Doomed to Fail - Ep 21: Germaine to a Lobster: The Hinterkaifeck Murders and Grady Stiles

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

Join us this week for the haunting story of the 1922 murders at the Hinterkaifeck Farm. The family heard noises & saw mysterious footprints leading up to their murders. Whoever killed them made themselves at home for a few days, cooking meals, feeding the animals, and taking their time to get out of dodge. This remains Germany’s most famous unsolved murder 101 years later. We also go over the rollercoaster life of Grady Stiles, the “Lobster Boy” born into a world of Side Shows just as they were petering out of public acceptance. A violent alcoholic who murdered – and also was murdered. It’s a wild ride through the history of the ‘Freak Show’ to the family that is still alive today (and it’s Farz who takes us on this journey!) https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpodYoutube - https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpodPhotos via public domain Hinterkaifeck farm via GoodreadsGrady Stiles via Facebook & Historic Mysteries Some Sources So for this episode I went to wikipedia of course, hinterkaifeck.net, an episode of Lore, and the podcast The Midnight Train oh and also I read the book The Man from the train - which will come in later. https://curiouscaseof.com/the-hinterkaifeck-murders/ Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthall James Simpson, case number B.A. 019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do. The team? Yes. We did great. Did they win today? We don't keep score. So no.

But, no, we did great. A lot of them hit the ball. I pitched to them. A lot of them hit it. One girl freaking scream cries the entire time. So she screamed cried the whole time. But, you know, other than that, I think it was fine. They had fun.

The kids had fun. Yeah. Great. The kids had fun. They had a good time. And then Florence had a game after her. And she did really well. She got a hit.

I think they tied. So it was good. Yeah. And now we're home. It's a disaster. One's in New York. What's you doing in New York? Visiting friends.

Nice. Just doing like a dude trip. Yeah. That's fun. Yeah. And then what are you going to do? You're going to put the kids down and bust out the wine or what's the game plan? I hope so.

we are painting so i'm painting like took everything out of my closet and i'm painting the whole inside of my closet and should we go cameras off because your parents internet is terrible i'm sorry i can't even i can't tell everything's so um hopefully that's better okay let's try that yeah so we yeah we are painting like a hallway and the doors and the whole inside of the closet so it's like a lot of work but it's good because everything's a mess because i take everything out of the closets we're having a good time we're going to go get sushi after this We're going to get, like, one sushi roll and then, like, a bunch of edamama and some rice. That's how we do sushi.

Joshua tree sushi. It's good. So here's the thing. All sushi has to be frozen before it gets to the restaurant in the United States anyway. Okay. So being proximity to an ocean doesn't actually impact anything. It does not, no. Okay.

All right. Well, there you go. Yeah. Learn some of you every day. Yeah. Sweet. I didn't go until I learned that. but once i did learn that i was like oh okay so i'm not crazy like this was a share sentiment okay

good yeah yeah cool well should we kick things off yeah well welcome to doom to fail the podcast where we discussed two relationships that were red flaggy and doom the fail one historic one true crime i'm farr's joined here by taylor hi taylor and we okay so hold on i think i know this time this time you go first do got it for a change okay so we'll go ahead and discuss our drinks i guess i want to go first so this can be a bit of flashback to last week because it's also going to include ginnis and it's also going to include sambuca so it's sambuca poured into a pine glass followed by super super super slow pour ginnis down the side like it trickles down the side so that the sambuca floats on the guinness

in the end of all this there's a name for it it's real it's real there's a name for it but if i told you the name you would know what i'm doing so i'm not going to tell you the name i'll tell you the name when i get to my story okay okay that's exciting i like sambuka i like a i like like a appertif hey i remember vaguely you know i remember vaguely a thing where don't you like light sambuka and then do a helicopter thing and then shoot it is that a thing I don't know. What's a helicopter thing? Because you like, yeah, like you light the Sambuca on fire, then you put your hand on top of the fire on top of the shock glass and then that extinguished to the fire and then the glass adheres to you because of the vacuum it creates your hand. So you can lift the whole thing up on the palm of your hand and then you're supposed to like wave it around your head to show that it's like really adhering and then you take it off and shoot it.

I think you need to do a lot of research before you try that. Make sure that's real before you can finish up. Yeah. That sounds very dangerous. I might have to edit that out. We cannot take all my ability right now. I don't. I don't recommend that.

I mean, even if it's something that people can do, I'm going to say, don't do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fair enough. Well, we'll do some research and get back to you on this. Amazing. Amazing. Well, I can't, okay, well, next time we're together, let's definitely figure how to do that. Oh, yeah. How do we do that?

this tap. Okay, we'll figure it out. Cool. That sounds weirdly delicious and semi-dangerous. Okay, so I go first and I'm going to do an old tiny story and I'm drinking Bex, the German beer, because have you seen Beer Fest? Oh my God. I love Beer Fest. So remember when they're like trying to name German beers and they're like, Und, Unbex. Do you remember that? Yes. Yes. I think about that all the time. So that's why if I'm like, what's a German beer? I'm like, und, unbex. So, how'd you find? So I can't wait.

So that's, we're in Germany. Check our backs. My, my favorite part of that movie was when the Indian guy, when they're done drinking that first night, he wakes up and he's, he's cuddling a dead deer, just like covered in blood. Yes. So good. So, yeah, he did. Oh, it's so good. I love how that one guy dies and then his twin comes and you forget that he's dead.

I know. incredible landfill oh my god it's so good oh my gosh they did so they're so hit or a mess broken lizard that troop like we watched the the tocoma fd show where they're like in the fire department is great we watch that but then like they have a new one called quasi about quasi motto and it's like so bad i barely watched it like it was a struggle i think our taste i think our taste also changes a little bit yes i guess but i feel like they're like i didn't like i didn't like slam and salmon but I like club dread and I like puddle cruiser anyway anyway and I saw them live and it wasn't very good and that was like 15 years ago super trooper super trooper super trooper how incredible

super trooper super two is another one that's better than the first one okay anyway Rick and a Bex also oh I'll do a little more another throwback to beer fest in a minute so it's so I was thinking last week it was super cute that you think the black dahlia is out of scope because we have no scope so you could definitely have done that if you had wanted to you can definitely do it in the future and i also think it's cute that you think she was found under the hollywood sign because she was not so i just wanted to make that clear that like i knew that you were wrong i didn't say anything he said anybody else also knew you were wrong wait she was well it was on the it was in the mountains though or whatever you it was in a park about 30 minutes away no it was like in the

city oh my god okay it was not in the mountains i'm so sorry listeners yeah people were screening the cars across America and the world. If I cause any road rage accidents, please forgive me. So, okay, so that reminds, so I'll say that for you, you can do the Black Dahlia later if you want to. I do think there's something about a redhead cop in there that she may have had a relationship with that you could explore. So I think that could be in this.

But that reminded me of my favorite murder, which is the Hinter-Kythek murders. Have you heard of those? Oh, and you said, okay, and you said, Bex, is, oh, my God, this is the creepy one, right? This is a super scary. It's super scary, which is why it's my favorite. Yeah. Let's do it. Love it. Okay, awesome. So it has, and there are some relationships in it, some like pretty bad ones. So I think they all kind of attributed to what happened. So the sound bites are what make it so fascinating. Like I'll go a little bit more into detail in like later, but first, let me just tell you the creepy part. So on April 4th, 1922, after a few days of no one seeing the

owners of Hintr Kiefeck, which is a farm. A neighbor went over to investigate. In the barn, he found four bodies stacked in the hay. They were the bodies of Andreas Gruber, 63, his wife, Cacelia Gruber, 72, their daughter, Victoria Gabriel, 35, and her daughter, Cacilia Gabriel, 7. They had been lured and attacked one by one. They'd be killed by a pickaxe, so like a big axe like a flat side and a pointy side, and in the head. Little Casilia, the seven-year-old girl, when they found her body, a lot of her hair had been pulled out. So the police think that she was laying there, dying for several hours, pulling out her hair like in agony and confusion.

