True Crime Campfire - Bad Sport: A Grab Bag of Parents From Hell

Episode Date: November 19, 2021

Parenthood, or so we hear, is full of a kind of transcendent joy, the kind you can only experience by watching your offspring learn and grow. That is, when they’re not making you want to hop in the car and keep driving until you run out of road. There are some ups and downs, for sure. But you’ll hardly ever find a parent who wouldn’t do almost anything for their kids. Notice we said “almost” anything. Because there have to be limits, right? Well…for the parents in today’s story, not so much. First we have Texas mom Wanda Holloway, who in 1990 tried to hire a hit man to take out her daughter's cheerleading rivals. Then we have French dad Christophe Fauviau, who dosed his kids' tennis opponents to make sure his little angels won every match. Sources:Texas Monthly, Mimi Swartz: https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/the-cheerleader-murder-plot/ABC News: https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=1680047&page=1https://www.wistv.com/story/4609148/eight-years-in-prison-for-dad-who-drugged-his-kids-tennis-rivals/The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/01/france.mainsectionWashington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2006/03/04/for-french-tennis-dad-deadly-obsession-to-win/2b80701d-a3fe-442c-a72d-08f858f9eee5/Follow 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]: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/true-crime-campfire/Become 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. Parenthood or so we hear is full of a kind of transcendent joy. The kind you can only experience by watching your own. offspring, learn and grow. That is, when they're not making you want to hop in the car and keep driving until you run out of a road, there are some ups and downs for sure, but you'll hardly

ever find a parent who wouldn't do almost anything for their kids. Notice we said almost anything. Because there have to be limits, right? Well, for the parents in today's story, not so much. This is bad sport, a grab bag of parents from hell. So, campers, for this first one, we're in Channelview, Texas, a blue-collar town just outside of Houston, January 30th, 1991. Eighth grader Shana Harper was practicing her gymnastics routine in the front yard when a couple of detectives pulled up in front of the house. We need to speak to your mama, they told her. and Shana led them up to the house. Inside they found 37-year-old Wanda Holloway,

pretty, dark-haired, beautifully dressed, and manicured as she always was. When she saw them standing in the doorway, Wanda stood still for a second. Then, piece by piece, she took off all her jewelry and laid it on a table. Shana, I've got to go away for a little while. Your grandma's going to look after you. And that was that. As her daughter looked on in total confusion,

Wanda put out her wrists for the handcuffs and followed the detectives out the So, what just happened here? What did this well-dressed, polite woman do to bring the gravis down upon her in the middle of an ordinary day? Well, see, Wanda Holloway grew up on the rough side of town, and Channelview was already pretty rough to begin with. Her family didn't have much in the way of money or status, and according to Mimi Swartz article on the case in Texas Monthly, Wanda always had the sneaking feeling that everybody was looking down on them. Her dad had butted heads with some of the leadership at their church when Wanda was looking. little, and rather than mend fences, he'd left to start a new church with a few other families,

a church that author Anne MacDonald Meyer described as a little more extreme than your average Southern Baptist. I wonder if that was part of the reason for the tension one to felt between her family and everybody else's. She didn't let that outcast feeling break her down, though. She used it instead. Let it fuel a relentless drive to succeed at everything she did. She was Lisa Simpson on steroids, always eager to please and full of energy, getting involved in as many activities as she could cram into a day, trying hard to muscle her way into the popular crowd. It never really worked, though.

People seemed to see her as a try-hard. And the one thing that might have helped Wanda sneak into the Cool Kids Club, trying out for the cheerleading squad, was a no-go. Her dad refused to let her do it, because he thought the uniforms were, quote, horish. Oe. Thanks, Dad. You know, how bad could they have been in the 60s, for God's sake? Anyway, Wanda wanted a lot more than the life she'd grown up with.

