My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - 65 - Pre-Milked Cereal

Episode Date: April 20, 2017

Get synced up for a brand new My Favorite Murder. This week, Karen and Georgia discuss the mysterious killing of Ronni Chasen and the tragic death of Mitrice Richardson.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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Yes, let's podcast. Okay, let's podcast. So early in the day, doesn't this podcast feel like we should do it at night? Yes, this is definitely a nocturnal podcast. Yeah, like with the lights off. Should we shut some stuff down? Maybe, make it spooky. Should you get your central system to shut it all?

Oh, you know, the clapper for the entire thing I have? Because I'm rich. Oh, nothing happened. Oh, hi. Hey, guys. This is my favorite murder. That's Karen Kilgara. And that's Georgia Hardstark.

We're here to talk to you about true crime. Are you ready? Are you ready for this? We haven't planned any of this conversation. No, not at all. Although it did have a kind of a lilting, choreographed quality. That's just how we naturally are with each other. That's just us.

That's us. We don't write anything down. We don't prepare in any way. We're just like the TV show This Is Us. That's us. Same exact thing. No. I'm sure it's great though.

Speaking of TV, this is a good segue. Yes. That we wrote. That we rehearsed four times. Oh, it just turns out. Oh, that's weird. I just got real TV again after like moving in and being like, we don't need TV.

Let's just, we'll just do Roku and blah, blah, blah and all these things. Didn't work? No. And I was like, I just want to turn like a food show on while I stuff it to Molly into my mouth in the middle of the day. Yeah. Like I don't want to have to beep, boop, boop and find the thing and then like, watch the thing.

Yeah, you just want to watch the TV for five minutes. You want to dive into the stream of TV that's already happening as opposed to hunt out specific because I find when I go hunt out specific things, I don't like it when I find like, it makes me go, oh, I don't actually like this. Like my food gets cold. Cause I can't eat in silence, I have this problem with that. Me too. So yeah, it's like you're scrolling like fine.

I can watch an episode of like five minutes of friends while I fucking eat this tamale again. I mean, let's be honest, I'm eating cereal for lunch. Was tamale the choice you made? Like this will impress people. No, because they're frozen tamales from Trader Joe's. Those ones that are like, that I just heat up and put salsa on and then I'm like, they're half cold.

The way you just said that made it sound like you're like fine, I'll admit it. I'm eating cereal. I want you to think I'm sitting here eating tamales homemade tamales. Okay, fine. It's homemade cereal. You know, like I like to do, but you made it yourself. Right.

Yeah. It's not that pre-packaged pre-milked cereal. Gross pre-milked pre-milked. I said it. What if that was a, what if you, what was it like powdered milk and you pour water into it and it's like cereal and I bet the army has that. Yeah, I bet they do. So it's like there's powdered milk and then there's cereal and then there's a little

bowl of water and then you break it and there's like a fucking like shitty spoon attached to the whole thing. It's part of the thing you break. You break a thing. Steven trademarked that. Wait, that just reminds me. So guy, our friend Guy Branham had a Passover cedar. Seder.

Seder. Fuck. I do it wrong every time. What if he just had a Passover cedar tree in his house? I, that's how I remembered it that way. Seder, cause Seder's like the, like the, you know, a guy with goat legs. Really? Seder, S-A-T-Y-R.

You know, they play the weird heart. Sure, sure, sure. Anyhow, it doesn't matter. Wait. Yeah, Guy Branham's cedar. How is it? He, it was of course lovely. He writes basically like a whole play.

Everyone at the table has parts and you have to like follow along and you say the prayers, but then there's other things and we play games. It's hilarious and really fun. But at one point I, he served quail. What? He served quail and I was eating it and then I flicked out the tiniest wishbone. And then I did the, I was sitting next to a guy named Matt who was super cool. Who's a writer that I now know.

And so we snapped the wishbone and I fucking won. Fuck yeah you did. I got my wish. And I haven't had a wishbone since I was a kid, probably at a cedar. But I'm like, that makes me so excited. Isn't that funny? And it was a tiny one because it was from a quail. So it was like, it flicked out and then I was like, hold on a second.

I think I just found a wishbone. It was like that big. Queue the email from fucking animal rights activists and Karen, you know the wishbone was part of this animals life and happiness. That's right. No, it's part of my happiness because it's going to bring me my wish. Give it. What was your wish?

Tell us. It won't come true. Right. That's not a thing. Just eternal love. That's all. That's all. The basics.

Now it's not going to come true. You tricked me. Did you eat gefilte fish? No. That's my favorite. It wasn't served. He did. So every year he does a different theme.

It's not standard traditional Jewish food. So it was Syrian food. Oh wow. It was a series of dishes that one more delicious than the next. A series of Syrian food. A series of Syrian. A series of Syrian serving. No.

No, you had it. Well, they're Syrian Jews. I mean, that's cool. Are they? Yeah. Tell me about them. I have never met them. But I'm sure they're there.

I bet they are. Okay. That's amazing. Television. Yes. And speaking of, you really quickly plugged the Guy Brennan TV show that you're on. Oh, that's... Because we're talking about TV and Guy Brennan.

It's so funny. Oh, and that... And again, what a great segue. I mean... Thanks for remembering your line. We never get to what we're actually talking about. It's all scripted. We never actually...

The segues are great, but they never talk about what they... Yeah. They just lead us away from topics. That's why people hate this podcast. I am on a television show called Talk Show the Game Show. Guy Brennan is the host. He's also our legal representative. But he is also a talk show host on a game show on TruTV Network.

It's Wednesday nights at 10 o'clock. Two episodes have already played. Tomorrow night will be the third episode. Is that Friday night or Wednesday night? Wednesday night. Oh, shoot. So last night. Yeah.

So next week. One over. I'm sure they're playing it. I've seen it constantly. They're playing it over and over. Yeah. I bet they repeat it. And...

But I wish this was earlier because I think this... They're like... Now it's all they're watching the ratings to see if they're gonna pick it up. Please everyone, Wednesday. Set your alarm clocks. I guess I'll tweet about it. But anyway. Anyway.

So TV. I got TV finally. And then I watched the... Which means I get all access to fucking ID and, you know... Yes. ...Gate line and all this shit. And everyone's like, did you watch Casey? Like three-part Casey Anthony thing.

Right. And so I was like, all right, this is my job. I'm gonna do this. Can I just say I saw those tweets and questions and, hey, watch this and whatever. And I purposely don't watch anything about Casey Anthony. I don't like that. I don't find anything in that story. I was just gonna say that.

Really? I just don't give a shit about her. I don't want to know. I don't want to know because I hate that story so much. It's just horrible. Me too. And I was gonna say, I just fucking couldn't watch it. Like, I know it's like my job and I should watch it and talk about it.

I was just like, fuck this Kant man. She just sucks so hard. But I don't understand why she, is this the glamorization of female criminals in that way where it's like, so she's a young hot girl that has a child that went to a party and maybe killed her child, but like, are we reporting about her more than other people because she's like a skinny white girl that was like at a party? Is it the same thing as that other girl that killed her boyfriend that? Right.

We talk together a lot. I think what it is is the coldheartedness in which like, it just, she's such a deep, deep narcissist that it's hard to watch like her jail cell, you know, conversations with her parents where, you know, when she first gets arrested is like me, me, me, me, me, not my daughter's dead. There's nothing about like my baby is dead. It's like, I can't believe this is happening to me and this isn't fair. And it's just like her poor parents have to come to the realization that they raised a

piece of shit narcissist who killed what could have been a not piece of shit narcissist or grandchild. And now they like have to stick with her. It's almost like this thing of this is all we have left is to stick with this kid, the one who sucked. I can't tell if it's because I haven't had enough diet coke today, but I feel nauseous right now talking about her. Like she, that it makes me nauseous cause there's other cold hearted bitches in the

world. But this is like saying, let's pay more attention to her because she weighs 97 pounds. I just hate the Nancy Grace Vidal for this particular story. And it's the same one with the other one where I would, I was always like, why are we talking about her? Yes. Why are we talking about her? And it's the same thing.

It's this kind of like, can you believe this hot bitch is this much of a cunt basically. Can you believe hot bitches are cunts? Who knew? Yes. Who fucking knew? There's so many different types of cunts out there. Yeah. It's like, can you believe not hot bitches are funny?

Yes. Because that's what they fucking needed to do. Yeah. That's the standard actually. Yeah. That's, that's the most common is we're not hot. That's why we're funny. We didn't grow up.

I'm not talking to you. I meant that for, I didn't mean that in an accusatory way. You should see some photos of me as a kid because you ain't wrong. Oh my God. I got a perm and I have braces. Anyways. Yeah. So Casey Anthony.

No, thanks. Stupid idiot. Awful. It's just sad and then awful. There's nothing in there that I go, oh, this is fascinating. Yeah. I just go, this is a tragedy. Yeah.

Yeah. It's ugly. Rough. I wrote shit down. What do you want to? Oh, um, I do. Well, this is, I wanted to read you because I read this this morning on Twitter. Uh, it said, uh, there's a, I guess a website called LAist and it basically is all the

stuff around LA. LAist. Oh, I love LAist. Yeah. Um, they do it in all different cities. Yeah. Um, surely it's owned by Rupert Murdoch or someone like that, but it brings me my local news and the headline this morning was dead body found in car parked in Filipino town.

And let me just, this is a short thing. I will read you. A body was discovered inside a vehicle parked in the middle of the street along the 300 block of West Lake Avenue that's, that's, well, turns out, uh, they, people founded at two 10 in the morning. The body of a male Hispanic in his 30s was found in the back seat of a black Hyundai. It had an Uber sticker. It's believed to have been towed to that location that it was discovered at.

Not driven towed there. A spokeswoman for, a woman for the LAPD said, told a LAist, my mouth is just, I'm not being quiet. My mouth has just dropped open. It's crazy that the department cannot confirm these claims that detectives and the corner are continuing their investigation of the case. So basically this is what probably they got the scoop on the scene, but no one's going to confirm.

