My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 85

Episode Date: August 27, 2018

This week’s hometowns include an attempted murder and swinging grandparents. 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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Do you like it? We like it. So last week we did all of our people that were hiding secret lives and which was super fun and we got so many that we will definitely continue to do them. But at one point we veered off into a basically an interesting anonymous donors, people that are doing positive things with their secret lives. Not everyone's starting a multiple family. There were some good parts.

And my beautiful friend, Jason Lopez, who, Steven, you know him too, who listens to every single episode and always the day after anything of ours comes out, he'll let me know what his observations are on the episode. And so after that last many so he wrote to me, Ethos, the music program for kids here in Portland is nonprofit that provides group lessons, music camps, et cetera. And after Prince died, they found out that he was one of their anonymous donors. Isn't that amazing? And then he said, isn't that random?

Just a little music school here in Portland and I said, that's because that means he was doing it everywhere. I bet you everywhere Prince went. Because Prince was like a kid in Minnesota. Like he knows what it's like to be a super talent that's out in the middle of nowhere just kind of waiting for your chance. So you know that he just sprinkled his shit around anonymously. I love that.

That's beautiful. Prince. Thanks, Prince. Let's all take a moment to thank Prince. Okay. Do you want me to go first? Oh, sure. The headline of this is the subject line.

My mom's ex-fiance tried to blow up her house and that is how she met my dad, South African hometown. Cool. This is brand new. We've never had one from South Africa. I don't think we have. Dearest Karen, Georgia, Steven and animal compadres, don't mind it. When my mom was in her 20s, she started dating a guy and they eventually got engaged and

moved in together. My grandparents are always a bit skeptical of the dude and thought he was a creep, but they went along with it out of respect for my mom. As an avid Jim Bunny in the 80s, my mom wore spandex body suits and tights to her workouts accompanied with a hairspray brush of curly hair and neon socks. Amazing. We could stop there and I'd be great. When she arrived home one day after a gym session, her then fiance started beating her

up for quote, dressing like a slut to the gym and accused her of seeking other men's attention. In parentheses, it says toxic masculinity ruins the party again. My mom stayed sexy and noped out of there, broke off their engagement and drove her little Volkswagen Beetle back to my grandparents house where she endured many, I told you so from my grand. That night after everyone had gone to bed, my mom awoke to a massive crash and smelled smoke.

She saw an orange flicker through her window and saw smoke coming out of the area where the car was parked under my granddad's little car park outside. My grandparents, my mom and my aunt rushed outside and found my mom's ex fiance speeding off down the street. He had thrown a homemade bomb into the car park and blown up half of my grandparents house. Holy shit. Luckily, everyone was safe, including my mom's Cocker Spaniel, Jason, Jason, Jason the Cocker

Spaniel. Sorry. The police alert, Jason, also my friend, I just talked about my friend Jason, the police were alerted and they arrested the ex, they requested that my mom get a report from a medical professional with regards to her physical injuries so that they could include that in her indictment against the ex as fate would have it. My dad was the doctor on call that day and that's how he met my mom. The rest is history.

They've been happily married for 27 years, have two kids, 10 dogs and three cats together. I love it. I really hope you enjoy the story as much as I always do. Keep up the amazing podcast. It's so great to find a community of true crime lovers and your podcast feels like home. Hope to catch you live someday, SSDGM Kelly. Kelly. That's the best.

That was great. For some reason, I read that headline. I read, pre read the email and I didn't really, it's like I didn't notice the part with the doctor until I just read it this time. Yeah, I love it. I love it. Oh, I just want to know like their first meeting was like, you know, well, you know, she wore that same workout outfit.

I was wondering if she was in her fucking spandex outfit. She's gonna stop by the doctor's real quick and then she's gonna go to the gym. She's gonna pull on those leg, leg warmers. Yes. Neon green. All right. This one's called, my grandmother was kidnapped and then in parenthesis it says she's okay. Hi, wonderful women, pets and Steven.

My grandmother used to work as a nurse's aide in an insane asylum in Connecticut in the 60s. Old Hills was a psychiatric hospital in Newton, Connecticut, Newtown, Connecticut that opened in the 30s and closed in the 90s. The massive campus still stands vacant. And of course there are stories of hauntings because I mean, it's an empty former insane asylum for Christ's sake. When my Nana worked there, each employee would go to a central building to clock in every morning and then report to the building they worked in.

