Small Town Murder - The Sinister Minister - Jackson Township, Pennsylvania

Episode Date: February 19, 2026

This week, in Jackson Township, Pennsylvania, when a Pastor's wife, who is also his singing act partner, dies in a seemingly tragic way, everybody has nothing but sympathy. But when a second wife also ends up dead, sympathy quickly turns into suspicion. That suspicion only grows, when people find out about the Minister's affairs, and lies. Did he really do such diabolical, and premeditated acts???   Along the way, we find out that cheaters often don't stop cheating, no matter what they say, that when your wife is seemingly dead, you shoudl definitely call 911, and that a homicide detectives job is to be "suspicious of everybody"!!   New episodes, every Wednesday & Friday nights!! 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!!   Exclusive $35-off Carver Mat at https://on.auraframes.com/SMALLTOWNMURDER. Promo Code SMALLTOWNMURDER

This week, in Jackson Township, Pennsylvania, when a pastor's wife dies in a seemingly tragic way, everybody has nothing but sympathy. But when a second wife also ends up dead, sympathy quickly turns into suspicion. Welcome to Small Town Murder. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder. Yay! Oh, yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay, indeed. My name is James Petter Gallo.

I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wiseman. Thank you, folks, so much for joining us today on another absolutely insane edition of small-taught-murder. We got some wild stuff for you today, as usual. That shouldn't be a shock to anybody out there. I would like to welcome everybody back to Netflix, of course. Yeah. And if you're new to the show, check out.

We have over 600 more episodes, so you can listen to that wherever you listen to podcasts. Also listen to crime in sports and your stupid opinions are other two shows. Check those out and do that. Definitely head over to shut up and give me murder.com. You need tickets for live shows, everybody. And that's where they are, starting with February the 21st in Nashville this week. Coming up, let's go. Still a few tickets left.

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How much of that do they get? A little bit of it? All of it? No, I thought it was a little bit of it. They get all of it? No. Oh, my goodness. I don't have any room in my pockets to hold any of this.

You get it all, everybody. There you go. And in addition to that, you also get all the shows we put out, crime and sports your stupid opinion small town murder all ad free and you get a shout out at the end of the show and you get new ones every other week new at bonus episodes one crime and sports one small town murder and you get it all this week for crime and sports we're going to talk about we're going to do part two of the dead cyclists episode because that was wild cyclists you guys

are people on bicycles die so often it's crazy so much then for small town murder let's do it let's dig into some conspiracy theory time and all of this with the, we're going to talk about the Kurt Cobain death because, uh, yeah, we've been planning on it actually for about the last month and then two days ago they came out with some new thing and investigation or whatever. So we're going to look into all that and see what we think because, uh, I haven't looked into it that, that deeply. I have my opinions, but, uh, yeah, who knows? We'll see what happens here.

Patreon.com slash crime in sports. That said, disclaimer time. Yeah. This is a comedy show, everybody. It is. It's a comedy show. We're comedians. People are certainly going to die because the show would be false advertising if they didn't.

But we're also going to make jokes. And you go, why does that work? Well, it works very easily here because we do it tastefully. See, that's how we do it. Think like, you know, 70s Playboy, you know, just the side of something. Nothing too crazy. Yeah, you don't want to be too gross about the whole thing. And I think the jokes lighten it up a little bit, too.

To me, if I'm listening to a serious show and they're like, and her head was removed from her body. It almost sounds creepier, doesn't it? It sounds gross. We like to try to lighten the mood a little bit, but what we do is we never make fun of the victims or the victims' families. Why's that, James? Because we're assholes.

Yeah, but. Well, we're not scumbags. And that's how that goes. That's all you have to do there. So that sounds good to you. You're going to hear a wild story. If you think true crime and comedy should never, ever go together, we might not be for you.

I don't know what to tell you, but I don't know what you're doing. I think maybe you should check it out. And, uh, give it a trouble. It might be something that you think, you don't think you would like, but you'll like it. Either way, no complaining later. That's what it is. That's the way it works, because we don't really care. That says about what people think anyway.

Yeah. That said, I think it's time to sit back, everybody. What do you say? Yeah. Let's all clear the lungs, arms to the sky, and let's all shout. Shut up and give me murder. Let's do this. everybody.

All right. Let's go on a trip, shall we? We go. Right. We're going to Jackson Township, Pennsylvania. That means nothing to you or to me because we don't live in Pennsylvania. If you live in Pennsylvania, you probably cracked up laughing just hearing that.

Because there are 18 Jackson Townships in Pennsylvania. Stop it. Which, yeah, when they plan that out, they didn't understand that someday, some dickhead doing research for a fucking comedy murder podcast. would have to figure out which goddamn Jackson Township this is in which county and then get all the right. It's insane how hard this was to compile the township. This is in eastern Pennsylvania. It's about an hour 45 to Philly and about an hour 45 to New York City. So right there.

Equidistant. It's about an hour and a half to Potsdown, Pennsylvania, our last Pennsylvania episode, Strange Affairs and Frozen Blood, which I think you can pretty much, you can conclude. lean from that and go back and check it out. This is in Monroe County. So this is the Jackson Township in Monroe County. That's the only thing that separates them is there's no two in the same county. I think that's the only rule they set out here. And this is a place where zip codes are important if you're mailing something.

Sure. Very, very important. Area code 570 and 272. Town motto, pretty simple and understandable. You're looking for the other Jackson Township. Sorry. That's your town motto. There's more.

Yeah. Well, wait, there's more. But wait, there's more. Oh, you're in the wrong place, man. Yeah, you want to be over in Lebanon County because that's where one of them is. That's where one of them is because I did the entire goddamn town stuff on that one. Oh, no. Oh, no.

In Monroe County and had to go back and do it over again. So a lot of fun. History in this town, a big portion of the Pocono State Park, which is a big Pennsylvania State Park, is on Camelback Mountain, which doesn't just exist in Phoenix. No? In Jackson Township. So it's a big part of that area. Township was incorporated on December 13th, 1843.

And like most of the Jackson Townships was named for Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson named for, yeah. A lot of the ones came about, like the one in Lebanon came about in like 1814, which at that point he was the hero of the war of 1812. So that made sense. And then later on, though, you're, you know, whof, you're making a statement with that one. Jackson Township was mainly a farming and logging community, really. I guess according to their history, quote, some of the state's most progressive farms in the mid-19th century were located in Jackson Township.

I don't know what that made grew weed. What does that mean? I don't know. Mushrooms. What are we talking about? Progressive farms. Jackson Township also played a part in the Monroe County ice industry. This was a big deal.

In actual industry, most of the ice was. harvested on two major lakes in the township, trout lake and Mountain Springs Lake. They just... Imagine that. Wait for the shit to freeze and chip it off and bring it in. You're just getting frozen lake water. Then you're drinking lake water.

Trout lake. Which sounds like there's trout in it, which means it probably smells a fish I would think, right? I can't imagine just dropping ice cubes of lake in your drink. Oh, it would look like a demigloss basically. It would have chunks floating in it and shit. Like, why is it all cloudy? Why?

No good. Is that all you used it for? Was just for drinks? I don't know if it was for drinks or I think mainly back then they used it to keep. They had ice boxes. Keep things fresh. Yeah, you get ice to put in the ice box to keep your fridge. That was a fridge back then before electricity.

So I think that was the major thing rather than for drinks. But I mean, I'm sure somebody made some shit with it. That's fascinating. Reviews this town and it has about 3.7 stars on niche is the average here. Here's four stars. A lot of people come for Crayola and Hershey, both of which are great. Okay. So it's near both of those things.

Yeah. Are you eating crayons, sir? I don't know. Both are great. They're both great. Both are delicious. I like yellow crayons and the regular Hershey's chocolate by the classic. You know what I mean?

The gray is nice. It's not bad. You wouldn't think it would have any flavor. You'd think gray would be pretty tasteless. But man, it's got something in there. Here's four stars. I wish I had the option of staying here forever. Are you being sent to space?

Like, why can't you just stay there? You can stay as long as you can. Have you been forcibly removed? That's what I mean. Are they kick you out of the town? Here's four stars. Minimal crime in this area. We'll be the judge of that.

We have the stats. Besides some isolated occasions, not many drastic occurrences. There are no major crimes. There are no giant in a small town in the middle of Pennsylvania. Not shocking. Here is three stars, very eclectic. Now, when you hear that, you would think, oh, there's like a lot of different kinds of people. Maybe there's like an art district and then there's like an industrial area.

It's very eclectic. No. No. What does it mean? They mean it's, well, I'll just read it. Quote, it gets quite hot in the summer. Ecclactic. Below zero in the winter and everything in between.

You know, weather. We have eclectic weather? Is that what they mean? Eclectic weather, meaning, yeah, it gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter. That's eclectic weather. You just live in Pennsylvania. That's all it is. Quarky.

Quirky. Here's two stars. People, many people I know are related to work in the area and are paid minimum wage. Are related to work. I don't know if they mean elated to work or related. I'm not sure. I don't know. My 46-year-old mother, who was about to

receive her master's degree and go on to her doctorate, works two jobs. Victoria's Secret. So she's, she's, they got a mall for below $10 an hour and a job overseeing special needs students at their jobs, which pays a salary of less than $5,000 a year. But she's got like hot panties on while she's. All the time. She's like got some hot underwear on while she's teaching these kids. Can't see the penny line, James.

That's amazing. The kids notice. No penny. Yeah, they're sticklers for that kind of shit. Yeah. People in this town, 6,596. Not a big town, not a small, tiny town, but, you know, kind of an in-between, but a little town. Men and women, way more women than men for a town of 65, 60, 600 people, 53.9% women, which is a lot.

It's normally, like, almost even. Men, 46.1, obviously. Median age here, 46.9. which is well above the national average by about eight years. So it's an older crowd. Family here, too, it's a very kind of stay married kind of crowd. 57.2% are married percent are married. So that's above the national average by far.

Lower divorce rate than normal. And it's about average for people that are single with children. Race of this town, 71.1% white, 7.3% black, 4.4% Asian, 16.3% Hispanic. Oh, 45.3% of the people here are religious, which is, you know, lower than the national average by about 5%. And the leading religion here, unshockingly, is Catholic, 25.1% Catholic. As we know, Catholics are the Baptists of the North. So they're everywhere. Just so much faces.

Yep. But our particular story takes place around a religious guy and I don't think he's Catholic. Not Catholic? Not Catholic. 0.2% Jewish. Unemployment, a little bit high. Not too, too high, but a little bit high. But, I mean, you're kind of an hour 45 in either direction from any kind of city. If you need a job, head over Victoria's Secret. I mean, it's $9 an hour, but it's not great.

You get a broad discount, so that's helpful. But it's a job. It's something. The median household income of a Jackson Township resident here, or the median household income here is 82,938. So that's above the national average. Not bad. $13,000. That's not bad. Commutable to Philly, right?

That's one. An hour 45. It's a, yeah, it's a commuter. You could do it, but it's rough. It's a tough day. It's a tough day. Yeah, I know a lot of people that do it for my house, like, around me to the city. It's, you know, an hour and a half.

It's a long day when you're doing three hours of round trip back and forth just in commuting. Costs a living here. 100 is regular average. Here, it's 95. And the housing is high here. Really? Median home cost here, $432,500. That's medium.

Holy. That is high. That is very high. Pennsylvania's average is $2,800 for the state. Wow. Well, above that. And if we've convinced you, damn it, the only place you could possibly be happy is in this particular Jackson Township, because, you know, we know there's plenty of others. We have for you the Jackson Township, Pennsylvania, Real Estate Report.

Okay, your average two-bedroom rental here goes for $1,220, which is about the national average. Yeah. Not bad. Now, here's some houses here. I found, number one, you're going to build your own house, damn it. Oh, just land. Big old hillside, 17.96 acres, so 18 acres. Wow.

Good amount of land. $109,000. That's a lot of land for $109,000. That's amazing. Yeah, it's kind of on a hill, so it would be hard to build shit. Like, you've got to really, got to get some engineers and architects involved. It's going to cost you. You've got to flatten some shit.

The land is decent. Here is a four-bedroom three-bath, 2,700 square foot house. Now, the outside, it looks nice. It's a brick house, two-story, you know, the two-car garage. Looks very nice. Inside looks like it's got some problems. They need some updating. The kitchen, it's just weird, man.

It's really done weird. They've made the worst tile choice. as I've ever seen in a house. Oh, no. In every area. It's all fucked up. So it's no good. But four bedroom three bath,

2,700 square feet, 0.36 acres. It is $425,000. There's your average. With a $10,000 price cut that just happened. And then finally, here is a four bedroom six bath. T-bowl for each and every beehole,

everybody. 4750 square foot weird ass house. It is really weird. It was designed by a, world-renowned architect Peter Bolin, who looks like he does mushrooms on the weekends, because this fucking house is weird. It's all I can describe it. It's just, you got to go, everybody's got to look it up.

We can't show legally show on Netflix, by the way. People have to. We'd love to. We can't because we'd have to get every homeowner's permission, and it would be a long process that we just don't have in turnaround time in production to be able to do that. So it's not working. And then we'd have to go with. If they said no, then we'd find more new houses, it'd be horrible.

I'm going to get it. Yeah. This house. Chase them down every fucking week. Yeah. $795,000 bucks. It's on 3.9 acres. Uh-huh.

And it is just weird. Got to see it to believe it type of weird house. Things to do with. They might be grateful for us to give the listing a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of run. But they also, if it sucks and we make fun of it, they're not going to be happy. And people are like, why don't you do that? It's like, would you like us to make fun of the house you're trying to sell on the biggest streaming service in the world, really? Was that what you'd like?

I don't think you'd want. That probably. Hi, your architects on mushrooms. Buy this house. Yeah. This house is built by a guy on hallucinogens. I think you'll like it. So anyway, things to do in this town.

Let's find out what we're doing the 2025 event. This is the 2026 coming up. Jackson Township Community Celebration. Oh, boy. Is there a yard sale? It's a four-day event. Well, they have rides, inflatables, games, fair food. Got to have that.

Concessions. Free live music, which we'll talk. about craft and merchandise market and all sorts of rides and everything like that. Let's find out what the entertainment is what we're interested in. Let's see here. The Wednesday entertainment will be New Wave Nation. Oh. I don't know.

They have a five-hour set. It says six to 11. That must be a few breaks in there, right? That's a A band? Yeah, I've never seen a band play a five-hour set before. That'd be even fish would get bored with that shit, even with their own garbage. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Thursday night, they'll have that 80s band. So they play covers from the 80s. That's from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. again. Then we have on Friday night, there's a couple of walks, a half-mile run walk, a kid's walk. They have. Sure. And just to tire them out. And it's not for charity or anything.

It's just to tire these little bastards out. We have live entertainment at 6 p.m. vinyl arcade will be there. It's another band. Yeah. It should just be called retro words. Yeah. Vinyl arcade.

Retro stuff. 8.30 p.m. Disco Inferno will be there. Hell yeah. Let's go. Is Blockbuster Sam Goody headlining? I think, yeah. There is this next one.

The next one. Circuit City Hollywood Video comes after Blockbuster. Let's go. Yeah, I got to do that here. Disco Inferno, it would be great if it was just the wrestler from the 90s who came out. He was like, hi, everybody. How you doing? I'm going to do some stuff here.

Saturday, June 21st, finally, we have from 3 to 11 p.m. This is all going on at 6 o'clock. We have Follow the Sun is the name of the band. Go west, I guess, at night, east of the morning. And then at 8.30 p.m., we have Trailer Park Ninjas. We'll be there. I'm beside myself. I don't know what to say about that.

There's only 6,000 people here. It's tough to get anybody to show up to this shit. Somehow I'm still surprised that ludicrous isn't here, though. Even that, even that. Yeah. Dude, ludicrous just played the bird's nest that the waste management opened. Nellie Ludacris and somebody else with them, too. But they headlined the whole fucking thing.

Of course they did. Yeah, because it's a... Well, one of the ludicry did. You don't know if it was which ludicrys it was. We don't know which ludicry that was. Also, Campfire Acoustic is a band and Giants of Science. Okay. I don't know how that makes it.

attractive for music. Now, crime rate in this town, property crime is about one third beneath the national average. So not a lot of property crime, violent crime, murder, rape, robbery, and of course, assault. The Mount Rushmore of crime is slightly above the above half the average. So it's almost half the average, too. So it's very safe here. Pretty safe. That said, let's talk about some murder here. Let's do it. Let's get into some murder. Okay. Now, we're going to start out in North Lebanon Township, which is not the town we just talked about, but it comes up here. This is April 23, 1999. Yeah.

Okay. 2.15 p.m. So a nice spring day, middle of the afternoon. Well, not so nice. We're kind of reeling from Columbine right now. Oh, yeah, April 23rd, 1999. Three days later. Yeah, three days after that. These people weren't thinking so much about that, I don't think. Maybe not. Maybe it was already over wrapped up by then.

Yeah, they were like, yeah, that's fine. Yeah. They're dead. I mean, they'll find all the bodies eventually, you know. Yeah, yeah. Jesus, that was the worst thing ever. That was a bad one. Oh, God.

So a guy named A.B. Shermer, okay. S-C-H-I-R-M-E-R. A-B. Shermer went for his afternoon jog that day. He was trying to run off the memories of Columbine. He couldn't take it. He was like, man, I watched it too much on CNN. Get some introspective. And he returned to his home on Skyline Drive in North,

Lebanon Township. At about 2.15 p.m. He walks in the door. When he walked in, he found his wife of decades, as we'll talk about, of almost of 30 years, 31 years, actually. She's lying at the bottom of the basement stairs in a pool of blood. Oh, no. There is the cord of a shop vacuum. If you don't know what a shop vac is, some people don't know with that.

It's the thing that you, like it sits in your garage, the big canister. And you can just, you can suck up like. screws and a swamp and just anything you want in there like plastic bags get a load of that kittens like whatever fuck it'll take anything in it's why all that shit that smokes the belt in your normal vacuum clean just no problem just gotta just dump it all out yeah suck up paint no problem well she's got the cord of one of these shop vacks wrapped around her ankle so she's down the steps you know angled down with her head down there, pool of blood, shop vac cord wrapped around her ankle.

