My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - 220 - Live at the Chevalier Theatre in Medford, MA (2018)

Episode Date: April 30, 2020

Karen and Georgia cover the murder of Mary-Lou Arruda and The Great Boston Fire of 1872.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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Night two show three. Oh yeah, that's a good song. I feel a little insane. Oh, I'm absolutely over the edge. For sure. We've done five nights in a row. Is that right? I don't know.

It's been a crazy week. My dress smells so bad. Oh, I can't even. If it smells were colors, I would look like pig pen right now for sure. There would just be a cloud. It's one of those aura photos. I'm like, oh, I'm so mysterious. And I just smell.

I stink. I stink. I stink. My undergarments are begging for mercy. Here's the thing. If you want to start like a side business, figure out a way to make Spanx deodorized in some way. Because, you know, us ladies on the road, and we know there's a lot of us out there. You can't just wash your shit all the time.

No. And I personally think washing something in a hotel sink is grosser than just wearing it five days in a row. Hard to tell. Hard to tell. I didn't tell you this, but when we were in New York, we got hotel rooms that had like separate bathtubs, which is like my, the only way I'll take a bathtub if there's not a shower, just rinsing other people's bodies into it.

Which now I've learned the bathtub is the same fucking thing, because when I got out of the first night, we would get to it. I didn't think about it. I know. You don't need to explain. I came out with someone else's body glitter all over my fucking body. What? Swear.

Swear. Someone went to a fucking rave or something. Or like Rebecca Romain after she played that one part in that one movie. Exactly. Sparkle, blue sparkles. Came out and I was like, I didn't put anything sparkly in the bathtub. That's hilarious. Never again.

What if someone got a hotel room just so they could fill a bathtub with sparkles and then get, get into it? Then I want to be their best friend. Right. My family won't let me be myself. I had to go into New York City and have an anonymous bathtub experience. Yeah. That's really funny that up until that point, you thought that the bathtubs were very sterile.

I know. Sterile environments. No, I know. I feel foolish. What are you going to do? Look. Listen. This is how we learn.

Yeah. And grow. Yeah? That's right. Slogan number one. Keep your eye peeled for all the other ones. If we're doling out advice to traveling women, may I? Yes.

And we are. And we always are. That's the point of the show. I would suggest having a hardcore homework podcast so that you don't have time to get into drugs and alcohol while you're on the road because you're sitting in your hotel room working on a story that you've changed five times in an hour. Poor Steven. Steven, can you get me pictures?

Oh no. Sam. He's not here. He's not here simply because he can't leave his, he can't deal, you can't work with us on the road. We're insane. Literally every five minutes, never mind. I can't do that murder.

It's fucking horrible. Can I do this one instead? You have to check with him to make sure the other one's not doing it. Wait for the okay. You get the okay. And then you change your mind immediately. Just keep asking and asking. Yeah.

Poor, poor Steven. He likes cats and he likes Georgia's cats. And that's about it. You know, sometimes we're like, I really love looking at crime scene photos and Karen doesn't and some people do and some people don't. Well, he just has to look at photos for us to pull for the live shows. It's very sad. It's so sad.

Just like you just realized bathtubs are dirty. I just realized how sad life is for Steven because of us. It's too bad we don't pay him. It's all volunteer. He's like our intern. It's not true. Just like how Vince was like, people always say to me like, it's so nice that you help them out on the road.

And he's like, I get paid. Yeah, motherfuckers. We pay him. I'm not like husband, do this thing for us, please. We're like, can we hire you because we're going to ask a lot of you and we don't want to feel bad about it. We'll pay you more than average so that you do way more than expected, but we're having a great time.

This is not complaining. No. God, it seems like it's important to say, I wonder if I should tell my story from last night. Oh, wait, first, let's take a look at some outfits because we didn't do this last night and it was absolutely heartbreaking when we realized it afterwards. I think the only important thing, I have a dress on, there's cheap shoes. Everyone knows this by now.

But Karen, let's talk about your dress. Well, okay. Thank you. Oh, thank you. No, don't. You don't have to. Thank you so much. I ordered this randomly off of Land's End, which is a catalog that actually cuts clothes

for people who wear clothes, like a human, human people, human people who wear clothes. Not like hanger bodies, not hanger bodies, not teens, just a lady, maybe a lady who's got her own farm in Upstate New York or something, I don't know, a person that just wants to be in. So I ordered this dress because I was like, that's a pretty pattern, that's fun. And then it came, I tried it on miraculously. It fit. I was just like, God damn you, Land's End.

Thank you. It's fucking established in 1864 or whatever. And then as I'm trying it on, I'm like, what do we have here? Yeah, I didn't even know it was like my birthday surprise from Land's End. They were all sewn. They were sewn. You know, sometimes they do that for, I don't know why, so no one gets in there before you do.

It's like I was sewn up, but I was like, and I was like, oh my God, look at how deep those pockets are. They go so deep. Those are her cough drops. It's like they knew that the marge who owns a farm Upstate is not going to go to whatever she's going to wear this dress to and not need pockets. Yes, we all need fucking pockets. And you know, someone sent us this, but I love this idea that they stopped putting

pockets in women's clothes because they didn't want them to carry concealed weapons. That's what I heard. It might be a rumor. Ladies. But I love it. Let's get back to our roots, you guys, carry concealed weapons. Yeah, tell your story from last night. Okay.

So let's see. Last night, at the end of last night, last night we did two shows here, which were both amazing. You guys are amazing crowds here in Boston. So good. We've seen you riot over sports. So we were kind of nervous that people are going to get mouthy, but everyone's been amazing. And so just they've really been great, great shows.

But of course, after the second meet and greet, and you know, we left her, you know, after midnight or whatever, we get home. Wait, first week, go through the drive-thru at Kelly's at Kelly's. You guys, Jesus, why don't we have that? I mean, yeah, I got a fucking, yes, we did it. You don't want to talk about your order? No. Okay.

It was really good, but I was telling these guys, I had roast beef, bad dreams afterwards. You can't just eat a big handful of roast beef at like one AM and then be like, everything's fine. Good night. It's like bad things, bad things happen. You were in it. We were escaping. We were escaping things.

Oh, I was there with you. Yeah. It was very, very real and scary. Yeah. We were escaping roast beef. There was a roast beef tidal wave, like the molasses flood, but roast beef. Yeah. So we're like, right.

We finally get to the hotel. We split up our food and we're walking through and we all say good night. These guys get off on a floor under mine. I get off on a floor and then I'm walking down the hall and I hear the pitter patter of little feet behind me and I'm like, if this is someone that was at the show. So I just start running. So I was, I was so fucking close. I was like 15 feet away from bed and roast beef and like feet up and I hear them running

too. No, chasing you. So I stop and turn around and they all stop. It's like four girls. They go like this. Like from the show. I assume they could have been staying there and just having some fun. I don't know what was going on, but I just went, good night and then I went into my room.

Maybe I'll meet you at a later date, but fuck no, am I going to talk to you right now? Oh my God. You have french fries getting cold. My eyes were bright red. I couldn't feel my feet anymore. I was just, it was, I was so tired. I have the light flu. No, it's fine.

Maybe I shouldn't have told that story. It seems very, it seems very Mariah Carey 99. I didn't, that's not how I meant it. But this isn't, this is my favorite murder podcast. Yeah, this is the podcast, my favorite murder. That's Karen Kielgarev, that's charge of heart start, yes. We're very, very happy to be here with you, very happy to be here with you. And especially that, not like how Brooklyn was serving canned wine at the live show.

