Small Town Murder - The Pastor's Dark Secrets - Emporia, Kansas

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

This week, in Emporia, Kansas, relationships spin out of control between two couples, resulting two different brutal murders, committed in totally different ways, by a most unliekly pair of killers. The cast of characters includes a Pastor, an Army Sergeant turned "medical technologist", a math professor, the "lady of the town", a pair of strange brothers that includes a welder/hair dresser, and a whole cast of confused detectives, trying to put this mess together. The whole thing is as horrifying as it is insane!!   Along the way, we find out that Kansas is apparently halfway to everywhere, that some bridges are scary, whether there are ghosts, or not, and that even after you're convicted of killing your wife, you can apparently still be a marriage counselor!!   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 Emporia, Kansas, a twisted tale of multiple vicious murders, affairs, and relationships between good small town church folk, rocks the community and leaves everybody wondering, could this really have happened? Welcome to Small Town 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 so much for joining us. today on another absolutely this is a twisted wild crazy this is a nutty case i've had this on the docket since about 2018 and it's just every time i looked at it i'm like that's too complicated i can't get into all that meanwhile we get into serial killers but for some reason this case i'm like it's just so complicated very daunting this week we're like we're doing it i don't care so we're going to get into this it's crazy stuff before we get into that though head over to shut up and give me murder dot com get your tickets for live

shows. I'm telling you, you want to go to a live show. They are so much fun. It is a comedy show and you get a murder story as a bonus in this hilarious comedy show with all the pictures and everything and you get to see everything involved in the case. You won't be able to believe it. It's a minute you won't be able to believe it. September 18th, Milwaukee, only a few tickets left for that. I don't even know if there's any together at this point. So check it out at the Papps. Next night, though, state theater in Minneapolis, tickets available for that in September 19th, get your tickets. October 3rd, Dallas, October 16th, 17th, San Jose, Sacramento, November 13th, 14th, Terrytown in Boston.

Get your tickets right now. Shut up and give me murder.com. Listen to our other two shows, Crime in Sports, which got some murdery stuff going on there. You don't have to like sports. Just check it out, we promise. And then your stupid opinions, which has just been hilarious. I've loved hearing people's complete, ridiculous opinions on everything. It's amazing.

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Patreon.com slash crime and sports. Do it. Do it now. That said, disclaimer time is a comedy show, people, everybody. It's a comedy show. We are comedians. People are going to die, unfortunately. We don't want them to die, but they're already dead.

So, you know, you can talk about something. So, yeah, there's plenty to talk about here. See, what we do is you go, how to murder and comedy go together. Pretty easy. See, what you do. is we'd never make fun of the victims or the victim's families. Why is that? Because we're assholes.

But? But we're not scumbags. It's pretty simple. Very easy. There's plenty of stuff to make fun of here. You don't have to make fun of some murder victim. You make fun of a murderer. That's fun.

That's easy to do. You do that. Maybe some small town police force lets a murderer go free for years so they can kill again. Let's make fun of that. And we make fun of towns because we're all from somewhere that deserves to be made fun of. Who cares? That's all in good. fun. But that's what you need to get into there. But that's it. That's all you have to worry

about. People get too into it. Don't worry about it. It's just good fun and also murder. So we're going to do it tastefully. That's how you do it there. So that said, I think it's time everybody to sit back. Let me say here. Clear the lungs. Arms to the sky. And let's all shout. Shut up and give me murder. Let's do this. everybody. Okay. Let's go on a trip, shall we? May as well.

Going to Kansas this week. Emporia, Kansas. Yeah. Emporia. Like empire, Emporia. It's like that. Emporia, Kansas.

But emporia. Yeah. Eastern Kansas, this is. About an hour to Topeka, if you want to go there for some reason. About an hour. Is that the capital? Yes.

Kansas, it is. As a matter of fact. About an hour 40 to Kansas. So, yeah, it's not that far. It's in Lyon County. Area Code 620. So there's that history here. Okay.

It's located on an upland prairie, apparently, according to their website. It was founded in 1857. They got its name from, you know where they got Emporia from? From an emporium that was nearby? From ancient, close. Ancient Carthage, which is very close. What? Ancient Carthage, which is.

I'm almost positive in North Africa. I think it's like Tunisia now, if I'm remembering that from reading it 20 years ago. But yeah, it was a place known in history as a prosperous center of commerce. So they were like... Is that where Carthage was? We're doing this. Carthage. Yeah, Carthage is the...

That's where they got it from. Get that. I didn't know geographically where Carthage landed. Yeah, I'm... I don't, like I said, I'm, you know, I'm not an expert on shit like this, but I think like 20 years ago I read it's... North Africa, I believe where Tunisia is now. But I could be completely wrong.

I'm not going to... You were going to say 20 years ago. That's where it was. It was there 20 years ago. So that 1864, Union Pacific Railway came through here and incorporated into all these other railways. And they got land grants to build from Fort Riley to Emporia to build, you know, railroads here. The road eventually reached Emporia in 1869, becoming the first railroad here. here. And then it was pretty boring for about 100 years because it's Kansas. Nothing really happened.

It was pretty boring. Pretty dull. And then on June 8th, 1974, they got some excitement. Not good excitement, but excitement. An F4 tornado struck him for you. Hey, hey, killing six people, injuring 200 and causing $25 million in 1974 Kansas money. Wow. I mean, think about how much corn or weed or whatever the hell had to be lost to have $25 million in damages back then. I guess you don't have to turn the land over this year. Well, it's all turned. It's been turned. The corn's now where the soy was and the soy is where the corn was.

So it's already done. We already switched them. It feels turned, right? It's turned back and forth. In 1988, March 6th, an armed gunman walked into the Cavalry Baptist Church during services and open fire. Oh, my God. 29-year-old guy had no particular target, just decided to shoot some people and killed one and injured four others. I'm so tired of that

That's just ridiculous Yeah Reviews It's I don't know why you'd I don't get it Obviously We're not at our last You know

Notch of our tether here So I know what I mean I don't know That's just such a fucking It's so much easier To just stay home and watch TV That's the problem I just

It's so much easier We found a show where It's just people like Tripping over Animals and shit On their ring doorbell Just watch that. It's so mindless. Who cares? Your brain will, you won't even think about that shit anymore. The new Ted Lassow will make you cry. You'll get into your fields and you don't need to shoot people.

Yeah, Widows Bay is interesting. Severance, very interesting. You'll really get hooked on it. I want so bad. Pluribus, waiting for next season. It's going to be great. Reviews of this town, five stars. Emporia is a great place to live, grow up, and work in. Oh, boy, perfect. Live. Yeah. Live. A diverse community of people, jobs, and food. A large community of agriculture influence, but also urban feel.

No one else has said this. It's nothing urban about this. Many community events to bring everyone together makes for a great living experience. Here's three stars. Okay. Now, bear with me because the words are not in the right order or something here. It feels like someone had a stroke four seconds before they wrote that. So, I always me to further my education to help me succeed in life.

Uh-oh. Got me. There are many things for people to do in this small town, such as bowling, roller skating, college sporting events, and many more. You know, small town stuff. Three children's events and many more. Many more. Here is two stars. I love a weather complaint.

These are my favorite. the weather here is very infrequent. No. Inconistent. Infrequent means sometimes we have no weather. Sometimes I go outside. Remember like on a cartoon when they would show the guy drawing like a, you know, like roadrunners going on it. It's just a blank sheet of paper.

It's all white with like sketches. That's what it looks like apparently. It's very infrequent. Infrequent. Infrequent. What's no leather feel like? I want to know. Suspended in animation.

just float. One day it'll be sunny and in the high 50s and the next day there's a blizzard. You know, weather. Fucking weather. High 50s and then a bl- that's so cold.

Who cares? And then finally one star. Emporia's government is corrupt. And corrupt is capitalized with two exclamation points. So they mean, whoever wrote this review must be,

I don't know what review they're discussing because it's not a response to another review. they are responding to a review that happened and we don't know which one. Whoever wrote this review must be on the city or county commissioner's payroll, law enforcement profile citizens who are economically challenged. Okay. Yeah, the broke. Poor people, yes.

If you look at people who get fucked with by the, it's poor people. Yeah. You want to pull over a Rolls-Royce and deal with that guy and his lawyers and everything? You see an 87 Camry with a rusted out wheel well. You go, I can do whatever I want to that guy, probably. I would think. I'll bet he's speeding and he'll have to pay it. That's right.

I sincerely believe Emporia and Lyon County judicial system is the poster child for organized crime, aka the Blue Mafia. He hates the cops in this town. People in this town, 24,220. It's gone down a bit since the murder happened. It's a good size for a little town. Decent size. It's pretty decent here.

Women, 52.2% are women, which is a lot. for a bigger population. That's skewing big time. And that's because there's also colleges here. So more women enroll in college in general. And there you go. And the median age is 29, which is telling you there's a lot of 20-year-olds here. Family in this town, only 44.7% married, and that is from the college.

Everyone else is married with kids, except for the college people. We have 21% are single with children, which is higher than the national average. Race in this town, 64.4% white, 2.7% black, 2.5% Asian, 26.8% Hispanic. Well, really? Farming community. Yeah. Here we go. 42.4% of the people are religious, which is less than I would expect in Kansas.

But no, they're there. And the highest one out of everything, I assume it's actually a tie. We have a tie between Catholic and Methodist. Really? Yes. I assume the Catholics are probably the 26.8% Hispanic. Sure. And then, yeah, the rest, you got your Lutherans, your Methodists, and that kind of thing.

Zero point zero percent Jewish, though. Unemployment, pretty low, under the average. Median household income here, unfortunately, also pretty low and under the average, which, again, you've got to factor college students into that. College kids and farmers. Who make college kids make nothing. So average, our median household income here, 46,642, which is very low, almost 25 grand below the national average.

Cost of living here, 100 being regular average, here it's 74.6. So it's a much high for... Seems like it. The housing is really low, though. Really? And home cost here, $137,700. Wow. So the income, 46,000, home cost $137,000.

It's like you're basically living in... 1996, essentially. You live in the late 90s, which that makes sense because if you go to Kansas, it feels like it's about 25 years behind the rest of the country. So it's, that makes sense. Even their prices are back there. You can just go there and pretend you're in the 90s. It's wonderful. That said, I think we need to find out how you could live here and where you could live.

For all the people convinced that they can't live anywhere else, we have for them the Emporia, Kansas Real Estate Report. All right, average two-bedroom rental here. You're ready for this? This is, I think I paid this in 1997 for a place. 870? 570. What? I think I lived at Belridge for that in the, in Phoenix, in a terrible area.

570. 570. I didn't, I haven't paid that. My God, I think I was paying 760 in 1997. Yeah, I lived in Belridge, which sucked when that's why it was fun. something. I look at copper palms.

I don't know that is. I do know what that is. It's a piece of shit. House number one, three bedroom one bath, 1,076 square feet. From the outside,

the porch is kind of a little dip it in the middle there. There is some fucked up carpet in every goddamn room, a lot of wood paneling. But it's built in 1910 and it's $54,900. So,

holy. Plenty to fix up. just had a price cut of five grand as well. Here's a three-bedroom two-bath, 1311 square feet. It's a nice little blue house with a nice front porch, big old porch, and it's a nice house inside.

The flooring, it's got, looks like probably original wood floors. It was built in 1920. Like they look, but they're cool. You could do something with that. Tiles kind of look like it's from 1995. All right. Who cares, though, three-bedroom, two-bath,

1311 square feet. $109,000. Unbelievable. That's incredible. And then finally, you want to stretch out. Corn has been good to you. Wheat has really paved the way for you. We have a four-bedroom, six bath, tea bowl for each and every beehole, everybody.

4,016 square feet. Big old house. Lots of garage, lots of stuff. It looks great. It's only on 0.6 acres, not a ton of land, but not bad. 739,000 bucks for that. That's marvelous. And that just had a $40,000 price.

cut. Yeah, in a place where people in a desirable area, try finding that for $700,000. So there you go. Things to do. Oh, there's lots of them. We have the Lion County Fair and Carnival and Rodeo. It's all included in that. And the rodeo.

And rodeo. Enjoy classic fair fun with carnival rides, food rodeos, tractor pulls, demolition derby, 4H events, and of course, more, obviously. Fantastic. We have pee-wee and ranch rodeos. There's a barbecue competition, which, okay, what do you got? I'll judge.

Let's do it. C-P-R-A rodeo. We got mutton busting, everybody. It's back. Mutton-bustin. Then they said buck, rumble and roll, which I think is some sort of livestock event. Yeah. An antique tractor pull.

Okay. Old tractors. A demolition derby for the tractors that don't do very well, I assume. Yeah. Fuck these tractors. A Farm Bureau kids tractor pull. Sounds dangerous. Sounds like kids driving tractors.

That's not good. I'm not sure. Either way. Very dangerous. And then there's a truck and tractor pull. So if you want to see anything pulled by a tractor, this is your day. You get over here. You got a hitch on it.

Bring it out. You're going to see it all. And there's also, of course, the swine and poultry. showings. The Sunday Sundays will be playing. That is Sunday like the day and Sunday like the ice cream.

The dessert. Sunday Sundays will be playing. There's also what is this? Orgonomy, forestry, wildlife, something, a woodworking course. And of course

the mutton bustin rock rumble and roll will close out the evening because you can't follow that. Oh, that's, Yeah, that's when kids get their asses kicked. Let's go. Forget about it. There's also the halfway to everywhere music fest, which I assume is it's right in the middle of the country.

But then they changed it. And now it's called the halfway to halfway music fest, which sounds like you're almost ready to get help for your alcoholism. Almost. You're halfway to the halfway house, buddy. You can almost do it. It sounds-A halfway. That's a quarter of the way. That's a quarter of the way, babe.

But yeah, there's that too. that said, I think it's time here. Oh, well, crime rate. Forget about that. Crime right in this town. What we are interested in here, property crime right at average. So right there, which you wouldn't expect in a small town in Kansas. But the college will make it like that because people piss in the streets and break windows and, you know, teenage boys fight and, you know, that works.

And then violent crime, murder rape robbery and, of course, assault. The Mount Rushmore of crime, the heavy stuff. It's a little more than half the average, but about half the average. Oh, okay. Not much. Yeah. So not too much here. So that's kind of how you get with a lot of these small college towns.

A lot of property. Halfway to halfway. Yeah. Dumb shit happens, but a little more. It's halfway. So that said, let's talk about some murder. What do you say, everybody? Let's do this.

We have a wild one here. Okay, let's start Friday, November 4th, 1983. A few days after Halloween. A few days after Halloween. The kids are, you know, still got piles of candy, I hope. It's nighttime. and in a van is Marty and Lorna Anderson. Okay, Marty and Lorna,

and we'll get way into more about them later. Now, Marty and Lorna are driving a van, and they have all four of their daughters in the car with them. Oh, God damn it. Van full of kids. Lorna's driving, too. So they're returning from Fort Riley, the Fort Riley area near Junction City, apparently.

So they're on a very dark stretch of highway. This is these, in this area, there's no streetlights. This is highway through nowhere. I mean, it's pitch black out there. It's highway 177 in Geary County. Now, Lorna, who's driving, Marty's wife, says that she feels ill and thinks she has food poisoning or something. She's like, I got to pull over.

I am not feeling good. And when the driver's going to throw up, you do need to pull over. You can't do that while you're driving. So she pulls over. gets out of the van and walks kind of few steps into a nearby field to be sick, basically. I'll go throw up in the wheat and then get back into this shit here. So Marty and the four girls are in the van. When she comes back, she tells Marty, she's like, yeah, I was saying, I was okay.

And she's like, yeah, I'm okay. But I don't know what I was doing. I had them in my hand and I threw up and lost, I just lost control of my body or something. But I dropped the keys. I dropped the keys to the van in the field. they might be sitting in your fuk. Either if not, they're sitting in a field in the pitch black in the middle of nowhere. So where the hell of that's rough.

And I can't move the car to position the headlights out there now. So if you don't have a little glove compartment flashlight, you're in deep shit right now. So she said, can you help me, you know, find them? I can't find the keys. So if you'd like to go home, we need to find the keys. So Marty says, God damn it, gets out of the car. And you know, he's like, why'd you take him out of the goddamn ignition? Why would you take them out of the...

Okay, fine. Why'd you shut it off? Why'd you shut it off? It's November 4th. Keep the heat on, go. You know what I mean? So either way, that's what she did. And so he gets out and to search the roadside with her.

And as he gets around the van and gets into the field and kind of goes, okay, where's the area? Out of nowhere, a masked man appears. Oh, no. You know how these fields are lurking with masked, you know, robbers and muggers. It's like Times Square in the 70s. I mean, you're going to get rolled if you're walking around a wheat field at night. They grow with the grain.

That's how it works, dude with a mask on. So this guy pops up out of nowhere and demands Marty's wallet. He's mugging him in a fucking field in the middle of nowhere, which is unexpected, I would say, to say the least, Marty hands his wallet over. Okay, you got that. You have a gun. Sure. Sure's now.

The man ends up shooting him anyway, just opening fire with 22-calibated. bullets peppering his body with shots. Oh, no. Including at least one in the head execution style. So when he went down, he could put, let me make sure and put one in his head. And the girls are in the car. Yeah, the girls, the girls are 10 feet away in the van,

watching this out of the van window, for whatever you could see out of van window in the dark. But she saw muzzle flashes, I bet. So. . . . . . now, Lorna said that she thinks that this gunman or she said the gunman heard a car

coming after this there was a car another car in the highway so he shoved her and would ditch just like threw her down

like shoved her pushed her and then grab Marty's wallet and ran so that was that disappears into the wheat field

into the night which is the cops are like armed robbers in a wheat field the fuck are you talking about

it's a wild Yeah, the only reason they're there is to she and get sick. Imagine betting on people pulling over. In the middle of nowhere stretch. I mean, maybe they'll pull over here, maybe 50 miles down the road. I'm betting on right here. It makes no sense that someone would be waiting for that. So the cops are very, very, very suspicious of this whole thing.