So this looks like a tragedy. Looks like she tripped. It looks like she tripped, yeah. Fell down the stairs. So he calls 911 right away, obviously. 911 shows up. And weird thing is they take her away in the ambulance, and he doesn't ride in the ambulance with her.

No? Which is strange. You'd think you'd be in the ambulance. And if they said you can't be in here for some medical reason, you'd be in the car fucking on their bumper, I would imagine, right? He stayed back at the house for a bit. Oh?

He wanted to stay back. I don't know if he wanted to change his jogging clothes or what the deal is, but he said, I'll be there in a while. I'm going to stay at the house for a minute here, which is odd. So, Jule was rushed to Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, where doctors discovered she has a traumatic brain injury and a fractured skull. Jesus. They figure out that the fractured skull would have required. about 750 pounds of force to to apply.

Can't do that from a fall down the stairs, right? I mean, it depends on how big those stairs are. You'd have to be. And if you're breaking your fall at all on the way down, I don't know how you would do that. That's like 750 pounds of force. Dropped from a two-story, like, that's a lot. So she's put on life support and she dies.

Yeah. Okay. Now, we'll talk about this here. And, you know, obviously, this looks like a, tragedy and he's a lot a A.B. is a local pastor. Very well known in the area. So is his wife. They've also had a musical

act that they've been doing together for the last 30 years. That's pretty popular in the church scene around here. So he's a known guy and, but they're gonna, they have to look into this obviously. It's any tragedy, any death they have to look into. So let's look

into them also. Let's let's join the police and look into them here. Sure. Arthur Burton Shermer is A. B. Shermer. Arthur Burton. He's born May 1st, 1948. He's originally from Milton, Delaware. Yep. Here. And his parents are Carl and Ina Shermer. And he went to Milton High School down there and went to Eastern Pilgrim College at one point. And then went to Messiah College, which sounds slightly religious. That could be a religious school. I'm not positive. Messiah college. Showing you how to live, really, at the Messiah. So, yeah, he also went to Elizabethtown College at one point.

And Messiah College is in Grantham, Pennsylvania. And the Elizabeth Town College was also like a Christian school, too, of some kind. So by the time he was 20, he was already saying, I'm going to be a minister, period. That's what I want to do. And then he meets his wife, his future wife, the woman who we found at the bottom of the stairs. Jules Vera Baney is her name, B-E-H-N-E-H-1. why until they get married and she changes it to Shermer. So Jewel here.

She is a preacher's daughter. Oh. When I say a preacher's daughter, I don't just mean her dad's a preacher. I mean both her parents are preachers. God, dang. Preacher, you know, possessive. Plossessive apostrophe. Yeah.

Yeah. So she, her, she's born in, wow, Kleinfeltersville, Pennsylvania. Too many syllables. K-L-E-I-N-F-E-L-T-E-R-S-F-I-L-E. Klein-Feltersville. Picking. Plainville, Felterville, you decide. Her parents are the Reverend Dionne Bayne and the Reverend Esther Levin-Good-Bainey.

Those are her parents. So this is a, she's not a real party household, I don't think. No, I can't imagine. Pretty strict stuff here. Probably the first time she made out was with this fella. Or the opposite. Because that's how those girls go. Oh, yeah, yeah.

If you're the Reverend's daughter, you're either chased or you are. Nothing or all of it. Fucking Madonna in 1984. None of them are every goddamn one. You're writhing on a stage, humping the air. One of the two, it depends. Yeah. So she went to Cedar Crest High School and Eastern Pilgrim

college and she was also attending a Messiah college when they met. That's how they met. Yeah. When she was a junior at Messiah College. So they get married. I found their wedding announcement, by the way. Really? In the paper, I found like the picture of her.

I have the picture of hers, a bride and all this shit. She apparently, according to the newspaper, quote, the bride wore an empire gown of Shantilly lace, which I'm sure, what's his name? Was that Fats Domino? would be very excited about. Was that not the Big Bopper? Big Bopper. Was it Big Bopper?

One of those guys. Okay. And it was a 50 song. And Poo de Soi. I don't know what the fuck. P-E-A-U-P-E-P-E-I-E, I assume. De-D-E-E-E. I don't know.

Franchise is not my strong thing. I'm sure if somebody said it to us, we'd know exactly what the fuck in me. Oh, it's a lovely pew-de-s-e-e. You have. Pud-de-s-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e. It's just like, it's just grunts. That's like caveman language. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A lot of the words in French. They put like six vowels at the end of a fucking word and it's just, that's how you pronounce six straight vowels. Every time. It says so the pew d'est, fashioned with long sleeves and a chapel train. Her veil was attached to a satin flower headpiece. She carried a white Bible topped with white roses and holly. Oh, boy. You can leave the book back there because I'm going to do horrible things to you later.

We don't need that. All of that sounds like the least sexy day ever. Oh, yeah. No, this has nothing to do. This is the Lord is joining two people. This has nothing to do with the hot fucking that's going to be happening later. Her father gave her away in marriage. A reception for the 500 guests.

500 guests. That poo de so, I mean, is a big fucking deal. I hope it could be. 500 people there? I hope it's edible. That thing's, that's a big deal. Wow, 500 people was held at the church junior chapel. There's a, wow, the junior chapel holds 500 people.

The newlyweds are honeymooning in New York State, after which they will be at home in the treetop apartments at Messiah College. So they're going to move in together. Hey, everybody, just going to take a quick break from the show and tell you a better, easier way to cook with Tovala. Tovala.com. Absolutely. You don't want to stare into the fridge. That dinner time, oh boy, what are we doing? We didn't plan anything tonight. Oh, no. How do we make something out of what we have and how do you put something? Don't do that stuff. Get Tavalla. These meals are amazing. I love food, but if you love food and hate cleaning and cooking and doing all that, this is the thing you need to get. Tavala, it is fantastic. This podcast is sponsored by Tavala. Tavala is a smart meal delivery service, fresh meals, and a smart of that does the cooking for you. So cool. Small town murder listeners can get a Tovala smart oven for just $49 plus free shipping when you order six,

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Now back to the show. They immediately begin building a life here where he wants to be a pastor and he wants her to be, you know, with him doing music stuff. And then they want to have kids and be like the church family and lead a church. And that's what they're all about from the very start. They will have three kids. They will have Julie, Amy, and Micah later on. So there's three kids total. Julie is a music teacher at Our Lady of the Valley Elementary School.

She worked there for years. She was also Bethany United Methodist Church's pianist, organist, and junior choir director, director of musicals, and kindergarten Sunday school teacher. So she's got... Our lady of whatever the fuck isn't... That's not Catholic, huh? Our Lady of the Valley Elementary School. No, and it might be. The religions, by the way, when it comes to shit like that, like a music teacher who's religious working in a Catholic school, in the Northeast, people are not as tribalistic about religion.

Yeah, they're just like Jesus is the way. If you're in a religion, you're in a religion, that's fine. It's all kind of one thing. It's not like in the South where it's like, you know, he's a Southern Baptist? I'm this kind of. What are you talking about Jesus? Let's kill each other. They get real.

Methodists and Baptist don't even eat the same potato salad. Oh, they get real. I mean, certain kinds of Baptists are different. There's Southern Baptists and there's a totally different thing. So up there, they're like, you like Jesus? Yeah, whatever, me too. Teach the kids some music. It's a little bit different.

Sing him on him. Yeah, they're less sectist, I guess, in the Northeast. So she does all of that and she's a kindergarten Sunday school teacher as well. So that tells me that she has patience. Yeah. She's teaching Sunday school. school kids church shit and in addition to that like junior choir director getting kids to sing together and director of musicals getting kids to do it back together that's that's patience

um she played keyboards and the church's praise band and she supervised the kids club for free is this is this is this all some some church positions are paid positions but i bet a lot of these are A lot of this is voluntary, probably. That's crazy. Because I know, like, my stepmother used to teach, like, Sunday school and, like, communion classes and shit. Yeah, you wouldn't think that about her, right? Not at all. She's very cool.

Yeah. Yeah, she used to teach that stuff. And I know she didn't, I don't think she got paid for it. She'd just go do it because my brother was getting ready for communion. So that was that. We'll pay you about it later. Yeah, there you go. We'll pay you about it as soon as we don't have to pay you.

As soon as we don't have to anymore. She gave private piano lessons and voice lessons as well for 30 years, too. Oh, wow. So she is into music, and so is A-B. These two are together. Now, according to her brother, John, he said, my sister was an easygoing person. She loved children. She had many responsibilities in the church.

Choir Director in charge of the kids' Sunday school classes, youth choir. Joel Shermer was a great mom, a loving, doting pastor's wife. She did everything for her family, for her husband, and was considered quite a wonderful person in the community. Which, I mean, it sounds like she is. You have to be. Yeah. She's putting up with a bunch of people's kids. So if you're putting up with a bunch of people's kids and you're not like beating or molesting them, you're an angel in my book.

Because I don't want to deal with, I don't want to see anybody's kids for any reason. So, you know. Yeah, I mean. Especially strangers, kids. fuck off. No thanks. Especially not on my day off. No,

oh, leave me the fuck on Sunday? Sunday? No, I don't think so. No. No. No. No.

Even people, never mind. I won't get into it. But yeah, I'm not a, I like, you know, I have a couple of nephews and a niece and they're great.

And that's about all. See them every once in a while for a couple hours. Even on my day off, I rarely want to see my own kids. That's a statement right there. It's my day off. Go do something. Go do something.

Yeah, my kids are adults now, so it's different. Yeah. Yours are almost there. So close. He becomes a, A.B. becomes a pastor for the Unitist Methodist churches here. Sure. So this is what he does. Now, this is 1970.

So I think he's feeling himself a little bit. He sings. He's the pastor. I think he's feeling important. I think he's feeling good. To quote baby Billy. I think he's feeling sexy with that long hair. Yeah.

Eli feeling sexy with that long hair. Now, he thinks he's, I think he thinks he's more than he is here. And in 1970, they've only been married two years. Uh-huh. And he gets caught having an affair already. Ah! This is not good. This is not good.

No, two years in? This is the problem with jobs that, like, have where people look up to. you because it attracts, sometimes it attracts a certain personality. What do you mean? Well, it attracts the personality of people who actually want to help people and want to guide people and stuff like that. But it also attracts the personality of someone who wants to be looked at, you know, wants people to just stare at them and also want people to look up to them.

It's kind of like there's two different psychologies of becoming a cop. There's the person who's like, well, there's three actually. There's one that's like, well, that's a job that has benefits. I have two kids. Fuck it. You know what I mean? And you can retire in 20 years and, you know, whatever. Then there is, huh, I'd really like to help people.

I'd like to like do stuff for society. And then there is, I'd like to be in charge of people and hold weapons on them and be, you know, I'd like to be in control of shit. Those are the three personalities. And maybe there's some pussy around here. Yeah. Well, yeah. And that's why they do psychological testing for that job. Whereas pastor, they don't really do psychological testing.

testing to see if you are in it for your ego and for parishioner pussy, which is what I think he's Imagine getting into church for pussy. Yeah. All you had to do was learn three jokes and go do comedy and you could have done that instead. It would have been way easier for you. Way easier. You don't even have to write them. Well, actually, not easy.

From what I've seen. Not easier because whenever I'm thinking about like a pastor's speech, I'm like, man, you can just take out of the book and then add your own shit. That's pretty, that's, yeah. We have to make up our own shit. It has to make sense, and then they all have to laugh at it. And you don't even have to get a reaction for people. You can't tell them shit, and they go, they're nod, and you can't do that in a stand-up club. So, yeah.

And if you get a half-powerful sermon where you can relate some bullshit from that thing into today's life and... You can write a joke, probably. The windshield's bigger than the rear-view mirror for a reason. Like, that shit, you'll get blow jobs till the fucking cows come home. Absolutely. And then you'll get blow jobs from the cows. The cows are notoriously horny in this area, by the way. That's actually a thing.

So after about two years of being married, this is. So this is bad. Now, Jule confessed to her family that he had been unfaithful and had strayed. Okay. So that's, she was, I mean, I guess she was embarrassed about it, but she would tell her family and she needed support. Wow. So A.B. will have multiple affairs with women in his congregation. What the fuck, A.B.

Not to be trusted with. your wife basically if you go to church not to be trusted this is the bad part is too this isn't just like you know oh some single lady wandered in and she's attracted to him and they had an affair these are women that come to him for to be in a trusted position these are women who come to him not only for spiritual guidance but sometimes for marital counseling oh my god so they'll come to him can you help me with my marriage and he's like i can help with this dick yeah i'll teach you something Yeah. So that is pretty fucked up.

That is the ultimate fuck up. That's like a, that's like a therapist fucking their client, a doctor. This is a position of trust. And this should be the most trusted. If these people actually believe all this, then this should be the most exalted position. And there is. So I don't get it. One woman later said that she had a years long affair with him after meeting him at church during a vulnerable period in her life.

Oh, my God. So we don't know how many simultaneous affairs he is carrying on. Yeah. How many's he got going on? He is dipping his stick in half the church at this point. So this woman said they met at a local hotel approximately three times a year for several years. So this isn't like a, this is just like a, yeah, like a maintenance thing every once in a while. He just can't have a dry dick, can he?

I think he's just like, well, I'm booked September, October. I can't, I got, I got room right before Thanksgiving, but I can't, I can't do any earlier than that. You should, I mean, if you're married, Christ, you shouldn't have time to, to, you shouldn't have enough left. No, you shouldn't. Well, I think this guy probably tells his wife, he's got to go counsel people, he's going to do some spiritual thing for the church. And then next thing you know, he's at the Howard Johnson's getting it on. Is that what it is? He's doing it there, Howard Johnson?

Well, that's just later on there's a Howard Johnson reference. So that's what's in my head is a shit hotel of Howard Johnson's. So they would do all this. She said that it was purely physical. She knew he was married. She came to him for help. And he helped her in a different way. Because the United Methodist Church frowns on divorce, as most churches tend to.

They're not real at the forefront of the divorce movement. They're not exactly a spear-tip there. crazy, isn't it? Shouldn't they be encouraging? Because then you're getting the revenue of the rental of the church again. I think, well, they won't allow you to marry in the church again because you're divorced. I don't know if that's every church, but that's a lot of churches. That's why my grandmother never went back to church because a priest told her that she couldn't get married in the church again because she was already married. And she told him to go fuck himself. And that was the end of that. As she should. Yeah. And then she would literally go to church and she would steal the body of Christ. She'd steal it. packages of it? Yeah, no, she'd steal it.

Like a whole bunch of it? Yeah. And then she'd try to give it to people at Easter like she was a priest. It was crazy. I was like, you stole the body of Christ. You understand that that is, whatever you're trying to do now is completely negated by the fact that you stole this from a church. Was it the little pieces or was it the wafers? The wafers and she'd break pieces off and give it to people.

Those are pretty good. Yeah, well, the taste is irrelevant here. They're not bad. They're not bad. She could have gotten some wheat in. I mean, that's fine. I put some cheese and some pursuit on it. I'm saying, what's the difference of what cracker it is?

It's a cracker. Why don't they do that? If it's the body of Christ, let's put some pursuit on there and get some taste. What's that? Is that the, what part of Christ is that? I don't know. That's the flesh, God damn. That's the flesh of Christ.

The pursuit. That's the calf of Christ. Give me that pursuit. I like it. So, yeah, they don't get divorced, Jewel and A.B. Because of this. So she knows. carrying on a fair. She knows about all this and she pretty much has to eat it because she

doesn't want to go against the church and all that kind of thing. She just keeps teaching and directing choirs and doing Sunday school and everybody knows. Yeah, she's like Henry Hill's wife. She's like Lorraine Brocko and Goodfellas. She knows what's going on. She's not just, she's just not going to R. Rossi, you're a whore. Yeah, yeah. There's a whore living in your building. Superintendent? She's not doing that. She's not a 38 to wake him up with. No. So they would travel all over the place and do music shit too. That's the other thing these two, Jewel and A.B. And the family, too, the kids as well. They traveled to the Rollinsville camp meeting in Lancaster in 1975, which was a two-week-long event where families stayed in cabins and attended

Bible studies, evening services, and prayer sessions. Yeah. You know, my nightmare. This sounds like. Torture. I don't want to pretend this is, what are we doing? I don't want to stay here with these people. I don't want to stay here with these people? Imagine him going cabin to cabin in this environment. Yeah, I was just thinking about all the misbehaving he'd be doing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Mama told him not to. He did it anyway.

That's a fact. So this, I mean... Everybody told him not to. Everyone told him not to. Jesus told him not to. He did it anyway. Now, this, too, he can go around and say, well, I have to go counsel this one. And this lady came to me for counseling.

And what she's supposed to say, you know? So, anyway, they would, they had a singing duet basically, Jewel and A.B. Which that would be hilarious if it was like a realistic duet where she sings about what's actually going on. That'd be fun. Real Stevie Nix shit. Yeah, but no,

it's not. Just singing her fucking silver spring at him. They're like Chapalron spilling her guts. This is like, you know, Jesus stuff and her pretending that everything's fine. So they made an album together at one point even. Oh, boy. Oh, yeah.

The whole family would put on community concerts and do all sorts of shit like that. They'd make the kids sing. Their album in 1974 was called Lord Bring Back the Springtime. It was the name of it. It was recorded by The Shermers. And the record label was Baldwin Sound Productions. I'm sure it was a top-notch firm there.

Springtime. Why is everything awful? I don't know. I want to sing about springtime. Lord, bring back the springtime. Yeah. The record contains 10 tracks. It's all gospel, religious songs, featuring songs such as ever gentle, ever sweet.

Ever, yeah. I want Jesus to walk with me. You generally do if you're religious, yeah. And softly and tenderly, which is about how he makes love to the congregation. Yeah. To other congregants. That's not a good one at all. It's a bad one there.