We're never going to hear about it again. That's what's so crazy about these things that you hear about. I, and then there's just a couple of tweets of the pictures of the car sitting there with cops all around it. Oh my God. But the idea, it's, uh, so scary. I've been taking Uber over and over for the past like couple of weeks. My first thought is that he's a driver.

Right. Right. Yes. Me too. Yeah. And someone put him in the back seat after killing him. Oh, my dad's about to start driving Uber. So that ain't happening anymore.

Oh, yeah. You know, he used to be a taxi driver in like North Hollywood. Marty was? Yeah. And like down the street from where he was like parked waiting late at night to get his next call. Some do some cab driver got shot in the back of the head from the back of the seat and he's like quitting.

Yeah. So now he's thinking of becoming an Uber driver and it's like, fuck dude, either going to have a really great story, stories to tell, or you're going to be parked in the middle of fucking Filipino town. Well, who knows? I mean, like, who knows? I want to hear about the story so bad. It's so crazy.

That's bananas. Like what? I want the story. Yeah. Oh, I have a podcast recommendation corner. So this podcast called The Vanished, which obviously talks about people who vanished. It's like a true crime podcast. I mean, let me explain this to you.

No, I needed a little bit of an underline, don't worry. So they have this one episode. Oh, I forgot what number it is, but it's the episode called the Mimi Lewis story. Mimi. I don't know what number is it. Steven. No, it's called the Mimi Lewis story. And it's really incredible because it's not about it's about this girl Mimi Lewis who

vanished. She was 14, but it's the whole episode is a conversation with this woman named Sandy Roberts who runs this nonprofit called Halo's Investigation where they try to find missing teens. And their mission is to stop getting the label runaway put on teens and juveniles who disappear. And it's a really good episode, especially for parents like of teenagers and young kids about how this happens, what happens, how they're lured, the internet. And they're saying, she's saying, let's stop saying that they're runaways and let's start saying that they were lured away, which is like suddenly makes you care so much more.

Yes. Because it's this automatic thing of when you're like, oh, she ran away, then she deserves whatever happened to her. But it's like, no, if someone manipulated her and that kind of thing and she was having a hard time at home and was lured away and there's like a bunch of stuff about sex trafficking and what that means, which is, I mean, it's a really good episode. Wow. That's very cool.

Yeah. It kind of moved me a lot. And that's vanished. Vanished. The vanished. It's the Mimi Lewis episode. Cool. Yeah.

Oh, my sister sent me, so my sister is a big creeper on the Facebook page. She likes to go on there and look around silently and secretly. And then she'll text me things that she sees and likes on there. And this one. She's like vetting it for you. And so this one was the day after the Milwaukee show. And she sent me a text that said, this made me tear up a little. Look at the amazing community you guys created.

And then it said, went to see the MFM, went to see MFM last night in Milwaukee. My friend and I went to get dinner beforehand and it was like murdering those descended on Milwaukee. Yay. It was the best ever. Basically, everyone we passed, I would whisper, shoot. I would whisper to my friend, they're totally here for the show, definitely a murderino. When we were at bars before and after, you slowly watched groups growing larger and larger

as separate groups would realize that we are all were murderinos and joined together. Why can't that be the normal bar scene? That would be a dream. Thank you, Karen and Georgia. And all, I think it cuts off at the bottom. It says, I think it says, and all murderinos everywhere. I love that so much because actually we didn't create this community. You guys have created it for yourselves and we're just up here kind of like reading these

stories and recording these podcasts, but you guys are the boots on the ground that are like every time we have a VIP meet and greet after a show, people will tell us, I met them in line. I'm now hanging out with that girl. It's the cutest thing in the world. I think that's what the live shows have done probably the most for us is make us like actually see all of these people who are like, the shows are so positive and I'm always like, if people are like, I'm scared to go alone, it's like, no, you're going to meet a hundred

fucking cool people that are your friends. It's just such a cool thing. It's not like they all get together because of our podcast, they get together over their love of true crime, which we all feel so in the dark about because you're not supposed to talk about it. Yeah, it's people I think who aren't really the types of people like it's like somebody like me who I'm not going to be the kind of person was like, Hey, what are you interested in?

I'm always like, arms crossed. And I think when people they have, it's a, you know, I just a second ago said it's so cute and that's the worst. I hate that word. I don't know why I used it because what it really is is a very empowering, cool, like it's almost like skipping over. It's almost like a weird tinder for friends where you don't have, you go, Oh, I know this person already.

I don't have to like make excuses or pretend I don't like a thing I like. I already have this thing in common and then we go from there, which is very cool. And it's just to us. It's just a, it's thrilling to be able to be a part of this thing that you guys are doing. Definitely. This is, listen, we didn't know this would be a thing. Hey, listen, listen and listen, listen and learn, listen and kind of learn.

We didn't know and we fucking love it and we're so, we're proud of you, we're so proud of you. We're proud of you. We're grateful. We're proud of you for going to shows and, and getting into the mix. Yeah. Thank you for supporting us. Hey, is it birthday corner?

Oh, it is birthday corner. Is it birthday corner, Steven? That's right. It's Steven's birthday corner. It's Steven's birthday corner. Hi. Yay. Steven, it was your.

That was very neat. Yeah, I thought you were going to give a good hi, say hi birthday boy. Hello. It's like we're at TGI Fridays and he knows that someone's about to come singing and we're all just like, oh, it's going to come. So worst feeling or you're waiting for that sombrero to get thrown down on your head. Have you ever done that to someone whose birthday it wasn't? Oh shit.

Do you. That's twisted. Can I tell it? Well, I won't tell it now because we're trying to give a birthday greeting, but one time people did that and they were talking about me before I came back from the bathroom and I thought they were talking shit about me and I started crying. And then they were like, and then I just sat down at the table like full pouting and everything got super uncomfortable.

And then it was like happy birth and when I realized what it was like they were actually doing the nice. That's like so shows you what your brain does. The worst. Incorrect. It's yeah. When you're in a bad situation, it was a already bad situation and it's like, okay, anyway, anyway, it's Steven.

It's Steven. It's about you. It's about you. For one second. Here's the thing in a card. Oh my gosh. It's a big old thing. George is presenting Steven with his birthday gift from us.

It's organic. And we're making you open it on camera. On camera. So much pressure. On camera. There's so much pressure to like this. I can do it with one hand. Okay, good.

There's cat fur on the tape. It's great. Perfect. It's part of the present, right? Don't judge me. It's from Elvis and Mimi. They wanted to add something. That's what they...

Oh, I didn't add that. It's all they could afford. Elvis and... It says California Six Woods Mall. No, don't give them a shout out. They didn't. They... We paid for this.

I'll cut that out. Yeah. Cut that out. Steven. Slow hand. It's organic whiskey. That's so cool. Oh my gosh.

My favorite. Okay. Open the card though. And it... The card is the important. Organic whiskey, my favorite. Organic whiskey. My favorite.

It's vegan gluten free whiskey with a bear on the front. It's also non-alcoholic. We hope that's okay. We're worried about you. It's just root beer. This is an intervention. Oh my gosh. Oh, should I read it?

Yeah. Oh, okay. We want... I don't know how much or everything. We've donated $300. Oh my gosh. To Santidore in your name because you know you love the kitties. Happy birthday Karen and Georgia.

Oh, thank you. Santidore is a really great catch. Not... I don't want to call it shelter. Yeah. It's rescue. Cat rescue. Yeah.

Down close in our neighborhood. Yeah. It's... Oh my gosh. That you love. Yeah. Yeah. I've done work with them before.

Yeah. The Christy Keefe has been on my podcast. The podcast. Right. Yeah. Sponsor a cat. Oh my God. Thank you.

Well, we just gave it to them. I said, this is for Stephen Ray Morris. I like that actually the feel of all of that really turned into a look what we did for you. I know. Look at how good we are. Can I say that Vince was like pushing hard for like the past month or like, what do I get Stephen? And he just kept saying, what about a house kimono?

He can wear on the house. He just kept... And I was like, what the fuck are... Why are you fucking pushing for this? I was like, I don't know. I see Stephen enjoying a house kimono. And I was like, he has a roommate. Just lounging around.

Yeah. I mean... Big sleeves. I mean, this is great. I mean, for a second you were... It was like, pull out a cat. Just like, here's a new cat. We got you a cat.

Do you want a carrot? You can take that... Everywhere. Where do we take the $300 back and then buy a cat? Buy a cat. Oh my God. At a cat, what were they called? Mill.

Mill. Oh no. This is much better. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much. Happy birthday. 30th. Yeah, 30th.

Yeah. I wanted people to think I was 20, but it's okay. Also, you're fired. Oh, okay. Oh yeah. We don't have anyone over 30 in our... I know. It's ageism.

We totally support it. It's fine. Stephen, what are you going to in your next 30 years? Let's hear a short-term goal. Let's hear a long-term goal. Let's... How are you going to reposition yourself for the next 30? Like it.

I like it. Ooh. I want to invest in real estate. I feel like that's smart. It is. It's like, what would we say? I want to eat a million things. Have more doughnut companies make doughnuts of my face.

Yes, that's smart. And then have like a cat ranch, maybe just open up. Dude. That sounds amazing. Really huge cats, like horse-sized cats. Cool. Like it's all mancoons, like the biggest cats you've ever seen. Children riding cats.

I think that's... I mean, that feels like giving back, you know? Yes. Smart. You know, positive things. What's one insane, stupid thing you're going to do? I mean, the one like, because I kind of feel like I'm doing what I love for a living now, and I feel really lucky to feel that way.

But there's always like that one insane thing that you're like, oh, if I had this, like, I've always wanted to learn how to fly an airplane. Oh. That's one thing that like, I feel like when you can afford the gas money, because like renting, like learning how to fly isn't that expensive, but renting the... buying the gas is the expensive part. Oh, that's interesting. I've always wanted to like learn how to fly a plane.

Stephen, here's... Okay, now we're going to make a solid plan. You do that. You take the next... How long does it take? 18 months? Learn to fly planes. And then we get a private plane.

Yep. I knew you were going there. Right? Yeah. And we go international. Yeah. Flyover, international waters. Pitfall style.

