Cold Case Files - No Known Enemies

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

When 81-year-old Helen Gale is found in her burned-out car, investigators in Southfield, Michigan wonder who would murder this pillar of the community. It will be eight years before a blown alibi brings them face-to face with her killer.This Episode is sponsored by BetterHelpBetterHelp: Visit BetterHelp.com/COLDCASE to get 10% off your first month.Homes.com: We’ve done your homework.Progressive: Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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of Cold Case Files, as well as the A&E Classic Podcasts, I Survived, American Justice, and City Confidential are all available ad-free on the new A&E Crime and Investigation channel on Apple Podcasts and Apple Plus for just $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year. And now on to the show. The following episode contains disturbing accounts of physical and sexual violence. Listener discretion is advised. My mom had this great life. She was just gregarious and joyful and fun.

It was hard for me to believe that anyone who knew my mom could do this. Not a day goes by I don't think about Helen and what she suffered. The killer was still out there. We had no suspects. It was a whodunit case. When there's a fire involved, fingerprints are destroyed, DNA evidence is destroyed.

You feel like you are fighting this impossible battle. When you're going through something like this, you don't even know what to ask. And everything you do ask makes you realize how little we know. This case has to be solved. Helen Gayle did not deserve to die the way she did. There are over 100,000 cold cases in America. Only about 1% are ever solved. This is one of those rare stories.

It's November 26th, 2011 in Southfield, Michigan. Nate Erwin is a fire investigator for the Highland Park Fire Department. I was off duty. I was called in to investigate a car fire burning in the alley in the rear of 196 West Pointa Vista. It's the day after Thanksgiving, and most people are still at home sleeping off their turkey dinner as the firefighters quickly douse the flames. You can extinguish vehicle fires quite quickly in just a few minutes. in just a few minutes. In the process, the firefighters actually getting into the vehicle, they discovered the remains of a body.

Firefighters determined the victim is a woman. Head down, feet up, wrapped in a comforter or something, a blanket. She was badly, badly burned. It was incredibly disturbing. The area the car was set in was an overgrown alley, situated behind mostly vacant houses. There was a large crowd around. The police were holding everybody back.

I started processing the scene. You're always trying to know who's in the crowd. There's always the stories of, you know, is the potential perpetrator there? But we needed to determine if a crime had been committed. You're eliminating other potential causes. You're not just getting trapped into the tunnel vision of, oh, there's a body there, so it must be a homicide. I'd look at all the other possibilities that it could have been. First, was this some sort of accident? Second, was there some sort of vehicle malfunction?

I was able to immediately eliminate an engine compartment fire. Was this somebody sleeping in their vehicle, smoking, doing drugs? While there's no sign of any breakdown or accident, the interior of the car is littered with worrying signs. Her head was down into the center council and she was squished in there. There's no way anybody would be riding like that. She was positioned like someone stuffed her inside of a vehicle and lit her on fire, for lack of better words. When we started unwrapping this blanket, there was just a strong smell of gasoline. The backseat was soaked, the comforter was soaked, and clearly the body had been soaked in gasoline. There was overwhelming evidence

that it was an intentionally set fire. Lewis Ebel is a cold case investigator for the Oakland County Sheriff's Department. Our experience tells us that usually when someone sets a fire, it's destroy evidence. Especially since the advent of DNA. Before it was fingerprints or fibers, hairs, but with DNA, it's taken it to a new level.

Investigators are now certain this is no accident and that foul play is involved. You just sit there wondering who could have done such a thing to her and why. It does bother you. It really does. All of the fatal fires bother you. It really does. All the fatal fires bother you. This particular one was incredibly gruesome. Bill Peterson is a cold case investigator for the Oakland County Sheriff's Department.