They're like, this is somebody had to have it out for them or this doesn't seem random, like a random robbery especially. That seems ridiculous. Then the next morning, November 5th. 5th, 1983. This is pre-noon. We're talking, you know, 10 a.m. here. People still have bacon, egg, and cheese on their breath here.

Lorna is already on the phone with the insurance agent to ask how much money she's getting and how much, how fast she can get the life insurance settlement, which is strange. The agent is so unsettled by this because it's so not normal. Just to tip everybody out there, if your spouse dies, especially under weird, suspicious circumstances, not like they had cancer for 10 years or something. Give it like two days. Just give it after the funeral. Yeah.

Give it a week. Don't call within 12 hours. To do the funeral. So I get that, but. You're going to need the money for a defense attorney if you call too soon. That's the problem. You can't call too soon. You got to give it some time.

You're going to need bail money. You're going to need a lot. So the agent's so unsettled, he calls the Geary County Sheriff's Department to go, I don't No, not for nothing, but I would look into this lady because this, we never get people calling literally the next morning about when's my insurance, when do I get paid. You know, this guy's barely dead for, they haven't even done an autopsy on him yet. And she's already going, where's my money? Term life, my husband's been murdered. I had nothing to do with it.

Can you send me a check? Right now, you know, I'm innocent. So this is about $270,000. Okay, that is a lot. That's a, especially in 1983. That's a shitload of money. That's a couple million. You know what I mean?

That's a lot. Yeah, why? What's he so important for? So, well, he's got a good job and we'll find out all about him. Now, they do the funeral, and the funeral is officiated by their pastor or minister or whatever you want to call it, the leader of the church they go to. It's a guy named Tom Bird, and he is the guy. He's the pastor and a good friend of theirs. And he does the, officiates the funeral service, okay?

Yeah. Now, a little bit about the birds to find out how they know the Andersons and how this all connects to it, which are itself. Now, Tom, Bird, like we said, the minister of the church, he has a wife named Sandra Lee. Sandra Lee Bird. She was Sandra Lee Stringer. I'm sorry. Sandra Lee Stringer, and now she's Sandy Lee Bird. She is Sandy, she goes by.

She's born June 5th, 1950 here. She grew up in Dallas, or she's born in Dallas, but grew up mostly in Arkansas. Oh, boy. Which might be the closest hospital to fucking Arkansas. It might be in Dallas for all we know. Because whenever we do Dallas for a show, which we'll be at, by the way, on October 3rd in Dallas. Whenever we do that, we get a shitload of people from Arkansas come out to it. Yeah.

They come to that in Nashville. It takes away, right? Yeah, people from Arkansas expect that no one's coming there, so they know I got to go to another state if I want to see stuff. That's fine. They wouldn't got themselves to comedy club, James. Oh, boy. Little Rock. That's terrific. That just reminds me of the 30 Rock episode where they go to where they go down to get someone from real America. And it's, isn't Jeff Dunham?

I don't know. Call on Liz Lemon a skank and shit. And they realize that it's probably how he really feels. Oh, yeah. They go to the chuckle hut. So Sandy is five foot one, short brown hair, you know, got a lot of laugh and a lot of personality. My kind of chick, if you know, if you've ever met my wife, five foot one dark hair and quite a bit

of energy. So that's what I'm into. Yeah, I like that. She's the high school valedictorian as well. Real smart girl and real smart, sharp kid. For Arkansas. I mean, valedictorian in Arkansas. So, yeah, she was a solid B student.

I mean, straight across the boards. No, I'm just kidding. Sandy was good stuff. She has a high school boyfriend named Thomas Paul Bird. Tom Bird. He's the guy who will become the minister. Oh, Tom Bird's been a man since high school. Come bird since high school.

He was a jock. He was a big jock in high school. Which I don't think he played. He was like a track guy. The track guys weren't like... The audacity. The popular jock. Jock?

High school, no. That wasn't it. You had to tackle somebody or, like, shoot a ball or hit something or that's when you were considered a jock, you know? Running doesn't take hand-eye coordination. No, it's just, especially the distance running that he does. It just takes a sick mind, I feel.

It just takes masochism. Yeah, to go, I'm going to run 10 miles. That's a sick thought. That's sick. Unless, like, a leopard is chasing you? Why are you running 10 miles? For what? The fuck do you do that?

I don't like it. So he's born 1950 as well, Tom Bird. He's the jock. He's the son of a Lutheran minister, which is a big deal, and he will become a minister because of that. He ran distance. He got an actual scholarship here to the University of Arkansas. Oh.

Razorbacks there to run distance running. Yeah. He, so he competes there. He'll end up getting two graduate degrees in theology. as well in theology and divinity. Some of it at the Lutheran seminary in Springfield, Illinois. So divine, he's got a degree about it. I'm a divine son of a bitch.

He's also, everybody says he's very magnetic. He's got a big personality. He can draw people in. From one of the people said, and this is from an A&E special, Tom was the type of person that he could draw people in and make friends with them real easy. people liked him and he seemed genuinely interested in you, which is what everybody says about very good politicians. They always say that.

They can walk in a room and make the people he talks to or she talks to feel important. Yeah. And that sort of thing and that they were interested in your shit. Yeah. Executives do it. Bill Clinton was very good at that. I don't care what it's not political, whatever you think of Bill Clinton, right or left. Everybody said the same thing.

he was very good at making people think he was interested. I don't know if he was or not, but they thought he was and that's fine. Yeah, the executive vice president, the company I worked for, there was 3,000 employees. The man knew everybody's name. Yeah, that's a sickness.

That's disturbing. That's why. I don't know how you can do that. I don't know why you'd want to do that. I get that it's nice. I know I can do my name because I was a monster. Yeah.

Because it's always on his desk going, Jesus, this guy again. Thought we fired you, Whisman. Yeah, you're back. So, this is, They describe him as just kind of an innovative path. He's a young guy with energy, too. He's the only young guy in his 20s and 30s.

He's got ideas and shit. Absolutely. He did play football, but running distance track was what he got the scholarship for. So he played football in high school. She ends up going to Rice University in Houston. Gall's school, right? No, Rice is everybody. They have a football team.

Yeah. Oh, right. Yeah. Unless they really suck, I assume it's everybody. So she goes off to Rice and then transfers to the University of Arkansas for her sophomore year because she missed Tom. Sue. Oh, boy. So in college, Sandy earns a master's degree in mathematics.

Oh. Yeah. That made both of us go, oh, God, I made my asshole pucker. Like, oh, that sounds horrible. Imagine having to do that. Imagine if someone says you have to get a master's degree in mathematics. Have to. I just hang myself.

They'd be like, there's no way I'm doing that. I can't do that. No way. I used to be really good at it, and I have since very evidently and clearly lost everything I knew. You're talking about, like, seventh grade, though. This is, we're talking about... I'm talking about 30 years ago. Yeah.

We're talking about junior high. I'm talking about this broad went to a college and got a master's degree in mathematics. That's a whole different shit. Yeah. It's so weird to say 30 years ago. Right? Jimmy's like, once I started a... bringing in letters and shit, I was out.

But before that, I got long divide like a bastard. Don't even fucking try it. Well, I did algebra and geometry and, like, advanced stuff of that. But when they started doing, like, calculus, I chose the opposite path of consumer math, James, where they taught you how to balance a checkbook. Literally addition and subtraction. I remember that class where they were like, hey.

the dumb dollars. And the credit column. The morons that need three credits to graduate. They're like, we'll let you do this. This is fine. You can pass this, right? I hope so. Practical shit.

August 21st, 1971, Sandy and Tom get married in Little Rock. Sandy's mother said that she, quote, never wanted her to marry him, but when she did, I took him

to be fine. I took him to be mine. So it wasn't really into the marriage, but once she married him, then he's part of the family, basically. She feared that Sandy was marrying too young and would not reach her potential because she is going to be going for a doctorate in computer math. This is in the 70s, late 70s. This is a new field. This is a big deal. This computer math and all that kind of shit. Sandy's mom said, quote, I always thought he was dull, which is the opposite of what everyone else thinks, which is funny. So he can turn it on and off is what that says to me. Sandy was bubbly.

She had a cute personality. She was adorable then. So they're going to end up having three kids, by the way, over the course of the late 70s through the very early 1980s. They have three kids. In 1982, Tom and Sandy moved from Arkansas to Emporia, Kansas. This is to take over a church called Faith Lutheran, which was a daughter. congregation of the Missouri Synod, Synod, S-Y-N-O-D.

Some, I don't know, Lutheran congregation. So this is kind of a startup church spun off an established church. Think Baby Billy in the Sears. We over there, we in that Sears? Think that. We over there, Annette Sears now. That's kind of what he's doing, spinning off this church and opening it. And this is his shot, man.

Oh, yeah. This is like, you want to be a pastor and a hot shit pastor. You got to open up a church, make it hot, and then you can do anything you want from there. You're gold. You can grow this spinoff bigger than cheers. Totally. You can do it. It'll become Frazier and be huge.

So before that, they had their three children, like we said, they lived in West Memphis, Arkansas for about two years, which is an awful place. You don't want that. You don't want that. He maintained a dual ministry in West Memphis and Forest City while Mrs. Bird here, Sandy, taught math at Memphis State University. Oh. So they're doing a lot here. Now, the church he went to in late 81, the Messiah Lutheran Church, they needed to build a new church to accommodate growth or divide and form a new congregation. So that's when they decided divide, new congregation, let this guy run it.

So that's how it worked. So they needed somebody you can do this. They needed an energetic, magnetic pastor who could have the energy to both build and recruit and organize. And that's, there's a lot consistent. This isn't just show up every week, do your sermon, talk to people and go home. This is, it's got to be. You're building a business essentially. Yeah.

Not essentially. You are building a business. Yeah, I was going to say, I don't care what the tax status of it. It's a goddamn business. If people show up in the door and leave with less money than they came, that's a fucking. in business. Period. If it weren't a business, they would not be worried about their congregation shrinking or growing.

No. They'd be like, well, whoever's here, they're here to hear the word. And that's all that matters. It's all the matters. It's all that matters. Sandy also has an opportunity with the Emporia move. She's not usually the pastor's wives, especially in this area. No.

Mild. Just kind of reflecting in the glory of what their husband's doing, basically. And that's it, especially back then, where she wasn't like that. She's not a behind the scenes type of person. She's got a personality and she's got a brain too, as we know. She's got a bachelor's, a master's, you know, wherever she is. She's always teaching classes. She's having a career also, you know what I mean?

And when she's working, too, she has a daughter and two sons but never stopped going. She'd have the kid go back to work, that type of thing here. Emporia State University, she gets hired at. to come here and she could teach math and also she could take her doctorate courses to get her doctorate. Great. Which is smart. Now, Tom said, quote, we were excited that there was an opportunity for her to teach math and take

courses and work on her master's degree in computer math. So that was really the deciding factor in us coming to Emporia was they both wanted to be there. Her family called her a perpetual student and teacher is the way they put it. someone who is very, very really into math and really liking it and has a lot of enthusiasm for it and likes to show people and teach them and learn something I don't have at all for math. I don't care. Housework and cooking and things like that were not her big, she didn't give a shit about that. Didn't care.

She did run church activities, raised the kids. She taught. She, you know, went to school. She did a lot at the same time. but people said dishes would collect in the sink, you know, dust bunnies around the furniture, that kind of shit. She once told a neighbor, quote, when I start cleaning, it's either because I'm moving or because my mom and dad are coming. Those are only two times? That's it.

Otherwise, shit's a mess. With three little kids, whoa, that's a lot. That's dirty. And Tom sucked at yard work and didn't like to do it. Basically, he'd let the yard grow to shin height before he'd mow it. They're living in squalor. They're living in, they're so busy, they're just like, don't have time for that, living in squalor. Wow.

Another thing, she's very meticulous, Sandy, about a lot of things, everything. The way she eats, the way she does her math, the way she does things. Seatbelt is a big deal to her. And this is 83 before there was like seatbelt laws. Before they gave a shit, yeah. And nobody cared. She was an early seatbelt adapter of. I'm not moving until everyone has their seatbelt on.

Buckle up. Buckle up, everybody. Car doesn't even give a shit at that point. No beeping. There will be no beeping reminder. Cops, let you cruise right by. It wasn't a law. I don't know about in Kansas,

but I know in New York it was like 87 they made that law. Well, it was after the adaption of shoulder harnesses because if it was just a lap belt, belt, they fucking can't tell. No, no. And the shoulder thing, I mean, that was around in the 70s, the shoulder thing. Was it? Yeah, they had those in the 70s. Yeah, I guess 70s cars had them.

Yeah, they had that. So anyway, even no matter what, she always put her seatbelt on. Everyone else had to, too. So the church grows, and it grows pretty fast. It's not bad. They bought a blonde brick church from an Assembly of God congregation. And, you know, new part of town. About 65 members are the ones they're starting out with.

They're about kind of young professionals, basically, is what they're going for. Those are people that can be there for a long time. Yeah. And if they have money, they can keep giving you money, too. So that's good. I mean, you can get the poor old ladies and everything. I mean, they're going to be there, but they don't give you shit. They give you two nickels out of their change purse, and they're going to be dead in five years.

So that's not the main point is that's a dying breed. You better get them while you can. Well, it's the same thing as a restaurant. No restaurant goes, okay, we're going to open up. We're going to cater to the 75 plus crowd. Really get them hooked on it. And then that's not what people do. They go, I want 29-year-old people here with like a,

couple of kids. He'll keep coming back for another 20 years. That's what you're looking for. One of the parishioners said they were ready for someone like Tom to come and whip them up and say, let's go. Yeah. Let's build this church. So in about a year, the Faith Lutheran Church added a daycare program, softball and volleyball teams, Bible studies. They have a preschool. Tom coaches. He plays in the leagues. He counsels people. He teaches. things. He's also on the Optimist Club. He's in the Optimist Club. Like for eyes or for like... No,

like optometrist club? Yeah. He, uh, it just seems like a basically a bunch of guys that play sports together, like old guys that play sports. I think it has something to do with the church. I'm not sure. Got some hope involved in it. A little bit of hope here. A hope that we can hit this jumper.

So the church, uh, because they have like a basketball team and a softball team. So the church fills up with people your regular, you know, standard brand Lutherans, but also other people who stop in who aren't even Lutheran some of them. Oh. Just because they keep hearing about this great new preacher that's worth checking out. Oh, we got some rumors. This Tom Birdboy, he really skits the word up there.

And you got a... Bird's got the word. Bird is the word, my friend, and it's happening. So, yeah, that's everybody's stopping in. Now, Sandy, she's also real busy. She's taking courses and teaching courses. She's a math instructor. One of her colleagues here, a math instructor at Emporia State, said she was very intelligent, very energetic, and on the go all the time.

She did what a minister's wife had to do. She took care of the kids. She'd get one thing done and move right on to the next. They also said she really didn't have time for friendships with people. Like if you were friends with her, it was a quick, it just doesn't have time for it. She's got so much shit going on. She has to prioritize, you know, prioritize where she puts her time. I got dust bunnies.

I don't got time for friends. No, one person said in a couple of minutes, you'd better talk to her and say what you want because she's going to be moving on. She's just busy. It's one of those things, you know. It's like the boss comes into the office and is walking through. Everybody's got, I got, blah, blah, blah, blah. They're busy. He's going to go get on a helicopter now.

So Tom's a big leader, though. He's being a huge leader. This is, by the way, one of the more kind of religiously conservative and kind of docturn is a big deal here. And the religious, the rigorous dogma of the whole thing. It's real, the real hardcore here as far as Lutheranism. If there's shades of Lutheranism, this is toward one side where they're a little more hardcore about it. But this is the system Tom trained in. Now, they expected, I guess, the church was supposed to, Tom's church is thinking, well, the main church is going to also help us here while we're going.

We're going to help us grow because this is we're a satellite of them. But in October 82, the new church broke from the old church. So he breaks from them. He says, never mind. He chose that? Yeah, he said, we don't need you because we have all these people. We've built all this with no help from you. So what the hell do we need you for?

by the fall of 83, which is down the road, membership had tripled by then. Oh, we're kicking your ass. We don't need you. Exactly. Don't need you. And Tom is the reason why. One of the church's elders said, quote, Tom could communicate with people. He could preach the word of God.

He was an excellent teacher, a superior motivator, and a virtually tireless worker. He just worked all the time. Apparently, he's got a 65-hour work week. He says it's 10 hours in administrative training, 10 hours in preparing and giving a sermon, 10 hours in outreach, 15 hours of teaching and 20 hours of counseling. That's how he broke down. Shit, that's a, you're a pussy. Try running a fucking goddamn, try running three goddamn podcasts that you have to fucking do all the research for. Do that, motherfuckers.

Hey, Tom, let's see if we give you a murder podcast, it's three goddamn hours long. and then another one that's an hour fucking 10 every week and see how you break those hours down. Yeah. See if he puts out a single fucking song over the next five years. Yeah, exactly. Putting out shit.

