My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 215

Episode Date: February 22, 2021

This week’s hometowns include a local Canadian murder and a badass survivor story.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, so that's right.

Or what, I don't know, we got to think of something. Do we? Uh, they know how it goes, you read your emails, you sent them into us, you want us to read them. We agree. Yeah, we fucking... That's what a relationship, that's how relationships work. Give and take.

We ask. You give. Thank you. Thank you. You want to go first this week? Just for fun. I mean, I love, love, love too. It's all I've ever wanted.

This one is just hometown story, hi Karen and Georgia exclamation mark. I was listening to episode 261 or you mentioned letter Kenny. Oh yeah. The wonderful TV show. I'm from Listowell, I bet that's not how you, Listowell, Listowell. Is it Listowell? It's definitely not Listowell. Your top 10 favorite towels of all time.

Number 10, those really scratchy hotel ones that are overly, number nine, the ones that your aunt has that don't absorb anything. Oh, but the frills at the end of it? Oh, that's number eight. My favorite thing when I go to a state sales is opening the fabric closet. That's not what it's called, you know, the like, not the pantry. It's not the pantry. The linen pantry.

Linen closet. Thank you. Because it's like, it's always, you know, older people and it's just decades of, no, we've never thrown away. And my grandma had one too, so like, I love it and I love the smell. We've never thrown away sheets or towels. Towels through the years. It's a beautiful thing.

We used to have my aunt Kathleen in the mid 80s turned my mom on to bath sheets. She was like, no, no, no. Bath sheets are like twice as big as a regular bath towel. Yeah. So hard to handle. When you get out of the shower, you can wrap yourself like entirely, it's almost like a blanket but a towel. Those number three on the top 10, Listowell List.

Now back to Listowell Canada. Where we go, I'm from Listowell, the town that letter Kenny was based off of and from which the creator, Jared Kiso hails, friend of the, friend of the family. Friend of the family against as well. Probably. Everyone is more of their actual friend, I believe. Okay. Let me tell you, it's an embarrassingly accurate depiction of our tiny town right down to the

name of the bar, Mo Dean's Roadhouse, and that's MMO Dean, Mo Dean's Roadhouse, which I adore, which is basically our only bar in town and closed down a few years ago. Someone even made a replica of the letter Kenny logo and replaced our town sign with it for a while. And again, shout out to our friend, Neil Mahoney, who was obsessed with the show and even had a letter Kenny themed birthday party. That's right. Anyways, that's not what I want to talk about.

Are you sure? I want to tell you about perhaps our most infamous crime, the murder of Jesse Keith. I remember hearing the story as a kid and thinking my older sister was just trying to scare me, but when she took me to visit Jesse Keith's grave, I realized it was true. I booted up our old Dell computer and waited for the dial-up to connect before doing some more research. Probably some five hours later, I had found all the information I needed. Jesse Keith was just 13 years old, went on October 1894.

Her throat was slit, her body stripped, her corpse mutilated. Ugh. I know. The scene was so horrific that town's folks thought Jack the Ripper had come to Canada and was on the loose in Ontario. A drift? That's so crazy. That's how un-fucking-believable a crime like that was, that it's like, yeah, you're

just trying to like, you can't wrap your head around it. Totally. It can't be anyone in your town. Exactly. So sad. A drifter known as Almead Chateau was accused shortly thereafter as he had been spotted around the train tracks near her house that day. Almead was apprehended five days after Keith's murder and was found carrying a valise containing

female undergarments. He confessed to the crime, but later recanted his statement. Nonetheless, he was found guilty and hanged on May 31st, 1895, making him the first man to be hanged in Perth County. Wow. Strangely, in 2011, while reconstructing the old jailhouse, his remains, along with those of the second man to be hanged in Perth County, were found under the foundation. I guess they just left their bodies there and paved them over.

After her death, Jesse's family had a large statue of a young girl with ruby eyes erected over her grave in our local cemetery. To this day, it remains the largest, and in my opinion, the most beautiful headstone in our cemetery, although the rubies were stolen years ago. The story of Jesse Keith has become something a folklor in our little town used to scare kids into staying away from strangers and visiting her grave has become a dare that angsty teenagers do for fun on Halloween, hoping to catch a glimpse of Jesse's ghost dancing around her headstone.