She had big dreams, owning her own business someday, driving around in a Lincoln Town car. She married her high school boyfriend at 18, though, and Tony told her he didn't want his wife working. Her job was to stay home and have kids. So Wanda put her career ambitions on the shelf. She had a son, Shane, in 1973, and in 77, which is the year I was born, she had a daughter, Sheena. And as her marriage to Tony slowly fell apart, Wanda gradually transferred all her hopes and dreams,

all that drive to show the world what Wanda was made of, to her children, especially Shana, and to her outward appearance. By the late 80s, Wanda was on her third husband, CD, much older and much wealthier than the first two, and she'd carved out a niche as one of the busiest broads in Channelview. She finally had her Lincoln, and she was always perfectly quaffed, manny pettied, and dressed to the nines. CD was in the oil biz. He had his own plane. He bought Wanda beautiful jewelry, including a $2,000 pair of canary diamond earrings. Two grand in 80s money. That's not to sneeze at. Wanda was like hella proud of those earrings and the Lincoln Town car and the

designer clothes. But she was even prouder of her most prized accomplishment, her smart, beautiful, talented daughter Shana. Now, I don't know how many of y'all are from Texas or of been to Texas or are aware of Texas. But the Texan campers will already know this. Football is basically a religion down there. Friday night lights, baby. It is no joke. And I'll tell you, I used to teach freshman comp back in my early days as a writing teacher. And we had this assignment where you had to write about like a subculture that you'd been a part of. And every single year, a whole bunch of boys would write about being on the high school football team. And the way they described it, you would have thought these dudes were storming the beaches at Normandy. It was

like, it was a band of brothers. It was a band of brothers. I have a family. They take it seriously. Oh yeah. I have a family friend who his goal, his whole life was to coach football, high school football in Texas. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And that is the only reason he got a teaching degree. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Because in Texas, you can't like coach unless you're a teacher, which is I think totally fair. I mean, he's a real... They're not messing around down there. It is literally, it's like a religion.

And he's a great teacher, honestly. He's a brilliant mathematician. But it just made me laugh because he's like, you know, coaching first and then sometimes I teach. Right. Oh, absolutely. If you're a boy and you're on the football team, like Whitney was saying, you're essentially a demigod. And if you're a girl and you want the same kind of treatment, you join the cheerleading squad.

Wanda never got to be a cheerleader. Her daddy wouldn't let her, those hoarish, hoarish skirts. But she was determined that Shana was going to be one. And Shana, who was in the sixth grade by 1989, had been training for years. She took classes at the Alpha Gymnastics Studio, where all the coaches were certified by the National Cheerleading Association. You could take cheerleading, tumbling, and gymnastics. And Shana was good at all of it. Yeah, she better have been, because Wanda had her in lessons.

She was five. Five. Yeah, I took gymnastics when I was five. And as you know, I'm a millennial. So naturally, we all got awards at the end of the season. And they took it a step further. They gave you specific awards for, like, your accomplishments. And my special recognition, a pencil jump.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Tall, gawky five-year-old Katie was so graceful. that my coaches had to scramble around for a ribbon for me. Look at that Katie go. She can jump straight up and down. Aw. I think I actually still have that ribbon somewhere.

The story is like deep in my family's floor at this point. Because, again, I am a tall woman and I am not coordinated. So gymnastics was a whole ordeal. Just a tall, beautiful, gawky gazelle. Anyway, enough about me. Has anybody seen that show Dance Moms? Well, from the sources we've read, the Alpha Gymnastic Studio in the late 80s made those moms look like a quilting bee. You'd walk in there and the air would just crackle with pent-up tension of 30 cheer moms,

all shelling out 35 bucks an hour for their kids' lessons, all determined that their little princess was going to be the undisputed queen. Oh, God, help us. Wanda was the queen of these moms. She and Shana were one of those mother-daughter bestie pairs you see at the mall in matching outfits. And y'all, that's not just an expression. Wanda actually bought matching outfits for her and Shana, including, wait for it, and I swear this is true, a cheerleading outfit. Oh, my God. So 30-something-year-old adult-ass woman in a cheer suit.

to match her daughters. Wanda, honey, please get some therapy for the love of God. It wasn't all trips to the mall, though. Wanda was dead serious about Shana's cheerleading aspirations. Or possibly Wanda's cheerleading aspirations? She made Shana practice relentlessly. If Shana said, Mom, I gotta do my homework right now,

Wanda would just do the homework for her to give her time to practice her splits and backflips. Priorities, man. Wanda's big dream was for Shana to make it onto the Alice Johnson Jr. High cheerleading squad. Shana had gone to a private elementary school, and Wanda pulled her out and enrolled her in the public school system just so she'd be able to try out for the team. The tryouts for Shana's seventh grade year were scheduled for the spring of that sixth grade year. Wanda basically prepped Shana for this tryouts since she was in kindergarten. And as the big day approached, Wanda felt sure her little girl was a lock.

