My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 102

Episode Date: December 24, 2018

This week’s "Christmas-themed" hometowns include a killer in the home and riding in cars with strangers.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is exactly right. We at Wondery live, breathe, and downright obsess over true crime. And now we're launching the ultimate true crime fan experience, Exhibit C. Join now by following Wondery, Exhibit C, on Facebook and listen to true crime on Wondery and Amazon Music. Exhibit C. It's truly criminal. Hello. Hello.

Christmas Eve. Merry, merry, merry, merry, merry Christmas. Welcome to my favorite murder. Christmas Eve, many so. That's right. Christmas Eve, that is in no way themed Christmas Eve. No. We're just telling you the best many so stories on this.

This is the eve of. Christmas. Christmas. What are you going to be? We're obviously recording this before. What are you going to be doing on Christmas Eve? What are you going to be for Christmas Eve? I'm going to be an elf on the shelf.

What are you going to be? I'm going to be a Jew. I'm going to be a couch. Ignoring your dumb holiday. But I bet you had a great Hanukkah. I probably did. I bet you smashed it. I bet it was the best Hanukkah I've ever had.

I bet you gave away so many little beautifully wrapped gifts. I bet you're right. Days after days of gifts. When I first, as a child, heard that Hanukkah meant eight days of gifts. I had already felt so much like that was the tribe I was supposed to truly be in. I thought I was supposed to be a divorcee's Jewish child in Manhattan. Okay, I was that in Orange County. But you didn't feel like you needed to be on the East Coast?

Probably. I hated everything about my life. So yeah, probably. Yeah, you probably wanted to be several thousand miles away. But this is what always bothered me. You guys got a ton of presents too. We did, but just knowing nothing about Judaism, I just pictured that it was Christmas every night for eight nights.

Where I'm like, they have all the humor. You get like a big, huge present every night. I was picturing baskets of bagels. That's true. Water bagels. That's true. Deliciously stacked deli sandwiches. Actually, that's what for Hanukkah, my family, we get caters.

Cantors cater deli sandwiches. The greatest. The best. You can't wrap your mouth around a cantor sandwich. No, it's the best. You have to dismantle it and eat four small sandwiches. It's the best. Yeah, that Hanukkah present thing, man, it's a real fucking lie.

They tell you that to get you to convert. Right. It's not true. To get you to drop out of Catholicism and jump on. Usually we would do like little gifts seven nights, and then the one big gift on the eighth night. Right. But small gifts are still pretty good gifts, right?

Yeah. I mean, it would be like stocking stuff or type of thing. Right. Sorry to burst your Hanukkah bubble. I guess I'll just stick with me old Catholicism. We're doing such a great job. This subject line of this first email is that's what it's like to have a killer in your home. Oh.

Hello, Karen, Georgia and Stephen. I absolutely lost my mind when Karen covered a story from my hometown Edmonton. Although Edmonton is quite literally the most boring place on earth. Koff Koff, our nickname is Deadmonton. We do not have a shortage of crazy f-dub crimes. Unfortunately, snowy, cold, boring Edmonton at Alberta is the murder capital of Canada. Holy shit. Yeah.

Not boring. And also Edmonton is a city in Alberta as a province. Right. As you said in the episode. As I know. Exactly as you knew. As a fact. As a fact knowing citizen of Canada.

My story comes to you from when I was working as a server in a senior's home. I was cleaning up a table after the meal and a group of old ladies at a nearby table were talking. I overheard one lady say something like, and that's what it's like to have a killer in your home. Oh my God. Now this lady was quite a character and a joker. And she and I liked to banter quite a bit. So I decided to jump in and lightly tease her. Haha.

What are you talking about? How does something like this come up in conversation? Just thinking that this is her offbeat sense of humor. She was quoting herself and that in my act out. The old lady turns to me and says, oh so casually. Oh no, it's the truth. I've had a killer in my home. My grandma, my granddaughter was married to Mark Twitchell.

