My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 60

Episode Date: March 5, 2018

This week's hometowns include sand dune sinkholes, suspicious thrift store finds, and a horrifying call-in story about babysitting.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And welcome. To my favorite murder. Minasod. Minasod. It's from Minasut. You know. Manhasut. It's your favorite place where we tell you your own stories about, maybe about murder.

Maybe about razors. Maybe about stuff and walls. Maybe about sinkholes. Maybe about something you found out about your grandpa when he died. Maybe it's that your grandpa was an alien. Maybe your grandpa was a sinkhole. Maybe your grandpa is the center of the earth, made of hot magma, where the Loch Ness Monster is passing through on his way from one lake to the other.

That's right. That's how they travel. Listen. Look. Look and listen to our fucking rambling bullshit on your way to work Monday morning. This is an organized podcast of single topic true crime. If you can't handle it. We take you, we take this very, you, we take you very seriously.

We take it very seriously. And we take every topic that exists seriously. Let's do this thing. No bullshitting. Okay. I guarantee to you, this one says, mom had a banger hometown, Georgia, Karen, Steven. So my mom had a banger for me tonight. That's British.

Right? Yeah. Like a party. It's like a party sausage. It's those little ones. Really long party sausages that you cut up into 30 pieces. That's what I was going to say. Did you mean the mini ones with toothpicks?

Like the little ones that you make into pigs in a blanket. How good are those little smokies? Little smokies. You can also take them camping guys. Focus please. So my mom had a banger for me tonight kept insisting she's told me, but no fucking way I would have forgotten this horrifying gem. My mother grew up in homebolt, South Dakota.

Oh, there's not British at all. In a small trailer house with her parents, raging alcoholic father, younger brother Barry and little sister Becky. One night my mom says she was out late with friends smoking dope as she recalls. Yes. Yep. Brenda is the bee's name. Oh my God.

Brenda. Mother's name is Brenda. There's no children named Brenda. No, that's done. 100%. The Brenda's and the Carlos and the Denise's and the Sheryl's are not. You know what? Can you, okay, picture a little baby, a little sweet baby and now picture it's named Barbara.

That has always been to me like that. Like when I meet a person named Barbara and like you are a baby named Barbara, a baby named Barbara. Although Barbara Gray, who is our, all of our mutual friends, I love her name on her. I think it suits her perfectly. It's so perfect. It's almost like it's like a 80s sitcom named her perfectly. And now we're bullshitting.

That's the height of bullshit. If you, but also if you haven't listened to the lady to lady podcast, that's how you're going to get to know Barbara Gray and her friends. That's why we told you this. Yeah. We planned it, we rehearsed it twice and now we're executing it. And we did a great job. Okay.

Here's the thing about this email that's ready. Okay. So she's the bee's knees smoking pot with her friends, comes home late. She had thought that her brother Barry was still out with his friends while her younger sister was in the front yard, having a quote camp out, sleep over in a tent. She had gotten ready for bed and climbed in the way her bed was placed. She could see directly down her hallway and after she got in bed that night, she remembers looking down the hallway and seeing a man crawling down the hallway towards her, not

walking on, but on his fucking hands and knees. That's the most menacing way to move towards someone. It's straight out of like the ring. Yes. It's very, because then the next thing that happens is their elbows turn in, it all goes backwards and then they go up a wall like a crab. Oh my God. Okay.

She tried to scream, but it was of course the reaction of I'm too fucking terrified to find my own goddamn voice. But the intruder heard her squeak and froze, which is even scarier. She finally found her voice and screamed for her dad. From there, her dad, mother and brother, brother holding a rifle. I thought it was going to be her brother in the hallway. No, it was not her brother in the hallway. Go on.

But running down the hall after this guy, he decided to fucking hide behind the tent. Oh my God, where the little girl is in? Where my young aunt and her friend were sleeping. My uncle Barry lines up a shot as my mom's dad leaps and says, don't you see girls? The guy ended up running off. They still have no idea who the man was. Oh no. I thought it was going to be whimsical and funny because her brother was really drunk

and crawling to his bed. No girl. That's what I thought was going to happen. No. Her brother was drunk. He got a shit right back together, grabbed the rifle in his room. No, no, it wasn't him. I thought that's how it would go.

