My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 132 - The Grandparents

Episode Date: July 22, 2019

This week’s minisode is a compilation of hometowns that feature grandmas and grandpas.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 and welcome to my favorite murder, the Minnesota where we read your shit to you. Do you like it? We like it. Okay, this one's called Glowing Eyes in the Basement Window and there's no intro because this is for real. Because we got to get to it. This episode's for real. Yep. I grew up in a super small town in northern Wisconsin. I was around 10 years old and my best friend and I were excited to go to a youth group at her church that night. Since her mom was part of the church's

band, we had to get there early for them to rehearse. We got there, we were the only kids, we went down to the basement where the group rooms were located to play around until group started. The basement was broken up into four quadrants with each with their own lights. So we only had the lights on in our quadrant of the basement and the rest of the rooms were dark. It was also dark outside by this time. So I'm feeling a little creeped out by being in this old church. There's also a window in that room that was at ground level and then it says important. So we find a bouncy ball and we're bouncing it back and forth to each other. When my friend bounces it wildly to me and I miss the catch. The ball proceeds to bounce off the walls and into the window sill

that is kind of pushed back into the wall. We follow the ball around the room and when it reaches said window sill, we both freeze because in this window we can make out the outline of a head with the biggest glowing white eyes. We both look at each other with the same terrified face and start screaming as if we aren't scared enough already. As we start to run up the stairs, we can hear the figure fucking yelling, no, help me. No. We are practically in tears at this point and we run to her mom and explain what we saw. She didn't believe us at first, of course, but we were both really distraught. So she finally agreed to investigate. As we went outside, we could hear someone still yelling, help me. No. This is what my mom's face turned to. This is when her mom's face turned to

an oh shit look. Not knowing what the fuck could be behind this old church, my mom decided to call the cops so they could investigate. Good. Once they arrived, we went behind the church to find, not a terrifying glowing eyed creature, but in fact, a poor old lady who had fallen off a ladder in her backyard. She had broken her legs. So when she saw the basement light turn on, she crawled her way to the ground level window to see if we could help. Oh my God, it's scarier. It's scarier. A huge old lady glasses were reflecting the light coming from the basement, which made her look absolutely terrifying. I felt so bad afterwards that I'd taken us that long to get

her help. But hey, better safe than sorry. SSGGM, your favorite rugby player, Shelby. Shit, Shelby. Hell yes. I know. First of all, my favorite girl's name, Shelby, I'm assuming. That is fucking. How scary is that? They were, they really were seeing something. They, it was real. And it was yelling, help me. It was real. It was a poor old lady. First of all, lady, what are you doing on your room? Lady, why are you on a ladder? You're an old lady. Ask your neighbor to help. If your glasses are this thick, you should not get up on a ladder.

Absolutely not. That's the sign I put next to all old lady ladders. Ask the army crawl to the basement window and it's like, help me. Help me, my legs broken. And then these little kids are screaming at you. Also like, oh, it's like she's been laying there all day. And it's like the light comes on. I'm just like, oh, oh, oh, I'm so thirsty. I wanted a cup of tea. A lemon balm tea. Oh, it's awful. So sad. Shit, that was a good one. Shelves. Okay, the subject line of this one is, grandpa stops a robbery with some unlikely help. All right, great. Page two.

Sup, Karen and Georgia and Stephen. Hi. My dad and I were on a road trip and we swung by a little house he grew up in with his seven brothers and sisters, his mom and his dad, who was the only police officer in town. Their house was also the police station. Where is this? New Zealand. Okay. That suddenly makes total sense. Right. Seriously, the front two rooms were the police for police business and the family kept the bedrooms to live in. And I think they shared the kitchen. Oh my God. It's amazing.

When I asked my dad what the hell they did when they needed to lock somebody up, he said, there was a shed in the garden. I don't know if he was joking. So good. Can you imagine growing up at a police station? I asked dad what it was like for grandpa to be the one and only cop in town. And he said he needed to improvise sometimes. Then he told me this story. Late one night, grandpa spotted men with flashlights inside the TV and appliance repair shop, obviously robbing the place. Back up from New Plymouth would take over an hour to get there. Grandpa didn't want to wait because, of course, he knew the people who owned the repair shop and he couldn't just watch while robbers ruin

their business. That's when he saw the lights in the local rugby club were on. I like to imagine that he now said, fuck protocol before he took off running for the club. He burst into the room of drinking rugby players. Oh my God. And as if anyone would like to help him catch some bad guys, they were into it. The town didn't have street lights back then. So grandpa had to shepherd the rugby players through the pitch dark, desperately trying to keep them quiet. He positioned them at the front of the shop. Then he snuck around back, took a deep breath and kicked in the back door, shouting, freeze police. The robbers dropped what they were holding and bolted out the front door

