My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 156

Episode Date: January 6, 2020

This week’s hometowns include badass grandmas and tales from the county morgue.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. We're going to read your shit back to you. I work at a mor- no greeting. Again, I'm into this. Do it your way. I work at a mortuary in Kentucky. I was picking up a body at the county morgue as a funeral home van pulled in with a drop off. The funeral director began chatting with the security guard beginning with, have I got a story for you? After months of doing coroner runs, I knew these stories were always good

in parentheses, murdering a caliber good. So I slowed down my work so I could listen in. That's right. You dropped the morgue. That's what we're here for. That's hardcore. Okay. The bodies the funeral director was bringing in were from a trailer park in an adjacent county. A man returned home to find his wife waiting for him and reveals she had found out he was having an affair. They argue, shouts, escalate to threats. The husband pulls out a gun and the wife gets in her truck to escape. He shoots her twice in the head through the back window of the truck as she attempts to drive away. She dies behind the wheel and the truck crashes bursting into flame. The husband then douses the trailer with gasoline, lights it,

takes his gun back inside and sits down in his comfy chair. He calls his sister, confesses to the murder and asks her to look in his freezer in the trailer's outbuilding. He hangs up, takes his gun and shoots himself in the head as the trailer goes up in flames around him. Afterward, his devastated sister follows his instructions, goes to his freezer in the outbuilding to find, packaged in individual bags, the dismembered body parts of his mistress. I spoke to the embalmer who had the job of arranging these parts for an ID viewing who noted that one, the parts were all in different stages of decay and two, the torso was missing. I later found out the likely reason why from a co-worker who had friends in that county, the lady was

pregnant, which is likely why he decided his mistress had to go. Yikes. SSDGM, Katie. Well, that is just a whole bunch of fucked up in this. It's so intense and horrible and it's that kind of thing where everybody loses it. It's like not fair to the women. Like I just fucking plow through everyone's life and ruins it for everyone. And dies himself. Yeah. Clearly. On his own fucking terms. Right. And but it's like somewhere, somewhere there has to be the realization that getting help is better than ending up like that. Yeah. Somewhere at some point. Yeah. Hopefully. I guess a lot of people do and some people just don't have that fucking capacity. Yeah, true. And then it just becomes

just tragedy stories that people are overhearing because then the people at the morgue, all those bodies are, it's a worse and worse state of, I mean, good God. This one's called Uncovered Juicy Family Secrets. And I'm reading it because I want everyone to send us their family secrets, please. Yes. Like your fucked up Juicy Family Secrets. Please. That's all we're here for. It starts, hey gang, I know you hate cheesy intros, so let's get started. My father died a few years ago, but something I found out after he died was that his father tried to kill him as an infant. Oh no. Suffocate him with a pillow. And my dad had a restraining order on him, which is why we never knew my dad's parental side of the family. So I've never known anybody with my last name.

But anyway, this year to cope with his grief, my brother did some digging into my dad's dad's side and turns out he had a secret half-brother who was a locally famous radio personality. What? My brother met with him and said he looked, talked, and acted so creepily similar to my dad. Also turns out my piece of shit grandfather also tried to kill him and his mom. What? So they cut off that side of the family as well, never knowing any family since his mom didn't have any. They would have been such great friends. Which is so sad. They would have been brothers. Yeah. Both were only children of single moms. Another development, my brother kept digging and it turns out my dad has nine more siblings. Oh. Shitty grandpa had seven kids with a woman,

got rich somehow, and had a ton of grandchildren who adored him. And then it says Ugg, which is very confusing since he was literally a monster to my dad and his secret semi-famous half-brother. I don't know how much of this my dad knew. Probably none of it. It may have been too painful for him. Anyway, my piece of shit grandfather is dead now for the past decade, but I will never stop digging. Seems like the older you get, the more family secrets come out. Yeah. Anyway, I love you guys so fucking much, Lauren. God, is this like the new thing because of all these ancestry and 23andMe where people are like, it's secrets that for decades people have been able to hide. It's like, well, now here it is. And it doesn't happen. A lot of people don't