So Tom taught a Bible class each Sunday. He taught teenagers also. Sometimes the birds together taught a class on family living. They formed a couples club and arranged potluck dinner. So they're really making the church branch out into social shit. Because if you can tie people, in socially where all their friends are there. Now they have to keep coming to church because they won't have any friends if they don't.

So often after a sermon, Tom would invite the congregation to hang out and stay and chit-chat for a while there. He would say, quote, Sandy and I want a fellowship with you. We want to fellowship with you, which sounds gross. That sounds like it's sticky. Sounds like a cult. Yeah. Let's fellowship the three of us. Me and my wife want to really fellowship all over you right now. it doesn't sound right.

Just you. Just you. Yeah. Or just her, one of the two. Yeah. So new members keep coming and coming and coming. One church member said he seemed interested in everybody. He was warm and giving and unafraid to show emotion or hug. He often said he was as interested in the well-being of those who weren't in church as the ones who were.

Which is kind of what the point, I thought the point of Christianity was. But to camera Most people that aren't there. Not more, but at least as much as about everybody. I think that's what I always thought. But I don't know. He was just a regular kind of guy that had as many problems as the next guy. But he knew we were all loved and we were all forgiven.

So he also, they said he was fun with the kids. He would have water gun fights with the youth group or arranging a mud football game for everybody. We're all going to play a mud football game. And then he showed up to play in a. a tuxedo to be funny. That kind of shit. That's kind of funny. That is kind of funny. It's a good gag. That's fun. Yeah, that is fun. Getting all muddy, getting up and then adjusting your bow tie would be pretty hilarious while you have mud all over it. In a wedding dress might be funnier. That could be great. That could be great. Just elegant. Although it's so much easier

to tackle with the train. You know what I mean? You just grab a haul. It's like dudes with the long dreads. They just grab them and pull them down by them. It's the same thing. So spring and summer 83. There's some problems or spring, I should say. Problems with this with Tom and Sandy. It's not about normal things too. It's not about, oh, we don't have enough money or, you know, your mother's always here or any shit like that. He's upset that Sandy's so ambitious. He's like, isn't it enough for you to just reflect my glory? What? Calm down and stop trying to be so goddamn successful. Listen, listen, it's enough for the moon. to just reflect the light off the sun.

It doesn't need to be its own light source. So what the fuck? Why can't you be the moon? That's what she said. Just sits around being white and reflective. And in goddamn awe of me also. Sit and really be in awe of me. Really sitting and go, wow, that Tom, do that about four or five times a day.

That's what I'd like. It's weird. And if I'm not around, that thing disappears. So I'd like you to do the same. Yeah. Tom wanted a more traditional pastor's wife, one that, you know, cares about the church and taking care of the home and all that. Meanwhile, she's a doctoral student who teaches math. So it's not that person.

Friends would hear Tom complain that Sandy never has any time for him. And friends of Sandy heard Sandy say that she feared that Tom didn't love her anymore because she's always, she's not around where he wants her to be. So they're having just insecurities, I think. the two of them, which sounds like they could just weird because they do tons of counseling where they counsel other marriages. You'd think they'd go, hey, we need to sit down and figure out time for each other. Right. And that would be the thing. I mean, how dare you when you can't figure your own shit out? Exactly. That's, yeah, that seems to be pretty typical, though. Yeah. Well, people that go into mental health tend to be people who've had mental health

problems or at least enough of an issue to get them to look into it to find out more. Their family, their mother was, you know, schizophrenic or something. That's kind of how a lot of people go into it. So I guess that would make sense. I mean, yeah. I had a therapist once that professed to me during a, he's a man, he professed to me in this session that he used to have a whackin addiction. Like a sexual addiction?

Yeah. Yeah, where he just pornography was everything. And he wanted to know about my pornography habits. And I was like, this will be our last session. Hey, not as bad as yours. That's the answer. How are you with pornography? Not that fucking bad.

Anyway, so my mom. I've never missed an appointment for it. I'll tell you that. Yeah, that's, wow. It's never interfered in my day. But let me tell you about this time I was raped. I think that's the bigger issue here. That might be relevant here, more relevant.

If I go into a goddamn drink and they start telling me about their problems, even for two seconds, it's over. I am paying you, asshole. Yeah. Yeah. That's what friends do back and forth. Oh, I'll let them talk about their shit because I talked about my shit. This is not a – I'm paying you. This is a one-way relationship.

You tell me about my stuff. And an insurance company are paying. This is a selfish endeavor. is what this is. And I'm fine with that that I'm being a... I don't need to hear about your shit. No. Don't upload this on me.

Fuck, no. So the thing is, Sandy wants to know of Tom's bored. She tells more than one friend she was afraid Tom didn't love her anymore and that he'd grown distance and that all he does is hang out at that church and he spends too much time with his secretary

and it's just awful. His secretary, by the way, is a woman named Lorna Anderson. Remember her? the sick one from the van in the beginning. That's the church secretary, Lorna Anderson. She is Lorna Slater Anderson. Slater's her maiden name there.

And then she'll also have some more names we'll talk about. She's born in 1953-ish here. Grew up in Hutchinson, Kansas, which we also did an episode on. She met Marty, while Marty Anderson, while he was training as a medical tech, and she was at Hutchinson Community College. They got married in 1973. They had four daughters. The youngest were twins.

The youngest two were twins. He had two and got two more. Got two more. He was like, shit, I thought we were having three. So by 83, the kids were, the twins were two. The middle kid was, don't know, and the oldest kid was eight. Those were the kids in the van while he's being shot in a field right outside the window. Martin, Marty, is Martin Kenneth Anderson, born December 8, 1948.

He is from Wellington, Kansas, which is a small town outside of Wichita. He graduated from high school there and went to Southwestern College and trained as a medical technologist. What even is that? I don't know. I've never heard of that before. I've never heard of a medical technologist. I guess that's the guy that knows how to work all the shit, right? I guess, but this is also in the late 60s.

So jobs in the medical field are completely different than they are now. I mean, who knows. That's the guy that knows how to use the machine that has that thing that goes up and down. Yeah. The thing is. I assume it does something with air. So two weeks after graduation, in June 1970, he has a biology degree from Southwestern College. He gets married.

This is before Lorna. He marries a woman from Scott City. They separate seven months later and his divorce is final in April of 1972. He just said they were incompatible. Now, at that point, he was like just emotionally shot. His brother, his younger brother, Steve, said he was emotionally wiped out by that. Yep. That's it.

He ends up getting involved with some. fundamentalist religious group at this point, which when you mix early 70s with broken inside, you can go, there's so many places. You can end up in a cult and a commune. You can be a fucking Harry Krishna. There was so many places. Isn't Westboro from Kansas? Westboro, Arkansas, I think it is.

Oh, it is Arkansas. I think it's Arkansas. Yeah, the Westboro Baptist cunts there. So he gets involved with that. Marty turned into a fucking religious zealot after that. Jesus. His brother said he didn't mind telling others they were condemned and going to the devil. It turned into one of those guys.

Oh, no. That was it. No discussion. They said before that he was, you know, he had, it was religion. He'd go to church or whatever, but he was a normal guy. He would swear and, you know, kept it to himself, yeah. Drink if the guys were watching a football game.

He'd have a couple of beers, stuff like that. But after that, they said, All of that was gone. And this was like hardcore rolling in the aisle speaking in tongues fucking group, which, I mean, that's insane. So, but that's the type of thing he was doing. So now Lorna, then he meets Lorna, who was Lorna Slater at the time. And Steve, his younger brother says, I thought she was a winner. I thought and still think she was the best thing that ever happened to Marty Anderson at that time.

she pulled him out of all of this she's a hot blonde that's all it takes by the way for a guy that's funny a guy can be rolling in the fucking I'll speak speaking in fucking tongues telling people they're going to a devil

if a hot blonde walks in and shows a little bit of cleavage he's like so can I buy you a drink our brains are not wired to withstand that you know what I mean it's not so bad after all not so bad especially in your 20s

it's just not wired to fight that We can't resist it. So she was sweet. She's loving. She's also slender and pretty attractive. She's not like drop dead gorgeous, but she's an attractive bond chick here. She was 20 at the time, too. So they get married in June of 1973.

Marty's 24. She's 20. He's a big guy too, 6-2, a stocky. Big guy. He was distrustful at first, but she won him over. what Marty's brother said in very simple terms, she was one of the very important stabilizing factors in bringing him back to being a normal guy.

What did that ex-wife do, man? Wow. What did this woman's vagina do? It must be magic for Christ's sake. There's that, who's the old one of magic vagina? That pushed him that way. I needed this one to bring him back.

She broke his ass, man. Holy shit. So they had their first of four, daughters at that point pretty early on and he loves his kids Marty's super into his kids and now Lorna as much as she's a sweetheart and as much as she is you know really into Marty and all that kind of thing she's also got our I don't know if I want to use the word I'm going to just reputation is the best way to put it it's got a bit of a rep around town and around what everywhere well for being very friendly a very

friendly young lady. She's a little sweetly slutty? A little bit. Now again, she's 20 and we're talking late 60s into the early 70s. Yeah. Free love. This is not abnormal. This is the time of...

It takes a while for it to get to Kansas. Well, that's the thing. Yeah, it takes a long time to get there. Like we said, this is actually fast. Sex got there quicker than music would or fashion. You know what I mean? Pussy travels fast. Pussy moves.

Pussy moves is really what I've heard and I've been told. It's the lubricant that pushes it. Pussy move, God damn it. So that's how they are going here. Yeah. She's got a bit of a reputation. But like I said, back then,

free love mixed with the pill just came out. So women are feeling their empowerment oats and they're like, well, guys go fuck around and go fuck around too. So Lorna takes advantage of that. Once they move to Emporia, I guess there's a bunch of players on Marty's hospital softball team here. She's doing this after marriage.

Oh, way after marriage, too. She has a rep going in, but he thinks I'm getting married, so that'll calm right down. But her rep continues. In 1977, it was their first summer in Emporia. And Lorna, basically, this is what the Kansas City star, the way they put it. Quote, it wasn't long before Lorna had become the post-game prize. She didn't always go to the winner. She just went to whomever was interested.

Oh, my God. The softball team passes around his wife like a fucking, like a goddamn joint. This is crazy. Wow. One of the players said it got to be a standing joke. Which one of us that night was Lorna going to hit on? Many of these were men that Marty worked with. Okay, so she hit on them?

Or she's actually fucking them. If they're open to it. If they're willing. Wow. Yeah, if they're into it. One of them said, quote, I think, oh, this is that guy's wife, Vicky, said, I think the fact that she hit on the men bothered the men more than it did the wives and girlfriends. Now, this Vicky said she took to watching Lorna at parties out of curiosity, really. She said, you'd watch her work the room out of curiosity.

She said it was almost like Lorna was trying to compensate for something. But I think the fact that she felt attractive to men made her feel good. Yeah. I think he just broke down her psychology pretty classic thing. Yeah. She's the type where you... She's the lady from Boogie Nights. Yeah, you'd hear all this and he'd go, where's your dad?

Yeah. What happened? You know what I mean? Yeah. What happened? I mean, something happened. You're ugly. Yep.

Was he not around? Yeah. Did he do... Something happened, obviously, here. So now he becomes, Marty becomes chief medical technologist. at Newman Memorial Hospital. He's also an army reservist. He's a board member of the Optimist Club.

And known as a big practical joker, by the way, also. Oh. Which sounds fun. What he does is he'll have like a guy come over the house and then have his wife hit on him. And then he like pops out of a garbage can and he's like, ha ha, got you. And she's like, you know, got her shirt hat off.

Get that out of your mouth right now. Spit that out of your mouth right now. So come. on, slaps dicks. You know how many dicks I've had to slap out of her mouth? It's ridiculous. When Marty arrived at Newman Memorial County Hospital in 76, he's the newly appointed chief medical technician, and he said the lab was a fucking shithole. It was understaffed and shittily equipped. So he added staff, bought new equipment, got the administration to give him what he needed and all that kind of thing. Yeah, he got to, you know, kind of build this program up here.

He's a good stable job because, and he needs that. He needs stability, basically. After what happened with that first wife, he wants no ups and downs. He just kind of wants stability because that broke him. He likes a stable home life and, you know, all that kind of thing. Big guy, like we said, humorous, though. Sometimes they said his practical jokes went a little too far. That was another thing.

Just a little too far. No real, you know, it kind of hurt people's feelings sometimes. Okay. Yeah, he just started going a little too long. Yeah, he just thought it was funny. But he was also in the Army, and in the Army going too far is kind of... Wow. Yeah.

That's what you do. Guys just go too far. That's the whole point. The farther you go, the crazier the practical joke is, you know? Until somebody gets shot in the foot and everybody's laughing. Yeah, and that's how they would laugh. Yeah. I saw this video of this guy.

He gets on like this guy's got a motorcycle, and it's like a mini bike, but it's not a mini, mini, it's like a mid-mini. And he's like, I can pop a wheelie on this fucking thing. And the guy, his friend's like, you can't do. It doesn't have enough power to pop a wheelie. I don't think you can do a wheelie. Just don't do it. And these guys are like 19. And this guy goes, I could, I couldn't.

Just to see what kind of power he has, he's standing off of it. He hits the throttle and stands straight up. And then he chases after it, tries to get on it, and immediately crashes into a wooden fence where he flies through the fence. And is completely off the screen. He is through a fence into, like, the woods over here. here. His friends go, ha ha ha ha. Now, are you okay? None of that.

Unless he's dead, we'll keep laughing, is basically what guys do. That's what's fun about being a guy. So Marty, when he would be at the hospital, he said sometimes he'd be a little too army sergeant, where he would, you know, kind of keep things a little too regimented and a little too much, a little too deep of a voice with people sometimes.

Now, the Optimist Club, that is how Tom and Marty first crossed paths. Tom Bird and Marty. Church softball, optimist basketball, things like that. So, you know, that's how they cross paths and that's how this all happened. Now, Marty and Lorna have their own problems. Uh-oh. Lorna told people that Marty could be cruel to her. She said that he drank and was at times violent toward the children.

Now, she doesn't say this till later, and there's possibly a good reason for it. No one knows if this is true. The children never describe abuse. Obviously, the two-year-olds wouldn't describe anything, but the eight-year-old would know of abuse, and they never said there was any abuse when asked about it. And nobody witnessed it. Absolutely. A lot of people both related to them and just people they know think that she completely is full of shit, basically. They have a lot of things going on here.

Lorna in the late 70s and early 80s entered psychiatric wards in Emporia or Wichita hospitals multiple times, three times. Checked in herself. Checked in. Yeah, it was checked in. I don't know who put her there, but was checked in. She never stayed more than a week, and we don't know what kind of therapy she got. But three different times she felt it necessary to go check herself into the hospital or she was put in the hospital by, I don't know who. A week is a good stay.

A week is a decently long stay. Now, Lorna hits on everyone, and that does not stop. No. The one guy, David, from the softball team, said that he remembers sitting outside on the Anderson steps with another ball player from the team. So it was Lorna and these two guys. He said, Lorna sat down between them and said, quote, if you guys were going to have an affair, how would you go about it? She didn't mean with each other, by the way, which is my first thought was, well, if I was going to cornhole Dave, here's how I'd start, okay?

Yeah. Don't get me wrong now. I mean, Dave's an attractive man and all, but, you know. How do you let him know that you want to taste it? Yeah, and he said sometimes she made her moves with Marty in plain sight. He said at a party one night, this is a different, David, a colleague of Marties and another softball. player said Marty was so smashed he was dropping beer bottles in the trash compactor and getting off on hearing the crunch. Oh my God.

He's going to have problems with that later. I hope not a garbage disposal. That's the trash compactor. The trash compactor. Yeah. It's like a little, looks like a dishwasher. Yeah. I don't like how they said getting off, but all right.

Yeah. Doing that in a friend's house or is it his own? I think it's his own house. I think it's his own house. Yeah. Still fucked up. Yeah, that's a problem. They said across the kitchen, Lorna started pawing another partier.

And then Lorna and the guy she was pawing on left and came back 20 minutes later. That's not good. That's not great. She hit on Marty's friends from high school, old friends, guy named Larry. Larry remembers watching Marty and Lorna at class reunions. Early on, they seemed to be getting along. This is great because at a class reunion, you only see snapshots. You don't have to see the every day.

It's like, you know, if you gain a weight, you don't realize it if you're gaining it every day. But then someone hasn't seen you in six months. They go, what the fuck happening? Oh, Jesus. Or 20 years. Or 20 years. She said they seemed to be getting worse as it went on. This person said, at the 10-year reunion, I noticed a little tension and almost some indifference on Marty's part.

And at the 15-year reunion, I could sense a lot of tension. It wasn't indifference on his part. It seemed more like frustration. So now it's growing. Marty knew about to go to your high school reunion. I've never even thought about going to a high school reunion. Not a chance. For what?

For what? For what? Why? Fuck them all. Fuck every single one of them. Marty knew about all this shit, by the way. He knew about Lorna and how she was. And, you know, he didn't really talk about it with a lot of people.

But one friend said that Marty confided in him that Marty once found his wife. and some other guy in the bathroom of their own home, she was in the tub and he was just sitting next to her talking. She's naked? Yeah, she's in the fucking tub. You walk into the bathroom and your wife's tits are hanging out, bubble bath, bathing, and there's just some dudes sitting on the toilet chatting with her. That's going to be uncomfortable.

Yeah. And Marty just turned around and left the house. Rather than going, hey, scumbag. Yeah. He's like William H. Macy and fucking boogie nights. You know what I mean? Like he's just like, up there she goes again. It's what's going on.

