My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - 179 - Live at Clusterfest in San Francisco
Episode Date: June 27, 2019Karen and Georgia cover the Mitchell Brothers murder and Ted Kaczynski. With special guest Patton Oswalt. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at http...s://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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What's up San Francisco!
Yay!
My God!
Yes!
What is this?
Some sort of festival or something?
Are you guys clustering and festivaling?
Me too.
I thought you were going to say clustering and fucking.
Because that's, I'm sorry, but it's a play on words.
I mean, you can really see the bar menu from here.
Can you?
Yeah.
Let's see if I can read it.
Can I hit four Budweiser tall boys, please?
And a time machine to 1996.
I got some work to do.
Do it.
Oh my God.
And my request for the fan and the smoke machine came through.
This is amazing.
We wanted a psychedelic rug.
We're both on LSD.
My rug!
Your rug.
Tell them about the dress fiasco.
Oh, guys.
It's, um, look.
Listen.
Because, nice.
Don't cheer for mottos.
It makes us look bad at the comedy festival.
Please.
You guys, be cool.
Be cool.
Be cool.
Be cool.
I put on my dress because I was excited because a murderino made me this dress.
And you want to know how she did it?
She ran up at a meet and greet when we were in Toronto.
Toronto, yeah.
She ran in and went, is it okay if I fit you for a dress?
And then went like this.
Measured the shit.
Measured the shit.
Really fast and ran away.
So fast.
We didn't even have time to say no, but please don't measure me.
It's like, do not put that measuring tape around my waist.
Yeah.
And it was too late and she did it.
Sarah Duke is her name.
Sarah Duke.org.gov.
And then I got it and then I was surprised because she did an amazing job and I love
it.
So I put it on too early, brushed my teeth and dripped as many drips of toothpaste down
the front of this dress as I possibly could have to the point where it was as if I'd never
used toothpaste or toothbrush before.
It's so relatable.
We've all been there.
You know, the first time you brush your teeth, but you're 50.
So also backstage, I tried getting rid of it by using white paper towels.
Guys, she made it so much worse.
So much worse.
And just kept putting shit on it.
It was epic.
Next was I tried some mascara just to cover it up.
And I was cheering her on the whole time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I tried mascara.
Have you tried that?
I grabbed some ice.
Oh, they have cranberry juice.
Oh, any stainable thing.
I was like, this coffee is amazing.
Let's throw it up here.
She really was about to put coffee on it.
I was.
And then someone came in with a tide.
Tide stain stick, ladies and gentlemen.
Perlo code murder.
It's our newest sell out, the tide stain stick.
We refuse.
You can't handle basic shit.
Oh, do you have pockets?
I do.
I didn't even know.
Sarah Duke.
Sorry.
I really flexed on you right there.
I didn't mean to do that.
Oh, do you?
What if I just ripped pockets in my dress?
Yeah.
Here.
I actually could have done that.
I had to sew myself into my dress because it's vintage.
So that means it's old.
By the way, this is the podcast.
My favorite murder.
If you don't know.
Thank you.
This is Karen Kielguera.
This is Georgia.
We're honored.
We're honored to be here at cluster fest this year.
It's very, very exciting.
We have a dressing room.
We got whisked into a dressing room.
It was very exciting.
And just looked away from everybody.
Y'all know I contact and slam the door.
This is the day I've been dreaming about for years and years.
It's finally happened.
I'm happy for you.
Here in my hometown.
Thank you.
That's right.
Thank you so much.
Well, Petaluma is my hometown, but I have to count it.
I have to.
No one knows what that means.
They all came out for you.
Yeah.
The whole town did.
They came in and out.
Who's watching the chickens, y'all?
Okay.
Should we sit down?
Let's sit down.
Yeah.
Sit down.
You're going to sit that way?
Really set yourself up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
You're not going to have a lot of movement.
Okay.
Once it's set.
You got to just give it a no.
Of course, cheat out a little bit.
Don't let them look at your.
Okay.
The only reason I sewed my dress is because I knew that this side faced the audience
and I didn't want everyone to be like, I can see her spanks the whole time.
See?
You're out of the theater.
Oh, I flashed my spanks.
Did you?
Yeah.
But it just looked like my leg because it's tan.
Like it's leg color.
You're spank colored?
Oh, I'm spank colored.
Lucky.
Lucky.
I flash mine.
They're like weirdly blue with veins.
Spider veins and blue.
What?
Whose grandma's leg is that?
I think there's been a lot.
I think there's some people who have been sitting here all day waiting for Patton to go on.
Hey.
So we should tell you guys what this podcast is.
Yeah.
We'll call you the all day of enters.
Hey, how's it feel to be rich?
Congratulations.
This is a true crime comedy podcast.
Sometimes when people don't know about it, have never heard it.
They hear that and then they say that's wrong and that's bad because those two things that should never be combined.
Comedy and then the worst person that could happen.
I mean, the worst thing that could happen to a person.
Stay with me, everybody.
The tide stain stick is getting me high as a kite right now.
So anyhow, we take this time in all of our live shows to explain to people in the audience who might not know that we are not laughing at the fact that people get murdered in this life.
It's horrible and we don't like it, but we've been obsessed both of us with true crime since we were like 12 years old.
And simultaneously we deal with all the shitty aspects of life through humor.
And so although those things run parallel in our conversations, they don't necessarily intertwine.
And essentially what we're saying is if you don't like it, get the fuck out right now.
Put your jacket on your seat.
You can come back, go to the bar, the menu, the corn dogs.
There's a really good subway around the corner from here.
It smells so much like a garbage can inside.
You will love it.
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Goodbye.
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You're first, right?
I am.
Karen's first.
I am trying so hard not to look at your paper and know what your story is.
Just keep your eyes off the paper.
I'm going to.
It's simple.
Okay.
I like surprises.
It's not like I can put the paper anywhere else.
I like clip it to a thing off my head.
That's from the kids in the hall.
I'm going to do the Mitchell Brothers murder.
Ooh.
Yeah.
I've been waiting to do this for quite some time.
All right.
So I got a lot of this information from a 1991 article called The Naked and the Dead, a porn
killing for the Washington Post by a writer named Michael Ibarra.
And also from some articles from the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Dark Horse IMDB.
Oh, that's weird.
Someone got up onto IMDB with their, what do you call that, when you get this specialty,
when you pay extra for belonging to IMDB so you can go on there and just kind of write
your shade out.
And someone did like a four page report on the Mitchell Brothers.
Thank you, random weirdo who is clearly Christian because there's very judgmental writing in
this.
Lot of judgment.
So let's just start.
Oh my God.
No, these are the Mitchell Brothers.
Jim and Artie Mitchell.
I don't know this story.
You don't?
No.
Not yet.
It was in San Francisco, though, right?
And did you ever go to the O'Farrell Theater?
Oh, yeah.
You loved it there.
I loved it there.
It's my favorite.
After work, I'd go and hang out.
Just hang out.
Lay down.
Stare into some crevasses.
Okay.
Okay.
So these, this is Jim and Artie Mitchell.
Jim, the older brother, James Lloyd Mitchell, is born November 30th, 1943.
And his younger brother, Artie, Jay Mitchell, was born just about two years later on December
17th, 1945.
Their parents, JR and Georgia May, settled the family in Antioch, California.
Oh.
Really?
What was that, 707?
Erica?
No way.
No way.
I don't know the story, so am I allowed to think they're, can I say they're hot?
Yes.
Or are they bad?
Okay, great.
You know you're like, you don't know, okay, great.
You guys know.
I mean, look.
Look, listen to the podcast.
They, they have, they have great features.
They seem very modern with those beards.