Softly and tenderly. Softly. Is that? And tenderly. I don't know why. The fuck that's about. That's crazy. Did they write that or is that just like a cover of something that's a common religious song?

I don't know. It might be. I mean, I want Jesus to walk with me. It feels like someone would have come up with that title before. When everybody knows that your husband cheats on you softly and tenderly, you don't write that song. No. You don't let him sing it either in front of you. No.

So 1975 to 1978, AB serves as the pastor of the United Methodist churches in the communities of Bainbridge and Marietta in Pennsylvania. Yeah. He and Jule would regularly do the camp meetings with their daughters and their son. And even sometimes Jules' reverend parents tagged along. Ooh, that's a party right there. Imagine that car ride. Bring the folks along. Oh, boy.

So I found a bunch of different newspaper articles about their musical where they were going to be and all kinds of shit like that. Really? 77, Dallas Town Catholics Plan buffet. The St. Joseph's Council of Catholic Women scheduled its annual Christmas buffet dinner. Reservations are open to all women of the church and their female guests. The program will feature the Reverend and Mrs. Arthur Shermer of the First Methodist Church of Marietta. The Shermers will present a program of old and unusual music. What was that mean?

A.B. is just coming to sing to only. Only the wives? Just going to say, so this is a room full of women and A.B. cruning softly tenderly to them. This is going to be, wow, he's going to be pockets full of phone numbers when he leaves that bad boy. Trying to slam. Trying to smash in the confessional. And what is an old and unusual music? What is unusual?

Well, I mean, this all sounds unusual. All religious music. Yeah, this all sounds unusual. Not all. Not all. No? No. Listen to like fucking.

Al Green sing about Jesus. That shit, you feel, I don't give a fuck about, I'm not religious at all, but man, does that shit sound good. Marvin Gay is singing about Jesus? Like, fuck yeah, yeah. Is it, do they just reference him or is it a All-Jesus all the time song? They're like gospel songs, but the way they sing them, they sing them like Al Green and Marvin Gay or whoever or even fucking like a hillbilly shit. Like again, bring up Jenstones again. The fucking, you know, do dudes on a banjo.

That shit's catchy as fuck. I don't care what they're singing about. but I don't listen to that shit but I mean if it's good I'll I'll listen to it I don't care about the Jesus part of it Every religious song I've heard apart from Hallelujah

or some Christmas song I'll fucking yeah I'll get down with my favorite my favorite Christmas songs are all the religious ones even though I don't believe they're all great they're all great oh holy night's the best Christmas song it's the most religious there is

the most religious song ever written the other ones are just they never run No, no, not like that. The lyrics are so bad. Not this kind of shit, like choir shit. I'm talking. I can't.

Marvin Gay is singing about Jesus is a whole other thing. I mean, he's got soul into it, and it's Marvin Gay, for Christ's sake. It's a totally different thing. Making it relatable. Yeah, it sounds like it could be about a woman. You could replace Jesus for, you know, Denise, and it would be fine. You know what I mean? You go, all right, yeah, yeah, I love you.

I feel of your spirit until the cows come home. I feel Jesus to spirit through. through my fingers. Yeah. Inside of him. Oh, no. Denise. Let's hold on.

Wait, I got to write a new line there. That's for the ladies. So after the United Methodist Conference transfers A.B. now to the Bethany United Methodist Church in 1978. That's when the family moves to Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Yeah. Which is where they were when the jewel tragedy happened. So his career is on the upswing, which I don't understand how, because every. Everyone has to know what he's up to.

There's this thing, James, in this whole forgiveness is fucking, mm-hmm. Yeah, they don't. They don't really do that, though. This isn't Catholicism where you just go say what you did and it's forgiven. Jesus might forgive you, but these people aren't going to. You know what I'm saying? That's the way church is. Jesus might forgive you, but we'll fucking remember that shit and judge you forever.

If you're slightly different. If he's still the pastor, maybe they don't. The pastor should be twice as fucking, the pastor should be. I don't disagree. Spotless. He should be Christ-like, right? I'm saying in the event he's not, perhaps that they relate even harder. But how would you listen to that guy now?

You're full of shit. Don't tell me what to do. Yeah, but what if they're doing it? You fuck Peggy. From row four. What are you talking about? You know what I mean? What if all these dudes are.

trying to do the same shit? I feel like that goes against literally everything that they're doing, right? Yeah, I don't disagree. But the amount of people that cheat on their spouse is outrageous. Yeah, absolutely. But if you're fucking the congregation, too, that's even worse. That's crazy. That's crazy.

But he's a great speaker. And I've heard him sing. And he's got like, it's almost like opera. He sounds like Jim Neighbors singing Christmas songs where he's like, Oh, really? Or he sings like that. You know what I mean? I don't like that.

I don't either. It's ridiculous. You're like, what are you doing? He just said, I'm going to make a Christmas album. What is this? Rudolph the Red Nose reindeer. That's not singing. I can do that.

That's terrible. Govee Gomer. Knock it off. This is terrible shit. What are you doing? So, but he's charismatic. He's magnetic. People love him.

People say it feels like God was speaking to you from the man. Like he had a passion. Yeah, he's a showman. That's why he's getting pussy left and right. He's a showman. Yeah. He should have just tried to be in a band. And right. You know what I mean? Just you could have gone around all this, but he needed to be also, you know, a respectable guy. One of his friends and associates named Darrell Cox said, over from the Cox outfit there. Sure, sure. It's repairing small, small engines. He said that AB was our friend. He said that AB was our friend, our confidant. He was just an all-around good guy.

And then he said, right, honey? Hey, where's my wife? Hold on a second. I hear bones. Where's that coming from? Now, this, he would eventually, by the way, A.B. serve as the chaplain of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. So the goddamn legislature of the state of Pennsylvania.

Okay. That's more fitting. That's, that fits. That's the environment he should be. That's what he should be. Perfect. and perfect mixture of setting. Religion and scumbag shit.

It's perfect. It's perfect. So, 1984, I found an ad for the annual banquet. The Emmanuel Brethren in Christ Church of Cleona held its annual mother-daughter banquet recently. He's got a type of where he wants to go.

How does he get these gigs? He's like, hey, listen, listen, I have a bonding experience for you and your daughter to take part in. Jesus Christ. This is unbelievable.

Everybody knows what he does. And they still just book it for women's conferences? He sings like a, sings like an angel, Jimmy. It's okay. It's totally fine. Wow. The Reverend Arthur Shermer and his family

from Bethany United Methodist Church presented a program of vocal music and a puppet show. A pup? Where the fuck did that come from? What is that about? I don't know. Before it was unusual music, now there's a puppet somewhere. I don't know.

that. This is really turning like Jim and Tammy Faye Baker style here, her with her Sally Muppet and all that. Very uncomfortable. Real weird. Lewis Beard led devotionals at dinner was served by the men of Emmanuel's couples class. Men of Emmanuel's

couples class. Okay. Here's 1984. This is from the Daily News. The guest entertainer was the Reverend Arthur Shermer. He entertained by singing new Christmas carols. One of which which was written by his wife.

Oh, my God. Which is actually all I want for Christmas is you. Mariah Carey stole it, that bitch. Yeah, I knew it. Nobody needs new Christmas songs, by the way. We have plenty. There's so many. There's so many.

So many. It's been, what, three decades since a decent one has come out, maybe four decades, probably, five. I don't know when the last one that came out that was any good was. To me, Christmas songs were all 1970 and before. Yeah. You know what I mean? They're either like the Holy Knights and all that or it's like Brenda Lee or whatever.

I don't want to hear from new kids on the block about Christmas at all. No, and I don't want to hear Santa Claus coming to town ever again. No, I've done with that song. I don't want to hear that at all. Bruce Springsteen trying to fucking get his phlegm up while singing about Santa Claus. I don't know. I like Bruce Springsteen, but that song is particularly bad. Not good.

Not good at all. Not good at all. So his wife's new Christmas song was entitled Christmas Is. Plural or Christmas? I was going to say, not like Charlie Murphy saying, Docnus is, not that. This is Christmas. Four Christmases.

It is. And it also is. It is this and it is that. And it ended with a Christmas sermonette, which I would assume is a woman's sermon. It's a mini sermon, obviously. But yeah, sermonette. Uncapable for women to understand.

Yeah, you know, how the church is. The meeting closed. God, that would sound awful. The meeting closed by the Greek. group singing Christmas carols with Betty Rine at the piano and Reverend Shermer leading the songs. Oh, boy. Get in there.

1985, their daughter, Julie, wins a contest. What did you do? Julie Shermer wins silver medal speech contest. And they say Julie Shermer, daughter of the Reverend and Mrs. Arthur Shermer, I mean, they go right to that shit, was chosen as the winner in a silver medal speech contest held in the Bunker Hill E.C. Church. She's 13 years old, sings with the Shermer Family Program, and is a student at Cedar Crest Middle School where she's in the band and chorus. She's now eligible to compete in a gold medal contest.

Her speech was entitled, a girl's ambition. And I don't know what that is in this particular context. To be married to a preacher who bangs half the congregation, I hope not. Other contestants. Ambition to get married and be obedient. That's, yeah, I guess so. So there's a lot of other people. She beat out a bunch of people.

1986, A.B. is a contest winner. What is this? He is the Dick Slinginist pastor in the Northeast. It's a very prestigious award. You won the gold medal. Yeah. No, there's one here from the Daily News. Clergyman identifies, quote, who is he?

A little detective work paid off for a Lebanon clergyman Wednesday afternoon. The Reverend Arthur B. Shermer won $131. by correctly identifying the man whose photo has appeared in the recently, appeared recently in the Daily News is, Who is he contest? So they put a picture in the paper and you, I guess, write in or call in or whatever and say who you think it is.

And then you went on a 331. Yeah. This is before reverse Google image search. So difficult. Shermer correctly deduced that the man is Theodore Pistek, who won an Oscar for the costumes he designed for the, film Amadeus. How the fuck does he know that?

He knows the... He recognizes the costume designer from Amadeus. That is a very... Very specific. Yeah, incredibly specific. You can recognize them on site? Wow. I guess if you're a music guy, I could see why you'd like the movie Amadeus.

Yeah. That makes sense. But to know what the costume guy looks like. Costume designer's face on site. They said the clue under Pistak's photo... was in the February 27th edition of the newspaper was he would be a useful person to have around at Halloween. He won an Oscar but not for acting. So Shermer said that clue is what did it for him.

He said, looking at the clue about Halloween, I thought he must have something to do with makeup or costumes. Then, because of the clue about the Oscar, I decided to call the Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts. That cost him money back then to call that. Yeah. That cost him money. That's a call from PA to. L.A. Yep. And sciences to get more information. They gave me

names of Oscar winners fitting this category. From then on, it was just a process of elimination. Getting the answer was just a phone call away. Schumer bought four newspapers until he hit pay dirt, he says. He has won the Who is he contest

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She's got like a second career in identifying people in the daily news. Yeah. 1988, here we go. The Salem United Methodist Church of Mannheim will host a sacred concert. Sacred and this guy in the same sentence is pretty ridiculous. By the Reverend Arthur Shermer family Sunday at 7 p.m. The program will consist of solos, duets, and other selections by the five-member family. Great.

Okay. 1994, here is Reverend and Mrs. Arthur Shermer, and it's Sunday, November 13th, 1030 a.m. and 7 p.m. And it's a picture of them like they went to Olin Mills or something, got their photo taken. Is she standing over his shoulder? He's over her shoulder. And he's got his hand on her shoulder and she's reaching up and holding his hand. You know what I mean? It's that picture.

Or they look like they're like hiding. like there's like a terrorist about telling them to do something and they're holding up together. It also shows a lot of control that picture. You know what I mean? Well, that shows, yeah, that's kind of stand by your man pose there. He's behind me and I'm okay with him. And that's a, yeah, I mean, I think that's what the Christian music people want to see then. And I appreciate it.

I love him. So April 23rd, 1999 is the event where poor Jewel, who's really, I mean, think about now that we've filled in the last 30 years, what she's gone through is... She's been going through it. A.B, took a jog, came home and found her with the shop back, wrapped around her ankle. Shop back around her ankle, 2.15 p.m. April 23rd, 1999, and he doesn't ride in the ambulance with her, which is so fucking weird. And she died.

She dies. Now, they said that it's really strange. Jules family, they get to the hospital before she dies because she's on life support. And I guess her brother, John, said he was struck. by what he saw. He said, quote, when you look at my sister lying in that hospital bed, I don't believe there was one spot on her face or head that wasn't black and blue. Wow. Yeah, because 750 pounds of force. Yeah, my first words to my father were something's not right here because there was just too much trauma to the head and face from falling down

six steps. No. Yeah. Your face doesn't hit all six of them. You. Your face doesn't hit all six of them. And even if it did. Five feet tall, those are a foot apart. Even if she bounced off every one, it still wouldn't cause this kind of damage. Like, this is crazy. And there's not enough height for her to, like, fall and land directly on her head and to have that kind of force. Something's weird. Now, they also, John, uh, Jules brother John also said that she, he didn't, wasn't a big fan of A.B's demeanor at the hospital either.

No. He said, quote, Schumer's demeanor at the hospital was like he was at Sunday, was, at a Sunday school picnic. He was sitting with his daughters and some other people from the church, and they were laughing and joking and carrying on. Now, I get that you have kids and you're trying to, but they're not little kids. That's the thing. It's not like if you had a five-year-old and a four-year-old, yeah, you try to, hey, everything's fine. But these are not small children.

Julie was 13, 15 years ago. She's almost 30 years old at this school. She's also at this point fighting for her life. She's not dead. And he's just giggling? Giggling. So John said, to the point that my father leaned over and said to me, you know, for a guy who has a wife laying there dying, he doesn't seem too overly concerned or distraught. Yeah.

Which I think anybody would say. So A, B, decided to take Jule off life support because it's up to him. He's the husband. Yeah. It's fucked up. Yeah, she wasn't going to regain consciousness. So, yeah. And it doesn't happen right now.

No, no, no, no. So when they take people off life support, it takes so long. You're going to let her sit there forever. You're going to fucking Terry Shivo, this poor woman, let her go. You know what I mean? She's not going to recover. No. It's sad, you know.

He declined an autopsy, which I don't know how he could decline an autopsy. It shouldn't be up to him. Nah, I'm good. I'm right. Let's just call it an accident and move on. It seems like, I don't know about that. Now, the thing is, though, John, Jule's sister, had already called law enforcement.

Joel's brother. Yeah, I'm sorry. Joel's brother was suspicious and he already called law enforcement and said, I'd like you guys to at least look into this because this doesn't look right to me. Yeah. So she dies on April 24th,

1999 at age 50. This poor woman. She'd been getting ready, her students ready for a concert at Our Lady of the Valley that she'll never get to see. It's very sad. So her body is taken away

for an actual autopsy regardless of what A.B. said. Now, they think she may have had, the medical theory is she had a heart attack, then fell down the stairs. 750 pounds of force. That's the wild part. But the problem is, when the medical examiner gets the body, the first thing he'd like to look at is the heart to see if that's what happened. They open her up. She has no heart. There's no heart her chest. She's an organ donor. They've already taken her heart for somebody else.

Oh, that's fucked up. So, I mean, great for the person who's getting a heart, but not so good for the medical examiner who would love to do an autopsy. They can harvest like that. They have to. Oh, yeah, I guess they have to. Yeah, they have to do it. Yeah, they have to do it.

Yeah, well, it's still. Dead tissue is dead tissue. It doesn't pop anymore. That's right. So that's going to, not only that, it has already been transplanted into somebody. So it's now in someone else's chest. So it's not like you can say, call it back and put it on a tray in front of me. It's in a person's body at this point.

It's set. It is fascinating how fast they, I got in a car accident. The last car accident I got in, somebody rear-ended me. Another car pulled up within three minutes. The lady that hit me was carrying live organs. Somebody like got in her backseat, snatched shit out and then took off. I was like, it was the craziest thing. Not live organs, but things of that nature when I was a problem.

process server, blood shit and stuff like that. And yeah, if you have any kind of delay, you have to get it. You got to go now. And an organ would be 10 times worse. I mean, that's got to go now, now, now. Fascinating. Which is always a good source of comedy whenever they use a, you know, like Reno 911 or something when there's an organ.

And you have to get it there. And they leave it on top of the car and drive away. Cooler falls off. So the cardiologist's theory about a heart attack couldn't be tested. Uh-huh. So they were like, what do we do here? So the doctor, Dr. Ross, and he'll come up later, he tracked down medical slides of Jules' heart tissue. Oh, well, he was, okay, yeah, you got to have it out, right?

Yeah, I guess when they take it out. So this is Dr. Wayne Ross. He said, her heart was healthy. When I examined it under the microscope, it showed no evidence of a heart attack. I clearly determined that Jules Shermer did not have a heart attack. It was clear as day. I put that thing in another person. It's still beaten.

It's still beat, well, he got the, he had tissue from it to look at, to see. Yeah. And also, if it's still working and somebody else, it's probably good. Still going. Still going. It's fine. So he conducted the autopsy, found no signs of heart disease, despite a cardiologist at the hospital suggesting that Jule might have had a heart attack that caused her to fall.

Because that's what, whatever you do, you assume that's what happened to them. I'm a cardiologist. I think, oh, they must have a heart attack and fell down because that's what I see all the time, is heart attack. So I would think that's what you think. Now, the issue here is, though, The fall, Dr. Ross discovers Jule had 14 areas of impact on her head. Six stairs.

14 areas of impact. Yeah. She hit each one several times? Twice and then a couple more for good measure. Those stairs kicked the shit out of it. That is, I mean, even if you cartwheel tumbled down them, you still wouldn't hit your head that many times. And that's a lot. You got to get up and do it again.

Yeah. This is multiple skull fracture. Yeah. Now, the issue is, and it could still be possible falling downstairs, you never know. But then when he examines the rest of her, there is nothing else wrong with her. She has nothing anywhere else on her body but her head. No broken ribs, no pelvic fractures. No wrist.

