My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 213

Episode Date: February 8, 2021

This week’s hometowns include a near-death experience in a bounce house and another Lizzie Borden connection.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is exactly right. 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. Let's see, it's truly criminal. Hello and welcome to my favorite murder, the mini-soad. That's Karen Kilgariff.

That's Georgia Heartster. Hi. Are you ready to hear your emails read back to you, BIOS? Let's do it. You want to go first? Sure. Okay. The subject line of this is, I have a Lizzie Borden thing you might not know.

Hi, Karen and Georgia and Steven and Pets. I just finished listening to mini-soad 211 and knew I had to write in with my own Lizzie Borden tie because there's a part of her story that never gets told and I'm freaking obsessed with. I was born and raised in New England and grew up surrounded by creepy graveyards, witch museums and countless stories of gory supernatural happenings in the shadows of places I walked past every day. Take me there.

I love it here and I love our macabre legacy. Ever since I was a little child, my grandfather has enthralled me with tales of our family's own twisted history going all the way back to the 1600s and Thomas Cornell, a common ancestor I happen to share with confounding figures like Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and Bill Gates and Lizzie Borden, but I'll get there in a second. So this is just name-dropped brag, name-dropped brag. Okay. In 1673, Thomas's wife, so we're talking about Thomas Cornell, their distant relative,

Thomas's wife, Rebecca was found dead before the fireplace, apparently burned to death. Rebecca was an old crow at this point, apparently, apparently disliked by many, including her own son, Thomas Jr. The story goes that that very night, she had refused to dine with the rest of the family because she heard they were serving fish. Hell yeah. When Thomas found her later, burned to a crisp on the floor, it was widely assumed that she had fallen asleep too close to the flames and an ember had ignited her clothing.

Oops, but believable enough. That is until Rebecca's brother was visited by her ghost in a dream. He then demanded her corpse be exhumed and reexamined, and as it turned out, the original examiner had failed to notice a huge gash in Rebecca's stomach. Suddenly the story changed. Rather than falling into the fire in her old age, Rebecca had been viciously murdered by her own son, desperate to get an early grab at his own inheritance. He must have burned the body to cover up his crimes.

The case went to court and Thomas Jr. was convicted of matricide, the very first case in American history. He was sentenced to hang on the testimony of a ghost, and not even a ghost who showed up for the trial, but who supposedly visited her brother in a dream. About 20 years later, this case would be referenced in support of spectral evidence for use in court cases during the Salem Frickin' Witch Trials. No, guys. That's really funny.

I didn't even think about the fact that this case was before the Salem Witch Trials. Wow. That's how old it is. That's crazy. When Rebecca was hanged, his wife gave birth to their seventh child, a girl she named Innocent, in honor of her husband who she believed to be innocent. Innocent Cornell would grow up to Mary Richard Borden, and together they had six children, including Lizzie's dear grandmother.

My grandfather has spent his retirement compiling evidence from both Thomas Jr. and Lizzie Borden's court cases, and will tell the story to literally anyone he meets. Like a true old-fashioned murdering out, yes, grandpa. So Lizzie wasn't the first in the family to be put on trial for murder. She was the first to get away with it, though, and yes, I fully believe she did it. Sorry, this was so long, but I hoped you enjoyed the story. Stay sexy and don't murder your mother, Alex. Wow.

What a crazy story. I mean, we learned so many things. But why can't someone else just be like, well, I had a dream last night where the ghosts of so-and-so, like, everyone could do that then, which is probably why they don't do it anymore. They could. Well, I mean, they could, but then, yeah, that's probably why, but then having exhumed the body and actually found evidence, I think that was really the piece.

You can't just go like, I had a dream. I was in my old high school, and it turns out I'm innocent. It doesn't work that way. That was a good one. Okay, this one is, I mean, this one's, I nearly died in a bounce house. Oh, shit. High murder and mayhem queens and associates. When I heard your request for ball pit stories, I knew I had to share this cautionary tale.

