My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 22

Episode Date: March 20, 2017

On this week's minisode, Karen and Georgia read your hometown murders including a cop's run in with Ottis Toole, pizza drug lords, and one about why you should never go to Poughkeepsie.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We at Wondery live, breathe and downright obsess over true crime and now we're launching the ultimate true crime fan experience, Exhibit C. Join now by following Wondery, Exhibit C on Facebook and listen to true crime on Wondery and Amazon Music, Exhibit C. It's truly criminal. Welcome to my favorite murder, Minnesota 22. Is it 22? The one where we get back on track. Did you listen to Last Week's Minnesota? No, I get scared listening. It's horrifying and you're right to be scared and I just tried to listen this morning. Was it the salt water? I mean, it was a real, it was a real study and something's very wrong. So you want to not chit chat. You want to get straight to the murder. No, I feel like it's important that we chit chat, but

I don't know. It's a self-loathing issue. It's difficult to look back on the work that you've done. Well, that's why I don't listen to it. Yeah, it's a smart move. I did in the beginning and then I was just like, all right, we're good for now. It's hard not to fall into it, though, because you ever do that thing where you're like, pretend you're someone else and listen as another person. What I do is pretend that someone else is listening for the first time. Would that sound like to that person? At what point would they be like, this isn't for me? And for me, in that exercise, it was like seven seconds in. Yeah, and right now, it's probably right now for someone. Yeah, if not seven seconds ago. So, okay, let's get on track.

So, starting now, Steven. Welcome to my favorite murder, Minnesota. That's Karen Kilgariff. And that's Georgia Hardstark. Boy, do we love to talk about murder, do you? Yes, you do, because you send us your hometown murders, the things that happen in your hometown or to your family or to your family, friends, to your college town. To that one barber that you grew up near but didn't know, never talked to directly. Wrote on a bus with their son. Yeah, knew them for degrees of Kevin Bacon away. Totally. So, we're gonna read, we just read you a couple of those, because they're so good and, you know, fuck it. It seems clear. I think our point is clear. Yeah. I think people understand what's happening. We're back on track. Do I go first? Sure.

Great, because first of all, let me belch seven times straight into the mic. The subject line of the first email here is the time my dad fought Otis Tool. Hi, ladies. I recently started listening to your podcast and I'm completely hooked in one of the earlier episodes you mentioned zero killer Otis Tool. I'm pretty sure I called him Otis, though. Is it Otis? It's Otis. Yeah. Yeah. And I had to share with you this story from my father. My father worked for the Tallahassee police department, the TPD. For a long time, around 12 years or so, he has some crazy horrifying fucked up stories during this time with the TPD. I bet he does. But this one takes the cake for me. I'm sure you've heard

of the serial killer Otis Tool. As it turns out, he did a stint in the Tallahassee jail while my dad worked there. My dad told me once how Tool recounted to him how he murdered a woman, sliced off her breast, then he and Henry Lee Lucas drove around with it on the dash of their van. But you probably haven't heard about the man with whom Tool shared his jail cell, Joe Nixon. He was convicted of kidnapping and murder of the kidnapping and murder of a local woman from the governor's square mall parking lot in Tallahassee. He took her to a remote location, tied her to a tree with jumper cables, then set her on fire. That's everything I hate. Yes, it's really awful. Also, Otis Tool is like one of the most awful looking, because he just looks like he does not

give one fuck about anything. He's so frightening. He looks like he takes, and I think he did, pleasure in other people's immense suffering. Yes, he's like, if it were a character in a horror movie, you'd be like, that guy's a little too much. Let's turn it down. Yeah, it's like Texas Chainsaw Massacre characters. Yeah, it looks like he's wearing his prosthetic forehead, but it's his real forehead. He's the one that admitted to killing John Walsh's son, Adam Walsh, right? Which we don't know for sure, but John Walsh believes it. I don't believe it. I don't either. It's that missing front tooth story. And the ears. So when they found was supposedly Adam Walsh's head in a creek. But then if you look at the side by side of the head, and which is

