True Crime Campfire - Apt Pupil: The Murder of Richard Carno

Episode Date: August 28, 2020

There’s an old saying that if you’re not where you want to be in your life—or who—you should “fake it til you make it.” And it can work great. For example, let’s say you’re terrified of public speaking. And inside you feel like you’re about to either pee yourself, barf up everything you’ve ever eaten, just turn around and flee, or possibly all three. But instead of letting the audience see your nerves, you straighten your shoulders and stride out to the podium in your best outfit, with a big, fake, confident smile on your face. Chances are, people will never know how scared you were, and you’ll actually start to FEEL confident after a while. But…what if you never get to the “til you make it” part? What if the core of your being is so dark, so abhorrent, so contrary to everything that makes us truly human, that your only option is to fake it, all the time? I bet you’d get real good at it. William Saroyan once wrote, “It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself.” For the villain in this story, it was just the opposite. The rehearsal was all about hiding the self. Sources:Investigation Discovery's "Diabolical," Episode "Teach Me to Kill"https://lasvegassun.com/news/2004/jan/22/siblings-facing-off-against-each-other-in-murder-t/https://www.newsbreak.com/nevada/las-vegas/news/1547024008696/susanne-carno-paid-her-brother-to-murder-husband-richard-carno-so-she-could-pocket-the-life-insurancehttps://lasvegassun.com/news/2004/mar/12/carno-insists-shes-innocent-at-sentencing/http://www.jailhouse-babes.com/personals/f094/f09-497.htmFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. There's an old saying that if you're not where you want to be in your life or who, you should fake it until you make it. And it can work great. For example, Let's say you're terrified of public speaking, and inside you feel like you're about to either pee yourself, barf up everything you've ever eaten, just turn around and flee, or possibly all three. But instead of letting the audience see your nerves, you straighten your shoulders and stride out to the podium in your best outfit with a big, fake, confident smile on your face. Chances are, people will never know how scared you were, and you'll actually start to feel confident after a while. But what if you never get to the till you make it part?

What if the core of your being is so dark, so abhorrent, so contrary to everything that makes us truly human, that your only option is to fake it, all the time? I bet you'd get real good at it. William Soroyan once wrote, it takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself. For the villain in this story, it was just the opposite. The rehearsal was all about hiding the self. This is apt pupil, the murder of Richard Carnot. So campers were in North Las Vegas, Nevada, January 30, 2002, early morning. Suzanne Carno was having trouble getting hold of her husband, Richard.

He was supposed to be at work really early that morning, and he didn't show up and didn't call, very much an un-richard thing to do. Richard was a creature of routine. You could set your watch by him. His co-workers were worried, so they called Suzanne, and ever since, she'd been calling and leaving increasingly panicky messages for him, but he still hadn't called her back. She went out and drove around, looking for him on his usual route to and from work,

just in case he'd gotten into a car accident and was lying in a ditch or something, but nothing. Just pretty much like my worst nightmare as a wife, you know, just... Ugh, it's a horrifying thought. So, finally, she started calling hospitals, but none of them had admitted a Richard Carno that day. So she called Richard's mom, Mary Ellen, in California. She hadn't heard from him either, and now she was worried sick, too.

She later said that she immediately got a sinking feeling that something was wrong. She started calling him, too, and so did his sister, Laura, but Richard wasn't picking up for anyone. So the day went on and turned into night, and everyone who loved Richard Carno was feeling like the bottom was falling out of their world. And then at 7.45 a.m. the next morning. A 911 call came in from a woman who sounded like she was about to pass out. She was so upset she was practically hyperventilating to the point where the dispatcher was worried about her and told her to slow down and take a breath. The woman said she was calling from Comstock trailer park and she said, I think I found a dead body. The body was in the passenger seat of a car, she said. He has a plastic bag around his head and a noose around his neck. I think I'm going to throw up. The 911 dispatcher knew that the neighborhood where Comstock Trailer Park was located was a rough one, so no stranger to shady shit.

She sent officers to the scene, and what they found was straight out of a horror movie. The car was a 1993 Greenford escort. The passenger seat was reclined back and slumped down between the two front seats, leaning back over the center console, was the body of a white male. Just like the caller had said, he had a plastic bag over his head and duct tape winding all the the way around, covering up his mouth and eyes. A yellow rope was tied into a noose around his neck. His wrists and ankles were tied with zip ties and more duct tape.

Yikes. Detective Rob Wilson knew they needed to keep the crime scene, aka the car, pristine. So instead of removing the body right away, they had the car, with the body in it, towed to the coroner's office, which is just macabre as hell. Like, can you imagine driving down the freeway and looking over at a tow truck and seeing a car with like a flipping dead body in it, that would be, I would say, unsettling a little bit. There was actually a case once in Arizona where a guy was using a corpse as a passenger so he could use the carpool lane.

Oh, my God. If I remember rightly, I do not think he killed the guy. I think he just saw an opportunity and ran with it. Like, oh, I cannot be late to work again. That's the kind of ingenuity you do not see from kids these days, is all in time. I could see using like a mannequin or a blow-up doll. It's happened before. A dead body.

