Small Town Murder - Savage Murder & Strange Milkshakes - Arab, Alabama

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

This week, in Arab, Alabama, when a woman is brutally murdered, stabbed almost 50 times, the case seems like a pretty easy one to solve. There is even DNA evidence, that points right to the suspect that police were looking at as the killer. He's arrested, and that strong evidence makes for an easy conviction. But that's only the start of this mess. Could he actually be innocent? Could his DNA have been planted? It sounds far fetched, until you hear about one person's desire for a certain horrifying milkshake, and habit of collecting bodily fluids, among other things!!   Along the way, we find out that you can't have a festival, based a round a certain food, and not serve that food, that if someone collects your nail clippings, you should run away from that person, and that milkshakes & facial cream is NOT made with the same ingredients by everybody!!   New episodes, every Wednesday & Friday nights!! Check us out on VIDEO Wednesday and Friday evenings on Netflix! www.netflix.com/smalltownmurder Go to shutupandgivememurder.com for all things Small Town Murder, Crime In Sports & Your Stupid Opinions!   Follow us on... instagram.com/smalltownmurder facebook.com/smalltownpod   Also, check out James & Jimmie's other shows, Crime In Sports & Your Stupid Opinions on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts!!

This week, in ARAB, Alabama, a twisted tale emerges when a woman is found horribly murdered in her own bed. The case seems open and shut with DNA evidence and all, but that's before we find out about an affair and one woman's cravings for the strangest milkshakes you've ever heard of. Welcome to Smalltown Murder. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder. Yay! Yay, indeed, Jimmy. Yay, indeed. My name is James Petro Gallo.

I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wiseman. Thank you, folks, so much for joining us again this week on Small Town Murder for one of the weirdest, craziest stories you've ever heard in your life. I can assure you that. This is, even by Small Town Murder standards, this is a weird one. Great. It's a twisted, weird, crazy story. We cannot wait to get to it.

Before we do, though, head over to shut up and give me murder.com tickets for live shows. Next live shows upcoming. We have October 3rd in Dallas, Texas. Get your tickets right now. And hurry up. Hurry up. Yeah, get those. Let's go.

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Then new ones every other week, one crime in sports, one small town murder. It's there. This week what we're going to do for crime in sports. We're going to talk about the murder of a baseball player's family. Oh. So there's nothing to do with sports whatsoever. We won't even go over a stat, I don't think, other than stab wounds or gunshot wounds or things like that. Central America?

No, no, no, no, no. This happened in America. The murderer was insane. And the way they caught him was the craziest thing. It's a wild story. And then for small town murder, pretty sure we're going to do this. It might change. We'll find out.

But I think we're going to do the trick-or-treat murder from 1957 back in California, which is a, it's coming to October here. We're in the fall. So Halloween time, it's a crazy story about. Is that the whole reason we check candy, that one? No, no, no. That's in Texas. We'll do that for a regular episode, the Candyman down there in Texas. Either way, patreon.com slash crime in sports is where you get at that.

and everything we put out with that. You have that subscription. All of our shows, you get ad-free as well. Right. And in addition to that, you also get a shout-out at the end of the show. So you can't beat it. It's a deal, everybody. Patreon.com slash crime in sports is where that is.

Disclaimer time is a comedy show, people. Everybody out there, we're comedians. We are. This is a comedy show. Obviously, there's terrible murder. You heard the opening of the show. There's a lot of terrible murder. And there's also jokes.

And you go, well, how does that work? really easily. That's the thing. It's super easy. All you have to do, this is the formula we've found. All we have to do is we never make fun of the victims or the victims families. Why is that, James? Because we're assholes, but we're not scumbags. There you have it. Pretty simple. It's honestly pretty easy. There's plenty of other things to make fun of. We make fun of murders. Let's say some small town police force screws up. Wink, wink, hint, that's going to happen here. And bad stuff happens from that. Those are people that deserve to be made fun of. than that, you know, maybe a small town

because who cares? We're all from a small town. Sure. We should all make fun of ourselves. It's a good time. So if that sounds good to you, holy shit, do we have a good show for you? If you think true crime and comedy should never, ever, ever go together, I don't know, maybe. Listen to this first because it's crazy. Check it out.

And either way, no complaining later. That said, I think it's time to sit back, everybody. Say, clear the lungs here. Clear the lungs. And let's all shout. Shut up and give me murder. Let's do this, everybody. Okay.

You ready? Yeah. Let's do it. Let's go on a trip, shall we? Where are we going? Going to Alabama this week. Yeah. Alabama, here we go.

I just played trivia the other night at a bar, and I got an answer right because of you. And it was Alabama. It was a show. Whereas the guy, the call. clearly has never seen my cousin Vinny because he was like, well, the actor Joe Pesky. He kept, he read this question, 17 fucking times calling him Joe Pesky. I was like, if he was here, he would beat the shit out of your knees for that. Good Lord, he would bite your ankle something fierce.

This is A-R-A-R-A-B, Arab Alabama. Yeah, yeah. It is spelled A-R-A-B, Arab-A-Labama, but they insist that it is pronounced A-Rab down there because that is how they say Arab down there. So they've decided, let's not only insult a people, let's insult our own town. Let's make, it's wild.

Which I, hey, if you're going to do it, spread it to yourself too, that's fine, I guess, I don't know. And if there's a state in this, in this union that would do that, I would pick that one to do it. That's probably the one there. It's in northern Alabama, about an hour 15 to Birmingham.

It's about three hours over to the east to Atlanta, and about an hour to our last Alabama episode, Gadsden, Alabama, which was episode 680, brutal idiocy, which it really was, too. There were some dumb things going on there. Dead person on a trailer, bad stuff. Let's see, this is in two different counties. It's in Marshall and Coleman counties.

Just happens to be on the line. Area codes 256 and 938. Motto here, we're just like that town in my cousin Vinnie. Right. I don't think that's the motto, but that's the one I gave it. I don't even what the town name was. I don't either, to be honest with you. I've only seen the movie.

Did they say it? I only seen the movie about 175 times. I think they do. Yeah, I remember the sack of Suds was the place they robbed. You're in Allah fucking Bama. You come from New York. They emphasized that part, but they don't talk about what town is. So a little bit of history.

What is now the town of Arab was established by a guy named Stephen Tudel. Thompson in the 1840s, and it was originally known as Thompson's Village. Oh. And they decided that wasn't quite insulting enough. So they needed to... What's really pissing people? Like, is there a way to make this town's name racist? Is that possible?

Because that's what we're going for. The current name of the town was an unintentional misspelling. This town is based on a fucking typo. James, there are so many words that are mispronunciations, misspelling. It's amazing. It's not... It's the opera. Yeah. No, we all, everyone outside of that area knows that.

They mispronounced opera. Yeah. And they run it still. They mispronounce Arab and call it Arab and that's on the sign of their towns. It's the same thing. Yeah. You're shocked about this. What's the misspelling?

Well, that's, I'm getting to here. The United States Postal Service in 1882 here was supposed to be Arrid Thompson, the son of the founder who had applied for a post office that year. Arid was one of three names sent to the posta, A-R-A-D. One of the three names sent. These were the three they sent for consideration. Tell us which one we can use. Arid, Inc. I-N-K.

Yeah. And Bird, Bird, Alabama. They came back and said, yeah, you're all set. Here you go. Arab Alabama, enjoy. They were like, that's not what we wanted. That wasn't even one of the three. Tough shit.

That's what you got. Here's a sign for your post office. So it was incorporated. It was narrated in 1892. Arab is a famously known sundown town as well. Not good. Is it really? Yeah.

They had an actual sign and everything. That's warning black people not to stay after dark. And it's known over the course. I've read a lot of things about this for this episode that even during the day, they weren't really allowed to welcome. It's sunup, sundown. Even the clan was disseminating material in Arab in 2014 and 2011. 15, fully uniformed up. So, I mean, it's there.

Reviews of this town here, unfortunately now that happens all over the place. Well, my stepbrother had those flyers on his door in the 90s. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's for a long time. It's fucking gross. Reviews of this town, you don't see them on doors much around these parts. No. Better not step on my fucking property. Good luck.

Yeah, or, yeah, go to Poughkeepsie with a fucking clan thing and put on somebody's door. You'll be, you'll be dissolved. quickly, I would imagine. So the reviews of this town, here is five stars. ARAB is like Mayberry, nice, quiet town with friendly people. Okay. The schools are great, plenty of small businesses to support, along with the chain businesses as well. So we have those two. We have stores, is what they're telling us here. Yeah. Here's three stars, friendly people, not thing to do, I guess nothing is what they're going for, not thing to do for the teenage, not thing to do do. is what they say, actually, for the teenagers.

Need more to do. You're in the swelling? Yeah. Need more to do. Would like a movie theater or a bowling alley. Now, we had one like last week where they were complaining all they had was a movie theater in a bowling alley, and these people would kill for a movie theater in a bowling alley. But I love it.

Man, the school are okay. At least they are safe and no fighting. Well, that sounds boring for the kids. Here's two stars, no jobs. This town is just about for people over the age of 45 plus and for people who are retired. The only good jobs is found in other cities nearby and you have to drive 45 plus minutes to get there. Family-owned businesses never survive and shut down, along with anything fun like skating rinks or theaters. Favoritism from cops is high in this area.

If they don't know you or somebody in your family, good luck in the courts. Okay. Yeah, my cousin Vinnie territory. We all get it. Yeah, okay. I do like that he said it's for people over 45 and retired. Yeah, who's retired? Wow.

Sign me up for that fucking life. I don't know. How young are you? No, shit. Yeah, all those old people are 45 and retired and it's kicking back. In the twilight of their life. People in this town, 8,462. Oh, wow.

And it's kind of in the whole area around the town and everything. So pretty small. By the way, Spurling's best places, which always has little descriptions of the town, says, ARAB is home to many businesses, including ARAB tire and service, White's auto repair, and... What? Yeah. And the butcher shop. No name.

Really thriving. Thriving. A home atropos. More women than men in this town, barely. 50.2% women. So just over the line there. median age is 40.6, which is just above the national average. So all these retired 46-year-olds out there, and they're not represented here in the median age.

Family here, 52.6 percent married. A lot of people single with children, 23.6 percent are single with children, yeah, which is more than double. It's like two and a half times the normal amount. Keep it together. Race and Arab here, 94.9 percent white. Pretty white. 0.8% black in Alabama. There's a lot of black people in Alabama.

That's interesting stat. 1.2% Asian and was it 1.5% Hispanic. So the religion here, 50-50 is the average for the country. 78.6% here are religious. Holy. And 47.4% of the population are Baptist. God. This is a one, yeah.

It's just, as we, You know, Baptists are the Catholics of the South. They're everywhere. There is not much of anything else. 0.0% a lot of other things here. Unemployment is low, very low, actually. There's apparently jobs to be had. Median household income here also low.

It's about 70 grand in the rest of the country here, 50,321. Wow. Not great. Cost of living overall. Normal is regular in the rest of the country is 100. Here it is 80.5, which is low. health care is the really expensive thing down here. Really?

It's way higher than anything else. Yeah. Median home cost here, $205,900, which is well cheaper than the rest of the country. Still incredibly expensive. We're making no money. Still seems high. Yeah, it seems a little bit high. So maybe we've convinced you that this is the place.

You want to go to the butcher shop. You want to see what they have in there. We have for you. We have for you the Arab, Alabama, real estate. Report. Average two-bedroom rental here, $810. That's cheap. Pretty low, about a third less than the national average there.

Our first house, though, what you get is not wonderful. Three-bedroom, one bath, 1, 270 square feet on a small lot. This place is, from the outside, looks semi-abandoned, has a metal roof, some laminate floors, a kitchen that has been last renovated in 1987. It's not great inside. $115,000 bucks for that. Oh. I don't know if that's worth it.

Our next house is a nice move-in-ready family house here. Three-bedroom, two-bath, 1426 square feet. So kind of your average home. 0.44-acre lot. It's almost a half acre. And it's all grass with woods behind you. You know, a tree line behind you. Not bad.

from the outside. It's got a nice porch. It's a nice walk-up. Real nice. $4.5,000 price cut recently takes it down to $230,000 for that bad boy. And finally, six-bedroom four bath. 5,620 square feet. It's big. Big house. It's got the pillars in the front like a, like a fake plantation house because it was built in 2000. So, you know. Oh, what? It's got a historic. That's probably good, though, because there's not.

There's no ghosts right. No juju there, if we know what we're talking about there. 15.31 acres, a big old lot with a there's a little pond on there. Oh, shit. Real nice. $1,199,000. That's an unbelievable deal. Not in Alabama.

That's not in the middle of nowhere. Location, location, location. Yeah. In any desirable place to live, it would be a great deal, but not in the middle of nowhere in Alabama. I would expect that to be cheaper. Things to do here. here. The pokey, I don't know, and I tried to figure it out.

I don't know if it's poke weed. I think it's poke. Polk Salat festival, S-A-L-A-T. Salat. Salat. Oh, salad. Salat. Salat, which means salad down there, I guess. It celebrates the poke salad dish cooked from wild plants.

And I look these up. They do not look like anything you'd want to eat. It's just some shit that grows in my woods. Like, if you just picked it up and said, I want to eat this now. It's crazy. It's a big plant. A large native herbaceous perennial plant known for its striking reddish purple stems, clusters of white flowers and dark purple berries. The American pokeweed.

Well, anyway, the festival has live music, artisan demonstrations, vendors, a food court, children's games. You know how it goes. All around a salad? All around a salad. Salad. And we have one review from it, too. So we'll find that out. But the main stage, well, let's start with the gazebo stage.

This is the acoustic stage. Oh, we got a, we had two stages. We got two stages, which means that they just, there's no plug-ins here. This stage has no power. It's just a gazebo. Here's the dry stage. We got Ravens Vale playing. Yeah.

Dusty French. Nope. I don't know. And then she sounds like dusty French sounds like a chick that's going to do a striptease, like a bawdy, like 1940 striptease with big giant pasties. He's got a feather. Yeah. Duster.

And then at 3 o'clock, to be announced, which is my favorite band. They don't even have one yet. I wonder if that is the name. No, it's just TBA. It's definitely not. All right. Then the main stage, the Lifegate Baptist Church string band. Jesus.

Evan Spruill, Spruill, S-P-R-U-I-E-L. Change your name. This is from a guy named Petro Gallo. Change your name still. that's not good. Traditions rising will be playing after that. And then finally, my nightmare, Jake and Elwood return a tribute to the Blues Brothers. So not even people who are comedians who think they're singers who can't sing. It's people imitating people who are actors and comedians who can't sing but think they can. It is fascinating. I don't think there's anybody that's

like in between on that. You either are, you love it or you're like, Dan, why are you doing this? I can't get through three minutes of that fucking movie. Can't do it. Can't do it. I'm not watching the movie. Can't do it. Can't watch them perform. I'm like, what are you doing?

You're both good at something. Stop doing this. This isn't what it is that you're good at. I think Belushi was doing it as a gag and I think Akroyd was taking it serious. They seem to both be taking it a little too fucking seriously to me. I don't know. I have one review of this festival from Elizabeth, one star. I am not sure why they called this the politely.

Salad Festival. There was no poke salad to be found. Oh. So there we go. Didn't even get it. There's also a feeling groovy festival, but we won't talk about that. No time. Crime rate in this town. Here we go. Property crime, town of 8,000. Quiet, Mayberry.

Three times, almost three times the national average. Property crime. Almost three times. Oh my God. Violent crime, murder, rape, robbery, and of course, assault, the Mount Rushmore of crime, also high, about one third above the average. This is not. That's crazy for a small town.

That's way out of a way. What's happening? I don't know. I don't know what's going on. Let's find out by talking about some murder, shall we? All right. Let's do this. Let's start out with talking about a guy here. All right.

This is Larry Randall Paget, Padgett with two T's. Randall has one L in it, by the way, which will be the bane of anyone's existence trying to research this goddamn thing because there's times. when the court spells it wrong. It's like, come on, guys, please, please think of future podcasters and help us out here. Spell it right. He goes by Randall, anyway. Randall Padgett here. He's born in Marshall County, Alabama, you know, in this area, kind of over toward the sand mountain and over there. Like I said, name gets spelled a million different ways. Always goes by Randall. That's what everybody calls him. They call him since he was a baby. So he's He grew up on a farm just had brothers and sisters, at least two brothers and a sister that I know of, had, you know, parents were church people. They went to church every Sunday and come back to the farm and, you know, bring the bell and everybody comes and eats them. It sounds like a real traditional, quote, unquote, big air quotes upbringing here. His younger brother Kendall said that he and he and Randall shared a room together.

together while growing up. And Kendall said that he wasn't popular in high school. Kendall wasn't, not Randall wasn't. And he looked to his older brother as a role model. And he said, I saw how good he always was and I became a nurse. I wanted to help people like my brother helped people. He said, I can never help people like he did. But, you know, I wanted to try.

Kendall and Randall. Kendall, Randall, yeah. Now his sister, Carol, Kendall. Randall, Carol. He said that, she said that Randall, quote, stood by us all so many times. So he seems to be kind of the older brother who takes the younger siblings under his wing. He's got the, he's the big brother and he's doing the job. He's doing the big brother job.

