MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories - The Mayor's Wife (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

Episode Date: May 11, 2026

On an evening in August 2000, a city council candidate stood behind a podium at a high school in small-town Alabama. He was speaking about why he'd entered the race, and he said he wanted a platform to discuss an important issue – the unsolved murder of a local school district employee. Right there, in front of all the news cameras and microphones, the candidate said he knew who committed the crime – because it had been revealed to him in a dream.   You can WATCH all new & exclusive MrBallen podcast episodes on my YouTube channel, just called "MrBallen" - https://www.youtube.com/c/MrBallen If you want to reach out to me, contact me on Instagram, Twitter or any other major social media platform, my username on all of them is @mrballen Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

One evening in August of 2000, a city council candidate stood behind a podium at a high school in small town, Alabama. He was speaking about why he'd entered the race in the first place. And he said it was because he wanted a platform to discuss a very important issue. And that issue was the unsolved murder of a local school district employee. And then, right there in front of all the news cameras and microphones, this candidate said he knew who committed that crime. Because it had been revealed to him in a dream. But before we get into today's story, if you're a fan of the strange, dark and mysterious, delivered in story format, and you've come to the right place, because that's all we do, so if that's of interest to you, please invite the follow button to your next

big house party. But don't give them the right address. Okay, let's get into today's story. On the morning of August 4, 1998, a 49-year-old woman named Charlotte Waits rushed around her kitchen in Lynette, Alabama. She reached past her husband Barry, who was washing the dishes at the sink, and she grabbed a coffee mug from the cupboard. It was a Tuesday morning, and they were both getting ready for busy days at work. Charlotte was a school administrator, and Barry was the acting mayor of the small town of Lynette, a very tight-knit community of about 9,000 residents. And as Barry left the sink to go grab his briefcase from the dining room,

Charlotte, who was pouring herself some coffee, reminded him that she had a hair appointment later that morning, and also that she'd be home later than usual because she had a meeting with her attorneys that afternoon. So Charlotte was unfortunately in the middle of a legal battle with her cousin Wayne over the inheritance from her late uncle's will. The uncle had left a lot of valuable land to Charlotte, but Wayne thought that he deserved some of that land too. So basically he was contesting the will, and today was the day that Charlotte, Wayne, and their attorneys were going to meet an attempt to hash it out. Barry asked Charlotte if she had decided what she was going to say at this meeting. And Charlotte shook her head and said no and said she was still kind of. thinking it over. Now, she knew she didn't want to just give up the land, but she also knew that

she didn't necessarily want to risk tearing her whole family apart over money. Barry walked over to her and put a hand on her shoulder and reassured her that whatever happened, the family would get through it. Then he gave her a kiss on the cheek, and he left for work. Once he was out the door, Charlotte left the kitchen and went upstairs and knocked on the bedroom door of her 17-year-old daughter Kara. And as soon as she did this, Charlotte heard a groan from inside the room. So opened the door up, and she found Kara curled up in bed. And Kara was looking very tired and very pale. But, you know, Charlotte knew this was not just a teenager who didn't want to, like, go to school or something. The reason that Kara looked the way she did and was sounding the way she did

is because Kara was pregnant, and she was dealing with pretty obvious morning sickness. Now, Charlotte was not thrilled about her 17-year-old daughter being pregnant. But more than that, she was especially not thrilled because she absolutely hated Kara's boyfriend, Dave Reed. Dave drank and got into trouble with the law, and he just was not the kind of guy Charlotte wanted her daughter around. At one point, before Kara was pregnant, Charlotte and Barry had forbid her from seeing Dave. They said, you cannot date him. But in secret, the two had continued to see each other, and now Kara was pregnant. And so Charlotte really couldn't help but feel deeply disappointed in her daughter. But she also knew her daughter was going to need a lot of support from her,