It was an ugly scene. It was obviously not a natural death, and it certainly wasn't an accidental death either. So it certainly pointed to homicide and to my way of thinking, to an attempt to cover up the crime. Investigator Irwin searches for clues in the alley where the car is parked. This was mostly a vacant neighborhood, really close off the expressway. It did provide good cover for somebody,

you know, looking to commit a crime, which I believe played into why the perpetrator chose to set the vehicle on fire there. What's incredibly difficult is you're looking through an alley and there's garbage and debris all over the place. Approximately 40 feet away from the vehicle, there's this burnt blue bag. You're looking at it, you're like,

well, did a hose line knock this down there? Was it in the vehicle? Anything could be potentially evidence. You don't really know. It was literally, okay, this is burnt, this appears to be part of this fire scene. One could reasonably conclude that it may have been right at the fire in the car and had been dropped some distance down. As they gather what evidence they can,

police officers attempt to identify the tragic victim. Police officers ran the plate and then we were able to see a medical identification bracelet on her wrist identifying her as Helen Gale. Darryl Palmer is a major crimes detective from the Southfield Police Department. Helen Gale was an 81-year-old widower. She lived alone and she had two daughters. She was a pillar of the community, well liked by everyone, living an active, very active life. She had worked for the Southfield Parks and Recreation Department for 31 years.

She retired, but she still kept doing volunteer part-time work coordinating their dance programs. Nancy Gale is Helen Gale's daughter. She worked there, gosh, from 19, roughly 78, until 2010. There was not a day that she wasn't there. So she loved it. I mean, it was really her soul. It was her heartbeat. She loved people.

She was a history buff and a religion buff, and she loved music. My mom had no disputes with anyone. Linda Smith is Helen Gale's friend. Helen had a wonderful personality. She didn't just sit in a rocking chair at home. Helen was on the move. She was upbeat, friendly, had a sense of humor. She was very attractive woman. She was meticulous how she dressed. She always put makeup on, had her hair done, didn't look her age. She was not a little old lady of 81. She was more like a 21. After finding Helen Gale's name among the ashes, investigators head to her home to search

the premises. No one was home, and everything appeared initially to be relatively normal until a closer look. There was no forced entry. The house was not ransacked either. In the bedroom, her flip phone is open, so she may have even tried to reach over and tried to call the police once she realized an intruder was in the house.

Family members said she would never leave home without her phone, and there was a comforter from the bed that was missing. And when Helen Gale's car was found, there was a cloth-tight material in the back seat, possibly the comforter that was on Helen Gale's car was found, there was a cloth-type material in the back seat. Possibly the comforter that was on Helen Gale's bed used to cover up the body. The big question with this case right away

was who would want to harm Helen Gale? It was hard for me to believe that anyone who knew my mom could do this. Who would want to murder Helen Gale? We did not know the answer. The next morning I received a phone call from an old family friend and she said, the police found a burning car

that we think is your mom's. And her body is in the car. And so at that point, I just booked a ticket and jumped on a plane. That was the longest flight I've ever taken. I kept looking around thinking, nobody here has any idea I'm flying home because they found my mom's body in a car.

It felt so hollow and so surreal. I kept thinking, what was that car ride like? Was she alive? My overwhelming thought was, at what point did she pass? At what was she and what was she not aware of? Helen's daughter, Nancy, left Michigan in her mid-20s and moved to Los Angeles, where she built a successful business

designing high-end handbags. Growing up in Southfield was fantastic. They were my former debiers. My mom and dad both worked, and we were a really active family. My father passed in 2000, but my mom was independent, had this great life. I've never seen anyone have that kind of love for life like my mother did.

We used to talk about her moving out to LA at some point. I wanted her to, and she would say, I have such a full life here. I work full time. I have great friends. My life works. When you want to see me, we'll make plans to be together. When I want to see you, I'll come out there." She was really, really happy.

After her flight to Michigan lands, Nancy heads straight for her old neighborhood. I still don't think I can quite define what it was like to see my childhood home as a crime scene. That's just so hard to palette. And it's still such a blur how we even got through that week. It was a blank slate for everybody. We had no information to latch onto. When you're going through something like this,

it's so foreign. You don't even know what to ask. And everything you do ask makes you realize how little we know. Nancy Gale stated to us that she spoke to her mother by phone on November 25th in the evening hours around 7 or 7 30 p.m. and everything seemed to be normal. We had talked on my way home from Thanksgiving, and we talked about just my day. It was nothing out of the ordinary. The last words we had were, I said, I love you, Mom,

and she said, I love you, Nan, and hung up the phone. I called her Sunday morning, and she didn't pick up. We determined that the crime occurred sometime in the evening after Nancy Gale spoke to her mother and the next morning when the vehicle was discovered in the alley in Highland Park, Set-A-Blaze. During our investigation, we discovered video surveillance from a credit union that was just down the road from Helen Gale's home. And video records found a vehicle going by early on the morning that was similar to her

car. And in the video, there was something white in the back seat in the area behind the driver's seat that could well have been the comforter off her bed. Detectives looked to forensic science to determine exactly how Helen Gale died. The autopsy showed that there was no suit in her lungs or trachea, you know, so she was, there's no question she was dead before she was set on fire. She wasn't set on fire alive. The autopsy ruled that she died from strangulation and that was her cause of death. Helen's burnt-out car offers no clues other than the comforter found on the back seat.