I just feel like if you find a dead body, you probably should call somebody. For some reason, I want to say that it was his roommate who died. Oh, my. It's like this is weekend at Bernice. That's exactly what this is. Holy shit. That is, that is dark. So, anywho, they got the car and the body back to their headquarters and a fingerprint check quickly identified.

the dead man as Richard Carnot. It was his car too. And 30 hours after he went missing, his family finally learned what had happened to their beloved husband, son, brother, and father. And they were completely gutted, devastated, and baffled. Like, how could this happen? Richard was going to be horribly missed. He was such a bright light for the people around him. Tall, lanky guy, piercing blue eyes, huge personality. Just one of those people who comes across kind of like a big kid. Just nothing but happy, loving, positive energy. And his mom said he gave the best hugs you've ever hugged. Richard was a good guy, a good dad.

He loved his family, and he loved his wife, Suzanne. And Suzanne was completely destroyed when she found out that Richard was gone. She just cried and cried. Their marriage was the second one for both of them, and they were big in love. They just had a baby less than a year earlier, and they were building a happy, blended family. Richard's son from his first marriage and Suzanne's two kids from hers. They'd only been married for four years, and now he was gone. It just seemed impossible.

Richard's friends and family couldn't imagine who would want to hurt him. Suzanne went on the local news to try to generate leads. She was barely holding it together. You could tell, but she did it. It was heartbreaking. She described trying to sleep that night he went missing. When she still didn't know what had happened, she said, we always touch feet at night, and I couldn't find his feet in bed.

Oh, my God. That's so sad. Ugh. Yeah. Suzanne just seemed totally rung out and bewildered. She said, we don't do anything. We don't drink. We don't go out. Somebody has to know something. Somebody must have seen something. And with tears streaming down her face, she kept asking, why would someone do this to our family? It's really heartbreaking, too, that interview. It's just like rips your guts out. It's hard to watch. The police had no idea. By all accounts, Richard was just a normal family guy, not into drugs or gangs or anything high risk like that.

But they began their investigation with the trailer park. This place was a high crime zone. Lots of drug deals and violence. It wasn't super unusual to find a dead body there, but it usually wouldn't be somebody like Richard Carnot. Why the hell would Richard be there in the first place? The trailer park was all the way on the other side of town from his work. Comstock wasn't the kind of neighborhood where people were willing and eager to talk to the police. Comstock was the kind of place where you minded your own damn business no matter what you saw,

or you could find yourself with broken kneecaps or worse. So the investigation figured this was going to be an uphill battle right from the start. And true to form, most people gave them the cold shoulder. But they did manage to coax a few brave souls. into sharing, and holy crap, did they have a story to tell? On the afternoon of January 30th, several Comstock residents had seen this. A man matching Richard Carnot's description, hands bound and mouth covered with duct tape, stumble running through the park.

The guy also had the remnants of duct tape around both ankles, as if he'd managed to rip himself out of it and get free. A short, stocky white guy was hot on his heels, chasing him. Can you imagine trying to run with your hands? hands bound up and duct tape in front of you, it would make it so much harder and so much scarier, too, because you feel like you're going to fall any second, I'm sure. It's just a freaking horror movie, like we said earlier. And somehow the fact that it happened in broad daylight makes it ten times scarier for me. I totally agree. And it gets worse. As these

witnesses watched, the short guy caught up with Richard, wrestled him down, and snapped a pair of handcuffs on his wrists. Oh, my God. Then he hauled him up and marched him back to the green Ford Escort where his body was eventually found. The short man forced Richard into the car and slammed the door. Multiple people witnessed this. No one called for help. What the fuck? Yeah, it's infuriating. I mean, it literally would have just taken one person having the huevos to call the police, and they probably would have saved this man's life. One guy, a 19-year-old Comstock resident named James Walsh, had even more info to give, and fortunately for the investigators, He was brave enough to give it.

He said that on the day of the murder, this dude named John Ray had showed up at his trailer driving that green Ford escort. So John Ray was a dirt bag, basically. The human equivalent of a wild-eyed little asshole honey badger or something. Little rabid weasel, except not cute. Yeah, he was the human equivalent of the dirt you dump out of your vacuum. He was just, you know, unpredictable and mean as a snake. nasty, just 10 pounds of hostility in a five-pound bag, basically. He looks like an angry hobbit.

