My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 191
Episode Date: September 7, 2020This week’s hometowns include a nun story and a serial killer connection.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-se...ll-my-info.
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Hello and welcome.
It's not my favorite murder.
The mini-soad.
Well, it's mini.
You're welcome.
There you go.
Yeah.
What more kind of introduction do you need for this one?
Keep making up.
Bullshit.
I can't keep telling you it's mini and you're not getting it.
I can't keep telling you that's Georgia Hardstar.
I can't keep telling you that that's Daniel Gareth and that you guys write us in eight
letters and we read them to you.
Yeah, wait a second.
You know what?
This is the wrong attitude.
What if there is a person logging on for the first time?
What if there's a person downloading from the mainframe today for the first time?
What's up, Jerry?
Thank you for joining us.
Hi.
What's your wife force you?
G or a J?
That's going to be a J.
Yeah.
That's why it's taken him this long.
He thought, boys don't like this.
Yes, they do, Jerry.
Just get, just you wait.
There are lady jerry's, aren't there?
Yeah, with G's.
But this Jerry is a J.
Oh, okay.
I didn't know that.
Okay.
Good to know.
Don't, don't fight the improv.
That's the worst thing you can do.
Oh, I just said no to your guy that you invited onto the show.
Shit.
Yeah.
What do you, I'm trying to flirt with an actual Jerry.
Oh yeah.
That's his name.
Oh, you want to go first this week?
Just change it up.
Sure.
Come on.
Let's do it.
Let's, let's just make Jerry think that this is how it's always, how it always is.
Jerry is going to be so fucking confused when it goes regular again.
When he has to binge listen to every episode.
He's going to be like, this isn't how I learned how it is.
I thought the voice that sounds just like the second voice was the first voice.
I've had them mixed up this whole time.
This is called slept in the lap of a serial killer.
Oh.
Okay.
It just starts growing up the son of a church of Christ preacher.
You see a lot of shit.
And a lot is one word.
It's also such a guy thing to just be like, there's no hello.
No, I don't have to talk to you about your pets.
No compliments, of course.
It's about my story.
Here it is.
Go ahead.
All right.
One thing happened in 1976 when my family lived in Jeffersonville, Indiana that I will
never forget.
I was six years old at the time.
My father would often counsel people with typically the goal of baptizing, i.e. saving
them, which is basically the job of a preacher.
One of these cases I will never forget.
It was a man named James Lofton.
He was 31 and married to his pregnant wife.
My folks took them and my younger brother and I to dinner one night.
As we drove home, I fell asleep in the back seat in Mr. Lofton's lap.
After they were both baptized a few weeks later during a Sunday morning sermon, Mr. Lofton
stood up in the middle of the sermon and yelled, y'all need to listen to these men because
he is speaking the truth.
Yes.
Yes.
Acting out in church is my favorite.
Because you know there's something going on.
No one does it.
No.
He says, now this thing wasn't normal for your average conservative church of Christ
service.
No, no, no.
And I remember it being extremely awkward.
Yes.
People get scared when you yell in church.
Even a six-year-old is like, that's not how this goes.
You're supposed to be paying attention to the guy up there, not people in the middle.
A few weeks later, Lofton stopped coming to church.
His wife contacted my father saying she was worried about him and that he was acting
very strange and not coming home at night.
Within a few days, Lofton and a younger accomplice took a car salesman from Louisville, Kentucky
across the river from Jeffersonville, Indiana on a test drive.
They drove onto the Louisville Bridge and shot the salesman in the back of the head,
where he fell into the Ohio River.
A few days later, Lofton, this time alone, beat to death a couple with an axe and set
fire to their house.
After that, he was captured by police and put into a jail where he would soon escape
just a day later.
He then called my dad, who pleaded for him to turn himself in.
I remember the police staking out our house to both protect us and also capture him if
they decided to come by.
The police did eventually catch him within a few days and he was convicted of one count
of capital murder in Kentucky and two counts in Indiana.