Yeah, success. No rules apply. Nope. We're going to buy planes. And Karen and I are on the wings the whole time. We Amelia Earhart the fuck out of this tour. That means we die on an island. Yep.

Cool. Hot test. Oh yeah. They're pretty sure they found off an island. They found her plane. Wait, really? Yeah. Oh.

Sorry. Oh, no, no, no. She's still alive. Happy birthday. Happy birthday, Amelia Earhart. Like died of starvation. 30 is your bad news birthday. Yep.

Oh, no. It turns out Amelia Earhart is dead. Can I just say too that... That's part growing up. Yep. Santa's not real. Oh, shit. The 30s are your best.

The 20s, you couldn't fucking pay me my 20s again. No, I'm stoked to be 30. Yeah. I'm really excited. Good. 20s are a disaster. But 30s, I would say this about your 30s. 30s, because you're out of your 20s, you think now I know.

Now I get it. Just remember that you do not know. Yeah. And that once you're in the position of that, then you can kind of like be flexible. But my big mistake in my 30s is like, ugh, I'm so much smarter now. And I think that that made me even stupider. Mine was that I have to grow up now. And I'm like, and you don't have to.

Like people who are like, I'm 32 and I'm going to marry my boyfriend. And I'm like, don't fucking do that. You don't even, you're 32. Like just don't take anything like relationships and jobs and whatever situation you're in as seriously as you think you're supposed to when you're in your 30s. Like you can wait until your later 30s, which I'm about to be, to do that. Yeah. Nice.

Yeah. Oh, thank you. Steven. Oh my gosh. Thank you. The courage thing was kind of in the real estate. You're right. Real estate was good.

It was like I was kind of hinting that you two idiots who don't spend your money well should. Happy birthday to our friend Steven. Well done. We're glad you're here. Yeah. We're very glad we have you here. Yeah. Thank you.

And soon you'll be paid for your work. Can't wait. Someone we were getting interviewed for something and someone was like, can I just ask, do you pay Steven? Like almost like you put him through so much shit. Do you at least pay him? And I'm like, yes. People are, they're very concerned that we're, that we really are mean to you.

Yeah. Yeah. Which is not true. So there's $300 of charity to prove we're not. Oh no. I love it. Okay. Good.

It's why he's here. You got a sister. You know what it's like to be treated like shit. We all, all three of us know what it's like to be treated like a sister brought like a sibling. Anyways. That's right. So we treat at will, with however we want, coming from a victim stance. Now, I do have a corrections corner.

Okay. We talked about it a little bit in both Indianapolis, Milwaukee and Chicago, but I am forced to say it to the nation and the world. I forgot about it. Everyone's holding their breath. Cherry Hill. Everyone knows Cherry Hills in New Jersey. Everyone knows that every, every single person on this planet.

No. I certainly didn't. And neither do the producers of city confidential because they really led me to believe that Cherry Hill was in Pennsylvania. Tell everyone, cause I just love this where it's like, so you did your murder a week ago before the live show aired and it was about Fred Newlander. Right. The murdering rabbi.

Yeah. And I thought maybe you were like, I did it once on accident, but you thought it was there. I didn't know. Now, the problem with it really is that I feel like some other part of my brain did know that like the first indoor mall was in New Jersey. That just makes good sense. I guess.

Yeah. You're right. Who the fuck? No. Context clues. No. No, you're right. I mean, I don't, I'll just write down whatever and then say whatever.

Fuck it. Middle of Pennsylvania, like middle of nowhere, not near Pittsburgh has to be so boring that they're like, put them all here because everyone's so bored. All they do is like, cause trouble, let's give them a place to go, give them a nice indoor mall. Give them a mall. Like New Jersey is kind of fun. They have like cool weird shit to do.

Don't they? I don't know. I don't either. I clearly don't know anything about any. What I said to people when we were on tour was in California, you can't just go to another state real fast, which is how they were making it sound in the city confidential. Like the daughter lived in Philly and so she like drove into Cherry Hill. So like that just led me to believe you can't just drive in if you're in LA and you want

to drive in from Nevada, that's going to take a while. I don't. I mean, it just doesn't make sense to someone that lives on this part of the planet. You know what? Fuck it. Fuck it all. Who fucking cares? Fuck it all.

Fuck it all. That's the tagline. Why am I the one singing now? Because it's fun. You got to do it. And also you can do it. You try to act like you can't and you can't. Okay.

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Here are 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. But her incredible success hit a deeply private pain. In our series, Whitney Houston, Destiny of a Diva, we'll tell you how she hid her true self to make everyone around her happy and how the pressure to be all things to all

people led her down a dark path. Follow Even the Rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Where are we now? Should we talk about the theme of this podcast? Yes. Murder? Oh, not singing.

Not Elvis. You want, do I go first? You go first. Stephen, birthday. Karen goes first. Is it me? Cool. All right, then.

Stephen, it's your birthday. You got to pick whoever you want to go first. Stephen, it's your birthday. Okay. Well, tonight, today, this afternoon, I'm going to do the murder of Hollywood super publicist, Ronnie Chasen. Do you know this one? Is it a she?

Yes. I think, I don't know anything about it. Okay. Take me there. I'm taking you back to 2010. Where were you in 2010? Where did you live? I was 30.

What? Yeah. Yeah. Dude. I'm liking this. I was 30. I was living in a studio apartment in Hollywood. It's really cute.

It was like $800 a month, which is the most hilarious thing I've ever heard. I thought you said I was really cute. Oh. I was really cute. Yeah. That's it. Go ahead. I had a shitty desk job that I fucking hated and I had no idea that my life would

be what it is today and I am so glad I didn't because then it wouldn't have happened. Did you wish and wish and hope that you would not work at a desk anymore? Oh my God. Because I have to tell you when I had two different jobs in my early 20s that both brought me such intense soul-sucking sorrow. That was my life until I was 30. Yeah. And I thought it would be that forever.

But I feel like when you're going through that you think this, because I feel this bad about it, that means it's going to happen forever. But actually, if you feel that bad about it, it means it won't continue on, in my opinion. Well, I fucking hustled my ass off to grasp anything that wouldn't keep me there and that turned into a blog, a blog. I used to think maybe if I just get married and have a baby, I can have some time off. That's how bad it was. I was just like, get me out of here.

I'll have a baby. Yeah. I mean, they do solve that problem. But babies will get you out of the office. That's for sure. And sometimes keep you from ever returning. Let me make this about me. You asked.

I did ask you. I want to know. Because it's weird to think, so it was seven years ago. So Stephen, you were 23. What were you doing? What were you doing, Stephen? I was just about to go to grad school in London. He's better than I was.

Bonjour. I dropped out immediately. Oh, great. Okay. Bonjour. Bonjour in London. Karen doesn't know our cheerio. She doesn't know the language.

I get offended by anyone that leaves the country or gets an education. It really upsets me out. Me myself, if it was seven years ago. Where were you? Where was Karen? I was, um, God. I was in a very... You were married.

No. You know where I was? I was in New York. I had just left my ex. I was like, I can't do this. And I bailed and went to New York. And I was in New York. This is when I got into podcasts.

Because I was in New York, I knew about three people in the entire city. I had a job, luckily. And I would just come home. I would work all week. And then I would come home. And on the weekends, I would sit at this weird little chopping block table in the kitchen. I would smoke out the window. Don't smoke.

It's bad for you. And I would listen to Dave Anthony and Greg Barron's podcast, Walking the Room. And they would fight and blather and like... It was the funniest thing. It was just like... And it was just like being in the room with them. So it was a weird way. That's why when people freak out and go like, I can't believe I'm meeting you.

You don't understand. I always grab them and I'm like, I do understand. It's like everybody goes through awful things and needs that kind of like companionship. And that's... It got me through kind of one of the hardest times of my adult life. Was pretending that I was having a conversation with Dave Anthony and Greg Barron. My whole studio apartment was painted while I listened to podcasts on a huge iPod that someone had given me.

One of those big thick blocky ones. Yes. So guys, we get it. We understand... So who got killed? Okay. Now, I take you back to November 16th of that year in Hollywood. So one of Hollywood's most powerful and beloved publicists, Ronnie Chason, has just left

the premiere party for the movie Berlesque. The Christina Aguilera share joint Berlesque at the W Hotel. Ronnie's the publicist for the movie. We were there last night. What's that? We were there yesterday. Yeah, that's right. Oh, this one's really folding over and over.

So she was the publicist for the movie's producer, Donald DeLine. She was also the publicist for the lighting designer, Peggy Eisenhower. And for the composer, Diane Warren, who'd written a song for this movie. She worked the room and she was now driving home down Sunset Boulevard. It was 1228 AM when Ronnie's Mercedes came to a stop at the left turn lane in the intersection of Whittier and Sunset. So if you've never been to LA before, most people know about the Sunset Strip, which is like the most famous part of Sunset Boulevard.

It starts, the Sunset Strip starts at Crescent Heights and it goes all the way down a little bit past Doheny. And basically along that strip, you've got the Chateau Marmont Hotel, you've got the comedy store, you've got the Viper Room, you've got the whiskey and you've got the Roxy. Used to be Tower Records was there. Look, soup is there. There's a little, a very Tony Shishi chunk called the Sunset Plaza that has restaurants and like the Armani store, fancy shopping, fancy eating.

And it's basically the, it takes you right into Beverly Hills. So once you get past that part, the Sunset Plaza portion basically takes a turn and then suddenly there's trees and there's big tall green hedges that are blocking off humongous mansions that they don't want you to look at. And it becomes like this gorgeous green drive. And a little further down on that drive, you've got the Beverly Hills Hotel that cost a thousand dollars a night to stay there. Did you know that?

How much does it cost? A thousand dollars a night. Did you say a thousand dollars a night? At the Beverly Hills Hotel. Yeah. Are you fucking kidding me? I was clicking to see how far down Sunset it was. And when you click on it, that hilarious Google thing happens where it says, if you're trying

to book yourself there and it's like over, it's like, I think it's 1098 a night. What? Yeah. Because it's like, you know, the polo club. It's like the famous. That's so much money. Yeah. They only want rich people there.