Now, this is bizarre to me, but the way they picked the cheerleaders at Alice Johnson Jr. High was they let the students vote. How this makes a damn bit of sense is beyond me. I mean, the other kids, like, they can't judge you on your flips and flops and jumps and splits and shit, right? Like, they're just going to make it a popularity contest. That's not the way to do it. But that's the way they did it there in 1989. So in the few days leading up to the tryouts, apparently there were still tryouts.

I don't know if, like, maybe there were initial, like, skills. base tryouts to pick the candidates for the other kids to vote on for it? They must have done that. I don't know. It's all very confusing to me, but in the days leading up to the vote, the candidates could campaign. So they'd make signs that said stuff like, vote Whitney for cheer squad. She's real loud. Seriously, you can hear me in the next town over.

Vote Katie. Her splits are the splitiest and stuff like that. Yeah, kids are known for having the discerning eye of a Russian judge during the Olympics. This is no problem for Shane. I mean, she was a popular kid. So she and Wanda put up the posters and figured it was already pretty much in the bag. But then, on the first day of campaigning, they got a nasty shock in the form of the mother-daughter team of Verna and Amber Heath. They'd known Verna and Amber forever.

They lived down the street from each other. Amber and Shana had gone to kindergarten and elementary school together, and they'd both taken lessons at Alpha Gymnastics for years. Like Shana, Amber was a pretty popular. friendly girl, an honor student, and a powerhouse of a cheerleader. Her mom, Verna, had been a champion baton twirler when she was growing up, and Amber had been winning twirling contests practically since she could walk. Shana actually liked Amber.

One of her friends told Texas Monthly's Mimi Swartz, Shana always mentioned that she'd like to be Amber's friend because they were so much alike. But when Shana had transferred over to Alice Johnson Junior High, Amber had stayed at the private school. Now, though, as Wanda and Shana walked into the junior high a few days, before the cheerleading team vote, they were shocked to see Amber there, standing next to her mom and handing out vote for Amber flyers with candy tape to him. See, Verna was planning on transferring Amber to Alice Johnson in the fall when she started seventh grade, and in the meantime,

she'd gotten special permission from the school board to let Amber go ahead and compete for the squad. That morning, Verna had picked her up at her private school and brought her over to meet her future classmates and campaign for the team, and it hit Wanda like a reckon ball to the face. was hornin in on Shana's territory, standing there smiling, laughing, and glad hand, and passing out candy. And it just was not fair. Now, I don't know how Shana felt about it, because Shana's feelings kind of tend to get left out in the telling of this story, so I'm not sure if she was angry, too, or if this was just all mama bear. But the upshot was, Wanda got so pissed off she filed a formal complaint with the school board, saying Amber shouldn't be allowed

to try out when she wasn't currently enrolled at the school. She got in the other parents' ears about it, trying to talk them into telling their kids not to vote for Amber, which I could have told her would backfire like crazy. But anyway, that's what she did. And she called her The Outsider. Yikes. Yikes. It's got something kind of mad Max about it in there or Stephen King or something.

There's a video game where a character's name is The Outsider. That's why I'm laughing. That's so funny. Oh, yeah. And again, these kids are like 12, 13 years old. It's just absurd. So, I'm sure you can see where this is going, right? It was all for naught.

There were two open slots on the team and three girls trying out and Shana didn't make it. For Wanda, it might as well have been a death in the family. She was gutted. Had to sit there and watch her baby girl cry. And in her mind, it was all Amber and Verna Heath's fault. If the school hadn't let Amber break the rules, Shana would have made that team for sure. And Wanda would have achieved her dream of being a cheerleader's mom. Oh, I mean, Shana would have achieved her dream of being a cheerleader.

