My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 169

Episode Date: April 6, 2020

This week’s hometowns include a wedding day murder and a city conspiracy.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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That's the best one yet. That's the best one yet. Hello. Hello. And welcome. Oh. Hello. To my favorite murder.

The minisode. Yeah, the short one. Yeah. Let's do this. Let's do the little one. You go first. This is the quick, this is the quick hit to hold you over. That's right.

How's your, uh, today's quarantine going? Fine. Oh, I went late in the sun a little bit. Man. That felt good. Yeah. Try it. Okay.

Well, it's different for me. Right now. Right now. 15 minutes. I come back and I'm covered in blisters. Thanks a lot. I have sunstroke. My first email, the subject line is hometown in quotes halving.

The word. Half. Like half. Half. But with a V. So it's very difficult to pronounce. It is. But you did great. Unless you're Dutch.

Thanks. Okay. Salutations. Nice. Great. This is fucking a spider wrote this to us. Charlie, is that you? So you didn't say it.

A relative spoiler alert. A relatively new listener here. Um, I had to listen to your episodes in order. I was introduced to your podcast by my brother and I'm obsessed with it. Thanks for the laughs in, uh, on my morning commute and giving me something other than excruciating traffic to think about. Not anymore. But you miss that fucking traffic.

Don't you? See, this is the way life teaches us. It's all over. Okay. Says for this. Ironically, here it says, for the sake of brevity, I'll get down to it. I grew up in a small mountain community in Northern California where my father was the fire captain at the local fire station as a kid.

He'd come home after a shift and tell us about some of his experiences. Mostly meant to teach us valuable life lessons. Dash sound familiar. Yeah. I mean, that's all it is. Lesson after lesson. Um, but here it says kid skateboarding accidents. Always wear a helmet.

House fires. Don't leave a candle burning. My dad's obsessed with that one. Don't leave a candle burning and make sure you turn off the stove. Dash dash. You get the idea. I'll lecture aside. Believe me when I say that he saw some shit in his 32 year career.

Of course he did. Uh, but one particular story takes the cake and will forever be burned into my memory. The highway that runs through our mountain community is pretty treacherous, especially in the wet winter months. Some say it's one of the most dangerous in the world, claiming lives on a regular basis. I wonder if they live in Calistoga because there's a couple of those mountain communities up there that are, it's crazy. It's truly on the mountain.

Like windy and terrifying hairpin turns and stuff. Yeah. And just forest on either side. Sure. Scary. Uh, parentheses. Um, you can imagine my dad's life lessons when it came to driving. One raining at evening, a man in a small sedan was driving behind a flatbed truck, towing

a tractor when one of the chains securing the tractor came loose. The tractor rolled off the flatbed and onto the sedan behind it, severing the car and the driver in half. Think upper body in the back seat, lower body jammed underneath the steering wheel. After determining that the driver, a man in his mid 30s was most definitely deceased and no longer in need of medical attention. My dad proceeded to search for some identification. He opened the glove box in the hopes of finding the man's registration or other documents

when he found a loaded handgun and a handwritten note. Hoping the note would give the clue to the man's identity. He began to read it. The note addressed to the parents of the driver's girlfriend and the driver proceeded to explain all of the reasons why he had murdered their daughter. My dad and his crew were eventually able to identify the man after his shift. My dad recounted the story to my mom and as it turns out, here's the kicker. I'm like, this story needs a kicker.

Yeah. My mom grew up with the guy and was friends with his sister. She described him as someone that was, quote, not really friendly and not a jerk, just kind of there, end quote. Needless to say, if it weren't for the tractor and perhaps the death highway, the girlfriend would have been murdered. Stay sexy, make sure items are secured before driving away and don't murder your girlfriend. Just break up with her like a normal person.

B. So he was on his way to kill the girlfriend. He hadn't just killed the girlfriend. Correct. Yes. It seems like they would have mentioned. Yeah. Holy shit.

