True Crime All The Time - Matthew Hoffman

Episode Date: May 20, 2019

As Matthew Hoffman neared his 30th birthday, his life was falling apart. Friends and neighbors described him as odd and he had already completed a lengthy prison stretch. He couldn't keep a job and was constantly broke. He made the fateful decision to rob a house and this decision led to him committing three murders and kidnapping a 13-year-old girl. Join Mike and Gibby as they discuss this harrowing murder case from our home state of Ohio. What was it with Hoffman's fascination with leaves? Is this a clue into his mental illness that may have contributed to the evil acts he committed? The details of the murders and what Hoffman chose to do with the bodies are unbelievable. His kidnapping victim survived but lost most of her family and will have to live with what happened to her for the rest of her life.You can support the show at patreon.com/truecrimeallthetimeVisit the show's website at truecrimeallthetime.com for contact, merchandise and donation informationSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

everyone and welcome to episode 131 of the True Crime All the Time podcast. I'm Mike Ferguson and with me as always is my partner in True Crime, Mike Gibby Gibson, Gibson, what's going on? Hey man, what's happening? I'm doing great. Yeah. I had a really long motorcycle ride yesterday. Yeah. It was great. I hadn't done that in a while. Got your leathers out. I had my cut on, man. Did you? I did. All right. And, um, You know, drove about, I mean, when I say really long, it was two, two and a half hours round trip. Yeah. But that's a good ride for me.

Did you know what a cut was until you got the bike and watched your favorite show? I did not. Okay. I had no idea. I was wondering. And had no idea it was spelled K-U-T-E. So you learned some things. Mm-hmm.

All right. You sleeveless. I don't know if mine is still called a cut. It's essentially a leather vest. I don't have any patches. I'm not, you know. You know, I'm not trying to come up against the, uh, the ire of any real motorcycle gangs or anything like that.

Maybe your other gang can give you a patch. The T-Cat, T-Cat gang? Yeah, that or the other group you belong to. The furry gang is that? You didn't even want to say it. Oh, all right, Gibbs. Let's do our new Patreon shout-out. Okay.

We had Melinda Wargacki. Hey, Wargaki. Olivia Marie Foster. Olivia. Stephanie Hansen. Hey Stephanie. Kelly Johnson. Thanks, Kelly Johnson. Laura Ball jumped out at our highest level. Laura. Zoe Darling Maxwell has been a Patreon supporter. She went through the stratosphere. I mean, she upped it like way past any level we have on there. How, Zoe. Thanks for that, Zoe. Which people can do. I sometimes get questions from people that say, well, why is this the most you can do?

You can do whatever you want. Yeah. These are just the guidelines. feel free to donate whatever you want. Do it. We had Pam Cree. Hey, Pam. Courtney Jennings. Hey, Courtney. Stephanie B.

Hey, Stephanie. Amanda Kepi. Kappi. Neely Ferguson. Hey. Might be some kind of relation. That's just weird, man, when you get your own family to contribute. It is.

Candice Zugich. Hey, Candice. Longtime supporter through PayPal. Yeah, the Zukich. And has decided to come over to Patreon. Rain a day. It's a raining day, but it's Raina. Get it?

It's Raina Day. Yeah, I got it. I think everybody got it without even having to explain it. Sometimes you have to. She jumped out to our highest level. Thanks, Raina. We had Saga, Sigurdar Dardotter. Sigerdardardar.

I don't know if I got that right. Saga or Sajee. Jumped out to our highest level as well. Marissa Baglio. Baglio, yeah. Sabon Brogan. Hey, Saban. Ingamar Thor Richter.

Sounds like a really bad rash. So I'm going to go with, I'm just going to stick with Ingamore. No, I think if you have the middle name Thor, big things are expected of you. You think, like, I mean. Save the world. Do something. Probably like six foot five, 250 pounds, you know. Or the total opposite.

Dede Hensley. Hey, Dedy. Adam. Hey, Adam. Raven Ivanov. Hey, Raven. Anne Marish Murphy. Marish, I like that name.

Yeah, different. So we have some really different names. I come I have a feeling we're going to be doing Ingamar again once we hear from them on how we butchered the name and need to redo it. Probably. No, I'm sure we probably will. If we go back into the Volgives, this week we selected Leanne Seeley. Hey, Leanne. Longtime Patreon supporter.

And we appreciate that, right? All the new support, the continued support. it makes a world of difference. And it really does. We had some great PayPal support as well. We had Shila Green. Hey, Shaila. Jerylind Jensen.

Jerylian, thank you. Jan Owen. Oh, thanks, Jan. And Chelsea Camp. Chelsea. And I have to tell a story about Chelsea. I don't know if she's going to like this or not. Okay.

Chelsea tagged us on Instagram. Right. A while back. And I saw it and I watched it. It was a video. It was essentially Chelsea listening to to the episode where she got her first PayPal shoutout. Oh, yeah.

She was so excited. I loved it. I got the biggest kick out of it. It was cool. She's probably going to never support again after I called her out. But you probably play this one. It was really good. It was great.

That was cool. We had a Patreon merch winner for April and that was Deanna Foster. So congrats to Deanna. She picked out what she wanted and it's on its way to her right now. Gibbs, we have to give a big shout out to our friend and Patreon supporter Lana Hyatt for her help with writing and research of this episode. Right now we have an episode out on True Crime All Time Unsolved. We're talking about David and Jeanette Crew. And this is a first for us. We're going to New Zealand. Yeah. We've been threatening to do that for quite some time.

Hang out with some Kiwis. And we finally did it. And I'm glad because we have a lot of listeners in New Zealand. I do. I think a lot of people are going to really like this episode. I hope so. All right, but let's get into TCAT. Are you ready? I'm ready.

We're talking about Matthew Hoffman. And we're back in our home state of Ohio. And the murders and abduction committed by Matthew Hoffman, just about two hours north of where we are, they rank right up there with some of the worst. It's the details of the crime that I think most people find so fascinating. I don't want to say that I don't want to get into numbers, right? But everybody looks at Bundy and, you know, Dahmer and these Gary Ridgeway, these people that killed a very large number of people. And those people have to be studied.

And we will do that and have done some of them. But this is a story that I think people. people will really find fascinating. First of all, there's a lot to unpack here, right? Including Hoffman's fascination with leaves, which, you know, you could almost do a whole podcast on that alone. It gets so far out there, leaves. Just lease them. I'm talking about leaves. Photosynthesis. Photosynthesis. That's a hard word to say. There's definitely hints and maybe even more than than hints of mental illness. But in the end, Matthew Hoffman stole multiple lives, took multiple lives, and he altered one little

girl's life forever. So Hoffman was born on November 1st, 1980 in northeastern Ohio to Robert and Patricia Hoffman. And even as a kid, he was referred to as odd, strange, weird, right? These are the adjectives that you see come out about Hoffman. People said he definitely had a fascination with climbing things, trees, buildings, you name it. If there was something outside that Hoffman could climb, he would do it. For one, he spent a lot of his free time in the woods.

So again, very much like yourself. I know you like to put on a bandana and, run around Rambo style with your survival knife. Yeah. Have a Rambo weekend every now and then, you know, just. I think it would be less lame if you would have other people there with you, but the fact that you want to do it by yourself, it says something about you. Sometimes you just got to be by yourself and be willing to grab your K bar and go.