When there's a fire involved, it makes things a lot more difficult. If there is evidence left, it's much more difficult to decipher. Say fingerprints are destroyed, DNA evidence is destroyed. We had the Michigan State Police Forensic Crime Team respond, and they did a very thorough job investigating Helen Gale's home. And officers noted inside Helen Gale's garage appeared to be possibly blood. We couldn't really tell based on the way things were

in the home what actually occurred. That was one of the unanswered mysteries of this case. What is clear is that Helen Gill's brutal murder has hit this small town hard. The Southfield community was blown away. This isn't something that happened there. This isn't something that happened in any of our circles. She was family to so many people.

So it really rocked everybody to the core. We chose to have her celebration of life at the Parks and Rec because that was her life. And those were her people. There were over 100 people there. It meant everything to see everybody there. It was hard for people to really wrap their head around it. So I felt like it was a lot.

It was my job to make sure people realized no matter how she died, we had to celebrate her. To see so many people didn't surprise me. Knowing Helen, I knew she had many friends. There was a press release that day, and I talked for a couple moments about the wonderful person my mom was, and then reached out to the community to please, please speak up if they had any idea of what happened, or if there was any way that they could help this investigation. What makes this case difficult is the fact that there's not an immediate red flag that gives you a direction.

In many cases there is. There's a ex-spouse or there's involvement in criminal activity, so you have a direction right away. But in a case like this where an elderly person is murdered and they've lived a very clean, straightforward, healthy lifestyle. There was no direction that was immediate. There was a reward offered in this homicide, and flyers were put out in the neighborhood. We talked to as many neighbors as we could. We looked at neighborhood residents in terms of parolees or people on probation,

and there were several, but none that had the type of criminal history or background that would lead us to believe they would be involved in something like this. Several days after the homicide, a person by the name of Darren Keener, Helen's next door neighbor, called the police department to report that a gas can was stolen off of his back porch. You always have to look at every possibility. So the thought that a prowler could have stolen

the gas can and also done something to Helen Gale, that is a possibility. A prowler could have been involved in this crime. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. There are so many sources of stress nowadays. It feels like everywhere you turn, there's another thing to be worried about. And work has become a huge contributing factor to overall stress levels for many people. In fact, 61% of the global workforce reports feeling higher than normal levels of stress these days. With all the pressures piling up, it's easy to feel overwhelmed. But this summer,

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations. Several days after the homicide of Helen Gale, a Southfield investigator went down to the alley and quite some distance from her car, there was a gas can in a pile of brush and trash and whatnot. There appeared to be a small amount of melted blue substance or fabric on the gas can itself. And we believe that it could possibly be the same material that the blue bag that was found next to the burning vehicle.

The traces of melted bag on the gas can prove that the bag and the can were both of the crime scene when the fire was set. Detective Palmer checks with Helen's neighbor, who confirms that the can looks like the one stolen from his porch. I felt that it was high probability that it was the can used to start the fire. People don't understand even just a gallon of gasoline

in a confined space like that is gonna give quite a little explosion. This new discovery sheds no light on what happened at Helen's house, but investigators quickly zero in on two suspicious incidents that happened there in recent months. Nancy told us that several weeks prior Helen Gayle's purse was discovered missing from inside her home. purse was discovered missing from inside her home. She called me and she said, ah, I was out gardening and I left the garage and side door open and she said in my Helen bag,

which was a bag that I've named after her, she said, it's gone and it was stolen. Our assumption was kids in the neighborhood or someone must have just swiped it. And it felt like a, even though it was her, her handbag, which feels very personal, it, it, it felt like a petty crime. The bag isn't the only thing missing from Helen's home. So my mom always kept a spare key under the pot

on the stoop and that went missing. Now in the homicide, the house is not broken into physically. So it's very likely someone had a key that entered it. Nancy soon realizes that something else is missing from her mom's house. So my mom always kept a little rainy day fund because she was born in 1930 and cash was still how the world circulated. And she was always very prepared for everything in life.