My brain broke. I walked back to the kitchen in a daze and went through the rest of my shift like a zombie. Mark Twitchell is the Dexter copycat killer. It would be serial killer who created profiles on dating websites to lure men to his garage where he would attack them with a stun baton. He killed one man, but his next victim managed to escape and Twitchell was apprehended. Holy shit. Twitchell had dreams of making movies and he was a huge fan of Dexter and it's believed he became a killer to be like Dexter. What the fuck?

It was a huge story here in Edmonton and in Canada in general. So huge. It was covered by Dateline. I remember my OG Murderino mom turning to me while watching the episode and saying, isn't it exciting? Keith Morrison is here in Edmonton. Fuck yes. Keith Morrison. And then in parenthesis she wrote, chill mom.

He's from Lloyd Minister. That's another town in the province of Alberta. I was too nervous to bring it up with the lady ever again, but I wish I did. I keep thinking she was there at the wedding and for the Christmases. One of the most sensationalized murder cases here and she'd probably seen the perpetrator in a tacky Christmas sweater. Stay sexy and don't eavesdrop on old ladies conversations, Beth. I remember that case. It's so, the guy that ended up living, it's such a terrifying, horrible thing.

Yeah. And he's still got tortured and shit. He thought he was showing up for a blind date. The guy that survived. It's amazing. Wow, that's bananas. It's so crazy. Oh man, can you imagine being fucking married and then being like, oh, guess what, your husband?

If there's a coldness that can't be explained. If there's an emptiness, if there's, I don't think you could see it sometimes. If there's a duffel bed that you won't talk about. And then you're not allowed to look in. Yeah. Yeah, you can't. You'll never know because that's their specialty. Right.

It's covering it up. Totally. Vince, please, please. It's always the last one you'd suspect. Oh no, I suspect him though, so it won't be him. There you go. It's great. That's my secret.

You just spread that suspecting dust around everywhere. The secret to a good marriage is suspect him of everything. And then when he doesn't do anything, you're pleasantly surprised. Oh my God, what a relief you say every single day. That's right. This is called writing in cars with strangers. Hi everyone. When I was in my early 20s, I moved to a small town at the edge of San Bernardino County.

Don't worry, I got out of there as quickly as I could, it says. Good for you. There was only one tiny little dive bar in the area. And since it was such a small remote desert town, the only thing to do on the weekend besides a ton of drugs was to go to this bar. And do a ton of drugs. And do a ton of drugs. Uber wasn't a thing back then, but luckily the bar had a quote, bar car.

A quiet older guy who they would call and he would pick you up and take you home from whatever you, for whatever you thought the ride was worth. Uh-oh. At first I was a little bit skeptical, but after a few rides with my friends, it turned into a normal thing. It was always the same old man. He was always happy to take us home no matter how drunk we were, how late it was, or how little cash we had left to tip him.

He volunteered to help the town drunks get home because he wanted to make sure everyone made it home safely, which like in a normal world, that's great. Yes. This is not a normal world. It's not a normal world. This is a podcast. Especially in the outskirts of fucking San Bernardino. San Bernardino.

San Bernardino. That's right. Get out. Flash forward to last year. I've since moved away, but was back in town to visit family for Christmas. I called one of my old friends and we had planned to meet at the bar. I asked him if the bar car was still running and he responded with, you didn't hear? Oh, the old you didn't hear.

He's in jail for murdering his girlfriend in the 80s. Fuck. I was horrified by this. I had taken countless rides home by myself when I had gotten blacked out drunk and stumbled out of the bar into his old car. My friend said it had been a small town gossip for decades and he was suspected to have murdered his girlfriend and they just never thought to mention this to me. As it turns out in the 80s, his girlfriend went missing.

Several months later, they found her severed head and hand in a river near the town. Uh-oh. This would be the only parts of her body the police would ever find. He would be the prime suspect, but they didn't have any evidence to convict him and the case went cold. In the early 2000s, they reopened the case and were able to test the DNA, which linked him to the crime. Shit.

