Doomed to Fail - Ep 7: Wilde Ones - Oscar Wilde & The Toolbox Killers

Episode Date: February 13, 2023

Welcome to episode 7! This week Taylor brings the tragic love story of Oscar Wilde & Lord Alfred Douglas - she also says "Posh" and "Velvet" approx 98324 times. Farz takes a spin on the 'relationship' podcast part of our show and talks about two friends who were both marginally bad guys but when they put their heads together and purchased a horrifying murder van, they became the Toolbox Killers. Follow us on Instagram & Facebook!  @doomedtofailpodhttps://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpodSome sources:Oscar Wilde’s Stirring Love Letters to Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglashttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_WildeThe Importance of Being Oscar (BBC)Wilde (the film) History.com - Oscar Wilde TrialFantastic Oxford lecture    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] 

The matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortthall James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Welcome to Doom to Fail, the podcast where we switch up the premise of the show unexpectedly, as is what I'll be doing later today. I'm Fars joined here by my co-host Taylor hi Taylor hello how are you doing today I'm good how are you I'm well are we recording at the normal time we are it is the morning it's very bright in your office that's delightful I um at at work this week I was like 830 meetings are really rough for me because I don't like the mornings like the mornings are dog I hate them I will never wake up early but I do get up early for this. So I guess it's just perspective. And I did not change the timing on this at all or the day

or anything. So kudos to me. Congratulations. Thank you. So let's go ahead and start by discussing what you would like to be drinking today or will be drinking. Cool. So I'll, I know for your story, I don't know what it is yet, but for your story, we'll be reminding everybody to hydrate and just drinking water. So make sure to have, have your water. I have my water and my coffee far as has his water and his diet coke so we're ready to go and then for my story that i'll jump into first is i have a quote from one of our one of our subjects or participants or whatever and it is alcohol taken in sufficient quantities may produce all the effects of drunkenness so who would have thought a posh drinkings and drinks is what we're uh is the drink in general

because today i'm going to talk about oscar wilde and his his boyfriend, Lord Alfred Douglas, who goes by the name Bozzi. So tell you more about their story. I do not know very much about Oscar Wilde. So if you asked me about movies that he was in, I probably won't know them. Well, he was in no movies because he's a playwright from the 1800s. I mean like movies about him, obviously. Okay, great. Yeah. I knew, I knew that much at least.

We'll get to it. I think there's some that you might recognize if maybe you haven't read or seen. So we'll get there. I did a lot of research this week. Just like watching movies, like you said, and listening to some podcasts. I have, I watched a documentary called The Importance of Being Oscar from the BBC. I watched the film Wild. It's from the 90s about Oscar Wilde. Stephen Frye plays him.

And Jude Law actually plays Lord Alfred Douglas. And this is the second movie that we've brought up where Jude Law plays like the young gay lover of an older man. He also did in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Oh, okay. So that was Jude Law's kind of genre, you know, 20 years ago or so. I also listened to a great Oxford lecture that I found. It's by a woman named Dr. Sosseltis. Her name's SOS.

I have no idea how to pronounce that. But Oxford University records their lectures. You can listen to them as a podcast. So the audio was pretty terrible because I think it was like just a microphone. like pinned to her while she was actually doing her class. And one of the episodes, I think she had like a brooch on or something. You could like hear it hitting the brooch. And someone was coughing the entire time.

So you're like, oh my God, go home. Do not cough for this entire lecture. But still, it was delightful. And it was, I learned a lot. So how many movies and books and podcasts in total were part of your research? I watched two movies and listened to about five hours of a podcast. Thorough. Thank you.

Very thorough. Yes, it's been, it's been a very, a very posh week for me. I know, you're listening to Oxford Lectures. Like, it's, I mean, you're like elevating us a little bit. Yeah, it's been difficult not to speak in an English accent to my family and friends. So I will try to not do that as well here, but I've been listening to it a lot. You don't want to, you don't want to try to do the whole section, your section in a British accent? No, I don't think I'm ready for that.

maybe next time maybe next time yes yes so this story appeals to me the way that the Eleanor Roosevelt story did when we talk about living a full life and really living the shit out of your life in this story you know Oscar Wilde lived a rich life it I say the word velvet a lot he it reminds me of this idea of like making up late because I hate the mornings and being an artist and throwing a fit and writing all your feelings and then eating a great meal and staying up late, drinking and talking and smoking, and then yelling about art and the meeting of life and then doing it all again. So just like this idea that you're just like in this world of just like artists and art and you're writing and you're writing poetry and you're writing these

plays and things like that. And it seems like, you know, really fun to be able to choose what you want to do, even though like he did have obviously working as a writer. And I also feel like I have context to what this looks like because we're in like the late 1800s and like the Victorian era. And I know what that looks like. That's kind of an estate. that I like. I want to paint all my walls black and like, you know, have that, have that look, you know, going on in my own home. So it's something that I can really see. And I feel like that I couldn't really see everything in the Taj Mahal story because I just like, don't know what day-to-day life is like, was like then. But I feel like I know what day-to-day life was for this. So I feel like it's easier for me to talk about if that makes sense. I keep picturing Hogwarts. Yeah, picture Hogwarts. Libraries with like rich oak and stuff like that. Exactly. You can totally picture Hogwarts or do have this. So it's very posh. Everything we're talking about is very, very posh. So I'm going to talk about the people, some of the stories they told, some of the things that they wrote, and then the bad things that happened to them. So there are a couple of bad things do happen to the people in this story. So Oscar Wilde was born. And this is actually where I thought maybe I could flip into an Irish accent, but I'm not, maybe I maybe won't. But his name was Oscar Finagle O'Fletary Wills Wilde. I don't know. It's a lot. It's very Irish. He's born in Dublin on the 16th of October, 1854.

His parents were super interested in keeping him educated. He had a, you know, like a tutor until he was, you know, pretty grown. And then he went to Trinity College in Dublin, and then he went to Oxford. So to cut to the chase and kind of spoil the story. Another quote from Oscar Wilde is, the two great turning points in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford and when society sent me to prison. So it's a big turning point in his life when he gets to go, go over to England, go to Oxford. He's a little bit of an outcast in the UK because he's Irish, but he gets along and he's fine. While in school at Oxford and Trinity College, he's already making waves as a poet. So he was known for being lavish in the right way, a lot of velvet, decorating his rooms with peacock feathers. He held lavish parties. He dated a woman who ended up leaving him

for Bram Stoker, which is, which is fun. I mean, if you're going to get left for anyone that's okay i can live with that i know i know so kind of delightful and so he's like here's what i'm thinking and this is just me you're trying to learn in seven hours this week what people study their whole lives but he's like my my impression of oscar wild is that he's half posh so he's for this time when he's in college and the rest of his life he's going to be part of like the poshest the most fancy part of the british society and that's what all his plays are about his play is and poetry are funny and posh people thought they were funny too so it was like making fun of them without them knowing and i think that is the key to like ingraining yourself into like a really

rich posh group he can get in and use their things go to their summer houses and take the clever things but leave the boring ones and i think that's kind of something that he was able to do does that make sense yeah yeah like you're kind of describing philip seymour hoffman and the oh god i forgot his name Truman, Truman Capote movie that he did, where he just kind of can find his way to mingle in different high culture and counterculture groups and fit in wherever he wants to. Yeah, I would, I would just say that Oscar Wilde's a little more like personal bowl than Truman Capote, but yes, it's like the same idea. That makes sense.