Sorry about that. Wanda had turned the whole thing into such a big, nasty mess that the school later changed the rule, made it so you actually had to have gone to the school for at least a semester to try out. But, of course, that rule change came too late to help Shana, so it didn't matter a damn to Wanda. Wanda had never been the type to throw in the towel, though, and when the next year came around, she decided this was going to be Shana's year. She was convinced that passing out candy had been the key to Amber's victory last year. So she decided to make something really special for Shana to hand out this time around.

So she talked to Shana's dad, her ex-husband, Tony, and Tony came up with the idea of having vote for Shana Harper for cheerleader printed on rulers and pencils. This was a blue-collar town, and a lot of kids couldn't afford their own rulers, so they figured the kids would really like a gift like that. So Wanda dropped a chunk of change to get the rulers and pencils made up, and when they were she went to the school to make sure it was okay for Shana to hand them out. Yeah, really should have done that before you spent all that money getting imprinted. Uh-huh.

She really should have because the school said, nope. The rule said you couldn't hand out gifts, and the rulers and pencils qualified. I don't know why the candy didn't qualify the year before, but whatever. Right, like that's what I thought, too. So Wanda went home and cried and ranted and raved, and then she came up with a new idea. She attached these little paper megaphones to the rulers, thinking for some reason that this would make it okay to pass them out. When the school saw Shana handing them out at school the next day, they confiscated them. And then they called a meeting.

And then they informed Wanda Holloway that her daughter had been disqualified. She'd broken one of the campaign rules, and now she couldn't try out. This was known forever more in Channelview as the ruler incident. Rulergate. The unpleasantness. The kerfuffle. It was a lot more than a kerfuffle to Wanda. Maybe more of a hoopla or just a plain old snafu.

Bamboozle. Boondoggle. God, the South has the best, the best phrasing for cluster fucks. It's the best. I just have cluster fuck and that's just boring. That's a good one too. Well, I don't know. I like cluster fuck.

So after this cluster fuck, Wanda demanded, then begged for the school to reconsider their decision. But the school didn't budge. She was livid. As for Shana, she'd had just about enough of this bullshit. And not long after the ruler wars, she told her dad she didn't think she wanted to be a cheerleader anymore. But that went right over Wanda's head. Yeah, at this point, it wasn't about Shana anymore, if it ever really had been. Wanda wanted to win.

Specifically, she wanted to beat that bitch Verna Heath. Third times the charm, right? And this third tryout was the biggest one yet. In March, Shana would be eligible to try out for the Channel View High School team. The dream team. Before Christmas, Wanda was already obsessing about how to make sure Shana won this time. She bled the ears of the high school administrator, asking what she could do to lock down her spot, suck up to the coaches, the sponsors. Was there anyone she could, you know, get another girl, disqualify?

Like, for example, just throwing this out there. Amber Heath? But nobody gave her any satisfactory answers. And the thought of that little outsider, Amber Heath, taking Shane's rightful spot on the high school team, the spot that little girl had worked so hard for since she was five years old, was just intolerable to Wanda. Never mind that the kid said she didn't even want to be a cheerleader anymore.

Wanda wanted, what Wanda wanted, and what Wanda wanted, Wanda got. say that one five times fast Wanda wanted what Wanda wanted and what Wanda wanted Wanda got Ah yeah It just blends together towards the end You did so good I'm just impressed you said it once

I'd high-five you if you were here So enter a guy named Terry Harper Terry had a checkered past And well kind of a checkered present too He was always getting in some kind of trouble Usually misdemeanor stuff like drunk driving and he liked getting in fistfights. He'd had kind of a rough go of it, several broken marriages, for example,

and he also just happened to be the brother of Wanda's ex-husband, Shane's dad, Tony. He was the only person Wanda knew with any kind of shady criminal past, very faintly shady, though it was. Plus, he was big and brawny and strong and worked construction, and I guess he seemed like a likely candidate for shenanigans. And sometime in the fall of downtown town car up to Terry Harper's trailer and told him she needed to talk to him. She was very cloak and dagger about it, told him not here, and asked him to meet her up the road at a convenience store instead.

Wanda obviously had a flair for the dramatic. The first thing she said to him was, how much do you love your niece? Loaded question, Wanda, damn. But Terry didn't have any trouble answering. He adored both Wanda's kids. I love her with my life, he said. That was just what Wanda wanted to hear. Good, she said, because I got a couple people I need taking care of, and I don't care of. care how you do it. I knew I was going to get Southern with this one. I just knew it was going to happen.

