My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - 184 - Weighted Blanket
Episode Date: August 22, 2019Karen and Georgia cover The Doodler and the deaths of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy...#do-not-sell-my-info.
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This is exactly right.
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Hello.
Hello.
You tricked me.
I surprised you.
Welcome to my favorite murder, the podcast, where we go over true crime cases that have
happened in the history of man, starting from the pro-magnant period, all the way up through
the Bible and beyond.
You know the important parts.
You know the ones you, those ones you like.
That's what we're here to talk to you about and teach you.
Yeah.
Yeah, we teach you.
There's so much teaching.
Get your notepad out.
Oh.
There'll be a quiz on this.
Oh my God.
Write down this info.
We call it quote unquote information, because who knows if it's true or real.
We don't for sure.
You know what's funny?
We're not going to check.
Why would that be a part of it?
I actually had kind of like a weird recovered memory the other night of the live show where
I talked about the murderer who was keeping all the bags of leaves in his house.
When you were like, how come I didn't read this one?
I'm like, I don't know, because it's brand new, like full confidence.
It was like a 12-year-old story.
There's those ones that I think about sometimes.
The mistakes we've made and the paths we've traveled, but we just keep tripping.
Because guess what?
You're my favorite mistake.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Me?
No.
Oh.
What else do you need to know?
Me?
Nothing.
No, not you.
I look at you, but I'm asking America.
I get how this works.
And beyond.
Nothing.
Oh.
Damn it.
Not one thing.
I can't figure this out.
Our improv is off this week.
We haven't been rehearsing.
No, but still and.
We're no butting instead of it.
I'm still anding.
Isn't it still and?
I'm still anding.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Can I just say?
This is the episode where we get sued for too many music.
Did you watch the... Touching your hand.
Did you watch the Elton John biopic?
I have not seen that movie yet.
Okay.
You know how I hate movies and I'm a bad person to watch TV with because I yell?
Right.
I was talking.
I loved it.
And I loved the biopic of Freddie Mercury with What's His Face.
Yeah.
Rami Malek.
Rami Malek.
And I hate movies and I hate biopics.
They're so easy to make fun of.
Yeah.
But I wasn't gross.
You know, it's funny.
My sister who never gets to see anything because she's a single parent and a full time teacher.
She actually, the first time she got a chance to go see a movie, she went to see the Elton
John biopic.
Loved it.
So good.
She's been with me every day since that I haven't yet seen it.
I'm shocked you haven't seen it.
Did you see the Queen, the Freddie Mercury one?
Yes.
I did see that one.
I was ready to fucking tear it apart.
And I loved it.
Yeah.
It's great.
I feel like any of those stories, what's more fascinating than watching someone become
a mega rock star?
Yeah.
That's a great story.
Yeah.
But it's an actor with fake teeth doing it.
So it's not that great.
It's not a biography.
It's not like a, you know, it's not real.
I thought you liked it.
I did.
It's a documentary.
I usually hate that shit.
Oh, got it.
Got it.
And in the beginning I was like, those teeth.
I bet that wasn't even how it really was.
And I was like, what's he going to do next?
Yep.
Yeah.
Very compelling.
Well, I think that guy from Mr. Robot is a great actor.
Yeah.
He was great.
Yeah.
But I'm very excited to see Rocket Man because I hear, everyone I know that's gone to see
it was surprised at how much they loved it and how much they, how true and honest it
was on Elton John's part.
Like how honest he was about being a diva and a dick sometimes and all the different things
that he was honest about.
Yeah.
I loved it.
I think a lot of those times when you're on that level of superstar, like kind of Mount
Rushmore style, you don't, you're like, yeah, it was the best to everybody all the time.
Well, that's why we wrote Stay Sexy and Don't Get Murder.
And we got real, real about it.
So we could remember later in the future when we're fucking country divas.
Which is two months from now.
Yeah.
It's now.
Now.
It's now.
Stephen will tell you.
Yeah, sorry.
We're already working on our next book.
Country divas.
So many asterisks on the cover of that book.
Also just speaking of which, in the spirit of our strong improv skills, if you've ever
listened to, there is a, I always call it a podcast, but it's not.
It's just this weird radio channel on my Apple Music.
And it's Elton John's Rocket Hour.
And he basically is the DJ for an hour and plays you all the new music he loves and old
hits he loves.
It's Henry Rollins, the sidekick, because I feel like Henry Rollins is by law required
to be part of something like that.
Nope.
It's all by himself going and he basically is just like, loves new music and loves breaking
like new bands.
And it is awesome.
And then he'll remind you of like, here's an old great hit.
Yeah.
Remember this one?
Yeah.
And then he'll say, you don't remember this one because it just came out.
Yeah.
Stop being a poser.
Yeah.
Here's this band.
Remember it now because you're listening to it for the first time right now.
Yeah.
Do you have anything?
Oh, I do.
Okay.
Kind of an important thing.
Do you have anything related?
Yes.
Do you have anything from the podcast?
Yeah.
Listen.
Look.
Last week in my spirited and totally, totally enthusiastic excitement to talk about season
two of Dairy Girls.
You can't, you can't, you can't discount your excitement over it and enthusiasm.
Like that needs to be part of it.
No, it is.
And it really, it's that I wanted to get the information right knowing I had messed it
up once before when I said the Dairy, Dairy Girls took place in Belfast as if there's only
one major city in Northern Ireland.
Last time last week when I talked about Dairy Girls, I said what I'll call now, I'll call
it the map name of Dairy because that's what I saw.
So you're not wrong, wrong.
Not technically, but culturally very wrong.
In America, you're not wrong.
Well, on maps, but I mean like if you pay attention to Dairy Girls, which is essentially
look at the title.
What you, yeah.
The basics of paying attention.
The town London Dairy is referred to as Dairy.
And so last week I called, again called it London Dairy, having been corrected, having
apologized, but I'd only forgotten my one mistake about talking about that show and
not the second, arguably could be more important.
They're equal mistakes maybe.
So anyway, I got one tweet that was very, very Irish and very guilt written or guilt
inducing where it was just like basically like, ah, you did it again and you don't seem
to care.
You don't care about anything.
But then I got another tweet that made me laugh really hard from Nini P and E-E-N-Y-P.
She wrote in and said, or sorry, they wrote in and said, as my dad always says, London
Dairy is the only town in Ireland with six silent letters.
So that's how in the future we'll remember to call it only Dairy.
It's just Dairy.
Just like we're locals.
And really, I'm going to take this contrition and this new information, this learned information
right into our UK and Ireland tour.
You're good, dude.
You're on it.
I'm on it.
We're coming to you, Ireland, to apologize to your face.
That's right.
I think Dublin on November 25th, that show isn't sold out.
And London on November 28th, that show just got posted and it's not sold out yet.
So sell it out and yell Dairy at us.
Don't do that.
Now it'll be super irritating.
And you don't care.
We'll discuss it.
You don't care.
Right.
Can I do a, what's it called, corner when I suggest something?
Suggestions going against.
Is that what you're calling it?
Did you watch, like I asked you to, Jailbirds on Netflix?
Nope.
Can we all need to talk about it now?
Because can we all need to?
It's the Sacramento Jail and it's just the stories.
It's like Orange is the New Black.
It's on like the sixth floor, which is the women's ward.
It's like Orange is the New Black, but real and terrifying and fascinating and wonderful
and awful and amazing.
They talk through the toilets.
What?
Yeah.
Like there's a way to not to, because the plumbing is such that it just goes all the
way down so you can talk to the dudes and like form relationships.
It's like Twitter through the toilet.
Oh my God.
When people fall in love, they send messages through the toilet.
They've like tricked the system and it's fascinating.
What else are you going to do if you're just sitting in jail?
Yeah.
Jailbirds on Netflix.
I highly recommend it.
Well, if we're going to do this and we might as well, then I will say the reason I haven't
watched Jailbirds and I do have it on my little list.
When people recommend something to me, I definitely write it down because I can't find anything
ever.
