everyone was so overwhelmed. We just kept bumping into each other instead of like, yeah, instead of merging, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't know. I I'm, I'm a millennial. I will blame Mercury. I don't, I don't know if that's the case, but well, if I'm acting weird, it's not you. I just still haven't like thought about how crappy yesterday was. It was a crappy day, but it was not fun. Today is Blaze's day off. So I'm very happy because now I get some time to do my stuff, like record with you. Oh, I thought for a second I was gonna, I, in my head, see, I thought that that meant, oh, Blaze's day off. So you're going to go have a great day with Blaze. Not like, oh, you have to work.

Well, I have to work now. I know. And now it makes sense. But at first I was like, oh, I'm so happy. You're going to like have a day to like cool off after yesterday. Well, once you and I are done, then yeah, then Blaze and I can hang out. So I mean, you know, we get our time. As parents, what is your, have your interests or things you do together changed?

Like, oh, great question. OK, this is what I keep telling people who are either expecting or are like thinking about having a baby is that maybe it's just my anxiety and my mind and the way I perceive the world. But I feel like there's a lot of fear mongering about like becoming a parent. And, you know, people kind of turn it into this like, I mean, it's obviously a huge deal. Don't get me wrong. And it's obviously like life changing. But I feel like people make it seem as though like you're bound to just lose yourself and ruin your marriage. And it's going to be so difficult. And I mean, again, maybe it's being a child of divorce. I don't know. I don't know what it is. But I had this total, all consuming fear that like, I was not going to ever be able to do the things I used to do that, like blazes, my relationship would be super strained. And I feel like for me, at least none of that has been true. Like it's been difficult, because obviously raising a human is difficult but I feel like we do just as much if not more now than we did before like we just take her with us so like to I don't know outings and um anything that we used to do like just out and about we take her with us now so it's like fun um and I don't know that our interests have changed I think it's more that just like we have kind of a shared like – I was trying to tell Allison this when she visited,

and I kept saying the word project, and that sounds so bad. I mean, raising a person. I'm pretty cynical about any family building. So, yeah, you can tell me. That's exactly how I went into this, like very cynical. And it's like, yeah, I went into it with like worst expectations as far as like, oh, my God, this is going to be just like the constant uphill battle. But I feel like it's actually a lot of it is just really fun and like exciting.

And like, I don't know, Blaze and I are different because we have a kid now, but like we get to kind of do that together for the first time. So I just think it's been really fun. And, you know, tomorrow, like there's a big flea market in downtown Cincinnati. fun and you know tomorrow like there's a big flea market um in downtown Cincinnati we're gonna go there and like I don't know have a beer and shop around and explore so act how actively different is uh your alone time together is it just that there is none no that's the other thing we now that the baby goes to bed at like seven or 8 and like sleeps through the night, we just have the whole evening. We make dinner. We watch movies.

We like hang out. Oh, nice. Nothing in that regard has changed either, which I think maybe is the key in that like we were able to get her to go to bed between like 7 and 8. And then that gives us a whole evening free. Gotcha. That makes more sense. It's been really nice. They still can go back to evening free. Gotcha. That makes more sense. It's been really nice. You can go back to your roots.

Yeah. And so now we like watch like, cause that was my other fear. I was like, Oh my God, we're never going to be able to watch like our shows anymore. Like we have so many different TV shows we like to watch together, but like now she just goes to bed at seven and we have our little baby

monitor and we watch like Ozark and it's, you know, life is good. And we have a glass of wine and it's, so anyway, if you're out there and you're like oh my god petrified it is a lot of work and it's very hard but it's also a lot of fun and people I feel like kind of overshadow the the fun part with all the scariness so I mean that does sound uh like generally like a nice message, but in my personal selfish circumstance, I would still not have a relationship with Alison because she goes to bed at seven too. So.

Oh, right. Yes. Well, I'd be like, it's very dependent on everybody's circumstances. I know. So Alison, if you're listening, we can't have kids until you've learned how to go to bed later. Got it. Okay, cool. Okay, great. Well, yeah, that'll work. to bed later. Got it. Okay, cool. Okay, great. Well, yeah, that'll work. I while we're being selfish, can I make like a selfish little shout out that has nothing to do with our podcast? Sure. As a shout out to your child or something? What? No, she has everything to do with our podcast. We're already grooming her to be the next star to take my place. So I don't have to work anywhere um no okay this is just uh I think I've already mentioned this once so I'll be brief but Alexander and I are doing two live shows in

Ohio and Cincinnati and Columbus uh June 8th and 9th and we've sold we've sold we haven't sold out and my brother said if we sell out I can buy the American Girl doll that matches what I look like. Uh-huh. Well, now I have a request, even though I'm not involved at all in BHT Sandy. But you have to dress like the American Girl doll to manifest it. And I have to see the outfit. And that's the thing. He said, I can take her on stage with me if we sell out the tickets.

But he says, I'm not allowed to purchase her unless we sell them out. Because I think he thinks we won't sell out. And he knows he doesn't want that in his life. So if you are listening and you want to do, we still have meet and greet tickets available. We're doing meet and greet. So if you want to come, we're in Cincinnati and Columbus, June 8th and 9th. If you want to see me matching my creepy American girl doll, living out my childhood dreams. Anyway, that's all. How are you, Em? Well, now I have something to look forward to in life. Just watching you get dressed up like a little, you know, it is the perfect outfit for you to like stand at the end of halls in the middle of the night and just stare at somebody. It feels very

shining. Okay. But I went and made like my own matching one. With your cricket? What? Where? No, no. I wish I could do that. But like I made one and I sent it to my brother in the middle of the night and I said like, I need this. And he was like, go to bed. And so I posted it on Beach to Sandy and everybody is like, oh, so here she is. I'll show you. Honestly, you already look like her. That's what I'm saying.

I made her to match me. She has a trashy classy headband. She has a little jean jacket she has a line like a little tiger shirt she has her pink doc martens her pink doc martens her coffee cup um and then at the bottom i made it say i love you christine you're a sicko because i'm unwell yeah truly unhinged but i think that's does she know she's on Hinge? That sweet little American girl doll. She's learning pretty quickly. I feel like in her little bio, it's, what's the, would the girl's name be, Christine, too? Um, obviously, yes.