Oh, fuck you. Or people that's saved up. Whatever. No, go stay somewhere else. But anyway, what I'm saying is this is the end of Sons of Boulevard because if you keep on driving, you end up at the beach, basically. You would drive past Bel Air, which is the richest, richest UCLA. And then ultimately the beach.

And that's a sharp contrast to where Sons of Boulevard starts, which is on basically Oliveira Street, downtown, 13 miles away, it has, I would say, near the majority of Los Angeles has 47,000 homeless people. So the two ends of this street couldn't be more different. And when you get into Beverly Hills, the weirdest thing about this, anybody that lives in Los Angeles knows like, you don't go into Beverly Hills if you don't have a reason to go there. Especially at night, it's empty basically. So it's like if you, if she's driving on sunset at 1238 at night, there's no cars on

the road. There's certainly no pedestrians ever. No. It's a big, wide street and it's empty. It's pristine, perfect, not a drop of litter anywhere, and it's completely empty. So most people, because LA and Hollywood is an industry town, most people are in bed at that time. All those rich people that live behind those hedges work their asses off and get up at

five in the morning. So it's always, you know, like lights out at 10 o'clock over on that side of town. Once your job is premier parties, which was Ronnie Chasen's job, that keeps you out a little bit later. So by 2010, Ronnie Chasen's clients had netted around 150 Oscar nominations, seven of them had won best picture, including a three Pete between 2008 and 2010. So she represented people that either worked on or made no country for old men, slumdog millionaire and the hurt locker.

Wow. Tell us what a publicist does exactly, not just the people listening, but myself as well. Okay. So you're a publicist as the person that makes sure that the press and the media know about their clients successes or career at the time. So like for her, like for publicists, like around Oscar time or award season is like the busiest time because that's when they want everybody to be on talk shows. They want everybody to be interviewed for newspapers and magazines and stuff.

And they don't reach out to you publicists reach out to them. Exactly. So they're basically, they would call and say, you know, my client Steven has this amazing podcast called the per cast that everyone's talking about these days and you've got to get him before he goes big. So let's get some placement here, here and here. And they basically are like a, like an amazing stage mom where they, they talk about you like you are going to be the next thing.

And because everything in LA is about you, you don't want the current hot thing. You want the next big thing. So that's the publicist deal in the world of that. Then they also just deal in the day to day of actually booking people on talk shows. And like the, all the stories from my experience of working on talk shows is when something bad happens, like say someone cancels or flakes or say your show has to go down because like the electricity went off or something, the people you don't want to have to deal with are the publicists.

Cause they're the people that come in and act on behalf of celebrities and they're the bad guy. So a celebrity will never be the one that's like, I don't want to do your show, a publicist will be the one that's like, they can't do it for this reason, this reason, but we can do it here. And because I know you're disappointed, I can also get you this person. So they're just a master politician. They are a, they're a cheerleader and they hustle 24 seven.

It's an insanely hard job. I would never want to do it. And it's a certain type of person that can do it because you really do have to fucking do that. Are you kidding me? No way. I mean, you, you're on the phone all the time and you have to like, you have to like play the game the hardest, I think, because you are really like a salesperson, but for people.

And so it's sometimes it's that, I mean, you've seen, you can watch it in movies, there's all kinds of movies about inside or Hollywood stuff, but like there are those times where publicists can make a star because it's like you just by a series of, of happenstance, it's like something will happen on a production and say somebody drops, somebody breaks their leg and they drop out and then they have to get replaced. Well, those that person, like a team comes together and then starts pitching and fixing and what, I mean, I'm, this is a completely made up scenario. I don't know what the actual technical thing is, but a publicist is the kind of person

that can come in and sell you on some and on, on an unknown and actually make someone's career. Yeah. And they, they do that more often than like a direct, you know, it's always like a director discovered me or whatever. And it's usually like a publicist or a casting director also they're women who like believe in people and watch people and, and like vouch for people essentially. And if someone owes them a favor, they could be like, we'll put this person in your movies,

my client. Exactly. Okay. It's all about favors and what, if something happens, then you owe them a favor or they owe you a favor. So then you get, I mean, Or they're reliable. They always bring me the right people and this is the person I call first and

In TV. That's what it all is. Like when you start to learn and I barely know that side because that's the booking side, which I never had to deal with. And I wouldn't have been able to because I can't organize anything and they're the most organized people in the world, but that's all they do all day is have those conversations where it's like, well, since you owe us the one from that, now we, we want this person on the day that their show comes out.

It's all like, it's crazy politics. It's amazing. So she was friends with a woman named Lily Zanik and I, she had a, she has a second name in there and I didn't write it down and then I couldn't find it. It's something Zanik. And I don't know if that means that she, she was married to hyphenated. It was hyphenated. So maybe it's just important to her that her original name was in there, but I didn't write

it down. Anyhow, this one was friends with Ronnie Chasen and she was also a producer who won best picture with her husband, Richard Zanik. They made driving as Daisy and Lily Zanik was quoted as saying the driving as Daisy campaign was all Ronnie. And that's why I thanked her twice at the Oscars. Wow. Yeah.

So it's just that kind of like the people in the business know who makes the engine go basically. And a lot of times it's, it's publicists. So Ronnie Chasen was born Veronica Cohen in Kingston, New York in 1946. She grew up in the Bronx. She moved to LA to be an actress and she changed her last name so that she had the same name as the famous restaurant Chasen's. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Smart. Because it's like Chasen's was like an insider celebrity restaurant back in the day. Yeah, like is she or is she part of that family? Yeah. You just are like, oh yeah, you better get a Chasen in here. She was on Guiding Light. She was on the Patty Duke show.

She's gorgeous. Like just, she looked like every other blonde actress in the 60s or 70s. I should, I'm not actually sure. I'm sure she would hate me saying exactly when she was at that age, but basically eventually she transitions into PR and she builds this huge career. And she's just a hustler and she's, everyone said she was just, she was known for being brassy and unapologetically pushy. She just didn't give a shit and she was also really honest.

So she would tell people to their face like, she said, oh, she had a friend named Kathy Berlin who was a New York publicist and Kathy Berlin said, I used to say that Ronnie got half her pieces placed because people would just say enough already. Like they would just, she would just wear them down. So she's also known as being real. People adored her obviously. People like to talk about people being big assholes in this business, but in my opinion, especially for women, you can't be that big of an asshole and get by.

You have, you know, people have to love you and you have to have loyalty. There's to be some charm thrown in there. There's gotta be, yeah, you gotta build loyalty to, to be as successful as this woman was. And there's a story that someone told, because someone who really loved her who said she got a lot of flak because she used to always take a doggie bag home, no matter what fancy dinner she was at, no matter what fancy restaurant, everybody being trying to be Hollywood. She'd always take her food home in a doggie bag. And so people would like whisper, oh, she cheap or whatever.

And what she actually did was she would take her food, her leftovers to her mom's house. So her mom could eat the fancy food that she was eating and like in, and she would share the like Hollywood night with her mom. Is not lovely. That's so sweet. I know. It's really hard for me to learn that you can't take half your food home at meetings. I mean, you can.

No, you can't. I like, I'm so bad at wasting food that I'm like, I'm no, I'm done. I could eat that at home in the, in my underpants. Yeah. But I have to say this, my dad told me this a long time ago. My dad told me this when I was like seven, where I was like, really, thanks for this amazing advice. But he was like, don't salt your food before you taste it.

Right. And it was that whole story of there was like somebody lost a job because it's, it shows that like you need to be able to try things and decide how they are as they are. Don't just decide you need to salt it. You're assuming things. That's right. Hey, seven year old. Thanks, dad.

That's really helpful. You'll always get by a kid and I have. So that's, I was just going to say that's, that's a similar thing where there could be somebody that you eat with that watches you take your food home because you want to keep it and goes, she's a smart frugal customer that doesn't give a shit who's watching her. Totally. Those are always the stories in Hollywood. Hollywood anyways, people going, not going along with the flow and being like, I want

my fucking doggy bag full of grilled cheese or whatever. Anyhow, let's get back to biz. So we're now, it's a long, hard night of work for Ronnie Chasen. She pulls up at this intersection in Beverly Hills between sunset and Whittier. No other cars as we've said, no pedestrians. In that situation, it's not unheard of for a Hollywood big wig to just go ahead and take a left on a red. It's their, it's their neighborhood.

They do what they want. Anyway. They take forever those lights. They take forever and no one's going to see it. No one's going to see it, but Ronnie didn't do that. She waited for the green and that's when she was ambushed by a lone gunman. He approached the passenger side of her car and he shot her four times through the window. Holy shit.

She was hit twice in the chest, once in her upper right arm and once through her right shoulder that, that bullet went into her heart and it was that shot that was believed to have killed her. She, her car then took the left and drove down Whittier south and glided a quarter of a mile down that windy street until it hit a light pole and crashed and set off the passenger airbags and was basically a car accident. A couple minutes later, a car, a couple passing in a car spotted the accident and you pulled over, saw what happened, called 911, but people had already called because they heard gunshots

in Beverly Hills. So everybody was calling the Beverly Hills police. Ronnie Chasen was rushed to Cedar's Sinai Hospital and she was pronounced dead at 1.12 a.m. So most people assumed when they heard about this, it was either a carjacking or someone had taken out a hit on her because it's such a weird, the idea in, just to give you a sense, I got most of this information from an article that guy, Gary Baum, not Guy Branham, Gary Baum wrote for the Hollywood Reporter.

And when he wrote this article, it was 2016. And in the article, he said, there have been no homicides in Beverly Hills since 2011. What? So in that five years, zero homicides in Beverly Hills, yeah. I think someone would want to kill his wife or whatever. There had been, the five years previous, there had been five homicides. Two of them had been that exact thing, domestic abuse, domestic homicides. And those were solved.

And then there were two other ones that were solved. And one was the shooting death of Mark Ruffalo's brother, which I'd never heard of. Mark Ruffalo was a, Mark Ruffalo had a brother, I believe his name was Scott and he was a hairdresser and he lived in Beverly Hills and he was shot to death in his house. What the fuck? Yeah. And they never solved it. Who did it?