So you were never happy to see him, and you dreaded seeing him ever again. He's like the embodiment of a YouTube comment section. That is dead accurate right there. So Ray sometimes couch-served with Walsh, because even though Walsh didn't like him, this 19-year-old kid was not going to say no to a guy like John Ray. And you'll see why in a minute. So James Walsh told the detectives that he was in his trailer that, day when he glanced out the window and saw Ray driving up in this green escort that Walsh hadn't seen him driving before. Ray parked the car and he got out and quickly kind of ran around the other

side and grabbed something and covered the windscreen with a blanket. And he was acting all furtive and nervous like he was trying to hide something in the car. And because this blanket was a blanket and it was windy and it wasn't big enough to cover the whole car, it only stayed on there for a few seconds before it slipped off. And when it did and James Walsh kind of peered into the car to figure out what Ray didn't want him to see, he could see that there was somebody in the passenger seat, and the guy was tied up, like handcuffed. So when Ray came bursting into the trailer, Walsh was like, holy shit, man, what the hell? Who is that? Who is that? Whose car is that? Why is that guy tied up? And in typical John Ray fashion, because, you know, he's a skilled and shrewd

negotiator, Ray said, listen, if you tell anybody what you just saw, I'm going to rape your sister, and then I'm going to blow up your trailer with a propang tank. Jesus. Okay, then. Message received. I, aye, captain. And poor 19-year-old James Walsh was, as you can imagine, scared chitless. He knew Ray was bad news bears. Once this maniac had brought a flippin' pipe bomb into his trailer and just like plopped it on the table, like, can you just hold this for me for a minute?

No, what the hell? So, sadly for Richard Carno and the people who loved him, Walsh had stayed quiet. Until he saw the murder on the news, that is. And as much as we might want to scream that he could have saved Richard's life and didn't, and that is most definitely a valid thing to scream about, at least he did do the right thing after the fact. So now the detectives knew that Richard had last been seen with this guy John Ray. Now they were cooking with gas. Well, propane. Yeah. And propane accessories. So they knew the stickhead John Ray. Specifically, they knew he had a rap sheet as long as a Lithuanian basketball player. Yeah, because those dudes are tall. Anyway, they knew Ray was prone to violence. He'd been

arrested on a slew of drug charges, not to mention threatening somebody with a gun and possession of a bomb. Good God, is this ever not a guy we want to get his hands on a bomb? Now, in addition to this dazzling resume, it didn't take detectives long to unearth another little detail that struck them as rather intriguing. John Ray was Suzanne Carnot's brother. Yeah. Sit with that for a second. Seems like it could be relevant, yeah?

Mm-hmm. So, of course, they went to Suzanne and told her what the witness James Walsh had seen, and they asked her about her brother. And then Suzanne was horrified, of course, and she said her brother had never liked Richard. He made no secret of it. Why didn't he like a sister's husband, you might ask?

Well, according to Suzanne, Ray thought Richard was a wussy for doing laundry and other little chores around the house. You know, woman's work, God forbid. Imagine setting that kind of example for your sons, the horror. And because Richard helped out around the house, Ray, self-appointed expert on gender and sexual politics, I guess, decided that this meant that he was gay. I swear to God, we are not making this up. I wish to hell we were. So obviously, this man's masculinity was more fragile than a Fabergei egg collection on a two-legged table.

Bless his heart. So, according to Suzanne, her brother hated Richard, thought he was gay and, like, hiding it from his sister. She said he had actually said he wanted to kill him one time, but she hadn't taken him seriously because, you know, you generally wouldn't, right? I know that if my unstable, violent relative was levying threats against my spouse, I'd just ignore it, too. Sure, wouldn't we all?

But people do. I mean, that's the thing in these cases. Like, people absolutely do. As frustrating as that is. But now Suzanne was confronted with the horrible possibility that he had been dead serious after all. He might just be crazy enough to have done this. And if he did kill Richard, this gay thing must be why. Just a toxic mixture of hate crime and personal vendetta.

By the way, it apparently had occurred to Richard's sister once to ask if he was gay. She made it clear to him that it was fine by her if he was. She loved him and supported him no matter what his sexual orientation. The same seemed to be true for his mom, too. They were a close, loving family, and that love was unconditional. But Richard just laughed it off and told her, no, he wasn't. And they'd moved on. So it seems unlikely that Ray's bizarre theory based on housework had any credence to it.

Not that we need to dignify that homophobic horseshit with a response. Yeah. But even if he were gay, this would be the weirdest fucking motive in the history of time. It really would. Like, all the way back to Cain and Abel, right? Like, what? Surely, that would be between Richard and Suzanne, and Suzanne seemed more than happy with

her husband. And John Ray barely knew Richard anyway. How and why would they even have been together that day? It was all just insane. John Ray was living kind of a nomadic couch-to-couch lifestyle. But fortunately for the investigators, Suzanne. Suzanne's other brother knew where he was crashing, and he told them where to find him. So I'm curious, would you all dime out your siblings, campers?

Like, if your brother was wanted for questioning in a murder, would you tell the detectives where to find him? How about you, Katie? I know. I know. Snitches get stitches. And I know this is going to be an unpopular response. And I know that one or both of my parents are going to text me. But yes, yes, I would. Because I truly believe that my brother would never hurt anyone. And I know from a true crime perspective, running from the cops looks super bad.