And they said no broken wrists or hands from trying to protect yourself, which is what people do. Just a few minor scrapes and bruises to her torso and arms, some in the shape of a handprint. Oh. Now they were also going, well, we don't know if that's the paramedics trying to help her. That could be that too. Anyway, they said that the, you know, if you fall down a flight, everybody's falling down some initial bit of something. You put your hands out.

Yeah. You definitely try to break your fall for sure. Your hands are fucked up. Yeah. So Dr. Ross classifies the cause of death as undetermined, which is not accidental. And it's not homicide. it's undetermined.

So that means we don't know shit. There's only four ways, right? I believe so, yeah. Natural homicide, undetermined, accidental. Suicide. Or accident. Yeah, or an accident.

I mean, that's, so he tells the cops, I would look into this further if I were you guys, you know, if I was that investigating kind of guy. Yeah. If I was doing some constabulary shit right now, I'd do this. my forte, I would be investigating. The cop said, thanks for the tip.

And they did nothing. That's what we do. No, thanks. No, thank you. We're good. We'd rather not. Yeah, it's crazy. So the cops decide we're not investigating this further.

Nothing? It was an accident. He sings like a fucking angel. And my wife says he's a wonderful guy. So that's what the cop said. Yeah, my wife said he's great. He really does that. A couple days later, John, Jule's sister, heads over to...

Jules' brother. Why do I keep calling him sister? I don't know why I keep doing that. Jules' brother, John. It's his sister, Jule. That's fucking me up. Now, he goes over to the house here, which I believe is like in the church property. It's like a house connected to it.

Yeah, I know that house. Because they call it the parsonage, which I believe would be that. I think the pastor gets. to stay there. Sometimes they donate it to somebody in the community that's like under that needs it. A tornado took their house down or something. Yeah. Or she just, they just can't get it together.

Somebody yeah, somebody with four kids. My aunt is that lady in a lot of community. She's the one staying at the thing? They give her a lot of homes. Oh, I don't know if she was giving the homes out or taking a minute. She's gotten a lot of homes in the church parking lot. Very nice. So he came over a couple days after

this all happened to look where it happened. He just wanted to see. And what he finds is there's no blood anymore. It's already cleaned up. It's completely cleaned up from the basement walls and floor and everything like that. Gone. And the walls. Everything. Now, he said

what the fuck here, what happened in the blood? I'm sure he said it in a more Jesusy way, but what the fuck is the general gist? Holy shit. A.B. said, paramedics cleaned it, which is hilarious. They do not. They, A, will not clean anything that was there to begin with, and they won't even clean up their own mess. Are you kidding me?

Oh, they will leave. They'll leave. So much more mess than that murder. Everywhere. Yeah. That's what they do, because their concern, you know, their primary concern is save this person's life, not make sure to clean up. Does anybody bring a garbage bag? Recycle that, would you?

Yeah. Who's got a big fucking stick with a poker on it? I can clean our stuff up. They don't care at all. So they would certainly not do crime scene. No way. That is 100% on you. Yeah.

They have businesses you can call it do that shit. So you don't have to clean up your own dead wives' blood and brains off of things. So anyway, one of the paramedics later said that we don't do that. Like they'd asked him, is our job is to help the patient not to destroy evidence or really affect the scene in any way. We're just trying to save a person. So it had to be AB that cleaned it up himself. So they think that he cleaned up the blood while she was in real. route to the hospital, then showed up at the hospital.

That way, there was an investigation when they came later. It's all cleaned up already. Nothing you can do about it. You can't do that. No. That shows zero concern. No, that's, that's, yeah. And it's all very nebulous because it's an accident and the paramedics came and took her.

So it's not really a crime scene at this moment. And who's to say how you grieve. That shit's so personal. You want to clean. You don't want her to, what if she gets better? She's going to come home and see her blood all over the plate. What if the kids see it? She's going to remember it.

Yeah. Either way, that's what happened. She's dead now and everybody's very suspicious, especially her family is very suspicious of AB. So 2000, the next year, he's transferred again, which happens a lot in the church, apparently. Yeah, not just the Catholic one. No, they move all over the place. He moved to the Pocono Township. in Monroe County and became the pastor of Readers United Methodist Church.

Readers is a small town inside Jackson Township. These townships have little towns in them, but it's all under the township. And now he's a single fella? Not just single, James. Oh, no. A widow. A widow. Think about that.

My wife, who by the way sang like a fucking angel that brought, tragic death. Yeah. I've been just mourning, tears coming. Had to transfer. It just reminded me of her too much to be there. It just all like everywhere I looked, all I saw was my wife. He is going to have, the pews are going to be dripping when he gets done with that shit. All she needed was wings and a harp.

She already had the voice. That's it. They're going to have to hand out towels to ladies as they come in to fucking put under them. Ladies are going to sit down putting on chapstick every day. Every day. So there he is. And he meets a lady. Shocking.

Are you surprised? The first day, I'm sure. He meets Betty Jean Scherzer, S-C-H-H-E-R-Z-E-R-S-E-R-S-R-Ser. She's born in 1952, so she's a couple years younger than him, but in the ballpark, she's from Hershey, Pennsylvania, where the chocolate is. She's known as a very kind, generous woman who gets involved with everything. Oh, boy. Charitable shit, church stuff. She joined the Pleasant Valley Ecumenical Network, which helps struggling families with food and clothing and

essentials like that. So that she's a very nice woman. Again, charitable. Charitable, kind. This is what I thought, like as a kid growing up, you go, that's what religion is supposed to be, right? They're kind, they're charitable and all that. Not hateful and shit like some of them now. Not everybody. There's some religious people who are just like this. This is what they're like. Well, that one with the picket signs is crazy. That's not Christlike at all. Those people, I call them every horrible name I can think of when I see them. Because I hope you're offended because I'm offended by your fucking presence in this world. So, fuck you.

Your general existence tries me fucking bad. It drives me crazy. It's all I can do to keep the car on the road, so I'm going to yell shit at you. Now, Betty, very kind, though. That's what she's all about. That's the main thing everyone's, oh, sweetest lady on the face of the earth, Betty.

Now, Betty's son said that he first met Shermer in 2001 when his mother was dating him in the beginning. He said that, A.B. had told him his first wife, Jula, died of cancer. So he's lying about. Why would he do that? Because that sounds way more sad. Does it? It's not suspicious. You couldn't have given her cancer. Yeah, there's that. If she fell down the steps, even if it's totally cleared, you go, hmm, everybody's suspicious like that. Whereas cancer is just off. She fell down the steps. Did she?

Yeah. I don't know. Everything, if he says one thing that's a little off, you're like, I don't think his wife fell down the Like you would absolutely do that. Whereas cancer, you just go, oh, God, Jesus, it's cancer. I don't know anybody who doesn't know somebody who's died of cancer. It's a horrible fucking thing. Yeah. Jesus Christ. And I hope you go get your ass checked soon, James.

Yeah, all should be checking our asses. Between, yeah, between, uh, where does this come from? It's just cancer. I'm just so sad about all of the Catherine O'Hara and I didn't know that fucking guy, but. Two in a week is crazy. You got to go get checked. Please do. What about you?

I'm going this year. I was going to say. Why me? Why is it just me? What did I do? Because I need you. I can't do this without you. We need each other.

Let's go hand in hand to get our asses checked. What do you say? I'll go with you. Let's go together. We'll get a toilet for two for the up to it days when we have to shit ourselves. senseless will hold hands. It'll be very, very nice. Two cameras. You watch mine. I'll watch yours. Beautiful. I'm in. I'm fucking in, man. Oh, God. So June 1st, 2001,

Betty and A.B. get married. Great. That is quick. Married. Within two years of his wife's death, he's married, which couldn't look like he's just trying to move on and start over and understandable for people. Yeah. Sometimes you replace them real fast because The void is so big. Yeah. Some people need to be with somebody. They just have to.

They don't like being alone. And his daughters, Amy and Julie, said they were really relieved that their dad found someone new because they were worried about them. Is there adults now and everything? Amy said they just seem like they were best friends. It really seemed like they had this closeness. Shermer here, AB, described Betty, as his best friend to his daughter. She's my best friend. We just hang out.

Well, that's what it looks like. Yeah. And Julie said it was a real friend. relief to know that he had someone he could talk to and share with and just hang out with. She's just happy that he's out of her hair, basically. He's not going to be calling me every day. So Betty's sisters, Tina and Sandy, we'll talk about them plenty of as we go here. Thought he was a wonderful guy and a great match for the sister, too.

Even Betty's mother, Jean, was thrilled with this arrangement. Everybody was thrilled. Couldn't have been better. They love him, yeah. Julie said, you know, she was just happy about that he had someone to hang out with. Now, Betty's sister Sandy said, I heard pastor, so I was happy for her. Is that many of the standing in her mind? Yeah.

The other sister said the pastor, the nice guy, the everything. He just seemed like he was perfect for her. And then Gene, Betty's mother, said he was so nice. We just didn't think there was anybody better than him. He sings like an angel. He's nice. He can't beat it here. And yeah, so I found the their wedding announcement as well.

Got one there too. It doesn't say anything about any French fashion accessories. Any flirt with a lot. None of those. No, pu de tuix. What was it called? Poud de sui. Pud de swat.

I believe. Poud de Sue. So enter the Musante's family. I believe that's how you pronounce it. M-U-S-A. A N-T-E-S. And I apologize if I'm saying that wrong. Musontes.

Musantis. Musantis. It depends on where you are and what part of the country you're in. Sure. Where, you know, what the origin of it is. This is Joseph and Cindy. Now, Joe, Massante is a, he's a carpenter. Yeah.

And he struggles with alcoholism for years and years and years. He's at a hard road. A lot of us do. Yeah. He's at a hard road here. He's a blue collar guy, works with his hands, and he comes home. He wants some drinks. And he brought his family to the.

Readers United Methodist Church hoping that faith would help him overcome his addiction. Literally, he's tried everything, he said, and he thought, maybe the church will do it for me. A carpenter, so is J.C. That's what I mean. Fuck it. And this is maybe last resort for him. Maybe he's tried this and that and AA and this one and that, and he's like, well, maybe the church will do it. I don't know.

So he throws himself into the church, and I mean into the worship and into helping around the church, too, because he's a carpenter. He can build some shit. One thing churches will do is they'll find out what you do and if you can do it for them for free. Fuck it. Can you do what you do for money for free for us, please? Is that possible? That is one thing they are real good at. Oh, boy.

Oh, boy. Can you do us a charitable? Yeah. We've told so many stories like that where they immediately put people to work. And he's doing construction around the church. He's repairing the building. He's creating things and, you know, pieces. He even built a special desk for AB's office.

A beautiful desk, big wooden, handmade fucking desk. Really? So this guy is not just a framer or a roof, and this guy does finish carpentry and shit. Carving. He's skilled. Yeah. Ornate.

Yeah. To make a desk, you have to have a lot of skill. That's a... That's easy. It's different. Now, Joe has a family as well. His wife's name is Cindy, Cynthia, Mora Mustain, or Mousante, Mustane.

Dave's wife. She was the church secretary and she became A.B.'s personal assistant as well. Yeah. So he's doing all the repairs, Joe, and his wife is also working in the church, being the pastor's assistant, being a secretary. You see where this is going. Yeah. An affair starts pretty quickly between A.B. and Cindy here. And it was...

How's they do it? Dude, I don't understand it. He's not even a young man anymore. You know what I mean? He's in his 50s at this point. It's, I mean, handsome, charismatic, those are all things. But when it directly conflicts with what you do, how the fuck do you pull it off? I don't understand why you pull it off.

Never mind how. I see how. I don't get why. What are you gaining from this? You know what I mean? I get what you're gaining. You're gaining plowing a younger woman, I understand. Yeah, yeah.

But this could fuck my entire life up. I'm going to do it anyway, is a weird thought. Close mouths don't get fed is what I'm told. His mouth is never closed, Jimmy. Whether he's singing or fucking. It's open. Nobody's mouth has ever closed. This guy is always in it.

It is. He is. And it was kind of everybody knew about it in town, sort of. Because she's his assistant. So, you know, they should be doing stuff together. If you see them at lunch together, that's not a big deal because they work together. Why wouldn't they be together? But there's a lot of like explicit.

text messages exchanged between the two of them. Their calls are quite frequent. They're always calling each other, which again. Do we have texts? Again, no, we have some emails, quotes and stuff like that. Oh, boy. Now, A.B. gave her a nickname, CD. Which I don't understand because that doesn't, that's not her, I don't know why.

Cindy, CD. What's her last name? Musante. And it was Moira or something as her maiden name. So I don't understand where that comes from. Okay. But CD, he called her. According to Cindy, they were in love.

They were in love. Now, he's been married like a year. Like, this is crazy. Now, both of their spouses are kind of in the way at this point, as you might imagine. Right. Yeah. So now, Cindy, why she's having an affair, you might wonder. Yeah, I do. We know why A.B. is. He can't help him.

He's just, it's his thing. That's what he does. Is she exhausted with her alcoholic? husband? Yeah. She said that they'd been married for 18 years and he was an alcoholic and she just had had enough. She said that she began as the personal secretary and it went from there. Now, Cindy's story of how this came to be was that August 3rd, 2008, okay, as we'll go through here, August 3rd, 2008 was, because the affair takes place in 2008, 2009, this was, this was, his 50th birthday.

This was her husband's 50th birthday. Oh, boy. Did he get drunk and ruin it? Well, the couple's two children, then 16-year-old Samantha, who'll come up quite a bit, and her 10-year-old at the time, boy, were out of the house that morning. So Cindy went to the grocery store to go shopping while Joe sat at home and he drank. Uh-huh. So...

It's my birthday. Yeah. Yeah. So she said that was pretty much it for me. I was done. And as she said, within a few weeks, she realized that she loved A-B. And that's when all the emails and texts and the affair starts here in 2008. So that's what's going on.

Now, this is all fine and dandy, if you can get away with it, I guess. But the problem is people know about this shit. And the first person to really find out definitely what the truth was was 16-year-old Samantha, Cindy's daughter. Oh, no. This poor kid, man. This is brutal. I mean, there's only so many times you can have somebody crawl into bed next to you, just reeking of obvious drunk booze.

I get, oh, I get Cindy, whatever, not wanting to be in a marriage. That's fine. But he woke up on his birthday. Don't fuck the pastor. That's not how you do it. I guess. And she said, not only mad, that was it. That was over for her.

I guess maybe they were going to have a celebration. He was too drunk. I don't know how it was. But either way, Samantha. found explicit text messages on her mother's phone between, which is the last thing a 16-year-old wants to see is explicit text messages between their mother and a pastor. That's the grossest thing you could fucking possibly think of. I mean, it's the grossest to see your mom being filthy.

But then with this is. With the pastor. She is like, please fucking men in black me, please just wipe my brain. I don't want to remember kindergarten. I don't want to remember anything. Just wipe me out. I never want to imagine my mom saying pussy ever. Start from scratch, especially her pussy.

In reference, too. And these messages also how much he loved her, how nice she looked all the time. And we couldn't wait to see her and get with her and all this type of shit. Those are pretty innocent. And then more graphic, yeah. And so Samantha said, how could my mom ever do something like this? to our family. She just didn't get it. Well. So she gets involved, Samantha,

which is a 16-year-old, certainly, I feel bad for it because she doesn't know what else to do. And she's trying to- She's trying to save her family is her goal. And I completely under, especially at 16, you don't sit back and go, well, let me think of the ramifications. You go, I don't want my mom and dad to get divorced.

I want them to be together because you're 16. So she had been like really tight with her mom. Like she said best friends with her mom. She said she was my best friend. She took me to all the horse shows and she loved horses just as much as I did. I kind of felt betrayed that I found something like this out. Understandable. So she decides to get involved.

They said, she was asked later on, Samantha, were they that explicit the text messages that you knew it was going on? And she said, there was no doubt. It wasn't, it wasn't, quote, I love you in Christ type of text messages, not something you'd expect your employer to be sending you. I love you. It wasn't, I love you in Christ. It was, I'm going to, I'm going to tag the Christ out of you when I see you later. I'm going to pound the Christ out of you when I see you. Really, really.

I'm going to fuck the Christ out of you. Out of you. That's more like probably closer to what it is rather than I love you in Christ. I love you. It wasn't I love you in Christ. That's a great line, by the way, Samantha. That's very funny. Yeah.

She's funny. I like her. So she said, fuck, she knew if her dad found out, it would probably spiral him even worse now. You think he's an alcoholic now. Wait until he finds out his wife's banging the pastor who he made a desk for. Yeah. How do you think that's going to end up? If he bent her over that, I swear to Christ.

Oh, man. So she said my dad struggled with alcoholism his entire life. He finally decided. had to get it together, so he started going to church. So he's like, she said, I got to fix this. So what she does is she creates a fake email account, Samantha. And under the name of Gene Smith. And she's going to catfish people.

Yes. She sent an anonymous message to A.B. Begging him to end the affair. Oh. This was sent September 26, 2008 from an alias here. with the subject line, a word of caution. This is Gene Smith. I know what you're doing.

She said, this is an anonymous email to warn you to keep it at a professional level with your staff at your office. And it was followed by a promise to report the affair to the authorities of the church if it didn't stop. A 16-year-old wrote that. 16-year-old. Samantha's sharp. She's sharp as shit. She's really sharp. Now, A.B. and Cindy knew exactly what it was, somehow.

Somehow they knew that with Samantha. I don't know how. What did she do? Signed at Samantha? I mean, Jean. Samantha, aka Gene. So they called Samantha into the church office to talk to her. This is A.B.N. Cindy.

And they denied the accusations and told her that she was the fucked up one for imagining something like that. Meanwhile, she read text messages of, I'm going to take it out of one place and put it in another. it's pretty obvious what's going on. You know what I'm saying? That's insulting, right? Yes. Now you're not only... You didn't read what...

Liars, but I'm a fucking moron now, too. That's what you're telling me. I'm an idiot. You didn't read what you thought you read. Okay. Okay. She's not six. She's 16.