They don't know. Karen Townley. I know, right? So anyway, that's like it for Beverly Hills. Now we talk about fucking, you know, Filipino town, the thing we were just talking about earlier where it's like, how many homicides are there in a month, much less in years and years. In 10 years, they'd had five and then there was this.

So it's insane. Anyway, which is the reason the movie Beverly Hills cop worked so well because truly nothing bad happens there. It's the home of all the rich people. Yeah. Everyone watch it. It's such a good movie. It holds up.

It holds up so well. Okay. Sorry. So I lost my place. So also just know this, Ronnie Chasen's estate was worth $6.1 million at the time of her death. Holy shit. Yeah.

So she was doing very well for herself. She was also single, no kids. She's, you know, like a working lady. So three weeks after the night of the shooting, the Beverly Hills Police Department holds a press conference and states that the case has been closed. The suspect was an ex-con named Harold Smith who had served time twice for robbery once in 1998 for a purse snatching where when the woman resisted, he broke her jaw. And that happened on Doheny Boulevard, which was about a quarter of a mile east of where

Ronnie Chasen had been shot. Oh, shit. And so this is how they found Harold Smith, a neighbor of his. So he lived in this place called the Harvey Apartments, which is on Santa Monica Boulevard. It's actually just north of Santa Monica Boulevard, kind of behind Paramount over there. It's basically Santa Monica and Western, which is not a great neighborhood. And this apartment building was not good at all. It was mostly, it was a lot of drug addicts and just people who were just getting by.

It was, it was bad news. So a neighbor of Harold Smith's calls in a tip to America's Most Wanted saying that he had shown up, Harold Smith had shown up at this neighbor's apartment 90 minutes after the killing in Beverly Hills, asking if anything had been reported on TV and then saying that he needed to go back to Beverly Hills because he had left his bike there. Oh, no. And then the neighbor said he saw the report of Ronnie Chasen's murder on the news and he knew he put it all together.

Right. So at 5.30 p.m. on December 1st, after Beverly Hills police get this tip, they go out to question Harold Smith. They find him in the lobby of the Harvey Apartments. And when they identify themselves to him as police, Harold pulls a 38 out of his pocket and shoots himself in the head. Shut the fuck. How did I not fucking know this part?

I know. It's crazy. I heard this part. I knew about the shooting. Yeah, me too. But I've never heard this part. Oh, my God. Okay.

So this neighbor that had called in the tip, he had been keeping some boxes for Harold Smith because Harold had been evicted from the Harvey Apartments six days before. And that's why Harold came back to that guy's house that night. Some of his stuff was there. So the police find this out or know this and go up to the neighbor's house and start looking through Harold Smith's stuff that's in the neighbor's apartment. And there they find four spent shell casings among Smith's belongings. And they test those against the ballistics and the Ronnie Chase murder.

They're a match. The police announced they have their guy and the case is closed. They took such a confident position at this press conference that even though they had not looked into her bank statements, they had not looked onto hard drive of her computer, they had not checked herself on records. They eventually got to that the following March, but at the time they made that announcement, they had not looked into almost anything in her life. And the fact that she, a lot of people make note of the fact that she had an estate with

no heirs worth $6.1 million. And a family, you know, she, sorry, so I'll just finish this. The following July, Beverly Hills police issued a news release stating that it completed the exhaustive investigation. And without a doubt, it's the conclusion of robbery homicide detectives that the sole perpetrator of this heinous crime was Harold Martin Smith. So last year, the Beverly Hills police finally released the files on this case and they were partially redacted.

So you couldn't read everything in them. But this reporter that wrote for the Hollywood reporter read the ballistics report and it actually, the ballistics report actually says that although the two guns in this case have similar characteristics, they're not, they're too insignificant for identification. So actually the ballistics report does not confirm that he was their guy at all. The files also reveal that the police did not dust for fingerprints on the right side of the car, which was where the shots were fired from. No fingerprints dusted over there.

They also never released the security camera footage from the neighborhood, the night. Everyone has security cameras. It's fucking Beverly Hills. And a man named TT Williams Jr. who was a retired LAPD homicide detective who he gets called to testify about police procedure a lot. He was stated as saying this about the lack of video footage memorializing Smith near the crime. He said, quote, there has to be some security cameras in that neighborhood that would have

caught him. I mean, Beverly Hills, give me a break. You've got a black man supposedly on a bike in the middle of the night. He'd be stopped 15 times. He would have stood out like a sore thumb. Seriously. And not surprisingly, they never released the footage from the lobby of the Harvey apartments the night of Harold, Harold Smith's suicide, and they had security cameras in that lobby.

So that whole moment where the cops identify themselves, that's all on camera. No one's ever seen that footage. Also of note, the gun that Harold Smith pulled out of his pocket and shot himself to death with was later determined to have been reported stolen three years earlier by a retired LAPD officer from his home in Santa Clarita. Just a little bit of a question mark there. Guns get stolen on the time. Then they go on the black market.

Anyone can have them. Yes. Okay. But the fact that it was a cop's gun, a retired policeman's gun, I think isn't good. Totally. Yeah. It's the, oh, I said, it's exactly that of, oh, I can connect those, which I'm not going to say, but

Well, I mean, That's all. It just, so I'll end with this, which I think is very interesting. It's a quote from a man named Stan Kephart, who is a former police chief in Arizona. And he also serves as an expert witness in cases involving law enforcement, operational standards. And he said this, it's not what you think about a suspect, it's what you can prove. And it appears that there is room for doubt that Harold Smith is the perpetrator in this

case. Holy shit. They didn't really prove factually that he was the perpetrator. They just basically said he was enclosed the case and he's dead. He can't defend himself. Wow. It's so interesting when you hear like, well, he had this and he did this that night and this thing happened and he's done this in the past.

And you're like, yeah, okay. He's obviously, he obviously did it. The end. But you don't think about the, like the deep, the deep evidence or the basic things like fingerprinting that side of the car or the obvious things like security cameras. You just hear these blanket statements and you're like, duh, but well, you go, that's easy. Like that's an easy, you tell me that a black ex con is shot somebody.

Oh, this, here's the other thing. Her purse was still in the car. It's a Prada bag. It was on the passenger seat. So he, so they're saying that he shot into this car four times and didn't take anything. There was nothing taken from the car. So he just, it's not a smash and grab. It's not his style.

It's not his MO, which we do know can escalate. But in this case, he didn't even steal anything. So now he's gone straight to murder. So basically he's not even a, it's not robbery anymore. It just doesn't make sense for someone to do that there either. Cause you can't blend, blend in with the rest of the city. You can't go hide in someone's backyard. You're just, you're like a waiting, what do they call it?

Duck? That's sitting duck. Well, also you, um, so that actually takes apart a bunch of things because they figured out that that neighbor who said that, um, that he put it all together because he knew then it was Ronnie Jason's murder, her name wasn't released until the next morning. So there was no way he could have known that during that conversation. Um, also if he, if it was 90 minutes after the, the shooting took place, how did he get back to those apartments that fast?

That's true. Especially if he left his bike, right? So what did he leave his bike and jump on a night bus from Beverly Hills into Hollywood? And in that case, then they should have had the bus driver testify, right? Or like that, or that would have been in the report that someone had seen him coming back. That would have all been added to the argument that it was him. Um, also there were, and I mean, this is like, this is, isn't even speculation. It's just like kind of random facts, but there were family members in, in her family that

in her, she had rewritten a new will in 2006, but they couldn't find that will. So they went off of her 1994 will and in that will, she gave the majority of her estate to one of her nieces. And she had another niece that in the will, it said, I knowingly, and, and what being aware of the implications that this might cause leave you $10, 94. I mean, maybe she was a drug addict then, then sucked. And then 96. They were like, all right, I just don't understand how, don't you have to file a will like with

a lawyer? No, in fact, I watched this thing, Joey Bay, it was whatever, it may be headline news, whatever, Joe, Joey Bay, her was the host of it. It was just a YouTube video. But this woman on it said, you actually can write on a napkin. This is my last will and testament. It doesn't have to be filed anywhere. If you sign it and you are of sound mind, it's legal.

That seems so absurd because it's like, it's just then someone can pick it up out of here, fucking sock drawer, light it on fire, and there's no will. And I'm the next to Ken. You know what I mean? Yes. Like you would think you wanted to get, you'd want to get it notarized and give it to someone. Well, you should keep it in a safe place. Yeah.

Definitely. But you, but it's just the legality of it. It doesn't need a lawyer's anything. This is what this woman on this thing said. Yeah. That it doesn't need any, it doesn't need a notary or anything. It seems such a, it's like, it's that thing of like, well, if you can get away with it, then congratulations.

There's no, no one will look into it. With what? What are you talking about? With burning someone's will or like getting rid of the 2006 will. Right. Then. Yes. That's exactly right.

Congratulations. Well, yeah. You know, you could do things in, you know, something like a will you would keep in a, what do you call it? A safety deposit box. Yeah. But what if she goes and, yeah, totally. When you don't give out those keys.

Yeah. I've never had a safety deposit box, but I will only have one key when I do. I have a PO box and it's very exciting. It's like, you feel like a grownup. Anyway, I think that's a fascinating one because I saw, oh, there's a show called demons in the city of angels. Oh, come on. Which is, which it's hilarious that it's like specific only to Los Angeles, but this, that's

what caught my attention because it started and I watched it going, oh, I do want to know how this turned out because I remember hearing about it and then hearing nothing. And basically it's just them going, we kind of don't buy it. And isn't it interesting that you and I who remember this happening and it kind of being, you know, if, you know, it was in your industry, like we had never heard about it again. Like it's almost like, yeah, we got, like they got the guy really low key, not maybe not letting a lot of reporters into the press conference. Does that make sense?

