My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 62

Episode Date: March 19, 2018

This week's hometowns include a farmer’s diary and a Ted Kaczynski encounter.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. Mini-sode. The mini-sode episode. That you are listening to in your car. Or at work. Whatever. Treadmill.

Cemetery. Doctor's office. Mowing the lawn. You're getting your teeth cleaned. You're getting your feet cleaned. You're getting your cat cleaned. You're getting your bat cleaned. This is a lot like Sesame Street.

And that's, we also wanted you to know that this show is brought to you today by the number nine. But stop letting your kids listen to this. Yeah. What's wrong with you? Insanity. Right. This is the mini-sode we reach at your fucking stories.

You know how it goes. I just want to say this, I, in recording our full episode, we do it all at once, I bit my fucking tongue and cheek so hard with my new tooth that my beautiful dentist just gave me. Oh, you're not used to having a tooth there. I'm not. I had broken a tooth. It had been broken for a long time.

I was pretending it wasn't real. Living in a fantasy world, trying to come out of that fantasy world, went to a dentist to get it fixed. He is the most beautiful man in America. That's gotta be rough. You sent me some photos of yourself in the chair. It's just like. Not cool.

Compounded how you look, which is hilarious because you've got like stuff on, compounded knowing that the guy, the fucking guy on the other side of the camera was like gorgeous. It's gorgeous. It's so weird because the first thing they do, it's like, you know, a fancy dentist office where the first thing they do is make you put on a pair of Oakley blades because it's like, you know, they're going to do some kind of thing. And it's like to protect your eyes where I'm like, can I not wear these or could I get a cute pair of cat eye versions?

I didn't. Can I just wait till he sees my eyeliner that I did for him today? The eyes are pretty much all I'm bringing to the table these days. Can I keep these exposed? Oh, no, I can't. No. Okay. Well, then definitely have him put on glasses with microscopic lenses so he can see up

close into my filth mouth. What are we talking about? We're talking people's fucking fetish trees. I said Georgia, the hilarious picture of all this shit in my mouth as I was like laying in the chair. It looked like your mouth was about to have a C-section because they put in a huge dam so that none of the stuff that they're like, because he keep pulling all the silver out of my teeth and replacing it so they don't want to make sure you don't swallow it.

Sure. It's ugly times in a Beverly Hills setting. It's not good. Okay. I, with my new tooth, just bit as my tongue, now I have a weird speech impediment. And with that, I'm going to go into our first Minnesota this episode. And I'm reading this first, even there's so many choices, Steven, but this one I picked because it says found diary leads to graveyard.

Hi all. I love the podcast. I'm always impressed that you're able to make us cry laugh and cry cry in the same episode. I heard on the last minisode, a call for interesting found object stories. So here it goes. A few years ago, I found a set of diaries from 1921 to 1957. Stop it. What?

Dream. Written by a farmer from a tiny town in Kansas who wrote a sentence or two every day about the weather and what work he did or bits of info about his family and community. It's beautiful. It's so good. That's the purest thing I've ever heard. It's the best. I started researching his family and as I read them, oh, I started researching his family

as I read them and eventually put together a rough family tree through census records and local newspapers and directories. It was such an interesting look into what it was like during the oil boom of the 1920s when everyone thought they were going to be rich to the Great Depression of the 1930s when everyone turned out to be poor. What were you saying? Like, when you go back in time and you want to yell at them to like, no, it's going to be that.

Get out of the dust bowl. Right. Move to California now and plant some orange trees. Okay. In one entry in 1928, our farmers describes how a family down the road, friends and neighbors of his, was killed the night before when their farmhouse mysteriously burned down with the entire family inside except for the 17-year-old son who had taken the family car to the movies and didn't get home until the fire was mostly out.

The murder was never solved partly because the cops assumed the son had done it and spent all of their attention and resources creating that narrative and getting him to confess, which he eventually did after hours of nonstop questioning, but later recanted. Is that the right word? Whatever. It's written. They never considered any other suspect or scenario, even though the son was eventually acquitted, I became so interested in the farmer's small-town life that I drove to Kansas

for my grandmother's house in Iowa to see the church that his father had helped build in 1899 and then nearby graveyard where the farmer's family and the murdered family were buried. I asked, oh, I arrived at dusk just as the son was going down and there was no one around for what seemed like miles. So I let myself into the graveyard gate. It was surreal, just slowly walking around and reading the names on the gravestones, like these people who had been fiction were suddenly there in real life.

