My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 154

Episode Date: December 23, 2019

This week’s hometowns include an unusual stalking story and a family secret.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 my favorite murder. The mini soap. That's Karen Kilgara. That's Georgia Hardstark. And here we go. Miriam. Thank you.

Claire. I made that up. What's your middle name? Lynn. Marie. God damn it. Lynn. It's just plain old Lynn.

Two N's though. Oh. Okay. This is a first responder story. That's what it says in the subject line. Hi, friends. With a bunch of A's. Yeah, I like it.

Hi, friends. Love you all that. So my husband has a paramedic. It's a fine line between, quote, tell me all the things, and quote, relive your trauma for my own fascination. God, let's read that again. It's a fine line between tell me all your things and relive your trauma for my own fascination. So I generally wait for him to tell me things.

One morning he came home saying he had a good story to send to my murder girls. Oh, good. On his time. One night, he and his partner go on a call for a 50 something woman who had tried to kill herself. She had cut herself pretty bad, but they had bandaged her and were ready to bring her to the hospital. A cop checked her robe pockets before they left and found a large kitchen knife.

He took it before the ambulance left with just the woman and the two medics. On the way to the hospital, there was a nearby cardiac arrest. This was at the woman's mother's house. What? A family member had asked the police to do a welfare check on the mother because she and her daughter had fought about money earlier in the evening. My husband went to that call to start the code. Since the woman was stable, he went inside with the equipment to do the resuscitation

while his partner stayed in the ambulance with the woman inside the house. My husband found a lot of police officers in the kitchen with a dead elderly woman. She had been beaten to death with a rolling pin. No amount of CPR could help. Mom, so my husband continued on to take the daughter to the hospital, this time with a police officer also in the truck because the woman had killed her mom and then tried to kill herself. Oh my God.

Oh, it's probably unnecessary to say, but I'm so glad the cop had taken that knife off of her when she got in the ambulance with my husband. Yeah. SSDGM and Hydra rolling pins when you fight about money, Carolyn from North Carolina. Holy shit. Ooh, a rolling pin. It's also dark and dramatic. You think it's bad in this one direction and then it takes a hard left into Holy Shitsville.

That's right. No one wants to live in Holy Shitsville. No, please. But we do like to drive by. Oh yeah. That's what this podcast is. That's right. This is called Home Town Story.

Perfect. Hi all. I had just moved into my very first solo apartment in the big city, which is me and my tabby Calvin in a cute little attic department in Cleveland Heights. Did I say attic? Yeah. Shit. Apartment.

I thought I'd gotten over that. In Cleveland Heights, Ohio. I don't think you have to get over it. Okay, great. At this point, there's t-shirts and stuff. You might as well just lean in. After about a week of getting used to being on my own, I came home to see the message light blinking.

This was the mid-90s before everyone had cell phones or voicemail, so my cute little apartment had an old-school answering machine. After about a week of getting used to being on my own, I came home to see the message light blinking on my machine with somewhere around 20 messages. Bad news. That's right. Only bad news. Which was way more than I'm used to receiving.

7. Up to 7 is amazing. Yeah. You're killing it. Everyone is super into you. Yeah. People can't get enough. 20 messages?

Someone's... Absolutely, there's death involved. Right. I pressed the play button and the first message was just five minutes of background noise, like distant sirens, horns honking and construction noise, et cetera. Weird, right? The second message was the same. And the third.

By the fourth message of five minutes of background noise, I started to feel a little freaked out. Yeah. Five minutes was the maximum message time built into the machine, so it appeared someone was just calling and letting the five minutes run out and then calling back to do it again. Someone had called me 20 times and just sat there saying nothing and a little tape ran out. Very freaky.

Somebody was calling her listening to her voicemail machine, like the quietness of it. I love everything about you, including your answering machine. I was suddenly very aware of how alone I was in this cute little apartment in the big city. As I sat there running through the worst case scenarios in my head, contemplating calling the police, thinking that maybe it's not such a bad idea to have a handgun, my sweet cat Calvin hopped up on the table. As he walked across the table, he stepped over the answering machine inadvertently activating the memo record function with his paw and sat there on the table, casually grooming

himself while the machine recorded another five minutes of ambient noise. Her own cat was stalking her. It says stay safe and don't get stalked by your cat. Tina. Oh my God, that's so scary and then such a relief. I know. And also reminds me of Frank, if there's a button nearby that Frank shouldn't be touching, he walks up with his paw like a person and touches it.

