RedHanded - Bonus Patreon Upcycle - Joe Metheny: Hate, Heroin & Human Hog Roasts

Episode Date: January 5, 2023

There aren't many true crime figures bigger than Joe Metheny. The 450-pound killer cook, who rampaged his way through south Baltimore's homeless community in the early 90s, claimed to have taken the lives of at least 10 victims...  But how does someone go from a quiet, high-achieving young boy to a homeless crack addict with a taste for murder? New merch at percivalclo.com! Code: REDHANDED10 for 10% off 2023 North American Tour Tickets: redhandedpodcast.com 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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cheer and ready to grab the new year by the balls. We are still on our little ball-grabbing break, so we have another one of our very best picks from our Patreon bonus episodes from last year 2022. And this one is one of our very best picks from our Patreon bonus episodes from last year, 2022. And this one is one of our most requested cases of all time. But before we get to Burger Boy, we have a little reminder for you all. A North American reminder.

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For now, you better put down that sandwich, though, because it's time to separate the cannibal man from the cannibal myth. We've all seen the picture of this terrifying looking heavy hitter, but who was the real Joe Metheny? I'm Hannah and welcome to your bonus episode for Patreon for the month of April. That sounds like it's probably right. We're going on holiday in two days. So we've been recording things back to back to back to back for stuff that's going out in like three weeks time. So we have no idea about the passage of time. The chronicles of the episodes.

We've just been behind these mics. And it doesn't matter because this, friends, is an evergreen show. So wherever you are, whenever you are, whoever you are, enjoy all the horrible things we're about to tell you. Because we've said it before and we'll say it again. When it comes to the world of true crime, fact is often far stranger and far more fucked up than fiction i really think that if this story was presented to you in like a true crime drama everyone would watch it but you'd be forgiven thinking that it was all just a bit unbelievable yeah far-fetched yes and actually as i say that they have used this story in a non-true crime in a fake crime drama criminal

minds but i don't think you ever watched criminal minds did you i just like yeah yeah yeah no so on criminal minds it's a show that annoys me in equal parts as it entertains me and i know that it's not for everybody but there is definitely one episode where they have used this okay okay as the inspiration right and i think anybody who watched that and had never heard of this case would be like, oh, this is so fucked up. This can't be real. And I'm like, well, well, well. Like the mushroom people in Hannibal.

Precisely. So the guy we're talking about today was a 450 pound killer cook, an ex-soldier who'd come back from Vietnam with severe PTSD and a raging heroin addiction. And he murdered sex workers for fun, then allegedly served them up to his unsuspecting barbecue customers as open

bun pork sandwiches. Now, if you're a patron of Red Handed, you've probably already heard of this case and seen the pictures of Joe Tiny Methany. But exactly how much of this unbelievable story is actually true? If you have spent any time on the internet, you will have seen the picture of Joe Methany. It's on every BuzzFeed list. It's on every true crime almanac has the picture. It's permanently burned onto my retinas forever. So who is this man? Joe Metheny

was born on March the 2nd, 1953 in Baltimore, Maryland. There's not a lot on record about his early life. And as we'll go on to see, Joe Metheny's retelling of events isn't exactly reliable. What we do know is that his dad died when Joe was just six years old. And that left his mum, Jean, to be the sole provider for little Joe and his five siblings. Jesus, being a single mother with six kids in the 50s. It's too many. In Maryland. Fuck your life. No, six is too many.

Six is too many of anything, actually. Yes. It's too many toes. It's too many lunches. It is. It's too many of anything actually yes it's too many toes it's it's it's too many lunches it is it's too many work days the only thing it is not too many of if you're buying half a dozen eggs yeah there you go don't tell us we don't give you anything don't tell us we don't advise you on your egg purchasing or remind you how many are in half a dozen anyway nothing makes me feel more old and timey than saying a dozen or half a dozen or a baker's dozen a baker's dozen what's

a baker's dozen 13 what oh because they do like a they do an extra one yeah i'm pretty sure i never someone's gonna tell me i'm wrong now but um i prefer that story yeah to the truth it's kind of like when i never feel more grown up than when i go to a butcher's. That makes me feel like I'm like, I am an adult. Or the green grocers and you're like a pound of olives or something. Pound of olives. Jesus. Building a house out of olives, are you? Nom, nom, nom. I want some olives. So Joe would later claim that after the death of his father, his mum, Jean, lost interest in her six children and she'd send them all off to stay with friends and family under a kind of casual foster care system i mean obviously i don't know jean but that's quite an unkind assessment maybe she