He received three consecutive life sentences.
If he's still alive, he would be 75 years old.
So that's my story.
Love your show and you two sexy ladies.
Stay that way and don't get murdered.
And his name is Matt Goad.
And I clicked on his link to, you know, in his signature and he's like an insanely talented
graphic artist turns out.
Famous, insanely talented.
We should not have talked.
You know, this happens every time we talk shit about somebody at the top of their
email.
We regret it by the end.
That's right.
That's a great story, Matt.
Wait, why did he do it?
Why did he go on a killing spree?
I mean, why did he stand up in the same thing that made him stand up in church and scream
something is the same thing that made him go on it.
It's just like you're unhinged.
No, you know what it is.
What?
He got the devil in him.
He's got the devil in him.
But he was baptized.
That's what it is.
It's that simple.
It's awful.
It's a hometown story.
Hey, all.
Perfect.
I just finished this week's episode and was delighted to hear Karen talk about Stull Cemetery.
I grew up a few miles from there in a little town called LaCompton and thought you might
like to hear from someone with a personal connection to the place.
That's the whole point of what this is.
That's what we're looking for.
We're setting out those those red threads to connect to your picture from the picture
we put up three months ago.
Get back to us about this stuff.
When I was a teenager in the 90s, the Bruin Church and so-called Hanging Tree were still
there.
By that time, drunken looky-loos.
Drunken looky-loos are the best kind of looky-loos.
Hey, what's that?
They look so loud.
They look so loud and it's always pointing and screaming.
They want to turn whatever it is into a restaurant and they're just like, that's co-kids.
Okay.
Well, one leads to the other.
Drunken looky-loos have done enough damage to headstones and cemetery grounds that the
community got fed up and surrounded the whole thing with a fence.
Wow.
Things were bad enough that the local sheriff's posted patrols every Halloween.
That actually makes sense.
Yeah.
Fucking looky-loos just falling all over the place.
I think once you destroy a headstone, you're not a looky-loo anymore.
That's called you're a menace.
I don't know.
Drunken menace?
That's called.
Sorry to loop it all together, but that's called you got the devil in you.
I mean, am I right?
Amen.
Hey, sister.
This is a Methodist episode of the mini.
Naturally, it was a rite of passage for area kids to sneak into the cemetery and scare the
shit out of each other.
Some of my classmates had ridiculous stories about it.
My personal favorite?
Two boys will call them Jay and Ryan who claim to have found the legendary staircase.
So do you remember the staircase that supposedly goes to help with lots of stories around it?
That's apparently very difficult to find.
It's not obvious from what I remember.
You can't be any looky-loo coming by.
No, especially if you're drunk.
You're going to be looking in the completely wrong place for a staircase.
You think it's spiral?
It's not.
It's spiral.
Come on.
It's not a spiral staircase to help.
They plan to send Jay down, but only after they'd looped a length of rope around his waist
and tied the other end to the bumper of Ryan's truck.
I'm not sure if they meant to tow Jay out of hell or to use him as devil bait.
Teenage boys, good bless.
At any rate, they never went through with it.
They said they heard growling as soon as Jay went down the first step and they ran for their lives.
Bullshit.
The devil.
Raccoon disturbed by two dumbasses.
I'll let you decide.
I never bought into the lore because my parents say the stories that only started circulating
when they were teenagers in the 70s and because I have family connection to the cemetery.
I'm not Amish, just ascended from German farmstock.
My dad's grandma, May, and grandpa, John are buried there.
I never knew John, but my great-grandma, May, lived to be 92, dying in 1991 when I was 8 years old.
May was a tiny, sweet lady who burned the shit out of fried bologna sandwiches every time.
Each Memorial Day, until I moved away from college, I visited the cemetery with my family
to leave flowers for my great-grandparents.
We'd often stand in the shade of the infamous tree as we paid our respects.
