My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 81

Episode Date: July 30, 2018

This week’s hometowns include a bad piano teacher and a cemetery surprise. 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. Let's make podcasts. Magic. Bling. Hi. Hello and welcome. This is my favorite murder. The mini soad. It's a mini episode. We read your emails. You fucking clap or roll your eyes. Sometimes you'll laugh. Sometimes you'll go, why do I do this to myself? Sometimes you'll puke, which is a story. You want to get into it? Should I do that one first? Kick it off. I was going to do it last, but let's do it first. That's a nice, you just, you set yourself up with the perfect transition.

And I never go first or was not expecting this. Yeah. I'm nervous. Oh my god, it's so different. Okay, this is called your podcast makes me sick. Surprise ending. Karen, Georgia and gang. I love your podcast and everything about you, blah, blah, blah. The story takes place a few weeks back. I was still in my heavy binge listening phase, having only discovered the show in April. I hopped in my car to head to the dentist and put on an episode titled perclensity. Yay. Still my favorite word I've ever made up. Georgia shares about Typhoid Mary and I'm getting pretty grossed out. As I'm pulling into the parking lot, Karen says, I like to imagine Typhoid Mary sat in seclusion in her room on that island and fantasized about all the different things she'd like to put her

hands in. Corn chowder, mashed potatoes. And the fantasy is both bear arms go up, go all the way in. Still love that. It's great. It's very fun to hear back things we've said. Yeah. We've done so much talking. Yeah. That's a good feeling. Don't remember it. It sounds hilarious. Yeah. And she said, that did mean I promptly pulled into the nearest space, open my door and vomited in the bushes. I had driven all the way though and had been looking forward to having my teeth clean. So I decided to just brush my teeth in the bathroom and hopefully not throw up anymore. As I sat in the waiting room, I began contemplating and decided I should probably ration myself to one episode a day. Four to six is too many. The hygienist calls me back and we exchange nice

how have you been when she pulls out the x-ray vest. That's when it hits me. I gasp. I gasp so loud the guy in the next room asked what type of work I was having done and then inform the hygienist that I can't have x-rays because I think I'm pregnant. She says, you think you're pregnant? I then explain how I threw up in the bushes and they usually have a pretty strong stomach. She shrugs and we skip the x-rays. I call my husband as soon as I leave and tell him about it. He picks up a test on the way home and you guessed it. Murderino, Bambino on the way. Yay. Thank you for making me sick enough to figure out. I was pregnant. Your friend in the bay, Shay. Shay, you have to name that baby Typhoid Mary. Or x-ray.

Typhoid Mary would be such a cute name. We saved that baby from x-ray. That's right. x-ray rays. With our gross x-rays. Imagery. You're welcome, baby Mary. That's so touching. I know. Because I absolutely thought it was going to go into I had food poisoning. I totally did too. Right. And maybe part of me wanted it to be that. Maybe it was like, this will be fun. Now let's tell food poisoning story to my favorite. I did too because I've never had it. You haven't? I've gotten sick before from food, but I don't think I've ever had legit food poisoning. I've only had it twice in the most recent time. Let me just be a little gross for one second.

So if you think you might be pregnant, pull over. But it's not that gross. What if people are just like, I might be pregnant, but I'm not going to. They just pull over. All these pregnant people. It's just everyone off the freeway. I was eating dinner at Casitas del Campo, which is this awesome Mexican restaurant in LA on Hyperion. And they do amazing shows downstairs, which is where, of course, I've talked at length about it. Golden Girls Live takes place. But upstairs is this old school Mexican restaurant. So I was sitting there with, I believe it was Chip Pope, my friend Chip Pope. I can't remember.