Yeah. She knows what she fucking saw. It wasn't I love you in Christ. Yeah. No, it was. Samantha. It really was. She said, they took me into his office and told me that I was wrong, that nothing was going on and how

dare I accuse them of an effect. of an affair. Yeah. And so they asked, I said, what did you say back? And she said, okay. She said, you're talking to your mother and the pastor of your church and they're telling you something and who are you going to, who are you to disagree? Which is true.

You don't know. You're 16. So now, later on, Cindy would tell people that she was having an affair, but not a real affair, an emotional affair. Oh, God, I hate those words. Then she said, this is even worse. She said she was just I got to use it. I got to wait

a second to say that. I'll remind me to come back with what she was trying to do. July 15th, 2008. Yeah. Okay, this is before the email was sent with Samantha and all of this, okay? This is right around the time Samantha's finding out about this affair.

Yeah. Okay. It is 2 a.m. on July 15th, 2008. And Arthur is driving, he says he's driving Betty who's 56 at this point, to the hospital for jaw pain. She's got some bad jaw pain going on. All right.

He's driving her to the hospital. He claimed about 150 a.m. She woke up with severe jaw pain, which was a TMJ flare-up, and they rushed to the hospital. Okay. Now, he was driving their 2007 Chrysler PT cruiser. Oh, boy.

What a bad car. It's a terrible car. North on Route 715 near Tanner'sville. This is less than two mile from where they live. All right. All right. He said he's going 50 to 55 miles an hour.

Wow. When a deer ran out into the road. Now, if you know anything about the East Coast and especially rural Pennsylvania, there are deer fucking everywhere. And I don't know. I mean, that car's got all. Everybody hits a deer. It's giving you all it's got at 55. That's what I, you are pinning it at 55.

Boy, are you getting. You're in the red in terms of the RPMs. Yeah. That car is in danger mode. And then you hit a deer with it? No. The deer ran out in front of the car, so he swerved to avoid the deer. Smart. Yeah.

Now, when he swerves to avoid the deer, he crashes into the guardrail on Route 715. This is in Jackson Township, obviously. Now, the problem is Betty has no seatbelt on when they crash at 55 miles an hour into a guard rail. And it stops? So, yeah, the car stops on the guardrail. Hit the, it kind of goes partially into the woods. There's pictures of it. I'll post on social media here.

So now, Betty, he said, wasn't wearing her seatbelt. So she was thrown around the car. She struck the windshield, the rearview mirror, the seatbelt post. She went all over the place here. So the car is crashed. A bystander named Stan Dickinson happens by. Yeah. And he's the guy who's going to end up calling 911 here.

He said he was driving home when he saw the PT cruiser alongside the guardrail so he stopped to help because it's two in the morning. Not a lot of people out there to help. So he said, I asked him, are you okay? What's going on? What happened? And he said, yeah. He said, I'm fine, but I don't think my wife is. Right.

Okay. Now, this Dickerson said the odd thing was his attitude. He turns on the light. There's a lot of blood in the car. She's obviously hurt. She's seemingly unconscious. and it was it was odd he seemed he seemed indifferent he was like yeah here's my wife check her out there look and turned on the light like you know i got my my my fucking McDonald's spilled on the floor

look there's my chicken nuggets like that's what he was acting like he said it was real weird so yeah they asked this uh this stan dickerson did he did you ask him if he called 911 and he said yes that was one of the first things i had asked him and he just said no i haven't why? Right. Do you need me too? So he called, Dickerson calls 9-1-1. I'll fucking call then.

And they said, what's your emergency? And he said, somebody hit a guardrail. There's a woman here. She's hurt. There's two people in the car, but the guy seems okay. All right. So the ambulance arrives. Betty is rushed to Lehigh Valley Hospital.

Now, Julie and Amy, his daughters, A.B.'s daughters from his first marriage here, are all they're they rush to the hospital as well and everything like that um and uh julie later on was asked what was your first thought when you heard what happened and she said no way horrible and she said i could tell uh this is amy i think the other daughter said i could tell he was crying and he just said amy i don't know what to do i remember it was hard to hear i don't know what to do that's all he said right now betty's sisters also arrive at the hospital hospital when they get word of the accident. And one of her sisters said, I was just in shock over what bets look like.

Everyone calls her bets, by the way. She had a wound to the left side of her head, two gashes on the right side. The sister said it was unbelievably sad. The doctor said that her injuries were so bad that she would never recover. She's not going to recover. He said, I would suggest taking her off life support. She's never coming back. Got it, yeah.

So they took her off life support. Man, she died. Yeah. I just waited. Yeah. It's terrible. Now, Sister Tina, Betz's sister Tina said he came out to the room where we had to wait, and he just opened the doors and said, Betz has passed. That's it.

She said he wasn't crying. He wasn't anything. And then the other sister said it was just so bizarre. The way he did, it was no, like, collapse. of like I had to get that out now. It's emotionally nothing. It was just, oh, she's passed away. Who wants pizza?

Like, it was a real weird thing. Now, his daughters, like Amy said, that he hides his emotions a lot. He doesn't show a lot. It's a real stoic man, yeah. She said that there were probably times where he appeared calm on the outside, but I would say inside he was a wreck. And at times when there wasn't a crowd of people around, he was not okay. She's saying it's just a performer's gene.

He gets on stage and he knows he's got to perform for the people, but then when he gets backstage, he can weep in the green room. He'll fall apart later. He'll fall apart later. Now, Betty, dead, like we said. The coroner, after the, she's pronounced dead, asks A, B for some details about the accident. Fill in his report. And they said, the detective here later said he told the coroner that the vehicle spun violently out of control. struck the guardrail and actually hit the rear of his car,

almost sounding as if the vehicle was rotating and flipping. And Betty's body went flying about the vehicle with no seatbelt. A.B. said Betty was so badly injured because she wasn't wearing the seatbelt. The coroner's office says, well, that sounds good to me. Sounds reasonable. No seatbelt bounced around. They said, you know, I don't know why she wasn't buckled up, but that's her problem. said, well, case closed. Accident.

Beaten to death by PT Cruiser. That's it. P.T. Cruiser. Homicide by P.T. Cruiser. No full autopsy. Okay. The body is cremated within 24 hours. Oh, boy, that's fast.

That is real fast. So the coroner's office rules it accidental, closes the case. And a family always says she always wore seatbelt. She never, like, her son said she would tell you every time you're getting in the car. seatbelt save lives. She told you that every goddamn time I got in the dog. She said that. She would say seatbelts save lives.

Literally. Not just buckle up. Repeat the commercial. So they were like, it's real weird that she wouldn't be wearing a seatbelt, but A, B, has explanations. Yeah. We've always worn, but it was always a threat from the driver's seat. If you don't wear that and I get a ticket, I'll kick your ass.

That's what it is. That's what I always told that. It wasn't about your safety. It was about it. It's a $60 ticket. I am not paying that. That's exactly where I heard it too. You bet my father.

If I get a ticket for your fucking seatbelt, I will take it out on you. That's exactly what it is, man. That's the difference. It's never about giving a shit about us. If you grew up poor or grew up not poor, that's the difference. The seatbelt was not to save your life.

It was to keep from tickets being mounted. That's all it was. Yeah. It's the truth. Absolute fucking truth. So he has different stories about, the seatbelt situation. Oh?

Different stories. He tells people she got cancer? Her seatbelt gave her cancer. He said, that's why she takes it off. No, Bishop Peggy Johnson, he said the seatbelt must have came unclapsed during impact. It is a piece of shit car. It is a shit box. To his daughters, he said Betty had just unbuckled to readjust to a more comfortable position in the seat.

and that's when the deer came out, just bad timing. He said he glanced away from the road for one second to look at Betty taking off her seatbelt. Like, you know, she distracted me. I heard the click. I looked over, looked up. There's a deer. I swerved. Next thing, you know, she's bouncing off everything.

So Julie said later on, quote, yeah, I think that could happen. I believe that's what happened. That's his daughter, Julie. Betty's sister, Tina doesn't see it quite the same way as we'll find out. No. She said that he, A.B. told the sister Tina that Betty had recently developed a habit of never wearing her seatbelt anymore. Okay. Now he's got so many stories. When you're in your 50s, you just go, you know what, I've been wearing the seatbelt for so long. I'm not wearing it anymore. How many times does it even come into play? Come on. I don't need this.

So then he said, quote, she was playing a little game. That's how he put it, to see how far they could. drive before the alert sounded for the sea. It's 2 a.m. We're rushing to the hospital. Hey, let's see how long it's before it goes bong, bong, bong, bong. Let's see how long that takes. I've got a spoiler alert.

It's 10 seconds. It's 10 seconds. And 50-year-old women on the way to the hospital don't care about that. They don't care. No. Teenage boys who have smoked too much weed that night go, hey, how long is that, man? Wait a say, hold on, do it.

Here, shut up, bro. Shut up. How many bongs before it shuts off? I think it's nine seconds, bro. I think it's not. That's who does that. So the sister said, he told me that she didn't put her seatbelt on. Like immediately, I'm like, she always wears her seatbelt, you know?

What do you mean she didn't have her seatbelt on? And he told me, well, lately, she's been doing a little game when she gets in the car. She's a real prankster this one, real trickster. She doesn't put her seatbelt on and she waits to see how far down the road before she hears the ding sound. It's 10 seconds, Dickett. It's the same in every car. And I said, that is crazy. And he said, I know.

That doesn't sound like Betts, but that's what she was doing. No, it doesn't sound like anybody. It doesn't sell like any adult human. That sounds like a nine-year-old where you go, will you stop doing that, put your goddamn seatbelt out before I get a fucking ticket? That's what you'd say. My daughter, my daughter likes to pull it and not like take it all the way off. Just like press the button and hold it there.

Just to hear it go, and just to piss me off. Because she knows it drives me fucking insane. Absolutely. And then she just clicks it back in. While she's doing that, she shot through the fucking windshield. And that would be, that's what happened here, apparently. You know what I would say? Serves you fucking right.

That's what you get, asshole. So this is nuts. Yeah. Anyway, the detective later said, I think Mr. Shermer was trying to offer an explanation because the sisters knew that Betty always wore her seatbelt. Yeah. So he said, I know it doesn't sound like her, but that's what happened. So this is weird. Now, after he told her about state police already talked to her about the events that led up to the death and everything like that, the sister asked him about the contradiction and the crash.

And he just said, it's just a game, man. That's what it is. Who's awesome than that? What's the game? That's what I'm saying. It's a real fun game. And it's the same amount every time. So that game would last one session. Ten seconds, ding-ding. That's how long it takes. Maybe two to make sure it's consistent.

It's still ten seconds. Game over. We never play this fucking game again, ever. He has to be hauling ass for us to get further or just snail's pace for us to not get as far. But every time, ten seconds. Ten seconds. So this is an email to one of the sisters here. He said, I would not hurt her.

That's what he said, which. He did two things that are bad there. A, he didn't do the contraction. I would not hurt her. But he typed it. So that's different than speech. People write different than they speak. So that I'll give you.

That's a great point. Yeah. But hurt her as a minimization. That minimizes crazy. She's not hurt. She's dead. No. She's gone.

Someone who didn't kill someone says, I didn't kill her. She's dead and I'm sad. She's already on fire. Gone. Dust. She's in a bag. The sister said, what did you tell? No, she's not in a bag.

She's in an urn that you're going to shit when you hear what this urn is. It's crazy. Oh, I can't wait. It's going to be amazing. I'm saving it out. Do we already get to the other thing that you were doing? The other thing you told me to remind you. Oh, shit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The daughter, what was that? Damn it. I got to go back. Son of a bitch. Oh, yes. Okay. Okay, yes.

Cindy had told people that the affair was just he was, she was just helping him. him, the emotional affair was just helping him grieve for his dead wife. That's all it was. That's it. So it wasn't in a physical affair. It was an emotional affair because she felt bad for him because his wife was dead and all. Yeah. I was just,

I was just fucking him to help him feel. Yeah. Trust me. He was smiling. I think I did it. I think I accomplished my goal. Terrible doesn't describe her. That's the nicest person ever.

Wow. So both sisters of Betty, Tina and Sandy, wondered why Betty was cremated immediately. What's up with that? Why'd you cremate her so fast? And one of them said, Atina said she was against cremation. And then here's A.B. telling us that she chose to be cremated. But they couldn't really say anything because he's the husband.

Yeah, he's allowed to maybe she told him that. And that's, you know, it's a private thing. It's her best friend. Yeah. So October 16, 2008. Okay. Now, Joe is getting suspicious. Remember Joe Moussante?

with Cindy, the husband of the guy of the woman that he's fucking. Well, he's getting suspicious as well because of all the time she spends with A-B. While Cindy was driving somewhere, she was away,

Joe asked Samantha directly, is your mother in love with the pastor? She knows that Samantha's the closest. Don't involve your kids. Nobody involved your kids in anything that has to do with your personal life whatsoever, first of all. But he's at the end of his rope

and he could be drunk, too, so we don't know. I don't know if it's love, Dad, but it's certainly lust. It's certainly something. Yeah. So Samantha said, yes, there's something going on there. Uh-huh. So Samantha says, and then he said, does she love him? And I just said, I think so.

And she said, that's probably one of the most horrible things that you can hear, that your wife wants somebody else. When asked how he reacted, Samantha said he didn't have a lot to say, but I could tell he was devastated. Yeah. He was. He ended up confronting Cindy and saying, what the fuck? Yeah. She said, I'm so, she admitted to it.

She said, I'm so sorry. I'm not, it's over. It's over. I'm going to recommit myself to this marriage. And it's all over and I'm not, I want to continue to be married to you and I love you and blah, blah, blah. So much for having enough of the alcoholism. Yeah. And later on, she said, on the surface, I did, I said what I said, but in my heart,

I didn't, she said. Meaning she wanted to stay in the marriage. She said on the surface, I did, but in my heart I didn't. I made it look like I wanted to continue to be married to him, but that was not my intention. Yeah. What the fuck? She said for the next two weeks, Joe watched every phone call his wife made, checked online records to see who she spoke to. He's checking the phone bills and she like her Verizon bill and shit.

He also reached out to AB's higher ups in the. church seeking an inquiry into him, that he shouldn't be fucking parishioners. That is the number one rule of being a pastor is all those women, don't fuck any of them. None of them. Zero women in here you can fuck. And if you're married, how about just fuck your wife? Just fuck your wife. Don't do it in front up there either, but do that private also, but just, you know.

And I realize there's relationships that are open and whatever it's on, but a pastor should never be in one of those. Probably not. Or he just shouldn't be a pastor, that's all. Right. You should be a pastor of a real progressive church, just a real laid-back church. They take some hallucinations together. Yeah, it's real fun if you're saying before.

That's a more fun church. Real progressive. Real progressive. October 28, 2008, Joe threatens to kill himself and the children. Joe, I would kill. Not the kids, Joe. Everybody, Joe says. We don't know how drunk he was or whatever.

But Cindy, scared, takes the children and goes to her sister's house. Yeah. And tells everybody around her family, including the kids, including 16-year-old Samantha, to let his calls go to voicemail. Don't take his calls. Don't do anything. Wow. That night, Joe called his daughter multiple times and she didn't answer.

He left voicemail saying, quote, if you love me at all, please call me back. Oh. Okay. He said, honey, if you love me even a little bit, please call me back. Yikes. to his daughter. She didn't hear the messages till the next morning. She's turned her phone off and ignored it.

October 29th, 2008, secretary of the church, Marjorie Hickman, arrives at the Reader's United Methodist Church and finds that the office door's stained glass window has been smashed. Blasted out. Blasted out. In or out? Smashed.

She didn't say. She just said smashed. Okay. She just saw it was smashed. I assume in. as we'll find out. Now, she goes inside and finds a figure slumped behind the pastor's desk, behind A.B.'s handmade desk, and it's Joe. Oh, God.

Joe is dead from a single gunshot wound to the head, sitting at the chair behind the, in the chair behind A.B.'s desk he made. He made. He's got a 380 handgun at his feet, not in his hand at his feet. 380? A 380? to the head. I think that's what he had. You can do. Okay. This is what I got. It's just an interesting choice.

Yeah. It's a small, yeah, it's not a huge round, but it's, I guess if you got a 380. I mean, it's a good size round. It's pretty close to 9-millimeter. It's just such a small weird gun. It's a little. Suicide and meth. It's odd. Yeah. So Cindy tells the kids here. Samantha said, my mom just sat us down and she said, your father decided he didn't want to be here anymore. Ooh. Now, the police think that's all. well, great and everything, but we'd like to make sure

he didn't want to be here anymore and it wasn't that someone else didn't want him to be here anymore. Let's check on that. So the detective here, Jim Wagner is his name, from the Pocono Township Police Department, along with the Pennsylvania State Troopers.

They examine the scene. They find glass fragments on the souls of Joe's shoes confirming he broke through the stained glass door himself. Well, at least he walked through broken glass. Something. And blood evidence was consistent. consistent with a self-inflicted wound, no signs of a struggle, gunshot residue on Joe's hand.

Huh. On his strong hand, too. Trigger hand. Yeah. You know what I mean? That sounds like suicide. They said, I mean, you could look at stack it any way you want. This guy killed himself.

I mean. That's wild. He was making a complaint. Hours before he broke into the office, he's there. He was calling the Reverend Brownwin Yocum. said he was calling to make a complaint and alleged that the pastor was having an affair with his wife. Yeah. There's only two places you can call someone to complain about that.

That's church and the military. The only places you can call and go, this guy's fucking my wife. And they wouldn't go, all right, what the fuck business is it over his wife? It's not fair. Yeah, well, figure it out. I don't know, divorce or something. That's when it's like an actual crime. What does he call her, doggy?

Yeah, he calling me for. So the guy said he wanted me to have something, he wanted to have something done about it. is what this person said. In a series of phone calls, this person arranged to have Joe come to her Allentown office the next morning to write out a formal complaint against A.B. But he never made the trip because he went and shot himself instead. Right. Police talked to Cindy. And there's one of the first interviews, obviously.