Gross. Well, I wish you the best. Little, little, little C. Any, Kremit? No. see. Anyway, so yeah, life has not changed that. Life has changed a lot since having a baby, but I feel like I'm just, the people who hoped I would advance in my maturity are disappointed. I was going to say, yeah, your sanity has flatlined for sure. Yes. Anyway, that's all. Sorry. that's me just talking and talking your ear off

that's what i we literally have a podcast because i loved it so much when you would do that five years ago i still haven't changed for some reason even though you've given me many reasons to i try i try to push you away yeah i you know i like the. I feel like I need to save you. So, um, okay. It hasn't worked yet, but maybe someday that's, that's part of the adventure with you, Christine. It'll never, we'll never, uh, find our happy place. We'll always be chasing each other. Okay. You know, that's it. You know, itine great this is the wyoming frontier prison i like it already i also like it but i feel like i at some point there's going to be a note that i i remember telling myself i need to look that up and I didn't so we're gonna figure out how

quickly that bullet comes up okay oh okay hey great so the Wyoming frontier prison we never cover Wyoming um it is sadly one of those states I think the world often forgets is a state um hi Wyoming we love you and we see you we see you today the w's are often forgotten i think um i can't think of a w that is immediately screamed about milwaukee wisconsin how many are there west virginia wisconsin wyoming don't do this to me as if i'm supposed to fucking know okay well hey uh hmm well okay was Oh, see that one is the most popular and that's when I forgot. Okay. Whatever. I forgot. This is a fun game that we're playing though. Yeah. Everyone in Wisconsin, West Virginia are like, fuck you. Okay. Uh, I do think by the

way of all the States, I thinkoming is spelled the coolest like visually i enjoy wyoming the most like who would have expected a w and a y back to back not i and together they literally spell out the the sound of y i feel like i feel like they they go well together because they make sense together when you pronounce them that's beautiful thank you um okay so this prison is also known as the old pen apparently um some sources were just calling it old pen the whole time and then i freaked out that i was covering two locations by accident but they are the same place okay uh this is in rawlins wyoming and this story starts in 1888 to 1890 because different sources had different years um i think it was 1888 that wyoming officially becomes a state and they needed

to build a state penitentiary i like how that's like first on the docket. They're like, okay, well, obviously bad people are going to be here. So let's fix that. You know that Parks and Rec sound that they use on TikTok? Like, right to jail. Right to jail. Right to jail. You go to Wyoming, jail. Wyoming's a state, jail.

The internet tells me Wyoming was founded in 1890. I don't know if you need that information or not. So that's why i put 1888 to 1890 because 1890 is when wyoming became a state but two years before is when the jail started getting built which was before wyoming became priorities so i don't know if they just had a feeling wyoming was going to totally become a state and they were like let's get this started now right to jail right to the construction of jail okay so wy totally become a state and they were like, let's get this started now. Right to jail. Right to the construction of jail. Okay, so Wyoming becomes a state and somehow two years

before they break ground on a jail, before Wyoming's even here. That part I don't totally understand. But the government was allotted $75,000 to build this prison, which at the time in today's world is $2.4 million dollars i always forget how expensive jails are because they i feel like they give off such an appearance of being barren right in my mind i'm like oh so you just put poured some concrete and that's as far as we got but like yeah i'm aware there's like programs and things like that you gotta feed them gotta feed them um so since the prison i guess there was originally before there was even an official state of wyoming there was a prison in laramie um which was called aha this was what i was gonna look up uh and laramie there was a prison

called the wyoming territorial prison um and i didn't know if i've covered that or not but i forgot to check our episode list okay i'm looking right now thank you i got it i've covered something with the word territorial in it i think that was yuma though that was yuma damn okay so i haven't yuma so you have not covered this one okay well um and you covered yuma in an episode called Spicy Highways and the New Brazilian Evangelical Gay Church of Murderers. What? The way Yuma picks the titles is out of control. That was before Yuma, I think. Was it?

I don't know. Was that all you? I don't know. That was right when Yuma, I think, was starting. So it could have been very much either of us. It could have been a collab effort. One of us said it. Probably you.

Could have been very much either of us. It could have been a collab effort. One of us said it, probably you. I think I say things and then the two of you are like, aha, title idea. Okay, okay. We're all perfectly the melting pot of Unhinged, I think, when it comes to title making. Okay, so the prison in Laramie, which was known as the Wyoming Territorial Prison prison it was doing a decent enough job as a prison that i think even though they had started uh breaking ground on building this new prison just people hadn't started moving to wyoming yet and so there wasn't a huge high priority for this

prison to get finished quickly so even though they agreed to a budget of like basically 2.4 million dollars it took 13 years to finish because of so many delays and dragging their feet oh okay um fun fact it was uh designed by the same architects who were responsible for alcatraz and i feel like i say that about a lot of prisons yeah maybe they were just they had like a a uh what do you call it? You know, this thing. A corporation. A really good idea.

They knew how to design a prison or two or three. Yeah, they had a stronghold on prison making. I don't know the right word that I'm trying to think of. But yeah, they had like the... The patent, I guess. I guess so. I do feel like for as many haunted prisons as I talk about, they at least are on the map for haunted prison designs. Yeah, yeah. I keep trying to say it and it's not happening.

So you just keep going. Okay. A chokehold? Chokehold is... Maybe. That's a very aggressive one that could be that's okay we'll get there and i'll yell it in about 25 minutes yeah yeah it's like the time we yelled oh so it's like episode one or something and all of a sudden we i feel like it happens a lot where

we scream something that doesn't make sense whether or not it ever made sense um so in 1901 the construction was finally done so that's why i'm saying it started in 1988 because it was said everywhere it took 13 years to finish 13 years in 1988 sorry 1888 okay and so it took 13 years to finish that was all over all these different sources which means that 1901 is the official year that the construction was finally done. And inmates from Wyoming Territorial Prison and Laramie were gradually transferred over to the Wyoming Frontier Prison. Okay.

I don't know why they didn't just turn the original prison into a stronger, better one, and just save money. and i mean they already had a penitentiary right i don't know okay i don't know how jail planners work um so it started out with one cell block called block a and it was 104 cells which were very small. There was no electricity. There was no running water. There was no heat. And there was no hot water until 1978. Oh, gosh. But they had 13 years to plan this out and couldn't fit any of that in there with their $2 million budget. Was there but they probably didn't have much of that back in the 1800s, right? I mean, I'm sure they they had it but it was probably

not a priority for prisoners yeah i don't know if that i maybe it wasn't a common thing but either way that fucking sucks then why do you have two million dollars once again i'm with you i'm like if you're not putting in pipes what are you doing with two million dollars i feel like if the point was for this to be like the state penitentiary like the one that every the jail that everyone's talking about why wouldn't you want it to like at least have a little heat you know you'd think so in wyoming it's cold up there boy apparently on a good night without heat the weather would get to only 20 degrees warmer than outside so oh boy So some, and some parts of the prison never got proper heating. Um, and those parts would sometimes only get up to like 50 degrees. So when it came to prison inmates,

it was very quickly overcrowding. And so they added, um, 34 more cells, which I feel like 34 is not a lot of cells when there's like significant overcrowding that it was so bad it demanded you to build. I feel like 34 is not enough. No. Okay. And eventually two whole new cell blocks were built. So there was the B cell, which was built in 1950. And that was solitary confinement. Yikes. And then there was the C block, which was built in 1966, and that was maximum security. I think there might have also been a woman's unit. But, and I say maybe because in the first few years, 11 women were incarcerated there. But a different source, multiple different sources said oh well one of the worst planning parts of that this was that they had no woman's unit and the women lived

amongst the men which yikes and within like eight years cal surprise they were all transferred to a different prison probably because the situation was so terrible for them. Yeah, I imagine. The original cell doors had skeleton key locks, and prisoners quickly learned how to pick those and escape. So this prison for the first few years was just riddled with escape attempts. Okay. One of the big changes was in 1917, so 16 years after the prison was built 16 years after a lot of escape attempts the prison finally put in a boston bar system which i guess locked everyone in their cells with just like one switch and that kept everyone locked in it was like all maybe electric

i don't know um but the first few years had a lot of escapes, uh, or at least a lot of attempts and multiple that resulted in guards being killed. Um, probably the biggest escape attempt that I saw was in 1912, 30 prisoners altogether tried climbing through barbed wire. Oh, ow, ow, ow. Oh no. no yeah which makes me wonder the conditions had to have been terrible for that to be worth it you know that's scary um also a few years later the walls and towers and additional construction were finally finished and i guess that's what finally started keeping the escapes down um but that one escape of 30 people was in 1912 also in 1912 uh the prison had one of its more famous murders between inmates okay so there was a woman that lived nearby the

jail called esther higgins and she was known as the pie lady um because she would bring inmates pies every week and the inmates loved her because i am assuming with conditions that i've already described they probably all didn't have great food i mean you don't i don't have to be in jail i could be living my life eating smoked salmon every day you bring me a pie i'll still love you honestly that's so true i have i'm very lucky and i have everything in the world if esther higgins knocked on my door with a pie, she's my favorite person on earth. Come on in. And so she would bring inmates pie every week and they all loved her.

