True Crime All The Time - Fred and Rosemary West Part1
Episode Date: November 12, 2018Fred and Rose West, one of England's most notorious serial killer couples, murdered at least 9 together during the 1970s and 1980s. But, they also killed separately. When Fred, who was alread...y a murderer, met Rose, the union brought out the worst in each of them. Their house at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, England, would become known as "The House of Horrors". Join Mike and Gibby for part 1 of 2 of the Fred and Rose West story. In this first episode we focus on the childhoods of both Fred and Rose and the murders that Fred committed before the pair met. They both had horrific childhoods, the facts of which give some insight into how they later were capable of committing such brutal murders. You can help support the show by going to patreon.com/truecrimeallthetimeVisit the show's website at truecrimeallthetime.com for contact, merchandise, and donation informationSponsors:Candid - Visit candidco.com/tcatt to get 25% off your modeling kit. Candid offers straighter, whiter teeth for thousands less than the other guys.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
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everyone and welcome to episode 104 of the True Crime All the Time podcast. I'm Mike Ferguson
and with me as always is my partner in True Crime Mike Gibson, Gibby. How are you today,
man? How are you doing, man? I'm doing great. Good. I am doing excellente. Doing better than last
week. Much better than last week. Yeah. I've had some time to think. That's good. Started making some
plans. I think a lot. I do think a lot. Yeah, I do too. I'm thinking right now. You're thinking about
movies, man, what is the name of that movie?
What is it?
Is that what goes through your head?
Yeah.
Amongst other things.
All day long.
All day long.
I'm thinking of a movie.
You know, it's still strange, but I am really excited about some things that, you know,
doing some things that I've been thinking about doing that I would have never had the time to do.
I know.
Now you can do it.
Yep.
So more podcast ideas, more book ideas.
Just, I'm just going to see what shakes out, man.
Yeah.
It's just like waking up on.
New Year's Day, man. The one thing I can say for sure, right, is that there is going to be more
of Mike and Gibby, without a doubt. Or Gibby and Mike? Or Gibby and Mike. It's going to be Mike and
Gibby. I already know, I can tell. It just, it rolls off the tongue. It sounds better that way.
Well, you're the one saying it. Yeah, that's why it sounds better that way. Yeah.
All right, Gibbs. Let's give our Patreon shoutouts. We had Chad Toy. Paul Redmond has been a Patreon
sponsor jumped up to our highest level.
Well, thank you both.
James Rose.
Hey, James.
Mark Warner.
Hey, Mark.
Tambry Brecon.
Get your break on.
Might be Breshawn.
Ooh, I think it is Breschon.
Or Breshawn.
Sounds more natural that way, doesn't you?
Bresha.
Kelly Bath.
Hey, Kelly.
She's clean.
Pamela Santos jumped out at her highest level.
Hey, thank you, Pamela Santos.
Sandy Corsi.
Becca Caspur.
Hey, Becca.
Laura Kajikov.
Or Kajoba.
No, couldn't be.
Cajap.
It could be that.
Hey, Cajacob.
Could be Cajacob, but I'm going with Cajacob.
I'm going to go with Cajacob.
You're probably right.
Gillian Lassard.
Yeah, that's good.
Crystal Thompson jumped out at our highest level.
Crystal sparkling.
Daisy.
Hey, Daisy.
She's country.
Lisa Sabo.
Hey, Lisa.
Claudia Gomez.
Hey, Claudia.
Jessica Hay, Haines.
Hello.
Kyle Bliss.
Hey, thanks, Kyle.
Jennifer Probst jumped out at our highest level.
That's cool.
Thank you.
She might be related to Jeff Probst.
Who's Jeff Probst?
The guy that hosts Survivor.
Oh, is that his name?
Mm-hmm.
I just knew him as Jeff.
Did you?
Just Jeff.
You didn't even know that.
Tracy Evans?
Hey, Tracy.
Starla Sims.
Starla.
Which I like that name.
She was like that.
Very cool.
Reno.
Oh, I like Reno, man.
The gambler.
It was probably playing blackjack right now.
somewhere. Melissa Duke.
Hey, Melissa. Meg Farmer.
Hey, Meg. Maria L.
Just Maria L? Yep. Nikia White.
Hey, Nikia.
Christy Koolin.
She's chilling.
Becky Jones. Hey, Becky.
Shannon A. Thank you, Shannon.
Vicki Lopez. Oh, thanks, Vicki.
And Dana Kesmetz.
And then Gibbs, we go back into the vault.
Yes.
This week, we selected Terry Swetnam.
Sweatnam.
Terry has been with us a very long.
long time. Oh, thank you so very much on Patreon. We really appreciate that. And we had some great PayPal
support as well. We had Kimberly Jones. Hey, thanks Kimberly.
Basluki Francine. Oh, thanks, Bazluki. Made a sizable donation on PayPal. Melissa Buell.
Hey, thanks, Melissa. And Jennifer Winkler. She's winking. So it's awesome. She knows Henry, too.
Henry Winkler? Yeah. So we got a lot of support. And we really appreciate that. It goes a long way towards helping us
you know, keep putting out this content.
Especially now.
Especially now.
That you're unemployed.
That I'm close to being unemployed.
Maybe you're quit wearing the sweatpants.
Maybe I'll be wearing more sweatpants because I don't have to leave the house.
What do you think about those apples?
Oh, you're probably right.
I can see this developing into you growing a full beard and wearing flannel shirts with
sweatpants.
Well, I haven't shaved since November for, for November.
Yeah.
I'm going to see what it looks like.
It's much grayer than I remember it.
Yeah, I shaved mine off, but then I just start letting it grow again.
So I'll see.
Yeah, we'll see.
It gets itchy.
It gets itchy.
It starts to get itchy.
Mine does if I don't do the neck.
So I can only do like to the jaw line.
Yeah.
Because from the neck down, I don't like it.
It gets itchy.
I try to do a straight, straight edge razor on my own neck.
Then I get a little excited.
Like, I wonder how far I can go before, you know.
Yeah.
You shouldn't be allowed to have a straight edge razor.
Yeah.
That really should be considered a deadly weapon in your hands for sure.
I've used by K-Barr before it.
It gets a really good shape.
I bet it does.
You get that thing honed, man.
Yeah.
All right, Gibbs.
At the same time this episode is out, we've got an unsolved episode out on Betsy Ardzma.
And we're going over to Pennsylvania, Penn State University.
Yeah.
I mean, nothing bad has ever happened at Penn State.
Yeah, we hear them in the news about anything.
Oh, wait, maybe not.
But this is a murder that goes back to.
69. It's like 50 years ago. Yeah. So almost 50 years ago. But, uh, you know, check that out.
We get into the story who Betsy was, possible suspects, you know, all of that good stuff.
But I think we have to dive right in to today's episode. And I don't think we had any choice,
Gibbs. We had to do this one. We've had so many requests for Fred and Rosemary West that,
we just couldn't put it off any longer.