You just needed some me time. Yeah. But these are all things that would continue on with Hoffman as an adult. But this is the type of kid that he would climb onto the roof of his house, jump off onto a trampoline. And we've all seen videos of that on ridiculousness, Tosh.0. It very rarely goes well,

at least on those shows. They wouldn't put it on unless somebody got seriously hurt. He climbed to the roof of buildings just to see if he could do it. It's fun. Not for me. It's like Spider-Man. He climbed a lot of the trees in his nests, neighborhood. Now, eventually he would use this as a method of spying on girls.

It's probably what happened the first time he climbed something up in a tree, he looked over his shoulder and he looked in the window and probably got a glimpse of something he shouldn't be seeing and thought, mm-hmm, this is how I do it. This is the way to do it. He once tied a piece of rope between two trees, high, you know, fairly high up and tried to walk across it like that like that flying willinda guy what's that uh do you know what i'm talking about the tight rope walker yeah have you ever seen the videos of that guy and i think he had multiple there were multiple generations yeah but one of the probably the first ones or the main ones the most well known he had one where i'm assuming it was new york city he was tight rope walking between these two

skyscrapers yeah it's pretty amazing actually there's a documentary out there i can't remember if it's on Netflix, Hulu, one of them. And maybe it's not still there. I watched it one time. Carrey that big balance pole. Yeah. Yeah, he had the big pole. I don't think he used a net.

And if I remember correctly, he died. Did he? Falling off when, I think, some type of high wind or something whipped him off. So it wasn't really his lack of skill, but some kind of freak wind blew him off. That's to be expected, though in that line of, that's a very dangerous line of work. Can't beat Mother Nature, man. without a net. Hoffman's parents split up when he was 16, 17 years old, and he chose to live with his mom.

It was around this same time that police caught him on top of the high school. And when they asked him what he was doing up there, again, he said, I just wanted to see if I could get up here. That was like his big thing. It was like a conquest. Yeah. I want to see if I could do it. To make it up these buildings. It's not like he had a ladder, right?

he's having to find a way to scale these buildings. Let's go do that. Let's go scale something right now. All right. I don't know if I have the upper body strength needed to scale anything at this point in time. Or the lower body? Or the lower. Just the body strength.

I shouldn't even have classified his upper. But I mentioned mental illness. I think Gibbs that from an early age, there were signs that Matthew Hoffman had some type of mental illness. It's something we'll talk about in detail more later on. One neighbor recalled an incident between Matthew and her dog. And I guess she said her dog started barking at him. And apparently he just stood there staring at the dog with what this woman described as a very blank, unemotional stare.

Other neighbors had stories that all revolved around the fact that they thought this guy was odd. He didn't act, at least to them, as other kids his age did. He was strange. And many people that knew him or neighbors that knew of him, they believed he was extremely unhappy. He graduated from East Knox High School in Apple Valley, Ohio in 1999. But he didn't go to high school with the other kids. He studied industrial electricity at the Knox County Career Center. Did you ever go to the Career Center? I thought about going the Career Center and taking architectural drawing. No, they had that?

Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, I was pretty good at it. But I chose to stay. Yeah, I never went to the Career Center. I knew a lot of people that did. Yeah. I didn't go just because none of my friends went.

So you weren't going to go. No. We go. I go, we go. Well, and I was into so many sports, too. Yeah. I think that made it, that would have made it harder. Yeah, you still play sports for your home school.

Right, but. It's just harder to get to practice. Right, because most of our practices were after school. Yeah. So you're already at school. You just go to practice. Yeah. But now I've got to get from the career center to.

You got to make that little quick drive over to the other school. I know it's rough, man. So after graduating high school, he got the heck out of Ohio. He moved to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. He said, I'm gone, man. I'm going to go where the mountains are. Like a lot of people do. Yeah.

Cool name, cool town. Yeah. He got a job at a plumbing company. But he used this job to commit his first crime. At least a first serious crime of which we know, right? He could have committed some type of crimes earlier on. There's nothing out there about them. This is the first one of record.

So he's on this plumbing job at a. condo site. And he decided that he was going to steal some things. But something must have clicked in his brain because he wasn't wearing gloves. And he started to become extremely worried about fingerprints. And he just knew they were going to catch him. Right. They were going to find his fingerprints. They were going to know it was him. Now, for all you budding criminals out there, I think this is something that you're supposed to think about before you're, doing the job, not after you've already pulled it. Yeah, it's too late by then, man. And you would know that if you've read pages 57 through 59 of Gibby's book. It's one of the best parts. It'll help you out

tremendously. Preparation is the best thing you can do, man, because you don't want to try to remember what the wipe down after the fact. You won't remember it all. So Hoffman's freaking out about these fingerprints. And the solution that he comes up with to the problem is to douse the whole place with gasoline and set it on fire. This is how he's going to get rid of his fingerprints. He's going to ensure that he's not caught. So it was reported that he used about 10 gallons. Man, that's quite a bit. Yeah, that's over a kill. I was filling up my riding lawnmower the other day and I have a five gallon, you know, can, it's quite a bit of gas, right? So two of those spread out, lit on fire. It's going to go up pretty quick. Yeah. And it did. It resulted in, you know, quite a blaze for 16 people to evacuate this condo site.

It caused about $2 million in damage. That's a lot, man. So needless to say, Hoffman wasn't going to to stick around the steamboat springs area. He didn't want to get caught for this one. You know, first it was a, it was a burglary. Now I've got to get rid of my fingerprints. I'm going to burn the whole condo to the ground. He's into arson. So now I'm into arson.

So he heads for Ohio, which as we know is the place that you go if you don't want to be found because no one else ever comes here. They're like, why would we go to Ohio? Why? I don't know why. You're right. There's no way. There's no reason to look in Ohio because no reasonable person would go there. Especially from Colorado. From Colorado. Why would we leave Colorado to go to Ohio? No, we love Ohio. We do. But I make fun. I kid. It's a great place. It's got us. Police in Colorado eventually figure out that it's him, right? That he committed this arson. But they also realized that for whatever reason, he had stolen some welcome to the city type signs,

you know, whatever city it was, whether it was Steamboat Springs or another city. So this is how they got him back to Colorado. What's he got? Welcome to Steamboat sign. Welcome to Parker. Welcome. What's he doing with him? I don't know. But this is what they used. You know, it was this pretense of coming back to Colorado to clear up this issue of the stolen signs, that's when they nabbed him for the arson. He was convicted in 2001 of theft, burglary, and first degree arson for setting the condo fire. And he was sentenced to eight years. You know, that's not a slap on the wrist. No, it's a good, good amount of time.

You and I talk about many people that have killed individuals that have sexually assaulted and committed, you know, heinous acts of sexual violence that don't get eight years. So, you know, not that we're jury, judge, whatever, but I'm accepting of that eight years. And he did six. So, you know, it wasn't like he got out in eight months after he was released. Where do you think he went, Gibbs? Well, of course. Why wouldn't he come back to Ohio, please?