So I'd tell him to turn himself in and hire a good attorney for him. My brother is the guy who defended all the underclassmen on his high school football team from hazing. So I really don't think it's in his heart to murder anyone. So this is all just conjecture at this point. Well, good for him, bless his heart. And, you know, to be honest, I wouldn't need to snitch on my brother because he's in a of a stress case that he'd snitch on himself. Like, I guarantee you, they would sit him down,

they'd be like, so, and he'd just immediately spill it. Which is why I could never, ever use him as an accomplice if I were ever done enough to do a crime. Yeah. So, it probably won't come up. So now that they knew where John Ray was staying, it was, you guessed it, habeas grabus time. He lawyered up immediately,

as people who have been in the system a lot often do. For the moment, anyway, John Ray wasn't saying a word. Richard's mom went to his arraignment. She glared daggers at him as the prosecutor charged him with kidnapping and murder, and the judge denied him bail. Richard's mom is kind of a badass. She's on that show Diabolical talking about this case, and she said, If looks could kill, he probably would have been dead on the spot. Yes, ma'am.

For the moment, John Ray was safely tucked behind bars, no bail. But investigators were still trying to figure out the hows and whys of Richard Karno's murder. They really didn't buy the idea that Ray had killed him for being allegedly gay. Yeah, I agree. I mean, if this were either a hate crime or a personal vendetta or some combination of both, you know, either I hate gay people or I hate you for lying to my sister, I would expect to see overkill, wouldn't you? Oh, yes, yes.

Yeah, but this murder was pretty clinical, pretty utilitarian. the killer used the amount of force necessary to take Richard's life, but he didn't seem to go beyond that. So we're not seeing rage there, right? It just feels different to me. It feels more like a hit. Oh, yes, fully. And they didn't know why the hell Richard would have gone with Ray to that trailer park on the day of the murder. Had Ray just straight up abducted the guy? They needed to put all the pieces together so they could see the big picture. As the investigators kept working, trying to figure out all this out, the Karno family had Richard's memorial service, and it was how you say, a little odd? Yeah. In particular, Suzanne's behavior was a bit, let's call it, eccentric. It was an

open casket memorial, and at one point, Suzanne put the baby on Richard's chest in the casket. Uh-huh. She put the baby on his dead father's chest. She put a baby on a dead body. what the fuck and it upset Richard's mom so much that she had to leave the room they knew Suzanne was a little kooky as Richard's mom put it her behavior could be odd sometimes kind of childish and immature but this was a whole other level yeah I've been to funerals where people touch the body like held their hands

touch their faces that's normal but laying a baby on a dead body I don't like leaving him there yeah like letting them just kind of sit there. That's, oh, my God. She, like, set him fully down. It wasn't, like, just, like... She laid him down on his belly on the body. And this is apparently just how my brain works, because I immediately thought, like, what

if the baby falls down between the body and the side of the casket? Oh, my God. I didn't even think about that. Wouldn't that be the worst? That would be just a whole different kind of traumatizing. Well, and you're asking for something like that to happen when you're doing that. So the Carnot family had gotten a bunch of rooms in a nearby... hotel, and every night during that week of Richard's Memorial, they had dinner together there

and talked about the case, and they had a gut feeling, all of them, that the whole story had yet to come out. I mean, Suzanne's brother, like what, why? And as they compared notes, they started to feel more and more certain that the investigators needed to look hard at Suzanne. And turns out, unbeknownst to the Carnos, they weren't the only ones starting to get a queasy feeling about Ms. Suzanne. Let's talk for a minute about a a guy named Dr. Raymond Moody. In 2002, Dr. Moody was a professor in the Department of Consciousness Studies, which I have no idea what the hell is, but it sounds interesting, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

He's a little bit of a controversial figure. He's a medical doctor, a psychiatrist, and an expert in near-death experiences and the psychology of grief. He wrote a best-selling book about near-death experiences called Life After Life. He says he had his own after a suicide attempt in the 90s. And he claims to have had nine past lives. So apparently he's a cat. Okay.

So he has some beliefs that some of us might view with some skepticism, but he's an expert in his field and he's generally a respected psychiatrist and philosopher. Respected enough to keep getting jobs anyway. So he's a little weird, but aren't we all? I mean, I know I am. Yeah. If you watch interviews with him, he's just the kind of professor that spends half the class talking about all the times he did shrooms in the 70s. Like without the ponytail, he's bald. I would be willing to bet $500 that he's had a ponytail at some point in his career.

So, Dr. Moody, if you're listening, let us know. So, anywho, we told you, Suzanne went on the local news right after Richard's murder, right? To ask for people to call in with leads. Well, on the day that segment aired, Dr. Moody got a call from his assistant. And she was like, Dr. Moody, turn on Channel 5 right now, right now. So he did. And there was Suzanne Carno on the news. sobbing and asking why anyone would do this to her family, et cetera, et cetera.

And Moody's first reaction, of course, was sympathy. Like, oh, my God, it's Suzanne. Oh, that poor girl. But Ben, as he and his assistants spoke about what they were watching, alarm bells started going off in both of their heads. Because the year before, Moody was teaching a course at UNLV called Near Death Experiences. One of his students seemed especially fascinated by the subject matter.

a young woman named Suzanne Carnot. They talked a lot in the class about the process of grief, and Suzanne was especially interested in that. She asked a ton of questions, stuff like, so the grief, how long does that last? And she would take notes, you know? It's like magnets. How do they work?