Now, Randall ended up going to Jacksonville State University. Alabama? I believe that's in Florida. I think it's Jacksonville State. Well, you never know because colleges have all these different names. Especially in the south. They love Jackson. I mean, you can go to the University of Miami, and it's in Ohio, motherfucker.

So, you know, watch out. So he went to Jacksonville State, came out with a business degree. Wow. And, you know, he's ready to go. And then he moves back to Marshall County where, you know, having a business degree is a lot more than most people have in this area. Yeah, but it's much more useful anywhere else, right? True, true. But he'll use his business.

skills in his own operation coming up soon here. He takes a job at a manufacturing plant that makes electrical switches. Yeah. That's what he does here. He's a big guy. Plus, by the way, going to college. Think about he graduated in probably, he went to college in 1968. Oh, fuck. That is, that means you have two choices. You can go to college or Vietnam. Where would you like to go? So I'm going to college, everybody. Yeah. Yeah. So that's why a lot of people, went to college back then. They always say that's where that's where baseball and football flipped on getting the best athletes and basketball started getting them.

Yeah, because baseball, they draft you out of high school, you go to the minors, you're eligible to be drafted for the military. But if you play football or basketball in college, you're in college, you're not eligible to be drafted. So that's how that's a lot of guys did that to wait out those four years. That was a big deal. Instead of being fed into the buzz saw. Exactly.

You can go to college. So he takes the job making electrical switches. He's a big guy, 6-2, 220, 230 pounds. Okay. Big strapping guy here. He'll end up after this, when he's done with the manufacturing place, he'll end up buying chicken houses. Chicken coops.

Chicken coops. He will be producing chickens for a chicken distributor for someone who comes and gets the chickens. It's a six-house operation. We'll talk about that. He's got a wife. In 1974, he gets married. married. So a couple years out of college. Sure. He marries Catherine

Kavanaugh. Catherine Shears Kavanaugh, to be exact. She is born August 19, 1954, so a few years younger than him, but, you know, in the ballpark. She goes by Kathy, and Kathy is born in Memphis, but I believe the kids,

her and her siblings grew up in Huntsville, from what I understand, Alabama. Her parents are Frank and Heneta. I wanted to write Henrietta. so bad and I'm like, Hanetta just doesn't flow from the fingertips. It's a different name.

You've never heard it before. Never heard Hanetta before in my life. I had to make sure it wasn't a typo. I was like, is this? I found it in two different. Yeah. Later found it in two different newspaper articles from two different newspapers. So I'm like,

I guess that's right. I don't know. It has to be. He's got three brother, or she has three sisters and a brother. And which I think, his family, Randall's family,

I think is three brothers and a sister. But this one is five kids. Her, Kathy, and her three sisters and her brother. Kathy's small and thin.

She's a, you know, a petite young woman here. Now, they do pretty well for themselves, as we'll talk about. By 1990,

they're doing great, financial. But we'll talk about how they get there. By then, they had 32, acres paid off. Fuck.

All paid off. A house that was nearly paid off. They have two kids. They have Micah born in about 1979. And then Heather born in about 1984. Yep. So they're doing the whole thing. They're living it.

Wow. He described it as living the simple life. He said it was a simple life. Had family and a little business that you ran and chickens and all that. The business is doing well and taking care of everything we need. need to take care of. Now, Randall also never arrested, no DUIs, no disorderly conduct down in downtown Arab one day. And, you know, no bad checks or frauds or domestic abuses or anything like that.

Very law-abiding couple and, you know, a couple of kids doing normal things. Really doing it. Okay. Now, when he still worked at the electric plant, making the switches there, this is 1986. And he meets a woman at work named Judy Bagwell. wrestling fans, I know your eyes just popped out of your fucking head. Yes, Judy Bagwell. If you're a wrestling fan, you may remember from the late 1990s when WCW wrestling was absolutely awful, the real late 90s when it was real bad.

Bad, bad, like 98, 99, 2000. One of their storylines was former crime and sports alumni Buff Bagwell was his mom, Judy Bagwell, was on the road with him all the time. The chick that shaved his balls? Yes, exactly. That's Judy Bagwell, yes. She would come out in wrestling and like, you know, yell at people for being mean to him and stuff like that and like walk him to the ring and make sure it was weird as fuck, a real weird storyline. But that's Judy Bagwell. So I was like, I had to make sure they weren't the same person. But they're not. It is not, right? They're not the same person. So she was married to a man named Tommy Smith. So she was technically at that time, Judy, or yeah, Judy Bagwell at the time. Tommy Smith is later. Okay. She had a swimming pool. That's important, by the way.

That a big deal for this area. Not a lot of pools, but she had a pool and that'll come in. It'll count. She's also Randall's neighbor. They live very close to each other within walking distance. No, no, no. But close by, and they also work in the same place at the electrical switch plant. And she lives right on his route home.

He passes her house. She was known amongst her. friends for being obsessive and a bit jealous with her men folk that she'll go out with. Yeah, a little obsessive little jealous. She's not married. At this point, she is married. Yes. And she'll be married again later.

So this is what happened here. Okay. They're at work one day, Randall and Judy Bagwell. Somebody made a joke, apparently, about Judy's pool and how she probably uses it for skinny dipping parties or some bullshit like that. They're working on an assembly line breaking each other's balls. And they're like, yeah, I know what you're doing with your pool and blah, blah, blah. Although not with that accent, I assure you.

Hey, I know what she's doing with a fucking pool. That accent's pretty ugly, too. Don't discount that. They're both pretty bad. So, yeah, hey, you know, Judy with a fucking pool over here, you know. Yeah. So just bullshit. And this is apparently a lot of ball breaking going on on the assembly floor there.

the shop floor. Tons of all that kind of shit going on. It's a ball break and locker room type environment. Yeah. That night, he was driving home late and he saw Judy, this is Randall driving home, sees Judy on the road in her car ahead of him. And she turned into her driveway. Now, he put his headlights on behind her just to spook her as a gag.

She didn't know who had the headlights blaring on her. high beams on like behind her. Then he drove home and thought it was a joke. Okay. The next day at work, though, he finds out that she knew it was him. Oh. She said, quote, did you chicken out last night? He was like.

It's a good joke because he's a chicken man. But right now he's not. He's not. Yeah, nothing to do with chickens at this point. So did you chicken out last night? And that's what he was like. What does that mean? So the next night, same stretch a row.

sees her, sees her in the driveway. This time he pulls in and stops to talk to her. She begins undressing herself, apparently, according to both of them. She just starts getting nude because she said, well, you're here to go skinny dipping. We were talking about it at work. That's the whole joke. But she just starts getting her tits out, which is not a joke anymore. And he said that he thought it was still a joke right up until the

the time he looked down and saw his balls exposed and she's completely naked. So they're both naked. Did she undress him? No, he was undressed too. And then he was like, oh, this isn't a joke. Oh, so he's like, ha ha, let's get undressed. And then they're both new. And I was like, oh, I got to pull these out. Oh, no. What have I done? So what he does is guess. Picks up his clothes and gets back in his truck to go home. Absolutely. It's exactly. Really? Yes. Which is, I know you said That is the opposite. I'm joking. I know you are.

I thought he was going to light him on fire and go fuck her in the pool. That's the point. Instead, he picked him up and went home. He left, got in his truck and went home. Yeah. Covered his balls back up and got the hell out of there. That's a very awkward strip together and then, uh-oh. What is the Zach Alphinakis movie?

And what do you say? I thought we were joking. I'm sorry as you pick your fucking underwear up off the floor. It's so weird. Your balls around, man. So a long weekend goes by. That was on a Friday. They have like a three-day weekend after that.

And he said, this is amazing. The way he put it was, the devil got in his brain all weekend, telling him he should just do it one time. No, you saw tits. Yeah, the devil, he's not in your brain. He's on your right shoulder. He's going, come on.

She wants you so bad. Come on. Look at her. She was naked in her own lives. She saw your balls. They're all uneven and weird. She didn't even care. Come on. Get in there. It was talking to, it was the serpent in your pants that was talking to you.

It was no devil at all. So he decides he's going to go for it one time. He's going to just do it once and get it over with. Yeah, that's definitely an invitation, right? Getting naked in front of, yeah, usually. Yeah, that's definitely an invitation. I've never read a chick get super naked in front of me when we were alone and just and have her just be like, I just wanted to show you my stuff and then put her clothes back.

I usually it means something, you know. Yeah. I'm not good at... Start screaming rape. That's a problem. I'm not an expert at women's signals, but stripping down is usually a pretty good one. It's a good signal. Yeah.

So he does it one time and then this obviously progresses because he's a guy and it's just going to... Way it's going to go. So he does it again and again and again. This goes on for years. Randall. This affair. Randall, Randall, Randall. He said that...

during the whole time he was miserable and through all of it though. He said it's just the lying and the both women and it was a lot, which it seems like awfully exhausting, especially for years. That seems like a lot to do. For one of them, you don't have to lie at all because she's married too.

So it's like, I don't know, lady, what are you going to do? Yeah, no, that's true, but it's still... sucks. She's acting like they're going to have a future together, and he's like, wow, we're not going to have a future together probably.

So he felt, he'll talk about later on, felt like he was leading her on a little bit, and then he felt like he was also screwing his wife over, obviously. So that's not great. Kind of leading both on, because you've got to make a choice. Yeah. Well, yeah, obviously. Yeah, that's bad.

So now, Judy is a little nutty, and we'll talk about that. She does some nutty stuff, like stripped down in front of coworkers. But, okay, this is after the affair started and all that. It's a little bit later on, but I'll put it in the wacky category here. inside her own house this is so fucking weird Randall has two kids right she built a duplicate

of their bedrooms in her house duplicate bedrooms exact exact same furniture exact same lamp exact same dresser exact same wallpaper everything exactly the same built replica

of this man's children's rooms in her own home. How? Of... Everything. Everything. Of his house in her house? Exact replicas of the rooms, of both kids' rooms in her home.

How? How many rooms she got? Jesus. Like a three-bedroom, four-bedroom, whatever. So she had guest rooms. That's what she decided to do with them. This is weird. Then, this is strange.

At Judy's house one time, Randall finds a sealed plastic bag. It was a block bag. Yeah. Inside of it, he finds one of the creepiest combinations of things ever. His own cigarette butts. Okay. And his own fingernail clippings.

How? Why does she have those? He has discarded all this shit, and now she has retrieved it all and put it into a Ziploc bag. That's DNA. How did... This is 1987. Yeah, yeah, but I mean, she's collecting, like, organic. matter of his

why is he clipping his nails at her house? He is getting far too comfortable there. Yeah, he's hanging out there. So he said, what the fuck?

Yeah, what is that? What is this? She told him, well, I love you so much that I wanted to save them. It's stuff. It's part of you. It's cigarette butts and fingernail

clippings. That's creepy. It's my trash. Yeah. So Randall, this is one of the things that Randall thought was weird.

That's actually the most normal thing that a woman does. If you've ever had sex with a woman, you'd know this. Randall thought it was super weird that right after sex, she'd run and go to the bathroom right away. That's the least weird thing she's done. Every woman does that. She's just being hygienic. They go pee right afterwards. That's what they do. Just trying to make sure she doesn't get a yeasty. Yeah. I've never met a woman who doesn't pee after sex. That's just what they do. So, okay. Now, Kathy knows about the affair. knows about it several times over.

It's a small, tiny town, and this is the neighbor that he works with from across the street. That's been going on for years. She knows. Yeah. Now, after the affair became known at work, he was asked to leave his supervisor's job because he was technically her superior at the job. Oh, we can't do that. Even in 1987, in rural Alabama, someone was like, it looks bad, you know what I mean? And so later, that's when he purchased the farm with the six poultry houses.

So technically, this affair kickstarted him into being a businessman, if you want to get technical about it. You bet I am. That's right. Now, you know that Kathy knows about the affair, because even if she didn't know about it before, she certainly found out about it one night in late 1987. Okay. It's a Wednesday night. we're at Kathy's church Okay, this is fucking wild

Kathy comes out of church Gets in her car And has a great surprise When she finds out Judy is hiding in the backseat of her car Why? Not only is she hiding in the back seat of her car She's fucking dressed like Carmen San Diego

She's got a fucking raincoat and sunglasses on Like she's like Like a private investigator From the 50s or something or Terminator or some shit. It's weird. Or a 1990s flasher. Yeah.

Yeah, or a fucking stripe and gremlins when he flashes the bartender. But this is in August at night in Alabama. She's been hiding in a car with a trench coat and sunglasses on, which means she's pouring sweat under there. Her under tits are soaked. Oh, boy. So she pops up and there's a confrontation. And this is how Judy describes it, okay? Wow, an incident at the church.

She said she put on a black wig and sunglasses. And a wig. And a trench coat and got into the backseat of Kathy's car to wait, but just to talk to her. Yeah. You could have stood next to the car in normal clothes and said, hi, Kathy, I'd like to speak with you like a normal human being. In not a disguise, any clothes. It's in normal clothes. You could have just put jeans on and went and stood.

there and said, hey, Kathy, how you doing? And then talked about it. Instead, she said, this is the only way you can talk to a person is to hide in their car. Hide in their car and disguised myself so that it... Well, yeah, they said, why'd you wear the, you know, what's up with the wig? Right. She said she wore the wig and, I mean, obviously, quote, to be discreet. Okay.

You know, to look crazier. It was like a person in a wig instead of a normal person standing there. So nobody else knew we were talking. Well, she said she knew several people who attended that church. and didn't want them to know it was her. Okay. So I don't want to draw attention to myself. So I dress up in a silly costume

and hide in a woman's car, so she'll scream because I want it to be real chill-like. Yeah. Now, she goes on to say here, Judy does, I told myself that was not a good thing to be doing. She said that Kathy screamed when she first saw her, then she recognized her. First, she thought she was being murdered by a stranger.

She had no idea. Just that's one of those, you know, know, things that everybody has. What if someone was hiding in the back seat of my car type of shit? Yeah. The reaction you're going to have to that is every time. Terrified. It's, ah!

Yeah, especially at night. And it's really unexpected, too, because in the church parking lot, I would think you'd feel safe on a Wednesday night in the church parking lot as everybody leaves the church. You know what I mean? That's the most down your guard's ever going to be. Yeah, totally down. So you're going to get in and then this person pops up, Kathy. And you're going to, ah, Jesus Christ.

Then she recognized her. Okay, and then calmed it down for a second. Like, okay, you're not a stranger, but why the fuck are you in my car, Judy? What the fuck? I know who you are, but uh-oh. Yeah. I know who you are. That's bad.

Totally. So Judy says, I told her I was in love with Randall and that he loved me. So this is her play right now to get Randall. She said, I hoped she would do like any other wife and ask Randall to move out. So she thought this was the way to kick her. start, his marriage dissolving. I'll tell the wife, she'll get mad kick him out, and then guess who's fucking him now? Now he's all mine. Then he's mine. Now I have nail clippings and plastic bags to the end of eternity.

Instead, Kathy tells Judy that she loved Randall, and this is the quote from Judy, quote, she told me she loved Randall too and that I could not have him. She said, no, he's my husband. You can't have him. We have two kids. We've been married for 15 fucking years or 11 years or whatever. I'm not giving him to you. Eat shit. And now it's Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson fighting over the same girl.

Same girl. And also the same Beatles catalog as a matter of fact. Yeah. They fought over that too. That's true. How about that? How do you do a song with a guy and then take all his shit? And take all his shit because he told you that's what he was doing was buying back all his stuff. It wasn't like a

he told Michael Jackson, I'm buying back all my shit, blah, blah, blah, this is my plan. And he went, Yeah, it's a good idea, and he did it. He just bought all his shit out from under him. That's pretty fucking. Yeah, and then he looked at his butt hole for a long time, real long time. That's so crazy. He took Paul McCartney's music and other people's face.

It's crazy. That's what allowed Michael Jackson to keep living crazy rich lifestyle until the end was the song catalog. He kept borrowing against it because it kept going up in value. So a church deacon had to be a church deacon had. to break up this little scuffle between the ladies. Yeah, which it's an exciting day for a church deacon. How is service tonight?

Amazing. It's cool. I found Carmen San Diego. That's the good news. It's the important part. She was in ARAB Alabama, which wasn't on the map. I was looking in Richtjavik the whole time and I couldn't, I was wrong. It's ARAB Alabama.

I found a henchman somewhere else, but that was not on her trail. Not even close. So Randall asked her about it afterwards Judy, what the fuck are you doing? Yeah. And she said that she just wanted to talk to her. I'm sorry. I was trying to rectify this.

I want you. Wow. So she said Randall was super angry about this incident. Yeah. And they took a two week break after that because he was so mad at her. No dick for you. And then they resume fucking after two weeks, though. It's a nice two week break.

It's a two week suspension of dick is what that is. So they started going. out and she said that he told her he felt guilty about the relationship, but that he didn't love his wife, quote, like a husband should. That's what he told her. I feel bad, but at the same time, I'm super into you and not as into her as I should be. Now, so, now Randy, Randall let Judy talk him out of this being a serious thing between Kathy and Randall and him and all this.

She was like, it's fine. I just went to talk to her. Everything was fine. and it was fine. But Kathy was telling him, this chick is nuts, dude. She showed up, well, you know, in a costume, it's crazy.