You have to go to Ohio. Yeah. So he's out on parole. He's in Ohio because you always come back to Ohio with your tail between your legs when you've either gone to prison in another state or you've gone to someplace like Hollywood, New York, Silicon Valley, and you failed to make it. Idaho, potato farm. Oh, sorry. You failed at your Idaho potato farm? Yeah, that's something different. So Hoffman's back in Ohio. He's living with his mama. and reporting to his local parole officer.

It's not surprising. We talk about this quite a bit about, you know, felons. He had a tough time finding work. There is this rumor going around Gibbs that some companies, they don't want to hire young men with felony arson on their records. I don't know why. I don't know. But that's the rumor going around.

Maybe a barbecue joint would take him. Because he's good with fire. I mean, what if this guy is, some type of savant with like pastries or something like that. And every Friday, he's bringing in these delicious treats for the rest of the office. Look at what you've missed out on there because you dismiss this guy because he liked to burn down buildings. You're hungry, aren't you? A little bit. Talking about pastries. You've had a lot of spare time lately. Are you doing some pastry baking at home? No, I'm not much of a baker. My youngest is, though.

All right. Just wondering. Hoffman did find some work driving a truck, and he always did some type of tree trumming. That was, you know, something that he did quite often, which if you really think about it, sounds like the perfect job for this guy. Well, it really is. You know, I've dealt with a lot of tree removal companies. Mm-hmm. And the...

A lot? Why have you dealt with a lot of them? It's a long story. But it's good to find the climbers. because they're hard to find, right? You know, you need them to get all the way up there, the tie things off to do. Yeah, there's only so many people that are want to want to do that.

Yeah, you can't be a big guy and do it, you know? It's not going to, the branches aren't going to support you, the higher up you go. So they need somebody. And you've got to be a little fearless. I would say a lot fearless, you know, because I don't even do ladders. You're up there swaying with the tree limbs.

I'm surely not climbing up to the top of some, you know, 40 foot tree or whatever it is. And I would say everyone I've ever met that does that, they seem to have a little bit of crazy in them. Yeah. They got just a little on the wild side, a little, everything's not quite maybe all there. There's a little, you know, just a little bit. Yeah.

But it does, right? You know, people always say find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life. You ever heard that saying? Sure. Yeah. So people say that. Yeah. Have you found that?

Maybe. Maybe. If I can make this podcasting work. That's true. I love to do it. So we'll have to see. And then you think about Matthew Hoffman, what did he enjoy doing? I mean, from a very young age, he enjoyed climbing trees.

So I don't know if he was climbing trees every day. I don't know if he was using a boom. I mean, I guess they do it different ways, right? But sometimes people have to climb all the way up, like you said. As a kid, this guy loved nothing. Nothing better than to climb a tree. And later in life, after prison, he ends up a tree climber. You can't tell me there's not something to that. That wasn't just an accident, right, that he became a tree climber. No, he said, man, I'm good at that. And I like it. I like it. So let me do it.

Well, the reason why I'm harping on it, it's going to become a huge factor in this story as we move through. Hoffman had some friends. Now, these friends later described him as a luf. They described him as a Gibby. I'm sorry, I mean a tightwad. Nice. Apparently, this guy never had any cash on him when it came time to pay a bill. Not sure where I've ever encountered someone else like that in my life.

You know, I'd really have to sit and think about it. It's a rough one. Yeah, a guy that once the bill comes, he's either in the bathroom, he's forgotten his wallet, or he's left a restaurant altogether. That's the best one I do. I know, that is a good one. You look out and you see me pulling away. You have no choice at that point.

That's classic give you. All right, Gibbs, let's take a quick break to talk about Poshmark. I think you all have heard me talk about Poshmark a couple of times. Last time I said my wife is getting ready to clean out her closet, buy some new clothes. Well, my daughter wanted to get involved, my youngest daughter, she wanted to buy some clothes. So her and I did it together. We had a lot of fun. She haggled with the woman that was selling the clothes.

She ended up getting a top, a dress, and a pair of jeans for, I think it was about $30 all in with shipping. It was an unbelievable deal. Everything came in about two or three days, and she loved it. It all fit. It was just about brand new. I could not believe it. And she used Posh Mark's new My Clawful. She was putting things in her closet and that's how we were keeping track of everything.

Anyway, you've got to download this app. There's tons of lightly used or brand new items with tags still on it on Poshmark. You shop for your next event or vacation. Shipping is so fast. And the app, you got to download this app because it's very easy to use. And listeners of true crime all time get $5 off your first person. All you have to do is enter the invite code true crime when you sign up. That's invite code true crime.

One of the descriptions that you'll see about Matthew Hoffman, and I think this is one that you hear about a lot with people that we talk about, he was intelligent, but he had no common sense. I think we hear it both ways, right? Some people have very low IQ, but you can tell by their actions that they have a good degree of common sense. They got the street smarts for sure. He was the other way around. He was an intelligent guy, just very, very. short on common sense. That's what his friend said. I say that about a lot of people. Now, I never say that about you. Never. You have more common sense than you know what to do with. You also have a

mensa card. You have a very special set of skills. I mean, really, when it comes down to it, you're the whole package. You're the full Monty. If you will. Definitely got a full Monty. Well, you don't have to brag about it. Oh. Okay. Well, you brought it up. I know. I was giving you the kudos that you deserve. You just take the kudos. You say, thank you. You don't go on and then extra brag. Now, I talked about Hoffman living with his mom. I've been talking about a lot of people living with their moms lately. But again, a lot of these guys are just getting out of prison. I don't know that they have much choice.

I don't have a lot of money. They don't have a lot of options. But he didn't do it all the time because he chose voluntarily to, to live outdoors a lot. This guy was very outdoorsy. He was a real bear grills type of dude. Yeah. That's a tough man. Yeah, I don't know if he was that tough, but he did like to rough it.

He did like to, you know, sleep in a tent, sleep outdoors, shoot his own food, uh, do things like that. Nothing wrong with that. Now,

you mentioned it, right? Didn't have a lot of money, which probably made some of this a necessary. at times. If you don't have a lot of money, you may need to catch your own dinner. You may need to sleep out in a tent. Yeah, at that point, you're probably killing some squirrels and roasting them up at nighttime. And he definitely did that. He was known to kill squirrels. He was known to eat them. Hmm, squirrel. He would pitch a tent out in the woods, get him a squirrel and, you know, fire it up.

There you go. Have you ever had squirrel? No, me neither. No, but people say it's out of the roadkill family. That's what I call them Roadkill. You know, there is a show that is literally just about people eating Roadkill. I believe. Because they're so cheap. Yeah. It's one of those cheap skate shows.

They get them fresh off the road. Yes, that is disgusting. People like Possum? No, I'm not eating none of that. Raccoon. I want Chipotle and that's it. But they're also the ones that eat the bone, you know? Oh, I'm not eating.

I'm not even looking at that. They cook it long enough that the bones get brittle and they chew on them. Too much, too much. Let's fast forward at 2009. All right. Matthew got it loan. Not sure how he did that. But he bought a 109-year-old house.

It's an old house, man. It is an old house. It only costs 37-5. So maybe that's how he got to loan. I mean, this is not an expensive house. It was about 10 miles or so, I think, from his mom's house. You can't be too far away from Mommy. Mommy, can I have some pudding?