Later on, as my family was drinking around the Christmas table, I told my mom with a suspicious tone, hey, do you remember that bar car driver who killed his girlfriend? The look of sheer horror on my mom's face as she realized this was the same guy who had driven me home was only matched by the excitedness of my aunt, a fellow murderer, as she asked questions about what it was like to get rides home from a murderer. Yes. Merry Christmas and l'chaim bitches. Stay sexy and don't get in cars with murderers B.

Yes. But how can you know? It's almost like he was doing it to make up for it. Yeah. Because it's such a, he clearly didn't hurt anybody while he did it or he would have gotten caught, right? Right, right. So maybe he's like, no, I'm a good guy still.

This just thing happened. I just had this bump in the road where I beheaded my girlfriend. Awful. Not cool at all. Okay, moving on. Okay, chill. Looking for a better cooking routine? With meal planning, shopping and prepping handled, Hello Fresh has you covered.

Hello Fresh makes home cooking easy and affordable so you can stay on track and on budget in the new year. Hello Fresh meals are convenient, seasonal and delicious. Stay cozy all winter long with classic comfort foods available weekly. Why stop with just dinner? Now you can enjoy Hello Fresh's expanded menu of quick lunch solutions, weekend brunch, simple side dishes and amazing desserts. Karen, January is going to be my month for Hello Fresh.

I am so sick of takeout. I miss cooking so much. I haven't lifted a knife or a pan since early fall. So I can't wait to get back in the kitchen and Hello Fresh makes it so easy and also makes it so that my food tastes good, which is hard to do on my own. It gives you everything, everything you need. So get up to 20 free meals with purchase plus free shipping on your first box at hellofresh.ca slash murder20 with code murder20.

That's up to 20 free meals plus free shipping on your first box when you go to hellofresh.ca slash murder20 and use code murder20. Goodbye. Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wondery's podcast against the odds. In our next season, three masked men hijack a school bus full of children in the sleepy farm town of Chowchilla, California. They bury the children and their bus driver deep underground, planning to hold them for ransom. Local police and the FBI marshal a search effort, but the trail quickly runs dry.

As the air supply for the trapped children dwindles, a pair of unlikely heroes emerges. Follow against the odds wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on the Amazon music or Wondery app. I'm not going to read you the subject line because it tips it too much. Okay, dear Karen, Georgia, Stephen and various furry animals, various furry associates. Well, so many tiny briefcases. One year during dinner on Christmas Eve, my family got talking about my cousin's old job at a haunted morgue unrelated story.

It then came up that my uncle's old house was actually haunted too. Apparently when his kids, my three much older cousins were younger, they all slept by themselves in the same room or nursery for the first part of their lives. Throughout each of their respective childhoods, they all described to their mom, my aunt, as having the exact same imaginary friend as the other. According to my aunt, they each described the friend as a young blonde girl with a red and yellow stripe dress. One day my aunt even walked in on my cousin, heatedly arguing out loud with this girl while he was playing dolls.

She said it was like he was just yelling to himself about his friend who wouldn't share. Oh my God, that's creepy. Aside from these weird coincidences and occurrences, my uncle also said that after the kids moved out of this specific room, they used it as a guest room and guests would report feeling extremely cold in the room as compared to the rest of the house and often felt very uneasy sleeping there. Insulation. Got to get that insulation checked. Got to get those nice thick windows. Right.

Okay, aside from these weird... nope. Fast forward a few years and my dad and his friend who owned a construction business at the time were hired by my uncle to renovate his house before they moved. As they tore up the floor in the old suspicious front room, of course they find a secret room hidden underneath the floor. It was incredibly dark in the room and my dad was too big to squeeze down there so he tried to convince his co-worker to check it out. Yeah, right.

To which he replied, uh, fuck no. To my intense surprise, they didn't investigate any further and just tiled over the whole. What? A couple days later, probably, they opened up the wall in said room and I shit you not, stuck to the wall. Now what? As if place there was a fucking red and yellow striped dress. Nuh-uh, nuh-uh.