And, you know, I definitely feel this way too. Like I have a couple, I know people in my life who are like very, you know, rich and, you know, I went to Harvard and, you know, all that. And I don't really fit in with them. You can tell that I don't fit in with them, even though I, like, try to. And I'm not, like, any worse than they are. I just isn't the same. And I feel like I can tell when someone's like a real old money that, like, we're different.

Yeah. Yeah. I would imagine if we were to hang out with the Kennedys, we'd stand out. Exactly. They'd know. Yeah. So, exactly. But he's, he's in there.

He's already, you know, writing and he's making money. and he kind of already becomes a caricature of himself. There's a lot of cartoons, like comics of him, like drawings and the papers and things, which is, I don't, I guess because they weren't like publishing photographs in the papers, so he should draw people, but a lot of like exaggerated cartoons of him. He had this like long brown hair. He was very tall and he had this like, his full lips and this long face. And so he's easy to do draw, you know, and to like characterize.

Are you looking him up? Yeah, I am. Okay, good. I was actually open up his IQ first, and then I couldn't find anything because they wouldn't have a key test back then. Yeah, he kind of looks like Snape. A little bit. Wow, you're real going full Hogwarts to like it.

So there's a, the new, the new Hogwarts game was just released yesterday. It's called, or sorry, the Harry Potter game. It's called Hogwarts Legacy, and I've been watching the gameplay. And I'm like, I'm definitely going to get it. It just hasn't dropped for Xbox one yet. So I don't know. I'll probably cut this out because it's totally relevant to anything. But that's why I'm thinking about Harry Potter so much. No, totally. Yeah, I heard about it too. I heard that it was coming out. So I hope it's fun.

It sounds fun. So yeah, so you can continue to think he kind looks like Snape, a little kinder, I imagine, kinder eyes than Snape's eyes, but looks a little bit like Snape with that hair. And there's already, you know, a play that's written that's sort of a satire of him. And he gets invited to come to America to promote it. So he's like part of the zeitgeist. So he travels to America. to promote this play and it ends up going back to, back to the UK and just continues to be a writer. Okay. Anyway, during this time, after college, while he's, like, in his 20s, he marries a woman named Constance Lloyd in 1884. And they have two sons, and he continues just like write and hang out. So it sounds like him and Constance loved each other.

You know, they had their two kids. They took good care of them. They took good care of each other. Unfortunately, the problem with their marriage was that Oscar Wilde, is gay he was gay he wasn't um going to be you know happy in a marriage because to a woman because he was a gay man and so he starts but she knew right like she knew that she was the beard i don't know if she knew she like she found out later obviously but immediately i don't think that she knew that wasn't like the deal right okay yeah it wasn't like let's get married and you know

you can do whatever you want it was like let's get married because i love you and let's have a family and then he just couldn't continue that. Yep, that's rough. Yeah. So a couple friends of his, one friend that will mention briefly is a friend named Robbie Ross, and he was played by Michael Sheen in the movie, in the Wild movie, and he did a great job. And this was his first physical relationship with a man.

So he's someone who will be in his life kind of on and off forever, but he does have a couple relationships with men sort of to start. But Robbie Ross was his first, and he was a Canadian man who was in the UK. He inherited a lot of money and just was able to kind of hang out and be a part of Oscar Wild Life. So I know I did an agenda at the beginning of this where whatever laid out what we were going to talk about. But I want to talk about Oscar's work and him as like a man in this time and in general. So some of the things that are famous that you may have heard of is the importance of being earnest. Have you seen that for that?

Is that a book or it's playing? No, I, no, I haven't. A book is the portrait of Dorian Gray. Do you remember that one? That I do, yeah. Okay. So there's that. He did a couple other, I mean, he did a ton of stuff, but some of the other famous ones are

Lady Windermers fan, Salomey and a woman of no importance. Those are some of the big ones. The portrait of Dorian Gray, if you, you know, read through it with a, you know, a lens. You can see it as like a homosexual love story between an older man and a younger man. So in the portrait of Dorian Gray, this man paints a painting of Dorian Gray, and the painting continues to get older and more decreed as Dorian does, you know, bad things and he lives his life, but he doesn't get older. So that's the basic of that story. So some of the themes from Oscar Wilde's work, and this is what I was getting from that lecture, the Oxford lecture, is not judging people because a theme of the time was judging fallen women. Everyone loved that, you know, this woman is pregnant out of wedlock.

This woman, you know, is leaving her husband and people loved to see those kind of like melodramatic tragedies on stage. And he really wanted to flip it and say, you know, judgments are a form of control. I think we've talked about that before with like marriage being a form of control and things like that. So judging women or anyone in that way is a way of controlling them. And so he wants to challenge that in his work. So in his work, one thing the characters do that they're allowed to do is, change. And a big tenet of Oscar Wilde's life is you can be something different in each moment and that's okay. And people don't let people judge you because you're constantly changing and

constantly evolving. And one of his things that he also said was the most fundamental human right is to be an individual. So that means there's no truth to who you are because you're always changing, but that's also a good thing. That's part of the tenant. It's very cool. I like that. Yeah. I want to think about Oscar Wilde is like he's like indulgence he's you know writing this plays he gets kind of fat he spends his money on fancy things so that's fun good for him and this is a time where being gay is illegal so like we talked about before there's always been gay people and it goes you know in and out of legality but right now it's actually illegal to be gay in the UK and in a more if I was talking about this for like days and days I would talk more about there's like these like young

men sex workers called rent boys and it's exactly what you sound like you know you can you know do that in in the movie wild one of them is played by orlando bloom he's in there for like four seconds it was his first movie but he just kind of like winks at asker wild and like walks away so it's a little like flirtation thing that's quite cute um so there's secret places for gay men to get together if you want to know if you want to be a gay man it's easy it's plenty it's available it's just like not you know, technically allowed. And so that means a lot of challenges for Oscar Wilde and people at this time, a lot of persecution, a lot of stigma. And he, you know, used his writing to start to challenge some of those societal norms and express love, like, in different ways. Okay. So that's a little bit

about his writing about, like, who he is as a person. So we're still in Hogwarts. He looks like Snape, very lush, very posh. So just to kind of tie up Constance, so poor Constance, she does die later in this story. So we won't come back to her, but she, but their relationship isn't the one that was doomed to fail, like, even though it was, but like, that's not what I'm talking about in the story. But like, of course, that was never going to work out because he was gay. They never got divorced, but she did end up passing away really young. She was only 40. She probably had MS, but they didn't know what that was then. So she just had, you know, a lot of pain and they did all these surgeries to figure it out but like surgery in 1890 was like

open it up and around and like see what's going on in there so it wasn't great and she died from complications of one of those surgeries um unfortunately when she was pretty young because she was 40 and i'm 40 so i'm saying that's young to die so this is like we're still like mid-1800s right late 1800s this whole thing's like the late 1800s yeah yeah yeah so surgery is still basically butchery yeah like no one's washing their hands there's you know blood everywhere yeah exactly the guy's probably also a butcher like that too it's in the back yeah that sounds like a terrible way to go so poor thing but here's the relationship that was doomed to fail so this is his Oscar Wilde's relationship

with Lord Alfred Douglas who goes by Bozzy and Bozzie is a nickname he got when he was a kid and it's from his mom calling him Boise because he was a boy and then turned into like Bozzie and he was like his mom's golden child, which I get because I call Miles my greatest story, my favorite boy and like stuff like that all the time. So I get that. That's fair. So in 1891, Wilde meets him and Boise himself was born in 1870. So time to do some math. When they meet in 1891, Bozzy is 21 and Oscar is 37. So this is something that I looked up how to tactfully address because I know that we like those age gaps are a big thing that we talk about a lot. So there's a thing that Wilde talks about that there's a great love between an older man and a younger man that's like ancient like Plato and Shakespeare was talking about it.