not just to finish high school, but also to be a teen mom. And so for right now, Charlotte was just trying to keep the peace. So with that in mind, Charlotte stepped into the bedroom and asked Kara how she was feeling. And Kara just kind of shrugged and said she was okay, just a little nauseous. Charlotte was sympathetic and nodded along and kind of helped straighten up a room for a second. And then she reminded Kara that her older sister Heather was coming home from college that night. And so it would be nice if they all had dinner together as a family. And Kara said, you know, she did have a babysitting gig for basically the whole day, but she promised she would make it home for dinner. Charlotte was pleased and told Kara she would see her later that night and then she said she had to get to work. So Charlotte left

the bedroom, went downstairs, grabbed her purse, and then out the door she headed to the garage to go to her car. Later that same morning, around 11.30 a.m., Charlotte drove back down her quiet residential street toward her house. She lived in a respectable upper middle class neighborhood where basically all the neighbors seemed to know each other and historically crime had been very low. Although recently there had been a string of robberies in the area, which had some people on edge, but, you know, for the most part, Charlotte and her family felt safe in their home. Charlotte was having a pretty hectic day. She'd had a very busy morning at work and then she'd gone to the salon for a haircut and pretty soon she had to get back to the office for a few more hours before her afternoon meeting with her cousin

Wayne and all the lawyers. However, Charlotte never really liked how her hair looked right after leaving the salon. So first, she wanted to stop by her house and restile it herself before heading back to work and finishing up her day. So she pulled into her garage and ran inside the house and went straight upstairs right to the bathroom. As she was plugging in her blow dryer, she heard a door open downstairs. And the sound surprised her because she thought that Kara was off at her babysitting gig. And Barry, her husband, usually didn't come home during his lunch break. So she set the blow dryer down and went to go see who it was. A few hours later, around 4.30 p.m., Charlotte's 21-year-old daughter, Heather, pulled up to the house. She just arrived from college, which was located a few towns

away, and she was excited to see her parents and sister when they all got home from work that night. But as Heather parked her car in the driveway, she noticed something odd. She saw the garage door was open and her mom's car was parked there. And this surprised her because when she had spoken to her mom on the phone the day before, Charlotte had said she probably wouldn't be home until around six. But Heather didn't think much of it. So she just grabbed her laundry hamper and a couple of grocery bags filled with her stuff out of the back seat of the car. And then as she walked into the garage to make her way into the house, she saw the door that led into the house was actually already open, but just a crack, which was kind of odd. Like there's no reason that door would be left open. And so now,

sensing that maybe something was off here, Heather walked up and slowly pushed that door open and she just called out for her mother to see what she was doing. But there was no answer. And so Heather stepped into the house, into the kitchen, and set down her hamper in the bags. And then she began walking around the first floor of the house to just see where her mom was. She didn't hear her. She couldn't see her. She's just walking around. And as she rounded the corner into the foyer, she saw her mom, but her mom was laying at the foot of the stairs totally motionless. Heather immediately ran to her mom and just grabbed her to see if she was okay, but when she touched her mom's leg, it was ice cold.

And so she ran into the other room, picked up the phone and called 911. A few minutes later, Lieutenant Richard Carter of the Lynette Police Department sped down Charlotte's residential street with his lights flashing and siren blaring. He was responding to a 911 call about a woman who had been found unresponsive. And he'd been very surprised when the dispatcher told him whose house this woman had been found inside of. It was the home of the town's mayor, Barry Waits. Now, as he pulled up in front of the home, he saw this young woman come running out the front door, crying hysterically. And so Lieutenant Carter, he stopped his car, he got out and he intercepted the young woman

who begged him to come in and help her mom. And so Carter and this young woman rushed over to the house and then he told her to stay outside while he went in and investigated. And so she did. She stayed out front and just quietly wept to herself while Lieutenant Carter stepped through the front door and right away, right inside, he saw what appeared to be a middle-aged woman lying on her back at the bottom of a staircase and she was totally motionless. Nearby, the contents of a purse were strewn all across the floor. Carter immediately knelt down and felt for a pulse on this woman, but there was nothing. And so Carter, he stood back up and just, just kind of assess the scene, and what he noticed was there was foam at the corner of this woman's

