My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 106

Episode Date: January 21, 2019

This week’s hometowns include a SWAT team invasion and a crime scene photographer.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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And welcome to this week's Mini-Sode. Hi. Welcome. Thank you. Here you go. My favorite murder. My favorite murder. The Mini-Sode.

We're doing great. This is, we know the name of it. We know to tell it to you at the top. I know my name's Georgia. And I know my name's Karen. And that's all you need to know. And if you thought the names were reversed from the faces, that's your fucking problem. We don't want to hear about it anymore.

And guess what? You're not alone. Most people freak out. We've heard it over 800,000 times. It's common practice. That's right. Also, yes, go to shows by yourself and also, yes, dress up for things if you feel like dressing up for them.

And that's all the news that's needed to print. Good night, San Diego. Stay classy. Okay. The first, this first one, the subject line is, the SWAT team invaded my band practice. Yay. Dear Karen, Georgia, Stephen and associates, I live about half an hour outside of Cleveland in a town where not much happens, usually all caps.

Here's some necessary background information. My high school was positioned remarkably close to a Motel 6 with only a patch of forest separating the property. That seems wrong. That's the scariest patch of land in all of the... I feel like motels shouldn't be allowed near schools. Or forests. Forests were so, I think.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone from out of, they do what they do in the motel and then they go hide in the forest about it. Listen, no shame if that's all you can afford. Hey. Just don't stay near fucking high school. And stop doing creepy shit in the forest.

All right. Great. Oh, the first line is all right. All right. So my marching band would have to practice in the middle of the school day to rehearse for football games and competitions, and on this particular day, it was nice enough to practice on the football field. My directors would stand at the top of the bleachers to get a good view of our forms

and such, and we would often look to them for critiques and directions. About halfway through our practice, we were playing through our show when we noticed one of the directors sprinting down the bleachers. Imagine how dangerous that is to run down bleachers. Teeth gone. Oh. Just face first. Just my ankle would roll, the second my foot took off.

100%. And disappearing. Strange. We kept playing as we had not been instructed to stop. The next thing we knew, at the literal corner of our eyes, we see tons of police cars speeding into the parking lot and a literal SWAT team running through the bleachers. At this point, the other director cuts us off as a SWAT team member whispered in her ear.

Oh, my God. Hot. She got on the megaphone and said, everyone, just please go inside right now. I need you to run. We were very confused and totally freaked out. So we did as we were told and picked up our instruments and sprinted inside. Leave your instrument. Save the trombone.

My murdering herself, looking back the whole way to see, to try to see what was happening. Once we had all made it back inside, the directors told us that a man who committed double homicide a few towns over and had been on the run for over a month had been staying at the Motel 6. Police got word of his location and when the murderer heard them coming, he ran across the woods and was hiding behind the bleachers, all caps, the whole time we were practicing. He loved music. He loved band marching.

He loves the song Tusk in all the different ways it's played. The whole arrest happened so fast that the students inside were taken out of lockdown very quickly, but we were out in the open the whole fucking time. No one ended up getting hurt. No shots were fired. We did get a lot of attention that afternoon being the only group of students with any intel of the incident which, as band nerds, was pretty cool. Stay sexy and don't keep playing your clarinet if you see law enforcement raiding the stadium,

Nikki. But why did the one guy run? First guy. Run. First guy probably ran to see what was happening. Okay, he wasn't like leaving the students in the dust and being like, goodbye. He was like the coward of the group. Yeah, he was like, I'm going to save myself.

Fuck you, nerd. I would love that if that was actually the football coach, they'd just gone up to tell the band leader something and then he sees the SWAT team and screams and cries and runs away. Save yourselves! And we're in trouble. That's amazing. Okay, this is from my cousin, Eliza Spear, who's a singer-songwriter.

She just put out a new single. I'm fucking supporting her and I was like, yo, I know your mom knows a murderer. Get her to tell me your story. Oh, nice. I'll plug your shit. Yeah, it's a plug-and-play. Go for it. It's how it works.

She's a darling and I love her and she's an incredible musician. Anyways, okay, Eliza says, hello, here is my mom's murder story. In 1991, my mom landed a job at Peterson Publishing after college, which published several car magazines. In her first year working with Peterson, Charlie Rathburn, a car photographer, would come in and give his photographs to my mom. My mom eventually left the company because she felt the objectification of women by one of the magazines.