That got loud because did you guys know that in a can of wine, here's a fucking insider tip that says it on the fucking can. It's two and a half glasses of wine. It's not a can of wine and like a can of beer. They didn't tell anyone that. Yeah. It got drunk, the part of the show. And Vince has a theory that when they make a drink, this special where it's like, the

my favorite murder can of wine or people are like, well, I have to have one, I mean, like everyone's just going like, I wouldn't normally, but give me four cans of wine, please. I'm going to go off tonight. It's happening. Yeah. Should we sit down? Yeah. Let's do it.

You guys, how cute is this tiny table? How cute is the table? It's the tiniest table. It's just the littlest table. It's a tiny table. This table is a set piece from the new PBS series, the miniaturist. You may have seen it when you guys came here, probably for the prices right live that was here in this theater.

We still have to get information about it. We haven't found out about any of the, was Plinko there? I don't know. Did people win actual money? Where's the car? Did somebody drive a car onto the stage? That can't happen. Oh, that would have been the best.

The huge wheel. Did they have a miniature size of the huge wheel? Hence the, maybe the table. We pull this off and it's got all the numbers on dollar. Um, who goes first? Oh, tell them what this is. This is a true crime. Oh, this is a true.

This is true. Say my line. Do you want to, um, this is a, this is a true crime comedy podcast. We like to warn people because, uh, we also should define sometimes there are people that come to these shows with people who really like the podcast. They've never heard of the podcast before. We like to call those people drag alongs. They don't know what's going on.

They're just trying to be supportive of their friend or mate. They got offered free dinner and they're like, fine, fine. I'll do with this thing with you that you keep talking about that. I don't understand. Fine. I'll sit next to you while you cry and do weird shit. We thank you for doing that. We thank you for being here, um, but we do want to warn you that this is a true crime

comedy podcast. So we're talking about murder. We're talking about death. We're talking about the darkest, worst shit, um, that society has to offer. But we also, uh, are do it in a comedic way. So we make jokes and, uh, make each other laugh while we do it. And sometimes that can be kind of a difficult combination for people who don't understand or might not want to give us the benefit of the doubt.

So for those people who are, uh, offended by that combination, you should probably get the fuck out right now. That's our, and we say that with so much love and thoughts and prayers. Yes. That's so many thoughts and prayers, which heals everything. Did you, there was a woman last night who, who didn't get the fuck out. She stayed even though that her friends who dragged her along told her that this was a murder mystery show.

It's just like murder mystery theater. Just come. I just, so much work. We walk out there like, so those are the costumes for what era is this set in? I don't understand. Yeah. Am I going to get tapped on the shoulder? And then I have to guess.

And then I fall over dead and someone has to, who's murder are we solving? And what is a podcast exactly? You're saying it's on my phone? It's already there? I don't know. I, I don't like to tap buttons too much. It's icky. So what we're saying is welcome.

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Goodbye. Hey, I'm Arisha. And I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wondery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about the incomparable diva, Whitney Houston. Whitney's voice defined a generation and even after her death, her talent remains unmatched.

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Yes. All right. So like I said. Let's see what you landed on. Yeah. I landed on a great one, meaning a horrible one. Wow, I had never heard of it, but I, it got to it through a lot of horror beforehand of I can't talk about that in front of all these people.

One of those. Sure. You guys have a lot of those here. Yeah. Thank you. Really no shortage of horrible things happening in the state of Massachusetts. Like, like the spelling of your state. Seriously, dude, how many teas and stays do you people want all the S's Jesus Christ.

You can have them, but this one is one of those ones that I hate and love because it's such a time and place. It's takes place in the late 70s when everything was great. Go outside, go play, tell it's dark. You know, sure. Lock your doors. Everything's fine. And then this thing happens and it changes everything forever.

This is the murder of Mary Lou Arruda. Yeah. Totally. This is the one I landed on because fuck, all right. Okay. Hmm. So there's this town called Rainham, Rainham. I wrote it as Rainham.

Is it Rainham? Okay. Rainham. Listen, now it's spelled ready for this. Yes. R-A-Y-N-H-A-M. That sounds like a yoga teacher's name. That Y doesn't need to be in there.

Rainham is vegan. You know it. So Rainham, Rainham, is a town in Brist, are you all right? Are you just going to pronounce it both ways the whole time? I forgot. Well, you see it phonetically, you just say it even though it's wrong sometimes. Sure. And that's how you get a podcast.

Wooster. Wooster. Yeah. Oh, we've learned all your lessons. Now we're just scared. Sorry. Yeah. So it's a town in Bristol County, Massachusetts, located just 32 miles south of Boston and 22

miles northeast of Providence, Rhode Island, where everyone keeps telling us to go. Back in the late... What happened? It looked like you were going to tell them when we were going to go and they were just like, no. Back in the late seventies, Rainham was a small safe bedroom community with a population of about 8,000 people. That's not a lot of people, but then an event occurred which changed life forever there

as it always fucking does. One resident said it was like someone ripped the canvas of the Norman Rockwell painting, which I think is like such a symbolic thing. Okay. All right. So September 8th, 1978, about 4 p.m., 15-year-old Mary Lou Aruda. She's a high school sophomore, a wee baby angel. She's on the cheerleading squad, normal girl.

She gets on her bike. It's an orange 10-speed, and she heads down the one-mile ride from a friend's house toward her home along Dean Road. At the time, it was like a dirt road surrounded by beautiful forests. I'm sure it's turning into fall, lovely, idyllic place. About half an hour later, a boy finds her bike on that road and takes it home to her family's house. It's such a small town that it's like, this is Mary Lou's bike, I'll take it there.

And of course, her family's like, this isn't fucking right, and immediately call the police to report her missing. Thankfully, Rainham Police Department aren't like police departments that we talk about all the fucking time that we're like, I bet she just ran away. Goodbye. Yeah. Thank God they weren't fucking like that. And this is actually a really interesting story because it really is a great example of

how police should be. So police officer David Bonaparte, he immediately sounds the alarms when he hears what's going on. Most police departments at the time require at least 24 hours before declaring a person missing, but Bonaparte was a rookie officer who hadn't even yet been to the police academy, and so he went against conventional wisdom immediately. He was just like, you know what, I'm a cop too. I've watched so many episodes of Beretta.

I have this, you guys. I have it. I don't know how that works, but that's what I read, and I wrote it, the end. That's how we do it. That's how I do things. So his quick reaction, along with the action of the rest of the police department, and a lot of people think ended what could have been a long career of a potential serial killer. Within minutes of Mary Lou's abduction, then chief Peter King, so chief king.

He's the chief and the king. Yeah. I've already got so much shit for that. He and his department preserved the crime scene on that fucking dirt road. They go there. They gather evidence that probably wouldn't have been around the next day because, you know, drivers and all of this stuff. So they got photos of the tire tracks.

So next to where her bike was found, there was a tire track that looked like it had accelerated away. So they get photos of the tire tracks, and they note that the tire tracks show abnormal wear pattern, and also, nearby, they find a Benson and Hedge's cigarette butt. Those look like my mom used to smoke. Benson and Hedge's lights, 100s, and we'd walk down to the store and buy them for her. How much did they cost, do you remember? No, we just, it was probably three bucks or something, it was whatever she put into

our hand. It's a wonderful time. This is that time. This is that time. This is the exact time. It's also the same time that that Aegis is, that's our corner store, it was a mile away, and they also had a gas pump out in front, and that's usually where we got gas. And I remember one time my mom, the guy came out to pump the gas, and my mom kind of like

looked and then she rolled up the window and lit a cigarette. Got the gas pump, and she's like, oh, here's how I'll solve the safety of the exterior issue of blowing us up. Jesus. He just, he just fucking hot boxed my mom's Benson and Hedge's lights, 100s. Two children inside of it. Yep. Yes.