So he's, you know, and he didn't believe her, though. He was like, oh, she's not that bad. Judy's fine. You fucked her crazy, Randall. Yeah, I would say. You fucked her Ziploc bag full of cigarette butts crazy.

So Randall and Kathy, they survived this little thing, but then they separate and go back, separate and go back, separate and go back, more than a few times. They go back and forth together. It's not a violent marriage. There's never any beatings or hittings. It's just they argue and then they separate for a minute and that's that.

You know, no daughters of protection or any crazy shit like that. Nobody ever said that, yeah, I always saw Kathy with a black eye or anything like that. Or I saw Randall with scratches on his face or anything. So that's good anyway. At least they fight like mature adults. So that's good. Yeah. But there is, they do leave and come back a lot.

That happens a lot, which is tough because they have two school-age kids at this point. So that's pretty brutal. But every time he ended up going back to her, Randall always went back to Kathy there. Now, by the summer of 1990, Kathy and Randall are separated but not divorced. Oh. But they are separated living apart. She was living in the family home with both children. he was living in a trailer near the chicken houses.

Oh, boy. That's what divorce is like, everybody. That's a trailer near the chicken houses. You want to bang that broad? Do it in a trailer next to a chicken shack while you smell shit. If you're doing well, you get a trailer next to the chicken house. Yeah. If you don't, you get your mother's couch.

Those are your options. You're not doing that. So keep in mind, if you're not doing well, this isn't it. This is higher than you're going to get. Yeah, this is a man with a successful business here. So, Kathy's working too. She goes to church regularly. She's just living her life, raising her kids.

She's living with the kids doing that. Thursday evening, August 16th, 1990. Kathy was at a revival service. Jesus Christ. She's always a church. Yeah, there's probably healings and every other poor shit thing going on there. Good Lord. that same Thursday night

Randall has both children with him at his trailer. He's got the kids tonight. The younger one is six at the time. She's sleeping in bed with him. And both children, you know, say he was there the entire night with them in the trailer.

Okay. The next day, Friday, August 17th, 1990, Kathy does not show up for work. Oh, no. Which is unlike Kathy. They call her house periodically all day, nobody ever answers.

So they're like, we don't know what the fuck. No call, no show Kathy over here. So Randall, then because no one can get a hold of Kathy, he drops the kids off at his aunt's house to watch them, and he goes to work at the plant because got to work.

Apparently he's working there too or goes to work at the chicken houses. He goes to work somewhere. So that afternoon, this is a crazy weird thing, without telling anyone where he was going, Or even asking his aunt, hey, can you watch the kids for a couple days? He and Judy just take off and go to Florida for the weekend that afternoon. They go to Destin, Florida.

Destin, really? In the panhandle. Yeah. Yikes. So he just takes off midday. Like I said, leaves the kids with his aunt and just leaves. Figures, you know, I guess they'll get dropped off later or something with Kathy. Destin is about six or seven hours away.

They're going to go scuba diving. Doesn't arrange child care. It leaves his kids with his aunt and they're in the car and that's that. Now, that evening at Kathy's house, this is technically in the community of grassy. But it's right outside of Arab and it's not big enough to even talk about. So Arab is the thing here. Randall's cousin, who is the aunt's son or daughter kid, takes the children back to Kathy's house to get a change of clothes.

because they're going to the revival service that night. Another fucking revival. God, damn. Jesus, they need a bowling alley in a movie theater in this town. Bad. Bad. Real bad. It's that much of that.

That's what they do. So Randall's cousin does that. Now, when they get into the house, we're not sure who walks into the bedroom first. Randall or the kids. Or not Randall, Randall's cousin or the kids. We're not sure, but they do find Kathy, and she's in the bedroom, not in good shape. Kathy has been absolutely brutalized. There's blood everywhere.

She's been stabbed 46 times. Fucking, wow. I mean, that is a lot of stabbing. Ooh. A lot of stabbing. And the first thing that the police notice is she's still wearing jewelry. So that's not robbery. So to be that or a terrible robber.

Yeah. Now, they said the body was not in a normal sleeping position. It was laid out across the bed. Her left leg was down and her right leg was propped up on a bedside table. Okay. A bedside that had an alarm clock sitting on it undisturbed. Yeah. So this isn't a natural position.

No. would be, yeah. This is like, almost like somebody threw her on the bed. Or placed her very specifically where they wanted her, one of the two. So there's a leg, like I said, hoisted onto the nightstand, which is weird, and the clock didn't get knocked over. So you can't imagine the struggle went to the nightstand because her leg is on there, but it didn't get knocked over. So it looks like it was placed there. The blood patterning on and around her body was consistent with her body having been moved after bleeding quite a bit.

So someone's posing or something. So, yeah, they think she bled where she fell and then someone arranged her the way they wanted her. Yeah. Okay. Her underwear had been cut off with scissors. Hmm. But neatly, not like a slice and a rip, snipped very neatly off. Like someone wasn't struggling when they did it or something like that.

Yeah. There is no vaginal trauma, okay? but there is semen present inside of her. And that's the other thing. And we'll talk about when they think that arrived in the system here. The lead investigator Strickland, remember his name, because he'll be a jackass for the next two hours or so. He said there was, quote,

a tremendous amount of blood on the body, the woman's night shirt and bed covering when he arrived at the home or on her body and her night shirt and her bed covering when he arrived at the home that night. He said cuts were apparent all over the body, including her hands. There's a lot of defensive wounds here. A lot of defensive wounds. So she was definitely alive. Most of the wounds were defensive out of 46.

This is a long struggle. I mean, you have that many wounds on your hands. This is a fight. It's horrible. there's no forced entry and nothing is stolen from the house. Okay. Which again, strange. When they say 46 wounds, does that include defensive wounds?

Yes, that's just 46. Yeah, totally. Yeah, that includes defensive wounds. 46 times a knife entered. Yeah. Yeah. So semen, like we said, recovered from the vaginal canal. They decide, the pathologist says that she was dead before the semen entered her body.

Oh, what? Yeah. That's, yeah. That's so personal and gross. Somehow that's not even the grossest thing that will happen in this story. Oh, boy. In terms of violence it is, but in terms of other things that are even sort of grosser somehow, this is weird. But that's horrifying.

That's necrophilia, obviously, somebody having a, I don't know if they're super into dead people, that would be necrophilia. But somebody raped a dead body. Godly. After they killed him, I assume. I assume someone didn't come in, kill or leave, and then another person broke in and was like, hey,

I could have time to rape. Look at this. Yeah, hey, it's raping time, everybody. Look at that. I don't even have to murder this time. No. Now, they said,

this is Strickland said that she was sexually assaulted after she was repeatedly stabbed. They said the evidence indicated that she did not move during the act of sexual intercourse. Right. So she was dead.

They find a bloody fingerprint on her body. Awesome. That is game set match, slam fucking dunk. Luckily, though, for whoever did the killing, an investigator destroyed it during the processing. No. Process. Yeah.

No. When you say we make fun of a bumble, this is what we're talking about. They said, here we go, case solved. No, it's not. So when you say that, It wasn't like he picked it up and was like, well, we don't need. It's not her fingerprint. We don't need this.

No, no, no. They collected it. And then he fucked up in the processing process and destroyed it. Or she, I don't know who it was. Some investigator, it doesn't matter. So another thing, there's a hidden house key around. Yeah. So they're like, okay, there's no forced entry.

So is there a hidden? Is there a hide a key? And they found out there is a hide a key. It's the key that children use to let themselves in after school because they're still too young to be trusted with keys. Its location is not general knowledge. It's not like everybody they know knows where the key is. It's only the kids and a couple close people, maybe an aunt that comes over to feed the dog when they go out of town or something. So they Strickland, the investigator, said evidence of the impending divorce was found in the home with the form in the form of a handwritten note stating that the parents would have joint custody of the children.

and that Kathy would be able to keep this house for several years and stay here with the kids. All right. So that night, they called to Florida. Now, he had, Randall had been notified apparently ahead of time in Florida that something had happened to Kathy. And then the police call him too right away. He said he called his brother to find out what happened because the police said they wouldn't give him any information. They just said she's passed away.

Can you please come back here? His brother told him that there was a knife involved. That's what his brother had heard, you know, round the Arab campfire here. So Randall said, I get on the phone and called my brother. And he said there's a knife involved. I must have vomited twice, I think.

Oh. He said he threw up. He and Judy get immediately into the car, snorkel still attached and all. Big flippers. Hard to drive with those flippers. Let me tell you something. Even harder to get in that.

seat with that tank on. That's the tough part. You put it back far enough. It's okay. So they get in start driving north. Judy drives first. Now within about a half hour, she was drifting all over the road

because she'd been up all night, she said. Right. Which he was like, what the fuck were you doing up all night? Why were you up all night? That's stupid. So Randall took over

and drove the rest of the six hours home while she slept in the passenger seat. Just slept it off. So Randall and Judy arrived. back home, Randall drives directly to the ARAB police department, which sounds like a that ARAB police department, them sons of bitch bastards. They question him because he's the husband and he ran away to Florida the next day without telling anybody.

That doesn't look good. How you doing, Randall? We got a lot of questions because everything you did was suspicious. Yeah, and you still smell like salt water. So this isn't good. everything he did suspicious. He and Judy are interviewed separately, as everybody is.

When he asked the last time he had sex with his wife, he said three or four months ago. That was Randall's time. So he could have said, well, we got into it

last night and it was all whatever, but he said no, three, four months ago. So keep that in mind. Don't tell the one in the other room, please. So he then, well, he might have been back with Kathy at that time too. We don't know. Oh, right. Breaking up, making up. Then he voluntarily gives blood samples.

So he gave voluntarily, they asked him, would you give a blood sample? And he said, there you go, no problem. Shoot me up or suck it out or whatever you do. He said that he figured, because they told him, look, we'll get DNA and there's this new thing, DNA, because it's 1990. DNA is your average layperson has never heard of DNA. in 1990 by any stretch. So they're like, we have this thing called DNA. So if we take your blood,

we can eliminate you like that if it's not you. And he said, fucking awesome. Take my blood and clear me and that's great. So Sunday, August 19th, 1990. The murder happened on the 17th. He came home on the 18th.

Now we're on the 19th. Randall invites detectives out to the murder house, his old house. Yeah. Because they ask, will you walk us through the crime scene? you know, and just show us the house, show us if anything's missing.

Just walk us through since you know the house so well. Now, the point is they suspect him, obviously. So 100%, yeah. Their point is they want to film him walking around the house saying something incriminating for 45 minutes. That's essentially what the goal is here. Yeah. So it's a 45 minute tape,

and they asked, there's scuff marks on a door that look like it was kicked open. And they said, are these fresh? Now, he could have said, I've never seen those before. They must be fresh, which mean it would be a fresh break-in. He said, no, they're old. Those have been there for like a year. That's nothing.

So that's an out he could have taken and didn't take it. And also, he, you know, during a second meeting, or they're talking about all that. So he said that. He's been, the crime scene, he doesn't seem like a guilty man when it comes to the crime scene tape. But they said maybe he's just being very, you know, careful. They have a second meeting with him and he said, because they said, well, did you kill your wife? And he said, no, not at all. I was home with my kids.

Ask my kids. They were there, blah, blah, blah. So they said, do you know anybody who may have? Because they always ask that. Either you might put them on to somebody that's the right path or it might be very telling who you blame it on. Sure. Either way. So he says, well, if I were you, I might look at Judy.

She's pretty possessive of me, and she keeps like a bag of my cigarette butts and fingernail clippings and then tells them about the time in the church parking lot where she dressed up in a costume and hidden the back seat of her car. So the cops are like, yeah, that sounds very interesting. We'd really like to talk to her, too. Yeah, she's done some real suspicious things for me. Weird shit. Maybe you guys will like her even better. Yeah. I mean, by the way, if you talk about skinny dipping, get ready to take your balls out because she's going to take you up on it.

So August 29th, 1990, Randall Padgett, both Randall and Judy are given polygraph tests. Yeah. Okay. Judy, by the way, said she was home alone watching television that night. Oh. No one can verify that whatsoever. But her. Yeah, that's a bad place to be.

Not good. Yeah. At least now, like you could at least say, well, my phone didn't move. My phone was home. You know, you can even see digitally what you watched. You can look at that and see if you switched apps. There's ways to tell shit. But back then it was just...

Yes, I'm still watching four times. Yeah. Otherwise, you could say it was Friday night. I was watching fucking full house and family matters. And what are they going to say? You know what I mean? And to corroborate that, they just ask you what was the plot of those shows. And if you nail them, it's over.

It's pretty easy. Well, Uncle Jesse's got a hot date, but Danny has something to do with the kids, and Jesse's got to figure out what's more important. The date are the kids, and Dave Cullier's an annoying twat. That's the plot of the show. Got it? Okay, great. They said, have mercy, and the little girl said, dude.

And on family matters, Erkel comes over and madness ensues. Erkel came over and fucked up a lot. Fooked up a whole bunch of stuff and then asked if it was indeed him. who did that. He was dumbfounded. Completely dumbfounded. So he took, he takes it.

He took that, bam polygraph, he takes the polygraph the head of the Alabama polygrapher's association here and says that he passed. He says you passed.

They tell him he passed his polygraph. Judy's given the same polygraph and examiners conclude that, she showed deception in the areas regarding knowledge of who killed Kathy Padgett. Oh. Which doesn't mean, that could mean that she knows Randall did it and is lying or she knows whatever. So now Randall, the other thing they find out is that Randall is a, you know, shitload of debt, which is not good.

He's in about $207,000 in debt. House is almost paid off, but he's got debt elsewhere. Yeah. And a lot of that has to do with the chicken houses because the, well, the, well, the, The whoever he sells them to, the chicken distributor or whatever, they have very specific things they make the chicken growers do that fit their things. So they told him he had to get some new equipment right now. So he had to like take out a huge loan for all these equipment for tens of thousands of chickens to be able to keep selling his chickens to people. He also owes Kathy's parents money as well, a good amount of money.

Money all over. Yeah. Now, the family here, her family, talk about class. This is a classy group of people. They put an ad out in the Huntsville Times saying, quote, card of thanks. We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to all of our dear friends and neighbors for the outpouring of love and concern shown to us following the tragic death of our beloved daughter and sister, sincerely the family of Kathy Kavanaugh Paget. How classy is that? Yeah.

We don't have time to call everyone who's been so nice to us. We're going to just put an ad in the newspaper. We're going to do a press release about, thank you. That is pretty goddamn classy, I got to say. It's smart, too. That's time-saving shit right there. That's effective. That's it.

Now, here is how DNA works in 1990, by the way, because it's way different than it works now. DNA evidence entered courtrooms in 87. That was when they were first used. Yeah. First DNA. She was killed, obviously, three years. later, 1990. In 1990, it is very different. It's new. It ran through a handful of private labs. It wasn't like every police force had a DNA lab they could work with here. And basically,

they told juries at the time, this is a magic thing. Yeah. This little bit of whatever's there can tell us exactly who was there like it's fucking magic. The jury, believed, and the courts allowed it in, so the juries believed this was basically like having a picture of the person doing it, essentially. Yeah, absolutely. And it's numbers and the numbers don't lie and that's it. That's all. There's no national accreditation requirement for forensic DNA labs at the time. It is a catch as catch can.

Wow. Whatever, yeah, whoever's got equipment, they just do it. So it's a real wild west for DNA. there's no mandatory proficiency testing. There's no any of that shit. If you say, I'm a lab, I can do DNA tests. They'll start sending you samples and you can charge them money. That's just how it is.

So the scientific fights about population frequency statistics that are a lot of the mid-90s with OJ and all that shit here. This was just starting in this time. It wasn't a big deal as far as is it one in this many people of this race or one in that many people, which seems to make a big difference to people. And there was also, they weren't thinking about a comparison sample, basically. Like having both samples, it's always... Yeah, they're just thinking about getting a profile at the moment. Yeah, basically, the blood in the tube, we don't know who it belongs to, but, you know, we have it. And nowadays, they would get another sample to compare them to make sure they're comparing the DNA of the right person.

But they didn't do that back then. Okay. Now, let's talk about secreters and non-secretors, which is pretty gross, okay? Basically, secreters are people who have traces of their blood and their semen, basically. Their blood type comes out and their semen like that. That's terrible. That's roughly 80% of the population. That's amazing.

That's 80% of the population. People are just swallowing blood all the time. Well, it's not blood. It's trace amounts of whatever. I'm, you know, so you eat more shit when you go out to eat, I'm sure, then the blood is in a load of jizz, you know what I mean? Still happening. So that means their ABO blood group antigens show up in their bodily fluids, saliva, semen, and so on. That's secretor.

The other 20% are non-secretors, meaning their blood type doesn't express in those fluids. All right. Fun word. Randall is a non-secreter. He doesn't express. He does not express. So whoever left so was, whoever left. the semen in Kathy. That's also non-secretor semen. So we're down to 20% of the population.

Okay. Now, before DNA was routine, it's a big deal here, basically. That's right away, you're getting it narrowed down to 20% of the population, which is way better than you could do 10 years before that. You know what I mean? Even if you had a blood type, it would be more than that. So. Yeah, and further down. I mean, obviously not further down. It's 20%, but it's like, It's all dudes. It's 20% of dudes on this planet. One of them did this. Someone, yeah, one of those 20% did it.