Call back to the most recent episode. I love it. So she was asking all these questions about, like, how people grieve. And one day, a few weeks into the semester, Dr. Moody walked into the classroom to find his students all huddled around Suzanne. She was in the middle of the group and crying, and she said her husband had just died suddenly in an ice skating accident of all things.

She says, I don't think it's really sunk in for me yet, but I have no idea how to tell my kids. How do I tell my kids? And, of course, the other students were all, you know, patting her on the back, giving her advice on how to talk to her kids about losing their dad. Everybody just felt horrible for her.

But Dr. Moody later said that something about the whole scene just seemed off. her affect just didn't feel right to him he said you know i've counseled a lot of people through the grief process and the emotions that she was expressing just seemed hollow to him it just didn't feel right this happened just a few months earlier it was like four months earlier now here was suzanne crying on the evening news giving what seemed to dr moody and his former student to be a repeat performance of that day in the classroom they were confused had suzanne remarried like instantly after her husband died back in August? Did her new husband die too? Did her husband come back from the dead only to die

again? Was he a zombie husband? What? The hell was going on? And then it hit them. That day in the classroom had been a dress rehearsal. Dr. Moody remembered all those questions she'd asked about grief. How long was it supposed to last? How did people act when they were grieving. What should parents tell their kids? It was rehearsal, research, prep work. The kind of thing an actor does before an important role. The hairs on the back of Dr. Moody's neck stood up. He called the police, and he and some of his former students told them all about it. Now, this was interesting, and it definitely cemented the suspicions the police already had of the grieving. Widow. It's creepy as hell, too. God, it gives me the Wiggins.

Chilling. It is terrifying. They started digging into Suzanne and Richard's private life, and what they found didn't exactly jive with the perfect image Suzanne had presented to them in her initial interview. Suzanne seemed to have two personas. There was the friendly, loving wife and mom slash stepmom, and then there was another Suzanne. One obsessed. with controlling every aspect of her family's life. The wildest example of this is her stepson, Richard's son. After she and Richard married, Suzanne told him she wanted to adopt the little boy.

Richard loved the idea. I guess the bio-mom wasn't in the picture. We couldn't find any information on that. But there was a catch, and it was a weird one. Suzanne didn't like the kid's name, Trevor Adam. So she told Richard she would only go through with the adoption if he allowed her to change Trevor's name. Jesus, Jumping Jack Murphy. That was just the weirdest shit I've ever heard in my life.

And for some banana pants reason, Richard agreed to this, which is bizarre in and of itself, but also kind of tells you something about what their relationship dynamic was like, right? And Trevor Adam became forever after Dominic Owen. And he still goes by Nick. He said he just got used to it. Now, campers, we're not talking about an infant here. This was a kid, like probably six years old or thereabouts, just based on the pictures I've seen. And she changed the child's name, like legally.

Bunkers. So, Kay, let's think this out. Why do we think that she did this? Because I don't buy for a second that it was just because she didn't like the name Trevor. I think this was all about control. Oh, yeah. I think she couldn't stand the idea that this child had agency outside of her control. Yeah, exactly.

Think about how cult leaders often rename their followers and were to strip them of their identity they had before joining the cult and their links to the outside world. That's right, yeah. I think this was a way for her to wiggle her way into Nick's brain and stay there forever. Almost like she was branding him in a way. That's creepy.

Yeah. New mommy improved mommy. Who was the first mommy again? Oh, God. And unfortunately for Nick, his new stepmomas' desire for control did not stop with the name change. Not even close. Nick, who's now an adult, of course,

when Suzanne first came into their life, she was nice. He was glad his dad had somebody, and he was excited when she has to adopt him. I can't imagine what he made of the name change at that age, but he says it made him feel good that Suzanne wanted to be his mom. It made him feel like, you know, they were going to be a family. But it did not take long for that dream to dissolve. Once Suzanne and Richard were married and everybody was living together, his new stepmom started treating him like the proverbial red-headed stepchild,

which, by the way, as a redhead by choice, by which I mean it's a die job, I find that term highly offensive. What fuck is wrong with red hair? Y'all just jealous is what I think. You people will bow before our beautiful flaming red locks. You mark my words. Anyway, I love my red hair.

Nick says now that he very quickly began to feel like Cinderella. Suzanne's kids were the ones who got all the love and attention while he was treated like an annoyance and sometimes a maid. Suzanne was the stereotypical wicked stepmother and was pretty much putting him at her mercy

while his dad worked his ass off to try and keep up with her spending. Because, of course, even though she didn't work herself, Suzanne insisted on controlling the family finances too. And she liked spending money. She really, really liked spending money. She had spent them by the time our story begins into a $40,000 hole of credit card debt. Yikes.