I hope sharing this with you all will bring her ancestors some peace in knowing that her tail is not forgotten. Stay sexy and pitter patter, let's get at her, Sam. Which must be the, which must be towel towns, the fucking battle cry. No, no, no, that's from letter Kenny. Great. But maybe same thing, kind of same, same as what they're saying. Yeah.

But the way, when you first said that a statue of a girl with ruby eyes seemed like something that would be quite haunting if it was still around, but especially in a cemetery. Yeah. But I love that Sam was like, I hope her ancestors find Sam solace, that's, that's sweet. Okay. Here's my first one. This is the subject line is badass survivor story, and it starts just like this. It doesn't matter.

I know, you know, I wish everyone well. I sent this in a few months ago, but it was about 30 pages long, so I'm not surprised it wasn't read. Smart. Smart. However, it's a pretty amazing story. So here's the abridged version. I got sent home from campus in the fall due to COVID parentheses.

I was fine. There were just a lot of cases. One night at the dinner table, my mom was telling stories to cheer me up and she casually mentioned in between bites that someone was murdered in the house I grew up in, mom. Anyway, of course, I immediately looked it up after dinner and I realized she got something wrong. It wasn't a murder story. It was a survivor story.

Susan Shoneman was 19 years old in 1985, studying cosmetology while living in Savannah, Georgia. From a pay phone a few blocks from her house, Susan called a bar. She thought her sister, Krista, who was visiting from Savannah, would be in. The bartender handed the phone to Krista, and at some point they got into an argument. During the call, a man asked Susan for directions to Bolton Street. In fuck-politeness fashion, she said, I don't know, and continued with the call. However, the man came back with a gun and forced Susan to come with him. Since they were in an argument, Krista just thought she hung up the phone.

They made their way down West Gwinnett Street and ended up behind a gray clapboard row house, the house I would eventually grow up in. He punched her, shot her, raped her and left her naked in a crawl space of the house. But Susan wasn't going to give up that easy. She mustered up enough strength to crawl out from under the house, climb over a four-foot wall, and then walk up three flights of stairs to a neighboring apartment for help. After two and a half weeks in the hospital, she was released to make an extremely long and extremely sad story short.

There were no leads, so the investigation was closed administratively. Susan eventually went back to cosmetology school in Savannah. And by 2001, she was a professional hairstylist, married with two children. The day before she and her husband were going to sign a contract on a house in Atlanta, her mother called her crying. There was a serial rapist loosed in the area. She begged them not to move there. Mom, do you not get it, she responded, there are rapes occurring every single day.

I'm not going to allow another rapist to keep me from doing what I feel I'm supposed to do. On the 30th anniversary of the attack, a community newspaper published an open letter that Susan wrote to her attacker, quote, I have often wondered if I ever crossed your mind. If you ever knew that I lived, survived your wrath that fateful night. Whether you do or not, I write this to inform you that not only did I physically survive you, I have overcome the hell and uttered destruction you caused by the grace of God I lived to tell, unquote, Susan is now the director of the Piedmont rape crisis center

where she answers several hundred calls a year from local women. Stay sexy and if you're going to grow up in a crime scene, make sure it's one with a badass survivor, that's from Sheldon, whose pronouns are she, her. That is incredible and unbelievable. So empowering and beautiful. And it's very cool that that on the 30th anniversary that that paper published that open letter. Totally.

That's really amazing. I think that's what a cool thing to have people be able to make a statement like that or kind of make that show of empowerment. Beautiful. Very cool. Very. I'm not going to read you the title because it gives it all away. Hi, Queens and Steven.

Fuck. Yeah. Let's get into it. You all have asked for stories on cocaine bathtubs and burning down the house before and this story has it all. Wow. Long story short, my dad is one of my best friends, but he has undiagnosed ADD and gets distracted easily.

He was cooking one afternoon about 20 years ago and got distracted by a movie on TV. Unfortunately, the stir fry oil ended up catching on fire and burning down our kitchen with the smoke going into the vents. What? Luckily, no one was hurt, but my dad ended up putting it out with buckets of pool water, which is not recommended. I bet. We had to move into a rented house while our kitchen was being rebuilt and smoke cleared

from the vents. My dad was in charge of finding the renovation crews. My dad found this sketchy European man will call Tony to do the countertop granite for an exceedingly reasonable price. Always a red flag. Anyways, one day Tony broke a large piece of granite and my mom and him got into several phone arguments for a few days. The next week, my mom got a call into her supervisor's office.