No, no.
People were begging for this.
Yeah, people really have wanted to hear us cover this story.
And I'll be honest with you.
I knew this story or I thought I did, right?
I knew the basic story.
Yeah.
But when you get into the research, man, you really start to realize how bad these two
really were.
Right.
And on top of that, and obviously we're going to get into it in detail, but how bad
their childhoods were both of them pretty damn bad but we're talking about husband and wife killers
fred and rosemary west and they there's there's no other way to say it gives they were vile
you know they tortured raped murdered at least 10 young women in the 70s now we're in england
right this happened in their home in england at 25 cromwell street and that's going to become
known as the House of Horrors.
Fred was already a killer before he even met Rose.
And of course, we're in England.
So you're going to have a chance to show off some of your spot-on English accents.
And I know you might change it up from region to region.
You're that good.
Pretty much.
Yeah.
It depends on the door.
And we got the going on.
And I'm going to have a chance to mess up.
Oh, countless cities, town names.
You know, there are some very hard to pronounce names over there.
But we'll see how I do.
And I will say in this case, you know, although it takes place earlier in time,
it reminds me so much Gibbs of the Paul Bernardo Carla Hamulka case that we did.
You know, all four of these people, extremely brutal, extremely savage.
Now, the one big difference, now, there's probably two big differences.
Number one, Fred and Rose don't look like Paul and Carla, right?
Paul and Carla were nicknamed Ken and Barbie.
They were good looking.
You're not going to say that about Fred and Rosemary.
These two are not winning any beauty contest.
Let's say that.
But the other thing is neither Fred nor Rose are going to get off as easy as
Carla Hamulka. And it's definitely going to be a two-parter, right? There is so much going on in this
case, you know, the backgrounds of these two people alone could fill an episode and almost does,
almost fills episode one. So let's start off. Let's dive in talking about the childhood of Fred
West. Frederick Walter Stephen West was born September 29th, 1941, and
and much Markle to farmers Walter West and Daisy Hill.
And it's a small town.
It's about 120 miles west of London.
But go back to this guy's name.
Frederick Walter Stephen.
It's like three first names.
That it is.
I know a lot of people's middle names are essentially,
could be first names too.
But he's got two middle names.
Why do you need two middle names?
And I'm not putting anybody down that has two middle names.
I've always just wondered that.
I don't know.
Is it because...
Some different culture.
have that though. Yeah, is it because
you know, the one on
the paternal side, you know,
named for somebody on that side and you're also
named for somebody on
your mother's side as well?
Maybe, yeah. I've always wondered
that. You don't see that as much here.
Do you in the States? No, not here.
Latin America, you see it a lot.
A lot of, you know,
especially with the women.
Double mental names. Now, the West
had seven children in total,
but they had them
basically one right after the other.
I mean, within a pretty short amount of time, they had seven kids.
So Fred had quite a few siblings, even though they were dirt poor.
I mean, they had no money whatsoever.
There wasn't always enough to go around.
And their house was described as basically a pigsty, dirty, filthy.
You know, there were articles about the fact that they,
they slaughtered their food inside the kitchen,
which I don't get,
it seems like you could easily do that outside.
I would think so.
But for some reason,
they chose,
you know,
they would slaughter a pig in their kitchen,
I think.
But I did butcher a pig,
helped butcher a pig in a basement in a summer kitchen.
And then we made sausage and...
Yeah, maybe.
So,
it just seems like a horrible mess.
But he had a relatively good relationship with his parents
was especially close with his mother.
And his mother was the dominant force in the family.
She was the one that gave out to punishments,
most often with a leather belt that she kept at the ready
like you do with your K bar.
Absolutely.
I mean, she basically walked around the house,
I think, with this leather belt.
And my dad had a big old white leather belt
that I met a few times in my young age.
But was he,
walking around with it or would he take it off?
Oh, you just take it off.
Right.
Get it out of the closet really fast.
Right.
That's what I was used to, right?
Take it off.
Or in the case of my grandfather, you had to go to the tree and pick out your own switch.
I always hated that.
There was an extra element of picking out the instrument that was going to be used to beat your ass.
Yeah.
That adds another element if you think about it.
Right.
You got to decide which one.
You don't want it to be too thick.
but then you get too thin
there's there's something to that too
I really have thick thin right yeah
you got to pick wisely
yeah but she walked around
with this leather bell and it was said that
a lot of times she would use
the buckle end to
beat these kids that's his wrong
there that's rough yeah
now Fred's father Walter
was an extremely
violent man and
there's some talk Gibbs
about the fact that he may have been
murderer himself.
His first wife died under some suspicious circumstances because apparently she died and when the
police came, he told them that she got stung by a bee.
Not to say you can't die from a bee sting, but.
Right.
Yeah.
Seems like somebody would be able to figure that out.
Now, what's not in question about his father was that he enjoyed violent sex.
And this is something that he passed on to his son, Fred.
There are stories of his dad, Walter, forcing himself on girls, women while they were out working
the fields, right?
To farmers.
But during some of these instances, Fred was there watching.
Fred would later say that his father taught him that if he saw a girl he wanted, he should
take her if he had the chance imagine that. I can't imagine. Imagine your dad saying that.
Right. And then, no, don't imagine this. But no, no, no. It's like caveman mentality.
You are watching your father violate someone sexually out in the middle of a farm field.
Come on, son, get in on this. It's just, that's what I, that's what you said imagine. That's what now I'm,
that's what he would probably do. It's almost inconceivable. Your turn, son. Do what I did.
I mean, you know, my dad taught me how to throw a baseball. He taught me a lot of things.
He sure as hell didn't teach me anything like that, nor would I have wanted to see or learn
anything like that. Let's go outside and pass the ball. He's like, let's go out in the farm field
and find out there's a woman. That's essentially what he was doing. Yeah. With his young son.
I mean, I know that a father is very important in a son's life, but it's unbelievable to
think that a dad would teach their son that. But that wouldn't be the only horrible lesson that
Walter would teach his son Fred because he also taught him about bestiality. So as the story goes,
apparently Walter is just running around this farm having sex with everything, human,
animal. And it didn't matter what type of animal. I'd be afraid if I was the chicken.
No, you're talking, it, in stories it said cows, pigs, sheep.
Didn't matter.
It didn't matter to this guy.
That's sick.
It is sick.
I mean, it's like making me sick to my stomach.
Well, you're, this whole story is probably going to have your stomach doing some flippity flops.
Yeah.
But it's hard to say that that's not the worst part of it.
The worst part of it is, again, he did this in front of his son, had sex with farm animals,
in front of his young son.
So from an early age,
what is Fred West picking up from his father?
Basically, Gibbs, right,
that it's okay to do whatever sick, twisted, perverted, perverted thing
that you want to do.
Yeah, you want to screw a chicken, go ahead, screw the chicken.
Do whatever you want to do.
That's what he's learning.