This is a sprawling campus with dozens of buildings and it was the middle of winter. So my grandmother ran into the main building, leaving her car unlocked, checked in and ran back to her car to drive to her sign building. After she turned on the car, she was suddenly shocked when a man popped up from the back seat, wrapped her neck with a piece of rope and said, drive. No. She did it. She was instructed.

He gave random orders to turn left, right, seemingly not having a destination in mind, but he ended up having her drive about 20 minutes to North Waterbury, Connecticut, where he jumped out of the car and bolted. Thankfully, because she had checked into work, but didn't show up minutes later to her sign building, the staff immediately knew something was wrong. Apparently, this man was one of the patients who had escaped his room and was looking to get as far away from Fairfield Hills as possible. My Nana was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Listen, this fucking thing right here, ready? Okay. They never did find the guy. Oh. As far as I know, but the rope he used to hold my grandmother was raw, was a raw ragged thing and it wore down the skin around her neck to the point where later on an EMT told her that if had worn even a tiny bit further, it would for sure have cut her carotid artery. Wow.

Carotid? Carotid, yeah. Carotid artery. It's a well-ordered carotid or carotid. Exactly. My Nana is one of the most badass women I know whose favorite phrase is, I don't get mad, I get even. She turned 92 years old this year and I would still manage to stay sexy and not get murdered

in any situation she was in. Finally, even though this story is about someone breaking out of an insane asylum, I don't want to diminish mental health issues in any way. So I just want to thank you both for normalizing and being so upfront with your mental health. Fairfield Hills was a place where people like you or me would be locked up and forgotten. That's right. And I'm glad that it's closed and we're slowly moving toward a point where people can seek help without the threat of stigma.

And that's definitely thanks to women like you. Oh. And that's CGM Lauren. God, that's so scary. Fucking terrifying. Nana. Did that, can you, did that happen at night? It doesn't sound well.

She got, I mean, she, I got to work and my mind it was the daytime. Yeah. You know what I mean? But I was just immediately, because you know there's that, it made me think of that, there's the urban myth that was going around for a little while warning people at the mall, like to check because there's that story of the girl that gets in the car and there's a guy in the back seat or whatever. So that, that idea, like my car, I can see in and even when I get into my car, I'll still

look back and just make sure I do once in a while when it's really dark, do a little check each. Yeah. Just in case. Yeah. Hmm. Okay. Now you go.

How about the subject line? Whose toenails are these? I love it. Hi, Karen. Hi, Karen. Georgia Karen associates. Yeah. That's right.

I got two. Shit. I really, I really liked that more than I should have. I'm almost 50. I needed to set the scene before I tried to explain the thing I found in my basement wall. I live in a big Victorian house that has been transformed into a co-op housing unit for university and college students. We have eight housemates plus we usually have a couple of couch surfers crashing in our

living room. So much fun. Oh, I was going to say what a mess. Fuck that shit. Yeah, but you get up in the morning and you make some coffee and you may or may not smoke a joint and then you just start playing cards and there's like four people. You could immediately just start playing games. Someone who always wants to hang out.

Yes. All the time. You should run a commune. I really should. All right. You know what I should do is be a super creep and like open my house up to borders. Do it. And just like pick.

Don't pick people. Do it. And I'd be like, you're here. You have to play UNO with me. Okay. That's not about me and since the co-op has been operating since the fifties, a lot of people have drifted in and out of our house. The basement is an amalgamation of all the strange shit that's been brought into our

house by generations of weird hippies. It's also an expansive basement with a lot of unfinished walls twisting into dark little rooms and hallways going nowhere in particular. It gives me the creeps and I hate going down there recently when I was looking for one of, when I was looking in one of those weird little storage rooms for a bike pump, I saw something highly fucked up. It was a glass jam jar sealed with a cork and set down on a beam in an open wall and it was filled to the top with human toenail clippings.

No, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No. Do you see it in your mind? No. Oh, look at all the yellow crescents. Stop it. The hard yellow crescents.

Stop it. I've asked many current and past housemates if they know anything about the toenail jar. One past housemate has seen it before and actually told me about the jar last year and I hadn't believed them. In any case, no one has any idea who put it in our basement, how long it's been there, why it was put there or whose toenails are in that jar. I wish I could say I threw it out, but I was ready to touch it and so was everyone else who has ever looked at it, SSDGM Emily.

That's awful. It's so disgusting. So where did I really want to go through that basement? With like a big old fluorescent, like a fluorescent beam. I just want to go through all the boxes. I lived in a house like that for a little while, like in Echo Park where like, I think that someone told me that the Brian Jonestown massacre, the band, used to like, that was their house.