How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat? Exactly. What's that from? It's Pink Floyd. It is. I know. Good stuff. The wall.

It's good stuff. I'm surprised you knew that. Well, why wouldn't I? I know. You were 25 years old when the wall came out, so that was right in your will house. I don't remember when it came out. It was like 1980. It was in the 70s, early 80s.

And we're going to talk more about this home in a little bit. It becomes a character in its own right in the story as Matthew Hoffman neared his 30th birthday. This guy was in a bad place. His girlfriend accused him of choking her during an argument. She left him taking her young son with her. He got fired from his tree trimming job. His supervisor later said that Hoffman gave him the creeps. Creeped him out.

There's people that do that, you know? I've met people like that. You're like, man, that's a creeper. be person. I think that was this guy. I mean, every article you read, whether it's a neighbor, it's a childhood friend. Now, granted, a lot of these people Gibbs are being interviewed after they find out what Matthew Hoffman did. What else are they going to say? But they're pretty much all saying the same thing. And they're giving examples, which are, you know, adding to that, yes, he was, he was kind of a strange dude. His car was about to be repossess.

and to top it all off, his dog ran away. His dog said, I'm out. I don't even want to be around you. Yeah. I got to go. You're so creepy, dude. I'm not even going to stick around. Yeah, I'm out.

And you keep eating all my squirrels. Yeah, that's probably, that was probably the big thing. So there's a lot of things in play here, right? A lot of things that happened to Matthew Hoffman. And what's a relatively short period of time, all of these things could trigger someone. but you add them all together. And I think they became one big huge trigger from Matthew Hoffman. Now, he's never really had much money, especially after he got out of prison.

Now he has some serious cash problems, right? He has no job. He was collecting unemployment, but that wasn't cutting it. So he made the fateful decision that he was going to commit a home invasion. So Hoffman turns 30 years old on November 1st, 2010, and just a few days later, goes to Lowe's and buys a pair of gloves. All right. We've all done that. It doesn't seem too strange.

Then on November 8th, just a few days after that visit, he buys another pair of gloves and he buys some duct tape. Well, you can always do something with duct tape. So you'll have some around. You can never have too much duct tape. Right. My issue is with the gloves. Did he not like the first pair of gloves that he bought? Did he figure out that they didn't go with the outfit that he was planning on wearing for the home invasion? I never could figure that part out.

Maybe he just like the value price that Lowe's had on gloves that day. And thought that I better get a second pair. Yeah. He also ordered a knife online. And he said about picking the home. that would be his target for this home invasion. And he picked the home of 32-year-old Tina Herman, who lived just maybe a quarter mile or so from his mom's house in Knox County. This was an isolated house. And it's definitely one of the reasons why Hoffman chose it.

He would say as much later on that Tina Herman lived with her 11-year-old son, Cody, Maynard and her 13-year-old daughter, Sarah Maynard. So full house? Full house. Tina's divorced, but she has custody of the children. So Hoffman has everything he thinks he need, right? To commit this home invasion. He has his hit kit, if you will. On Tuesday, November 9th, he went to Tina Herman's home and he actually camped out in the woods across the street from her house. So he's in a sleeping bag in the woods watching Tina's house. The next morning around 9 a.m. He's still watching the house and he sees Tina leave. He waits a little bit and then he creeps across the street and enters through the garage door that for some reason did not completely

close all the way. I don't know how mine doesn't do that, but this one stopped where there was enough room for someone to slide underneath it. Mine's either always up or always down. You know, bounces up because they can't go down. There's no way to stop it in the middle. Yeah. Hoffman would later say that he was excited, very excited to be in someone else's house, going through their things. It gave him a rush, Gibbs, a sense of excitement, maybe even some type of sense of power. We might get caught, but I'm so good, I'm not. Or, I'm doing something that no one else knows about. I'm looking at these people's things and they'll have no idea. Right. He spent about an hour in the house. But he eventually realized that there just

wasn't much in there of value to steal. So he was really getting ready to leave. But before he could leave, Tina Herman returned home along with her best friend, 41 year old, Steele. He's Stephanie Sprang and Hoffman stuck. He's in the back of the house. These two women are entering the house. He has no exit point. And eventually he's confronted first by Tina and then later by Stephanie after she heard the commotion. So this is a bad scene, right? Two women come home to find an intruder in their house. Matthew attacked Tina, started hitting her with a blackjack. that he had brought along with him. It didn't work the way that he thought it would.

I think he thought one or two blows and it was going to knock her unconscious. It didn't do that. You know, he hit her a couple of times and it didn't knock her out. So he stabbed her with the hunting knife that he had bought online and brought along specifically for this mission. And I say mission, I think he looked at it like that, right? He set a target. He set a date. He's carrying out his mission, which even in his own words later on, is going to be that this was a burglary.

Right. That's what he went there to do, steal some things from this house. So obviously, Stephanie is seeing what's going on. She is watching Matthew Hoffman attack her friend Tina and she starts to run through the house. Hoffman chased her down and stabbed her to death with. the knife. He then went back to Tina Herman's body and stabbed her more times to make sure that she was dead. You have to think about this picture. I mean, this thing escalated very quickly. Oh, he's got to be freaking out. He is freaking out. Because like I said, if you believe him, Hoffman says this was designed to be a simple house burglary. It is now escalated to a multiple homicide. Yeah, things got bad, bad quickly. And I do agree with you. I think he had to have been

freaking out. At the same time, all this is going on. Tina's dog is barking nonstop. And we'll give our warning here, animal cruelty warning. Yes. It's not going to be graphic. But if you don't want to hear it, you know, just skip ahead about 15 seconds and you'll be past it. So warning out of the way. Hoffman killed the family dog to stop it from making noise. And again, could he have lived with the noise? Maybe. But is he panicking so badly that he can't handle it at that moment, probably? Well, he stressed out, freaking out.

So whatever the dog's doing is probably amplified in his head. Mm-hmm. Well, what's he going to do now, Gibbs? He's got a real mess. Well, you know, you got to get rid of the bodies. Right. So that's the first thing. He made the decision to dispose of the bodies.

He also thought in his head, I better burn the house down as well. He's, he's used to that. He's done that before. Right. What he did was cut the bodies of Tina and Stephanie up into smaller pieces. So he dismembered them, put the pieces in garbage bags. Now, he's loading the garbage bags up in the garage in Stephanie's Jeep. when all of a sudden he hears more people coming into the house, right? So he's in the garage.

He hears someone come in through the front door. It turned out to be Tina's son, Cody and her daughter, Sarah. Hoffman confronted the kids in the house. Sarah immediately ran to her bedroom. Hoffman caught 11-year-old Cody and stabbed him to death. Then he ran after Sarah. But when he found her, There was something inside of him, something that would not allow him to kill her. I don't know what it was. I don't even know if Matthew Hoffman knows what it was. He'd already killed three people and one of them was an 11 year old. She was lucky.

But for whatever reason, he could not kill her. Yeah. Talking about luck, man. And as far as that, you know, I mean, she just lost her mom and her brother. But luckily, he didn't do anything to her. But unbelievably, she doesn't know that. Right. At this point, she hasn't seen her mom.