He's just getting fucked over at every turn. Everything. So a childhood friend here that Larry guy said a couple of times, he mentioned to me where he had heard some things that she was involved with someone else, but he didn't want to believe it. I think Marty so much wanted to build a good family that he shut out what he didn't want to see. Yeah. Jesus.

So 81 is. when they had the twins, like we said. When he learned that she was going to have twins, he was very excited. He was walking around, showing everybody the sonogram going, look at my twins. Hey, I got twins. Problem is he wasn't only so sure they were his twins. That's the issue. Oh, no.

Yeah, that's what's not great. Lorna, one of the guys Lorna talked to and knew Lorna well, said that Lorna tended to have steady side guys. that she would see on a regular basis. Most of the time it was businessmen from late 20s to early 40s, so she really doesn't have a big type. That's the window. The only thing that a lot of them have, yeah, right?

The only thing a lot of them have in common is a lot of them are associated with her husband. That's the main thing that they have in common. I'll know him. Yeah, this one guy said she had her standards. Mostly she wanted good-looking guys. I just got the impression that she wanted to feel needed, to feel loved by someone because she wasn't getting any love at home.

That's one of the guys she was banging. Yeah, I don't know if that's it. I don't think anyone could love her enough to make her not do this. That's the thing. Loving her more isn't going to help. All day. It doesn't matter.

All day. It doesn't matter. She needs to be told by somebody else in a minute. Exactly. Well, more people. Sure, he likes me, but what about other people? Does everyone like me? What about the rest of them?

What about everybody else? A billion people on this planet. Are all the dicks hard? Unless they are, then I'm not doing my job. It seems like what she's doing. So summer of 1982, Denise Cohen, she moves into the Anderson home to help Lorna care for the children, live in nanny, while Marty was away for a month at a reserve summer camp. Oh, Christ. Imagine what Lauren is going to be doing.

Wow. Lorna's boyfriend at the time was at the house frequently and sometimes even stayed the night. the balls to have an affair stay the night. Wow. They said that he would try to sneak out early in the mornings, but that one of the mornings, one of the daughters, walked into her mother's bedroom before he left.

Why would you stay the night? You're going to sleep over? Get the fuck in your car and go. It's so gross. In someone else's house with their kids there and shit, why would you want to? This guy's a scumbag. You've got your ass where that guy sleeps.

Come on, man. I don't want that shit. Now, Denise said, quote, I told her I thought it was bad for the kids what she was doing. And, quote, she didn't care. She's like, yeah, but it's very good for me. When Marty returned from camp, Denise said that, quote, she just told him he'd have to move downstairs and that she didn't want him in her bedroom anymore. So he moved downstairs. Denise said, I asked her one day, why don't you just divorce him?

And she said, I couldn't do it. I couldn't take care of them myself, meaning. four kids. Now, Marty told his friends around this time that he didn't love Lorna anymore, but he couldn't afford to leave. He said he didn't have the money to maintain two households,

and he feared how little he would see his daughters as well. Yeah, so they stayed together. Neither of them want to be in this marriage, but they stay together anyway. One time they had, one of the kind of last gas efforts of being a family was

they tried to become active in church. Maybe we'll go to church and that'll get us going. They joined a new and growing congregation, Faith Lutheran, with their minister, Tom Bird. That's how they get in here. The bird is the word and he is here. So January 1983, Lorna here meets with her friend Jan. Okay. Jan is a woman she confides in a lot.

Jan Mead. They had drinks one day at the Ramada Inn. Meet me at the Ramada Inn for some drinks. that's something anyone has said in 30 years. So I guess Jan hired Lorna for an American Heart Association Fund Drive, and that's how they got together. Women used to do that a lot in the late 80s. And I mean, through the mid-80s, too,

where they just go to a happy hour for drinks after a week. And that's not near as common anymore, is it? No, now they go to each other's houses and drink copious amounts of white wine. Yes, that's a white wine. That's what they do now. They figured out it's cheaper to drink at home. And we're getting bothered less by creepy guys. Cocos?

The diner? It had a full bar. God damn, that's what I love about East Coast diners. Full bar. It's just hilarious to walk in and cause you all these liquor bottles. Cocos is a weird place to go drink. And Caros was that one? I think so.

I don't know. Cocos is not. Cocos was the one, though. That was their thing. Cuckos is where like old people go to eat a hamburger. And a piece of pie. And a piece of pie. It's like Village Inn or something.

It's a weird place to get drunk all the time. Mizarre. So Jan said their conversation drifted from work to men. And Jan said she told me she was sleeping with her hairdresser and that she no longer and that she never really loved her husband is the way she put it. Never even really loved a time. She found a straight hairdresser to seduce? Straight hairdresser. A lot of straight hair dressers back then.

My family's full of them. Yeah. Yeah, you're right, yeah. It happens a lot. And because, I mean, it was one of those things where you go, everybody's always going to need a haircut. Yeah. You know, and you do it.

So in the time it took for, like from January to February, now she's not into the hairdresser anymore. Here, Lorna is it. Now she tells Jan, I'm not in love with my hairdresser anymore. That's over. Yeah. What I am in love with is my pastor. Oh no.

Tom Byrd. She said that she and Tom were taking little trips to Topeka and Wichita to spend afternoons in motel rooms together. Yeah. This is a great fucking lying quote. For a minister, he's really good in bed. For a minister. I mean, he's not like an NFL, you know, outside linebacker. That's obviously much better.

But for a minister, not a bad leg. He's not really throwing. long strokes, but they're consistent. Yeah. No, and he obviously won't go down on me because vaginas are scary and the Lord said no. But other than that, he knows, because he doesn't have a lot of depth, he grinds the pelvis.

And that's the thing. He gets in as much as he can and really works the outside. Yeah, just get circular motion. That's how it works there. So, um, that's fucking crazy. Yeah. So now Jan gets roped into this.

One day in March 1983, she called the home, Lorna's home, expecting to talk to Lorna, and Marty picked up the phone, and Jan said, can I talk to him, Lorna?

It's Jan. And Marty said, well, Lorna is in Wichita meeting with you, isn't she? So Jan scrambled to cover. Oh, well,

yeah, we were supposed to get the, I thought that, but the, blah, blah, and then, yeah, I'm here, and I'm waiting on her.

Yeah, had to figure something out. The next day, Lorna called, Jan back and said sorry about that, but I need an excuse because me and a friend spent the afternoon in a motel. Good Lord. She told Jan that she was afraid, by the way, that one of her daughters had seen her kissing Tom. So she was scared that the daughter was going to spill it to Marty. April 19, 1983, Lorna arrives late for a meeting with Jan. All right. Jan brought her coffee and tried to be consoling. And Lorna, to complain that her home life was worse than ever and that her love for Tom was just so deep.

She couldn't take it anymore. She said, I know that sounds really terrible, but sometimes I just wish that something would happen to Marty and Tom's wife so we could just spend the rest of our lives together. This person. How many others, lady? Criss-cross, you know what I mean? Like, you could also do that with paperwork. That's the other thing that could work.

Yeah, there is something that could happen to them. they could be served. That's it. And then it's a little uncomfortable for a while and everybody scrambles for rent for a minute. And then it's fine after a few years. You'll figure it out. So four days after that, Lorna was home talking on the phone, unaware that her new babysitter, Esther Aldredi, had come up from the basement and was standing behind her, politely waiting for her to finish so she could get paid for the day. Yeah.

So Esther overhears Lorna say that she couldn't, wow, couldn't wait for Marjorie. to die so she could spend his money. Not even so I could be with somebody else so I can spend his money. That's gross. That same month, Lorna crying, makeup all over her, ran through a hall at Newman Memorial at the hospital and ran into one of her Marty's David Workman, one of his work friends that we talked about. He noticed bruises around her eye and cheek and said, did you get in a car wreck?

and she said, no, Marty's been beating me. Oh, my God. Okay. Then they went to her van in the parking lot and talked for about an hour. And as David said, I was probably the only person in the lab that would talk to her at that time. Isn't how shitty she's been to Marty. She asked this guy if people had heard about her affair with Danny Carter, and we'll get into that, her former hairdresser. This guy said, I said, yes, everybody knew.

It's a small town. Yeah, we've heard. You can't be in this town and fuck a bunch of people and not have everybody know about it. You just can't do that. We all get our haircut by him. He's been telling us all. Yeah, and he's really excited about it too. Like he, in real animation.

So the Andersons were, he said everyone talks about it all the time. You're fucking around. So they said, this guy said, we had to get our daily dose of Andersons like we had to get our dose of general hospital, the soap opera. It was the ongoing human. live soap opera they could watch this mess going on. So she said to him, well, if Marty doesn't stop beating me, he's going to get a dose of his own medicine. She tells this guy who works with Marty that Danny, the guy I'm banging and his brother, Daryl, were going to beat Marty up if he didn't stop.

She said, if they, if Marty doesn't stop, they are going to drug Marty, then run him off the road or they'll even shoot him. I'm not sure yet. Okay. So this David Workman said, half of me didn't believe it. The other half wasn't sure. And so he just calmed her down and kind of shifted the conversation. And he got out of the van and drove away and they never talked about it again. Find out after these messages.

We'll be right back. So financial issues here, the couple is relying almost exclusively on Marty's salary from the hospital and money from the Army Reserves. Basically, as a reserve captain, he's earning about $4,000 a year. So not much from the reserves. And his hospital pays about $33,000, which isn't terrible in the early 80s. You can live on that. Sub 40, but he's doing fine.

Not bad, but it's not enough, especially with four kids and twin daughters and all that kind of thing. So payments were about $800 a month on their house at the time, which is expensive for back then. And they had the Ford van for all the kids that was $252 a month. Oh, Jesus. So that's, that's, you know, $10.50 right there just in the house and car payment. It's before we have a sandwich. That's before a goddamn thing, a diaper, a fucking, you know, a Cheerio, a Teddy Graham. Any of it is purchased.

An 80s van? Imagine the gas that thing drinks. Oh, it's guzzling. So they had to borrow money from family. They decided to cut off, cut up their credit cards. They borrowed, took out a loan from the bank. bank, you know, they stay with bright checks, even if their account was overdrawn. In May of 83, they overdrew their checking account 20 times.

20 times. Each overdraft is 10 bucks, by the way. So $200, just an overdraft fees. They couldn't afford the shit they were buying. So there's also other people who don't exactly love Lorna here. one woman who worked with Marty said that everybody was always comforting Lorna and she used the word put some stank on the word comfort like they were like you know

like she doesn't need it like she they were concubines for the Japanese fucking military or something like comfort women like that's almost like the way she put it yeah they said that there were women in Emporia who would not go to any parties that the Anderson might be at because they were afraid that Lorna would come after their husbands. Like, wow. You can't.

If Lorna was around, you kept your husband tight because she'll go blow them out in the parking lot. You better watch out. Imagine. Imagine being so. No. Nope. I just mean like the lack of trust. Like, it also takes two.

Do you know what I mean? A woman coming on to somebody, if he doesn't give a shit about that, You know what I mean? Do they make sense? Absolutely. But these wives are like, he's only human. His dick isn't going to suck itself, which is a crazy thought because, yeah, he doesn't have to go with her, but they're afraid.

They're afraid. Yeah, I believe my husband's an okay guy, but she's coming on to him. I don't know. Who knows? Everybody's had their dick sucked by her. Maybe she's that good. Maybe she's amazing. And also, who knows what kind of confidence?

These are like fucking Kansas farm women. So who knows if they're like, you know, they're, they're, they're, feeling, you know, a little less than or something like that. So another here, Esther, the babysitter, said that she described being sent to the basement with the kids while men came and went upstairs. Yeah. What? Like a parade of them.

She said, quote, a lot of different men would come into her home. She would send the kids of myself into the basement. And I didn't think anything about it because I thought it was normal. You know, I'm the babysitter. This is like a teenage babysitter. the way. Another woman in Emporia, a grown-up, said, quote, she had several boyfriends, as I understand, and I can't condemn a person, but she was kind of a lady of the town. And then said, can I say that? Is that right to say in an interview? The lady of the town. She put it as, like, euphemistically as

possible for a human being to put it. And she's like, is that okay to say? It's so hard not to call her a whore. Yeah. I was thinking to call her the lady of the town or the best dick sucker around. I couldn't tell which one, but is this, that's the better way? Lady of the town. Lady of the town. A slut. No, God, no.

So, Marty, by the way, while all this is going on, is really taking a liking to Tom Bird, inviting him to play basketball on Thursday nights and eventually sponsoring Bird into the Flint Hills Optimist Club. It's a social club, it seems like. They played volleyball and softball together through the spring of, in summer of 83. sometimes after softball, Tom would come by Marty's house for a post-game beer. Some Sundays Tom conducted confirmation classes at the Anderson's homes even, and they were studying to become members even when they were, you know, they're just, you know, it's all happening basically here. Just at large, yeah.

At large. So now Lorna, early 83, how she ended up working for the church is they needed money, as we know. So she took a part-time job as a church secretary there with Tom as her boss. She was busy and the church was so busy that they needed the secretary. It's about 15 hours a week, you know, small job. But yeah, here she is. Lorna Anderson's going to do it. So we figure that Lorna and Tom probably met a softball game first.

Summer of 82, we're thinking, because they played in the leagues together. and then they must have met again when Lorna enrolled her daughter in the preschool that the church offered. But apparently their relationship of any kind didn't really happen until Lorna was hired in 83 as the church secretary. That's when it happened. All right. So there's rumors all over town, boy. Holy shit. Oh, my God.

Everyone's paying attention to Tom and it doesn't take long before people start going. And she's always around too. She's a little blonde secretary he's got is always right next to him. That is just, I don't know, and they'll live with each other a little elbow. Yeah. That's it. One here, a senior pastor at the mother church or the sister church of theirs took Tom aside for a word about to tell him, quote, what people are saying. You know, hey, people are saying just to let you know, you know, you know, make a lot.

it looked like you're not so close to her. People are talking. Boy, are they talking. Absolutely. And they said, so are the ministers. Everybody's talking. At one point, they discussed with him, maybe Lorna should just resign to, you know, keep this out of everybody's mouth. And in the end, they said, okay, we'll make a compromise. Lorna can keep her job, but only be at the church during working hours. Don't have her hanging around there and doing all that, just when she's working and leaving,

and that's fine. And Tom assured the church there's nothing improper going on that Lorna had a troubled marriage. And he said, a tendency to, quote, spiral down. She's in a bad marriage. She's a tendency to spiral out. And he said, I'm the shepherd. This is what a shepherd's supposed to do to, you know, get them back into the flock here. So help and, you know, mentor her with my penis.

So I take down my zipper and I'll give her a nice landing plate. She spirals down to her knees real good is what she does. God damn. March 83, Lorna is telling Jan Mead, her friend there, that she and Tom were involved. She used Jan as an alibi, like we said, saying that, you know, I'm going on business to see Jan and really she's meeting Tom. She said he's pretty good in bed for a minister and all that shit. And also telling her that, you know, I wish something would happen to my husband and his wife so he could just be together. Friday, July 15th, 1983, Sandy gets a promotion at the college.

Great. And she celebrates. She's very happy. They're going to go out that weekend and celebrate her and Tom. She's excited about it. So the next day, Saturday, July 16th, 1983, she has word of her promotion. She's going to have more classes, more time in front of students. And this is exactly what she's looking for in her career.

So they go out to dinner in a movie. They get home around 9.30, which means they must. to be eaten at five o'clock. How old are these people? So the babysitter's there around 9.30 when they get home. It's the teenage babysitter, and she's getting ready to leave.

Sandy says, can you stay a little bit longer? Stick around. Stick around. And she says, I guess. So Sandy grabs a bottle of wine and a bottle of bourbon from the house. And tells the sitter, we'll be back by 10.30. And then they get in the car and drive off with the liquor. We just need an hour.

Just need an hour to really tie one on and get fucking in the car. We're going to do shots. Yeah. So now Tom, this is what he says happened from there. They went back to the church and made a drink. Then they went to a private club where they had two more drinks each. Maybe it was the optimist club. I'm not sure.

They left the club around 1045 and returned to the church where Sandy drops. Tom off and he said she told him that she was going to drive to her office at Emporia State to work saying she'd only be gone like 45 minutes to an hour. She had a couple of things she had to do and straighten out at 11 o'clock at night. After drinking. On a Saturday night, by the way. Yeah. So he says between 1115 and 1145, he went jogging as one does. Now, now. What is this story? He does jog five miles a day, at least because he's a college distance runner and he's never stopped doing that.

So he's always running. So that's not abnormal. It is abnormal to go for a run at 11.15 on a Saturday night after you've been drinking. After a day and drinking. Yeah. Yeah. He said he jogged about 2.6 miles.

Because they knew the route he went. Okay. Sandy wasn't back by midnight. So he drove past the university and didn't find her, didn't see her car. So he started making calls. Now, his calls are in a real weird order of how you do this. Okay, now, you are Tom.

You went home, the babysitter's there with the kids. She went off to work. You're at the church. You drive past the university. You don't see your car there. What's the first place you call? Home. Home.

Is she home yet? See if she answers the phone or if the babysitter's still there. He calls the police first. Oh. Before he even tries to find out where the fuck Sandy is, he calls the police. then that's around midnight then an hour later 1 a.m. he calls the babysitter

to ask whether Sandy had come home or not what did he do in the interim sat in the parking lot? That's what I'm saying and there's an hour of I call the cops and maybe she's home now I'll call it's weird very very fucking strange

so the next morning July 17th 83 Sunday morning big day for the you know for the everybody here. For the church to big down. Yeah.