There's also an enzyme called whoops, phosphogloglucomutase. Phosphoglycumutase. Okay. There's a shortened version of that. Don't worry. We'll get to it. So we'll talk about that later. But that's, keep that in mind.

Then a truck drive. comes forward to say he saw something the day of the murder. He said he had seen a car matching Judy Bagwell's leaving the vicinity of Kathy's house in the middle of the night

the night before she was found murdered. The vehicle was identified by a specific detail. It's a white Ford station wagon with a missing hubcap seen moving fast on the road in the area in the early morning hours. That's how they described.

So the missing hubcap is the thing that they're focusing in on here. It's not exactly, you know, a VIN number, but it's how many white station wagons with a back left missing hubcap are there, you know, yeah. So it's the kind of thing that at least gives homicide detectives something to go on. Yeah, because rarely are you missing a hubcap? And in the event that one falls off, most people just go to AutoZone or Pet Boys or whatever. And just get all four of the cheap plastic ones. Just a shitty one.

Make them on match. You kick them on there. Yeah. So October 5th, 1990, Randall is at his in-laws house. Yeah. His dead wife's parents' house with the kids, about 30 miles from where he's living. Sure. There's a knock on the door.

He comes to the door. And a detective says, you're under arrest for your wife's murder and takes him one. There he are. There he are. He said, well, can I go back inside and tell my children? and he said, the cop said, absolutely not. Can I go back inside and get a shotgun and come out here with it? Can I go back inside my house where all my things are, including all my weapons? Well, my in-laws house, but still, there's stuff in there.

He spends about three days in jail before making bond. It's only a $100,000 bond, so he makes it. He raises it. He goes home and runs his chicken houses because he's got a business to run. I mean, those three days he was in there, those chickens, someone had to take care of him. Now, October 8th, the day he gets out of jail is the same day that the DNA results come back. Okay, here we go. The sample was compared with his sample was compared with samples of semen found at the crime scene.

And a Maryland lab reported that there was a match in the genetic patterns between his blood and the semen that only occurred at a frequency of one in 940,000 people. people, which still is, it sounds like a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, not really that many people. No, what is that? A 30th of the, of the, of the, two Wyoming's, you know what I mean? Like, so, yeah, half a person in Wyoming, you know, so. It thinned the population further down, but it's not, it's not down to one. They said the state tested a blood sample taken from Randall.

it was PGM, that's that thing I couldn't pronounce, type 2-1. The same day, the state also tested a sample from another suspect in the case that we've never been known. We don't know who that is. The same sample, that sample typed as either PGM 1-1 or PGM-1-0. All right. So now there's another suspect, too, which is interesting. and we'd never find out who that is. The sample labeled as Pagets then went on, as our guy here, Randall,

then went on to Cellmark Diagnastics in Maryland. That's the DNA analysis. And they reported that the DNA in the blood matched the DNA in the semen. So they're saying it's Randall Seaman with a one in 940,000 person. You know, that's how it is. So now Judy's blood was never drawn. Her DNA was never tested. we don't know shit about that.

So she wasn't the other suspect. We know that. Yeah. She doesn't have semen, so it doesn't matter. That doesn't matter. Her house was never searched. Her car was never searched. Oh.

They didn't do anything. And she's the one who blew the polygraph. Right. They said that according to the defense, Randall Padgett's own trailer and vehicle weren't searched either. They didn't search his home or vehicle. Ever.

Why? Why? Because what's that going to help them? Nothing stolen. They have his blood. That's the only thing they need to search through at that point. He doesn't have what he needed there anyway. He took it with them and threw it out, I'm sure.

I mean, I'd be looking for a knife. I'd be looking for a murder weapon, maybe some clothes with some blood on them, things like that. If I thought I had a suspect. You know, you never know. How many times do it, we go, well, people will get rid of that shit. How many times have we found that they don't? Oh, my God. So many times to hang on to it.

It's just behind the couch stuff back there or something. and the knife is in their fucking butcher's block again. It's crazy. It's wild. So now they didn't photograph her like to see if she had any wounds on her arms or anything like that, scratches or anything. They didn't photograph her like defensive stuff. Nothing. The other thing is nobody realized that she took two weeks off work after that too, Judy.

Oh. From that, the time they came back from Florida till then, she took two weeks off of work, which could just be. I'm going to be, you know, might they just arrested my boyfriend for murder, so I'm a little flustered right now? Who knows? Can't really think. No. So anyway, he's freed on $100,000 bond. Now, Randall's lawyers, let's find out a bit about them.

They are John Mark McDaniel and William P. Burgess Jr. here. Very experienced criminal defense lawyers with good reputation, strong, you know, competent reputations. And, you know, they're hired. They're not public defenders or anything. So that's to say right away. He's got good lawyers. So they move for a change of venue due to pretrial publicity because this is the biggest thing that's ever happened around here. And they're denied a move.

Oh, we're going to stay here. Denied, yeah. They also retain an independent DNA expert, which is not cheap or easy to find at this time. No. That's difficult. They advise their client, look. This is what you need to do. They offered us a deal.

Take the plea. Take the life in prison. Just take it. They got your DNA. They might as well have a video of you raping your dead wife. Just take the deal. Take life without parole. They'll take the death penalty off the table.

And we can do life without parole. That's the best you're going to get. That's a wild deal. Yeah, it's the best you're going to get, basically. Okay. So, which is what a lot of people do when they're dead to rights on DNA, they'll say, fuck, I got to play. What else are you going to do?

Yeah, rather than go through all the costs and expense of the trial, they'll just say, we'll take the death penalty off the table and that'll be that. So it's interesting. Now, he tells his lawyers, look, investigate Judy Bagwell. I think she had something to do with it. But his lawyers are like, dude, they have your DNA inside of her. Yeah. Unless she figured out a way to shoot sperm out of herself somehow.

It ain't hers. So stop saying you didn't do anything. What are you talking about? about. And also, too, the defense doesn't have, like the state can just spend anything they want. A D.A. They can spend anything. I need this test. I need that test. I want that done for trial. The defense, this is real money coming out of somebody's pocket. Like, it's not just the state's funds. So they're like, look, dude, you know, you can't afford for us to do a whole investigation, run down scientific shit on Judy anyway. It's a waste of time. Yeah. Especially when they have this.

This particular evidence is really fucking tough. overcome. Totally. So June 1991, the trial is delayed here. Prosecutors said in a recent court ruling, that tightening of the rules in the use of DNA samples, which is a key part

of their case, means they need more time to prepare for trial to get their science ready the way they need to present it. So then it's expected to take place October-ish, and then October it's delayed again. It's postponed after a motion by Randall's attorney for a continuance to allow for an independent lab to examine evidence found at the scene of the death.

All right. So here is something that the judge ruled on that the jury didn't hear about. This is a pretrial thing. Some forensic shit here. Before trial, the judge held a hearing outside the presence of the jury on whether to admit DNA population frequency statistics, meaning the numbers. that tell you what the match actually means. Is it one in 50? Is it one in a million?

You know, what are our odds here? So those numbers are excluded. Nowadays, they'd never do that. That's part of how DNA is looked at as how accurate it is. When they say one in 18 billion or 18 trillion, you go, well, you know. That's pretty, that's a lot. That's a lot. Yeah, that's more people than will ever live on the earth.

So probably it's, you know, whatever. Very narrow. But if someone says one in a hundred, you go, well, I'm not sending someone a death row over one and a hundred out of a hundred. That could, there's just a hundred people in this courtroom could be one of us. Even a hundred thousand. Yeah, even that. So they don't hear those numbers.

And the judge said that the reason was that he didn't want to put any odds in front of the jury. Because like I said, this is new. Yeah. So at the time, they think this is the way you go about presenting DNA to a jury as you don't confuse them more with numbers. and odds and all this shit. So the jury was just told the samples matched. Never told at what rate they matched. That's that.

So they'll never hear that. Now, December 1992, the defense has a DNA sample of their own. Oh. Okay. With the trial approaching, they have a result of Randall's blood tested, the p.gm type of 1-1, not 2-1, which is with the other labs. set. They're saying 1-1. So the defense gives the prosecution the test results here. And in normal discovery, they go back and forth. And basically, we'll talk about what happens there.

Now, like we said, Randall's attorneys are still advising him, plead no contest, take the life. Just do it. He's saying, no, no, no, I didn't do this, and I'm not fucking doing it. And then also he said, again, you haven't looked at Judy. She's got replica bedrooms of my kids. She hid in the back seat. She's got a bag of my fingernail clippings and fucking cool butts. This isn't okay. She saves my new ports, man.

This is fucking weird. So nothing ever happened, though. Now, Alabama did not at the time fund indigent capital defense the way most states. do, and they still don't today. So how do they do it? There's some states where it's just absolutely fixed for the state. If you're up in a capital case, you're going to fucking prison. They have literally an open checkbook for a whole state's budget.

You have nothing. They have to approve everything you ask for, a DNA sample of this or that, and they don't give you shit. There was a, yeah, there's a huge thing in Texas because they were doing that for years and people's lawyers were asleep. They didn't even give a fuck. You know which states do it and which states don't. You can name them all off the top of your head, I'm sure, pretty quickly.

Lawyers asleep through the trial? Absolutely, yeah. Oh, my God. They don't care. Once you're convicted, you're convicted, and you're going down. So now he wasn't indigent at the time either. He owned a farm, so he had some income. He mortgaged his farm and eventually had to sell his 32 acres to pay his lawyers.

Oh, fuck. Sold the house, too, that Kathy was killed in, had to sell the, chicken houses, everything, to pay for lawyers. Between him and his family, the legal bills came to about $200,000. That's $200,01990. Oh, God. So we're talking, you know, 600 grand now or something in that range. That's a lot of fucking money, especially for a poultry farmer in rural Alabama.

It's not a lot. So he's not Frank Purdue, this fucking guy here. April 1992 is the trial. This shit is crazy. Okay. Now, he's obviously charged with stabbing his wife during the commission of a rape or attempted rape. Yeah. That's what they're going on.

Now, they're trying to pick a jury, which isn't easy, obviously. The defense is asking that some of the 50 jurors also be questioned separately, not just in a group. like they do sometimes. Like raise your hand if you're this or that. If you have law enforcement in your family or whatever the fuck. So they only had 11 jurors questioned by noon. And so the questioning of small groups of potential jurors began after that. Not enough time to do them one at a time.

Jury selection had to resume the next day. So basically this is just a long process. And this jury is going to be sequestered during the trial, which they think could last for two weeks. So in addition to finding qualified jurors that don't know a lot about the case or haven't formed an opinion on it, you also have to find people who don't, you know, who aren't their primary child care person or we don't have a whole lot going on. Yeah, a trip booked or basically have the next two weeks just off to dick around. So April 7, 1992, the state retests its own sample, by the way. This is right before the trial. This is the one from October 1990.

They sent it to Cellmark. And the result was PGM one to one again, which is the same result the defense got. Remember? Same tube, same laboratory, different answer. Same blood and the same tube got a different answer from the lab. So everyone's very confused now. How would that even happen? I'm not sure.

Now, this PGM, just to tell you about what that is, it's an enzyme found in human blood comes in variants and those variants are inherited, which means they can be typed, which they can include or exclude people from a sample. By 1990, this PGM typing was already old. This was already last year's shit. This was not cutting edge at all. It had been in routine forensic use for years, but it's not as discriminating as DNA. A PM, a PGM type shares with you a large chunk of the population, but it's also

cheaper and that's the one thing. So that's why they do it. They said also your PGM type does not change. No matter what you do, no matter what you eat, no matter how many years go by. It's basically your bloodstream's fingerprint is what they're saying. So that's why they're like, well, how the fuck does the same sample come back as two different things then? If it came through this, hmm, it makes no sense. It has to be the same all the way around.

So, but the DNA, it still matches the DNA. That's just the PGM thing. So now they're wondering, well, is that even Randall's blood that you're testing for the DNA? That's what they're saying at this point because you've got two different test results from the same fucking tube. So April 9, 1992 is the second day of the trial. The state receives their results, but the trial's already underway. The jury's seated. The state's DNA experts are waiting to testify under subpoena.

So they just sit on it, the state. They just sit on this result. because like I said, it doesn't affect the DNA. Whoever's blood is in that tube matches the semen, but is that Randall's blood in that tube? Who the fuck knows? So April 13th, four days later, near the end of the state's case, there's a recess, and the prosecutor tells the defense attorney about the April 7th retest, which is a fucking week ago, which is crazy. By this point, all the DNA experts have already testified,

left town and there's no DNA experts that live in Arab, Alabama. You know what I'm saying? These people all flew in from, you know, civilization to come here. Yeah, from the big city. So they said by that time, the record shows the state's DNA experts had already testified. Therefore, the only witness subject to cross-examination on the ramifications of the different PGM types was the serialologist, which is just the blood person. But they're not an expert in this. So it's a mess. The defense asks for a mistrial at this point. There's also a new DNA study that just came out also that is the problem here.

I'll read you this article. This is, I believe, from like the New York Times or, this is the Huntsville Times, but a reprint of other shit. The murder case against Larry Randall Paget hinges on DNA genetic match between the blood of Paget and the seaman found at the crime scene and the validity. of the evidence appearing in jeopardy on Tuesday. The New York Times reported Tuesday that the National Academy of Science has issued a report that DNA fingerprinting should not be allowed in court until laboratory standards have tightened and a firmer scientific basis of the method established. Okay, so we need to get to a tighter window of people.

And we can't do that at the present usage and application of this. Pretty much. Yeah, the National Academy of Sciences, their report just basically says nothing to do with Randall's case, just says, we're not at the point yet where we should be able to use DNA in court because there is no standards for shit, basically. Anybody could come in and say, I know DNA. He's guilty or she's guilty, and that's that. They set a key link in the state's case for a capital murder charge against Padgett here has been DNA match provided by a Maryland lab. The Times report, which also carried was carried on wire services, said the Academy reported that the technique must be regulated and controlled by sciences and federal agencies that have no stake in the method success. You can't have everything be like prosecutors into this because they want this for their own purposes. We need third parties who don't give a shit. It behooves them much more. Absolutely.

Defense attorneys for Padgett here made a motion for a mistrial. on the basis of the report, which was denied by Circuit Judge Bill Jettin. The trials expected to continue. Later, the DA noted that Victor McKusick of St. John's Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, chairman of the Committee on DNA Technology and Forensic Science for the National Research Council, had responded to the news report earlier in the day. That guy said he was, quote, very upset when he saw a news article on the report earlier that day. He said it seriously misrepresents our findings.

So the guy that did the study says the report actually misrepresents what it is. Okay. Which is why the judge denied the mistrial based on it. He said the impression it gives about our conclusions is misleading. He said the committee had, quote, worked very hard over the past two years to resolve a question that has caused a great deal of controversy in both scientific and legal circles. he said the facts reported in the news article are, quote, basically correct, but what is wrong is how they are put together and interpreted. Interesting. Okay.

Meaning, yeah, the sky is blue, but it doesn't mean that it'll rain tomorrow. That's not what the sky is blue means. You know what that sort of shit. So whether the article stated that DNA evidence should not be allowed in court unless a more scientific basis is established, this guy said, on the contrary, because he said, that's not our conclusion. The article said that was the conclusion, but our conclusion wasn't it shouldn't be used in court. That was just they took our data and said they think it shouldn't be used in court. So he says on the contrary, we confirm the general reliability using DNA typing in forensic science. When performed properly, the technique is capable of providing strong evidence for solving crimes.

While the Times story said the court should stop admitting DNA evidence until lab standards have been tight, and the guy who ran the whole study said that that's not what the report says. He said, our report emphasizes the need for a high level of quality control and collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data. That's all we're talking about. We say that some degree of standardization is needed in lab procedures and that a mandatory accreditation program should be established, which that should be obvious to everybody, I would imagine, right? So this guy went on to say that the group here, the research people, feels that DNA evidence is

a powerful tool for criminal investigation and one that should be used even as standards are strengthened. He said, we do not say that courts should cease to admit this evidence. During this interim period, court should require laboratories to at least demonstrate they are effectively in compliance with the requirements for accreditation. So maybe they're not accredited yet because we don't have that program, but here's we have all our shit lined up. You know what I mean? Yeah, there's no health board coming to look at.

at it, but check it out where we grind our meat is clean, you know? I assure you, this is going to be used in the future when it gets more refined. We're doing great. He said that much of the controversy surrounding the DNA evidence has surrounded population genetics, which is exactly what this case is the problem. Oh, fuck. So, okay, the serialologist is up there. The defense counsel only has a few hours to prepare for this person.