Oh, the olden days. Sometimes they're so much better than, no, they weren't. They were terrible. Yeah, it wasn't good. It was great for adults, they could do whatever the fuck they wanted. I mean, they partied like fucking crazy. They did. All right.

So they also found the cigarette butt. They picked that fucking thing up, note, you know, they're like on it. And they're also able to immediately get statements from several witnesses who had been driving in the area. And they reported seeing a green car with black racing, a black racing stripe driven by a man with dark curly hair and dark dream glasses. He drove, they saw him drive by multiple times. A few people did.

And they also saw that car driving away, someone was like, I saw something bulky in the passenger seat. So they think that that's the person who abducted Mary Lou. An extensive search is conducted for three days in the area where she was last seen, including hundreds of police dog searches. So they're fucking searching the wooded areas. On September 10th, police circulate a wanted poster containing the sketch of the driver and a description of the bright green car.

I couldn't find the sketch anywhere, which fucking sucks because I just want to see that. And I wanted Steven to have nightmares for days. What if we just started telling Steven to look up like surgery photos? Steven, can you get me a picture of a brain being dissected? It's personal. I need it for the show. You know, I don't actually need it. Never mind.

Air drop it to me. So then on September 13th, police get information about a dude and along with that dude, a photo, and they're like, oh, shit, this guy looks just like the composite sketch. His name is James Cater. He is a 32-year-old dude. He's a doughnut maker from Brockton, Massachusetts. I know you don't want to chew now because I just ruined it for you. But also doughnuts.

So this fucking absolute piece of shit, he had once attacked a 63-year-old woman while she was at a cemetery at her fucking dead husband's grave morning, come at her with a chair leg that she had escaped. What the fuck? Just the leg or a whole chair and he only beat her with the leg? Don't. I don't know. Okay.

Sorry. I pictured breaking up, but that would make more sense. I pictured him being like, eh, and then, but... How far did he move with the chair? That's all I want to know. Yeah. Not important. Then, this is important, a decade before Mary Lou's abduction, in 1968, Cater had pled

guilty to assault with intent to rape, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and kidnapping. When he had abducted a 13-year-old and over girl who he had run off the road while she was on her bicycle. And then he forced her into his car, drove her about 30 minutes out of town into a wooded area. She had fought him off and run, but he caught up with her and then he had tied her to a tree where he had strangled her until she lost consciousness, but when she woke up, he was gone and she got free and escaped.

He had served a prison sentence for this. He had pled guilty. He was like, I fucking totally did that. He served a prison sentence, but was, I don't know how long he served, wait, I could probably put math in my brain. Do it. We'll give you 30 seconds for quick math. I need six years.

He served a prison sentence, but was released four years ahead of schedule. You got it. Here's the thing, when prisons are full, get the people who attack children out first. That's important. There's so many people who had a minuscule amount of pot on them that just need to stay them in. Any one of color, please, but yeah, the white dude, the white dudes that had fucking tried to rape children.

Right. Whoops. Fucking sarcastic. None of that should have been sarcastic. Sorry. Okay. So he had, so he was released ahead of schedule. It's terrible.

And in 1976, he had started hanging around the Bridgewater area because he was going to therapy. Where the hospital is? Yep. Yeah. It's the director of the Bridgewater hospital, everybody. Great job. We love your facility.

I hear great, really creepy stories coming out of there. Yep. Yep. Which I guess is near this place. So two years fucking later, Mary Lou disappears while riding her bike home. Yeah. Guess that motherfucking therapy didn't work. The day after Mary Lou disappeared, this fucking dude, James Cater, had gotten married

to an 18-year-old. So he was, I know, he was 32. He married an 18-year-old. And I had to check if either she was an Avon lady or from a place called Avon, Massachusetts. You guys have a place called Avon, Massachusetts here. Do you know that? I didn't. Is that where they invented all the wonderful products?

No. I was like, there's no, I was like, I'm not going to get that. I'm not going to be like, from Avon. I was like, that's not a place. It's a place. It's a place. Yeah. Also just the idea of an 18-year-old Avon lady where she's like, I don't give a shit.

I'm doing it. So the day after Mary Lou disappeared and they had gotten married, then they left the country on a honeymoon. A week later, when he returned on September 19th, I guess someone was like, the police totally think it's you. You should go talk to them. Because he went into the police station with his new 18-year-old Avon wife and his lawyer. And when he walked into the police station, he looked so similar to the composite sketch

that one of the officers, Chief Lou Pacheco, said, you're not going to believe this. But our composite just walked into the station. Oh, shit. He was just like, hey, everybody. The guys here, the guys here, he gave, so Kader gave permission for police to search his car. I guess within a car he had a bright green 1976 Opel with a black racing stripe. Actually, we have a photo of the car, I think somewhere we can take a look at it.

That's Mary Lou, I know. That's the car. It even says Opel on the side of it. Wow. I mean, I hate his guts. That's a sweet car. Yeah, it's not the car's fault. No.

So. But bright green with black is a little too Frankenstein for me. Maybe a nice rust orange. Okay. We'll talk about it later, sorry, we'll talk about it later. Your business. Thank you. That's awesome.

Thank you, Steven, too. As well. The right front tire had excessive wear, just like in the photos of the tire at the scene. Inside the car they found wedding gifts, but also two cartons of cigarettes. Hey, guess what kind? Benson and Hedges. That's probably right. And two pairs of dark rim glasses in the glove compartment.

He went there with everything that they knew about him. Jesus Christ. In the trunk, they also found copies of the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald newspapers, both open to articles about the disappearance of Mary Lou over that. Just confess. Yeah. Yeah. I was basically confessing with things as opposed to words.

I mean this dude, and you'll see, he's truly the biggest piece of shit in the fucking world. Also his alibi for the day was total bullshit, of course. But he denies any involvement, but okay, you can turn that off. Thank you. I want to see a picture of him. Yes, he sucks. We have a photo of him. He sucks.

I kind of was, in my mind, was picturing more of a Jim Croci type, which I know is a deep cut. But that looks like... I don't know what that... I don't know what that... Who that is. It's the 70s thing, you wouldn't understand. But that looks like Paul Sorvino at a bad wig.

Still don't know. Really? Yeah. Come on. I don't know. Mary Sorvino's dad? Yes. Really?

Yeah. He was in law and order, like the first couple of seasons of law and order. Way back when. Deep cuts. Right. Karen's new podcast. Thank you. Where I just list names of people no one knows.

We'll call it the loneliest girl in the world. Okay. Thank you. You can take that down because he sucks. Okay. All right. So sadly then... Wait, sorry.

That fucking guy had an 18-year-old wife? Yep. I hate... I hate things. I do too. This is the podcast that's basically called, like, why the fuck? Yeah. What the fuck?

You know? Very sadly, nine weeks after her abduction on November 11th, 1978, Mary Lou's body was discovered in the Freetown Fall River State Forest, Freighton Fall. Her body was discovered by a couple of boys who were out fucking dirt bike racing. I know. And they probably never went dirt bike racing again. She was fully clothed and had been tied to a tree while standing up. That's right.

Exactly the way he... His other victim was, yeah. And the cause of death was ruled by the medical examiner's strangulation by ligature or positional asphyxiation, meaning that he had tied her to a tree, including her neck. And when she had passed out, she had choked to death because of the weight. It's fucking awful. So it was determined that she had died the same day she went missing. At the trial...