And in the middle of this dinner, I start farting in a way that like it's quiet and stuff. Only I know it's happening. Oh my God. But the first one, I almost laughed because I was like, wow, that was a lot. Like a public fart. But then it keeps happening for the rest of the dinner. Oh my God. And it was like really long drawn out where I was like, I don't think I've ever experienced this before. It's like more farting than not farting. Oh my God. And then I went home and began the worst bout of food poisoning that I'd ever experienced

to the point where I almost thought I was going to have to go to the hospital. I have to say that it wasn't from Casitas del Campo because it takes like 24 to 48 hours for whatever you ate to give you food poisoning. And in fact, in doing that math, it is a business that's now shut down. Remember those fresh and easy grocery stores that used to be all over LA? Yeah. Oh yeah. They're like weird shrimp salads and stuff. Yes. I got a Chinese chicken salad. Oh my God. And when I did the math, I was like, it was that cabbage filled Chinese chicken salad. And I haven't been able to eat anything with cabbage in it since.

Good. Because it was so horrible. I wouldn't either. I'm not going to either. That was one of the grocery stories I could have told. It was just a farting story. But I mean, those you know when you have food poisoning because the farting approach and style is unlike anything. Like if you are sitting anywhere and the farting becomes long, long and powerful, get indoors, get to a bathroom.

I mean, if a fart ever surprises me of all fucking people, something is truly wrong with my gastrointestinal more so than it already is. Because, okay, go. We really kicked this one off. Well, here we go. Hello. It can only go uphill from here. Okay, let's see. We'll start with this one. Hometown story, piano teacher nefariousness.

Never trust a piano teacher. I mean, this one is. Dear Karen, Georgia, Steven, Steven, and that Steven spelled both ways. I grew up in a small town bordering the Jersey Shore parentheses. I apologize on behalf of all Italian Americans from New Jersey for anything annoying we have ever done ever. Close parentheses. When I was a kid, my mom brought me to music lessons, arts and crafts, and other extracurricular activities to encourage the creative side of my child brain.

Unfortunately, one of these good hearted gestures was bringing me to a piano lesson with a creepy old pedophile. Oh, no. For a while, I was taking piano and guitar lessons from a nice lady who lives as her father, who also taught piano, and oftentimes stopped in during the lesson in exchange small talk with me or my mom. He was nice, but kind of strange. He had a wandering eye and would wear one of those ties that had piano keys all the way down it.

Not saying these ties make you a pervert, but come on. They don't make you a pervert. They're just so corny. Yeah, there's a lot of corn. One day while I was in my super, oh, while I was in my lesson, sorry, the father was chatting with my mom and showed her the series of superimposed photographs of children who were other students photoshopped into random scenes like a girl in the middle of a safari or a boy coming out of a shark's mouth. My mom was like, oh, haha, cool.

But in her head was like, what the fuck? She did not want to diss the old man. He probably worked very diligently on the computer. He then told my mother that he could make a cool edited pic of her daughter. I knew where this was going. Can I take a photo of your daughter? If she provided a photograph of then 12 year old me, my mom kindly but firmly responded and no thank you.

And he never asked again. Fast forward a couple months later, my piano teacher canceled our lessons out of nowhere due to a family emergency with her father. My mom sent her condolences and she assumed he just died or was very sick. A week or so later on a warm summer day, my mom was watching the dishes and watching the news when the old man's mugshot appeared on the TV. My mom screamed so loud and for so long that my dad had to go shut the windows. Turns out contractors were renovating the piano teacher's bathroom

and noticed some unusual wiring, red flag called the cops and nearly had a heart attack and ripped out the walls and discovered a video camera recording system. My mother nearly had a heart attack as she realized both of us had for sure used that bathroom and all the students that were victims to his gross picture collages or home videos. The piano teacher later told my mom, we might be called to testify, but we never were truly disturbing. Shout out to any contractors that see suspicious things and speak up. I can't imagine how many fucked up things they discovered during renovations.

Because of them, this pervert will hopefully spend his last days in jail. Bye. Thanks for making this amazing podcast. I listen all the time for perspective and to remind myself of my mom saying, don't trust anyone with two holes in their nose. Stay sexy and especially don't trust anyone with a piano tie. Alexandra. Oh my God.

Holy. The piano teacher thing or the like when you go to someone's house and there someone lives with them or they're like, you know what I mean? Yep. Isn't that from the, what was that show? We love the family. Wasn't the pedophile's mom in it a piano teacher with the family? Which one is that?