You know, I always get baffled, but season two of Mindhunter came on Netflix and that's
what I've been binging.
And it is, I loved it so much.
I watched it all in like basically two days under my weighted blanket and I will tell
you this and it's not a spoiler because they talk about it in a lot of the articles, but
among the cases that they address, a big chunk of the back half of the series is spent
in the case of the Atlanta child killer.
That's right.
They handle it so perfectly.
They handle it because I got super nervous.
I was just like, uh, this is going to be the version that we've always gotten and whatever.
And it's as if they've listened.
It's like they listened to Payne Lindsay's Atlanta child killer.
It's so well done because it's, of course, from the point of view of these, the FBI men
that went in, but then it gets turned and the women playing these mothers of the murdered
children get their time in a way they never have in reality.
And as I was watching it, I was just like, this is beautiful and important because these
are the things that they were saying to anyone who would listen and no one was listening.
And no, it gave me that feeling of like the kind of justice where at least they got to
say these beautiful and important things about that kind of, um, that kind of murder
and the kind of, um, failure in the justice system for at risk kids, like the kids that
were below the poverty line in Atlanta, um, in the early 80s.
Yeah.
It was unbelievable.
Yes.
And when the white majority of people who were white in law enforcement would come in
and be so fucking condescending and everything was about you need to take care of your children.
So like on the insult on top of the injury, it was unbelievable and as if they don't
love their kids and are worried about their kids as much as those, you know, as anybody
else in that city.
Right.
It's there's a couple of really moving, beautiful moments and I just think it's, I think they
did a great job.
I love it.
I can't wait to watch the rest of it.
Yeah.
The second, keeping with the suggestions corner, confronting OJ, the podcast.
Okay.
So I was like, I'm done.
I know everything there is to know about the OJ case.
We've all watched the Simpsons, like we all know all the things, but then this one is
hosted by Kim Goldman, who's Ron Goldman's sister and it's really moving and really
beautiful and it's about, uh, loss and tragedy and going through this thing that she went
through as a young woman and it's, it's really well done and beautiful.
That's great.
I've been listening to, um, I've already talked about listening to the Ram Das podcast here
and now a couple of times and, but I've listened to almost all of them and I've transitioned
over to a podcast by a woman named Tara Brock, who is an unbelievably amazing teacher and
she's, um, I don't even know what, what the correct terminology is, but it's all, it's
basically kind of like a, she's a meditation teacher, but it's very, it's kind of like
what we do, how we use our own minds against ourselves and how to get out of the ruts and
habits of, of being in the mind, um, and it's really good.
It's that kind of thing where like the way she talks you through the stuff, it's not
too woo woo, it's not too out there and you don't have to know or have studied a bunch
of stuff.
Like it's just, it's very basic.
She reminds, a lot of the stuff she says reminds me of the stuff my therapist says.
It's really good and it, it's just how it's, you know, I don't know, I've just been, I've
been listening to it a lot, like, you know, sitting out in the sun and it's just that
kind of thing.
Like you go, Oh yeah, that's true.
Just this when you, when you, when you give your mind too much credit and then you get
stuck in these patterns and how to get out of them.
Anyway, if you're interested in hearing about any of that Tara Brock, um, I think that's
her podcast.
Yeah, I looked it up and it's like literally just her name, Tara Brock, B R A C H.
Oh, like the candies.
I wouldn't have known that.
Yeah.
Hold on.
There's one other one I want to suggest.
Carrier.
Um, and it's a really cool, like it kind of reminds me of Night Vale.
It's like a, it's like an audio book, but it's not and it's really well acted and it's,
uh, Cynthia Arrivo is the main character and star and she's incredible and it's just a
really fun.
But it's a podcast?
Yeah.
And it's like to get out of your head.
It's, it's creepy.
Oh, that's cool.
Yeah.
Well, that's our recommendations.
There you go.
Oh, that took 45 minutes.
Um, go to my favorite murder.com, join the fan cult, have fun with it, you guys.
That's all we have.
Uh, oh, were you going to do your, your TV guide for the exactly right network?
That's right.
Uh, this podcast will kill you this week.
Their episode is about cystic fibrosis, which I find really interesting and I'm sure a lot
of people out there want to hear about it.
Perkast has Lucy from Wine and Crime, uh, Murder Squad, Billy Jensen and my, uh, alcohol
supplier, Paul Holes, Murder Squad is Owls, Headman, and there's a bonus episode of you
and Billy Jensen at the Skylight bookstore.
That's right.
And then Fall Line.
Yeah.
With Sprite's Gas, Paul Holes.
Oh, right.
Yeah.
That's another photo.
Drinking my alcohol.
What if he drank my alcohol?
But he said he has.
He's, he's had a couple cans of wine while he's here.
Oh, then I feel good.
Okay.
Um, the Fall Line season five is out and it's incredible.
Yeah.
Um, what about, uh, this week on your podcast, your other podcast?
Do you need a ride?
Yeah.
Um, the other podcast.
The other.
Is, Steven, is this week, do you need a ride just me and Chris?
Yes.
Last week was too.
No, no.
It's, cause it's every other week.
So yeah.
This, this Monday was the ghost, the ghost, uh, the Swan Lake lights and everything.
So that's just Chris and I, basically driving around and yeah.
I'd listen to that.
The two of you just talking.
It was fun.
It was one of the first ones we've ever done at actual night.
That's right.
We do it during the day.
Cool.
And at one point we drove by Echo Park Lake and all the swan boats had Christmas lights
in like on, in the shapes of swans.
So it looked so beautiful.
Pretty.
It was really cool.
Love it.
Um, and that just, that's just one of the things that happens.
One of the many things and you too can listen along.
We look at things.
Can you fucking believe that?
They comment on them.
Yeah.
In, in real time.
And Riff.
That's right.
And they don't let Steven wear a seatbelt in the back.
So it's real.
Excited.
Forbidden.
You hear him whimpering the entire time.
One of these, he make him sit in the baby seat all day.
No.
He'd, he'd like it.
Yeah.
It's like a baby seat, but with all kinds of podcasting equipment around it and attached
to it.
Yeah.
And a Starbucks just right next to him in case he gets antsy.
Actually a Starbucks opened in my back seat.
Did you hear?
A Starbucks store opened a new location in your back seat.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
It's a joke.
I can't.
You're just trying to piece through it.
So what you're saying to me is, let me explain this joke to you, but I don't understand.
Look and listen.
Don't want you to be upset.
This joke I don't get.
There's no Starbucks in the back seat of my car.
I thought you meant when, let me tell you what I thought.
I thought you went when opened and spilled.
Shit.
I didn't even think about that.
That's ladies and gentlemen, we, what we call, what is it, a homonym.
Oh, confusion.
That's called, huh?
Huh?
Am I?
Am I?
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You're first this week.
Is it me?
It's you.
Okay.
So this, I got the idea to do this case because when we went to San Francisco to do the Custer
Fest Festival, which was an amazing show, we had the best time.
And at the end, our good friend, the front of the show, Pat Noswalt.
I was going to call him podcast Oswald.
Why doesn't he have a podcast called that?
I think, I think we're going to pitch it to him.
Podcast Oswald came on and he came and did his hometown from when he lived in San Francisco,
which was the serial killer, the doodler.
And I was just flipping out because I'd never heard of this serial killer before.
I mean, I think it was like maybe in the list and I kind of looked at it, but it was not
anything that growing up in the Bay Area that I was familiar with and which freaked me out.
And Patten went over it.
It kind of, it was very quick.
You know, we couldn't get super detailed into it.
So I figured that's what I would do this week.
So this week I am doing San Francisco's the doodler.
Yes, fair enough.
There's an incredibly great article from the website, The All, a WL, which was written
by someone named Elon Green that had very good detailed stuff about the victims of these
crimes.
Also, USA Today, The Washington Post, and of course, All American, Wicca, Wikipedia.
And this starts in 1974.