I, too, was a childhood ball pit treasure hunter, mostly, mostly used band-aids down there. Oh, no. That's a great little tidbit. However, this is not a story about ball pits, but rather they're more dangerous cousin, the bounce house. When I was in my early 20s, I had an older friend, C, who had the most epic backyard parties, bonfires, music, free-flowing booze and weed.

It was great. One summer, he rented a bounce house for his young son's birthday party. That night, the birthday boy was at his mom's house, so C thought it would be a great idea to throw another rager with the bounce house as the main attraction for the adults. Nice. Sure. I was stoked. I hadn't been in a bounce house since childhood, so after a few drinks, I decided to check

it out with some friends. By this time, the bounce house had seen quite a lot of action and had started to deflate. It was also pretty dark outside, and that combined with a couple beers and a touch of pot made it a disorienting experience. Before I knew it, I was thrown face first into the deflating space between the wall of the bounce house and the inflated surface. I was a scrawny 23-year-old weakling and was completely pinned face down, arms at my side. As much as I struggled, I could not pull free or shout for help.

As I struggled for air, my vision began to dim and the panic set in. Just as I was about to resign to my fate of death by bounce house, an arm shot out of nowhere and yanked me back to the surface. My dear sober friend, Ben, had noticed my legs sticking out of the crevice and literally sprang into action, likely saving my life. Safe to say, that was my last bounce house adventure. Not sure what ended up happening with the bounce house, but I'm pretty sure C did not get his deposit back.

Love you, ladies. I started listening to MFM at the start of the pandemic and just caught up today. Thank you for all that you do. Stay safe and don't bounce drunk, Alex. She hers. That's all. That's two Alexes in a row. Oh, weird.

Very good advice, though, because I was making me laugh because I've been in bounce houses with kids, like someone saying, come with me. And then you kind of get in there, but you stand on the side like a weird adult. Like I didn't want to be in there, but it was like probably Nora or someone like that. But yeah, there is a spot where you just should not go near it because the sides are the danger. And then you kind of have no one really says that. You have no control really over like, you just want to stand there, but you can't. It's I'm not.

No, you got to. It's almost like you got to jump around. That's the safest. You can't hang and act like casual and like be a wallflower and be cool. You can't be cool about it or you'll die. You like the idea that that person was going to drown in a bounce house. Can you imagine? And no one would like, no.

You're drowning. Yeah. No. And but then your body's found it wrecks the whole party. Okay. I'm not going to read you the subject line of this one. It just starts MFM crew. Long time listener, first time writer, blah, blah, blah.

Since we're sending all types of stories at this point, here you go. So it was 2004-ish. I was in high school and it was MLK day. So naturally my parents were working and I was home with my probably 10 year old brother and his best friend, who was our neighbor. In typical teenage girl fashion, I was up in my room, which was hot pink and lime green, I disagree, talking on the phone with one of my friends, casual. When all of a sudden my brother runs into the room and says, and then it's in all caps,

I need the phone. Without even turning my head to look at him, I just said, no, I'm on it. Also it was clearly my cell phone and we had a house phone. He could have just used that, whatever. I'm clearly over it. Anyway, he persisted. So I turned to look at him and he is covered in soot to which I replied, what did you do before telling him, my friend, I got to go.

It was then that I noticed the soot footprints that led up the stairs and followed them into the living room where it looked like he had paced six circles around the room before coming to tell me that he had all caps lit the neighbor's yard on fire. I was so excited for the reveal, soot footprints everywhere, he and his friend were playing with fireworks. Of course, parentheses, clearly I was a great babysitter and one shot two yards over and immediately burst the very dry grass into flames. It's so dangerous, but children playing with fireworks was just the norm at some

like in the past. It's what they're fucking for. It's to make fireworks and then be like kids aren't allowed to play with them. So what old people are supposed to play with fireworks, it's for kids, they're about kids, their children are drawn to them. But the idea that they lit off like a fucking Piccolo Pete thinking they knew exactly the depth and breadth of the power of this thing and then it just flew away. My favorite, I mean, my favorite visual of this is the footprints of the kid clearly

going what do I do? What do I do? What do I do? Like a circle. Hold his head. He beat me up. Yeah. Lighting a cigarette.