horrifying, if the ears are different, there's a missing tooth, you know, whatever. Anyways, yeah, no, it's not the same kid. They just, I mean, fair enough to five year old boy or roughly five year old boys dead in the same area. They don't they want that to be the same. Sure. I mean, I'll do. Okay, so let's talk about Joe Nixon. He was one of the less famous Nixons. He was convicted of kidnap. Oh, sorry. So tool and Nixon sharing a cell in the jail on the top floor. And one of the dayguards, including my dad, noticed that water's leaking from above. So they go upstairs and find that tool and Nixon have purposefully clogged their toilet and water was quickly flooding the cell. In addition to that, the pair were butt ass naked and covered in soap

to make themselves slippery. But that's not the craziest part. They each fashioned a number of shanks and then had them grasped in their fists between their fingers. Wolverine style. Oh my God. They were basically trying to force the police to open the cell and then fight their way out. Absolutely bonkers. The sheriff was president told them to cut it out. You two jokers. You boys back to bed right now. Otherwise, he'd have to send in some police, including my dad to quote unquote disarm them. The men refused. So my dad had to go and wrestle a slippery naked and armed autist tool to the ground. Jesus. As my dad said, while telling me this story, quite the nice gentleman. Wow. Callie. That's hilarious. That's fucked up.

No, he's autist tool is the guy in the horror movie that the girl gets away and she's right at the edge of the forest and the man picks her up in the truck and she's crying and saying, thank you so much. I just had to go to the hospital and he goes, okay, hold on real quick. We're going to go up here and he drives her back to the house that she just escaped from their buddies. Yeah, because you never expected duo. That's right. You know, it's so it's like not fair. How do you, it's hard enough to just like find a friend that you want to have lunch with much less that you're going to just murder people all over the place. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh no. All right. Between Henry Lee Lucas and honest tool, which one do you think was perpetually late all the time?

What? I was an hour and 15 minutes late to the recording today, everybody. I think that's a real honest tool move of me. Do you think it's honest? This is the one that's like, what's our, I thought it was it for and Henry is like, I was here right on time. Please. I was here meditating. Okay. This is called my brother and the Texas murder house. Hi Karen and Georgia. My name is Bonnie and I'm from Dallas, but I have a half brother who grew up in a small North Texas town with his mother. When he was in high school, he joined a club that I guess you could say was like a crime stopper group for teens. Sounds fucking awesome. How did I not have, we don't have that at my high school. What the hell are they going to do? I think they're going to sit around talking

about murder, which we do. Maybe spy on some people who are suspicious in their town. Totally. Fucking dig it. Teens. Teens. One day, the group was invited to the local sheriff station for a tour and meet and greet type situation. This led to a little Q and A session and one student asked the sheriff, which case it stuck with him the most in all of his years on the job. The sheriff went on to tell a heartbreaking story about a man who lost his mind, shot and killed his wife, and then shot and killed himself. Of course, the students were intrigued and continued to ask more questions about the case. That's when the sheriff, for reasons I can't wrap my head around, brought out the case file and showed the students the frigging crime scene photos. The list of things

sheriff should not do, number one, show children photos of dead bodies. Am I right? And anyway, here's the good part. As my brother looked at the photos, he couldn't help but feel like something felt familiar. When he came across the photo of the front of the house, he realized that it was his mother fucking house, all caps. He went on to discover that the room the wife was shot and killed in was his bedroom. No. No, thank you, sir. Bye-bye. I never really learned too many details about the murder suicide, so I'm sorry. I can't explain more about that, but I still felt like this was a story to my like to hear. That's correct. Anyways, you guys are the tits. You guys are the tits. The name of this one is tits. In every way. And your podcast is

one of my favorite things of all time, so keep up the good work. XOXO Bonnie. Thanks, Bonnie. That was, I mean, bad enough that you're looking at crime scene photos, but then to have that like gotcha moment. No, that story could have been done with just the sheriff showed them crime scene photos. Yeah, but no, it was not. Jesus. That's so awful. I've never seen. I've seen crime scene photos, but I've never, you know, you see one off. I've never seen like a folder with actual like the crime scene photos that detective you like detectives used. I mean, there was somebody that was talking about that for one of the cases. One of, I think maybe a live show we did and somebody talking about about it afterward. They, a relative of theirs had to look at all the crime scene.