She laid out the whole thing for her ex-brother-in-law. Verna and Amber Heath had screwed Shana out of cheerleading two years in a row, and she wanted him dead. She said, you got to understand, Terry. If Shana doesn't make it this time, she's never going to make it. This is a high school tryout. Oh, well, if it's the high school tryout. Jesus, Murphy woman. So to say that this caught Terry by surprise would be an understatement. He'd known Wanda almost all his life, and he could not believe what was coming out of her mouth. And little did Wanda know, but she'd come to him at exactly the wrong time for this. To be fair, there'd probably never been a time in Terry's life when he'd had been cool with bumping off a 13-year-old girl, but now it was definitely the worst time ever

to ask. See, Terry had recently decided to turn over a new leaf, told Texas Monthly that he'd resolve that fall to stop, quote, cussing, drinking, and go into clubs and put his faith in the Lord. He told Wanda he could never do what she was asking, and he didn't know of anybody who would. You're talking about a 13-year-old child, Wanda. Wanda said he didn't know this particular 13-year-old, implying, I guess, that in bitch years, Amber was at least 35. She told him, it's like dog years. She told him, just think about it. We'll talk again later. Terry was just grateful to get the hell out of there. and he had at home just shaking his head.

He was hoping he'd never hear another word about it. Maybe Wanda just temporarily lost her marbles and was feeling much better now. But then, on Christmas Eve, Terry was over at his brother's place for dinner and presents, and Shana was there hanging out with her daddy. After dinner, she sat down next to Terry on the couch and said, Uncle Terry, my mom wants you to call her, okay?

Rout row. As the phone rang, Terry was hoping against hope that Wanda would pick up and say, Terry, deals off. I don't know what I was thinking. But no. Have you found somebody yet? She said,

Come on, Terry. We don't have that much time left before the tryouts, and we can't let Shane to lose again. She'll be so crushed, she'll never want to cheerlead again. Bitch, she already said she didn't want to do it anymore. You just didn't listen. When Terry hung up the phone that evening,

he knew what he had to do. He didn't want to. Nobody wants to dime out a family member to the cops. But he figured if he didn't say anything and then something happened to Verna and Amber Heath, he might end up a suspect. It's probably not too surprising that Terry had a little bit of work cut out for him to get the police to believe his story. I mean, if you stand Wanda and Terry up side by side, which one of them are you going to think is telling the truth? Terry the

ruffian or Wanda, the upstanding citizen, TM. But Terry kept at it, and finally the cops asked him if he was willing to wear a wire and get Wanda talking about the hit. Terry agreed, and over the next few weeks, he secretly recorded six conversations. As the police listened in, their jaws were on the floor. Wanda turned into a totally different person in these recordings. She went from one of Channel View's most genteel and elegant ladies to Corella DeVille. Terry told her he'd found a hitman who'd do the job, and Wanda seemed thrilled. At one point, Terry quoted her the hitman's price. To kill both Verna and Amber, it was going to cost $7,500. five grand for Amber since she was the child and 2,500 for her mother.

Wanda wasn't happy. $7,500 was quite a bit steeper than she thought it was going to be, which also always cracks me up. It's like, how much would you expect it to cost to end two human lives? She wanted the friends and family price, I guess. But you can't keep a good cheer mom down, and Wanda quickly came up with plan B. Just do the mother, she said.

Amber will be too devastated to try out. Damn, Wanda, that is cold, bitch. You can build a snowman out of that sentence. Oof. With the particulars all worked out, Wanda moved on to the business of the down payment. Remember those $2,000 canary diamond earrings? Well, always the drama queen.

Wanda took them off one by one, and with great ceremony, handed them to Terry. She said, I couldn't pull the trigger myself, but I sure can do it this way. And then she laughed. and that laugh. It was something else,

a full-on Disney villain head thrown back cartoon witch's cackle. True crime legend Skip Hollinsworth later said it was clear she enjoyed touching her dark side. Yeah, at one point

she asks Terry to tell her about the hitman and she's like, tell me about this guy, he a badass or what? She was really getting into it, really getting into her role for sure. As you'll probably remember

from our murder for hire episode a while back, Once money changes hands in a case like this, it's usually time for the habeas grabus. Once Wanda handed over those canary diamonds, she gave the police what they needed to get an arrest warrant. And the next day, as you saw at the start of the episode, they hauled Wanda in. She was out on bail the next day, and her daughter had a few questions for her. Wanda told Shana, I made a little mistake. I tried to have Amber's mom killed.