Dad's always been frustrated by the legends about Stull because they've led to people fucking up the cemetery grounds.
To me, Stull Cemetery is just a peaceful, sad place like any small country cemetery,
but it's fascinating to track how these kinds of legends come into being.
Thanks for the hours of entertainment and for building a fabulous community, Lauren.
Aw, that's sweet.
That was a heartfelt touching story.
Yeah, and then it was a little behind-the-scenes of Stull Cemetery, the gateway to hell.
And then it made me remember that Vince made me my first ever fried bologna sandwich
because that's totally a Midwestern thing.
It is. I've never had a fried bologna sandwich.
It's pretty good.
Did you like it?
Yeah, of course.
It's fried and bologna.
Yeah, I was gonna say.
Is it like a flat fried hot dog, basically?
It's like a grilled cheese, but with fried bologna in it.
Okay.
It's great.
Yeah, I'm seeing it.
Yeah, I can picture it now.
Okay, Mimi is acting up.
Mimi's in.
Mimi.
Okay, this is called...
Scream for the microphone, Mimi.
Scream.
Mimi.
There she is.
Okay, lay down, please.
I think we're gonna post this as a video on the fan cult, so you'll be able to see Mimi
just getting cat hair all over me right now.
Okay, this is called...
It's an amazing video.
You know the thing that people haven't seen enough of, cats.
Okay, this is called...
Our mother-in-law was Patty Hearst's escort for her trial.
Yes.
Hello, MFM crew.
I've been meaning to write this story for some time, but it wasn't until I mentioned
it to my ex-husband's wife and fellow Mernerino Maddi, who said she hadn't heard the story,
that we asked our mother-in-law to tell us all the details over a socially distant mother-stay
brunch.
That's what mother-stay brunch is for, is tell us about your crazy stories.
With your husband's new wife.
Whatever.
That's modern and bold, and I like it.
It's very emotionally intellectual, or yeah, emotionally intelligent.
It is.
It's emotionally...
Emotionally intellectual is like a little bit snobby.
That's a little...
Like you're bragging about knowing the difference between sociopaths and psychopaths.
Okay.
So, actually...
Oh, this is funny.
Our mother-in-law, Jerry Jewett, I must have picked that up, the Jerry, was hired by the
U.S. Marshals Office in San Francisco as a secretary upon graduation from high school.
She was hired for the job by a bunch of old men, and she said she got the job because,
while facing a wall, her boobs hit before her toes did.
Yay for 70s sexism, right?
What?
Wait a second.
That was the job interview?
Well, essentially, probably.
Do you think Jerry Jewett was being sarcastic when she told that story, or this was like
a literal, this is how she got the job?
I mean, yeah, they probably hired her because she looked a certain way.
Yeah.
She was, you know, it's like Dolly Parton, it's like nine to five, Dolly Parton.
Secretary, culture, sexism, culture, boobs against the wall.
That wouldn't work for me, this A-cup is not hitting the wall anytime soon.
Anyway, the Patty Hearst case was the biggest thing in the news, and when she was arrested
and tried, she had to have a female escort or matron with her at all times during transport
and the trial.
Being that Jerry was one of only two women in the entire place, she was assigned to be
Patty's matron.
She was required to remove Patty from her cell, take her to and from the car back and forth
from the jail in Redwood City to the trial in San Francisco and be there with her on
any breaks, take her to the bathroom, et cetera.
Our mother-in-law and all her naive 20-year-old wisdom got in trouble for many reasons during
this assignment.
One being she let Patty kiss her boyfriend and fellow SLA member Stephen Solia through
the cell bars.
Oh, she's romantic.
She's let him smooch, but also it's the guy who kidnapped her.
Oh, yeah.
I see.
I see the problem with that.
I see how it's problematic.
I see it now.
During Patty's 1975 arrest, the police used Jerry as a decoy in the marked van to distract
the media while they took Patty out through the back in an unmarked car.