Yeah. With all the science. each other. So this DNA is going to be useless. Useless. So this guy is the only witness. His name is Roger Morris and the state serialologist and the cross-examination on him. This is verbatim what it says. This is the defense counsel said, would a person with a PGM type 1-1, would that same, would that be the same blood as a person with the blood type PGM-21?

and this person said not generally, which is not no, by the way. So the defense counsel said they would be different people, wouldn't they? And the witness said, well, and the defense counsel said different blood, and the witness said, yes, sir. So that's all they could get out of that. Okay. Now, the defense witnesses, they present more than a dozen witnesses

who all testified that they were friends and coworkers of Randall, and that Randall has a great reputation for, quote, truth and peace in the community where he lived and grew up. We've all known him forever, and we all like him forever, and we don't think he did it. Also testifying for the defense was a Coleman County locksmith who said he had gone to the house where Kathy was found, and he said, you didn't really need a key or to break in.

He said that he was able to, the locks were so bad in that house, he was able to enter the house within two seconds with the use of a state driver's license, like a bedroom door with just the knob turns. You know, you can just pop those open in your house. Yeah, especially if you have the striker going the opposite direction. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you could pop those, no fucking problem.

So they said this is anybody could have broken in without the key or forced entry. Yeah. Now a defense expert, they hire their own DNA. expert on cross-examination by the state, that expert had to concede that the DNA in the seaman was consistent with Randall Padgett. Okay. The sample he got and that. Yeah.

So that's not good. That's the defense's own DNA expert, said. Yeah. The Siemens Randalls. Based on being a secretor, but there's no other. Right. Being a non-secreter. Right.

Right. No, the only question is that they were saying with the different bloods. is, is that his blood that they're testing? Now, this guy, he's saying, you know, as far as everything official is going, he was handed Randall's blood. He's not the guy to say it wasn't Randall's blood because he doesn't know.

He just knows the blood you gave me matches the semen. That's it. And if that's Randall's blood, then that's Randall. And that's Randall. Hugely damaging, obviously. It sucks, yeah.

Have your own expert say that, yeah, that's your fucking semen in there. So then there's a station wagon. witness here. Jimmy Gullion, a poultry feed truck driver. He delivers poultry feed, who delivers to farms during the night and early morning. Could you get a worse job? Could you get a worse job? I guess shoveling the chicken shit? That's about the only thing. Yeah. The only way this would be good is if like he hates people and he never has to see one of them if he does this job. That's it. Well, he said he remembered seeing a car speeding on Bridge Road toward Alabama 69.

Route 69. About 2 a.m. the night Kathy was killed in her home on Bridge Road. So saw a car speeding away. He said it was a white station wagon with a missing hubcap, one missing hubcap, and had two people in it who appeared to be men. Uh-oh. He said the driver had bushy black hair, he testified. Uh-huh.

Okay. Now, this driver also said that he knew. Randall, know him, he's a chicken feed guy, we got a chicken farmer, and he said, I didn't see him in the car. He wasn't one of the people I saw in the car. Okay, I saw two, one, not him. Now, keep in mind, two o'clock in the morning, there are no street lights. This is a rural road to do in the morning. So your headlights might have flashed on it for two seconds.

It's really hard to say I definitely saw or didn't see anything in a car. That's completely. So the district attorney challenges this man's testimony saying that he had been, quote, real specific about events that happened seven years ago, but you're not real specific about this shit, but you knew stuff that happened a long time ago. And he also said, the DA said this witness also told him personally several days earlier he didn't know if he had seen the car on the night Kathy was killed or on the night she was found. So they're saying, now you're positive it was the night she was killed and you're positive you didn't see him in the dark at 2 a.m. Whereas when I talked to you, you said, I saw a car, didn't see who was in it, and I'm not sure if it was the right night or not. Which is a big difference. And there's preliminary questioning.

So then it happens. Randall testifies. He's got to. He's got to. He has to be more believable than DNA, essentially, as if he wants to get out of this. So he said, yes, he admitted that he had begun an affair with another woman in 1986 and that it had continued until the time of his wife's death. It's just so good. He said he discussed the affair with his wife several times.

Disgust is a fun way to put that, by the way. I discussed it with her. She yelled a lot. I sat there and nodded. It was a discussion. It wasn't discussed. It was disgust. Disgust, yeah.

So several times, and that. Several months before his wife's death, he suggested they separate because he was confused and he thought he was being unfair to both Judy and Kathy. So he said, let's just separate. So the defense attorney said, okay, that makes sense. Did you murder your wife? He said, no, sir. Yeah. Then here's the best one.

Did you have sex with her corpse? Oh, Jesus. You know what I'm saying? An open court. Lyndon Johnson has the famous political line of someone saying somebody fucked animals on a farm. And he said, they said, well, that guy doesn't even go near farms. He doesn't fuck animals on farms. And he said, I don't give a shit.

Make the bastard deny it. So that's why, that's how you see dirty mudslinging politics is from make the bastard deny it. just say anything you want. And they can, now when they say they didn't do it, now that's all they're going to talk about. So that's why you see that often. This is his own. I don't fuck chickens. His own fucking attorney saying, do you bang that corpse there, buddy?

He said, no, sir. So he admitted, yes, I did lie when I told an aunt that I was going to work at my poultry farm when I left my two kids with her. That's right. I did lie to that. He said that, uh, instead, I, went to Judy's house and banged her and then packed up and went to Florida for scuba diving. They're like none of that. None of this looks good, Randall.

He said the other woman was notified, Judy was notified by her sister that Kathy had been killed while they were in Florida. So that's how he originally found out. And he said he vomited his supper up upon hearing the news. Puked up his supper. He said he immediately returned to Arab, cooperated with police, gave a bloods, sample. He said, I arrived at the police department at 7 a.m. and found no one to talk to the next day. He said, so he went to his parents home. And they said, well, what did you do there? And he said, I went to my parents' house and hug my children and parents. And then he got choked up several

times during testimony. He said that he had taken his two children to counseling for several months after the incident as well. It messed us all up. Now, cross-examination. examination. And you'll never get a district attorney who is more, he could be stone sitting before a buffet and wouldn't be more hungry than to have a murder suspect on the stand. They fucking live to have a murder suspect on the stand. Live for it. Yeah. Yeah. So this DA said he, again, talked to him and Randall said he had taken the two children to visit their maternal grandparents every other week after his wife's death. But he's, again, talked to him. And Randall said he had taken the two children to visit their maternal grandparents every other week after his wife's death. But, but that he stopped after several months. Oh. He said the maternal grandparents who live in Huntsville, quote, took me to court over custody after his arrest. So that's why I stopped taking him.

They said, what kind of woman was Kathy Padgett? And she said, here he said, quote, she was good as gold. And they said, yet you went out to the next door neighbor and had an affair. And he said, yes, sir. Yeah, I did. So he's had to answer some tough questions. Let's just say there. There's things that you don't do to your wife, right?

Yeah, I would say, yeah, for sure. But I mean, that's why you got the mistress, because this shit's crazy over here. I suppose. I mean, maybe his wife is down, too. I don't know, but she seems like she is nuts and down for whatever this Judy. Oh, she'll do anything. Anything.

She was, this is crazy, too. She was never called to the stand by either side. Kathy wasn't? Judy wasn't. Kathy's dead. That's what I meant. Judy. Yeah.

The mistress. Judy was not called by either. She was like this weird, like nuclear weapons sitting in the middle of the floor that nobody wanted to get too near her touch because she could fuck up either side's case, pretty much. So Geneva Convention. Yeah, but they didn't agree to it. They just were both fingers crossed. They don't call Judy and no one called Judy luckily for them. It's weird.

So the reason, this is per the defense, that the state had offered her immunity if she would implicate Randall. If she would say that he told her, you know, that he did it and all that. And she said, well, he never said he would. She would never take the deal. So, I mean, that's nice of her. So the state said, fuck it, because a witness who won't give you what you want under immunity is not a good witness to put in front of the jury. And the defense led her alone, too, because she might have been a hostile. witness and they didn't know. And, you know, he said, I don't want to get up there, argue with her,

and fuck our whole case up, basically. So the result was both sides going, eh, they're going to call her? They arrested. Okay. Never mind. I guess you just got like grateful. I don't know. It could be beneficial to you, but it could also damage you if they get to cross. And they get to cross. One thing lawyers hate is asking questions they don't know the answer to already. Yeah. Yeah. You don't get somebody up there and go, I'm just going to explore and see what happens. That's not what any, especially in a capital case. That's not the time to fuck around like this. He was salivating to ask, did you bang your wife's corpse?

Oh, yeah, did you? Well, no, that was the defense attorney. He had to ask him that just to take that grenade away from the. Oh, to take it away from them. Because they would have put it with some stank on it. You had sex with your wife's course, whereas he was just like, did you have sex with your wife's corpse? No, sir.

That's what I thought. All right, good. Yeah, just checking, though. Because you're a good guy, ain't you? He's a good fella, aren't you? Yeah. So the verdict here, a verdict, it's a jury of 11 women and three men. So it's 12 plus two alternates.

And the way they do it is they don't, in this area, they don't, none of the jurors know who's going to be the final 12 yet. Oh. They pick the final 12 after the trial. Oh. They pick the 12 who are going to deliberate. So all 14 have to pay attention, essentially, because they might be jurors. That's a way to keep the alternates from not paying attention is why they do. do that. So the deliberations come deep into the deliberations here, which is only a couple hours,

the jury sends a question to the judge. That is, quote, does the defendant have to have intent to commit rape while on the way to commit murder or before the murder or can the intent come during the commission of the crime or the commission of the crime of murder or directly after? Which one is a capital murder. What about afterthought? What is meant by that? Or a forethought or whatever. So, what's meant by that? So they're,

these are bad questions for the defense counts. Not good at all. That's like, yeah. Oh my God. They're deciding whether or not to kill me. They're just deciding, yeah. Did he go over there fixing a raper or not? That's that they're trying to decide. Oh, boy. So that's bad. If you're him, you're going, oh, fuck, they definitely think I killed her. This is bad. So it's interesting. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's, It's a very, by the way, apt and sophisticated legal question that they put together.

So that's pretty good. Then they go in. It's three hours of total deliberation, including the question, and they find him guilty of everything. Yeah. Everything. Guilty of everything. Capital murder, intent to rape. Oh, my God.

Death penalty shit here. So now, sentencing won't be for another two months, I believe, a month and a half. So after trial and before sentencing, some crazy shit happens. The defense attorney receives a letter signed by just a man named Phil. That's all they would sign it, claiming to confess to Kathy's murder. Phil? Phil. Phil?

What's you doing all that going, Phil? Phil. When I was putting this together, I was on the couch and I read that and I went, Phil? And I looked up at Sarah and she was like, oh boy, here he goes again with the Beverly Hills cop references. You change, man. It's a very cliche name of a... Phil.

So funny. Phil, is that you? Is that you, Phil? What's you doing? I know that's that you, Phil. You changed, man. So the letter bore a Baton Rouge, Louisiana postmark. It's typewritten and includes numerous crude sexual remarks, which is...

Oh, Jesus. Which is what you want to put in your confession letter. Now, details of the crime are noted in the letter, but most, if not all of the details, were part of the testimony presented during trial. So anybody could have heard these details. The judge refuses to allow it in his evidence and just goes on with the sentencing. They say it's obviously horseshit. It's a hoax. It's a hoax.

This guy did it. May 22nd, 1992 is sentencing. Okay. During the penalty phase here. Several jurors and family members here were weeping openly, okay? Family members are pleading for his life and jurors are openly weeping, which is a bad sign for the prosecutor. The jurors are openly weeping. Neighbors, friends, coworkers, church members that know him all testified that there's no way they could believe that Randall committed this crime.

and that if he did, he had worthwhile enough qualities that would make it better for him to be in prison for the rest of his life than to kill him. Even if he did that, there's still enough good in him that we don't have to kill him. He's redeemable, at least in his soul. At least in prison. Yeah, he'll be fine. So several testified that they didn't believe in the death penalty no matter what. While others said they would accept it under certain circumstances, many said they would have to have seen. seen, physically seen him murdering and raping his wife in order to believe that he was

capable of it. I would have to watch him do it, which I would. And I'd be whacking it too. Let me tell you, I'm into that. That's what's one of the guys said. Super weird. No. That's a real interesting. I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of evidence that can prove that you don't need to see it happen. That's true. Scar yourself with that. Well, just, you don't want to see it, but you're saying I wouldn't believe unless I saw it. If someone said you were raping and killing people, I would say, I don't believe it unless you, you gotta have some

serious, beyond a reasonable doubt, beyond, beyond for me to believe that. You know what I mean? Whereas if I didn't know you, I'd just go, yeah, he's a rapist who kills people. Yeah, sure. So he's a secretor. Leave him alone. Leave him alone. A non-secreter, actually. He's a non-secreter,

so what. Then they bring up his mom, Vera, who's all frail and old, and had not attended the trial, she took the witness stand to say that she was proud to be Randall's mother. She said, quote, he is a fine, fine man. He has always had a good heart, and he has two wonderful children who love him. I beg and plead with you to spare my baby for his babies, just for his kids. So an old lady saying, that's tough, right? The prosecution does not cross-examine

any of the family members, because what are you going to say? Oh, he's a good guy, huh? And then an old lady's going to cry? Is that going to win you points with the jury? So the most emotionally upset of all was his older brother, Thomas. This is Randall's older brother, Thomas, who with a younger brother and a sister, attended every day of the trial. Really? He said, I had to go home Wednesday and tell his two kids that he wouldn't be coming home.

His kids need him. They don't have anybody else. Which, yeah, their mom's dead. He just got convicted of murdering her. So he left the courthouse and went and told the kids just gave him the bad news. Yeah, because they said your dad's either coming home today or he's not, one of the two. So now his younger brother, Kendall, was talking about how he helped him out when he was a kid so much. And he became a nurse because of his brother helping him out.

And that's what a good person he is. And he said, quote, I can never help people like he did. And now I would trade places with him if I could. I love him that much. His sister said about, you know, he stands by us all the time. She also said his kids need to know their father is not going to die right now. Now, much of the time during this testimony, Randall is sobbing, just has his hands, and head in his hands on the table openly sobbing the whole time.

This is happening, yeah. But you don't see very much in defendant. No. out of defendants. My favorite was Corey Richens because she didn't cry one fucking bit when hearing about her husband or about what her kids have been through.

But then her brother got up and said what a great guy or a great woman she was and she just started crying then. Only when it was about her and how wonderful she was. Feels so good when you talk about me like that. Yep. Now the closing arguments,

the district attorney, Thompson and Jolly, these two guys, told the jury during their arguments that it was evident that many good people testified on Randall's behalf. Hey, we can't say shit about those people. They're nice people. But they didn't hear all the evidence that you guys have, the jury. That's the problem.

That's why they're so behind their friend and their relative. You guys know all the evidence. He said, you can't help but feel something for the pageant family. They didn't put Randall Padgett here. He did. He asked, what kind of man, if he's such a great guy, what kind of man would mutilate the body of his children's mother, then allow them to be put in the position to possibly discover the body as they did.

That's a great point. Yeah. Yeah. He said, if you say he does not deserve the death penalty, then no one does. No one ever has or ever will. Which, come on. Ted Bundy and this guy aren't the same. Relax.

Yeah. He didn't go back, cut her head off, and rape it afterwards. That puts some more stank on it to me. They didn't position her in their beds with their teddy bears. Yeah, exactly. So the defense attorney said life without parole would mean that he'll never be back in this county again. You'll never run across. Just not your problem anymore.

Just ship him off. He said, Mr. Padgett has done a terrible, terrible act. But he has done some good. In prison, it's possible that he could maybe help somebody. He's willing to help people. Maybe that's what he can do. Maybe you could train dogs for the police or some shit. Something to help do counseling, you know, other inmate counseling with each other or whatever.

The defense attorney said the character witnesses were speaking from their heart and they were here to say that you can't judge a whole person from one act. That's what they told you and that's what we believe. That's what the defense attorney said. He said, if this was such a horrible act or if he was, if this was such a horrible bad man, I don't think so many people would be speaking on his behalf. if he was that bad. So many decent, obviously decent people. Prosecution comes back again, and they say, look, I don't fault those people for speaking on his behalf. It's his family.

You don't know what people do behind closed doors. He said he has had a lot of rights along the way, and the rights have been protected. I wonder where we would be today if Kathy Padgett had the same rights that night. Would there be 25 people in the front. yard of her home pleading with Randall Paget not to kill her because she was a good person, would Mrs. Kavanaugh, that's Kathy's mom, be out there pleading for the life of her daughter, that opportunity didn't exist for Kathy Paget. So really regardless. Now, the jury comes back with a nine to three judgment. Nine to three in favor of life in prison. That is their recommendation. So nine to

three is their recommendation is then life in prison. Okay, so. Government is about to you, sir. Hold on. Let me get the gavel here. About to put it, just about the judge says, not so fucking fast. Hold on.

One second. He says, no, no, no. The judge describes a woman sleeping in her bed. And this is, he does it like in a creepy way. And a man coming down the hall toward that bedroom with a knife in his hand. And he goes in and begins to stab and stab. And that's not enough for his sick desire. He then has to rape the corpse.