So I'm like that probably. Inside the house were the bodies of the maid, Maria Baumgartner, she was 44, and the baby Joseph, who was two. They had been dead since March 31st, so for about five days. It had taken a while for the town to notice because the fire was on and the animals were fed. someone was living in the farm so it looked like someone was living there like the animals weren't crying they were well fed the dogs weren't parking they were taken care of the you know the fires were on so that people thought someone was there so someone happened living there like with the dead bodies for several days after prior to it's so creepy prior to the murders the former maid so it's actually

maria Baumgartner's first day which is like the worst first day of work ever is the day you get murdered on the job but it was her first day poor thing the former maid had quit because she had heard footsteps in the attic and she thought that the house was haunted so she was like i'm out of here so also like andreas the dad is a jerk so that could have contributed it as well but she said that she heard noises in the attic and it scared her enough that she left Andreas the dad he also told people in town that he saw footprints in the snow going into the one of the barns where the door had been broken but none leaving so yeah yeah that's part i remember yeah you know so everything i read was like dramatically different facts about this so i just like

picked my favorite because i don't know but one thing did say that there were two sets of footprints in the snow which would like change who we think might think it might be but there was definitely one set of footprints in the snow leading towards one of the buildings but none leading out so that's scary Yeah, yeah. Actually, so Taylor, like it reminds me of, um, it reminds, so there was, we had one of those in the U.S. too, if you remember, like it was a, it was this family that went into this cabin. I'd want to say it was somewhere in California. And there was like separate cabins and all, every, every was dead. It was like, nobody knows how it happened. And there was like footprints and it was the exact same story, except like in the U.S. Whatever. I'm sidetracking your story, but like, No, totally. It's so scary. It's so scary. Andreas had also told people in town that he found a newspaper from Munich on his property. Munich is about 40 miles away from Hintr Kaifek, and he didn't subscribe to this newspaper. Nobody in town had brought one in.

So there was like a newspaper that he couldn't identify that he found on his property. So that was weird, you know? Yeah. After the murders, cigarettes were found in the attic, as well as the attic had like a trap door. a false floor with like a little compartment in it and that's eventually where the murder weapon was found it was like they found the bloody axe in the attic underneath the floorboard so whoever it was definitely went back up to the attic and hit it in there so like that's the scary story someone living in my attic is like the scariest fucking thing i could possibly think of it's like

parasite yeah oh my god it's so freaking scary like i feel like there's been like dozens of like lifetime movies and stories of just like you know someone's like watching you through the events or you know just like having someone up there and also like funny that like it must it's like it's like 1922 so it must have been so smoky that you wouldn't notice someone smoking in your attic you just kind of let it go but but yeah it's so scary like the footprints are so scary the idea that like they killed the baby you know they lived in the house with the dead bodies like they cleaned up after themselves they took care of it like they were living there you know and then they left Taylor have you seen them have you seen the open house on Netflix is it what

Jennifer. Yes. Yes. I think so. That's this story. Look in the basement or something. Yeah. Yeah. Like so we were living there and nobody knew. I mean, that was fictional. It's scarier that it's real, but whatever, same story and concepts. It's so scary. I think I've also seen things in like New York City where like somebody had someone living in like his crawl space like in his apartment and she would like come out at night and like pee in the sink. So wild. Okay. So that's like. So wild. Okay. So that's like. just of it. That's why it's it's so fascinating to me. I think the whole thing is like so scary. But I want to go look a little bit more into detail. So I went to Wikipedia, of course. There's a hinder khyfeck.net. I watched an episode of lore. So lore is a podcast.

And they have two seasons of show on Amazon where they like act out of the stories. I think they're all really different because they're all different stories. But in the one about hinder khyfeck, the dad, Andreas, is played by the grandpapa from beer fest. Oh, nice. So it's the best. I love when he goes, what is it, Grandpapa? That guy also played Arnold Schwarzenegger and Arnold Schwarzenegger made for a TV movie. Oh, that totally makes sense.

Right. He was in, like, a bunch of, like, he was in the original Dune. Like, he's like a very famous actor. Like, I'm giving him no justice. But yes. Like, I'm like, oh, the grandpa from Beer Fest, but you know what I mean. He's in this lore. Another, the woman who played the maid in that episode of lore is in Dark.

Do you ever watch Dark? It was also really good in German. in Netflix. It's like really creepy and good. So anyway, some good German actors. I listened to a podcast, The Midnight Train, but I also read the book, The Man from the Train, which will come in later. So I read that a long time ago, but it kind of ties back to this. So I'm going to kind of go through it again, but a little bit more in detail. So Hinder-Kafeck was a farm behind the town of Kaifek in Germany. Hintra means behind. So it was just like near Kaifek, Hinder Kaifik. It was 43 miles north of Munich. It was built around 1863. It had several buildings. It was in just like the house. There was a main house which had a basement for like food storage and then that attic. A stable, a barn, a machine house, a bakery slash laundry, a coach house and a well. So it's also a time when like there's no indoor plumbing. So like your, you know, your, your kitchen is usually separate from the house. And, you know, your laundry is separate from the house. And it was a farm where like people could buy like milk from them. They could probably

buy like meat from them and they had like vegetables and stuff. So like a farming compound. on the lore show they do a really good job of showing you just like it feels isolated and it's really fucking cold it's like snowing you know like everyone's freezing they just have candles and like shawls so really cold and really it felt very isolated but it wasn't like super isolated you could walk to town there were some neighbors that were like pretty close and it also was right by the train tracks so you could also always hear the train going by the gruber family lived on the farm so that's andreas caesalia victoria and then the two children One source said that Victoria was the owner of the farm, the 35-year-old, with her husband.

But I don't know where that came from. It could have been that Andreas owned the farm from his first wife's family because he was a widower and then married. Cacilia, she was like 10 years older than him. So that could be how we got it. But there's like a bunch of different stories about how they may have gotten it. Also, just for the record, Victoria, the daughter, she was married to a man named Carl Gabriel. He died in World War I in France and his body was never found. He is the father of Casilia, the seven-year-old.

So the undisputable fact of the story is that Andreas was awful. He was like a bully and a jerk. He was awful to his family. The people in town didn't like him. He was abusive. And one thing to note is Joseph, the two-year-old boy, was not the son of Victoria's husband, the one who died in the war. His parentage is in question.

So in 1915, Andreas and Victoria, his daughter, were convicted of having an incestuous relationship between 1907 and 1910 like it went to court i don't know like how that works exactly but he got a year in prison and she got a month in prison for that so like he definitely had raped his daughter you know definitely abused her for a long time it was like 10 years before this we definitely did it how do you go why did it rape the punishment why is it incest right that's a good point it wasn't It wasn't like, they were accused of having an incestuous relationship, which feels like that makes it sound like she was cool with it. There's no way she was cool with it.

Seems late. Seems like, yeah. Yeah, good point. He should be charged with, like, raping a family member. But there's also another person that I think that Joseph might have been Joseph's father, the neighbor Lawrence Stittenbauer, he was married to someone else, but he was having an affair with Victoria. Like, everybody knew that they were having an affair. So he could have been Joseph's dad as well.