I recognized the names of the families and the neighbors all around, including the headstone for the murdered family. I had brought them some flowers, which I placed and then thanked the farmer for keeping his diaries and then I started to get spooked the fuck out and kind of walked jogged back to my car. I still have the diaries and although the farmer turned out to be a real asshole in the fifties, I'm glad I saved them. Keep up the good work and SSGGM Jessica, Jessica, be my best friend.

That was such a good twister room. I just man, Jessica is at home right now going, oh, you already are my best friend. Yeah. I fucking thought like when he was like, what an incredible, I love people who fucking think like that. That's great. She went there and did that and brought them flowers. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean. I feel like that movie starts in the last diary before the fifties diary starts. What happened where he turned? What life event? And at the same time back when then we switch back to modern day, the movie goes back and forth. She's leaving the graveyard.

It starts fucking pouring. She has to hide out in a fucking barnyard. Turns out it's the fucking, you know, one of their barnyards. It's haunted. It's one of the many barnyards. You know what I mean? Yep. It's a haunted barnyard.

So there's ghost chickens. Yes. And there's ghost geese. Ghost geese. Ghost geese just hissing at you, trying to bite you. And what we learn at the end of the fucking day is that time is a flat circle. It time is the flattest of circles. I mean, I got, I got called flat chested in high in elementary school, but this is flatter

than that. You're supposed to be flat chested. I know. That's what I always said, but apparently fucking these washed girls were not. That's disgusting. I'm doing great. You are. You're fine now.

Look at you. All right. This is called, uh, that time I gave my best friend bad advice, but she ssdgm'd anyways. Okay. Hi, Karen and Georgia. A few years ago, my best friend moved into a cute little apartment building and immediately made friends with all of her neighbors. She's one of those.

Yeah. Congratulations. You're not weird. Most of her neighbors with a you, by the way, so she's probably, uh, we're really cool. You are weird. We're really cool. That was so condescending. I'm sorry.

I just wanted to acknowledge it, you know, uh, but she did get creepy vibes from one of them. He also happened to be the caretaker. Oh, so anytime there was a problem, he was the one she had a call to fix it. Green jumpsuit. I'm seeing it. Yeah. Nope.

Nothing's wrong. Nope. Everything that that sink just fell off the wall for other reasons. I love flooding. It's how I, it's how I want it at one point. He had to do a bunch of repairs on the building and asked her if she would like to be his assistant. No, thank you, sir.

That's what she should have said, but she was a bit hesitant at first because her gut was telling her not to, but she really needed the extra cash. So she ended up agreeing to it. Wait, I'm sorry. How old was this person? I don't know, but she's living alone. So, okay. She's an adult.

It's not kids. It's not a kid stuff. I mean, even when he asked her to meet him in the middle of an alley, despite the fact that they both lived in the same building. Honey. Of course, even leave that part in. Okay. No, that's a, that's when you go, oh my God, you know what's crazy is we're going to go

to Hawaii and I'm not going to be here anymore. Right now. Yeah. The night before the scheduled workday, she called me to ask if I thought she should still go. Well, I didn't think she should have agreed to working with him in the first place. I felt that she needed to do the polite thing and honor her commitments. Honor with a you.

This is straight out of the UK. What is this? Is this from some kind of a nun's convent? Don't honor your God damn commitments. You don't owe anybody anything. Especially not with a you. Honor with a you. They're in the UK.

That's right. I convinced her that she still needed to work with him the next day. Love that this chick's like admitting. Yeah, she's being very candid and I respect it. The next morning she called me again. This time she was hiding under her covers in her bedroom while the creepy caretaker was banging on her door and peering into her windows. She listened to her instincts instead of me and decided that nothing good would have come

from meeting him in that alley. A couple days later, he was arrested for kidnapping a young woman from a grocery store and sexually assaulting her. Holy shit. When the police went to investigate his apartment, they found his ex-girlfriend who had been assaulted and tied up. Shit. The guy's rap sheet was a mile long.

He'd previously done time for kidnapping, rape, and even escaped prison at one point. Oh my God. I am so thankful that my friend was able to listen to her gut instead of me. She fucked politeness, stayed sexy, and didn't get murdered. Love the show you guys. Thanks, Mac. Looking for a better cooking routine? With meal planning, shopping, and prepping handled, Hello Fresh has you covered.