My dad said, I could go ahead and do that, donkey.
That's messed up, man.
And I don't think there's any doubt, Gibbs,
that Fred West was exposed to a lot of sex.
Some of it, probably all of it, very strange, twisted, but from a very early on, from a very
early age.
And unfortunately, he started to emulate these same behaviors that he picked up from his dad.
Yeah.
So I'm just trying to picture the end of the day around the farm at the dinner table,
you know, his dad talking about what he did, who he did, you know,
neighbor girl, whatever. And then Fred's what talking about I went out and got me a sheep today,
got me a cow, got me the, the mule. I actually don't think you're that far off because unlike a lot of
cases that we talk about where strange, perverted, sick things are going on in a family,
this was not hidden. Everybody knew what was going on. So I don't know that you, I know you're kind of
joking around a little bit, but I don't know that you're that far off. They very well could have
have been sitting around every night talking about exactly what they did that day. But Fred had
another problem. His mother, Daisy, wasn't much better. You know, she had some sick perversions of
her own and many of these involved Fred because from an early age, 12, 13, she began sexually abusing
her son, Fred, taking him to bed with her and making him perform sexual act.
I wasn't lying Gibbs to me. This is one messed up story. And when we get into Rose's story,
it's not going to be much better. It's, it's extremely bad as well. But it wasn't just that
with his mom. She also encouraged him to have sex with his sisters. God, it's messed up.
The whole thing. And his dad wasn't left out of this part either. You know, his dad,
Walter was said to have forced himself on his daughters as well. So again, go back to neighbors,
daughters in the field, livestock. He's sexually abusing his own daughters. His son's aware of all this
and his son is being abused by his mom. Yes. And being encouraged to have sexual activity with
his sisters. You just don't get much more messed up than that. No, no. No.
You can't even, I mean, you don't even know what to say, do you?
No, I don't.
It's like, this is the stuff that you like, somebody makes like a really bad horror movie.
Right.
You know, this is the horror movie.
You could not.
Yeah.
We say that all the time.
If you wrote this and somebody would say, there's no way, right?
There's no way if you made this up.
There's no way all of that happened.
This all happened.
Yeah.
Wow.
So much inappropriate sex going on in this family, some with livestock.
Now, I know.
that no one listening to this episode is is going to be thinking, you know, poor Fred, right?
by by the end of the Fred and Rosemary West saga.
But you have to admit, I mean, as a kid, he went through some shit when he was young.
There's no, there's no doubt about it.
It always makes me wonder, Gibbs, would he have turned out to be a killer if he had been
brought up in a stable household with a pro?
with appropriate acting parents.
Nobody knows the answer to that,
but you would have to think he would have had a much better chance.
The problem with Fred was that because he was surrounded by all of this
and his parents were actively involved and even encouraged this stuff,
he thought all of this was normal, right?
Why wouldn't you?
Your mom and dad are doing it.
They're saying it's okay.
They're encouraging you to do it.
You would grow up thinking, hey, this is pretty normal.
The sex, the abuse, the violence, the taking of whatever you want.
And again, we're going to be talking about and saying some of these same exact things
when we start talking about Rosemary.
But we're going to continue on with Fred for a while.
He wasn't a good student.
He was a troublemaker, created quite a bit of trouble.
during his school years, he was constantly being punished for acting out. I didn't know you as a kid,
but this is something that I imagine you experienced once or twice. Could. In the principal's office.
First name basis. Back when they used to be allowed to paddle you. My name was on one of the paddles.
Yeah, I wasn't sure, but I had a feeling that you probably got paddled quite a bit in school.
But I liked it and she knew that. Well, that's the deal.
difference, right? You were, you were doing things on purpose. It's like, hey, Mrs. Robinson.
Please, ma'am, may I have another? Yeah. You were doing things on purpose to get sent to the principal's
office so that you could get paddled. Yeah. So you might be a little bit like Fred in that way.
But very much unlike you, Gibbs, Fred had an IQ of 84. So he was about probably less than half of what you,
what your IQ is.
So you would not have seen him at any of the Mentsa meetings back in the day.
Pretty exclusive club.
It is.
And you guys are probably about the same age.
So you could have seen him if he was a little smarter.
I'm in that MENSA Plus club.
Oh,
is that an extra special double secret probation club?
Something like that.
Don't talk about it except on this podcast, you know.
That nobody listens to.
So is it like Fight Club?
You're not supposed to talk about it?
Is that the first rule of Minsa special?
Plus. Again, I can't comment, but yeah. Now, when Fred got in trouble in school, which he did quite often, his mother Daisy would come in and berate the teacher. So it kind of reminds me of maybe like the Goldbergs. You ever watch the Goldbergs? I do. I love the Goldberg. Yeah. And, you know, the mom is like at the school in a heartbeat, standing up for her kids, especially the youngest. But just like on the Goldbergs,
This is not making Fred look very good, right?
He's not looking like the tough guy in front of his classmates.
He's looking like the guy whose mother has to come in and fight his battles.
Right.
No boy wants that in school.
He dropped out of school at the age of 15 and began working as a farm hand.
At the age of 15, he could barely read and write.
You know, back in the day, though, there was a lot of kids that worked the farm that just didn't go to school because it was more important for them to work on the farm.
farm so they didn't have the education that they needed there definitely was they were they were more
there for the just the sweat you know the labor yeah and i didn't graduate high school all that long ago
and there were kids back then you know in the 90s that you knew there was no way that they should
have graduated right you set in class with these people you saw their test scores they could barely
read barely right but yet they they just kind of went through the system and next thing you know
they were graduating right along with you.
But the one thing that Fred was,
was a charmer.
And he used the gift of Gab that he had,
you know,
to be able to talk to females and get them to do the things that he wanted
them to do.
And later on,
he's going to use some of those same skills to lure in his victims.
Now,
at the age of 17,
Fred had a head injury when he was involved in a motorcycle accident.
I feel like lately gives we've been talking about a lot of motorcycle accidents and it's freaking me out.
Going to have to put yours up for the winter soon.
Well, it's supposed to snow like in a couple of days.
So I don't think I'll be riding it.
But it is freaking me out a little bit.
But during this accident, he suffered a fractured skull, arm and leg.
And the guy was in a coma for like a week.
And he was left with a metal plate in his head.
and one leg ended up for the rest of his life being shorter than the other.
Now, you know that metal plate that I have in my head, Gibbs.
Yeah.
I had to have it replaced.
Yeah.
Because every time my wife would rev up the microwave,
I'd piss my pants and forget who I was for about a half hour.
And you spent around twice.
I know.
I don't know.
It's fun and watch, though.
You used to turn it on in purpose.
There wasn't even anything in there.
As long as you had pants on.