Yeah. So the fire engulfed three quarters of their backyard but didn't get to the house because my brother and a bunch of other neighborhood kids brought out all their hoses to put the fire out themselves. Yes. They banded together. By the time the fire department got there, the only remnant was a big black circle of soot.

My dad had to take my brother to a weekly fire prevention class after that and the neighbor had the greenest grass next year. You're welcome. Stay sexy and don't play with fireworks at least in the winter, Kendall. Oh my God. That's so good. My cousin, my older cousin, Mitch, when he was a kid, so he's older than me though, he's like set his family's kitchen on fire.

They were doing the trick where you flick matches, you know, you light them and flick them at the same time, you fucking dish towel burst into flames, the whole kitchen got burned down. They had to like completely gut the whole thing. Oh my God, like they had to escape from where they were standing. And now he's a financial advisor, so he got his shit together, at least. Or did he? Or did he?

He could still be a pyromaniac. Who knows? Okay. He could be a complete, yeah. That's a surprise in the wall story. Hi, MFM fam. I started listening to your podcast at the beginning of quarantine last year, and this week I came upon the episode where you asked people to send in things they found hidden

in walls. I have a non-murdery but still spooky finding for you. Some important dates and details. My mom and dad moved into my childhood home in 1990, divorced in 2000, and my dad passed away in 2003. Even though they were divorced, my dad just happened to be at my mom's house, formerly their shared house, visiting with us when he died suddenly from a heart attack, which my sisters and I witnessed.

Super traumatic. Yes. So awful. In 2014-ish, my mom's house flooded and they had to reno everything. Floors, walls, mental capacity, etc. My mom decided to turn her laundry room into another bathroom, and when they got to the drywall, they found a note that my dad had written in Sharpie that read, my dearest Andrea, may there never be any walls between us.

I love you, Wendell. I know. And is dated November 23rd, 1991, along with some artistic scribbles from me at age two. So he like brought his daughter in, was like, let's leave mommy a note. What did the mom do? The date on it, November 23rd, was the same date that he died in the same house 12 years later. No.

We were all mind blown, the date being the same just made it so much crazier. Hope this gave you some chills and fuzzy feelings thanks for your company during this lonely year. Aubrey. Oh, Aubrey. I didn't want to spoil it. That's so sad. Oh, sorry.

But I just thought as a woman who went through all that and then found that, I just would think she would have totally broken down. I'm sure. She did. She probably did. God damn. That's really lovely. I didn't want to label tearjerker in the letter, but I didn't want to spoil it.

Total tearjerker. Isn't that sweet? Yeah, that's fine. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. Yeah. Always write notes in walls, everyone. 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. Stay cozy all winter long with classic comfort foods available weekly. While I stop with just dinner, now you can enjoy Hello Fresh's expanded menu of quick lunch solutions, weekend brunch, simple side dishes, and amazing desserts. Karen, January is going to be my month for Hello Fresh.

I am so sick of takeout. I miss cooking so much I haven't lifted a knife or a pan since early fall. So I can't wait to get back in the kitchen and Hello Fresh makes it so easy and also makes it so that my food tastes good, which is hard to do on my own. It gives you everything, everything you need. So get up to 20 free meals with purchase plus free shipping on your first box at hellofresh.ca slash murder20 with code murder20. That's up to 20 free meals plus free shipping on your first box when you go to hellofresh.ca

slash murder20 and use code murder20. Goodbye. Hey, I'm Aresha. And I'm Brooke. I'm the host 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, we'll 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. Sorry, that's why I didn't end on it.

No, that's okay. I'm going back to a ball pit story. Great. Yes, yes, I love it. So we're going, this is the sine wave of the average many so. My last one's funny too, so it's pretty good. Okay. But this is the subject line is ball pits and accidentally justifying my mother's paranoia.

I was just listening to the hometown about ball pit scissors and wanted to share my own ball pit story. For my entire life, my mother has had this irrational fear of people hiding dirty needles in random locations, hoping that someday some unsuspecting victim would accidentally get poked by one. Dirty needles were potentially stashed everywhere and anywhere, hidden in the bristles of the fuzzy things at the base of escalators. Oh my God.