She hasn't seen Stephanie. She didn't see her brother get killed. She has no idea that anyone in her family is actually dead. So Hoffman tied her up with electrical cord. Then he went out, cut up Cody's body and loaded those garbage bags into the Jeep as well. He's dismembered three people. and has their body parts in one of the woman's Jeep. So like we said, Sarah doesn't know the full extent of what's going on in this house.

But once Hoffman had all the bags loaded, he loaded Sarah into the vehicle and he drove back to his house. And I said Gibbs, when we talked about him buying the house, that it's kind of a central figure in this case. We would talk about it more. And now's the time to do that. Because Matthew Hoffman had filled this old house with leaves. Yeah. And it's, it's almost beyond description. We're not talking about a dusting of leaves here and there.

We are talking about mounds of leaves feet high. This is like a rain tree commercial. What's rain tree? Rain trees is one that makes all that outdoor leafy shoes. That's real. tree. That's what I said, wasn't it? You said rain tree. Rain tree. Real tree. You like real tree, like the camo type. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the spinoff. This is a rain tree. That's your company. That's mine. That's the spino. Yeah. So you're describing like a leafy camo. So I mean,

some people rake their leaves to get them off the property. He's like raking them into his property the way sounds. He is. And what I found so perplexing about that is everything that talks. talked about this house, said that there were only two trees on the whole lot, which means he's not raking his yard. No. He is literally having to go out, collect leaves, and bring them back to his house. Bagging and dumping them. So mounds of leaves all over the house, bags filled with more leaves in different rooms. It was said that they were stacked floor to ceiling. In some rooms, they were attached to the walls. Really?

People described it as almost like insulation. Like he was trying to insulate the house better. I just think the guy like leaves. I think he, you know, he had strange addiction show. Right. I don't think he ate him, but he liked being around. He knows what he did with him. And you know, it has to go back to his childhood, right?

Spending so much time outdoors, climbing trees. It has to. So he took Sarah to. his leaf mansion and he held her there for four days. So he kidnapped her. During this time he sexually assaulted her, kept her gagged and chained on a bed of leaves. This is a 13 year old girl being sexually assaulted by a 30 year old man on a bed of leaves. A bed of leaves, Gibbs. I mean, just what a nightmare to be going through what she's going through and just the How bizarre? I mean, how bizarre is that? A bed of leaves? Well, also during this four-day period,

you know, he left her chained up at his house as he went to dispose of the bodies of her mother, her brother, and her mom's friend. Hoffman had a special place in mind for the disposal of the bodies. It was a hollowed out portion of a 60-foot tree, Gibbs that he was familiar with. The tree was so big that he had to use a pulley system. He climbed the tree, used the pulley system to get the bags up high enough to reach this hollowed out spot. And it's such a devious hiding place. Right. Who in the world is ever going to climb this tree to look in this hollowed spot? Right. Nobody. What are the chances? Now, Hoffman had to figure out what to do with Tina's house. It was filled with blood. This was a very graphic crime scene.

Even though I know, I could still guess what he's going to do. Yeah. I think most people listening could guess. He's going to go back to the one thing that he knows, the one thing that he's done before, he's going to burn it down. But something happened. A deputy spotted him near Tina Herman's truck with some cans of gas. So the deputy goes over. he's saying, hey, some don't look right here. He asked Matthew what he was doing. He said he was waiting for his girlfriend. When the deputy asked her his name,

Matthew said he only knew her first name, which is strange for boyfriends and girlfriends. Sure. Now, if you met somebody at 2 o'clock, as the lights were dimming and the bar was closing, I get that. You might not have gotten last names. but when you say my girlfriend and you say you don't know the person's last name that's all it's

it's going to set the radar off yeah it definitely does but what he added was her first name Sarah he doesn't even make up a name he gives the name of Tina Herman's daughter he's standing next to her truck says that Sarah is his girlfriend so that messed up his arson plan but that didn't getting caught. What really got him caught and the big break for police came from a Walmart bag found inside Tina's home. Inside the bag was a tarp and some trash bags. And they were able to trace the barcode to purchases made at the local Walmart and match it up with video surveillance. And they found video which showed a man buying the items, walking out of the store, and driving away in a Toyota Yaros.

What in the hell of the Toyota Yaris? Yeah, I don't know. Wasn't there a game, a video game back in the day called Yaris or something like that? A Atari game. I actually think it's a very, very small car, but I'm not positive. Like a Fred Funstone? Well, not that you have to pedal with your own feet. Not like that.

Maybe. So authorities did a quick search. of all Toyota Yaris owners around that area. And the name that popped up was Matthew Hoffman. Didn't take them long, right? To match the name Matthew Hoffman to the report of the deputy who talked with a Matthew Hoffman next to Tina Herman's truck. And that's all it took, right?

From that, they were able to get a search warrant for Hoffman's house. And it was on November 14th. It's a Sunday morning around a SWAT team stormed into Hoffman's house. And they found him asleep on the sofa. I'm assuming there were leaves everywhere around the sofa. They were like, are we inside, outside? I thought we just went in someplace. Well, it really was. These guys were shocked. They talked about it a lot in different articles. They're shocked at what they found in this house. Like we said, mounds of leaves in different rooms, bags filled with leaves. One officer said that he expected to find at least one body, if not multiple bodies under these massive piles of leaves. Now, they didn't, but that's what they

were expecting. They reached the basement door, which Hoffman had blockaded using a sewing machine cabinet. This is what had kept Sarah from leaving. That and the fact that I think she was chained up for a lot of the time. Once the SWAT guys got that out of the way, they found Sarah in the basement in a white plastic sheet with holes cut in it for legs. Hoffman had essentially made a makeshift diaper for her to wear. She was found bound, gagged, and laying on a big pile of leaves. It was said that when police first got to her, she said she was worried about being. And late for school. This girl had no idea what was going on. She's bound and gait and chained and, you know, all these things. The first thing that pops into her head is, I'm late for school.

Yeah. Got to get this cool. She's traumatized, man. I don't, I don't think there's any doubt about that. But keep in mind, she also doesn't know at this point that her mom and brother are dead. She told the police that she was worried about her dog, thought that her dog might have been hurt. And your heart aches for this girl and what she went through. Couldn't imagine. No, not at all. And you'd never want to have to, right? Even if you could.

Right. So they search Hoffman's house. It's just, it's just more leaves. It's leaves everywhere. One officer said they found 110 bags of leaves in a bathroom. The bags were attached to the walls like insulation. Gipps, I don't even know how you physically get 110 bags filled with leaves into a bathroom. Oh, it's a bizarre, man.

Bag all that up. Bringing them in, I don't know. Police found strange drawings, doodles on some of the walls. They found names scrawled on some of the walls. And when they opened up the freezer, they found a, couple of red popsicles and two dead unskinned squirrels. Oh, squirrels. Yeah.

That was it. That's all he had in his freezer. Well, I don't know if you have a popsicle with each squirrel or how you break down the popsicle squirrel ratio. Yeah. But maybe it's like a had the squirrel and had a popsicle for dessert later. Maybe. You know.

So obviously he's arrested, right? And after he's arrested, they interview neighbors and. And all kinds of stuff starts coming out about him. Basically, most of the neighbors just said they weren't sure what to make of this guy. Right. They talked about the fact that he did shoot and eat squirrels because he had told them he didn't like to go grocery shopping. Why go grocery shopping? We got this whole forest filled of.