It's a payday for Christ's sake. It's just payday today. People are going to church, but there's a couple who's not going to church that day. They're instead going canoeing, which sounds more fun. Going to the Cottonwood River to go canoeing. They approached the launch area near the Rocky Ford Bridge, which is a narrow wooden decked iron bridge built in the 1890s.

You would not go over this for all the fucking money in the world. If we were driving somewhere and had to pass this, we would be going around 40 fucking miles to get around this bridge. I don't care how long it takes. I'm not crossing that in a vehicle. Wood. Not a chance. It's a wooden bridge, too.

But it's narrow and it's creepy looking too. It's 130 years old. Yeah, I mean, at the time it was not even 100 years old. Spring Chicken. It's only like 90 at the time. So it sits on a gravel road about eight miles southeast of town at the bottom of an S curve made of two hard 90 degree turns. So there's a lot going on there. So the canoers here, they are canoeists, however, I don't know which one is correct.

Before they could put the boat in the water, they see a couple things making them pause. One is a station wagon, a Pugé, by the way. Oh, yeah. 78, Pujo, overturned and partly submerged in the river. Oh, no. Which isn't, that's not where that goes. No. So then they see in the shallows just downstream, the body of what looks like a woman floating face down in the shallows.

Oh, no. Again, not good. So this is a guy named Brian Fletcher, one of the canoe people. He spots this body. It's a single lane steel bridge under it. And he drives to the trailer of Mark Gibbons, a friend of his nearby, because no one has a cell phone. And they call police. The officer comes and they discover that it's Sandy laying out there.

That's Sandy's car. And that's Sandy floating. So an officer comes to tell Tom Sandy's been found. They don't say where. They say, because he called last night saying my wife's missing, they said, we found your wife. Okay. That's it. That's all he's been told.

He said, what was she doing out there? We never go out there. Where? Where, sir? Exactly. Out there. And they're like, we haven't told you where there was. We didn't even say where we found her.

So that's an odd reaction. Did she say that? That's very strange. So where she was found here, one of the cops is a guy, Highway Patrolman named John Rule, and he's been in the whole police force for about 14 years, and Highway Patrol guys do a lot of car accident investigations. They do a lot of that shit. He's had over 700 that he's investigated.

Wow. Very experienced guy. Every day. And he said he's never seen anything like this accident before in 700, which is a bad sign. Why? Well, he said it didn't seem like an accident. He said, there's the car. It's a white 78 Pujo station wagon.

It's beached on its back in the shallows where the low and rushing Cottonwood River passes under the Rocky Ford Bridge. And then in a foot deep, Eddie in front of the car is the body of Sandy. So it's very strange. And Sandy should have apparently, you know, she should have been in church this day and all that. But instead she's faced down in a river. And it's a little bit odd. So he sees some things he doesn't like here. A couple of things he doesn't like.

First of all, gravel. There's some gravel things he doesn't like. He couldn't understand the gravel. He said it wasn't all torn up or tracked with the skid marks of a driver struggling to corolla careening car. If your car's going into the river, you're trying to stop it generally. Yeah, you're trying to steer away from water. Yeah, the road will certainly show much. of you trying to not hit the water?

Most people try not to drive into a body of water. Yeah, just a normal thing here. They said it would look like the driver had neither lost control nor struggled. It looked like the driver had safely negotiated the two sharp curves back up the road a little bit and deliberately aimed the car just to the right of the south approach of the bridge and shot precisely through a narrow gap in the brush, tumbling 65 feet to the river bottom. Huh. He said, that's what it looked like to me. Like, because they missed the bridge, it looks like, pretty much, like it went off. And it's very hard to miss the bridge and not stop the vehicle because of all the shit that's in the way, the obstacles.

Exactly. Something else, too, the car looked like it had tumbled down the embankment. They said a car with speed would have shot through the light brush and landed further out in the river. If you've ever seen a Dukes of Hazard episode, you'll understand. cars fly through the air while the Dixiehorn plays in the background. And Roscoe P. Coltrane gets very angry on the other side. You know, that's what we do. Yeah, that's how Smokey loses the bandit.

That's it, man. You got to jump. So they said that was weird. And they said this was just at the bottom of the embankment. The driver's door had been ripped off and is laying on the bank seven feet from the car. Fuck. They said the door was so close that rule, this officer, said, it told him that the car wasn't moving fast, maybe less than 10 miles an hour. But that didn't explain the body.

If the door was behind the car, why is the body in front of the car? Right. Things that fall out of things that are very heavy and moving tend to not move faster than them and end up in front of them, physics-wise. So it didn't make sense. They said, or at least on the same side. Why was she in front? Shouldn't she have been on the side? Why is she in front of the car? Also, the seat, the driver's seat of the station wagon was pushed far back.

Like someone over six feet would be sitting in it. She's 5-1, remember we talked about. That's weird. They said her feet wouldn't even have reached the pedals from the seat position. If you know someone that's 5-1, they drive on top of the fucking dashboard. Like when Sarah has her car, if I go to get in it, I can't even get in the seat in the position. it's in. I have to put it all the way back before I can even literally get into it. It would cry.

The wheel would impale me. Three inches shorter than me. When she drives anywhere and I go getting that driver's seat, I blast my fucking knees on the steering wheel. Oh, yeah. It's only three inches. When you're a kid, though, you're also uncomfortable, so you're close and like, I got to be on top of this because you don't, you're not confident in your skills. You don't sit back like, yeah, I'm just driving. You're like, oh, God, don't crash.

Yeah, I put my fucking foot on the deck. I hate people do that. But I could. I mean, I sit back so far. Yeah, who knows. So also there's blood that he finds. Oh, in the car? Which is odd.

Well, let's talk about it. Dry droplets of red-brown blood made a trail back up the embankment. Oh. Which is strange. Like she got off the road and just started leaking. Yeah. While flying through the air. Yeah.

She just leaked all the way down while somehow being outside of a car that she was in. Right. Now, he follows the blood trail. 22 feet from the car, he finds blood smeared on a tree branch. This is just like old-fashioned detective work here. There's a blood trail. This is very, yeah. Here's more blood.

This is about five feet above the ground, blood smeared on a tree branch. More blood is found spattered or even splattered on this one. I don't know if it's official spatter here. More blood on tree leaves around there. just west of the tree under the bridge this rule guy found a lady's watch that smashed a smashed lady's watch and that was odd also because objects

flying from a car tend to go in the same direction of the car again pesky physics playing a part here and the watch was considerably behind and west of the automobile so that made no sense That would take an act of force pushing it that way. So think about the whole scene and how it's set up now at this point. Bridge coming.

You'd have to negotiate turns to get to the bridge. The side of the bridge shot off the embankment, not shot off far enough to end up in the river. Right. You hit your face on a tree on the way in. Obviously, as the driver's door is torn off. Would that be maybe somebody's trying to get out of the car before it goes into the river? Like, I'll just bail. Yeah?

Maybe. But the tree branches five feet up so they'd have to be standing up. The watch being over there, the door. Yeah. The body in front of the car. There was an event and then the person was stuffed in the car unconscious and slowly driven off this cliff. How'd she end up in front of the car then? Excellent questions.

That's the thing. Even in that, even in a nefarious scenario, how the fuck did she end up in the front of the car? How did that happen? Unless she's beaten and thrown off the bridge and then. Somebody drove the car behind her? He's trying to figure out. He said, how the hell did the blood get on the tree well away from where it seemed that the driver had tumbled from the car? Right.

Straight above was the railing of the iron bridge, and so they went up to the bridge. Maybe there's something up there. Now, the blood is type A, which is the same blood type as Sandra and a shitload of other people, though. That's the problem. No DNA back then. There's no explanation of how Sandra's blood could be. located on the west side of the tree if her injury had resulted from being ejected from the vehicle as it traveled east of the tree from the road into the creek. It just didn't make any

sense. So they also found near the south end of the bridge when they went up there. There was a four inch diameter pool of what appeared to be blood on the bridge. They followed it to the railing where they found more blood and right below that was the tree with the blood on it. So they're thinking this came from up, not from... It rained, yeah. It rained. So they just kept, they stayed, they looked. This rule guy was really the only guy looking into any of this shit.

Nobody else, everyone just went, whoop, that's a bad accident, and that's as far as they wanted to get into it. He's the only guy telling people, I'm not sure about this. And they're going, ah, you're fine. Everyone's ignoring him. He said, that's not a typical, none of this is typical of an accident, is what Rule said. He couldn't be for sure or no for sure what happened, but it looked as if someone had beaten and thrown someone over the railing, specifically Sandy Bird.

So he went back to his office and told his supervisors he didn't think Sandy's bird was an accident. Sandy Bird's death was an accident. And they said, eh, it was. Don't worry about it. You spending too much time on this. Now, there's other evidence too here that she'd been standing on the bridge in the area where the blood was found. There was also evidence that at 9.30 p.m., she stopped by the home, talked to the babysitter,

picked up the wine and bourbon. We got the wristwatch under the bridge. Also, the planks on the bridge above the body had one to three inch gaps between the planks, as if this bridge couldn't get more terrifying. Right. It's not even together. No. They found two red plastic cups in the entrance to a field just to the south of the bridge,

which were similar to the ones found underneath. neat the bridge. Two of them. Two of them, bourbon wine. Now, you also, this is probably a place teenagers would come drink too.

So, you don't know. The other thing that they find is they kept returning to one single solitary detail. Sandy was not wearing a seatbelt. She loves seatbelts. Loves seatbelts. And they're like, when they said that

later on, her family, all of her friends was like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What now? Yeah. Impossible. One reporter said Sandy Bird always wore a seatbelt. It's a habit.

And you don't just break that habit. So she didn't have on a seatbelt and that was unusual. She was thrown from the car and that shouldn't have happened. Now we get into the autopsy here. There's an autopsy that shows that Sandy's fifth, sixth, 10th, 11th, and 12th left ribs were broken. All on the left side. That's a lot. Her left wrist was broken.

She had cuts on her upper right arm, left forearm, the left side of her forehead and her left cheek, which these sound like defensive wounds if I'm, you know. Yeah, defending from a right-handed person. Or, I mean, that is the side of the vehicle that you're being thrown from. But there's also bruises in various stages of purpling marked on her right forearm as well. Oh. Yeah. So the finding was that she had bled to death from a ruptured kidney. That's the impact.

Kidney. Oh, my God. She died of blunt force. That's horrifying. Horrifying. Fuck. No water was sucked into her lungs. So she hit the fucking water dead.

Dead. Which are you going to die in the air on the way down? Rarely. Yeah. That kidney would have to bleed out in seconds. in seconds. You rupture an organ. You're in trouble.

You better get your shit together, especially a kidney. That's a lot. Of blood? I don't know. You're asking the wrong guy. I know that Carthage is Tunisia. That's about all I know. I just found out.

I'm lost otherwise. Yeah. Another shit, I am not a doctor. I don't know. But I don't think that you would die in seconds if your heart ruptured. Rupures sure. Obviously, yeah. I mean, people have like ruptured spleen and shit like that, but your spleen is in a

important as your kidney. You know what I mean? Your kidney is doing functions all the time and you need it. But you also got two of them. I mean, if one explodes and it's a lot of blood in there too, it's internal bleeding. So they this, she's faced down on the water with no water in her lungs. So rule says she's got to be dead before she ever touched the water. So this is crazy. Dr. Juan Gabriel performed the autopsy and determined that she had died as a result of an automobile accident when her car, that's the final ruling when her car was the bridge and proceeded down an embankment into the river. The doctor noted that her most serious injury was a transacted kidney, transacted, okay, which he stated was the kind of injury people received commonly in motor vehicle accidents. That's common.

On force, yeah. And so he found food in her stomach and concluded she died within roughly three hours of her last meal. Dinner was around seven. That puts her time of death around 10. Now, around 10, even by Tom's telling, Tom was with her at 10 o'clock. Right. That's when they were having a drink or whatever. The jog, Tom describes, happens more than an hour after they think she's dead.

Okay. Now, time of death is really hard to pin down. That's the other thing, too, because nobody's systems are the same. It's a good ballpark, but you can't say, you said 10 and it was 11, and that's not enough to, go on. That's not enough evidence because the doctor could be wrong on the time of death. But it doesn't look good. It's another suspicious thing. That day, Rule, the officer, the highway patrolman, went to the bridge with a different, with the county coroner, says, let me take you and show you. This is what happens, by the way. A lot of times, this is how murders are decided, whether it's a murder or not, is the, you'll have a detective arguing with a coroner. going, let me show you why it is or it isn't a murder.

There's this, in the homicide book, there's this case where this guy came in off. His head was fucking mangled. He had skull fractures. He looked brutalized. I mean, horrifying. And the guy ruled it a homicide. And they said, it's not a fucking homicide. They had to take him to the scene to show him what happened.

The guy died in his bathroom. And where he fucking died, he wedged, he was wedged. so the door wouldn't open. So that bruising was his wife trying to open the door while he was wedged in between a fuck. And she didn't know it. She couldn't see it. And she was just trying to open.

So he goes, when you see, he was caught between the door and the toilet and kept getting nailed. That's why that is. It didn't die. It's natural causes. So they have to show them, and sometimes it's to sway them that it's a homicide. And this doctor said,

I don't think so. It's an accident. Still insisted. Yep. and question the decision really, except for rule of this guy. Police officers, they took their photographs and measurements and, you know, all of that. They said there was no evidence that the car was out of control or made any kind of breaking or sliding action, but the doctor concluded that her death was caused by loss of blood or hemorrhage due to internal injuries caused by blunt trauma.

In his judgment, her death resulted approximately 30 minutes to an hour after the injuries occurred, then she'd have fucking water in her lungs. Now, wouldn't she? wouldn't you know there's no satisfactory explanation as to why there's no water found in her lungs even though she was found on her water and was supposedly alive for 30 minutes

to an hour. Doesn't make sense. So yeah. Now the babysitter later described Tom coming home that night. She said he was in a shirt and tie not jogging attire. Yeah. And Tom's

answer was, well, I changed into the shirt after the run, and it wasn't a tie. I was in a polo shirt. And so the 14, she's just a 14-year-old babysitter. She's confused. She doesn't remember what I. She can't identify a tie. What does she know about men's fashion?

Nothing. You know, come on. So Sandy's family, by the way, they're not in Kansas. They're in Arkansas. Her mother, Jane Stringer Grismer is her name now, because she's got a stepfather named Jerry Grismer. They live in Little Rock, and they seem like very. nice people, by the way. When Sandy died, the Grismers were given the accident story, and they were like, I mean, they have no doubt, no reason to question it. Your daughter was in a car accident and died. You go, oh, God, that's terrible.

apart from the seatbelt thing, but okay. And they don't know that, though. Okay. They don't know any of this. That's the other thing. Jane, the mom, had been convinced from the start that it was a little suspicious, but, you know, it wasn't a big deal. Her and her husband would later hire an attorney, but they said publicly, we do know we fully support Tom. We believe that Tom had nothing to do with anything, obviously, and it was a horrible accident.

You know, they asked. You think they'd die. in the car. You rarely jump to the conclusion. They were thrown out and violently dead. And deathed, yes, violently killed. The other thing is they ask him for a copy of the autopsy report. And he says, oh, yeah, sure, then never gives it to them.

So they really like the autopsy. That's weird. Then Tom tells people his version the next day following the discovery of Sandy's body. So the Monday after that, he discusses Sandy's death with a bunch of different people. and his versions are a bit inconsistent. He doesn't tell the same story twice, really. He gave a statement to one person in which he said that early in the evening, Sandra bought, brought hamburgers to the church, and they ate dinner there.

And then she changed clothes at the church, and she went to a, and then they went to a movie. After the movie, they went by the house, and Sandra picked up a bottle of wine and bourbon in approximately 9.30. They went to the church, fixed a drink, and thereafter went to the process. private club where they had two more drinks each, left the club at 1045, went back to the church where she dropped him off. She went to her office, like we said. He said, I jogged my 2.6 miles.

She said she'd be gone by 45 minutes. I drove by the university. She wasn't there. I called the cops. I called the babysitter, called the personnel department at the university, all that shit, called the hospital. They said, so basically, if we accept this, the last food she ate. was about 7 p.m. at the church, and the first autopsy found food in Sandy's stomach, which caused him to form an opinion that she had died within three hours, would have put that in the neighborhood of 10 o'clock. Even his mats as we ate at 7. So, okay. So who does Tom blame?

Who? It's the state's fault. Oh, okay. The state's fault. It's not that shitty car. No, not that you bought your fucking wife a French car. That's not it. They're French, right, Pujos? Like a Renault. Are they out of Fiatz, you dip shit? They're out of Reynolds that day. That's the problem. So he insists the state is liable that there was poor signage and that's what caused the crash. And he is saying he is going to sue the state for this bridge.

Oh. Basically. Now the bridge, the Rocky Ford Bridge, the weird part about this bridge is it serves no real purpose. It doesn't go anywhere. There's nothing over there to go. They said it's at the end of a gravel road, southeast of town, that led functionally to no destination. It's not a route anyone takes to get anywhere. Locals describe it with this.

They said, quote, it's not a main road coming into Emporia. The road goes from nowhere to nowhere. It's just that they put a bridge across this river because why not? Because it's a river and we should probably get a bridge across it. So they were like, this makes no sense. Why was she, what was she doing alone, apparently, if he says he wasn't there, near midnight on a Saturday at the creepy bridge? Yeah. So it's the, the, uh, a newsman covered it this way and said, what's a preacher's wife doing out here in the middle of the night alone?