Swimsuit issue was wrong and she didn't want her name associated with that. My cousin Nancy is a fucking saint. That's cool. I love her. Four years later, and I wrote about this dude in the book. This is insane. Four years later at another part of the city, Linda Sobek was a 27-year-old swimsuit model who was formerly a cheerleader for the Raiders.

She was known by her friends as the fabric that kept them all together and she was well liked by the majority of people around her. She was on the phone to her mother on Thursday, November 16, 1995, when she cut the conversation short. She needed to go to a daytime shoot and she would call her mother back after that. Her mother never got the call and it was then that they began to worry. A road worker in the Angeles National Forest found photos of Sobek in the trash along with a Lexus receipt signed by Charlie Rathburn, the photographer, showing permission to loan

the Lexus for the shoot. The police had their first lead. They approached Rathburn in his Hollywood home. He was drunk and threatening to kill himself and once in custody, he confessed to killing Sobek. Rathburn led police 25 miles north of Los Angeles in the Angeles National Forest where he had buried Sobek days before. He told the police he had accidentally struck her with a car during a photo shoot for Auto

Week magazine and that he panicked and hit her body out of fear. Fucking bullshit. The story seemed far-fetched and the investigators didn't believe it. The autopsy revealed no broken bones and no traumatic injuries that would come from being hit by a car. During the trial, he changed the story saying that he strangled Sobek when an argument got out of hand. The trial found him guilty of first degree murder and sexual assault and he was sentenced

to life in prison and he still resides in a California institution for men today. He's 60 years old. My mom told me that every time he would deliver photographs to her, he didn't show any emotion. She says it was as if he was a robot, quote, he would say nothing. He would just walk in, stand in front of my desk and hand me his photos in their sleeve and just walk away. No greeting. No smile.

And my cousin Nancy was like really cute, you know? So maybe, I don't know. There you go. Let me know if you need any more information or anything of that nature. There was also a murder in front of my house about six months ago. That is a crazy story. If you want to hear about that one, it was a brother and sister stabbing kind of ordeal that ended in front of my house.

Crazy shit. Talk soon, Eliza. What? No. You better talk to her very soon. I know. I'm like, okay, give me that one too. Why is she saying brother, sister, stabbing ordeal like it's something that we all know

about? Truly. I'll kill her myself. You know how that goes when you stab your brother or sister in an ordeal. Eliza. Eliza. Eliza Spear, check her out on Spotify. We'll have to get that.

It's Linda Sobeck, right? Yeah. That is a very, all of the true crime shows have covered that story. She is the classic beautiful blonde LA actress model that gets murdered. And she, I write, it's in the book and one of my stories that's, I should have been killed in it, but she would never go alone on shoots. Like that was a rule, but she had had lunch with him that day and was like, he seems fine and went like broke her own rule.

Right. And so she's like, he seems like a robot. He's perfect. That'll be, that's very safe. Yeah. First, you know, the poor baby. Okay. There's no subject line on this one, but hey guys, I was backpacking through Thailand

last month and met a German tourist who shared a story with me that I thought you'd appreciate. My new German friend was out swimming one day in Koi Phi Phi, full guest. Sure. Or Koi Phi Phi. Oibai. Oibai. Cover all your bases. This is an island on the south end of Thailand.

Somewhat later in the evening, suddenly a lady on the beach started shouting about a person floating out in the water that appeared to be drowning. His person was floating just past the buoy line indicating the end of the designated swim zone. I guess my new German friend had some previous lifeguarding experience and decided to be the hero and swim out to rescue him. When he finally reached the person in the water, he realized that they were blue. Yes, blue.