right into about a dozen drunk, enthusiastic rugby players. Amazing. As my dad said, quote, they weren't cops, so they didn't have to hold anything back. Holy shit. I feel sorry for the robbers. They had not signed up for anything like what happened to them and it was dark, so they literally didn't know what hit them. Oh my God. They were scraped off the pavement and sent to New Plymouth for processing and the rugby guys would talk about nothing else for days. I think we all dream that one day we'll get to help take down a criminal. Hopefully we'll be sober and not one of the 12 other huge ass men when it happens. Stay sexy and help out your local cop, Lorraine. That is a perfect story. Isn't that, I mean, you can just see it all happening. And

as soon as you said rugby players, I'm like, oh, so fun. Yes. And drunk ones too, the best kind. Are there any other kind? Are there any other kind? Yeah. A, B, how good are they at tackling and punching? Punching. Punching and tackling. Yes. It's what they do and it's like you can't get by them. No. That's their whole job. No. Is to keep you from getting by them. That's a brilliant story. God bless Lorraine. I'm not going to tell you the name of this one, but I will tell you that the theme of my story is today is grandparents. Okay. Because here's another one. Hello all the wonderful people and animals of MFM. Hey, that's, that's one of the best ones yet. Easy. Love it. I have quite the slew of stories I've been meaning to write into you murderous great uncle,

survivor, friends, mom, high school, murders. However, once you mentioned writing in stories about secretive, about secretives, my cousin, I can't be right. No, I get it. She wrote secret lives, but it was in one word. Oh, I see. She forgot to do the secret lives. About secretives, which is the professional name for it. That's right. My cousin who introduced me to your podcast insisted I finally buckle down and write this thing. So here it is. Around April, I was cleaning out my grandparents house where they lived for 62 years now. They didn't pass, they didn't pass, just had a lot of shit that needed to go and came across some interesting things in the process. My grandmother who, who we call batchy has always sounds like that shit. It does. B-A-T-C-H-I-E.

Batchy. Batchy. Okay. Has always been known for the insane amount of photos she takes. So naturally, a lot of what I found was pictures. Lots of family from growing up, some of my mom and her sister, when they were kids, et cetera. As I was working on the living room cleaning all the wine glasses on display with Batchy, she was telling me about the good old days and how all her, quote, intimate friends would come over and they would have a great time. But quote, of course not when the children were around. I was taken back by that statement, but I chalked it up to an 84-year-old woman with dementia talking about throwing crazy parties with her friends, getting drunk, playing cards, listening to Elvis records. Elvis. All of those things. And so is Elvis. In the next few days,

I found some interesting birthday cards from my nanny and grandpa meatball. What the fuck? My cousin's grandparents. Is this, is this a cartoon character writing into us? I just love that. Like funny names are the best. In the hall closet, which I again was like, hmm, they have very, they have a very uncomfortable sense of humor, but chalked it up to nothing other than that. And then the next paragraph says, okay, so I was wrong. It certainly wasn't nothing. I moved on to clean their bedroom. At this point, my Batchy and Papa were staying at my mom's house so I could be slightly more productive and found a box of pictures under the bed, not being at all surprised by this because they were quite literally boxes of pictures everywhere. I opened the box to

look at the photos and possibly have a few laughs about my mom's old boyfriends or whatever. All caps. Nope. Not pictures of my mom's old boyfriends or photos of us growing up. Instead, I found photos of my grand, but from my grandparents, all caps, Swinger parties. No, no, no, no. Stephen is pointing at the, you have photos. Oh, my God. Oh, no, what I'm looking at right now. She sent them to us. Oh, no. She took them and sent them to us. I love her. Love her. Love her. Are they old people? Or they new young, were they young? They're, they're middle-aged people, but it's in the 60s or 70s. I mean, 70s or 80s. But look, they're all in one bed, like, like Charlie Bucket's grandparents. It's a bunch of adults in a bed under a sheet together, smiling like little devils. Oh, my God.

They are having so much fun crowd. She's touching his penis in that photo, but you can't tell. And laughing her ass off too. Oh, my God. They're like all like in one bed together. Let me see more. Let me see more. Holy shit. There's a lot of them. You guys. Oh, my God. They're like all naked and having this. How many of these can we post? I don't, I feel like we can't post these. Because we don't know, unless Steven goes through and puts tiny black bars across everybody's eyes. Look at this one. The thing is, like, they're in these suggested positions, but they're cracking up. They're, they're just being kind of funny, dirty, drunk. Yeah. It's kind of what it seems like. But also in a room that it, that's paneled in. Wood panel.