It's a cornucopia of nature's treasures. They're right there for the taking. They said he was controlling. He was odd. But they also said he was smart. in a scary way at the same time. But neighbors were shocked that he could have murdered anyone. They said this was a guy that played with their kids.

Outside, he climbed trees with them. He had hung up ropes from some of the larger tree limbs. And they were where he and the kids could swing from rope to rope. And he had set up all kinds of stuff. Like Tarzan. Yeah. Yeah. Something like that.

You never played Tarzan before, huh? Have I ever played Tarzan? Yeah. Is it Tarzan or Tarzan? It'd be Tarzan around this area. Tarzan, wherever, whatever planet you're from? No, I'm just messing. Yeah.

Well, we don't need to talk about it. I know you probably played it. No. I don't know. What you mean? Just swinging from trees? Sure. No.

Okay. About. Are you have some other game called Tarzan that you're trying to spring on me? No, I wouldn't say that. Or catch me in. Tarzan and Jane. You didn't say anything about Jane in the beginning. Well, I just assumed that everybody knew Jane was involved in any Tarzan activity.

Well, I'm sure whatever Tarzan activity you're involved in, there's some Jane. Got to have a Jane. But again, it's just like everything is trees with this guy, right? Trees and leaves. Leaves and trees. Einhorn and Finkel. It just, it all goes together. This is what happens.

So you have all of these people saying that he was strange, he was odd, but neighbors at least did not see him as violent. Now, I think Hoffman's girlfriend may have seen that side. We talked about that. I wanted to talk about this back then, but I'll talk about it now. I'm actually really shocked that this man ever had a girlfriend in the first place. I mean, you're telling me that a female actually came and spent time at this guy's house in and among all these leaves. You've been around my wife quite a bit. She gets so ticked at me when I don't put my shoes in the closet. Which is true, but also very strange to me because there's a lot of shoes on the floor, but yours.

She's mad at you for not having yours in there. Oh, she's mad at the kids too. Yeah. They just don't listen. Oh, okay. I tend to listen. Yeah. You know what's good for you.

I do. I do. Yeah. But mad about shoes, three, four feet high piles of leaves. bags of leaves all over the place. I just can't imagine any woman and her young son. She had a son. Right.

Would be in that type of situation. I think if you just tracked a couple of leaves into your house, your wife would not be happy. If the dog tracked it in, she'd yell at me, blame it on me. Yeah. She's going to hear this back when I'm editing. She's like, you're making me sound so mean. She does it all the time.

Well. No. But I never understood. that part. And there wasn't enough in the research to really, you know, expand on it other than his girlfriend left because he allegedly choked her. Otherwise, she was okay with the, uh, I don't know. Full house of Leafs and all the critters attached to him. Yeah. Now, when police first questioned Hoffman, he didn't really say anything, right? For hours and hours, day after day, he stonewalled them. And remember, they still do not.

know what exactly happened to Tina, Stephanie, and Cody. They know something bad happened in that house. Right. From the amount of blood and the crime scene, but they don't know exactly what happened and they don't know where they are. It wasn't until the 16th that Hoffman opened up to a detective named Joe Deeds. And this was only after Dietz got a little creative and was able to make Hoffman think that he was not recording their conversation. Because up until then, right, every conversation had been recorded, he just was not willing to say anything. But when he didn't think he was being recorded, he told Dietz that he had a bad dream in

his cell that involved him being at a food processing plant. And he was opening up trash bags filled with dismembered body parts. He wanted to confess. but Matthew Hoffman had terms. And these are terms Gibbs that you and I have never heard before in all the research and all the cases that we've looked at. So what Hoffman wanted to do, he wanted to write down everything, including the locations of the bodies for his attorney.

Then he would try to escape. And he wanted police to shoot him dead. Okay. This was his terms. The skate plan gone bad. Right. He was already on suicide watch, right? He had stated that he could not live with what he had done.

He would definitely give him the chance to take his own life. But obviously, authorities can't go along with this plan. They told Hoffman that he clammed up again. But just a couple of days later, he finally agreed to tell them everything. He told them where to find the bodies in the tree. he agreed to plead guilty on all counts and he agreed to write out his confession. And he did. He laid everything out in his confession. Much of it we've already talked about, but I wanted to read one part in particular. He said, quote, I did not enter the house to kill those people. I did not know a single

one of them. I didn't know their names. And I didn't know who all lived at the house. I did not plan for any of this to happen. I didn't want to kill anyone. I tried to knock the first woman out so I could escape, but it didn't work. A second woman showed up and things quickly spiraled out of control. They kept escalating and I was panicking. I only chose to process the bodies to make their disposal easier. You believe that?

You don't believe that? I don't know that Matthew Hoffman went there to kill anyone. I don't. I don't know. No, I don't think that was his intention. But there are some things that really piss me off about Matthew Hoffman's confession. And it's all centered around how he painted himself out to be, I don't know, Gibbs is almost like Sarah Maynard's protector. Like he was her knight in shining armor.

I mean, he did all this terrible stuff to her family. And to her. And her. But in the confession, he talked about, you know, how comfy this bed of leaves was that he had made for her. He talked about how he watched movies with her, Iron Man 1 and 2. He also said that he gave her the book Treasure Island to read. It even goes on. There's more to it.

Oh, I was so sweet. I took care of it. I did this, I did that. She slept in my arms. Yeah. I cradled her. It's just, it's sickening. Everything in the confession as it relates to the part with Sarah was as if he was saying, you know, I was great to her.

I was doing her a favor. I was looking out for her. I was taking care of her. I almost couldn't take it. I was getting sick reading it. So Hoffman pleaded guilty to the. murders and was sentenced on January 6, 2011 to multiple life terms with no possibility of parole. I'm totally fine with that.

I would have been okay with the death penalty, but it was taken off the table and we'll talk about why here in a minute. The Knox County prosecutor read some words prepared by young Sarah Maynard. She said, this has changed my whole life. and my family's life too. This is so sickening Matthew to know you even had the guts to do this to a family. I'm not scared of you, Matthew. I'm going to stand up for myself and live my life.

And the death penalty. The family had agreed to let prosecutors take it off the table in exchange for the information about where the bodies could be found. I don't know, Gibbs, without them doing that and Matthew Hoffman having a reason to say where the bodies are, I'm not sure when or if forever they would have been found. I don't think so. Unless the tree got struck by lightning and came down. Yeah. It would have had to have been some strange circumstance that revealed where those bodies were.

Hoffman was sent to the Toledo Correctional Institution and he was. kept in a unit for prisoners who are a danger to themselves or others or who could face danger from other prisoners. So two things here. Number one, that definitely sounds like Matthew Hoffman. Right. But two, as I'm reading that, it to me sounds like most prisoners. I mean, you're either a danger to yourself or a danger to others or for most people, you're at risk of getting hurt by other prisoners. Yeah. You're falling into one of those categories. I don't know how you don't. I know what they mean about the third one, right? You're, everybody's at a risk. Exactly. In prison. But some people are at a very special risk, you know, he's had a few minor infractions in prison, but nothing real severe,

disobedience, destroying property, disturbance. I think that's a Tuesday morning for most inmates. That's, Nothing, nothing big. No, nothing jumps out of you like, oh my gosh, I can't believe you did this or that. Yeah, I mean, I know they're minor stuff, but still, man, someone messes with your Twinkies, if they take your Oreos. Well, for me, it's ramen noodles. Don't take my ramen noodles. I will stand my ground. If I'm in prison, I will stand my ground around ramen noodles.