In fact, she had a closet full of wrapped gifts for the year to bring to people's birthdays and house warmings. And so having some cash on hand was really about the preparation, I think, instilled in her generation. When we searched the home, none of that cash was located. We suspected that this could be some sort of robbery and someone that came there looking for money. So we now had a situation where Helen Gale had a purse stolen. She had a key missing. And we also had a neighbor reporting a gas can

taken from his back porch. Those three things does tell us that someone was up to no good in the neighborhood. But who that someone was up to no good in the neighborhood, but who that person was, we had no idea. We had no clear-cut direction. We had no suspects. It was a whodunit case. Looking for anything to jumpstart the case, Detective Palmer searches for any other local

crimes that could be related to the murder of Helen Gale. We learned that on November 20th, six days prior to Helen Gale's homicide, there was an elderly female, Nancy Daly, killed in her home in Royal Oak, Michigan. This is a short distance from Helen Gale's home in Southfield. Her throat was slit and her hands were bound. She died in a very violent manner. Is this a serial killer of elderly people? We were very interested to find out more about that case because this could very well lead us

to the killer of Helen Gale. And Nancy Daly had hired a couple to do some yard work. And we were also looking at the time of the landscapers at Helen Gale's home. to do some yard work. And we were also looking at the time of the landscapers at Helen Gale's home. So we were trying to connect those dots to see if the two cases were related. My mom, she had landscapers

that would come and do work on the house, and she'd invite them in, she'd make them lunch. I can definitely see why any crew working at her house would have been looked at, why any crew working at her house would have been looked at, because they had access to her house. And if they were to have someone working for them that had a criminal past or lifestyle,

they could very well possibly be a suspect in this crime. They could have theoretically discovered the key under the pot. The bottom line is someone has come into the house and committed a theft. The house is not broken into physically. So it's very likely someone had a key that entered it. So we decided to look at a thorough background on those employees, and we also brought a number of them in to be interviewed,

but they all appeared to be very cooperative. They weren't nervous or appear to be hiding anything. And so there was nobody in that landscaping crew that raised a red flag. It's yet another dead end for investigators. I would talk with Nancy and she felt very frustrated. One does wonder, where is this going? And what's being done?

And why is, do we hear nothing? The killer was still out there. I kept calling and asking questions. I felt like I was being, I think, sort of pacified by the department. They were trying and looking, and of course, they have bosses and people moving them to new cases. Darrell Palmer was always there for me,

always pick up the phone. He used to say, I will not retire until this case has been solved. But I feel like even he was sort of pushed into this place where there was nothing more he could do. Helen Gale's actual case file was kept on my desk. And I never put it in a cabinet where it was out of sight, out of mind. But in 2016, I went back to being a patrol officer, became an evidence tech and training

officer for the last few years of my career. With Detective Palmer no longer in charge, the case goes cold. It's now May 2016, five years after Helen Gayle's murder. A case is considered cold when all your leads have resulted in negative results. It's very difficult knowing that every case can't be solved. I mean, there's either evidence or there isn't. The case went cold. The first few times I heard that,

I could not reconcile it. I knew I had to keep moving forward with my life, but I couldn't let this go. My mom was gone, and obviously we wanted this person off the street. And then something, I think, just hit me at the five-year mark, and that's when I realized we have to do something. Finally, I was talking to my best friend, Rosie. I said, what can we do about this? And she's a writer as it

happens. And so she wrote a story of just how ridiculous it is that something that is front page, front line news for so long just goes flat. As if, okay they're over that, my mom doesn't matter. That's, if you're not careful, that's how it can be taken. So she writes this story. The Southfield PD appears to have ended their pursuit of Justice and Gayle's murder. Gayle's family members, as well as many Southfield citizens, are appealing for nude efforts to apprehend the person

who took the life they so cherished. The first time I read the letter, it embodied exactly what I was feeling. Nancy and Rosie plan to send the letter to the media to pressure the police to pick up the case. First, Nancy takes some advice from a new private investigator friend. Scott was an investigative journalist