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Goodbye. What makes a person a murderer? Are they born to kill or are they made to kill? I'm Candice DeLong and on my new podcast Killer Psyche Daily I share a quick 10 minute rundown every weekday on the motivations and behaviors of the criminal masterminds, psychopaths and cold-blooded killers you hear about in the news. I have decades of experience as a psychiatric nurse, FBI agent, and criminal profiler. On Killer Psyche Daily I'll give you insight into cases like Ryan Grantham and the newly

arrested Stockton serial killer. I'll also bring on expert guests to dive deeper into the details, share what it's like to work with a behavioral assessment unit at Quantico, answer some killer trivia, and even host virtual Q&As where I'll answer your burning questions. Hey Prime members, listen to the Amazon Music Exclusive podcast Killer Psyche Daily in the Amazon Music app. Download the app today. The subject line of this email is the time my mom had a chat with the unibomber.

Apps are fucking lately. Read this to me. Hello Karen, Georgia, Stephen, and company. I love it. Perfect. First and foremost, thank you for sharing your true crime obsession with the world as someone who requested the first season of CSI on DVD for Christmas at the age of 10. Oh my God, I love you so much.

I have a longstanding interest in all things crime and murder related, but no idea that I had so many fellow murdering us out there to share this passion until recently, with until recently. Props to you. Hey, thanks. You too. Right back to you from the deepest of 1991. My hometown murder story is the tale of my mother's brush with fame.

None other, fuck my tongue, none other than the mathematician turned wilderness expert and notorious serial killer, Ted Kaczynski, aka the unibomber. I've lived in Texas for most of my life, but when I was four, my parents decided that Montana would be a nice place to raise a child for a couple of years. Little did they know this brief relocation would provide the opportunity for my mom to meet a serial killer. My mother had been working as a federal probation and pretrial services officer in Helena for almost two years, went on April 3, 1996.

The local FBI called my mom's office to give them a heads up. They had just arrested the man they believed was the unibomber. My mom spoke with the federal public defender, Michael Donahue. I love Michael Donahue. Donahue is my favorite show, he's just set up a time. I used to watch Donahue after school every day. I mean, I saw shit I should have not seen when I was 10, like, I saw, I've told you this already, right?

I saw they had like white supremacists on their skinheads. And they were going off and being like, I was just sitting there like crying in my parents' living room going like, well, I didn't understand this, why don't we talk anymore about these fucking shows that like Jenny Jones fucking, who else is there, Maury Pradovich, Jerry Springer. Like the shit. Haroldo. Haroldo.

Haroldo was trash filled. Ricky Lake was gorgeous. Ricky Lake, they had style and they had class. Ricky Lake was kitschy. Yes. They knew who they were. Yeah. And my favorite line of ever that I fucking say all the time is when it was like, I'm

big and bold and I know them all that. Yeah. And like all these women came out and then this fucking amazing black egg guy stands up and goes, someone lied to you and it's my favorite, someone lied to you. Well, there's my favorite line was on a Donahue where after this, this horrible white supremacist bitter rant, they just like little like devil characters like they look like awful like insects from a fucking sci-fi movie. Yes.

They're just, they're just filled with hate and it was pouring out of and this woman stands up to say something and this guy's interrupts her and keeps on talking and she goes, hold on, you need to be quiet. You are in New York City now and the entire audience was like, yeah. It was the best. Oh, we got to bring that shit back. Yeah. Well, I mean, or not.

Okay. Time and place. We don't have to do it. We have other stuff to do. Okay. Here we go back to where I was in the paragraph, which is, right, Donahue. As a pretrial service officer, her job was to prepare a report. Is that where I was?

No, Donahue. Thank you. You said it twice and I didn't listen to you. Please trust me for once in your life. Just listen to me. Mom spoke with a federal public defender, Michael Hotpants Donahue, to set up a time to meet with Kaczynski. Got it.

She, she went in early the next morning and slipped past news vans and reporters into the county jail where she found the FPD waiting with Kaczynski in his jail cell. As a pretrial services, as a pretrial service officer, her job was to prepare a report for the judge to aid them in making bail decisions. Basically she had to assess the risk of Kaczynski being out on bond and make a recommendation to the judge. I asked my mother what her recommendation was and since she has unflinching integrity and pride in her work, her response was recommendation is confidential to her own child, to her own

child. No, mom. That's rad. It's like, come on. But I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that bail recommendation for the subject of the FBI's most expensive investigation at the time was probably a hard note. My mom sat right next to him and is on his jail cell caught, conducted the pretrial interview, the contents of which she will not share with me after 20 years.