So it could have been like either of those. They don't really know who his parent, who his father was. But other than that, terrible thing, is a business as usual at the farm. The family kind of goes in and out of town. People see them all the time. They get their mail. There you have coffee delivery on the way. There's someone coming to fix the tractor.

So there's no indication that like anything bad is going to happen. I can also mention, you know, the former maid quit. She said the house was haunted. The new maid, Maria Baumgartner, came with her sister. on March 31st, 1922. Her sister stayed for a little bit and then left her sister there and she was the last person to see the family alive.

In the middle of the night, somebody lured the family one by one into the barn and murder them. So I feel like about... Okay, okay. Sorry, can you pause there real quick? Is that really what people think happened? Yes. So here, they did a couple, they did some tests. Like, what can you hear from the house from the barn? Can you hear someone

screaming? And you couldn't. That, they didn't think that happened. But in the lore show, which I think kind of may might make sense. It's like the dad went out first to like milk the cow or whatever. And then the person killed him, dropped his body in the barn, and then like

let the cow out, you know? So everybody else would be like, oh shit, the cow's out. What the fuck is he doing? And then go and like bring the cow back and they end up in the barn. You know? It just sounds it just sounds very much like people walking down the basement

steps in a horror movie. well yeah but also like what reference like what would make them I guess maybe because they were afraid that the house was haunted or whatever like someone was there but like I don't know how like how actually scared they were of like something weird happening but I also feel like you're so freaking tired you worked on your farm all day you know you have to get bed it's like late so and it's snowing and like it's cold and you're just like oh the barn doors open again damn it and you go out there and check it and then you like see a dead body and all of a sudden you're killed too you know I don't think it'd be like that hard. I guess. I guess that's true. You know, and it would make sense that the maid didn't go out because she wouldn't know to do that because it was her first day and the baby obviously is a baby. So he would sit inside.

Right. I don't know. I think that I think that that checks out to me. I don't know. No one knows. They left the body stacked like cordwood. It always says stack like cordwood, which I'd only hear in this. They just like have them stacked like wood. They were stacked and under some hay. The murderer then went back into the house, killed Maria.

Again, it was her first freaking day. And then he killed the baby, which is terrible. He could kill the baby in its little crib. And then they stayed for a few days. They fed the animals, made food, cleaned up. People weren't too worried because they saw the smoke. Then on April 1st, which is the next day, some coffee cellars named Hans and Edward arrived to take an order.

They walked around, didn't see anyone. They saw that the machine house was open, but the gate had been broken for a while, so they knew that. And they just laughed. They didn't see anyone and thought that was kind of weird. A man, during this time, also a man named Michael happened to pass by, he said that he saw that the oven was on, he saw the smoke, and when he kind of walked by, he saw a person outside,

and that person, like, pointed a lantern at him in a way that, like, he couldn't see who they were. And then he kind of, like, ran away because he was scared. So he saw someone, but he doesn't know who it was. That's also very creepy. I know. When, so this reminds me a couple, well, a long time ago, Miles was just a baby.

I was sitting on the couch in our L.A. apartment. And I was, I was, like, breastfeeding miles, so I couldn't move. and Florence was in there too and Juan was in the kitchen and someone tried to open our door and I was like one oh my God so Juan came running and then like they had open our neighbors or two and they left and it was this old couple and I think they had found

like a big ring of like mail keys like the postman would have and like tried to open up people's doors but I was like we were very clearly home and they tried to open up our door and then afterwards like one and our neighbor that called the police and the police were like they found him let's see if you know who he is so they took them to a place and they just had the guy

stand in front of the cop car and they'd like shown the lights at his face if he couldn't see them but they could see him wait they couldn't see him like they could see the man who tried to make into our house but the man couldn't see Juan oh well that's good yeah yeah you know yeah yeah well y'all saw his face like y'all had no you knew that that was the guy yeah we saw him through the peak the keyhole we were like very clearly home it was really weird and scary wow okay yeah and then in the end the police officers were like we're just going to drive him to Hollywood and let him out and hopefully he doesn't come back it's not good police.

Great job, LAPD. I know. Perfect. Perfect response to that. So someone else saw two people, there's some like suspicious things happening. So because the other little girl was out of school for a couple days.

Family didn't go to church on Sunday. So people started to like get suspicious. Like where are they? We haven't seen them in a while. April 4th, a dude named Albert Hoffner came to repair an engine. Like he knew that he was supposed to go and repair this machine in the machine house he didn't see anyone there kind of walked around knocked on the doors was like what's going on he ended up going into the barn not the barn the machine house like a different out

building and spending four hours fixing the tractor or whatever it was and while he was there it he said that when he got out of the barn some things were different like someone had like kind of cleaned up a little bit after he had done that so it sounds like the person or persons who was in the house left during the time that he was in the barn like he was in the machine house fixing the tractor so it's interesting how tidy this guy was i know he just kept cleaning up for like the blood people i mean he's a nice house guest absent the killing part yeah yeah totally i've had the animals all the whole thing he is possible that albert's presence made the um made the guy leave later in the day the neighbor laurence schildenbauer who's possibly the dad of joseph sent his sons to see if anybody was there

because he was like it's weird to have an answer to the door the kids came back and said we can't find anybody. So Lawrence went back with another, some grownups and thank God the kids didn't find the bodies. The grownups did. They found them in the barn and in the house. So they're the ones who are the first people to find them. The police are called and then here are the list of suspects. And again, like we'll never know who actually did it, but here's what people think about it. Lorenz is a big suspect, obviously. He's possibly the father of Joseph. He 100% had an affair with Victoria. He also was super weird and did some like weird things. So when he got there, he like tried to move the bodies around to like see them better or something so he just like touched all of the crime scene like a lot this during this time you could use fingerprints like pink fingerprints were had been invented as like a way to to solve crimes but they didn't do it in this case for whatever reason they didn't take fingerprints he also like laurence had a alibi for the night of the murders but I think he's pretty suspicious like he he was the one who ended up finding the murder weapon in the attic being like oh it's here I just tripped over it you know like okay

I'm suspicious. And he also, you know, because of the kid, like he, you know, maybe was mad at Andreas for what he had done to Victoria. Maybe he didn't want to pay child support for Yosef. Like, who knows? And he also, like, lived really close. So he could have definitely, like, had the, like, proximity to do it. But also, because he lived so close, like, he wouldn't really need to hang out there. So that, I think, is weird.