Richard worked hard, but he wasn't making enough to pay those kinds of bills, and he was worried about it. But Suzanne just kept on spending. I think she had a pretty tight emotional grip on Richard. I mean, the name change thing tells me that, if nothing else, that he would allow this woman to change his child's name. It's just bizarre. So, you know, we don't know a huge amount about what went on between them

in terms of relationship dynamics, but something caught my eye when I was researching the case. In one of the newspaper articles I read, Suzanne says that Richard was the first person who ever made her feel safe. She said, he knew I sometimes loath to be touched and needed to be in dark corners to feel safe. Now, on the one hand, that sounds like something someone who's lived through some kind of trauma would do. And maybe Suzanne does have something like that in her history, but given what we're about to find out about her,

part of me wonders if this was a way for her to manipulate Richard, make him feel sorry for her, make him think she's so fragile that if he presses her about anything, her spending, for example, she might just curl up in a corner and fear. Now, who knows for sure, but we do know that in the summer prior to Richard's death, the same summer that Suzanne took that class on grieving at UNLV, she and Richard each took out a life insurance policy with a payout of $500,000. Half a mill. And Richard didn't actually want to spend the money for such an exorbitantly big policy,

which, by the way, did not even come close to match in their income and made no sense at all. But Suzanne, of course, insisted. it. So y'all, we got some red flags waving. So the investigators were getting more and more suspicious of Suzanne, but they didn't have anything concrete on her yet. And her brother, John Ray, wasn't cooperating either, just sitting in jail, keeping his mouth shut. So they started surveilling Suzanne, just kind of a fishing expedition to see what they could find out. They noticed that Suzanne was spending a lot of time at Richard's grave, like, like a lot. She'd bring their baby and let him play around the gravestone and just sit there. They wondered if maybe she was talking to

Richard. They wondered what she might be saying. They decided, this is so crazy. So crazy. And I love it so much. To plant a bug on the grave. That's just the best thing we've ever heard. That grave is wearing a wire. They put the bug in a bouquet of flowers. Yeah, that's just how Wiley Coyote would have done it? And then the roadrunner would have turned it into one of those flowers that squirts water while Wiley wasn't looking. It writes itself.

And so the investigators waited. But sadly, this brilliant plan was foiled when a groundskeeper at the cemetery came by, picked up the bouquet, and tossed it in a dumpster. Nice job, asshole. You fucked up the cool surveillance plan. You twat. So unfortunately,

because of groundskeeper silly, we'll never know what Suzanne was saying to Richard at the gravesite. Maybe I'm sorry? Maybe, ha, ha, ha, I got you, you bastard, and I'm going to get away with it. We have no way of knowing. But then, one afternoon, the investigators got a call from a man who refused to give his name, but told them they needed to check Suzanne's computer. There was incriminating stuff on there that they needed to see.

So they went and put the grab-us on the desktop computer. And when they fired it back up at the station, they realized that somebody had reset it back to factory settings. Ooh, suspicion. Definitely. Resetting your computer basically takes it back to the way it was the day you bought it before you put any of your own stuff on there. In other words, somebody had wiped this computer clean as the day it was born. Damn. Luckily, though, John Gras.

Ray wasn't as clever or as careful as his sister. He had been working as a security guard at the time of the murder, and that was his only access to a computer. Can we just stop for a second and deal with how many dirtbag murderers turn out to have worked as security guards? I mean, I'm sure most security guards are fine folks, so don't get us wrong. But it just seems to be a profession that attracts, you know, John Ray's. So this company, whatever it was, I'm sure they rested easy knowing that they had this pissed off little hobbit guarding their stuff. Just angry little badger with a nightstick.

So the investigators went and put the grab-us on Johnny Boy's work computer, and they found some suspicious stuff. There was a gold mine of emails between John and his dear grieving sister. At first glance, the email

seemed innocuous. Suzanne was asking John to, quote, build her a bookshelf for $50. And Campers, she really wanted that bookshelf, stat. She kept asking him when he was going to build it, when he was going to build it, when, when, when. And finally, she told him, I'm going nuts waiting. If you are not going to build it, I will either do it myself or find somebody else who will. Like, chill lady, IKEA gives you an instruction manual and everything.

Sounds pretty intense for a bookshelf related conversation. Unless, maybe it wasn't about a bookshelf at all. Exactly. It seemed pretty clear to the investigators that these emails were about something a lot more sinister than a bookshelf. It seemed to them that bookshelf was most likely code language for murder, and $50,000 actually meant $50,000. Suzanne signed all the emails, Your Sister Suzanne, as if she wanted to continually remind John of their family bonds and the loyalty she expected him to show her. Man, I love it when these people think they're being so smooth, don't you? And it's just as obvious as hell what's going on.

Listen up. Listen. If you're going to plan something illegal, do not do it in writing, you losers. How many times do we have to talk about murderers getting on AIM and making their murder plots part of their away messages are some shit? I know you feel like you're Jason born. but I can promise you that you're not half as clever as you think you are, and a jury is going to see through your bad metaphors. And then I'm going to make fun of you on a podcast

and also to Whitney and text messages for several days. I don't mean to murder spain, but come the fuck on. Murder spain. Yeah, nobody's that frantic and been out of shape about a damn bookshelf, okay? So their theory of the crime was that Suzanne had probably had John Ray wait for Richard outside the house early that morning because he left for work like super early in the morning and then ambushed him as he was getting in his car to go to work. He duct tape Richard's mouth and wrists and ankles and drove him to the trailer park where he knew he could bully James Walsh

into helping him out if he needed it. The one thing they weren't sure about was why Ray had waited so long to kill Richard. Based on the witness accounts from the trailer park, he'd held Richard for most of that day. Was he just waiting for dark or was there something else going on? Was he on marching orders from Suzanne to wait until a certain time, maybe? I have no idea, but the waiting for dark theory makes as much sense as any other, I guess. Or maybe he was just getting up his nerve. I mean, if you look at that avalanche of, where's my bookshelf? Where's my bookshelf? Why haven't you built my bookshelf yet? Emails, you know, from Suzanne, it doesn't seem like Ray was in a super big hurry to do this. So maybe he just had to muster up his courage and it took him all day to do it.