Was it Ted Bundy or something? I don't know. I can't remember, but just how that was the part, maybe that they were, they were a policeman or something. Just that the evidence was so upsetting. Oh, it was a jury, a bunch of jury members. Yeah. Right. And they needed PTSD treatment. Yes. That was the jury because it was one of the, it can only be one of the like eight stories we've done on the road. Right. I never, I guess I didn't think about that that like any time I watch any of this stuff, I close my eyes all the time. Like this, I'll get like a sense of it and close my eyes. But if it's anything like, like the person is dead, you can see how they were murdered and they're looking at the camera. No, no, no. See, I'm the opposite. You look at it. I look at

like what, what knots did they tie? How tight were the ropes? I don't know why. I just feel like they'll tell you though, not in a like excited way and not like horrified. Yeah, you got to see it. Yeah. And I just also feel like obligated in a weird way, like to the victim, to like, to like, no, what they went through, narrator telling you isn't that's not how you got to see it for yourself. I need to get my own PTSD. Thank you very much. I see. You know, that's a bit of you're going to put on a hair shirt for your interest. You're going to like make yourself suffer a tiny bit. A hair shirt. That's the old, they used to old monks used to put on really itchy shirts as a way to suffer for the Lord. I always bring it back. It sounds like

yeah, that's funny. It's not funny. It's funny. All right, give me one more. Okay. This says don't go to Poughkeepsie. Don't get murdered. Hi, Karen, Georgia, Steven, Elvis, Mimi. My hometown murder comes to you from the town where I went to college, Poughkeepsie, New York. It's a last stop on the Metro North Hudson line from Grant Central, and it doesn't really have anything worthwhile except a mall with a target attached, which couldn't be more worthwhile. A life saving thing. Okay, from November 1996 to August 1998, a man named Kendall Francois picked up sex workers from Main Street in downtown Poughkeepsie, brought them back to his parents' house on Fulton Avenue, had sex with them, strangled them, and then hid their bodies in the attic

and crawl spaces of his parents' house. That was a separate phrase just to, you know, got it, really underline it. While his parents lived there, another separate sentence. I think, yeah, they're like dramatic effects, but it's like you can't really tell with periods. Francois was 75 inches tall. What? What? How tall is that? Six feet? What the fuck? Why are we doing it that way? I don't know. Is that how you do it in Poughkeepsie? 12 is 72, right? Poughkeepsie, come on. Oh, Poughkeepsie, it's their, like, kind of metric, so they do things. Yeah, even though it's ages aren't metric. That's good. Francois was 75 inches tall. Oh, oh, sorry. That's what it says in the mugshot, and I'm too tired for the math.

Oh, they're one of us. I'd love it. Why don't I just read the rest of the sentence? I do that all the time. Okay, had a reputation for being violent with sex workers, was nicknamed stinky because he apparently had really terrible hygiene, a winning combination. On September 1st, 1998, a woman whom Kendall Francois had abducted managed to break free from his assault and escape the house on Fulton Avenue. She told a woman at a nearby gas station that she'd been assaulted and then walked away. The woman flagged down police officers, pointed them in the victim's direction. Police located the victim, took her back to the station for questioning, where she filed a complaint against Francois. Police went to Francois' home to ask him some

to come into the station for further questioning. He went with them willingly and was soon arrested after confessing to most of his crimes. He pled not guilty. He was convicted of eight counts of first degree murder and eight counts of second degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole because Francois' defense attorney got him to plead guilty before the DA could ask for the death penalty. He avoided trial by jury and since the death penalty could only be given by a jury, he avoided the death penalty completely. Apparently this was some loophole in the New York legal system at the time and it sounds like bullshit. Francois died in 2014 at the age of 43. Apparently due to the HIV, he contracted from one of his victims.

