My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 9

Episode Date: October 24, 2016

On this week’s My Favorite Murder minisode, Karen and Georgia read your hometown murder stories including serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, murderer Mark Winger, and a two-parter involving a feigned love of camping, a dead body, and a couch covered in blood!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. Should we pause while Elvis finishes being in the litter box? No, let's power through it. Are we already recording? Yeah. Yeah, then we have to. Okay. And starting. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Welcome to a Minnesota of my favorite murderer. Elvis is done in the litter box and we're ready to now present you with your own hometown murder stories. Yeah, we do this because you guys send in so, so many good ones. So, so, so, so many. And then so,

so, so, so many so, so, so ones and so, so, so, so, so, so many. So, so one. And I just repeated your joke. It should be read. Okay, do you want to go foist? Sure. Read me a home townie. Here's my first pick. The subject line, it's from Gretchen and it just says literally just tractors, also a serial killer. Gretchen, you piqued my interest. I was like, what the hell's going on? Is she really only going to talk about tractors? Well, let's find out because I just made sure it was short. I didn't actually read it. Hey ladies, I'm from a small town in southeastern Michigan called Tecumseh. I imagine that's after the famous Native American.

So there's really not much going on here, mostly just tractors and cornfields. The biggest crime story in the last 10 years was probably a married couple receiving jail time for their overdue library books. That's not true, Gretchen. And it is. Think so? Yeah. Oh, then I'm fucked. Are you, do you have overdue library books?

Well, not right now, but when I was, I probably like 10, I checked out all the encyclopedia Browns at Petaluma Public Library and then didn't return them and then put them in my closet, like couldn't deal with them. I forgot about them, yeah. Put them, no, I knew that I had them, but I put them in the far back corner of the closet, like at the dirtiest of all secrets. They don't exist anymore. I'm sure my mom just found them one day and brought them back, but.

Because you don't know what happened to them? It was one of my earliest quote unquote problems that like kept me up at night. Oh my God, that sounds like a babysitter's club book. It sounds like an encyclopedia Brown book. Yes, it's a book about how do you solve that problem. Oh man, the anxiety I have around not turning in a library book profile. And also just so reflective of how I solve problems, which is just don't do it. Bury it.

Run away, move out of town. All right, however, this is back to Gretchen's email. However, when I was just a wee murderer, you know, Oh, the idea of that. I love you. That is so cute. Just a five year old obsessed with murder. And I was checking out my hometown to see if anything weird had ever happened here.

I found this 1960 serial killer, Henry Lee Lucas murdered his alcoholic abusive mother in my hometown after an apparent argument. He is one of the kings of serial killers. Kings. This is this is like having royalty in the worst possible way. That name alone gives me fucking shivers. He's bad news.

Oh my gosh. He was born in Virginia, but after spending his teen years in and out of jail for raping his half brother and dead animals, fucking psycho and parentheses, he was released and came to find dear old mom. Oh dear. He was sentenced to 20 to 40 years for her death, but after multiple suicide attempts in prison, he was released to a mental hospital and then paroled in 1970 after only 10 years.

Then he would then went on to attempt a kidnapping for which he received another five years. And when he was released, he took one of his prison friends and went on an apparent cross country murder spree, making taking his love interest with them as well. Sounds like the Britney Spears movie where they do a cross country. A walk to remember. No, that's about a cancer. A girl with cancer.

Many more, I think. The uh, this fault in our stars. No. That's about the girl with cancer that goes to the end frame. There's so many people screaming the title of that movie right now. Britney Spears. Not yet. Crossroads.

Crossroads. Steven was one of them. You know it. Of course he knew it. I love it. Oh, that's cute. You got a lot of crossroads. Did you see crossroads in the theater?

No, I watched it recently. Oh. Oh, in your adult life? It was for work. Oh, sure it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You work as a pedophile? Oh my god, I'm Steven.

I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have to do this. You only said that because of his mustache. Pick on Steven. Keeping it all in. Suddenly Karen and Georgia got real mean to Steven. It's fun to be mean to Steven. No, it isn't.

It isn't. Okay. Once this lunatic was arrested again in 1983 for possession of a deadly weapon, he confessed to hundreds of murders. What? Over 600. No.

I'm pretty sure Henry Lee Lucas is an autist tool and Henry Lee Lucas. Aren't they the? Yeah. Yeah. All right. Anyway, these are, they're like big hitters that we should probably cover at some point.

I don't know. I like that we don't do the ones that everyone does. Oh, that's, that's good. Like last podcast someone left it a legit good one about that. I know. Like we don't need to do that. Yeah, we can't let them do all that work. It's called a research and I'm not interested.