And had a large gouge out of their forehead. The person he had swum out to save was actually a corpse and appeared to have been dead for some time. The German guy dragged the body into shore, upon further inspection of the corpse, realized he knew the guy. No. Yes, this man was on one of his tour groups only two days earlier. The authorities were called and it was extrapolated that he was struck in the head by a boat

while swimming outside the beach's designated swim zone. Hope you enjoyed this story. Stay sexy and don't swim past the buoy line, Casey. Oh man. Isn't that nuts? That's maybe one of the nutsest we've had. That's so nuts. And what a weird feeling because you only know that person two days were, but you also know

them enough as a person to be like, holy good God. And what a bummer way to go, man. Hopefully it was fast. Yeah, and hopefully the boating person didn't know that he had just done that and then just kept boating away into the fucking sunrise set. Did you, sorry. Yes. This is a sidebar article discussion.

They just discovered a shark. Wait, what? They just discovered a shark. Oh no. What's going to be? They just discovered a shark in Greenland that's 400 years old. No. Yes.

And Stephen, please find the picture because it doesn't have any teeth and its eyes are kind of like, what? It's like, someone kill me, please. It looks like a cartoon of a worried shark and it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Just thinking of like horrible ocean things, but there's also some great things happening in the ocean too. Oh, an old man shark.

I've seen it. There's one picture that's from the teeth. You can see the mouth. He's like, enough already. It's a woman, of course. She's like, enough already. She's like, kill me now. Like 300 years ago, I was done with this shit.

She's like, no, I can't join Tinder. Yeah. This water tastes like gasoline. This is. Can I get out of here? I swam around with everything. Oh my God. Isn't that the best?

She's like, let me fucking leave this world already. Leave? Where's the one where there's one where it literally looks like someone went and pulled every tooth out of her mouth. He would have shark without teeth be like you could like it's like a snake without venom. You'd be like, oh, you're going to bite me? I know. Oh, you gum my arm.

You funny. I want some applesauce. You're scratching this shark 400 years old, though. Bananas. The sharks are aliens. Stephen brought up sharks with human teeth. I think it was, uh, I forget it was the shark tank murder in Australia. Oh, yeah.

We like threw one of these up on the stage. Just for fun. The best. Listen, they're aliens. It's crazy. Look. Look, listen. Okay.

This is called my mom tried to hire a crime scene photographer for a wedding photography. Which normally wouldn't tell you this like the subject line to ruin it, but it's just so funny. It's so good. I don't even need to read you the rest of it. Really. Hi, ladies. Stephen and fur associates.

A little fun slash creepy story thanks to my wonderfully odd mutter mutter. Wow. Hello, mutter. Hello, mutter. Uh, last year I was busy planning my wedding. Turns out you have to hire a wedding photographer close to a year before the wedding. Who's supposed to know this? Question mark, question mark.

I fucking agree. Uh, I was, and I was running out of options. Whilst in the midst of stress and frustration, I asked my mom for help. She earnestly asked one of her oldest friends, let's call him Stephen, to be our photographer. Stephen used to be the police commissioner for Western Australia and had an esteemed career in homicide investigation. Oh, great. Okay.

I responded quite confused. I didn't know Stephen was a photographer to which my mother earnestly and extremely casually replied, well, he used to be a crime scene photographer for the police, for the police, you know, photographing dead bodies and that kind of thing. He took the photos at our wedding to and for someone who's used to photographing dead bodies. He photographed live ones pretty well. Oh, okay. Thanks, mom.

I didn't end up hiring Stephen as our photographer, but looking back, I kind of regret it. Not many people lived to tell the tale that they were photographed by a homicide photographer. Yes. SSDGM, Emma. Emma, these are the things we have to grab onto in life. We're not aiming for perfection. We're aiming for pictures that have a good story behind them. That's right.

That's all you want. My fucking wedding photographer was on acid for most of my weddings. Imagine looking through George's wedding album. They are trippy. It's a joy. That's a lot of patterns. Looking for a better cooking routine? With meal planning, shopping and prepping handled, Hello Fresh has you covered.

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Goodbye. What makes a person a murderer? Are they born to kill or are they made to kill? I'm Candice DeLong and on my new podcast Killer Psyche Daily I share a quick 10 minute rundown every weekday on the motivations and behaviors of the criminal masterminds, psychopaths and cold-blooded killers you hear about in the news. I have decades of experience as a psychiatric nurse, FBI agent and criminal profiler. On Killer Psyche Daily I'll give you insight into cases like Ryan Grantham and the newly

arrested Stockton Serial Killer. I'll also bring on expert guests to dive deeper into the details, share what it's like to work with a behavioral assessment unit at Quantico, answer some killer trivia and even host virtual Q&As where I'll answer your burning questions. Hey Prime members, listen to the Amazon Music Exclusive Podcast Killer Psyche Daily in the Amazon Music app. Download the app today. Okay, here's my last one.