like suspect something and so don't do it until their parents die. And then like that wasn't my dad and they have no one that can ask questions to. Yeah. It's and no one to kind of confront and go, is there a reason this was happening? Look, I wasn't not stoked. Wait, I wasn't not bummed that I didn't have a secret sibling when I did my DNA test. You know what I mean? Or that I wasn't adopted because I'm like exactly like my dad. There's no way. But I wasn't like, I was hoping for some a little drama, a little branch off that family tree that kind of went somewhere else. Yeah. That kind of went all curly and weird. It was like, nope. It's fascinating. Well, and also I think it's it might be nice to people here and then they're like, oh, I'm not the only

one with this weird family with all this crazy shit. Guys, everyone has crazy shit in their family just because my family is actually my family doesn't mean we don't have a bunch of crazy fucking secrets and shit for real. You know, for real. My dad knows how to use a switchblade. That's all I'm saying. Okay. So this just says hometown story is the subject line. Okay. Hello, Karen, Georgia and the pack. I love that pack. Can you imagine if my dogs and your cats all got together and like ran as a pack? Oh, that would be cute. Elvis jumps on to Georgia's back to go in the trash can. And they all they make a pyramid and they go to Hawaii together. Okay. When I was a 21 year old college student, I had this sense that I was invincible.

Oh, God. Hello. This meant a lot of solo night walks home from the bar in parentheses, kids don't try this at home. One night I was less than half a block from my apartment when it happened. I felt large hands firmly grabbing my shoulders from behind. I froze. I couldn't move, scream or react in any way. All I could think was it's happening. This is it. As the hands grip on my shoulders got tighter and forced me into the street where they then abruptly let go. I spun around to look and took in the following scene. Standing at the front gate of the house that I was just about to walk past was a frat bro drunkenly pissing onto the sidewalk in the street next to me was the gentleman who saw that I was just about to unknowingly walk into a

non consensual golden shower and recognizing that there was no time to intervene in any other way grabbed me mere inches from disaster and pulled me out of harm's way. Wow. I thanked him. He said, you're welcome and we parted ways. If you're out there kind sir, I still appreciate what you did for me that day. Stay sexy and don't walk home alone at night and don't get peed on by strangers, Jana. Oh my God, that's like the best possible outcome. It is the perfect turn. It's the perfect turn. That's amazing. Isn't that crazy? I wonder, was the guy his friend or something? Or he was, if it was just a bunch of people walking home from a bar, you just had better vision than she did or something. Lucky. Yeah. Okay. This is a grandma's squirreling story. Squirreling. Squirreling

away. Oh, okay. Yes. Yes. Squirreling should away. Got it. Hey, friends, human and furry. I just listened to the Minnesota grandparent's squirreling random items. So I remembered my own grandmother's story. My grandmother told me when she and my grandfather were young and just starting out that my grandpa would constantly complain about the amount of shoes she had. Not much changes over the years, do they? Well, this major complaint was not just that she had so many shoes, but that she had too many pairs of shoes that were too worn down to wear again anyway. As you can imagine, a newly married couple living in Montana in the early 60s did not have the biggest home, so he wanted her to clear out some room in the house. My grandma refused and thought that was

that until one day she came home to her husband burning the trash in a metal barrel. No, they lived on a small ranch in Montana, so this was pretty normal. She didn't think anything of it until she noticed multiple pairs of her old shoes were gone. Yet, my grandpa took it upon himself to clear out the closet of my grandma's old shoes. Now, I told you this is a squirreling story. So my grandma went running out of the house cursing my grandpa and trying to put out the fire. She exclaimed that inside those shoes is where she hid all her extra cash. She would make from odd jobs and babysitting from other ranch families. Apparently, my stubborn grandpa burnt over $100 in cash by simply trying to clean out the closet. And then it says to save you, well, Stephen, time,

that's around $800 to $1,000 now. Oh, no. Stay sexy and don't hide money in your shoes, Whitney. I'm so glad that I was immediately thinking it was going to be like tens of thousands of dollars, so thank God, but still. $800 to $1,000 when you're fucking living on a ranch trying to make ends meet. Young newlyweds. That's so much money. You know what's funny is immediately the picture in my mind was this pair of shoes that I had when I was 19 that I loved so much that were like these little slip-on. They almost look like rich guy slippers where they were black, flat, and they had a weird little crest at the top. And I wore them until they had a hole in the bottom. And then I put electricianers tape over the hole because I couldn't find them anywhere

else. So I just kept doing that. And I like that's the first pair of shoes I imagined were in that grandma's closet. Well, I don't really understand where the money would have gone, but that's not our business. I guess maybe in the toe. Yeah, she's like, but also why is she hiding it? I mean, like, what? Anyway, look. A lot of questions. No answers. That money got burnt. And listen, hopefully after that, they started sharing some secrets with each other. You gotta at least tell your your life partner where you're hiding money. Yes, especially because you'll forget. I told Mints where I was hiding money once because I was like, never let me throw that coat away. Okay. Looking for a better cooking routine with meal planning, shopping, and prepping