He was on his way. Holy shit. I mean, amazing if true, a great story if not. I mean. That has, that reeks of legendary hometown style stuff. Please don't tell us if it's not. I feel like those are like my friend's dad knew another dad who we all know each other turns out.

Okay. The audience is sleeping on my stories. So let me grab them. Okay. I'm sorry. She looks really pissed off. Okay. Well, she has a right to be.

Amen, sister. She, she has it really hard. It's really, she's been quarantining her whole fucking life. Now I know. We're all indoor cats now. Every last one of us. We really are. So you, you don't like it?

Let your cat out. Okay. This one's called that one time a guy chopped up his wife on my parents wedding day. Oh, hello to my, this is weird. Hello to my two favorite vintage dress connoisseurs. I don't think I've seen you in a vintage dress. How am I? Don't hog vintage dress area.

I was there when you were fucking seven talking about Sesame Street and shit. I was in the vintage doors. You were scrubbing through. Sorry. Scouring the word. It's good. Thank you. Scouring.

You were. You're right. Scouring through myself. Scabies. That's right. I crawled so you could run. That was beautiful. I just don't have the energy anymore.

I really, I have. I was more grandma. You were, you were more like, um, perfect astronauts wife. Yeah. I was much more grandma drag. I loved a really dowdy, um, you know, one of those fifties dresses that was like brown and black plaid. Your name would have been Mabel or something.

Yes. Fully. And then orthopedic shoe. That was my thing. So cute. Thank you. So cute. Okay.

This story comes from my mom's hometown. I've always been a murderer at heart. I would secretly switch the TV to investigation discovery when my parents left the room, but my mom doesn't share the same passion for true crime that I do probably because her and my dad are both therapists and hear enough crazy stories at work. So when my mom was recounting her wedding day and mentioned that her priest couldn't come to her wedding reception because he was comforting a local family after a whole, a horrible tragedy, I was immediately hooked.

It took a little bit of prying to get the full scoop out of her, but it turns out that the story revolves around a local well loved man who owned a family taco shop. Now the same weekend, my mom and dad were prepping for their lovely wedding. This man, all caps, chopped up his wife and cooked her at their taco shop. Oh no. Yep. It says. No.

Yep. He hit her over the head with a metal bar, dismembered her body and then cooked her, cooked up her remains at their restaurant. If there's anything remotely funny about the story, it would be that during my mom's otherwise lovely wedding video, you can hear my aunt, who is much more of a murderer than my mom, loudly and graphically discussing how they found the man's wife's head in a box. Oh my God. Uh-huh.

I bet the mom was so pissed. The bride was so pissed. So pissed. It's fine. No, it's fine. No, of course we have to talk about it. She's like livid. Many attest to the fact that the man and his wife had a seemingly happy marriage before

the incident, making it all the more shocking to locals. Apparently he saw, I'm not saying the guy's name isn't this, but I'm not saying it, so the man apparently saw his wife as a demon at the time of the incident. Many doctors and sheriffs blamed this quote on marijuana-induced psychosis. And then she says, to me, that explanation sounds like some war on drugs era bullshit. My mom and many others that knew him attribute his violent behavior to his recent brain surgery to remove a blood clot. Oh, that's a plot of a law and order.

That's right. Dun, dun, dun. They believe he never fully recovered from the surgery and was never quite the same after. Either way, it's a tragic story and probably put a slight damper on my parents' wedding day. My grandmother and my grandma was much more worried about John F. Kennedy Jr., whose plane went missing that day. This was definitely a very bad day for a wedding.

Woo, sorry for that heaviness. On the bright side, my parents still remember their wedding fondly and have been happily married for almost 21 years. Like I mentioned, yeah, they're both therapists and are completing as many Skype and phone calls as they can during this international pandemic to make sure their clients still have access to the help they need. This is a gentle reminder to listeners that caring for your mental health is more important than ever right now.