I think I won't read you the subject line. Okay. Just in case. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not knowing. Okay, good. Hi all, including Steven and Pets. Please allow me a moment to share one of the most embarrassing moments of my teaching career

thus far. Yes, please. Please support teachers. Los Angeles teachers are on strike right now and I think one of the main things they're striking for is smaller class sizes, but all teachers should be paid more. It's a travesty how little teachers get paid. Yes. It's also very sexist.

Yeah. It is because it's fucking majority or female. It's totally a feminism fucking cause. It absolutely is. Even on top of that, what they do, in people's minds, it's very easy to be relegated to. This is like some kind of advanced babysitting. No. These people are raising your children.

They're raising your children. They're making their future what it's going to be. And if you can't, please try to figure out if there's any support groups in your area to support teachers to pay for school lunches, to pay for supplies. But if you live in the Los Angeles area and there's a strike fund that you can donate money to, they would really help a lot of people because people are, I mean, it's getting so serious. Yeah.

100%. Sorry. Can't do it. There. There I said it. Okay. I spent a few lovely years as a music teacher and a choir director at a smallish Catholic school.

Part of my job was taking my 35 middle school choir students on a big overnight trip every year. It was always spectacularly stressful and I spent most of the year worried about it. My last year there, I took the kids to New Orleans. Luckily, my principal was kind enough to hire a friend of hers as the travel agent and he planned all of our excursions, lodging and travel. Big load off me. Our second day there, we finished most of our stuff for the day, including my sweet

kids singing for the local church service. Directly after we were booked on what the travel agent had described as a, quote, haunted museum tour, I thought it sounded neat and figured it would be just spooky enough for a group of six to eighth graders. We all get off the bus and go inside and the tour takes us up into a little apartment. And y'all, it was not a haunted museum. It was a tour of the actual real life apartment where Zach Bowen killed and dismembered and cooked the body of his girlfriend.

Oh, I took a bunch of 11 to 13 year olds, 11 to 13 year old religious children to a murder house. The tour included seeing the kitchen and fridge where he cooked her and the bathtub where she was dismembered. It's not even a historical murder. It's like a recent, really sad, awful mental illness. Fuck. Who put that on the tour?

Nobody. One of my, so they saw the kitchen, fridge and bathtub. One of my, my overdramatic choir girls claimed she heard something whisper her name and spent the rest of the evening crying about it while one of the workers in the voodoo shop downstairs comforted her. And then just a separate line. It was a weird night. Stay sexy.

I don't know, please just Google the itinerary destinations next time, Micaela. I feel like if Vince hadn't stepped in as our tour manager, that's basically what our tours would be like. And it would be like, why are we here? What's up everybody in the to voodoo shop? That's right. It just have gone downhill. Oh, that's awful.

Isn't that? And I wonder if any murdering is were made that day though. I mean, you know, the, you know, the couples eyes were sparked where they're just like, wait, sorry, what is this? I just can't help as a, as a, as a not popular kid when I was younger, the girl who's crying and needs all the attention because she heard someone whisper her name, I kind of want to smack her in the face. Yes or no.

Like shut up Cecilia, like, well, as the girl who grew up telling Cecilia to shut up, you were a face. Yes, I agree with you. Cecilia, nobody, there's no such thing as ghosts. Shut up. Also just crying. You have to save crying at school for when it's an advanced situation. If you cry because you think you hear someone whisper your name and you're kind of generally

scared. Yeah. That's a boy that cries wolf situation. Right. You're going to play that card out and no one will care. You're the crier. You're the crier. Yeah.

Don't be the crier. Save it. Save the crying for when it really matters. Right. Aliens, for example. Or a dance. Uh-oh. Is there a story there?

Okay. This is called unexpected visitor. Hi, Karen, Georgia, Steven and pets. Today I was listening to a hometown where a woman walked back into her apartment after doing laundry to find someone chilling behind her door. This reminded me of a fun story I could share from my time at grad school at the University of South Dakota. During my second year, I was working on my finals for the spring semester.

