My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 83

Episode Date: August 13, 2018

This week’s hometowns include a cult member roommate and a surprise found in a wall.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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Hello and welcome. It's the mini-sode. The mini-sode of the My Favorite Murder podcast. That's that podcast you listen to. What are you listening to right now? It's a short version where we read your stories of your hometown murders and also a bevy of any other things we find interesting. Madness.

Mayhem. Uh... Grandparent. Grandparents. We love a grandparent story. That's it. You want to go first or you want me to go first? I love to go first.

You do. Let's do it. It's a control issue. Uh, the subject line of this is my roomie, the Mooney. Okay. Awesome. Fun. Hello, Steven, Karen, Georgia, and assorted pets.

Great. I was listening to one of the old mini-sodes and I heard you guys mention the Mooneys. My first college roommate and her family were and are Mooneys or unificationists as they prefer to be referred to. It's like a religion, it's like a culty religion thing. It's a fucking straight up cult. Okay, great. But I think that when you're in it, you're like, this is my religion.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. Sure. Um, I, and if you, I actually learned a lot about the church the first couple of years of college, 2013 to 2015. So this is recent. Yeah. Um, because she wasn't still is one of my closest friends.

Her parents got married because they were personally, quote unquote, matched together by the Revan Sung Young Moone. Her dad was Jewish, but ended up converting to unificationism. Must have been one of those spaghetti dinners, LOL. Uh, and his parents regularly sent people to try to unbrainwash him for the first couple of years, but to no avail. I'm pretty sure they ended up disowning him. One of the big things in the church is that unmarried people were not allowed to date,

but instead had to occasion a quote matching process. This meant you had to decide you wanted to get married and your parents, the church would work together to find someone who also wanted to get married and they would quote unquote match you and the two of you would quote unquote date. I know it really does. Probably two of you would date and with the expectation that you would get married within a year or so. I mean, shit, dude, like half the fucking ladies I know are like, sign me the fuck and

I'll eat spaghetti and get matched with someone. That's all I have to do. That's all I have to do. But here's the thing. All you want is your friends to like the best dating option is someone saying, I have a friend you're really going to like. Yes. And not enough people fucking do that.

Everyone get on that. It's all I do. I'm always wrong. That's true. But you try a lot. I try hard. I don't think I'm going to hold old Miss Havish, I'm over here or Georgia's always like, no, have you ever thought about this?

How? Where I'm like, I don't think I don't think anything anymore. Tell me your perfect person and I'm like, who do I know that's like that? Yeah. No, I'm there. She also likes to run starry's if I do have a crush on somebody and I'll just say a dumb thing. Oh, then she'll be like, here's what we're gonna do if he walked in.

Okay, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna have a party and then when you walk up, I'm gonna shove you really hard. You're gonna clunk heads with him. Which at first here's my problem. When we start to do that, I laugh and think it's funny. And then when the party starts, I begin a slow, terrible panic and end up in the furthest back corner and I won't move. And you can feel the heat coming off of Karen because of her embarrassment.

When you mention it, oh my God, it's the best. I can't, I don't understand how people flirt genuinely and earnestly with other people. I've never dated someone that I haven't like hit on when I met them called Turkey. I'm going to have to take your class. You got to act like pretend you have to like conjure someone. I conjured my mom because she's a fucking slutty flirt. I love Janet. And I'm just like, what's up?

I'm hot and you know it. Like let's talk. What? You have to do, you have to conjure someone. You know. I just see the idea of it. Because as we said a million times, my flirting technique is fur on my brows and act like either I didn't hear what they said to me or I didn't like what they said to me and

turn around. Yeah, let's walk away. I'm from the 90s. I'm fair. I've had so many guys have crushes on you because of that. The problem is whether it works or not, I'll never know. I'll never fucking know. When I've been, I fucking walked into our friend Megan Gans's birthday party across

the room. Shout out Megan Gans. She also loves endeavor. She's the best. Walked across the room, saw a fucking tall dude in a fucking Ben Sherman shirt and was like, I'm going to talk to that motherfucker tonight. He and I made eye contact. He doesn't remember.

And that, but he came over later and was like, hi, I'm Vince and we just fucking hit it off immediately. So you were, you were giving him the old Janet eye across the room, so then he knew to come over. Yes. Yes. And then he saw me talking to our friends and was like, came over. Yeah.

You got to. And then when you shake hands, you just like give it this little, this like baddie eyelash. You're fucking Jessica Rabbit. You're Jessica Rabbit. No, I am. That's who you're conjuring. Oh God. Cut all of this out.

