Sins & Survivors: A Las Vegas True Crime Podcast - A Fight For Survival - Swing Shift (Free Bonus Episode)

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

A deep dive into self-defense, domestic violence, and what went into making A Fight For Survival. Let us know what you think about the episodeWe're dropping this swing shift as a FREE BONUS episode to celebrate our upcoming Patreon! We've covered a lot of cases on the "self defense" topic so we needed some time to discuss.We have a big surprise in store next week too so stay tuned thanks for listening and supporting the show!Domestic Violence Resourceshttp://sinspod.co/resourcesClick here to become a member of our Patreon!https://sinspod.co/patreonVisit and join our Patreon now and access our ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content & schwag!Apple Podcast Subscriptionshttps://sinspod.co/appleWe're now offering premium membership benefits on Apple Podcast Subscriptions! On your mobile deviceLet us know what you think about the episodehttps://www.buzzsprout.com/twilio/text_messages/2248640/open_sms Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/sins-survivors-a-las-vegas-true-crime-podcast--6173686/support.

To listen ad-free, visit Zinspod.co slash subscribe. Starting at $2.99 a month, you'll also get access to our exclusive bonus content episodes when you join through Patreon or Apple subscriptions. Thanks for supporting the show! Do we do that at the beginning of Overtime? Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. Hi, and welcome to Overtime.

It's not called Overtime. It's called Swing Shift. Hi, and welcome to our Swing Shift episode. Our most recent Swing Shift episode for episode 22, part 2. Actually, for episode 22, parts one and two, we have won overtime. We made that call. You're going to have to live with it. Although, if you don't like that and you want more overtime, please let us know. Write to us at Sean at SinsAndSurvivors.com. Or John at SinsAndSurvivors.com.

If you have praise, please write to john at sins and survivors dot com if you have complaints please address them to sean it's fine that's so that was three cases we did three cases in two weeks which is really interesting yep and we also have a possibly coming up in the next couple weeks an interview with a survivor who killed her abuser in self-defense, which I hope she's looking into whether or not she can be part of the podcast because she wants to speak with her attorney first, which is completely understandable. But I'm hoping that we can have her on for an interview. I think the audience would love to hear from her. Yes, absolutely. And I would too. I really want to hear her, what she has to say. Yeah. But we covered three other cases over these two episodes. Two in Vegas and one in Elko.

Elko. Very small. It's a very small place. Have you ever been to Elko? I have never been to Elko. Me neither. In my research, I found that you can fly to Elko into their... They have an airport? They have an airport. They do.

It's not a big airport, but you can fly there. You can't fly direct from Las Vegas, though. You have to fly through Salt Lake. But Delta flies there. You can take a flight from Salt Lake to Elko on Delta? Yeah. Okay. Weird.

I'm assuming that it's not very often. Is it like an eight-person Cedar plane? It might be. It might be like one of those prop planes, like a commuter plane. I'm not sure. But it's you know not very often is it like an eight person cedar plane it might be it might be like one of those prop planes like a commuter plane i'm not sure but it's not cheap it's like 600 bucks it's probably cheaper to drive then yeah drive the seven hours yeah it's cheaper to take probably less you probably take an uber there cheaper it's probably less annoying too than having to transfer and all that yeah i think you transfer in charles de gaulle oh okay convenience it's not too bad it's 13 hours there 13 hours back semi-direct but um yeah elko is like the largest city in even that area as small as it is i i can't even call it a city but i mean that's where the largest within a few of the counties, just in that part, that upper northeast part of Nevada.

And we definitely think of cities that are not Reno and Carson City, Las Vegas, Boulder City, and Henderson as rural Nevada, or at least I do. I think Elko probably qualifies as rural. I really wish I had looked up, like, do they have a movie theater? I know they have a casino. I'm sure they do. I know their big industry is gold mining. I know that they, I'm pretty sure that's what they're known for, like the gold, that's the gold mine capital in Nevada or something like that. I'm going to tell you some statistics about Elko. you ready i'm ready elko is the one two three four five six seven eighth largest city in nevada uh las vegas is largest then henderson right then reno sure

then are you ready for this one north las vegas okay our our know. North Las Vegas is smaller than Reno? Okay. Smaller than Reno. Not by much, though. Is this population? Population. Okay. Population 2020. Okay. And, oh no, I'm sorry, I sorted by, oh yeah, population 2020, yeah.