I mean, he came for the rescue. He was there for that part. But no, there was a full on fucking crawling intruder in their house. No. Horrifying. I hate it. If this ever gets on your cast, I may shit a brick. So I hope to hear my mom's fucked up story told by one of your angelic voices.

Stay fucking sexy and don't get goddamn murdered, Nicole. Well done, Nicole. Go shit a brick. Please go tell a fucking... Deborah. Close. Barbara. Brenda.

Brenda. Tell Brenda we say hi. Hi. Banger. That was a banger. That was a banger. Okay. Oh, she meant it in the Miley Cyrus way.

Banger. There's a Miley Cyrus way to say banger. Yeah. I didn't know that. And an album to back it up. Really? I don't know anything about pop culture. That might be banger's plural.

Anyway. Huh. Oh, kids these days. They're going around being political and smart. With their tongues out. With their tongues out. Okay. This is called thrifted murder dress.

Oh. Hello, everybody. Perfect. Perfect. When I was with a... But a wee lass, my mom was an avid thrifter. With no college degree and a small child to raise, she started selling thrifted goods on eBay.

Think those teenagers on Depop at circa 1999. I don't know what that means. Does that have some kind of Korean reference? I think Depop, D-E-P-O-P, is like a vintage clothing selling app. Oh. Someone in line, I was like, where did you get your dress at the meet and greet? And they said that and I forgot about it. Okay.

So it might be an online store or app. Yeah. But I remember being obsessed with eBay and it was just like this, it was nothing like it. Yes. At the time, it was so exciting. Okay. The countdown part was the best part.

Oh my God. They didn't have buy it now shit. No. Like you had to... You had to hang in. Like you had to find your thing of this is the lamp from my childhood and then fight against others. So fucking asshole.

And wherever the fuck would buy it from right out underneath, like a penny more. And that's the reason that you thought you wanted that thing so bad that you actually didn't need or wanted it. Oh my God. Now we just, okay. One day she founded beautiful 1940s dress. The problem, it had blood stains and would appear to be a hole from where someone got stabbed.

What? Funny enough, she bought the dress despite its obvious flaws. At the time she thought she could cut the zipper and sell it since there was a market for them. But she eventually got creeped out and threw the dress away. While we have found some cool stuff at the Goodwill since then, like $10,000 cash, I'm not joking. What?

Tell us that story. Did you... New hometown requests. Yes. Random shit you found in like crazy places. Found things. Found, thrift store things is awesome. Found thrift store things, maybe like anything found.

Especially money. Oh. Big piles of money that you just kind of found. $10,000 cash. You would shit. That's a drug blazer. I thought you meant... Now we can buy that drug blazer there, always wanting it.

Oh, I'm talking about that fucking smart tweed blazer with the elbow pockets that smells a little bit like cigars. But secretly the person's a coke dealer? Exactly. Yeah. Okay. We have unfortunately not found another murder dress. As a kid, I didn't think much of the incident, but now Murder We Know Me wonders if this

dress was part of some old timey unsolved murder. Anyway, see you all in March, Judy. God, I can't read today. Judy. Judy. We'll see you in March, Judy. See you in March, Judy. Are we just gonna wear that dress?

Do we have dinner plans with Judy in March? No, for the live Los Angeles show. You know, March is the month where Karen and I leave our apartments and houses and venture out into the world. We go and then we'll just kind of dine with whoever emails us. That's right. It happens all the time. That was a good story.

I mean, that is the idea that that just could be a floating piece of evidence that no one got or something. Yeah, like some small town jurisdiction was at emptying out the evidence room and they're like, this vintage dress is pretty obvious. I'm just gonna get it all at Goodwill. And then they're like, this pile of cash that someone's robbed from a bank, we'll just put it in the Goodwill. Okay.

This is an I survived plus a sinkhole story. Say, whoa. Oh, Karen's like trifecta, but with two things. I'm trifecta minus one. What do they call that? Sleek. It's a bifecta. Bifecta.

Hello, Karen. Georgia, Steven, an all associated animal. Love it. That sounds like it's civic based. I live near the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, which is located on the southern tip of Lake Michigan. A very common pastime when spending a day at the beach is to run up and down the dunes. I'm not entirely sure why that is, as the sand is always hot as fuck.

And have you ever tried to climb a sand mountain? It sucks. These dunes are known as living dunes because they move anywhere from a few to upwards of 20 feet per year. One of the more famous dunes is called Mount Baldy and is over 120 feet tall. In July of 2013, six year old Nathan Wassner was visiting the dunes with his family and went to climb Mount Baldy with his father when all of a sudden he fell into a sinkhole all caps.