But the emails did make one thing clear anyway. This quote unquote gay thing was not the motive. Money was. Surprise, surprise. So still, this wasn't absolute proof of anything, but it was a pretty good little piece of evidence nonetheless. Enough, in fact, to get an arrest warrant for Suzanne. When Richard's mother showed up for her arraignment, she watched Suzanne standing up there all tear-stained in her orange jumpsuit and she thought, gotcha, bitch. I like her. Love her so much. And Nick was so happy, he said he wanted to run and catch up with her just so he could Smile and wave. Ding dong, the witch is dead.

Hell, yeah. John Ray and Suzanne were charged together. The case hinged on a lot of circumstantial evidence. The emails with John Ray, the huge amount of debt she'd run up with her reckless spending, that ridiculously huge life insurance policy on Richard, and of course, her practice run in Dr. Moody's class. Moody, by the way, thought she was an idiot. He said, she should have gone to an acting coach if she wanted to act like she was grieving.

I'm a psychiatrist. I can't teach acting. He ain't wrong. I agree. And also, I mean, Dr. Moody is a trained psychologist. If anyone could pinpoint a lie or an inconsistency in her behavior, it would have been him or any shrink, really. So if you're going to pull a thing like this, don't pull it in a psychiatrist's class, for God's sake. Dumbass.

Suzanne's lawyer didn't even attempt to make her seem like a bowl. In fact, her opening statement was like, you may find her odd. You may find her offensive. You may find her vulgar. You may find her to be the biggest liar in town. Just shades of the Jody Arias trail. Like, hey, we're not asking you like the bitch.

Like, we get that she's the worst. Just don't convict her of murder, okay? Unsurprisingly, Suzanne's attorney pointed the finger squarely at John Ray as the mastermind behind Richard's murder, and she accused 19-year-old witness James Walsh of helping him, despite a complete lack of evidence to support that. Meanwhile, John's lawyer pointed right back at Suzanne. He said, if Suzanne is the master puppeteer, then my client, John Ray, is just a stupid puppet that allowed himself to be used.

Yeah, by that. A stupid puppet. A stupid puppet. A stupid puppet. A stupid puppet shaped like an angry little badger. I found this strategy by both attorneys very interesting. It was a slap fight between them as much as it was between them and the prosecutors. I'm not super familiar with cases that are tried together, so I can't speak to how common this is. But I do remember that the Menendez brothers were initially tried together and presented a United Front and it damn near worked.

I just can't imagine sitting in the jury and seeing these two horrible people. blame shift and being very sympathetic. John didn't react to anything at all. He pretty much just sat there like a bump on a log for the whole trial. Suzanne looked a bit upset, but not much. She mostly looks annoyed in the video I've seen of the trial, just so pissed that she got herself caught. I bet the jury was really affected by how long John Ray held Richard captive in his car

before he finally killed him. All day. And that means by the. the way, that all the time Suzanne was making those frantic phone calls to Richard's voicemail. And all the time she was calling hospitals and calling the police and calling Richard's mom, she knew exactly where he was. She knew her shit-stained brother had him, and she knew he was going to kill him dead. Just appalling. So, anyhow, they both got convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, and John

Ray got a kidnapping charge added on there as well. They were both given two consecutive life sentences with the first possibility of parole in 2044. Just too soon for me, because as flippin' awful as Richard's murder was, it wasn't Suzanne's only crime. Now, we're going to throw out a little content warning on this next part because it involves child abuse. So if you need to skip ahead, about 30 to 45 seconds ought to do it, I think. So after the trial, Richard's son Nick, the one whose name Suzanne had insisted on changing, went to his grandma and finally told her about the hell Suzanne had been putting him through for years. She'd been abusing him physically, emotionally, and sexually pretty much as long as they'd been living

in the same house. He described to his grandma how he'd wanted to tell his dad what Suzanne was doing to him, but she threatened to kill him, if he did. And she'd choked him into unconsciousness before, so he felt like she meant it. He was terrified of her, and he had nowhere to turn for help. And just imagine how much worse that must have made it for him when his dad died, like his one potential protector, just gone. And now he's alone with the monster. So, of course, Nick's grandmother pressed charges for the child abuse, and Suzanne ended up pleading guilty to coercion of a minor.