During the trial, Patty and Jerry crocheted a lot and became friends as they spent a lot
of time together.
Patty would ask Jerry to buy her cigarettes and promised that her family would pay her
back, which Jerry made very clear did not happen.
That's the very rich.
They always forget to give you $15.
Right.
They don't realize that $15 is so much money to you because that's not to them.
You'd have to say to them, listen, Patty, I need this $15 back because to me, it's $2
million.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Right.
It's just like any normal young woman, but she does think Patty had been brainwashed.
In the 1988 movie Patty made about her trial, she named one of the jurors, Jerry Jewett,
as a tiny nod to our mother-in-law.
We asked her, I know.
We asked her if they had talked since the trial was over and she said no, but that she
had quote, Twittered at her, but Patty never Twittered back.
No.
Anyway, we knew that we had to share this amazing story with you ladies and also want to thank
you for what you do.
We adore you, SSDGM, Rachel and Maddie.
Wow.
Like you're like, that's like history and you're, you're crushing like in history.
Let's see.
This is just our tile.
This is my dad's story.
My dad is a boomer, which means he was able to pay for his education at UC Berkeley by
working a few side jobs.
I mean, my dad says that all the time.
UC Berkeley, it would like cost $5,000 back then.
It was so cheap.
Yeah.
Why don't you, why can't you pay your way through college now and it's cause it's $150,000
for a fucking one semester.
Yeah.
And then the interest on that student loan and make sure that you're going to keep paying
the student loan well after you've paid it off three times.
But don't worry the job market when you get out of college is fucked and your opening
job is fucking 30 grand.
Okay.
Yeah.
Jerry, stop fucking.
Jerry, stop it.
My dad is a big guy.
So one of these jobs was a security guard for a warehouse in Emeryville.
There'd been a string of warehouse robberies, so his job was to patrol the floor alone
until morning.
He was instructed to never under any circumstance let anyone into the building.
The job is going well until one shift when there's banging on the warehouse door.
He opens the little security window to peer out into the street and they're standing in
the light is a nun.
She's in full habit in a bad part of town in the middle of the night.
She tells him her car broke down.
Can't she come in and use the phone?
Brilliant.
My poor Catholic dad feels so conflicted, but he asked to tell her that he can't open
the door until morning.
She asks him, please, please, can she come in?
She just needs to make a phone call.
He tells her he really can't, but that he will make the call for her.
So he goes to call the police.
When he comes back to the door, the woman is gone.
The police arrive and there is no broken down car and no nun.
Oh my God.
Was she really a nun in trouble or did she have a costume and hidden accomplices who
would have robbed the warehouse, possibly harming my dad in the process?
We'll never know.
Maybe my dad will find out when he gets to Catholic heaven and meets a pistol of nun.
Actually, when the gates are like, remember that nun, you didn't help.
Bye.
You're going down.
You're on the water slide straight to hell.
Straight through the skull cemetery.
Stay sexy and don't trust someone just because they have a uniform.
Emma.
I love that because I feel like all of us would have opened the door, like your first
instinct is to open the door and he refused to as a Catholic, especially as a Catholic,
which I wonder if they looked up beforehand of like, what would work on this specific
would be a, you know, it's almost too, it's almost too, too good of a disguise.
It's sound.
It is reminding me.
Is it a Marky Mark movie?
Is it like the Italian job?
Is there something like that?
Yeah.
Wasn't there one with nuns?
Was it the town, nun masks, but then the masks were like zombies?
No, I think you're thinking like that.
What's the one with Whoopi Goldberg from the 80s?
The great Kathy Najimi.
Such a good movie.
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Goodbye.
Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wondery's podcast against the odds.
In our next season, three masked men hijack a school bus full of children in the sleepy
farm town of Chowchilla, California.
They bury the children and their bus driver deep underground, planning to hold them for
ransom.