And what is mind blowing is that 1974 is also the year that John Wayne Gacy began killing
back teenage young boys that Ted Bundy began killing young women, that Coral Watts began
killing fucking everybody, and that BTK began killing.
74.
74.
Get your shit together.
It was not so.
It was a time and a place.
There was all kinds of murdering happening all across the United States.
And San Francisco was no exception.
And the city had already been plagued for five years by the now very infamous and yet still
yet unidentified killer, the Zodiac.
Do you think it's going to be solved anytime soon?
Did he leave DNA behind?
I don't know.
I bet it is.
I mean, I hope so, but it's like he started in 68.
So it's like that DNA is like 60 years old.
Yeah, but I bet there's more than you think because it didn't cross his mind that we'd
be a touch DNA at this point or whatever.
I mean, I hope so.
And I hope it was saved.
You know those when these crimes come up or you listen to a thing and they're like,
and then all the records were destroyed, Maria Kondo on the fucking on the evidence room.
Yeah.
And now there's nothing left.
Space.
Yeah.
Get rid of all this evidence.
Yeah.
So who knows?
I mean, that would be an incredibly, it would be so exciting.
And yet it would be also so anticlimactic at this point.
Dick.
It's always just some dick.
Well, and based on the legendary David Fincher movie, the Zodiac.
Yeah.
Oh, no, I'm sorry.
Zodiac.
Plain Zodiac.
Um, the Zodiac is the porn that was made based on the Zodiac and it's all the astrology
science fucking sexy, um, that is sexy.
But in the movie, the guy that they interview at the end, I feel like that's the guy for
sure.
It just really felt like it.
But then again, the movie wanted you to think that.
Yeah.
But in real life, that guy totally seems like the guy.
Yes.
And he lived right near Petaluma.
Yeah.
Zodiac watch.
Zodiac watch and also squirrels in your mobile home.
The end.
Yeah.
The end.
Butterflies in your van, as you learned from last many so.
Last many so did then.
Squirrels in your.
Squirrels in your mobile home.
Stop it.
Get out of here.
If you're double wide.
So, uh, so he had the Zodiac had been taunting SFPD and the SF media with a constant stream
of cryptic threatening letters, uh, for five years at this point, um, the last verified
letter ever written by the Zodiac, this was verified, not, they'd received other ones
after that, but they were all kind of, they weren't sure who wrote them.
The last verified one was written by the Zodiac on January 29th, 1974.
But what the city didn't realize was that just as a Zodiac's reign of terror was beginning
to wane, a new killers was just beginning because, uh, five days before the last Zodiac
letter on January 24th, 1974, at just around two o'clock in the morning, the fully clothed
body of a man is found lying face up at the water's edge on San Francisco's ocean beach.
He'd been stabbed multiple times on the front and back of his body and investigators determine
he died only hours before he was found.
And based on the defensive wounds on this left hand, he, um, he was believed to be conscious
and put up a fight during his attack.
Um, no identification was found on the body, but the man was eventually identified as 49
year old Gerald Kavanaugh, um, who was Canadian born, born in 1923, um, he had emigrated to
America and now worked at a mattress factory in a Bay Area.
He was single, um, and no one else that they interviewed really knew that much about this
man's personal life.
So, um, six months later on June 25th, 1974, a woman walking along Stow Lake, uh, which
is now called Spuckles Lake in Golden Gate Park, discovers the body of a man who'd been
stabbed five times, um, again on the front and back of his body.
Um, and he'd also died shortly before his body was found, um, and investigators notice
there are also defensive wounds on this body and he also had no idea on him when he was
found.
Um, this victim is identified as 27 year old Joseph J Stevens and J Stevens was a popular
female impersonator and gay comedian who'd worked at, um, San Francisco's world famous
club, Finocchios.
Um, yeah.
So, um, 27, such a baby and he, when he made his debut, the all article talks about it.
He was like, he really, he was this really gorgeous drag queen who, um, really made
a splash, got to work at Finocchios, which was a very big deal, but then eventually stopped
doing drag and started just doing gay standup comedy.
And yeah, and, and so young.
I mean, like really just kind of starting a future there.
Yeah.
Um, witnesses say that the night, um, of his murder or, you know, the, the evening before,
um, they saw Jay leaving the cabaret club in North Beach and, um, the police theorize
that Jay himself had driven with his murderer to the park, um, and actually given him a
ride.
So, um, less than two weeks after Jay's, um, body is found on July 7th, a woman's walking
her, uh, walking her dog discovers the body of 31 year old German American immigrant,
Klaus Christman.
He had been stabbed 15 times on the front and back of his body, more than the first
two victims.
Yeah.
And his throat had been slashed three times.
Holy shit.
Um, Inspector Dave Tashi of the SFPD described it as one of the most vicious stabbings he'd
ever seen.
That name might sound familiar to you because Inspector Dave Tashi was the lead detective
on the Zodiac.
That's who Mark Ruffalo played in Zodiac.
Uh-uh.
Yeah.
He had serious therapy probably at the end when he retired.
I mean, he was, he was in it deep and so he was one of the detectives on this case as
well.
Wow.
Um, Klaus Christman was wearing a wedding, a wedding ring, but when investigators, um,
searched his body, they find a tube of makeup in his, um, possession, leading them to believe
that Christman was a closeted gay man.
Um, and later witnesses report seeing him at a gay bar in the Tenderloin called Bojangles
and this was the last place Christman was seen alive.
Wow.
So the police see that there, uh, could be a connection from this stabbing to the other
stabbings that have been happening.
Okay.
So then 10 months later on May 12th, 1975, so this is almost a year later, a fourth body
is found stabbed to death beside the highway running parallel to Ocean Beach.
Um, so he's identified through fingerprints as 32 year old registered nurse Frederick
Capen and Capen had also served in the Navy.
Um, he was a decorated soldier, um, for his service in the Vietnam war.
He'd actually won a commendation medal for saving the lives of four men under fire.
Wow.
Um, he had also been stabbed in the heart and there were markings in the sand indicating
that his body, having dragged about 20 feet from the place he was killed.
Um, and then less than a month later, uh, on June 4th, 1975, a 67 year old Swedish sailor
named Harold Goldberg is found by a hiker in the bushes near the 16th tee of the Lincoln
Park golf course, which is just northeast of Ocean Beach.
So it's around basically the same area.
Um, and Harold's pants had been unzipped.
His underwear were missing and the body had been there for over two weeks.
Holy shit.
Yeah.
And it was basically a hiker went like 10 feet off the trail and then found this body
that had basically been hidden there.
So all five of these victims were found within four miles of each other and all within the
span of 18 months.
And because all of the victims were seemingly connected somehow to the gay, uh, lifestyle
or scene, um, of course the gay community is gripped by fear because clearly there is
someone who is attacking, um, predator.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a predator in, in their midst.
Um, of course, many people in the gay community felt like the police were not only not empathetic
to the situation, but they, they actually blamed the victims and blamed gay men for
putting themselves into vulnerable positions when they went somewhere with a stranger.
So there's a lot of mistrust and animosity coming from both sides.
And then in July of 1975, there are two separate attacks on gay men at the Fox Plaza Apartments
on Market Street, uh, within two weeks of each other.
So both victims are able to escape with their lives.
So this is the first time people are coming into contact with who they think this person
who's killed these other people might be.
Um, and they, both of these men give the same description of their attacker.
He is a tall, young black man with very smooth skin.
Um, so when a third man is assaulted around the same time and provides a similar description
of the attacker, the police, uh, are starting to feel very confident that they're going
to be able to catch this guy.
The problem is this man, this third man who was assaulted quickly leaves the city after
the attack and will not answer phone calls from the police.
And so essentially this is what they come up against is it's the seventies, early seventies
in San Francisco, mid seventies in San Francisco, where a lot of the people, uh, some of the
people will say that frequented gay bars were not out to their families.
And there was a ton of risk of being outed as a gay person in the, in the early to mid
seventies.
Totally.
Um, cause this is 1974, 75 in 1978, and this still blows my mind.
