Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries - 69: Hit Man: The True Story of a Fake Contract Killer

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

What if I told you the most sought-after hit man in Houston in the 90's wasn't really a hit man? He worked for the police Gary Johnson spent his career working with members of his community who thought they were hiring someone to kill their loved ones. They were other police officers, churchgoers, and parents. But they all had a dark side, and they all wanted instant gratification. And now, Gary is the subject of a new movie streaming on Netflix, HIT MAN. TW: brief mention of suicide Subscribe on Patreon for bonus content and to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society. Patrons have access to ad-free listening and bonus content. And members of our High Council on Patreon have access to our after-show called Footnotes. Apple subscriptions are now live! Get access to ad-free episodes and bonus episodes when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Follow on Tik Tok and Instagram for a daily dose of horror. We have a monthly newsletter now! Be sure to sign up for updates and more. This episode is sponsored by Miracle Made. Upgrade your sleep with Miracle Made! Go to TryMiracle.com/HSP and use the code HSP to claim your FREE 3 PIECE TOWEL SET and SAVE over 40% OFF.

On a spring evening in 1989, a well-dressed woman named Kathy nervously picked at her fingernails. She was at a Houston area bowling alley for her company's corporate league. But as she sat and watched her co-workers crack jokes and bowl gutter balls, her mind was somewhere else. She kept looking over her shoulder at the front of the bowling alley, eyes fixated on the entrance, waiting in nervous anticipation. And that's when she saw him. A man in an old t-shirt and jeans entered the bowling

alley and walked over to the bar. On his neck was a chain with a silver human skull as the pendant. He looked like a biker and blended in with the other regulars at the bar. That must be him, she thought to herself. When her coworkers weren't watching, she slunk away from the lane. She had never imagined she would be in this situation. She practiced what she would say to the man in her mind over and over again. How do you do this casually? The man must be used to these kinds of encounters, the ones that begin and end in suburban bowling alleys.

Kathy was not, and she braced herself as she approached him. Come with me, she said. The man scooted off the barstool and followed. This is it, Cathy thought to herself as she power walked towards her car in the lot, the man silently following behind her. How was she going to face her husband after this? How was she going to go her husband after this? How was she going to go home and pretend everything was normal? Her friend had connected the two and she was the

one who told him to meet her at this bowling alley, but now she wasn't sure if she regretted it. No time to think. She opened the driver's side door of her car and climbed in, and the man popped the passenger side. When she turned to look at him, she saw that he was already looking at her. He was probably around 40, with brown hair and kind brown eyes, slender build, and while he looked like a tough guy at the bar, he now had a softness to him. His brow had relaxed and he carried himself almost like an old friend. Made Cathy relax a little bit as she took a deep breath and prepared to say what she needed to say, the reason they were both here in the first place.

I'd like to hire you to kill my husband for me." And just like that, she knew there was no going back. This episode is brought to you by Miracle Made. I know I talk about getting hot at night, but that was in LA. Currently I am in Texas, where apparently summer started weeks ago and sweating is a necessary part of sleep hygiene. But not for me. No thank you. I brought my MiracleMaid sheets with me to Texas and everything else is in storage but not these sheets. That's because MiracleMaid makes sheets that help regulate your temperature while you sleep, which helps you sleep better at night because the perfect temperature is so important to sleeping.

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Go to trymiracle.com slash HSP and use code HSP to claim your free three piece towel set and save over 40% off. Again, that's trymiracle.com slash HSP to treat yourself. Thank you to Miracle Made for sponsoring this episode. Welcome to Heart Starts Founding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. As always, I'm your host, Kaelyn Moore. I want to talk about Hitmen. Or, really, I want to talk about the types of people who hire Hitmen. Because it's probably not who you think. Later this week, Netflix is releasing their new summer movie, Hitman,

starring Glenn Powell and directed by Richard Linklater. The movie is a fictional retelling of a very real story. It's the story of a hitman, but at the core of the real story that inspired the movie is a story of the people who chose to hire someone to kill someone they know. The movie is based on the fantastic reporting of my favorite true crime journalist, Skip Hollinsworth, a writer for Texas Monthly.