was just like i literally have no money to feed you go and stay with auntie doris yeah i think it's so hard to know what the actual situation was growing up, because Joe is very unforgiving of his mother. But Jean tells a very different story. She says that Joe and his siblings were well looked after, well fed, and they always had a roof over their heads. And she also claims that the only time the kids were ever sent away from home was if she needed to work late, doing a second job as a barmaid just to make ends meet.

See, that to me seems more likely. Yeah, and also, fucking fair enough. Overall, Jean Metheny felt that she'd given all of her kids, Joe included, a pretty good upbringing, given her circumstances. And she paints a rather idyllic picture of things, claiming that Joe was an intelligent, thoughtful and academically gifted young boy, who did well at school and spent most of his free time riding his bike. In 1973, aged 18, Metheny joined the US Army for a year. After his return, he claimed to have done a tour of Vietnam, saying that he'd gone out there to fight as part of an artillery

unit. And this time in Vietnam became a big part of Joe Metheny's identity. He claimed that while he was there, he was exposed to incredible brutality, which had permanently traumatized him and left him numb to violence. And he claimed that while out in Vietnam, he'd become addicted to heroin. And that did happen a lot. And that substance would hold a grip over Joe Metheny for the rest of his life. However, US Army tours of Vietnam ended in the same year that Joe joined up. Indeed. And in fact, Jean, Joe's mum, claims that she has absolutely no memory of any mention of Vietnam when Joe was in the service, saying that she always thought

he'd been stationed in Germany. Now, it's important to note that in Germany in 1973, counterculture, anarchism, and squatting were thriving. And along with that came a surge in recreational drug use. Berghain, baby! Uh-huh. So if Joe Metheny was stationed in Germany, as his mum Jean claims to remember, then there's a good chance that he would have been exposed to the same heavy drug use that was also common in Vietnam so that could explain the heroin addiction if he was based in Germany and he's just

lying about going to Vietnam yeah it doesn't come with the same amount of sympathy though does it no it does not it does not I think you are already hitting the nail on the head Hannah I think you know even coming back to him saying when he gets back from being in the army that he was exposed to incredible brutality and things like that in Vietnam. Of course, the people who went to Vietnam were exposed to incredible brutality. But often, as we've seen time and time again, the people that saw really, really horrible shit never talk about it when they got back. And he talks about it quite a lot. And I'm not saying, obviously, not all people that were exposed to that react in exactly the same way,

but it is quite a common trait. When I worked at Soho Theatre, there was a guy who was now an actor, but he'd done, like, three tours in Bosnia in the army.

I mean, he's just popped back into my head now. I haven't thought about him for years, but that's what he would say. I'd ask about it, he'd be like,

I can't talk about it. And he was this, like, very, like, jolly, entertaining, extremely charismatic guy. But the second you asked him about it, he'd be like, I can't talk about it. And he was this very jolly, entertaining, extremely charismatic guy. But the second you asked him about it, he'd be like, no.

Yeah. And I think you see that quite a lot in cases like this. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to light some of the biggest controversies in US history. Presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, NASA embarks on an ambitious program to reinvent space exploration with the launch of its first reusable vehicle, the Space Shuttle. And in 1985, they announced they're sending teacher Krista McAuliffe into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, along with six other astronauts. But less than two minutes after liftoff, the Challenger explodes.

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And it's clear to see already in our breakdown of Joe Metheny that he has a habit of bending the truth or even just downright lying to create a version of himself that is a bit more appealing to the people around him. As Hannah said, going to Vietnam and coming back a war vet was going to get him a little bit more sympathy than just having been stationed vietnam and coming back a war vet was going to get him a little bit more sympathy than just having been stationed in germany and living in a squat and taking loads of drugs exactly i think like the common rhetoric of soldiers american soldiers being exposed to heroin in vietnam is that's a very very common thing and yeah you're going to get a lot people are going to be a bit more understanding of that than they are of a squat party in Berlin. Yes.