And before he died, he died in 1941. He did win a bunch of civil claims for slander against people who. called him the murder of hinder kifek so maybe he didn't do it i also i also don't want him to have done it because it's much scarier to think of someone had no motivation who just blew in from out of town and did that that's so much freaker than like yeah here here's all the logical reasons why this guy would do it 100 percent that's definitely like way more scary a couple other people some people think that karl gabriel did not die in world war one and he came back and he did it so he got home to Heter Kaifek was like, huh, my wife has a son who's two. I've been gone for three years,

you know, did some math, got super upset and killed everybody and then just disappeared into the wind. So that's a, I mean, there's no evidence for that, but some people think that. There's another man who named Severin, who was a former lover of Victoria's. I think he could have done it. There's a man named Peter Weber who was talking to a friend and saying, like, I've done some work at Hendrik Hafeck, they have a lot of money, we should go back there, and we should steal all their money and kill them, which is exactly the plot of In Cold Blood. Have you read that? I have not read that, but I saw the movie Capote. Taylor, the universal answer the question of have I read that is no. I've seen the movie versions of anything. It's like, but I feel like

if you're going to read that book, you should read In Cold Blood. I know. It's so scary. I remember reading it and being like, I am so scared. I felt like in friends. when jolly put the book in the freezer like i felt like i wanted to do that like i was like this is so scary you know i've heard that a lot i've heard that a lot but you are also like a super avid reader and you had that exact same reaction to that old lady seen and it when you read that and you threw your book i did throw my book thank you for remembering that that was very specific i did throw my book when i read the old lady seen in it because it was so scary i was at a restaurant okay so yes so a lot of people could have done it everyone hated andrea so there's a bunch of brothers people suspect

So there's like two brothers called the Gump Brothers, and they think that they, that they might have done it, but they, there's no really not enough evidence for them. There's a woman named Teresa in 1971. She said that when she was 12, her mother got visited by two brothers named Carl and Andreas. And she said that they had done, they had confessed to the mother in front of her when she was 12 that they did it. But that also feels really weird. I don't think that they, that seems like very suspicious thing that lady just wanted to get some attention. There's also another pair of brothers called the Bickler brothers and their friend Gayorg. They repeatedly said they thought the family should be dead.

So, you know, saying that out loud, you probably shouldn't do that. So they think that maybe they did it, you know, the three of them did it together. But there's no proof to that. The only thing that is like maybe leans in that direction is like the family dog hated everyone except these guys for some reason. So they like knew the family. So the dog might have been calm when they came over. and never barked when they were, like, sneaking around. It was like, that could have been it.

And then also, this is super weird. The maid, the original maid, she said, in addition to hearing this footsteps in the attic, she used to talk to someone outside of her window, and she thought it was one of these guys, and these guys were like, it wasn't us. What? I know. This does not sound, like, somebody of sound mind, or it sounds like a complete liar is what it sounds like. I mean, like, could you imagine someone like, hello, Farras, I think that a side of your window.

Don't look at my face. I mean, I'm someone else. Taylor, if I heard your voice, it would scare the shit out of me. Oh my God, I know. It's so scary. Like, what's going on to? Like, what's happening? Like, there's something going on.

Oh, man. That sounds like, that sounds like one of those, like, it's like one of those like Japanese horror movies, like the level, like multiple levels of scary. Yeah, it's so scary. So, like, that is such a weird story. So, like, I don't know, maybe it was, maybe it was them moving around, but just like, I don't know why. I don't know. And also, like, who the fuck was the maid talking to? Like, I don't, I don't know.

Was it anyone? So that's terrifying. Other brothers, a lot of people that were, like, investigated, but no one was ever convicted. The last thing. And this is what I think you were talking about is, like, the actual scariest thing is maybe it was someone they didn't know. You know, maybe it's someone who just, like, suck around and sit in the attic for little bit and then killed them and then left because they just wanted to kill people this is the

theory is in the book the man from the train which i actually i did read also and it's about the man who did the remember the vizalia ax murders no it sounds familiar but i don't remember it so i'm going to see maybe i'm saying that wrong it's a v i l-s-c-a so vizelka ax-murters those are on june 10th 1912. So it was a in Vasilka, Iowa. There were a family lived in this like farmhouse and there were I think six people in the family and then two little girls were just like spending the night having a sleepover and they were all murdered with an axe. They were all of the mirrors in the house were covered when people finally found them, which was so scary. So all the mirrors were covered. All of the all of the bodies were like kind of like just like. scattered around the house. The guy definitely like masturbated over the bodies, particularly of the little girls. So it was like a real bad guy. But so that's like one of the scariest fucking stories.

And so in this book, the man from the train, the author, Bill James, he, you know, talks about how there's a bunch of other crimes that are very, very similar to that one. And they all occur in like really close proximity to a train as someone like going in and like murdering a family and leaving just because he like wants to, to murder people. I thought the scary, I think this book was like, okay. and I think it was great I wish it had been better but oh wait this is other now Wikipedia says it was 1897 so that can't be true no it was in 1912 anyway I feel like now there's just so much wrong information on the internet so much so much

conflicting stuff like I with my story what I'm gonna go through I'm like I you could fact chip me on like 50 points here and you're gonna pull different sources for all of them so I mean maybe it's because I'm like researching things more than I ever have but I'm like what the hell this is yeah but I was like asking I was like asking I was like yesterday I tried to ask Bard for facts because I was like, oh, I've never used Bard, like, I'm just asking a question. And it was like very wrong, like totally wrong. And I was like, that's wrong. And it was like, I'm learning. And I was like, what? Why? Don't trust Bard.

But anyway, so in The Man from the Train, I think it was in 1912 when you killed that family in Iowa that you can stay at that house also, BT Dubbs. It's a like a bed of breakfast, which is terrible. So he, you know, he would kill people who wouldn't rob them. He just wanted to kill people. the scariest thing that happened in that book that I remember is that the one thing that the author says is like people were always like there was a really creaky step at that on that at that house so like how could he have killed everybody upstairs and killed everybody downstairs without everybody hearing you know like there's just like no way he could have like snuck around the house and killed people like we were saying with like the defa murderers like you can't shoot everybody anybody else waking up but the author was like he didn't tiptoe up the stairs he ran up the stairs. and killed everybody you know he just like did it so fast that no one had time to react which i think is terrifying and makes sense yeah sure i mean you can see both i think that we're over emphasizing like a creek on a stairs going to wake something up like if you have a family you have people in your house we're going to be walking them down the stairs like they want to go

down and get a couple of water like you're going to hear shit it's like yeah that's a house settling i hear shit all the time my house and it's somewhat terrifying sometimes but i don't have you you don't check your attic or you're busy No, Taylor, one time, I might as well just one time, it was like the first night I moved into the new house and Luna wasn't with me, which like is extra creepy because I don't know what happened in that house, maybe someone was killed there. I don't have no idea. And I'm in my room. I'm dead asleep. And I basically hear the girl from the ring just screaming outside my bedroom window. What? And I'm like, whoa. Like I, my every hair I have like stood up on end. It was the most terrible, middle of the middle. night like three four o'clock in the morning and i told somebody about this like a few nights later i was like i heard this sound it was a scary thing over her and then they played for me foxes howling on youtube foxes had the most terrifying how i've ever heard of my entire

when we're done recording when we're done all with all this stuff go listen to it if you ever hear that sound you will literally think that like that woman is crawling out of your tv to come into your room and kill you and it is just a fox so anyways i'm sorry i'm sorry I figured it out. No. I'm also good. I didn't talk to you. Just like, yelled, that's so scary. In college, one time, my shampoo fell off my, like, thing into my bathtub in the middle of the night. And I've never ever scared of my life. It was like a huge bang, you know? I was like, oh, good. So this author thinks that the man from the train is a man named Paul Mueller. Paul Mueller was a German immigrant in America. And he was like a vagrant, you know, on trains all the time. And he, there's like, evidence that he's in the places where a lot of people were killed. So that's the person that he thinks it is. But Paul Mueller also disappears. The acts murders in America stop after like a certain amount of time.

So he thinks that Paul Mueller went back to Germany and he did the Kinder Khyphick murders. Because the timing could technically work out because also because he was German, so he would like, he could leave America, go back, blend into Germany and he would obviously literally never be found, you know? So that's what that's what the author. or the man from the train thinks. I don't know. There was a, in 2007, 15 students at the Police Academy in, this is hilarious. Okay. So, and I took a lot of German, but the Police Academy is called Pulitzer Fakhokhoek, and the place that they are from is Furennefeldbrook. No, Fierston

Feldbrook, one word. Firstenfeldbrook. Okay. So they examined the case using modern criminal techniques. They confirmed that they know who it is using the forensics. and what they had and all these things, but they won't say who they think it is because they don't want his family to, in consideration of his descendants, which is super dumb. That is, yeah, that's really gracious.