mouth. So he wondered if maybe she had had a seizure or some sort of allergic reaction at the top of the stairs and sort of had lost her balance and maybe fell down the stairs and the fall had killed her. But then he also noticed there were definitely a few drops of blood on the front of her blouse. And when he looked closer at her face, he noticed there were pretty obvious scratch marks on her chin, and also a red mark around her neck. And he realized this woman likely had not just fallen down the stairs. She'd been attacked, beaten, and potentially strangled. Later that day, around 5 p.m., Lieutenant Richard Carter sorted through a pile of dirty laundry

on the floor of Charlotte Waits' laundry room. For the past half hour, he'd been scouring the crime scene for clues, and now he was holding two white towels that were dotted with reddish-brown spots that looked like blood that had just begun to dry. He called over a forensics officer and told him to take the towels into evidence. He couldn't be sure yet that the blood was even Charlott's, but if it was, it could be a potential clue. After searching the whole house, Carter actually had a pretty strong theory about what had happened to Charlotte. There were no signs of forced entry, and the TV and other valuables were still in the home.

Charlotte's purse had been dumped out on the floor just a few feet away from the stairs, but her cash and her credit cards were still in her wallet. So Carter did not think this was a robbery gone wrong. He thought maybe the killer just kind of dumped out the purse at the end to make it seem like a robbery, but it was a weak attempt. This did not seem like a robbery. What this seemed like, at least to Carter at this point, was that Charlotte had been intentionally killed by somebody that she knew. But just then, Carter heard commotion by the front door. And so he went to go see what was going on, and he saw there was a man out on the doorstep literally being physically held back by two forensics officers.

And then after a second, Carter recognized who it was. it was the town's mayor. Barry waits, the victim's husband. The officers were trying to keep him outside, but Barry pushed past them, and right away, he saw what they were kind of keeping him from, which was his wife's body, laying there on the floor, obviously dead. And when Barry saw that, he just froze and began to hyperventilate. At this point, Carter didn't try to force Barry back outside. Instead, he gently grabbed Barry's arm and led him into the next room and sat him down on the couch and just tried to get him to calm down. but it was like he couldn't. Barry was gasping and, like, really was struggling to breathe. And then he actually doubled over and clutched at his chest. And Carter thought maybe he's having a heart attack. And so instead of trying to talk to him, he just yelled for somebody to call an ambulance.

Later that same night, around 8 p.m., Lieutenant Carter stepped into the lobby of the local hospital's emergency department. He showed his badge to the nurse at the front desk and then asked to see Barry waits. But the nurse said he would have to wait because they were still running Tessalonberry and he couldn't have any visitors until they were sure he was stable. And Carter was pretty disappointed to hear this. Not because he was, you know, desperate to get in there and console the mayor. It was actually because he needed to talk to the mayor. This is the spouse of a potential murder victim. He needed to know what Barry knew. And so he turned to leave, but before he did,

he noticed sitting in the waiting room was Barry and Charlotte's daughter, Heather, who, you know, Carter and Heather, they had spoken for a few minutes back at the house earlier that day when Heather was the one who came running out and directed him into the house. They had spoken a little bit, but Carter thought, you know what, if I can't talk to Barry, maybe I can talk to Heather. Maybe she's calmed down enough that we could have a real conversation right now. And so he walked over to her. As Carter approached, Heather looked up and definitely recognized who he was and sort of gave off body

language that it was okay for him to come and sit down. And so Carter, he walked over. He sat down next to her. and he saw there was actually another girl, a teenager who was sitting next to Heather, and Heather quickly turned and pointed to her and said this was her younger sister, Kara. Lieutenant Carter nodded and introduced himself to Kara, and then he asked both women, you know, how was their dad doing? And Heather said that the doctors so far believed he was not having heart attack,

that it was likely a panic attack, but they were going to monitor him overnight just to be sure. Both of the girls seemed very upset. They had tears in their eyes. They both appeared to be in shock. they hadn't done anything suspicious, really. Carter knew he couldn't just rule them out as suspects yet. Like he had to really ask them some pointed questions. So he took out his notebook and as delicately as he could,

he began asking them some questions. So by this point, Carter's officers had already learned that Charlotte had left her work around 11 a.m. that morning. And it was not until about 1 p.m. that her coworkers called her house because she had not come back to work. And they said there was no answer. And so that meant the murder. Carter had likely taken place sometime between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.