This episode will reference his article on the case as well as other coverage and articles on it. And I should mention here, at some points I'll be building out scenes and fictionalizing elements based on the real information we have on the case, just as I did with the opening scene of this episode. I also want to take a quick second here to announce some fun new updates that we have. So you may notice that the show has a new cover photo, which I'm so excited about. The last cover shot we had was taken in the Paris Catacombs on an iPhone. And this one is straight from inside the Rogue Detecting Society headquarters. And also, this is a really fun one, Heart Starts Pounding now has a YouTube channel.

I'm linking it in the description, but head over there for our new segment called The Attic, where I tell you about the internet's dark curiosities from, well, my attic. Okay, and with that, let's dive right back in. A few weeks before Kathy asked a stranger to murder her husband for her, A few weeks before Kathy asked a stranger to murder her husband for her, a phone call came in to Houston area police. It was a bail bondsman. He said that a former high school classmate of his had reached out to him asking if he knew anyone she could pay to kill her husband.

The bondsman felt incredibly uncomfortable with this ask, so he called the cops. But the police didn't have resources to look into this kind of case, so they called the DA's Special Crimes Division to ask if they had anyone who handled murder-for-hire cases. The lead investigator said that they didn't. But looking around, he noticed a man in the office named Gary Johnson sitting at his desk. Gary was a 42 year old investigator who mostly tracked down stolen cars and sometimes helped with stakeouts. He never wanted to be an investigator, he wanted to be an

academic. But when he wasn't accepted to a PhD program in psychology, he wound up with a job at the DA's office. But Gary was a good looking guy, he was decent under pressure and a fantastic listener. And maybe that's why his boss got an idea. Hey Gary, his boss shouted, you're our new hitman. And just like that, Gary was plucked off his desk and told to meet the 37 year old Cathy Scott at the bowling alley. He had no idea what he was doing at first. He was bookish with wire rimmed glasses and now he had to go pretend to be a hitman? What did a hitman even look like?

Gary chose a biker persona and named him Mike Kane as if he were going off the representation we've seen of hitmen in movies. He figured that the tougher he looked, the more believable it would be that he killed people for money. And sitting in Cathy's car, it seemed to be working. During the encounter, Gary was wearing a wire and he was instructed to get details and verbal confirmation that Cathy was fully intending to pay for a hit on her husband. Now Gary had worked with criminals before, they were usually tough to crack, but Cathy

seemed desperate and mild-mannered. He wouldn't have been surprised to learn that she had never committed a crime in her life. Yes, he had a whole tough guy act planned out, but sitting here now, it seemed like Kathy just needed a friend. He dropped the act and just started asking her thoughtful questions about her situation, choosing to come across as sympathetic rather than brutish.

And just like that, all of Kathy's walls came down. She had been holding in her frustrations with her husband of four months, her fifth husband in 10 years actually. And she told Gary everything. She told him how she was frustrated that her husband had removed her name from their checking account after he got upset about how much money she was spending. There was a lot of money on the line here. $50,000 worth of insurance money, $47,000 of retirement money,

and two houses that would all be hers if her husband only died. Kathy told Mike that the best place for her husband to be killed would probably be the black neighborhood. They had lots of drug problems anyways, she said, so no one would suspect a thing. Any sympathy that Gary may have had for this woman was now completely gone.

And that's when she leaned forward and told him she would hire him for $2,500 and pay him a hundred bucks upfront. Bingo. That's what he needed her to say on the wire. Gary told her he would do it, got out of the car, and within minutes, the bowling alley parking lot was lit up with lights and sirens from cop cars. He had successfully done his first sting. Kathy would go on to be sentenced to a whopping 80 years in prison for trying to order the execution

of her husband. At her trial, she tried to make it seem like Gary had charmed her into thinking she wanted her husband dead, but she didn't really want that. Gary hadn't coaxed Cathy though, really at all. No, he just had this almost superhuman ability to listen to people and ask questions, and they would tell him everything he needed. So with that, he had an official new job within the DA's office. He was their fake hitman. Gary, as you may imagine, was not the guy who anyone expected would play a convincing killer for hire.

He had a master's degree in psychology and taught a class on human sexuality at a local community college. Three times divorced, he was closer to his two cats, Id and Ego, than with any other person. Yet it was this experience that most likely made him the perfect pretend contract killer. Instead of approaching cases from the angle of a cop trying to get a confession,

he played therapist and allowed people to confess their darkest desires to him. His next investigation took him to 32-year-old Catherine Beasle, who had asked a private detective she hired, quote, how much it would cost to get someone killed. That was enough for the detective to contact the police, and Johnson was assigned to the case.