I don't want to know if he was the axe murder. Let me break. If you help people. So the Gruber family was buried in Weidhofen Cemetery near there. They were buried without their heads because their skulls have been sent to a psychic to try to identify the killer. That did not work. I love old-timey medicine.

She said, I don't know why she needed their heads. She said that the murders had been committed by two people and that the murder weapon was still on the property, which was true because they actually didn't find the weapon until they were demolishing it. So that part was true. So maybe it was two people, I don't know, 50% right so far. The skulls were kept in the justice building

in Augesburg, Germany, and they were destroyed by bombing during World War II. So, wow. Wampom, pretty durable. In 1923, just a year later, Hinder-Kaafik Farm was demolished. So you can't go there anymore. You can't visit it.

It's kind of even not clear exactly where the buildings were, probably because people were going there and, you know, being weird and creepy and trying to see what was up and scaring each other. So they demolish the whole thing. And then, you know, kind of folds into World War II and a bunch of other stuff happened. So it was all kind of ruined. But it's a mystery and it will be a mystery forever, which is exciting. And it's so scary.

just the idea of a murder in your attic i think the um okay so i'm going to be quoting heath ledgers the joker in this it is the unpredictability of it that makes it terrifying that's why the whole lack of motivation part is like as a horror story it is much better to have no motivation and just assume that there's some psycho out there who's just knock it on doors seeing what's open i'm gonna go but like also it makes you wonder why someone would do that anyways if they were living there for that long well we don't know how when they were living there but the maid the earlier maids said that she thought the house was haunted which like maybe it was or it was this person you know that she was picking up on so if you're just living comfortably there anyways then who cares like

what was what was the added motivation and killing them other being crazy other than being crazy and I think that like, I mean, if it was so the relationship part is like if it was the Lauren's the neighbor slash possible father of the boy, then like it's because, you know, he didn't want to play child support for this like a fair baby that he had and that's why he did it. Other people, like some of their motivation from these like groups of brothers is like they were so mad and grossed out by the incest that they thought that the family should die. So both things are like red flaggy like that is the thing that like ultimately might have. been the thing but it also might have been just fucking a guy who found their house and wanted to kill them which is i think the most fun slash scariest answer yeah yeah is there are there any movies on this did you see any any media for shows there are some movies that i haven't i didn't watch i think there's there's one oh there's one that got bad reviews but it's like a horror movie of someone

who like went there but it's like a not about the the murderers it's about like someone going there and investigate the murders anyways it doesn't look as good but the episode of lore on Amazon Prime and it's about an hour long and they it's pretty good they go through like they kind of like layer on top the different scenarios of what they think might have happened so like the different people that they they think it might be and they show them each doing it being like oh maybe it was like the um the husband coming back from from the war and he you know he saw the family was upset or maybe it was the neighbor or whatever so it doesn't it mentions the stranger but it doesn't like do that but it does like okay just watch it. anyway, but at the beginning of it, it does show like the mailman coming and being like, huh, like kind of looking around and they have like the murderer. You only see like his bottom half, but he's like holding the axe behind the door and the mailman's like knocking on it, which is fun because that's really fucking scary for that mailman. Yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. What a crazy, there's, um,

there should be some compilation of all these deaths that are incredibly, incredibly mysterious. Like I do remember that cabin death. I'm going to research sadly, I'll send information on it, but there was like the exact same story where it's like, family was on these different cabins all in the woods all together and then like all them died and act to death nobody has any idea what happened to it was it's just like that's just like chills like remember they happened like again like the 80s happened to a Girl Scout camp there was like Girl Scout camp cabins and the cabin that was furthest away the girls all got murdered also I'm going to Girl Scout camp in a few weeks so I will probably die afraid I don't know why I brought

it up because I'm about to go to girls like camp when I was flying across the Atlantic I was just thinking about how you were referencing that Malaysian flight that just disintegrated over the air I'm sorry I know that's that has a documentary about it and it's a fucking mystery it the documentary does not have any answers it's real scary so I don't I haven't watched that I've read that the prevailing theory suspicion is that the US military accidentally shot out of the air when they were conducting other exercises and buried buried the lead basically that's what i think too after watching the documentary that's my vote oh is that what the documentary says it's one of the options and uh

it seems very like more it seems more likely than the other ones yeah yeah okay cool freaky story if you hear a creek in your house there's probably someone living in your house that you're unaware of likely it's a nine out of ten chance so lucky to or If you hear the girl from the ring screaming, it's probably a fox howling. Facts here, you're just only to get on this show. Well, thanks for listening. Yeah. So I will transition us to the true crime side of our story.

And knowing you, Taylor, you're going to know what I'm talking about here. The drink that I referenced earlier, Sambuca poured into a pint glass with Guinness poured after it so that the Sambuca floats. that is referred to as a freak show. Freak Show. Yeah, I don't know why. I couldn't understand why that was the name that was the name that they gave to it, but that's what it's technically called. So that's what we're going to be discussing.

It's a real drink and a freak show was a real thing of the past. So is a critical part and a critical component what we're going to be discussing. So I personally don't love the term freak show because what we basically did as a society back in the day when these things were prominent was we just took people who were different from us and label them as freaks and then charge two bits of gander to stare at them at a human zoo

it doesn't seem very nice it's not very nice that's good good concussion yeah yeah and i found the earliest version of a freak show it was in the 1600s and that's where the concept of a freak show started because back then the king of england somehow some of the cross these twins in genoa italy who were conjoined twins. So one of them was an, I hate to use the word normal, but you know what I mean? Like a regular dude. And then he had a conjoined twin that was like basically

just like a head and part of the shoulder that was coming out of his chest. It was called the normal one, quote unquote, normal one was called Lazarus. The other one was called John. And the brother, John. I don't know why that's funny. I just had to left about that.

I know, I know, I know. I know. i kind of love this story okay and i'll explain so john was the parasitic brother so it really wasn't even like a fully functional human being it was like it was just like grunt and that was basically all i could really do and like maybe blink its eyes every now and then and it is just like dangled off of lazarus for the most part apparently at one point this is the part that's amazing about the story Lazarus was actually sentenced to death because he killed someone and he got off this argument actually worked he got off by saying if you kill me then you kill my parisidic

brother and he didn't do anything oh my god wait he could talk wait no say he just like grunted yeah yeah yeah so i was like you know kudos this guy Lazarus for making lemonade out of lemons but like that was a pretty good argument to make so more power too much most of what freak shows consisted of was just people showing you know the disabilities that they have and sometimes people would do other stuff too for example there would be people who were ambiguously raced and they would call them some unknown some species of humans or if there was somebody who was heavily tattooed or heavily pierced they'd also get a spot on the freak show but occasionally you'd have people with legitimate talent so you'd have people who would eat flames or swallow swords the guy

who would do like nails in his nose and stuff like that yeah yeah and then you obviously have the folks that have congenital defects like they're they have deformities that are not what people are used to seeing, and they also would join freak shows, which is a shitty thing to do to people. Sometimes it's okay. I'm actually going to say when I actually thought it was a good thing, but for the most part, it was kind of like not a great thing to do to somebody. I wrote here that it's actually kind of funny how some of this stuff still persists to this day. So, for example, there's a chain of grocery stores in Texas, and it might be elsewhere. I haven't seen it anywhere else. In California, they're known as Randalls, but in Texas, they're known as. Tom Thumb have you heard of them before okay it's probably a Texas thing they're