The dune literally swallowed him. Oh my God. Nightmare. Nightmare. Apparently all the years of shifting had compromised the integrity of the surface and allowed for a giant ass boy swallowing sinkhole. His father and other beachgoers immediately tried to dig him out, but they could not see or hear him and the sand was difficult to displace.

First responders arrived and tried to use shovels to dig Nathan out. To no avail. After a few hours, they were able to drive an excavator up the dune. Start using that to dig, but they had to be extremely careful so as not to hurt Nathan with a giant metal claw digging thing. So progress was slow as they would have the excavator move a foot forward, dig around with their arms and shovels, then repeat the process for what I'm sure seemed like an eternity.

One of after what I'm sure seemed like an eternity, one of the first responders felt the top of Nathan's head and was able to pull him out. He was found in a standing position as if he had fallen down a narrow pipe. When he was pulled out, he was cold limp and didn't have a pulse, which wasn't terribly surprising since he had spent four hours buried in a sand sinkhole. That's fucking horrifying. But then, as he was in the back of a lifeguard truck on the way to the ambulance, he first responder noticed that a cut on the top of his head had started to bleed.

His heart started beating again. He was rushed to a local hospital and then later airlifted to Chicago where it was determined that he had suffered no brain damage. And in fact, his only injuries appeared to be that cut on his head where someone nicked it with a shovel while they were digging and a scratch on his cheek. He has no memory of the incident, so he's not even traumatized, just the parents. No one knows how he was able to survive that long buried in the sand. Mount Baldy was closed for a few years afterwards, good.

But they reopened it last summer with a big fence and warning signs around it saying that if you went inside the fence, you'd be fined. Pretty sure the threat of getting buried alive inside a sand dune is more of a deterrent than a fine, but okay, stay sexy and away from sand dunes, Kim. It scares me so much nuts, but this sand dune got angels saved him. Yes, they did. Also, can you imagine being this parents of like, longer they search, you're just like this.

We're looking for my kid's body. That is bananas that I have to admit, I read the first page of that. I did not read the second page and I was like, Stephen, you've got the whole world in your hands right now. I know, I'm like, what is because, you know, better than to lead us down the stony path of then the child just died in the sand, right, right, Stephen? Sometimes we like that. He knows it.

Well, true. Sometimes it's just like. It printed out that way too, so that made it probably worse. More dramatic. Because it was like you had to turn the page. I was not expecting my kid to, to renaith and to live. I really wanted him to be in a hidden cave with the Egyptian treasure. It's crazy that he doesn't remember it because like, I wonder if he was just like off one

another in another plane of existence. This whole interior was like, we're shutting all of us down for, we're going to hold for six hours and we're going to be right back online. Do you need us to give us a knock on the head with the shovel? Just go ahead and dig into my head with the shovel. Looking for a better cooking routine? With meal planning, shopping and prepping handled, HelloFresh has you covered. HelloFresh makes home cooking easy and affordable so you can stay on track and on budget in

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Hey, I'm Aresha. And I'm Brooke. 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. Instead of reading the last one, I have a recorded one for my friend. So today's Monday. So tomorrow is the 6th of March, Tuesday.

And so the episode of Drunk History in this new season that I'm on is going to play. And it's tomorrow night. At what time? I don't know. 9 p.m.? Sure. Comedy Central. Comedy Central, yeah.

And so it's a special episode called Drunk Mysteries, and I got to do a murder. Nice. So I'm doing that. Check it out. And it just so happens that a friend of mine, a good friend of mine, is the editor of my episode, which is really cool. And he has a hometown he's been always wanted to tell me. So his name is John Kasen, he has a podcast called Ghosting Around, and it's a ghost story,

like true gross stories. It's really cute. And so this is his hometown murder. So thanks for not making me look like a fucking idiot on Drunk History, John, I hope. Well, we'll see. I hope. We'll see. Okay, here it is.