So this fucker's arrested and taken to trial. At the trial, James Cater testifies on his own behalf. He acknowledges his guilt in the incident of 1968 that is fucking identical to this one. But he stated he was rebuilding his life since the release from prison in January 1976. So it wasn't him. And FBI expert William Bodziak, who would later testify about the shoe print at OJ Simpson's trial, was an expert witness about the tire track found on Dean Street in Rainham in this

trial. There's like all these expert witnesses and all these fucking people come in and it's just insane. In June of 1979, James Cater's convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. But wait, don't applaud! Okay, Supreme Court judicial court overturns that conviction in 1979. And the following one, they also fucking overturn in 1985, his other first degree conviction

because testimony... So they had gotten all this eyewitness testimony saying that they had seen this car and count number they were like telling them what they saw, then they hypnotized all those people because that's what they did in the fucking 70s and 80s for witnesses. Remember all that hypnotizing? Yeah, it was great. And so they were saying that the hypnotized witnesses that were used to identify the make and license plate of his car shouldn't have been used in his conviction.

So then that third trial comes in 1992, that one fucking ends in mistrial again. He is retried in 96 where his fucking attorney Joseph Krosky said that Mary Lou had actually been the victim of cult activity. It wasn't him because there was all kinds of satanic panic times and there was all maybe some weird cult activity you guys fucking know. Not that you guys are Satanists, I didn't mean it like that. You might be. I mean, maybe you are.

Maybe you are. I'm not judging you. I'm kind of judging you. He promised the jurors that they would hear from a witness who saw more than 20 people carrying torches into the dark woods around the time that Mary Lou had been killed. He promised. I don't think he did it. So four fucking times this guy goes to like multi-week trials and Mary Lou's family, the

whole fucking community, the police officers who are all, from what you read, like horribly touched by this fucking case and want to, you know, get this asshole put where he's fucking belongs, more than half a dozen motions for appeals, including that they all included, you know, putting the family through the crime scene photos, traumatizing testimony by all the witnesses, all these bullshit theories, it would become the country's longest running court case. Whoa. So he's finally fucking convicted on December 22nd, 1996 at his fourth trial and sentenced

to life. Yes. They can cheer now, right? Yes. Okay, good. That's upheld in 2000 and 2007 when he tries again to fucking get retrials and the Supreme Court of Massachusetts are like, fuck you, Dick, are you fucking serious? No.

If only that's what they said. I'm saying it for them because, you know, that's what they all wanted to fucking say. Okay, the fucker James Cater finally dies from cancer in January 23rd, 2016. Whoa. So it's recent. Very recent. But there are some, what happens in the town of Rainham, there is some like, at least, everyone's trying so hard to uphold the memory of Mary Lou and they never forget her.

They refuse to let her memory be forgotten or let people say like, that doesn't happen in our town. They won't fucking let people do that. So the annual meeting held by the police every year to review policies regarding missing persons, there's this meeting and right now the chief, Jim Donovan, who's the chief now, he was 10 years old at the time of Mary Lou's disappearance. He begins his presentation every year by recounting her case and saying, quote, her memory drives our vigorous pursuit of missing persons.

Her youngest, Mary Lou's youngest sibling, who turned five the day that her sister's body was found, I know, was influenced by the investigators who never gave up. Every single fucking time there was any kind of motion or any trial, the investigators never gave up. They always were there in full force. She remembers that and she becomes a special operations sergeant with the Massachusetts Department of Corrections. Yes, she does.

Yes, she does. Amazing. Yeah. Another sibling, Joseph, he served as the driving force behind the creation of a soccer field in Mary Lou's memory on King Philip Street in her honor. So people would never say that this sort of thing can't happen in this town. She wants people to remember her. And she's on a plaque in the police station.

She, there's a fingerprinting program for children that's named after her. And she even has a street name, Mary Lou Court. And her mother, Joanne, when fucking, when he died, when Cater died, her mother said, quote, I do believe in a heaven and I do believe there is hell and he's going to rot in it. And that's the story of Mary Lou Arruda. Wow. God damn it. Thanks.

I mean, that's such a beautiful thing that like a small town can kind of kick ass that way and like the police force can kick ass that way and then kind of like almost set that standard. Right. It's nice because we hear so many of these stories of like, they didn't do anything for three weeks and we have to be like, why don't you do? It's like so frustrating every time, you know, that was a standard and it was the way things were done and it was the rules then.

So you can't get mad at that, but when it's done in a way that it should be and helps convict this dude who had a pattern, in fact, pattern of the way he did things, there's no fucking way he would have stopped doing it. No, not at all. So I mean, potentially they fucking stopped a serial killer. Yeah, it's incredible. Yeah. Good job, Rainam.

Yeah. Nice. Well, I'm going to do the Great Boston Fire of 1872 just for just for fun. I'm super into disaster here in Boston and then they've metro area. Shit. I know. So there is a guy named Bruce Twickler who's basically the expert on the Great Boston Fire and he's written a bunch of stuff.

He also is making a movie about it. And so I watched this talk that he gave and a lot of people who are from this area have no idea that Boston had a fire that was on par with the Great Chicago Fire. I'm not from here and I don't even know. It doesn't make any sense. This fire is in the top five. He just fires up in United States history. Holy shit.

Yeah. You guys. Congratulations, everybody. Pyros. It's really funny, though, because as he was talking in the beginning of this talk that he gave, he also is talking and it's something that you never think about. But in the 1800s, just all of America was constantly catching on fire. That's all it did.

And at one point... Everything was made of matches. Everything was... Why would they build buildings out of matches? They didn't know, you guys. It was crazy. It was build of matches and fire, everything. And then fireworks on the day that it was finished being built.

Why? This made me laugh out loud in the Gold Rush time, which was 1849, 1850, in San Francisco. Like in 1851, San Francisco caught on fire and almost burned entirely down. It was the hugest fire that was May 3rd, 1851, I believe. And May 3rd, 1852, all of the buildings they rebuilt burned down again. What a bummer, man. I know. Except the insurance people are like, okay, all right.

So yeah, this was just a huge issue all over the country. And especially in Boston, because Boston, as you all know, is super old. And as it grew, the streets are insanely narrow. Like being from California, being in like in downtown Boston or like in the city center of Boston, it makes me want to have a heart attack. It's like, this is insanity, get away from me. Very narrow, adorable, but old and narrow. And at the time, of course, because everything was being built up or whatever, they would

just build and there was no coding, there was kind of like no rules. And it was like, well, if things go well and everyone gets rich, put up another building. But I'm right next to each other and then make the street four feet wide and then put another building right over here. And the other thing was they had, I'll get into it, I'll explain it to you. So here's the thing. So the first issue is if you've watched movies that take place in that time, like what's that fucking Leonardo DiCaprio movie?

Thank you, the Gangs of New York, that's not what they said. In the Gangs of New York, you see this, the fire departments used to be mostly volunteer. And they were, it was basically just like clubs of people who decided we're going to be in charge of putting out fires and there'd be a bunch of different ones. And they would all run to the fire with their water and they would get there and then they'd all start fist fighting about who was going, because there was a thing the insurance companies did. They called it first water.

So if you were the fire brigade that got the first water on the fire, they would give you a couple dollars, which was in today's money, $17,000. And what they called a hog's shed of beer, which is 63 gallons of beer. So if you... I should have just put the beer on the fire. No fucking way. But it would immediately start a fire. So essentially a fire would break out, the alarm would go off, all these dudes would

come running over with their water and then start fist fighting. And then the building would burn down while they were all fist fighting. This was very, very common. I'm not an insurance, but that sounds like a bad way to do things. It's not a good plan. It's not a good plan. But this is just how it was for a while. So anything that's going to fall.

I need it though. I know. Okay. Because of course, we're using the smallest table. This is actually... Stuart Little donated this table to us. It was so nice, so nice of him. So a man named Josiah Quincy used to be the mayor, sure, you can cheer for your old neighbor.

I mean, mayor. He was the mayor. Probably a neighbor too. He was also your neighbor, because the buildings are so close together, everyone was your neighbor. It works. Oh, I live around the corner from him. Josiah Quincy, the mayor of Boston, tried to reorganize the fire department in 1826. And they got so mad at him, because it was such a political...