Yeah.
And with their kicky hats.
Yeah.
There are men who say, we can wear a hat.
I don't care what your weird standards of my head are.
What?
What are you talking about?
Don't have time for this.
Tide stick.
You're not supposed to sniff it.
Can we turn the fan down from Beyonce right down to Salash?
Cause my, cause my thing blew away.
Karen.
If someone could.
Karen with the words.
Okay.
So their dad, JR was a professional gambler and this isn't a tragic story.
He did it so well.
He kept the family in their beautiful home in Antioch and everyone did fine.
Everyone was happy and well adjusted.
It's the rare, rare story of a professional gambler that doesn't devastate his entire
family.
So if you want to find a glimmer of hope and a sliver of inspiration, there it is.
And Jim and Artie growing up are inseparable.
They're very popular with other kids.
They remain lifelong friends with all of their childhood friends, which is always a very
good sign.
Okay.
I'm not friends with any of my children.
They were dicks.
No, I'm kidding.
A whole room full of kids is like, okay.
So in the mid sixties, Jim Mitchell, I think it's, I think Jim is there on the left.
He looks like a gym.
Almost positive.
So he goes to San Francisco State University.
The fighting.
You know, the fighting, uh, coit towers, yes.
Can you imagine if your team went out and there was just a bunch of coit towers waiting
there to kick their ass?
You would cry.
They were like, they're all running around.
They're so tall.
It's like, this isn't fair.
They're hundreds of feet taller than us too bad.
Play them.
Okay.
So Jim wants to be just like Francis Ford Coppola.
He wants to make great film.
He's very interested in film, um, but for money, he works at a place called the Follies,
which is a theater that shows what they called back then, nudies.
Yeah.
All the good music.
Wait, I think I just did the hokey pokey.
Interestingly enough, the hokey pokey was the soundtrack to one of the first porn's.
Put your right foot in.
Come on.
No.
I'm going to walk you through it.
It's very obvious.
Okay.
Nudies were short plotless films of naked people fucking.
Sounds about right.
So every time he would go into this theater, which was disgusting and small and dirty and
cramped and smelled, he saw that it was always packed with public masturbators.
And when his brother already gets out of the army, he said, Jim says to Artie, look, if
these guys will go to this disgusting theater to watch these terrible movies, imagine if
we opened a really nice theater and made good porn movies for them to watch.
But then they can't jerk off in the theater.
Why?
Because it's nice.
Don't be crazy.
That's even hotter.
We're like, oh, the lure.
Oh.
Oh, yeah.
Maroon velour.
What?
Were you going to make a sconce joke?
Yes.
The sconce is in here.
Beautiful.
Jerk.
Jerk.
Jerk.
Jerk.
Jerk.
Okay.
We are terrible.
Well, this whole story is quite terrible.
So buckle it down.
So on July 4th, 1969, they team up with a plan to open their own dirty movie theater.
They enlist the help of Artie's wife, Meredith Bradford, who was an Ivy League graduate and
a business genius.
And they were like, get in here.
We're just pervs.
We need some money people.
We need a bottom line person.
They get together.
Oh, and this is sorry.
This is Meredith Bradford and Artie and their daughter Liberty in the 70s when everyone
was the best.
Don't make me do it.
The jingle that you hate me for.
Do it.
Getting in your head.
Do it.
One, two, three.
Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty.
That's all we hear on TV on tour.
The past six months have been that commercial over and fucking over again.
I think it's a commercial that runs during forensic files.
So at night, we go home from a show and we'd be in the hotel room and then we'd watch forensic
files at the same time.
And then watch that fucking commercial 29 times.
And then later on the next day, when something would come up that would be nerve wracking
or upsetting, we'd be like, yeah, oh, we have to do that.
Let's take care of it.
Liberty, Liberty, Liberty.
Liberty.
So if you're a little bit crazy like us, how do we recommend?
It's now our inside joke.
Everyone here.
Look, we're 15 minutes in and I'm still on page one.
Shit.
Go, go, go.
All right.
Let's get serious.
Okay.
So in March of 1969, they open the O'Farrell Theater Hotness.
It was the old Pontiac showroom at 895 O'Farrell Street.
They converted it.
It's a two-story building.
They converted it into their beautiful dream movie theater.
Get those cars out and those butts in.
Yeah.
Butts and dicks in.
So two weeks later, the vice squad shuts them down and thus begins the Mitchell Brothers
years long war with the San Francisco authorities.
Luckily, there's plenty of lawyers around, ready and willing and stoked to argue First
Amendment free speech.
That is the first one, right?
I should have double checked that.
Over the years, they fight almost 200 legal battles against obscenity charges because
of the O'Farrell Theater and they manage to win almost every single one and keep the theater
open.
Yes.
So this is basically post-sexual revolution, post-summer of love, when everyone's like,
yeah, let's actually do something with these ideas and get to fucking on screen.
So I hope none of my relatives are here.
So the theater, of course, is an instant success with the people that are lines of public
masturbators around the corner waiting to publicly masturbate.
They show up in droves.
They're like, oh, you, me too.
This is my dream.
Do you like the lure?
Where do you get your, where's that trench coat from?
Oh my God, it's gorgeous.
Is that London Fall?
No, Burlington Coat Factory.
Burlington.
Are you kidding me?
More than great coats.
Okay, so, in 1972, so basically they're watching the public masturbators love and life in this
theater, finally free to be who they truly are, deep down, guys who jerk off constantly.
So they're running the nudies and the loops, they call them these shorter films, and then
Jim is like, we need to make a full length dirty movie that's actually good, that people
are going to be excited about watching.
So Artie had heard this story that was kind of like a well-known story in the army, so
he dreamed up the plot of what would eventually become behind the green door.
We're going to play it in its entirety right now.
Ladies and gentlemen, behind the green door.
Okay.
Okay.
Oh, so is she like a hoity-toity, and then she, okay, I don't want to guess the plot.
You know, it's interesting, she's a pearl diver, and she finally finds her 500th pearl
behind the green door.
What if that was the plot?
They make it for around 60 grand, and it will eventually make just about $30 million gross.
When it's shown at the Cannes Film Festival a year later, it gets a standing ovation.
All right.
I bet.
Yeah.
This is very San Francisco to me, this part of the story where it's like, yes, we're smut
dealers, but we're also artists.
We make Cannes bend to our will.
We are San Francisco, and we hate Los Angeles.
Okay.
I know.
I know.
I know.
We need to.
We know.
That Giants Rally the other night was un-be-fucking-leave-able.
They should have won it.
They should have won it.
Okay.
So, that's called pandering.
So, the star of the film is Juan Marilyn Chambers, and her performance, although wordless,
is considered groundbreaking for the time she doesn't say word.
In the whole film.
Okay.
I can picture it.
She, while that movie came out, was also the model on the box of Ivory Snow detergent.
Oh.
She looks really happy about it.
Yeah.
Is she okay?
She loves all her jobs.
Well, she gets to do more drugs on this job.
Okay.
I actually had to ask Jay.
He sent me this picture as one of the pictures to pick, and I said, I'd like to use the Ivory
Snow picture, but can you crop it so her bare vag isn't sitting there in front of us?
Okay.
Because that's the real picture.
You can still, there's a little nip slip right there.
There's some nip.
Good for her.
But apparently they had Brazilians back then, which is great news.
So, Marilyn Chambers basically broke the mold of what everyone was used to seeing in
porn or dirty movies.
Usually it was bleach, blonde women, huge boobs, the dead eyes with a bunch of black
eyeliner.
Marilyn Chambers looked like the girl next door.
It was like if Sybil Shepard was from Cupertino.