Did I mention my mom is one of the first female FBI agents? Oh. Well, she is and her supervisor wanted to know why she was making so many calls to one of the top cocaine smugglers from Europe. That's right. You see, Tony's phones were tapped and the reason the granite was so cheap is because that was clearly his side hustle since he used the granite and marble to smuggle in the cocaine.

Needless to say, that contract was quickly terminated. I can't believe my parents didn't get a divorce that year, but they're still together 35 years later. Thanks again for being so open about mental health and women empowerment. Also my mom and I have a complicated relationship because she's a big Trump supporter, but I like telling these stories of her past to remind me of how much of a badass she is. I've sent in previous stories about her, so hope they get read one day. Best see.

Wow. I just like that person who has the marble dealer, who I guess that's the front of his business or whatever you call that, that's what he fronts with, that he's doing business with FBI agents and doesn't know it. Yeah. Yeah. How good can he be? Great point.

I didn't think of that. Do a little research. And then arguing with them about broken marble, don't argue with an FBI agent, just replace the marble. And just casually ask when you're hanging out in the kitchen one day, like, hey, what do you do? Just get, like, do a little recon. Yeah.

Okay. I'm not going to read you the subject line of this one. And just starts, hello, my favorite people. I hail from Monroe County, Michigan, which is a bunch of nothing in between Detroit and Toledo. There's a small city of Monroe at the center, but the rest of the county is quite rural. I was re-listening to Care and Tell the Horrible Story of PSA Flight 1771 and suddenly remembered that a plane crash definitely happened around here when I was very young.

I headed straight to the internet and got really sucked in and found out a bunch of stuff I never knew before. So here's the tragic story. Com Air Flight 3272 was headed from Cincinnati to Detroit on January 9th, 1997. This is typically a short, easy flight, probably around 45 minutes. Aboard the flight were three crew members and 26 passengers. The pilots were beginning to receive pre-landing instructions when the plane suddenly rolled 145 degrees to the left, then violently rolled back to the right and then nose dived straight

down into a rural field located between Monroe and the nearby town of Dundee. This crash site was a mere 18 miles from the Detroit Metro Airport, aka literal minutes from the flight's destination. The whole plane was obliterated by the impact, much like PSA 1771 was in your story. All 29 people on board died. I don't want to attempt to get technical, but basically weather conditions had caused ice to build up on the plane, which caused the engines to abruptly stall mid-flight. Apparently there was a de-icing mechanism, but these pilots had been wrongly instructed

to wait until some ice built up before activating it. This next piece of information really blew my mind. Although only two of the passengers had actually been from here, all of the unidentified remains were buried at a memorial site in Monroe County's own Rose Lawn Cemetery. Finding this out was pretty crazy for me, because this very cemetery literally bordered the property I grew up on and is where both of my parents are buried. I even found a local article from a few years ago about how fellow ComAir pilots had traveled to Monroe to visit the memorial for the 20th anniversary of the crash, and people leave

roses at the memorial every single year on January 9th. Oh, and one last thing, that May Day show Karen talked about totally did an episode on this, but I couldn't figure out a way to watch it. Sorry if this was too long. Never stop doing everything you do. You're amazing. Stay sexy and don't be afraid to fly. It's much safer now.

Philip. Wow, Philip. Yeah. I mean, also, it's just really crazy because I think having, it's so awful, obviously, to have it happen, but to be in the town, just like thinking of the other side of it where it's like a plane crashes in your town or just outside of your town. And it's one of those things where you get on a quick flight and you feel invincible. It's 45 minutes.

It's not a big deal, but you get on the long flights and you feel like it's scary and it's just like, I hate hearing those stories. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and they're not that common. I think that's the other reason that people want to tell a story like that is because they happen so rarely compared to how many flights happen. Totally.

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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 Mike Corrie, 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. All right, for my last story, remember how C, whose dad burned down the kitchen and hired a cocaine importer to renovate it, which was the title of the last one, said I also sent in some stories of my mom who was the first FBI agent.

Well, I looked it up and found one of those stories she had sent in in the past. Great. It's a show now. Perfect. All right. So this one's from a while before and it says, Hi, Karen, Georgia, Stephen, beloved animals and fellow murderinos. My name is Celeste, so C is Celeste, and I just started listening to my favorite murder

this year. I'm so obsessed. I'm going back and catching up on all the past episodes. So if this is read, it may take me some time to hear it. I'm a head and neck surgeon that specializes in facial plastics and reconstruction. I listen to this podcast on drives and while wearing headphones walking into the hospital. I often think that if the other doctors or patients knew what I was listening to, they'd be super freaked out.