Beasle had seen a man named Nelson in 1991. She claimed that they had a proper relationship, but Nelson claimed it was just a brief thing. That part isn't super important. What is important though, is that Nelson was married. And when he got nervous and broke off their entanglement, Beasel flew off the handle. She started calling him nonstop and sent him letters when he wouldn't answer the phone. She even went so far as to sue him for medical bills

for ailments she decided were his fault. When none of that sufficed as revenge, she got in touch with Johnson at At their first meeting, which I cannot confirm was at a Denny's, but it may very well have been, that was Gary's favorite meeting spot. She told him that she didn't want Nelson dead, she just wanted someone to go over and break his legs and trash his apartment. But Gary wasn't interested in meddling in the affairs of a woman who wanted to get back at her lover.

Once again, he was in character as tough biker guy Mike Kane, and maybe being dressed like Bruce Springsteen gave him more confidence than his regular desk job persona. But he got up and walked away from Beasel. Call me when you want the real thing," he said. Not long after that, Beasel asked Gary to meet her again. She came equipped with a few hundred bucks, a picture of Nelson, and information about his schedule. She wanted him dead, and she was ready to pay Gary to do it. to pay Gary to do it. Once again, that's all Gary needed to hear, and Beasel was arrested, though she was only sentenced to 10 years of deferred adjudication. Everything would change for Gary that same year, in 1991. That year, the infamous pom-pom mom, Wanda Halloway, tried to hire a hitman

to kill another woman. See, she was nervous her pre-teen daughter wouldn't make the cheerleading team, so she plotted to have the mother of her daughter's rival killed in hopes it would distract the girl from trying out. Wanda was caught when she reached out to an undercover cop to handle the hit, but it was so mishandled that the case ended up being mostly a nightmare for prosecutors. After that, Gary's DA office put out word that if anyone wanted a sting operation done right, Gary was their guy. Soon, his black landline was constantly ringing off the hook. If you're wondering, like I was, how many possible murder-for-hire plots could have

been happening in the Houston area in the 1990s, the number will probably shock you. Johnson estimated that from 1989 to 2001, he investigated over 300 cases of people searching for hitmen to hire. So I talked about this in episode 41, two Marys, two murders, but I am always shocked when I hear about the types of people who hire hitmen. Gary was even surprised by his clientele.

When he came up with the persona of Mike Kane, the tough biker who doesn't mess around, he thought he needed to look like a tough guy because he would be dealing with hardened convicts or dangerous psychopaths. He didn't realize that most of his clients would be middle to upper class men and women around his age with good jobs and families. They were people who blended into society but had dark impulses and wanted instant gratification. Wolves in sheep's clothing. This is how Gary described the people who reached out to him. Quote, except for one or two instances, the people I meet are not ex-cons. If ex-cons want somebody dead, they know what to do.

My people have spent their lives living within the law. A lot of them have never even gotten a traffic ticket. Yet they have developed such a frustration with their place in the world that they think they have no other option but to eliminate whoever is causing their frustration. They are all looking for the quick fix, which has become the American way. Today, people can pay to get their televisions fixed and their garbage picked up. So why can't they pay me, a hitman, to fix their lives? So when Gary was approached by one of these people, it always disappointed him.

He got a glimpse into all of the bad actors in society, even the ones that no one expected. Like the cop in his own community who wanted to kill his ex-wife after the break. One of the most shocking clients to be connected with Gary was William Peoples, a veteran cop who was highly esteemed in his community. Peoples felt like his ex-wife was costing him too much money in child support payments and asked another cop who also wanted his own ex-wife killed to help him find a hitman.

They contacted a criminal who was on parole who was referred to Gary, who as a reminder worked for the police. It seemed like the cops had no idea they were working with one of their own, which is a testament to how skilled Gary was. People's offered to pay $10,000 to kill his ex-wife and $ 2,000 more to kill her new husband as well. He was eventually sentenced to 10 years in jail, but the other officer was never convicted. There was also the woman of God, 61 year old Patsy Haggard. Patsy had asked a young woman in her neighborhood who had struggled with drug use if she knew a hitman, a common mistake.