So everyone's like, yeah, I could get her.
She'd fuck me, the public masturbator.
You got to have a dream, you know?
Right?
But more importantly, maybe for the first time in history, it was a film that portrayed
a woman having sex not only on her own terms, but even more groundbreaking, enjoying it.
Oh my God.
Don't tell God.
He'll be so mad.
He will be so, he hates that.
Okay.
So, after this, obviously, it's explosion.
The Mitchell Brothers ride this wave of success and they take their money and they start making
more and more porn films, including such hits as, these are some of the posters.
Well, the last, Resurrection of Eve or Sodom and Gomorrah, the last seven days, which apparently
they went way over budget on.
That's a porn?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a Bible porn.
It's just the dirtiest time.
Can you imagine?
Oh, the fervor that was kicked up.
Sitting in there in the old Farrell Theater with all your friends, jerking it to Bible
porn.
Oh, then also, of course, because it was a trend that hit CB mamas.
Yes.
What's that?
What?
No.
Oh, I get it.
Nobody's interested in.
Okay.
All right.
10-4 then.
There was also the autobiography of a flea.
What the?
Were they all, oh, so they were on Acid.
They were on so much acid.
Okay.
And cocaine.
Acid, coke, booze, pot, and whatever was on the floor of the Dirty Dirty Movie Theater
that they ran.
There was a whole bunch of other ones, Never a Tender Moment, Beyond Dissod.
They made a movie in 1985 called The Graffenberg Spot, which is about people trying to find
the G-spot, and which is, right?
Yeah.
It's liberating.
That's honorable.
It's great.
Hey, let's get that on the docket.
But.
I mean, all that matters is that you're looking for it.
Yeah.
You don't have to.
Give it a whirl.
Yeah.
In fact, they said that a special, there's a special effect they used, they used garden
hoses in that film.
So.
No.
Spoiler alert.
They found it.
Okay.
So.
Here's Jim directing.
Oh, yeah, it is.
Take off your fucking transition lenses, Jim.
You goddamn creep.
Yeah.
I'm trying to work.
I'm trying to do my process here, and you're over me like every serial killer mugshot I've
ever seen.
But how would they, they know who the director is if you didn't have those terrible shades
on indoors.
That's true.
Right.
Because he refused to wear his beret.
Okay.
All of this work, and it does very large body of work that they put out in a very short
amount of time, earn them a place in the adult video industry hall of fame.
Then organized crime, the mafioso.
Oh.
And I just put up a picture of Tony Soprano.
Sorry.
We got to go.
Organized crime starts basically bootlegging the Mitchell Brothers movies and selling them.
And so Jim and Artie do the thing that they do best that they've been doing all for years
in San Francisco.
They take the mafia to court.
Don't do that.
Yeah.
At first a judge rules that materials cannot receive obscene materials cannot receive
copyright status.
But then when that, so they lose that case, but they take it to the fifth circuit court
of appeals.
They win and they're granted copyright protection.
And that legal decision is the reason why you see FBI warnings at the beginning of every
video you watch on your old VHS player.
Oh my God.
That's, thank you Jim and Artie for making people who are afraid of authority make their
heart jump a little bit right before they try to watch Crossing Delancey for the 15th
time.
That's my story.
But no matter how many legal battles the Mitchell Brothers face, they somehow always
win.
Oh, that's clearly cut and pasted from a different area.
Fame, bribes, they have a lot of money and they're white.
So they continue to turn a very hefty profit for the O'Farrell Theater and their success
allows them to expand their business and open 11 more theaters on the West Coast.
So many public masturbators out there.
They were coming out in droves and also they would carpool, sometimes they'd carpool from
city to city and be like, do you want to go jerk it down in Manteca because they open
a new one down there?
And then we'll go to the waterslides.
Local jokes, get local work, okay.
So of course in the city of San Francisco, Artie and Jim skyrocket to local counterculture
fame.
That's a rough one.
It was hard.
They make friends with every big name in the city, not just the artists and the writers,
but the local politicians, which may be why they were able to then after the movies exploded,
they start adding live nude dancing to their theater's lineup.
Billy Huntress Thompson would refer to the O'Farrell Theater as the Carnegie Hall of
Public Sex in America.
Classy.
That's how you know you've made it.
Practice, practice, practice, public masturbators.
So they never claimed to have invented the lap dance, but they were the first people to
bring it to San Francisco because their dancers sat on customers' laps for tips as early as
1980.
Oh, wow.
Check this shit out.
My goodness.
What, you can't handle it?
It's natural.
It's natural to be fully nude with a bunch of super weird dudes slumped down in their seats,
jerking it at you.
And that's Marilyn Chambers, by the way.
Is it?
Yeah.
That's her.
She's striking a pose.
Yeah.
Great.
Okay.
Thanks.
And your face spearmint, Rhina.
So, it's an L.A. reference.
Okay.
In the 80s, the Mitchell Brothers brothers, what's happening, tried to add live sex shows
to the bill, but then the city finally said, boys, you've gone too far.
And they outlawed it.
At this time, Mayor Diane Feinstein was in office, and she was doing everything she could
to shut down the O'Farrell Theater.
She had that thing rated constantly.
She was on their ass.
And after one raid, the Mitchell Brothers actually put up on the theater's marquee for show
times called Mayor Feinstein, and then they put her home phone number on it.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, fucking respect, right?
Yeah.
Jesus.
If you're going to come for the queen, you better come for it.
That's some, like, old school trolling.
That's rich.
And then she sat at home, ringing phone, going, but her hair was perfectly, perfectly
quaffed.
Diane.
Okay.
So, the Mitchell Brothers are beloved in the city as much for their legal fight for
the liberation of public masturbators as for their large donations towards popular causes
of the time, like saving the whales and saving the rainforests.
And during the AIDS crisis, they gave generously to local charities and hospitals were very
active and poured a lot of money into fighting AIDS.
And...
That's awesome.
Yeah.
They were good old hometown boys.
When Geraldo Rivera came to them and asked if he could film inside the O'Farrell Theater
for a piece he was doing on his show, they said, sure you can, after you donate $15,000
to an AIDS charity.
So they were, again...
Amazing.
So, this is so San Francisco.
And just really quick as a sidebar.
So when I lived here, the big joke we had, the O'Farrell Theater has an amateur night,
or had an amateur night in the 90s.
So any old gal could run on down and see if she could make it as a exotic dancer at the
O'Farrell Theater.
And it was my friend Dawn Frazier, I worked at the Gap with her, and we get our paycheck.
And then she'd go...
We'd look at our paycheck and she'd go, it's time to go to the O'Farrell Theater.
But then, my friend Ebi actually went down and auditioned one night, and she was so sure
she had the perfect routine, and it included...
And I wonder if she was doing it as a reference.
She was wearing a rubber shirt, like a rubber turtleneck, so it was like a shirt that was
like latex, really tight, right?
It's the 90s.
And then she was wearing a set of pearls.
And so she's kind of doing pretty good at the beginning of her thing.
And then she tries to take the shirt off, but it sticks to her skin.
Like she can't get it up, it's taking her forever.
And the music, like she's passed all her dance cues and stuff, because she can't get the
shirt off, she didn't rehearse with the shirt.
And then she gets it up and it gets stuck on her head.
But she cannot get it up over her face, and the pearls break, the string of pearls break
in there with her.
And then when she finally gets the shirt off, it's like a pinata of pearls, just bursts
on the stage.
Then she gets down on her hands and knees to pick the pearls up, because she doesn't
want to trip the girl that's coming out after her, because you only have like five minutes,
or probably two, five, that would be an eternity.
Anyway.