I love it. No, no, no, I love it, but I'm also, now I'm sweating. I can feel your heat. I'm so, you know what it is, just pretend you're someone else for a minute. It's true. You know what? If I could wear sunglasses. Girl, they're called bangs and they work just as well.

Here's the thing. You know, it worked great for me for so long. You're giant heads. No. When Georgia just said your giant tits to me, she also looked at me the way she was talking about looking at someone. You gave me a little downward eye. I looked at your tits.

I'm sorry. It worked. I've had three wines. Listen. Look. Listen. I'll do both. Okay.

This is turning into it. That makes me laugh so hard because being a blackout drunk for all the time where I should have been practicing all stuff like this, I think I was doing stuff like that. You were practicing. I just don't remember. Yeah, great. That's like better because remembering it the next day is a horror show. So you already did it.

You're already there. You're practiced. Yeah. Listen. You're Zha Zha Gabor. Darling. I slapped him across the face. Slap him across the face.

I'm going to start slapping cops and see if that works for me. Okay. Sorry. Go on. We're in the middle of an email right now. This is being recorded. I love that this is being recorded and distributed. Steven, you do send these out, right?

Okay. Thank you. Okay. Steven's our caretaker. Go on. The idea that basically you tell the head of your cult that you would also like to be married, like your 1000 friends match, so basically, so this other person would like to be married.

You meet and my point was imagine the moment of like having to walk through that door where you're looking at this person and any impression you have, you're also like, and I have to marry this person. Yeah. It's not even like, just go and have coffee. It's no big deal. Yeah. You have to marry them.

Yeah. It's very high stakes. Very exciting. Pass. If you are in a bar, be like, well, at least I don't have to marry this person. I can go talk to everyone. I never have to speak to them again. It's not like it's the moonies.

That's what it is. There's no fucking stakes. There's no stakes. Thank you, Georgia. You're welcome. I'll go with this. Then you, okay. So then you had to go to a special mass ceremony.

I've seen these on TV in the 80s. They used to show it on the news like every six months, it'd be like, the Reverend Moon had a ceremony for this unification church and it was a huge room with literally a thousand or 2,000 people all wearing the same shit, all getting married at the same time. Romantic. So insane. So romantic. I mean, romantic.

So then you'd have the mass ceremony to get married within the church, but afterward you'd have to get a marriage license and get married in a courthouse to get those sweet, sweet tax breaks. Oh, because it wasn't legal. Okay. Well, it wasn't necessarily real until they got their certificate. They still had to do the government work is what this person was saying. Both my roommate and another one of her siblings were involved with something called Generation

Peace Academy after high school. Good band name. Oh my God. Right? Yes. Basically, they spent a year traveling around the country and raising money for the church, which means they were raising money so that Reverend Moon could buy guns and ammo. The magazine.

And lived out of cars and had to learn to survive camping out in the wilderness. Pass. Hard pass. Fun. You lost me. Marry a stranger. I never knew all the fucked up shit that happened with the Mooneys. I experienced them as regular people whose Christianity was just a little weirder than

what I grew up with. That's really open. Yeah, it's true. My former roommate, well, because I bet her roommate was cool and she liked her. My former roommate and her siblings no longer believe in the teachings of Reverend Moon, but like her good sons and daughters, pretend to for their parents. Oh, you don't, don't do that. Though none of them are planning on getting matched LOL.

Stay sexy and sometimes you can't call your dad because he's in the cult too. Okay. Amazing ending. Like that was a great bring back around. That was a profesh letter. That was great. Thank you so much. Letter K.

Okay. I want to read this one because it's a corrections corner from a hometown. Oh, great. And I really appreciate this is back from back and I really appreciate back putting herself out here, out there and here and everywhere for us and like it's a safe fucking space. You can, you can be wrong where we always are. Please. This is called, oh shit.

Detective dad was wrong about the dingo. Oh, Karen, Karen and Georgia all caps exclamation mark. It's me, the daughter of the dingo ate my baby detective. I remember two episodes ago, I did the dingo baby and I was like, there was even like how it was so divided in Australia, whether the dingo did it or the mother did it. And even the head of the detectives, like daughter wrote it and I was like, we all know we inquank that she did it and I was like, nobody knew. Well, this is fucking, this is her writing us.

Great. She says, it's me. I'd like to apologize for perpetuating the bullshit quote, Lindy did it theory. I had no idea how wrong it was because I've always been scared to look into it because since I was a kid, the whole family had, has been banned from talking about the case. Yeah. My brothers were sent to their rooms for asking too many questions. Love you brothers.