Oh, nice. Stay sexy and try not to schedule your wedding on the same day as a horrific local tragedy Aaron from Michigan. Oof. Yeah. Horrifying. But it almost feels like since the parents are still married, which is actually the odds are against you.

So that's great news. It's like all the bad luck, I mean, it's not luck, but all the bad vibes went somewhere else and they got. Good point. I mean, that's a, that's an odd stance to take. It's almost like I'm being a spiritualist or something. Right. Or that you're like, wait for bad things to happen before you do anything good.

Wait for a bad magnet to come and I don't even know what the point is. Hope other people have tragedy before them before you have any joy. Yeah. That's a very revealing about really how I am. Okay. Let's see. This just says hometown story. Great.

Hey, lovelies. Well, I love you guys stuff for now and get to it. Love it. Let's do it. My mom and I were cooking dinner one night and listening to a podcast and they were covering Richard Ramirez out of nowhere. My mom just calmly says, did you know your grandma was almost his 15th victim immediately? I just stopped everything and screamed, what are you, wait, are you serious?

And she said, yep. And she was 15 and had, and he had come up behind her and her friends grabbed her and apparently had a knife in his hand. He ended up punching him in the balls and he let her go. So that was in quotes. I call my grandma and she confirmed that this was true before I could even finish saying his name to ask her if it was true. She cut me off, gasping and went on with the story.

She said her and her friends were walking home one day and out of nowhere she was grabbed from the back and he had a knife held to her and she yelled to her friends to run and get help. My grandma fought as hard as she could until eventually she just punched him in the dick. After that, she said she felt like passing out but she knew that she had to keep running for help. Eventually she got to her family and friends she was walking with and they tried to chase him down but they couldn't catch him.

A few days later she saw him on the news and she saw that they caught him. I'm so thankful my grandma was able to get out of that alive and she even said she's glad he died back in 2013 when she heard about his death because quote, that's what he gets for everything he did. All the laughs and smiles you give me, you've helped me through some tough times, give Elvis a cookie and pet Steven's mustache for me, SSGM jewels. Wow. Those jewels, wow, first hand in grandma, oh my God.

Also how young is Jules that her grandma was 15 when Richard remarried, this is a baby writing us or her family news. You're too young, Jules, go to bed. But thank you for getting us that good stuff because you know that's the good stuff we want. And then go to bed. Looking for a better cooking routine? With meal planning, shopping and prepping handled, Hello Fresh has you covered.

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Hi, KGS pets. It's K slash G. You get it. I sent this once before, but let me be honest, I'm quarantined and have nothing better to do but spam my favorite podcasters. Here we go. My father was in graduate school in Rochester, New York during the Vietnam War. While he was there, there was an attack on the nearby army draft offices. No one was hurt, but draft registry files were destroyed and the attackers just generally

ransacked the place. One of the files that happened to be destroyed was my uncle's who avoided the draft because he was a practicing Buddhist and a conscientious objector. The whole incident was called the flower city conspiracy and officially dubbed a terrorist attack. Oh, years later, my dad was catching up with an old friend from grad school who casually asked whatever happened with that FBI investigation. My dad had no idea what he meant, but his friend explained that back in school, the FBI

had approached people in their friend circle and interviewed them about my dad and his possible connection to the attack. Since his brother's file was destroyed and he was just generally known to be a draft dodging hippie, he was basically on the shortlist of people who might be involved. The Freedom of Information Act that my dad could request any old documents about him, so he decided to head to the FBI's offices and find out what their old investigation turned up. The secretary at the office told him that they could release the files, but there was

a five cent charge per page for copies. Thinking this was fine, he agreed only to be told that the total would be almost $1,000. Turns out they had amassed thousands and thousands of pages on him during that time. Where he went, what he did, ladies, he had over to his apartment, etc. The FBI secretary offered him a condensed version with just the highlights. I guess spark notes on dossiers are a common practice. Which is what he ended up getting. My dad said he might have done a lot fewer drugs if he knew there was a man in a black

car outside watching. Jesus! But the investigation never came up with any real connection to the Flower City conspiracy and they never brought any charges against him. How much? I bet he did it. No. Stop it.