So with that in mind, Carter asked Heather and Kara where they'd been that morning and afternoon, with a focus on 11 to 1. Kara told him she'd been babysitting all day. And Heather said she'd been at her school, her college, which was 30 miles away, until around 4 p.m. that afternoon when she had left to drive to her parents' house. At some point, Carter asked both of them if they had any idea if there was someone out there who might have had a grudge against their mother, or who might have wanted to hurt their mom, or who might have, you know, been happy if something happened to her.

And the girls immediately shook their head and said, absolutely not. There was no one. I mean, their mom was awesome. Everybody seemed to like her, and they were a happy, normal family. There was no issues they knew of. Carter jotted all this down in his notebook, and his plan was to check out the daughter's alibis as soon as you go back to the station. The next day, Lieutenant Carter was at the precinct debriefing with the other

investigators on Charlotte's case. He'd listened to the local news on the radio while driving to work that morning, and since Charlotte was the acting mayor's wife, her murder was all anybody in town could talk about. So Carter was really feeling a lot of pressure to solve this case quickly. Now, by this point, he had already followed up on Heather and Kara's alibis, and they had both checked out. Neither of the daughters could have been home between 11 and 1. So Carter had, officially, ruled them out as suspects. And so now the other officers were going around the room, basically updating Carter on what they had done the night before. And Carter was admittedly a little frustrated to hear that after they had questioned Charlotte's neighbors and coworkers right after they had gotten to the scene, that that had not led to any new suspects.

And also another point of frustration was the one person who likely would be able to help them the most, at least at this point in the investigation, was the acting mayor, Barry, Charlotte's husband. but he was still in the hospital and so was not being allowed to speak to them. But just as Carter and the others were sort of scratching their heads wondering what they were going to do next, the front door of the precinct opened and who walked in, but Barry waits. A few minutes later, Lieutenant Carter and Barry were sitting in Carter's office. Barry said he had just been released from the hospital and they had determined that his heart was fine and he really had just had a panic attack.

So as soon as he was out of the hospital, he'd come right over here to see what he could do to help with the investigation. And so Carter asked Barry to walk him through what he had done the previous day, the day Charlotte was killed. Barry said that on top of being the acting mayor, he was also the head of the local National Guard Armory, and he had been attending to business at the armory all day. He did say he left at some point to get a haircut, maybe mid-morning, but the barbershop was closed, so he went right back to work, and he had stayed there until around 4.30, when he got a panicked phone call from his daughter, Heather, telling him their mom was unresponsive in the house. As Barry spoke, Carter actually primarily was just looking at Barry's hands and arms to see if there were any scratches or cuts or bruises.

Because the running theory, based on what they saw at the crime scene, is that Charlotte put up a fight against her attacker before she was killed. And so presumably there should be wounds of some kind on the attacker and probably on their hands and arms. But as Carter stared at Barry, there were no visible injuries at all. And also, I mean, Barry's story seemed very linear, very simple. and he seemed very earnest about it and eager to help. And so, you know, Carter couldn't just jump to conclusions and assume that Barry was, you know, telling the truth and that he was not a suspect here.

But Carter's first impression was that Barry was telling the truth. At some point, Carter kind of shifted the conversation and asked Barry if he had any idea about who might have wanted to hurt his wife. And Barry said, yes, he did. There were actually two people who would definitely benefit from Charlotte being dead. He said the first person was the sky named, Dave Reed, who was actually their daughter Kara's boyfriend. He said that he and Charlotte had tried to stop Kara from seeing this guy because he was kind of a bad guy, but the teens had kept sneaking

around and eventually Dave had gotten Kara pregnant. And so Barry wondered if maybe Dave had gone over to sort of confront Charlotte, to maybe demand to be able to see Kara and things got out of hand. Carter grabbed a pen and he wrote down Dave's full name. Then he asked about the second person who had been a problem with Charlotte. He explained that his wife and her cousin were in the middle of this contentious dispute over an inheritance. In fact, he said Charlotte had been scheduled to meet with Wayne and their attorneys the same day that she was killed. And when he heard this, Carter sat up in his chair because he thought to himself that the timing here could not be a coincidence. The cousin was suddenly his top suspect.