I have tons of crazy fucked up trauma stories, but that's for another time. Anyways, I wanted to write you about my badass mom. Her family is Lebanese that immigrated through Mexico then to Texas. So she speaks English, Spanish and Arabic. She started working for the FBI as a clerk in the early 70s to put herself through college for a criminal justice degree. When she graduated in the late 70s, they just started allowing females to become FBI agents. Wow.

Since my mom had worked there for several years and spoke those languages, she was recruited. I attached a photo of her training at Quantico, which we have. And Steven, let's put it in the Instagram post. When she has a few glasses of wine, the Murderino in me loves to get some of her stories sampled below. She told me about the time in the early 80s. She was in Puerto Rico doing helicopter surveillance on FALN, a Puerto Rican terrorist group that had made several bombing attacks on the US in the late 70s to mid 80s.

I'd attach a link, but I know you all don't like those. We like them if you've told the story, but you can't use the link to tell the story, right? Yeah. Links aren't don't help in an email that we're reading. Right. I feel like she's like, I'm not lying, here's a link. She and her fellow agents had made an arrest in the morning.

Sure. Totally normal. When they were done, she and the pilot decided to tour around the island in the helicopter and she put on regular clothes. While in the air, they heard on the radio there was a raid and a shootout. So the pilot quickly turned around to join the fray and my mom in her tank top and shorts pulled on a bulletproof vest and ended up jumping out of the helicopter and tackling one of the assailants to the ground like a freaking spider monkey.

Another time she told me about a drug bust in Miami. I like to think of her as undercover in the movie Blow. And she found one of the drug lords in the ventilation system and only his underwear. He had he had all that insulation and fiberglass sticking to his skin and was writhing around in the backseat of her squad car because he was itching so bad. I also remember the one time when I was in second grade, I missed the school bus and she had to take me in her undercover car, though I wasn't supposed to ever go in it. There was a giant shotgun attached to the inner roof of her car, again, totally normal.

A few years later, she was in a car chase when she got t-boned by another car. She pulled the guy over and drew her weapon to get him out. But he turned out just to be a drunk, which she was naturally pissed about. Though she did more terrorist and drug cartel work, she was there when the behavioral science unit was really getting started at the FBI and remembers taking classes at Quantico about profiling serial killers. She loves mine hunters, but watching it for her is like me watching Grey's Anatomy. That thing of like, I do this for a living and that's not how it works in the OR, you

know? You just want to argue the whole thing. Anyways, that's a sampling of tales I wanted to share with you all. I also wanted to say that my relationship with my mom is complicated and could be strained. I want to thank you both for taking for talking about your complex relationships with your mothers. I know how much my mom has done for me, but she's insanely stubborn and I'm learning that I don't need to feel guilty for being frustrated or angry with her.

For example, she's a Trump supporter. This podcast, My Own Therapy and our mutual love of true crime has helped us bond because I asked her to tell me stories to write to you all, which she loves, rather than getting into more political arguments over the holidays. Stay sexy and don't get murdered, but do give your mom wine to spill her secrets. Exo, Exo, Celeste. All right, Celeste. Well done.

Okay, cool. Here's my last story. All right, I won't read you the subject line. Hey, guys, on a recent mini-sode, you guys said submission boxes never close, so I'm bringing my submission for times your parents almost killed you back up to the top of your inbox. Yeah. I would like to preface the story by saying, my parents are incredible people.

You don't have to do that. They always are when they almost kill you. Yeah, guess what? It's not going to matter when people judge them after whatever we're about to read. My parents are incredible people and child neglect was never an issue growing up. That being said, here we go. So this incident happened when I was only one years old, so I've only heard it retold, but it gets retold every three to five years.

One year on family vacation, we vacation near Lake Erie, and on one of the days we took a boat to Kelly's Island. Who was in charge of what kids, who was in charge of what kids on this day is still pretty hotly debated in the family. Nobody was in charge of anybody. I fucking promise you. Everyone was like real casual agreements the night before on the eighth beer. Or it was like, the kids will take care of each other, don't worry about it.