That was a great story.
And that woman, which is someone famous sexually, okay.
Okay.
So then in 1985, they make Hunter S. Thompson, famed writer, the night manager, oops, of
the O'Farrell Theater.
Ben Saberle?
What's that?
You mean Ben Saberle?
Yeah, that's true.
My husband.
Has he ever been here for Halloween?
No, he should, huh?
So Hunter S. Thompson, so this description is taken from a website called Hunter S.
Thompson Films by someone named Wayne Ewing.
He was once given a tour of the O'Farrell Theater in 1985 by Hunter S. Thompson, the
night manager, and he described it thusly.
One of the first floors, on the first floor were three venues, New York stage, where one
girl would dance while others gave lap dances to the audience, which I think is what we
saw there in that picture.
The Copenhagen Room, where patrons sat around the perimeter with flashlights and girls performed
in the middle or on your lap, and then the Ultra Room, a room with private cubicles from
which you watched while the girls did each other in the box, and you fed them tips through
slots in the glass.
That's complicated.
Right.
There were just like a variety of different Madonna videos, is essentially what was happening
inside there.
And as they were on the tour, one of the dancers walked by and said, be careful not to touch
the walls.
Oh, I mean, that's a good lesson for, I mean, rule for life, really.
It all the time.
Never touch a wall.
So Hunter S. Thompson, the leader, wrote about his relationship with the Mitchell Brothers
in his 2003 book, Kingdom of Fear, where he said, Jim and Artie Mitchell were as bizarre
a pair of brothers as ever lived.
I loved them both, but the sex business had made them crazy.
They were deep in San Francisco politics, but they were always in desperate need of sound
political advice.
That was my job.
The Night Manager gig was only a cover for my real responsibility, which was to keep
them out of jail, which was not easy.
So of course, they have this huge success, money, drugs, all the things we said came
along with it, and they both got divorced twice.
Jim had four kids with his second wife, Artie had six kids total, three with his first wife
and three with his second wife.
But by the mid-80s, they were both single, and they were both having flings with various
O'Farrell Theater dancers and different porn stars.
So they did make a sequel to Behind the Green Door in 1985, but it's regarded as one of the
worst porn films of all time.
It was the height of the AIDS crisis, so they decided to make, which was very conscientious
and very San Francisco of them, they decided to make the first safe sex porno, and everyone
hated its guts.
And also at the same time, Artie was, Artie's drinking and drugs were getting out of hand.
He also very much liked shooting guns and playing with guns.
He accidentally put three bullets into the ceiling of their office and the upstairs
office.
I mean, I guess I could see one, but how did he do three accidentally?
You're drunk and you didn't hear the first one, so you're like, is this what just happened
or is this?
Remember, do it as a drunk, Karen.
Okay, hold on, I think I heard something.
And it's just this gun, it's just a gun.
No smiling, you get your own gun.
Also he starts affecting the business badly, for example, he started bouncing checks, not
because they didn't have enough money, but because the bank did not recognize his signature
anymore.
That's how fucked up he was when he was signing checks.
That's a bad sign.
Finally, he went to May's Oyster House on Polk Street with a gun, with a gun though.
Oh no.
Boo.
I like the first part.
Yeah, Oyster.
He wanted to shoot open some oysters at May's.
So when he had to be disarmed at May's, they said, how about you don't come into work anymore?
And coworkers, family and friends were all turning to Jim saying that he was the one
that had to solve the arty problem.
In fact, arty's ex-wife Karen called her brother on February 18th, 1991, after she was forced
to get a restraining order that only allowed arty to see his children under court supervision.
So she had to send the kids over to his house on the weekends, and then he was so fucked
up that she was worried about them, and they basically had to get someone to intervene.
So again, she tells Jim, you have to do something about arty.
But arty didn't like being the one with the problem, so he argued that everyone at the
theater did drugs and drank, and was fucked up in smoke pot and shotguns into the ceiling.
So why is he the one getting picked on?
And he begins leaving taunting messages on his brother's answering machine saying, I'm
not the only one that needs to quit something because you smoke.
I mean, smoking kills.
No, it's true.
Not back then, though.
Oh, right.
Back then it was still super chill.
So now arty is not only not helping with the theater, but then he's fucking with Jim,
and Jim has to handle everything and do it without his brother.
So it's February 27th, 1991.
Arty is living on Mohawk Avenue in Cordo Madera with his girlfriend of nine months, Julie
Bejo.
She was a 27-year-old ex-Opherald theater dancer who had to quit because of a knee injury,
which you don't think about that, the physical toll that it takes on the knees and joints.
So arty had always said he had an open door policy at his house, which literally meant
he left his front door unlocked every night, because he wanted to make sure that all his
party friends had a place to stay if they needed somewhere to go and steal his money
if they needed to.
Yes, maybe threaten him physically.
So that night, February 27th at 10.15, arty and Julie are in bed, and they hear the front
door open and then someone banging around in the living room.
So it isn't totally out of the ordinary until they hear a gunshot.
And so arty gets up to see who it is.
He grabs an empty beer bottle for protection.
Julie jumps into the closet to hide.
She hears arty yell, what's going on?
Who's out there as he walks into the hallway, and then six more gunshots ring out.
Julie reaches out from the closet, grabs the phone, and calls the police.
And as luck would have it, Officer Kent Haas was making a traffic stop right around the
corner when that call came in.
So he pulled onto Mohawk Drive.
He parked a couple doors down from the address that was given, and he sees a man with a limp
walking down the street carrying an umbrella.
And it had been raining around that time, so that wasn't too weird.
But he still thought he should at least question this person, so he ordered the man to stop.
And instead, the guy real quick ducked down behind a car and started pulling at the waistband
of his pants, scary for tons of reasons.
So Officer Haas tells the man to stop or he'll shoot, and the man complies and puts his
hand up.
And when backup arrives, they pull the man up from his hiding place.
He's Jim Mitchell, and he's got a.22 rifle shoved down his pant leg.
And he also has a.38 in a holster underneath his jacket.
And inside the house, his brother already is lying dead in the bathroom doorway.
He's been shot in the shoulder, in the torso, and through his right eye with a.22.
Jim Mitchell is arrested and charged with the murder of his brother, and of course,
within hours, a media circus ensues.
So this was right on the cusp of court TV, and they actually, during this trial, had
an argument whether or not they should air this on television, because it, of course,
had everything.
It was like siblings and corn, and what more do you want?
That's plenty.
So this infamous trial begins on January 13, 1992.
The courtroom is filled with cops, strippers, entertainment tonight producers, O'Farrell
theater patrons, and employees, and at least one porn actor.
You got to hope there was one person who was all of those things, you know?
Mary Hart.
Okay.
Don't tell her I said that.
They all watch as person after person testifies that Jim Mitchell loved his brother.
He was his closest friend, and he was only going over to Artie's house for an intervention
that escalated into a heated fight, and then in a fit of rage, Jim decided to put Artie
out of his drug-addled misery.
That's the story that the defense tries to mount.
But the prosecution counters this theory, because if that were true, then why did Jim
park blocks away from Mohawk Avenue so no one would see his car, and why did he bring
two guns, and why did he shoot his brother seven times with three hits, and why did he
slash Artie's tires before he entered the house?
Lots of questions.
Very good, valid questions.
According to the DA, these actions told the story of a premeditated murder, not a heat
of the moment accidental death.
But when the verdict came in, the power of the Mitchell brothers and their legend in
the city came through, because the jury threw out the first degree murder charge and found
Jim Mitchell guilty of voluntary manslaughter.