Yeah. You know what I mean? It's interesting that we never heard anything more about it. She had a bunch of friends in this article. It was, it made me sad because I feel it's like, you know, this type of woman, you know, you know this lady. Oh yeah. She's smart and sharp and like pushy enough to make, to be the top in the top of the business

and such a hard business. They all, her friends say, if it was her friend that died in a suspicious way, she wouldn't rest until she found out what really happened. And she wouldn't take no for an answer. And she would. So that's, it's really sad because I think it's that thing of like, there's a lot of people going, I wish I could do something or I wish I knew something. Or maybe they're right.

Am I supposed to do something even if I think the cops are right? Like, what do I do? You know? It's just so, it's just too convenient. Like to find who the fuck keeps four spent shell casings in their like box, in their boxes, in their shitty apartment. You didn't check them into the LA River as you were walking home in 90 minutes. But you leave your bike at the scene of the crime.

Sure. Like, sure. None of it. Also, how do you get, how do you get back across town at night? You can't get anywhere in 90 minutes in Los Angeles. No. You're not even in a fucking car. I mean the traffic.

Anyway. That's great. That was really interesting. I never followed up on that. Hopefully. We'll hear more about it soon. They're trying to make, they were trying to make a documentary about it, but they weren't having a lot of problems.

Well, it's funny because we're having a theme today. Oh, really? Los Angeles. What did the LAPD do, question mark? Absolutely. Racial issues, what happened, tampering, et cetera. Wow. But first, F2P.

Sorry. This is where the commercial will go. So this is what I've wanted to do for a while, but it's scary to tackle because it's kind of big. It's, and it's, every time I go back to look into it, it's just like, it's a lot. Okay. This is the story of Maitris Richardson. Do you know this one?

You probably will once I tell you. So around 7pm on the night of September 17th, 2009, 24-year-old Maitris Richardson pulls her Honda Civic into the parking lot of Joffreys, which is a fancy pants restaurant on the Pacific Coast Highway. Do you know what I'm talking about? No. It's one of those Joffreys. It's like super fancy pants.

Like on the coast? Like on the coast in Malibu. Yeah, yeah. Okay. It's very, like it's spelled Joffrey, not Geoffrey, you know what I mean? While she's there from the valet to ordering her food, interacting with other patrons, her behavior is erratic and bizarre, but she wasn't threatening in any way. When the bill came for 89.51, Maitris couldn't pay.

So when she was confronted by staff, she announced that she had come to avenge Michael Jackson's death. Oh no. I know. Management decides to call the police and they say, we have a guest here who was refusing to pay her bill and we think she may, she sounds really crazy. She may be on drugs or something, but Maitris Richardson wasn't on drugs. She's a 24 year old smart and beautiful African-American woman from South LA.

She graduated from California State University Fullerton with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology the year before. And at the time, she worked as an administrative assistant at a freight company, but she wanted to work with children and at the time she volunteered as a mentor for at risk children and worked with kids at a cheerleading camp. So it's not really known why she was in Malibu though, which was 40 miles from her home. They think maybe she was visiting the campus of Pepperdine, which is right by Joffrey's, you know, to look at the campus.

But just sorry, side note, I told my mom when I was a junior in high school that I wanted to go to Pepperdine because my friend Jen Mason's older sister Becky went there and my mother laughed in my face and said, who's going to pay for that? Because Pepperdine is insanely expensive, volleyball college on the beach, basically. It's Tony. It's for the rich. It's for rich people, as is Joffrey's, which is how you build an $89 dinner for one person. I could do that at Applebee's.

I mean, let's be honest, I had a $60 lunch today with Vince, so let's be realistic here. I swear to God, sometimes when I get a pretzel as an appetizer, I could just eat nine pretzels. Do it. Okay. Cheesauce? Well, I mean, that's crucial. I'm not going to eat them dry. What do I look like?

Big and soft and then have like a thing of that cheese sauce. Am I a monster? Mustard. I hate when they try to get creative. Okay. I hate when they try to be like, this stupid aioli or whatever the fuck. Oh, no, no, no. And then the, oh, like a, it's a mustard that's got spicy honey in it.

No, no. Just give me cheese sauce like they serve at Applebee. That's all we want. We want to eat cheese soup, but we can't and we know it because of polite society says it's not okay unless you're in like Wisconsin. Right. So give me a bread to dip it in it and be okay with that. Fine.

I'll pretend it's a dip. Fine. Fine. It's the same thing with onion soup. Like I just want to eat bread and cheese with a spoon. Yeah. And then you can put a little broth underneath it. Yeah.

Whatever. If you need me to be that fine. Okay. Sorry. That was a real left turn. So you're leaving camp. So they don't know why she was there, but it seems that she was suffering at the time of a previously undiagnosed manic episode, which is also evidenced by her, her Facebook

posts recently, which were incoherent and rambling. She said things like there are signs everywhere, smile, with a smiley face. And then another said, I just want to sleep low, but you know me and my crazy ideas. Let's see where they take me. Smiley face. Oh yeah. So that's like, did she not know she was manic from what I can tell? No.

And her mom, I think they were all very surprised by it by the fact that this is, they think that's what happened for sure, but nobody knew what was going to happen. Yeah. She was undiagnosed and unknown. I'm sorry to ask this, but when, when was this? 2009. Oh wow. Yeah.

Okay. No, no one listens in the beginning of what year it is. You know what I mean? I don't. It's hard to focus. Yeah. I like to get to the story. Yeah.

I settled down. I'm still thinking of stuff I said. Yeah. My story, my thing. 2009. Where were you? 2000. You were near 2010.

Oh my God. This is like, it's like we picked a theme for this episode. That's so true. We didn't. That weird chunk of time. It's like, it's like our periods are synced, but our murders are synced instead. It's all coming together in the red tent, Steven. Yeah.

Steven's writing this one down because he's blushing so hard. He loves a good period joke. Sisters. Sisters. Um, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, signs. Three nights after that last post she wrote, she's at Joffrey's going through this shit. Three LAPD deputies arrive. They call Matrice's, it's MyTrice, I believe, not Matrice.

MyTrice's great-grandmother who offers to pay the bill, but she would have had a fax and image of her credit card, which she wasn't able to do because who the fuck has a fucking fax machine. In 2009, yeah. Don't you hate that? Yeah. So they were like, nope. Sorry, grandma.

Sorry. Great-grandma. You can't do this. Um, they search her car and they find a very small amount of marijuana as well as bottles of vodka and tequila and half a case of beer, but they gave her a field sobriety test and she passed. Okay. So I'm sorry, but the officers could have placed Matrice in, MyTrice in an involuntary

psychiatric hold based on her odd behavior, but they said that that would require a lot of paperwork and a trip to the hospital. So instead they arrested her on charges of suspicion of not paying for the meal and possession of less than one ounce of marijuana and they took her to Lost Hills Police Department. Uh-oh. I know. Upon her arrest, her phone, purse, and money are locked in her car and the car is towed to a tow yard.

What? Why? Do you going to need that after? Well, Lost Hills Police Department, again, Fancy Pants Police Department and a Fancy Pants part of Malibu, like really nice area. It's the same station where Mel Gibson was taken after being pulled over for drunk driving and yelling anti-Semitic slurs, same station, but, but they let him keep his purse. Well, well, they escorted him from Lost Hills to his towed car that cause they treat famous

and rich people, which is what their neighborhood is. And white people. Remember in the Big Lebowski, stay out of my beach community, throw some mug at Big Lebowski's face. It's like that. Yeah. Unfortunately, my Trees didn't receive the same treatment as a famous asshole. My Trees' mother called the Lost Hills station around 10 p.m. and all of these phone calls

you can hear on YouTube and I fucking listened to them. She's asking if they're going to book her and release her that night and saying, it's dark and she doesn't have a car and I don't want her wandering. And she's like, I'll come pick her up right now. But if you keep her overnight, that's fine, I'll get her in the morning. I just want to know you're not going to release her. And this woman is, you know, she's clearly upset, but she's just like, I don't know what's happening.

I'll deal with it. She's a together woman. Yeah. Um, she's, the mother said she's not from that area and I would hate to wake up and to a morning report saying girl lost somewhere and her head chopped off, but the deputy assured my Trees' mother not to worry. I can't breathe. Hold on.

But yet at 12 30 in the morning, my Trees with only the clothes on her back and without a purse, money or her phone was released into the darkness and cold of the Santa Monica mountains. Why? Which you and I like, let's, let's set the stage again from Beverly Hills to Santa Monica mountain in Malibu. It is fucking remote. It's huge houses on a lot of land that butt up against the Santa Monica mountains, which

are not pretty hiking trails. They're fucking wilderness scrub brush. It's there's no, there's nothing commercial around there. Well, that's what they said too is nothing was open at that point. All businesses are closed. It closed at like six. Yes. And there's, it's like even the businesses that are, there are really few and far between

it's not like you're going to walk up and get. Yeah. You have to basically be down in the city of Malibu to be close to anything. And the Santa Monica mountain is where all the mountain lions live and it's really rocky and hilly. I went to Jewish camp there and it was totally wilderness. I mean, it was not cute. Yes.

It's not the city. No, it's really not. And this is a city girl who had never been out in the wilderness like this. So all businesses are closed. Public transportation doesn't really exist out there. You know, they have like bus to the shopping center and back, but not, you know, real transportation. And she's 11 miles from her car at the Malibu toe yard. The walk would have taken her up and down hills through a tunnel along the shoulder of

a highway winding through the mountains, which I fucking have driven there and you get carsick just from driving. It's a crazy mountain. Also, I'll tell you this from my research, 11 miles, just so you know, it's 13 miles from Beverly Hills to downtown Los Angeles. So she would have had to walk slightly less than that long all the way down sunset. That's ridiculous. That's a day's walk.

So when her mom calls the next morning, she finds out that my trees have been released. And I listened to the fucking message, the call, and it's they're blowing the officers blowing her off. And she's like, how long do I have to wait to file a missing person's report? And he's like, well, wait a couple hours and then call us back. Like they're, they're very being, being very casual and she's like, she doesn't know the area. She didn't have anything on her.

What the hell's going on? And they were very flippant about it. And we're like, let me try to track things down. Call me in a couple hours, which is like, can you imagine waiting for your child for a couple of hours? And then, and then she said, you know, she doesn't know the area and she's in a depressive state. And she probably had some clue, you know, that something was triggering.