And we promptly left a few dinner parties when a drunk aunt finally sift enough courage to broach the subject. Shanti Georgia, what's up? Hey, what's up? Whenever someone brought it up, my dad would coldly say, I did better work elsewhere and nothing else. I always assume my dad just thought that Lindy did it and didn't want to be questioned. And being the scary, quiet father figure, I sure as shit did not want to question him

on it. Absolutely. Now you guys open that door to that, to that information and then parentheses and him being mostly deaf and unable to listen to this podcast. I realized that we were probably not, we were probably not allowed to talk about it because dad knew he really fucked up, but instead of admitting it, he just inflicted a cone of silence on the family for over 30 years. Go dad.

Yeah. She wrote that. I didn't say that. But I support it. Yeah. It's very crazy to think the old man that enthusiastically plays peek-a-boo with my one-year-old nephew was doing some real shady shit in the 80s. Everybody was.

I mean, thank you for all that you do and also for teaching me that you never stop learning your parents are flawed humans, SSDGM back, and I just want to say how fucking impressed I am that you can like admitting that you fucked up and making light of it and being okay with it and wanting to learn more is the fucking most powerful thing you can do as a human being. It's the only thing you're supposed to be doing on the planet. And it's the way you make connections with other people. That's right.

And listen, it's a hard thing to do when your parental imprinting has been don't look at anything you may have done and never talk about it. So like, I get that idea of just going, we know what the real story is and hopefully she didn't feel attacked or called out or anything because that wasn't what we were trying to do. It's just almost like I didn't know. I didn't know either way. And so.

And there's no reason she should have been like questioning it from the beginning, you know? No. And it's the thing of like, you know, it's like one of the hardest things in life and this happens earlier for some of us than others is realizing your parents are human beings. That have biases. They have biases and flaws.

Yes. It's really hard and no one wants to question it or admit it because it kind of shakes your entire foundation. Yes. At whatever age you're at. Also, I think we've talked about this and I think everybody that's in a true crime knows this already, but the police have such a shitty fucking job. Because basically they have to be hitting three pointers the entire time under incredibly

high pressure and if they get into a thing where they get led down the primrose path of like, oh, we heard their seventh day Adventist and nobody knows about that and that is associated with the devil. And everyone wants this solved immediately and the quickest it can be done and we need to prove that we're taking care of our community. Like let's just, you know. Yeah. You're just making the call that at that point you can make.

You're doing the thing you can do. Yeah. Like when police coerce a confession, they're not trying to just solve the case and get a confession. They think that the person who's confessing actually did it and they're getting a confession out of them because they're doing their hardest. They don't see it the same. I mean, whatever.

Yeah. It's just, yeah. We get it and way to go back. And it also makes me feel good that we've created this community where saying something like this is a safe space and that's, I think it's supported and celebrated. And I think it's really being wrong is okay here and so I appreciate her being part of that. It's, it means a lot to me.

I'm so into being wrong. I do it all the time. I do it just so I can admit it later. Okay. So the subject line of this one is found in the wall. These never get old for me. Amazing. Go.

Hi Karen. Georgia, Steven, felines and canines. Great. Oh, that's the first one of that. Never really thought about the fact that it kind of rhymes. First of all, I love the podcast. Second of all, I once found some fucked up shit in the wall of an old house. Here we go.

Here we go. Several years ago, my dad was buying old Victorian houses and fixing them up and flipping them. Yes. Cool, dad. So cool. You know, before the whole housing bubble burst. Oh.

Yes. I do know about that. Got it. Oh, I was underwater in my own home. One house he bought needed a bad gut job. The dining room was covered in this wonderful 1970s wood paneling and every bedroom had a different incredibly ostentatious wallpaper. Ugh, my dream.

Please show me 17 pictures of that. I love wallpaper. I love wallpaper. I love it. Do you remember the store wallpapers to go? Oh my God. Yes. In the 80s, 70s, 80s.

And you can go down there and they just had a, it was like a store filled with wallpapers on the floor. I drive through. It was to go. You'd order it to go. No, but I do. And wallpaper is making a comeback. The secret is you get a really tacky crazy wallpaper, but you only wallpaper one wall

with it and you paint the rest of the walls like a light, you know, complimentary color. Yeah. Everyone. And it becomes your fascinator wall. Follow my design blog. It's called wallpapers to go. By Georgia. By Georgia.

Um, the room I was living in was covered in gigantic blue and lime green flowers. 100% on board. Hard to sleep. While pulling down the wood panel. It's aggressive. Yeah. It's like, yeah, yeah. We all, my sister and I got to pick our paint wall color when we were in the house where

I heard the dog outside my bedroom window. I wanted it to be kind of a nice moss, a light moss green. It was fucking neon lime green to the point where I feel like, you know, they do those studies where if you paint the walls, the color has psychological effects. I am 1000% sure that it made my experience as a 12 to 14 year old, much more painful than it needed to be. Zap that brain of yours. Okay.