But one inmate named Frank Wigfall, when he finally got out of prison, he tracked her down. He SA'd her to the fullest extent. And then he killed her down he essayed her um to the fullest extent and then he killed her oh my god uh i don't know if he i don't know what the story is there i don't know if maybe he thought they were in love or something and he stalked her i'm not sure what happened but it ended with him r-wording her and killing her and he ended up obviously getting found and brought back to prison and then he had to face all of the inmates who loved the pie lady and they fucked him up like they i mean that was like the only probably constant nice person coming into their this is into the jail so bad and so um they all rounded up together at a block they dragged him up the stairs to the second floor of the walk-up and they put a

noose around his neck and they threw him over oh my god um i will say he was a man of color so um it feels it feels a little on the nose that he was lynched so i'm just i feel like i don't know if that's important information for people to know but it just feels like the like there might have been a race issue there on top of everything else um what year was that again this was uh 1912 i don't i don't know the the state of the country in terms of race relations not good probably not super awesome so um i don't know if it's important that that's how they killed him but it it might be important and i'm unaware of that so i feel like i should address it anyway um so that's how he died where he was thrown over the um the walk-up which is also like in an additional way like intimately horrible because it was in such a public space

of the jail where people just probably walked by him for the rest of the day you know what i mean um or at least until guards could go grab him right um so frank wigfall was known is probably one of the more popular inmates that's known to have gone to the jail at this point, maybe because of his story. Sure. But other inmates that were, um, other inmates that stayed in this jail were Annie Bruce, who apparently killed her father with a poisoned plum pie. So there's two plum ladies in the story. Oh gosh. Then I think you covered him. If not think you covered him if not you covered his twin um train robber william carlisle aka the gentleman bandit who he was so he was known as a gentleman bandit because he never shot anybody and he always apologized to women and kids for bothering them i mean that was the one we did like two weeks ago yeah it. Was that the same person, William Carlyle?

Does that sound right? Oh, my God. I don't know. I feel like I just kept calling him. No, I don't think that was the name. Well, he didn't just steal money from people. He stole someone's title. So I covered Milton Sharp, the Inconvenient Outlaw.

Oh, the Inconvenient Outlaw, not the Gentleman Bandit. But they do sound great together. Right. I kind of like their story. We should write a little book about it. A fanfic? oh the inconvenient outlaw not the gentleman bandit but they do sound great together right i like i kind of like their their story we should write a little a fanfic of them being best friends well so a very similar they're enemies but they're so polite that they just are like pardon me sir this is my train that i'm robbing. There's that Nickelodeon writer brain. She's still in there, folks. What happened to this plant?

Why is it like approaching me? It's an executive producer at Nickelodeon and I heard your pitch and it's obsessed now. It's like, excuse me, excuse me. It's like on top of me. Is that new? No. Or has it been on top of you? It's been here for a long time. Okay. It's like on top of me. Is that new? No. Or has it been on top of you? It's been here for a long time.

Okay. That's better. Oh. Well, okay. So this gentleman bandit was another person who stayed in this prison. Another guy who I don't know anything about, but his name is Henry Edmondson. And apparently he was so terrible that the governor pardoned him just to get him out of wyoming whoa that seems like not the right approach at all but okay um so there

were four types of like main four main types of work that prisoners did throughout the years at this prison so originally when the prison was, they also built a prison broom factory and prisoners would build brooms. Um, during a riot, the factory got burned down. So when they rebuilt it, it became a shirt factory. So people then started making shirts. And then in the 1930s, they changed the shirt factory into a wool mill. And here's a fun fact they use this wool mill the prisoners would make woolen blankets and they were making blankets at the time for world war ii soldiers and they did so well on these blankets they were like such top tier quality that apparently um they won the navy e or the battle effectiveness award which is something that like only sailors win.

They ended up winning that year instead for having, for keeping the soldiers warm, which is ironic because they were probably fucking freezing in their own cells. Dark horse coming in hot. Yeah. So, and then 20 years later,

the Wyoming frontier prison instead made license plates, I guess. Cause after the war, they didn't have a use for the blankets. I feel like that ultimately ends up being the most common thing they make in prisons, right? Yeah. Well, that's the stereotype, at least, that I know. So, in 1981, the jail finally closed. Oh, I'm going to sneeze. Hang on. Nope. I announced it, so it's not true you

jinxed it i know so in 1981 the jail finally closed and six years later it was actually used as a filming location for the movie prison on the nose great um and apparently there was so much significant damage from filming uh that this might have been one of the reasons that they started thinking about preserving the prison because they were like, oh, people can just come in here and fuck this place up. Oh, no. So a year later, the jail was renamed to the Wyoming Frontier Prison. I think for a while it was called the Wyoming Frontier Prison at Rollins, or a longer name. So they renamed it in 1988,

and it became a museum under the Old Penn Joint Powers Board, which was basically their preservation society. Okay. And they also offer guided prison tours now. They do ghost tours. They offer paranormal investigations. I don't know if this is year-round or it might just be during October.

I feel like any historical area that does ghost tours, sometimes it's a limited seasonal experience. Right. But overall, there were just under 14,000 inmates who were incarcerated here. And the prison is now on the National Registry of Historic Places. Nice. As for the deaths, which I feel like I'm about to like enter into my stupid body. You're falling apart.

I really feel like I'm like hanging on by like some really loose screws. As for the deaths, I mentioned earlier that several guards were killed on the property um i think one of them also died by suicide and several inmates died here around 200 are said to have died here from either disease dying by suicide from uh inmate violence and of course executions oof so as for the violence i just wanted to give you one example of how wild the violence was here you already gave me one do i need another yeah okay because this one really threw me apparently there was one inmate who took another inmate's skin and turned it into a pair of shoes no thank you and then he won the naval e award for battle effectiveness yeah yikes that's fucking scary that's like some ed

gein shit uh-huh yeah so i don't know if he wore them or if he just made it for fun and it doesn't matter and he still made someone into shoes horrifying um and then so that's just to let you know that like this penitentiary was originally built and continued to be for the worst of the worst at least in one of the cell blocks i think cell block c ended up being max security because up until 1966 everyone was just together and i think even the guards were like we didn't think this through that like there are some people here who don't need to be next to maximum security prisoners in 1906 the uh which by the way this prison was built in 1901 so very quickly uh to house some of the more difficult inmates aka the more violent inmates the dungeon house was built

great and here there's only one source i could find that had this but apparently in the dungeon house there was a sensory deprivation room now that you it was total pitch blackness uh and you were not allowed to lie down ever. No. Also in the dungeon, there was the punishment pole. Oh my God. Where people would be handcuffed to it and whipped with rubber hoses. Oh my God. In 1912, wow, 1912 has been mentioned a lot. The big year for this prison.