I learned about this by watching the mayor of Castro Street, which is that amazing documentary
about Harvey milk.
He's amazing.
He's, it's such a good documentary.
If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it.
In 1978, conservatives tried to pass this thing called the Briggs initiative, uh, where
they were trying to ban, um, gay people from teaching in California public schools.
Holy shit.
That was 1978, which you would think, Oh no, it's, we're almost to the eighties.
Like everything's fine.
That's just an indicator for, uh, you know, if you, if you don't know or remember of the,
of the serious, uh, like oppression that was actually really happening.
And that's, it's an amazing part of the mayor of Castro Street when, when they go on and
they basically debate the two people that brought this initiative forward and Harvey
milk and the amazing female lawyer.
I don't know her name off the top of my head, basically decimate these people on the live
news, like on the seven o'clock news.
And it is, it is a beautiful thing to behold.
Yeah.
Cause it's basically two people going, yeah, you, you guys like to stand up and talk about
like that we're pervert perverted or we're, you know, automatically bad people or whatever.
And it's like, once you see two people who are just like out and queer and proud going,
you can't do this to us.
The other two look like dipshits and assholes.
Like it's just such a telling moment and that initiative of course does not get passed.
And it basically kind of they, you know, Harvey milk got out into the street and started talking
to people and having people really doing like pounding the pavement and saying to people
like if this initiative passed, you understand that like you could be next whatever group
you're in, right?
If you are not like the white majority, you're also in danger.
Like we can't start picking people off in these like in these minority groups and saying
that that's fine.
Yeah.
And you watch people have this conversation with, with people on the street and you watch
their faces realize like, oh yeah, this can't happen.
It's really amazing and beautiful, but we're still, so this is, we're now three years before
that.
So people who are being attacked because they were at a gay bar are like, there's no way
they're, they can't come forward and have their face on the news.
San Francisco, whichever one thinks of as a progressive city, it's like, there's only
parts of it that are.
That's right.
Yeah.
And not, and, and it doesn't mean that the people at your job will understand or your
boss will understand.
Or, you know, your parents, everything, yeah, there's, there's a ton of risk.
So anyway, that, that became a big problem with this.
And of course the narrative became they, like they won't do anything about it.
Like it was really.
We can't help you because you're not doing anything.
Yeah.
Well, if you're not going to come forward too bad for you and like throw it all over your
shoulder.
So by the assault victims and other witnesses accounts, the police put the killer's MO
together and basically what, what would happen is this guy would go to gay bars, night clubs,
24 hour diners and he would sketch the faces of basically his victims and then he'd come
up to them, tell them that he was a cartoonist.
He'd show them the sketch that he'd drawn of them, start up the conversation and all
the witnesses and the victims said he was a very talented person, very talented illustrator,
really intelligent.
He literally had like an upper middle class education.
He was very charming, a smooth talker and he had a big smile, which I always say, you
know, I say the smiley or someone is get away from that person.
Yeah.
What are you trying to prove?
Yeah.
Now I'm like, am I smiling too much?
I guess I do.
I kill everybody.
I guess I have a lot of teeth and not a lot of lip and it's just, it gets me and people
think I'm psychotic because of it.
I just want you to get huge collagen injections into your lips.
Into my teeth?
Straight into the teeth.
Okay.
But lip shaped.
For you.
Your lip.
Inception.
Don't worry about it.
Okay.
So essentially he was intelligent, charming and smooth enough that he could lure people
to a private secluded second location to hook up and people felt very safe doing that with
him.
Because all of these attacks happened on or around the weekends at night, police suspected
that he could live in the barrier, but not in the city and then drive into the city on
the weekends to do that and then leave.
Smart.
I mean, they're smart to figure that out.
Right.
That he's smart.
Correct.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I do.
Five months after these, the July Fox Plaza apartment attacks, police released a composite
sketch of the suspect based on the assault witness's descriptions.
It shows a man who is between 19 and 25 years old.
He's African American, medium-complexed.
He stands between 5'11 and 6' tall and he is lanky.
The suspect is reported to have, quote, sexual identification problems.
This is from the police reports.
Wow.
Yeah.
And Isor was seeing a psychiatrist on an ongoing outpatient basis.
I don't know if that's from the conversations that the witnesses and victims had with him
or what, or if it was the investigation that basically brought the cops to those people.
I do know that there was a, they did discover or there is, one police report that says that
there is a psychiatrist that came forward that said they had a patient who admitted
to being the doodler.
But they can't say who it is because, no, no, no, that's not true because if it's, you're
hurting someone else or yourself, you can break doctor-patient confidentiality.
Is that true?
Yeah.
Immediate, immediate danger to yourself or others?
That's what they tell you when you first go in is if it's your, yeah, to yourself or
others or they think you're being hurt.
They can break it.
Does your therapist say that to you?
I think every therapist I've ever had has said they're the first, like, eating.
Do they?
Really?
Yeah.
Oh.
I'm gonna confront Michelle next week.
I guess she's telling everyone about your shit.
Everything we talk about is on her blog.
Okay.
So, the composite goes out and it's a very detailed and specific picture and all the
identifying details are very specific, but nothing comes of the release of it.
And then in January of 1976, the San Francisco Chronicle runs an article about the doodler
murders.
It includes one story from an unnamed witness, a European diplomat, who met the suspect
in a restaurant in the upper market, which also could be considered the lower Castro.
That's right where my gap was when I used to work at the gap.
Oh, I know that one.
Yeah.
Yeah, I worked over there too.
So, the suspect asked the diplomat if he had any cocaine.
They went off to the diplomat's apartment and they took party and chit chat or whatever.
And while they were in the diplomat's apartment, the suspect proceeded to stab him six times.
But the diplomat managed to get away and he survived to basically make this police report.
He claims to the police that he and the suspect did not have sexual relations.
And that person remains unnamed.
There's also stories about a famous and still living a Hollywood celebrity that also was
attacked by the doodler, could be one of these three men that were in this apartment building.
And that name, people have been trying to figure out who that person is for years.
For a long time, they suspected it was Rock Hudson because he was shooting McMillan and
his wife in San Francisco at the time.
But they say this celebrity is still alive, so it can't be Rock Hudson.
That's what, that's, you know, Rumer Mill stuff.
Reading the story in the Chronicle, people start calling in tips to the SFPD, leading
police to finally arrest a suspect based on the description and people seeing this person
in different places, he had been seen in a tenderloin bar, perhaps Bojangles, and that
is Bojangles with a hyphen.
There was no Bojangles fast food restaurant in San Francisco at the time, so it's not
a Bojangles fast food.
It's a bar.
So there had been a guy in a tenderloin bar offering to draw some of the customers.
They go, they arrest a man, and when they do, they find a sketchbook on him and a butcher
knife.
No.
Yes.
Guilty.
They, when they bring him in for questioning, he is very cooperative.
He never admits to murdering or attacking any of these victims, but the police feel
very strongly that this is their man.
And at one point, he snaps and tries to attack the interrogating detectives.
Holy shit.
He is arrested for attempted assault or whatever.
But when it comes time to press charges about the murders with this guy, the three surviving
victims refused to testify against him in court, fearing that it would out them and
destroy their lives.
And as a result, the police are forced to release this suspect.
And that suspect's identity has never been released to the public.
Despite this setback in the case, when that, like basically, when that piece of the story
comes out to the public, Harvey Milk immediately steps forward to defend the surviving victim's
decision not to testify saying, quote, I understand their position.
I respect the pressure society has put on them.
And Harvey Milk also cited that 20 to 25% of the 85,000 gay men in San Francisco are
closeted about their sexuality at this point in time, showing a wide reluctance of gay
men to share their personal lives publicly.
Understandable.
Understandable because the fallout was so much greater than we can understand today that
anyone really understands.
It was a big part of that culture.
I just can't, I just can't get over when I, because remembering the, the Briggs initiative
from the documentary I watched, I was like, oh, that must have happened a couple years
before.
Yeah.