And, you know, she said she worked as a personal secretary for the pastor. And the trooper said, why would he go do it here? Why here? What's the It's not like it was a deal I could see if it was a place Where he had the keys to When he could go in there

And it was like, you know, He broke into the church for this Yeah, we could have broken into the Arby's And done this, you know what I mean? Like, why here did he do this? And she told him, quote, Joseph believed that the pastor was involved With someone at the church.

Uh-huh. And the next question logically is, Does he have a wife? Who? Who in the church is he involved with? and she said, quote, I guess that would be me. Oh. That was really, you went the long way to get there.

You really went the long way to get there. Wow. What a fascinating way to say it. I guess that would be me. You did not want to say that. She didn't think they were going to get to the who? She's like, if he asked me, I'm going to be honest, but I'm not fucking giving away any information here.

You've got to pry it from my cold. dead hands. Yes. I don't know. Rumor is he's fucking somebody. Really? Who? Ah, shit.

Shit. Damn it. You foiled me. These detectives are so curious. Fuck. They're so curious. They're so nosy. They don't stop asking questions.

They just keep asking stuff. Nosey. I figured maybe that would satisfy him. And then they said, who. God damn it. Damn it. Asshole with this who. Fucking wise asses.

So that's what it's going on. So now they go, okay, we're looking into A.B. here to make sure he didn't do this, because it looks like a suicide, but let's find out. So A.B. does have an airtight alibi. Cindy had warned him that Joe and his gun were both missing. So he took off from his house and was in a hotel an hour away. Smart move. Gone. He took off. But three times, death has touched to this man. That's the thing. This is, this guy is just the pastor of fucking, of, of, of death. That's the best way to put it. That's a lot of death to touch you. The fucking pastor of tragedy, he is. Yeah. So after this, A.B. admitted to the bishop that he had a non-physical relationship with Cindy. Yeah.

And was told to take a health leave. Because, you know, they just, that's what they do. Well, you just take some time off and that'll make it all better. And then we'll put you somewhere else and it'll be fine. Sounds like you're sick, wink, wink. Yeah. Aren't she? You don't feel good, right? So the guy said he told him, take a deep breath and let the investigation proceed and just take you relax for your own health. Two weeks later, A.B. resigned from the church. Oh, he's done. Just resigned. Now, Joe's death is ruled a suicide case closed no matter how much motivation anybody had. The evidence says he killed himself, period. So that's that. Now, Joe as a sister, and she, if there's a couple of kind of hero-type figures in this entire story. Yeah.

She's the A-1 hero of this fucking story. All right. Rose Cobb is her name. She's awesome. She does not let shit go, and I like her. She said nothing about this felt right. No? About her brother's suicide.

She arrived post-suicide to the house, Joe and Cindy's. house and noticed the home was empty, not of furniture, but of people. Okay. I don't know how I think in a church community, it's kind of like if you're like if you're Italian, if somebody dies, everyone comes to the fucking house and they bring you food and they, you know, that kind of shit. So she said there was none of it. Nobody was there.

Nobody was doing anything. It didn't make sense. And Rose said it was horrible, shocking, traumatic thing to have somebody not only shoot themselves, but shoot themselves in a church. I couldn't believe it. My brother was dead and I didn't know what happened to him. Yeah. So she traveled to readers for the memorial service and found this house was empty.

There's no mourners. She said there's no food. There's no any of this shit. There's no widow grieving? Nothing. No. No neighbors with nothing. So she asked.

Samantha? No? Well, she might be around, but nobody that's not in the family. Okay. She asked Cindy, why did nobody come over? And that's when Cindy spilled it and said, well, I, I had an affair and love the pastor and me and Joe were done and she tells her the whole story. Oh, boy.

So Rose said, first I asked her, are you having an affair? And she said, well, that depends on what you mean by an affair. She is ready to testify, this lady. That is, that depends on what the definition of the word is, is. That's one of those. That depends on what you mean by an affair. Okay. She's already litigating this.

Yep. She's already parsing. And Rose Cobb said, and then she explained it was emotional. She said, well, I mean, this is Rose, said, well, I mean, I guess I just felt like she was so in love with him. And she didn't know what, like, Rose was just shocked by this. So she didn't expect to go to her brother's memorial service and then talk to the one, her sister in law and hear that she was in love with some pastor and none of this. Yeah. The marriage was over.

And not only was the marriage over, she wasn't even. According to Rose Cobb, Cindy wasn't that sad, according to Rose, about this whole thing. She was more excited about being in love with the pastor. Oh, boy. Rose said she was very giddy, giddy, yeah, very childlike. That's Rose's opinion. We don't know how true that is, obviously. That's just what Rose says, but, you know, she seems pretty trustworthy here.

Sure, sure. Then Rose learns the rest of the shit here. She already doesn't like this AB guy just here and that he's, you know, banging. as her brother's wife. Then she learns that Betty, his second wife, A. B. second wife, had just died a few months earlier in a car car.

Right. Yeah. Then found out his first wife had died from a fall down the stairs nine years before that. Right. She said, I said, what happened? And she said, well, you know, a deer ran out in front of the road.

He swerved to miss the deer and hit a bridge or something like that. And she ended up dying. That was what Rose said the explanation was. She said, I knew something was not right. The hair on the back of my neck actually stood up. I thought he was a fraud. Something was wrong.

Yeah, well, what seatbelt games do you play? Yeah, you don't fucking, you don't hear, ding, that doesn't turn you on? You don't play ding dong? By the way. Do we get to know the urn? Yes, I was just going to say, you want to know the urn? By the way, it was that, the urn thing. Then riveted.

It is an urn with a big deer on it. No! Yes, a big fucking deer he puts on it. A deer. He bought the deer earn. That means it's legit, right? Why would you do that? Is that telling on yourself a little bit?

The deer thing, is that just weird to be? He's really selling it. He's selling hard. He is selling this shit like a timeshare. This is wild. Why would they sell that, though? Especially back east where you can actually docking accidents. Getting a fucking deer.

But some guy who hunted deer for 30 years, he might want to run with a deer on it. You know what I mean? He's been hanging their heads. Now they're hanging his. You know how it is. It's so funny, though. Why would he do that? That's what I'm saying.

I had to say that fact because that's so amazing. What a dick. He's such an asshole. This guy. People cannot help telling on themselves. They can't fucking help it. So about Jewel, Rose says she was just suspicious of all. these deaths.

And she's... And then I saw the deer earn. What the fuck? What the fuck? I was like, this is bullshit. There's a goddamn deer earn. She said, oh, she fell down some stairs, you know, about a sweeper or something, Cobb said. Really?

That's a Rose said that the explanation from Cindy was. You know, she fell down some stairs, a sweeper, you know, the shop vac. Yeah. So Rose says she dies from falling down the stairs. Then the second wife dies from being in a car accident where the deer never even hit the car. It's like, what happened? Yeah, he avoided it. She said it struck me as funny that so many bad things was happening to him.

It's just this poor bastard. Yeah, this is insane. So now Rose hears all this shit and says, I'm going to contact the police too. Yeah. So she contacts not only Bishop Peggy Johnson of the United Methodist Church. She also contacts the Pocono Township Police. Oh. That's what led to Shermer's resignation in 2008

and prompted Detective Jim Wagner to reopen Betty's case. Oh. So, yeah. Rose said, I didn't trust what was going on. This was all about her brother, to begin with. She said, I didn't trust what was going on. Did he really kill himself? She looked at this in a macro view and said,

Joe's the third dead body linked to this asshole pastor who fucks congregants. So he's a dishonest guy, and that's that. So anyway, Rose is contacted by the police as well. She contacts them. They contact her back. Detective Jim Wagner was all ears, this guy. I like the way he puts this. This is how every detective should think. He said, my job's to be suspicious, and I'm suspicious of everyone. Yeah, you're a homicide detective. I'm suspicious. Whatever happens. Yeah. I accuse my wife of cheating on me four or five times a day. Just to keep her honest.

I mean, it's ruined our marriage. Don't get me wrong. It is destroyed the trust and everything we have, but I feel peace of mind. That's the thing. Tell my kids they're liars. I don't trust a goddamn person. I don't trust anybody. My dog, he's on my shit side.

Let me tell you. He lies to me a lot. He lies to me. I put him under house arrest. That's what happens. Tells me he loves me. I don't fucking believe. I don't buy them.

Licks to the face? False. So Detective Wagner. Detective Wagner said there were just too many red flags to ignore. He said, I suspected that it was very possible for Joe's death to be at the hands of Mr. Shermer or Cindy because it made it very convenient for them to be together. And they are. They are together now, too.

They are immediately together. An item. An item. He's at the house all the time. Everything. So the detective said Joe discovered that his wife and Mr. Shermer were having an affair and how convenient that Joe was now gone. Right. But Wagner said, I'm going to even open up that suicide again.

The state police can call it a suicide. I'm going to check it out. I'm going to look into it. So, yeah. And they said that the only people that might have alibis to kill Joe, Cindy and A.B., both had airtight alibis. Airtight. away. She was with family members. All of her kids were around. And Samantha seems like she would roll on her if she was suspicious of this too. And she's calling him and saying, watch out.

He's out there with a gun right now. Yeah, totally. And Detective Wagner said, A.B. was an hour away and his alibi checked out. Cindy also had an alibi and she was with her children. So he agreed with the state police. That death definitely was a suicide. Wow. Rose said, they said he killed himself and I accepted that he did. So Rose said that was fine. She accepted that her brother was not murdered. But she had a lot of other questions, though. She says, so she goes to the detective. The detective said, I thought it was strange that a man loses two wives in a relatively short period of time. It certainly needed to be investigated thoroughly. Right. Less than 10 years, that's crazy. He said, had we caught this right away, had the officers suspected some foul play in the

beginning, we would have had a lot more evidence to look at. But they just, everything's an accident, so you just have to kind of go back. Now, the prosecutor, this is Michael Mancuso, the Monroe County District Attorney prosecutor here. He said, quote, well, my office was never even aware of Betty's death because it was listed as an accident. Right. Yeah, yeah. So they would come to us. Yeah. He said it was listed as an accident due to car crash. It was never flagged by the original investigators as anything suspicious, so the DA's office had no reason to look into it. It wasn't until the fall of 2008 that I was approached by Pocono Township Police Officer Jimmy Wagner, that's a detective we were talking about, and a Pennsylvania state trooper Phil

Barletto with their suspicions. They had seen photographs that were taken at the scene of the so-called accident. They were very concerned because the blood in the vehicle didn't match the condition of the vehicle, which was lightly damaged and didn't match the circumstance. It looked as if Betty, who'd been in the passenger side of the vehicle, was bleeding before the accident. Oh. He said that was a big red flag. And he was asked, how did all this come out? Basically, they started looking at the Reverend after Joe's suicide.

Joe's suicide and Rose pushing. That's what sparked all of this. If Joe just moves away and recedes into nothing, they never look into this shit twice, ever. Yeah. They don't ever recognize that there was blood before the car accident, ever. Joe and Cindy get a divorce. None of this shit happens at all. Or he kills himself somewhere else, less suspiciously, not in church.

If he does it in his bedroom, different story. So they were like, interesting. So they started looking everything there. And as they were looking into the backstory, they found out Shermer's first wife had died under somewhat mysterious circumstances of all down the stairs. So he's like, I got a lot to look into. Now, they're going to look into Betty's crash first. They review the crash photos noting low speed impact, not 55, like he said. Like 10?

More like 15 to 25. Oh, sir. The other thing that was fucked up here, this is four months after this, basically. They also found no deer evidence, which there isn't really going to be evidence of a deer running across the street. It doesn't leave anything behind unless it's shit. It's part from all those pellets, yeah. Yeah, that's it. So it's interesting here.

Now, he immediately sees in these photos, no skid marks, no tire marks, no evidence of any evasive maneuver whatsoever. No signs of braking. So what he said happened, slam on the brakes, spin in a circle, this is all going to leave marks on the road. All that shit. Yeah. No marks. Any swerve will, if you swerve hard enough at 55, you'll leave tire marks whether you're on the brakes or not. Especially if you spin after that?

Yeah. Yeah. This is the kicker, though. No. The coins. The coins. Yes. In the dish?

In the ashtray. When they looked at the coin holder, they saw that almost all the quarters remained neatly in place. Oh, one of those stacker things that are in Dodges. Yeah. Yep. And he said the impact was so minor that they didn't go flying all over the place. Yeah. If you've got six, seven quarters in there, because it's just a spruce.

that holds them. They're heavy enough. Everywhere. They're heavy enough that in an impact, it'll compress that spring and they'll they're fucking everywhere. Everywhere. Projectiles. Yep.

They said that that was crazy. They said also the car looked to be in remarkably good shape. He said there was a little damage to the front end of the car. The airbags had not deployed. Under 25 then. Yeah. It was very obvious. This was a low speed impact.

Mr. Shermer's vehicle was actually functional after the accident. It was driveable. She said he could have backed up and continued to drive his wife to the hospital. And he didn't. He didn't. So they do an accident reconstruction here. They get experts from Penn State University. Yeah.

They create two animated reconstructions. At 20 miles an hour, the PT cruiser hit the guardrail and stopped. They got two PTs. Yeah, that cost them upwards of $4,000. It was really, they went on. out for that. How they found two that weren't totaled, amazing. Two that weren't just complete shit.

Well, they had to go find like one of those old person communities. They usually have them in there somewhere. So they said at 40 miles an hour, it crashed through the guardrail and continued into the woods. Went right through it, hot knife through butter. Yeah. Since the car only moved one guardrail beam about a foot before being stopped by it,

the actual speed they found was likely 18 to 22 months. miles an hour. So slow. Which is way different than 55 miles an hour. Why would you do that? Yeah. And they said at that speed, there was no evidence of an avoidance maneuver and insufficient damage to cause a fatal injury. This wasn't a high speed crash. Yeah, 20 miles an hour, you can stop that car so fast. You can. And if you hit something at 20 miles an hour, I mean, it's an impact, but it's not. You're not going to die. Oh, you're not going to explode a PT. Even a PT cruiser can survive that. Has minimal, yeah, and safety features.

The detective studies the blood patterns inside the PT cruiser and found inconsistencies with AB's narrative as well. Uh-oh. He said there were numerous blood drops on the seat cushion that had been diluted or absorbed or had a diluted or an absorbed look to it as if she had been sitting in the blood for a length of time. I got like mushed into the seat. So an interviewer said that would raise some questions, right?

They said, if I'm sitting in a car being thrown around, there might be blood all around here, but there wouldn't be blood on my seat probably, right? And the detective said, no, not underneath your body. And the fact that it was absorbed and saturated meant she was placed in it. Yeah, that's how it works. They said, if Betty had been an unrestrained passenger thrown violently around the car, you'd expect blood to be across the dashboard, windshield, and on multiple surfaces. He said there was blood on the passenger seat, the floorboard, and the dashboard.

And there'd be like a variety of types of blood. There would be pools, spatter, there'd be mist, there'd be smears. It'd be all over the place. All different ways. They said dried blood that Betty's body had been placed on top of. They said the blood on the floorboard matched where Betty's head was resting. in the reclined seat. And so the amount showed she had been in that position for a substantial period of time after

receiving her injuries far longer than the moments between a crash and the arrival of paramedics. Yeah. There's also a contact stain on the headrest, a blood pattern showing movement from left, consistent with a heavily bleeding person being loaded into the car, not thrown around by impact. Yeah. So the doctor, Wayne Ross, remember him from Jewel's? He said, the presence of that blood and where it was in the car told me that bloodshed had occurred before she got into the car. Okay.

Driver's side, not a drop of blood, perfectly clean. Yeah. Perfectly clean. And there was, yeah. He had not a speck of blood on him. He was pristine. So December 2008, they do a search warrant. Here we go.

Okay. This is for the parson. in readers. So where they live in the church, I guess, in readers. They search in the garage here. This is Betty's. And with Luminol, they find blood in the garage. They find a trail of blood leading to the car's passenger side.

Oh, fuck. That's not good at all. That deer is vicious. He's a mean, you know what it is? He keeps, he holds a grudge. That's the problem. He'll come for you when you least expect it. He's been around all day.

He's outside just smoking. He's waiting. One of these cock suckers going to go to bed. I want to set up. Wow. The detectives said they spotted it almost immediately, blood on the floor. That's someone had tried to clean. Okay.

White marks indicated a scrubbing effort, but the luminal tells all. And that's it. They said it lit up like crazy. The detective said, I walked in the back of the garage, and as soon as I entered, I observed blood stains on the concrete floor. I was shocked. I could not believe I was seeing blood stains on the floor. So, yeah, the trail of blood leads from the back door of the house through the garage

to the exact spot where the PT Cruiser's passenger door would have been when it was parked. Because A, B, always, always, always pulled into the garage exactly the same way. That's what you do. Habits. Everyone has them. Yeah, if you've got a parking spot, you park how you park. All the time.

So the blood path led directly to where Betty would have been loaded in, and tests confirm that the blood was Betty's, the blood they found in the garage. So they said she was bleeding prior to getting in that car, and she was assaulted and put in that car and placed in that car seat. The DNA testing confirmed the blood was 20 trillion times more likely to belong to Betty than anyone else. I would call out a match than anyone else. 20 trillion, which is a trillion times more than every human that's ever lived on the earth, basically. Ever. Ever. There still has not been somebody that duplicates her DNA.

This planet will have burnt. The sun will burn out and this planet will die before there are 20 trillion people to compare this shit to. Unbelievable. It's her. So they said, Betty was beaten somewhere in or near the house, dragged through the back door, across the garage floor, loaded into the passenger seat of the PT cruiser while bleeding profusely, A.B. Then gently drove into the guardrail and went, oh, no, my poor wife. Wow.

That is diabolical, right? Holy shit. So they have all his info. They're going to bring A.B. In for a little interrogation. And they're not going to tell them they know this, right? Well, let's find out. All right.

This should be great. Well, he was interrogated for six hours. Uh-huh. Okay. Now, when they confront him with the. blood evidence is a story changed. First of all, he said, there's no blood in the garage. I don't know what you're talking about.