I have no idea exactly what they did with it, but I know that since they moved out, the house has been on the market several more times. This story, this is the story I always tell people to their disbelief when sharing spooky stories and I thought you guys would love to hear it. Thank you so much for reading. I sincerely hope to see, to join you at the Des Moines live show in spring. Stay sexy and don't play with selfish ghosts, Maya. Oh my god, that's, look, I love that story.

I love it. But I've been, for my own sanity, say, no way, not true. I mean, you'd, here's the thing, people who don't care about shit like this would take that dress and put it in the garbage. You and I, and what I believed to be normal people, would put on some doctor's gloves and go in there with tweezers and pull that fucking dress. After photographing the shit out of it. Photographing every aspect.

And then we'd put it on our pet and let our cat or dog run around. I did this, Miss Sony, it's to you too. I would light some sage and I would, okay. This is my last one. Okay. This is called, good luck at college, don't get murdered. Okay. Hello, podcasting gals, guy and assorted furry animals.

I grew up in a small town in eastern Oregon. When the time came for me to select a college, my parents and I felt a small school would be an easy transition for me. We enrolled in a liberal arts college outside of Portland, Oregon, and had just over 2,000 students and was ranked as a top 25 small college, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Brad, Brad, Brad, Brad, about college. Congratulations about college. The school was very conservative, except it was very conservative.

This is what she's basically saying. There was no dancing, it was conservative. Roommates, no boys allowed, et cetera. Okay. They were all making plans to travel home for Christmas. And then, okay, my roommate was planning to ride back to Montana with a fellow student who was also from the big Sky State. He'd been in the room several times, she had a crush on him, blah, blah, blah.

Imagine our shock and awe and confusion when the FBI showed up one morning and arrested him. Yep, you read that right. He was dragged out of our dorm in handcuffs. As we learned soon after, he was a serial killer. And I actually question this. You tell me. Yes, a person who killed multiple people.

That's not a serial killer, right? Well, it has to be within a certain amount of time. Right. Okay. He was the center of a multi-state manhunt, days before coming to one of the top ranked Christian schools in the nation. He went to the home. His family had previously owned and killed the owners in their bed.

Whoa. He then left on his full ride scholarship to the Northwest. Shit. When he arrived at college, he asked us all to call him by his middle name. That should have been a clue as to something that was up. His middle name was Shadow. Was he a little gray cat? He was an owl.

Why did we not see that as a red flag? Okay. The murdered couple were found naked in their bed a few days after the killing when a neighbor became suspicious that all the windows were open. The trail of the killer grew cold and the police even considered consulted a psychic who described the killer as a slight built young man with black hair who knew the victims and the layout of the house. He said that the man was at college somewhere in the West and would be arrested in December

of 1993. Shit. Holy shit. With that insight, the police began looking into the history of the murdered couple. Before their search reached Oregon, Shadow confided in a fellow student that he had a gun. Of course, the religious student immediately contacted campus security, which led to a call to local law enforcement.

Our small school made the news that night, but not for academic achievement. Many of us followed his trial and he is now serving a sentence of 150 years. Shit. Needless to say, the university did not list it as a highlight in the yearbook, nor is it in any brochures. The moral of the story is that small schools aren't necessarily safe. Don't trust people named Shadow and always SSDGM free. Wow.

Crazy, right? That's so insane. Yeah. It's awful. It's crazy because it's that idea like you're going to do this thing and then just go off to your new life and be like, call me by my middle name. Yeah. Hey, I can have a normal life now.

Yeah. It's me, Lynn. You know, if he hadn't told them about the gun, that one guy and the guy hadn't fucking narked on him, he might have killed more people. That's how it always goes. Yeah. They can't keep their trap shut. Good.

Yeah, that's true. Oh, you mean, I thought you meant the person he told. Not Shadow. You're getting mad at the guy who narked on it. Shut your mouth. You snitch. Yeah. Snitch is gay.