I love this woman. She's by the book. She did share that the Tweed jacket Ted Kaczynski wore at his court appearances was donated to the martial service by her deputy chief and that the strangest part of the entire ordeal to her was all of the media attention the case received, not her interaction with Kaczynski. Also, my parents took me to a park in Lincoln, Montana, close to where Kaczynski was captured shortly before his arrest, obviously not aware that a mass murderer was in our midst.

I asked her if she had been scared to speak with a serial killer. She told me no. It was the opposite. She told her boss she wanted the interview and that he better not give it to the other officer she worked with. Guess I know where I get my murderer tendencies from. That's awesome. Thank you all for what you do.

And of course, remember to stay sexy and don't get murdered. Much love. Mal. Mal. Mm hmm. And Mac. That's good. I know.

That's awesome. Kaczynski, we don't talk about him enough. It's so weird when people, he is truly a serial killer, but being a bomber, he was so far away. Yeah. It's so, it's like a different brand of evil, it's a different flavor. It's a different category. Yeah.

It doesn't, I don't think I would have been scared because that's like a person that is coming up with these terrible ideas and then executing them totally detached. She's not, especially as a woman, he's not sexually assaulting women. That's right. He's not going after women, but also her sitting next to him. You say she's sitting next to a serial killer, but it doesn't feel the same way. It's not the classic definition. Right.

Right. But he's still a murderer. Yep. Very intentionally. We'll do him someday. Someday. Okay. Here's the other one.

This is called a head in a jar. Great. Hello there, Karen. This is a retelling of Silence of the Lambs. I'm going to be so mad. It is. Ready? Hello there, Karen and Georgia.

I'm a newbie to your podcast, so Steven, she doesn't know about you yet. Or the animals. Don't worry. You can come into episode eight, ten. I think 17. Okay. Oh, get that tattooed. You've got that tattooed.

17. What did we do for 17 episodes? We're going to just stare into the space on the carpet. Hey, so take that out, carpet. And then it's, and then the carpet grew, Steven. Oh my God. That's his origin. Mustache first.

That's his origin story. Origin story. Nice. Holy shit. Someone make a fucking cartoon of that. Okay. I'm a newbie to your podcast. It's actually the first and only podcast I've ever listened to.

Awesome. There's other great ones out there. No, there isn't. I'm the only podcast. A friend recommended it to me and I'm hooked. Hooked like writing. No, wait. Hooked like hiding in the bathroom, listening while my children play and sitting in my car

until the last minute before I have to go into work. Yes. What the, what has happened to me? Anyhow, I'd like to share a story with you. I'm from Santa Rosa. That's near Petaluma. Yeah. My family has been here for a long time, eight generations.

You may have heard of the famous Joaquin Marietta. Is it Marietta County? I don't know. Marietta County? Maricopa County? Nope. Marietta. Joaquin Marietta.

He was a Mexican bandit or Robin Hood, depending on who you talked to. He was all around California in the mid 1800s doing whatever it is he did, stealing from the rich, giving to the poor, question mark. I said question mark. It was actually just a question mark. It was just a question mark. Yeah. Rumor has it that there was a worn out on dear old Joaquin dead or alive.

When I was a young girl around 10 or so, my mother took me to her neighbor's workplace. She took me there to see the head in the jar, as any good mother would, apparently of Joaquin's head. Oh. These neighbors are an eclectic bunch, and keeping a head in a jar at his office didn't seem to out of the ordinary for old Bill. What did Bill do for a living? He had a, quote, workplace.

He's a teacher. What does that mean? Kindergarten teacher. He's a murderer. Their family has been in the area for many generations as well, and the story was that his great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather caught Marietta, beheaded him, and preserved the head in a large jar. When we got there, the head was gone.

He told us that they had to take the head to the family property and bury it as the police have been sniffing around. What? The thing is, my mother saw that head when she was 20, so we knew it existed. She saw the jar, the head, she saw it, and obviously never forgot it. She described it to me in great detail, so much so that I almost remember seeing it. And then my printer stopped fucking working because my printer is a fucking piece of shit and I hate it so much.