The woman called the police who instructed her to introduce Patsy to Gary. Patsy immediately became infatuated with the handsome hitman and offered to sleep with him during some of their clandestine meetings to discuss the plan, of which he declined every time. Patsy found Gary to be understanding and patient, and she opened up to him immediately. She told him about the time that she burned down her kitchen just to annoy her husband, and now she wanted him dead. The confessions were coming so easily

that Gary realized he didn't really need to be playing such a tough character. Instead, he became the master of being able to change his appearance and parts of his personality to suit each person he worked with. With women, he played a softer character who listened and didn't interrupt, and he was shocked at how much they would just open up to him. For men, he would play it a little tougher to convince them he was capable of doing the job. But usually for everyone, he would come across as sympathetic towards his clients. He understood their marital troubles or their financial woes, but he also came across as

cold-blooded enough to kill without feeling bad. He could off your ex-lover and make it look like a suicide, no problem. He could car bomb your sister so she wouldn't get your parents' inheritance. He would even offer to break your wife's neck and make it look like she fell. All because he understood why you wanted that. But Gary never pressured any of his clients into confessing. Like Catherine Beasel, if he felt like they weren't serious enough about hiring a hitman, he would just drop it. There was no use in throwing someone in jail just for having dark

thoughts. Sometimes people would get very drunk and say they wanted their husbands dead. Sometimes people would get very drunk and say they wanted their husbands dead. Those people were usually not serious and he never pursued those leads that far. He needed proof that they wanted to go through with the plot and were willing to pay for it. So maybe you're like me and you're wondering how dealing with these kinds of people

affected him psychologically. Well, on one hand, he felt like he was saving lives. If these people weren't connected to him, they were going to find another hitman. A real hitman. These people were dead set on having someone killed. There were also times where he felt like he almost understood where the person was coming from. One person reached out to Gary to throw his ex-wife's new boyfriend down a well because he was mistreating his daughter. The father felt powerless in the situation and was trying to protect his child. But on the other hand, over time, he started realizing just how much evil there was in the world.

him, he started realizing just how much evil there was in the world. On January 6, 2000, Gary took a meeting with 32-year-old Bobby Wykley. Bobby nervously bounced his leg up and down as he dreamed up ways Gary could kill his 28-year-old wife and their nine month old baby. Maybe he could break her neck and make it look like she slipped. Or perhaps the brake line of her car could be cut and the two would just slam into a tree. As long as it looked like an accident, he could collect the insurance money on their lives.

Gary had met with a lot of unsympathetic people, but Bobby was something else. Killing your own child for the insurance money? I'm sure in that moment, Gary wanted to just reach over and wring that guy's neck. I mean, I would. But he was a seasoned pro at this job. So he listened to the man, asking a few questions to try to understand where this desire was coming from. I'm just greedy, that's all it boils down to, Bobby reportedly told Gary during the meeting. Over the last few years, he had gotten an idea in his head that started as a seed, but

grew and grew and grew into an obsession. Weigli wanted to become a private detective. There was something about living a life as a man of mystery that enticed him. He loved the idea of owning rare guns and going to detective school. But, he told Gary, he needed money to go live this life. Money that he didn't have. Money that was sitting in his family's $650,000 life insurance policy. Why not just kill your wife?

Gary asked. Bobby didn't want to deal with the child once he was living his new life. It would be better if the kid was gone too. Or, he waffled, maybe the kid could live? After their meeting, Bobby jumped in his car with his kid in the backseat and pawned a gun he owned for $250 for the down payment. As he did this, officers rushed to his home to tell his wife what was going on and get her to safety. Once Bobby handed the money over to another undercover officer, he was in handcuffs. It's relatively easy to not feel bad for the people that were soliciting Gary's services. I mean, to just ask any person they assumed was a criminal for help finding a hitman is

certainly a choice. These people were in their little bubbles and assumed anyone with a criminal record was willing to help them kill their spouse. They didn't realize that many of the criminals they approached were now informants for the police. But also, as more people were falling for Gary's trap, more publications were writing about him. By the mid-90s, Gary's name was out there publicly as an undercover cop posing as a

hitman. He became terrified that he would one day sit down with a client and they would look at him and say, you're Gary Johnson, aren't you? If that were to happen, the jig would be up and his life could be in jeopardy. However, that never happened. People never thought to dig into the person they were hiring as their hitman. They went into the situation with blind trust, which is surprising when you take into account how prominent some of Gary's clients were.