Candy. Okay. We'll wrap it up with this one. Okay. I won't read this subject line. Hi, Georgia, Karen, Steven and Petz. I wanted to share what happened to me 20 years ago when I came home for the holidays. My parents had moved to a new house after I left for school.

That's important, not only because it meant I was sleeping in a guest room with no phone. One night, my parents were out of town and I was home alone with our dog and two cats. At 2am, I woke up suddenly thinking I heard a man's voice. I had just about convinced myself it was a dream when I sat up and saw that the dog and cats were wide awake staring at the bedroom door with hackles raised. Oh, God. I started looking around for something to use as a weapon when I heard a male voice from the next room in a creepy sing-song voice say, Peek-a-boo.

I got out of bed and grabbed the bedside lamp. The dog and cats were growling at the bedroom door ready to throw down. Again, the voice said, Peek-a-boo. No. It was exactly the same tone, which was now sounding a little familiar. It turned out a talking big bird doll my mom had bought my niece had been hidden away in a closet for Christmas and it had started talking on its own. Needless to say, I disemboweled that thing and put its electrical components in one room

and the doll in another before trying to go back to sleep. Oh, my God. I normally kept that creepy toy for years after my niece had outgrown it just to torment me. Thanks for being my constant companions as I walk my dog. You make me laugh out loud like an idiot and I don't mind. Stay sexy and sleep with a pack of Ryder Dipets in case Big Bird shows up. Sarah.

I got to get a dog. I got to get a dog. Holy shit. That used to happen when I was little, one of the first big Christmas gifts we got was it was called, I think it was called, I want to say Baby Alive, but I think Baby Alive was the one that you fed. Yeah. This was the one that crawled.

Oh, yeah. And it was like a doll head, but then a machine body. And we were so excited to get it because it was like the commercial that was on every cartoon, you know, block. And the first night I went to bed with it in the middle of the night, it turned on and it's so scary because it's really loud and then it has baby noises. And it's like, you can hear the mechanical part of it. Oh, Steven has a photo.

What's it called, Steven? Oh, wait, turn it. That-A-Way. What? Baby That-A-Way. No, that's a terrible name for it. Yes, that's it. Look at this fucking demon thing.

That's a demon. And so it's that thing, but the joints are like screws and bolts and like it's like, I'm coming for your soul. Late 70s machinery, so it's the loudest. I'm coming for your soul. But at least it didn't fucking say peekaboo in a man's voice. Dude, peekaboo in a man's voice. It's a nightmare.

It's a familiar man's voice. Like a soft-spoken man, which would be scarier. That's one of the top three things I don't want to hear coming from the other room when I'm home alone at night. The word peekaboo specifically. No. By anyone. Peekaboo is horrifying.

Peekaboo is like, oh, you're going to murder the fuck out of me. That's straight out of a horror movie. Yes. The other day I was walking through my house and I whispered no more milk to myself. What? Why? Because I was drinking too much milk. But I whispered it to myself and then I could not stop laughing at how creepy though.

Someone had heard you? If somebody had just walked in the door. No more milk. No more milk. Sometimes you can be the creep you're scared of. Sometimes it's you. Yeah. It's all good emotions.

Happy Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and all the every, if you don't celebrate anything. Sorry. Yes. If you don't celebrate anything, you can celebrate these wonderful stories that you just heard of the human strength and the will to survive and hey, if you're having, if you're not having a great holiday, reach out to someone you know, friends, family, we want to make sure that everyone stays connected this holiday season because it's not always fun for people. It can be very shitty, depending.

So a great thing to do if you're feeling shitty, go to a food bank and help out. Go to a soup kitchen and help out. Put yourself around. Don't eat a toy, don't do something cool. Put yourself around other people and put yourself around people that are good at helping others. And then you can blend right in and turn it around for yourself. I love it. Yeah, right?

Yeah. All right. Well, stay sexy. And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Elvis, smoke cookie? Okay.