It was basically kind of mafia shit. And he was like, this needs to stop being dudes fighting in the street. And we should probably get a little bit more organized. And the other part of that too was they had these things, bucket brigades, where you had to... If something in your neighborhood was on fire, you had to go stand in the bucket brigade, and they would just pass water. That's how they got the water to the fire.

And if you didn't stand in the line, you'd be fined a dollar. So the whole system was not good in terms of putting water on fire. They just kept fucking it up. Josiah Quincy tried to fix it, but he made so many enemies reorganizing the fire department that he lost his next election, because they were like, fuck you, dude, this is our little club. But they ended up using... No longer using bucket brigades, they started using these steam engines to pump the water

onto the buildings. And so... Okay, so, but this story is mostly about a man named John Damral. So he is a Boston native. He was an orphan as a child. He spent his teens being an apprentice to a master carpenter. So he knew a lot about building. He also learned a lot about business.

And in 1857, he has elected to the Boston City Council. He makes a lot of connections politically. And in 1858, he becomes a professional fire engineer, right? And at 28, he rises very quickly. He's very smart. He knows business. He's well connected. And he's all about...

He's really into safety, and he understands the way that buildings are built in Boston, that it's basically just one big fire trap. And he dedicates his career to trying to fix that, because he knows about the other horrible fires around the country, and he wants to make sure that doesn't happen to Boston. So when he's 28, he becomes a captain in the fire department. So that was about eight years after they changed over to steam engines. Things were a little less wild, was a little more organized, and kind of the city was in charge a little bit more.

Then in 1866, he is promoted to chief engineer of the fire department, shit, in the fire department. Oh. They're the competitor for the fire department? Yeah. Yeah. They fought so hard, but they brought potatoes to all the fires. It didn't make sense.

So Damrell successfully lobbies to win the right to make building inspections to start enforcing fire codes, because everything inside every building was made of wood, of course, and then they would do things like just have one exit. There was lots of buildings that were built that just had a single central staircase, and that was the only way you could get out of the building. So the fire was on the first floor, goodbye, that was like, that's it. It's funny, the shit we think of as like fucking commonplace, like, I want to inspect your building, and they're like, no way, M-Y-O-B, it was a very M-Y-O-B time back then.

And what is that, you said that, thank you, you said it last night, and everyone laughed, and I was like, I'm not going to ask what that means. Oh, you can always ask. Sorry, I just have to shorten things, because we're really pressed for time. So one of the other campaigns that Damrell really was invested in was getting more water available, and more fire hydrants put it around the city, and also replacing the old leaky water mains. So they were like the original pipes that they had laid down, like, that the pilgrims

had fucking put in the ground. They were still there, super leaky, the water pressure sucked shit. And he was like, so here's the thing, as we build all these tall boxes of tinder directly on top of each other, we need to be able to pump water if something catches on fire. And obviously, it would make sense that the water board would be like, oh, what a great point. They're like, no, absolutely not. There's a guy named Nathaniel Bradley that was on the water board, and he told Damrell

that the water supply was fine, and it's not worth the money to rip up the streets and replace the old pipes. And spoiler alert, he was wrong. And also a lot of these building owners were insured to the gills, so they didn't give a shit. They were just like, it's kind of fine if it burns down. I'm good either way. So they didn't want to spend the money to fireproof them, and nobody wanted to spend the money

to replace any of these water mains. Okay, so on Sunday, October 8th, 1871, oh, oh, that's the day of the Great Chicago Fire. It lasts, I wondered what the fuck I was doing. I was like, why am I talking about that now? Third show. The Great Chicago, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Where am I? The Great Chicago Fire lasted for two days, 10,000 buildings were burned down. It killed 300 people, it destroyed over three square miles of the city. It left 100,000 people homeless, and they say there was more urban damage in that city than there was in the entire Civil War. Oh my God. It was that bad. And actually when I lived in Chicago, we went and saw a play called The Great Chicago Fire,

so actually I know tons about it, we don't have time to talk about it now, but there's one amazing part where most of the citizens, the fire got so strong and so hot that everyone was pushed into Lake Michigan, they just had to go stand there and stand in the water to cool off and to get away from the flames. It's super insane. So when that happens, Chief Damrell takes a trip to Chicago to find out what went wrong, what the problems were, and just so he could learn and take that back to Boston and make sure it didn't happen here.

I feel like everyone should be listening to this guy. No. The guy who's trying to get people not killed in the fire. But you know it was something like, his beard wasn't long enough or some shit like that, we're just like, no, Damrell over there with his hardly any facial hair. What do you marry a fire if you love it so much? Oh, are you scared of a little fire? I'll punch you out.

So what he learns from the fire chief in Chicago, and there was also a Civil War general that had actually been brought in to help during the fire, like to help control it and then keep civil order afterwards. And so they told him all about what went wrong. And they said, of course, everything was insanely dry. The entire city, of course, was made of wood. They're really stiff winds. The fire alarm was delayed.

And the firemen were misdirected as to where they should go in the beginning. So the communication was really bad. And most of the roofs of the buildings there were mansard roofs. And so mansard roofs, you've seen them, they're the ones that basically it looks like the top of the roof has like a cuff on it of wood. So even if the front of the building is masonry or brick, the top of the building just has the driest fucking shingles of all time. And it's like eight feet of it.

And so most of the buildings at the time that was like the style had that type of roof. And so when a building catches on fire, when the top goes up like that, and then all the top of the buildings are wood, the building, each one catches the next one on fire. And so that's what happened there. They also did a thing, they tried to do a thing to stop the Chicago fire, which was they thought, you know, sometimes in a wildfire happens, the firemen go out and they start a fire and backburn so that when the wildfire hits, there's nothing to burn and it just goes out.

Well, they thought they were going to do that in Chicago by blowing up buildings. So they went into fire and just started blowing shit up to be like, okay, then this can't catch on fire. Well, of course, then it's rubble and then all the woods exposed and it was like tinder. It just created, it was like pre-setting your campfire logs up and, you know, a little triangle and it of course did not work at all. It made it worse. And they used gunpowder.

So there's a stiff wind and a firestorm. And then, you know what we're going to do? Blow gunpowder into the air. Guys, five, six, seven, eight. Holy crap. So Darmel comes back to Boston. He makes a report about everything that he learned about the Chicago fire. He puts pressure to get a new firehouse built in the new downtown area that was the one

that was just being built and getting popular and to make more water available down there. And he also tried to get a building code and stated to stop those man-sert roofs from being used on new buildings. He's like, we just don't need it. It's not, it doesn't even look that good. Also, let's not blow up buildings in the case of a fire in the future. And he is told, look, I wrote it right there, to mind his own business and to stop exaggerating the needs of his department.

So you're being hysterical. So, in October of 1872, there was, this is also one of those things where it's like the combination of just all these horrible things that happened. There's a horse flu that comes down through New England from Canada. And all these fucking horses get super sick. And it debilitates the entire fire department's horses, they're especially trained and extremely strong horses that can pull those insanely heavy steam engines that they pull from fire to fire.

Well, all those horses are like, oh, can you get me some horses? So damrel, when that starts, he's like, oh, fuck, no, okay, we have to fire, I mean, hire 500 extra men, because we got to go back to the days of pulling our own steam engines around, because we don't have any, because all the horses are up in bed. They got better. They got better, by the way. At first, I thought they all died and I'm like, now I have to fucking tell everybody all the horses died.