Back to whatever this show is. Okay. He's pulling down the fucking. While pulling down the wood paneling in the dining room, we discovered a hole in the wall. My dad comments that it was so lazy of the previous owners to just put paneling over a hole in the drywall instead of repairing it. But I looked inside the hole and it and found a very old manila envelope.

It wasn't a million dollars inside, but it was too very old, eight millimeter film roll rolls, reels, sorry, unmarked. Naturally, I assumed it was a snuff film, wouldn't we all? So I called a friend that worked at a video production company and asked him what to do with these film reels. Bring them down immediately. I have to know what's on them. He tells me.

Love you. Love you. I drove to his studio and clean and clean the film with cotton and baby oil trying to restore them. I think it was supposed to be he cleaned, whatever. My friend told me we'd only get one viewing out of them because the film was so deteriorated. Oh my God. So I call a few more buddies and we had a screening party.

What was on the film? They're all dead now. What? You want to do a guess? What was on the film? Snuff film. Oh, you think it was a snuff film? Yeah.

Stephen, what do you think was on this film? Mustache and porn? Just childhood memories? No, it was homemade porn. From the 1960s. Holy shit. Judging by the woman's plastic and unmovable gigantic hair and the man's... That's not what I thought you were going to say.

And the man's impressive mustache and the room they were in had gigantic floral wallpaper in my bedroom. Amazing. So good. Freaked out, I returned home and talked to the elderly woman who lived across the street. She'd been in her house for about 40 years at that point. And I asked her if she remembers the people I described from the film. And she...

You know, they had a giant bush. And she's like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I know them. Oh, her, yeah. Oh, sure. She had a giant bush. God, that thing was big. She said that in the late 60s, there was a pastor from the local church who lived there. Oh, really?

But he wasn't married. So who was the mystery woman? I still have the film reels, but they're so badly damaged, they can't really be viewed anymore. Anyway, SSDGM. And always watch mystery films found in walls. Annie. Annie.

Fuck Annie. Amazing. That was everything we needed to be. I think I would prefer, I mean, obviously finding money's great, bloody blah. I think finding two film reels would make me go insane. The thing of, we'll only be able to watch this once, is almost, it's like from a movie where you're like, come on, it's not a thing. So everybody get down here, call everybody.

Yeah. And then it's exactly what you'd want it to be, which is fucking homemade vintage porn. Homemade porn. And if only that pastor knew that in 40 years, homemade porn would be a celebrated piece of the internet that everybody participated on. Everyone loves it. It's not even real porn. I love it.

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slash murder20 with code murder20. That's up to 20 free meals plus free shipping on your first box when you go to hellofresh.ca slash murder20 and use code murder20. Goodbye. 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. All right, I'm going to skip to this one because so we're doing unboxing videos for the fan cult where we basically open presents that are sent to us from our fucking incredible awesome, talented, sometimes insane listeners like you, listener. And so this is from the one that's getting put up this week that blue are fucking mine. It's going up. It's early.

It's early. It went up Friday. Okay. So it went up Friday. Today's Monday. And so this is the letter that accompanied it. Hello all, I am so thrilled to gift you my dad's original dare kit from 1994. And this harkens back to when I fucking told Karen about going to an estate sale and on

their website, one of the photos from the estate sale was the dare or like the drug kit that the cops would bring to the elementary school to show you all the dangers and crazy scary drugs you could do in like this briefcase. This fucking chick sent hers to our us. We have touched it. Oh, we looked at it lives in my apartment. Yep. He was a dare officer for 18 years and a cop for 26 years.

Shout out to officer Pete. It was collecting dust in his garage since he has now retired at the ripe age of 52 goals. Am I right? So basically her dad let her send this to us as a gift. Thank you. So I fucking Stephen walked in and had like packages in the box and looked at us and like you just like, hi, how are you hugs? Whatever.

And he was like, you're Georgia. You're going to lose your fucking mind. Like he didn't even say hi. Stephen said the F word. Oh, I swear. Oh, no. Yeah. I mean, when I came, I was like, I can't it's like burning a hole in my pocket.

Yeah. I just wanted to see it too. You know, and I and we went over like, let's record like that was our first no makeup recording because I was like, just need to open this. We gotta do this. Yeah. So first I wanted to thank you for creating this murdering community and for saving me from hours of boredom at my desk job.