This is when the executions began. Especially once the prison finished building its death house. Oh, my God. Which was six death row cells. I think maybe at first and then maybe it grew. I'm not sure. But there were six death row cells in what is called death house. And originally the executions held here were public and they were via hanging but then

very quickly they moved to uh a different execution so in 1912 the executions began only four years later uh it went from they went from doing public hangings to having private executions in the now built execution chamber oh yeah yeah um nine men were hanged uh but the first two of them were not just hanged normally whatever that means they were hanged on julian gallows do you know what julian gallows are no and I'd prefer not to find out. So apparently this was a Wyoming creation. Oh, good for you. It's you did it. W Y. So, um, I, it's not used anymore. I think very quickly they were like, this is inhumane. Um, this is an inhumane way to murder someone i guess yeah yeah you know well you said it you

said it you said it um so i think at first they thought it was more humane for the executioner and also it was for the executioner because it took away the guilt of them having to kill a person so it was also cost efficient because they didn't have to pay an executioner what is it so the julian gallows it essentially had the prisoners kill themselves oh god um i don't if i'm not explaining it right i do have a video of it no no no no no not like of someone actually dying but like it's like in a museum now um but uh if i'm not explaining it right i can show you the video of like how it worked because i do a demonstration with it but so you're standing on a platform with a noose around your neck and the platform um next

to the platform is a bucket filled with water that's slowly emptying out no which makes the empty bucket as it's getting empty, it's rising. And when it rises, it knocks this lever. And the lever is what opens a trap door that you're standing on. So then the victim falls through. Is this some mousetrap shit? Yeah, it felt like mousetrap. Like there was like a Rube Goldberg situation.

This is horrific. Oh, so I see what you're saying. So there is no set executioner yeah it's like it's like you're just standing on a platform that happens to be a trap door and only when the water bucket empties is when the trap door will open so no one else has to physically move the trap door but someone has to physically fill the bucket with water i was thinking that i was like i have to hang it there and say okay i put a hole a hole in it. Like, but here's the thing. The Julian gallows wouldn't always drop quickly enough. And so it was very easy for the trapdoor to just for the trapdoor to just slowly move. So you're not having a quick snap of the neck. You are you're strangling yourself heinous um and that was the i think the first two this story was all dependent on the sources because some sources said it was all julian gallows some just said it

was the first two and then the next seven of the nine were like a normal hanging whatever that means um i don't know how many people were stuck with the julian gallows but it was at least two too many and only four of the nine apparently died from their neck quickly being snapped which means five of them had to die by strangulation okay um which means they were certainly suffering and hangings were the standard execution there until 1936. And then instead, they were like, that's too inhumane. Let's build a gas chamber. I knew it was next. I knew it. And I saw again, on one source that this was like the country's first gas chamber. I don't know if it was like just the first gas chamber in a prison or something.

But I looked it up because I didn't believe it. And there was something about Nevada 10 years earlier. So I don't know, or Nevada 10 years earlier. So, um, I don't know if it was the first or not, but it was probably one of the first. It's just like,

Oh, just like playing loosey goosey here with like their inventions and their, I don't know why I'm mad at Wyoming right now, but I'm like, Oh wow. Good for you. You built a water,

a mousetrap hanging gallows and now you're uh they had nothing going on they were a brand new state they were like i guess we can make whatever fucking rules we want i guess we have two million dollars to spend yeah and then it'll still take us 13 years and we'll forget heating so oops um so this the standard execution was hanging until 1936 and then from 19 until 1965, which means my mother was in preschool when they finally said the gas chambers too much. And only shockingly in, uh, 30 years, only five men died by gas chamber, which like, I know it's still five lives, but I'm amazed it wasn't a bigger number.

Well, and, and just from a logistical standpoint, like you built this whole contraption. which like i know it's still five lives but i'm amazed it wasn't a bigger number well and and just from a logistical standpoint like you built this whole contraption yeah for five moments it's just strange it's like why are you making this so complicated i mean anyway yeah i see what you're saying it is kind of weird idea how we just don't kill anyone i feel like that's a little much zero dollars you're taking it a little too far zero dollars you could have saved it all okay uh so one of the five who died by gas chamber uh he was the last one and i think also the youngest one to die by gas chamber his name was andrew pixley and apparently you should cover him he was apparently well i don't know if you should because children are involved

but he was known to be one of if not the worst worst killer in Wyoming. Whoa. Okay. Well, I just bookmarked the page. So, or his like Wikipedia. So I'll do some digging later. I will say his victims were two children. Okay. Um, and also super creepy. He, um, in his cell carved pictures of them into the walls of his cell. No. And he would call them his guardian angels. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. He was not right. He also took the longest to die of any inmate.

And I guess one of the tour guides of the jail even said, apparently there's like, apparently there's a saying and you know, morbid fucked up world where the more evil you are, or it takes evil longer to die. And so I guess because he was the worst killer, the tour guides are not surprised that it took him the longest to die in the gas chamber. So,

um, he, it took him seven minutes in the gas chamber so um he it took him seven minutes in the gas chamber to die which is twice as long as anybody else and he laughed the whole time oh ew allegedly that was from one source but that was a pretty creepy enough yeah yuck so um that's uh the deaths and that we know of, but I mean, think of how many people there was, uh, uh, there was a guard who was killed and then thrown on the stairs. I mean, there was a lot of violence in this prison.

It lasted from 1981 or from 18. It was an 80 year old prison. So just imagine how much violence was there. As for the ghosts, the hotspots include the shower and the death row area, obviously. Um, and the shower people here crying,

they see wet footprints that have walked out of the shower. I hate that. Um, I don't know how detailed I want to get into this. Um, so I'm going to, for your sake. So I'm just going to say people see a black cat laundering the prison,

um, who he was murdered here. Okay. Um, and so they see him near the cells and they also see him, especially near the, uh, gas chamber.

So in the chamber, people hear footsteps, they hear laughing. Apparently people have also heard young girls crying and that's thought to be andrew pixley's victims oh geez um in i don't know if this was andrew pixley's cell but in one of the cells they i guess they light candles during the ghost tour for certain cells and in his uh the candle will turn itself off and relight itself ew uh and it will also sometimes burn brighter than everyone else's or it will fade more than others

or it will stay straight while the rest of them flicker. People also catch orbs and apparitions on their cameras, including a full-bodied spirit in the chapel who is just standing there, and you can very clearly see its legs. They also hear voices talking to each other in the cells. People have thought a full conversation was happening in some cells. Uh, and people have gotten EVPs such as help me and give me a cigarette.