Is there something going on here we need to know about? What's going on? Or is it any of your fucking business? Maybe she's cheating. That's the other thing. We don't know. That's a, then, then who's she cheating with? Because we really got to talk to that guy.

Yeah. Rumors are huge again. They fly fast and furious, these fucking rumors. That Tom is sleeping with his secretary and Sandy's accident wasn't an accident because it's Tom because she wants to fuck the secretary. And Lorna also wanted her husband dead. They've heard there's insurance money. Tom has insurance on Sandy. And oh boy.

And it's a whole plot. And it's a big deal. I mean, every, the problem is all of these rumors turn out to a lot of, there's a lot of truth to. A lot of these rumors is the problem in terms of money stuff and things like that. Now, at the hospital, Sandy's colleagues from Emporia State were asking each other, this is really a fucking, what do you think? You know what I mean? What do you think?

Marty Anderson's coworkers at the hospital were literally saying, Tom Bird did it. He totally did it. They were like convinced of it. Yeah? So, yeah. Now, a friend of Lorna's later on said, this is great when asked about Lorna in this whole situation. Quote, my impression has always been probably that she's a little bit on the Looney Tunes side, which is a very nice church lady way to put, she's a fucking whack job. It's just great.

Happy Lapeu. Yeah. Now, the other thing is the town does not want any of these rumors to be true because that kind of makes them look. bad. Makes this whole place look like shit. Yeah, basically one long-time person from the area said that people just didn't believe it. They said the idea that we don't have these types of people here was a very prominent feeling.

It's not someone from here. We don't have that kind of person here. We don't have nice people. Those kind of people. Those kind of people. Late July through October 1983, still a traffic accident, ruled as a traffic accident. Tom's now a single father of three and is even closer to Lorna

Lorna than he was before. People are saying that now they're seen nearly every day together all the time. Around the hospital. And he's still married and he's still alive at this point. Marty's well alive till November. So around the hospital Marty works at, the nurses are gossiping about it

and all that kind of thing. And he says people they were talking about, well, maybe it's an accident and they said he rolled his chair out into the hallway and said, you don't believe that, do you? Tom Byrd did it. And then rolled his chair back in. That's Marty. Yeah. And this is the guy that he's friends with and all that. So then Friday, November 4th is the Highway 177 killing of Marty where they pull over. She says she's sick. Guy pops out of the fucking cornfield with a gun and a mask and robs him and shoots him. And then the next morning, she's on the phone trying to get 270 grand.

And then Tom fucking Bird is the guy doing the funeral. Okay. Now that's that all, when I said in the beginning, it's like, oh yeah, they're pastured at the funeral. It's a little more weird than that, right? So then Sandy's family finds out about Marty's death. That's a big deal. Okay. Yeah. Because now they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. on a second here. The people in Arkansas found out? Yeah, Sandy's family finds out about it. And they're like, hmm, that's weird. So yeah, Sandy had confided in her mother the fears about Tom and Lorna before she died. And now they're like the same lady, the same guy whose wife, Sandy thought the husband was having an affair with. Now her husband's dead and his wife is dead. This is

suspicious. Yeah. So now they started getting a little bit different. They hire a lawyer. They discover that the Emporia Police, Kansas City Highway Patrol, and the Kansas City Bureau of Investigation are all now, after this death, now all circling back to Sandy's death as well. They said, yeah, we want this.

And they said at that point, they again asked for Sandy's autopsy report, but Tom wouldn't give it to them. Okay. Tom, now if I'm Tom at this point, first thing I'm doing, is distancing myself from Lorna, at least publicly. This has gotten way out of hand. Way out of hand. Do you see why I was like, oh, Christ, this is going to be a pain.

He has to put together. This is so much shit to figure out people's lives. It's out of hand. So if your time, though, you're going to publicly try to, you know, inch away from her. You certainly got to just go to God and get away. Just do your job. No, he becomes her spokesperson. for the press.

I'm speaking through my pastor, you know. He offers, he says that, he says that the mask gunman looked scared is what he says in the press when he's defending Lorna. Now, people are like, A, you weren't there. How would you know? And B, yeah, even if she told you, pitch black wearing a ski mask. Pitch black outside wearing a ski mask. How could you see anybody who was scared under that?

So that's an odd thing. So the police go, well, let's look into a situation. shit here. Let me look into Lorna a bit here. So they do. When they look into Lorna trying to find extramarital affairs to see if there was motivation, they found just locally more than 60 men who acknowledged having sexual relationships with Lorna, just locally. So since they've lived here, 60 men in a town of less than 20,000. At the time, like 28,000 people. She fucked 60 guys under her husband's nose in a small town. Wow. This is disturbing. I mean, that doesn't mean she's banging Tom necessarily. Right. Yeah. But then they found witnesses who hear Tom and Lorna use pet

names for each other. What? There's some greeting cards that we'll find that we'll talk about in a little bit here that were recovered from her bedroom signed by Tom. And one said, I love you. I am confident of the future. And that makes the present, okay. Oh my God. There were, they took work conferences, which were just the two of them going and fucking, they would hold hands if they were out in another town. They would, you know, act like they were together. Yeah, people who were around them who didn't know the whole story were like,

they have a real electricity between them, those two. Yeah. It's really good. Beautiful relationship. Yeah. It's fucking wild. Now, the letters we're going to talk about, and we'll get in more detail about how they found them. But basically in these letters, they kept saying how they couldn't wait to be together.

And they kept using the phrase after Friday night, after Friday night, which is when Friday night is when Marty was killed. Uh-huh. After this Friday night, after Friday night, they were all signed Tom. So the police's theory, basically at some point in the spring of 83, they decided, let's kill our spouses, basically. Unbelievable. That's what they're thinking. Divorce is expensive. and Tom would owe child support

and Marty's going to try to get custody and the divorce would not, you know, divorce isn't going to pay out a life insurance policy. There's seven kids to think about here. Seven? Yeah. Seven, by the way, all under the age of 10. We can't divorce.

Seven very small children. That seven children will destroy their lives. We have to murder their parents. That'll be much better for them. That's what's happening right now. Holy shit. So Lorna wanted Marty's insurance money. Tom would probably want his wife gone and, you know, didn't want to be poor.

You'd take the money too. So why not? So here's what they're thinking now. People start coming forward with things. Oh, with the stories. Well, you remember Darrell Carter? Yeah. Because they're looking for guys she went out with.

So Darrell Carter is one of the guys she went out with. He is a local building contractor. his brother is Dan he is a welder who does hair on the side what I've never okay I've never heard of anybody pulling their shit off their face

and then being like you know their big fucking black mask thing pulling that off and then be like so what do we want here what are we doing now bangs a perm what are you going on what's happening so you have blisters on your forearms have you ever met anyone who goes

I'm a welder and I'd do a little woman's hair in the evening I've never heard that once Do a few highlights at night You know nothing crazy So Dan is that brother Danny

So there's Danny and Darrell Which of course is confusing But both of them By the way Had fucked Lorna That's the thing They really have in common Besides blood

Is They're both real brothers And Eskimo brothers At the same time That's unbelievable They've nailed it They have come out of and gone in, the same vaginas. The same ones.

Dan had cut her hair at a commercial street salon in 1981 and then drifted into a brief affair. And then Darrell had his own history. So in May, 1983, Lorna asked Darrell to meet her at the church. This is after Sandy, obviously, had gone. He came, or no, no, it's before. I'm sorry. He came not knowing what. it was about. This is before Sandy is killed,

okay? Yeah. Um, he got there and Lorna was there and so's the minister. So he's like, it's weird for the chick I'm banging who's married to invite me to church and then have a minister be there. Right. I thought she wanted to get dirty in a pew or something. You know what I mean? Some real filthy shit.

Fucking a confessional. Yeah. Yeah. So out of, uh, does Lutherans have confessions? I don't know. I just assume there's a booth somewhere that you can be quiet in. I mean, you can, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it be a confessional booth people apparently they're really horny it's a jack booth if you want it to be maybe it's one of those churches that has a screaming room yeah it's like a gemstone's prayer pod you can go in and whack it so um the two of them then laid out for this guy two different plans to

kill marty this is the original thing they're talking about okay now the first plan was tom's plan He told Darrell that he'd been out on a country gravel road south of Emporia, and there's a bridge over the river, he said, maybe 15 feet down to the water. And if a person were drugged or drunk, that person could very easily miss the curve in the road and go over. All right. This is how he's saying we should kill Marty. Yeah. Mind you. So the plan is drug Marty, take him to that bridge, put him in a car, send the car off the embankment into the river so it looks like an accident.

Now, Darrell's job, they don't need Darrell for that, but Darrell's job would be to wait nearby and drive Tom back into town afterwards, where Lorna would always, would have been home the whole time with a rock solid alibi watching four kids. Absolutely. So that's plan one. We could do that. Or here's another one. You know, this is Tom and Lorna said this one's a little cruder, but it could also work. We could stage a robbery and just shoot Marty. Yeah.

But these are his two ideas of how to kill people. Yeah. They said if we shoot him, we don't even need your help. But, you know, that's option too. So according to Daryl at some point in this conversation, Tom said this line. This is fucking amazing. Amazing is what he said.

Incredible. He said, so who's going to do it then? If you don't need me, then why are you telling me about it? One, then who's going to kill Marty? and Tom said, quote, I'm a man of God and I'm going to kill Martin Anderson. What does that mean? I don't know. That's the craziest statement anyone's ever made.

Is it not? I'm a man of God, so I'm going to murder my girlfriend's husband. Okay. I read the Bible and Kane just did it. I mean, fuck it. Do it. Darrell said, I don't want any part of this, basically. He said that the meeting, you know, he said,

That's not what he said at the time, though. He said, oh, I need to think about it, and which is, let me get out of here right now. As he was leaving, Tom said, if anyone asked you why you'd been at the church tonight, say that it was to talk about the youth group selling fireworks at your fireworks stand. Go ahead and lie. So, go ahead and lie to us. And go ahead and lie to whoever. So a few days later, Tom shows up at Darrell's job site to press him for an answer because he had just said, I don't know. So Darrell asked, you know, why didn't you just get a divorce, both of you?

What are you talking about here? And Tom said, well, Lorna doesn't want a divorce. She wants life insurance money. That's why. And he said, I love Lorna. Yeah. Yeah. He said, I love Lorna.

I want to help her. And he said that I'll be the one presiding over the funeral, so I'll be close to her. And no one would ever suspect me because I'm a minister. so I can get away with it, basically. Darrell finally called two days later and said, I can't do this. I want nothing to do with it. So then plan B.

Also, he's the hardest motherfucker in Kansas. How about that? Yeah. That is a scary human being. Very scary. Dude, he's a fucking sociopath. It's crazy. Diabolical.

I'm a man of God. I'll kill him. I'll get it. That means I won't get in trouble because they won't figure it out. Right. So late summer of 83, plan B entered Dan Carter. The other brother Lorna's fucked, okay? Yeah, he's the welder beautician, Dan.

During this arrangement, okay, Lorna gave Dan Carter $5,000 to get Marty killed. By the way, $5,000 came from Sandy Bird's life insurance settlement. Tom paid it, by the way. That is so gross. So gross. Dan passed the money up to his supervisor at the Wolf Creek nuclear plant, a guy named Gregory Curry. And then Gregory Curry passed that along to a third man down in Mississippi. So essentially, Dan didn't say, I'll do it. He said, I'll find someone to do it for $5,000. He went to his boss at work, which is, imagine going to your boss and go, I need a hitman.

You know anybody? And then the hitman said, I actually do know a guy, or the boss that I do know a guy, some dude in Mississippi. Imagine subcontracting something out and making zero money on it. Nothing. Not a goddamn thing to middle this shit. Subcontracting murder and getting money on. It's not like drugs where he could pinch a little or something. People could steal a little.

There's nothing to pinch. What are you going to do? He gave you $5 grand and you paid $5 grand. You did. And he just wants to do that. Now, the other thing that's crazy is the guy in Mississippi says, yeah, I'll do it, gets the money, and then just doesn't do a goddamn thing. Says, I'm not afraid of you people. And who are you going to call?

He's a real contractor, because that's what contractors do. Yes, I got your money. Now what? Yeah. You paid up front? I am not showing up to plum this job. Yeah. A welder has to do the job.

A contractor, they don't. He's not coming around. So plan C now, since plan B isn't going to work, because they're out five grand now. So they were like, okay, plan C, let's do plan C, which is going to be what already happened. So now people keep coming forward. And remember the highway patrolman rule that guy? He's just waiting because he believes that this was definitely not an accident, but it's still an accident officially. So that's what's going on.

Then Martin Anderson gets shot to death. That's when he's like, okay, come on, guys. Seriously. Holy shit. This is clearly not fucking an accident. So that's bad. So by the end of the month, people are telling cops everything now about Lorna

and about how she tried to hire someone. The Carter's both come forward and say she tried to hire us because they don't want to get in trouble. Yeah. And you'd love to blame these cops for the stupidity, really, and just the turning a blind eye. But this happened 40 years later in Mesa, Arizona. It happens all the time. Same fucking thing.

Traffic accidents are real. Traffic accidents are like fire. They're real tough, weird things can have. Fire is that when a homicide detective sees a fire, they're like, fuck. There's a case I'm not going to fucking solve because there's just, you know, you. Even, you know, if you have proof of arson, that's not proof of this. It's not proof of that. It's really difficult to prove who did it.

Unless someone saw someone lighting a fire, it's hard to prove who lit a fire. Right. Someone who died in the fire because it could have lit the fire. If that lady hadn't killed her fucking kids, she may have been able to kill countless other adults. Oh, tons. The only reason Lori Val got caught is because they were minors and people, those are accountable. You're accountable for them. Yeah.

Yeah, people look for minors. That's the problem. Yeah. Yeah, they'll look. Totally. So, you know, this is the big talk here. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation called Trooper Rule. And he said, yeah, this is exactly what I think. I think that Pastor Bird here had connived to arrange to kill Marty.

And I think he had something to do with his wife's death. I think all these things are happening. Wow. So November 23, 1983, Lorna is arrested in charge with conspiracy to commit murder against her husband. Okay. Okay. December 1st, 1983. Tom contacts a woman named Jennifer Peterson, who lives a few doors down and happens to be Darrell Carter's girlfriend. Oh. Plan A guy, Darrell Carter. Tom says he needs to talk to Darrell. Jennifer offers to have Darrell call him, and Tom says, no, no phones.

Which isn't suspicious at all. So Darrell hears about this, knows exactly what the fuck's going on, and goes right to the cops. Because again, I'm not involved in this shit. So December 10th, 83, the cops convinced Darrell to meet with Tom and wear a wire. Go ahead and meet with him.

Do what you want you to do, but wear this wire. This is the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, is coordinating all this. He meets Tom in a parking lot, and they want to talk in Tom's car. because they said that you're less likely to be murdered in his car.

Someone's less likely to murder you in their own car, basically. Yeah. Which, if you've ever seen a mob movie, yeah, then you've got to get rid of the car. It's a mess. You want to murder them in their car. It's a mess.

Yeah. You got to call the wolf. Yeah, you got to call the wolf. You got to tell Karen you hit a skunk. It's a mess. So. You got to dress and dushy clothes. It's all of it.

So Tom openly talks openly for 45, fucking minutes. What? 45 minutes. Carter received instructions talking Tom's car. Yeah, talking Tom's car. The thinking was

people don't shoot in their own cars. Also, get him to admit that he'd been involved in the murder solicitations. Now, Carter said he didn't pay attention to instructions, though. He and Byrd sat in his pickup, Carter's pickup. Not in Byrd.

Carter did not ask Bird a single direct question. He never mentioned the plot. He told police that he that had been hatched at the church. He just sat there. Carter opened things up by saying, quote, things are a mess, aren't they? Which is really all you need to say, though.

Yeah. And then they chatted about Danny's troubles, about Lorna's arrest, about the cops. Tom Bird wanted to make sure Carter understood why they had to meet at the church last spring, and that was to discuss the youth group selling fireworks, right?

Right. So they go back and forth and keeping each other's names and everything out of everything and talk about rumors that were ruining Byrd's name at that time. And the subject gets around to Marty and Byrd said, I'm not happy or sad about Marty dying. He did complain that the police are desperate to tie me to this fucking murder. Yeah. So Darrell, or he asked, do you think that she had anything to do with it? Do you think that she did it or had it had it done?

And Tom said, I'm pretty, I'm sure she didn't do it. And Carter said, do you think she had it done? And Tom says, I know she talked about it before. I don't, I can't tell you what I think, you know, but I think she tell me and she may one of these days. So then Carter said, that was an awfully big coincidence in your wife's death and Marty's death. that's pretty much the same two plans you came to me with. Right. Yeah.

How would she not know if that really happened? That's what I mean. So Tom said, there's nothing I can do about that. I'm just trying to exist and build my life back up. As the conversation winds down, Tom says, I don't think Lorna will ever talk to me until it's all over. And I think maybe she'll talk to me, but I don't know if it's ever going to be all over.

over. Okay. Now, for his cooperation, Dan is allowed to plead to a reduced charge and get probation. Oh. For that. For hearing a solicitation of a murder and not going right to the cops for that. Okay. Got it. Yeah. His supervisor, who took the money and gave it to a guy in Mississippi, also gets drawn into this, and he gets a deal as well because the Mississippi guy, they never caught. He's a moron. Somehow he's a supervisor of a nuclear facility. Think about that. He's in charge of fucking atoms and protons and shit. That's terrifying.