And the fact that it happens after the fact in 1978 is so shocking to me and so justifying
in that, in that risk that he's talking about, you know, totally just like, it's like still
coming at you.
Yeah.
And actually when the killings began, it had only been a year since the American Psychiatric
Association Board of Trustees had stopped classifying homosexuality as a disorder.
Holy shit.
It had only been a year.
So it was very, you know, the stigma was not gone in any way.
So that was 40 years ago.
The case still remains unsolved, but this past February, 2019, police released new information
about this case.
And I think Patton talked about this a little bit.
But since the capture of the Golden State Killer through use of DNA, detectives' interest
in the doodler was reinvigorated because all those big cold cases that seemed so mystifying
back then are all, I think, being looked at.
I think so, yeah.
So the advances in DNA forensics lead detectives to believe their chances of catching the killer
are now much higher.
In the past year, investigators have submitted DNA evidence to the police's crime lab and
are still awaiting results.
In early February, 2019, San Francisco police released an updated sketch of the original
suspect to reflect how he may appear now 40 years later.
And it essentially is a bald black man.
Yeah.
Basically.
It looks just like the original picture, but he's bald and like heavier.
Yeah, essentially.
So authorities have released the recording of the 911 call that reported the discovery
of the first victim, Gerald Cavanaugh's body.
The caller was anonymous at the time, but they're asking whoever that caller is to come
forward so they can re-interview them and see if there's any additional information that
they can get from that person if they're still alive.
Which is the weirdest part of it is, it's long ago enough that that's a big issue in
this case.
It's possible that the doodler may have been responsible for as many as 14 murders that
took place in San Francisco's gay community during that stretch of time between 1974 and
1975.
And if the doodler is still alive today, he would be in his mid-60s.
So I said I was always so curious as to how I didn't know about this kind of famous San
Francisco serial killer.
And then I read this paragraph from the Elon Green's article in the All which kind of like
took my breath away because he says, and then four and a half years after the killings ended,
San Francisco's own Ken Horn, a ballet school dropout, was reported to the Center for Disease
Control with Kaposi's sarcoma.
And five murdered men would become relative to what followed a statistical blip.
So essentially these murders happened a little bit of time past and then the AIDS crisis
began.
And basically everything changed permanently in San Francisco and obviously in the world.
And so that is the hopefully soon to be solved case of San Francisco's the doodler.
Dude, that is emotionally charged.
Isn't it nuts?
I'm crazy.
It's so like when we start pulling apart these old cold cases where it's just like
all the reasons and the reasons are more injustice, it's like victims being victimized basically
just because of who they are.
It's always just like it's the case, but then you also have to factor in and all of these
the time and place which really affect it more than you would think it when you hear
the story and you're like, well, let's just solve it.
And it's like, no, you don't understand what was going on at the time, how horrible things
were or how racist and how sexist and how homophobic things were back then in all these
cases.
And it wasn't back then that was just regular life.
Right.
Everyone was supposed to shut their mouth and try to be in your place.
Keep your place and keep your mouth shut and not speak.
And if there was a message to be said, some white man was going to say it for you.
Some straight white man, I should say.
So yeah.
All right.
This is one of these disappearances and these mysterious circumstances, cases that I've
been following for a while.
So I thought I'd finally do the mysterious disappearance and death of Chris Kramers and
Lee San Frun.
Get ready.
Get.
Okay.
Okay.
Got a ton of information.
There's like three-part article and follow-up from The Daily Beast from 2017.
They do an investigative pieces on this called Lost Girls.
It's a whole series by Jeremy Critt.
Also all that's interesting.com, there's an article by Katie Serena.
There's a blog called Scarlet Letters that has a really great article about this.
And the crime blog, mostly mystery.com, has some good info too.
So I've never heard of this.
Okay.
I think you will once you hear about it.
The details.
Right now.
As I say it.
Okay.
I'll vomit this out of my mouth.
Okay.
Got it.
Here we are.
In the spring of 2014, Chris Kramers, and that's a female, K-R-I-S, and Lee San Frun.
They're students.
They're from the Netherlands and they're planning a trip together to Panama.
Lee San is 22.
She graduated with a degree in Applied Sciences from DeVinter, which I don't know if I said
that right.
Yeah.
It seemed like you had a good...
DeVinter.
There's a bit of an accent there.
I liked it.
Another lenses, right?
Yeah.
You know.
I've been to Amsterdam.
Yeah.
You go all over it.
She had just graduated.
And Chris, who was 21, had just completed her studies in cultural, social education,
specializing in art education at the University of Utrecht.
They had met while working in a cafe together and had become close friends.
And they had recently moved into the same student housing in its Amherst Fort, is where
it's called, in the Netherlands.
So they were planning to go to Panama as like they're in between year.
They were fucking stoked.
They had spent six months saving up money and planning, like meticulously planning this
trip.
It was going to be part vacation, but then the other part of it was going to be a service
trip.
They plan on spending some time hiking and tourisming, which is my new word.
And then they were also going to be learning Spanish and then following that they would
be volunteering at a school teaching arts and crafts to local kids while staying with
a host family.
Nice.
So it's going to be like their, what's it called, bump year?
Is it bump year?
It's absolutely not bump year, but it's gap year.
Gap year.
Thank you.
There it is.
You had a gap year working at the gap.
Right in my front teeth.
I had gap year from age zero to 17.
So Lysanne, she's six feet tall and athletic.
She'd been a volleyball star in college and was into extreme things like skydiving and
mountaineering.
She had done alpine hiking, you know, in the Netherlands, so she was experienced, an experienced
hiker and mountaineerer.
She was, she's described as thoughtful, intelligent, empathetic, and she kept a diary and brought
it along with her to Panama.
So Chris Kremers was described as creative and intelligent.
She's outspoken, responsible.
She had this beautiful long strawberry blonde hair.
She had less outdoor experience, but she was young and healthy and like ready to fucking
take on the world.
She planned to go to graduate school for art history after their trip to Panama, after
their bump year.
They both grew up in Amherst Fort, the town in the Netherlands, about 45 minutes from
Amsterdam, where we had so much fun.
Yes.
What a time.
What a time.
I will never forget that hotel room.
Oh my God, yeah.
It was like my dream apartment hotel room.
It was so beautiful.
It was.
Okay.
I was going to talk about Vince's snafu at the airport, but maybe I shouldn't.
I don't think you should.
I won't.
Okay.
Tour stories.
That's the new podcast.
That's right.
Okay.
On March 15th, 2014, the Whitman flew from Amsterdam to Panama City and took another
flight to Boca del Toro, then a boat to the Panamanian island of Isla Cullen, and then
the archipelago.
That's probably not right.
Look.
The way you pronounced it.
Archipelago.
Archipelago.
Archipelago.
Archipelago.
Is there an eye in there somewhere?
Arch...
No.
Not anymore.
Archipelago.
Archipelago.
So they adventure in town and around there until March 29th, and they arrive to Bukete.
It's the small town on the Caldera River in western Panama where they're going to stay
in the host family's house and teach children.
And this town, Bukete, is something like, it's like a fairy tale.
It's in the bottom of this valley and it's surrounded by like rain forests and there's
a volcano.
It's gorgeous and there's a lot of expats and tourists that go to this place specifically.
And of course, you and I remember Panama in the 80s, it wasn't a fucking safe place to
be.
Crazy.
Yeah.
So not.
Not in Latin America.
And Bukete is thought to be even safer.
It's popular with retirees and expats and has just one paved street and fewer than 10,000
residents.
It's known as Little Switzerland for its resemblance to the Alps.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's cool.
Yeah.
But when they arrive there and they go to where they're supposed to start work at the
school, they're disappointed to find out that they are turned away, that the people
say that they're too early and there's like a whole mix up with their schedule.
But they were able to find their host family, these two young women, and they checked in
there and they plan to do some sightseeing while they figured out what the problem was.
So on April.
I'm sorry, but that gives me this uncomfortable feeling.
Yeah.
Like it's starting already.
Yeah.