But this motorcycle accident,
it had other effects on Fred besides the physical ones that I mentioned, his behavior changed
dramatically. And it was something that was noticed by everyone around him. It was like his control over
his emotions, his rage were diminished after this accident. And then to make matters worse,
he got knocked off a fire escape onto his head. This was after he healed from the motorcycle accident.
then. So he had two pretty serious head injuries. The motorcycle one being much worse, but
you know, it's something that we always talk about, right? These, these head injuries. And we're
going to talk about it with Rosemary as well. It adds up, man. We see it so many times.
It can't be a coincidence, right? That all these killers are a lot of these killers that we talk about.
And we're going to talk about it a little bit more, but Fred meets a 16 year old girl named
Rina Costello, who.
by that early age was already an experienced thief well known by the or to the police and this was
something they had in common Fred was a thief a burglar he stole whatever he could get his hands on he
had a reputation with police as well as a neer do well what's a neer will dell I don't know what
a neer will dell is a neer do well it's just a word I've always wanted to use in the podcast
Neer-Weldell.
No, why do you keep saying ne'er-will-near-do-well?
Neer-do-well.
It just means like a troublemaker.
Really?
Yeah.
You neer-do-well?
Or you neer-will-dell or whatever you said the first time?
Neer-well-duler.
It's just, I don't know, something I've always wanted to say.
You still have that word of the day calendar or something?
That's probably in there.
Maybe that's where I got it from.
It sounds like I need to get one of those.
I think you need to get a word of the hour.
If they have that.
Really ramp up.
Because you need to catch out.
This is what I'm saying.
I don't think word of the day is going to...
I'm getting vexed here.
Are you vexed?
Yeah, I'm getting vexing.
I don't think word of the day is going to get you where you need to go as quick as you want to get there.
Yeah.
Maybe word of the minute, word of the hour at the very least.
One day I could be opulent with the words.
I don't think you're using that correctly.
I don't think I'm using it right either.
All right.
It's always fun.
There's a new podcast right.
right there. Just open up the
Ecyclopedia and see what happens.
Open up the what?
The Ecyclopedia.
You said, like, encyclopedia?
That's the website, but we can open up the book, Ecyclopedia.
Yeah, that's the one I'm working on.
Like EX.
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm working on it.
I bet you it's a good one.
Yeah.
We don't have any followers right now.
Shocking.
Yeah.
All right, Gibbs.
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Fred got caught stealing some things from stores on a number of occasions.
One time he got caught with another boy stealing a gold watch strap and two cigarette cases.
Both of the kids got fine, but they got to let go.
But there's a lot more trouble, much more trouble.
about to come because in 1961, Fred West is 20 years old. He was arrested and convicted after
impregnating a local 13 year old girl. And while police are talking to him, they're questioning him.
They find out pretty easily that he had sex with this underage girl a number of times.
They also figure out that he had been molesting girls for years.
dating back to his early teens.
I don't think Fred was that withholding with information.
Because I actually think his attitude was one of shock.
He was shocked that people, the police, that anyone thought that he had done anything wrong.
He just didn't see anything wrong with what he was doing.
Because he thought it was normal because he saw, yeah.
He saw, yeah, his dad do it.
So this is what people do.
Exactly.
He freely said what he had done.
and was shocked that they were upset with him.
Yeah.
Like he couldn't comprehend that.
Now,
he went to trial.
His mother came to his defense at trial.
Even though,
Gibbs,
you know,
she knew what he had been doing.
He had been doing it at home.
So it couldn't have been a big shock to her that he would have done this to
someone else.
He'd been doing it at home at her direction.
But anyway,
she stood up for him in court.
The motorcycle.
accident was brought up as a factor in his behavior. And the case against him eventually fell
apart because the 13 year old didn't want to testify. And that happens. We know we've talked
about that in other cases. Now, I did want to say this. There were some things in the research
that conflicted around this story. You know, some people have said that this 13 year old was
actually his sister, but the majority of the research says it was not a family member.
Maybe it was the daughter of a family friend or something like that.
But there are some articles that say that this was his sister.
But either way, Fred was essentially disowned by his family.
They kicked him out of the house.
But he didn't go to jail.
Of course not.
Right?
He didn't do any time, essentially.
Which is kind of hard to believe.
He's a 20-year-old that confessed to inappropriate sexual relations with a 13-year-old girl.
Yeah.
And Jerry Lou Lewis, what?
And impregnated her.
Yeah.
That one's a little tough.
I know it's 1961, but still.
So Fred worked construction for a while, got fired for stealing on the construction site.
But eventually the next year, his family allowed him to come.
come home and live back at home.
Enough time has passed.
Yeah, we've disowned you for a year.
Now you can come back.
Oh, and by the way, we're all still sleeping together.
Yeah.
We're going to draw names to see who's going to go to bed with who tonight.
So that part is not changed.
Yeah.
It was around this time that he was allowed to come back home that he reunited with
Rina Costello, who was by this time a sex worker and she was pregnant with someone
else's child. But the two of them got married later that year does not seem like a great way to
start off a marriage. I'm sure it happens, but the love of your life is a sex worker who is
pregnant with someone else's baby. They had to lie to Fred's parents and tell them that the baby was
his. That's where they had to lie, huh? That's, yeah, we don't have to lie about all this other,
All this other stuff.
I'm screwing animals.
I'm screwing my sister.
I'm screwing.
But I can't tell them that the baby and my girlfriend or my wife now's belly is not mine.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Seems like a strange place to draw the line.
After they married, they moved to Scotland.
And Renna's baby was born.
She named her Charmaine.
And after she was born, Fred wrote a letter home to his mother.
saying that the baby had died during childbirth.
And the letter, he added that they adopted a mixed race baby because it turned out Gibbs,
the father of Renna's baby was Asian.
And Fred wasn't going to be able to explain that.
Right.
It didn't look like him at all.
So he made up the story that the child died and then they adopted an Asian baby.
An Asian baby.
Okay.
Or a mixed race.
baby or whatever you want everyone.
Yeah, sure.
But I still go back to your point.
They're okay with all this other stuff, but for some reason would not be okay with this.
Yeah, that's the deep, dark secret there.
Yeah.
We can't let them know that you have another father to the baby.
Yeah.
That's such a strange line in the sand.
Now, this probably does not come as a shock, but Fred West had a voracious sexual appetite.
Well, when you're doing everything and.
animals from a very early age you're gonna yeah surprise he's i mean picking up pies and doing them
and i think because of that he wasn't into reportedly straight missionary type sex it just didn't
do anything for him i mean think of the stuff that he had done since he was 12 years old i'm sure he
was in sick again yeah he was into bondage sodomy oral sex i mean i mean
And not just like once a week, once a day.
He wanted it multiple times every day.
Yeah.
And that's what I mean by sexual appetite.
While they were in Scotland, he started driving an ice cream truck.
The ice cream man, huh?
He was the ice cream man.
There we go.
The only one in Scotland.
He just drove all around Scotland delivering, you know, ice cream.
By playing Van Helen's ice cream man song.
but what it did was it allowed him the opportunity to meet many young girls.
When you say young, you mean young.