Um, help me give me a cigarette. Yeah, please. God, same, same person. Same sentence. Yeah. People feel something dark and threatening and a lot of the cells, especially near death row, they will also feel also feel um anxiety and chest pressure when they go into death row uh tour guides say that you feel like they feel like when they're

telling stories to a tour tour group they feel like they shouldn't be telling the stories like someone's watching them that's kind of freaky i hate that where they feel like they should shut up. That's weird. They also say that things walk by in the corner of their eye, including the apparition of a man and a brimmed hat hanging near the gallows. He is seen through reflections. Wait, hanging or like hanging out? I think hanging out. Oh, I thought you meant like hanging. Well, speaking of hanging,

there have been a few people who say that they have witnessed the residual haunting of the scene of Frank Wigfall being hanged by inmates in the second walkway. The guy who killed the pie lady. Yeah. And people say that they have just watched the whole scene happen. Oh, my God. Spirits hanging another spirit with a rope holy shit um there is an episode of ghost adventures on here um and this was actually not uh one of their super duper best episodes i i'm never a fan of when they go to multiple locations in one episode so they only covered

this prison and showed like maybe 10 minutes of footage do you feel like that i mean just because you've i was gonna say you've watched more of the show than i have but that might not be true because when i was making my pregnancy announcement video i watched probably 60 episodes in a row but do you feel like the uh when they do that like multiple places do you think that's because they don't get enough content or do you think they probably have to plan this in advance though? Right? Like, I think maybe,

I mean, honestly, I would just assume they just didn't. I mean, I don't, I think it's like not visually as fun, but I wouldn't like particularly blame the ghost of ventures crew for moments like that.

I think the producers find out about another haunted location nearby and maybe try to kill two birds one stone with their budget okay like while they're i see yeah yeah i think maybe i mean if i were a producer and i was trying to think of how to be smart with my money maybe i would think best case scenario we get such good footage at both places we get two episodes by accident for the price of one so and then maybe neither of them like really worked out. So they just clump them together in one episode. I don't totally know. Huh?

Interesting. Okay. Um, but yeah, I don't, maybe they just didn't get a lot of stuff. I don't know. Um,

but they did get one thing and that's Zach Bagans saying this quote. Oh God. About every 30 seconds, someone rips a fart. That's when you get, that's what you get when you have four guys sitting in an rv in a stakeout all you hear is crunch crunch crunch fart fart fart but i didn't fart um why and then we start with a real winner which is my it's always one of my favorite shots

when zach bagans is wearing sunglasses inside oh god help me and because there wasn't a lot of um info or a lot of footage from this location it actually worked out well for me because instead of having to watch a 45 minute episode i got to watch like a 20 minute episode um but uh the tour basically one of the tour guides he talked to said that he has seen a full black apparition of a man uh in the hallway and the guy thought the tour guide thought that this man had broken in so he shouted hey and apparently the shadow looked at him like he clearly got his attention and when the tour guide was going after him saying you can't be in here he vanished and interestingly zach then interviews another tour guide was going after him saying, you can't be in here, he vanished. And interestingly,

Zach then interviews another tour guide who had the exact same experience without ever having met the other tour. Oh, that's weird. Um, also this is where I love to judge Zach, but then also since we're talking about producers, I feel like a producer made him do this.

And, but, uh, however you want to see it, go for it. But Zach checks out the gallows where people died and he literally stands where they did and puts the noose around his neck and stares solemnly out the window. Oh, he stares out the window. He stares out the window and he thinks about how this was the last thing they saw while he has the noose around their neck and so um again i don't know if that was his call or if this was a producer who is not aware of how tasteless that is and i

mean i'll be honest made a creative call eva would never do this but as our producer she said can you stand here and put a noose around your neck and look solemnly at the window i could say i would say no thank you uh so even if a producer is like do this like especially in them especially in the tv world because he's an executive producer of his own show he can determine what he does he doesn't do the star of it i feel like no one can really make you do that but i guess i know i know i know I know. I just, I don't know whose call it was, but it got ran with. It got ran with. And then they hear a male voice in the stairwell. They see balls of light.

Something grabs Nick's head. Aaron uses the spirit box. And when he asks, should I be nervous? The spirit box says, yup. And then this one, this part was super spooky to me. So Billy hears and sees someone walking around the cell block. He's like convinced he just saw someone walking past him,

even though he's completely alone in the prison. And he follows it to the stairwell, which is a stairwell that someone died on. And right after Billy says uh i swear i saw someone go in there you can see from the view of a camera of the the camera pointing at the stairwell picks itself up and gently puts itself on the floor huh which was super weird because he was he was in a super haunted space he He had just saw someone walk by. And then when he says it out loud, I swear,

I just saw someone saw someone go in here in that moment. Then the camera in that haunted spot lifts itself up off the tripod and puts itself on the floor and was like, no, no one can see me now. It's like you saw nothing. You saw nothing. Um,

and in case anyone cares, uh, this is season 7, episode 12, unless you're watching it on Discovery, where it is season 8, episode 12, and it's the 33-minute mark. So, anyway, that's the Wyoming

Frontier Prison. Good job, Em. Thank you. You've been doing some stuff lately. I'm like... Oh. That's nice of you to say I just like the I just really like the hauntings they just really get me good

I've been trying to do more hauntings but I gotta be honest I've been doing a few hauntings in a row now I think so I might find myself a little alien story soon do a little alien, alien's always good too I'm getting a fix I need a fix for my alien stories i'm not going to complain all right so i have a story for you today

um this one's kind of creepy it's the murder of lucille johnson aka the legos murder what in the world well i will tell you anytime i've stepped on a lego it felt like i was dying so goodbye cruel world so if that's the whole story where lucille stepped on a lego and that was it that's a that's a great quick story it had ups and downs we can all relate yep uh there there is uh that stage of parenting i have not reached yet i've done that definitely as a child and it fucking sucks but i have not reached the stage of parenting where there are Legos kind of scattered about and I am risking my foot's life every day. So once I get there, I may take back what I said earlier in this episode about how easy breezy, fun, awesome this whole parenting thing is. I feel like, yeah. Yeah. The second Leona hits uh lego sage i will be wearing shoes inside your

house everywhere just in case i it's not a bad idea i'll be honest um okay so the episode that i watched on this uh was on investigation discovery um you can watch it on discovery plus and it's called scene of the crime with tony harris and i love tony harris he is this like very suave suave suave suave suave this very suave uh like journalist and he just had like investigative journalist he has this way of like asking questions without seeming like smarmy i don't know i just love him um and so he just like delves into this he goes and sees the evidence he goes and talks to the people sees the scene of the crime like he's just very uh fun to watch so i definitely recommend that episode um i also listen to a podcast called this is the place uh this is also uh some information

from ksl.com in the arizona republic but the story itself takes place in salt lake city or more specifically a suburb of Salt Lake called Holiday. And this is about Lucille Johnson. She was 78 years old. She was a caring, loving mother. She's also a grandmother living in Holiday, Utah. And when her husband died, she lived alone but was extremely independent. So despite being 78, she like gardened every day. She even helped the elderly neighbors in her neighborhood. So she would like go help even older people. I know she's very sweet, bring them flowers, bring them food, like just help around the neighborhood. She was just one of those people where everyone described her as just like the gentlest,

most giving person. And she was very independent despite being 78. She lived alone. And her kids weren't really worried about her because she was so independent. Her daughter, Shirley, talked to her on the phone every day. Every day after work, Shirley called her and chatted with her. And then on February 1st, 1991, Shirley had spoken to her mom as usual. And her mom was telling her about her day, said she had gone to the senior center to get help with her car, and that they had helped her take her car in to get repaired at the auto repair shop, and then she had gotten a ride home. So that was what she had done that day. Shirley was on her way home from work and decided, you know what,

I'm going to pick up some pizzas. I'm going to pick up a pizza for my family and I'm going to pick up a pizza for my mom and drop it off at her house. Weirdly, as she's on her way to her mom's, she's about to turn down her mom's street and she just suddenly has this thought. And the thought is, you know, it's getting late. Just go home, be with your kids and go see mom in the morning. Oh. And so she's like, it just kind of overtook me that i had like second thoughts about going there so she she just wanted to be home be with her family so she skipped stopping at her mom's very weird went home and pretty much had dinner and passed

out and the next morning the first thing she did was get up and go to see her mom unfortunately she finds her mother laying on the floor of her house with a pillow over her face and there is blood everywhere like everywhere oh my god really horrific so her immediate thought because i mean understandably your brain wouldn't your brain would be trying to figure out what's going on without really knowing how to fill in the blanks. So her immediate thought was, oh, she must have injured herself and been bleeding profusely and was trying to use a pillow to stop the bleeding on her way to the bathroom. Like that was her first thought. And so she called 911 and they asked if Shirley knew CPR, but she said like, no, it doesn't matter because she's dead.