Because when you travel that much and you're saying they took a plane and then they took
a boat and they had to do it, they're like clearly going to a slightly remote location.
Yeah.
Like language completely.
Right.
And then there, people are like, oh no, no, you're not supposed to be here.
You're not.
Like even if it was a hotel in the United States, I'd be like, uh-oh.
Yeah.
So imagine you're so far from home.
Totally.
But you have your best friend with you and like, so that's comforting, but you're also
two women in a foreign country, which is just scary to begin with.
So they find their host family, they check in there and they're going to do some sightseeing.
On April 1st, 2014, Chris and Luzan, they take a taxi from their host family's home and dropped
off at the famous Piennista Trail.
It's a trail that leads them to the Continental Divide, which is like that saying the Continental
Divide gives me like goosebumps, doesn't it?
Yeah.
It feels so huge and like a cool indie band name.
Yeah.
Doesn't it?
Oh, that would be a good name.
Right.
By the way, all these pronunciations are really a plus.
Thank you.
I'm trying.
Yeah, you're doing great.
Thank you.
So just in case we're all wondering like I was earlier, the Continental Divide is the
crust that marks the spot where the countries' water breaks for the Pacific Ocean in one
direction and the Caribbean in the other.
So it's like dividing the two oceans.
They both go in either direction.
Look at this way.
Look at that way.
Got it.
Here you are.
East-West?
Okay.
Didn't get that far.
Sorry.
I'm pretty sure we had a book.
Oh, yeah?
Like in the National Geographic series style where it was called the Continental Divide.
And I would look at it but not read it.
That was my big thing.
So like pictures only and then I'm out.
You and I know.
Words are overrated.
God, the information is dumb.
I can't read.
Okay.
So this hike that they were going to take, which goes up and back, the Piennista Trail.
It's like a famous trail.
It should just take four or five hours to get there and back.
And if they had gone further, it turns into kind of like wild terrain and they don't suggest
you go that way.
So even though this is a trail that's famous, it wouldn't have been suggested that two foreigners
take that trail themselves.
And they'd actually met with a potential guide earlier in the day and this guide had suggested
that he'll take them on the trail.
They can spend the night at his ranch and then come back.
They had turned him down for some reason but had agreed to come see him the next day.
So it's kind of weird that they were then just like, but let's go on this.
I think they were expecting it to be just a small casual hike.
So I think they're smart to not spend the night at just a stranger's ranch.
Right.
That's probably what they were thinking.
They'll take a regular hike the next day.
But so they just, it seems like they just wanted to take a nice hike and kill some time.
So they plan to hike through the scenic forest around the Baru volcano, which is an active
volcano and that would bring them through the cloud forest, which is because the height
is so fucking heighted that it's through the clouds and there's also waterfalls and shit.
Amazing.
Yeah.
Judging by the clothes and what they brought with them, they obviously didn't plan on being
there long.
They dressed in just shorts and tank tops and only brought a light backpack, one of their
passports, a little bit of money, their cell phones and a digital camera.
Like they weren't planning to need more than a snack and some water, nothing more than
that.
This was not a long-term hike.
Not at all.
Yeah.
They were never seen alive again.
Okay.
So, there's so much, one of the mysteries about this case is that there's so many different
versions of it, of who this belonged to, what happened here.
One of those things is that there was a dog that had started the hike with them, a dog
named Blue that might have belonged to the host family, it might have belonged to the
restaurant that they had had lunch at, family, but the dog had gone with them.
And when the dog returned that evening, without the girls, the family who the dog belonged
to and the host family began to worry about where the girls were because the temperatures
at night in the cloud forest would have been in the 50s and 60s at that elevation, which
means hypothermia would have been a risk, especially since they were dressed so lightly.
The host family searched around the area, around their home and just some light searching
but decided to wait until morning to alert authorities not really knowing.
I don't think they, you know, the girls hadn't left behind a note saying where they were
going, I don't think they knew that they were going just for a hike, so they could
have been anywhere.
Right.
And they probably didn't, they didn't want to raise an alarm immediately.
Right.
But by the next morning, on April 2nd, the women hadn't shown up to their appointment
with that local tour guide we had talked about, who was supposed to show them around.
And so the teachers from the language school reported that women missing to police.
So the locals began to search for the women on foot, but the authorities thinking the
girls were just probably out partying or something and not actually missing, didn't
begin the search until April 6th.
Oh no.
So they had left on the 1st and it wasn't until the 6th that they began to actually
search, but the locals had been searching.
And at that point, the authorities asked the locals to stop searching so they could take
over.
And a local named John Tornblum, he was a guide with more than 10 years of experience
who had been looking for the girls, he said that quote, the rescue operation was a total
clusterfuck.
Oh no.
Yeah.
So when the families of the women found out that they were missing, and these were two
really reliable girls, when they found out that their reliable daughters were missing,
they flew straight to Panama and they brought with them detectives from the Netherlands.
So along with the local police, they searched the forest for 10 days using dogs, helicopters,
and ground teams.
The parents offered a $30,000 reward, but there was no sign and no trace of the women
at all.
Wow.
Like they had disappeared.
After a 10 day search without any leads, local authorities called the search off.
I know.
Then about 10 weeks later, after the search was called off, in mid-June 2014, an indigenous
woman from the Nobi tribe brought Lisanne's blue backpack to the police.
She was like, yo, I fucking found this in a rice paddy and the banks of the river.
The river was so powerful that the locals called it the serpent.
It was like a crazy river.
She's like, I fucking found it near a rice paddy, near her village of Alto Romero.
It was at least an eight hour walk from where the girls had last been seen, but the indigenous
woman was like, it was not there the day before, I'm sure of it.
So she brought it in.
And I think everyone must have known at the time that they were looking for these two
missing tourists.
Inside the backpack were two pairs of sunglasses, $83 in cash, Lisanne's passport, a water
bottle, Lisanne's camera, because she had brought a separate camera, two bras, and the
women's phones.
So I'm assuming that women were like, when I got home today after our lunch, I took my
bra off.
That's the first thing I fucking did.
Yeah.
It's just FYI.
Sure.
So I'm assuming that's why they were in there.
Yeah.
The police assumed they were like, oh, it must have traveled up the river and gotten caught
in branches and shit.
But here's the thing, the backpack was totally dry and everything in it, including the camera,
was in working order.
Okay.
Right?
So it was probably not in water.
No.
Yeah.
So both the info from the phones that were in there and the camera were able to tell
like somewhat of a story of where the girls had traveled in their days following the disappearance.
So with the phone, the first emergency call had been attempted from Chris's home the night
the girls were last seen on the first.
So that night, they had left around 11 o'clock in the afternoon to go hiking on what was supposed
to be a four or five hour hike and at 9.39 p.m. on April 1st, someone tried to call emergency
services from one of their phones, but there's no signal.
Right.
They're in the fucking rainforest.
They're in the cloud forest.
That's right.
Yeah.
Then over the next four days, 77 attempts are made to call the authorities, the police,
both using 1-2-2, which is the emergency number in the Netherlands, and 9-1-1, which
is the emergency number in Panama.
So it's like, who do you, if you end up, I call 9-1-1, right?
Yeah.
But I think in any state now or any country now, you press 9-1-1 and it will go to emergency
services.
Right.
That might not be true.
I mean, if only.
Yeah.
I think there's, yeah, there is, I remember this, but there was a story of like people
trying to do it and it not going through because they didn't have coverage or whatever, where
it's like, if this is what you're trying to do, it'll go through no matter what.
Yeah.
And there's another thing, like it's 2014, which seems like not that long ago, but it
is.
Five years ago.
Yeah.
Digitally and technically, it's right.
10 years ago.
Yeah.
So using the call logs, police are able to come up with an outline of the time the girl
spent missing in the forests.
Can you fucking imagine being so scary?
This is why I stay home at all times.
Because they were in the jungle out of the 77 calls that they made, only one managed
to make contact with a signal, but it broke up between like one or two seconds later,
which is like even worse that they're like, oh my God, there's a signal and then it fucking
goes away.