I don't know.
I actually don't know how young, but he had a number of affairs on Renna.
But still in 1964, they had their own baby girl.
They named Anna Marie.
And Renna had a friend by the name of Anna.
She helped watch the kids from time to time.
but one day while he was driving his ice cream truck, Fred was involved in an accident where he
killed a four-year-old boy.
Wow.
Instantly.
But apparently the accident was not his fault.
He was not charged.
I didn't get all the details of the accident.
But after that, he'd had enough of Scotland.
And I think this had something to do with it.
The accident, it wasn't just the coincidence that right after this, you know, he packed
up the family and moved back to England. But they also brought along Renna's friend Anna McFall.
And they settled in Gloucester, England. Gloucester. So Fred got a job at a slaughterhouse,
which to me is some very eerie foreshadowing. Slaughterhouse rules. For what we know is about to come.
And you have to wonder, Gibbs, when we get into some of these murders, whether
he used some of what he learned
working at this slaughterhouse.
Man, I used to deliver to a slaughterhouse
when I was UPS driver.
Nasty?
Yeah, it's nasty.
And you smell the, like the iron, you know,
the metal, I don't know.
From the blood?
Like the blood smell?
Yeah.
And you'd walk in and there'd just be like red meat,
you know, like pieces of meat,
little pieces of meat everywhere,
just from when they walked out
that was on their feet, you know?
Oh, gosh.
I'm sure they posed it all down, clean it all up in the night, you know.
And you'd seen what their netting on and their white jackets and stuff.
And it was a big butcher, Slaughterhouse, but...
We just had 50,000 vegetarians turn off the show.
Yeah, but, man, it was...
I was like, oh, man.
You dreaded that every time you had to...
Yeah, it was because you knew that when you went in, when you came back out,
you had to drag your feet across the gravel, you know, to get that stuff off your feet,
off your shoes and...
Was it one of those things where the smell, like...
Oh, yeah, it stuck with you.
My nose is very sensitive.
My daughters are into like these sensies.
They have all these weird smells.
And that stuff wafts through the house.
And once it gets up into my nose...
It stays there, man.
I cannot.
It's like I can just walk around all day smelling that same smell.
If you deliver the front, it went bad.
People were on the back where they dispose a lot of stuff.
That's where the nasty stench was.
All right.
You're really, really dragging this slaughterhouse thing out.
I don't think that's what's going to turn people.
No, it's not.
I mean, if they haven't already turned it off.
If they're still with us, they're good.
You're right.
Now, eventually, Rina had enough for Fred, right?
It wasn't just the, I want sex three or four times a day and I want this type of sex.
She just got to the point where she was done with it.
So she moved back to Scotland, but she left her two children behind with Fred.
But it wasn't by choice.
when she tried to leave, she wanted to take the kids, but Fred wouldn't allow it.
And remember, one of those kids is technically not his, right? Charmaine is not his biological child,
but yet he wouldn't let Renna take her.
You always wonder how they can do that, you know, how someone can do that.
But then you watch some of the, I've seen some shows, you know, true stories, you know,
and how people can manipulate others.
Oh, I think he was manipulative.
I also think he probably threatened her and did some of that by force.
Sure.
She was probably scared of him and what he would do.
But Anna McFall, her friend, stayed behind with Fred after Renna left.
And the two of them became involved.
Well, if you're with Fred, you're going to get involved.
You're going to be involved one way or the other.
So either volunteer or involuntary.
And it's probably not going to be good.
You know it's not going to be good.
But apparently, Anna was kind of.
infatuated with Fred and Renna would come back, you know, to England to visit the kids from time to
time. And one time when she came back, there they were. They were essentially a couple.
Yeah. Fred and Anna. And she had to be like, you know, WTF, what's going on here?
Are you crazy? Why would you even want to be with him? It's probably what she's thinking.
And she probably thought it was even more strange when she came back later to visit. Anna was pregnant
with Fred's baby. Yeah.
Fred and Renner still married.
They hadn't divorced.
She just is living in Scotland.
But this union is not going to last very long between Anna and Fred.
Number one, like I said, Fred and Renner are still married.
But Anna is pestering him, talking to Fred, trying to get him to divorce Renna.
Apparently, he didn't take this very well.
He got tired of it.
And he killed Anna.
and the unborn baby, both.
Just like that.
Just like that.
So I'm tired of hearing you talk.
And he killed her.
Killed her on the baby.
Okay.
And then he dismembered her body and buried it outside the trailer where they lived.
And he did something strange that would become one of his signatures in later murders.
He removed each one of her fingers and each one of her toes.
Oh, one at a time?
I don't know.
He could have done them all at the same time, I guess, if he had...
But individually, they were all removed.
Okay.
Yeah.
And they weren't buried with her body.
Because they don't find her remains for a very long time.
We probably won't talk about the finding of the remains until episode two.
But it's something important to talk about because it's going to be a signature.
He's going to do this in later murders.
It always amazes me what people will do, right?
You know, we had like, he's got the fingers and toes and you got the people that cut off the
breast and you know, the people that keep the feet, you know, the people that.
Why, right?
You wonder, like, why is it that?
What draws somebody to, I mean, number one, to murder.
That's bad enough.
But then what you're talking about is wanting to, let's say, keep a very specific body part.
I mean, think about Arthur Shawcross.
Yeah.
You know, cutting out the, the genitals.
And yeah, I mean, why, why do that?
You know, why keep the heads?
Why keep, I just, I don't know.
Again, you know, to get into these people's minds, it's scary business.
After Fred murdered Anna, Renna came back, came back.
They lived together in the trailer.
They were still husband and wife living with the kids.
I'm assuming he told her that Anna had run off on him or something like that.
but they fell back into their old routines living together taking care of the kids but this isn't
going to last either renna left again the following year and once again left the two kids behind with fred
now one other thing that i want to make sure we talk about gibbs is the number of sexual assaults that
were going on in around this area during this time frame i've read reports that there were as many as
eight sexual assaults, where the offender's description matched very closely to that of Fred West.
So we know he's a monster. He's already murdered at least one female. And who knows if there were
others before, there probably were. So one female and an unborn child. And an unborn child.
Yeah. But we're also talking about what is most likely a serial rapist as well.
Now, one possible murder victim of West was a 15-year-old girl named Mary Bastholm.
She was abducted from a bus stop in Gloucester in January of 1968.
Mary had been on her way to visit her boyfriend when she was abducted.
All that police found were some pieces from a monopoly game that she had been carrying.
Apparently, she was going to play monopoly with her boyfriend.
they immediately thought that her disappearance was tied in with these other sexual assaults,
but they didn't have a suspect.
But they all kind of mimic each other.
Yeah, they were all very similar.
Howard Sounds, he wrote a book about the West.
And in the book, you know, he believes that Fred was involved in the abduction and murder
of Mary.