That was the one in the very beginning of the podcast. We were really into where the son got kidnapped as a young kid and then came back. Oh yes. But it turned out he wasn't really a pedophile. That was just, he was the one that had been accused of the murder of the son. And then when the son came back, he was. No, he was a pedophile in addition to that though. Oh, it was Andrew McCarthy.

Yes. Yes. Yes. He was a pedophile. He had gotten out of prison. So he was like innocent and guilty at the same time. Yeah. So they thought he had something to do.

Yeah. It's a good show. That was a good show. All right. Let's see here. I read that one already. This one. Okay.

This one's called. This one's funny. Okay. I'm not going to tell you the name of it till after it because it's a clever name, but it gives it away. Okay. All right. Dear Georgia, Karen and the MFM crew.

About 20 years ago, the museum I worked at was offered some old coffins that had been unearthed during a street construction project. This is a colonial era city with a long history of relocating old church yards to make a room for urban growth. But as many horror movies teach us, graves are often left behind in the process. That's right. Our city workers are so accustomed to finding historic burials, they sometimes just leave them in place and build over them.

What do you think this is? I'm not going there. These burials. They've got to explain the movie, Poltergeist or something. Yeah, but that was a valley. So anyway, the San Fernando Valley. Historic colonial. Okay.

This family is building a pool. The swimming pool. Craig, Dean Elson's there. These burials were near the site of an old civil world hospital. So a local historical society had them exhumed and moved to a university for further study. As it turns out, they were just regular folks, men, women and a few children who were buried in a long forgotten cemetery from the 1830s. The curator and I viewed the remains, which the archaeologists had placed in coffin-sized

cardboard boxes. Most were just jumbled bones with some broken wood, broken coffin wood mixed in. But two were fairly intact, including one with a full head of hair still covered by a woolen grave blanket. So as I was looking at these remains, I kept noticing weird fluffy stuff mixed with these bones. It looked like plant roots or clumps of dried up grass or something. These clumps tended to be nestled near the middle of each body around the pelvis.

I couldn't figure out what it was. Then I saw it. The most well preserved body right below the grave blanket covering her midsection. I saw the biggest, all caps, bush I had ever laid eyes on. Yes, I'm talking about pubic hair on a skeleton. See, the fluffy clumps I'd seen in every coffin was pubic hair that had resisted decay for more than 150 years. Fun fact, they don't fucking, they don't teach you this shit.

You never hear about this. Fun fact, all after all the soft bits wrought away, the harder bits, including cartilage nails and body hair can remain behind stuck to the bones. Think about that next time you stroll in a cemetery. Now, I'm not a pubesh. I'm not pubeshaming anybody here because waxing and trimming is a personal choice. And these 19th century people never heard of such things as a bikini wax. But there is something, and this is in stars, asterisks, extremely unsettling about seeing

giant gnarly and totally untamed bush on exhumed skeletons. Up to that point in the visit, I was feeling okay, but once I realized what I was looking at, I had a swoony moment where I couldn't decide whether I would vomit or faint. Fortunately, I didn't either. I also kept my mouth shut, figuring the curator didn't want to hear me freak out about dead people's pubes. Probably. The bodies I saw were eventually reburied respectfully in a beautiful historic cemetery

in the city, pubes and all. But the museum never did take the coffin since they were too moldy and gross and filled with those loose pubes from long dead Irish immigrants. How dare you. You pointed right at me. I'm an Irish immigrant. You know you're you and your hairy bush. We know how we are.

That's part of our charm. I learned a few things from this experience. First, I'm far more squeamish than I thought I was. I love true crime stories with the sight of real dead bodies, especially skeletons with robust growths of pubic hair, disturb me deeply. Secondly, cremation seems so much better than lying around, underground, moldering away for decades. I love a cemetery stroll, but I really don't want to end up decaying in one.