Oh, okay. Just a teensy, tiny, itty-bitty mistake. An accident, really. I tripped and fell into a hitman's car and my earrings fell into his hand. Poor Shana was totally blindsided. And campers, imagine what this must have been like for her. She's 13 years old. In the eighth grade, getting ready to start high school next year, and you know what kids are like at that age.

Can you even imagine the shit she was about to take from the other kids at school? Yeah, I really can't. Poor kid. And unsurprisingly, it also hit Amber and Verna right between the eyes. Verna later said, I felt numb, and I felt hurt, and I sank into the couch. You've got to really dislike someone to do that. She and Wanda hadn't been friends exactly, but they were friendly, or at least Verna thought they were. So I can't imagine what something like this would do to your sense of safety and security.

For Verna, and especially for Amber, who must have learned at some point that she'd been one of the original targets, too. It just must have been terrifying. I mean, could you ever trust anybody again? Would you spend the rest of your school years worrying that one of your other friend's moms was going to do the same thing? Just awful. Of course, the story hit the media like a hurricane

with every news station and tabloid show on the planet posting up in Channel View to watch Wanda's trial unfold. There were two TV movies before it was all over too, my favorite, being the one with Holly Hunter as Wanda. And I remember seeing it way back in 93 when it came out, and unfortunately, I couldn't find it streaming anywhere, or else I was going to suggest y'all watch it, but it doesn't seem to be around anymore, which is a shame. So, anywho, Wanda showed up to her court proceedings,

dressed up as always, with her nails painted blood red and her hair done and her makeup perfect, laughing and joking with her lawyer and seeming fairly untroubled about the whole thing. She was facing the possibility of life in prison, though, for solicitation of capital murder. It's serious shit. Now, it took two trials. The first one was overturned because one of the jurors had a prior drug offense, and Wanda got out on bail for five years waiting on trial number two. But eventually Wanda got convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Verna sued her too, and Wanda agreed to pay her 150 grand in damages, which ha ha ha ha. Unfortunately though, our girl didn't actually do 10 years in prison. She only served six lousy months before they

let her out on probation in 97. But don't worry, y'all, because she also had to pay a 10 $1,000 fine, and do a thousand hours of community service. So, you know, it's all fine. Hmm. Oi. Years later, Shana went on a talk show to talk about how the whole thing had affected her. It was pretty awful, as you can imagine. Poor kid had to go to Channel View High for four years after that with her mom, the biggest joke in town. Knowing what teenagers are like, I cannot imagine that was a good time. Now, an adult, Shana's spoken out about how important it is to just let your kids be who they are, not who you want them to be. She said she's never once pushed her kids

into anything they didn't have an interest in and she's worked really hard not to try and live her life vicariously through them. Good advice. She and Wanda are still pretty close, though. Wanda's allegedly a good grandma, which I'm not going to say too much about that.

It's like, come here, baby, come here, honey, are you going out for cross country again this year? Tell Nana who your biggest rival is. Come on. Mom, stop it, you know. I can just imagine the scene. So, clearly, parents can take their kids' sports a little too seriously. And it's not just the moms.

The dads can get into it with the best of them, as we see with the curious case of French tennis dad, Christoph Favio. In 2003, both of Christoph's teenage kids, Maxime and Valentin, were talented players. And Christoph was their biggest cheerleader. He was there for every game, always with bottles of water, cups of soda for his kids and their opponents. He could be a little bit overbearing. Some people noticed him glaring at his kids from the sidelines during their games, and he was so possessive with his daughter that he'd follow her around like a big protective dog. Even when she