And then Sparks. Ah, Sparks. I didn't know Sparks had 100,000 people in it. I didn't know that either. That's weird. How many people live in reno uh reno 264 thousand people okay and north las vegas 262 000 okay yeah reno is larger than north las vegas wow so uh and then after sparks carson city sure carson city only has 58 000 people it's the seat

of government yes that. That's embarrassing. We have that many people in our yard and they're walking around by our house today. Yes. And then Fernley. Wow, okay. I've never heard of Fernley. I've heard of Fernley. There was a case I almost covered today out of Fernley.

That's a weird flex. Sorry, I was just bringing it up. And then Elko. Sure. And then Mesquite. Mesquite, yeah, I was going... That's okay. And then Elko. Sure. And then Mesquite. Mesquite, yeah, I was going to say it has to be Mesquite next. And then Boulder City. What, shush.

Boulder City doesn't have less than 10,000 people in it, does it? 14,000 people in Boulder City. All right, that's shocking. If you don't know, Boulder City is about 30 minutes away from Henderson. It's where Boulder Dam is, the Hoover Dam. from henderson it's uh where boulder boulder dam is the hoover dam the difference is like there's no target or walmart in boulder city but you can easily drive into las vegas and there's an international airport there i mean you'd have to drive i don't know how far you'd have to drive out of elko to get to like a movie theater or there's got to be a movie theater in elko i'm

really curious i'm gonna take that as an action item to look that up. I'm sure it's charming too. They have mines. Their principal thing is mining. Mining was big in Nevada. Silver. Tin. What else? Rhyolite. Nice. Fallon

comes after that with 9,000 people. We know someone from Fallon. We do. Winnemucca. E ely so now we're like this is all very small like anything beyond anything smaller than boulder city fallon and beyond is definitely rural nevada i mean a lot of these things are rural nevada yeah mesquite rural i'm gonna say anything outside of even north las vegas yeah it's rural nevada not carson city or wash or um reno yeah yeah not reno and well reno's the third largest so definitely not that but um yeah yeah and we're talking like hundreds of miles of desert in between these cities yeah

nevada is huge and 80 owned by the government and there's just little little parts that are populated lots of ghost towns too a lot of ghost towns where mining towns popped up and yes you mentioned rhyolite that is a fun ghost town to visit yes there's another one that's the one with the bottle house i'm pretty sure that's right that's right yeah that's fun you can road trip up there and um and really check out some cool stuff if you're ever in nevada that's like a fun road it almost makes me want us to like fly to reno sometime and then do like a northern nevada like west to east like road trip or something oh fly home back out of salt lake maybe yeah that'd be interesting because i've never seen any of those cities up

there i mean we've been to tonopah but but I've never been to Fernley or whatever. What else did you say? Fallon, Fernley, Ely. Yeah, I've never been up there. Elko. Yeah, that's crazy. That'd be fun. We did not expect to talk about Elko this much.

No. I don't think the people in Elko talk about Elko this much. No, I don't. Unless they use it in the context of like, we have to get out of Elko. Why do we? I'm just kidding. I'm sure Elko is lovely. I'm sure it is.

And it probably appeals to people who like small town life. Yeah. Yeah, it looks perfectly nice. Yeah. I don't know what the temperature's like up there. I did look that up, actually, because I was curious, too.

But like, highs on average in the 80s and then lows in the 20s. Oh, so not bad. Not as hot as here. I mean, they have, they have some hundred degree days and they have like in July and August, but like on average, significantly cooler and significantly colder. Yeah. So yeah. That's appealing.

Mm-hmm. All right. So back to the That's appealing. Mm-hmm. All right. So, back to the cases. Okay. So, we talked about how some of the cases, one of the case, the first case we covered was- Tammy and David. Tammy and David ended up in jail time.

Yeah. For Tammy, which that one, I thought, was the one that had the strongest evidence. Right. Because she had all those injuries on her body. I mean, they were all self-defense. We'll say that up front, definitely. Yes. But hers was, there was no question whatsoever

that it was a self-defense case. No, I don't think so. And every story she told, or the story she told about what happened was completely consistent with all of the physical evidence that was collected and the statements of her neighbors and her family about what was going on. She had that awful injury to her head, 13 staples to close it, all of that.

And she ended up taking a plea deal, which still resulted in her being locked up for like four years. Right. They lived on like Boulder Highway. Yeah. for like four years right they lived on like boulder highway yeah which is i'm gonna say i don't think it's controversial to say it is not the nicest area in las vegas no it's kind of like an older more distressed community part of henderson the older part of henderson more um where we live less affluent less aff. Less affluent, yeah. And?