and now he's a private investigator, does a lot of innocence work. And he said, look, if we blast it to the media, it infuriates people and you get a lot of noise. But is that really, what's our real objective? It's to get the police back on the case. So do we want to make them angry or do we want to say, look, we need something to be done and we want to make them angry? Or do we want to say, look, we need something

to be done and we want to work with you? Scott sends a letter to his contacts at local police departments, including the cold case unit at the Sheriff's Office in Oakland County, the county where Southfield is located. I was actually getting my hair done. And the next thing I know, I get a phone call from a sergeant at Oakland County and he said, your mom's paperwork is on my desk. And we're going to start giving some real attention to the case. And there we were, like back in, back in action. But we had no idea the chain of events that this would set off. It actually was the biggest piece because it ignited everything.

When we first got the case, we start to read and read and read. There's a lot of paperwork involved and we have to go through every bit of it before we can actually do anything. We saw that Salfield had talked to Darren Keener, a neighbor of Helen. Darren, right? Yeah. Back in 2011, Keener reported his gas can stolen from his front porch, a gas can that was found near Helen Gayle's burnt car,

along with a partially burnt blue bag. The last time you saw that can, do you remember if it was in the bag or out of the bag? I don't know. I just know it was right by that door. You don't know if it was in the bag? I'm not 100% sure on that. Darren Keener had an alibi. The murder happened on the Friday night, Saturday morning of the Thanksgiving weekend. Keener's alibi was that he had his daughter that weekend. He had been divorced from his ex-wife and he had, I believe, one weekend a month where

she could stay with him. And he told Southfield that that was his weekend, and he had spent the weekend with his daughter, most of it at his mother's house. And when we start following up with additional interviews, Darren Keener jumped out at us for several reasons. His life was a train wreck at the time of the murder. He was strung out on drugs. His house had been foreclosed.

He was broke. Natural gas turned off. He's really at out on drugs. His house had been foreclosed. He was broke. Natural gas turned off. He's really at a dead end. The fact that he had a history of narcotics use gave him a motive for stealing money from her. Obviously, he was known to our victim. He was a next door neighbor, and he would occasionally do favors for, run errands, whatever.

Her key had gone missing several days before the killing happened. Did he take it? We don't know. But if he did, he had access to the house, clearly. We contacted him to let him know that we're the Caucasian unit, Oakland County, and we're looking at this case down, we want to talk to you.

Then all of a sudden he's in Toledo, Ohio. And I don't know if he thought, well, by leaving Michigan, I'm going to escape the long arm of the law. But you know, Toledo is about an hour drive from Southfield. I suppose on the theory that if he moved to Ohio, we'd never find him. I'm not quite sure how that was supposed to work, but he continued working at the Ford plant. So finding him was not rocket science. The cold case detectives bring in Keener for an interview.

At first, Keener said that his mom had picked him up on Saturday morning. And then he said, well, no, actually it was Friday night, because he realized Saturday morning didn't quite cover up when the murder happened. The new detectives need to talk to Keener's mother and his ex-wife. The focus was, well, let's break down his alibi. We did talk with his mother and her responses were varied. I guess a good way to put it. She tried to cover for him,

but was not completely successful. She was not terribly credible. We talked with his ex-wife about visitation weekends when he had his daughter. And she responded immediately, oh, I have a journal. I have a journal going all the way back. So yes, I can tell you when his weekends were.

Really, could we see it? And it was pretty detailed and went back a long way, including the time of this homicide. So it was extremely helpful. So the records showed that he didn't have her that weekend. His alibi is verifiably false. So when his alibi falls apart, he goes way up on the suspect list. The Cold Case team takes a closer look at Keener's cell phone records. One of the things we found was that he made some calls to a part-time girlfriend, whom he had met, as I recall, in rehab and told her that

morning after the crime had happened that he had done something bad, something very bad. She didn't know what it was about, but he was definitely upset and possibly remorseful after the killing happened, which is terrific evidence also. So not only are we tacking his alibi, but now we have more circumstantial evidence that

he's our suspect. The things he told Southfield PD aren't true. It's all nonsense. Homes.com knows that when it comes to home shopping, it's never just about the house or condo. It's about the home. And what makes a home is more than just the house or property, it's the location and neighborhood.