went to the water fountain, he'd be right there behind her. But of course, you know, a lot of sports parents are intense. Christoph was the helicopter pilot in the French army until 1999, when he retired from the military and started working at a tennis club. Before long, he started coaching Maxime and Valentin, and they both showed real promise, Valentin especially. Soon they were playing in tournaments all over the world, racking up trophies and climbing up the ladder. By 2003, 13-year-old Valentin was one of the highest ranked players in France. If you were playing close enough attention, though, you might have noticed a strange pattern developing. Specifically, that the Fabio's rivals were dropping like

flies. One after the other had to forfeit because of illness or heat exhaustion, or they just played so badly that they lost and later described feeling sick and woozy. It seemed to happen a lot with 18-year-old Maxine's opponents, especially. He was a good player, but he didn't have his sister's talent, and he didn't share her relentless strive to be the best. He wasn't necessarily interested in tennis as a career. But nevertheless, more and more often, his opponent seemed unable to keep up with him. They'd be in the middle of a match and suddenly be overwhelmed with exhaustion, Blurn vision, and nausea.

And then one afternoon, a young guy was getting ready to play Maxim in the semi-final of the tournament. Not a big one, just a kind of small-scale competition. The guy headed into the locker room to get dressed when something stopped him cold. Colonel Favio was hunched down over the kid's gear bag, and it looked like he was messing around with his stuff. The kid made sure he was out of sight and kept watching, and he couldn't believe what he was seeing. Favio took the player's water bottle out of the bag and unscrewed the top. His jaw on the floor, the young tennis player watched his opponent's dad take out a bottle of pills, pull apart a couple of capsules, and pour the powder into his water bottle.

Fabio shook the bottle to dissolve the drug, then put it back where he found it, zipped up the gear bag, and walked out of the room. Holy guacamole. God, that's so creepy. Imagine being that kid and watching this full-grown adult trying to poison you like that. Unsurprisingly, the kid refused to play against Maxime that day. and when the club officials pressed him for an answer why, he finally broke down and told them what he'd seen. They called the police and the kid handed over his water bottle for testing.

They sent it off to the lab, and in the meantime, they started looking into the history of the Favio's tennis careers. It didn't take detectives long to uncover the pattern, a list of almost 30 players, many of them under 18, who'd gotten sick during matches with the Favio kids. And it was about to get much, much worse. day after the incident in the locker room, while the police were still waiting for the results of the lab tests on the water bottle, Maxime played against a young man who collapsed right after the game. He ended up in the hospital for several days, and the police sent his water bottle off for testing along with the first one. Now, why the hell they didn't make sure

Christoph couldn't set foot in that tennis club while they were carrying on this investigation? I don't know. I mean, it's possible that they just didn't want to tip him off that they were looking at him, but for God's sakes, you're putting kids' lives at risk, letting this man run around unsupervised. And lo and behold, on July 3rd, a young man, an elementary school teacher who was playing against Maxime that day, forfeited the match after the first set. He said he was feeling exhausted and sick, and he just couldn't go any further. Maxime got his default win, and the teacher, 25-year-old Alexander Lajardère, gotten his car to drive home. On the way, he fell asleep at the wheel. His car ran off the road and hit a tree, killing Alexander instantly.

At autopsy, a talk screen revealed something disturbing, a massive dose of a drug called Temesta. Now, Temesta is a benzodiazepine, a sedative. It's used to treat seizure disorders and anxiety. In the States, it's often called Ativan, and it's pretty strong stuff. Especially when somebody doses you with four times the therapeutic amount, which is what Alexander had in his system at the time of the crash. And I know this is going to shock you, campers, but when the test results came back on the water bottle, from Maxine's other two opponents, guess what? They were loaded with Temesta, too. It was time to put the habeas gravis on Colonel Favio.

They arrested him just as he got home from Egypt, where he'd been at a tournament with Valentin, and it didn't take long for him to crack under interrogation. Christoph came right out and admitted to slipping Temesta into the water bottles of Alexander Lajardère and the other two men as well. And as the story hit the media, more and more players came forward, saying they'd had similar experiences, weird symptoms that hit during their matches with the Favios.