It's unbelievable. I told you he's churned on like the laptop in the middle of the night and all of a sudden a movie starts playing and like, and he's just laying there next to it like it was his choice. Oh, okay. The subject line of this one is, mother, I can't tell you anything or you look suspicious. Karen, Georgia, Steven and gaggle of pet friends. My mom shared a story with me over the weekend about my grandpa, her father-in-law.

Back in November of 1960, there was a plane crash that occurred in the small southern Indiana town that my dad grew up in. 57 passengers and six crew members were on the flight and no one survived. In the area that the plane crashed, the town decided to build a memorial for the individuals that lost their lives that day. My grandpa volunteered to be the keeper of the grounds, making sure the path through the trees was always mowed and he would make sure to weed whack it as well. He did this once a week for over 40 years until he passed away himself.

That's beautiful. Oh, my God. That's plenty right there. Yeah. But there's more. Oh, shit. To get to where this memorial was, he would have to drive his truck through the back roads of southern Indiana to basically a path in the trees, the one that he created with

his lawnmower. He would then walk the path to remove anything that would obstruct his mowing. On one particular day during his initial walk, he came upon a body that was completely naked with both their feet and arms bound together with rope. This was pre-cell phone. So my grandpa had to get back into his truck, drive the back roads to the house, let me sidebar real quick. My grandpa also refused to ever drive even the speed limit.

And I like to imagine that this was the day he said, fuck it and sped for the first time in his life. Anyway, he got home, called the police to explain that they needed to come out right away. My poor grandma is trying to ask questions as he ran out the door. He told her not to talk to anyone. She persisted in her questions when he finally yelled, mother, I can't tell you anything or you'll look suspicious.

Oh, my God. There's nothing better than when old men call their wives mother. It's the funniest thing of all time. Oh, God. All in all, it ended up being a meth deal gone wrong. Oh, fuck. Oh, it's so scary and dark and out in the middle of nowhere. No.

Once the crime scene was removed, my grandpa went back to his duty of keeping the memorial at peak condition. That's such a beautiful thing. Yeah. And then horrible in the middle of it. But then. Yes. Thanks for reading along, Stephen and Georgia Karen.

If this gets chosen, y'all are a treat and I look forward to more years. Yes. The murdering of the demand years of listening and there's no name. I want to be a treat always. I love that. You're a real treat. Y'all are a treat. I love being a treat.

I kept not going to tell you the name of this. Okay. Hey, y'all. I love you guys and your pod. My mom got me hooked on it a few months ago and now I'm behind in my grad school papers. Don't blame us. Take responsibility. Anyway, my grandfather passed away about 10 years ago.

He was the sweetest little man you'd ever met. My best friend is a kid. Him and my grandmother were your typical seven grandparents. We rode horses every Sunday after church and he took me to gymnastic classes. Anyway, my grandma and grandpa met in the church choir years ago, fell in love and were married for 45 years. Oh. Way to go.

Fast forward to three years ago, my mom gets a DNA kit done. That's how all good stories start. Oh, God. And finds out she has a brother she never knew about halfway across the country. She gets in touch with him and he tells my mom that my grandfather and his mother were an item back in the 50s before he went to prison. What? My mom obviously confronted my grandmother about this and she chuckled and said, yeah,

your daddy was a different man back before I met him. This conversation spiraled into my grandma, confessing to my mom that my grandpa was actually part of the prison choir program that's saying in her church, so they did meet in choir. My grandma was in the church non-prison choir and that's how they met. They eventually married once he was out of prison. My mom tried to pry on what he was in prison for, but my grandma wouldn't talk much about it and we've had no luck finding old records. My grandma came from a prominent family, doctors, lawyers, et cetera, but she has never really

been close with them. Family reunions were always awkward. It all makes sense now after learning she met my ex-config grandpa in a prison church choir. I guess they didn't approve. Stay sexy and don't believe your grandparents when they tell you how they met Whitney. Can you imagine you are a young woman in a Godfaring southern family that's successful and you're singing in the choir and here comes some hot young convict who's like,

ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. Yeah, you catch eyes across the fucking room. And harmonize in the name of the Lord. That's right. Danger. That is a sexy love story. It's the plot of Son of a Preacher, man, I think. Oh!

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The subject line of this is clergy Facebook groups and Jeffrey Dahmer. Great. Hi, friends. I'm writing on behalf of myself and a colleague. We're both female clergy, a pastor and a deacon, and we're both murderinos. We also are both in a number of clergy Facebook groups, which is where this story comes from. Listen, I'll spare you the details, but it probably comes as no surprise that clergy Facebook groups can be real dumpster fires.