So, Tom is now charged in early 84 with criminal solicitation to commit first-degree murder. So is Lorna. Same charge. This is for the Marty plot. Okay. So no one's actually been charged with actually killing anyone at this point. The solicitation case is also, though, going to bring Sandy's accident way back into focus for the public and things like that. The question is, will the church say fuck this guy?

They should. They absolutely don't. They don't. Faith is a crazy thing, man. Church people sometimes can put faith into people, fallible human beings as well, which is mind-blowing to me. Um, that, that's the craziest fucking thing. They sit around going, nobody's God and nobody's God and nobody's God, but then they treat people the same way as you would treat. He's not arrested though, right?

God. Yeah. He's arrested. Yeah. Okay. No, he is arrested here. And we still have faith in him. Absolutely.

They bail him out. They raise his fucking bail. Holy. Holy. Your pastor, your minister is in jail for murder solicitation. For his, the secretary, he's banned. that lady's wife and you go, well, let's bail them out. Jesus.

Holy. So, yeah, it's fucking crazy. There's a headline in the Wichita Eagle that says, congregation rallies around pastor. Jesus. They spoke of Christian love and the presumption of innocence. They treated the charges. They basically said it's obviously a mistake and, you know,

they'll figure it out during the hearings and they'll dismiss it. This is crazy. He's accused of solicitation, not of the, murder. So we don't think he's, we don't think he would do that. No. On the Sunday of the week he's arrested, he is back on the fucking pulpit doing a sermon. And they're sitting there like, mm-hmm, yep, here's my money. Wow. Worshippers are, you know, filing out of the church were greeted by television crews and reporters because this is a big fucking story. It becomes a national story. At one point, the Gazette ran an editorial essentially begging for

for the rumors to stop, warning that innocent people are being hurt. It just turned into a mess. Imagine if they had social media back then? Crazy. Holy shit. Imagine if there was some fucking Facebook group called Emporia's moms or some horse shit.

Wow, that would have been a mess. So anyway, the insurance, Marty carried the insurance policy in the neighborhood of $270,000 and Sandy Bird, her insurance was around $300,000. So between the two of them, they were looking to collect,

almost 600 grand, which was a crazy amount of money back then. So, yeah, there was a joint investigation that opens in August of 84 now here. The joint investigation of this is the Lion and Geary counties to look back on Sandy as well. And the press, they join up with each other too as well, press from different areas. they are trying to figure this whole thing out. They said, you know, a picture's emerging of a pastor and his lover and they're trying to get rid of the spouses. It's real, fucking gritty and grimy. One of the reporters said, I got mainly pushback from members of the church and other members of the community.

They said, I'm not saying anyone tried to cover it up, but it was almost like things like this don't happen in a little town like this. People couldn't wrap their heads around something like that happening in Emporia. They refused to believe it, literally. Just as a thing here. No. And people can just not believe shit. Yeah. And there's people that say fucking people didn't exist that existed and there's goddamn film footage of and shit from, you know.

I heard a guy saying that Babe Ruth didn't exist yesterday. What? And a major league baseball player was saying how Babe Ruth doesn't, didn't exist. An idiot, a fucking moron. Why would he say that? Once everybody's died who has seen something, people just go, well, it didn't happen. Because, I mean, no one's alive. It's fucking crazy.

It's crazy, even though there's so much footage of Babe Ruth. He's in fucking movies, for Christ's sake. There's only, I think, two pictures of Abraham Lincoln. Yeah. He didn't exist either. Maybe the Civil War didn't happen. There's people that say World War II didn't happen. Yeah.

Didn't even, not the whole. Holocaust, World War II. The whole fucking war didn't happen. Well, my grandfathers are fucking liars because they told me all about it. What the hell were they doing? You know what I mean? It's crazy. So October 84, now it's time to get it on.

Exhumation time, people. Here we go. We're pulling them out of the ground. We're pulling Sandy out of the ground. We know how Martin died. It's just a matter of who. Sandy, we pull her out of the ground. Second autopsy performed by Dr. William Eckert, a certified forensic pathologist.

In addition to the injuries noted by Dr. Gabriel, the second autopsy reveals fractures of the left shoulder blade, a laceration to the top of her head indicating a considerable amount of impact or blunt trauma, which according to Dr. Eckert was capable of rendering a person unconscious instantaneously a blow to the fucking head. Also found three linear type injuries above the left wrist, which was fractured, a similar injury on the right arm above the wrist, and one in the elbow joint of the right arm. The opinion was the injuries on the back of her arms were defensive injuries. Yeah, put her hand. Yeah, he explained, you know, obviously trying to ward off blows, basically. And in the doctor's opinion, the lanier marks above her wrist could have been caused by an

instrument such as a branch of a tree, a baseball bat, a pool cue, or a tire iron. You know. All of which are vicious. murder utensils. To attack your five-foot-one wife with. Yeah. Crazy. In this doctor's opinion, the injuries to Sandra Bird's kidney could have been caused by her falling from a height in excess of 20 feet.

It didn't have to be a car accident. And the other thing is they found no injuries to her body, which could have been caused from an ejection from an automobile. None of the injuries matched that whatsoever. Shit. So this turns it into a homicide. Yes. Okay. Now, remember those letters we talked about that they found?

Yeah. Okay. Love you to the move. These were found at the bottom of Lorna's lingerie drawer. Ah! Which, by the way, is packed. It's extensive. This is the Geary County Sheriff Bill Deppish.

He says, as a dug down through the lingerie, and some of it was pretty exotic. He comments on the exoticness of the laundering. My wife. won't wear any of that shit. I try to get her, but... One of the chances he left all of that in the drawer. Yeah, he's like, or at some point he went, you know, you just know it. Put one in his pocket.

Shirt pocket. He said, I went clear down to the bottom of that drawer and found a couple of envelopes. And inside were letters, two love letters signed by Tom describing how the two of them would finally be together after Friday night. Oh, boy. And Martin Anderson was murdered on a Friday night, and the letters were written before that. So that doesn't look good. Neither does that lace pocket square with his police uniform. Is that a crotchless lace pocket square you got there?

That's a hell of a nice piece of that uniform, buddy. There's a very nice front tricks of Hollywood pocket square. That's excellent right there. Boy, I'll tell you what. So late 1984, is Lorna going to talk? Is she going to crack? You'd assume she would, right? Because, you know, Tom's not going to do it, but maybe.

Maybe, you know, it's possible. Who knows? Well, she does. She gives police her account of Sandy's death that Tom told her. So this is hearsay, mind you, but still. Perhaps from the one matters. Yes, describing a tire iron, a struggle on the bridge, and Sandy trying to hold.

This is disturbing. Okay. A tire iron. This is fucking, this is really bad. I guess Tom said he and Sandy drove out to Rocky Ford Bridge together. He struck her with the tire iron, which the doctor called. Not bad. Causing the linear blunt injuries that they would find.

He thought he killed her and tried to throw her over the rail. The problem was she was still alive and grabbed the side of the bridge and fucking held on. Oh my God. She is dangling from the fucking bridge. So he kicked her over and over again until she couldn't hold on anymore and fell off and died. Wow. That is fucking cold-blooded, dude. I'm sorry, that's ice cold, dude. Ice cold. And she had to have died on her way down because she didn't get any water in her lungs. No, that's the thing. I think she might, I think she might, to fell on the rocks before that. Oh, God, damn.

So what he did is he kicked her, and then he staged it. He put her body into the car because it fell, and so he got her back into the car, aimed the car at the embankment and let it roll. Now, the forensic evidence matches up goddamn perfectly with exactly what they were talking about. So, yeah. And then Lorna said, oh, by the way, Tom also shod. Got Marty. Oh, yeah.

So this isn't good at all. Now, the kids, everybody's kids are all a mess. Yeah. The Anderson kids are all younger than 10, and the birds have three kids all younger than 10. Tom and Sandy are, I guess, parents here, Tom and Sandy are legally contesting the custody of their grandchildren, their parents. So Sandy's parents want them, Tom's parents want them. July 1984 is

Tom's trial for just solicitation of murder of Marty Anderson. That's it. Just the shot. Just that. Yeah.

Newspaper reporters come in from everywhere all over the place. Television, radio crews. There's those big TV trucks

in the street. It's wild. The New Yorker came. Everybody. One of them said, the New Yorker said, a preacher's deadly sin.

And then under it, I'm a man of God and I'm going to kill my lover's hubby. The prosecution said when she didn't come to pick him up, he didn't call home. He didn't call the school. He called the police. Why? Because he knew exactly where Sandy was. Floating face down in the Cottonwood River, bitches.

I added the bitches part. Also, why he was wearing a shirt and tie. They said, well, he'd just beaten his wife on a bridge and staged a wreck. He's going to have dirt and blood all over his jogging clothes. and he's going to need to change out of them. And what does he have clean shirt and tie from dinner? Right. There you go.

So otherwise, they don't have a whole lot more than people, you know, they have people testifying he tried to get, hire them, all this type of shit. He's found guilty of conspiracy. Okay. Or solicitation, I'm sorry. Solicitation, not conspiracy. Sentencing comes around, you, sir, may fuck off two to seven years. That's light.

Seems a little light for trying to get someone to murder somebody. Seven being the max, huh? Yeah, that's what's crazy. The newspaper says, quote, Emporia waits. Questions persist. Who killed Marty Anderson? If Tom Bird really killed his wife, how did he get back from the bridge that night? In some living rooms in the city, the feelings are firm.

Tom Bird may have had something to do with his wife's death, but the state wasn't going to be able to prove it. So they don't believe it. January 85, the grand jury interns returns with indictments charging Tom Bird with first-degree premeditated murder of his wife. That's not good. Warren has served on him while he's in the jail or in prison, I should say. The newspaper is putting, given plot holes there. I mean, granted, any lawyer worth their muster is going to, mustard is going to be able to, is it mustard?

I don't know. I'm going to be able to find that loophole. But, you know what I mean? Yeah. Still, it's very strange that they're putting out an opportunity for him to get out, giving him an out for this. That's what's fucking crazy. In the newspaper. Fucking nuts.

And they're holding up Lauren and stuff because she's a witness now. So that's what they do here. July 1985 is the trial for Sandy's murder that Tom has to do. Now, the positions of her body and the car in their final resting places do not support the theory that Sandra Byrd had been ejected from a moment. moving vehicle when its door was torn off. The state's expert witness testified that given the mechanics of the automobile's role, it was his opinion that Sandra's body would have been deposited on the land between the door and the final resting place of the vehicle and that her body would not have ended up

in front of the vehicle in the river. The interior of Sandra's car contained no blood or hair, which would have indicated a person banging around the car, which is what would have happened. They said the physical evidence at the scene and more comprehensive. complete examination of her body, performed with the second autopsy, proved that she wasn't killed in an automobile accident, but fatal injuries as a result of being beaten and thrown off a bridge. They also bring in Charles Henderson, who's a former inmate of the Lansing State Penitentiary. Love these guys. Yeah, he said that he'd been in a cell right next to Tom's.

And according to him, Tom visited with him about the death of his wife and indicated that he and Lorna Anderson conspired to have his own wife killed. So he also said he discussed with Henderson the amount of money that he and Lorna Anderson were going to receive from insurance companies. On redirect, Henderson said that Tom Byrd told him that he had his wife killed. So there's that. The defense does have an expert. They have Dr. Bridgens, and he concluded that Sandra Byrne had to been injured when she was thrown out of the driver's side doors. It went over the embankment at a speed of 15 to 20 miles an hour and rolled. over. He concluded that the state's theory of how Sandra Byrd died was unlikely based on her

injuries. And various other witnesses called by the defense tended to support the theory that the death was a result of an accident rather than intentional. Now, the verdict comes in, nine men and three women, which he was probably pretty happy with that fucking spread. Well, I mean, that's three guilties right out of the game. That's what he's looking at. We got to hopefully those nine men could convince those three women how innocent I am. Yeah. They deliberate for about six hours and they find him guilty as balls. Oh.

Absolutely guilty of killing his wife. Sentencing comes around, you, sir, may fuck off life, but parole eligible after 15 years. 15. So 15 to life, essentially, is what he got. Wow. Now, August of 85, Lorna pleads guilty to two counts of criminal solicitation to commit first-degree murder of her husband and begins serving her state sentence here. The problem is the way she described some of her of what Tom said happened or didn't happen or wanted to happen is at odds with what Darrell Carter said. So she told the court that they had planned to drug Marty and place him on some railroad tracks to be run over or to have someone drop a brick on Marty's car as he drove under a highway overpass.

Not the other things that Darrell said, which was the things that actually happened. Lorna also agreed to tell authorities in Lyon County about what she knows about what happened at the Rocky Ford Bridge. That's part of her guilty plea. She has to talk about Sandra, which is a totally different case, which is very strange. They said it's an odd arrangement considering Tom Bird is serving time for that. It's already over. He just got found guilty. Right.

So she also went to Geary County, told the investigators there what she knows about what happened on that highway. That night her husband was slain. And after their talk, sheriffs did some digging, but didn't find anything. They had to wait for good weather and enough money and a farmer's permission to go through his farm ponds. Oh. We'll find out why. On November 1st, an investigator brought a metal detector over a pile of mud bulldozed from a pond and found a 22 caliber automatic. He threw the gun in the pond?

That's it. Believed to be the weapon used to kill Marty. Shortly after Marty was killed, investigators searched the Anderson home for a 22 but never found it. Marty had kept a 22 that belonged to his father. The weapon in the pond is his fucking father's 22. He killed Marty with his dad's gun? With his dad's gun and kicked a small woman off a bridge as she tried to hold on for her life. Also, how else would he have gotten that gun unless she gave it to him?

She, exactly. Yeah, he didn't go in and get it. I mean, he is over there tagging her all the time, but who knows? She's an asshole to give him that gun. Yeah. So during sentencing, Lorna gets you, ma'am may fuck off. five and a half to 18 years. Wow.

She gets, which she is horrified. She didn't think she was going to get anything like that. What? I don't know if she's never seen a murder trial, but then when they judge sentences her, they immediately come cuff her and take her to prison. That's how it works. And she was overheard saying that if she knew she was going to go to prison so quickly, she wouldn't have worn her good clothes.

You'll get it back in. You got 20 years. years or so. You'll get it back in about five and a half to 18 or seven and a half to 18. Keep your figure. Also, yeah, the same year, 1985, Lorna gets remarried. Who? To a guy named Randy Eldridge.

Okay. So she's remarried. 1986, the Kansas Supreme Court rejects all nine of Tom Byrd's points on appeal and affirms the murder conviction. We'll talk about a couple of those points in a minute here. 1987 though a two-part CBS docudrama

airs this is like movie of the week miniseries time called murder ordained oh you know that's coming so made for TV movie filmed on location in Emporia

to get they got everything the dialogue is taken directly from court documents for accuracy and the townspeople played extra roles so it's like the wire for fucking

for this. Now, Murder Or Dane Yeah, has a 7 out of 10 on IMDB Which is not bad for a TV movie. Wait till you hear who's in it. It's got some really big... Kathy Bates is in this fucking movie. Get out of here.

Kathy Bates, Keith Caradine, Joe Beth Williams, who was in everything from the late 80s into the early 90s. Who would everybody... John Goodman's in this fucking movie. Pre-Rosanne, John Goodman. Yeah.

Who else is this? Terry Kinney. Bruce French, Anne Curry. She looks familiar. Johnny Galecki. Yeah, Johnny Galecki, the Darlene's boyfriend and Big Bang Theory guy. That guy, he's in it too.

Now, Tom didn't like the film. Oh, he's upset with it. Didn't care for it. He said... Was he played by John Goodman? Not happy about it? Who played Tom? Tom was played by Sandy.

Terry Kinney played Tom. Sandy was played by Annabella Rice. Okay, so Tom said that the movie can't be authentic because no one involved with the movie was interviewed. And the four principal characters, no one talked to us. Two of us are dead. So how could you do make a movie? He said, this is ridiculous. Quote, if Lorna has not talked to them and I have not talked to them, where do they get those scenes?

The bottom line is their fiction. This is what he said in an interview with the Kansas City star. He said he's innocent and blames his convictions on his association with Eldridge, who the newspaper described as lascivious. Eldridge is now, that's Married to her. Yeah. That's Lorna is Eldridge. That's what he's talking about. Oh, Mrs. Eldridge.

Mrs. Eldridge. He admitted that he and his secretary were lovers, but only their spouses were dead. He said, I rose up as a knight in shining armor and felt she was being mistreated and needed my help. I was alone. She was alone and we had all these kids. Little did she know she would turn out to be, little did I know she would turn out to be the dragon herself. Now he's blaming her. He's a hero. He's a hero. He said principle wise, I don't think it's right for a movie to be broadcast while a person's appeals are pending. Well, then he wouldn't have a movie for 30 years. That's the problem. He, uh, this is the first time he's speaking out and he says he wants to try to portray the other side to

portray the truth of so much that's been fictionalized. Yeah. The guy who wrote the movie said, I, this is based on interviews with reporters, who interviewed everybody, interviews with Lorna, yeah,

um, and transcripts of the trials. So, yeah, and newspaper articles, especially, Kansas City Star did a great series on this case. A,

it could have been a fucking book. That's, I mean, like there's no investigative reporting like this ever anymore. It doesn't, it does not. exist. No reporter's going to go, I'm going to dive into that story. And every Sunday, we're going to have another six-page part of this story, like a serialized thing. Well, his editor would tell

him, go, fuck yourself. Yeah, I need this covered. He'd say, sure, but I'm not paying you for any of that. That's what I'd say, we don't have time for that. Yeah, exactly. An IMDB reviewer also agrees with Tom. Oh? They say, quote, Tom Bird is innocent. He is not guilty of this crime. It was his, Quote, girlfriend. The movie twisted the facts way out of line with what really happened. What happened here is a terrible tragedy for the murder victims and the victim of false imprisonment. While in prison, Tom established marriage counseling for inmates and their spouses, coordinated a fundraiser for the Ronald McDonald House, led Bible studies, and helped establish a halfway house for inmate's spouses.