So that's like a big thing that he, you know, talks about love between, you know, different types of people. And so I'm not going to get into that any more than that. It's not illegal. So fine. So the age. It feels different for some reason. I know. I think so too, but I'm like, I don't know why.

I don't know why either. Am I, it was me as assholes? I don't know. Maybe. Yeah. So, like, I don't know. It's a male relationship thing or it could be the time in which the relationship, I don't know. Maybe we are assholes.

Yeah, I think, I don't know. It could be that. I really don't know. But that's, that's what, it is what it is. It's not illegal, the age gap, but, you know, being gay is illegal at this time. So there's, you know, that happening with their relationship. So when they meet, it's very passionate. Bosey introduces him to the idea of rent boys.

So, like, you know, see other people. They, like, go to sex parties and kind of giving into your kind of sexual desire. And Boise is from a very posh line of, you know, minor royalty. And his dad is the Marquess of Queensberry, which is a very fancy name for your dad to have. And his family history includes lots of people dying by suicide. and lots of people converting to Catholicism. So they're like not mentally stable in his family. And so right now, Boise is the golden boy around town.

Their fair is very passionate. There's lots of love letters and poems. Bozzi's a writer as well, but not as good. He's just like a rich guy who's a writer. So he's in there. And it sounds like Oscar was more involved in the relationship and Bozzy loves him, but it's also like never really going to commit to him. Meanwhile, so they kind of like they kind of lives together in like a

country house in different places. And, you know, Oscar's still married, but he doesn't, he spends all this time with Bozzy. And Bozy's dad, the Marquess of Queensberry and Marquess's M-A-R-Q-U-E-S-S, which is a British nobleman ranking above an earl and below a duke. Still don't know what that means. I like to define it. I know. Whatever. So he's like minor, minor, whatever. And so the Marquess of Queensberry is pissed that he sees his son in this relationship with Oscar Wild. And he's suspicious that they're more than friends. And he's just like really, really mad. And so he's kind of following his son around, yelling at him, telling him that he cannot be

in this relationship. Everyone's denying it and yelling. And then he goes, he tries to get into this club to like heckle Oscar Wilde and Bozy because he knows that they're there. And he doesn't get let in. But he leaves a calling card. So you know, like a calling card is like, you know, your name and I, you leave a note. or whatever. So this is spelled, spelled incorrectly, but he writes on his calling card for Oscar Wilde posing somdomite. So he's

spelled Sodomite wrong. But essentially he's saying, like, give this to the gay man in there. It's Oscar Wild and they know he's gay and giving it to the guards. And instead of Wild being like, this man is a crazy person who cares, he sues him for libel. So Oscar Wilde sues his boyfriend's dad for libel for calling him gay. publicly so he really like didn't need to do that but he like you know they ended up going to trial so it goes to trial on april 3rd 1895 and he is framed it's an older man who grooms younger men and eventually wild drops his libel claim because they're like what are you talking about we have all these witnesses like so many people know you're gay so they're yeah it's only it's only libel or slander if it's not true right so why put yourself

out there that seems like a real uh it's a bad move yeah it was a bad move yeah he didn't need to do that so he did that and then you know he has to he loses all of his money because he has to like pay all these court fees and all these things and his friends are like you should leave like just leave the UK leave for a few years go to paris like whatever like just get out of here for a little bit but he doesn't want to he wants to stay his his sons are there like he doesn't want to leave yet. And he was like, I've made my bed, like, I need to stay here. So now everyone knows that he's, now everyone, not just the people in the know, know that he is gay. And so he gets charged with gross indecency, which is part of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which is an act to make

further provision for the protection of women and girls, the suppression of brothels and other purposes. So it's basically like they don't be gay or anything that people would think as, I don't know, sleazy law. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, he's still, you know, he's always past people love him, you know, but they also are the ones who are like making these laws. So it's pretty, you know, hypocritical to them to be like, you know, you're going to, like, you have to, you know, be charged for this, even though we like adore you and don't really care. So he does get charged, he's sentenced to two years of hard labor. So he goes to like a hard labor prison and it's awful. And he, you know, goes there and while he's in prison, his mom passes away, all the

sad stuff happens. He's not allowed to write like plays or poetry or anything, but he can write letters. So he writes this like really, really long letter to Bozzi called De Profundis, which is from the depths. And it's half a love letter to him and half a letter to the way that he lived his entire life. So it's a little bit of like, it's like its own kind of novella and it's thing that gets published after he dies. That's awful, you know, especially going to prison for being gay. Like, that's not, not okay. And even though we had all of that, it is also worth noting that, you know, he inspired people to think differently about love kind of ongoing. He became kind of a caricature of a gay man, which probably isn't what he wanted, but at least,

you know, who's sort of at the forefront of getting it out there at this time. And, you know, I was thinking was, I know that none of this is actually true, but in theory, jail is supposed to be rehabilitative, right? So was the assumption two years is how long it takes to not be gay anymore? Or was it just supposed to be like a constant recurring theme of just throwing someone in jail for being gay? Yeah, I don't know if they were like thinking about like conversion therapy. You know, I think they were just like two years of hard labor for that. And I don't think there was like a on-staff psychiatrist. I doubt there was a doctor.

You know, like, it was just not great. So he does go out of prison, and he goes to Italy and finds Bozzi there. They spend a few months together, but Oscar's very weak. And I don't think Bozzy wants to deal with it. Like, he just doesn't want to take care of him. In the movie, they have a scene, even before this, where Oscar's, like, just has the flu, and Bozzie doesn't want to take care of him because he's kind of a bride. He's a kid.