Oh. I'd actually been to parties there when I was younger and they, so the basement was filled with like fucking people shit who had to like jam and get the fuck out of there or whatever. I'm just, I didn't take anything, it was just like fun to look through people shit. I love it. I'm a monster. I love communal living.

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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. I'm not going to tell you the name of this one, but I will tell you that the theme of my story is today as grandparents. Okay. Because here's another one. Hello, all the wonderful people and animals of MFM.

Hey. Perfect. That's one of the best ones yet. Easy. Love it. I have quite the slew of stories I've been meaning to write into you. Murderous great-uncle, survivor, friend's mom, high school murderers, however, once you mentioned writing in stories about secretives, my cousin, I can't be right, no, I get it.

She wrote secret lives, but it was in one word. Oh, I see. She forgot to do it. Secret lives. About secretives, which is the professional name for it. That's right. My cousin who introduced me to your podcast insisted I finally buckle down and write this thing.

So here it is. Around April, I was cleaning out my grandparents' house where they lived for 62 years now. They didn't pass, they didn't pass, just had a lot of shit that needed to go and came across some interesting things in the process. My grandmother, who we call Batchy, has always... It sounds like batshit. It does. B-A-T-C-H-I-E.

Batchy. Batchy. Okay. Has always been known for the insane amount of photos she takes. So naturally, a lot of what I found was pictures. Lots of family from growing up, some of my mom and her sister when they were kids, et cetera. As I was working on the living room, cleaning all the wine glasses on display with Batchy, she was telling me about the good old days and how all her, quote, intimate friends would

come over and they would have a great time, but, quote, of course not when the children were around. I was taken back by that statement, but I chalked it up to an 84-year-old woman with dementia talking about throwing crazy parties with her friends, getting drunk, playing cards, listening to Elvis records. Elvis. All of those things. And so is Elvis.

In the next few days, I found some interesting birthday cards from my nanny and grandpa meatball. What the fuck? My cousin's grandparents. Is this a cartoon character writing into it? I just love that. Like, funny names are the best. In the hall closet, which I again was like, hmm, they have a very uncomfortable sense

of humor, but chalked it up to nothing other than that. And then the next paragraph says, okay, so I was wrong. It certainly wasn't nothing. I moved on to clean their bedroom at this point, my batchie and papa were staying at my mom's house so I could be slightly more productive and found a box of pictures under the bed, not being at all surprised by this because they were quite literally boxes of pictures everywhere. I opened the box to look at the photos and possibly have a few laughs about my mom's

old boyfriends or whatever. All caps. Nope. Not pictures of my mom's old boyfriends or photos of us growing up. Instead, I found photos of my grand, but from my grandparents, all caps, swinger parties. No, no, no, no. Stephen is pointing at that. You have photos.

What? Holy shit. Oh, sweat. Oh, my God. Oh, no. What I'm looking at right now, she sent them to us. Oh, no. She took them and sent them to us.

I love her. Love her. Love her. Are they old people? Are they new? Were they young? They're old, but it's in the 60s or 70s, I mean 70s or 80s, but look, they're all in one bed like Charlie Bucket's grandparents.

It's a bunch of adults in a bed under a sheet together smiling like little devils. Oh, my God. They are having so much fun. She's touching his penis in that photo, but you can't tell. And laughing her ass off, too. Oh, my God. They're all in one bed together. Oh, my God.

Let me see more. Let me see more. Holy shit. There's a lot of them. You guys. Oh, my God. They're like all naked and having these. Can we post?

I don't know. I feel like we can't post these. I don't know. Because we don't know unless Stephen goes through and puts tiny black bars across everybody's eyes. Look at this one. The thing is like they're in these suggestive positions, but they're cracking up. They're just being kind of funny, dirty, drunk is kind of what it seems like, but also in

a room that it that's paneled in wood panel while wallpaper and then wood paneling on the bottom half. It's a seven. This looks like 1980 to me. Yeah. So brown. And they look like they look like the 1980s, 40s. You know what I mean?

Like they're in their 40s. Yes. They look old to us. Okay. It also looks like people who probably drank a ton and were bored. And they were like, well, you look, you all have a mustache or a beard. Right. We might as well just fuck each other.

We fucked each other in high school, like she's already seen his dick. Let's just all use. I want to see your honey's dick or whatever. Yes, exactly. Okay. Let me finish this. No, don't put that away. I want to keep looking at it.