If you want to know the true story, read the book Caged Bird by Dave Racer. Tom Bird and Dave Racer also co-authored a book In the Shadow. of Joseph, which was released in 2004. The book features 27 letters from Byrd discussing his daily life in prison. I, by the way, did not read any of those. Two people found that helpful 14 thumbs down to eat dicks. Also, that's a man who fucked his parishioner's wife. I don't want him counseling inmates' wives.

Nope, don't want you near my spouse, as a matter of fact. So Lorne has now notified. in her prison cell that she faces a new charge of first-degree murder, by the way, in Marty's death. They also hinted that someone else may be charged in the death. November 1998, or 1998, Lorna pleads because she doesn't want to go to trial for first-degree murder. So she pleads guilty to second-degree murder. Okay. She is found guilty, pleads guilty, and sentenced to you, ma'am, may fuck off 15 years to life. Again, same thing. No parole until 15 years. So Tom appeals.

He's trying to get the Supreme Court to look at his shit here. He says that while in the penitentiary in 1985, remember his cellmate or whatever? Yeah. They're saying that Tom told this guy that he conspired and all that kind of shit on the motion for a new trial. They say that this one person says she was a desk clerk at the Copa Villa motel and spoke with Henderson, the cellmate, the morning he was to testify. She testified Henderson told her he didn't know who Thomas Byrd was and had no idea why he was there. After he testified, he spoke with this lady again and told her he learned why he was there. He told her some friends in Oklahoma had left him holding the bag.

He said he was there to tell what had been overheard that his friends told him some things. The trial judge denied the motion for a new trial stating that it was his opinion that it was unlikely there would be a different result of a new trial were granted. That's the first appeal there. He, there's a lot of things too. He contends that the state speculated that they threw, that he threw his wife off the bridge. That was a matter of consideration for the jury, but the state's evidence in the case indicated that it occurred. It was up to the jury to determine that point. Seventh point raised by him on all of these was that the state's evidence was insufficient to permit a rational fact finder to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Sandra Bird's death resulted from a homicide rather than an accident.

So, also, he didn't get a change of venue. Okay. There's some interesting stats here as far as the survey indicated that they called 306 people in Emporia that had a telephone. 97.4% of the people had heard of the case. How do you not? Roughly half of those believed that he killed his wife. Yeah. The people were given three options.

Yes, he was involved. No, he was not or not sure. And they said that, yeah, about half the people were pretty sure he was. They said obviously that would happen because, you know, they know their local area here. So anyway, change of venue. He doesn't get either. And the Supreme Court anyway tells him, you know what? We don't want to hear it.

Keep fucking off, mister. Yeah. So no one cares. So also 1990. Tom gets married in prison again. To who? A woman named Terry. Really?

That's it. Woman named Terry. 1990, Tom, again. they're talking he's going to go back on trial now for Marty's murder because before it was just solicitation now they're going to try him for murder and they all the stations want this to be aired on TV. Yeah. They want this to be gavel to gavel coverage and the judge denies it. Really?

He denies the TV coverage because that was not a member of the Pamela Smart one was the first like gavel to gavel trial covered and that was like 91. So they said, you know, this basically, the problem. is this case rests solely on Lorna. Sully. Yeah. She's the only one who has any part of this. So her problem is, and the prosecution's problem is she's told 14 different versions of this shit. Incredibly incredible.

Exactly. And that's literally all they have. And she's a co-conspirator, so that makes it messy. The verdict comes back in less than an hour of deliberation. Fast. And they find him not guilty. Really? They had no.

All they had was Lorna. That's it. They had no other evidence. So not guilty. That's it. And they said that Lorna's contradictory stories, all the jurors said was the reason why they couldn't. Okay. Convict this man.

Sandy's family is pissed off and shocked, by the way. Fucking hey. Yeah. Even though it wasn't her murder trial, it was Marty's. Sandy's mom said, I was stunned. Regardless of the verdict, I think he's guilty. I felt it was so clear in the mind of the. prosecution, or in my mind, the prosecution had proved their point. I'm really disappointed,

but I believe in the justice system, this jury did what they thought was right, and if Tom's in jail, and Tom is in jail for murdering Sandy. She said, you aren't supposed to lose a child. Mothers are meant to be buried first, not to bury their children. Who would suspect that a small town minister who married his childhood sweetheart would be capable of murder? Twice. Everyone that listens to this show, but other than that, I'm not sure if everyone does. Wow. They said, we have been told it was a car accident, but we couldn't understand it. Sandy was a scaredy cat. For her to be out on that strange road made us wonder, but neither did we suspect Tom. It's like, we wondered why was she out there? They weren't like, well, Tom killed her. So that's good. And he did a pretty decent job to where they almost, he almost got away with it. He almost did. But the problem is that the regular medical exam, they wouldn't have exhumed her. He'd have been fine. But then when they had a specialist look at her, that's a problem.

Sandy's mom also said that when Byrd was arrested for soliciting the murder of Marty, she said that's when I started coming out of tunnel vision. I started keeping records of conversations with people about Sandra's death and started checking her phone bills. It was then that she learned that Tom had placed numerous calls to Lorna Anderson from their home while staying there to attend Sandy's funeral in Little Rock. Ew. He was calling her from Sandy's parents' fucking house. That's disgusting. Disgusting. Fucking L.D. on top of it.

Remember when that was a big deal? It's a goddamn long-distance call. This guy's shooting LDs out and his fucking concubine? What the fuck is that about? She said she couldn't understand when during the trials the media labeled Bird Charismatic. She said, quote, we have never seen him that way. Zero charisma. 1990.

Now, remember, Tom got married to Terry. Tom and Terry. Lorna divorces Randy Eldridge in 1990. She's no longer Eldridge. She's no longer in Eldridge. Now, 2000, 2001, both years, Tom becomes parole eligible, but is denied in both years, 2000 and 2001, mainly because he won't admit to the fucking crime still. Wow. That's when his book, Caged Bird appears, arguing at length that he was innocent.

June of 2004, about 20 years since the conviction, Tom is finally paroled. Wow. He's paroled in June 2004 to live in Wyandotte County with his wife, Terry, who we know about, who's a schoolteacher, by the way, who he married in prison. Yeah. He was discharged from parole supervision in 2006, completely free as a bird, a Tom bird, and went on to work as what, Jimmy? A fucking marriage counselor.

Oh my God, what? Dude, that's like so ironically, hilariously ridiculous. He must have said, do I have the balls to do that? Yeah, I do. Fuck it. A marriage counselor. I mean, I got a solution for how you could end your marriage, but that's just me.

You guys talk amongst yourselves. Mine's a little different. I see. You guys got two options. You could divorce or get out. Wow. Then 2004, Lorna's married again. What?

You know who she married? No. A guy named Terry. What are the fucking odds that both of these people would marry people named Terry? That's, is that the craziest part of this whole story? Terry Moore, his name is. 2007, Lorna is paroled and not discharged from supervision until 2014 when she was 61 years old.

Yeah. She's using the name Lorna Anderson Moore. She becomes the chief executive of a housing nonprofit in Hutchinson, Kansas, called Interfaith Housing Services. She's the CEO of that. CEO? She's running a business? Housing, that's crazy.

2025 now, very quickly. Kind of their story's over. But this bridge has become a giant. destination for people who want to go somewhere creepy and like a ghost tour thing. Huge. This article says on humid summer nights, teenagers still drive out past the edge of Emporia down a narrow country road or county road that dissolves into farmland and dark. They park near the bridge and wait.

Some swear they've seen a ghostly figure walking the rails. Others say they hear splashing as if a car's gone into the Cottonwood River again. The story shift and change, an apparition in white, headlights that appear in vanish, but they all circle back to one name, Sandra Bird. So that's, they said, today when people talk about the bird case, they don't mean the trials or the evidence, they mean the bridge. Teenagers drive out there at night to test their courage. Locals tell ghost stories, and its location is featured on multiple Kansas's most haunted

websites. That's what started into. Haunted. Haunted. Yeah, they said, one person said, even when my kids were growing up, there were always stories about Bird Bridge. They call it Bird Bridge now, all the kids and everybody. They just call it Bird Bridge. But I never

expected any of that. That's what they said. They said, you know, the bridge is being replaced, huh? Somebody says it's been talked about for years, but no one ever replaces it. 26 here, two of the Emporia Gazette reporters who covered the case,

Nancy Horst and Bobby Milner Milinar drew a standing room crowd of more than 150 people to a library at Emporia State to talk it all through once more, the whole case. They talked about all of that. And also it says here, popular with ghost hunters and teens looking for a scare, Rocky Ford Bridge or Bird Bridge to locals, is also the centerpiece of the murder-ordained cycling route. The route is part of the dirty Kansa Promotian's iconic route challenge classified as beginner level difficulty. However, the story behind the 13-mile route elevates the ride to something more than a casual outing. It's an iconic part of Emporia's history reminding us that small-town folks are just as fallible as our big city counterparts.

They have a bike thing that does the whole. It's the whole Tom Bird, what he did thing. It's fucking crazy. So there you go, everybody. That is Emporia, Kansas. and tell me that's not a fucking crazy story. God damn. I can't believe they...

I mean... It's too much. Yeah. I can't believe they're out. It's wild. All of it. Yeah. Go down the list.

There's so much of it. So if you can't believe it, but you'll want to, tell us all about it. Get on whatever app you're on. Give us five stars. It helps so much. So whatever you're listening on, give us five stars. Netflix, thumbs up means a lot. Thank you for doing that.

And if you're watching on Netflix and just found the show, you're in luck. There are... There's so many. hundreds of episodes on whatever app you listen to podcasts on that you can catch up on, like almost 700 of them that aren't on Netflix. So get on there and check that out. Also, uh,

follow us on social media at small town murder on Instagram, small town pod on Facebook. Shut up and give me murder.com is where you get all the, of those tickets for live shows, all the merchandise. September the 18th at the PAPS to Milwaukee. I'm not sure if there's any tickets left for that. So check if you want.

I think there might be individual ones. I'm not positive. I don't know if we have comps to give. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. We might release more. I don't know. September 19th, Minneapolis State Theater.

Get in there right goddamn now. October 3rd, Dallas, Texas. Come on, Arkansas. Come on out and see us here. October 16th, San Jose, October 17th, Sacramento, November 13th in Terrytown, November 14th in Boston. That's our goddamn schedule. Shut up and give me murder.com is where you get all of that.

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and you get every goddamn show we put out all ad-free as well. And you get a shout-out, and that's right fucking now. Jimmy, hit me with the names of the people who would never, ever, ever kick us as we clung to the side of a bridge. Hit me with him right, goddamn now. This executive producer, a happy hour in Conroe, Texas, and Gary Howard. Gary!

Arcadelphia. Can they fucking name anything in Arkansas? Damn, Gary. After something... You are. Trucking through some... Yeah, that's bad. Gare, bear.

We love you, bud. We don't want to see you. Get out of these horrible places, man. Please. Arkansas's like McDonald's at this point. They put Arc in front of everything. Stop it. Take meadows.

Janice Hill. Jennifer, Bashir? By sheer? For sure. I don't know. Thank you, Jennifer. Carla Clark in Arkansas.

Maybe she could do it. It's her birthday. Happy birthday. She's 60. Go get Gary. Help her. Get on some board somewhere and change the fucking names. Help Gary.

This arc shit. It's not cute anymore. It's weird. Claude Cavallo. Vladana. Cochick. Vladana. Like the female Vladimir, right?

Putin? Russian Madonna. Vladonna. Yeah. Diana, Adams, Deanna and Fladonna. Christina Musto, orphans' home life. I don't know what that means,

but I hope it's a rescue of some sort, whether it's kids or dogs or... Something. Whatever. Rescue them orphans. Thank you. Appreciate you people. Other producers this week. Bradley Horn, Drew Lauby,

Laude. Holly would know last name. Wanda would know last name. Jeff Brown. Jay Campbell. Nick Boswell, Anthony Monies. Muno. Anthony Munoz?

The Hall of Fame Offensive tackle for the Bengals? Anthony Monez? Munoz is the Hall of Fame offensive tackle for the... That's right. I saw him get inducted

in Hall of Fame. That was fun. Raymond Shannon. Angie would know last name. Sonica. Sonica. From the Netherlands? Sonica?

Like Sonic's girlfriend? That's what I'm saying? Gary Gorman. Tanya Frederick. Zach Ney. Michelle would know last name. Kim Christian. Connor Schrooter, Schrooter, Amanda Faye, Julie, would know last name, Hillary Putnam, Putnam, Brandon Battle, Leslie Heisler, Colin McKinsey, Angie Pelke, Heather Morgan, Jade S, Tana, Tanya, Stiles, Blair Buckholder, Woo-hoo, would no last name, Zachariah Kittner, Joe would no last name, Lisa G, Rachel S, Todd Kaiser, fellow member of the Dark Humor Club, Mark Savage, or shewage.

Savage or Savage or Savage. James would know last name. Nikki would know last name. Gator Girl. Cheyenne Ozerwis. Ozerwis. Ozerwitz. Ozerowitz.

Bo Tierney. Sybil Currier. Ashley Krishione. Jackson. Clemmy. Rebecca Vivian DeVille. That's a fun name. Mayanase.

I think that's them making fun in the way you say mayonnaise, James. Maybe. Sorry. Cat Finley Julie at Bits 3D T.J. Reyes. Shelly would know last name.

Syria. Syria Green. Onyx Ocaria. Megan would know last name. Tracy Scoba. Soida Palacios. Natalie, England.

Holden Mycock, James. That's a real person. Oh, yeah. I'm sure that's a real person. Mitchell? Clearly. Dixon. How about that?

Dixon after Mycock. They're probably two. Holden macaque. Yeah. They know each other. They're probably buddies. They listen together, I'm sure. Denise Zimney, Daniel Meyer, Daniel Meyer, sorry. Amos with no last name. Mindy Henderson, Kaylee Bailey. That's fun to say. Caleb Bailey. I'm shocked that there's not more serial killers whose first and last name rhyme.

Like just tired of hearing it. Yeah. Colin Robertson. Casey Hutchinson, David DeVanez, Devons. Zach Bass, Moe would know last name. Blake Turner, Josh, Josh, Bradcliffe, Megan Seizak, Sean would no last name, the Aussie Moose, Rachel Plaisance, Pliassons, Alexis Mike Sel. Michael, Mike Sel, McKessel, MacSell, Becca B, Beaureas, Amelia Bibbles. All right, Heather Orozco, Melanie, Melanie Fielkowski, Lindsay Eldridge, David Peschen, Petitione, Marcy H, H, Beverly Pops. Potter, Peedy would know last name. Tom would know the last name. Christy Brown, Mel Faborg, J-H-R, Aaron McMillan, Grace Z, Gina Stoner. Good for you.

Sarah Hotham, Hot Ham, Melissa Simons, Becky Fritz, Elisa, Eliza, Shofenior, Schofenier, Schofornier, Sonia Downer. You got that. Leia Jones. That's probably somebody named after Star Wars. There was never a name Leia before that, right? I never heard that before. No, I never thought.

Jacob O'Keefe, J. Farr, Amy Gunter, Karen Vladda, Stelatti. Allison Burns, Ludwig von Schittsmear, James. That's a real person. Oh, yeah. No, I know him. I know him from a long time. We went to high school together. The Von Schittsmears were very prominent around my town.

They really were. They owned everything. Ryan James. Brian Monta. Monta. Montahano. Tanita Bandita. Another one. There's no way that's real.

That's a fun name, though. That's a fun one. Ishmael Cox, Nessa and Sean. Juso, Pialo, Pialajo. I don't know. Heather Johannes, Karupin, would know the last name. Janelle Bradley, Katie Jeffers, Melanie would no last name. Rhonda would know last name.

Steven Siciliano, Ashby, J. Poma Ijabako. Ibekeo. Oh. That's not right. Karen Stewart, Linda Lou. Page with no last name.

Vincent Nadarro. Billy Cranston, Robin Watkins, Rachel, peg Steve. Do it. I dare you. Get him. Get him. Run, Steve, run.

They're trying to peg you. Run. Peg Steve. Steve running. God, damn it. That's amazing. Run. Steve.

Running backwards, though, so we don't know his back's not to anybody. Small Miguel, Miguel, Miguelito, Miguel Lito, Cindy Purcell,

Megan Mullen, Milan, Kelly Spizillo, Spazilo, wow, Darlene, RCDC in 1982, Lola Delgado,

Kenneth Trail, Shannon, with no last name, Clayton McDaniel, and everybody named Steve that's on the run. Thank you all so much. Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for everything you do for us. Thank you for your time, your money, your effort, you're spreading the word, anything you do for us. Even if you just say to nobody and say to your dog, hey, these guys are pretty funny. Thanks for that. We appreciate that. Thanks for all that you do for us. If you want to follow us on social media, shut up and give me murder.com as links to everything that you could possibly want to do there. So do Keep coming back and seeing us. And until next week, everybody, it's been our pleasure. Bye.