Yeah, the kid, exactly. So, yeah. They break up. Oscar kind of lives in Paris for the rest of his life. He dies on November 30th, 1900 at the age of 46. So he dies of meningitis. And he's buried in Paris. Bozzy actually lives until 1945. So he lives for 45 more years. He conversed to Catholicism, gets married and has a kid. He just kind of sucks. I think he's just kind of doing whatever. Yeah. You know. Can I throw out a casting idea for? Bobozy. Yeah. Ryan Filippe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, Ryan Filippe looks just like Judilaw in the 90s. I'm sure you're right. They do kind of look the same. So, yes. Wouldn't have been that big of a difference. That's exactly right. I think they, I think people have them confused all the time. But maybe they're, I know Ryan Filippe and Reese Wetherspoon's

son is like 20 now. Maybe he can do it. There you go. If they do it again. And then just so that that's the sad story. That's Oscar and the man he loved. and the man's father who sent him to jail and all these things. Some news homosexuality was decriminalized in England and Wales in 1967, so no longer illegal. And in 2017, Oscar Wilde was among an estimated 50,000 men who were pardoned for homosexual acts that were no longer considered offenses under the Policing and Crime Act in 2017. So that law essentially put 50,000 men in jail. And, you know, 100 years later, they all get pardoned because it's no longer criminal.

You said 67? Yeah, that's, yeah. So that's a little bit ahead of the curve. So the U.S., the Stonewall U.S., the Stonewall U.S., happened in 69? Yeah. It's good for them. Yeah, totally. That's it.

That's it. That's all I got. Hey, so question for you, like, having done the research you did and the reading that you did, if you were to point to a specific thing to look at or, read or whatever to basically get the condensed version of oscar wild as like a human as a philosopher i think maybe even um what would you what would you point to i already know the story of dorian gray just curious like if there's anything else out there i mean i would honestly watch the movie the wild movie um it's on amazon you can rent it the one with the one with the one with jude law

it's pretty good and it's w i l d and i'll put a link in the thing but i thought i did a great job I'm sort of just kind of in Stephen Fry the actor did a great job playing him he really looks like him you just like kind of get this idea that he's like this like big presence you know around town and did you see the unfortunate there are also you know

in the movie and in real life there were other men who loved Oscar like that like Robbie Ross who would have just been you know in love with him his whole life but he fell for the like golden boy around town and that was his downfall

in one of the um the pictures of them together the it links to an article it says lord alfred douglas the man who destroyed oscar wild so not a good way to be remembered i guess no no he didn't it was it was it was it was his fault much as it was his dad's fault for like bringing it up and like making it a big thing and they could have just had like a rocky passionate love affair their whole lives but it had unfortunately they got the court involved and i don't know why um Oscar wild would be like that's libel why you'd even like stir the pot like that yeah just let it die yeah just be like okay that guy's not he spelled it wrong like he doesn't know he's talking about and then move on rather than you know going to court and having you know maids be like he's all sneaking dudes up to his room things like that you're like why why bring it up but apparently uh Alfred douglas was also quote unquote a virulent virulent racist amongst other things it doesn't come up with the movie but how are me surprised because probably that makes sense um great awesome well thank you for sharing i i'm gonna i'm gonna give that movie a whirl

i've always heard the name oscar while because i consume a lot of the media that he had some influence on um it never got deep into like who he was as a person but he sounds pretty fascinating as a philosopher in particular yeah um so i'm going to segue into the true crime side of the equation for today. Like I said, my drink today is watered. It has absolutely nothing to do with the story. It has to do with the fact that I was at a work conference all last week in Florida. And I just needed to spend this weekend in the next week, hydrating.

So that's the idea. So this whole time, we've been looking at relationships that were doomed to fail. And knowingly or not, I've kind of couched that. And actually, you kind of have to, Taylor, within the framework of romantic. relationships, but there are probably thousands of stories of friendships that were also doomed to fail. Friendships that probably should have been avoided all along. It's funny, as we discuss the premise of the show and how sometimes the universe puts two people together at the exact same time, and I started researching this particular episode and framed it more

as being put together at the exact wrong time, like a pairing that you should have, the universe could have avoided and done without. Yeah. Ooh, okay. yeah i know i'm getting i'm getting again like the premise is like a little bit shifty but it's still kind of like you probably really shouldn't put these two together like you said at the beginning we have we have very loose premise exactly we're just telling stories we're easy going over here thanks for coming okay um so one thing that i thought of when i was looking into like this thing that i'm going to talk about today was it seems that in non-romantic relationships in particular that end in tragedy there's at the very least either a power and

balance between the parties or feedback loop that leads to the tragedy and a lot of times of power imbalance with these kinds of friendships are based on one's mental acuity versus the others as in I can't remember the she said I should have done the research on this before I started talking um what's the book where the guy hugs the bunny too hard and then the friend is um is it's it's grapes of wrath is it grapes of wrath no it's um bunny hug of mice and men of mice and men like there's a great example of you know two individuals with slightly different mental acuity and it was obviously like that's where i started thinking about and when i started going through the research of this i thought about the probably the single most

impactful friendship gone wrong from our childhood taylor in real life not of mice and men but in real life can you think of what i'm thinking about the most impactful one of our generation the most impactful friendship of our generation gone wrong gone wrong oh my god i have no idea can you give me a hint color oh the um are you going to do common i'm not doing columbine but that's the that's the story that came to mind so yeah yeah that's exactly what i thought of when i was thinking about like man two people should definitely not have gotten together in any capacity I thought a Columbine. And yeah, okay.

So for those that don't know, this is Columbine is about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebel. There were two friends who became acquaintances in high school. And in 1999, they ended up injuring 24 people and killing 13, including later themselves. So total death count was 15. And this is kind of the situation that kicked off mass school shootings in general. I remember, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I was, I was in. Reno at like a student council conference, you know, and it was like 500 like good kids, you know, talking about how we get everybody to be involved in whatever. And we had just had like

three days of like, you know, meeting new people and doing all these things. And, and I remember getting on the bus to go back to Las Vegas to home and someone telling us that it happened. And it was just like such a stark contrast to what I had just experienced of like this like, you know, all the all the kids trying to like get everybody involved and excited. And then, you know, of the same time someone was killing people in a school where you are supposed to feel safe but you don't need more obviously thank you fuck you america so that that's actually why i thought it was like i couched is the most impactful because there's certain things that happen in our youth where you're like i remember where i was it's like when people talk about where they were when candy was shot

anyways but that was kind of my first thought and it took me back to a particularly awful story i remember reading about like years ago and i think it's still considered obscure in the pantheon of true crime like i don't hear this story told very often it is well let's get into it maybe you already know it i'm i'm i'm thinking about the toolbox killers laurence bittaker and roy norris gross yes i know a little bit i feel like i don't have that that kind of makes them more throw up so i'm excited okay so you're yeah again you're a phd in true crime so i'm not surprised um i do i do want to differentiate this from the toy box killer which sounds delightful by comparison like you're forced to be locked in an f a

or schwartz before they kill you this is not that this is tool box so that's not a thing though what with the f a schwartz why because they're bankrupt i'd say that'd be a weird a weird a weird thing yeah that might be that might have to be the the reboot of those saw movies. Like I said, like I almost feel like there are some true crime stories that though they're incredibly interesting and compelling are just too much

for mainstream consumption and appeal. That's essentially this. The toolbox killers, like I'm not going to go super into the weeds and details on the gross stuff because it's just too gross. So don't even out of the top. Totally. I mean, I feel like I, I know some of the gross stuff.