At his sentencing, notable San Francisco figures like former Mayor Frank Jordan, former police
chief Richard Hongisto, and Sheriff Michael Hennessy all speak on Jim's behalf, vouching
for his good character, literally the opposite of every single obscenity trial that they
had to sit through in the 70s, where all the politicians and law enforcement accused Jim
and Artie of ruining the city.
Jim Mitchell, at the end of that sentencing, is sentenced to six years in San Quentin.
Wow.
Uh-huh.
Oh, here's some pictures.
That's him in the courtroom with his lawyer.
Oh, those guys watching the game up there?
That was the weirdest golf clap of all time.
Oh, courtroom of shit.
And this is what I love.
This is an out-of-order, like, time-wise.
This is clearly from a 70s or early 80s trial that they had to go to, but I just like that
picture of him.
I just think it's kind of haunting and beautiful.
Who would play him?
I don't know who has insanely round glasses these days.
Just bring your glasses and you can play him.
If you can get those glasses again.
So Jim serves just over three years in San Quentin and is then released.
Wow.
Yeah.
He immediately returns to the O'Farrell Theater to continue managing it, and he sets up the
Artie Fund, which raises money for a local drug rehab center, as well as for the surf
rescue squad of the San Francisco Fire Department, who had, in 1990, saved Artie's life when
he had been carried out by a riptide trying to save his own kids, who he thought were drowning.
Do not swim in the San Francisco beach areas.
It's cold.
It's saltier than normal seawater, and it's trying to kill you all the time, especially
if you're very young.
Jim Mitchell eventually retires to a farm on the outskirts of a little town I like to
call Petaluma, California.
Yes.
We have them all.
I'm known a writer, Lloyd Bridges, fucking Guy Fieri, Snoopy, fucking Snoopy lives there.
Okay.
Okay.
And then it's in Petaluma that on July 12, 2007, Jim Mitchell dies of a heart attack
at the age of 63.
He is buried next to his brother, Artie, in their hometown of Antioch, California.
So just a couple of things in the aftermath, in 2011, Jim Mitchell's son, James, was tried
and convicted of murdering the mother of his child with a baseball bat while she was holding
their daughter.
And his child took place just down the hall from where his father was tried almost 20
years earlier.
On an up note on July 28th, 1999, then Mayor Willie Brown declared it Maryland Chambers'
Day.
So you've got five shopping days left.
Get on it.
And then back down on a down note in the year 2000, a movie about the Mitchell brothers
starring real life brothers, Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, entitled Rated X, came
up with that then.
They put the X in sex, it says right there.
They wrote that.
Okay.
That's why they look so proud in that pictures, because they wrote that tagline.
And then my favorite quote of this story, don't go next.
My favorite quote of this entire story is one time Artie Mitchell once said to an ex-wife,
you never really realize how ugly bodies are until they're stuck in your face every day
of the week.
They look a lot better with clothes on and that is the insane story of the Mitchell brothers
murder.
Amazing.
Sorry.
That was so long.
I got Vince.
Oh, great.
Oh, nice.
Vince.
Vince.
My husband.
Vince just came out specifically to tell me I did a good job.
Doesn't he look like Hunter S. Thompson?
He does.
I think it's hot.
Let me tell you guys.
That one's yours.
Thanks.
Okay.
I'm doing the Unabomber.
Whoa.
Yes.
Yes.
Finally.
Yes.
I've always wanted to do it and now I have to do it in six pages, which is going to
be really hard, so it's like the fucking truncated version.
Go home and read about it.
There's a show called the Unabomber that's good, but let me tell you the quick version
of it.
All right.
This is Ted Kaczynski.
For 17 years between 1978 and 1995, Ted Kaczynski was one of America's most feared men.
From his comfort of his home, he sent more than 16 homemade bombs to unsuspecting victims
than what he deemed as he wanted to start a revolution against modern technology.
Me too.
It sucks.
But through hugs, guys.
Oh, oh.
Okay.
Ted Kaczynski's born on May 22nd, 1942 in Chicago, and he's born in a hard-working family.
It seems like they're totally fucking normal, and he's a happy baby, and then he gets a
severe case of hives and is forced into a hospital isolation, and then for months he
just shows no emotion.
So I think that you can't just put a baby in a room by itself and expect everything to
be fine, everyone.
That's how they used to cure hives, was isolate babies.
That was always the solution every time.
Yeah.
But this is when they decided that wasn't true.
The 1940s.
Leave babies alone.
Okay.
In elementary school, so he's an interesting kid.
In elementary school, his test scores show that his IQ is 167.
Yeah.
That's quite high.
Mine too.
And he skipped sixth grade.
So he later describes that as a pivotal event in his life, and I think that when you get,
he said before he could make friends and be a normal kid, but then after skipping school,
he didn't feel like he fit in with the older kids, wah, wah, wah.
It's so hard.
Okay.
You know what?
I would have loved to have skipped sixth grade, because that's when they did the presidential
fitness test, and fucking, I had to go first.
I had to go first on the arm hang.
I dropped after three seconds.
The entire class booed me.
I never blew anybody up.
I should, and I might.
I mean, did you say, I'm never going to use the arm hang in my adult life.
Why do I have to know this?
It was so hard.
It's hard.
It's really hard.
I don't even want to.
Okay.
He's considered an outsider by his classmates.
They call him, they regarded him as a walking brain.
So he just was like, nobody liked him, I guess, wah.
He graduates high school at 15.
He's accepted to Harvard.
He starts in the fall of 1958 on scholarship at 16 years old.
Hell yeah.
And I wrote, same dude.
At sophomore at Harvard, he participates in a study, okay, this is fucked up.
Ready for this?
He participates in a study described by author Alston Chase as purposely brutalizing
psychological experiment led by Harvard psychologist Henry Murray.
So subjects are told they'll be debating personal philosophy with a fellow student.
So they're astorite essays detailing their personal life and aspirations and hopes and
dreams and everything about them.
And the essays are then turned over to an attorney who in later sessions, it's a weekly
session, they confront and belittle the subject using the content of the essays as ammunition.
A lot of people think this was MKUltra, an MKUltra experiment.
It actually sounds like girls in junior high.
I think they just, this was the old junior high test.
Yeah, you're not wrong.
Draw it out of you.
Use it against you.
So this is some straight up, a clockwork orange shit.
They put electrodes that monitor the subject's physiological reactions.
Their encounters are filmed and the subjects are played the film of them fucking looking
sad and shit.
They have to watch themselves belittle.
That's horrifying.
This is like straight up fucking, yeah.
But that's also the kind of Instagram, isn't it?
Oh, you're not wrong.
The first test pilot.
The experiment lasts three years with someone verbally abusing and humiliating Ted because
he spends 200 hours as part of the study.
So that will make you fucked up.
That's him there.
That's around that time, I believe.
What you want to make kites, you idiot, that used to be his dream.
I got it.
That's dumb.
That's dumb.
Kites are dumb.
People think the experiments are part of MKUltra, the CIA research into mind control.
Things like it.
I'm going to go on record and say it was.
This is the official.
This is it.
So Ted does earn his bachelor's arts degree in math from Harvard in 1962, graduating in
only three years.
Super fucking smart.
In 1962, he enrolls at the University of Michigan where he earns his master's and doctoral degrees
in math and is offered a teaching position.
So in 1967, at 25 years old, he starts teaching at fucking University of Michigan math, right?
Oh, no.
Yes.
And then he becomes the youngest assistant professor of mathematics in the history of
UC Berkeley.
Wow.
You guys went there.
My dad calls it cow.
Oh.
Yeah.
It's old school.
But all his students hate him and so he resigns.
Seriously.
Is that more of that test that he was in?
Yeah.
Yell at him.