Finally, if you're into waxing or trimming, always make sure you look your best. You might end up on display in a university anthropology lab in 180 years. Will. It's like so. I think that's the same thing with like when you see nails or teeth on us, you know, when you see like a skull and there's teeth in it and then you can see that they had braces or dentures like you can see what the human the person's face looked like with those teeth. And it makes it so much more real than without.

Yeah. I guess pubics like or like nails. If you see like painted toenails on a skeleton, you'd be like, oh my god, this person like did these things. They painted their nails so much it went down to the bone. Yeah, that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah. No, it makes it real.

Well, and also it's hilarious because I have never thought about this once. And then as you were describing that, probably because the, you know, Irish immigrant stuff you're saying, but I really did picture almost like a pink bush. I don't know that it would get like that something would catch that person's eye and then just be like, what the fuck is this minute? Now you have to rethink the whole movie. The mummy.

Yeah. And you have to think about what kind of dye they use to make their bush pink. Guys, we've got pubes. We've got farts. Lots of vomiting. This is this is the last one. I think this is it. No, you have a few more.

I do have two more, which means you have one more, right? I can do one more. Um, or I could just do this one. What is it? It's kind of long on the subject line is. Oh, wait, actually, I'm sorry. Hold on. This was called pubes from the crypt.

Even though we never named the mini so this should be like the junior high special. Yeah. Okay. Let's see. For this one, the subject line is absolutely bonkers beef stroganoff story. Oh, we talked about beef stroganoff in pockets. Okay. Um, greetings.

I'm a fam fam. I've been tempted to write many a time. One of my childhood friends murdered another. A boy whose locker was near mine killed a woman in Florida. And I once spent a week at a conference with Robert Durst. What the fuck? Shit, you better write back. But it is Karen's mention of beef stroganoff and many so 80 that finally compels me to write.

My dad only recently shared the story with me and I make him tell it to everyone because it's just so beyond. Here it is. Yay. Love parent stories, right? Uh, also later life parent stories, things they didn't tell you in America. Totally. It's the late sixties.

My dad is 18 and the weekend of my aunt's, it's the weekend of my aunt's wedding. My great uncle owned a nearby restaurant and offered to make the rehearsal dinner for the wedding party. Their families and the priest up at our family's summer house about 20 miles away. He made, you guessed it, beef stroganoff. Before I go any further, I need to tell you a little bit about my great uncle said that you can truly appreciate and picture what comes next. He was a great big man, 400 pounds, and he apparently had an even larger personality. He wouldn't, he couldn't go anywhere without being stopped.

He knew everyone and everyone loved him. Love it. He was also a drinker who liked shiny things like the ginormous and not at all inconspicuous mint green Cadillac that he bought just before all of this happened. Oh no. Ugh. You know that thing because it's the late sixties. Yeah.

So a mint green Cadillac from the late sixties. Flashy. Hi. Is this beef stroganoff going to end up all over it? Well, let's find out. Okay. And then next word in this is onward. It's the night of the rehearsal and everyone is at the church.

My dad and the groom's father slipped out early and headed to the lake house to make sure everything was set for the dinner. About halfway there, they approached a church whose sign advertised a potluck supper and noticed cars lined up and down both sides of the road. That in and of itself wasn't strange, but the fact that they were all dinged and dented and scratched up with tiny, with shiny mint green paint was. My dad and the groom's father knew exactly what had happened and hightailed it out of there. When they reached the house, their fears were confirmed.

There was my great uncle's mint green Cadillac precariously parked sideways in front of the house with the engine still running. And in the house was my great uncle passed out and snoring on the couch. They ran into the kitchen where there was no beef stroganoff to be found and immediately realized what they were looking, they were looking forward in the wrong place. They went back down to the car, opened the door and were greeted with a sight that can only be described as a crime scene of epic proportions. The entire white interior of his brand new Cadillac, Cadillac was all caps,

absolutely covered in beef stroganoff. It was in the glove box. It was dripping from the ceiling. It was all everywhere. Oh my God. And the guests were due to arrive any minute. So my dad and the groom's dad did the only thing they could to salvage the evening. They got spatulas and scraped the beef stroganoff back into the box.