Local police and the FBI marshal a search effort, but the trail quickly runs dry as the
air supply for the trapped children dwindles, a pair of unlikely heroes emerges.
Follow against the odds wherever you get your podcasts.
You can listen ad free on the Amazon music or Wondery app.
This one's called human skin book bindings at the Mutter Museum, Dear Karen Georgia and
Co.
On behalf of the staff at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, well known for its
Muter Museum, we are huge fans of your podcast, which is such an honor.
That museum is so fucking cool and badass.
I'm so bummed I've never been there yet.
In your most recent episode, the question of how common was the practice of binding
books in human skin came up and we wanted to offer our expertise.
Hell yes, Muter Museum, Mutter.
Our historical medical library just happens to have the largest confirmed collection of
Anthropodermic, like, like, like derma, Karen, you're so sorry.
No, you're right.
I love words.
Anthropodermic books in the country, so we thought we'd share what we know.
It wasn't uncommon for 19th century physicians and surgeons to tan human skin and subsequently
use the leather as book bindings.
Traditional 19th century tanning began by soaking an animal skin in lime water.
After the skins had soaked any flesh, fat and hair was removed from the skin by hand.
Ew.
The defleshed skins were soaked again in lime water for a few days and then soaked in baths
of tannin, usually derived from tree bark that were made progressively stronger over
a period of weeks or months.
Once tanned, the skins were dried, rolled and pressed into leather.
Of course, this brings up the question of whether the doctors had their patient's permission,
which in many cases can't be confirmed.
Three of our five Anthropodermic books came from the skin of one woman, Mary Lynch, who
died of trichinosis on January 16, 1869 at Old Blockley in Philadelphia.
One of her attending physicians, John Stockton Howe, removed a piece of her skin from her
thigh sometime between her death and burial.
In June of 1887, Howe used the skin to partially bind three books, all dealing with women's
reproductive health.
We don't know if Howe had Mary Lynch's permission or why he chose to bind books about conception
and childbirth with her skin.
These three books, in addition to the other two Anthropodermic books in the library collection,
represent a unique convergence of text and medical specimen.
The books as collections of text remain valuable sources in the history of medicine.
The books as objects force us into uncomfortable considerations of the use of human skin and
bindings and whether the use of human skin diminishes the value of the text, rendering
them mere objects of mortal curiosity.
So smart.
If you're ever in Philadelphia, we would love to give you a private tour and we'd love
to take it.
Oh, please.
Stay sexy and don't let your skin be turned into a book without your consent.
The staff at the Muter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
And then I remember that I have a friend who's this really smart librarian who was working
on a book about this practice, so I looked it up and it actually comes out next month
in October.
Oh, sure.
It's called Dark Archives, a librarian's investigation into the science and history
of books bound in human skin.
And her name's Megan Rosenblum.
I just, I completely forgot, but I knew this girl.
That's such good news that that book is coming out because I would love to know why they
did that and what the, I mean, like, it just doesn't, it's so creepy to me.
This book gets into all of that.
How cool is that?
Because we've heard a couple stories about creepy doctors where I'm thinking this doctor
that did that with the, this story that you just told may, may have been a creep, could
have been.
Yeah, sounds like it.
Real good.
I don't know.
But then maybe in this book, it explains that it was like some, I don't know, what would
the explanation be that would make me feel better?
I'm not sure.
There can't be one.
I mean, history, maybe for like history's sake, you know?
I mean, but it's a book.
I know.
Just use fucking paper and leave people alone.
Well, I bet you'll find out in the book, Dark Archives by Megan Rosenblum.
Here's my last one.
This just starts high y'all.
I grew up in the East Bay, Concord, California.
In middle school and the beginning of high school, I used to walk home with my brother
and one day I started receiving calls from an unknown caller.
The only sound from the phone calls would be heavy breathing.
This scared the living shit out of me.
For years, I would receive these phone calls at random times, just heavy breathing into
the receiver.
At first, I thought I have a stalker.