Though only three of these murders can be confirmed of the 600 he admitted to. One of them was his mother. So I guess that makes my hometown pretty special. George W. Bush sentenced him to life in prison in Texas and he passed away on March 12th, 2001. Good riddance. Love you ladies.

Love the podcast. Give Elvis a cookie for me. Stay sexy. Don't get murdered. Crutch it. Girl. Girl. It's funny that it took George W. Bush to like fucking get,

like to keep this guy in prison. See, he did some good stuff. Yeah. You're always pissed about like the people he, he put in prison who weren't supposed to be there or too long and then you're like, yeah, but this guy fucking deserved it. Or you just laugh at him because of those speeches.

We saw, I saw a super cut of some of his worst speech moments. A couple weeks ago at work. It was hilariously terrible. He just did not have the gift. No. Not at all. Good painter though. Great painter.

Should have stuck with that. What do you have? All right. Well, mine is a double. So it's kind of long. Okay. So get in here. But it's funny.

Dig in. Dig in here. Get comfy. So this is from Brendan B. His photo is very sassy in his email. It says, hi, Georgia. Cause he sent it just to my email address. I don't know why.

My friends and I are big fans of your podcast, listen at work, blah, blah, blah, blah. My best friend told me I had to email you. At first I thought like I have nothing to say. Then I remembered back in 2006, I had one of the most weird weeks of my life. It's a story I've told over drinks a lot. But I love to stretch it out.

Let's see here. I'm like that, Brendan. I'm the same way. If I have a story that would take a normal person three minutes to tell, it'll take me 15. And people will love it. And you just dress it up and you flourish and you add show. Yeah.

And you pause. This is why we're podcasters. You pause. You just, you maintain attention for as long as humanly possible. You're a fucking storyteller, man. Yeah. That's right. It's good.

All right. Okay. So when I was hiking with a boy I liked and, sorry, two stories. One was hiking with a boy I liked and one in my actual backyard. At the time I was living in Hawthorne, New Jersey, very close to the cookie factory. I don't know what that means.

Elvis. Oh no. All right. Story number one. It was probably around summertime and I was still a smoker. So this was a long time ago as I can't remember the last time I bought cigarettes. This guy who I had a huge crush on who now in retrospect probably only wanted to be just good friends was kind of a sporty guy. He liked to hike and rock climb and other such stuff like you do when you're obsessed with someone.

You pretend like you like those things too. That's right. Oh, that sounds like a, I would never, that sounds like a nightmare dating a sporty person. I had lived through it for five years. Shut up. I married it. I pretended I liked camping for five years.

Oh, Karen. It was hard. You sacrificed yourself. The first time I told my sister and Adrienne I was going camping, Adrienne just fucking turned on me like a viper and goes, Camping? Are you kidding me? Camping?

Yeah. They knew. They knew you were trying to be someone you're not. It happens. It happens. This is from my podcast, Divorce Corner. Guys, find someone with similar things to you. Guys, don't ever pretend, especially camping, because then you're out in the dirt.

But she knows something about hiking and biking and camping and all that sort of shit. It's like you feel like you're supposed to be doing that. That's right. Like that feels like they're vegan. You're like, yeah, I should be vegan too. I've always wanted to, like, knew I should go vegan. I know I should hike more and exercise more. But like, if you're not that fucking person, you're not that person.

Also, we're like, I'm sorry, but I will watch. I will watch 25 movies in a row. It's what I love. I want to talk about it. I want to make them. I want to watch them. Some dick who walks uphill and boots isn't fucking better than you because of that. You know, who do you think you are?

Campy? Fucking dick. Slip on the fucking ground. You know that there's room service in hotels? And no snakes. And no, no snakes. Not one snake in a pool. Just like last time I went camping, I like slept on a yoga mat in a fucking sleeping bag.

It's rough. It's rough. Why would you? Don't do that. Who are you trying to prove? Your boyfriend, the guy you don't really earn that into. All right. New Jersey.

Let's see here. You got lost. Sorry, Brendan. I'll let you tell the story yourself. He asked me to go hiking with him one morning. And I remember I had to borrow my friend's Timberland boots. So that it looked like I knew the proper footwear to wear. Oh, bad start.

One guy tried to take me hiking once on a date and I was like, and I got there and my whole like get up and I, and then we walked and we passed a bar and I was like, let's go drink. And I might not go drink with me. Did it work? Uh-huh. Oh, thank God. It's great.

We had a pretzel and we drank. Fun. Because I can't. No way. Let's see here. We were hiking for what seemed like hours and truth be told, I think I was this just there. So occasionally we could mess around and make out.