Yeah.
What a nightmare.
After April 5th, Lisanne's battery dies and the phone's not used again.
But Chris's phone would not make any more calls either, but was intermittently used
to search for reception.
So there was no more like emergency calls put out, but you could tell it was open and
turned on.
Then on April 6th, a bunch of unsuccessful attempts were made to unlock Chris's phone
because she had a pin number to unlock the phone.
So someone got the phone and was trying to put the pin number in, but they put the number
in wrong.
So it probably wasn't Chris or she was dehydrated and like couldn't think of the correct one.
Exactly.
It never received the correct number again.
So it was never able to open again and try to reach emergency services.
By April 11th, both phones were dead.
All right.
Now let's talk about Lisanne's camera, a Canon PowerShot SX-270 promo code murder.
On the digital memory card had over 100 images found and strangely the battery is still half
full when the investigators get to it 10 weeks later.
Whoa.
So shout out to the Canon PowerShot.
Yeah.
That's a good battery, ladies and gentlemen.
Yeah.
But it also means that they hadn't been really using the camera that much, and there was
no signal on it so they couldn't track it with GPS on the camera itself, which I think
you can now.
Can you?
Yeah.
Well, also, you have to think if they were panicking and walking around the forest, they're not
going to be like, hold on a second.
Yeah.
What's a camera going to do for you?
Right.
Nothing.
And you would like to think that they would then start taking pictures to tell the story,
but that's a very dark concept.
It is.
And then also they say that a lot of people will use it to leave messages for their family
or they'll leave a message as to where they're going and how to find them, but those aren't
found.
Okay.
However, there are some photos found.
Oh, 100.
The first of the photos on the camera are taken the morning that they left April 1st that
women are shown on the beginning of the trail towards the continental divide.
There's nothing strange about them.
They're fucking selfies, they're shit that 21 and 22 year girls would take, scenery,
you know, I'll take a photo of you, you, of me, selfies together, they look happy and
normal, all is going well.
But in the last few shots from that day, it looks as though the women are following an
indigenous trail down the opposite side of the crest and it places them about an hour
from the top of the divide.
So that's part of where, you know, the indigenous people won't even go during the rainy season
themselves.
It's just these, you know, weird trails and you're supposed to, I feel like a lot of
people when they take a hike, they think the trail wraps around back to where they were
going.
But this is one that you have to turn around and go back the other way.
But there was no sign saying, don't go further than this at the time.
Right.
So they're still heading downhill away from Bukete.
The last image that we have of Chris Kramer's face is her turning to look back to the camera.
And at this point, she seems pissed off.
She seems upset and distressed and like, where the fuck are we going and why the fuck you're
taking a photo of me right now?
Like we need to concentrate.
She seems upset.
Then things get strange.
On April 8th, so they went missing on the first April 8th, 90 flash photos were taken
between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m.
I don't like that.
Apparently they, and I've seen the photos.
It reminds me of that one crazy story of the snowstorm and the avalanche and what happened
to those people.
Oh, the Dilatop Pass.
Thank you.
My God.
It's just like that, where there's weird photos that don't mean anything to us but have to
mean something.
So you can tell they're deep in the jungle, some of them there's nothing in focus.
You can just see the rain coming down and some rocks and trees and stuff.
It's in near complete darkness.
So the timing between photos is also interesting because they vary from just a few seconds
as fast as the camera could take them or 15 minutes apart and more.
So it shows that it was already raining pretty hard and a few photos show that they were
possibly near a river or ravine and some photos show a twig.
So it looks like they're taking photos of markers that they're setting up to remind
themselves either of where they have already gone through, so maybe they're making circles
and are freaking out about it and like, we've already been here, let's take a photo.
So they put a marker up with a twig with plastic bags and candy wrappers on top of a rock and
they also used a roll of toilet paper to spell something out on a boulder and put a rusty
mirror in the center of the letters.
Maybe it was to reflect the sunlight the next day and flag a passing helicopter.
But it's speculated that maybe these photos were taken as a reference point in an attempt
to mark where they were, like I said.
So to make sure they weren't going in circles.
Or they were using the camera's flash to get light to see the path in front of them.
Because the thing I keep thinking of, because that's what I thought of first, because of
rear window where you're like, you feel, because you're also in the jungle, just the spiders
alone.
You don't even have to get into snakes, spiders alone.
So you and I are walking in the blackness of the jungle.
They said something about jumping venomous snakes.
No.
No.
So if you feel anything.
Nothing.
Then you're like, what's on me?
Yeah.
And then that's the only way you would be able to see things.
Yeah.
Oh, I don't know.
Like what did I just walk into?
What did I just hit?
Yes.
Like you can't see in front of you.
Yeah.
You're lost in the jungle.
Yeah.
It's horrifying.
Or is it to help searchers locate them with the flash?
They think someone's trying to find them, so maybe they'll see the flash.
Oh, yeah.
Can't get them.
The timestamp on these photos means that one of the women, so it's the eighth at this point,
which means that the women, one of them or both of them had already managed to survive
more than a week without food or shelter in the wilderness.
Wow.
It's speculated that perhaps by now one of the women was badly hurt or perhaps even
dead at this point.
Most likely that was Chris based on the photos and also she couldn't get into Leanne's phone.
So.
Oh, right.
Yeah.
She couldn't get into her phone because she couldn't ask her about it.
And there's also a single close-up photo that shows, it looks like it shows a wound to the
right side of Chris's head in the temple area and blood matting her distinctive strawberry
blonde hair.
So, I know.
It's fucking awful.
It's horrible.
So sad.
When the backpack is turned in, there's a new search put together along the Serpent River
where the backpack was found there, Chris's jeans shorts are found zipped up and folded
neatly on top of a rock near where the backpack had been found.
So some say that maybe that was a marker where they were, you know, had been like, let's
put a marker here.
We had, we've run out of stuff to put down.
Others say that the shorts were actually found in the river and someone else took them out
and folded them up like thinking they were being helpful in some way.
Maybe I was thinking maybe, you know, in hypothermia, when you start taking your clothes off,
I could have been that, but they were zipped up and like folded and put down.
Yeah.
It wasn't like you'd be, you'd toss it off and walk away.
Right.
Exactly.
So it was probably, yeah, who knows.
So two months later, after this is found, this time even closer to where the backpack
was discovered, a skeletal part of a pelvis as well as a boot with a foot instill inside
were found.
I know.
Soon, at least 33 scattered bones were discovered along the same riverbank DNA tests confirmed
that they belong to the girls.
So Lesanne's bones looked as if they had decomposed naturally because there was still
bits of flesh attached to them.
But Chris's bones were stark white and looked as if they had been bleached.
So like maybe she had died and the sun had bleached her bones, but it was like two months
later.
So a Panamanian forensic anthropologist said that under magnification, there was no marks
on the bones at all.
So this means, so I was like, okay, then they hadn't been stabbed.
That was my first thought.
But then I realized it also means that there was no claw marks or bite marks that would
suggest scavengers, you know, tossing these 33 bones all over the fucking place.
So that's actually suspicious, right?
And so, and no marks would also indicate that they hadn't been broken up on the river rocks
either.
Like they hadn't been, you know, died and down the river.
So the other thing is the scattered bones being found is weird because most surrounding
victims, as the locals will say, are usually found in one piece further downstream or they
get stuck in like the rocks and are found later.
And sometimes they drag the river, even a year later, the bodies are found intact.
So it's weird that they are found, and like in little pieces like that as well.
A former cadaver lab supervisor said it's almost unheard of for dronny victims to break
up into tiny fragments and quote, almost impossible for it to happen in less than two months.
Which is the time between the one the girls went missing in April when their bone shards
were recovered in June.
Yeah.
At the stage of the search, proper police procedures.
And so of course these are totally, you know, everyone is saying that they weren't followed
and the police fucked up on this.
And police procedures were largely ignored.
No search grid was made at the time.