That's for the thing in the 80s though. So specific. That like, that these were hidden places. Okay, go on. Dirty needles because it was, it was a kind of aftermath of the AIDS epidemic where it's like, that was another way you could get it. But the idea of that they would be, how much time do you spend in the fuzzy things at the bottom of escalators?

Like that's. When you're a kid, it's like half your mall trip is trying to figure out how the escalator works. Yeah, that's true, true. So they're in coin return slots, the slots, the slots between section, those plastic slides, the demo shoes you could try on at the store. You guessed it, ball pit. Those are so fucking specific.

I love it. Oh my God. That poor mom was just like, didn't sleep. She just didn't want a surprise bad thing to happen. That's really what I'm reading from all of this. For little kid me, this was a real buzzkill as I've had quite a few, as I have quite a few memories of sitting out and watching my friends play in a potentially needle infested ball pit that my mother so graciously protected me from.

Fast forward to me being 15, working my first job in the Midwest at an all in one funplex. Oh my God. You know, the big warehouses, laser tag and bowling and roller rinks and bad pizza. Anyways, this warehouse had a massive ball pit that had a big jungle gym in the center and you could jump from it into the ball. Oh my God. That's amazing. Once a year, the whole staff would come in on the day that we were closed and we would

empty the ball pit to clean it. So at least this place cleaned it. Once a year? What'd you say? Once a year. Is that what they said? Oh no. That's not enough, friends.

For Christmas. For Christmas you get clean balls. It's like here's how you get your Christmas bonus is there's loose change at the bottom of the fucking ball pit and you can keep whatever you can pick up, yeah, coins. You heard me once a year and then in those little things called Astrix, Gags, two Astrix, Gags. Completely correct. Well, guess what we found at the bottom of the ball pit?

Not one, not two, but three dirty needles, only two of which were capped. I, given my history, was horrified even more so when my manager told me not to worry. They usually find a few every year. Oh my God. Stop telling my mom, thinking it was a fun, oh hey, I guess you're right, that dirty needles could be in ball pits and boy was that a mistake. Now her irrational needle phobia has only been validated. No chance needles could have fallen from someone's pocket into the ball pit by accident.

She is sure it was malicious and she's on the lookout now more than ever. Fast forward another five years and some friends of mine bought a facility with a ball pit and since I had previously told the story, I was the first person alerted when they too emptied the ball pit and found an uncapped needle. What? This second instance was not shared with my mother. So yeah, ball pits, danger game, Lynn. Wow, like I would think maybe one in 10 ball pits once a year would have one, but that

all the time, that's fucking bananas. I mean, it's like best case scenario. It's children with diabetes, yeah, and that are just being irresponsible, but I would think at that age, the mom would be kind of standing by like, don't keep that in your pocket, I'll hold it for you. No child, we don't keep your insulin pen in your pocket. Just run around with it. But we don't know.

But then it's like, maybe also there's just some heroin addicts that are like living free and like. I remember when like goth kids would go to like the play area or like, I once saw like a Disneyland like the goth kids were having their goth day, it's like, maybe they just went to a ball like a Chuck E. Cheese once and played in the ball pit. But so you're saying goths are heroin? No, I'm saying a goth kid with an insulin issue. Oh, I don't know what I'm fucking saying.

What I'm saying is, here's my last hometown. Okay. Okay. It says, hello ladies. And then a bunch of S's and then it says snake trigger warning. I just finished listening to the Minnesota where the family was living on top of a snake den and had to share my snake story featuring my fearless and insane mother. I grew up in Atlanta near the Chattahoochee River, which meant particularly in the warm

months that snakes were a pretty regular occurrence. My mother considered herself a friend to most snakes because they kept mice and vermin out of her garden. True. But always had an eye out for copperheads when we were children because they had enough venom to kill me and my older brother. Hi. Hi.

Is that Mimi? The Daughery. Cool. Daughery's like, are we talking snakes? Let's talk about snakes. Come here, Daughery. Do this thing. Don't try to fucking jump off the balcony today.