That's not going to go over well, but they didn't. Oh, good. They got better after when no one needed them. Okay, so, on November 9th, 1872, it's 7 p.m., we're on the corner of Kingston and Summer Street and it is a building, it's a commercial storehouse, so there's a book called The Story of the Great Boston Fire by a man named Charles Coffin and it was written, he was actually a witness, he was there that day and he describes the contents of the building, he says, there's bales of hay and boxes of dry goods in the basement and on the first floor, the second

and third floor are stores of paper and muslin, first year anniversary, that's what the store was called. That's the name of the store. Paper and matches and such. On the fourth and fifth, are rooms full of hosiery gloves, tape, muslin, thread and trimmings, shreds of materials for making skirts and corsets, so the quote is, tinder above, tinder below, which is what everyone's going to do tonight after this show. Okay, so it truly is just like a fire waiting to happen, there's a spark in the basement

at 7 p.m., the fire starts down there, it all goes bales of hay, it's the driest shit you can find, so the fire starts down there, no one notices because it's 7 o'clock at night and it's the weekend, and so it's going and it's raging out of control and the elevator shaft is made of wood, so what they also don't know is as that fire starts going, it also goes up straight up the center of the building simultaneously, it's like, we can do it! So the only time anyone notices that this fire is in the basement of this building is when all of the windows of the basement blow out, surprise, happy birthday, and that's when people are like, what's this we see here and smell, and so people start running up and

down the street yelling fire, now at the time they did have fire boxes on the street, there's a lot of people who don't know about this and because my dad was a San Francisco fireman for about 40 years, yeah, that's right, he's an American hero, I've known about this since I was a kid, but you don't really notice them until you start looking for them, they're like freestanding little boxes on the street, they kind of blend in with like a lamp post or whatever, but they just say fire on them and you can walk up and open them and pull it and a fire truck will come to that box. They should tell us about those, I feel like, I feel like they don't want people pulling

a box, but what if there's a fire, and I don't know those exist, and I can't get my phone to call, I can't get my phone to recognize my face to turn on, and so I can call an ambulance. It's me, it's me, just because I have face mask on, you can't tell. You just refuse to take your Batman mask off, they'll know, it's me. But every story, like my dad would tell me, or I would tell him stories like, oh my friends got stuck and they were in this weird neighborhood and they didn't know, pull a box, that was my dad's solution to everything, go just pull a box, it'll be a fire truck there in two minutes.

Well, now I know, and now we're all going to pull one tonight. Yeah, pull a box, if you need to. Well, we're waiting for our turn today. Tell them Jim Kilgariff told you to do it, and then I'll give you his phone number later, he will love it. Pull a box. Pull a box, Jim. But he used to also say that too, and he would hear stories of people getting lost in bad

neighborhoods or whatever, you got to pull a box. I'm doing it. Do it. But then you do have to deal with the fireman who show up and you're just standing there with a smile on your face. Well, I'm going to run, that's the trick, that's the one part you didn't think of. This is not for pranks. Oh.

Okay. Also, of course, please clean your lint traps, if you don't know already, and we're coming up into the holiday season, water that motherfucking Christmas tree, and do not leave the lights on at night. No one needs to look at that shit, they're sleeping. People who leave their lights on all night, their Christmas lights or their lights lights. No, no, no, the Christmas lights on the Christmas tree that light the Christmas tree on fire, that then light the curtains on fire, and then your house is on fire.

A solution? Be Jewish. Be Jewish! Please be Jewish. Won't you please be Jewish this Christmas season? Think of others. Selfish Christian assholes. No, we let the menorah burn out, it's fine.

Oh yeah, you guys like to put actual flame right in your front window. Real fucking flame. Yeah. You don't even use them, lights, okay, so it's seven o'clock when this fire starts in the basement. Okay, great. Oh, that's what I was talking about. So back then, only cops could pull a box, that's my favorite phrase now.

They had to have a little key, so the beat cop that had the key to that fire box had already passed and was out of the, like out of earshot, I guess. So everybody's running up and down the street, screaming fire, but that doesn't matter until somebody actually pulls the alarm, so it takes 45 minutes for the fire departments to actually get there. That's too long. Because once they get the alarm, it's way too long. Once they get the alarm, they have to start pulling their steam engines themselves.

That's forgot about the horses. The horses are in bed with thermometers in their mouths. With the thing on their little heads. Yeah, their little horse heads. They're just watching soap operas. So it was, but of course, Damrell had hired all those extra dudes, so at least they had people. Also, Coffin, the man who wrote that book, said also little boys would run in and help

them and pull the steam engines. Get out of here, Timmy, you're not helping. Sure. No, all the eight-year-olds can come in and try to do something you're incredibly unsafe. Well, the eight-year-olds probably had jobs then, too. Yeah, they threw down their cigars. They ran over to help. Thank you.

That's so good of you. Okay. But then they get there. They've got their steam engines. They're all set up. And of course, the fucking water pressures for shit, because they didn't replace any of the pipes. So it's like, the water pressure basically was set up for when they were like two-story

buildings. But this is a six-story building. So it's just kind of like pissing out and not really working out so great. And then the winds kick up. So what happened with this first building is the basement, the windows blew out. The fire was going up the center. And then the people on the street, the witnesses said that when the fire came up out of the basement, it shot straight up six stories and caught that mansard roof on fire.

So the entire building was entirely engulfed by the time the fire department got there. And then started catching the other buildings on the roofs on fire. And then they can't get the water up to the top. And the majority of this fire is going north. They're able to get enough. Dammrell gets on the scene. He starts sending different fire companies in different directions. So he's like, you go five streets that way and you start putting out the fires that

way. And you really control the size, obviously, of the fire. See, if I were him, I would have been directing people by going, I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. And I told you so. And I told you so. And I told you.

You should have fucking listened to me. I told your alderman. With your eight-year-old fucking workers. Nobody fucking listens to me. Goddamn sick horses. Get away from me, Jackie. But no, he's a noble man and he's kicking into business. And he also, this was crucial, he immediately sent word to every city within 50 miles of

Boston asking for them to drag their steam engines because there's no horses, truly. And all these cities respond, they say 27 different towns in the area responded and brought, I know, right? Everyone's like, get in there. Also, some from as far as Connecticut and New Hampshire, yeah, great job, you guys. Great job, your ancestors. High five your grandma when you get home. So a real problem they started having is that crowds, of course, begin to accumulate around

the mass fire that's broken out because there's people that are running out of houses holding like one statue of the Virgin Mary and a washboard. That's literally, that's literally in that book by Charles Coffin. Those were her, those were her price positions. Shit, what a life. I mean, not, not the most fun life unless she loved laundry. Sure. We don't know.

She loved the Lord. But there's looters, of course, so there's people trying to run out with like the three things they could grab, then there's people trying to grab shit they didn't grab. And then there's people who are just standing around like we had, they had nothing else to do on a Saturday. And so there's just all these human bodies. It's just like a mass of human bodies within four hours. This fire has traveled a mile straight into the heart of Boston's business district.

And they say that sailors on the coast of Maine could see it from their ships. It was that huge. And then Darmel's called a city hall and oh, we should probably put up, I bet there's at least one picture, right? That could kick us off. Okay. So here's, this is the scope of this fire and this, it goes by how, by where it started, which is up there.

No. No down there. Yes. 7pm. Hold on. Shut up. You don't know. I know.

It starts here. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And it goes like that. Yeah. And that's when everyone's like, oh, look at the fire. And then it's like, and the winds go, and then it's like, oh my God, Connecticut, you

go this way, New Hampshire, save our docks or whatever the fuck. But then Darmel gets called to city hall because the mayor wants him to try the thing that he knows is going to work great. What? Gunpowder. Blow up some buildings. And he's like, X-nay, it doesn't work. And of course they don't listen to him.

And so they start trying to blow up buildings. And that's why the fire, they were doing it up on the north side, thinking they were going to contain it at the top. And that's why the fire then spread out like that is because they were, they were blowing up buildings and it got so bad they stopped because they were like, oh, I guess you're right about the gunpowder thing. They're like, we made it work. This is crazy.