I'm sure that you'll talk about some of it as well, but it's gross. I will go mildly into the, it's like real, real bad. It's real, real bad. Like, I was thinking about, like, how certain situations have, like, and certain folks within this genre have an it factor. You know, Bundy being considered normally good looking, Gacy being a clown involved in politics, BTK had a normal family. These two are just garbage humans.

they have none of that if you look at a picture of laurence biddecker in particular he looks like pennywise the clown it's terrifying like he's i'm gonna look it up in an incognito windows so it's not like in my search history that's good call i should have been doing that this whole time oh yeah you see it like his forehead does look like penny wise right he's like he's like pointy and it's got a huge forehead like it's just creepy at creepy looking dude yeah Let's get into our two main characters and note the red flags along the way. I'll start with what I'm going to say is the main antagonist of the story, which is Lawrence Bidicker. He actually died fairly recently.

He actually died in 2019. So we'll get to how that ended up happening. But Lawrence was born in 1940 to a couple who gave him up to an orphanage. He was adopted as an infant. And his family moved around quite a bit. I don't have the years, but I do know over the course of 17 years, he went from Pennsylvania to Florida to Ohio to California. So setting up

roots was obviously a challenge. Like if you're a kid growing up like that, you're going to have like very shallow human connections because you'll never have the opportunity to build deeper ones, right? Or, I mean, it also depends on who you are. You know, like my husband,

his dad was in the military and he moved around and like he has friends from every place that he lived that he still talks to because his parents are making friends with everybody. And his parents were like made it really made a mission of for them to meet people yeah if it's if you as a parent understand that you have to make that like a point that your kids are socialized then i'm sure it's different than if you're this guy this is not like he got this so right uh once he turned 17 he seemed like he kind of fell into a life

of crime but they were still kind of cute 1950s crimes like he was arrested for auto theft evading arrest and i mean this last one is less dennis the menacee uh there was a hit and run as well Oh, that's bad. Yeah, we don't know if a person died or not, but, but, you know, still, I mean, he got hit by 1950s car. He probably wasn't doing great. He spent two years in a reform school and he kind of just drifted in and out of different facilities for various different crimes until he was about 21 years old. At 21, Lawrence's mental acuity comes into play. He is said to be manipulative and was found to have an IQ of 138.

Do you know what that means, Taylor? I don't know what that. means yeah i didn't know what i meant either for the record it's like the blood pressure like i don't know what that means just systolic diabolic it's like yeah just am i going to die or not for context the IQ classifications there's like various versions of this but like just generally speaking 90 to 109 on an IQ test is average okay 120 to 129 is considered superior 130 and above is considered very superior. So like I said, there's different scoring methodologies for this, but just generally

speaking, a quote-unquote genius is someone with an IQ of around 140 or so. Is that true? Like, what if you're a bad test taker or what if you're a good test taker or how do they test you? I don't know how test-taking or your ability to be good at it. I have never taken an IQ test. I don't know if it's like, do you need to know something,

or is it just like how you logically reach conclusions to things? Right. Because I don't think if they ask you, like who was president in 1912. I think they just. It's not like a Kaplan course to study for it. Right. I think it's.

I'm sorry. I'm just, I want to know. How do you take an IQ test? They're like this is test that IQ, MENSA, the most ECRIQ test. Ooh, when you can do in five minutes. Who knows?

There's a free IQ test.net. Yeah, I feel like you need to go into a space with people in like lab codes watching you do it for it to be like legit. Um, so Einstein was 160. Yeah, yeah. So I was going to, yeah, I was going to bring that up. So for example, again, a genius is somebody with an IQ of around 140 or above. Lawrence was a 138. I looked it up Elon Musk was a 155 and like you said Einstein was a once is a 160

he was closer to Elon Musk than he was to our IQ for context Snoop Dogg is 147 seriously yeah but I don't believe that about Elon Musk I think he made that up I mean I don't know if he I want to see some receipts for Elon Musk's I mean the guy you started three companies and ran them kind of and then and then spun off the planet with his ego. I think it's just like not having any empathy. Anyway, um, continue. I'm so sorry. Well, well, anyway, let's take IQ test later. Well, let everybody know unless they're bad or wildly different. If one of us is really smart and one of us is not, let's just not share it. Exactly, exactly. It's got to be the

same. We will not be sharing our IQs later. I think, I think if I had to guess, you're probably a 119, which is just shy of superior. It's very average. And I think I'm probably like, I'm probably right next to that. Maybe like a 117, 116. All right. We'll take it. We'll figure it out.

Okay. And report back, maybe. So I bring all this up because I mentioned that I think he's the main antagonist. And I think being basically a professional criminal criminal with that level of intelligence has to put you in a rare category based on people you would normally interact with. Let's leave, let's leave Lawrence there and move on to his partner in crime, Roy Norris. So Roy was eight years, Lawrence's junior. so there you go there's a little bit of that obvious power and balance in addition to the fact that borne's was crazy smart and roy wasn't there was also the age gap uh he ended up in foster homes

quite a bit mostly dude was mom being a drug addict uh this guy was kind of fucked from birth it sounds like there was a lot of stories around his abuse and what people did to him and uh he didn't have an easy life growing up but again like also you know i was reading it and i was also thinking like it's the 50s like how do you interpret that like isn't this standard that your dad comes home and just beats the entire family like I don't right I mean I'm not saying it's good but I'm saying like did he have it worse than a lot of people or was his particularly bad hard to gauge that I think yeah totally one thing that was interesting was that at one point in his youth uh Roy did try to attempt suicide oh yeah like he just strikes me as someone like a kid with no mentors or anyone to look

up to. I don't really see him as like an obvious deviant just yet, like mostly just like a lost kid, you know? I would say that changed, the older he got. He, unlike Lawrence, who was like involved in stupid petty theft, like stealing cars and shit, Roy's dabbling in the criminal underworld came about through sexual crimes that he was committing or trying to commit. So around the age of 21, he was caught trying to break into a woman's house for refusing to let him in. It sounded kind of like a date gone wrong. For that, he was arrested. He was diagnosed as having a schizoid personality disorder. Again, not to harp on this too much, but think about that. On the one hand, you have Lawrence, who is basically Beethoven levels of intelligence. Beethoven

I looked up was 135 to 140. And on the other hand, you have an obviously mentally ill man in Roy, who's diagnosed as schizzoid personality. Yeah, totally. After Roy is released, he attacks a female student in San Diego, strikes her in the head, and then beats her repeatedly. So his escalation is ramping pretty quickly from trying to break into a woman's house to like this level of aggression and violence. Still, when he is arrested, he goes to the psych ward for mental illness,

which I don't know how I feel about this. I don't know how mental illness or the criminal justice system worked in the 1950s and 60s, but this guy's crimes beared so heavily towards sexual violence. And they keep putting him in psych wards. Yeah. I don't. Is that a mental illness? Yes, probably in some way.

But also it's very violence. He should probably shouldn't be around other people. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I was thinking, well, it's definitely abhorrent behavior. So maybe that's a signal of mental illness. But he's, yeah, definitely put him in jail. He shouldn't be around others.

right yeah definitely shouldn't be around other people staying on brand for roy he is eventually released from that situation and then he rapes a woman in redondo beach which is actually reported to police and that'll come up again because that is a really really critical moment and why everything else here happens it happens i will say this like i am changing i'm not using the word rape very much deliberately in this because I just don't want to say it like 300 times. So just note that I'm, I don't know. I don't get triggered by much, but I did get kind of upset at like how many times this comes up over and over again.