The following day, Carter walked into an interrogation room at the Lynette police station and he sat down across the table from two people, Wayne Rice and his attorney. When Carter had called Wayne to set up this meeting, Wayne had responded by saying he would not say a word without his lawyer present. And this made Carter pretty suspicious because during this very brief phone call, Carter had never even suggested to Wayne that he was a suspect in his cousin's murder. So when Carter sat down with Wayne and his lawyer, he pretty much leaned right in and grilled Wayne.

He wanted to know what was going on with this inheritance. Wayne said he knew that his contesting their uncle's will had caused a lot of problems within the family. But he said that he hadn't wished any harm on Charlotte. And in fact, she'd been his best ally at the time of her death. Carter asked him to explain what he meant by that. And Wayne said that the last time he spoke to Charlotte, she seemed to be in favor of giving him some of the land that their uncle had left to her. According to Wayne, Charlotte had said she was really upset about the family being torn apart over money. and she felt like keeping all the land for herself was just not worth it.

And when Carter heard this, he was pretty surprised because Barry had made it sound like Charlotte had no intention of giving up the land to Wayne. Like that wasn't even an option. So Carter wondered if anything Wayne was saying here was even true. He asked Wayne for his alibi. And Wayne said he'd literally been at work all day at an aluminum processing plant just outside of town. He said he hadn't even left for lunch something he typically did, like he was at work truly

all day. And then he also gave Carter the names of several co-workers who could confirm his whereabouts. Before Carter let Wayne go, he asked him if he could take his fingerprints. And Wayne immediately looked at his attorney, and his attorney kind of nodded at him. And so Wayne looked at Carter and said, okay. Later that same day, Carter sat down with the other suspect on his list, Kara's boyfriend, Dave. Dave was very moody and standoffish and just seemed kind of annoyed that he was even there. When Carter asked him if he knew why he'd been called to the station in the first place, Dave just kind of sighed and said, yeah, I do. He'd heard about what happened to Kara's mother, and he knew, you know, given his contentious relationship with her and her husband,

that of course he was going to be viewed as a suspect, which to him was absurd. And so Carter actually just asked Dave point blank about his relationship with Kara's parents. And Dave would admit that, yeah, they definitely didn't like him. But Dave insisted he would never hurt Charlotte or Barry for that matter, and he hadn't even been in town the day that she was killed. He'd been at work all day at a landscaping job miles away. Carter asked for the names of some of Dave's coworkers to verify his alibi, and he also asked him to provide his fingerprints, to which Dave sort of rolled his eyes and said,

you're wasting your time, but he said he would do it just because he wanted to clear his name. A couple of weeks later, in the middle of August, Lieutenant Carter sat at his desk flipping through Charlotte's autopsy report, which he had just received from the medical examiner, and he realized that Charlotte's murder had been even more brutal than he had thought. It turned out the murder weapon had been Charlotte's own blouse. Her killer had grabbed the strings dangling from her neckline

and then used them to strangle her to death. She'd also received a pretty serious head injury that could have been fatal on its own, and she also had a broken wrist. Now, this level of violence made Carter feel even more sure that this murder had to have been personal. But as he read deeper into the report, the evidence seemed to paint a different picture. There were three sets of fingerprints found at the crime scene, and two of them belonged to Barry and Kara, which was not a surprise because they lived in the house.

But the third set of prints was actually unidentified, and it wasn't a match for any of the suspects on Carter's radar, including Kara's boyfriend Dave and Charlotte's cousin Wayne. So at this point, Lieutenant Carter just felt kind of stuck. Also, Barry, Wayne, and Dave's alibis had all checked out as well, so truly his list of suspects was basically down to zero. So if Charlotte had been killed by someone she knew, which was the initial running theory, Carter was going to have to dig even harder to find out who it was. In October of 1998, so a couple of months after Charlotte Waits was killed, Lieutenant Carter walked into the Lynette Police precinct right as the death sergeant was hanging up the phone. The sergeant stopped Carter and told him they had just gotten yet another call on the Charlotte Wade's tip line. And before the sergeant even explained what the caller had said, Carter felt dread building in the pit of his stomach.