You're kite.
It's stupid.
Okay.
It's still stupid.
It's still dumb.
After resigning from Berkeley, he moves back home with his parents and then he starts writing
anti-technology think pieces.
He buys 1.5 acres of land in Florence Gulch, which is near Lincoln, Montana.
So he just buys this fucking spacious forest place.
In 1972, he moves to a remote cabin that he built on his new land.
He wants to be, he's totally reclusive.
He lives a simple life with little money and without electricity or running water.
It sounds like a nightmare.
But tons of kites.
So many kites.
So many kites.
Surrounded by kites.
Just filled, a cabin filled.
Look up in the sky, kites, everywhere.
His eyes looking back down at you.
He works odd jobs and he teaches himself survival skills such as tracking game and how
to identify edible plants, farming, bow drilling and other primitive technologies.
He starts reading about sociology and political philosophy and anarchism.
And he believes that violence is the only way people will listen to real revolutionaries.
On May 25th, 1978, Ted mails his first bomb.
And it arrives at the office of Buckley Christ, who's a professor of materials engineering
at Northwestern University, the home of the screaming.
Calculators?
Yeah.
No, no, you're right.
That's right.
Too obvious.
No, no, no.
That's good.
Okay.
So this dude, Buckley, is like, this package is suspicious and I'm not fucking opening
it.
He contacts campus police and he's like, see that package?
I don't trust it.
And officer Terry Marker's like, let me open it.
Opens it.
It explodes.
He only has injuries on his hand.
The second package arrives on May 9th, sent to a John Harris, who's a graduate student
at Northwestern University, and the package explodes when he opens it and he suffers minor
cuts and burns.
On November 15th, 1979, a bomb is placed in the cargo hold of American Airlines Flight
444 flying from Chicago to Washington, D.C. But there's a faulty timing mechanism that
prevents the bomb from exploding, but it starts to smoke, so they find it and shit, and they
find that the bomb would have obliterated the plane if it had blown up.
So he's a genius, but he's not that good at making bombs.
He's not the best at it, thankfully.
He's better at kiting.
Over a year later, on June 10th, on June 8th, 1980, possibly to commemorate my birth two
days earlier, I wrote.
Thank you.
It was fun.
United Airlines President Percy Wood is injured after he opens a package disguised as a book,
and he gets a few cuts and burns, and the initials F.C. are found on a piece of pipe from the
bomb.
So Ted Gazinci does this thing where he just makes false things that make people –
Clues.
Thank you.
So a federal task force is finally assembled, and they are – start calling him the unabomber,
an acronym for – so it's university and airline bomber.
So unabomber.
You get it.
I like how you sounded it out.
Unabomber.
Like those two heads on electric company that said stuff to each other.
Unabomber.
Bomber.
Unabomber.
They conduct exhaustive forensic examinations of the bombs and make – they try to make
links to the victims, but they're so random that they can't make any links, really.
And they conclude that the bomber made his explosives from common scrap materials, including
wood, fishing wire, nails, and tape, but those are all widely available things, so they can't
trace any of them.
This says more bombing between October 8th, 1981 and November 15th, 1985.
He sends out six bombs, including four that explode and seriously injure the opener with
shrapnel injury – shrapnel injuries, serious burns, that sort of thing, including the secretary
of the intended.
You just have a job that you want to get through the day, so you can go home to your cats and
have a glass of chablis, and your fucking – your boss makes you open his goddamn mail.
Motherfuckers.
Damn it.
I was just trying to sniff that white out and get through the day, but no.
Yeah.
Like, what a bummer, right?
But she's injured.
She lives?
Yes.
Oh, that's good.
The 11th bomb to be sent out becomes the first death caused by the unabomber.
On December 11th, 1985, Hugh Scrutton, a 38-year-old computer store owner in Sacramento, California.
Not really.
We're going to have to bring them another poll holes if you keep fucking doing them.
I will.
I love the push-pull of my Sacramento relationship.
Okay, so he's a computer store owner.
He picks up what he thinks is just, like, road hazard, is the word that's written
right here that I use all the time.
Yeah.
What's this road hazard, Georgia?
Fire!
There's so many road hazards.
Okay, in the parking lot outside his store, but it's actually a nail and splinter-loaded
bomb, and Hugh Scrutton is killed.
Fuck that shit.
A similar attack against another computer store happens in Salt Lake City two years later
on February 20th, 1987.
The bomb is disguised as a piece of lumber, and it injures Gary Wright, another computer
store owner, and the blast severs the nerves in his left arm and more than 200 pieces of
shrapnel end but end up in his body.
Wow.
Yuck.
And also, like, these are computer store owners.
I know.
It's like, he's not sending anything to the was or anybody down in San Jose, it's just
like...
This guy is just like, I just want to work with what I love.
I just love PCs.
Yeah.
They're the wave of the future, everyone.
What's this road hazard?
It sucks.
And so then a woman recalls that before the attack, she had noticed a man by the scene
wearing a hooded sweatshirt and aviator sunglasses, leaving a bag behind at the store.
She's the first eyewitness account of the elusive unabomber and helps create the now-famous
sketch of him.
Oh, yeah.
Do you remember seeing this?
Sure.
In 1987.
Terrifying.
Do you remember seeing it?
Because that happened near you, I guess, kind of.
I absolutely remember seeing it, it was on the news a lot.
But also, I also thought it was a poster for the movie, The Fly.
Because where did he get sunglasses that huge that you can only get today in a dumb store
on Melrose in Los Angeles?
Yeah.
Well, so there's so much controversy surrounding this photo, including the fact that the person
that she saw wasn't him, which is why it doesn't look anything like him.
Or...
He's just a super cool guy.
Yeah.
She just...
Yeah, she saw that guy.
But that's not...
She couldn't get him out of her mind.
Right.
But also that she said...
When they sketched it, she's like, that's not what he looks like.
And so there's this controversy and conspiracy that the FBI didn't want to catch him.
And so they didn't put out a sketch that looks like him.
Because of MKUltra?
Because of MKUltra.
Goodbye.
So then Kaczynski goes dark for six years and doesn't reemerge until 1993 when he sends
two more bombs that are set off and injures their victim, intended victims.
One is Charles Epstein, a geneticist.
Right?
Maybe.
Yeah.
At UC San Francisco, he loses a couple of fingers.
The other is David Gelner.
He's a computer scientist at Yale.
He loses the use of his right hand and suffers severe burns and shrapnel wounds.
And the bomb...
When the bomb explodes in his fucking hands.
Okay.
On December 10th, 1994, New York City advertising executive Thomas Mosser is killed when he
opens a package that's posted to his home in Caldwell, New Jersey.
So it's a second murder.
Months later, Kaczynski mails a letter from San Francisco to the New York Times and takes
responsibility for the bomb.
He claims that Mosser was targeted for his public relations firm's work for Exxon Corporation,
the company whose tanker, the Valdez, spilled oil in Alaska's Prince William Sound.
So he sends the bomb to the fucking public relation firm instead of...
You got a name?
Don't send it to anyone.
I'm not saying...
Get those publicists.
Seriously.
You take them down one by one.
Man, you go to work.
All you want to do is go home and have a glass of chablis.
As I've said previously, pet your cat.
Okay.
Release some statements for your clients, but no.
Right.
But no.
In 1995, timber industry lobbyist Gilbert B. Murray is killed when a package explodes
at his Sacramento office, and the package is actually addressed to the person that Murray
had recently replaced as the president of the California Forestry Association.
So two months later, on June 24th, Ted mails several letters from San Francisco to media
outlets and demands that his 35,000-word essay...
Remember we just did that?