John, I'm so sorry I didn't listen to you. So at 2.30 a.m., they were blowing up the buildings. They stopped that. An hour later, several buildings blow up on their own because no one turned the motherfucking gas line off. Guys. Guys. We've got to get this organized.

At some point, somebody somewhere, and it's not John D'Armel, I think it's like some genius citizen, what they start doing is they start, they find the biggest pieces of material they can find and soak them in water, huge blankets. Somebody gets, there's boat sails and they start taking soaked pieces of material and laying them across these roofs so that then when the sparks are going, those man-served roofs aren't catching on fire and that's the way they ended up saving the Old South Church. The Old South Church is one of the only buildings that ended up standing in the area that it's in.

I don't know. It's downtown. Uptown. Is it downtown? Downtown. Over in Northtown? It's in town. It's in the town.

And people love it. It's such a great fucking church. Oh, it's in the south part, South Church. And that is one of the turning points of the fire, is people being like, hey, how about we put water on it? How about we stop contributing to the fire and try to fight it? First, can I do my idea of taking all the old pine trees that we can find? No.

So, the fire is finally brought, oh, I think, is there, do you have, can you go to the next picture? Let me just see what Steven pulled up for us. Oh, this is a before-after. What? Yes. That's some rubble. That's as Franklin Street looking up before and then Franklin Street after.

That's how bad it was. No joke. And that's how, I bet that's probably the widest part of any street in Boston ever. I've never seen one that wide. Crazy. Crazy. Will you go to the next one? No.

Oh, that's the panoramic. Wow. I mean, not so. That's bananas. And then, wait, there's one more that I really like. Oh. They just sat on the rubble like, why didn't we listen to John Damrell? Oh, man.

Shit. I really want to blow this building up and now I regret it. There's no buildings left. 30 people were killed in the fire, 12 of them were firemen who died in the line of duty. Holy shit. Yeah. Which actually, it's actually kind of a small, all told. Because Chicago had like 300, right?

300, yeah. So it's thankfully smaller, but still. Newspapers report losses up to $90 million in damage for back then, which is over $1 billion in damage today. Shit. But I bet some people were like, yeah, I totally lost my house. Yeah. Oh.

I guess I better get a new house. Well, 90% of the buildings that, 90% of things that looked like this were entirely rebuilt in two years. Wow. And so one of the things that Bruce Twickler says in this speech that I was watching is he says, if you went on a cruise in September of 1872, which was like a couple months before the fire, a world cruise last two years, so when you got back in 1874, you would come back to an entirely different city.

Holy shit. Which would be amazing. Like you'd come back and you'd be like, why is that department store over there? Like things completely switched around. And the city did use all of this rubble to build Atlantic Avenue. So go down there and you're actually walking on the rubble of the old city. So although John Damrell was initially hailed as a hero among the firemen that he worked with and the citizens that saw him, and there's these stories of like, he was like running

up when they called him to city hall and he passes by a little boy who's like, my parents are caught in that building and he goes up into the building to try to find the parent. Like he's, he was incredibly heroic and incredibly brave and fought the fire himself and organized people and firing in, he just started firing people to take advantage of this moment. They're fired. But he ends up losing his job as fire chief and they blame him for the fire. The only person who gave a single shit about fire safety in the city in 1872. And they were like, it's your fault because everything's political, but he didn't give

a shit. He goes into politics and he becomes the city's first building inspector in 1877. And Boston became one of this, like the strictest, uh, fire code cities in the country because of this system that he set up all the, all the ways, um, like the fire codes that are set up in Boston are because of John Damrell. And that is the story of the great Boston fire of 1872. Amazing. That is bananas.

You, that was great. I was riveted. If there had been more table, I would have been on the edge of it. Just hanging off the edge of it. This part I would have just been staring at you, but instead I just kept doing weird things with my arms. It's hard to know where to put your body. Yeah.

Let's stand up. I think we have time for a home. Yeah. Let's do it. Yeah. Let me pull some things from places from here and here, banks out and down. There we go. There's a lot of signs tonight.

Yeah. People have ideas. No, listen. You need to listen. Now you need to listen to me. Not yet. If you're yelling right now, you're not going to, I can see your mouth moving. You're not getting.

Okay. I'm going to do my sister right now, roommate, roommate. I have to tell you the rules and if you're yelling, you can't hear the rules and there's been nights where people didn't hear the rules. Clearly didn't hear the rules. Bad things happen. Yeah. So there's definitely rules and regulations for this part of the show.

We're like the fire marshals of hometown. And we're going to marshal the shit out of the hometown. That's right. This is really important and we would just really, we need it to be a local story. Please, please don't think you're the fucking exception to the rule of any of these rules. Massachusetts. Here. Boston.

Ideally, we'd love an accent. I've asked fucking two nights in a row. She has asked. People think it's not important. It's very important to me. Your story needs to be concise. You need to be able to tell it quickly and clearly there should be a beginning, a middle and an end.

It's better for people when they're listening. When you get up here, it's very easy to kind of get overwhelmed and lose your place. So you can't be too drunk, although we're not, you can do what you want with your life. And oh, just remember that everybody hates you if you get picked. So you have to tell quickly. That's the key. It's your night. All right.

Let's see. Can I get the lights a little bit? Can we have the lights up? Is that possible? I'm scared. I hate doing this. Some lights. So much.

It's so awful. It's so, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I hate this. So I don't know why I do it every time. It sucks. It hurts me in my soul.

Oh, Vince is right over there. Walk over to him. Thank you. I swear to God, if she says she's from Florida, I'm going to punch her in the face. Oh, turn the lights down. Where'd it go? You can turn the lights off before she sees everyone. Thank you.

It's so scary. You guys don't even understand. I don't understand. Okay. Are you from Boston? Yes. I live here now. Come over to me and hug me.

Hello. Hi. What's your name? My name is Libby. Libby. Libby. I brought my bag. I brought my bag.

Libby, where are you from? I am from Acton, Massachusetts. It's about 40 minutes outside. Okay. Conquered. If you know the Battle of Lexington and Conquered. Yeah. We love that bell.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Well, today'ssonaro.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yes. No. It's props. Okay, yes. Yes.

Okay. Yes. Yes. Okay. Yes. Okay. Yes, yes. Sorry.

Okay. Well, how would I respond to that question? I don't really have any idea. I think it's positive. Yes? An odd number in your phone account. Yes, yes! dad hears her screaming, and so he goes in, the guy grabs scissors, stabs the dad in

the neck. His own dad or his own father? His own father. He stabs him in the neck, and then the girl's trying to help him, so the guy stabs his girlfriend in the chest, the mom walks in, he's freaking out, and they finally, people came to help, and then they were like, oh, do you know your rights, and he said, yes, I'm a murderer. And that was... Did you know him in high school?

I had some glasses with him. I never talked to him. I didn't think this would happen. That's bananas. You know. I never saw it coming out. I know. We never did.

You know, yeah. And so the dad is expected to not survive a mess. And the girlfriend or the mom or... The girlfriend, I think, is supposed to make it. She's in critical care. The mom is okay. Oh my God. That's...

Libby. And he's in jail. He's being held right now for his psychiatric evaluation. Yeah. Oh shit. Jesus. He tried to get help before. Yeah.

They let him go. Yeah. Yes. That's a very good point. Very upset. You need to fund mental health. I don't know. Yeah.

I don't know. Somebody's got to do it. There's so many fucking things wrong with this country right now that it doesn't get prioritized. Yeah. But as my mom was a psychiatric nurse, she used to rant and rave when they were defunding all public health and she would tell us like a lunatic profit at the dinner table, in the future there's going to be people walking up and down the street that need to be medicated.