Ever since the police had set up this tip line for information on Charlotte's murder, it had been flooded with calls basically every day. But rather than all these tips, helping with the case, the tip line had actually just slowed the investigation down, because Carter and his team had to take time to follow up on every single one of these leads, even though most of them were just rumors and conspiracy theories. By this point, from all these tips, they'd looked into a young man who lived on the same street as Charlotte and who had a history of robbing houses, but he had an airtight alibi. They'd also investigated another local man who'd strangled his girlfriend in a similar way to how Charlotte was attacked, but he also had an alibi.

Carter had even driven all the way to Georgia to investigate a tip that a small-time criminal had bragged at a party about killing Charlotte, only to find out this small-time criminal had an alibi too, and that the tipster had made the whole story up just to get him in trouble. Also, in addition to these new suspects having alibis, their prince didn't match the prince found at the crime scene, that third set of prints. But sort of adding more confusion to this was an expert told Carter that actually it seems like those third prints could belong to a child. And so maybe we're totally unrelated to the murder. And so now, as Carter looked over at this death sergeant who was getting ready to tell him about whatever call he had just had, you know, Carter just braced for more bad news because all these tip calls were basically bad news. And when the desk sergeant spoke, it was. It was more bad news.

The sergeant said, this call wasn't even a tip at all. A local woman had just called in to complain about the lack of progress. And as difficult as it was for Carter to hear that now, in addition to the pressure he was feeling that locals were literally spamming the hotline just to complain about him, like that was bad. But Carter also understood their frustration because he was actually feeling just as upset as everybody else in town. But after running into nothing but dead ends here, he was out of ideas. And he had a feeling in his gut that unless something major changed soon,

this case, unfortunately, was going to go cold. Fast forward about three years to one morning in 2001. On this day, Lieutenant Carter was working at his desk when he heard a familiar sound. The precinct's tip line was ringing yet again. After that initial wave of tips on the Charlotte Wade's case, the case had completely stalled out for a couple of years. It was basically cold. Carter had ultimately been reassigned to other cases,

and Charlotte's family had just sort of been forced to move on without any sort of closure. Kara had her baby and Heather graduated college and was you know working a real job. And Barry had also basically moved on with his life. He had gotten remarried and was still very much in politics. And in fact, just the previous year, he'd run for a term on city council. However, during that election cycle, Barry's opponent had publicly accused him of killing his wife Charlotte. And even though he had no actual evidence to support his accusation, aside from the fact that he had a dream about it, all the attention from these accusations had totally reinvigorated the case, and calls had once again begun flowing to this

tip line. However, just like before, the vast majority of these tips were just wild theories and gossip. But that particular day, when the desk sergeant who manned the tip line opened up Carter's office, Carter looked up and saw he was visibly excited, like whatever he had just heard on tip line actually mattered. And before Carter could even ask him, like, what'd you hear? The death sergeant said he had just spoken to two tipsters who clearly had some real information that they wanted to share that was going to blow this case wide open. Based on that crucial tip, forensic evidence and witness testimony, this is what police believe happened to Charlotte waits on August 4, 1998. Around 11.30 a.m., the killer pulled up outside of Charlotte's house

and right away recognized Charlotte's car in the garage. And when they saw it, their heart raced with excitement because they hadn't been sure that she'd even be home. But clearly, the killer had gotten here right at the right time. So they parked at the end of the driveway, and they walked up into the garage, and they walked over to the door that led into the house. And they tried the handle and found it was unlocked.

So they opened it up. The killer stepped inside the kitchen, and right away, they heard footsteps on the second floor. And they knew it had to be sure. Charlotte, there was nobody else home. So the killer closed the door. They went around to the stairs that led to the second floor, and up they went. And right as the killer reached the second floor hallway, Charlotte came out of the bathroom

and saw them. And Charlotte was definitely very surprised to see them standing there. But the killer immediately just asked her a question, point blank. And when she answered the question, it was not what the killer wanted to hear. And so the killer tried to get her to change her mind, to answer this question different, but the conversation quickly escalated into a full-blown argument, and then the killer just totally lost their temper and hit Charlotte across the face. Blood immediately began pouring out of Charlotte's nose and kind of stunned.