And it also ties into, you know, his telling of his childhood being this sort of semi-orphaned child that was just like lumped off on family members in a casual foster care system, as he put it, rather than just having an incredibly hardworking mum who was doing her best to make sure he was fed and clothed. Now on the surface, this kind of lying about having been to Vietnam rather than Germany, and the lies that he's telling at this point in his life, they are important contextually speaking, but at the moment they're not that much to worry about. They're not exactly lies to write home about. We've seen plenty of killers creating elaborate backstories in order to get sympathy for their actions or to explain away why they did what they did. And we've said this before, no one is a monster in their own mind. Everybody wants to be able to shape their

narrative, shape their experiences to explain their behaviour away. But this constant lying would form a big part of Metheny's life. After being honorably discharged from the army a year after he joined, Metheny's life spiraled. He quickly cut all contact with his family as heroin and crack cocaine took over his life. He got a job as a forklift driver but spent his entire meager wage on fueling his drug habit. And forklift is quite heavy machinery so I mean not a great choice and that meant because he spent all of his money on drugs he had no money left to put a roof over his head so he lived as part of South Baltimore's substantial homeless population and here he got the ingenious nickname Tiny because he was so huge.

He was actually over 450 pounds, even though he left the army as a fit young man. So going from an intelligent child with relatively good prospects to an honorably discharged soldier to a then homeless crack addict, it's easy to see why Metheny would want to create a more sympathetic life story, because this is the thing. He kind of has to have had a worse series of experiences that led him to be where he is than he did in order to not feel like he's a failure. That's what I think is the driving motivation for Joe Metheny to say how horrible his childhood was, and to say what a traumatic time he'd had in

the army. I'm not saying that it's not like it was the opposite, like he had a perfect childhood, or he had a perfect time in the army, and it wasn't problematic at all, or like traumatic at all. But he makes it so much worse, because otherwise, he has to face the reality of people looking and be like, well, then it's your fault. And obviously, I'm not saying that people who have substance abuse problems, it's their fault. But this is why he's lying. Oh, absolutely. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection.

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desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. So yes, it's easy to see why he would talk about his mum putting him in a foster home, despite the fact that she actually worked hard to put a roof over his head. It's also easy to see the appeal

of the broken Vietnam vet story over the guy who just got sent to Germany and partied a bit too hard. Anti-Vietnam War sentiment was at an all-time high post-1973, as the US had embarrassingly pulled out of Vietnam with nothing to show for the war, but a generation of broken young men

and a nation with a lot of civilian blood on its hands. They didn't lose, though, they signed a peace treaty. But that sentiment was very much anti-government rather than anti-soldier. In fact, there was actually a great deal of sympathy for the young conscripts who had got sent out to fight for a war that they didn't believe in and had come back destroyed and addicted to opioids. So for Joe Metheny, again, this was a very obvious narrative to go for. Despite his crippling addiction,

Metheny was briefly able to pull his life together, the operative word there being up briefly. In the early 90s, Big Joe managed to bag himself a wife, who some sources call Latifa, but there's not a whole lot out there on who she was. In fact, we even had a look at the marriage records for Marilyn through the late 80s to the year 2000, and we couldn't find any mention of Joe Metheny or his wife. So it's entirely possible that the pair of them never actually

got married. They did have a child though, and with his wage from forklift driving, Joe Metheny was able to afford a small trailer home for his family, and it seemed for a short while that things were on the up for Joe Metheny. Everything's coming up Milhouse. But it was not to last. All was not well at Casa del Metheny. Joe and his wife were still regularly taking crack cocaine and heroin. And around July 1994, Joe returned from work to find nothing left in his trailer park home. All of his family belongings were gone, and so was his wife and their son. Joe

wasn't that fussed about his missing wife or his possessions. He'd been homeless for long enough that it wasn't exactly the end of the world. But the loss of his son was unbearable. Metheny's lifestyle left him feeling like he couldn't talk to the police, and he was also already cut off from his family family so he couldn't get help from them either. Six agonizing months went by with Joe descending into a drug-fueled meltdown. Then Metheny heard that his wife was now living with a new man in a tent city under a bridge on the other side of Baltimore. Apparently Joe's son had been taken away by authorities, and now his wife was working as a sex worker,