I had locked my door because I was expecting a friend of mine to come over later that night to hang out. And then she writes, I know, very stupid. It's not. You're fine. You're fine. Well, at my computer in the living room, I heard the door open and someone walk in. I turned around at my desk to say hello when I realized this was not my friend, but a complete

stranger who had just walked into my apartment. This guy was about six feet tall and muscular as hell, not to mention high as balls. Oh, no. He casually walked through the apartment, sat down on my couch across from my desk, and pulled out a pipe. He looked at me and said, hey, what's up? Recognizing that glazed over look in his eyes, I decided that freaking out at him may not be my best option.

So I calmly responded, not much, you. He said he was good, and then he offered me a head off his pipe. I respectfully declined since I needed to, quote, focus on my finals. After a few minutes past of us sitting there in complete silence, I asked if he needed anything. He politely responded, no, stood up and started looking through my apartment. About this time, the friend that I was expecting walked through the door. He saw the guy rifling through some of my stuff and did a couple double takes between

the stranger and me, reading the room pretty well. He looked at me without speaking and gave me the who the fuck is this look. And I responded with a no fucking idea look. My friend calmly walked by the stranger to sit on the couch. The stranger then offered my friend a hit and he declined as well. Finally after what must have been about 15 more minutes of silence and snooping, the guy seemed to get bored of the situation and said, I'm out of here. He grabbed his pipe and also one of my large textbooks that was sitting on the coffee table

and shoved them down the back of his sweatpants. Yeah. All caps. He then waved goodbye and walked out of the door. We watched him walk away from my balcony with a weird gate that I assume was to try to prevent the textbook from slipping farther into his crack. After he was far enough away, I looked around the apartment to see if he'd grabbed anything else.

Not that there was much to find since I was a porous fuck grad student, but he only took the book. To this day, I have no idea who that guy was or why he decided to grab a giant textbook of stage lighting from one of my theater classes. But I hope that he got a couple bucks off a half price books or something to buy some more weed or a backpack for his next heist. Stay sexy and lock your damn door, you stupid college student Natalie. Whoa.

It's that thing when Vince is leaving and he'll yell, we live in an apartment complex so there's like a hallway. He'll yell, I'm not locking the door and closes the door and I'm like, you just let everyone in the fucking building know that the door is not locked and someone's in the house. They're just like a bandit around the corner like, oh, I was going to go over there, but I'm going over here now. Finally.

That's the weirdest thing too is that guy could have been a graduate student with her. Right. Like that guy could just have hit like taken some weird pot that was actually Angel Dust and been on it to a whole different like. Or he could have been like, he could have thought it was his friend's apartment and tried to play it off. And I was like, the girl who was there acted like she knew me, so I had to stick around. Yeah.

And then I just stole the book because I'm high. Yeah. And then that book looked really nice. Yeah. And so I put it in my sweaty underpants. I put it down my butt. Ew. College is hard in so many ways.

Not just because of the finals, I'm assuming. I've never had one. I don't know. I couldn't. Yeah. I've never had a finale on college. Never participated in any of those kind of testing situations and I never studied. I just didn't care.

No, I remember the day I quit college was a night we all got together to like for history finals studying and I hadn't read one page of the book and I was just sitting there and I was just like this thing that turned in me where I was like, I'm not doing this anymore. It's like, oh, I don't belong here. No. Who am I? Who did I think I was going to be outside of high school? And also what are they doing?

I was just looking at my friends like, what is your goal? I don't get what any of us are doing. You got to have that goal and I just never had any. I didn't have the vision. I didn't have the eye of the tiger. And look at us now. We got, we basically got life, LASIKs, LASIK. And now we have the vision.

We have permanent. Tiger eyes. Love. Send us your, just any fucking story. Yeah. It's funny. It's interesting. Send it to my favorite murder at Gmail and like, thank you guys.

You're the best. Yeah. You keep on providing us with so much great content. All we have to do is read it. I love it. It's the best. Stay sexy. And don't get murdered.

Good boy. Elvis, do you want a cookie? Yeah. Big? You