And they lived in like a small, a very small apartment complex, I would call it. I think it's four or five buildings. And then I think they're eight unit buildings, four on the ground floor and then four on the second floor. I don't know how any two people live in 500 square feet together. Yeah, and when we looked at pictures because like you mentioned in the episode when we're going over the facts and it's like

pushed her down on the bed on the couch on the chair found on the chair found on the futon i was like how do they have all this furniture in this little house and i think it was just the the piece of furniture that they were calling a couch was also a futon, which means it could go flat to be a bed. And maybe it wasn't very large. That's why the police called it a futon chair. So it just, yeah, we had to look at the pictures to see exactly how small. And it was one of those apartments where they didn't even have a full-size range. They just have like a little-

Yeah, a little tiny stove. A little like two-burner stove, like an oven that you couldn't put a cookie sheet in. A very small, very modest apartment. Yes. I wasn't kidding. I lived in an apartment that small, but I would never have lived with another person. I really did like that apartment in New York, even though it smelled like Chinese food literally all the time. But I would never live there with another person something about being an adult

and having a bed that folds down out of the wall i think i don't know people in new york do that i don't want to touch it's fine whatever space is space yeah and i know people do what they can to get by so yeah i think but i think you're right that living in that small space meant there was nowhere to go there was nowhere to hide during the pandemic yeah oh wait was it the pandemic no no no they weren't 10 years before okay but like or whatever eight years before but like even if they were fighting it's not like she could go in a bedroom and close the door right there was there's go in the kitchen yeah there. There was nowhere to go. So compare that to the second case.

Catherine's case. Yep. Catherine and Aaron. They lived in Summerlin. In a two-story home with a garage. It initially looked like a small home to me. It was like the homes are like a tube. Yeah. It's like they're not a lot wider than the two-car garage in the front of the house.

But they're two stories and they go back really far. So there's living space on the garage level and also living space upstairs. Mm-hmm. So it was like four, it's like a four-bedroom, I don't know how many square feet, but like not small. No, not small. And like you pointed out, in a more affluent community, I'm going to go out on a limb and say they have an HOA. They definitely have a community there of neighbors who are outspoken.

Yes. We talked about the letters they wrote. The one guy wrote a letter and he was like, I don't really care. I don't, I don't believe she, I don't believe it was self-defense and I don't want her here. Yeah.

A lot of, a lot of empathy. Yeah. And like compare that to the community where Tammy and David lived there, their neighbors were well aware of the fighting that was going on. They, they, but, Their neighbors were well aware of the fighting that was going on. But, but I'll say but, they didn't seem to be taking any steps to have the police come out there. They can really, that was not something they were interested in having happen.

Or having her be evicted or them be evicted for causing disturbances or being loud. I mean, their very own property manager knew that he was violent toward her. And obviously, you should never evict someone from your property just because they're a victim of domestic violence. But it didn't sound like there was complaints being made in the sense that anyone wanted them to leave. Yeah, not at all so they they were living in this community where it was kind of like this open secret this thing that was going on with them was known to all of them but they weren't they didn't seem to while they cared about tammy i think the one neighbor showed that he cared about her and you know asked if she was okay that day but they weren't all up in their business and they were had really good relationships with both of them it sounded like they would go over each

other's houses to chat and like say oh yeah this happened last night or she did this to me or bum cigarettes off each other it was like a much more cohesive and together community um even though there was all this violence going on but i feel like in katherine and aaron's it was more of like a i don't want to say segregated but sort of like everyone's in their own little unit they're not all communally living except when this stuff happened and then all of a sudden everybody's going to sign off on this letter yeah in a petition with like 25 signatures people all around the neighborhood saying they didn't want her there we also mentioned the

I hate to say the drug angle but I had a theory on that and since we're in swing shift I'll just say it real quick because she had been Tammy had been stabbed in the head

like a week before she ended up killing him and, you know, had like 13 staples in her head. So it makes absolute sense to me that when she went to the doctor, she was prescribed painkillers for the stab wound in her head. And at the time, in 2012, oxycodone was the thing that you got for pain. And it was the opioid epidemic, and it was definitely killing people, and it was definitely way more addictive than we knew. But it's not weird at all that she had that in her house, because a lot of people had that in their house. There was an opioid epidemic in every state in the country.