Take Lynn Kilroy, for example. Gary and the 39-year-old Lynn Kilroy sat in a hotel in the nice part of town one October evening. Instead of hospital lighting and leaky faucets, this hotel had 1,000 thread count sheets and air conditioning. This time, the client was a little more high profile. Lynn sprawled out on the king bed and ran through a laundry list of complaints she had. First, she hated her husband. 34-year-old heir to a gas and oil fortune

named William Smiley Kilroy Jr. Mostly, she hated that he had cerebral palsy and that she had to help him. Despite only being married 13 months, she was tired of feeling handicapped by his, well, handicap. What was Lynn's draw to her husband in the first place, you may ask? Well, William was the only son of one of Houston's most important cultural benefactors,

Jeanne Kilroy, and he was set to inherit astounding wealth upon his parents' death. Gary glanced over at Lynn. Her sparkling diamond necklace made little reflections on her face. He was confused. What was her angle? Lynn was raised middle class and had a business degree. The life she was living with William in their 15-room home was far better than the life she was living without him

She wasn't set to receive much if he died did she really feel like his disability was worth killing him over and That's when Lynn revealed a deeper layer of her hellish plot. I Just want to be with Derek. She sighed Derek was Lynn's lover. The two met, get this, four days prior. You can't even watch every episode of The Office in four days, and Lynn met a man and planned her husband's murder in that time.

Lynn worried that if she filed for divorce from William, he would use his family's influence to receive full custody of their six-month-old daughter. Better be safe than sorry and just have him whacked, she joked, looking up at Gary with a pouty mouth. Ideally, she would like to have her husband killed while she was gone. Later that week, she was going to leave with Derek for a vacation. Could you just do it then? she asked with the same pouty expression.

Gary looked at Lyn with his signature collected and sympathetic expression. Normally, he may want to act fast in this situation. If Lyn couldn't hire Gary ASAP, in this situation. If Lynn couldn't hire Gary ASAP, maybe her lover would go off and find a real hitman and have Lynn's poor husband killed for real. But Gary wasn't worried about that. Derek wasn't going to go find a real hitman. No. Loverboy Derek was also an undercover cop. See, a little while before she met Derek, Lynn had been complaining to her neighbor about her husband William in a way that made the neighbor fear she was homicidal. Worried she might actually kill William, the neighbor went to his mother, who hired Derek Hartsfield, a real cop, to spy on Lynn.

The affair Lynn thought she was having was really all due to Jeannie Kilroy's intervention. Don't get me wrong, Derek was very convincing and very into his role. He slept with Lynn within hours of knowing her, and two days into their affair, Lynn asked Derek if he knew a hitman. Gary knew all of this as he sat on the stiff king bed of the hotel room. He didn't show his hand at all as he asked Lynn questions to get her intentions on the tape. She was being quite vague as she spoke, saying things like, quote,

I want away from him. The only way you're gonna be free is if he's dead, the faux hitman said. I just want you to understand how serious this is. Do what you need to do, she told him. Then she reached for her designer bag and pulled out $200,000 worth of jewelry and offered it to Gary as payment. "'There's another 50,000 in it for you "'before we leave for Brazil,' she said. "'And with that, Gary got up and left the room.

"'He was running late for the college class "'he was teaching that evening, "'and the cops would be at the door any minute now.'" Lynn would go on to be sentenced to just five years probation for the solicitation. Her lawyers argued that the fear of losing her child in a custody battle prevented her from thinking straight, but Gary knew better. There was really only one time where someone realized Gary was a cop and backed out of the deal.

But it was only because the informant that connected the two felt bad and revealed Gary's identity. No one else ever double crossed Gary and none of the clients ever figured out who he was. One time, while a client was in the middle of telling Gary how he wanted his wife killed, the police came to the door. This man named Roberts Holliday had spent weeks planning the murder of his wife,

even going so far as to report her for being suicidal so that when she died, no one would think it was suspicious. Eventually, he asked a topless dancer at a club for recommendations for a hitman. And that dancer, God bless her, immediately called the cops. Holliday asked Gary, who was using his mic character for this meeting, if he could slit his wife's wrists and make it look like she had done it herself. That way he would get her life insurance policy and could file a malpractice lawsuit against her doctor.