to fuel her and her new partner's drug habit. Metheny, now enraged by the idea that he might never see his son again, went on a ill-planned mission to the other side of town to find his wife and her new boyfriend. However, when he got to the tent city, he found that where his wife had been staying, there was nothing left but a stained mattress and some drug paraphernalia. His wife and her new man were nowhere to be found. Now on quite the comedown, Metheny decided to get

high with two homeless men who were living in the tent city, and these men were called Randall Brewer and Randy Piker. However, this wasn't the mellow session that Brewer and Piker had in mind when Joe came over to them to get high. Once they'd all finished shooting up heroin, Metheny turned on Randall and Piker, beating them both to death with an axe, before chopping them up and leaving their remains in the tent city. But Big Joe still wasn't done. Then, this is according to his confession that he did much later, then he went to speak to a local sex worker who he thought might know his wife. And when this woman said she didn't know Latifa, Metheny yet again grew violent.

He raped this woman before strangling her to death and then hiding her body in a nearby bush. Then he lured another sex worker to talk to him before raping and murdering her as well. He dumped her body in the river. And to top off this rampage, he spotted a local fisherman who had potentially seen him commit at least one of the murders. So Joe alleged that he killed this man with a steel pipe before throwing him into the river too. Now it's important to note that there has never been any evidence found that backed up these murders, including that of the two sex workers or the fishermen.

These killings, well the accounts of these killings, are purely taken from Metheny's later confessions. Which, you know, it can go two ways. Like he's either spinning a story, which a lot of serial killers like to do, exaggeration, delusions of grandeur, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I also can completely buy that sex workers living in a tent city in Baltimore in the 90s, no one is going to know they've gone.

So the only verifiable victims out of these first five that Metheny claims were Randall Brewer and Randy Piker, who definitely existed and were definitely killed. What we also know for definite is that in 1994, in the months after killing Brewer and Piker, Metheny lured a sex worker named Kathy Magaziner to his trailer park home before getting her high and then brutally strangling her to death with an extension cord. He then buried Kathy's body in a shallow grave on the grounds of a pallet factory where he'd been working, driving forklifts, before, quote, kicking some dirt over her belongings.

He said he then came back six months later to dig up her head, put it in a box and chuck it in the bin. Some sources say that Metheny actually performed sex acts on Kathy's decomposing body before chucking it away, but we haven't been able to verify this. Now you're probably thinking that Big Joe seems to be getting away with quite a lot without much happening to him. Well in 1995 that all changed. Metheny was arrested and charged with the murders of Randall Brewer and Randy Piker, the homeless men that he'd brutally killed with an axe. Metheny spent the next 18 months in jail waiting for his court hearing, at which he

pled his innocence. The trial only lasted a week and eventually the case was thrown out due to a lack of evidence. So after almost two years behind bars and being acquitted of two murders that he absolutely definitely did, what was this narcissistic murderer going to do next? Was he going to count his blessings, turn his life around, thank the universe for this beautiful second chance? Of course not. Joe Metheny had successfully, even if rather slowly, given the police the slip. And now it was time to double down and really get into his enormous murderous stride. After being released from prison,

Metheny went back to his old boss at the pallet factory and asked for his forklift driving job back. His boss, who surprisingly agreed, also let Metheny move a trailer onto the grounds of the yard so that he could guard the place overnight. Now Metheny, who seemed to be devolving day by day, had successfully found himself the perfect tucked away location on a quiet trading estate to go about his murderous business have you seen stand by me no okay um have you seen breaking bad yes i feel like this sort of it's quite an american trope of this man who lives in a trailer on a junkyard and like has a ferocious dog with a big chain. Absolutely.

And in this case, he is fucking terrifying. Yes, yes. He actually is. He's not a gentle giant. No. He's not Shrek. Get out of my swamp. So in mid-November 1996, Metheny killed another woman called Kimberly Lynn Spicer.

He lured her back to his trailer before stabbing her to death and then hiding her body on the grounds of the pallet factory. And then his luck ran out. On December 8th, 1996, Metheny lured another sex worker called Rita Kemper back to his trailer. The pair took drugs before Metheny tried to have sex with Kemper. Kemper refused and tried to make a break for it. But before she could, Metheny grabbed her, savagely beat her, and then he tried to rape her whilst telling her he was going to kill her and bury her in the woods with the other girls. And we know he said that because unlike previous victims, Kemper managed to escape.