Yeah.
And a piece titled, The Industrial Society and its Future, which was the original name
of our book, but we had to change it.
He says he wants his 35,000-word manifesto to be printed verbatim by a major newspaper
or he would keep sending bombs.
So after debating the wisdom of giving terrorists such a fucking platform, FBI director Louis
Frey and attorney general Janet Reno, your favorite, your favorite Reno.
My personal style guru.
They authorized its publication because they said that maybe it could help lead to the
bomber's identification.
So they fucking put the...
On September 19th, 1995, these poor people are like, Washington Post, what's happened
in the news today?
And the New York Times published the Unabombers Manifesto.
It rails against the Industrial Revolution and the evils of modern technology.
It's like, you're fucking 95 years too late already, bro.
Although I wonder if we all sat down and read it right now, if we wouldn't be like,
ugh, he was kind of right, it's all happening, it's all happening.
You do the math.
No, wait, calculators do the math, okay.
So, after this publishing, a woman named Linda Patrick is casually reading the manifesto
in the paper, as you do, breakfast or whatever.
You skim a manifesto before work.
She recognizes the language as to be similar to the language in letters that her husband
David receives from his estranged older brother, Ted.
She's like, that sounds like his insane rantings that he always fucking sends to...
In his Christmas letter that I hate getting every year.
We don't care what you did in that cabin, Ted.
We're not putting you in the newsletter for months.
So she's like, David, honey, this is your brother's shit.
You should at least tell the FBI.
And David's like, no, no, no, no, no, it can't be, can't be, la, la, la, la, fingers in his
ears.
But in February of 1996, he's like, okay, it comes forward and provides a writing sample
of Ted's to the FBI.
He wants to be kept anonymous, but it's leaked to years.
So on April 3rd, 1996, they're finally able to connect the two and they arrest Ted Kaczynski
near Lincoln, Montana at his creepy place, residence.
Hi, cabin.
Thank you.
They find a wealth of incriminating evidence inside his tiny cabin, including another bomb,
bomb making components, and the original manuscript of the manifesto.
Which is like...
That he hand wrote?
Yeah.
With his Lisa Frank pen.
People start to theorize that Kaczynski is also the Zodiac killer.
But it's discounted when the MOs don't match up.
But I'm like, sometimes MOs don't match up.
For a reason.
Sometimes they like to throw you off the trail.
Let's check the DNA.
Does that work out age wise?
Probably none of it works out.
He started Zodiac-ing when he was around 14.
We did everything else very young.
I want it to be true.
So therefore...
Okay, so he's indicted on 10 counts of illegally transporting, mailing, and using bombs and
three counts of murder.
In late 97, he's put on trial in federal court in Sacramento.
But the case never moves forward because he gets locked up in all of these procedural
battles with the lawyers and prosecutors and the judge because of course he hates them
all and thinks he's smarter than all of them and they can all go fuck off in his fucking
mind.
He is and they can.
He has to represent himself, blah, blah, blah.
Psychiatric evaluation ordered by the court diagnoses him as a paranoid schizophrenic.
His lawyers later attribute his hostility towards mind control techniques and his participation
in the study that he had done.
Yeah, that adds up.
He doesn't want to plead insanity.
So to avoid a long trial and the death penalty, he pleads guilty to all charges on January
22, 1998 and he receives eight life sentences without the possibility of parole and he's
sent to a super max prison in Colorado.
Yay.
His cabin is seized by the U.S. government when it's put up for auction and it's now
on display at the Newsome, the Newseum, Newseum.
Sounding that one out.
You thought that was someone's last name.
Newseum in Washington, D.C.
The Newseum.
The Newseum.
I wonder what that is in Washington, D.C.
So he's now 77.
He is still a prolific writer and corresponds in longhand with hundreds of people.
He still produces essays and books.
In 2012, he responds to the Harvard Alumni Association Directory inquiry for the 50th
reunion of the class of 1962.
I've got my jacket, boys.
I'm ready to come and visit you.
He lists his occupation as prisoner and his eight life sentences as awards.
What a fucking dick.
And I wrote, but really he's a murderer who killed three people and physically and psychologically
traumatized 23 people in his nationwide bombing campaign from 1978 to 1995 and he now spends
23 hours a day secluded in his cell.
And that is the quick unabomber.
Wow.
Thanks.
You did that so fast.
I'm sorry I stretched out the Mitchell brothers all over your...
No, that was fun.
That was...
That was fun.
And I wanted to be quick because we have a really special hometown that I'm so excited
about.
Yes.
It's the fun part about doing festivals is there's other people around to come do your
show with you and so we're excited to bring out our friend and yours, Mr. Patton Oswald.
Thank you.
Oh, thank you.
We have this chair for you.
It's Patton Oswald.
Man.
Whoo.
That was a quick unabomber.
Good lord.
But that's actually good because I'm going to now debut my new one-man show, Manson in
a Minute.
Oh, cool.
Yeah.
Very excited.
Great.
I'll take royalties of that.
Please.
Yeah.
It was weird.
I was reading about some San Francisco...
I'm going to do a local San Francisco murder that...
And by the way, San Francisco, much like Karen and I in the early 90s, was a place for murderers
who became big in LA later to come and kind of work out their stuff here early.
That's right.
I took my daughter through the hate.
I've been here with a family all week, so I walked her by 636 Cole, which is Charles
Manson's old house, where he lived with Van Houten and Fromm, Squeaky Fromm, coming knock
on our door.
They had their little...
The outfits.
Can you imagine the outfits?
Exactly.
Before, oh, the misunderstandings were hilarious.
And now that house is a pâtisserie where everything costs $90.
Enjoy Cole Valley.
And also, the night stalker committed a murder up here killed a couple named Debbie and Peter
Pan.
No, really?
Yes.
Is that the one in the marina?
I believe so.
But the night stalker killed Peter Pan in San Francisco.
Oh.
What an asshole.
I have a really good brag that my cousin Marty, Martin Kilgara, who is on the San Francisco
police department, now retired, was one of the cops that went to investigate right after
and found his fingerprint on the windowsill.
He never told any of us that until two thanksgivings ago, when someone's like, hey, Karen, I think
you'd be interested in this, and I still fucking stood up at the dinner table and screamed
at the top of my lawn.
That's the best thing I've ever heard in my life.
Wow.
But what I'm going to talk about very briefly is the doodler.
I don't know if you guys know who the doodler was.
Oh, shit.
Well, the 1970s in San Francisco was quite a time.
You had almost...
Really?
We haven't heard.
Yeah.
Almost back to back, you had the zodiac followed by the zebra killings, followed by the doodler.
The doodler operated, I believe, January of 1974 until the summer of 1975.
He patrolled, prowled the streets of the Castro.
He would pick up gay men, he would sketch them, and then kill them.
He would do a sketch of them and kill them, and the police worked the case.
And again, imagine, like, just back to back, zodiac, zebra killings, and the doodler.
And by the way, that does sound like late-season Batman villains.
We've run out of...
We had the Joker and the Penguin, and now we've got, oh, it's King Tut and the weird
Vincent Price egg guy.
I don't know who we have left, but yeah.
Sorry, this is a dumb question for sure, but did the people who got sketched, were they
into that part of it up until the physical threat?
Was it like, what's your hobby?
I'm going to draw you with a big head and a tiny body, like riding a horse on the Golden
Gate Bridge or something.
Was it that?
So, you play football there, champ?
Like a football?
All right.
Well, there you go.
Well, what I'm wondering is, you know, it was, again, it was a well-known case.
So by the 9th or 10th victim, when the sketching started, were they like, oh, I think this
is the doodler, like, you know?