Christoph's explanation was basically, look, I just kind of lost my mind there for a while, okay? He was fighting a lot with the officials at the tennis club, felt like they were doing him and his kids wrong at every turn, which I'm sure was paranoid shite, but he believed it. He told the police, I felt like people were always judging me on my kid's tennis performance, and I just couldn't take the pressure. He started taking to Mesta for his own anxiety, and apparently it wasn't a very big leap for him to start dose in his own.

kids' opponents. People were horrified, of course, and saddened at the loss of a bright young man, but more than anything else, people were just confused, especially about why Christoph would go to these lengths to give Maxime an advantage. I mean, the kid was a good player, but not great. It's not like tennis was his life's ambition, and these tournaments weren't even remotely high stakes. The prize money never got much above 50 bucks. At one of the matches, first prize was, I shit you not, a ham. I mean, maybe he just really loves ham. People can get pretty intense about their favorite lunch meats. I think it was a honey baked, maybe.

Yeah, because it certainly wasn't one of those like $1,200 Iberico Spanish hams. Probably not. Like, what? Maybe it was a rum ham. Oh, maybe. Christoph was charged with administering toxic substances with premeditation and unintentionally causing death. manslaughter, basically, French for manslaughter. The maximum penalty was 20 years in prison.

Dang, that's a lot of time just to lay hands on a good leg of ham. It wasn't about the ham, Whitney. Yeah, I'm not convinced. According to psychiatrists who examined tennis dad from hell, Favio became so obsessed with his kid's tennis careers that he couldn't see anything else. He was convinced that they were at a disadvantage because, of corrupt officials who had it in for them, and I guess this was his way of eveninging the score, risking other people's lives in the process. We should be clear here, Campers, Favio did this

all on his own. The kids had nothing to do with it. They didn't know anything about it, and when the story broke, they kind of just went into hiding for a while, which is sad because they really were talented tennis players. I'm sure they didn't want to win this way. Yeah, I mean, I mean, Valentin was a legit star. One of the tennis officials told the Guardian, quote, she's a brilliant player. She has a great attack and she never lets go. She's a pleasure to watch.

She didn't need her dad fixing her damn matches for her. Just like Wanda Holloway, Christoph was making this all about him and his sad ego. Yeah, parents, I promise you that your kids do not care as much as you about their sports. It's really gross to project that on them and project their success like that. You raise them, but they own their accomplishments, not you. Absolutely. Christoph ended up with an eight-year prison sentence, and he did seem genuinely remorseful,

not that it makes it any better. At the court hearing, he apologized to Alexander's family. He said, he couldn't imagine the grief they were feeling and said, I hope one day you will forgive me. Yeah, live that fantasy, bro. So, Katie, let's dish a little here. What the heck and heck was going on in these two cases? What turns a garden variety sports parent into this?

Pure narcissism? I mean, I think we see some of that in Wanda Holloway, for sure. She'd always had that relentless drive to outshine her fellow channel-viewians. Kept marrying up. Husbands kept getting older and richer and always made sure she was dressed to the nines and everything. Right. And I wish we knew more about Christoph's background, but from what we do know, it seems like he might have been the same kind of overachieving

striving type personality. I mean, pilots don't tend to be shy types. And, I mean, it's clear that this urge to protect your child was on steroids with them for whatever reason. Yeah. Christoph went from being a helicopter pilot to a helicopter parent.

I'm a comedian. Good one. You know, the really scary thing, too, is how many cases we had to pick from for this episode. I mean, we rifled through pageant moms who'd committed embezzlement, another one who committed murder to buy their little toddlers, their tiaras. A little league mom who stalked and harassed the coach in his family because he didn't think her precious little hero was good enough to go to state. A mom who catfished her daughter's former best friend and the guys of a cute boy, didn't cyber bullied her until she took her own life. Yeah, and we could

keep going. I mean, this shit is rampant. So, parents... If you're finding yourself tempted to commit a crime on behalf of your offspring, maybe just, you know, take a breath. And remember that your kids are whole people all to themselves, not empty vessels waiting to fulfill your own unachieved dreams. If you can wrap your head around that, you'll be a lot happier, and so will they. 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 grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Kelly, Fire-O-3 Chick, awesome handle, Chelsea, Atia, Tina, Sarah, and Shanna. We appreciate you to the moon and back. And y'all, if you're not yet a patron, you are missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free at least a day early, plus an extra episode a month. And once you hit the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff.

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