They can't take care of themselves or out on the street. It's not how we're supposed to be treating each other. Some people need help. Yeah. And we need to give money to programs to help people with mental illness. It's important. Sorry I hijacked your story. Thank you.

Libby. Thank you. Libby, that was amazing. Thank you. You did great. Yeah. That was awesome. That's the fastest hometown we've ever had.

I also detected a little accent. Did you? The first thing I said is there was no accent. I heard a little accent. Yeah. But I'm from Southern California. You want to do one more? Okay.

Okay. Hold on a second. You have to pick this time. Okay. Karen's going to pick. Because it's sad. Hold on. Everyone is pointing.

Everyone's pointing at you. Okay. Come on. Come on. Do you guys even know her? I feel like sometimes people will be pointing at someone from there over there and they just want the person to get picked. It's fun to point.

It's so fun to point. Holy shit. You guys agree. Joya. Joya. Everybody. Hi. Joya.

Hi. Where are you from? I'm from good old Kid Cod. All right. Do you know everyone here? No. No. I'm actually here by myself.

Oh. That's fun. And this story is about my mother, who is very upset that I'm here by myself right now. Did she hate us? She called me and we were talking about her attack. Oh. And I was like, yeah, I'm on my way to Medford right now because I'm determined to get on stage and tell your story.

Well, let's hear it. So, all right. It's a little long. I'm going to turn it off. 1978, Milford, Massachusetts. My mother is 18. She's sleeping. It's like quarter to three in the morning.

She wakes up from this like weird something noise and she wakes up. The only light in her room is the green glow of her digital alarm clock. And she notices her mother's cat anxiously pacing up and down the keyboard in her room. And she's like, okay, what the hell? The cat's name was Kitty. Very clever. And the cat and her did not have a good relationship. They weren't close at all.

And she's like, okay, I don't understand. So she gets out of bed and she notices that her turntable was still going. On a blank record. And so she turns it off, goes back to bed, like whatever. Not long after, it's still like 3 a.m., she wakes up again. This time there's a figure standing over her. A ski mask on, all black. He was wearing fucking spandex.

She was half asleep. So she was super confused. And she thought it was her mom standing there with her curlers. Her mom would wear her curlers to bed. So she goes, mom? It's not. A young man is standing there and he immediately goes for her throat. He's choking her.

She's struggling and she's delirious because she's half asleep. It doesn't realize that this is real life. And he's got her hands around her throat. She's choking her. She can't breathe. She just knows that she has to make a sound. So she starts screaming. She starts like muffled screaming.

He starts to beat her in the head with something. And he didn't have a weapon. It wasn't a gun or a knife. It was a flashlight. And he was beating her in the face with a flashlight. He like splits open her mouth. She's just bleeding. But she managed to get a sound out because her bedroom was downstairs.

Her parents, my grandma and grandpa, they're like diagonal. They're upstairs like diagonal from her. And my grandmother woke up, immediately throws her hand to her husband and goes, kill him. She knew. She knew. And my grandfather, Frank, he served in World War II. Bless his soul.

He's ready. He takes his leg, he swings it out and slams it onto the floor. Like, fucker, we know you're down there. I'm coming. And the attacker is still on my mother. He like, Spidey mode, like leaps back. And he's like abort mission. So he books it.

He books it out the back where he came in, like the laundry room door or something. And my grandfather run, no, he doesn't run. He leaps down the stairs. He doesn't even touch a single step. And he ends up in the doorway like this. In his underwear. In his underwear. Old timey high up underwear.

Yeah, like tall, tall man, just like, as my mother called it, gorilla mode. And he's like, where the fuck is he? And my mom, surprisingly, she doesn't really know how she fought him off, how she ended up on the floor. But like, face covered in blood, she's super calm. And she just points. And all she says is, some asshole. That's all she says.

All she says. And my grandmother's in there. She's crying. She's so distraught. And so my grandfather books it after this guy. My mom believes that he hid in the boat in their backyard. And so my grandfather runs out to the street, nearly attacks a jogger just innocently running at 3 AM, you know, as one does, you know.

And he, so like, you know, man in his underwear, menacingly chasing you. And then the guy's like, hey man, hey man, like, where the fuck? And so he's like, oh, sorry, just trying to catch a murderer, I don't know. And so he doesn't catch him. But that same night, this intruder, this is the bummer part of the story. He sneaks in to another home, not far from their neighborhood. And he beats a little boy in the head with his own baseball bat. The boy survived, but with permanent brain damage.

And so that's like, that's the sad part. Afterwards, my mother worked for the Millford Daily News at the time. She sees the report and they released her name in the paper because she was 18. So they were like, okay, yeah, we'll take your name. We'll put it in there. And it just said like young woman attacked. So everybody assumed that she was raped. And she started getting harassing phone calls.

Like people were calling her, just making, like mimicking this whole situation, making a whole like, she bonkle about it, whatever. And so she was super upset. She did not go to the trial because she was still suffering from PTSD. But this fucking dumbass, he was caught because they found his ID. Just out on the street. He must have lost it when he was running away. And they caught him.

I'm not sure how long he was sentenced for, but they got him. My mother and that little boy survived. Oh my God. We're good. Wow. Joy everybody. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Oh my God. Thank you. I love the Brooklyn show, by the way. Tell your mom we say hi. Yeah. I will. Shit. Oh my God.

This podcast is so crazy because it tells these insane, there's so many people who have stories like these. So many. And we get to hear them and we get to like, you know, celebrate the people who survive and the people who have to survive when people don't. And we're so lucky to be able to just support these women and survivors. Yeah, and to also, I think there's a kind of a message that I feel like maybe people didn't understand before that you're all kind of telling each other, which is that this

happens a lot and you can't get through it. I think it's, there's kind of an amazing, you know, kind of a resilient lesson that comes through all this stuff, which is that I think when bad things happen to people, it makes people shut down or not talk about it. And the way it used to be is you don't talk about bad things. And really what people are learning is you absolutely must talk about bad things, process bad things, share bad things. Because when you do that and you process it, you become stronger for it.

You really do. And all the people that we've met that have told us these insane fucking stories are, you know, that's the story they're telling us. That's why I'm even able to say it is because that's the, that's the story we keep getting over and over. So like the idea that Joy's mom is just like told her, clearly told her that story. And it's like the family lore, you know, that's an amazing lesson. And I think it's great for people to hear.

And there are people out there who have been through it or are here to support you and want to be there for you as well. So it's, we're really lucky that we have all these incredible people to support. Well, and you guys are creating a community. I mean, it's, it's incredible. It's like you're all, you're all kind of letting each other know you're out there. And, you know, the started is kind of like, oh, we liked your crime. That's interesting.

And, oh, I'm allowed to like to your crime was kind of like the first wave. Now it's this thing of like, we can do whatever the fuck we want. And, you know, there's a lot of strength in this community. And we're so excited to see you guys. I mean, selling out three shows in one theater is like an incredible. It's incredible. Yeah. And we appreciate what you guys do.

We love being part of this community and fucking support women. You know, we're here for each other. We're fucking forced. Here's the thing. It's already happening. It's already happening. And you guys know what's happening. You can feel it happening.

There's something else happening. There's shitty things happening in this country right now. There's also incredibly powerful things happening in this country right now. That's what you have to remember. Remember you have each other that we all have each other and that we are all already connected. And that's amazing. And we're sharing each other's strength and it's fucking amazing. And let's do it.

When you tell your story to other women who support you and have been through it, it's fucking incredible. And we can do incredible things with that power. Yeah. Yeah. So do that. Do that. Do all those things we just listed and also stay sexy.

And don't. Thank you, Boston. Thank you.