Then they climbed into the Cadillac and drove it up into the woods to hide it. Once the car was safely hidden away, they calmly went back in the house, cleaned themselves and my great uncle up, waited for the guests to arrive. And when they did, they served him up that beef stroganoff like nothing happened. XO and SSDGM, Kate. Oh my God. I just love it. Like these are the days when you could be an alcoholic and it was hilarious.

That's not troubling. Now it would be like every, you know, if he hit eight cars, that's eight lawsuits. All the people that ate that scooped up food, they would sue him too. Totally. Imagine just the little things that would be in that beef stroganoff from the car. It was new, it was new. But just little fibers, little fibers. Fibers, like picking stuff out of your teeth.

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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. Should we do one more? Sure. OK.

Do you have one to end on? I have one I can do. Do it. OK. This is called Respiratory Therapist. Hi. My mom is a registered respiratory therapist in Las Vegas. Hi.

Right. I just, yeah. Look, hi. Hi. She went back to school at the age of 48 and got her degree while raising my sister and I on her own. She's kind of my hero. Anyways, after she earned her degree,

we had to move from Las Vegas to a college town in the Midwest. The town only had about 10,000 people in it, excluding a large number of students. But I'm just trying to paint the picture of how fucking small this place was compared to Las Vegas where I grew up. OK. Fair enough. Good.

Since the city was so tiny, the hospital only had less than 175 beds. In a facility so small, everyone took care of all the patients. But one of the first nights, my mom started working there. She had to do what is called, in medical terms, a terminal extubation. Or what we commonly known as pulling the plug. Extubation. Extubation, right.

That sucks. That's horrible. A terminal extubation. I'd never heard that before. She was, she had never taken someone off life support before and she was understandably shaking. Shaking. Reading about the procedure is different from doing it, you know?

So she was, so she held back tears as she quickly and methodically disconnected the woman who was like 80 or something. I don't know, but she lived a full life and left the room so that the family could grieve the loss. She went into a supply room and shut the door just in time to cry her eyes out. It was the first time she had literally ended a life. After about 10 minutes and regaining her composure for the rest of the work night, my mom opened the door and all that tripped over the patient,

she had just disconnected from the ventilator. In those 10 minutes that my mom had gone into supply room to be alone, her patient started breathing on her own again and even regained consciousness for the first time in over a month. What? They even had a conversation right there in the hall as the patient was being taken home by her family. What?

My mom has since had to perform other terminal extubations, but her first is the one that she will never forget. Thought you would all like this story now that we're talking about almost any crazy story about almost any crazy thing. We think that you will all enjoy. That's true. Thank you for all the hard work that you put into this podcast. It gets me through my work days in a construction company mostly consisting of men.

They once even had a bet as to what I was listening to. They thought I was Katy Perry and I had to admit to three grown men that, no, I am not a firework. I am a murderino. Yay! Karen, thank you especially for talking about alcoholism so candidly. It helps me talk to my dad about his own.

Oh, we were just talking about that. Wow, yeah. Much love, Brianna. Oh, my God. Wow. Here's what I love. And I'm sure it's collapsed timeline. But like, well, we better unplug her.

Goodbye. Cry, cry, cry. Pull the tube out. Hey, what's up? Are you awake? All right, let's go. 10 minutes on the whole way. She can get out of here.

You know what? Pull a doctor into that decision-making process. Well, we thought this would last five minutes. You don't have any more time on the clock here. We only have 175 beds. They're like, we want to get her home. We want to celebrate. We're going to do Christmas in July.

Let's get this taken care of. That's right. All right. Wow. That was a great one. We really dug in. Yeah, we got to the heart of the matter. It was a lot of physical, a lot of, you know,

a lot of human experience. Yeah, lots of gross stuff. Yeah, you know, which is the good stuff. Right, right. Send us your weird gross stuff. Maybe we'll do another junior high episode at some point, or whatever, or just whatever. Yeah, thanks for, or my favorite murder Gmail is where you send it. Thanks for listening, you guys.

And stay sexy. And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Nice. Where's that guy? Elvis. Want a cookie? Ah, good boy.