What a dick. Jesus. Okay. All of his victims were petite white women with short brown hair, hazel, brown or hazel eyes, ranging from 25 to 51 and almost all of them were reported missing by their mothers because they were sex workers. Police didn't prioritize the missing person's reports and it's generally believed Francois could have been stopped sooner had police not devalued the missing women because of their sex worker status. My freshman year of college, I would walk by the murder house on Fulton Avenue a couple times a week on my way to from tutoring at Poughkeepsie Middle School where Kendall Francois was working as a hall monitor at the time of the murders. Very bad murdery vibes even though it's been completely fixed up.

I think it was a residential life. It was the residential life director of my college who lived there for a while while I was a student. I don't think I could be paid to live in a murder house unless I decided I never wanted to sleep again. We're wrapping it up now. A really terrible B-list horror movie was made inspired by the Poughkeepsie murders called the Poughkeepsie tapes. It was pulled from distribution shortly after it was made in 2007, but there are extended trailers available on YouTube. At one point in college, some dude made me watch one of them late at night and YouTube actually removed the audio on the video because it was too disturbing. I made the dude walk me back to my dorm because I was so scared. Apparently the movie got released for

real in 2014. I just read the Wikipedia for it and now I want to bleach my eyeballs so proceed with caution. I bet they have, right? The Poughkeepsie tapes. So that's the Poughkeepsie murders. Don't go to Poughkeepsie, don't get murdered. Katie. Wow. Wow, thanks, Katie. At the point where it's life in prison without the possibility of parole, do you care that the death penalty isn't an option? I feel like at that point, yeah, I feel like at that point for me, I'm like, well, he's fucking gone. Yes, for sure. He's not out murder, like hurting people. No. That's all that matters. If it was the option of life in prison with the possibility of parole, which then probably the death penalty wouldn't be an option, then I'd be like, I'll fucking kill him. Yeah.

No, I don't want him to fucking get out of there. It's so hard because these people that are like multiple offenders or lifelong offenders, it seems so insane. It just seems to be a different, it's just a different echelon of crime and how people should be punished. People are like, like rabid dogs that can't stop killing other human beings. Yeah, it's not all the same, like people who can be rehabilitated. Yeah, it's not. It's not. And as much as I want to, like, the VM really get behind abolishing the death penalty, I think there's like, we read too many cases where it's like, no, I think that this person, not that I think I want to kill them or I just want someone else to kill them. I just don't want to think that they, yeah,

there's fucking scary blights on humanity. For sure. I know. You know what I think will be interesting is how much the study of like sociopaths and psychopaths and how like the mental element of killers comes into play to actually, you know, it's that thing of like, well, I think it's sociopaths, they aren't, can't be rehabilitated. There's no, if you don't have a conscience, you can't build one. It does. Yeah. I mean, there's, which is not to say all sociopaths are evil because lots of people like to talk about that. And you can build an understanding of what's right and wrong. If you're not a fucking murderer, which I'm sure a lot of sociopaths plenty aren't. Yeah, plenty aren't. Then you can be, you know, you can teach that. But it's the idea

that it's like, when a dog has rabies, yeah, it only wants to do one thing. Yeah. And you can, it's just that, I think. But I mean, we're talking about human beings. It's just the worst. It's the worst topic. I know. Okay. And we're also facing a prison planet future where because privatized prisons are going to make rich people richer. Then, then it'll be everybody will love throwing people away forever. That's what I hate. Is this, you just better make sure you're the right person. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is chill. This is so cool for a many 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