Or they just went...
Well, what if it's...
Yeah, exactly.
It can't be.
I don't want to ruin this.
It's such a romantic moment.
Oh, so it looks great.
I kind of want...
Maybe I'll just take it and run with that doodle of me.
All the pictures were very complimentary, so no one ever wanted to interrupt him.
It was like, that is what my eyes look like.
I've always thought so.
Oh, he's giving me that jawline.
I've always wanted...
That's her jaw.
Well, here's the other weird twist of the story, though.
There were survivors of his attacks, and the police narrowed down a suspect that they were
sure was the doodler.
I can't believe I'm using the doodler.
It's the best.
Yeah, exactly.
It'd be like the Uncle Schmecky murderer, like, what happened was, there were a couple
of survivors.
The police had this guy, what they felt like was dead to rights, and these survivors would
not come forward, because at the time, it was still looked down upon to be gay.
They were afraid of being outed.
They would not testify against him, and they never were able to charge the guy, and here's
the last part of this, one of the survivors, according to police, and according to an article
that I read in the all, was a very, very famous film actor at the time.
They believe it was either Richard Chamberlain or Rock Hudson, and he escaped the doodler
and would not testify, and so that was another reason that...
But he's going to testify tonight, ladies and gentlemen.
You loved him in the Thornburgs.
Let's get him out here, folks.
Richard Chamberlain.
Come on.
Richard Chamberlain from Showgun.
Come on.
Yeah, so there was this whole, so basically, he killed 13 people and went free because
of people being afraid to testify, and so the doodlers out there...
Well, I did read recently, they're going to retest the DNA evidence they have.
It's in the news recently.
Is that true?
Mm-hmm.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Yeah.
So they might...
Maybe they'll finally get him.
If we had just produced this correctly, we could have revealed those DNA tests tonight.
Someone in this room is the doodler.
You're not the father.
You're not the father.
You're not the father.
But I mean, again, it's one of those things of so many of, from the 70s, there were people
that kind of went free because of just how primitive a lot of police work was.
One thing that my late wife, Michelle, kept mentioning to me, my wife wrote a book called
That I'll Be Gone in the Dark, but one thing that really disturbed her was she would read
police reports about them going to look at suspects, and it was like, rang suspects doorbell,
no answer, and then they didn't follow up because he wasn't home.
That was how long the investigation went.
He wasn't home.
What could we do?
I mean, he left out.
If someone's not home, we can't interview them.
I mean, how could it be him if he leaves the house?
Exactly.
There's no way.
It's not him.
He slipped our dragnet by going to go see Freebie and the Bean, and so we had to let him go.
I don't know what I could do.
Yeah, so that all that thing about the set, again, it would be amazing to really go back
and do a true crime procedural show set in the 70s with all of those limitations.
I'm seeing that thing as well.
I guess he's going to get caught.
I don't know what to do.
All of that.
And then they're like to the women, well, what were you wearing?
Yeah.
This is a really bummer show.
Or they could, or it could be the thing of like they have a whole plate full of saliva,
and they're like, Sarge, what do you want me to do with this saliva?
Throw it away.
We don't need that.
Oh, God.
It's like, it can't help us.
Oh, my Lord.
Ew.
Any bodily fluid.
Get it out of here.
There's a semen in the fridge.
Oh, dump it.
Let's dump it.
We don't need that.
Oh, my God.
Can we get the press in here really quick?
Get them to confess or let them go.
I don't know what's spitting semen.
What?
Come on.
Come on, guys.
Yeah.
Let's quit fooling around.
Good Lord.
I'm not Mr. Wizard here.
I don't, you know.
Wow.
Did I do mine too quickly?
I'm sorry.
No, no.
That was amazing.
It was just perfect.
That was amazing.
I just, again, there was a, I'm just trying to imagine being living in San Francisco in
the 70s and just like, we got past the zodiac, we got past the semen, the doodler, like,
what the hell?
What is next?
No wonder they just knocked on doors or like, we're so sick of this shit.
Yeah, exactly.
What's like the waffler is next or something?
I don't know.
Not our precious waffles.
That was amazing.
Yeah.
That was a really good one.
Thank you.
The doodler.
The doodler, everyone.
The doodler.
By the way, oh, my God.
I was just over in Galway in Dublin and I know that you guys are about to tour Europe
in the fall and you're going to Ireland at one point, right?
Yeah.
One of the guys that, my guy, that my opener is a huge fan of your podcast and said, tell
them to listen to a podcast.
I'm sure you've already heard about it.
It's called West Cork.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
And he was like, West Cork is the weirdest.
It is so insular that there was this very big murder by this guy that, it's so clear
the guy that did it and got away with it because the people in West Cork are like, we don't,
we don't snitch on each other.
No, we don't.
And a lot of weird stuff goes down in West Cork.
So if you're over there, maybe go read it.
It's a good one.
It's a good podcast.
And the murderer, I think he's like in the podcast being interviewed.
Yes, exactly.
Because he's so cocky.
Really?
And he's anxious to be on the, like he's excited that he's on this podcast.
He wants to help.
People think that I did it, but I mean, it's crazy I didn't.
And it's just so, like he couldn't walk more into a confession more times and they couldn't
get him convicted.
Yeah.
Those podcasters must have been, they're just like, are we actually getting this on
tape?
How is this possible?
If you didn't put a tape in this and press record, I'm going to be so mad at you.
Yeah, exactly.
But they must have the oldest thing like this is like the anti the jinx because he's confessing
over and over again and he's walking, you know, like that's okay.
We don't care.
Hi, I'm Bob the murderer.
How are you guys doing?
Great to be on the podcast.
You want to talk, talk about a MailChimp really quick and then we'll do the thing or what's
going on.
You got any promo codes you want to give this week or?
Oh, we have to say some names from what's it called?
Nope.
If I had gotten it would have been great.
You have it.
You have it.
I don't.
Go back around.
No.
Stephen, cut that out.
That was terrible, Stephen.
Well, thank you Pat.
That was amazing.
Thank you guys so much.
Thank you so much for capping off our show tonight.
Yeah.
Come on.
Pat Noswell, ladies and gentlemen.
Amazing.
Pat Noswell, everyone.
Should we say goodbye?
Yeah, I guess we should.
What we really need to say right now is stay saved and do God's missions.
That's a really, it's a really important message from our podcast.
Did you hear that story?
No.
Okay, so.
I've already creeped out.
We're just going to tell Pat.
We're just going to tell Pat and the few people who don't know the story, but it really
is the best.
Oh boy.
So we walked up to another woman, an older lady.
She saw I think like at the mall and she was wearing one of our t-shirts that said SSDGM
on the front of it.
So the girl goes up and goes, oh my God, you're a murderer too?
Oh my God.
And they try to start talking to her and the woman goes, yeah, I don't know what you're
talking about.
And she said, you're sure.
And the woman goes, my daughter told me that this meant stay saved and do God's missions.
Fuck you, mom.
Fuck you, mom.
Yeah.
I forgot, but loves murder.
Set her up.
Yes.
Set her mom up.
Set her up for public interactions that she did not understand and that were not Christ-based.
Wow.
And we're not, could not be less Christ-based.
That's fantastic.
So.
Oh man, there should be so much a sort of trend of giving those shirts out and what,
just telling their moms different acronyms for things.
And then just have murder people run up all the time.
Murder!
Yes!
No.
It's our campaign to get people to yell murder in mom's faces across the US.
Religious mom's faces.
It could be any religion.
Salty donuts.
No.
No.
But more than that, what we really want you to do is stay sexy and don't get murdered.
Thank you, San Francisco.
Thank you, guys.
All right.