But this story, I believe the most. My dad was supposedly in charge of all the older kids, toddler age and up, but my mom was in charge of me, who was only one-year-old baby at the time. Groups split up that day, and my dad had the little ones and went to do, quote, age-appropriate activities, and my mom and her sisters found a winery on the island to get their drink on. Yeah, they did. In parentheses, baby me along for the ride.

The day when is planned, and the groups met back up at the end of the day to catch the boat back to good old Ohio. On the walk back to the boat, someone, parentheses still unclear who initially said it, said, where's Aaron? No, no, no, no, no. That in parentheses it says baby me. My mom describes this moment almost in slow motion. She claims everything stopped as she looked around the group for me and realized I was

nowhere to be found. And this is in all caps. She drunkenly left me at the winery. I didn't know it. Oh my God. Oh my God. My mom then, quote, ran faster than she has ever ran in her life. Fucking better.

Back to the winery, which is hard to believe since she was plastered, and found me sitting all caps outside the winery in a puddle of mud. No. That's like the band. Only no drunk vacationers on the island that day found me worthy of kidnapping. To this day, my parents still argue on who left me and also argue about who noticed I was missing. Not the parents.

I personally believe that my seven-year-old brother at the time was the one that pointed out my absence, but who's to say? Anyway, hope you found the story as funny as I still do. Stay sexy. And don't leave your one-year-old at a winery, Aaron. P.S., since this original email, my parents recently took a trip back to the island. They drunkenly took selfies next to some dirt outside the winery and sent them to me, saying, this is where we almost lost you forever.

Oh my God. I feel like that winery was like another baby. That can't have been the first time. And here's where we ask for submissions of people who own and run wineries. What's the craziest thing you've ever seen? Well, because also wineries are a great way for alcoholics to pretend like they're doing an activity that isn't alcohol-based because it's about the winery and the tour and the details of loving wine.

But it doesn't matter because having grown up in wine country, that's all when relatives come to visit, that's all we used to do. And when I still drank by the end of the afternoon, you'd start drinking like at one and you would be fucking shit-based. Yeah. No one spits that shit out. No. Of course not.

Of course not. Not that long ago after we had a show in San Francisco and it was our last show of the tour. And so Vince and I were like, let's just go to Napa for a couple of days. And we went into this one, wine tasting, it wasn't even a winery. And the chick, we were trying wine and the chick was like, she turned her back and gave us a taste, turned her back, turned around, I was like, wow, you guys are really drinking it.

Like she comments that we were fucking overdoing it and I was like, oh, fuck. She knew we were just there for the wine. I mean, there's those phonies, I'm sure, especially in Napa who pretend like take little sips and smell it and do all that shit where it's just like, look, we're not here for that. We've all watched Sideways. We know the, with our friend, Paul Giamatti, friend of the family. With friend of the family, close friend of the family, Paul Giamatti. And if you don't believe us, stellar performance, have you listened to the Stay Sexy and Don't

Get Murdered audio book? He lends his beautiful voice. Yes, you can, if you like Sideways, you'll love our book. Thank you for sending in those stories. That was an amazing batch. You guys really know how to do it. Keep it going. Yeah.

Thank you so much. Yeah. If you want to send your story in, you can write us at my favorite murder at Gmail. That's right. Or you can org. I don't know why you submit it on the website rather than Gmail, but you can if you want, if you don't have access. Oh, is it on the, you're supposed to go to the website?

No, no, there's also like a submission. This is usually your line. I don't do it. I don't ever say this line. Stephen, is there a... Well, I think it gets directly, like it gets forwarded from, at least my understanding is it gets forwarded from the website to the email. Right.

So if you're like in Antarctica in a fucking like bunker and you can't for some reason don't have access to email, you can just go to our website. My favorite murder at Gmail. Please send your stories in. Please. Let's send it on a somber note. Look, if you are in Antarctica, we're sorry. We are.

Clearly you did something bad. We hope you're okay. Did you get sent there? Are you? Are you on the CB radio talking? Are you studying aliens and you can't tell anybody about it? You can send us an anonymous email that you can say, don't read this on the podcast and just tell us the truth of that.

Please. You're like, we have drilled down, down to the polar core or whatever it would be called. That sounds right. We have drilled down to cores, unfrozen cores, no, they would still be frozen. Sure. Sure. Super frozen permafrost. We drilled through the permafrost.

We found the aliens. Don't worry about it. Everything's fine. Yeah. That's actually the only email I want about the aliens. Please. Stay sexy. And don't get murdered.

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