Can someone recommend a printer that doesn't fucking suck? Shit, I didn't know. Okay. Do you have one more? No, no, no, there's other ones. That sounds about right. I did it! So now we just don't know, what if it wasn't Joaquin Mira's, Mira this head, it was like

some neighbors. I don't know. We got to get the B side of that story. Shit, man. No, I love it. This is a cliffhanger. This is a classic cliffhanger. I'm so fucking lily.

Yeah? You want to know? Well, then you have to tune into the next mini-sode. Where we forget that we even talked about this. Where we never talk about it again. Oh, how's the book club going? Well, we've all got great intentions. Canapes.

Canapes everywhere. Okay. Oh, I like this one. This is a short and an interesting. Great. The haunting of my dad's van. Uh-huh. Yes, yes, yes.

A long time listener and murderino. Super excited to see you guys in London in May, someone from London. So my dad is a builder, so London, and seems to enjoy a crappy van, meaning he has to replace them on the regular. A few years ago, he bought a van off of a guy who he'd found in the paper and he's a complete stranger to my dad and has no connection or ties to our family. Once my dad had paid him and driven home, he performed the usual ritual of looking for loose change down the side.

Oh, see, dad, you're embarrassing us. Dad, are you me when I was eight? When I discovered that you could dig around in the car and find loose stuff, like, it was like a whole world was open to me. I have a really big problem, a really big problem with unfamiliar crumbs. Okay. I really, really don't like them. I don't want anyone else to fucking touch them in front of me.

I don't want to touch them myself. I just don't, you know, like, impersonal crumbs. I get it. Like, you don't know how they got there. You didn't enjoy the cookie that made those crumbs. Right. I get it. Whereas I love to dig my fingernails into unfamiliar crumbs.

And you get them under your nail. I don't like it. I don't like it. But you could get 25 cents? No. Or an old bobby pin. No, never. You never got 25 cents.

I guarantee it. You got about one single dice or a die. Okay. So the dad's looking for the loose change in the seats. His hand hits a piece of paper and he pulls it out to have a look. Oh my God. It's an old newspaper clipping that has been very carefully cut out and folded. And as he unfolds it, he realized it's his grandmother's obituary from 1981.

Stop! Your fucking face. Dot, dot, dot. What the actual fuck? Needless to say. Dot, dot, dot. No, I need a minute. Okay.

Oh my God. Yes. Okay, go on. Insane. Yeah. What are the odds? Needless to say. He didn't keep the van for long, but that's probably due to the engine falling out or

the exhaust exploding. The exhaust exploding. I don't know if it's. Is that a thing? I don't know. In England. It doesn't work. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Over there. Right. The whole back ends of cars explode. When my parents first told me that I thought they were winding me up, British. Winding me up. But their faces were deadly serious and they have the newspaper clipping. They have it. Parents are liars though.

But they have the newspaper clipping. Yeah, but they cut it out themselves when she died. There's crumbs, provable crumbs from 1981 on that clipping. They said it freaked them out at the time. It really freaked them out at the time. Neither of them believe in supernatural stuff, but they both admitted that this made them wobble. I hate not knowing answers to mysteries and this one is a killer.

Again, can't wait to see in May SSDGM, Georgia from London. Oh, my God. Hi, Georgia. I didn't know we had those there. That's bananas. I mean, why didn't he do any, if you were a murderer, you know, he would have done some fucking digging like the girl from the first story and found the fucking guy who had owned it originally and how he knew his grandma.

But I mean, God, that's weird. It's so weird because what if the guy's like, Oh, I don't know, it's whoever had the van before me. Yeah. Then go track that guy down. Go get on your bike. It's never going to be the first one. It's going to be like three down the road and then you're going to be like a detective.

That's right. You've got to dig in. You've got to be in it for the long haul. If you're going to get excited about a clipping, then you've got to follow that clipping on its long path. How badly do you want to fucking mystery to dig into? Also, it's kind of easy, though. Like not a hard one.

No, but like just something that you could, you'd microfish it up. You don't want to go to the library. I don't want to microfish it. You don't want to go to a basement anywhere? I don't want to go to a basement, but microfish sounds like 14 hours of fucking fishing. I don't want to talk anymore because my tongue hurts so bad. All right. Thank you guys for listening.

Send your shit to my favorite murdering email. And stay sexy. Don't get murdered. Bye. Elvis, you want a cookie? Cookie? There it is. Oh, bye.

There it is, oh, bye.