12 wallpaper and then wood paneling on the bottom half. It's a seven. This looks like 1980 to me. It's so brown. And they look like, they look like 1980s, 40s. You know what I mean? Like, they're in their 40s. Yes. They look old to us. Okay. It also looks like people who probably drank a ton and were bored. Yeah. And they were like, well, you look, you all have a mustache or a beard. Right. We might as well just fuck each other. Like you two fucked each other in high school. Like you've already seen a dick. Let's just all, I want to see your honey's dick or whatever. Yes, exactly. Okay. Let me finish this. Keep, no, don't put that away. I want to keep looking at it. Okay. Uh, so my grand, no, no, but my grandparents swing. So those are her grandparents,

swinger parties and a few sex toys from way back in the day when my mom and aunts were growing up. And then I was mortified. I immediately took pictures of the photos and sent them to my cousins so they could be just as scarred as I was. That's what I would do. And had to take a break from cleaning the house for a little while. Yeah, I did. I pieced all these things together. I realized what I had just stumbled upon. These were all old people that I knew, all people I had dinner with and played cards with when I was young. My nanny and grandpa meatball were both featured in these photos as well as a few other close friends of my grandparents. Needless to say, I could never really look at my grandparents the same way ever again. Shit, the grandparent just still alive?

Yeah, she was just cleaning her house. Oh, no, no, they're batches fucking kicking it. Uh, and I took my cousins down with me. There's still a lot of that house that needs to get cleaned out, but quite frankly, I'm horrified to do so. Yep. So yeah, that's the story of how I learned my grandparents were swingers. Stay sexy and don't look under your grandparents bed. Delaney. Okay. Delaney. Delaney. Delaney. Delaney. Like Melanie, but with a D. Okay. I'm just saying she just blew up her grandparent, her grandparents spot so hard, like, because not that many people call their grandmother batchy. Yeah, totally. Some people are going to know there's going to be people in that hometown that are like, excuse me, Oh, yeah, that's really insane. This is just like,

it's just, they're having so much fun. Guys, sex is natural and sex is fun. And everyone does it with everybody. Everyone's grandparents do it and take pictures of it. Oh my god. It also looks like they're doing it just to be like, yeah, just take a picture of this. We're being dirty on purpose. Could be. And it would a gorgeous expression of human love. That was fun. And then just the photo, like the fact that there are photos just made it. I mean, I was, I'm shocked. 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.

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plus free shipping on your first box when you go to Hello, fresh.ca slash murder 20 and use code murder 20. Goodbye. Hey, I'm Arisha. And I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wondery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about the incomparable diva Whitney Houston. Whitney's voice defined a generation and even after her death, her talent remains unmatched. But her incredible success hit a deeply private pain. In our series, Whitney Houston, Destiny of a diva will 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. This is a lighthearted one that really veers from the standard norm. If you have children in the car and you're listening to this, this is definitely rated NC 17 fun ex husband. Stephen plug your ears. Stephen, Stephen, get out of the room but keep it recording. The subject line of this is ex husband's grandpa's porn. Oh, dear. Okay. Hey, Karen, Georgia, Stephen and assorted animals. Before I got married, in parentheses, never again, my now ex and I moved into his parents in law apartment in their house. Also a bad idea. His paternal grandparents lived there previously and had passed away. And some of their items were left in the apartment. My ex was unpacking the linen

closet and suddenly started yelling for me to come upstairs. When I came up, he was pissing his pants, laughing and holding an old VHS tape in his hands. Apparently he found a box of tapes at the bottom of the closet. He remembered that his grandpa took tons of photos and had a camcorder running all the time. My ex said he was wondering what nostalgic footage he would find. And he was planning on hooking up an old VCR to watch it when he flipped the first tape over to read the hand written label. Instead of seeing baby's first Christmas or Uncle Fred and Aunt Jane's wedding, he saw printed neatly in his grandfather's handwriting, big tits and pink clits. Oh, my God.