At one point we were scaling over a very large boulder in the middle of the woods. And when we came down there underneath was a radius bone. I don't say this like I'm a smarty pants who memorizes bones in the human body. But I do remember in high school, just like everyone else since in science class, we had a lifestyle skeleton that we would use to learn

the different bones of the body. I remember that the radius bone is the bone that connects the wrist to the elbow. It's not exactly something you expect to see in the middle of the woods, but it's also unmistakable. And first we went through the motions of this is not real. This can't be happening, but it dawned on us more and more that this is exactly what was happening.

We were several miles in the woods, technically the middle of nowhere. And after a little digging, notice that indeed we were standing on the remains of a decomposed body. It was so decomposed, there wasn't really even a smell. And I may just note that it was not easy getting here to this place we were.

I had to physically push myself to get there, but mostly I did it because I was trying to impress him as we scaled rocks and jumped around the forest like guys do. Guys who like to mess around with guys who are kind of sporty. Brendan, we get it. Brendan, we love you.

This guy's probably fun to hang out with. He is the best. The rest of the story- He's flourishing. That's why we know he's one of us. I bet he's not dating a fucking sporty guy anymore. The rest of the story is kind of a blur, even though it took the rest of the night.

Neither of us had a cell phone, and we knew that it would probably be difficult to find our way back here. At first we considered leaving and just pretending like we had not discovered this body. Always an option. But the idea, honestly, is something I knew I would haunt me for the rest of my life.

Yeah. Sometimes I can't help myself. I have to do the right thing. Eventually what we did- Eventually what we did was he left me there with the skeleton, and he found his way back to his car and he called the police.

Fuck. That had to be a rock, paper, scissors moment, right? Yeah, who gets to go back to the car? And who gets to stay with the skeleton? You're holding the skeleton's hand. Oh, that's so sad. Sorry. An hour or two later,

he came back with the police and we were questions and fingerprinted. They said that somebody would be coming out to talk to us again about the situation, but for now please try not to tell many people. It was honestly one of the most bizarre nights I've ever experienced. So why don't you go and then I'll tell you

story number two of hits. We don't find out who the person was or the- Like if- No, he ends it at the end, but no. I'm sorry. Okay, okay. Yeah, unfortunately. Of course, Brendan's gonna write a two-parter.

Oh yeah, Brendan is so Brendan. Brendan is like us. Brendan needs a podcast about dating dudes that he didn't want to date. Well, this, my next one is from someone named Rebecca and the subject line is, leave well enough alone, ass hat. Of course we're gonna read that.

Of course. Here's a hometown murder for you. I entitled this hometown murder, you couldn't leave well enough alone, could you? Awesome. So I am from a town in Illinois and then in the 90s, there was a horrible murder here. Mark Wenger called 911 one day after finding a man

beating his wife to death with a hammer in his kitchen and shooting the man to death. Oh my god. During the 911 call, Mark says that his baby daughter is crying and he will call back. That's not what you do. Yeah, we know that now this sticks to hi-hat. No, she was fucking him.

He killed them both. When the police arrive, oops. When the police arrive, both his wife and Roger, the man in the kitchen were barely alive and were taken to the hospital where they both later died. Before the paramedics came in, however, a police officer snapped a picture of the scene. Mark Wenger was hailed as a hero

and the community rallied around him. It turned out that Roger Harrington had driven Mark's wife, Donna, and baby daughter home from the airport during the drive. Donna reported that Roger drove erratically and kept talking about hearing voices. After she got home, Mark called the company and complained about Roger. So for the next few years,

freaking Mark Wenger kept showing up at the police station asking questions about the murder. It was suspicious enough that the original detectives looked up the case file again. In it, they saw the picture that one officer had, that one officer had taken at the scene. They realized there was no way that Mark's story was not possible. There was no way that Mark's story

was not possible, but I think she means possible, because the bodies were pointing, pointed in the wrong direction. In addition, a woman Mark had dated at the time secretly came forward and said that Mark had talked about killing his wife with her. What? So Mark went to prison.

While there, he tried to hire a convict to kill this woman, his ex-girlfriend. Holy shit. And so he was transferred to a supermax. Springfield in the surrounding area has a lot of good murder stories. Maybe I'll send some more some other time. Stay sexy, ladies. Bex.

Fuck, man. Wow. I thought that was gonna be... There's one where when the woman's dying, she, in her blood, paints the initials of the killer on the wall. No. Yeah, I don't remember.

This one... I saw this like a date line of this one too, where it's like, they thought it was this like... It's like a... You know when you have a crazy Uber driver and you're like, drop me off a couple stores down? Yes. It's like that.