He's a monster. He also said that he has his own reasons for believing Randall killed Kathy. I don't know your own reason. When they're instructing a jury, they don't say take all the evidence, all the statements, and your own reasons and mix them all together. Yeah. Do whatever you think, you know. Whatever you came off with, whatever evidence you have. And he overrides the jury and says, you, sir, may find.

off, death in the electric chair. Oh, my God. Why do we have a jury then, Judge? That's the point. Why bother? Why not just let this guy decide everything if he's the guy who's decided? So that's fucking wild. By the way, you might be going around the country and other places. How the fuck can a judge do that? Because I've seen judges set aside guilty verdicts and say, no, no, they didn't meet the burden, actually.

and we're going to call it not guilty. That's one thing to err on the side of the society. No, of the person who's... Of the American. Yeah, exactly, the person whose rights are we're talking about in the defendant. But to just unilaterally decide on the death penalty yourself when the jury's supposed to do, that's a wild thing that you're allowed to do. Is he allowed to do that?

That feels like an appeal. Oh, yeah. Wow. It's Alabama, babe. This is everything is set up for you to basically. be on a slip and slide to the electric chair here. That's what they have their whole court system set up for. Until 2017, by the way, which is 20 fucking five years later than this case, the judges could override a jury sentencing recommendation in a capital case.

The jury says life, judge says death, it's death, period. That's it. Since 1976, Alabama judges did this 112 times. Dude, that is sick. That's a system set up to kill people. That a jury said no to. Put them to life and prison. That's 91% of those overrides. Of all the overrides, because 112 times was just all the overrides.

Okay, got it. Either way. But 91% of those overrides were a judge saying death when a jury chose life. so they don't do it the other way around. Nine percent of the time. That's crazy. You should be able to flip it to get them all. Everything should be to protect the rights of a person

that might be put to the death penalty. You know what I mean? Everything should be to protect the citizens from getting countersued for wrongful shit and more tax money out the fucking window. Ask Arizona how they felt about paying every one of four. fucking Joe Arpaio's fucking lawsuits because everything he did was illegal.

50 million plus. Hundreds of millions of dollars, taxpayers of Arizona, Jimmy and myself included, paid out over the years for that bullshit. For years and years because he's a twat.

Yep. At the peak of this, roughly one in five people on Alabama death row had been put there by a judge that overruled. Is that right? Overruled the jury.

One in 50? One in five. 20%. That wouldn't mean there's 5,000 people on death row. Yeah, yeah. Florida and Delaware, the only other states that allowed it, ended the practice in 2016. Delaware's an odd ball, one for that, but Florida, I get, yeah.

Alabama kept it going until 2017. It's over. Alabama became the last state in the country to do a lot of things, first of all. Yeah, to graduate high school. Well, especially to abolish is the next word. They don't abolish it unless forced to. To do their ABCs? To abolish judicial override.

And that was in 2017. The bill, though, was not made retroactive. So all the people that got that can eat shit. It's only for the future. That's fucked up. It's fucked up. So that's it. Wow.

Now, the judge does this. That's crazy. Now, the other thing is they test the DNA on the envelope of the confession letter they got. The defense does later. saliva from the envelope on this letter is not a DNA match with the evidence taken from Kathy. So is not him. Well, whoever licked the law envelope or the stamp is not him. Phil, didn't do it.

Phil, no. May 16th, 1993, while Randall is on death row. Here's an ad in the paper in the Huntsville Times. $25,000 reward for information which leads to the release in all capital. letters of Randall Padgett, now held for murder of Kathy Padgett. Okay. And they give the times that happen around 2 a.m. just off Highway 69 in the grassy community near Arab.

So that's what we're talking about here. He's the public, 25 grand, please, anything. Nothing ever comes up. So he's on death row. Yeah. And he's chilling on death row. as much as you can chill on death row. Every day's a anxiety bomb.

I would think. He's at the Holman Correctional Facility. Oh, shit. Outside Atmore, Alabama, near the Florida line. Holman's terrible. 350 miles from home. Now, obviously, the electric chair is the state's method of execution. He said the cell is about five by eight.

The average one. Very fucking small. He has no light of a. his own, only light that comes in from other places. He only gets natural light or from the hallway or whatever. The door, then the doors, you know, they close the door, there's no light,

he's just sitting in there. So he said his first description of sitting there was, quote, I'm all alone on a different planet. This is crazy. Where am I? So he said the first night there was one of the strangest things in his entire life. Around midnight, two men in cells above him

were talking. By his account, he said it sounded like a black man and a white man. We're talking. One of them offered to end the night with a prayer. And Randall said, he said a beautiful, long prayer that was just everything everybody needed to hear. And he laid there in the dark thinking, well, maybe this place isn't as bad as I thought it was going to be.

Maybe at least there's something soothing for the soul here. Then the other man that's the other man suggested they wrap it up with a moment of silence. Then the guy who just said the beautiful prayer asked whether he was making fun of him. You making fun of me? Is that why you said a moment of silence? Because it was too long. Then a racial slur came out.

And next thing you know, they proceeded to curse each other for minutes and one of them threatened to have his mother and cousin killed. He said, so in a five minute time, it went from, hey, let's say a nice prayer together to I will have your mother. killed in five fucking minutes, which is death row, you know. So Randall was lying on his bunk bed and he said, man, people were dying around him. They executed Varnel Weeks in 1995. By the way, he described the death row ritual around someone being killed, someone being executed. He said a trustee goes sell to sell collecting candy and potato chips in a bag so the condemned man could have them on his last night. So you go around, they go around, you donate. This is some stuff I have for him, basically. So your last night, you have a trove of some candy and some, you know, maybe a ding-dong

and some ramen or something. So yeah, it's interesting. Now, Randall thought that was weird, because he's like, what the hell's the guy want to party for? They're going to kill him. What is he, what are they partying about? So he's laying in bed on his bunk there at the Holman Correctional facility, and he's thinking. And he keeps, it just keeps going back. in his head that every time he had sex with Judy, she would immediately get up and go into the bathroom. And he's like, why did she do that? Why did she do that? And then his thoughts went to something else. But as it goes on, he starts to come up with, and a lawyer he talks to after a minute, starts to come up with, did Judy collect his semen and deposit it in the body?

Oh, my God. Is that what happened? because they're like, because he doesn't, we don't think he did it. So is that what the deal is? Is what his attorneys were thinking about? And that's what he was thinking about. And that's why he said,

holy shit, she used to go to the goddamn bathroom all the time. She saved my cigarette butts and my nail clippings. Right. She'll definitely save some jizz. I mean, that's like a fucking. That's crazy, though. That's like Dom Peronian for her.

How much? If a fingernail clipping means a lot to her, think about what a load's going to mean. But how much can you, I guess, I guess all of it come, out, but if you had a condom full of it?

Yeah. It's all you need. Over time, too, if you just keep putting it like, like Peeward-Harmine's ball of tinfoil. Yeah. You know what I mean? If you just keep putting a little bit

into the baggie. You add into it, yeah. A little more big league chew in the mouth than keep getting that gumball bigger. How long does that keep? You got to just keep it from drying out, right? Yeah.

No shit. Ah, Jesus. I don't want to. think about it. Okay. Now, he has appeals here. Now, the PGM, like I said, it was old technology kind of by that point. Your PGM doesn't change.

Here's something that no one ever resolved is what the fuck happened in that tube of blood? How did that blood get to be, how is it different blood, one test from another test from the same tube? How is it different blood? That's what they don't get. Was it mislabeling? Was did somebody messed the numbers up? Was there a dyslexic lab assistant? That's what I mean.

Who put a wrong label on wrong something? Was it degraded or contaminated? Was that it? Was it typed wrong the first time? A clerical error? A whole bunch of shit could have happened. Maybe the sheriff's department. Maybe the lab in Maryland.

Maybe who the fuck knows. But one thing's for sure. That's a mistake because that's impossible. Yeah. Yeah. Your blood doesn't change. So they said, And his lawyers said they don't know.

They said they don't know if it was a blunder, an accident, a deliberate thing. They have no idea. Who knows? So, whom they never know. Now, here's the appeal. First off is a Brady violation, which means that basically they didn't get all the, the defense didn't get all the evidence they should have. That's what that means.

They were withheld evidence from them. So basically, the way they work this out is the state, the test of this has three elements. The state suppressed the evidence. The evidence was favorable to the defense and the evidence was material to the goings-on. Right. They hid shit that you could have used, basically. It's culpatorious fuck. Yeah.

Yeah. The Court of Criminal Appeals found all three factors in that particular case. All three? All three with the blood. All three, Nick said. Because that's from the not telling them right away about the test was different blood. that's what this is from. Okay.

So they're saying, well, they could have probably used that when the DNA experts were on the stand, but they didn't tell you until after the DNA experts were gone. So that's interesting. Now, the state's argument on appeal of that was it was no harm because you got to cross-examine the serialist about it or the serologist. The court was not impressed. It's basically said this. It said that the court already rejected the notion that a defendant who gets through across examination on undisclosed material has suffered no prejudice.

The court said cross-examining the serologist did nothing to allow the appellate to determine what the different PGM types would mean to the DNA experts whose testimony was key in convicting the appellant because they're the ones who said it was his jiz. Oh, right. You know what I mean? So they're the ones that needed to figure that out in front of a jury and they were already gone and didn't get a chance to. The reliability of DNA tests would be dependent upon the integrity of the samples tested.

Therefore, as the appellate contends, the DNA experts were entitled to know about the possibility of a mix-up or a tainted sample before giving their conclusions to the jury. Okay. Now, the judge, one judge said it's hard to imagine scientific evidence more crucial than blood test evidence showing that the blood found at the scene of the crime was not the blood of the defendant, withholding such. withholding such evidence to prevent testing by the opposing party is equivalent to concealment and contrary to the ideal that a court must be a truth-seeking forum. We're not a train station getting ready to railroad people. We're supposed to define the truth and figure out if this is right or not. Now, one thing that's interesting, the judge's phrasing, blood found at the scene of the crime,

is weird because there is no... The only blood is hers, right? Yeah, there is no mystery blood. And a lot of people who have talked about this case have taken that sentence and said, there was mystery blood. But there is not. But there isn't.

So it's not what the record says at all. The whole thing is about the PGM typing of the blood sample contributing to him. That's it. And the separate existence of a second sample type that day. And that's just early DNA, too. right? If they'd test it today, it would be much more specific, right? It's much better now. Yeah, they have much, much more DNA, you know, exact.

Yeah, specific, specificity. There it is. There you go. It's a fun word. It's a good word. I like it. It's a specificity. It's poetic. So it's interesting. So stats that the judge excluded also that they're appealing on. In the appeal, Randall argues that it was error because a bare assertion of a match without any frequency figure is scientifically meaningless. Because remember, the judge didn't allow the one in this many people or the odds. It's his. The criminal court of appeals held that the trial court had discretion to exclude the statistics

and that excluding them was within that discretion. So at the time, I don't think they even knew enough to know what a big deal that was. So it's interesting. So he loses that point completely. So the conviction, though, because of the total Brady violations, is overturned. Oh. They got to retry them if they want to put them away again. Does he come off of death row then?

Off of death row, but to county jail. To regular jail. Right. Put off of death row, which is a plus. That's great. The state applies for a rehearing. The case was assigned to a judge. And this is a rehearing on this appeal, by the way.

The rehearing their side is that Randall already knew about the PGM discrepancy because his own expert testified his blood in February had gotten one to one. So there was no real suppression. Okay. The court, the judge said there's no way that the defense's test on its own sample in February could have made Randall aware of the results of a test the state ran two months later on their sample. Okay. Impossible. So then the judge explained the difference that actually matters here. They said it's one thing to argue that your expert disagrees with their experts.

That's normal. Dueling experts is every case we talk about. And they tune that out. Juries kind of tend to whatever. Yeah, they'll take. They pick what they believe. They pick the one that they feel is legitimate and they discard the other one. It's something else entirely to stand up and say the state's own lab got two different answers out of the same tube.

That's not possible. That's impossible. So that's different. Because from that, the court said a jury could conclude the sample was tainted at the time of the first test or that it belonged to somebody other than him. Which one of those was his? Yeah. Yeah. So the court rule calls the state's four-day delay in telling the defense inexcusable.

And the application for rehearing was overruled. So one thing the court didn't do too, it did not find the evidence insufficient, though. Never said that, said the opposite, actually. Because Randall also argued that the state failed to present enough evidence for any rational jury to convict. And the court rejected that. So you got Brady violations, but there was plenty evidence, asshole. Viewing the evidence in light most favorable to the state, no forced entry, nothing taking, jewelry still on the body, a sex act after the at or after the time of death,

a DNA match, a rational jury could find capital murder in that pretty easily. So because of that, he has to stay in jail. It's not a complete overturning, but he will get a new trial. Okay, good. So he goes back to Marshall County here to be tried again to the county jail. And I'm sure his family was happy to see him. They didn't have to go all the way down there. So retrial shit now.

Okay. This is where shit gets crazy. All right. Because the case was going back to retrial, the court of criminal appeals had to tell the judge what to instruct a jury the second time around. Because it was already overturned. In doing so, this is what they say. Okay. The capital charge was murder committed during rape.

Under Alabama law during means in the course of or in connection with or an immediate flight from an underlying felony. Okay, you know where we're going with this? Yeah, because necrophilia does not count. Rape as charged requires sexual intercourse by forcible compulsion. If to force somebody. The state's own pathologist testified that Kathy was dead before the semen entered her body. That evidence allowed for the sex act occurring to up to 15 minutes after her death. So before rigor sets in.

So the court reasoned if the intent to have intercourse arose only after she was already dead, there could be no forcible compulsion of the victim because there was no victim left to compel. You can't rape the dead? You can't rape the dead. What? And the fuck is that logic? That's the same guy says. that is the guy who says, I'll try, I can't get AIDS twice.

That's the same guy. Yeah. Who says that. It's the same thing. I don't care. Can't get AIDS for syphilis. Yeah. It's that guy. We've all worked with that guy.

Yeah. We all have the good. Every job I've ever been to how you can't get AIDS twice, guy. The, uh, that, that logic is crazy because if she's allowed, she's certainly not going to allow this. Yeah. But she's dead. So if you want to. That tells me if you want to rape someone, make sure to kill them first.

Yeah. That's what that tells people. And do it in Alabama. Take them to Alabama and murder them and rape them. So finding no Alabama authority on the point, the court went looking elsewhere and founded in Pennsylvania and Kentucky. Commonwealth v. Suddler holds that the crime of rape applies only to indignities to the living. And Smith v. Commonwealth holds that intercourse with a dead body. is not rape, but it is prohibited under the abuse of a corpse statute.

It just goes to that. But abuse of the corpse is not the same punishment as what rape is. Exactly. It should be much worse. The rape of a corpse is the, that's the person we least want hanging around anywhere. That would mean that Ed Game would do like eight years in Alabama. Yeah, yeah. Shit, he's just been a normal guy down there, it sounds like.

He didn't kill anybody, right? Well, I guess he may have killed one person, right? Oh, he killed people, yeah, yeah, for sure. He definitely killed that lady. Oh, too. Killed a couple people, yeah. So anyway, about Alabama court of appeals, hell holds a corpse can't be raped. Can't rape the dead.

So in that case, the court said that the offense would be the abuse of a corpse under Alabama code, knowingly treating a human corpse in a way that would outrage ordinary family sensibilities. Oh, boy. Okay. Well, I mean, that could get real. When we're talking about raping them, that's one thing. That could be anything. Ordinary sensibility. Family sensibilities. Right. Go back to the haulers. Those families are fucking each other back there. Yeah, it could be anything, man. You're right. So, okay, the court wrote, the appellant's theory of the case is that, wow, if he did not commit the crime of rape, then he cannot be convicted of capital murder as charged. in the indictment, and he would not be subject to the death penalty. He is, in fact, using the crime of abuse as a corpse as a defense to capital murder, which is super weird.

I raped her after she was, she was long dead on that one. Come on. And the court said, yeah, the court said that's the law. We agree. Yeah, they said, on retrial, if the evidence supports it, Paget is entitled to a jury instruction that abuse of a corpse is a defense to capital murder. He can go up there and say that all day.

He killed her before he raped her, so you can't even say. He's not entitled to an instruction on rape as a lesser included offense because if she was already dead, there's no rape to be a lesser offense of. Wow. So, yeah, that's, so his formal position becomes, I didn't rape my wife, I desecrated her body, and that's not a crime. That's the formal defense. Yeah.

So now he says he did neither, by the way. He's still saying he didn't do anything, but that's his defense's deal, which is just fucking wild. So 1997, there's going to be a new trial. He gets a new defense attorney. His mother, who's at this point 78 years old, mortgages her house to hire him a defense attorney. This poor woman, I feel so bad for people who have to do that. She believes in his innocence, though. Yeah, she absolutely does.

Yeah. So this is Richard Jaffe, J-A-F-F-E. He's a Birmingham retrial counsel. This is his specialty. It's a big deal. He's one of the best-known capital defense attorneys in the state, too. So they put it out there. Now, over his career, he's secured the release of multiple men from death row.

And we're talking in Alabama where everything's against you, including Gary Drinkard. And he has been counsel in some of the highest-present. profile cases in the state, including representing Eric Robert Rudolph. He's one of the scumbag Timothy McVeigh buddies, isn't he? Yeah, he got, he's the Olympic Park Bomber. Oh, was he the Atlanta guy? Yeah, but I think he was one of those guys, too. He's certainly one of those types of guys.