So at 530 that morning, a homeowner in Cold Canyon, which is right next to the actual Santa Monica Mountain Canyon called Lost Hills to say that there was a prowler walking around. He told the dispatcher that the prowler had been sitting kind of sprawled out on these wooden steps in the back of the house, but had disappeared into the surrounding wilderness. And other neighbors said that they heard and saw Maitris either leaving or attempting to enter the man's home, and that they heard loud screams in a vacant home around the time that she went missing, but they searched the area and didn't find anything. And later they searched the area.

They called the police. I don't know if they came. That was the last time Maitris was seen alive. She disappeared into the Santa Monica Mountains and for five months the Lost Hills, so she disappeared. Super crazy wilderness gone with only her clothes that she had on, T-shirt, jeans, sneakers. So for five months Lost Hills insisted that there was no surveillance tape of the police station because they wanted to see this, you know, like what happened, when did she leave,

what state was she in. But they miraculously found the tape five months later sitting on a desk. According to Maitris' mother, the tape shows her daughter in an obvious psychological distress inside the intake towel. So she clutches at the mesh screening and is rocking side to side like a small child, says a cousin of hers. But a spokesperson for the department said about releasing her, she exhibited no signs of mental illness or intoxication.

She was fine. She's an adult. Okay, but you don't let them go without a fucking wallet or cell phone. Yeah, none of this makes sense. Like it doesn't add up. Is she an adult? Then what's, like, then why are you treating her? Why would you lock her purse away and not answer questions to her parents?

Okay. Don't worry. It gets worse. Okay. So the station log shows that Maitris made four phone calls to her grandmother, but 18 C phone records don't reflect those calls for whatever reason. So the surveillance tape also shows a deputy leaving the station right after Maitris was released, like leaving towards where she was going.

But the deputy maintained that he wasn't at the station before the tapes were released. He said he wasn't there that night. And when he's caught in his lie, he stated, the night this nonsense happened, I was one of the guys that kept away from this, minding my own business, which is like what that insinuates that something was going on that you kept out of. Yes. Well, also, it's your job to be at the police station and take care of the people that are at the police station.

That's not nonsense. That's your job of a person's in distress. This isn't, this is a person that is in mental distress. Well, the nonsense could have been, you know, the actions police took when she got there, whatever happened to her there. If anything happened to her there, I'm speculating. So that's the nonsense he could have been talking about, you know what I mean? So three, it wasn't until three months later, January 2010, that Los Angeles County Sheriff's

Department conducted. So three months later, conducts one of the largest scale searches in the history of the department. Over 300 volunteers trained in search and rescue participate in the 18 square mile search of the area of Malibu Canyon and the hills of Malibu Creek State Park. They find racially and sexually offensive graffiti on the walls of a culvert in the canyon. The graffiti was freshly painted and the paint can's brushes and other potential evidence

was left at the scene and Matrice wasn't found. Finally, almost a year after she disappeared from the station, in August 2010, park rangers who were looking to see if marijuana growers had returned to dark canyon, they stumble on Matrice's naked, mummified body. She was in a very secluded creek bed in Malibu Canyon. With the clothes she was wearing the night she disappeared scattered around. Oh, so they were, had been taken off of her, or she took them off. Now here's the most fucked up thing.

Okay. Okay. Deputies by protocol should have waited for the coroner to arrive so that Matrice's remains could be photographed, the site inspected for clues and the crime scene established. Instead, against orders by the coroner who later said that he, quote, was very clear with officials, the deputies bagged Richardson's remains and airlifted them by helicopter. Whoa. Before the coroner could even get there.

Whoa. This is, okay. The coroner said that he could not think of another case in which police agency had moved entire skeletal remains without coroner's approval. To prove this point, months later, Matrice's mother, to, so I can, so this is proof, Matrice, how badly it was done. Matrice's mother was visiting the site where her, where her daughter's body was found and found a finger bone that belonged to Matrice left behind in the dessert, in the dessert,

in the dirt. Oh my God. I think there's an article that they're with her and they find that. That's insane. Finds in the spot, oh look, and digs out a fucking finger bone that had been left behind because the proper people didn't. Did they eventually prove it really was hers? Yeah, it was hers for sure.

And there have also been small toe bones, finger and vertebrae found left behind and also the bones from her neck, there's bones from her neck, foot and hand missing from her body, her remains, so. What? Yeah. The fuck. This was such a crazy case because I followed it step by step, so her leaving, I was like, what happened?

And everyone was like, what could have happened to her? And then you see the surveillance video and you're like, oh, that's some shady shit. Then they find her body and then the bones are fucked. It's just like, it just keeps getting worse. Yeah. So the disturbance made it so that the coroner wasn't able to determine how she died. Right. I think that would be the idea.

Right. And the jeans, belt and black bra that were discovered a few feet from her body, they were found, but they were not tested for signs of foul play and were buried along with her. So they weren't tested for any DNA, any ripping or anything that would have, uh-huh. This is like that thing, it just reminds me of, like, where you don't know what the things you need to be in place until you realize they're not in place. So it's like, once a coroner tells people don't move that body and the police airlift the body away, shouldn't then those police be frozen in no longer, they're no longer

active duty in this case because they're clearly hiding something. Like there should be protocol for the coroner to then go to some other police chief. Yeah. And this is where, so this article I was gonna, that I got a lot of info on, it's a Newsweek article by Alexander Nazarion who, this article is really great because he talks a lot about the LAPD corruption and why this could have taken place and they're like rampant racism that was going on at the time to a point where, you know, the second in command is going to prison for 15 years because of corruption.

So it's incredibly corrupt, there's like, you know, rampant, anti, rampant racism. And so he tells, I don't talk about a lot in this, but he tells background of why this is so obvious and, you know, could have happened this way. When you, and I think most people that are into true crime watched the ESPN 30 by 30 of Jay Simpson, that part of the Daryl Gates era of the LAPD was so shocking and eye-opening to me and it going all the way back to the riots in the 60s, it's just so crazy how long this has been a humongous problem in Los Angeles that has never, that hasn't been solved or even really addressed.

Yeah. No, for sure. And it's, it's not, not happening anymore, you know, it's, it hasn't changed at all. No, no, it's just hidden better and, you know, we've, we've put a band-aid over some of the things to make it look less horrifying, but it's still there. Well, and also it's just the, it's the rationalism, the justification of using the, the violence and the crime that happens in the day to day to then justify any behavior on the part. I mean, it's just, it sucks.

I have plenty, I have a bunch of people who are police people in my family. Yeah, you do. I'm not anti-police. I'm, it's down to the person though, especially in this day and age, it's down to the person because there's, because it's just such a, it's like such a closed, you know, like it's a frat basically. Well, yeah. And in LA, and I'm sure a lot of other cities specifically, the cards are stacked against

you if you're not white and you don't have money and you're, you know, the cards are stacked against you. You're not, you don't start at zero sum at all. Yeah. Like, yeah, I don't, you know, I don't want to forget that as someone who lives here and knows that I'm fricking privileged as shit to be wearing that. Well, and also just, we don't have to think about- Totally.

How bad it could be. I mean, this is like, this is like saying you can't be mentally ill or you will just be almost literally thrown to the wolves. Right. It's insanity. Yeah. And what did happen to her at that police station. Yeah.

I mean, that whole door, the mental illness thing is incredible because it's like you should have taken her and admitted her for psychiatric treatment because she was mentally unstable and unsound to make her own decisions. And not only did you not do that and keep her in prison or keep her in jail until her mother could come or someone could come, you let her out without money, without a jacket, without any, you knew she wasn't going to get anywhere. That's not like she could have hitchhiked or maybe she did hitchhike and that's what happened.

But it's, they're still culpable. Right. Well, yeah. Also, what's the, if you know, see, that's the thing is this isn't just a random person that they don't know and like, well, too bad for you and you're an adult. Yeah. There's someone contacting you, telling you what the situation is, telling you there are concerns and you still do the thing against that person's wishes.

That's what makes, leads me to believe something else was taking place because why would you hide? Why would you say, we just let her go and she left and it's not our problem and it makes that feels like cover up. Well, it's so crazy. The mom specifically was like, she doesn't know the area and I don't want her to get killed. Yes.

But what's so frustrating to me listening to the tape of her mother calling is like this feeling of nobody, like, I think a lot about when you call the cops and they don't help you, what do you, you can't call the cops again on like, like, that's your last. Yes. That's supposed to be the last option is you call the cops and they help you. Yeah. But it's so sad to be like the minute they told her to wait two hours and she hung up the phone.

I picture her in her house and her family having to wait two hours. That's insane. And she's not a runaway. You know, you let, you guys let her out and the minute they're like, oh shit, then they're culpable and they're open for. And also it doesn't make sense because it's like, oh, if you're going to treat this person like, oh, there, look, she went to a restaurant. She ate $80 for the food and she couldn't pay for it.

And we arrested her. Okay. Got it. Yeah. All of that makes sense to me. Yeah. It is illegal to do that thing. And there, but there, then you learn there are extenuating circumstances and it, so clearly

it wasn't that big of a crime to you if you just released her the next day. So you didn't, this isn't, you're not holding her for a robbery or what would that be? You're not holding her. That's not stealing. Well, when I, when I was a teen, you know, like in seventh grade and got caught stealing, you know, they give you a ticket, like they ticket you like copwood and you move on, you know? Yeah.

It's like, why didn't that just happen? Well, it's because they've been searched her car and found, you know. But then they're not holding her for drugs. They're not holding her because she took a sobriety test and she passed. Yeah. Fuck. It doesn't, it's just like, you can't, you can't justify the police action in this because nothing is adding up to this is a criminal until we treated her like a criminal.