Never saw blood in the garage. Then they go, well, we found blood in the garage. Ah. And they said, okay, went through this. First, he flatly denied Betty had ever bled in the garage. Then they said, we found a bunch of blood. And then he said, you know what? Oh, yeah.

So you got a period. This memory, you know how it is. You get in your 50s and, you know, memory it's way. Yeah. He said that, yes, that's right. He and Betty were moving firewood. from the garage to the backyard, some wood fell on Betty and cut her arm,

so much that she dripped blood all over the floor. That's a nasty gash. That's nasty. That's amazing. That's a nasty gash is a horrible thing to say. To any woman, really. To really any woman, really. That's a nasty gash.

Okay, sorry about that, guys. That hit me real hard because I'm 12. anyway. But you really got to cut yourself to spray blood. I, okay. You know how my house is. I have wood stoves and we keep wood fires going all the time. I get wood on a nightly basis from October to about April.

Every single. I have, one time I got a splinter in my thumb and a little bit of blood was there. There is zero blood in my woodshed. No trails of it. There's none of it. And this is every single fucking day for months. Never for years. How what, what does he say in Qatar?

The mall or just the wood? A piece of wood. A sharp piece of wood. She got stuck with it. Right in her, right in her bad. All right. She stabbed herself with a piece of wood. Yeah, that sounds awful.

So poor Betty here. That's what he said. Now, investigators went to look at the wood pile near the backyard fire pit. Yeah. Underneath the stack, they found, like I'm under the stack, they found newspapers dated September 2008, two months after Betty's death in July. So she didn't put wood on top of there. No. Because she was dead before that newspaper came out.

Why did he put newspapers there? Well, you need kindling. Yeah, but the... Yeah, I know. This is the dumbest. He's such an idiot this guy. It's, I mean, it's the old to prove who you are. You got today, the date, man, every page has the date.

It's fucking crazy. Every goddamn page. And they said, she was already sitting in her dear urn, her dear themed urn when this is going on. And one of the investigators said all of us thought it was BS. It was a made up story. And it's amazing that he doesn't realize it. And then they found all the emails from his computer revealing his marital discord, which is now we get some details.

He was avoiding divorce to retain assets. He didn't want to get a divorce because he didn't want to give her half. He said that they hadn't really had any sexual contact in a couple of years, him and Betty, because she had been going through menopause and had been completely uninterested in sex. Okay. So they had no sex for years. That's right when they got married. right? Because they haven't been married that long, right?

2001, they got married. 2008, this happened. So this could have been 2005 menopause started. Five years of sex and then it stops. That's tough. And also, he talks about his affairs and the fact that he loves porn a lot. Loves it. Loves it.

Okay. Loves it. People who claim to love porn the least are the ones that are the most into it, by the way. The ones are like, I don't like it. It's a horrible, horrible thing. Check their history. it's the ones that lecture you about your affection to porn.

Those are the people that love it way more than you. Way more than you could ever. You only like it a little bit, so much that you're not embarrassed to tell anybody. You know what I mean? They love it so much. It's a secret. From time to time. Every once in a while, fill in some gaps or whatever. As an aid.

Yes. As a tool. He can only come with it. That's crazy. This is his lifestyle. So also, after all of this, their affair is still going on while they're investigating this, which is crazy. He started staying weekends at the house, Cindy's house, that Joe built with his hands, by the way, because he's a car car. By January 2010, he moved in. Yeah.

They lived together now. Samantha said he started to spend the night and he'd spend the weekend and go home. And pretty soon he wasn't leaving at all. Oh, boy. So Samantha on her 18th birthday packed up her shit and left. So I'm fucking out of this place. Samantha's a badass, dude. She is not taking this shit.

She's not having this shit. No. Her and Betty, not having, her and Rose, not having this shit at all. Rose, the sister, Joe's sister. She said she couldn't live under the same roof as this asshole, who ruined her whole family. So summer of 2010, Cindy texted Samantha and said, A.B. proposed. He gave me a.

engagement ring. And I said, yes. Samantha said she was terrified because she knows he has two dead wives already. And so she thought he's going to kill my mother. That's what's going to happen. He's going to go for a third. So she called the Pocono Township Police Department immediately. Yeah. And the detective Wendy Surface said when Samantha contacted her office, she was fearful for her mother. She was afraid of what would happen. And the detective said, yeah, that sounds pretty good. Pretty weird. I'd be afraid, too. So this detective said, I don't think Cindy was safe at all. I think it was a matter of time before whatever his trigger was would surface in their relationship, too.

I think that trigger is somebody else. I think that trigger is being caught about somebody. I mean, somebody else is somebody else. As long as it's not known, then it doesn't fucking matter. Yeah. This is, but you confront him on it. Now we might get into a divorce where now we're going to take half my shit. It's a different story.

So they said that this had been two years since Betty had died when this happened. And this detective said the case was a long time building because there were so many gaps in time we had to fill. So anyway, they have all his emails. They have all of this type of shit. July 8th, 2010, Betty's death is reclassified by the coroner as a homicide rather than an accident. So that is July 8th, September 13th, 2010. A.B. is arrested for Betty's murder. Oh. It is on.

Hey, A.B., we've reclassified your wife's death. And bad news. Bad news. Get in. He was living at Cindy's home. Yeah. And the detective, Jim Wagner, said, we found Mr. Shermer living at Joseph Musante's home. We arrested him there. And it was pretty satisfying putting him in cuffs. Yeah. I bet. He's denied bail as well here. A grand jury heard witnesses like a paramedic, who talked about the injuries not matching the damage,

and experts on staging, too. Right. Now, they're still looking into Jewel now as well. Remember that? White one. Wagner said, okay, I think he killed her. Let's find out about that first one.

So he looks into that. And he called the cops in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. And he said, I found out that her death was in 1999. It was from a fall down a flight of stairs. So A.B. had said that Jule was vacuuming the stairs when she somehow got tangled in the shop back cord and tumbled to the bottom. Okay. Five six. Yeah. She's not 85 years old where that would happen either. She's like a, you know, a 30-year-old lady at that point. I think she could pull it

together. It should be all right. Yeah. The doctor said it looked like she had a heart attack at first, but then the medical examiner couldn't prove that and then said it wasn't. And Dr. Wayne Ross again says the problem is the pathology was totally negative for heart disease, and the problem is we have to make sure it's on a homicide. Right. So he also noticed that she had several skull fractures, like we talked about, no other broken bones, no significant injuries below her neck. Right.

And they said if she fell down the stairs, she'd have all sorts of other injuries. That's why he classified it as undetermined. Right. So I didn't say it was an accident. He said, undetermined means it's open. It could certainly be a homicide. It could be anything. Yeah.

He just doesn't have enough evidence. Yeah. He just doesn't have enough evidence. to go either way, but he urged investigators to look into their death, but they didn't. Wow. They didn't. They just didn't look. Now, Shermer's daughters, though, they don't believe their mother was murdered.

They believe their mother was an accident. Really? Yes, absolutely. Amy said, there were no questions. I had no questions. I wasn't questioning anything. Okay. And Julie said, I didn't think it was uncommon for people to fall down steps.

And I still don't. I think vacuuming steps with a shop vac is very dangerous for anyone. That's generally why people don't vacuum steps with a shop vacate, too, which is also... Yeah, who would do that? Why would you do that? It doesn't make sense. So they do 3D scans. Uh-huh.

This is Dr. Wayne Ross again here. He said no autopsy to review. The investigators turned to Wayne Ross, who'd autopsyed her in 1999. They asked him to review Betty's medical records. as well. So using Betty's cat scans, Dr. Ross and a team of computer specialists created three-dimensional renderings of her skull

images. This is for Betty, not Jewel. Right. This is evidence they need. The 3D models allowed him to examine the wounds up close and in detail as if he had her body on the autopsy table. Oh boy. He said, quote, what we are looking at here is two lacerations

and you can see the staples on top. Obviously, this was not caused by a car accident. This is along the right side of her head. I didn't see any windshield abrasions in the front. The lacerations were to the right side of the head and were very distinct up toward the top. Okay. He said it was inconsistent with a crash, but matching blunt force from a cylindrical object.

Sylendrical? He said that, well, I believe she was beaten. And my conclusion, she was beaten with an object such as a pipe or maybe a crowbar, something along those lines. So similar to the fireplace poker we had a few weeks back. Yeah, yeah. Maybe a baseball. All that. Absolutely. Yeah.

By the way, those people are great. The family of the Twarski family, unbelievable people they are. Love that. They said, Brad Twarski, terrific, the brother of the victim of Kathy. Unbelievable. It's just great people. Just want to say that out front here. So, you know, Zachia, a fireplace poker murder.

That was the name of it. So he said that, that and the fact. that Betty has all this and Jewell has head injuries in the same way that are suspicious, they said it's just not possibly. Two wives dying of head injuries with absolutely opposite things that caused them. However, low impact, but high fucking damage. So he then puts Betty's 3D scans next to Jules' autopsy records in 1999. and the wounds are identical almost.

He said, we're nearly identical. Wow. That's it. Identical. Identical. He said both women had two linear tears on the right side of the head. Both died of traumatic brain injuries. Both were married to the same man.

Two and two. He said, let's use common sense. How likely is it to have two women married to the same guy, two lacerated? on the right side of the head, both dying of traumatic brain injuries under bizarre circumstances. Pretty well, zero, right? He said, the obvious answer to that is never. That's how likely it is. It's never going to happen.

So they do the jewelry investigation as well here. And one of the detectives, or the district attorney said, we want to move as quickly as we can because it's difficult to investigate something that happened 11 years ago. Right. Which is obvious, yeah. So anyway, also they had to, they had to. an investigator inspect the PT Cruiser that Betty was in for defects that might have contributed to the crash just to see, didn't find anything.

He even said it was still working. Apart from it being a pizza cruiser, everything was operating. He goes, a real piece of crap, but I mean, it works for a PT cruiser. Yeah. And he said the vehicle worked great. He said, I've never seen that before. A vehicle that's been involved in a fatal accident that has never been driven in. I couldn't believe it.

He said it looks like It looks like it was brand new It was working great I've never seen that before I've never seen that It's so rare It's funny as fuck So now let's involve

Arca Uh huh You may have heard of Arca Everybody out there If you're true crime enthusiasts You have heard of Arca You had an assful of Arca From the Karen Reed trials

Oh Oh yeah Yeah Arca is the the organization that does all these testing things here, and I believe that they testified for the defense, I want to say that the crash did not happen with the man there. So that's in the Karen Reed case.

Now, ARCA, ARCCA, was contacted in February 2011 to do a simulation at the Shermer residence, the former one where Jule fell down the stairs. Oh. So the house was vacant during this time. up for sale, so perfect time. They said it's hard to say how often we get called in on murder investigations, but this definitely isn't the first one

we've been involved in during our 25 years in business. He said, we conduct research as well as simulations for investigations in criminal and civil cases. For example, our work has led to the U.S. Army making seats to better protect personnel and vehicles

from mine blasts, as well as better protection for people in the backs of ambulances. Oh. So that's good. They also did space shuttle work. They came up with better ways to protect astronauts after these Challenger explosion of 86. Did they come up with the tiles? I think they've probably figured it out.

Also helped authorities locate the point of origin of TWA Flight 800's explosion over New York after that, too. Oh. They employ more than 200 veteran engineers, experts, and consultants with, professional credentials and extensive experience in their chosen fields, according to their website. They said, we don't take any sides. When we're involved in simulations for criminal cases, it's usually for automobile accidents. Though the dynamics of a simulated crash or fall usually are in question, the findings can sometimes be disputed, such as how many times the vehicle roll over or how hard was the impact.

We look at the independent data. We remain objective and we don't take any sides. Okay, he said, we've had some attorneys use our findings in trials and others tell us they won't use our findings because it hurts their cases. But the thing about this is, too, I mean, I know I'm not questioning their organization, but I tend to anybody, whoever's paying you is who's paying you. Yeah. Whoever's paying you is whose side you're on. Now, that doesn't, that makes sense, though. If they do sometimes come up with things where they say, we're not using your this because it hurts us, then that means they're being, I think they're, they seem.

like an honest organization to me, but I mean, that's just for them to be not honest would be a crazy, like that would be crazy. I mean, that would ruin everything. They're holding everything. Yeah. So the tests are months after this, the arrest and everything, Dr. Ross visits the house in Lebanon where Jule died. Investigators wanted to definitively find out about the going down the stairs. A biomedical engineering firm, Arka, carries this out. They covered. the heads of crash test dummies in chalk so they could see where the head hit hit the stairs. Then they pushed the dummies down the same staircase multiple times with like accelerometers inside the heads to measure impact forces.

Okay. The results were in every case the same. The places struck on the dummy's head did not match Jules fracture patterns whatsoever. At all. Yeah. The test showed that a stair fall would produce brush burn. abrasions, contusions, and scraping patterns from sliding contact with the steps. No crushing.

Jule had none of those. Yeah. The dummies also sustained significant forces that should have caused neck, rib, and pelvic injuries. She didn't have any of that either. None of them. So, they conclude that Jule had been struck repeatedly on the head with a long cylindrical object just like Betty.

Wow. Same weapon type, he said. Wow. So, now, A.B.'s defense attorney, he called the experiment's junk science. Yeah. That's it. He said, crash test dummies aren't designed for stairfall recreations. Got to make stair dummies for those.

Oh, they don't have those and get the fuck out of my face. He said, to stage a realistic experiment, you would need a living person, but no one is going to risk a real life in this way. You don't need it. That's why we have simulated. Are you kidding me? Have you not seen a simulated human? They exist. Come on.

You could have gotten anybody. You could have gotten those people. Knoxville would have done it. Oh, yeah, for sure. No problem. If you shot it, only if when he got to the bottom of the stairs, they shot him in the nuts with a beanbag from a shotgun or something. Then he would have done it. But up until that, it's not really a trick.

So the lawyer said this simply wasn't scientific. It was silly. These were bad tests. This was junk science. When you look at anthropomorphic test dummies being pushed downstairs, they were not designed for this purpose. There's no scientific studies. There's no peer-reviewed articles. There's nothing that accepts this.

And they asked him, well, doesn't it make sense that you wouldn't push a person down the stairs to find out how they'd be injured? And they said, well, you wouldn't push. Just a jog down the stairs to find out how a person was injured either. He said, all the test dummies showed in this case, was that somebody who fell down those stairs could have hit their head multiple times and that's what happened. Someone fell down the stairs

and hit their head multiple times. All right. Well, the state completely disagrees with that lawyer and they reclassify Jules' death as a homicide. Yeah. Yes. And Jules' brother, John, said,

in my opinion, the paramedics should have called in law enforcement. Yeah. Absolutely. They said the police were not even called until Jule was already at the hospital. And he had already cleaned up the crime scene. Yeah, it was already

already way too late. So Julie, this is their daughter, Julie, Jewel and AB's daughter, she said I was angry. I'm still angry. You can tell. I'm angry because I don't believe that. I don't believe that he could know

she didn't fall down the steps and that her injuries aren't from that. And I just, I don't believe that. So the interviewer asks her, I have to ask you, what about the medical examiner who said that both your mother and Betty had remarkably similar wounds. Right.

And Julie said, oh, well, I actually don't believe them. One man is saying that. Oh, Julie. Who happens to be the medical examiner's the problem.

I feel bad for Julie because she's in a tough spot. Her mom's already gone. Her stepmom's gone. She's already mourned. Now she's trying to keep her dad from going to prison. I get, psychologically,

I get where Julie's coming from, but at some point you've got to step back and go, let everybody handle it. And the interviewer said, but he's the medical examiner. That's why he makes that call. And she said, I'm sorry. I just don't believe what he said.

I just don't. I read something where it said my mom had 12 blows to her head, and I do not believe that to be true. Based on what? I don't know. I believe that to be true. That's what it is. The prosecutor said our efforts were also involved in the death of the first wife because they were so similar, the injuries, the pattern of blows to the head, the type of weapon that would have been used. It was a small cylindrical object.

We were pretty confident we could use some of that evidence as well, which we did. Lebanon then prompted, that's the town or the county, prompted to file their own homicide charges against Arthur for the death of Jule Schumer. And in September of 2012, he is absolutely indicted for Jules' murder as well. Okay. This was 2011 and 2012 that they're reversing. Yeah. That's early for her to be getting into the conspiracy theory shit. Totally, yeah.

To not believe a doctor? Who's telling you there's skull fractures in the head. I see those. And she's like, I don't believe it. I don't know. So they cited his arrogance, non-cooperation, and forensic parallels to the two wives. The defense attorney said the prosecutors and the police have asked repeatedly, what are the chances that two women married to the same guy would die in a similar fashion? Is this a coincidence?

That's the question that the attorney is asked. And the attorney says, it's a coincidence. People die. Coincidence has happened. Accidents happen. They happen every day. It happens all the time. Yeah.

So the murder, Betty's murder will be tried first here. The prosecutor, Mike Mancuso, said it's going to be a tough case. He said there's a lot of unknowns out there with the case because it was circumstantial. It's extremely circumstantial. So as a prosecutor, building a case like that, you're not exactly sure all the little pieces of evidence that you need are going to be admissible in court. Yeah. And also they said that they want to present Jules' death in court as well. And they want that.

That's a big one. Yeah. And his defense attorney wants that out. The defense attorney said, it's not fair. I don't want to talk about two wives. No. Defense attorney said it's not fair. Yeah.

Which is a great legal argument. It's a great legal argument. if you're five and you're not going to pop-sickle. One of the two. It's not fair. It's not fair. He said it's meant to get, it's not meant to get before the jury. Wasn't anything that was proved, yet it still had to be proven. Yet it has to yet, it still has yet to be proven. Even the allegations have nothing to do with this case. The prosecutor said, that's hogwash. It's relevant. As proof of motive identity and in this case, most importantly, lack of accident.

So the judge agreed and will allow evidence of Jules' death to be brought in. Fantastic. I got to Google the origin of hogwash, by the way. That's a good one. I know what it means, but I don't know where the fuck did that come from. Hogwash. That's kind of like horseshit, I guess. It's just things laying around a farm.