That's it. Stay sexy and don't get murdered and live a life the FBI could write 10,000 pages on. Tara. That's a good point. It's also, wouldn't you kill to read a day-by-day diary of what you did? First of all, so boring, but for my narcissism piece, it would be so satisfying to be like, and then I took the bus to the Gap. She looked contemplative that day and she smelled three cigarettes.

She wore a grandma, she wore a shawl, and a bonnet, it's very odd. The barrettes in her hair didn't make sense because she didn't need them, but they seem more decorative than anything else. She kept trying to give children candy. That's kind of the most embarrassing part of that era of the 90s was barrettes no one actually needed. Oh yeah. A lot of just two barrettes, a lot of baby behavior.

Okay. This is, this one is quite something. Okay. Baby behavior, why isn't this a real episode and we could call it baby behavior? So, the subject line is celebrity chef Lamborghini stolen with a side of attempted murder. Hi best friends, let's get into it. I'm from Marin County and in high school in 2009, I was running with the wrong crowd. What an epic beginning, great job.

One day I was hanging with my friend and he casually told me that our mutual friend was planning to steal a car from a famous chef in San Francisco. The mutual friend was older than me, he was like 16 at the time and he didn't strike me as the James Bond grand theft auto type. So even though I was a young murderer, no, I still really didn't give a shit. Some months later, my friend shows me an article with a headline like Guy Fieri's Lamborghini is stolen from dealership in San Francisco. No, just want to let that sink in for a moment.

Our mutual friend stole Guy Fieri's Lamborghini, Mr. Flavortown himself. He repelled off the roof in the middle of the night, impersonated a worker, drove that shit off the lot and Joy wrote it over the golden game. He deserves it. No charges pressed. For real? You get it. You get away clean.

Listen to this, the thing was bright, freaking yellow and he was literally 16 years old. I honestly couldn't even drive at 16, so I was like, holy shit. This is also epic because those cars are, it's well known that they're impossible to drive. Are they? So hard to drive. Yeah. It's just like a crazy racing machine.

Oh, that's so badass. I love this guy. They hadn't found the car yet and they didn't have a suspect in mind. I was like, there's no way I can get involved in this, but I want, but I know more than the cops about this crazy heist. After a few months without running into him though, I once again started minding my own business. The biggest for him was that he was actually kind of a huge asshole, sociopath, and instead

of being the coolest 16 year old ever, he caused a massive scene trying to kill his ex-girlfriend by shooting at her from his motorcycle outside the 2am club in Mill Valley where nothing like this has literally ever happened. So the police tracked his motorcycle back to a storage unit and then boom, there's the bright yellow Lambo along with a ton of shit like fake IDs, drugs and guns. I'm sorry, he is the coolest 16 year old. Imagine what his parents are going through. Imagine the leather jacket that guy wears.

It's vegan leather, which is the coolest. Oh, it's so cool. When they caught him, Guy Fieri actually had to testify against him in court in Marin and I can't help but giggle when I think about it. Anyways, the kid got sent to jail for attempted murder and is sitting across the bay in San Quentin as we speak. He's still an icon regardless of his murderous fuckery, but it's a bummer he had to ruin it by being an asshole.

Thanks for reading this and I hope the facts are accurate because in true MFM form, I did my best. I don't care if they're accurate. We don't want the truth. It's good stuff. We can't handle the truth. But hey, that's why I'm sending this to y'all and not NPR or something. Anyways, stay sexy and don't fuck with Flavortown XOXOC.

Oh my God. That was so good. That was excellent. That was fucking legendary, it had everything we need, everything in and more. Thank you, C. Great job. Weirdly, mine has Alcatraz in it too. My last one.