She just kind of stepped back and went back into the bathroom to grab a towel to blot her face with it. Now, at this point, the killer knew they had crossed a line. And so persuading Charlotte at this point to do what they wanted was clearly out of the question. Like this was a no-going-back moment. So as Charlotte came out of the bathroom with this towel on her face looking totally shaken up, the killer walked up and grabbed her from behind and they clutched the strings that were hanging from the neckline of her blouse and they pulled them tight around her neck. And so Charlotte began gasping for breath and trying to fight them off, but the killer absolutely

had her in this chokehold. And then finally, when Charlotte had lost enough oxygen that she stopped struggling, the killer let go of the strings and then kicked her down the staircase. And when the killer saw what they had done, when they saw Charlotte at the base of the stairs, obviously motionless, very likely dead, the reality of what they had just done, it hit them. And so in a panic, they grabbed the bloody towel that Charlotte had dropped. You know, she was using to blot her nose, but she had dropped it on the ground. They grabbed that, and they rushed down the stairs and kind of cleaned up the rest of the blood on Charlotte's face and then dumped the towels in the laundry room.

Then they grabbed Charlotte's purse off the table and kind of scattered its contents on the floor near her body, hoping the police would think this was a robbery gone wrong. And then after that, they fled the house, got back in their car, and hurried back to work at the National Guard Armory before anyone even noticed they were gone. The killer was Lynette Alabama's mayor and Charlotte's own husband, Barry Waits. Barry had secretly gotten into a lot of debt, and he needed the full inheritance from Charlotte's uncle to pay it off. And so when Barry went to his own home in the middle of the day and basically confronted Charlotte

and asked her, what do you plan to do at this meeting with Wayne? Are you going to give him some of this inheritance? And she told him that, yes, her plan was to settle and split the inheritance. Well, when Barry heard that, he snapped and he killed his wife. Not just because he was mad at her for her decision, but also because he needed. needed more money. He's thinking, okay, I'm going to get half of this inheritance because she's given the other half to wane, but if I kill her, I'll get her life insurance policy and then together I'll have enough to pay off my debts. However, when the insurance company went to pay out the claim,

because Barry early on in the investigation was clearly a suspect in his wife's murder, the company would not pay him the money. Instead, they paid the insurance money to their daughters. But a couple of years Later, Barry still tried to get his hands on that money by tricking his own daughters into signing it over to him. But when Heather and Kara realized what he was doing, they finally saw their father for what he was. And so it was the daughters who were the tipsters who broke this case wide open. They told Lieutenant Carter everything they knew about their dad's very suspicious behavior. Along with his clear financial motives for the murder, they also said that their father had intimidated them into hiding information from the police and had even called in fake tips to redirect

attention away from himself. Barry Waits was arrested in February of 2006 and nine months later, he was found guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison. A quick note about our stories, they are all based on true events, but we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes. The Mr. Ballin Podcast Strange, Dark, and Mysterious Stories, is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr. Ballen. Our head of writing is Evan Allen, produced by Jeremy Bone. This episode was written by Kate Gallagher. Research and fact-checking by Shelley Shoe, Samantha Van Hoose, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway, and Camille Callahan.

Research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen Ear. Audio editing and post-produced by Whit Lacasio and Cole Lacasio. Additional audio editing by Jordan Stidham. Production Coordination by Samantha Collins. production support by Antonio Manada and Delana Corley, artwork by Jessica Clogston Kiner, theme song called Something Wicked by Ross Bugden. Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin podcast.

And just a reminder, every new and exclusive episode we put out on the Mr. Ballin podcast, you can also now watch on the Mr. Ballin YouTube channel that very same day. And trust me, some of these stories you truly have to see to believe. Again, my YouTube channel is just called Mr. Ballin. If you want to listen to episodes one week early and ad-free, you can subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit SiriusXM.com slash podcast plus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice. So that's going to do it. I really appreciate your support.

Until next time, see you.