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dwindles, a pair of unlikely heroes emerges. Follow against the odds wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. I'm not going to read this subject line. Hello, lovely friends and animals. I listen all the time to get through my boring desk job and you guys keep me laughing and make the time fly by. I'm always trying to remember different things that have happened to me to write in about, but I never have any luck, which is why I was excited when I realized my grandma is a badass bitch that spent her younger life as a nurse in the Bronx, jumping buildings at rooftop parties and doing things I can never imagine my Irish Catholic grandma doing. It's so amazing because

also is Irish Catholics were very bottom heavy. Usually it's not easy to jump from roof to roof. Okay, so she's led a few stories slip. Like the one time she told us on her way to work one day, she stopped at the phone booth to make a call and went to lean her elbow down when she felt something squishy. No, she immediately pulled her arm away to see a fucking human eyeball. She knew it was a human eye because she was a nurse and she had no idea how it got there, but she figured she better just leave it for whoever left it there to find. I can't do eyeballs. You can't. I have a hard time with eyeballs. You did the eyeball killer. I did. It was hard. It is really gross. And also, did that person go in there to call like 9-1-1?

What are you making calls for? Oh, God. Or could have just been someone that like was trying to fuck with people and it wasn't real. Let's pretend it was a cow's eyeball. Let's pretend it was a cow's eyeball that was also not real. Right. Okay. Another story, it was like a fake cow. Another story my grandma loves is how on long shifts at the hospital when she would need a nap, all the break rooms would be full of other people sleeping or doing the do. And it was almost never a nice quiet space where she could get some rest. So, she decided to start taking naps in the morgue on the fucking examination tables. Apparently, she was friends with the mortician and he didn't mind. I love to hear her crazy stories and hopefully

one day she'll spill more of the beans. But until then, SSDGM, Finn. Yeah. I love those. I want to talk to grandma. I mean, you're a nurse in the Bronx. Back in the day. You got some fucking stories. There's some stories to tell. Oh, the eyeballs. Oh, the eyeballs. Okay. This one's very late-hearted, it says. It starts, stop. When I was five years old, my mom woke me up at around 6 a.m. and frantically scurried me and my brother into my parents' bed. She was shaking and I could hear my dad clacking around the house, clattering around that. She was shaking and I could hear my dad clattering around the house. About five minutes later, I heard the back door close and a couple minutes after that,

the police were knocking on our door. Once my parents had chilled the fuck out and the cops were gone, I was told what had gone down. When my dad had gotten up to start his day, he walked into the bathroom to find a man taking a bubble bath. What? Dad started yelling to mom to quote, call 911, call 911. Side note, I'm from Melbourne, Australia, so you should 100% dial 000, but Holly wouldn't panic our powerful entities. Wow. So he said call 911, even though it was called. Even though that wasn't their emergency number. That's hilarious. Dad was hiding all the knives while my mom was protecting the children when they heard a little

voice say, excuse me, would you be able to close the door? Oh, and can someone grab me a towel? Well, after the intruder had soaked himself, spa jets on and everything, he quietly let himself out of the back door and sauntered off to start his day. The police didn't quite know how to handle it. To be honest, they probably thought it was fucking hilarious. So we added an extra lock to the back door and gave that tub a good scrub. Love everything you do. Stay sexy and never underestimate the importance of a good soak. Hashtag self care. Hillary. What? I don't know. Where? I don't know. And how? I agree. Oh my God, that's hilarious. I know. Nothing. He wasn't doing anything. He wasn't,

and he kind of wasn't worried about it. Yeah. It seems like, yeah. All right, send us your stories. Drugs. Drugs. The answer is always drugs. Always. My favorite murder at Gmail. Send us your weird stories, family secrets. Let's do this. We love it all. And stay sexy. And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Elvis, do you want a cookie?