And so I just don't want to do that to you or the listeners or myself again. So I'm just not going to go into detail. We can assume there was a lot of sexual crime. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So let's get into the overlap between these two deviants. so how do they come together so let's go back to lawrence in 1974 Lawrence stole a stake again it's kind he's kind of Dennis the menace like what a what a stupid crime anyways so

the grocery store employee who was going way above and beyond uh confronted Lawrence and Lawrence ended up stabbing the guy oh god never would do that let him take it take the steak like who cares yeah the guy lived but Lawrence was arrested obviously and he was sent to prison in san lewis obisbo all these places that i'm listening i'm like i have so many amazing memories of it's so weird i know like it's so beautiful there redondo beach is one of my favorite places in the world and it's just like you think about what was going on with these guys and it just tints everything you know this weird and then going back to roy's rape accusation in redondo beach in nineteen seventy six he was arrested for that

And then he also landed in San Luis Obispo. So now you have the two coming together, right? You have the incredibly smart manipulative Lawrence, the incredibly, you know, mentally ill and sexually violent, Roy coming together. Yeah, I was, I was thinking about this. I was like, how do you compare this? Like, what is it like with that kind of kisman when two people kind of come together? I thought about like Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippen or Jobs and Boise.

That's kind of what this is. in like a totally opposite way they're going to change the world let's make it worse or or let's invent computers or let's be the best and yeah totally yeah so so the two hung out in like seemingly different crowds roy was more with like the hardened criminal types the biker types and lorence kind of kept to himself and hung out with the older inmates not for any like it just seems like that's just where he ravitated towards it wasn't because like he couldn't hang out apparently Lawrence would save Roy multiple times from getting beaten up and jumped like he wasn't like soft in any way like he just didn't hang out that crowd regardless they bonded while they were in prison

mostly because of this situation where Lawrence was saving Roy's from getting his ass kicked they bonded and decided to get together once they were released and when they bonded over again it was just gross sexual stuff that don't need to talk about yeah but that was basically it that's like They're just like, we're like sharing fantasies with each other. Lawrence ends up getting released in 1978 and then he moves to Los Angeles. And again, given what I said about the guy earlier, like he's doing pretty well for himself. He got like a really, really good job. He was making $1,000 a week in 1978, which I can't do the conversion.

That sounds like a billion dollars in today's money. I think, I think you're right. I think it's a billion dollars. It's exactly a billion dollars. Are you doing the conversion? Yeah, it's in 1978. Yeah. in 1978 money to today oh my god $4,500 a week?

Yeah, that's so much money. Yeah, he's crushing it. Yeah, he was a skilled laborer. He socialized normally, like people knew him. So I didn't say any of this in the outline, but he would like donate to the Salvation Army. He would go buy food and give it out to the homeless people. people in downtown LA like he he was being a normal dude despite the fact that he looks like penny wise roy's released a few months after this and he goes right back to being a piece of shit

committing more sexual assaults while living with his mother for whatever reason Lawrence writes to Roy and the two make plans to meet up and they did and this is where they start putting together their plan to play out the scenarios they discussed while they were in jail together acted like this was like a startup like they started like pulling their money together like it was that's why i brought like the wazziac jobs things i was just like they had this like lightball moment but it was just like so counter good like i don't yeah they pulled money together they were like buying materials i'll get into this like they like right they're like planning to do something like a party like something fun but they're planning to commit crimes

they ended up converting a van they did the van life thing before van life was a thing oh my god yeah it was anyways we'll we'll we'll go into it yeah they ended up buying a van obviously and i sort of wondering like is this where the trope comes from like did these guys actually invent that trope and we don't know we I don't know but it had to have been close to the beginning of that, right? I mean, how long have a van's even been around? Totally. That's funny. So, yeah, let's get into what they ended up doing after they put together this, you know,

LLC of theirs. I'm joking there was no LLC, obviously. So they have their van. But they're probably the road to that. Yeah, exactly. So they have their van. They have a plan and they have each other's support. They start going through with this plan.

This all gets, like I said, super gratuitous. And I just don't want to say the word raped 300 times. So I'm going to gloss over a lot, except one particular murderer I will go into the details of. Well, part of the details of. I'm actually not going to go into details of that one either that much. But the overarching premise was the same. They'd see a girl walking on the beach. It's just the most, like, innocent safe place.

How many times, I mean, you've, how many times you go to Manhattan Beach, you go to Redondo, like it's just beautiful and everybody's just having a good time in the sun it's like the safest place you would hope to be and anyways that's what they would do they see a girl walking always near the beach or on the beach approach her tell her they have marijuana or beer and then they can give her a ride they adopt abduct her abduct her and they typically drive her up to the san gabriel melons where they do what they do and kill her there that's it that's their entire mo do they always kill them no no they didn't so there were several women or girls who would either get away or they would release for whatever reason yeah it was it was a little bit uh it seems like just something got into them with the ones that they ended up killing but none of them had good experiences like none of them were like got away like not emotionally scarred of course no no yeah we'll get into one of those women actually later because she becomes really really relevant so the list that i'm going to go off of the ones that we know they killed there's actually one more that they think they killed because there was pictures

of her alive in the San Gabriel Mountains, but they actually, these guys never talked about that one, so they don't know what happened to her. So she's just always been missing. One, the first one was 16-year-old Lynn Schaefer. The second one was 18-year-old Andrea Joy Hall. The third one, third and fourth were Jackie Doris Gilliam, who was 15, and Jacqueline Leah Lamp, who was 13. They spent two days torturing those two girls. I didn't mention this, but the reason they were called the toolbox killers is because the back of the van, like I said, I was going to talk about later,

was converted into like a workshop that also had a bed in it. And part of the torture method came from devices they kept in the toolbox. And like that comes up big time with Jackie and Jacqueline. And it will come up again with the next one. The next one was Shirley Lynette Ledford,

who was 16 when she was abducted while hitchhiking home from a Halloween party. Again, the hitchhiking thing, the van, it's just like so, it's like a movie. I mean, now, hopefully, we know a little bit better. Yeah. You know, but I feel like then this is the story you hear a thousand times. Like, a woman was hitchhiking, got into a van, and gets murdered.

It seems like it happened all the time. And maybe it happened 1% of the time. But people were doing it all the time, which is really crazy. I think about that that was like I'll just hitchhike home yeah from a Halloween party so when I was living in Hill Country I would constantly see hitchhikers for whatever reason and there was a part of me Taylor that was like just stop just stop like get the story like just figure out what is going on like get the story of what's happening and you can get murdered on both sides picking someone up and being picked up I would be murdered I I'm definitely on

that side of that equation Shirley is the one that I'll actually talk about because it's, I mean, they're all bad, but it's the worst one. For context, the audio recording of what happened to her is now used by the FBI to desensitize agents. Oh. Yeah. No. Yeah. We're going to be harping a lot on that audio recording.