And he points out that in later crimes, that we know Fred.
was responsible for. We don't know for sure anything about Mary, but we know in later crimes that
he abducted women in this exact same way. So in Howard's book, he offers up some possible links
between West and Bastholm, said Fred was a customer at the restaurant where Mary worked,
and she often served him. So there was some connection. At one of his many jobs, Fred had a lot of jobs.
he got fired a lot.
But at one of them, he had done some work near the restaurant.
And the author also claims that Mary had been seen with a girl fitting Anna McFall's description
and that a witness put Mary inside of Fred's car.
So again, this author believes that Fred killed, abducted, probably sexually assaulted,
and ultimately murdered Mary Bastholm.
but it's not a proven murder of Fred West.
The month after Mary Bastholm went missing, Fred's mother died due to complications
from a gallbladder surgery.
And like I kind of mentioned it, he bounced around between jobs, but later that year,
he would meet his next wife.
Fred West met Roselette, the woman that would become his partner in crime.
I've got my partner in crime
and true crime. True crime.
I forgot. I left out the true.
Yeah.
You got to put true crime in there.
It makes it sound like we're actually out there committing crimes.
Not anymore.
We stopped doing that a while.
If I leave out the true.
But they met November of 1968.
While he was still married to Renna,
they're not even divorced.
Fred was 27 at the time.
Rose was 15.
They actually met on her 15th birthday at a bus stop
where,
Fred stopped to give her a ride.
And it's been theorized that, you know, Fred did a lot of cruising, right, looking for women
and would stop and give them a ride.
And I think a lot of those women that he gave a ride to were, you know, ended up being sexually
assaulted.
Right.
But these two, Fred and Rose, they had an instant attraction to each other.
So just like we did with Fred, I think we have to dive into Rosemary's background,
because it's fascinating as well.
Very.
The Rosemary Pauline Letts was born November 29th,
1953 in Devon, England to William and Daisy Letts.
And she kind of grew up Gibbs in a somewhat similar fashion to Fred.
Her father, William, was a paranoid schizophrenic,
who was extremely strict and abusive to everyone in the house.
So a little, little different there.
I think in Fred's case, his mother was more of the disciplinarian, the strict one, the one that
meaded out the punishment.
In Rosemary's case, it was definitely her dad.
And I think Gibbs, he was the sort of guy that he was looking for, just the smallest thing.
Someone did wrong or that he felt was out of line so that he could punish them.
So he seeked it out.
Yeah, it was like he was, you know, nitpicking or seeking out.
Like you said, just anything he could find that he thought was not perfect.
And if you weren't perfect, you were going to get it.
It's like that movie with Julia Roberts, man.
With the labels and the towel and the dish towels.
Yeah.
What is it called?
Twisting.
Twisting in the wind.
No, you're twisting in the wind.
No, you're twisting in the wind.
That's not the name of the movie.
I'm like, I don't know.
That's not it.
The movie is called Sleeping with the Enemy.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
I just think we need to do a podcast about,
movies that you can't remember.
Well, I mean, I got the gist of it.
You said it's like that movie.
I said with the labels, you said yeah.
I said with the towels, you said yeah.
And then I said, what's the name of it?
But I can tell you, she...
And then I told you what it was.
She falls out of the boat, swims ashore, throws a rock,
knock the lights out, cuts her hair, gets on the bus.
I got it, man.
You could probably do a one-man play right here in the studio of the rest of the movie.
I could.
But we could sit here for 20 minutes and you couldn't tell me the name of the movie.
I couldn't.
It's fascinating to me.
I'm on a history.
How your brain works.
If we could figure that out, it would probably be good for a lot of people.
So Rose grew up with two sisters and a brother.
And her brother would later talk about their father saying, if he felt we were in bed too late,
he would throw a bucket of cold water on us.
We were not allowed to speak and play like normal children.
if we made too much noise, he would beat us with a belt or a chunk of wood.
He beat us until we were black and blue.
And then when mom stepped into help, he would beat her too.
Gibbs, he's talking about being beaten with a chunk of wood.
It's not fun.
I mean, today, you know, back in the day, I get it.
You know, I got the belt.
I got the switch.
I never got the chunk of wood.
No.
Today, hell, you can't do any of that stuff.
Can't beat nobody with a two by four, not today.
If you even raised the belt up, protective services would probably, child protective
services would ring the doorbell before the belt even, you know, made its way to the buttock.
To the buttock.
To the buttock.
But Rose or Rosie, as she was called back then, she escaped a lot of the beatings that were doled out by her father,
much like Fred and his mother.
Rose was her father's favorite.
And it seemed to me as if he treated her better than her siblings.
That's been said that she wasn't very intelligent, but she figured out early on how to please
her father.
And that was by doing exactly what he said to do at the exact moment that he said to do it.
But Gibbs, even though she got out of a lot of the beatings, what she didn't get out of was
the sexual abuse. Her father sexually abused her from a very early age. So Rose's mother,
Daisy, she suffered from severe depression. And it's been theorized that her father, William,
used her as a sexual replacement for his wife, who because of this severe depression,
had essentially withdrawn from the relationship. There was no physical,
intimacy. And so he replaced that with his young daughter. It's horrible. It is horrible. I talked about
it earlier. I mean, the similarities between the childhoods of Rose and Fred, they're hard to miss.
You know, they both endured violence, sexual abuse. And they learned from their parents at very young
ages the normalcy of things that society views as, you know, they learn from their parents at very young ages, the normalcy of
things that society views as extremely taboo or immoral, right?
This was normal to them because this is how they grew up.
It really is.
It's enough to make you sick thinking about parents doing this to their children,
doing what these parents did.
So talked about Daisy's mother's depression.
She also had it while she was pregnant with Rose and she received electroshock therapy.
Was a big thing back then?
It was. We talked about it on a number of episodes. Now, what we haven't talked about is someone, a woman receiving electroshock therapy while she's pregnant. I don't think we've ever talked about that. I don't know how that works. But she received a number of treatments. And the last treatment came just a couple of days before she gave birth. So there's a lot of speculation, right, about what effect the,
shock treatments had on Rose in the womb. And part of that speculation is that most likely areas of her
prefrontal cortex were damaged, which is not good, right? This is the area of the brain that controls
urges, regulates emotions, helps us determine right from wrong. If that's what happened to her and that
area of the brain got damaged, it could go a long way in explaining why she was or how she was, or
how she was able to do some of the things that she's going to do later on.
Right.
And maybe the same with Fred and his head injuries.
Maybe that's,
it's why we talk about head injuries so much.
Like we always talked about in the McDonald triad.
Yeah, but, you know,
if you remember,
head injuries aren't even part of the McDonald triad.
You know,
it's,
it's,
uh,
animal cruelty,
bedwetting and arson.
Okay.
Now,
we've seen a lot of animal cruelty in the
episodes that we've done.
I've had some bad wedding.
We've had some arson.
But I think Gibbs, we've had much more brain head trauma injuries than we've had some
of those other parts of the triad.