named after a guy who was named general Tom Thumb who stopped growing at six months old so in total he was two feet tall and weighed 15 pounds and like not even joking I am one block in one I'm in my parents house right now for listeners I'm one one block from one Tom Thumb and then another block for another one behind me so like this is like a very pervasive name that caught on all because of this one guy general tom thumb another and that was a pt barnum act another famous act was one that involved the guy named joseph merrick do you remember that name um no so you might remember his alternate name which was the mean name that i don't love for him which was the elephant man oh yes yes yes wait i'm sorry i had to go back because tom that's not the first time

to me use the word the name tom thumb that is i mean well i'm not tom thumb is a character from english folklore no way tom thumb it said i'm brandy lukipedia tom thumb may have been a real person born in fifteen nineteen i was thinking that it was hongch christian anderson but that's thumbalina but like tom thumb is um yeah it's definitely from further back than that it's like but it's i think it's it makes sense that it's anything for a ridiculously small person continue no no you you're you're You know what? I might have besmirched Tom Thumb because I just assumed that it was named after him because I didn't know there was any other Tom Thumbum that ever existed. Yeah, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a some belief kind of character, I think. Okay, everybody just discount everything I said there, but trust everything that I say going forward. Okay.

Perfect. Perfect. Okay, Joseph Merrick. So he was known as the colloquial name form was the elephant man. He suffered from a disease called Proteus syndrome, which results in basically just overgrowth of tissue. that would lead to just traumatic disfigurement like his um his skeleton is on display in some museum in the uk and you can tell this guy had it really really rough like it's just overgrowth of tissue everywhere that it shouldn't be and as a result he was obviously heavily heavily disfigured he was displayed in london when it was yeah he was basically displayed in london for a period of time this is the part where i think that general tom thumb and jose

of America kind of break the mold of like how I think it's mean to do this to people. The reason was that these guys had no options, right? So by all accounts, Tom Thumb was being paid $150 a week by PT Barnum. And he were at that time, he basically retired young and super super rich. Joseph on the other hand, he was treated like a complete leper in society and he had zero income or healthcare opportunities so this guy ran this freak show like i know that it's not a good thing to do to someone but like what else was he going to do like this was his only way to support himself and on top of that because wait a minute what i have so many i'm so sorry i have to

i have to interrupt you right now there is a 1980 movie called the elephant man directed by david lynch starring anthony hopkins oh yeah yeah yeah and in fact like there was um so I think it was Bradley Cooper. Can you fact-struck me? I think it was Bradley Cooper played Joseph Merrick on Broadway, actually. Like fairly recently, in the past like five to seven years, I want to say. No way. Huh.

And they didn't do anything to his buddy. He just made a weird face. Yeah. It was Bradley Cooper, right? Yeah. He's just like moving his face to the side. Like, and did you watch The Witcher? Oh, yeah, yeah. In The Witcher, how she like has that hump for the first half of it?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Also, anybody who likes The Witcher show, you've got to get Witcher 3 on PlayStation or Xbox. It's incredible. It's so good. I mean, I don't know about PlayStation, but the Witcher show is great. But, well, so my other point was that because Joseph was, or the Alphabet Joseph, whatever you want to call, because he was such a popular act, a lot of doctors would come and see him and they were like trying to figure out like what's going on with this guy it was i i didn't read this down but i think it was in 1996 when they finally discovered that he had this illness and that's what it actually was so like there was no help for him essentially

but yeah it is what it is like in the grand scheme of things it was probably better that he was in this situation than just like homeless in the uk right or like murdered as a baby yeah yeah precisely so we start at this point getting into the early night early 1900s and medical science start becoming a thing, and the world starts falling out of love with freak shows. It started being viewed as basically distasteful, thank God. Laws actually started being passed in some places saying that you can't exhibit someone and charge money to view them because of physical deformity, disease, or general mutation. What that also meant is in the latter 1900s, freak shows weren't really a lucrative endeavor. Before, if you had a genetic mutation or disease, you could live a reasonably comfortable life despite it.

I mean, you felt like shit because people are gawking at you, but it's better than not having that, not having any source of income at all. Like I mentioned with elephant, man. So it was during this time period of the transition from Frickshows being like a good thing. You know, I get it, yeah. Yeah.

But basically, our main character in the story rose to prominence. And his name is Grady Stiles, which I'm sure you know. I don't know yet. That was a really long introduction. And I'm really excited. And also, I just, I cannot wait to share with people these pictures of Bradley Cooper.

He's just making a face. I saw, you know what? I saw him do it, like, do his transformation into the elephant man. And I thought that was pretty good. He liked, you can watch clips of him doing it on, like, talk shows and stuff. And I was like, okay, like, you know, for looking the way he'd do. He's just like holding one shoulder up higher and making like a kissy face. Like, he sat.

There's like no attempts to make him look like anything else. They just like Bradley Cooper making your face. Anyway. Because it's Bradley Cooper. You can't put him in disguise. It was the entire point of- It looks so ridiculous. I can't even, so I'm going to stop looking at it

because it's too much. Fair enough. Fair enough. So, Grady's alternate name is the lobster boy. So the reason I bring this up and the reason I gave that long intro is because I think that that plays a part of what's going to end up happening here. Because you have a guy in Grady Stiles who is, is raised when being a freak is a good thing,

or like a lucrative thing to do. And he catches the tail end of that. And there's a steep decline in that. So back then, well, you know what, I'm digressing. I'll tell you the justification here in a moment. Again, starting off, right off the bat, I'm going to say, I don't love making fun of people with situations like this guy has.

But I will say in this case, not because Grady had a disability, but because he's a total rampaging, violent, drunk piece of shit, he got exactly what was coming to him. And his disability had nothing to do with that. So I'm just going to preface all this. Grady was born with a condition known as actorectally, which is a genetic condition where the central digits of the hand and or the feet are missing.

So basically, you end up in large part with some amalgamation of like a pinky and like thumb or big toe and a pinky toe essentially that it gives the appearance of a claw basically like you only have these digits and a lot of times there they have other issues where like those digits are longer than they should be anyways so it looks even more off essentially grady's case was particularly bad because he actually had it in both his hands and his feet so he only had claws like four digits four claws on his appendages got it the condition was actually pretty well documented in Grady's family history. So Grady's family had had this condition for

generations, including Grady's dad, Brady Senior. Senior came up in the freak show, freak show circuit back when this wasn't a disreputable thing to be a part of. And he leveraged his deformity to make a good living for the family. So by all accounts, he made like $70,000 to $80,000 a year doing this, which like that's really really good money in a situation like this like because you think of like somebody working in a freak show like you assume they live in like a tent right I mean this is like he was able to actually support a family off the back of his disability Grady's not going to be in that exact same position but like that's what he was accustomed to right eventually you know Grady's born and then he goes on the road with senior and they perform together again it's worth

noting that despite everything I'm about to say about the kind of person that Grady grew up to be this had to be shitty but like i think i like how most kids they want to fit in with other kids and if you're someone that is born like this you're not just like called a freak but then your dad monetizes your condition and that can't be a good feeling and so i'm making a lot of excuses for this guy his economic situation the fact that he probably felt shitty about him like i do think all that plays a factor in what ends up happening or who he ends up becoming that's all all I'm saying. Mm-hmm.