People just, holy shit, horseshit, hogwash. It's probably cleaned up horse shit, right? Something or, yeah, maybe. Like dagnab it or daggummit. The runoff from a washed hog, I'm not sure. It's pretty gross. Pretty gross. January 2013, Betty's murder trial, 11 days long, 60 witnesses.

Yeah. Blood trails, reconstructions, all this shit. Okay. In the openings, Michael Van Cuso calls AB a wolf in shepherd's clothing. Okay, because he's a shepherd. It's not bad. Shepard in the flock, yeah. Yep.

A man who used his charm. and magnetism and religious authority to pray upon the most vulnerable in his congregation. He said, the Shermer case compels a great many images in my mind, images of desperation and self-destruction, images of murder and deceit, images of betrayal, the betrayal of a friend, of marriage vows, of a mother to her children, of a faith and congregation,

and finally the image of a wolf in shepherd's clothing praying upon his own flock. That is some shit right there. Samantha testifies Cindy's daughter Cindy and Joe's daughter She described how AB Had infiltrated her family

seduced her mother Driven her father to despair And destroyed everything she's known And loved her entire life He is a swarm of locust Is what he is essentially She spoke directly to AB From the witness box

She described his desire To be with Cindy And his need to get rid of His inconvenient wife She talked about the fair, the fact that they gas litter in that confrontation in the office, saying you don't know what you're talking about when she was 16.

Her father's... You don't know what dirty talk is. Yeah. Her father's final voicemail that she didn't even hear until he was dead the next morning, saying if you love me, even a little bit, call me. Oh, Jesus. The guilt she feels... Yeah. She missed a call.

Horrifying. When somebody does that, I had a similar thing happen. And that I fucking fucks me up. Yep. Guy killed himself, fucking texted me a 215, can I talk right now? And I was going to sleep and I was like, I'm too tired. Next morning he was

dead. Yeah. Mine called me. He was murdered though. Oh, that's different. Yeah. But he needed, you weren't going to stop. He wanted me to go with him. Oh, well then that's a good thing. Yeah. Yeah. Right? Yeah. You're not dead. It's better one person

than both of you. That's good. I mean, that's some survivor's guilt. That could be, I could have been in a gutter with that kid. It's so fucked up. This I feel bad because my friend, I could have. Yeah. Yeah. If you know this, I'll tell you about the details.

What the fuck, James? I could have because I was... You piece of shit. The point is I was there, him and his girlfriend, I was somehow the relationship counselor. Oh, no. He was calling me because they were in a giant fight. Yeah. That was the problem and it's a long story.

I could have spent 10 minutes and whatever, but I was just like, I'm so tired of doing this. And now I wish I could do that before. feel terrible. So anyway, that's how it goes. Now, Betty's son here, Betty Jean's son, Nate, he said when he heard about the crash, he rushed to the hospital, as is him testifying. The nurse told him she's in pretty bad shape, be prepared for what you're about to see. He continued the testimony, and he said that AB seemed calm and relaxed during the time that his mother was in the hospital and said that AB told him that he and Betty Jean had agreed that neither one would want to live on life support. And he also said that she said that she was

She wanted to be cremated. Now, he said his mother never mentioned either issue to him, so he just figured, you know, that must be what it is. He said he had spoken to his mother by phone on her birthday, June 28th. He said she seemed distant and upset, but he said she wouldn't say if anything was bothering her. All right. They show the pictures of Joe Mousante's corpse on the monitor here,

and that's when AB closes his eyes and puts his head in his hands. Yeah. Because of Joe? He was stoic the whole time and that's when he seemed real sad. Saw a man dead. Saw a man dead in his office. That's my desk. Those are my things.

AB's friend, Anne-Marie Thorson, Thorson Moe was a prosecution witness, hinted at a possible motive when she testified that A.B. told her that Betty had discovered he was having an affair with his secretary and gave him an ultimatum. end the relationship or they would get divorced. Yeah. So that we didn't know about that she found out. And this woman said he said he didn't want a divorce because he didn't want to lose half of everything. Cindy testifies. Yeah. They said, do you love the defendant?

She said, I do. Yeah. That's how that goes. And then all the rest of the shit that we already talked about. But she said that on the stand. A, B testifies. What's his say? He's figuring if I can move a congregation, I can move 12 people.

Oh, fuck. This is going to be easy. Like Sunday morning. He, Amber, herds this shit like a motherfucker. Yeah? He's overconfident of I know what I'm doing and I can do this. And every time they ask him a question, he goes right at the jury. Right to the jury.

Stares at them the whole time. Don't do it. Weirdest most uncomfortable thing ever. The jury wants to observe you like a zoo animal. Yeah. They don't want you staring at them back. You can glance over once in a while like you're telling a conversation to multiple people, but you can't just stare at them and answer a question.

It's weird. You don't take the question over to them and answer it. That's what she did every time. The lawyer asks you a question. You look away from the person asking the question and then answer it to other people is a weird thing to do. She thought that was a winning strategy, and so did he. Well, they told her, I think, make sure to look at the jury. Make eye contact with the jury.

Let them see emotion in your eyes. And she took that as stare at the jury the entire time and never break eye contact. Freak everybody out. Like the epitome of misunderstanding. Absolutely. And then once she did it one day, they were like, you got to keep doing the same thing. It looks like they're changing up. It's weird.

Yeah. So they said he repositioned his chair to face the jury directly, which is creepy. Oh, my God. Very creepy. He said, I didn't stage an event. not I didn't kill my wife I didn't stage an event which is a very big minimum

now it's not even hurting her now it's staging an event she's not even there in that scenario he said she undid her seatbelt a deer up her appeared he swerved he said he cradled his dying wife and he said he was alone lost and scared

he talked about the woodpile story of how the blood got there modifying it to better fit the evidence now only Betty had been cut by the wood when it fell from stack. He said he got cut two last time. He explained the blood trail by saying she'd initially walk toward the garage's

bay door, then turned back and exited through the back door to the kitchen where he tended the wound, of course. He took care of it. And the prosecutor said, that's pretty absurd why she would change direction in her own garage. She's not lost. She knows where she is. When asked about the cremation, he said it was her wish. Betty's sisters had said she was against cremation. Yeah. When asked about the urn decorated with a deer, the animal that he claims caused the death. Right.

This is fucking amazing. He said, quote, Betty loved deer. Betty, Bravo, sir. She loved deer. Betty loved deer, man. And at that moment, I thought it would be meaningful. It's meaningful, all right. Big Bambi, man.

15 years later by two idiot comedians. Everything with deer in it. She can't get enough. She loves it. He admitted to the adultery, admitted he lied about the affair, and he told the jury that, although he looks fine on the outside, he's, quote, crying on the inside. This guy is amazing. This is wild.

I'm inside. I'm crying, Your Honor. I can't stop. I can't stop. And the prosecutor, as you might imagine, is real sarcastic. and shitty to him the whole time because obviously. And so these asked him, didn't you purposely do this and clean up? And they said, Betty didn't die in that simple crash.

Isn't that right? And he said, no, sir. And then explain the blood and the falling wood and all that bullshit. He did say they had not had sex in a number of years because she'd been through menopause and wasn't interested. He admitted viewing pornography on his home computer and cheated on his wife. Okay. This is how the DA Mancuso, the district attorney, would later talk about his testimony, A.Bs.

Schumer did nothing to alter the mood of the trial. If anything, his direct testimony hurt him. The tone and effect, the tone and affect were not credible, the substance even less so. He came across as real hollow and wooden. It seemed rehearsed. There wasn't much empathy, and I don't think he had it in him. So it was hard for the jury to relate that if this was an accident, why can't he express himself in a more genuine way? He also became instantly more defensive and inward in cross-examination.

In fact, after he testified, he was walking away from the courtroom and told one of the sheriff's deputies that he had just given himself life in prison. He knew he didn't do well for himself on the stand. That's the thing. That's the thing. Yeah, you know when it didn't go, how you. Amber heard knew. Yeah. She knew because she's a performer. If it's your second open, Mike, you heard three laughs.

You think you did great. If you've been doing comedy 10 years and you eat dicks, you know you ate dicks. You know exactly what you did out there. So even if you did well, you know it wasn't as well as it should have been. That's what he knows. And if you're testifying, you know the response you're hoping to get. Yeah, especially if you're looking in their eyes. Yeah, if you don't feel what you're...

Like me to you, we're here. It's immediate. We're the same fucking distance he was. We're fucking six feet away from each other. If you don't get it. You don't get it. Yeah. Wow. 90 minutes of deliberation.

That's pretty quick. Yeah. That's not bad. Found guilty of first-degree murder and tampering as well. Okay. Just in one. Just betty's. Yeah.

And the sentencing, you, pastor asshole, may fuck off mandatory life without parole. Oh, dang. Because it's first degree plus an aggravator. Mandatory life. You can be a chap on somewhere else, dickhead. You get a lot of people to, a lot of people to fucking. Lots to say. Lots of flock in there.

Go shepherd them. Now, Betty's sister said, I'm happy that justice was served for our sister bets. Let's put it that way. And then the other sister said, I just hope he suffers. And I hope he's in a lot of pain and rots in there. I love that so much. I thought she was going to say, I hope, you know, is my sister's rest and peace. I hope he just rots in hell.

He's a lot of pain. Fuck him. She said she was pretty amazing, Ron. I love it. I think it's great. She was the absolute sweetest person ever. She never said a bad thing about anybody, Sandy said. The prosecutor, by the way, kept calling him the sinister minister, which is phenomenal.

Also the name of an ECW character from the late 90s, early 2000s, but that's fine. He's the guy who fucked his hand all up by blowing it up. I hope that he gets gingivitis and every tooth rots out of his head. It's just out of his head. It's just he can't eat anything crunch. That's what I hope. Samantha said, I expected to be happy, but it was actually, it was really difficult. At the end of the day, it doesn't bring back my dad and it doesn't bring back Betty.

Joe's sister Rose, remember her or the person who did all this, she said, I think that he finds vulnerable people and he grooms them for himself and he gets pleasure out of this. Yeah, he's upping them. Absolutely. His defense attorney said, quote, he hasn't been the best person, but he's not a murderer. I mean, he's not a great guy or nothing. I mean, you're wrong, but okay. Okay.

June 2014, he's going to have to go to trial for Jules' murder, too. You bet. Yeah. He pleads no contest. Have to. Because this one's coming up. And he's life without parole. So what's the difference at this point?

Yeah, life without parole for murdering your wife. We're going to talk about that other time that your other wife died. This is coming up in this trial. It's all going to happen. He pleads no contest to third-degree murder. Oh. What is that? By the way, he said he's not guilty. He only took the deal to spare his daughters from enduring another trial. Now, in the sentencing, his two daughters and their husbands pled for leniency. His son said, to us, it's impossible to believe he's a killer. A.B. said, I loved her and she loved me. We did make beautiful music together. I cannot look at my children and grandchildren without seeing her. I did not kill Jule. I was not the best husband or the best father or the best father. Or the best. best pastor, but I'm not a murderer. Okay.

The judge said, are you the kind, loving, always caring person or the multiple adulterer living a double life? Yeah. And they talked about he didn't have a prior record that they were trying to do for mitigating. The judge says he does have a prior record. He's convicted in Monroe County. A jury said you are a murderer. You're the first person I've ever sentenced for criminal homicide who has a prior homicide conviction.

You're the worst guy I've ever sentenced. I'm not, but I'm not a murderer. You're literally serving life without for murder. Unbelievable. And then the judge said, you can keep going on saying you never murdered your wife. He said, but it doesn't really matter. He said, because you, sir, may fuck off 20 to 40 years consecutive to the life without parole. Suck it.

Yeah. And a $50,000 fine in case he's got any money in the bank to eat dicks. Yeah. Betty's sister Tina said it's close. A. B. Shermer will die in prison and that's what I was after. And her other sister said, I can't help but think he should have been put away in 1999 and I would have my dear sister with me. Also a fact. Prosecutor described him as a coward and a murderer and everything like that.

February 2013, there was a two-hour dateline episode on this. Oh, boy. They doubled up. An hour each, huh? An hour each. Yeah, there's two murders. February 2013, he was transferred to the state correctional institution at Green in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania. 2014, he appeals the conviction saying that Jules' death or the details of Joe's suicide shouldn't have been presented at trial, among other different issues that we'll get into.

We don't have time to get into the legalities of it, but there's a bunch of points. Here's the crazy part we have to end with. Cindy still visited him. She stayed with him. She was next. Continued to visit him in prison, depositing $600 a month in his commissary fund. She never married him but considers herself his wife. Wow.

She's also become a surrogate mother to Amy and Julie, his two daughters, and visits them and their children. They all believe AB is innocent. Wow. I suppose, I mean, that's who you want. I guess. They're going to be delusional together, the three of them, like this. Fine. I feel bad for the daughters.

I don't feel bad for Cindy. She knows better. Do you let that woman around your kids? Who's to stop them? The kid. Oh, from their kids. Julie, yeah. Yeah, I mean, not me, but they think everybody's innocent.

So why wouldn't that? She's a poor, you know, poor widow. Julie didn't even want this. Yeah. Julie didn't even want this to be a murder. Samantha says this. What is my relationship with my mother? None.

We have no relationship at all. She's simply not the same person anymore. She wasn't the mother who raised me. My deepest wish is for Cindy to truly see Arthur to witness his authentic self, the man he truly is. She took the other daughters because Sam left her. Yeah, Sam wouldn't talk to her anymore. Good for you, Sam. The detective said Mr. Shermer didn't pull the trigger, but he's responsible for Joe Monsante's death.

There are three deaths on his hands. I believe Joe was sending a message to us in law enforcement that there was something shady happening with his family. Because that's why he did it in the church probably. They also asked the detective, how close do you think he came to getting away with murder? And the detective said very, very close. If not for Rose Cobb, she put this case into a little ball and showed us from the very start what kind of person A.B. Shermer was. And Rose says, I'm only doing what he couldn't do for himself, meaning my brother. Couldn't do that.

It's fucking horrible. They love Cindy, by the way, his daughters, A.B.'s daughters. June 2017, the Supreme Court denies to review his case. Good. The medical examiner, just to close out this case, says, science doesn't lie, but people do, routinely lie for many reasons. But truth is always on the body and in the body. You just have to find it.

You know what else, James? It's a sin. It's a sin. Yeah. Another source is CBS 48 hours. did some interviews that I got a lot of quotes from there too. So it's a sin. That's fucking great.

So there you go. There is Jackson Township, Pennsylvania. We will get through the ending real quick here. Head over to shut up and give me murder.com. Definitely. Also, rate and review on whatever at you or listen to the podcast or on Netflix or whatever. And definitely do that. Head over to shut up and give me murder.com.

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of the show which is right god damn now jimmy hit me with the names of the most wonderful fucking people in the world who would never ever ever do any of this shit to us here let me let me hear about him right now this executive producer gary hoard in livingston texas unemployed looking for work somebody hire gary damman you know he's had a back truck in anywhere he can do it yeah he's great Do it for us. Don't send us any more money until you get a goddamn job, Gary. Yeah, we feel terrible, brother. Fucking shit, man.

Thanks, man. I'll mention it every week, too, to get you a gig. Yeah, somebody hire Gary, god damn it. And we're going to say it every week until we hear that he's got a job. Nicole Benson also. Thank you guys for doing what you're doing. You're the best. Other producers this week, Peyton Meadows, Ryan Bender.

Happy Hour, checking in Midland, Texas. I think he's home. Janice Hill, Melanie Highsmith, James Pinson, Cabri Stanton, Becky Ireland, Heather Walker, McKenzie Ray Eccleston, Nancy Combs, Ben Gooden, Remy, Remy Crowley, Ferenga, Bethany Pritchett, Lindsay S, Newley, Burma. Yep, Cindy Morgan, J. McCath, Kelly Gleason, Sharon Diaz, Chris M. Abbey would know the last name. Brookhurst would know the last name. Corrielle would no last name. Tommy would know the last name. Rieu Rodriguez. Catherine Boyd, Candice Sullivan, Rachel Morgan, Charles Sutton.

Oh, that's Dutton. Charles S. Dutton is what I was confusing that with in my head, but it is not that person. Plus, I think Charles S. Dutton is dead. I think he is dead. I think that's true. Linda Barnes, Patonic, Jessica Witherley. Kachy, Kachee, Asi-Bunum, Akhi, Kaki, Kachy, Kachy, Kachy, Kachy, Kachy, Kachy, Anna Bailey, Rosie Brunson, Joni, Johnny, Nathan, I think it's Joni, Nathan, Peter Larson, Larson, Tom, would know the last time, Diana DeNara Sanchez, Diana, Eric Macbeth, Jacob de Brasinski, Emily Ward MNJ 1193, Emily would know last name, Bradley Germain or German, Bridget would know the last name, Brigitte possibly, Tricia Jenner, Jessica would know last name, Kelly Owens, Runa,

Fox, Sandra Sellers, SMT, Mr. Moose, Steve in Hawaii, Jose Sebastian, Heather Hand, nope, that's Amber. Why would I ever confuse the two names? Amber Hansen, Britt Mejia, Jean, Jean, McPherson, I think it's Gene. Jess Brasher, Rose Williams, Stacey would know last name, Jackie would know last name, Raggitsu on Instagram, Rachel Coro, Aaron Taylor, Lily Love, Moon, April Grant, Dirty Frogs, Angela Saunders, Doc Holliday, Tim would know last name, Lauren would know last name, Maria, Mariah Maxfield, Maddie Porterfield, Carrie Busey, Bussy, Brendan Clancy, Mike McCartney, Jordan would know last name, Dennis Peterson, Amber Starkey, Marcus Delgado, Michela, Michaela, Ficello, Marissa Caramico, Casey Tran, Brian McDonough, Donald, Tracy would no last name. The letter S. Sarah Norman. Victoria Sarnay.

Alex. Alexis. Alexis. Alexis. Alexis would know last name. Alyssa would no less name. Kelvin Mann. Cassandra Clark.

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