We're not as good as that. No one's safe. Delete Facebook is all I have to say. Lots of petty arguments about how right and wrong way to do things, depressing stories, about how genuinely shitty church people can be to one another, and my personal favorite, endless examples of sexism and misogyny in the church. But on a good day, in these groups, you can find love, affirmation, and support from your colleagues, a heartwarming story that restores your hope in people, and occasionally, a fantastic

and disturbing what the fuck story like this one. Yay. Yeah. See, there's always a silver lining. A pastor colleague of ours posted in the group that when he was visiting with an older member of his church, he learned that this church member was a prison guard where Jeffrey Dahmer was held. Not only that, but this church member slash prison guard had to escort Dahmer back to

a cell after an attempt was made on his life. Apparently, Dahmer was attending Sunday Night Chapel parentheses. I mean, good for him, but I would hate to be the clergy person leading that service. And parentheses. When a fellow inmate armed with a homemade razor blade slash toothbrush ship tried to slit Dahmer's throat on the first swipe, however, the blade broke and the guards pulled the two apart. Dahmer had to go to the infirmary with a cut on his neck.

And when he was released from the infirmary, our colleague's church member had the task of escorting him back to a cell. On their way to a cell, Dahmer turned to the guard and said, that's what happens when you give an amateur a knife. What the fuck? Oh my God. My colleague and I thought you all would appreciate this story and the fact that you've got a lot of clergy murdering us out there.

Wow. Say sexy and don't get murdered. We'll handle doing God's missions. Sarah and Julie, oh my God. That's the creepiest thing I've ever heard. The clergy bringing the good hometowns. Thank you. Jeffrey Dahmer.

I mean, Jeffrey Dahmer is, yeah, he makes true crime no fun, in my opinion. There's just, it's just so awful. It's so awful. It's so awful. Okay. Here's my last one. Okay. Hello, friends.

I'm a fairly new but compulsive listener and I just heard the episode about finding things in your walls. I lived in Manitow Springs, Colorado. I'm sure I'm fucking saying that wrong. Sure. I lived a long time ago in a remodeled 1800s home. I was just asking to be haunted. The large home was divided into five separate apartments and the only space tenant shared

was the basement laundry room. I went into the community laundry room one night and found the door stuck on something. I shoved my body weight into the door and busted my ass into the laundry room but managed to damage the large wooden laundry bench against a wall in the process. While trying to discreetly put the top piece of plywood back on the bench, I happened a glance inside. It was a staircase that was A, very deliberately hidden, B, going into the earth from an already underground basement, C, compromised of 12 hand-dug steps.

No. Comprised. Comprised. Thank you. I went upstairs and skipped the laundry that night. Oh. The day I was moving. Hand-dug steps.

I'm like, I can't. It's horrible. It's horrible. The day I was moving from the house, I finally went down the hidden stairs. I got to the bottom and shined my flashlight to find a small bedroom-sized hole dug into the ground beneath my house. There was an entire nursery filled with baby furniture dating at least a hundred years old.

What? The craziest part was that nothing was out of place in the slightest. It looked like it was being kept up even. Everyone I tell the story to develops new theories, especially given the town's paranormal and dark stigma. Well, stay out of the creepy devil basement and don't get murdered. No name. Oh.

Your face. Oh. First of all, no pictures? I know. Would you ever descend? I would. But, okay, but think about earth-dug stairs. Uh-huh.

If they, if you crush those stairs on the way down, then you're stuck in the hole. Oh. And you have to live in the baby room down there. You have to get in the crib. Maybe each baby furniture is the soul of someone who fell down the stairs and turned into a weird rocking horse from the 1800s. That is, who did that? Why did they do it?

They put their baby furniture, a hundred-year-old baby furniture down there. It sounds like it was set up like a room, not just like a storage place for baby furniture. Yeah, like a baby's room. A dirt baby could live there. A dirt baby's room. Like a warm baby. Oh. A little earthworm baby with big eyes and eyelashes.

Like the guy from the Richard Scarry. And he's got a little top hat and a pipe. Earthworm ghost baby. Nick Terry, can you get on the earthworm ghost baby, please? I feel like it might be the end of the year. I feel like it's the end of a long year. I feel like we need a minute of a break. I feel like, I feel like I love doing this show, but I may have just gone over the edge

with the earthworm dirt baby. It's so off. It's terrible. Why don't we have pictures of it? Why can't I see it firsthand? Right, it's your fucked up weird stories. Jesus, that was fun. We'll read them in 2020.

Yes, thank you. Thanks, guys. But don't lie. Yeah, don't make earthworm babies up. That better be true. God damn it. Stay sexy. And don't get murdered.

Goodbye. Elvis, do you want a cookie? Yeah.