Totally. Yeah. Because Radie had atrodectally in his legs or his feet as well, he really only had two options for mobility. One was a wheelchair, but the most common way he would move around is you just use his upper body to just shuffle his legs forward and move that way. As a result of that, he became incredibly strong in his upper body, like abnormally strong. Multiple reports would indicate how freakishly strong in this guy ended up becoming.

he's just doing a gymnast routine for 24 hours a day all day long for his entire life so that that helps yeah oh my god totally as grady grew up uh he he got married he had three kids with a woman named uh mary who worked at the freak show too she had no conditions like she was like just a staffer at the freak show that grady was at they fell in love they ended up having kids only one of the kids ended up being born without actoredeckly a girl named kathy the other ones basically did what Grady's dad did to him. They joined Grady on the freak show at the freak show. It's so weird saying that word.

It's just like, it feels so gross. Is there another word for it? No, that's what it was. Is there anything else that it does? I guess you call it a side show. I guess you call it a side show. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not in the popular culture of it.

We're like, I mean, there was an American horse right called Freak. Wait, was it called a freak show? Yeah, yeah. It was, yeah. There is a lobster boy in it. it yeah it definitely gets better at the first it's weird it's one of the iffy ones but um no what's i'm gonna say oh so there's nothing else besides the the thing or thing it doesn't like affect anything else is just that just that yeah psychologically magically he was all sound

well absent me everything else yeah so uh it's also word known here in addition everything else is going on but he was also like a drunk but like not in like a fun good time kind of a way his wife would later claim after the events we're going to discuss here that the only times that he wasn't drinking when he was awake was between 8 and 10 a.m. So he was like constantly drinking essentially. He was aggressive. He was drinking water during that time. Yeah, who knows? I mean, if you look at pictures of him, he looks like a picture of a guy who's been drinking nonstop. Like he looks rough. He looks like he's on a rough time. But he also paired that with a three pack of day cigarette habit, which also doesn't help anything.

No, that sounds terribly smell terrible. You probably smelled horrible. And neighbors in their small Florida town they lived in would regularly hear just belligerent screaming from their house is Grady would regularly get drunk and berate abused his family. He would physically beat these shit out of his wife and his kids with his hands.

And like, well, his hands were like basically pinchers. he would like grab them and choke them and he was strong as shit like you'd be able to throw them around like crazy there's one story where that daughter i mentioned earlier kathy uh she was pregnant and she tried to stop grady from beating her mom like got in the middle of it and grady ended up beating kathy so bad that she ended up going into early labor like that moment he was he was a jerk he was a really really again i kind of understand part of it given his background all that but like still he's a terrible person yeah no excuse to like beat the shut out of your family right right exactly so eventually mary grew tired of this treatment and

she leaves rady she ends up marrying a new guy and she left the kids with him so like not a good woman either basically the the eldest daughter she was named donna and donna wanted to basically extract herself from this living arrangement so she agreed to to marry this poor poor bastard named jack lane grady as with most abusers could feel the controlling grip he had on his family slipping away first his wife leaves him marries another man then the daughter wants to leave him as well so he's he's he's he's completely pissed this point and the day before the wedding grady asked jack over to discuss something like the marriage i don't know the details are

hazy again on this stuff and it was during this meeting that grady ends up shooting jack in the back and killing him oh my god yeah that's his daughter's fiance yeah this this is literally the night before the marriage the wedding he does this grady would obviously yeah he would obviously get arrested and he got he got um he put on a self-defense claim is like because if you don't believe that because like you look at this guy and like dude he's basically just like an upper torso and like he just put on an act of like dude i'm disabled like i can't do this stuff like this guy was gonna kill me like he made that whole argument he ended being found guilty on third degree murder charges which like is better than first and second degree but still pretty

bad but because of his condition they're like what do we do with this guy you can't put on a normal cell like people will just throw him around like a volleyball like and so they decided that we'll just release him on probation when you get a 15 years probation and we're going to release him that was what the court decided to do for killing a guy like a kid basically like absolutely this is so Florida this most Florida story I've ever heard I mean there's a lot of florist stories pretty good yeah yeah apparently for a brief period of time after all this happened Grady goes on the straight and arrow he quits drinking and just like tries to be a more sensible reasonable human being during this time Mary

decides to leave her husband and not only gets back with grady they remarry it's crazy we're like you should never do that you should never it's like calling it's like drunk calling or texting your ex just don't do it definitely don't remarry them yeah not a good move so obviously the whole not drinking thing doesn't last very long and he starts beating the shut of her again because of course he does like you're not going to change this guy by this point marion apparently had enough and decided to do something about brady mary had a son with the guy she left brady for originally the son's name is henry glen newman and oh i wrote it here i forgot so she mary mary loved carney guys so the guy she left grady for was called the midget man so he was a

little person and yeah and they ended up having a child together and that was that child was named harry glenneman junior mary ends up asking harry Jerry Jr. to take care of Brady after sustaining tremendous abuse. And Harry did so by offering $1,500 to another freak show worker named Chris Wyant to kill Grady. And Chris, no qualms. Again, this goes back to my story, where I'm like, how do these people just find each other? Like, it's just like, they're like Magnus. They come together so wild to me. You just ask the first guy he meets and he's like, yeah, I'll do it for $1,500. one always was laughing he when you were talking about the people of Florida you're like

this guy's just tripping over scumbags it's true it's so true i don't get how they come together it's just like they're yeah i mean good for them they have a network you know they have more of a network for that than i do so kudos yeah i mean i'm glad you good for you yes of course of course chris obviously agrees to this and immediately just goes over to the trailer that Brady's in. He looks in the windows. Brady's just like shit house drunk, watching television. He opens the door, goes inside, point blank, shoots him in the head and kills him. So this is the son of Grady's wife that she had during the time that she was married to

someone else? Yes. Okay. Yes. So, so Chris is the friend of that. Oh, it's not even the son. It's the friend of the son. Exactly.

So Chris is just like looking to kill someone. Just somebody just asked me. Somebody just asked me. Anybody who wants me to do it? Like this is, this. Dude, they're all living in like a commune, really, these are all, they're all freak show,

staffers and actors and whatever. Like, they're all like together. And so I don't know, I guess easy, easy going over there. But there's like, do you watch Bones? No. Probably that. There's just like, so whatever, they're like investigating things.

And like the whole thing is like, the woman bones is really smart. And then, like, the man is David Boreannis or whatever from Buffy. Yeah, Angel. He's like, yeah, yeah, exactly. He's like the cop and she's like a really different scientist. But for some reason that makes absolutely no sense. It has to solve the case at the circus.

So they become circus performers to go solve the case. And you're like, why would anyone ever ask you to do that? It's just really funny. And they like, but they like listen to their little trailer and like learn how to like juggle. It's really stupid, but funny. But yes, but I know that. But I can picture like a circus, traveling circus. Da-da-da-da-da.

I like right now. I know everyone knows what means. You know, it's funny, is this entire time, while I was researching this, I was only thinking about that American Horror Story season, which I couldn't get through because I actually didn't think it was that good at all. I think it's better later. It gets better. Okay. Yeah. Yes. It's not my favorite, but I think the ending is pretty good.