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first box at hellofresh.ca slash murder 20 with code murder 20. That's up to 20 free meals plus free shipping on your first box when you go to hellofresh.ca slash murder 20 and use code murder 20. Goodbye. Hey, I'm Aresha. And I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts 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. All right, one more. Are you ready for this? Okay. I honest, I love your podcast. My friend just turned me onto it. What? The way you said that was like, I don't care what anybody says. Yeah, I love your podcast. No, you know what? I love it. Despite what everyone says, I love your podcast. My friend turned me onto it. I was rocking my brain trying to come up with a good hometown murder story and had completely forgotten about this gem. Enjoy. If you use this for any purpose, please don't link back to my real name just in case. Bitches, be crazy. No shit. So

in 2006, that was for me. So in 2006, in a time of my space in AOL, instant messenger, I had a part-time job at a grocery store or pharmacy in an affluent suburb of Chicago. I went away to college downstate but continued to work there when I was home for breaks and weekends. In the fall of my freshman year, a guy from my high school who had been a year too older than me found me via my space and started chatting with me. I didn't know him, but I did know his younger brother. I kept making reference to the fact that I had a boyfriend and he threw on a sly. So, smiley face, I was intrigued enough to chat with him. So a few weeks passed right here from him primarily on Friday and Saturday nights. He was flirty but never inappropriate and I kept

getting the feeling that he was broken. Like, bad things had happened to him. Like, he had a rough life. One weekend in the fall when I was home, I learned that my co-worker had died. She was in her 40s and I'd worked with her once or twice but was never close with her. We had a cast of interesting characters while I'd been working there, including a medium or astrologist. And so she didn't strike me as very memorable, but then I learned that she had been murdered. What? Oh, I just, I don't know. Oh, you're saying, oh. Yeah, exactly. I was surprised. It sounded like a what? I immediately thought a heart disease. That's what gets most middle-aged from him. So please, watch what you eat. Yeah, donate too. Where I'm from was not a place where murders

happen. It is the only murder I've ever heard of happening here and was completely swept under the rug. No one talked about it and everyone proceeded forth as if it had never happened. But not me. I became obsessed with it. Duh, she said. It turns out she had been murdered in a fairly abandoned industrial area of town. Her second job was delivering pizzas at a pizza place where her son also worked. Apparently she swapped shifts with him that night because her son was, quote, sick. I don't know the specifics of the murder, but I know that she was, that she was shot when she delivered a pizza to this abandoned area and the murderer was a drug lord. Her son owned the, owed the guy money. They had planned on murdering him that night, but she showed up instead. So I

guess they were like, fuck it. This is fine. We'll just murder her. I started to put the pieces together. Her son was the guy that had been chatting with me from my space. It was completely obsessed with this murder for like a month of my freshman year. So the next time the guy messaged me, I said something generic like, I just found out about your mom. I worked with her and I'm really sorry to hear about what happened. At that point, I didn't know he had played anywhere on the death, just that she had been killed and he acted weird that I had said anything at all and never talked to me again. I didn't drive down the road. She was killed on for like seven years. It gave me the creeps. See, I swear to God, I thought you were going to say the son did it.

Like then it turned out that he did it or planned it or like paid people to do it or something. Yeah, but it turned out it was purely like revenge or like supposed to be him. Wow, which almost feels like he's partly culpable in a way. Well, yeah. Like not, not just like accidentally, but like, yeah, if you, if you owe money to drug lords, bad things are going to happen to you and your family. Yeah, probably don't do it. You guys don't it's, you know what, get the get a friend. Yeah, to go in with you on a nice bag of bad grass. Yeah, smoke that. And we know you're all drug lords alone. There's some people listening to this right now or packing their backpacks to go meet their drug lord. Please unpack it. Stay home.

Just relax. Have a nice cup of tea. You could actually, yes, you could have a completely drug free day. I made it sound like smoking bad pot is your only option. You know, drugs are also an option. I mean, it's, you know, you're human. I just, I don't know, I was trying to make them, I was trying to give them as drug addicts something that they needed. Yeah, that's true. That's what they beg for. Well, you guys send us your hometown murders at my favorite murder at Gmail. And you guys thank you for writing these. They're second fun and depressing. It's super involved and it's everyone's got a story. Yeah, we want to know all of them. We do. Thanks for sending them in. Stay sexy. And don't get murdered. Elvis,

you want a cookie? He's on top of the fridge right now. Give him a second to my face. Elvis, your line. All right. Want a cookie? There he is. That's not a goat. That's a cat. Bye. Bye.