She was sentenced to four additional years in prison, which ain't shit if you ask me, but there you go. At least she was fully exposed for the trash that she is. I want to give her the guillotine, Whitney. Oh, yeah. The guillotine has her name all over it. I agree. And, you know, Nick, he misses his dad. he says he misses his big nose which I thought was sweet he misses doing woodwork with him

he missed having fun and listening to jazz you know Richard's sister misses calling him on his birthday she says she grieves for the man he never had a chance to become Richard's a granddad now and you know he'll never know it and of course his mom misses those big bone crunching hugs the most at her sentencing Suzanne got weepy yeah she's really good at the fake tears y'all like really

convincing. She manages these big, fat, sloppy tears and like red eyes and everything, which is impressive because a lot of these conscieless assholes cannot manage real tears. And that's often one of the ways you can tell that they're lying. Yeah. When I first watched the show, I knew a little bit about this backstory. So I was paying a lot of attention to her news appearance. And I was ready to be like, she's not really crying, but she was. And that freaks me out. Like, it was really like actually kind of heartbreaking to watch. It really seemed real. And so. I guess that practice run was important for her

method acting. Yeah, definitely. She said she was innocent and the only reason she'd been convicted was because of her eccentric personality. Which... What? She said Richard had loved her for her quirkiness and called her his

odd duck. Well, quack, quack, bitch, you're going to die in prison. You know, I bet she actually did practice. I bet she practiced in the mirror. Remember Dante Satorius practicing facial expressions in the mirror? I absolutely, I would bet you 500 bucks that she practiced that whole weepy speech that she did on the news. And she also said at her sentencing, and I quote, and get your barf bags ready, okay? She said, you can't take my children from me. You can't take my husband from me. We are united in our hearts.

Yeah. Yeah. So, What has Ms. Suzanne been up to since she was sentenced to life in prison, you might ask? Well, Suzanne, like so many of the criminal asshats we've covered before her, has a prison dating profile. Now, it's not quite as spectacular as Mark Twitchell's, but it's something else. It's on jailhousebabs.com. A fine, upstanding outfit, I'm sure. And it features a smiling picture of Suzanne that does not look like it was taken in prison. She's in regular street clothes, and she looks quite a very big.

it younger than she is now. So I'm guessing they let her use an old picture from before she was locked up. Mm-hmm. Well, she's a murderer, child abuser, and now I guess we can add catfish to the list, right, for using an old picture. Okay, so campers, allow me to read this to you. It says, can you see me? Can you look beyond my lean, five-foot seven-inch, one hundred forty-pound body lightly bronzed by summer's light? beyond my naturally curly chestnut locks that delicately drape over my shoulders? Can you peer into my emerald green eyes and see me? Can you see my inner beauty? Can you see beyond these walls this conviction and see what really defines me?

Bring back to life the desire to smile, to laugh, to feel needed and appreciated. If you look, you will see. I'm an energetic woman who is intelligent, artistic, witty, and charming. I will give as much as I'm given and more. You will be cherished with genuine sincerity. Oh, genuine sincerity. Please see me if you dare. That's the only true part in the whole damn thing, if you dare.

Why is this such a common theme in murderers dating profiles? Can you look past X? It is exactly like what Twitchell said. I also love that she's asking people to look past all these. arguably attractive features and it's like bitch you're a murderer shouldn't you be asking your potential pen pals to look past that I know that's like she's like can you look past the fact that I'm gorgeous and it's like what are you talking about yeah kills your husband what the it's flipping Mark Twitchell all over again my crime doesn't define me at all yeah yeah it does

shut the fuck up now if that wasn't enough to entice you and how could it possibly not be The profile lists her measurements as 34, 29, 32, hot, her height as 5'7, her sexual orientation as bisexual, and her marital status as widowed. Self-made. Exactly. Who doesn't want to take charge gal, right? She lists her religion as pagan and says that before her murder conviction, she was a homemaker. Yeah, I'm sure Nick has lots of stories to tell about the home you made, Susie Q. Get fucked.

Well, if there's one thing I think we can confidently see. say about Ms. Carnot is that she loves the spotlight. She chewed the scenery real hard with that weepy performance at her sentencing. She's reaching out for admirers now from behind bars. And we haven't mentioned this yet, but has it struck anybody else how toweringly dumb it was for her to go on the local news after Richard's murder and ask for leads? Oh my God, right? I don't know if maybe she was hoping people would send donations or if she was really enjoying the attention. But if She hadn't done that, we might not be sitting here talking about this case today. Yep, because her little dress rehearsal in Dr. Moody's class four months before Richard's death was a pivotal point at her trial.

It proved premeditation, for one thing. And, I mean, she had to know that there was at least a possibility that one of her former classmates might see the broadcast, right? I mean, she should have known anyway, so did she just not think about that for some reason? Or was she so arrogant that she just figured she could talk her way out of any trouble that might come up? I don't know, but it is hilarious to me because I'm sure she just thought she was so smart, taking that grief class and learning all about how she'd be expected to act, you know, after Richard died. And of course, as is so often the case with these weenies, it ended up being her undoing instead. Womp, womp.

So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe. until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And we want to send a shout out to a few of our newest patrons. Thank you so much to Sarah, Benjamin, Kimberly, and Rachel. We appreciate you to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out.

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