It was very traumatic. So they were, they were, they could kill us. Anyways, her favorite snake disposal method was chopping their heads off with a shovel. If you think you wouldn't want to meet my mom in a dark alley, you are correct. When I was in fourth grade and my fancy-ass private school decided it was smart to dedicate two entire months to a live-action Oregon Trail game where students were split into families that were, that were trying to travel from the east coast along the treacherous path.

You would roll dice and see if your wagon hinge broke or if you were facing a deadly snowstorm or dying of dysentery. Oh. Did you guys play that? Yeah. Or was, not yet. No, I was too old. Sorry.

The Oregon Trail was like the, the, like, group behind me. That's me. Anyways, one way to win points that you could exchange for food, clothing, or medicine was to make arts and crafts at home to bring in and present to the class. Think wooden spoon dolls or corn husk skirts. Then it says in parenthesis, I don't know if those are things, but I ran out of examples. Someone on my team had recently suffered a rattlesnake bite and I was in desperate need of points to buy an elixir, so I went home begging my mom to help.

So that was like the, the dice they rolled was pretend. Pretend. Okay. Exactly. Good, good, good. Being a sensible person, my mom was pretty pissed off that instead of learning fractions, this expensive school was teaching us how to be proper domestic wives in the 1850s. Yeah.

True. She decided that the appropriate craft was actually not a craft at all. Earlier that week, one of our dogs had killed a copperhead and trash day hadn't come around. So the dead, that dead snake was sitting in our compost pile still. My mother proceeded to chop its head off with a shovel, put it into a piece of Tupperware and send it to school with me the next day. I being a big fan of my mom's and an eight year old thought this was a fabulous plan. You can imagine the scene when I stood up in front of my entire fourth grade class and

presented a severed snake head to the teacher in charge that day proudly declaring that I brought the head of a snake that bit, that had bit my teammate. In pretend, the teammate got bitten by a rattlesnake and then- Right, she didn't even bring a elixir. Yes. And the elixir was basically like the mom going, you want an elixir, I mean, here's a little reality for you in the Oregon Trail. That's right.

Thank you. I'll leave the chaos that ensued to y'all's imagination, but all in all, I got the maximum number of points. Yes. A teacher who threw up in the trash can and a strongly worded note sent home from my mother regarding school policy on dismembered animals. Mom, she's on the rat. But hey, we successfully crossed the Oregon Trail.

Thanks so much for all that you do. I'm trying to work up the courage to begin virtual therapy and hearing both of you discuss it so frequently and with such openness is deeply meaningful to me. Just do it. Just do it. Just do it. It's fun. You'll love it.

It just goes. And bring a snake head with you. You'll be fine. You'll be fine. They're like, read this letter to her and she'll understand what your childhood was like exactly. You don't have to solve it anyway. Open with the letter.

Yeah. Then that's it. My best friends told me to read you this letter about my childhood, so here you go. Stay sexy and don't forget to terrify your teacher with a severed snake head, E.K. Yes. Yes. Tell your mom we say hi and get great parenting. Just rad mom action.

She goes like, she's basically saying that you get some reality into the stupid game. If you're going to do it, do it for real. I'm not sewing you some fucking stupid handkerchief that says like, Venom sucks on it. I'm fucking breaking off the head of a rattlesnake. I'm teaching my daughter how to do that for future happenings and sending it to school or to make a teacher on it. Yes. I mean, that is mothering, which is probably why neither of us have children.

That's the real deal. All right. Yeah. That was a great batch. I mean, it was everything you need to know about surviving real life, whether it's staying away from the walls of a bounce house, staying out off the bottom of a ball pit. Keep your needles out of your pockets if you're going to go in a ball pit. Put them in the safe needle drop before you go in.

These are all great examples of the kind of stories you want to hear from you too. So email us at my favorite murderer at Gmail, on our website, my favorite murderer. We want to hear your story. And stay sexy. Oh, and don't get murdered. Goodbye. Bye. Elvis, do you want a cookie?

Yeah.