It's like, you know, this is a person, this is say a criminal who ate $80 worth of food that she couldn't pay for in a manic episode where people do way crazier shit. Well, yeah, we've talked about Elisa Lam and how that could have been what, how she got in the water tank, which, you know, if you compare these two cases, it's like, yeah, you do crazy shit when you're going through a manic episode. Yes. But also the, the lost, I feel like you're talking about, we're talking about a police department or a police, yeah, police department, lost Hills that deals mostly with rich, white

people upset about something. They don't know how to deal with something like this. And so they, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. So that, I think that makes a big difference. It's not like it was, you know, the Hollywood police department, which also wouldn't have been as big of a deal because if they let her out in Hollywood, she'd have fucking places

to go. Well, and also I would think that they would be much more used to dealing with people with mental illness. The Hollywood police department, like there's that one on Wilcox that's just like never not hopped in day and night. There's somebody pulling in or pulling out of that because that's my, that's my sneak up to get out of Hollywood and go home. Don't tell anyone the sneaks.

Wilcox. That's my sneak. At Wilcox. Man. That's like, that's the North South fountain. Yeah. But totally. But I mean, like you're right.

It's like, it's almost like a privileged police department because they don't have that much happening there. So they don't have experience with these sorts of things. And when they do, it's like some crazily rich, drunk white woman. Yeah. Or Mel Gibson. Who's like, fuck you. Or Mel Gibson, who, or I think, oh, didn't also they pull over Rhys, but there's been

and she said, do you know who I am? Is that, I bet you're right. I'm pretty sure that happened in Malibu, but anyway, whatever. That's that kind of thing of like everyone's kind of living up to this certain. So it's suddenly like, oh, there's a black girl that ate, ate food she couldn't pay for. You know, little bonkers. Yeah.

So now we're going to treat her like the criminal she is. Well, okay. But then that means you would that, that would mean process her in a criminal way that keeps her safe at least that the thing of the mom going, please don't let her go. That's just, we have to get plumbers. So my beautiful new house is now having plumbing problems. Is everybody. They don't know, but I hope that's not a ghost.

It's just plumbing problems. It just suddenly starts like gloog, like it's about to overflow with like, fucking. With racial tension. All right. Yes. All of that is correct. They find her body. All these bones are missing.

They can't determine how she died. And then her shit's not tested for foul play. Okay. Then there's no explanation given for why investigators were never able to find her vans sneakers or her T-shirt that she was wearing when she disappeared. Oh, I don't like that. Her jeans, bell and black bra were there, which is like, you could be like, well, animals came and got them.

But it's like, why would they pick a pair of shoes and a T-shirt and not all this other stuff? That body wasn't messed with. It's not. Right. Also, that makes me think of those stories about the deaths on Mount Hood. I mean, no, Crater Lake, the Crater Lake stories I did in Portland. And one of them, there was a guy that they found his body like years later and it was

a skeleton sitting in jeans. Like jeans don't just come off. It's not, animals can't take your jeans off. Right. Yes. Animals can't take your jeans off is what Steven's writing down right now. I can tell. Don't think about what he's saying.

Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. We need like a booth to put him in where we can't see him. But also, going back to the Lisa Lam thing, she took her clothes off too. Right. That's the thing that happens to manic people. Yeah. And, you know, I think another thing people don't understand is how fucking cold it gets in the, I know LA is like warm all the time, but in the mountains in LA and especially in

Malibu by the ocean. You're next to the ocean. Really fucking cold. It's cold. So maybe she was having hypothermia, which is a thing that they take their clothes off, but then why wouldn't they have found the rest of them, you know, traced her, the trail she took and found the other stuff. Okay.

My Teresa's parents have maintained that their daughter should never have been released on her own by the sheriff's department. They filed several lawsuits against the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department for releasing her from jail, even though they claim she was experiencing severe bipolar disorder at the time. In 2011, they won a civil lawsuit against the county. However, two reports by the Office of Independent Review found the LAPD not culpable from my Teresa's death deeming it was not, it was not a homicide and there was no foul play.

Then why did they airlift the fucking body against the coroner's wishes? And the coroner couldn't say how she died. So how can you definitely definitively say it was a homicide? It was not a homicide. Yeah. Yeah. You don't know. You don't have that report.

Yeah. Well, you don't have the neck bones to test to see if she was choked to death because you fucking left them behind. Yeah. It's months later. Yeah. The body has been out there for months. Yeah.

Sorry. Yeah. No. So I'm yelling at you. You're the one that told me the story. And they also, they were also cleared of any wrongdoing in how it handled the discovery of her remains. So they were like, and also it's fine.

Okay. Sounds great. Rhonda Hampton, who's the woman that Alexander Nazarion from the Newsweek article kind of goes around with and interviews her. She was a psychologist at one time in an office where Maitreya said intern, so she's really devoted to finding answers. She's just this really awesome woman. She filed a dozen complaints about the various deputies involved in Maitreya's case.

Nine of these were registered with the Internal Criminal Investigations Bureau, but they are treating them as instead of, let's see, they're treating them as service complaints, not matters of potential criminality, which is like they're just belittling them, you know, or minimizing them. On December 30th, 2016, which is recently, results of the criminal investigation into the handling of Maitreya's case concluded that there was insufficient evidence to support criminal prosecution of anyone involved in the handling of the case. In either way, the statute of limitations for concealment or tampering of evidence like

the surveillance tapes had passed the end. I mean, that sucks. Yeah, that's just straight up shitastic and I mean, Pac-Man. So that was a theme of the day of sucktastic shit. It's almost, well, it's like rich cop, rich police departments getting caught doing what they want and then covering it and not getting any kind of, and not getting in trouble for it. Yeah.

That's the thing about opening the door to prosecuting police then opens the door. I understand that thinking that it opens this door to like anybody, but yeah, it's like it goes deeper and deeper and you know, but still, it has to get solved because there are such, it's like, it's the most natural thing in the world, the exploitation of power. It's like you give a man a gun and say, you have the legal right to use this on whoever you want to your discretion is so much power for one person to have, man or one or whoever. They're just people. They're people like you and me that just are now police, like they're not, they're my neighbor,

they're like any old dude, they're your fucking ex-boyfriend, girlfriend, they're not. And they're also people who are being traumatized by what they see in the streets every day. Or like what's it called when you just stop caring about it? Apathy. Yeah. Yeah. But there's like real things going on. Did you ever watch Southland?

It was such a good show. No. It was such a good show. My good friend, Sean Hattacy, was one of the stars and he was the best, but there was a character on it that used to take a ton of pills because he had like an on-the-job injury, he didn't want, he couldn't go out on disability. So he was just in tons of pain all the time and then just taking tons and tons of like painkillers.

And it just was like, it was just the most fascinating, like there's a why behind all of this. It needs to get analyzed and it needs to get fixed. And that's like part of it is that where it's just like you're going out there, you're in pain, you deal with the worst society has to offer every single day as your job. And you have to make split second decisions on what's going to happen to who and why. And you have to stand behind those or else you're going to look weak and your whole department is going to look weak.

Yeah. And you can't, yeah, it's just, it's rough. I do have a good piece of news. We could actually finish this on like an uptick. Let's do it. It's kind of interesting because again on the LAist, I saw an article this morning that the LAPD is revising their use of force policy with an eye toward de-escalation. Oh my God, I love that.

Can you fucking believe that shit? That's the word that needs to be in place constantly de-escalation. You can do that. So it said, on Tuesday, the Los Angeles police commission approved a revised, I'm trying to read this article and someone's calling me. Who is it? I almost picked it up. I have to text somebody now.

Now I have to wait till they stop calling me so I can go back to my thing. Who calls anybody? I mean, okay, we'll come back in here. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles police commission approved a revised use of force policy that favors de-escalation over use of deadly force. The new policy requires officers to try and de-escalate situations using non-lethal force whenever possible before firing their guns. That's a huge step somewhere.

It always blows my mind when, yeah, it always blows my mind when someone, a cop shoots to kill someone when you could have just shot them in the shoulder or in the knee or anywhere. You don't have to shoot them in the head. On Los Feliz Boulevard near where we live, not a few months ago, some guy, I don't know what he was doing, but cops shot him right in the fucking head. And it's like, if you thought he was burglarizing someone, he definitely didn't have a weapon. Just shoot him in the fucking knee, man. Yeah, there just needs to be more tools and more options.

I think it's becoming such a like, all or nothing. Yeah. I mean, who knows? I don't know. I'm just saying from what I read and these reports and the fact that, you know, these videos that go up where it's like the cop that just, there was a J walker. Did you see that? No.

Yeah, it's just another one. It's a video that during all the other horrible things that are happening, people are going, we please retweet this and make this a story too, because it's a guy that's J walking, the cop comes and just fucking cold cocks him and gets him on the ground and just starts beating the shit out of him. He's J walking. J walking. It's that stuff where it's just like, that stuff has to stop.

Yeah. And that's that one guy who was a fucking piece of shit. You know, it's not like that. Unfortunately, he represents the entirety of his, you know, of tired of his job, but it's probably this fucking asshole and maybe his partner is like, Jesus, I've been warning them that this guy's insane or whatever. I mean, it's just, it's awful. I know.

So, yeah. Can I, I'll tell you a thing that's funny. So Vince sent me this article today that this, this wife, this ex-wife of her husband's dying of cancer. That's not funny. And he's like a couple of days away from dying. He's kind of out of it. And she wanted him to die with a happy thought in his head.

So she told him that Trump had been impeached. I almost started crying when I heard that because it's not sweet and he believed it and he was like, okay, I'm so glad to hear that and then he died and you were like, it's so touching, but it's also so awful. It's where we're at. Hey, man. It's where we're at. Making the best of it by talking about murder.

We're doing it. Happy birthday, Steven. Happy birthday, Steven. Please do something about police corruption as soon as you can in your 30s. Steven, did you, please, you have one job to stop police corruption. Please. Can we, please. And thanks for listening, you guys, you fucking gorgeous people with beautiful souls and hearts.

Thank you so much. And stay sexy. Don't get murdered. Bye. Bye. Oh, Elvis. Elvis. Do you cut this part where we are just talking and he doesn't come sometimes.

Elvis, you want a cookie? Oh, come on. Elvis, you want a cookie? Oh, he's just a dick about it now. He waited till he got to the mic. Elvis, you want a cookie? Yeah. All right.

There it is. Good boy. Mimi, go to sleep. Stay sleeping.