I believe that for sure.
It seems like almost every episode.
We are finding that one of these killers had, you know, some type of head injury.
Yeah, some major head trauma for sure.
And it can't be just a coincidence.
It cannot be.
that, you know, many of these killers suffered some type of head or brain trauma.
Now, as a child, Rose developed a habit of rocking back and forth.
And especially as time went on, she would rock her head and neck constantly.
And as a little girl, she would do it for hours and hours until it was said that it put her in
almost like a hypnotic like state that she would do it for so long.
Her family called her dozy Rosie.
Really?
Yeah.
Because they thought she was a little bit slow.
I mean, those were their words.
And she didn't do well in school.
She was overweight and was teased by her classmates because of that.
But when it happened, she fought back.
She would go on the offensive.
She would yell and scream and attack her tormentors.
the people that were bullying her.
And she developed kind of a reputation of being like a hothead or belligerent.
But because of all these things that she went through, you know, she was a loner.
She didn't have a lot of friends growing up.
Her parents divorced when she was a teenager.
And she originally lived with her mother.
But in 1968, she made the decision to go live with her father.
And the sexual abuse perpetrated on her.
her father, it started right back up immediately.
It was strange to me when I got to, you know, the part of the research about this,
because in the back of my head, Gibbs, I kept saying, why would she make that decision
knowing what her father had done to her for so many years?
Yeah.
I couldn't figure that out.
But this brings us to the point where she met Fred.
And initially, Rose's father could.
couldn't stand Fred and apparently even reported him to police for having sex with Rose who was
under age.
Think about that.
He called the police on Fred because he was having sex with his daughter.
You got to have some stones to make that call after you've been sexually abusing your own
daughter for years.
Well, you know, people like that don't see anything wrong with what they did.
they see what's wrong with what what somebody else is doing exactly now i get that you're probably
absolutely right about that but that's one thing that kind of you know stuck out at me as well
you know who's to say that he calls the police and because rose is infatuated with fred
she doesn't tell them what he's been doing so you you're either really confident really dumb
or you got stones to spare i don't know it's one of those it's a combination of some of those
A mix of that.
But I mentioned earlier that Fred and Rose had an instant attraction.
And I think gives most of it or all of it was physical.
Both of these people were very sexual individuals.
I mean, look back on what we've talked about in their childhoods.
They were both exposed to inappropriate sexual acts at a very early age.
They were just exposed to a lot of things that,
number one, nobody should ever be exposed to.
But number two, no kids should be exposed to any type of sexual activity that young, right?
Whether it's on the internet or, I mean, you sure as hell don't expect it to come from your own family.
But it's got to do something to the developing brain.
And I think it did something to Fred and Rose because, you know, we've already talked about Fred's sexual appetite.
Rose is probably going to match him.
She was very sexual.
We'll get into more of that aspect in part two.
But her dad eventually warms up to Fred, right?
He goes from calling the police on him to thinking, you know what?
I kind of like this guy.
Because they got the same, uh, they like the same thing.
You're, you're absolutely right.
It's wrong.
It's so wrong.
People that have looked at this case have theorized that,
the reason William changed his mind about Fred was because he saw himself.
He realized that Fred was a sexual predator just like he was.
This is like a kindred spirit to him.
So I said that the two met when she was 15.
When she turned 16, she moved into Fred's trailer.
Within a few months of that, they moved out of the trailer and into a house in Gloucester.
but it's not the house of horrors, right? We haven't gotten to that part of the story yet.
That move would come later. But incredibly, Rose's father, William, continued to have sex with his
daughter, even while she was having this relationship with Fred West. Again, I think it's part of
the reason why he changed his mind about Fred. You know, he realized who this guy was to the point where
he was okay with allowing William to have sex with Rose.
He probably didn't see anything wrong with it, right?
To your point, yeah, he didn't.
He grew up with moms and dads having sex with their kids.
Fred West, I don't think he saw anything wrong with it.
I think everybody in the audience is about ready to scratch their eyeball out.
Oh, they haven't already.
Saying, how in the world can all of this stuff,
happen. But Gibbs, I think this is a good stopping point for part one of the Fred and Rosemary
West story. And man, we just scratched the surface. You know, now that these two are a couple,
they are going to go on to perpetrate a level of evil. It's, they're going to eventually be some of
England's most notorious killers. Yeah. See, you even got the killing wrong. You, you're trying to make a
just went out and blatantly killed somebody. No, nobody went too well. Enjoyment turned to disaster.
That's what I'm going on all of that, more most of it anyway. All right. So a little clip of Fred to
wet the appetite for episode two. There's going to be a lot of audio in episode two because there is a
lot of audio of Fred. There's some of Rose as well, but it's all around the murder. So it's going to come
episode two. But in that clip, again, might be hard to hear. It might be hard for, you know,
some of us to make out. But he's essentially saying, you've got it all wrong, right? I didn't go out
looking to kill anyone. He's basically saying that everybody was having fun and things went
badly. That's what, that's what he's trying to say, right? And he's talking about sex. Right.
he's having sex with these women everybody's having a good time and something went wrong well it's not going to turn out that way right that's not the way it really happened but that's the way he's trying to spin it right gibbs we've got some voicemails you want to check some of those out yeah let's do it hey mike and gibby this is mattie from northern california um i just want to watch you guys know that you are my hands down favorite through crime podcast i've ever found um you guys are so good that it's so difficult to find any
others because I just continually compare them to T-Cat and you guys' research is just amazing,
you guys flow.
I just want to say thank you.
You're amazing.
Keep doing what you're doing.
Please keep doing what you're doing.
You make my work and you make my driving anywhere that I go.
So much more worth it.
I'm going to go on a cat episode of some sort.
I just found out that there's this whole like team Mike or team Ghibie.
I'm totally team Mike.
You're an absolute legend.
Sorry, Gibby.
keep you guys doing. I enjoy it a lot. I'm an absolute legend, Gibby. Did you know that?
We knew you're a legend. Well, you wear the shirt that says, I'm a legend. You got the hat. I'm a legend. I thought you were going to say you're a legend in your own mind. Well, I'm almost speechless. I don't even know what to say because I sit here week after week. We hear about 95% Team Gibby, right? That's about the ratio. Your head at certain point.
points in the episode and the voicemails is so big that you can't get out of the studio.
We know that.
Oh, come on, man.
No.
That's why we had the overhead door.
It's like a garage door that lifts up.
But we appreciate that voicemail, Matt.
I mean, we try hard, right?
With the research and all of that, we try to put it in.
And I think we will keep doing this show as long as people keep listening.
Yeah.
Plain and simple.
Absolutely.
We're not going to run out of.
bad people to talk about.
We haven't even scratched the surface.
Oh my gosh.
I was looking at our list the other day.
And, you know,
I always talk about when people leave voicemails and, you know,
they'll suggest a certain case.
And I'll say that's on the list, right?
It's been on the list since we started.