It is really, really bad. Did you listen to it? You can't listen to it. You can't find it, but there's transcripts of it that are circulating. and there's also like up teen thousand reports of people who actually have listened to it and what the outcomes of them listening to it was which again like that audio recording is going to keep coming up over and over again because it had it had it sounds like very very dramatic impacts on everybody who listened to it wow so um the so like i said like if you wanted to you can look up

the audio recording but you can look up the transcript of it i'll expand on one part of what was happening during the recording that sounds horrible i think i know what the answer to this is taylor you might actually know what this is because you sort of are familiar with this with this crime do you know what an old cranon is it's part of your anatomy oh no okay so it's part of your elbow so it is the it's this point i'm pointing nobody can see this because it's audio medium but it's an elbow put your elbow well everybody pay your elbows in the air so yeah so it is it is the bottom bottom part. It's the part that, like, is, is, um, hinged from the forearm that ties to the top, right? So obviously, it's a place where a lot of bone comes together, a lot of cartilage comes together.

Is it your funny bone? No, your funny bones above that. You're funny, actually, actually, your funny bone, the top part of your funny, the, your funny bone is where the top part of your old crinon actually connects to the upper arm. Okay. I don't know why this makes you want to throw up, but just like talking about it is making me kind of nauseous, but keep going. Aren't you glad we're doing this at 8 a.m. your time? Shirley's autopsy revealed that that part of her anatomy was basically sawdust. Oh, my God. So in the audio recording, the sound of a sledgehammer repeatedly hitting something can be heard.

There were 25 distinct sounds of that happening with a ton of screaming and everything else that came with. then the assumption is that that's where that injury came from it was one of a lot of injuries but that's the bulk of what you would hear if you ever were able to hear the audio recording is this sounds oh god it's like i'm like thinking about it it's like so awful pause they recorded it and kept it just the audio or the recorded a video no i mean this is 78 there's probably no capacity for video recording in a van right so you know just audio they're in the van yeah it seems hard to wield a sledgehammer in a van i mean they really i mean it's why you have to really want it you don't get in vans don't get advanced yeah totally 100% yeah that that detail is the only

one that i really am going to discuss because it was just it just shows how terrible and brutal it was later on Roy himself would describe the tape by saying if you ever heard that tape there's just no possible way that you'd not begin crying and trembling I doubt you could listen to more than 60 seconds of it but he's saying it was there

but he's saying it like he's proud of it oh my god yeah like he like it wasn't like a oh man you can't he believe how crazy this was like what a wild Friday that was like you know he's kind of like ragged about it yeah so thanks one interesting note that might have contributed to why her death was particularly awful

is that Lawrence she was rejected by Lawrence so she worked at some diner that Lawrence would frequent and he asked her out and she said no and they actually they actually think that's also why she ended up getting in the van she was like oh I know this guy I see him all the time right so there was like a trust element there but she didn't know that he felt the way he felt towards her like what do you want what was intention was obviously yeah she didn't expect to get murdered yeah you should be able to say no to people and not get not for your safety yeah exactly so after shirley's death and her body was discovered she was the only one whose body was discovered by the way

everybody else was um like lost the mountains roy he's a real social butterfly he He rekindled a friendship with another guy he met in jail named Joseph Jackson. And Joseph seemed to have way more humanity in him than Roy himself. Roy went on to tell Joseph what he and Lawrence had been up to. Just like, just what are you just casually mentioning it? Like, oh, we did you do this weekend. It's just, it's just, have you been cornered by someone who thinks what they're telling you is amazing and you can't get away from them? Sure.

I'll tell you what. So every conference. I can't think of this specific example, but go on. I know exactly what my example is. Every conference I go to, there's some crypto bro who shows up who's going to revolutionize democracy through the blockchain. And they just find you and start telling you everything about NFTs and crypto and blockchain. You're like your eyes just fucking glazing over and they won't. Every conference, universally across the board.

Yeah. That's my hell. So please anybody. crypto bros never talked to me about crypto i don't care like i aged out of it i think i actually hit that age where it's like i don't need to learn anything more like i don't need i don't need web 3.0 like web 2's good i got it i'm fine i'm holding on that side so yeah anyways joseph probably said they're just kind of nodding along to how cool roy's story was and then immediately went to the police good on him he's the reason all this happened like he's the reason why like the

downfall happened because the police had no they these were all missing people for the most part except for the last one surely and stupidly enough roy gave such detail that police were able to triangulate him just from what joseph reiterated from that stories that he told for example he mentioned that one time they had maced a woman while trying to get her into their minivan and then joseph recounted that exact story verbatim and the police looked up the report saying yeah This woman showed up saying there was a silver minivan. There's two guys in it. And they maced me and tried to drag me into it.

Did Joseph get some sort of presidential medal of honor? I don't know. I hope he was still alive. We don't know something. Yeah. Unfortunately, Joseph Jackson's not an easy name to Google. Ah, true. Yeah.

So man, good for him. Good for him. That's great. Yeah. Like Roy Bates, like we gave him all the details that he needed to incriminate himself. That story, the one of the maised woman, she, her name is Robin Robeck. and she was she report all this like I said to the police but she couldn't identify the people at the time so the case kind of just went away after joseph described what happened the missing girls the abductions the police went back to robin with photos of roy and lawrence and she immediately identified them like it wasn't like just those two obviously it was like a photo lineup up like a dozen but she immediately picked out those two wow police are actually doing really good work here so they're starting to survey roy and they saw him dealing marijuana

which was a parole violation form that he was picked up on. Lawrence was also picked up, but it was more blunt. It was for the assault on Robin. Police searched Lawrence's apartment and Roy's bedroom in his mom's house. And they find basically what you would expect, just tons of photos of victims, of potential victims, of random girls walking down the beach, jewelry of the victims. They also found that audio recording. mentioned earlier. They said they also found acidic material, which apparently Lawrence intended

on using on the next victim. So thank God that stopped. Oh my God. Yeah. Roy was having a pretty hard time with this. He was having a hard time with being arrested. He actually waived his Miranda rights just to show how intelligent he is. And then he ultimately confessed to police. His argument at being mostly like, hey, it wasn't me, it was Lawrence all the, all long, you know, just like the, the prisoner's dilemma story basically, just rehashed in this situation, which again, like I said, I always kind of couch Lawrence as the antagonist, but like he's not like, Roy's not like some innocent bystandard to any of this stuff. No, I mean, he was there and he didn't tell, he didn't tell anyone.

Exactly. Like the other guy did. Exactly. And, uh, Roy was ultimately given a $10,000 bail, whereas Lawrence was outright. denied bail, which I don't even understand why Roy was given that option, seems incredibly generous. Yeah. Although, I mean, again, going for conversion rates, it might have been unattainable amounts of money for him anyways. Roy would eventually testify against Lawrence in return for the prosecution not seeking the death penalty, obviously. Roy ends up getting 45 years to life,

and then he became eligible for parole in 2010, but he actually, this is later on in his prison life he didn't actually go to his parole hearing which deferred it out another 10 years by the time the next 10 years came he was dead so didn't really matter not that he would have gotten released anyways right uh lawrence is incredible he just keeps on criming so he hired two inmates while he was in jail who to go kill robin because they're about to get released soon to prevent her from testifying so that isn't that just what what alec murdoch did too or tried to tell someone from jail? Oh, man.