There's no way CPR would do anything. She's definitely gone. And ooh, I still get goose cam when reading this part. Ooh, it gives me the creeps. So they asked her to describe the scene. She described the blood. She described the pillow on her mom's face, still not really totally getting what was going on.

And the dispatch quietly and calmly said ma'am are you sure you're alone in the house forget it i have goose cam just for like the millionth time hearing that it it creeps me the fuck out and hearing her tell that on the episode is like so chilling because she you can tell she's still just so gripped with fear about that moment so she said that was a moment she knew her mother had been murdered and she had been trying to piece this together as an accident and she knew at that moment that her mother had been murdered um so she was interviewed like i said in the id episode and she said that the phrase are you alone in the house, has haunted her for years. And to this day, she can't be alone in her house. She just needs somebody to be there.

Fair enough. Yeah. So Lieutenant Manny Lassig was the first officer on the scene. And in the episode, he described finding Lucille's body at the end of the hall, just as Shirley had described. The pillow was still over her face. She had been savagely beaten. There was a lot of trauma to her head and chest. There was blood pooled under her head, blood spatter throughout the hallway to indicate that there had been a struggle. Like it was extremely violent. The pillow of her face was also soaked with blood and her head had been struck multiple times.

And they found a man's footprint on her chest as if someone had stomped on her oh my god it's really brutal um and that kick or stomp or whatever it was had broken eight of her ribs holy shit yeah so okay this is like significantly personal this is aggressive and brutal and there were some items missing from the house uh there was a designer purse some rings and so they figured robbery was a potential motive the storm door had been left open and was unlocked and discovers also noticed that a set of legos had been scattered all over the floor as if they had been played with oh okay yeah that's super creepy it's like someone with a kid came to kill her creepy right yeah and like kept the kid busy well play with these legos yeah uh you may be onto something anyway uh-huh but other valuables like an expensive necklace and

wallet like her wallet was still there so they were kind of confused about this and according to shirley uh the daughter if lucille was in the house that storm door was always locked like there was no way it would have been left unlocked um so it's definitely someone she knew exactly so and it was also extra personal because they didn't try to steal any of her shit they just wanted to kill her well they stole some of her shit but not i thought i thought you said her wallet was still there and everything yeah but so a designer purse was missing uh and some rings some rings were missing so some jewelry and a designer purse but the wall her wallet was still there so and and uh an expensive necklace so they didn't do a very thorough robbery i guess is maybe the better way to put it sure um so yeah like, like you said, it must be someone she knew because

she would have or at least trusted enough to open the door for them. Yeah. So Lucille's injuries, like you said, also suggested this was a personal attack because again, she's 78. It doesn't take much to subdue a 78 year old woman. And yet she had multiple skull fractures, eight broken ribs and was attacked over and over again. I mean this was clearly overkill and it looked as though the motive could have been either anger or revenge. They really weren't sure. So Lucille's family held a really beautiful funeral service for her. Many people came to pay their respects and help comfort her family. Her son who was interviewed in the episode who's now uh his

mother's age in his 70s um said that he still listens to the tape the recording of that funeral because it was just so beautiful to hear people talk about his mom and so that was a really sweet moment um but the whole time during this funeral shirley looking around like, could somebody here have been the one to do this? Because this was such a personal attack. And so as much as the funeral was touching, it was also like she was on edge because she thought maybe somebody here knows something or was involved. That being said, one of the first people they zeroed in on was a relative and he was a nephew of lucille's so lucille and her nephew had a shared interest in genealogy they collected family photos they did a lot of work building up their family tree and so he had spent a lot of time

with lucille in her home and he had recently been financially struggling so she had sort of taken him in and helped him with money. And Shirley's note about this is that she remembers her mom at one point saying she was tired of constantly being expected to give her nephew money over and over again. And she told Shirley she couldn't keep this up and she was going to cut him off. And that was one week before she was murdered. Wow. Okay. That is a big red flag that'll do it and he loved legos no i'm just kidding i was like they both had a shared interest in legos playmobil no right

yeah what was your what was your german one that you got me the was it playmobil yeah was duplo also german duplo is german i think that's the Playmobil like for littler kids. Like that's like the Lego for little kids. It's like the big box. Yeah, we had Duplo and Playmobil and Lego, I guess. I think I had a combo of all three when I was little. We did too. All kind of scattered about.

I never got that into Playmobil, but I went to the toy store the other day and I was like, wow, this Playmobil but I like I went to the toy store the other day and I was like wow this Playmobil stuff is fun like there's like I kind of hope Leanna's into Playmobil because there's so many fun little like I mean Lego's cool too but I don't know something about Playmobil is really fun to play with I feel like I feel like I I never cared about like building anything but I just loved the sets and so I would just yeah i would just build them just to and never like to play with the dolls to like then like act out a scene i would literally like i don't know maybe someone can diagnose me with something but i used to only care about the sets not the people and then once the set part was built i would just sit there and stare at the at

the rooms and i would just imagine like a honey i shrunk the kids moment and i would just walk around in the set oh that's cool but i would do that for hours like there was so interesting because like now you do your escape rooms like you're still kind of in that i would i also it felt like that i would get the same um i don't, serotonin boost whenever I would go to theme parks and walk around on that set. Or like if I went to a movie lot and walked around on the set. I always, I like putting myself in imaginary places. Oh, that's really fun. Oh, no, I don't think there's anything to diagnose.

I feel like that's just a really cool imagination. Well, thank you. But my parents definitely thought it was weird that I had no interest in building with these things or playing with the things with faces. I didn't play with those either. I never cared about the people. I always wanted to design the inside of the house and stuff. Yeah. It was very Sims before its time, I guess.

Right. Take the one background they gave you and that's it. Honestly, I never had to even set it up. If you just gave me the fold out part and I just held it, I wouldn't even need the blocks. And I would just stare at it for hours. I don't know if it's being an only child and that was how I entertained myself. Maybe.