And so sorry, that was his Mark's story to the cops that it was the crazy driver? Yeah, I think he was trying to pin it on him. Right. But then it turned out that he just killed his wife and the guy that was there. Totally. I wonder who the guy was.

I wonder if they were having an affair. I'm gonna go ahead and look all that stuff up. Do it. Um, not right now, because I'm about to read you part two of Brendan's email. Story number two. So it's the same week. Now I'm going out with a football captain.

God, it sucks. A murder occurred literally in my backyard. I had a nice little apartment that had a nice little backyard. Both of my cats were indoor cats. And I remember vividly the time one of them got out and went exploring for an entire weekend. Oh my God, I feel your pain. That's the worst.

I searched high and low for two days trying to find him and didn't even sleep. Eventually he came back on his own, as they say cats always do. During this time, a murder occurred in the house directly behind my apartment. I only know this because when I was out looking for my cat neighbors, I've never met before asked me

if I knew anything about the murder. First, I had no idea what they were talking about until I saw the police pull up and yellow tape went all around the property behind my house. Meanwhile, I'm still looking for my cat and to be perfectly honest with you, I was feeling almost hysterical as I was so afraid that he might get hurt

or in a fight with a dog or hit by a car. I get it. I walked around fucking shitty Echo Park at midnight crying one night looking for all this. Because Elvis got out. Elvis got out. Some fucking dude in like a lowrider pulled up and I was like, do you need a ride?

And I was crying. And I was like, I can't find my cat. And he was like, OK, bye. I was going to kill you, but this is really depressing. Or I thought you were hot, but now you're crying and I don't want to deal with you. Yeah, he really drove away. OK, one point I found myself in the backyard

were some of the property from the other house where the murder took place was in the backyard. I saw a couch covered in blood. Later, I would read in the paper some of the details about the murder that took place in the middle of the night while I was fast asleep, not 20 feet away. Eventually, the police came to question all the neighbors and me.

I guess names are linked in the database on a computer somewhere. Because when the police came to talk to me at my kitchen, they brought up the body that I had found in the woods two days prior. Oh, that's right. I've never been in a situation like this and honestly could see how it all looked shady and shifting.

Start asking yourself, what are the chances of this being possible? Two bodies, two murders, the same week. I'm never a guilty feeling person, but I admit that I did start to sweat at the kitchen table. Yeah, you better. I must have smoked a pack of cigarettes while this police officer interrogated me.

I felt so bad that all I could say was, no, I don't know. I have no information. I'm sorry I'm useless, which really was the truth. Nothing further ever came from either of the stories and the police never doubled back to get another statement from me. But I'll never forget the week in the summer of 2006 that for one moment, I got to feel what it's like to possibly

be a criminal. Shit. To have someone second-guess you and question your whereabouts, to feel that unmistakable humorous chuckle in me trying to suppress itself with a very strong police officer keeps asking you, where were you? How do you know that? Yeah.

How did this happen? Maybe you could use this story. I'd be happy to work on it. Love your show. You're too bad. You don't get to work on it. Brendan, you worked hard enough by going through it. We don't want the work done stormy.

We want the fucking, we want the vomitous like strain of thought. The raw feed from your brain. That's, that would be so scary because then you start acting suspicious knowing how suspicious you look. It's like when you think someone thinks that you're stealing something from a store, so you like put your arms in the air and walk around with your arms in the air. I'm not stealing anything.

Yes. As you do. And your purse is filled with bananas and stuff. It's just bananas. You just love bananas. They don't sell bananas there. You can't afford bananas. It's just Banana Republic and they're like,

why are you stealing bananas? We don't sell bananas here. Well, I don't like any of your clothes. Well, I stole all these bananas from someone else. Elsewhere. Elsewhere. And I'm, you're dropping them off here because you're a Banana Republic.

This is nonsensical corner with Karen. That was, those were all wonderful. Yeah. I wish we could read 60 at a time. We're just, we're getting through them as quick as we can. We should just do a daily Minnesota. Yes, we really should. People wouldn't get sick of that all.

And we wouldn't go out of our fucking minds. No. No. Someday. Anyway, keep them coming. Anyway, my favorite murder at gmail.com. Thanks you guys. Uh, good, great review.

Subscribe on iTunes, please. On I-I-I-Tunes. I-I-E too. It's a different, it's not iTunes. It's I-I-E. I-I-E. It's different sites. And thanks for listening.

Oh, and I was just going to say stay safe. Well, I was going to say, don't get murdered. Bye. Bye. Elvis want a cookie? Want a mini cookie? Good boy. That's a yes.