That was one of the only ones I could think of American War Stories. I quit halfway through. But, I mean, yeah. Do you ever watch Freaks from like the 20s or whatever? No, no. And you know what's funny is I, oh, of course it wouldn't be, yeah, because I kept trying to, as I was researching the whole freak show thing, I was like, what was that movie where they go one of us? One of, I guess it's called freaks, right? Okay. That's freaks. Yeah, it's from 1932. Yeah, yeah. That would not have helped the situation of these shows and these performers, I don't think. But go back to the story. So obviously, we're not dealing with like the swanest people in the world here. Chris Harry, June. and mary were basically immediately suspected of the murder and caught for it harry initially was being questioned by police on this murder he volunteered a polygraph which he obviously failed and then

broke down crying and told the police everything in that you know including his mother including his friend chris all of it like he just brought everybody into this situation with him chris was yeah chris the guy the actual gunman himself he was charged with second-degree murder and he got 27 years in prison. Amazingly, Chris was released in 2009, so this guy's out and about walking around right now. That's so crazy, because the story starts in like a time

that feels completely different than ours. Dude, that's nuts, doesn't it? Like, you're like a trailer in the Boggs in Everglades of Florida where they're constructing tents to display humans with congenital defects. Right. And this,

you know, this guy would still be, actually he was born in 37 would he still be alive maybe he could be so alive right he could definitely be alive yeah yeah it's nuts i mean the kids are definitely so around i mean i saw a picture of his kids like they're still around they're kicking and doing their own thing same with mary actually so mary was found guilty of conspiracy to commit first three murder and she only got 12 years absolutely for killing somebody i mean granted she played up the fact there was a lot of domestic violence and abuse which i guess worked for grady when he went to court and was like i'm i have this issue you should go light on me i mean i don't know i guess i guess that's an argument we made

but she only ended up serving seven years for this she got out in 2000 so and she also moved right back to the city where her and grady used to live and nobody seems to care i'll discuss that here in a moment too uh the guy who got at the worst is actually her son harry junior so he got charged the first three murder and he got sentenced to life and he did it because he died in prison in 2014 so wow yeah yeah it's um i pointed out this fact that like nobody went to gradi's funeral they said it was like maybe 10 people that showed up there was something that like they kept trying to throw out like who could actually be the pallbearer to carry his casket and nobody would volunteer to do it because everybody hated this guy so we always talk about like don't

come up before in your yeah it's come up before I just feel like we should not have pallbearers we should move past that as a society I mean what's what's what's the what's a well yeah I guess yeah just what would you do I just don't feel like you should do that I think it's a lot of responsibility and no yeah I've been a pallbearer before it's not fun it's not a good experience oh no I'm sorry that sounds terrible yeah it feels weird it feels really weird like there's like corpse on my shoulder it's like ugh i don't know yeah no we're i'm gonna vote no on paul barris yeah yeah don't volunteer especially if you hate the guy which like in this case like everybody did i was gonna say like we always talk about like

don't kill your family but it seems like this guy really had it coming like it feels like it's okay to kill your family but like at least like get away with it like don't do it in a way that your son goes to jump the rest of his life and dies there like there's a better way to do this to do this, I think. Yeah. But yeah, that's his story. And like, you know, I made some excuses to the top of like, look, the economic decline, the fact that you're treated the way you're treated in society,

by your own family, by your peers. Like, you got to, I don't know, maybe it would do that. Maybe this is who you turn into under any circumstance. I don't know, but it's not a good way to live. I wouldn't love that for anybody I know. So yeah, yeah, especially that being up transition time where you're like, this could have been a job and then like it's not anymore which is the correct answer but also like don't but then people what are people supposed to do how much is set i'm doing the math right now in the 1930s okay so

his dad made about 70 000 oh no you know what that was that was already transferred no never mind that's it so it would have been 70 to 80 000 in today's money is what it would have come out to that sounds great yeah like it's you're living in like the everglades like yeah that's you're like the richest guy within like 70 counties of you so yeah and yeah it's got to suck to not have that anymore not have that opportunity like that's why with the jose american thing i was like well is it a bad thing that we they did this to him like you know i don't know i know and like pt bartum obviously like is bad in retrospect i don't know he made he made tom thumb super rich. Like, he gave him, like, a super, like...

Right, but he also tells us, like, super racist and, like, weird things also that I don't know the details of, but I know that he's, like, not as exciting as Hugh Jackman. But, but, yeah, also, like, you know, Tompum got a job. Yeah, yeah. Like, I mean, okay, so P.T. Barnum, I think,

was the guy who would put people of different races up and call them a new species of human. I think that was the guy that did that. And there's another thing I didn't right down here which she did which was like also kind of fucked up so he found this 80 year old blind woman who was a former slave and put her in a freak show his show saying that she was the

oldest one on earth at 160 years old she had other issues too i forgot what it was like she was missing like a leg and she was a blind or like something there was something she was obviously in very in a very bad way and he capitalized on it which which again, like, isn't nice, but like, I don't know, maybe that was a way for her to make a living. I mean, I'm so conflicting. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, we're not going to do it anymore.

No, we should not do it anymore. You know, but I mean, I'm sure there's places in the world would they do that still. Yeah. I think it has to be. Yeah. Yeah. There's definitely parts of the world that do stuff like this still to this day. Like, I mean, think of how some of these countries treat people who are like just

gay like yes no totally yeah imagine yeah yeah precisely precisely so uh yeah this was this taylor this was the story that i was that i was referencing when i was researching that guy ken rex whatever that guy was who got killed in skidmore missouri and i was like what and i asked chat gbt when is it okay to kill somebody oh right right so so chat dbt obviously didn't reply to me but it but doing research it was like i was like justifiably the universe seems aligned on two murders and it's that guy the ken guy and then this guy which is like all across where it was like these were the two people that had it coming the most so yeah that's the story thank you that's interesting yeah that's crazy yeah yeah going a little further back in time than usual i guess

i mean this guy was one of the 1930s but i kind of like that i'm gonna go further back next week even further further further further further further i got to get back of the ancient times ish you know you your story i literally while you were talking i typed out like what my next story is going to be because you gave me the best reminder of one of the freakiest things i've ever read about it's not the cabin thing that we discussed earlier it's another one that happened like very recently like in the early 2000 i would say i remember exactly but it was i remember reading about this was like oh my god i can't leave i forgot about this this case and um yeah that's gonna be next week oh my i can't wait sweet well that is our tales are anything taylor you want to you want to sign off with

i definitely want to ask everyone to please if you're listening please share it with people i'm just like like our post on instagram share them in your stories it can really help people find us i'm like slowly adding people to my to my lincoln and i feel like i post it all the time but then i also get people who are like, oh, I just heard of this. And I'm like, okay. So like the algorithm isn't just me. You know, I need to like, we need to move it along and share it. So please share if you can. We're at Doom to Fail pod in every place imaginable on Instagram. And you can also just if you don't, if someone's asking you the best way to find a podcast, you can just literally just put Doom to Fail into Spotify or Apple Podcasts on your phone and find us there.

And I also, yeah, I also want to share. shout you out, Taylor, because the graphics you're creating are probably the coolest graphics of any podcasts I've ever seen. Pars, I'm so freaking excited to, after you stop recording, to show you what I just made for this episode. Oh, they're so cool. They're so, you did, you did JFK drinking orange shoes for OJ and Kennedy. I'm obsessed with it.

It's so good. Thank you. I really like it. I'm like, this is really good, you guys. And I don't think anybody else is doing it. I don't see anybody else doing stuff like that. Like, it's a really cool bad. of our two stories coming together. I love it.

Thank you. Thank you. It's very fun. Majority is the most fun I've ever had. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you, Taylor. I'm going to go ahead and kill the recording. And we are...