And no soil samples were taken like from the backpack and from where they said it was found
or from the boots to where they had left to kind of just see what was their route and
where they had gone.
You can find more info, none of that was done.
And when the backpack was finally fingerprinted, over 30 different unidentified fingerprints
were lifted from it.
There were 13 on the backpack.
This is according to Scarlett, the Scarlett letter blog that she wrote that 13 were on
the backpack, 12 on the phones and camera as well as six different ones on the bras.
But see, there's no chain of command.
So it could have just been like people freaked out at the police.
They pulled stuff out and there was no fingerprints, you know, no one's fingerprint.
So no one went back over and said, no, no, no, this is the, this is the woman who actually
brought this in.
Exactly.
This is her family member.
Right.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Okay.
When forensic examiners couldn't decide if there was foul play or if it was an accident,
the Panamanian government simply decided that the case was closed, thinking it was just
a drowning.
By November, the attorney general publicly announced that the women had died of a hiking
accident after having been, quote, dragged to death in the river system.
People theorized that they rushed to wrap these cases up to protect tourism, which is
a huge part of the Panaman economy.
So further investigation by the Daily Beast.
And so they got all these fucking unclassified documents somehow, like all the photos and
the autopsy reports and all this shit they got a hold of, which is crazy and gets on
it.
Yeah, dude.
I couldn't have written this whole piece without the investigation they had done.
So further investigation by the Daily Beast writer into the case in 2017 uncovered enough
new evidence to suggest foul play, as well as possible link to other murders in the area,
including the Dutch girls.
There have been at least 25 unsolved murders and disappearances in this remote rural area.
Wow.
Since 2009, victims include many locals.
The majority of them are women and children, as well as tourists, including an American
woman named Catherine Johannet, who was 23, who was murdered in February 2017.
Some sources say the real number of disappeared could be higher.
And there's, I mean, there's so many.
I've stayed up all night fucking reading about this shit before.
There's so many theories out there that maybe the government ignored or there was a cover
up or the remains were thrown in the river to get rid of them or deliberately planted.
And there's all this cartel, hitmen, and cannibals and some slightly fucking racist shit happening.
Supernatural forces, organ traffickers, this kind of thing.
And the local guide who was the last person to see them, remember who they turned down?
Of course, he's become a suspect in a lot of the minds of people who are trying to figure
out what happened, and he's fucking going crazy about it.
So to this day, the disappearance and deaths, as well as the mysterious weird fucking clues
left behind, make the death of Chris Kremers and Lee Sanfroon still a mystery.
And that is the disappearance and death of Chris Kremers and Lee Sanfroon.
Wow.
We'll put the photos up because they're creepy.
I mean.
And it's just so sad, these two girls in the prime of their life going to try to make
a difference and to start the beginning of the rest of their lives and imagine, no matter
what happened, what they went through is a nightmare.
That's right.
Yeah, it's not always like they were...
It's not always just because it's a murder, it's like it could just be you take a wrong
turn.
Personally, I think that that's what happened.
Yeah.
I personally think that they got lost, and everything that happened from the first on
is to panicked women trying to get home.
Just trying to get home.
It makes me think of that happens in the Angeles National Forest a lot, and that you couldn't
be closer to a major U.S. city, and people constantly are like, take a wrong turn and
have to get helicoptered out of the...
And also thinking of that as a forest when it's like, there's not that much.
Totally.
I mean, we're not talking about the Black Forest in Germany or something.
It's pretty sparse, but it's nature.
It's unpredictable.
And you don't know what to do in an emergency half the time.
This is why I stay home.
And it sounds like if they were like, oh, we're going to go for a four-hour hike, they're
not going to have flashlights, they're not going to have batteries of any kind.
And they don't think they're going that far.
They think they're following a well-known trail.
But I was looking at the photos, and some of it just looks like riverbeds when it looks
like a trail, but it's actually not.
Some of it's crazy that the walls of this trail go up around you.
It's beautiful.
It's gorgeous.
It's a lucky adventure and have fun, but...
But take a battery, a flashlight, a bunch of stuff.
Know your friend's password for their phone.
Luna bar.
That's crazy.
Isn't that crazy?
Yeah.
Wow, good one.
Thank you.
Do you have a fucking hooray?
Absolutely.
Good.
All right.
Mine is simple.
Vince showed it to me last night.
It's my new favorite Instagram.
It brings me so much joy.
It's just UPS dogs, and it's fucking UPS workers on their route, and the dogs, they
mean along the way.
Oh, my God.
And a lot of them are like, they show at the foot of their truck, the dog that they always
see waiting for a treat.
Look at that.
Oh, my God.
My friend.
And then sometimes it's a deer, and sometimes it's more dogs, and there's one with a squirrel.
And it's just dogs being happy to see the UPS drivers.
There's a couple of dogs dressed as UPS drivers.
That's the cutest.
It's the most brilliant marketing fucking thing I've ever seen in my life.
It's so good.
Also, because those people really have to, there's, I can't remember, oh no, I can't
remember if it's FedEx.
If the guy that comes and brings stuff to me is FedEx, I think he's FedEx actually.
Because George, my dog sounds like a monster when she's in like an echoey hallway barking
to make sure that the person doesn't come in the door.
She's scary sounding.
And then I open the door and there's people who are like flinch or whatever.
And she got past me and got out, and the guy was so sweet, because I was like, here's
the lawsuit.
Here it comes, or this lunatic dog.
But all she wants to do is scare the people, and then the second they pet her, she doesn't
care what they do.
It's so smart.
It must be so terrifying to be a male person, or a fucking delivery driver, and you just
don't know how the dog's going to react to you.
Also just, yeah, this is a great, yeah, I just think it's brilliant, and it's incredible
photos.
It's so good.
And I just was stressed out last night and just scrolled through it going, look at this
one.
He was going to show it to me.
Look at this one.
It's really cute.
There's one with a raccoon who's just like stoked.
It's like, they know they're drivers, you know?
Is the driver giving the raccoon a tiny packet?
Here's your pine cone, sir.
And he takes it up to his house.
And then he writes a review on Amazon of his pine cone.
This pine cone is a little sappy.
Three and a half stars out of five.
Sappy.
I was definitely disappointed and heartbroken.
That's awesome.
Mine is equally as simple, but it's just that I have begun a swimming regimen that is saving
my life.
Because, you know, I overthink everything.
So when I try to do get active and do make adjustments, I'm always like, yeah, but it's
going to be this.
Hi.
Nice to meet you.
Yeah.
Hello.
Hello, Twin.
But I've just been getting in that pool every single day because also it's been boiling
hot in Los Angeles, luckily.
But the way it feels afterwards, it's just like, ah, I get it.
I get exercise now.
I love it.
It makes sense.
So it's just very like calming and it makes me chill out and it makes me feel like I've
done something good, so I don't have that like creepy self-loathing thing that I think
I'm just a touch addicted to because we're a tune to it because it's what we're used
to.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's been really nice.
And also then I can see the difference in the tone in my legs like I can just, I can
feel my clothes being slightly less tight and it feels great.
So should we do what we did a while back of like do yoga once a week?
Yeah.
Like everyone pick your one thing and do it once a week.
Yeah.
You don't have to do it every day.
All of the listeners are like, yeah, we've been doing it.
Oh, shit.
But no, let's do it.
I mean.
I haven't.
I mean, I don't.
Yeah, let's do it.
It's hard.
Let's re-approach it.
Okay.
It's the, like for me, exercise is hard because it makes me feel humongous and sweaty and
like my, you know, my, all my bones are going to break.
Yeah.
But of course swimming is zero impact and feels great and feels like you're really getting
something done.
Yeah.
So, yeah, we just build on, we take our small pieces and build.
Yeah.
That's the idea.
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
Yay.
Thanks for listening, guys.
Guys, thanks for being here with us again one more week.
That's right.
We love you.
We do.
We appreciate you.
We definitely do.
And stay sexy.
And don't get murdered.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Elvis, you want a cookie?
Good boy.