We both fucking died laughing. And I was tempted to include the anecdote in my speech at the upcoming wedding. But his parents would have spontaneously combusted. So I was sworn to secrecy. But I'm divorced now, so fuck it. Stay sexy and get rid of your porn before your grandchildren find out about it. But I'm divorced now, so fuck it. Stay sexy and get rid of your porn before your grandchildren find it, Laura. Oh, or don't. And like, what if that was just really was just like a baby's birthday, but he was like, I'm gonna fuck with my grandkids when they go through my shit. Oh, my God, that would be fucking hilarious. Maybe he's a little older, maybe he's going a little organic in the brain. He's like, this is funny. I don't care. There's what they get for looking for

my things. That is most... That's her new t-shirt. I mean, for real. It's so, it's so disturbing. I won't repeat it, but you'll see it in our merch store. The t-shirt we're going to get made is going to be the drawing of a very old man's hand holding a VHS. And the writing's going to be really small, so you can't see unless you're close. Okay, I love it. God damn, that made me laugh. Can I just do a real quick one, please? This one's called My Grandmother Bitternazzi. Yes. I feel like we all, it's like a good time in our lives. Hell's yeah. For this. Hello, longtime listener, first time writer. My grandmother Wilma grew up in Germany in World War II. Some of the families in her community took turns hiding a box in their houses. This box

contained valuables that belonged to the Jewish, other Jewish families in town. Once the Nazi soldiers heard of this, they wanted to put a stop to it. When the soldiers came to my grandmother's door, her dog was barking, this gets said. So fucking, so a fucking Nazi shot and killed her dog. Yep. Wilma, who was 10 to 12 years old at this time, was so upset she bit the Nazi. Yes. Her family was punished and she eventually was able to flee to England before settling in Canada. She never spoke, spoke much about her childhood, but someone from a community paper interviewed her and published her story in a paper. I thought you would like the story about a bad ass little girl biting a Nazi, Erin. No, I'm crying. No, I'm crying. I hate Nazi so much.

Also, it's just like, think of any fucking World War II Nazi movie that you've seen and how oppressive and awful their presence is. And they go into these towns and take over and fucking turn people against each other and their monsters. And this little girl's just like, you fucking killed my dog. I don't give a shit what you do. You killed my dog. I'm going to do the only thing I can. I'm going to bite you. And you fucking deserve it. You goddamn Nazi. I love Wilma. Wilma. I also love it's that's such a great idea that like, then she emigrates to England, she emigrates to Canada, she fucking lives her private life.

And then somebody sits her down and goes, Hey, what's, give me some highlights. Do you have any stories? Oh, yeah, I got a story for you. I've been a Nazi once. Yeah. As a child. And I'm here to tell the tale. So it's the subject line is golf wielding grandmother lighthearted. Great. Hi, Karen, Georgia, Steven and animals. I stumbled upon your show recently, and it has made my commute to work in law school so much more enjoyable. I did them. I did make the mistake of listening to your episode about the leaf man too close to bedtime and ended up sleeping with the lights on because obviously murderers wait until you turn them off. But otherwise, I'm so impressed with your wonderful mix of humor and tragedy with these

dark and fascinating stories. Thanks. My hometown isn't about a murder, but an attempted robbery. One day, my grandma phoned to say that she was in the hospital for a broken arm, which on its face seems rather ordinary. However, the story comes out that my grandma woke up in the middle of the night to noises coming from down the hall. She lives alone and doesn't have any pets. So she knew something was up. Naturally, she grabs one of my grandpa's old golf clubs, sneaks out of her room to investigate and finds a large man rifling through her things in the living room. At this point, most people would call for help, but apparently my badass grandma thought that she would handle the situation on her own. After all, she had lived through World War II in Latvia

before she was... That's where my family's from. Is that right? Yes. Fuck yeah. So she was forced to flee to the U.S. as a teenager after some of her family were killed. Yeah, she doesn't fuck around. She's not fucking around. She doesn't scare easy. So she looked around her house to make sure the man was alone, smart, popped out her with her golf club raised and started beating the thief over the head while shouting at him in Latvian. Good girl! He was so startled and probably concussed that he dropped what he grabbed, resisted the grandma attack very briefly, which is when my grandma's arm was broken and then fled into the night. He was never caught by the police, but thankfully, he also never returned. Afterwards, my mom gave my grandma a lecture about the

importance of calling the cops, the risks of attacking intruders without knowing if they are armed or not, and how she could have made an escape instead. My grandma promised that she would be more responsible, but when we visited her next, we discovered that she had placed a golf club in every room of her house. Oh, grandma! Anyways, you're awesome, so make sure you stay sexy and always carry a golf club. Love, Erica. Oh my god. Fuck yeah, Latvian grandma doesn't take shit. She couldn't have hit that hard with that, right? I mean, I feel like I just surprised the shit out of this dude. Yeah. Well, it probably hurt and maybe like knocked him a little senseless, but yeah. And then also this woman screaming at you in a foreign language. Yeah. Wow, that's

incredible. I like that one. Yeah, I do too. Those were all amazing. Those were great. And listen, any story you have that's fucking crazy, just send them to us. My favorite writer at Gmail. And stay sexy. And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Elvis, you want a cookie? Good boy. Nice one.