Maybe. Just look at a fake park forever. I like it. I mean, anyway, listen, there's worse things to do in your free time as a child. I guess so. Anyway, sorry. I'm just going to stare at this box for three hours it was like i had a blast okay it sounds like you did i can tell oh boy so anyway this nephew is like the first

uh suspect here or at least a person of interest because he's been um benefiting financially from his aunt and uh she cut him off and then she was murdered so not a good look for him um what's more is the nephew called shirley uh lucille's daughter who found her body the nephew called shirley right after lucille's death and said quote shirley i'm not calling to say i'm sorry i have my own feelings to deal with but there are things in that house that belong to me and i want to be there when you clean it out so not a great look once again yeah that's not cute so at this point they're like holy shit we think one of our relatives did this could it be is it possible she even said at the funeral she tried to give him a hug and he was like a brick wall like he wouldn't react or respond to

her so she was just very weirded out by this whole thing he did have an alibi that he was at home but like that couldn't be verified by anybody and he had a financial motive but so they tried to figure out how to prove this and what they did was they tested the shoe print that was like on her chest and matched it to the nephew's shoes and foot size and it was not a match oh i didn't see that coming okay done so basically now they're back to square one because that was the only lead they had and they had no suspects and the case basically went cold for 22 years 22 years oh my god i know i thought you were gonna say like 22 minutes and then someone had an epiphany. 22 minutes. 22 years. Jesus. So what year is it now when something happens?

It's now 2013. Whoa. Yeah. Big jump in time here. The case got renewed interest. Thanks to federal funding, Utah's cold cases were now being revisited with modern forensics. And nowadays, very small amounts of DNA can be used to identify an individual. And nowadays, very small amounts of DNA can be used to identify an individual.

You know, when this murder occurred back in the day in, what year did I say it was? 91. You know, DNA was just a very new concept as far as like solving crimes. So they were able to go back and reopen the case and revisit it. And thankfully, they still had biologic samples from the scene of the murder and they thank god had been preserved properly because there's nothing more infuriating to me when you're watching like this show and they're like we can finally solve it and it's like oops we lost all the blood or like oops we accidentally threw the t-shirt in the trash and accidentally bled all over it oh i sneezed on it oopsies exactly it's like so infuriating or like oh

they just lost it and it's like what do you mean they lost it what do you mean so thank god this evidence was all preserved and they had a number of things they could test so her shoes the pillow over her face which was saturated in blood and her shirt which was covered in blood and they pulled all this out during the show which was was very kind of unsettling. Like they had her shirt and you could see the blood on it. Just really disturbing. Yeah. That's really sobering. It is.

And the shirt still had like the boot print on it that you can see. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. And they had also thankfully thought ahead and they had clipped her fingernails. Oh. And so now they're able to see if uh there's

dna under her fingernails you know that came from during the struggle yeah so they also thought the pillow may have had some sort of dna left behind by the killer if he was holding it uh on her face so they sent the pillowcase and the fingernail clippings in and then they just had to wait my least favorite activity yeah so lo and behold the following february they get a letter from the department of public safety to notify them that they had indeed found dna under lucille's fingernails that was not hers hey so they ran it through codis and they got a match and it was a family member the The DNA belonged to not a family member, but to an Arizona resident named John Edward Sansing, who was currently sitting on death row for the murder of a different woman named Trudy Calabrese in 1998.

What? Okay, how'd they know each other? Okay, let me tell you. So let me first tell you what happened to Trudy, the murder that he's on death row for. So February 24th of 1998, John Sansing had requested a food box from the local church to help feed his family. So 41-year-old Trudy Calabrese took a box of food over to his home. When she delivered the food, she turned to leave and he grabbed her from behind. She was bound and assaulted and then he stabbed her repeatedly in the abdomen with a knife oh my god then he bought some drugs with her jewelry then dragged her body

into the backyard and shoved it between a shed and a wall where she laid until basically like the trash out next to where the trash was until officers found her body the following day. Oh my God. So senselessly brutal and horrific, but it gets worse because disturbingly, John's wife, Kara, knew this was going on as it happened. And not only was she home, but their young children were home too during this whole event. Wait, what? His wife knew that he was killing people? Yes. His wife knew that he was killing this woman.

She was in on it. And not only was she home during this whole event watching it happen, but the kids were home as well. Oh my God. In fact, Sansing's nine-year-old daughter told officers her daddy killed the church lady who came to their home to bring them free food. Wow. So I see a connection between those two women that they were both just very kind and helpful yes precisely like being taken advantage of and when asked by police whether the woman said anything this is disturbing the girl nodded and replied she said god just help me oh my god yeah it's so fucked up it makes me so mad that some people have kids it's like twisted. So the kids told police they had heard their parents planning to rob the church lady the day before. So like.

Oh, shit. So this was fully thought out. All premeditated. Yeah. And the wife was fully like part of this plan. So John Sansing went to death row for that murder and his wife, Kara, went to prison for life for her role in the murder. And his wife, Kara, went to prison for life for her role in the murder. So now investigators had to figure out how he how his DNA basically got under Lucille's fingernails.

Yeah. Also, before we jump onto it, I also want to say, like, there's probably a large chance he's killed other people. If like there's no way we think there's no way we happen to perfectly catch him on both of them. Isn't that I had the same thought because the first one happened in 91, the in 98 and it's like yeah i think he did something in between those other seven years and and for it to be so brutal i feel like it required practice which i hate to say but like i feel like you don't just start you don't just start by kicking someone's ribs in one time and breaking eight of them and then just no uh no hesitation nothing just like yeah it's fine that's just what we do here which i mean it's possible but yeah i would agree that i would bet there's more to this story so police spoke with sansing's wife cara the one who had gone to prison for life and she told them that he had worked at a car dealership in salt lake city near lucille's

home back in the early 90s so remember how i said lucille had gone to take her car in for repairs the day that she was killed so oh okay that's probably where the connection was so it gets weirder it gets weirder uh investigators still had one piece of evidence they hadn't fully understood until now which was the legos so they had sent these legos in for fingerprint analysis um and the analysis had come back showing a small child's fingerprints aha could it have been one of those two kids who witnessed the other murder too the fingerprints clinched the case because they were the fingerprints of john sansing's five-year-old son. Uh-huh. Well, I'll do it. So you called it earlier when you said someone came with their kids.

Which, like, and I couldn't be surprised by that information when you just told me about a second murder he caused while his children watched. Were there, right. Which now makes me wonder, like, how many murders did it take for you to do in front of your kids before they got used to this or before they were like oh it's fine yeah yeah so it's just tragic um investigators finally figured out how john sansing had gotten into the house he had used his five-year-old son as bait so it brought him to lucille's door gaining her trust so she would let them inside and then as john sansing brutally murdered lucille he kept his five-year-old son busy in the other room playing with legos and think about it like that was a struggle that was a loud violent struggle yeah the kid definitely heard yeah it's not like he has no idea what's going

on in the other room or also if there's that much blood in that room daddy was covered in blood for sure yeah you're totally right and the kid was like whatever and then he took the weapon with Or also if there's that much blood in that room, daddy was covered in blood for sure. Yeah, you're totally right. And the kid was like, whatever. And then he took the weapon with him too. So it's like, this kid saw a lot. So after a 23-year investigation, John Sansing finally pleaded guilty to murdering Lucille.