Yeah. And it didn't matter what economic background you had or what your profession was or any of that. It was really common and, like you said, made widely available to people, and a lot of families have suffered because of it. They've lost people to overdose or are dealing with their addiction or them turning to more hard street drugs. So it was the reason why I was hesitant to really go into it in

the episode was because in spite of all that, there's still like a stigma. And I didn't want to attach that stigma to Tammy. And even though it was alleged that like David was maybe using drugs, like his friend said he was, or friend slash neighbor said that he was using drugs because he is dead and he has a family. I didn't necessarily feel the need to like pile that on or attach that stigma to him, but it really shouldn't even be anything that's stigmatizing, right? So it just was, I hesitated to bring it up, but it felt like it was important part of the story when you were reminding me that if he was using drugs, it could have made him to be more violent or more volatile at the time. Right.

And if he was taking her drugs, taking her Oxy, that stuff was really addictive. And it's possible that he got addicted and then he just took her Oxy and wouldn't give him to her and she needed him for her pain. Yeah. He was abusing her via denying her the medication. Yeah, withholding medication. That was a really important thing that you pointed out that could have been true. Yeah, that's a thing.

It's a theory. It's just a theory, yeah. It's a theory, but it sort of fits the fact. And, yeah. And then the last case, we were joking around about El elko but that's the only case that really went to trial so tammy took a plea and got four years katherine took a plea was would have had served maybe five six years but she got a suspended sentence and basically just got probation for four years um and then uh britney i don't know if there was a plea on the table and she denied it.

I don't know that. But her case actually went to trial, lasted two weeks. Good on her lawyer because they brought home a verdict of not guilty because of her self-defense. Yeah. It makes me wonder if Tammy could have gotten, if she had gone to trial, she could have gotten a not guilty. I wonder that too. And I don't know if she took that plea because she was concerned about some of the things that might have come out during trial or if she just wanted it to be over with and move past it. Yeah.

And I, obviously, I don't, I don't know, but we can't ignore the fact that Tammy is Latina. Catherine and Brittany are white, and there is systemic racism. There is, there just is in our justice system and a lot of our systems. So I don't know if she was treated differently as a defendant, either because they suspected her of drug use or because of her race or her economic background the neighborhood she lived in in henderson i don't know but i still i still cringe at that inequality that she was suffered because like you said she had the strongest strongest evidence that she was being beaten on a regular basis including a stab wound in her head and she ended up serving four

years for fighting back yeah Yeah, it's horrible. All right. Anything else you wanted to cover? No, I think that was it. Which one did we research the most? I would say that we were equal in Tammy and Catherine time. Yeah. We really dug into the court documents for those, too. Yeah. We didn't get any court documents for those too. We didn't get any

court documents for the one in Elko. No, but the Elko papers, the reporters had done a really wonderful job giving a lot of detail about what was going on. Like you said, I think they had two murders the year prior. And so it was kind of big news. There was a lot of drama and courtroom drama around it. So I think it was covered really well and extensively by the Elko Press because, I mean, it's a small town of 20,000 people

and it was probably on everyone's minds. Everyone was chatting about it. They probably were really interested. Where in Las Vegas, what are we pacing at? three or four murders a week yeah it was probably huge news there yes i think that was a great yeah i think it was they worked well together yeah a great thing and i'm really hopeful to bring that um that interview yeah in a couple weeks

um okay i guess we can wrap it up do you want to say the thing you want to say the thing thank you for listening and thank you as always for supporting the podcast we really appreciate it and we remind you what happens here happens everywhere even elko even elko The Thank you. you Thank you. Thanks for listening. Visit SinsPod.co slash subscribe for exclusive bonus content and to listen ad-free. Remember to like and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Threads at Sins and Survivors. If you're enjoying the podcast, please leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice. You can contact us at questions at sinsandsurvivors.com.

If you or someone you know is affected by domestic violence or needs support, please reach out to local resources or the National Domestic Violence Hotline. A list of resources is available on our website, sinsandsurvivors.com. Sins and Survivors, a Las Vegas true crime podcast, is research written and produced by your hosts, Sean and John. The information shared in this podcast is accurate at the time of recording. If you have questions, concerns, or corrections, please email us. Links to source material for this episode can be found on our website, sinsandsurvivors.com. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast creators, hosts, and their guests. All individuals are innocent until proven guilty.

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