Yeah. He wrote a book called Quest for Justice Defending the Damned, which he has there. He wrote a book and he said his purpose in writing it was to get people to reconsider. or the death penalty, saying it's really, the system is enormously expensive. It produces exonerations at a rate that should terrify everybody, and it does not reliably reserve itself for the worst offenders, which 100% true on all of those fucking things. All those things. Totally.

So this is how he heard of the case. In 1992, when it was going on, he was speaking at a small death penalty rally at a Baptist church, an anti-death penalty rally, which nowadays, I think the Baptist Church have pro-death penalty rallies. I can't imagine. They switch that pretty hard. I can't imagine there's an anti-rally there at all. Back in the day, that's what the church people used to be about.

Yeah. I mean, Jimmy Carter's whole evangelical shit back in the day, all those people, they were all, they were all the big, smiley, nice people, and we shouldn't kill, and we were nice and friends, and Jesus loves everybody. Jesus is just all right with me. I mean, it's all the whole fucking, that's the 70s. Well, yeah. Things got nasty after 9-11.

The church has completely changed. Yeah. Then they wanted to kill everybody. Yeah, yeah. But it used to, everything used to be love and preach or love and peace and fuck the cops. And now it's, now it's turned to this entirely opposite embrace. It's all backlash.

Every cop's the best. Are they? Look at this shit. It's all backlash, though. This, we need to kill them all, was backlash to the Jesus loves everybody. Yeah. Then it became, well, he loves everybody, but everybody's doing crazy shit. And there's crime in the streets.

And there's crime in the streets because they closed all the fucking mental hospitals. They have no programs for anything. Drugs exploded. Crack came about in the 80s. So that's all going that way again. Crime in the street. Yeah. Just a different powder.

Yeah. And less crime in the street is the thing. Yeah. They figured that out a little bit. So anyway, they see. said at this point here, a woman came up to him and asked him whether he'd heard about Randall Paget's case. This woman's name was Brenda Massengill, like the douche.

Nice. He said he'd never heard of it, and he didn't want to get involved. And he didn't want to know about it, basically. Who's that? This lawyer. He said, I've heard of the case. Jeff. And she said, yeah.

She said, well, you get involved. And he said, I have no interest. He already, because she told him who his counsel was. And she said, this guy said, oh, that's very competent lawyers. I'm not going to get involved. He has good lawyers. And he said, I never expected to hear about it again in this case. That was that.

Three years later, after the reversal, Padgett's family called his office, the same guy. And his brothers and his sister came to Birmingham and sat in Jaffe's office for five hours going through the entire transcript of the first trial with him. And he saw it all and said, fuck, all right, I'll take the case. This is crazy. This whole thing's crazy. Now, Brenda Massengill had been a. coworker of Randall and Judes at the electrical switch plant. Okay, they barely knew each other.

They weren't tight. They didn't hang out. No skinny dipping. We had employee numbers that were close. Yeah, and she knew that he was a nice guy, basically. That's all she knew. She believed he was innocent. She said she always had a heart for the underdog, and she believed that God was guiding

her and that she wanted to do for his children and his mother what she would hope somebody would do for her or someone in her family. That's incredibly common. As a kind person. That's what I mean. When you say I was believing in God's guiding her and all that, that's what we want from you people. Yeah, I mean, I've heard stories where I'm like, I don't think that person did it. But then I fucking go about my day.

Then you go about your day. If you knew the person personally, you might be a little different. Maybe. I don't know. You wouldn't do this, but it would still. I might still go about my day. If it was me, you better not go about your fucking day. You know where your bread's buttered assholes.

I'll give me that shit. So we're ready too close. No shit. That's awesome. So anyway, she started writing to him on death row. Yeah. She organized a support group of his friends. Wow.

She helped raise money at yard sales for his defense. She set up a reward hotline. She's the one who put the ad in the paper. Wow. For the $25,000 reward. She wrote to Legal Aid Organization. and the governor. Imagine all of that.

She's selling used power wheels on a Sunday. This lady's working her ass off for you. For you. You know what Randall thought? What? She's a plant from the state. I don't buy it. He thought she was a plant the whole time.

He said the retrial's coming up. He's positive. The state is trying to get a woman to get him talking. That's what this is about. Oh, boy. So he said, a woman, I don't barely know her. Yeah.

Don't know this lady. All of a sudden now she's writing me letters, doing all this work for him. For me, why? Because she's a plant. This is bullshit. Okay. He refused to let her visit. Really?

Wow. His reasoning was that if she came to see him, then she could never testify. If she never came to see him, she can't testify to anything he says, basically. So over the next couple years, people stop writing to Randallie, stop talking to. stop talking to him, but she does it. She stays and keeps going and keeps going. And eventually he decides, I guess I got to trust this lady because she won't stop. You want to give it a shot.

Give it a whirl. Yeah. No semen for this one. No, no. Her family thought she was fucking nuts, obviously. Really? Imagine your mom was doing all of this. You'd be like, mom, stop it.

Stop doing this. Jesus, he's going to get out and murder you. Is that what you want, you fucking idiot? and then rape your corpse, which isn't rape, by the way. So watch out. Mom would be getting a lot of Anna-Fraise dinners. No shit. So her son was a police officer.

Yeah. Again, that's not helping any. No. That's like Love After Lockup. The lady was going out with the inmate and her daughter was a corrections officer. She's like, my daughter's not going to like this. Yeah. She also said her politics and everything, she's very conservative.

So this is very unlike her to be doing this. She said that she, in her opinion, she said, if you did something wrong and a jury convicted you, then you're guilty and you belong there. And her son was lecturing her about it. Not everybody is innocent. You can't save all the puppies, that type of shit. He said, not everybody's in jail for the reason Randall is. Some people might be in his sympathy. He's a fucking murdering corpse abuser.

So then, Jaffe has to decide, do I allow, do I try to get the judge off of this case? because obviously the judge has some stank for my client. Right. He said, I have my own reasons why I think he's guilty, death penalty. So he had to try to figure that out. But he said, if we lose again, this judge sentences my client to death again, obviously. So do I try to recuse him? He read the transcript and said, actually, after reading the whole transcript, he said,

the judge was actually beside that last thing that I disagree with, he was completely fair the whole way. was really a good judge in letting things in and not letting things in and doing a lot of fair things for both sides. So he said, I could get somebody much worse than him. Right. So I'm going to keep him. Super shitty judge. Yeah. So I'm going to keep one that doesn't even pay attention or something.

He said, I'm going to keep him. Then his in-house investigator, Jaffy's in-house investigators, a guy named Rick Blake. Blake does all the leg work and does all of this type of shit looking. Ask the shit the cop should have done the first time. Asking everybody interviewing a million people. Instead, he does it. And this is where the craziest shit in the whole story comes out. Okay.

They looked around and this guy, Blake, said, it's a small town that has a limited number of beauty salons. Judy Bagwell's a woman who lives in this town. She goes to one of these salons. Yeah. For sure. She likes to be hot. She's here.

Women talk to their hairdressers. and hairdressers remember everything, which is true because I know barbers in my family. They'll say anything in front of a barber. It's fucking crazy. And women are worse with their hairdressers. Oh, God, yeah. They look at them as like a fucking psychiatrist

that also can give them a perm and some highlights. It's weird as shit. Oh, my God, and Goodfellas. They were describing murders. In front of the bar. Yeah, yeah. I can't tell you how many times I'm sure my grandfather's cutting somebody's hair

while two guinea guys, two big fat guineas were talking about doing some crime. And he's just like, who cares? None of my business. Eight bucks, please. If she ever did that, Tony'd fucking kill her. I know he would. I know he would.

All right. Take it. So he went around to the salons asking who knew her. He found three separate women who didn't, weren't connected in any way. That didn't hang out or anything, so they didn't like get a story together, all independently. Who all told them the same story. Oh. Okay.

All three said that Judy had talked about. at the time she's married now to a man named Tommy Smith. She told all these women that she likes to save Tommy's semen after sex. She's still, this guy too. She likes to save the seaman. Three women, three different salons. They don't even know each other, these fucking women, okay? No connection between them.

They all have the exact same story that she told. I like to save my husband's semen. Yeah, this is their Pokemon cards. You can't, there's not even a joke that can override what's going. No, no, I know. Yeah, she's collided. I'm just saying, never mind that. Yeah.

No, just focus for once a day. This is too gross to even fucking sidetrack. Okay. She's got a reason, though. Oh, yes. Only one of the three could be brought into court because it's the same telling. So the lady who gets brought into court is known as, quote, the milkshake lady.

Yeah. And that's how she is. Now, let's find out what she fucking says, because it's horrifying. Yeah. Horriff. Just keep in mind, milkshake lady. Okay.

Brings all the, yeah. Okay. Retrial. During the pretrial rulings here, the judge delayed a ruling on whether a motion by defense attorney, um, on whether Randall's alleged girlfriend, meaning Judy,

should be fingerprinted and her prints compared with those found at the murder scene, not the bloody print, but other prints. We don't have it. Because we don't have it. They don't have her fingerprint. The judge also delayed ruling on a defense request for special expenses for an expert witness. The defense attorney told the judge he plans to have a jury survey conducted in the county before deciding if he will ask the trial, that the trial be moved to another county. And they do it here.

Now, the defense case is that Judy. killed Paget, killed Kathy Paget after collecting Randall's semen and then depositing them in the body. That is their case. That's the theory. They said that Judy was so obsessive to the point of building a replica of another woman's children's bedroom inside her own home. That's right. That's weird. She was at a patience.

This man kept coming and going from his wife, separating, going back, coming and going. And she got impatient. She knew where the house key was. Yep. She knew where the hidden key was. She collected biological materials from not only Randall, other partners, cigarette butts, fingernail, clippings, and semen. After sex with Randall, she'd immediately get up and go to the bathroom, which is, like I said, the least suspicious thing. She took two weeks off immediately after the murder, and, according to witnesses, had scratches up and down her arms during that time.

She took two weeks off also. A truck driver reported reported her. her car, a car matching hers, missing Hubcap and all, leaving the area in the middle of the night. She made repeated phone calls to Kathy Padgett, pushing her to give Randall a divorce. She had a hidden, she'd hidden in Kathy's car in disguise. She was also never tested, searched, or treated as a suspect ever. So that's that. So they said a body moved after bleeding, laid across the bed with one leg prop on a nightstand.

next to an undisturbed alarm clock with underwear cut off with scissors and zero vaginal trauma. That's why they were like, they couldn't understand the zero vaginal trauma, even if it was afterwards. But this explains it if someone just put the semen in there and didn't actually do any raping or any sexing or whatever the fuck you want to call it, corpseing. So the state DNA expert here, he testifies that the semen found in the body came from Randall Paget based on DNA. Lock stock. It can't refute it. Irrefute. His jizz.

It is his jiz. Judy takes to stand. Okay. The first time anybody's, she's been the boogie woman this entire trial. The first trial that appeals everything. She's subpoenaed and called. She takes the stand. The state was still dangling immunity if she would implicate him, but she wouldn't.

She didn't take it. So she did it. apparently the prosecutors did not expect the defense to call him or to call her at all because they didn't call her and they were like holy shit they called judy that's crazy everybody was shocked um she's unprepared hostile has immunity she could do anything she wants in here and you don't know what she's going to say so this is really a wild card um so anyway she's on the stand uh she's now judy bagwell Atanasoff. Oh, I don't know what that is. She, Judy said she broke down several times during questioning from Richard Jaffe. She was questioned for more than two hours by defense and prosecution altogether. She said she worked at the Arab Eaton plant for more than 10 years.

She said she moved to Huntsville five years ago and remarried about two years ago. This is from 1997. So she moved out of the area after 92, after everybody thought she was a weird. And then at the Eaton switches, that's what it is. It's Eaton switches. Those are like, those are everywhere. Those are like in every house. That's where they come from. Wow. So she had been married and was a neighbor of Padgett and his wife, Kathy, when they had began an affair in 86, and she gives all of that kind of stuff. Several months before, she and her husband divorced. So she was freshly divorced when the affair started. She just came out of a marriage horny. And he just

happen to be there. So Judy testified that they drove to Destin, Florida, the same day Kathy's body was found were notified via phone call about midnight that she'd been killed. She said that Randall shook his head in disbelief and had little to say on the long drive home, which she slept most of the way too. So she said she hadn't spoken to Randall since the morning they returned to Arab. The morning they went into the police station. It's the last time they spoke to each other. Isn't that amazing? Well, I mean, they didn't arrest him that day, though, either, right?

No, no, no. No, they were still talking to him. And so they never talked after that. That's crazy. No. He said you need to look at her, and then they never got together again. She described the church parking lot incident, where she was trying to be discreet by disguising herself in the least discreet costume possible and hiding in a fucking woman's

goddamn back seat. Dick Flasher's costume. Yeah. She said that Kathy told her she loved Randall and that she loved him too and that I couldn't have him. She said that Randall was angry about that incident, but they continued to see each other after the two-week break. She said that he told her he felt guilty, but he didn't love Kathy like you should. Asked about her ability to get into the Paget House. She said she knew where the hidden key was.

It was the one the kids used when coming home from school. They said, do you know about a hidden key? And she said, do you mean the one the kids use when they come home from school? And then she tried to take it back saying, well, I don't know where it is or anything. I've heard, I've heard tell. I don't know. She said that, wow, she said not hearing from Randall after Kathy's death was painful. She said, I loved him very much.

It took me a very long time to get over him. This is while she's crying. And she added, she still cares about him now. Yeah. Okay. She said she was alone at home. watching television. They said, anybody, anybody verify that. She said, no, just watching Eric. I'll ask for cheese, nothing more.

Looking at some phone bills, she said she made numerous calls over a six to seven month period to a Mormon missionary in Utah. She had met at her home soon after Kathy's death and her own separation from Randall. I don't know if she's trying to join Mormonism or hook up with a missionary. I'm not sure which one. With her, it could be anything. His position's great. Come over. Come on over. She denied that she had ever driven or ridden in an old model white station wagon

that several witnesses said they had seen her in or near driving at the time of the death. She drove that car. She denies she ever had that car. We're like, can't you look at the DMV records and find out what she had registered? Maybe it was registered to somebody else. Maybe it threw them out every year. Maybe back then, might be. be in rural Alabama too.

They might not have computer systems they can afford. Another witness testified he saw the car leaving the area that we know about that one. Then he asked the question here. He asked her, if that is Randall's DNA in Kathy's vaginal canal, how do you think it got there? Which is a interesting question. There's generally only one way. Well, you could object to that call for speculation. She's not a medical witness or a police.

She doesn't know anything about crime scene stuff. Roll the lives. But basically anybody could, I know to object to that as speculation. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? But the prosecutor didn't object. Yeah. How indeed.

Yeah. Well, they probably figured she'd say, the fuck do I know. You know what I mean? That would make sense. It's his semen. He probably had sex with his wife. Yep. But instead, she said, and I quote,

If that was Randall's DNA, it had to have come from me. What the fuck does that mean? How? Boy, do I have a lot more questions? You just put yourself at a crime scene with a dead woman is what you just did. Why did she say that? Why would you say it had to have come from me? Okay.

It's his DNA, then it came from me. I would never say that about your DNA, Jane. No, had to have come from, I must have put it there. Now, the cross on her, the prosecutor can't get up fast enough to cross-examine her. She testified that Randall was very protective of knowledge of their affair getting to his family. Quote, he said his mother would hate him, even though he told his mother about the separation in 1990. He still didn't want to tell her he was having an affair. Wow.

She said she had no reason to kill Kathy or frame Randall by placing semen on the body. Well, then why'd you say it had to come from me? That's crazy. Yeah. So she said, I care about him very much. So Jaffe asked her, the defense asked her and the redirect, if Padgett was, quote, weak about leaving Kathy, and she said he was. They said, did you ever think about Kathy Padgett dying? What do you answer?

You just say, I mean, no. just wanted him to leave his wife. I mean, that's the answer, right? If you're being honest, and you swore on the Bible, and you're a very religious person, you'd probably say,

I don't know, I may have to dreams about it. She said, yes, I used to go to sleep at night praying she would die. I'm not proud of that. That's what she said.

If there's jizz in there, it came from me, and I would pray she died every night. That's a lot. to God about it and asked him pretty please. It's why when you said, and if I'm a religious person and swore in a Bible, I'm like, oh my God, if you're a religious person, you're asking for the wrong favors probably here. She said, please.

Please kill that innocent woman who just wants to have a family with her husband and children. Please strike her from this earth so I can continue to fuck her husband. Please, God. That's what you do, right? Smythe that woman, so I don't have to say jizzing. anymore. God damn it. She said that she had gotten bunk beds like the one that the Padgett's children had had weeks before the murder in anticipation that Padgett would soon divorce his wife and that his children would spend time with them. I didn't even think about that being the reason.

So that the transition into my house is seamless and they won't even think twice. Oh, look, it's my same sheets. Same exact. Shit. Wow. Isn't that crazy? Then he says, this is Jaffe, would you admit it if you killed Kathy Padgett? Uh-huh. And Kathy said, I don't know how you could hide something like that while she cried.

She didn't say no. Or Judy said that. Yeah. She didn't say no. No. I don't know how you could hide that. Well, you're doing a good job. Yeah.