And although he was already on death row, he received an additional life sentence for Lucille's murder. And, you know, Tony, my friend on Investigation Discovery. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He interviewed him in prison and actually got some more details about the story. So I'm going to tell you kind of what was asked and what John Sansing shared. So he confirmed that that morning she had brought her car in for service and he worked at the car dealership and had given her a ride home. This woman is 78 years old. It's like so disturbing to me. He gave her a ride home. Yeah. Because she took her car in to be repaired. So he now knows her address and all precisely trying to be a good Samaritan or pretending to be a good Samaritan. Right, right, right. He said it seemed like she may have had money or jewelry by just looking at her, looking at her house. And so he pinned her as a target for robbery.

He told her he had his young kids in town and would love for her to meet them. And she was so excited to be able to like meet his little kids and he seemed sweet. So he brought them to her house. She let them in with the hopes of getting to know the little kids and he seemed sweet so he brought them to our house she let them in with the hopes of getting to know the little kids and uh apparently he had not just brought his five-year-old son he'd also brought his wife and his daughter so everybody is over there at the same so so the wife is also involved in two murders then okay wow i don't know why i keep being surprised i know me too but it's like this is a family affair, unfortunately.

So he asked if he could use her restroom. She said yes. He went into the bathroom, and while he was away from her, he snuck out, went into several rooms looking for things to steal, but then she caught him. So supposedly he panicked, then grabbed her in a bear hug, that's a quote, brought her to the ground, and then hit her over and over again with a crystal vase oh shit but also i'm like i know we talked about this

earlier but like it seemed so brutal and personal yeah like maybe he's just a fucking sicko i don't know i don't know i mean especially like when you think about like that he didn't steal like her credit card or anything i mean i know like he's still like a designer person, all that. But in my mind, if you're not taking someone's wallet, I feel like you're missing out on easy cash. You're missing out on a credit card or a social security number. Like I feel like it was sloppily done, which I feel like if you agree if you came over to rob her then either you're just a bad robber or you really didn't plan on killing her and so the robbery even like maybe it was just about killing her i don't know i don't know or maybe he didn't mean to kill her

and then he got so flustered he forgot to keep keep robbing her i don't know yeah maybe the maybe the the killing like threw him off but also like why was it so brutal like he kept smashing the vase in her head he broke her ribs he must have snapped i don't know it's so weird it's like what the hell why is it so brutal if if he barely even knew this woman oh my god this poor woman i know it's really really disturbing um so when tony brought up the fact that john's kids were in the other room because like hello okay it's not like normal like yeah like the guy gets so taken aback that this is even being brought up he gets extremely defensive and this is what he says quote you're trying to make me say that just because I'm a criminal, they're a criminal.

But that ain't true. They're in prison for what they've done, not what I've done to them or what our past is like. It's what they chose to do that got them in trouble. Oh, what now? And indeed, the little boy that had witnessed both murders and potentially more who left his fingerprints on the Legos at Lucille's house grew up to have an extensive criminal record himself. And this is just so tragic to me it's like such a cycle of abuse and neglect and trauma i was gonna say like it's horrible i'm not trying to say like it wasn't a criminal's fault for being a criminal but a fucking hello like you just see the cycle of it it's like yeah fucking sad

and for the dad to be like that had nothing to do with me it's like are you nothing you made him think that murder is fucking normal what are you talking about way to get by it it's so sick to me and it just makes me ill and like the amount of trauma in this situation i can't even begin to grasp um so according to the dad it had absolutely nothing to do with his upbringing this is just happens to be the path his son has chosen for himself. Super fucked up. So this is kind of the last note here. Lucille's son, John, who is, like I said, is now close to his mom's age when she passed away, says he believes closure is forgiveness.

And he has forgiven John Sansing for murdering his mother. for murdering his mother his sister shirley the one who found their mother's body says she doesn't think she'll ever feel safe alone at night again but she no longer carries feelings of anger and believes her mother's positive family legacy is the most important thing she's left behind and that's the story of the salt lake city legos murder wow i wonder what happened with the nephew that they like all blamed for the murder i know like he probably was like fuck you guys i'm out of here like no like no wonder he like wouldn't hug her back he's like i know you told the police i might have something to do with this oh my god oh gosh woof i don't know what to tell you man that that's a doozy isn't that bizarre i mean the fact

you were like oh it sounds like someone brought their kids to the murder like sometimes it really is just the most clear-cut thing like oh it was playing with legos in the other room it's exactly what happened it's always a weirdly perfect setup to me when it's just a random fucking person and like i don't mean perfect in a good way it's just like it yeah it really throws it really throws a wrench in any investigation because it's like you assume something that brutal had to be personal that it right totally like helps the killer get away because it's like i made it look so person which like in my mind like i like it freaks me out that there could be a killer out there where that's their mo of like making it look personal so you have no idea how random it is how random it is and like oh he went she went to get her car fixed but like that's all the information we had

and it's like if thank god for dna uh evidence because if they hadn't properly preserved that or the fingerprint uh he would have gone away he would have just never at least with this crime yeah they would never have figured out who did it it's it's disturbing so i mean i'm glad at least there's that element of like down the road things can get solved even if right now they seem like unsolvable oh wow it also really freaks me out that like i'm nearly convinced for Wow. It also really freaks me out that like, I'm nearly convinced for nothing but speculation that he has killed before. Honestly, I had not thought about that until you said it during the episode. And like, I can't get that thought out of my head because again, it's like total speculation and there's, but like, what are the odds that this man was killing killing too well he was attacking too well unless maybe he had his own

background of like seeing violence and so maybe he was just good at violence i don't know but it seems like you don't just walk into a situation the other part is that the second murder him but the second one he got caught like that day like the next day like it wasn't like he did a good job like he got almost it almost makes you feel like the first one was an accidental murder and he didn't have to think it through as much oh interesting when all of a sudden he had to think out a murder he was bad at planning i don't know like right well and it also mentioned you know i don't know what their drug history was but it did mention that he bought drugs with her jewelry so who knows if drugs played a part oh yeah so it's yeah it's so hard to say but either way really fucked up oh my god well i got nothing wow i didn't think i calling it the lego killer or whatever is interesting because

it feels like now in hindsight it's such a small piece to it the lego's murder i mean i may have just kind of i mean it is called that like on the episode but i feel like but that is the part that clinched the case like yeah the fingerprint is the part that um kind of and it also makes it so much more fucked up because it it proved that his kid was at her house yeah oh i wonder if lego felt like they had to put out a statement about that i really doubt it i really don't think they would ever want to draw attention to this that's true but can you imagine being like the creator of lego and hearing the story and then just going like like that's not good that's that's it's terrible but i mean at least their product holds a fingerprint well hey you know what two years that's a ringing endorsement for Lego, I guess.

I should be their PR person. Definitely collects DNA, which is also why I think a lot of children get sick a lot because they're just playing with Legos and grimy germs. That's pretty gnarly to say, oh, our toy collects DNA. Yikes. Forensically, it's an excellent thing. Forensically, it's great news for all medically wash them yikes use some purell boy well i don't know man that's that was a brutal one that one was that one got me good um hmm how do we end this where what are you up to for the rest of the day

well you're gonna go play with blaze i'm gonna go hang out with blaze we'll probably go to the dog park and you know just enjoy his version of a saturday um and i guess oh we still also have to do our little aftermath discussion yeah the aftermath i'm still trying to come up with a name for it on patreon the the bonus you didn't want but definitely get and did not ask for yeah did not ask for well if you are a patreon member uh hop on over and and check out our our extra bonus content that we will be recording after this we'll see you there if you're not sick of us yet and that's why we drink