Don't mess with my ramen noodles. And I'm like, don't mess with my Twizzlers. You think you can get Twizzlers in prison? If you can get cigarettes. and marijuana. I think I can... I don't think they sell marijuana at the... Well, you get it somehow. You've got to know the right... Because somebody shoved it up their rear end and brought it waddled it in.

Maybe I don't want Twizzlers in. I was going to say, you get what you pay for. Yeah. Now you got me thinking of the shapes of things that's... What would I want? The shape would make sure that it could not be shoved up someone's... I don't know, dude. I think there's a lot of things that are... I once saw a video. of a woman that somehow had two VCRs in between underneath her dress somehow. She was trying to walk out of a store with two VCRs.

Geez. Now, obviously, they're not inside her rear end, but yeah. I thought that was amazing. Well, yeah. And they weren't tucked into anything. Huh. She is literally holding these two VCRs and walking at the same time somehow. You need thigh power.

Exactly. Yeah. I don't know. It didn't have anything to do with what you were saying. No, it didn't, Mike. But I chose to talk about it anyway. Well, I'm glad you didn't go to it because you were talking about it. I think you were headed like you could fit anything up your key store.

But I was like, yeah, be careful. I mean, people sneak all kinds of stuff into prison. And a lot of times that's the way they do it. Yeah. So Matthew's mother, it's something we talked about his parents early on, but his mother, Pat said in an interview later that she could not comprehend. what her son had done. What else can you say? I think she said it all. I mean, how could you ever understand him doing something so terrible? And so senseless, right? It's both. Yeah,

senseless, terrible. It's horrible. It's horrible the crime, but it's also senseless. There was no reason for it. I mean, the extremeness, I mean, to sit there and have to chop the bodies up, too. I mean, that's sickening, right? And then to do what he did was Sarah when he didn't need to do that. No, there's no doubt about it. But she went on to say that most of the family disowned him. And I think that's a question, right? That gets brought up a lot. You know, family is family. Blood is blood. But at a certain point, some family members, they're not going to stick by you. Sometimes you got to boil that blood, man. Now, mothers are different. I think for mothers very hard to give up on their children, even when they've done something so bad that the rest of the world looks at it, you know, looks at them as a monster.

Well, and I'm sure some, some moms harbor the, the guilt. Guilt, sure, because they raised them. What did I do wrong that made him do this? Yep.

Even if they didn't do anything wrong. I think that, that would still be there. So Pat, at one point, you know, I was reading this in an article at one point, she visited him about,

every six weeks, talk to him on the phone once a week. But the part that I took away from the article was that in all of those visits and all of those phone conversations, not one time. Did Matthew Hoffman ever utter a single word about the murders? Never said anything about him. I guess if not asked, why will I bring it up? Yeah, maybe. So, you know, kind of as we're closing this episode out, some interesting things that happened. Wells Fargo foreclosed on Matthews House of Leaves. This is something that you and I know quite a bit about. Oh, we, we, the stories we have about what you can find in foreclosed homes. They must have sold that. I was thinking when I was first reading about it, boy, they must have sold that bad boy at a deep discount. Oh yeah. And then I got to thinking,

you know, all the disclosures that you have to make in a real estate transaction. You have to disclose if somebody was murdered in the house. And it varies state by state, right? Sure. Do you have to disclose that a young girl was held prisoner in the house for four days? And that the previous owner kept mounds of leaves and squirrels in his freezer. I don't think you have to disclose that. No, I don't think you have to.

But, man, you know, you'd like to know, at least about. some of the stuff. But if you're from the area, do you not know what house that is? I think somebody knows. And if you're looking for houses and it comes down between that and another one down the block, do you say, you know, honey, do you want this one? Or do you want the other one down the block with no leaves and no squirrels? Yeah.

I just kept thinking, you know, my wife's always watching those HG TV shows. Oh, yeah. Flip this house hunter, something, something. Nashville, Vegas. She's got it all, man. Panama City. I don't know. Yeah.

I've seen it, man. She's, she's, I think you and I should start a HG TV show. Okay. Where we remodel crime scene houses. Again, you got me doing all the work.

I said we. Yeah. I didn't say you. Oh, I don't know how to remodel anything. That's what I'm saying. You got me doing all the work. I'll supervise.

Yeah, that's what you do. But think about it. Yeah. That's the best of both worlds. You get all the, the legions of HG's, GTV faithful.

Sure. You get the legions of true crime faithful. There you go. And you meld it into one unbelievable force majeure. And I think it's going to be pretty much the same demographics. So there you go. I think it's amazing. I think it's an amazing idea.

You're on to something. Let's call them right now. Somebody you say, I might have to edit that out because somebody else steal it. Maybe. You could be the next Taron. I don't know who that is. Isn't that the guy that does L.A.? I don't know.

I don't watch any of those shows. I said my wife watches them all. But you sit there with her. No, I do not sit there with her. But think about it. You could tell the story of the crime in a very respectful way while you're doing the remodel. Could happen.

I think it could. You're definitely a thinker. Now watch. In like three months, there will be a show. Oh, I'm sure it's a guarantee. It's probably already in the works. It probably is already in the works. But I'd like to see somebody tackle that remodel.

The whole leaves squirrel remodel. Vanilla ice could do it. I think he could. He's got that modeling thing. I've actually watched that one a couple of times. Yeah. Just because it was vanilla ice and I wanted to see what he was doing. So this house.

Yes. I know I got off on a tangent, but they actually donated it to Habitat for Humanity. I don't know that they did that out of the goodness of their heart. They probably did it because they didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of selling that house. Right. And they wanted to get it off their books. Yeah, you know. But it worked out good.

Sure. Because ultimately they found a good recipient for the house. Then we get to the 60 foot tree. That was torn down. Even though I did read something about it being part of Hoffman's negotiation for him giving up all the information that they would not harm the tree. But they did it anyway. So we've alluded to possible mental illness on the part of Matthew Hoffman. I say possible gives, but I think it's more than.

possible. It seems very likely that there was something going on. Some underlying some degree. Yeah. Psychologists have looked at his obsession with trees and leaves. They've looked at some of his drawings, his scribbles that police found inside the house. They say it all points to a person that was coming unhinged that was dealing with some type of mental illness. He's been classified as a sociopath. He's been labeled as suffering from delusions. But like we talk about in a lot of our cases, Hoffman was never treated for anything, any type of mental illness. And I look back on his childhood. I can't help but think that there, there were some signs. There was something there. Now, whether, you know, somebody picked up on it, that's a different matter. Or whether somebody did

pick up on it and they just said, hey, it'll be okay. It'll work itself out. I do think there was definitely some signs in adulthood. Right. And I just don't know who was there to see them. He was isolated for much of the time. He did have the girlfriend for a little while. That's true. You know, he lived with his mother for a while. I don't know. Seems like somebody would have seen something. But by at the end, right he had been in that house for a little while sounds like he was pretty much on his own maybe as it got worse and worse nobody ever really saw it but i'm speculating i really don't know and then there's sarah right we cannot forget about sarah no precious thing man this poor girl she survived an incredible ordeal that four days right that was an that was an incredible ordeal

she's rescued only to find out that her family was dead. Longest week of her life ever. Oh, without a doubt. She ended up going to live with her biological father. And here's a short clip of Sarah on the Dr. Phil show. I really just wanted people to get a chance to hear her voice. Sure. Just trying to stay positive thinking that I would live through it.