She climbed through the back window of Joe Metheny's trailer and escaped into the night. Metheny knew he'd fucked up, and a week later on the 15th of December, he called a friend and asked for help burying the body of Kimberly Lynn Spicer, who he'd left just decomposing on the grounds of the pallet factory on which he lived and worked. This friend, understandably, immediately called the police, so Joe's made quite a big miscalculation there. And the same day, Metheny, who clearly wasn't that concerned, went to his work's Christmas party,

during which the police arrived and arrested him and charged him with murder. So embarrassing. Oh my God. There's no other worse place to be arrested than the work Christmas party. I know. It's like Carol and Dave are getting off in the back

and they're like, oh my God, we're going to be so embarrassed on Monday. Oh phew, Joe Metheny got arrested for murder. Yeah, exactly. It's like when I went to that wedding and one of the groomsmen fell asleep in the garden because he was so drunk and I was like, oh God, what a relief. That's all everyone's going to remember. Then three days after this embarrassing Christmas party on the 18th of December,

Joe Metheny led the police to the remains of Kimberly Lynn Spicer and Kathy Magaziner. During his confession, he told them that he had killed another eight people, including Randall Brewer and Randy Piker. Because remember, that case was actually thrown out of court due to a lack of evidence. So they can't get him for it again? I think they can. If it was a mistrial, they can. If he was acquitted, they can't.

It depends on that. Now, although, as we said earlier other than brewer and piker there was very little evidence to back up any of these claims with regards to the other eight murders apart from randy and randall that he was confessing to i think one reason that he adds in brewer and piker into his confession list is i think he does sort of fall into ed kemper territory of even though he doesn't hand himself in he's like well i'm clearly going away for the rest of my life i might as well be infamous as well yeah absolutely i think joe metheny is also it's very clear that he is very self-absorbed i think you know anybody who's seen any type of killers we know that when

we talk about people being psychopathic all psychopaths tend to be narcissistic, though not all narcissists are psychopaths. And I think you see a lot of his narcissism playing out here. I think he also puts a lot of pride, maybe not the right word, but stock in his appearance, right? And I don't mean that in a vain way. I mean that in like, he's this big guy. If you see all the pictures of him, he's scowling, he's like pulling almost animalistic faces. It's very theatrical because he's this big guy. If you see all the pictures of him, he's scowling. He's like pulling almost animalistic faces. It's very theatrical because he's trying to be as scary as he possibly can to sort of be as domineering, dominating, and coming across as powerful as he possibly can.

And I think, you know, the lies about having killed this many people, even though there's no proof that he did all of them, I think it's just part of that storytelling. And that idea of infamy certainly fits in line with one of the reasons that Joe Metheny became quite so famous. Allegedly, following his arrest, Joe Metheny began telling his fellow inmates, and even some authorities, that the true motivation he had had for the murder of Kimberly Spicer and the attempted murder of Rita Kemper was not just about sexual gratification. No, no, no.

Joe Metheny claimed that he had been using the flesh of the women he had killed to make pork and beef barbecue sandwiches, which he sold to the other workers at the pallet factory. Yep. And, Hannah, you've said it before, cannibalism is very hard to prove unless you catch people literally red-handed.

Because the evidence is gone. Again, like, we don't know. I don't buy it. Not for one second. Yeah, I think, again, you're just sort of getting that narrative of him picking the worst things he can think of. The thing that's going to freak the most people out. I mean, he, he like dumped these women's bodies on the pallet factory he worked at he gets arrested at his christmas party i think it's like

you said if he's gonna go out he might as well go out with a fucking bang and tell everybody he works with that he'd been secretly feeding them dead sex workers like fucking hell he is just doing this like his pictures show to be as scary as he possibly can to come across as the most fucked up guy and maybe it's also kind of a preservation thing i don't know maybe i'm reading too much into this but he knows he's going to prison maybe he's like i'm this giant huge tall guy big guy if i say that when i go into prison i killed eight people and i fed those women to other people like is it just kind of like a prison yard i mean yeah no i think he's looking

for that's completely possible but i'm like you're fucking massive joe like why do you need yeah yeah i could kind of get that if he was like some little weedy like we look i mean i think it's you know i don't think he sees the world clearly but um maybe he's insecure yeah maybe yeah possibly maybe we don't know enough about his childhood but I think there is definitely this feeling of like powerlessness that maybe emanates from him a bit, even though he's such a big guy, big dominating person, character. I don't know. I don't know.