It didn't, it wasn't that part of his story that he tried to have hired a hitman to tell someone? I'm trying to remember. No, it was, it was somebody, it was somebody else who tried to hire someone while in jail to kill the prosecution. It was one of the idiots that I covered. It wasn't, it wasn't the day bell guy. What was the other, oh, it was got, Drew Peterson. Was it?

Oh, yeah, okay. Gosh, that's so ridiculous. That is not going to work. It never works. For our listeners who are incarcerated, there is... You are constantly surveilled. There are no hit men. There are none.

No hit men. Obviously, he got caught for that. He ended up going to trial for the murders in 1981, having sort of pled guilty. He didn't reply when the judge asked him if he pleads guilty or not. So in that situation, it's just deferred that you're pleading not guilty. And so that's what the judge entered. his defense obviously tried to exclude the audio recording of Shirley's death and the judge actually told the jury because they would play this tape in court they told the jury for those of you who do not know what hell is like you will find out like that is the level of insane that we're talking about apparently when a tape was played the entire courtroom and observers in the courtroom were reduced to tears except for Lawrence and again I mentioned the impact this tape has had on people as an aside one of the main about Investigators in the crime committed suicide after this trial.

Oh, my God. And he wrote a 10-page suicide note that specifically referenced the tape and the murders is haunting him. Oh, no. How many murders? How many people did they go? It would have been five. Ugh. Well, it's five that we know of because they confess to it.

There's another, there's another one where the girl is at the dump site in the San Gabriel Mountains with pictures of her there. and they didn't confess to that one. So we don't know what happened to this one. She's still missing. Lawrence interestingly took the stand in his own defense, but it seems like that was mostly for his own entertainment value rather than any realistic hope of talking his way out of this.

He was obviously found guilty and obviously sentenced to death. Lawrence is just like, when you talk, he's just a piece of work. He continued being a pain in the ass from prison. He was actually declared what's called a vexatious litigant. At one point, which I love. like that is someone who just will not stop filing frivolous lawsuits for no reason so like there was one story about how he filed a frivolous lawsuit because he was served like a broken cookie and he called that cruel and unusual punishment like he was just in the ass yeah

once you're labeled the vexatious litigant you have to get permission from a judge or a lawyer to actually submit any more litigation so like that's like his right to foul complaints was basically taken away from him because he was so annoying because he was so annoying like he ended up dying in 2019 who was 79 years old which is like a pretty ripe old age and he was still on death row at the time roy also died surely thereafter he died in 2020 he was 70 uh he would have been 71 or 72 at this point or 7 8 year age gap um and that's kind of it like these were two guys who came together who the universe put together who in my mind i think that laurence would have just been the normal dude probably like

yeah his crimes weren't that bad until they met like he was just and he had a clear job like he was doing normal shit but i don't know boy kind of brought the worst out but also the reason i placed him as the antagonist is because roy kind of planted the seeds and then And Lawrence had the intellect to completely run with it. If it wasn't for Lawrence, Ray would have just been like running, just finding women and hitting them over the head with a baseball bat. Like, you know, like, there'd be no like system if it wasn't for Lawrence's

abilities, but. Right. So like separately, they might have done other things, but together that was really the thing. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's awful. It's all around awful.

Hey, the story. I think, again, this is one of those ones that you just don't hear about very often because it's just so bad. And I've literally skipped over, like, 95% of the details of what happens with these people. And there's a reason for it. If you want to read more, read more. But it's not going to make you feel good. No, it's going to make you feel terrible. Oh, my God.

Yeah. Those poor babies. Oh, I see a picture of the van. Not great. It looks like exactly what you think it would look like. Yeah. Yeah. Yuck.

it sounds like also some of the pictures i'm looking at from like movies about it from like the 70s and 80s i guess um it does look very saw you know the the stories of what they would do when they got up to the san gabriel mountains mm-hmm because i've been up there i mean you've been up there right like yeah it's not it's not it's not far from l.a it's desolate it is desolate there's like hundreds of little offshoot roads that you could go down that would take you places where nobody's ever going to find you yeah and it's just you with these two lunatics in a van that had its entire back stripped out there's a bed put in there and it's turned into like a workshop like it's yeah it is saw like it is close to that universe you can get and some of the some of the shit

they did was just like yeah do you think they used their tools for like other things Yes, I know they did. Like fixing things? No, I meant other things like torturing people. No, no, I mean, but like also they're like, oh, I need a screwdriver and then like would like use it even though they had just like murder zone with it. They just take the pieces of hair than like blood that's on it to off and start using it. And then like fix a chair.

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. I mean, they seem handy enough to build this mobile kill van. Ugh, that's terrible. So, so, you know, going on. back to like the entire premise of like what goes on i think they tell you this what if you do rehab that like you're not supposed to date somebody else in rehab right yeah because there's a underlying component in your brain that's going to maybe go backwards with each other yeah and this is a little bit of that too like if you make buddies with somebody while you're incarcerated

you maybe just like you know what like leave that relationship where it is that while you're in jail and then move on with your life and do something different like find other people go to the coffee shop go to the dog park and just like socialize with others i think like that's kind of the red flag here is like just there's no need to come back together like yeah that part of your life yeah that part of life happened it must have been magical but we can leave that in san lewis obisbo's prison when it does happen i feel like that the moment when they're like oh you have all these terrible thoughts too that was like the no turning back point you know they're like oh i found someone who's just like me in yeah it might be of leonard lake and charles ing like it's just like just garbage wrapped in

skin just showing it's just there's such trash and they bond over the things that nobody should bond over yeah totally so my aunt who will never listen to this one time told my mom a story and i don't have the details but she said that in san francisco in the 70s one of her friends was a gay man and he was killed by someone who came over and just shot him and i think it was charles ing yeah i know that story it was he was a radio dj or something and he put an ad in the paper and somebody just showed up and shot him and left and that's me and confess of that wow that's crazy i know um wow well that's awful yeah do you have any Do you have any ending banter that you want to go into?

Thank you to everyone who's listening. Please give us reviews. That's super helpful. I made an email address. So I have doomed to fail pod at gmail.com. If anybody wants to email us by anything. And we're going to work on maybe a newsletter. Just getting it out to more people is going to be really the thing to keep this going.

I think that's our next step. Yeah. Yeah. And thank you for taking point on that. Obviously, my last two weeks have been chaos. two weeks ago I had no electricity for a week and then last week I was on the road so thanks for taking a point on that stuff yeah totally I'm glad you're back and yeah everybody watch watch wild the movie and there's some toolbox killer movies maybe watch it maybe don't I'm not watching it yeah I might not do it I like I like the saw movies but I like them because they're like ridiculous and not 100% accurate and really yeah so they didn't really happen yeah Yeah. Well, thank you, Taylor. Hopefully you have a great weekend.

Oh, you too. And safe travels for work the next week or two. Thanks. Yeah, I guess I'll see you next week. Cool. Thanks all. Bye. Bye.