And just thinking about what had happened. happen to them and just staying strong. So obviously tough for her to talk about. The other reason why I wanted to play this clip specifically, the Dr. Phil clip, some people have criticized her father over the years saying that he tried to profit off of his daughter's misery by accepting money and kind of, essentially making her go on all of these different shows and that he made quite a bit of money off of this terrible thing yeah terrible man especially if she didn't want to do it right now if for

some reason she wanted to go on the show and talk about it and it was cathartic and that's one thing but this is a very young girl how many very young girls want to go on national tv and talk about what has just happened to them unless possibly they're prodded by somebody else. And if it was all over money, man, that is sick. Yeah. Well, I don't think he was the nicest guy. Well, he wasn't. There's no doubt about that. It came out that in 2013, his name is Larry. So Larry and his wife, Tracy, who at that point would have been Sarah's stepmom, they were both arrested and charged. And charged with domestic violence for assaulting Sarah Maynard. Sheriff's office came out and said that her dad hit her in the back of the head,

that her mother later kicked Sarah down a flight of stairs. This girl can't catch a break. She cannot. I didn't find the actual resolution of that case, but I know she took out a protective order against both of them. Yeah, needed that for sure. They were definitely charged. I didn't see whether or not they were they were found guilty, but she's the one making the claim.

So I can't imagine that that they got all back together as a happy family unit regardless. No, I don't think there was no Kuma, yeah. No, definitely not. But that's it. That is the story of Matthew Hoffman, you know, just absolutely senseless murders. And then, you know, like we said, the horrifying experience that. Sarah Maynard had to go through. I just hope she's doing well.

Yeah, I do too. I really, I tried to find more about what she's doing today. It's hard to find because, and maybe for a good reason. You know, hopefully she's just living her life. I hope so. And, you know, putting, working to put the pieces back together. This case is still not that old. I mean, she would be what, 20, 21 now by this point?

I think so. She just needs to take day by day. Yeah. You know, just one day at a time, wake up and get through the day, man. That's a lot to ask. It is. It is. You're also a walking cliche, but.

Well. You sound like for those baseball players, we just got to take the game one day at a time. That's right. We'll get through this series. No, but yeah, I really hope she's doing well. It doesn't sound like she's in the spotlight. And I think that's a good thing. No, I think for a person like her, we don't want her to be in the spotlight.

We want to, we want her to be able to live out her life and the way she wants to, not be hounded and stuff like that. Try to forget all that. We got some voicemails, Gibbs. You want to check those out? Yes, here. Hi, my name is Ghibie. My name is Natalie.

I live and work in L.A. And love your podcast because I get to pass the time on the 405 traffic. is as bad as they say. But, yeah, your podcast makes it go by so much faster. But I wanted to bring up Janine Jones. I don't know if you all have heard of this woman. She is a serial killer. She killed tons of infants back in the 70s

and basically a serial killer of infants, but nobody really talks about that. So I wanted to bring her name in, put her on your list, Janine Joan. She is currently serving time for those murders in Texas, I believe. I work with postpartum depression, and I just find this to be a very interesting case. So I hope you do too. And I'm not going to pick a team because I like you both for different reasons

and appreciate you both for different reasons. So thank you for all that you do and keep your own time picking. I wonder what the different reasons are. I don't know. It's her reasons, man. My wit, charm. Good looks. My flow of the...

Why are they just all your reasons? Vocabulary. My depth and depth vocabulary. Yeah, Janine Jones. Definitely on the list. We've had a lot of people requesting that one. We're going to have to move it up for sure. We're calling from Georgia.

I just wanted to give you guys a call in which you know that I love your podcast. It's actually my favorite. I listen to Thorndon Scale. and case file, but true crime all the time is definitely my number one. I listen to it on the way home from work, on the way to work, and I just wanted to give you guys a shout out on your voicemail and keep your own time ticking. Wow, those are some really good podcasts.

They are. Put us in that realm, but put us on top. That's awesome. Yeah, we really appreciate that a lot. Makes us feel good about what we're doing, right, Gibbs? If you just knew how hard I worked, it'd make that happen. Oh, my gosh, you do. I do, man.

Hey, Mike and Gibby, this is TJ. I'm calling to let you know that I love your show. I love the details and the way you guys talk back and forth. It just seems like a normal conversation. There is a case in my hometown of Whiteland, Indiana, by the guy named David James Roberts. And he had burned down this house that had a husband, wife, and an infant. and he was the very first guy ever.

He was the first fugitive ever on America's Most Wanted. And he was also the first fugitive caught because of that. But anyway, I just thought that would be an interesting case for you guys to dive into. And it's from my hometown. But you guys keep up the awesome work. Be safe and keep your own time ticking. All right. That's one I've not heard of.

That's a new one. Yeah, we've got to put that on the list. start doing some investigation. You and your investigation. Hi Mike and Gibby. This is Grant calling from Kansas City, Kansas. I wanted to let you guys know that

I absolutely loved your guys' podcast. Never really listened to a podcast and started about two weeks ago and stumbled across your guys. And started with Ed Kemper and then after listening to it and loving it started from the very beginning and worked my way through.

You guys do a great job of talking about some of the darkest points in our history for what happens to... Yeah, that was it. That was it? Yeah. Oh. Something happened. It got cut off.

But I didn't want to not play it. Like, this is getting good. And I don't know what happened. But whatever it did, we appreciate it. Oh. We definitely appreciate it. Thank you so much. We got mailbag.

Mailbag. Yeah, we got some really good mailbag. All right. So we only got one package, but it was a good one. Okay. So our friend Chavon from Boston. Yeah. She works at the original Boston coffee cake company.

Coffee cake. Send us four big coffee cakes. Coffee cakes. Why, you just keep saying coffee cakes? It sounds fun to say. Oh, does it? Yeah. Well, they're more fun to eat, actually.

They're very good. Yeah, I'm going to find out. I know. I already dug into one and then you came over tonight and you're going to be taking home. You're going to be taking one home with you, but very, very good. So we appreciate that, Chavon a lot. Thank you. Right.

Gives you got anything else before we head out? No, man. That was a good episode. It was something. That's for sure. Different. It was, that's what I was going to say.

It was different than some of the other ones that we've been doing. You know, the underlying factors are kind of behind. Why did he do what he did? Why, you know, why did he choose to do it the way that he did? What was this thing with leaves and just, you know, some, there's some strange.

facets to it for sure. But that's it. That's it for another episode of true crime all the time. So for Mike and Gibby. Stay safe and keep your own time ticking.