He's also just a compulsive liar, quite possibly. Well, yeah, I think that is certainly true. So between 1997 and 1998, Jonah Metheny was charged with robbery and the murder of Kathy Magaziner, the murder of Kimberly Lynn Spicer, the kidnapping and attempted sexual assault of Rita Kemper, and the murder of a fourth woman,

28-year-old Toni Ingrassia, whose body was found near the pallet factory. And in the end, Joe Metheny was found guilty of three out of the four cases against him. The Tony Ingrassia case was thrown out again for a lack of evidence and he got 50 years for his attack on Rita Kemper, life in jail for the murder of Kathy Magaziner and in late 1998, Joe Metheny was handed a death sentence for the murder of Kimberly Lynn Spicer. However, Metheny's death sentence was eventually overturned in 2000,

and he was given another whole-of-life sentence. Big Joe Metheny was eventually found dead in his cell on the 5th of August 2017, aged 64. His death was chalked up to natural causes, probably linked to his heavy drug use, and also suspected cardiac arrest. He claims that he cooked and sold human flesh,

but again, none of this has ever shown to be true and neither have five of the ten murders that he confessed to. Realistically, these stories are probably just the ramblings of a narcissist rather than probably the actions of the evil killer cook that everybody wanted him to be. But also, knowing who he went after, being homeless people and sex workers it's also hard to know if he isn't telling the truth i think joe metheny is i think everyone

sees that picture and they're like oh my god and like then we get all of these requests but it is one of those cases that when you just scratch the surface it's not actually as interesting as you think it is i think that's the thing that is the thing but i can leave you with one fun fact hooray i love a fun fact but yeah like the kind of evil killer cook it reminds me of the evil killer clown and we all know that john wayne gacy obviously got big into painting when he was in prison drew and painted lots of clowns that people for some reason like to buy and i don't know what they do put them up in their houses maybe i mean i think some of them are like priceless. I think you can get a lot of money for them. They're so fucked up.

Well, Joe Metheny got into it too. He got big into illustration in prison and now you can buy a signed Joe Metheny birthday card for the low, low price of $140. But you really shouldn't. Don't. Who is buying that? Please don't do that. For whom?

Anyway, that's it guys. That is the case of big tiny joe methney do you remember years ago when we got sent one of our first pr packages it was from some sort of true crime magazine or something i can't remember but one of the things they sent us was this like enormous pop-up poster of joe jones and i was like i'm not joe jones jim jones jim jones yeah sorry joe jones was someone i lived with in costa rica very tired uh yeah jim jones poster of Joe Jones. And I was like, I'm not Joe Jones. Jim Jones. Yeah. Sorry. Joe Jones was someone I lived with in Costa Rica. Very tired. Yeah. Jim Jones. And I was like, I'm not putting that on my wall. Oh, I hate that. He's responsible for the death of nearly a thousand people. I hate that. And I feel like that's why like, sorry, I'm going off on just true crime in general. No,

do it. That's what gives us all a bad name. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think talking about being morbidly curious about the extremes of human behavior and what could be more extreme than murder is grubby it's the kind of weird etsy coloring book pop art like poster veneration of fucking killers is that's the sick part yes exactly i don't think anyone should ever be ashamed of intellectual curiosity about things no matter how bizarre or perverse they may seem. Because if you're not curious about something, how can you ever understand it? And if you don't understand it, I'm not saying that we're changing the world by being interested in true crime. But it's like, if as a collective, as like a species, we don't understand why people do bad things, how could we ever prevent it?

Or how would we ever know how to treat people who had done that and i mean treat as in maybe medically maybe psychiatrically maybe just how to put them in prison and what we need to do so no i hate that whole like true crime is grubby no it fucking isn't so stop doing that yeah don't buy a birthday card don't do it buy joe metheny spend your money elsewhere like continuing to be a patron of Red Handed and buy our merch yes goodbye bye you don't believe in ghosts

I get it lots of people don't I in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either, until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness,

and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery+. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey

to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me.

And it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding, and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.