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From the waters of Lake Erie. It was raising flags. He said, there's no way that that fish should weigh 7.9 pounds. It's just not big enough. To a nondescript office building in Richmond, Virginia, home to a $700 million fund for children with special needs. If there was a cliche list of how to blow money that you just stole very quickly,

this guy did all of them. To the ski slopes of Salt Lake City, where a former Olympic snowboarder landed on the FBI's most wanted list. Ryan James' wedding is one of those interesting narcos who have had two very successful careers, one legal and one illegal. We're pulling back the curtain on a fresh lineup

of opportunists who stopped at nothing to get ahead. These are the stories of people who saw a loophole, a moment of weakness, a chance to get ahead and took it. I'm host Sarah James McLaughlin. Join me for a new season of The Opportunist on May 19th. Follow now wherever you get your podcasts. ["The Opportunist"] As we talked to various people involved in the investigation, the puzzle became more

and more clear until it was finally a completed puzzle. It's now January 2017, seven years after Helen Gayle's murder. I was convinced way beyond a reasonable doubt that Keener was our guy, that he had attacked and killed Helen Gayle in her bedroom, had put her in the car, taken her car with the body in it to Highland Park, and torched it in an attempt to separate it from the initial crime scene. You're piling on so much circumstantial evidence that not only were we confident the prosecutor would take it, I was optimistic that he would plead guilty because I'm looking at this going, I'd love to try this case and I would love to have this type of evidence that you just can't explain away. And that's when we arrested him

and put him in front of the court. It was very satisfying to get him arrested because all these years later, he probably thought I'm home free. Darrell Palmer called me and told me that Darren Keener was arrested. And he said he opened the door. He knew it was all over. He knew that was the end. He knew that was the end. We were all collectively so excited.

We went to see the hearings. It was terrible to look, to lay eyes on this man, this person that did this. What's under that skin? That a human being could do this. I believe Keener was probably using drugs that night. He probably needed more money for more drugs. Helen Gale was often not home on Thanksgiving weekend

because she would be visiting one of her children. So Darren Keener may have assumed that this was a good opportunity to use that key, come into the house and see what he could get. In any event, what I do seriously believe is once he got into the house, she may have surprised him, whatever, but he kills her in the bedroom. And then he goes out through the hallway to the garage and then he drives off. Facing overwhelming evidence against him, Keener strikes a plea deal, just as cold case detectives had hoped.

He was charged with murder and subsequently pled guilty to second degree murder. He never confessed what he did. He pled guilty, but he never explained his actions. I think I feel better not knowing exactly what happened. The truth is, if I knew exactly what happened, then I could never get that picture out of my head. By the very nature of a plea,

you're not gonna get 100% of what you want, but you take the uncertainty of a jury away, you take the stress of a trial away from the family, and you get justice. He was sentenced to 12 to 50 years in prison. And so overall, I'm satisfied, especially if it's closer to 50. I was happy with the plea deal because we knew at this point we needed to move forward. We found who it was, very happy that he'd be behind bars and couldn't do this to someone else.

My feeling is Helen's case was solved because of Nancy's relentless quest to get justice for her mother. The impact statement for me was a complete catharsis, but still to this day no matter how much I can deal with it and how much I can focus on the greatness of my mom, every time the words my mom was murdered come out of my mouth I sort of, it's like I see myself saying those words and it's still so impossible to believe. There was a lot of sadness for me. Of course the obvious sadness for my mom's friends and family and for me and my friends and just I was also

really sad for Keener's family because they're innocent bystanders to this. They have nothing to do with this and they get sort of cast out into the world of, you don't matter because you're associated with him. I do feel like, I think the final chapter is this journey to forgiveness. And I think I have, I think I am there. And it's not forgiving him for doing this.

It's just this understanding of where people can find themselves in life. Something snapped for this man. And that makes me sad. And it feels better to feel sad for him. And it's really a nod to my mom. She taught me to be resilient, and she taught me about redemption.

And that's what... That is my mom's legacy. That is Helen Gayle's legacy. I don't want to be a person to find my tragedies. I want to honor her by staying like a joyous, happy soul, because when we're here, that's a choice we get to make every day.

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