This is called... San Quentin. Same thing. Oh. Right. Similar. Right. Okay, this one's about Alcatraz.

Same bay. Same bay. Hello, MFM crew. I just finished listening to episode 214 where Georgia went over the hilariously crafty story of the escape from Alcatraz. I want to share a very cool story about my badass native uncle. This is not necessarily a murder story. That is, unless you count the murder of my native people and culture for centuries.

Yay. Yep. Anyhow, all caps. We do. We do. We do. 100%. And then it says all caps.

Anyhow. My uncle is John Trudell. You may or may not have heard of him, but he was the fearless leader of the American Indian movement in the 1970s. He was also part of the Alcatraz takeover by natives from all tribes, which lasted from November 20th, 1969 to June 11th, 1971. This was an occupation to protest federal laws which contradicted land treaties with tribes and aimed to destroy American Indian culture.

My uncle wasn't having it. I remember hearing about this for sure. Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is really famous. Yeah, we learned this. They occupied Alcatraz. Yeah.

I think they talk about it on the Alcatraz tour. Right. Yeah. And then from all tribes joined in on the movement, breaking in, quote, and occupying Alcatraz in a protest that was a first of its kind and a huge success for native people. The occupation of Alcatraz was successful by allowing natives to finally have a voice in their mistreatment in North America and allowed them to expose issues in the way the government treats native people.

And then a very eff the police moment, am I right? My uncle's role in the protest was to run radio free Alcatraz. He voiced the anger, sadness, concerns, and celebrations of many native people and truly became a sounding board to let the world know who these people were from a cell block in a notorious abandoned prison. Yeah. The movement was eventually forced to shut down, but the great work our native people did there shows how passionate we are about culture and how we never back down.

My uncle went on to lead the AIM, American Indian Movement, and pissed the government off for many years. He created spoken word music, starred in movies, and even dated Angelina Jolie's mom. And it says, yes, of all the amazing things he did, that was my favorite and most exciting claim to fame in fifth grade. Now at 28 years old, I truly see the inspiration he was to so many. I'm so proud of my badass family, my badass last name, and my history. My uncle left on his journey a few years ago, but his memory lives on in many people and

with memorials, my cousin organizes annually. Stay sexy and never stop pissing off authority, Rose. Wow. Isn't that beautiful? That was amazing, Rose. Hell yes to your uncle and that movement, that's so cool. Incredible. Yeah.

And it is, I could be wrong about the tour, it being a part of the tour, I just remember if it wasn't on the Alcatraz Tours tour, then they taught it in our schools, maybe because just I live so close by. Right. But I think, well I did go on the Alcatraz tour when I was like seven, so that could be where I heard about it. But I do think that they taught that in schools here in California. Yeah.

Yeah. Crazy. Amazing. Is that it? I think that's it. I think we've done it. What do we do now? We say goodbye.

All right. Send us your stories. Tell us what's going on in your lives right now. Is there any like quarantine foibles that you're having or whatever? Any mix-ups? Like, oh, are any meat cutes? Any meat cutes? Any meat cutes through your front window that can't actually, they can't really take

place, but the passion is there. It's a look cute. Oh, it's a stare down. It's stare porn. That's the reason I love the movie Twilight so much is my friend was like, how could you like that movie? And I was like, it was like 15-year-old stare porn. Who doesn't love a good stare across a chemistry class?

A good moment. Come on. He's looking right at me. He's looking at me. The best. So yeah, if you, if my recommendation is watch the movie Twilight. Yeah. Tell us what, tell us what online dating is like right now.

I'm so curious. It's got to suck. A lot of back and forth, a lot of chit chat. You have to like get to know people probably or just like, hey, what's, talking about the weather. It must be very dull. Yeah. For sure.

I can imagine. Unless. Thanks for listening, guys. Yeah. And stay sexy. And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Elvis.

You want a cookie? Yeah.