Within minutes of agreeing to pay Gary, the police banged on the motel door where the meeting was taking place. In a state of fear, Holliday held onto Gary and asked him what they should do, not realizing his hitman was the one who tipped off the police. But as the early 90s shifted into the late 90s, the economy got a little better and business died down. Quote, it's very much tied to the economy, Gary once said in an interview with the Washington Post.

He later told Skip Hollinsworth, when the economy is good, people don't get so frantic. But when it starts going bad, everyone gets a little bit crazier and starts thinking about knocking someone else off. During a particularly dry time in the late 90s, he said that his only solicitations were for the murder of witnesses during trials.

However, in the early 2000s, another economic downturn happened and work started picking up again. Editor's note kind of makes me think about what's happening these days. It's during the early 2000s that a woman was sitting at home when she heard a knock on her door. It was Gary.

Your husband has put a $20,000 hit on you, he informed her. Her husband was a 60-year-old used car salesman who was upset at the prospect of his wife getting something he wanted during their divorce. This time it was their property. Initially the man had asked a neighbor to perform the hit and the neighbor got in touch with Gary not realizing he was a cop. Gary told the woman he was planning on arresting her husband. There was just one problem.

The man said he would only pay if the hit was confirmed, and Gary needed the money to prove the man was serious. Would you mind helping us stage your murder? he asked. With the help of a few other officers, the woman lied down on a tarp with her hands and feet bound in tape. Gary even added some ketchup to her hair to get the full effect. On an early 2000s point and shoot camera, the whole thing looked believable. And it wasn't long before the police were at the man's door carting him away. And the wife lived to tell her side of the story. Doing the work that Gary did, it would have been easy for him to become heartless over time. I mean, he had seen the worst of the worst.

People who were willing to have their children killed to pursue their fantasies. People who wanted to kill their disabled partners to run away with their lovers. But surprisingly for Gary, he never became heartless. He developed a soft spot for people in a way. Not everyone who wanted to hire a hitman was selfishly trying to solve their problems. Later in his career, he heard about a woman who asked a Starbucks employee

if she knew where to find a hitman. She wanted her husband killed. Gary was about to take the case when he decided to dig into the woman's past a bit, and what he found really affected him. The woman's husband was abusive, horribly so, and she feared that if she left him, he would just hunt her down and do god knows what. She felt like her hands were tied and the only way forward was a world without him in it. It would have been easy for Gary to do his usual routine. Drink watered down coffee in a booth at Denny's while she

told him what she wanted him to do. He would lean forward at just the right time so her confession was clear on the wire under his shirt. They would lean forward at just the right time so her confession was clear on the wire under his shirt. They would go through the charade of her digging out $100 from her tattered purse, probably the only $100 she owned, as an upfront payment. But Gary didn't want to do that. He didn't think that would solve this problem. Instead, he referred the woman to a therapist, as well as a social service agency that could help her safely get away from her relationship. He wanted to make sure she would have a secure shelter she could go to. I said at the beginning of this episode that I didn't want to only talk about Gary Johnson,

the fake hitman, but the types of people who hired him. A lot of the people Gary got involved with wanted money. They were afraid their partners would do too well in a divorce. They were nervous their sister would get a better inheritance. They wanted to be with their lovers or start new careers. All issues that could have been resolved, might I add, without murder. But when he came across someone who legitimately needed help, who actually had to get out of a tough

situation and felt like if she didn't kill her partner, he would kill her, he still tried to help her. It seemed like Gary was in this job to save people. He was saving the loved ones of his clients and he may have saved that woman's life as well. Gary sadly passed away in 2023 at the age of 76, but his story lives on in the Netflix movie Hitman. If you get the chance to watch it, let me know what you think What parts of Gary's real story made it into the film and next week? Fun news for everyone you can check out my YouTube video that I'll be doing breaking down the movie versus the real story So make sure you go right over to YouTube and subscribe to heart starts pounding

I'm gonna share the link in the description of this episode make sure you go right over to YouTube and subscribe to Heart Starts Pounding. I'm going to share the link in the description of this episode. This has been Heart Starts Pounding, written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Additional research by Marissa Dow. Sound design and mix by PeachTreeSound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or a case

request? Check out heartstartspounding.com. Until next time, stay curious.