Okay. So my grandparents, no, no, but my grandparents swing. So those are her grandparents, swinger parties and a few sex toys from way back in the day when my mom and aunts were growing up. And then I was mortified. I immediately took pictures of the photos and sent them to my cousins so they could be just as scarred as I was. That's what I would do.

And how to take a break from cleaning the house for a little while. Yeah, I did. So I pieced all these things together. I realized what I had just stumbled upon. These were all old people that I knew, all people I had dinner with and played cards with when I was young. My nanny and grandpa meatball were both featured in these photos as well as a few other close friends of my grandparents.

Needless to say, I could never really look at my grandparents the same way ever again. Oh, shit. The grandparent is still alive. Yeah. She was just cleaning her house. Oh, I thought... No, no. They're batches fucking kicking it.

And I took my cousins down with me. There's still a lot of that house that needs to get cleaned out, but quite frankly, I'm horrified to do so. So yeah, that's the story of how I learned my grandparents were swingers. Stay sexy and don't look under your grandparents bed. Delaney. Okay. Delaney is just...

Yeah. Delaney. Delaney. Like Melanie, but with a D. Okay. Oh, my God. I'm just saying, she just blew up her grandparents' spot so hard, like, because not that many people call their grandmother batchy.

Yeah, totally. Some people are going to know. So there's going to be people in that hometown that are like, excuse me, a-wah-ha? Yeah. That's really insane. This is just like... They're having so much fun. Guys, sex is natural and sex is fun.

And then everyone does it. And everybody... And everyone's grandparents... ...do it and take pictures of it. Oh, my God. It also looks like they're doing it just to be like, just take a picture of this. We're being dirty on purpose. It could be.

Or... And it would a gorgeous expression of human love. That was fun. And then just the photo, like, the fact that there are photos just made it. I mean, I was... I'm shocked. Do you want to hear this last one? Absolutely.

Society mom or covert criminal? Lighthearted. Okay. Hello, MFMists. Oh, no, MFMists. Oh. MFMists. Nice one.

I'll take it. That... You know what? That just moved up to number one. My daughter turned me on to your show and now I never miss an episode. The Murderino community in Denver was a great support system for her when she moved across the country. So this dad thanks you all, you too, Steven, from the bottom of my heart for creating such

a wonderful movement of awesome people. That's great. Thank you. I have a family story that I've never told anyone until now. My mom has always appeared from the outside as a very cultured and sophisticated woman. Now, in her 80s, she still runs volunteer organizations and goes to the theater and other fancy events. But people who know her history know that she grew up dirt poor in Chicago and has always been a scrappy badass.

When I was in high school, I bought my first real car. It was a Datsun B210. A little beater that costs like $250. After owning it a few months, I took it to a mechanic who said that the whole underside of the car was rusted out and it was amazing that it was still holding together. A couple of days after that diagnosis, I woke up early one morning to find my mom trudging into the house out of breath with her clothes all dirty. She told me to get dressed and then she drove me to the local mall where she told me to

call the police and tell them my car was stolen. I did and made a police report. And a couple of days later, the cops found the car deep in the woods about a quarter mile away from our rural Virginia house, banged up and a wreck, apparently the victim of kids taking it out for a joy ride. Only after the car was found did my mom tell me the real story. She had taken my car out, found some secluded dirt road and tried repeatedly to crash it into a tree in an attempt to total it.

But she was too scared to really commit to it. This was way before airbags. So after three or four good bangs, she thought she'd done a good enough job and abandoned the car. The thought of my society mom careening through the woods, trying mostly unsuccessfully to wreck my car made me laugh out loud, but she was very serious about it and made me swear that I wouldn't tell anyone, particularly not my dad. Since it would technically be fraud or some shit, we could all get in trouble.

Even though it happened 40 years ago, I've never told anyone that story until now. And now that it's out, I'm looking forward to revealing to my kids that their sweet old grandma is really a badass car smashing insurance fraud perpetrating criminal. Stay sexy and don't be fooled by sweet old grandmas. Love David. Oh my God. That is unbelievable. That is like a talk.

That's like an old school version of a helicopter mom where she's like, you got ripped off. Yeah. I'm going to take care of it. Shut your mouth. Don't worry about it. I got this. Oh my God. So funny.

Please send us your emails. My favorite murder at Gmail. We enjoy them so much. Keep sending us these fucking hilarious, wonderful stories. And also please stay sexy. And don't get murdered. I got a bag. Good boy.

Elvis, you want a cookie? Good boy. Nice one. Oh, come on. Oh, come on.