Hey, everybody. This is my hometown murder slash I was a preteen person of interest story. So it's Orlando around 1990. I was 12 and a half or so, and I used to babysit for the two kids across the street. So one day I'm riding my bike home from school and I noticed there's a big crowd of people and news vans and police cars outside of my friend's house, which is just outside the neighborhood from the end of my street. And so I find out that between my friend's bedroom window and the brick wall that surrounded

the house, someone had parked a white truck in the grass and left it there. And it turns out that the truck belonged to the mom of the kids across the street that I babysat for. And then in the back of the truck, wrapped in a bed sheet was her dead body. She had been killed by blunt force trauma in her bedroom while the kid for a sleep upstairs wrapped up in her bed sheet, put in the back of her truck and then driven out of the neighborhood and parked in front of my friend's house. So everyone suspected her estranged husband, obviously, who lived on a houseboat three

years or three hours away and because they were going through a big messy divorce and she was asking for the house, the kids and the business that they owns together. So after all this happens, no arrests were made, still no arrests were made, still unsolved. But the dad moved back into the house to the chagrin of everyone. And then to make it worse, he asked my parents one day if I am available to babysit again. And without asking me, they say yes, because they don't want him to suspect that they suspect him of killing his wife. So anyway, I'm over there babysitting at night and there are still blood splatters on the

floor circled by Sharpie. And I didn't even look in the bedroom because I did not even want to even mess with that. But as I'm putting the kids to bed that night, one of the kids stops me and says, hey, John, and I say yes. And he says, I missed my mom. And so my 12 year old unequipped self, I think just said, I know, like I'm Han Solo. And then went and sat downstairs for a couple of hours waiting for a murderer to come home. So anyway, long story short, I turned out, or at least I got out of there, okay.

However, years later, this was a little dainty maw when I was 30 about my mom tells me that when the murder first happened, the detectives came over to our house and asked for a pair of my shoes to compare to the bloody footprints at the crime scene, which of course, she let them have my shoes. I never found out which pair of shoes they were that exonerated me. But that is the story of how I became a preteen person of interest. Anyway, I hope you dug the story and stay sexy and don't babysit for a murderer. Oh, the thing is, John is one of the sweetest people you've ever met in your life.

So like, like him as a 12 year old must have been like an angel baby. Also, I love the answer. I know. Just like, I bet that helped that little kid instead of like go to bed or whatever weird adults would say. Right. That's just kind of like a kid going, yeah, you're right. It's an acknowledgement of your pain instead of being like, don't be sad, which is like.

It feels like we're going to have to change a very, very long ago, like a declaration that we made on this podcast, which is no male babysitters. That's what I was thinking too, because that's what I wanted to say is like, John is a sweetheart. Yeah. I promise everyone, he didn't do it at 12 years old. How can you imagine suspecting a 12 year old like he's one of your suspects? They have to clear everybody. It's not like it hasn't happened.

Well, he said that we text about it and he said it's been the case has been opened a couple of times, but they haven't found any, you know, found anything and. But the father, the kid stayed in the house where their mother was murdered with the blood on the wall and the father moves like that's so unhealthy for those totally horrible. I guess. Yeah. I don't know how they turned out, but it's super sad. Oh, yeah.

I like it though. I like it. I first person told is always thought. I mean, just like, you know, and you're like, like he's been trying to tell me that story forever. I mean, there's there's truly nothing better also. That's how it happens for so many people where it's like, he's just an innocent 12 year old and all of a sudden he knows that people murder each other.

Totally. Like all these things become real and he also gets shoved into a weird adult position and his parents send him back over to a murderer's house because they don't want to be rude because they don't want to be rude to the murderer. That's nuts. It's crazy. I mean, they don't even have the like, oh, he's going to go to camp that week. Right.

They don't even lie. Sure. He's available. Of course. We're not suspicious of you and it's like, even if it wasn't the dad, you're sending him back to the murder house at night alone as a 12 year old with kids. Yes. Like the killer's still on the loose, even if it's the dad or not.

Can't those kids leave that house and come to a different house? Yeah. Why don't they come to John's house to take care to get babysat and stay there forever. I'll call his mom when this is over. We're going to have some more into this one. We really have to get on the horn with her. Yeah. Mrs. Cason.

Cason Point. But here's the thing. It's that exact thing that made him the great television editor that he is today. That's true. These are the things that build us. That's true. Yeah. I think that's it.

Send us your shit. My favorite murder Gmail, y'all. Yeah. Keep it up. We love all these stories. We do. You guys are the best. Stay sexy.

And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Goodbye. Elvis, you want a cookie? Kiss the boi.