We haven't done 25% of the ones I put on the list to start with because we keep
finding other ones that weren't on the list that we find fascinating and we end up doing
those.
I mean, that's the part I love is when you're researching.
like more of a well-known and you start diving in and like you said you find these and you're like
wow let's do that one because it's probably you know a little less well-known and we do try you know
we want to sprinkle sprinkle them in yes hi mike hi gibby this is sarah calling for men at sea
i just want to say thank you so much for your podcast i've never listened to a podcast before
and to this day you're the only podcast that i still listen to so i just wanted to say thank you for
that and congratulations on 100 episodes. Keep up the good work and keep your own time chicken.
That's nice. That's very nice. Appreciate that very, very much. I thought she was going to say
that we're the only podcast she's ever listened to. So then she would really have no frame of
reference as to whether we're good or not. But I don't think that's what she was saying. I think
she was saying she's listened to a lot and we're the ones that she still listens to. What do you
think? Do you take it that way? I think it that way. Okay.
Yeah.
If no matter what, let's take it that way because I think it makes us feel better.
Yes.
But actually, either way, I'm happy because she's still listening.
I love it.
Hey, Mike and Givy, San Diego.
Actually, more Riverside now, but Southern California.
I'm a listener.
I'm a very avid listener.
And I just got through your episode about David Westerfield.
I'm actually from, you know, the San Diego area of living.
all over and I just, it really hit home because there was a really big story when it happened here
and I was in high school when she was abducted. So when Mike was talking about, you know, the
city kind of, the response from the residence was very immediate. It really was. I remember it
being on the news. I remember it was just a very heavily covered story and it felt at the time like
the entire city was looking for Danielle.
So, you know, thank you for telling that story.
It was a very big story for us down here in Southern California.
And I wanted to tell you guys to keep up the great work.
I really, really enjoy the podcast.
I've recommended it to many friends.
So thank you very much for taking the time out of your days to do this podcast for us.
I listen to several of your podcasts.
So thanks again.
and keep your own time ticking.
What can he say, Gibbs?
You got to love it.
It's good stuff, man.
I like it.
You got to like it.
No, you do.
When people say that they appreciate what you're doing, it makes us feel great.
It has made us feel great from the very first email we got, the very first direct message
or Facebook message that we got, the very first voicemail that we got where people,
someone said, hey, thank you.
We appreciate what you're doing.
Now, she said something that you can't stress enough, which is telling friends.
And I think a lot of people are doing that.
Our numbers are really spiking and we appreciate that.
Hi, it's Jill from Chicago.
I just wanted to thank you guys again because I woke up today and I was getting my morning
situation together and I was like, it's Monday.
It's T-Cat Day.
And I barely get through a couple hours before I'm already listening to it.
So I wanted to thank you guys for being so reliable and lovely.
And I am team Mike.
And, you know, Mike I'm referring to knows who I mean.
Love you guys.
Yeah, he's got a big smile on his face, so he knows.
No, that's an homage to you.
I know what's happening.
Because you do that all the time.
You know, she knows who I'm talking about or he knows which one he is or you know which one you are.
When I say, I love you, she knows who I'm talking about.
but we do love Jill.
We appreciate that.
And I will say, Gibbs, I was putting the finishing touches on, you know, this episode
earlier in the day and just happened to break into the Duke's Shorty Sausages.
Yeah.
Serrano pepper version or serracha.
I always forget.
Serrano or serracha.
I forget what it's called.
But I can't get enough of them.
And Jill, I still have the ones that Jill sent.
And I'm trying to ration them.
You know, because I can go nuts.
I could eat a whole bag.
You've seen me.
You love putting those sausages in your mouth, that's for sure.
I don't know if I'd go that far, but we should have a sponsorship for Duke Shorty sausages.
I've talked about it so much.
I feel like we're giving them free advertising.
Well, I think they make those in Colorado.
We just need to file the boulder and talk to Mr. Duke himself.
Right.
I think everybody listening should email Dukes and say, hey, you've got to give these boys a sponsorship deal.
All right, Gibbs.
let's talk about mailback just for a minute just for a minute
Eileen Snyder sent us a very cool Halloween card
sent me some Harley anniversary tokens
from the heart of Harley country which I appreciated now I will say
the card had a lot of glitter on it for a Halloween card
so my wife is probably going to think I was at a strip joint
so I may need your backing on that I'd be like um what Halloween
card. What are you talking about? There was no Halloween cards. Strip joint. Either way,
it's worth it. Yeah. It's worth it. And it was very cool. We appreciate that. And then,
you know, our good friend S, who you've probably heard, he calls in every now and then with a
voicemail, sent us what is probably the most interesting, eclectic package we've ever received. So
first off, there was some actual cotton plans that it looked like he literally pulled off the
side of the road, got out and cut. Stuck them in a box. Yeah. Some farmers like,
Hey, dude, what are you doing? My crops down. You're cutting my cotton, which we know is an ode to your,
the hills are alive with the sound of cotton moment. Exactly. That I will never forget,
probably for as long as I live. It was good, man. First of all, cotton makes very little sound.
Have you ever been standing in the cotton field? No, not really. And then you don't know.
but also in the box two five dollar bills which i kept both of them no i gave one to gibbs i kept one
a pair of what appear to be five dollar truck stop sunglasses okay and a shopping bag with the letters
gsa written on it it's like a mystery box Gibbs i don't know if these are clues i don't know if
some of these are clues that we're supposed to put together there was a couple of pins in there
that looked to be straight out of like an office.
But he also sent three Harley chips.
Now, knowing S, he's going to call back in, probably, and say, you know, your first clue is whatever.
And it's going to lead us on something.
We might want to take pictures of the money before we spend it.
Maybe there'll be like a clue tied into the money.
There might be.
It's like our.
Can you go back to that place and get our money back?
Because we're already spending.
You already spending.
But we appreciate that.
I got a big kick.
out of it looking through the box. And Gibbs, I know you did too. The cotton is what really cracked me up.
I don't think I've ever seen real cotton. I've seen it one time. Like, we went on a trip sometime,
somewhere, and they had like, you know, those little buy them in the little bags,
souvenir. They're like a little piece of, you know, the cotton, the cotton thing. You just bought a
cotton ball in a bag? No, it was like, no, it was like the, and paid extra for it? Probably what,
it's like that, you know, it was in a baggie. That was your keepsake. But this is on like a big
plant. Yeah, and I'm talking like a little, just a chunk of it, you know.
There's like three plants in this box and they got individual cotton clusters.
Oh, all right. Now, everybody get ready for episode two. It is going to be a rough one.
There's no doubt about it. You know, they don't call the house at 25 Cromwell Street,
the house of horrors for nothing. There was some bad stuff. Bad stuff. That went down at that house.
and we're going to detail it all.
But that's next week.
So that's it for another episode of True Crime All the Time.
So for Mike and Gabby,
stay safe and keep your own time ticking.