Now comes the grossest shit. Grosser than murder, grosser than rape and jizz planting and anything else we can come up with here. The milkshake lady testifies. But not only did she save her lover's semen after intercourse, she used it as facial cream and mixed it into her protein shakes. Oh my God. Facial cream and protein shakes. She took it out of, she dug it out of herself.

And put it into. A receptacle of some kind of... Squatted over her hand. Yeah. Ziplack bag, I'm thinking. Yeah. Her little mint. Hold those fingers tight.

And then stored it for... Keep it coming. Yeah. You got to build a... How much does it take? Is there a few drops like Vizene? Do you put... Do you need a lot to make it a consistent?

Do you need? Well, you want to cover the whole face. You really want to scrub it in. And then you've got to have enough left for the milkshake. Now, the milkshake, is this just like a flavoring agent? Like if they put like a squirt of something in? Or is this... Is this the main...

Is it a jizz shake? You know, when you make thin set, it's got to be like the consistency of peanut butter. Do you want that in the shake? Do you want to be able, like, a blizzard to tip it over and go, it's done? You go, you get a vanilla shake, but sometimes they're... sprinkle a little like broken up orios on top of it. Is that what it is? Or is it a jizz flavored milkshake and that's the vanilla?

Or do you always every time go, I wish I would have put more in it. Like with the Oreos. Yeah. Like with the old man, I could. No matter how many I put in, it's not enough. I always want more. So that was hideous. That's hideous.

And they bring, they bring her up after Kathy had testified too. So the jury's like, oh, oh. She used it for the crow's feet and for and for her fucking overnight oats. Her protein shake in the morning? Doesn't say. I don't think it's a time of day thing. Just whenever she gets jizz, she puts it in a protein sheet. Whenever she wants a protein check.

Randall's kids both testify. They didn't testify at all in the first trial. He shoots a lot, right? She could have saved multiple loads, too. We're talking about it. So the kids testify, and they testify, that they spent the night, their mother was killed at home with their father in his trailer at the poultry farm, never saw him leave. Couldn't have done it.

Now, they were sleeping because they were small children at the time. They were like 13 and, or shit, 11 and fucking six at the time or something. But the girl was sleeping in bed with him. Right. She might have noticed. In bed. Next one. Randall testifies again.

Has to. He said, you know, he was asked to leave his job as a supervisor. or he has the poultry houses. He said that he never completely agreed to marrying Judy, but, quote, I may have led her to believe that. I never spoke to her again after we came home from Florida. He said he never harmed his wife physically,

but said he was very ashamed about what I did to her emotionally. Asked by Jaffe if he killed her or had a reason to kill her, he said, I was home with my children the night she was killed. Cross on Randall said, let's see, you had $207,000 in debt from the poultry farm. And he said, well, I didn't feel any financial pressure, even though I owed my wife's parents' money for a loan. They made the poultry company and ordered him because the poultry company ordered

him to install new feed bins. They said, you didn't think the other woman could do it in 1990 and in 1992. You've changed your mind about her? and he said after learning a lot of quote a lot of things specifically about her jizz milkshakes. Have you heard of the milkshakes, man? Yeah. And that an old model white station wagon had been seen near his wife's house that night too. He's like, that's what she fucking drove.

They then said, if your seaman is in the body of Kathy Pagent, you don't know how it got there. And he said, that's right. That's the most. the most wild thing anybody's ever said about their own semen that I actually believe. Because the most wild thing you've ever heard about someone else's semen is if it winds up in this person's vagina, it had to have come from me. It's crazy. Because I've got a tube of it. In closings, the defense talks about the positioning of the body.

Jaffe's central argument here is that Randall was a big man. He wouldn't have needed 46 stabs to kill her. If it was Randall, there would have been no struggle. Right. Also, because she wouldn't have struggled because she knows him. He said that all of this. Then he also said, nobody could be raped in the position she was in. You can't rape a person in that position.

Right. It's not a fuckable position is what he basically said. The legs aren't open. The legs are. Yeah. They're up. Well, they're up. But he also said that no one could, that corpse can't be raped anyway.

The rest of the defense case is the pathologist. The state's own pathologist said Kathy was dead before the semen entered her body. The position of the body, it moved after bleeding, laid across the bed, one leg on the nightstand, absence of vaginal trauma, underwear cut off with scissors calmly and apparently with time. As if she was already dead. Yeah. Size differential between Randall and Kathy. Also the missing investigative steps. No test on Judy's blood.

No search of her house. A bloody fingerprint from the victim's body destroyed by an investigator. The PGM problem. that the defense could finally put in front of the jury. All this shit goes to the jury three days of deliberations, days. Really? Randall said not a drop of sleep for three days up the whole time. Yep.

The initial vote they voted was eight to four guilty. That's the initial poll they took. Then the third day, the judge said, fuck this. He called both people in the chambers, both sides, and said, clarimist trial. I don't believe in forcing jurors to give up their beliefs, which is what happens after a few days in a jury room. Someone's going to just give in to other people's shit. The defense attorney tried to talk him out of it. He said, come on. My client cannot do another trial. He literally can't afford it. He's going to be fucked if we do another trial. And, you know, it's crazy.

His family sold everything they own to try to get him out. But the judge said, sorry, that's what I'm doing. As they're coming out of the courtroom, the The chambers. Jaffy was the last one with the judge behind him. He turned around and said, judge, just ask the jurors if they think they can come to a verdict, please. Yeah. Judge ignored him, took the bench, went to the jury, commended them for their fine work, says it's been two and a half days. He said, ladies and gentlemen, after two and a half days, I feel I have no choice to. And then he stopped, looked at Richard Jaffe in the eye, and then turned back to the judge.

jury and said, ladies and gentlemen, is there any one of you who feels that more deliberation would be fruitful? Oh. Two jurors answered yes. Then the judge said, you know what? Go back in the jury room. Fuck it. Go chat.

Go chat it up. Maybe we'll give you another time. So 45 minutes later, they have a verdict. Okay. We got to get through the end here. Not guilty on all counts. How did they do that? that.

And someone's saying, if his jizz was there, it must have been from me is a pretty good way to. I don't know how you got anybody saying guilty after that. That's wild. So not guilty. Yeah. He said it felt like I had been underwater, like I had been held underwater to the point of drowning. And then the not guilty verdict just pulls me up to the air. I can breathe again and I'm going to live.

there is one particular juror who is the main juror here. Yeah. Okay. Walking to his car, the lawyer walking to his car after the trial, he was approached by a woman in her 40s. She was one of the two jurors. The defense had read basically the defense all all has a big thing of the jury on the wall. They fucking cross jurors off who hate them and shit. Like that one is not voting for us.

She hates us. That one, we got a chance with her, whatever. they read her as hostile the whole trial, thought they hated the defense and thought for certain she'd be voting guilty. She asked if she could have a word. So this guy's like, great,

this lady's going to gallop me now. She said she'd been sitting in the jury room listening to 11 other people, most of the men discussing a crime scene photograph, and then she realized something none of them would know and only a woman would know

is you can't have sex in that position. That's what she said. She climbed on top of the table in the jury room to demonstrate, put herself, she put her right leg up, put her left leg down, replicated the exact position compared to the photograph that they had in front of them, and then looked around and said, could any of you fuck me now? No. And it went from eight to four for guilty to 12 nothing for acquittal. Wow. They said you can't. It would have just somebody put the jizz in there.

That's it. So the whole case is flipped on some 40-year-old woman climbing up on a jury room table and going, could you get it, my pussy? Could you? I mean, Rick, somebody could take your dick out? Try. Just try. You can, I dare you.

I'm confident. None of you fucking punks can enter me. So then she said, you tell Randall Padgett to stay away from Judy and go spend time with his kids. Stay away from that psycho. Go spend time. the judge says to Randall, you're free to go? Yeah. He's like, what?

This is crazy. So they walk him back across the street to collect his belongings, which I go, you can keep them. Yeah. I don't want anything I had in there. I don't touch any of those. Yeah. And yeah, apparently the inmates of the jail all beat on the windows as he came out because

they saw he's out. They're like, holy shit, he's not cuffed. Look at that. He's not cuffed. He means he's not guilty. He did it. His son drove him home. His son who was 11 when he was arrested.

drove him home. Yeah, I mean, they saw the milkshake lady, this jury, the replica bedroom, the raincoat, the zip lock bag full of fucking DNA evidence, two weeks off, scratched arms, truck driver, missing station with a missing hubcap station wagon, destroyed fingerprint. Judy never investigated. And they were like, this is not beyond a reasonable doubt. Right. And the fact that she said it must have come from me.

Must have. There's two possibilities here. either, Randall may have done it. We don't know. We don't know. And the, the,

the, the, the, the, the, the, the, clerical error that happened to

help a guilty guy. We don't know. Or there's also, maybe Judy did it. Right. Seems like maybe a, likely scenario at this point, but we don't know.

We can't blame a person for murder or accuse them of anything. We're not doing that. How many shows have we done that, a guy or a woman, cheats on their spouse, and then, and then conspires with that person.

None of them ever without that person go kill the spouse. Not usually not. That would be, this may be the first time it's ever happened. It's fucking great. I'll do it without him knowing about it. And then there's a third possibility that who the fuck knows, basically. Yeah. Well, someone had to have his jizz.

So it's definitely Randall's jizz in there. So someone had to have a seaman. And it happened after death. And it happened after death. No one is ever charged with this after that. They don't even bother trying? They don't even. Well, they didn't investigate Judy in the beginning,

so they'd have no way of all the evidence that would have been against her is gone. All the evidence that would have been against anybody would have been gone because all they did was talk to Randall. They didn't even investigate it. They just focused on him and that was that. So you can't investigate a 1990 murder in 1998. Like it's fresh, you know what I mean?

So the scene's gone. everything's gone. In 2001, the Alabama legislature passed the compensation for wrongful incarceration act. Exoneries are supposed to receive $50,000 for each year wrongly served. That's how this works. He applied in 2003 and they denied him. Really? The statute requires that the charges have been dismissed because he was totally innocent.

Meanwhile, he was found not guilty, which that's not as innocent as the prosecutor dismissing. charges, even though that is the basis of guilt and innocence in our entire judicial system. And you convicted him, therefore, they were dismissed after that. Yep. He was, yep, it was, that's it. So they said it has to be, but it's not. They, whatever. So anyway, they didn't dismiss it.

He was found innocent. He said, not guilty is not innocent according to the state of Alabama. The only way you're not guilty, the only way you're innocent is if the prosecutor says you're innocent, not if the jury says you're innocent, which is. again, like everything else in Alabama, the exact opposite of what we were going for. Like a law, I mean legal shit that happens here. And whatever that pokey salad was or poke salad. That's gross.

And then the act prevents any money from a state settlement going to pay legal fees, which is what you need the fucking money for. So the, it's so stupid. They're stacking the deck. Yeah. But the politicians come out and say, we passed a thing saying there's compensation funds. And people go, oh, see, they're not that bad, even though it's not really helping anybody. We're tough on crime. And in the event that we messed up, we got a compensation fund.

Yeah. Nope. In the 15 years after the act passed, one case resulted in payment. One in 15 years. Tell me there was one wrongful conviction in all of Alabama. You guys fucked up only one time? And it wasn't this guy. No.

It was a guy who did receive it died a year before the claim was settled and the money went to his family. Sons a bitch. He said, I'm not asking for a million dollars. I just like to be put back where I was. That's all Randall says. This is the cost. He lost his home, 32 acres, six chicken houses, any jobs he might have had, 200 grand in legal fees.

Him and his family lost a bunch of shit. Five years in custody. Three and a half of them on death row. Lost his children's, you know, one's 18 now, for Christ's sake. Also, a felony arrest record that doesn't go away when he's found not guilty as well. Is that right? He applied for temp work

with the Census Bureau after his acquittal, aced the test, but they explained, we can't hire you because the FBI says you have a felony arrest record and we aren't allowed to hire felons. So he went back to poultry farming and married Brenda Massengill, the lady who fucking helped him

through prison and all that. He ends up marrying this lady. Oh, wow. Isn't that crazy? From work, the one who helped him. Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah.

Yep, she did all that kind of shit, all the groups and everything like that. In the Paget household, the years in jail are referred to as, quote, when he left or quote, when he was on vacation. So they're like mob guys in prison going, yeah, your father's at college. Don't worry about it. He's being a cowboy in Montana. Don't worry about it. I'll be back in a couple of years. In 2004, he's married to Brenda.

He is carrying 86,000 chickens in a continuous sight. of grow out and catch out. So he's got, he's got 86,000 chickens he raises at a time. Yeah, Brenda said, quote, it is stinky, but it is their life. It smells terrible. Oh, it's the worst thing in the world.

And he sleeps in a trailer next to that. God. Remember Bill Strickland, the investigator? Yeah, he's kind of a dick. He said in 2016, there is no doubt in my mind that we arrested the right man in that case. In my opinion, it was a travesty of justice that he wasn't convicted in the second trial.

And I think most of all law enforcement who are involved in the case feel that way, too. We're all dummies. Wow. By the way, there's a thing here where Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon were reading exonerated stories. There was a play or something like that. Padgett's story was in the interview pool and he was read in early stage readings. Tim Robbins playing him. Old New Lush there playing him.

And I always think of Bull Durham first. And Susan Sarandon, yeah, I like it better. Shawshank bores the fuck out of me. It's almost overrated movie of all time. It's fine, but it's people say it's the great, it's not the godfather. Calm down. It's fine. It's a really great twist and everything.

It's, there's holes in it, too. It's fine. It's a fine movie, but it's not, oh my God, the greatest. It's not that. It's like, it's the in-and-out burger of movies. It's fine. Calm the fuck down. But I think that movie either lended to or he chose that script to be a part of it because Susan Sarandon is real strong with the advocacy work for the wrongly convicted.

And they're not together anymore, so who gives a shit? No, it's been a long time. So the final published play and the 2005 court TV film used six other exoneries. His story wasn't one of them. Yeah, but they had, but he and Brenda went to the premiere and they have framed photographs of the two of them with Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and Danny Glover. Who's just too old for this shit, taking pictures and everything. Danny Glover? Robbins came over and asked, by the way, from what you saw was my portrayal of you fair and are you upset of how I portrayed you when it was going on before the film.

And Padgett said, why should I be mad? And Robbins was like, I just didn't want you to think I overdid the Southern accent at all, which it's rural Alabama. It's really hard to overdo it. It's tough. It's like overdoing a Brooklyn accent. It's really hard to do. It's just going to happen. Overacting on the Alabama?

I don't think so. For years and years and years after his acquittal, maybe still to this day, Randall's still making the payments on his mother's mortgage that she had to take out to pay his lawyer. $527 a month every month. Oh, my God. He returned to Marshall County, moved in with his mother at 47 years old without a pot to piss in. He speaks at colleges, churches, death penalty conferences all over the country. He works as a peer specialist with witness to innocence, an organization founded by the sister Helen Prejean, the lady from the Sean Penn movie that Susan Sarandon played, I think, as a matter of fact. Remember that?

No. Murder in the first, was it, maybe? That must be it. That might be a, I don't know. Bad choice for a date when you're 16. That's what I went. Bad choice. The girl was crying.

I'm getting nothing tonight. This girl's crying. His son became an architect, graduated from Auburn and currently lives in Nashville. His daughter also went to Auburn, and at one point was running the company she worked for. He has three granddaughters now. How? And he said, quote, I always thought that if you went to trial in the United States of America and you told the truth, the truth would come out. I found out that's not the way it works. So there you go. Yeah, it's a crazy thing.

It doesn't seem like he did it. You generally don't, you're generally incapable of living a normal lifestyle like that and then coming out of prison and going right back into it if you're a cold-blooded fucking murderer. Yeah. It seems more likely someone else did it in a particular someone with a milkshake infatuation as a matter of fact. So, Anyway, there you go. There is ARAB, Alabama, and they did not disappoint everybody. That's a wild. Such a gross case.

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Yeah, it's not us, dad. He did it with his throat. Dad. Dad. Sarah Grupe. I think it's Grupe. G-R-U-P-E. That's group A. Robin Baldah. Happy Hour in Checking and Sonora, Texas. I don't even know they had one. Gary Howard in Kankiki, Illinois.

The two of them in terrible places, right? Small town, murder town, I believe. Is it? Yeah. I think it's Kankakee. I think it's Kankakee, yeah. That's what we were yelled at when we said it. Yeah.

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Tiny luchador would be amazing. A tiny luchador in general would be great. Great. It back at moonsault. You could throw it. Oh, that'd be great. Other producers. Liz Vasquez, Peyton Meadows.

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How about it? Sister, perhaps. Jamie Stovall, Sherry Almondi, Tina Wright, L.A. in Chicago. Ryan Gunyon. Vicky with no last name. Julie Claxton. P. Gold, 001. Daniel Go.

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No. Beats the shit out of me, I don't remember. I'm sure it's not. Maybe not. Gina or Jaina Amar. Jaina Amar. Blasphemous with no last name.

That's probably true. Marissa Rite. Tanya Azar. Stacey Tyree. Erica Young, Margaret Farrier, Luna Snow, Tim Rinaldo, Teresa Stanislaw, Megan Meyer, M. would know last name, Corey, Bradley, Molly Fulton, Lynn Conalongo. Okay.

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