At 13 through 15 years old, I thought I was going to get murdered, but also thought this
would be such a great TV show.
Lifetime TV show.
It's, I mean, they are not wrong.
I never told anyone in retrospect, not sure why I never said something, but whatever.
Finally, two years after these random phone calls started, I received the last unknown
call.
I was walking home with my best friend, Haley, expecting a phone call to come through, but
it never did.
We finally get to my house and I get the phone call.
The heavy breathing right into the fucking phone.
Then I realized I could actually hear the breathing.
In the other room, there was Haley heavily breathing into her phone.
It turns out my best friend, Haley, had been calling my phone, blocking her number and
breathing into her phone for years.
What the fuck?
Since we walked home in different directions, I never caught her vote for.
Oh my God.
Thankfully, the heavy breathing didn't just stop there.
From then on, whenever Haley would leave me a voicemail, she would just heavy breathe
into the phone and that tradition has continued throughout the last 10 years.
I now live in San Antonio, Texas, and Haley's still in the Bay Area.
We're both almost 28 years old.
She's still my best friend.
Even though she terrorized me for years, she grew up to be a beautiful wife and fantastic
mother to a sweet baby angel, one and a half year old little girl.
Haley, my personal favorite US Postal Service employee, fuck Trump support USPS, has been
fighting a rare, that was on the piece of paper I just read, has been fighting a rare
form of leukemia since quarantine started.
Legit, right in the heat of COVID-19, she found out and has been kicking leukemia's
ass ever since.
My God.
She's currently at Stanford receiving a stem cell transplant in order to avoid her leukemia
from ever coming back.
We still talk normally and frequently, even if her sense of humor has gotten slightly
darker, a lot of death jokes, but whatever makes her feel better, and she's still fighting
through it.
So I like to think even in the darkest times, it's super fucking important to remember the
good times, even if those good times are tormenting phone calls from your youth.
So keep in touch with your loved ones, socially distance yourself, support the USPS, vote,
and most importantly, block your number or call your best friend and heavy breathe into
the phone, scaring the living shit out of them.
You never know how much you'll appreciate it later, ssdgmlexi.
Oh my God, that's so sweet.
I was like mad for her and then I was like, that's so sweet.
No, that's a good prank because she like did it to her long enough.
And I bet you it drove, I bet you it drove her friend crazy that she never said anything.
The whole point was probably to get her to freak out so then she'd be like, it's me dumb
ass.
Yeah, she would have laughed and been like, got you, but it was like three years in.
But like Lexi was just trying to be like a real soldier about it.
So Haley's like, okay, I guess I'll just keep breathing into your phone.
You idiot.
Oh my God.
Amazing.
I love that story.
That was good.
I think that's hilarious.
I think that's hilarious.
So many levels.
Wow.
Yes, it is.
Wow.
And Haley keep kicking leukemia's ass.
Please do.
Please do.
Wow, that was incredible.
That was a great last story.
Send us your stories that are like that or not like that or like whatever you want them
to be.
It can be anything you want.
We do grandparents.
We do stuff, stuffed in walls.
We do, of course, traditional hometown, just the scariest murder you heard about when you
were growing up.
Or like tell us a funny story from the set of Seinfeld that like no one would know about.
Oh my God.
Wouldn't that be...
This one time, Elaine couldn't stop laughing at Jerry Stiller.
Did you ever hide anything in the cupboards?
What was really in the cereal boxes?
Okay, if this gets posted in anyone's snitch tags, Jerry Seinfeld, you're kicked out of
being a murderer now, for real.
This is not something we wanted to get back to him.
Don't be a nerd.
He's not going to Twitter back at us, just like fucking fatty her swan either.
None of them.
We're going to get iced out, so don't approach it.
Don't approach it.
We don't need it.
We're just having fun.
Let's all keep calm, cool, and stay sexy.
And don't get murdered.
Goodbye.
Elvis, you want a cookie?