Secondly, here's a short hometown for you. My above mentioned dad was the dare officer for a girl named Christina Long in Danbury, Connecticut. In 2002, she was in middle school and he said she seemed like a really happy kid. Unfortunately, she didn't have the greatest home life and that was around the time my space was getting popular. Oh, no. She used to meet up with a man later identified as Saul Dos Reyes.

The police said that they had a few sexual encounters before the night where she where he killed her. She had been missing and the only and they only found the body after he confessed. But this case made national news because it was the first time that the internet had been used to meet someone that resulted in their death. Wow. Oh my God. Lastly, my dad was also the one who started the troop, my true crime obsession.

I can clearly remember being in line at the grocery store at about 11 or 12 and seeing a who killed John Benet? People magazine cover. I turned to my dad and said, do you know who killed her? And he looked at me and said, yeah, everyone knows the brother did it. Whoa. Wow. It was just like Karen's John Wayne, Gacy bodies in the book experience.

I had never even, it had never even occurred to me that people kill within their own families. I needed to know everything. Oh, and also he told me that they actually still study the ransom note to show cops what deception looks like. Wow. Things like the spacing, the amount of money that was asked for and the fact that it sounded like it was being dictated, which I've never thought about that means it was fake as fuck. My dad said he would be happy to call in to go over the deer kit and talk about police

stuff with you guys. Which I never, like I just read this right now, I'm kind of scared for you guys to do that because I know he will say something embarrassing about me, fucking amen girl. P.S. Due to a bad fall off a horse in December 2017, New Year's actually, I had to have major spinal fusion surgery and was in the hospital for a week and had to lay flat in bed for another three months after. Your podcast absolutely was my escape and savior.

Cannot thank you enough. The moment I was conscious after surgery, I told my mom that I was not missing your live show and I'm happy to say that I made it to your Phoenix show. Whoa. That's where I live now with my mom, back brace and walker all in tow. Wow. SSDGM, Thea pronounced fee, uh, and then it says, stop here. Don't read my contact info lab, but please feel free to reach out and then she put her.

Thea. Thea, I mean, this is something I will carry with me for the rest of my life. This is a straight fuck, this drug kit is a straight fucking in a fire grab your shit. Not just because it's something I've always wanted, but because you're, you asked your dad who's this fucking probably celebrated cop to give it to a stranger and he said yes and you did it. And I promise you it's in good hands. Yeah.

And Stephen will fucking take care of it. It's never been in better hands. Pretty sure one of the fucking pills that they show is a pez and another is a vitamin and that just brings me so much joy. And one of them for all the oldies out there, like me, one of them looks exactly like a contact cold medicine pill where it's, it's like red, it's like a one of those things and it has tiny beads inside multicolored beads where I was just like, this, the action, you know, it just like explode.

Yeah. And I was just like, that's a cold pill. Yeah. But yeah, tell us it's uppers, downers or benes or black beauties or whatever we'll want to do them all. Yes. Um, thank you. Thea.

Yeah. That was great. I can't tell you how much this podcast means to me that someone would send that to us. Like that's just, it's a dream. It's amazing. Yeah. And so fun. And guess what else is amazing?

This, again, we keep getting to tell you cool, exciting announcements and surprises. Right. And this one is very cool because we were, uh, get to basically, we're working with Sony Pictures on an upcoming film that is going to come out and, uh, we're going to talk about that. But, um, to do that, we're going to dedicate a mini so to it. So we're going to, for you, we were going to ask that from you to send us your stories of the reveal of somebody that you know that had a secret life.

Right. So next, this next, uh, next Monday is going to be an episode dedicated to this movie, uh, called searching and the, uh, so we want stories of secret lives and that's just a hint about what the movie is about. We saw it. We fucking loved it. So send us your reveals of secret lives, whether it's someone found out about yours, you found out about someone else's family members, fucking teachers, like this crazy reveal of a secret

life. And just remember that, um, we want to, we basically to get your, your story read, just think of it as you have to be in the top 10. Yeah. And then you have a story where it's like, and it turned out that they were already married. My cat was an outdoor cat and lived with six other people. Actually, that's a good story, fucking tell us like that sounds fun, but, but we do want like the craziest, truest story of this and put in the subject line, send it to my favorite

murder at GMO and put a secret life in the subject line and then whatever else you want. Yeah. So Steven, come pull them easily. We're very excited. It's going to be really fun and, uh, be a part of it with us. We love it. Uh, thank you guys for sending in your emails, send whatever you want as well. Fucking yay.

Yay. Stay sexy. And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Elvis. He said, I don't know.